Freud - Complete Works

Ivan Smith 2000, 2007, 2010, 2011. All rights reserved.

Table Of Contents

Alphabetical

A Case Of Paranoia Running Counter To The Psycho-Analytic Theory Of The Disease (1915f)

'A Child Is Being Beaten' (1919e)

A Childhood Recollection From Dichtung Und Wahrheit (1917b)

A Comment On Anti-Semitism (1938a)

A Connection Between A Symbol And A Symptom (1916c)

A Difficulty In The Path Of Psycho-Analysis (1917a)

A Disturbance Of Memory On The Acropolis (1936a)

A Metapsychological Supplement To The Theory Of Dreams (1917d)

A Mythological Parallel To A Visual Obsession (1916b)

A Note On Psycho-Analytic Publications And Prizes (1919c)

A Note On The Prehistory Of The Technique Of Analysis (1920b)

A Note On The Unconscious In Psycho-Analysis (1912g)

A Note Upon The 'Mystic Writing-Pad' (1925a)

A Religious Experience (1928a)

A Reply To Criticisms Of My Paper On Anxiety Neurosis (1895f)

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis (1923d)

A Short Account Of Psycho-Analysis (1924f)

A Special Type Of Choice Of Object Made By Men (1910h)

Abstracts Of The Scientific Writings Of Dr. Sigm. Freud 1877-1897 (1897b)

Address Delivered In The Goethe House At Frankfurt (1930e)

Address To The Society Of B'nai B'rith (1941e [1926])

An Autobiographical Study (1925d)

An Evidential Dream (1913a)

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis (1940a [1938])

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy (1909b)

Analysis Terminable And Interminable (1937c)

Anti-Semitism In England (1938c)

Associations Of A Four-Year-Old Child (1920d)

Autobiographical Note (1901)

Beyond The Pleasure Principle (1920g)

Character And Anal Erotism (1908b)

Charcot (1893f)

Civilization And Its Discontents (1930a)

'Civilized' Sexual Morality And Modern Nervous Illness (1908d)

Constructions In Analysis (1937d)

Contribution To A Questionnaire On Reading (1906f)

Contributions To A Discussion On Masturbation (1912f)

Contributions To A Discussion On Suicide (1910g)

Contributions To The Neue Freie Presse

Creative Writers And Day-Dreaming (1908e)

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva (1907a)

Dostoevsky And Parricide (1928b)

Dr. Anton Von Freund (1920c)

Dr. Ernest Jones (On His 50th Birthday) (1929a)

Dr. Reik And The Problem Of Quackery (1926i)

Dr. Sandor Ferenczi (On His 50th Birthday) (1923i)

Dreams And Telepathy (1922a)

Dreams In Folklore (1957a [1911])

Editorial Changes In The Zeitschrift (1924h)

Family Romances (1909c)

Fausse Reconnaissance ('Deja Raconte') In Psycho-Analytic Treatment (1914a)

Female Sexuality (1931b)

Fetishism (1927e)

Findings, Ideas, Problems (1941f [1938])

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis (1910a)

Formulations On The Two Principles Of Mental Functioning (1911b)

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria (1905e)

Freud's Psycho-Analytic Procedure (1904a)

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis (1918b)

Further Remarks On The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence (1896b)

'Great Is Diana Of The Ephesians' (1911f)

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego (1921c)

Heredity And The Aetiology Of The Neuroses (1896a)

Humour (1927d)

Hysterical Phantasies And Their Relation To Bisexuality (1908a)

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety (1926d)

Instincts And Their Vicissitudes (1915c)

Introduction To Edoardo Weiss's Elements Of Psycho-Analysis (1931c)

Introduction To J. Varendonck's The Psychology Of Day-Dreams (1921b)

Introduction To Pfister's The Psycho-Analytic Method (1913b)

Introduction To Psycho-Analysis And The War Neuroses (1919d)

Introduction To The Special Psychopathology Number Of The Medical Review Of Reviews (1930c)

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis (1916-1917)

James J. Putnam (1919b)

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious (1905c)

Josef Breuer (1925g)

Josef Popper-Lynkeus And The Theory Of Dreams (1923f)

Karl Abraham (1926b)

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood (1910c)

Letter To Dr. Alfons Paquet (1930d)

Letter To Dr. Friedrich S. Kraus On Anthropophyteia (1910f)

Letter To Dr. Hermine Von Hug-Hellmuth (1919i)

Letter To Fritz Wittels (1924g)

Letter To Georg Fuchs (1931f)

Letter To Le Disque Vert (1924a)

Letter To Senor Luis Lopez-Ballesteros Y De Torres (1923h)

Letter To The Burgomaster Of Pribor (1931e)

Letter To The Editor Of The Jewish Press Centre In Zurich (1925b)

Libidinal Types (1931a)

Lines Of Advance In Psycho-Analytic Therapy (1919a)

Lou Andreas-Salome (1937a)

Medusa's Head (1940c [1922])

Moses And Monotheism (1939a)

Mourning And Melancholia (1917e)

My Contact With Josef Popper-Lynkeus (1932c)

My Views On The Part Played By Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses (1906a)

Negation (1925h)

Neurosis And Psychosis (1924b)

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis (1933a)

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis (1909d)

Observations And Examples From Analytic Practice (1913h)

Observations On Transference-Love (1915a)

Obsessions And Phobias (1895c)

Obsessive Actions And Religious Practices (1907b)

On Beginning The Treatment (1913c)

On Dreams (1901a)

On Narcissism: An Introduction (1914c)

On Psycho-Analysis (1913m)

On Psychotherapy (1905a)

On The Grounds For Detaching A Particular Syndrome From Neurasthenia Under The Description 'Anxiety Neurosis' (1895b)

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement (1914d)

On The Occasion Of The Opening Of The Hebrew University (1925c)

On The Psychical Mechanism Of Hysterical Phenomena (1893a)

On The Sexual Theories Of Children (1908c)

On The Teaching Of Psycho-Analysis In Universities (1919j)

On The Universal Tendency To Debasement In The Sphere Of Love (1912d)

On Transformations Of Instinct As Exemplified In Anal Erotism (1917c)

On Transience (1916a)

Preface To Aichhorn's Wayward Youth (1925f)

Preface To Bourke's Scatalogic Rites Of All Nations (1913k)

Preface To Freud's Shorter Writings 1893-1906 (1906b)

Preface To Hermann Nunberg's General Theory Of The Neuroses On A Psycho-Analytic Basis (1932b)

Preface To J. J. Putnam's Addresses On Psycho-Analysis (1921a)

Preface To Marie Bonaparte's The Life And Works Of Edgar Allan Poe (1933d)

Preface To Max Eitingon's Report On The Berlin Psycho-Analytic Policlinic (1923g)

Preface To Maxim Steiner's The Psychical Disorders Of Male Potency (1913e)

Preface To Raymond De Saussure's The Psycho-Analytic Method (1922e)

Preface To Reik's Ritual: Psycho-Analytic Studies (1919g)

Preface To Richard Sterba's Dictionary Of Psycho-Analysis (1936b)

Preface To Sandor Ferenczi's Psycho-Analysis: Essays In The Field Of Psycho-Analysis (1910b)

Preface To Ten Years Of The Berlin Psycho-Analytic Institute (1930b)

Preface To Wilhelm Stekel's Nervous Anxiety-States And Their Treatment (1908f)

Prefatory Note To A Paper By E. Pickworth Farrow (1926c)

Prospectus For Schriften Zur Angewandten Seelenkunde (1907e)

Psychical (Or Mental) Treatment (1890a)

Psycho-Analysis (1926f)

Psycho-Analysis And Telepathy (1941d [1921])

Psycho-Analysis And The Establishment Of The Facts In Legal Proceedings (1906c)

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia (1911c)

Psychopathic Characters On The Stage (1942a [1905])

Recommendations To Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis (1912e)

Remarks On The Theory And Practice Of Dream-Interpretation (1923c)

Remembering, Repeating And Working-Through (1914g)

Repression (1915d)

Review Of Wilhelm Neutra's Letters To Neurotic Women (1910m)

Sandor Ferenczi (1933c)

Screen Memories (1899a)

Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses (1898a)

Some Additional Notes On Dream-Interpretation As A Whole (1925i)

Some Character-Types Met With In Psycho-Analytic Work (1916d)

Some Dreams Of Descartes' (1929b)

Some Elementary Lessons In Psycho-Analysis (1940b [1938])

Some General Remarks On Hysterical Attacks (1909a)

Some Neurotic Mechanisms In Jealousy. Paranoia And Homosexuality (1922b)

Some Psychical Consequences Of The Anatomical Distinction Between The Sexes (1925j)

Some Reflections On Schoolboy Psychology (1914f)

Splitting Of The Ego In The Process Of Defence (1940e [1938])

Studies On Hysteria (1895d)

The Acquisition And Control Of Fire (1932a)

The Antithetical Meaning Of Primal Words (1910e)

The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest (1913j)

The Disposition To Obsessional Neurosis (1913i)

The Dissolution Of The Oedipus Complex (1924d)

The Dynamics Of Transference (1912b)

The Economic Problem Of Masochism (1924c)

The Ego And The Id (1923b)

The Expert Opinion In The Halsmann Case (1931d)

The Future Of An Illusion (1927c)

The Future Prospects Of Psycho-Analytic Therapy (1910d)

The Goethe Prize

The Handling Of Dream-Interpretation In Psycho-Analysis (1911e)

The Infantile Genital Organization (1923e)

The Interpretation Of Dreams (1900a)

The Loss Of Reality In Neurosis And Psychosis (1924e)

The Moses Of Michelangelo (1914b)

The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence (1894a)

The Occurrence In Dreams Of Material From Fairy Tales (1913d)

The Psychical Mechanism Of Forgetfulness (1898b)

The Psycho-Analytic View Of Psychogenic Disturbance Of Vision (1910i)

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman (1920a)

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life (1901b)

The Question Of Lay Analysis (1926e)

The Resistances To Psycho-Analysis (1925e)

The Sexual Enlightenment Of Children (An Open Letter To Dr. M. Furst) (1907c)

The Significance Of Sequences Of Vowels (1911d)

The Subtleties Of A Faulty Action (1935b)

The Taboo Of Virginity (1918a)

The Theme Of The Three Caskets (1913f)

The 'Uncanny' (1919h)

The Unconscious (1915e)

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death (1915b)

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality (1905d)

To Romain Rolland (1926a)

To Thomas Mann On His Sixtieth Birthday (1935c)

Totem And Taboo (1912-1913)

Two Encyclopaedia Articles (1923a)

Two Instances Of Pathogenic Phantasies Revealed By The Patients Themselves (1910j)

Two Lies Told By Children (1913g)

Types Of Onset Of Neurosis (1912c)

Victor Tausk (1919f)

Why War? (1933b)

'Wild' Psycho-Analysis (1910k)

Chronological

Psychical (Or Mental) Treatment (1890a)

On The Psychical Mechanism Of Hysterical Phenomena (1893a)

Charcot (1893f)

The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence (1894a)

On The Grounds For Detaching A Particular Syndrome From Neurasthenia Under The Description 'Anxiety Neurosis' (1895b)

Obsessions And Phobias (1895c)

Studies On Hysteria (1895d)

A Reply To Criticisms Of My Paper On Anxiety Neurosis (1895f)

Heredity And The Aetiology Of The Neuroses (1896a)

Further Remarks On The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence (1896b)

Abstracts Of The Scientific Writings Of Dr. Sigm. Freud 1877-1897 (1897b)

Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses (1898a)

The Psychical Mechanism Of Forgetfulness (1898b)

Screen Memories (1899a)

The Interpretation Of Dreams (1900a)

On Dreams (1901a)

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life (1901b)

Autobiographical Note (1901)

Freud's Psycho-Analytic Procedure (1904a)

On Psychotherapy (1905a)

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious (1905c)

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality (1905d)

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria (1905e)

My Views On The Part Played By Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses (1906a)

Preface To Freud's Shorter Writings 1893-1906 (1906b)

Psycho-Analysis And The Establishment Of The Facts In Legal Proceedings (1906c)

Contribution To A Questionnaire On Reading (1906f)

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva (1907a)

Obsessive Actions And Religious Practices (1907b)

The Sexual Enlightenment Of Children (An Open Letter To Dr. M. Furst) (1907c)

Prospectus For Schriften Zur Angewandten Seelenkunde (1907e)

Hysterical Phantasies And Their Relation To Bisexuality (1908a)

Character And Anal Erotism (1908b)

On The Sexual Theories Of Children (1908c)

'Civilized' Sexual Morality And Modern Nervous Illness (1908d)

Creative Writers And Day-Dreaming (1908e)

Preface To Wilhelm Stekel's Nervous Anxiety-States And Their Treatment (1908f)

Some General Remarks On Hysterical Attacks (1909a)

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy (1909b)

Family Romances (1909c)

Contributions To The Neue Freie Presse

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis (1909d)

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis (1910a)

Preface To Sandor Ferenczi's Psycho-Analysis: Essays In The Field Of Psycho-Analysis (1910b)

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood (1910c)

The Future Prospects Of Psycho-Analytic Therapy (1910d)

The Antithetical Meaning Of Primal Words (1910e)

Letter To Dr. Friedrich S. Kraus On Anthropophyteia (1910f)

Contributions To A Discussion On Suicide (1910g)

A Special Type Of Choice Of Object Made By Men (1910h)

The Psycho-Analytic View Of Psychogenic Disturbance Of Vision (1910i)

Two Instances Of Pathogenic Phantasies Revealed By The Patients Themselves (1910j)

'Wild' Psycho-Analysis (1910k)

Review Of Wilhelm Neutra's Letters To Neurotic Women (1910m)

Formulations On The Two Principles Of Mental Functioning (1911b)

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia (1911c)

The Significance Of Sequences Of Vowels (1911d)

The Handling Of Dream-Interpretation In Psycho-Analysis (1911e)

'Great Is Diana Of The Ephesians' (1911f)

The Dynamics Of Transference (1912b)

Types Of Onset Of Neurosis (1912c)

On The Universal Tendency To Debasement In The Sphere Of Love (1912d)

Recommendations To Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis (1912e)

Contributions To A Discussion On Masturbation (1912f)

A Note On The Unconscious In Psycho-Analysis (1912g)

An Evidential Dream (1913a)

Introduction To Pfister's The Psycho-Analytic Method (1913b)

On Beginning The Treatment (1913c)

The Occurrence In Dreams Of Material From Fairy Tales (1913d)

Preface To Maxim Steiner's The Psychical Disorders Of Male Potency (1913e)

The Theme Of The Three Caskets (1913f)

Two Lies Told By Children (1913g)

Observations And Examples From Analytic Practice (1913h)

The Disposition To Obsessional Neurosis (1913i)

The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest (1913j)

Preface To Bourke's Scatalogic Rites Of All Nations (1913k)

On Psycho-Analysis (1913m)

Totem And Taboo (1912-1913)

Fausse Reconnaissance ('Deja Raconte') In Psycho-Analytic Treatment (1914a)

The Moses Of Michelangelo (1914b)

On Narcissism: An Introduction (1914c)

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement (1914d)

Some Reflections On Schoolboy Psychology (1914f)

Remembering, Repeating And Working-Through (1914g)

Observations On Transference-Love (1915a)

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death (1915b)

Instincts And Their Vicissitudes (1915c)

Repression (1915d)

The Unconscious (1915e)

A Case Of Paranoia Running Counter To The Psycho-Analytic Theory Of The Disease (1915f)

On Transience (1916a)

A Mythological Parallel To A Visual Obsession (1916b)

A Connection Between A Symbol And A Symptom (1916c)

Some Character-Types Met With In Psycho-Analytic Work (1916d)

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis (1916-1917)

A Difficulty In The Path Of Psycho-Analysis (1917a)

A Childhood Recollection From Dichtung Und Wahrheit (1917b)

On Transformations Of Instinct As Exemplified In Anal Erotism (1917c)

A Metapsychological Supplement To The Theory Of Dreams (1917d)

Mourning And Melancholia (1917e)

The Taboo Of Virginity (1918a)

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis (1918b)

Lines Of Advance In Psycho-Analytic Therapy (1919a)

James J. Putnam (1919b)

A Note On Psycho-Analytic Publications And Prizes (1919c)

Introduction To Psycho-Analysis And The War Neuroses (1919d)

'A Child Is Being Beaten' (1919e)

Victor Tausk (1919f)

Preface To Reik's Ritual: Psycho-Analytic Studies (1919g)

The 'Uncanny' (1919h)

Letter To Dr. Hermine Von Hug-Hellmuth (1919i)

On The Teaching Of Psycho-Analysis In Universities (1919j)

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman (1920a)

A Note On The Prehistory Of The Technique Of Analysis (1920b)

Dr. Anton Von Freund (1920c)

Associations Of A Four-Year-Old Child (1920d)

Beyond The Pleasure Principle (1920g)

Preface To J. J. Putnam's Addresses On Psycho-Analysis (1921a)

Introduction To J. Varendonck's The Psychology Of Day-Dreams (1921b)

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego (1921c)

Dreams And Telepathy (1922a)

Some Neurotic Mechanisms In Jealousy. Paranoia And Homosexuality (1922b)

Preface To Raymond De Saussure's The Psycho-Analytic Method (1922e)

Two Encyclopaedia Articles (1923a)

The Ego And The Id (1923b)

Remarks On The Theory And Practice Of Dream-Interpretation (1923c)

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis (1923d)

The Infantile Genital Organization (1923e)

Josef Popper-Lynkeus And The Theory Of Dreams (1923f)

Preface To Max Eitingon's Report On The Berlin Psycho-Analytic Policlinic (1923g)

Letter To Senor Luis Lopez-Ballesteros Y De Torres (1923h)

Dr. Sandor Ferenczi (On His 50th Birthday) (1923i)

Letter To Le Disque Vert (1924a)

Neurosis And Psychosis (1924b)

The Economic Problem Of Masochism (1924c)

The Dissolution Of The Oedipus Complex (1924d)

The Loss Of Reality In Neurosis And Psychosis (1924e)

A Short Account Of Psycho-Analysis (1924f)

Letter To Fritz Wittels (1924g)

Editorial Changes In The Zeitschrift (1924h)

A Note Upon The 'Mystic Writing-Pad' (1925a)

Letter To The Editor Of The Jewish Press Centre In Zurich (1925b)

On The Occasion Of The Opening Of The Hebrew University (1925c)

An Autobiographical Study (1925d)

The Resistances To Psycho-Analysis (1925e)

Preface To Aichhorn's Wayward Youth (1925f)

Josef Breuer (1925g)

Negation (1925h)

Some Additional Notes On Dream-Interpretation As A Whole (1925i)

Some Psychical Consequences Of The Anatomical Distinction Between The Sexes (1925j)

To Romain Rolland (1926a)

Karl Abraham (1926b)

Prefatory Note To A Paper By E. Pickworth Farrow (1926c)

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety (1926d)

The Question Of Lay Analysis (1926e)

Psycho-Analysis (1926f)

Dr. Reik And The Problem Of Quackery (1926i)

The Future Of An Illusion (1927c)

Humour (1927d)

Fetishism (1927e)

A Religious Experience (1928a)

Dostoevsky And Parricide (1928b)

Dr. Ernest Jones (On His 50th Birthday) (1929a)

Some Dreams Of Descartes' (1929b)

Civilization And Its Discontents (1930a)

Preface To Ten Years Of The Berlin Psycho-Analytic Institute (1930b)

Introduction To The Special Psychopathology Number Of The Medical Review Of Reviews (1930c)

The Goethe Prize

Letter To Dr. Alfons Paquet (1930d)

Address Delivered In The Goethe House At Frankfurt (1930e)

Libidinal Types (1931a)

Female Sexuality (1931b)

Introduction To Edoardo Weiss's Elements Of Psycho-Analysis (1931c)

The Expert Opinion In The Halsmann Case (1931d)

Letter To The Burgomaster Of Pribor (1931e)

Letter To Georg Fuchs (1931f)

The Acquisition And Control Of Fire (1932a)

Preface To Hermann Nunberg's General Theory Of The Neuroses On A Psycho-Analytic Basis (1932b)

My Contact With Josef Popper-Lynkeus (1932c)

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis (1933a)

Why War? (1933b)

Sandor Ferenczi (1933c)

Preface To Marie Bonaparte's The Life And Works Of Edgar Allan Poe (1933d)

The Subtleties Of A Faulty Action (1935b)

To Thomas Mann On His Sixtieth Birthday (1935c)

A Disturbance Of Memory On The Acropolis (1936a)

Preface To Richard Sterba's Dictionary Of Psycho-Analysis (1936b)

Lou Andreas-Salome (1937a)

Analysis Terminable And Interminable (1937c)

Constructions In Analysis (1937d)

A Comment On Anti-Semitism (1938a)

Anti-Semitism In England (1938c)

Moses And Monotheism (1939a)

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis (1940a [1938])

Some Elementary Lessons In Psycho-Analysis (1940b [1938])

Medusa's Head (1940c [1922])

Splitting Of The Ego In The Process Of Defence (1940e [1938])

Psycho-Analysis And Telepathy (1941d [1921])

Address To The Society Of B'nai B'rith (1941e [1926])

Findings, Ideas, Problems (1941f [1938])

Psychopathic Characters On The Stage (1942a [1905])

Dreams In Folklore (1957a [1911])

About This Edition

1

STUDIES ON HYSTERIA

(1893-1895)

2

Intentionally left blank

Studies On Hysteria

3

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

In 1893 we published a ‘Preliminary Communication’¹ on a new method of examining and treating hysterical phenomena. To this we added as concisely as possible the theoretical conclusions at which we had arrived. We are here reprinting this ‘Preliminary Communication’ to serve as the thesis which it is our purpose to illustrate and prove.

We have appended to it a series of case histories, the selection of which could not unfortunately be determined on purely scientific grounds. Our experience is derived from private practice in an educated and literate social class, and the subject matter with which we deal often touches upon our patients’ most intimate lives and histories. It would be a grave breach of confidence to publish material of this kind, with the risk of the patients being recognized and their acquaintances becoming informed of facts which were confided only to the physician. It has therefore been impossible for us to make use of some of the most instructive and convincing of our observations. This of course applies especially to all those cases in which sexual and marital relations play an important aetiological part. Thus it comes about that we are only able to produce very incomplete evidence in favour of our view that sexuality seems to play a principal part in the pathogenesis of hysteria as a source of psychical traumas and as a motive for ‘defence’ - that is, for repressing ideas from consciousness. It is precisely observations of a markedly sexual nature that we have been obliged to leave unpublished.

The case histories are followed by a number of theoretical reflections, and in a final chapter on therapeutics the technique of the ‘cathartic method’ is propounded, just as it has grown up under the hands of the neurologist.

If at some points divergent and indeed contradictory opinions are expressed, this is not to be regarded as evidence of any fluctuation in our views. It arises from the natural and justifiable differences between the opinions of two observers who are agreed upon the facts and their basic reading of them, but who are not invariably at one in their interpretations and conjectures.

J. BREUER, S. FREUD

April 1895

¹ 'On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena’, Neurologisches Centralblatt, 1893, Nos. 1 and 2.

Studies On Hysteria

4

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

The interest which, to an ever-increasing degree, is being directed to psycho-analysis seems now to be extending to these Studies on Hysteria. The publisher desires to bring out a new edition of the book, which is at present out of print. It appears now in a reprint, without any alterations, though the opinions and methods which were put forward in the first edition have since undergone far-reaching and profound developments. So far as I personally am concerned, I have since that time had no active dealings with the subject; I have had no part in its important development and I could add nothing fresh to what was written in 1895. So I have been able to do no more than express a wish that my two contributions to the volume should be reprinted without alteration.

BREUER

As regards my share of the book, too, the only possible decision has been that the text of the first edition shall be reprinted without alteration. The developments and changes in my views during the course of thirteen years of work have been too far-reaching for it to be possible to attach them to my earlier exposition without entirely destroying its essential character. Nor have I any reason for wishing to eliminate this evidence of my initial views. Even to-day I regard them not as errors but as valuable first approximations to knowledge which could only be fully acquired after long and continuous efforts. The attentive reader will be able to detect in the present book the germs of all that has since been added to the theory of catharsis: for instance, the part played by psychosexual factors and infantilism, the importance of dreams and of unconscious symbolism. And I can give no better advice to any one interested in the development of catharsis into psycho-analysis than to begin with Studies on Hysteria and thus follow the path which I myself have trodden.

FREUD

VIENNA, July 1908

Studies On Hysteria

5

I

PRELIMINARY COMMUNICATION

(1893)

(BREUER AND FREUD)

Studies On Hysteria

6

I

ON THE PSYCHICAL MECHANISM OF HYSTERICAL PHENOMENA:

PRELIMINARY COMMUNICATION (1893)

(BREUER AND FREUD)

I

A chance observation has led us, over a number of years, to investigate a great variety of different forms and symptoms of hysteria, with a view to discovering their precipitating cause - the event which provoked the first occurrence, often many years earlier, of the phenomenon in question. In the great majority of cases it is not possible to establish the point of origin by a simple interrogation of the patient, however thoroughly it may be carried out. This is in part because what is in question is often some experience which the patient dislikes discussing; but principally because he is genuinely unable to recollect it and often has no suspicion of the causal connection between the precipitating event and the pathological phenomenon. As a rule it is necessary to hypnotize the patient and to arouse his memories under hypnosis of the time at which the symptom made its first appearance; when this has been done, it becomes possible to demonstrate the connection in the clearest and most convincing fashion.

This method of examination has in a large number of cases produced results which seem to be of value alike from a theoretical and a practical point of view.

Studies On Hysteria

7

They are valuable theoretically because they have taught us that external events determine the pathology of hysteria to an extent far greater than is known and recognized. It is of course obvious that in cases of ‘traumatic’ hysteria what provokes the symptoms is the accident. The causal connection is equally evident in hysterical attacks when it is possible to gather from the patient’s utterances that in each attack he is hallucinating the same event which provoked the first one. The situation is more obscure in the case of other phenomena.

Our experiences have shown us, however, that the most various symptoms, which are ostensibly spontaneous and, as one might say, idiopathic products of hysteria, are just as strictly related to the precipitating trauma as the phenomena to which we have just alluded and which exhibit the connection quite clearly. The symptoms which we have been able to trace back to precipitating factors of this sort include neuralgias and anaesthesias of very various kinds, many of which had persisted for years, contractures and paralyses, hysterical attacks and epileptic convulsions, which every observer regarded as true epilepsy, petit mal and disorders in the nature of tic, chronic vomiting and anorexia, carried to the pitch of rejection of all nourishment, various forms of disturbance of vision, constantly recurrent visual hallucinations, etc. The disproportion between the many years’ duration of the hysterical symptom and the single occurrence which provoked it is what we are accustomed invariably to find in traumatic neuroses. Quite frequently it is some event in childhood that sets up a more or less severe symptom which persists during the years that follow.

The connection is often so clear that it is quite evident how it was that the precipitating event produced this particular phenomenon rather than any other. In that case the symptom has quite obviously been determined by the precipitating cause. We may take as a very commonplace instance a painful emotion arising during a meal but suppressed at the time, and the producing nausea and vomiting which persists for months in the form of hysterical vomiting. A girl, watching beside a sick-bed in a torment of anxiety, fell into a twilight state and had a terrifying hallucination, while her right arm, which was hanging over the back of the chair, went to sleep; from this there developed a paresis of the same arm accompanied by contracture and anaesthesia. She tried to pray but could find no words; a length she succeeded in repeating a children’s prayer in English. When subsequently a severe and highly complicated hysteria developed, she could only speak, write and understand English, while her native language remained unintelligible to her for eighteen months. - The mother of a very sick child, which had at last fallen asleep, concentrated her whole will-power on keeping still so as not to waken it. Precisely on account of her intention she made a ‘clacking’ noise with her tongue. (An instance of ‘hysterical counter-will’.) This noise was repeated on a subsequent occasion on which she wished to keep perfectly still; and from it there developed a tic which, in the form of a clacking with the tongue, occurred over a period of many years whenever she felt excited. - A highly intelligent man was present while his brother had an ankylosed hip-joint extended under an anaesthetic. At the instant at which the joint gave way with a crack, he felt a violent pain in his own hip-joint, which persisted for nearly a year. - Further instances could be quoted.

Studies On Hysteria

8

In other cases the connection is not so simple. It consists only in what might be called a ‘symbolic’ relation between the precipitating cause and the pathological phenomenon - a relation such as healthy people form in dreams. For instance, a neuralgia may follow upon mental pain or vomiting upon a feeling of moral disgust. We have studied patients who used to make the most copious use of this sort of symbolization. In still other cases it is not possible to understand at first sight how they can be determined in the manner we have suggested. It is precisely the typical hysterical symptoms which fall into this class, such as hemi-anaesthesia, contraction of the field of vision, epileptiform convulsions, and so on. An explanation of our views on this group must be reserved for a fuller discussion of the subject.

Observations such as these seem to us to establish an analogy between the pathogenesis of common hysteria and that of the traumatic neuroses, and to justify an extension of the concept of traumatic hysteria. In traumatic neuroses the operative cause of the illness is not the trifling physical injury but the affect of fright - the psychical trauma. In an analogous manner, our investigations reveal, for many, if not for most, hysterical symptoms, precipitating causes which can only be described as psychical traumas. Any experience which calls up distressing affects - such as those of fright, anxiety, shame or physical pain - may operate as a trauma of this kind; and whether it in fact does so depends naturally enough on the susceptibility of the person affected (as well as on another condition which will be mentioned later). In the case of common hysteria it not infrequently happens that, instead of a single, major trauma, we find a number of partial traumas forming a group of provoking causes. These have only been able to exercise a traumatic effect by summation and they belong together in so far as they are in part components of a single story of suffering. There are other cases in which an apparently trivial circumstance combines with the actually operative event or occurs at a time of peculiar susceptibility to stimulation and in this way attains the dignity of a trauma which it would not otherwise have possessed but which thenceforward persists.

Studies On Hysteria

9

But the causal relation between the determining psychical trauma and the hysterical phenomenon is not of a kind implying that the trauma merely acts like an agent provocateur in releasing the symptom, which thereafter leads an independent existence. We must presume rather that the psychical trauma - or more precisely the memory of the trauma - acts like a foreign body which long after its entry must continue to be regarded as an agent that is still at work; and we find the evidence for this in a highly remarkable phenomenon which at the same time lends an important practical interest to our findings.

For we found, to our great surprise at first, that each individual hysterical symptom immediately and permanently disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which it was provoked and in arousing its accompanying affect, and when the patient had described that event in the greatest possible detail and had put the affect into words. Recollection without affect almost invariably produces no result. The psychical process which originally took place must be repeated as vividly as possible; it must be brought back to its status nascendi and then given verbal utterance. Where what we are dealing with are phenomena involving stimuli (spasms, neuralgias and hallucinations) these re-appear once again with the fullest intensity and then vanish for ever. Failures of function, such as paralyses and anaesthesias, vanish in the same way, though, of course, without the temporary intensification being discernible.¹

¹ The possibility of a therapeutic procedure of this kind has been clearly recognized by Delboeuf and Binet, as is shown by the following quotations: 'On s’expliquerait dès lors comment le magnétiseur aide à la guérison. Il remet le sujet dans l’état où le mal s’est manifesté et combat par la parole le même mal, mais renaissant.’ [‘We can now explain how the hypnotist promotes cure. He puts the subject back into the state in which his trouble first appeared and uses words to combat that trouble, as it now makes a fresh emergence.’] (Delboeuf 1889.) - ‘. . . peut-être verra-t-on qu’en reportant le malade par un artifice mental au moment même où le symptôme a apparu pour la première fois, on rend ce malade plus docile à une suggestion curative.’ [‘. . . we shall perhaps find that by taking the patient back by mean of a mental artifice to the very moment at which the symptom first appeared, we may make him more susceptible to a therapeutic suggestion.’] (Binet, 1892, 243.) - In Janet’s interesting study on mental automatism (1889), there is an account of the cure of a hysterical girl by a method analogous to ours.

Studies On Hysteria

10

It is plausible to suppose that it is a question here of unconscious suggestion: the patient expects to be relieved of his sufferings by this procedure, and it is this expectation, and not the verbal utterance, which is the operative factor. This, however, is not so. The first case of this kind that came under observation dates back to the year 1881, that is to say to the ‘pre-suggestion’ era. A highly complicated case of hysteria was analysed in this way, and the symptoms, which sprang from separate causes, were separately removed. This observation was made possible by spontaneous auto-hypnoses on the part of the patient, and came as a great surprise to the observer.

We may reverse the dictum ‘cessante causa cessat effectuss’ [‘when the cause ceases the effect ceases’] and conclude from these observations that the determining process continues to operate in some way or other for years - not indirectly, through a chain of intermediate causal links, but as a directly releasing cause just as a psychical pain that is remembered in waking consciousness still provokes a lachrymal secretion long after the event.Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences.¹

¹ In this preliminary communication it is not possible for us to distinguish what is new in it from what has been said by other authors such as Moebius and Strümpell who have held similar views on hysteria to ours. We have found the nearest approach to what we have to say on the theoretical and therapeutic sides of the question in some remarks, published from time to time, by Benedikt. These we shall deal with elsewhere.

Studies On Hysteria

11

II

At first sight it seems extraordinary that events experienced so long ago should continue to operate so intensely - that their recollection should not be liable to the wearing away process to which, after all, we see all our memories succumb. The following considerations may perhaps make this a little more intelligible.

The fading of a memory or the losing of its affect depends on various factors. The most important of these is whether there has been an energetic reaction to the event that provokes the affect. By ‘reaction’ we here understand the whole class of voluntary and involuntary reflexes - from tears to acts of revenge - in which, as experience shows us, the affects are discharged. If this reaction takes place to a sufficient amount a large part of the affect disappears as a result. Linguistic usage bears witness to this fact of daily observation by such phrases as ‘to cry oneself out’ [‘sich ausweinen’], and to ‘blow off steam’ [‘sich austoben’, literally ‘to rage oneself out’]. If the reaction is suppressed, the affect remains attached to the memory. An injury that has been repaid, even if only in words, is recollected quite differently from one that has had to be accepted. Language recognizes this distinction, too, in its mental and physical consequences; it very characteristically describes an injury that has been suffered in silence as ‘a mortification’ [‘Kränkung’, literally ‘making ill’]. - The injured person’s reaction to the trauma only exercises a completely ‘cathartic’ effect if it is an adequate reaction - as, for instance, revenge. But language serves as a substitute for action; by its help, an affect can be ‘abreacted’ almost as effectively. In other cases speaking is itself the adequate reflex, when, for instance, it is a lamentation or giving utterance to a tormenting secret, e.g. a confession. If there is no such reaction, whether in deeds or words, or in the mildest cases in tears, any recollection of the event retains its affective tone to begin with.

Studies On Hysteria

12

'Abreaction’, however, is not the only method of dealing with the situation that is open to a normal person who has experienced a psychical trauma. A memory of such a trauma, even if it has not been abreacted, enters the great complex of associations, it comes alongside other experiences, which may contradict it, and is subjected to rectification by other ideas. After an accident, for instance, the memory of the danger and the (mitigated) repetition of the fright becomes associated with the memory of what happened afterwards - rescue and the consciousness of present safety. Again, a person’s memory of a humiliation is corrected by his putting the facts right, by considering his own worth, etc. In this way a normal person is able to bring about the disappearance of the accompanying affect through the process of association.

To this we must add the general effacement of impressions, the fading of memories which we name ‘forgetting’ and which wears away those ideas in particular that are no longer affectively operative.

Our observations have shown, on the other hand, that the memories which have become the determinants of hysterical phenomena persist for a long time with astonishing freshness and with the whole of their affective colouring. We must, however, mention another remarkable fact, which we shall later be able to turn to account, namely, that these memories, unlike other memories of their past lives, are not at the patients’ disposal. On the contrary, these experiences are completely absent from the patient’s memory when they are in a normal psychical state, or are only present in highly summary form. Not until they have been questioned under hypnosis do these memories emerge with the undiminished vividness of a recent event.

Thus, for six whole months, one of our patients reproduced under hypnosis with hallucinatory vividness everything that had excited her on the same day of the previous year (during an attack of acute hysteria). A diary kept by her mother with out her knowledge proved the completeness of the reproduction. Another patient, partly under hypnosis and partly during spontaneous attacks, re-lived with hallucinatory clarity all the events of a hysterical psychosis which she had passed through ten years earlier and which she had for the most part forgotten till the moment at which it re-emerged. Moreover, certain memories of aetiological importance which dated back from fifteen to twenty-five years were found to be astonishingly intact and to possess remarkable sensory force, and when they returned they acted with all the affective strength of new experiences.

Studies On Hysteria

13

This can only be explained on the view that these memories constitute an exception in their relation to all the wearing-away processes which we have discussed above. It appears, that is to say, that these memories correspond to traumas that have not been sufficiently abreacted; and if we enter more closely into the reasons which have prevented this, we find at least two sets of conditions under which the reaction to the trauma fails to occur.

In the first group are those cases in which the patients have not reacted to a psychical trauma because the nature of the trauma excluded a reaction, as in the case of the apparently irreparable loss of a loved person or because social circumstance made a reaction impossible or because it was a question of things which the patient wished to forget, and therefore intentionally repressed from his conscious thought and inhibited and suppressed. It is precisely distressing things of this kind that, under hypnosis, we find are the basis of hysterical phenomena (e.g. hysterical deliria in saints and nuns, continent women and well-brought-up children).

The second group of conditions are determined, not by the content of the memories but by the psychical states in which the patient received the experiences in question. For we find, under hypnosis, among the causes of hysterical symptoms ideas which are not in themselves significant, but whose persistence is due to the fact that they originated during the prevalence of severely paralysing affects, such as fright, or during positively abnormal psychical states, such as the semi-hypnotic twilight state of day-dreaming, auto-hypnoses, and so on. In such cases it is the nature of the states which makes a reaction to the event impossible.

Both kinds of conditions may, of course, be simultaneously present, and this, in fact, often occurs. It is so when a trauma which is operative in itself takes place while a severely paralysing affect prevails or during a modified state of consciousness. But it also seems to be true that in many people a psychical trauma produces one of these abnormal states, which, in turn, makes reaction impossible.

Both of these groups of conditions, however, have in common the fact that the psychical traumas which have not been disposed of by reaction cannot be disposed of either by being worked over by means of association. In the first group the patient is determined to forget the distressing experiences and accordingly excludes them so far as possible from association; while in the second group the associative working-over fails to occur because there is no extensive associative connection between the normal state of consciousness and the pathological ones in which the ideas made their appearance. We shall have occasion immediately to enter further into this matter.

It may therefore be said that the ideas which have become pathological have persisted with such freshness and affective strength because they have been denied the normal wearing-away process by means of abreaction and reproduction in states of uninhibited association.

Studies On Hysteria

14

III

We have stated the conditions which, as our experience shows, are responsible for the development of hysterical phenomena from psychical traumas. In so doing, we have already been obliged to speak of abnormal states of consciousness in which these pathogenic ideas arise, and to emphasize the fact that the recollection of the operative psychical trauma is not to be found in the patient’s normal memory but in his memory when he is hypnotized. The longer we have been occupied with these phenomena the more we have become convinced that the splitting of consciousness which is so striking in the well-known classical cases under the form of ‘double conscience’ is present to a rudimentary degree in every hysteria, and that a tendency to such dissociation, and with it the emergence of abnormal states of consciousness (which we shall bring together under the term ‘hypnoid’) is the basic phenomenon of this neurosis. In these views we concur with Binet and the two Janets, though we have had no experience of the remarkable findings they have made on anaesthetic patients.

We should like to balance the familiar thesis that hypnosis is an artificial hysteria by another - the basis and sine qua non of hysteria is the existence of hypnoid states. These states share with one another and with hypnosis, however much they may differ in other respects, one common feature: the ideas which emerge in them are very intense but are cut off from associative communication with the rest of the content of consciousness. Associations may take place between these hypnoid states, and their ideational content can in this way reach a more or less high degree of psychical organization. Moreover, the nature of these states and the extent to which they are cut off from the remaining conscious processes must be supposed to vary just as happens in hypnosis, which ranges from a light drowsiness to somnambulism, from complete recollection to total amnesia.

If hypnoid states of this kind are already present before the onset of the manifest illness, they provide the soil in which the affect plants the pathogenic memory with its consequent somatic phenomena. This corresponds to dispositional hysteria. We have found, however, that a severe trauma (such as occurs in a traumatic neurosis) or a laborious suppression (as of a sexual affect, for instance) can bring about a splitting-off of groups of ideas even in people who are in other respects unaffected; and this would be the mechanism of psychically acquired hysteria. Between the extremes of these two forms we must assume the existence of a series of cases within which the liability to dissociation in the subject and the affective magnitude of the trauma vary inversely.

Studies On Hysteria

15

We have nothing new to say on the question of the origin of these dispositional hypnoid states. They often, it would seem, grow out of the day-dreams which are so common even in healthy people and to which needlework and similar occupations render women especially prone. Why it is that the ‘pathological associations’ brought about in these states are so stable and why they have so much more influence on somatic processes than ideas are usually found to do - these questions coincide with the general problem of the effectiveness of hypnotic suggestions. Our observations contribute nothing fresh on this subject. But they throw a light on the contradiction between the dictum ‘hysteria is a psychosis’ and the fact that among hysterics may be found people of the clearest intellect, strongest will, greatest character and highest critical power. This characterization holds good of their waking thoughts; but in their hypnoid states they are insane, as we all are in dreams. Whereas, however, our dream-psychoses have no effect upon our waking state, the products of hypnoid states intrude into waking life in the form of hysterical symptoms.

IV

What we have asserted of chronic hysterical symptoms can be applied almost completely to hysterical attacks. Charcot, as is well known, has given us a schematic description of the ‘major’ hysterical attack, according to which four phases can be distinguished in a complete attack: (1) the epileptoid phase, (2) the phase of large movements, (3) the phase of ‘attitudes passionelles’ (the hallucinatory phase), and (4) the phase of terminal delirium. Charcot derives all those forms of hysterical attack which are in practice met with more often than the complete ‘grande attaque’, from the abbreviation, absence or isolation of these four distinct phases.

Studies On Hysteria

16

Our attempted explanation takes its start from the third of these phases, that of the ‘attitudes passionelles’. Where this is present in a well-marked form, it exhibits the hallucinatory reproduction of a memory which was of importance in bringing about the onset of the hysteria - the memory either of a single major trauma (which we find par excellence in what is called traumatic hysteria) or of a series of interconnected part-traumas (such as underlie common hysteria). Or, lastly, the attack may revive the events which have become emphasized owing to their coinciding with a moment of special disposition to trauma.

There are also attacks, however, which appear to consist exclusively of motor phenomena and in which the phase of attitudes passionelles is absent. If one can succeed in getting into rapport with the patient during an attack such as this of generalized clonic spasms or cataleptic rigidity, or during an attaque de somneil [attack of sleep] - or if, better still, one can succeed in provoking the attack under hypnosis - one finds that here, too, there is an underlying memory of the psychical trauma or series of traumas, which usually comes to our notice in a hallucinatory phase.

Thus, a little girl suffered for years from attacks of general convulsions which could well be, and indeed were, regarded as epileptic. She was hypnotized with a view to a differential diagnosis, and promptly had one of her attacks. She was asked what, she was seeing and replied 'The dog! the dog’s coming!’; and in fact it turned out that she had had the first of her attacks after being chased by a savage dog. The success of the treatment confirmed the choice of diagnosis.

Again, an employee who had become a hysteric as a result of being ill-treated by his superior, suffered from attacks in which he collapsed and fell into a frenzy of rage, but without uttering a word or giving any sign of a hallucination. It was possible to provoke an attack under hypnosis, and the patient then revealed that he was living through the scene in which his employer had abused him in the street and hit him with a stick. A few days later the patient came back and complained of having had another attack of the same kind. On this occasion it turned out under hypnosis that he had been re-living the scene to which the actual onset of the illness was related: the scene in the law-court when he failed to obtain satisfaction for his maltreatment.

Studies On Hysteria

17

In all other respects, too, the memories which emerge, or can be aroused, in hysterical attacks correspond to the precipitating causes which we have found at the root of chronic hysterical symptoms. Like these latter causes, the memories underlying hysterical attacks relate to psychical traumas which have not been disposed of by abreaction or by associative thought activity. Like them, they are, whether completely or in essential elements, out of reach of the memory of normal consciousness and are found to belong to the ideational content of hypnoid states of consciousness with restricted association. Finally, too, the therapeutic test can be applied to them. Our observations have often taught us that a memory of this kind which has hitherto provoked attacks, ceases to be able to do so after the process of reaction and associative correction have been applied to it under hypnosis.

The motor phenomena of hysterical attacks can be interpreted partly as universal forms of reaction appropriate to the affect accompanying the memory (such as kicking about and waving the arms and legs, which even young babies do), partly as a direct expression of these memories; but in part, like the hysterical stigmata found among the chronic symptoms, they cannot be explained in this way.

Hysterical attacks, furthermore, appear in a specially interesting light if we bear in mind a theory that we have mentioned above, namely, that in hysteria groups of ideas originating in hypnoid states are present and that these are cut off from associative connection with the other ideas, but can be associated among themselves, and thus form the more or less highly organized rudiment of a second consciousness, a condition seconde. If this is so, a chronic hysterical symptom will correspond to the intrusion of this second state into the somatic innervation which is as a rule under the control of normal consciousness. A hysterical attack, on the other hand, is evidence of a higher organization of this second state. When the attack makes its first appearance, it indicates a moment at which this hypnoid consciousness has obtained control of the subject’s whole existence - it points, that is, to an acute hysteria; when it occurs on subsequent occasions and contains a memory it points to a return of that moment. Charcot has already suggested that hysterical attacks are a rudimentary form of a condition seconde. During the attack, control over the whole of the somatic innervation passes over to the hypnoid consciousness. Normal consciousness, as well-known observations show, is not always entirely repressed. It may even be aware of the motor phenomena of the attack, while the accompanying psychical events are outside its knowledge.

Studies On Hysteria

18

The typical course of a severe case of hysteria is, as we know, as follows. To begin with, an ideational content is formed during hypnoid states; when this has increased to a sufficient extent, it gains control, during a period of ‘acute hysteria’, of the somatic innervation and of the patient’s whole existence, and creates chronic symptoms and attacks; after this it clears up, apart from certain residues. If the normal personality can regain control, what is left over from the hypnoid ideational content recurs in hysterical attacks and puts the subject back from time to time into similar states, which are themselves once more open to influence and susceptible to traumas. A state of equilibrium, as it were, may then be established between the two psychical groups which are combined in the same person: hysterical attacks and normal life proceed side by side without interfering with each other. An attack will occur spontaneously: just as memories do in normal people; it is, however, possible to provoke one, just as any memory can be aroused in accordance with the laws of association. It can be provoked either by stimulation of a hysterogenic zone or by a new experience which sets it going owing to a similarity with the pathogenic experience. We hope to be able to show that these two kinds of determinant, though they appear to be so unlike, do not differ in essentials, but that in both a hyperaesthetic memory is touched on.

In other cases this equilibrium is very unstable. The attack makes its appearance as a manifestation of the residue of the hypnoid consciousness whenever the normal personality is exhausted and incapacitated. The possibility cannot be dismissed that here the attack may have been divested of its original meaning and may be recurring as a motor reaction without any content.

It must be left to further investigation to discover what it is that determines whether a hysterical personality manifests itself in attacks, in chronic symptoms or in a mixture of the two.

Studies On Hysteria

19

V

It will now be understood how it is that the psychotherapeutic procedure which we have described in these pages has a curative effect. It brings to an end the operative force of the idea which was not abreacted in the first instance, by allowing its strangulated affect to find a way out through speech; and it subjects it to associative correction by introducing it into normal consciousness (under light hypnosis) or by removing it through the physician’s suggestion, as it is done in somnambulism accompanied by amnesia.

In our opinion the therapeutic advantages of this procedure are considerable. It is of course true that we do not cure hysteria in so far as it is a matter of disposition. We can do nothing against the recurrence of hypnoid states. Moreover, during the productive stage of an acute hysteria our procedure cannot prevent the phenomena which have been so laboriously removed from being at once replaced by fresh ones. But once this acute stage is past, any residues which may be left in the form of chronic symptoms or attacks are often removed, and permanently so, by our method, because it is a radical one; in this respect it seems to us far superior in its efficacy to removal through direct suggestion, as it is practised to-day by psychotherapists.

If by uncovering the psychical mechanism of hysterical phenomena we have taken a step forward along the path first traced so successfully by Charcot with his explanation and artificial imitation of hystero-traumatic paralyses, we cannot conceal from ourselves that this has brought us nearer to an understanding only of the mechanism of hysterical symptoms and not of the internal causes of hysteria. We have done no more than touch upon the aetiology of hysteria and in fact have been able to throw light only on its acquired forms - on the bearing of accidental factors on the neurosis.

VIENNA, December 1892

Studies On Hysteria

20

II

CASE HISTORIES

(BREUER AND FREUD)

Studies On Hysteria

21

II

CASE HISTORIES

(BREUER AND FREUD)

CASE 1

FRÄULEIN ANNA O. (Breuer)

At the time of her falling ill (in 1880) Fräulein Anna O. was twenty-one years old. She may be regarded as having had a moderately severe neuropathic heredity, since some psychoses had occurred among her more distant relatives. Her parents were normal in this respect. She herself had hitherto been consistently healthy and had shown no signs of neurosis during her period of growth. She was markedly intelligent, with an astonishingly quick grasp of things and penetrating intuition. She possessed a powerful intellect which would have been capable of digesting solid mental pabulum and which stood in need of it - though without receiving it after she had left school. She had great poetic and imaginative gifts, which were under the control of a sharp and critical common sense. Owing to this latter quality she was completely unsuggestible; she was only influenced by arguments, never by mere assertions. Her willpower was energetic, tenacious and persistent; sometimes it reached the pitch of an obstinacy which only gave way out of kindness and regard for other people.

One of her essential character traits was sympathetic kindness. Even during her illness she herself was greatly assisted by being able to look after a number of poor, sick people, for she was thus able to satisfy a powerful instinct. Her states of feeling always tended to a slight exaggeration, alike of cheerfulness and gloom; hence she was sometimes subject to moods. The element of sexuality was astonishingly undeveloped in her. The patient, whose life became known to me to an extent to which one person’s life is seldom known to another, had never been in love; and in all the enormous number of hallucinations which occurred during her illness that element of mental life never emerged.

Studies On Hysteria

22

This girl, who was bubbling over with intellectual vitality: led an extremely monotonous existence in her puritanically-minded family. She embellished her life in a manner which probably influenced her decisively in the direction of her illness, by indulging in systematic day-dreaming, which she described as her ‘private theatre’. While everyone thought she was attending, she was living through fairy tales in her imagination; but she was always on the spot when she was spoken to, so that no one was aware of it. She pursued this activity almost continuously while she was engaged on her household duties, which she discharged unexceptionably. I shall presently have to describe the way in which this habitual day-dreaming while she was well passed over into illness without a break.

The course of the illness fell into several clearly separable phases:

(A) Latent incubation. From the middle of July, 1880, till about December 10. This phase of an illness is usually hidden from us; but in this case, owing to its peculiar character, it was completely accessible; and this in itself lends no small pathological interest to the history, I shall describe this phase presently.

(B) The manifest illness. A psychosis of a peculiar kind, paraphasia, a convergent squint, severe disturbances of vision, paralyses (in the form of contractures), complete in the right upper and both lower extremities, partial in the left upper extremity, paresis of the neck muscles. A gradual reduction of the contracture to the right-hand extremities. Some improvement, interrupted by a severe psychical trauma (the death of the patient’s father) in April, after which there followed

(C) A period of persisting somnambulism, subsequently alternating with more normal states. A number of chronic symptoms persisted till December, 1881.

(D) Gradual cessation of the pathological states and symptoms up to June, 1882.

Studies On Hysteria

23

In July, 1880, the patient’s father, of whom she was passionately fond, fell ill of a peripleuritic abscess which failed to clear up to which he succumbed in April, 1881. During the first months of the illness Anna devoted her whole energy to nursing her father, and no one was much surprised when by degrees her own health greatly deteriorated. No one, perhaps not even the patient herself, knew what was happening to her; but eventually the state of weakness, anaemia and distaste for food became so bad that to her great sorrow she was no longer allowed to continue nursing the patient. The immediate cause of this was a very severe cough, on account of which I examined her for the first time. It was a typical tussis nervosa. She soon began to display a marked craving for rest during the afternoon, followed in the evening by a sleep-like state and afterwards a highly excited condition.

At the beginning of December a convergent squint appeared. An ophthalmic surgeon explained this (mistakenly) as being due to paresis of one abducens. On December 11 the patient took to her bed and remained there until April 1.

There developed in rapid succession a series of severe disturbances which were apparently quite new: left-sided occipital headache; convergent squint (diplopia), markedly increased by excitement; complaints that the walls of the room seemed to be falling over (affection of the obliquus); disturbances of vision which it was hard to analyse; paresis of the muscles of the front of the neck, so that finally the patient could only move her head by pressing it backwards between her raised shoulders and moving her whole back; contracture and anaesthesia of the right upper, and, after a time, of the right lower extremity. The latter was fully extended, adducted and rotated inwards. Later the same symptom appeared in the left lower extremity and finally in the left arm, of which, however, the fingers to some extent retained the power of movement. So, too, there was no complete rigidity in the shoulder-joints. The contracture reached its maximum in the muscles of the upper arms. In the same way, the region of the elbows turned out to be the most affected by anaesthesia when, at a later stage, it became possible to make a more careful test of this. At the beginning of the illness the anaesthesia could not be efficiently tested, owing to the patient’s resistance arising from feelings of anxiety.

Studies On Hysteria

24

It was while the patient was in this condition that I under took her treatment, and I at once recognized the seriousness of the psychical disturbance with which I had to deal. Two entirely distinct states of consciousness were present which alternated very frequently and without warning and which became more and more differentiated in the course of the illness. In one of these states she recognized her surroundings; she was melancholy and anxious, but relatively normal. In the other state she hallucinated and was ‘naughty’ - that is to say, she was abusive, used to throw the cushions at people, so far as the contractures at various times allowed, tore buttons off her bed clothes and linen with those of her fingers which she could move, and so on. At this stage of her illness if something had been moved in the room or someone had entered or left it she would complain of having ‘lost’ some time and would remark upon the gap in her train of conscious thoughts. Since those about her tried to deny this and to soothe her when she complained that she was going mad, she would, after throwing the pillows about, accuse people of doing things to her and leaving her in a muddle, etc.

These ‘absences’ had already been observed before she took to her bed; she used then to stop in the middle of a sentence, repeat her last words and after a short pause go on talking. These interruptions gradually increased till they reached the dimensions that have just been described; and during the climax of the illness, when the contractures had extended to the left side of her body, it was only for a short time during the day that she was to any degree normal. But the disturbances invaded even her moments of relatively clear consciousness. There were extremely rapid changes of mood leading to excessive but quite temporary high spirits, and at other times severe anxiety, stubborn opposition to every therapeutic effort and frightening hallucinations of black snakes, which was how she saw her hair, ribbons and similar things. At the same time she kept on telling herself not to be so silly: what she was seeing was really only her hair, etc. At moments when her mind was quite clear she would complain of the profound darkness in her head, of not being able to think, of becoming blind and deaf, of having two selves, a real one and an evil one which forced her to behave badly, and so on.

Studies On Hysteria

25

In the afternoons she would fall into a somnolent state which lasted till about an hour after sunset. She would then wake up and complain that something was tormenting her - or rather, she would keep repeating in the impersonal form ‘tormenting, tormenting’. For alongside of the development of the contractures there appeared a deep-going functional disorganization of her speech. It first became noticeable that she was at a loss to find words, and this difficulty gradually increased. Later she lost her command of grammar and syntax; she no longer conjugated verbs, and eventually she used only infinitives, for the most part incorrectly formed from weak past participles; and she omitted both the definite and indefinite article. In the process of time she became almost completely deprived of words. She put them together laboriously out of four or five languages and became almost unintelligible. When she tried to write (until her contractures entirely prevented her doing so) she employed the same jargon. For two weeks she became completely dumb and in spite of making great and continuous efforts to speak she was unable to say a syllable. And now for the first time the psychical mechanism of the disorder became clear. As I knew, she had felt very much offended over something and had determined not to speak about it. When I guessed this and obliged her to talk about it, the inhibition, which had made any other kind of utterance impossible as well, disappeared.

This change coincided with a return of the power of movement to the extremities of the left side of her body, in March, 1881. Her paraphasia receded; but thenceforward she spoke only in English - apparently, however, without knowing that she was doing so. She had disputes with her nurse who was, of course, unable to understand her. It was only some months later that I was able to convince her that she was talking English. Nevertheless, she herself could still understand the people about her who talked German. Only in moments of extreme anxiety did her power of speech desert her entirely, or else she would use a mixture of all sorts of languages. At times when she was at her very best and most free, she talked French and Italian. There was complete amnesia between these times and those at which she talked English. At this point, too, her squint began to diminish and made its appearance only at moments of great excitement. She was once again able to support her head. On the first of April she got up for the first time.

Studies On Hysteria

26

On the fifth of April her adored father died. During her illness she had seen him very rarely and for short periods. This was the most severe psychical trauma that she could possibly have experienced. A violent outburst of excitement was succeeded by profound stupor which lasted about two days and from which she emerged in a greatly changed state. At first she was far quieter and her feelings of anxiety were much diminished. The contracture of her right arm and leg persisted as well as their anaesthesia, though this was not deep. There was a high degree of restriction of the field of vision: in a bunch of flowers which gave her much pleasure she could only see one flower at a time. She complained of not being able to recognize people. Normally, she said, she had been able to recognize faces without having to make any deliberate effort; now she was obliged to do laborious ‘recognizing work’¹ and had to say to herself ‘this person’s nose is such-and-such, his hair is such-and-such, so he must be so-and-so’. All the people she saw seemed like wax figures without any connection with her. She found the presence of some of her close relatives very distressing and this negative attitude grew continually stronger If someone whom she was ordinarily pleased to see came into the room, she would recognize him and would be aware of things for a short time, but would soon sink back into her own broodings and her visitor was blotted out. I was the only person whom she always recognized when I came in; so long as I was talking to her she was always in contact with things and lively, except for the sudden interruptions caused by one of her hallucinatory ‘absences’.

She now spoke only English and could not understand what was said to her in German. Those about her were obliged to talk to her in English; even the nurse learned to make herself to some extent understood in this way. She was, however, able to read French and Italian. If she had to read one of these aloud, what she produced, with extraordinary fluency, was an admirable extempore English translation.

She began writing again, but in a peculiar fashion. She wrote with her left hand, the less stiff one, and she used Roman printed letters, copying the alphabet from her edition of Shakespeare.

She had eaten extremely little previously, but now she refused nourishment altogether. However, she allowed me to feed her, so that she very soon began to take more food. But she never consented to eat bread. After her meal she invariably rinsed out her mouth and even did so if, for any reason, she had not eaten anything - which shows how absent-minded she was about such things.

¹ [In English in the original.]

Studies On Hysteria

27

Her somnolent states in the afternoon and her deep sleep after sunset persisted. If, after this, she had talked herself out (I shall have to explain what is meant by this later) she was clear in mind, calm and cheerful.

This comparatively tolerable state did not last long. Some ten days after her father’s death a consultant was brought in, whom, like all strangers, she completely ignored while I demonstrated all her peculiarities to him. ‘That’s like an examination,’¹ she said, laughing, when I got her to read a French text aloud in English. The other physician intervened in the conversation and tried to attract her attention, but in vain. It was a genuine ‘negative hallucination’ of the kind which has since so often been produced experimentally. In the end he succeeded in breaking through it by blowing smoke in her face. She suddenly saw a stranger before her, rushed to the door to take away the key and fell unconscious to the ground. There followed a short fit of anger and then a severe attack of anxiety which I had great difficulty in calming down. Unluckily I had to leave Vienna that evening, and when I came back several days later I found the patient much worse. She had gone entirely without food the whole time, was full of anxiety and her hallucinatory absences were filled with terrifying figures, death’s heads and skeletons. Since she acted these things through as though she was experiencing them and in part put them into words, the people around her became aware to a great extent of the content of these hallucinations.

The regular order of things was: the somnolent state in the afternoon, followed after sunset by the deep hypnosis for which she invented the technical name of ‘clouds’.² If during this she was able to narrate the hallucinations she had had in the course of the day, she would wake up clear in mind, calm and cheerful. She would sit down to work and write or draw far into the night quite rationally. At about four she would go to bed. Next day the whole series of events would be repeated. It was a truly remarkable contrast: in the day-time the irresponsible patient pursued by hallucinations, and at night the girl with her mind completely clear.

¹ [In English in the original.]

² [In English in the original.]

Studies On Hysteria

28

In spite of her euphoria at night, her psychical condition deteriorated steadily. Strong suicidal impulses appeared which made it seem inadvisable for her to continue living on the third floor. Against her will, therefore, she was transferred to a country house in the neighbourhood of Vienna (on June 7, 1881). I had never threatened her with this removal from her home, which she regarded with horror, but she herself had, without saying so, expected and dreaded it. This event made it clear once more how much the affect of anxiety dominated her psychical disorder. Just as after her father’s death a calmer condition had set in, so now, when what she feared had actually taken place, she once more became calmer. Nevertheless, the move was immediately followed by three days and nights completely without sleep or nourishment, by numerous attempts at suicide (though, so long as she was in a garden, these were not dangerous), by smashing windows and so on, and by hallucinations unaccompanied by absences which she was able to distinguish easily from her other hallucinations. After this she grew quieter, let the nurse feed her and even took chloral at night.

Before continuing my account of the case, I must go back once more and describe one of its peculiarities which I have hitherto mentioned only in passing. I have already said that throughout the illness up to this point the patient fell into a somnolent state every afternoon and that after sunset this period passed into a deeper sleep - ‘clouds’. (It seems plausible to attribute this regular sequence of events merely to her experience while she was nursing her father, which she had had to do for several months. During the nights she had watched by the patient’s bedside or had been awake anxiously listening till the morning; in the afternoons she had lain down for a short rest, as is the usual habit of nurses. This pattern of waking at night and sleeping in the afternoons seems to have been carried over into her own illness and to have persisted long after the sleep had been replaced by a hypnotic state.) After the deep sleep had lasted about an hour she grew restless, tossed to and fro and kept repeating ‘tormenting, tormenting’, with her eyes shut all the time. It was also noticed how, during her absences in day-time she was obviously creating some situation or episode to which she gave a clue with a few muttered words. It happened then - to begin with accidentally but later intentionally - that someone near her repeated one of these phrases of hers while she was complaining about the ‘tormenting’. She at once joined in and began to paint some situation or tell some story, hesitatingly at first and in her paraphasic jargon; but the longer she went on the more fluent she became, till at last she was speaking quite correct German. (This applies to the early period before she began talking English only.) The stories were always sad and some of them very charming, in the style of Hans Andersen’s Picture-book without Pictures, and, indeed, they were probably constructed on that model. As a rule their starting-point or central situation was of a girl anxiously sitting by a sick-bed. But she also built up her stories on quite other topics. - A few moments after she had finished her narrative she would wake up, obviously calmed down, or, as she called it, ‘gehäglich’.¹ During the night she would again become restless, and in the morning, after a couple of hours’ sleep, she was visibly involved in some other set of ideas. - If for any reason she was unable to tell me the story during her evening hypnosis she failed to calm down afterwards, and on the following day she had to tell me two stories in order for this to happen.

¹ [She used this made-up word instead of the regular German ‘behaglich’, meaning ‘comfortable’.]

Studies On Hysteria

29

The essential features of this phenomenon - the mounting up and intensification of her absences into her auto-hypnosis in the evening, the effect of the products of her imagination as psychical stimuli and the easing and removal of her state of stimulation when she gave utterance to them in her hypnosis - remained constant throughout the whole eighteen months during which she was under observation.

The stories naturally became still more tragic after her father’s death. It was not, however, until the deterioration of her mental condition, which followed when her state of somnambulism was forcibly broken into in the way already described, that her evening narratives ceased to have the character of more or less freely-created poetical compositions and changed into a string of frightful and terrifying hallucinations. (It was already possible to arrive at these from the patient’s behaviour during the day.) I have already described how completely her mind was relieved when, shaking with fear and horror, she had reproduced these frightful images and given verbal utterance to them.

While she was in the country, when I was unable to pay her daily visits, the situation developed as follows. I used to visit her in the evening, when I knew I should find her in her hypnosis, and I then relieved her of the whole stock of imaginative products which she had accumulated since my last visit. It was essential that this should be effected completely if good results were to follow. When this was done she became perfectly calm, and next day she would be agreeable, easy to manage, industrious and even cheerful; but on the second day she would be increasingly moody, contrary and unpleasant, and this would become still more marked on the third day. When she was like this it was not always easy to get her to talk, even in her hypnosis. She aptly described this procedure, speaking seriously, as a ‘talking cure’¹, while she referred to it jokingly as ‘chimney-sweeping’.¹ She knew that after she had given utterance to her hallucinations she would lose all her obstinacy and what she described as her ‘energy’; and when, after some comparatively long interval, she was in a bad temper, she would refuse to talk, and I was obliged to overcome her unwillingness by urging and pleading and using devices such as repeating a formula with which she was in the habit of introducing her stories. But she would never begin to talk until she had satisfied herself of my identity by carefully feeling my hands. On those nights on which she had not been calmed by verbal utterance it was necessary to fall back upon chloral. I had tried it on a few earlier occasions, but I was obliged to give her 5 grammes, and sleep was preceded by a state of intoxication which lasted for some hours. When I was present this state was euphoric, but in my absence it was highly disagreeable and characterized by anxiety as well as excitement. (It may be remarked incidentally that this severe state of intoxication made no difference to her contractures.) I had been able to avoid the use of narcotics, since the verbal utterance of her hallucinations calmed her even though it might not induce sleep; but when she was in the country the nights on which she had not obtained hypnotic relief were so unbearable that in spite of everything it was necessary to have recourse to chloral. But it became possible gradually to reduce the dose.

¹ [In English in the original.]

Studies On Hysteria

30

The persisting somnambulism did not return. But on the other hand the alternation between two states of consciousness persisted. She used to hallucinate in the middle of a conversation, run off, start climbing up a tree, etc. If one caught hold of her, she would very quickly take up her interrupted sentence without knowing anything about what had happened in the interval. All these hallucinations, however, came up and were reported on in her hypnosis.

Her condition improved on the whole. She took nourishment without difficulty and allowed the nurse to feed her; except that she asked for bread but rejected it the moment it touched her lips. The paralytic contracture of the leg diminished greatly. There was also an improvement in her power of judgement and she became much attached to my friend Dr. B., the physician who visited her. She derived much benefit from a Newfoundland dog which was given to her and of which she was passionately fond. On one occasion, though, her pet made an attack on a cat, and it was splendid to see the way in which the frail girl seized a whip in her left hand and beat off the huge beast with it to rescue his victim. Later, she looked after some poor, sick people, and this helped her greatly.

It was after I returned from a holiday trip which lasted several weeks that I received the most convincing evidence of the pathogenic and exciting effect brought about by the ideational complexes which were produced during her absences, or condition seconde, and of the fact that these complexes were disposed of by being given verbal expression during hypnosis. During this interval no ‘talking cure’ had been carried out, for it was impossible to persuade her to confide what she had to say to anyone but me - not even to Dr. B. to whom she had in other respects become devoted. I found her in a wretched moral state, inert, unamenable, ill-tempered, even malicious. It became plain from her evening stories that her imaginative and poetic vein was drying up. What she reported was more and more concerned with her hallucinations and, for instance, the things that had annoyed her during the past days. These were clothed in imaginative shape, but were merely formulated in stereotyped images rather than elaborated into poetic productions. But the situation only became tolerable after I had arranged for the patient to be brought back to Vienna for a week and evening after evening made her tell me three to five stories. When I had accomplished this, everything that had accumulated during the weeks of my absence had been worked off. It was only now that the former rhythm was re-established: on the day after her giving verbal utterance to her phantasies she was amiable and cheerful, on the second day she was more irritable and less agreeable and on the third positively ‘nasty’. Her moral state was a function of the time that had elapsed since her last utterance. This was because every one of the spontaneous products of her imagination and every event which had been assimilated by the pathological part of her mind persisted as a psychical stimulus until it had been narrated in her hypnosis, after which it completely ceased to operate.

Studies On Hysteria

31

When, in the autumn, the patient returned to Vienna (though to a different house from the one in which she had fallen ill), her condition was bearable, both physically and mentally; for very few of her experiences - in fact only her more striking ones - were made into psychical stimuli in a pathological manner. I was hoping for a continuous and increasing improvement, provided that the permanent burdening of her mind with fresh stimuli could be prevented by her giving regular verbal expression to them. But to begin with I was disappointed. In December there was a marked deterioration of her psychical condition. She once more became excited, gloomy and irritable. She had no more ‘really good days’ even when it was impossible to detect anything that was remaining ‘stuck’ inside her. To wards the end of December, at Christmas time, she was particularly restless, and for a whole week in the evenings she told me nothing new but only the imaginative products which she had elaborated under the stress of great anxiety and emotion during the Christmas of 1880. When the scenes had been completed she was greatly relieved.

A year had now passed since she had been separated from her father and had taken to her bed, and from this time on her condition became clearer and was systematized in a very peculiar manner. Her alternating states of consciousness, which were characterized by the fact that, from morning onwards, her absences (that is to say, the emergence of her condition seconde) always became more frequent as the day advanced and took entire possession by the evening - these alternating states had differed from each other previously in that one (the first) was normal and the second alienated; now, however, they differed further in that in the first she lived, like the rest of us, in the winter of 1881-2, whereas in the second she lived in the winter of 1880-1, and had completely forgotten all the subsequent events. The one thing that nevertheless seemed to remain conscious most of the time was the fact that her father had died. She was carried back to the previous year with such intensity that in the new house she hallucinated her old room, so that when she wanted to go to the door she knocked up against the stove which stood in the same relation to the window as the door did in the old room. The change-over from one state to another occurred spontaneously but could also be very easily brought about by any sense-impression which vividly recalled the previous year. One had only to hold up an orange before her eyes (oranges were what she had chiefly lived on during the first part of her illness) in order to carry her over from the year 1882 to the year 1881. But this transfer into the past did not take place in a general or indefinite manner; she lived through the previous winter day by day. I should only have been able to suspect that this was happening, had it not been that every evening during the hypnosis she talked through whatever it was that had excited her on the same day in 1881, and had it not been that a private diary kept by her mother in 1881 confirmed beyond a doubt the occurrence of the underlying events. This re-living of the previous year continued till the illness came to its final close in June, 1882.

Studies On Hysteria

32

It was interesting here, too, to observe the way in which these revived psychical stimuli belonging to her secondary state made their way over into her first, more normal one. It happened, for instance, that one morning the patient said to me laughingly that she had no idea what was the matter but she was angry with me. Thanks to the diary I knew what was happening; and, sure enough, this was gone through again in the evening hypnosis: I had annoyed the patient very much on the same evening in 1881. Or another time she told me there was something the matter with her eyes; she was seeing colours wrong. She knew she was wearing a brown dress but she saw it as a blue one. We soon found that she could distinguish all the colours of the visual test-sheets correctly and clearly, and that the disturbance only related to the dress-material. The reason was that during the same period in 1881 she had been very busy with a dressing-gown for her father, which was made with the same material as her present dress, but was blue instead of brown. Incidentally, it was often to be seen that these emergent memories showed their effect in advance; the disturbance of her normal state would occur earlier on, and the memory would only gradually be awakened in her condition seconde.

Studies On Hysteria

33

Her evening hypnosis was thus heavily burdened, for we had to talk off not only her contemporary imaginative products but also the events and ‘vexations’¹ of 1881. (Fortunately I had already relieved her at the time of the imaginative products of that year.) But in addition to all this the work that had to be done by the patient and her physician was immensely increased by a third group of separate disturbances which had to be disposed of in the same manner. These were the psychical events involved in the period of incubation of the illness between July and December, 1880; it was they that had produced the whole of the hysterical phenomena, and when they were brought to verbal utterance the symptoms disappeared.

When this happened for the first time - when, as a result of an accidental and spontaneous utterance of this kind, during the evening hypnosis, a disturbance which had persisted for a considerable time vanished - I was greatly surprised. It was in the summer during a period of extreme heat, and the patient was suffering very badly from thirst; for, without being able to account for it in any way, she suddenly found it impossible to drink. She would take up the glass of water she longed for, but as soon as it touched her lips she would push it away like some one suffering from hydrophobia. As she did this, she was obviously in an absence for a couple of seconds. She lived only on fruit, such as melons, etc., so as to lessen her tormenting thirst. This had lasted for some six weeks, when one day during hypnosis she grumbled about her English lady-companion whom she did not care for, and went on to describe, with every sign of disgust, how she had once gone into that lady’s room and how her little dog - horrid creature! - had drunk out of a glass there. The patient had said nothing, as she had wanted to be polite. After giving further energetic expression to the anger she had held back, she asked for something to drink, drank a large quantity of water without any difficulty and woke from her hypnosis with the glass at her lips; and thereupon the disturbance vanished, never to return. A number of extremely obstinate whims were similarly removed after she had described the experiences which had given rise to them. She took a great step forward when the first of her chronic symptoms disappeared in the same way - the contracture of her right leg, which, it is true, had already diminished a great deal. These findings - that in the case of this patient the hysterical phenomena disappeared as soon as the event which had given rise to them was reproduced in her hypnosis - made it possible to arrive at a therapeutic technical procedure which left nothing to be desired in its logical consistency and systematic application. Each individual symptom in this complicated case was taken separately in hand; all the occasions on which it had appeared were described in reverse order, starting before the time when the patient became bed-ridden and going back to the event which had led to its first appearance. When this had been described the symptom was permanently removed.

¹ [In English in the original.]

Studies On Hysteria

34

In this way her paralytic contractures and anaesthesias, disorders of vision and hearing of every sort, neuralgias, coughing, tremors, etc., and finally her disturbances of speech were ‘talked away’. Amongst the disorders of vision, the following, for instance, were disposed of separately: the convergent squint with diplopia; deviation of both eyes to the right, so that when her hand reached out for something it always went to the left of the object; restriction of the visual field; central amblyopia; macropsia; seeing a death’s head instead of her father; inability to read. Only a few scattered phenomena (such, for instance, as the extension of the paralytic contractures to the left side of her body) which had developed while she was confined to bed, were untouched by this process of analysis, and it is probable, indeed, that they in fact had no immediate physical cause.

It turned out to be quite impracticable to shorten the work by trying to elicit in her memory straight away the first provoking cause of her symptoms. She was unable to find it, grew confused, and things proceeded even more slowly than if she was allowed quietly and steadily to follow back the thread of memories on which she had embarked. Since the latter method, however, took too long in the evening hypnosis, owing to her being over-strained and distraught by ‘talking out’ the two other sets of experiences - and owing, too, to the reminiscences needing time before they could attain sufficient vividness - we evolved the following procedure. I used to visit her in the morning and hypnotize her. (Very simple methods of doing this were arrived at empirically.) I would next ask her to concentrate her thoughts on the symptom we were treating at the moment and to tell me the occasions on which it had appeared. The patient would proceed to describe in rapid succession and under brief headings the external events concerned and these I would jot down. During her subsequent evening hypnosis she would then, with the help of my notes, give me a fairly detailed account of these circumstances.

Studies On Hysteria

35

An example will show the exhaustive manner in which she accomplished this. It was our regular experience that the patient did not hear when she was spoken to. It was possible to differentiate this passing habit of not hearing as follows:

(a) Not hearing when someone came in, while her thoughts were abstracted. 108 separate detailed instances of this, mentioning the persons and circumstances, often with dates. First instance: not hearing her father come in.

(b) Not understanding when several people were talking. 27 instances. First instance: her father, once more, and an acquaintance.

(c) Not hearing when she was alone and directly addressed. 50 instances. Origin: her father having vainly asked her for some wine.

(d) Deafness brought on by being shaken (in a carriage, etc.). 15 instances. Origin: having been shaken angrily by her young brother when he caught her one night listening at the sick room door.

(e) Deafness brought on by fright at a noise. 37 instances. Origin: a choking fit of her father’s, caused by swallowing the wrong way.

(f) Deafness during deep absence. 12 instances.

(g) Deafness brought on by listening hard for a long time, so that when she was spoken to she failed to hear. 54 instances.

Of course all these episodes were to a great extent identical in so far as they could be traced back to states of abstraction or absences or to fright. But in the patient’s memory they were so clearly differentiated, that if she happened to make a mistake in their sequence she would be obliged to correct herself and put them in the right order; if this was not done her report came to a standstill. The events she described were so lacking in interest and significance and were told in such detail that there could be no suspicion of their having been invented. Many of these incidents consisted of purely internal experiences and so could not be verified; others of them (or circumstances attending them) were within the recollection of people in her environment.

Studies On Hysteria

36

This example, too, exhibited a feature that was always observable when a symptom was being ‘talked away’: the particular symptom emerged with greater force while she was discussing it. Thus during the analysis of her not being able to hear she was so deaf that for part of the time I was obliged to communicate with her in writing. The first provoking cause was habitually a fright of some kind, experienced while she was nursing her father - some oversight on her part, for instance.

The work of remembering was not always an easy matter and sometimes the patient had to make great efforts. On one occasion our whole progress was obstructed for some time because a recollection refused to emerge. It was a question of a particularly terrifying hallucination. While she was nursing her father she had seen him with a death’s head. She and the people with her remembered that once, while she still appeared to be in good health, she had paid a visit to one of her relatives. She had opened the door and all at once fallen down unconscious. In order to get over the obstruction to our progress she visited the same place again and, on entering the room, again fell to the ground unconscious. During her subsequent evening hypnosis the obstacle was surmounted. As she came into the room, she had seen her pale face reflected in a mirror hanging opposite the door; but it was not herself that she saw but her father with a death’s head. - We often noticed that her dread if a memory, as in the present instance, inhibited its emergence, and this had to be brought about forcibly by the patient or physician.

Studies On Hysteria

37

The following incident, among others, illustrates the high degree of logical consistency of her states. During this period, as has already been explained, the patient was always in her condition seconde - that is, in the year 1881 - at night. On one occasion she woke up during the night, declaring that she had been taken away from home once again, and became so seriously excited that the whole household was alarmed. The reason was simple. During the previous evening the talking cure had cleared up her disorder of vision, and this applied also to her condition seconde. Thus when she woke up in the night she found herself in a strange room, for her family had moved house in the spring of 1881. Disagreeable events of this kind were avoided by my always (at her request) shutting her eyes in the evening and giving her a suggestion that she would not be able to open them till I did so myself on the following morning. The disturbance was only repeated once, when the patient cried in a dream and opened her eyes on waking up from it.

Since this laborious analysis for her symptoms dealt with the summer months of 1880, which was the preparatory period of her illness, I obtained complete insight into the incubation and pathogenesis of this case of hysteria, and I will now describe them briefly.

In July, 1880, while he was in the country, her father fell seriously ill of a sub-pleural abscess. Anna shared the duties of nursing him with her mother. She once woke up during the night in great anxiety about the patient, who was in a high fever; and she was under the strain of expecting the arrival of a surgeon from Vienna who was to operate. Her mother had gone away for a short time and Anna was sitting at the bedside with her right arm over the back of her chair. She fell into a waking dream and saw a black snake coming towards the sick man from the wall to bite him. (It is most likely that there were in fact snakes in the field behind the house and that these had previously given the girl a fright; they would thus have provided the material for her hallucination.) She tried to keep the snake off, but it was as though she was paralysed. Her right arm, over the back of the chair, had gone to sleep and had become anaesthetic and paretic; and when she looked at it the fingers turned into little snakes with death’s heads (the nails). (It seems probable that she had tried to use her paralysed right arm to drive off the snake and that its anaesthesia and paralysis had consequently become associated with the hallucination of the snake.) When the snake vanished, in her terror she tried to pray. But language failed her: she could find no tongue in which to speak, till at last she thought of some children’s verses in English and then found herself able to think and pray in that language. The whistle of the train that was bringing the doctor whom she expected broke the spell.

Studies On Hysteria

38

Next day, in the course of a game, she threw a quoit into some bushes; and when she went to pick it out, a bent branch revived her hallucination of the snake, and simultaneously her right arm became rigidly extended. Thenceforward the same thing invariably occurred whenever the hallucination was recalled by some object with a more or less snake-like appearance. This hallucination, however, as well as the contracture only appeared during the short absences which became more and more frequent from that night onwards. (The contracture did not become stabilized until December, when the patient broke down completely and took to her bed permanently.) As a result of some particular event which I cannot find recorded in my notes and which I no longer recall, the contracture of the right leg was added to that of the right arm.

Her tendency to auto-hypnotic absences was from now on established. On the morning after the night I have described, while she was waiting for the surgeon’s arrival, she fell into such a fit of abstraction that he finally arrived in the room without her having heard his approach. Her persistent anxiety interfered with her eating and gradually led to intense feelings of nausea. Apart from this, indeed, each of her hysterical symptoms arose during an affect. It is not quite certain whether in every case a momentary state of absence was involved, but this seems probable in view of the fact that in her waking state the patient was totally unaware of what had been going on.

Some of her symptoms, however, seem not to have emerged in her absences but merely in an affect during her waking life; but if so, they recurred in just the same way. Thus we were able to trace back all of her different disturbances of vision to different, more or less clearly determining causes. For instance, on one occasion, when she was sitting by her father’s bedside with tears in her eyes, he suddenly asked her what time it was. She could not see clearly; she made a great effort, and brought her watch near to her eyes. The face of the watch now seemed very big - thus accounting for her macropsia and convergent squint. Or again, she tried hard to suppress her tears so that the sick man should not see them.

Studies On Hysteria

39

A dispute, in the course of which she suppressed a rejoinder, caused a spasm of the glottis, and this was repeated on every similar occasion.

She lost the power of speech (a) as a result of fear, after her first hallucination at night, (b) after having suppressed a remark another time (by active inhibition), (c) after having been unjustly blamed for something and (d) on every analogous occasion (when she felt mortified). She began coughing for the first time when once, as she was sitting at her father’s bedside, she heard the sound of dance music coming from a neighbouring house, felt a sudden wish to be there, and was overcome with self-reproaches. Thereafter, throughout the whole length of her illness she reacted to any markedly rhythmical music with a tussis nervosa.

I cannot feel much regret that the incompleteness of my notes makes it impossible for me to enumerate all the occasions on which her various hysterical symptoms appeared. She herself told me them in every single case, with the one exception I have mentioned; and, as I have already said, each symptom disappeared after she had described its first occurrence.

In this way, too, the whole illness was brought to a close. The patient herself had formed a strong determination that the whole treatment should be finished by the anniversary of the day on which she was moved into the country. At the beginning of June, accordingly, she entered into the ‘talking cure’ with the greatest energy. On the last day - by the help of re-arranging the room so as to resemble her father’s sickroom - she reproduced the terrifying hallucination which I have described above and which constituted the root of her whole illness. During the original scene she had only been able to think and pray in English; but immediately after its reproduction she was able to speak German. She was moreover free from the innumerable disturbances which she had previously exhibited. After this she left Vienna and travelled for a while; but it was a considerable time before she regained her mental balance entirely. Since then she has enjoyed complete health.

Studies On Hysteria

40

Although I have suppressed a large number of quite interesting details, this case history of Anna O. has grown bulkier than would seem to be required for a hysterical illness that was not in itself of an unusual character. It was, however, impossible to describe the case without entering into details, and its features seem to me of sufficient importance to excuse this extensive report. In just the same way, the eggs of the echinoderm are important in embryology, not because the sea urchin is a particularly interesting animal but because the protoplasm of its eggs is transparent and because what we observe in them thus throws light on the probable course of events in eggs whose protoplasm is opaque. The interest of the present case seems to me above all to reside in the extreme clarity and intelligibility of its pathogenesis.

There were two psychical characteristics present in the girl while she was still completely healthy which acted as predisposing causes for her subsequent hysterical illness:

(1) Her monotonous family life and the absence of adequate intellectual occupation left her with an unemployed surplus of mental liveliness and energy, and this found an outlet in the constant activity of her imagination.

(2) This led to a habit of day-dreaming (her ‘private theatre’), which laid the foundations for a dissociation of her mental personality. Nevertheless a dissociation of this degree is still within the bounds of normality. Reveries and reflections during a more or less mechanical occupation do not in themselves imply a pathological splitting of consciousness, since if they are interrupted - if, for instance, the subject is spoken to - the normal unity of consciousness is restored; nor, presumably, is any amnesia present. In the case of Anna O., however, this habit prepared the ground upon which the affect of anxiety and dread was able to establish itself in the way I have described, when once that affect had transformed the patient’s habitual day-dreaming into a hallucinatory absence. It is remarkable how completely the earliest manifestation of her illness in its beginnings already exhibited its main characteristics, which afterwards remained unchanged for almost two years. These comprised the existence of a second state of consciousness which first emerged as a temporary absence and later became organized into a ‘double conscience’; an inhibition of speech, determined by the affect of anxiety, which found a chance discharge in the English verses; later on, paraphasia and loss of her mother-tongue, which was replaced by excellent English; and lastly the accidental paralysis of her right arm, due to pressure, which later developed into a contractural paresis and anaesthesia on her right side. The mechanism by which this latter affection came into being agreed entirely with Charcot’s theory of traumatic hysteria - a slight trauma occurring during a state of hypnosis.

Studies On Hysteria

41

But whereas the paralysis experimentally provoked by Charcot in his patients became stabilized immediately, and whereas the paralysis caused in sufferers from traumatic neuroses by a severe traumatic shock sets in at once, the nervous system of this girl put up a successful resistance for four months. Her contracture, as well as the other disturbances which accompanied it set in only during the short absences in her condition seconde, and left her during her normal state in full control of her body and possession of her senses; so that nothing was noticed either by herself or by those around her, though it is true that the attention of the latter was centred upon the patient’s sick father and was consequently diverted from her.

Since, however, her absences with their total amnesia and accompanying hysterical phenomena grew more and more frequent from the time of her first hallucinatory auto-hypnosis, the opportunities multiplied for the formation of new symptoms of the same kind, and those that had already been formed became more strongly entrenched by frequent repetition. In addition to this, it gradually came about that any sudden distressing affect would have the same result as an absence (though, indeed, it is possible that such affects actually caused a temporary absence in every case); chance coincidences set up pathological associations and sensory or motor disturbances, which thenceforward appeared along with the affect. But hitherto this only occurred for fleeting moments. Before the patient took permanently to her bed she had already developed the whole assemblage of hysterical phenomena, without anyone knowing it. It was only after the patient had broken down completely owing to exhaustion brought about by lack of nourishment, insomnia and constant anxiety, and only after she had begun to pass more time in her condition seconde than in her normal state, that the hysterical phenomena extended to the latter as well and changed from intermittent acute symptoms into chronic ones.

Studies On Hysteria

42

The question now arises how far the patient’s statements are to be trusted and whether the occasions and mode of origin of the phenomena were really as she represented them. So far as the more important and fundamental events are concerned, the trustworthiness of her account seems to me to be beyond question. As regards the symptoms disappearing after being ‘talked away’, I cannot use this as evidence; it may very well be explained by suggestion. But I always found the patient entirely truthful and trustworthy. The things she told me were intimately bound up with what was most sacred to her. Whatever could be checked by other people was fully confirmed. Even the most highly gifted girl would be incapable of concocting a tissue of data with such a degree of internal consistency as was exhibited in the history of this case. It cannot be disputed, however, that precisely her consistency may have led her (in perfectly good faith) to assign to some of her symptoms a precipitating cause which they did not in fact possess. But this suspicion, too, I consider unjustified. The very insignificance of so many of those causes, the irrational character of so many of the connections involved, argue in favour of their reality. The patient could not understand how it was that dance music made her cough; such a construction is too meaningless to have been deliberate. (It seemed very likely to me, incidentally, that each of her twinges of conscience brought on one of her regular spasms of the glottis and that the motor impulses which she felt - for she was very fond of dancing - transformed the spasm into a tussis nervosa.) Accordingly, in my view the patient’s statements were entirely trustworthy and corresponded to the facts.

Studies On Hysteria

43

And now we must consider how far it is justifiable to suppose that hysteria is produced in an analogous way in other patients, and that the process is similar where no such clearly distinct condition seconde has become organized. I may advance in support of this view the fact that in the present case, too, the story of the development of the illness would have remained completely unknown alike to the patient and the physician if it had not been for her peculiarity of remembering things in hypnosis, as I have described, and of relating what she remembered. While she was in her waking state she knew nothing of all this. Thus it is impossible to arrive at what is happening in other cases from an examination of the patients while in a waking state, for with the best will in the world they can give one no information. And I have already pointed out how little those surrounding the present patient were able to observe of what was going on. Accordingly, it would only be possible to discover the state of affairs in other patients by means of some such procedure as was provided in the case of Anna O. by her auto-hypnoses. Provisionally we can only express the view that trains of events similar to those here described occur more commonly than our ignorance of the pathogenic mechanism concerned has led us to suppose.

When the patient had become confined to her bed, and her consciousness was constantly oscillating between her normal and her ‘secondary’ state, the whole host of hysterical symptoms, which had arisen separately and had hitherto been latent, became manifest, as we have already seen, as chronic symptoms. There was now added to these a new group of phenomena which seemed to have had a different origin: the paralytic contractures of her left extremities and the paresis of the muscles raising her head. I distinguish them from the other phenomena because when once they had disappeared they never returned, even in the briefest or mildest form or during the concluding and recuperative phase, when all the other symptoms became active again after having been in abeyance for some time. In the same way, they never came up in the hypnotic analyses and were not traced back to emotional or imaginative sources. I am therefore inclined to think that their appearance was not due to the same psychical process as was that of the other symptoms, but is to be attributed to a secondary extension of that unknown condition which constitutes the somatic foundation of hysterical phenomena.

Studies On Hysteria

44

Throughout the entire illness her two states of consciousness persisted side by side: the primary one in which she was quite normal psychically, and the secondary one which may well be likened to a dream in view of its wealth of imaginative products and hallucinations, its large gaps of memory and the lack of inhibition and control in its associations. In this secondary state the patient was in a condition of alienation. The fact that the patient’s mental condition was entirely dependent on the intrusion of this secondary state into the normal one seems to throw considerable light on at least one class of hysterical psychosis. Every one of her hypnoses in the evening afforded evidence that the patient was entirely clear and well-ordered in her mind and normal as regards her feeling and volition so long as none of the products of her secondary state was acting as a stimulus ‘in the unconscious’. The extremely marked psychosis which appeared whenever there was any considerable interval in this unburdening process showed the degree to which those products influenced the psychical events of her ‘normal’ state. It is hard to avoid expressing the situation by saying that the patient was split into two personalities of which one was mentally normal and the other insane. The sharp division between the two states in the present patient only exhibits more clearly, in my opinion, what has given rise to a number of unexplained problems in many other hysterical patients. It was especially noticeable in Anna O. how much the products of her ‘bad self’, as she herself called it, affected her moral habit of mind. If these products had not been continually disposed of, we should have been faced by a hysteric of the malicious type - refractory, lazy, disagreeable and ill-natured; but, as it was, after the removal of those stimuli her true character, which was the opposite of all these, always reappeared at once.

Studies On Hysteria

45

Nevertheless, though her two states were thus sharply separated, not only did the secondary state intrude into the first one, but - and this was at all events frequently true, and even when she was in a very bad condition - a clear-sighted and calm observer sat, as she put it, in a corner of her brain and looked on at all the mad business. This persistence of clear thinking while the psychosis was actually going on found expression in a very curious way. At a time when, after the hysterical phenomena had ceased, the patient was passing through a temporary depression, she brought up a number of childish fears and self-reproaches, and among them the idea that she had not been ill at all and that the whole business had been simulated. Similar observations, as we know, have frequently been made. When a disorder of this kind has cleared up and the two states of consciousness have once more become merged into one, the patients, looking back to the past, see themselves as the single undivided personality which was aware of all the nonsense; they think they could have prevented it if they had wanted to, and thus they feel as though they had done all the mischief deliberately. - It should be added that this normal thinking which persisted during the secondary state must have fluctuated enormously in its amount and must very often have been completely absent.

I have already described the astonishing fact that from beginning to end of the illness all the stimuli arising from the secondary state, together with their consequences, were permanently removed by being given verbal utterance in hypnosis, and I have only to add an assurance that this was not an invention of mine which I imposed on the patient by suggestion. It took me completely by surprise, and not until symptoms had been got rid of in this way in a whole series of instances did I develop a therapeutic technique out of it.

The final cure of the hysteria deserves a few more words. It was accompanied, as I have already said, by considerable disturbances and a deterioration in the patient’s mental condition. I had a very strong impression that the numerous products of her secondary state which had been quiescent were now forcing their way into consciousness; and though in the first instance they were being remembered only in her secondary state, they were nevertheless burdening and disturbing her normal one. It remains to be seen whether it may not be that the same origin is to be traced in other cases in which a chronic hysteria terminates in a psychosis.

Studies On Hysteria

46

CASE 2

FRAU EMMY VON N., AGE 40, FROM LIVONIA  (Freud)

On May 1, 1889, I took on the case of a lady of about forty years of age, whose symptoms and personality interested me so greatly that I devoted a large part of my time to her and determined to do all I could for her recovery. She was a hysteric and could be put into a state of somnambulism with the greatest ease; and when I became aware of this I decided that I would make use of Breuer’s technique of investigation under hypnosis, which I had come to know from the account he had given me of the successful treatment of his first patient. This was my first attempt at handling that therapeutic method. I was still far from having mastered it; in fact I did not carry the analysis of the symptoms far enough nor pursue it systematically enough. I shall perhaps be able best to give a picture of the patient’s condition and my medical procedure by reproducing the notes which I made each evening during the first three weeks of the treatment. Wherever later experience has brought me a better understanding, I shall embody it in footnotes and interpolated comments.

May 1, 1889. - This lady, when I first saw her, was lying on a sofa with her head resting on a leather cushion. She still looked young and had finely-cut features, full of character. Her fact bore a strained and painful expression, her eyelids were drawn together and her eyes cast down; there was a heavy frown or her forehead and the naso-labial folds were deep. She spoke in a low voice as though with difficulty and her speech was from time to time subject to spastic interruptions amounting to a stammer. She kept her fingers, which exhibited a ceaseless agitation resembling athetosis, tightly clasped together. There were frequent convulsive tic-like movements of her face and the muscles of her neck, during which some of them, especially the right sterno-cleido-mastoid, stood out prominently. Furthermore she frequently interrupted her remarks by producing a curious ‘clacking’ sound from her mouth which defies imitation.¹

¹ This ‘clacking’ was made up of a number of sounds. Colleagues of mine with sporting experience told me, on hearing it, that its final notes resembled the call of a capercaillie.

Studies On Hysteria

47

What she told me was perfectly coherent and revealed an unusual degree of education and intelligence. This made it seem all the more strange when every two or three minutes she suddenly broke off, contorted her face into an expression of horror and disgust, stretched out her hand towards me, spreading and crooking her fingers, and exclaimed, in a changed voice, charged with anxiety: ‘Keep still! - Don’t say anything! - Don’t touch me!’ She was probably under the influence of some recurrent hallucination of a horrifying kind and was keeping the intruding material at bay with this formula.¹ These interpolations came to an end with equal suddenness and the patient took up what she had been saying, without pursuing her momentary excitement any further, and without explaining or apologizing for her behaviour - probably, therefore, without herself having noticed the interpolation.²

I learned what follows of her circumstances. Her family came from Central Germany, but had been settled for two generations in the Baltic Provinces of Russia, where it possessed large estates. She was one of fourteen children, of which she herself in the thirteenth. Only four of them survive. She was brought up carefully, but under strict discipline by an over-energetic and severe mother. When she was twenty-three she married an extremely gifted and able man who had made a high position for himself as an industrialist on a large scale, but was much older than she was. After a short marriage he died of a stroke. To this event, together with the task of bringing up her two daughters, now sixteen and fourteen years old, who were often ailing and suffered from nervous troubles, she attributed her own illness. Since her husband’s death, fourteen years ago, she had been constantly ill with varying degrees of severity. Four years ago her condition was temporarily improved by a course of massage combined with electric baths. Apart from this, all her efforts to regain her health have been unsuccessful. She has travelled a great deal and has many lively interests. She lives at present in a country seat on the Baltic near a large town. For several months she has once more been very ill, suffering from depression and insomnia, and tormented with pains; she went to Abbazia in the vain hope of improvement, and for the last six weeks has been in Vienna, up till now in the care of a physician of outstanding merit.

I suggested that she should separate from the two girls, who had their governess, and go into a nursing home, where I could see her every day. This she agreed to without raising the slightest objection.

¹ These words did in fact represent a protective formula, and this will be explained later on. Since then I have come across similar protective formulas in a melancholic woman who endeavoured by their means to control her tormenting thoughts - wishes that something bad might happen to her husband and her mother, blasphemies, etc.

² What we had here was a hysterical delirium which alternated with normal consciousness, just as a true tic intrudes into a voluntary movement without interfering with it and without being mixed up with it.

Studies On Hysteria

48

On the evening of May 2 I visited her in the nursing home. I noticed that she started violently whenever the door opened unexpectedly. I therefore arranged that the nurses and the house physicians, when they visited her, should give a loud knock at her door and not enter till she had told them to come in. But even so, she still made a grimace and gave a jump every time anyone entered.

Her chief complaint to-day was of sensations of cold and pain in her left leg which proceeded from her back above the iliac crest. I ordered her to be given warm baths and I shall massage her whole body twice a day.

She is an excellent subject for hypnotism. I had only to hold up a finger in front of her and order her to go to sleep, and she sank back with a dazed and confused look. I suggested that she should sleep well, that all her symptoms should get better, and so on. She heard all this with closed eyes but with unmistakably concentrated attention; and her features gradually relaxed and took on a peaceful appearance. After this first hypnosis she retained a dim memory of my words; but already at the second there was complete somnambulism (with amnesia). I had warned her that I proposed to hypnotize her, to which she raised no difficulty. She has not previously been hypnotized, but it is safe to suppose that she has read about hypnotism, though I cannot tell what notions she may have about the hypnotic state.¹

This treatment by warm baths, massage twice a day and hypnotic suggestion was continued for the next few days. She slept well, got visibly better, and passed most of the day lying quietly in bed. She was not forbidden to see her children, to read, or to deal with her correspondence.

¹ Every time she woke from hypnosis she looked about her for a moment in a confused way, let her eyes fall on me, seemed to have come to her senses, put on her glasses, which she took off before going to sleep, and then became quite lively and on the spot. Although in the course of the treatment (which lasted for seven weeks in this first year and eight in the second) we discussed every sort of subject, and although I put her to sleep twice almost every day, she never made any comment to me about the hypnosis or asked me a single question about it; and in her waking state she seemed, so far as possible, to ignore the fact that she was undergoing hypnotic treatment.

Studies On Hysteria

49

May 8, morning. - She entertained me, in an apparently quite normal state, with gruesome stories about animals. She had read in the Frankfurter Zeitung, which lay on the table in front of her, a story of how an apprentice had tied up a boy and put a white mouse into his mouth. The boy had died of fright. Dr. K. had told her that he had sent a whole case of white rats to Tiflis. As she told me this she demonstrated every sign of horror. She clenched and unclenched her hand several times. ‘Keep still! - Don’t say anything! - Don’t touch me! - Supposing a creature like that was in the bed!’ (She shuddered.) ‘Only think, when it’s unpacked! There’s a dead rat in among them - one that’s been gn-aw-aw-ed at!’

During the hypnosis I tried to disperse these animal hallucinations. While she was asleep I picked up the Frankfurter Zeitung. I found the anecdote about the boy being maltreated, but without any reference to mice or rats. So she had introduced these from her delirium while she was reading. (I told her in the evening of our conversation about the white mice. She knew nothing of it, was very much astonished and laughed heartily.¹)

¹ A sudden interpolation like this of a delirium into a waking state was not uncommon with her and was often repeated later in my presence. She used to complain that in conversation she often gave the most absurd answers, so that people did not understand her. On the occasion when I first visited her I asked her how old she was and she answered quite seriously: ‘I am a woman dating from last century.’ Some weeks later she explained to me she had been thinking at the time in her delirium of a beautiful old cupboard which, as a connoisseur of old furniture, she had bought in the course of her travels. It was to this cupboard that her answer had referred when my question about her age raised the topic of dates.

Studies On Hysteria

50

During the afternoon she had what she called a ‘neck cramp’,¹ which, however, as she said, ‘only lasted a short time - a couple of hours’.

Evening. - I requested her, under hypnosis, to talk, which, after some effort, she succeeded in doing. She spoke softly and reflected for a moment each time before answering. Her expression altered according to the subject of her remarks, and grew calm as soon as my suggestion had put an end to the impression made upon her by what she was saying. I asked her why it was that she was so easily frightened, and she answered: ‘It has to do with memories of my earliest youth.’ ‘When?’ ‘First when I was five years old and my brothers and sisters often threw dead animals at me. That was when I had my first fainting fit and spasms. But my aunt said it was disgraceful and that I ought not to have attacks like that, and so they stopped. Then I was frightened again when I was seven and I unexpectedly saw my sister in her coffin; and again when I was eight and my brother terrified me so often by dressing up in sheets like a ghost; and again when I was nine and I saw my aunt in her coffin and her jaw suddenly dropped.’

This series of traumatic precipitating causes which she produced in answer to my question why she was so liable to fright was clearly ready to hand in her memory. She could not have collected these episodes from different periods of her childhood so quickly during the short interval which elapsed between my question and her answer. At the end of each separate story she twitched all over and took on a look of fear and horror. At the end of the last one she opened her mouth wide and panted for breath. The words in which she described the terrifying subject-matter of her experience were pronounced with difficulty and between gasps. Afterwards her features became peaceful.

¹ A species of migraine.

Studies On Hysteria

51

In reply to a question she told me that while she was describing these scenes she saw them before her, in a plastic form: and in their natural colours. She said that in general she thought of these experiences very often and had done so in the last few days. Whenever this happened she saw these scenes with all the vividness of reality.¹ I now understand why she entertains me so often with animal scenes and pictures of corpses. My therapy consists in wiping away these pictures, so that she is no longer able to see them before her. To give support to my suggestion I stroked her several times over the eyes.

May 9. - Without my having given her any further suggestion, she had slept well. But she had gastric pains in the morning. They came on yesterday in the garden where, she stayed out too long with her children. She agreed to my limiting the children’s visits to two and a half hours. A few days ago she had reproached herself for leaving the children by themselves. I found her in a somewhat excited state to-day; her forehead was lined, her speech was halting and she made her clacking noises. While she was being massaged she told me only that the children’s governess had brought her an ethnological atlas and that some pictures in it of American Indians dressed up as animals had given her a great shock. ‘Only think, if they came to life!’ (She shuddered.)

¹ Many other hysterical patients have reported to us that they have memories of this kind in vivid visual pictures and that this applied especially to their pathogenic memories.

Studies On Hysteria

52

Under hypnosis I asked why she had been so much frightened by these pictures, since she was no longer afraid of animals. She said they had reminded her of visions she had had (when she was nineteen) at the time of her brother’s death. (I shall hold over enquiring into this memory until later.) I then asked her whether she had always spoken with a stammer and how long she had had her tic (the peculiar clacking sound).¹ Her stammering, she said, had come on while she was ill; she had had the tic for the last five years, ever since a time when she this was sitting by the bedside of her younger daughter who was very ill, and had wanted to keep absolutely quiet. I tried to reduce the importance of this memory, by pointing out that after all nothing had happened to her daughter, and so on. The thing came on, she said, whenever she was apprehensive or frightened. I instructed her not to be frightened of the pictures of the Red Indians but to laugh heartily at them and even to draw my attention to them. And this did in fact happen after she had woken up: she looked at the book, asked whether I had seen it, opened it at the page and laughed out loud at the grotesque figures, without a trace of fear and without any strain in her features. Dr. Breuer came in suddenly with the house-physician to visit her. She was frightened and began to make her clacking noise, so that they soon left us. She explained that she was so much agitated because she was unpleasantly affected by the fact that the house-physician came in every time as well.

I had also got rid of her gastric pains during the hypnosis by stroking her, and I told her that though she would expect the pain to return after her midday meal it would not do so.

Evening. - For the first time she was cheerful and talkative and gave evidence of a sense of humour that I should not have expected in such a serious woman; and, among other things, in the strong feeling that she was better, she made fun of her treatment by my medical predecessor. She had long intended, she said, to give up that treatment but had not been able to find the right method of doing so till a chance remark made by Dr. Breuer, when he visited her once, showed her a way out. When I seemed to be surprised at this, she grew frightened and began to blame herself very severely for having been indiscreet. But I was able, it seemed, to re-assure her. - She had had no gastric pains, though she had expected them.

¹ I had already asked her this question about the tic during her waking state, and she had replied: ‘I don’t know; oh, a very long time.’

Studies On Hysteria

53

Under hypnosis I asked her to tell me further experiences which had given her a lasting fright. She produced a second series of this kind, dating from her later youth, with as much promptitude as the first series and she assured me once more that all these scenes appeared before her often, vividly and in colours. One of them was of how she saw a female cousin taken off to an insane asylum (when she was fifteen). She tried to call for help but was unable to, and lost her power of speech till the evening of the same day. Since she talked so often about asylums in her waking state, I interrupted her and asked on what other occasions she had been concerned with insanity. She told me that her mother had herself been in an asylum for some time. They had once had a maid-servant one of whose previous mistresses had spent a long time in an asylum and who used to tell her horrifying stories of how the patients were tied to chairs, beaten, and so on. As she told me this she clenched her hands in horror; she saw all this before her eyes. I endeavoured to correct her ideas about insane asylums, and assured her that she would be able to hear about institutions of this kind without referring them to herself. At this, her features relaxed.

She continued her list of terrifying memories. One, at fifteen, of how she found her mother, who had had a stroke, lying on the floor (her mother lived for another four years); again, at nineteen, how she came home one day and found her mother dead, with a distorted face. I naturally had considerable difficulty in mitigating these memories. After a rather lengthy explanation, I assured her that this picture, too, would only appear to her again indistinctly and without strength. - Another memory was how, at nineteen, she lifted up a stone and found a toad under it, which made her lose her power of speech for hours afterwards.¹

During this hypnosis I convinced myself that she knew everything that happened in the last hypnosis, whereas in waking life she knows nothing of it.

¹ A special kind of symbolism must, no doubt, have lain behind the toad, but I unfortunately neglected to enquire into it.

Studies On Hysteria

54

May 10, morning. - For the first time to-day she was given a bran bath instead of her usual warm bath. I found her looking cross and with a pinched face, with her hands wrapped in a shawl. She complained of cold and pains. When I asked her what was the matter, she told me that the bath had been uncomfortably short to sit in and had brought on pains. During the massage she started by saying that she still felt badly about having given Dr. Breuer away yesterday. I pacified her with a white lie and said that I had known about it all along, where upon her agitation (clacking, grimaces) ceased. So each time even while I am massaging her, my influence has already begun to affect her; she grows quieter and clearer in the head, and even without questioning under hypnosis can discover the cause of her ill-humour on that day. Nor is her conversation during the massage so aimless as would appear. On the contrary, it contains a fairly complete reproduction of the memories and new impressions which have affected her since our last talk, and it often leads on, in a quite unexpected way, to pathogenic reminiscences of which she unburdens herself without being asked to. It is as though she had adopted my procedure and was making use of our conversation, apparently unconstrained and guided by chance, as a supplement to her hypnosis. For instance, to-day she began talking about her family, and in a very roundabout way got on to the subject of a cousin. He was rather queer in the head and his parents had all his teeth pulled out at one sitting. She accompanied the story with horrified looks and kept repeating her protective formula (‘Keep still! - Don’t say anything! - Don’t touch me!’). After this her face smoothed out and she became cheerful. Thus, her behaviour in waking life is directed by the experiences she has had during her somnambulism, in spite of her believing, while she is awake, that she knows nothing about them.

Studies On Hysteria

55

Under hypnosis I repeated my question as to what it was that had made her upset and I got the same answers but in the reverse order: (1) her indiscreet talk yesterday, and (2) her pains caused by her being so uncomfortable in the bath. - I asked her to-day the meaning of her phrase 'Keep still!’, etc. She explained that when she had frightening thoughts she was afraid of their being interrupted in their course, because then everything would get confused and things would be even worse. The ‘Keep still!’ related to the fact that the animal shapes which appeared to her when she was in a bad state started moving and began to attack her if anyone made a movement in her presence. The final injunction 'Don’t touch me!’ was derived from the following experiences. She told me how, when her brother had been so ill from taking a lot of morphine - she was nineteen at the time- he used often to seize hold of her; and how, another time, an acquaintance had suddenly gone mad in the house and had caught her by the arm; (there was a third, similar instance, which she did not remember exactly;, and lastly, how, when she was twenty-eight and her daughter was very ill, the child had caught hold of her so forcibly, in its delirium that she was almost choked. Though these four instances were so widely separated in time, she told me them in a single sentence and in such rapid succession that they might have been a single episode in four acts. Incidentally, all the accounts she gave of traumas arranged like these in groups began with a ‘how’, the component traumas being separated by an ‘and’. Since I noticed that the protective formula was designed to safeguard her against a recurrence of such experiences, I removed this fear by suggestion, and in fact I never heard the formula from her again.

Evening. - I found her very cheerful. She told me, with a laugh, that she had been frightened by a small dog which barked at her in the garden. Her face was a little bit drawn, however, and there was some internal agitation which did not disappear until she had asked me whether I was annoyed by something she had said during the massage this morning and I had said ‘no’. Her period began again to-day after an interval of scarcely a fortnight. I promised to regulate this by hypnotic suggestion and, under hypnosis, set the interval at 28 days.¹

Under hypnosis, I also asked her whether she remembered the last thing she told me; in asking this what I had in mind was a task which had been left over from yesterday evening; but she began quite correctly with the ‘don’t touch me’ from this morning’s hypnosis. So I took her back to yesterday’s topic. I had asked her the origin of her stammering and she had replied, ‘I don’t know’.² I had therefore requested her to remember it by the time of to-day’s hypnosis. She accordingly answered me to-day without any further reflection but in great agitation and with spastic impediments to her speech: ‘How the horses bolted once with the children in the carriage; and how another time I was driving through the forest with the children in a thunderstorm, and a tree just in front of the horses was struck by lightning and the horses shied and I thought: "You must keep quite still now, or your screaming will frighten the horses even more and the coachman won’t be able to hold them in at all." It came on from that moment.’ She was quite unusually excited as she told me this story. I further learnt from her that the stammer had begun immediately after the first of these two occasions, but had disappeared shortly afterwards and then came on for good after the second, similar occasion. I extinguished her plastic memory of these scenes, but asked her to imagine them once more. She appeared to try to do this and remained quiet as she did so; and from now on she spoke in the hypnosis without any spastic impediment.³

¹ A suggestion which was carried out.

²  It is possible that this answer, ‘I don’t know’, was correct; but it may quite as well have indicated reluctance to talk about the causes of the stammering. I have since observed in other patients that the greater the effort they have made to repress a thing from their consciousness the more difficulty they have in remembering it under hypnosis as well as in waking life.

³ As we see from this, the patient’s tic-like clacking and her spastic stammer were two symptoms which went back to similar precipitating causes and had an analogous mechanism. I have already commented on this mechanism in a short paper on hypnotic treatment (1892-3b), and I shall also return to it below.

Studies On Hysteria

56

Finding her disposed to be communicative, I asked her what further events in her life had frightened her so much that they had left her with plastic memories. She replied by giving me a collection of such experiences:- How a year after her mother’s death, she was visiting a Frenchwoman who was a friend of hers, and had been sent into the next room with another girl to fetch a dictionary, and had then seen someone sit up in the bed who looked exactly like the woman she had just left behind in the other room. She went stiff all over and was rooted to the spot. She learnt afterwards that it was a specially arranged dummy. I said that what she saw had been a hallucination, and appealed to her good sense, and her face relaxed. How she had nursed her sick brother and he had had such fearful attacks as a result of the morphine and had terrified her and seized hold of her. I remembered that she had already mentioned this experience this morning, and, as an experiment, I asked her on what other occasions this ‘seizing hold’ had happened. To my agreeable surprise she made a long pause this time before answering and then asked doubtfully ‘My little girl?’ She was quite unable to recall the other two occasions (see above). My prohibition - my expunging of her memories - had therefore been effective. - Further, how, while she was nursing her brother, her aunt’s pale face had suddenly appeared over the top of the screen. She had come to convert him to Catholicism.

Studies On Hysteria

57

I saw that I had come to the root of her constant fear of surprises, and I asked for further instances of this. She went on: How they had a friend staying at her home who liked slipping into the room very softly so that all of a sudden he was there; how she had been so ill after her mother’s death and had gone to a health resort and a lunatic had walked into her room several times at night by mistake and come right up to her bed; and lastly, how, on the journey here from Abbazia a strange man had four times opened the door of her compartment suddenly and had fixed his eyes on her each time with a stare. She was so much terrified that she sent for the conductor.

I wiped out all these memories, woke her up and assured her she would sleep well to-night, having omitted to give her this suggestion in her hypnosis. The improvement of her general condition was shown by her remark that she had not done any reading to-day, she was living in such a happy dream - she, who always had to be doing something because of her inner unrest.

May 11, morning. - To-day she had an appointment with Dr. N., the gynaecologist, who is to examine her elder daughter about her menstrual troubles. I found Frau Emmy in a rather disturbed state, though this was expressed in slighter physical signs than formerly. She called out from time to lime: ‘I’m afraid, so afraid, I think I shall die.’ I asked her what she was afraid of? Was it of Dr. N.? She did not know, she said; she was just afraid. Under hypnosis, which I induced before my colleague arrived, she declared that she was afraid she had offended me by something she had said during the massage yesterday which seemed to her to have been impolite. She was frightened of anything new, too, and consequently of the new doctor. I was able to soothe her, and though she started once or twice in the presence of Dr. N., she behaved very well apart from this and produced neither her clacking noises nor any inhibition of speech. After he had gone I put her under hypnosis once more, to remove any possible residue of the excitement caused by his visit. She herself was very much pleased with her behaviour and put great hopes in the treatment; and I tried to convince her from this example that there is no need to be afraid of what is new, since it also contains what is good.¹

¹ Didactic suggestions of this kind always missed fire with Frau Emmy, as will be seen from what follows.

Studies On Hysteria

58

Evening. - She was very lively and unburdened herself of a number of doubts and scruples during our conversation before the hypnosis. Under hypnosis I asked her what event in her life had produced the most lasting effect on her and came up most often in her memory. Her husband’s death, she said. I got her to describe this event to me in full detail, and this she did with every sign of deepest emotion but without any clacking or stammering: - How, she began, they had been at a place on the Riviera of which they were both very fond, and while they were crossing a bridge he had suddenly sunk to the ground and lain there lifeless for a few minutes but had then got up again and seemed quite well; how, a short time afterwards, as she was lying in bed after her second confinement, her husband, who had been sitting at breakfast at a small table beside her bed, reading a newspaper, had got up all at once, looked at her so strangely, taken a few paces forward and then fallen down dead; she had got out of bed, and the doctors who were called in had made efforts to revive him which she had heard from the next room; but it had been in vain. And, she then went on to say, how the baby, which was then a few weeks old, had been seized with a serious illness which had lasted for six months, during which she herself had been in bed with a high fever. - And there now followed in chronological order her grievances against this child, which she threw out rapidly with an angry look on her face, in the way one would speak of someone who had become a nuisance. This child, she said, had been very queer for a long time; it had screamed all the time and did not sleep, and it had developed a paralysis of the left leg which there had seemed very little hope of curing. When it was four it had had visions; it had been late in learning to walk and to talk, so that for a long time it had been believed to be imbecile. According to the doctors it had had encephalitis and inflammation of the spinal cord and she did not know what else besides. I interrupted her here and pointed out to her that this same child was to-day a normal girl and in the bloom of health, and I made it impossible for her to see any of these melancholy things again, not only by wiping out her memories of them in their plastic form but by removing her whole recollection of them, as though they had never been present in her mind. I promised her that this would lead to her being freed from the expectation of misfortune which perpetually tormented her and from the pains all over her body, of which she had been complaining precisely during her narrative, after we had heard nothing of them for several days.¹

¹ On this occasion my energy seems to have carried me too far. When, as much as eighteen months later, I saw Frau Emmy again in a relatively good state of health, she complained that there were a number of most important moments in her life of which she had only the vaguest memory. She regarded this as evidence of a weakening of her memory, and I had to be careful not to tell her the cause of this particular instance of amnesia. - The overwhelming success of the treatment in this respect was no doubt also due to the great detail in which I had got her to repeat these memories to me (in far greater detail than is shown in my notes), whereas with other memories I was too often satisfied with a mere mention.

Studies On Hysteria

59

To my surprise, after this suggestion of mine, she began without any transition speaking of Prince L., whose escape from an asylum was being talked about a great deal at the time. She brought out new fears about asylums - that people in them were treated with douches of ice-cold water on the head and put into an apparatus which turned them round and round till they were quiet. When, three days ago, she had first complained about her fear of asylums, I had interrupted her after her first story, that the patients were tied on to chairs. I now saw that I had gained nothing by this interruption and that I cannot evade listening to her stories in every detail to the very end. After these arrears had been made up, I took this fresh crop of fears from her as well, I appealed to her good sense and told her she really ought to believe me more than the silly girl from whom she had had the gruesome stories about the way in which asylums are run. As I noticed that she still stammered occasionally in telling me these further things, I asked her once more what the stammer came from. No reply. ‘Don’t you know?’ 'No.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Why not? Because I mayn’t!’ (She pronounced these words violently and angrily.) This declaration seemed to me to be evidence of the success of my suggestion, but she expressed a desire for me to wake her up from her hypnosis, and I did so.¹

¹ It was not until the next day that I understood this little scene. Her unruly nature, which rebelled, both in her waking state and in artificial sleep, against any constraint, had made her angry with me because I had assumed that her narrative was finished and had interrupted it by my concluding suggestion. I have come across many other proofs that she kept a critical eye upon my work in her hypnotic consciousness. She had probably wanted to reproach me with interrupting her story to-day just as I had previously interrupted her accounts of the horrors in the asylum; but she had not ventured to do so. Instead of this, she had produced these further stories, apparently without any transition and without revealing the connecting thoughts. My blunder was made plain to me the next day by a depreciatory comment on her part.

Studies On Hysteria

60

May 12. - Contrary to my expectation, she had slept badly and only for a short time. I found her in a state of great anxiety, though, incidentally, without showing her usual physical signs of it. She would not say what the matter was, but only that she had had bad dreams and kept seeing the same things. ‘How dreadful it would be,’ she said, ‘if they were to come to life.’ During the massage she dealt with a few points in reply to questions. She then became cheerful; she told me about her social life at her dower house on the Baltic, of the important people whom she entertains from the neighbouring town, and so on.

Hypnosis. - She had had some fearful dreams. The legs and arms of the chairs were all turned into snakes; a monster with a vulture’s beak was tearing and eating at her all over her body; other wild animals leapt upon her, etc. She then passed on to other animal-deliria, which, however, she qualified with the addition ‘That was real’ (not a dream): how (on an earlier occasion) she had been going to pick up a ball of wool, and it was a mouse and ran away; how she had been on a walk, and a big toad suddenly jumped out at her, and so on. I saw that my general prohibition had been ineffective and that I should have to take her frightening impressions away from her one by one.¹ I took an opportunity of asking her, too, why she had gastric pains and what they came from. (I believe that all her attacks of zoöpsia are accompanied by gastric pains.) Her answer, which she gave rather grudgingly, was that she did not know. I requested her to remember by tomorrow. She then said in a definitely grumbling tone that I was not to keep on asking her where this and that came from, but to let her tell me what she had to say, I fell in with this, and she went on without preface: ‘When they carried him out, I could not believe he was dead.’ (So she was talking of her husband again, and I saw now that the cause of her ill-humour was that she had been suffering from the residues of this story which had been kept back.) After this, she said, she had hated her child for three years, because she always told herself that she might have been able to nurse her husband back to health if she had not been in bed on account of the child. And then after her husband’s death there had been nothing but insults and agitations. His relatives, who had always been against the marriage and had then been angry because they had been so happy together, had spread a rumour that she had poisoned him, so that she had wanted to demand an enquiry. Her relatives had involved her in all kinds of legal proceedings with the help of a shady journalist. The wretch had sent round agents to stir people up against her. He got the local papers to print libellous articles about her, and then sent her the cuttings. This had been the origin of her unsociability and her hatred of all strangers. After I had spoken some calming words about what she had told me, she said she felt easier.

¹ I unfortunately failed to enquire into the significance of Frau Emmy’s animal visions - to distinguish, for instance, what was symbolic in her fear of animals from what was primary horror, such as is characteristic of many neuropaths from youth onwards.

Studies On Hysteria

61

May 13. - Once again she had slept badly, owing to gastric pains. She had not eaten any supper. She also complained of pains in her right arm. But she was in a good mood; she was cheerful, and, since yesterday, has treated me with special distinction. She asked me my opinion about all sorts of things that seemed to her important, and became quite unreasonably agitated, for instance, when I had to look for the towels needed in massage, and so on. Her clacking and facial tic were frequent.

Hypnosis. - Yesterday evening it had suddenly occurred to her why the small animals she saw grew so enormous. It happened to her for the first time at D-- during a theatrical performance in which a huge lizard appeared on the stage. This memory had tormented her a great deal yesterday as well.¹

¹ The visual memory of the big lizard had no doubt only attained its great importance owing to its coinciding in time with a powerful affect which she must have experienced during the theatrical performance. In treating the present patient, as I have already confessed, I was often content to receive the most superficial explanations. In this instance, too, I failed to make any further investigation. - We shall be reminded, moreover, of hysterical macropsia. Frau Emmy was extremely short-sighted and astigmatic, and her hallucinations may often have been provoked by the indistinctness of her visual perceptions.

Studies On Hysteria

62

The reason for the re-appearance of the clacking was that yesterday she had abdominal pains and had tried not to show it by groaning. She knew nothing of the true precipitating cause of the clacking (see above). She remembered, too, that I had instructed her to discover the origin of her gastric pains. She did not know it, however, and asked me to help her. I asked whether, perhaps, on some occasion after a great excitement, she had forced herself to eat. She confirmed this. After her husband’s death she had for a long time lost her appetite completely and had only eaten from a sense of duty; and her gastric pains had in fact begun at that time. I then removed her gastric pains by stroking her a few times across the epigastrium. She then began of her own accord to talk about the things that had most affected her. ‘I have told you,’ she said, ‘that I was not fond of the child. But I ought to add that one could not have guessed it from my behaviour. I did everything that was necessary. Even now I reproach myself for being fonder of the elder one.’

May 14. - She was well and cheerful and had slept till 7.30 this morning. She only complained of slight pains in the radial region of her hand and in her head and face. What she tells me before the hypnosis becomes more and more significant. To-day she had scarcely anything dreadful to produce. She complained of pains and loss of sensation in her right leg. She told me that she had had an attack of abdominal inflammation in 1871; when she had hardly recovered from this, she had nursed her sick brother, and it was then that the pains first came on. They had even led to a temporary paralysis of her right leg.

Studies On Hysteria

63

During the hypnosis I asked her whether it would now be possible for her to take part in social life or whether she was still too much afraid. She said it was still disagreeable to have anyone standing behind her or just beside her. In this connection she told me of some more occasions on which she had been disagreeably surprised by someone suddenly appearing. Once, for instance, when she had been going for a walk with her daughters on the island of Rügen, two suspicious-looking individuals had come out from some bushes and insulted them. In Abbazia, while she was out for a walk one evening, a beggar had suddenly emerged from behind a rock and had knelt down in front of her. It seems that he was a harmless lunatic. Lastly, she told me of how her isolated country house had been broken into at night, which had very much alarmed her. It is easy to see, however, that the essential origin of this fear of people was the persecution to which she had been subjected after her husband’s death.¹

Evening. - Though she appeared to be in high spirits, she greeted me with the exclamation: ‘I’m frightened to death; oh, I can hardly tell you, I hate myself!’ I learned at last that she had had a visit from Dr. Breuer and that on his appearance she had given a start of alarm. As he noticed it, she had assured him that it was ‘only this once’. She felt so very sorry on my account that she should have had to betray this relic of her former nervousness. I have more than once had occasion to notice during these last few days how hard she is on herself, how liable she is to blame herself severely for the least signs of neglect if the towels for the massage are not in their usual place or if the newspaper for me to read when she is asleep is not instantly ready to hand. After the removal of the first and most superficial layer of tormenting recollections, her morally oversensitive personality, with its tendency to self-depreciation, has come into view. Both in her waking state and under hypnosis, I duly told her (what amounted to the old legal tag ‘de minimis non curat lex’) that there is a whole multitude of indifferent, small things lying between what is good and what is evil - things about which no one need reproach himself. She did not take in my lesson, I fancy, any more than would an ascetic mediaeval monk, who sees the finger of God or a temptation of the Devil in every trivial event of his life and who is incapable of picturing the world even for a brief moment or in its smallest corner as being without reference to himself.

In her hypnosis she brought up some further horrifying images (in Abbazia, for instance, she saw bloody heads on every wave of the sea). I made her repeat the lessons I had given her while she was awake.

¹ At the time I wrote this I was inclined to look for a psychical origin for all symptoms in cases of hysteria. I should now explain this sexually abstinent woman’s tendency to anxiety as being due to neurosis (i.e. anxiety neurosis).

Studies On Hysteria

64

May 15. - She had slept till 8.30 a.m. but had become restless towards morning, and received me with some slight signs of her tic, clacking and speech-inhibition. ‘I’m frightened to death,’ she said once more. In reply to a question she told me that the Pension in which her children were staying was on the fourth floor of a building and reached by a lift. She had insisted yesterday that the children should make use of the lift for coming down as well as going up, and was now reproaching herself about this, because the lift was not entirely to be trusted. The owner of the Pension had said so himself. Had I heard, she asked, the story of the Countess Sch. who had been killed in Rome in an accident of that kind? I happen to be acquainted with the Pension and I know that the lift is the private property of the owner of the Pension; it does not seem to me very likely that this man, who makes a special point of the lift in an advertisement, would himself have warned anyone against using it. It seemed to me that we had here one of the paramnesias that are brought about by anxiety. I told her my view and succeeded without any difficulty in getting her herself to laugh at the improbability of her fears. For that very reason I could not believe that this was the cause of her anxiety and determined to put the question to her hypnotic consciousness. During massage, which I resumed to-day after a few days’ interval, she told me a loosely connected string of anecdotes, which may have been true - about a toad which was found in a cellar, an eccentric mother who looked after her idiot child in a strange fashion, a woman who was shut up in an asylum because she had melancholia - and which showed the kind of recollections that passed through her head when she was in a disquieted frame of mind. When she had got these stories out she became very cheerful. She described her life on her estate and her contacts with prominent men in German Russia and North Germany; and I really found it extremely hard to reconcile activities of this kind with the picture of such a severely neurotic woman.

Studies On Hysteria

65

I therefore asked her in hypnosis why she was so restless this morning. In place of her doubts about the lift, she informed me that she had been afraid that her period was going to start again and would again interfere with the massage.¹

¹ The sequence of events had accordingly been as follows: when she woke up in the morning she found herself in an anxious mood, and to account for it she grasped at the first anxious idea that came to mind. On the previous afternoon she had had a conversation about the lift at the Pension. Over-careful of her children as usual, she had asked their governess whether her elder daughter, who could not walk much on account of ovarian neuralgia on the right side and pains in the right leg, used the lift for going down as well as up. A paramnesia then enabled her to link the anxiety she was conscious of with the idea of the lift. Her consciousness did not present her with the real cause of her anxiety; that only emerged - but now it did so without any hesitation - when I questioned her about it in hypnosis. The process was the same as that studied by Bernheim and others after him in persons who carry out in a post-hypnotic condition instructions given them during hypnosis. For instance, Bernheim (1886, 29) suggested to a patient that after he woke up he should put both his thumbs in his mouth. He did so, and excused his action by saying that his tongue had been giving him pain since the previous day when he had bitten it in an epileptiform attack. Again, in obedience to a suggestion, a girl made an attempt to murder a law-court officer who was totally unknown to her. When she was seized and questioned as to the motives of her act, she invented a story of a wrong done to her which called for revenge. There seems to be a necessity for bringing psychical phenomena of which one becomes conscious into causal connection with other conscious material. In cases in which the true causation evades conscious perception one does not hesitate to attempt to make another connection, which one believes, although it is false. It is clear that a split in the content of consciousness must greatly facilitate the occurrence of ‘false connections’ of this kind.

I shall dwell a little on this example I have given of a false connection, since in more than one respect it deserves to be described as typical. It is typical, in the first place, of the present patient’s behaviour; for in the further course of the treatment she afforded me many opportunities of resolving such false connections by explanations arrived at in hypnosis, and of removing their effects. I will give a detailed account of one of these instances, since it throws a strong light on the psychological phenomenon in question. I had recommended Frau Emmy to try replacing her usual luke-warm bath by a hip-bath of cool water, which I told her would be more refreshing. She used to obey medical instructions implicitly, but never ceased to view them with profound mistrust. I have already said that she had hardly ever derived any benefit from her medical treatment. My advice to her to take cool baths was not delivered in such an authoritative manner as to prevent her from having the courage to give open expression to her hesitations: ‘Whenever I have taken a cool bath,’ she said, ‘it has made me melancholy for the rest of the day. But I will try it again, if you like; you mustn’t think I won’t do whatever you tell me to.’ I pretended to give up my proposal, but in her next hypnosis I suggested to her that she should herself put forward the idea of cool baths - having thought it over, she would like to try the experiment after all, and so on. This in fact happened. Next day, she took up the idea of having cool hip-baths; she tried to convince me with all the arguments which I had previously used to her, and I agreed without much enthusiasm. But on the day after she had had the hip-bath I did in fact find her in a deep depression. ‘Why are you like this to-day?’ I asked. ‘I knew beforehand that it would happen,’ she answered, ‘it’s because of the cold bath; it always happens.’ ‘It was you yourself who asked for it,’ I said. ‘Now we know they don’t suit you. We’ll go back to the luke-warm ones.’ Afterwards I asked her in her hypnosis, ‘Was it really the cool bath that depressed you so much?’ ‘Oh,’ was her answer, ‘the cool bath had nothing to do with it. But I read in the paper this morning that a revolution had broken out in San Domingo. Whenever there is any unrest there the whites are always the sufferers; and I have a brother in San Domingo who has already caused us a lot of concern, and I am worried now in case something happens to him.’ This brought to a close the issue between us. Next morning she took her cool hip-bath as though it were a matter of course and continued doing so for several weeks without ever attributing any depression to that source.

It will be agreed that this instance is typical also of the behaviour of a large number of neuropaths in regard to the therapeutic procedures recommended by their physicians. The patient who develops a symptom on a particular day - whether owing to unrest in San Domingo or else where - is always inclined to attribute it to his doctor’s latest advice. Of the two conditions necessary for bringing about a false connection of this kind, one, mistrust, seems always to be present; while the other, the splitting of consciousness, is replaced by the fact that most neuropaths have in part no knowledge of the true causes (or at any rate the releasing causes) of their disorder, and in part deliberately avoid such knowledge, because they are unwilling to be reminded of that share of the causes for which they themselves are to blame.

It might be thought that these psychical conditions which we have laid down for neuropaths as distinct from hysterics - namely, ignorance or deliberate overlooking - would necessarily be more favourable for the production of a false connection than would be the presence of a split in consciousness, which, after all, withdraws material for causal connections from consciousness. The split, however, is rarely a clear cut one. As a rule, portions of the subconscious complex of ideas intrude into the subject’s ordinary consciousness, and it is precisely they that provoke this kind of disturbance. What is usually perceived consciously, as in the instances I have quoted above, is the general feeling attached to the complex - a mood of anxiety, it may be, or of grief; and it is this feeling that, by a kind of ‘compulsion to associate’, must have a connection found for it with some complex of ideas which is present in consciousness. (Compare, too, the mechanism of obsessional ideas, described in two papers, 1894a and 1895c.)

Not long ago I was able to convince myself of the strength of a compulsion of this kind towards association from some observations made in a different field. For several weeks I found myself obliged to exchange my usual bed for a harder one, in which I had more numerous or more vivid dreams, or in which, it may be, I was unable to reach the normal depth of sleep. In the first quarter of an hour after waking I remembered all the dreams I had had during the night, and I took the trouble to write them down and try to solve them. I succeeded in tracing all these dreams back to two factors: (1) to the necessity for working out any ideas which I had only dwelt upon cursorily during the day - which had only been touched upon and not finally dealt with; and (2) to the compulsion to link together any ideas that might be present in the same state of consciousness. The senseless and contradictory character of the dreams could be traced back to the uncontrolled ascendancy of this latter factor.

It is a quite regular thing for the mood attaching to an experience and the subject-matter of that experience to come into different relations to the primary consciousness. This was shown in the case of another patient, Frau Cäcilie M., whom I got to know far more thoroughly than any of the other patients mentioned in these studies. I collected from her very numerous and convincing proofs of the existence of a psychical mechanism of hysterical phenomena such as I have put forward above. Personal considerations unfortunately make it impossible for me to give a detailed case history of this patient, though I shall have occasion to refer to it from time to time. Frau Cäcilie had latterly been in a peculiar hysterical state. This state was certainly not a unique one, though I do not know if it has hitherto been recognized. It might be called a ‘hysterical psychosis for the payment of old debts’. The patient had experienced numerous psychical traumas and had spent many years in a chronic hysteria which was attended by a great variety of manifestations. The causes of all these states of hers were unknown to her and everyone else. Her remarkably well-stocked memory showed the most striking gaps. She herself complained that it was as though her life was chopped in pieces. One day an old memory suddenly broke in upon her clear and tangible and with all the freshness of a new sensation. For nearly three years after this she once again lived through all the traumas of her life - long-forgotten, as they seemed to her, and some, indeed, never remembered at all - accompanied by the acutest suffering and by the return of all the symptoms she had ever had. The ‘old debts’ which were thus paid covered a period of thirty-three years and made it possible to discover the origins, often very complicated, of all her abnormal states. The only way of relieving her was to give her an opportunity of talking off under hypnosis the particular reminiscence which was tormenting her at the moment, together with all its accompanying load of feelings and their physical expression. When I was prevented from doing so, so that she was obliged to say these things to a person in whose presence she felt embarrassed, it sometimes happened that she would tell him her story quite calmly and would subsequently, in hypnosis, produce for me all the tears, all the expressions of despair, with which she would have wished to accompany her recital. For a few hours after a purgation of this kind during hypnosis she used to be quite well and on the spot. After a short interval the next reminiscence of the series would break its way in. But this reminiscence would be preceded some hours earlier by the mood which was proper to it. She would become anxious or irritable or despairing without ever suspecting that this mood did not belong to the present moment but to the state to which she would next be subject. During this transition period she would habitually make a false connection to which she would obstinately cling until her next hypnosis. For instance, she once greeted me with the question : ‘Am I not a worthless person? Is it not a sign of worthlessness that I said to you what I did yesterday?’ What she had actually said to me the day before did not in fact seem to me to justify this damning verdict. After a short discussion, she clearly recognized this; but her next hypnosis brought to light a recollection of an occasion, twelve years earlier, which had aroused severe self-reproaches in her - though, incidentally, she no longer subscribed to them in the least.

Studies On Hysteria

66

I then got her to tell me the history of her pains in the leg. She began in the same way as yesterday and then went on with a long series of instances of experiences, alternately distressing and irritating, which she had had at the same time as her pains in the leg and the effect of which had each time been to make them worse, even to the point of her having bilateral paralysis of the legs with loss of sensation in them. The same was true of the pains in her arm. They too had come on while she was nursing someone who was ill, at the same time as the ‘neck-cramps’. Concerning the latter, I only learnt that they succeeded some curious restless states accompanied by depression which had been there previously. They consist in an ‘icy grip’ on the back of the neck, together with an onset of rigidity and a painful coldness in all her extremities, an incapacity to speak and complete prostration. They last from six to twelve hours. My attempts to show that this complex of symptoms represented a recollection failed. I put some questions to her with a view to discovering whether her brother, while she was nursing him during his delirium, had ever caught hold of her by the neck; but she denied this. She said she did not know where these attacks came from.¹

¹ On subsequent reflection, I cannot help thinking that these ‘neck cramps’ may have been determined organically and have been analogous to migraine. In medical practice we come across a number of conditions of this kind which have not been described. These show such a striking resemblance to the classical attack of hemicrania that we are tempted to extend the concept of the latter and to attach only secondary importance to the localization of the pain. As we know, many neuropathic women very often have hysterical attacks (spasms and deliria) along with an attack of migraine. Every time I observed a ‘neck-cramp’ in Frau Emmy it was accompanied by an attack of delirium.

As regards the pains in her arm and leg, I am of opinion that what we have here is the not very interesting and correspondingly common case of determination by chance coincidence. She had pains of this kind while she was in an agitated state nursing her sick brother; and, owing to her exhaustion, she felt them more acutely than usual. These pains, which were originally associated only accidentally with those experiences, were later repeated in her memory as the somatic symbol of the whole complex of associations. I shall be able below to give several more examples in confirmation of this process. It seems probable that in the first instance these pains were rheumatic; that is to say, to give a definite sense to that much misused term, they were of a kind which resides principally in the muscles, involves a marked sensitiveness to pressure and modification of consistency in the muscles, is at its most severe after a considerable period of rest and immobilization of the extremity (i.e. in the morning), is improved by practising the painful movement and can be dissipated by massage. These myogenic pains, which are universally common, acquire great importance in neuropaths. They themselves regard them as nervous and are encouraged in this by their physicians, who are not in the habit of examining muscles by digital pressure. Such pains provide the material of countless neuralgias and so-called sciaticas, etc. I will only refer briefly here to the relation of these pains to the gouty diathesis. My patient’s mother and two of her sisters suffered very severely from gout (or chronic rheumatism). Some part of the pains which she complained of at the time of the treatment may, like her original pains, have been of contemporary origin. I cannot tell, since I had no experience then in forming a judgement of this state of the muscles.

Studies On Hysteria

67

Evening. - She was in very good spirits and showed a great sense of humour. She told me incidentally that the affair of the lift was not as she had reported it. The proprietor had only said what he did in order to give an excuse for the lift not being used for downward journeys. She asked me a great many questions which had nothing pathological about them. She has had distressingly severe pains in her face, in her hand on the thumb side and in her leg. She gets stiff and has pains in her face if she sits without moving or stares at some fixed point for any considerable time. If she lifts anything heavy it brings on pains in her arm. - An examination of her right leg showed fairly good sensibility in her thigh, a high degree of anaesthesia in the lower part of the leg and in the foot and less in the region of the buttock and hip.

In hypnosis she informed me that she still occasionally has frightening ideas, such as that something might happen to her children, that they might fall ill or lose their lives, or that her brother, who is now on his honeymoon, might have an accident, or his wife might die (because the marriages of all her brothers and sisters had been so short). I could not extract any other fears from her. I forbade her any need to be frightened when there was no reason for it. She promised to give it up ‘because you ask me to’. I gave her further suggestions for her pains, her leg, etc.

May 16. - She had slept well. She still complained of pains in her face, arms and legs. She was very cheerful. Her hypnosis yielded nothing. I applied a faradic brush to her anaesthetic leg.

Evening. - She gave a start as soon as I came in. ‘I’m so glad you’ve come,’ she said, ‘I am so frightened.’ At the same time she gave every indication of terror, together with stammering and tic. I first got her to tell me in her waking state what had happened. Crooking her fingers and stretching out her hands before her, she gave a vivid picture of her terror as she said: 'An enormous mouse suddenly whisked across my hand in the garden and was gone in a flash; things kept on gliding back wards and forwards.’ (An illusion from the play of shadows?) ‘A whole lot of mice were sitting in the trees. - Don’t you hear the horses stamping in the circus? - There’s a man groaning in the next room; he must be in pain after his operation. - Can I be in Rügen? Did I have a stove there like that?’ She was confused by the multitude of thoughts crossing one another in her mind and by her efforts to sort out her actual surroundings from them. When I put questions to her about contemporary things, such as whether her daughters were here, she could make no answer.

Studies On Hysteria

68

I tried to disentangle the confusion of her mind under hypnosis. I asked her what it was that frightened her. She repeated the story of the mouse with every sign of terror, and added that as she went down the steps she saw a dreadful animal lying there, which vanished at once. I said that these were hallucinations and told her not to be frightened of mice; it was only drunkards who saw them (she disliked drunkards intensely). I told her the story of Bishop Hatto. She knew it too, and listened to it with extreme horror. - ‘How did you come to think of the circus?’ I went on to ask. She said that she had clearly heard the horses stamping in their stables near-by and getting tied up in their halters, which might injure them. When this happened Johann used to go out and untie them. I denied that there were stables near-by or that anyone in the next room had groaned. Did she know where she was? She said she knew now, but had thought earlier that she was in Rügen. I asked her how she got on to this memory. They had been talking in the garden, she said, of how hot it was in one part of it, and all at once the thought had come to her of the shadeless terrace in Rügen. Well then, I asked, what were her unhappy memories of her stay in Rügen? She produced a series of them. She had had the most frightful pains there in her legs and arms; when she was out on excursions there she had several times been caught in a fog and lost her way; twice, while she was on a walk, a bull had come after her, and so on. How was it that she had had this attack to-day? - How (she answered)? She had written a great many letters; it had taken her three hours and had given her a bad head. - I could assume, accordingly, that her attack of delirium was brought on by fatigue and that its content was determined by associations from such things as the shadeless place in the garden, etc. I repeated all the lessons I have been in the habit of giving her and left her composed to sleep.

Studies On Hysteria

69

May 17. - She had a very good night. In the bran bath which she had to-day, she gave some screams because she took the bran for worms. I heard this from the nurse. She herself was reluctant to tell me about it. She was almost exaggeratedly cheerful, but she kept interrupting herself with cries of ‘ugh!’ and made faces expressive of terror. She also stammered more than she has for the last few days. She told me she had dreamt last night that she was walking on a lot of leeches. The night before she had had horrible dreams. She had had to lay out a number of dead people and put them in coffins, but would not put the lids on. (Obviously, a recollection of her husband.) She told me further that in the course of her life she had had a large number of adventures with animals. The worst had been with a bat which had got caught in her wardrobe, so that she had rushed out of the room without any clothes on. To cure her of this fear her brother had given her a lovely brooch in the form of a bat; but she had never been able to wear it.

Under hypnosis she explained that her fear of worms came from her having once been given a present of a pretty pin cushion; but next morning, when she wanted to use it, a lot of little worms had crept out of it, because it had been filled with bran which was not quite dry. (A hallucination? Perhaps a fact.) I asked her to tell me some more animal stories. Once, she said, when she had been walking with her husband in a park in St. Petersburg, the whole path leading to a pond had been covered with toads, so that they had had to turn back. There had been times when she had been unable to hold out her hand to anyone, for fear of its turning into a dreadful animal, as had so often happened. I tried to free her from her fear of animals by going through them one by one and asking her if she was afraid of them. In the case of some of them she answered ‘no’; in the case of others, ‘I mustn’t be afraid of them.’¹ I asked her why she had stammered and jerked about so much yesterday. She replied that she always did this when she was very frightened.² - But why had she been so frightened yesterday? - Because all kinds of oppressive thoughts had come into her head in the garden: in particular, how she could prevent something from heaping up again inside her after her treatment had come to an end. I repeated the three reasons for feeling reassured which I had already given her: (1) that she had become altogether healthier and more capable of resistance, (2) that she would get the habit of telling her thoughts to someone she was on close terms with, and (3) she would henceforth regard as indifferent a whole number of things which had hitherto weighed upon her. She went on to say that she had been worried as well because she had not thanked me for my visiting her late in the day; and she was afraid that I would lose patience with her on account of her recent relapse. She had been very much upset and alarmed because the house physician had asked a gentleman in the garden whether he was now able to face his operation. His wife had been sitting beside him, and she (the patient) could not help thinking that this might be the poor man’s last evening. - After this last piece of information her depression seemed to be cleared up.³

Evening. - She was very cheerful and contented. The hypnosis produced nothing whatever. I devoted myself to dealing with her muscular pains and to restoring sensibility in her right leg. This was very easily accomplished in hypnosis, but her restored sensibility was in part lost again when she woke up. Before I left her she expressed her astonishment that it was such a long time since she had had any neck-cramps, though they usually came on before every thunderstorm.

¹ The procedure I was following here can scarcely be regarded as a good one: none of it was carried out exhaustively enough.

² Her stammering and clacking were not completely relieved after they had been traced back to the two initial traumas, though from then on the two symptoms were strikingly improved. The patient herself explained the incompleteness of the success as follows. She had got into the habit of stammering and clacking whenever she was frightened, so that in the end these symptoms had come to be attached not solely to the initial traumas but to a long chain of memories associated with them, which I had omitted to wipe out. This is a state of things which arises quite often and which always limits the beauty and completeness of the therapeutic outcome of the cathartic procedure.

³ It was here that I learnt for the first time, what was confirmed on countless later occasions, that when one is resolving a current hysterical delirium, the patient’s communications are given in a reverse chronological order, beginning with the most recent and least important impressions and connections of thought and only at the end reaching the primary impression, which is in all probability the most important one causally.

Studies On Hysteria

70

May 18. - She had slept last night better than she had for years. But after her bath she complained of cold at the back of her neck, tightness and pains in the face, hands and feet. Her features were strained and her hands clenched. The hypnosis brought out no psychical content underlying her neck-cramp. I improved it by massage after she had woken up.¹

¹ Her astonishment the evening before at its being so long since she had had a neck-cramp was thus a premonition of an approaching condition which was already in preparation at the time and was perceived in the unconscious. This curious kind of premonition occurred regularly in the case already mentioned of Frau Cäcilie M. If, for instance, while she was in the best of health, she said to me, ‘It’s a long time since I’ve been frightened of witches at night’, or, ‘how glad I am that I’ve not had pains in my eyes for such a long time’, I could feel sure that the following night a severe onset of her fear of witches would be making extra work for her nurse or that her next attack of pains in the eyes was on the point of beginning. On each occasion what was already present as a finished product in the unconscious was beginning to show through indistinctly. This idea, which emerged as a sudden notion, was worked over by the unsuspecting ‘official’ consciousness (to use Charcot’s term) into a feeling of satisfaction, which swiftly and invariably turned out to be unjustified. Frau Cäcilie, who was a highly intelligent woman, to whom I am indebted for much help in gaining an understanding of hysterical symptoms, herself pointed out to me that events of this kind may have given rise to superstitions about the danger of being boastful or of anticipating evils. We must not vaunt our happiness on the one hand, nor, on the other, must we talk of the worst or it will happen. The fact is that we do not boast of our happiness until unhappiness is in the offing, and we become aware of our anticipation in the form of a boast, because in such cases the subject-matter of what we are recollecting emerges before the feeling that belongs to it - that is to say, because an agreeable contrasting idea is present in consciousness.

Studies On Hysteria

71

I hope that this extract from the history of the first three weeks of the treatment will be enough to give a clear picture of the patient’s state, of the character of my therapeutic efforts and of the measure of their success. I shall now proceed to amplify the case history.

The delirium which I have last described was also the last considerable disturbance in Frau Emmy von N.’s condition. Since I did not take the initiative in looking for the symptoms and their basis, but waited for something to come up in the patient or for her to tell me some thought that was causing her anxiety, her hypnoses soon ceased to produce material. I therefore made use of them principally for the purpose of giving her maxims which were to remain constantly present in her mind and to protect her from relapsing into similar conditions when she had got home. At that time I was completely under the sway of Bernheim’s book on suggestion and I anticipated more results from such didactic measures than I should to-day. My patient’s condition improved so rapidly, that she soon assured me she had not felt so well since her husband’s death. After a treatment lasting in all for seven weeks I allowed her to return to her home on the Baltic.

It was not I but Dr. Breuer who received news of her about seven months later. Her health had continued good for several months but had then broken down again as a result of a fresh psychical shock. Her elder daughter, during their first stay in Vienna, had already followed her mother in developing neck-cramps and mild hysterical states; but in particular, she had suffered from pains in walking owing to a retroverted uterus. On my advice she had gone for treatment to Dr. N., one of our most distinguished gynaecologists, who had put her uterus right by massage, and she had remained free from trouble for several months. Her trouble recurred, however, while they were at home, and her mother called in a gynaecologist from the neighbouring University town. He prescribed a combined local and general treatment for the girl, which, however, brought on a severe nervous illness (she was seventeen at the time). It is probable that this was already an indication of her pathological disposition which was to manifest itself a year later in a character-change. Her mother, who had handed the girl over to the doctors with her usual mixture of docility and mistrust, was overcome by the most violent self-reproaches after the unfortunate outcome of the treatment. A train of thought which I have not investigated brought her to the conclusion that Dr. N. and I were together responsible for the girl’s illness because we had made light of her serious condition. By an act of will as it were, she undid the effects of my treatment and promptly, relapsed into the states from which I had freed her. A distinguished physician in her neighbourhood, to whom she went for advice, and Dr. Breuer, who was in correspondence with her, succeeded in convincing her of the innocence of the two targets of her accusations; but even after this was cleared up, the aversion to me which she formed at the time was left over as a hysterical residue, and she declared that it was impossible for her to take up her treatment with me again. On the advice of the same medical authority she turned for help to a Sanatorium in North Germany. At Breuer’s desire I explained to the physician in charge the modifications of hypnotic therapy which I had found effective in her case.

Studies On Hysteria

72

This attempted transfer failed completely. From the very first she seems to have been at cross-purposes with the doctor. She exhausted herself in resisting whatever was done for her. She went downhill, lost sleep and appetite, and only recovered after a woman friend of hers who visited her in the Sanatorium in effect secretly abducted her and looked after her in her house. A short time afterwards, exactly a year after her first meeting with me, she was again in Vienna and put herself once more into my hands.

I found her much better than I had expected from the accounts I had received by letter. She could get about and was free from anxiety; much of what I had accomplished the year before was still maintained. Her chief complaint was of frequent states of confusion - ‘storms in her head’ as she called them. Besides this she suffered from sleeplessness, and was often in tears for hours at a time. She felt sad at one particular time of day (five o’clock). This was the regular hour at which, during the winter, she had been able to visit her daughter in the nursing home. She stammered and clacked a great deal and kept rubbing her hands together as though she was in a rage, and when I asked her if she saw a great many animals, she only replied: ‘Oh keep still!’

At my first attempt to induce hypnosis she clenched her fists and exclaimed: ‘I won’t be given any antipyrin injections; I would rather have my pains! I don’t like Dr. R.; he is antipathetic to me.’ I perceived that she was involved in the memory of being hypnotized in the sanatorium, and she calmed down as soon as I brought her back to the present situation.

Studies On Hysteria

73

At the very beginning of the treatment I had an instructive experience. I had asked her how long she had had a recurrence of the stammering, and she had hesitatingly answered (under hypnosis) that it was ever since a shock she had at D--- during the winter. A waiter at the hotel in which she was staying had concealed himself in her bedroom. In the darkness, she said, she had taken the object for an overcoat and put out her hand to take hold of it; and the man had suddenly ‘shot up into the air’. I took this memory-picture away, and in fact from that time on she ceased to stammer noticeably either in hypnosis or in waking life. I cannot remember what it was that led me to test the success of my suggestion, but when I returned the same evening I asked her in an apparently innocent voice how I could manage to fasten the door when I went away (while she was lying asleep) so that no one could slip into the room. To my astonishment she gave a violent start and began grinding her teeth and rubbing her hands. She indicated that she had had a severe shock of that kind at D---, but could not be persuaded to tell me the story. I observed that she had in mind the same story which she had told me that morning during the hypnosis and which I thought I had wiped out. In her next hypnosis she told me the story in greater detail and more truthfully. In her excitement she had been walking up and down the passage and found the door of her maid’s bed room open. She had tried to go in and sit down. Her maid had stood in the way, but she refused to be stopped and walked in, and then caught sight of the dark object against the wall which turned out to be a man. It was evidently the erotic factor in this little adventure which had caused her to give an untrue account of it. This taught me that an incomplete story under hypnosis produces no therapeutic effect. I accustomed myself to regarding as incomplete any story that brought about no improvement, and I gradually came to be able to read from patients’ faces whether they might not be concealing an essential part of their confessions.

The work that I had to do with her this time consisted in dealing in hypnosis with the disagreeable impressions she had received during her daughter’s treatment and during her own stay in the sanatorium. She was full of suppressed anger with the physician who had compelled her under hypnosis to spell out the word ‘t . . . o . . . a . . . d’ and she made me promise never to make her say it. In this connection I ventured upon a practical joke in one of my suggestions to her. This was the only abuse of hypnosis - and a fairly innocent one at that - of which I have to plead guilty with this patient. I assured her that her stay in the sanatorium at ‘-tal’ [-’vale’] would become so remote to her that she would not even be able to recall its name and that whenever she wanted to refer to it she would hesitate between ‘-berg’ [‘-hill’], ‘-tal’, ‘-wald’ [‘-wood’] and so on. This duly happened and presently the only remaining sign of her speech-inhibition was her uncertainty over this name. Eventually, following a remark by Dr. Breuer, I relieved her of this compulsive paramnesia.

Studies On Hysteria

74

I had a longer struggle with what she described as ‘the storms in her head’ than with the residues of these experiences. When I first saw her in one of these states she was lying on the sofa with her features distorted and her whole body unceasingly restless. She kept on pressing her hands to her forehead and calling out in yearning and helpless tones the name ‘Emmy’, which was her elder daughter’s as well as her own. Under hypnosis she informed me that this state was a repetition of the many fits of despair by which she had been overcome during her daughter’s treatment, when, after she had spent hours in trying to discover some means of correcting its bad effects, no way out presented itself. When, at such a time, she felt her thoughts becoming confused, she made it a practice to call out her daughter’s name, so that it might help her back to clear-headedness. For, during the period when her daughter’s illness was imposing fresh duties on her and she felt that her own nervous condition was once again gaining strength over her, she had determined that whatever had to do with the girl must be kept free from confusion, however chaotic everything else in her head was.

In the course of a few weeks we were able to dispose of these memories too and Frau Emmy remained under my observation for some time longer, feeling perfectly well. At the very end of her stay something happened which I shall describe in detail, since it throws the strongest light on the patient’s character and the manner in which her states came about.

I called on her one day at lunch-time and surprised her in the act of throwing something wrapped up in paper into the garden, where it was caught by the children of the house-porter. In reply to my question, she admitted that it was her (dry) pudding, and that this went the same way every day. This led me to investigate what remained of the other courses and I found that there was more than half left on the plates. When I asked her why she ate so little she answered that she was not in the habit of eating more and that it would be bad for her if she did; she had the same constitution as her late father, who had also been a small eater. When I enquired what she drank she told me she could only tolerate thick fluids, such as milk, coffee or cocoa; if she ever drank water or minerals it ruined her digestion. This bore all the signs of a neurotic choice. I took a specimen of her urine and found it was highly concentrated and overcharged with urates.

Studies On Hysteria

75

I therefore thought it advisable to recommend her to drink more and decided also to increase the amount of her food. It is true that she did not look at all noticeably thin but I nevertheless thought it worth while to aim at feeding her up a little. When on my next visit I ordered her some alkaline water and forbade her usual way of dealing with her pudding, she showed considerable agitation. ‘I’II do it because you ask me to,’ she said, ‘but I can tell you in advance that it will turn out badly, because it is contrary to my nature, and it was the same with my father.’ When I asked her under hypnosis why it was that she could not eat more or drink any water, she answered in a rather sullen tone: ‘I don’t know.’ Next day the nurse reported that she had eaten the whole of her helpings and had drunk a glass of the alkaline water. But I found Frau Emmy herself lying in a profoundly depressed state and in a very ungracious mood. She complained of having very violent gastric pains. ‘I told you what would happen,’ she said. ‘We have sacrificed all the successful results that we have been struggling for so long. I’ve ruined my digestion, as always happens if I eat more or drink water, and I have to starve myself entirely for five days to a week before I can tolerate anything.’ I assured her that there was no need to starve herself and that it was impossible to ruin one’s digestion in that way: her pains were only due to the anxiety over eating and drinking. It was clear that this explanation of mine made not the slightest impression on her. For when, soon afterwards, I tried to put her to sleep, for the first time I failed to bring about hypnosis; and the furious look she cast at me convinced me that she was in open rebellion and that the situation was very grave. I gave up trying to hypnotize her, and announced that I would give her twenty-four hours to think things over and accept the view that her gastric pains came only from her fear. At the end of this time I would ask her whether she was still of the opinion that her digestion could be ruined for a week by drinking a glass of mineral water and eating a modest meal; if she said yes, I would ask her to leave. This little scene was in very sharp contrast to our normal relations, which were most friendly.

Studies On Hysteria

76

I found her twenty-four hours later, docile and submissive. When I asked her what she thought about the origin of her gastric pains, she answered, for she was incapable of prevarication: ‘I think they come from my anxiety, but only because you say so.’ I then put her under hypnosis and asked her once again: 'Why can’t you eat more?’

The answer came promptly and consisted once more in her producing a series of chronologically arranged reasons from her store of recollections: ‘I’m thinking how, when I was a child, it often happened that out of naughtiness I refused to eat my meat at dinner. My mother was very severe about this and under the threat of condign punishment I was obliged two hours later to eat the meat, which had been left standing on the same plate. The meat was quite cold by then and the fat was set so hard’ (she showed her disgust) ‘. . . I can still see the fork in front of me . . . one of its prongs was a little bent. Whenever I sit down to a meal I see the plates before me with the cold meat and fat on them. And how, many years later, I lived with my brother who was an officer and who had that horrible disease. I knew it was contagious and was terribly afraid of making a mistake and picking up his knife and fork’ (she shuddered) ‘. . . and in spite of that I ate my meals with him so that no one should know that he was ill. And how, soon after that, I nursed my other brother when he had consumption so badly. We sat by the side of his bed and the spittoon always stood on the table, open’ (she shuddered again) ‘. . . and he had a habit of spitting across the plates into the spittoon. This always made me feel so sick, but I couldn’t show it, for fear of hurting his feelings. And these spittoons are still on the table whenever I have a meal and they still make me feel sick.’ I naturally made a thorough clearance of this whole array of agencies of disgust and then asked why it was that she could not drink water. When she was seventeen, she replied, the family had spent some months in Munich and almost all of them had contracted gastric catarrh owing to the bad drinking water. In the case of the others the trouble was quickly relieved by medical attention, but with her it had persisted. Nor had she been improved by the mineral water which she was recommended. When the doctor had prescribed it she had thought at once ‘that won’t be any use’. From that time onwards this intolerance both of ordinary water and mineral water had recurred on countless occasions.

Studies On Hysteria

77

The therapeutic effect of these discoveries under hypnosis was immediate and lasting. She did not starve herself for a week but the very next day she ate and drank without making any difficulty. Two months later she wrote in a letter: ‘I am eating excellently and have put on a great deal of weight. I have already drunk forty bottles of the water. Do you think I should go on with it?’

I saw Frau von N. again in the spring of the following year at her estate near D---. At this time her elder daughter, whose name she had called out during her ‘storms in the head’, entered on a phase of abnormal development. She exhibited unbridled ambitions which were out of all proportion to the poverty of her gifts, and she became disobedient and even violent towards her mother. I still enjoyed her mother’s confidence and was sent for to give my opinion on the girl’s condition. I formed an unfavourable impression of the psychological change that had occurred in the girl, and in arriving at a prognosis I had also to take into account the fact that all her step-brothers and sisters (the children of Herr von N. by his first marriage) had succumbed to paranoia. In her mother’s family, too, there was no lack of a neuropathic heredity, although none of her more immediate relatives had developed a chronic psychosis. I communicated to Frau von N. without any reservation the opinion for which she had asked and she received it calmly and with understanding. She had grown stout, and looked in flourishing health. She had felt relatively very well during the nine months that had passed since the end of her last treatment. She had only been disturbed by slight neck-cramps and other minor ailments. During the several days which I spent in her house I came for the first time to realize the whole extent of her duties, occupations and intellectual interests. I also met the family doctor, who had not many complaints to make about the lady; so she had to some degree come to terms with the profession.

Studies On Hysteria

78

She was thus in very many respects healthier and more capable, but in spite of all my improving suggestions there had been little change in her fundamental character. She seemed not to have accepted the existence of a category of ‘indifferent things’. Her inclination to torment herself was scarcely less than it had been at the time of her treatment. Nor had her hysterical disposition been quiescent during this good period. She complained, for instance, of an inability to make journeys of any length by train. This had come on during the last few months. A necessarily hurried attempt to relieve her of this difficulty resulted only in her producing a number of trivial disagreeable impressions left by some recent journeys she had made to D--- and its neighbourhood. She seemed reluctant, however, to be communicative under hypnosis, and even then I began to suspect that she was on the point of withdrawing once more from my influence and that the secret purpose of her railway inhibition was to prevent her making a fresh journey to Vienna.

It was during these days, too, that she made her complaints about gaps in her memory ‘especially about the most important events’, from which I concluded that the work I had done two years previously had been thoroughly effective and lasting. - One day, she was walking with me along an avenue that led from the house to an inlet in the sea and I ventured to ask whether the path was often infested by toads. By way of reply she threw a reproachful glance at me, though unaccompanied by signs of horror; she amplified this a moment later with the words ‘but the ones here are real’. During the hypnosis, which I induced in order to deal with her railway inhibition, she herself seemed dissatisfied with the answers she gave me, and she expressed a fear that in future she was likely to be less obedient under hypnosis than before. I determined to convince her of the contrary. I wrote a few words on a piece of paper, handed it to her and said: ‘At lunch to-day you will pour me out a glass of red wine, just as you did yesterday. As I raise the glass to my lips you will say: "Oh, please pour me out a glass, too", and when I reach for the bottle, you will say: "No thank you, I don’t think I will after all". You will then put your hand in your bag, draw out the piece of paper and find those same words written on it.’ This was in the morning. A few hours later the little episode took place exactly as I had pre-arranged it, and so naturally that none of the many people present noticed anything. When she asked me for the wine she showed visible signs of an internal struggle - for she never drank wine - and after she had refused the drink with obvious relief, she put her hand into her bag and drew out the piece of paper on which appeared the last words she had spoken. She shook her head and stared at me in astonishment.

After my visit in May, 1890, my news of Frau von N. became gradually scantier. I heard indirectly that her daughter’s deplorable condition, which caused her every kind of distress and agitation, did eventually undermine her health. Finally, in the summer of 1893, I had a short note from her asking my permission for her to be hypnotized by another doctor, since she was ill again and could not come to Vienna. At first I did not understand why my permission was necessary, till I remembered that in 1890 I had, at her own request, protected her against being hypnotized by anyone else, so that there should be no danger of her being distressed by coming under the control of a doctor who was antipathetic to her, as had happened at -berg (-tal, -wald). I accordingly renounced my exclusive prerogative in writing.

Studies On Hysteria

79

DISCUSSION

Unless we have first come to a complete agreement upon the terminology involved, it is not easy to decide whether a particular case is to be reckoned as a hysteria or some other neurosis (I am speaking here of neuroses which are not of a purely neurasthenic type; and we have still to await the directing hand which shall set up boundary-marks in the region of the commonly occurring mixed neuroses and which shall bring out the features essential for their characterization. If, accordingly, we are still accustomed to diagnosing a hysteria, in the narrower sense of the term, from its similarity to familiar typical cases, we shall scarcely be able to dispute the fact that the case of Frau Emmy von N. was one of hysteria. The mildness of her deliria and hallucinations (while her other mental activities remained intact), the change in her personality and store of memories when she was in a state of artificial somnambulism, the anaesthesia in her painful leg, certain data revealed in her anamnesis, her ovarian neuralgia, etc., admit of no doubt as to the hysterical nature of the illness, or at least of the patient. That the question can be raised at all is due only to one particular feature of the case, which also provides an opportunity for a comment that is of general validity. As we have explained in the ‘Preliminary Communication’ which appears at the beginning of this volume, we regard hysterical symptoms as the effects and residues of excitations which have acted upon the nervous system as traumas. Residues of this kind are not left behind if the original excitation has been discharged by abreaction or thought-activity. It is impossible any longer at this point to avoid introducing the idea of quantities (even though not measurable ones). We must regard the process as though a sum of excitation impinging on the nervous system is transformed into chronic symptoms in so far as it has not been employed for external action in proportion to its amount. Now we are accustomed to find in hysteria that a considerable part of this ‘sum of excitation’ of the trauma is transformed into purely somatic symptoms. It is this characteristic of hysteria which has so long stood in the way of its being recognized as a psychical disorder.

If, for the sake of brevity, we adopt the term ‘conversion’ to signify the transformation of psychical excitation into chronic somatic symptoms, which is so characteristic of hysteria, then we may say that the case of Frau Emmy von N. exhibited only a small amount of conversion. The excitation, which was originally psychical, remained for the most part in the psychical sphere, and it is easy to see that this gives it a resemblance to the other, non-hysterical neuroses. There are cases of hysteria in which the whole surplus of stimulation undergoes conversion, so that the somatic symptoms of hysteria intrude into what appears to be an entirely normal consciousness. An incomplete transformation is however more usual, so that some part at least of the affect that accompanies the trauma persists in consciousness as a component of the subject’s state of feeling.

Studies On Hysteria

80

The psychical symptoms in our present case of hysteria with very little conversion can be divided into alterations of mood (anxiety, melancholic depression), phobias and abulias (inhibitions of will). The two latter classes of psychical disturbance are regarded by the French school of psychiatrists as stigmata of neurotic degeneracy, but in our case they are seen to have been adequately determined by traumatic experiences. These phobias and abulias were for the most part of traumatic origin, as I shall show in detail.

Some of the phobias, it is true, corresponded to the primary phobias of human beings, and especially of neuropaths - in particular, for instance, her fear of animals (snakes and toads, as well as all the vermin of which Mephistopheles boasted himself master), and of thunderstorms and so on. But these phobias too were established more firmly by traumatic events. Thus her fear of toads was strengthened by her experience in early childhood of having a dead toad thrown at her by one of her brothers, which led to her first attack of hysterical spasms; and similarly, her fear of thunderstorms was brought out by the shock which gave rise to her clacking, and her fear of fogs by her walk on the Island of Rügen. Nevertheless, in this group the primary - or, one might say, the instinctive - fear (regarded as a psychical stigma) plays the preponderant part.

The other, more specific phobias were also accounted for by particular events. Her dread of unexpected and sudden shocks was the consequence of the terrible impression made on her by seeing her husband, when he seemed to be in the best of health, succumb to a heart-attack before her eyes. Her dread of strangers, and of people in general, turned out to be derived from the time when she was being persecuted by her family and was inclined to see one of their agents in every stranger and when it seemed to her likely that strangers knew of the things that were being spread abroad about her in writing and by word of mouth. Her fear of asylums and their inmates went back to a whole series of unhappy events in her family and to stories poured into her listening ears by a stupid servant-girl. Apart from this, this phobia was supported on the one hand by the primary and instinctive horror of insanity felt by healthy people, and on the other hand by the fear, felt by her no less than by all neurotics, of going mad herself. Her highly specific fear that someone was standing behind her was determined by a number of terrifying experiences in her youth and later life. Since the episode in the hotel, which was especially distressing to her because of its erotic implications, her fear of a stranger creeping into her room was greatly emphasized. Finally, her fear of being buried alive, which she shared with so many neuropaths, was entirely explained by her belief that her husband was not dead when his body was carried out - a belief which gave such moving expression to her inability to accept the fact that her life with the man she loved had come to a sudden end. In my opinion, however, all these psychical factors, though they may account for the choice of these phobias, cannot explain their persistence. It is necessary, I think, to adduce a neurotic factor to account for this persistence - the fact that the patient had been living for years in a state of sexual abstinence. Such circumstances are among the most frequent causes of a tendency to anxiety.

Studies On Hysteria

81

Our patient’s abulias (inhibitions of will, inability to act) admit even less than the phobias of being regarded as psychical stigmata due to a general limitation of capacity. On the contrary, the hypnotic analysis of the case made it clear that her abulias were determined by a twofold psychical mechanism which was at bottom a single one. In the first place an abulia may simply be the consequence of a phobia. This is so when the phobia is attached to an action of the subject’s own instead of to an expectation - for instance, in our present case, the fear of going out or of mixing with people, as compared with the fear of someone creeping into the room. Here the inhibition of will is caused by the anxiety attendant upon the performance of the action. It would be wrong to regard abulias of this kind as symptoms distinct from the corresponding phobias, though it must be admitted that such phobias can exist (provided they are not too severe) without producing abulias. The second class of abulias depends on the presence of affectively-toned and unresolved associations which are opposed to linking up with other associations, and particularly with any that are incompatible with them. Our patient’s anorexia offers a most brilliant instance of this kind of abulia. She ate so little because she did not like the taste, and she could not enjoy the taste because the act of eating had from the earliest times been connected with memories of disgust whose sum of affect had never been to any degree diminished; and it is impossible to eat with disgust and pleasure at the same time. Her old-established disgust at meal times had persisted undiminished because she was obliged constantly to suppress it, instead of getting rid of it by reaction. In her childhood she had been forced, under threat of punishment, to eat the cold meal that disgusted her, and in her later years she had been prevented out of consideration for her brothers from expressing the affects to which she was exposed during their meals together.

At this point I may perhaps refer to a short paper in which I have tried to give a psychological explanation of hysterical paralyses (Freud 1893c). I there arrived at a hypothesis that the cause of these paralyses lay in the inaccessibility to fresh associations of a group of ideas connected, let us say, with one of the extremities of the body; this associative inaccessibility depended in turn on the fact that the idea of the paralysed limb was involved in the recollection of the trauma - a recollection loaded with affect that had not been disposed of. I showed from examples from ordinary life that a cathexis such as this of an idea whose affect is unresolved always involves a certain amount of associative inaccessibility and of incompatibility with new cathexes.

Studies On Hysteria

82

I have not hitherto succeeded in confirming, by means of hypnotic analysis, this theory about motor paralyses, but I can adduce Frau von N.’s anorexia as proving that this mechanism is the operative one in certain abulias, and abulias are no thing other than a highly specialized - or, to use a French expression, ‘systematized’ - kind of psychical paralysis.

Frau von N.’s psychical situation can be characterized in all essentials by emphasizing two points. (1) The distressing affects attaching to her traumatic experiences had remained unresolved - for instance, her depression, her pain (about her husband’s death), her resentment (at being persecuted by his relatives), her disgust (at the compulsory meals), her fear (about her many frightening experiences), and so on. (2) Her memory exhibited a lively activity which, sometimes spontaneously, sometimes in response to a contemporary stimulus (e.g. the news of the revolution in San Domingo), brought her traumas with their accompanying affects bit by bit into her present-day consciousness. My therapeutic procedure was based on the course of this activity of her memory and endeavoured day by day to resolve and get rid of whatever that particular day had brought to the surface, till the accessible stock of her pathological memories seemed to be exhausted.

These two psychical characteristics, which I regard as generally present in hysterical paroxysms, opened the way to a number of important considerations. I will, however, put off discussing them till I have given some attention to the mechanism of the somatic symptoms.

It is not possible to assign the same origin to all the somatic symptoms of these patients. On the contrary, even from this case, which was not rich in them, we find that the somatic symptoms of a hysteria can arise in a variety of ways. I will venture, in the first place, to include pains among somatic symptoms. So far as I can see, one set of Frau von N.’s pains were certainly determined organically by the slight mortifications (of a rheumatic kind) in the muscles, tendons or fascia which cause so much more pain to neurotics than to normal people. Another set of pains were in all probability memories of pains - were mnemic symbols of the times of agitation and sick-nursing which played such a large part in the patient’s life. These pains, too, may well have been originally justified on organic grounds but had since then been adapted for the purposes of the neurosis. I base these assertions about Frau von N.’s pains mainly on observations made elsewhere which I shall report on a later page. On this particular point little information could be gathered from the patient herself.

Studies On Hysteria

83

Some of the striking motor phenomena exhibited by Frau von N. were simply an expression of the emotions and could easily be recognized in that light. Thus, the way in which she stretched her hands in front of her with her fingers spread out and crooked expressed horror, and similarly her facial play. This, of course, was a more lively and uninhibited way of expressing her emotions than was usual with women of her education and race. Indeed, she herself was restrained, almost stiff in her expressive movements when she was not in a hysterical state. Others of her motor symptoms were, according to herself, directly related to her pains. She played restlessly with her fingers (1888) or rubbed her hands against one another (1889) so as to prevent herself from screaming. This reason reminds one forcibly of one of the principles laid down by Darwin to explain the expression of the emotions - the principle of the overflow of excitation, which accounts, for instance, for dogs wagging their tails. We are all of us accustomed, when we are affected by painful stimuli, to replace screaming by other sorts of motor innervations. A person who has made up his mind at the dentist’s to keep his head and mouth still and not to put his hand in the way, may at least start drumming with his feet.

A more complicated method of conversion is revealed by Frau von N.’s tic-like movements, such as clicking with the tongue and stammering, calling out the name ‘Emmy’ in confusional states, using the composite formula ‘Keep still! Don’t say anything! Don’t touch me!’ (1888). Of these motor manifestations, the stammering and clacking can be explained in accordance with a mechanism which I have described, in a short paper on the treatment of a case by hypnotic suggestion (1892-93), as ‘the putting into effect of antithetic ideas’. The process, as exemplified in our present instance, would be as follows. Our hysterical patient, exhausted by worry and long hours of watching by the bedside of her sick child which had at last fallen asleep, said to herself: ‘Now you must be perfectly still so as not to awaken the child.’ This intention probably gave rise to an antithetic idea in the form of a fear that she might make a noise all the same that would wake the child from the sleep which she had so long hoped for. Similar antithetic ideas arise in us in a marked manner when we feel uncertain whether we can carry out some important intention.

Studies On Hysteria

84

Neurotics, in whose self-feeling we seldom fail to find a strain of depression or anxious expectation, form greater numbers of these antithetic ideas than normal people, or perceive them more easily; and they regard them as of more importance. In our patient’s state of exhaustion the antithetic idea, which was normally rejected, proved itself the stronger. It is this idea which put itself into effect and which, to the patient’s horror, actually produced the noise she dreaded. In order to explain the whole process it may further be assumed that her exhaustion was only a partial one; it affected, to use the terminology of Janet and his followers, only her ‘primary ego’ and did not result in a weakening of the antithetic idea as well.

It may further be assumed that it was her horror at the noise produced against her will that made the moment a traumatic one, and fixed the noise itself as a somatic mnemic symptom of the whole scene. I believe, indeed, that the character of the tic itself, consisting as it did of a succession of sounds which were convulsively emitted and separated by pauses and which could be best likened to clackings, reveals traces of the process to which it owed its origin. It appears that a conflict had occurred between her intention and the antithetic idea (the counter-will) and that this gave the tic its discontinuous character and confined the antithetic idea to paths other than the habitual ones for innervating the muscular apparatus of speech.

Studies On Hysteria

85

The patient’s spastic inhibition of speech, her peculiar stammer, was the residue of an essentially similar exciting cause. Here, however, it was not the outcome of the final innervation - the exclamation - but the process of innervation itself - the attempted convulsive inhibition of the organs of speech - which was made into a symbol of the event for her memory.

These two symptoms, the clacking and the stammering, which were thus closely related through the history of their origin, continued to be associated and were turned into chronic symptoms after being repeated on a similar occasion. Thereafter they were put to a further use. Having originated at a moment of violent fright, they were thenceforward joined to any fright (in accordance with the mechanism of monosymptomatic hysteria which will be described in Case 5), even when the fright could not lead to an antithetic idea being put into effect.

The two symptoms were eventually linked up with so many traumas, had so much reason for being reproduced in memory, that they perpetually interrupted the patient’s speech for no particular cause, in the manner of a meaningless tic. Hypnotic analysis, however, was able to demonstrate how much meaning lay concealed behind this apparent tic; and if the Breuer procedure did not succeed in this case in getting rid of the two symptoms completely at a single blow, that was because the catharsis had extended only to the three principal traumas and not to the secondarily associated ones.¹

¹ I may here be giving an impression of laying too much emphasis on the details of the symptoms and of becoming lost in an unnecessary maze of sign-reading. But I have come to learn that the determination of hysterical symptoms does in fact extend to their subtlest manifestations and that it is difficult to attribute too much sense to them. Let me give an example to justify this statement. Some months ago I had under my treatment an eighteen-year-old girl belonging to a family with a bad heredity. Hysteria played its full part in her complex neurosis. The first thing I heard from her was a complaint that she suffered from attacks of despair of two varieties. In one variety she felt drawing and pricking sensations in the lower part of her face, from her cheeks down towards her mouth; in the other variety the toes of both her feet were stretched out convulsively and kept on wriggling about.To begin with I myself was unwilling to attach much importance to these details, and there can be no doubt that earlier students of hysteria would have been inclined to regard these phenomena as evidence of the stimulation of cortical centres during a hysterical attack. It is true that we are ignorant of the locality of the centres for paraesthesias of this kind, but it is well known that such paraesthesias usher in partial epilepsy and constitute Charcot’s sensory epilepsy. Symmetrical cortical areas in the immediate vicinity of the median fissure might be held responsible for the movement of the toes. But the explanation turned out to be a different one. When I had come to know the girl better I put a straight question to her as to what kind of thoughts came to her during these attacks. I told her not to be embarrassed and said that she must be able to give an explanation of the two phenomena. The patient turned red with shame, but I was able to persuade her in the end, without using hypnosis, to give the following account, the truth of which was fully confirmed by her companion, who was present at the time. From the time when her periods first set in she had suffered for years from cephalagia adolescentium which had made any regular occupation impossible and had interfered with her education. When at last she was freed from this disability, this ambitious and rather simple-minded child was determined to work extremely hard at her own improvement, so as to catch up once more with her sisters and contemporaries. In doing so she made quite unreasonable efforts, and an effort of this kind usually ended in an outburst of despair at having over-estimated her powers. She also, of course, compared herself with other girls physically and felt unhappy when she discovered some physical disadvantage in herself. Her teeth projected noticeably, and she began to feel upset about this. She got the idea of correcting the defect by practising for a quarter of an hour at a time pulling down her upper lip over the projecting teeth. The failure of these childish efforts once led to a fit of despair; and thenceforward the drawing and pricking sensations from the cheek downwards were established as the content of one of her two varieties of attack. The origin of the other variety - with its motor symptoms of stretching out and wriggling the toes - was no less easily found. I was told that her first attack of this kind followed after an excursion on the Schafberg near Ischl, and her relatives were naturally inclined to set it down to over-exertion. But the girl herself told me a different story. It seems that it was a favourite habit of the sisters to tease one another about the large size of their feet - an undeniable fact. The patient had long felt unhappy over this blemish and tried to force her feet into the tightest possible boots. Her observant father, however, would not allow this and saw to it that she only wore comfortable-fitting footgear. She was much dissatisfied with this regulation. She thought about it all the time and acquired the habit of wriggling her toes about in her shoes, as people do when they want to discover whether a shoe is much too large, how much smaller a size they could take, etc. During the excursion on the Schafberg (which she was far from finding an exertion) there was once again, of course, an opportunity for her attention to be drawn to the subject of shoes, in view of the shortened skirts she wore. One of her sisters said to her in the course of the walk: ‘You’ve put extra big shoes on to-day.’ She experimented by wriggling her toes and got the same impression. Thenceforward she could not escape from her agitation about the unlucky size of her feet, and when they got back from the walk her first attack came on; her toes curled up and moved about involuntarily as a mnemic symbol of the whole depressing train of thought.

I may point out that what we are dealing with here are attacks and not chronic symptoms. I may also add that after the patient’s confession her first variety of symptoms ceased, but the second variety - her attacks of wriggling her toes - persisted. There must therefore have been something left over, which she had not confessed.

Postscript. I learnt later that the reason why the foolish girl worked so hard at beautifying herself was that she wanted to attract a young cousin of hers. - [Added 1924:] Some years later her neurosis turned into a dementia praecox.

Studies On Hysteria

86

In accordance with the rules governing hysterical attacks, the exclamation of ‘Emmy’ during her attacks of confusion reproduced, it will be remembered, her frequent states of helplessness during her daughter’s treatment. This exclamation was linked to the content of the attack by a complex train of thought and was in the nature of a protective formula against the attack. The exclamation would probably, through a more extended application of its meaning, have degenerated into a tic, as had in fact already happened in the case of the complicated protective formula ‘Don’t touch me’, etc. In both these instances hypnotic treatment prevented any further development of the symptoms; but the exclamation ‘Emmy’ had only just come into existence, and I caught it while it was still on it native soil, restricted to attacks of confusion.

As we have seen, these motor symptoms originated in various ways: by putting an antithetic idea into effect (as in the clacking), by a simple conversion of psychical excitation into motor activity (as in the stammering), or by a voluntary action during a hysterical paroxysm (as in the protective measures exemplified by the exclamation ‘Emmy’ and the longer formula). But however these motor symptoms may have originated, they all have this one thing in common. They can be shown to have an original or long-standing connection with traumas, and stand as symbols for them in the activities of the memory.

Studies On Hysteria

87

Others of the patient’s somatic symptoms were not of a hysterical nature at all. This is true, for example, of the neck-cramps, which I regard as a modified form of migraine and which as such are not to be classed as a neurosis but as an organic disorder. Hysterical symptoms, however, regularly become attached to these. Frau von N.’s neck-cramps, for instance, were employed for the purpose of hysterical attacks, whereas she did not have the typical symptomatology of hysterical attacks at her disposal.

I will amplify this description of Frau von N.’s psychical state by considering the pathological changes of consciousness which could be observed in her. Like her neck-cramps, distressing present-day events (cf. her last delirium in the garden) or anything which powerfully recalled any of her traumas brought her into a state of delirium. In such states - and the few observations I made led me to no other conclusion - there was a limitation of consciousness and a compulsion to associate similar to that prevailing in dreams; hallucinations and illusions were facilitated to the highest degree and feeble-minded or even nonsensical inferences were made. This state, which was comparable to one of hallucinatory alienation probably represented an attack. It might be regarded as an acute psychosis (serving as the equivalent of an attack) which would be classified as a condition of ‘hallucinatory confusion’. A further resemblance between such states of hers and a typical hysterical attack was shown by the fact that a portion of the old-established traumatic memories could usually be detected underlying the delirium. The transition from a normal state to a delirium often occurred quite imperceptibly. She would be talking quite rationally at one moment about matters of small emotional importance, and as her conversation passed on to ideas of a distressing kind I would notice, from her exaggerated gestures or the appearance of her regular formulas of speech, etc., that she was in a state of delirium. At the beginning of the treatment the delirium lasted all day long; so that it was difficult to decide with certainty whether any given symptoms - like her gestures - formed part of her psychical state merely as symptoms of an attack, or whether - like the clacking and stammering - they had become genuine chronic symptoms. It was often only possible after the event to distinguish between what had happened in a delirium and what had happened in her normal state. For the two states were separated in her memory, and she would sometimes be highly astonished to hear of the things which the delirium had introduced piecemeal into her normal conversation. My very first interview with her was the most remarkable instance of the way in which the two states were interwoven without paying any attention to each other. Only at one moment of this psychical see-sawing did it happen that her normal consciousness, in touch with the present day, was affected. This was when she gave me an answer which originated from her delirium and said she was ‘a woman dating from last century’.

Studies On Hysteria

88

The analysis of these states of delirium in Frau von N. was not exhaustively carried out. This was mainly because her condition improved so rapidly that the deliria became sharply differentiated from her normal life and were restricted to the periods of her neck-cramps. On the other hand, I gathered a great deal of information about the patient’s behaviour in a third state, that of artificial somnambulism. Whereas in her normal state she had no knowledge of the psychical experiences during her deliria and during her somnambulism, she had access during somnambulism to the memories of all three states. In point of fact, therefore, she was at her most normal in the state of somnambulism. Indeed, if I leave on one side the fact that in somnambulism she was far less reserved with me than she was at her best moments in ordinary life - that is, that in somnambulism she gave me information about her family and such things, while at other times she treated me as a stranger - and if, further, I disregard the fact that she exhibited the full degree of suggestibility characteristic of somnambulism, I am bound to say that during her somnambulism she was in a completely normal state. It was interesting to notice that on the other hand her somnambulism showed no trace of being super-normal, but was subject to all the mental failings that we are accustomed to associate with a normal state of consciousness.

Studies On Hysteria

89

The examples which follow throw light on the behaviour of her memory in somnambulism. In conversation one day she expressed her delight at the beauty of a plant in a pot which decorated the entrance hall of the nursing-home. ‘But what is its name, doctor? Do you know? I used to know its German and its Latin names, but I’ve forgotten them both.’ She had a wide knowledge of plants, while I was obliged on this occasion to admit my lack of botanical education. A few minutes later I asked her under hypnosis if she now knew the name of the plant in the hall. Without any hesitation she replied; ‘The German name is "Türkenlilie" [Turk’s-cap lily]; I really have forgotten the Latin one.’ Another time, when she was feeling in good health, she told me of a visit she had paid to the Roman Catacombs, but could not recall two technical terms; nor could I help her with them. Immediately afterwards I asked her under hypnosis which words she had in mind. But she did not know them in hypnosis either. So I said to her: ‘Don’t bother about them any more now, but when you are in the garden to-morrow between five and six in the afternoon - nearer six than five - they will suddenly occur to you.’ Next evening, while we were talking about something which had no connection with catacombs, she suddenly burst out: ‘"Crypt", doctor, and "Columbarium".’ ‘Ah! those are the words you couldn’t think of yesterday. When did they occur to you?’ ‘In the garden this afternoon just before I went up to my room.’ I saw that she wanted to let me know in this way that she had followed out my instructions as to time exactly, as she was in the habit of leaving the garden at about six o’clock.

Thus we see that even in somnambulism she did not have access to the whole extent of her knowledge. Even in that state there was an actual and a potential consciousness. It used often to happen that when I asked her during her somnambulism, where this or that phenomenon was derived from, she would wrinkle her forehead, and after a pause would answer in a deprecatory tone: ‘I don’t know.’ On such occasions I had made it my practice to say: ‘Think a moment; it will come to mind directly’; and after a short reflection she would be able to give me the desired information. But it sometimes happened that nothing came to her mind and that I was obliged to leave her with the task of remembering it by the next day; and this never failed to occur.

In her ordinary life Frau von N. scrupulously avoided any untruthfulness, nor did she ever lie to me under hypnosis. Occasionally, however, she would give me incomplete answers and keep back part of her story until I insisted a second time on her completing it. It was usually - as in the instance quoted on p. 73 - the distaste inspired by the topic which closed her mouth in somnambulism no less than in ordinary life. Nevertheless, in spite of these restrictive traits, the impression made by her mental behaviour during somnambulism was, on the whole, one of an uninhibited unfolding of her mental powers and of a full command over her store of memories.

Studies On Hysteria

90

Though it cannot be denied that in a state of somnambulism she was highly suggestible, she was far from exhibiting a pathological absence of resistance. It can be asserted on the whole that I did not make more impression on her in that state than I might have expected to do if I were making an investigation of this kind into the psychical mechanisms of someone in full possession of his faculties who put complete confidence in what I said. The only difference was that Frau von N. was unable, in what passed as her normal state, to meet me with any such favourable mental attitude. If, as with her animal phobia, I failed to give her convincing reasons, or did not go into the psychical history of the origin of a symptom but tried to operate by the agency of authoritative suggestion, I invariably observed a strained and dissatisfied expression on her face; and when, at the end of the hypnosis, I asked her whether she would still be afraid of the animal, she would answer: ‘No - since you insist.’ A promise like this, based only on her obedience to me, never met with any success, any more than did the many general injunctions which I laid upon her, instead of which I might just as well have repeated the single suggestion that she should get well.

But this same person who clung so obstinately to her symptoms in the face of suggestion and would only abandon them in response to psychical analysis or personal conviction, was on the other hand as amenable as the best medium to be found in any hospital, so far as irrelevant suggestions were concerned - so far as it was a question of matters not connected with her illness. I have given instances of her post-hypnotic obedience in the course of the case history. There does not seem to me to be anything contradictory in this behaviour. Here, too, the stronger idea was bound to assert itself. If we go into the mechanism of ‘idées fixes’, we find that they are based upon and supported by so many experiences operating with such intensity that we cannot be surprised to find that these ideas are able to put up a successful resistance against the opposing idea brought forward by suggestion, which is clothed with only limited powers. It would have to be a truly pathological brain from which it was possible to blow away by mere suggestion such well founded products of intense psychical events.¹

¹ I have been deeply impressed in another of my patients by this interesting contrast during somnambulism between a most far-reaching obedience in everything unconnected with the symptoms and the obstinacy with which those symptoms persist because they are deeply rooted and inaccessible to analysis. A lively and gifted girl, who had suffered for eighteen months from severe disturbances of her power of walking, was under my treatment for more than five months without my being able to help her. She was analgesic and had painful areas in both legs and a rapid tremor in her hands. She walked bent forward, dragging her legs and with short steps; she staggered as though she was a cerebellar case and, indeed, often fell down. Her temperament was strikingly cheerful. One of the leading authorities in Vienna at the time was misled by this syndrome into diagnosing her case as one of multiple sclerosis. Another specialist recognized her as a hysteric - a diagnosis which was supported by the complicated picture presented by the disease in its beginnings (pains, fainting-fits, amaurosis) - and handed her on to me for treatment. I tried to improve her gait by suggestion, manipulation of her legs under hypnosis, etc., but I had no success in spite of her being an excellent subject for somnambulism. One day, after she once more came tottering into the room, one arm supported on her father’s, the other on an umbrella whose tip was already much worn down, I lost patience and shouted at her in her hypnosis: ‘This has gone on too long. To-morrow morning that umbrella of yours will break in your hands and you’ll have to walk without it, and from that time on you will never need an umbrella again.’ I cannot imagine how I came to be so foolish as to give a suggestion to an umbrella. Afterwards I felt ashamed of myself, and did not suspect that my clever patient would save my reputation in the eyes of her father, who was a physician and was present during her hypnoses. Next day her father said to me: ‘What do you think she did yesterday? We were walking along the Ringstrasse when she suddenly got into the highest spirits. She began singing - in the very middle of the street - "Ein freies Leben führen wir" [‘We live a free life’] and beat time on the pavement with her umbrella and broke it.’ Of course she herself had no notion that she had wittily transformed a nonsensical suggestion into a brilliantly successful one. Since her condition was not improved by assurances, commands and treatment under hypnosis, I turned to psychical analysis and requested her to tell me what emotion had preceded the onset of her illness. She answered (under hypnosis but without any signs of feeling) that a short time previously a young relative of hers had died to whom she had for many years considered herself engaged. This piece of information, however, produced no alteration whatever in her condition. Accordingly, during her next hypnosis, I told her I was quite convinced that her cousin’s death had had nothing at all to do with her state, but that something else had happened which she had not mentioned. At this she gave way to the extent of letting fall a single significant phrase; but she had hardly said a word before she stopped, and her old father, who was sitting behind her, began to sob bitterly. Naturally I pressed my investigation no further; but I never saw the patient again.

Studies On Hysteria

91

It was while I was studying Frau von N.’s abulias that I began for the first time to have grave doubts about the validity of Bernheim’s assertion, ‘tout est dans la suggestion’ [‘suggestion is everything’] and about his clever friend Delboeuf’s inference: 'Comme quoi il n’y a pas d’hypnotisme’ [‘That being so, there is no such thing as hypnotism’]. And to this day I cannot understand how it can be supposed that by merely holding up a finger and saying once ‘go to sleep’ I had created in the patient the peculiar psychical state in which her memory had access to all her psychical experiences. I may have called up the state by my suggestion but I did not create it, since its features - which are, incidentally, found universally - came as such a surprise to me.

The case history makes sufficiently plain the way in which therapeutic work was carried out during somnambulism. As is the usual practice in hypnotic psychotherapy, I fought against the patient’s pathological ideas by means of assurances and prohibitions, and by putting forward opposing ideas of every sort. But I did not content myself with this. I investigated the genesis of the individual symptoms so as to be able to combat the premises on which the pathological ideas were erected. In the course of such an analysis it habitually happened that the patient gave verbal utterance with the most violent agitation to matters whose accompanying affect had hitherto only found outlet as an expression of emotion. I cannot say how much of the therapeutic success each time was due to my suggesting the symptom away in statu nascendi and how much to my resolving the affect by abreaction, since I combined both these therapeutic factors. Accordingly, this case cannot strictly be used as evidence for the therapeutic efficacy of the cathartic procedure; at the same time I must add that only those symptoms of which I carried out a psychical analysis were really permanently removed.

Studies On Hysteria

92

The therapeutic success on the whole was considerable; but it was not a lasting one. The patient’s tendency to fall ill in a similar way under the impact of fresh traumas was not got rid of. Anyone who wanted to undertake the definitive cure of a case of hysteria such as this would have to enter more thoroughly into the complex of phenomena than I attempted to do. Frau von N. was undoubtedly a personality with a severe neuropathic heredity. It seems likely that there can be no hysteria apart from a disposition of this kind. But on the other hand disposition alone does not make hysteria. There must be reasons that bring it about, and, in my opinion, these reasons must be appropriate: the aetiology is of a specific character. I have already mentioned that in Frau von N. the affects of a great number of traumatic experiences had been retained and that the lively activity of her memory brought now one and now another of these traumas to the surface of her mind. I shall now venture to put forward an explanation of the reason why she retained the affects in this way. That reason, it is true, was connected with her hereditary disposition. For, on the one hand, her feelings were very intense; she was of a vehement nature, capable of the strongest passions. On the other hand, since her husband’s death, she had lived in complete mental solitude; her persecution by her relatives had made her suspicious of friends and she was jealously on guard against anyone acquiring too much influence over her actions. The circle of her duties was very wide, and she performed the whole of the mental work which they imposed on her by herself, without a friend or confidant, almost isolated from her family and handicapped by her conscientiousness, her tendency to tormenting herself and often, too, by the natural helplessness of a woman. In short the mechanism of the retention of large sums of excitation, apart from everything else, cannot be overlooked in this case. It was based partly on the circumstances of her life and partly on her natural disposition. Her dislike, for instance, of saying anything about herself was so great, that, as I noticed to my astonishment in 1891, none of the daily visitors to her house recognized that she was ill or were aware that I was her doctor.

Studies On Hysteria

93

Does this exhaust the aetiology of this case of hysteria? I do not think so. For at the time of her two treatments I had not yet raised in my own mind the questions which must be answered before an exhaustive explanation of such a case is possible. I am now of the opinion that there must have been some added factor to provoke the outbreak of illness precisely in these last years, considering that operative aetiological conditions had been present for many years previously. It has also struck me that amongst all the intimate information given me by the patient there was a complete absence of the sexual element, which is, after all, more liable than any other to provide occasion for traumas. It is impossible that her excitations in this field can have left no traces whatever; what I was allowed to hear was no doubt an editio in usum delphini [a bowdlerized edition] of her life-story. The patient behaved with the greatest and to all appearances with the most unforced sense of propriety, without a trace of prudishness. When, however, I reflect on the reserve with which she told me under hypnosis about her maid’s little adventure in the hotel, I cannot help suspecting that this woman who was so passionate and so capable of strong feelings had not won her victory over her sexual needs without severe struggles, and that at times her attempts at suppressing this most powerful of all instincts had exposed her to severe mental exhaustion. She once admitted to me that she had not married again because, in view of her large fortune, she could not credit the disinterestedness of her suitors and because she would have reproached herself for damaging the prospects of her two children by a new marriage.

I must make one further remark before bringing Frau von N.’s case history to a close. Dr. Breuer and I knew her pretty well and for a fairly long time, and we used to smile when we compared her character with the picture of the hysterical psyche which can be traced from early times through the writings and the opinions of medical men. We had learnt from our observations on Frau Cäcilie M. that hysteria of the severest type can exist in conjunction with gifts of the richest and most original kind - a conclusion which is, in any case, made plain beyond a doubt in the biographies of women eminent in history and literature. In the same way Frau Emmy von N. gave us an example of how hysteria is compatible with an unblemished character and a well-governed mode of life. The woman we came to know was an admirable one. The moral seriousness with which she viewed her duties, her intelligence and energy, which were no less than a man’s, and her high degree of education and love of truth impressed both of us greatly; while her benevolent care for the welfare of all her dependants, her humility of mind and the refinement of her manners revealed her qualities as a true lady as well. To describe such a woman as a ‘degenerate’ would be to distort the meaning of that word out of all recognition. We should do well to distinguish between the concepts of ‘disposition’ and ‘degeneracy’ as applied to people; otherwise we shall find ourselves forced to admit that humanity owes a large proportion of its great achievements to the efforts of ‘degenerates’.

Studies On Hysteria

94

I must confess, too, that I can see no sign in Frau von N.’s history of the ‘psychical inefficiency’ to which Janet attributes the genesis of hysteria. According to him the hysterical disposition consists in an abnormal restriction of the field of consciousness (due to hereditary degeneracy) which results in a disregard of whole groups of ideas and, later, to a disintegration of the ego and the organization of secondary personalities. If this were so, what remains of the ego after the withdrawal of the hysterically-organized psychical groups would necessarily also be less efficient than a normal ego; and in fact, according to Janet, the ego in hysteria is afflicted by psychical stigmata, condemned to mono-ideism and incapable of the volitional acts of ordinary life. Janet, I think, has made the mistake here of promoting what are after-effects of changes in consciousness due to hysteria to the rank of primary determinants of hysteria. The subject is one that deserves further consideration elsewhere; but in Frau non N. there was no sign of any such inefficiency. During the times of her worst states she was and remained capable of playing her part in the management of a large industrial business, of keeping a constant eye on the education of her children, of carrying on her correspondence with prominent people in the intellectual world - in short, of fulfilling her obligations well enough for the fact of her illness to remain concealed. I am inclined to believe, then, that all this involved a considerable excess of efficiency, which could perhaps not be kept up in the long run and was bound to lead to exhaustion - to a secondary ‘misére psychologique’ [‘psychological impoverishment’]. It seems likely that disturbances of this kind in her efficiency were beginning to make themselves felt at the time when I first saw her; but however that may be, severe hysteria had been present for many years before the appearance of the symptoms of exhaustion.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] I am aware that no analyst can read this case history to-day without a smile of pity. But it should be borne in mind that this was the first case in which I employed the cathartic procedure to a large extent. For this reason I shall leave the report in its original form. I shall not bring forward any of the criticisms which can so easily be made on it to-day, nor shall I attempt to fill in any of the numerous gaps in it. I will only add two things: what I afterwards discovered about the immediate aetiology of the illness and what I heard of its subsequent course.

When, as I have mentioned, I spent a few days as Frau Emmy’s guest in her country house, there was a stranger present at one of the meals who clearly tried to make himself agreeable. After his departure my hostess asked me how I had liked him and added as it were in passing: ‘Only imagine, the man wants to marry me!’ When I took this in connection with some other remarks which she had made, but to which I had not paid sufficient attention, I was led to conclude that she was longing at that time to be married again but found an obstacle to the realization of her purpose in the existence of her two daughters, who were the heiresses of their father’s fortune.

A few years later at a Scientific Congress I met a prominent physician from Frau Emmy’s part of the country. I asked him if he was acquainted with the lady and knew anything of her condition. Yes, he said, he knew her, and had himself given her hypnotic treatment. She had gone through the same performance with him - and with many other doctors - as she had with me. Her condition had become very bad; she had rewarded his hypnotic treatment of her by making a remarkable recovery, but had then suddenly quarrelled with him, left him, and once more set her illness going to its full extent. It was a genuine instance of the ‘compulsion to repeat’.

It was not for another quarter of a century that I once more had news of Frau Emmy. Her elder daughter - the one of whom I had earlier made such an unfavourable prognosis - approached me with a request for a report on her mother’s mental condition on the strength of my former treatment of her. She was intending to take legal proceedings against her mother, whom she represented as a cruel and ruthless tyrant. It seems that she had broken off relations with both her children and refused to assist them in their financial difficulties. The daughter who wrote to me had obtained a doctor’s degree and was married.

Studies On Hysteria

95

CASE 3

MISS LUCY R., AGE 30   (Freud)

At the end of the year 1892 a colleague of my acquaintance referred a young lady to me who was being treated by him for chronically recurrent suppurative rhinitis. It subsequently turned out that the obstinate persistence of her trouble was due to caries of the ethmoid bone. Latterly she had complained of some new symptoms which the well-informed physician was no longer able to attribute to a local affection. She had entirely lost her sense of smell and was almost continuously pursued by one or two subjective olfactory sensations. She found these most distressing. She was, moreover, in low spirits and fatigued, and she complained of heaviness in the head, diminished appetite and loss of efficiency.

The young lady, who was living as a governess in the house of the managing director of a factory in Outer Vienna, came to visit me from time to time in my consulting hours. She was an Englishwoman. She had a delicate constitution, with a poor pigmentation, but was in good health apart from her nasal affection. Her first statements confirmed what the physician had told me. She was suffering from depression and fatigue and was tormented by subjective sensations of smell. As regards hysterical symptoms, she showed a fairly definite general analgesia, with no loss of tactile sensibility, and a rough examination (with the hand) revealed no restriction of the visual field. The interior of her nose was completely analgesic and without reflexes; she was sensitive to tactile pressure there, but the perception proper to it as a sense-organ was absent, alike for specific stimuli and for others (e.g. ammonia or acetic acid). The purulent nasal catarrh was just then in a phase of improvement.

In our first attempts at making the illness intelligible it was necessary to interpret the subjective olfactory sensations, since they were recurrent hallucinations, as chronic hysterical symptoms. Her depression might perhaps be the affect attaching to the trauma, and is should be possible to find an experience in which these smells, which had now become subjective, had been objective. This experience must have been the trauma which the recurring sensations of smell symbolized in memory. It might be more correct to regard the recurrent olfactory hallucinations, together with the depression which accompanied them, as equivalents of a hysterical attack. The nature of recurrent hallucinations makes them unsuitable in point of fact for playing the part of chronic symptoms. But this question did not really arise in a case like this which showed only a rudimentary development. It was essential, however, that the subjective sensations of smell should have had a specialized origin of a sort which would admit of their being derived from some quite particular real object.

Studies On Hysteria

96

This expectation was promptly fulfilled. When I asked her what the smell was by which she was most constantly troubled she answered: ‘A smell of burnt pudding.’ Thus I only needed to assume that a smell of burnt pudding had actually occurred in the experience which had operated as a trauma. It is very unusual, no doubt, for olfactory sensations to be chosen as mnemic symbols of traumas, but it was not difficult to account for this choice. The patient was suffering from suppurative rhinitis and consequently her attention was especially focused on her nose and nasal sensations. What I knew of the circumstances of the patient’s life was limited to the fact that the two children whom she was looking after had no mother; she had died some years earlier of an acute illness.

I therefore decided to make the smell of burnt pudding the starting-point of the analysis. I will describe the course of this analysis as it might have taken place under favourable conditions. In fact, what should have been a single session spread over several. This was because the patient could only visit me in my consulting hours, when I could only devote a short time to her. Moreover, a single discussion of this sort used to extend over more than a week, since her duties would not allow her to make the long journey from the factory to my house very often. We used therefore to break our conversation off short and take up the thread at the same place next time.

Miss Lucy R. did not fall into a state of somnambulism when I tried to hypnotize her. I therefore did without somnambulism and conducted her whole analysis while she was in a state which may in fact have differed very little from a normal one.

Studies On Hysteria

97

I shall have to go into this point of my technical procedure in greater detail. When, in 1889, I visited the Nancy clinics, I heard Dr. Liébeault, the doyen of hypnotism, say: ‘If only we had the means of putting every patient into a state of somnambulism, hypnotic therapy would be the most powerful of all.’ In Bernheim’s clinic it almost seemed as though such an art really existed and as though it might be possible to learn it from Bernheim. But as soon as I tried to practise this art on my own patients, I discovered that my powers at least were subject to severe limits, and that if somnambulism were not brought about in a patient at the first three attempts I had no means of inducing it. The percentage of cases amenable to somnambulism was very much lower in my experience than what Bernheim reported.

I was accordingly faced with the choice of either abandoning the cathartic method in most of the cases which might have been suitable for it, or of venturing on the experiment of employing that method without somnambulism and where the hypnotic influence was light or even where its existence was doubtful. It seemed to me a matter of indifference what degree of hypnosis - according to one or other of the scales that have been proposed for measuring it - was reached by this non somnambulistic state; for, as we know, each of the various forms taken by suggestibility is in any case independent of the others, and the bringing about of catalepsy, automatic movements, and so on, does not work either for or against what I required for my purposes, namely that the awakening of forgotten memories should be made easier. Moreover, I soon dropped the practice of making tests to show the degree of hypnosis reached, since in quite a number of cases this roused the patients’ resistance and shook their confidence in me, which I needed for carrying out the more important psychical work. Furthermore, I soon began to tire of issuing assurances and commands such as: ‘You are going to sleep! . . . sleep!’ and of hearing the patient, as so often happened when the degree of hypnosis was light, remonstrate with me: ‘But, doctor, I’m not asleep’, and of then having to make highly ticklish distinctions: ‘I don’t mean ordinary sleep; I mean hypnosis. As you see, you are hypnotized, you can’t open your eyes’, etc., ‘and in any case, there’s no need for you to go to sleep’, and so on. I feel sure that many other physicians who practise psychotherapy can get out of such difficulties with more skill than I can. If so, they may adopt some procedure other than mine. It seems to me, however, that if one can reckon with such frequency on finding oneself in an embarrassing situation through the use of a particular word, one will be wise to avoid both the word and the embarrassment. When, therefore, my first attempt did not lead either to somnambulism or to a degree of hypnosis involving marked physical changes, I ostensibly dropped hypnosis, and only asked for ‘concentration’; and I ordered the patient to lie down and deliberately shut his eyes as a means of achieving this ‘concentration’. It is possible that in this way I obtained with only a slight effort the deepest degree of hypnosis that could be reached in the particular case.

Studies On Hysteria

98

But in doing without somnambulism I might be depriving myself of a precondition without which the cathartic method seemed unusable. For that method clearly rested on the patients in their changed state of consciousness having access to memories and being able to recognize connections which appeared not to be present in their normal state of consciousness. If the somnambulistic extension of memory were absent there could also be no possibility of establishing any determining causes which the patient could present to the physician as something unknown to him (the patient); and, of course, it is precisely the pathogenic memories which, as we have already said in our ‘Preliminary Communication’ are ‘absent from the patients’ memory, when they are in a normal psychical state, or are only present in a highly summary form’.

I was saved from this new embarrassment by remembering that I had myself seen Bernheim producing evidence that the memories of events during somnambulism are only apparently forgotten in the waking state and can be revived by a mild word of command and a pressure with the hand intended to indicate a different state of consciousness. He had, for instance, given a woman in a state of somnambulism a negative hallucination to the effect that he was no longer present, and had then endeavoured to draw her attention to himself in a great variety of ways, including some of a decidedly aggressive kind. He did not succeed. After she had been woken up he asked her to tell him what he had done to her while she thought he was not there. She replied in surprise that she knew nothing of it. But he did not accept this. He insisted that she could remember everything and laid his hand on her forehead to help her to recall it. And lo and behold! she ended by describing everything that she had ostensibly not perceived during her somnambulism and ostensibly not remembered in her waking state.

Studies On Hysteria

99

This astonishing and instructive experiment served as my model. I decided to start from the assumption that my patients knew everything that was of any pathogenic significance and that it was only a question of obliging them to communicate it. Thus when I reached a point at which, after asking a patient some question such as: ‘How long have you had this symptom?’ or: ‘What was its origin?’, I was met with the answer: ‘I really don’t know, I proceeded as follows. I placed my hand on the patient’s forehead or took her head between my hands and said: ‘You will think of it under the pressure of my hand. At the moment at which I relax my pressure you will see something in front of you or something will come into your head. Catch hold of it. It will be what we are looking for. - Well what have you seen or what has occurred to you?’

On the first occasions on which I made use of this procedure (it was not with Miss Lucy R.) I myself was surprised to find that it yielded me the precise results that I needed. And I can safely say that it has scarcely ever left me in the lurch since then. It has always pointed the way which the analysis should take and has enabled me to carry through every such analysis to an end without the use of somnambulism. Eventually I grew so confident that, if patients answered, ’I see nothing’ or ‘nothing has occurred to me’, I could dismiss this as an impossibility and could assure them that they had certainly become aware of what was wanted but had refused to believe that that was so and had rejected it. I told them I was ready to repeat the procedure as often as they liked and they would see the same thing every time. I turned out to be invariably right. The patients had not yet learned to relax their critical faculty. They had rejected the memory that had come up or the idea that had occurred to them, on the ground that it was unserviceable and an irrelevant interruption; and after they had told it to me it always proved to be what was wanted. Occasionally, when, after three or four pressures, I had at last extracted the information, the patient would reply: ‘As a matter of fact I knew that the first time, but it was just what I didn’t want to say’, or: ‘I hoped that would not be it.’

Studies On Hysteria

100

This business of enlarging what was supposed to be a restricted consciousness was laborious - far more so, at least, than an investigation during somnambulism. But it nevertheless made me independent of somnambulism, and gave me insight into the motives which often determine the ‘forgetting’ of memories. I can affirm that this forgetting is often intentional and desired; and its success is never more than apparent.

I found it even more surprising perhaps that it was possible by the same procedure to bring back numbers and dates which, on the face of it, had long since been forgotten, and so to reveal how unexpectedly accurate memory can be.

The fact that in looking for numbers and dates our choice is so limited enables us to call to our help a proposition familiar to us from the theory of aphasia, namely that recognizing something is a lighter task for memory than thinking of it spontaneously. Thus, if a patient is unable to remember the year or month or day when a particular event occurred, we can repeat to him the dates of the possibly relevant years, the names of the twelve months and the thirty-one numbers of the days of the month, assuring him that when we come to the right number or the right name his eyes will open of their own accord or that he will feel which is the right one. In the great majority of cases the patient will in fact decide on a particular date. Quite often (as in the case of Frau Cäcilie M.) it is possible to prove from documents belonging to the period in question that the date has been recognized correctly; while in other cases and on other occasions the indisputable accuracy of the date thus chosen can be inferred from the context of the facts remembered. For instance, after a patient had had her attention drawn to the date which had been arrived at by this ‘counting over’ method, she said: ‘Why, that’s my father’s birthday!’ and added: ‘Of course! It was because it was his birthday that I was expecting the event we were talking about.’

Here I can only touch upon the theme in passing. The conclusion I drew from all these observations was that experiences which have played an important pathogenic part, and all their subsidiary concomitants, are accurately retained in the patient’s memory even when they seem to be forgotten - when he is unable to call them to mind.¹

¹ As an example of the technique which I have described above of carrying out investigations in non-somnambulistic states - that is, where there is no extension of consciousness - I will describe an instance which I happen to have analysed in the course of the last few days. I was treating a woman of thirty-eight, suffering from anxiety neurosis (agoraphobia, attacks of fear of death, etc.). Like so many such patients, she had a disinclination to admitting that she had acquired these troubles in her married life and would have liked to push them back into her early youth. Thus she told me that she was seventeen when she had had a first attack of dizziness, with anxiety and feelings of faintness, in the street in her small native town, and that these attacks had recurred from time to time, till a few years ago they had given place to her present disorder. I suspected that these first attacks of dizziness, in which the anxiety faded more and more into the background, were hysterical and I made up my mind to embark on an analysis of them. To begin with she only knew that this first attack came over her while the was out shopping in the principal street. ’What were you going to buy?’ - ‘Different things, I believe; they were for a ball I had been invited to.’ - ‘When was this ball to take place?’ - ‘Two days later, I think.’ - ‘Something must have happened to agitate you a few days before, something that made an impression on you.’ - ‘I can’t think of anything. After all, it was twenty-one years ago.’ - ‘That makes no difference; you will remember all the same. I shall press on your head, and when I relax the pressure, you will think of something or see something, and you must tell me what that is.’ I went through this procedure; but she remained silent. ’Well, has nothing occurred to you?’ - ‘I have thought of something, but it can’t have any connection with this.’ - ‘Tell it to me anyway.’ - ‘I thought of a friend of mine, a girl, who is dead. But she died when I was eighteen - a year later, that is.’ - ‘We shall see. Let’s stick to this point. What about this friend of yours?’ - ‘Her death was a great shock to me, as I used to see a lot of her. A few weeks earlier another girl had died, and that had made a great stir in the town. So after all, I must have been seventeen at the time.’ - ‘There, you see, I told you we could rely on the things that come into your head under the pressure of my hand. Now, can you remember what you were thinking about when you felt dizzy in the street?’ -(‘I wasn’t thinking of anything; I only felt dizzy.’ - ‘That’s not possible. States like that never happen without being accompanied by some idea. I shall press once more and the thought you had will come back to you.... Well, what has occurred to you?’ - ‘The idea that I am the third.’ - ‘What does that mean?’ - ‘When I got the attack of dizziness I must have thought: "Now I am dying, like the other two girls." ' - ‘That was the idea, then. As you were having the attack you thought of your friend. So her death must have made a great impression on you.’ - ‘Yes, it did. I can remember now that when I heard of her death I felt it was dreadful to be going to a ball, while she was dead. But I was looking forward so much to the ball and was so busy with preparations for it; I didn’t want to think of what had happened at all.’ (We may observe here a deliberate repression from consciousness, which rendered the patient’s memory of her friend pathogenic.)

The attack was now to some extent explained. But I still required to know of some precipitating factor which had provoked the memory at that particular time. I formed what happened to be a lucky conjecture. ’Do you remember the exact street you were walking along just then?’ - ‘Certainly. It was the principal street, with its old houses. I can see them now.’ - ‘And where was it that your friend lived?’ - ‘In a house in the same street. I had just passed it, and I had the attack a couple of houses further on.’ - ‘So when you went by the house it reminded you of your dead friend, and you were once more overcome by the contrast which you did not want to think of.’

I was still not satisfied. There might, I thought, be something else at work as well that had aroused or reinforced the hysterical disposition of a girl who had till then been normal. My suspicions turned to her monthly periods as an appropriate factor, and I asked: ‘Do you know at what time in the month your period came on?’ The question was not a welcome one. ‘Do you expect me to know that, too? I can only tell you that I had them very seldom then and very irregularly. When I was seventeen I only had one once.’ - ‘Very well, then, we will find out when this once was by counting over.’ I did the counting over, and she decided definitely on one particular month and hesitated between two days immediately preceding the date of a fixed holiday. ‘Does that fit in somehow with the date of the ball?’ She answered sheepishly: ‘The ball was on the holiday. And now I remember, too, what an impression it made on me that my only period that year should have had to come on just before the ball. It was my first ball.’

There is no difficulty now in reconstructing the interconnection between the events, and we can now see into the mechanism of this hysterical attack. It is true that the achievement of this result had been a laborious business. It required complete confidence in my technique on my side, and the occurrence to the patient of a few key ideas, before it was possible to re-awaken, after an interval of twenty-one years, these details of a forgotten experience in a sceptical person who was, in fact, in a waking state. But once all this had been gone through, the whole thing fitted together.

Studies On Hysteria

101

After this long but unavoidable digression I will return to the case of Miss Lucy R. As I have said, then, my attempts at hypnosis with her did not produce somnambulism. She simply lay quietly in a state open to some mild degree of influence, with her eyes closed all the time, her features somewhat rigid, and without moving hand or foot. I asked her if she could remember the occasion on which she first had the smell of burnt pudding. ‘Oh yes, I know exactly. It was about two months ago, two days before my birthday. I was with the children in the schoolroom and was playing at cooking with them’ (they were two little girls). ‘A letter was brought in that had just been left by the postman. I saw from the postmark and the handwriting that it was from my mother in Glasgow and wanted to open it and read it; but the children rushed at me, tore the letter out of my hands and cried: "No, you shan’t read it now! It must be for your birthday; we’ll keep it for you!" While the children were having this game with me there was suddenly a strong smell. They had forgotten the pudding they were cooking and it was getting burnt. Ever since this I have been pursued by the smell. It is there all the time and becomes stronger when I am agitated.’

‘Do you see this scene clearly before your eyes?’ - ‘As large as life, just as I experienced it.’ - ‘What could there be about it that was so agitating?’ - ‘I was moved because the children were so affectionate to me.’ - ‘Weren’t they always?’ - 'Yes - but just when I got the letter from my mother.’ - ‘I don’t understand why there is a contrast between the children’s affection and your mother’s letter, for that’s what you seem to be suggesting.’ - ‘I was intending to go back to my mother’s, and the thought of leaving the dear children made me feel so sad.’ - ‘What’s wrong with your mother? Has she been feeling lonely and sent for you? Or was she ill at the time, and were you expecting news of her?’ - ‘No; she isn’t very strong, but she’s not exactly ill, and she has a companion with her.’ - ‘Then why must you leave the children?’ - 'I couldn’t bear it any longer in the house. The housekeeper, the cook and the French governess seem to have thought that I was putting myself above my station. They joined in a little intrigue against me and said all sorts of things against me to the children’s grandfather, and I didn’t get as much support as I had expected from the two gentlemen when I complained to them. So I gave notice to the Director’ (the children’s father). ‘He answered in a very friendly way that I had better think the matter over for a couple of weeks before I finally gave him my decision. I was in this state of uncertainty at the time, and thought I should be leaving the house; but I have stayed on.’ - ‘ Was there something particular, apart from their fondness for you, which attached you to the children?’ - ‘Yes. Their mother was a distant relation of my mother’s, and I had promised her on her death-bed that I would devote myself with all my power to the children, that I would not leave them and that I would take their mother’s place with them. In giving notice I had broken this promise.’

This seemed to complete the analysis of the patient’s subjective sensation of smell. It had turned out in fact to have been an objective sensation originally, and one which was intimately associated with an experience - a little scene - in which opposing affects had been in conflict with each other: her regret at leaving the children and the slights which were nevertheless urging her to make up her mind to do so. Her mother’s letter had not unnaturally reminded her of her reasons for this decision, since it was her intention to join her mother on leaving here. The conflict between her affects had elevated the moment of the letter’s arrival into a trauma, and the sensation of smell that was associated with this trauma persisted as its symbol. It was still necessary to explain why, out of all the sense-perceptions afforded by the scene, she had chosen this smell as a symbol. I was already prepared, however, to use the chronic affection of her nose as a help in explaining the point. In response to a direct question she told me that just at that time she had once more been suffering from such a heavy cold in the nose that she could hardly smell anything. Nevertheless, while she was in her state of agitation she perceived the smell of the burnt pudding, which broke through the organically determined loss of her sense of smell.

Studies On Hysteria

102

But I was not satisfied with the explanation thus arrived at. It all sounded highly plausible, but there was something that I missed, some adequate reason why these agitations and this conflict of affects should have led to hysteria rather than anything else. Why had not the whole thing remained on the level of normal psychical life? In other words, what was the justification for the conversion which occurred? Why did she not always call to mind the scene itself, instead of the associated sensation which she singled out as a symbol of the recollection Such questions might be over-curious and superfluous if we were dealing with a hysteric of long standing in whom the mechanism of conversion was habitual. But it was not until this trauma, or at any rate this small tale of trouble, that the girl had acquired hysteria.

Now I already knew from the analysis of similar cases that before hysteria can be acquired for the first time one essential condition must be fulfilled: an idea must be intentionally repressed from consciousness and excluded from associative modification. In my view this intentional repression is also the basis for the conversion, whether total or partial, of the sum of excitation. The sum of excitation, being cut off from psychical association, finds its way all the more easily along the wrong path to a somatic innervation. The basis for repression itself can only be a feeling of unpleasure, the incompatibility between the single idea that is to be repressed and the dominant mass of ideas constituting the ego. The repressed idea takes its revenge, however, by becoming pathogenic.

Studies On Hysteria

103

I accordingly inferred from Miss Lucy R.’s having succumbed to hysterical conversion at the moment in question that among the determinants of the trauma there must have been one which she had sought intentionally to leave in obscurity and had made efforts to forget. If her fondness for the children and her sensitiveness on the subject of the other members of the household were taken together, only one conclusion could be reached. I was bold enough to inform my patient of this interpretation. I said to her: ‘I cannot think that these are all the reasons for your feelings about the children. I believe that really you are in love with your employer, the Director, though perhaps without being aware of it yourself, and that you have a secret hope of taking their mother’s place in actual fact. And then we must remember the sensitiveness you now feel towards the servants, after having lived with them peacefully for years. You’re afraid of their having some inkling of your hopes and making fun of you.’

She answered in her usual laconic fashion: ‘Yes, I think that’s true.’ - ‘But if you knew you loved your employer why didn’t you tell me?’ - ‘I didn’t know - or rather I didn’t want to know. I wanted to drive it out of my head and not think of it again; and I believe latterly I have succeeded.’¹  ‘Why is it that you were unwilling to admit this inclination? Where you ashamed of loving a man?’ - ‘Oh no, I’m not unreasonably prudish. We’re not responsible for our feelings, anyhow. It is distressing to me only because he is my employer and I am in his service and live in his house. I don’t feel the same complete independence towards him that I could towards anyone else. And then I am only a poor girl and he is such a rich man of good family. People would laugh at me if they had any idea of it.’

¹ I have never managed to give a better description than this of the strange state of mind in which one knows and does not know a thing at the same time. It is clearly impossible to understand it unless one has been in such a state oneself. I myself have had a very remarkable experience of this sort, which is still clearly before me. If I try to recollect what went on in my mind at the time I can get hold of very little. What happened was that I saw something which did not fit in at all with my expectation; yet I did not allow what I saw to disturb my fixed plan in the least, though the perception should have put a stop to it. I was unconscious of any contradiction in this; nor was I aware of my feelings of repulsion, which must nevertheless undoubtedly have been responsible for the perception producing no psychical effect. I was afflicted by that blindness of the seeing eye which is so astonishing in the attitude of mothers to their daughters, husbands to their wives and rulers to their favourites.

Studies On Hysteria

104

She now showed no resistance to throwing light on the origin of this inclination. She told me that for the first few years she had lived happily in the house, carrying out her duties and free from any unfulfillable wishes. One day, however, her employer, a serious, overworked man whose behaviour towards her had always been reserved, began a discussion with her on the lines along which children should be brought up. He unbent more and was more cordial than usual and told her how much he depended on her for looking after his orphaned children; and as he said this he looked at her meaningly. . . . Her love for him had begun at that moment, and she even allowed herself to dwell on the gratifying hopes which she had based on this talk. But when there was no further development, and when she had waited in vain for a second hour’s intimate exchange of views, she decided to banish the whole business from her mind. She entirely agreed with me that the look she had caught during their conversation had probably sprung from his thoughts about his wife, and she recognized quite clearly that there was no prospect of her feelings for him meeting with any return.

I expected that this discussion would bring about a fundamental change in her condition. But for the time being this did not occur. She continued to be in low spirits and depressed. She felt somewhat refreshed in the mornings by a course of hydropathic treatment which I prescribed for her at the same time. The smell of burnt pudding did not disappear completely, though it became less frequent and weaker. It only came on, she said, when she was very much agitated. The persistence of this mnemic symbol led me to suspect that, in addition to the main scene, it had taken over the representation of the many minor traumas subsidiary to that scene. We therefore looked about for anything else that might have to do with the scene of the burnt pudding; we went into the subject of the domestic friction, the grandfather’s behaviour, and so on, and as we did so the burnt smell faded more and more. During this time, too, the treatment was interrupted for a considerable while, owing to a fresh attack of her nasal disorder, and this now led to the discovery of the caries of the ethmoid.

On her return she reported that at Christmas she had received a great many presents from the two gentlemen of the house and even from the servants, as though they were all anxious to make it up with her and to wipe out her memory of the conflicts of the last few months. But these signs of goodwill had not made any impression on her.

Studies On Hysteria

105

When I enquired once more about the smell of burnt pudding, she informed me that it had quite disappeared but that she was being bothered by another, similar smell, resembling cigar-smoke. It had been there earlier as well, she thought, but had, as it were, been covered by the smell of the pudding. Now it had emerged by itself.

I was not very well satisfied with the results of the treatment. What had happened was precisely what is always brought up against purely symptomatic treatment: I had removed one symptom only for its place to be taken by another. Nevertheless, I did not hesitate to set about the task of getting rid of this new mnemic symbol by analysis.

But this time she did not know where the subjective olfactory sensation came from - on what important occasion it had been an objective one. ‘People smoke every day in our house,’ she said, ‘and I really don’t know whether the smell I notice refers to some special occasion.’ I then insisted that she should try to remember under the pressure of my hand. I have already mentioned that her memories had the quality of plastic vividness, that she was a ‘visual’ type. And in fact, at my insistence, a picture gradually emerged before her, hesitatingly and piecemeal to begin with. It was the dining-room in her house, where she was waiting with the children for the two gentlemen to return to luncheon from the factory. ‘Now we are all sitting round the table, the gentlemen, the French governess, the housekeeper, the children and myself. But that’s like what happens every day.’ - ‘Go on looking at the picture; it will develop and become more specialized.’ - ‘Yes, there is a guest. It’s the chief accountant. He’s an old man and he is as fond of the children as though they were his own grandchildren. But he comes to lunch so often that there’s nothing special in that either.’ - ‘Be patient and just keep looking at the picture; some thing’s sure to happen.’ - ‘Nothing’s happening. We’re getting up from the table; the children say their good-byes, and they go upstairs with us as usual to the second floor.’ - ‘And then?’ - 'It is a special occasion, after all. I recognize the scene now. As the children say good-bye, the accountant tries to kiss them. My employer flares up and actually shouts at him: "Don’t kiss the children!" I feel a stab at my heart; and as the gentlemen are already smoking, the cigar-smoke sticks in my memory.’

Studies On Hysteria

106

This, then, was a second and deeper-lying scene which, like the first, operated as a trauma and left a mnemic symbol behind it. But to what did this scene owe its effectiveness? ‘Which of the two scenes was the earlier,’ I asked, ‘this one or the one with the burnt pudding?’ - ‘The scene I have just told you about was the earlier, by almost two months.’ - ‘Then why did you feel this stab when the children’s father stopped the old man? His reprimand wasn’t aimed at you.’ - ‘It wasn’t right of him to shout at an old man who was a valued friend of his and, what’s more, a guest. He could have said it quietly.’ - ‘So it was only the violent way he put it that hurt you? Did you feel embarrassed on his account? Or perhaps you thought: "If he can be so violent about such a small thing with an old friend and guest, how much more so might he be with me if I were his wife".’ - ‘No, that’s not it.’ - ‘But it had to do with his violence, hadn’t it?’ - ‘Yes, about the children being kissed. He has never liked that.’

And now, under the pressure of my hand, the memory of a third and still earlier scene emerged, which was the really operative trauma and which had given the scene with the chief accountant its traumatic effectiveness. It had happened a few months earlier still that a lady who was an acquaintance of her employer’s came to visit them, and on her departure kissed the two children on the mouth. Their father, who was present, managed to restrain himself from saying anything to the lady, but after she had gone, his fury burst upon the head of the unlucky governess. He said he held her responsible if anyone kissed the children on the mouth, that it was her duty not to permit it and that she was guilty of a dereliction of duty if she allowed it; if it ever happened again he would entrust his children’s upbringing to other hands. This had happened at a time when she still thought he loved her, and was expecting a repetition of their first friendly talk. The scene had crushed her hopes. She had said to herself: ‘If he can fly out at me like, this and make such threats over such a trivial matter, and one for which, moreover, I am not in the least responsible, I must have made a mistake. He can never have had any warm feelings for me, or they would have taught him to treat me with more consideration.’ - It was obviously the recollection of this distressing scene which had come to her when the chief accountant had tried to kiss the children and had been reprimanded by their father.

Studies On Hysteria

107

After this last analysis, when, two days later, Miss Lucy visited me once more, I could not help asking her what had happened to make her so happy. She was as though transfigured. She was smiling and carried her head high. I thought for a moment that after all I had been wrong about the situation, and that the children’s governess had become the Director’s fiancée. But she dispelled my notion. ‘Nothing has happened. It’s just that you don’t know me. You have only seen me ill and depressed. I’m always cheerful as a rule. When I woke yesterday morning the weight was no longer on my mind, and since then I have felt well.’ - ‘And what do you think of your prospects in the house?’ - ‘I am quite clear on the subject. I know I have none, and I shan’t make myself unhappy over it.’ - ‘And will you get on all right with the servants now?’ - ‘I think my own oversensitiveness was responsible for most of that.’ - ‘And are you still in love with your employer?’ - ‘Yes, I certainly am, but that makes no difference. After all, I can have thoughts and feelings to myself.’

I then examined her nose and found that its sensitivity to pain and reflex excitability had been almost completely restored. She was also able to distinguish between smells, though with uncertainty and only if they were strong. I must leave it an open question, however, how far her nasal disorder may have played a part in the impairment of her sense of smell.

This treatment lasted in all for nine weeks. Four months later I met the patient by chance in one of our summer resorts. She was in good spirits and assured me that her recovery had been maintained.

Studies On Hysteria

108

DISCUSSION

I am not inclined to under-estimate the importance of the case that I have here described, even though the patient was suffering only from a slight and mild hysteria and though only a few symptoms were involved. On the contrary it seems to me in instructive fact that even an illness such as this, so unproductive when regarded as a neurosis, called for so many psychical determinants. Indeed, when I consider this case history more closely, I am tempted to regard it as a model instance of one particular type of hysteria, namely the form of this illness which can be acquired even by a person of sound heredity, as a result of appropriate experiences. It should be understood that I do not mean by this a hysteria which is independent of any pre-existing disposition. It is probable that no such hysteria exists. But we do not recognize a disposition of this sort in a subject until he has actually become a hysteric; for previously there was no evidence of its existence. A neuropathic disposition, as generally understood, is something different. It is already marked out before the onset of the illness by the amount of the subject’s hereditary taint or the sum of his individual psychical abnormalities. So far as my information goes, there was no trace in Miss Lucy R. of either of these factors. Her hysteria can therefore be described as an acquired one, and it presupposed nothing more than the possession of what is probably a very widespread proclivity - the proclivity to acquire hysteria. We have as yet scarcely a notion of what the features of this proclivity may be. In cases of this kind, however, the main emphasis falls upon the nature of the trauma, though taken in conjunction, of course, with the subject’s reaction to it. It turns out to be a sine qua non for the acquisition of hysteria that an incompatibility should develop between the ego and some idea presented to it. I hope to be able to show elsewhere how different neurotic disturbances arise from the different methods adopted by the ‘ego’ in order to escape from this incompatibility. The hysterical method of defence - for which, as we have seen, the possession of a particular proclivity is necessary - lies in the conversion of the excitation into a somatic innervation; and the advantage of this is that the incompatible idea is repressed from the ego’s consciousness. In exchange, that consciousness now contains the physical reminiscence which has arisen through conversion (in our case, the patient’s subjective sensations of smell) and suffers from the affect which is more or less clearly attached to precisely that reminiscence. The situation which has thus been brought about is now not susceptible to further change; for the incompatibility which would have called for a removal of the affect no longer exists, thanks to the repression and conversion. Thus the mechanism which produces hysteria represents on the one hand an act of moral cowardice and on the other a defensive measure which is at the disposal of the ego. Often enough we have to admit that fending off increasing excitations by the generation of hysteria is, in the circumstances, the most expedient thing to do; more frequently, of course, we shall conclude that a greater amount of moral courage would have been of advantage to the person concerned.

Studies On Hysteria

109

The actual traumatic moment, then, is the one at which the incompatibility forces itself upon the ego and at which the latter decides on the repudiation of the incompatible idea. That idea is not annihilated by a repudiation of this kind, but merely repressed into the unconscious. When this process occurs for the first time there comes into being a nucleus and centre of crystallization for the formation of a psychical group divorced from the ego - a group around which everything which would imply an acceptance of the incompatible idea subsequently collects. The splitting of consciousness in these cases of acquired hysteria is accordingly a deliberate and intentional one. At least it is often introduced by an act of volition; for the actual outcome is something different from what the subject intended. What he wanted was to do away with an idea, as though it had never appeared, but all he succeeds in doing is to isolate it psychically.

In the history of our present patient the traumatic moment was the moment of her employer’s outburst against her about his children being kissed by the lady. For a time, however, that scene had no manifest effect. (It may be that her oversensitiveness and low spirits began from it, but I cannot say.) Her hysterical symptoms did not start until later, at moments which may be described as ‘auxiliary’. The characteristic feature of such an auxiliary moment is, I believe, that the two divided psychical groups temporarily converge in it, as they do in the extended consciousness which occurs in somnambulism. In Miss Lucy R.’s case the first of the auxiliary moments, at which conversion took place, was the scene at table when the chief accountant tried to kiss the children. Here the traumatic memory was playing a part: she did not behave as though she had got rid of everything connected with her devotion to her employer. (In the history of other cases these different moments coincide; conversion occurs as an immediate effect of the trauma.)

Studies On Hysteria

110

The second auxiliary moment repeated the mechanism of the first one fairly exactly. A powerful impression temporarily reunited the patient’s consciousness, and conversion once more took the path which had been opened out on the first occasion. It is interesting to notice that the second symptom to develop masked the first, so that the first was not clearly perceived until the second had been cleared out of the way. It also seems to me worth while remarking upon the reversed course which had to be followed by the analysis as well. I have had the same experience in a whole number of cases; the symptoms that had arisen later masked the earlier ones, and the key to the whole situation lay only in the last symptom to be reached by the analysis.

The therapeutic process in this case consisted in compelling the psychical group that had been split off to unite once more with the ego-consciousness. Strangely enough, success did not run pari passu with the amount of work done. It was only when the last piece of work had been completed that recovery suddenly took place.

Studies On Hysteria

111

CASE 4

KATHARINA ----  (Freud)

In the summer vacation of the year 189– I made an excursion into the Hohe Tauern so that for a while I might forget medicine and more particularly the neuroses. I had almost succeeded in this when one day I turned aside from the main road to climb a mountain which lay somewhat apart and which was renowned for its views and for its well-run refuge hut. I reached the top after a strenuous climb and, feeling refreshed and rested, was sitting deep in contemplation of the charm of the distant prospect. I was so lost in thought that at first I did not connect it with myself when these words reached my ears: ‘Are you a doctor, sir?’ But the question was addressed to me, and by the rather sulky-looking girl of perhaps eighteen who had served my meal and had been spoken to by the landlady, as ‘Katharina’. To judge by her dress and bearing, she could not be a servant, but must no doubt be a daughter or relative of the landlady’s.

Coming to myself I replied: ‘Yes, I’m a doctor: but how did you know that?’

‘You wrote your name in the Visitors’ Book, sir. And I thought if you had a few moments to spare . . . The truth is, sir, my nerves are bad. I went to see a doctor in L-- about them and he gave me something for them; but I’m not well yet.’

So there I was with the neuroses once again - for nothing else could very well be the matter with this strong, well-built girl with her unhappy look. I was interested to find that neuroses could flourish in this way at a height of over 6,000 feet; I questioned her further therefore. I report the conversation that followed between us just as it is impressed on my memory and I have not altered the patient’s dialect.

‘Well, what is it you suffer from?’

‘I get so out of breath. Not always. But sometimes it catches me so that I think I shall suffocate.’

Studies On Hysteria

112

This did not, at first sight, sound like a nervous symptom. But soon it occurred to me that probably it was only a description that stood for an anxiety attack: she was choosing shortness of breath out of the complex of sensations arising from anxiety and laying undue stress on that single factor.

‘Sit down here. What is it like when you get "out of breath"?’

‘It comes over me all at once. First of all it’s like something pressing on my eyes. My head gets so heavy, there’s a dreadful buzzing, and I feel so giddy that I almost fall over. Then there’s something crushing my chest so that I can’t get my breath.’

‘And you don’t notice anything in your throat?’

‘My throat’s squeezed together as though I were going to choke.’

‘Does anything else happen in your head?’

‘Yes, there’s a hammering, enough to burst it.’

‘And don’t you feel at all frightened while this is going on?’

‘I always think I’m going to die. I’m brave as a rule and go about everywhere by myself - into the cellar and all over the mountain. But on a day when that happens I don’t dare to go anywhere; I think all the time someone’s standing behind me and going to catch hold of me all at once.’

So it was in fact an anxiety attack, and introduced by the signs of a hysterical ‘aura’ - or, more correctly, it was a hysterical attack the content of which was anxiety. Might there not probably be some other content as well?

‘When you have an attack do you think of something and always the same thing? or do you see something in front of you?’

‘Yes. I always see an awful face that looks at me in a dreadful way, so that I 'm frightened.’

Perhaps this might offer a quick means of getting to the heart of the matter.

‘Do you recognize the face? I mean, is it a face that you’ve really seen some time?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know what your attacks come from?’

‘No.’

‘When did you first have them?’

Studies On Hysteria

113

‘Two years ago, while I was still living on the other mountain with my aunt. (She used to run a refuge hut there, and we moved here eighteen months ago.) But they keep on happening.’

Was I to make an attempt at an analysis? I could not venture to transplant hypnosis to these altitudes, but perhaps I might succeed with a simple talk. I should have to try a lucky guess. I had found often enough that in girls anxiety was a consequence of the horror by which a virginal mind is overcome when it is faced for the first time with the world of sexuality.¹

So I said: ‘If you don’t know, I’II tell you how I think you got your attacks. At that time, two years ago, you must have seen or heard something that very much embarrassed you, and that you’d much rather not have seen.’

‘Heavens, yes!’ she replied, ‘that was when I caught my uncle with the girl, with Franziska, my cousin.’

‘What’s this story about a girl? Won’t you tell me all about it?’

‘You can say anything to a doctor, I suppose. Well, at that time, you know, my uncle - the husband of the aunt you’ve seen here - kept the inn on the ---kogel. Now they’re divorced, and it’s my fault they were divorced, because it was through me that it came out that he was carrying on with Franziska.’

‘And how did you discover it?’

‘This way. One day two years ago some gentlemen had climbed the mountain and asked for something to eat. My aunt wasn’t at home, and Franziska, who always did the cooking, was nowhere to be found. And my uncle was not to be found either. We looked everywhere, and at last Alois, the little boy, my cousin, said: "Why, Franziska must be in Father’s room!" And we both laughed; but we weren’t thinking anything bad. Then we went to my uncle’s room but found it locked. That seemed strange to me. Then Alois said: "There’s a window in the passage where you can look into the room." We went into the passage; but Alois wouldn’t go to the window and said he was afraid. So I said: "You silly boy! I’II go, I’m not a bit afraid." And I had nothing bad in my mind. I looked in. The room was rather dark, but I saw my uncle and Franziska; he was lying on her.’

¹ I will quote here the case in which I first recognized this causal connection. I was treating a young married woman who was suffering from a complicated neurosis and, once again, was unwilling to admit that her illness arose from her married life. She objected that while she was still a girl she had had attacks of anxiety, ending in fainting fits. I remained firm. When we had come to know each other better she suddenly said to me one day: ‘I’ll tell you now how I came by my attacks of anxiety when I was a girl. At that time I used to sleep in a room next to my parents’; the door was left open and a night-light used to burn on the table. So more than once I saw my father get into bed with my mother and heard sounds that greatly excited me. It was then that my attacks came on.’

Studies On Hysteria

114

‘Well?’

‘I came away from the window at once, and leant up against the wall and couldn’t get my breath - just what happens to me since. Everything went blank, my eyelids were forced together and there was a hammering and buzzing in my head.’

‘Did you tell your aunt that very same day?’

‘Oh no, I said nothing.’

‘Then why were you so frightened when you found them together? Did you understand it? Did you know what was going on?’

‘Oh no. I didn’t understand anything at that time. I was only sixteen. I don’t know what I was frightened about.’

‘Fräulein Katharina, if you could remember now what was happening in you at that time, when you had your first attack, what you thought about it - it would help you.’

‘Yes, if I could. But I was so frightened that I’ve forgotten everything.’

(Translated into the terminology of our ‘Preliminary Communication’, this means: ‘The affect itself created a hypnoid state, whose products were then cut off from associative connection with the ego-consciousness.’)

‘Tell me, Fräulein. Can it be that the head that you always see when you lose your breath is Franziska’s head, as you saw it then?’

‘Oh no, she didn’t look so awful. Besides, it’s a man’s head.’

‘Or perhaps your uncle’s?’

‘I didn’t see his face as clearly as that. It was too dark in the room. And why should he have been making such a dreadful face just then?’

‘You’re quite right.’

(The road suddenly seemed blocked. Perhaps something might turn up in the rest of her story.)

Studies On Hysteria

115

‘And what happened then?’

‘Well, those two must have heard a noise, because they came out soon afterwards. I felt very bad the whole time. I always kept thinking about it. Then two days later it was a Sunday and there was a great deal to do and I worked all day long. And on the Monday morning I felt giddy again and was sick, and I stopped in bed and was sick without stopping for three days.’

We had often compared the symptomatology of hysteria with a pictographic script which has become intelligible after the discovery of a few bilingual inscriptions. In that alphabet being sick means disgust. So I said: ‘If you were sick three days later, I believe that means that when you looked into the room you felt disgusted.’

‘Yes, I’m sure I felt disgusted,’ she said reflectively, ‘but disgusted at what?’

‘Perhaps you saw something naked? What sort of state were they in?’

‘It was too dark to see anything; besides they both of them had their clothes on. Oh, if only I knew what it was I felt disgusted at!’

I had no idea either. But I told her to go on and tell me whatever occurred to her, in the confident expectation that she would think of precisely what I needed to explain the case.

Well, she went on to describe how at last she reported her discovery to her aunt, who found that she was changed and suspected her of concealing some secret. There followed some very disagreeable scenes between her uncle and aunt, in the course of which the children came to hear a number of things which opened their eyes in many ways and which it would have been better for them not to have heard. At last her aunt decided to move with her children and niece and take over the present inn, leaving her uncle alone with Franziska, who had meanwhile become pregnant. After this, however, to my astonishment she dropped these threads and began to tell me two sets of older stories, which went back two or three years earlier than the traumatic moment. The first set related to occasions on which the same uncle had made sexual advances to her herself, when she was only fourteen years old. She described how she had once gone with him on an expedition down into the valley in the winter and had spent the night in the inn there. He sat in the bar drinking and playing cards, but she felt sleepy and went up to bed early in the room they were to share on the upper floor. She was not quite asleep when he came up; then she fell asleep again and woke up suddenly ‘feeling his body’ in the bed. She jumped up and remonstrated with him: ‘What are you up to, Uncle? Why don’t you stay in your own bed?’ He tried to pacify her: ‘Go on, you silly girl, keep still. You don’t know how nice it is.’ - ‘I don’t like your "nice" things; you don’t even let one sleep in peace.’ She remained standing by the door, ready to take refuge outside in the passage, till at last he gave up and went to sleep himself. Then she went back to her own bed and slept till morning. From the way in which she reported having defended herself it seems to follow that she did not clearly recognize the attack as a sexual one. When I asked her if she knew what he was trying to do to her, she replied: ‘Not at the time.’ It had become clear to her much later on, she said; she had resisted because it was unpleasant to be disturbed in one’s sleep and ‘because it wasn’t nice’.

Studies On Hysteria

116

I have been obliged to relate this in detail, because of its great importance for understanding everything that followed. - She went on to tell me of yet other experiences of somewhat later date: how she had once again had to defend herself against him in an inn when he was completely drunk, and similar stories. In answer to a question as to whether on these occasions she had felt anything resembling her later loss of breath, she answered with decision that she had every time felt the pressure on her eyes and chest, but with nothing like the strength that had characterized the scene of discovery.

Immediately she had finished this set of memories she began to tell me a second set, which dealt with occasions on which she had noticed something between her uncle and Franziska. Once the whole family had spent the night in their clothes in a hay loft and she was woken up suddenly by a noise; she thought she noticed that her uncle, who had been lying between her and Franziska, was turning away, and that Franziska was just lying down. Another time they were stopping the night at an inn at the village of N--; she and her uncle were in one room and Franziska in an adjoining one. She woke up suddenly in the night and saw a tall white figure by the door, on the point of turning the handle: ‘Goodness, is that you, Uncle? What are you doing at the door?’ - ‘Keep quiet. I was only looking for something.’ - ‘But the way out’s by the other door.’ - ‘I’d just made a mistake’ . . . and so on.

Studies On Hysteria

117

I asked her if she had been suspicious at that time. ‘No, I didn’t think anything about it; I only just noticed it and thought no more about it.’ When I enquired whether she had been frightened on these occasions too, she replied that she thought so, but she was not so sure of it this time.

At the end of these two sets of memories she came to a stop, She was like someone transformed. The sulky, unhappy face had grown lively, her eyes were bright, she was lightened and exalted. Meanwhile the understanding of her case had become clear to me. The later part of what she had told me, in an apparently aimless fashion, provided an admirable explanation of her behaviour at the scene of the discovery. At that time she had carried about with her two sets of experiences which she remembered but did not understand, and from which she drew no inferences. When she caught sight of the couple in intercourse, she at once established a connection between the new impression and these two sets of recollections, she began to understand them and at the same time to fend them off. There then followed a short period of working-out, of ‘incubation’, after which the symptoms of conversion set in, the vomiting as a substitute for moral and physical disgust. This solved the riddle. She had not been disgusted by the sight of the two people but by the memory which that sight had stirred up in her. And, taking everything into account, this could only be the memory of the attempt on her at night when she had ‘felt her uncle’s body’.

So when she had finished her confession I said to her: ‘I know now what it was you thought when you looked into the room. You thought: "Now he’s doing with her what he wanted to do with me that night and those other times." That was what you were disgusted at, because you remembered the feeling when you woke up in the night and felt his body.’

‘It may well be,’ she replied, ‘that that was what I was disgusted at and that that was what I thought.’

'Tell me just one thing more. You’re a grown-up girl now and know all sorts of things . . .’

‘Yes, now I am.’

‘Tell me just one thing. What part of his body was it that you felt that night?’

Studies On Hysteria

118

But she gave me no more definite answer. She smiled in an embarrassed way, as though she had been found out, like someone who is obliged to admit that a fundamental position has been reached where there is not much more to be said. I could imagine what the tactile sensation was which she had later learnt to interpret. Her facial expression seemed to me to be saying that she supposed that I was right in my conjecture. But I could not penetrate further, and in any case I owed her a debt of gratitude for having made it so much easier for me to talk to her than to the prudish ladies of my city practice, who regard whatever is natural as shameful.

Thus the case was cleared up. - But stop a moment! What about the recurrent hallucination of the head, which appeared during her attacks and struck terror into her? Where did it come from?  I proceeded to ask her about it, and, as though her knowledge, too, had been extended by our conversation, she promptly replied: ‘Yes, I know now. The head is my uncle’s head - I recognize it now - but not from that time. Later, when all the disputes had broken out, my uncle gave way to a senseless rage against me. He kept saying that it was all my fault: if I hadn’t chattered, it would never have come to a divorce. He kept threatening he would do something to me; and if he caught sight of me at a distance his face would get distorted with rage and he would make for me with his hand raised. I always ran away from him, and always felt terrified that he would catch me some time unawares. The face I always see now is his face when he was in a rage.’

This information reminded me that her first hysterical symptom, the vomiting, had passed away; the anxiety attack remained and acquired a fresh content. Accordingly, what we were dealing with was a hysteria which had to a considerable extent been abreacted. And in fact she had reported her discovery to her aunt soon after it happened.

‘Did you tell your aunt the other stories-about his making advances to you?’

‘Yes. Not at once, but later on, when there was already talk of a divorce. My aunt said: "We’ll keep that in reserve. If he causes trouble in the Court, we’ll say that too."'

I can well understand that it should have been precisely this last period - when there were more and more agitating scenes in the house and when her own state ceased to interest her aunt, who was entirely occupied with the dispute - that it should have been this period of accumulation and retention that left her the legacy of the mnemic symbol.

I hope this girl, whose sexual sensibility had been injured at such an early age, derived some benefit from our conversation. I have not seen her since.

Studies On Hysteria

119

DISCUSSION

If someone were to assert that the present case history is not so much an analysed case of hysteria as a case solved by guessing, I should have nothing to say against him. It is true that the patient agreed that what I interpolated into her story was probably true; but she was not in a position to recognize it as something she had experienced. I believe it would have required hypnosis to bring that about. Assuming that my guesses were correct, I will now attempt to fit the case into the schematic picture of an ‘acquired’ hysteria on the lines suggested by Case 3. It seems plausible, then, to compare the two sets of erotic experiences with ‘traumatic’ moments and the scene of discovering the couple with an ‘auxiliary’ moment. The similarity lies in the fact that in the former experiences an element of consciousness was created which was excluded from the thought-activity of the ego and remained, as it were, in storage, while in the latter scene a new impression forcibly brought about an associative connection between this separated group and the ego. On the other hand there are dissimilarities which cannot be overlooked. The cause of the isolation was not, as in Case 3, an act of will on the part of the ego but ignorance on the part of the ego, which was not yet capable of coping with sexual experiences. In this respect the case of Katharina is typical. In every analysis of a case of hysteria based on sexual traumas we find that impressions from the pre-sexual period which produced no effect on the child attain traumatic power at a later date as memories, when the girl or married woman has acquired an understanding of sexual life. The splitting-off of psychical groups may be said to be a normal process in adolescent development; and it is easy to see that their later reception into the ego affords frequent opportunities for psychical disturbances. Moreover, I should like at this point to express a doubt as to whether a splitting of consciousness due to ignorance is really different from one due to conscious rejection, and whether even adolescents do not possess sexual knowledge far oftener than is supposed or than they themselves believe.

Studies On Hysteria

120

A further distinction in the psychical mechanism of this case lies in the fact that the scene of discovery, which we have described as ‘auxiliary’, deserves equally to be called ‘traumatic’. It was operative on account of its own content and not merely as something that revived previous traumatic experiences. It combined the characteristics of an ‘auxiliary’ and a ‘traumatic’ moment. There seems no reason, however, why this coincidence should lead us to abandon a conceptual separation which in other cases corresponds also to a separation in time. Another peculiarity of Katharina’s case, which, incidentally, has long been familiar to us, is seen in the circumstance that the conversion, the production of the hysterical phenomena, did not occur immediately after the trauma but after an interval of incubation. Charcot liked to describe this interval as the ‘period of psychical working-out’ [élaboration].

The anxiety from which Katharina suffered in her attacks was a hysterical one; that is, it was a reproduction of the anxiety which had appeared in connection with each of the sexual traumas. I shall not here comment on the fact which I have found regularly present in a very large number of cases - namely that a mere suspicion of sexual relations calls up the affect of anxiety in virginal individuals.¹

¹ (Footnote added 1924:) I venture after the lapse of so many years to lift the veil of discretion and reveal the fact that Katharina was not the niece but the daughter of the landlady. The girl fell ill, therefore, as a result of sexual attempts on the part of her own father. Distortions like the one which I introduced in the present instance should be altogether avoided in reporting a case history. From the point of view of understanding the case, a distortion of this kind is not, of course, a matter of such indifference as would be shifting the scene from one mountain to another.

Studies On Hysteria

121

CASE 5

FRÄULEIN ELISABETH VON R.  (Freud)

In the autumn of 1892 I was asked by a doctor I knew to examine a young lady who had been suffering for more than two years from pains in her legs and who had difficulties in walking. When making this request he added that he thought the case was one of hysteria, though there was no trace of the usual indications of that neurosis. He told me that he knew the family slightly and that during the last few years it had met with many misfortunes and not much happiness. First the patient’s father had died, then her mother had had to undergo a serious eye-operation and soon afterwards a married sister had succumbed to a heart-affection of long standing after a confinement. In all these troubles and in all the sick-nursing involved, the largest share had fallen to our patient.

My first interview with this young woman of twenty-four years of age did not help me to make much further progress in understanding the case. She seemed intelligent and mentally normal and bore her troubles, which interfered with her social life and pleasures, with a cheerful air - the belle indifférence of a hysteric, I could not help thinking. She walked with the upper part of her body bent forward, but without making use of any support. Her gait was not of any recognized pathological type, and moreover was by no means strikingly bad. All that was apparent was that she complained of great pain in walking and of being quickly overcome by fatigue both in walking and in standing, and that after a short time she had to rest, which lessened the pains but did not do away with them altogether. The pain was of an indefinite character; I gathered that it was something in the nature of a painful fatigue. A fairly large, ill defined area of the anterior surface of the right thigh was indicated as the focus of the pains, from which they most often radiated and where they reached their greatest intensity. In this area the skin and muscles were also particularly sensitive to pressure and pinching (though the prick of a needle was, if anything, met with a certain amount of unconcern). This hyperalgesia of the skin and muscles was not restricted to this area but could be observed more or less over the whole of both legs. The muscles were perhaps even more sensitive to pain than the skin; but there could be no question that the thighs were the parts most sensitive to both these kinds of pain. The motor power of the legs could not be described as small, and the reflexes were of medium strength. There were no other symptoms, so that there was no ground for suspecting the presence of any serious organic affection. The disorder had developed gradually during the previous two years and varied greatly in intensity.

Studies On Hysteria

122

I did not find it easy to arrive at a diagnosis, but I decided for two reasons to assent to the one proposed by my colleague, viz. that it was a case of hysteria. In the first place I was struck by the indefiniteness of all the descriptions of the character of her pains given me by the patient, who was nevertheless a highly intelligent person. A patient suffering from organic pains will, unless he is neurotic in addition, describe them definitely and calmly. He will say, for instance, that they are shooting pains, that they occur at certain intervals, that they extend from this place to that and that they seem to him to be brought on by one thing or another. Again, when a neurasthenic¹ describes his pains, he gives an impression of being engaged on a difficult intellectual task to which his strength is quite unequal. His features are strained and distorted as though under the influence of a distressing affect. His voice grows more shrill and he struggles to find a means of expression. He rejects any description of his pains proposed by the physician, even though it may turn out afterwards to have been unquestionably apt. He is clearly of opinion that language is too poor to find words for his sensations and that those sensations are something unique and previously unknown, of which it would be quite impossible to give an exhaustive description. For this reason he never tires of constantly adding fresh details, and when he is obliged to break off he is sure to be left with the conviction that he has not succeeded in making himself understood by the physician. All this is because his pains have attracted his whole attention to themselves. Fräulein von R. behaved in quite an opposite way; and we are driven to conclude that, since she nevertheless attached sufficient importance to her symptoms, her attention must be dwelling on something else, of which the pains were only an accessory phenomenon - probably on thoughts and feelings, therefore, which were connected with them.

¹ (A hypochondriac or a person affected with anxiety neurosis.)

Studies On Hysteria

123

But there is a second factor which is even more decisively in favour of this view of the pains. If one stimulates an area sensitive to pain in someone with an organic illness or in a neurasthenic, the patient’s face takes on an expression of discomfort or physical pain. Moreover he flinches and draws back from the examination and resists it. In the case of Fräulein von R., however, if one pressed or pinched the hyperalgesic skin and muscles of her legs, her face assumed a peculiar expression, which was one of pleasure rather than pain. She cried out - and I could not help thinking that it was as though she was having a voluptuous tickling sensation - her face flushed, she threw back her head and shut her eyes and her body bent backwards. None of this was very exaggerated but it was distinctly noticeable, and it could only be reconciled with the view that her disorder was hysterical, and that the stimulation had touched upon a hysterogenic zone.

Her expression of face did not fit in with the pain which was ostensibly set up by the pinching of her muscles and skin; it was probably more in harmony with the subject-matter of the thoughts which lay concealed behind the pain and which had been aroused in her by the stimulation of the parts of the body associated with those thoughts. I had repeatedly observed expressions of similar significance in undoubted cases of hysteria, when a stimulus was applied to their hyperalgesic zones. Her other gestures were evidently very slight hints of a hysterical attack.

To begin with there was no explanation of the unusual localization of her hysterogenic zone. The fact that the hyperalgesia mainly affected the muscles also gave food for thought. The disorder which is most usually responsible for diffuse and local sensitivity to pressure in the muscles is a rheumatic infiltration of those muscles - common chronic muscular rheumatism. I have already spoken of its tendency to simulate nervous affections. This possibility was not contradicted by the consistency of the patient’s hyperalgic muscles. There were numerous hard fibres in the muscular substance, and these seemed especially sensitive. Thus it was probable that an organic change in the muscles of the kind indicated was present and that the neurosis attached itself to this and made it seem of exaggerated importance.

Studies On Hysteria

124

Treatment proceeded on the assumption that the disorder was of this mixed kind. We recommended the continuation of systematic kneading and faradization of the sensitive muscles, regardless of the resulting pain, and I reserved to myself treatment of her legs with high tension electric currents, in order to be able to keep in touch with her. Her question whether she should force herself to walk was answered with a decided ‘yes’.

In this way we brought about a slight improvement. In particular, she seemed to take quite a liking to the painful shocks produced by the high tension apparatus, and the stronger these were the more they seemed to push her own pains into the background. In the meantime my colleague was preparing the ground for psychical treatment, and when, after four weeks of my pretence treatment, I proposed the other method and gave her some account of the procedure and mode of operation, I met with quick understanding and little resistance.

The task on which I now embarked turned out, however, to be one of the hardest that I had ever undertaken, and the difficulty of giving a report upon it is comparable, moreover, with the difficulties that I had then to overcome. For a long time, too, I was unable to grasp the connection between the events in her illness and her actual symptom, which must nevertheless have been caused and determined by that set of experiences.

When one starts upon a cathartic treatment of this kind, the first question one asks oneself is whether the patient herself is aware of the origin and the precipitating cause of her illness. If so, no special technique is required to enable her to reproduce the story of her illness. The interest shown in her by the physician, the understanding of her which he allows her to feel and the hopes of recovery he holds out to her - all these will decide the patient to yield up her secret. From the beginning it seemed to me probable that Fräulein Elisabeth was conscious of the basis of her illness, that what she had in her consciousness was only a secret and not a foreign body. Looking at her, one could not help thinking of the poet’s words:

Das Mäskchen da weissagt verborgnen Sinn.¹

¹ [‘Her mask reveals a hidden sense.’] Nevertheless, it will be seen later that I was mistaken in this.

Studies On Hysteria

125

In the first instance, therefore, I was able to do without hypnosis, with the reservation, however, that I could make use of it later if in the course of her confession material arose to the elucidation of which her memory was unequal. Thus it came about that in this, the first full-length analysis of a hysteria undertaken by me, I arrived at a procedure which I later developed into a regular method and employed deliberately. This procedure was one of clearing away the pathogenic psychical material layer by layer, and we liked to compare it with the technique of excavating a buried city. I would begin by getting the patient to tell me what was known to her and I would carefully note the points at which some train of thought remained obscure or some link in the causal chain seemed to be missing. And afterwards I would penetrate into deeper layers of her memories at these points by carrying out an investigation under hypnosis or by the use of some similar technique. The whole work was, of course, based on the expectation that it would be possible to establish a completely adequate set of determinants for the events concerned. I shall discuss presently the methods used for the deep investigation.

The story which Fräulein Elisabeth told of her illness was a wearisome one, made up of many different painful experiences. While she told it she was not under hypnosis; but I made her lie down and keep her eyes shut, though I made no objection to her occasionally opening them, changing her position, sitting up, and so on. When she was more deeply moved than usual by a part of her story she seemed to fall into a state more or less resembling hypnosis. She would then lie motionless and keep her eyes tightly shut.

Studies On Hysteria

126

I will begin by repeating what emerged as the most superficial layer of her memories. The youngest of three daughters, she was tenderly attached to her parents and spent her youth on their estate in Hungary. Her mother’s health was frequently troubled by an affection of the eyes as well as by nervous states. Thus it came about that she found herself drawn into especially intimate contact with her father, a vivacious man of the world, who used to say that this daughter of his took the place of a son and a friend with whom he could exchange thoughts. Although the girl’s mind found intellectual stimulation from this relationship with her father, he did not fail to observe that her mental constitution was on that account departing from the ideal which people like to see realized in a girl. He jokingly, called her ‘cheeky’ and ‘cock-sure’, and warned her against being too positive in her judgements and against her habit of regardlessly telling people the truth, and he often said she would find it hard to get a husband. She was in fact greatly discontented with being a girl. She was full of ambitious plans. She wanted to study or to have a musical training, and she was indignant at the idea of having to sacrifice her inclinations and her freedom of judgement by marriage. As it was, she nourished herself on her pride in her father and in the prestige and social position of her family, and she jealously guarded everything that was bound up with these advantages. The unselfishness, however, with which she put her mother and elder sisters first, when an occasion arose, reconciled her parents completely to the harsher side of her character.

In view of the girls’ ages it was decided that the family should move to the capital, where Elisabeth was able for a short time to enjoy a fuller and gayer life in the home circle. Then, however, the blow fell which destroyed the happiness of the family. Her father had concealed, or had perhaps himself overlooked, a chronic affection of the heart, and he was brought home unconscious one day suffering from a pulmonary oedema. He was nursed for eighteen months, and Elisabeth saw to it that she played the leading part at his sick-bed. She slept in his room, was ready to wake if he called her at night, looked after him during the day and forced herself to appear cheerful, while he reconciled himself to his hopeless state with uncomplaining resignation. The beginning of her illness must have been connected with this period of nursing, for she remembered that during its last six months she had taken to her bed for a day and a half on account of the pains we have described. She asserted, however, that these pains quickly passed off and had not caused her any uneasiness or attracted her attention. And in fact it was not until two years after her father’s death that she felt ill and became incapable of walking on account of her pains.

Studies On Hysteria

127

The gap that was caused in the life of this family of four women by her father’s death, their social isolation, the breaking-off of so many connections that had promised to bring her interest and enjoyment, her mother’s ill-health which was now becoming more marked - all this cast a shadow over the patient’s state of feeling; but at the same time it kindled a lively desire in her that her family might soon find something to replace their lost happiness, and led her to concentrate her whole affection and care on the mother who was still living.

When the year of mourning had passed, her elder sister married a gifted and energetic man. He occupied a responsible position and his intellectual powers seemed to promise him a great future. But to his closer acquaintances he exhibited a morbid sensitiveness and an egoistic insistence on his fads; and he was the first in the family circle to venture to show lack of consideration for the old lady. This was more than Elisabeth could bear. She felt called upon to take up the fight against her brother-in-law whenever he gave her occasion, while the other women did not take his temperamental outbursts to heart. It was a painful disappointment to her that the rebuilding of their former family happiness should be thus interrupted; and she could not forgive her married sister for the feminine pliancy with which she persistently avoided taking sides. Elisabeth retained a number of scenes in her memory in this connection, involving complaints, in part not expressed in words, against her first brother-in-law. But her chief reproach against him remained the fact that, for the sake of a prospective promotion, he moved with his small family to a remote town in Austria and thus helped to increase her mother’s isolation. On this occasion Elisabeth felt acutely her helplessness, her inability to afford her mother a substitute for the happiness she had lost and the impossibility of carrying out the intention she had formed at her father’s death.

The marriage of her second sister seemed to promise a brighter future for the family, for the second brother-in-law, though less outstanding intellectually, was a man after the heart of these cultivated women, brought up as they had been in a school of consideration for others. His behaviour reconciled Elisabeth to the institution of marriage and to the thought of the sacrifices it involved. Moreover the second young couple remained in her mother’s neighbourhood, and their child became Elisabeth’s favourite. Unfortunately another event cast a shadow over the year in which this child was born. The treatment of her mother’s eye-trouble necessitated her being kept in a dark room for several weeks, during which Elisabeth was with her. An operation was then pronounced unavoidable. The agitation at this prospect coincided with the preparations for her first brother-in-law’s move. At last her mother came through the operation, which was performed by a master hand. The three families were united at a summer holiday resort, and it was hoped that Elisabeth, who had been exhausted by the anxieties of the last few months, would make a complete recovery during what was the first period of freedom from sorrows and fears that the family had enjoyed since her father’s death.

Studies On Hysteria

128

It was precisely during this holiday, however, that Elisabeth’s pains and locomotor weakness started. She had been to some extent aware of the pains for a short while, but they came on violently for the first time after she had had a warm bath in the bath establishment of the little watering-place. A few days earlier she had been for a long walk - in fact a regular tramp lasting half a day - and this they connected with the appearance of the pains, so that it was easy to take the view that Elisabeth had first been ‘overtired’ and had then ‘caught a cold’.

From this time on Elisabeth was the invalid of the family. She was advised by her doctor to devote the rest of the same summer to a course of hydropathic treatment at Gastein, and she went there with her mother. But a fresh anxiety now arose. Her second sister had become pregnant again and reports of her condition were most unfavourable, so that Elisabeth could hardly make up her mind to travel to Gastein. She and her mother had been there for barely a fortnight when they were called back by the news that her sister, who had now taken to her bed, was in a very bad state.

There followed an agonizing journey, during which Elisabeth was tormented not only by her pains but by dreadful expectations; on their arrival at the station there were signs that led them to fear the worst; and when they entered the sick-room there came the certainty that they had come too late to take their leave of a living person.

Studies On Hysteria

129

Elisabeth suffered not only from the loss of this sister, whom she had dearly loved, but almost as much from the thoughts provoked by her death and the changes which it brought along with it. Her sister had succumbed to an affection of the heart which had been aggravated by her pregnancy. The idea now presented itself that heart disease was inherited from the father’s side of the family. It was then recalled that the dead sister had suffered during her early girlhood from chorea accompanied by a mild cardiac disorder. They blamed themselves and the doctors for having permitted the marriage, and it was impossible to spare the unhappy widower the reproach of having endangered his wife’s health by bringing on two pregnancies in immediate succession. From that time onwards Elisabeth’s thoughts were occupied without interruption with the gloomy reflection that when, for once in a way, the rare conditions for a happy marriage had been fulfilled, this happiness should have come to such an end. Furthermore, she saw the collapse once more of all she had desired for her mother. Her widowed brother-in-law was inconsolable and withdrew from his wife’s family. It appeared that his own family, which had been estranged from him during his short, happy marriage, thought this was a favourable moment for drawing him back into their own circle. There was no way of preserving the unity that had existed formerly. It was not practicable for him to live with her mother in view of Elisabeth’s unmarried state. Since, also, he refused to allow the two women to have the custody of the child, which was the dead woman’s only legacy, he gave them occasion for the first time to accuse him of hard-heartedness. Lastly - and this was not the least distressing fact - a rumour reached Elisabeth that a dispute had arisen between her two brothers-in-law. She could only guess at its cause; it seemed, however, that the widower had put forward financial demands which the other declared were unjustifiable and which, indeed, in view of the mother’s present sorrow, he was able to characterize as blackmail of the worst description.

Here, then, was the unhappy story of this proud girl with her longing for love. Unreconciled to her fate, embittered by the failure of all her little schemes for re-establishing the family’s former glories, with those she loved dead or gone away or estranged, unready to take refuge in the love of some unknown man - she had lived for eighteen months in almost complete seclusion, with nothing to occupy her but the care of her mother and her own pains.

Studies On Hysteria

130

If we put greater misfortunes on one side and enter into a girl’s feelings, we cannot refrain from deep human sympathy with Fräulein Elisabeth. But what shall we say of the purely medical interest of this tale of suffering, of its relations to her painful locomotor weakness, and of the chances of an explanation and cure afforded by our knowledge of these psychical traumas?

As far as the physician was concerned, the patient’s confession was at first sight a great disappointment. It was a case history made up of commonplace emotional upheavals, and there was nothing about it to explain why it was particularly from hysteria that she fell ill or why her hysteria took the particular form of a painful abasia. It threw light neither on the causes nor the specific determination of her hysteria. We might perhaps suppose that the patient had formed an association between her painful mental impressions and the bodily pains which she happened to be experiencing at the same time, and that now, in her life of memories, the was using her physical feelings as a symbol of her mental ones. But it remained unexplained what her motives might have been for making a substitution of this kind and at what moment it had taken place. These, incidentally, were not the kind of questions that physicians were in the habit of raising. We were usually content with the statement that the patient was constitutionally a hysteric, liable to develop hysterical symptoms under the pressure of intense excitations of whatever kind.

Her confession seemed to offer even less help towards the cure of her illness than it did towards its explanation. It was not easy to see what beneficent influence Fräulein Elisabeth could derive from recapitulating the tale of her sufferings of recent years - with which all the members of her family were so familiar - to a stranger who received it with only a moderate sympathy. Nor was there any sign of the confession producing a curative effect of this kind. During this first period of her treatment she never failed to repeat that she was still feeling ill and that her pains were as bad as ever; and, when she looked at me as the said this with a sly look of satisfaction at my discomfiture, I could not help being reminded of old Herr von R.’s judgement about his favourite daughter - that she was often ‘cheeky’ and ‘ill-behaved’. But I was obliged to admit that she was in the right.

Studies On Hysteria

131

If I had stopped the patient’s psychical treatment at this stage, the case of Fräulein Elisabeth von R. would clearly have thrown no light on the theory of hysteria. But I continued my analysis because I firmly expected that deeper levels of her consciousness would yield an understanding both of the causes and the specific determinants of the hysterical symptoms. I therefore decided to put a direct question to the patient in an enlarged state of consciousness and to ask her what psychical impression it had been to which the first emergence of pains in her legs had been attached.

With this end in view I proposed to put the patient into a deep hypnosis. But, unfortunately, I could not help observing that my procedure failed to put her into any state other than the one in which she had made her recital. I was glad enough that on this occasion she refrained from triumphantly protesting: ‘I’m not asleep, you know; I can’t be hypnotized.’ In this extremity the idea occurred to me of resorting to the device of applying pressure to the head, the origin of which I have described in full in the case history of Miss Lucy. I carried this out by instructing the patient to report to me faithfully whatever appeared before her inner eye or passed through her memory at the moment of the pressure. She remained silent for a long time and then, on my insistence, admitted that she had thought of an evening on which a young man had seen her home after a party, of the conversation that had taken place between them and of the feelings with which she had returned home to her father’s sick-bed.

This first mention of the young man opened up a new vein of ideas the contents of which I now gradually extracted. It was a question here of a secret, for she had initiated no one, apart from a common friend, into her relations with the young man and the hopes attached to them. He was the son of a family with which they had long been on friendly terms and who lived near their former estate. The young man, who was himself an orphan, was devotedly attached to her father and followed his advice in pursuing his career. He had extended his admiration for her father to the ladies of the family. Numerous recollections of reading together, of exchanging ideas, and of remarks made by him which were repeated to her by other people, bore witness to the gradual growth in her of a conviction that he loved her and understood her and that marriage with him would not involve the sacrifices on her part which she dreaded from marriage in general. Unluckily, he was scarcely any older than herself and was still far from being self-supporting. But she was firmly determined to wait for him.

Studies On Hysteria

132

After her father had fallen seriously ill and she had been so much taken up with looking after him, her meetings with her friend became more and more rare. The evening which she had first remembered represented what had actually been the climax of her feeling; but even then there had been no éclaircissement between them. On that occasion she had allowed herself to be persuaded, by the insistence of her family and of her father himself, to go to a party at which she was likely to meet him. She had wanted to hurry home early but had been pressed to stay and had given way when he promised to see her home. She had never had such warm feelings towards him as while he was accompanying her that evening. But when she arrived home late in this blissful frame of mind, she found her father was worse and reproached herself most bitterly for having sacrificed so much time to her own enjoyment. This was the last time she left her sick father for a whole evening. She seldom met her friend after this. After her father’s death the young man seemed to keep away from her out of respect for her sorrow. The course of his life then took him in other directions. She had to familiarize herself by degrees with the thought that his interest in her had been displaced by others and that she had lost him. But this disappointment in her first love still hurt her whenever she thought of him.

It was therefore in this relationship and in the scene described above in which it culminated that I could look for the causes of her first hysterical pains. The contrast between the blissful feelings she had allowed herself to enjoy on that occasion and the worsening of her father’s state which had met her on her return home constituted a conflict, a situation of incompatibility. The outcome of this conflict was that the erotic idea was repressed from association and the affect attaching to that idea was used to intensify or revive a physical pain which was present simultaneously or shortly before. Thus it was an instance of the mechanism of conversion for the purpose of defence, which I have described in detail elsewhere.

Studies On Hysteria

133

A number of comments might of course be made at this point. I must emphasize the fact that I did not succeed in establishing from her memory that the conversion took place at the moment of her return home. I therefore looked about for similar experiences during the time she was nursing her father and elicited a number of them. Among these, special prominence attached, on account of their frequent occurrence, to scenes in which, at her father’s call, she had jumped out of bed with bare feet in a cold room. I was inclined to attribute some importance to these factors, since in addition to complaining about the pain in her legs she also complained of tormenting sensations of cold. Nevertheless, even here I was unable to get hold of any scene which it was possible to identify as that at which the conversion had occurred. I was inclined for this reason to think that there was a gap in the explanation at this point, until I recollected that the hysterical pains in the legs had in fact not made their appearance during the period when she was nursing her father. She only remembered a single attack of pain, which had only lasted a day or two and had not attracted her attention. I now directed my enquiries to this first appearance of the pains. I succeeded in reviving the patient’s memory of it with certainty. At that very time a relative had visited them and she had been unable to receive him, owing to being laid up in bed. This same man had been unlucky enough, when he visited them again two years later, to find her in bed once more. But in spite of repeated attempts we failed to trace any psychical cause for the first pains. I thought it safe to assume that they had in fact appeared without any psychical cause and were a mild rheumatic affection; and I was able to establish that this organic disorder, which was the model copied in her later hysteria, had in any case to be dated before the scene of her being accompanied back from the party. From the nature of things it is nevertheless possible that these pains, being of organic origin, may have persisted for some time to a mitigated degree without being very noticeable. The obscurity due to the fact that the analysis pointed to the occurrence of a conversion of psychical excitation into physical pain though that pain was certainly not perceived at the time in question or remembered afterwards - this is a problem which I hope to be able to solve later on the basis of further considerations and later examples.¹

¹ I cannot exclude the possibility, though I cannot establish the fact, that these pains, which chiefly affected the thighs, were of a neurasthenic nature.

Studies On Hysteria

134

The discovery of the reason for the first conversion opened a second, fruitful period of the treatment. The patient surprised me soon afterwards by announcing that she now knew why it was that the pains always radiated from that particular area of the right thigh and were at their most painful there: it was in this place that her father used to rest his leg every morning, while she renewed the bandage round it, for it was badly swollen. This must have happened a good hundred times, yet she had not noticed the connection till now. In this way she gave me the explanation that I needed of the emergence of what was an atypical hysterogenic zone. Further, her painful legs began to ‘join in the conversation’ during our analyses. What I have in mind is the following remarkable fact. As a rule the patient was free from pain when we started work. If, then, by a question or by pressure upon her head I called up a memory, a sensation of pain would make its first appearance, and this was usually so sharp that the patient would give a start and put her hand to the painful spot. The pain that was thus aroused would persist so long as she was under the influence of the memory; it would reach its climax when she was in the act of telling me the essential and decisive part of what she had to communicate, and with the last word of this it would disappear. I came in time to use such pains as a compass to guide me; if she stopped talking but admitted that she still had a pain, I knew that she had not told me everything, and insisted on her continuing her story till the pain had been talked away. Not until then did I arouse a fresh memory.

During this period of ‘abreaction’ the patient’s condition, both physical and mental, made such a striking improvement that I used to say, only half jokingly, that I was taking away a certain amount of her motives for pain every time and that when I had cleared them all away she would be well. She soon got to the point of being without pain most of the time; she allowed herself to be persuaded to walk about a great deal and to give up her former isolation. In the course of the analysis I sometimes followed the spontaneous fluctuations in her condition; and I sometimes followed my own estimate of the situation when I considered that I had not completely exhausted some portion of the story of her illness.

Studies On Hysteria

135

During this work I made some interesting observations, whose lessons I subsequently found confirmed in treating other patients. As regards the spontaneous fluctuations, in the first place, I found that in fact none had occurred which had not been provoked by association with some contemporary event. On one occasion she had heard of an illness of one of her acquaintances which reminded her of a detail of her father’s illness; another time her dead sister’s child had been on a visit to them, and its likeness to its mother had stirred up her feelings of grief; and yet another time a letter from her distant sister showed clear evidence of her unfeeling brother-in-law’s influence and gave rise to a pain which required her to produce the story of a family scene which she had not yet told me about. Since she never brought up the same precipitating cause of a pain twice over, it seemed that we were justified in supposing that we should in this way exhaust the stock of them; and I therefore did not hesitate to get her into situations which were calculated to bring up fresh memories which had not yet reached the surface. For instance, I sent her to visit her sister’s grave, and I encouraged her to go to a party at which she might once more come across the friend of her youth.

In the next place, I obtained some insight into the manner of origin of what might be described as a ‘monosymptomatic’ hysteria. For I found that her right leg became painful under hypnosis when the discussion turned on her nursing her sick father, on her relations with the friend of her youth or on other events falling within the first period of her pathogenic experiences; on the other hand, the pain made its appearance in her other, left, leg as soon as I stirred up a memory relating to her dead sister or her two brothers-in-law - in short, to an impression from the second half of the story of her illness. Having thus had my attention aroused by the regularity of this relation, I carried my investigation further and formed an impression that this differentiation went still further and that every fresh psychical determinant of painful sensations had become attached to some fresh spot in the painful area of her legs. The original painful spot in her right thigh had related to her nursing her father; the area of pain had extended from this spot to neighbouring regions as a result of fresh traumas. Here, therefore, what we were dealing with was not strictly speaking a single physical symptom, linked with a variety of mnemic complexes in the mind, but a number of similar symptoms which appeared, on a superficial view, to be merged into one symptom. But I did not pursue further the delimitation of zones of pain corresponding to different psychical determinants, since I found that the patient’s attention was directed away from this subject.

Studies On Hysteria

136

I did, however, turn my attention to the way in which the whole symptomatic complex of abasia might have been built up upon these painful zones, and in that connection I asked her various questions, such as what was the origin of her pains in walking? in standing? and in lying down? Some of these questions she answered spontaneously, some under the pressure of my hand. Two things emerged from this. In the first place she divided all the scenes with painful impressions attached to them into groups for me, according as she had experienced them while she was sitting or standing, and so on. For instance, she was standing by a door when her father was brought home with his heart attack, and in her fright she stood stock still as though she was rooted to the ground. She went on to add a number of other memories to this first example of fright while she was standing, till she came to the fearful scene in which once again she stood, as though spellbound, by her sister’s death-bed. This whole chain of memories might be expected to show that there was a legitimate connection between her pains and standing up; and it might indeed be accepted as evidence of an association. But we must bear in mind that another factor must be proved to be present in all these events, one which directed her attention precisely to her standing (or, as the case may be, to her walking, sitting, etc.) and consequently led to conversion. The explanation of her attention taking this direction can scarcely be looked for elsewhere than in the circumstance that walking, standing and lying are functions and states of those parts of her body which in her case comprised the painful zones, namely, her legs. It was therefore easy in the present case to understand the connection between the astasia-abasia and the first occurrence of conversion.

Studies On Hysteria

137

Among the episodes which, according to this catalogue, seemed to have made walking painful, one received special prominence: a walk which she had taken at the health resort in the company of a number of other people and which was supposed to have been too long. The details of this episode only emerged with hesitation and left several riddles unsolved. She had been in a particularly yielding mood, and eagerly joined her party of friends. It was a fine day, not too hot. Her mother stopped at home and her elder sister had already gone away. Her younger sister felt unwell, but did not want to spoil her enjoyment; the brother-in-law began by saying that he would stay with his wife, but afterwards decided to join the party on Elisabeth’s account. This scene seemed to have had a great deal to do with the first appearance of the pains, for she remembered being very tired and suffering from violent pain when she returned from the walk. She said, however, that she was not certain whether she had already noticed the pains before this. I pointed out to her that she was unlikely to have undertaken such a long walk if she had had any considerable pains. I asked her what it was in the walk that might have brought on the pain and she gave me the somewhat obscure reply that the contrast between her own loneliness and her sick sister’s married happiness (which her brother-in-law’s behaviour kept constantly before her eyes) had been painful to her.

Another scene, which was very close to the former one in time, played a part in linking the pains with sitting. It was a few days later. Her sister and brother-in-law had already left the place. She found herself in a restless, yearning mood. She rose early in the morning and climbed a small hill to a spot which they had often been to together and which afforded a lovely view. She sat down there on a stone bench and gave herself up to her thoughts. These were once again concerned with her loneliness and the fate of her family; and this time she openly confessed to a burning wish that she might be as happy as her sister. She returned from this morning meditation with violent pains, and that same evening had the bath after which the pains made their final and permanent appearance.

Studies On Hysteria

138

It was further shown without any doubt that her pain in walking and standing used, to begin with, to be allayed when she was lying down. The pains were not linked to lying down as well until, after hearing the news of her sister’s illness, she travelled back from Gastein and was tormented during the night alike by worry about her sister and by raging pains, as she lay, sleepless, stretched out in the railway carriage. And for quite a time after this, lying down was actually more painful to her than walking or standing.

In this way, firstly, the painful region had been extended by the addition of adjacent areas: every fresh theme which had a pathogenic effect had cathected a new region in the legs; secondly, each of the scenes which made a powerful impression on her had left a trace behind it, bringing about lasting and constantly accumulating cathexis of the various functions of the legs, a linking of these functions with her feelings of pain. But a third mechanism had unmistakably been involved in the building up of her astasia-abasia. The patient ended her description of a whole series of episodes by complaining that they had made the fact of her ‘standing alone’ painful to her. In another series of episodes, which comprised her unsuccessful attempts to establish a new life for her family, she was never tired of repeating that what was painful about them had been her feeling of helplessness, the feeling that she could not ‘take a single step forward’. In view of this, I was forced to suppose that among the influences that went to the building up of her abasia, these reflections of hers played a part; I could not help thinking that the patient had done nothing more nor less than look for a symbolic expression of her painful thoughts and that she had found it in the intensification of her sufferings. The fact that somatic symptoms of hysteria can be brought about by symbolization of this kind was already asserted in our ‘Preliminary Communication’. In the Discussion on the present case I shall bring forward two or three conclusive instances of this. This psychical mechanism of symbolization did not play a prominent part with Fräulein Elisabeth von R. It did not create her abasia. But everything goes to show that the abasia which was already present received considerable reinforcement in this way. Accordingly, this abasia, at the stage of development at which I came across it, was to be equated not only with a functional paralysis based on psychical associations but also with one based on symbolization.

Studies On Hysteria

139

Before I resume my account of the case I will add a few words on the patient’s behaviour during this second phase of the treatment. Throughout the analysis I made use of the technique of bringing out pictures and ideas by means of pressing on the patient’s head, a method, that is, which would be unworkable without the patient’s full co-operation and willing attention. Sometimes, indeed, her behaviour fulfilled my highest expectations, and during such periods it was surprising with what promptitude the different scenes relating to a given theme emerged in a strictly chronological order. It was as though she were reading a lengthy book of pictures, whose pages were being turned over before her eyes. At other times there seemed to be impediments of whose nature I had no suspicion then. When I pressed her head she would maintain that nothing occurred to her. I would repeat my pressure and tell her to wait, but still nothing appeared. The first few times when this recalcitrance exhibited itself I allowed myself to be led into breaking off the work: it was an unfavourable day; we would try another time. Two observations, however, decided me to alter my attitude. I noticed, in the first place, that the method failed in this way only when I found Elisabeth in a cheerful state and free from pain, never when she was feeling badly. In the second place, that she often made such assertions as that she saw nothing, after she had allowed a long interval to pass during which her tense and preoccupied expression of face nevertheless betrayed the fact that a mental process was taking place in her. I resolved, therefore, to adopt the hypothesis that the procedure never failed: that on every occasion under the pressure of my hand some idea occurred to Elisabeth or some picture came before her eyes, but that she was not always prepared to communicate it to me, and tried to suppress once more what had been conjured up. I could think of two motives for this concealment. Either she was applying criticism to the idea, which she had no right to do, on the ground of its not being important enough or of its being an irrelevant reply to the question she had been asked; or she hesitated to produce it because she found it too disagreeable to tell. I therefore proceeded as though I was completely convinced of the trustworthiness of my technique. I no longer accepted her declaration that nothing had occurred to her, but assured her that something must have occurred to her. Perhaps, I said, she had not been sufficiently attentive, in which case I should be glad to repeat my pressure. Or perhaps she thought that her idea was not the right one. This, I told her, was not her affair; she was under an obligation to remain completely objective and say what had come into her head, whether it was appropriate or not. Finally I declared that I knew very well that something had occurred to her and that she was concealing it from me; but she would never be free of her pains so long as she concealed anything. By thus insisting, I brought it about that from that time forward my pressure on her head never failed in its effect. I could not but conclude that I had formed a correct opinion of the state of affairs, and I derived from this analysis a literally unqualified reliance on my technique. It often happened that it was not until I had pressed her head three times that she produced a piece of information; but she herself would remark afterwards: ‘I could have said it to you the first time.’ - ‘And why didn’t you?’ - ‘I thought it wasn’t what was wanted’, or ‘I thought I could avoid it, but it came back each time.’ In the course of this difficult work I began to attach a deeper significance to the resistance offered by the patient in the reproduction of her memories and to make a careful collection of the occasions on which it was particularly marked.

Studies On Hysteria

140

I have now arrived at the third period of the treatment. The patient was better. She had been mentally relieved and was now capable of successful effort. But her pains had manifestly, not been removed; they recurred from time to time, and with all their old severity. This incomplete therapeutic result corresponded to an incompleteness in the analysis. I still did not know exactly at what moment and by what mechanism the pains had originated. During the reproduction of the great variety of scenes in the second period and while I was observing the patient’s resistance to telling me about them, I had formed a particular suspicion. I did not venture yet, however, to adopt it as the basis of my further action. But a chance occurrence decided the matter. One day while I was working with the patient, I heard a man’s footsteps in the next room and a pleasant voice which seemed to be asking some question. My patient thereupon got up and asked that we might break off for the day: she had heard her brother-in-law arrive and enquire for her. Up to that point she had been free from pain, but after the interruption her facial expression and gait betrayed the sudden emergence of severe pains. My suspicion was strengthened by this and I determined to precipitate the decisive explanation.

I therefore questioned her about the causes and circumstances of the first appearance of the pains. By way of answer her thoughts turned towards her summer visit to the health resort before her journey to Gastein, and a number of scenes turned up once more which had not been treated very completely. She recalled her state of feeling at the time, her exhaustion after her anxieties about her mother’s eyesight and after having nursed her at the time of her operation, and her final despair of a lonely girl like her being able to get any enjoyment out of life or achieve anything in it. Till then she had thought herself strong enough to be able to do without the help of a man; but she was now overcome by a sense of her weakness as a woman and by a longing for love in which, to quote her own words, her frozen nature began to melt. In this mood she was deeply affected by her second sister’s happy marriage - by seeing with what touching care he looked after her, how they understood each other at a single glance and how sure they seemed to be of each other. It was no doubt to be regretted that the second pregnancy followed so soon after the first, and her sister knew that this was the reason of her illness; but how willingly she bore it because he was its cause. On the occasion of the walk which was so intimately connected with Elisabeth’s pains, her brother-in-law had at first been unwilling to join in it and had wanted to stay by his sick wife. She, however, persuaded him with a look to go with them, because she thought it would give Elisabeth pleasure. Elisabeth remained in his company all through the walk. They discussed every kind of subject, among them the most intimate ones. She found herself in complete agreement with everything he said, and a desire to have a husband like him became very strong in her. Then, a few days later, came the scene on the morning after the departure of her sister and brother-in-law when she made her way to the place with a view, which had been a favourite object of their walks. There she sat down and dreamt once again of enjoying such happiness as her sister’s and of finding a husband who would know how to capture her heart like this brother-in-law of hers. She was in pain when she stood up, but it passed off once more. It was not until the afternoon, when she had had the warm bath, that the pains broke out, and she was never again free from them. I tried to discover what thoughts were occupying her mind while she was having the bath; but I learnt only that the bath-house had reminded her of the members of her family who had gone away, because that was the building in which they had stayed.

Studies On Hysteria

141

It had inevitably become clear to me long since what all this was about; but the patient, deep in her bitter-sweet memories, seemed not to notice the end to which she was steering, and continued to reproduce her recollections. She went on to her visit to Gastein, the anxiety with which she looked forward to every letter, finally the bad news about her sister, the long wait till the evening, which was the first moment at which they could get away from Gastein, then the journey, passed in tormenting uncertainty, and the sleepless night - all of these accompanied by a violent increase in her pains. I asked her whether during the journey she had thought of the grievous possibility which was afterwards realized. She answered that she had carefully avoided the thought, but she believed that her mother had from the beginning expected the worst. - Her memories now went on to their arrival in Vienna, the impression made on them by the relatives who met them, the short journey from Vienna to the summer resort in its neighbourhood where her sister lived, their reaching there in the evening, the hurried walk through the garden to the door of the small garden house, the silence within and the oppressive darkness; how her brother-in-law was not there to receive them, and how they stood before the bed and looked at her sister as she lay there dead. At that moment of dreadful certainty that her beloved sister was dead without bidding them farewell and without her having eased her last days with her care - at that very moment another thought had shot through Elisabeth’s mind, and now forced itself irresistibly upon her once more, like a flash of lightning in the dark: ‘Now he is free again and I can be his wife.’

Studies On Hysteria

142

Everything was now clear. The analyst’s labours were richly rewarded. The concepts of the ‘fending off’ of an incompatible idea, of the genesis of hysterical symptoms through the conversion of psychical excitations into something physical and the formation of a separate psychical group through the act of will which led to the fending-off - all these things were, in that moment, brought before my eyes in concrete form. Thus and in no other way had things come about in the present case. This girl felt towards her brother-in-law a tenderness whose acceptance into consciousness was resisted by her whole moral being. She succeeded in sparing herself the painful conviction that she loved her sister’s husband, by inducing physical pains in herself instead; and it was in the moments when this conviction sought to force itself upon her (on her walk with him, during her morning reverie, in the bath, by her sister’s bedside) that her pains had come on, thanks to successful conversion. At the time when I started her treatment the group of ideas relating to her love had already been separated from her knowledge. Otherwise she would never, I think, have agreed to embarking on the treatment. The resistance with which she had repeatedly met the reproduction of scenes which operated traumatically corresponded in fact to the energy with which the incompatible idea had been forced out of her associations.

The period that followed, however, was a hard one for the physician. The recovery of this repressed idea had a shattering effect on the poor girl. She cried aloud when I put the situation drily before her with the words: ‘So for a long time you had been in love with your brother-in-law.’  She complained at this moment of the most frightful pains, and made one last desperate effort to reject the explanation: it was not true, I had talked her into it, it could not be true, she was incapable of such wickedness, she could never forgive herself for it. It was easy to prove to her that what she herself had told me admitted of no other interpretation. But it was a long time before my two pieces of consolation - that we are not responsible for our feelings, and that her behaviour, the fact that she had fallen ill in these circumstances, was sufficient evidence of her moral character - it was a long time before these consolations of mine made any impression on her.

Studies On Hysteria

143

In order to mitigate the patient’s sufferings I had now to proceed along more than one path. In the first place I wanted to give her an opportunity of getting rid of the excitation that had been piling up so long, by ‘abreacting’ it. We probed into the first impressions made on her in her relations with her brother-in-law, the beginning of the feelings for him which she had kept unconscious. Here we came across all the little premonitory signs and intuitions of which a fully-grown passion can make so much in retrospect. On his first visit to the house he had taken her for the girl he was to marry and had greeted her before her elder but somewhat insignificant-looking sister. One evening they were carrying on such a lively conversation together and seemed to be getting on so well that his fiancee had interrupted them half-seriously with the remark: ‘The truth is, you two would have suited each other splendidly.’ Another time, at a party where they knew nothing of his engagement, the young man was being discussed and a lady criticized a defect in his figure which suggested that he had had a disease of the bones in his childhood. His fiancee herself listened quietly, but Elisabeth flared up and defended the symmetry of her future brother-in-law’s figure with a zeal which she herself could not understand. As we worked through these recollections it became clear to Elisabeth that her tender feeling for her brother-in-law had been dormant in her for a long time, perhaps even from the beginning of her acquaintance with him, and had lain concealed all that time behind the mask of mere sisterly affection, which her highly-developed family feeling could enable her to accept as natural.

This process of abreaction certainly did her much good. But I was able to relieve her still more by taking a friendly interest in her present circumstances. With this end in view I arranged for an interview with Frau von R. I found her an understanding and sensitive lady, though her vital spirits had been reduced by her recent misfortunes. I learned from her that on closer examination the charge of unfeeling blackmail which had been brought by the elder brother-in-law against the widower and which had been so painful to Elisabeth had had to be withdrawn. No stain was left on the young man’s character. It was a misunderstanding due to the different value which, as can readily be seen, would be attached to money by a business man, to whom money is a tool of his trade, and a civil servant. Nothing more than this remained of the painful episode. I begged her mother from that time forward to tell Elisabeth everything she needed to know, and in the future to give her the opportunity for unburdening her mind to which I should have accustomed her.

Studies On Hysteria

144

I was also, of course, anxious to learn what chance there was that the girl’s wish, of which she was now conscious, would come true. Here the prospects were less favourable. Her mother told me that she had long ago guessed EIisabeth’s fondness for the young man, though she had not known that the feeling had already been there during her sister’s lifetime. No one seeing the two of them together - though in fact this had now become a rare event - could doubt the girl’s anxiety to please him. But, she told me, neither she (the mother) nor the family advisers were particularly in favour of a marriage. The young man’s health was by no means good and had received a fresh set-back from the death of his beloved wife. It was not at all certain, either, that his mental state was yet sufficiently recovered for him to contract a new marriage. This was perhaps why he was behaving with so much reserve; perhaps, too, it was because he was uncertain of his reception and wished to avoid comments that were likely to be made. In view of these reservations on both sides, the solution for which Elisabeth longed was unlikely to be achieved.

I told the girl what I had heard from her mother and had the satisfaction of benefiting her by giving her the explanation of the money affair. On the other hand I encouraged her to face with calmness the uncertainty about the future which it was impossible to clear up. But at this point the approach of summer made it urgent for us to bring the analysis to an end. Her condition was once more improved and there had been no more talk of her pains since we had been investigating their causes. We both had a feeling that we had come to a finish, though I told myself that the abreaction of the love she had so long kept down had not been carried out very fully. I regarded her as cured and pointed out to her that the solution of her difficulties would proceed on its own account now that the path had been opened to it. This she did not dispute. She left Vienna with her mother to meet her eldest sister and her family and to spend the summer together.

Studies On Hysteria

145

I have a few words to add upon the further course of Fräulein Elisabeth von R. 's case. Some weeks after we had separated I received a despairing letter from her mother. At her first attempt, she told me, to discuss her daughter’s affairs of the heart with her, the girl had rebelled violently and had since then suffered from severe pains once more. She was indignant with me for having betrayed her secret. She was entirely inaccessible, and the treatment had been a complete failure. What was to be done now? she asked. Elisabeth would have nothing more to do with me. I did not reply to this. It stood to reason that Elisabeth after leaving my care would make one more attempt to reject her mother’s intervention and once more take refuge in isolation. But I had a kind of conviction that everything would come right and that the trouble I had taken had not been in vain. Two months later they were back in Vienna, and the colleague to whom I owed the introduction of the case gave me news that Elisabeth felt perfectly well and was behaving as though there was nothing wrong with her, though she still suffered occasionally from slight pains. Several times since then she has sent me similar messages and each time promised to come and see me. But it is a characteristic of the personal relationship which arises in treatments of this kind that she has never done so. As my colleague assures me, she is to be regarded as cured. Her brother-in-law’s connection with the family has remained unaltered.

In the spring of 1894 I heard that she was going to a private ball for which I was able to get an invitation, and I did not allow the opportunity to escape me of seeing my former patient whirl past in a lively dance. Since then, by her own inclination, she has married someone unknown to me.

Studies On Hysteria

146

DISCUSSION

I have not always been a psychotherapist. Like other neuropathologists, I was trained to employ local diagnoses and electro-prognosis, and it still strikes me myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science. I must console myself with the reflection that the nature of the subject is evidently responsible for this, rather than any preference of my own. The fact is that local diagnosis and electrical reactions lead nowhere in the study of hysteria, whereas a detailed description of mental processes such as we are accustomed to find in the works of imaginative writers enables me, with the use of a few psychological formulas, to obtain at least some kind of insight into the course of that affection. Case histories of this kind are intended to be judged like psychiatric ones; they have, however, one advantage over the latter, namely an intimate connection between the story of the patient’s sufferings and the symptoms of his illness - a connection for which we still search in vain in the biographies of other psychoses.

In reporting the case of Fräulein Elisabeth von R. I have endeavoured to weave the explanations which I have been able to give of the case into my description of the course of her recovery. It may perhaps be worth while to bring together the important points once more. I have described the patient’s character, the features which one meets with so frequently in hysterical people and which there is no excuse for regarding as a consequence of degeneracy: her giftedness, her ambition, her moral sensibility, her excessive demand for love which, to begin with, found satisfaction in her family, and the independence of her nature which went beyond the feminine ideal and found expression in a considerable amount of obstinacy, pugnacity and reserve. No appreciable hereditary taint, so my colleague told me, could be traced on either side of her family. It is true that her mother suffered for many years from a neurotic depression which had not been investigated; but her mother’s brothers and sisters and her father and his family could be regarded as well-balanced people free from nervous trouble. No severe case of neuro-psychosis had occurred among her close relatives.

Such was the patient’s nature, which was now assailed by painful emotions, beginning with the lowering effect of nursing her beloved father through a long illness.

Studies On Hysteria

147

There are good reasons for the fact that sick-nursing plays such a significant part in the prehistory of cases of hysteria. A number of the factors at work in this are obvious: the disturbance of one’s physical health arising from interrupted sleep, the neglect of one’s own person, the effect of constant worry on one’s vegetative functions. But, in my view, the most important determinant is to be looked for elsewhere. Anyone whose mind is taken up by the hundred and one tasks of sick-nursing which follow one another in endless succession over a period of weeks and months will, on the one hand, adopt a habit of suppressing every sign of his own emotion, and on the other, will soon divert his attention away from his own impressions, since he has neither time nor strength to do justice to them. Thus he will accumulate a mass of impressions which are capable of affect, which are hardly sufficiently perceived and which, in any case, have not been weakened by abreaction. He is creating material for a ‘retention hysteria’. If the sick person recovers, all these impressions, of course, lose their significance. But if he dies, and the period of mourning sets in, during which the only things that seem to have value are those that relate to the person who has died, these impressions that have not yet been dealt with come into the picture as well; and after a short interval of exhaustion the hysteria, whose seeds were sown during the time of nursing, breaks out.

We also occasionally come across this same fact of the traumas accumulated during sick-nursing being dealt with subsequently, where we get no general impression of illness but where the mechanism of hysteria is nevertheless retained. Thus I am acquainted with a highly-gifted lady who suffers from slight nervous states and whose whole character bears evidence of hysteria, though she has never had to seek medical help or been unable to carry on her duties. She has already nursed to the end three or four of those whom she loved. Each time she reached a state of complete exhaustion; but she did not fall ill after these tragic efforts. Shortly after her patient’s death, however, there would begin in her a work of reproduction which once more brought up before her eyes the scenes of the illness and death. Every day she would go through each impression once more, would weep over it and console herself - at her leisure, one might say. This process of dealing with her impressions was dovetailed into her everyday tasks without the two activities interfering with each other. The whole thing would pass through her mind in chronological sequence. I cannot say whether the work of recollection corresponded day by day with the past. I suspect that this depended on the amount of leisure which her current household duties allowed.

Studies On Hysteria

148

In addition to these outbursts of weeping with which she made up arrears and which followed close upon the fatal termination of the illness, this lady celebrated annual festivals of remembrance at the period of her various catastrophes, and on these occasions her vivid visual reproduction and expression of feeling kept to the date precisely. For instance, on one occasion I found her in tears and asked her sympathetically what had happened that day. She brushed aside my question half-angrily: ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘it is only that the specialist was here again to-day and gave us to understand that there was no hope. I had no time to cry about it then.’ She was referring to the last illness of her husband, who had died three years earlier. I should be very much interested to know whether the scenes which she celebrated at these annual festivals of remembrance were always the same ones or whether different details presented themselves for abreaction each time, as I suspect in view of my theory.¹ But I cannot discover with certainty. The lady, who had no less strength of character than intelligence, was ashamed of the violent effect produced in her by these reminiscences.

I must emphasize once more: this woman is not ill; her postponed abreaction was not a hysterical process, however much it resembled one. We may ask why it should be that one instance of sick-nursing should be followed by a hysteria and another not. It cannot be a matter of individual predisposition, for this was present to an ample degree in the lady I have in mind.

¹ I once learnt to my surprise that an ‘abreaction of arrears’ of this kind - though the impressions concerned were not derived from sick nursing - can form the subject-matter of an otherwise puzzling neurosis. This was so in the case of Fräulein Mathilde H., a good-looking, nineteen-year-old girl. When I first saw her she was suffering from a partial paralysis of the legs. Some months later, however, she came to me for treatment on account of a change in her character. She had become depressed to the point of a taedium vitae, utterly inconsiderate to her mother, irritable and inaccessible. The patient’s picture as a whole forbad my assuming that this was a common melancholia. She was very easily put into a state of deep somnambulism, and I availed myself of this peculiarity of hers in order to give her commands and suggestions at every visit. She listened to these in deep sleep, to the accompaniment of floods of tears; but, apart from this, they caused very little change in her condition. One day she became talkative in her hypnosis and told me that the cause of her depression was the breaking off of her engagement, which had occurred several months earlier. Closer acquaintance with her fiancé had brought out more and more things that were unwelcome to her and her mother. On the other hand, the material advantages of the connection had been too obvious for it to be easy to decide to break it off. So for a long time they had both wavered and she herself had fallen into a state of indecision in which she regarded all that happened to her with apathy. In the end her mother uttered the decisive negative on her behalf. A little later she had woken up as though from a dream and begun to occupy her thoughts busily with the decision that had already been made and to weigh the pros and cons. This process, she told me, was still going on: she was living in the period of doubt, and every day she was possessed by the mood and thoughts which were appropriate to the day in the past with which she was occupied. Her irritability with her mother, too, had its basis only in the circumstances which prevailed at that time.: In comparison with these activities of her thoughts, her present life seemed like a mere appearance of reality, like something in a dream. -I did not succeed in inducing the girl to talk again. I continued to address her while she was in deep somnambulism and saw her burst into tears each time without ever answering me; and one day, round about the anniversary of her engagement, her whole state of depression passed off - an event which brought me the credit of a great therapeutic success by hypnotism.

Studies On Hysteria

149

But I must now return to Fräulein Elisabeth von R. While she was nursing her father, as we have seen, she for the first time developed a hysterical symptom - a pain in a particular area of her right thigh. It was possible by means of analysis to find an adequate elucidation of the mechanism of the symptom. It happened at a moment when the circle of ideas embracing her duties to her sick father came into conflict with the content of the erotic desire she was feeling at the time. Under the pressure of lively self-reproaches she decided in favour of the former, and in doing so brought about her hysterical pain.

According to the view suggested by the conversion theory of hysteria what happened may be described as follows. She repressed her erotic idea from consciousness and transformed the amount of its affect into physical sensations of pain. It did not become clear whether she was presented with this first conflict on one occasion only or on several; the latter alternative is the more likely. An exactly similar conflict - though of higher ethical significance and even more clearly established by the analysis - developed once more some years later and led to an intensification of the same pains and to an extension beyond their original limits. Once again it was a circle of ideas of an erotic kind that came into conflict with all her moral ideas; for her inclinations centred upon her brother-in-law, and, both during her sister’s lifetime and after her death, the thought of being attracted by precisely this man was totally unacceptable to her. The analysis provided detailed information about this conflict, which constituted the central point in the history of the illness. The germs of the patient’s feeling for her brother-in-law may have been present for a long time; its development was favoured by physical exhaustion owing to more sick-nursing and by moral exhaustion owing to disappointments extending over many years. The coldness of her nature began to yield and she admitted to herself her need for a man’s love. During the several weeks which she passed in his company at the health resort her erotic feelings as well as her pains reached their full height.

Studies On Hysteria

150

The analysis, moreover, gave evidence that during the same period the patient was in a special psychical state. The connection of this state with her erotic feelings and her pains seems to make it possible to understand what happened on the lines of the conversion theory. It is, I think, safe to say that at that time the patient did not become clearly conscious of her feelings for her brother-in-law, powerful though they were, except on a few occasions, and then only momentarily. If it had been otherwise, she would also inevitably have become conscious of the contradiction between those feelings and her moral ideas and would have experienced mental torments like those I saw her go through after our analysis. She had no recollection of any such sufferings; she had avoided them. It followed that her feelings themselves did not become clear to her. At that time, as well as during the analysis, her love for her brother-in-law was present in her consciousness like a foreign body, without having entered into relationship with the rest of her ideational life. With regard to these feelings she was in the peculiar situation of knowing and at the same time not knowing - a situation, that is, in which a psychical group was cut off. But this and nothing else is what we mean when we say that these feelings were not clear to her. We do not mean that their consciousness was of a lower quality or of a lesser degree, but that they were cut off from any free associative connection of thought with the rest of the ideational content of her mind.

But how could it have come about that an ideational group with so much emotional emphasis on it was kept so isolated? In general, after all, the part played in association by an idea increases in proportion to the amount of its affect.

Studies On Hysteria

151

We can answer this question if we take into account two facts which we can make use of as being established with certainty. (1) Simultaneously with the formation of this separate psychical group the patient developed her hysterical pains. (2) The patient offered strong resistance to the attempt to bring about an association between the separate psychical group and the rest of the content of her consciousness; and when, in spite of this, the connection was accomplished she felt great psychical pain. Our view of hysteria brings these two facts into relation with the splitting of her consciousness by asserting that the second of them indicates the motive for the splitting of consciousness, while the first indicates its mechanism. The motive was that of defence, the refusal on the part of the patient’s whole ego to come to terms with this ideational group. The mechanism was that of conversion: i.e. in place of the mental pains which she avoided, physical pains made their appearance. In this way a transformation was effected which had the advantage that the patient escaped from an intolerable mental condition; though, it is true, this was at the cost of a psychical abnormality - the splitting of consciousness that came about - and of a physical illness - her pains, on which an astasia-abasia was built up.

I cannot, I must confess, give any hint of how a conversion of this kind is brought about. It is obviously not carried out in the same way as an intentional and voluntary action. It is a process which occurs under the pressure of the motive of defence in someone whose organization - or a temporary modification of it - has a proclivity in that direction.

This theory calls for closer examination. We may ask: what is it that turns into physical pain here? A cautious reply would be: something that might have become, and should have become, mental pain. If we venture a little further and try to represent the ideational mechanism in a kind of algebraical picture, we may attribute a certain quota of affect to the ideational complex of these erotic feelings which remained unconscious, and say that this quantity (the quota of affect) is what was converted. It would follow directly from this description that the ‘unconscious love’ would have lost so much of its intensity through a conversion of this kind that it would have been reduced to no more than a weak idea. This reduction of strength would then have been the only thing which made possible the existence of these unconscious feelings as a separate psychical group. The present case, however, is not well fitted to give a clear picture of such a delicate matter. For in this case there was probably only partial conversion; in others it can be shown with likelihood that complete conversion also occurs, and that in it the incompatible idea has in fact been ‘repressed’, as only an idea of very slight intensity can be. The patients concerned declare, after associative connection with the incompatible idea has been established, that their thoughts had not been concerned with it since the appearance of the hysterical symptoms.

Studies On Hysteria

152

I have asserted that on certain occasions, though only for the moment, the patient recognized her love for her brother-in-Iaw consciously. As an example of this we may recall the moment when she was standing by her sister’s bed and the thought flashed through her mind: ‘Now he is free and you can be his wife’. I must now consider the significance of these moments in their bearing on our view of the whole neurosis. It seems to me that the concept of a ‘defence hysteria’ in itself implies that at least one moment of this kind must have occurred. Consciousness, plainly, does not know in advance when an incompatible idea is going to crop up. The incompatible idea, which, together with its concomitants, is later excluded and forms a separate psychical group, must originally have been in communication with the main stream of thought. Otherwise the conflict which led to their exclusion could not have taken place.¹ It is these moments, then, that are to be described as ‘traumatic’: it is at these moments that conversion takes place, of which the results are the splitting of consciousness and the hysterical symptom. In the case of Fräulein Elisabeth von R. everything points to there having been several such moments - the scenes of the walk, the morning reverie, the bath, and at her sister’s bedside. It is even possible that new moments of the same kind happened during the treatment. What makes it possible for there to be several of these traumatic moments is that an experience similar to the one which originally introduced the incompatible idea adds fresh excitation to the separated psychical group and so puts a temporary stop to the success of the conversion. The ego is obliged to attend to this sudden flare-up of the idea and to restore the former state of affairs by a further conversion. Fräulein Elisabeth, who was much in her brother-in-law’s company, must have been particularly liable to the occurrence of fresh traumas. From the point of view of my present exposition, I should have preferred a case in which the traumatic history lay wholly in the past.

¹ It is otherwise in hypnoid hysteria, where the content of the separate psychical group would never have been in the ego-consciousness.

Studies On Hysteria

153

I must now turn to a point which I have described as offering a difficulty to the understanding of this case history. On the evidence of the analysis, I assumed that a first conversion took place while the patient was nursing her father, at the time when her duties as a nurse came into conflict with her erotic desires, and that what happened then was the prototype of the later events in the Alpine health resort which led to the outbreak of the illness. But it appeared from the patient’s account that while she was nursing her father and during the time that followed - what I have described as the ‘first period’ - she had no pains whatever and no locomotor weakness. It is true that once during her father’s illness she was laid up for a few days with pains in her legs, but it remained a question whether this attack was already to be ascribed to hysteria. No causal connection between these first pains and any psychical impression could be traced in the analysis. It is possible, and indeed probable, that what she was suffering from at that time were common rheumatic muscular pains. Moreover, even if we were inclined to suppose that this first attack of pains was the effect of a hysterical conversion as a result of the repudiation of her erotic thoughts at the time, the fact remains that the pains disappeared after only a few days, so that the patient had behaved differently in reality from what she seemed to indicate in the analysis. During her reproduction of what I have called the first period she accompanied all her stories about her father’s illness and death, about her impressions of her dealings with her first brother-in-law, and so on, with manifestations of pain, whereas at the time of actually experiencing these impressions she had felt none. Is not this a contradiction which is calculated to reduce very considerably our belief in the explanatory value of an analysis such as this?

I believe I can solve this contradiction by assuming that the pains - the products of conversion - did not occur while the patient was experiencing the impressions of the first period, but only after the event, that is, in the second period, while she was reproducing those impressions in her thoughts. That is to say, the conversion did not take place in connection with her impressions when they were fresh, but in connection with her memories of them. I even believe that such a course of events is nothing unusual in hysteria and indeed plays a regular part in the genesis of hysterical symptoms. But since an assertion like this is not self-evident, I will try to make it more plausible by bringing forward some other instances.

It once happened to me that a new hysterical symptom developed in a patient during the actual course of an analytic treatment of this kind so that I was able to set about getting rid of it on the day after its appearance. I will interpolate the main features of the case at this point. It was a fairly simple one, yet not without interest.

Studies On Hysteria

154

Fräulein Rosalia H., aged twenty-three, had for some years been undergoing training as a singer. She had a good voice, but she complained that in certain parts of its compass it was not under her control. She had a feeling of choking and constriction in her throat so that her voice sounded tight. For this reason her teacher had not yet been able to consent to her appearing as a singer in public. Although this imperfection affected only her middle register, it could not be attributed to a defect in the organ itself. At times the disturbance was completely absent and her teacher expressed great satisfaction; at other times, if she was in the least agitated, and sometimes without any apparent cause, the constricted feeling would reappear and the production of her voice was impeded. It was not difficult to recognize a hysterical conversion in this very troublesome feeling. I did not take steps to discover whether there was in fact a contracture of some of the muscles of the vocal cords.¹ In the course of the hypnotic analysis which I carried out with the girl, I learned the following facts about her history and consequently about the cause of her trouble. She lost her parents early in life and was taken to live with an aunt who herself had numerous children. In consequence of this she became involved in a most unhappy family life. Her aunt’s husband, who was a manifestly pathological person, brutally ill-treated his wife and children. He wounded their feelings more particularly by the way in which he showed an open sexual preference for the servants and nursemaids in the house; and the more the children grew up the more offensive this became. After her aunt’s death Rosalia became the protector of the multitude of children who were now orphaned and oppressed by their father. She took her duties seriously and fought through all the conflicts into which her position led her, though it required a great effort to suppress the hatred and contempt which she felt for her uncle.² It was at this time that the feeling of constriction in her throat started. Every time she had to keep back a reply, or forced herself to remain quiet in the face of some outrageous accusation, she felt a scratching in her throat, a sense of constriction, a loss of voice - all the sensations localized in her larynx and pharynx which now interfered with her singing. It was not to be wondered at that she sought an opportunity of making herself independent and escaping the agitations and distressing experiences which were of daily occurrence in her uncle’s house. A highly competent teacher of singing came to her assistance disinterestedly and assured her that her voice justified her in choosing the profession of singer. She now began to take lessons with him in secret. But she used often to hurry off to her singing lesson while she still had the constriction in her throat that used to be left over after violent scenes at home. Consequently a connection was firmly established between her singing and her hysterical paraesthesia - a connection for which the way was prepared by the organic sensations set up by singing. The apparatus over which she ought to have had full control when she was singing turned out to be cathected with residues of innervations left over from the numerous scenes of suppressed emotion. Since then, she had left her uncle’s house and had moved to another town in order to be away from her family. But this did not get over her difficulty.

¹ I had another case of a singer under my observation in which a contracture of the masseters made it impossible for her to practise her art. This young woman had been obliged to go on the stage by unfortunate events in her family. She was singing at a rehearsal in Rome at a time when she was in a state of great emotional excitement, and suddenly had a feeling that she could not close her open mouth and fell to the floor in a faint. The doctor who was called in brought her jaws together forcibly. But thenceforward the patient was unable to open her jaws by more than a finger’s breadth and had to give up her new profession. When, several years later, she came to me for treatment, the causes of her emotional excitement had obviously long since disappeared, for some massage while she was in a state of light hypnosis sufficed to enable her mouth to open wide. Since then the lady has sung in public.

² [Footnote added 1924:] In this instance, too, it was in fact the girl’s father, not her uncle.

Studies On Hysteria

155

This good-looking and unusually intelligent girl exhibited no other hysterical symptoms.

I did my best to get rid of this ‘retention hysteria’ by getting her to reproduce all her agitating experiences and to abreact them after the event. I made her abuse her uncle, lecture him, tell him the unvarnished truth, and so on, and this treatment did her good. Unfortunately, however, she was living in Vienna under very unfavourable conditions. She had no luck with her relatives. She was being put up by another uncle, who treated her in a friendly way; but for that very reason her aunt took a dislike to her. This woman suspected that her husband had a deeper interest in his niece, and therefore chose to make her stay in Vienna as disagreeable as possible. The aunt herself in her youth had been obliged to give up a desire for an artistic career and envied her niece for being able to cultivate her talent, though in the girl’s case it was not her desire but her need for independence that had determined her decision. Rosalie felt so constrained in the house that she did not venture, for instance, to sing or play the piano while her aunt was within earshot and carefully avoided singing or playing to her uncle (who, incidentally, was an old man, her mother’s brother) when there was a possibility of her aunt coming in. While I was trying to wipe out the traces of old agitations, new ones arose out of these relations with her host and hostess, which eventually interfered with the success of my treatment as well as bringing it to a premature end.

Studies On Hysteria

156

One day the patient came for her session with a new symptom, scarcely twenty-four hours old. She complained of a disagreeable pricking sensation in the tips of her fingers, which, she said, had been coming on every few hours since the day before and compelled her to make a peculiar kind of twitching movement with her fingers. I was not able to observe an attack; otherwise I should no doubt have been able to guess from the nature of the movements what it was that had occasioned them. But I immediately tried to get on the track of the explanation of the symptom (it was in fact a minor hysterical attack) by hypnotic analysis. Since the whole thing had only been in existence such a short time I hoped that I should quickly be able to explain and get rid of the symptom. To my astonishment the patient produced a whole number of scenes, without hesitation and in chronological order, beginning with her early childhood. They seemed to have in common her having had some injury done to her, against which she had not been able to defend herself, and which might have made her fingers jerk. They were such scenes, for instance, as of having had to hold out her hand at school and being struck on it with a ruler by her teacher. But they were quite ordinary occasions and I should have been prepared to deny that they could play a part in the aetiology of a hysterical symptom. But it was otherwise with one scene from her girlhood which followed. Her bad uncle, who was suffering from rheumatism, had asked her to massage his back and she did not dare to refuse. He was lying in bed at the time, and suddenly threw off the bed-clothes, sprang up and tried to catch hold of her and throw her down. Massage, of course, was at an end, and a moment later she had escaped and locked herself in her room. She was clearly loth to remember this and was unwilling to say whether she had seen anything when he suddenly uncovered himself. The sensations in her fingers might be explained in this case by a suppressed impulse to punish him, or simply by her having been engaged in massaging him at the time. It was only after relating this scene that she came to the one of the day before, after which the sensations and jerking in her fingers had set in as a recurrent mnemic symbol. The uncle with whom she was now living had asked her to play him something. She sat down to the piano and accompanied herself in a song, thinking that her aunt had gone out; but suddenly she appeared in the door. Rosalie jumped up, slammed the lid of the piano and threw the music away. We can guess what the memory was that rose in her mind and what the train of thought was that she was fending off at that moment: it was a feeling of violent resentment at the unjust suspicion to which she was subjected and which should have made her leave the house, while in fact she was obliged to stay in Vienna on account of the treatment and had nowhere else where she could be put up. The movement of her fingers which I saw her make while she was reproducing this scene was one of twitching something away, in the way in which one literally and figuratively brushes something aside - tosses away a piece of paper or rejects a suggestion.

Studies On Hysteria

157

She was quite definite in her insistence that she had not noticed this symptom previously - that it had not been occasioned by the scenes she had first described. We could only suppose, therefore, that the event of the previous day had in the first instance aroused the memory of earlier events with a similar subject-matter and that thereupon a mnemic symbol had been formed which applied to the whole group of memories. The energy for the conversion had been supplied, on the one hand, by freshly experienced affect and, on the other hand, by recollected affect.

When we consider the question more closely we must recognize that a process of this kind is the rule rather than the exception in the genesis of hysterical symptoms. Almost invariably when I have investigated the determinants of such conditions what I have come upon has not been a single traumatic cause but a group of similar ones. (This is well exemplified in the case of Frau Emmy - Case History 2.) In some of these instances it could be established that the symptom in question had already appeared for a short time after the first trauma and had then passed off, till it was brought on again and stabilized by a succeeding trauma. There is, however, in principle no difference between the symptom appearing in this temporary way after its first provoking cause and its being latent from the first. Indeed, in the great majority of instances we find that a first trauma has left no symptom behind, while a later trauma of the same kind produces a symptom, and yet that the latter could not have come into existence without the co-operation of the earlier provoking cause; nor can it be cleared up without taking all the provoking causes into account.

Studies On Hysteria

158

Stated in terms of the conversion theory, this incontrovertible fact of the summation of traumas and of the preliminary latency of symptoms tells us that conversion can result equally from fresh symptoms and from recollected ones. This hypothesis completely explains the apparent contradiction that we observed between the events of Fräulein Elisabeth von R.’s illness and her analysis. There is no doubt that the continued existence in consciousness of ideas whose affect has not been dealt with can be tolerated by healthy individuals up to a great amount. The view which I have just been putting forward does no more than bring the behaviour of hysterical people nearer to that of healthy ones. What we are concerned with is clearly a quantitative factor - the question of how much affective tension of this kind an organism can tolerate. Even a hysteric can retain a certain amount of affect that has not been dealt with; if, owing to the occurrence of similar provoking causes, that amount is increased by summation to a point beyond the subject’s tolerance, the impetus to conversion is given. Thus when we say that the construction of hysterical symptoms can proceed on the strength of recollected affects as well as fresh ones, we shall not be making any unfamiliar assertion, but stating something that is almost accepted as a postulate.

I have now discussed the motives and mechanism of this case of hysteria; it remains for me to consider how precisely the hysterical symptom was determined. Why was it that the patient’s mental pain came to be represented by pains in the legs rather than elsewhere? The circumstances indicate that this somatic pain was not created by the neurosis but merely used, increased and maintained by it. I may add at once that I have found a similar state of things in almost all the instances of hysterical pains into which I have been able to obtain an insight. There had always been a genuine, organically-founded pain present at the start. It is the commonest and most widespread human pains that seem to be most often chosen to play a part in hysteria: in particular, the periosteal and neuralgic pains accompanying dental disease, the headaches that arise from so many different sources and, not less often, the rheumatic muscular pains that are so often unrecognized. In the same way I attribute an organic foundation to Fräulein Elisabeth von R.’s first attack of pain which occurred as far back as while she was nursing her father. I obtained no result when I tried to discover a psychical cause for it - and I am inclined, I must confess, to attribute a power of differential diagnosis to my method of evoking concealed memories, provided it is carefully handled. This pain, which was rheumatic in its origin,¹ then became a mnemic symbol of her painful psychical excitations; and this happened, so far as I can see, for more than one reason. The first and no doubt the most important of these reasons was that the pain was present in her consciousness at about the same time as the excitations. In the second place, it was connected, or could be connected, along a number of lines with the ideas in her mind at the time. The pain, indeed, may actually have been a consequence, though only a remote one, of the period of nursing - of the lack of exercise and reduced diet that her duties as a sick-nurse entailed. But the girl had no clear knowledge of this. More importance should probably be attached to the fact that she must have felt the pain during that time at significant moments, for instance, when she sprang out of bed in the cold of winter in response to a call from her father. But what must have had a positively decisive influence on the direction taken by the conversion was another line of associative connection: the fact that on a long succession of days one of her painful legs came into contact with her father’s swollen leg while his bandages were being changed. The area of her right leg which was marked out by this contact remained thereafter the focus of her pains and the point from which they radiated. It formed an artificial hysterogenic zone whose origin could in the present case be clearly observed.

If anyone feels astonished at this associative connection between physical pain and psychical affect, on the ground of its being of such a multiple and artificial character, I should reply that this feeling is as little justified as astonishment at the fact that it is the rich people who own the most money. Where there are no such numerous connections a hysterical symptom will not, in fact, be formed; for conversion will find no path open to it. And I can affirm that the example of Fräulein Elisabeth von R, was among the simpler ones as regards its determination. I have had the most tangled threads to unravel, especially in the case of Frau Cäcilie M.

¹ It may, however, have been of a spinal-neurasthenic sort.

Studies On Hysteria

159

I have already discussed in the case history the way in which the patient’s astasia-abasia was built up on these pains, after a particular path had been opened up for the conversion. In that passage, however, I also expressed my view that the patient had created, or increased, her functional disorder by means of symbolization, that she had found in the astasia-abasia a somatic expression for her lack of an independent position and her inability to make any alteration in her circumstances, and that such phrases as ‘not being able to take a single step forward’, ‘not having anything to lean upon’, served as the bridge for this fresh act of conversion.

I shall try to support this view by other examples. Conversion on the basis of simultaneity, where there is also an associative link, seems to make the smallest demands on a hysterical disposition; conversion by symbolization, on the other hand, seems to call for the presence of a higher degree of hysterical modification. This could be observed in the case of Fräulein Elisabeth, but only in the later stage of her hysteria. The best examples of symbolization that I have seen occurred in Frau Cäcilie M., whose case I might describe as my most severe and instructive one. I have already explained that a detailed report of her illness is unfortunately impossible.

Frau Cäcilie suffered among other things from an extremely violent facial neuralgia which appeared suddenly two or three times a year, lasted for from five to ten days, resisted any kind of treatment and then ceased abruptly. It was limited to the second and third branches of one trigeminal, and since an abnormal excretion of urates was undoubtedly present and a not quite clearly defined ‘acute rheumatism’ played some part in the patient’s history, a diagnosis of gouty neuralgia was plausible enough. This diagnosis was confirmed by the different consultants who were called in at each attack. Treatment of the usual kind was ordered: the electric brush, alkaline water, purges; but each time the neuralgia remained unaffected until it chose to give place to another symptom. Earlier in her life - the neuralgia was fifteen years old - her teeth were accused of being responsible for it. They were condemned to extraction, and one fine day, under narcosis, the sentence was carried out on seven of the criminals. This was not such an easy matter; her teeth were so firmly attached that the roots of most of them had to be left behind. This cruel operation had no result, either temporary or permanent. At that time the neuralgia raged for months on end. Even at the time of my treatment, at each attack of neuralgia the dentist was called in. On each occasion he diagnosed the presence of diseased roots and began to get to work on them; but as a rule he was soon interrupted. For the neuralgia would suddenly cease, and at the same time the demand for the dentist’s services. During the interval her teeth did not ache at all. One day, when an attack was raging once more, the patient got me to give her hypnotic treatment. I laid a very energetic prohibition on her pains, and from that moment they ceased. I began at that time to harbour doubts of the genuineness of the neuralgia.

Studies On Hysteria

160

About a year after this successful hypnotic treatment Frau Cäcilie’s illness took a new and surprising turn. She suddenly developed new pathological states, different from those that had characterized the last few years. But after some reflection the patient declared that she had had all of them before at various times during the course of her long illness, which had lasted for thirty years. There now developed a really surprising wealth of hysterical attacks which the patient was able to assign to their right place in her past. And soon, too, it was possible to follow the often highly involved trains of thought that determined the order in which these attacks occurred. They were like a series of pictures with explanatory texts. Pitres must have had something of the sort in mind in putting forward his description of what he termed ‘délire ecmnésique’. It was most remarkable to see the way in which a hysterical state of this kind belonging to the past was reproduced. There first came on, while the patient was in the best of health, a pathological mood with a particular colouring which she regularly misunderstood and attributed to some commonplace event of the last few hours. Then, to the accompaniment of an increasing clouding of consciousness, there followed hysterical symptoms: hallucinations, pains, spasms and long declamatory speeches. Finally, these were succeeded by the emergence in a hallucinatory form of an experience from the past which made it possible to explain her initial mood and what had determined the symptoms of her present attack. With this last piece of the attack her clarity of mind returned. Her troubles disappeared as though by magic and she felt well once again - till the next attack, half a day later. As a rule I was sent for at the climax of the attack, induced a state of hypnosis, called up the reproduction of the traumatic experience and hastened the end of the attack by artificial means. Since I assisted at several hundreds of such cycles with the patient, I gained the most instructive information on the way in which hysterical symptoms are determined. Indeed, it was the study of this remarkable case, jointly with Breuer, that led directly to the publication of our ‘Preliminary Communication’.

Studies On Hysteria

161

In this phase of the work we came at last to the reproduction of her facial neuralgia, which I myself had treated when it appeared in contemporary attacks. I was curious to discover whether this, too, would turn out to have a psychical cause. When I began to call up the traumatic scene, the patient saw herself back in a period of great mental irritability towards her husband. She described a conversation which she had had with him and a remark of his which she had felt as a bitter insult. Suddenly she put her hand to her cheek, gave a loud cry of pain and said: ‘It was like a slap in the face.’ With this her pain and her attack were both at an end.

There is no doubt that what had happened had been a symbolization. She had felt as though she had actually been given a slap in the face. Everyone will immediately ask how it was that the sensation of a ‘slap in the face’ came to take on the outward forms of a trigeminal neuralgia, why it was restricted to the second and third branches, and why it was made worse by opening the mouth and chewing - though, incidentally, not by talking.

Next day the neuralgia was back again. But this time it was cleared up by the reproduction of another scene, the content of which was once again a supposed insult. Things went on like this for nine days. It seemed to be the case that for years insults, and particularly spoken ones, had, through symbolization, brought on fresh attacks of her facial neuralgia.

But ultimately we were able to make our way back to her first attack of neuralgia, more than fifteen years earlier. Here there was no symbolization but a conversion through simultaneity. She saw a painful sight which was accompanied by feelings of self-reproach, and this led her to force back another set of thoughts. Thus it was a case of conflict and defence. The generation of the neuralgia at that moment was only explicable on the assumption that she was suffering at the time from slight toothache or pains in the face, and this was not improbable, since she was just then in the early months of her first pregnancy.

Studies On Hysteria

162

Thus the explanation turned out to be that this neuralgia had come to be indicative of a particular psychical excitation by the usual method of conversion, but that afterwards it could be set going through associative reverberations from her mental life, or symbolic conversion. In fact, the same behaviour that we found in Fräulein Elisabeth von R.

I will give a second example which demonstrates the action of symbolization under other conditions. At a particular period, Frau Cäcilie was afflicted with a violent pain in her right heel - a shooting pain at every step she took, which made walking impossible. Analysis led us in connection with this to a time when the patient had been in a sanatorium abroad. She had spent a week in bed and was going to be taken down to the common dining-room for the first time by the house physician. The pain came on at the moment when she took his arm to leave the room with him; it disappeared during the reproduction of the scene, when the patient told me she had been afraid at the time that she might not ‘find herself on a right footing’ with these strangers.

This seems at first to be a striking and even a comic example of the genesis of hysterical symptoms through symbolization by means of a verbal expression. Closer examination of the circumstances, however, favours another view of the case. The patient had been suffering at the time from pains in the feet generally, and it was on their account that she had been confined to bed so long. All that could be claimed on behalf of symbolization was that the fear which overcame the patient, as she took her first steps, picked out from among all the pains that were troubling her at the time the one particular pain which was symbolically appropriate, the pain in her right heel, and developed it into a psychical pain and gave it special persistence.

In these examples the mechanism of symbolization seems to be reduced to secondary importance, as is no doubt the general rule. But I have examples at my disposal which seem to prove the genesis of hysterical symptoms through symbolization alone. The following is one of the best, and relates once more to Frau Cäcilie. When a girl of fifteen, she was lying in bed, under the watchful eye of her strict grandmother. The girl suddenly gave a cry; she had felt a penetrating pain in her forehead between her eyes, which lasted for weeks. During the analysis of this pain, which was reproduced after nearly thirty years, she told me that her grandmother had given her a look so ‘piercing’ that it had gone right into her brain. (She had been afraid that the old woman was viewing her with suspicion.) As she told me this thought she broke into a loud laugh, and the pain once more disappeared. In this instance I can detect nothing other than the mechanism of symbolization, which has its place, in some sense, midway between autosuggestion and conversion.

My observation of Frau Cäcilie M. gave me an opportunity of making a regular collection of symbolizations of this kind. A whole set of physical sensations which would ordinarily be regarded as organically determined were in her case of psychical origin or at least possessed a psychical meaning. A particular series of experiences of hers were accompanied by a stabbing sensation in the region of the heart (meaning ‘it stabbed me to the heart’). The pain that occurs in hysteria of nails being driven into the head was without any doubt to be explained in her case as a pain related to thinking. ( ‘Something’s come into my head.’) Pains of this kind were always cleared up as soon as the problems involved were cleared up. Running parallel to the sensation of a hysterical ‘aura’ in the throat, when that feeling appeared after an insult, was the thought ‘I shall have to swallow this’. She had a whole quantity of sensations and ideas running parallel with each other. Sometimes the sensation would call up the idea to explain it, sometimes the idea would create the sensation by means of symbolization, and not infrequently it had to be left an open question which of the two elements had been the primary one.

Studies On Hysteria

163

I have not found such an extensive use of symbolization in any other patient. It is true that Frau Cäcilie M. was a woman who possessed quite unusual gifts, particularly artistic ones, and whose highly developed sense of form was revealed in some poems of great perfection. It is my opinion, however, that when a hysteric creates a somatic expression for an emotionally coloured idea by symbolization, this depends less than one would imagine on personal or voluntary factors. In taking a verbal expression literally and in feeling the ‘stab in the heart’ or the ‘slap in the face’ after some slighting remark as a real event, the hysteric is not taking liberties with words, but is simply reviving once more the sensations to which the verbal expression owes its justification. How has it come about that we speak of someone who has been slighted as being ‘stabbed to the heart’ unless the slight had in fact been accompanied by a precordial sensation which could suitably be described in that phrase and unless it was identifiable by that sensation? What could be more probable than that the figure of speech ‘swallowing something’, which we use in talking of an insult to which no rejoinder has been made, did in fact originate from the innervatory sensations which arise in the pharynx when we refrain from speaking and prevent ourselves from reacting to the insult? All these sensations and innervations belong to the field of ‘The Expression of the Emotions’, which, as Darwin has taught us, consists of actions which originally had a meaning and served a purpose. These may now for the most part have become so much weakened that the expression of them in words seems to us only to be a figurative picture of them, whereas in all probability the description was once meant literally; and hysteria is right in restoring the original meaning of the words in depicting its unusually strong innervations. Indeed, it is perhaps wrong to say that hysteria creates these sensations by symbolization. It may be that it does not take linguistic usage as its model at all, but that both hysteria and linguistic usage alike draw their material from a common source.¹

¹ In states in which mental alteration goes deeper, we clearly also find a symbolic version in concrete images and sensations of more artificial turns of speech. Frau Cäcilie M. passed through a period during which she transformed every thought she had into a hallucination, the explanation of which often called for much ingenuity. She complained to me at that time of being troubled by a hallucination that her two doctors - Breuer and I - were hanging on two trees next each other in the garden. The hallucination disappeared after the analysis had brought out the following explanation. The evening before, Breuer had refused to give her a drug she had asked for. She had then set her hopes on me but had found me equally hard-hearted. She was furious with us over this, and in her anger she thought to herself: ‘There’s nothing to choose between the two of them; one’s the pendant [match] of the other.’

Studies On Hysteria

164

III

THEORETICAL

(BREUER)

Studies On Hysteria

165

III

THEORETICAL

(BREUER)

In the ‘Preliminary Communication’ which introduces this work we laid down the conclusions to which we were led by our observations, and I think that I can stand by them in the main. But the ‘Preliminary Communication’ is so short and concise that for the most part it was only possible in it to hint at our views. Now, therefore, that the case histories have brought forward evidence in support of our conclusions it may be permissible to state them at greater length. Even here, there is, of course, no question of dealing with the whole field of hysteria. But we may give a somewhat closer and clearer account (with some added reservations, no doubt) of those points for which insufficient evidence was adduced or which were not given enough prominence in the ‘Preliminary Communication’.

In what follows little mention will be made of the brain and none whatever of molecules. Psychical processes will be dealt with in the language of psychology; and, indeed, it cannot possibly be otherwise. If instead of ‘idea’ we chose to speak of ‘excitation of the cortex’, the latter term would only have any meaning for us in so far as we recognized an old friend under that cloak and tacitly reinstated the ‘idea’. For while ideas are constant objects of our experience and are familiar to us in all their shades of meaning, ‘cortical excitations’ are on the contrary rather in the nature of a postulate, objects which we hope to be able to identify in the future. The substitution of one term for another would seem to be no more than a pointless disguise. Accordingly, I may perhaps be forgiven if I make almost exclusive use of psychological terms.

There is another point for which I must ask in advance for the reader’s indulgence. When a science is making rapid advances, thoughts which were first expressed by single individuals quickly become common property. Thus no one who attempts to put forward to-day his views on hysteria and its psychical basis can avoid repeating a great quantity of other people’s thoughts which are in the act of passing from personal into general possession. It is scarcely possible always to be certain who first gave them utterance, and there is always a danger of regarding as a product of one’s own what has already been said by someone else. I hope, therefore, that I may be excused if few quotations are found in this discussion and if no strict distinction is made between what is my own and what originates elsewhere. Originality is claimed for very little of what will be found in the following pages.

Studies On Hysteria

166

(1)  ARE ALL HYSTERICAL PHENOMENA IDEOGENIC?

In our ‘Preliminary Communication’ we discussed the psychical mechanism of ‘hysterical phenomena’, not of ‘hysteria’, because we did not wish to claim that this psychical mechanism or the psychical theory of hysterical symptoms in general has unlimited validity. We are not of the opinion that all the phenomena of hysteria come about in the manner described by us in that paper, nor do we believe that they are all ideogenic, that is, determined by ideas. In this we differ from Moebius, who in 1888 proposed to define as hysterical all pathological phenomena that are caused by ideas. This statement was later elucidated to the effect that only a part of the pathological phenomena correspond in their content to the ideas that cause them - those phenomena, namely, that are produced by allo- or auto-suggestion, as, for instance, when the idea of not being able to move one’s arm causes a paralysis of it; while another part of the hysterical phenomena, though caused by ideas, do not correspond to them in their content - as, for instance, when in one of our patients a paralysis of the arm was caused by the sight of snake-like objects.

In giving this definition, Moebius is not merely proposing a modification in nomenclature and suggesting that in future we should only describe as hysterical those pathological phenomena which are ideogenic (determined by ideas); what he thinks is that all hysterical symptoms are ideogenic. ‘Since ideas are very frequently the cause of hysterical phenomena, I believe that they always are.’ He terms this an inference by analogy. I prefer to call it a generalization, the justification for which must first be tested.

Studies On Hysteria

167

Before any discussion of the subject, we must obviously decide what we understand by hysteria. I regard hysteria as a clinical picture which has been empirically discovered and is based on observation, in just the same way as tubercular pulmonary phthisis. Clinical pictures of this kind that have been arrived at empirically are made more precise, deeper and clearer by the progress of our knowledge; but they ought not to be and cannot be disrupted by it. Aetiological research has shown that the various constituent processes of pulmonary phthisis have various causes: the tubercle is due to bacillus Kochii, and the disintegration of tissue, the formation of cavities and the septic fever are due to other microbes. In spite of this, tubercular phthisis remains a clinical unity and it would be wrong to break it up by attributing to it only the ‘specifically tubercular’ modifications of tissue caused by Koch’s bacillus and by detaching the other modifications from it. In the same way hysteria must remain a clinical unity even if it turns out that its phenomena are determined by various causes, and that some of them are brought about by a psychical mechanism and others without it.

It is my conviction that this is in fact so; only a part of the phenomena of hysteria are ideogenic, and the definition put forward by Moebius tears in half the clinical unity of hysteria, and indeed the unity of one and the same symptom in the same patient.

We should be drawing an inference completely analogous to Moebius’s ‘inference by analogy’ if we were to say that because ideas and perceptions very often give rise to erections we may assume that they alone ever do so and that peripheral stimuli set this vasomotor process in action only by a roundabout path through the psyche. We know that this inference would be false, yet it is based on at least as many facts as Moebius’s assertion about hysteria. In conformity with our experience of a large number of physiological processes, such as the secretion of saliva or tears, changes in the action of the heart, etc., it is possible and plausible to assume that one and the same process may be set in motion equally by ideas and by peripheral and other non-psychical stimuli. The contrary would need to be proved and we are very far short of that. Indeed, it seems certain that many phenomena which are described as hysterical are not caused by ideas alone.

Studies On Hysteria

168

Let us consider an everyday instance. A woman may, when ever an affect arises, produce on her neck, breast and face an erythema appearing first in blotches and then becoming confluent. This is determined by ideas and therefore according to Moebius is a hysterical phenomenon. But this same erythema appears, though over a less extensive area, when the skin is irritated or touched, etc. This would not be hysterical. Thus a phenomenon which is undoubtedly a complete unity would of one occasion be hysterical and on another occasion not. It may of course be questioned whether this phenomenon, the erethism of the vasomotors, should be regarded as a specifically hysterical one or whether it should not be more properly looked upon simply as ‘nervous’. But on Moebius’s view the breaking up of the unity would necessarily result in any case and the affectively-determined erythema would alone be called hysterical.

This applies in exactly the same way to the hysterical pain which are of so much practical importance. No doubt these are often determined directly by ideas. They are ‘hallucinations of pain’. If we examine these rather more closely it appears that the fact of an idea being very vivid is not enough to produce them but that there must be a special abnormal condition of the apparatuses concerned with the conduction and sensation of pain, just as in the case of affective erythema an abnormal excitability of the vasomotors must be present. The phrase ‘hallucinations of pain’ undoubtedly gives the most pregnant description of the nature of these neuralgias, but it compels us too, to carry over to them the views that we have formed of hallucinations in general. A detailed discussion of these views would not be in place here. I subscribe to the opinion that ‘ideas’, mnemic images pure and simple, without any excitation of the perceptual apparatus, never, even at their greatest vividness and intensity, attain the character of objective existence which is the mark of hallucinations.¹

¹ This perceptual apparatus, including the sensory areas of the cortex, must be different from the organ which stores up and reproduces sense-impressions in the form of mnemic images. For the basic essential of the function of the perceptual apparatus is that its status quo ante should be capable of being restored with the greatest possible rapidity; otherwise no proper further perception could take place. The essential of memory, on the other hand, is that no such restoration should occur but that every perception should create changes that are permanent. It is impossible for one and the same organ to fulfil these two contradictory conditions. The mirror of a reflecting telescope cannot at the same time be a photographic plate. I am in agreement with Meynert, in the sense of believing, as I have said, that what gives hallucinations their objective character is an excitation of the perceptual apparatus (though I do not agree with him when he speaks of an excitation of the subcortical centres). If the perceptual organ is excited by a mnemic image, we must suppose that that organ’s excitability has been changed in an abnormal direction, and that this change is what makes hallucination possible.

Studies On Hysteria

169

This applies to sensory hallucinations and still more to hallucinations of pain. For it does not seem possible for a healthy person to endow the memory of a physical pain with even the degree of vividness, the distant approximation to the real sensation, which can, after all, be attained by optical and acoustic mnemic images. Even in the normal hallucinatory state of healthy people which occurs in sleep there are never, I believe, dreams of pain unless a real sensation of pain is present. This ‘retrogressive’ excitation, emanating from the organ of memory and acting on the perceptual apparatus by means of ideas, is therefore in the normal course of things still more difficult in the case of pain than in that of visual or auditory sensations. Since hallucinations of pain arise so easily in hysteria, we must posit an abnormal excitability of the apparatus concerned with sensations of pain.

This excitability makes its appearance not only under the spur of ideas but of peripheral stimuli in just the same way as the erethism of the vasomotors which we discussed above.

It is a matter of daily observation to find that in people with normal nerves peripheral pains are brought on by pathological processes, not in themselves painful, in other organs. Thus headaches arise from relatively insignificant changes in the nose or neighbouring cavities, and again, neuralgias of the intercostal and brachial nerves from the heart, etc. If the abnormal excitability, which we have been obliged to postulate as a necessary condition of hallucinations of pain, is present in a patient, that excitability is also at the disposal, so to speak, of the irradiations that I have just mentioned. The irradiations that occur also in non-neurotic people are made more intense, and irradiations are formed of a sort which, it is true, we only find in neurotic patients but which are based on the same mechanism as the others. Thus, ovarian neuralgia depends, I believe, on states of the genital apparatus. That its causes are psychical would have to be proved, and this is not achieved by showing that that particular kind of pain, like any other, can be produced under hypnosis as a hallucination, or that its cause can be psychical. Like erythema or one of the normal secretions, it arises both from psychical and from purely somatic causes. Are we to describe only the first kind as hysterical - cases which we know have a psychical origin? If so, the commonly observed cases of ovarian neuralgia would have to be excluded from the hysterical syndrome, and this will hardly do.

If a slight injury to a joint is gradually followed by a severe arthralgia, no doubt the process involves a psychical element viz. a concentration of attention on the injured part, which intensifies the excitability of the nerve tracts concerned. But this can hardly be expressed by saying that the hyperalgesia has been caused by ideas.

The same is true of the pathological diminution of sensation. It is quite unproved and improbable that general analgesia or analgesia of individual parts of the body unaccompanied by anaesthesia is caused by ideas. And even if the discoveries of Binet and Janet were to be fully confirmed to the effect that hemi-anaesthesia is determined by a peculiar psychical condition, by a splitting of the psyche, the phenomenon would be a psychogenic but not an ideogenic one, and therefore, according to Moebius, should not be termed hysterical.

Studies On Hysteria

170

If, therefore, there are a large number of characteristic hysterical phenomena which we cannot suppose to be ideogenic, it would seem right to limit the application of Moebius’s thesis. We shall not define as hysterical those pathological phenomena which are caused by ideas, but only assert that a great number of hysterical phenomena, probably more than we suspect to-day, are ideogenic. But the fundamental pathological change which is present in every case and enables ideas as well as non-psychological stimuli to produce pathological effects lies in an abnormal excitability of the nervous system.¹ How far this excitability is itself of psychical origin is another question.

Yet even though only some of the phenomena of hysteria are ideogenic, nevertheless it is precisely they that may be described as the specifically hysterical ones, and it is the investigation of them, the discovery of their psychical origin, which constitutes the most important recent step forward in the theory of the disorder. The further question then arises: ho do these phenomena come about? What is their ‘psychical mechanism’?

This question requires a quite different answer in the case of each of the two groups into which Moebius divides ideogenic symptoms. Those pathological phenomena which correspond in their content to the instigating idea are relatively understandable and clear. If the idea of a heard voice does not merely cause it to echo faintly in the ‘inward ear’, as it does in healthy people, but causes it to be perceived in a hallucinatory manner as a real, objective acoustic sensation, this may be equated with familiar phenomena of normal life - with dreams - and is quite intelligible on the hypothesis of abnormal excitability. We know that with every voluntary movement it is the idea of the result to be achieved which initiates the relevant muscular contraction; and it is not very hard to see that the idea that this contraction is impossible will impede the movement (as happens in paralysis by suggestion).

The situation is otherwise with those phenomena which have no logical connection with the determining idea. (Here, too, normal life offers parallels, as, for instance, blushing for shame.) How do they arise? Why does an idea in a sick man evoke one particular entirely irrational movement or hallucination which does not in any way correspond to it?

¹ Attributed by Oppenheim to ‘instability of the molecules’. It may be possible at a later stage to replace the very vague statement in the text above by a more precise and significant formula.

Studies On Hysteria

171

In our ‘Preliminary Communication’ we felt able to say something about this causal relation on the basis of our observations. In our exposition of the subject, however, we introduced and employed without apology the concept of ‘excitations which flow away or have to be abreacted’. This concept is of fundamental importance for our theme and for the theory of the neuroses in general, and it seems to demand and to deserve a more detailed examination. Before I proceed to this, I must ask to be forgiven for taking the reader back to the basic problems of the nervous system. A feeling of oppression is bound to accompany any such descent to the ‘Mothers’.

But any attempt at getting at the roots of a phenomenon inevitably leads in this way to basic problems which cannot be evaded. I hope therefore that the abstruseness of the following discussion may be viewed with indulgence.

(2)  INTRACEREBRAL TONIC EXCITATIONS - AFFECTS

(A)

We know two extreme conditions of the central nervous system: a clear waking state and dreamless sleep. A transition between these is afforded by conditions of every degree of decreasing clarity. What interests us here is not the question of the purpose of sleep and its physical basis (its chemical or vasomotor determinants) but the question of the essential distinction between the two conditions.

We can give no direct information about the deepest, dreamless sleep, for the very reason that all observations and experiences are excluded by the state of total unconsciousness. But as regards the neighbouring condition of sleep accompanied by dreams, the following assertions can be made. In the first place, when in that condition we intend to make voluntary movements - of walking, speaking, etc. - this does not result in the corresponding contractions of the muscles being voluntarily initiated, as they are in waking life. In the second place, sensory stimuli are perhaps perceived (for they often make their way into dreams) but they are not apperceived, i.e. do not become conscious perceptions. Again, ideas that emerge do not, as in waking life, activate all the ideas which are connected with them and which are present in potential consciousness; a great number of the latter remain unexcited. (For instance, we find ourselves talking to a dead person without remembering that he is dead.) Furthermore, incompatible ideas can be present simultaneously without mutually inhibiting each other, as they do in waking life. Thus, association is defective and incomplete, We may safely assume that in the deepest sleep this severance of connections between the psychical elements is carried still further and becomes total.

Studies On Hysteria

172

On the other hand, when we are fully awake every act of will initiates the corresponding movement; sense-impressions become conscious perceptions; and ideas are associated with the whole store present in potential consciousness. In that condition the brain functions as a unit with complete internal connections.

We shall perhaps only be describing these facts in other words if we say that in sleep the paths of connection and conduction in the brain are not traversable by excitations of the psychical elements ( ? cortical cells), whereas in waking life they are completely so traversable.

The existence of these two different conditions of the paths of conduction can, it seems, only be made intelligible if we suppose that in waking life those paths are in a state of tonic excitation (what Exner calls ‘intercellular tetanus’), that this intracerebral excitation is what determines their conductive capability, and that the diminution and disappearance of that excitation is what sets up the state of sleep.

We ought not to think of a cerebral path of conduction as resembling a telephone wire which is only excited electrically at the moment at which it has to function (that is, in the present context, when it has to transmit a signal). We ought to liken it to a telephone line through which there is a constant flow of galvanic current and which can no longer be excited if that current ceases. Or better, let us imagine a widely-ramified electrical system for lighting and the transmission of motor power; what is expected of this system is that simple establishment of a contact shall be able to set any lamp or machine in operation. To make this possible, so that everything shall be ready to work, there must be a certain tension present throughout the entire network of lines of conduction, and the dynamo engine must expend a given quantity of energy for this purpose. In just the same way there is a certain amount of excitation present in the conductive paths of the brain when it is at rest but awake and prepared to work.¹

This view of the matter is supported by the fact that merely being awake, without doing any work, gives rise to fatigue and produces a need for sleep. The state of waking in itself causes a consumption of energy.

¹ I may perhaps venture here to indicate briefly the notion on which the above statements are based. We usually think of the sensory nerve cells as being passive receptive organs. This is a mistake. For the mere existence of a system of associative fibres proves that these sensory nerve-cells also send out excitation into the nerve-fibres. If excitation from two sensory cells flows into a nerve-fibre that connects them - whether per continuitatem or per contiguitatem - then a state of tension must exist in it. This state of tension has the same relation to the excitation flowing away in, for instance, a peripheral motor fibre as hydrostatic pressure has to the living force of flowing water or as electric tension has to an electric current. If all the nerve-cells are in a state of mean excitation and are exciting their nerve-processes, the whole immense network forms a single reservoir of ‘nervous tension’. Apart then from a potential energy which lies quiescent in the chemical substance of the cell and an unknown form of kinetic energy which is discharged when the fibres are in a state of excitation, we must assume the existence of yet another quiescent state of nervous excitation: tonic excitation or nervous tension.

Studies On Hysteria

173

Let us imagine a man in a state of intense expectation, which is not, however, directed to any particular sensory field. We then have before us a brain which is quiescent but prepared for action. We may rightly suppose that in such a brain all the paths of conduction are at the maximum of their conductive capability - that they are in a state of tonic excitation. It is a significant fact that in ordinary language we speak of such a state as one of tension. Experience teaches us what a strain this state is and how fatiguing, though no actual motor or psychical work is performed in it.

This is an exceptional state, which, precisely on account of the great consumption of energy involved, cannot be tolerated for long. But even the normal state of being wide awake calls for an amount of intracerebral excitation varying between limits that are not very widely separated. Every diminishing degree of wakefulness down to drowsiness and true sleep is accompanied by correspondingly lower degrees of excitation.

When the brain is performing actual work, a greater consumption of energy is no doubt required than when it is merely prepared to perform work. (In just the same way the electrical system described above by way of comparison must cause a greater amount of electrical energy to flow into the conducting lines when a large number of lamps or motors are switched into the circuit.) Where functioning is normal no more energy is liberated than is immediately employed in activity. The brain, however, behaves like one of those electrical systems of restricted capability which are unable to produce both a large amount of light and of mechanical work at the same time. If it is transmitting power, only a little energy is available for lighting, and vice versa. Thus we find that if we are making great muscular efforts we are unable to engage in continuous thought, or that if we concentrate our attention in one sensory field the efficiency of the other cerebral origins is reduced - that is to say, we find that the brain works with a varying but limited amount of energy.

The non‑uniform distribution of energy is no doubt determined by what Exner calls ‘facilitation by attention’ - by an increase in the conductive capability of the paths in use and a decrease in that of the others; and thus in a working brain the ‘intracerebral tonic excitation’, too, is non‑uniformly distributed.¹

¹ The conception of the energy of the central nervous system as being a quantity distributed over the brain in a changing and fluctuating manner is an old one. ‘La sensibilite’, wrote Cabanis, ‘semble e comporter à la manière d’une fluide dont la quantité totale est déterminée et qui, toutes les fois qu’il se jette en plus grande abonds ance dans un de ses canaux, diminue proportionellement dans le autres.’ (Quoted from Janet, 1894, 277.) [‘Sensibility seems to behave like a fluid whose total quantity is fixed and which, whenever it pours into one of its channels in greater abundance, becomes proportionally less in the others.’]

Studies On Hysteria

174

We wake up a person who is sleeping - that is, we suddenly raise the quantity of his tonic intracerebral excitation - by bringing a lively sensory stimulus to bear upon him. Whether alterations in the blood-circulation in the brain are essential links here in the causal chain, and whether the blood-vessels are directly dilated by the stimulus, or whether the dilatation is a consequence of the excitation of the cerebral elements - all this is undecided. What is certain is that the state of excitation, entering through a gateway of the senses, spreads over the brain from that point, becomes diffused and brings all the paths of conduction into a state of higher facilitation.

It is still not in the least clear, of course, how spontaneous awakening occurs - whether it is always one and the same portion of the brain that is the first to enter a state of waking excitation and the excitation then spreads from there, or whether sometimes one and sometimes another group of elements acts as the awakener. Nevertheless spontaneous awakening, which, as we know, can take place in complete quiet and darkness without any external stimulus, proves that the development of energy is based on the vital process of the cerebral elements themselves. A muscle remains unstimulated, quiescent, however long it has been in a state of rest and even though it has accumulated a maximum of tensile force. This is not so with the cerebral elements. We are no doubt right in supposing that during sleep the latter regain their previous condition and gather tensile force. When this has happened to a certain degree, when, as we may say, a certain level has been reached, the surplus flows away into the paths of conduction, facilitates them and sets up the intracerebral excitation of the waking state.

We can find an instructive example of the same thing in waking life. When the waking brain has been quiescent for a considerable time without transforming tensile force into live energy by functioning, there arises a need and an urge for activity. Long motor quiescence creates a need for movement (compare the aimless running round of a caged animal) and if this need cannot be satisfied a distressing feeling sets in. Lack of sensory stimuli, darkness and complete silence become a torture; mental repose, lack of perceptions, ideas and associative activity produce the torment of boredom. These unpleasurable feelings correspond to an ‘excitement’, to an increase in normal intracerebral excitation.

Studies On Hysteria

175

Thus the cerebral elements, after being completely restored liberate a certain amount of energy even when they are at rest and if this energy is not employed functionally it increases the normal intracerebral excitation. The result is a feeling of unpleasure. Such feelings are always generated when one of the organism’s needs fails to find satisfaction. Since these feelings disappear when the surplus quantity of energy which has been liberated is employed functionally, we may conclude that the removal of such surplus excitation is a need of the organism. And here for the first time we meet the fact that there exists in the organism a ‘tendency to keep intracerebral excitation constant’ (Freud).

Such a surplus of intracerebral excitation is a burden and a nuisance, and an urge to use it up arises in consequence. If it cannot be used in sensory or ideational activity, the surplus flows away in purposeless motor action, in walking up and down, and so on, and this we shall meet with later as the commonest method of discharging excessive tensions.

We are familiar with the great individual variations which are found in this respect: the great differences between lively people and inert and lethargic ones, between those who ‘cannot sit still’ and those who have an ‘innate gift for lounging on sofas’ and between mentally agile minds and dull ones which can tolerate intellectual rest for an unlimited length of time. These differences, which make up a man’s ‘natural temperament’, are certainly based on profound differences in his nervous system - on the degree to which the functionally quiescent cerebral elements liberate energy.

Studies On Hysteria

176

We have spoken of a tendency on the part of the organism to keep tonic cerebral excitation constant. A tendency of this kind is, however, only intelligible if we can see what need it fulfils. We can understand the tendency in warm-blooded animals that to keep a constant mean temperature, because our experience has taught us that that temperature is an optimum for the functioning of their organs. And we make a similar assumption in regard to the constancy of the water-content of the blood; and so on. I think that we may also assume that there is an optimum for the height of the intracerebral tonic excitation. At that level of tonic excitation the brain is accessible to all external stimuli, the reflexes are facilitated, though only to the extent of normal reflex activity, and the store of ideas is capable of being aroused and open to association in the mutual relation between individual ideas which corresponds to a clear and reasonable state of mind. It is in this state that the organism is best prepared for work.

The situation is already altered by the uniform heightening of tonic excitation which constitutes ‘expectation’. This makes the organism hyperaesthetic towards sensory stimuli, which quickly become distressing, and also increases its reflex excitability above what is useful (proneness to fright). No doubt this state is useful for some situations and purposes; but if it appears spontaneously and not for any such reasons, it does not improve our efficiency but impairs it. In ordinary life we call this being ‘nervous’. In the great majority of forms of increase in excitation, however, the over-excitation is not uniform, and this is always detrimental to efficiency. We call this ‘excitement’. That the organism should tend to maintain the optimum of excitation and to return to that optimum after it has been exceeded is not surprising, but quite in keeping with other regulating factors in the organism.

I shall venture once more to recur to my comparison with an electrical lighting system. The tension in the network of lines of conduction in such a system has an optimum too. If this is exceeded its functioning may easily be impaired; for instance, the electric light filaments may be quickly burned through. I shall speak later of the damage done to the system itself through a break-down of its insulation or through ‘short-circuiting’.

Studies On Hysteria

177

(B)

Our speech, the outcome of the experience of many generations, distinguishes with admirable delicacy between those forms and degrees of heightening of excitation which are still useful for mental activity because they raise the free energy of all cerebral functions uniformly, and those forms and degrees which restrict that activity because they partly increase and partly inhibit these psychical functions in a manner that is not uniform. The first are given the name of ‘incitement’, and the second ‘excitement’.¹ An interesting conversation, or a cup of tea or coffee has an ‘inciting’ effect; a dispute or a considerable dose of alcohol has an ‘exciting’ one. While incitement only arouses the urge to employ the increased excitation functionally, excitement seeks to discharge itself in more or less violent ways which are almost or even actually pathological. Excitement constitutes the psycho-physical basis of the effects, and these will be discussed below. But I must first touch briefly on some physiological and endogenous causes of increases of excitation.

Among these, in the first place, are the organism’s major physiological needs and instincts: need for oxygen, craving for food, and thirst. Since the excitement which they set going is linked to certain sensations and purposive ideas, it is not such a pure example of increase of excitation as the one discussed above, which arose solely from the quiescence of the cerebral elements. The former always has its special colouring. But it is unmistakable in the anxious agitation which accompanies dyspnoea and in the restlessness of a starving man.

The increase of excitation that comes from these sources is determined by the chemical change in the cerebral elements themselves, which are short of oxygen, of tensile force or of water. It flows away along preformed motor paths, which lead to the satisfaction of the need that set it going: dyspnoea leads to breathing with effort, and hunger and thirst to a search for and attainment of food and water. The principle of the constancy of excitation scarcely comes into operation as far as this kind of excitation is concerned; for the interests which are served by the increase in excitation in these cases are of far greater importance to the organism than the re-establishment of normal conditions of functioning in the brain. It is true that we see animals in a zoo running backwards and forwards excitedly before feeding-time; but this may no doubt be regarded as a residue of the preformed motor activity of looking for food, which has now become useless owing to their being in captivity, and not as a means of freeing the nervous system of excitement.

If the chemical structure of the nervous system has been permanently altered by a persistent introduction of foreign substances, then a lack of these substances will cause states of excitation, just as the lack of normal nutritive substances does in healthy people. We see this in the excitement occurring in abstinence from narcotics.

¹ [In German ‘Anregung’ = ‘incitement’, ‘stimulation’; ‘Aufregung’ = ‘excitement’, ‘agitation’.]

Studies On Hysteria

178

A transition between these endogenous increases of excitation and the psychical affects in the narrower sense is provided by sexual excitation and sexual affect. Sexuality at puberty appears in the first of these forms, as a vague, indeterminate, purposeless heightening of excitation. As development proceeds, this endogenous heightening of excitation, determined by the functioning of the sex-glands, becomes firmly linked (in the normal course of things) with the perception or idea of the other sex - and, indeed, with the idea of a particular individual, where the remarkable phenomenon of falling in love occurs. This idea takes over the whole quantity of excitation liberated by the sexual instinct. It becomes an ‘affective idea’; that is to say, when it is actively present in consciousness it sets going the increase of excitation which in point of fact originated from another source, namely the sex-glands.

The sexual instinct is undoubtedly the most powerful source of persisting increases of excitation (and consequently of neuroses). Such increases are distributed very unevenly over the nervous system. When they reach a considerable degree of intensity the train of ideas becomes disturbed and the relative value of the ideas is changed; and in orgasm thought is almost completely extinguished.

Perception too - the psychical interpretation of sense-impressions - is impaired. An animal which is normally timid and cautious becomes blind and deaf to danger. On the other hand, at least in males, there is an intensification of the aggressive instinct. Peaceable animals become dangerous until their excitation has been discharged in the motor activities of the sexual act.

Studies On Hysteria

179

(C)

A disturbance like this of the dynamic equilibrium of the nervous system - a non-uniform distribution of increased excitation - is what makes up the psychical side of affects.

No attempt will be made here to formulate either a psychology or a physiology of the affects. I shall only discuss a single point, which is of importance for pathology, and moreover only for ideogenic affects - those which are called up by perceptions and ideas. (Lange, 1885, has rightly pointed out that affects can be caused by toxic substances, or, as psychiatry teaches us, above all by pathological changes, almost in the same way as they can by ideas.)

It may be taken as self-evident that all the disturbances of mental equilibrium which we call acute affects go along with an increase of excitation. (In the case of chronic affects, such as sorrow and care, that is to say protracted anxiety, the complication is present of a state of severe fatigue which, though it maintains the non-uniform distribution of excitation, nevertheless reduces its height.) But this increased excitation cannot be employed in psychical activity. All powerful affects restrict association - the train of ideas. People become ‘senseless’ with anger or fright. Only the group of ideas which provoked the affect persists in consciousness, and it does so with extreme intensity. Thus the excitement cannot be levelled out by associative activity.

Affects that are ‘active’ or ‘sthenic’ do, however, level out the increased excitation by motor discharge. Shouting and jumping for joy, the increased muscular tone of anger, angry words and retaliatory deeds - all these allow the excitation to flow away in movements. Mental pain discharges it in difficult breathing and in an act of secretion: in sobs and tears. It is a matter of everyday experience that such reactions reduce excitement and allay it. As we have already remarked, ordinary language expresses this in such phrases as ‘to cry oneself out’, ‘to blow off steam’, etc. What is being got rid of is nothing else than the increased cerebral excitation.

Studies On Hysteria

180

Only some of these reactions, such as angry deeds and words, serve a purpose in the sense of making any change in the actual state of affairs. The rest serve no purpose whatever, or rather their only purpose is to level out the increase of excitation and to establish psychical equilibrium. In so far as they achieve this they serve the ‘tendency to keep cerebral excitation constant’.

The ‘asthenic’ affects of fright and anxiety do not bring about this reactive discharge. Fright paralyses outright the power of movement as well as of association, and so does anxiety if the single useful reaction of running away is excluded by the cause of the affect of anxiety or by circumstances. The excitation of fright disappears only by a gradual levelling out.

Anger has adequate reactions corresponding to its cause. If these are not feasible, or if they are inhibited, they are replaced by substitutes. Even angry words are substitutes of this kind. But other, even quite purposeless, acts may appear as substitutes. When Bismarck had to suppress his angry feelings in the King’s presence, he relieved himself afterwards by smashing a valuable vase on the floor. This deliberate replacement of one motor act by another corresponds exactly to the replacement of natural pain-reflexes by other muscular contractions. When a tooth is extracted the preformed reflex is to push away the dentist and utter a cry; if, instead of that, we contract the muscles of our arms and press against the sides of the chair, we are shifting the quantum of excitation that has been generated by the pain from one group of muscles to another. In the case of violent spontaneous toothache, where there is no preformed reflex apart from groaning, the excitation flows off in aimless pacing up and down. In the same way we transpose the excitation of anger from the adequate reaction to another one, and we feel relieved provided it is used up by any strong motor innervation.

If, however, the affect can find no discharge of excitation of any kind along these lines, then the situation is the same with anger as with fright and anxiety. The intracerebral excitation is powerfully increased, but is employed neither in associative nor in motor activity. In normal people the disturbance is gradually levelled out. But in some, abnormal reactions appear, An ‘abnormal expression of the emotions’, as Oppenheim says, is formed.

Studies On Hysteria

181

(3)  HYSTERICAL CONVERSION

I shall scarcely be suspected of identifying nervous excitation with electricity, if I return once more to the comparison with an electrical system. If the tension in such a system becomes excessively high, there is danger of a break occurring at weak points in the insulation. Electrical phenomena then appear at abnormal points; or, if two wires lie close beside each other, there is a short circuit. Since a permanent change has been produced at these points, the disturbance thus brought about may constantly recur if the tension is sufficiently increased. An abnormal ‘facilitation’ has taken place.

That the conditions applying in the nervous system are to some extent similar can well be maintained. It forms throughout an interconnected whole; but at many points in it great, though not insurmountable, resistances are interposed, which prevent the general, uniform distribution of excitation. Thus in normal people in a waking state excitation in the organ of ideation does not pass over to the organs of perception: such people do not hallucinate. In the interests of the safety and efficiency of the organism, the nervous apparatuses of the complexes of organs which are of vital importance - the circulatory and digestive organs - are separated by strong resistances from the organs of ideation. Their independence is assured. They are not affected directly by ideas. But the resistances which prevent the passage of intracerebral excitation to the circulatory and digestive apparatuses vary in strength from one individual to another. All degrees of affective excitability are to be found between, on the one hand, the ideal (which is rarely met with to-day) of a man who is absolutely free from ‘nerves’, whose heart-action remains constant in every situation and is only affected by the particular work it has to perform, the man who has a good appetite and digestion, whatever danger he is in - between a man of this kind and, on the other hand, a ‘nervous’ man who has palpitations and diarrhoea on the smallest provocation.

However this may be, there are resistances in normal people against the passage of cerebral excitation to the vegetative organs. These resistances correspond to the insulation of electrical conducting lines. At points at which they are abnormally weak they are broken through when the tension of cerebral excitation is high, and this - the affective excitation - passes over to the peripheral organs. There ensues an ‘abnormal expression of emotion’.

Studies On Hysteria

182

Of the two factors which we have mentioned as being responsible for this result, one has already been discussed by us in detail. This first factor is a high degree of intracerebral excitation which has failed to be levelled down either by ideational activities or by motor discharge, or which is too great to be dealt with in this way.

The second factor is an abnormal weakness of the resistances in particular paths of conduction. This may be determined by the individual’s initial constitution (innate disposition); or it may be determined by states of excitation of long duration which, as one might say, loosen the whole structure of his nervous system and lower all its resistances (pubertal disposition); or it may be determined by weakening influences, such as illness and under-nourishment (disposition due to states of exhaustion). The resistance of particular paths of conduction may be lowered by a previous illness of the organ concerned which has facilitated the paths to and from the brain. A diseased heart is more susceptible to the influence of an affect than is a healthy one. ‘I have a sounding-board in my abdomen’, I was told by a woman who suffered from parametritis, ‘if anything happens, it starts up my old pain.’ (Disposition through local illness.)

The motor actions in which the excitation of affects is normally discharged are ordered and co-ordinated even though they are often useless. But an excessively strong excitation may by-pass or break through the co-ordinative centres and flow off in primitive movements. In infants, apart from the respiratory action of screaming, affects only produce and find expression in uncoordinated contractions of the muscles of this primitive kind - in arching the body and kicking about. As development proceeds, the musculature passes more and more under the control of the power of co-ordination and the will. But the opisthotonus, which represents the maximum of motor effort of the total somatic musculature, and the clonic movements of kicking and threshing about, persist throughout life as the form of reaction for the maximal excitation of the brain for the purely physical excitation in epileptic attacks as well as for the discharge of maximal affects in the shape of more or less epileptoid convulsions (viz. the purely motor part of hysterical attacks).

Studies On Hysteria

183

It is true that abnormal affective reactions of this kind are characteristic of hysteria. But they also occur apart from that illness. What they indicate is a more or less high degree of nervous disorder, not hysteria. Such phenomena cannot be described as hysterical if they appear as consequences of an affect which, though of great intensity, has an objective basis, but only if they appear with apparent spontaneity as manifestations of an illness. These latter, as many observations, including our own, have shown, are based on recollections which revive the original affect - or rather, which would revive it if those reactions did not, in fact, occur instead.

It may be taken for granted that a stream of ideas and recollections runs through the consciousness of any reasonably intelligent person while his mind is at rest. These ideas are so little vivid that they leave no trace behind in the memory and it is impossible afterwards to say how the associations occurred. If, however, an idea comes up that originally had a strong affect attached to it, that affect is revived with more or less intensity. The idea which is thus ‘coloured’ by affect emerges in consciousness clearly and vividly. The strength of the affect which can be released by a memory is very variable, according to the amount to which it has been exposed to ‘wearing-away’ by different influences, and especially according to the degree to which the original affect has been ‘abreacted’. We pointed out in our ‘Preliminary Communication’ to what a varying extent the affect of anger at an insult, for instance, is called up by a recollection, according to whether the insult has been repaid or endured in silence. If the psychical reflex was fully achieved on the original occasion, the recollection of it releases a far smaller quantity of excitation.¹ If not, the recollection is perpetually forcing on to the subject’s lips the abusive words which were originally suppressed and which would have been the psychical reflex to the original stimulus.

¹ The instinct of revenge, which is so powerful in the natural man and is disguised rather than repressed by civilization, is nothing whatever but the excitation of a reflex that has not been released. To defend oneself against injury in a fight and, in doing so, to injure one’s opponent is the adequate and preformed psychical reflex. If it has been carried out insufficiently or not at all, it is constantly released again by recollection, and the ‘instinct of revenge’ comes into being as an irrational volitional impulse, just as do all other ‘instincts’. The proof of this lies precisely in the irrationality of the impulse, its divorce from any question of usefulness or expediency, indeed in its disregard of all considerations of the subject’s own safety. As soon as the reflex has been released, the irrational nature of the impulse can become conscious.

Ein andres Antlitz, eh sie geschehen,

Ein anderes zeigt die vollbrachte Tat.

[Literally: ‘A deed shows one countenance before it has happened and another after it has been accomplished.’]

Studies On Hysteria

184

If the original affect was discharged not in a normal but in an ‘abnormal’ reflex, this latter is equally released by recollection. The excitation arising from the affective idea is ‘converted’ (Freud) into a somatic phenomenon.

Should this abnormal reflex become completely facilitated by frequent repetition, it may, it seems, drain away the operative force of the releasing ideas so totally that the affect itself emerges to a minimal extent only, or not at all. In such a case the ‘hysterical conversion’ is complete. The idea, moreover, which now no longer produces any psychical consequences, may be overlooked by the subject, or may be promptly forgotten if it emerges, like any other idea which is unaccompanied by affect.

It may be easier to accept the possibility of a cerebral excitation which should have given rise to an idea being replaced in this way by an excitation of some peripheral path, if we call to mind the inverse course of events which follows when a preformed reflex fails to occur. I will select an extremely trivial example - the sneezing reflex. If a stimulus of the mucous membrane of the nose fails for any reason to release this preformed reflex, a feeling of excitation and tension arises, as we all know. The excitation, which has been unable to flow off along motor paths, now, inhibiting all other activity, spreads over the brain. This everyday example gives us the pattern of what happens when a psychical reflex, even the most complicated one, fails to occur. The excitement which we have discussed above as characteristic of the instinct of revenge is in essentials the same. And we can follow the same process even up to the highest regions of human achievement. Goethe did not feel he had dealt with an experience till he had discharged it in creative artistic activity. This was in his case the preformed reflex belonging to affects, and so long as it had not been carried out the distressing increase in his excitation persisted.

Studies On Hysteria

185

Intracerebral excitation and the excitatory process in peripheral paths are of reciprocal magnitudes: the former increases if and so long as no reflex is released; it diminishes and disappears when it has been transformed into peripheral nervous excitation. Thus it seems understandable that no observable affect is generated if the idea that should have given rise to it immediately releases an abnormal reflex into which the excitation flows away as soon as it is generated. The ‘hysterical conversion’ is then complete. The original intracerebral excitation belonging to the affect has been transformed into the excitatory process in the peripheral paths. What was originally an affective idea now no longer provokes the affect but only the abnormal reflex.¹

We have now gone a step beyond the ‘abnormal expression of the emotions’. Hysterical phenomena (abnormal reflexes) do not seem to be ideogenic even to intelligent patients who are good observers, because the idea that gave rise to them is no longer coloured with affect and no longer marked out among other ideas and memories. They emerge as purely somatic phenomena, apparently without psychical roots.

¹ I am anxious not to drive the analogy with an electrical system to death. In view of the totally dissimilar conditions it can scarcely illustrate the processes in the nervous system, and can certainly not explain them. But I may once more recall the case in which, owing to excessively high tension, the insulation of the wires in a lighting system breaks down and a ‘short circuit’ occurs at some point in it. If electrical phenomena (such as overheating or sparking) occur at this point, the lamp to which the wire leads fails to light. In just the same way, the affect fails to appear if the excitation flows away in an abnormal reflex and is converted into a somatic phenomenon.

Studies On Hysteria

186

What is it that determines the discharge of affect in such a way that one particular abnormal reflex is produced rather than some other?  Our observations answer this question in many instances by showing that here again the discharge follows the ‘principle of least resistance’ and takes place along those paths whose resistances have already been weakened by concurrent circumstances. This covers the case which we have already mentioned of a particular reflex being facilitated by already-existing somatic illness. If, for instance, someone suffers often from cardiac pains, these will also be provoked by affects. Alternatively, a reflex may be facilitated by the fact that the muscular innervation concerned was deliberately intended at the moment at which the affect originally occurred. Thus, Anna O. (in our first case history) tried, in her fright, to stretch out her right arm that had gone to sleep owing to pressure against the back of the chair, in order to ward off the snake; and from that time on the tetanus in her right arm was provoked by the sight of any snake-like object. Or again, in her emotion, she brought her eyes forcibly together in order to read the hands of the watch, and thereupon a convergent squint became one of the reflexes of that affect. And so on.

This is due to the operation of simultaneity, which, indeed, governs our normal associations. Every sense-perception calls back into consciousness any other sense-perception that appeared originally at the same time. (Cf. the text-book example of the visual image of a sheep and the sound of its bleating, etc.) If the original affect was accompanied by a vivid sense-impression, the latter is called up once more when the affect is repeated; and since it is a question of discharging excessively great excitation, the sense-impression emerges, not as a recollection, but as a hallucination. Almost all our case histories provide instances of this. It is also what happened in the case of a woman who experienced a painful affect at a time when she was having violent toothache due to periostitis, and who thenceforward suffered from infra-orbital neuralgia whenever the affect was renewed or even recollected.

Studies On Hysteria

187

What we have here is the facilitation of abnormal reflexes according to the general laws of association. But sometimes (though, it must be admitted, only in higher degrees of hysteria) true sequences of associated ideas lie between the affect and its reflex. Here we have determination through symbolism. What unites the affect and its reflex is often some ridiculous play upon words or associations by sound, but this only happens in dream-like states when the critical powers are low and lies outside the group of phenomena with which we are here dealing.

In a large number of cases the path taken by the train of determination remains unintelligible to us, because we often have a very incomplete insight into the patient’s mental state and an imperfect knowledge of the ideas which were active at the time of the origin of the hysterical phenomenon. But we may assume that the process is not entirely unlike what we can observe clearly in more favourable cases.

The experiences which released the original affect, the excitation of which was then converted into a somatic phenomenon, are described by us as psychical traumas, and the pathological manifestation arising in this way, as hysterical symptoms of traumatic origin. (The term ‘traumatic hysteria’ has already been applied to phenomena which, as being consequences of physical injuries-traumas in the narrowest sense of the word - form part of the class of ‘traumatic neuroses’.)

The genesis of hysterical phenomena that are determined by traumas finds a perfect analogy in the hysterical conversion of the psychical excitation which originates, not from external stimuli nor from the inhibition of normal psychical reflexes, but from the inhibition of the course of association. The simplest example and model of this is afforded by the excitation which arises when we cannot recollect a name or cannot solve a riddle, and so on. If someone tells us the name or gives us the answer to the riddle, the chain of associations is ended, and the excitation vanishes, just as it does on the ending of a reflex chain. The strength of the excitation caused by the blocking of a line of associations is in direct ratio to the interest which we take in them - that is, to the degree to which they set our will in motion. Since, however, the search for a solution of the problem, or whatever it may be, always involves a large amount of work, though it may be to no purpose, even a powerful excitation finds employment and does not press for discharge, and consequently never becomes pathogenic.

Studies On Hysteria

188

It does, however, become pathogenic if the course of associations is inhibited owing to ideas of equal importance being irreconcilable - if, for instance, fresh thoughts come into conflict with old-established ideational complexes. Such are the torments of religious doubt to which many people succumb and many more succumbed in the past. Even in such cases, however, the excitation and the accompanying psychical pain (the feeling of unpleasure) only reach any considerable height if some volitional interest of the subject’s comes into play - if, for instance, a doubter feels himself threatened in the matter of his happiness or his salvation. Such a factor is always present, however, when the conflict is one between firmly-rooted complexes of moral ideas in which one has been brought up and the recollection of actions or merely thoughts of one’s own, which are irreconcilable with them; when, in other words, one feels the pangs of conscience. The volitional interest in being pleased with one’s own personality and satisfied with it comes into operation here and increases to the highest degree the excitation due to the inhibition of associations. It is a matter of everyday experience that a conflict like this between irreconcilable ideas has a pathogenic effect. What are mostly in question are ideas and processes connected with sexual life: masturbation in an adolescent with moral sensibilities; or, in a strictly conscientious married woman, becoming aware of an attraction to a man who is not her husband. Indeed, the first emergence of sexual feelings and ideas is very often in itself enough to bring about an intense state of excitation, owing to its conflicting with a deeply-rooted idea of moral purity.¹

A state of excitation of this kind is usually followed by psychical consequences, such as pathological depression and anxiety-states (Freud). Sometimes, however, concurrent circumstances bring about an abnormal somatic phenomenon in which the excitation is discharged. Thus there may be vomiting where the feeling of uncleanness produces a physical feeling of nausea, or a tussis nervosa, as in Anna O. (Case History 1), when moral anxiety provokes a spasm of the glottis, and so on.²

¹ Cf. on this point some interesting observations and comments by Benedikt.

² Compare a passage in Mach’s ‘Bewegungsempfindungen’ which deserves to be recalled in this connection: ‘It has often been found during the experiments (on giddiness) which I have described, that in general a feeling of nausea set in if it was difficult to bring the sensations of movement into harmony with the optical impressions. It appeared as though a part of the stimulus proceeding from the labyrinth had been compelled to leave the optic tracts, which were closed to it on account of another stimulus, and to enter upon quite other tracts . . . I have also repeatedly observed a feeling of nausea in making an attempt to combine stereoscopic images which are widely separated.’

Here we have nothing less than the physiological pattern for the generation of pathological, hysterical phenomena as a result of the co-existence of vivid ideas which are irreconcilable with one another.

Studies On Hysteria

189

There is a normal, appropriate reaction to excitation caused by very vivid and irreconcilable ideas - namely, to communicate them by speech. An amusingly exaggerated picture of the urge to do this is given in the story of Midas’s barber, who spoke his secret aloud to the reeds. We meet the same urge as one of the basic factors of a major historical institution - the Roman Catholic confessional. Telling things is a relief; it discharges tension even when the person to whom they are told is not a priest and even when no absolution follows. If the excitation is denied this outlet it is sometimes converted into a somatic phenomenon, just as is the excitation belonging to traumatic affects. The whole group of hysterical phenomena that originate in this way may be described, with Freud, as hysterical phenomena of retention.

The account that we have hitherto given of the mechanism by which hysterical phenomena originate is open to the criticism that it is too schematic and simplifies the facts. In order that a healthy person who is not initially neuropathic may develop a genuine hysterical symptom, with its apparent independence of the mind and with a somatic existence in its own right, there must always be a number of concurrent circumstances.

The following case will serve as an example of the complicated nature of the process. A twelve-year-old boy, who had previously suffered from pavor nocturnis and whose father was highly neurotic, came home from school one day feeling unwell. He complained of difficulty in swallowing and headache. The family doctor assumed that the cause was a sore throat. But the condition did not improve even after several days. The boy refused food and vomited when it was pressed on him. He moved about listlessly, without energy or enjoyment; he wanted to lie in bed all the time and was very much run down physically. When I saw him five weeks later, he gave the impression of being a shy and shut-in child, and I became convinced that his condition had a psychical basis. On being questioned closely, he brought up a trivial explanation - a severe reproof given by his father - which had clearly not been the real cause of his illness. Nor could anything be learnt from his school. I promised that I would extract the information later under hypnosis. This, however, turned out to be unnecessary. In response to strong appeals from his clever and energetic mother, he burst into tears and told the following story. While he was on his way home from school he had gone into a urinal, and a man had held out his penis to him and asked him to take it into his mouth. He had run away in terror, and nothing else had happened to him. But he was ill from that instant. As soon as he had made his confession he recovered completely. - In order to produce the anorexia, the difficulty in swallowing and the vomiting, several factors were required: the boy’s innate neurotic nature, his severe fright, the irruption of sexuality in its crudest form into his childish temperament and, as the specifically determining factor, the idea of disgust. The illness owed its persistence to the boy’s silence, which prevented the excitation from finding its normal outlet.

In all other cases, as in this one, there must be a convergence of several factors before a hysterical symptom can be generated in anyone who has hitherto been normal. Such symptoms are invariably ‘overdetermined’, to use Freud’s expression.

It may be assumed that an overdetermination of this sort is also present when the same affect has been called out by a series of several provoking causes. The patient and those about him attribute the hysterical symptom only to the last cause, though that cause has as a rule merely brought to light something that had already been almost accomplished by other traumas.

Studies On Hysteria

190

A girl of seventeen ¹ had her first hysterical attack (which was followed by a number of others) when a cat jumped on her shoulder in the dark. The attack seemed simply to be the result of fright. Closer investigation showed, however, that the girl, who was particularly good-looking and was not properly looked after, had recently had a number of more or less brutal attempts made on her, and had herself been sexually excited by them. (Here we have the factor of disposition.) A few days before, a young man had attacked her on the same dark staircase and she had escaped from him with difficulty. This was the actual psychical trauma, which the cat did no more than make manifest. But it is to be feared that in many such cases the cat is regarded as the causa efficiens.

In order for the repetition of an affect to bring about a conversion in this way, it is not always necessary that there should be a number of external provoking causes; the renewal of the affect in memory is often also enough, if the recollection is repeated rapidly and frequently, immediately after the trauma and before its affect has become weakened. This is enough if the affect was a very powerful one. Such is the case in traumatic hysteria, in the narrower sense of the word. During the days following a railway accident, for instance, the subject will live through his frightful experiences again both in sleeping and waking, and always with the renewed affect of fright, till at last, after this period of ‘psychical working-out [élaboration]’ (in Charcot’s phrase ) or of ‘incubation’, conversion into a somatic phenomenon takes place. (Though there is another factor concerned which we shall have to discuss later.)

As a rule, however, an affective idea is promptly subjected to ‘wearing away’, to all the influences touched on in our ‘Preliminary Communication’, which deprive it little by little of its quota of affect. Its revival causes an ever-diminishing amount of excitation, and the recollection thus loses the capacity to contribute to the production of a somatic phenomenon. The facilitation of the abnormal reflex disappears and the status quo ante is thereupon re-established.

¹ I have to thank Herr Assistent Dr. Paul Karplus for this case.

Studies On Hysteria

191

The ‘wearing-away’ influences, however, are all of them effects of association, of thinking, of corrections by reference to other ideas. This process of correction becomes impossible if the affective idea is withdrawn from ‘associative contact’. When this happens the idea retains its whole quota of affect. Since at every renewal the whole sum of excitation of the original affect is liberated once more, the facilitation of the abnormal reflex that was started at the time is finally completed; or, if the facilitation was already complete, it is maintained and stabilized. The phenomenon of hysterical conversion is in this way permanently established.

Our observations show two ways in which affective ideas can be excluded from association.

The first is ‘defence’, the deliberate suppression of distressing ideas which seem to the subject to threaten his happiness or his self-esteem. In his paper on ‘The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’ (1894a) and in his case histories in the present volume, Freud has discussed this process, which undoubtedly possesses very high pathological significance. We cannot, it is true, understand how an idea can be deliberately repressed from consciousness. But we are perfectly familiar with the corresponding positive process, that of concentrating attention on an idea, and we are just as unable to say how we effect that. Ideas, then, from which consciousness is diverted, which are not thought about, are also withdrawn from the wearing-away process and retain their quota of affect undiminished.

We have further found that there is another kind of idea that remains exempt from being worn away by thought. This may happen, not because one does not want to remember the idea, but because one cannot remember it: because it originally emerged and was endowed with affect in states in respect of which there is amnesia in waking consciousness - that is, in hypnosis or in states similar to it. The latter seem to be of the highest importance for the theory of hysteria, and accordingly deserve a somewhat fuller examination.¹

¹ When, here and later on, we speak of ideas that are currently present and operative but yet unconscious, we are seldom concerned with single ideas (such as the big snake hallucinated by Anna O. which started her contracture). It is almost always a question of complexes of ideas, of recollections of external events and trains of thought of the subject’s own. It may sometimes happen that every one of the individual ideas comprised in such a complex of ideas is thought of consciously, and that what is exiled from consciousness is only the particular combination of them.

Studies On Hysteria

192

(4)  HYPNOID STATES

When, in our ‘Preliminary Communication’ we put forward the thesis that the basis and sine qua non of hysteria is the existence of hypnoid states, we were overlooking the fact that Moebius had already said exactly the same thing in 1890. ‘The necessary condition for the (pathogenic) operation of ideas is, on the one hand, an innate - that is, hysterical - disposition and, on the other, a special frame of mind. We can only form an imprecise idea of this frame of mind. It must resemble a state of hypnosis; it must correspond to some kind of vacancy of consciousness in which an emerging idea meets with no resistance from any other - in which, so to speak, the field is clear for the first comer. We know that a state of this kind can be brought about not only by hypnotism but by emotional shock (fright, anger, etc.) and by exhausting factors (sleeplessness, hunger, and so on).’

The problem to whose solution Moebius was here making a tentative approach is that of the generating of somatic phenomena by ideas. He here recalls the ease with which this can occur under hypnosis, and regards the operation of affects as analogous. Our own, somewhat different, view on the operation of the affects has been fully explained above. I need not, therefore, enter further into the difficulty involved in Moebius’s assumption that in anger there is a ‘vacancy of consciousness’¹ (which admittedly exists in fright and prolonged anxiety) or into the more general difficulty of drawing an analogy between the state of excitation in an affect and the quiescent state in hypnosis. We shall come back later, however, to these remarks by Moebius, which in my opinion embody an important truth.

¹ It is possible that by this description Moebius means nothing else than the inhibition of the current of ideas - an inhibition which certainly occurs in the case of affects, though owing to entirely different causes from those operating in hypnosis.

Studies On Hysteria

193

For us, the importance of these states which resemble hypnosis - ‘hypnoid’ states - lies, in addition and most especially, in the amnesia that accompanies them and in their power to bring about the splitting of the mind which we shall discuss presently and which is of fundamental significance for ‘major hysteria’. We still attribute this importance to hypnoid states. But I must add a substantial qualification to our thesis. Conversion - the ideogenic production of somatic phenomena - can also come about apart from hypnoid states. Freud his found in the deliberate amnesia of defence a second source, independent of hypnoid states, for the construction of ideational complexes which are excluded from associative contact. But, accepting this qualification, I am still of opinion that hypnoid states are the cause and necessary condition of many, indeed of most, major and complex hysterias.

First and foremost, of course, among hypnoid states are to be numbered true auto-hypnoses, which are distinguished from artificial hypnoses only by the fact of their originating spontaneously. We find them in a number of fully-developed hysterias, occurring with varying frequency and duration, and often alternating rapidly with normal waking states (cf. Case Histories 1 and 2). On account of the dream-like nature of their content, they often deserve the name of ‘delirium hystericum’. What happens during auto-hypnotic states is subject to more or less total amnesia in waking life (whereas it is completely remembered in artificial hypnosis). The amnesia withdraws the psychical products of these states, the associations that have been formed in them, from any correction during waking thought; and since in auto-hypnosis criticism and supervision by reference to other ideas is diminished, and, as a rule, disappears almost completely, the wildest delusions may arise from it and remain untouched for long periods. Thus it is almost only in these states that there arises a somewhat complicated irrational ‘symbolic relation between the precipitating cause and the pathological phenomenon’, which, indeed, is often based on the most absurd similarities of sound and verbal associations. The absence of criticism in auto-hypnotic states is the reason why auto-suggestions so frequently arise from them as, for instance, when a paralysis remains behind after a hysterical attack. But, and this may be merely by chance, we have scarcely ever in our analyses come across an instance of a hysterical phenomenon originating in this manner. We have always found it happen, in auto-hypnosis no less than outside it, as a result of the same process - namely, conversion of an affective excitation.

Studies On Hysteria

194

In any case, this ‘hysterical conversion’ takes place more easily in auto-hypnosis than in the waking state, just as suggested ideas are realized physically as hallucinations and movements so much more easily in artificial hypnosis. Nevertheless the process of conversion of excitation is essentially the same as has been described above. When once it has taken place, the somatic phenomenon is repeated if the affect and the auto-hypnosis occur simultaneously. And in that case it seems as though the hypnotic state has been called up by the affect itself. Accordingly, so long as there is a clear-cut alternation between hypnosis and full waking life, the hysterical symptom remains restricted to the hypnotic state and is strengthened there by repetition; moreover, the idea that gave rise to it is exempt from correction by waking thoughts and their criticism precisely because it never emerges in clear waking life.

Thus with Anna O. (Case History 1) the contracture of her right arm, which was associated in her auto-hypnosis with the affect of anxiety and the idea of the snake, remained for four months restricted to the moments during which she was in a hypnotic state (or, if we consider this term inappropriate for absences of very short duration, a hypnoid one), though it recurred frequently. The same thing happened with other conversions that were carried out in her hypnoid state; and in this way the great complex of hysterical phenomena grew up in a condition of complete latency and came into the open when her hypnoid state became permanent.

The phenomena which have arisen in this way emerge into clear consciousness only when the split in the mind, which shall discuss later, has been completed, and when the alternation between waking and hypnoid states has been replaced by co-existence between the normal and the hypnoid complexes of ideas.

Are hypnoid states of this kind in existence before the patient falls ill, and how do they come about? I can say very little about this, for apart from the case of Anna O. we have no observations at our disposal which might throw light on the point. It seems certain that with her the auto-hypnosis had the way paved for it by habitual reveries and that it was fully established by an affect of protracted anxiety, which, indeed, would itself be the basis for a hypnoid state. It seems not improbable that this process holds good fairly generally.

Studies On Hysteria

195

A great variety of states lead to ‘absence of mind’ but only a few of them predispose to auto-hypnosis or pass over immediately into it. An investigator who is deep in a problem is also no doubt anaesthetic to a certain degree, and he has large groups of sensations of which he forms no conscious perception; and the same is true of anyone who is using his creative imagination actively (cf. Anna O.’s ‘private theatre’). But in such states energetic mental work is carried on, and the excitation of the nervous system which is liberated is used up in this work. In states of abstraction and dreaminess, on the other hand, intracerebral excitation sinks below its clear waking level. These states border on sleepiness and pass over into sleep. If during such a state of absorption, and while the flow of ideas is inhibited, a group of affectively-coloured ideas is active, it creates a high level of intracerebral excitation which is not used up by mental work and is at the disposal of abnormal functioning, such as conversion.

Thus neither ‘absence of mind’ during energetic work nor unemotional twilight states are pathogenic; on the other hand, reveries that are filled with emotion and states of fatigue arising from protracted affects are pathogenic. The broodings of a care-ridden man, the anxiety of a person watching at the sick-bed of someone dear to him, the day-dreams of a lover - these are states of this second kind. Concentration on the affective group of ideas begins by producing ‘absence of mind’. The flow of ideas grows gradually slower and at last almost stagnates; but the affective idea and its affect remain active, and so consequently does the great quantity of excitation which is not being used up functionally. The similarity between this situation and the determinants of hypnosis seems unmistakable. The subject who is to be hypnotized must not really go to sleep, that is to say, his intracerebral excitation must not sink to the level of sleep; but his flow of ideas must be inhibited. When this is so, the whole mass of excitation is at the disposal of the suggested idea.

Studies On Hysteria

196

This is the way in which pathogenic auto-hypnosis would seem to come about in some people - by affect being introduced into a habitual reverie. This is perhaps one of the reasons why in the anamnesis of hysteria we so often come across the two great pathogenic factors of being in love and sick-nursing. In the former, the subject’s longing thoughts about his absent loved one create in him a ‘rapt’ state of mind, cause his real environment to grow dim, and then bring his thinking to a standstill charged with affect; while in sick-nursing the quiet by which the subject is surrounded, his concentration on an object, his attention fixed on the patient’s breathing - all this sets up precisely the conditions demanded by many hypnotic procedures and fills the twilight state produced in this way with the affect of anxiety. It is possible that these states differ only quantitatively from true auto-hypnoses and that they pass over into them.

Once this has happened, the hypnosis-like state is repeated again and again when the same circumstances arise; and the subject, instead of the normal two conditions of mind, has three: waking, sleeping and the hypnoid state. We find the same thing happening when deep artificial hypnosis has been frequently brought on.

I cannot say whether spontaneous hypnotic states may also be generated without an affect intervening in this way, as a result of an innate disposition; but I consider it very probable. When we see the difference in susceptibility to artificial hypnosis both among healthy and sick people and how easily it is brought on in some, it seems reasonable to suppose that in such people it can also appear spontaneously. And a disposition for this is perhaps necessary before a reverie can turn into an auto-hypnosis. I am therefore far from attributing to all hysterical patients the generating mechanism which we have been taught by Anna O.

I speak of hypnoid states rather than of hypnosis itself because it is so difficult to make a clear demarcation of these states, which play such an important part in the genesis of hysteria. We do not know whether reveries, which were described above as preliminary stages of auto-hypnosis, may not themselves be able to produce the same pathological effect as auto-hypnosis, and whether the same may not also be true of a protracted affect of anxiety. It is certainly true of fright. Since fright inhibits the flow of ideas at the same time at which an affective idea (of danger) is very active, it offers a complete parallel to a reverie charged with affect; and since the recollection of the affective idea, which is constantly being renewed, keeps on re-establishing this state of mind, ‘hypnoid fright’ comes into being, in which conversion is either brought about or stabilized. Here we have the incubation stage of ‘traumatic hysteria’ in the strict sense of the words.

Studies On Hysteria

197

In view of the fact that states of mind which are so different though they agree with one another in the most important respect can be classed with auto-hypnosis, it seems desirable to adopt the expression ‘hypnoid’, which lays stress on this internal similarity. It sums up the view put forward by Moebius in the passage quoted above. Most of all, however, it points to auto-hypnosis itself, the importance of which in the genesis of hysterical phenomena rests on the fact that it makes conversion easier and protects (by amnesia) the converted ideas from wearing-away - a protection which leads, ultimately, to an increase in the psychical splitting.

If a somatic symptom is caused by an idea and is repeatedly set going by it, we should expect that intelligent patients capable of self-observation would be conscious of the connection; they would know by experience that the somatic phenomenon appeared at the same time as the memory of a particular event. The underlying causal nexus is, it is true, unknown to them; but all of us always know what the idea is which makes us cry or laugh or blush, even though we have not the slightest understanding of the nervous mechanism of these ideogenic phenomena. Sometimes patients do really observe the connection and are conscious of it. For instance, a woman may say that her mild hysterical attack (trembling and palpitations, perhaps) comes from some great emotional disturbance and is repeated when, and only when, some event reminds her of it. But this is not the case with very many or indeed the majority of hysterical symptoms. Even intelligent patients are unaware that their symptoms arise as the result of an idea and regard them as physical phenomena on their own account. If it were otherwise the psychical theory of hysteria must already have reached a respectable age.

It would be plausible to believe that, though the symptoms in question were ideogenic in the first instance, the repetition of them has, to use Romberg’s phrase, ‘imprinted’ them into the body, and they would now no longer be based on a psychical process but on modifications in the nervous system which have occurred in the meantime: they would have become self-sufficient, genuinely somatic symptoms.

Studies On Hysteria

198

This view is in itself neither untenable nor improbable. But I believe that the new light which our observations have thrown on the theory of hysteria lies precisely in its having shown that this view is inadequate to meet the facts, at any rate in many instances. We have seen that hysterical symptoms of the most various kinds which have lasted for many years ‘immediately and permanently disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which they were provoked and in arousing their accompanying affect, and when the patient had described that event in the greatest possible detail and had put the affect into words’. The case histories which have been reported in these pages provide some pieces of evidence in support of these assertions. ‘We may reverse the dictum "cessante causa cessat effectus" ["when the cause ceases the effect ceases"], and conclude from these observations that the determining process’ (that is, the recollection of it) ‘continues to operate for years - not indirectly, through a chain of intermediate causal links, but as a directly releasing cause - just as a psychical pain that is remembered in waking consciousness still provokes a lachrymal secretion long after the event. Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences.’ But if this is so - if the memory of the psychical trauma must be regarded as operating as a contemporary agent, like a foreign body, long after its forcible entrance, and if nevertheless the patient has no consciousness of such memories or their emergence - then we must admit that unconscious ideas exist and are operative.

Moreover, when we come to analyse hysterical phenomena we do not only find such unconscious ideas in isolation. We must recognize the fact that in reality, as has been shown by the valuable work carried out by French investigators, large complexes of ideas and involved psychical processes with important consequences remain completely unconscious in a number of patients and co-exist with conscious mental life; we must recognize that there is such a thing as a splitting of psychical activity, and that this is of fundamental value for our understanding of complicated hysterias.

Studies On Hysteria

199

I may perhaps be allowed to explore this difficult and obscure region rather more fully. The need to establish the meaning of the terminology that has been used may to some extent excuse the theoretical discussion which follows.

(5)  UNCONSCIOUS IDEAS AND IDEAS INADMISSIBLE TO CONSCIOUSNESS -

SPLITTING OF THE MIND

We call those ideas conscious which we are aware of. There exists in human beings the strange fact of self-consciousness. We are able to view and observe, as though they were objects, ideas that emerge in us and succeed one another. This does not happen always, since occasions for self-observation are rare, But the capacity for it is present in everyone, for everyone can say: ‘I thought this or that.’ We describe as conscious those ideas which we observe as active in us, or which we should so observe if we attended to them. At any given moment of time there are very few of them; and if others, apart from those, should be current at the time, we should have to call them unconscious ideas.

It hardly seems necessary any longer to argue in favour of the existence of current ideas that are unconscious or subconscious. They are among the commonest facts of everyday life. If I have forgotten to make one of my medical visits, I have feelings of lively unrest. I know from experience what this feeling means: that I have forgotten something. I search my memories in vain; I fail to discover the cause, till suddenly, hours later perhaps, it enters my consciousness. But I have been uneasy the whole time. Accordingly, the idea of the visit has been all the time operative, that is to say present, but not in my consciousness. Or again, a busy man may have been annoyed by something one morning. He is entirely absorbed by his office work; while he is doing it his conscious thoughts are fully occupied, and he gives no thought to his annoyance. But his decisions are influenced by it and he may well say ‘no’ where he would otherwise have said ‘yes’. So in spite of everything this memory is operative, that is to say present. A great deal of what we describe as ‘mood’ comes from sources of this kind, from ideas that exist and are operative beneath the threshold of consciousness. Indeed, the whole conduct of our life is constantly influenced by subconscious ideas. We can see every day how, where there is mental degeneration, as for instance in the initial stages of general paralysis, the inhibitions which normally restrain certain actions become weaker and disappear. But the patient who now makes indecent jokes in the presence of women was not, in his healthy days, prevented from doing so by conscious memories and reflections; he avoided it ‘instinctively’ and ‘automatically’ - that is to say, he was restrained by ideas which were called up by the impulse to behave in this way, but which remained beneath the threshold of consciousness, though they nevertheless inhibited the impulse. All intuitive activity is directed by ideas which are to a large extent subconscious. For only the clearest and most intense ideas are perceived by self-consciousness, whilst the great mass of current but weaker ideas remains unconscious.

Studies On Hysteria

200

The objections that are raised against ‘unconscious ideas’ existing and being operative seem for the most part to be juggling with words. No doubt ‘idea’ is a word belonging to the terminology of conscious thinking, and ‘unconscious idea’ is therefore a self-contradictory expression. But the physical process which underlies an idea is the same in content and form (though not in quantity) whether the idea rises above the threshold of consciousness or remains beneath it. It would only be necessary to construct some such term as ‘ideational substratum’ in order to avoid the contradiction and to counter the objection.

Thus there seems to be no theoretical difficulty in also recognizing unconscious ideas as causes of pathological phenomena. But if we go into the matter more closely we come upon other difficulties. As a rule, when the intensity of an unconscious idea increases it enters consciousness ipso facto. Only when its intensity is slight does it remain unconscious. What seems hard to understand is how an idea can be sufficiently intense to provoke a lively motor act, for instance, and at the same time not intense enough to become conscious.

I have already mentioned a view which should not, perhaps, be dismissed out of hand. On this view the clarity of our ideas, and consequently their capacity for being observed by our self-consciousness - that is, for being conscious - is determined, among other things, by the feelings of pleasure or unpleasure which they arouse, by their quota of affect. When an idea immediately produces lively somatic consequences, this implies that the excitation engendered by it flows off into the paths concerned in these consequences, instead of, as would happen otherwise, becoming diffused in the brain; and precisely because this idea has physical consequences, because its sums of psychical stimuli have been ‘converted’ into somatic ones, it loses the clarity which would otherwise have marked it out in the stream of ideas. Instead of this it is lost among the rest.

Studies On Hysteria

201

Suppose, for instance, that someone has had a violent affect during a meal and has not ‘abreacted’ it. When subsequently he attempts to eat he is overtaken by choking and vomiting and these seem to him purely somatic symptoms. His hysterical vomiting continues for some considerable time. It disappears after the affect has been revived, described and reacted to under hypnosis. There can be no doubt that every attempt to eat called up the memory concerned. This memory started the vomiting but did not appear clearly in consciousness, because it was now without affect, whereas the vomiting absorbed the attention completely.

It is conceivable that the reason which has just been given explains why some ideas that release hysterical phenomena are not recognized as their causes. But this reason - the fact that ideas that have lost their affect because they have been converted are overlooked - cannot possibly explain why, in other cases, ideational complexes that are anything but devoid of affect do not enter consciousness. Numerous examples of this are to be found in our case histories.

In patients like these we found that it was the rule for the emotional disturbance - apprehensiveness, angry irritability, grief - to precede the appearance of the somatic symptom or to follow it immediately, and to increase, either until it was cleared up by being given utterance in words or until the affect and the somatic phenomenon gradually disappeared again. Where the former happened the quality of the affect always became quite understandable, even though its intensity could not fail to seem to a normal person (and to the patient himself, after it had been cleared up) to be out of all proportion. These, then, were ideas which were intense enough not merely to cause powerful somatic phenomena but also to call out the appropriate affect and to influence the course of association by bringing allied ideas into prominence - but which, in spite of all this, remained outside consciousness themselves. In order to bring them into consciousness hypnosis was necessary (as in Case Histories 1 and 2), or (as in Case Histories 4 and 5) a laborious search had to be made with strenuous help from the physician.

Studies On Hysteria

202

Ideas such as these which, though current, are unconscious, not because of their relatively small degree of liveliness, but in spite of their great intensity, may be described as ideas that are ‘inadmissible to consciousness’.¹

The existence of ideas of this kind that are inadmissible to consciousness is pathological. In normal people all ideas that can become current at all enter consciousness as well if they are sufficiently intense. In our patients we find a large complex of ideas that are admissible to consciousness existing side by side with a smaller complex of ideas that are not. Thus in them the field of ideational psychical activity does not coincide with potential consciousness. The latter is more restricted than the former. Their psychical ideational activity is divided into a conscious and an unconscious part, and their ideas are divided into some that are admissible and some that are inadmissible to consciousness. We cannot, therefore, speak of a splitting of consciousness, though we can of a splitting of the mind.

Conversely, these subconscious ideas cannot be influenced or corrected by conscious thought. They are very often concerned with experiences which have in the meantime lost their meaning - dread of events which did not occur, fright that turned to laughter or joy after a rescue. Such subsequent developments deprive the memory of all its affect so far as consciousness is concerned; but they leave the subconscious idea, which provokes somatic phenomena, completely untouched.

¹ This expression [‘Bewusstseinsunfähig’] is not unambiguous and for that reason leaves much to be desired. It is, however, constructed on the analogy of ‘Hoffähig’ [‘admissible to Court’, ‘having the entrée’] and may in the meantime be used for lack of a better term.

Studies On Hysteria

203

Perhaps I may be allowed to quote another example. A young married woman was for some time very much worried about her younger sister’s future. As a result of this her period, normally regular, lasted for two weeks; she was tender in the left hypogastrium, and twice she found herself lying stiff on the floor, coming out of a ‘faint’. There followed an ovarian neuralgia on the left side, with signs of a severe peritonitis. The absence of fever, and a contracture of the left leg (and of her back), showed that the illness was a pseudo-peritonitis; and when, a few years later, the patient died and an autopsy was performed, all that was found was a ‘microcystic degeneration’ of both ovaries without any traces of an old peritonitis. The severe symptoms disappeared by degrees and left behind an ovarian neuralgia, a contracture of the muscles of the back, so that her trunk was as stiff as a board, and a contracture of the left leg. The latter was got rid of under hypnosis by direct suggestion. The contracture of her back was unaffected by this. Meanwhile her younger sister’s difficulties had been completely smoothed out and all her fears on that score had vanished. But the hysterical phenomena, which could only have been derived from them, persisted unaltered. It was tempting to suppose that what we were faced by were changes in innervation, which had assumed an independent status and were no longer attached to the idea that had caused them. But after the patient had been compelled under hypnosis to tell the whole story up to the time when she had fallen ill of ‘peritonitis’ - which she did most unwillingly - she immediately sat up in bed without assistance, and the contracture of her back disappeared for ever. (Her ovarian neuralgia, which was undoubtedly much older in its origin, remained unaffected.) Thus we see that her pathogenic anxious idea had persisted in active operation for months on end, and that it had been completely inaccessible to any correction by actual events.

If we are obliged to recognize the existence of ideational complexes that never enter consciousness and are not influenced by conscious thought, we shall have admitted that, even in such simple cases of hysteria as the one I have just described, there is a splitting of the mind into two relatively independent portions. I do not assert that everything that we call hysterical has a splitting of this kind as its basis and necessary condition; but I do assert that ‘the splitting of psychical activity which is so striking in the well-known cases in the form of "double conscience" is present to a rudimentary degree in every major hysteria’, and that ‘the liability and tendency to such a dissociation is the basic phenomenon of this neurosis’.

Studies On Hysteria

204

But before entering into a discussion of this subject, I must add a comment with regard to the unconscious ideas which produce somatic effects. Many hysterical phenomena last continuously for a long time, like the contracture in the case described above. Should we and may we suppose that during all this time the causative idea is perpetually active and currently present? I think so. It is true that in healthy people we see their psychical activity going forward to the accompaniment of a rapid change of ideas. But we find sufferers from severe melancholia immersed continuously for long periods in the same distressing idea which is perpetually active and present. Indeed, we may well believe that even when a healthy person has a great care on his mind it is present all the time, since it governs his facial expression even when his consciousness is filled with other thoughts. But the portion of psychical activity which is separated off in hysterical subjects and which we think of as filled with unconscious ideas contains as a rule such a meagre store of them and is so inaccessible to interchange with external impressions that it is easy to believe that a single idea can be permanently active in it.

If it seems to us, as it does to Binet and Janet, that what lies at the centre of hysteria is a splitting off of a portion of psychical activity, it is our duty to be as clear as possible on this subject. It is only too easy to fall into a habit of thought which assumes that every substantive has a substance behind it - which gradually comes to regard ‘consciousness’ as standing for some actual thing; and when we have become accustomed to make use metaphorically of spatial relations, as in the term ‘sub-consciousness’, we find as time goes on that we have actually formed an idea which has lost its metaphorical nature and which we can manipulate easily as though it was real. Our mythology is then complete.

Studies On Hysteria

205

All our thinking tends to be accompanied and aided by spatial ideas, and we talk in spatial metaphors. Thus when we speak of ideas which are found in the region of clear consciousness and of unconscious ones which never enter the full light of self-consciousness, we almost inevitably form pictures of a tree with its trunk in daylight and its roots in darkness, or of a building with its dark underground cellars. If, however, we constantly bear in mind that all such spatial relations are metaphorical and do not allow ourselves to be misled into supposing that these relations are literally present in the brain, we may nevertheless speak of a consciousness and a subconsciousness. But only on this condition.

We shall be safe from the danger of allowing ourselves to be tricked by our own figures of speech if we always remember that after all it is in the same brain, and most probably in the same cerebral cortex, that conscious and unconscious ideas alike have their origin. How this is possible we cannot say. But then we know so little of the psychical activity of the cerebral cortex that one puzzling complication the more scarcely increases our limitless ignorance. We must take it as a fact that in hysterical patients a part of their psychical activity is inaccessible to perception by the self-consciousness of the waking individual and that their mind is thus split.

A universally known example of a division of psychical activity like this is to be seen in hysterical attacks in some of their forms and stages. At their beginning, conscious thought is often extinguished; but afterwards it gradually awakens. Many intelligent patients admit that their conscious ego was quite lucid during the attack and looked on with curiosity and surprise at all the mad things they did and said. Such patients have, furthermore, the (erroneous) belief that with a little goodwill they could have inhibited the attack, and they are inclined to blame themselves for it. ‘They need not have behaved like that.’ (Their self-reproaches of being guilty of simulation are also to a great extent based on this feeling.) But when the next attack comes on, the conscious ego is as little able to control what happens as in earlier ones. - Here we have a situation in which the thought and ideation of the conscious waking ego stands alongside of the ideas which normally reside in the darkness of the unconscious but which have now gained control over the muscular apparatus and over speech, and indeed even over a large part of ideational activity itself: the splitting of the mind is manifest.

Studies On Hysteria

206

It may be remarked that the findings of Binet and Janet deserve to be described as a splitting not merely of psychical activity but of consciousness. As we know, these observers have succeeded in getting into contact with their patients’ ‘subconsciousness’, with the portion of psychical activity of which the conscious waking ego knows nothing; and they have been able in some of their cases to demonstrate the presence of all the psychical functions, including self-consciousness, in that portion, since it has access to the memory of earlier psychical events. This half of a mind is therefore quite complete and conscious in itself. In our cases the part of the mind which is split off is ‘thrust into darkness’, as the Titans are imprisoned in the crater of Etna, and can shake the earth but can never emerge into the light of day. In Janet’s cases the division of the realm of the mind has been a total one. Nevertheless, there is still inequality in status. But this, too, disappears when the two halves of consciousness alternate, as they do in the well known cases of ‘double conscience’, and when they do not differ in their functional capability.

But let us return to the ideas which we have shown in our patients as the causes of their hysterical phenomena. It is far from being possible for us simply to describe them all as being ‘unconscious’ and ‘inadmissible to consciousness’. They form an almost unbroken scale, passing through every gradation of vagueness and obscurity, between perfectly conscious ideas which release an unusual reflex and those which never enter consciousness in waking life but only in hypnosis. In spite of this, we regard it as established that a splitting of psychical activity occurs in the more severe degrees of hysteria and that it alone seems to make a psychical theory of the illness possible.

Studies On Hysteria

207

What, then, can be asserted or suspected with probability about the causes and origin of this phenomenon?

Janet, to whom the theory of hysteria owes so very much and with whom we are in agreement in most respects, has expressed a view on this point which we are unable to accept.

Janet’s view is the following. He considers that the ‘splitting of a personality’ rests on an innate psychological weakness (‘insuffisance psychologique’). All normal mental activity presupposes a certain capacity for ‘synthesis’, the ability to unite several ideas into a complex. The combination of the various sense-perceptions into a picture of the environment is already a synthetic activity of this kind. This mental function is found to be far below the normal in hysterical patients. If a normal person’s attention is directed as fully as possible upon some point, e. g. upon a perception by a single sense, it is true that he temporarily loses the capacity to apperceive impressions from the other senses - that is, to take them up into his conscious thought. But in hysterical subjects this happens without any special concentration of the attention. As soon as they perceive anything they are inaccessible to other sense-perceptions. Indeed, they are not even in a position to take in together a number of impressions coming from a single sense. They can, for instance, only apperceive tactile sensations in one half of the body; those from the other side reach the centre and are used for the co-ordination of movement, but are not apperceived. A person like this is hemi-anaesthetic. In normal people, an idea calls into consciousness a great number of others by association; these may be related to the first one, for instance, in a confirmatory or an inhibiting manner, and only the most vivid ideas are so extremely powerful that their associations remain below the threshold of consciousness. In hysterical people this is always the case. Every idea takes possession of the whole of their limited mental activity, and this accounts for their excessive affectivity. This characteristic of their mind is described by Janet as the ‘restriction of the field of consciousness’ of hysterical patients, on the analogy of a ‘restriction of the field of vision’. For the most part the sense-impressions that are not apperceived and the ideas that are aroused but do not enter consciousness cease without producing further consequences. Sometimes, however, they accumulate and form complexes - mental strata withdrawn from consciousness; they form a subconsciousness. Hysteria, which is essentially based on this splitting of the mind, is a ‘maladie par faiblesse’ [‘disease due to weakness’], and that is why it develops most readily when a mind which is innately weak is submitted to influences that weaken it still further or is faced by heavy demands in relation to which its weakness stands out still more.

Studies On Hysteria

208

Janet’s opinions, as thus summarized, already give his answer to the important question as to the disposition to hysteria - as to the nature of the typus hystericus (taking the term in the sense in which we speak of a typus phthisicus, by which we understand the long narrow thorax, the small heart, etc.). Janet regards a particular form of congenital mental weakness as the disposition to hysteria. In reply, we should like to formulate our own view briefly as follows. It is not the case that the splitting of consciousness occurs because the patients are weak-minded; they appear to be weak-minded because their mental activity is divided and only a part of its capacity is at the disposal of their conscious thought. We cannot regard mental weakness as the typus hystericus, as the essence of the disposition to hysteria.

An example makes plain what is intended by the first of these two sentences. We were frequently able to observe the following course of events with one of our patients (Frau Cäcilie M.). While she was feeling comparatively well a hysterical symptom would appear - a tormenting, obsessive hallucination, a neuralgia, or something of the kind - and would for some time increase in intensity. Simultaneously the patient’s mental capacity would continuously decrease, and after a few days any uninitiated observer would have been bound to call her weak-minded. She would then be relieved of the unconscious idea (the memory of a psychical trauma, often belonging to the remote past), either by the physician under hypnosis or by her suddenly describing the event in a state of agitation and to the accompaniment of a lively emotion. When this had happened she did not merely become quiet and cheerful and free from the tormenting symptom; it was always astonishing to observe the width and clarity of her intellect and the acuteness of her understanding and judgement. Chess, which she played excellently, was a favourite occupation of hers, and she enjoyed playing two games at a time, which can scarcely be regarded as indicating a lack of mental synthesis. It was impossible to escape the impression that during a course of events such as we have just described the unconscious idea drew to itself an ever-increasing portion of her psychical activity and that the more this happened the smaller became the part played by conscious thought, till it was reduced to total imbecility; but that when, to use the remarkably apt Viennese expression, she was ‘beisammen’ [literally ‘together’, meaning ‘in one’s right mind’], she possessed quite remarkable mental powers.

Studies On Hysteria

209

As a comparable state in normal people we would adduce, not concentration of attention, but preoccupation.(If someone is 'preoccupied’ by some vivid idea, such as a worry, his mental capacity is similarly reduced.

Every observer is largely under the influence of the subjects of his observation, and we are inclined to believe that Janet’s views were mainly formed in the course of a detailed study of the feeble-minded hysterical patients who are to be found in hospitals or institutions because they have not been able to hold their own in life on account of their illness and the mental weakness caused by it. Our own observations, carried out on educated hysterical patients, have forced us to take an essentially different view of their minds. In our opinion ‘among hysterics may be found people of the clearest intellect, strongest will, greatest character and highest critical power’. No amount of genuine, solid mental endowment is excluded by hysteria, though actual achievements are often made impossible by the illness. After all, the patron saint of hysteria, St. Theresa, was a woman of genius with great practical capacity.

But on the other hand no degree of silliness, incompetence and weakness of will is a protection against hysteria. Even if we disregard what is merely a result of the illness, we must recognize the type of feeble-minded hysteric as a common one. Yet even so, what we find here is not torpid, phlegmatic stupidity but an excessive degree of mental mobility which leads to inefficiency. I shall discuss later the question of innate disposition. Here I merely propose to show that Janet’s opinion that mental weakness is in any way at the root of hysteria and splitting of the mind is untenable.

Studies On Hysteria

210

In complete opposition to Janet’s views, I believe that in a great many cases what underlies dissociation is an excess of efficiency, the habitual co-existence of two heterogeneous trains of ideas. It has frequently been pointed out that we are often not merely ‘mechanically’ active while our conscious thought is occupied by trains of ideas which have nothing in common with our activity, but that we are also capable of what is undoubtedly psychical functioning while our thoughts are ‘busy elsewhere’ - as, for instance, when we read aloud correctly and with the appropriate intonation, but afterwards have not the slightest idea of what we have been reading.

There are no doubt a whole number of activities, from mechanical ones such as knitting or playing scales, to some requiring at least a small degree of mental functioning, all of which are performed by many people with only half their mind on them. This is specially true of people who are of a very lively disposition, to whom monotonous, simple and uninteresting occupation is a torture, and who actually begin by deliberately amusing themselves with thinking of something different (cf. Anna O.’s ‘private theatre’). Another situation, but a similar one, occurs when an interesting set of ideas, derived for instance from books or plays, forces itself upon the subject’s attention and intrudes into his thoughts. This intrusion is still more vigorous if the extraneous set of ideas is strongly coloured with affect (e.g. worry or the longing of someone in love). We then have the state of preoccupation that I have touched upon above, which, however, does not prevent many people from performing fairly complicated actions. Social circumstances often necessitate a duplication of this kind even when the thoughts involved are of an exacting kind, as for instance when a woman who is in the throes of extreme worry or of passionate excitement carries out her social duties and the functions of an affable hostess. We all of us manage minor achievements of this kind in the course of our work; and self-observation seems always to show that the affective group of ideas are not merely aroused from time to time by association but are present in the mind all the time and enter consciousness unless it is taken up with some external impression or act of will.

Studies On Hysteria

211

Even in people who do not habitually allow day-dreams to pass through their minds alongside their usual activity, some situations give rise during considerable periods of time to this simultaneous existence of changing impressions and reactions from external life on the one hand, and an affectively-coloured group of ideas on the other. Post equitem sedet atra cura [‘black care sits behind the rider’]. Among these situations the most prominent are those of looking after someone dear to us who is ill, and of being in love. Experience shows that sick nursing and sexual affects also play the principal part in the majority of the more closely analysed case histories of hysterical patients.

I suspect that the duplication of psychical functioning, whether this is habitual or caused by emotional situations in life, acts as a substantial predisposition to a genuine pathological splitting of the mind. This duplication passes over into the latter state if the content of the two co-existing sets of ideas is no longer of the same kind, if one of them contains ideas which are inadmissible to consciousness - which have been fended off, that is, or have arisen from hypnoid states. When this is so, it is impossible for the two temporarily divided streams to reunite, as is constantly happening in healthy people, and a region of unconscious psychical activity becomes permanently split off. This hysterical splitting of the mind stands in the same relation to the ‘double ego’ of a healthy person as does the hypnoid state to a normal reverie. In this latter contrast what determines the pathological quality is amnesia, and in the former what determines it is the inadmissibility of the ideas to consciousness.

Studies On Hysteria

212

Our first case history, that of Anna O., to which I am obliged to keep on returning, affords a clear insight into what happens. The girl was in the habit, while she was in perfect health, of allowing trains of imaginative ideas to pass through her mind during her ordinary occupations. While she was in a situation that favoured auto-hypnosis, the affect of anxiety entered into her reverie and created a hypnoid state for which she had amnesia. This was repeated on different occasions and its ideational content gradually became richer and richer; but it continued to alternate with states of completely normal waking thought. After four months the hypnoid state gained entire control of the patient. The separate attacks ran into one another and thus an état de mal arose, an acute hysteria of the most severe type. This lasted for several months in various forms (the period of somnambulism); it was then forcibly interrupted, and thereafter alternated once again with normal psychical behaviour. But even during her normal behaviour there was a persistence of somatic and psychical phenomena (contractures, hemi-anaesthesia and changes in speech) of which in this case we know as a fact that they were based on ideas belonging to the hypnoid state. This proves that even during her normal behaviour the ideational complex belonging to the hypnoid state, the ‘subconsciousness’, was in existence and that the split in her mind persisted.

I have no second example to offer of a similar course of development. I think, however, that the case throws some light also on the growth of traumatic neuroses. During the first few days after the traumatic event, the state of hypnoid fright is repeated every time the event is recalled. While this state recurs more and more often, its intensity so far diminishes that it no longer alternates with waking thought but only exists side by side with it. It now becomes continuous, and the somatic symptoms, which earlier were only present during the attack of fright, acquire a permanent existence. I can, however, only suspect that this is what happens, as I have never analysed a case of this kind.

Freud’s observations and analyses show that the splitting of the mind can also be caused by ‘defence’, by the deliberate deflection of consciousness from distressing ideas: only, however, in some people, to whom we must therefore ascribe a mental idiosyncracy. In normal people, such ideas are either successfully suppressed, in which case they vanish completely, or they are not, in which case they keep on emerging in consciousness. I cannot tell what the nature of this idiosyncracy is. I only venture to suggest that the assistance of the hypnoid state is necessary if defence is to result not merely in single converted ideas being made into unconscious ones, but in a genuine splitting of the mind. Auto-hypnosis has, so to speak, created the space or region of unconscious psychical activity into which the ideas which are fended off are driven. But, however this may be, the fact of the pathogenic significance of 'defence’ is one that we must recognize.

Studies On Hysteria

213

I do not think, however, that the genesis of splitting of the mind is anything like covered by the half-understood processes that we have discussed. Thus, in their initial stages hysterias of a severe degree usually exhibit for a time a syndrome that may be described as acute hysteria. (In the anamnesis of male cases of hysteria we generally come across this form of illness represented as being ‘encephalitis’; in female cases ovarian neuralgia leads to a diagnosis of ‘peritonitis’.) In this acute stage of hysteria psychotic traits are very distinct, such as manic and angry states of excitement, rapidly changing hysterical phenomena, hallucinations, and so on. In states of this kind the splitting of the mind may perhaps take place in a different manner from that which we have tried to describe above. Perhaps the whole of this stage is to be regarded as a long hypnoid state, the residues of which provide the nucleus of the unconscious ideational complex, while waking thought is amnesic for it. Since we are for the most part ignorant of the causes that lead to an acute hysteria of this kind (for I do not venture to regard the course of events with Anna O. as having general application), there would seem to be another sort of psychical splitting which, in contrast to those discussed above, might be termed irrational.¹ And no doubt yet other forms of this process exist, which are still concealed from our young psychological science; for it is certain that we have only taken the first steps in this region of knowledge, and our present views will be substantially altered by further observations.

¹ I must, however, point out that precisely in the best-known and clearest example of major hysteria with manifest ‘double conscience’ - precisely in the case of Anna O. - no residue of the acute stage was carried over into the chronic one, and all the phenomena of the latter had already been produced during the ‘incubation period’ in hypnoid and affective states.

Studies On Hysteria

214

Let us now enquire what the knowledge of splitting of the mind that has been gained during the last few years has achieved towards an understanding of hysteria. It seems to have been great in amount and in importance.

These discoveries have in the first place made it possible for what are apparently purely somatic symptoms to be traced back to ideas, which, however, are not discoverable in the patients’ consciousness. (It is unnecessary to enter into this again.) In the second place, they have taught us to understand hysterical attacks, in part at least, as being products of an unconscious ideational complex. (Cf. Charcot.) But, besides this, they have also explained some of the psychical characteristics of hysteria, and this point perhaps deserves a more detailed discussion.

It is true that ‘unconscious ideas’ never, or only rarely and with difficulty, enter waking thought; but they influence it. They do so, first, through their consequences - when, for instance, a patient is tormented by a hallucination which is totally unintelligible and senseless, but whose meaning and motivation become clear under hypnosis. Further, they influence association by making certain ideas more vivid than they would have been if they had not been thus reinforced from the unconscious. So particular groups of ideas constantly force themselves on the patient with a certain amount of compulsion and he is obliged to think of them. (The case is similar with Janet’s hemi-anaesthetic patients. When their anaesthetic hand is repeatedly touched they feel nothing; but when they are told to name any number they like, they always choose the one corresponding to the number of times they have been touched,) Again, unconscious ideas govern the patient’s emotional tone, his state of feeling. When, in the course of unrolling her memories, Anna O. approached an event which had originally been bound up with a lively affect, the corresponding feeling made its appearance several days in advance and before the recollection appeared clearly even in her hypnotic consciousness.

This makes the patients’ ‘moods’ intelligible - their inexplicable, unreasonable changes of feeling which seem to waking thought without motive. The impressionability of hysterical patients is indeed to a large extent determined simply by their innate excitability; but the lively affects into which they are thrown by relatively trivial causes become more intelligible if we reflect that the ‘split-off mind’ acts like a sounding-board to the note of a tuning-fork. Any event that provokes unconscious memories liberates the whole affective force of these ideas that have not undergone a wearing-away, and the affect that is called up is then quite out of proportion to any that would have arisen in the conscious mind alone.

Studies On Hysteria

215

I have spoken above (p. 208 f.) of a patient whose psychical functioning always stood in inverse ratio to the vividness of her unconscious ideas. The diminution of her conscious thinking was based partly, but only partly, on a peculiar kind of abstraction. After each of her momentary ‘absences’ - and these were constantly occurring - she did not know what she had thought of in the course of it. She oscillated between her 'conditions primes’ and ‘secondes’, between the conscious and the unconscious ideational complexes. But it was not only on that account that her psychical functioning was reduced, nor on account of the affect which dominated her from the unconscious. While she was in this state her waking thought was without energy, her judgement was childish and she seemed, as I have said, positively imbecile. I believe that this was due to the fact that waking thought has less energy at its disposal if a great amount of psychical excitation is appropriated by the unconscious.

If this state of things is not merely temporary, if the split-off mind is in a constant state of excitation, as it was with Janet’s hemi-anaesthetic patients - in whom, moreover, all the sensations in no less than one half of the body were perceived only by the unconscious mind - if this is the case, so little cerebral functioning is left over for waking thought that the weakness of mind which Janet describes and regards as innate is fully accounted for. There are only very few people of whom it could be said, as of Uhland’s Bertrand de Born, that they never need more than half their mind. Such a reduction in their psychical energy does make the majority of people weak-minded.

This weakness of mind caused by a splitting of the psyche seems also to be a basis of a momentous characteristic of some hysterical patients - their suggestibility. (I say ‘some’, since it is certain that among hysterical patients are to be found people of the soundest and most critical judgement as well.)

Studies On Hysteria

216

By suggestibility we understand, in the first instance, only an inability to criticize ideas and complexes of ideas (judgements) which emerge in the subject’s own consciousness or are introduced into it from outside through the spoken word or through reading. All criticism of ideas like these which come freshly into consciousness is based on the fact that they awaken other ideas by association and amongst them some that are irreconcilable with the fresh ones. The resistance to these latter is thus dependent on the store of antagonistic ideas in potential consciousness, and the strength of the resistance corresponds to the ratio between the vividness of the fresh ideas and that of those aroused from memory. Even in normal intellects this ratio is very various. What we describe as an intellectual temperament depends on it to a great extent. A ‘sanguine’ man is always delighted by new people and things, and this is no doubt so because the intensity of his mnemic images is less in comparison with that of new impressions than it is in a quieter, ‘phlegmatic’ man. In pathological states the preponderance of fresh ideas and the lack of resistance to them increases in proportion to the fewness of the mnemic images aroused - that is, in proportion to the weakness and poorness of their associative powers. This is already what happens in sleep and dreams, in hypnosis and whenever there is a reduction in mental energy, so long as this does not also reduce the vividness of the fresh ideas.

The unconscious, split-off mind in hysteria is pre-eminently suggestible on account of the poverty and incompleteness of its ideational content. But the suggestibility of the conscious mind, too, in some hysterical patients seems to be based on this. They are excitable from their innate disposition; in them, fresh ideas are very vivid. In contrast to this, their intellectual activity proper, their associative function, is reduced, because only a part of their psychical energy is at the disposal of their waking thought, owing to a splitting-off of an ‘unconscious’. As a result of this their power of resistance both to auto- and allo-suggestions is diminished and sometimes abolished. The suggestibility of their will also seems to be due to this alone. On the other hand, hallucinatory suggestibility, which promptly changes every idea of a sense-perception into an actual perception, demands, like all hallucinations, an abnormal degree of excitability of the perceptual organ and cannot be traced back solely to a splitting of the mind.

Studies On Hysteria

217

(6)  INNATE DISPOSITION - DEVELOPMENT OF HYSTERIA

At almost every stage of these discussions I have been obliged to recognize that most of the phenomena which we have been endeavouring to understand can be based, among other things, on an innate idiosyncracy. This defies any explanation that seeks to go beyond a mere statement of the facts. But the capacity to acquire hysteria is also undoubtedly linked with an idiosyncracy of the person concerned, and an attempt to define it more accurately will perhaps not be entirely unprofitable.

I have explained above why I cannot accept Janet’s view that the disposition to hysteria is based on innate psychical weakness. The medical practitioner who, in his capacity as family doctor, observes the members of hysterical families of all ages will certainly be inclined to regard this disposition as lying in an excess rather than in a defect. Adolescents who are later to become hysterical are for the most part lively, gifted and full of intellectual interests before they fall ill. Their energy of will is often remarkable. They include girls who get out of bed at night so as secretly to carry on some study that their parents have forbidden from fear of their overworking. The capacity for forming sound judgements is certainly not more abundant in them than in other people; but it is rare to find in them simple, dull intellectual inertia and stupidity. The overflowing productivity of their minds has led one of my friends to assert that hysterics are the flower of mankind, as sterile, no doubt, but as beautiful as double flowers.

Their liveliness and restlessness, their craving for sensations and mental activity, their intolerance of monotony and boredom, may be formulated thus: they are among those people whose nervous system while it is at rest liberates excess of excitation which requires to be made use of (cf. p. 175). During development at puberty, and in consequence of it, this original excess is supplemented by the powerful increase in excitation which arises from the awakening of sexuality, from the sex glands. From then on there is a surplus quantity of free nervous energy available for the production of pathological phenomena.

But in order for these phenomena to appear in the form of hysterical symptoms there must evidently also be another, specific idiosyncracy in the individual concerned. For after all, the great majority of lively and excitable people do not become hysterical. I was only able, above, to describe this idiosyncracy in the vague and unenlightening phrase, ‘abnormal excitability of the nervous system’. But it may be possible to go further and say that this abnormality lies in the fact that in such people the excitation of the central organ can flow into the sensory nervous apparatuses which are normally accessible only to peripheral stimuli, as well as into the nervous apparatuses of the vegetative organs which are isolated from the central nervous system by powerful resistances. It may be that this idea of there being a surplus of excitation constantly present which has access to the sensory, vasomotor and visceral apparatuses already accounts for some pathological phenomena.

Studies On Hysteria

218

In people of this kind, as soon as their attention is forcibly concentrated on some part of the body, what Exner speaks of as the ‘facilitation of attention’ in the sensory path of conduction concerned exceeds the normal amount. The free, floating excitation is, as it were, diverted into this path, and a local hyperalgesia is produced. As a result, every pain, however caused, reaches maximum intensity, every ailment is ‘fearful’ and ‘unbearable’. Further, whereas in normal people a quantity of excitation, after cathecting a sensory path, always leaves it again, this is not so in these cases. That quantity, moreover, not only remains behind but is constantly increased by the influx of fresh excitations. A slight injury to a joint thus leads to arthralgia, and the painful sensations due to ovarian swelling lead to chronic ovarian neuralgia; and since the nervous apparatuses of the circulation are more accessible to cerebral influence than in normal people, we find nervous palpitation of the heart, a tendency to fainting, proneness to excessive blushing and turning pale, and so on.

However, it is not only in regard to central influences that the peripheral nervous apparatuses are more easily excitable. They also react in an excessive and perverse fashion to appropriate, functional stimuli. Palpitations follow from moderate effort no less than from emotional excitement, and the vasomotor nerves cause the arteries to contract (‘dead fingers’), apart from any psychical influence. And just as a slight injury leaves behind an arthralgia, a short attack of bronchitis is followed by nervous asthma, and indigestion by frequent cardiac pains. We must accordingly recognize that accessibility to sums of excitation of central origin is no more than a special case of general abnormal excitability,¹ even though it is the most important one from the point of view of our present topic.

¹ Oppenheim’s ‘instability of the molecules’.

Studies On Hysteria

219

It seems to me, therefore, that the old ‘reflex theory’ of these symptoms, which would perhaps be better described simply as ‘nervous’ ones but which form part of the empirical clinical picture of hysteria, should not be completely rejected. The vomiting, which of course accompanies the dilatation of the uterus in pregnancy, may, where there is abnormal excitability quite well be set going in a reflex manner by trivial uterine stimuli, or perhaps even by the periodic changes in size of the ovaries. We are acquainted with so many remote effects resulting from organic changes, so many strange instances of ‘referred pain’, that we cannot reject the possibility that a host of nervous symptoms which are sometimes determined psychically may in other cases be remote effects of reflex action. Indeed, I venture to put forward the highly unmodern heresy that even motor weakness in a leg may sometimes be determined by a genital affection, not psychically, but by direct reflex action. I think we shall do well not to insist too much on the exclusiveness of our new discoveries or to seek to apply them in all cases.

Other forms of abnormal sensory excitability still escape our understanding completely: general analgesia, for instance anaesthetic areas, real restriction of the field of vision, and so on. It is possible and perhaps probable that further observations will prove the psychical origin of one or other of these stigmata and so explain the symptom; but this has not yet happened (for I do not venture to generalize the findings presented by our first case history), and I do not think it is justifiable to presume that this is their origin before it has been properly traced.

On the other hand the idiosyncracy of the nervous system and of the mind which we have been discussing seems to explain one or two very familiar properties of many hysterical patients. The surplus of excitation which is liberated by their nervous system when in a state of rest determines their incapacity to tolerate a monotonous life and boredom - their craving for sensations which drives them, after the onset of their illness, to interrupt the monotony of their invalid life by all kinds of ‘incidents’, of which the most prominent are from the nature of things pathological phenomena. They are often supported in this by autosuggestion. They are led further and further along this road by their need for being ill, a remarkable trait which is as pathognomonic for hysteria as is fear of being ill for hypochondria. I know a hysterical woman who inflicted on herself injuries which were often quite severe, merely for her own use and without those about her or her physician learning of them. If she did nothing else she used to play all kinds of tricks while she was alone in her room simply to prove to herself that she was not normal. For she had in fact a distinct feeling of not being well and could not discharge her duties satisfactorily, and she tried to justify herself in her own eyes by actions such as these. Another patient, a very sick woman suffering from pathological conscientiousness and full of distrust of herself, felt every hysterical phenomenon as something guilty, because, she said, she need not have had it if she had really wanted not to. When a paresis of her legs was wrongly diagnosed as a disease of the spine she felt it as an immense relief, and when she was told that it was ‘only nervous’ and would pass off, that was enough to bring on severe pangs of conscience. The need to be ill arises from the patient’s desire to convince herself and other people of the reality of her illness. When this need is further associated to the distress caused by the monotony of a sick-room, the inclination to produce more and more new symptoms is developed to its fullest.

Studies On Hysteria

220

If, however, this turns into deceitfulness and actual simulation (and I think that we now err just as far on the side of denying simulation as we used to on the side of accepting it), that is based, not on the hysterical disposition but, as Moebius has so aptly said, on its being complicated by other forms of degeneracy - by innate, moral inferiority. In just the same way the ‘malicious hysteric’ comes into existence when someone who is innately excitable but poor in emotion is also a victim to the egoistic stunting of character which is so easily produced by chronic ill-health. Incidentally, the ‘malicious hysteric’ is scarcely commoner than the malicious patient in the later stages of tabes.

A surplus of excitation also gives rise to pathological phenomena in the motor sphere. Children having this characteristic very easily develop tic-like movements. These may be started in the first instance by some sensation in the eyes or face or by an uncomfortable article of clothing, but they become permanent unless they are promptly checked. The reflex paths are very easily and quickly dug in deep.

Nor can the possibility be dismissed of there being purely motor convulsive attacks which are independent of any psychical factor and in which all that happens is that the mass of excitation accumulated by summation is discharged, in just the same way as the mass of stimuli caused by anatomical modifications is discharged in an epileptic fit. Here we should have the non-ideogenic hysterical convulsion.

We so often find adolescents who had previously been healthy, though excitable, falling ill of hysteria during pubertal development, that we must ask ourselves whether that process may not create the disposition to hysteria where it was not present innately. And in any case we must attribute more to it than a simple raising of the quantity of excitation. Sexual maturation impinges on the whole nervous system, increasing excitability and reducing resistances everywhere. We are taught this from the observation of adolescents who are not hysterical and we are thus justified in believing that sexual maturation also establishes the hysterical disposition in so far as it consists precisely in this characteristic of the nervous system. In saying this we are already recognizing sexuality as one of the major components of hysteria. We shall see that the part it plays in it is very much greater still and that it contributes in the most various ways to the constitution of the illness.

If the stigmata spring directly from this innate breeding ground of hysteria and are not of ideogenic origin, it is also impossible to give ideogenesis such a central position in hysteria as is sometimes done nowadays. What could be more genuinely hysterical than the stigmata? They are pathognomonic findings which establish the diagnosis; and yet precisely they seem not to be ideogenic. But if the basis of hysteria is an idiosyncracy of the whole nervous system, the complex of ideogenic, psychically determined symptoms is erected on it as a building is on its foundations. And it is a building of several storeys. Just as it is only possible to understand the structure of such a building if we distinguish the plans of the different floors, it is, I think, necessary in order to understand hysteria for us to pay attention to the various kinds of complication in the causation of the symptoms. If we disregard them and try to carry through an explanation of hysteria by employing a single causal nexus, we shall always find a very large residue of unexplained phenomena left over. It is just as though we tried to insert the different rooms of a many-storeyed house into the plan of a single storey.

Studies On Hysteria

221

Like the stigmata, a number of other nervous symptoms - some pains and vasomotor phenomena and perhaps purely motor convulsive attacks - are, as we have seen, not caused by ideas but are direct results of the fundamental abnormality of the nervous system.

Closest to them are the ideogenic phenomena which are simply conversions of affective excitation (p. 181). They arise as the consequences of affects in people with a hysterical disposition and in the first instance they are only an ‘abnormal expression of the emotions’ (Oppenheim).¹ This becomes by repetition a genuine and apparently purely somatic hysterical symptom, while the idea that gave rise to it becomes unnoticeable (p. 184) or is fended off and therefore repressed from consciousness. The most numerous and important of the ideas that are fended off and converted have a sexual content. They are at the bottom of a great deal of the hysteria of puberty. Girls who are approaching maturity - and it is they who are chiefly concerned - behave very differently towards the sexual ideas and feelings which crowd in on them. Some girls meet them with complete unembarrassment, among whom a few ignore and overlook the whole subject. Others accept them like boys, and this is no doubt the rule with peasant and working class girls. Others again, with more or less perverse curiosity, run after anything sexual that they can get hold of in talk or books. And lastly there are natures of a refined organization who, though their sexual excitability is great, have an equally great moral purity and who feel that anything sexual is something incompatible with their ethical standards, something dirtying and smirching.² They repress sexuality from their consciousness, and the affective ideas with a content of this kind which have caused the somatic phenomena are fended off and thus become unconscious.

¹ This disposition is nothing else than what Strümpell speaks of as the ‘disturbance in the psycho-physical sphere’ which underlies hysteria.

² Some observations lead us to believe that the fear of touching, or, more properly, the fear of being dirtied, which compels women to keep on washing their hands all the time, very often has this derivation. Their washing is derived from the same mental process as Lady Macbeth’s.

Studies On Hysteria

222

The tendency towards fending off what is sexual is further intensified by the fact that in young unmarried women sensual excitation has an admixture of anxiety, of fear of what is coming, what is unknown and half-suspected, whereas in normal and healthy young men it is an unmixed aggressive instinct. The girl senses in Eros the terrible power which governs and decides her destiny and she is frightened by it. All the greater, then, is her inclination to look away and to repress from her consciousness the thing that frightens her.

Marriage brings fresh sexual traumas. It is surprising that the wedding night does not have pathogenic effects more frequently, since unfortunately what it involves is so often not an erotic seduction but a violation. But indeed it is not rare to find in young married women hysterias which can be traced back to this and which vanish if in the course of time sexual enjoyment emerges and wipes out the trauma. Sexual traumas also occur in the later course of many marriages. The case histories from whose publication we have been obliged to refrain include a great number of them - perverse demands made by the husband, unnatural practices, etc. I do not think I am exaggerating when I assert that the great majority of severe neuroses in women have their origin in the marriage bed.¹

Certain sexual noxae, which consist essentially in insufficient satisfaction (coitus interruptus, ejaculatio praecox, etc.), result according to the discovery of Freud (1895b) not in hysteria but in an anxiety neurosis. I am of opinion, however, that even in such cases the excitation of the sexual affect is quite frequently converted into hysterical somatic phenomena.

It is self-evident and is also sufficiently proved by our observations that the non-sexual affects of fright, anxiety and anger lead to the development of hysterical phenomena. But it is perhaps worth while insisting again and again that the sexual factor is by far the most important and the most productive of pathological results. The unsophisticated observations of our predecessors, the residue of which is preserved in the term ‘hysteria’, came nearer the truth than the more recent view which puts sexuality almost last, in order to save the patients from moral reproaches. The sexual needs of hysterical patients are no doubt just as variable in degree from individual to individual as in healthy people and are no stronger than in them; but the former fall ill from them, and, for the most part, precisely owing to struggling against them, owing to their defence against sexuality.

Alongside sexual hysteria we must at this point recall hysteria due to fright - traumatic hysteria proper - which constitutes one of the best known and recognized forms of hysteria.

In what may be called the same stratum as the phenomena which arise from the conversion of affective excitation are to be found those which owe their origin to suggestion (mostly auto-suggestion) in individuals who are innately suggestible. A high degree of suggestibility - that is to say, the unrestricted preponderance of ideas that have been freshly aroused - is not among the essential features of hysteria. It can, however, be present as a complication in people with a hysterical disposition, in whom this very idiosyncracy of the nervous system makes possible the somatic realization of supervalent [‘Überwertig’] ideas. Moreover, it is for the most part only affective ideas which are realized in somatic phenomena by suggestion, and consequently the process may often be regarded as a conversion of the accompanying affect of fright or anxiety.

These processes - the conversion of affect, and suggestion - remain identical even in the complicated forms of hysteria which we must now consider. They merely find more favourable conditions in such cases: it is invariably through one of these two processes that psychically-determined hysterical phenomena come into being.

¹ It is a most unfortunate thing that clinical medicine ignores one of the most important of all the pathogenic factors or at least only hints at it delicately. This is certainly a subject in which the acquired knowledge of experienced physicians should be communicated to their juniors, who as a rule blindly overlook sexuality - at all events so far as their patients are concerned.

Studies On Hysteria

223

The third constituent of the hysterical disposition, which appears in some cases in addition to those that have been already discussed, is the hypnoid state, the tendency to auto-hypnosis (p. 192). This state favours and facilitates in the greatest degree both conversion and suggestion; and in this way it erects, as we might say, on the top of the minor hysterias, the higher storey of major hysteria. The tendency to auto-hypnosis is a state which is to begin with only temporary and which alternates with the normal one. We may attribute to it the same increase of mental influence on the body that we observe in artificial hypnosis. This influence is all the more intense and deep-going here in that it is acting upon a nervous system which even outside hypnosis is abnormally excitable.¹ We cannot tell how far and in what cases the tendency to auto-hypnosis is an innate property of the organism. I have expressed the view above (pp. 195‑196) that it develops from reveries that are charged with affect. But there can be no doubt that innate disposition plays a part in this as well. If this view is correct, it will be clear here once again how great an influence on the development of hysteria is to be ascribed to sexuality. For, apart from sick-nursing, no psychical factor is so well-calculated to produce reveries charged with affect as are the longings of a person in love. And over and above this the sexual orgasm itself, with its wealth of affect and its restriction of consciousness, is closely akin to hypnoid states.

The hypnoid element is most clearly manifested in hysterical attacks and in those states which can be described as acute hysteria and which, it seems, play such an important part in the development of hysteria (p. 213). These are obviously psychotic states which persist for a long time, often for several months and which it is frequently necessary to describe as hallucinatory confusion. Even if the disturbance does not go as far as this, a great variety of hysterical phenomena emerge in it, a few of which actually persist after it is over. The psychical content of these states consists partly in precisely the ideas which have been fended off in waking life and repressed from consciousness. (Cf. the ‘hysterical deliria in saints and nuns, continent women and well-brought-up children’.)

¹ It is tempting to identify the disposition to hypnosis with innate abnormal excitability; for artificial hypnosis, too, exhibits ideogenic changes in secretion and local blood-supply, formation of vesicles, etc This seems to be the view held by Moebius. But in my opinion it would involve us in a vicious circle. The miraculous workings of hypnosis are, so far as I can see, only observable in hysterical patients. What we should be doing would be first to assign the phenomena of hysteria to hypnosis, and then to assert that hypnosis is the cause of those phenomena.

Studies On Hysteria

224

Since these states are so often nothing less than psychoses and are yet derived immediately and exclusively from hysteria, I cannot agree with Moebius’s opinion that ‘apart from the deliria attached to attacks, it is impossible to speak of an actual hysterical insanity’ (1895, 18). In many cases these states constitute an insanity of this kind; and psychoses like these also recur in the further course of a hysteria. It is true that essentially they are nothing other than the psychotic stage of an attack, but since they last for months they can nevertheless hardly be described as attacks.

How does one of these acute hysterias arise? In the best known case (Case History 1) it developed out of an accumulation of hypnoid attacks; in another case (where there was already a complicated hysteria present) it arose in association with a withdrawal of morphine. The process is for the most part completely obscure and awaits clarification from further observations.

Accordingly, we may apply to the hysterias which have been discussed here Moebius’s pronouncement (ibid., 16): ‘The essential change that occurs in hysteria is that the mental state of the hysterical patient becomes temporarily or permanently similar to that of a hypnotized subject.’

The persistence in the normal state of the symptoms that have arisen during the hypnoid one corresponds entirely to our experiences with post-hypnotic suggestion. But this already implies that complexes of ideas that are inadmissible to consciousness co-exist with the trains of ideas that pursue a conscious course, that the splitting of the mind has taken place (p. 206). It seems certain that this can happen even without a hypnoid state, from the wealth of thoughts which have been fended off and repressed from consciousness but not suppressed. In one way or another there comes into existence a region of mental life - sometimes poor in ideas and rudimentary, sometimes more or less on a par with waking thought - our knowledge of which we owe, above all, to Binet and Janet. The splitting of the mind is the consummation of hysteria. I have shown above (in Section 5) how it explains the principal characteristics of the disorder. One part of the patient’s mind is in the hypnoid state, permanently, but with a varying degree of vividness in its ideas, and is always prepared whenever there is a lapse in waking thought to assume control over the whole person (e. g. in an attack or delirium). This occurs as soon as a powerful affect interrupts the normal course of ideas, in twilight states and states of exhaustion. Out of this persisting hypnoid state unmotivated ideas, alien to normal association, force their way into consciousness, hallucinations are introduced into the perceptual system and motor acts are innervated independently of the conscious will. This hypnoid mind is in the highest degree susceptible to conversion of affects and to suggestion, and thus fresh hysterical phenomena appear easily, which without the split in the mind would only have come about with great difficulty and under the pressure of repeated affects. The split-off mind is the devil with which the unsophisticated observation of early superstitious times believed that these patients were possessed. It is true that a spirit alien to the patient’s waking consciousness holds sway in him; but the spirit is not in fact an alien one, but a part of his own.

Studies On Hysteria

225

The attempt that has been made here to make a synthetic construction of hysteria out of what we know of it to-day is open to the reproach of eclecticism, if such a reproach can be justified at all. There were so many formulations of hysteria, from the old ‘reflex theory’ to the ‘dissociation of personality’, which have had to find a place in it. But it can scarcely be otherwise; for so many excellent observers and acute minds have concerned themselves with hysteria. It is unlikely that any of their formulations was without a portion of the truth. A future exposition of the true state of affairs will certainly, include them all and will merely combine all the one-sided views of the subject into a corporate reality. Eclecticism, therefore, seems to me nothing to be ashamed of.

But how far we still are to-day from the possibility of any such complete understanding of hysteria! With what uncertain strokes have its outlines been drawn in these pages, with what clumsy hypotheses have the gaping lacunas been concealed rather than bridged! Only one consideration is to some extent consoling: that this defect attaches, and must attach, to all physiological expositions of complicated psychical processes. We must always say of them what Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream says of tragedy: ‘The best in this kind are but shadows.’ And even the weakest is not without value if it honestly and modestly tries to hold on to the outlines of the shadows which the unknown real objects throw upon the wall. For then, in spite of everything, the hope is always justified that there may be some degree of correspondence and similarity between the real processes and our idea of them.

Studies On Hysteria

226

IV

THE PSYCHOTHERAPY OF HYSTERIA

(FREUD)

Studies On Hysteria

227

IV

THE PSYCHOTHERAPY OF HYSTERIA

(FREUD)

In our ‘Preliminary Communication’ we reported how, in the course of our investigation into the aetiology of hysterical symptoms, we also came upon a therapeutic method which seemed to us of practical importance. For ‘we found, to our great surprise at first, that each individual hysterical symptom immediately and permanently disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which it was provoked and in arousing its accompanying affect, and when the patient had described that event in the greatest possible detail and had put the affect into words’. (p. 9.)

We further endeavoured to explain the way in which our psychotherapeutic method works. ‘It brings to an end the operative force of the idea which was not abreacted in the first instance, by allowing its strangulated affect to find a way through to speech; and it subjects it to associative corrected by introducing it into normal consciousness (under light hypnosis) or by removing it through the physician’s suggestion, as is done in somnambulism accompanied by amnesia.’ (p. 19.)

I will now try to give a connected account of how far this method carries us, of the respects in which it achieves more than other methods, of the technique by which it works and of the difficulties it meets with. Much of the substance of this is already contained in the case histories printed in the earlier portion of this book, and I shall not be able to avoid repeating myself in the account which follows.

(1)

For my own part, I too may say that I can still hold by what is contained in the ‘Preliminary Communication’. None the less I must confess that during the years which have since passed - in which I have been unceasingly concerned with the problems touched upon in it - fresh points of view have forced themselves on my mind. These have led to what is in part at least a different grouping and interpretation of the factual material known to me at that time. It would be unfair if I were to try to lay too much of the responsibility for this development upon my honoured friend Dr. Josef Breuer. For this reason the considerations which follow stand principally under my own name.

Studies On Hysteria

228

When I attempted to apply to a comparatively large number of patients Breuer’s method of treating hysterical symptoms by an investigation and abreaction of them under hypnosis, I came up against two difficulties, in the course of dealing with which I was led to an alteration both in my technique and in my view of the facts. (1) I found that not everyone could be hypnotized who exhibited undoubted hysterical symptoms and who, it was highly probable, was governed by the same psychical mechanism. (2) I was forced to take up a position on the question of what, after all, essentially characterizes hysteria and what distinguishes it from other neuroses.

I will put off until later my account of how I got over the first of these two difficulties and what I have learnt from it, and I will begin by describing the attitude I adopted in my daily practice towards the second problem. It is very hard to obtain a clear view of a case of neurosis before one has submitted it to a thorough analysis - an analysis which can, in fact, only be brought about by the use of Breuer’s method; but a decision on the diagnosis and the form of therapy to be adopted has to be made before any such thorough knowledge of the case has been arrived at. The only course open to me, therefore, was to select for cathartic treatment such cases as could be provisionally diagnosed as hysteria, which exhibited one or more of the stigmata or characteristic symptoms of hysteria. It then sometimes happened that in spite of the diagnosis of hysteria the therapeutic results turned out to be very scanty and that even analysis brought nothing significant to light. On other occasions again, I tried applying Breuer’s method of treatment to neuroses which no one could have mistaken for hysteria, and I found that in that manner they could be influenced and indeed cleared up. I had this experience, for instance, with obsessional ideas, genuine obsessional ideas of the Westphal type, in cases without a single trait which recalled hysteria. Consequently, the psychical mechanism revealed by the ‘Preliminary Communication’  could not be pathognomonic for hysteria. Nor could I resolve, merely for the sake of preserving that mechanism as a criterion of it, to lump all these other neuroses in with hysteria. I eventually found a way out of all these emerging doubts by the plan of treating all the other neuroses in question in the same way as hysteria. I determined to investigate their aetiology and the nature of their psychical mechanism in every case and to let the decision as to whether the diagnosis of hysteria was justified depend upon the outcome of that investigation.

Studies On Hysteria

229

Thus, starting out from Breuer’s method, I found myself engaged in a consideration of the aetiology and mechanism of the neuroses in general. I was fortunate enough to arrive at some serviceable findings in a relatively short time. In the first place I was obliged to recognize that, in so far as one can speak of determining causes which lead to the acquisition of neuroses, their aetiology is to be looked for in sexual factors. There followed the discovery that different sexual factors, in the most general sense, produce different pictures of neurotic disorders. And it then became possible, in the degree to which this relation was confirmed, to venture on using aetiology for the purpose of characterizing the neuroses and of making a sharp distinction between the clinical pictures of the various neuroses. Where the aetiological characteristics coincided regularly with the clinical ones, this was of course justified.

In this manner I found that neurasthenia presented a monotonous clinical picture in which, as my analyses showed, a ‘psychical mechanism’ played no part. There was a sharp distinction between neurasthenia and ‘obsessional neurosis’, the neurosis of obsessional ideas proper. In this latter one I was able to recognize a complicated psychical mechanism, an aetiology similar to that of hysteria and an extensive possibility of reducing it by psychotherapy. On the other hand, it seemed to me absolutely necessary to detach from neurasthenia a complex of neurotic symptoms which depend on a quite different and indeed at bottom a contrary aetiology. The component symptoms of this complex are united by a characteristic which has already been recognized by Hecker (1893). For they are either symptoms or equivalents and rudiments of manifestations of anxiety; and for this reason I have given to this complex which is to be detached from neurasthenia the name of ‘anxiety neurosis’. I have maintained that it arises from, an accumulation of physical tension, which is itself once more of sexual origin. This neurosis, too, has no psychical mechanism, but it invariably influences mental life, so that ‘anxious expectation’, phobias, hyperaesthesia to pains, etc., are among its regular manifestations. This anxiety neurosis, in my sense of the term, no doubt coincides in part with the neurosis which, under the name of ‘hypochondria’, finds a place in not a few descriptions alongside hysteria and neurasthenia. But I cannot regard the delimitation of hypochondria in any of the works in question as being the correct one, and the applicability of its name seems to me to be prejudiced by the fixed connection of that term with the symptom of ‘fear of illness’.

After I had in this way fixed the simple pictures of neurasthenia, anxiety neurosis and obsessional ideas, I went on to consider the cases of neurosis which are commonly included under the diagnosis of hysteria. I reflected that it was not right to stamp a neurosis as a whole as hysterical because a few hysterical signs were prominent in its complex of symptoms. I could well understand this practice, since after all hysteria is the oldest, best-known and most striking of the neuroses under consideration; but it was an abuse, for it put down to the account of hysteria so many traits of perversion and degeneracy. Whenever a hysterical sign, such as an anaesthesia or a characteristic attack, was found in a complicated case of psychical degeneracy, the whole condition was described as one of ‘hysteria’, so that it is not surprising that the worst and the most contradictory things were found together under this label. But just as it was certain that this diagnosis was incorrect, it was equally certain that we ought also to separate out the various neuroses; and since we were acquainted with neurasthenia, anxiety neurosis, etc., in a pure form, there was no longer any need to overlook them in the combined picture.

Studies On Hysteria

230

The following view, therefore, seemed to be the more probable one. The neuroses which commonly occur are mostly to be described as ‘mixed’. Neurasthenia and anxiety neuroses are easily found in pure forms as well, especially in young people. Pure forms of hysteria and obsessional neurosis are rare; as a rule these two neuroses are combined with anxiety neurosis. The reason why mixed neuroses occur so frequently is that their aetiological factors are so often intermixed, sometimes only by chance, sometimes as a result of causal relations between the processes from which the aetiological factors of the neuroses are derived. There is no difficulty in tracing this out and demonstrating it in detail. As regards hysteria, however, it follows that that disorder can scarcely be segregated from the nexus of the sexual neuroses for the purposes of study, that as a rule it represents only a single side, only one aspect, of a complicated case of neurosis, and that it is only in marginal cases that it can be found and treated in isolation. We may perhaps say in a number of instances: a potiori fit denominatio [i.e. it has been given its name from its more important feature].

I will now examine the case histories that have been reported here, with a view to seeing whether they speak in favour of my opinion that hysteria is not an independent clinical entity.

Breuer’s patient, Anna O., seems to contradict my opinion and to be an example of a pure hysterical disorder. This case, however, which has been so fruitful for our knowledge of hysteria, was not considered at all by its observer from the point of view of a sexual neurosis, and is now quite useless for this purpose. When I began to analyse the second patient, Frau Emmy von N., the expectation of a sexual neurosis being the basis of hysteria was fairly remote from my mind. I had come fresh from the school of Charcot, and I regarded the linking of hysteria with the topic of sexuality as a sort of insult - just as the women patients themselves do. When I go through my notes on this case to-day there seems to me no doubt at all that it must be looked on as a case of severe anxiety neurosis accompanied by anxious expectation and phobias - an anxiety neurosis which originated from sexual abstinence and had become combined with hysteria. Case 3, that of Miss Lucy R., can perhaps best be described as a marginal case of pure hysteria. It was a short hysteria which ran an episodic course and had an unmistakable sexual aetiology, such as would correspond to an anxiety neurosis. The patient was an over-mature girl with a need to be loved, whose affections had been too hastily aroused through a misunderstanding. The anxiety neurosis, however, did not become visible, or it escaped me. Case 4, Katharina, was nothing less than a model of what I have described as ‘virginal anxiety’. It was a combination of anxiety neurosis and hysteria. The former created the symptoms, while the latter repeated them and operated with them. Incidentally, it was a case typical of a large number of neuroses in young people that are described as ‘hysteria’. Case 5, that of Fräulein Elisabeth von R., was once again not investigated as a sexual neurosis. I was only able to express, without confirming it, a suspicion that a spinal neurasthenia may have been its basis.

I must add, though, that in the meantime pure hysterias have become even rarer in my experience. If it was possible for me to bring together these four cases as hysterias and if in reporting them I was able to overlook the points of view that were of importance as regards sexual neuroses, the reason is that these histories date some distance back, and that I did not at that time as yet submit such cases to a deliberate and searching investigation of their neurotic sexual foundation. And if, instead of these four, I did not report twelve cases whose analysis provides a confirmation of the psychical mechanism of hysterical phenomena put forward by us, this reticence was necessitated by the very circumstance that the analysis revealed these cases as being simultaneously sexual neuroses, although certainly no diagnostician would have refused them the name of hysteria. But an elucidation of these sexual neuroses would overstep the bounds of the present joint publication.

Studies On Hysteria

231

I should not like it to be wrongly thought that I do not wish to allow that hysteria is an independent neurotic affection, that I regard it merely as a psychical manifestation of anxiety neurosis and that I attribute to it ‘ideogenic’ symptoms only and am transferring the somatic symptoms (such as hyterogenic points and anaesthesias) to anxiety neurosis. Nothing of the sort. In my opinion it is possible to deal with hysteria, freed from any admixture, as something independent; and to do so in every respect except in that of therapeutics. For in therapeutics we are concerned with a practical aim, with getting rid of the pathological state as a whole. And if hysteria generally appears as a component of a mixed neurosis, the situation resembles that in which there is a mixed infection, where preserving life sets a problem which does not coincide with that of combating the operation of one particular pathogenic agent.

It is very important for me to distinguish the part played by hysteria in the picture of the mixed neuroses from that played by neurasthenia, anxiety neurosis and so on, because, once I have made this distinction, I shall be able to express concisely the therapeutic value of the cathartic method. For I am inclined to venture the assertion that that method is - as a matter of theory - very well able to get rid of any hysterical symptom, whereas, as will be easily understood, it is completely powerless against the phenomena of neurasthenia and is only able rarely and in roundabout ways to influence the psychical effects of anxiety neurosis. Its therapeutic effectiveness in any particular case will accordingly depend on whether the hysterical components of the clinical picture do or do not assume a position of practical importance in comparison with the other neurotic components.

There is another obstacle in the way of the effectiveness of the cathartic method, which we have already indicated in the ‘Preliminary Communication’. It cannot affect the underlying causes of hysteria: thus it cannot prevent fresh symptoms from taking the place of the ones which had been got rid of. On the whole, then, I must claim a prominent place for our therapeutic method as employed within the framework of a therapy of the neuroses; but I should like to advise against assessing its value or applying it outside this framework. Since, however, I cannot in these pages offer a ‘therapy of the neuroses’ of the sort needed by practitioners, what I have just said is equivalent to postponing my account of the subject to a possible later publication. But I am able, I think, to add the following remarks by way of expansion and elucidation.

Studies On Hysteria

232

(1) I do not maintain that I have actually got rid of all the hysterical symptoms that I have undertaken to influence by the cathartic method. But it is my opinion that the obstacles have lain in the personal circumstances of the patients and have not been due to any question of theory. I am justified in leaving these unsuccessful cases out of account in arriving at a judgement, just as a surgeon disregards cases of death which occur under anaesthesia, owing to post-operational haemorrhage, accidental sepsis, etc., in making a decision about a new technique. When I come to deal with the difficulties and drawbacks of the procedure later on, I shall return to a consideration of failures from this source.

(2)  The cathartic method is not to be regarded as worthless because it is a symptomatic and not a causal one. For a causal therapy is in fact as a rule only a prophylactic one; it brings to a halt any further effects of the noxious agency, but does not therefore necessarily get rid of the results which that agency has already brought about. As a rule a second phase of treatment is required to perform this latter task, and in cases of hysteria the cathartic method is quite invaluable for this purpose.

(3) Where a period of hysterical production, an acute hysterical paroxysm, has been overcome and all that is left over are hysterical symptoms in the shape of residual phenomena, the cathartic method suffices for every indication and brings about complete and permanent successes. A favourable therapeutic constellation of this kind is not seldom to be found precisely in the region of sexual life, owing to the wide oscillations in the intensity of sexual needs and the complications of the conditions necessary in order to bring about a sexual trauma. Here the cathartic method does all that can be asked of it, for the physician cannot set himself the task of altering a constitution such as the hysterical one. He must content himself with getting rid of the troubles to which such a constitution is inclined and which may arise from it with the conjunction of external circumstances. He will feel satisfied if the patient regains her working capacity. Moreover, he is not without consolation for the future when he considers the possibility of a relapse. He is aware of the principal feature in the aetiology of the neuroses - that their genesis is as a rule overdetermined, that several factors must come together to produce this result; and he may hope that this convergence will not be repeated at once, even though a few individual aetiological factors remain operative.

It might be objected that, in cases of hysteria like this, in which the illness has run its course, the residual symptoms in any case pass away spontaneously. It may be said in reply, however, that a spontaneous cure of this kind is very often neither rapid nor complete enough and that it can be assisted to an extraordinary degree by our therapeutic intervention. We may readily leave it for the moment as an unresolved question whether by means of the cathartic therapy we cure only what is capable of spontaneous cure or sometimes also what would not have been cleared up spontaneously.

Studies On Hysteria

233

(4) Where we meet with an acute hysteria, a case which is passing through the period of the most active production of hysterical symptoms and in which the ego is being constantly overwhelmed by the products of the illness (i.e. during a hysterical psychosis), even the cathartic method will make little change in the appearance and course of the disorder. In such circumstances we find ourselves in the same position as regards the neurosis as a physician faced by an acute infectious disease. The aetiological factors have performed their work sufficiently, at a time which has now passed and is beyond the reach of any influence; and now, after the period of incubation has elapsed, they have become manifest. The illness cannot be broken off short. We must wait for it to run its course and in the mean time make the patient’s circumstances as favourable as possible. If, during an acute period like this, we get rid of the products of the illness, the freshly generated hysterical symptoms, we must also be prepared to find that those that have been got rid of will promptly be replaced by others. The physician will not be spared the depressing feeling of being faced by a Sisyphean task. The immense expenditure of labour, and the dissatisfaction of the patient’s family, to whom the inevitable length of an acute neurosis is not likely to be as familiar as the analogous case of an acute infectious disease - these and other difficulties will probably make a systematic application of the cathartic method as a rule impossible in any given case. Nevertheless, it remains a matter for serious consideration whether it may not be true that even in an acute hysteria the regular clearing up of the products of the illness exercises a curative influence, by supporting the patient’s normal ego which is engaged in the work of defence, and by preserving it from being overwhelmed and falling into a psychosis and even perhaps into a permanent state of confusion.

What the cathartic method is able to accomplish even in acute hysteria, and how it even restricts the fresh production of pathological symptoms in a manner that is of practical importance, is quite clearly revealed by the case history of Anna O., in which Breuer first learnt to employ this psychotherapeutic procedure.

Studies On Hysteria

234

(5) Where it is a question of hysterias which run a chronic course, accompanied by a moderate but constant production of hysterical symptoms, we find the strongest reason for regretting our lack of a therapy which is effective causally, but we also have most ground for the appreciation of the value of the cathartic procedure as a symptomatic therapy. In such cases we have to do with the mischief produced by an aetiology that persists chronically. Everything depends on reinforcing the patient’s nervous system in its capacity to resist; and we must reflect that the existence of a hysterical symptom means a weakening of the resistance of that nervous system and represents a factor predisposing to hysteria. As can be seen from the mechanism of monosymptomatic hysteria, a new hysterical symptom is most easily formed in connection with, and on the analogy of, one that is already present. The point at which a symptom has already broken through once (see p. 181) forms a weak spot at which it will break through again the next time. A psychical group that has once been split off plays the part of a ‘provoking’ crystal from which a crystallization which would otherwise not have occurred will start with the greatest facility. To get rid of the symptoms which are already present, to undo the psychical changes which underlie them, is to give back to patients the whole amount of their capacity for resistance, so that they can successfully withstand the effects of the noxious agency. A very great deal can be done for such patients by means of prolonged supervision and occasional ‘chimney-sweeping’ (p. 29).

(6) It remains for me to mention the apparent contradiction between the admission that not all hysterical symptoms are psychogenic and the assertion that they can all be got rid of by a psychotherapeutic procedure. The solution lies in the fact that some of these non-psychogenic symptoms (stigmata, for instance) are, it is true, indications of illness, but cannot be described as ailments; and consequently it is not of practical importance if they persist after the successful treatment of the illness. As regards other such symptoms, it seems to be the case that in some roundabout way they are carried off along with the psychogenic symptoms, just as, perhaps, in some roundabout way they are after all dependent on a psychical causation.

Studies On Hysteria

235

I must now consider the difficulties and disadvantages of our therapeutic procedure, so far as they do not become obvious to everyone from the case histories reported above or from the remarks on the technique of the method which follow later. I will enumerate and indicate these difficulties rather that elaborate them.

The procedure is laborious and time-consuming for the physician. It presupposes great interest in psychological happenings, but personal concern for the patients as well. I cannot imagine bringing myself to delve into the psychical mechanism of a hysteria in anyone who struck me as low-minded and repellent, and who, on closer acquaintance, would not be capable of arousing human sympathy; whereas I can keep the treatment of a tabetic or rheumatic patient apart from personal approval of this kind. The demands made on the patient are not less. The procedure is not applicable at all below a certain level of intelligence, and it is made very much more difficult by any trace of feebleness of mind. The complete consent and complete attention of the patients are needed, but above all their confidence, since the analysis invariably leads to the disclosure of the most intimate and secret psychical events. A good number of the patients who would be suitable for this form of treatment abandon the doctor as soon as the suspicion begins to dawn on them of the direction in which the investigation is leading. For patients such as these the doctor has remained a stranger. With others, who have decided to put themselves in his hands and place their confidence in him - a step which in other such situations is only taken voluntarily and never at the doctor’s request - with these other patients, I say, it is almost inevitable that their personal relation to him will force itself, for a time at least, unduly into the foreground. It seems, indeed, as though an influence of this kind on the part of the doctor is a sine qua non to a solution of the problem. I do not think any essential difference is made in this respect whether hypnosis can be used or whether it has to be by-passed and replaced by something else. But reason demands that we should emphasize the fact that these drawbacks, though they are inseparable from our procedure, cannot be laid at its door. On the contrary, it is quite clear that they are based on the predetermining conditions of the neuroses that are to be cured and that they must attach to any medical activity which involves intense preoccupation with the patient and leads to a psychical change in him. I have not been able to attribute any deleterious effects or danger to the employment of hypnosis, though I made copious use of it in some of my cases. Where I caused damage, the reasons lay elsewhere and deeper. If I survey my therapeutic efforts during the last few years since the communications made by my honoured teacher and friend Josef Breuer showed me the use of the cathartic method, I believe that in spite of everything, I have done much more, and more frequent, good than harm and have accomplished some things which no other therapeutic procedure could have achieved. It has on the whole, as the ‘Preliminary Communication’ put it, brought ‘considerable therapeutic advantages’.

Studies On Hysteria

236

There is one other advantage in the use of this procedure which I must emphasize. I know of no better way of getting to understand a severe case of complicated neurosis with a greater or lesser admixture of hysteria than by submitting it to an analysis by Breuer’s method. The first thing that happens is the disappearance of whatever exhibits a hysterical mechanism. In the meantime I have learnt in the course of the analysis to interpret the residual phenomena and to trace their aetiology; and in this way I have secured a firm basis for deciding which of the weapons in the therapeutic armoury against the neuroses is indicated in the case concerned. When I reflect on the difference that I usually find between my judgement on a case of neurosis before and after an analysis of this kind, I am almost inclined to regard an analysis as essential for the understanding of a neurotic illness. Moreover, I have adopted the habit of combining cathartic psychotherapy with a rest-cure which can, if need be, be extended into a complete treatment of feeding-up on Weir Mitchell lines. This gives me the advantage of being able on the one hand to avoid the very disturbing introduction of new psychical impressions during a psychotherapy, and on the other hand to remove the boredom of a rest-cure, in which the patients not infrequently fall into the habit of harmful day-dreaming. It might be expected that the often very considerable psychical work imposed on the patients during a cathartic treatment, and the excitations resulting from the reproduction of traumatic experiences, would run counter to the intentions of the Weir Mitchell rest cure and would hinder the successes which we are accustomed to see it bring about. But the opposite is in fact the case. A combination such as this between the Breuer and Weir Mitchell procedures produces all the physical improvement that we expect from the latter, as well as having a far-reaching psychical influence such as never results from a rest-cure without psychotherapy.

Studies On Hysteria

237

(2)

I will now return to my earlier remark that in my attempts to apply Breuer’s method more extensively I came upon the difficulty that a number of patients could not be hypnotized, although their diagnosis was one of hysteria and it seemed probable that the psychical mechanism described by us operated in them. I needed hypnosis to extend their memory in order to find the pathogenic recollections which were not present in their ordinary consciousness. I was obliged therefore either to give up the idea of treating such patients or to endeavour to bring about this extension in some other way.

I was able as little as anyone else to explain why it is that one person can be hypnotized and another not, and thus I could not adopt a causal method of meeting the difficulty. I noticed, however, that in some patients the obstacle lay still further back: they refused even any attempt at hypnosis. The idea then occurred to me one day that the two cases might be identical and that both might signify an unwillingness; that people who were not hypnotizable were people who had a psychical objection to hypnosis, whether their objection was expressed as unwillingness or not. I am not clear in my mind whether I can maintain this view.

The problem was, however, how to by-pass hypnosis and yet obtain the pathogenic recollections. This I succeeded in doing in the following manner.

When, at our first interview, I asked my patients if they remembered what had originally occasioned the symptom concerned, in some cases they said they knew nothing of it, while in others they brought forward something which they described as an obscure recollection and could not pursue further. If, following the example of Bernheim when he awoke in his patients impressions from their somnambulistic state which had ostensibly been forgotten (cf. p. 98 f.), I now became insistent - if I assured them that they did know it, that it would occur to their minds, - then, in the first cases, something did actually occur to them, and, in the others, their memory went a step further. After this I became still more insistent; I told the patients to lie down and deliberately close their eyes in order to ‘concentrate’ - all of which had at least some resemblance to hypnosis. I then found that without any hypnosis new recollections emerged which went further back and which probably related to our topic. Experiences like this made me think that it would in fact be possible for the pathogenic groups of ideas, that were after all certainly present, to be brought to light by mere insistence; and since this insistence involved effort on my part and so suggested the idea that I had to overcome a resistance, the situation led me at once to the theory that by means of my psychical work I had to overcome a psychical force in the patients which was opposed to the pathogenic ideas becoming conscious (being remembered). A new understanding seemed to open before my eyes when it occurred to me that this must no doubt be the same psychical force that had played a part in the generating of the hysterical symptom and had at that time prevented the pathogenic idea from becoming conscious. What kind of force could one suppose was operative here, and what motive could have put it into operation?  I could easily form an opinion on this. For I already had at my disposal a few completed analyses in which I had come to know examples of ideas that were pathogenic, and had been forgotten and put out of consciousness. From these I recognized a universal characteristic of such ideas: they were all of a distressing nature, calculated to arouse the affects of shame, of self-reproach and of psychical pain, and the feeling of being harmed; they were all of a kind that one would prefer not to have experienced, that one would rather forget. From all this there arose, as it were automatically, the thought of defence. It has indeed been generally admitted by psychologists that the acceptance of a new idea (acceptance in the sense of believing or of recognizing as real) is dependent on the nature and trend of the ideas already united in the ego, and they have invented special technical names for this process of censorship to which the new arrival must submit. The patient’s ego had been approached by an idea which proved to be incompatible, which provoked on the part of the ego a repelling force of which the purpose was defence against this incompatible idea. This defence was in fact successful. The idea in question was forced out of consciousness and out of memory. The psychical trace of it was apparently lost to view. Nevertheless that trace must be there. If I endeavoured to direct the patient’s attention to it, I became aware, in the form of resistance, of the same force as had shown itself in the form of repulsion when the symptom was generated. If, now, I could make it appear probable that the idea had become pathogenic precisely as a result of its expulsion and repression, the chain would seem complete. In several of the discussions on our case histories, and in a short paper on ‘The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’ (1894a), I have attempted to sketch out the psychological hypotheses by the help of which this causal connection - the fact of conversion - can be demonstrated.

Studies On Hysteria

238

Thus a psychical force, aversion on the part of the ego, had originally driven the pathogenic idea out of association and was now opposing its return to memory. The hysterical patient’s ‘not knowing’ was in fact a ‘not wanting to know’ - a not wanting which might be to a greater or less extent conscious. The task of the therapist, therefore, lies in overcoming by his psychical work this resistance to association. He does this in the first place by ‘insisting’, by making use of psychical compulsion to direct the patients’ attention to the ideational traces of which he is in search. His efforts, however, are not exhausted by this, but, as I shall show, they take on other forms in the course of an analysis and call in other psychical forces to assist them.

I must dwell on the question of insistence a little longer, Simple assurances such as ‘of course you know it’, ‘tell me all the same’, ‘you’ll think of it in a moment’ do not carry us very far. Even with patients in a state of ‘concentration’ the thread breaks off after a few sentences. It should not be forgotten, however, that it is always a question here of a quantitative comparison, of a struggle between motive forces of different degrees of strength or intensity. Insistence on the part of a strange doctor who is unfamiliar with what is happening is not powerful enough to deal with the resistance to association in a serious case of hysteria. We must think of stronger means.

In these circumstances I make use in the first instance of a small technical device. I inform the patient that, a moment later, I shall apply pressure to his forehead, and I assure him that, all the time the pressure lasts, he will see before him a recollection in the form of a picture or will have it in his thoughts in the form of an idea occurring to him; and I pledge him to communicate this picture or idea to me, whatever it may be. He is not to keep it to himself because he may happen to think it is not, or because it would be too disagreeable for him to say it. There is to be no criticism of it, no reticence, either for emotional reasons or because it is judged unimportant. Only in this manner can we find what we are in search of, but in this manner we shall find it infallibly. Having said this, I press for a few seconds on the forehead of the patient as he lies in front of me; I then leave go and ask quietly, as though there were no question of a disappointment: ‘What did you see?’ or ‘ What occurred to you?’

Studies On Hysteria

239

This procedure has taught me much and has also invariably achieved its aim. To-day I can no longer do without it. I am of course aware that a pressure on the forehead like this could be replaced by any other signal or by some other exercise of physical influence on the patient; but since the patient is lying in front of me, pressure on his forehead, or taking his head between my two hands, seems to be the most convenient way of applying suggestion for the purpose I have in view. It would be possible for me to say by way of explaining the efficacy of this device that it corresponded to a ‘momentarily intensified hypnosis’; but the mechanism of hypnosis is so puzzling to me that I would rather not make use of it as an explanation. I am rather of opinion that the advantage of the procedure lies in the fact that by means of it I dissociate the patient’s attention from his conscious searching and reflecting - from everything, in short, on which he can employ his will - in the same sort of way in which this is effected by staring into a crystal ball, and so on. The conclusion which I draw from the fact that what I am looking for always appears under the pressure of my hand is as follows. The pathogenic idea which has ostensibly been forgotten is always lying ready ‘close at hand’ and can be reached by associations that are easily accessible. It is merely a question of getting some obstacle out of the way. This obstacle seems once again to be the subject’s will, and different people can learn with different degrees of ease to free themselves from their intentional thinking and to adopt an attitude of completely objective observation towards the psychical processes taking place in them.

What emerges under the pressure of my hand is not always a ‘forgotten’ recollection; it is only in the rarest cases that the actual pathogenic recollections lie so easily to hand on the surface. It is much more frequent for an idea to emerge which is an intermediate link in the chain of associations between the idea from which we start and the pathogenic idea which we are in search of; or it may be an idea which forms the starting point of a new series of thoughts and recollections at the end of which the pathogenic idea will be found. It is true that where this happens my pressure has not revealed the pathogenic idea - which would in any case be incomprehensible, torn from its context and without being led up to - but it has pointed the way to it and has shown the direction in which further investigation is to be made. The idea that is first provoked by the pressure may in such cases be a familiar recollection which has never been repressed. If on our way to the pathogenic idea the thread is broken off once more, it only needs a repetition of the procedure, of the pressure, to give us fresh bearings and a fresh starting-point.

Studies On Hysteria

240

On yet other occasions the pressure of the hand provokes a memory which is familiar in itself to the patient, but the appearance of which astonishes him because he has forgotten its relation to the idea from which we started. This relation is then confirmed in the further course of the analysis. All these consequences of the pressure give one a deceptive impression of there being a superior intelligence outside the patient’s consciousness which keeps a large amount of psychical material arranged for particular purposes and has fixed a planned order for its return to consciousness. I suspect, however, that this unconscious second intelligence is no more than an appearance.

In every fairly complicated analysis the work is carried on by the repeated, indeed continuous, use of this procedure of pressure on the forehead. Sometimes this procedure, starting from where the patient’s waking retrospection breaks off, points the further path through memories of which he has remained aware; sometimes it draws attention to connections which have been forgotten; sometimes it calls up and arranges recollections which have been withdrawn from association for many years but which can still be recognized as recollections; and sometimes, finally, as the climax of its achievement in the way of reproductive thinking, it causes thoughts to emerge which the patient will never recognize as his own, which he never remembers, although he admits that the context calls for them inexorably, and while he becomes convinced that it is precisely these ideas that are leading to the conclusion of the analysis and the removal of his symptoms.

Studies On Hysteria

241

I will try to enumerate a few instances of the excellent results brought about by this technical procedure.

I treated a girl suffering from an intolerable tussis nervosa which had dragged on for six years. It obviously drew nourishment from every common catarrh, but must nevertheless have had strong psychical motives. All other kinds of therapy had long proved impotent against it. I therefore tried to remove the symptom by means of psychical analysis. All she knew was that her nervous cough began when, at the age of fourteen, she was boarding with an aunt. She maintained that she knew nothing of any mental agitations at that time and did not believe that there was any motive for her complaint. Under the pressure of my hand she first of all remembered a big dog. She then recognized the picture in her memory: it was a dog of her aunt’s which became attached to her, followed her about everywhere, and so on. And it now occurred to her, without further prompting, that this dog died, that the children gave it a solemn burial and that her cough started on the way back from the funeral. I asked why, but had once more to call in the help of a pressure. The thought then came to her: ‘Now I am quite alone in the world. No one here loves me. This creature was my only friend, and now I have lost him.’ She continued her story. ‘The cough disappeared when I left my aunt’s, but it came on again eighteen months later.’ ‘Why was that?’ ‘I don’t know.’ I pressed again. She recalled the news of her uncle’s death, when the cough started again, and also recalled having a similar train of thought. Her uncle seems to have been the only member of the family who had shown any feeling for her, who had loved her. Here, then, was the pathogenic idea. No one loved her, they preferred everyone else to her, she, did not deserve to be loved, and so on. But there was something attaching to the idea of ‘love’ which there was a strong resistance to her telling me. The analysis broke off before this was cleared up.

Studies On Hysteria

242

Some time ago I was asked to relieve an elderly lady of her attacks of anxiety, though judging by her traits of character she was scarcely suitable for treatment of this kind. Since her menopause she had become excessively pious, and she used to receive me at each visit armed with a small ivory crucifix concealed in her hand, as though I were the Evil One. Her anxiety attacks, which were of a hysterical character, went back to her early girlhood and, according to her, originated from the use of a preparation of iodine intended to reduce a moderate swelling of her thyroid gland. I naturally rejected this derivation and tried to find another instead of it which would harmonize better with my views on the aetiology of the neuroses. I asked her first for an impression from her youth which stood in a causal relation to her anxiety attacks, and, under the pressure of my hand, a memory emerged of her reading what is known as an ‘edifying’ book, in which there occurred a mention, in a sufficiently pious strain, of the sexual processes. The passage in question made an impression on the girl which was quite the reverse of the author’s intention: she burst into tears and flung the book away. This was before her first anxiety attack. A second pressure on the patient’s forehead conjured up a further reminiscence - the recollection of a tutor of her brothers who had manifested a great admiration for her and towards whom she herself had had feelings of some warmth. This recollection culminated in the reproduction of an evening in her parents’ house when they had all sat round the table with the young man and had enjoyed themselves immensely in an entertaining conversation. During the night following that evening she was woken up by her first anxiety attack which, it is safe to say, had more to do with a repudiation of a sensual impulse than with any contemporary doses of iodine. - What prospect should I have had by any other method of revealing such a connection, against her own views and assertions, in this recalcitrant patient who was so prejudiced against me and every form of mundane therapy?

Studies On Hysteria

243

Another example concerns a young, happily-married woman. As long ago as in her early girlhood she used for some time to be found every morning in a stuporose condition, with her limbs rigid, her mouth open and her tongue protruding; and now once again she was suffering, on waking, from attacks which were similar though not so severe. Since deep hypnosis turned out not to be obtainable, I began to investigate while she was in a state of concentration. At my first pressure I assured her that she would see something that was directly related to the causes of her condition in her childhood. She was quiet and co-operative. She saw once more the house in which she had spent her early girlhood, her own room, the position of her bed, her grandmother, who had lived with them at that time, and one of her governesses of whom she had been very fond. A number of small scenes, all of them unimportant, which took place in these rooms and between these people followed one after the other; they were concluded by the departure of the governess, who left in order to get married. I could make nothing at all of these reminiscences; I could not establish any relation between them and the aetiology of the attacks. Various circumstances showed, however, that they belonged to the same period at which the attacks first appeared. But before I was able to proceed with the analysis I had occasion to talk to a colleague who in former years had been the family doctor of my patient’s parents. He gave me the following information. At the time at which he was treating the girl, who was approaching maturity and very well developed physically, for her first attacks, he was struck by the excessive affectionateness of the relation between her and the governess who was at that time in the house. He became suspicious and induced the grandmother to keep an eye on this relationship. After a short time the old lady was able to report to him that the governess was in the habit of visiting the child in bed at night and that after such nights the child was invariably found next morning in an attack. They did not hesitate after this to arrange for the silent removal of this corrupter of youth. The children and even the mother were encouraged to believe that the governess had left in order to get married. - My therapy, which was immediately successful, consisted in giving the young woman the information I had received.

Studies On Hysteria

244

The revelations which one obtains through the procedure of pressing occasionally appear in a very remarkable form and in circumstances which make the assumption of there being an unconscious intelligence even more tempting. Thus I remember a lady who had suffered for many years from obsessions and phobias and who referred me to her childhood for the genesis of her illness but was also quite unable to say what might be to blame for it. She was frank and intelligent and she put up only a remarkably small conscious resistance. (I may remark in parenthesis that the psychical mechanism of obsessions has a very great deal of internal kinship with hysterical symptoms and that the technique of analysis is the same for both of them.) When I asked this lady whether she had seen anything or had any recollection under the pressure of my hand, she replied: ‘Neither the one nor the other, but a word has suddenly occurred to me.’ ‘A single word?’ ‘Yes, but it sounds too silly.’ 'Say it all the same.’ ‘Concierge.’ ‘Nothing else?’ ‘No.’ I pressed a second time and once more an isolated word shot through her mind: 'Night-gown.’ I saw now that this was a new sort of method of answering, and by pressing repeatedly I brought out what seemed to be a meaningless series of words: ‘Concierge’ - 'night-gown’ - ’bed’ - ’town’ - ’farm-cart.’ ‘What does all this mean?’ I asked. She reflected for a moment and the following thought occurred to her: ‘It must be the story that has just come into my head. When I was ten years old and my next elder sister was twelve, she went raving mad one night and had to be tied down and taken into the town on a farm-cart. I remember perfectly that it was the concierge who overpowered her and afterwards went with her to the asylum as well.’  We pursued this method of investigation and our oracle produced another series of words, which, though we were not able to interpret all of them, made it possible to continue this story and lead on from it to another one. Soon, moreover, the meaning of this reminiscence became clear. Her sister’s illness had made such a deep impression on her because the two of them shared a secret; they slept in one room and on a particular night they had both been subjected to sexual assaults by a certain man. The mention of this sexual trauma in the patient’s childhood revealed not only the origin of her first obsessions but also the trauma which subsequently produced the pathogenic effects.

The peculiarity of this case lay only in the emergence of isolated key-words which we had to work into sentences; for the appearance of disconnectedness and irrelevance which characterized the words emitted in this oracular fashion applies equally to the complete ideas and scenes which are normally produced under my pressure. When these are followed up, it invariably turns out that the apparently disconnected reminiscences are closely linked in thought and that they lead quite straight to the pathogenic factor we are looking for. For this reason I am glad to recall a case of analysis in which my confidence in the products of pressure were first put to a hard test but afterwards brilliantly justified.

Studies On Hysteria

245

A very intelligent and apparently happy young married woman had consulted me about an obstinate pain in her abdomen which was resistant to treatment. I recognized that the pain was situated in the abdominal wall and must be referred to palpable muscular indurations, and I ordered local treatment. Some months later I saw the patient again and she said to me: ‘The pain I had then passed off after the treatment you recommended, and it stayed away for a long time; but now it has come back in a nervous form. I know that is so, because I no longer have it, as I used to, when I make certain movements, but only at particular times - for instance, when I wake up in the morning and when I am agitated in certain ways.’ The lady’s diagnosis was quite correct. It was now a question of finding out the cause of the pain, and she could not help me about this while she was in an uninfluenced state. When I asked her, in concentration and under the pressure of my hand, whether anything occurred to her or whether she saw anything, she decided in favour of seeing and began to describe her visual pictures. She saw something like a sun with rays, which I naturally took to be a phosphene, produced by pressure on the eyes. I expected that something more serviceable would follow. But she went on: ‘Stars of a curious pale blue light, like moon light’ and so on, all of which I took to be no more than flickering, flashes and bright specks before her eyes. I was already prepared to regard this experiment as a failure and I was wondering how I could make an inconspicuous retreat from the affair, when my attention was attracted by one of the phenomena which she described. She saw a large black cross, leaning over, which had round its edges the same shimmer of light with which all her other pictures had shone, and on whose cross-beam a small flame flickered. Clearly there could no longer be any question of a phosphene here. I now listened carefully. Quantities of pictures appeared bathed in the same light, curious signs looking rather like Sanskrit; figures like triangles, among them a large triangle; the cross once more. . . . This time I suspected an allegorical meaning and asked what the cross could be. ‘It probably means pain,’ she replied. I objected that by ‘cross’ one usually meant a moral burden. What lay concealed behind the pain? She could not say, and went on with her visions: a sun with golden rays. And this she was also able to interpret. ‘It’s God, the primaeval force.’ Then came a gigantic lizard which regarded her enquiringly but not alarmingly. Then a heap of snakes. Then once more a sun, but with mild, silver rays; and in front of her, between her and this source of light, a grating which hid the centre of the sun from her. I had known for some time that what I had to deal with were allegories and at once asked the meaning of this last picture. She answered without hesitation: ‘The sun is perfection, the ideal, and the grating represents my weaknesses and faults which stand between me and the ideal.’ ‘Are you reproaching yourself, then? Are you dissatisfied with yourself: ‘Yes indeed.’ ‘Since when?’ ‘Since I have been a member of the Theosophical Society and have been reading its publications. I always had a low opinion of myself.’ ‘What has made the strongest impression on you recently?’ ‘A translation from the Sanskrit which is just now coming out in instalments.’ A minute later I was being initiated into her mental struggles and her self-reproaches, and was hearing about a small episode which gave rise to a self-reproach - an occasion on which what had previously been an organic pain now for the first time appeared as the consequence of the conversion of an excitation. The pictures which I had first taken for phosphenes were symbols of trains of thought influenced by the occult and were perhaps actually emblems from the title-pages of occult books.

Studies On Hysteria

246

Hitherto I have been so warm in my praises of the achievements of pressure as an auxiliary procedure, and I have the whole time so greatly neglected the aspect of defence or resistance, that I may no doubt have created an impression that this little device has put us in a position to master the psychical obstacles to a cathartic treatment. But to believe this would be to make a serious mistake. Gains of this kind, so far as I can see, are not to be looked for in treatment. Here, as elsewhere, a large change requires a large amount of work. The procedure by pressure is no more than a trick for temporarily taking unawares an ego which is eager for defence. In all fairly serious cases the ego recalls its aims once more and proceeds with its resistance.

I must mention the different forms in which this resistance appears. One is that, as a rule, the pressure procedure fails on the first or second occasion. The patient then declares, very disappointedly: ‘I expected something would occur to me, but all I thought was how tensely I was expecting it. Nothing came.’ The fact of the patient putting himself on his guard like this does not yet amount to an obstacle. We can say in reply: ‘It’s precisely because you were too curious; it will work next time.’ And in fact it does work. It is remarkable how often patients, even the most docile and intelligent, can completely forget their undertaking, though they had agreed to it beforehand. They promised to say whatever occurred to them under the pressure of my hand, irrespectively of whether it seemed to them relevant or not, and of whether it was agreeable to them to say it or not - to say it, that is, without selecting and without being influenced by criticism or affect. But they do not keep this promise; it is evidently beyond their strength to do so. The work keeps on coming to a stop and they keep on maintaining that this time nothing has occurred to them. We must not believe what they say, we must always assume, and tell them, too, that they have kept something back because they thought it unimportant or found it distressing. We must insist on this, we must repeat the pressure and represent ourselves as infallible, till at last we are really told something. The patient then adds: ‘I could have told you that the first time.’ ‘Why didn’t you say it?’ ‘I couldn’t believe it could be that. It was only when it came back every time that I made up my mind to say it.’ Or else: ‘I hoped it wouldn’t be that of all things. I could well do without saying that. It was only when it refused to be repressed that I saw I shouldn’t be let off.’ Thus after the event the patient betrays the motives for a resistance which he refused to admit to begin with. He is evidently quite unable to do anything but put up resistance.

Studies On Hysteria

247

This resistance often conceals itself behind some remarkable excuses. ‘My mind is distracted to-day; the clock (or the piano in the next room) is disturbing me.’ I have learned to answer such remarks: ‘Not at all. You have at this moment come up against something that you had rather not say. It won’t do any good. Go on thinking about it.’ The longer the pause between my hand-pressure and the patient’s beginning to speak, the more suspicious I become and the more it is to be feared that the patient is re-arranging what has occurred to him and is mutilating it in his reproduction of it. A most important piece of information is often announced as being a redundant accessory, like an opera prince disguised as a beggar. ‘Something has occurred to me now, but it has nothing to do with the subject. I’m only saying it because you want to know every thing.’ Accompanying words such as these usually introduce the long-sought solution. I always prick up my ears when I hear a patient speak so disparagingly of something that has occurred to him. For it is an indication that defence has been successful if the pathogenic ideas seem, when they re-emerge, to have so little importance. From this we can infer in what the process of defence consisted: it consisted in turning a strong idea into a weak one, in robbing it of its affect.

A pathogenic recollection is thus recognizable, among other things, by the fact that the patient describes it as unimportant and nevertheless only utters it under resistance. There are cases, too, in which the patient tries to disown it even after its return. ‘Something has occurred to me now, but you obviously put it into my head.’ Or, ‘I know what you expect me to answer. Of course you believe I’ve thought this or that.’ A particularly clever method of disavowal lies in saying: ‘Something has occurred to me now, it’s true, but it seems to me as if I’d put it in deliberately. It doesn’t seem to be a reproduced thought at all.’ In all such cases, I remain unshakeably firm. I avoid entering into any of these distinctions but explain to the patient that they are only forms of his resistance and pretexts raised by it against reproducing this particular memory, which we must recognize in spite of all this.

When memories return in the form of pictures our task is in general easier than when they return as thoughts. Hysterical patients, who are as a rule of a ‘visual’ type, do not make such difficulties for the analyst as those with obsessions.

Once a picture has emerged from the patient’s memory, we may hear him say that it becomes fragmentary and obscure in proportion as he proceeds with his description of it. The patient is, as it were, getting rid of it by turning it into words. We go on to examine the memory picture itself in order to discover the direction in which our work is to proceed.  ‘Look at the picture once more. Has it disappeared?’ ‘Most of it, yes, but I still see this detail.’ ‘Then this residue must still mean something. Either you will see something new in addition to it, or something will occur to you in connection with it.’ When this work has been accomplished, the patient’s field of vision is once more free and we can conjure up another picture. On other occasions, however, a picture of this kind will remain obstinately before the patient’s inward eye, in spite of his having described it; and this is an indication to me that he still has something important to tell me about the topic of the picture. As soon as this has been done the picture vanishes, like a ghost that has been laid.

Studies On Hysteria

248

It is of course of great importance for the progress of the analysis that one should always turn out to be in the right vis-à-vis the patient, otherwise one would always be dependent on what he chose to tell one. It is therefore consoling to know that the pressure technique in fact never fails, apart from a single case, which I shall have to discuss later but of which I can at once say that it corresponds to a particular motive for resistance. It can of course happen that one makes use of the procedure in circumstances in which there is nothing for it to reveal. For instance, we may ask for the further aetiology of a symptom when we already have it completely before us, or we may investigate a psychical genealogy of a symptom, such as a pain, which is in fact a somatic one. In such cases the patient will equally assert that nothing has occurred to him and this time he will be in the right. We can avoid doing the patient an injustice if we make it a quite general rule all through the analysis to keep an eye on his facial expression as he lies quietly before us. We can then learn to distinguish without any difficulty the restful state of mind that accompanies the real absence of a recollection from the tension and signs of emotion with which he tries to disavow the emerging recollection, in obedience to defence. Moreover, experiences like these make it possible also to use the pressure technique for purposes of differential diagnosis.

Thus even with the assistance of the pressure technique the work is by no means easy. The one advantage that we gain is of learning from the results of this procedure the direction in which we have to conduct our enquiries and the things that we have to insist upon to the patient. With some cases this suffices. The principal point is that I should guess the secret and tell it to the patient straight out; and he is then as a rule obliged to abandon his rejection of it. In other cases more is required. The patient’s persisting resistance is indicated by the fact that connections are broken, solutions fail to appear, the pictures are recalled indistinctly and incompletely. Looking back from a later period of an analysis to an earlier one, we are often astonished to realize in what a mutilated manner all the ideas and scenes emerged which we extracted from the patient by the procedure of pressing. Precisely the essential elements of the picture were missing - its relation to himself or to the main contents of his thoughts - and that is why it remained unintelligible.

Studies On Hysteria

249

I will give one or two examples of the way in which a censoring of this kind operates when pathogenic recollections first emerge. For instance, the patient sees the upper part of a woman’s body with the dress not properly fastened - out of carelessness, it seems. It is not until much later that he fits a head to this torso and thus reveals a particular person and his relation to her. Or he brings up a reminiscence from his childhood of two boys. What they look like is quite obscure to him, but they are said to have been guilty of some misdeed. It is not until many months later and after the analysis has made great advances that he sees this reminiscence once more and recognizes himself in one of the children and his brother in the other.

What means have we at our disposal for overcoming this continual resistance?  Few, but they include almost all those by which one man can ordinarily exert a psychical influence on another. In the first place, we must reflect that a psychical resistance, especially one that has been in force for a long time, can only be resolved slowly and by degrees, and we must wait patiently. In the next place, we may reckon on the intellectual interest which the patient begins to feel after working for a short time. By explaining things to him, by giving him information about the marvellous world of psychical processes into which we ourselves only gained insight by such analyses, we make him himself into a collaborator, induce him to regard himself with the objective interest of an investigator, and thus push back his resistance, resting as it does on an affective basis. But lastly - and this remains the strongest lever - we must endeavour, after we have discovered the motives for his defence, to deprive them of their value or even to replace them by more powerful ones. This no doubt is where it ceases to be possible to state psychotherapeutic activity in formulas. One works to the best of one’s power, as an elucidator (where ignorance has given rise to fear), as a teacher, as the representative of a freer or superior view of the world, as a father confessor who gives absolution, as it were, by a continuance of his sympathy and respect after the confession has been made. One tries to give the patient human assistance, so far as this is allowed by the capacity of one’s own personality and by the amount of sympathy that one can feel for the particular case. It is an essential precondition for such psychical activity that we should have more or less divined the nature of the case and the motives of the defence operating in it, and fortunately the technique of insistence and pressure takes us as far as this. The more such riddles we have already solved, the easier we may find it to guess a new one and the sooner we shall be able to start on the truly curative psychical work. For it is well to recognize this clearly: the patient only gets free from the hysterical symptom by reproducing the pathogenic impressions that caused it and by giving utterance to them with an expression of affect, and thus the therapeutic task consists solely in inducing him to do so; when once this task has been accomplished there is nothing left for the physician to correct or to remove. Whatever may be required for this purpose in the way of counter-suggestions has already been expended during the struggle against the resistance. The situation may be compared with the unlocking of a locked door, after which opening it by turning the handle offers no further difficulty.

Besides the intellectual motives which we mobilize to overcome the resistance, there is an affective factor, the personal influence of the physician, which we can seldom do without, and in a number of cases the latter alone is in a position to remove the resistance. The situation here is no different from what it is elsewhere in medicine and there is no therapeutic procedure of which one may say that it can do entirely without the co-operation of this personal factor.

Studies On Hysteria

250

(3)

In view of what I have said in the preceding section about the difficulties of my technique, which I have unsparingly exposed (I brought them together, incidentally, from the severest cases; things often turn out very much more conveniently) - in view of all this, then, everyone will no doubt feel inclined to ask whether it would not be more expedient, instead of putting up with all these troubles, to make a more energetic use of hypnosis or to restrict the use of the cathartic method to patients who can be put under deep hypnosis. As regards the latter proposal I should have to answer that in that case the number of suitable patients, so far as my skill is concerned, would dwindle far too much; and I would meet the first piece of advice with the suspicion that the forcible imposition of hypnosis might not spare us much resistance. My experiences on this point, oddly enough, have not been numerous, and I cannot, therefore, go beyond a suspicion. But where I have carried out a cathartic treatment under hypnosis instead of under concentration, I did not find that this diminished the work I had to do. Not long ago I completed a treatment of this kind in the course of which I caused a hysterical paralysis of the legs to clear up. The patient passed into a state which was very different psychically from waking and which was characterized physically by the fact that it was impossible for her to open her eyes or get up till I had called out to her: ‘Now wake up!’ None the less I have never come across greater resistance than in this case. I attached no importance to these physical signs, and towards the end of the treatment, which lasted ten months, they had ceased to be noticeable. But in spite of this the patient’s state while we were working lost none of its psychical characteristics - the capacity she possessed for remembering unconscious material and her quite special relation to the figure of the physician. On the other hand, I have given an example in the case history of Frau Emmy von N. of a cathartic treatment in the deepest somnambulism in which resistance played scarcely any part. But it is also true that I learnt from that lady nothing whose telling might have called for any special overcoming of objections, nothing that she could not have told me even in a waking state, supposing we had been acquainted for some time and she had thought fairly highly of me. I never reached the true causes of her illness, which were no doubt identical with the causes of her relapse after my treatment (for this was my first attempt with this method); and the only occasion on which I happened to ask her for a reminiscence which involved an erotic element I found her just as reluctant and untrustworthy in what she told me as I did later with any of my non-somnambulistic patients. I have already spoken in that lady’s case history of the resistance which she put up even during somnambulism to other requests and suggestions of mine. I have become altogether sceptical about the value of hypnosis in facilitating cathartic treatments, since I have experienced instances in which during deep somnambulism there has been absolute therapeutic recalcitrance, where in other respects the patient has been perfectly obedient. I reported a case of this kind briefly on p. 90 n., and I could add others. I may admit, too, that this experience has corresponded pretty well to the requirement I insist upon that there shall be a quantitative relation between cause and effect in the psychical field as well.

Studies On Hysteria

251

In what I have hitherto said the idea of resistance has forced its way into the foreground. I have shown how, in the course of our therapeutic work, we have been led to the view that hysteria originates through the repression of an incompatible idea from a motive of defence. On this view, the repressed idea would persist as a memory trace that is weak (has little intensity), while the affect that is torn from it would be used for a somatic innervation. (That is, the excitation is ‘converted’.) It would seem, then, that it is precisely through its repression that the idea becomes the cause of morbid symptoms - that is to say, becomes pathogenic. A hysteria exhibiting this psychical mechanism may be given the name of ‘defence hysteria’.

Now both of us, Breuer and I, have repeatedly spoken of two other kinds of hysteria, for which we have introduced the terms ‘hypnoid hysteria’ and ‘retention hysteria’. It was hypnoid hysteria which was the first of all to enter our field of study. I could not, indeed, find a better example of it than Breuer’s first case, which stands at the head of our case histories. Breuer has put forward for such cases of hypnoid hysteria a psychical mechanism which is substantially different from that of defence by conversion. In his view what happens in hypnoid hysteria is that an idea becomes pathogenic because it has been received during a special psychical state and has from the first remained outside the ego. No psychical force has therefore been required in order to keep it apart from the ego and no resistance need be aroused if we introduce it into the ego with the help of mental activity during somnambulism. And Anna O.’s case history in fact shows no sign of any such resistance.

I regard this distinction as so important that, on the strength of it, I willingly adhere to this hypothesis of there being a hypnoid hysteria. Strangely enough, I have never in my own experience met with a genuine hypnoid hysteria. Any that I took in hand has turned into a defence hysteria. It is not, indeed, that I have never had to do with symptoms which demonstrably arose during dissociated states of consciousness and were obliged for that reason to remain excluded from the ego. This was sometimes so in my cases as well; but I was able to show afterwards that the so-called hypnoid state owed its separation to the fact that in it a psychical group had come into effect which had previously been split off by defence. In short, I am unable to suppress a suspicion that somewhere or other the roots of hypnoid and defence hysteria come together, and that there the primary factor is defence. But I can say nothing about this.

My judgement is for the moment equally uncertain as regards ‘retention hysteria’, in which the therapeutic work is supposed equally to proceed without resistance. I had a case which I looked upon as a typical retention hysteria and I rejoiced in the prospect of an easy and certain success. But this success did not occur, though the work was in fact easy. I therefore suspect, though once again subject to all the reserve which is proper to ignorance, that at the basis of retention hysteria, too, an element of defence is to be found which has forced the whole process in the direction of hysteria. It is to be hoped that fresh observations will soon decide whether I am running the risk of falling into one-sidedness and error in thus favouring an extension of the concept of defence to the whole of hysteria.

Studies On Hysteria

252

I have dealt so far with the difficulties and technique of the cathartic method, and I should like to add a few indications as to the form assumed by an analysis when this technique is adopted. For me this is a highly interesting subject, but I cannot expect it to arouse similar interest in others, who have not yet carried out an analysis of this kind. I shall, it is true, once more be talking about the technique, but this time it will be about inherent difficulties for which we cannot hold the patients responsible and which must be partly the same in a hypnoid or retention hysteria as in the defence hysterias which I have before my eyes as a model. I approach this last part of my exposition with the expectation that the psychical characteristics which will be revealed in it may one day acquire a certain value as raw material for the dynamics of ideation.

The first and most powerful impression made upon one during such an analysis is certainly that the pathogenic psychical material which has ostensibly been forgotten, which is not at the ego’s disposal and which plays no part in association and memory, nevertheless in some fashion lies ready to hand and in correct and proper order. It is only a question of removing the resistances that bar the way to the material. In other respects this material is known, in the same way in which we are able to know anything; the correct connections between the separate ideas and between them and the non-pathogenic ones, which are frequently remembered, are in existence; they have been completed at some time and are stored up in the memory. The pathogenic psychical material appears to be the property of an intelligence which is not necessarily inferior to that of the normal ego. The appearance of a second personality is often presented in the most deceptive manner.

Whether this impression is justified, or whether in thinking this we are not dating back to the period of the illness an arrangement of the psychical material which in fact was made after recovery - these are questions which I should prefer not to discuss as yet, and not in these pages. The observations made during such analyses can in any case be most conveniently and clearly described if we regard them from the position that we are able to assume after recovery for the purpose of surveying the case as a whole.

As a rule, indeed, the situation is not as simple as we have represented it in particular cases - for instance, where there is one symptom only, which has arisen from one major trauma. We do not usually find a single hysterical symptom, but a number of them, partly independent of one another and partly linked together. We must not expect to meet with a single traumatic memory and a single pathogenic idea as its nucleus; we must be prepared for successions of partial traumas and concatenations of pathogenic trains of thought. A monosymptomatic traumatic hysteria is, as it were, an elementary organism, a unicellular creature, as compared with the complicated structure of such comparatively severe neuroses as we usually meet with.

Studies On Hysteria

253

The psychical material in such cases of hysteria presents itself as a structure in several dimensions which is stratified in at least three different ways. (I hope I shall presently be able to justify this pictorial mode of expression.) To begin with there is a nucleus consisting in memories of events or trains of thought in which the traumatic factor has culminated or the pathogenic idea has found its purest manifestation. Round this nucleus we find what is often an incredibly profuse amount of other mnemic material which has to be worked through in the analysis and which is, as we have said, arranged in a threefold order.

In the first place there is an unmistakable linear chronological order which obtains within each separate theme. As an example of this I will merely quote the arrangement of the material in Breuer’s analysis of Anna O. Let us take the theme of becoming deaf, of not hearing. This was differentiated according to seven sets of determinants, and under each of these seven headings ten to over a hundred individual memories were collected in chronological series (p. 35). It was as though we were examining a dossier that had been kept in good order. The analysis of my patient Emmy von N. contained similar files of memories though they were not so fully enumerated and described. These files form a quite general feature of every analysis and their contents always emerge in a chronological order which is as infallibly trustworthy as the succession of days of the week or names of the month in a mentally normal person. They make the work of analysis more difficult by the peculiarity that, in reproducing the memories, they reverse the order in which these originated. The freshest and newest experience in the file appears first, as an outer cover, and last of all comes the experience with which the series in fact began.

Studies On Hysteria

254

I have described such groupings of similar memories into collections arranged in linear sequences (like a file of documents, a packet, etc.) as constituting ‘themes’. These themes exhibit a second kind of arrangement. Each of them is - I can not express it in any other way - stratified concentrically round the pathogenic nucleus. It is not hard to say what produces this stratification, what diminishing or increasing magnitude is the basis of this arrangement. The contents of each particular stratum are characterized by an equal degree of resistance, and that degree increases in proportion as the strata are nearer to the nucleus. Thus there are zones within which there is all equal degree of modification of consciousness, and the different themes extend across these zones. The most peripheral strata contain the memories (or files), which, belonging to different themes, are easily remembered and have always been clearly conscious. The deeper we go the more difficult it becomes for the emerging memories to be recognized, till near the nucleus we come upon memories which the patient disavows even in reproducing them.

It is this peculiarity of the concentric stratification of the pathogenic psychical material which, as we shall hear, lends to the course of these analyses their characteristic features. A third kind of arrangement has still to be mentioned - the most important, but the one about which it is least easy to make any general statement. What I have in mind is an arrangement according to thought-content, the linkage made by a logical thread which reaches as far as the nucleus and tends to take an irregular and twisting path, different in every case. This arrangement has a dynamic character, in contrast to the morphological one of the two stratifications mentioned previously. While these two would be represented in a spatial diagram by a continuous line, curved or straight, the course of the logical chain would have to be indicated by a broken line which would pass along the most roundabout paths from the surface to the deepest layers and back, and yet would in general advance from the periphery to the central nucleus, touching at every intermediate halting-place - a line resembling the zig-zag line in the solution of a Knight’s Move problem, which cuts across the squares in the diagram of the chess-board.

Studies On Hysteria

255

I must dwell for a moment longer on this last simile in order to emphasize a point in which it does not do justice to the characteristics of the subject of the comparison. The logical chain corresponds not only to a zig-zag, twisted line, but rather to a ramifying system of lines and more particularly to a converging one. It contains nodal points at which two or more threads meet and thereafter proceed as one; and as a rule several threads which run independently, or which are connected at various points by side-paths, debouch into the nucleus. To put this in other words, it is very remarkable how often a symptom is determined in several ways, is ‘overdetermined’.

My attempt to demonstrate the organization of the pathogenic psychical material will be complete when I have introduced one more complication. For it can happen that there is more than one nucleus in the pathogenic material - if, for instance, we have to analyse a second outbreak of hysteria which has an aetiology of its own but is nevertheless connected with a first outbreak of acute hysteria which was got over years earlier. It is easy to imagine, if this is so, what additions there must be to the strata and paths of thought in order to establish a connection between the two pathogenic nuclei.

I shall now make one or two further remarks on the picture we have just arrived at of the organization of the pathogenic material. We have said that this material behaves like a foreign body, and that the treatment, too, works like the removal of a foreign body from the living tissue. We are now in a position to see where this comparison fails. A foreign body does not enter into any relation with the layers of tissue that surround it, although it modifies them and necessitates a reactive inflammation in them. Our pathogenic psychical group, on the other hand, does not admit of being cleanly extirpated from the ego. Its external strata pass over in every direction into portions of the normal ego; and, indeed, they belong to the latter just as much as to the pathogenic organization. In analysis the boundary between the two is fixed purely conventionally, now at one point, now at another, and in some places it cannot be laid down at all. The interior layers of the pathogenic organization are increasingly alien to the ego, but once more without there being any visible boundary at which the pathogenic material begins. In fact the pathogenic organization does not behave like a foreign body, but far more like an infiltrate. In this simile the resistance must be regarded as what is infiltrating. Nor does the treatment consist in extirpating something - psychotherapy is not able to do this for the present - but in causing the resistance to melt and in thus enabling the circulation to make its way into a region that has hitherto been cut off.

Studies On Hysteria

256

(I am making use here of a number of similes, all of which have only a very limited resemblance to my subject and which, moreover, are incompatible with one another. I am aware that this is so, and I am in no danger of over-estimating their value. But my purpose in using them is to throw light from different directions on a highly complicated topic which has never yet been represented. I shall therefore venture to continue in the following pages to introduce similes in the same manner, though I know this is not free from objection.)

If it were possible, after the case had been completely cleared up, to demonstrate the pathogenic material to a third person in what we now know is its complicated and multi-dimensional organization, we should rightly be asked how a camel like this got through the eye of the needle. For there is some justification for speaking of the ‘defile’ of consciousness. The term gains meaning and liveliness for a physician who carries out an analysis like this. Only a single memory at a time can enter ego-consciousness. A patient who is occupied in working through such a memory sees nothing of what is pushing after it and forgets what has already pushed its way through. If there are difficulties in the way of mastering this single pathogenic memory - as, for instance, if the patient does not relax his resistance against it, if he tries to repress or mutilate it - then the defile is, so to speak, blocked. The work is at a standstill, nothing more can appear, and the single memory which is in process of breaking through remains in front of the patient until he has taken it up into the breadth of his ego. The whole spatially-extended mass of psychogenic material is in this way drawn through a narrow cleft and thus arrives in consciousness cut up, as it were, into pieces or strips. It is the psychotherapist’s business to put these together once more into the organization which he presumes to have existed. Anyone who has a craving for further similes may think at this point of a Chinese puzzle.

If we are faced with starting such an analysis, in which we have reason to expect an organization of pathogenic material like this, we shall be assisted by what experience has taught us, namely that it is quite hopeless to try to penetrate directly to the nucleus of the pathogenic organization. Even if we ourselves could guess it, the patient would not know what to do with the explanation offered to him and would not be psychologically changed by it.

Studies On Hysteria

257

There is nothing for it but to keep at first to the periphery of the psychical structure. We begin by getting the patient to tell us what he knows and remembers, while we are at the same time already directing his attention and overcoming his slighter resistances by the use of the pressure procedure. Whenever we have opened a new path by thus pressing on his forehead, we may expect him to advance some distance without fresh resistance.

After we have worked in this way for some time, the patient begins as a rule to co-operate with us. A great number of reminiscences now occur to him, without our having to question him or set him tasks. What we have done is to make a path to an inner stratum within which the patient now has spontaneously at his disposal material that has an equal degree of resistance attaching to it. It is best to allow him for a time to reproduce such material without being influenced. It is true that he himself is not in a position to uncover important connections, but he may be left to clear up material lying within the same stratum. The things that he brings up in this way often seem disconnected, but they offer material which will be given point when a connection is discovered later on.

Here we have in general to guard against two things. If we interfere with the patient in his reproduction of the ideas that pour in on him, we may ‘bury’ things that have to be freed later with a great deal of trouble. On the other hand we must not over-estimate the patient’s unconscious ‘intelligence’ and leave the direction of the whole work to it. If I wanted to give a diagrammatic picture of our mode of operation, I might perhaps say that we ourselves undertake the opening up of inner strata, advancing radially, whereas the patient looks after the peripheral extension of the work.

Advances are brought about, as we know, by overcoming resistance in the manner already indicated. But before this, we have as a rule another task to perform. We must get hold of a piece of the logical thread, by whose guidance alone we may hope to penetrate to the interior. We cannot expect that the free communications made by the patient, the material from the most superficial strata, will make it easy for the analyst to recognize at what points the path leads into the depths or where he is to find the starting-points of the connections of thought of which he is in search. On the contrary, this is precisely what is carefully concealed; the account given by the patient sounds as if it were complete and self-contained. It is at first as though we were standing before a wall which shut out every prospect and prevents us from having any idea whether there is anything behind it, and if so, what.

Studies On Hysteria

258

But if we examine with a critical eye the account that the patient has given us without much trouble or resistance, we shall quite infallibly discover gaps and imperfections in it. At one point the train of thought will be visibly interrupted and patched up by the patient as best he may, with a turn of speech or an inadequate explanation; at another point we come upon a motive which would have to be described as a feeble one in a normal person. The patient will not recognize these deficiencies when his attention is drawn to them. But the physician will be right in looking behind the weak spots for an approach to the material in the deeper layers and in hoping that he will discover precisely there the connecting threads for which he is seeking with the pressure procedure. Accordingly, we say to the patient: ‘You are mistaken; what you are putting forward can have nothing to do with the present subject. We must expect to come upon something else here, and this will occur to you under the pressure of my hand.’

For we may make the same demands for logical connection and sufficient motivation in a train of thought, even if it extends into the unconscious, from a hysterical patient as we should from a normal individual. It is not within the power of a neurosis to relax these relations. If the chains of ideas in neurotic and particularly in hysterical patients produce a different impression, if in them the relative intensity of different ideas seems inexplicable by psychological determinants alone, we have already found out the reason for this and can attribute it to the existence of hidden unconscious motives. We may thus suspect the presence of such secret motives wherever a breach of this kind in a train of thought is apparent or when the force ascribed by the patient to his motives goes far beyond the normal.

Studies On Hysteria

259

In carrying out this work we must of course keep free from the theoretical prejudice that we are dealing with the abnormal brains of ‘dégénérés’ and ‘déséquilibrés’,¹ who are at liberty, owing to a stigma, to throw overboard the common psychological laws that govern the connection of ideas and in whom one chance idea may become exaggeratedly intense for no motive and another may remain indestructible for no psychological reason. Experience shows that the contrary is true of hysteria. Once we have discovered the concealed motives, which have often remained unconscious, and have taken them into account, nothing that is puzzling or contrary to rule remains in hysterical connections of thought, any more than in normal ones.

In this way, then, by detecting lacunas in the patient’s first description, lacunas which are often covered by ‘false connections’, we get hold of a piece of the logical thread at the periphery, and from this point on we clear a further path by the pressure technique.

In doing this, we very seldom succeed in making our way right into the interior along one and the same thread. As a rule it breaks off half-way: the pressure fails and either produces no result or one that cannot be clarified or carried further in spite of every effort. We soon learn, when this happens, to avoid the mistakes into which we might fall. The patient’s facial expression must decide whether we have really come to an end, or whether this is an instance which requires no psychical elucidation, or whether what has brought the work to a standstill is excessive resistance. In the last case, if we cannot promptly overcome the resistance we may assume that we have followed the thread into a stratum which is for the time being still impenetrable. We drop it and take up another thread, which we may perhaps follow equally far. When we have arrived at this stratum along all the threads and have discovered the entanglements on account of which the separate threads could not be followed any further in isolation, we can think of attacking the resistance before us afresh.

¹ [‘Degenerate’ and ‘unbalanced’ persons.]

Studies On Hysteria

260

It is easy to imagine how complicated a work of this kind can become. We force our way into the internal strata, overcoming resistances all the time; we get to know the themes accumulated in one of these strata and the threads running through it, and we experiment how far we can advance with our present means and the knowledge we have acquired; we obtain preliminary information about the contents of the next strata by means of the pressure technique; we drop threads and pick them up again; we follow them as far as nodal points; we are constantly making up arrears; and every time that we pursue a file of memories we are led to some side-path, which nevertheless eventually joins up again. By this method we at last reach a point at which we can stop working in strata and can penetrate by a main path straight to the nucleus of the pathogenic organization. With this the struggle is won, though not yet ended. We must go back and take up the other threads and exhaust the material. But now the patient helps us energetically. His resistance is for the most part broken.

In these later stages of the work it is of use if we can guess the way in which things are connected up and tell the patient before we have uncovered it. If we have guessed right, the course of the analysis will be accelerated; but even a wrong hypothesis helps us on, by compelling the patient to take sides and by enticing him into energetic denials which betray his undoubted better knowledge.

We learn with astonishment from this that we are not in a position to force anything on the patient about the things of which he is ostensibly ignorant or to influence the products of the analysis by arousing an expectation. I have never once succeeded, by foretelling something, in altering or falsifying the reproduction of memories or the connection of events; for if I had, it would inevitably have been betrayed in the end by some contradiction in the material. If something turned out as I had foretold, it was invariably proved by a great number of unimpeachable reminiscences that I had done no more than guess right. We need not be afraid, therefore, of telling the patient what we think his next connection of thought is going to be. It will do no harm.

Another observation, which is constantly repeated, relates to the patient’s spontaneous reproductions. It may be asserted that every single reminiscence which emerges during an analysis of this kind has significance. An intrusion of irrelevant mnemic images (which happen in some way or other to be associated with the important ones) in fact never occurs. An exception which does not contradict this rule may be postulated for memories which, unimportant in themselves, are nevertheless indispensable as a bridge, in the sense that the association between two important memories can only be made through them.

Studies On Hysteria

261

The length of time during which a memory remains in the narrow defile in front of the patient’s consciousness is, as has already been explained, in direct proportion to its importance. A picture which refuses to disappear is one which still calls for consideration, a thought which cannot be dismissed is one that needs to be pursued further. Moreover, a recollection never returns a second time once it has been dealt with; an image that has been ‘talked away’ is not seen again. If nevertheless this does happen we can confidently assume that the second time the image will be accompanied by a new set of thoughts, or the idea will have new implications. In other words, they have not been completely dealt with. Again, it frequently happens that an image or thought will re-appear in different degrees of intensity, first as a hint and later with complete clarity. This, however, does not contradict what I have just asserted.

Among the tasks presented by analysis is that of getting rid of symptoms which are capable of increasing in intensity or of returning: pains, symptoms (such as vomiting) which are due to stimuli, sensations or contractures. While we are working at one of these symptoms we come across the interesting and not undesired phenomenon of ‘joining in the conversation’. The problematical symptom re-appears, or appears with greater intensity, as soon as we reach the region of the pathogenic organization which contains the symptom’s aetiology, and thenceforward it accompanies the work with characteristic oscillations which are instructive to the physician. The intensity of the symptom (let us take for instance a desire to vomit) increases the deeper we penetrate into one of the relevant pathogenic memories; it reaches its climax shortly before the patient gives utterance to that memory; and when he has finished doing so it suddenly diminishes or even vanishes completely for a time. If, owing to resistance, the patient delays his telling for a long time, the tension of the sensation - of the desire to vomit - becomes unbearable, and if we cannot force him to speak he actually begins to vomit. In this way we obtain a plastic impression of the fact that ‘vomiting’ takes the place of a psychical act (in this instance, the act of utterance ), exactly as the conversion theory of hysteria maintains.

Studies On Hysteria

262

This oscillation in intensity on the part of the hysterical symptom is then repeated every time we approach a fresh memory which is pathogenic in respect of it. The symptom, we might say, is on the agenda all the time. If we are obliged temporarily to drop the thread to which this symptom is attached, the symptom, too, retires into obscurity, to emerge once more at a later period of the analysis. This performance goes on until the working-over of the pathogenic material disposes of the symptom once and for all.

In all this, strictly speaking, the hysterical symptom is not behaving in any way differently from the memory-picture or the reproduced thought which we conjure up under the pressure of our hand. In both cases we find the same obsessionally obstinate recurrence in the patient’s memory, which has to be disposed of. The difference lies only in the apparently spontaneous emergence of the hysterical symptoms, while, as we very well remember, we ourselves provoked the scenes and ideas. In fact, however, there is an uninterrupted series, extending from the unmodified mnemic residues of affective experiences and acts of thought to the hysterical symptoms, which are the mnemic symbols of those experiences and thoughts.

The phenomenon of hysterical symptoms joining in the conversation during the analysis involves a practical drawback, to which we ought to be able to reconcile the patient. It is quite impossible to effect an analysis of a symptom at a single stretch or to distribute the intervals in our work so that they fit in precisely with pauses in the process of dealing with the symptom. On the contrary, interruptions which are imperatively prescribed by incidental circumstances in the treatment, such as the lateness of the hour, often occur at the most inconvenient points, just as one may be approaching a decision or just as a new topic emerges. Every newspaper reader suffers from the same drawback in reading the daily instalment of his serial story, when, immediately after the heroine’s decisive speech or after the shot has rung out, he comes upon the words: ‘To be continued.’ In our own case the topic that has been raised but not dealt with, the symptom that has become temporarily intensified and has not yet been explained, persists in the patient’s mind and may perhaps be more troublesome to him than it has otherwise been. He will simply have to make the best of this; there is no other way of arranging things. There are patients who, in the course of an analysis, simply cannot get free of a topic that has once been raised and who are obsessed by it in the interval between two treatments; since by themselves they cannot take any steps towards getting rid of it, they suffer more, to begin with, than they did before the treatment. But even such patients learn in the end to wait for the doctor and to shift all the interest that they feel in getting rid of the pathogenic material on to the hours of treatment, after which they begin to feel freer in the intervals.

Studies On Hysteria

263

The general condition of patients during an analysis of this kind also deserves notice. For a time it is uninfluenced by the treatment and continues to be an expression of the factors that were operative earlier. But after this there comes a moment when the treatment takes hold of the patient; it grips his interest, and thenceforward his general condition becomes more and more dependent on the state of the work. Every time something new is elucidated or an important stage in the process of the analysis is reached, the patient, too, feels relieved and enjoys a foretaste, as it were, of his approaching liberation. Every time the work halts and confusion threatens, the psychical burden by which he is oppressed increases; his feeling of unhappiness and his incapacity for work grow more intense. But neither of these things happens for more than a short time. For the analysis proceeds, disdaining to boast because the patient feels well for the time being and going on its way regardless of his periods of gloom. We feel glad, in general, when we have replaced the spontaneous oscillations in his condition by oscillations which we ourselves have provoked and which we understand, just as we are glad when we see the spontaneous succession of symptoms replaced by an order of the day which corresponds to the state of the analysis.

To begin with, the work becomes more obscure and difficult, as a rule, the deeper we penetrate into the stratified psychical structure which I have described above. But once we have worked our way as far as the nucleus, light dawns and we need not fear that the patient’s general condition will be subject to any severe periods of gloom. But the reward of our labours, the cessation of the symptoms, can only be expected when we have accomplished the complete analysis of every individual symptom; and indeed, if the individual symptoms are interconnected at numerous nodal points, we shall not even be encouraged during the work by partial successes. Thanks to the abundant causal connections, every pathogenic idea which has not yet been got rid of operates as a motive for the whole of the products of the neurosis, and it is only with the last word of the analysis that the whole clinical picture vanishes, just as happens with memories that are reproduced individually.

Studies On Hysteria

264

If a pathogenic memory or a pathogenic connection which had formerly been withdrawn from the ego-consciousness is uncovered by the work of the analysis and introduced into the ego, we find that the psychical personality which is thus enriched has various ways of expressing itself with regard to what it has acquired. It happens particularly often that, after we have laboriously forced some piece of knowledge on a patient, he will declare: ‘I’ve always known that, I could have told you that before.’ Those with some degree of insight recognize afterwards that this is a piece of self-deception and blame themselves for being ungrateful. Apart from this, the attitude adopted by the ego to its new acquisition depends in general on the stratum of analysis from which that acquisition originates. Things that belong to the external strata are recognized without difficulty; they had, indeed, always remained in the ego’s possession, and the only novelty to the ego is their connection with the deeper strata of pathological material. Things that are brought to light from these deeper strata are also recognized and acknowledged, but often only after considerable hesitations and doubts. Visual memory-images are of course more difficult to disavow than the memory-traces of mere trains of thought. Not at all infrequently the patient begins by saying: ‘It’s possible that I thought this, but I can’t remember having done so.’ And it is not until he has been familiar with the hypothesis for some time that he comes to recognize it as well; he remembers - and confirms the fact, too, by subsidiary links - that he really did once have the thought. I make it a rule, however, during the analysis to keep my estimate of the reminiscence that comes up independent of the patient’s acknowledgement of it. I shall never be tired of repeating that we are bound to accept whatever our procedure brings to light. If there is anything in it that is not genuine or correct, the context will later on tell us to reject it. But I may say in passing that I have scarcely ever had occasion to disavow subsequently a reminiscence that has been provisionally accepted. Whatever has emerged has, in spite of the most deceptive appearance of being a glaring contradiction, nevertheless turned out to be correct.

Studies On Hysteria

265

The ideas which are derived from the greatest depth and which form the nucleus of the pathogenic organization are also those which are acknowledged as memories by the patient with greatest difficulty. Even when everything is finished and the patients have been overborne by the force of logic and have been convinced by the therapeutic effect accompanying the emergence of precisely these ideas - when, I say, the patients themselves accept the fact that they thought this or that, they often add: ‘But I can’t remember having thought it.’ It is easy to come to terms with them by telling them that the thoughts were unconscious. But how is this state of affairs to be fitted into our own psychological views? Are we to disregard this withholding of recognition on the part of patients, when, now that the work is finished, there is no longer any motive for their doing so?  Or are we to suppose that we are really dealing with thoughts which never came about, which merely had a possibility of existing, so that the treatment would lie in the accomplishment of a psychical act which did not take place at the time? It is clearly impossible to say anything about this - that is, about the state which the pathogenic material was in before the analysis - until we have arrived at a thorough clarification of our basic psychological views, especially on the nature of consciousness. It remains, I think, a fact deserving serious consideration that in our analyses we can follow a train of thought from the conscious into the unconscious (i.e. into something that is absolutely not recognized as a memory), that we can trace it from there for some distance through consciousness once more and that we can see it terminate in the unconscious again, without this alternation of ‘psychical illumination’ making any change in the train of thought itself, in its logical consistency and in the interconnection between its various parts. Once this train of thought was before me as a whole I should not be able to guess which part of it was recognized by the patient as a memory and which was not. I only, as it were, see the peaks of the train of thought dipping down into the unconscious - the reverse of what has been asserted of our normal psychical processes.

Studies On Hysteria

266

I have finally to discuss yet another topic, which plays an undesirably large part in the carrying out of cathartic analyses such as these. I have already admitted the possibility of the pressure technique failing, of its not eliciting any reminiscence in spite of every assurance and insistence. If this happens, I said, there are two possibilities: either, at the point at which we are investigating, there is really nothing more to be found - and this we can recognize from the complete calmness of the patient’s facial expression; or we have come up against a resistance which can only be overcome later, we are faced by a new stratum into which we cannot yet penetrate - and this, once more, we can infer from the patient’s facial expression, which is tense and gives evidence of mental effort. But there is yet a third possibility which bears witness equally to an obstacle, but an external obstacle, and not one inherent in the material. This happens when the patient’s relation to the physician is disturbed, and it is the worst obstacle that we can come across. We can, however, reckon on meeting it in every comparatively serious analysis.

I have already indicated the important part played by the figure of the physician in creating motives to defeat the psychical force of resistance. In not a few cases, especially with women and where it is a question of elucidating erotic trains of thought, the patient’s co-operation becomes a personal sacrifice, which must be compensated by some substitute for love. The trouble taken by the physician and his friendliness have to suffice for such a substitute. If, now, this relation of the patient to the physician is disturbed, her co-operativeness fails, too; when the physician tries to investigate the next pathological idea, the patient is held up by an intervening consciousness of the complaints against the physician that have been accumulating in her. In my experience this obstacle arises in three principal cases.

(1) If there is a personal estrangement - if, for instance, the patient feels she has been neglected, has been too little appreciated or has been insulted, or if she has heard unfavourable comments on the physician or the method of treatment. This is the least serious case. The obstacle can easily be overcome by discussion and explanation, even though the sensitiveness and suspiciousness of hysterical patients may occasionally attain surprising dimensions.

Studies On Hysteria

267

(2) If the patient is seized by a dread of becoming too much accustomed to the physician personally, of losing her independence in relation to him, and even of perhaps becoming sexually dependent on him. This is a more important case, because its determinants are less individual. The cause of this obstacle lies in the special solicitude inherent in the treatment. The patient then has a new motive for resistance, which is manifested not only in relation to some particular reminiscence but at every attempt at treatment. It is quite common for the patient to complain of a headache when we start on the pressure procedure; for her new motive for resistance remains as a rule unconscious and is expressed by the production of a new hysterical symptom. The headache indicates her dislike of allowing herself to be influenced.

(3) If the patient is frightened at finding that she is transferring on to the figure of the physician the distressing ideas which arise from the content of the analysis. This is a frequent, and indeed in some analyses a regular, occurrence. Transference on to the physician takes place through a false connection. I must give an example of this. In one of my patients the origin of a particular hysterical symptom lay in a wish, which she had had many years earlier and had at once relegated to the unconscious, that the man she was talking to at the time might boldly take the initiative and give her a kiss. On one occasion, at the end of a session, a similar wish came up in her about me. She was horrified at it, spent a sleepless night, and at the next session, though she did not refuse to be treated, was quite useless for work. After I had discovered the obstacle and removed it, the work proceeded further; and lo and behold: the wish that had so much frightened the patient made its appearance as the next of her pathogenic recollections and the one which was demanded by the immediate logical context. What had happened therefore was this. The content of the wish had appeared first of all in the patient’s consciousness without any memories of the surrounding circumstances which would have assigned it to a past time. The wish which was present was then, owing to the compulsion to associate which was dominant in her consciousness, linked to my person, with which the patient was legitimately concerned; and as the result of this mésalliance - which I describe as a ‘false connection’ - the same affect was provoked which had forced the patient long before to repudiate this forbidden wish. Since I have discovered this, I have been able, whenever I have been similarly involved personally, to presume that a transference and a false connection have once more taken place. Strangely enough, the patient is deceived afresh every time this is repeated.

Studies On Hysteria

268

It is impossible to carry any analysis to a conclusion unless we know how to meet the resistance arising in these three ways. But we can find a way of doing so if we make up our minds that this new symptom that has been produced on the old model must be treated in the same way as the old symptoms. Our first task is to make the ‘obstacle’ conscious to the patient. In one of my patients, for instance, the pressure procedure suddenly failed. I had reason to suppose that there was an unconscious idea of the kind mentioned under (2) above, and I dealt with it at the first attempt by taking her by surprise. I told her that some obstacle must have arisen to continuing the treatment, but that the pressure procedure had at least the power to show her what this obstacle was; I pressed on her head, and she said in astonishment: ‘I see you sitting on the chair here; but that’s nonsense. What can it mean?’ I was then able to enlighten her. With another patient the ‘obstacle’ used not to appear directly as a result of my pressure, but I was always able to discover it if I took the patient back to the moment at which it had originated. The pressure procedure never failed to bring this moment back for us. When the obstacle had been discovered and demonstrated the first difficulty was cleared out of the way. But a greater one remained. It lay in inducing the patient to produce information where apparently personal relations were concerned and where the third person coincided with the figure of the physician.

To begin with I was greatly annoyed at this increase in my psychological work, till I came to see that the whole process followed a law; and I then noticed, too, that transference of this kind brought about no great addition to what I had to do. For the patient the work remained the same: she had to overcome the distressing affect aroused by having been able to entertain such a wish even for a moment; and it seemed to make no difference to the success of the treatment whether she made this psychical repudiation the theme of her work in the historical instance or in the recent one connected with me. The patients, too, gradually learnt to realize that in these transferences on to the figure of the physician it was a question of a compulsion and an illusion which melted away with the conclusion of the analysis. I believe, however, that if I had neglected to make the nature of the ‘obstacle’ clear to them I should simply have given them a new hysterical symptom - though, it is true, a milder one - in exchange for another which had been generated spontaneously.

Studies On Hysteria

269

I have now given enough indications, I think, of the way in which these analyses have been carried out and of the observations that I have made in the course of them. What I have said may perhaps make some things seem more complicated than they are. Many problems answer themselves when we find ourselves engaged in such work. I did not enumerate the difficulties of the work in order to create an impression that, in view of the demands a cathartic analysis makes on physician and patient alike, it is only worth while undertaking one in the rarest cases. I allow my medical activities to be governed by the contrary assumption, though I cannot, it is true, lay down the most definite indications for the application of the therapeutic method described in these pages without entering into an examination of the more important and comprehensive topic of the treatment of the neuroses in general. I have often in my own mind compared cathartic psychotherapy with surgical intervention. I have described my treatments as psychotherapeutic operations; and I have brought out their analogy with the opening up of a cavity filled with pus, the scraping out of a carious region, etc. An analogy of this kind finds its justification not so much in the removal of what is pathological as in the establishment of conditions that are more likely to lead the course of the process in the direction of recovery.

When I have promised my patients help or improvement by means of a cathartic treatment I have often been faced by this objection: ‘Why, you tell me yourself that my illness is probably connected with my circumstances and the events of my life. You cannot alter these in any way. How do you propose to help me, then?’ And I have been able to make this reply: ‘No doubt fate would find it easier than I do to relieve you of your illness. But you will be able to convince yourself that much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. With a mental life that has been restored to health you will be better armed against that unhappiness.’

270

PREFACE TO FREUD’S SHORTER WRITINGS 1893-1906

(1906)

271

Intentionally left blank

272

PREFACE TO FREUD’S COLLECTION OF SHORTER WRITINGS ON

THE THEORY OF THE NEUROSES FROM THE YEARS 1893-1906

In response to many wishes that have reached me, I have decided to lay before my colleagues in collected form the minor works on the neuroses which I have published since 1893. They consist of fourteen short papers, mostly in the nature of preliminary communications, which have appeared in scientific proceedings or medical periodicals - three of them in French. The two last (XIII and XIV), which give a very succinct account of my present position as regards both the aetiology and the treatment of the neuroses, are taken from L. Löwefeld’s well-known volumes, Die psychischen Zwangserscheinungen, 1904, and the fourth edition of Sexualleben und Nervenleiden, 1906, having been written by me at the request of their author, who is an acquaintance of mine.

The present collection serves as an introduction and supplement to my larger publications dealing with the same topics - Studies on Hysteria (with Dr. J. Breuer), 1895; The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900; The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 1901 and 1904; Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, 1905; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,1905; Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, 1905. The fact that I have put my Obituary of J.-M. Charcot at the head of this collection of my short papers should be regarded not only as the repayment of a debt of gratitude, but also as an indication of the point at which my own work branches off from the master’s.

No one who is familiar with the course of development of human knowledge will be surprised to learn that I have in the meantime gone beyond some of the opinions which are expressed here, and have seen my way to modifying others. Nevertheless, I have been able to retain the greater part of them unaltered and in fact have no need to withdraw anything as wholly erroneous or completely worthless.

273

CHARCOT

(1893)

274

Intentionally left blank

275

CHARCOT

On the 16th of August of this year, J.M. Charcot died suddenly, without pain or illness, after a life of happiness and fame. In him, all too soon, the young science of neurology has lost its greatest leader, neurologists of every country have lost their master teacher and France has lost one of her foremost men. He was only sixty-eight years old; his physical strength and mental vigour, together with the hopes he so frankly expressed, seemed to promise him the long life which has been granted to not a few mental workers of this century. The nine imposing volumes of his Oevres complètes, in which his pupils had collected his contributions to medicine and neuropathology, his Leçons du mardi, the yearly reports of his clinic at the Salpêtrière, and other works besides - all these publications will remain precious to science and to his pupils; but they cannot take the place of the man, who had still much more to give and to teach and whose person or whose writings no one has yet approached without learning something from them.

He took an honest, human delight in his own great success and used to enjoy talking of his beginnings and the road he had travelled. His scientific curiosity, he said, had been aroused early, when he was still a young interne, by the mass of material presented by the facts of neuropathology, material which was not in the least understood at the time. In those days, whenever he went the rounds with his senior in one of the departments of the Salpêtrière (the institution for the care of women) amid all the wilderness of paralyses, spasms and convulsions for which forty years ago there was neither name nor understanding, he would say: ‘Faudrait y retourner et y rester’, and he kept his word. When he became médecin des hôspitaux, he at once took steps to enter the Salpêtrière in one of the departments for nervous patients. Having got there, he stayed where he was instead of doing what French senior physicians are entitled to do - transferring in regular succession from one department to another and from hospital to hospital, and at the same time changing their speciality as well.

Charcot

276

Thus his first impression and the resolution it led him to were decisive for the whole of his further development. His having a great number of chronic nervous patients at his disposal enabled him to make use of his own special gifts. He was not a reflective man, not a thinker: he had the nature of an artist - he was, as he himself said, a ‘visuel’, a man who sees. Here is what he himself told us about his method of working. He used to look again and again at the things he did not understand, to deepen his impression of them day by day, till suddenly an understanding of them dawned on him. In his mind’s eye the apparent chaos presented by the continual repetition of the same symptoms then gave way to order: the new nosological pictures emerged, characterized by the constant combination of certain groups of symptoms. The complete and extreme cases, the ‘types’, could be brought into prominence with the help of a certain sort of schematic planning, and, with these types as a point of departure, the eye could travel over the long series of ill-defined cases - the ‘formes frustes’ - which, branching off from one or other characteristic feature of the type, melt away into indistinctness. He called this kind of intellectual work, in which he had no equal, ‘practising nosography’, and he took pride in it. He might be heard to say that the greatest satisfaction a man could have was to see something new - that is, to recognize it as new; and he remarked again and again on the difficulty and value of this kind of ‘seeing’. He would ask why it was that in medicine people only see what they have already learned to see. He would say that it was wonderful how one was suddenly able to see new things - new states of illness - which must probably be as old as the human race; and that he had to confess to himself that he now saw a number of things which he had overlooked for thirty years in his hospital wards. No physician needs to be told what a wealth of forms were acquired by neuropathology through him, and what increased precision and sureness of diagnosis were made possible by his observations. But the pupil who spent many hours with him going round the wards of the Salpêtrière - that museum of clinical facts, the names and peculiar characteristics of which were for the most part derived from him would be reminded of Cuvier, whose statue, standing in front of the Jardin des Plantes, shows that great comprehender and describer of the animal world surrounded by a multitude of animal forms; or else he would recall the myth of Adam, who, when God brought the creatures of Paradise before him to be distinguished and named, may have experienced to the fullest degree that intellectual enjoyment which Charcot praised so highly.

Charcot, indeed, never tired of defending the rights of purely clinical work, which consists in seeing and ordering things, against the encroachments of theoretical medicine. On one occasion there was a small group of us, all students from abroad, who, brought up on German academic physiology, were trying his patience with our doubts about his clinical innovations. ‘But that can’t be true,’ one of us objected, ‘it contradicts the Young-Helmholtz theory.’ He did not reply ‘So much the worse for the theory, clinical facts come first’ or words to that effect; but he did say something which made a great impression on us: ‘La theorie, c’est bon, mais ca n’empeche pas d’exister’.

Charcot

277

For a whole number of years Charcot occupied the Chair of Pathological Anatomy in Paris, and he carried on his neuropathological studies and lectures, which quickly made him famous abroad as well as in France, on a voluntary basis and as a secondary occupation. It was a piece of good fortune for neuropathology that the same man could undertake the discharge of two functions: on the one hand he created the nosological picture through clinical observation, and on the other he demonstrated that the same anatomical changes underlay the disease whether it appeared as a type or as a forme fruste. It is very generally recognized how successful this anatomical clinical method of Charcot’s was in the field of organic nervous diseases - in tabes, multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and so on. Years of patient waiting were often necessary before the presence of organic change could be proved in those chronic illnesses which are not directly fatal; and only in a hospital for incurables like the Salpêtrière was it possible to keep the patients under observation for such long periods of time. Charcot made his first demonstration of this kind before he had charge of a department. While he was still a student he happened to engage a maid-servant who suffered from a peculiar tremor and could not find a situation on account of her clumsiness. Charcot recognized her condition as a paralysie choréiforme, a disease which had already been described by Duchenne, but whose basis was unknown. Charcot kept this interesting servant, although in the course of the years she cost him a small fortune in dishes and plates. When at last she died he was able to demonstrate from her case that paralysie choréiforme was the clinical expression of multiple cerebro-spinal sclerosis.

Pathological anatomy has to serve neuropathology in two ways. Besides demonstrating the presence of a morbid change, it must establish the localization of that change; and we all know that during the last two decades the second part of this task has aroused the greater interest of the two and has been more actively pursued. Charcot played a most distinguished part in this work, too, although the pioneer discoveries were not made by him. To begin with he followed in the footsteps of our fellow-countryman, Türck, who is said to have lived and carried on his researches in comparative isolation among us. When the two great innovations came - the Hitzig-Fritsch stimulation experiments and Flechsig’s findings on the development of the spinal cord - which ushered in a new epoch in our knowledge of the ‘localization of nervous diseases’, Charcot’s lectures on localization played the largest and best part towards bringing the new theories into touch with the clinical work and making them fruitful for it. As regards in especial the relationship of the somatic muscular apparatus to the motor area of the human cerebrum, I may remind the reader of the long time during which the more exact nature and topography of this relationship was in question. (Was there a common representation of both extremities in the same areas? or was there a representation of the upper extremity in the anterior central convolution and if the lower extremity in the posterior one - that is, a vertical disposition?) At last, continued clinical observations and experiments in stimulation and extirpation on living subjects during surgical operations decided the question in favour of the view of Charcot and Pitres that the middle third of the central convolutions mainly serves the representation of the arm, while the upper third and the mesial portion serve that of the leg - that is to say, that in the motor area the disposition is a horizontal one.

Charcot

278

An enumeration of Charcot’s separate contributions would not enable us to establish his significance for neuropathology. For during the last two decades there have not been many themes of any importance in whose formulation and discussion the school of the Salpêtrière has not had an outstanding share; and the ‘school of the Salpêtrière’ was, of course, Charcot himself, who, with the wealth of his experience, the transparent clarity of his diction and the plasticity of his descriptions, could easily be recognized in every publication of the school. Among the circle of young men whom he thus gathered round him and made into participants in his researches, a few eventually rose to a consciousness of their own individuality and made a brilliant name for themselves. Now and then, even, it happened that one of them would come forward with an assertion which seemed to the master to be more clever than correct; and this he would argue against with plenty of sarcasm in his conversation and lectures, but without doing any damage to his affectionate relationship with his pupil. And in fact Charcot leaves behind him a host of pupils whose intellectual quality and whose achievements up to now are a guarantee that the study and practice of neuropathology in Paris will not so quickly slip down from the height to which Charcot has brought them.

Charcot

279

In Vienna we have repeatedly had occasion to realize that the intellectual significance of an academic teacher is not necessarily combined with a direct personal influence on younger men which leads to the creation of a large and important school. If Charcot was so much more fortunate in this respect we must put it down to the personal qualities of the man - to the magic that emanated from his looks and from his voice, to the kindly openness which characterized his manner as soon as his relations with someone had overcome the stage of initial strangeness, to the willingness with which he put everything at the disposal of his pupils, and to his life-long loyalty to them. The hours he spent in his wards were hours of companionship and of an exchange of ideas with the whole of his medical staff. He never shut himself away from them there. The youngest newly-qualified physician walking the wards had a chance of seeing him at his work and might interrupt him at it; and the same freedom was enjoyed by students from abroad, who, in later years, were never lacking at his rounds. And, lastly, on the evenings when Madame Charcot was at home to a distinguished company, assisted by a highly-gifted daughter who was growing up in the likeness of her father, the pupils and medical assistants who were always present met the guests as part of the family.

In 1882 or 1883, the circumstances of Charcot’s life and work took on their final form. People had come to realize that the activities of this man were a part of the assets of the nation’s ‘gloire’, which, after the unfortunate war of 1870-1, was all the more jealously guarded. The government, at the head of which was Charcot’s old friend, Gambetta, created a Chair of Neuropathology for him in the Faculty of Medicine (so that he could give up the Chair of Pathological Anatomy) and also a clinic, with auxiliary scientific departments, at the Salpêtrière. ‘Le service de M. Charcot’ now included, in addition to the old wards for chronic female patients, several clinical rooms where male patients, too, were received, a huge out-patient department - the ‘consultation externe’ -, a histological laboratory, a museum, an electro-therapeutic department, an eye and ear department and a special photographic studio. All these things were so many means of keeping former assistants and pupils permanently at the clinic in secure posts. The two-storeyed, weathered-looking buildings and the courtyards which they enclosed reminded the stranger vividly of our Allgemeines Krankenhaus; but no doubt the resemblance did not go far enough. ‘It may not be beautiful here, perhaps,’ Charcot would say when he showed a visitor his domain, ‘but there is room for everything you want to do.’

Charcot

280

Charcot was in the very prime of life when this abundance of facilities for teaching and research were placed at his disposal. He was a tireless worker, and always, I believe, the busiest in the whole institute. His private consultations, to which patients flocked ‘from Samarkand and the Antilles’, could not keep him from his teaching activities or his researches. There is no doubt that this throng of people did not turn to him solely because he was a famous discoverer but quite as much because he was a great physician and friend of man, who could always find an answer to a problem and who, when the present state of science did not allow him to know, was able to make a good guess. He has often been blamed for his therapeutic method which, with its multiplicity of prescriptions, could not but offend a rationalistic conscience. But he was simply continuing the procedures which were customary at that time and place, without deceiving himself much about their efficacy. He was, however, not pessimistic in his therapeutic expectations, and repeatedly showed readiness to try new methods of treatment in his clinic: their short-lived success was to find its explanation elsewhere.

As a teacher, Charcot was positively fascinating. Each of his lectures was a little work of art in construction and composition; it was perfect in form and made such an impression that for the rest of the day one could not get the sound of what he had said out of one’s ears or the thought of what he had demonstrated out of one’s mind. He seldom demonstrated a single patient, but

mostly a series of similar or contrasting cases which he compared with one another. In the hall in which he gave his lectures there hung a picture which showed ‘citizen’ Pinel having the chains taken off the poor madmen in the Salpêtrière. The Salpêtrière, which had witnessed so many horrors during the Revolution, had also been the scene of this most humane of all revolutions. At such lectures Maître Charcot himself made a curious impression. He, who at other times bubbled over with vivacity and cheerfulness and who always had a joke on his lips, now looked serious and solemn under his little velvet cap; indeed, he even seemed to have grown older. His voice sounded subdued. We could almost understand how ill-disposed strangers could reproach the whole lecture with being theatrical. Those who spoke like this were doubtless accustomed to the formlessness of German clinical lectures, or else forgot that Charcot gave only one lecture in the week and could therefore prepare it carefully.

In this formal lecture, in which everything was prepared and everything had to have its place, Charcot was no doubt following a deeply-rooted tradition; but he also felt the need to give his audience a less elaborated picture of his activities. This purpose was served by his out-patient clinic of which he took personal charge in what were known as his ‘Leçons du mardi’. There he took up cases which were completely unknown to him; he exposed himself to all the chances of an examination, all the errors of a first investigation; he would put aside his authority on occasion and admit - in one case that he could arrive at no diagnosis and in another that he had been deceived by appearances; and he never appeared greater to his audience than when, by giving the most detailed account of his processes of thought and by showing the greatest frankness about his doubts and hesitations, he had thus sought to narrow the gulf between teacher and pupil. The publication of these improvised lectures, given in the year 1887 and 1888, at first in French and now in German as well, has also immeasurably widened the circle of his admirers; and never before has a work on neuropathology had such a success with the medical public as this.

Charcot

281

At about the time at which the clinic was established and at which he gave up the Chair of Pathological Anatomy, a change occurred in the direction of Charcot’s scientific pursuits, and to this we owe the finest of his work. He now pronounced that the theory of organic nervous illnesses was for the time being fairly complete, and he began to turn his attention almost exclusively to hysteria, which thus all at once became the focus of general interest. This, the most enigmatic of all nervous diseases, for the evaluation of which medicine had not yet found a serviceable angle of approach, had just then fallen into thorough discredit; and this discredit extended not only to the patients but to the physicians who concerned themselves with the neurosis. It was held that in hysteria anything was possible, and no credence was given to a hysteric about anything. The first thing that Charcot’s work did was to restore its dignity to the topic. Little by little, people gave up the scornful smile with which the patient could at that time feel certain of being met. She was no longer necessarily a malingerer, for Charcot had thrown the whole weight of his authority on the side of the genuineness and objectivity of hysterical phenomena. Charcot had repeated on a small scale the act of liberation in memory of which Pinel’s portrait hung in the lecture hall of the Salpêtrière. Once the blind fear of being made a fool of by the unfortunate patient had been given up - a fear which till then had stood in the way of a serious study of the neurosis - the question could arise as to what method of approach would lead most quickly to a solution of the problem. A quite unbiased observer might have arrived at this conclusion: if I find someone in a state which bears all the signs of a painful affect - weeping, screaming and raging - the conclusion seems probable that a mental process is going on in him of which those physical phenomena are the appropriate expression. A healthy person, if he were asked, would be in a position to say what impression it was that was tormenting him; but the hysteric would answer that he did not know. The problem would at once arise of how it is that a hysterical patient is overcome by an affect about whose cause he asserts that he knows nothing. If we keep to our conclusion that a corresponding psychical process must be present, and if nevertheless we believe the patient when he denies it; if we bring together the many indications that the patient is behaving as though he does know about it; and if we enter into the history of the patient’s life and find some occasion, some trauma, which would appropriately evoke precisely those expressions of feeling - then everything points to one solution: the patient is in a special state of mind in which all his impressions or his recollections of them are no longer held together by an associative chain, a state of mind in which it is possible for a recollection to express its affect by means of somatic phenomena without the group of the other mental processes, the ego, knowing about it or being able to intervene to prevent it. If we had called to mind the familiar psychological difference between sleep and waking, the strangeness of our hypothesis might have seemed less. No one should object that the theory of a splitting of consciousness as a solution to the riddle of hysteria is much too remote to impress an unbiased and untrained observer. For, by pronouncing possession by a demon to be the cause of hysterical phenomena, the Middle Ages in fact chose this solution; it would only have been a matter of exchanging the religious terminology of that dark and superstitious age for the scientific language of to-day.

Charcot

282

Charcot, however, did not follow this path towards an explanation of hysteria, although he drew copiously upon the surviving reports of witch trials and of possession, in order to show that the manifestations of the neurosis were the same in those days as they are now. He treated hysteria as just another topic in neuropathology; he gave a complete description of its phenomena, demonstrated that these had their own laws and uniformities, and showed how to recognize the symptoms which enable a diagnosis of hysteria to be made. The most painstaking investigations, initiated by himself and his pupils, extended over hysterical disturbances of sensibility in the skin and deeper tissues, over the behaviour of the sense organs, and over the peculiarities of hysterical contractures and paralyses, and of trophic disturbances and changes in metabolism. The many different forms of hysterical attack were described, and a schematic plan was drawn up by depicting the typical configuration of the major hysterical attack as occurring in four stages, which made it possible to trace the commonly observed ‘minor’ attacks back to this same typical configuration. The localization and frequency of occurrence of the so-called ‘hysterogenic zones’ and their relationship to the attacks were also studied, and so on. Once all this information about the manifestations of hysteria had been arrived at, a number of surprising discoveries were made. Hysteria in males, and especially in men of the working class was found far more often than had been expected; it was convincingly shown that certain conditions which had been put down to alcoholic intoxication or lead-poisoning were of a hysterical nature; it was possible to subsume under hysteria a whole number of affections which had hitherto not been understood and which had remained unclassified; and where the neurosis had become joined with other disorders to form complex pictures, it was possible to separate out the part played by hysteria. Most far-reaching of all were the investigations into nervous illnesses which followed upon severe traumas - the ‘traumatic neuroses’ - views about which are still under discussion and in connection with which Charcot has successfully put forward the arguments in favour of hysteria.

After the latest extensions of the concept of hysteria had so often led to a rejection of aetiological diagnosis, it became necessary to enter into the aetiology of hysteria itself. Charcot put forward a simple formula for this: heredity was to be regarded as the sole cause. Accordingly, hysteria was a form of degeneracy, a member of the ‘famille névropathique’. All other aetiological factors played the part of incidental causes, of ‘agents provocateurs’.

The construction of this great edifice was naturally not achieved without violent opposition. But it was the sterile opposition of an old generation who did not want to have their views changed. The younger among the neuropathologists, including those in Germany, accepted Charcot’s teaching to a greater or lesser degree. Charcot himself was completely certain that his theories about hysteria would triumph. When it was objected that the four stages of hysteria, hysteria in men, and so on, were not observable outside France, he pointed out how long he himself had overlooked these things, and he said once more that hysteria was the same in all places and at every time. He was very sensitive about the accusation that the French were a far more neurotic nation than any other and that hysteria was a kind of national bad habit; and he was much pleased when a paper ‘On a Case of Reflex Epilepsy’, which dealt with a Prussian Grenadier, enabled him to make a long range diagnosis of hysteria.

Charcot

283

At one point in his work Charcot rose to a level higher even than that of his usual treatment of hysteria. The step he took assured him for all time, too, the fame of having been the first to explain hysteria. While he was engaged in the study of hysterical paralyses arising after traumas, he had the idea of artificially reproducing those paralyses, which he had earlier differentiated with care from organic ones. For this purpose he made use of hysterical patients whom he put into a state of somnambulism by hypnotizing them. He succeeded in proving, by an unbroken chain of argument, that these paralyses were the result of ideas which had dominated the patient’s brain at moments of a special disposition. In this way, the mechanism of a hysterical phenomenon was explained for the first time. This incomparably fine piece of clinical research was afterwards taken up by his own pupil, Pierre Janet, as well as by Breuer and others, who developed from it a theory of neurosis which coincided with the mediaeval view - when once they had replaced the ‘demon’ of clerical phantasy by a psychological formula.

Charcot’s concern with hypnotic phenomena in hysterical patients led to very great advances in this important field of hitherto neglected and despised facts, for the weight of his name put an end once and for all to any doubt about the reality of hypnotic manifestations. But the exclusively nosographical approach adopted at the School of the Salpêtrière was not suitable for a purely psychological subject. The restriction of the study of hypnosis to hysterical patients, the differentiation between major and minor hypnotism, the hypothesis of three stages of ‘major hypnosis’, and their characterization by somatic phenomena - all this sank in the estimation of Charcot’s contemporaries when Liébeault’s pupil, Bernheim, set about constructing the theory of hypnotism on a more comprehensive psychological foundation and making suggestion the central point of hypnosis. It is only the opponents of hypnotism who, content to conceal their lack of personal experience behind an appeal to authority, still cling to Charcot’s assertions and who like to take advantage of a pronouncement made by him in his last years, in which he denied to hypnosis any value as a therapeutic method.

Charcot

284

Furthermore, the aetiological theories supported by Charcot in his doctrine of the ‘famille névropathique’, which he made the basis of his whole concept of nervous disorders, will no doubt soon require sifting and emending. So greatly did Charcot over-estimate heredity as a causative agent that he left no room for the acquisition of nervous illness. To syphilis he merely allotted a modest place among the ‘agents provocateurs’; nor did he make a sufficiently sharp distinction between organic nervous affections and neuroses, either as regards their aetiology or in other respects. It is inevitable that the advance of our science, as it increases our knowledge, must at the same time lessen the value of a number of things that Charcot taught us; but neither changing times nor changing views can diminish the fame of the man whom - in France and elsewhere - we are mourning to-day.

VIENNA, August 1893.

285

ON THE PSYCHICAL MECHANISM OF HYSTERICAL PHENOMENA: A LECTURE

(1893)

286

Intentionally left blank

287

ON THE PSYCHICAL MECHANISM OF HYSTERICAL PHENOMENA ¹

Gentlemen, - I am appearing before you to-day with the object of giving you a report on a work the first part of which has already been published in the Zentralblatt für Neurologie under the names of Josef Breuer and myself. As you may gather from the title of the work, it deals with the pathogenesis of hysterical symptoms and suggests that the immediate reasons for the development of hysterical symptoms are to be looked for in the sphere of psychical life.

But before I enter further into the contents of this joint work, I must explain the position it occupies and name the author and the discovery which, in substance at least, we have taken as our starting point, although our contribution has been developed quite independently.

As you know, Gentlemen, all the modern advances made in the understanding and knowledge of hysteria are derived from the work of Charcot. In the first half of the eighties, Charcot began to turn his attention to the ‘major neurosis’, as the French call hysteria. In a series of researches he has succeeded in proving the presence of regularity and law where the inadequate or half-hearted clinical observations of other people saw only malingering or a puzzling lack of conformity to rule. It may safely be said that everything new that has been learnt about hysteria in recent times goes back directly or indirectly to his suggestions. But among Charcot’s numerous works, none, in my estimate, is of higher value than the one in which he taught us to understand the traumatic paralyses which appear in hysteria; and since it is precisely this work of which ours appears as a continuation, I hope you will allow me to lay this subject before you once again in some detail.

¹ A lecture delivered by Dr. Sigm. Freud at a meeting of the ‘Wiener medizinischer Club’ on January 11, 1893. Special shorthand report by the Wiener medizinische Presse, revised by the lecturer.

On The Psychical Mechanism Of Hysterical Phenomena

288

We will take the case of a person who is subjected to a trauma without having been ill previously and perhaps without ever having any hereditary taint. The trauma must fulfil certain conditions. It must be severe - that is, it must be of a kind involving the idea of mortal danger, of a threat to life. But it must not be severe in the sense of bringing psychical activity to an end. Otherwise it will not produce the result we expect from it. Thus, for instance, it must not involve concussion of the brain or any really serious injury. Moreover, the trauma must have a special relation to some part of the body. Let us suppose that a heavy billet of wood falls on a workman’s shoulder The blow knocks him down, but he soon realizes that nothing has happened and goes home with a slight contusion. After a few weeks, or after some months, he wakes up one morning and notices that the arm that was subjected to the trauma is hanging down limp and paralysed, though in the interval, in what might be called the incubation period, he has made perfectly good use of it. If the case is a typical one, it may happen that peculiar attacks set in - that, after an aura, the subject suddenly collapses, raves, and becomes delirious; and, if he speaks in his delirium, what he says may show that the scene of his accident is being repeated in him, embellished, perhaps, with various imaginary pictures. What has been happening here? How is this phenomenon to be explained?

Charcot explains the process by reproducing it, by inducing the paralysis in a patient artificially. In order to bring this about, he needs a patient who is already in a hysterical state; he further requires the condition of hypnosis and the method of suggestion. He puts a patient of this kind into deep hypnosis and gives him a light blow on the arm. The arm drops; it is paralysed and shows precisely the same symptoms as occur in spontaneous traumatic paralysis. The blow may also be replaced by a direct verbal suggestion: ‘Look! your arm is paralysed!’ In this case too the paralysis exhibits the same characteristics.

On The Psychical Mechanism Of Hysterical Phenomena

289

Let us try to compare the two cases: on the one hand a trauma, on the other a traumatic suggestion. The final result, the paralysis, is exactly the same in both cases. If the trauma in the one case can be replaced in the other case by a verbal suggestion, it is plausible to suppose that an idea of this kind was responsible for the development of the paralysis in the case of the spontaneous traumatic paralysis as well. And in fact a number of patients report that at the moment of the trauma they actually had a feeling that their arm was smashed. If this were so, the trauma could really be completely equated with the verbal suggestion. But to complete the analogy a third factor is required. In order that the idea ‘your arm is paralysed’ should be able to provoke a paralysis in the patient, it was necessary for him to be in a state of hypnosis. But the workman was not in a state of hypnosis. Nevertheless, we may assume that he was in a special state of mind during the trauma; and Charcot is inclined to equate that affect with the artificially induced state of hypnosis. This being so, the traumatic spontaneous paralysis is completely explained and brought into line with the paralysis produced by suggestion; and the genesis of the symptom is unambiguously determined by the circumstances of the trauma.

Charcot has, moreover, repeated the same experiment in order to explain the contractures and pains which appear in traumatic hysteria; and in my opinion there is scarcely any point at which he has penetrated into the understanding of hysteria more deeply than here. But his analysis goes no further: we do not learn how other symptoms are generated, and above all we do not learn how hysterical symptoms come about in common, non-traumatic hysteria.

At about the same time, Gentlemen, at which Charcot was thus throwing light on hystero-traumatic paralyses, Dr. Breuer between 1880 and 1882, undertook the medical care of a young lady who - with a non-traumatic aetiology - fell ill of a severe and complicated hysteria (accompanied by paralyses, contractures, disturbances of speech and vision, and psychical peculiarities of every kind), while she was nursing her sick father. This case will retain an important place in the history of hysteria, since it was the first one in which a physician succeeded in elucidating all the symptoms of the hysterical state, in learning the origin of each symptom and at the same time in finding a means of causing that symptom to disappear We may say that it was the first case of hysteria to be made intelligible. Dr. Breuer kept back the conclusions which followed from this case till he could be certain that it did not stand alone. After I returned, in 1886, from a course of study under Charcot, I began, with Breuer’s constant co-operation, to make close observations on a fairly large number of hysterical patients and to examine them from this point of view; and I found that the behaviour of this first patient had in fact been typical and that the inferences which were justified by that case could be carried over to a considerable number of hysterical patients, if not to all.

On The Psychical Mechanism Of Hysterical Phenomena

290

Our material consisted of cases of common, that is of non-traumatic, hysteria. Our procedure was to take each separate symptom and enquire into the circumstances in which it had made its first appearance; and we endeavoured in this way to arrive at a clear idea of the precipitating cause that symptom. Now you must not suppose that this is a simple job. If you question patients along these lines, you will as a rule receive no answer at all to begin with. In a small group of cases the patients have their reasons for not saying what they know. But in a greater number of cases the patients have no notion of the context of their symptoms. The method by which something can be learnt is an arduous one. It is as follows. The patients must be put under hypnosis and then questioned as to the origin of some particular symptom - as to when it first appeared and what they remember in that connection. While they are in this state, the memory, which was not at their disposal in a waking state, returns. We have learnt in this manner that, to put it roughly, there is an affectively coloured experience behind most, if not all, phenomena of hysteria; and further, that this experience is of such a kind that it at once makes the symptom to which it relates intelligible and shows accordingly that the symptom, once again, is unambiguously determined. If you will allow me to equate this affectively coloured experience with the major traumatic experience underlying traumatic hysteria, I can at once formulate the first thesis at which we have arrived: ‘There is a complete analogy between traumatic paralysis and common, non-traumatic hysteria.’ The only difference is that in the former a major trauma has been operative, whereas in the latter there is seldom a single major event to be signalized, but rather a series of affective impressions - a whole story of suffering. But there is nothing forced in equating such a story, which appears as the determining factor in hysterical patients, with the accident which occurs in traumatic hysteria. For no one doubts any longer to-day that even in the case of the major mechanical trauma in traumatic hysteria what produces the result is not the mechanical factor but the affect of fright, the psychical trauma. The first thing that follows from all this, then, is that the pattern of traumatic hysteria, as it was laid down by Charcot for hysterical paralyses, applies quite generally to all hysterical phenomena, or at least to the great majority of them. In every case what we have to deal with is the operation of psychical traumas, which unambiguously determine the nature of the symptoms that arise.

On The Psychical Mechanism Of Hysterical Phenomena

291

I will now give you a few instances of this. First, here is an example of the occurrence of contractures. Throughout the whole period of her illness, Breuer’s patient, whom I have already mentioned, exhibited a contracture of the right arm. It emerged under hypnosis that at a time before she had fallen ill she was subjected to the following trauma. She was sitting half-dozing at the bedside of her sick father; her right arm was hanging over the back of her chair and went to sleep. At this moment she had a terrifying hallucination; she tried to fend it off with her arm but was unable to do so. This gave her a violent fright, and for the time being the matter ended there. It was not until the outbreak of her hysteria that the contracture of the arm set in. In another woman patient, I observed that her speech was interrupted by a peculiar ‘clacking’  with her tongue, which resembled the cry of a capercaillie. I had been familiar with this symptom for months and regarded it as a tic. It was only after I once happened to question her under hypnosis about its origin that I discovered that the noise had first appeared on two occasions. On each of these she had made a firm decision to keep absolutely quiet. This happened once when she was nursing a child of hers who was seriously ill. (Nursing sick people often plays a part in the aetiology of hysteria.) The child had fallen asleep and she was determined not to make any noise that might wake it. But fear that she might make a noise turned into actually making one - an instance of ‘hysterical counter-will’;  she pressed her lips together and made the clacking noise with her tongue. Many years later the same symptom had arisen a second time, once again when she had made a decision to be absolutely quiet, and it had persisted ever afterwards. A single precipitating cause is often not enough to fixate a symptom; but if this same symptom appears several times accompanied by a particular affect, it becomes fixated and chronic.

On The Psychical Mechanism Of Hysterical Phenomena

292

One of the commonest symptoms of hysteria is a combination of anorexia and vomiting. I know of a whole number of cases in which the occurrence of this symptom is explained quite simply. Thus in one patient vomiting persisted after she had read a humiliating letter just before a meal and had been violently sick after it. In other cases disgust at food could be quite definitely related to the fact that, owing to the institution of the ‘common table’, a person may be compelled to eat his meal with someone he detests. The disgust is then transferred from the person to the food. The woman with the tic whom I have just mentioned was particularly interesting in this respect. She ate uncommonly little and only under pressure. I learnt from her in hypnosis that a series of psychical traumas had eventually produced this symptom of disgust at food. While she was still a child, her mother, who was very strict, insisted on her eating any meat she had left over at her midday meal two hours later, when it was cold and the fat was all congealed. She did so with great disgust and retained the memory of it; so that later on, when she was no longer subjected to this punishment, she regularly felt disgust at mealtimes. Ten years later she used to sit at table with a relative who was tubercular and kept constantly spitting across the table into the spitoon during meals. A little while later she was obliged to share her meals with a relative who, as she knew, was suffering from a contagious disease. Breuer’s patient, again, behaved for some time like someone suffering from hydrophobia. During hypnosis it turned out that she had once unexpectedly seen a dog drinking out of a tumbler of water of hers.

On The Psychical Mechanism Of Hysterical Phenomena

293

Sleeplessness or disturbed sleep are also symptoms that are usually susceptible to the most precise explanation. Thus, for years on end a woman could never get to sleep till six in the morning. She had for a long time slept in the room adjoining her sick husband, who used to rise at six o’clock. After that hour she had been able to sleep in quiet; and she behaved in the same way once more many years later during a hysterical illness. Another case was that of a man. He was a hysterical patient who had slept very badly for the last twelve years. His sleeplessness, however, was of a quite special sort. In the summer he slept excellently, but in the winter very badly; and in November he slept quite particularly badly. He had no notion what this was due to. Enquiry revealed that in November twelve years earlier he had watched for many nights at the bedside of his son, who was ill with diphtheria.

Breuer’s patient, to whom I have so often referred, offered an example of a disturbance of speech. For a long period of her illness she spoke only English and could neither speak nor understand German. This symptom was traced back to an event which had happened before the outbreak of her illness. While she was in a state of great anxiety, she had attempted to pray but could find no words. At last a few words of a child’s prayer in English occurred to her. When she fell ill later on, only the English language was at her command.

On The Psychical Mechanism Of Hysterical Phenomena

294

The determination of the symptom by the psychical trauma is not so transparent in every instance. There is often only what may be described as a ‘symbolic’ relation between the determining cause and the hysterical symptom. This is especially true of pains. Thus one patient suffered from piercing pains between her eyebrows. The reason was that once when she was a child her grandmother had given her an enquiring, ‘piercing’ look. The same patient suffered for a time from violent pains in her right heel, for which there was no explanation. These pains, it turned out, were connected with an idea that occurred to the patient when she made her first appearance in society. She was overcome with fear that she might not ‘find herself on a right footing’. Symbolizations of this kind were employed by many patients for a whole number of so-called neuralgias and pains. It is as though there were an intention to express the mental state by means of a physical one; and linguistic usage affords a bridge by which this can be effected. In the case, however, of what are after all the typical symptoms of hysteria- such as hemi-anaesthesia, restriction of the visual field, epileptiform convulsions, etc. - a psychical mechanism of this sort cannot be demonstrated. On the other hand this can often be done in respect to the hysterogenic zones.

These examples, which I have chosen out of a number of observations, seem to offer proof that the phenomena of common hysteria can safely be regarded as being on the same pattern as those of traumatic hysteria, with the involvement of psychical, as vs. actual physical trauma and that accordingly every hysteria can be looked upon as traumatic hysteria in the sense of implying a psychical trauma and that every hysterical phenomenon is determined by the nature of the trauma.

On The Psychical Mechanism Of Hysterical Phenomena

295

The further question which would then have to be answered is as to the nature of the causal connection between the determining factor which we have discovered during hypnosis and the phenomenon which persists subsequently as a chronic symptom. This connection might be of various kinds. It might be of the type that we should describe as a ‘releasing’ factor. For instance, if someone with a disposition to tuberculosis receives a blow on the knee as a result of which he develops a tubercular inflammation of the joint, the blow is a simple releasing cause. But this is not what happens in hysteria. There is another kind of causation - namely, direct causation. We can elucidate this from the picture of a foreign body, which continues to operate unceasingly as a stimulating cause of illness until it is got rid of. Cessante causa cessat effectus.¹ Breuer’s observation shows us that there is a connection of this latter kind between the psychical trauma and the hysterical phenomenon. For Breuer learnt from his first patient that the attempt at discovering the determining cause of a symptom was at the same time a therapeutic manoeuvre. The moment at which the physician finds out the occasion when the symptom first appeared and the reason for its appearance is also the moment at which the symptom vanishes. When, for instance, the symptom presented by the patient consists in pains, and when we enquire from him under hypnosis as to their origin, he will produce a series of memories in connection with them. If we can succeed in eliciting a really vivid memory in him, and if he sees things before him with all their original actuality, we shall observe that he is completely dominated by some affect. And if we then compel him to put this affect into words, we shall find that, at the same time as he is producing this violent affect, the phenomenon of his pains emerges very markedly once again and that thenceforward the symptom, in its chronic character, disappears. This is how events turned out in all the instances I have quoted. And it was an interesting fact that the memory of this particular event was to an extraordinary degree more vivid than the memory of any others, and that the affect accompanying it was as great, perhaps, as it had been when the event actually occurred. It could only be supposed that the psychical trauma does in fact continue to operate in the subject and maintains the hysterical phenomenon, and that it comes to an end as soon as the patient has spoken about it.

As I have just said, if, in accordance with our procedure, one arrives at the psychical trauma by making enquiries from the patient under hypnosis, one discovers that the memory concerned is quite unusually strong and has retained the whole of its affect. The question now arises how it is that an event which occurred so long ago - perhaps ten or twenty years - can persist in exercising its power over the subject, how it is that these memories have not been subject to the processes of wearing away and forgetting.

¹ [‘When the cause ceases the effect ceases’]

On The Psychical Mechanism Of Hysterical Phenomena

296

With a view to answering this question, I should like to begin with a few remarks on the conditions which govern the wearing-away of the contents of our ideational life. We will start from a thesis that may be stated in the following terms. If a person experiences a psychical impression, something in his nervous system which we will for the moment call the sum of excitation is increased. Now in every individual there exists a tendency to diminish this sum of excitation once more, in order to preserve his health. The increase of the sum of excitation takes place along sensory paths, and its diminution along motor ones. So we may say that if anything impinges on someone he reacts in a motor fashion. We can now safely assert that it depends on this reaction how much of the initial psychical impression is left. Let us consider this in relation to a particular example. Let us suppose that a man is insulted, is given a blow or something of the kind. This psychical trauma is linked with an increase in the sum of excitation of his nervous system. There then instinctively arises an inclination to diminish this increased excitation immediately. He hits back, and then feels easier; he may perhaps have reacted adequately-that is, he may have got rid of as much as had been introduced into him. Now this reaction may take various forms. For quite slight increases in excitation, alterations in his own body may perhaps be enough: weeping, abusing, raging, and so on. The more intense the trauma, the greater is the adequate reaction. The most adequate reaction, however is always a deed. But, as an English writer has wittily remarked, the man who first flung a word of abuse at his enemy instead of a spear was the founder of civilization. Thus words are substitutes for deeds, and in some circumstances (e. g. in Confession) the only substitutes. Accordingly, alongside the adequate reaction there is one that is less adequate. If, however, there is no reaction whatever to a psychical trauma, the memory of it retains the affect which it originally had. So that if someone who has been insulted cannot avenge the insult either by a retaliatory blow or by a word of abuse, the possibility arises that the memory of the event may call up in him once more the affect which was originally present. An insult that has been repaid, even if only in words, is recollected quite differently from one that has had to be accepted; and linguistic usage characteristically describes an insult that has been suffered in silence as a ‘mortification’. Thus, if for any reason there can be no reaction to a psychical trauma, it retains its original affect, and when someone cannot get rid of the increase in stimulation by ‘abreacting’ it, we have the possibility of the event in question remaining a psychical trauma. Incidentally, a healthy psychical mechanism has other methods of dealing with the affect of a psychical trauma even if motor reaction and reaction by words are denied to it - namely by working it over associatively and by producing contrasting ideas. Even if the person who has been insulted neither hits back nor replies with abuse, he can nevertheless reduce the affect attaching to the insult by calling up such contrasting ideas as those of his own worthiness, of his enemy’s worthlessness, and so on. Whether a healthy man deals with an insult in one way or the other, he always succeeds in achieving the result that the affect which was originally strong in his memory eventually loses intensity and that finally the recollection, having lost its affect, falls a victim to forgetfulness and the process of wearing-away.

On The Psychical Mechanism Of Hysterical Phenomena

297

Now we have found that in hysterical patients there are nothing but impressions which have not lost their affect and whose memory has remained vivid. It follows, therefore, that these memories in hysterical patients, which have become pathogenic, occupy an exceptionalposition as regards the wearing-away process; and observation shows that, in the case of all the events which have become determinants of hysterical phenomena, we are dealing with psychical traumas which have not been completely abreacted, or completely dealt with. Thus we may assert that hysterical patients suffer from incompletely abreacted psychical traumas.

We find two groups of conditions under which memories become pathogenic. In the first group the memories to which the hysterical phenomena can be traced back have for their content ideas which involved a trauma so great that the nervous system had not sufficient power to deal with it in any way, or ideas to which reaction was impossible for social reasons (this applies frequently to married life); or lastly the subject may simply refuse to react, may not want to react to the psychical trauma. In this last case the contents of the hysterical deliria often turn out to be the very circle of ideas which the patient in his normal state has rejected, inhibited and suppressed with all his might.(For instance, blasphemies and erotic ideas occur in the hysterical deliria of nuns.)  But in a second group of cases the reason for the absence of a reaction lies not in the content of the psychical trauma but in other circumstances. For we very often find that the content and determinants of hysterical phenomena are events which are in themselves quite trivial, but which have acquired high significance from the fact that they occurred at specially important moments when the patient’s predisposition was pathologically increased. For instance, the affect of fright may have arisen in the course of some other severe affect and may on that account have attained such great importance. States of this kind are of short duration and are, as one might say, out of communication with the rest of the subject’s mental life. While he is in a state of auto-hypnosis such as this, he cannot get rid associatively of an idea that occurs to him, as he can in a waking state. After considerable experience with these phenomena, we think it probable that in every hysteria we are dealing ‘with a rudiment of what is called  ‘double conscience’, dual consciousness, and that a tendency to such a dissociation and with it the emergence of abnormal states of consciousness, which we propose to call ‘hypnoid’, is the basic phenomenon of hysteria.

On The Psychical Mechanism Of Hysterical Phenomena

298

Let us now consider the manner in which our therapy operates. It falls in with one of the dearest human wishes - the wish to be able to do something over again. Someone has experienced a psychical trauma without reacting to it sufficiently. We get him to experience it a second time, but under hypnosis; and we now compel him to complete his reaction to it. He can then get rid of the idea’s affect, which was so to say ‘strangulated’, and when this is done the operation of the idea is brought to an end. Thus we cure - not hysteria but some of its individual symptoms - by causing an unaccomplished reaction to be completed.

You must not suppose, then, that very much has been gained by this for the therapeutics of hysteria. Hysteria, like the neuroses, has its deeper causes; and it is those deeper causes that set limits, which are often very appreciable, to the success of our treatment.

299

THE NEURO-PSYCHOSES OF DEFENCE

(1894)

300

Intentionally left blank

301

THE NEURO-PSYCHOSES OF DEFENCE

(AN ATTEMPT AT A PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY OF ACQUIRED HYSTERIA, OF MANY

PHOBIAS, AND OBSESSIONS AND OF CERTAIN HALLUCINATORY PSYCHOSES)

After making a detailed study of a number of nervous patients suffering from phobias and obsessions, I was led to attempt an explanation of those symptoms; and this enabled me afterwards to arrive successfully at the origin of pathological ideas of this sort in new and different cases. My explanation therefore seems to me to deserve publication and further examination. Simultaneously with this ‘psychological theory of phobias and obsessions’ my observation of patients resulted in a contribution to the theory of hysteria, or rather to a change in it, which appears to take into account an important characteristic that is common both to hysteria and to the neuroses I have just mentioned. Furthermore, I had occasion to gain insight into what is undoubtedly a form of mental disease, and I found at the same time that the point of view which I had tentatively adopted established an intelligible connection between these psychoses and the two neuroses under discussion. At the end of this paper I shall bring forward a working hypothesis which I have made use of in all three instances.

The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

302

I

Let me begin with the change which seems to me to be called for in the theory of the hysterical neurosis.

Since the fine work done by Pierre Janet, Josef Breuer and others, it may be taken as generally recognized that the syndrome of hysteria, so far as it is as yet intelligible, justifies the assumption of there being a splitting of consciousness, accompanied by the formation of separate psychical groups. Opinions are less settled, however, about the origin of this splitting of consciousness and about the part played by this characteristic in the structure of the hysterical neurosis.

According to the theory of Janet (1892-4 and 1893), the splitting of consciousness is a primary feature of the mental change in hysteria. It is based on an innate weakness of the capacity for psychical synthesis, on the narrowness of the ‘field of consciousness (champ de la conscience)' which, in the form of a psychical stigma, is evidence of the degeneracy of hysterical individuals.

In contradistinction to Janet’s view, which seems to me to admit of a great variety of objections, there is the view put forward by Breuer in our joint communication (Breuer and Freud, 1893). According to him, ‘the basis and sine qua non of hysteria’ is the occurrence of peculiar dream-like states of consciousness with a restricted capacity for association, for which he proposes the name ‘hypnoid states’. In that case, the splitting of consciousness is secondary and acquired; it comes about because the ideas which emerge in hypnoid states are cut off from associative communication with the rest of the content of consciousness.

I am now in a position to bring forward evidence of two other extreme forms of hysteria in which it is impossible to regard the splitting of consciousness as primary in Janet’s sense. In the first of these forms I was repeatedly able to show that the splitting in the content of consciousness is the result of an act of will on the part of the patient; that is to say, it is initiated by an effort of will whose motive can be specified. By this I do not, of course, mean that the patient intends to bring about a splitting of his consciousness. His intention is a different one; but, instead of attaining its aim, it produces a splitting of consciousness.

The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

303

In the third form of hysteria, which we have demonstrated by means of a psychical analysis of intelligent patients, the splitting of consciousness plays an insignificant part, or perhaps none at all. They are those cases in which what has happened is only that the reaction to traumatic stimuli has failed to occur, and which can also, accordingly, be resolved and cured by ‘abreaction’.¹ These are the pure ‘retention hysterias’.

As regards the connection with phobias and obsessions, I am only concerned with the second form of hysteria. For reasons which will soon be evident, I shall call this form ‘defence hysteria’, using the name to distinguish it from hypnoid hysteria and retention hysteria. I may also provisionally present my cases of defence hysteria as ‘acquired’ hysteria, since in them there was no question either of a grave hereditary taint or of an individual degenerative atrophy.

For these patients whom I analysed had enjoyed good mental health up to the moment at which an occurrence of incompatibility took place in their ideational life - that is to say, until their ego was faced with an experience, an idea or a feeling which aroused such a distressing affect that the subject decided to forget about it because he had no confidence in his power to resolve the contradiction between that incompatible idea and his ego by means of thought-activity.

In females incompatible ideas of this sort arise chiefly on the soil of sexual experience and sensation; and the patients can recollect as precisely as could be desired their efforts at defence, their intention of ‘pushing the thing away’, of not thinking of it, of suppressing it. I will give some examples, which I could easily multiply, from my own observation: the case of a girl, who blamed herself because, while she was nursing her sick father, she had thought about a young man who had made a slight erotic impression on her; the case of a governess who had fallen in love with her employer and had resolved to drive this inclination out of her mind because it seemed to her incompatible with her pride; and so on.²

¹ Cf. our joint communication, ibid., 2, 8-9.

² These examples are taken from a volume by Breuer and myself which is still in preparation and which deals in detail with the psychical mechanism of hysteria.

The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

304

I cannot, of course, maintain that an effort of will to thrust things of this kind out of one’s thoughts a pathological act; nor do I know whether and in what way intentional forgetting succeeds in those people who, under the same psychical influences, remain healthy. I only know that this kind of ‘forgetting’ did not succeed with the patients I analysed, but led to various pathological reactions which produced either hysteria or an obsession or a hallucinatory psychosis. The ability to bring about one of these states - which are all of them bound up with a splitting of consciousness -by means of an effort of will of this sort, is to be regarded as the manifestation of a pathological disposition, although such a disposition is not necessarily identical with individual or hereditary ‘degeneracy’.

As regards the path which leads from the patient’s effort of will to the onset of the neurotic symptom, I have formed an opinion which may be expressed, in current psychological abstractions, somewhat as follows. The task which the ego, in its defensive attitude, sets itself of treating the incompatible idea as ‘non arivée’ simply cannot be fulfilled by it. Both the memory-trace and the affect which is attached to the idea are there once and for all and cannot be eradicated. But it amounts to an approximate fulfilment of the task if the ego succeeds in turning this powerful idea into a weak one, in robbing it of the affect - the sum of excitation - with which it is loaded. The weak idea will then have virtually no demands to make on the work of association. But the sum of excitation which has been detached from it must be put to another use.

The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

305

Up to this point the processes in hysteria, and in phobias and obsessions are the same; from now on their paths diverge. In hysteria, the incompatible idea is rendered innocuous by its sum of excitation being transformed into something somatic. For this I should like to propose the name of conversion.

The conversion may be either total or partial. It proceeds along the line of the motor or sensory innervation which is related - whether intimately or more loosely - to the traumatic experience. By this means the ego succeeds in freeing itself from the contradiction; but instead, it has burdened itself with a mnemic symbol which finds a lodgement in consciousness, like a sort of parasite, either in the form of an unresolvable motor innervation or as a constantly recurring hallucinatory sensation, and which persists until a conversion in the opposite direction takes place. Consequently the memory-trace of the repressed idea has, after all, not been dissolved; from now on, it forms the nucleus of a second psychical group.

The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

306

I will only add a few more words to this view of the psycho-physical processes in hysteria. When once such a nucleus for a hysterical splitting-off has been formed at a ‘traumatic moment’, it will be increased at other moments (which might be called ‘auxiliary moments’) whenever the arrival of a fresh impression of the same sort succeeds in breaking through the barrier erected by the will, in furnishing the weakened idea with fresh affect and in re-establishing for a time the associative link between the two psychical groups, until a further conversion sets up a defence. The distribution of excitation thus brought about in hysteria usually turns out to be an unstable one. The excitation which is forced into a wrong channel (ie which has been channelled into a somatic innervation) now and then finds its way back to the idea from which it has been detached, and it then compels the subject either to work over the idea associatively or to get rid of it in hysterical attacks - as we see in the familiar contrast between attacks and chronic symptoms. The operation of Breuer’s cathartic method lies in leading back the excitation in this way from the somatic to the psychical sphere deliberately, and in then forcibly bringing about a settlement of the contradiction by means of thought-activity and a discharge of the excitation by talking.

If the splitting of consciousness which occurs in acquired hysteria is based upon an act of will, then we have a surprisingly simple explanation of the remarkable fact that hypnosis regularly widens the restricted consciousness of a hysteric and allows access to the psychical group that has been split off. Indeed, we know it as a peculiarity of all states resembling sleep that they suspend the distribution of excitation on which the ‘will’  of the conscious personality is based.

Thus we see that the characteristic factor in hysteria is not the splitting of consciousness but the capacity for conversion, and we may adduce as an important part of the disposition to hysteria - a disposition which in other respects is still unknown - a psycho-physical aptitude for transposing very large sums of excitation into the somatic innervation.

This aptitude does not, in itself, exclude psychical health; and it only leads to hysteria in the event of there being a psychical incompatibility or an accumulation of excitation. In taking this view, Breuer and I are coming closer to Oppenheim’s¹ and Strümpell’s² well-known definitions of hysteria, and are diverging from Janet, who assigns too great an importance to the splitting of consciousness in his characterization of hysteria.³ The presentation given here may claim to have made intelligible the connection between conversion and the hysterical splitting of consciousness.

¹ According to Oppenheim, hysteria is an intensified expression of motion. The ‘expression of emotion’, however, represents the amount of psychical excitation which normally undergoes conversion.

² Strümpell maintains that in hysteria the disturbance lies psycho-physical sphere - in the region where the somatic and the mental are linked together.

³ In the second section of his acute paper ‘Quelques définitions . . .’ Janet has himself dealt with the objection which argues that splitting of consciousness occurs in psychoses and in so-called ‘psychasthenia’ as well as in hysteria, but in my judgement he has not met it satisfactorily. It is in the main this objection which obliges him to describe hysteria as a form of degeneracy. But he has failed to produce any characteristic which sufficiently distinguishes the splitting of consciousness in hysteria from that in psychoses and similar states.

The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

307

II

If someone with a disposition lacks the aptitude for conversion, but if, nevertheless, in order to fend off an incompatible idea, he sets about separating it from its affect, then that affect is obliged to remain in the psychical sphere. The idea, now weakened, is still left in consciousness, separated from all association. But its affect, which has become free, attaches itself to other ideas which are not in themselves incompatible; and, thanks to this ‘false connection’, those ideas turn into obessional ideas. This, in a few words, is the psychological theory of obsessions and phobias mentioned at the beginning of this paper.

I will now indicate which of the various elements put forward in this theory can be directly demonstrated and which have been filled in by me. What can be directly demonstrated, apart from the end-product of the process - the obsession - is in the first place the source of the affect which is now in a false connection. In all the cases I have analysed it was the subject’s sexual life that had given rise to a distressing affect of precisely the same quality as that attaching to his obsession. Theoretically, it is not impossible that this affect should sometimes arise in other fields; I can only report that so far I have not come across any other origin. Moreover, it is easy to see that it is precisely sexual life which brings with it the most copious occasions for the emergence of incompatible ideas.

Furthermore, the most unambiguous statements by the patients give proof of the effort of will, the attempt at defence, upon which the theory lays emphasis; and at least in a number of cases the patients themselves inform us that their phobia or obsession made its first appearance after the effort of will had apparently succeeded in its aim. ‘Something very disagreeable happened to me once and I tried very hard to put it away from me and not to think about it any more. I succeeded at last; but then I got this other thing, which I have not been able to get rid of since.’ It was with these words that a woman patient confirmed the chief points of the theory I have developed here.

The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

308

Not everyone who suffers from obsessions is as clear as this about their origin. As a rule, when one draws a patient’s attention to the original idea of a sexual kind, the answer is: ’It can’t come from that. I didn’t think at all much about that. For a moment I was frightened, but I turned my mind away from it and I haven’t been troubled by it since.’ In this frequent objection we have evidence that the obsession represents a substitute or surrogate for the incompatible sexual idea and has taken its place in consciousness.

Between the patient’s effort of will, which succeeds in repressing the unacceptable sexual idea, and the emergence of the obsessional idea, which, though having little intensity in itself, is now supplied with an incomprehensibly strong affect, yawns the gap which the theory here developed seeks to fill. The separation of the sexual idea from its affect and the attachment of the latter to another, suitable but not incompatible idea-these are processes which occur without consciousness. Their existence can only be presumed, but can not be proved by any clinico-psychological analysis. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that these processes are not of a psychical nature at all, that they are physical processes whose psychical consequences present themselves as if what is expressed by the terms ‘separation of the idea from its affect’ and ‘false connection’ of the latter had really taken place.

Alongside of the cases which show a sequence between an incompatible sexual idea and an obsessional idea, we find a number of other cases in which obsessional ideas and sexual ideas of a distressing character are present simultaneously. To call the latter ‘sexual obsessional ideas’ will not do very well, for they lack one essential feature of obsessional ideas: they turn out to be fully justified, whereas the distressing character of ordinary obsessional ideas is a problem for both doctor and patient. So far as I have been able to see my way in cases of this kind, what is happening is that a perpetual defence is going on against sexual ideas that are continually coming up afresh - a piece of work, that is to say, which has not yet come to completion.

The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

309

So long as the patients are aware of the sexual origin of their obsessions, they often keep them secret. If they do complain about them, they usually express their astonishment that they should be subject to the affect in question - that they should feel anxiety, or have certain impulses, and so on. To the experienced physician, on the contrary, the affect seems justified and comprehensible; what he finds noticeable is only that an affect of that kind should be linked with an idea which does not merit it. The affect of the obsession appears to him, in other words, as being dislodged or transposed; and if he has accepted what has been said in these pages, he will be able, in a number of cases of obsessions, to attempt to re-translate them into sexual terms.

To provide this secondary connection for the liberated affect, any idea can be made use of which is either able, from its nature, to be united with an affect of the quality in question, or which has certain relations to the incompatible idea which make it seem as though it could serve as a surrogate for it. Thus, for example, liberated anxiety, whose sexual origin must not be remembered by the patient, will seize upon the common primary phobias of mankind about animals, thunderstorms, darkness and so on, or upon things which are unmistakably associated in one way or another with what is sexual-such as micturition, defaecation, or dirtying and contagion generally.

The ego gains much less advantage from choosing transposition of affect as a method of defence than from choosing the hysterical conversion of psychical excitation into somatic innervation. The affect from which the ego has suffered remains as it was before, unaltered and undiminished, the only difference being that the incompatible idea is kept down and shut out from recollection. The repressed ideas, as in the other case, form the nucleus of a second psychical group, which, I believe, is accessible even without the help of hypnosis. If phobias and obsessions are unaccompanied by the striking symptoms which characterize the formation of an independent psychical group in hysteria, this is doubtless because in their case the whole alteration has remained in the psychical sphere and the relationship between psychical excitation and somatic innervation has undergone no change.

The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

310

To illustrate what has been said about obsessions, I will give a few examples which are, I imagine, of a typical kind:

(1) A girl suffered from obsessional self-reproaches. If she read something in the papers about coiners, the thought would occur to her that she, too, had made counterfeit money; if a murder had been committed by an unknown person, she would ask herself anxiously whether it was not she who had done the deed. At the same time she was perfectly conscious of the absurdity of these obsessional reproaches. For a time, this sense of guilt gained such an ascendancy over her that her powers of criticism were stifled and she accused herself to her relatives and her doctor of having really committed all these crimes. (This was an example of a psychosis through simple intensification - an ‘Überwältigungspsychose’.) Close questioning then revealed the source from which her sense of guilt arose. Stimulated by a chance voluptuous sensation, she had allowed herself to be led astray by a woman friend into masturbating, and had practised it for years, fully conscious of her wrong-doing and to the accompaniment of the most violent, but, as usual, ineffective self-reproaches. An excessive indulgence after going to a ball had produced the intensification that led to the psychosis. After a few months of treatment and the strictest surveillance, the girl recovered.

The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

311

(2) Another girl suffered from the dread of being overcome by the need to urinate, and of being unable to avoid wetting herself, ever since a need of this kind had in fact once obliged her to leave a concert hall during the performance. By degrees this phobia had made her completely incapable of enjoying herself or of going into society. She only felt well if she knew that there was a W. C. near at hand which she could reach unobtrusively. There was no question of any organic complaint which might justify this mistrust in her power to control her bladder; when she was at home, in quiet conditions, or at night, the need to urinate did not arise. A detailed examination showed that the need had occurred first in the following circumstances. In the concert hall a gentleman to whom she was not indifferent had taken a seat not far from her. She began to think about him and to imagine herself sitting beside him as his wife. During this erotic reverie she had the bodily sensation which is to be compared with an erection in a man, and which in her case - I do not know if this is always so - ended with a slight need to urinate. She now became greatly frightened by the sexual sensation (to which she was normally accustomed) because she had resolved within herself to combat this particular liking, as well as any other she might feel; and next moment the affect had become transferred on to the accompanying need to urinate and compelled her after an agonizing struggle to leave the hall. In her ordinary life she was so prudish that she had an intense horror of everything to do with sex and could not contemplate the thought of ever marrying. On the other hand, she was so hyperaesthetic sexually that during every erotic reverie, in which she readily indulged, the same voluptuous sensation appeared. The erection was each time accompanied by the need to urinate, though without its making any impression on her until the scene in the concert hall. The treatment led to an almost complete control over her phobia.

The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

312

(3) A young married woman who, in five years of marriage, had had only one child, complained to me of an obsessional impulse to throw herself out of the window or from the balcony, and also of a fear which seized her when she saw a sharp knife, of stabbing her child with it. She admitted that marital intercourse seldom occurred, and only subject to precautions against conception, but she did not miss it, she said, as hers was not a sensual nature. At this point I ventured to tell her that at the sight of a man she had erotic ideas and that she had therefore lost confidence in herself and regarded herself as a depraved person, capable of anything. The translation back of the obsessional idea into sexual terms was successful. In tears, she at once confessed the long-concealed poverty of her marriage; and later she told me also of distressing ideas of an unmodified sexual character such as the often-recurring sensation of something forcing itself under her skirt.

I have turned observations of this kind to account in my therapeutic work by leading back the attention of patients with phobias and obsessions to the repressed sexual ideas in spite of all their protestations, and, wherever possible, by stopping up the sources from which those ideas sprang. I cannot, of course, assert that all phobias and obsessions arise in the manner I have shown here. In the first place, my experience of them includes only a limited number compared with the frequency of these neuroses; and in the second place, I myself am aware that such ‘psychasthenic’ symptoms, as Janet terms them, are not all equivalent.¹ There are, for instance, purely hysterical phobias. Nevertheless, I think that it will be possible to show the presence of the mechanism of transposition of affect in the great majority of phobias and obsessions, and I would therefore urge that these neuroses, which are found in an isolated state as often as in combination with hysteria or neurasthenia, should not be thrown into a heap along with common neurasthenia, for the basic symptoms of which there is no ground at all to assume a psychical mechanism.

¹ The group of typical phobias, of which agoraphobia is a typical model, cannot be traced back to the psychical mechanism described above; on the contrary, the mechanism of agoraphobia differs from that of obsessions proper, and of the phobias that are reducible to them, in one decisive point. There is no repressed idea from which the anxiety affect might have been separated off. The anxiety of these phobias has another origin.

The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

313

III

In both the instances considered so far, defence against the incompatible idea was effected by separating it from its affect; the idea itself remained in consciousness, even though weakened and isolated. There is, however, a much more energetic and successful kind of defence. Here, the ego rejects the incompatible idea together with its affect and behaves as if the idea had never occurred to the ego at all. But from the moment at which this has been successfully done the subject is in a psychosis, which can only be classified as ‘hallucinatory confusion. A single example may serve to illustrate this statement:

A girl had given her first impulsive affection to a man, and firmly believed that he returned her love. In fact, she was wrong; the young man had a different motive for visiting the house. Disappointments were not wanting. At first she defended herself against them by effecting a hysterical conversion of the experiences in question and thus preserved her belief that one day he would come and ask her hand. But at the same time she felt unhappy and ill, because the conversion was incomplete and because she was continually being met by fresh painful impressions. Finally, in a state of great tension, she awaited his arrival on a particular day, the day of a family celebration. But the day wore on and he did not appear. When all the trains by which he could arrive had come and gone, she passed into a state of hallucinatory confusion: he had arrived, she heard his voice in the garden, she hurried down in her night-dress to receive him. From that time on she lived for two months in a happy dream, whose content was that he was there, always at her side, and that everything was as it had been before (before the time of the disappointments which she had so laboriously fended off). Her hysteria and her depression of spirits were overcome. During her illness she was silent about the whole latter period of doubt and suffering; she was happy so long as she was left undisturbed, and she broke out in fury only when some rule of conduct insisted on by those around her hindered her in something which seemed to her to follow quite logically from her blissful dream. This psychosis, which had been unintelligible at the time, was explained ten years later with the help of a hypnotic analysis.

The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

314

The fact to which I now wish to call attention is that the content of a hallucinatory psychosis of this sort consists precisely in the accentuation of the idea which was threatened by the precipitating cause of the onset of the illness. One is therefore justified in saying that the ego has fended off the incompatible idea through a flight into psychosis. The process by which this has been achieved once more eludes the subject’s self perception, as it eludes psychologico-clinical analysis. It must be regarded as the expression of a pathological disposition of a fairly high degree and it may be described more or less as follows. The ego breaks away from the incompatible idea; but the latter is inseparably connected with a piece of reality, so that, in so far as the ego achieves this result, it, too, has detached itself wholly or in part from reality. In my opinion this latter event is the condition under which the subject’s ideas receive the vividness of hallucinations; and thus when the defence has been successfully carried out he finds himself in a state of hallucinatory confusion.

I have only very few analyses of psychoses of this sort at my disposal. But I think we have to do here with a type of psychical illness which is very frequently employed. For no insane asylum is without what must be regarded as analogous examples - the mother who has fallen ill from the loss of her baby, and now rocks a piece of wood unceasingly in her arms, or the jilted bride who, arrayed in her wedding-dress, has for years been waiting for her bridegroom.

It is perhaps not superfluous to point out that the three methods of defence here described and, along with them, the three forms of illness to which those methods lead, may be combined in the same person. The simultaneous appearance of phobias and hysterical symptoms which is so often observed in practice is one of the factors which render it difficult to separate hysteria clearly from other neuroses and which make it necessary to set up the category of ‘mixed neuroses’. It is true that hallucinatory confusion is not often compatible with a persistence of hysteria, nor, as a rule, of obsessions. On the other hand, it is not rare for a psychosis of defence episodically to break through the course of a hysterical or mixed neurosis.

I should like, finally, to dwell for a moment on the working hypothesis which I have made use of in this exposition of the neuroses of defence. I refer to the concept that in mental functions something is to be distinguished - a quota of affect or sum of excitation - which possesses all the characteristics of a quantity (though we have no means of measuring it), which is capable of increase, diminution, displacement and discharge, and which is spread over the memory-traces of ideas somewhat as an electric charge is spread over the surface of a body.

This hypothesis which, incidentally, already underlies our theory of ‘abreaction’ in our ‘Preliminary Communication’ (1893a), can be applied in the same sense as physicists apply the hypothesis of a flow of electric fluid. It is provisionally justified by its utility in co-ordinating and explaining a great variety of psychical states.

VIENNA, end of January 1894.

315

OBSESSIONS AND PHOBIAS

THEIR PSYCHICAL MECHANISM AND THEIR AETIOLOGY

(1895)

316

Intentionally left blank

317

OBSESSIONS AND PHOBIAS

THEIR PSYCHICAL MECHANISM AND THEIR AETIOLOGY

I shall begin by challenging two assertions which are often found repeated in regard to the syndromes ‘obsessions’ and ‘phobias’. It must be said, first, that they cannot be included under neurasthenia proper, since the patients afflicted with these symptoms are no more often neurasthenics than not; and secondly, that we are not justified in regarding them as the effect of mental degeneracy, because they are found in persons no more degenerate than the majority of neurotics in general, because they sometimes improve, and sometimes, indeed, we even succeed in curing them.¹

Obsessions and phobias are separate neuroses, with a special mechanism and aetiology which I have succeeded in demonstrating in a certain number of cases, and which, I hope, will prove similar in a good number of fresh cases.

As regards classification of the subject, I propose in the first place to exclude a group of intense obsessions which are nothing but memories, unaltered images of important events. As an example, I may cite Pascal’s obsession: he always thought he saw an abyss on his left hand ‘after he had nearly been thrown into the Seine in his coach’. Such obsessions and phobias, which might be called traumatic, are allied to the symptoms of hysteria.

Apart from this group we must distinguish: (a) true obsessions (b) phobias. The essential difference between them is the following:

Two constituents are found in every obsession: (1) an idea that forces itself upon the patient (2) an associated emotional state. Now in the group of phobias this emotional state is always one of ‘anxiety’, while in true obsessions other emotional states, such as doubt, remorse, or anger, may occur just as well as anxiety. I will first attempt to explain the really remarkable psychological mechanism of true obsessions, a mechanism quite different from that of the phobias.

¹ I am very glad to find that the authors of the most recent work on this subject express opinions very similar to mine. Cf. Gélineau (1894), and Hack Tuke (1894).

Obsessions And Phobias

318

I

In many true obsessions it is quite plain that the emotional state is the principal thing, since that state persists unchanged while the idea associated with it varies. The girl in Case 1 quoted below, for example, felt remorse in some degree for all sorts of reasons - for having stolen, for having ill-treated her sisters, for having made counterfeit money, etc. People who doubt have many doubts at the same time or in succession. It is the emotional state which remains constant in them; the idea changes. In other cases the idea, too, seems fixated, as in Case 4, of the girl who pursued the servants in the house with an incomprehensible hatred, though constantly changing the individual object.

Now a careful psychological analysis of these cases shows that the emotional state, as such, is always justified. The girl in Case 1, who suffered from remorse, had good reasons for it; the women in Case 3 who doubted their powers of resistance to temptation knew very well why. The girl in Case 4, who detested servants, had good reasons for complaining, etc. Only, and it is in these two characteristics that the pathological mark lies, (1) the emotional state persists indefinitely, and, (2) the associated idea is no longer the appropriate original one, related to the aetiology of the obsession, but is one which replaces it, a substitute for it.

The proof of this is the fact that we can always find in the previous history of the patient, at the beginning of the obsession, the original idea that has been replaced. The replaced ideas all have common attributes; they correspond to really distressing experiences in the subject’s sexual life which he is striving to forget. He succeeds merely in replacing the incompatible idea by another ill-adapted for being associated with the emotional state, which for its part remains unchanged. It is this mésalliance between the emotional state and the associated idea that accounts for the absurdity so characteristic of obsessions.

Obsessions And Phobias

319

I will now bring forward my observations and conclude with an attempt at a theoretical explanation.

Case 1. A girl reproached herself for things which she knew were absurd: for having stolen, for having made counterfeit money, for being involved in a conspiracy, etc., according to what she happened to have been reading during the day.

Reinstatement of the replaced idea: She reproached herself with the masturbation she had been practising in secret without being able to renounce it. She was cured by careful surveillance which prevented her from masturbating.

Case 2. A young man, a medical student, suffered from an analogous obsession. He reproached himself for all sorts of immoral acts: for having killed his cousin, for having violated his sister, for having set fire to a house, etc. He got to the point of having to turn round in the street to see whether he had not killed the last passer-by.

Reinstatement: He had been much affected by reading in a quasi-medical book that masturbation, to which he was addicted, destroyed one’s morale.

Case 3. Several women complained of an obsessional impulse to throw themselves out of the window, to stab their children with knives, scissors, etc.

Reinstatement: Obsessions based on typical temptations. These were women who, not being at all satisfied in marriage, had to struggle against the desires and voluptuous ideas that constantly troubled them at the sight of other men.

Case 4. A girl who was perfectly sane and very intelligent displayed an uncontrollable hatred against the servants in the house. It had been started in connection with an impertinent servant, and had been transferred from servant to servant, to an extent that made housekeeping impossible. The feeling was a mixture of hate and disgust. She gave as a reason for it that the coarseness of these girls spoilt her idea of love.

Reinstatement: This girl had been an involuntary witness of a love-scene in which her mother had taken part. She had hidden her face, had stopped up her ears, and had done her utmost to forget it, as it disgusted her and would have made it impossible for her to remain with her mother, whom she loved tenderly. She succeeded in her efforts, but her anger at her idea of love having been defiled persisted within her, and this emotional state soon linked itself to the idea of a person who could take her mother’s place.

Obsessions And Phobias

320

Case 5. A girl had become almost completely isolated on account of an obsessional fear of incontinence of urine. She could no longer leave her room or receive visitors without having urinated a number of times. When she was at home or entirely alone the fear did not trouble her.

Reinstatement: It was an obsession based on temptation or mistrust. She did not mistrust her bladder, but her resistance to erotic impulses. The origin of the obsession shows this clearly. Once, at the theatre, on seeing a man who attracted her, she had felt an erotic desire, accompanied (as spontaneous pollutions in women always are) by a desire to urinate. She was obliged to leave the theatre, and from that moment on she was a prey to the fear of having the same sensation, but the desire to urinate had replaced the erotic one. She was completely cured.

Although the cases I have enumerated show varying degrees of complexity, they have this in common: the original (incompatible) idea has been replaced by another idea, the substituted idea. In the cases which I now append, the original idea has been replaced, but not by another idea; it has been replaced by acts or impulses which originally served as measures of relief or as protective procedures, and are now grotesquely associated with an emotional state which does not fit them, but which has persisted unchanged, and which has remained as justifiable as it was at its origin.

Case 6. Obsessional arithmomania. - A woman found herself obliged to count the boards in the floor, the steps in the stair case, etc. - acts which she performed in a ridiculous state of anxiety.

Reinstatement: She had begun the counting in order to distract her mind from obsessional ideas (of temptation). She had succeeded in doing so, but the impulse to count had replaced the original obsession.

Obsessions And Phobias

321

Case 7.Obsessional brooding and speculating. - A woman suffered from attacks of this obsession which ceased only when she was ill, and then gave place to hypochondriacal fears. The theme of her worry was always a part or function of her body; for example, respiration: ‘Why must I breathe? Suppose I didn’t want to breathe?’ etc.

Reinstatement: At the very beginning she had suffered from the fear of becoming insane, a hypochondriacal phobia common enough among women who are not satisfied by their husbands, as she was not. To assure herself that she was not going mad, that she was still in possession of her mental faculties, she had begun to ask herself questions and concern herself with serious problems. This calmed her at first, but with time the habit of speculation replaced the phobia. For more than fifteen years, periods of fear (pathophobia) and of obsessive speculating had alternated in her.

Case 8. Folie du doute. - Several cases showed the typical symptoms of this obsession but were explained very simply. These persons had suffered or were still suffering from various obsessions, and the knowledge that the obsessions had disturbed all their acts and had many times interrupted their train of thought provoked a legitimate doubt about the reliability of their memory. The confidence of each one of us is shaken, and we all of us have to re-read a letter or repeat a calculation if our attention has been distracted several times during the performance of the act. Doubt is a quite logical result when obsessions are present.

Case 9. Folie du doute (Hesitation). - The girl in Case 4 had become extremely slow in the performance of all her everyday actions, particularly in her toilet. She took hours to tie her shoe laces or to clean her finger-nails. By way of explanation she said she could not make her toilet while the obsessional ideas were occupying her, nor immediately afterwards. As a result, she had become accustomed to wait a definite length of time after each return of the obsessional idea.

Obsessions And Phobias

322

Case 10. Folie du doute. (Fear of scraps of paper.) - A young woman had suffered from scruples after having written a letter; at the same time she collected all the pieces of paper she saw. She explained this by confessing to a love which she had formerly refused to admit. As a result of constantly repeating her lover’s name, she was seized with a fear that the name might have slipped off the end of her pen, that she might have written it upon some scrap of paper in a pensive moment.¹

Case 11. Mysophobia. - A woman kept washing her hands constantly and touched door-handles only with her elbow.

Reinstatement: It was the case of Lady Macbeth. The washing was symbolic, designed to replace by physical purity the moral purity which she regretted having lost. She tormented herself with remorse for conjugal infidelity, the memory of which she had resolved to banish from her mind. In addition, she used to wash her genitals.

As regards the theory of this process of substitution, I will content myself with answering three questions that arise here.

(1) How can the substitution come about?

It seems to be the expression of a special inherited mental disposition. At any rate, ‘similar heredity’ is often enough found in obsessional cases, and in hysteria. Thus the patient in Case 2 told me that his father had suffered from similar symptoms. He once introduced me to a first cousin who had obsessions and a tic convulsif; and to his sister’s daughter, aged eleven, who already gave evidence of obsessions (probably of remorse).

(2) What is the motive for the substitution?

I think it may be regarded as an act of defence (Abwehr) of the ego against the incompatible idea. Among my patients there are some who remember a deliberate effort to banish the distressing idea or recollection from the field of consciousness. (See Cases 3, 4, 11.) In other cases the expulsion of the incompatible idea is brought about which has left no trace in the patient’s memory.

(3) Why does the emotional state that is associated with the obsessional idea persist indefinitely instead of vanishing like other states of our ego?

This question may be answered by reference to the theory of the genesis of hysterical symptoms developed by Breuer and myself.¹ Here I will only remark that, by the very fact of the substitution, the disappearance of the emotional state is rendered impossible.

¹ Cf. the German popular song:

Auf jedes weisse Blatt Papier möcht’ ich es schreiben:

Dein ist mein Herz und soll es ewig, ewig bleiben.

Obsessions And Phobias

323

II

In addition to these two groups of true obsessions there is the class of ‘phobias’, which must now be considered. I have already mentioned the great difference between obsessions and phobias: that in the latter the emotion is always one of anxiety, fear. I might add that obsessions are varied and more specialized, phobias are more monotonous and typical. But this distinction is not of capital importance.

Among the phobias, also, two groups may be differentiated, according to the nature of the object feared: (1) common phobias, an exaggerated fear of things that everyone detests or fears to some extent: such as night, solitude, death, illnesses, dangers in general, snakes, etc. (2) contingent phobias, the fear of special conditions that inspire no fear in the normal man; for example, agoraphobia and the other phobias of locomotion. It is interesting to note that these phobias have not the obsessive feature that characterizes true obsessions and the common phobias. The emotional state appears in their instance only under special conditions which the patient carefully avoids.

The mechanism of phobias is entirely different from that of obsessions. Substitution is no longer the predominant feature in the former; psychological analysis reveals no incompatible, replaced idea in them. Nothing is ever found but the emotional state of anxiety which, by a kind of selective process, brings up all the ideas adapted to become the subject of a phobia. In the case of agoraphobia, etc., we often find the recollection of an anxiety attack; and what the patient actually fears is the occurrence of such an attack under the special conditions in which he believes he cannot escape it.

¹ ‘On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena’ (1893a)

Obsessions And Phobias

324

The anxiety belonging to this emotional state, which underlies all phobias, is not derived from any memory; we may well wonder what the source of this powerful condition of the nervous system can be.

I hope to be able to demonstrate, on another occasion, that there is reason to distinguish a special neurosis, the ‘anxiety neurosis’, of which the chief symptom is this emotional state. I shall then enumerate its various symptoms and insist on the necessity for differentiating this neurosis from neurasthenia, with which it is now confused. Phobias, then, are part of the anxiety neurosis, and are almost always accompanied by other symptoms of the same group.

The anxiety neurosis, too, has a sexual origin as far as I can see, but it does not attach itself to ideas taken from sexual life; properly speaking, it has no psychical mechanism. Its specific cause is the accumulation of sexual tension, produced by abstinence or by unconsummated sexual excitation (using the term as a general formula for the effects of, of relative impotence in the husband, of excitation without satisfaction in engaged couples, of enforced abstinence, etc.).

It is under such conditions, extremely frequent in modern society, especially among women, that anxiety neurosis (of which phobias are a psychical manifestation) develops.

In conclusion I may point out that combinations of a phobia and an obsession proper may co-exist, and that indeed this is a very frequent occurrence. We may find that a phobia had developed at the beginning of the disease as a symptom of anxiety neurosis. The idea which constitutes the phobia and which is associated with the state of fear may be replaced by another idea or rather by the protective procedure that seemed to relieve the fear. Case 7 (obsessive speculating) presents a neat example of this group: a phobia along with a true substitutive obsession.

325

ON THE GROUNDS FOR DETACHING A PARTICULAR SYNDROME FROM

NEURASTHENIA UNDER THE DESCRIPTION ‘ANXIETY NEUROSIS’

(1895)

326

Intentionally left blank

327

ON THE GROUNDS FOR DETACHING A PARTICULAR SYNDROME FROM

NEURASTHENIA UNDER THE DESCRIPTION ‘ANXIETY NEUROSIS’

It is difficult to make any statement of general validity about neurasthenia, so long as we use that name to cover all the things which Beard has included under it. In my opinion, it can be nothing but a gain to neuropathology if we make an attempt to separate from neurasthenia proper all those neurotic disturbances in which, on the one hand, the symptoms are more firmly linked to one another than to the typical symptoms of neurasthenia (such as intracranial pressure, spinal irritation, and dyspepsia with flatulence and constipation ); and which, on the other hand, exhibit essential differences in their aetiology and mechanism from the typical neurasthenic neurosis. If we accept this plan, we shall soon obtain a fairly uniform picture of neurasthenia. We shall then be in a position to differentiate from genuine neurasthenia more sharply than has hitherto been possible various pseudo-neurasthenias (such as the clinical picture of the organically determined nasal reflex neurosis, the nervous disorders of the cachexias and arterio-sclerosis, the preliminary stages of general paralysis of the insane, and of some psychoses). Further, it will be possible - as Möbius has proposed - to eliminate some of the status nervosi of hereditarily degenerate individuals; and we shall also discover reasons why a number of neuroses which are to-day described as neurasthenia - in particular, neuroses of an intermittent or periodical nature - ought rather to be included under melancholia. But the most marked change of all will be introduced if we decide to detach from neurasthenia the syndrome which I propose to describe in the following pages and which satisfies especially fully the conditions set out above. The symptoms of this syndrome are clinically much more closely related to one another than to those of genuine neurasthenia (that is, they frequently appear together and they replace one another in the course of the illness); and both the aetiology and the mechanism of this neurosis are fundamentally different from the aetiology and mechanism of genuine neurasthenia as it will be left after this separation has been effected.

On The Grounds For Detaching A Particular Syndrome From Neurasthenia

328

I call this syndrome ‘anxiety neurosis’, because all its components can be grouped round the chief symptom of anxiety, because each one of them has a definite relationship to anxiety. I thought that this view of the symptoms of anxiety neurosis had originated with me, until an interesting paper by E. Hecker (1893) came into my hands, in which I found the same interpretation expounded with all the clarity and completeness that could be desired.¹ Nevertheless, although Hecker recognizes certain symptoms as equivalents or rudiments of an anxiety attack, he does not separate them from the domain of neurasthenia, as I propose to do. But this is evidently due to his not having taken into account the difference between the aetiological determinants in the two cases. When this latter difference is recognized there is no longer any necessity for designating anxiety symptoms by the same name as genuine neurasthenic ones; for the principal purpose of giving what is otherwise an arbitrary name is to make it easier to lay down general statements.

¹ Anxiety is actually brought forward as one of the principal symptoms of neurasthenia in a work by Kaan (1893).

On The Grounds For Detaching A Particular Syndrome From Neurasthenia

329

I

THE CLINICAL SYMPTOMATOLOGY OF ANXIETY NEUROSIS

What I call ‘anxiety neurosis’ may be observed in a completely developed form or in a rudimentary one, in isolation or combined with other neuroses. It is of course the cases which are in some degree complete and at the same time isolated which give particular support to the impression that anxiety neurosis is a clinical entity. In other cases, where the syndrome corresponds to a ‘mixed neurosis’, we are faced with the task of picking out and separating those symptoms which belong, not to neurasthenia or hysteria, and so on, but to anxiety neurosis.

The clinical picture of anxiety neurosis comprises the following symptoms:

(1) General irritability. This is a common nervous symptom and as such belongs to many status nervosi. I mention it here because it invariably appears in anxiety neurosis and is important theoretically. Increased irritability always points to an accumulation of excitation or an inability to tolerate such an accumulation - that is, to an absolute or a relative accumulation of excitation. One manifestation of this increased irritability seems to me to deserve special mention; I refer to auditory hyperaesthesia, to an oversensitiveness to noise - a symptom which is undoubtedly to be explained by the innate intimate relationship between auditory impressions and fright. Auditory hyperaesthesia frequently turns out to be a cause of sleeplessness, of which more than one form belongs to anxiety neurosis.

(2) Anxious expectation. I cannot better describe the condition I have in mind than by this name and by adding a few examples. A woman, for instance, who suffers from anxious expectation will think of influenzal pneumonia every time her husband coughs when he has a cold, and, in her mind’s eye, will see his funeral go past; if, when she is coming towards the house, she sees two people standing by her front door, she cannot avoid thinking that one of her children has fallen out of the window; when she hears the bell ring, it is someone bringing news of a death, and so on - while on all these occasions there has been no particular ground for exaggerating a mere possibility.

On The Grounds For Detaching A Particular Syndrome From Neurasthenia

330

Anxious expectation, of course, shades off imperceptibly into normal anxiety, comprising all that is ordinarily spoken of as anxiousness - or a tendency to take a pessimistic view of things; but at every opportunity it goes beyond a plausible anxiousness of this kind, and it is frequently recognized by the patient himself as a kind of compulsion. For one form of anxious expectation - that relating to the subject’s own health - we may reserve the old term hypochondria. The height reached by the hypochondria is not always parallel with the general anxious expectation; it requires as a precondition the existence of paraesthesias and distressing bodily sensations. Thus hypochondria is the form favoured by genuine neurasthenics when, as often happens, they fall victims to anxiety neurosis.

A further expression of anxious expectation is no doubt to be found in the inclination to moral anxiety, to scrupulousness and pedantry - an inclination which is so often present in people with more than the usual amount of moral sensitiveness and which likewise varies from the normal to an exaggerated form in doubting mania.

Anxious expectation is the nuclear symptom of the neurosis. It openly reveals, too, a portion of the theory of the neurosis. We may perhaps say that here a quantum of anxiety in a freely floating state, which, where there is expectation, controls the choice of ideas and is always ready to link itself with any suitable ideational content.

(3) But anxiousness - which, though mostly latent as regards consciousness, is constantly lurking in the background - has other means of finding expression besides this. It can suddenly break through into consciousness without being aroused by a train of ideas, and thus provoke an anxiety attack. An anxiety attack of this sort may consist of the feeling of anxiety, alone, without any associated idea, or accompanied by the interpretation that is nearest to hand, such as ideas of the extinction of life, or of a stroke, or of a threat of madness; or else some kind of paraesthesia (similar to the hysterical aura) may be combined with the feeling of anxiety, or, finally, the feeling of anxiety may have linked to it a disturbance of one or more of the bodily functions - such as respiration, heart action, vasomotor innervation or glandular activity. From this combination the patient picks out in particular now one, now another, factor. He complains of ‘spasms of the heart’, ‘difficulty in breathing’, ‘outbreaks of sweating’, ‘ravenous hunger’, and such like; and, in his description, the feeling of anxiety often recedes into the background or is referred to quite unrecognizably as ‘being unwell’, ‘feeling uncomfortable’, and so on.

On The Grounds For Detaching A Particular Syndrome From Neurasthenia

331

(4) Now it is an interesting fact, and an important one from a diagnostic point of view, that the proportion in which these elements are mixed in an anxiety attack varies to a remarkable degree, and that almost every accompanying symptom alone can constitute the attack just as well as can the anxiety itself. There are consequently rudimentary anxiety attacks and equivalents of anxiety attacks, all probably having the same significance, which exhibit a great wealth of forms that has as yet been little appreciated. A closer study of these larval anxiety-states (as Hecker calls them) and their diagnostic differentiation from other attacks should soon become a necessary task for neuropathologists.

I append here a list which includes only those forms of anxiety attack which are known to me:-

(a) Anxiety attacks accompanied by disturbances of the heart action, such as palpitation, either with transitory arrhythmia or with tachycardia of longer duration which may end in serious weakness of the heart and which is not always easily differentiated from organic heart affection; and, again, pseudo-angina pectoris - diagnostically a delicate subject!

(b) Anxiety attacks accompanied by disturbances of respiration, several forms of nervous dyspnoea, attacks resembling asthma, and the like. I would emphasize that even these attacks are not always accompanied by recognizable anxiety.

(c) Attacks of sweating, often at night.

(d) Attacks of tremor and shivering which are only too easily confused with hysterical attacks.

(e) Attacks of ravenous hunger, often accompanied by vertigo.

(f) Diarrhoea coming on in attacks.

(g) Attacks of locomotor vertigo.

(h) Attacks of what are known as congestions, including practically everything that has been termed vasomotor neurasthenia.

(i) Attacks of paraesthesias. (But these seldom occur without anxiety or a similar feeling of discomfort.)

On The Grounds For Detaching A Particular Syndrome From Neurasthenia

332

(5) Waking up at night in a fright (the pavor nocturnus of adults), which is usually combined with anxiety, dyspnoea, sweating and so on, is very often nothing else than a variant of the anxiety attack. This disturbance is the determinant of a second form of sleeplessness within the field of anxiety neurosis. I have become convinced, moreover, that the pavor nocturnus of children, too, exhibits a form which belongs to anxiety neurosis. The streak of hysteria about it, the linking of the anxiety with the reproduction of an appropriate experience or a dream, causes the pavor nocturnus of children to appear as something special. But the pavor can also emerge in a pure form, without any dream or recurring hallucination.

(6) ‘Vertigo’ occupies a prominent place in the group of symptoms of anxiety neurosis. In its mildest form it is best described as ‘giddiness’; in its severer manifestations, as ‘attacks of vertigo’ (with or without anxiety), it must be classed among the gravest symptoms of the neurosis. The vertigo of anxiety neurosis is not rotatory nor does it especially affect certain planes or directions, like Meniere’s vertigo. It belongs to the class of locomotor or co-ordinatory vertigo, as does the vertigo in oculomotor paralysis. It consists in a specific state of discomfort, accompanied by sensations of the ground rocking, of the legs giving way and of its being impossible to stand up any more; while the legs feel as heavy as lead and tremble or the knees bend. This vertigo never leads to a fall. On the other hand, I should like to state that an attack of vertigo of this kind may have its place taken by a profound fainting fit. Other conditions in the nature of fainting occurring in anxiety neurosis appear to depend upon cardiac collapse.

Attacks of vertigo are not seldom accompanied by the worst sort of anxiety, often combined with cardiac and respiratory disturbances. According to my observations, vertigo produced by heights, mountains and precipices is also often present in anxiety neurosis. Furthermore, I am not sure whether it is not also right to recognize alongside of this a vertigo a stomacho laeso.

On The Grounds For Detaching A Particular Syndrome From Neurasthenia

333

(7) On the basis of chronic anxiousness (anxious expectation) on the one hand, and a tendency to anxiety attacks accompanied by vertigo on the other, two groups of typical phobias develop, the first relating to general physiological dangers, the second relating to locomotion. To the first group belong fear of snakes, thunderstorms, darkness, vermin, and so on, as well as the typical moral over-scrupulousness and forms of doubting mania. Here the available anxiety is simply employed to reinforce aversions which are instinctively implanted in everyone. But as a rule a phobia which acts in an obsessional manner is only formed if there is added to this the recollection of an experience in which the anxiety was able to find expression as, for instance, after the patient has experienced a thunderstorm in the open. It is a mistake to try to explain such cases as being simply a persistence of strong impressions; what makes these experiences significant and the memory of them lasting is, after all, only the anxiety which was able to emerge at the time and which can similarly emerge now. In other words, such impressions remain powerful only in people with ‘anxious expectation’.

The other group includes agoraphobia with all its accessory forms, the whole of them characterized by their relation to locomotion. We frequently find that this phobia is based on an attack of vertigo that has preceded it; but I do not think that one can postulate such an attack in every case. Occasionally we see that after a first attack of vertigo without anxiety, locomotion, although henceforward constantly accompanied by a sensation of vertigo, still continues to be possible without restriction; but that, under certain conditions - such as being alone or in a narrow street - when once anxiety is added to the attack of vertigo, locomotion breaks down.

On The Grounds For Detaching A Particular Syndrome From Neurasthenia

334

The relation of these phobias to the phobias of obsessional neurosis, whose mechanism I made clear in an earlier paper¹ in this periodical, is of the following kind. What they have in common is that in both an idea becomes obsessional as a result of being attached to an available affect. The mechanism of transposition of affect thus holds good for both kinds of phobia. But in the phobias of anxiety neurosis (1) this affect always has the same colour, which is that of anxiety; and (2) the affect does not originate in a repressed idea, but turns out to be not further reducible by psychological analysis, nor amenable to psychotherapy. The mechanism of substitution, therefore, does not hold good for the phobias of anxiety neurosis.

Both kinds of phobias (and also obsessions) often appear side by side; although the atypical phobias, which are based on obsessions, need not necessarily spring from the soil of anxiety neurosis. A very frequent and apparently complicated mechanism makes its appearance if, in what was originally a simple phobia belonging to an anxiety neurosis, the content of the phobia is replaced by another idea, so that the substitute is subsequent to the phobia. What are most often employed as substitutes are the ‘protective measures’ that were originally used to combat the phobia. Thus, for instance, ’brooding mania’ arises from the subject’s endeavours to disprove that he is mad, as his hypochondriacal phobia maintains; the hesitations and doubt, and still more the repetitions, of folie du doute arise from a justifiable doubt about the certainty of one’s own train of thought, since one is conscious of its persistent disturbance by ideas of an obsessional sort, and so on. We can therefore assert that many syndromes, too, of obsessional neurosis, such as folie du doute and the like, are also to be reckoned, clinically if not conceptually, as belonging to anxiety neurosis.²

¹ ‘The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’ (1894a).

² See ‘Obsessions and Phobias’ (1895c).

On The Grounds For Detaching A Particular Syndrome From Neurasthenia

335

(8) The digestive activities undergo only a few disturbances in anxiety neurosis; but these are characteristic ones. Sensations such as an inclination to vomit and nausea are not rare, and the symptom of ravenous hunger may, by itself or in conjunction with other symptoms (such as congestions), give rise to a rudimentary anxiety attack. As a chronic change, analogous to anxious expectation, we find an inclination to diarrhoea, and this has been the occasion of the strangest diagnostic errors. Unless I am mistaken, it is this diarrhoea to which Möbius (1894) has drawn attention recently in a short paper. I suspect, further, that Peyer’s reflex diarrhoea, which he derives from disorders of the prostate (Peyer, 1893), is nothing else than this diarrhoea of anxiety neurosis. The illusion of a reflex relationship is created because the same factors come into play in the aetiology of anxiety neurosis as are at work in the setting up of such affections of the prostate and similar disorders.

The behaviour of the gastro-intestinal tract in anxiety neurosis presents a sharp contrast to the influence of neurasthenia on those functions. Mixed cases often show the familiar ‘alternation between diarrhoea and constipation’. Analogous to this diarrhoea is the need to urinate that occurs in anxiety neurosis.

(9) The paraethesias which may accompany attacks of vertigo or anxiety are interesting because they, like the sensations of the hysterical aura, become associated in a definite sequence; although I find that these associations, in contrast to the hysterical ones, are atypical and changing. A further similarity to hysteria is provided by the fact that in anxiety neurosis a kind of conversion¹ takes place on to bodily sensations, which may easily be overlooked - for instance, on to rheumatic muscles. A whole number of what are known as rheumatic individuals who, moreover, can be shown to be rheumatic - are in reality suffering from anxiety neurosis. Along with this increase of sensitivity to pain, I have also observed in a number of cases of anxiety neurosis a tendency to hallucinations; and these could not be interpreted as hysterical.

(10)  Several of the symptoms I have mentioned, which accompany or take the place of an anxiety attack, also appear in a chronic form. In that case they are still less easy to recognize, since the anxious sensation which goes with them is less clear than in an anxiety attack. This is especially true of diarrhoea, vertigo and paraesthesias. Just as an attack of vertigo can be replaced by a fainting fit, so chronic vertigo can be replaced by a constant feeling of great feebleness, lassitude and so on.

¹ See ‘The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’ (1894a).

On The Grounds For Detaching A Particular Syndrome From Neurasthenia

336

II

INCIDENCE AND AETIOLOGY OF ANXIETY NEUROSIS

In some cases of anxiety neurosis no aetiology at all is to be discovered. It is worth noting that in such cases there is seldom any difficulty in establishing evidence of a grave hereditary taint.

But where there are grounds for regarding the neurosis as an acquired one, careful enquiry directed to that end reveals that a set of noxae and influences from sexual life are the operative aetiological factors. These appear at first sight to be of a varied nature, but they soon disclose the common character which explains why they have a similar effect on the nervous system. Further, they are present either alone or together with other noxae of a ‘stock’ kind, to which we may ascribe a contributory effect. This sexual aetiology of anxiety neurosis can be demonstrated with such overwhelming frequency that I venture, for the purpose of this short paper, to disregard those cases where the aetiology is doubtful or different.

In order that the aetiological conditions under which anxiety neurosis makes its appearance may be presented with greater accuracy, it will be advisable to consider males and females separately. In females - disregarding for the moment their innate disposition - anxiety neurosis occurs in the following cases:

(a) As virginal anxiety or anxiety in adolescents. A number of unambiguous observations have shown me that anxiety neurosis can be produced in girls who are approaching maturity by their first encounter with the problem of sex, by any more or less sudden revelation of what had till then been hidden - for instance, by witnessing the sexual act, or being told or reading about these things. Such an anxiety neurosis is combined with hysteria in an almost typical fashion.

On The Grounds For Detaching A Particular Syndrome From Neurasthenia

337

(b) As anxiety in the newly married. Young married women who have remained anaesthetic during their first cohabitations not seldom fall ill of an anxiety neurosis, which disappears once more as soon as the anaesthesia gives place to normal sensitivity. Since most young wives remain healthy where there is initial anaesthesia of this kind, it follows that, in order that this kind of anxiety shall emerge, other determinants are required; and these I will mention later.

(c) As anxiety in women whose husbands suffer from ejaculatio praecox or from markedly impaired potency; and (d) whose husbands practise coitus interruptus or reservatus. These cases belong together, for on analysing a great number of instances it is easy to convince oneself that they depend simply on whether the woman obtains satisfaction in coitus or not. If not, the condition for the genesis of an anxiety neurosis is given. On the other hand, she is saved from the neurosis if the husband who is affected with ejaculatio praecox is able immediately to repeat coitus with better success. Coitus reservatus by means of condoms is not injurious to the woman, provided she is very quickly excitable and the husband very potent; otherwise, this kind of preventive intercourse is no less injurious than the others. Coitus interruptus is nearly always a noxa. But for the wife it is only so if the husband practises it regardlessly - that is to say, if he breaks off intercourse as soon as he is near emission, without troubling himself about the course of the excitation in her. If, on the other hand, the husband waits for his wife’s satisfaction, the coitus amounts to a normal one for her; but he will fall ill of an anxiety neurosis. I have collected and analysed a large number of observations, on which these assertions are based.

(e)  Anxiety neurosis also occurs as anxiety in widows and intentionally abstinent women, not seldom in a typical combination with obsessional ideas; and

(f) As anxiety in the climacteric during the last major increase of sexual need.

On The Grounds For Detaching A Particular Syndrome From Neurasthenia

338

Cases (c) (d) and (e) comprise the conditions under which anxiety neurosis in the female sex arises most frequently and most readily, independently of hereditary disposition. It is in reference to these cases of anxiety neurosis - these curable acquired cases - that I shall try to show that the sexual noxae discovered in them are really the aetiological factor of the neurosis.

Before doing so, however, I will discuss the sexual determinants of anxiety neurosis in men. I propose to distinguish the following groups, all of which have their analogies in women:

(a)  Anxiety of intentionally abstinent men, which is frequently combined with symptoms of defence (obsessional ideas, hysteria). The motives which are responsible for intentional abstinence imply that a number of people with a hereditary disposition, eccentrics, etc., enter into this category.

(b) Anxiety in men in a state of unconsummated excitation (e.g. during the period of engagement before marriage), or in those who (from fear of the consequences of sexual intercourse) content themselves with touching or looking at women. This group of determinants - which, incidentally, can be applied unaltered to the other sex (during engagements or relations in which sexual intercourse is avoided) - provides the purest cases of the neurosis.

(c) Anxiety in men who practise coitus interruptus. As has been said, coitus interruptus is injurious to the woman if it is practised without regard to her satisfaction; but it is injurious to the man if, in order to obtain satisfaction for her, he directs coitus voluntarily and postpones emission. In this way it becomes intelligible that when a married couple practise coitus interruptus, it is, as a rule, only one partner who falls ill. Moreover, in men coitus interruptus only rarely produces a pure anxiety neurosis; it usually produces a mixture of anxiety neurosis and neurasthenia.

(d) Anxiety in senescent men. There are men who have a climacteric like women, and who produce an anxiety neurosis at the time of their decreasing potency and increasing libido.

On The Grounds For Detaching A Particular Syndrome From Neurasthenia

339

Finally, I must add two other cases which apply to both sexes:

(a) People who, as a result of practising masturbation, have become neurasthenics, fall victims to anxiety neurosis as soon as they give up their form of sexual satisfaction. Such people have made themselves particularly incapable of tolerating abstinence.

I may note here, as being important for an understanding of anxiety neurosis, that any pronounced development of that affection only occurs among men who have remained potent and women who are not anaesthetic. Among neurotics whose potency has already been severely damaged by masturbation, the anxiety neurosis resulting from abstinence is very slight and is mostly restricted to hypochondria and mild chronic vertigo. The majority of women, indeed, are to be regarded as ‘potent’; a really impotent - i.e. a really anaesthetic - woman is in a similar way little susceptible to anxiety neurosis, and she tolerates the noxae I have described remarkably well.

How far, in addition to this, we are justified in postulating any constant relation between particular aetiological factors and particular symptoms in the complex of anxiety neurosis, I should not like to discuss as yet in this paper.

(b) The last of the aetiological conditions I have to bring forward appears at first sight not to be of a sexual nature at all. Anxiety neurosis also arises - and in both sexes - as a result of the factor of overwork or exhausting exertion - as, for instance, after night-watching, sick-nursing, or even after severe illness.

On The Grounds For Detaching A Particular Syndrome From Neurasthenia

340

The main objection to my postulate of a sexual aetiology for anxiety neurosis will probably be to the following effect. Abnormal conditions in sexual life of the kind I have described are found so extremely frequently that they are bound to be forthcoming wherever one looks for them. Their presence in the cases of anxiety neurosis which I have enumerated does not, therefore, prove that we have unearthed in them the aetiology of the neurosis. Moreover, the number of people who practise coitus interruptus and the like is incomparably larger than the number who are afflicted with anxiety neurosis, and the great majority of the former tolerate this noxa very well.

To this I must reply in the first place that, considering the admittedly enormous frequency of the neuroses and especially of anxiety neurosis, it would certainly not be right to expect to find an aetiological factor for them that is of rare occurrence; in the second place, that a postulate of pathology is in fact satisfied, if in an aetiological investigation it can be shown that the presence of an aetiological factor is more frequent than its effects, since, in order for these latter to occur, other conditions may have to exist in addition ( such as disposition, summation of specific aetiological elements, or reinforcement by other stock noxae); and further, that a detailed dissection of suitable cases of anxiety neurosis proves beyond question the importance of the sexual factor. I will confine myself here, however, to the single aetiological factor of coitus interruptus and to bringing out certain observations which confirm it.

(1) So long as an anxiety neurosis in young married women is not yet established, but only appears in bouts and disappears again spontaneously, it is possible to demonstrate that each such bout of the neurosis is traceable to a coitus which was deficient in satisfaction. Two days after this experience - or, in the case of people with little resistance, the day after - the attack of anxiety or vertigo regularly appears, bringing in its train other symptoms of the neurosis. All this vanishes once more, provided that marital intercourse is comparatively rare. A chance absence of the husband from home, or a holiday in the mountains which necessitates a separation of the couple, has a good effect. The gynaecological treatment which is usually resorted to in the first instance is beneficial because, while it lasts, marital intercourse is stopped. Curiously enough the success of local treatment is only transitory: the neurosis sets in again in the mountains, as soon as the husband begins his holiday too; and so on. If, as a physician who understands this aetiology, one arranges, in a case in which the neurosis has not yet been established, for coitus interruptus to be replaced by normal intercourse, one obtains a therapeutic proof of the assertion I have made. The anxiety is removed, and - unless there is fresh cause for it of the same sort - it does not return.

(2) In the anamneses of many cases of anxiety neurosis we find, both in men and women, a striking oscillation in the intensity of its manifestations, and, indeed, in the coming and going of the whole condition. One year, they will tell you, was almost entirely good, but the next one was dreadful; on one occasion the improvement seemed to be due to a particular treatment, which, however, turned out to be quite useless at the next attack; and so on. If we enquire into the number and sequence of the children and compare this record of the marriage with the peculiar history of the neurosis, we arrive at the simple solution that the periods of improvement or good health coincided with the wife’s pregnancies, during which, of course, the need for preventive intercourse was no longer present. The husband benefited by the treatment after which he found his wife pregnant - whether he received it from Pastor Kneipp or at a hydropathic establishment.

(3) The anamnesis of patients often discloses that the symptoms of anxiety neurosis have at some definite time succeeded the symptoms of some other neurosis - neurasthenia, perhaps - and have taken their place. In these instances it can quite regularly be shown that, shortly before this change of the picture, a corresponding change has occurred in the form of the sexual noxa.

On The Grounds For Detaching A Particular Syndrome From Neurasthenia

341

Observations of this sort, which can be multiplied at will, positively thrust a sexual aetiology on the doctor for a certain category of cases. And other cases, which would otherwise remain unintelligible, can at least be understood and classified without inconsistency by employing that aetiology as a key. I have in mind those very numerous cases in which, it is true, everything is present that has been found in the previous category - on the one hand the manifestations of anxiety neurosis, and on the other the specific factor of coitus interruptus - but in which something else as well intrudes itself: namely, a long interval between the presumed aetiology and its effects, and also perhaps aetiological factors that are not of a sexual nature. Take, for instance, a man who, on receiving news of his father’s death, had a heart attack and from that moment fell a victim to an anxiety neurosis. The case is not comprehensible, for, till then, the man was not neurotic. The death of his father, who was well advanced in years, did not take place under in any way special circumstances, and it will be admitted that the normal and expected decease of an aged father is not one of those experiences which usually cause a healthy adult to fall ill. Perhaps the aetiological analysis will become clearer if I add that this man had been practising coitus interruptus for eleven years, with due consideration for his wife’s satisfaction. The clinical symptoms are, at least, exactly the same as those which appear in other people after only a short sexual noxa of the same kind, and without the interpolation of any other trauma. A similar assessment must be made of the case of a woman whose anxiety neurosis broke out after the loss of her child, or of the student whose preparatory studies for his final examination were interfered with by an anxiety neurosis. I think that in these instances, too, the effect is not explained by the ostensible aetiology. One is not necessarily ‘overworked’ by study, and a healthy mother as a rule reacts only with normal grief to the loss of a child. Above all, however, I should have expected the student, as a result of his overwork, to acquire cephalasthenia, and the mother, as a result of her bereavement, hysteria. That both should have been overtaken by anxiety neurosis leads me to attach importance to the fact that the mother had been living for eight years in conditions of marital coitus interruptus, and that the student had for three years had an ardent love affair with a ‘respectable’ girl whom he had to avoid making pregnant.

On The Grounds For Detaching A Particular Syndrome From Neurasthenia

342

These considerations lead us to the conclusion that the specific sexual noxa of coitus interruptus, even when it is not able on its own account to provoke an anxiety neurosis in the subject, does at least provoke him to acquire it. The anxiety neurosis breaks out as soon as there is added to the latent effect of the specific factor the effect of another, stock noxa. The latter can act in the sense of the specific factor quantitatively but cannot replace it qualitatively. The specific factor always remains decisive for the form taken by the neurosis. I hope to be able to prove this assertion concerning the aetiology of the neuroses more comprehensively too.

In addition, these latter remarks contain an assumption which is not in itself improbable, to the effect that a sexual noxa like coitus interruptus comes into force through summation. A shorter or longer time is needed - depending on the individual’s disposition and any other inherited weaknesses of his nervous system - before the effect of this summation becomes visible. Those individuals who apparently tolerate coitus interruptus without harm, in fact become disposed by it to the disorders of anxiety neurosis, and these may break out at some time or other, either spontaneously or after a stock trauma which would not ordinarily suffice for this; just as, by the path of summation, a chronic alcoholic will in the end develop a cirrhosis or some other illness, or will, under the influence of a fever, fall a victim to delirium.

On The Grounds For Detaching A Particular Syndrome From Neurasthenia

343

III

FIRST STEPS TOWARD A THEORY OF ANXIETY NEUROSIS

The following theoretical discussion can only claim to have the value of a first, groping attempt; criticism of it ought not to affect an acceptance of the facts which have been brought forward above. Moreover, an assessment of this ‘theory of anxiety neurosis’ is made the more difficult from being only a fragment of a more comprehensive account of the neuroses.

What we have so far said about anxiety neurosis already provides a few starting points for gaining an insight into the mechanism of this neurosis. In the first place there was our suspicion that we had to do with an accumulation of excitation; and then there was the extremely important fact that the anxiety which underlies the clinical symptoms of the neurosis can be traced to no psychical origin. Such an origin would exist, for instance, if it was found that the anxiety neurosis was based on a single or repeated justifiable fright, and that that fright had since provided the source for the subject’s readiness for anxiety. But this is not so. Hysteria or a traumatic neurosis can be acquired from a single fright, but never anxiety neurosis. Since coitus interruptus takes such a prominent place among the causes of anxiety neurosis, I thought at first that the source of the continuous anxiety might lie in the fear, recurring every time the sexual act was performed, that the technique might go wrong and conception consequently take place. But I have found that this state of feeling, either in the man or the woman, during coitus interruptus has no influence on the generation of anxiety neurosis, that women who are basically indifferent about the consequence of a possible conception are just as liable to the neurosis as those who shudder at the possibility, and that everything depends simply on which partner has forfeited satisfaction in this sexual technique.

A further point of departure is furnished by the observation, not so far mentioned, that in whole sets of cases anxiety neurosis is accompanied by a most noticeable decrease of sexual libido or psychical desire, so that on being told that their complaint results from ‘insufficient satisfaction’, patients regularly reply that that is impossible, for precisely now all sexual need has become extinguished in them. From all these indications - that we have to do with an accumulation of excitation; that the anxiety which probably corresponds to this accumulated excitation is of somatic origin, so that what is being accumulated is a somatic excitation; and, further, that this somatic excitation is of a sexual nature and that a decrease of psychical participation in the sexual processes goes along with it - all these indications, I say, incline us to expect that the mechanism of anxiety is to be looked for in a deflection of somatic excitation from the psychical sphere, and in a consequent abnormal employment of that excitation.

On The Grounds For Detaching A Particular Syndrome From Neurasthenia

344

This concept of the mechanism of anxiety neurosis can be made clearer if one accepts the following view of the sexual process, which applies, in the first instance, to men. In the sexually mature male organism somatic sexual excitation is produced probably continuously - and periodically becomes a stimulus to the psyche. In order to make our ideas on this point firmer, I will add by way of interpolation that this somatic excitation is manifested as a pressure on the walls of the seminal vesicles, which are lined with nerve endings; thus this visceral excitation will develop continuously, but it will have to reach a certain height before it is able to overcome the resistance of the intervening path of conduction to the cerebral cortex and express itself as a psychical stimulus. When this has happened, however, the group of sexual ideas which is present in the psyche becomes supplied with energy and there comes into being the psychical state of libidinal tension which brings with it an urge to remove that tension. A psychical unloading of this kind is only possible by means of what I shall call specific or adequate action. This adequate action consists, for the male sexual instinct, in a complicated spinal reflex act which brings about the unloading of the nerve-endings, and in all the psychical preparations which have to be made in order to set off that reflex. Anything other than the adequate action would be fruitless, for once the somatic sexual excitation has reached threshold value it is turned continuously into psychical excitation, and something must positively take place which will free the nerve endings from the load of pressure on them - which will, accordingly, remove the whole of the existing somatic excitation and allow the subcortical path of conduction to re-establish its resistance.

On The Grounds For Detaching A Particular Syndrome From Neurasthenia

345

I shall refrain from describing more complicated instances of the sexual process in a similar way. I will only state that in essentials this formula is applicable to women as well, in spite of the confusion introduced into the problem by all the artificial retarding and stunting of the female sexual instinct. In women too we must postulate a somatic sexual excitation and a state in which this excitation becomes a psychical stimulus - libido - and provokes the urge to the specific action to which voluptuous feeling is attached. Where women are concerned, however, we are not in a position to say what the process analogous to the relaxation of tension of the seminal vesicles may be.

We can include within the framework of this description of the sexual process not only the aetiology of anxiety neurosis but that of genuine neurasthenia. Neurasthenia develops whenever the adequate unloading ( the adequate action) is replaced by a less adequate one - thus, when normal coition, carried out in the most favourable conditions, is replaced by masturbation or spontaneous emission. Anxiety neurosis, on the other hand, is the product of all those factors which prevent the somatic sexual excitation from being worked over psychically. The manifestations of anxiety neurosis appear when the somatic excitation which has been deflected from the psyche is expended subcortically in totally inadequate reactions.

I will now attempt to discover whether the aetiological conditions for anxiety neurosis which I set out above exhibit the common character that I have just attributed to them. The first aetiological factor I postulated for men was intentional abstinence. Abstinence consists in the withholding of the specific action which ordinarily follows upon libido. Such withholding may have two consequences. In the first place, the somatic excitation accumulates; it is then deflected into other paths, which hold out greater promise of discharge than does the path through the psyche. Thus the libido will in the end sink, and the excitation will manifest itself subcortically as anxiety. In the second place, if the libido is not diminished, or if the somatic excitation is expended, by a short cut, in emissions, or if, in consequence of being forced back, the excitation really ceases, then all kinds of things other than an anxiety neurosis will ensue. Abstinence, then, leads to anxiety neurosis in the manner described above. But it is also the operative agent in my second aetiological group, that of unconsummated excitation. My third group, that of coitus reservatus with consideration for the woman, operates by disturbing the man’s psychical preparedness for the sexual process, in that it introduces alongside of the task of mastering the sexual affect another psychical task, one of a deflecting sort. In consequence of this psychical deflection, once more, libido gradually disappears, and the further course of things is then the same as in the case of abstinence. Anxiety in senescence (the male climacteric) requires another explanation. Here there is no diminution of libido; but, as in the female climacteric, so great an increase occurs in the production of somatic excitation that the psyche proves relatively insufficient to master it.

On The Grounds For Detaching A Particular Syndrome From Neurasthenia

346

The aetiological conditions applying to women can be brought into the framework of my scheme with no greater difficulties than in the case of men. Virginal anxiety is a particularly clear example. For here the groups of ideas to which the somatic sexual excitation should become attached are not yet enough developed. In the newly-married woman who is anaesthetic, anxiety only appears if the first cohabitations arouse a sufficient amount of somatic excitation. When the local indications of such excitement (spontaneous sensations of stimulation, desire to micturate and so on) are lacking, anxiety is also absent. The case of ejaculatio praecox and of coitus interruptus can be explained on the same lines as in men, namely that the libidinal desire for the psychically unsatisfying act gradually disappears, while the excitation which has been aroused during the act is expended subcortically. The alienation between the somatic and the psychical sphere is established more readily and is more difficult to remove in women than in men. The cases of widowhood and of voluntary abstinence, and also that of the climacteric, are dealt with in the same way in both sexes; but where abstinence is concerned there is in the case of women no doubt the further matter of intentional repression of the sexual circle of ideas, to which an abstinent woman, in her struggle against temptation, must often make up her mind. The horror which, at the time of the menopause, an ageing woman feels at her unduly increased libido may act in a similar sense.

On The Grounds For Detaching A Particular Syndrome From Neurasthenia

347

The two last aetiological conditions on our list seem to fall into place without difficulty. The tendency to anxiety in masturbators who have become neurasthenic is explained by the fact that it is very easy for them to pass into a state of ‘abstinence’ after they have been accustomed for so long to discharging even the smallest quantity of somatic excitation, faulty though that discharge is. Finally, the last case, - the generation of anxiety neurosis through severe illness, overwork, exhausting sick-nursing, etc., - finds an easy interpretation when brought into relation with the effects of coitus interruptus. Here the psyche, on account of its deflection, would seem to be no longer capable of mastering the somatic excitation, a task on which, as we know, it is continuously engaged. We are aware to what a low level libido can sink under these conditions; and we have here a good example of a neurosis which, although it exhibits no sexual aetiology, nevertheless exhibits a sexual mechanism.

The view here developed depicts the symptoms of anxiety neurosis as being in a sense surrogates of the omitted specific action following on sexual excitation. In further support of this view, I may point out that in normal copulation too the excitation expends itself, among other things, in accelerated breathing, palpitation, sweating, congestion, and so on. In the corresponding anxiety attacks of our neurosis we have before us the dyspnoea, palpitations, etc. of copulation in an isolated and exaggerated form.

A further question may be asked. Why, under such conditions of psychical insufficiency in mastering sexual excitation, does the nervous system find itself in the peculiar affective state of anxiety?  An answer may be suggested as follows. The psyche finds itself in the affect of anxiety if it feels unable to deal by appropriate reaction with a task (a danger) approaching from the outside;  it finds itself in the neurosis of anxiety if it notices that it is unable to even out the (sexual) excitation originating from within - that is to say, it behaves as though it were projecting that excitation outwards. The affect and its corresponding neurosis are firmly related to each other. The first is a reaction to an exogenous excitation, the second a reaction to the analogous endogenous one. The affect is a state which passes rapidly, the neurosis is a chronic one; because, while exogenous excitation operates with a single impact, the endogenous excitation operates as a constant force. In the neurosis, the nervous system is reacting against a source of excitation which is internal, whereas in the corresponding affect it is reacting against an analogous source of excitation which is external.

On The Grounds For Detaching A Particular Syndrome From Neurasthenia

348

IV

RELATION TO OTHER NEUROSES

There are still a few words to be said about the relations of anxiety neurosis to the other neuroses as regards their onset and their internal connections.

The purest cases of anxiety neurosis are usually the most marked. They are found in sexually potent youthful individuals, with an undivided aetiology, and an illness that is not of too long standing.

More often, however, symptoms of anxiety occur at the same time as, and in combination with, symptoms of neurasthenia, hysteria, obsessions or melancholia. If we were to allow ourselves to be restrained by a clinical intermixture like this from acknowledging anxiety neurosis as an independent entity, we ought, logically, also to abandon once more the separation which has been so laboriously achieved between hysteria and neurasthenia.

For the purposes of analysing ‘mixed neuroses’ I can state this important truth: Wherever a mixed neurosis is present, it will be possible to discover an intermixture of several specific aetiologies.

A multiplicity of aetiological factors such as this, which determine a mixed neurosis, may occur purely fortuitously. For instance, a fresh noxa may add its effects to those of an already existing one. Thus, a woman who has always been hysterical may begin at a certain point in her marriage to experience coitus reservatus; she will then acquire an anxiety neurosis in addition to her hysteria. Or again, a man who has hitherto masturbated and has become neurasthenic, may get engaged and become sexually excited by his fiancée; his neurasthenia will now be joined by a new anxiety neurosis.

In other cases the multiplicity of aetiological factors is by no means fortuitous: one of the factors has brought the other into operation. For example, a woman with whom her husband practises coitus reservatus without regard to her satisfaction may find herself compelled to masturbate in order to put an end to the distressing excitation that follows such an act; as a result, she will produce, not an anxiety neurosis pure and simple, but an anxiety neurosis accompanied by symptoms of neurasthenia. Another woman suffering from the same noxa may have to fight against lascivious images against which she tries to defend herself; and in this way she will, through the coitus interruptus, acquire obsessions as well as an anxiety neurosis. Finally, as a result of coitus interruptus, a third woman may lose her affection for her husband and feel an attraction for another man, which she carefully keeps secret; in consequence, she will exhibit a mixture of anxiety neurosis and hysteria.

In a third category of mixed neuroses the interconnection between the symptoms is still more intimate, in that the same aetiological determinant regularly and simultaneously provokes both neuroses. Thus, for instance, the sudden sexual enlightenment, which we have found present in virginal anxiety, always gives rise to hysteria as well; by far the majority of cases of intentional abstinence become linked from the beginning with true obsessional ideas; coitus interruptus in men never seems to me to be able to provoke a pure anxiety neurosis, but always a mixture of it with neurasthenia.

On The Grounds For Detaching A Particular Syndrome From Neurasthenia

349

From these considerations it appears that we must further distinguish the aetiological conditions for the onset of the neuroses from their specific aetiological factors. The former - for example, coitus interruptus, masturbation or abstinence - are still ambiguous, and each of them can produce different neuroses. Only the aetiological factors which can be picked out in them, such as inadequate disburdening, psychical insufficiency or defence accompanied by substitution, have an unambiguous and specific relation to the aetiology of the individual major neuroses.

As regards its intimate nature, anxiety neurosis presents the most interesting agreements with, and differences from, the other major neuroses, in particular neurasthenia and hysteria. It shares with neurasthenia one main characteristic - namely that the source of excitation, the precipitating cause of the disturbance, lies in the somatic field instead of the psychical one, as is the case in hysteria and obsessional neurosis. In other respects we rather find a kind of antithesis between the symptoms of anxiety neurosis and of neurasthenia, which might be brought out by such labels as ‘accumulation of excitation’ and ‘impoverishment of excitation’. This antithesis does not prevent the two neuroses from being intermixed with each other; but it nevertheless shows itself in the fact that the most extreme forms of each are in both cases also the purest.

The symptomatology of hysteria and anxiety neurosis show many points in common which have not yet been sufficiently considered. The appearance of symptoms either in a chronic form or in attacks, the paraesthesias, grouped like aurae, the hyperaesthesias and pressure-points which are found in certain surrogates of an anxiety attack (in dyspnoea and heart-attacks), the intensification, through conversion, of pains which perhaps have an organic justification - these and other features which the two illnesses have in common even allow of a suspicion that not a little of what is attributed to hysteria might with more justice be put to the account of anxiety neurosis. If one goes into the mechanism of the two neuroses, so far as it has been possible to discover it hitherto, aspects come to light which suggest that anxiety neurosis is actually the somatic counterpart to hysteria. In the latter just as in the former there is an accumulation of excitation (which is perhaps the basis for the similarity between their symptoms we have mentioned). In the latter just as in the former we find a psychical insufficiency, as a consequence of which abnormal somatic processes arise. In the latter just as in the former, too, instead of a psychical working-over of the excitation, a deflection of it occurs into the somatic field; the difference is merely that in anxiety neurosis the excitation, in whose displacement the neurosis expresses itself, is purely somatic (somatic sexual excitation), whereas in hysteria it is psychical (provoked by conflict). Thus it is not to be wondered at that hysteria and anxiety neurosis regularly combine with each other, as is seen in ‘virginal anxiety’ or in ‘sexual hysteria’, and that hysteria simply borrows a number of its symptoms from anxiety neurosis, and so on. These intimate relations which anxiety neurosis has with hysteria provide a fresh argument, moreover, for insisting on the detachment of anxiety neurosis from neurasthenia; for if this detachment is not granted, we shall also be unable any longer to maintain the distinction which has been acquired with so much labour and which is so indispensable for the theory of the neuroses, between neurasthenia and hysteria.

VIENNA, December 1894.

350

A REPLY TO CRITICISMS OF MY PAPER ON ANXIETY NEUROSIS

(1895)

351

Intentionally left blank

352

A REPLY TO CRITICISMS OF MY PAPER ON ANXIETY NEUROSIS

In the second number of Mendel’s Neurologisches Zentralblatt for 1895, I published a short paper in which I ventured an attempt to detach a number of nervous states from neurasthenia and to establish them as an independent entity under the name of ‘anxiety neurosis’.¹  I was led to do so by the presence of a constant conjunction of certain clinical features with certain aetiological ones - a thing which, in general, should permit us to make a separation of this kind. I found - and in this Hecker (1893) had anticipated me - that the neurotic symptoms in question could all be classed together as constituting expressions of anxiety; and, from my study of the aetiology of the neuroses, I was able to add that these portions of the complex of the ‘anxiety neurosis’  exhibit special aetiological preconditions which are almost the opposite of the aetiology of neurasthenia. My observations had shown me that in the aetiology of the neuroses (at all events of acquire–d cases and acquirable forms) sexual factors play a predominant part and one which has been given far too little weight; so that a statement such as that ‘the aetiology of the neuroses lies in sexuality’, with all its unavoidable incorrectness per excessum et defectum, nevertheless comes nearer to the truth than do the other doctrines, which hold the field at the present time. A further assertion which my observations forced me to make was to the effect that the various sexual noxae are not to be found in the aetiology of every neurosis indifferently, but that unmistakable special relationships hold between particular noxae and particular neuroses. Thus I could assume that I had discovered the specific causes of the various neuroses. I then sought to formulate shortly the special character of the sexual noxae which constitute the aetiology of anxiety neurosis, and, on the basis of my view of the sexual process (p. 108), I arrived at the proposition: anxiety neurosis is created by everything which keeps somatic sexual tension away from the psychical sphere, which interferes with its being worked over psychically. If we go back to the concrete circumstances in which this factor becomes operative, we are led to assert that abstinence, whether voluntary or involuntary, sexual intercourse with incomplete satisfaction, coitus interruptus, deflection of psychical interest from sexuality, and similar things, are the specific aetiological factors of the states to which I have given the name of anxiety neurosis.

¹ ‘On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia under the Description "Anxiety Neurosis"' (1895b).

A Reply To Criticisms Of My Paper On Anxiety Neurosis

353

When I published the paper I have mentioned, I was under no illusion as to its power to carry conviction. In the first place, I was aware that the account I had given was only a brief and incomplete one and even in places hard to understand - just enough, perhaps, to arouse the reader’s expectations. Then, too, I had scarcely brought forward any examples and given no figures. Nor had I touched on the technique of collecting anamneses or done anything to prevent misunderstandings. I had not given consideration to any but the most obvious objections; and, as regards the theory itself, I had laid stress only on its main proposition and not on its qualifications. Accordingly, each reader was in fact at liberty to form his own opinion as to the binding force of the whole hypothesis. I could, moreover, reckon upon another difficulty in the way of its acceptance. I know very well that in putting forward my ‘sexual aetiology’ of the neuroses, I have brought up nothing new, and that undercurrents in medical literature taking these facts into account have never been absent. I know, too, that official academic medicine has in fact also been aware of them. But it has acted as if it knew nothing about the matter. It has made no use of its knowledge and has drawn no inferences from it. Such behaviour must have a deep-seated cause, originating perhaps in a kind of reluctance to look squarely at sexual matters r in a reaction against older attempts at an explanation, which are regarded as obsolete. At all events, one had to be prepared to meet with resistance in venturing upon an attempt to make something credible to other people which they could without any trouble have discovered for themselves.

A Reply To Criticisms Of My Paper On Anxiety Neurosis

354

In such circumstances it would perhaps be more expedient not to answer critical objections until I had myself expressed my views on this complicated subject in greater detail and had made them more intelligible. Nevertheless, I cannot resist the motives which prompt me to make an immediate answer to a criticism of my theory of anxiety neurosis which has appeared in recent days. I do so because its author, L. Löwenfeld of Munich, the author of Pathologie und Therapie der Neurasthenia, is a man whose judgement undoubtedly carries great weight with the medical public; because of a mistaken view which Löwenfeld’s account imputes to me; and finally because I wish to combat at the very start the impression that my theory can be refuted quite so easily by the first objections that come to hand.

With an unerring eye Löwenfeld (1895) detects the essential feature of my paper - namely, my assertion that anxiety-symptoms have a specific and uniform aetiology of a sexual nature. If this cannot be established as a fact, then the main reason for detaching an independent anxiety neurosis from neurasthenia disappears as well. There remains, it is true, one difficulty to which I called attention - the fact that anxiety-symptoms also have such very unmistakable connections with hysteria, so that a decision on Löwenfeld’s lines would prejudice the separation between hysteria and neurasthenia. This difficulty, however, is met by a recourse to heredity as the common cause of all these neuroses (a view which I will go into later).

What arguments, then, does Löwenfeld use to support his objection to my theory?

(1) I emphasized as a point essential to an understanding of anxiety neurosis that the anxiety appearing in it does not admit of a psychical derivation - that is to say that the preparedness for anxiety, which constitutes the nucleus of the neurosis, cannot be acquired by a single or repeated affect of psychically justified fright. Fright, I maintained, might result in hysteria or a traumatic neurosis, but not in an anxiety neurosis. This denial, it is easy to see, is nothing else than the counterpart to my contention, on the positive side, that the anxiety appearing in my neurosis corresponds to a somatic sexual tension which has been deflected from the psychical field - a tension which would otherwise have made itself felt as libido.

A Reply To Criticisms Of My Paper On Anxiety Neurosis

355

Against this, Löwenfeld insists on the fact that in a number of cases ‘states of anxiety appear immediately or shortly after a psychical shock (fright alone, or accidents which were accompanied by fright), and in such situations there are sometimes circumstances which make the simultaneous operation of sexual noxae of the kind mentioned extremely improbable.’ He gives, shortly, as a particularly pregnant example, one clinical observation (to serve instead of many). This example concerns a woman of thirty, with a hereditary taint, who had been married for four years and who had had a first, difficult, confinement a year before. A few weeks after this event her husband had an attack of illness which frightened her, and in her agitation she ran about the cold room in her chemise. From that time on she was ill. First she had states of anxiety and palpitations in the evening, then came attacks of convulsive trembling, and after that phobias, and so on. It was the picture of a fully-developed anxiety neurosis. ‘Here,’ concludes Löwenfeld, ‘the anxiety states are obviously of psychical origin, brought about by the single fright.’

I do not doubt that my respected critic can produce many similar cases. I myself can supply a long list of analogous examples. Anyone who has not seen such cases - and they are extremely common - of an outbreak of anxiety neurosis after a psychical shock, ought not to regard himself as qualified to take part in discussions about anxiety neurosis. I will only remark in this connection that neither fright nor anxious expectation need always be found in the aetiology of such cases; any other emotion will do as well. If I hastily recall a few cases from my memory, I think of a man of forty-five who had his first attack of anxiety (with cardiac collapse) at the news of the death of his father, who was an old man; from that time on he developed a complete and typical anxiety neurosis with agoraphobia. Again, I think of a young man who was overtaken by the same neurosis on account of his agitation about the disagreements between his young wife and his mother and who had a fresh onset of agoraphobia after every domestic quarrel. Then, there was a student, something of an idler, who produced his first anxiety attacks during a period in which, under the spur of his father’s displeasure, he was working hard for an examination. I recall, too, a woman, herself childless, who fell ill as a result of anxiety about the health of a small niece. And other similar instances. About the facts themselves, which Löwenfeld uses against me, there is not the slightest doubt.

A Reply To Criticisms Of My Paper On Anxiety Neurosis

356

But there is doubt about their interpretation. Are we to accept the post hoc ergo propter hoc conclusion straight away and spare ourselves any critical consideration of the raw material? There are examples enough in which the final, releasing cause has not, in the face of critical analysis, maintained its position as the causa efficiens. One has only to think, for instance, of the relationship between trauma and gout. The role of a trauma in provoking an attack of gout in the injured limb is probably no different from the role it plays in the aetiology of tabes and general paralysis of the insane; only in the case of gout it is clear to the meanest capacity that it is absurd to suppose that the trauma has ‘caused’ the gout instead of having merely provoked it. It is bound to make us thoughtful when we come across aetiological factors of this sort - ‘stock’ factors, as I should like to call them - in the aetiology of the most varied forms of illness. Emotion, fright, is also a stock factor of this kind. Fright can provoke chorea, apoplexy, paralysis agitans and many other things just as well as it can provoke anxiety neurosis. I must not go on to argue, of course, that, because of their ubiquity, the stock causes do not satisfy our requirements and that there must be specific causes as well; to do so would be to beg the question in favour of the proposition I want to prove. But I am justified in drawing the following conclusion: if the same specific cause can be shown to exist in the aetiology of all, or the great majority, of cases of anxiety neurosis, our view of the matter need not be shaken by the fact that the illness does not break out until one or other stock factor, such as emotion, has come into operation.

A Reply To Criticisms Of My Paper On Anxiety Neurosis

357

So it was with my cases of anxiety neurosis. Let us take the man who, after receiving the news of his father’s death, fell ill so inexplicably.(I add ‘inexplicably’ because the death was not unexpected and did not occur in unusual or shattering circumstances.) This man had carried out coitus interruptus for eleven years with his wife, whom he tried for the most part to satisfy. Again, the young man who was not equal to the quarrels between his wife and his mother, had practised withdrawal with his young wife from the first, in order to spare himself the burden of children. Then we have the student who acquired an anxiety neurosis from overwork, instead of the cerebral neurasthenia that was to be expected: he had maintained a relationship for three years with a girl whom it was not permissible for him to make pregnant. Again, there was the woman who, childless herself, was overtaken by an anxiety neurosis about a niece’s illness: she was married to an impotent man and had never been sexually satisfied. And so on. Not all these cases are equally clear or equally good evidence for my thesis; but when I add them to the very considerable number of cases in which the aetiology shows nothing but the specific factor, they fit without contradiction into the theory I have put forward and they allow of an extension of our aetiological understanding beyond the boundaries hitherto in force.

If anyone wants to prove to me that in these remarks I have unduly neglected the significance of the stock aetiological factors, he must confront me with observations in which my specific factor is missing - that is, with cases in which anxiety neurosis has arisen after a psychical shock although the subject has (on the whole) led a normal vita sexualis. Let us see now whether Löwenfeld’s case fulfils this condition. My respected opponent has evidently not been clear about this necessity in his own mind, otherwise he would not have left us so completely in the dark about his patient’s vita sexualis. I will leave on one side the fact that this case of a lady of thirty is obviously complicated by a hysteria as to the psychical origin of which I have not the least doubt; and I naturally admit without raising any objection the presence of an anxiety neurosis alongside of this hysteria. But before I turn a case to account for or against the theory of the sexual aetiology of the neuroses, I must first have studied the patient’s sexual behaviour more closely than Löwenfeld has done here. I should not be content to conclude that, because the time at which the lady received her psychical shock was shortly after a confinement, coitus interruptus could not have played a part during the previous year, and that therefore sexual noxae are ruled out. I know cases of women who were made pregnant every year, and who yet had anxiety neurosis, because - incredible as it may seem - all sexual relations were stopped after the first fertilizing coition, so that in spite of having many children they suffered from sexual privation through all these years. No doctor is ignorant of the fact that women conceive from men whose potency is very slight and who are not able to give them satisfaction. Finally (and this is a consideration which should be taken into account precisely by the upholders of a hereditary aetiology), there are plenty of women who are afflicted with congenital anxiety neurosis - that is to say, who inherit, or who develop without any demonstrable disturbance from outside, a vita sexualis which is the same as the one usually acquired through coitus interruptus and similar noxae. In a number of these women we are able to discover a hysterical illness in their youth, since which their vita sexualis has been disturbed and a deflection of sexual tension from the psychical sphere has been established. Women with this kind of sexuality are incapable of obtaining real satisfaction even from normal coitus, and they develop anxiety neurosis either spontaneously or after further operative factors have supervened. Which of all these elements were present in Löwenfeld’s case? I do not know. But I repeat: this case is evidence against me only if the lady who responded to a single fright with an anxiety neurosis had before then enjoyed a normal vita sexualis.

It is impossible to pursue an aetiological investigation based on anamneses if we accept those anamneses as the patients present them, or are content with what they are willing to volunteer. If syphilidologists still depended on the statements of their patients for tracing back an initial infection of the genitals to sexual intercourse, they would be able to attribute an imposing number of chancres in allegedly virginal persons to catching a chill; and gynaecologists would have little difficulty in confirming the miracle of parthenogenesis among their unmarried lady clients. I hope that one day the idea will prevail that neuropathologists, too, in collecting the anamneses of major neuroses, may proceed upon aetiological prejudices of a similar kind.

A Reply To Criticisms Of My Paper On Anxiety Neurosis

358

(2) Löwenfeld says further that he has repeatedly seen anxiety states appear and disappear where a change in the subject’s sexual life had certainly not taken place but where other factors were in play.

I, too, have made exactly the same observation, without, however, being misled by it. I myself have caused anxiety attacks to disappear by means of psychical treatment, improvement of the patient’s general health, and so on; but I have naturally not concluded from this that what had caused the anxiety attack was a lack of treatment. Not that I should like to foist a conclusion of this sort upon Löwenfeld. My joking remark is only intended to show that the state of affairs may easily be complicated enough to render Löwenfeld’s objection quite invalid. I have not found it difficult to reconcile the fact brought forward here with my assertion that anxiety neurosis has a specific aetiology. It will readily be granted that there are aetiological factors which, in order to exercise their effect, must operate with a certain intensity (or quantity) and over a certain period of time - which, that is to say, become summated. The effects of alcohol are a standard example of causation like this through summation. It follows that there must be a period of time in which the specific aetiology is at work but in which its effect is not yet manifest. During this time the subject is not ill as yet, but he is predisposed to a particular illness - in our case, to anxiety neurosis - and now the addition of a stock noxa will be able to set the neurosis off, just as would a further intensification of the operation of the specific noxa. The situation may also be expressed as follows: it is not enough for the specific noxa to be present; it must also reach a definite amount; and, in the process of reaching that limit, a quantity of specific noxa can be replaced by a quota of stock noxa. If the latter is removed once more, we find ourselves below a certain threshold and the clinical symptoms depart once more. The whole therapy of the neuroses rests upon the fact that the total load upon the nervous system, to which it has succumbed, can be brought below this threshold by influencing the aetiological mixture in a great variety of ways. From these circumstances we can draw no conclusion as to the existence or non-existence of a specific aetiology. These considerations are surely indisputable and assured. But anyone who does not think them sufficient may be influenced by the following argument. According to the views of Löwenfeld and very many others, the aetiology of anxiety states is to be found in heredity. Now heredity is certainly immune to alteration; thus if anxiety neurosis is curable by treatment, we should have to conclude according to Löwenfeld’s argument that its aetiology cannot reside in heredity.

A Reply To Criticisms Of My Paper On Anxiety Neurosis

359

For the rest, I might have been spared having to defend myself against these two objections of Löwenfeld’s, if my respected opponent had paid greater attention to my paper itself. In it, both these objections are anticipated and answered. I have only been able to repeat here what I said there; and I have even purposely analysed the same cases over again. Moreover the aetiological formulas on which I have just laid weight are contained in the text of my paper. I will repeat them once more. I maintain that there exists a specific aetiological factor for anxiety neurosis which can be replaced in its operation by stock noxae in a QUANTITATIVE sense, but not in a QUALITATIVE one; I furthermore maintain that this specific factor determines above all the FORM of the neurosis; whether a neurotic illness occurs at all depends on the total load upon the nervous system (in proportion to its capacity to carry the load). As a rule the neuroses are overdetermined; that is to say, several factors operate together in their aetiology.

(3) I need not concern myself so much about refuting Löwenfeld’s next comments, since on the one hand they damage my theory very little and on the other they raise difficulties whose existence I acknowledge. Löwenfeld writes: ‘The Freudian theory is totally insufficient to explain the appearance or non-appearance of anxiety attacks in individual instances. If anxiety-states - i. e. the clinical symptoms of anxiety neurosis - occurred solely through a subcortical storing-up of somatic sexual excitation and an abnormal employment of it, then every person who is afflicted with anxiety-states ought, so long as no changes take place in his sexual life, to have an anxiety attack from time to time,just as an epileptic has his attack of grand and petit mal. But this, as everyday experience shows, is by no means so. The anxiety attacks happen in the great majority of instances only on definite occasions; if the patient avoids these occasions or is able to paralyse their influence by taking some precaution, he remains exempt from anxiety attacks, whether he is consistently given over to coitus interruptus or to abstinence, or whether he enjoys a normal sexual life.’

A Reply To Criticisms Of My Paper On Anxiety Neurosis

360

There is a great deal to be said about this. In the first place, Löwenfeld forces upon my theory an inference which it is not bound to accept. To suppose that in the storing-up of somatic sexual excitation the same thing must be happening as in the accumulation of the stimulus which leads to an epileptic convulsion, is to make a far too detailed hypothesis, and I have given no occasion for it; nor is it the only one that presents itself. I need only assume that the nervous system has the power to master a certain amount of somatic sexual excitation even where the latter is deflected from its aim, and that disturbances only occur when that quantum of excitation receives a sudden increment, and Löwenfeld’s claim would be disposed of. I have not ventured to extend my theory in that direction, chiefly because I did not expect to find any solid points of support along that path. I should merely like to indicate that we ought not to think of the production of sexual tension independently of its distribution; that in normal sexual life this production, when it is stimulated by a sexual object, takes on a substantially different form from what it does in a state of psychical quiescence; and so on.

It must be admitted that the condition of affairs here is in all probability different from what prevails in the tendency to epileptic convulsions, and that it cannot yet be consistently derived from the theory of the accumulation of somatic sexual excitation.

A Reply To Criticisms Of My Paper On Anxiety Neurosis

361

Against Löwenfeld’s further assertion - that anxiety-states only appear under certain conditions and fail to appear when those conditions are avoided, regardless of what the subject’s vita sexualis may be - it must be pointed out that he clearly has in mind here only the anxiety of phobias, as, indeed, is shown by the examples attached to the passage I have quoted. He says nothing at all about the spontaneous anxiety attacks which take the form of vertigo, palpitation, dyspnoea, trembling, sweating, and so on. My theory, on the contrary, seems by no means unequal to explaining the emergence or non-emergence of these attacks of anxiety. For in a whole number of such cases of anxiety neurosis there does in fact appear to be a periodicity in the emergence of the states of anxiety, similar to what has been observed in epilepsy, except that in the latter the mechanism of the periodicity is more transparent. On closer examination we discover the presence, with great regularity, of an excitatory sexual process (that is, a process which is able to generate somatic sexual tension), and which, after the lapse of a definite and often constant interval of time, is followed by the anxiety attack. This role is played, in abstinent women, by menstrual excitation; it is played, too, by nocturnal pollutions, which also recur periodically. Above all, it is played by sexual intercourse itself (harmful from its being incomplete), which carries over its own periodicity to the effects it brings about, viz. to the anxiety attacks. If anxiety attacks occur which break through the usual periodicity, it is generally possible to trace them back to an incidental cause of rare and irregular occurrence - to a single sexual experience, something read or seen, and the like. The interval I have mentioned varies from a few hours to two days; it is the same as that which elapses in other people between the occurrence of the same causes and the onset of the well-known sexual migraine, which has well-established connections with the syndrome of anxiety neurosis.

Besides this, there are plenty of cases in which a single anxiety-state is provoked by the extra addition of a stock factor, by an excitement of some kind or other. The same holds good, therefore, for the aetiology of the individual anxiety attack as for the causation of the whole neurosis. It is not very strange that the anxiety of the phobias should obey different conditions; they have a more complicated structure than purely somatic anxiety attacks. In phobias the anxiety is linked to a definite ideational or perceptual content, and the arousal of this psychical content is the chief condition for the emergence of the anxiety. When this happens, anxiety is ‘generated’, just as for instance sexual tension is generated by the arousal of libidinal ideas. The connection of this process, however, with the theory of anxiety neurosis has not yet been elucidated.

A Reply To Criticisms Of My Paper On Anxiety Neurosis

362

I see no reason why I should try to hide the gaps and weaknesses in my theory. The main thing about the problem of the phobias seems to me to be that when the vita sexualis is normal - then the specific condition, a disturbance of sexual life in the sense of a deflection of the somatic from the psychical, is not fulfilled - phobias do not appear at all. However much else may be obscure about the mechanism of phobias, my theory can only be refuted when I have been shown phobias where sexual life is normal or even where there is a disturbance of it of a non-specific sort.

(4) I now pass on to a remark by my esteemed critic which I cannot leave uncontradicted. In my paper on anxiety neurosis I had written:

‘In some cases of anxiety neurosis no aetiology at all is to be discovered. It is worth noting that in such cases there is seldom any difficulty in establishing evidence of a grave hereditary taint.

‘But where there are grounds for regarding the neurosis as an acquired one, careful enquiry directed to that end reveals that a set of noxae and influences from sexual life  . . .’ Löwenfeld quotes this passage and adds the following gloss: ‘From this it appears that Freud always regards a neurosis as "acquired" whenever incidental causes are to be found for it.’

If this meaning follows naturally from my text, then the latter gives a very distorted expression to my thoughts. Let me point out that in the preceding pages I have shown myself far stricter than Löwenfeld in my evaluation of incidental causes. If I were myself to elucidate the meaning of the passage I wrote I should add, after the subordinate clause ‘But where there are grounds for regarding the neurosis as an acquired one . . .’, the words ‘because evidence (referred to in the previous sentence) of a hereditary taint is not forthcoming . . .’  What this means is that I hold the case to be an acquired one, since no heredity is to be discovered in it. In doing so I am behaving like everyone else, perhaps with the slight difference that others may declare the case to be determined by heredity even when there is no heredity, so that they overlook the whole category of acquired neuroses. But this difference runs in my favour. I admit, however, that I am myself to blame for this misunderstanding, on account of the way in which I expressed myself in the first sentence: ‘no aetiology at all is to be discovered’. I shall certainly be taken to task from other directions as well and be told that I have created useless trouble for myself by searching for the specific causes of neuroses. Some will say that the true aetiology of anxiety neurosis, as of neuroses in general, is known: it is heredity. And two real causes cannot exist side by side. I have not, they will say, denied the aetiological role of heredity; but if so, all other aetiologies are merely incidental causes and equal to one an other in value or want of value.

I do not share this view of the role of heredity; and since in my short paper on anxiety neurosis it is precisely to this theme that I have paid least attention, I will now try to make good some of what I have omitted in it and to remove the impression that in writing my paper I had not attended to all the relevant problems.

A Reply To Criticisms Of My Paper On Anxiety Neurosis

363

I think we can arrive at a picture of the probably very complicated aetiological situation which prevails in the pathology of the neuroses if we postulate the following concepts:

(a) Precondition, (b) Specific Cause, (c) Concurrent Causes, and, as a term which is not equivalent to the foregoing ones, (d) Precipitating or Releasing Cause.

In order to meet every possibility, let us assume that the aetiological factors we are concerned with are capable of a quantitative change - that is of increase or decrease.

If we accept the idea of an aetiological equation of several terms which must be satisfied if the effect is to take place, then we may characterize as the precipitating or releasing cause the one which makes its appearance last in the equation, so that it immediately precedes the emergence of the effect. It is this chronological factor alone which constitutes the essential nature of a precipitating cause. Any of the other causes, too, can in a particular case play the role of precipitating cause; and this role can change within the same aetiological combination.

The factors which may be described as preconditions are those in whose absence the effect would never come about, but which are incapable of producing the effect by themselves alone, no matter in what amount they may be present. For the specific cause is still lacking.

The specific cause is the one which is never missing in any case in which the effect takes place, and which moreover suffices, if present in the required quantity or intensity, to achieve the effect, provided only that the preconditions are also fulfilled.

As concurrent causes we may regard such factors as are not necessarily present every time, nor able, whatever their amount, to produce the effect by themselves alone, but which operate alongside of the preconditions and the specific cause in satisfying the aetiological equation.

The distinctive character of the concurrent, or auxiliary, causes seems clear; but how do we distinguish between a precondition and a specific cause, since both are indispensable and yet neither suffices alone to act as a cause?

The following considerations seem to allow us to arrive at a decision. Among the ‘necessary causes ' we find several which reappear in the aetiological equations concerned in many other effects and thus exhibit no special relationship to any one particular effect. One of these causes, however, stands out in contrast to the rest from the fact that it is found in no other aetiological equation, or in very few; and this one has a right to be called the specific cause of the effect concerned. Furthermore, preconditions and specific causes are especially distinct from each other in those cases in which the preconditions have the characteristic of being long-standing states that are little susceptible to alteration, while the specific cause is a factor which has recently come into play.

A Reply To Criticisms Of My Paper On Anxiety Neurosis

364

I will try to give an example of this complete aetiological schematic picture:

Effect: Phthisis pulmonum.

Precondition: Disposition, for the most part laid down through heredity, by the organic constitution.

Specific Cause: Bacillus Kochii.

Auxilliary Causes: Anything that diminishes the powers - emotions as well as suppurations or colds.

The schematic picture for the aetiology of anxiety neurosis seems to me to be on the same lines:

Precondition: Heredity.

Specific Cause: A sexual factor, in the sense of a deflection of sexual tension away from the psychical field.

Auxiliary Causes: Any stock noxae - emotion, fright, and also physical exhaustion through illness or over-exertion.

If I consider this aetiological formula for anxiety neurosis in detail, I am able to add the following remarks. Whether a special personal constitution (which need not be produced by heredity) is absolutely necessary for the production of an anxiety neurosis, or whether any normal person can be made to have an anxiety neurosis by some given quantitative increase of the specific factor - this I am not able to decide with certainty; but I incline strongly to the latter view. -Hereditary disposition is the most important precondition for anxiety neurosis; but it is not an indispensable one, since it is absent in a class of borderline cases. -The presence of the specific sexual factor can, in the majority of cases, be demonstrated with certainty. In one series of cases (congenital ones) this factor is not separated from the precondition of heredity, but is fulfilled with the help of it. That is to say, in some patients this peculiarity of the vita sexualis - psychical inadequacy in mastering somatic sexual tension - is innate in the form of a stigma whereas ordinarily it is via that peculiarity that they acquire the neurosis. In another class of borderline cases the specific cause is contained in a contributory one. This is when the psychical inadequacy which I have just mentioned is brought about by exhaustion and such causes. All these cases fall into classes which melt into one another and do not form separate categories. In all of them, moreover, we find that the sexual tension undergoes the same vicissitudes; and for most of them the distinction between precondition, specific and auxiliary cause holds good, in conformity with the solution of the aetiological equation which I have given above.

A Reply To Criticisms Of My Paper On Anxiety Neurosis

365

When I consult my experience on this point, I cannot find that there is any antithetic relation as regards anxiety neurosis between hereditary disposition and the specific sexual factor. On the contrary, the two aetiological factors support and supplement each other. The sexual factor is usually only operative in those who have an innate hereditary taint as well;  heredity alone is usually not able to produce an anxiety neurosis, but waits for the occurrence of a sufficient amount of the specific sexual noxa. The discovery of the hereditary element does not, therefore, exempt us from searching for a specific factor. On its discovery, incidentally, all our therapeutic interest as well depends. For what can we do therapeutically about heredity as an aetiological element?  It has always been there in the patient and will continue to be there until the end of his life. Taken by itself, it cannot help us to understand the episodic onset of a neurosis or the cessation of a neurosis as a result of treatment. It is nothing but a precondition of the neurosis - an inexpressibly important precondition, it is true, but nevertheless one which has been over-estimated, to the detriment of therapy and theoretical comprehension. To be convinced by the contrasting state of affairs, one has only to think of the cases of nervous diseases that run in families (such as chorea chronica, Thomsen’s disease, and so on), in which heredity unites in itself all the aetiological preconditions.

In conclusion, I should like to repeat the few statements in which I am accustomed, as a first approximation to the truth, to express the mutual relationships between the various aetiological factors:

(1) Whether a neurotic illness occurs at all depends upon a quantitative factor - upon the total load on the nervous system as compared with the latter’s capacity for resistance. Everything which can keep this quantitative factor below a certain threshold-value, or can bring it back to that level, has a therapeutic effect, since by so doing it keeps the aetiological equation unsatisfied.

What is to be understood by the ‘total load’ and by the ‘capacity for resistance’ of the nervous system, could no doubt be more clearly explained on the basis of certain hypotheses regarding the function of the nerves.

(2)  What dimensions the neurosis attains depends in the first instance on the amount of the hereditary taint. Heredity acts like a multiplier introduced into an electric circuit, which increases the deviation of the needle many times over.

(3) But what form the neurosis assumes - what direction the deviation takes - is solely determined by the specific aetiological factor arising from sexual life.

Although I am aware of the many still unsolved difficulties of the subject, I hope that, on the whole, my hypothesis of an anxiety neurosis will prove more fruitful for an understanding of the neuroses than Löwenfeld’s attempt to account for the same facts by postulating ‘a combination of neurasthenic and hysterical symptoms in the form of an attack.’

VIENNA, beginning of May 1895.

366

HEREDITY AND THE AETIOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

(1896)

367

Intentionally left blank

368

HEREDITY AND THE AETIOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

I am addressing in particular the disciples of J.-M. Charcot, in order to put forward some objections to the aetiological theory of the neuroses which was handed on to us by our teacher.

The role attributed in that theory to nervous heredity is well known: it is the sole true and indispensable cause of neurotic affections, and the other aetiological influences can aspire only to the name of agents provocateurs. Such was the opinion laid down by the great man himself and by his pupils, M M. Guinon, Gilles de la Tourette, Janet and others, in regard to the major neurosis, hysteria; and I believe the same view is held in France and in most other places in regard to the other neuroses, though, where these states analogous to hysteria are concerned, it has not been promulgated in so solemn and decided a manner.

I have long entertained doubts on this subject, but I have had to wait to find corroborative facts in my daily experience as a doctor. My objections are now of a double order: factual arguments and arguments derived from speculation. I will begin with the former, arranging them according to the importance I ascribe to them.

I

(a)  Affections which are fairly often remote from the domain of neuropathology, and which do not necessarily depend on a disease of the nervous system, have sometimes been regarded as nervous and as showing the presence of a hereditary neuropathic tendency. This has been so with true facial neuralgias and with many headaches which were thought to be nervous but which arose rather from post-infectious pathological changes and suppuration in the pharyngo-nasal cavities. I feel convinced that the patients would benefit if we were more often to hand over the treatment of these affections to the rhinological surgeons.

Heredity And The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

369

(b) All the nervous affections found in a patient’s family, without consideration of their frequence or severity, have been accepted as a basis for charging him with a hereditary nervous taint. Does not this way of looking at things imply drawing a sharp line between families which are clear of all nervous predisposition and families which are subject to them to an unlimited extent? And do not the facts argue in favour of the contrary view that there are transitions and degrees in nervous disposition and that no family escapes it altogether?

(c) Our opinion of the aetiological role of heredity in nervous illnesses ought decidedly to be based on an impartial statistical examination and not on a petitio principi. Until such an examination has been made we ought to believe that the existence of acquired nervous disorders is just as possible as that of hereditary ones. But if there can be nervous disorders that are acquired by people without a predisposition, it can no longer be denied that the nervous affections met with in our patient’s relatives may partly have arisen in that way. It will then no longer be possible to quote them as conclusive evidence of the hereditary disposition imputed to the patient by reason of his family history, for a retrospective diagnosis of the illnesses of ancestors or absent members of a family can only very rarely be successfully made.

(d) Those who are adherents of M. Fournier and M. Erb in the matter of the part played by syphilis in the aetiology of tabes dorsalis and progressive paralysis have learned that powerful aetiological influences must be recognized whose collaboration is indispensable for the pathogenesis of certain illnesses which could not be produced by heredity alone. Nevertheless M. Charcot remained to the very last (as I know from a private letter I had from him) strictly opposed to Fournier’s theory, which is, however, gaining ground every day.

(e) There is no doubt that certain nervous disorders can develop in people who are perfectly healthy and whose family is above reproach. This is a matter of daily observation in cases of Beard’s neurasthenia; if neurasthenia were restricted to people who were predisposed, it would never have attained the importance and extent with which we are familiar.

Heredity And The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

370

(f) In nervous pathology there is similar heredity and what is known as dissimilar heredity. No objection can be made to the former; it is in fact a very remarkable thing that in the disorders which depend on similar heredity (Thomsen’s disease, Friedreich’s disease, the myopathies, Huntington’s chorea, etc.) we never come across a trace of any other accessory aetiological influence. But dissimilar heredity, which is much more important than the other, leaves gaps which would have to be filled before a satisfactory solution of aetiological problems could be reached. Dissimilar heredity consists in the fact that the members of the same family are found to be affected by the most various nervous disorders, functional and organic, without its being possible to discover any law determining the replacement of one illness by another or the order of their succession through the generations. Alongside of the sick members of these families there are others who remain healthy; and the theory of dissimilar heredity does not tell us why one person tolerates the same hereditary load without succumbing to it or why another person, who is sick, should choose this particular nervous affection from among all the illnesses which make up the great family of nervous diseases instead of choosing another one - hysteria instead of epilepsy or insanity, and so on. Since there is no such thing as chance in neurotic pathogenesis any more than anywhere else, it must be allowed that it is not heredity that presides over the choice of the particular nervous disorder which is to develop in the predisposed member of a family, but that there are grounds for suspecting the existence of other aetiological influences, of a less incomprehensible nature, which would then deserve to be called the specific aetiology of such and such a nervous affection. Without the existence of this special aetiological factor, heredity could have done nothing; it would have lent itself to the production of another nervous disorder if the specific aetiology in question had been replaced by some other influence.

Heredity And The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

371

II

There has been too little research into these specific and determining causes of nervous disorders, for the attention of physicians has remained dazzled by the grandiose prospect of the aetiological precondition of heredity. Those causes nevertheless deserve to be made the object of industrious study. Although their pathogenic power is in general only accessory to that of heredity, great practical interest attaches to the knowledge of this specific aetiology; it will allow our therapeutic efforts a path of access, whereas hereditary disposition, which is something fixed in advance for the patient from his birth, brings our efforts to a halt with its unapproachable power.

I have been engaged for years in researches into the aetiology of the major neuroses (functional nervous states analogous to hysteria) and it is the result of those studies that I propose to describe to you in the following pages. To avoid any possible misunderstanding I shall begin by making two remarks on the nosography of the neuroses and on the aetiology of the neuroses in general.

I was obliged to begin my work with a nosographic innovation. I found reason to set alongside of hysteria the obsessional neurosis (Zwangsneurose) as a self-sufficient and independent disorder, although the majority of the authorities place obsessions among the syndromes constituting mental degeneracy or confuse them with neurasthenia. I for my part, by examining the psychical mechanism of obsessions, had learnt that they are connected with hysteria more closely than one might suppose.

Hysteria and obsessional neurosis form the first group of the major neuroses studied by me. The second contains Beard’s neurasthenia, which I have divided up into two functional states separated by their aetiology as well as by their symptomatic appearance - neurasthenia proper and the anxiety neurosis (Angstneurose), a name which, I may say in passing, I am not pleased with myself. I gave my detailed reasons for making this separation, which I consider necessary, in a paper published in 1895.

As regards the aetiology of the neuroses, I think it should be recognized in theory that aetiological influences, differing among themselves in their importance and in the manner in which they are related to the effect they produce, can be grouped in three classes: (1) Preconditions, which are indispensable for producing the disorder concerned but which are of a general nature and are equally met with in the aetiology of many other disorders; (2) Concurrent Causes, which share the character of preconditions in that they function in the causation of other disorders as well as in that of the disorder under consideration, but which are not indispensable for the production of the latter; and (3) Specific Causes, which are as indispensable as the preconditions, but are of a limited nature and appear only in the aetiology of the disorder for which they are specific.

In the pathogenesis of the major neuroses, then, heredity fulfils the role of a precondition, powerful in every case and even indispensable in most cases. It could not do without the collaboration of the specific causes; but the importance of hereditary disposition is proved by the fact that the same specific causes acting on a healthy individual produce no manifest pathological effect, whereas in a predisposed person their action causes the neurosis to come to light, whose development will be proportionate in intensity and extent to the degree of the hereditary precondition.

Thus the action of heredity is comparable to that of a multiplier in an electric circuit, which exaggerates the visible deviation of the needle, but which cannot determine its direction.

There is yet another thing to be noted in the relations between the hereditary precondition and the specific causes of neuroses. Experience shows - what one might have guessed in advance - that in these questions of aetiology one should not neglect the relative quantities, so to speak, of the aetiological influences. But one could not have guessed the following fact, which seems to arise from my observations: namely that heredity and the specific causes can replace each other as regards quantity, that the same pathological effect will be produced by the coincidence of a very serious specific aetiology with a moderate disposition or of a severely loaded nervous heredity with a slight specific influence. And we shall simply be meeting not unexpected extreme instances in this series if we come upon cases of neurosis in which we shall look in vain for an appreciable degree of hereditary disposition, provided that what is lacking is made up for by a powerful specific influence.

Heredity And The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

372

As concurrent (or auxiliary) causes of neuroses may be enumerated all the stock agents met with elsewhere: emotional disturbance, physical exhaustion, acute illnesses, intoxications, traumatic accidents, intellectual overwork, etc. I maintain that none of these, not even the last, enters into the aetiology of the neuroses regularly or necessarily, and I am aware that to declare this opinion is to put oneself in direct opposition to a theory which is looked upon as universally accepted and irreproachable. Since Beard declared that neurasthenia was the fruit of our modern civilization, he has only met with believers; but I find it impossible to accept this view. A laborious study of the neuroses has taught me that the specific aetiology of the neuroses has escaped Beard’s notice.

I have no desire to depreciate the aetiological importance of these stock agents. Since they are very various, occur very frequently and are most often named by patients themselves, they become more prominent than the specific causes of the neuroses - an aetiology which is either hidden or unknown. Fairly frequently they fulfil the function of agents provocateurs which render manifest a neurosis that has previously been latent; and a practical interest attaches to them, for a consideration of these stock causes may offer lines of approach to a therapy which does not aim at a radical cure and is content with repressing the illness to its former state of latency.

But it is not possible to establish any constant and close relation between one of these stock causes and one or other form of nervous affection. Emotional disturbance, for instance, is found equally in the aetiology of hysteria, obsessions and neurasthenia, as well as in that of epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, diabetes and many others.

Heredity And The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

373

Stock concurrent causes can replace the specific aetiology in respect of quantity, but can never take its place entirely. There are numerous cases in which all the aetiological influences are represented by the hereditary precondition and the specific cause, stock causes being absent. In the other cases indispensable aetiological factors are not in themselves sufficient in quantity to bring about an outbreak of neurosis; a state of apparent health may be maintained for a long time, though it is in reality a state of predisposition to neurosis. It is then enough for a stock cause to come into action as well, and the neurosis becomes manifest. But it must be clearly pointed out that under these conditions the nature of the stock cause which supervenes is a matter of complete indifference - whether it is an emotion, a trauma, an infectious illness or anything else. The pathological effect will not be modified according to this variation; the nature of the neurosis will always be dominated by the pre-existing specific cause.

What, then are the specific causes of neuroses? Is there a single one or are there several? And is it possible to establish a constant aetiological relation between a particular cause and a particular neurotic effect, in such a way that each of the major neuroses can be attributed to a special aetiology?

On the basis of a laborious examination of the facts, I shall maintain that this last supposition is quite in agreement with reality, that each of the major neuroses which I have enumerated has as its immediate cause one particular disturbance of the economics of the nervous system, and that these functional pathological modifications have as their common source the subject’s sexual life, whether they lie in a disorder of his contemporary sexual life or in important events in his past life.

This, to tell the truth, is no new, unheard-of proposition. Sexual disorders have always been admitted among the causes of nervous illness, but they have been subordinated to heredity - and co-ordinated with the other agents provocateurs; their aetiological influence has been restricted to a limited number of observed cases. Physicians had even fallen into the habit of not investigating them unless the patient brought them up himself. What gives its distinctive character to my line of approach is that I elevate these sexual influences to the rank of specific causes, that I recognize their action in every case of neurosis, and finally that I trace a regular parallelism, a proof of a special aetiological relation between the nature of the sexual influence and the pathological species of the neurosis.

Heredity And The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

374

I am quite sure that this theory will call up a storm of contradictions from contemporary physicians. But this is not the place in which to present the documents and the experiences which have forced me to my convictions, nor to explain the true meaning of the rather vague expression ‘disorders of the economics of the nervous system’. This will be done, most fully, I hope, in a work on the subject which I have in preparation. In the present paper I limit myself to reporting my findings.

Neurasthenia proper, if we detach anxiety neurosis from it, has a very monotonous clinical appearance: fatigue, intracranial pressure, flatulent dyspepsia, constipation, spinal paraesthesias, sexual weakness, etc. The only specific aetiology it allows of is (immoderate) masturbation or spontaneous emissions.

It is the prolonged and intense action of this pernicious sexual satisfaction which is enough on its own account to provoke a neurasthenic neurosis or which imposes on the subject the special neurasthenic stamp that is manifested later under the influence of an incidental accessory cause. I have also come across people presenting the indications of a neurasthenic constitution in whom I have not succeeded in bringing to light the aetiology I have mentioned; but I have at least shown that the sexual function has never developed to its normal level in these patients; they seemed to have been endowed by heredity with a sexual constitution analogous to what is brought about in a neurasthenic as a result of masturbation.

The anxiety neurosis exhibits a much richer clinical picture: irritability, states of anxious expectation, phobias, anxiety attacks, complete or rudimentary, attacks of fear and of vertigo, tremors, sweating, congestion, dyspnoea, tachycardia, etc., chronic diarrhoea, chronic locomotor vertigo, hyperaesthesia, insomnia, etc.¹ It is easily revealed as being the specific effect of various disorders of sexual life which possess a characteristic common to all of them. Enforced abstinence, unconsummated genital excitation (excitation which is not relieved by a sexual act ), coition which is imperfect or interrupted (which does not end in gratification), sexual efforts which exceed the subject’s psychical capacity, etc. - all these agents, which occur only too frequently in modern life, seem to agree in the fact that they disturb the equilibrium of the psychical and somatic functions in sexual acts, and that they prevent the psychical participation necessary in order to free the nervous economy from sexual tension.

¹ For the symptomatology as well as for the aetiology of anxiety neurosis, see my paper referred to above.

Heredity And The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

375

These remarks, which perhaps contain the germ of a theoretical explanation of the functional mechanism of the neurosis in question, give rise already to a suspicion that a complete and truly scientific exposition of the subject is not possible at the present time, and that it would be necessary to start off by approaching the physiological problem of sexual life from a fresh angle.

I will say finally that the pathogenesis of neurasthenia and anxiety neurosis can easily do without the co-operation of a hereditary disposition. That is the outcome of daily observation. But if heredity is present, the development of the neurosis will be affected by its powerful influence.

As regards the second class of major neuroses, hysteria and obsessional neurosis, the solution of the aetiological problem is of surprising simplicity and uniformity. I owe my results to a new method of psycho-analysis, Josef Breuer’s exploratory procedure; it is a little intricate, but it is irreplaceable, so fertile has it shown itself to be in throwing light upon the obscure paths of unconscious ideation. By means of that procedure - this is not the place in which to describe it ¹ - hysterical symptoms are traced back to their origin, which is always found in some event of the subject’s sexual life appropriate for the production of a distressing emotion. Travelling backwards into the patient’s past, step by step, and always guided by the organic train of symptoms and of memories and thoughts aroused, I finally reached the starting-point of the pathological process; and I was obliged to see that at bottom the same thing was present in all the cases submitted to analysis - the action of an agent which must be accepted as the specific cause of hysteria.

¹ See Studies on Hysteria, by Breuer and Freud, 1895.

Heredity And The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

376

This agent is indeed a memory relating to sexual life; but it is one which presents two characteristics of the first importance. The event of which the subject has retained an unconscious memory is a precocious experience of sexual relations with actual excitement of the genitals, resulting from sexual abuse committed by another person; and the period of life at which this fatal event takes place is earliest youth - the years up to the age of eight to ten, before the child has reached sexual maturity.

A passive sexual experience before puberty: this, then, is the specific aetiology of hysteria.

I will without delay add some factual details and some commentary to the result I have announced, in order to combat the scepticism with which I expect to meet. I have been able to carry out a complete psycho-analysis in thirteen cases of hysteria, three of that number being true combinations of hysteria and obsessional neurosis. (I do not speak of hysteria with obsessions.) In none of these cases was an event of the kind defined above missing. It was represented either by a brutal assault committed by an adult or by a seduction less rapid and less repulsive, but reaching the same conclusion. In seven out of the thirteen cases the intercourse was between children on both sides - sexual relations between a little girl and a boy a little older (most often her brother)  who had himself been the victim of an earlier seduction. These relations sometimes continued for years, until the little guilty parties reached puberty; the boy would repeat the same practices with the little girl over and over again and without alteration - practices to which he himself had been subjected by some female servant or governess and which on account of their origin were often of a disgusting sort. In a few cases there was a combination of an assault and relations between children or a repetition of a brutal abuse.

The date of this precocious experience varied. In two cases the series started in the little creature’s second year (?); the commonest age in my observations is the fourth or fifth year. It may be somewhat by accident, but I have formed an impression from this that a passive sexual experience occurring only after the age of from eight to ten is no longer able to serve as the foundation of the neurosis.

Heredity And The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

377

How is it possible to remain convinced of the reality of these analytic confessions which claim to be memories preserved from the earliest childhood? and how is one to arm oneself against the tendency to lies and the facility of invention which are attributed to hysterical subjects? I should accuse myself of blame-worthy credulity if I did not possess more conclusive evidence. But the fact is that these patients never repeat these stories spontaneously, nor do they ever in the course of a treatment suddenly present the physician with the complete recollection of a scene of this kind. One only succeeds in awakening the psychical trace of a precocious sexual event under the most energetic pressure of the analytic procedure, and against an enormous resistance. Moreover, the memory must be extracted from them piece by piece, and while it is being awakened in their consciousness they become the prey to an emotion which it would be hard to counterfeit.

Conviction will follow in the end, if one is not influenced by the patients’ behaviour, provided that one can follow in detail the report of a psycho-analysis of a case of hysteria.

The precocious event has left an indelible imprint on the history of the case; it is represented in it by a host of symptoms and of special features which could be accounted for in no other way; it is peremptorily called for by the subtle but solid interconnections of the intrinsic structure of the neurosis;  the therapeutic effect of the analysis lags behind if one has not penetrated so far; and one is then left with no choice but to reject or to believe the whole.

Heredity And The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

378

Is it understandable that a precocious sexual experience of this kind, undergone by an individual whose sex is barely differentiated, can become the source of a persistent psychical abnormality like hysteria?  And how would this supposition fit in with our present ideas on the psychical mechanism of that neurosis? A satisfactory reply can be given to the first of these questions. It is precisely because the subject is in his infancy that the precocious sexual excitation produces little or no effect at the time; but its psychical trace is preserved. Later, when at puberty the reactions of the sexual organs have developed to a level incommensurable with their infantile condition, it comes about in one way or another that this unconscious psychical trace is awakened. Thanks to the change due to puberty, the memory will display a power which was completely lacking from the event itself. The memory will operate as though it were a contemporary event. What happens is, as it were, a posthumous action by a sexual trauma.

So far as I can see, this awakening of a sexual memory after puberty, when the event itself has happened at a time long before that period, forms the only psychological instance of the effect of a memory surpassing that of an actual event. But the constellation is an abnormal one, which touches a weak side of the psychical mechanism and is bound to produce a pathological psychical effect.

I believe I can see that this inverse relation between the psychical effect of the memory and of the event contains the reason for the memory remaining unconscious.

In this way we arrive at a very complex psychical problem, but one which, properly appreciated, promises to throw a vivid light on the most delicate questions of psychical life.

The ideas put forward here, which have as their starting point the finding of psycho-analysis to the effect that a memory of a precocious sexual experience is always found as the specific cause of hysteria, are not in harmony with the psychological theory of neuroses held by M. Janet, nor with any other; but they agree perfectly with my own speculations on the ‘Abwehrneurosen’, as I have developed them elsewhere.

Heredity And The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

379

All the events subsequent to puberty to which an influence must be attributed upon the development of the hysterical neurosis and upon the formation of its symptoms are in fact only concurrent causes - ‘agents provocateurs’ as Charcot used to say, although for him nervous heredity occupied the place which I claim for the precocious sexual experience. These accessory agents are not subject to the strict conditions imposed on the specific causes; analysis demonstrates in an irrefutable fashion that they enjoy a pathogenic influence for hysteria only owing to their faculty for awakening the unconscious psychical trace of the childhood event. It is also thanks to their connection with the primary pathogenic impression, and inspired by it, that their memories will become unconscious in their turn and will be able to assist in the growth of a psychical activity withdrawn from the power of the conscious functions.

The obsessional neurosis (Zwangsneurose) arises from a specific cause very analogous to that of hysteria. Here too we find a precocious sexual event, occurring before puberty, the memory of which becomes active during or after that period; and the same remarks and arguments which I put forward in connection with hysteria will apply to my observations of the other neurosis (six cases, three of which were pure ones). There is only one difference which seems capital. At the basis of the aetiology of hysteria we found an event of passive sexuality, an experience submitted to with indifference or with a small degree of annoyance or fright. In obsessional neurosis it is a question on the other hand, of an event which has given pleasure, of an act of aggression inspired by desire (in the case of a boy) or of a participation in sexual relations accompanied by enjoyment (in the case of a little girl). The obsessional ideas, when their intimate meaning has been recognized by analysis, when they have been reduced, as it were, to their simplest expression, are nothing other than reproaches addressed by the subject himself on account of this anticipated sexual enjoyment, but reproaches distorted by an unconscious psychical work of transformation and substitution.

The very fact of sexual aggressions of this kind taking place at such a tender age seems to reveal the influence of a previous seduction of which the precocity of sexual desire would be the consequence. In the cases analysed by me analysis confirms this suspicion. In this way an interesting fact is explained which is always found in these cases of obsessions: the regular complication of the framework of symptoms by a certain number of symptoms which are simply hysterical.

Heredity And The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

380

The importance of the active element in sexual life as a cause of obsessions, and of sexual passivity for the pathogenesis of hysteria, even seems to unveil the reason for the more intimate connection of hysteria with the female sex and the preference of men for obsessional neurosis. One sometimes comes across a pair of neurotic patients who were a pair of little lovers in their earliest childhood - the man suffering from obsessions and the woman from hysteria. If they are a brother and sister, one might mistake for a result of nervous heredity what is in fact the consequence of precocious sexual experiences.

There are no doubt pure and isolated cases of hysteria or obsessions, independent of neurasthenia or anxiety neurosis; but this is not the rule. A psychoneurosis appears more often as an accessory to a neurasthenic neurosis, provoked by it and following its decline. This is because the specific causes of the latter, the contemporary disorders of sexual life, operate at the same time as auxiliary causes of the psychoneuroses, whose specific cause, the memory of the precocious sexual experience, they awaken and revive.

As regards nervous heredity, I am far from being able to estimate correctly its influence in the aetiology of the psychoneuroses. I admit that its presence is indispensable for severe cases; I doubt if it is necessary for slight ones; but I am convinced that nervous heredity by itself is unable to produce psychoneuroses if their specific aetiology, precocious sexual excitation, is missing. I even believe that the decision as to which of the neuroses, hysteria or obsessions, will develop in a given case, is not decided by heredity but a special characteristic of the sexual event in earliest childhood.

381

FURTHER REMARKS ON THE NEURO-PSYCHOSES OF DEFENCE

(1896)

382

Intentionally left blank

383

FURTHER REMARKS ON THE NEURO-PSYCHOSES OF DEFENCE

In a short paper published in 1894, I grouped together hysteria, obsessions and certain cases of acute hallucinatory confusion under the name of ‘neuro-psychoses of defence’, because those affections turned out to have one aspect in common. This was that their symptoms arose through the psychical mechanism of (unconscious) defence - that is, in an attempt to repress an incompatible idea which had come into distressing opposition to the patient’s ego. In some passages in a book which has since appeared by Dr. J. Breuer and myself (Studies on Hysteria) I have been able to elucidate, and to illustrate from clinical observations, the sense in which this psychical process of ‘defence’ or ‘repression’ is to be understood. There, too, some information is to be found about the laborious but completely reliable method of psycho-analysis used by me in making those investigations - investigations which also constitute a therapeutic procedure.

My observations during my last two years of work have strengthened me in the inclination to look on defence as the nuclear point in the psychical mechanism of the neuroses in question; and they have also enabled me to give this psychological theory a clinical foundation. To my own surprise, I have come upon a few simple, though narrowly circumscribed, solutions of the problems of neurosis, and in the following pages I shall give a preliminary and brief account of them. In this kind of communication it is not possible to bring forward the evidence needful to support my assertions, but I hope to be able to fulfil this obligation later in a detailed presentation.

Further Remarks On The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

384

I

THE ‘SPECIFIC’ AETIOLOGY OF HYSTERIA

In earlier publications, Breuer and I have already expressed the opinion that the symptoms of hysteria can only be understood if traced back to experiences which have a ‘traumatic’ effect, and that these psychical traumas refer to the patient’s sexual life. What I have to add here, as a uniform outcome of the analyses carried out by me on thirteen cases of hysteria, concerns on the one hand the nature of those sexual traumas, and, on the other, the period of life in which they occur. In order to cause hysteria, it is not enough that there should occur at some period of the subject’s life an event which touches his sexual existence and becomes pathogenic through the release and suppression of a distressing affect. On the contrary, these sexual traumas must have occurred in early childhood (before puberty), and their content must consist of an actual irritation of the genitals (of processes resembling copulation).

I have found this specific determinant of hysteria - sexual passivity during the pre-sexual period - in every case of hysteria (including two male cases) which I have analysed. How greatly the claims of hereditary disposition are diminished by the establishment in this way of accidental aetiological factors as a determinant needs no more than a mention. Furthermore, a path is laid open to an understanding of why hysteria is far and away more frequent in members of the female sex; for even in childhood they are more liable to provoke sexual attacks.

Further Remarks On The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

385

The most immediate objections to this conclusion will probably be that sexual assaults on small children happen too often for them to have any aetiological importance, or that these sorts of experiences are bound to be without effect precisely because they happen to a person who is sexually undeveloped; and further, that one must beware of forcing on patients supposed reminiscences of this kind by questioning them, or of believing in the romances which they themselves invent. In reply to the latter objections we may ask that no one should form too certain judgements in this obscure field until he has made use of the only method which can throw light on it - of psycho-analysis for the purpose of making conscious what has so far been unconscious.¹ What is essential in the first objections can be disposed of by pointing out that it is not the experiences themselves which act traumatically their revival as a memory after the subject has entered on sexual maturity.

My thirteen cases were without exception of a severe kind; in all of them the illness was of many years’ duration, and a few came to me after lengthy and unsuccessful institutional treatment. The childhood traumas which analysis uncovered in these severe cases had all to be classed as grave sexual injuries; some of them were positively revolting. Foremost among those guilty of abuses like these, with their momentous consequences, are nursemaids, governesses and domestic servants, to whose care children are only too thoughtlessly entrusted; teachers, moreover, figure with regrettable frequency. In seven out of these thirteen cases, however, it turned out that blameless children were the assailants; these were mostly brothers who for years on end had carried on sexual relations with sisters a little younger than themselves. No doubt the course of events was in every instance similar to what it was possible to trace with certainty in a few individual cases: the boy, that is to say, had been abused by someone of the female sex, so that his libido was prematurely aroused, and then, a few years later, he had committed an act of sexual aggression against his sister, in which he repeated precisely the same procedures to which he himself had been subjected.

¹ I myself am inclined to think that the stories of being assaulted which hysterics so frequently invent may be obsessional fictions which arise from the memory-trace of a childhood trauma.

Further Remarks On The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

386

Active masturbation must be excluded from my list of the sexual noxae in early childhood which are pathogenic for hysteria. Although it is found so very often side by side with hysteria, this is due to the circumstance that masturbation itself is a much more frequent consequence of abuse or seduction than is supposed.

It is not at all rare for both of the two children to fall ill later on of a defence neurosis - the brother with obsessions and the sister with hysteria. This naturally gives the appearance of a familial neurotic disposition. Occasionally, however, this pseudo-heredity is resolved in a surprising fashion. In one of my cases a brother, a sister, and a somewhat older male cousin were all of them ill. From the analysis which I carried out on the brother, I learnt that he was suffering from self-reproaches for being the cause of his sister’s illness. He himself had been seduced by his cousin, and the latter, it was known in the family, had been the victim of his nursemaid.

I cannot say for certain what the upper age-limit is below which sexual injury plays a part in the aetiology of hysteria; but I doubt whether sexual passivity can bring on repression later than between the eighth and tenth years, unless it is enabled to do so by previous experiences. The lower limit extends as far back as memory itself - that is, therefore, to the tender age of one and a half or two years! (I have had two cases of this.) In a number of my cases the sexual trauma (or series of traumas) occurred in the third and fourth years of life. I should not lend credence to these extraordinary findings myself if their complete reliability were not proved by the development of the subsequent neurosis. In every case a number of pathological symptoms, habits and phobias are only to be accounted for by going back to these experiences in childhood, and the logical structure of the neurotic manifestations makes it impossible to reject these faithfully preserved memories which emerge from childhood life. True, it would be useless to try to elicit these childhood traumas from a hysteric by questioning him outside psycho-analysis; their traces are never present in conscious memory, only in the symptoms of the illness.

Further Remarks On The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

387

All the experiences and excitations which, in the period of life after puberty, prepare the way for, or precipitate, the outbreak of hysteria, demonstrably have their effect only because they arouse the memory-trace of these traumas in childhood, which do not thereupon become conscious but lead to a release of affect and to repression. This role of the later traumas tallies well with the fact that they are not subject to the strict conditions which govern the traumas in childhood but that they can vary in their intensity and nature, from actual sexual violation to mere sexual overtures or the witnessing of sexual acts in other people, or receiving information about sexual processes.¹

In my first paper on the neuroses of defence there was no explanation of how the efforts of the subject, who had hitherto been healthy, to forget a traumatic experience of this sort could have the result of actually effecting the intended repression and thus opening the door to the defence neurosis. It could not lie in the nature of the experiences, since other people remained healthy in spite of being exposed to the same precipitating causes. Hysteria, therefore, could not be fully explained from the effect of the trauma: it had to be acknowledged that the susceptibility to a hysterical reaction had already existed before the trauma.

The place of this indefinite hysterical disposition can now be taken, wholly or in part, by the posthumous operation of a sexual trauma in childhood. ’Repression’ of the memory of a distressing sexual experience which occurs in maturer years is only possible for those in whom that experience can activate the memory-trace of a trauma in childhood.

¹ In a paper on the anxiety neurosis, I remarked that ‘anxiety neurosis can be produced in girls who are approaching maturity by their first encounter with the problem of sex. . . . Such an anxiety neurosis is combined with hysteria in an almost typical fashion.’ I know now that the occasion on which this ‘virginal anxiety’ breaks out in young girls does not actually represent their first encounter with sexuality, but that an experience of sexual passivity had previously occurred in their childhood, the memory of which is aroused by this ‘first encounter’.

² A psychological theory of repression ought also to throw light on the question of why it is only ideas with a sexual content that can be repressed. Such an explanation might start out from the following indications. It is known that having ideas with a sexual content produces excitatory processes in the genitals which are similar to those produced by sexual experience itself. We may assume that this somatic excitation becomes transposed into the psychical sphere. As a rule the effect in question is much stronger in the case of the experience than in the case of the memory. But if the sexual experience occurs during the period of sexual immaturity and the memory of it is aroused during or after maturity, then the memory will have a far stronger excitatory effect than the experience did at the time it happened; and this is because in the meantime puberty has immensely increased the capacity of the sexual apparatus for reaction. An inverted relation of this sort between real experience and memory seems to contain the psychological precondition for the occurrence of a repression. Sexual life affords - through the retardation of pubertal maturity as compared with the psychical functions - the only possibility that occurs for this inversion of relative effectiveness. The traumas of childhood operate in a deferred fashion as though they were fresh experiences; but they do so unconsciously. I must postpone entering into any more far-reaching psychological discussion till another occasion. Let me add, however, that the period of ‘sexual maturity’ which is in question here does not coincide with puberty but falls earlier (from the eighth to the tenth year).

Further Remarks On The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

388

Obsessions similarly presuppose a sexual experience in childhood (though one of a different nature from that found in hysteria). The aetiology of the two neuro-psychoses of defence is related as follows to the aetiology of the two simple neuroses, neurasthenia and anxiety neurosis. Both the latter disorders are direct effects of the sexual noxae themselves, as I have shown in my paper on anxiety neurosis (1895b); both the defence neuroses are indirect consequences of sexual noxae which have occurred before the advent of sexual maturity - are consequences, that is, of the psychical memory-traces of those noxae. The current causes which produce neurasthenia and anxiety neurosis often at the same time play the part of exciting causes of the neuroses of defence; on the other hand, the specific causes of a defence-neurosis - the traumas of childhood - can at the same time lay the foundations for a later development of neurasthenia. Finally, it not infrequently happens, too, that neurasthenia or anxiety neurosis is maintained, not by current sexual noxae, but, instead, solely by the persisting effect of a memory of childhood traumas.¹

II

THE NATURE AND MECHANISM OF OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS

Sexual experiences of early childhood have the same significance in the aetiology of obsessional neurosis as they have in that of hysteria. Here, however, it is no longer a question of sexual passivity, but of acts of aggression carried out with pleasure and of pleasurable participation in sexual acts - that is to say, of sexual activity. This difference in the aetiological circumstances is bound up with the fact that obsessional neurosis shows a visible preference for the male sex.

¹ (Footnote added 1924:) This section is dominated by an error which I have since repeatedly acknowledged and corrected. At that time I was not yet able to distinguish between my patients’ phantasies about their childhood years and their real recollections. As a result, I attributed to the aetiological factor of seduction a significance and universality which it does not possess. When this error had been overcome, it became possible to obtain an insight into the spontaneous manifestations of the sexuality of children which I described in my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d). Nevertheless, we need not reject everything written in the text above. Seduction retains a certain aetiological importance, and even to-day I think some of these psychological comments are to the point.

Further Remarks On The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

389

In all my cases of obsessional neurosis, moreover, I have found a substratum of hysterical symptoms which could be traced back to a scene of sexual passivity that preceded the pleasurable action. I suspect that this coincidence is no fortuitous one, and that precocious sexual aggressivity always implies a previous experience of being seduced. However, I can as yet give no definitive account of the aetiology of obsessional neurosis; I only have an impression that the decision as to whether hysteria or obsessional neurosis will arise on the basis of traumas in childhood depends on chronological circumstances in the development of the libido.

The nature of obsessional neurosis can be expressed in a simple formula. Obsessional ideas are invariably transformed self-reproaches which have re-emerged from repression and which always relate to some sexual act that was performed with pleasure in childhood. In order to elucidate this statement it is necessary to describe the typical course taken by an obsessional neurosis.

In a first period - the period of childhood immorality - the events occur which contain the germ of the later neurosis. First of all, in earliest childhood, we have the experiences of sexual seduction that will later on make repression possible; and then come the acts of sexual aggression against the other sex, which will later appear in the form of acts involving self-reproach.

This period is brought to a close by the advent of sexual ‘maturation’, often itself unduly early. A self-reproach now be comes attached to the memory of these pleasurable actions; and the connection with the initial experience of passivity makes it possible - often only after conscious and remembered efforts - to repress them and to replace them by a primary symptom of defence. Conscientiousness, shame and self-distrust are symptoms of this kind, with which the third period begins - the period of apparent health, but actually, of successful defence.

Further Remarks On The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

390

The next period, that of the illness, is characterized by return of the repressed memories - that is, therefore, by the failure of the defence. It is not certain whether the awakening of those memories occurs more often accidentally and spontaneously or as a result of current sexual disturbances, as a kind of by-product of them. The re-activated memories, however, and the self reproaches formed from them never re-emerge into consciousness unchanged: what become conscious as obsessional ideas and affects, and take the place of the pathogenic memories so far as conscious life is concerned, are structures in the nature of a compromise between the repressed ideas and the repressing ones.

In order to describe clearly and with probable accuracy the processes of repression, the return of the repressed and the formation of pathological compromise-ideas, one would have to make up one’s mind to quite definite assumptions about the substratum of psychical events and of consciousness. So long as one seeks to avoid this, one must be content with the following remarks which are intended more or less figuratively. There are two forms of obsessional neurosis, according to whether what forces an entrance into consciousness is solely the mnemic content of the act involving self-reproach, or whether the self-reproachful affect connected with the act does so as well.

The first form includes the typical obsessional ideas, in which the content engages the patient’s attention and, as an affect, he merely feels an indefinite unpleasure, whereas the only affect which would be suitable to the obsessional idea would be one of self-reproach. The content of the obsessional idea is distorted in two ways in relation to the obsessional act of childhood. First, something contemporary is put in the place of something past; and secondly, something sexual is replaced by something analogous to it that is not sexual. These two alterations are the effect of the inclination to repress, still in force, which we will ascribe to the ‘ego’. The influence of the re-activated pathogenic memory is shown by the fact that the content of the obsessional idea is still in part identical with what has been repressed or follows from it by a logical train of thought. If, with the help of the psycho-analytic method, we reconstruct the origin of an individual obsessional idea, we find that from a single current impression two different trains of thought have been set going. The one which has passed by way of the repressed memory proves to be as correctly logical in its structure as the other, although it is incapable of being conscious and insusceptible to correction. If the products of the two psychical operations do not tally, what takes place is not some sort of logical adjustment of the contradiction between them; instead, alongside of the normal intellectual outcome, there comes into consciousness, as a compromise between the resistance and the pathological intellectual product, an obsessional idea which appears absurd. If the two trains of thought lead to the same conclusion, they reinforce each other, so that an intellectual product that has been arrived at normally now behaves, psychologically, like an obsessional idea. Wherever a neurotic obsession emerges in the psychological sphere, it comes from repression. Obsessional ideas have, as it were, a compulsive psychical currency, not on account of their intrinsic value, but on account of the source from which they derive or which has added a contribution to their value.

Further Remarks On The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

391

A second form of obsessional neurosis comes about if what has forced its way to representation in conscious psychical life is not the repressed mnemic content but the likewise repressed self-reproach. The affect of self-reproach can, by means of some mental addition, be transformed into any other unpleasurable affect. When this has happened there is no longer anything to prevent the substituted affect from becoming conscious. Thus self-reproach (for having carried out the sexual act in childhood) can easily turn into shame (in case some one else should find out about it), into hypochondriacal anxiety (fear of the physical injuries resulting from the act involving the self-reproach), into social anxiety (fear of being punished by society for the misdeed), into religious anxiety, into delusions of being noticed (fear of betraying the act to other people), or into fear of temptation (a justified mistrust of one’s own moral powers of resistance), and so on. In addition, the mnemic content of the act involving self-reproach may be represented in consciousness as well, or it may remain completely in the background - which makes diagnosis much more difficult. Many cases which, on a superficial examination, seem to be common (neurasthenic) hypochondria, belong to this group of obsessional affects; what is known as ‘periodic neurasthenia’ or ‘periodic melancholia’ seems in particular to resolve itself with unexpected frequency into obsessional affects and obsessional ideas - a discovery which is not a matter of indifference therapeutically.

Further Remarks On The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

392

Besides these compromise symptoms, which signify the return of the repressed and consequently a collapse of the defence that had been originally achieved, the obsessional neurosis constructs a set of further symptoms, whose origin is quite different. For the ego seeks to fend off the derivatives of the initially repressed memory, and in this defensive struggle it creates symptoms which might be classed together as ‘secondary defence’. These are all of them ‘protective measures’, which have already done good service in the fight against obsessional ideas and obsessional affects. If these aids in the defensive struggle genuinely succeed in once more repressing the symptoms of the return which have forced themselves on the ego, then the obsession is transferred to the protective measures themselves and creates a third form of ‘obsessional neurosis’- obsessional actions. These actions are never primary; they never contain anything but a defence - never an aggression. A psychical analysis of them shows that, in spite of their peculiarity, they can always be fully explained by being traced back to the obsessional memories which they are fighting against.¹

¹ To take a single example only. An eleven-year-old boy had in an obsessional way instituted the following ceremonial before going to bed. He did not go to sleep until he had told his mother in the minutest detail all the experiences he had had during the day; there must be no bits of paper or other rubbish on the carpet in his bedroom in the evening; his bed had to be pushed right up against the wall, three chairs had to be placed in front of it, and the pillows had to lie in a particular way. In order to go to sleep he was obliged first to kick both his legs out a certain number of times and then lie on his side. This was explained in the following manner. Years before, a servant-girl who put the nice looking boy to bed had taken the opportunity of lying down on him and abusing him sexually. When, later on, this memory was aroused in him by a recent experience, it manifested itself in his consciousness in a compulsion to perform the ceremonial I have described above. The meaning of the ceremonial was easy to guess and was established point by point by psycho-analysis. The chairs were placed in front of the bed and the bed pushed against the wall in order that nobody else should be able to get at the bed; the pillows were arranged in a particular way so that they should be differently arranged from how they were on that evening; the movements with his legs were to kick away the person who was lying on him; sleeping on his side was because in the scene he had been lying on his back; his circumstantial confession to his mother was because, in obedience to a prohibition by his seductress, he had been silent to his mother about this and other sexual experiences; and, finally, the reason for his keeping his bedroom floor clean was that neglect to do so had been the chief reproach that he had so far had to hear from his mother.

Further Remarks On The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

393

Secondary defence against the obsessional ideas may be effected by a forcible diversion on to other thoughts with a content as contrary as possible. This is why obsessional brooding, if it succeeds, regularly deals with abstract and suprasensual things; because the ideas that have been repressed are always concerned with sensuality. Or else the patient tries to make himself master of each of his obsessional ideas singly by logical work and by having recourse to his conscious memories. This leads to obsessional thinking, to a compulsion to test things and to doubting mania. The advantage which perception has over memory in such tests at first causes the patient, and later compels him, to collect and store up all the objects with which he has come into contact. Secondary defence against obsessional affects leads to a still wider set of protective measures which are capable of being transformed into obsessional acts. These may be grouped according to their purpose: penitential measures (burdensome ceremonials, the observation of numbers), precautionary measures (all sorts of phobias, superstition, pedantry, increase of the primary symptom of conscientiousness); measures to do with fear of betrayal (collecting scraps of paper, seclusiveness), or to ensure numbing (dipsomania). Among these obsessional acts and obsessional impulses, phobias, since they circumscribe the patient’s existence, play the greatest part.

There are cases in which one can observe how the obsession is transferred from the idea or from the affect on to the protective measure; others in which the obsession oscillates periodically between the symptom of the return of the repressed and the symptom of the secondary defence; and yet other cases in which no obsessional idea is constructed at all, but, instead, the repressed memory is at once represented by what is apparently a primary measure of defence. Here we reach at one bound the stage which elsewhere only completes the course run by the obsessional neurosis after the defensive struggle has taken place. Severe cases of this disorder end in the ceremonial actions becoming fixated, or in a general state of doubting mania, or in a life of eccentricity conditioned by phobias.

Further Remarks On The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

394

The fact that the obsessional ideas and everything derived from them meet with no belief is no doubt because at their first repression the defensive symptom of conscientiousness has been formed and that that symptom, too, acquires an obsessional force. The subject’s certainty of having lived a moral life throughout the whole period of his successful defence makes it impossible for him to believe the self-reproach which his obsessional idea involves. Only transitorily, too, on the appearance of a new obsessional idea and occasionally in melancholic states of exhaustion of the ego, do the pathological symptoms of the return of the repressed compel belief. The ‘obsessional’ character of the psychical formations which I have described here has quite generally nothing to do with attaching belief to them. Nor is it to be confused with the factor which is described as the ‘strength’ or ‘intensity’ of an idea. Its essence is rather indissolubility by psychical activity that is capable of being conscious; and this attribute undergoes no change, whether the idea to which the obsession attaches is stronger or weaker, or less or more intensely ‘illuminated’, or ‘cathected with energy’ and so on.

The cause of this invulnerability of the obsessional idea and its derivatives is, however, nothing more than its connection with the repressed memory from early childhood. For if we can succeed in making that connection conscious - and psychotherapeutic methods already appear able to do so - the obsession, too, is resolved.

Further Remarks On The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

395

III

ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF CHRONIC PARANOIA ¹

For a considerable time I have harboured a suspicion that paranoia, too - or classes of cases which fall under the heading of paranoia - is a psychosis of defence; that is to say, that, like hysteria and obsessions, it proceeds from the repression of distressing memories and that its symptoms are determined in their form by the content of what has been repressed. Paranoia must, however, have a special method or mechanism of repression which is peculiar to it, in the same way as hysteria effects repression by the method of conversion into somatic innervation, and obsessional neurosis by the method of substitution (viz. by displacement along the lines of certain categories of associations). I had observed several cases which favoured this interpretation, but had found none which proved it; until, a few months ago, I had an opportunity, through the kindness of Dr. Josef Breuer, of undertaking the psycho-analysis for therapeutic purposes of an intelligent woman of thirty-two, in whose case a diagnosis of chronic paranoia could not be questioned. I am reporting in these pages, without waiting further, some of the information I have been able to obtain from this piece of work, because I have no prospect of studying paranoia except in very isolated instances, and because I think it possible that my remarks may encourage a psychiatrist better placed than I am in this matter to give its rightful place to the factor of ‘defence’ in the discussion as to the nature and psychical mechanism of paranoia which is being carried on so actively just now. I have, of course, on the strength of the following single observation, no intention of saying more than: ‘This case is a psychosis of defence and there are most probably others in the class of "paranoia" which are equally so.’

¹ (Footnote added 1924:) More correctly, no doubt, dementia paranoides.

Further Remarks On The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

396

Frau P., thirty-two years of age, has been married for three years and is the mother of a child of two. Her parents were not neurotic; but her brother and sister are to my knowledge, like her, neurotic. It is doubtful whether she may not, at one time in her middle twenties, have become temporarily depressed and confused in her judgement. In recent years she was healthy and capable, until, six months after the birth of her child, she showed the first signs if her present illness. She became uncommunicative and distrustful, showed aversion to meeting her husband’s brothers and sisters and complained that the neighbours in the small town in which she lived were behaving differently towards her from how they did before and were rude and inconsiderate to her. By degrees these complaints increased in intensity, although not in definiteness. She thought people had something against her, though she had no idea what; but there was no doubt that everyone - relatives and friends - had ceased to respect her and were doing all they could to slight her. She had racked her brains, she said, to find the reason for this, but had no idea. A little time later she complained that she was being watched and that people were reading her thoughts and knew everything that was going on in her house. One afternoon she suddenly had the idea that she was being watched while she was undressing in the evening. From that time on she took the most precautionary measures when she undressed; she got into bed in the dark and did not begin to take off her things till she was under the bedclothes. Since she avoided all contact with other people, ate poorly and was very depressed, she was sent in the summer of 1895 to a hydropathic establishment. There, fresh symptoms appeared and those she already had increased in strength. Already in the spring of that year, when she was alone one day with her housemaid, she had suddenly had a sensation in her lower abdomen, and had thought to herself that the girl had at that moment had an improper idea. This sensation grew more frequent during the summer and became almost continual. She felt her genitals ‘as one feels a heavy hand’. Then she began to see images which horrified her - hallucinations of naked women, especially of the lower part of a woman’s abdomen with pubic hairs, and occasionally of male genitals as well. The image of the abdomen with hair and the physical sensation in her own abdomen usually occurred together. The images became very tormenting, for they happened regularly when she was in the company of a woman, and it made her think that she was seeing the woman in an indecent state of nakedness, but that simultaneously the woman was having the same picture of her (!). At the same time as these visual hallucinations - which vanished again for several months after their first appearance in the hydropathic establishment - she began to be pestered by voices which she did not recognize and which she could not account for. When she was in the street, they said: ‘That’s Frau P.- There she goes! Where’s she going to?’ Every one of her movements and actions was commented on; and at times she heard threats and reproaches. All these symptoms became worse when she was in company or in the street. For that reason she refused to go out; she said that eating disgusted her; and her state of health rapidly deteriorated.

Further Remarks On The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

397

I gathered all this from her when she came to Vienna for treatment with me in the winter of 1895. I have set it out at length because I want to convey the impression that what we are dealing with here really is a quite frequent form of chronic paranoia - a conclusion with which the details of her symptoms and behaviour which I have still to describe will be found to tally. At that time she concealed from me the delusions which served to interpret her hallucinations, or else the delusions had in fact not yet occurred to her. Her intelligence was undiminished; the only unusual thing I learnt was that she had repeatedly made appointments with her brother, who lived in the neighbourhood, in order to confide something important to him, but had never told him anything. She never spoke about her hallucinations, and towards the end she no longer said much either about the slights and persecutions of which she was subjected.

What I have to report about this patient concerns the aetiology of the case and the mechanism of the hallucinations. I discovered the aetiology when I applied Breuer’s method, exactly as in a case of hysteria - in the first instance for the investigation and removal of the hallucinations. In doing so, I started out from the assumption that in this case of paranoia, just as in the two other defence neuroses with which I was familiar, there must be unconscious thoughts and repressed memories which could be brought into consciousness in the same way as they were in those neuroses, by overcoming a certain resistance. The patient at once confirmed my expectation, for she behaved in analysis exactly like, for instance, a hysterical patient; with her attention on the pressure of my hand,¹ she produced thoughts which she could not remember having had, which at first she did not understand and which were contrary to her expectations. The presence of significant unconscious ideas was thus demonstrated in a case of paranoia as well, and I was able to hope that I might trace the compulsion of paranoia, too, to repression. The only peculiarity was that the thoughts which arose from the unconscious were for the most part heard inwardly or hallucinated by the patient, in the same way as her voices.

¹ Cf. my Studies on Hysteria.

Further Remarks On The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

398

Concerning the origin of the visual hallucinations, or at least of the vivid images, I learned the following. The image of the lower part of a woman’s abdomen almost always coincided with the physical sensation in her own abdomen; but the latter was much more constant and often occurred without the image. The first images of a woman’s abdomen had appeared in the hydropathic establishment a few hours after she had in fact seen a number of naked women at the baths; so they turned out to be simple reproductions of a real impression. It was therefore to be presumed that these impressions had been repeated only because great interest was attached to them. She told me that she had felt ashamed for these women; she herself had been ashamed to be seen naked for as long as she could remember. Since I was obliged to regard the shame as something obsessional, I concluded, in accordance with the mechanism of defence, that an experience must have been repressed here about which she had not felt ashamed. So I requested her to let the memories emerge which belonged to the theme of feeling ashamed. She promptly reproduced a series of scenes going back from her seventeenth to her eighth year, in which she had felt ashamed of being naked in her bath in front of her mother, her sister and the doctor; but the series ended in a scene at the age of six, in which she was undressing in the nursery before going to bed, without feeling any shame in front of her brother who was there. On my questioning her, it transpired that scenes like this had occurred often and that the brother and sister had for years been in the habit of showing themselves to one another naked before going to bed. I now understood the meaning of her sudden idea that she was being watched as she was going to bed. It was an unaltered piece of the old memory which involved self-reproach, and she was now making up for the shame which she had omitted to feel as a child.

Further Remarks On The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

399

My conjecture that we had to do with an affair between children, as is so often found in the aetiology of hysteria, was strengthened by the further progress of the analysis, which at the same time yielded solutions of individual details that frequently recurred in the clinical picture of the paranoia. The patient’s depression began at the time of a quarrel between her husband and her brother, as a result of which the latter no longer came to the house. She had always been very fond of this brother and she missed him very much at that time. Besides this she spoke of a certain moment in her illness at which for the first time ‘everything became clear to her’ - that is, at which she became convinced of the truth of her suspicion that she was despised by everyone and deliberately slighted. This certainty came to her during a visit from her sister-in law who, in the course of conversation, let fall the words: ‘If anything of that sort happens to me, I treat it in a light vein.’ At first Frau P. took this remark unsuspectingly; but later, after the visitor had left, it seemed to her that the words had contained a reproach, as if she was in the habit of taking serious things lightly; and from that moment on she was certain that she was the victim of general slander. When I questioned her as to what made her feel justified in applying the words to herself, she answered that it was the tone of voice in which her sister-in-law had spoken that had (although, it is true, only subsequently) convinced her of it. This is a detail which is characteristic of paranoia. I now obliged her to remember what her sister-in-law had been saying before the remark she complained of, and it emerged that the sister-in-law had related how in her parents’ home there had been all sorts of difficulties with her brothers, and had added the wise comment: ‘In every family all sorts of things happen that one would like to draw a veil over. But if anything of the kind happens to me, I take it lightly.’ Frau P. now had to admit that her depression was attached to the statements made by her sister-in-law before her last remark. Since she had repressed both the statements which might have awakened a memory of her relations with her brother, and had only retained the insignificant last one, it was with it that she was obliged to connect her feeling that her sister-in-law was making a reproach against her; and since its content offered no basis for this, she turned from the content to the tone in which the words had been spoken. This is probably a typical piece of evidence that the misinterpretations of paranoia are based on a repression.

Further Remarks On The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

400

My patient’s singular conduct, too, in making appointments with her brother, and then having nothing to tell him, was solved in a surprising fashion. Her explanation was that she had thought that if she could only look at him he would be bound to understand her sufferings, since he knew the cause of them. Now, as this brother was in fact the only person who could know about the aetiology of her illness, it was clear that she had been acting in accordance with a motive which, although she herself did not understand it consciously, could be seen to be perfectly justified as soon as it was supplied with a meaning derived from the unconscious.

I then succeeded in getting her to reproduce the various scenes in which her sexual relationship with her brother (which had certainly lasted at least from her sixth to her tenth year) had culminated. During this work of reproduction, the physical sensation in her abdomen ‘joined in the conversation’ as it were, as is regularly observed to happen in the analysis of hysterical mnemic residues. The image of the lower part of a woman’s naked abdomen (but now reduced to childish proportions and without hair on it) appeared with the sensation or stayed away, according as the scene in question had occurred in full light or in the dark. Her disgust at eating, too, found an explanation in a repulsive detail of these proceedings. After we had gone through this series of scenes, the hallucinatory sensations and images had disappeared, and (up to the present, at any rate) they have not returned.¹

¹ Later on, when an exacerbation of her illness undid the successful results of the treatment - which were in any case meagre - the patient no longer saw the offensive images of other people’s genitals but had the idea that other people saw her genitals whenever they were behind her.

(Added 1922) The fragmentary account of this analysis in the text above was written while the patient was still undergoing treatment. Very shortly after, her condition became so much more serious that the treatment had to be broken off. She was transferred to an institution and there went through a period of severe hallucinations which had all the signs of dementia praecox. Contrary to expectation, however, she recovered and returned home, had another child which was quite healthy, and was able for a long period (12 to 15 years) to carry out all her duties in a satisfactory manner. The only sign of her earlier psychosis was said to be that she avoided the company of all relatives, whether of her own family or of her husband’s. At the end of this period, affected by very adverse changes in her circumstances, she again became ill. Her husband had become unable to work and the relatives she had avoided were obliged to support the family. She was again sent to an institution, and died there soon after, of a pneumonia which rapidly supervened.

Further Remarks On The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

401

I had found, therefore, that these hallucinations were nothing else than parts of the content of repressed childhood experiences, symptoms of the return of the repressed.

I now turned to the analysis of the voices. First and foremost what had to be explained was why such an indifferent content as ‘Here comes Frau P.’, ‘She’s looking for a house now’, and so on, could have been so distressing to her; next, how it was that precisely these innocent phrases had managed to be marked out by hallucinatory reinforcement. From the first it was clear that the ‘voices’ could not be memories that were being produced in a hallucinatory way, like the images and sensations, but were rather thoughts that were being ‘said aloud’.

The first time she heard the voices was in the following circumstances. She had been reading Otto Ludwig’s fine story, Die Heiterethei, with eager interest, and she noticed that while she was reading, thoughts were emerging which claimed her attention. Immediately afterwards, she went for a walk along a country road, and, as she was passing a small peasant’s house, the voices suddenly said to her ‘That’s what the Heiterethei’s cottage looked like! There’s the spring and there are the bushes! How happy she was in spite of all her poverty!’ The voices then repeated to her whole paragraphs from what she had just been reading. But it remained unintelligible why the Heiterethei’s cottage and bushes and spring, and precisely the most trivial and irrelevant passages of the story, should be forced on her attention with pathological strength. However, the solution of the puzzle was not difficult. Her analysis showed that while she was reading, she had had other thoughts as well and that she had been excited by quite different passages in the book. Against this material - analogies between the couple in the story and herself and her husband, memories of intimacies in her married life, and of family secrets - against all this a repressing resistance had arisen because it was connected, by easily demonstrable trains of thought, with her aversion to sexuality and thus ultimately went back to the awakening of her old childhood experience. In consequence of this censorship exercised by the repression, the innocuous and idyllic passages, which were connected with the proscribed ones by contrast and also by propinquity, acquired the additional strength in their relation to consciousness which made it possible for them to be spoken aloud. The first of the repressed ideas, for instance, related to the slander to which the heroine, who lived alone, was exposed from her neighbours. My patient easily discovered the analogy with her own self. She, too, lived in a small place, met no one, and thought she was despised by her neighbours. This distrust of her neighbours had a real foundation. She had been obliged at first to be content with a small apartment, and the bedroom wall against which the young couple’s double bed stood adjoined a room belonging to their neighbours. With the beginning of her marriage - obviously through an unconscious awakening of her childhood affair, in which she and her brother had played at husband and wife - she had developed a great aversion to sexuality. She was constantly worried in case her neighbours might hear words and noises through the party wall, and this shame turned into suspiciousness towards the neighbours.

Further Remarks On The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

402

Thus the voices owed their origin to the repression of thoughts which, in the last analysis, were in fact self-reproaches about experiences that were analogous to her childhood trauma. The voices were accordingly symptoms of the return of the repressed. But they were at the same time consequences of a compromise between the resistance of the ego and the power of the returning repressed - a compromise which in this instance had brought about a distortion that went beyond recognition. In other instances in which I had occasion to analyse Frau P.’s voices, the distortion was less great. Nevertheless, the words she heard always had a quality of diplomatic indefiniteness: the insulting allusion was generally deeply hidden; the connection between the separate sentences was disguised by a strange mode of expression, unusual forms of speech and so on - characteristics which are common to the auditory hallucinations of paranoics in general and in which I see the traces of distortion through compromise. For instance, the remark, ’there goes Frau P.; she’s looking for a house in the street’, meant a threat that she would never recover; for I had promised her that after her treatment she would be able to go back to the small town in which her husband worked.(She had provisionally taken rooms in Vienna for a few months.)

In isolated instances Frau P. also received more definite threats - for example, in regard to her husband’s relatives; yet there was still a contrast between the reserved manner in which they were expressed and the torment which the voices caused her. In view of what is known of paranoia apart from this, I am inclined to suppose that there is a gradual impairment of the resistances which weaken the self-reproaches; so that finally the defence fails altogether and the original self-reproach, the actual term of abuse, from which the subject was trying to spare himself, returns in its unaltered form. I do not know, however, whether this course of events is a constant one, or whether the censorship of the words involving the self-reproach may be absent from the beginning or may persist to the end.

Further Remarks On The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

403

It only remains for me now to employ what has been learned from this case of paranoia for making a comparison between paranoia and obsessional neurosis. In each of them, repression has been shown to be the nucleus of the psychical mechanism, and in each what has been repressed is a sexual experience in childhood. In this case of paranoia, too, every obsession sprang from repression; the symptoms of paranoia allow of a classification similar to the one which has proved justified for obsessional neurosis. Part of the symptoms, once again, arise from primary defence - namely, all the delusional ideas which are characterized by distrust and suspicion and which are concerned with ideas of being persecuted by others. In obsessional neurosis the initial self-reproach has been repressed by the formation of the primary symptom of defence: self-distrust. With this, the self-reproach is acknowledged as justified; and, to weigh against this, the conscientiousness which the subject has acquired during his healthy interval now protects him from giving credence to the self-reproaches which return in the form of obsessional ideas. In paranoia, the self-reproach is repressed in a manner which may be described as projection. It is repressed by erecting the defensive symptom of distrust of other people. In this way the subject withdraws his acknowledgement of the self-reproach; and, as if to make up for this, he is deprived of a protection against the self-reproaches which return in his delusional ideas.

Other symptoms of my case of paranoia are to be described as symptoms of the return of the repressed, and they, too, like those of obsessional neurosis, bear the traces of the compromise which alone allows them to enter consciousness. Such are, for instance, my patient’s delusional idea of being watched while she was undressing, her visual hallucinations, her hallucinations of sensation and her hearing of voices. In the delusional idea which I have just mentioned there is a mnemic content which is almost unaltered and has only been made indefinite through omission. The return of the repressed in visual images approaches the character of hysteria rather than of obsessional neurosis; but hysteria is in the habit of repeating its mnemic symbols without modification, whereas mnemic hallucinations in paranoia undergo a distortion similar to that in obsessional neurosis: an analogous modern image takes the place of the repressed one. (E. g., the abdomen of an adult woman appears instead of a child’s, and an abdomen on which the hairs are especially distinct, because they were absent in the original impression.) A thing which is quite peculiar to paranoia and on which no further light can be shed by this comparison, is that the repressed self-reproaches return in the form of thoughts spoken aloud. In the course of this process, they are obliged to submit to twofold distortion: they are subjected to a censorship, which leads to their being replaced by other, associated, thoughts or to their being concealed by an indefinite mode of expression, and they are referred to recent experiences which are no more than analogous to the old ones.

Further Remarks On The Neuro-Psychoses Of Defence

404

The third group of symptoms that are found in obsessional neurosis, the symptoms of secondary defence, cannot be present as such in paranoia, because no defence can avail against the returning symptoms to which, as we know, belief is attached. In place of this, we find in paranoia another source for the formation of symptoms. The delusional ideas which have arrived in consciousness by means of a compromise (the symptoms of the return) make demands on the thought-activity of the ego until they can be accepted without contradiction. Since they are not themselves open to influence, the ego must adapt itself to them; and thus what corresponds here to the symptoms of secondary defence in obsessional neurosis is a combinatory delusional formation - interpretative delusions which end in an alteration of the ego. In this respect, the case under discussion was not complete; at that time my patient did not as yet exhibit any signs of the attempts at interpretation which appeared later. But I have no doubt that if we apply psycho-analysis to this stage of paranoia as well, we shall be able to arrive at a further important result. It should then turn out that the so-called weakness of memory of paranoics is also a tendentious one - that is to say, that it is based on repression and serves the ends of repression. A subsequent repression and replacement takes place of memories which are not in the least pathogenic, but which are in contradiction to the alteration of the ego which the symptoms of the return of the repressed so insistently demand.

405

THE AETIOLOGY OF HYSTERIA

(1896)

406

Intentionally left blank

407

THE AETIOLOGY OF HYSTERIA

GENTLEMEN, - When we set out to form an opinion about the causation of a pathological state such as hysteria, we begin by adopting the method of anamnestic investigation: we question the patient or those about him in order to find out to what harmful influences they themselves attribute his having fallen ill and developed these neurotic symptoms. What we discover in this way is, of course, falsified by all the factors which commonly hide the knowledge of his own state from a patient - by his lack of scientific understanding of aetiological influences, by the fallacy of post hoc, propter hoc, by his reluctance to think about or mention certain noxae and traumas. Thus in making an anamnestic investigation of this sort, we keep to the principle of not adopting the patients’ belief without a thorough critical examination, of not allowing them to lay down our scientific opinion for us on the aetiology of the neurosis. Although we do, on the one hand, acknowledge the truth of certain constantly repeated assertions, such as that the hysterical state is a long-persisting after-effect of an emotion experienced in the past, we have, on the other hand, introduced into the aetiology of hysteria a factor which the patient himself never brings forward and whose validity he only reluctantly admits - namely, the hereditary disposition derived from his progenitors. As you know, in the view of the influential school of Charcot heredity alone deserves to be recognized as the true cause of hysteria, while all other noxae of the most various nature and intensity only play the part of incidental causes, of ‘agents provocateurs’.

The Aetiology Of Hysteria

408

You will readily admit that it would be a good thing to have a second method of arriving at the aetiology of hysteria, one in which we should feel less dependent on the assertions of the patients themselves. A dermatologist, for instance, is able to recognize a sore as luetic from the character of its margins, or the crust on it and of its shape, without being misled by the protestations of his patient, who denies any source of infection for it; and a forensic physician can arrive at the cause of an injury, even if he has to do without any information from the injured person. In hysteria, too, there exists a similar possibility of penetrating from the symptoms to a knowledge of their causes. But in order to explain the relationship between the method which we have to employ for this purpose and the older method of anamnestic enquiry, I should like to bring before you an analogy taken from an advance that has in fact been made in another field of work.

Imagine that an explorer arrives in a little-known region where his interest is aroused by an expanse of ruins, with remains of walls, fragments of columns, and tablets with half effaced and unreadable inscriptions. He may content himself with inspecting what lies exposed to view, with questioning the inhabitants - perhaps semi-barbaric people - who live in the vicinity, about what tradition tells them of the history and meaning of these archaeological remains, and with noting down what they tell him - and he may then proceed on his journey. But he may act differently. He may have brought picks, shovels and spades with him, and he may set the inhabitants to work with these implements. Together with them he may start upon the ruins, clear away the rubbish, and, beginning from the visible remains, uncover what is buried. If his work is crowned with success, the discoveries are self-explanatory; the ruined walls are part of the ramparts of a palace or a treasure house; the fragments of columns can be filled out into a temple; the numerous inscriptions, which, by good luck, may be bilingual, reveal an alphabet and a language, and, when they have been deciphered and translated, yield undreamed-of information about the events of the remote past, to commemorate which the monuments were built. Saxa loquuntur!

If we try, in an approximately similar way, to induce the symptoms of a hysteria to make themselves heard as witnesses to the history of the origin of the illness, we must take our start from Josef Breuer’s momentous discovery: the symptoms of hysteria (apart from the stigmata) are determined by certain experiences of the patient’s which have operated in a traumatic fashion and which are being reproduced in his psychical life in the form of mnemic symbols. What we have to do is to apply Breuer’s method - or one which is essentially the same - so as to lead the patient’s attention back from his symptom to the scene in which and through which that symptom arose; and, having thus located the scene, we remove the symptom by bringing about, during the reproduction of the traumatic scene, a subsequent correction of the psychical course of events which took place at the time.

The Aetiology Of Hysteria

409

It is no part of my intention to-day to discuss the difficult technique of this therapeutic procedure or the psychological discoveries which have been obtained by its means. I have been obliged to start from this point only because the analyses conducted on Breuer’s lines seem at the same time to open up the path to the causes of hysteria. If we subject a fairly large number of symptoms in a great number of subjects to such an analysis, we shall, of course, arrive at a knowledge of a correspondingly large number of traumatically operative scenes. It was in these experiences that the efficient causes of hysteria came into action. Hence we may hope to discover from the study of these traumatic scenes what the influences are which produce hysterical symptoms and in what way they do so.

This expectation proves true; and it cannot fail to, since Breuer’s theses, when put to the test in a considerable number of cases, have turned out to be correct. But the path from the symptoms of hysteria to its aetiology is far more laborious and leads through other connections than one would have imagined.

For let us be clear on this point. Tracing a hysterical symptom back to a traumatic scene assists our understanding only if the scene satisfies two conditions; if it possesses the relevant suitability to serve as a determinant and if it recognizably possesses the necessary traumatic force. Instead of a verbal explanation, here is an example. Let us suppose that the symptom under consideration is hysterical vomiting;  in that case we shall feel that we have been able to understand its causation (except for a certain residue) if the analysis traces the symptom back to an experience which justifiably produced a high amount of disgust - for instance, the sight of a decomposing dead body. But if, instead of this, the analysis shows us that the vomiting arose from a great fright, e.g. from a railway accident, we shall feel dissatisfied and will have to ask ourselves how it is that the fright has led to the particular symptom of vomiting. This derivation lacks suitability as a determinant. We shall have another instance of an insufficient explanation if the vomiting is supposed to have arisen from, let us say, eating a fruit which had partly gone bad. Here, it is true, the vomiting is determined by disgust, but we cannot understand how, in this instance, the disgust could have become so powerful as to be perpetuated in a hysterical symptom; the experience lacks traumatic force.

The Aetiology Of Hysteria

410

Let us now consider how far the traumatic scenes of hysteria which are uncovered by analysis fulfil, in a fairly large number of symptoms and cases, the two requirements which I have named. Here we meet with our first great disappointment. It is true, indeed, that the traumatic scene in which the symptom originated does in fact occasionally possess both the qualities - suitability as a determinant and traumatic force - which we require for an understanding of the symptom. But far more frequently, incomparably more frequently, we find one of the three other possibilities realized, which are so unfavourable to an understanding. Either the scene to which we are led by analysis and in which the symptom first appeared seems to us unsuited for determining the symptom, in that its content bears no relation to the nature of the symptom; or the allegedly traumatic experience, though it does have a relation to the symptom, proves to be an impression which is normally innocuous and incapable as a rule of producing any effect; or, lastly, the ‘traumatic scene’ leaves us in the lurch in both respects, appearing at once innocuous and unrelated to the character of the hysterical symptom.

(Here I may remark in passing that Breuer’s view of the origin of hysterical symptoms is not shaken by the discovery of traumatic scenes which correspond to experiences that are insignificant in themselves. For Breuer assumed - following Charcot - that even an innocuous experience can be heightened into a trauma and can develop determining force if it happens to the subject when he is in a special psychical condition - in what is described as a hypnoid state. I find, however, that there are often no grounds whatever for presupposing the presence of such hypnoid states. What remains decisive is that the theory of hypnoid states contributes nothing to the solution of the other difficulties, namely that the traumatic scenes so often lack suitability as determinants.)

Moreover, Gentlemen, this first disappointment we meet with in following Breuer’s method is immediately succeeded by another, and one that must be especially painful to us as physicians. When our procedure leads, as in the cases described above, to findings which are insufficient as an explanation both in respect to their suitability as determinants and to their traumatic effectiveness, we also fail to secure any therapeutic gain; the patient retains his symptoms unaltered, in spite of the initial result yielded by the analysis. You can understand how great the temptation is at this point to proceed no further with what is in any case a laborious piece of work.

The Aetiology Of Hysteria

411

But perhaps all we need is a new idea in order to help us out of our dilemma and lead to valuable results. The idea is this. As we know from Breuer, hysterical symptoms can be resolved if, starting from them, we are able to find the path back to the memory of a traumatic experience. If the memory which we have uncovered does not answer our expectations, it may be that we ought to pursue the same path a little further; perhaps behind the first traumatic scene there may be concealed the memory of a second, which satisfies our requirements better and whose reproduction has a greater therapeutic effect; so that the scene that was first discovered only has the significance of a connecting link in the chain of associations. And perhaps this situation may repeat itself; inoperative scenes may be interpolated more than once, as necessary transitions in the process of reproduction, until we finally make our way from the hysterical symptom to the scene which is really operative traumatically and which is satisfactory in every respect, both therapeutically and analytically. Well, Gentlemen, this supposition is correct. If the first-discovered scene is unsatisfactory, we tell our patient that this experience explains nothing, but that behind it there must be hidden a more significant, earlier, experience; and we direct his attention by the same technique to the associative thread which connects the two memories - the one that has been discovered and the one that has still to be discovered.¹ A continuation of the analysis then leads in every instance to the reproduction of new scenes of the character we expect. For example, let us take once again the case of hysterical vomiting which I selected before, and in which the analysis first led back to a fright from a railway accident - a scene which lacked suitability as a determinant. Further analysis showed that this accident had aroused in the patient the memory of another, earlier accident, which, it is true, he had not himself experienced but which had been the occasion of his having a ghastly and revolting sight of a dead body. It is as though the combined operation of the two scenes made the fulfilment of our postulates possible, the one experience supplying, through fright, the traumatic force and the other, from its content, the determining effect. The other case, in which the vomiting was traced back to eating an apple which had partly gone bad, was amplified by the analysis somewhat in the following way. The bad apple reminded the patient of an earlier experience: while he was picking up windfalls in an orchard he had accidentally come upon a dead animal in a revolting state.

I shall not return any further to these examples, for I have to confess that they are not derived from any case in my experience but are inventions of mine. Most probably, too, they are bad inventions. I even regard such solutions of hysterical symptoms as impossible. But I was obliged to make up fictitious examples for several reasons, one of which I can state at once. The real examples are all incomparably more complicated: to relate a single one of them in detail would occupy the whole period of this lecture. The chain of associations always has more than two links; and the traumatic scenes do not form a simple row, like a string of pearls, but ramify and are interconnected like genealogical trees, so that in any new experience two or more earlier ones come into operation as memories. In short, giving an account of the resolution of a single symptom would in fact amount to the task of relating an entire case history.

¹ I purposely leave out of this discussion the question of what the category is to which the association between the two memories belong, (whether it is an association by simultaneity, or by causal connections or by similarity of content), and of what psychological character is to be attributed to the various ‘memories’ (conscious or unconscious).

The Aetiology Of Hysteria

412

But we must not fail to lay special emphasis on one conclusion to which analytic work along these chains of memory has unexpectedly led. We have learned that no hysterical experience can arise from a real experience alone, but that in every case the memory of earlier experiences awakened in association to it plays a part in causing the symptom. If - as I believe - this proposition holds good without exception, it furthermore shows us the basis on which a psychological theory of hysteria must be built.

You might suppose that the rare instances in which analysis is able to trace the symptom back direct to a traumatic scene that is thoroughly suitable as a determinant and possesses traumatic force, and is able, by thus tracing it back, at the same time to remove it (in the way described in Breuer’s case history of Anna O.) - you might suppose that such instances must, after all, constitute powerful objections to the general validity of the proposition I have just put forward. It certainly looks so. But I must assure you that I have the best grounds for assuming that even in such instances there exists a chain of operative memories which stretches far back behind the first traumatic scene, even though the reproduction of the latter alone may have the result of removing the symptom.

It seems to me really astonishing that hysterical symptoms can only arise with the co-operation of memories, especially when we reflect that, according to the unanimous accounts of the patients themselves, these memories did not come into their consciousness at the moment when the symptom first made its appearance. Here is much food for thought; but these problems must not distract us at this point from our discussion of the aetiology of hysteria. We must rather ask ourselves: where shall we get to if we follow the chains of associated memories which the analysis has uncovered? How far do they extend!  Do they come anywhere to a natural end? Do they perhaps lead to experiences which are in some way alike, either in their content or the time of life at which they occur, so that we may discern in these universally similar factors the aetiology of hysteria of which we are in search?

The Aetiology Of Hysteria

413

The knowledge I have so far gained already enables me to answer these questions. If we take a case which presents several symptoms, we arrive by means of the analysis, starting from each symptom, at a series of experiences the memories of which are linked together in association. To begin with, the chains of memories lead backwards separately from one another; but, as I have said, they ramify. From a single scene two or more memories are reached at the same time, and from these again side-chains proceed whose individual links may once more be associatively connected with links belonging to the main chain. Indeed, a comparison with the genealogical tree of a family whose members have also intermarried, is not at all a bad one. Other complications in the linkage of the chains arise from the circumstance that a single scene may be called up several times in the same chain, so that it has multiple relationships to a later scene, and exhibits both a direct connection with it and a connection established through intermediate links. In short, the concatenation is far from being a simple one; and the fact that the scenes are uncovered in a reversed chronological order (a fact which justifies our comparison of the work with the excavation of a stratified ruined site) certainly contributes nothing to a more rapid understanding of what has taken place.

If the analysis is carried further, new complications arise. The associative chains belonging to the different symptoms begin to enter into relation with one another; the genealogical trees become intertwined. Thus a particular symptom in, for instance, the chain of memories relating to the symptom of vomiting, calls up not only the earlier links in its own chain but also a memory from another chain, relating to another symptom, such as a headache. This experience accordingly belongs to both series, and in this way it constitutes a nodal point. Several such nodal points are to be found in every analysis. Their correlate in the clinical picture may perhaps be that from a certain time onwards both symptoms have appeared together, symbiotically, without in fact having any internal dependence on each other. Going still further back, we come upon nodal points of a different kind. Here the separate associative chains converge. We find experiences from which two or more symptoms have proceeded; one chain has attached itself to one detail of the scene, the second chain to another detail.

The Aetiology Of Hysteria

414

But the most important finding that is arrived at if an analysis is thus consistently pursued is this. Whatever case and whatever symptom we take as our point of departure, in the end we infallibly come to the field of sexual experience. So here for the first time we seem to have discovered an aetiological precondition.

From previous experience I can foresee that it is precisely against this assertion or against its universal validity that your contradiction, Gentlemen, will be directed. Perhaps it would be better to say, your inclination to contradict; for none of you, no doubt, have as yet any investigations at your disposal which, based upon the same procedure, might have yielded a different result. As regards the controversial matter itself, I will only remark that the singling out of the sexual factor in the aetiology of hysteria springs at least from no preconceived opinion of my part. The two investigators as whose pupil I began my studies of hysteria, Charcot and Breuer, were far from having any such presupposition; in fact they had a personal disinclination to it which I originally shared. Only the most laborious and detailed investigations have converted me, and that slowly enough, to the view I hold to-day. If you submit my assertion that the aetiology of hysteria lies in sexual life to the strictest examination, you will find that it is supported by the fact that in some eighteen cases of hysteria I have been able to discover this connection in every single symptom, and, where the circumstances allowed, to confirm it by therapeutic success. No doubt you may raise the objection that the nineteenth or the twentieth analysis will perhaps show that hysterical symptoms are derived from other sources as well, and thus reduce the universal validity of the sexual aetiology to one of eighty percent. By all means let us wait and see; but, since these eighteen cases are at the same time all the cases on which I have been able to carry out the work of analysis and since they were not picked out by anyone for my convenience, you will find it understandable that I do not share such an expectation but am prepared to let my belief run ahead of the evidential force of the observations I have so far made. Besides, I am influenced by another motive as well, which for the moment is of merely subjective value. In the sole attempt to explain the physiological and psychical mechanism of hysteria which I have been able to make in order to correlate my observations, I have come to regard the participation of sexual motive forces as an indispensable premiss.

The Aetiology Of Hysteria

415

Eventually, then, after the chains of memories have converged, we come to the field of sexuality and to a small number of experiences which occur for the most part at the same period of life - namely, at puberty. It is in these experiences, it seems, that we are to look for the aetiology of hysteria, and through them that we are to learn to understand the origin of hysterical symptoms. But here we meet with a fresh disappointment and a very serious one. It is true that these experiences, which have been discovered with so much trouble and extracted out of all the mnemic material, and which seemed to be the ultimate traumatic experiences, have in common the two characteristics of being sexual and of occurring at puberty; but in every other respect they are very different from each other both in kind and in importance. In some cases, no doubt, we are concerned with experiences which must be regarded as severe traumas - an attempted rape, perhaps, which reveals to the immature girl at a blow all the brutality of sexual desire, or the involuntary witnessing of sexual acts between parents, which at one and the same time uncovers unsuspected ugliness and wounds childish and moral sensibilities alike, and so on. But in other cases the experiences are astonishingly trivial. In one of my women patients it turned out that her neurosis was based on the experience of a boy of her acquaintance stroking her hand tenderly and, at another time, pressing his knee against her dress as they sat side by side at table, while his expression let her see that he was doing something forbidden. For another young lady, simply hearing a riddle which suggested an obscene answer had been enough to provoke the first anxiety attack and with it to start the illness. Such findings are clearly not favourable to an understanding of the causation of hysterical symptoms. If serious and trifling events alike, and if not only experiences affecting the subject’s own body but visual impressions too and information received through the ears are to be recognized as the ultimate traumas of hysteria, then we may be tempted to hazard the explanation that hysterics are peculiarly constituted creatures - probably on account of some hereditary disposition or degenerative atrophy - in whom a shrinking from sexuality, which normally plays some part at puberty, is raised to a pathological pitch and is permanently retained; that they are, as it were, people who are psychically inadequate to meeting the demands of sexuality. This view, of course, leaves hysteria in men out of account. But even without blatant objections such as that, we should scarcely be tempted to be satisfied with this solution. We are only too distinctly conscious of an intellectual sense of something half-understood, unclear and insufficient.

The Aetiology Of Hysteria

416

Luckily for our explanation, some of these sexual experiences at puberty exhibit a further inadequacy, which is calculated to stimulate us into continuing our analytic work. For it sometimes happens that they, too, lack suitability as determinants although this is much more rarely so than with the traumatic scenes belonging to later life. Thus, for instance, let us take the two women patients whom I have just spoken of as cases in which the experiences at puberty were actually innocent ones. As a result of those experiences the patients had become subject to peculiar painful sensations in the genitals which had established themselves as the main symptoms of the neurosis. I was unable to find indications that they had been determined either by the scenes at puberty or by later scenes; but they were certainly not normal organic sensations nor signs of sexual excitement. It seemed an obvious thing, then, to say to ourselves that we must look for the determinants of these symptoms in yet other experiences, in experiences which went still further back - and that we must, for the second time, follow the saving notion which had earlier led us from the first traumatic scenes to the chains of memories behind them. In doing so, to be sure, we arrive at the period of earliest childhood, a period before the development of sexual life; and this would seem to involve the abandonment of a sexual aetiology. But have we not a right to assume that even the age of childhood is not wanting in slight sexual excitations, that later sexual development may perhaps be decisively influenced by childhood experiences?  Injuries sustained by an organ which is as yet immature, or by a function which is in process of developing, often cause more severe and lasting effects than they could do in maturer years. Perhaps the abnormal reaction to sexual impressions which surprises us in hysterical subjects at the age of puberty is quite generally based on sexual experiences of this sort in childhood, in which case those experiences must be of a similar nature to one another, and must be of an important kind. If this is so, the prospect is opened up that what has hitherto had to be laid at the door of a still unexplained hereditary predisposition may be accounted for as having been acquired at an early age. And since infantile experiences with a sexual content could after all only exert a psychical effect through their memory-traces, would not this view be a welcome amplification of the finding of psycho-analysis which tells us that hysterical symptoms can only arise with the co-operation of memories?

The Aetiology Of Hysteria

417

II

You will no doubt have guessed, Gentlemen, that I should not have carried this last line of thought so far if I had not wanted to prepare you for the idea that it is this line alone which, after so many delays, will lead us to our goal. For now we are really at the end of our wearisome and laborious analytic work, and here we find the fulfilment of all the claims and expectations upon which we have so far insisted. If we have the perseverance to press on with the analysis into early childhood, as far back as a human memory is capable of reaching, we invariably bring the patient to reproduce experiences which, on account both of their peculiar features and of their relations to the symptoms of his later illness, must be regarded as the aetiology of his neurosis for which we have been looking. These infantile experiences are once more sexual in content, but they are of a far more uniform kind than the scenes at puberty that had been discovered earlier. It is now no longer a question of sexual topics having been aroused by some sense impression or other, but of sexual experiences affecting the subject’s own body - of sexual intercourse (in the wider sense). You will admit that the importance of such scenes needs no further proof; to this may now be added that, in every instance, you will be able to discover in the details of the scenes the determining factors which you may have found lacking in the other scenes - the scenes which occurred later and were reproduced earlier.

I therefore put forward the thesis that at the bottom of every case of hysteria there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience, occurrences which belong to the earliest years of childhood but which can be reproduced through the work of psycho-analysis in spite of the intervening decades. I believe that this is an important finding, the discovery of a caput Nili in neuropathology; but I hardly know what to take as a starting-point for a continuation of my discussion of this subject. Shall I put before you the actual material I have obtained from my analyses? Or shall I rather try first to meet the mass of objections and doubts which, as I am surely correct in supposing, have now taken possession of your attention? I shall choose the latter course; perhaps we shall then be able to go over the facts more calmly.

(a) No one who is altogether opposed to a psychological view of hysteria, who is unwilling to give up the hope that some day it will be possible to trace back its symptoms to ‘finer anatomical changes’  and who has rejected the view that the material foundations of hysterical changes are bound to be of the same kind as those of our normal mental processes - no one who adopts this attitude will, of course, put any faith in the results of our analyses; however, the difference in principle between his premisses and ours absolves us from the obligation of convincing him on individual points.

The Aetiology Of Hysteria

418

But other people, too, although they may be less averse to psychological theories of hysteria, will be tempted, when considering our analytic findings, to ask what degree of certainty the application of psycho-analysis offers. Is it not very possible either that the physician forces such scenes upon his docile patients, alleging that they are memories, or else that the patients tell the physician things which they have deliberately invented or have imagined and that he accepts those things as true?  Well, my answer to this is that the general doubt about the reliability of the psycho-analytic method can be appraised and removed only when a complete presentation of its technique and results is available. Doubts about the genuineness of the infantile sexual scenes can, however, be deprived of their force here and now by more than one argument. In the first place, the behaviour of patients while they are reproducing these infantile experiences is in every respect incompatible with the assumption that the scenes are anything else than a reality which is being felt with distress and reproduced with the greatest reluctance. Before they come for analysis the patients know nothing about these scenes. They are indignant as a rule if we warn them that such scenes are going to emerge. Only the strongest compulsion of the treatment can induce them to embark on a reproduction of them. While they are recalling these infantile experiences to consciousness, they suffer under the most violent sensations, of which they are ashamed and which they try to conceal; and, even after they have gone through them once more in such a convincing manner, they still attempt to withhold belief from them, by emphasizing the fact that, unlike what happens in the case of other forgotten material, they have no feeling of remembering the scenes.¹

This latter piece of behaviour seems to provide conclusive proof. Why should patients assure me so emphatically of their unbelief, if what they want to discredit is something which - from whatever motive - they themselves have invented?

It is less easy to refute the idea that the doctor forces reminiscences of this sort on the patient, that he influences him by suggestion to imagine and reproduce them. Nevertheless it appears to me equally untenable. I have never yet succeeded in forcing on a patient a scene I was expecting to find, in such a way that he seemed to be living through it with all the appropriate feelings. Perhaps others may be more successful in this.

¹ (Footnote added 1924:) All this is true; but it must be remembered that at the time I wrote it I had not yet freed myself from my overvaluation of reality and my low valuation of phantasy.

The Aetiology Of Hysteria

419

There are, however, a whole number of other things that vouch for the reality of infantile sexual scenes. In the first place there is the uniformity which they exhibit in certain details, which is a necessary consequence if the preconditions of these experiences are always of the same kind, but which would otherwise lead us to believe that there were secret understandings between the various patients. In the second place, patients sometimes describe as harmless events whose significance they obviously do not understand, since they would be bound otherwise to be horrified by them. Or again, they mention details, without laying any stress on them, which only someone of experience in life can understand and appreciate as subtle traits of reality.

Events of this sort strengthen our impression that the patients must really have experienced what they reproduce under the compulsion of analysis as scenes from their childhood. But another and stronger proof of this is furnished by the relationship of the infantile scenes to the content of the whole of the rest of the case history. It is exactly like putting together a child’s picture-puzzle: after many attempts, we become absolutely certain in the end which piece belongs in the empty gap; for only that one piece fills out the picture and at the same time allows its irregular edges to be fitted into the edges of the other pieces in such a manner as to leave no free space and to entail no overlapping. In the same way, the contents of the infantile scenes turn out to be indispensable supplements to the associative and logical framework of the neurosis, whose insertion makes its course of development for the first time evident, or even, as we might often say, self-evident.

The Aetiology Of Hysteria

420

Without wishing to lay special stress on the point, I will add that in a number of cases therapeutic evidence of the genuineness of the infantile scenes can also be brought forward. There are cases in which a complete or partial cure can be obtained without our having to go as deep as the infantile experiences. And there are others in which no success at all is obtained until the analysis has come to its natural end with the uncovering of the earliest traumas. In the former cases we are not, I believe, secure against relapses; and my expectation is that a complete psycho-analysis implies a radical cure of the hysteria. We must not, however, be led into forestalling the lessons of observation.

There would be one other proof, and a really unassailable one, of the genuineness of childhood sexual experiences namely, if the statements of someone who is being analysed were to be confirmed by someone else, whether under treatment or not. These two people will have had to have taken part in the same experience in their childhood - perhaps to have stood in some sexual relationship to each other. Such relations between children are, as you will hear in a moment, by no means rare. Moreover, it quite often happens that both of those concerned subsequently fall ill of neuroses; yet I regard it as a fortunate accident that, out of eighteen cases, I have been able to obtain an objective confirmation of this sort in two. In one instance, it was the brother (who had remained well) who of his own accord confirmed - not, it is true, his earliest sexual experiences with his sister (who was the patient) - but at least scenes of that kind from later childhood, and the fact that there had been sexual relations dating further back. In the other instance, it happened that two women whom I was treating had as children had sexual relations with the same man, in the course of which certain scenes had taken place à trois. A particular symptom, which was derived from these childhood events, had developed in both women, as evidence of what they had experienced in common.

The Aetiology Of Hysteria

421

(b)  Sexual experiences in childhood consisting in stimulation of the genitals, coitus-like acts, and so on, must therefore be recognized, in the last analysis, as being the traumas which lead to a hysterical reaction to events at puberty and to the development of hysterical symptoms. This statement is certain to be met from different directions by two mutually contradictory objections. Some people will say that sexual abuses of this kind, whether practised upon children or between them, happen too seldom for it to be possible to regard them as the determinant of such a common neurosis as hysteria. Others will perhaps argue that, on the contrary, such experiences are very frequent-much too frequent for us to be able to attribute an aetiological significance to the fact of their occurrence. They will further maintain that it is easy, by making a few enquiries, to find people who remember scenes of sexual seduction and sexual abuse in their childhood years, and yet who have never been hysterical. Finally we shall be told, as a weighty argument, that in the lower strata of the population hysteria is certainly no more common than in the highest ones, whereas everything goes to show that the injunction for the sexual safeguarding of childhood is far more frequently transgressed in the case of the children of the proletariat.

Let us begin our defence with the easier part of the task. It seems to me certain that our children are far more often exposed to sexual assaults than the few precautions taken by parents in this connection would lead us to expect. When I first made enquiries about what was known on the subject, I learnt from colleagues that there are several publications by paediatricians which stigmatize the frequency of sexual practices by nurses and nursery maids, carried out even on infants in arms; and in the last few weeks I have come across a discussion of ‘Coitus in Childhood’ by Dr. Stekel (1895) in Vienna. I have not had time to collect other published evidence; but even if it were only scanty, it is to be expected that increased attention to the subject will very soon confirm the great frequency of sexual experiences and sexual activity in childhood.

The Aetiology Of Hysteria

422

Lastly, the findings of my analysis are in a position to speak for themselves. In all eighteen cases (cases of pure hysteria and of hysteria combined with obsessions, and comprising six men and twelve women) I have, as I have said, come to learn of sexual experiences of this kind in childhood. I can divide my cases into three groups, according to the origin of the sexual stimulation. In the first group it is a question of assaults - of single, or at any rate isolated, instances of abuse, mostly practised on female children, by adults who were strangers, and who, incidentally, knew how to avoid inflicting gross, mechanical injury. In these assaults there was no question of the child’s consent, and the first effect of the experience was preponderantly one of fright. The second group consists of cases in which some adult looking after the child - a nursery maid or governess or tutor, or, unhappily all too often, a close relative - has initiated the child into sexual intercourse and has maintained a regular love relationship with it - a love relationship, moreover, with its mental side developed - which has often lasted for years. The third group, finally, contains child-relationships proper - sexual relations between two children of different sexes, mostly a brother and sister, which are often prolonged beyond puberty and which have the most far-reaching consequences for the pair. In most of my cases I found that two or more of these aetiologies were in operation together; in a few instances the accumulation of sexual experiences coming from different quarters was truly amazing. You will easily understand this peculiar feature of my observations, however, when you consider that the patients I was treating were all cases of severe neurotic illness which threatened to make life impossible.

Where there had been a relation between two children I was sometimes able to prove that the boy-who, here too, played the part of the aggressor - had previously been seduced by an adult of the female sex, and that afterwards, under the pressure of his prematurely awakened libido and compelled by his memory, he tried to repeat with the little girl exactly the same practices that he had learned from the adult woman, without making any modification of his own in the character of the sexual activity.

The Aetiology Of Hysteria

423

In view of this, I am inclined to suppose that children cannot find their way to acts of sexual aggression unless they have been seduced previously. The foundation for a neurosis would accordingly always be laid in childhood by adults, the children themselves would transfer to one another the disposition to fall ill of hysteria later. I will ask you to consider a moment longer the special frequency with which sexual relations in childhood occur precisely between brothers and sisters and cousins, as a result of their opportunities for being together so often; supposing, then, ten or fifteen years later several members of the younger generation of the family are found to be ill, might not this appearance of a family neurosis naturally lead to the false supposition that a hereditary disposition is present where there is only a pseudo-heredity and where in fact what has taken place is a handing-on, an infection in childhood?

Now let us turn to the other objection, which is based precisely on an acknowledgement of the frequency of infantile sexual experiences and on the observed fact that many people who remember scenes of that kind have not become hysterics. Our first reply is that the excessive frequency of an aetiological factor cannot possibly be used as an objection to its aetiological significance. Is not the tubercle bacillus ubiquitous and is it not inhaled by far more people than are found to fall ill of tuberculosis? And is its aetiological significance impaired by the fact that other factors must obviously be at work too before the tuberculosis, which is its specific effect, can be evoked? In order to establish the bacillus as the specific aetiology it is enough to show that tuberculosis cannot possibly occur without its playing a part. The same doubtless applies to our problem. It does not matter if many people experience infantile sexual scenes without becoming hysterics, provided only that all the people who become hysterics have experienced scenes of that kind. The area of occurrence of an aetiological factor may be freely allowed to be wider than that of its effect, but it must not be narrower. Not everyone who touches or comes near a smallpox patient develops smallpox; nevertheless infection from a smallpox patient is almost the only known aetiology of the disease.

The Aetiology Of Hysteria

424

It is true that if infantile sexual activity were an almost universal occurrence the demonstration of its presence in every case would carry no weight. But, to begin with, to assert such a thing would certainly be a gross exaggeration; and secondly, the aetiological pretensions of the infantile scenes rest not only on the regularity of their appearance in the anamneses of hysterics, but, above all, on the evidence of there being associative and logical ties between those scenes and the hysterical symptoms - evidence which, if you were given the complete history of a case, would be as clear as daylight to you.

What can the other factors be which the ‘specific aetiology’ of hysteria still needs in order actually to produce the neurosis? That, Gentlemen, is a theme in itself, which I do not propose to enter upon. To-day I need only indicate the point of contact at which the two parts of the topic - the specific and the auxiliary aetiology - fit into one another. No doubt a considerable quantity of factors will have to be taken into account. There will be the subject’s inherited and personal constitution, the inherent importance of the infantile sexual experiences, and, above all, their number: a brief relationship with a strange boy, who afterwards becomes indifferent, will leave a less powerful effect on a girl than intimate sexual relations of several years’ standing with her own brother. In the aetiology of the neuroses quantitative preconditions are as important as qualitative ones: there are threshold-values which have to be crossed before the illness can become manifest. Moreover, I do not myself regard this aetiological series as complete; nor does it solve the riddle of why hysteria is not more common among the lower classes. (You will remember, by the way, what a surprisingly large incidence of hysteria was reported by Charcot among working-class men). I may also remind you that a few years ago I myself pointed out a factor, hitherto little considered, to which I attribute the leading role in provoking hysteria after puberty. I then put forward the view that the outbreak of hysteria may almost invariably be traced to a psychical conflict arising through an incompatible idea setting in action a defence on the part of the ego and calling up a demand for repression. What the circumstances are in which a defensive endeavour of this kind has the pathological effect of actually thrusting the memory which is distressing to the ego into the unconscious and of creating a hysterical symptom in its place I was not able to say at that time. But to-day I can repair the omission. The defence achieves its purpose of thrusting the incompatible idea out of consciousness if there are infantile sexual scenes present in the (hitherto normal) subject in the form of unconscious memories, and if the idea that is to be repressed can be brought into logical or associative connection with an infantile experience of that kind.

The Aetiology Of Hysteria

425

Since the ego’s efforts at defence depend upon the subject’s total moral and intellectual development, the fact that hysteria is so much rarer in the lower classes than its specific aetiology would warrant is no longer entirely incomprehensible.

Let us return once again, Gentlemen, to the last group of objections, the answering of which has led us such a long way. We have heard and have acknowledged that there are numerous people who have a very clear recollection of infantile sexual experiences and who nevertheless do not suffer from hysteria. This objection has no weight; but it provides an occasion for making a valuable comment. According to our understanding of the neurosis, people of this kind ought not to be hysterical at all, or at any rate, not hysterical as a result of the scenes which they consciously remember. With our patients, those memories are never conscious; but we cure them of their hysteria by transforming their unconscious memories of the infantile scenes into conscious ones. There was nothing that we could have done or needed to do about the fact that they have had such experiences. From this you will perceive that the matter is not merely one of the existence of the sexual experiences, but that a psychological precondition enters in as well. The scenes must he present as unconscious memories; only so long as, and in so far as, they are unconscious are they able to create and maintain hysterical symptoms. But what decides whether those experiences produce conscious or unconscious memories - whether that is conditioned by the content of the experiences, or by the time at which they occur, or by later influences - that is a fresh problem, which we shall prudently avoid. Let me merely remind you that, as its first conclusion, analysis has arrived at the proposition that hysterical symptoms are derivatives of memories which are operating unconsciously.

The Aetiology Of Hysteria

426

(c) Our view then is that infantile sexual experiences are the fundamental precondition for hysteria, are, as it were, the disposition for it and that it is they which create the hysterical symptoms, but that they do not do so immediately, but remain without effect to begin with and only exercise a pathogenic action later, when they have been aroused after puberty in the form of unconscious memories. If we maintain this view, we shall have to come to terms with the numerous observations which show that a hysterical illness may already make its appearance in childhood and before puberty. This difficulty, however, is cleared up as soon as we examine more closely the data gathered from analyses concerning the chronology of the infantile experiences. We then learn that in our severe cases the formation of hysterical symptoms begins - not in exceptional instances, but, rather, as a regular thing - at the age of eight, and that the sexual experiences which show no immediate effect invariably date further back, into the third or fourth, or even the second year of life. Since in no single instance does the chain of effective experiences break off at the age of eight, I must assume that this time of life, the period of growth in which the second dentition takes place, forms a boundary line for hysteria, after which the illness cannot be caused. From then on, a person who has not had sexual experiences earlier can no longer become disposed to hysteria; and a person who has had experiences earlier, is already able to develop hysterical symptoms. Isolated instances of the occurrence of hysteria on the other side of this boundary line (that is, before the age of eight) may be interpreted as a phenomenon of precocious maturity. The existence of this boundary-line is very probably connected with developmental processes in the sexual system. Precocity of somatic sexual development may often be observed, and it is even possible that it can be promoted by too early sexual stimulation.

In this way we obtain an indication that a certain infantile state of the psychical functions, as well as of the sexual system, is required in order that a sexual experience occurring during this period shall later on, in the form of a memory, produce a pathogenic effect. I do not venture as yet, however, to make any more precise statement on the nature of this psychical infantilism or on its chronological limits.

The Aetiology Of Hysteria

427

(d) Another objection might arise from exception being taken to the supposition that the memory of infantile sexual experiences produces such an enormous pathogenic effect, while the actual experience itself has none. And it is true that we are not accustomed to the notion of powers emanating from a mnemic image which were absent from the real impression. You will moreover notice the consistency with which the proposition that symptoms can only proceed from memories is carried through in hysteria. None of the later scenes, in which the symptoms arise, are the effective ones; and the experiences which are effective have at first no result. But here we are faced with a problem which we may very justifiably keep separate from our theme. It is true that we feel impelled to make a synthesis, when we survey the number of striking conditions that we have come to know: the fact that in order to form a hysterical symptom a defensive effort against a distressing idea must be present, that this idea must exhibit a logical or associative connection with an unconscious memory through a few or many intermediate links, which themselves, too, remain unconscious at the moment, that this unconscious memory must have a sexual content, that its content must be an experience which occurred during a certain infantile period of life. It is true that we cannot help asking ourselves how it comes about that this memory of an experience that was innocuous at the time it happened, should posthumously produce the abnormal effect of leading a psychical process like defence to a pathological result, while it itself remains unconscious.

But we shall have to tell ourselves that this is a purely psychological problem, whose solution may perhaps necessitate certain hypotheses about normal psychical processes and about the part played in them by consciousness, but that this problem may be allowed to remain unsolved for the time being, without detracting from the value of the insight we have so far gained into the aetiology of hysterical phenomena.

The Aetiology Of Hysteria

428

III

Gentlemen, the problem, the approaches to which I have just formulated, concerns the mechanism of the formation of hysterical symptoms. We find ourselves obliged, however, to describe the causation of those symptoms without taking that mechanism into account, and this involves an inevitable loss of completeness and clarity in our discussion. Let us go back to the part played by the infantile sexual scenes. I am afraid that I may have misled you into over-estimating their power to form symptoms. Let me, therefore, once more stress the fact that every case of hysteria exhibits symptoms which are determined, not by infantile but by later, often by recent, experiences. Other symptoms, it is true, go back to the very earliest experiences and belong, so to speak, to the most ancient nobility. Among these latter are above all to be found the numerous and diverse sensations and paraesthesias of the genital organs and other parts of the body, these sensations and paraesthesias being phenomena which simply correspond to the sensory content of the infantile scenes, reproduced in a hallucinatory fashion, often painfully intensified.

Another set of exceedingly common hysterical phenomena - painful need to urinate, the sensation accompanying defaecation, intestinal disturbances, choking and vomiting, indigestion and disgust at food - were also shown in my analyses (and with surprising regularity) to be derivatives of the same childhood experiences and were explained without difficulty by certain invariable peculiarities of those experiences. For the idea of these infantile sexual scenes is very repellent to the feelings of a sexually normal individual; they include all the abuses known to debauched and impotent persons, among whom the buccal cavity and the rectum are misused for sexual purposes. For physicians, astonishment at this soon gives way to a complete understanding. People who have no hesitation in satisfying their sexual desires upon children cannot be expected to jib a finer shades in the methods of obtaining that satisfaction; and the sexual impotence which is inherent in children inevitably forces them into the same substitutive actions as those to which adults descend if they become impotent. All the singular conditions under which the ill-matched pair conduct their love-relations - on the one hand the adult, who cannot escape his share in the mutual dependence necessarily entailed by a sexual relationship, and who is yet armed with complete authority and the right to punish, and can exchange the one role for the other to the uninhibited satisfaction of his moods, and on the other hand the child, who in his helplessness is at the mercy of this arbitrary will, who is prematurely aroused to every kind of sensibility and exposed to every sort of disappointment, and whose performance of the sexual activities assigned to him is often interrupted by his imperfect control of his natural needs - all these grotesque and yet tragic incongruities reveal themselves as stamped upon the later development of the individual and of his neurosis, in countless permanent effects which deserve to be traced in the greatest detail. Where the relation is between two children, the character of the sexual scenes is none the less of the same repulsive sort, since every such relationship between children postulates a previous seduction of one of them by an adult. The psychical consequences of these child-relations are quite extraordinarily far-reaching; the two individuals remain linked by an invisible bond throughout the whole of their lives.

Sometimes it is the accidental circumstances of these infantile sexual scenes which in later years acquire a determining power over the symptoms of the neurosis. Thus, in one of my cases the circumstance that the child was required to stimulate the genitals of a grown-up woman with his foot was enough to fixate his neurotic attention for years on to his legs and to their function, and finally to produce a hysterical paraplegia. In another case, a woman patient suffering from anxiety attacks which tended to come on at certain hours of the day could not be calmed unless a particular one of her many sisters stayed by her side all the time. Why this was so would have remained a riddle if analysis had not shown that the man who had committed the assaults on her used to enquire at every visit whether this sister, who he was afraid might interrupt him, was at home.

The Aetiology Of Hysteria

429

It may happen that the determining power of the infantile scenes is so much concealed that, in a superficial analysis, it is bound to be overlooked. In such instances we imagine that we have found the explanation of some particular symptom in the content of one of the later scenes - until, in the course of our work, we come upon the same content in one of the infantile scenes, so that in the end we are obliged to recognize that, after all, the later scene only owes its power of determining symptoms to its agreement with the earlier one. I do not wish because of this to represent the later scenes being unimportant; if it was my task to put before you the rules that govern the formation of hysterical symptoms, I should have to include as one of them that the idea which is selected for the production of a symptom is one which has been called up by a combination of several factors and which has been aroused from various directions simultaneously. I have elsewhere tried to express this in the formula: hysterical symptoms are overdetermined.

One thing more, Gentlemen. It is true that earlier I put the relation between recent and infantile aetiology aside as a separate theme. Nevertheless, I cannot leave the subject without overstepping this resolution at least with one remark. You will agree with me that there is one fact above all which leads us astray in the psychological understanding of hysterical phenomena, and which seems to warn us against measuring psychical acts in hysterics and in normal people with the same yardstick. That fact is the discrepancy between psychically exciting stimuli and psychical reactions which we come upon in hysterical subjects. We try to account for it by assuming the presence in them of a general abnormal sensitivity to stimuli, and we often endeavour to explain it on a physiological basis, as if in such patients certain organs of the brain which serve to transmit stimuli were in a peculiar chemical state (like the spinal centres of a frog, perhaps, which has been injected with strychnine) or as if these cerebral organs had withdrawn from the influence of higher inhibiting centres (as in animals being experimented on under vivisection). Occasionally one or other of these concepts may be perfectly valid as an explanation of hysterical phenomena; I do not dispute this. But the main part of the phenomenon - of the abnormal, exaggerated, hysterical reaction to psychical stimuli - admits of another explanation, an explanation which is supported by countless examples from the analyses of patients. And this is as follows: The reaction of hysterics is only apparently exaggerated; it is bound to appear exaggerated to us because we only know a small part of the motives from which it arises.

The Aetiology Of Hysteria

430

In reality, this reaction is proportionate to the exciting stimulus; thus it is normal and psychologically understandable. We see this at once when the analysis has added to the manifest motives, of which the patient is conscious, those other motives, which have been operative without his knowing about them, so that he could not tell us of them.

I could spend hours demonstrating the validity of this important assertion for the whole range of psychical activity in hysteria, but I must confine myself here to a few examples. You will remember the mental ‘sensitiveness’ which is so frequent among hysterical patients and which leads them to react to the least sign of being depreciated as though they had received a deadly insult. What would you think, now, if you were to observe this high degree of readiness to feel hurt on the slightest occasion, if you came across it between two normal people, a husband and wife, perhaps? You would certainly infer that the conjugal scene you had witnessed was not solely the result of this latest trifling occasion, but that inflammable material had been piling up for a long time and that the whole heap of it bad been set alight by the final provocation.

I would ask you to carry this line of thought over on to hysterical patients. It is not the latest slight - which, in itself, is minimal - that produces the fit of crying, the outburst of despair or the attempt at suicide, in disregard of the axiom that an effect must be proportionate to its cause; the small slight of the present moment has aroused and set working the memories of very many, more intense, earlier slights, behind all of which there lies in addition the memory of a serious slight in childhood which has never been overcome. Or again, let us take the instance of a young girl who blames herself most frightfully for having allowed a boy to stroke her hand in secret, and who from that time on has been overtaken by a neurosis. You can, of course, answer the puzzle by pronouncing her an abnormal, eccentrically disposed and over-sensitive person; but you will think differently when analysis shows you that the touching of her hand reminded her of another, similar touching, which had happened very early in her childhood and which formed part of a less innocent whole, so that her self-reproaches were actually reproaches about that old occasion. Finally, the problem of the hysterogenic points is of the same kind. If you touch a particular spot, you do something you did not intend: you awaken a memory which may start off a convulsive attack, and since you know nothing of this psychical intermediate link you refer the attack directly to the operation of your touch. The patients are in the same state of ignorance and therefore fall into similar errors. ie they too are unaware of the re-awakening of the unconscious memory They constantly establish ‘false connections’ between the most recent cause, which they are conscious of, and the effect, which depends on so many intermediate links. If, however, the physician has been able to bring together the conscious and unconscious motives for the purpose of explaining a hysterical reaction, he is almost always obliged to recognize that the seemingly exaggerated reaction is appropriate and is abnormal only in its form.

The Aetiology Of Hysteria

431

You may, however, rightly object to this justification of the hysterical reaction to psychical stimuli and say that nevertheless the reaction is not a normal one. For why do healthy people behave differently?  Why do not all their excitations of long ago come into operation once more when a new, present-day, excitation takes place? One has an impression, indeed, that with hysterical patients it is as if all their old experiences - to which they have already reacted so often and, moreover, so violently - had retained their effective power; as if such people were incapable of disposing of their psychical stimuli. Quite true, Gentlemen, something of the sort must really be assumed. You must not forget that in hysterical people when there is a present-day precipitating cause, the old experiences come into operation in the form of unconscious memories. It looks as though the difficulty of disposing of a present impression, the impossibility of transforming it into a powerless memory, is attached precisely to the character of the psychical unconscious. You see that the remainder of the problem lies once more in the field of psychology - and, what is more, a psychology of a kind for which philosophers have done little to prepare the way for us.

The Aetiology Of Hysteria

432

To this psychology, which has yet to be created to meet our needs - to this future psychology of the neuroses - I must also refer you when, in conclusion, I tell you something which will at first make you afraid that it may disturb our dawning comprehension of the aetiology of hysteria. For I must affirm that the aetiological role of infantile sexual experience is not confined to hysteria but holds good equally for the remarkable neurosis of obsessions, and perhaps also, indeed, for the various forms of chronic paranoia and other functional psychoses. I express myself on this with less definiteness, because I have as yet analysed far fewer cases of obsessional neurosis than of hysteria; and as regards paranoia, I have at my disposal only a single full analysis and a few fragmentary ones. But what I discovered in these cases seemed to be reliable and filled me with confident expectations for other cases. You will perhaps remember that already, at an earlier date, I recommended that hysteria and obsessions should be grouped together under the name of ‘neuroses of defence’, even before I had come to know of their common infantile aetiology. I must now add that although this need not be expected to happen in general - every one of my cases of obsessions revealed a substratum of hysterical symptoms, mostly sensations and pains, which went back precisely to the earliest childhood experiences. What, then, determines whether the infantile sexual scenes which have remained unconscious will later on, when the other pathogenic factors are super-added, give rise to hysterical or to obsessional neurosis or even to paranoia? This increase in our knowledge seems, as you see, to prejudice the aetiological value of these scenes, since it removes the specificity of the aetiological relation.

The Aetiology Of Hysteria

433

I am not yet in a position, Gentlemen, to give a reliable answer to this question. The number of cases I have analysed is not large enough nor have the determining factors in them been sufficiently various. So far, I have observed that obsessions can be regularly shown by analysis to be disguised and transformed self-reproaches about acts of sexual aggression in childhood, and are therefore more often met with in men than in women, and that men develop obsessions more often than hysteria. From this I might conclude that the character of the infantile scenes - whether they were experienced with pleasure or only passively - has a determining influence on the choice of the later neurosis; but I do not want to underestimate the significance of the age at which these childhood actions occur, and other factors as well. Only a discussion of further analyses can throw light on these points. But when it becomes clear which are the decisive factors in the choice between the possible forms of the neuro-psychoses of defence, the question of what the mechanism is in virtue of which that particular form takes shape will once again be a purely psychological problem.

I have now come to the end of what I have to say to-day. Prepared as I am to meet with contradiction and disbelief, I should like to say one thing more in support of my position. Whatever you may think about the conclusions I have come to, I must ask you not to regard them as the fruit of idle speculation. They are based on a laborious individual examination of patients which has in most cases taken up a hundred or more hours of work. What is even more important to me than the value you put on my results is the attention you give to the procedure I have employed. This procedure is new and difficult to handle, but it is nevertheless irreplaceable for scientific and therapeutic purposes. You will realize, I am sure, that one cannot properly deny the findings which follow from this modification of Breuer’s procedure so long as one puts it aside and uses only the customary method of questioning patients. To do so would be like trying to refute the findings of histological technique by relying upon macroscopic examination. The new method of research gives wide access to a new element in the psychical field of events, namely, to processes of thought which have remained unconscious - which, to use Breuer’s expression, are ‘inadmissible to consciousness’. Thus it inspires us with the hope of a new and better understanding of all functional psychical disturbances. I cannot believe that psychiatry will long hold back from making use of this new pathway to knowledge.

434

ABSTRACTS OF THE SCIENTIFIC WRITINGS OF DR. SIGM. FREUD 1877-1897

(1897)

435

Intentionally left blank

436

ABSTRACTS OF THE SCIENTIFIC WRITINGS OF DR. SIGM. FREUD

1877-1897

A

BEFORE APPOINTMENT AS PRIVATDOZENT

I

‘Observations on the configuration and finer structure of the lobed organs in eels described as testes.’

Dr. Syrski had recently recognized a paired, lobulated, grooved organ occurring in the abdominal cavity of the eel as the animal’s male sexual organ which had long been looked for. At Professor Claus’s suggestion I investigated the occurrence and tissue components of these lobed organs at the zoological station in Trieste.

II

‘On the origin of the posterior nerve-roots in the spinal cord of Ammocoetes (Petromyzon planeri).’

(From the Institute of Physiology of the University of Vienna. With one plate.)

Investigation of the spinal cord of Ammocoetes showed that the large nerve-cells described by Reissner as occurring in the posterior grey matter (posterior cells) give rise to the root fibres of the posterior roots.-The anterior and posterior spinal roots of the Petromyzon, at all events in the caudal region, are displaced relatively to each other in their origins and remain distinct from each other in their peripheral course.

Abstracts Of The Scientific Writings Of Dr. Sigm. Freud 1877-1897

437

III

‘On the spinal ganglia and spinal cord of Petromyzon.’

(From the Institute of Physiology of the University of Vienna. With four plates and two woodcuts.)

The spinal ganglion cells of fish were long regarded as bipolar, and those of the higher animals were considered to be unipolar. As regards the latter elements Ranvier had shown that their single process branched in a T-shape after a short course. - By the use of a gold maceration technique it was possible to make a complete survey of the spinal ganglia of Petromyzon; their nerve cells exhibit every transition between bipolarity and unipolarity with T-shaped branching of the fibres; the number of fibres of the posterior root is regularly greater than the number of nerve cells in the ganglion; thus there are ‘fibres of passage’ and ‘subsidiary’ nerve fibres, of which the latter merely mingle with the elements of the roots. - A link between the spinal ganglion cells and the posterior cells in the spinal cord which have been described is provided in Petromyzon by cellular elements which are exposed on the surface of the spinal cord between the posterior root and ganglion. These scattered cells indicate the path taken by the spinal ganglion cells in the course of evolution. - In relation to the spinal cord of Petromyzon, the paper further describes the branching of the fibres in the central pathway of the posterior root fibres, and the forked ramification of the anterior commissural fibres, the intercalation of nerve cells in the spinal portions of the anterior roots, and a very fine nerve-net (which can be stained by gold chloride) in the pia mater.

IV

‘Note upon a method for anatomical preparations of the nervous system.’

A modification of a method recommended by Reichert. - A mixture of 1 part concentrated nitric acid, 3 parts water, and 1 part concentrated glycerine, since it destroys connective tissue and makes it easy to remove bones and muscles, is useful for laying bare the central nervous system with its peripheral branches, particularly in small mammals.

V

‘On the structure of the nerve fibres and nerve cells of the river crayfish.’

The nerve fibres of the river crayfish, when the tissues are examined live, exhibit without exception a fibrillary structure. The nerve cells, whose survival can be recognized from the granules in their nucleus, seem to be composed of two substances. One of these is reticular and is continued into the fibrils of the nerve fibres, and the other is homogeneous and is continued in their ground substance.

VI

‘The structure of the elements of the nervous system.’

(Lecture delivered before the Psychiatric Society, 1882.)

Contents as in V.

Abstracts Of The Scientific Writings Of Dr. Sigm. Freud 1877-1897

438

VII

‘A new method for the study of nerve-tracts in the central nervous system.’

If fine sections of the central organ, hardened in chromate are treated with gold chloride, a strong solution of soda and a 10 percent solution of calcium iodide, a red to blue stain is obtained which affects either the medullary sheaths or only the axis cylinders. The method is no more reliable than other methods of gold staining.

VIIa

‘A new histological method for the study of nerve-tracts in the brain and spinal chord.’

Contents as in VII.

VIII

‘A case of cerebral haemorrhage with indirect basal focal symptoms in a patient suffering from scurvy.’

A report of a case of cerebral haemorrhage in a patient suffering from scurvy, which ran a rapid course under continuous observation. The symptoms are explained with reference to Wernicke’s theory of the indirect effect of focal lesions.

IX

‘On Coca.’

The alkaloid of the coca plant which was described by Niemann received little attention for medical purposes at the time. My work included botanical and historical notes on the coca plant based on statements in the literature; it confirmed by experiments on normal subjects the remarkable stimulating effects of cocaine and its action in preventing hunger, thirst and sleep; and it endeavoured to lay down indications for the therapeutic use of the drug.

Among these indications the reference to the possible employment of cocaine during withdrawal of morphine became of importance later. The expectation voiced at the end of the work that the property of cocaine for producing local anaesthesia would find further applications was soon afterwards fulfilled by K. Koller’s experiments in anaesthetizing the cornea.

Abstracts Of The Scientific Writings Of Dr. Sigm. Freud 1877-1897

439

X

‘Contribution to our knowledge of the effects of coca.’

Dynamometric demonstration of the increase in motor strength during cocaine euphoria, motor strength (measured by the strength of the grip) shows a regular daily oscillation (similar to that of body temperature).

XI

‘A note upon the inter-olivary tract.’

Short notes on the connections of the roots of the auditory nerve and the connection between the inter-olivary tract and the crossed trapezoid body, based upon incompletely myelinated human preparations.

XII

‘A case of muscular atrophy with extensive disturbances of sensibility (syringomyelia).’

The combination of bilateral muscular atrophy, of bilateral disturbance of sensibility in the nature of a ‘partial’, dissociated paralysis of sensation, and of trophic disturbances in the left hand (which also exhibited the most intense anaesthesia), taken together with the restriction of the pathological symptoms to the upper part of the body, permitted a diagnosis in vivo in a 36-year-old man of syringomyelia, an affection which at that time was regarded as rare and hard to recognize.

Abstracts Of The Scientific Writings Of Dr. Sigm. Freud 1877-1897

440

B

AFTER APPOINTMENT AS PRIVATDOZENT

XIII

‘Acute multiple neuritis of the spinal and cranial nerves.’

An eighteen-year-old man fell ill without fever but with general symptoms and dragging pains in his chest and legs. At first he showed symptoms of endocarditis, but later the pains increased and sensitiveness to pressure developed in the vertebral column and regionally in the skin, muscles and nerve trunks as the affection involved one extremity after the other: heightening of the reflexes, outbreaks of sweating, local wasting, and lastly diplopia, disturbances of swallowing, facial paresis, and hoarseness. Finally fever, extreme acceleration of the pulse and pulmonary affection. The diagnosis of acute multiple neuritis made during the course of the illness was confirmed by the post-mortem findings, which showed that all the spinal nerves in their sheaths were injected, greyish-red, and, as it were, bunched up. Similar changes in the cranial nerves. Endocarditis. - According to the pathologist, this was the first post-mortem finding of polyneuritis to be made in Vienna.

XIV

‘On the relation of the restiform body to the posterior column and its nucleus with some remarks on two fields of the medulla oblongata.’

Jointly with Dr. L. Darkschewitsch (Moscow).

By studying preparations with incompletely myelinated medulla the restiform body can be divided into two components: a ‘nucleus’ (primary restiform body) and a ‘fringe’ (secondary restiform body). The latter contains the olivary fibre system which becomes medullated later. The primary restiform body, which is medullated earlier, is divided into a ‘head portion’ and a ‘tail portion’. The head of the primary restiform body arises from the nucleus of the column of Burdach and thus represents a (for the most part uncrossed) continuation to the cerebellum of the centripetal tract from the extremities. The corresponding continuation to the cerebrum is provided by means of the arcuate fibres originating from this same nucleus. The tail portion of the primary restiform body is a direct continuation of the spinal lateral cerebellar tract. - The lateral field of the medulla oblongata allows of a uniform interpretation of its components. It contains four grey substances with the systems of fibres proceeding from them, which are to be considered homologous to one another as substances in which the sensory nerves from the extremities, and the trigeminal, vagal, and auditory nerves have their origin.

Abstracts Of The Scientific Writings Of Dr. Sigm. Freud 1877-1897

441

XV

‘On the origin of the auditory nerve.’

A description of the origin of the auditory nerve, based on preparations of the human foetus, illustrated by four drawings of cross-sections and a diagram. The auditory nerve falls into three portions, of which the lowest (most spinal) terminates in the auditory ganglion and has continuations through the cornu trapezoides and the tracts of the superior olivary body; the second can be traced as the ‘ascending’ auditory root of Roller into what is known as Deiters’ nucleus; and the third runs into the inner auditory field of the medulla oblongata, from which continuations into the cerebellum arise. Details are given of the further course of these tracts so far as it has been possible to follow them.

XVI

‘Observation of a severe case of hemi-anaesthesia in a hysterical male.’

(The organ of vision was examined by Dr. Konigstein.)

The case history of a 29-year-old engraver with a bad family history, who fell ill after a dispute with his brother. The case afforded a demonstration of the symptom of sensible and sensorial hemi-anaesthesia in its classical form. - The disturbance in the field of vision and in the sense of colour is reported by Dr. Königstein.

XVII

‘Remarks on addiction to cocaine and the fear of cocaine.’

(With reference to a lecture by W. A. Hammond.)

The employment of cocaine for the relief of abstinence from morphine resulted in the misuse of cocaine and gave physicians an opportunity of observing the new clinical picture of chronic cocaine addiction. My essay, supported by a pronouncement from an American neuropathologist, seeks to show that this addiction to cocaine comes about only in addicts to other drugs (such as morphine) and that cocaine itself cannot be blamed for it.

XVIII

‘On hemianopsia in earliest childhood.’

An observation of disturbance in one half of the visual field in two children, aged 26 months and three and a quarter years, an age at which the symptom had not previously been medically recorded. A discussion on the lateral inclination of the head and eyes which was to be observed in one of the cases and on the localization of the suspected lesion. Both cases are to be classed among the ‘unilateral cerebral palsies of children’.

Abstracts Of The Scientific Writings Of Dr. Sigm. Freud 1877-1897

442

XIX

On the Interpretation of the Aphasias, a critical study.

After a firm basis for the understanding of cerebral disturbances of speech had been established by the discovery and definite localization of a motor and a sensory aphasia (Broca and Wernicke), the authorities set about tracing the more subtle symptoms of aphasia as well to factors of localization. In this way they arrived at the hypothesis of a conduction aphasia, with subcortical and transcortical, and motor and sensory forms. This critical study is directed against this view of speech disorders and it seeks to introduce for their explanation functional factors in place of the topographical ones. The forms described as subcortical and transcortical are not to be explained by a particular localization of the lesion but by conditions of reduced capacity for conduction in the apparatus of speech. In fact there are no aphasias caused by subcortical lesion. The justification for distinguishing a central aphasia from a conduction aphasia is also disputed. The speech area of the cortex is seen rather as a continuous region of the cortex inserted between the motor fields of the cortex and those of the optic and auditory nerves--a region within which all communication and association subserving speech function takes place. The so-called speech-centres revealed by the pathology of the brain correspond merely to the corners of this field of speech; they are not distinguished functionally from the interior regions; it is only on account of their position in relation to the contiguous cortical centres that they produce more obvious signs when they become disordered.

The nature of the subject treated here called at many points for a closer investigation of the delimitation between the physiological and the psychological approach. Meynert’s and Wernicke’s views on the localization of ideas in nervous elements have had to be rejected and Meynert’s account of a representation of the body in the cerebral cortex has required revision. Two facts of cerebral anatomy, namely (1) that the masses of fibres entering the spinal cord are constantly diminished on passing upwards, owing to the interposition of grey matter, and (2) that there are no direct paths from the periphery of the body to the cortex - these two facts lead to the conclusion that a really complete representation of the body is present only in the grey matter of the cord (as a ‘projection’), whereas in the cortex the periphery of the body is only ‘represented’ in less detail through selected fibres arranged according to function.

XX

Clinical Studies of the Unilateral Cerebral Palsies of Children.

(In collaboration with Dr. O. Rie.)

(No. III of Beiträge zur Kinderheilkunde edited by Dr. M. Kassowitz.)

A monograph describing this affection, based on studies of material in the First Public Institute for Children’s Diseases in Vienna, directed by Kassowitz. In ten sections it deals with (1) the history and literature of the cerebral palsies of children;(2) 35 observations of the authors’ own, which are then summarized in tabular form and described individually; (3) the analysis of the individual symptoms of the clinical picture; (4) the pathological anatomy; (5) the relations of cerebral palsy to epilepsy and, (6) to infantile poliomyelitis; (7) differential diagnosis and (8) therapy. A ‘choreatic paresis’ is described by the authors for the first time; it is distinguished by peculiar characteristics in its onset and course, and in it the unilateral paresis is from the beginning represented by hemichorea. There is further an account of the findings of an autopsy (lobar sclerosis as a result of an embolism of the middle cerebral artery) on a woman patient described in the Iconographie de la Saltpêtrière. Emphasis is laid on the close relations between epilepsy and the cerebral palsies of children, in consequence of which some cases of apparent epilepsy might deserve to be described as ‘cerebral palsy without palsy’. In connection with the much discussed question as to the existence of a polioencephalitis acuta, which is supposed to constitute the anatomical basis of unilateral cerebral palsy and to offer a complete analogy with poliomyelitis infantilis, the authors argue against this hypothesis of Strümpell’s; but they hold firmly to the expectation that a modified view of poliomyelitis acuta infantilis will allow of its being equated with cerebral palsy on another basis. In the therapeutic section are collected the hitherto published reports on the intervention by brain surgeons directed to the cure of genuine or traumatic epilepsy.

Abstracts Of The Scientific Writings Of Dr. Sigm. Freud 1877-1897

443

XXI

‘A case of successful treatment by hypnotism with some remarks on the origin of hysterical symptoms through "counter will".’

A young woman after the birth of her first child was compelled to give up breast-feeding it owing to a complex of hysterical symptoms (loss of appetite, sleeplessness, pains in her breasts, failure of milk-secretion, agitation). When, after the birth of a second child, these obstacles recurred, deep hypnosis on two occasions, accompanied by counter-suggestions, succeeded in removing the obstacles, so that the patient became an excellent nursing mother. The same result was brought about a year later in similar circumstances after two more hypnoses. Some remarks are appended on the fact that it is possible in hysterical patients for distressing antithetic or anxious ideas to be realized which normal people are able to inhibit; several observations of tic are traced back to this mechanism of ‘counter-will’.

XXII

‘Charcot.’

An obituary of the master of neuropathology who died in 1893 and among whose pupils the present writer numbers himself.

XXIII

‘On a symptom which often accompanies enuresis nocturna in children.’

In perhaps half the cases of children suffering from enuresis we find a hypertonia of the lower extremities the significance and implications of which are unexplained.

XXIV

‘On the psychical mechanism of hysterical phenomena.’

(Preliminary communication in collaboration with Dr. J. Breuer.)

The mechanism to which Charcot traced back hystero-traumatic paralyses, and the assumption of which enabled him to provoke them deliberately in hypnotized hysterical patients, can also be made responsible for numerous symptoms of what is described as non-traumatic hysteria. If we put the hysteric under hypnosis and lead his thoughts back to the time at which the symptom in question first appeared, a memory of a psychical trauma (or series of traumas) belonging to that time awakens in him with hallucinatory vividness, the symptom having persisted as a mnemic symbol of the trauma. Thus hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences. If the traumatic scene which has been arrived at in this way is reproduced vividly, accompanied by a generation of affect, the symptom which has hitherto been obstinately maintained disappears. We must therefore suppose that the forgotten memory has been acting like a foreign body in the mind, with the removal of which the irritating phenomena cease. This discovery, first made by Breuer in 1881, can be made the basis of a therapy of hysterical phenomena which deserves to be described as ‘cathartic’.

The memories which are revealed as ‘pathogenic’, as the roots of hysterical symptoms, are regularly ‘unconscious’ to the patient. It seems that by thus remaining unconscious they escape the wearing-away process to which psychical material is normally subject. A wearing-away of this sort is brought about by the method of ‘abreaction’. Pathogenic memories avoid being dealt with by abreaction either because the experiences concerned have occurred in special psychical states to which hysterical persons are inherently inclined, or because those experiences have been accompanied by an affect which brings about a special psychical state in hysterical persons. A tendency to a ‘splitting of consciousness’ is accordingly the basic psychical phenomenon in cases of hysteria.

Abstracts Of The Scientific Writings Of Dr. Sigm. Freud 1877-1897

444

XXV

An Account of the Cerebral Diplegias of Childhood (in Connection with Little’s Disease.)

(No. III, New Series, of Beiträge zur Kinderheilkunde edited by Dr. M. Kassowitz.)

A supplement to the Clinical Study of the Unilateral Cerebral Palsies of Children summarized under XX above.The history, pathological anatomy and physiology of the affection are treated here in the same order as in the earlier monograph, and the relevant clinical pictures are illustrated by 53 observations made by the author himself. It was, however, necessary in addition to take into account the range of forms that must be described as ‘cerebral diplegias’ and to point out their clinical similarity. In face of the differences of opinion that prevail in the literature of these disorders, the author has adopted the standpoint of an earlier authority, Little, and has thus arrived at the erection of four principal types, which are described as general spasticity, paraplegic spasticity, general chorea and bilateral athetosis, and bilateral spastic hemiplegia (spastic diplegia).

General spasticity includes the forms which are usually referred to as ‘Little’s disease’. Paraplegic spasticity is the name given to what was earlier regarded as a spinal affection, tabes spastica infantilis. The spastic diplegias correspond most easily to a doubling of unilateral cerebral palsies, but are characterized by a superfluity of symptoms which finds its explanation in the bilateral nature of the cerebral affection. The justification for including general chorea and bilateral athetosis among these types is provided by numerous characteristics of the clinical picture and by the existence of many mixed and transitional forms which link all these types together.

A discussion follows of the relations of these clinical types to the aetiological factors which are here assumed to be operative and to the insufficient number of post-mortem findings that have been reported. The following conclusions are reached:

Cerebral diplegias can be divided according to their origin into (a) those congenitally determined, (b) those arising at the time of birth and (c) those acquired after birth. But it is extremely rarely that this distinction can be drawn from the clinical peculiarities of the case, and not always possible from the anamnesis. All the aetiological factors of the diplegias are enumerated: prenatal (trauma, illness, or shock affecting the mother, place of the child in the family); operative at the time of birth (the factors stressed by Little, namely premature birth, difficult labour, asphyxia); and after birth (infectious diseases, trauma or shock affecting the child). Convulsions cannot be regarded as causes but only as symptoms of the affection. The aetiological part played by inherited syphilis is recognized as important. There is no exclusive relation between any one of these aetiologies and any one type of cerebral diplegia, but preferential relations are often apparent. The view that cerebral diplegias are affections with a single aetiology is untenable.

The pathological findings in the diplegias are of many kinds, and in general the same as in the hemiplegias; for the most part they are in the nature of end stages, from which it is not invariably possible to infer back to the initial lesions. They do not as a rule allow of a decision as to the aetiological category to which a case is to be referred. Nor is it usually possible to deduce the clinical picture from the post-mortem findings; so that the assumption that there are intimate and exclusive relations between clinical types and anatomical changes must also be rejected.

The pathological physiology of cerebral diplegias has an essential connection with the two characteristics by which both general and paraplegic spasticity are distinguished from other manifestations of organic disease of the cerebrum. For in both these clinical forms contracture predominates over paralysis and the lower extremities are affected more severely than the upper ones. The discussion in this paper reaches the conclusion that the more intense affection of the lower extremities in general and paraplegic spasticity must be connected with the localization of the lesion (meningeal haemorrhage along the median fissure) and the preponderance of contracture with the superficiality of the lesion. The strabismus of diplegic children, which is particularly common in paraplegic spasticity and where premature birth is the aetiology, is traceable to the retinal haemorrhages in new-born children described by Königstein.

A special section directs attention to the numerous instances of the familial and hereditary occurrence of children’s diseases which show a clinical affinity with cerebral diplegias.

Abstracts Of The Scientific Writings Of Dr. Sigm. Freud 1877-1897

445

XXVI

‘On familial forms of cerebral diplegias.’

An observation of two brothers, one six and a half and the other five years old, whose parents were blood relations, and who present a complicated clinical picture which has gradually developed, in the one case since birth and in the other since the second year. The symptoms of this familial disorder (lateral nystagmus, atrophy of the optic nerve, alternating convergent strabismus, monotonous and, as it were, scanning speech, intention tremor of the arms, spastic weakness of the legs, accompanied by high intelligence) give grounds for constructing a new affection which is to be regarded as a spastic counterpart to Friedreich’s disease. Emphasis is laid on the far-reaching similarity of these cases to those described as multiple sclerosis by Pelizaeus in 1885.

XXVII

‘The cerebral diplegias of children.’

A summary of the findings in the monograph abstracted above, No. XXV.

XXVIII

‘Some points for a comparative study of organic and hysterical motor paralyses.’

A comparison between organic and hysterical paralyses made under the influence of Charcot in order to arrive at a line of approach to the nature of hysteria. Organic paralysis is either periphero-spinal or cerebral. On the basis of discussions in my critical study on the aphasias, the former is described as projection paralysis and is paralysis en détail, and the latter is described as representation paralysis and is paralysis en masse. Hysteria imitates only the latter category of paralyses but has freedom to specialize which makes it resemble projection paralysis; it can dissociate the areas of paralysis which regularly occur in cerebral affections. Hysterical paralysis has a tendency to excessive development; it can be extremely in tense and yet strictly confined to a small area, while cortical paralysis regularly increases its extent with an increase in its intensity. Sensibility behaves in a directly contrary manner in the two kinds of paralysis.

The special characteristics of cortical paralysis are determined by the peculiarities of cerebral structure, and allow us to infer back to the anatomy of the brain. Hysterical paralysis on the contrary behaves as though there were no such thing as cerebral anatomy. Hysteria knows nothing of the anatomy of the brain. The alteration which underlies hysterical paralysis can have no resemblance to organic lesions but must be looked for in the conditions governing the accessibility of some particular circle of ideas.

Abstracts Of The Scientific Writings Of Dr. Sigm. Freud 1877-1897

446

XXIX

‘The neuro-psychoses of defence: an attempt at a psychological theory of acquired hysteria, of many phobias and obsessions and of certain hallucinatory psychoses.’

The first of a series of short papers which now follow and which are directed to the task of preparing a general exposition of the neuroses on a new basis which is now in hand.

The splitting of consciousness in hysteria is not a primary characteristic of this neurosis, based on degenerative weakness, as Janet insists. It is the consequence of a peculiar psychical process known as ‘defence’ which is shown by some short reports of analyses to be present not only in hysteria but in numerous other neuroses and psychoses. Defence comes into operation when an instance of incompatibility arises in ideational life between a particular idea and the ‘ego’. The process of may be figuratively represented as though the quota of excitation were torn away from the idea that is to be repressed and put to some other use. This can occur in a variety of ways: in hysteria the liberated sum of excitation is transformed into somatic innervation (conversion hysteria); in obsessional neurosis it remains in the psychical field and attaches itself to other ideas which are not incompatible in themselves and which are thus substitutes for the repressed idea. The source of the incompatible ideas which are subjected to defence is solely and exclusively sexual life. An analysis of a case of hallucinatory psychosis shows that this psychosis too represents a method of achieving defence.

XXX

‘Obsessions and phobias: their psychical mechanism and aetiology.’

Obsessions and phobias are to be distinguished from neurasthenia as independent neurotic affections. In both it is a question of the linkage between an idea and an affective state. In phobias the latter is always the same, namely anxiety; in true obsessions it can be of various kinds (self-reproach, sense of guilt, doubt, etc.). The affective state emerges as the essential element of the obsession, since it remains unaltered in the individual case, whereas the idea attached to it is changed. Psychical analysis shows that the affect of the obsession is justified in every instance, but that the idea attached to it represents a substitute for an idea derived from sexual life which is more appropriate to the affect and which has succumbed to repression. This state of affairs is illustrated by numerous short analyses of cases of folie du doute, washing mania, arithmomania, etc., in which the reinstatement of the repressed idea was successful and accompanied by useful therapeutic effects. The phobias in the strict sense are reserved for the paper on anxiety neurosis (No. XXXII).

Abstracts Of The Scientific Writings Of Dr. Sigm. Freud 1877-1897

447

XXXI

Studies on Hysteria.

(In collaboration with Dr. J. Breuer.)

This volume contains the carrying-through of the subject raised in the ‘Preliminary Communication’ (No. XXIV) dealing with the psychical mechanism of hysterical phenomena. Although it proceeds from the joint work of the two authors, it is divided into separate sections, of which four detailed case histories together with discussions and an attempt at a ‘Psychotherapy of Hysteria’ represent my share. The aetiological part played by the sexual factor is stressed with greater emphasis in this book than in the ‘Preliminary Communication’, and the concept of ‘conversion’ is used to throw light on the formation of hysterical symptoms. The essay on psychotherapy seeks to give some insight into the technique of the psycho-analytic procedure, which is alone able to lead to the investigation of the unconscious content of the mind, and the employment of which may also be expected to lead to important psychological discoveries.

XXXII

‘On the grounds for detaching a particular syndrome from neurasthenia under the description "anxiety neurosis".’

The concurrence of a constant grouping of symptoms with a particular aetiological determinant makes it possible to pick out from the composite province of ‘neurasthenia’ a syndrome which deserves the name of ‘anxiety neurosis’, because all of its constituents arise from the symptoms of anxiety. These are either to be regarded as immediate manifestations of anxiety or as rudiments and equivalents of them (E. Hecker), and they are often in complete opposition to the symptoms which constitute neurasthenia proper. The aetiology of the two neuroses also points to an opposition of this kind. Whereas true neurasthenia arises from spontaneous emissions or is acquired through masturbation, the factors belonging to the aetiology of anxiety neurosis are such as correspond to a holding back of sexual excitation - such as abstinence when libido is present, unconsummated excitation and, above all, coitus interruptus. In actual life the neuroses here distinguished usually appear in combination, though pure cases can also be demonstrated. When a mixed neurosis of this kind is subjected to analysis, it is possible to indicate a mixture of several specific aetiologies.

An attempt to arrive at a theory of anxiety neurosis leads to a formula to the effect that its mechanism lies in the deflection of somatic sexual excitation from the psychical field and a consequent abnormal employment of that excitation. Neurotic anxiety is transformed sexual libido.

Abstracts Of The Scientific Writings Of Dr. Sigm. Freud 1877-1897

448

XXXIII

‘A reply to criticisms of my paper on anxiety neurosis.’

A reply to objections made by Löwenfeld to the content of No. XXXII. The problem of the aetiology of the pathology of the neuroses is dealt with here, to justify the division into three categories of the aetiological factors that appear: (a) preconditions, (b) specific causes and (c) concurrent or auxiliary causes. What are called preconditions are the factors which, though they are indispensable for producing the effect, cannot by themselves produce it but need in addition the specific causes. The specific causes are distinguished from the preconditions by the fact that they figure in only a few aetiological formulas, while the preconditions play the same part in numerous affections. Auxiliary causes are such as neither need invariably be present nor are able by themselves to produce the effect in question. - In the case of neuroses it is possible that the precondition may be heredity; the specific cause lies in sexual factors; everything else that is brought up apart from these as forming the aetiology of the neuroses (overwork, emotion, physical illness) is an auxiliary cause and can never entirely take the place of the specific factor, though it can no doubt serve as a substitute for it in the matter of quantity. The form of a neurosis depends on the nature of the specific sexual cause; whether there shall be a neurotic illness at all is determined by factors operating quantitatively; heredity works like a multiplier inserted in an electric circuit.

XXXIV

‘On Bernhardt’s disturbance of sensibility in the thigh.’

A self-observation of this harmless affection, which is probably traceable to local neuritis; and a report of some other cases, including bilateral ones.

Abstracts Of The Scientific Writings Of Dr. Sigm. Freud 1877-1897

449

XXXV

‘Further remarks on the neuro-psychoses of defence.’

(1) The specific aetiology of hysteria. A continuation of psycho-analytic work with hysterical subjects has had the uniform result of showing that the suspected traumatic events (as mnemic symbols of which hysterical symptoms persist) occur in the patients’ earliest childhood and are to be described as sexual abuses in the narrowest sense.

(2) The nature and mechanism of obsessional neurosis. Obsessional ideas are invariably transformed self-reproaches which have re-emerged from repression and which always relate to some sexual act that was performed with pleasure in childhood. The course taken by this return of the repressed is traced, as are the results of a primary and secondary work of defence.

(3) Analysis of a case of chronic paranoia. This analysis, which is reported in detail, indicates that the aetiology of paranoia is to be found in the same sexual experiences of early childhood in which the aetiology of hysteria and of obsessional neurosis has already been discovered. The symptoms of this case of paranoia are traced in detail to the activities of defence.

XXXVI

‘The aetiology of hysteria.’

More detailed reports of the infantile sexual experiences which have been shown to constitute the aetiology of the psychoneuroses. In their content these experiences must be described as ‘perversions’, and those responsible are as a rule to be looked for among the patient’s nearest relatives. A discussion of the difficulties which have to be surmounted in uncovering these repressed memories and of the objections that may be raised against the results thus arrived at. Hysterical symptoms are shown to be derivatives of memories operating unconsciously; they appear only in collaboration with such memories. The presence of infantile sexual experiences is an indispensable condition if the efforts of defence (which occur in normal people as well) are to result in producing pathogenic effects - that is to say, neuroses.

Abstracts Of The Scientific Writings Of Dr. Sigm. Freud 1877-1897

450

XXXVII

‘Heredity and the aetiology of the neuroses.’

The findings hitherto arrived at by psycho-analysis on the aetiology of the neuroses are here employed to criticize the current theories of the omnipotence of heredity in neuropathology. The part played by heredity has been overestimated in several directions. Firstly, by including among the inheritable neuropathic illnesses conditions such as headaches, neuralgias, etc., which are very probably attributable as a rule to organic affections of the cranial cavities (the nose). Secondly, by regarding every discoverable nervous ailment among relatives as evidence of hereditary taint and by thus from the first leaving no room for acquired neuropathic illnesses which can possess no similar evidential weight. Thirdly, the aetiological role of syphilis has been misunderstood and the nervous ailments deriving from it have been put down to the account of heredity. But in addition, a general objection is permissible against a form of heredity which is described as ‘dissimilar inheritance’ (or inheritance with a change in the form of the illness), and to which a far more important part is allotted than to ‘similar’ inheritance. But when the fact of hereditary taint in a family is demonstrated in its members being affected alternatively by every sort of nervous complaint - chorea, epilepsy, hysteria, apoplexy, etc. - without any more precise determinants, then either we need a knowledge of the laws according to which these complaints replace one another or else room is left for the individual aetiologies which determine precisely the choice of the neuropathic state which in fact results from them. If such particular aetiologies exist, they are the specific causes, so much sought after, of the various different clinical forms, and heredity is pushed back into the role of a requirement or precondition.

Abstracts Of The Scientific Writings Of Dr. Sigm. Freud 1877-1897

451

XXXVIII

Infantile Cerebral Palsies.

This is a summary of the two works on the same theme published in 1891 and 1893, together with the additions and alterations which have since become necessary. These affect the chapter on poliomyelitis acuta, which has meantime been recognized as a non-systematic disease, on encephalitis as an initial process of spastic hemiplegia, and on the interpretation of cases of paraplegic spasticity, the cerebral nature of which affection may recently have been placed in doubt. A special discussion is concerned with the attempts to split up the content of the cerebral diplegias into several clearly divided clinical entities, or at least to separate what is known as ‘Little’s disease’ as a clinical individual from among the medley of forms of similar affections. The difficulties which meet such attempts are pointed out, and it is maintained as the only justifiable view that ‘infantile cerebral palsy’ shall be retained at present as a collective clinical concept for a whole number of similar affections with an exogenous aetiology. The rapid increase in observations of familial and hereditary nervous disorders of children, which resemble infantile cerebral palsies clinically at many points, has made it a pressing matter to collect these new forms and to attempt to draw a fundamental distinction between them and infantile cerebral palsies.

Abstracts Of The Scientific Writings Of Dr. Sigm. Freud 1877-1897

452

APPENDIX

A. Works written under my influence.

E. Rosenthal, Contribution à létude des diplégies cérérebrales de l’enfance. Thèse de Lyon. (Médaille d’argent.) (1892.)

L. Rosenberg, Casuistische Beiträge zur Kenntnis der cerebralen Kinderlähmungen und der Epilepsie. (No. IV, New Series, of Beiträge zur Kinderheilkunde, edited by Kassowitz.) (1893.)

B. Translations from the French.

J.-M Charcot, Neue Vorlesungen über die Krankheiten des Nervensystems, insbesondere über Hysterie. (Toeplitz & Deuticke, Vienna.)

H Bernheim, Die Suggestion und ihre Heilwirkung. (Fr. Deuticke, Vienna.) (Second Edition, 1896.)

H Bernheim, Neue Studien über Hypnotismus, Suggestion und Psychotherapie. (Fr. Deuticke, Vienna.)

J.-M Charcot, Poliklinische Vortrage. Vol. I. (Leçons du Mardi.) With notes by the translator. (Fr. Deuticke, Vienna.)

453

SEXUALITY IN THE AETIOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

(1898)

454

Intentionally left blank

455

SEXUALITY IN THE AETIOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

Exhaustive researches during the last few years have led me to recognize that the most immediate and, for practical purposes, the most significant causes of every case of neurotic illness are to be found in factors arising from sexual life. This theory is not entirely new. A certain amount of importance has been allowed to sexual factors in the aetiology of the neuroses from time immemorial and by every writer on the subject. In certain marginal regions of medicine a cure for ‘sexual complaints’ and for ‘nervous weakness’ has always been promised in the same breath. When once the validity of the theory ceases to be denied, therefore, it will not be hard to dispute its originality.

In a few short papers which have appeared during the last years in the Neurologisches Zentralblatt, the Revue Neurolgique and the Wiener klinische Rundschau, I have tried to give an indication of the material and the points of view which offer scientific support for the theory of the ‘sexual aetiology of the neuroses’. A full presentation is, however, still wanting, mainly because, in endeavouring to throw light on what is recognized as the actual state of affairs, we come upon ever fresh problems for the solution of which the necessary preliminary work has not been done. It does not seem to me at all premature, however, to attempt to direct the attention of medical practitioners to what I believe to be the facts so that they may convince themselves of the truth of my assertions and at the same time of the benefits they may derive in their practice from a knowledge of them.

I am aware that efforts will be made, by the use of arguments with an ethical colouring, to prevent the physician from pursuing the matter further. Anyone who wants to make certain whether or not his patients’ neuroses are really connected with their sexual life cannot avoid asking them about their sexual life and insisting upon receiving a true account of it. But in this, it is asserted, lies the danger both for the individual and society. A doctor, I hear it being said, has no right to intrude upon his patients’ sexual secrets and grossly injure their modesty (especially with women patients) by an interrogation of this sort. His clumsy hand can only ruin family happiness, offend the innocence of young people and encroach upon the authority of parents; and where adults are concerned he will come to share uncomfortable knowledge and destroy his own relations to his patients. It is therefore his ethical duty, the conclusion is, to keep away from the whole business of sex.

Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

456

To this one may well reply that it is the expression of a prudery which is unworthy of a physician and which inadequately conceals its weakness behind bad arguments. If factors arising out of sexual life must really be acknowledged to be causes of illness, then, for that very reason, investigation and discussion of them automatically falls within the sphere of a physician’s duty. The injury to modesty of which he is guilty in this is no different and no worse, one would imagine, than when he insists on examining a woman’s genital organs in order to cure a local affection - a demand on which he is pledged to insist by his medical training itself. Even now one often hears elderly women who have spent their youth in the provinces tell of how at one time they were reduced to a state of exhaustion by excessive genital haemorrhages, because they could not make up their minds to allow a doctor to see their nakedness. The educative influence which has been exercised on the public by the medical world has, in the course of one generation, so altered things that an objection of this sort is an extremely rare occurrence among the young women of to-day. If it were to occur, it would be condemned as unreasonable prudery, as modesty in the wrong place. Are we living in Turkey, a husband would ask, where all that a sick woman may show to the physician is her arm through a hole in the wall?

It is not true that interrogation of his patients and knowledge about their sexual concerns give the physician a dangerous degree of power over them. It was possible in earlier times for the same objection to be made against the uses of anaesthetics, which deprive the patient of his consciousness and of the exercise of his will and leave it to the doctor to decide whether and when he shall regain them. And yet to-day anaesthetics have become indispensable to us because they are able, better than anything else, to assist the doctor in his medical work; and among his many other serious obligations, he has taken over the responsibility for their use.

Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

457

A doctor can always do harm if he is unskilful or unscrupulous, and this is no more and no less true where it is a question of investigating his patients’ sexual life than it is in other things. Naturally, if someone, after an honest self-examination, feels that he does not possess the tact, seriousness and discretion which are necessary for questioning neurotic patients, and if he is aware that revelations of a sexual character would provoke lascivious thrills in him rather than scientific interest, then he will be right to avoid the topic of the aetiology of the neuroses. All we ask, in addition, is that he should also refrain from treating nervous patients.

Nor is it true that patients put insuperable obstacles in the way of an investigation into their sexual life. After some slight hesitation, adults usually adjust themselves to the situation by saying: ‘After all, I’m at the doctor’s; I can say anything to him.’ A great many women who find it difficult enough to go through life concealing their sexual feelings, are relieved to find that with the doctor no other consideration outweighs that of their recovery, and they are grateful to him that for once they are allowed to behave quite humanly about sexual things. A dim knowledge of the overwhelming importance of sexual factors in the production of neuroses (a knowledge which I am trying to capture afresh for science) seems never to have been lost in the consciousness of laymen. How often do we witness scenes like this: A married couple, one of whom is suffering from a neurosis, comes to us for consultation. After we have made a great many introductory remarks and apologies to the effect that no conventional barriers should exist between them and the doctor who wants to be of use in such cases, and so on, we tell them that we suspect that the cause of the illness lies in the unnatural and detrimental form of sexual intercourse which they must have chosen since the wife’s last confinement. We tell them that doctors do not as a rule concern themselves with such matters, but that that is reprehensible of them, even though the patients do not want to be told about things like that, etc. Thereupon one of the couple nudges the other and says: ‘You see! I told you all along it would make me ill.’ And the other answers: ‘Well, I know, I thought so too; but what is one to do?’

Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

458

In certain other circumstances, such as when one is dealing with young girls, who, after all, are systematically brought up to conceal their sexual life, one will have to be content with a very small measure of sincere response on the part of the patient. But an important consideration comes into play here namely that a doctor who is experienced in these things does not meet his patients unprepared and as a rule does not have to ask them for information but only for a confirmation of his surmises. Anyone who will follow my indications as to how to elucidate the morphology of the neuroses and translate it into aetiological terms, will need the addition of very few further admissions from his patients; in the very description of their symptoms, which they are only too ready to give, they have usually acquainted him at the same time with the sexual factors that are hidden behind.

It would be a great advantage if sick people had a better knowledge of the certainty with which a doctor is now in a position to interpret their neurotic complaints and to infer from them their operative sexual aetiology. It would undoubtedly spur such people on to abandon their secretiveness from the moment they have made up their minds to seek help for their sufferings. Moreover, it is in the interest of all of us that a higher degree of honesty about sexual things should become a duty among men and women than has hitherto been expected of them. This cannot be anything but a gain for sexual morality. In matters of sexuality we are at present, every one of us, ill or well, nothing but hypocrites. It will be all to our good if, as a result of such general honesty, a certain amount of toleration in sexual concerns should be attained.

Doctors usually take very little interest in a good many of the questions which are discussed among neuropathologists in connection with the neuroses: whether, for instance, one is justified in making a strict differentiation between hysteria and neurasthenia, whether one may distinguish hystero-neurasthenia alongside of them, whether obsessions should be classed with neurasthenia or recognized as a separate neurosis, and so on. And, indeed, such distinctions may well be a matter of indifference to a practitioner, so long as no further consequences follow from the decisions arrived at - no deeper insight and no pointers for therapeutic treatment - and so long as the patient will in every instance be sent off to a hydropathic establishment, and be told that there is nothing the matter with him. But it will be a different thing if our point of view about the causative relations between sexuality and the neuroses is adopted. Fresh interest is then aroused in the symptomatology of the different neurotic cases, and it becomes of practical importance that one should be able correctly to break down the complicated picture into its components and correctly to name them. For the morphology of the neuroses can with little difficulty be translated into aetiology and a knowledge of the latter leads on quite naturally to new indications for methods of cure.

Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

459

Now the important decision we have to make - and this can be done with certainty in every instance if the symptoms are carefully assessed - is whether the case bears the characteristics of neurasthenia or of a psychoneurosis (hysteria, obsessions).(Mixed cases in which signs of neurasthenia are combined with signs of a psychoneurosis are of very frequent occurrence; but we will leave consideration of them till later.) It is only in neurasthenias that questioning the patient succeeds in disclosing the aetiological factors in his sexual life. These factors are, of course, known to him and belong to the present time, or, more properly, to the period of his life since sexual maturity (though this delimitation does not cover every case). In psychoneuroses questioning of this kind has little result. It may perhaps give us a knowledge of the factors which have to be recognized as precipitating ones, and these may or may not be connected with sexual life. If they are, they show themselves to be no different in kind from the aetiological factors of neurasthenia; that is, they entirely lack any specific relation to the causation of the psychoneurosis. And yet, in every instance, the aetiology of the psychoneuroses, too, lies in the field of sexuality. By a curious circuitous path, of which I shall speak later, it is possible to arrive at a knowledge of this aetiology and to understand why the patient was unable to tell us anything about it. For the events and influences which lie at the root of every psychoneurosis, belong, not to the present day, but to an epoch of life which is long past and which is, as it were, a prehistoric one-to the time of early childhood; and that is why the patient, too, knows nothing of them. He has - though only in a particular sense - forgotten them.

Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

460

Thus, in every case of neurosis there is a sexual aetiology; but in neurasthenia it is an aetiology of a present-day kind, whereas in the psychoneuroses the factors are of an infantile nature. This is the first great contrast in the aetiology of the neuroses. 1 A second one emerges when we take account of a difference in the symptomatology of neurasthenia itself. Here, on the one hand, we find cases in which certain complaints characteristic of neurasthenia (intracranial pressure, proneness to fatigue, dyspepsia, constipation, spinal irritation, etc.) are prominent; in other cases these signs play a minor part and the clinical picture is composed of other symptoms, all of which exhibit a relation to the nuclear symptom, that of anxiety (free anxiousness, unrest, expectant anxiety, complete, rudimentary or supplementary anxiety attacks, locomotor vertigo, agoraphobia, insomnia, increased sensitivity to pain, and so on). I have left the name of neurasthenia to the first type, but have distinguished the second type as ‘anxiety neurosis’; and I have given reasons for this separation in another place, where I have also taken account of the fact that as a rule both neuroses appear together. For the present purpose it is enough to emphasize that parallel to the difference in the symptoms of these two forms of illness there goes a difference in their aetiology. Neurasthenia can always be traced back to a condition of the nervous system such as is acquired by excessive masturbation or arises spontaneously from frequent emissions; anxiety neurosis regularly discloses sexual influences which have in common the factor of reservation or of incomplete satisfaction - such as coitus interruptus, abstinence together with a lively libido, so-called unconsummated excitation, and so on. In my short paper intended to introduce anxiety neurosis I put forward the formula that anxiety is always libido which has been deflected from its employment.

Where there is a case in which symptoms of neurasthenia and of anxiety neurosis are combined - where, that is, we have a mixed case - we have only to keep to our proposition, empirically arrived at, that a mingling of neuroses implies the collaboration of several aetiological factors, and we shall find our expectation confirmed in every instance. How often these aetiological factors are linked with one another organically, through the interplay of sexual processes - for instance, coitus interruptus or insufficient potency in the man, going along with masturbation - would well deserve separate discussion.

Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

461

Having diagnosed a case of neurasthenic neurosis with certainty and having classified its symptoms correctly, we are in a position to translate the symptomatology into aetiology; and we may then boldly demand confirmation of our suspicions from the patient. We must not be led astray by initial denials. If we keep firmly to what we have inferred, we shall in the end conquer every resistance by emphasizing the unshakeable nature of our convictions. In this way we learn all sorts of things about the sexual life of men and women, which might well fill a useful and instructive volume; and we learn, too, to regret from every point of view that sexual science is even to-day still regarded as disreputable. Since minor deviations from a normal vita sexualis are much too common for us to attach any value to their discovery, we shall only allow a serious and long continued abnormality in the sexual life of a neurotic patient to carry weight as an explanation. Moreover, the idea that one might, by one’s insistence, cause a patient who is psychically normal to accuse himself falsely of sexual misdemeanours - such an idea may safely be disregarded as an imaginary danger.

If one proceeds in this manner with one’s patients, one also gains the conviction that, so far as the theory of the sexual aetiology of neurasthenia is concerned, there are no negative cases. In my mind, at least, the conviction has become so certain that where an interrogation has shown a negative result, I have turned this to account too for diagnostic purposes. I have told myself, that is, that such a case cannot be one of neurasthenia. In this way I have been led in several instances to assume the presence of progressive paralysis instead of neurasthenia, because I had not succeeded in establishing the fact - a fact that was necessary for my theory - that the patient indulged very freely in masturbation; and the further course of those cases later confirmed my view. In another instance the patient, who exhibited no clear organic changes, complained of intracranial pressure, headaches and dyspepsia, but countered my suspicions about his sexual life straightforwardly and with unshaken certainty; and the possibility occurred to me that he might have a latent suppuration in one of his nasal sinuses. A specialist colleague of mine confirmed this inference I had made from the negative sexual results of my interrogation, by removing the pus from the patient’s antrum and relieving him of his ailments.

Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

462

The appearance of there nevertheless being ‘negative cases’ can arise in another way as well. Sometimes an interrogation discloses the presence of a normal sexual life in a patient whose neurosis, on a superficial view, does in fact closely resemble neurasthenia or anxiety neurosis. But a more deep -going investigation regularly reveals the true state of affairs. Behind such cases, which have been taken for neurasthenia, there lies a psychoneurosis - hysteria or obsessional neurosis. Hysteria in especial, which imitates so many organic affections, can easily assume the appearance of one of the ‘actual neuroses’ by elevating the latter’s symptoms into hysterical ones. Such hysterias in the form of neurasthenia are not even very rare. Falling back on psychoneurosis when a case of neurasthenia shows a negative sexual result, is, however, no cheap way out of the difficulty; the proof that we are right is to be obtained by the method which alone unmasks hysteria with certainty - the method of psycho-analysis, to which we shall refer presently.

There may perhaps be some, however, who are quite willing to recognize the sexual aetiology in their neurasthenic patients, but who nevertheless blame it as one-sidedness if they are not asked to pay attention as well to the other factors which are always mentioned by the authorities as causes of neurasthenia. Now it would never occur to me to substitute a sexual aetiology in neuroses for every other aetiology, and so to assert that the latter have no operative force. This would be a misunderstanding. What I think is rather that in addition to all the familiar aetiological factors which have been recognized - and probably correctly so - by the authorities as leading to neurasthenia, the sexual factors, which have not hitherto been sufficiently appreciated, should also be taken into account. In my opinion, however, these sexual factors deserve to be given a special place in the aetiological series. For they alone are never absent in any case of neurasthenia, they alone are capable of producing the neurosis without any further assistance, so that those other factors seem to be reduced to the role of an auxiliary and supplementary aetiology, and they alone allow the physician to recognize firm relations between their manifold nature and the multiplicity of the clinical pictures. If, on the other hand, I group together all the patients who have ostensibly become neurasthenic from overwork, emotional agitation, as an after-effect of typhoid fever, and so on, they show me nothing in common in their symptoms. The nature of their aetiology gives me no idea of what kind of symptoms to expect, any more than, conversely, does the clinical picture they present enable me to infer what aetiology is at work in them.

Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

463

The sexual causes, too, are the ones which most readily offer the physician a foothold for his therapeutic influence. Heredity is no doubt an important factor, when it is present; it enables a strong pathological effect to come about where otherwise only a very slight one would have resulted. But heredity is inaccessible to the physician’s influence; everyone is born with his own hereditary tendencies to illness, and we can do nothing to change them. Nor should we forget that it is precisely in regard to the aetiology of the neurasthenias that we must necessarily deny the first place to heredity. Neurasthenia (in both its forms) is one of those affections which anyone may easily acquire without having any hereditary taint. If it were otherwise, the enormous increase in neurasthenia, of which all the authorities complain, would be unthinkable. In what concerns civilization, among whose sins people so often include responsibility for neurasthenia, these authorities may indeed be right (although the way in which this comes about is probably quite different from what they imagine). Yet the state of our civilization is, once again, something that is unalterable for the individual. Moreover this factor, being common to all the members of the same society, can never explain the fact of selectivity in the incidence of the illness. The physician who is not neurasthenic is exposed to the same influence of an allegedly detrimental civilization as the neurasthenic patient whom he has to treat. Subject to these limitations, the factors of exhaustion retain their significance. But the element of ‘overwork’, which physicians are so fond of producing to their patients as the cause of their neurosis, is too often unduly misused. It is quite true that anyone who, owing to sexual noxae, has made himself disposed to neurasthenia, tolerates intellectual work and the psychical exigencies of life badly; but no one ever becomes neurotic through work or excitement alone. Intellectual work is rather a protection against falling ill of neurasthenia; it is precisely the most unremitting intellectual workers who remain exempt from neurasthenia, and what neurasthenics complain of as ‘overwork that is making them ill’  does not as a rule deserve to be called ‘intellectual work’ at all, either in its quality or quantity. Physicians will have to become accustomed to explaining to an office-worker who has been ‘overworked’ at his desk or to a housewife for whom her domestic activities have become too heavy, that they have fallen ill, not because they have tried to carry out duties which are in fact easily performed by a civilized brain, but because all the while they have been grossly neglecting and damaging their sexual life.

Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

464

Furthermore, it is only the sexual aetiology which makes it possible for us to understand all the details of the clinical history of neurasthenics, the mysterious improvements in the middle of the course of the illness and the equally incomprehensible deteriorations, both of which are usually related by doctors and patients to whatever treatment has been adopted. In my records, which include more than two hundred cases, there is, for instance, the story of a man who, when the treatment prescribed by his family physician had done him no good, went to Pastor Kneipp and for a year after being treated by him showed an extraordinary improvement in the middle of his illness. But when, a year later, his symptoms grew worse once more and he again went to Wörishofen for help, the second treatment was unsuccessful. A glance into the patient’s family record solved the double riddle. Six and a half months after his first return from Wörishofen his wife bore him a child. This meant that he had left her at the beginning of a pregnancy of which he was not yet aware; after his return he was able to practise natural intercourse with her. At the close of this period, which had a curative effect on him, his neurosis was started up afresh by his once more resorting to coitus interruptus; the second treatment was bound to prove a failure, since this pregnancy of his wife’s remained her last.

Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

465

There was a similar case, in which, once again, the treatment had an unexpected effect which called for an explanation. This case turned out to be still more instructive, for it exhibited a puzzling alternation in the symptoms of the neurosis. A young neurotic patient had been sent by his physician to a reputable hydropathic establishment on account of a typical neurasthenia. There his condition steadily improved at first, so that there was every prospect that he would be discharged as a grateful disciple of hydrotherapy. But in the sixth week a complete change occurred; the patient ‘could no longer tolerate the water’, became more and more nervous, and finally left the establishment after two more weeks, uncured and dissatisfied. When he complained to me about this therapeutic fraud I asked him a few questions about the symptoms which had overtaken him in the middle of the treatment. Curiously enough, a complete change had come over them. He had entered the sanatorium with intracranial pressure, fatigue and dyspepsia; what had troubled him during the treatment were excitement, attacks of dyspnoea, vertigo in walking, and disturbances of sleep. I was now able to say to him: ‘You are doing hydrotherapy an injustice. As you yourself very well knew, you fell ill as a result of long-continued masturbation. In the sanatorium you gave up this form of satisfaction, and therefore you quickly recovered. When you felt well, however, you unwisely sought to have relations with a lady - a fellow-patient, let us suppose - which could only lead to excitement without normal satisfaction. The beautiful walks in the neighbourhood of the establishment gave you ample opportunity for this. It was this relationship, not a sudden inability to tolerate hydrotherapy, which caused you to fall ill once more. Moreover, your present state of health leads me to conclude that you are continuing this relationship here in town as well.’ I can assure my readers that the patient confirmed what I said, point by point.

Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

466

The present treatment of neurasthenia - which is, perhaps, carried out most successfully in hydropathic establishments - has as its aim the amelioration of the nervous condition by means of two factors: shielding the patient and strengthening him. I have nothing to say against such a method of treatment, except that it takes no account of the circumstances of the patient’s sexual life. According to my experience, it is highly desirable that the medical directors of such establishments should become properly aware that they are dealing, not with victims of civilization or heredity, but - sit venia verbo - with people who are crippled in sexuality. They would then, on the one hand, be more easily able to account for their successes as well as their failures; and, on the other, they would achieve new successes which, till now, have been at the mercy of chance or of the patient’s unguided behaviour. If we take a neurasthenic woman, suffering from anxiety, away from her home and send her to a hydropathic establishment, and if there, freed from all duties, she is made to bathe and take exercise and eat plenty of food, we shall certainly be inclined to think that the improvement - often a brilliant one - which is achieved in a few weeks or months is due to the rest which she has enjoyed and to the invigorating effects of hydrotherapy. That may be so: but we are overlooking the fact that her removal from home also entails an interruption of marital intercourse, and that it is only the temporary elimination of this pathogenic cause which makes it possible for her to recover under favourable treatment. Neglect of this aetiological point of view brings its subsequent revenge, when what seemed such a gratifying cure turns out to be a very transitory one. Soon after the patient has returned to ordinary life the symptoms of the complaint appear once more and oblige him either to spend a part of his existence unproductively from time to time in establishments of this kind or to direct his hopes of recovery elsewhere. It is therefore clear that with neurasthenia the therapeutic problems must be attacked, not in hydropathic institutions but within the framework of the patient’s life.

Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

467

In other cases our aetiological theory can help the physician in charge of the institution by throwing light on the source of failures which occur in the institution itself, and can suggest to him means of avoiding them. Masturbation is far commoner among grown-up girls and mature men than is generally supposed, and it has a harmful effect not only by producing neurasthenic symptoms, but also because it keeps the patients under the weight of what they feel to be a disgraceful secret. Physicians who are not accustomed to translate neurasthenia into masturbation account for the patient’s pathological state by referring it to some catchword like anaemia, undernourishment, overwork, etc., and then expect to cure him by applying a therapy devised against those conditions. To their astonishment, however, periods of improvement in him alternate with periods in which all his symptoms grow worse and are accompanied by severe depression. The outcome of such a treatment is, in general, doubtful. If physicians knew that all the while the patient was struggling against his sexual habit and that he was in despair because he had once more been obliged to give way to it, if they understood how to win his secret from him, to make it less serious in his eyes and to support him in his fight against the habit, then the success of their therapeutic efforts might in this way well be assured.

To break the patient of the habit of masturbating is only one of the new therapeutic tasks which are imposed on the physician who takes the sexual aetiology of the neurosis into account; and it seems that precisely this task, like the cure of any other addiction, can only be carried out in an institution and under medical supervision. Left to himself, the masturbator is accustomed, whenever something happens that depresses him, to return to his convenient form of satisfaction. Medical treatment, in this instance, can have no other aim than to lead the neurasthenic, who has now recovered his strength, back to normal sexual intercourse. For sexual need, when once it has been aroused and has been satisfied for any length of time, can no longer be silenced; it can only be displaced along another path. Incidentally, the same thing applies to all treatments for breaking an addiction. Their success will only be an apparent one, so long as the physician contents himself with withdrawing the narcotic substance from his patients, without troubling about the source from which their imperative need for it springs. ‘Habit’ is a mere form of words, without any explanatory value. Not everyone who has occasion to take morphia, cocaine, chloral hydrate, and so on, for a period, acquires in this way an ‘addiction’ to them. Closer enquiry usually shows that these narcotics are meant to serve - directly or indirectly - as a substitute for a lack of sexual satisfaction; and whenever normal sexual life can no longer be re-established, we can count with certainty on the patient’s relapse.

Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

468

Another task is set to the physician by the aetiology of anxiety neurosis. It consists in inducing the patient to give up all detrimental forms of sexual intercourse and to adopt normal sexual relations. This duty, it will be understood, falls primarily on the patient’s trusted physician - his family doctor; and he will do his patient a serious injury if he regards himself as too respectable to intervene in this field.

Since in these instances it is most often a question of a married couple, the physician’s efforts at once encounter Malthusian plans for limiting the number of conceptions in marriage. There seems to me no doubt that such proposals are gaining ground more and more among our middle classes. I have come across some couples who have already begun practising methods for preventing conception as soon as they have had their first child, and others whose sexual intercourse was from their wedding-night designed to comply with that purpose. The problem of Malthusianism is far-reaching and complicated, and I have no intention of handling it here in the exhaustive manner which would actually be necessary for the treatment of neuroses. I shall only consider what attitude a physician who recognizes the sexual aetiology of the neuroses had best take up towards the problem.

Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

469

The worst thing he can do is obviously - under whatever pretext - to try to ignore it. Nothing that is necessary can be beneath my dignity as a doctor; and it is necessary to give a married couple who contemplate limiting the number of their offspring the assistance of one’s medical advice if one does not want to expose one or both of them to a neurosis. It cannot be denied that in any marriage Malthusian preventive measures will become necessary at some time or other; and, from a theoretical point of view, it would be one of the greatest triumphs of humanity, one of the most tangible liberations from the constraints of nature to which mankind is subject, if we could succeed in raising the responsible act of procreating children to the level of a deliberate and intentional activity and in freeing it from its entanglement with the necessary satisfaction of a natural need.

A perspicacious physician will therefore take it upon himself to decide under what conditions the use of measures for preventing conception are justified, and, among those measures, he will have to separate the harmful from the harmless ones. Everything is harmful that hinders the occurrence of satisfaction. But, as we know, we possess at present no method of preventing conception which fulfils every legitimate requirement - that is, which is certain and convenient, which does not diminish the sensation of pleasure during coitus and which does not wound the woman’s sensibilities. This sets physicians a practical task to the solution of which they could bend their energies with rewarding results. Whoever fills in this lacuna in our medical technique will have preserved the enjoyment of life and maintained the health of numberless people; though, it is true, he will also have paved the way for a drastic change in our social conditions.

Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

470

This does not exhaust the possibilities which flow from a recognition of the sexual aetiology of the neuroses. The main benefit which we obtain from it for neurasthenics lies in the sphere of prophylaxis. If masturbation is the cause of neurasthenia in youth, and if, later on, it acquires aetiological significance for anxiety neurosis as well, by reason of the reduction of potency which it brings about, then the prevention of masturbation in both sexes is a task that deserves more attention than it has hitherto received. When we reflect upon all the injuries, both the grosser and the finer ones, which proceed from neurasthenia - a disorder which we are told is growing more and more prevalent - we see that it is positively a matter of public interest that men should enter upon sexual relations with full potency. In matters of prophylaxis, however, the individual is relatively helpless. The whole community must become interested in the matter and give their assent to the creation of generally acceptable regulations. At present we are still far removed from such a state of affairs which would promise relief, and it is for this reason that we may with justice regard civilization, too, as responsible for the spread of neurasthenia. Much would have to be changed. The resistance of a generation of physicians who can no longer remember their own youth must be broken down; the pride of fathers, who are unwilling to descend to the level of humanity in their children’s eyes, must be overcome; and the unreasonable prudery of mothers must be combated - the mothers who at present look upon it as an incomprehensible and undeserved stroke of fate that ‘their children should have been the ones to become neurotic’. But above all, a place must be created in public opinion for the discussion of the problems of sexual life. It will have to become possible to talk about these things without being stamped as a trouble-maker or as a person who makes capital out of the lower instincts. And so here, too, there is enough work left to do for the next hundred years - in which our civilization will have to learn to come to terms with the claims of our sexuality.

Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

471

The value of making a correct diagnostic separation of the psychoneuroses from neurasthenia is also shown by the fact that the psychoneuroses call for a different practical assessment and for special therapeutic measures. They make their appearance as a result of two kinds of determinants, either independently or in the train of the ‘actual neuroses’ (neurasthenia and anxiety neurosis). In the latter case we are dealing with a new type of neurosis - incidentally, a very frequent one - a mixed neurosis. The aetiology of the ‘actual neuroses’ has become an auxiliary aetiology of the psychoneuroses. A clinical picture arises in which, let us say, anxiety neurosis predominates but which also contains traits of genuine neurasthenia, hysteria and obsessional neurosis. When confronted with a mixture of this kind, we shall nevertheless not be wise to give up separating out the clinical pictures proper to each neurotic illness; for after all it is not difficult to explain the case to oneself in the following manner. The predominant place taken by the anxiety neurosis shows that the illness has come into being under the aetiological influence of an ‘actual’ sexual noxa. But the person concerned was, apart from that, disposed to one or more of the psychoneuroses owing to a special aetiology and would at some time or other have fallen ill of a psychoneurosis either spontaneously or with the advent of some other weakening factor. In this way the auxiliary aetiology for the psychoneurosis which is still lacking is supplied by the actual aetiology of the anxiety neurosis.

For such cases it has quite correctly come to be the therapeutic practice to disregard the psychoneurotic components in the clinical picture and to treat the ‘actual neurosis’ exclusively. In very many cases it is possible to overcome the neurosis as well which it has brought along with it, provided that the neurasthenia is effectively dealt with. But a different view must be taken in those cases of psychoneurosis which either appear spontaneously or remain behind as an independent entity after an illness composed of neurasthenia and psychoneurosis has run its course. When I speak of a ‘spontaneous’ appearance of a psychoneurosis, I do not mean that anamnestic investigation shows us no aetiological element whatever. It may do so, no doubt; but it may also happen that our attention is directed to some indifferent factor - an emotional state, an enfeeblement owing to physical illness, and so on. It must, however, be borne in mind in all these cases that the true aetiology of the psychoneuroses does not lie in such precipitating causes, but remains beyond the reach of ordinary anamnestic examination.

Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

472

As we know, it is in an attempt to bridge this gap that the assumption has been made of a special neuropathic disposition (which, incidentally, if it existed, would not leave much hope of success for the treatment of such pathological conditions). The neuropathic disposition itself is regarded as a sign of a general degeneracy, and thus this convenient technical term has come to be superabundantly used against the wretched patients whom the doctors are quite incapable of helping. Fortunately, the state of affairs is different. The neuropathic disposition does no doubt exist, but I must deny that it suffices for the creation of a psychoneurosis. I must further deny that the conjunction of a neuropathic disposition with precipitating causes occurring in later life constitutes an adequate aetiology of the psychoneuroses. In tracing back the vicissitudes of an individual’s illness to the experiences of his ancestors, we have gone too far; we have forgotten that between his conception and his maturity there lies a long and important period of life - his childhood - in which the seeds of later illness may be acquired. And that- is what in fact happens with a psychoneurosis. Its true aetiology is to be found in childhood experiences, and, once again - and exclusively - in impressions concerned with sexual life. We do wrong to ignore the sexual life of children entirely; in my experience, children are capable of every psychical sexual activity, and many somatic sexual ones as well. Just as the whole human sexual apparatus is not comprised in the external genitals and the two reproductive glands, so human sexual life does not begin only with puberty, as on a rough inspection it may appear to do. Nevertheless it is true that the organization and evolution of the human species strives to avoid any great degree of sexual activity during childhood. It seems that in man the sexual instinctual forces are meant to be stored up so that, on their release at puberty, they may serve great cultural ends. (W. Fliess.) Consideration of this sort may make it possible to understand why the sexual experiences of childhood are bound to have a pathogenic effect. But they produce their effect only to a very slight degree at the time at which they occur; what is far more important is their deferred effect, which can only take place at later periods of growth. This deferred effect originates - as it can do in no other way - in the psychical traces which have been left behind by infantile sexual experiences. During the interval between the experiences of those impressions and their reproduction (or rather, the reinforcement of the libidinal impulses which proceed from them), not only the somatic sexual apparatus but the psychical apparatus as well has undergone an important development; and thus it is that the influence of these earlier sexual experiences now leads to an abnormal psychical reaction, and psychopathological structures come into existence.

Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

473

I can do no more in these brief hints than mention the chief factors on which the theory of the psychoneuroses is based: the deferred nature of the effect and the infantile state of the sexual apparatus and of the mental instrument. To reach a true understanding of the mechanism by which the psychoneuroses come about, a more extended exposition would be necessary. Above all, it would be indispensable to put forward as worthy of belief certain hypotheses, which seem to me to be new, about the composition and mode of operation of the psychical apparatus. In a book on the interpretation of dreams on which I am now engaged I shall find occasion to touch upon those fundamental elements of a psychology of the neuroses. For dreams belong to the same set of psychopathological structures as hysterical idées fixes, obsessions, and delusions.

Since the manifestations of the psychoneuroses arise from the deferred action of unconscious psychical traces, they are accessible to psychotherapy. But in this case the therapy must pursue paths other than the only one so far followed of suggestion with or without hypnosis. Basing myself on the ‘cathartic’ method introduced by Josef Breuer, I have in recent years almost completely worked out a therapeutic procedure which I propose to describe as ‘psycho-analytic’. I owe a great number of successes to it, and I hope I may be able further to increase it effectiveness considerably. The first accounts of the technique and scope of this method were given in Studies on Hysteria, written jointly with Breuer and published in 1895. Since then a good deal, as I think I may say, has been altered for the better. Whereas at that time we modestly declared that we could undertake to only to remove the symptoms of hysteria, not to cure hysteria itself, this distinction has since come to seem to me without substance, so that there is a prospect of a genuine cure of hysteria and obsessions. It is therefore with very lively interest that I have read in the publications of colleagues that ‘in this case the ingenious procedure devised by Breuer and Freud has failed’, or that ‘the method has not performed what it seemed to promise’. This gave me something of the feelings of a man who reads his own obituary in the paper, but who is able to reassure himself by his better knowledge of the facts. For the method is so difficult that it has quite definitely to be learned; and I cannot recall that a single one of my critics has expressed a wish to learn it from me. Nor do I believe that, like me, they have occupied themselves with it intensely enough to have been able to discover it for themselves. The remarks in the Studies on Hysteria are totally inadequate to enable a reader to master the technique, nor are they in any way intended to give any such complete instruction.

Psycho-analytic therapy is not at present applicable to all cases. It has, to my knowledge, the following limitations. It demands a certain degree of maturity and understanding in the patient and is therefore not suited for the young or for adults who are feeble-minded or uneducated. It also fails with people who are very advanced in years, because, owing to the accumulation of material in them, it would take up so much time that by the end of the treatment they would have reached a period of life in which value is no longer attached to nervous health. Finally, the treatment is only possible if the patient has a normal psychical state from which the pathological material can be mastered from which to work i.e. a relatively normal ego. During a condition of hysterical confusion, or an interpolated mania or melancholia, nothing can be effected by psycho-analytic means. Such cases can nevertheless be treated by analysis after the violent manifestations have been quieted by the usual measures. In actual practice, chronic cases of psychoneurosis are altogether more amenable to the method than cases with acute crises, in which the greatest stress is naturally laid on the speed with which the crises can be dealt with. For this reason, the most favourable field of work for this new therapy is offered by hysterical phobias and the various forms of obsessional neurosis.

Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

474

That the method is confined within these limits is to a large extent explained by the circumstances in which I had to work it out. My material does in fact consist of chronic nervous cases derived from the more educated classes. I think it very probable that supplementary methods may be devised for treating children and the public who go for assistance to hospitals. I ought also to say that up to the present I have tried my treatment exclusively on severe cases of hysteria and obsessional neurosis; I cannot tell how it would turn out with those mild cases which, to all appearance at least, are cured by some unspecific kind of treatment lasting for a few months. It will readily be understood that a new therapy which calls for many sacrifices can only reckon on obtaining patients who have already tried the generally accepted methods without success, or whose condition has justified the inference that they could expect nothing from these supposedly more convenient and shorter therapeutic procedures. Thus it happened that I was obliged to tackle the hardest tasks straightaway with an imperfect instrument. The test has proved all the more convincing.

The main difficulties which still stand in the way of the psycho-analytic method of cure. It is no more than a necessary corollary to this complete ignorance that doctors consider themselves justified in using the most unfounded assurances for the consolation of their patients or in order to induce them to adopt therapeutic measures. ‘Come to my sanatorium for six weeks’, they will say, ‘and you will get rid of your symptoms’ (travel anxiety, obsessions, and so on).Sanatoria are, it is true, indispensable for calming acute attacks that may arise in the course of a psychoneurosis by diverting the patient’s attention, nursing him and taking care of him. But towards removing chronic conditions they achieve precisely nothing: and the superior sanatoria, which are supposed to be conducted on scientific lines, do no more than the ordinary hydropathic establishments.

Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

475

It would be more dignified as well as more helpful to the patient - who, after all, has to come to terms with his ailments - for the doctor to tell the truth, as he knows it from his daily practice. The psychoneuroses as a genus are by no means mild illnesses. When hysteria sets in, no one can foretell when it will come to an end. We mostly comfort ourselves with the vain prophecy that ‘one day it will suddenly disappear’. Recovery often enough turns out to be merely an agreement to mutual toleration between the sick part of the patient and the healthy part; or it is the result of the transformation of a symptom into a phobia. A girl’s hysteria, calmed down with difficulty, revives in her as a wife after the short interruption of young married happiness. The only difference is that another person, the husband, is now driven by his own interests to keep silence about her condition. Even if an illness of this kind leads to no manifest incapacity on the patients’ part to carry on their life, it nearly always prevents free unfolding of their mental powers. Obsessions recur throughout their lives; and phobias and other restrictions upon the will have hitherto been unamenable to treatment of any kind. All this is kept from the knowledge of the layman. The father of a hysterical girl is consequently horrified if, for instance, he is asked to agree to her being given a year’s treatment, when she has perhaps only been ill for a few months. The layman is, as it were, deeply convinced in himself that all these psychoneuroses are unnecessary; so he has no patience with the processes of the illness and no readiness to make sacrifices for its treatment. If, in face of a case of typhus which lasts three weeks, or of a broken leg which takes six months to mend, he adopts a more understanding attitude, and if, as soon as his child shows the first signs of a curvature of the spine, he finds it reasonable that orthopaedic treatment should be carried on over several years, the difference in his behaviour is due to the better knowledge on the part of the physicians who pass on their knowledge honestly to the layman. Honesty on the part of the physician and willing acquiescence on the part of the layman will be established for the neuroses too, as soon as an insight into the nature of those affections becomes common property in the medical world. Radical treatment of these disorders will no doubt always require special training and will be incompatible with other kinds of medical activity. On the other hand, this class of physicians, which will, I believe, be a large one in the future, has the prospect of achieving noteworthy results and of obtaining a satisfying insight into the mental life of mankind.

476

THE PSYCHICAL MECHANISM OF FORGETFULNESS

(1898)

477

Intentionally left blank

478

THE PSYCHICAL MECHANISM OF FORGETFULNESS

The phenomenon of forgetfulness, which I should like to describe and then go on to explain in this paper, has doubtless been experienced by everyone in himself or been observed by him in others. It affects in particular the use of proper names - nomen propria - and it manifests itself in the following manner. In the middle of carrying on a conversation we find ourselves obliged to confess to the person we are talking to that we cannot hit on a name we wanted to mention at that moment, and we are forced to ask for his - usually ineffectual - help. ‘What is his name? I know it so well. It’s on the tip of my tongue. Just this minute it’s escaped me.’ An unmistakable feeling of irritation, similar to that which accompanies motor aphasia, now attends our further efforts to find the name, which we feel we had in our head only a moment before. In appropriate instances two accompanying features deserve our notice. First, an energetic deliberate concentration of the function which we call attention proves powerless, however long it is continued, to find the lost name. Secondly, in place of the name we are looking for, another name promptly appears, which we recognize as incorrect and reject, but which persists in coming back. Or else, instead of a substituted name, we find in our memory a single letter or syllable, which we. We say, for instance: ‘It begins with a "B".’ If we finally succeed, in one way or another, in discovering what the name is, we find in the great majority of cases that it does not begin with a ‘B’ and does not in fact contain the letter ‘B’ at all.

The Psychical Mechanism Of Forgetfulness

479

The best procedure for getting hold of the missing name is, as is generally known, ‘not to think of it’ - that is, to divert from the task that part of the attention over which one has voluntary control. After a while, the missing name ‘shoots’ into one’s mind; one cannot prevent oneself from calling it out aloud - to the great astonishment of one’s companion, who has already forgotten the episode and who has in any case only taken very little interest in the speaker’s efforts. ‘Really,’ he is apt to say, ‘it makes no difference what the man is called; only go on with your story.’ The whole of the time until the matter is cleared up, and even after the intentional diversion, one feels preoccupied to a degree which cannot in fact be explained by the amount of interest possessed by the whole affair.¹

In a few cases which I have myself experienced of forgetting names in this way, I have succeeded, by means of psychical analysis, in accounting to myself for the chain of events; and I shall now describe in detail the simplest and clearest case of this kind.

During my summer holidays I once went for a carriage drive from the lovely city of Ragusa to a town nearby in Herzegovina. Conversation with my companion centred, as was natural, round the condition of the two countries (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and the character of their inhabitants. I talked about the various peculiarities of the Turks living there, as I had heard them described years before by a friend and colleague who had lived among them as a doctor for many years. A little later, our conversation turned to the subject of Italy and of pictures, and I had occasion to recommend my companion strongly to visit Orvieto some time, in order to see the frescoes there of the end of the world and the Last Judgement, with which one of the chapels in the cathedral had been decorated by a great artist. But the artist’s name escaped me and I could not recall it. I exerted my powers of recollection, made all the details of the day I spent in Orvieto pass before my memory and convinced myself that not the smallest part of it had been obliterated or become indistinct. On the contrary, I was able to conjure up the pictures with greater sensory vividness than is usual with me. I saw before my eyes with especial sharpness the artist’s self-portrait - with a serious face and folded hands - which he has put in a corner of one of the pictures, next to the portrait of his predecessor in the work, Fra Angelico da Fiesole; but the artist’s name, ordinarily so familiar to me, remained obstinately in hiding, nor could my travelling companion help me out. My continued efforts met with no success beyond bringing up the names of two other artists, who I knew could not be the right ones. These were Botticelli and, in the second place, Boltraffio.² The repetition of the sound ‘Bo’ in the two substitutive names might perhaps have led a novice to suppose that it belonged to the missing name as well, but I took good care to steer clear of that expectation.

¹ Nor by any feeling of unpleasure one may have at being inhibited in a psychical act.

² The first of these names was very familiar to me; the second, on the other hand, I hardly knew.

The Psychical Mechanism Of Forgetfulness

480

Since I had no access to any reference books on my journey, I had for several days to put up with this lapse of memory and with the inner torment associated with it which recurred at frequent intervals each day, until I fell in with a cultivated Italian who freed me from it by telling me the name: Signorelli. I was myself able to add the artist’s first name, Luca. Soon my ultra-clear memory of the master’s features, as depicted in his portrait, faded away.

What influences had led me to forget the name Signorelli which was so familiar to me and which is so easily impressed on the memory? And what paths had led to its replacement by the names Botticelli and Boltraffio? A short excursion back into the circumstances in which the forgetting had taken place sufficed to throw a light on both questions.

Shortly before I had come to the subject of the frescoes in the cathedral at Orvieto, I had been telling my travelling-companion something I had heard from my colleague years ago about the Turks in Bosnia. They treat doctors with special respect and they show, in marked contrast to our own people, an attitude of resignation towards the dispensations of fate. If the doctor has to inform the father of a family that one of his relatives is about to die, his reply is: ‘Herr, what is there to be said? If he could be saved, I know you would help him.’ Another recollection lay in my memory close to this story. The same colleague had told me what overriding importance these Bosnians attached to sexual enjoyments. One of his patients said to him once: ‘Herr, you must know, that if that comes to an end then life is of no value.’ At the time, it seemed to the doctor and me that the two character-traits of the Bosnian people illustrated by this could be assumed to be intimately connected with each other. But when I remembered these stories on my drive into Herzegovina, I suppressed the second one, in which the subject of sexuality was touched on. It was soon after this that the name Signorelli escaped me and that the names Botticelli and Boltraffio appeared as substitutes.

The influence which had made the name Signorelli inaccessible to memory, or, as I am accustomed to say, had ‘repressed’ it, could only proceed from the story I had suppressed about the value set on death and sexual enjoyment. If that was so, we ought to be able to discover the intermediate ideas which had served to connect the two themes. The affinity between their content - in the one case, the Last Judgement, ‘Doomsday’, and in the other, death and sexuality- seems to be very slight; and since the matter concerned the repression from memory of a name, it was on the face of it probable that the connection was between one name and another. Now, ‘Signor’ means ‘Herr, and the ‘Herr’ is also present in the name ‘Herzegovina’. Moreover it was certainly not without relevance that both the patients’ remarks which I was to recall contained a ‘Herr’ as a form of address to the doctor. The translation of ‘Signor’ into ‘Herr’ was therefore the means by which the story that I had suppressed had drawn after it into repression the name I was looking for. The whole process was clearly made easier by the fact that during the last few days in Ragusa I had been speaking Italian continually - that is, that I had become accustomed to translating German into Italian in my head.¹

When I tried to recover the name of the artist, to bring it back out of repression, the influence of the tie which the name had entered into in the meantime inevitably made itself felt. I did find an artist’s name, but not the right one. It was a displaced name, and the line of displacement was laid down by the names that were contained in the repressed topic. ‘Botticelli’ contains the same final syllables as ‘Signorelli’; the final syllables - which, unlike the first part of the word, ‘Signor’, could not make a direct connection with the name ‘Herzegovina’ - had therefore returned; but the influence of the name ‘Bosnia’, which is regularly associated with the name ‘Herzegovina’, had shown itself by directing the substitution to two artists’ names which began with the same syllable ‘Bo’: ‘Botticelli’ and then ‘Boltraffio’. The finding of the name ‘Signorelli’ is thus seen to have been interfered with by the topic which lay behind it, in which the names ‘Bosnia’ and ‘Herzegovina’ appear.

¹ ‘A far-fetched, forced explanation’, it will be said. This impression to establish a connection with what is not suppressed; and for this purpose it does not scorn even the path of external association. There is the same ‘forced’ situation when rhymes have to be made.

The Psychical Mechanism Of Forgetfulness

481

For this topic to have been able to produce such effects it is not enough that I should have suppressed it once in conversation - an event brought about by chance motives. We must assume rather that the topic itself was also intimately bound up with trains of thought which were in a state of repression in me - that is, with trains of thought which, in spite of the intensity of the interest taken in them, were meeting with a resistance that was keeping them from being worked over by a particular psychical agency and thus from becoming conscious. That this was really true at that time of the topic of ‘death and sexuality’ I have plenty of evidence, which I need not bring up here, derived from my own self-investigation. But I may draw attention to one consequence of these repressed thoughts. Experience has taught me to require that every psychical product shall be fully elucidated and even overdetermined. Accordingly, it seemed to me that the second substitutive name, ‘Boltraffio’, called for a further determination; for so far only its initial letters had been accounted for, by their assonance with ‘Bosnia’. I now recollected that these repressed thoughts had never engrossed me more than they had a few weeks before after I had received a certain piece of news. The place where the news reached me was called ‘Trafoi’ and this name is too much like the second half of the name ‘Boltraffio’ not to have had a determining effect on my choice of the latter. In the following small schematic diagram, I have attempted to reproduce the relations which have now been brought to light.

Fig. 1

The Psychical Mechanism Of Forgetfulness

482

It is perhaps not without interest for its own sake to be able to see into the history of a psychical event of this kind, which is among the most trivial disturbances that can affect the control of the psychical apparatus and which is compatible with an otherwise untroubled state of psychical health. But the example elucidated here receives an immensely added interest when we learn that it may serve as nothing more nor less than a model for the pathological processes to which the psychical symptoms of the psychoneuroses - hysteria, obsessions and paranoia - owe their origin. In both cases we find the same elements and the same play of forces between those elements. In the same manner as here and by means of similar superficial associations, a repressed train of thought takes possession in neuroses of an innocent recent impression and draws it down with itself into repression. The same mechanism which causes the substitute names ‘Botticelli’ and ‘Boltraffio’ to emerge from  ‘Signorelli’ (a substitution by means of intermediate or compromise ideas) also governs the formation of obsessional thoughts and paranoic paramnesias. Again, we have seen that such cases of forgetfulness have the characteristic of liberating continuous unpleasure till the moment the problem is solved - a characteristic which is unintelligible apart from this, and something which was in fact unintelligible to the person I was talking to; but there is a complete analogy to it in the way in which collections of repressed thoughts attach their capacity for producing affect to some symptom whose psychical content seems to our judgement totally unsuited to such a liberation of affect. Finally, the resolution of the whole tension by a communication of the correct name from an external quarter is itself a good example of the efficacy of psycho-analytic therapy, which aims at correcting the repressions and displacements and which removes the symptoms by re-instating the genuine psychical object.

The Psychical Mechanism Of Forgetfulness

483

Among the various factors, therefore, which contribute to a failure in recollection or a loss of memory, the part played by repression must not be overlooked; and it can be demonstrated not only in neurotics but (in a manner that is qualitatively the same) in normal people as well. It may be asserted quite generally that the ease (and ultimately the faithfulness, too) with which a given impression is awakened in the memory depends not only on the psychical constitution of the individual, the strength of the impression when it was fresh, the interest directed towards it at the time, the psychical constellation at the present time, the interest that is now devoted to its awakening, the connections into which the impression has been drawn, and so on - not only on such things but also on the favourable or unfavourable attitude of a particular psychical factor which refuses to reproduce anything that might liberate unpleasure, or that might subsequently lead to the liberation of unpleasure. Thus the function of memory, which we like to regard as an archive open to anyone who is curious, is in this way subjected to restriction by a trend of the will, just as is any part of our activity directed to the external world. Half the secret of hysterical amnesia is uncovered when we say that hysterical people do not know what they do not want to know; and psycho-analytic treatment, which endeavours to fill up such gaps of memory in the course of its work, leads us to the discovery that the bringing back of those lost memories is opposed by a certain resistance which has to be counterbalanced by work proportionate to its magnitude. In the case of psychical processes which are on the whole normal, it cannot, of course, be claimed that the influence of this one-sided factor in the revival of memories in any way regularly overcomes all the other factors that must be taken into account.¹

¹ It would be a mistake to believe that the mechanism which I have brought to light in these pages only operates in rare cases. It is, on the contrary, a very common one. On one occasion, for instance, when I was meaning to describe the same small incident to a colleague of mine, the name of my authority for the stories about Bosnia suddenly escaped me. The reason for this was as follows. Just before, I had been playing cards. My authority was called Pick. Now ‘Pick’ and ‘Herz’ are two of the four suits in the pack. Moreover the two words were connected by an anecdote in which this same person pointed to himself and said: ‘I’m not called "Herz", but "Pick".’ ‘Herz’ appears in the name ‘Herzegovina’ and the heart itself, as a sick bodily organ, played a part in the thoughts I have described as having been repressed.

The Psychical Mechanism Of Forgetfulness

484

In connection with the tendentious nature of our remembering and forgetting, I not long ago experienced an instructive example - instructive because of what it betrayed - of which I should like to add an account here. I was intending to pay a twenty-four-hour visit to a friend of mine who unfortunately lives very far away, and I was full of the things I was going to tell him. But before this I felt under an obligation to call on a family of my acquaintance in Vienna, one of whose members had moved to the town in question, so as to take their greetings and messages with me to the absent relative. They told me the name of the pension in which he lived, and also the name of the street and the number of the house, and, in view of my bad memory, wrote the address on a card, which I put in my wallet. The next day, when I had arrived at my friend’s, I began: ‘I’ve only one duty to carry out that may interfere with our being together; it’s a call, and it shall be the first thing I do. The address is in my wallet.’ To my astonishment, however, it was not to be found there. So now I had to fall back on my memory, after all. My memory for names is not particularly good, but it is incomparably better than for figures and numbers. I may have been paying medical visits at a certain house for a year on end, and yet, if I should have to be driven there by a cab driver, I should have difficulty in remembering the number of the house. But in this case I had taken special note of the house number; it was ultra-clear, as if to jeer at me - for no trace remained in my recollection of the name of the pension or the street. I had forgotten all the data in the address which might have served as a starting - point for discovering the pension; and, quite against my usual habit, I had retained the number of the house, which was useless for the purpose. In consequence, I was unable to make the call. I was consoled remarkably quickly, and I devoted myself entirely to my friend. When I was back again in Vienna and standing in front of my writing desk, I knew without a moment’s hesitation where it was that, in my ‘absent-mindedness’, I had put the card with the address on it. In my unconscious hiding of the thing the same intention had been operative as in my curiously modified act of forgetting.

485

SCREEN MEMORIES

(1899)

486

Intentionally left blank

487

SCREEN MEMORIES

In the course of my psycho-analytic treatment of cases of hysteria, obsessional neurosis, etc., I have often had to deal with fragmentary recollections which have remained in the patient’s memory from the earliest years of his childhood. As I have shown elsewhere, great pathogenic importance must be attributed to the impressions of that time of life. But the subject of childhood memories is in any case bound to be of psychological interest, for they bring into striking relief a fundamental difference between the psychical functioning of children and of adults. No one calls in question the fact that the experiences of the earliest years of our childhood leave ineradicable traces in the depths of our minds. If, however, we seek in our memories to ascertain what were the impressions that were destined to influence us to the end of our lives, the outcome is either nothing at all or a relatively small number of isolated recollections which are often of dubious or enigmatic importance. It is only from the sixth or seventh year onwards - in many cases only after the tenth year - that our lives can be reproduced in memory as a connected chain of events. From that time on, however, there is also a direct relation between the psychical significance of an experience and its retention in the memory. Whatever seems important on account of its immediate or directly subsequent effects is recollected; whatever is judged to be inessential is forgotten. If I can remember an event a long time after its occurrence, I regard the fact of having retained it in my memory as evidence of its having made a deep impression on me at the time. I feel surprised at forgetting; and I feel even more surprised, perhaps, at remembering something apparently indifferent.

Screen Memories

488

It is only in certain pathological mental conditions that the relation holding in normal adults between the psychical significance of an event and its retention in memory once more ceases to apply. For instance, a hysteric habitually shows amnesia for some or all of the experiences which led to the onset of his illness and which from that very fact have become important to him and, apart from that fact, may have been important on their own account. The analogy between pathological amnesia of this kind and the normal amnesia affecting our early years seems to me to give a valuable hint at the intimate connection that exists between the psychical content of neuroses and our infantile life.

We are so much accustomed to this lack of memory of the impressions of childhood that we are apt to overlook the problem underlying it and are inclined to explain it as a self-evident consequence of the rudimentary character of the mental activities of children. Actually, however, a normally developed child of three or four already exhibits an enormous amount of highly organized mental functioning in the comparisons and inferences which he makes and in the expression of his feelings; and there is no obvious reason why amnesia should overtake these psychical acts, which carry no less weight than those of a later age.

Before dealing with the psychological problems attaching to the earliest memories of childhood, it would of course be essential to make a collection of material by circularizing a fairly large number of normal adults and discovering what kind of recollections they are able to produce from these early years. A first step in this direction was taken in 1895 by V. and C. Henri, who sent round a paper of questions drawn up by them. The highly suggestive results of their questionnaire, which brought in replies from 123 persons, were published by the two authors in 1897. I have no intention at present of discussing the subject as a whole, and I shall therefore content myself with emphasizing the few points which will enable me to introduce the notion of what I have termed ‘screen memories’.

The age to which the content of the earliest memories of childhood is usually referred back is the period between the ages of two and four. (This is the case with 88 persons in the series observed by the Henris.) There are some, however, whose memory reaches back further - even to the time before the completion of their first year; and, on the other hand, there are some whose earliest recollections go back only to their sixth, seventh, or even eighth year. There is nothing at the moment to show what else is related to these individual differences; is to be noticed, say the Henris, that a person whose earliest recollection goes back to a very tender age - to the first year of his life, perhaps - will also have at his disposal further detached memories from the following years, and that he will be able to reproduce his experiences as a continuous chain from an earlier point of time - from about his fifth year - than is possible for other people, whose first recollection dates from a later time. Thus not only the date of the appearance of the first recollection but the whole function of memory may, in the case of some people, be advanced or retarded.

Screen Memories

489

Quite special interest attaches to the question of what is the usual content of these earliest memories of childhood. The psychology of adults would necessarily lead us to expect that those experiences would be selected as worth remembering which had aroused some powerful emotion or which, owing to their consequences, had been recognized as important soon after their occurrence. And some indeed of the observations collected by the Henris appear to fulfil this expectation. They report that the most frequent content of the first memories of childhood are on the one hand occasions of fear, shame, physical pain, etc., and on the other hand important events such as illnesses, deaths, fires, births of brothers and sisters, etc. We might therefore be inclined to assume that the principle governing the choice of memories is the same in the case of children as in that of adults. It is intelligible - though the fact deserves to be explicitly mentioned - that the memories retained from childhood should necessarily show evidence of the difference between what attracts the interest of a child and of an adult. This easily explains why, for instance, one woman reports that she remembers a number of accidents that occurred to her dolls when she was two years old but has no recollection of the serious and tragic events she might have observed at the same period.

Now, however, we are met by a fact that is diametrically opposed to our expectations and cannot fail to astonish us. We hear that there are some people whose earliest recollections of childhood are concerned with everyday and indifferent events which could not produce any emotional effect even in children, but which are recollected (too clearly, one is inclined to say) in every detail, while approximately contemporary events, even if, on the evidence of their parents, they moved them intensely at the time, have not been retained in their memory. Thus the Henris mention a professor of philology whose earliest memory, dating back to between the ages of three and four, showed him a table laid for a meal and on it a basin of ice. At the same period there occurred the death of his grandmother which, according to his parents, was a severe blow to the child. But the professor of philology, as he now is, has no recollection of this bereavement; all that he remembers of those days is the basin of ice. Another man reports that his earliest memory is an episode upon a walk in which he broke off a branch from a tree. He thinks he can still identify the spot where this happened. There were several other people present, and one of them helped him.

Screen Memories

490

The Henris describe such cases as rare. In my experience, based for the most part, it is true, on neurotics, they are quite frequent. One of the subjects of the Henris’ investigation made an attempt at explaining the occurrence of these mnemic images, whose innocence makes them so mysterious, and his explanation seems to me very much to the point. He thinks that in such cases the relevant scene may perhaps have been only incompletely retained in the memory, and that that may be why it seems so unenlightening: the parts that have been forgotten probably contained everything that made the experience noteworthy. I am able to confirm the truth of this view, though I should prefer to speak of these elements of the experience being omitted rather than forgotten. I have often succeeded, by means of psycho-analytic treatment, in uncovering the missing portions of a childhood experience and in thus proving that when the impression, of which no more than a torso was retained in the memory, had been restored to completeness, it did in fact agree with the presumption that it is the most important things that are recollected. This, however, provides no explanation of the remarkable choice which memory has made among the elements of the experience. We must first enquire why it should be that precisely what is important is suppressed and what is indifferent retained; and we shall not find an explanation of this until we have investigated the mechanism of these processes more deeply. We shall then form a notion that two psychical forces are concerned in bringing about memories of this sort. One of these forces takes the importance of the experience as a motive for seeking to remember it, while the other - a resistance - tries to prevent any such preference from being shown. These two opposing forces do not cancel each other out, nor does one of them (whether with or without loss to itself) overpower the other. Instead, a compromise is brought about, somewhat on the analogy of the resultant in a parallelogram of forces. And the compromise is this. What is recorded as a mnemic image is not the relevant experience itself - in this respect the resistance gets its way; what is recorded is another psychical element closely associated with the objectionable one - and in this respect the first principle shows its strength, the principle which endeavours to fix important impressions by establishing reproducible mnemic images. The result of the conflict is therefore that, instead of the mnemic image which would have been justified by the original event, another is produced which has been to some degree associatively displaced from the former one. And since the elements of the experience which aroused objection were precisely the important ones, the substituted memory will necessarily lack those important elements and will in consequence most probably strike us as trivial. It will seem incomprehensible to us because we are inclined to look for the reason for its retention in its own content, whereas in fact that retention is due to the relation holding between its own content and a different one which has been suppressed. There is a common saying among us about shams, that they are not made of gold themselves but have lain beside something that is made of gold. The same simile might well be applied to some of the experiences of childhood which have been retained in the memory.

Screen Memories

491

There are numerous possible types of case in which one psychical content is substituted for another, and these come about in a variety of psychological constellations. One of the simplest of these cases is obviously that occurring in the childhood memories with which we are here concerned - the case, that is, where the essential elements of an experience are represented in memory by the inessential elements of the same experience. It is a case of displacement on to something associated by continuity; or, looking at the process as a whole, a case of repression accompanied by the substitution of something in the neighbourhood (whether in space or time). I have elsewhere¹ had occasion to describe a very similar instance of substitution which occurred in the analysis of a patient suffering from paranoia. The woman in question hallucinated voices, which used to repeat long passages from Otto Ludwig’s novel Die Heiterethei to her. But the passages they chose were the most trifling and irrelevant in the book. The analysis showed, however, that there were other passages in the same work which had stirred up the most distressing thoughts in the patient. The distressing affect was a motive for putting up a defence against them, but the motives in favour of pursuing them further were not to be suppressed. The result was a compromise by which the innocent passages emerged in the patient’s memory with pathological strength and clarity. The process which we here see at work - conflict, repression, substitution involving a compromise - returns in all psychoneurotic symptoms and gives us the key to understanding their formation. Thus it is not without importance if we are able to show the same process operating in the mental life of normal individuals, and the fact that what it influences in normal people is precisely their choice of childhood memories seems to afford one more indication of the intimate relations which have already been insisted upon between the mental life of children and the psychical material of the neuroses.

The processes of normal and pathological defence and the displacements in which they result are clearly of great importance. But to the best of my knowledge no study whatever has hitherto been made of them by psychologists; and it remains to be ascertained in what strata of psychical activity and under what conditions they come into operation. The reason for this neglect may well be that our mental life, so far as it is the object of our conscious internal perception, shows nothing of these processes, apart from instances which we classify as ‘faulty reasoning’ and some mental operations which aim at producing a comic effect. The assertion that a psychical intensity can be displaced from one presentation (which is then abandoned) on to another (which thenceforward plays the psychological part of the former one) is as bewildering to us as certain features of Greek mythology - as, for instance, when the gods are said to clothe someone with beauty as though it were with a veil, whereas we think only of a face transfigured by a change of expression.

¹ ‘Further Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’ (1896b).

Screen Memories

492

Further investigation of these indifferent childhood memories has taught me that they can originate in other ways as well and that an unsuspected wealth of meaning lies concealed behind their apparent innocence. But on this point I shall not content myself with a mere assertion but shall give a detailed report of one particular instance which seems to me the most instructive out of a considerable number of similar ones. Its value is certainly increased by the fact that it relates to someone who is not at all or only very slightly neurotic.

The subject of this observation is a man of university education, aged thirty-eight. Though his own profession lies in a very different field, he has taken an interest in psychological questions ever since I was able to relieve him of a slight phobia by means of psycho-analysis. Last year he drew my attention to his childhood memories, which had already played some part in his analysis. After studying the investigation made by V. and C. Henri, he gave me the following summarized account of his own experience.

‘I have at my disposal a fair number of early memories of childhood which I can date with great certainty. For at the age of three I left the small place where I was born and moved to a large town; and all these memories of mine relate to my birth place and therefore date from my second and third years. They are mostly short scenes, but they are very well preserved and furnished with every detail of sense-perception, in complete contrast to my memories of adult years, which are entirely lacking in the visual element. From my third year onwards my recollections grow scantier and less clear; there are gaps in them which must cover more than a year; and it is not, I believe, until my sixth or seventh year that the stream of my memories becomes continuous. My memories up to the time of my leaving my first place of residence fall into three groups. The first group consists of scenes which my parents have repeatedly since described to me. As regards these, I feel uncertain whether I have had the mnemic image from the beginning or whether I only construed it after hearing one of these descriptions. I may remark, however, that there are also events of which I have no mnemic image in spite of their having been frequently retailed by my parents. I attach more importance to the second group. It comprises scenes which have not (so far as I know) been described to me and some of which, indeed, could not have been described to me, as I have not met the other participants in them (my nurse and playmates) since their occurrence. I shall come to the third group presently. As regards the content of these scenes and their consequent claim to being recollected, I should like to say that I am not entirely at sea. I cannot maintain, indeed, that what I have retained are memories of the most important events of the period, or what I should to-day judge to be the most important. I have no knowledge of the birth of a sister, who is two and a half years younger than I am; my departure, my first sight of the railway and the long carriage-drive before it - none of these has left a trace in my memory. On the other hand, I can remember two small occurrences during the railway-journey; these, as you will recollect, came up in the analysis of my phobia. But what should have made most impression on me was an injury to my face which caused a considerable loss of blood and for which I had to have some stitches put in by a surgeon. I can still feel the scar resulting from this accident, but I know of no recollection which points to it, either directly or indirectly. It is true that I may perhaps have been under two years old at the time.

Screen Memories

493

‘It follows from this that I feel no surprise at the pictures and scenes of these first two groups. No doubt they are displaced memories from which the essential element has for the most part been omitted. But in a few of them it is at least hinted at, and in others it is easy for me to complete them by following certain pointers. By doing so I can establish a sound connection between the separate fragments of memories and arrive at a clear understanding of what the childish interest was that recommended these particular occurrences to my memory. This does not apply, however, to the content of the third group, which I have not so far discussed. There I am met by material - one rather long scene and several smaller pictures - with which I can make no headway at all. The scene appears to me fairly indifferent and I cannot understand why it should have become fixed in my memory. Let me describe it to you. I see a rectangular, rather steeply sloping piece of meadow-land, green and thickly grown; in the green there are a great number of yellow flowers - evidently common dandelions. At the top end of the meadow there is a cottage and in front of the cottage door two women are standing chatting busily, a peasant-woman with a handkerchief on her head and a children’s nurse. Three children are playing in the grass. One of them is myself (between the age of two and three); the two others are my boy cousin, who is a year older than me, and his sister, who is almost exactly the same age as I am. We are picking the yellow flowers and each of us is holding a bunch of flowers we have already picked. The little girl has the best bunch; and, as though by mutual agreement, we - the two boys - fall on her and snatch away her flowers. She runs up the meadow in tears and as a consolation the peasant-woman gives her a big piece of black bread. Hardly have we seen this than we throw the flowers away, hurry to the cottage and ask to be given some bread too. And we are in fact given some; the peasant-woman cuts the loaf with a long knife. In my memory the bread tastes quite delicious - and at that point the scene breaks off.

‘Now what is there in this occurrence to justify the expenditure of memory which it has occasioned me?  I have racked my brains in vain over it. Does the emphasis lie on our disagreeable behaviour to the little girl? Did the yellow colour of the dandelions- a flower which I am, of course, far from admiring to-day - so greatly please me? Or, as a result of my careering round the grass, did the bread taste so much nicer than usual that it made an unforgettable impression on me? Nor can I find any connection between this scene and the interest which (as I was able to discover without any difficulty) bound together the other scenes from my childhood. Altogether, there seems to me something not quite right about this scene. The yellow of the flowers is a disproportionately prominent element in the situation as a whole, and the nice taste of the bread seems to me exaggerated in an almost hallucinatory fashion. I cannot help being reminded of some pictures that I once saw in a burlesque exhibition. Certain portions of these pictures, and of course the most inappropriate ones, instead of being painted, were built up in three dimensions - for instance, the ladies’ bustles. Well, can you point out any way of finding an explanation or interpretation of this redundant memory of my childhood?’

Screen Memories

494

I thought it advisable to ask him since when he had been occupied with this recollection: whether he was of opinion that it had recurred to his memory periodically since his childhood, or whether it had perhaps emerged at some later time on some occasion that could be recalled. This question was all that it was necessary for me to contribute to the solution of the problem; the rest was found by my collaborator himself, who was no novice at jobs of this kind.

‘I have not yet considered that point,’ he replied. ‘Now that you have raised the question, it seems to me almost a certainty that this childhood memory never occurred to me at all in my earlier years. But I can also recall the occasion which led to my recovering this and many other recollections of my earliest childhood. When I was seventeen and at my secondary school, I returned for the first time to my birthplace for the holidays, to stay with a family who had been our friends ever since that remote date. I know quite well what a wealth of impressions overwhelmed me at that time. But I see now that I shall have to tell you a whole big piece of my history: it belongs here, and you have brought it upon yourself by your question. So listen. I was the child of people who were originally well-to-do and who, I fancy, lived comfortably enough in that little corner of the provinces. When I was about three, the branch of industry in which my father was concerned met with a catastrophe. He lost all his means and we were forced to leave the place and move to a large town. Long and difficult years followed, of which, as it seems to me, nothing was worth remembering. I never felt really comfortable in the town. I believe now that I was never free from a longing for the beautiful woods near our home, in which (as one of my memories from those days tells me) I used to run off from my father, almost before I had learnt to walk. Those holidays, when I was seventeen, were my first holidays in the country, and, as I have said, I stayed with a family with whom we were friends and who had risen greatly in the world since our move. I could compare the comfort reigning there with our own style of living at home in the town. But it is no use evading the subject any longer: I must admit that there was something else that excited me powerfully. I was seventeen, and in the family where I was staying there was a daughter of fifteen, with whom I immediately fell in love. It was my first calf-love and sufficiently intense, but I kept it completely secret. After a few days the girl went off to her school (from which she too was home for the holidays) and it was this separation after such a short acquaintance that brought my longings to a really high pitch. I passed many hours in solitary walks through the lovely woods that I had found once more and spent my time building castles in the air. These, strangely enough, were not concerned with the future but sought to improve the past. If only the smash had not occurred! If only I had stopped at home and grown up in the country and grown as strong as the young men in the house, the brothers of my love! And then if only I had followed my father’s profession and if I had finally married her - for I should have known her intimately all those years! I had not the slightest doubt, of course, that in the circumstances created by my imagination I should have loved her just as passionately as I really seemed to then. A strange thing. For when I see her now from time to time - she happens to have married someone here - she is quite exceptionally indifferent to me. Yet I can remember quite well for what a long time afterwards I was affected by the yellow colour of the dress she was wearing when we first met, whenever I saw the same colour anywhere else.’

Screen Memories

495

That sounds very much like your parenthetical remark to the effect that you are no longer fond of the common dandelion. Do you not suspect that there may be a connection between the yellow of the girl’s dress and the ultra-clear yellow of the flowers in your childhood scene?

‘Possibly. But it was not the same yellow. The dress was more of a yellowish brown, more like the colour of wallflowers. However, I can at least let you have an the intermediate idea which may serve your purpose. At a later date, while I was the in the Alps, I saw how certain flowers which have light colouring in the lowlands take on darker shades at high altitudes. Unless I am greatly mistaken, there is frequently to be found in mountainous regions a flower which is very similar to the dandelion but which is dark yellow and would exactly agree in colour with the dress of the girl I was so fond of. But I have not finished yet. I now come to a second occasion which stirred up in me the impressions of my childhood and which dates from a time not far distant from the first. I was seventeen when I revisited my birthplace. Three years later during my holidays I visited my uncle and met once again the children who had been my first playmates, the same two cousins, the boy a year older than I am and the girl of the same age as myself, who appear in the childhood scene with the dandelions. This family had left my birthplace at the same time as we did and had become prosperous in a far-distant city.’

And did you once more fall in love - with your cousin this time - and indulge in a new set of phantasies?

‘No, this time things turned out differently. By then I was at the University and I was a slave to my books. I had nothing left over for my cousin. So far as I know I had no similar phantasies on that occasion. But I believe that my father and my uncle had concocted a plan by which I was to exchange the abstruse subject of my studies for one of more practical value, settle down, after my studies were completed, in the place where my uncle lived, and marry my cousin. No doubt when they saw how absorbed I was in my own intentions the plan was dropped; but I fancy I must certainly have been aware of its existence. It was not until later, when I was a newly-fledged man of science and hard pressed by the exigencies of life and when I had to wait so long before finding a post here, that I must sometimes have reflected that my father had meant well in planning this marriage for me, to make good the loss in which the original catastrophe had involved my whole existence.’

Screen Memories

496

Then I am inclined to believe that the childhood scene we are considering emerged at this time, when you were struggling for your daily bread - provided, that is, that you can confirm my idea that it was during this same period that you first made the acquaintance of the Alps.

‘Yes, that is so: mountaineering was the one enjoyment that I allowed myself at that time. But I still cannot grasp your point.’

I am coming to it at once. The element on which you put most stress in your childhood scene was the fact of the country-made bread tasting so delicious. It seems clear that this idea, which amounted almost to a hallucination, corresponded to your phantasy of the comfortable life you would have led if you had stayed at home and married this girl - or, in symbolic language, of how sweet the bread would have tasted for which you had to struggle so hard in your later years. The yellow of the flowers, too, points to the same girl. But there are also elements in the childhood scene which can only be related to the second phantasy - of being married to your cousin. Throwing away the flowers in exchange for bread strikes me as not a bad disguise for the scheme your father had for you: you were to give up your unpractical ideals and take on a ‘bread-and-butter’ occupation, were you not?

‘It seems then that I amalgamated the two sets of phantasies of how my life could have been more comfortable -the "yellow" and the "country-made bread" from the one and the throwing away of the flowers and the actual people concerned from the other.’

Yes. You projected the two phantasies on to one another and made a childhood memory of them. The element about the Alpine flowers is as it were a stamp giving the date of manufacture. I can assure you that people often construct such things unconsciously - almost like works of fiction.

‘But if that is so, there was no childhood memory, but only a phantasy put back into childhood. A feeling tells me, though, that the scene is genuine. How does that fit in?’

There is in general no guarantee of the data produced by our memory. But I am ready to agree with you that the scene is genuine. If so, you selected it from innumerable others of a similar or another kind because, on account of its content (which in itself was indifferent) it was well adapted to represent the two phantasies, which were important enough to you. A recollection of this kind, whose value lies in the fact that it represents in the memory impressions and thoughts of a later date whose content is connected with its own by symbolic or similar links, may appropriately be called a ‘screen memory’. In any case you will cease to feel any surprise that this scene should so often recur to your mind. It can no longer be regarded as an innocent one since, as we have discovered, it is calculated to illustrate the most momentous turning-points in your life, the influence of the two most powerful motive forces - hunger and love.

Screen Memories

497

‘Yes, it represented hunger well enough. But what about love?’

In the yellow of the flowers, I mean. But I cannot deny that in this childhood scene of yours love is represented far less prominently than I should have expected from my previous experience.

‘No. You are mistaken. The essence of it is its representation of love. Now I understand for the first time. Think for a moment! Taking flowers away from a girl means to deflower her. What a contrast between the boldness of this phantasy and my bashfulness on the first occasion and my indifference on the second.’

I can assure you that youthful bashfulness habitually has as its complement bold phantasies of that sort.

‘But in that case the phantasy that has transformed itself into these childhood memories would not be a conscious one that I can remember, but an unconscious one?’

Unconscious thoughts which are a prolongation of conscious ones. You think to yourself ‘If I had married so-and-so’, and behind the thought there is an impulse to form a picture of what the ‘being married’ really is.

‘I can go on with it now myself. The most seductive part of the whole subject for a young scapegrace is the picture of the marriage night. (What does he care about what comes afterwards?) But that picture cannot venture out into the light of day: the dominating mood of diffidence and of respect towards the girl keeps it suppressed. So it remains unconscious-'

Screen Memories

498

And slips away into a childhood memory. You are quite right. It is precisely the coarsely sensual element in the phantasy which explains why it does not develop into a conscious phantasy but must be content to find its way allusively and under a flowery disguise into a childhood scene.

‘But why precisely, into a childhood scene, I should like to know?’

For the sake of its innocence, perhaps. Can you imagine a greater contrast to these designs for gross sexual aggression than childish pranks? However, there are more general grounds that have a decisive influence in bringing about the slipping away of repressed thoughts and wishes into childhood memories: for you will find the same thing invariably happening in hysterical patients. It seems, moreover, as though the recollection of the remote past is in itself facilitated by some pleasurable motive: forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit.¹

‘If that is so, I have lost all faith in the genuineness of the dandelion scene. This is how I look at it: On the two occasions in question, and with the support of very comprehensible realistic motives, the thought occurred to me: "If you had married this or that girl, your life would have become much pleasanter." The sensual current in my mind took hold of the thought which is contained in the protasis and repeated it in images of a kind capable of giving that same sensual current satisfaction. This second version of the thought remained unconscious on account of its incompatibility with the dominant sexual disposition; but this very fact of its remaining unconscious enabled it to persist in my mind long after changes in the real situation had quite got rid of the conscious version. In accordance, as you say, with a general law, the clause that had remained unconscious sought to transform itself into a childhood scene which, on account of its innocence, would be able to become conscious. With this end in view it had to undergo a fresh transformation, or rather two fresh transformations. One of these removed the objectionable element from the protasis by expressing it figuratively; the second forced the apodosis into a shape capable of visual representation - using for the purpose the intermediary ideas of "bread" and "bread-and-butter occupations". I see that by producing a phantasy like this I was providing, as it were, a fulfilment of the two suppressed wishes for deflowering a girl and for material comfort. But now that I have given such a complete account of the motives that led to my producing the dandelion phantasy, I cannot help concluding that what I am dealing with is something that never happened at all but has been unjustifiably smuggled in among my childhood memories.’

¹ [‘Some day, perhaps, it will be a joy to remember even these things.’]

Screen Memories

499

I see that I must take up the defence of its genuineness. You are going too far. You have accepted my assertion that every suppressed phantasy of this kind tends to slip away into a childhood scene. But suppose now that this cannot occur unless there is a memory-trace the content of which offers the phantasy a point of contact - comes, as it were, half way to meet it. Once a point of contact of this kind has been found - in the present instance it was the deflowering, the taking away of the flowers - the remaining content of the phantasy is remodelled with the help of every legitimate intermediate idea - take the bread as an example - till it can find further points of contact with the content of the childhood scene. It is very possible that in the course of this process the childhood scene itself also undergoes changes; I regard it as certain that falsifications of memory may be brought about in this way too. In your case the childhood scene seems only to have had some of its lines engraved more deeply: think of the over-emphasis on the yellow and the exaggerated niceness of the bread. But the raw material was utilizable. If that had not been so, it would not have been possible for this particular memory, rather than any others, to make its way forward into consciousness. No such scene would have occurred to you as a childhood memory, or perhaps some other one would have - for you know how easily our ingenuity can build connecting bridges from any one point to any other. And apart from your own subjective feeling which I am not inclined to under-estimate, there is another thing that speaks in favour of the genuineness of your dandelion memory. It contains elements which have not been solved by what you have told me and which do not in fact fit in with the sense required by the phantasy. For instance, your boy cousin helping you to rob the little girl of her flowers - can you make any sense of the idea of being helped in deflowering someone? or of the peasant woman and the nurse in front of the cottage?

Screen Memories

500

‘Not that I can see.’

So the phantasy does not coincide completely with the childhood scene. It is only based on it at certain points. That argues in favour of the childhood memory being genuine.

‘Do you think an interpretation like this of an apparently innocent childhood memory is often applicable?’

Very often, in my experience. Shall we amuse ourselves by seeing whether the two examples given by the Henris can be interpreted as screen memories concealing subsequent experiences and wishes? I mean the memory of a table laid for a meal with a basin of ice on it, which was supposed to have some connection with the death of the subject’s grandmother, and the other memory, of a child breaking off a branch from a tree while he was on a walk and of his being helped to do it by someone.

He reflected for a little and then answered: ‘I can make nothing of the first one. It is most probably a case of displacement at work; but the intermediate steps are beyond guessing. As for the second case, I should be prepared to give an interpretation, if only the person concerned had not been a Frenchman.’

I cannot follow you there. What difference would that make?

‘A great deal of difference, since what provides the intermediate step between a screen memory and what it conceals is likely to be a verbal expression. In German "to pull one out" is a very common vulgar term for masturbation. The scene would then be putting back into early childhood a seduction to masturbation - someone was helping him to do it - which in fact occurred at a later period. But even so, it does not fit, for in the childhood scene there were a number of other people present.’

Whereas his seduction to masturbate must have occurred in solitude and secrecy. It is just that contrast that inclines me to accept your view: it serves once again to make the scene innocent. Do you know what it means when in a dream we see ‘a lot of strangers’, as happens so often in dreams of nakedness in which we feel so terribly embarrassed? Nothing more nor less than secrecy, which there again is expressed by its opposite. However, our interpretation remains a jest, since we have no idea whether a Frenchman would recognize an allusion to masturbation in the words casser une branche d’un arbre or in some suitably emended phrase.

Screen Memories

501

This analysis, which I have reproduced as accurately as possible, will, I hope, have to some extent clarified the concept of a ‘screen memory’ as one which owes its value as a memory not to its own content but to the relation existing between that content and some other, that has been suppressed. Different classes of screen memories can be distinguished according to the nature of that relation. We have found examples of two of these classes among what are described as the earliest memories of childhood - that is, if we include under the heading of screen memories the incomplete childhood scenes which are innocent by very reason of their incompleteness. It is to be anticipated that screen memories will also be formed from residues of memories relating to later life as well. Anyone who bears in mind their distinctive feature - namely that they are extremely well remembered but that their content is completely indifferent - will easily recall a number of examples of the sort from his own memory. Some of these screen memories dealing with events later in life owe their importance to a connection with experiences in early youth which have remained suppressed. The connection, that is, is the reverse of the one in the case which I have analysed, where a childhood memory was accounted for by later experiences. A screen memory may be described as ‘retrogressive’ or as having ‘pushed forward’ according as the one chronological relation or the other holds between the screen and the thing screened-off. From another point of view, we can distinguish positive screen memories from negative ones (or refractory memories) whose content stands in a contrary relation to the suppressed material. The whole subject deserves a more thorough examination; but I must content myself with pointing out what complicated processes - processes, incidentally, which are altogether analogous to the formation of hysterical symptoms - are involved in the building up of our store of memories.

Screen Memories

502

Our earliest childhood memories will always be a subject of special interest because the problem mentioned at the beginning of this paper (of how it comes about that the impressions which are of most significance for our whole future usually leave no mnemic images behind) leads us to reflect upon the origin of conscious memories in general. We shall no doubt be inclined at first to separate off the screen memories which are the subject of this study as heterogeneous elements among the residues of childhood recollections. As regards the remaining images, we shall probably adopt the simple view that they arise simultaneously with an experience as an immediate consequence of the impression it makes and that thereafter they recur from time to time in accordance with the familiar laws of reproduction. Closer observation, however, reveals certain features which do not tally with this view. Above all, there is the following point. In the majority of significant and in other respects unimpeachable childhood scenes the subject sees himself in the recollection as a child, with the knowledge that this child is himself; he sees this child, however, as an observer from outside the scene would see him. The Henris duly draw attention to the fact that many of those taking part in their investigation expressly emphasized this peculiarity of childhood scenes. Now it is evident that such a picture cannot be an exact repetition of the impression that was originally received. For the subject was then in the middle of the situation and was attending not to himself but to the external world.

Whenever in a memory the subject himself appears in this way as an object among other objects this contrast between the acting and the recollecting ego may be taken as evidence that the original impression has been worked over. It looks as though a memory-trace from childhood had here been translated back into a plastic and visual form at a later date - the date of the memory’s arousal. But no reproduction of the original impression has ever entered the subject’s consciousness.

Screen Memories

503

There is another fact that affords even more convincing evidence in favour of this second view. Out of a number of childhood memories of significant experiences, all of them of similar distinctness and clarity, there will be some scenes which, when they are tested (for instance by the recollections of adults), turn out to have been falsified. Not that they are complete inventions; they are false in the sense that the they have shifted an event to a place where it did not occur - this is the case in one of the instances quoted by the Henris - or that they have merged two people into one or substituted one for the other, or the scenes as a whole give signs of being combinations of two separate experiences. Simple inaccuracy of recollection does not play any considerable part here, in view of the high degree of sensory intensity possessed by the images the and the efficiency of the function of memory in the young; close the investigation shows rather that these falsifications of memory are tendentious - that is, that they serve the purposes of the repression and replacement of objectionable or disagreeable impressions. It follows, therefore, that these falsified memories too, must have originated at a period of life when it has become the possible for conflicts of this kind and impulsions towards repression to have made a place for themselves in mental life - far later, therefore, than the period to which their content belongs. But in these cases too the falsified memory is the first that we become aware of: the raw material of memory-traces out of which it was forged remains unknown to us in its original form.

The recognition of this fact must diminish the distinction we have drawn between screen memories and other memories derived from our childhood. It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess. Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused. In these periods of arousal, the child hood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge; they were formed at that time. And a number of motives, with no concern for historical accuracy, had a part in forming them, as well as in the selection of the memories themselves.

504

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

(1901)

505

Intentionally left blank

506

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

FREUD, SIGM., Vienna. Born May 6, 1856, at Freiberg in Moravia. Studied in Vienna. Pupil of Brücke, the physiologist. Promotion, 1881. Pupil of Charcot in Paris 1885-6. Habilitation, 1885. Has worked as physician and Dozent at Vienna University since 1886. Proposed as Professor Extraordinarius, 1897. Earlier Freud produced writings on histology and cerebral anatomy and, subsequently, clinical works on neuropathology; translated writings by Charcot and Bernheim. In 1884 ‘Über Coca’, a paper which introduced cocaine into medicine. In 1891 Zur Auffassung der Aphasien. In 1891 and 1893 monographs on the cerebral palsies of children, which culminated in 1897 in the volume on the subject in Nothnagel’s Handbuch. In 1895 Studien über Hysterie (with Dr. J. Breuer). Since then Freud has turned to the study of the psychoneuroses and especially hysteria, and in a series of shorter works he has stressed the aetiological significance of sexual life for the neuroses. He has also developed a new psychotherapy of hysteria, on which only extremely little has been published. A book, Die Traumdeutung, is in the press.

507

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

(1900)

Flectere si nequero superos, Acheronta movebo

The Interpretation Of Dreams

508

Preface to the First Edition

I have attempted in this volume to give an account of the interpretation of dreams; and in doing so I have not, I believe, trespassed beyond the sphere of interest covered by neuro-pathology. For psychological investigation shows that the dream is the first member of a class of abnormal psychical phenomena of which further members, such as hysterical phobias, obsessions and delusions, are bound for practical reasons to be a matter of concern to physicians. As will be seen in the sequel, dreams can make no such claim to practical importance; but their theoretical value as a paradigm is on the other hand proportionately greater. Anyone who has failed to explain the origin of dream-images can scarcely hope to understand phobias, obsessions or delusions or to bring a therapeutic influence to bear on them.

But the same correlation that is responsible for the importance of the subject must also bear the blame for the deficiencies of the present work. The broken threads which so frequently interrupt my presentation are nothing less than the many points of contact between the problem of the formation of dreams and the more comprehensive problems of psycho pathology. These cannot be treated here, but, if time and strength allow and further material comes to hand, will form the subject of later communications.

The difficulties of presentation have been further increased by the peculiarities of the material which I have had to use to illustrate the interpreting of dreams. It will become plain in the course of the work itself why it is that none of the dreams already reported in the literature of the subject or collected from unknown sources could be of any use for my purposes. The only dreams open to my choice were my own and those of my patients undergoing psycho-analytic treatment. But I was precluded from using the latter material by the fact that in its case the dream-processes were subject to an undesirable complication owing to the added presence of neurotic features. But if I was to report my own dreams, it inevitably followed that I should have to reveal to the public gaze more of the intimacies of my mental life than I liked, or than is normally necessary for any writer who is a man of science and not a poet. Such was the painful but unavoidable necessity; and I have submitted to it rather than totally abandon the possibility of giving the evidence for my psychological findings. Naturally, however, I have been unable to resist the temptation of taking the edge off some of my indiscretions by omissions and substitutions. But whenever this has happened, the value of my instance has been very definitely diminished. I can only express a hope that readers of this book will put themselves in my difficult situation and treat me with indulgence, and further, that anyone who finds any sort of reference to himself in my dreams may be willing to grant me the right of freedom of thought - in my dream-life, if nowhere else.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

509

Preface to the Second Edition

If within ten years of the publication of this book (which is very far from being an easy one to read) a second edition is called for, this is not due to the interest taken in it by the professional circles to whom my original preface was addressed. My psychiatric colleagues seem to have taken no trouble to overcome the initial bewilderment created by my new approach to dreams. The professional philosophers have become accustomed to polishing off the problems of dream-life (which they treat as a mere appendix to conscious states) in a few sentences - and usually in the same ones; and they have evidently failed to notice that we have something here from which a number of inferences can be drawn that are bound to transform our psychological theories. The attitude adopted by reviewers in the scientific periodicals could only lead one to suppose that my work was doomed to be sunk into complete silence; while the small group of gallant supporters, who practise medical psycho-analysis under my guidance and who follow my example in interpreting dreams and make use of their interpretations in treating neurotics, would never have exhausted the first edition of the book. Thus it is that I feel indebted to a wider circle of educated and curious-minded readers, whose interest has led me to take up once more after nine years this difficult, but in many respects fundamental, work.

I am glad to say that I have found little to change in it. Here and there I have inserted some new material, added some fresh points of detail derived from my increased experience, and at some few points recast my statements. But the essence of what I have written about dreams and their interpretation, as well as about the psychological theorems to be deduced from them - all this remains unaltered: subjectively at all events, it has stood the test of time. Anyone who is acquainted with my other writings (on the aetiology and mechanism of the psycho-neuroses) will know that I have never put forward inconclusive opinions as though they were established facts, and that I have always sought to modify my statements so that they may keep in step with my advancing knowledge. In the sphere of dream-life I have been able to leave my original assertions unchanged. During the long years in which I have been working at the problems of the neuroses I have often been in doubt and some times been shaken in my convictions. At such times it has always been the Interpretation of Dreams that has given me back my certainty. It is thus a sure instinct which has led my many scientific opponents to refuse to follow me more especially in my researches upon dreams.

An equal durability and power to withstand any far-reaching alterations during the process of revision has been shown by the material of the book, consisting as it does of dreams of my own which have for the most part been overtaken or made valueless by the march of events and by which I illustrated the rules of dream-interpretation. For this book has a further subjective significance for me personally - a significance which I only grasped after I had completed it. It was, I found, a portion of my own self-analysis, my reaction to my father’s death - that is to say, to the most important event, the most poignant loss, of a man’s life. Having discovered that this was so, I felt unable to obliterate the traces of the experience. To my readers, however, it will be a matter of indifference upon what particular material they learn to appreciate the importance of dreams and how to interpret them.

Wherever I have found it impossible to incorporate some essential addition into the original context, I have indicated its more recent date by enclosing it in square brackets.¹

BERCHTESGADEN, Summer 1908

¹ [Footnote added 1914.] In later editions these were omitted.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

510

Preface to the Third Edition

Nine years elapsed between the first and second editions of this book, but after scarcely more than a single year a third edition has become necessary. This new turn of events may please me; but just as formerly I was unwilling to regard the neglect of my book by readers as evidence of its worthlessness, so I cannot claim that the interest which is now being taken in it is a proof of its excellence.

Even the Interpretation of Dreams has not been left untouched by the advance of scientific knowledge. When I wrote it in 1899, my theory of sexuality was not yet in existence and the analysis of the more complicated forms of psycho-neurosis was only just beginning. It was my hope that dream-interpretation would help to make possible the psychological analysis of the neuroses; since then a deeper understanding of neuroses has reacted in turn upon our view of dreams. The theory of dream-interpretation has itself developed further in a direction on which insufficient stress had been laid in the first edition of this book. My own experience, as well as the works of Wilhelm Stekel and others, have since taught me to form a truer estimate of the extent and importance of symbolism in dreams (or rather in unconscious thinking ). Thus in the course of these years much has accumulated which demands attention. I have endeavoured to take these innovations into account by making numerous interpolations in the text and by additional footnotes. If these additions threaten at times to burst the whole framework of the book or if I have not everywhere succeeded in bringing the original text up to the level of our present knowledge, I must ask the reader’s indulgence for these deficiencies: they are the results and signs of the present increasingly rapid development of our science. I may even venture to prophesy in what other directions later editions of this book - if any should be needed - will differ from the present one. They will have on the one hand to afford a closer contact with the copious material presented in imaginative writing, in myths, in linguistic usage and in folklore; while on the other hand they will have to deal in greater detail than has here been possible with the relations of dreams to neuroses and mental diseases.

Herr Otto Rank has given me valuable assistance in selecting the additional matter and has been entirely responsible for correcting the proofs. I owe my thanks to him and to many others for their contributions and corrections.

VIENNA, Spring 1911

The Interpretation Of Dreams

511

Preface to the Fourth Edition

Last year (1913) Dr. A. A. Brill of New York produced an English translation of this book (The Interpretation of Dreams, G. Allen & Co., London).

On this occasion Dr. Otto Rank has not only corrected the proofs but has also contributed two self-contained chapters to the text - the appendices to Chapter VI.

VIENNA, June 1914

The Interpretation Of Dreams

512

Preface to the Fifth Edition

Interest in the Interpretation of Dreams has not flagged even during the World War, and while it is still in progress a new edition has become necessary. It has not been possible, however, to notice fully publications since 1914; neither Dr. Rank nor I have any knowledge of foreign works since that date.

A Hungarian translation, prepared by Dr. Hollós and Dr. Ferenczi, is on the point of appearing. In 1916-17 my Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis were published in Vienna by Hugo Heller. The central section of these, comprising eleven lectures, is devoted to an account of dreams which aims at being more elementary and at being in closer contact with the theory of the neuroses than the present work. On the whole it is in the nature of an epitome of the Interpretation of Dreams, though at certain points it enters into greater detail.

I have not been able to bring myself to embark upon any fundamental revision of this book, which might bring it up to the level of our present psycho-analytic views but would on the other hand destroy its historic character. I think, however, that after an existence of nearly twenty years it has accomplished its task.

BUDAPEST-STEINBRUCH, July 1918

The Interpretation Of Dreams

513

Preface to the Sixth Edition

Owing to the difficulties in which the book trade is placed at present, this new edition has long been in demand, and the preceding edition has, for the first time, been reprinted without any alterations. Only the bibliography at the end of the volume has been completed and brought up to date by Dr. Otto Rank.

Thus my assumption that after an existence of nearly twenty years this book had accomplished its task has not been confirmed. On the contrary, I might say that it has a new task to perform. If its earlier function was to offer some information on the nature of dreams, now it has the no less important duty of dealing with the obstinate misunderstandings to which that information is subject.

VIENNA, April 1921

The Interpretation Of Dreams

514

Preface to the Eighth Edition

During the interval between the publication of the last (seventh) edition of this book in 1922 and the present one, my Gesammelte Schriften have been issued in Vienna by the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag. The second volume of that collection consists of an exact reprint of the first edition of the Interpretation of Dreams, while the third volume contains all the additions that have since been made to it. The translations of the book which have appeared during the same interval are based upon the usual, single-volume, form of the work: a French one by I. Meyerson published under the title of La science des rêves in the ‘Bibliothèque de Philosophie Contemporaine’ in 1926; a Swedish one by John Landquist, Drömtydning (1927); and a Spanish one by Luis López Ballesteros y de Torres, which occupies Volumes VI and VII of the Obras Completas. The Hungarian translation, which I thought was on the point of completion as long ago as in 1918, has even now not appeared.

In the present revised edition of the work I have again treated it essentially as an historic document and I have only made such alterations in it as were suggested by the clarification and deepening of my own opinions. In accordance with this, I have finally given up the idea of including a list of works on the problems of dreams published since the book’s first appearance, and that section has now been dropped. The two essays which Otto Rank contributed to earlier editions, on ‘Dreams and Creative Writing’ and ‘Dreams and Myths’, have also been omitted.

VIENNA, December 1929

The Interpretation Of Dreams

515

Preface to the Third (Revised) English Edition

In 1909 G. Stanley Hall invited me to Clark University, in Worcester, to give the first lectures on psycho-analysis. In the same year Dr. Brill published the first of his translations of my writings, which were soon followed by further ones. If psycho-analysis now plays a role in American intellectual life, or if it does so in the future, a large part of this result will have to be attributed to this and other activities of Dr. Brill’s.

His first translation of The Interpretation of Dreams appeared in 1913. Since then much has taken place in the world, and much has been changed in our views about the neuroses. This book, with the new contribution to psychology which surprised the world when it was published (1900), remains essentially unaltered. It contains, even according to my present-day judgement, the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make. Insight such as this falls to one’s lot but once in a lifetime.

VIENNA, March 15, 1931

The Interpretation Of Dreams

516

CHAPTER I

THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE DEALING WITH THE PROBLEMS OF DREAMS

In the pages that follow I shall bring forward proof that there is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and that, if that procedure is employed, every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which has a meaning and which can be inserted at an assignable point in the mental activities of waking life. I shall further endeavour to elucidate the processes to which the strangeness and obscurity of dreams are due and to deduce from those processes the nature of the psychical forces by whose concurrent or mutually opposing action dreams are generated. Having gone thus far, my description will break off, for it will have reached a point at which the problem of dreams merges into more comprehensive problems, the solution of which must be approached upon the basis of material of another kind.

I shall give by way of preface a review of the work done by earlier writers on the subject as well as of the present position of the problems of dreams in the world of science, since in the course of my discussion I shall not often have occasion to revert to those topics. For, in spite of many thousands of years of effort, the scientific understanding of dreams has made very little advance - a fact so generally admitted in the literature that it seems unnecessary to quote instances in support of it. In these writings, of which a list appears at the end of my work, many stimulating observations are to be found and a quantity of interesting material bearing upon our theme, but little or nothing that touches upon the essential nature of dreams or that offers a final solution of any of their enigmas. And still less, of course, has passed into the knowledge of educated laymen.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

517

It may be asked what view was taken of dreams in prehistoric times by primitive races of men and what effect dreams may have had upon the formation of their conceptions of the world and of the soul; and this is a subject of such great interest that it is only with much reluctance that I refrain from dealing with it in this connection. I must refer my readers to the standard works of Sir John Lubbock, Herbert Spencer, E. B. Tylor and others, and I will only add that we shall not be able to appreciate the wide range of these problems and speculations until we have dealt with the task that lies before us here - the interpretation of dreams.

The prehistoric view of dreams is no doubt echoed in the attitude adopted towards dreams by the peoples of classical antiquity.¹ They took it as axiomatic that dreams were connected with the world of superhuman beings in whom they believed and that they were revelations from gods and daemons. There could be no question, moreover, that for the dreamer dreams had an important purpose, which was as a rule to foretell the future. The extraordinary variety in the content of dreams and in the impression they produced made it difficult, however, to have any uniform view of them and made it necessary to classify dreams into numerous groups and subdivisions according to their importance and trustworthiness. The position adopted towards dreams by individual philosophers in antiquity was naturally dependent to some extent upon their attitude towards divination in general.

In the two works of Aristotle which deal with dreams, they have already become a subject for psychological study. We are told that dreams are not sent by the gods and are not of a divine character, but that they are ‘daemonic’, since nature is ‘daemonic’ and not divine. Dreams, that is, do not arise from supernatural manifestations but follow the laws of the human spirit, though the latter, it is true, is akin to the divine. Dreams are defined as the mental activity of the sleeper in so far as he is asleep.

¹  What follows is based on Büchsenschütz’s scholarly study (1868).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

518

Aristotle was aware of some of the characteristics of dream life. He knew, for instance, that dreams give a magnified construction to small stimuli arising during sleep. ‘Men think that they are walking through fire and are tremendously hot, when there is only a slight heating about certain parts.’ And from this circumstance he draws the conclusion that dreams may very well betray to a physician the first signs of some bodily change which has not been observed in waking.¹

Before the time of Aristotle, as we know, the ancients regarded dreams not as a product of the dreaming mind but as something introduced by a divine agency; and already the two opposing currents, which we shall find influencing opinions of dream-life at every period of history, were making themselves felt. The distinction was drawn between truthful and valuable dreams, sent to the sleeper to warn him or foretell the future, and vain, deceitful and worthless dreams, whose purpose it was to mislead or destroy him.

Gruppe (1906, 2, 930) quotes a classification of dreams on these lines made by Macrobius and Artemidorus: ‘Dreams were divided into two classes. One class was supposed to be influenced by the present or past, but to have no future significance. It included the έυύπυια or insomnia, which gave a direct representation of a given idea or of its opposite - e.g. of hunger or of its satiation -, and the φαυτάσματα, which lent a fantastic extension to the given idea - e.g. the nightmare or ephialtes. The other class, on the contrary, was supposed to determine the future. It included (1) direct prophecies received in a dream (the χρηματισμός or oraculum), (2) previsions of some future event (the όραμα or visio) and (3) symbolic dreams, which needed interpretation (the όυειρος or somnium). This theory persisted for many centuries.’

¹ The Greek physician Hippocrates deals with the relation of dreams to illnesses in one of the chapters of his famous work.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

519

This variation in the value that was to be assigned to dreams was closely related to the problem of ‘interpreting’ them. Important consequences were in general to be expected from dreams. But dreams were not all immediately comprehensible and it was impossible to tell whether a particular unintelligible dream might not be making some important announcement. This provided an incentive for elaborating a method by which the unintelligible content of a dream might be replaced by one that was comprehensible and significant. In the later years of antiquity Artemidorus of Daldis was regarded as the greatest authority on the interpretation of dreams, and the survival of his exhaustive work must compensate us for the loss of the other writings on the same subject.¹

The pre-scientific view of dreams adopted by the peoples of antiquity was certainly in complete harmony with their view of the universe in general, which led them to project into the external world as realities things which in fact enjoyed reality only within their own minds. Moreover, their view of dreams took into account the principal impression produced upon the waking mind in the morning by what is left of a dream in the memory: an impression of something alien, arising from another world and contrasting with the remaining contents of the mind. Incidentally, it would be a mistake to suppose that the theory of the supernatural origin of dreams is without its supporters in our own days. We may leave on one side pietistic and mystical writers, who, indeed, are perfectly justified in remaining in occupation of what is left of the once wide domain of the supernatural so long as that field is not conquered by scientific explanation. But apart from them, one comes across clear-headed men, without any extravagant ideas, who seek to support their religious faith in the existence and activity of superhuman spiritual forces precisely by the inexplicable nature of the phenomena of dreaming. (Cf. Haffner, 1887.) The high esteem in which dream-life is held by some schools of philosophy (by the followers of Schelling, for instance) is clearly an echo of the divine nature of dreams which was undisputed in antiquity. Nor are discussions of the premonitory character of dreams and their power to foretell the future at an end. For attempts at giving a psychological explanation have been inadequate to cover the material collected, however decidedly the sympathies of those of a scientific cast of mind may incline against accepting any such beliefs.

¹ For the further history of dream-interpretation in the Middle Ages see Diepgen (1912) and the monographs of Förster (1910 and 1911), Gotthard (1912), etc. Dream-interpretation among the Jews has been discussed by Almoli (1848), Amram (1901), and Löwinger (1908); also, quite recently and taking account of psycho-analytic findings, by Lauer (1913). Information upon dream-interpretation among the Arabs has been given by Drexl (1909), Schwarz (1913) and the missionary Tfinkdji (1913); among the Japanese by Miura (1906) and Iwaya (1902); among the Chinese by Secker (1909-10); and among the people of India by Negelein (1912).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

520

It is difficult to write a history of the scientific study of the problems of dreams because, however valuable that study may have been at a few points, no line of advance in any particular direction can be traced. No foundation has been laid of secure findings upon which a later investigator might build; but each new writer examines the same problems afresh and begins again, as it were, from the beginning. If I attempted to take those who have written on the question in chronological order and to give a summary of their views upon the problems of dreams, I should have to abandon any hope of giving a comprehensive general picture of the present state of knowledge of the subject. I have therefore chosen to frame my account according to topics rather than authors and, as I raise each dream problem in turn, I shall bring forward whatever material the literature contains for its solution.

Since, however, it has been impossible for me to cover the whole of the literature of the subject, widely scattered as it is and trenching upon many other fields, I must ask my readers to be satisfied so long as no fundamental fact and no important point of view is overlooked in my description.

Until recently most writers on the subject have felt obliged to treat sleep and dreams as a single topic, and as a rule they have dealt in addition with analogous conditions on the fringe of pathology, and dream-like states, such as hallucinations, visions and so on. The latest works, on the contrary, show a preference for a restricted theme and take as their subject, perhaps, some isolated question in the field of dream-life. I should be glad to see in this change of attitude the expression of a conviction that in such obscure matters it will only be possible to arrive at explanations and agreed results by a series of detailed investigations. A piece of detailed research of that kind, predominantly psychological in character, is all I have to offer in these pages. I have had little occasion to deal with the problem of sleep, for that is essentially a problem of physiology, even though one of the characteristics of the state of sleep must be that it brings about modifications in the conditions of functioning of the mental apparatus. The literature on the subject of sleep is accordingly disregarded in what follows.

The questions raised by a scientific enquiry into the phenomena of dreams as such may be grouped under the headings which follow, though a certain amount of overlapping can not be avoided.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

521

(A)

THE RELATION OF DREAMS TO WAKING LIFE

The unsophisticated waking judgement of someone who has just woken from sleep assumes that his dreams, even if they did not themselves come from another world, had at all events carried him off into another world. The old physiologist Burdach (1838, 499), to whom we owe a careful and shrewd account of the phenomena of dreams, has given expression to this conviction in a much-quoted passage: ‘In dreams, daily life, with its labours and pleasures, its joys and pains, is never repeated. On the contrary, dreams have as their very aim to free us from it. Even when our whole mind has been filled with something, when we are torn by some deep sorrow or when all our intellectual power is absorbed in some problem, a dream will do no more than enter into the tone of our mood and represent reality in symbols.’ I. H. Fichte (1864, 1, 541), in the same sense, actually speaks of ‘complementary dreams’ and describes them as one of the secret benefactions of the self-healing nature of the spirit. Strümpell (1877, 16) writes to similar effect in his study on the nature and origin of dreams a work which is widely and deservedly held in high esteem: ‘A man who dreams is removed from the world of waking consciousness.’ So too (ibid., 17): ‘In dreams our memory of the ordered contents of waking consciousness and of its normal behaviour is as good as completely lost.’ And again (ibid., 19) he writes that ‘the mind is cut off in dreams, almost without memory, from the ordinary content and affairs of waking life.’

The preponderant majority of writers, however, take a contrary view of the relation of dreams to waking life. Thus Haffner (1887, 245): ‘In the first place, dreams carry on waking life. Our dreams regularly attach themselves to the ideas that have been in our consciousness shortly before. Accurate observation will almost always find a thread which connects a dream with the experiences of the previous day.’ Weygandt (1893, 6)  specifically contradicts Burdach’s statement which I have just quoted: ‘For it may often, and apparently in the majority of dreams, be observed that they actually lead us back to ordinary life instead of freeing us from it.’ Maury (1878, 51) advances a concise formula: ‘Nous rêvons de ce que nous avons vu, dit, désiré ou fait’ ¹; while Jessen, in his book on psychology (1855, 530), remarks at somewhat greater length: ‘the content of a dream is invariably more or less determined by the individual personality of the dreamer, by his age, sex, class, standard of education and habitual way of living, and by the events and experiences of his whole previous life.’

¹ [‘We dream of what we have seen, said, desired or done.’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

522

The most uncompromising attitude on this question is adopted by J. G. E. Maass, the philosopher (1805 ), quoted by Winterstein (1912): ‘Experience confirms our view that we dream most frequently of the things on which our warmest passions are centred. And this shows that our passions must have an influence on the production of our dreams. The ambitious man dreams of the laurels he has won (or imagines he has won) or of those he has still to win; while the lover is busied in his dreams with the object of his sweet hopes. . . . All the sensual desires and repulsions that slumber in the heart can, if anything sets them in motion, cause a dream to arise from the ideas that are associated with them or cause those ideas to intervene in a dream that is already present.’

The same view was taken in antiquity on the dependence of the content of dreams upon waking life. Radestock (1879, 134) tells us how before Xerxes started on his expedition against Greece, he was given sound advice of a discouraging kind but was always urged on again by his dreams; whereupon Artabanus, the sensible old Persian interpreter of dreams, observed to him pertinently that as a rule dream-pictures contain what the waking man already thinks.

Lucretius’ didactic poem De rerum natura contains the following passage (IV, 962):

Et quo quisque fere studio devinctus adhaeret

aut quibus in rebus multum sumus ante morat

atque in ea ratione fuit contenta magis mens,

in somnis eadem plerumque videmur obire;

causidici causas agere et componere leges,

induperatores pugnare ac proelia obire . . .¹

¹ [‘And whatever be the pursuit to which one clings with devotion, whatever the things on which we have been occupied much in the past, the mind being thus more intent upon that pursuit, it is generally the same things that we seem to encounter in dreams: pleaders to plead their cause and collate laws, generals to contend and engage battle . . .’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

523

Cicero (De divinatione, II, lxvii, 140) writes to exactly the same effect as Maury so many years later: ‘Maximeque reliquiae rerum earum moventur in animis et agitantur de quibus vigilantes aut cogitavimus aut egimus.’ ¹

The contradiction between these two views upon the relation between dream-life and waking life seems in fact insoluble. It is therefore relevant at this point to recall the discussion of the subject by Hildebrandt (1875, 8 ff.), who believes that it is impossible to describe the characteristics of dreams at all except by means of ‘a series of contrasts which seem to sharpen into contradictions’. ‘The first of these contrasts’, he writes, ‘ is afforded on the one hand by the completeness with which dreams are secluded and separated from real and actual life and on the other hand by their constant encroachment upon each other and their constant mutual dependence. A dream is something completely severed from the reality experienced in waking life, something, as one might say, with an hermetically sealed existence of its own, and separated from real life by an impassable gulf. It sets us free from reality, extinguishes our normal memory of it and places us in another world and in a quite other life-story which in essentials has nothing to do with our real one. . . .’ Hildebrandt goes on to show how when we fall asleep our whole being with all its forms of existence ‘disappears, as it were, through an invisible trap-door’. Then, perhaps, the dreamer may make a sea-voyage to St. Helena in order to offer Napoleon, who is a prisoner there, a choice bargain in Moselle wines. He is received most affably by the ex-Emperor and feels almost sorry when he wakes and the interesting illusion is destroyed. But let us compare the situation in the dream, proceeds Hildebrandt, with reality. The dreamer has never been a wine-merchant and has never wished to be. He has never gone on a sea-voyage, and if he did, St. Helena would be the last place he would choose to go to. He nourishes no sympathetic feelings whatever towards Napoleon, but on the contrary a fierce patriotic hatred. And, on top of all the rest, the dreamer was not even born when Napoleon died on the island; so that to have any personal relations with him was beyond the bounds of possibility. Thus the dream experience appears as something alien inserted between two sections of life which are perfectly continuous and consistent with each other.

¹ [‘Then especially do the remnants of our waking thoughts and deeds move and stir within the soul.’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

524

‘And yet’, continues Hildebrandt, ‘what appears to be the contrary of this is equally true and correct. In spite of everything, the most intimate relationship goes hand in hand, I believe, with the seclusion and separation. We may even go so far as to say that whatever dreams may offer, they derive their material from reality and from the intellectual life that revolves around that reality. . . . Whatever strange results they may achieve, they can never in fact get free from the real world; and their most sublime as well as their most ridiculous structures must always borrow their basic material either from what has passed before our eyes in the world of the senses or from what has already found a place somewhere in the course of our waking thoughts - in other words from what we have already experienced either externally or internally.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

525

(B)

THE MATERIAL OF DREAMS - MEMORY IN DREAMS

All the material making up the content of a dream is in some way derived from experience, that is to say, has been reproduced or remembered in the dream - so much at least we may regard as an undisputed fact. But it would be a mistake to suppose that a connection of this kind between the content of a dream and reality is bound to come to light easily, as an immediate result of comparing them. The connection requires, on the contrary, to be looked for diligently, and in a whole quantity of cases it may long remain hidden. The reason for this lies in a number of peculiarities which are exhibited by the faculty of memory in dreams and which, though generally remarked upon, have hitherto resisted explanation. It will be worth while to examine these characteristics more closely.

It may happen that a piece of material occurs in the content of a dream which in the waking state we do not recognize as forming a part of our knowledge or experience. We remember, of course, having dreamt the thing in question, but we cannot remember whether or when we experienced it in real life. We are thus left in doubt as to the source which has been drawn upon by the dream and are tempted to believe that dreams have a power of independent production. Then at last, often after a long interval, some fresh experience recalls the lost memory of the other event and at the same time reveals the source of the dream. We are thus driven to admit that in the dream we knew and remembered something which was beyond the reach of our waking memory.¹

A particularly striking example of this is given by Delboeuf from his own experience. He saw in a dream the courtyard of his house covered with snow and found two small lizards half-frozen and buried under it. Being an animal-lover, he picked them up, warmed them and carried them back to the little hole in the masonry where they belonged. He further gave them a few leaves of a small fern which grew on the wall and of which, as he knew, they were very fond. In the dream he knew the name of the plant: Asplenium ruta muralis. The dream proceeded and, after a digression, came back to the lizards. Delboeuf then saw to his astonishment two new ones which were busy on the remains of the fern. He then looked round him and saw a fifth and then a sixth lizard making their way to the hole in the wall, until the whole roadway was filled with a procession of lizards, all moving in the same direction . . . and so on.

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] Vaschide (1911) remarks that it has often been observed that in dreams people speak foreign language more fluently and correctly than in waking life.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

526

When he was awake, Delbouf knew the Latin names of very few plants and an Asplenium was not among them. To his great surprise he was able to confirm the fact that a fern of this name actually exists. Its correct name is Asplenium ruta muraria, which had been slightly distorted in the dream. It was hardly possible that this could be a coincidence; and it remained a mystery to Delboeuf how he had acquired his knowledge of the name ‘Asplenium’ in his dream.

The dream occurred in 1862. Sixteen years later, while the philosopher was on a visit to one of his friends, he saw a little album of pressed flowers of the sort that are sold to foreigners as mementoes in some parts of Switzerland. A recollection began to dawn on him - he opened the herbarium, found the Asplenium of his dream and saw its Latin name written underneath it in his own handwriting. The facts could now be established. In 1860 (two years before the lizard dream) a sister of this same friend had visited Delboeuf on her honeymoon. She had with her the album, which was to be a gift to her brother, and Delboeuf took the trouble to write its Latin name under each dried plant, at the dictation of a botanist.

Good luck, which made this example so well worth recording, enabled Delboeuf to trace yet another part of the content of the dream to its forgotten source. One day in 1877 he happened to take up an old volume of an illustrated periodical and in it he found a picture of the whole procession of lizards which he had dreamed of in 1862. The volume was dated 1861 and Delbouf remembered having been a subscriber to the paper from its first number.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

527

The fact that dreams have at their command memories which are inaccessible in waking life is so remarkable and of such theoretical importance that I should like to draw still more attention to it by relating some further ‘hypermnesic’ dreams. Maury tells us how for some time the word ‘Mussidan’ kept coming into his head during the day. He knew nothing about it except that it was the name of a town in France. One night he dreamt that he was talking to someone who told him he came from Mussidan, and who, on being asked where that was, replied that it was a small town in the Department of Dordogne. When he woke up, Maury had no belief in the information given him in the dream; he learnt from a gazetteer, however, that it was perfectly correct. In this case the fact of the dream’s superior knowledge was confirmed, but the forgotten source of that knowledge was not discovered.

Jessen (1855, 551) reports a very similar event in a dream dating from remoter times: ‘To this class belongs among others a dream of the elder Scaliger (quoted by Hennings, 1784, 300) who wrote a poem in praise of the famous men of Verona. A man who called himself Brugnolus appeared to him in a dream and complained that he had been overlooked. Although Scaliger could not remember having ever heard of him, he wrote some verses on him. His son learnt later in Verona that someone named Brugnolus had in fact been celebrated there as a critic.’

The Marquis d’Hervey de St. Denys, quoted by Vaschide (1911, 232 f.), describes a hypermnesic dream which has a special peculiarity, for it was followed by another dream which completed the recognition of what was at first an unidentified memory: ‘I once dreamt of a young woman with golden hair, whom I saw talking to my sister while showing her some embroidery. She seemed very familiar to me in the dream and I thought I had seen her very often before. After I woke up, I still had her face very clearly before me but I was totally unable to recognize it. I then went to sleep once more and the dream-picture was repeated. . . . But in this second dream I spoke to the fair-haired lady and asked her if I had not had the pleasure of meeting her before somewhere. "Of course," she replied, "don’t you remember the plage at Pornic?" I immediately woke up again and I was then able to recollect clearly all the details associated with the attractive vision in the dream.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

528

The same author (quoted again by Vaschide, ibid., 233-4-) tells how a musician of his acquaintance once heard in a dream a tune which seemed to him entirely new. It was not until several years later that he found the same tune in an old collected volume of musical pieces, though he still could not remember ever having looked through it before.

I understand that Myers has published a whole collection of hypermnesic dreams of this kind in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research; but these are unluckily inaccessible to me.

No one who occupies himself with dreams can, I believe, fail to discover that it is a very common event for a dream to give evidence of knowledge and memories which the waking subject is unaware of possessing. In my psycho-analytic work with nervous patients, of which I shall speak later, I am in a position several times a week to prove to patients from their dreams that they are really quite familiar with quotations, obscene words and so on, and make use of them in their dreams, though they have forgotten them in their waking life. I will add one more innocent case of hypermnesia in a dream, because of the great ease with which it was possible to trace the source of the knowledge that was accessible only in the dream.

One of my patients dreamt in the course of a fairly lengthy dream that he had ordered a ‘Kontuszówka’ while he was in a cafe. After telling me this, he asked me what a ‘Kontuszówka’ was, as he had never heard the name. I was able to tell him in reply that it was a Polish liqueur, and that he could not have invented the name as it had long been familiar to me from advertisements on the hoardings. At first he would not believe me; but some days later, after making his dream come true in a cafe, he noticed the name on a hoarding at a street corner which he must have gone past at least twice a day for several months.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

529

I have noticed myself from my own dreams how much it a matter of chance whether one discovers the source of particular elements of a dream. Thus, for several years before completing this book, I was pursued by the picture of a church tower of very simple design, which I could not remember ever having seen. Then I suddenly recognized it, with absolute certainty, at a small station on the line between Salzburg and Reichenhall. That was during the second half of the eighteen nineties and I had travelled over the line for the first time in 1886. During later years, when I was already deeply absorbed in the study of dreams, the frequent recurrence in my dreams of the picture of a particular unusual-looking place became a positive nuisance to me. In a specific spatial relation to myself, on my left-hand side, I saw a dark space out of which there glimmered a number of grotesque sandstone figures. A faint recollection, which I was unwilling to credit, told me it was the entrance to a beer-cellar. But I failed to discover either the meaning of the dream-picture or its origin. In 1907 I happened to be in Padua, which, to my regret, I had not been able to visit since 1895. My first visit to that lovely University town had been a disappointment, as I had not been able to see Giotto’s frescoes in the Madonna dell’Arena. I had turned back half-way along the street leading there, on being told that the chapel was closed on that particular day. On my second visit, twelve years later, I decided to make up for this and the first thing I did was to set off towards the Arena chapel. In the street leading to it, on my left-hand side as I walked along and in all probability at the point at which I had turned back in 1895, I came upon the place I had seen so often in my dreams, with the sandstone figures that formed part of it. It was in fact the entrance to the garden of a restaurant.

One of the sources from which dreams derive material for reproduction - material which is in part neither remembered nor used in the activities of waking thought - is childhood experience. I will quote only a few of the authors who have noticed and stressed this fact.

Hildebrandt (1875, 23): ‘I have already expressly admitted that dreams sometimes bring back to our minds, with a wonderful power of reproduction, very remote and even forgotten events from our earliest years.’

Strümpell (1877, 40): ‘The position is even more remarkable when we observe how dreams sometimes bring to light, as it were, from beneath the deepest piles of débris under which the earliest experiences of youth are buried in later times, pictures of particular localities, things or people, completely intact and with all their original freshness. This is not limited to experiences which created a lively impression when they occurred or enjoy a high degree of psychical importance and return later in a dream as genuine recollections at which waking consciousness will rejoice. On the contrary, the depths of memory in dreams also include pictures of people, things, localities and events dating from the earliest times, which either never possessed any psychical importance or more than a slight degree of vividness, or which have long since lost what they may have possessed of either, and which consequently seem completely alien and unknown alike to the dreaming and waking mind till their earlier origin has been discovered.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

530

Volkelt (1875, 119): ‘It is especially remarkable how readily memories of childhood and youth make their way into dreams. Dreams are continually reminding us of things which we have ceased to think of and which have long ceased to be important to us.’

Since dreams have material from childhood at their command, and since, as we all know, that material is for the most part blotted out by gaps in our conscious faculty of memory, these circumstances give rise to interesting hypermnesic dreams, of which I will once more give a few examples.

Maury (1878, 92) relates how when he was a child he used often to go from Meaux, which was his birthplace, to the neighbouring village of Trilport, where his father was superintending the building of a bridge. One night in a dream he found himself in Trilport and was once more playing in the village street. A man came up to him who was wearing a sort of uniform. Maury asked him his name and he replied that he was called G. and was a watchman at the bridge. Maury awoke feeling sceptical as to the correctness of the memory, and asked an old maid-servant, who had been with him since his childhood, whether she could remember a man of that name. ‘Why, yes’, was the reply, ‘he was the watchman at the bridge when your father was building it.’

Maury (ibid., 143-4) gives another equally well corroborated example of the accuracy of a memory of childhood emerging in a dream. It was dreamt by a Monsieur F., who as a child had lived at Montbrison. Twenty-five years after leaving it, he decided to revisit his home and some friends of the family whom he had not since met. During the night before his departure he dreamt that he was already at Montbrison and, near the town, met a gentleman whom he did not know by sight but who told him he was Monsieur T., a friend of his father’s. The dreamer was aware that when he was a child he had known someone of that name, but in his waking state no longer remembered what he looked like. A few days later he actually reached Montbrison, found the locality which in his dream had seemed unknown to him, and there met a gentleman whom he at once recognized as the Monsieur T. in the dream. The real person, however, looked much older than he had appeared in the dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

531

At this point I may mention a dream of my own, in which what had to be traced was not an impression but a connection. I had a dream of someone who I knew in my dream was the doctor in my native town. His face was indistinct, but was confused with a picture of one of the masters at my secondary school, whom I still meet occasionally. When I woke up I could not discover what connection there was between these two men. I made some enquiries from my mother, however, about this doctor who dated back to the earliest years of my childhood, and learnt that he had only one eye. The schoolmaster whose figure had covered that of the doctor in the dream, was also one-eyed. It was thirty-eight years since I had seen the doctor, and so far as I know I had never thought of him in my waking life, though a scar on my chin might have reminded me of his attentions.

A number of writers, on the other hand, assert that elements are to be found in most dreams, which are derived from the very last few days before they were dreamt; and this sounds like an attempt to counterbalance the laying of too much weight upon the part played in dream-life by experiences in childhood. Thus Robert (1886, 46) actually declares that normal dreams are as a rule concerned only with the impressions of the past few days. We shall find, however, that the theory of dreams constructed by Robert makes it essential for him to bring forward the most recent impressions and leave the oldest out of sight. None the less the fact stated by him remains correct, as I am able to confirm from my own investigations. An American writer, Nelson, is of the opinion that the impressions most frequently employed in a dream arise from the day next but one before the dream occurs, or from the day preceding that one - as though the impressions of the day immediately before the dream were not sufficiently attenuated or remote.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

532

Several writers who are anxious not to cast doubts on the intimate connection between the content of dreams and waking life have been struck by the fact that impressions with which waking thoughts are intensely occupied only appear in dreams after they have been pushed somewhat aside by the workings of daytime thought. Thus, after the death of someone dear to them, people do not as a rule dream of him to begin with, while they are overwhelmed by grief (Delage, 1891). On the other hand one of the most recent observers, Miss Hallam (Hallam and Weed, 1896, 410-11), has collected instances to the contrary, thus asserting the right of each of us to psychological individualism in this respect.

The third, most striking and least comprehensible characteristic of memory in dreams is shown in the choice of material reproduced. For what is found worth remembering is not, as in waking life, only what is most important, but on the contrary what is most indifferent and insignificant as well. On this point I will quote those writers who have given the strongest expression to their astonishment.

Hildebrandt (1875, 11): ‘For the remarkable thing is that dreams derive their elements not from major and stirring events nor the powerful and compelling interests of the preceding day, but from incidental details, from the worthless fragments, one might say, of what has been recently experienced or of the remoter past. A family bereavement, which has moved us deeply and under whose immediate shadow we have fallen asleep late at night, is blotted out of our memory till with our first waking moment it returns to it again with disturbing violence. On the other hand, a wart on the forehead of a stranger whom we met in the street and to whom we owe no second thought after passing him has a part to play in our dream. . . .’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

533

Strümpell (1877, 39): ‘There are cases in which the analysis of a dream shows that some of its components are indeed derived from experiences of the previous day or its predecessor, but experiences so unimportant and trivial from the point of view of waking consciousness that they were forgotten soon after they occurred. Experiences of this kind include, for instance, remarks accidentally overheard, or another person’s actions inattentively observed, or passing glimpses of people or things, or odd fragments of what one has read, and so on.’

Havelock Ellis (1899, 727): ‘The profound emotions of waking life, the questions and problems on which we spread our chief voluntary mental energy, are not those which usually present themselves at once to dream consciousness. It is, so far as the immediate past is concerned, mostly the trifling, the incidental, the "forgotten" impressions of daily life which reappear in our dreams. The psychic activities that are awake most intensely are those that sleep most profoundly.’

Binz (1878, 44-5) actually makes this particular peculiarity of memory in dreams the occasion for expressing his dissatisfaction with the explanations of dreams which he himself has supported: ‘And the natural dream raises similar problems. Why do we not always dream of the mnemic impressions of the day we have just lived through? Why do we often, without any apparent motive, plunge instead into the remote and almost extinct past? Why does consciousness so often in dreams receive the impression of indifferent mnemic images, while the brain cells, just where they carry the most sensitive marks of what has been experienced, lie for the most part silent and still, unless they have been stirred into fresh activity shortly before, during waking life?’

It is easy to see how the remarkable preference shown by the memory in dreams for indifferent, and consequently unnoticed, elements in waking experience is bound to lead people to overlook in general the dependence of dreams upon waking life and at all events to make it difficult in any particular instance to prove that dependence. Thus Miss Whiton Galkins (1893, 315), in her statistical study of her own and her collaborator’s dreams, found that in eleven per cent of the total there was no visible connection with waking life. Hildebrandt (1875, ) is unquestionably right in asserting that we should be able to explain the genesis of every dream-image if we devoted enough time and trouble to tracing its origin. He speaks of this as ‘an exceedingly laborious and thankless task. For as a rule it ends in hunting out every kind of utterly worthless psychical event from the remotest corners of the chambers of one’s memory, and in dragging to light once again every kind of completely indifferent moment of the past from the oblivion in which it was buried in the very hour, perhaps, after it occurred.’ I can only regret that this keen-sighted author allowed himself to be deterred from following the path which had this inauspicious beginning; if he had followed it, it would have led him to the very heart of the explanation of dreams.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

534

The way in which the memory behaves in dreams is undoubtedly of the greatest importance for any theory of memory in general. It teaches us that ‘nothing which we have once mentally possessed can be entirely lost’ (Scholz, 1893, 59); or, as Delboeuf puts it, ‘que toute impression même la plus insignifiante, laisse une trace inaltérable, indéfiniment susceptible de reparâitre au jour.’ This is a conclusion to which we are also driven by many pathological phenomena of mental life. Certain theories about dreams which we shall mention later seek to account for their absurdity and incoherence by a partial forgetting of what we know during the day. When we bear in mind the extraordinary efficiency that we have just seen exhibited by memory in dreams we shall have a lively sense of the contradiction which these theories involve.

It might perhaps occur to us that the phenomenon of dreaming could be reduced entirely to that of memory: dreams, it might be supposed, are a manifestation of a reproductive activity which is at work even in the night and which is an end in itself. This would tally with statements such as those made by Pilcz (1899), according to which there is a fixed relation observable between the time at which a dream occurs and its content-impressions from the remotest past being reproduced in dreams during deep sleep, while more recent impressions appear towards morning. But views of this sort are inherently improbable owing to the manner in which dreams deal with the material that is to be remembered. Strümpell rightly points out that dreams do not reproduce experiences. They take one step forward, but the next step in the chain is omitted, or appears in an altered form, or is replaced by something entirely extraneous. Dreams yield no more than fragments of reproductions; and this is so general a rule that theoretical conclusions may be based on it. It is true that there are exceptional cases in which a dream repeats an experience with as much completeness as is attainable by our waking memory. Delboeuf tells how one of his university colleagues had a dream which reproduced in all its details a dangerous carriage accident he had had, with an almost miraculous escape. Miss Calkins (1893) mentions two dreams whose content was an exact reproduction of an event of the previous day, and I shall myself have occasion later to report an example I came across of a childhood experience re-appearing in a dream without modification.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] Subsequent experience leads me to add that it by no means rarely happens that innocent and unimportant actions of the previous day are repeated in a dream: such, for instance, as packing a trunk, preparing food in the kitchen, and so on. What the dreamer is himself stressing in dreams of this kind is not, however, the content of the memory but the fact of its being ‘real’: ‘I really did do all that yesterday.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

535

(C)

THE STIMULI AND SOURCES OF DREAMS

There is a popular saying that ‘dreams come from indigestion’ and this helps us to see what is meant by the stimuli and sources of dreams. Behind these concepts lies a theory according to which dreams are a result of a disturbance of sleep: we should not have had a dream unless something disturbing had happened during our sleep, and the dream was a reaction to that disturbance.

Discussions upon the exciting causes of dreams occupy a very large space in the literature of the subject. The problem could obviously only arise after dreams had become a subject of biological investigation. The ancients, who believed that dreams were inspired by the gods, had no need to look around for their stimulus: dreams emanated from the will of divine or daemonic powers and their content arose from the knowledge or purpose of those powers. Science was immediately faced by the question of whether the stimulus to dreaming was always the same or whether there could be many kinds of such stimuli; and this involved the consideration of whether the explanation of the causation of dreams fell within the province of psychology or rather of physiology. Most authorities seem to agree in assuming that the causes that disturb sleep - that is, the sources of dreaming - may be of many kinds and that somatic stimuli and mental excitations alike may come to act as instigators of dreams. Opinions differ widely, however, in the preference they show for one or the other source of dreams and in the order of importance which they assign to them as factors in the production of dreams.

Any complete enumeration of the sources of dreams leads to a recognition of four kinds of source; and these have also been used for the classification of dreams themselves. They are: (1) external (objective) sensory excitations; (2) internal (subjective) sensory excitations; (3) internal (organic) somatic stimuli; and (4) purely psychical sources of stimulation.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

536

1.  EXTERNAL SENSORY STIMULI

The younger Strümpell, the son of the philosopher whose book on dreams has already given us several hints upon their problems, published a well-known account of his observations upon one of his patients who was afflicted with general anaesthesia of the surface of his body and paralysis of several of his higher sense organs. If the few of this man’s sensory channels which remained open to the external world were closed, he would fall asleep. Now when we ourselves wish to go to sleep we are in the habit of trying to produce a situation similar to that of Strümpell’s experiment. We close our most important sensory channels, our eyes, and try to protect the other senses from all stimuli or from any modification of the stimuli acting on them. We then fall asleep, even though our plan is never completely realized. We cannot keep stimuli completely away from our sense organs nor can we completely suspend the excitability of our sense organs. The fact that a fairly powerful stimulus will awaken us at any time is evidence that ‘even in sleep the soul is in constant contact with the extracorporeal world’. The sensory stimuli that reach us during sleep may very well become sources of dreams.

Now there are a great number of such stimuli, ranging from the unavoidable ones which the state of sleep itself necessarily involves or must tolerate from time to time, to the accidental, rousing stimuli which may or do put an end to sleep. A bright light may force its way into our eyes, or a noise may make itself heard, or some strong-smelling substance may stimulate the mucous membrane of our nose. By unintentional movements during our sleep we may uncover some part of our body and expose it to sensations of chill, or by a change in posture we may ourselves bring about sensations of pressure or contact. We may be stung by a gnat, or some small mishap during the night may impinge upon several of our senses at once. Attentive observers have collected a whole series of dreams in which there has been such a far-reaching correspondence between a stimulus noticed on waking and a portion of the content of the dream that it has been possible to identify the stimulus as the source of the dream .

The Interpretation Of Dreams

537

I will quote from Jessen (1855, 527 f.) a collection of dreams of this kind which may be traced back to objective, and more or less accidental, sensory stimulation.

‘Every noise that is indistinctly perceived arouses corresponding dream-images. A peal of thunder will set us in the midst of a battle; the crowing of a cock may turn into a man’s cry of terror; the creaking of a door may produce a dream of burglars. If our bed-clothes fall off in the night, we may dream, perhaps, of walking about naked or of falling into water. If we are lying cross-wise in bed and push our feet over the edge, we may dream that we are standing on the brink of a frightful precipice or that we are falling over a cliff. If our head happens to get under the pillow, we dream of being beneath a huge overhanging rock which is on the point of burying us under its weight. Accumulations of semen lead to lascivious dreams, local pains produce ideas of being ill-treated, attacked or injured. . . .’

‘Meier (1758, 33) once dreamt that he was overpowered by some men who stretched him out on his back on the ground and drove a stake into the earth between his big toe and the next one. While he was imagining this in the dream he woke up and found that a straw was sticking between his toes. On another occasion, according to Hennings (1784, 258), when Meier had fastened his shirt rather tight round his neck, he dreamt that he was being hanged. Hoffbauer dreamt when he was a young man of falling down from a high wall, and when he woke up found that his bedstead had collapsed and that he had really fallen on to the floor. . . . Gregory reports that once, when he was lying with his feet on a hot-water bottle, he dreamt he had climbed to the top of Mount Etna and that the ground there was intolerably hot. Another man, who was sleeping with a hot poultice on his head, dreamt that he was being scalped by a band of Red Indians; while a third, who was wearing a damp night-shirt, imagined that he was being dragged through a stream. An attack of gout that came on suddenly during sleep caused the patient to believe he was in the hands of the Inquisition and being tortured on the rack. (Macnish.)'

The Interpretation Of Dreams

538

The argument based on the similarity between the stimulus and the content of the dream gains in strength if it is possible deliberately to convey a sensory stimulus to the sleeper and produce in him a dream corresponding to that stimulus. According to Macnish (loc. cit.), quoted by Jessen (1855, 529), experiments of this sort had already been made by Girou de Buzareingues. ‘He left his knee uncovered and dreamt that he was travelling at night in a mail coach. He remarks upon this that travellers will no doubt be aware how cold one’s knees become at night in a coach. Another time he left his head uncovered at the back and dreamt that he was taking part in a religious ceremony in the open air. It must be explained that in the country in which he lived it was the custom always to keep the head covered except in circumstances such as these.’

Maury (1878) brings forward some new observations of dreams produced in himself. (A number of other experiments were unsuccessful.)

(1) His lips and the tip of his nose were tickled with a feather. - He dreamt of a frightful form of torture: a mask made of pitch was placed on his face and then pulled off, so that it took his skin off with it,

(2) A pair of scissors was sharpened on a pair of pliers. -He heard bells pealing, followed by alarm-bells, and he was back in the June days of 1848.

(3) He was given some eau-de-cologne to smell. -He was in Cairo, in Johann Maria Farina’s shop. Some absurd adventures followed, which he could not reproduce.

(4) He was pinched lightly on the neck. - He dreamt he was being given a mustard plaster and thought of the doctor who had treated him as a child.

(5) A hot iron was brought close to his face. - He dreamt that the ‘chauffeurs’¹ had made their way into the house and were forcing its inhabitants to give up their money by sticking their feet into braziers of hot coal. The Duchess of Abrantes, whose secretary he was in the dream, then appeared.

(8) A drop of water was dropped on his forehead. - He was in Italy, was sweating violently and was drinking white Orvieto wine.

(9) Light from a candle was repeatedly shone upon him through a sheet of red paper. - He dreamt of the weather and of the heat, and was once again in a storm he had experienced in the English Channel.

¹ The ‘chauffeurs’ were bands of robbers in La Vendée, who made use of the method of torture described above.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

539

Other attempts at producing dreams experimentally have been reported by Hervey de Saint-Denys, Weygandt (1893), and others.

Many writers have commented upon ‘the striking facility with which dreams are able to weave a sudden impression from the world of the senses into their own structure so that it comes as what appears to be a pre-arranged catastrophe that his been gradually led up to.’ (Hildebrandt, 1875,.) ‘In my youth’, the author goes on, ‘I used to make use of an alarm-clock in order to be up regularly at a fixed hour. It must have happened hundreds of times that the noise produced by this instrument fitted into an ostensibly lengthy and connected dream as though the whole dream had been leading up to that one event and had reached its appointed end in what was a logically indispensable climax.’

I shall quote three of these alarm-clock dreams presently in another connection.

Volkelt (1875, 108 f.) writes: ‘A composer once dreamt that he was giving a class and was trying to make a point clear to his pupils. When he had done, he turned to one of the boys and asked him if he had followed. The boy shouted back like a lunatic: "Oh ja! " He began to reprove the boy angrily for shouting, but the whole class broke out into cries first of "Orja!", then of "Eurjo!" and finally of "Feuerjo!" At this point he was woken up by actual cries of "Feuerjo!" in the street.’

Garnier (1865) tells how Napoleon I was woken by a bomb-explosion while he was asleep in his carriage. He had a dream that he was once more crossing the Tagliamento under the Austrian bombardment, and at last started up with a cry: ‘We are undermined!’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

540

A dream dreamt by Maury (1878, 161) has become famous. He was ill and lying in his room in bed, with his mother sitting beside him, and dreamt that it was during the Reign of Terror. After witnessing a number of frightful scenes of murder, he was finally himself brought before the revolutionary tribunal. There he saw Robespierre, Marat, Fouquier-Tinville and the rest of the grim heroes of those terrible days. He was questioned by them, and, after a number of incidents which were not retained in his memory, was condemned, and led to the place of execution surrounded by an immense mob. He climbed on to the scaffold and was bound to the plank by the executioner. It was tipped up. The blade of the guillotine fell. He felt his head being separated from his body, woke up in extreme anxiety and found that the top of the bed had fallen down and had struck his cervical vertebrae just in the way in which the blade of the guillotine would actually have struck them.

This dream was the basis of an interesting discussion between Le Lorrain (1894) and Egger (1895) in the Revue philosophique. The question raised was whether and how it was possible for a dreamer to compress such an apparently superabundant quantity of material into the short period elapsing between his perceiving the rousing stimulus and his waking.

Examples of this kind leave an impression that of all the sources of dreams the best confirmed are objective sensory stimuli during sleep. Moreover they are the only sources whatever taken into account by laymen. If an educated man, who is unacquainted with the literature of dreams, is asked how dreams arise, he will infallibly answer with a reference to some instance he has come across in which a dream was explained by an objective sensory stimulus discovered after waking. Scientific enquiry, however, cannot stop there. It finds an occasion for further questions in the observed fact that the stimulus which impinges on the senses during sleep does not appear in the dream in its real shape but is replaced by another image in some way related to it. But the relation connecting the stimulus of the dream to the dream which is its result is, to quote Maury’s words (1854, 72); ‘une affinité quelconque, mais qui n’est pas unique et exclusive.’ ¹ Let us consider in this connection three of Hildebrandt’s alarm-clock dreams (1875, 37 f.). The question they raise is why the same stimulus should have provoked three such different dreams and why it should have provoked these rather than any other.

¹ [‘An affinity of some kind, but one which is not unique and exclusive.’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

541

‘I dreamt, then, that one spring morning I was going for a walk and was strolling through the green fields till I came to a neighbouring village, where I saw the villagers in their best clothes, with hymn-books under their arms, flocking to the church. Of course! It was Sunday, and early morning service would soon be beginning. I decided I would attend it; but first, as I was rather hot from walking, I went into the churchyard which surrounded the church, to cool down. While I was reading some of the tombstones, I heard the bell-ringer climbing up the church tower and at the top of it I now saw the little village bell which would presently give the signal for the beginning of devotions. For quite a while it hung there motionless, then it began to swing, and suddenly its peal began to ring out clear and piercing - so clear and piercing that it put an end to my sleep. But what was ringing was the alarm-clock.

‘Here is another instance. It was a bright winter’s day and the streets were covered with deep snow. I had agreed to join a party for a sleigh-ride; but I had to wait a long time before news came that the sleigh was at the door. Now followed the preparations for getting in - the fur rug spread out, the foot muff put ready- and at last I was sitting in my seat. But even then the moment of departure was delayed till a pull at the reins gave the waiting horses the signal. Then off they started, and, with a violent shake, the sleigh bells broke into their familiar jingle - with such violence, in fact, that in a moment the cobweb of my dream was torn through. And once again it was only the shrill sound of the alarm-clock.

‘And now yet a third example. I saw a kitchen-maid, carrying several dozen plates piled on one another, walking along the passage to the dining-room. The column of china in her arms seemed to me in danger of losing its balance. "Take care," I exclaimed, "or you’ll drop the whole load." The inevitable rejoinder duly followed: she was quite accustomed to that kind of job, and so on. And meanwhile my anxious looks followed the advancing figure. Then - just as I expected -she stumbled at the threshold and the fragile crockery slipped and rattled and clattered in a hundred pieces on the floor. But the noise continued without ceasing, and soon it seemed no longer to be a clattering; it was turning into a ringing - and the ringing, as my waking self now became aware, was only the alarm-clock doing its duty.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

542

The question of why the mind mistakes the nature of objective sensory stimuli in dreams receives almost the same answer from Strümpell (1877) as from Wundt (1874): the mind receives stimuli that reach it during sleep under conditions favourable to the formation of illusions. A sense impression is recognized by us and correctly interpreted - that is, it is placed in the group of memories to which, in accordance with all our previous experiences, it belongs - provided the impression is sufficiently strong, clear and lasting and provided we have sufficient time at our disposal for considering the matter. If these conditions are not fulfilled, we mistake the object which is the source of the impression: we form an illusion about it. ‘If someone goes for a walk in the open country and has in indeterminate perception of a distant object, he may at first believe it to be a horse.’ On a closer view he may be led to interpret it as a cow lying down, and the image may finally resolve itself definitely into a group of people sitting on the ground. The impressions received by the mind from external stimuli during sleep are of a similarly indeterminate nature; and on their basis the mind forms illusions, since a greater or smaller number of mnemic images are aroused by the impression and it is through them that it acquires its psychical value. From which of the many groups of memories concerned the related images shall be aroused and which of the possible associative connections shall accordingly be put into action - these questions too, on Strümpell’s theory, are indeterminable and are, as it were, left open to the arbitrary decision of the mind.

At this point we are faced with a choice between two alternatives. We may admit it as a fact that it is impossible to follow the laws governing the formation of dreams any further; and we may accordingly refrain from enquiring whether there may not be other determinants governing the interpretation put by the dreamer upon the illusion called up by the sense-impression. Or, on the other hand, we may have a suspicion that the sensory stimulus which impinges on the sleeper plays only a modest part in generating his dream and that other factors determine the choice of the mnemic images which are to be aroused in him. In fact, if we examine Maury’s experimentally produced dreams (which I have related in such detail for this very reason), we shall be tempted to say that the experiment in fact accounts for the origin of only one element of the dreams; the rest of their content seems too self-contained, too definite in its details, to be explicable solely by the necessity for fitting in with the element experimentally introduced from outside. Indeed, one begins to have doubts about the illusion theory and about the power of objective impressions to give a shape to dreams when one finds that those impressions are sometimes subjected in dreams to the most peculiar and far-fetched interpretations. Thus Simon (1888) tells us of a dream in which he saw some gigantic figures seated at table and clearly heard the frightful snapping noise made by their jaws coming together as they chewed. When he awoke he heard the beat of a horse’s hooves galloping past his window. The noise made by the horse’s hooves may have suggested ideas from a group of memories connected with Gulliver’s Travels - the giants of Brobdingnag and the virtuous Houyhnhnms - if I may venture on an interpretation without the dreamer’s assistance. Is it not probable, then, that the choice of such an unusual group of memories as these was facilitated by motives other than the objective stimulus alone!¹

¹ [Footnote added 1911:] The appearance of gigantic figures in a dream gives grounds for supposing that some scene from the dreamer’s childhood is involved. - [Added 1925:] Incidentally, the interpretation given in the text, pointing to a reminiscence of Gulliver’s Travels, is a good example of what an interpretation ought not to be. The interpreter of a dream should not give free play to his own ingenuity and neglect the dreamer’s associations.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

543

2.  INTERNAL (SUBJECTIVE) SENSORY EXCITATIONS

In spite of any objections to the contrary, it has to be admitted that the part played by objective sensory excitations during sleep in provoking dreams remains indisputable. And if such stimuli may appear, from their nature and frequency, insufficient to explain every dream-image, we shall be encouraged to seek for other sources of dreams analogous to them in their operation. I cannot say when the idea first cropped up of taking internal (subjective) excitations of the sense organs into account alongside of the external sensory stimuli. It is, however, the case that this is done, more or less explicitly, in all the more recent discussions of the aetiology of dreams. ‘An essential part is also played, I believe’, writes Wundt (1874, 657), ‘in the production of the illusions that occur in dreams by the subjective visual and auditory sensations which are familiar to us in the waking state as the formless areas of luminosity which become visible to us when our field of vision is darkened, as ringing or buzzing in the ears, and so on. Especially important among these are the subjective excitations of the retina. It is in this way that is to be explained the remarkable tendency of dreams to conjure up before the eyes similar or identical objects in large numbers. We see before us innumerable birds or butterflies or fishes or coloured beads or flowers, etc. Here the luminous dust in the darkened field of vision has taken on a fantastic shape, and the numerous specks of which it consists are incorporated into the dream as an equal number of separate images; and these, on account of their mobility, are regarded as moving objects. -This is no doubt also the basis of the great fondness shown by dreams for animal figures of every sort; for the immense variety of such forms can adjust itself easily to the particular form assumed by the subjective luminous images.’

As sources of dream-images, subjective sensory excitations have the obvious advantage of not being dependent, like objective ones, upon external chance. They are ready to hand, as one might say, whenever they are needed as an explanation. But they are at a disadvantage compared with objective sensory stimuli in that the part they play in instigating a dream is scarcely or not at all open to confirmation, as is the case with objective stimuli, by observation and experiment. The chief evidence in favour of the power of subjective sensory excitations to instigate dreams is provided by what are known as ‘hypnagogic hallucinations’, or, to use Johannes Müller’s term (1826), ‘imaginative visual phenomena’. These are images, often very vivid and rapidly changing, which are apt to appear - quite habitually, in some people - during the period of falling asleep; and they may also persist for a time after the eyes have been opened. Maury, who was subject to them in a high degree, has made an exhaustive examination of them and maintains (as did Müller before him) their connection and indeed their identity with dream-images. In order to produce them, he says (Maury, 1878, 59 f.), a certain amount of mental passivity, a relaxation of the strain of attention, is necessary. It is enough, however, to fall into a lethargic state of this kind for no more than a second (provided that one has the necessary predisposition) in order to have a hypnagogic hallucination. After this one may perhaps wake up again and the process may be repeated several times until one finally falls asleep. Maury found that if he then woke up once more after not too long an interval, he was able to detect in his dream the same images that had floated before his eyes as hypnagogic hallucinations before he fell asleep. (Ibid., 134 f.) This was the case on one occasion with a number of grotesque figures with distorted faces and strange coiffures which pestered him with extreme pertinacity while he was going to sleep and which he remembered having dreamt about after he woke. Another time, when he was suffering from hunger owing to having put himself on a light diet, he had a hypnagogic vision of a plate and a hand armed with a fork which was helping itself to some of the food from the plate. In the dream which followed he was sitting at a well spread table and heard the noise made by the diners with their forks. Yet another time, when he went to sleep with his eyes in an irritated and painful state, he had a hypnagogic hallucination of some microscopically small signs which he could only decipher one by one with the greatest difficulty; he was woken from his sleep an hour later and remembered a dream in which here was an open book printed in very small type which he was reading painfully.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

544

Auditory hallucinations of words, names, and so on can also occur hypnagogically in the same way as visual images, and may then be repeated in a dream - just as an overture announces the principal themes which are to be heard in the opera that is to follow.

A more recent observer of hypnagogic hallucinations, G. Trumbull Ladd (1892), has followed the same lines as Müller and Maury. After some practice he succeeded in being able to wake himself suddenly without opening his eyes, from two to five minutes after gradually falling asleep. He thus had an opportunity of comparing the retinal sensations which were just disappearing with the dream-images persisting in his memory. He declares that it was possible in every case to recognize an internal relation between the two, for the luminous points and lines of the idioretinal light provided, as it were, an outline drawing or diagram of the figures mentally perceived in the dream. For instance, an arrangement of the luminous points in the retina in parallel lines corresponded to a dream in which he had been seeing, clearly spread out in front of him, some lines of print which he was engaged in reading. Or, to use his own words, ‘the clearly printed page which I was reading in my dream faded away into an object that appeared to my waking consciousness like a section of an actual page of print when seen through an oval hole in a piece of paper at too great a distance to distinguish more than an occasional fragment of a word, and even that dimly.’ Ladd is of opinion (though he does not underestimate the part played in the phenomenon by central factors) that scarcely a single visual dream, occurs without the participation of material provided by intraocular retinal excitation. This applies especially to dreams occurring soon after falling asleep in a dark room, while the source of stimulus for dreams occurring in the morning shortly before waking is the objective light which penetrates the eyes in a room that is growing light. The changing, perpetually shifting character of the excitation of the idioretinal light corresponds precisely to the constantly moving succession of images shown us by our dreams. No one who attaches importance to these observations of Ladd’s will underestimate the part played in dreams by these subjective sources of stimulation, for, as we know, visual images constitute the principal component of our dreams. The contributions from the other senses, except for that of hearing, are intermittent and of less importance.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

545

3.  INTERNAL ORGANIC SOMATIC STIMULI

Since we are now engaged in looking for sources of dreams inside the organism instead of outside it, we must bear in mind that almost all our internal organs, though they give us scarcely any news of their working so long as they are in a healthy state, become a source of what are mainly distressing sensations when they are in what we describe as states of excitation, or during illnesses. These sensations must be equated with the sensory or painful stimuli reaching us from the outside. The experience of ages is reflected in - to take an example - Strümpell’s remarks on the subject (1877, 107): ‘During sleep the mind attains a far deeper and wider sensory consciousness of somatic events than during the waking state. It is obliged to receive and be affected by impressions of stimuli from parts of the body and from changes in the body of which it knows nothing when awake.’ So early a writer as Aristotle regarded it as quite possible that the beginnings of an illness might make themselves felt in dreams before anything could be noticed of it in waking life, owing to the magnifying effect produced upon impressions by dreams. (See above, p. 518.) Medical writers, too, who were certainly far from believing in the prophetic power of dreams, have not disputed their significance as premonitors of illness. (Cf. Simon, 1888, 31, and many earlier writers.)¹

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] Apart from the diagnostic value ascribed to dreams (e.g. in the works of Hippocrates), their therapeutic importance in antiquity must also be borne in mind. In Greece there were dream oracles, which were regularly visited by patients in search of recovery. A sick man would enter the temple of Apollo or Aesculapius, would perform various ceremonies there, would be purified by lustration, massage and incense, and then, in a state of exaltation, would be stretched on the skin of a ram that had been sacrificed. He would then fall asleep and would dream of the remedies for his illness. These would be revealed to him either in their natural form or in symbols and pictures which would afterwards be interpreted by the priests. For further information upon therapeutic dreams among the Greeks see Lehmann (1908, 1, 74), Bouché-Leclercq (1879-1882), Hermann (1858, §41, 262 ff., and 1882, §38, 356), Böttinger (1795, 163 ff.), Lloyd (1877), Döllinger (1857, 130).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

546

Instances of the diagnostic power of dreams seem to be vouched for in more recent times. Thus Tissié (1898, 62 f.) quotes from Artigues (1884, 43) the story of a forty-three-year old woman, who, while apparently in perfect health, was for some years tormented by anxiety-dreams. She was then medically examined and found to be in the early stages of an affection of the heart, to which she eventually succumbed.

Pronounced disorders of the internal organs obviously act as instigators of dreams in a whole number of cases. The frequency of anxiety-dreams in diseases of the heart and lungs is generally recognized. Indeed, this side of dream-life is placed in the foreground by so many authorities that I am content with a mere reference to the literature: Radestock, Spitta, Maury, Simon (1888), Tissié. Tissié is even of the opinion that the particular organ affected gives a characteristic impress to the content of the dream. Thus the dreams of those suffering from diseases of the heart are usually short and come to a terrifying end at the moment of waking; their content almost always includes a situation involving a horrible death. Sufferers from diseases of the lungs dream of suffocation, crowding and fleeing, and are remarkably subject to the familiar nightmare. (It may be remarked, incidentally, that Börner (1855) has succeeded in provoking the latter experimentally by lying on his face or covering the respiratory apertures.)  In the case of digestive disorders dreams contain ideas connected with enjoyment of food or disgust. Finally, the influence of sexual excitement on the content of dreams can be adequately appreciated by everyone from his own experience and provides the theory that dreams are instigated by organic stimuli with its most powerful support.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

547

No one, moreover, who goes through the literature of the subject can fail to notice that some writers, such as Maury and Weygandt (1893), were led to the study of dream problems by the effect of their own illnesses upon the content of their dreams.

Nevertheless, though these facts are established beyond a doubt, their importance for the study of the sources of dreams is not so great as might have been hoped. Dreams are phenomena which occur in healthy people - perhaps in everyone, perhaps every night - and it is obvious that organic illness cannot be counted among its indispensable conditions. And what we are concerned with is not the origin of certain special dreams but the source that instigates the ordinary dreams of normal people.

We need only go a step further, however, in order to come upon a source of dreams more copious than any we have so far considered, one indeed which seems as though it could never run dry. If it is established that the interior of the body when it is in a diseased state becomes a source of stimuli for dreams, and if we admit that during sleep the mind, being diverted from the external world, is able to pay more attention to the interior of the body, then it seems plausible to suppose that the internal organs do not need to be diseased before they can cause excitations to reach the sleeping mind - excitations which are somehow turned into dream-images. While we are awake we are aware of a diffuse general sensibility or coenaesthesia, but only as a vague quality of our mood; to this feeling, according to medical opinion, all the organic systems contribute a share. At night, however, it would seem that this same feeling, grown into a powerful influence and acting through its various components, becomes the strongest and at the same time the commonest source for instigating dream-images. If this is so, it would only remain to investigate the laws according to which the organic stimuli turn into dream-images.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

548

We have here reached the theory of the origin of dreams which is preferred by all the medical authorities. The obscurity in which the centre of our being (the ‘moi splanchnique’, as Tissié calls it) is veiled from our knowledge and the obscurity surrounding the origin of dreams tally too well not to be brought into relation to each other. The line of thought which regards vegetative organic sensation as the constructor of dreams has, moreover, a particular attraction for medical men since it allows of a single aetiology for dreams and mental diseases, whose manifestations have so much in common; for coenaesthetic changes and stimuli arising from the internal organs are also held largely responsible for the origin of the psychoses. It is not surprising, therefore, that the origin of the theory of somatic stimulation may be traced back to more than one independent source.

The line of argument developed by the philosopher Schopenhauer in 1851 has had a decisive influence on a number of writers. Our picture of the universe, in his view, is arrived at by our intellect taking the impressions that impinge on it from outside and remoulding them into the forms of time, space and causality. During the daytime the stimuli from the interior of the organism, from the sympathetic nervous system, exercise at the most an unconscious effect upon our mood. But at night, when we are no longer deafened by the impressions of the day, those which arise from within are able to attract attention just as at night we can hear the murmuring of a brook which is drowned by daytime noise. But how is the intellect to react to these stimuli otherwise than by carrying out its own peculiar function on them? The stimuli are accordingly remodelled into forms occupying space and time and obeying the rules of causality, and thus dreams arise. Scherner (1861) and after him Volkelt (1875) endeavoured subsequently to investigate in more detail the relation between somatic stimuli and dream-images, but I shall postpone my consideration of these attempts till we reach the section dealing with the various theories about dreams.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

549

Krauss, the psychiatrist, in an investigation carried through with remarkable consistency, traces the origin alike of dreams and of deliria and delusions to the same factor, namely to organically determined sensations. It is scarcely possible to think of any part of the organism which might not be the starting-point of a dream or of a delusion. Organically determined sensations ‘may be divided into two classes: (1) those constituting the general mood (coenaesthesia) and (2) the specific sensations immanent in the principal systems of the vegetative organism. Of these latter five groups are to be distinguished: (a) muscular, (b) respiratory, (c) gastric, (d) sexual and (e) peripheral sensations.’ Krauss supposes that the process by which dream-images arise on the basis of somatic stimuli is as follows. The sensation that has been aroused evokes a cognate image, in accordance with some law of association. It combines with the image into an organic structure, to which, however, consciousness reacts abnormally. For it pays no attention to the sensation, but directs the whole of it to the accompanying images - which explains why the true facts were for so long misunderstood. Krauss has a special term for describing this process: the ‘trans-substantiation’ of sensations into dream-images.

The influence of organic somatic stimuli upon the formation of dreams is almost universally accepted to-day; but the question of the laws that govern the relation between them is answered in very various ways, and often by obscure pronouncements. On the basis of the theory of somatic stimulation, dream-interpretation is thus faced with the special problem of tracing back the content of a dream to the organic stimuli which caused it; and, if the rules for interpretation laid down by Scherner (1861) are not accepted, one is often faced with the awkward fact that the only thing that reveals the existence of the organic stimulus is precisely the content of the dream itself.

There is a fair amount of agreement, however, over the interpretation of various forms of dreams that are described as ‘typical’, because they occur in large numbers of people and with very similar content. Such are the familiar dreams of falling from a height, of teeth falling out, of flying and of embarrassment at being naked or insufficiently clad. This last dream is attributed simply to the sleeper’s perceiving that he has thrown off his bedclothes in his sleep and is lying exposed to the air. The dream of teeth falling out is traced back to a ‘dental stimulus’, though this does not necessarily imply that the excitation of the teeth is a pathological one. According to Strümpell the flying dream is the image which is found appropriate by the mind as an interpretation of the stimulus produced by the rising and sinking of the lobes of the lungs at times when cutaneous sensations in the thorax have ceased to be conscious: it is this latter circumstance that leads to the feeling which is attached to the idea of floating. The dream of falling from a height is said to be due to an arm falling away from the body or a flexed knee being suddenly extended at a time when the sense of cutaneous pressure is beginning to be no longer conscious; the movements in question cause the tactile sensations to become conscious once more, and the transition to consciousness is represented psychically by the dream of falling (ibid., 118). The obvious weakness of these attempted explanations, plausible though they are, lies in the fact that, without any other evidence, they can make successive hypotheses that this or that group of organic sensations enters or disappears from mental perception, till a constellation has been reached which affords an explanation of the dream. I shall later have occasion to return to the question of typical dreams and their origin.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

550

Simon (1888, 34 f.) has attempted to deduce some of the rules governing the way in which organic stimuli determine the resultant dreams by comparing a series of similar dreams. He asserts that if an organic apparatus which normally plays a part in the expression of an emotion is brought by some extraneous cause during sleep into the state of excitation which is usually produced by the emotion, then a dream will arise which will contain images appropriate to the emotion in question. Another rule lays it down that if during sleep an organ is in a state of activity, excitation or disturbance, the dream will produce images related to the performance of the function which is discharged by the organ concerned. Mourly Vold (1896) has set out to prove experimentally in one particular field the effect on the production of dreams which is asserted by the theory of somatic stimulation. His experiment consisted in altering the position of a sleeper’s limbs and comparing the resultant dreams with the alterations made. He states his findings as follows:

(1) The position of a limb in the dream corresponds approximately to its position in reality. Thus, we dream of the limb being in a static condition when it is so actually.

(2) If we dream of a limb moving, then one of the positions passed through in the course of completing the movement in variably corresponds to the limb’s actual position.

(3) The position of the dreamer’s own limb may be ascribed in the dream to some other person.

(4) The dream may be of the movement in question being hindered.

(5) The limb which is in the position in question may appear in the dream as an animal or monster, in which case a certain analogy is established between them.

(6) The position of a limb may give rise in the dream to thoughts which have some connection with the limb. Thus, if the fingers are concerned, we dream of numbers.

I should be inclined to conclude from findings such as these that even the theory of somatic stimulation has not succeeded in completely doing away with the apparent absence of determination in the choice of what dream-images are to be produced.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] This author has since produced a two-volume report on his experiments (1910 and 1912), which is referred to below.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

551

4.  PSYCHICAL SOURCES OF STIMULATION

When we were dealing with the relations of dreams to waking life and with the material of dreams, we found that the most ancient and the most recent students of dreams were united in believing that men dream of what they do during the daytime and of what interests them while they are awake. Such an interest, carried over from waking life into sleep, would not only be a mental bond, a link between dreams and life, but would also provide us with a further source of dreams and one not to be despised. Indeed, taken in conjunction with the interests that develop during sleep - the stimuli that impinge on the sleeper - it might be enough to explain the origin of all dream-images. But we have also heard the opposite asserted, namely that dreams withdraw the sleeper from the interests of daytime and that, as a rule, we only start dreaming of the things that have most struck us during the day, after they have lost the spice of actuality in waking life. Thus at every step we take in our analysis of dream-life we come to feel that it is impossible to make generalizations without covering ourselves by such qualifying phrases as ‘frequently’, ‘as a rule’ or ‘in most cases’, and without being prepared to admit the validity of exceptions.

If it were a fact that waking interests, along with internal and external stimuli during sleep, sufficed to exhaust the aetiology of dreams, we ought to be in a position to give a satisfactory account of the origin of every element of a dream: the riddle of the sources of dreams would be solved, and it would only remain to define the share taken respectively by psychical and somatic stimuli in any particular dream. Actually no such complete explanation of a dream has ever yet been achieved, and anyone who has attempted it has found portions (and usually very numerous portions) of the dream regarding whose origin he could find nothing to say. Daytime interests are clearly not such far-reaching psychical sources of dreams as might have been expected from the categorical assertions that everyone continues to carry on his daily business in his dreams.

No other psychical sources of dreams are known. So it comes about that all the explanations of dreams given in the literature of the subject - with the possible exception of Scherner’s, which will be dealt with later - leave a great gap when it comes to assigning an origin for the ideational images which constitute the most characteristic material of dreams. In this embarrassing situation, a majority of the writers on the subject have tended to reduce to a minimum the part played by psychical factors in instigating dreams, since those factors are so hard to come at. It is true that they divide dreams into two main classes - those ‘due to nervous stimulation’ and those ‘due to association’, of which the latter have their source exclusively in reproduction (cf. Wundt, 1874, 657 f.). Nevertheless they cannot escape a doubt ‘whether any dream can take place without being given an impetus by some somatic stimulus’ (Volkelt, 1875, 127). It is difficult even to give a description of purely associative dreams. ‘In associative dreams proper, there can be no question of any such solid core. Even the very centre of the dream is only loosely put together. The ideational processes, which in any dream are ungoverned by reason or common sense, are here no longer even held together by my relatively important somatic or mental excitations, and are thus abandoned to their own kaleidoscopic changes and to their own jumbled confusion.’ (Ibid., 118.) Wundt (1874, 656-7), too, seeks to minimize the psychical factor in the instigation of dreams. He declares that there seems to be no justification for regarding the phantasms of dreams as pure hallucinations; most dream-images are probably in fact illusions, since they arise from faint sense-impressions, which never cease during sleep. Weygandt (1893, 17) has adopted this same view and made its application general. He asserts of all dream-images ‘that their primary causes are sensory stimuli and that only later do reproductive associations become attached to them’. Tissié (1898, 183) goes even further in putting a limit to the psychical sources of stimulation: ‘Les rêves d’origine absolument psychique n’existent pas’; and (ibid., 6) ‘les pensées de nos rêves nous viennent du dehors. . . .’ ¹

¹ [‘Dreams of purely psychical origin do not exist.’ ‘The thoughts in our dreams reach us from outside.’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

552

Those writers who, like that eminent philosopher Wundt, take up a middle position do not fail to remark that in most dreams somatic stimuli and the psychical instigators (whether unknown or recognized as daytime interests) work in co-operation.

We shall find later that the enigma of the formation of dreams can be solved by the revelation of an unsuspected psychical source of stimulation. Meanwhile we shall feel no surprise at the over-estimation of the part played in forming dreams by stimuli which do not arise from mental life. Not only are they easy to discover and even open to experimental confirmation; but the somatic view of the origin of dreams is completely in line with the prevailing trend of thought in psychiatry to-day. It is true that the dominance of the brain over the organism is asserted with apparent confidence. Nevertheless, anything that might indicate that mental life is in any way independent of demonstrable organic changes or that its manifestations are in any way spontaneous alarms the modern psychiatrist, as though a recognition of such things would inevitably bring back the days of the Philosophy of Nature, and of the metaphysical view of the nature of mind. The suspicions of the psychiatrists have put the mind, as it were, under tutelage, and they now insist that none of its impulses shall be allowed to suggest that it has any means of its own. This behaviour of theirs only shows how little trust they really have in the validity of a causal connection between the somatic and the mental. Even when investigation shows that the primary exciting cause of a phenomenon is psychical, deeper research will one day trace the path further and discover an organic basis for the mental event. But if at the moment we cannot see beyond the mental, that is no reason for denying its existence.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

553

(D)

WHY DREAMS ARE FORGOTTEN AFTER WAKING

It is a proverbial fact that dreams melt away in the morning. They can, of course, be remembered; for we only know dreams from our memory of them after we are awake. But we very often have a feeling that we have only remembered a dream in part and that there was more of it during the night; we can observe, too, how the recollection of a dream, which was still lively in the morning, will melt away, except for a few small fragments, in the course of the day; we often know we have dreamt, without knowing what we have dreamt; and we are so familiar with the fact of dreams being liable to be forgotten, that we see no absurdity in the possibility of someone having had a dream in the night and of his not being aware in the morning either of what he has dreamt or even of the fact that he has dreamt at all. On the other hand, it sometimes happens that dreams show an extraordinary persistence in the memory. I have analysed dreams in my patients which occurred twenty-five and more years earlier; and I can remember a dream of my own separated by at least thirty-seven years from to-day and yet as fresh as ever in my memory. All of this is very remarkable and not immediately intelligible.

The most detailed account of the forgetting of dreams is the one given by Strümpell. It is evidently a complex phenomenon, for Strümpell traces it back not to a single cause but to a whole number of them.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

554

In the first place, all the causes that lead to forgetting in waking life are operative for dreams as well. When we are awake we regularly forget countless sensations and perceptions at once, because they were too weak or because the mental excitation attaching to them was too slight. The same holds good of many dream-images: they are forgotten because they are too weak, while stronger images adjacent to them are remembered. The factor of intensity, however, is certainly not in itself enough to determine whether a dream-image shall be recollected. Strümpell admits, as well as other writers (e.g. Calkins, 1893, 312), that we often forget dream-images which we know were very vivid, while a very large number which are shadowy and lacking in sensory force are among those retained in the memory. Moreover when we are awake we tend easily to forget an event which occurs only once and more readily to notice what can be perceived repeatedly.¹ Now most dream-images are unique experiences; and that fact will contribute impartially towards making us forget all dreams. Far more importance attaches to a third cause of forgetting. If sensations, ideas, thoughts, and so on, are to attain a certain degree of susceptibility to being remembered, it is essential that they should not remain isolated but should be arranged in appropriate concatenations and groupings. If a short line of verse is divided up into its component words and these are mixed up, it becomes very hard to remember. ‘If words are properly arranged and put into the relevant order, one word will help another, and the whole, being charged with meaning, will be easily taken up by the memory and retained for a long time. It is in general as difficult and unusual to retain what is nonsensical as it is to retain what is confused and disordered.’ Now dreams are in most cases lacking in intelligibility and orderliness. The compositions which constitute dreams are barren of the qualities which would make it possible to remember them, and they are forgotten because as a rule they fall to pieces a moment later. Radestock (1879, 168), however, claims to have observed that it is the most peculiar dreams that are best remembered, and this, it must be admitted, would scarcely tally with what has just been said.

Strümpell believes that certain other factors derived from the relation between dreaming and waking life are of still greater importance in causing dreams to be forgotten. The liability of dreams to be forgotten by waking consciousness is evidently only the counterpart of the fact which has been mentioned earlier that dreams scarcely ever take over ordered recollections from waking life, but only details selected from them, which they tear from the psychical context in which they are usually remembered in the waking state. Thus dream-compositions find no place in the company of the psychical sequences with which the mind is filled. There is nothing that can help us to remember them. ‘In this way dream-structures are, as it were, lifted above the floor of our mental life and float in psychical space like clouds in the sky, scattered by the first breath of wind.’ (Strümpell, 1877, 87.) After waking, moreover, the world of the senses presses forward and at once takes possession of the attention with a force which very few dream-images can resist; so that here too we have another factor tending in the same direction. Dreams give way before the impressions of a new day just as the brilliance of the stars yields to the light of the sun.

¹ Dreams that recur periodically have often been observed. Cf. the collection given by Chabaneix (1897).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

555

Finally, there is another fact to be borne in mind as likely to lead to dreams being forgotten, namely that most people take very little interest in their dreams. Anyone, such as a scientific investigator, who pays attention to his dreams over a period of time will have more dreams than usual - which no doubt means that he remembers his dreams with greater ease and frequency.

Two further reasons why dreams should be forgotten, which Benini quotes as having been brought forward by Bonatelli as additions to those mentioned by Strümpell, seem in fact to be already covered by the latter. They are (1) that the alteration in coenaesthesia between the sleeping and waking states is unfavourable to reciprocal reproduction between them; and (2) that the different arrangement of the ideational material in dreams makes them untranslatable, as it were, for waking consciousness.

In view of all these reasons in favour of dreams being forgotten, it is in fact (as Strümpell himself insists) very remarkable that so many of them are retained in the memory. The repeated attempts by writers on the subject to lay down the rules governing the recollection of dreams amount to an admission that here too we are faced by something puzzling and unexplained. Certain particular characteristics of the recollection of dreams have been rightly emphasized recently (cf. Radestock, 1879, and Tissié, 1898), such as the fact that when a dream seems in the morning to have been forgotten, it may nevertheless be recollected during the course of the day, if its content, forgotten though it is, is touched upon by some chance perception.

But the recollection of dreams in general is open to an objection which is bound to reduce their value very completely in critical opinion. Since so great a proportion of dreams is lost altogether, we may well doubt whether our memory of what is left of them may not be falsified.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

556

These doubts as to the accuracy of the reproduction of dreams are also expressed by Strümpell (1877): ‘Thus it may easily happen that waking consciousness unwittingly makes interpolations in the memory of a dream: we persuade ourselves that we have dreamt all kinds of things that were not contained in the actual dreams.’

Jessen (1855, 547) writes with special emphasis on this point: ‘Moreover, in investigating and interpreting coherent and consistent dreams a particular circumstance must be borne in mind which, as it seems to me, has hitherto received too little attention. In such cases the truth is almost always obscured by the fact that when we recall dreams of this kind to our memory we almost always - unintentionally and without noticing the fact - fill in the gaps in the dream-images. It is seldom or never that a coherent dream was in fact as coherent as it seems to us in memory. Even the most truth-loving of men is scarcely able to relate a noteworthy dream without some additions or embellishments. The tendency of the human mind to see everything connectedly is so strong that in memory it unwittingly fills in any lack of coherence there may be in an incoherent dream.’

Some remarks made by Egger, though they were no doubt arrived at independently, read almost like a translation of this passage from Jessen: ‘. . . L’observation des rêves a ses ifficultés spéciales et le seul moyen d’éviter tout erreur en pareille matière est de confier au papier sans le moindre retard ce que l’on vient d’éprouver et de remarquer; sinon, l’oubli vient vite ou total ou partiel; l’oubli total est sans gravité; mais l’oubli partiel est perfide; car si l’on se met ensuite à raconter ce que l’on n’a pas oublié, on est exposé à compléter par imagination les fragments incohérents et disjoints fournis par la mémoire . . .; on devient artiste à son insu, et le récit périodiquement répété s’impose à la créance de son auteur, qui, de bonne foi, le présente comme un fait authentique, dûment établi selon les bonnes méthodes. . . .’ ¹

Very similar ideas are expressed by Spitta (1882, 338), who seems to believe that it is not until we try to reproduce a dream that we introduce order of any kind into its loosely associated elements: we ‘change things that are merely juxtaposed into sequences or causal chains, that is to say, we introduce a process of logical connection which is lacking in the dream.’

Since the only check that we have upon the validity of our memory is objective confirmation, and since that is unobtainable for dreams, which are our own personal experience and of which the only source we have is our recollection, what value can we still attach to our memory of dreams?

¹ [‘There are peculiar difficulties in observing dreams, and the only way of escaping all errors in such matters is to put down upon paper with the least possible delay what we have just experienced or observed. Otherwise forgetfulness, whether total or partial, quickly supervenes. Total forgetfulness is not serious; but partial forgetfulness is treacherous. For if we then proceed to give an account of what we have not forgotten, we are liable to fill in from our imagination the incoherent and disjointed fragments furnished by memory. . . . We unwittingly become creative artists; and the tale, if it is repeated from time to time, imposes itself on its author’s own belief, and he ends by offering it in good faith as an authentic fact duly and legitimately established.’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

557

(E)

THE DISTINGUISHING PSYCHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF DREAMS

Our scientific consideration of dreams starts off from the assumption that they are products of our own mental activity. Nevertheless the finished dream strikes us as something alien to us. We are so little obliged to acknowledge our responsibility for it that we are just as ready to say ‘mir hat geträumt’ [‘I had a dream’, literally ‘a dream came to me’] as ‘ich habe geträumt’ [‘I dreamt’]. What is the origin of this feeling that dreams are extraneous to our minds?  In view of our discussion upon the sources of dreams, we must conclude that the strangeness cannot be due to the material that finds its way into their content, since that material is for the most part common to dreaming and waking life. The question arises whether in dreams there may not be modifications in the processes of the mind which produce the impression we are discussing; and we shall therefore make an attempt at drawing a picture of the psychological attributes of dreams.

No one has emphasized more sharply the essential difference between dreaming and waking life or drawn more far-reaching conclusions from it than G. T. Fechner in a passage in his Elemente der Psychophysik (1889, 2, 520-1). In his opinion, ‘neither the mere lowering of conscious mental life below the main threshold’, nor the withdrawal of attention from the influences of the external world, are enough to explain the characteristics of dream-life as contrasted with waking life. He suspects, rather, that the scene of action of dreams is different from that of waking ideational life. ‘If the scene of action of psychophysical activity were the same in sleeping and waking, dreams could, in my view, only be a prolongation at a lower degree of intensity of waking ideational life and, moreover, would necessarily be of the same material and form. But the facts are quite otherwise.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

558

It is not clear what Fechner had in mind in speaking of this change of location of mental activity; nor, so far as I know, has anyone else pursued the path indicated by his words. We may, I think, dismiss the possibility of giving the phrase an anatomical interpretation and supposing it to refer to physiological cerebral localization or even to the histological layers of the cerebral cortex. It may be, however, that the suggestion will eventually prove to be sagacious and fertile, if it can be applied to a mental apparatus built up of a number of agencies arranged in a series one behind the other.

Other writers have contented themselves with drawing attention to the more tangible of the distinguishing characteristics of dream-life and with taking them as a starting-point for attempts at more far reaching explanations.

It has justly been remarked that one of the principal peculiarities of dream-life makes its appearance during the very process of falling asleep and may be described as a phenomenon heralding sleep. According to Schleiermacher (1862, 351), what characterizes the waking state is the fact that thought-activity takes place in concepts and not in images. Now dreams think essentially in images; and with the approach of sleep it is possible to observe how, in proportion as voluntary activities become more difficult, involuntary ideas arise, all of which fall into the class of images. Incapacity for ideational work of the kind which we feel as intentionally willed and the emergence (habitually associated with such states of abstraction) of images - these are two characteristics which persevere in dreams and which the psychological analysis of dreams forces us to recognize as essential features of dream-life. We have already seen that these images - hypnagogic hallucinations - are themselves identical in their content with dream-images.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1911:] Silberer (1909) has given some nice examples of the way in which, in a drowsy state, even abstract thoughts become converted into pictorial plastic images which seek to express the same meaning. [Added 1925:] I shall have occasion to return to this discovery in another connection.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

559

Dreams, then, think predominantly in visual images - but not exclusively. They make use of auditory images as well, and, to a lesser extent, of impressions belonging to the other senses. Many things, too, occur in dreams (just as they normally do in waking life) simply as thoughts or ideas - probably, that is to say, in the form of residues of verbal presentations. Nevertheless, what are truly characteristic of dreams are only those elements of their content which behave like images, which are more like perceptions, that is, than they are like mnemic presentations. Leaving on one side all the arguments, so familiar to psychiatrists, on the nature of hallucinations, we shall be in agreement with every authority on the subject in asserting that dreams hallucinate - that they replace thoughts by hallucinations. In this respect there is no distinction between visual and acoustic presentations: it has been observed that if one falls asleep with the memory of a series of musical notes in one’s mind, the memory becomes transformed into an hallucination of the same melody; while, if one then wakes up again - and the two states may alternate more than once during the process of dropping asleep - the hallucination gives way in turn to the mnemic presentation, which is at once fainter and qualitatively different from it.

The transformation of ideas into hallucinations is not the only respect in which dreams differ from corresponding thoughts in waking life. Dreams construct a situation out of these images; they represent an event which is actually happening; as Spitta (1882, 145) puts it, they ‘dramatize’ an idea. But this feature of dream-life can only be fully understood if we further recognize that in dreams - as a rule, for there are exceptions which require special examination - we appear not to think but to experience; that is to say, we attach complete belief to the hallucinations. Not until we wake up does the critical comment arise that we have not experienced anything but have merely been thinking in a peculiar way, or in other words dreaming. It is this characteristic that distinguishes true dreams from day-dreaming, which is never confused with reality.

Burdach (1838, 502 f.) summarizes the features of dream-life which we have so far discussed in the following words: ‘These are among the essential features of dreams: (a) In dreams the subjective activity of our minds appears in an objective form, for our perceptive faculties regard the products of our imagination as though they were sense impressions . . . (b) Sleep signifies an end of the authority of the self. Hence falling asleep brings a certain degree of passivity along with it. . . . The images that accompany sleep can occur only on condition that the authority of the self is reduced.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

560

The next thing is to try to explain the belief which the mind accords to dream-hallucinations, a belief which can only arise after some kind of ‘authoritative’ activity of the self has ceased. Strümpell (1877) argues that in this respect the mind is carrying out its function correctly and in conformity with its own mechanism. Far from being mere presentations, the elements of dreams are true and real mental experiences of the same kind as arise in a waking state through the agency of the senses. (Ibid., 34.) The waking mind produces ideas and thoughts in verbal images and in speech; but in dreams it does so in true sensory images. (Ibid., 35.) Moreover, there is a spatial consciousness in dreams, since sensations and images are assigned to an external space, just as they are in waking. (Ibid., 36.) It must therefore be allowed that in dreams the mind is in the same relation to its images and perceptions as it is in waking. (Ibid., 43.) If it is nevertheless in error in so doing, that is because in the state of sleep it lacks the criterion which alone makes it possible to distinguish between sense-perceptions arising from without and from within. It is unable to submit its dream-images to the only tests which could prove their objective reality, In addition to this, it disregards the distinction between images which are only interchangeable arbitrarily and cases where the element of arbitrariness is absent. It is in error because it is unable to apply the law of causality to the content of its dreams. (Ibid., 50-1.)  In short, the fact of its having turned away from the external world is also the reason for its belief in the subjective world of dreams.

Delboeuf (1885, 84) arrives at the same conclusion after somewhat different psychological arguments. We believe in the reality of dream-images, he says, because in our sleep we have no other impressions with which to compare them, because we are detached from the external world. But the reason why we believe in the truth of these hallucinations is not because it is impossible to put them to the test within the dream. A dream can seem to offer us such tests: it can let us touch the rose that we see - and yet we are dreaming. In Delboeuf’s opinion there is only one valid criterion of whether we are dreaming or awake, and that is the purely empirical one of the fact of waking up. I conclude that everything I experienced between falling asleep and waking up was illusory, when, on awaking, I find that I am lying undressed in bed. During sleep I took the dream images as real owing to my mental habit (which cannot be put to sleep) of assuming the existence of an external world with which I contrast my own ego.¹

¹ Haffner (1887, 243) attempts, like Delboeuf, to explain the activity of dreaming by the modification which the introduction of an abnormal condition must inevitably produce in the otherwise correct functioning of an intact mental apparatus; but he gives a somewhat different account of that condition. According to him the first mark of a dream is its independence of space and time, i. e. the fact of a presentation being emancipated from the position occupied by the subject in the spatial and temporal order of events. The second basic feature of dreams is connected with this - namely, the fact that hallucinations, phantasies and imaginary combinations are confused with external perceptions. ‘All the higher powers of the mind - in particular the formation of concepts and the powers of judgement and inference on the one hand and free self-determination on the other hand - are attached to sensory images and have at all times a background of such images. It follows, therefore, that these higher activities too take their part in the disorderliness of the dream-images. I say "take their part", since in them selves our powers of judgement and of will are in no way altered in sleep. Our activities are just as clear-sighted and just as free as in waking life. Even in his dreams a man cannot violate the laws of thought as such - he cannot, for instance, regard as identical things that appear to him as contraries, and so on. So too in dreams he can only desire what he looks upon as a good (sub ratione boni). But the human spirit is led astray in dreams in its application of the laws of thought and of will through confusing one idea with another. Thus it comes about that we are guilty of the grossest contradictions in dreams, while at the same time we can make the clearest judgements, draw the most logical inferences and come to the most virtuous and saintly decisions. . . . Lack of orientation is the whole secret of the flights taken by our imagination in dreams, and lack of critical reflection and of communication with other people is the main source of the unbridled extravagance exhibited in dreams by our judgements as well as by our hopes and wishes.’ (Ibid., 18.)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

561

Detachment from the external world seems thus to be regarded as the factor determining the most marked features of dream-life. It is therefore worth while quoting some penetrating remarks made long ago by Burdach which throw light on the relations between the sleeping mind and the external world and which are calculated to prevent our setting too great store by the conclusions drawn in the last few pages. ‘Sleep’, he writes, ‘can occur only on condition that the mind is not irritated by sensory stimuli. . . . But the actual ‘recondition of sleep is not so much absence of sensory stimuli as absence of interest in them.¹ Some sense impressions may actually be necessary in order to calm the mind. Thus the miller can only sleep so long as he hears the clacking of his mill; and anyone who feels that burning a night-light is a necessary precaution, finds it impossible to get to sleep in the dark.’ (Burdach, 1838, 482.)

‘In sleep the mind isolates itself from the external world and withdraws from its own periphery. . . . Nevertheless connection is not broken off entirely. If we could not hear or feel while we were actually asleep, but only after we had woken up, it would be impossible to wake us at all. . . . The persistence of sensation is proved even more clearly by the fact that what rouses us is not always the mere sensory strength of an impression but its psychical context: a sleeping man is not aroused by an indifferent word, but if he is called by name he wakes. . . . Thus the mind in sleep distinguishes between sensations. . . . It is for that reason that the absence of a sensory stimulus can wake a man if it is related to something of ideational importance to him; so it is that the man with the night-light wakes if it is extinguished and the miller is roused if his mill comes to a stop. He is awakened, that is, by the cessation of a sensory activity; and this implies that that activity was perceived by him, but, since it was indifferent, or rather satisfying, did not disturb his mind.’ (Ibid., 485-6.)

Even if we disregard these objections - and they are by no means trifling ones -, we shall have to confess that the features of dream-life which we have considered hitherto, and which have been ascribed to its detachment from the external world, do not account completely for its strange character. For it should be possible otherwise to turn the hallucinations in a dream back into ideas, and its situations into thoughts, and in that way to solve the problem of dream-interpretation. And that in fact is what we are doing when, after waking, we reproduce a dream from memory; but, whether we succeed in making this re-translation wholly or only in part, the dream remains no less enigmatic than before.

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] Cf. the ‘désintérêt’ which Claparède (1905, 306 f.) regards as the mechanism of falling asleep.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

562

And indeed all the authorities unhesitatingly assume that yet other and more deep-going modifications of the ideational material of waking life take place in dreams. Strümpell (1877, 27-8) has endeavoured to put his finger on one such modification in the following passage: ‘With the cessation of sensory functioning and of normal vital consciousness, the mind loses the soil in which its feelings, desires, interests and activities are rooted. The psychical states, too - feelings, interests, judgements of value - which are linked to mnemic images in waking life, are subjected to . . . an obscuring pressure, as a result of which their connection with those images is broken; perceptual images of things, persons, places, events and actions in waking life are reproduced separately in great numbers, but none of them carries its psychical value along with it. That value is detached from them and they thus float about in the mind at their own sweet will. . . .’ According to Strümpell, the fact of images being denuded of their psychical value (which in turn goes back to detachment from the external world) plays a principal part in creating the impression of strangeness which distinguishes dreams from actual life in our memory.

We have seen that falling asleep at once involves the loss of one of our mental activities, namely our power of giving intentional guidance to the sequence of our ideas. We are now faced by the suggestion, which is in any case a plausible one, that the effects of the state of sleep may extend over all the faculties of the mind. Some of these seem to be entirely suspended; but the question now arises whether the rest continue to operate normally and whether under such conditions they are capable of normal work. And here it may be asked whether the distinguishing features of dreams cannot be explained by the lowering of psychical efficiency in the sleeping state - a notion which finds support in the impression made by dreams on our waking judgement. Dreams are disconnected, they accept the most violent contradictions without the least objection, they admit impossibilities, they disregard knowledge which carries great weight with us in the daytime, they reveal us as ethical and moral imbeciles. Anyone who when he was awake behaved in the sort of way that is shown in situations in dreams would be considered insane. Anyone who when he was awake talked in the sort of way that people talk in dreams or described the sort of thing that happens in dreams would give us the impression of being muddle-headed or feeble minded. It seems to be no more than putting the truth into words when we express our very low opinion of mental activity in dreams and assert that in dreams the higher intellectual faculties in particular are suspended or at all events gravely impaired.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

563

The authorities display unusual unanimity - exceptions will be treated later - in expressing opinions of this kind on dreams; and these judgements lead directly to a particular theory or explanation of dream-life. But it is time for me to leave generalities and to give instead a series of quotations from various writers - philosophers and physicians - upon the psychological characteristics of dreams.

According to Lemoine (1855), the ‘incoherence’ of dream images is the one essential characteristic of dreams.

Maury (1878, 163) agrees with him: ‘II n’y a pas de rêves absolument raisonnables et qui ne contiennent quelque incohérence, quelque anachronisme, quelque absurdité.’ ¹

Spitta quotes Hegel as saying that dreams are devoid of all objectives and reasonable coherence.

Dugas writes: ‘Le rêve c’est l’anarchie psychique affective et mentale, c’est le jeu des fonctions livrées à ellesmêmes et s’exerçant sans contrôle et sans but; dans le rêve l’esprit est un automate spirituel.’ ²

Even Volkelt (1875, 14), whose theory is far from regarding psychical activity during sleep as purposeless, speaks of ‘the relaxing, disconnecting and confusing of ideational life, which in the waking state is held together by the logical force of the central ego.’

The absurdity of the associations of ideas that occur in dreams could scarcely be criticized more sharply than it was by Cicero (De divinatione, II): ‘Nihil tam praepostere, tam in condite, tam monstruose cogitari potest, quod non possimus somniare.’ ³

Fechner (1889, 2, 522) writes: ‘It is as though psychological activity had been transported from the brain of a reasonable man into that of a fool.’

¹ [‘There are no dreams that are absolutely reasonable and that do not contain some incoherence, anachronism or absurdity.’]

² [‘A dream is psychical, emotional and mental anarchy; it is the play of functions left to their own devices and acting without control or purpose; in dreams the spirit becomes a spiritual automaton.’]

³ [‘There is no imaginable thing too absurd, too involved, or too abnormal for us to dream about it.’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

564

Radestock (1879, 145): ‘In fact it seems impossible to detect any fixed laws in this crazy activity. After withdrawing from the strict policing exercised over the course of waking ideas by the rational will and the attention, dreams melt into a mad whirl of kaleidoscopic confusion.’

Hildebrandt (1875, 45): ‘What astonishing leaps a dreamer may make, for instance, in drawing inferences! How calmly he is prepared to see the most familiar lessons of experience turned upside down. What laughable contradictions he is ready to accept in the laws of nature and society before, as we say, things get beyond a joke and the excessive strain of nonsense wakes him up. We calculate without a qualm that three times three make twenty; we are not in the least surprised when a dog quotes a line of poetry, or when a dead man walks to his grave on his own legs, or when we see a rock floating on the water; we proceed gravely on an important mission to the Duchy of Bernburg or to the Principality of Liechtenstein to inspect their naval forces; or we are persuaded to enlist under Charles XII shortly before the battle of Poltava.’

Binz (1878, 33), having in mind the theory of dreams which is based upon such impressions as these, writes: ‘The content of at least nine out of ten dreams is nonsensical. We bring together in them people and things that have no connection whatever with one another. Next moment there is a shift in the kaleidoscope and we are faced by a new grouping, more senseless and crazy, if possible, than the last. And so the changing play of the incompletely sleeping brain goes on, till we awake and clasp our forehead and wonder whether we still possess the capacity for rational ideas and thoughts.’

Maury (1878, 50) finds a parallel to the relation between dream-images and waking thoughts which will be highly significant to physicians: ‘La production de ces images que chez l’homme éveillé fait le plus souvent naître la volonté, correspond, pour l’intelligence, à ce que sont pour la motilité certains mouvements que nous offre la choreé et les affections paralytiques. . .’ He further regards dreams as ‘toute une série de dégradations de la faculté pensante et raisonnante.’ (Ibid., 27.)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

565

It is scarcely necessary to quote the writers who repeat Maury’s opinion in relation to the various higher mental functions. Strümpell (1877, 26), for instance, remarks that in dreams - even, of course, where there is no manifest nonsense - there is an eclipse of all the logical operations of the mind which are based on relations and connections. Spitta (1882, 148) declares that ideas that occur in dreams seem to be completely withdrawn from the law of causality. Radestock (1879, ) and other writers insist upon the weakness of judgement and inference characteristic of dreams. According to Jodl (1896, 123), there is no critical faculty in dreams, no power of correcting one set of perceptions by reference to the general content of consciousness. The same author remarks that ‘every kind of conscious activity occurs in dreams, but only in an incomplete, inhibited and isolated fashion.’ The contradictions with our waking knowledge in which dreams are involved are explained by Stricker (1879, 98) and many others as being due to facts being forgotten in dreams or to logical relations between ideas having disappeared. And so on, and so on.

Nevertheless, the writers who in general take so unfavourable a view of psychical functioning in dreams allow that a certain remnant of mental activity still remains in them. This is explicitly admitted by Wundt, whose theories have had a determining influence on so many other workers in this field. What, it may be asked, is the nature of the remnant of normal mental activity which persists in dreams? There is fairly general agreement that the reproductive faculty, the memory, seems to have suffered least, and indeed that it shows a certain superiority to the same function in waking life (see Section B above), though some part of the absurdities of dreaming seems to be explicable by its forgetfulness. In the opinion of Spitta (1882, 84 f.) the part of the mind which is not affected by sleep is the life of the sentiments and it is this which directs dreams. By ‘sentiment’ [‘Gemüt’] he means ‘the stable assemblage of feelings which constitutes the innermost subjective essence of a human being’.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

566

Scholz (1893, 64) believes that one of the mental activities operating in dreams is a tendency to subject the dream material to ‘re-interpretation in allegorical terms’. Siebeck too (1877, 11) sees in dreams a faculty of the mind for ‘wider interpretation’, which is exercised upon all sensations and perceptions. There is particular difficulty in assessing the position in dreams of what is ostensibly the highest of the psychical functions, that of consciousness. Since all that we know of dreams is derived from consciousness, there can be no doubt of its persisting in them; yet Spitta (1882, 84-5) believes that what persists in dreams is only consciousness and not self-consciousness. Delboeuf (1885, 19), however, confesses that he is unable to follow the distinction.

The laws of association governing the sequence of ideas hold good of dream-images, and indeed their dominance is even more clearly and strongly expressed in dreams. ‘Dreams’, says Strümpell (1877, 70), ‘run their course, as it seems, according to the laws either of bare ideas or of organic stimuli accompanying such ideas - that is, without being in any way affected by reflection or common-sense or aesthetic taste or moral judgement.’

The authors whose views I am now giving picture the process of forming dreams in some such way as this. The totality of the sensory stimuli generated during sleep from the various sources which I have already enumerated arouse in the mind in the first place a number of ideas, which are represented in the form of hallucinations or more properly, according to Wundt, of illusions, in view of their derivation from external and internal stimuli. These ideas become linked together according to the familiar laws of association and, according to the same laws, call up a further series of ideas (or images). The whole of this material is then worked over, so far as it will allow, by what still remain in operation of the organizing and thinking faculties of the mind. (See, for instance, Wundt and Weygandt.) All that remain undiscovered are the motives which decide whether the calling up of images arising from non-external sources shall proceed along one chain of associations or another.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

567

It has often been remarked, however, that the associations connecting dream-images with one another are of a quite special kind and differ from those which operate in waking thought. Thus Volkelt (1875, 15) writes: ‘In dreams the associations seem to play at catch-as-catch-can in accordance with chance similarities and connections that are barely perceptible. Every dream is stuffed full of slovenly and perfunctory associations of this kind.’ Maury (1878, 126) attaches very great importance to this feature of the way in which ideas are linked in dreams, since it enables him to draw a close analogy between dream-life and certain mental disorders. He specifies two main features of a ‘délire’: ‘(1) une action spontanée et comme automatique de l’esprit; (2) une association vicieuse et irrégulière des idées.’ ¹ Maury himself gives two excellent instances of dreams of his own in which dream-images were linked together merely through a similarity in the sound of words. He once dreamt that he was on a pilgrimage (pélerinage) to Jerusalem or Mecca; after many adventures he found himself visiting Pelletier, the chemist, who, after some conversation, gave him a zinc shovel (pelle); in the next part of the dream this turned into a great broad-sword. (Ibid., 137.) In another dream he was walking along a highway and reading the number of kilometres on the milestones; then he was in a grocer’s shop where there was a big pair of scales, and a man was putting kilogramme weights into the scale in order to weigh Maury; the grocer then said to him: ‘You’re not in Paris but on the island of Gilolo.’ Several other scenes followed, in which he saw a Lobelia flower, and then General Lopez, of whose death he had read shortly before. Finally, while he was playing a game of lotto, he woke up. (Ibid., 126.)²

We shall no doubt be prepared to find, however, that this low estimate of psychical functioning in dreams has not been allowed to pass without contradiction - though contradiction on this point would seem to be no easy matter. For instance, Spitta (1882, 118), one of the disparagers of dream-life, insists that the same psychological laws which regulate waking life also hold good in dreams; and another, Dugas (1897a), declares that ‘le rêve n’est pas déraison ni même irraison pure’.³ But such assertions carry little weight so long as their authors make no attempt to reconcile them with their own descriptions of the psychical anarchy and disruption of every function that prevail in dreams. It seems, however, to have dawned upon some other writers that the madness of dreams may not be without method and may even be simulated, like that of the Danish prince on whom this shrewd judgement was passed. These latter writers cannot have judged by appearances; or the appearance presented to them by dreams must have been a different one.

¹ [‘(1) A mental act which is spontaneous and as it were automatic; (2) an invalid and irregular association of ideas.’]

² [Footnote added 1909:] At later stage we shall come to understand the meaning of dreams such as this which are filled with alliterations and similar-sounding first syllables.

³ [`Dreams are not contrary to reason or even entirely lacking in reason.’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

568

Thus Havelock Ellis (1899, 721), without dwelling on the apparent absurdity of dreams, speaks of them as ‘an archaic world of vast emotions and imperfect thoughts’, the study of which might reveal to us primitive stages in the evolution of mental life.

The same view is expressed by James Sully (1893, 362) in a manner that is both more sweeping and more penetrating. His words deserve all the more attention when we bear in mind that he was more firmly convinced, perhaps, than any other psychologist that dreams have a disguised meaning. ‘Now our dreams are a means of conserving these successive personalities. When asleep we go back to the old ways of looking at things and of feeling about them, to impulses and activities which long ago dominated us.’

The sagacious Delboeuf (1885, 222) declares (though he puts himself in the wrong by not giving any refutation of the material which contradicts his thesis): ‘Dans le sommeil, hormis la perception, toutes les facultés de l’esprit, intelligence, imagination, mêmoire, volonté, moralité, restent intactes dans leur essence; seulement elles s’appliquent à des objets imaginaires et mobiles. Le songeur est un acteur qui joue à volontà les fous et les sages, les bourreaux et les victimes, les nains et les géants, les démons et les anges.’ ¹

¹ [‘In sleep, all the mental faculties (except for perception) - intelligence, imagination, memory, will and morality - remain essentially intact; they are merely applied to imaginary and unstable objects. A dreamer is an actor who at his own will plays the parts of madmen and philosophers, of executioners and their victims, of dwarfs and giants, of demons and angels.’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

569

The most energetic opponent of those who seek to depreciate psychical functioning in dreams seems to be the Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys, with whom Maury carried on a lively controversy, and whose book, in spite of all my efforts, I have not succeeded in procuring. Maury (1878, 19) writes of him: ‘M. le Marquis d’Hervey prête à l’intelligence durant le sommeil, toute sa liberté d’action et d’attention et il ne semble faire consister le sommeil que dans l’occlusion des sens, dans leur fermeture au monde extérieur; en sorte que l’homme qui dort ne se distingue guère, selon sa manière de voir, de l’homme qui laisse vaguer sa pensée en se bouchant les sens; toute la différence qui sépare alors la pensée ordinaire de celle du dormeur c’est que, chez celui-ci, l’idée prend une forme visible, objective et ressemble, à s’y méprendre, à la sensation déterminée par les objets extérieurs; le souvenir revêt l’apparence du fait présent.’ ¹ To this Maury adds ‘qu’il y a une différence de plus et capitale à savoir que les facultés intellectuelles de l’homme endormi n’offrent pas l’équilibre qu’elles gardent chez l’homme éveillé.’ ²

Vaschide (1911, 146 f.) gives us a clearer account of Hervey de Saint-Denys’ book and quotes a passage from it upon the apparent incoherence of dreams: ‘L’image du rêve est la copie de l’idée. Le principal est l’idée; la vision n’est qu’accessoire. Ceci établi, il faut savoir suivre la marche des idées, il faut savoir analyser le tissu des rêves; l’incohérence devient alors compréhensible, les conceptions les plus fantasques deviennent des faits simples et parfaitement logiques. . . . Les rêves les plus bizarres trouvent même une explication des plus logiques quand on sait les analyser.’ ³

¹ [‘The Marquis d’Hervey attributes complete liberty of action and attention to the intelligence during sleep, and he seems to think that sleep consists merely in the blocking of the senses, in their being closed to the external world. So that on his view a sleeping man would hardly be different from a man who shut off his senses and allowed his thought to wander; the only distinction between ordinary thoughts and those of a sleeper would be that, in the latter, ideas assume a visible and objective shape and are indistinguishable from sensations determined by external objects, while memories take on the appearance of present events.’]

² [‘There is a further distinction and one of capital importance: namely, that the intellectual faculties of a sleeping man do not exhibit the balance maintained in a man who is awake.’]

³ [ ‘Dream-images are copies of ideas. The essential thing is the idea, the vision is a mere accessory. When this is once established, we must know how to follow the sequence of the ideas, we must know how to analyse the texture of dreams; their incoherence then becomes intelligible, and the most fantastic notions become simple and perfectly logical facts. . . . We can even find a most logical explanation for the strangest dreams if we know how to analyse them.’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

570

Johan Stärcke (1913, 243) has pointed out that a similar explanation of the incoherence of dreams was put forward by an earlier writer, Wolf Davidson (1799, 136), whose work was unknown to me: ‘The remarkable leaps taken by our ideas in dreams all have their basis in the law of association; sometimes, however, these connections occur in the mind very obscurely, so that our ideas often seem to have taken a leap when in fact there has been none.’

The literature of the subject thus shows a very wide range of variation in the value which it assigns to dreams as psychical products. This range extends from the deepest disparagement, of the kind with which we have become familiar, through hints at a yet undisclosed worth, to an overvaluation which ranks dreams far higher than any of the functions of waking life. Hildebrandt (1875, 19 f.), who, as we have heard, has summed up the whole of the psychological features of dream-life in three antinomies, makes use of the two extreme ends of this range of values for his third paradox: ‘it is a contrast between an intensification of mental life, an enhancement of it that not infrequently amounts to virtuosity, and, on the other hand, a deterioration and enfeeblement which often sinks below the level of humanity. As regards the former, there are few of us who could not affirm, from our own experience, that there emerges from time to time in the creations and fabrics of the genius of dreams a depth and intimacy of emotion, a tenderness of feeling, a clarity of vision, a subtlety of observation, and a brilliance of wit such as we should never claim to have at our permanent command in our waking lives. There lies in dreams a marvellous poetry, an apt allegory, an incomparable humour, a rare irony. A dream looks upon the world in a light of strange idealism and often enhances the effects of what it sees by its deep understanding of their essential nature. It pictures earthly beauty to our eyes in a truly heavenly splendour and clothes dignity with the highest majesty, it shows us our everyday fears in the ghastliest shape and turns our amusement into jokes of indescribable pungency. And sometimes, when we are awake and still under the full impact of an experience like one of these, we cannot but feel that never in our life has the real world offered us its equal.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

571

We may well ask whether the disparaging remarks quoted on earlier pages and this enthusiastic eulogy can possibly relate to the same thing. Is it that some of our authorities have overlooked the nonsensical dreams and others the profound and subtle ones? And if dreams of both kinds occur, dreams that justify both estimates, may it not be a waste of time to look for any distinguishing psychological feature of dreams? Will it not be enough to say that in dreams anything is possible - from the deepest degradation of mental life to an exaltation of it which is rare in waking hours? However convenient a solution of this kind might be, what lies against it is the fact that all of the efforts at research into the problem of dreams seem to be based on a conviction that some distinguishing feature does exist, which is universally valid in its essential outline and which would clear these apparent contradictions out of the way.

There can be no doubt that the psychical achievements of dreams received readier and warmer recognition during the intellectual period which has now been left behind, when the human mind was dominated by philosophy and not by the exact natural sciences. Pronouncements such as that by Schubert (1814, 20 f.) that dreams are a liberation of the spirit from the power of external nature, a freeing of the soul from the bonds of the senses, and similar remarks by the younger Fichte (1864, 1, 143 f.)¹ and others, all of which represent dreams as an elevation of mental life to a higher level, seem to us now to be scarcely intelligible; today they are repeated only by mystics and pietists.² The introduction of the scientific mode of thought has brought along with it a reaction in the estimation of dreams. Medical writers in especial tend to regard psychical activity in dreams as trivial and valueless; while philosophers and non-professional observers - amateur psychologists - whose contributions to this particular subject are not to be despised, have (in closer alignment with popular feeling) retained a belief in the psychical value of dreams. Anyone who is inclined to take a low view of psychical functioning in dreams will naturally prefer to assign their source to somatic stimulation; whereas those who believe that the dreaming mind retains the greater part of its waking capacities have of course no reason for denying that the stimulus to dreaming can arise within the dreaming mind itself.

¹ Cf. Haffner (1887) and Spitta (1882, 11 f.).

² [Footnote added 1914:] That brilliant mystic Du Prel, one of the few authors for whose neglect in earlier editions of this book I should wish to express my regret, declares that the gateway to metaphysics, so far as men are concerned, lies not in waking life but in the dream. (Du Prel, 1885, 59.)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

572

Of the superior faculties which even a sober comparison may be inclined to attribute to dream-life, the most marked is that of memory; we have already discussed at length the not uncommon evidence in favour of this view. Another point of superiority in dream-life, often praised by earlier writers - that it rises superior to distance in time and space  - may easily be shown to have no basis in fact. As Hildebrandt (1875, ) points out, this advantage is an illusory one; for dreaming rises superior to time and space in precisely the same way as does waking thought, and for the very reason that it is merely a form of thought. It has been claimed for dreams that they enjoy yet another advantage over waking life in relation to time - that they are independent of the passage of time in yet another respect. Dreams such as the one dreamt by Maury of his own guillotining (see above, p. 539 f.) seem to show that a dream is able to compress into a very short space of time an amount of perceptual matter far greater than the amount of ideational matter that can be dealt with by our waking mind. This conclusion has however been countered by various arguments; since the papers by Le Lorrain (1894) and Egger (1895) on the apparent duration of dreams, a long and interesting discussion on the subject has developed, but it seems unlikely that the last word has yet been said on this subtle question and the deep implications which it involves.¹

Reports of numerous cases seem to put it beyond dispute that dreams can carry on the intellectual work of daytime and bring it to conclusions which had not been reached during the day, and that they can resolve doubts and problems and be the source of new inspiration for poets and musical composers. But though the fact may be beyond dispute, its implications are open to many doubts, which raise matters of principle.²

Lastly, dreams are reputed to have the power of divining the future. Here we have a conflict in which almost insuperable scepticism is met by obstinately repeated assertions. No doubt we shall be acting rightly in not insisting that this view has no basis at all in fact, since it is possible that before long a number of the instances cited may find an explanation within the bounds of natural psychology.

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] A further bibliography and a critical discussion of these problems will be found in Tobowolska (1900).

² [Footnote added 1914:] Cf. the criticism in Havelock Ellis (1911, 265).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

573

(F)

THE MORAL SENSE IN DREAMS

For reasons which will only become apparent after my own investigations into dreams have been taken into account, I have isolated from the subject of the psychology of dreams the special problem of whether and to what extent moral dispositions and feelings extend into dream-life. Here too we are met by the same contradictory views which, curiously enough, we have found adopted by different authors in regard to all the other functions of the mind during dreams. Some assert that the dictates of morality have no place in dreams, while others maintain no less positively that the moral character of man persists in his dream-life.

Appeal to the common experience of dreams seems to establish beyond any doubt the correctness of the former of these views. Jessen (1855, 553) writes: ‘Nor do we become better or more virtuous in sleep. On the contrary, conscience seems to be silent in dreams, for we feel no pity in them and may commit the worst crimes - theft, violence and murder - with complete indifference and with no subsequent feelings of remorse.’

Radestock (1879, 164): ‘It should be borne in mind that associations occur and ideas are linked together in dreams without any regard for reflection, common sense, aesthetic taste or moral judgement. Judgement is extremely weak and ethical indifference reigns supreme.’

Volkelt (1875, 23): ‘In dreams, as we are all aware, proceedings are especially unbridled in sexual matters. The dreamer himself is utterly shameless and devoid of any moral feeling or judgement; moreover, he sees everyone else, including those for whom he has the deepest respect, engaged in acts with which he would be horrified to associate them while he was awake, even in his thoughts.’

In diametrical opposition to these, we find statements such as Schopenhauer’s that everyone who figures in a dream acts and speaks in complete accordance with his character. K. P. Fischer (1850, 72 f.), quoted by Spitta (1882, 188), declares that subjective feelings and longings, or affects and passions, reveal themselves in the freedom of dream-life, and that people’s moral characteristics are reflected in their dreams.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

574

Haffner (1884, 251): ‘With rare exceptions . . . a virtuous man will be virtuous in his dreams as well; he will resist temptations and will keep himself aloof from hatred, envy, anger and all other vices. But a sinful man will as a rule find in his dreams the same images that he had before his eyes while he was awake.’

Scholz: ‘In dreams is truth: in dreams we learn to know ourselves as we are in spite of all the disguises we wear to the world, . . . . The honourable man cannot commit a crime in dreams, or if he does he is horrified over it as over something contrary to his nature. The Roman Emperor who put a man to death who had dreamt that he had assassinated the ruler, was justified in so doing if he reasoned that the thoughts one has in dreams, one has, too, when awake. The common expression "I wouldn’t dream of such a thing" has a doubly correct significance when it refers to something which can have no lodgement in our hearts or mind.’ (Plato, on the contrary, thought that the best men are those who only dream what other men do in their waking life.)

Pfaff (1868 ), quoted by Spitta (1882, 192), alters the wording of a familiar saying: ‘Tell me some of your dreams, and I will tell you about your inner self.’

The problem of morality in dreams is taken as the centre of interest by Hildebrandt, from whose small volume I have already quoted so much - for, of all the contributions to the study of dreams which I have come across, it is the most perfect in form and the richest in ideas. Hildebrandt too lays it down as a rule that the purer the life the purer the dream, and the more impure the one the more impure the other. He believes that man’s moral nature persists in dreams. ‘Whereas’, he writes, ‘even the grossest mistake in arithmetic, even the most romantic reversal of scientific laws, even the most ridiculous anachronism fails to upset us or even to arouse our suspicions, yet we never lose sight of the distinction between good and evil, between right and wrong or between virtue and vice. However much of what accompanies us in the daytime may drop away in our sleeping hours, Kant’s categorical imperative is a companion who follows so close at our heels that we cannot be free of it even in sleep. . . . But this can only be explained by the fact that what is fundamental in man’s nature, his moral being, is too firmly fixed to be affected by the kaleidoscopic shuffling to which the imagination, the reason, the memory and other such faculties must submit in dreams.’ (Ibid., 45 f.)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

575

As the discussion of this subject proceeds, however, both groups of writers begin to exhibit remarkable shifts and inconsistencies in their opinions. Those who maintain that the moral personality of man ceases to operate in dreams should, in strict logic, lose all interest in immoral dreams. They could rule out any attempt at holding a dreamer responsible for his dreams, or at deducing from the wickedness of his dreams that he had an evil streak in his character, just as confidently as they would reject a similar attempt at deducing from the absurdity of his dreams that his intellectual activities in waking life were worthless. The other group, who believe that the ‘categorical imperative’ extends to dreams, should logically accept unqualified responsibility for immoral dreams. We could only hope for their sake that they would have no such reprehensible dreams of their own to upset their firm belief in their own moral character.

It appears, however, that no one is as confident as all that of how far he is good or bad, and that no one can deny the recollection of immoral dreams of his own. For writers in both groups, irrespective of the opposition between their opinions on dream-morality, make efforts at explaining the origin of immoral dreams; and a fresh difference of opinion develops, according as their origin is sought in the functions of the mind or in deleterious effects produced on the mind by somatic causes. Thus the compelling logic of facts forces the supporters of both the responsibility and the irresponsibility of dream-life to unite in recognizing that the immorality of dreams has a specific psychical source.

Those who believe that morality extends to dreams are, however, all careful to avoid assuming complete responsibility for their dreams. Thus Haffner (1887, 250) writes: ‘We are not responsible for our dreams, since our thought and will have been deprived in them of the basis upon which alone our life possesses truth and reality . . . For that reason no dream-wishes or dream-actions can be virtuous or sinful.’ Nevertheless, he goes on, men are responsible for their sinful dreams in so far as they cause them indirectly. They have the duty of morally cleansing their minds not only in their waking life but more especially before going to sleep.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

576

Hildebrandt presents us with a far deeper analysis of this mingled rejection and acceptance of responsibility for the moral content of dreams. He argues that in considering the immoral appearance of dreams allowance must be made for the dramatic form in which they are couched, for their compression of the most complicated processes of reflection into the briefest periods of time, as well as for the way in which, as even he admits, the ideational elements of dreams become confused and deprived of their significance. He confesses that he has the greatest hesitation, nevertheless, in thinking that all responsibility for sins and faults in dreams can be repudiated.

‘When we are anxious to disown some unjust accusation, especially one that relates to our aims and intentions, we often use the phrase "I should never dream of such a thing", we are in that way expressing, on the one hand, our feeling that the region of dreams is the most remote and furthest in which we are answerable for our thoughts, since thoughts in that region are so loosely connected with our essential self that they are scarcely to be regarded as ours; but nevertheless, since we feel obliged expressly to deny the existence of these thoughts in this region, we are at the same time admitting indirectly that our self-justification would not be complete unless it extended so far. And I think that in this we are speaking, although unconsciously, the language of truth.’ ( Ibid., 49.)

‘It is impossible to think of any action in a dream for which the original motive has not in some way or other - whether as a wish, or desire or impulse - passed through the waking mind.’ We must admit, Hildebrandt proceeds, that this original impulse was not invented by the dream; the dream merely copied it and spun it out, it merely elaborated in dramatic form a scrap of historical material which it had found in us; it merely dramatized the Apostle’s words: ‘Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer’. And although after we have awoken, conscious of our moral strength, we may smile at the whole elaborate structure of the sinful dream, yet the original material from which the structure was derived will fail to raise a smile. We feel responsible for the dreamer’s errors - not for the whole amount of them, but for a certain percentage. ‘In short, if we understand in this scarcely disputable sense Christ’s saying that "out of the heart proceed evil thoughts", we can hardly escape the conviction that a sin committed in a dream bears with it at least an obscure minimum of guilt.’ (Hildebrandt, 1875, 51 ff.)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

577

Thus Hildebrandt finds the source of immorality in dreams in the germs and hints of evil impulses which, in the form of temptations, pass through our minds during the day; and he does not hesitate to include these immoral elements in his estimate of a person’s moral value. These same thoughts, as we know, and this same estimate of them, are what have led the pious and saintly in every age to confess themselves miserable sinners.¹

There can of course be no doubt as to the general existence of such incompatible ideas; they occur in most people and in spheres other than that of ethics. Sometimes, however, they have been judged less seriously. Spitta (1882, 194) quotes some remarks by Zeller, which are relevant in this connection: ‘A mind is seldom so happily organized as to possess complete power at every moment and not to have the regular and clear course of its thoughts constantly interrupted not only by inessential but by positively grotesque and nonsensical ideas. Indeed, the greatest thinkers have had to complain of this dreamlike, teasing and tormenting rabble of ideas, which have disturbed their deepest reflections and their most solemn and earnest thoughts.’

A more revealing light is thrown upon the psychological position of these incompatible thoughts by another remark of Hildebrandt’s (1875, 55), to the effect that dreams give us an occasional glimpse into depths and recesses of our nature to which we usually have no access in our waking state. Kant expresses the same idea in a passage in his Anthropologie in which he declares that dreams seem to exist in order to show us our hidden natures and to reveal to us, not what we are, but what we might have been if we had been brought up differently. Radestock (1879, 84), too, says that dreams often do no more than reveal to us what we would not admit to ourselves and that it is therefore unfair of us to stigmatize them as liars and deceivers. Erdmann writes: ‘Dreams have never shown me what I ought to think of a man; but I have occasionally learnt from a dream, greatly to my own astonishment, what I do think of a man and how I feel towards him.’ Similarly I. H. Fichte (1864, I, 539) remarks: ‘The nature of our dreams gives a far more truthful reflection of our whole disposition than we are able to learn of it from self-observation in waking life.

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] It is of some interest to learn the attitude of the Inquisition to our problem. In Caesar Carena’s Tractatus de Officio sanctissimae Inquisitionis, 1659, the following passage occurs: ‘If anyone speaks heresies in a dream, the inquisitors should take occasion to enquire into his way of life, for what occupies a man during the day is wont to come again in his sleep.’ (Communicated by Dr. Ehniger, St. Urban, Switzerland.)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

578

It will be seen that the emergence of impulses which are foreign to our moral consciousness is merely analogous to what we have already learnt - the fact that dreams have access to ideational material which is absent in our waking state or plays but a small part in it. Thus Benini (1898) writes: ‘ Certe nostre inclinazioni che si credevano soffocate e spente da un pezzo, si ridestano; passioni vecchie e sepolte rivivono; cose e persone a cui non pensiamo mai, ci vengono dinanzi.’ ¹ And Volkelt (1875, 105): ‘Ideas, too, which have entered waking consciousness almost unnoticed and have perhaps never again been called to memory, very frequently announce their presence in the mind through dreams.’ At this point, finally, we may recall Schleiermacher’s assertion that the act of falling asleep is accompanied by the appearance of ‘involuntary ideas’ or images.

We may, then, class together under the heading of  ‘involuntary ideas’ the whole of the ideational material the emergence of which, alike in immoral and in absurd dreams, causes us so much bewilderment. There is, however, one important point of difference: involuntary ideas in the moral sphere contradict our usual attitude of mind, whereas the others merely strike us as strange. No step has yet been taken towards a deeper knowledge which would resolve this distinction.

¹ [`Certain of our desires which have seemed for a time to be stifled and extinguished are re-awakened; old and buried passions come to life again; things and persons of whom we never think appear before us.’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

579

The question next arises as to the significance of the appearance of involuntary ideas in dreams, as to the light which the emergence during the night of these morally incompatible impulses throws upon the psychology of the waking and dreaming mind. And here we find a fresh division of opinion and yet another different grouping of the authorities. The line of thought adopted by Hildebrandt and others who share his fundamental position inevitably leads to the view that immoral impulses possess a certain degree of power even in waking life, though it is an inhibited power, unable to force its way into action, and that in sleep something is put out of action which acts like an inhibition in the daytime and has prevented us from being aware of the existence of such impulses. Thus dreams would reveal the true nature of man, though not his whole nature, and they would constitute one means of rendering the hidden interior of the mind accessible to our knowledge. Only upon some such premises as these can Hildebrandt base his attribution to dreams of warning powers, which draw our attention to moral infirmities in our mind, just as physicians admit that dreams can bring unobserved physical illnesses to our conscious notice. So, too, Spitta must be adopting this view when, in speaking of the sources of excitation which impinge upon the mind (at puberty, for instance), he consoles the dreamer with the assurance that he will have done all that lies within his power if he leads a strictly virtuous life in his waking hours, and if he takes care to suppress sinful thoughts whenever they arise and to prevent their maturing and turning into acts. According to this view we might define the ‘involuntary ideas’ as ideas which had been ‘suppressed’ during the day, and we should have to regard their emergence as a genuine mental phenomenon.

Other writers, however, regard this last conclusion as unjustifiable. Thus Jessen (1855) believes that involuntary ideas, both in dreams and in waking, and in feverish and other delirious conditions, ‘have the character of a volitional activity that has been put to rest and of a more or less mechanical succession of images and ideas provoked by internal impulses’. All that an immoral dream proves as to the dreamer’s mental life is, in Jessen’s view, that on some occasion he had cognizance of the ideational content in question; it is certainly no evidence of a mental impulse of the dreamer’s own.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

580

As regards another writer, Maury, it would almost seem as though he too attributes to the dreaming condition a capacity, not for the arbitrary destruction of mental activity, but for analysing it into its components. He writes as follows of dreams which transgress the bounds of morality: ‘Ce sont nos penchants qui parlent et qui nous font agir, sans que la conscicnce nous retienne, bien que parfois elle nous avertisse. J’ai mes défauts et mes penchants vicieux; à l’état de veille je tâche de lutter contre eux, et il m’arrive assez souvent de n’y pas succomber. Mais dans mes songes j’y succombe toujours ou pour mieux dire j’agis par leur impulsion, sans crainte et sans remords. . . . Evidemment les visions qui se déroulent devant ma pensée et qui constituent le rêve, me sont suggérées par les incitations que je ressens et que ma volonté absente ne cherche pas à refouler.’ (Maury, 1878, 113.)¹

No one who believes in the capacity of dreams to reveal an immoral tendency of the dreamer’s which is really present though suppressed or concealed, could express his view more precisely than in Maury’s words: ‘En rêve l’homme se révèle donc tout entier à soi-même dans sa nudité et sa misère natives. Dès qu’il suspend l’exercice de sa volonté, il devient le jouet de toutes les passions contres lesquelles, à l’état de veille, la conscience, le sentiment de l’honneur, la crainte nous défendent.’ (Ibid., 165.)² In another passage we find these pertinent sentences: ‘Dans le songe, c’est surtout l’homme instinctif qui se révèle. . . . L’homme revient pour ainsi dire à l’eéat de nature quand il rêve; mais moins les idées acquises ont pénétré dans son esprit, plus les penchants en désaccord avec elles conservent encore sur lui l’influence dans le rêve.’ (Ibid., 462.)³ He goes on to relate by way of example how in his dreams he is not infrequently the victim of the very superstition which he has been attacking in his writings with particular vehemence.

¹ [‘It is our impulses that are speaking and making us act, while our conscience does not hold us back, though it sometimes warns us. I have my faults and my vicious impulses; while I am awake I try to resist them, and quite often I succeed in not yielding to them. But in my dreams I always yield to them, or rather I act under their pressure without fear or remorse.  .  .  . The visions which unroll before my mind and which constitute a dream are clearly suggested by the urges which I feel and which my absent will does not attempt to repress.’]

² [‘Thus in dreams a man stands self-revealed in all his native nakedness and poverty. As soon as he suspends the exercise of his will, he becomes the plaything of all the passions against which he is defended while he is awake by his conscience, his sense of honour and his fears.’]

³ [‘What is revealed in dreams is primarily the man of instinct.  .  .  . Man may be said to return in his dreams to a state of nature. But the less his mind has been penetrated by acquired ideas, the more it remains influenced in dreams by impulses of a contrary nature.’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

581

These penetrating reflections of Maury’s, however, lose their value in the investigation of dream-life owing to the fact that he regards the phenomena which he has observed with such accuracy as no more than proofs of an ‘automatisme psychologique’ which, in his view, dominates dreams and which he looks upon as the exact opposite of mental activity.

Stricker (1879) writes: ‘Dreams do not consist solely of illusions. If, for instance, one is afraid of robbers in a dream, the robbers, it is true, are imaginary - but the fear is real.’ This calls our attention to the fact that affects in dreams cannot be judged in the same way as the remainder of their content; and we are faced by the problem of what part of the psychical processes occurring in dreams is to be regarded as real, that is to say, has a claim to be classed among the psychical processes of waking life.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

582

(G)

THEORIES OF DREAMING AND ITS FUNCTION

Any disquisition upon dreams which seeks to explain as many as possible of their observed characteristics from a particular point of view, and which at the same time defines the position occupied by dreams in a wider sphere of phenomena, deserves to be called a theory of dreams. The various theories will be found to differ in that they select one or the other characteristic of dreams as the essential one and take it as the point of departure for their explanations and correlations. It need not necessarily be possible to infer a function of dreaming (whether utilitarian or otherwise) from the theory. Nevertheless, since we have a habit of looking for teleological explanations, we shall be more ready to accept theories which are bound up with the attribution of a function to dreaming.

We have already made the acquaintance of several sets of views which deserve more or less to be called theories of dreams in this sense of the term. The belief held in antiquity that dreams were sent by the gods in order to guide the actions of men was a complete theory of dreams, giving information on everything worth knowing about them. Since dreams have become an object of scientific research a considerable number of theories have been developed, including some that are extremely incomplete.

Without attempting any exhaustive enumeration, we may try to divide theories of dreams into the following three rough groups, according to their underlying assumptions as to the amount and nature of psychical activity in dreams.

(1) There are the theories, such as that of Delboeuf, according to which the whole of psychical activity continues in dreams. The mind, they assume, does not sleep and its apparatus remains intact; but, since it falls under the conditions of the state of sleep, which differ from those of waking life, its normal functioning necessarily produces different results during sleep. The question arises in regard to these theories whether they are capable of deriving all the distinctions between dreams and waking thought from the conditions of the state of sleep. Moreover, there is no possibility of their being able to suggest any function for dreaming; they offer no reason why we should dream, why the complicated mechanism of the mental apparatus should continue to operate even when set in circumstances for which it appears undesigned. Either dreamless sleep or, if disturbing stimuli intervene, awakening, would seem to be the only expedient reactions - rather than the third alternative of dreaming.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

583

(2) There are the theories which, on the contrary, presuppose that dreams imply a lowering of psychical activity, a loosening of connections, and an impoverishment of the material accessible. These theories must imply the attribution to sleep of characteristics quite different from those suggested, for instance, by Delboeuf. Sleep, according to such theories, has a far reaching influence upon the mind; it does not consist merely in the mind being shut off from the external world; it forces its way, rather, into the mental mechanism and throws it temporarily out of use. If I may venture on a simile from the sphere of psychiatry, the first group of theories construct dreams on the model of paranoia, while the second group make them resemble mental deficiency or confusional states.

The theory according to which only a fragment of mental activity finds expression in dreams, since it has been paralysed by sleep, is by far the most popular with medical writers and in the scientific world generally. In so far as any general interest may be supposed to exist in the explanation of dreams, this may be described as the ruling theory. It is to be remarked how easily this theory avoids the worst stumbling-block in the way of any explanation of dreams - the difficulty of dealing with the contradictions involved in them. It regards dreams as a result of a partial awakening  - ‘a gradual, partial and at the same time highly abnormal awakening’, to quote a remark of Herbart’s upon dreams (1892, 307). Thus, this theory can make use of a series of conditions of ever-increasing wakefulness, culminating in the completely waking state, in order to account for the series of variations in efficiency of mental functioning in dreams, ranging from the inefficiency revealed by their occasional absurdity up to fully concentrated intellectual functioning.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

584

Those who find that they cannot dispense with a statement in terms of physiology, or to whom a statement in such terms seems more scientific, will find what they want in the account given by Binz (1878, 43): ‘This condition’ (of torpor) ‘comes to an end in the early hours of the morning, but only by degrees. The products of fatigue which have accumulated in the albumen of the brain gradually diminish; more and more of them are decomposed or eliminated by the unceasing flow of the blood stream. Here and there separate groups of cells begin to emerge into wakefulness, while the torpid state still persists all around them. The isolated work of these separate groups now appears before our clouded consciousness, unchecked by other portions of the brain which govern the process of association. For that reason the images produced, which correspond for the most part to material impressions of the more recent past, are strung together in a wild and irregular manner. The number of the liberated brain-cells constantly grows and the senselessness of the dreams correspondingly diminishes.’

This view of dreaming as an incomplete, partial waking state is no doubt to be found in the writings of every modern physiologist and philosopher. The most elaborate exposition of it is given by Maury (1878, 6 f.). It often appears as though that author imagined that the waking or sleeping state could be shifted from one anatomical region to another, each particular anatomical region being linked to one particular psychical function. I will merely remark at this point that, even if the theory of partial waking were confirmed, its details would still remain very much open to discussion.

This view naturally leaves no room for assigning any function to dreaming. The logical conclusion that follows from it as to the position and significance of dreams is correctly stated by Binz (1878, 35): ‘Every observed fact forces us to conclude that dreams must be characterized as somatic processes, which are in every case useless and in many cases positively pathological. . . .’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

585

The application to dreams of the term ‘somatic’, which is italicized by Binz himself, has more than one bearing. It alludes, in the first place, to the aetiology of dreams which seemed particularly plausible to Binz when he studied the experimental production of dreams by the use of toxic substances. For theories of this kind involve a tendency to limit the instigation of dreams so far as possible to somatic causes. Put in its most extreme form the view is as follows. Once we have put ourselves to sleep by excluding all stimuli, there is no need and no occasion for dreaming until the morning, when the process of being gradually awakened by the impact of fresh stimuli might be reflected in the phenomenon of dreaming. It is impracticable, however, to keep our sleep free from stimuli; they impinge upon the sleeper from all sides - like the germs of life of which Mephistopheles complained - from without and from within and even from parts of his body which are quite unnoticed in waking life. Thus sleep is disturbed; first one corner of the mind is shaken into wakefulness and then another; the mind functions for a brief moment with its awakened portion and is then glad to fall asleep once more. Dreams are a reaction to the disturbance of sleep brought about by a stimulus - a reaction, incidentally, which is quite superfluous.

But the description of dreaming - which, after all is said and done, remains a function of the mind - as a somatic process implies another meaning as well. It is intended to show that dreams are unworthy to rank as psychical processes. Dreaming has often been compared with ‘the ten fingers of a man who knows nothing of music wandering over the keys of a piano’ ; and this simile shows as well as anything the sort of opinion that is usually held of dreaming by representatives of the exact sciences. On this view a dream is something wholly and completely incapable of interpretation; for how could the ten fingers of an unmusical player produce a piece of music?

Even in the distant past there was no lack of critics of the theory of partial waking. Thus Burdach (1838, 508 f.) wrote: ‘When it is said that dreams are a partial waking, in the first place this throws no light either on waking or on sleeping, and in the second place it says no more than that some mental forces are active in dreams while others are at rest. But variability of this kind occurs throughout life.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

586

This ruling theory, which regards dreams as a somatic process, underlies a most interesting hypothesis put forward for the first time by Robert in 1886. It is particularly attractive since it is able to suggest a function, a utilitarian purpose, for dreaming. Robert takes as the groundwork of his theory two facts of observation which we have already considered in the course of our examination of the material of dreams (see above, p. 532 ff.), namely that we dream so frequently of the most trivial daily impressions and that we so rarely carry over into our dreams our important daily interests. Robert (1886, 10) asserts that it is universally true that things which we have thoroughly thought out never become instigators of dreams but only things which are in our minds in an uncompleted shape or which have merely been touched upon by our thoughts in passing: ‘The reason why it is usually impossible to explain dreams is precisely because they are caused by sensory impressions of the preceding day which failed to attract enough of the dreamer’s attention.’ Thus the condition which determines whether an impression shall find its way into a dream is whether the process of working over the impression was interrupted or whether the impression was too unimportant to have a right to be worked over at all.

Robert describes dreams as ‘a somatic process of excretion of which we become aware in our mental reaction to it’. Dreams are excretions of thought that have been stifled at birth. ‘A man deprived of the capacity for dreaming would in course of time become mentally deranged, because a great mass of uncompleted, unworked-out thoughts and superficial impressions would accumulate in his brain and would be bound by their bulk to smother the thoughts which should be assimilated into his memory as completed wholes.’ Dreams serve as a safety-valve for the over-burdened brain. They possess the power to heal and relieve. (Ibid., 32.)

We should be misunderstanding Robert if we were to ask him how it can come about that the mind is relieved through the presentation of ideas in dreams. What Robert is clearly doing is to infer from these two features of the material of dreams that by some means or other an expulsion of worthless impressions is accomplished during sleep as a somatic process, and that dreaming is not a special sort of psychical process but merely the information we receive of that expulsion. Moreover, excretion is not the only event which occurs in the mind at night. Robert himself adds that, besides this, the suggestions arising during the previous day are worked out and that ‘whatever parts of the undigested thoughts are not excreted are bound together into a rounded whole by threads of thought borrowed from the imagination and thus inserted in the memory as a harmless imaginative picture.’ (Ibid., 23.)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

587

But Robert’s theory is diametrically opposed to the ruling one in its estimate of the nature of the sources of dreams. According to the latter, there would be no dreaming at all if the mind were not being constantly wakened by external and internal sensory stimuli. But in Robert’s view the impulsion to dreaming arises in the mind itself - in the fact of its becoming overloaded and requiring relief; and he concludes with perfect logic that causes derived from somatic conditions play a subordinate part as determinants of dreams, and that such causes would be quite incapable of provoking dreams in a mind in which there was no material for the construction of dreams derived from waking consciousness. The only qualification he makes is to admit that the phantasy-images arising in dreams out of the depths of the mind may be affected by nervous stimuli. (Ibid., 48.) After all, therefore, Robert does not regard dreams as so completely dependent upon somatic events. Nevertheless, in his view dreams are not psychical processes, they have no place among the psychical processes of waking life; they are somatic processes occurring every night in the apparatus that is concerned with mental activity, and they have as their function the task of protecting that apparatus from excessive tension - or, to change the metaphor - of acting as scavengers of the mind.

Another writer, Yves Delage, bases his theory on the same features of dreams, as revealed in the choice of their material; and it is instructive to notice the way in which a slight variation in his view of the same things leads him to conclusions of a very different bearing.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

588

Delage (1891, 41) tells us that he experienced in his own person, on the occasion of the death of someone of whom he was fond, the fact that we do not dream of what has occupied all our thoughts during the day, or not until it has begun to give place to other daytime concerns. His investigations among other people confirmed him in the general truth of this fact. He makes what would be an interesting observation of this kind, if it should prove to have general validity, on the dreams of young married couples: ‘S’ils ont été fortement épris, presque jamais ils n’ont rêvé l’un de l’autre avant le mariage ou pendant la lune de miel; et s’ils ont rêvé d’amour c’est pour être infidèles avec quelque personne indifférente ou odieuse.’ What, then, do we dream of? Delage identifies the material that occurs in our dreams as consisting of fragments and residues of the preceding days and of earlier times. Everything that appears in our dreams, even though we are inclined at first to regard it as a creation of our dream-life, turns out, when we have examined it more closely, to be unrecognized reproduction - ‘souvenir inconscient’. But this ideational material possesses a common characteristic: it originates from impressions which probably affected our senses more strongly than our intelligence or from which our attention was diverted very soon after they emerged. The less conscious and at the same time the more powerful an impression has been, the more chance it has of playing a part in the next dream.

Here we have what are essentially the same two categories of impressions as are stressed by Robert: the trivial ones and those that have not been dealt with. Delage, however, gives the situation a different turn, for he holds that it is because these impressions have not been dealt with that they are capable of producing dreams, not because they are trivial. It is true in a certain sense that trivial impressions, too, have not been dealt with completely; being in the nature of fresh impressions, they are ‘autant de ressorts tendus’ which are released during sleep. A powerful impression which happens to have met with some check in the process of being worked over or which has been purposely held under restraint has more claim to play a part in dreams than an impression which is weak and almost unnoticed. The psychical energy which has been stored up during the daytime by being inhibited and suppressed becomes the motive force for dreams at night. Psychical material that has been suppressed comes to light in dreams.¹

At this point, unluckily, Delage interrupts his train of thought. He can attribute only the smallest share in dreams to any independent psychical activity; and thus he brings his theory into line with the ruling theory of the partial awakening of the brain: ‘En somme le rêve est le produit de la pensée errante, sans but et sans direction, se fixant successivement sur les souvenirs, qui ont gardé assez d’intensité pour se placer sur sa route et l’arrêter au passage, établissant entre eux un lien tantôt faible et indécis, tantôt plus fort et plus serré, selon que l’activité actuelle du cerveau est plus ou moins abolie par le sommeil.’ ²

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] Anatole France expresses exactly the same idea in Le lys rouge: ‘Ce que nous voyons la nuit, ce sont les restes malheureux de ce que nous avons négligé dans la veille. Le rêve est souvent la revanche des choses qu’on méprise ou le reproche des êtres abandonnés.’ [‘What we see during the night are the miserable remnants of what we have neglected during the previous day. A dream is often a retaliation on the part of what we despise or a reproach on the part of those we have deserted.’]

² [‘In short, dreams are the product of thought wandering without purpose or direction, attaching itself in turn to memories which have retained enough intensity to stand in its way and interrupt its course, and linking them together by a bond which is sometimes weak and vague and sometimes stronger and closer, according as the brain’s activity at the moment is abolished by sleep to a greater or less extent.’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

589

(3) We may place in a third group those theories which ascribe to the dreaming mind a capacity and inclination for carrying out special psychical activities of which it is largely or totally incapable in waking life. The putting of these faculties into force usually provides dreaming with a utilitarian function. Most of the estimates formed of dreaming by earlier writers on psychology fall into this class. It will be enough, however, for me to quote a sentence from Burdach (1838, 512). Dreaming, he writes, ‘is a natural activity of the mind which is not limited by the power of individuality, which is not interrupted by self-consciousness and which is not directed by self-determination, but which is the freely operating vitality of the sensory centres.’

This revelling of the mind in the free use of its own forces is evidently regarded by Burdach and the rest as a condition in which the mind is refreshed and collects new strength for the day’s work - in which, in fact, it enjoys a sort of holiday. Thus Burdach quotes with approval the charming words in which the poet Novalis praises the reign of dreams: ‘Dreams are a shield against the humdrum monotony of life; they set imagination free from its chains so that it may throw into con fusion all the pictures of everyday existence and break into the unceasing gravity of grown men with the joyful play of a child. Without dreams we should surely grow sooner old; so we may look on them - not, perhaps as a gift from on high- but as a precious recreation, as friendly companions on our pilgrimage to the grave.’

The reviving and healing function of dreams is described with still more insistence by Purkinje (1846, 456): ‘These functions are performed especially by productive dreams. They are the easy play of the imagination and have no connection with the affairs of daytime. The mind has no wish to prolong the tensions of waking life; it seeks to relax them and to recover from them. It produces above all conditions contrary to the waking ones. It cures sorrow by joy, cares by hopes and pictures of happy distraction, hatred by love and friendliness, fear by courage and foresight; it allays doubt by conviction and firm faith, and vain expectation by fulfilment. Many of the spirit’s wounds which are being constantly re-opened during the day are healed by sleep, which covers them and shields them from fresh injury. The healing action of time is based partly on this.’ We all have a feeling that sleep has a beneficial effect upon mental activities, and the obscure working of the popular mind refuses to let itself be robbed of its belief that dreaming is one of the ways in which sleep dispenses its benefits.

The most original and far-reaching attempt to explain dreaming as a special activity of the mind, capable of free expansion only during the state of sleep, was that undertaken by Scherner in 1861. His book is written in a turgid and high-flown style and is inspired by an almost intoxicated enthusiasm for his subject which is bound to repel anyone who cannot share in his fervour. It puts such difficulties in the way of an analysis of its contents that we turn with relief to the clearer and briefer exposition of Scherner’s doctrines given by the philosopher Volkelt. ‘Suggestive gleams of meaning proceed like lightning flashes out of these mystical agglomerations, these clouds of glory and splendour - but they do not illuminate a philosopher’s path.’ It is in these terms that Scherner’s writings are judged even by his disciple.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

590

Scherner is not one of those who believe that the capacities of the mind continue undiminished in dream-life. He himself shows how the centralized core of the ego - its spontaneous energy - is deprived of its nervous force in dreams, how as a result of this decentralization the processes of cognition, feeling, willing and ideation are modified, and how the remnants of these psychical functions no longer possess a truly mental character but become nothing more than mechanisms. But by way of contrast, the mental activity which may be described as ‘imagination’, liberated from the domination of reason and from any moderating control, leaps into a position of unlimited sovereignty. Though dream-imagination makes use of recent waking memories for its building material, it erects them into structures bearing not the remotest resemblance to those of waking life; it reveals itself in dreams as possessing not merely reproductive but productive powers. Its characteristics are what lend their peculiar features to dreams. It shows a preference for what is immoderate, exaggerated and monstrous. But at the same time, being freed from the hindrances of the categories of thought, it gains in pliancy, agility and versatility. It is susceptible in the subtlest manner to the shades of the tender feelings and to passionate emotions, and promptly incorporates our inner life into external plastic pictures. Imagination in dreams is without the power of conceptual speech. It is obliged to paint what it has to say pictorially, and, since there are no concepts to exercise an attenuating influence, it makes full and powerful use of the pictorial form. Thus, however clear its speech may be, it is diffuse, clumsy and awkward. The clarity of its speech suffers particularly from the fact that it has a dislike of representing an object by its proper image, and prefers some extraneous image which will express only that particular one of the object’s attributes which it is seeking to represent. Here we have the ‘symbolizing activity’ of the imagination. . . . Another very important point is that dream-imagination never depicts things completely, but only in outline and even so only in the roughest fashion. For this reason its paintings seem like inspired sketches. It does not halt, however, at the mere representation of an object; it is under an internal necessity to involve the dream-ego to a greater or less extent with the object and thus produce an event. For instance, a dream caused by a visual stimulus may represent gold coins in the street; the dreamer will pick them up delightedly and carry them off.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

591

The material with which dream-imagination accomplishes its artistic work is principally, according to Scherner, provided by the organic somatic stimuli which are so obscure during the daytime. (See above, p. 544 ff.) Thus the excessively fantastic hypothesis put forward by Scherner and the perhaps unduly sober doctrines of Wundt and other physiologists, which are poles asunder in other respects, are entirely at one in regard to their theory of the sources and instigators of dreams. According to the physiological view, however, the mental reaction to the internal somatic stimuli is exhausted with the provoking of certain ideas appropriate to the stimuli; these ideas give rise to others along associative lines and at this point the course of psychical events in dreams seems to be at an end. According to Scherner, on the other hand, the somatic stimuli do no more than provide the mind with material of which it can make use for its imaginative purposes. The formation of dreams only begins, in Scherner’s eyes, at the point which the other writers regard as its end.

What dream-imagination does to the somatic stimuli cannot, of course, be regarded as serving any useful purpose. It plays about with them and pictures the organic sources, from which the stimuli of the dream in question have arisen, in some kind of plastic symbolism. Scherner is of the opinion - though here Volkelt and others refuse to follow him - that dream imagination has one particular favourite way of representing the organism as a whole: namely as a house. Fortunately, however, it does not seem to be restricted to this one method of representation On the other hand, it may make use of a whole row of houses to indicate a single organ; for instance, a very long street of houses may represent a stimulus from the intestines. Again, separate portions of a house may stand for separate portions of the body; thus, in a dream caused by a headache, the head may be represented by the ceiling of a room covered with disgusting, toad-like spiders.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

592

Leaving this house-symbolism on one side, any number of other kinds of things may be used to represent the parts of the body from which the stimulus to the dream has arisen. ‘Thus the breathing lung will be symbolically represented by a blazing furnace, with flames roaring with a sound like the passage of air; the heart will be represented by hollow boxes or baskets, the bladder by round, bag-shaped objects or, more generally, by hollow ones. A dream caused by stimuli arising from the male sexual organs may cause the dreamer to find the top part of a clarinet in the street or the mouth-piece of a tobacco-pipe, or again, a piece of fur. Here the clarinet and the tobacco-pipe represent the approximate shape of the male organ, while the fur stands for the pubic hair. In the case of a sexual dream in a woman, the narrow space where the thighs come together may be represented by a narrow courtyard surrounded by houses, while the vagina may be symbolized by a soft, slippery and very narrow foot-path leading across the yard, along which the dreamer has to pass, in order, perhaps, to take a gentleman a letter.’ (Ibid., 34.) It is of special importance that, at the end of dreams with a somatic stimulus, such as these, the dream imagination often throws aside its veil, as it were, by openly revealing the organ concerned or its function. Thus a dream ‘with a dental stimulus’ usually ends by the dreamer picturing himself pulling a tooth out of his mouth.

Dream-imagination may, however, not merely direct its attention to the form of the stimulating organ; it may equally well symbolize the substance contained in that organ. In this way, a dream with an intestinal stimulus may lead the dreamer along muddy streets, or one with a urinary stimulus may lead him to a foaming stream. Or the stimulus as such, the nature of the excitement it produces, or the object it desires, may be symbolically represented. Or the dream-ego may enter into concrete relations with the symbols of its own state; for instance, in the case of painful stimuli the dreamer may engage in a desperate struggle with fierce dogs or savage bulls, or a woman in a sexual dream may find herself pursued by a naked man. Quite apart from the wealth of the means that it employs, the symbolizing activity of the imagination remains the central force in every dream. The task of penetrating more deeply into the nature of this imagination and of finding a place for it in a system of philosophical thought is attempted by Volkelt in the pages of his book. But, though it is well and feelingly written, it remains excessively hard to understand for anyone whose early education has not prepared him for a sympathetic grasp of the conceptual constructions of philosophy.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

593

There is no utilitarian function attached to Scherner’s symbolizing imagination. The mind plays in its sleep with the stimuli that impinge upon it. One might almost suspect that it plays with them mischievously. But I might also be asked whether my detailed examination of Scherner’s theory of dreams can serve any utilitarian purpose, since its arbitrary character and its disobedience to all the rules of research seem only too obvious. By way of rejoinder, I might register a protest against the arrogance which would dismiss Scherner’s theory unexamined. His theory is built upon the impression made by his dreams upon a man who considered them with the greatest attention and seems to have had a great personal gift for investigating the obscure things of the mind. Moreover it deals with a subject that for thousands of years has been regarded by mankind as enigmatic, no doubt, but also as important in itself and its implications - a subject to the elucidation of which exact science, on its own admission, has contributed little apart from an attempt (in direct opposition to popular feeling) to deny it any meaning or significance. And finally it may honestly be said that in attempting to explain dreams it is not easy to avoid being fantastic. Ganglion cells can be fantastic too. The passage which I quoted on p. 584 from a sober and exact investigator like Binz, and which describes the way in which the dawn of awakening steals over the mass of sleeping cells in the cerebral cortex, is no less fantastic - and no less improbably - than Scherner’s attempts at interpretation. I hope to be able to show that behind the latter there is an element of reality, though it has only been vaguely perceived and lacks the attribute of universality which should characterize a theory of dreams. Meanwhile the contrast between Scherner’s theory and the medical one will show us the extremes between which explanations of dream-life doubtfully oscillate to this very day.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

594

(H)

THE RELATIONS BETWEEN DREAMS AND MENTAL DISEASES

When we speak of the relation of dreams to mental disorders we may have three things in mind: (1) aetiological and clinical connections, as when a dream represents a psychotic state, or introduces it, or is left over from it; (2) modifications to which dream-life is subject in cases of mental disease; and (3) intrinsic connections between dreams and psychoses, analogies pointing to their being essentially akin . These numerous relations between the two groups of phenomena were a favourite topic among medical writers in earlier times and have become so once again to-day, as is shown by the bibliographies of the subject collected by Spitta, Radestock, Maury and Tissié. Quite recently Sante de Sanctis has turned his attention to this subject.¹ It will be enough for the purpose of my thesis if I do no more than touch upon this important question.

As regards the clinical and aetiological connections between dreams and psychoses, the following observations may be given as samples. Hohnbaum, quoted by Krauss, reports that a first outbreak of delusional insanity often originates in an anxious or terrifying dream, and that the dominant idea is connected with the dream. Sante de Sanctis brings forward similar observations in cases of paranoia and declares that in some of these the dream was the ‘vraie cause déterminante de la folie’. The psychosis, says de Sanctis, may come to life at a single blow with the appearance of the operative dream which brings the delusional material to light; or it may develop slowly in a series of further dreams, which have still to overcome a certain amount of doubt. In one of his cases the significant dream was followed by mild hysterical attacks and later by a condition of anxious melancholia. Férée (quoted by Tissié, 1898) reports a dream which resulted in a hysterical paralysis. In these instances the dreams are represented as the aetiology of the mental disorder; but we should be doing equal justice to the facts if we said that the mental disorder made its first appearance in dream-life, that it first broke through in a dream. In some further examples the pathological symptoms are contained in dream-life, or the psychosis is limited to dream-life. Thus Thomayer (1897) draws attention to certain anxiety-dreams which he thinks should be regarded as equivalents of epileptic fits. Allison (quoted by Radestock, 1879) has described a ‘nocturnal insanity’, in which the patient appears completely healthy during the day but is regularly subject at night to hallucinations, fits of frenzy, etc. Similar observations are reported by de Sanctis (a dream of an alcoholic patient which was equivalent to a paranoia, and which represented voices accusing his wife of unfaithfulness) and Tissié. The latter (1898) gives copious recent examples in which acts of a pathological nature, such as conduct based on delusional premises and obsessive impulses, were derived from dreams. Guislain describes a case in which sleep was replaced by an intermittent insanity.

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] Among later writers who deal with these relations are Féré, Ideler, Lasègue, Pichon, Régis, Vespa, Giessler, Kazowsky, Pachantoni, etc.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

595

There can be no doubt that alongside of the psychology of dreams physicians will some day have to turn their attention to a psychopathology of dreams.

In cases of recovery from mental diseases it can often be quite clearly observed that, while functioning is normal during the day, dream-life is still under the influence of the psychosis. According to Krauss (1859, 270), Gregory first drew attention to this fact. Macario, quoted by Tissié, describes how a manic patient, a week after his complete recovery was still subject in his dreams to the flight of ideas and the violent passions which were characteristic of his illness.

Very little research has hitherto been carried out into the modifications occurring in dream-life during chronic psychoses. On the other hand, attention was long ago directed to the underlying kinship between dreams and mental disorders, exhibited in the wide measure of agreement between their manifestations. Maury (1854, 124) tells us that Cabanis (1802) was the first to remark on them, and after him Lélut, J. Moreau (1855) and, in particular, Maine de Biran the philosopher. No doubt the comparison goes back still earlier. Radestock (1879, 217) introduces the chapter in which he deals with it by a number of quotations drawing an analogy between dreams and madness. Kant writes somewhere: ‘The madman is a waking dreamer.’ Krauss (1859, 270) declares that ‘insanity is a dream dreamt while the senses are awake’. Schopenhauer calls dreams a brief madness and madness a long dream. Hagen describes delirium as dream-life induced not by sleep but by illness. Wundt writes: ‘We ourselves, in fact, can experience in dreams almost all the phenomena to be met with in insane asylums.’

Spitta (1882, 199), in much the same way as Maury (1854), enumerates as follows the different points of agreement which constitute the basis for this comparison: ‘(1) Self-consciousness is suspended or at least retarded, which results in a lack of insight into the nature of the condition, with consequent inability to feel surprise and loss of moral consciousness. (2) Perception by the sense organs is modified: being diminished in dreams but as a rule greatly increased in insanity. (3) Interconnection of ideas occurs exclusively according to the laws of association and reproduction; ideas thus fall into sequences automatically and there is a consequent lack of proportion in the relation between ideas (exaggerations and illusions). All this leads to (4) an alteration or in some cases a reversal of personality and occasionally of character traits (perverse conduct).’

Radestock (1879, 219) adds a few more features - analogies between the material in the two cases: ‘The majority of hallucinations and illusions occur in the region of the senses of sight and hearing and of coenaesthesia. As in the case of dreams, the senses of smell and taste provide the fewest elements. - Both in patients suffering from fever and in dreamers memories arise from the remote past; both sleeping and sick men recollect things which waking and healthy men seem to have forgotten.’ The analogy between dreams and psychoses is only fully appreciated when it is seen to extend to the details of expressive movement and to particular characteristics of facial expression.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

596

‘A man tormented by physical and mental suffering obtains from dreams what reality denies him: health and happiness. So too in mental disease there are bright pictures of happiness, grandeur, eminence and wealth. The supposed possession of property and the imaginary fulfilment of wishes - the withholding or destruction of which actually affords a psychological basis for insanity - often constitute the chief content of a delirium. A woman who has lost a loved child experiences the joys of motherhood in her delirium; a man who has lost his money believes himself immensely rich; a girl who has been deceived feels that she is tenderly loved.’

(This passage from Radestock is actually a summary of an acute observation made by Griesinger (1861, 106), who shows quite clearly that ideas in dreams and in psychoses have in common the characteristic of being fulfilments of wishes. My own researches have taught me that in this fact lies the key to a psychological theory of both dreams and psychoses.)

‘The chief feature of dreams and of insanity lies in their eccentric trains of thought and their weakness of judgement.’ In both states we find an over-valuation of the subject’s own mental achievements which seems senseless to a sober view; the rapid sequence of ideas in dreams is paralleled by the flight of ideas in psychoses. In both there is a complete lack of sense of time. In dreams the personality may be split - when, for instance, the dreamer’s own knowledge is divided between two persons and when, in the dream, the extraneous ego corrects the actual one. This is precisely on a par with the splitting of the personality that is familiar to us in hallucinatory paranoia; the dreamer too hears his own thoughts pronounced by extraneous voices. Even chronic delusional ideas have their analogy in stereotyped recurrent pathological dreams (le rêve obsédant). - It not infrequently happens that after recovering from a delirium patients will say that the whole period of their illness seems to them like a not unpleasant dream: indeed they will sometimes tell us that even during the illness they have occasionally had a feeling that they are only caught up in a dream - as is often the case in dreams occurring in sleep.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

597

After all this, it is not surprising that Radestock sums up his views, and those of many others, by declaring that ‘insanity, an abnormal pathological phenomenon, is to be regarded as an intensification of the periodically recurrent normal condition of dreaming’. (Ibid., 228.)

Krauss (1859, 270 f.) has sought to establish what is perhaps a still more intimate connection between dreams and insanity than can be demonstrated by an analogy between these external manifestations. This connection he sees in their aetiology or rather in the sources of their excitation. The fundamental element common to the two states lies according to him, as we have seen, in organically determined sensations, in sensations derived from somatic stimuli, in the coenaesthesia which is based upon contributions arising from all the organs. (Cf. Peisse, 1857, 2, 21, quoted by Maury, 1878, 52.)

The indisputable analogy between dreams and insanity, extending as it does down to their characteristic details, is one of the most powerful props of the medical theory of dream-life, which regards dreaming as a useless and disturbing process and as the expression of a reduced activity of the mind. Nevertheless it is not to be expected that we shall find the ultimate explanation of dreams in the direction of mental disorders; for the unsatisfactory state of our knowledge of the origin of these latter conditions is generally recognized. It is quite likely, on the contrary, that a modification of our attitude towards dreams will at the same time affect our views upon the internal mechanism of mental disorders and that we shall be working towards an explanation of the psychoses while we are endeavouring to throw some light on the mystery of dreams.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

598

POSTSCRIPT, 1909

The fact that I have not extended my account of the literature dealing with the problems of dreams to cover the period between the first and second editions of this book stands in need of a justification. It may strike the reader as an unsatisfactory one, but for me it was none the less decisive. The motives which led me to give any account at all of the way in which earlier writers have dealt with dreams were exhausted with the completion of this introductory chapter; to continue the task would have cost me an extraordinary effort - and the result would have been of very little use or instruction. For the intervening nine years have produced nothing new or valuable either in factual material or in opinions that might throw light on the subject. In the majority of publications that have appeared during the interval my work has remained unmentioned and unconsidered. It has, of course, received least attention from those who are engaged in what is described as ‘research’ into dreams, and who have thus provided a shining example of the repugnance to learning anything new which is characteristic of men of science. In the ironical words of Anatole France, ‘les savants ne sont pas curieux’. If there were such a thing in science as a right to retaliate, I should certainly be justified in my turn in disregarding the literature that has been issued since the publication of this book. The few notices of it that have appeared in scientific periodicals show so much lack of understanding and so much misunderstanding that my only reply to the critics would be to suggest their reading the book again - or perhaps, indeed, merely to suggest their reading it.

A large number of dreams have been published and analysed in accordance with my directions in papers by physicians who have decided to adopt the psycho-analytic therapeutic procedure, as well as by other authors. In so far as these writings have gone beyond a mere confirmation of my views I have included their findings in the course of my exposition. I have added a second bibliography at the end of the volume containing a list of the most important works that have appeared since this book was first published. The extensive monograph on dreams by Sante de Sanctis (1899), of which a German translation appeared soon after its issue, was published almost simultaneously with my Interpretation of Dreams, so that neither I nor the Italian author was able to comment upon each other’s work. I have unfortunately been unable to escape the conclusion that his painstaking volume is totally deficient in ideas- so much so, in fact, that it would not even lead one to suspect the existence of the problems with which I have dealt.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

599

Only two publications require to be mentioned which come near to my own treatment of the problems of dreams. Hermann Swoboda (1904), a youthful philosopher, has undertaken the task of extending to psychical events the discovery of a biological periodicity (in 23-day and 28-day periods) made by Wilhelm Fliess. In the course of his highly imaginative work he has endeavoured to use this key for the solution, among other problems, of the riddle of dreams. His findings would seem to underestimate the significance of dreams; the subject matter of a dream, on his view, is to be explained as an assemblage of all the memories which, on the night on which it is dreamt, complete one of the biological periods, whether for the first or for the nth time. A personal communication from the author led me at first to suppose that he himself no longer took this theory seriously, but it seems that this was a mistaken conclusion on my part. At a later stage I shall report upon some observations which I made in connection with Swoboda’s suggestion but which led me to no convincing conclusion. I was the more pleased when, in an unexpected quarter, I made the chance discovery of a view of dreams which coincides entirely with the core of my own theory. It is impossible, for chronological reasons, that the statement in question can have been influenced by my book. I must therefore hail it as the single discoverable instance in the literature of the subject of an independent thinker who is in agreement with the essence of my theory of dreams. The book which contains the passage upon dreaming which I have in mind appeared in its second edition in 1900 under the title of Phantasien eines Realisten by ‘Lynkeus’.¹

POSTSCRIPT, 1914

The preceding plea of justification was written in 1909. I am bound to admit that since then the situation has changed; my contribution to the interpretation of dreams is no longer neglected by writers on the subject. The new state of affairs, however, has now made it quite out of the question for me to extend my previous account of the literature. The Interpretation of Dreams has raised a whole series of fresh considerations and problems which have been discussed in a great variety of ways. I cannot give an account of these works, however, before I have expounded those views of my own on which they are based. I have therefore dealt with whatever seems to me of value in the latest literature at its appropriate place in the course of the discussion which now follows.

¹ [Footnote added 1930:] Cf. my paper on Josef Popper-Lynkeus and the theory of dreams (1923f).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

600

CHAPTER II

THE METHOD OF INTERPRETING DREAMS:

AN ANALYSIS OF A SPECIMEN DREAM

The title that I have chosen for my work makes plain which of the traditional approaches to the problem of dreams I am inclined to follow. The aim which I have set before myself is to show that dreams are capable of being interpreted; and any contributions I may be able to make towards the solution of the problems dealt with in the last chapter will only arise as by products in the course of carrying out my proper task. My presumption that dreams can be interpreted at once puts me in opposition to the ruling theory of dreams and in fact to every theory of dreams with the single exception of Scherner’s; for ‘interpreting’ a dream implies assigning a ‘meaning’ to it - that is, replacing it by something which fits into the chain of our mental acts as a link having a validity and importance equal to the rest. As we have seen, the scientific theories of dreams leave no room for any problem of interpreting them, since in their view a dream is not a mental act at all, but a somatic process signalizing its occurrence by indications registered in the mental apparatus. Lay opinion has taken a different attitude throughout the ages. It has exercised its indefeasible right to behave inconsistently; and, though admitting that dreams are unintelligible and absurd, it cannot bring itself to declare that they have no significance at all. Led by some obscure feeling, it seems to assume that, in spite of everything, every dream has a meaning, though a hidden one, that dreams are designed to take the place of some other process of thought, and that we have only to undo the substitution correctly in order to arrive at this hidden meaning.

Thus the lay world has from the earliest times concerned itself with ‘interpreting’ dreams and in its attempts to do so it has made use of two essentially different methods.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

601

The first of these procedures considers the content of the dream as a whole and seeks to replace it by another content which is intelligible and in certain respects analogous to the original one. This is ‘symbolic’ dream-interpreting; and it inevitably breaks down when faced by dreams which are not merely unintelligible but also confused. An example of this procedure is to be seen in the explanation of Pharaoh’s dream propounded by Joseph in the Bible. The seven fat kine followed by seven lean kine that ate up the fat kine - all this was a symbolic substitute for a prophecy of seven years of famine in the land of Egypt which should consume all that was brought forth in the seven years of plenty. Almost of the artificial dreams constructed by imaginative writers are designed for a symbolic interpretation of this sort: they reproduce the writer’s thoughts under a disguise which is regarded as harmonizing with the recognized characteristics of dreams.¹ The idea of dreams being chiefly concerned with the future and being able to foretell it - a remnant of the old prophetic significance of dreams - provides a reason for transposing the meaning of the dream, when it has been arrived at by symbolic interpretation, into the future tense. It is of course impossible to give instructions upon the method of arriving at a symbolic interpretation. Success must be a question of hitting on a clever idea, of direct intuition, and for that reason it was possible for dream-interpretation by means of symbolism to be exalted into an artistic activity dependent on the possession of peculiar gifts.²

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] I found by chance in Gradiva, a story written by Wilhelm Jensen, a number of artificial dreams which were perfectly correctly constructed and could be interpreted just as though they had not been invented but had been dreamt by real people. In reply to an enquiry, the author confirmed the fact that he had no knowledge of my theory of dreams. I have argued that the agreement between my researches and this writer’s creations is evidence in favour of the correctness of my analysis of dreams. (See Freud, 1907a.)

² [Footnote added 1914:] Aristotle remarked in this connection that the best interpreter of dreams was the man who could best grasp similarities; for dream-pictures, like pictures on water, are pulled out of shape by movement, and the most successful interpreter is the man who can detect the truth from the misshapen picture. (Büchenschütz, 1868, 65.)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

602

The second of the two popular methods of interpreting dreams is far from making any such claims. It might be described as the ‘decoding’ method, since it treats dreams as a kind of cryptography in which each sign can be translated into another sign having a known meaning, in accordance with a fixed key. Suppose, for instance, that I have dreamt of a letter and also of a funeral. If I consult a ‘dream-book’, I find that ‘letter’ must be translated by ‘trouble’ and ‘funeral’ by ‘betrothal’. It then remains for me to link together the key words which I have deciphered in this way and, once more, to transpose the result into the future tense. An interesting modification of the process of decoding, which to some extent corrects the purely mechanical character of its method of transposing, is to be found in the book written upon the interpretation of dreams by Artemidorus of Daldis.¹ This method takes into account not only the content of the dream but also the character and circumstances of the dreamer; so that the same dream-element will have a different meaning for a rich man, a married man or, let us say, an orator, from what it has for a poor man, a bachelor or a merchant. The essence of the decoding procedure, however, lies in the fact that the work of interpretation is not brought to bear on the dream as a whole but on each portion of the dream’s content independently, as though the dream were a geological conglomerate in which each fragment of rock required a separate assessment. There can be no question that the invention of the decoding method of interpretation was suggested by disconnected and confused dreams.²

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] Artemidorus of Daldis, who was probably born at the beginning of the second century A.D., has left us the most complete and painstaking study of dream-interpretation as practised in the Graeco-Roman world. As Theodor Gomperz (1866, 7 f.) points out, he insisted on the importance of basing the interpretation of dreams on observation and experience, and made a rigid distinction between his own art and others that were illusory. The principle of his interpretative art, according to Gomperz, is identical with magic, the principle of association. A thing in a dream means what it recalls to the mind - to the dream-interpreter’s mind, it need hardly be said. An insuperable source of arbitrariness and uncertainty arises from the fact that the dream-element may recall various things to the interpreter’s mind and may recall something different to different interpreters. The technique which I describe in the pages that follow differs in one essential respect from the ancient method: it imposes the task of interpretation upon the dreamer himself. It is not concerned with what occurs to the interpreter in connection with a particular element of the dream, but with what occurs to the dreamer. - Recent reports, however, from a missionary, Father Tfinkdji (1913), show that modern dream-interpreters in the East also make free use of the dreamer’s collaboration. He writes as follows of dream-interpreters among the Arabs of Mesopotamia: ‘Pour interprêter exactement un songe, les oniromanciens les plus habiles s’informent de ceux qui les consultent de toutes les circonstances qu’ils regardent nécessaires pour la bonne explication. . . . En un mot, nos oniromanciens ne laissent aucune circonstance leur échapper et ne donnent l’interprétation désirée avant d’avoir parfaitement saisi et reçu toutes les interrogations désirables.’ [‘In order to give a precise interpretation of a dream, the most skilful dream-diviners find out from those who consult them all the circumstances which they consider essential in order to arrive at a right explanation. . . . In short, these dream-diviners do not allow a single point to escape them and only give their interpretation after they have completely mastered the replies to all the necessary enquiries.’] Among these enquiries are habitually included questions as to the dreamer’s closest family relations - his parents, wife and children - as well as such a typical formula as: ‘Habuistine in hac nocte copulam conjugam ante vel post somnium?’ [‘Did you copulate with your wife that night before or after you had the dream?’] -’L’idée dominante dans l’interprétation des songes consiste à expliquer le rêve par son opposée.’ [‘The principal idea in interpreting dreams lies in explaining a dream by its opposite.’]

² [Footnote added 1909:] Dr. Alfred Robitsek has pointed out to me that the oriental ‘dream-books’ (of which ours are wretched imitations) base the greater number of their interpretations of dream-elements upon similarity of sounds and resemblance between words. The fact that these connections inevitably disappear in translation accounts for the unintelligibility of the renderings in our own popular dream-books. The extraordinarily important part played by punning and verbal quibbles in the ancient civilizations of the East may be studied in the writings of Hugo Winckler. - [Added 1911:] The nicest instance of a dream-interpretation which has reached us from ancient times is based on a play upon words. It is told by Artemidorus: ‘I think too that Aristander gave a most happy interpretation to Alexander of Macedon when he had surrounded Tyre and was besieging it but was feeling uneasy and disturbed because of the length of time the siege was taking. Alexander dreamt he saw a satyr dancing on his shield. Aristander happened to be in the neighbourhood of Tyre, in attendance on the king during his Syrian campaign. By dividing the word for satyr into σάand τύρος he encouraged the king to press home the siege so that he became master of the city.’ (σά Τύρος = Tyre is thine.) - Indeed, dreams are so closely related to linguistic expression that Ferenczi has truly remarked that every tongue has its own dream-language. It is impossible as a rule to translate a dream into a foreign language and this is equally true, I fancy, of a book such as the present one. [Added 1930:] Nevertheless, Dr. A. A. Brill of New York, and others after him, have succeeded in translating The Interpretation of Dreams.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

603

It cannot be doubted for a moment that neither of the two popular procedures for interpreting dreams can be employed for a scientific treatment of the subject. The symbolic method is restricted in its application and incapable of being laid down on general lines. In the case of the decoding method everything depends on the trustworthiness of the ‘key’ - the dream-book, and of this we have no guarantee. Thus one might feel tempted to agree with the philosophers and the psychiatrists and, like them, rule out the problem of dream-interpretation as a purely fanciful task.¹

But I have been taught better. I have been driven to realize that here once more we have one of those not infrequent cases in which an ancient and jealously held popular belief seems to be nearer the truth than the judgement of the prevalent science of today. I must affirm that dreams really have a meaning and that a scientific procedure for interpreting them is possible.

My knowledge of that procedure was reached in the following manner. I have been engaged for many years (with a therapeutic aim in view) in unravelling certain psychopathological structures - hysterical phobias, obsessional ideas, and so on. I have been doing so, in fact, ever since I learnt from an important communication by Josef Breuer that as regards these structures (which are looked on as pathological symptoms) unravelling these coincides with removing them. (Cf. Breuer and Freud, 1895.)  If a pathological idea of this sort can be traced back to the elements in the patient’s mental life from which it originated, it simultaneously crumbles away and the patient is freed from it. Considering the impotence of our other therapeutic efforts and the puzzling nature of these disorders, I felt tempted to follow the path marked out by Breuer, in spite of every difficulty, till a complete explanation was reached. I shall have on another occasion to report at length upon the form finally taken by this procedure and the results of my labours. It was in the course of these psycho-analytic studies that I came upon dream-interpretation. My patients were pledged to communicate to me every idea or thought that occurred to them in connection with some particular subject; amongst other things they told me their dreams and so taught me that a dream can be inserted into the psychical chain that has to be traced backwards in the memory from a pathological idea. It was then only a short step to treating the dream itself as a symptom and to applying to dreams the method of interpretation that had been worked out for symptoms.

¹ After I had completed my manuscript I came across a work by Stumpf (1889) which agrees with my views in seeking to prove that dreams have a meaning and can be interpreted. He effects his interpretation, however, by means of a symbolism of an allegorical character without any guarantee of the general validity of his procedure.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

604

This involves some psychological preparation of the patient. In the attention he pays to his own psychical perceptions and the elimination of the criticism by which he normally sifts the thoughts that occur to him. In order that he may be able to concentrate his attention on his self-observation it is an advantage for him to lie in a restful attitude and shut his eyes. It is necessary to insist explicitly on his renouncing all criticism of the thoughts that he perceives. We therefore tell him that the success of the psycho-analysis depends on his noticing and reporting whatever comes into his head and not being misled, for instance, into suppressing an idea because it strikes him as unimportant or irrelevant or because it seems to him meaningless. He must adopt a completely impartial attitude to what occurs to him, since it is precisely his critical attitude which is responsible for his being unable, in the ordinary course of things, to achieve the desired unravelling of his dream or obsessional idea or whatever it may be.

I have noticed in my psycho-analytical work that the whole frame of mind of a man who is reflecting is totally different from that of a man who is observing his own psychical processes. In reflection there is one more psychical activity at work than in the most attentive self-observation, and this is shown amongst other things by the tense looks and wrinkled forehead of a person pursuing his reflections as compared with the restful expression of a self-observer. In both cases attention must be concentrated, but the man who is reflecting is also exercising his critical faculty; this leads him to reject some of the ideas that occur to him after perceiving them, to cut short others without following the trains of thought which they would open up to him, and to behave in such a way towards still others that they never become conscious at all and are accordingly suppressed before being perceived. The self-observer on the other hand need only take the trouble to suppress his critical faculty. If he succeeds in doing that, innumerable ideas come into his consciousness of which he could otherwise never have got hold. The material which is in this way freshly obtained for his self-perception makes it possible to interpret both his pathological ideas and his dream-structures. What is in question, evidently, is the establishment of a psychical state which, in its distribution of psychical energy (that is, of mobile attention), bears some analogy to the state before falling asleep - and no doubt also to hypnosis. As we fall asleep, ‘involuntary ideas’ emerge, owing to the relaxation of a certain deliberate (and no doubt also critical) activity which we allow to influence the course of our ideas while we are awake. (We usually attribute this relaxation to ‘fatigue’.) As the involuntary ideas emerge they change into visual and acoustic images. (Cf. the remarks by Schleiermacher and others quoted above on p. 559 f.)¹ In the state used for the analysis of dreams and pathological ideas, the patient purposely and deliberately abandons this activity and employs the psychical energy thus saved (or a portion of it) in attentively following the involuntary thoughts which now emerge, and which - and here the situation differs from that of falling asleep - retain the character of ideas. In this way the ‘involuntary’ ideas are transformed into voluntary ones.

¹ [Footnote added 1919:] Silberer (1909, 1910 and 1912) has made important contributions to dream-interpretation by directly observing this transformation of ideas into visual images.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

605

The adoption of the required attitude of mind towards ideas that seem to emerge ‘of their own free will’ and the abandonment of the critical function that is normally in operation against them seem to be hard of achievement for some people. The ‘involuntary thoughts’ are liable to release a most violent resistance, which seeks to prevent their emergence. If we may trust that great poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, however, poetic creation must demand an exactly similar attitude. In a passage in his correspondence with Körner - we have to thank Otto Rank for unearthing it - Schiller (writing on December 1, 1788) replies to his friend’s complaint of insufficient productivity: ‘The ground for your complaint seems to me to lie in the constraint imposed by your reason upon your imagination. I will make my idea more concrete by a simile. It seems a bad thing and detrimental to the creative work of the mind if Reason makes too close an examination of the ideas as they come pouring in - at the very gateway, as it were. Looked at in isolation, a thought may seem very trivial or very fantastic; but it may be made important by another thought that comes after it, and, in conjunction with other thoughts that may seem equally absurd, it may turn out to form a most effective link. Reason cannot form any opinion upon all this unless it retains the thought long enough to look at it in connection with the others. On the other hand, where there is a creative mind, Reason - so it seems to me - relaxes its watch upon the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it look them through and examine them in a mass. - You critics, or whatever else you may call yourselves, are ashamed or frightened of the momentary and transient extravagances which are to be found in all truly creative minds and whose longer or shorter duration distinguishes the thinking artist from the dreamer. You complain of your unfruitfulness because you reject too soon and discriminate too severely.’

Nevertheless, what Schiller describes as a relaxation of the watch upon the gates of Reason, the adoption of an attitude of uncritical self-observation, is by no means difficult. Most of my patients achieve it after their first instructions. I myself can do so very completely, by the help of writing down my ideas as they occur to me. The amount of psychical energy by which it is possible to reduce critical activity and increase the intensity of self-observation varies considerably according to the subject on which one is trying to fix one’s attention.

Our first step in the employment of this procedure teaches us that what we must take as the object of our attention is not the dream as a whole but the separate portions of its content. If I say to a patient who is still a novice: ‘What occurs to you in connection with this dream?’, as a rule his mental horizon becomes a blank. If, however, I put the dream before him cut up into pieces, he will give me a series of associations to each piece, which might be described as the ‘background thoughts’ of that particular part of the dream. Thus the method of dream interpretation which I practise already differs in this first important respect from the popular, historic and legendary method of interpretation by means of symbolism and approximates to the second or ‘decoding’ method. Like the latter, it employs interpretation en détail and not en masse; like the latter, it regards dreams from the very first as being of a composite character, as being conglomerates of psychical formations.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

606

In the course of my psycho-analyses of neurotics I must already have analysed over a thousand dreams; but I do not propose to make use of this material in my present introduction to the technique and theory of dream-interpretation. Apart from the fact that such a course would be open to the objection that these are the dreams of neuropaths, from which no valid inferences could be made as to the dreams of normal people, there is quite another reason which forces this decision upon me. The subject to which these dreams of my patients lead up is always, of course, the case history which underlies their neurosis. Each dream would therefore necessitate a lengthy introduction and an investigation of the nature and aetiological determinants of the psychoneuroses. But these questions are in themselves novelties and highly bewildering and would distract attention from the problem of dreams. On the contrary, it is my intention to make use of my present elucidation of dreams as a preliminary step towards solving the more difficult problems of the psychology of the neuroses. If, however, I forego my principal material, the dreams of my neurotic patients, I must not be too particular about what is left to me. All that remains are such dreams as have been reported to me from time to time by normal persons of my acquaintance, and such others as have been quoted as instances in the literature dealing with dream-life. Unluckily, however, none of these dreams are accompanied by the analysis without which I cannot discover a dream’s meaning. My procedure is not so convenient as the popular decoding method which translates any given piece of a dream’s content by a fixed key. I, on the contrary, am prepared to find that the same piece of content may conceal a different meaning when it occurs in various people or in various contexts. Thus it comes about that I am led to my own dreams, which offer a copious and convenient material, derived from an approximately normal person and relating to multifarious occasions of daily life. No doubt I shall be met by doubts of the trustworthiness of ‘self-analyses’ of this kind; and I shall be told that they leave the door open to arbitrary conclusions. In my judgement the situation is in fact more favourable in the case of self-observation than in that of other people; at all events we may make the experiment and see how far self-analysis takes us with the interpretation of dreams. But I have other difficulties to overcome, which lie within myself. There is some natural hesitation about revealing so many intimate facts about one’s mental life; nor can there be any guarantee against misinterpretation by strangers. But it must be possible to overcome such hesitations. ‘Tout psychologiste’, writes Delboeuf, ‘est obligé de faire l’aveu même de ses faiblesses s’il croit par là jeter du jour sur quelque problème obscur.’¹ And it is safe to assume that my readers too will very soon find their initial interest in the indiscretions which I am bound to make replaced by an absorbing immersion in the psychological problems upon which they throw light.²

¹ [‘Every psychologist is under an obligation to confess even his own weaknesses, if he thinks that it may throw light upon some obscure problem.’]

² I am obliged to add, however, by way of qualification of what I have said above, that in scarcely any instance have I brought forward the complete interpretation of one of my own dreams, as it is known to me. I have probably been wise in not putting too much faith in my readers’ discretion.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

607

Accordingly I shall proceed to choose out one of my own dreams and demonstrate upon it my method of interpretation. In the case of every such dream some remarks by way of preamble will be necessary. - And now I must ask the reader to make my interests his own for quite a while, and to plunge, along with me, into the minutest details of my life; for a transference of this kind is peremptorily demanded by our interest in the hidden meaning of dreams.

PREAMBLE

During the summer of 1895 I had been giving psycho-analytic treatment to a young lady who was on very friendly terms with me and my family. It will be readily understood that a mixed relationship such as this may be a source of many disturbed feelings in a physician and particularly in a psychotherapist. While the physician’s personal interest is greater, his authority is less; any failure would bring a threat to the old-established friendship with the patient’s family. This treatment had ended in a partial success; the patient was relieved of her hysterical anxiety but did not lose all her somatic symptoms. At that time I was not yet quite clear in my mind as to the criteria indicating that a hysterical case history was finally closed, and I proposed a solution to the patient which she seemed unwilling to accept. While we were thus at variance, we had broken off the treatment for the summer vacation. - One day I had a visit from a junior colleague, one of my oldest friends, who had been staying with my patient, Irma, and her family at their country resort. I asked him how he had found her and he answered: ‘She’s better, but not quite well.’ I was conscious that my friend Otto’s words, or the tone in which he spoke them, annoyed me. I fancied I detected a reproof in them, such as to the effect that I had promised the patient too much; and, whether rightly or wrongly, I attributed the supposed fact of Otto’s siding against me to the influence of my patient’s relatives, who, as it seemed to me, had never looked with favour on the treatment. However, my disagreeable impression was not clear to me and I gave no outward sign of it. The same evening I wrote out Irma’s case history, with the idea of giving it to Dr. M. (a common friend who was at that time the leading figure in our circle) in order to justify myself. That night (or more probably the next morning) I had the following dream, which I noted down immediately after waking.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] This is the first dream which I submitted to a detailed interpretation.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

608

DREAM OF JULY 23RD-24TH, 1895

A large hall - numerous guests, whom we were receiving. -Among them was Irma. I at once took her on one side, as though to answer her letter and to reproach her for not having accepted my ‘solution’ yet. I said to her: ‘If you still get pains, its really only your fault.’ She replied: ‘If you only knew what pains I’ve got now in my throat and stomach and abdomen - its choking me’ -I was alarmed and looked at her. She looked pale and puffy. I thought to myself that after all I must be missing some organic trouble. I took her to the window and looked down her throat, and she showed signs of recalcitrance, like women with artificial dentures. I thought to myself that there was really no need for her to do that. - She then opened her mouth properly and on the right I found a big white patch; at another place I saw extensive whitish grey scabs upon some remarkable curly structures which were evidently modelled on the turbinal bones of the nose. - I at once called in Dr. M., and he repeated the examination and confirmed it . . . . Dr M. looked quite different from usual; he was very pale, he walked with a limp and his chin was clean-shaven. . . . My friend Otto was now standing beside her as well, and my friend Leopold was percussing her through her bodice and saying: ‘She has a dull area low down on her left.’ He also indicated that a portion of the skin on the left shoulder was infiltrated. (I noticed this, just as he did, in spite of her dress.) . . . M. said ‘There’s no doubt its an infection, but no matter; dysentery will supervene and the toxin will eliminated’ . . . We were directly aware, too, of the origin of her infection. Not long before, when she was feeling unwell, my friend Otto had given her an injection of a preparation of propyl, propyls . . . propionic acid. . . . trimethylamin (and I saw before me the formula for this printed in heavy type). . . . Injections of that sort ought not to be made so thoughtlessly . . . . And probably the syringe had not been clean.

This dream has one advantage over many others. It was immediately clear what events of the previous day provided its starting-point. My preamble makes that plain. The news which Otto had given me of Irma’s condition and the case history which I had been engaged in writing till far into the night continued to occupy my mental activity even after I was asleep. Nevertheless, no one who had only read the preamble and the content of the dream itself could have the slightest notion of what the dream meant. I myself had no notion. I was astonished at the symptoms of which Irma complained to me in the dream, since they were not the same as those for which I had treated her. I smiled at the senseless idea of an injection of propionic acid and at Dr. M.’s consoling reflections. Towards its end the dream seemed to me to be more obscure and compressed than it was at the beginning. In order to discover the meaning of all this it was necessary to undertake a detailed analysis.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

609

ANALYSIS

The hall - numerous guests whom we were receiving. We were spending that summer at Bellevue, a house standing by itself on one of the hills adjoining the Kahlenberg. The house had formerly been designed as a place of entertainment and its reception-rooms were in consequence unusually lofty and hall like. It was at Bellevue that I had the dream, a few days before my wife’s birthday. On the previous day my wife had told me that she expected that a number of friends, including Irma, would be coming out to visit us on her birthday. My dream was thus anticipating this occasion: it was my wife’s birthday and a number of guests, including Irma, were being received by us in the large hall at Bellevue.

I reproached Irma for not having accepted my solution. I said: ‘If you still get pains, it’s your own fault.’ I might have said this to her in waking life, and I may actually have done so. It was my view at that time (though I have since recognized it as a wrong one) that my task was fulfilled when I had informed a patient of the hidden meaning of his symptoms: I considered that I was not responsible for whether he accepted the solution or not - though this was what success depended on. I owe it to this mistake, which I have now fortunately corrected, that my life was made easier at a time when, in spite of all my inevitable ignorance, I was expected to produce therapeutic successes. -I noticed, however, that the words which I spoke to Irma in the dream showed that I was specially anxious not to be responsible for the pains which she still had. If they were her fault they could not be mine. Could it be that the purpose of the dream lay in this direction?

The Interpretation Of Dreams

610

Irma’s complaint: pains in her throat and abdomen and stomach; it was choking her. Pains in the stomach were among my patient’s symptoms but were not very prominent; she complained more of feelings of nausea and disgust. Pains in the throat and abdomen and constriction of the throat played scarcely any part in her illness. I wondered why I decided upon this choice of symptoms in the dream but could not think of an explanation at the moment.

She looked pale and puffy. My patient always had a rosy complexion. I began to suspect that someone else was being substituted for her.

I was alarmed at the idea that I had missed an organic illness. This, as may well be believed, is a perpetual source of anxiety to a specialist whose practice is almost limited to neurotic patients and who is in the habit of attributing to hysteria a great number of symptoms which other physicians treat as organic. On the other hand, a faint doubt crept into my mind - from where, I could not tell - that my alarm was not entirely genuine. If Irma’s pains had an organic basis, once again I could not be held responsible for curing them; my treatment only set out to get rid of hysterical pains. It occurred to me, in fact, that I was actually wishing that there had been a wrong diagnosis; for, if so, the blame for my lack of success would also have been got rid of.

I took her to the window to look down her throat. She showed some recalcitrance, like women with false teeth. I thought to myself that really there was no need for her to do that. I had never had any occasion to examine Irma’s oral cavity. What happened in the dream reminded me of an examination I had carried out some time before of a governess: at a first glance she had seemed a picture of youthful beauty, but when it came to opening her mouth she had taken measures to conceal her plate. This led to recollections of other medical examinations and of little secrets revealed in the course of them - to the satisfaction of neither party.‘There was really no need for her to do that’ was no doubt intended in the first place as a compliment to Irma; but I suspected that it had another meaning besides. (If one carries out an analysis attentively, one gets a feeling of whether or not one has exhausted all the background thoughts that are to be expected.) The way in which Irma stood by the window suddenly reminded me of another experience. Irma had an intimate woman friend of whom I had a very high opinion. When I visited this lady one evening I had found her by a window in the situation reproduced in the dream, and her physician, the same Dr. M., had pronounced that she had a diphtheritic membrane. The figure of Dr. M. and the membrane reappear later in the dream. It now occurred to me that for the last few months I had had every reason to suppose that this other lady was also a hysteric. Indeed, Irma herself had betrayed the fact to me. What did I know of her condition? One thing precisely: that, like my Irma of the dream, she suffered from hysterical choking. So in the dream I had replaced my patient by her friend. I now recollected that I had often played with the idea that she too might ask me to relieve her of her symptoms. I myself, however, had thought this unlikely, since she was of a very reserved nature. She was recalcitrant, as was shown in the dream. Another reason was that there was need for her to do it: she had so far shown herself strong enough to master her condition without outside help. There still remained a few features that I could not attach either to Irma or to her friend: pale; puffy; false teeth. The false teeth took me to the governess whom I have already mentioned; I now felt inclined to be satisfied with bad teeth. I then thought of someone else to whom these features might be alluding. She again was not one of my patients, nor should I have liked to have her as a patient, since I had noticed that she was bashful in my presence and I could not think she would make an amenable patient. She was usually pale, and once, while she had been in specially good health, she had looked puffy.¹Thus I had been comparing my patient Irma with two other people who would also have been recalcitrant to treatment. What could the reason have been for my having exchanged her in the dream for her friend? Perhaps it was that I should have liked to exchange her: either I felt more sympathetic towards her friend or had a higher opinion of her intelligence. For Irma seemed to me foolish because she had not accepted my solution. Her friend would have been wiser, that is to say she would have yielded sooner. She would then have opened her mouth properly, and have told me more than Irma.²

¹ The still unexplained complaint about pains in the abdomen could also be traced back to this third figure. The person in question was, of course, my own wife; the pains in the abdomen reminded me of one of the occasions on which I had noticed her bashfulness. I was forced to admit to myself that I was not treating either Irma or my wife very kindly in this dream; but it should be observed by way of excuse that I was measuring them both by the standard of the good and amenable patient.

² I had a feeling that the interpretation of this part of the dream was not carried far enough to make it possible to follow the whole of its concealed meaning. If I had pursued my comparison between the three women, it would have taken me far afield. There is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable - a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

611

What I saw in her throat: a white patch and turbinal bones with scabs on them. The white patch reminded me of diphtheritis and so of Irma’s friend, but also of a serious illness of my eldest daughter’s almost two years earlier and of the fright I had had in those anxious days. The scabs on the turbinal bones recalled a worry about my own state of health. I was making frequent use of cocaine at that time to reduce some troublesome nasal swellings, and I had heard a few days earlier that one of my women patients who had followed my example had developed an extensive necrosis of the nasal mucous membrane. I had been the first to recommend the use of cocaine, in 1885, and this recommendation had brought serious reproaches down on me. The misuse of that drug had hastened the death of a dear friend of mine. This had been before 1895.

I at once called in Dr. M., and he repeated the examination. This simply corresponded to the position occupied by M. in our circle. But the ‘at once’ was sufficiently striking to require a special explanation. It reminded me of a tragic event in my practice. I had on one occasion produced a severe toxic state in a woman patient by repeatedly prescribing what was at that time regarded as a harmless remedy (sulphonal), and had hurriedly turned for assistance and support to my experienced senior colleague. There was a subsidiary detail which confirmed the idea that I had this incident in mind. My patient - who succumbed to the poison - had the same name as my eldest daughter. It had never occurred to me before, but it struck me now almost like an act of retribution on the part of destiny. It was as though the replacement of one person by another was to be continued in another sense: this Mathilde for that Mathilde, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It seemed as if I had been collecting all the occasions which I could bring up against myself as evidence of lack of medical conscientiousness.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

612

Dr. M. was pale, had a clean-shaven chin and walked with a limp. This was true to the extent that his unhealthy appearance often caused his friends anxiety. The two other features could only apply to someone else. I thought of my elder brother, who lives abroad, who is clean-shaven and whom, if I remembered right, the M. of the dream closely resembled. We had had news a few days earlier that he was walking with a limp owing to an arthritic affection of his hip. There must, I reflected, have been some reason for my fusing into one the two figures in the dream. I then remembered that I had a similar reason for being in an ill-humour with each of them: they had both rejected a certain suggestion I had recently laid before them.

My friend Otto was now standing beside the patient and my friend Leopold was examining her and indicated that there was a dull area low down on the left. My friend Leopold was also a physician and a relative of Otto’s. Since they both specialized in the same branch of medicine, it was their fate to be in competition with each other, and comparisons were constantly being drawn between them. Both of them acted as my assistants for years while I was still in charge of the neurological out-patients’ department of a children’s hospital. Scenes such as the one represented in the dream used often to occur there. While I was discussing the diagnosis of a case with Otto, Leopold would be examining the child once more and would make an unexpected contribution to our decision. The difference between their characters was like that between the bailiff Bräsig and his friend Karl: one was distinguished for his quickness, while the other was slow but sure. If in the dream I was contrasting Otto with the prudent Leopold, I was evidently doing so to the advantage of the latter. The comparison was similar to the one between my disobedient patient Irma and the, friend whom I regarded as wiser than she was. I now perceived another of the lines along which the chain of thought in the dream branched off: from the sick child to the children’s hospital. - The dull area low down on the left seemed to me to agree in every detail with one particular case in which Leopold had struck me by his thoroughness. I also had a vague notion of something in the nature of a metastatic affection; but this may also have been a reference to the patient whom I should have liked to have in the place of Irma. So far as I had been able to judge, she had produced an imitation of a tuberculosis.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

613

A portion of the skin on the left shoulder was infiltrated. I saw at once that this was the rheumatism in my own shoulder, which I invariably notice if I sit up late into the night. Moreover the wording in the dream was most ambiguous: ‘I noticed this, just as he did . . . .’ I noticed it in my own body, that is. I was struck, too, by the unusual phrasing: ‘a portion of the skin was infiltrated.’ We are in the habit of speaking of ‘a left upper posterior infiltration’, and this would refer to the lung and so once more to tuberculosis.

In spite of her dress. This was in any case only an interpolation. We naturally used to examine the children in the hospital undressed: and this would be a contrast to the manner in which adult female patients have to be examined. I remembered that it was said of a celebrated clinician that he never made a physical examination of his patients except through their clothes. Further than this I could not see. Frankly, I had no desire to penetrate more deeply at this point.

Dr. M. said: ‘Its an infection, but no matter. Dysentery will supervene and the toxin will be eliminated.’ At first this struck me as ridiculous. But nevertheless, like all the rest, it had to be carefully analysed. When I came to look at it more closely it seemed to have some sort of meaning all the same. What I discovered in the patient was a local diphtheritis. I remembered from the time of my daughter’s illness a discussion on diphtheritis and diphtheria, the latter being the general infection that arises from the local diphtheritis. Leopold indicated the presence of a general infection of this kind from the existence of a dull area, which might thus be regarded as a metastatic focus. I seemed to think, it is true, that metastases like this do not in fact occur with diphtheria: it made me think rather of pyaemia.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

614

No matter. This was intended as a consolation. It seemed to fit into the context as follows. The content of the preceding part of the dream had been that my patient’s pains were due to a severe organic affection. I had a feeling that I was only trying in that way to shift the blame from myself. Psychological treatment could not be held responsible for the persistence of diphtheritic pains. Nevertheless I had a sense of awkwardness at having invented such a severe illness for Irma simply in order to clear myself. It looked so cruel. Thus I was in need of an assurance that all would be well in the end, and it seemed to me that to have put the consolation into the mouth precisely of Dr. M. had not been a bad choice. But here I was taking up a superior attitude towards the dream, and this itself required explanation.

And why was the consolation so nonsensical?

Dysentery. There seemed to be some remote theoretical notion that morbid matter can be eliminated through the bowels. Could it be that I was trying to make fun of Dr. M.’s fertility in producing far-fetched explanations and making unexpected pathological connections? Something else now occurred to me in relation to dysentery. A few months earlier I had taken on the case of a young man with remarkable difficulties associated with defaecating, who had been treated by other physicians as a case of ‘anaemia accompanied by malnutrition’. I had recognized it as a hysteria, but had been unwilling to try him with my psychotherapeutic treatment and had sent him on a sea voyage. Some days before, I had had a despairing letter from him from Egypt, saying that he had had a fresh attack there which a doctor had declared was dysentery. I suspected that the diagnosis was an error on the part of an ignorant practitioner who had allowed himself to be taken in by the hysteria. But I could not help reproaching myself for having put my patient in a situation in which he might have contracted some organic trouble on top of his hysterical intestinal disorder. Moreover, ‘dysentery’ sounds not unlike ‘diphtheria’ - a word of ill omen which did not occur in the dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

615

Yes, I thought to myself, I must have been making fun of Dr. M. with the consoling prognosis ‘Dysentery will supervene’, etc.: for it came back to me that, years before, he himself had told an amusing story of a similar kind about another doctor. Dr. M. had been called in by him for consultation over a patient who was seriously ill, and had felt obliged to point out, in view of the very optimistic view taken by his colleague, that he had found albumen in the patient’s urine. The other, however, was not in the least put out: ‘No matter’, he had said, ‘the albumen will soon be eliminated!’ - I could no longer feel any doubt, therefore, that this part of the dream was expressing derision at physicians who are ignorant of hysteria. And, as though to confirm this, a further idea crossed my mind: ‘Does Dr. M. realize that the symptoms in his patient (Irma’s friend) which give grounds for fearing tuberculosis also have a hysterical basis? Has he spotted this hysteria? or has he been taken in by it?’

But what could be my motive for treating this friend of mine so badly? That was a very simple matter. Dr. M. was just as little in agreement with my ‘solution’ as Irma herself. So I had already revenged myself in this dream on two people: on Irma with the words ‘If you still get pains, it’s your own fault’, and on Dr. M. by the wording of the nonsensical consolation that I put into his mouth.

We were directly aware of the origin of the infection. This direct knowledge in the dream was remarkable. Only just before we had had no knowledge of it, for the infection was only revealed by Leopold.

When she was feeling unwell, my friend Otto had given her an injection. Otto had in fact told me that during his short stay with Irma’s family he had been called in to a neighbouring hotel to give an injection to someone who had suddenly felt unwell. These injections reminded me once more of my unfortunate friend who had poisoned himself with cocaine. I had advised him to use the drug internally only, while morphia was being withdrawn; but he had at once given himself cocaine injections.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

616

A preparation of propyl . . . propyls . . . propionic acid. How could I have come to think of this? During the previous evening, before I wrote out the case history and had the dream, my wife had opened a bottle of liqueur, on which the word ‘Ananas’¹ appeared and which was a gift from our friend Otto: for he has a habit of making presents on every possible occasion. It was to be hoped, I thought to myself, that some day he would find a wife to cure him of the habit. This liqueur gave off such a strong smell of fusel oil that I refused to touch it. My wife suggested our giving the bottle to the servants, but I - with even greater prudence - vetoed the suggestion, adding in a philanthropic spirit that there was no need for them to be poisoned either. The smell of fusel oil (amyl . . .) evidently stirred up in my mind a recollection of the whole series - propyl, methyl, and so on - and this accounted for the propyl preparation in the dream. It is true that I carried out a substitution in the process: I dreamt of propyl after having smelt amyl. But substitutions of this kind are perhaps legitimate in organic chemistry.

Trimethylamin. I saw the chemical formula of this substance in my dream, which bears witness to a great effort on the part of my memory. Moreover, the formula was printed in heavy type, as though there had been a desire to lay emphasis on some part of the context as being of quite special importance. What was it, then, to which my attention was to be directed in this way by trimethylamin? It was to a conversation with another friend who had for many years been familiar with all my writings during the period of their gestation, just as I had been with his. He had at that time confided some ideas to me on the subject of the chemistry of the sexual processes, and had mentioned among other things that he believed that one of the products of sexual metabolism was trimethylamin. Thus this substance led me to sexuality, the factor to which I attributed the greatest importance in the origin of the nervous disorders which it was my aim to cure. My patient Irma was a young widow; if I wanted to find an excuse for the failure of my treatment in her case, what I could best appeal to would no doubt be this fact of her widowhood, which her friends would be so glad to see changed. And how strangely, I thought to myself, a dream like this is put together! The other woman, whom I had as a patient in the dream instead of Irma, was also a young widow.

¹ I must add that the sound of the word ‘Ananas’ bears a remarkable resemblance to that of my patient Irma’s family name.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

617

I began to guess why the formula for trimethylamin had been so prominent in the dream. So many important subjects converged upon that one word. Trimethylamin was an allusion not only to the immensely powerful factor of sexuality, but also to a person whose agreement I recalled with satisfaction whenever I felt isolated in my opinions. Surely this friend who played so great a part in my life must appear again elsewhere in these trains of thought. Yes. For he had a special knowledge of the consequences of affections of the nose and its accessory cavities; and he had drawn scientific attention to some very remarkable connections between the turbinal bones and the female organs of sex. (Cf. the three curly structures in Irma’s throat.) I had had Irma examined by him to see whether her gastric pains might be of nasal origin. But he suffered himself from suppurative rhinitis, which caused me anxiety; and no doubt there was an allusion to this in the pyaemia which vaguely came into my mind in connection with the metastases in the dream.

Injections of that sort ought not to be made so thoughtlessly. Here an accusation of thoughtlessness was being made directly against my friend Otto. I seemed to remember thinking something of the same kind that afternoon when his words and looks had appeared to show that he was siding against me. It had been some such notion as: ‘How easily his thoughts are influenced! How thoughtlessly he jumps to conclusions!’ -Apart from this, this sentence in the dream reminded me once more of my dead friend who had so hastily resorted to cocaine injections. As I have said, I had never contemplated the drug being given by injection. I noticed too that in accusing Otto of thoughtlessness in handling chemical substances I was once more touching upon the story of the unfortunate Mathilde, which gave grounds for the same accusation against myself. Here I was evidently collecting instances of my conscientiousness, but also of the reverse.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

618

And probably the syringe had not been clean. This was yet another accusation against Otto, but derived from a different source. I had happened the day before to meet the son of an old lady of eighty-two, to whom I had to give an injection of morphia twice a day. At the moment she was in the country and he told me that she was suffering from phlebitis. I had at once thought it must be an infiltration caused by a dirty syringe. I was proud of the fact that in two years I had not caused a single infiltration; I took constant pains to be sure that the syringe was clean. In short, I was conscientious. The phlebitis brought me back once more to my wife, who had suffered from thrombosis during one of her pregnancies; and now three similar situations came to my recollection involving my wife, Irma and the dead Mathilde. The identity of these situations had evidently enabled me to substitute the three figures for one another in the dream.

I have now completed the interpretation of the dream.¹ While I was carrying it out I had some difficulty in keeping at bay all the ideas which were bound to be provoked by a comparison between the content of the dream and the concealed thoughts lying behind it. And in the meantime the ‘meaning’ of the dream was borne in upon me. I became aware of an intention which was carried into effect by the dream and which must have been my motive for dreaming it. The dream fulfilled certain wishes which were started in me by the events of the previous evening (the news given me by Otto and my writing out of the case history). The conclusion of the dream, that is to say, was that I was not responsible for the persistence of Irma’s pains, but that Otto was. Otto had in fact annoyed me by his remarks about Irma’s incomplete cure, and the dream gave me my revenge by throwing the reproach back on to him. The dream acquitted me of the responsibility for Irma’s condition by showing that it was due to other factors - it produced a whole series of reasons. The dream represented a particular state of affairs as I should have wished it to be. Thus its content was the fulfilment of a wish and its motive was a wish.

¹ [Footnote added 1909] Though it will be understood that I have not reported everything that occurred to me during the process of interpretation.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

619

Thus much leapt to the eyes. But many of the details of the dream also became intelligible to me from the point of view of wish-fulfilment. Not only did I revenge myself on Otto for being too hasty in taking sides against me by representing him as being too hasty in his medical treatment (in giving the injection); but I also revenged myself on him for giving me the bad liqueur which had an aroma of fusel oil. And in the dream I found an expression which united the two reproaches: the injection was of a preparation of propyl. This did not satisfy me and I pursued my revenge further by contrasting him with his more trustworthy competitor. I seemed to be saying: ‘I like him better than you.’ But Otto was not the only person to suffer from the vials of my wrath. I took revenge as well on my disobedient patient by exchanging her for one who was wiser and less recalcitrant. Nor did I allow Dr. M. to escape the consequences of his contradiction but showed him by means of a clear allusion that he was an ignoramus on the subject. (‘Dysentery will supervene’, etc.) Indeed I seemed to be appealing from him to someone else with greater knowledge (to my friend who had told me of trimethylamin) just as I had turned from Irma to her friend and from Otto to Leopold. ‘Take these people away! Give me three others of my choice instead! Then I shall be free of these undeserved reproaches!’ The groundlessness of the reproaches was proved for me in the dream in the most elaborate fashion. I was not to blame for Irma’s pains, since she herself was to blame for them by refusing to accept my solution. I was not concerned with Irma’s pains, since they were of an organic nature and quite incurable by psychological treatment. Irma’s pains could be satisfactorily explained by her widowhood (cf. the trimethylamin) which I had no means of altering. Irma’s pains had been caused by Otto giving her an incautious injection of an unsuitable drug - a thing I should never have done. Irma’s pains were the result of an injection with a dirty needle, like my old lady’s phlebitis - whereas I never did any harm with my injections. I noticed, it is true, that these explanations of Irma’s pains (which agreed in exculpating me) were not entirely consistent with one another, and indeed that they were mutually exclusive. The whole plea - for the dream was nothing else - reminded one vividly of the defence put forward by the man who was charged by one of his neighbours with having given him back a borrowed kettle in a damaged condition. The defendant asserted first, that he had given it back undamaged; secondly, that the kettle had a hole in it when he borrowed it; and thirdly, that he had never borrowed a kettle from his neighbour at all. So much the better: if only a single one of these three lines of defence were to be accepted as valid, the man would have to be acquitted.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

620

Certain other themes played a part in the dream, which were not so obviously connected with my exculpation from Irma’s illness: my daughter’s illness and that of my patient who bore the same name, the injurious effect of cocaine, the disorder of my patient who was travelling in Egypt, my concern about my wife’s health and about that of my brother and of Dr. M., my own physical ailments, my anxiety about my absent friend who suffered from suppurative rhinitis. But when I came to consider all of these, they could all be collected into a single group of ideas and labelled, as it were, ‘concern about my own and other people’s health - professional conscientiousness’. I called to mind the obscure disagreeable impression I had had when Otto brought me the news of Irma’s condition. This group of thoughts that played a part in the dream enabled me retrospectively to put this transient impression into words. It was as though he had said to me: ‘You don’t take your medical duties seriously enough. You’re not conscientious; you don’t carry out what you’ve undertaken.’ Thereupon, this group of thoughts seemed to have put itself at my disposal, so that I could produce evidence of how highly conscientious I was, of how deeply I was concerned about the health of my relations, my friends and my patients. It was a noteworthy fact that this material also included some disagreeable memories, which supported my friend Otto’s accusation rather than my own vindication. The material was, as one might say, impartial; but nevertheless there was an unmistakable connection between this more extensive group of thoughts which underlay the dream and the narrower subject of the dream which gave rise to the wish to be innocent of Irma’s illness.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

621

I will not pretend that I have completely uncovered the meaning of this dream or that its interpretation is without a gap. I could spend much more time over it, derive further information from it and discuss fresh problems raised by it. I myself know the points from which further trains of thought could be followed. But considerations which arise in the case of every dream of my own restrain me from pursuing my interpretative work. If anyone should feel tempted to express a hasty condemnation of my reticence, I would advise him to make the experiment of being franker than I am. For the moment I am satisfied with the achievement of this one piece of fresh knowledge. If we adopt the method of interpreting dreams which I have indicated here, we shall find that dreams really have a meaning and are far from being the expression of a fragmentary activity of the brain, as the authorities have claimed. When the work of interpretation has been completed, we perceive that a dream is the fulfilment of a wish.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

622

CHAPTER III

A DREAM IS THE FULFILMENT OF A WISH

When, after passing through a narrow defile, we suddenly emerge upon a piece of high ground, where the path divides and the finest prospects open up on every side, we may pause for a moment and consider in which direction we shall first turn our steps. Such is the case with us, now that we have surmounted the first interpretation of a dream. We find ourselves in the full daylight of a sudden discovery. Dreams are not to be likened to the unregulated sounds that rise from a musical instrument struck by the blow of some external force instead of by a player’s hand; they are not meaningless, they are not absurd; they do not imply that one portion of our store of ideas is asleep while another portion is beginning to wake. On the contrary, they are psychical phenomena of complete validity - fulfilments of wishes; they can be inserted into the chain of intelligible waking mental acts; they are constructed by a highly complicated activity of the mind.

But no sooner have we begun to rejoice at this discovery than we are assailed by a flood of questions. If, as we are told by dream-interpretation, a dream represents a fulfilled wish, what is the origin of the remarkable and puzzling form in which the wish-fulfilment is expressed? What alteration have the dream thoughts undergone before being changed into the manifest dream which we remember when we wake up? How does that alteration take place? What is the source of the material that has been modified into the dream? What is the source of the many peculiarities that are to be observed in the dream-thoughts - such, for instance, as the fact that they may be mutually contradictory? (Cf. the analogy of the borrowed kettle on p. 619.) Can a dream tell us anything new about our internal psychical processes? Can its content correct opinions we have held during the day?

The Interpretation Of Dreams

623

I propose that for the moment we should leave all these questions on one side and pursue our way further along one particular path. We have learnt that a dream can represent a wish as fulfilled. Our first concern must be to enquire whether this is a universal characteristic of dreams or whether it merely happened to be the content of the particular dream (the dream of Irma’s injection) which was the first that we analysed. For even if we are prepared to find that every dream has a meaning and a psychical value, the possibility must remain open of this meaning not being the same in every dream. Our first dream was the fulfilment of a wish; a second one might turn out to be a fulfilled fear; the content of a third might be a reflection; while a fourth might merely reproduce a memory. Shall we find other wishful dreams besides this one? or are there perhaps no dreams but wishful ones?

It is easy to prove that dreams often reveal themselves without any disguise as fulfilments of wishes; so that it may seem surprising that the language of dreams was not understood long ago. For instance, there is a dream that I can produce in myself as often as I like - experimentally, as it were. If I eat anchovies or olives or any other highly salted food in the evening, I develop thirst during the night which wakes me up. But my waking is preceded by a dream; and this always has the same content, namely, that I am drinking. I dream I am swallowing down water in great gulps, and it has the delicious taste that nothing can equal but a cool drink when one is parched with thirst. Then I wake up and have to have a real drink. This simple dream is occasioned by the thirst which I become aware of when I wake. The thirst gives rise to a wish to drink, and the dream shows me that wish fulfilled. In doing so it is performing a function - which it was easy to divine. I am a good sleeper and not accustomed to be woken by any physical need. If I can succeed in appeasing my thirst by dreaming that I am drinking, then I need not wake up in order to quench it. This, then, is a dream of convenience. Dreaming has taken the place of action, as it often does elsewhere in life. Unluckily my need for water to quench my thirst cannot be satisfied by a dream in the same way as my thirst for revenge against my friend Otto and Dr. M.; but the good intention is there in both cases. Not long ago this same dream of mine showed some modification. I had felt thirsty even before I fell asleep, and I had emptied a glass of water that stood on the table beside my bed. A few hours later during the night I had a fresh attack of thirst, and this had inconvenient results. In order to provide myself with some water I should have had to get up and fetch the glass standing on the table by my wife’s bed. I therefore had an appropriate dream that my wife was giving me a drink out of a vase; this vase was an Etruscan cinerary urn which I had brought back from a journey to Italy and had since given away. But the water in it tasted so salty (evidently because of the ashes in the urn) that I woke up. It will be noticed how conveniently everything was arranged in this dream. Since its only purpose was to fulfil a wish, it could be completely egoistical. A love of comfort and convenience is not really compatible with consideration for other people. The introduction of the cinerary urn was probably yet another wish-fulfilment. I was sorry that the vase was no longer in my possession - just as the glass of water on my wife’s table was out of my reach. The urn with its ashes fitted in, too, with the salty taste in my mouth which had now grown stronger and which I knew was bound to wake me.¹

¹ Weygandt (1893, 41) was aware of the occurrence of thirst dreams, for he writes: ‘The sensation of thirst is perceived with greater precision than any other; it always gives rise to an idea of its being quenched. The manner in which the thirst is represented as being quenched in the dream varies, and derives its special form from some near-by memory. Another general feature in these cases is that immediately after the idea of the thirst being quenched there follows a disappointment over the small effect produced by the imaginary refreshment.’ Weygandt, however, overlooks the fact that this reaction of a dream to a stimulus is one which holds good universally. Other people who are attacked by thirst in the night may wake up without having had a dream; but that is no objection to my experiment. It merely shows that they are worse sleepers than I am. - Compare in this connection Isaiah xxix, 8: ‘It shall even be as when an hungry man dreameth, and, behold, he eateth; but he awaketh, and his soul is empty: or as when a thirsty man dreameth, and, behold, he drinketh; but he awaketh, and, behold, he is faint, and his soul hath appetite.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

624

Dreams of convenience like these were very frequent in my youth. Having made it a practice as far back as I can remember to work late into the night, I always found it difficult to wake early. I used then to have a dream of being out of bed and standing by the washing-stand; after a while I was no longer able to disguise from myself the fact that I was really still in bed, but in the meantime I had had a little more sleep. A slothful dream of this kind, which was expressed in a particularly amusing and elegant form, has been reported to me by a young medical colleague who seems to share my liking for sleep. The landlady of his lodgings in the neighbourhood of the hospital had strict instructions to wake him in time every morning but found it no easy job to carry them out. One morning sleep seemed peculiarly sweet. The landlady called through the door: ‘Wake up, Herr Pepi! It’s time to go to the hospital!’ In response to this he had a dream that he was lying in bed in a room in the hospital, and that there was a card over the bed on which was written: ‘Pepi H., medical student, age 22.’ While he was dreaming, he said to himself ‘As I’m already in the hospital, there’s no need for me to go there ' - and turned over and went on sleeping. In this way he openly confessed the motive for his dream.

Here is another dream in which once again the stimulus produced its effect during actual sleep. One of my women patients, who had been obliged to undergo an operation on her jaw which had taken an unfavourable course, was ordered by her doctors to wear a cooling apparatus on the side of her face day and night. But as soon as she fell asleep she used to throw it off. One day, after she had once more thrown the apparatus on the floor, I was asked to speak to her seriously about it. ‘This time I really couldn’t help it’, she answered. ‘It was because of a dream I had in the night. I dreamt I was in a box at the opera and very much enjoying the performance. But Herr Karl Meyer was in the nursing-home and complaining bitterly of pains in his jaw. So I told myself that as I hadn’t any pain I didn’t need the apparatus; and I threw it away.’ The dream of this poor sufferer seems almost like a concrete representation of a phrase that sometimes forces its way on to people’s lips in unpleasant situations: ‘I must say I could think of something more agreeable than this.’ The dream gives a picture of this more agreeable thing. The Herr Karl Meyer on to whom the dreamer transplanted her pains was the most indifferent young man of her acquaintance that she could call to mind.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

625

The wish-fulfilment can be detected equally easily in some other dreams which I have collected from normal people. A friend of mine, who knows my theory of dreams and has told his wife of it, said to me one day: ‘My wife has asked me to tell you that she had a dream yesterday that she was having her period. You can guess what that means.’ I could indeed guess it. The fact that this young married woman dreamt that she was having her period meant that she had missed her period. I could well believe that she would have been glad to go on enjoying her freedom a little longer before shouldering the burden of motherhood. It was a neat way of announcing her first pregnancy. Another friend of mine wrote and told me that, not long before, his wife had dreamt that she had noticed some milk stains on the front of her vest. This too was an announcement of pregnancy, but not of a first one. The young mother was wishing that she might have more nourishment to give her second child than she had had for her first.

A young woman had been cut off from society for weeks on end while she nursed her child through an infectious illness. After the child’s recovery, she had a dream of being at a party at which, among others, she met Alphonse Daudet, Paul Bourget, and Marcel Prévost; they were all most affable to her and highly amusing. All of the authors resembled their portraits, except Marcel Prévost, of whom she had never seen a picture; and he looked like . . . the disinfection officer who had fumigated the sick-room the day before and who had been her first visitor for so long. Thus it seems possible to give a complete translation of the dream: ‘It’s about time for something more amusing than this perpetual sick-nursing.’

These examples will perhaps be enough to show that dreams which can only be understood as fulfilments of wishes and which bear their meaning upon their faces without disguise are to be found under the most frequent and various conditions. They are mostly short and simple dreams, which afford a pleasant contrast to the confused and exuberant compositions that have in the main attracted the attention of the authorities. Nevertheless, it will repay us to pause for a moment over these simple dreams. We may expect to find the very simplest forms of dreams in children, since there can be no doubt that their psychical productions are less complicated than those of adults. Child psychology, in my opinion, is destined to perform the same useful services for adult psychology that the investigation of the structure or development of the lower animals has performed for research into the structure of the higher classes of animals. Few deliberate efforts have hitherto been made to make use of child psychology for this purpose.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

626

The dreams of young children are frequently pure wish-fulfilments and are in that case quite uninteresting compared with the dreams of adults. They raise no problems for solution; but on the other hand they are of inestimable importance in proving that, in their essential nature, dreams represent fulfilments of wishes. I have been able to collect a few instances of such dreams from material provided by my own children.

I have to thank an excursion which we made to the lovely village of Hallstatt in the summer of 1896 for two dreams: one of these was dreamt by my daughter, who was then eight and a half, and the other by her brother of five and a quarter. I must explain by way of preamble that we had been spending the summer on a hillside near Aussee, from which, in fine weather, we enjoyed a splendid view of the Dachstein. The Simony Hütte could be clearly distinguished through a telescope. The children made repeated attempts at seeing it through the telescope - I cannot say with what success. Before our excursion I had told the children that Hallstatt lay at the foot of the Dachstein. They very much looked forward to the day. From Hallstatt we walked up the Echerntal, which delighted the children with its succession of changing landscapes. One of them, however, the five year-old boy, gradually became fretful. Each time a new mountain came into view he asked if that was the Dachstein and I had to say ‘No, only one of the foothills.’ After he had asked the question several times, he fell completely silent; and he refused point-blank to come with us up the steep path to the waterfall. I thought he was tired. But next morning he came to me with a radiant face and said: ‘Last night I dreamt we were at the Simony Hütte.’ I understood him then. When I had spoken about the Dachstein, he had expected to climb the mountain in the course of our excursion to Hallstatt and to find himself at close quarters with the hut which there had been so much talk about in connection with the telescope. But when he found that he was being fobbed off with foothills and a waterfall, he felt disappointed and out of spirits. The dream was a compensation. I tried to discover its details, but they were scanty: ‘You have to climb up steps for six hours’ - which was what he had been told.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

627

The same excursion stirred up wishes in the eight-and-a-half year-old girl as well - wishes which had to be satisfied in a dream. We had taken our neighbour’s twelve-year-old son with us to Hallstatt. He was already a full-blown gallant, and there were signs that he had engaged the young lady’s affections. Next morning she told me the following dream: ‘Just fancy! I had a dream that Emil was one of the family and called you "Father" and "Mother" and slept with us in the big room like the boys. Then Mother came in and threw a handful of big bars of chocolate, wrapped up in blue and green paper, under our beds.’ Her brothers, who have evidently not inherited a faculty for understanding dreams, followed the lead of the authorities and declared that the dream was nonsense. The girl herself defended one part of the dream at least; and it throws light on the theory of the neuroses to learn which part. ‘Of course it’s nonsense Emil being one of the family; but the part about the bars of chocolate isn’t.’ It had been precisely on that point that I had been in the dark, but the girl’s mother now gave me the explanation. On their way home from the station the children had stopped in front of a slot-machine from which they were accustomed to obtain bars of chocolate of that very kind, wrapped in shiny metallic paper. They had wanted to get some; but their mother rightly decided that the day had already fulfilled enough wishes and left this one over to be fulfilled by the dream. I myself had not observed the incident. But the part of the dream which had been proscribed by my daughter was immediately clear to me. I myself had heard our well-behaved guest telling the children on the walk to wait till Father and Mother caught up with them. The little girl’s dream turned this temporary kinship into permanent adoption. Her affection was not yet able to picture any other forms of companionship than those which were represented in the dream and which were based on her relation to her brothers. It was of course impossible to discover without questioning her why the bars of chocolate were thrown under the beds.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

628

A friend of mine has reported a dream to me which was very much like my son’s. The dreamer was an eight-year-old girl. Her father had started off with several children on a walk to Dornbach, with the idea of visiting the Rohrer Hütte. As it was getting late, however, he had turned back, promising the children to make up for the disappointment another time. On their way home they had passed the sign-post that marks the path up to the Hameau. The children had then asked to be taken up to the Hameau; but once again for the same reason they had to be consoled with the promise of another day. Next morning the eight-year-old girl came to her father and said in satisfied tones: ‘Daddy, I dreamt last night that you went with us to the Rohrer Hütte and the Hameau.’ In her impatience she had anticipated the fulfilment of her father’s promises.

Here is an equally straightforward dream, provoked by the beauty of the scenery at Aussee in another of my daughters, who was at that time three and a quarter. She had crossed the lake for the first time, and the crossing had been too short for her: when we reached the landing-stage she had not wanted to leave the boat and had wept bitterly. Next morning she said: ‘Last night I went on the lake.’ Let us hope that her dream-crossing had been of a more satisfying length.

My eldest boy, then eight years old, already had dreams of his phantasies coming true: he dreamt that he was driving in a chariot with Achilles and that Diomede was the charioteer. As may be guessed, he had been excited the day before by a book on the legends of Greece which had been given to his elder sister.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

629

If I may include words spoken by children in their sleep under the heading of dreams, I can at this point quote one of the most youthful dreams in my whole collection. My youngest daughter, then nineteen months old, had had an attack of vomiting one morning and had consequently been kept without food all day. During the night after this day of starvation she was heard calling out excitedly in her sleep: ‘Anna Fweud, stwawbewwies, wild stwawbewwies, omblet, pudden!’ At that time she was in the habit of using her own name to express the idea of taking possession of something. The menu included pretty well everything that must have seemed to her to make up a desirable meal. The fact that strawberries appeared in it in two varieties was a demonstration against the domestic health regulations. It was based upon the circumstance, which she had no doubt observed, that her nurse had attributed her indisposition to a surfeit of strawberries. She was thus retaliating in her dream against this unwelcome verdict.¹

Though we think highly of the happiness of childhood because it is still innocent of sexual desires, we should not forget what a fruitful source of disappointment and renunciation, and consequently what a stimulus to dreaming, may be provided by the other of the two great vital instincts.² Here is another instance of this. My nephew, aged 22 months, had been entrusted with the duty of congratulating me on my birthday and of presenting me with a basket of cherries, which are still scarcely in season at that time of year. He seems to have found the task a hard one, for he kept on repeating ‘Chewwies in it’ but could not be induced to hand the present over. However, he found a means of compensation. He had been in the habit every morning of telling his mother that he had a dream of the ‘white soldier’ - a Guards officer in his white cloak whom he had once gazed at admiringly in the street. On the day after his birthday sacrifice he awoke with a cheerful piece of news, which could only have originated from a dream: ‘Hermann eaten all the chewwies!³

¹ The same feat was accomplished shortly afterwards by a dream produced by this little girl’s grandmother - their combined ages came to some seventy years. She had been obliged to go without food for a whole day on account of a disturbance due to a floating kidney. During the following night, no doubt imagining herself back in the heyday of her girlhood, she dreamt that she had been ‘asked out’ to both of the principal meals and been served at both with the most appetizing delicacies.

² [Footnote added in 1911:] A closer study of the mental life of children has taught us, to be sure, that sexual instinctual forces, in infantile form, play a large enough part, and one that has been too long overlooked, in the psychical activity of children. Closer study, too, has given us grounds for feeling some doubt in regard to the happiness of childhood as it has been constructed by adults in retrospect. Cf. my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d).

³ [Footnote added 1911:] The fact should be mentioned that children soon begin to have more complicated and less transparent dreams, and that, on the other hand, adults in certain circumstances often have dreams of a similarly simple, infantile character. The wealth of unexpected material that may occur in the dreams of children of four or five is shown by examples in my ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’ (1909b) and in Jung (1910a). - [Added 1914:] For analytical interpretations of children’s dreams see also von Hug-Hellmuth (1911 and 1913), Putnam (1912), van Raalte (1912), Spielrein (1913) and Tausk (1913). Children’s dreams are also reported by Bianchieri (1912), Busemann (1909 and 1910), Doglia and Bianchieri (1910-11) and, in particular, Wiggam (1909), who laid stress on their trend towards wish-fulfilment. - [Added 1911:] On the other hand, dreams of an infantile type seem to occur in adults with special frequency when they find themselves in unusual external circumstances. Thus Otto Nordenskjöld (1904, 1, 336 f.) writes as follows of the members of his expedition while they were wintering in the Antarctic: ‘The direction taken by our innermost thoughts was very clearly shown by our dreams, which were never more vivid or numerous than at this time. Even those of us who otherwise dreamt but rarely had long stories to tell in the morning when we exchanged our latest experiences in this world of the imagination. They were all concerned with the outside world which was now so remote from us, though they were often adapted to our actual circumstances. One of my companions had a particularly characteristic dream of being back in his school class-room, where it was his task to skin miniature seals which had been specially prepared for instructional purposes. Eating and drinking, however, were the pivot round which our dreams most often revolved. One of us, who had a special gift for attending large luncheon parties during the night, was proud if he was able to report in the morning that he had "got though a three-course dinner". Another of us dreamt of tobacco, of whole mountains of tobacco; while a third dreamt of a ship in full sail coming in across open water. Yet another dream is worth repeating. The postman brought round the mail and gave a long explanation of why we had had to wait so long for it: he had delivered it at the wrong address and had only succeeded in recovering it with great difficulty. We dreamt, of course, of still more impossible things. But there was a most striking lack of imaginativeness shown by almost all the dreams that I dreamt myself or heard described. It would certainly be of great psychological interest if all these dreams could be recorded. And it will easily be understood how much we longed for sleep, since it could offer each one of us everything that he most eagerly desired.’. - [Added 1914:] According to Du Prel (1885, 231), ’Mungo Park, when he was almost dying of thirst on one of his African journeys, dreamt unceasingly of the well-watered valleys and meadows of his home. Similarly, Baron Trenck suffering torments of hunger while he was a prisoner in the fortress at Magdeburg, dreamt of being surrounded by sumptuous meals; and George Back, who took part in Franklin’s first expedition, when he was almost dying of starvation as a result of his fearful privations, dreamt constantly and regularly of copious meals.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

630

I do not myself know what animals dream of. But a proverb, to which my attention was drawn by one of my students, does claim to know. ‘What’, asks the proverb, ‘do geese dream of?’ And it replies: ‘Of maize.’¹ The whole theory that dreams are wish-fulfilments is contained in these two phrases.²

It will be seen that we might have arrived at our theory of the hidden meaning of dreams most rapidly merely by following linguistic usage. It is true that common language sometimes speaks of dreams with contempt. (The phrase ‘Träume sind Schäume [Dreams are froth]’ seems intended to support the scientific estimate of dreams.) But, on the whole, ordinary usage treats dreams above all as the blessed fulfillers of wishes. If ever we find our expectation surpassed by the event, we exclaim in our delight: ‘I should never have imagined such a thing even in my wildest dreams.

¹ [Footnote added 1911:] A Hungarian proverb quoted by Ferenczi goes further and declares that ‘pigs dream of acorns and geese dream of maize’. - [Added 1914:] A Jewish proverb runs: ‘What do hens dream of? - of millet.’ (Bernstein and Segel, 1908, 116.)

² [Footnote added 1914:] I am far from seeking to maintain that I am the first writer to have had the idea of deriving dreams from wishes. (Cf. the opening sentence of my next chapter.) Those who attach any importance to anticipations of this kind may go back to classical antiquity and quote Herophilus, a physician who lived under the first Ptolemy. According to Büchsenschütz (1868, 33), he distinguished three sorts of dreams: those which are sent by the gods, those which are natural and arise when the mind forms a picture of something that is agreeable to it and will come about, and those which are of a mixed nature and which arise of their own accord from the emergence of pictures in which we see what we wish for. J. Stärcke (1913, ) has drawn attention to a dream in Scherner’s collection which that writer himself describes as the fulfilment of a wish. Scherner (1861, 239) writes: ‘The dreamer’s imagination fulfilled her waking wish so promptly, simply because that wish was emotionally active in her.’ Scherner classes this dream among ‘dreams of mood’; alongside it he places ‘dreams of erotic yearning’ in men and women, and ‘dreams of ill-temper’. There is clearly no question of Scherner attributing any more importance to wishes in the instigation of dreams than to any other waking mental state: still less is there any question of his having related wishes to the essential nature of dreaming.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

631

CHAPTER IV

DISTORTION IN DREAMS

If I proceed to put forward the assertion that the meaning of every dream is the fulfilment of a wish, that is to say that there cannot be any dreams but wishful dreams, I feel certain in advance that I shall meet with the most categorical contradiction.

‘There is nothing new,’ I shall be told, ‘in the idea that some dreams are to be regarded as wish-fulfilments; the authorities noticed that fact long ago. Cf. Radestock (1879, 137 f.), Volkelt (1875, 110 f.), Purkinje (1846, 456), Tissié (1898, 70), Simon (1888, 42, on the hunger dreams of Baron Trenck while he was a prisoner), and a passage in Griesinger (1845, 89).¹ But to assert that there are no dreams other than wish-fulfilment dreams is only one more unjustifiable generalization, though fortunately one which it is easy to disprove. After all, plenty of dreams occur which contain the most distressing subject matter but never a sign of any wish-fulfilment. Eduard von Hartmann, the philosopher of pessimism, is probably furthest removed from the wish-fulfilment theory. In his Philosophie des Unbewussten (1890, 2, 344) he writes: "When it comes to dreams, we find all the annoyances of waking life carried over into the state of sleep; the only thing we do not find is what can to some extent reconcile an educated man to life - scientific and artistic enjoyment. . . ." But even less disgruntled observers have insisted that pain and unpleasure are more common in dreams than pleasure: for instance, Scholz (1893, 57), Volkelt (1875, 80), and others. Indeed two ladies, Florence Hallam and Sarah Weed (1896, 499), have actually given statistical expression, based on a study of their own dreams, to the preponderance of unpleasure in dreaming. They find that 57.2 per cent of dreams are "disagreeable" and only 28.6 percent positively "pleasant". And apart from these dreams, which carry over into sleep the various distressing emotions of life, there are anxiety-dreams, in which that most dreadful of all unpleasurable feelings holds us in its grasp till we awaken. And the commonest victims of these anxiety-dreams are precisely children,² whose dreams you have described as undisguised wish-fulfilments.’

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] A writer as early as Plotinus, the Neoplatonist, is quoted by Du Prel (1885, 276) as saying: ‘When our desires are aroused, imagination comes along and, as it were, presents us with the objects of those desires.’

² Cf. Debacker (1881) on pavor nocturnus.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

632

It does in fact look as though anxiety-dreams make it impossible to assert as a general proposition (based on the examples quoted in my last chapter) that dreams are wish-fulfilments; indeed they seem to stamp any such proposition as an absurdity.

Nevertheless, there is no great difficulty in meeting these apparently conclusive objections. It is only necessary to take notice of the fact that my theory is not based on a consideration of the manifest content of dreams but refers to the thoughts which are shown by the work of interpretation to lie behind dreams. We must make a contrast between the manifest and the latent content of dreams. There is no question that there are dreams whose manifest content is of the most distressing kind. But has anyone tried to interpret such dreams? to reveal the latent thoughts behind them? If not, then the two objections raised against my theory will not hold water: it still remains possible that distressing dreams and anxiety-dreams, when they have been interpreted, may turn out to be fulfilments of wishes.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] It is hard to credit the obstinacy with which readers and critics of this book shut their eyes to this consideration and overlook the fundamental distinction between the manifest and latent content of dreams. - On the other hand, nothing in the literature of the subject comes so near to my hypothesis as a passage in James Sully’s essay ‘The Dream as a Revelation’ (1893, 364). The fact that I am only now quoting it for the first time is no sign of disparagement: ‘It would seem then, after all, that dreams are not the utter nonsense they have been said to be by such authorities as Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton. The chaotic aggregations of our night-fancy have a significance and communicate new knowledge. Like some letter in cypher, the dream-inscription when scrutinized closely loses its first look of balderdash and takes on the aspect of a serious, intelligible message. Or, to vary the figure slightly, we may say that, like some palimpsest, the dream discloses beneath its worthless surface-characters traces of an old and precious communication.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

633

When in the course of a piece of scientific work we come upon a problem which is difficult to solve, it is often a good plan to take up a second problem along with the original one - just as it is easier to crack two nuts together than each separately. Thus we are not only faced by the question ‘How can distressing dreams and anxiety-dreams be wish-fulfilments?’; our reflections enable us to add a second question: ‘Why is it that dreams with an indifferent content, which turn out to be wish-fulfilments, do not express their meaning undisguised?’ Take, for instance, the dream which I treated at such length of Irma’s injection. It was not by any means of a distressing nature and interpretation showed it as a striking example of the fulfilment of a wish. But why should it have needed any interpretation at all? Why did it not say what it meant straight out? At first sight the dream of Irma’s injection gave no impression that it represented a wish of the dreamer’s as fulfilled. My readers will have had no such impression; but neither did I myself before I carried out the analysis. Let us describe this behaviour of dreams, which stands in so much need of explanation, as ‘the phenomenon of distortion in dreams’. Thus our second problem is: what is the origin of dream-distortion?

A number of possible solutions of the problem may at once occur to us: as, for instance, that some incapacity exists during sleep for giving direct expression to our dream-thoughts. But the analysis of certain dreams forces us to adopt another explanation of distortion in dreams. I will exemplify this by another dream of my own. Once again this will involve me in a variety of indiscretions; but a thorough elucidation of the problem will compensate for my personal sacrifice.

PREAMBLE. - In the spring of 1897 I learnt that two professors at our university had recommended me for appointment as professor extraordinarius. The news surprised and greatly delighted me, since it implied recognition by two eminent men, which could not be put down to any considerations of a personal kind. But I at once warned myself not to attach any expectations to the event. During the last few years the Ministry had disregarded recommendations of that sort; and several of my colleagues who were my seniors in age and at least my equals in merit had been waiting vainly for appointment. I had no reason to believe that I should be more fortunate. I therefore determined to meet the future with resignation. So far as I knew, I was not an ambitious man; I was following my profession with gratifying success even without the advantages afforded by a title. Moreover there was no question of my pronouncing the grapes sweet or sour: they hung far too high over my head.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

634

One evening I had a visit from a friend - one of the men whose example I had taken as a warning to me. For a consider able time he had been a candidate for promotion to a professorship, a rank which in our society turns its holder into a demi-god to his patients. Less resigned than I was, however, he was in the habit of paying his respects from time to time in the offices of the Ministry with a view to advancing his prospects. He had been paying one of these visits just before calling on me. He told me that on this occasion he had driven the exalted official into a corner and had asked straight out whether the delay over his appointment was not in fact due to denominational considerations. The reply had been that, in view of the present state of feeling, it was no doubt true that, for the moment, His Excellency was not in a position, etc. etc. ‘At least I know where I am now’, my friend had concluded. It was not news to me, though it was bound to strengthen my feeling of resignation; for the same denominational considerations applied to my own case.

On the morning after this visit I had the following dream, which was remarkable among other things for its form. It consisted of two thoughts and two pictures - each thought being succeeded by a picture. I shall, however, report only the first half of the dream here, since the other half has no connection with the purpose for which I am describing the dream.

I. . . . My friend R. was my uncle. - I had a great feeling of affection for him.

II. I saw before me his face, somewhat changed. It was a though it had been drawn out lengthways. A yellow beard that surrounded it stood out especially clearly.

Then followed the two other pieces which I shall pass over - once more a thought followed by a picture.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

635

The interpretation of the dream took place as follows.

When, during the course of the morning, the dream came into my head, I laughed aloud and said: ‘The dream’s nonsense!’ But it refused to go away and followed me about all day, till at last in the evening I began to reproach myself: ‘If one of your patients who was interpreting a dream could find nothing better to say than that it was nonsense, you would take him up about it and suspect that the dream had some disagreeable story at the back of it which he wanted to avoid becoming aware of. Treat yourself in the same way. Your opinion that the dream is nonsense only means that you have an internal resistance against interpreting it. Don’t let yourself be put off like this.’ So I set about the interpretation.

‘R. was my uncle.’ What could that mean?  I never had more than one uncle - Uncle Josef.¹ There was an unhappy story attached to him. Once - more than thirty years ago - in his eagerness to make money, he allowed himself to be involved in a transaction of a kind that is severely punished by the law, and he was in fact punished for it. My father, whose hair turned grey from grief in a few days, used always to say that Uncle Josef was not a bad man but only a simpleton; those were his words. So that if my friend R. was my Uncle Josef, what I was meaning to say was that R. was a simpleton. Hardly credible and most disagreeable! - But there was the face which I saw in the dream with its elongated features and yellow beard. My uncle did in fact have a face like that, elongated and framed in a handsome fair beard. My friend R. had originally been extremely dark; but when black-haired people begin to turn grey they pay for the splendour of their youth. Hair by hair, their black beards go through an unpleasing change of colour: first they turn to a reddish brown, then to a yellowish brown, and only then to a definite grey. My friend R.’s beard was at that time passing through this stage - and so, incidentally, was my own, as I had noticed with dissatisfaction. The face that I saw in the dream was at once my friend R.’s and my uncle’s. It was like one of Galton’s composite photographs. (In order to bring out family likenesses, Galton used to photograph several faces on the same plate.) So there could be no doubt that I really did mean that my friend R. was a simpleton - like my Uncle Josef.

¹ It is astonishing to observe the way in which my memory - my waking memory - was narrowed at this point, for the purposes of the analysis. Actually I have known five of my uncles and loved and honoured one of them. But at the moment at which I overcame my resistance to interpreting the dream I said to myself that I never had more than one uncle - the one that was intended in the dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

636

I still had no idea at all what could be the purpose of this comparison, against which I continued to struggle. It did not go very deep, after all, since my uncle was a criminal, whereas my friend R. bore an unblemished character . . . except for having been fined for knocking a boy down with his bicycle. Could I have had that crime in mind? That would have been making fun of the comparison. At this point I remembered another conversation which I had had a few days earlier with another colleague, N., and, now I came to think of it, upon the same subject. I had met N. in the street. He too had been recommended for a professorship. He had heard of the honour that had been paid me and had offered me his congratulations on it; but I had unhesitatingly refused to accept them. ‘You are the last person’, I had said, ‘to make that kind of joke; you know what such a recommendation is worth from your own experience.’ ‘Who can say?’ he had answered - jokingly, it seemed; ‘there was something definite against me. Don’t you know that a woman once started legal proceedings against me? I needn’t assure you that the case was dismissed.(It was a disgraceful attempt at blackmail; and I had the greatest difficulty in saving the prosecutrix from being punished. But perhaps they may be using this at the Ministry as an excuse for not appointing me. But you have an unblemished character.’ This told me who the criminal was, and at the same time showed me how the dream was to be interpreted and what its purpose was. My Uncle Josef represented my two colleagues who had not been appointed to professorships - the one as a simpleton and the other as a criminal. I now saw too why they were represented in this light. If the appointment of my friends R. and N. had been postponed for ‘denominational’ reasons, my own appointment was also open to doubt; if, however, I could attribute the rejection of my two friends to other reasons, which did not apply to me, my hopes would remain untouched. This was the procedure adopted by my dream: it made one of them, R., into a simpleton and the other, N., into a criminal, whereas I was neither the one nor the other; thus we no longer had anything in common; I could rejoice at my appointment to a professorship, and I could avoid drawing the distressing conclusion that R.’s report of what the high official had said to him must apply equally to me.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

637

But I felt obliged to proceed still further with my interpretation of the dream; I felt I had not yet finished dealing with it satisfactorily. I was still uneasy over the light-heartedness with which I had degraded two of my respected colleagues in order to keep open my own path to a professorship. My dissatisfaction with my conduct, however, had diminished since I had come to realize the worth that was to be attached to expressions in dreams. I was prepared to deny through thick and thin that I really considered that R. was a simpleton and that I really disbelieved N.’s account of the blackmailing affair. Nor did I believe that Irma was really made dangerously ill through being injected with Otto’s preparation of propyl. In both these cases what my dreams had expressed was only my wish that it might be so. The assertion in which my wish was realized sounded less absurd in the later dream than in the earlier one; it made cleverer use of the actual facts in its construction, like a well designed slander of the kind that makes people feel that ‘there’s something in it’. For one of the professors in his own faculty had voted against my friend R., and my friend N. had himself innocently provided me with the material for my aspersions. Nevertheless, I must repeat, the dream seemed to me to stand in need of further elucidation.

I then recalled that there was still a piece of the dream which the interpretation had not touched. After the idea had occurred to me that R. was my uncle, I had had a warm feeling of affection for him in the dream. Where did that feeling belong?  I had naturally never had any feeling of affection for my Uncle Josef. I had been fond of my friend R. and had esteemed him for many years; but if I had gone up to him and expressed my sentiments in terms approaching the degree of affection I had felt in the dream, there could be no doubt that he would have been astonished. My affection for him struck me as ungenuine and exaggerated - like the judgement of his intellectual qualities which I had expressed by fusing his personality with my uncle’s, though there the exaggeration had been in the opposite direction. But a new light began to dawn on me. The affection in the dream did not belong to the latent content, to the thoughts that lay behind the dream; it stood in contradiction to them and was calculated to conceal the true interpretation of the dream. And probably that was precisely its raison d’être. I recalled my resistance against embarking on the interpretation, how long I had put it off and how I had declared that the dream was sheer nonsense. My psycho-analytic treatments taught me how a repudiation of that kind was to be interpreted: it had no value as a judgement but was simply an expression of emotion. If my little daughter did not want an apple that was offered to her, she asserted that the apple tasted sour without having tasted it. And if my patients behaved like the child, I knew that they were concerned with an idea which they wanted to repress. The same was true of my dream. I did not want to interpret it, because the interpretation contained something that I was struggling against. When I had completed the interpretation I learnt what it was that I had been struggling against - namely, the assertion that R. was a simpleton. The affection that I felt for R. could not be derived from the latent dream-thoughts; but no doubt it originated from this struggle of mine. If my dream was distorted in this respect from its latent content - and distorted into its opposite - then the affection that was manifest in the dream served the purpose of this distortion. In other words, distortion was shown in this case to be deliberate and to be a means of dissimulation. My dream thoughts had contained a slander against R.; and, in order that I might not notice this, what appeared in the dream was the opposite, a feeling of affection for him.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

638

It seemed as though this might be a discovery of general validity. It is true that, as was shown by the instances quoted in Chapter III, there are some dreams which are undisguised fulfilments of wishes. But in cases where the wish-fulfilment is unrecognizable, where it has been disguised, there must have existed some inclination to put up a defence against the wish; and owing to this defence the wish was unable to express itself except in a distorted shape. I will try to seek a social parallel to this internal event in the mind. Where can we find a similar distortion of a psychical act in social life? Only where two persons are concerned, one of whom possesses a certain degree of power which the second is obliged to take into account. In such a case the second person will distort his psychical acts or, as we might put it, will dissimulate. The politeness which I practise every day is to a large extent dissimulation of this kind; and when I interpret my dreams for my readers I am obliged to adopt similar distortions. The poet complains of the need for these distortions in the words:

Das Beste, was du wissen kannst,

Darfst du den Buben doch nicht sagen.¹

A similar difficulty confronts the political writer who has disagreeable truths to tell to those in authority. If he presents them undisguised, the authorities will suppress his words - after they have been spoken, if his pronouncement was an oral one, but beforehand, if he had intended to make it in print. A writer must beware of the censorship, and on its account he must soften and distort the expression of his opinion. According to the strength and sensitiveness of the censorship he finds himself compelled either merely to refrain from certain forms of attack, or to speak in allusions in place of direct references, or he must conceal his objectionable pronouncement beneath some apparently innocent disguise: for instance, he may describe a dispute between two Mandarins in the Middle Kingdom, when the people he really has in mind are officials in his own country. The stricter the censorship, the more far-reaching will be the disguise and the more ingenious too may be the means employed for putting the reader on the scent of the true meaning.²

¹ [‘After all, the best of what you know may not be told to boys.’]

² [Footnote added 1919:] Frau Dr. H. von Hug-Hellmuth (1915) has recorded a dream which is perhaps better fitted than any to justify my choice of nomenclature. In this example the dream-distortion adopted the same methods as the postal censorship for expunging passages which were objectionable to it. The postal censorship makes such passages unreadable by blacking them out; the dream-censorship replaced them by an incomprehensible mumble.

In order to make the dream intelligible, I must explain that the dreamer, a cultivated and highly esteemed lady, was fifty years of age. She was the widow of an officer of high rank who had died some twelve years previously and was the mother of grown sons, one of whom was in the field at the time of the dream.

Here then is the dream - which deals with ‘love services’ in war-time. ‘The patient went to Garrison Hospital No. 1 and informed the sentry at the gate that she must speak to the Chief Medical Officer (mentioning a name that was unknown to her) as she wanted to volunteer for service at the hospital. She pronounced the word "service" in such a way that the N.C.O. at once understood that she meant "love service". Since she was an elderly lady, after some hesitation he allowed her to pass. Instead of finding the Chief Medical Officer, however, she reached a large and gloomy apartment in which a number of officers and army doctors were standing and sitting round a long table. She approached a staff surgeon with her request, and he understood her meaning after she had said only a few words. The actual wording of her speech in the dream was: "I and many other women and girls in Vienna are ready to . . ." at this point in the dream her words turned into a mumble " . . . for the troops - officers and other ranks without distinction." She could tell from the expressions on the officers’ faces, partly embarrassed and partly sly, that everyone had understood her meaning correctly. The lady went on: "I’m aware that our decision must sound surprising, but we mean it in bitter earnest. No one asks a soldier in the field whether he wishes to die or not." There followed an awkward silence of some minutes. The staff surgeon then put his arm round her waist and said: "Suppose, madam, it actually came to . . . (mumble)." She drew away from him, thinking to herself: "He’s like all the rest of them", and replied: "Good gracious, I’m an old woman and I might never come to that. Besides, there’s one condition that must be observed: age must be respected. It must never happen that an elderly woman . . . (mumble) . . . a mere boy. That would be terrible." "I understand perfectly," replied the staff surgeon. Some of the officers, and among them one who had been a suitor of hers in her youth, laughed out loud. The lady then asked to be taken to the Chief Medical Officer, with whom she was acquainted, so that the whole matter could be thrashed out; but she found, to her consternation, that she could not recall his name. Nevertheless, the staff surgeon, most politely and respectfully, showed her the way up to the second floor by a very narrow, iron, spiral staircase, which led directly from the room to the upper storeys of the building. As she went up she heard an officer say: "That’s a tremendous decision to make - no matter whether a woman’s young or old! Splendid of her!" Feeling simply that she was doing her duty, she walked up an interminable staircase. The dream was repeated twice in the course of a few weeks, with, as the lady remarked, some quite unimportant and meaningless modifications.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

639

The fact that the phenomena of censorship and of dream-distortion correspond down to their smallest details justifies us in presuming that they are similarly determined. We may therefore suppose that dreams are given their shape in individual human beings by the operation of two psychical forces (or we may describe them as currents or systems); and that one of these forces constructs the wish which is expressed by the dream, while the other exercises a censorship upon this dream-wish and, by the use of that censorship, forcibly brings about a distortion in the expression of the wish. It remains to enquire as to the nature of the power enjoyed by this second agency which enables it to exercise its censorship. When we bear in mind that the latent dream-thoughts are not conscious before an analysis has been carried out, whereas the manifest content of the dream is consciously remembered, it seems plausible to suppose that the privilege enjoyed by the second agency is that of permitting thoughts to enter consciousness. Nothing, it would seem, can reach consciousness from the first system without passing the second agency; and the second agency allows nothing to pass without exercising its rights and making such modifications as it thinks fit in the thought which is seeking admission to consciousness. Incidentally, this enables us to form a quite definite view of the ‘essential nature’ of consciousness: we see the process of a thing becoming conscious as a specific psychical act, distinct from and independent of the process of the formation of a presentation or idea; and we regard consciousness as a sense organ which perceives data that arise elsewhere. It can be demonstrated that these basic assumptions are absolutely indispensable to psychopathology. We must, however, postpone our further consideration of them to a later stage.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

640

If this picture of the two psychical agencies and their relation to consciousness is accepted, there is a complete analogy in political life to the extraordinary affection which I felt in my dream for my friend R., who was treated with such contumely during the dream’s interpretation. Let us imagine a society in which a struggle is in process between a ruler who is jealous of his power and an alert public opinion. The people are in revolt against an unpopular official and demand his dismissal. But the autocrat, to show that he need take no heed of the popular wish, chooses that moment for bestowing a high distinction upon the official, though there is no other reason for doing so. In just the same way my second agency, which commands the approaches to consciousness, distinguished my friend R. by a display of excessive affection simply because the wishful impulses belonging to the first system, for particular reasons of their own on which they were intent at the moment, chose to condemn him as a simpleton.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1911:] Hypocritical dreams of this description are not uncommon events in my own case or in that of other people. While I was engaged in working out a certain scientific problem, I was troubled for several nights in close succession by a somewhat confusing dream which had as its subject a reconciliation with a friend whom I had dropped many years before. On the fourth or fifth occasion I at last succeeded in understanding the meaning of the dream. It was an incitement to abandon my last remnants of consideration for the person in question and to free myself from him completely, and it had been hypocritically disguised as its opposite. I have reported elsewhere a ‘hypocritical Oedipus dream’, dreamt by a man, in which the hostile impulses and death-wishes contained in the dream-thoughts were replaced by manifest affection. Another kind of hypocritical dream will be mentioned below in Chapter VI.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

641

These considerations may lead us to feel that the interpretation of dreams may enable us to draw conclusions as to the structure of our mental apparatus which we have hoped for in vain from philosophy. I do not propose, however, to follow this line of thought; but, having cleared up the matter of distortion in dreams, I shall go back to the problem from which we started. The question raised was how dreams with a distressing content can be resolved into wish-fulfilments. We now see that this is possible if dream-distortion has occurred and if the distressing content serves only to disguise something that is wished for. Bearing in mind our assumption of the existence of two psychical agencies, we can further say that distressing dreams do in fact contain something which is distressing to the second agency, but something which at the same time fulfils a wish on the part of the first agency. They are wishful dreams in so far as every dream arises from the first agency; the relation of the second agency towards dreams is of a defensive and not of a creative kind.¹ If we were to restrict ourselves to considering what the second agency contributes to dreams, we could never arrive at an understanding of them: all the conundrums which the authorities have observed in dreams would remain unsolved.

The fact that dreams really have a secret meaning which represents the fulfilment of a wish must be proved afresh in each particular case by analysis. I shall therefore select a few dreams with a distressing content and attempt to analyse them. Some of them are the dreams of hysterical patients which require lengthy preambles and an occasional excursus into the psychical processes characteristic of hysteria. But I cannot escape this aggravation of the difficulties of presenting my argument.

As I have already explained, when I undertake the analytic treatment of a psycho-neurotic patient his dreams are invariably discussed between us. In the course of these discussions I am obliged to give him all the psychological explanations which have enabled me myself to reach an understanding of his symptoms. I am thereupon subjected to a remorseless criticism, certainly no less severe than I have to expect from the members of my own profession. And my patients invariably contradict my assertion that all dreams are fulfilments of wishes. Here, then, are some instances from the material of dreams that have been brought up against me as evidence to the contrary.

¹ [Footnote added 1930:] Later we shall also come across instance in which, on the contrary, a dream expresses a wish on the part of the second agency.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

642

‘You’re always saying to me’, began a clever woman patient of mine, ‘that a dream is a fulfilled wish. Well, I’ll tell you a dream whose subject was the exact opposite - a dream in which one of my wishes was not fulfilled. How do you fit that in with your theory? This was the dream:

‘I wanted to give a supper-party, but I had nothing in the house but a little smoked salmon. I thought I would go out and buy something, but remembered then that it was Sunday afternoon and all the shops would be shut. Next I tried to ring up some caterers, but the telephone was out of order. So I had to abandon my wish to give a supper-party.’

I answered, of course, that analysis was the only way of deciding on the meaning of the dream; though I admitted that at first sight it seemed sensible and coherent and looked like the reverse of a wish-fulfilment. ‘But what material did the dream arise from? As you know, the instigation to a dream is always to be found in the events of the previous day.’

ANALYSIS. - My patient’s husband, an honest and capable wholesale butcher, had remarked to her the day before that he was getting too stout and therefore intended to start on a course of weight-reduction. He proposed to rise early, do physical exercises, keep to a strict diet, and above all accept no more invitations to supper. -She laughingly added that her husband, at the place where he regularly lunched, had made the acquaintance of a painter, who had pressed him to be allowed to paint his portrait, as he had never seen such expressive features. Her husband however had replied in his blunt manner that he was much obliged, but he was sure the painter would prefer a piece of a pretty young girl’s behind to the whole of his face.¹ She was very much in love with her husband now and teased him a lot. She had begged him, too, not to give her any caviare.

I asked her what that meant; and she explained that she had wished for a long time that she could have a caviare sandwich every morning but had grudged the expense. Of course her husband would have let her have it at once if she had asked him. But, on the contrary, she had asked him not to give her any caviare, so that she could go on teasing him about it.

¹ Cf. the phrase ‘sitting for one’s portrait’ and Goethe’s lines:

Und wenn er keinen Hintern hat,

Wie mag der Edle sitzen?

[And if he hasn’t a behind,

How can his Lordship sit?]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

643

This explanation struck me as unconvincing. Inadequate reasons like this usually conceal unconfessed motives. They remind one of Bernheim’s hypnotized patients. When one of these carries out a post-hypnotic suggestion and is asked why he is acting in this way, instead of saying that he has no idea he feels compelled to invent some obviously unsatisfactory reason. The same was no doubt true of my patient and the caviare. I saw that she was obliged to create an unfulfilled wish for herself in her actual life; and the dream represented this renunciation as having been put into effect. But why was it that she stood in need of an unfulfilled wish?

The associations which she had so far produced had not been sufficient to interpret the dream. I pressed her for some more. After a short pause, such as would correspond to the over coming of a resistance, she went on to tell me that the day before she had visited a woman friend of whom she confessed she felt jealous because her (my patient’s) husband was constantly singing her praises. Fortunately this friend of hers is very skinny and thin and her husband admires a plumper figure. I asked her what she had talked about to her thing friend. Naturally, she replied, of that lady’s wish to grow a little stouter. Her friend had enquired, too: ‘When are you going to ask us to another meal? You always feed one so well.’

The meaning of the dream was now clear, and I was able to say to my patient: ‘It is just as though when she made this suggestion you said to yourself: "A likely thing! I’m to ask you to come and eat in my house so that you may get stout and attract my husband still more! I’d rather never give another supper-party." What the dream was saying to you was that you were unable to give any supper-parties, and it was thus fulfilling your wish not to help your friend to grow plumper. The fact that what people eat at parties makes them stout had been brought home to you by your husband’s decision not to accept any more invitations to supper in the interests of his plan to reduce his weight.’ All that was now lacking was some coincidence to confirm the solution. The smoked salmon in the dream had not yet been accounted for. ‘How’, I asked, ‘did you arrive at the salmon that came into your dream?’ ‘Oh’, she replied, ‘smoked salmon is my friend’s favourite dish.’ I happen to be acquainted with the lady in question myself, and I can confirm the fact that she grudges herself salmon no less than my patient grudges herself caviare.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

644

The same dream admits of another and subtler interpretation, which in fact becomes unavoidable if we take a subsidiary detail into account. (The two interpretations are not mutually contradictory, but both cover the same ground; they are a good instance of the fact that dreams, like all other psychopathological structures, regularly have more than one meaning.) My patient, it will be remembered, at the same time as she was occupied with her dream of the renunciation of a wish, was also trying to bring about a renounced wish (for the caviare sandwich) in real life. Her friend had also given expression to a wish - to become stouter - and it would not have been surprising if my patient had dreamt that her friend’s wish was unfulfilled; for my patient’s own wish was that her friend’s wish (to put on weight) should not be fulfilled. But instead of this she dreamt that one of her own wishes was not fulfilled. Thus the dream will acquire a new interpretation if we suppose that the person indicated in the dream was not herself but her friend, that she had put herself in her friend’s place, or, as we might say, that she had ‘identified’ herself with her friend. I believe she had in fact done this; and the circumstance of her having brought about a renounced wish in real life was evidence of this identification.

What is the meaning of hysterical identification? It requires a somewhat lengthy explanation. Identification is a highly important factor in the mechanism of hysterical symptoms. It enables patients to express in their symptoms not only their own experiences but those of a large number of other people; it enables them, as it were, to suffer on behalf of a whole crowd of people and to act all the parts in a play single-handed. I shall be told that this is not more than the familiar hysterical imitation, the capacity of hysterics to imitate any symptoms in other people that may have struck their attention - sympathy, as it were, intensified to the point of reproduction. This, however, does no more than show us the path along which the psychical process in hysterical imitation proceeds. The path is something different from the mental act which proceeds along it. The latter is a little more complicated than the common picture of hysterical imitation; it consists in the unconscious drawing of an inference, as an example will make clear. Supposing a physician is treating a woman patient, who is subject to a particular kind of spasm, in a hospital ward among a number of other patients. He will show no surprise if he finds one morning that this particular kind of hysterical attack has found imitators. He will merely say: ‘The other patients have seen it and copied it; it’s a case of psychical infection.’ That is true; but the psychical infection has occurred along some such lines as these. As a rule, patients know more about one another than the doctor does about any of them; and after the doctor’s visit is over they turn their attention to one another. Let us imagine that this patient had her attack on a particular day; then the others will quickly discover that it was caused by a letter from home, the revival of some unhappy love-affair, or some such thing. Their sympathy is aroused and they draw the following inference, though it fails to penetrate into consciousness: ‘If a cause like this can produce an attack like this, I may have the same kind of attack since I have the same grounds for having it.’ If this inference were capable of entering consciousness, it might possibly give rise to a fear of having the same kind of attack. But in fact the inference is made in a different psychical region, and consequently results in the actual realization of the dreaded symptom. Thus identification is not simple imitation but assimilation on the basis of a similar aetiological pretension; it expresses a resemblance and is derived from a common element which remains in the unconscious.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

645

Identification is most frequently used in hysteria to express a common sexual element. A hysterical woman identifies herself in her symptoms most readily - though not exclusively - with people with whom she has had sexual relations or with people who have had sexual relations with the same people as herself. Linguistic usage takes this into account, for two lovers are spoken of as being ‘one’. In hysterical phantasies, just as in dreams, it is enough for purposes of identification that the subject should have thoughts of sexual relations without their having necessarily taken place in reality. Thus the patient whose dream I have been discussing was merely following the rules of hysterical processes of thought in expressing her jealousy of her friend (which incidentally she herself knew was unjustified) by taking her place in the dream and identifying herself with her by creating a symptom - the renounced wish. The process might be expressed verbally thus: my patient put herself in her friend’s place in the dream because her friend was taking my patient’s place with her husband and because she (my patient) wanted to take her friend’s place in her husband’s high opinion.¹

¹ I myself regret the insertion into my argument of excerpts from the psychopathology of hysteria. Their fragmentary presentation and detachment from their context cannot fail to detract from their enlightening effect. If, however, they serve to indicate the intimate connection between the topic of dreams and that of the psychoneuroses, they will have fulfilled the purpose for which they are inserted.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

646

A contradiction to my theory of dreams produced by another of my women patients (the cleverest of all my dreamers) was resolved more simply, but upon the same pattern: namely that the non-fulfilment of one wish meant the fulfilment of another. One day I had been explaining to her that dreams are fulfilments of wishes. Next day she brought me a dream in which she was travelling down with her mother-in-law to the place in the country where they were to spend their holidays together. Now I knew that she had violently rebelled against the idea of spending the summer near her mother-in-law and that a few days earlier she had successfully avoided the propinquity she dreaded by engaging rooms in a far distant resort. And now her dream had undone the solution she had wished for: was not this the sharpest possible contradiction of my theory that in dreams wishes are fulfilled? No doubt; and it was only necessary to follow the dream’s logical consequence in order to arrive at its interpretation. The dream showed that I was wrong. Thus it was her wish that I might be wrong, and her dream showed that wish fulfilled. But her wish that I might be wrong, which was fulfilled in connection with her summer holidays, related in fact to another and more serious matter. For at about the same time I had inferred from the material produced in her analysis that at a particular period of her life something must have occurred that was of importance in determining her illness. She had disputed this, since she had no recollection of it; but soon afterwards it had turned out that I was right. Thus her wish that I might be wrong, which was transformed into her dream of spending her holidays with her mother-in-law, corresponded to a well-justified wish that the events of which she was then becoming aware for the first time might never have occurred.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

647

I have ventured to interpret - without any analysis, but only by a guess - a small episode which occurred to a friend of mine who was in the same class as I was all through our career at a secondary school. One day he listened to a lecture which I gave before a small audience on the novel idea that dreams were wish-fulfilments. He went home and dreamt that he had lost all his cases (he was a barrister) and afterwards arraigned me on the subject. I evaded the issue by telling him that after all one can’t win all one’s cases. But to myself I thought: ‘Considering that for eight whole years I sat on the front bench as top of the class while he drifted about somewhere in the middle, he can hardly fail to nourish a wish, left over from his school-days, that some day or other I may come a complete cropper.’

A dream of a gloomier kind was also brought up against me by a patient as an objection to the theory of wishful dreams.

The patient, who was a young girl, began thus: ‘As you will remember, my sister has only one boy left now - Karl; she lost his elder brother, Otto, while I was still living with her. Otto was my favourite; I more or less brought him up. I’m fond of the little one too, but of course not nearly so fond as I was of the one who died. Last night, then, I dreamt that I saw Karl lying before me dead. He was lying in his little coffin with his hands folded and with candles all around - in fact just like little Otto, whose death was such a blow to me. Now tell me, what can that mean? You know me. Am I such a wicked person that I can wish my sister to lose the one child she still has? Or does the dream mean that I would rather Karl were dead than Otto whom I was so much fonder of?

I assured her that this last interpretation was out of question. And after reflecting a little I was able to give her the correct interpretation of the dream, which she afterwards confirmed. I was able to do so because I was familiar with the whole of the dreamer’s previous history.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

648

The girl had early been left an orphan and had been brought up in the house of a much older sister. Among the friends who visited at the house was a man who made a lasting impression on her heart. For a time it had seemed as though her scarcely acknowledged relations with him would lead to marriage; but this happy outcome was brought to nothing by her sister, whose motives were never fully explained. After the breach the man ceased to visit the house; and shortly after the death of little Otto, on to whom she had meanwhile turned her affection, my patient herself set up on her own. She did not succeed, however, in freeing herself from her attachment to her sister’s friend. Her pride bade her avoid him; but she was unable to transfer her love to any of the other admirers who presented themselves later. Whenever it was announced that the object of her affections, who was by profession a literary man, was to give a lecture anywhere, she was invariably in the audience; and she took every possible opportunity of seeing him from a distance on neutral ground. I remembered that she had told me the day before that the Professor was going to a particular concert and that she intended to go to it as well so as to enjoy a glimpse of him once more. That had been on the day before the dream, and the concert was to take place on the day on which she told me the dream. It was therefore easy for me to construct the correct interpretation, and I asked her whether she could think of anything that happened after little Otto’s death. She answered at once: ‘Of course! the Professor came to see us again after a long absence, and I saw him once more beside little Otto’s coffin.’ This was exactly what I had expected, and I interpreted the dream in this way: ‘If now the other boy were to die, the same thing would happen. You would spend the day with your sister and the Professor would be certain to come to offer his condolences, so that you would see him again under the same conditions as the other time. The dream means no more than your wish to see him once more, a wish which you are inwardly struggling against. I know you have a ticket for to-day’s concert in your pocket. Your dream was a dream of impatience: it anticipated the glimpse you are to have of him to-day by a few hours.’

In order to conceal her wish, she had evidently chosen a situation in which such wishes are usually suppressed, a situation in which one is so much filled with grief that one has no thought of love. Yet it is quite possible that even in the real situation of which the dream was an exact replica, beside the coffin of the elder boy whom she had loved still more, she may have been unable to suppress her tender feelings for the visitor who had been absent so long.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

649

A similar dream of another woman patient had a different explanation. When she was young the had been remarkable for her ready wit and cheerful disposition; and these characteristics were still to be seen, at all events in the ideas that occurred to her during the treatment. In the course of a longish dream, this lady imagined that she saw her only, fifteen-year-old daughter lying dead ‘in a case.’ She had half a mind to use the scene as an objection to the wish-fulfilment theory, though she herself suspected that the detail of the ‘case’ must point the way to another view of the dream.¹ In the course of the analysis she recalled that at a party the evening before there had been some talk about the English word ‘box’ and the various ways in which it could be translated into German - such as ‘Schachtel’, ‘Loge’, ‘Kasten’, ‘Ohrfeige’, and so on. Other portions of the same dream enabled us to discover further that she had guessed that the English ‘box’ was related to the German ‘Büchse’, and that she had then been plagued by a recollection that ‘Büchse’ is used as a vulgar term for the female genitals. If some allowance was made for the limits of her knowledge of topographical anatomy, it might be presumed, therefore, that the child lying in the case meant an embryo in the womb. After being enlightened up to this point, she no longer denied that the dream-picture corresponded to a wish of hers. Like so many young married women, she had been far from pleased when she became pregnant; and more than once she had allowed herself to wish that the child in her womb might die. Indeed, in a fit of rage after a violent scene with her husband, she had beaten with her fists on her body so as to hit the child inside it. Thus the dead child was in fact the fulfilment of a wish, but of a wish that had been put aside fifteen years earlier. It is scarcely to be wondered at if a wish that was fulfilled after such a long delay was not recognized. Too much had changed in the interval.

¹ Like the smoked salmon in the dream of the abandoned supper party.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

650

I shall have to return to the group of dreams to which the last two examples belong (dreams dealing with the death of relatives of whom the dreamer is fond) when I come to consider ‘typical’ dreams. I shall then be able to show from further instances that, in spite of their unwished for contents, all such dreams must be interpreted as wish-fulfilments.

I owe the following dream, not to a patient, but to an intelligent jurist of my acquaintance. He told it to me, once again, in order to restrain me from rash generalizing on the theory of wishful dreams. ‘I dreamt’, said my informant, ‘that I came up to my house with a lady on my arm. A closed carriage was standing in front of it and a man came up to me, showed me his credentials as a police officer and requested me to follow him. I asked him to allow me a little time to put my affairs in order. Can you suppose that I have a wish to be arrested?’ - Of course not, I could only agree. Do you happen to know the charge on which you were arrested?  - ‘Yes, for infanticide, I believe.’ - Infanticide? But surely you’re aware that that’s a crime that can only be committed by a mother on a new-born child? - ‘Quite true.’¹ - And what were the circumstances in which you had the dream? What happened on the previous evening? - ‘I would prefer not to tell you. It’s a delicate matter.’ - Nevertheless I shall have to hear it; otherwise we shall have to give up the idea of interpreting the dream. - ‘Very well then, listen. I didn’t spend last night at home but with a lady who means a great deal to me. When we woke up in the morning there was a further passage between us, after which I went to sleep again and had the dream I described to you.’ - Is she a married woman? - ‘Yes.’ - And you don’t want to have a child by her? - ‘Oh, no; that might give us away.’ - So you don’t practice normal intercourse? - ‘I take the precaution of withdrawing before ejaculation.’ - I think I may assume that you had used this device several times during the night, and that after repeating it in the morning you felt a little uncertain whether you had carried it out success fully. - ‘That’s possible, no doubt.’ - In that case your dream was the fulfilment of a wish. It gave you a reassurance that you had not procreated a child, or, what amounts to the same thing, that you had killed a child. The intermediate links are easily indicated. You remember that a few days ago we were talking about marriage difficulties and how inconsistent it is that there should be no objection to carrying out intercourse in such a way that no fertilization takes place, whereas any interference when once the ovum and semen have come together and a foetus has been formed is punished as a crime. We went on to recall the mediaeval controversy over the exact point of time at which the soul enters the foetus, since it is not until after that that the concept of murder becomes applicable. No doubt, too, you know Lenau’s gruesome poem in which child murder and child prevention are equated. - ‘Oddly enough I happened to think of Lenau this morning, quite by chance, as it seemed.’ - An after-echo of your dream. And now I can show you another incidental wish-fulfilment contained in your dream. You came up to your house with the lady on your arm. Thus you were bringing her home, instead of spending the night in her house as you did in reality. There may be more than one reason why the wish-fulfilment which constitutes the core of the dream was disguised in such a disagreeable form. Perhaps you have learned from my paper on the aetiology of anxiety neurosis that I regard coitus interruptus as one of the aetiological factors in the development of neurotic anxiety? It would tally with this if, after carrying out sexual intercourse in this way several times, you were left in an uneasy mood which afterwards became an element in the construction of your dream. Moreover, you made use of this moodiness to help disguise the wish-fulfilment. Incidentally, your reference to infanticide has not been explained. How did you come to light on this specifically feminine crime? - ‘I must admit that some years ago I became involved in an occurrence of that kind. I was responsible for a girl’s trying to avoid the consequence of a love-affair with me by means of an abortion. I had nothing to do with her carrying out her intention, but for a long time I naturally felt very nervous in case the business came out.’ - I quite understand that. This recollection provides a second reason why you must have been worried by your suspicion that your device might have gone wrong.

¹ It often happens that the account first given of a dream is incomplete and that the memory of the omitted portions only emerges in the course of analysis. These subsequently added portions regularly turn out to provide the key to the dream’s interpretation. Cf. the discussion below on the forgetting of dreams.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

651

A young physician who heard me describe this dream during a course of lectures must have been greatly struck by it, for he promptly re-dreamt it, applying the same pattern of thought to another theme. The day before, he had sent in his income tax return, which he had filled in perfectly honestly, since he had very little to declare. He then had a dream that an acquaintance of his had come to him from a meeting of the tax commissioners and informed him that, while no objection had been raised to any of the other tax returns, general suspicion had been aroused by his and a heavy fine had been imposed on him. The dream was a poorly disguised fulfilment of his wish to be known as a doctor with a large income. It recalls the well-known story of the girl who was advised not to accept a suitor because he had a violent temper and would be sure to beat her if they were married. ‘If only he’d begun beating me already!’ the girl replied. Her wish to be married was so intense that she was ready to take the threatened unpleasantness into the bargain, and even went so far as to turn it into a wish.

The very frequent dreams, which appear to stand in contradiction to my theory because their subject-matter is the frustration of a wish or the occurrence of something clearly unwished-for, may be brought together under the heading of ‘counter-wish dreams’. If these dreams are considered as a whole, it seems to me possible to trace them back to two principles; I have not yet mentioned one of these, although it plays a large part not only in people’s dreams but in their lives as well. One of the two motive forces leading to such dreams is the wish that I may be wrong. These dreams appear regularly in the course of my treatments when a patient is in a state of resistance to me; and I can count almost certainly on provoking one of them after I have explained to a patient for the first time my theory that dreams are fulfilments of wishes.¹ Indeed, it is to be expected that the same thing will happen to some of the readers of the present book: they will be quite ready to have one of their wishes frustrated in a dream if only their wish that I may be wrong can be fulfilled.

¹ [Footnote added 1911:] During the last few years similar ‘counter-wish dreams’ have repeatedly been reported to me by people who have heard me lecturing, as a reaction to first making the acquaintance of my ‘wishful’ theory of dreams.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

652

The same point is illustrated by one last dream of the kind which I will quote from a patient under treatment. This was the dream of a girl who had succeeded in her struggle to continue her treatment with me against the will of her relatives and of the authorities whose opinions had been consulted. She dreamt that her people forbade her to go on coming to me. She then reminded me of a promise I had given her that if necessary I would continue the treatment without a fee. To this I replied: ‘I cannot make any allowances in money matters.’ It must be admitted that it was not easy to point to the wish-fulfilment in this instance. But in all such cases one discovers a second riddle, the solution of which helps one to solve the original one. What was the origin of the words she put into my mouth? Of course I had said nothing of the kind to her; but one of her brothers, and the one by whom she was most influenced, had been good enough to attribute this sentiment to me. The dream was thus intended to prove her brother right. And it was not only in her dreams that she insisted on his being right; the same idea dominated her whole life and it was the motive of her illness.

A dream which seems at first sight to put special difficulties in the way of the wish-fulfilment theory was dreamt and interpreted by a physician, and reported by August Stärcke (1911): ‘I saw upon my left index-finger the first indication of syphilis on the terminal phalange.’ The reflection that, apart from the dream’s unwished-for content, it appears to be clear and coherent, might dissuade us from analysing it. If, however, we are prepared to face the trouble involved, we shall find that ‘Primäraffekt’ was equivalent to a ‘prima affectio’ (a first love), and that the repellent ulcer turned out, to quote Stärcke’s words, to ‘stand for wish-fulfilments that were highly charged with emotion’.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

653

The second motive for counter-wish dreams is so obvious that it is easy to overlook it, as I did myself for some considerable time. There is a masochistic component in the sexual constitution of many people, which arises from the reversal of an aggressive, sadistic component into its opposite. Those who find their pleasure, not in having physical pain inflicted on them, but in humiliation and mental torture, may be described as ‘mental masochists’. It will at once be seen that people of this kind can have counter-wish dreams and unpleasurable dreams, which are none the less wish-fulfilments since they satisfy their masochistic inclinations. I will quote one such dream, produced by a young man who in his earlier years had greatly tormented his elder brother, to whom he had a homosexual attachment. His character having undergone a fundamental change, he had the following dream, which was in three pieces: I. His elder brother was chaffing him. II. Two grown men were caressing each other with a homosexual purpose. III. His brother had sold the business of which he himself had looked forward to becoming the director. He awoke from the last dream with the most distressing feelings. Nevertheless it was a masochistic wishful dream, and might be translated thus: ‘It would serve me right if my brother were to confront me with this sale as a punishment for all the torments he had to put up with from me.

I hope that the foregoing examples will be enough (till the next objection is raised) to make it seem plausible that even dreams with a distressing content are to be construed as wish-fulfilments. Nor will anyone regard it as a chance coincidence that the interpretation of these dreams has brought us up each time against topics about which people are loth to speak or to think. The distressing feeling aroused by these dreams is no doubt identical with the repugnance which tends (usually with success) to restrain us from discussing or mentioning such topics, and which each of us has to overcome if we nevertheless find ourselves compelled to embark on them. But the unpleasurable feeling which thus recurs in dreams does not disprove the existence of a wish. Everyone has wishes that he would prefer not to disclose to other people, and wishes that he will not admit even to himself. On the other hand, we are justified in linking the unpleasurable character of all these dreams with the fact of dream-distortion. And we are justified in concluding that these dreams are distorted and the wish-fulfilment contained in them disguised to the point of being unrecognizable precisely owing to the repugnance felt for the topic of the dream or for the wish derived from it and to an intention to repress them. The distortion in the dream is thus shown in fact to be an act of the censorship. We shall be taking into account everything that has been brought to light by our analysis of unpleasurable dreams if we make the following modification in the formula in which we have sought to express the nature of dreams: a dream is a (disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] A great living writer, who, as I have been told, refuses to hear anything of psycho-analysis or the interpretation of dreams, has independently arrived at an almost identical formula for the nature of dreams. He speaks of a dream as ‘the unauthorized emergence of suppressed desires and wishes, under false features and name’. (Spitteler, 1914, 1.)

[Added 1911:] I shall anticipate questions which will be discussed later by quoting at this point Otto Rank’s enlargement and modification of the above basic formula: ‘On the basis and with the help of repressed, infantile sexual material, dreams regularly represent present-day, and also as a rule erotic, wishes as fulfilled, in a veiled and symbolically disguised shape.’ (Rank, 1910.)

[Added 1925:] I have nowhere stated that I adopted Rank’s formula as my own. The shorter version, as stated in the text above, seems to me adequate. But the mere fact of my having mentioned Rank’s modification has been enough to unleash countless accusations against psycho-analysis of having asserted that ‘all dreams have a sexual content’.

If this sentence is taken in the sense in which it was intended, it merely shows the unconscientious manner in which critics are accustomed to perform their functions, and the readiness with which opponents overlook the clearest statements if they do not give scope to their aggressive inclinations. For only a few pages earlier I had mentioned the variety of the wishes whose fulfilments are to be found in children’s dreams (wishes to take part in an excursion or a sail on a lake, or to make up for a missed meal, and so on ); and in other passages I had discussed dreams of hunger, dreams stimulated by thirst or by excretory needs, and dreams of mere convenience. Even Rank himself made no absolute assertion. The words he used were ‘also as a rule erotic wishes’, and what he said can be amply confirmed in the dreams of most adults.

The situation would be different if ‘sexual’ was being used by my critics in the sense in which it is now commonly employed in psycho-analysis - in the sense of ‘Eros’. But my opponents are scarcely likely to have had in mind the interesting problem of whether all dreams are created by ‘libidinal’ instinctual forces as contrasted with ‘destructive’ ones.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

654

There remain to be discussed anxiety-dreams as a special sub-species of dreams with a distressing content. The notion of regarding these as wishful dreams will meet with very little sympathy from the unenlightened. Nevertheless I can deal with anxiety-dreams very briefly at this point. They do not present us with a new aspect of the dream-problem; what they face us with is the whole question of neurotic anxiety. The anxiety that we feel in a dream is only apparently explained by the dream’s content. If we submit the content of the dream to analysis, we find that the anxiety in the dream is no better justified by the dream’s content than, let us say, the anxiety in a phobia is justified by the idea to which the phobia relates. No doubt it is true, for instance, that it is possible to fall out of a window and that there is therefore reason for exercising a certain degree of caution in the neighbourhood of a window; but we cannot see why the anxiety felt in a phobia on this subject is so great and pursues the patient far beyond its occasion. We find then that the same thing may be validly asserted both of phobias and of anxiety-dreams: in both cases the anxiety is only superficially attached to the idea that accompanies it; it originates from another source.

Since this intimate connection exists between anxiety in dreams and in neuroses, in discussing the former I must refer to the latter. In a short paper on anxiety-neurosis (Freud, 1895b), I argued some time ago that neurotic anxiety is derived from sexual life and corresponds to libido which has been diverted from its purpose and has found no employment. Since then this formula has met the test of time; and it enables us now to infer from it that anxiety-dreams are dreams with a sexual content, the libido belonging to which has been transformed into anxiety. There will be an opportunity later to support this assertion by the analysis of some neurotic patients’ dreams. In the course, too, of a further attempt to arrive at a theory of dreams, I shall have occasion to discuss once more the determinants of anxiety-dreams and their compatibility with the theory of wish-fulfilment.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

655

CHAPTER V

THE MATERIAL AND SOURCES OF DREAMS

When the analysis of the dream of Irma’s injection showed us that a dream could be the fulfilment of a wish, our interest was at first wholly absorbed by the question of whether we had come upon a universal characteristic of dreams, and for the time being we stifled our curiosity about any other scientific problems that may have arisen during the work of the interpretation. Having followed one path to its end, we may now retrace our steps and choose another starting-point for our rambles through the problems of dream-life: for the time being, we may leave the topic of wish-fulfilment on one side, though we are still far from having exhausted it.

Now that the application of our procedure for interpreting dreams enables us to disclose a latent content in them which is of far greater significance than their manifest one, the pressing task at once arises of re-examining one by one the various problems raised by dreams, to see whether we may not now be in a position to find satisfactory solutions for the conundrums and contradictions which seemed intractable so long as we were only acquainted with the manifest content.

In the first chapter I have given a detailed account of the views of the authorities on the relation of dreams with waking life and on the origin of the material of dreams. No doubt, too, my readers will recall the three characteristics of memory in dreams, which have been so often remarked on but which have never been explained:

(1) Dreams show a clear preference for the impressions of the immediately preceding days. Cf. Robert, Strümpell, Hildebrandt and Hallam and Weed.

(2) They make their selection upon different principles from our waking memory, since they do not recall what is essential and important but what is subsidiary and unnoticed.

(3) They have at their disposal the earliest impressions of our childhood and even bring up details from that period of our life which, once again, strike us as trivial and which in our waking state we believe to have been long since forgotten.¹

All these peculiarities shown by dreams in their choice of material have, of course, only been studied by earlier writers in connection with their manifest content.

¹ The view adopted by Robert that the purpose of dreams is to unburden our memory of the useless impressions of daytime is plainly no longer tenable if indifferent memory images from our childhood appear at all frequently in dreams. Otherwise we could only conclude that dreams perform their function most inadequately.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

656

(A)

RECENT AND INDIFFERENT MATERIAL IN DREAMS

If I examine my own experience on the subject of the origin of the elements included in the content of dreams, I must begin with an assertion that in every dream it is possible to find a point of contact with the experiences of the previous day. This view is confirmed by every dream that I look into, whether my own or anyone else’s. Bearing this fact in mind, I am able, on occasion, to begin a dream’s interpretation by looking for the event of the previous day which set it in motion; in many instances, indeed, this is the easiest method. In the two dreams which I have analysed in detail in my last chapters (the dream of Irma’s injection and the dream of my uncle with a yellow beard) the connection with the previous day is so obvious as to require no further comment. But in order to show the regularity with which such a connection can be traced, I will go through the records of my own dreams and give some instances. I shall only quote enough of the dream to indicate the source we are looking for:

(1) I was visiting a house into which I had difficulty in gaining admittance . . .; in the meantime I kept a lady WAITING.

Source: I had had a conversation with a female relative the evening before in which I had told her that she would have to wait for a purchase she wanted to make till . . . etc.

(2) I had written a MONOGRAPH on certain (indistinct) species of plant.

Source: That morning I had seen a monograph on the genus Cyclamen in the window of a book-shop.

(3) I saw two women in the street, A MOTHER AND DAUGHTER, the latter of whom was a patient of mine.

Source: One of my patients had explained to me the previous evening the difficulties her mother was putting in the way of her continuing her treatment.

(4) I took out a subscription in S. and R.’s bookshop for a periodical costing TWENTY FLORINS a year.

Source: My wife had reminded me the day before that I still owed her twenty florins for the weekly household expenses.

(5) I received a COMMUNICATION from the Social Democratic COMMITTEE, treating me as though I were a MEMBER.

Source: I had received communications simultaneously from the Liberal Election Committee and from the Council of the Humanitarian League, of which latter body I was in fact a member.

(6) A man standing on A CLIFF IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SEA, IN THE STYLE OF BÖCKLIN.

Source: Dreyfus on the Ile di Diable; I had had news at the same time from my relatives in England, etc.

The question may be raised whether the point of contact with the dream is invariably the events of the immediately preceding day or whether it may go back to impressions derived from a rather more extensive period of the most recent past. It is unlikely that this question involves any matter of theoretical importance; nevertheless I am inclined to decide in favour of the exclusiveness of the claims of the day immediately preceding the dream - which I shall speak of as the ‘dream-day’. Whenever it has seemed at first that the source of a dream was an impression two or three days earlier, closer enquiry has convinced me that the impression had been recalled on the previous day and thus that it was possible to show that a reproduction of the impression, occurring on the previous day, could be inserted between the day of the original event and the time of the dream; moreover it has been possible to indicate the contingency on the previous day which may have led to the recalling of the older impression.

On the other hand I do not feel convinced that there is any regular interval of biological significance between the instigating daytime impression and its recurrence in the dream. (Swoboda, 1904, has mentioned an initial period of eighteen hours in this connection.)¹

¹ [Footnote added 1911:] As I have mentioned in a postscript to my first chapter (p. 599 f.), Hermann Swoboda has made a far-reaching application to the mental field of the biological periodic intervals of 23 and 28 days discovered by Wilhelm Fliess. He has asserted in particular that these periods determine the emergence of the elements which appear in dreams. No essential modification in dream-interpretation would be involved if this fact were to be established; it would merely provide a fresh source of origin of dream-material. I have, however, recently made some investigations upon my own dreams, to test now far the ‘theory of periodicity’ is applicable to them. For this purpose I chose some specially outstanding dream-elements the time of whose appearance in real life could be determined with certainty.

I. DREAM OF OCTOBER 1ST-2ND, 1910

(Fragment) . . . Somewhere in Italy. Three daughters were showing me some small curios, as though we were in an antique shop, and were sitting on my lap. I commented on one of the objects: ‘Why, you got that from me’, and saw plainly before me a small profile relief with the clear-cut features of Savonarola.

When had I last seen a portrait of Savonarola? My travel-diary proved that I had been in Florence on September 4th and 5th. While I was there I thought I would show my travelling companion the medallion bearing the fanatical monk’s features, let into the pavement of the Piazza della Signoria, which marks the place where he was burned. I pointed it out to him, I believe, on the morning of the 3rd. Between this impression and its reappearance in the dream 27 + 1 days elapsed - Fliess’s ‘female period’. Unluckily for the conclusiveness of this example, however, I must add that on the actual ‘dream-day’ I had a visit (for the first time since my return) from a capable but gloomy-looking medical colleague of mine whom I had many years before nick-named ‘Rabbi Savonarola’. He introduced a patient to me who was suffering from the effects of an accident to the Pontebba express, in which I myself had travelled a week earlier, and my thoughts were thus led back to my recent visit to Italy. The appearance in the content of the dream of the outstanding element ‘Savonarola’ is thus accounted for by my colleague’s visit on the dream-day; and the interval of 28 days is deprived of its significance.

II. DREAM OF OCTOBER 10TH-11TH, 1910

I was once more working at chemistry in the University laboratory. Hofrat L. invited me to come somewhere and walked in front of me in the corridor, holding a lamp or some other instrument before him in his uplifted hand and with his head stretched forward in a peculiar attitude, with a clear-sighted (? far-sighted) look about him. Then we crossed an open space. . . . (The remainder was forgotten.)

The most outstanding point in the content of this dream was the way in which Hofrat L. held the lamp (or magnifying glass ) before him, with his eyes peering into the distance. It was many years since I had last seen him; but I knew at once that he was only a substitute figure in the place of someone else, someone greater than he - Archimedes, whose statue stands near the Fountain of Arethusa at Syracuse in that very attitude, holding up his burning-glass and peering out towards the besieging army of the Romans. When did I see that statue for the first (and last) time? According to my diary it was on the evening of September 17th; and between then and the time of the dream 13 + 10 = 23 days had elapsed - Fliess’s ‘male period’.

Unfortunately, when we go into the interpretation of this dream in greater detail, we once again find that the coincidence loses some of its conclusiveness. The exciting cause of the dream was the news I received on the dream-day that the clinic, in whose lecture room I was able by courtesy to deliver my lectures, was shortly to be removed to another locality. I took it for granted that its new situation would be very out of the way and told myself that in that case I might just as well not have a lecture room at my disposal at all. From that point my thoughts must have gone back to the beginning of my career as University Lecturer when I in fact had no lecture room and when my efforts to get hold of one met with little response from the powerfully placed Hofrats and Professors. In those circumstances I had gone to L., who at that time held the office of Dean of the Faculty and who I believed was friendlily disposed to me, to complain of my troubles. He promised to help me, but I beard nothing more from him. In the dream he was Archimedes, giving me a pousuv [footing] and himself leading me to the new locality. Anyone who is an adept at interpretation will guess that the dream-thoughts were not exactly free from ideas of vengeance and self-importance. It seems clear, in any case, that without this exciting cause Archimedes would scarcely have found his way into my dream that night; nor am I convinced that the powerful and still recent impression made on me by the statue in Syracuse might not have produced its effect after some different interval of time.

III. DREAM OF OCTOBER 2ND-3rd, 1910

(Fragment) . . . Something about Professor Oser, who had drawn up the menu for me himself, which had a very soothing effect. . . . (Some more that was forgotten.)

This dream was a reaction to a digestive disturbance that day, which made me consider whether I should go to one of my colleagues to have a dietary prescribed for me. My reason for choosing Oser for that purpose, who had died in the course of the summer, went back to the death of another University teacher whom I greatly admired, which had occurred shortly before (on October 1st). When had Oser died? and when had I heard of his death? According to a paragraph in the papers he had died on August 22nd. I had been in Holland at that time and had my Vienna newspaper sent on to me regularly; so that I must have read of his death on August 24th or 25th. But here the interval no longer corresponds to either period. It amounts to 7 + 30 + 2 = 39 days or possibly 40 days. I could not recall having spoken or thought of Oser in the meantime.

Intervals such as this one, which cannot be fitted into the theory of periodicity without further manipulation, occur far more frequently in my dreams than intervals which can be so fitted. The only relation which I find occurs with regularity is the relation which I have insisted upon in the text and which connects the dream with some impression of the dream-day.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

657

Havelock Ellis, who has also given some attention to this point, declares that he was unable to find any such periodicity in his dreams in spite of looking for it. He records a dream of being in Spain and of wanting to go to a place called Daraus, Varaus or Zaraus. On waking he could not recall any such place-name, and put the dream on one side. A few months later he discovered that Zaraus was in fact the name of a station on the line between San Sebastian and Bilbao, through which his train had passed 250 days before he had the dream.

I believe, then, that the instigating agent of every dream is to be found among the experiences which one has not yet ‘slept on’. Thus the relations of a dream’s content to impressions of the most recent past (with the single exception of the day immediately preceding the night of the dream) differ in no respect from its relations to impressions dating from any remoter period. Dreams can select their material from any part of the dreamer’s life, provided only that there is a train of thought linking the experience of the dream-day (the ‘recent’ impressions) with the earlier ones.

But why this preference for recent impressions? We shall form some notion on this point, if we submit one of the dreams in the series I have just quoted to a fuller analysis. For this purpose I shall choose the

DREAM OF THE BOTANICAL MONOGRAPH

I had written a monograph on a certain plant. The book lay before me and I was at the moment turning over a folded coloured plate. Bound up in each copy there was a dried specimen of the plant, as though it had been taken from a herbarium.

ANALYSIS

That morning I had seen a new book in the window of a book-shop, bearing the title The Genus Cyclamen - evidently a monograph on that plant.

Cyclamens, I reflected, were my wife’s favourite flowers and I reproached myself for so rarely remembering to bring her flowers, which was what she liked. - The subject of ‘bringing flowers’ recalled an anecdote which I had recently repeated to a circle of friends and which I had used as evidence in favour of my theory that forgetting is very often determined by an unconscious purpose and that it always enables one to deduce the secret intentions of the person who forgets. A young woman was accustomed to receiving a bouquet of flowers from her husband on her birthday. One year this token of his affection failed to appear, and she burst into tears. Her husband came in and had no idea why she was crying till she told him that to-day was her birthday. He clasped his hand to his head and exclaimed: ‘I’m so sorry, but I’d quite forgotten. I’ll go out at once and fetch your flowers.’ But she was not to be consoled; for she recognized that her husband’s forgetfulness was a proof that she no longer had the same place in his thoughts as she had formerly. - This lady, Frau L., had met my wife two days before I had the dream, had told her that she was feeling quite well and enquired after me. Some years ago she had come to me for treatment.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

658

I now made a fresh start. Once, I recalled, I really had written something in the nature of a monograph on a plant, namely a dissertation on the coca-plant, which had drawn Karl Koller’s attention to the anaesthetic properties of cocaine. I had myself indicated this application of the alkaloid in my published paper, but I had not been thorough enough to pursue the matter further. This reminded me that on the morning of the day after the dream - I had not found time to interpret it till the evening - I had thought about cocaine in a kind of day-dream. If ever I got glaucoma, I had thought, I should travel to Berlin and get myself operated on, incognito, in my friend’s house, by a surgeon recommended by him. The operating surgeon, who would have no idea of my identity, would boast once again of how easily such operations could be per formed since the introduction of cocaine; and I should not give the slightest hint that I myself had had a share in the discovery. This phantasy had led on to reflections of how awkward it is, when all is said and done, for a physician to ask for medical treatment for himself from his professional colleagues. The Berlin eye-surgeon would not know me, and I should be able to pay his fees like anyone else. It was not until I had recalled this day-dream that I realized that the recollection of a specific event lay behind it. Shortly after Koller’s discovery, my father had in fact been attacked by glaucoma; my friend Dr. Königstein, the ophthalmic surgeon, had operated on him; while Dr. Koller had been in charge of the cocaine anaesthesia and had commented on the fact that this case had brought together all of the three men who had had a share in the introduction of cocaine.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

659

My thoughts then went on to the occasion when I had last been reminded of this business of the cocaine. It had been a few days earlier, when I had been looking at a copy of a Festschrift in which grateful pupils had celebrated the jubilee of their teacher and laboratory director. Among the laboratory’s claims to distinction which were enumerated in this book I had seen a mention of the fact that Koller had made his discovery there of the anaesthetic properties of cocaine. I then suddenly perceived that my dream was connected with an event of the previous evening. I had walked home precisely with Dr. Königstein and had got into conversation with him about a matter which never fails to excite my feelings whenever it is raised. While I was talking to him in the entrance-hall, Professor Gärtner and his wife had joined us; and I could not help congratulating them both on their blooming looks. But Professor Gärtner was one of the authors of the Festschrift I have just mentioned, and may well have reminded me of it. Moreover, the Frau L., whose disappointment on her birthday I described earlier, was mentioned - though only, it is true, in another connection - in my conversation with Dr. Königstein.

I will make an attempt at interpreting the other determinants of the content of the dream as well. There was a dried specimen of the plant included in the monograph, as though it had been a herbarium. This led me to a memory from my secondary school. Our headmaster once called together the boys from the higher forms and handed over the school’s herbarium to them to be looked through and cleaned. Some small worms - book worms - had found their way into it. He does not seem to have had much confidence in my helpfulness, for he handed me only a few sheets. These, as I could still recall, included some Crucifers. I never had a specially intimate contact with botany. In my preliminary examination in botany I was also given a Crucifer to identify - and failed to do so. My prospects would not have been too bright, if I had not been helped out by my theoretical knowledge. I went on from the Cruciferae to the Compositae. It occurred to me that artichokes were Compositae, and indeed I might fairly have called them my favourite flowers. Being more generous than I am, my wife often brought me back these favourite flowers of mine from the market.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

660

I saw the monograph which I had written lying before me. This again led me back to something. I had had a letter from my friend in Berlin the day before in which he had shown his power of visualization: ‘I am very much occupied with your dream-book. I see it lying finished before me and I see myself turning over its pages. How much I envied him his gift as a seer! If only I could have seen it lying finished before me!

The folded coloured plate. While I was a medical student I was the constant victim of an impulse only to learn things out of monographs. In spite of my limited means, I succeeded in getting hold of a number of volumes of the proceedings of medical societies and was enthralled by their coloured plates. I was proud of my hankering for thoroughness. When I myself had begun to publish papers, I had been obliged to make my own drawings to illustrate them and I remembered that one of them had been so wretched that a friendly colleague had jeered at me over it. There followed, I could not quite make out how, a recollection from very early youth. It had once amused my father to hand over a book with coloured plates (an account of a journey through Persia) for me and my eldest sister to destroy. Not easy to justify from the educational point of view!  I had been five years old at the time and my sister not yet three; and the picture of the two of us blissfully pulling the book to pieces (leaf by leaf, like an artichoke, I found myself saying) was almost the only plastic memory that I retained from that period of my life. Then, when I became a student, I had developed a passion for collecting and owning books, which was analogous to my liking for learning out of monographs: a favourite hobby. (The idea of ‘favourite’ had already appeared in connection with cyclamens and artichokes.) I had become a book-worm. I had always, from the time I first began to think about myself, referred this first passion of mine back to the childhood memory I have mentioned. Or rather, I had recognized that the childhood scene was a ‘screen memory’ for my later bibliophile propensities.¹ And I had early discovered, of course, that passions often lead to sorrow. When I was seventeen I had run up a largish account at the bookseller’s and had nothing to meet it with; and my father had scarcely taken it as an excuse that my inclinations might have chosen a worse outlet. The recollection of this experience from the later years of my youth at once brought back to my mind the conversation with my friend Dr. Königstein. For in the course of it we had discussed the same question of my being blamed for being too much absorbed in my favourite hobbies.

¹ Cf. my paper on screen memories.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

661

For reasons with which we are not concerned, I shall not pursue the interpretation of this dream any further, but will merely indicate the direction in which it lay. In the course of the work of analysis I was reminded of my conversation with Dr. Königstein, and I was brought to it from more than one direction. When I take into account the topics touched upon in that conversation, the meaning of the dream becomes intelligible to me. All the trains of thought starting from the dream - the thoughts about my wife’s and my own favourite flowers, about cocaine, about the awkwardness of medical treatment among colleagues, about my preference for studying monographs and about my neglect of certain branches of science such as botany - all of these trains of thought, when they were further pursued, led ultimately to one or other of the many ramifications of my conversation with Dr. Königstein. Once again the dream, like the one we first analysed - the dream of Irma’s injection - turns out to have been in the nature of a self-justification, a plea on behalf of my own rights. Indeed, it carried the subject that was raised in the earlier dream a stage further and discussed it with reference to fresh material that had arisen in the interval between the two dreams. Even the apparently indifferent form in which the dream was couched turns out to have had significance. What it meant was: ‘After all, I’m the man who wrote the valuable and memorable paper (on cocaine)', just as in the earlier dream I had said on my behalf: ‘I’m a conscientious and hard-working student.’ In both cases what I was insisting was: ‘I may allow myself to do this.’ There is, however, no need for me to carry the interpretation of the dream any further, since my only purpose in reporting it was to illustrate by an example the relation between the content of a dream and the experience of the previous day which provoked it. So long as I was aware only of the dream’s manifest content, it appeared to be related only to a single event of the dream-day. But when the analysis was carried out, a second source of the dream emerged in another experience of the same day. The first of these two impressions with which the dream was connected was an indifferent one, a subsidiary circumstance: I had seen a book in a shop-window whose title attracted my attention for a moment but whose subject-matter could scarcely be of interest to me. The second experience had a high degree of psychical importance: I had had a good hour’s lively conversation with my friend the eye-surgeon; in the course of it I had given him some information which was bound to affect both of us closely, and I had had memories stirred up in me which had drawn my attention to a great variety of internal stresses in my own mind. Moreover, the conversation had been interrupted before its conclusion because we had been joined by acquaintances.

We must now ask what was the relation of the two impressions of the dream-day to each other and to the dream of the subsequent night. In the manifest content of the dream only the indifferent impression was alluded to, which seems to confirm the notion that dreams have a preference for taking up unimportant details of waking life. All the strands of the interpretation, on the other hand, led to the important impression, to the one which had justifiably stirred my feelings. If the sense of the dream is judged, as it can only rightly be, by its latent content as revealed by the analysis, a new and significant fact is unexpectedly brought to light. The conundrum of why dreams are concerned only with worthless fragments of waking life seems to have lost all its meaning; nor can it any longer be maintained that waking life is not pursued further in dreams and that dreams are thus psychical activity wasted upon foolish material. The contrary is true: our dream-thoughts are dominated by the same material that has occupied us during the day and we only bother to dream of things which have given us cause for reflection in the daytime.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

662

Why is it, then, that, though the occasion of my dreaming was a daytime impression by which I had been justifiably stirred, I nevertheless actually dreamt of something indifferent? The most obvious explanation, no doubt, is that we are once more faced by one of the phenomena of dream-distortion, which in my last chapter I traced to a psychical force acting as a censorship. My recollection of the monograph on the genus Cyclamen would thus serve the purpose of being an allusion to the conversation with my friend, just as the ‘smoked salmon’ in the dream of the abandoned supper-party served as an allusion to the dreamer’s thought of her woman friend. The only question is as to the intermediate links which enabled the impression of the monograph to serve as an allusion to the conversation with the eye-surgeon, since at first sight there is no obvious connection between them. In the example of the abandoned supper-party the connection was given at once: ‘smoked salmon’, being the friend’s favourite dish, was an immediate constituent of the group of ideas which were likely to be aroused in the dreamer’s mind by the personality of her friend. In this later example there were two detached impressions which at a first glance only had in common the fact of their having occurred on the same day: I had caught sight of the monograph in the morning and had had the conversation the same evening. The analysis enabled us to solve the problem as follows: connections of this kind, when they are not present in the first instance, are woven retrospectively between the ideational content of one impression and that of the other. I have already drawn attention to the intermediate links in the present case by the words I have italicized in my record of the analysis. If there had been no influences from another quarter, the idea of the monograph on the Cyclamen would only, I imagine, have led to the idea of its being my wife’ s favourite flower, and possibly also to Frau L.’s absent bouquet. I scarcely think that these background thoughts would have sufficed to evoke a dream. As we are told in Hamlet:

There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave

To tell us this.

But, lo and behold, I was reminded in the analysis that the man who interrupted our conversation was called Gärtner and that I had thought his wife looked blooming. And even as I write these words I recall that one of my patients, who bore the charming name of Flora, was for a time the pivot of our discussion. These must have been the intermediate links, arising from the botanical group of ideas, which formed the bridge between the two experiences of that day, the indifferent and the stirring one. A further set of connections was then established - those surrounding the idea of cocaine, which had every right to serve as a link between the figure of Dr. Königstein and a botanical monograph which I had written; and these connections strengthened the fusion between the two groups of ideas so that it became possible for a portion of the one experience to serve as an allusion to the other one.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

663

I am prepared to find this explanation attacked on the ground of its being arbitrary or artificial. What, it may be asked, would have happened if Professor Gärtner and his wife with her blooming looks had not come up to us or if the patient we were talking about had been called Anna instead of Flora? The answer is simple. If these chains of thought had been absent others would no doubt have been selected. It is easy enough to construct such chains, as is shown by the puns and riddles that people make every day for their entertainment. The realm of jokes knows no boundaries. Or, to go a stage further, if there had been no possibility of forging enough intermediate links between the two impressions, the dream would simply have been different. Another indifferent impression of the same day - for crowds of such impressions enter our minds and are then forgotten - would have taken the place of the ‘monograph’ in the dream, would have linked up with the subject of the conversation and would have represented it in the content of the dream. Since it was in fact the monograph and not any other idea that was chosen to serve this function, we must suppose that it was the best adapted for the connection. There is no need for us to emulate Lessing’s Hänschen Schlau and feel astonished that ‘only the rich people own the most money’.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

664

A psychological process by which, according to our account, indifferent experiences take the place of psychically significant ones, cannot fail to arouse suspicion and bewilderment. It will be our task in a later chapter to make the peculiarities of this apparently irrational operation more intelligible. At this point we are only concerned with the effects of a process whose reality I have been driven to assume by innumerable and regularly recurrent observations made in analysing dreams. What takes place would seem to be something in the nature of a ‘displacement’ - of psychical emphasis, shall we say? - by means of intermediate links; in this way, ideas which originally had only a weak charge of intensity take over the charge from ideas which were originally intensely cathected and at last attain enough strength to enable them to force an entry into consciousness. Displacements of this kind are no surprise to us where it is a question of dealing with quantities of affect or with motor activities in general. When a lonely old maid transfers her affection to animals, or a bachelor becomes an enthusiastic collector, when a soldier defends a scrap of coloured cloth - a flag - with his life’s blood, when a few seconds’ extra pressure in a hand-shake means bliss to a lover, or when, in Othello, a lost handkerchief precipitates an outburst of rage - all of these are instances of psychical displacements to which we raise no objection. But when we hear that a decision as to what shall reach our consciousness and what shall be kept out of it - what we shall think, in short - has been arrived at in the same manner and on the same principles, we have an impression of a pathological event and, if such things happen in waking life, we describe them as errors in thought. I will anticipate the conclusions to which we shall later be led, and suggest that the psychical process which we have found at work in dream-displacement, though it cannot be described as a pathological disturbance, nevertheless differs from the normal and is to be regarded as a process of a more primary nature.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

665

Thus the fact that the content of dreams includes remnants of trivial experiences is to be explained as a manifestation of dream-distortion (by displacement); and it will be recalled that we came to the conclusion that dream-distortion was the product of a censorship operating in the passage-way between two psychical agencies. It is to be expected that the analysis of a dream will regularly reveal its true, psychically significant source in waking life, though the emphasis has been displaced from the recollection of that source on to that of an indifferent one. This explanation brings us into complete conflict with Robert’s theory, which ceases to be of any service to us. For the fact which Robert sets out to explain is a non-existent one. His acceptance of it rests on a misunderstanding, on his failure to replace the apparent content of dreams by their real meaning. And there is another objection that can be raised to Robert’s theory. If it were really the business of dreams to relieve our memory of the ‘dregs’ of daytime recollections by a special psychical activity, our sleep would be more tormented and harder worked than our mental life while we are awake. For the number of indifferent impressions from which our memory would need to be protected is clearly immensely large: the night would not be long enough to cope with such a mass. It is far more likely that the process of forgetting indifferent impressions goes forward without the active intervention of our psychical forces.

Nevertheless we must not be in a hurry to take leave of Robert’s ideas without further consideration. We have still not explained the fact that one of the indifferent impressions of waking life, one, moreover, dating from the day preceding the dream, invariably contributes towards the dream’s content. The connections between this impression and the true source of the dream in the unconscious are not always there ready-made; as we have seen, they may only be established retrospectively, in the course of the dream-work, with a view, as it were, to making the intended displacement feasible. There must therefore be some compelling force in the direction of establishing connections precisely with a recent, though indifferent, impression; and the latter must possess some attribute which makes it especially suitable for this purpose. For if that were not so, it would be just as easy for the dream-thoughts to displace their emphasis on to an unimportant component in their own circle of ideas.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

666

The following observations may help us towards clearing up this point. If in the course of a single day we have two or more experiences suitable for provoking a dream, the dream will make a combined reference to them as a single whole; it is under a necessity to combine them into a unity. Here is an instance. One afternoon during the summer I entered a railway compartment in which I found two acquaintances who were strangers to each other. One of them was an eminent medical colleague and the other was a member of a distinguished family with which I had professional relations. I introduced the two gentlemen to each other, but all through the long journey they conducted their conversation with me as a go-between, so that I presently found myself discussing various topics alternately, first with the one and then with the other. I asked my doctor friend to use his influence on behalf of a common acquaintance of ours who was just starting a medical practice. The doctor replied that he was convinced of the young man’s capacity, but that his homely appearance would make it hard for him to make his way in families of the better class; to which I replied that that was the very reason why he needed influential assistance. Turning to my other fellow-traveller, I enquired after the health of his aunt - the mother of one of my patients - who was lying seriously ill at the time. During the night following the journey I had a dream that the young friend on whose behalf I had pleaded was sitting in a fashionable drawing-room in a select company composed of all the distinguished and wealthy people of my acquaintance and, with the easy bearing of a man of the world, was delivering a funeral oration on the old lady (who was already dead so far as my dream was concerned), the aunt of my second fellow-traveller. (I must confess that I had not been on good terms with that lady.) Thus my dream had, once again, worked out connections between the two sets of impressions of the previous day and had combined them into a single situation.

Many experiences such as this lead me to assert that the dream-work is under some kind of necessity to combine all the sources which have acted as stimuli for the dream into a single unity in the dream itself.¹

¹ The tendency of the dream-work to fuse into a single action all events of interest which occur simultaneously has already been remarked on by several writers; e.g. Delage (1891, 41) and Delboeuf (1885, 237), who speaks of ‘rapprochement forcé' [‘enforced convergence’].

The Interpretation Of Dreams

667

I will now proceed to the question of whether the instigating source of a dream, revealed by analysis, must invariably be a recent (and significant) event or whether an internal experience, that is, the recollection of a psychically important event - a train of thought - can assume the role of a dream-instigator. The answer, based upon a large number of analyses, is most definitely in favour of the latter alternative. A dream can be instigated by an internal process which has, as it were, become a recent event, owing to thought-activity during the previous day. This seems to be the appropriate moment for tabulating the different conditions to which we find that the sources of dreams are subject. The source of a dream may be either -

(a) a recent and psychically significant experience which is represented in the dream directly,¹ or

(b) several recent and significant experiences which are combined into a single unity by the dream,² or

(c) one or more recent and significant experiences which are represented in the content of the dream by a mention of a contemporary but indifferent experience,³ or

(d) an internal significant experience (e.g. a memory or a train of thought), which is in that case invariably represented in the dream by a mention of a recent but indifferent impression.4

It will be seen that in interpreting dreams we find one condition always fulfilled: one component of the content of the dream is a repetition of a recent impression of the previous day. This impression that is to be represented in the dream may either itself belong to the circle of ideas surrounding the actual instigator of the dream - whether as an essential or as a trivial portion of it - or it may be derived from the field of an indifferent impression which has been brought into connection with the ideas surrounding the dream-instigator by more or less numerous links. The apparent multiplicity of governing conditions is in fact merely dependent upon the two alternatives of whether a displacement has or has not taken place; and it is worth pointing out that we are enabled by these alternatives to explain the range of contrast between different dreams just as easily as the medical theory is enabled to do by its hypothesis of brain-cells ranging from partial to total wakefulness. (See above, p. 583 ff.)

¹ As in the dream of Irma’s injection and in the dream of my uncle with the yellow beard.

² As in the young doctor’s funeral oration.

³ As in the dream of the botanical monograph.

4 Most of my patient’s dreams during analysis are of this kind.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

668

It will further be observed, if we consider these four possible cases, that a psychical element which is significant but not recent (e.g. a train of thought or a memory)  can be replaced, for the purpose of forming a dream, by an element which is recent but indifferent, provided only that two conditions are fulfilled: (1) the content of the dream must be connected with a recent experience, and (2) the instigator of the dream must remain a psychically significant process. Only in one case - case (a) - are both of these conditions fulfilled by one and the same impression. It is to be noticed, moreover, that indifferent impressions which are capable of being used for constructing a dream so long as they are recent lose that capacity as soon as they are a day (or at the most a few days) older. From this we must conclude that the freshness of an impression gives it some kind of psychical value for purposes of dream-construction equivalent in some way to the value of emotionally coloured memories or trains of thought. The basis of the value which thus attaches to recent impressions in connection with the construction of dreams will only become evident in the course of our subsequent psychological discussions.¹

In this connection it will be noticed, incidentally, that modifications in our mnemic and ideational material may take place during the night unobserved by our consciousness. We are often advised that before coming to a final decision on some subject we should ‘sleep on it’, and this advice is evidently justified. But here we have passed from the psychology of dreams to that of sleep, and this is not the last occasion on which we shall be tempted to do so.²

¹ See the passage on ‘transference’ in Chapter VII.

² [Footnote added 1919:] An important contribution to the part played by recent material in the construction of dreams has been made by Pötzl (1917) in a paper which carries a wealth of implications. In a series of experiments Pötzl required the subjects to make a drawing of what they had consciously noted of a picture exposed to their view in a tachistoscope. He then turned his attention to the dreams dreamt by the subjects during the following night and required them once more to make drawings of appropriate portions of these dreams. It was shown unmistakably that those details of the exposed picture which had not been noted by the subject provided material for the construction of the dream, whereas those details which had been consciously perceived and recorded in the drawing made after the exposure did not recur in the manifest content of the dream manifest content of the dream. The material that was taken over by the dream-work was modified by it for the purposes of dream-construction in its familiar ‘arbitrary’ (or, more properly, ‘autocratic’) manner. The questions raised by Pötzl’s experiment go far beyond the sphere of dream-interpretation as dealt with in the present volume. In passing, it is worth remarking on the contrast between this new method of studying the formation of dreams experimentally and the earlier, crude technique for introducing into the dream stimuli which interrupted the subject’s sleep.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

669

An objection, however, may be raised which threatens to upset these last conclusions. If indifferent impressions can only find their way into a dream provided they are recent, how does it happen that the content of dreams also includes elements from an earlier period of life which at the time when they were recent possessed, to use Strümpell’s words, no psychical value, and should therefore have been long since forgotten - elements, that is to say, which are neither fresh nor psychically significant?

This objection can be completely dealt with by a reference to the findings of the psycho-analysis of neurotics. The explanation is that the displacement which replaces psychically important by indifferent material (alike in dreaming and in thinking) has in these cases already taken place at the early period of life in question and since then become fixed in the memory. These particular elements which were originally indifferent are indifferent no longer, since taking over (by means of displacement) the value of psychically significant material. Nothing that has really remained indifferent can be reproduced in a dream.

The reader will rightly conclude from the foregoing arguments that I am asserting that there are no indifferent dream-instigators - and consequently no ‘innocent’ dreams. Those are, in the strictest and most absolute sense, my opinions - if I leave on one side the dreams of children and perhaps brief reactions in dreams to sensations felt during the night. Apart from this, what we dream is either manifestly recognizable as psychically significant, or it is distorted and cannot be judged till the dream has been interpreted, after which it will once more be found to be significant. Dreams are never concerned with trivialities; we do not allow our sleep to be disturbed by trifles.¹ The apparently innocent dreams turn out to be quite the reverse when we take the trouble to analyse them. They are, if I may say so, wolves in sheep’s clothing. Since this is another point upon which I may expect to be contradicted, and since I am glad of an opportunity of showing dream-distortion at work, I will select a number of ‘innocent’ dreams from my records and submit them to analysis.

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] Havelock Ellis, a friendly critic of this book, writes (1911, 166): ‘This is the point at which many of us are no longer able to follow Freud.’ Havelock Ellis has not, however, carried out any analyses of dreams and refuses to believe how impossible it is to base one’s judgement on their manifest content.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

670

I

An intelligent and cultivated young woman, reserved and undemonstrative in her behaviour, reported as follows: I dreamt that I arrived too late at the market and could get nothing either from the butcher or from the woman who sells vegetables. An innocent dream, no doubt; but dreams are not as simple as that, so I asked to be told it in greater detail. She thereupon gave me the following account. She dreamt she was going to the market with her cook, who was carrying the basket. After she had asked for something, the butcher said to her: ‘That’s not obtainable any longer’, and offered her something else, adding ‘This is good too.’ She rejected it and went on to the woman who sells vegetables, who tried to get her to buy a peculiar vegetable that was tied up in bundles but was of a black colour. She said: ‘I don’t recognize that; I won’t take it.’

The dream’s connection with the previous day was quite straightforward. She had actually gone to the market too late and had got nothing. The situation seemed to shape itself into the phrase ‘Die Flieschbank war schon gescholossen’. I pulled myself up: was not that, or rather its opposite, a vulgar description of a certain sort of slovenliness in a man’s dress? However, the dreamer herself did not use the phrase; she may perhaps have avoided using it. Let us endeavour, then, to arrive at an interpretation of the details of the dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

671

When anything in a dream has the character of direct speech, that is to say, when it is said or heard and not merely thought (and it is easy as a rule to make the distinction with certainty), then it is derived from something actually spoken in waking life-though, to be sure, this something is merely treated as raw material and may be cut up and slightly altered and, more especially, divorced from its context.¹ In carrying out an interpretation, one method is to start from spoken phrases of this kind. What, then, was the origin of the butcher’s remark ‘That’s not obtainable any longer’? The answer was that it came from me myself. A few days earlier I had explained to the patient that the earliest experiences of childhood were ‘not obtainable any longer as such’, but were replaced in analysis by ‘transferences’ and dreams. So I was the butcher and she was rejecting these transferences into the present of old habits of thinking and feeling. -What, again, was the origin of her own remark in the dream ‘I don’t recognize that; I won’t take it’? For the purposes of the analysis this had to be divided up. ‘I don’t recognize that’ was something she had said the day before to her cook, with whom she had had a dispute; but at the time she had gone on: ‘Behave yourself properly!’ At this point there had clearly been a displacement. Of the two phrases that she had used in the dispute with her cook, she had chosen the insignificant one for inclusion in the dream. But it was only the suppressed one, ‘Behave yourself properly!’ that fitted in with the rest of the content of the dream: those would have been the appropriate words to use if someone had ventured to make improper suggestions and had forgotten ‘to close his meat-shop’. The allusions underlying the incident with the vegetable-seller were a further confirmation that our interpretation was on the right track. A vegetable that is sold tied up in bundles (lengthways, as the patient added afterwards) and is also black, could only be a dream-combination of asparagus and black (Spanish) radishes. No knowledgeable person of either sex will ask for an interpretation of asparagus. But the other vegetable - ’Schwarzer Retting’ - can be taken as an exclamation - ‘Schwarzer rett’ dich!’ -, and accordingly it too seems to hint at the same sexual topic which we suspected at the very beginning, when we felt inclined to introduce the phrase about the meat-shop being closed into the original account of the dream. We need not enquire now into the full meaning of the dream. So much is quite clear: it had a meaning and that meaning was far from innocent.²

¹ See my discussion of speeches in dreams in my chapter on the dream-work. Only one writer on the subject seems to have recognized the source of spoken phrases occurring in dreams, namely Delboeuf (1885, 226), who compares them to clichés.

² If anyone is curious to know, I may add that the dream concealed a phantasy of my behaving in an improper and sexually provocative manner, and of the patient putting up a defence against my conduct. If this interpretation seems incredible, I need only point to the numerous instances in which doctors have charges of the same kind brought against them by hysterical women. But in such cases the phantasy emerges into consciousness undisguised and in the form of a delusion, instead of being distorted and appearing only as a dream. - [Added 1909:] This dream occurred at the beginning of the patient’s psycho-analytic treatment. It was not until later that I learnt that she had been repeating in it the initial trauma from which her neurosis had arisen. I have since then come across the same behaviour in other patients; having been exposed to a sexual assault in their childhood, they seek, as it were, to bring about a repetition of it in their dreams.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

672

II

Here is another innocent dream, dreamt by the same patient, and in a sense a counterpart to the last one. Her husband asked her: ‘Don’t you think we ought to have the piano tuned?’ And she replied: ‘It’s not worth while; the hammers need reconditioning in any case.’

Once again this was a repetition of a real event of the previous day. Her husband had asked this question and she had made some such reply. But what was the explanation of her dreaming it?  She told me that the piano was a disgusting old box, that it made an ugly noise, that it had been in her husband’s possession before their marriage,¹ and so on. But the key to the solution was only given by her words: ‘It’s not worth while.’ These were derived from a visit she had paid the day before to a woman friend. She had been invited to take off her jacket, but had refused with the words: ‘Thank you, but its not worth while; I can only stop a minute.’ As she was telling me this, I recollected that during the previous day’s analysis she had suddenly caught hold of her jacket, one of the buttons having come undone. Thus it was as though she were saying: ‘Please don’t look; its not worth while.’ In the same way the ‘box’ [‘Kasten’] was a substitute for a ‘chest’ [‘Bruskasten’]; and the interpretation of the dream led us back at once to the time of her physical development at puberty, when she had begun to be dissatisfied by her figure. We can hardly doubt that it led back to still earlier times, if we take the word ‘disgusting’ into account and the ‘ugly noise’, and if we remember how often - both in double entendres and in dreams - the lesser hemispheres of a woman’s body are used, whether as contrasts or as substitutes, for the larger ones.

¹ This last was a substitute for the opposite idea, as the course of the analysis will make clear.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

673

III

I will interrupt this series for a moment and insert a short innocent dream produced by a young man. He dreamt that he was putting on his winter overcoat once more, which was a dreadful thing. The ostensible reason for this dream was a sudden return of cold weather. If we look more closely, however, we shall notice that the two short pieces that make up the dream are not in complete harmony. For what could there be ‘dreadful’ about putting on a heavy or thick overcoat in cold weather?  Moreover, the innocence of the dream was decidedly upset by the first association that occurred to the dreamer in the analysis. He recalled that a lady confided to him the day before that her youngest child owed its existence to a torn condom. On that basis he was able to reconstruct his thoughts. A thin condom was dangerous, but a thick one was bad. The condom was suitably represented as an overcoat, since one slips into both of them. But an occurrence such as the lady described to him would certainly be ‘dreadful’ for an unmarried man.

And now let us return to our innocent lady dreamer.

IV

She was putting a candle into a candlestick; but the candle broke so that it wouldn’t stand up properly. The girls at her school said she was clumsy; but the mistress said it was not her fault.

Yet again the occasion for the dream was a real event. The day before she had actually put a candle into a candlestick, though it did not break. Some transparent symbolism was being used in this dream. A candle is an object which can excite the female genitals; and, if it is broken, so that it cannot stand up properly, it means that the man is impotent. (‘It was not her fault.’) But could a carefully brought-up young woman, who had been screened from the impact of anything ugly, have known that a candle might be put to such a use? As it happened, she was able to indicate how it was that she obtained this piece of knowledge. Once when they were in a rowing boat on the Rhine, another boat had passed them with some students in it. They were in high spirits and were singing, or rather shouting, a song:

Wenn die Königin von Schweden,

Bei geschlossenen Fensterläden

Mit Apollokerzen . . .¹

She either failed to hear or did not understand the last word and had to get her husband to give her the necessary explanation. The verse was replaced in the content of the dream by an innocent recollection of some job she had done clumsily when she was at school, and the replacement was made possible owing to the common element of closed shutters. The connection between the topics of masturbation and impotence is obvious enough. The ‘Apollo’ in the latent content of this dream linked it with an earlier one in which the virgin Pallas figured. Altogether far from innocent.

¹ [‘When the Queen of Sweden, behind closed shutters, . . . with Apollo candles.’ The missing word is ‘onaniert’ (‘masturbates’).]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

674

V

In order that we may not be tempted to draw conclusions too easily from dreams as to the dreamer’s actual life, I will add one more dream of the same patient’s, which once more has an innocent appearance. ‘I dreamt,’ she said, ‘of what I really did yesterday: I filled a small trunk so full of books that I really had difficulty in shutting it and I dreamt what really happened.’ In this instance the narrator herself laid the chief emphasis on the agreement between the dream and reality. All such judgements on a dream and comments upon it, though they have made themselves a place in waking thought, invariably form in fact part of the latent content of the dream, as we shall find confirmed by other examples later on. What we were being told, then, was that what the dream described had really happened the day before. It would take up too much space to explain how it was that the idea occurred to me of making use of the English language in the interpretation. It is enough to say that once again what was in question was a little ‘box’ (cf. the dream of the dead child in the ‘case’, p. 649 f.) which was so full that nothing more could get into it. Anyhow, nothing bad this time.

In all of these ‘innocent’ dreams the motive for the censorship is obviously the sexual factor. This, however, is a subject of prime importance which I must leave on one side.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

675

(B)

INFANTILE MATERIAL AS A SOURCE OF DREAMS

Like every other writer on the subject, with the exception of Robert, I have pointed out as a third peculiarity of the content of dreams that it may include impressions which date back to earliest childhood, and which seem not to be accessible to waking memory. It is naturally hard to determine how rarely or how frequently this occurs, since the origin of the dream elements in question is not recognized after waking. Proof that what we are dealing with are impressions from childhood must therefore be established by external evidence and there is seldom an opportunity for doing this. A particularly convincing example is that given by Maury of the man who determined one day to revisit his old home after an absence of more than twenty years. During the night before his departure he dreamt that he was in a totally unknown place and there met an unknown man in the street and had a conversation with him. When he reached his home, he found that the unknown place was a real one in the immediate neighbourhood of his native town, and the unknown man in the dream turned out to be a friend of his dead father’s who was still living there. This was conclusive evidence that he had seen both the man and the place in his childhood. This dream is also to be interpreted as a dream of impatience like that of the girl with the concert-ticket in her pocket (p. 647 f.), that of the child whose father had promised to take her on an excursion to the Hameau (cf. p. 628 f.), and similar ones. The motives which led the dreamers to reproduce one particular impression from their childhood rather than any other cannot, of course, be discovered without an analysis.

Someone who attended a course of lectures of mine and boasted that his dreams very seldom underwent distortion reported to me that not long before he had dreamt of seeing his former tutor in bed with the nurse who had been with his family till his eleventh year. In the dream he had identified the locality where the scene occurred. His interest had been aroused and he had reported the dream to his elder brother, who had laughingly confirmed the truth of what he had dreamt. His brother remembered it very well, as he had been six years old at the time. The lovers had been in the habit of making the elder boy drunk with beer, whenever circumstances were favourable for intercourse during the night. The younger boy - the dreamer - who was then three years old and slept in the room with the nurse, was not regarded as an impediment.

There is another way in which it can be established with certainty without the assistance of interpretation that a dream contains elements from childhood. This is where the dream is of what has been called the ‘recurrent’ type: that is to say, where a dream was first dreamt in childhood and then constantly reappears from time to time during adult sleep. I am able to add to the familiar examples of such dreams a few from my own records, though I have never myself experienced one. A physician in his thirties told me that from the earliest days of his childhood to the present time a yellow lion frequently appeared in his dreams; he was able to give a minute description of it. This lion out of his dreams made its appearance one day in bodily form, as a china ornament that had long disappeared. The young man then learnt from his mother that this object had been his favourite toy during his early childhood, though he himself had forgotten the fact.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

676

If we turn now from the manifest content of dreams to the dream-thoughts which only analysis uncovers, we find to our astonishment that experiences from childhood also play a part in dreams whose content would never have led one to suppose it. I owe a particularly agreeable and instructive example of a dream of this kind to my respected colleague of the yellow lion. After reading Nansen’s narrative of his polar expedition, he had a dream of being in a field of ice and of giving the gallant explorer galvanic treatment for an attack of sciatica from which he was suffering. In the course of analysing the dream, he thought of a story dating from his childhood, which alone, incidentally, made the dream intelligible. One day, when he was a child of three or four, he had heard the grown-ups talking of voyages of discovery and had asked his father whether that was a serious illness. He had evidently confused ‘Reisen’ [‘voyages’] with ‘Reissen’ [‘gripes’], and his brothers and sisters saw to it that he never forgot this embarrassing mistake.

There was a similar instance of this when, in the course of my analysis of the dream of the monograph on the genus Cyclamen, I stumbled upon the childhood memory of my father, when I was a boy of five, giving me a book illustrated with coloured plates to destroy. It may perhaps be doubted whether this memory really had any share in determining the form taken by the content of the dream or whether it was not rather that the process of analysis built up the connection subsequently. But the copious and intertwined associative links warrant our accepting the former alternative: cyclamen - favourite flower - favourite food - artichokes; pulling to pieces like an artichoke, leaf by leaf (a phrase constantly ringing in our ears in relation to the piecemeal dismemberment of the Chinese Empire) - herbarium - book-worms, whose favourite food is books. Moreover I can assure my readers that the ultimate meaning of the dream, which I have not disclosed, is intimately related to the subject of the childhood scene.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

677

In the case of another group of dreams, analysis shows us that the actual wish which instigated the dream, and the fulfilment of which is represented by the dream, is derived from childhood; so that, to our surprise, we find the child and the child’s impulses still living on in the dream.

At this point I shall once more take up the interpretation of a dream which we have already found instructive - the dream of my friend R. being my uncle. We have followed its interpretation to the point of recognizing clearly as one of its motives my wish to be appointed to a professorship; and we explained the affection I felt in the dream for my friend R. as a product of opposition and revolt against the slanders upon my two colleagues which were contained in the dream-thoughts. The dream was one of my own; I may therefore continue its analysis by saying that my feelings were not yet satisfied by the solution that had so far been reached. I knew that my waking judgement upon the colleagues who were so ill-used in the dream-thoughts would have been a very different one; and the force of my wish not to share their fate in the matter of the appointment struck me as insufficient to explain the contradiction between my waking and dreaming estimates of them. If it was indeed true that my craving to be addressed with a different title was as strong as all that, it showed a pathological ambition which I did not recognize in myself and which I believed was alien to me. I could not tell how other people who believed they knew me would judge me in this respect. It might be that I was really ambitious; but, if so, my ambition had long ago been transferred to objects quite other than the title and rank of professor extraordinarius.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

678

What, then, could have been the origin of the ambitiousness which produced the dream in me? At that point I recalled an anecdote I had often heard repeated in my childhood. At the time of my birth an old peasant-woman had prophesied to my proud mother that with her first-born child she had brought a great man into the world. Prophecies of this kind must be very common: there are so many mothers filled with happy expectations and so many old peasant-women and others of the kind who make up for the loss of their power to control things in the present world by concentrating it on the future. Nor can the prophetess have lost anything by her words. Could this have been the source of my thirst for grandeur? But that reminded me of another experience, dating from my later childhood, which provided a still better explanation. My parents had been n the habit, when I was a boy of eleven or twelve, of taking me with them to the Prater. One evening, while we were sitting in a restaurant there, our attention had been attracted by a man who was moving from one table to another and, for a small consideration, improvising a verse upon any topic presented to him. I was despatched to bring the poet to our table and he showed his gratitude to the messenger. Before enquiring what the chosen topic was to be, he had dedicated a few lines to myself; and he had been inspired to declare that I should probably grow up to be a Cabinet Minister. I still remembered quite well what an impression this second prophecy had made on me. Those were the days of the ‘Bürger’ Ministry. Shortly before, my father had brought home portraits of these middle-class professional men - Herbst, Giskra, Unger, Berger and the rest - and we had illuminated the house in their honour. There had even been some Jews among them. So henceforth every industrious Jewish schoolboy carried a Cabinet Minister’s portfolio in his satchel. The events of that period no doubt had some bearing on the fact that up to a time shortly before I entered the University it had been my intention to study Law; it was only at the last moment that I changed my mind. A ministerial career is definitely barred to a medical man. But now to return to my dream. It began to dawn on me that my dream had carried me back from the dreary present to the cheerful hopes of the days of the ‘Bürger’ Ministry, and that the wish that it had done its best to fulfil was one dating back to those times. In mishandling my two learned and eminent colleagues because they were Jews, and in treating the one as a simpleton and the other as a criminal, I was behaving as though I were the Minister, I had put myself in the Minister’s place. Turning the tables on His Excellency with a vengeance! He had refused to appoint me professor extraordinarius and I had retaliated in the dream by stepping into his shoes.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

679

In another instance it became apparent that, though the wish which instigated the dream was a present-day one, it had received a powerful reinforcement from memories that stretched far back into childhood. What I have in mind is a series of dreams which are based upon a longing to visit Rome. For a long time to come, no doubt, I shall have to continue to satisfy that longing in my dreams: for at the season of the year when it is possible for me to travel, residence in Rome must be avoided for reasons of health.¹ For instance, I dreamt once that I was looking out of a railway-carriage window at the Tiber and the Ponte Sant’ Angelo. The train began to move off, and it occurred to me that I had not so much as set foot in the city. The view that I had seen in my dream was taken from a well-known engraving which I had caught sight of for a moment the day before in the sitting-room of one of my patients. Another time someone led me to the top of a hill and showed me Rome half-shrouded in mist; it was so far away that I was surprised at my view of it being so clear. There was more in the content of this dream than I feel prepared to detail; but the theme of ‘the promised land seen from afar’ was obvious in it. The town which I saw in this way for the first time, shrouded in mist, was - Lübeck, and the prototype of the hill was - at Gleichenberg. In a third dream I had at last got to Rome, as the dream itself informed me; but I was disappointed to find that the scenery was far from being of an urban character. There was a narrow stream of dark water; on one side of it were black cliffs and on the other meadows with big white flowers. I noticed a Herr Zucker (whom I knew slightly) and determined to ask him the way to the city. I was clearly making a vain attempt to see in my dream a city which I had never seen in my waking life. Breaking up the landscape in the dream into its elements, I found that the white flowers took me to Ravenna, which I have visited and which, for a time at least, superseded Rome as capital of Italy. In the marshes round Ravenna we found the loveliest water-lilies growing in black water. Because we had had such difficulty in picking them out of the water, the dream made them grow in meadows like the narcissi at our own Aussee. The dark cliff, so close to the water, reminded me vividly of the valley of the Tepl near Karlsbad. ‘Karlsbad’ enabled me to explain the curious detail of my having asked Herr Zucker the way. The material out of which the dream was woven included at this point two of those facetious Jewish anecdotes which contain so much profound and often bitter worldly wisdom and which we so greatly enjoy quoting in our talk and letters. Here is the first one: the ‘constitution’ story. An impecunious Jew had stowed himself away without a ticket in the fast train to Karlsbad. He was caught, and each time tickets were inspected he was taken out of the train and treated more and more severely. At one of the stations on his via dolorosa he met an acquaintance, who asked him where he was travelling to. ‘To Karlsbad’, was his reply, ‘if my constitution can stand it.’ My memory then passed on to another story: of a Jew who could not speak French and had been recommended when he was in Paris to ask the way to the rue Richelieu. Paris itself had for many long years been another goal of my longings; and the blissful feelings with which I first set foot on its pavement seemed to me a guarantee that others of my wishes would be fulfilled as well. ‘Asking the way’, moreover, was a direct allusion to Rome, since it is well known that all roads lead there. Again, the name Zucker was once more an allusion to Karlsbad; for we are in the habit of prescribing treatment there for anyone suffering from the constitutional complaint of diabetes. The instigation to this dream had been a proposal made by my friend in Berlin that we should meet in Prague at Easter. What we were going to discuss there would have included something with a further connection with ‘sugar’ and ‘diabetes’.

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] I discovered long since that it only needs a little courage to fulfil wishes which till then have been regarded as unattainable; [added 1925:] and thereafter became a constant pilgrim to Rome.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

680

A fourth dream, which occurred soon after the last one, took me to Rome once more. I saw a street-corner before me and was surprised to find so many posters in German stuck up there. I had written to my friend with prophetic foresight the day before to say that I thought Prague might not be an agreeable place for a German to walk about in. Thus the dream expressed at the same time a wish to meet him in Rome instead of in a Bohemian town, and a desire, probably dating back to my student days, that the German language might be better tolerated in Prague. Incidentally, I must have understood Czech in my earliest childhood, for I was born in a small town in Moravia which has a Slav population. A Czech nursery rhyme, which I heard in my seventeenth year, printed itself on my memory so easily that I can repeat it to this day, though I have no notion what it means. Thus there was no lack of connections with my early childhood in these dreams either.

It was on my last journey to Italy, which, among other places, took me past Lake Trasimene, that finally - after having seen the Tiber and sadly turned back when I was only fifty miles from Rome - I discovered the way in which my longing for the eternal city had been reinforced by impressions from my youth. I was in the act of making a plan to by-pass Rome next year and travel to Naples, when a sentence occurred to me which I must have read in one of our classical authors:¹ ‘Which of the two, it may be debated, walked up and down his study with the greater impatience after he had formed his plan of going to Rome - Winckelmann, the Vice-Principal, or Hannibal, the Commander-in-Chief’ I had actually been following in Hannibal’s footsteps. Like him, I had been fated not to see Rome; and he too had moved into the Campagna when everyone had expected him in Rome. But Hannibal, whom I had come to resemble in these respects, had been the favourite hero of my later school days. Like so many boys of that age, I had sympathized in the Punic Wars not with the Romans but with the Carthaginians. And when in the higher classes I began to understand for the first time what it meant to belong to an alien race, and anti-semitic feelings among the other boys warned me that I must take up a definite position, the figure of the semitic general rose still higher in my esteem. To my youthful mind Hannibal and Rome symbolized the conflict between the tenacity of Jewry and the organization of the Catholic church. And the increasing importance of the effects of the anti-semitic movement upon our emotional life helped to fix the thoughts and feelings of those early days. Thus the wish to go to Rome had become in my dream-life a cloak and symbol for a number of other passionate wishes. Their realization was to be pursued with all the perseverance and single-mindedness of the Carthaginian, though their fulfilment seemed at the moment just as little favoured by destiny as was Hannibal’s lifelong wish to enter Rome.

¹ [Footnote added 1925:] The author in question must no doubt have been Jean Paul.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

681

At that point I was brought up against the event in my youth whose power was still being shown in all these emotions and dreams. I may have been ten or twelve years old, when my father began to take me with him on his walks and reveal to me in his talk his views upon things in the world we live in. Thus it was, on one such occasion, that he told me a story to show me how much better things were now than they had been in his days. ‘When I was a young man’, he said, ‘I went for a walk one Saturday in the streets of your birthplace; I was well dressed, and had a new fur cap on my head. A Christian came up to me and with a single blow knocked off my cap into the mud and shouted: "Jew! get off the pavement!"' ‘And what did you do?’ I asked. ‘I went into the roadway and picked up my cap’, was his quiet reply. This struck me as unheroic conduct on the part of the big, strong man who was holding the little boy by the hand. I contrasted this situation with another which fitted my feelings better: the scene in which Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar Barca,¹ made his boy swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Ever since that time Hannibal had had a place in my phantasies.

I believe I can trace my enthusiasm for the Carthaginian general a step further back into my childhood; so that once more it would only have been a question of a transference of an already formed emotional relation on to a new object. One of the first books that I got hold of when I had learnt to read was Thiers’ history of the Consulate and Empire. I can still remember sticking labels on the flat backs of my wooden soldiers with the names of Napoleon’s marshals written on them. And at that time my declared favourite was already Massena (or to give the name its Jewish form, Manasseh).² (No doubt this preference was also partly to be explained by the fact that my birthday fell on the same day as his, exactly a hundred years later.) Napoleon himself lines up with Hannibal owing to their both having crossed the Alps. It may even be that the development of this martial ideal is traceable still further back into my childhood: to the times when, at the age of three, I was in a close relation, sometimes friendly but some times warlike, with a boy a year older than myself, and to the wishes which that relation must have stirred up in the weaker of us.

The deeper one carries the analysis of a dream, the more often one comes upon the track of experiences in childhood which have played a part among the sources of that dream’s latent content.

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] In the first edition the name of Hasdrubal appeared instead: a puzzling mistake, which I have explained in my Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b), Chapter X (2).

² [Footnote added 1930:] Incidentally, doubts have been thrown on the Marshal’s Jewish origin.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

682

We have already seen (on p. 534) that a dream very seldom reproduces recollections in such a way that they constitute, without abbreviation or modification, the whole of its manifest content. Nevertheless there are some undoubted instances of this happening: and I can add a few more, relating, once more, to childhood scenes. One of my patients was presented in a dream with an almost undistorted reproduction of a sexual episode, which was at once recognizable as a true recollection. His memory of the event had, in fact, never been completely lost in waking life, though it had become greatly obscured, and its revival was a consequence of work previously done in analysis. At the age of twelve, the dreamer had gone to visit a school friend who was laid up in bed, when the latter, by what was probably an accidental movement, uncovered his body. At the sight of his friend’s genitals, my patient had been overcome by some sort of compulsion and had uncovered himself too and caught hold of the other’s penis. His friend looked at him with indignation and astonishment; where upon, overcome by embarrassment, he let go. This scene was repeated in a dream twenty-three years later, including all the details of his feelings at the time. It was modified, however, to this extent, that the dreamer assumed the passive instead of the active role, while the figure of his school-friend was replaced by someone belonging to his contemporary life.

It is true that as a rule the childhood scene is only represented in the dream’s manifest content by an allusion, and has to be arrived at by an interpretation of the dream. Such instances when they are recorded, cannot carry much conviction, since as a rule there is no other evidence of these childhood experiences having occurred: if they date back to a very early age they are no longer recognized as memories. The general justification for inferring the occurrence of these childhood experiences from dreams is provided by a whole number of factors in psycho-analytic work, which are mutually consistent and thus seem sufficiently trustworthy. If I record some of these inferred childhood experiences torn from their context for the purposes of dream-interpretation, they may perhaps create little impression, especially as I shall not even be able to quote all the material on which the interpretations were based. Nevertheless I shall not allow this to deter me from relating them.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

683

I

All the dreams of one of my women patients were characterized by her being ‘rushed’: she would be in a violent rush to get somewhere in time not to miss a train, and so on. In one dream she was going to call on a woman friend; her mother told her to take a cab and not to walk; but she ran instead and kept on falling down. -The material which came up in analysis led to memories of rushing about and romping as a child. One particular dream recalled the favourite children’s game of saying a sentence ‘Die Kuh rannte, bies sie fiel’ [‘The cow ran till it fell’] so quickly that it sounds as though it were a single word - another rush in fact. All these innocent rushings-about with little girl friends were remembered because they took the place of other, less innocent ones.

II

Here is another woman patient’s dream: She was in a big room in which all sorts of machines were standing, like what she imagined an orthopaedic institute to be. She was told I had no time and that she must have her treatment at the same time as five others. She refused, however, and would not lie down in the bed - or whatever it was - that was meant for her. She stood in the corner and waited for me to say it wasn’t true. Meanwhile the others were laughing at her and saying it was just her way of ‘carrying on.’ - Simultaneously, it was as though she was making a lot of small squares.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

684

The first part of the content of this dream related to the treatment and was a transference on to me. The second part contained an allusion to a scene in childhood. The two parts were linked together by the mention of the bed.

The orthopaedic institute referred back to a remark I had made in which I had compared the treatment, alike in its length and in its nature, to an orthopaedic one. When I started her treatment I had been obliged to tell her that for the time being I had not much time for her, though later I should be able to give her a whole hour daily. This had stirred up her old sensitiveness, which is a principal trait in the character of children inclined to hysteria: they are insatiable for love. My patient had been the youngest of a family of six children (hence: at the same time as five others) and had therefore been her father’s favourite; but even so she seems to have felt that her adored father devoted too little of his time and attention to her. -Her waiting for me to say it wasn’t true had the following origin. A young tailor’s apprentice had brought her a dress and she had given him the money for it. Afterwards she had asked her husband whether if the boy lost the money she would have to pay it over again. Her husband, to tease her, had said that was so. (The teasing in the dream.) She kept on asking over and over again and waited for him to say after all it wasn’t true. It was then possible to infer that in the latent content of the dream she had had a thought of whether she would have to pay me twice as much if I gave her twice as much time - a thought which she felt was avaricious or filthy. (Uncleanliness in childhood is often replaced in dreams by avariciousness for money; the link between the two is the word ‘filthy’.) If the whole passage about waiting for me to say, etc., was intended in the dream as a circumlocution for the word ‘filthy’, then her ‘standing in the corner’ and ‘not lying down in the bed’ would fit in with it as constituents of a scene from her childhood: a scene in which she had dirtied her bed and been punished by being made to stand in the corner, with a threat that her father would not love her any more and her brothers and sisters would laugh at her, and so on. -The small squares related to her little niece, who had shown her the arithmetical trick of arranging the digits in nine squares (I believe this is correct) so that they add up in all directions to fifteen.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

685

III

A man dreamt as follows: He saw two boys struggling - barrel-maker’s boys, to judge by the implements lying around. One of the boys threw the other down; the boy on the ground had earrings with blue stones. He hurried towards the offender with his stick raised, to chastise him. The latter fled for protection to a woman, who was standing by a wooden fence, as though she was his mother. She was a woman of the working classes and her back was turned to the dreamer. At last she turned around and gave him a terrible look so that he ran off in terror. The red flesh of the lower lids of her eyes could be seen standing out.

The dream had made copious use of trivial events of the previous day. He had in fact seen two boys in the street, one of whom threw the other down. When he hurried up to stop the fight they had both taken to their heels. -Barrel-maker’s boys. This was only explained by a subsequent dream in which he used the phrase ‘knocking the bottom out of a barrel’. -From his experience he believed that earrings with blue stones were mostly worn by prostitutes. A line from a well-known piece of doggerel about two boys then occurred to him: ‘The other boy was called Marie’ (i.e. was a girl). -The woman standing. After the scene with the two boys he had gone for a walk along the bank of the Danube and had profited by the loneliness of the spot to micturate against a wooden fence. Further on, a respectably dressed elderly lady had smiled at him in a very friendly manner and had wanted to give him her visiting-card. Since the woman in the dream was standing in the same position as he had been in when he was micturating, it must have been a question of a micturating woman. This tallies with her terrible look and the red flesh standing out, which could only relate to the gaping of the genitals caused by stooping. This, seen in his childhood, reappeared in later memory as ‘proud flesh’ - as a wound.

The dream combined two opportunities he had had as a little boy of seeing little girls’ genitals: when they were thrown down and when they were micturating. And from the other part of the context it emerged that he had a recollection of being chastised or threatened by his father for the sexual curiosity he had evinced on these occasions.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

686

IV

Behind the following dream (dreamt by an elderly lady) there lay a whole quantity of childhood memories, combined, as best they might be, into a single phantasy.

She went out in a violent rush to do some commissions. In the Graben she sank down on her knees, as though she was quite broken-down. A large number of people collected round her, especially cab-drivers; but no one helped her up. She made several vain attempts, and she must at last have succeeded, for she was put into a cab which was to take her home. Someone threw a big, heavily-laden basket (like a shopping-basket) in through the window after her.

This was the same lady who always felt ‘rushed’ in her dreams, just as she had rushed and romped about when she was a child. The first scene in the dream was evidently derived from the sight of a horse fallen down; in the same way the word ‘broken-down’ referred to horse-racing. In her youth she had ridden horses, and no doubt when she was still younger she had actually been a horse. The falling down was related to a memory from very early childhood of the seventeen year-old son of the house-porter who had fallen down in the street in an epileptic fit and been brought home in a carriage. She had of course only heard about this, but the idea of epileptic fits (of the ‘falling sickness’) had obtained a hold on her imagination and had later influenced the form taken by her own hysterical attacks. - If a woman dreams of falling, it almost invariably has a sexual sense: she is imagining herself as a ‘fallen woman’. The present dream in particular scarcely left any room for doubt, since the place where my patient fell was the Graben, a part of Vienna notorious as a promenade for prostitutes. The shopping-basket [Korb] led to more than one interpretation. It reminded her of the numerous rebuffs [Körbe] which she had dealt out to her suitors, as well as of those which she complained of having later received herself. This also connected with the fact that no one helped her up, which she herself explained as a rebuff. The shopping-basket further reminded her of phantasies which had already come up in her analysis, in which she was married far beneath her and had to go marketing herself. And lastly it might serve as the mark of a servant. At this point further childhood recollections emerged. First, of a cook who had been dismissed for stealing, and who had fallen on her knees and begged to be forgiven. She herself had been twelve at the time. Then, of a housemaid who had been dismissed on account of a love-affair with the family coachman (who incidentally married her subsequently). Thus this memory was also one of the sources of the coachmen (drivers) in the dream (who, in contradistinction to the actual coachman, failed to raise the fallen woman). There remained to be explained the fact of the basket being thrown in after her and through the window. This reminded her of handing in luggage to be sent off by rail, of the country custom of lovers climbing in through their sweethearts’ window and of other little episodes from her life in the country: how a gentleman had thrown some blue plums to a lady through the window of her room, and how her own younger sister had been scared by the village idiot looking in through her window. An obscure memory from her tenth year then began to emerge, of a nurse in the country who had had love-scenes (which the girl might have seen something of) with one of the servants in the house and who, along with her lover, had been sent off, thrown out (the opposite of the dream-image ‘thrown in) - a story that we had already approached from several other directions. A servant’s luggage or trunk is referred to contemptuously in Vienna as ‘seven plums: ‘pack up your seven plums and out you go!’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

687

My records naturally include a large collection of patients’ dreams the analysis of which led to obscure or entirely forgotten impressions of childhood, often going back to the first three years of life. But it would be unsafe to apply any conclusions drawn from them to dreams in general. The persons concerned were in every instance neurotics and in particular hysterics; and it is possible that the part played by childhood scenes in their dreams might be determined by the nature of their neurosis and not by the nature of dreams. Nevertheless, in analysing my own dreams - and, after all, I am not doing so on account of any gross pathological symptoms - it happens no less frequently that in the latent content of a dream I come unexpectedly upon a scene from childhood, and that all at once a whole series of my dreams link up with the associations branching out from some experience of my childhood. I have already given some instances of this, and I shall have others to give in a variety of connections. I cannot, perhaps, bring this section to a better close than by reporting one or two dreams of mine in which recent occasions and long-forgotten experiences of childhood came together as sources of the dream.

I

Tired and hungry after a journey, I went to bed, and the major vital needs began to announce their presence in my sleep; I dreamt as follows:

I went into a kitchen in search of some pudding. Three women were standing in it; one of them was the hostess of the inn and was twisting something about in her hands, as though she were making Knödel. She answered that I must wait until she was ready. (These were not definite spoken words.) I felt impatient and went off with a sense of injury. I put on an overcoat. But the first I tried on was too long for me. I took it off, rather surprised to find it was trimmed with fur. A second one that I put on had had a long strip with a Turkish design let into it. A stranger with a long face and a short pointed beard came up and tried to prevent my putting it on, saying it was his. I showed him then that it was embroidered all over with a Turkish pattern. He asked: ‘What have the Turkish (designs, stripes . . .) to do with you?’ But then we became quite friendly with each other.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

688

When I began analysing this dream, I thought quite unexpectedly of the first novel I ever read (when I was thirteen, perhaps); as a matter of fact I began at the end of the first volume. I have never known the name of the novel or of its author; but I have a vivid memory of its ending. The hero went mad and kept calling out the names of the three women who had brought the greatest happiness and sorrow into his life. One of these names was Pélagie. I still had no notion what this recollection was going to lead to in the analysis. In connection with the three women I thought of the three Fates who spin the destiny of man, and I knew that one of the three women - the inn-hostess in the dream - was the mother who gives life, and furthermore (as in my own case) gives the living creature its first nourishment. Love and hunger, I reflected, meet at a woman’s breast. A young man who was a great admirer of feminine beauty was talking once - so the story went - of the good-looking wet-nurse who had suckled him when he was a baby: ‘I’m sorry’, he remarked, ‘that I didn’t make a better use of my opportunity.’ I was in the habit of quoting this anecdote to explain the factor of ‘deferred action’ in the mechanism of the psychoneuroses. - One of the Fates, then, was rubbing the palms of her hands together as though she was making dumplings: a queer occupation for a Fate, and one that cried out for an explanation. This was provided by another and earlier memory of my childhood. When I was six years old and was given my first lessons by my mother, I was expected to believe that we were all made of earth and must therefore return to earth. This did not suit me and I expressed doubts of the doctrine. My mother thereupon rubbed the palms of her hands together - just as she did in making dumplings, except that there was no dough between them - and showed me the blackish scales of epidermis produced by the friction as a proof that we were made of earth. My astonishment at this ocular demonstration knew no bounds and I acquiesced in the belief which I was later to hear expressed in the words: ‘Du bist der Natur einen Tod schuldig.’ [‘Thou owest Nature a death.’]¹ So they really were Fates that I found in the kitchen when I went into it - as I had so often done in my childhood when I was hungry, while my mother, standing by the fire, had admonished me that I must wait till dinner was ready. - And now for the dumplings - the Knödel! One at least of my teachers at the University - and precisely the one to whom I owe my histological knowledge (for instance of the epidermis) - would infallibly be reminded by the name Knödl of a person against whom he had been obliged to take legal action for plagiarizing his writings. The idea of plagiarizing - of appropriating whatever one can, even though it belongs to someone else - clearly led on to the second part of the dream, in which I was treated as though I were the thief who had for some time carried on his business of stealing overcoats in the lecture-rooms. I had written down the word ‘plagiarizing’, without thinking about it, because it occurred to me; but now I noticed that it could form a bridge [Brücke] between different pieces of the dream’s manifest content. A chain of associations (Pélagie - plagiarizing - plagiostomes² or sharks [Haifische] - a fish’s swimming-bladder [Fischblase]) connected the old novel with the case of Knödl and with the overcoats, which clearly referred to implements used in sexual technique. (Cf. Maury’s alliterative dreams.) No doubt it was a very far-fetched and senseless chain of thought; but I could never have constructed it in waking life unless it had already been constructed by the dream-work. And, as though the need to set up forced connections regarded nothing as sacred, the honoured name of Brücke (cf. the verbal bridge above) reminded me of the Institute in which I spent the happiest hours of my student life, free from all other desires -

So wird’s Euch an der Weisheit Brüsten

Mit jedem Tage mehr gelüsten³

- in complete contrast to the desires which were now plaguing me in my dreams. Finally there came to mind another much respected teacher - his name, Fleischl [‘Fleisch’ = ‘meat’], like Knödl, sounded like something to eat - and a distressing scene in which scales of epidermis played a part (my mother and the inn-hostess) as well as madness (the novel) and a drug from the dispensary which removes hunger: cocaine.

¹ Both of the emotions that were attached to these childhood scenes - astonishment and submission to the inevitable - had occurred in a dream which I had had shortly before this one and which had first reminded me of this event in my childhood.

² I have deliberately avoided enlarging upon the plagiostomes; they reminded me of an unpleasant occasion on which I had disgraced myself in connection with this same University teacher.

³ [‘Thus, at the breasts of Wisdom clinging,

Thou’lt find each day a greater rapture bringing.’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

689

I might pursue the intricate trains of thought further along these lines and explain fully the part of the dream which I have not analysed; but I must desist at this point because the personal sacrifice demanded would be too great. I will only pick out one thread, which is qualified to lead us straight to one of the dream-thoughts underlying the confusion. The stranger with the long face and pointed beard who tried to prevent my putting on the overcoat bore the features of a shop-keeper at Spalato from whom my wife had bought a quantity of Turkish stuffs. He was called Popovic, an equivocal name, on which a humorous writer, Stettenheim, has already made a suggestive comment: ‘He told me his name and blushingly pressed my hand.’ Once again I found myself misusing a name, as I already had done with Pélagie, Knödl, Brücke and Fleischl. It could scarcely be denied that playing about with names like this was a kind of childish naughtiness. But if I indulged in it, it was as an act of retribution; for my own name had been the victim of feeble witticisms like these on countless occasions. Goethe, I recalled, had remarked somewhere upon people’s sensitiveness about their names: how we seem to have grown into them like our skin. He had said this á propos of a line written on his name by Herder:

‘Der du von Göttern abstammst, von Gothen oder vom Kote.’ -¹

‘So seid ihr Götterbilder auch zu Staub.’ ²

I noticed that my digression on the subject of the misuse of names was only leading up to this complaint. But I must break off here. - My wife’s purchase made at Spalato reminded me of another purchase, made at Cattaro, which I had been too cautious over, so that I had lost an opportunity of making some nice acquisitions. (Cf. the neglected opportunity with the wet-nurse.) For one of the thoughts which my hunger introduced into the dream was this: ‘One should never neglect an opportunity, but always take what one can even when it involves doing a small wrong. One should never neglect an opportunity, since life is short and death inevitable.’ Because this lesson of ‘carpe diem’ had among other meanings a sexual one, and because the desire it expressed did not stop short of doing wrong, it had reason to dread the censorship and was obliged to conceal itself behind a dream. All kinds of thoughts having a contrary sense then found voice: memories of a time when the dreamer was content with spiritual food, restraining thoughts of every kind and even threats of the most revolting sexual punishments.

¹ [`Thou who art the offspring of gods or of Goths or of dung’]

² [`So you too, divine figures, have turned to dust!’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

690

II

The next dream calls for a rather long preamble:

I had driven to the Western Station to take the train for my summer holiday at Aussee, but had arrived on the platform while an earlier train, going to Ischl, was still standing in the station. There I had seen Count Thun who was once again travelling to Ischl for an audience with the Emperor. Though it was raining, he had arrived in an open carriage. He had walked straight in through the entrance for the Local Trains. The ticket inspector at the gate had not recognized him and had tried to take his ticket, but he had waved the man aside with a curt motion of his hand and without giving any explanation. After the train for Ischl had gone out, I ought by rights to have left the platform again and returned to the waiting room; and it had cost me some trouble to arrange matters so that I was allowed to stop on the platform. I had passed the time in keeping a look-out to see if anyone came along and tried to get a reserved compartment by exercising some sort of ‘pull’. I had intended in that case to make a loud protest: that is to say to claim equal rights. Meantime I had been humming a tune to myself which I recognized as Figaro’s aria from Le Nozze di Figaro:

Se vuol ballare, signor contino,

Se vuol ballare, signor contino,

Il chitarino le suonerò¹

(It is a little doubtful whether anyone else would have recognized the tune.)

¹ [‘If my Lord Count is inclined to go dancing,

If my Lord Count is inclined to go dancing,

I’II be quite ready to play him a tune . . .’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

691

The whole evening I had been in high spirits and in a combative mood. I had chaffed my waiter and my cab-driver - without, I hope, hurting their feelings. And now all kinds of insolent and revolutionary ideas were going through my head, in keeping with Figaro’s words and with my recollections of Beaumarchais’ comedy which I had seen acted by the Comédie français. I thought of the phrase about the great gentlemen who had taken the trouble to be born, and of the droit du Seigneur which Count Almaviva tried to exercise over Susanna. I thought, too, of how our malicious opposition journalists made jokes over Count Thun’s name, calling him instead ‘Count Nichtsthun’. Not that I envied him. He was on his way to a difficult audience with the Emperor, while I was the real Count Do-nothing -(just off on my holidays. There followed all sorts of enjoyable plans for the holidays. At this point a gentleman came on to the platform whom I recognized as a Government invigilator at medical examinations, and who by his activities in that capacity had won the flattering nickname of ‘Government bedfellow’. He asked to be given a first-class half-compartment to himself in virtue of his official position, and I heard one railwayman saying to another: ‘Where are we to put the gentleman with the half first-class ticket?’ This, I thought to myself, was a fine example of privilege; after all I had paid the full first-class fare. And I did in fact get a compartment to myself, but not in a corridor coach, so that there would be no lavatory available during the night. I complained to an official without any success; but I got my own back on him by suggesting that he should at all events have a hole made in the floor of the compartment to meet the possible needs of passengers. And in fact I did wake up at a quarter to three in the morning with a pressing need to micturate, having had the following dream:

The Interpretation Of Dreams

692

A crowd of people, a meeting of students. - A count (Thun or Taaffe) was speaking. He was challenged to say something about the Germans, and declared with a contemptuous gesture that their favourite flower was a colt’s foot, and put some sort of dilapidated leaf - or rather the crumpled skeleton of a leaf - into his buttonhole. I fired up - so I fired up,¹ though I was surprised at my taking such an attitude.

(Then, less distinctly:) It was as though I was in the Aula, the entrances were cordoned off and we had to escape. I made my way through a series of beautifully furnished rooms, evidently ministerial or public apartments, with furniture upholstered in a colour between brown and violet; at last I came to a corridor, in which a housekeeper was sitting, an elderly stout woman. I avoided speaking to her, but she evidently thought I had a right to pass, for she asked whether she should accompany me with the lamp. I indicated to her, by word or gesture, that she was to stop on the staircase; and I felt I was being very cunning in thus avoiding inspection at the exit. I got downstairs and found a narrow and steep ascending path, along which I went.

(Becoming indistinct again) . . . It was as though the second problem was to get out of the town, just as the first one had been to get out of the house. I was driving in a cab and had ordered the driver to drive me to a station. ‘I can’t drive with you along the railway-line itself’, I said, after he had raised some objection, as though I had overtired him. It was as if I had already driven with him for some of the distance one normally travels by train. The stations were cordoned off. I wondered whether to go to Krems or Znaim, but reflected that the Court would be in residence there, so I decided in favour of Graz, or some such place. I was now sitting in the compartment, which was like a carriage on the Stadtbahn; and in my buttonhole I had a peculiar plaited, long-shaped object, and beside it some violet-brown violets made of a stiff material. This greatly struck people. (At this point the scene broke off.)

Once more I was in front of the station, but this time in the company of an elderly gentleman. I thought of a plan for remaining unrecognized; and then saw that this plan had already been put into effect. It was as though thinking and experiencing were one and the same thing. He appeared to be blind, at all events with one eye, and I handed him a male glass urinal (which we had to buy or had bought in town). So I was a sick-nurse and had to give him the urinal because he was blind. If the ticket-collector were to see us like that, he would be certain to let us get away without noticing us. Here the man’s attitude and his micturating penis appeared in plastic form. (This was the point at which I awoke, feeling a need to micturate.)

The dream as a whole gives one the impression of being in the nature of a phantasy in which the dreamer was carried back to the Revolutionary year 1848. Memories of that year had been recalled to me by the Jubilee in 1898, as well as by a short trip which I had made to the Wachau, in the course of which I had visited Emmersdorf,² the place of retirement of the student-leader Fischhof, to whom certain elements in the manifest content of the dream may allude. My associations then led me to England and to my brother’s house there. He used often to tease his wife with the words ‘Fifty Years Ago’ (from the title of one of Lord Tennyson’s poems), which his children used then to correct to ‘fifteen years ago’. This revolutionary phantasy, however, which was derived from ideas aroused in me by seeing Count Thun, was like the façade of an Italian church in having no organic relation with the structure lying behind it. But it differed from those façades in being disordered and full of gaps, and in the fact that portions of the interior construction had forced their way through into it at many points.

¹ This repetition crept into my record of the dream, apparently through inadvertence. I have let it stand, since the analysis showed that it was significant.

² (Footnote added 1925:] This is a mistake, but not a slip this time. I only learnt later that the Emmersdorf in the Wachau is not to be identified with the place of the same name which was the refuge of the revolutionary leader Fischhof.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

693

The first situation in the dream was an amalgam of several scenes, which I can separate out. The insolent attitude adopted by the Count in the dream was copied from a scene at my secondary school when I was fifteen years old. We had hatched a conspiracy against an unpopular and ignorant master, the moving spirit of which had been one of my school-fellows who since those days seemed to have taken Henry VIII of England as his model. The leadership in the chief assault was allotted to me, and the signal for open revolt was a discussion on the significance of the Danube to Austria (cf. the Wachau). One of our fellow-conspirators had been the only aristocratic boy in the class, who, on account of his remarkable length of limb, was called ‘the Giraffe’. He was standing up, like the Count in my dream, having been taken to task by the school tyrant, the German language master. The favourite flower and the putting into his buttonhole of something in the nature of a flower (which last made me think of some orchids which I had brought the same day for a woman friend and also of a rose of Jericho) were a striking reminder of the scene in one of Shakespeare’s historical plays which represented the beginning of the Wars of the Red and White Roses. (The mention of Henry VIII opened the way to this recollection.) - From there it was only a short step to red and white carnations. (Two little couplets, one in German and the other in Spanish, slipped into the analysis at this point:

Rosen, Tulpen, Nelken,

alle Blumen welken.¹

Isabelita, no Ilores,

que se marchitan las flores.²

The appearance of a Spanish couplet led back to Figaro.) Here in Vienna white carnations had become an emblem of anti-semitism, and red ones of the Social Democrats. Behind this lay a recollection of a piece of anti-semitic provocation during a railway journey in the lovely Saxon countryside (cf. Anglo-Saxon). -The third scene which contributed to the formation of the first situation in the dream dated from my early student days. There was a discussion in a German students’ club on the relation of philosophy to the natural sciences. I was a green youngster, full of materialistic theories, and thrust myself forward to give expression to an extremely one-sided point of view. Thereupon someone who was my senior and my superior, someone who has since then shown his ability as a leader of men and an organizer of large groups (and who also, incidentally, bears a name derived from the Animal Kingdom), stood up and gave us a good talking-to: he too, he told us, had fed swine in his youth and returned repentant to his father’s house. I fired up (as I did in the dream) and replied boorishly that since I now knew that he had fed swine in his youth I was no longer surprised at the tone of his speeches. (In the dream I was surprised at my German-nationalist attitude.) There was a general uproar and I was called upon from many sides to withdraw my remarks, but I refused to do so. The man I had insulted was too sensible to look upon the incident as a challenge, and let the affair drop.

¹ [‘Roses, tulips, carnations: every flower fades.’]

² [‘Isabelita, do not weep because the flowers fade.’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

694

The remaining elements of this first situation in the dream were derived from deeper layers. What was the meaning of the Count’s pronouncement about colt’s foot? To find the answer, I followed a train of associations: colt’s foot [‘Huflattich’, literally ‘hoof lettuce’] - lettuce - salad - dog-in-the-manger [‘Salathund’, literally ‘salad dog’]. Here was a whole collection of terms of abuse: ‘Gir-affe’ [‘Affe’ is the German for ‘ape’], ‘swine’, ‘dog’ - and I could have arrived at ‘donkey’ if I had made a detour through another name and insulted yet another academic teacher. Moreover, I translated ‘colt’s foot’ - whether rightly or wrongly I could not tell - by the French ‘pisse-en-lit’. This information was derived from Zola’s Germinal, in which a child was told to pick some of that plant for salad. The French word for ‘dog’ - ‘chien’ - reminded me of the major function (‘chier’ in French, compared with ‘pisser’ for the minor one). Soon, I thought, I should have collected examples of impropriety in all three states of matter - solid, liquid and gaseous; - for this same book, Germinal, which had plenty to do with the approaching revolution, contained an account of a very peculiar sort of competition - for the production of a gaseous excretion known by the name of ‘flatus’.¹ I now saw that the path leading to flatus had been prepared far ahead: from flowers, through the Spanish couplet, Isabelita, Isabella and Ferdinand, Henry VIII, English history, and the Armada which sailed against England, after whose defeat a medal was struck, bearing the inscription ‘Flavit et dissipati sunt’², since the storm-blast had scattered the Spanish fleet. I had thought, half seriously, of using those words as the heading to the chapter on ‘Therapy’, if ever I got so far as producing a detailed account of my theory and treatment of hysteria.

¹ Not in fact in Germinal but in La terre: a mistake which I only observed after I had completed the analysis. - Notice the occurrence of the same letters in ‘Huflattich’ [‘colt’s foot’] and ‘flatus’.

² [Footnote added 1925:] An unsolicited biographer, Dr. Fritz Wittels has charged me with having omitted the name of Jehovah from the above motto. [Added 1930:] The English medallion bears the deity’s name in Hebrew lettering on a cloud in the background. It is so placed that it can be taken as being part either of the design or of the inscription.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

695

Turning now to the second episode of the dream, I am unable to deal with it in such detail - out of consideration for the censorship. For I was putting myself in the place of an exalted personage of those revolutionary times, who also had an adventure with an eagle [Adler] and is said to have suffered from incontinence of the bowels, and so on. I thought to myself that I should not be justified in passing the censorship at this point, even though the greater part of the story was told me by a Hofrat (a consiliarius aulicus [court councillor] - cf. Aula). The series of public rooms in the dream were derived from His Excellency’s saloon carriage, of which I had succeeded in getting a glimpse. But the ‘rooms’ [Zimmer] also meant ‘women’ [Frauenzimmer], as is often the case in dreams - in this instance ‘public women’. In the figure of the housekeeper I was showing my lack of gratitude towards a witty elderly lady and ill repaying her hospitality and the many good stories that I heard while I was stopping in her house. -The allusion to the lamp went back to Grillparzer, who introduced a charming episode of a similar kind, which he had actually experienced, into his tragedy about Hero and Leander, Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen [‘The Waves of the Sea and of Love’] - the Armada and the storm.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1911:] In an interesting paper, Silberer (1910) has tried to show from this part of my dream that the dream-work can succeed in reproducing not only the latent dream-thoughts but also the psychical processes that take place during the formation of dreams. (This is what he terms ‘the functional phenomenon’.) [Added 1914:] But he is, I think, overlooking the fact that ‘the psychical processes that take place during the formation of dreams’ were, like the rest, part of the material of my thoughts. In this boastful dream I was evidently proud of having discovered those processes.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

696

I must also refrain from any detailed analysis of the two remaining episodes of the dream. I will merely pick out the elements leading to the two childhood scenes on whose account alone I embarked upon a discussion of this dream. It will rightly be suspected that what compels me to make this suppression is sexual material; but there is no need to rest content with this explanation. After all, there are many things which one has to keep secret from other people but of which one makes no secret to oneself; and the question here is not as to why I am obliged to conceal the solution but as to the motives for the internal censorship which hid the true content of the dream from myself. I must therefore explain that the analysis of these three episodes of the dream showed that they were impertinent boastings, the issue of an absurd megalomania which had long been suppressed in my waking life and a few of whose ramifications had even made their way into the dream’s manifest content (e. g. ‘I felt I was being very cunning’), and which incidentally accounted for my exuberant spirits during the evening before I had the dream. The boasting extended to all spheres; for instance, the mention of Graz went back to the slang phrase ‘What’s the price of Graz? ', which expresses the self-satisfaction of a person who feels extremely well-off. The first episode of the dream may also be included among the boastings by anyone who will bear in mind the great Rabelais’ incomparable account of the life and deeds of Gargantua and his son Pantagruel.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

697

Here is the material relating to the two childhood scenes which I have promised my readers. I had bought a new trunk for the journey, of a brownish violet colour. This colour appears more than once in the dream: the violet-brown violets made of a stiffish material and beside them a thing known as a ‘Mädchenfänger’ [‘girl-catcher’] - and the furniture in the ministerial apartments. It is commonly believed by children that people are struck by anything new. The following scene from my childhood has been described to me, and my memory of the description has taken the place of my memory of the scene itself. It appears that when I was two years old I still occasionally wetted the bed, and when I was reproached for this I consoled my father by promising to buy him a nice new red bed in N., the nearest town of any size. This was the origin of the parenthetical phrase in the dream to the effect that we bought or had to buy the urinal in town: one must keep one’s promises. (Notice, too, the juxtaposition in symbolism of the male urinal and the female trunk or box.) This promise of mine exhibited all the megalomania of childhood. We have already come across the significant part played in dreams by children’s difficulties in connection with micturition (cf. the dream reported on p. 685). We have also learned from the psycho-analysis of neurotic subjects the intimate connection between bed-wetting and the character trait of ambition.

When I was seven or eight years old there was another domestic scene, which I can remember very clearly. One evening before going to sleep I disregarded the rules which modesty lays down and obeyed the calls of nature in my parents’ bedroom while they were present. In the course of his reprimand, my father let fall the words: ‘The boy will come to nothing.’ This must have been a frightful blow to my ambition, for references to this scene are still constantly recurring in my dreams and are always linked with an enumeration of my achievements and successes, as though I wanted to say: ‘You see, I have come to something.’ This scene, then, provided the material for the final episode of the dream, in which - in revenge, of course - the roles were interchanged. The older man (clearly my father, since his blindness in one eye referred to his unilateral glaucoma¹ )was now micturating in front of me, just as I had in front of him in my childhood. In the reference to his glaucoma I was reminding him of the cocaine, which had helped him in the operation, as though I had in that way kept my promise. Moreover, I was making fun of him; I had to hand him the urinal because he was blind, and I revelled in allusions to my discoveries in connection with the theory of hysteria, of which I felt so proud.²

¹ There is another interpretation. He was one-eyed like Odin the father-god. - Odhins Trost. - The consolation I offered him in the first childhood scene of buying him a new bed.

² Here is some further interpretative material. Handing him the glass reminded me of the story of the peasant at the optician’s, trying glass after glass and still not being able to read. - (Peasant-catcher [Bauerfänger, ‘sharper]: girl-catcher [Mädchenfänger] in the preceding episode of the dream.) - The way in which the father in Zola’s La terre was treated among the peasants after he had grown feeble-minded. -The tragic requital that lay in my father’s soiling his bed like a child during the last days of his life; hence my appearance in the dream as a sick-nurse. -’Here it was as though thinking and experiencing were one and the same thing.’ This recalled a strongly revolutionary literary play by Oskar Panizza, in which God the Father is ignominiously treated as a paralytic old man. In his case will and deed were represented as one and the same thing, and he had to be restrained from cursing and swearing by one of his archangels, a kind of Ganymede, because his imprecations would be promptly fulfilled. - My making plans was a reproach against my father dating from a later period. And indeed the whole rebellious content of the dream, with its lèse majesté and its derision of the higher authorities, went back to rebellion against my father. A Prince is known as the father of his country; the father is the oldest, first, and for children the only authority, and from his autocratic power the other social authorities have developed in the course of the history of human civilization - except in so far as the ‘matriarchy’ calls for a qualification of this assertion. -The phrase ‘thinking and experiencing were one and the same thing’ had a reference to the explanation of hysterical symptoms, and the ‘male urinal’ belonged in the same connection. I need not explain to a Viennese the principle of the ‘Gschnas’. It consists in constructing what appear to be rare, and precious objects out of trivial and preferably comic and worthless materials (for instance, in making armour out of saucepans, wisps of straw and dinner rolls) - a favourite pastime at bohemian parties here in Vienna. I had observed that this is precisely what hysterical subjects do: alongside what has really happened to them, they unconsciously build up frightful or perverse imaginary events which they construct out of the most innocent and everyday material of their experience. It is to these phantasies that their symptoms are in the first instance attached and not to their recollections of real events, whether serious or equally innocent. This revelation had helped me over a number of difficulties and had given me particular pleasure. What made it possible for me to refer to this by means of the dream-element of the ‘ male urinal’ was as follows. I had been told that at the latest ‘Gschnas’-night a poisoned chalice belonging to Lucrezia Borgia had been exhibited; its central and principal constituent had been a male urinal of the type used in hospitals.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

698

The two scenes of micturition from my childhood were in any case closely linked to the topic of megalomania; but their emergence while I was travelling to Aussee was further assisted by the chance circumstance that there was no lavatory attached to my compartment and that I had reason to anticipate the predicament which in fact arose in the morning. I awoke with the sensations of a physical need. One might, I think, be inclined to suppose that these sensations were the actual provoking agent of the dream; but I would prefer to take another view, namely that the desire to micturate was only called up by the dream-thoughts. It is quite unusual for me to be disturbed in my sleep by physical needs of any kind, especially at the hour at which I awoke on this occasion - a quarter to three in the morning. And I may meet a further objection by remarking that upon other journeys under more comfortable conditions I have scarcely ever felt a need to micturate when I have woken up early. But in any case it will do no harm to leave the point unresolved.

My experiences in analysing dreams have drawn my attention to the fact that trains of thought reaching back to earliest childhood lead off even from dreams which seem at first sight to have been completely interpreted, since their sources and instigating wish have been discovered without difficulty. I have therefore been compelled to ask myself whether this characteristic may not be a further essential precondition of dreaming. Stated in general terms, this would imply that every dream was linked in its manifest content with recent experiences and in its latent content with the most ancient experiences. And I have in fact been able to show in my analysis of hysteria that these ancient experiences have remained recent in the proper sense of the word up to the immediate present. It is still extremely hard to demonstrate the truth of this suspicion; and I shall have to return in another connection (Chapter VII) to a consideration of the probable part played by the earliest experiences of childhood in the formation of dreams.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

699

Of the three characteristics of memory in dreams enumerated at the beginning of this chapter, one - the preference for non-essential material in the content of dreams - has been satisfactorily cleared up by being traced back to dream-distortion. We have been able to confirm the existence of the other two - the emphasis upon recent and upon infantile material - but we have not been able to account for them on the basis of the motives that lead to dreaming. These two characteristics inclusion of both recent and infantile material, whose explanation and appreciation remain to be discovered, must be kept in mind. Their proper place must be looked for elsewhere - either in the psychology of the state of sleep or in the discussion of the structure of the mental apparatus upon which we shall later embark, after we have learnt that the interpretation of dreams is like a window through which we can get a glimpse of the interior of that apparatus.

There is, however, another inference following from these last dream-analyses to which I will draw attention at once. Dreams frequently seem to have more than one meaning. Not only, as our examples have shown, may they include several wish-fulfilments one alongside the other; but a succession of meanings or wish-fulfilments may be superimposed on one another, the bottom one being the fulfilment of a wish dating from earliest childhood. And here again the question arises whether it might not be more correct to assert that this occurs ‘invariably’ rather than ‘frequently.’¹

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] The fact that the meanings of dreams are arranged in superimposed layers is one of the most delicate, though also one of the most interesting, problems of dream-interpretation. Anyone who forgets this possibility will easily go astray and be led into making untenable assertions upon the nature of dreams. Yet it is still a fact that far too few investigations have been made into this matter. Hitherto the only thorough piece of research has been Otto Rank’s into the fairly regular stratification of symbols in dreams provoked by pressure of the bladder.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

700

(C)

THE SOMATIC SOURCES OF DREAMS

If one tries to interest an educated layman in the problem of dreams and, with that end in view, asks him what in his opinion are the sources from which they arise, one finds as a rule that he feels confident of possessing the answer to this part of the question. He thinks at once of the effects produced on the construction of dreams by digestive disturbances or difficulties - ‘dreams come from indigestion’ -, by postures accidentally assumed by the body and by other small incidents during sleep. It never seems to occur to him that when all these factors have been taken into account anything is left over that needs explaining.

I have already discussed at length in the opening chapter (Section C) the part assigned by scientific writers to somatic sources of stimulation in the formation of dreams; so that here I need only recall the results of that enquiry. We found that three different kinds of somatic sources of stimulation were distinguished: objective sensory stimuli arising from external objects, internal states of excitation of the sense organs having only a subjective basis, and somatic stimuli derived from the interior of the body . We noticed moreover that the authorities were inclined to push into the background, or to exclude entirely, any possible psychical sources of dreams, as compared with these somatic stimuli (cf. p. 552). In our examination of the claims made on behalf of somatic sources of stimulation we arrived at the following conclusions. The significance of objective excitations of the sense organs (consisting partly of chance stimuli during sleep and partly of excitations such as cannot fail to impinge even upon a sleeping mind) is established from numerous observations and has been experimentally confirmed (cf. p. 538). The part played by subjective sensory excitations seems to be demonstrated by the recurrence in dreams of hypnagogic sensory images (cf. p. 543 f.). And lastly it appears that, though it is impossible to prove that the images and ideas occurring in our dreams can be traced back to internal somatic stimuli to the extent to which this has been asserted to be the case, nevertheless this origin finds support in the universally recognized influence exercised upon our dreams by states of excitation in our digestive, urinary and sexual organs.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

701

It would appear, then, that ‘nervous stimulation’ and ‘somatic stimulation’ are the somatic sources of dreams - that is to say, according to many writers, their sole source.

On the other hand, we have already found a number of doubts expressed, which seemed to imply a criticism, not indeed of the correctness, but of the adequacy of the theory of somatic stimulation.

However secure the supporters of this theory might feel in its factual basis - especially as far as accidental and external nervous stimuli are concerned, since these can be traced in the content of dreams without any trouble at all - not one of them could fail to perceive that it is impossible to attribute the wealth of ideational material in dreams to external nervous stimuli alone. Miss Mary Whiton Calkins (1893, 312) examined her own and another person’s dreams for six weeks with this question in mind. She found that in only 13.2 per cent and 6.7 per cent of them respectively was it possible to trace the element of external sense-perception; while only two cases in the collection were derivable from organic sensations. Here we have statistical confirmation of what I had been led to suspect from a hasty survey of my own experiences.

It has often been proposed to separate off ‘dreams due to nervous stimulation’ from other forms of dreams as a sub-species that has been thoroughly investigated. Thus Spitta divides dreams into ‘dreams due to nervous stimulation’ and ‘dreams due to association’. This solution was, however, bound to remain unsatisfactory so long as it was impossible to demonstrate the link between the somatic sources of a dream and its ideational content. Thus, in addition to the first objection - the insufficient frequency of external sources of stimulation - there was a second one - the insufficient explanation of dreams afforded by such sources. We have a right to expect the supporters of this theory to give us explanations of two points; first, why it is that the external stimulus of a dream is not perceived in its true character but is invariably misunderstood (Cf. the alarm-clock dreams on p. 541 f.); and secondly, why it is that the reaction of the perceiving mind to these misunderstood stimuli should lead to results of such unpredictable variety.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

702

By way of answer to these questions, Strümpell (1877, 108 f.) tells us that, because the mind is withdrawn from the external world during sleep, it is unable to give a correct interpretation of objective sensory stimuli and is obliged to construct illusions on the basis of what is in many respects an indeterminate impression. To quote his own words: ‘As soon as a sensation or complex of sensations or a feeling or a psychical process of any kind arises in the mind during sleep as a result of an external or internal nervous stimulus and is perceived by the mind, that process calls up sensory images from the circle of experiences left over in the mind from the waking state - that is to say, earlier perceptions - which are either bare or accompanied by their appropriate psychical values. The process surrounds itself, as it were, with a larger or smaller number of images of this kind and through them the impression derived from the nervous stimulus acquires its psychical value. We speak here (just as we usually do in the case of waking behaviour) of the sleeping mind "interpreting" the impressions made by the nervous stimulus. The outcome of this interpretation is what we describe as a "dream due to nervous stimulation", that is, a dream whose components are determined by a nervous stimulus producing its psychical effects in the mind according to the laws of reproduction.’

Wundt is saying something essentially identical with this theory when he asserts that the ideas occurring in dreams are derived, for the most part at least, from sensory stimuli, including especially coenaesthetic sensations, and are for that reason mainly imaginative illusions and probably only to a small extent pure mnemic ideas intensified into hallucinations. Strümpell (1877, 84) has hit upon an apt simile for the relation which subsists on this theory between the contents of a dream and its stimuli, when he writes that ‘it is as though the ten fingers of a man who knows nothing of music were wandering over the keys of a piano’. Thus a dream is not, on this view, a mental phenomenon based on psychical motives, but the outcome of a physiological stimulus which is expressed in psychical symptoms because the apparatus upon which the stimulus impinges is capable of no other form of expression. A similar presupposition also underlies, for instance, the famous analogy by means of which Meynert attempted to explain obsessive ideas: the analogy of a clock-face on which certain figures stand out by being more prominently embossed than the rest.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

703

However popular the theory of the somatic stimulation of dreams may have become and however attractive it may seem, its weak point is easily displayed. Every somatic dream stimulus which requires the sleeping mental apparatus to interpret it by the construction of an illusion may give rise to an unlimited number of such attempts at interpretation - that is to say, it may be represented in the content of the dream by an immense variety of ideas.¹  But the theory put forward by Strümpell and Wundt is incapable of producing any motive governing the relation between an external stimulus and the dream-idea chosen for its interpretation - is incapable, that is, of explaining what Lipps (1883, 170) describes as the ‘remarkable choice often made’ by these stimuli ‘in the course of their productive activity’. Objections have further been raised against the presupposition upon which the whole theory of illusion is based - the presupposition that the sleeping mind is incapable of recognizing the true nature of objective sensory stimuli. Burdach, the physiologist, showed us long ago that even in sleep the mind is very well able to interpret correctly the sense impressions that reach it and to react in accordance with that correct interpretation; for he recalled the fact that particular sense impressions which seem important to the sleeper can be excepted from the general neglect to which such impressions are subjected during sleep (as in the case of a nursing mother or wet-nurse and her charge), and that a sleeper is much more certain to be woken by the sound of his own name than by any indifferent auditory impression - all of which implies that the mind distinguishes between sensations during sleep (cf. p. 562). Burdach went on to infer from these observations that what we must presume during the state of sleep is not an incapacity to interpret sensory stimuli but a lack of interest in them. The same arguments which were used by Burdach in 1830 were brought forward once more without any modifications by Lipps in 1883 in his criticism of the theory of somatic stimulation. Thus the mind seems to behave like the sleeper in the anecdote. When someone asked him if he was asleep, he replied ‘No’. But when his questioner went on to say; ‘Then lend me ten florins’, he took refuge in a subterfuge and replied: ‘I’m asleep.’

¹ [Footnote added 1914]: Mourly Vold has produced a two-volume work containing detailed and precise reports of a series of experimentally produced dreams. I should recommend a study of this work to anyone who wishes to convince himself of how little light is thrown on the content of individual dreams by the conditions of the experiments described in it and of how little help in general is afforded by such experiments towards an understanding of the problems of dreams.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

704

The inadequacy of the theory of the somatic stimulation of dreams can be demonstrated in other ways. Observation shows that external stimuli do not necessarily compel me to dream, even though such stimuli appear in the content of my dream when and if I do dream. Supposing, let us say, that I am subjected to a tactile stimulus while I am asleep. A variety of different reactions are then open to me. I may disregard it, and when I wake up I may find, for instance, that my leg is uncovered or that there is some pressure on my arm; pathology provides very numerous instances in which various powerfully exciting sensory and motor stimuli can remain without effect during sleep. Or again, I may be aware of the sensation in my sleep - I may be aware of it, as one might say, ‘through’ my sleep -(which is what happens as a rule in the case of painful stimuli) but without my weaving the pain into a dream. And thirdly, I may react to the stimulus by waking up so as to get rid of it.¹ It is only as a fourth possibility that the nervous stimulus may cause me to dream. Yet the other possibilities are realized at least as frequently as this last one of constructing a dream. And this could not happen unless the motive for dreaming lay elsewhere than in somatic sources of stimulation.

Certain other writers - Scherner and Volkelt, the philosopher, who adopted Scherner’s views - formed a just estimate of the gaps which I have here indicated in the explanation of dreams as being due to somatic stimulation. These writers attempted to define more precisely the mental activities which lead to the production of such variegated dream-images from the somatic stimuli; in other words, they sought to regard dreaming once again as something essentially mental - as a psychical activity. Scherner did not merely depict the psychical characteristics unfolded in the production of dreams in terms charged with poetic feeling and glowing with life; he believed, too, that he had discovered the principle according to which the mind deals with the stimuli presented to it. On his view, the dream-work, when the imagination is set free from the shackles of daytime, seeks to give a symbolic representation of the nature of the organ from which the stimulus arises and of the nature of the stimulus itself. Thus he provides a kind of ‘dream-book’ to serve as a guide to the interpretation of dreams, which makes it possible to deduce from the dream-images inferences as to the somatic feelings, the state of the organs and the character of the stimuli concerned. ‘Thus the image of a cat expresses a state of angry ill-temper, and the image of a smooth and lightly-coloured loaf of bread stands for physical nudity.’ The human body as a whole is pictured by the dream-imagination as a house and the separate organs of the body by portions of a house. In ‘dreams with a dental stimulus’, an entrance-hall with a high, vaulted roof corresponds to the oral cavity and a staircase to the descent from the throat to the oesophagus. ‘In dreams due to headaches, the top of the head is represented by the ceiling of a room covered with disgusting, toad-like spiders.’ A variety of such symbols are employed by dreams to represent the same organ. ‘Thus the breathing lung will be symbolically represented by a blazing furnace, with flames roaring with a sound like the passage of air; the heart will be represented by hollow boxes or baskets, the bladder by round, bag-shaped objects or, more generally, by hollow ones.’ ‘It is of special importance that at the end of a dream the organ concerned or its function is often openly revealed, and as a rule in relation to the dreamer’s own body. Thus a dream with a dental stimulus usually ends by the dreamer picturing himself pulling a tooth out of his mouth.’

¹ [Footnote added 1919:] Cf. Landauer (1918) on behaviour during sleep. Anyone can observe persons asleep carrying out actions which obviously have a meaning. A man asleep is not reduced to complete idiocy; on the contrary, he is capable of logical and deliberate acts.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

705

This theory of dream-interpretation cannot be said to have been very favourably received by other writers on the subject. Its main feature seems to be its extravagance; and there has even been hesitation in recognizing such justification as, in my opinion, it can lay claim to. As will have been seen, it involves a revival of dream-interpretation by means of symbolism - the same method that was employed in antiquity, except that the field from which interpretations are collected is restricted within the limits of the human body. Its lack of any technique of interpreting that can be grasped scientifically must greatly narrow the application of Scherner’s theory. It seems to leave the door open to arbitrary interpretations, especially as in its case, too, the same stimulus can be represented in the dream content in a variety of different ways. Thus even Scherner’s disciple, Volkelt, found himself unable to confirm the view that the body was represented by a house. Objections are also bound to arise from the fact that once again the mind is saddled with the dream-work as a useless and aimless function; for, according to the theory we are discussing, the mind is content with making phantasies about the stimulus with which it is occupied, without the remotest hint at anything in the nature of disposing of the stimulus.

There is one particular criticism, however, which is gravely damaging to Scherner’s theory of the symbolization of somatic stimuli. These stimuli are present at all times and it is generally held that the mind is more accessible to them during sleep than when it is awake. It is difficult to understand, then, why the mind does not dream continuously all through the night, and, indeed, dream every night of all the organs. An attempt may be made to avoid this criticism by adding the further condition that in order to arouse dream-activity it is necessary for special excitations to proceed from the eyes, ears, teeth, intestines, etc. But the difficulty then arises of proving the objective nature of such increases of stimulus - which is only possible in a small number of cases. If dreams of flying are a symbolization of the rising and sinking of the lobes of the lungs, then, as Strümpell has already pointed out, either such dreams would have to be much more frequent than they are or it would be necessary to prove an increase in the activity of breathing in the course of them. There is a third possibility, which is the most probable of all, namely that special motives may be temporarily operative which direct the attention to visceral sensations that are uniformly present at all times. This possibility, however, carries us beyond the scope of Scherner’s theory.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

706

The value of the views put forward by Scherner and Volkelt lies in the fact that they draw attention to a number of characteristics of the content of dreams which call for explanation and seem to promise fresh discoveries. It is perfectly true that dreams contain symbolizations of bodily organs and functions, that water in a dream often points to a urinary stimulus, and that the male genitals can be represented by an upright stick or a pillar, and so on. In the case of dreams in which the field of vision is full of movement and bright colours, in contrast to the drabness of other dreams, it is scarcely possible not to interpret them as ‘dreams with a visual stimulus’; nor can one dispute the part played by illusions in the case of dreams characterized by noise and a confusion of voices. Scherner reports a dream of two rows of pretty, fair-haired boys standing opposite each other on a bridge, and of their attacking each other and then going back to their original position, till at last the dreamer saw himself sitting down on a bridge and pulling a long tooth out of his jaw. Similarly Volkelt reports a dream in which two rows of drawers in a cupboard played a part and which once more ended with the dreamer pulling out a tooth. Dream-formations such as these, which are recorded in great numbers by the two authors, forbid our dismissing Scherner’s theory as an idle invention without looking for its kernel of truth. The task, then, that faces us is to find an explanation of another kind for the supposed symbolization of what is alleged to be a dental stimulus.

Throughout the whole of this discussion of the theory of the somatic sources of dreams I have refrained from making use of the argument based upon my dream-analyses. If it can be proved, by a procedure which other writers have not employed upon their dream-material, that dreams possess a value of their own as psychical acts, that wishes are the motive for their construction and that experiences of the preceding day provide the immediate material for their content, then any other theory of dreams, which neglects so important a procedure of research and accordingly represents dreams as a useless and puzzling psychical reaction to somatic stimuli, stands condemned without there being any necessity for specific criticisms. Otherwise - and this seems highly improbable - there would have to be two quite different kinds of dreaming, one of which has come only under my observation and the other only under that of the earlier authorities. All that remains, therefore, is to find a place in my theory of dreams for the facts upon which the current theory of the somatic stimulation of dreams is based.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

707

We have already taken the first step in this direction by advancing the thesis (see p. 666 f.) that the dream-work is under the necessity of combining into a unity all instigations to dreaming which are active simultaneously. We found that, when two or more experiences capable of creating an impression are left over from the previous day, the wishes derived from them are combined in a single dream, and similarly that the psychically significant impressions and the indifferent experiences from the previous day are brought together in the dream-material, provided always that it is possible to set up communicating ideas between them. Thus a dream appears to be a reaction to everything that is simultaneously present in the sleeping mind as currently active material. So far as we have hitherto analysed the material of dreams, we have seen it as a collection of psychical residues and memory-traces, to which (on account of the preference shown for recent and infantile material) we have been led to attribute a hitherto indefinable quality of being ‘currently active’. We can foresee, then, without any great difficulty, what will happen if fresh material in the form of sensations is added during sleep to these currently active memories. It is once again owing to the fact of their being currently active that these sensory excitations are of importance for the dream; they are united with the other currently active psychical material to furnish what is used for the construction of the dream. To put it another way, stimuli arising during sleep are worked up into a wish-fulfilment the other constituents of which are the familiar psychical ‘day’s residues’. This combination need not occur; as I have already pointed out, there is more than one way of reacting to a somatic stimulus during sleep. When it does occur, it means that it has been possible to find ideational material to serve as the content of the dream of such a sort as to be able to represent both kinds of source of the dream - the somatic and the psychical.

The essential nature of the dream is not altered by the fact of somatic material being added to its psychical sources: a dream remains the fulfilment of a wish, no matter in what way the expression of that wish-fulfilment is determined by the currently active material.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

708

I am prepared to leave room at this point for the operation of a number of special factors which can lend a varying importance to external stimuli in relation to dreams. As I picture it, a combination of individual factors, physiological and accidental, produced by the circumstances of the moment, is what determines how a person shall behave in particular cases of comparatively intense objective stimulation during sleep. The habitual or accidental depth of his sleep, taken in conjunction with the intensity of the stimulus, will make it possible in one case for him to suppress the stimulus so that his sleep is not interrupted and in another case will compel him to wake up or will encourage an attempt to overcome the stimulus by weaving it into a dream. In accordance with these various possible combinations, external objective stimuli will find expression in dreams with greater or less frequency in one person than in another. In my own case, since I am an excellent sleeper and obstinately refuse to allow anything to disturb my sleep, it very rarely happens that external causes of excitation find their way into my dreams; whereas psychical motives obviously cause me to dream very easily. In fact I have only noted a single dream in which an objective and painful source of stimulus is recognizable; and it will be most instructive to examine the effect which the external stimulus produced in this particular dream.

I was riding on a grey horse, timidly and awkwardly to begin with, as though I were only reclining upon it. I met one of my colleagues, P., who was sitting high on a horse, dressed in a tweed suit, and who drew my attention to something (probably to my bad seat). I now began to find myself sitting more and more firmly and comfortably on my highly intelligent horse, and noticed that I was feeling quite at home up there. My saddle was a kind of bolster, which completely filled the space between its neck and crupper. In this way I rode straight in between two vans. After riding some distance up the street, I turned round and tried to dismount, first in front of a small open chapel that stood in the street frontage. Then I actually did dismount in front of another chapel that stood near it. My hotel was in the same street; I might have let the horse go to it on its own, but I preferred to lead it there. It was as though I should have felt ashamed to arrive at it on horseback. A hotel ‘boots’ was standing in front of the hotel; he showed me a note of mine that had been found, and laughed at me over it. In the note was written, doubly underlined: ‘No food’ and then another remark (indistinct) such as ‘No work’, together with a vague idea that I was in a strange town in which I was doing no work.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

709

It would not be supposed at first sight that this dream originated under the influence, or rather under the compulsion, of a painful stimulus. But for some days before I had been suffering from boils which made every movement a torture; and finally a boil the size of an apple had risen at the base of my scrotum, which caused me the most unbearable pain with every step I took. Feverish lassitude, loss of appetite and the hard work with which I nevertheless carried on - all these had combined with the pain to depress me. I was not properly capable of discharging my medical duties. There was, however, one activity for which, in view of the nature and situation of my complaint, I should certainly have been less fitted than for any other, and that was - riding. And this was precisely the activity in which the dream landed me: it was the most energetic denial of my illness that could possibly be imagined. I cannot in fact ride, nor have I, apart from this, had dreams of riding. I have only sat on a horse once in my life and that was without a saddle, and I did not enjoy it. But in this dream I was riding as though I had no boil on my perineum - or rather because I wanted not to have one. My saddle, to judge from its description, was the poultice which had made it possible for me to fall asleep. Under its assuaging influence I had probably been unaware of my pain during the first hours of sleep. The painful feelings had then announced themselves and sought to wake me; where upon the dream came and said soothingly: ‘No! Go on sleeping! There’s no need to wake up. You haven’t got a boil; for you’re riding on a horse, and it’s quite certain that you couldn’t ride if you had a boil in that particular place.’ And the dream was successful. The pain was silenced, and I went on sleeping.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

710

But the dream was not content with ‘suggesting away’ my boil by obstinately insisting upon an idea that was inconsistent with it and so behaving like the hallucinatory delusion of the mother who had lost her child or the merchant whose losses had robbed him of his fortune.¹ The details of the sensation which was being repudiated and of the picture which was employed in order to repress that sensation also served the dream as a means of connecting other material that was currently active in my mind with the situation in the dream and of giving that material representation. I was riding on a grey horse, whose colour corresponded precisely to the pepper-and-salt colour of the suit my colleague P. was wearing when I had last met him in the country. The cause of my boils had been ascribed to my eating highly-spiced food - an aetiology that was at least preferable to the sugar which might also occur to one in connection with boils. My friend P. liked to ride the high horse over me ever since he had taken over one of my women patients on whom I had pulled off some remarkable feats. (In the dream I began by riding tangentially - like the feat of a trick rider.) But in fact, like the horse in the anecdote of the Sunday horseman, this patient had taken me wherever she felt inclined. Thus the horse acquired the symbolic meaning of a woman patient. (It was highly intelligent in the dream.) ‘I felt quite at home up there’ referred to the position I had occupied in this patient’s house before I was replaced by P. Not long before, one of my few patrons among the leading physicians in this city had remarked to me in connection with this same house: ‘You struck me as being firmly in the saddle there.’ It was a remarkable feat, too, to be able to carry on my psychotherapeutic work for eight or ten hours a day while I was having so much pain. But I knew that I could not go on long with my peculiarly difficult work unless I was in completely sound physical health; and my dream was full of gloomy allusions to the situation in which I should then find myself. (The note which neurasthenics bring with them to show the doctor; no work, no food.) In the course of further interpretation I saw that the dream-work had succeeded in finding a path from the wishful situation of riding to some scenes of quarrelling from my very early childhood which must have occurred between me and a nephew of mine, a year my senior, who was at present living in England. Furthermore, the dream had derived some of its elements from my travels in Italy: the street in the dream was composed of impressions of Verona and Siena. A still deeper interpretation led to sexual dream-thoughts, and I recalled the meaning which references to Italy seem to have had in the dreams of a woman patient who had never visited that lovely country: ‘gen Italien [to Italy]’ - ‘Genitalien [genitals]’; and this was connected, too, with the house in which I had preceded my friend P. as physician, as well as with the situation of my boil.

¹ Cf. the passage in Griesinger and my remarks in my second paper on the neuro-psychoses of defence (Freud, 1896b).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

711

In another dream I similarly succeeded in warding off a threatened interruption of my sleep which came this time from a sensory stimulus. In this case it was only by chance, however, that I was able to discover the link between the dream and its accidental stimulus and thus to understand the dream. One morning at the height of summer, while I was staying at a mountain resort in the Tyrol, I woke up knowing I had had a dream that the Pope was dead. I failed to interpret this dream - a non-visual one - and only remembered as part of its basis that I had read in a newspaper a short time before that his Holiness was suffering from a slight indisposition. In the course of the morning, however, my wife asked me if I had heard the frightful noise made by the pealing of bells that morning. I had been quite unaware of them, but I now understood my dream. It had been a reaction on the part of my need for sleep to the noise with which the pious Tyrolese had been trying to wake me. I had taken my revenge on them by drawing the inference which formed the content of the dream, and I had then continued my sleep without paying any more attention to the noise.

The dreams quoted in earlier chapters included several which might serve as instances of the working-over of such so-called nervous stimuli. My dream of drinking water in great gulps is an example. The somatic stimulus was apparently its only source, and the wish derived from the sensation (the thirst, that is) was apparently its only motive. The case is similar with other simple dreams in which a somatic stimulus seems able by itself to construct a wish. The dream of the woman patient who threw off the cooling apparatus from her cheek during the night presents an unusual method of reacting to a painful stimulus with a wish-fulfilment: it appears as though the patient succeeded temporarily in making herself analgesic, while ascribing her pains to someone else.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

712

My dream of the three Fates was clearly a hunger dream. But it succeeded in shifting the craving for nourishment back to a child’s longing for his mother’s breast, and it made use of an innocent desire as a screen for a more serious one which could not be so openly displayed. My dream about Count Thun showed how an accidental physical need can be linked up with the most intense (but at the same time the most intensely suppressed) mental impulses. And a case such as that related by Garnier (1872, 1, 476) of how the First Consul wove the noise of an exploding bomb into a battle dream before he woke up from it reveals with quite special clarity the nature of the sole motive that leads mental activity to concern itself with sensations during sleep. A young barrister, fresh from his first important bankruptcy proceedings, who dropped asleep one afternoon, behaved in just the same way as the great Napoleon. He had a dream of a certain G. Reich of Husyatin whom he had come across during a bankruptcy case; the name ‘Husyatin’ kept on forcing itself on his notice, till he woke up and found that his wife (who was suffering from a bronchial catarrh) was having a violent fit of coughing [in German ‘husten’].

Let us compare this dream of the first Napoleon (who, incidentally, was an extremely sound sleeper) with that of the sleepy student who was roused by his landlady and told that it was time to go to the hospital, and who proceeded to dream that he was in bed at the hospital and then slept on, under the pretext that as he was already in the hospital there was no need for him to get up and go there. This latter dream was clearly a dream of convenience. The dreamer admitted his motive for dreaming without any disguise; but at the same time he gave away one of the secrets of dreaming in general. All dreams are in a sense dreams of convenience: they serve the purpose of prolonging sleep instead of waking up. Dreams are the GUARDIANS of sleep and not its disturbers. We shall have occasion elsewhere to justify this view of them in relation to awakening factors of a psychical kind; but we are already in a position to show that it is applicable to the part played by objective external stimuli. Either the mind pays no attention at all to occasions for sensation during sleep - if it is able to do this despite the intensity of the stimuli and the significance which it knows attaches to them; or it makes use of a dream in order to deny the stimuli; or, thirdly, if it is obliged to recognize them, it seeks for an interpretation of them which will make the currently active sensation into a component part of a situation which is wished for and which is consistent with sleeping. The currently active sensation is woven into a dream in order to rob it of reality. Napoleon could sleep on - with a conviction that what was trying to disturb him was only a dream-memory of the thunder of the guns at Arcole.¹

¹ The two sources from which I know this dream do not agree in their account of it.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

713

Thus the wish to sleep (which the conscious ego is concentrated upon, and which, together with the dream-censorship and the ‘secondary revision’ which I shall mention later, constitute the conscious ego’s share in dreaming) must in every case be reckoned as one of the motives for the formation of dreams, and every successful dream is a fulfilment of that wish. We shall discuss elsewhere the relations subsisting between this universal, invariably present and unchanging wish to sleep and the other wishes, of which now one and now another is fulfilled by the content of the dream. But we have found in the wish to sleep the factor that is able to fill the gap in the theory of Strümpell and Wundt and to explain the perverse and capricious manner in which external stimuli are interpreted. The correct interpretation, which the sleeping mind is perfectly capable of making, would involve an active interest and would require that sleep should be brought to an end; for that reason, of all the possible interpretations, only those are admitted which are consistent with the absolute censorship exercised by the wish to sleep. ‘It is the nightingale and not the lark.’ For if it were the lark it would mean the end of the lovers’ night. Among the interpretations of the stimulus which are accordingly admissible, that one is then selected which can provide the best link with the wishful impulses lurking in the mind. Thus everything is unambiguously determined and nothing is left to arbitrary decision. The misinterpretation is not an illusion but, as one might say, an evasion. Here once again, however, just as when, in obedience to the dream-censorship, a substitution is effected by displacement, we have to admit that we are faced by an act which deviates from normal psychical processes.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

714

When external nervous stimuli and internal somatic stimuli are intense enough to force psychical attention to themselves, then - provided that their outcome is dreaming and not waking up - they serve as a fixed point for the formation of a dream, a nucleus in its material; a wish-fulfilment is then looked for that shall correspond to this nucleus, just as (see above) intermediate ideas are looked for between two psychical dream stimuli. To that extent it is true that in a number of dreams the content of the dream is dictated by the somatic element. In this extreme instance it may even happen that a wish which is not actually a currently active one is called up for the sake of constructing a dream. A dream, however, has no alternative but to represent a wish in the situation of having been fulfilled; it is, as it were, faced with the problem of looking for a wish which can be represented as fulfilled by the currently active sensation. If this immediate material is of a painful or distressing kind, that does not necessarily mean that it cannot be used for the construction of a dream. The mind has wishes at its disposal whose fulfilment produces unpleasure. This seems self-contradictory; but it becomes intelligible when we take into account the presence of two psychical agencies and a censorship between them.

As we have seen, there are ‘repressed’ wishes in the mind, which belong to the first system and whose fulfilment is opposed by the second system. In saying that there are such wishes I am not making a historical statement to the effect that they once existed and were later abolished. The theory of repression, which is essential to the study of the psychoneuroses, asserts that these repressed wishes still exist - though there is a simultaneous inhibition which holds them down. Linguistic usage hits the mark in speaking of the ‘suppression’ of these impulses. The psychical arrangements that make it possible for such impulses to force their way to realization remain in being and in working order. Should it happen, however, that a suppressed wish of this kind is carried into effect, and that its inhibition by the second system  (the system that is admissible to consciousness) is defeated, this defeat finds expression as unpleasure. In conclusion: if sensations of an unpleasurable nature arising from somatic sources occur during sleep, the dream-work makes use of that event in order to represent - subject to the continuance of the censorship to a greater or less degree - the fulfilment of some wish which is normally suppressed.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

715

This state of affairs is what makes possible one group of anxiety-dreams - dream-structures unpropitious from the point of view of the wish-theory. A second group of them reveal a different mechanism; for anxiety in dreams may be psychoneurotic anxiety: it may originate from psychosexual excitations - in which case the anxiety corresponds to repressed libido. Where this is so, the anxiety, like the whole anxiety-dream, has the significance of a neurotic symptom, and we come near the limit at which the wish-fulfilling purpose of dreams breaks down. But there are some anxiety dreams in which the feeling of anxiety is determined somatically - where, for instance, there happens to be difficulty in breathing owing to disease of the lungs or heart - and in such cases the anxiety is exploited in order to assist the fulfilment in the form of dreams of energetically suppressed wishes which, if they had been dreamt about for psychical reasons, would have led to a similar release of anxiety. But there is no difficulty in reconciling these two apparently different groups. In both groups of dreams two psychical factors are involved: an inclination towards an affect and an ideational content; and these are intimately related to each other. If one of them is currently active, it calls up the other even in a dream; in the one case the somatically determined anxiety calls up the suppressed ideational content, and in the other the ideational content with its accompanying sexual excitation, having been set free from repression, calls up a release of anxiety. We can put it that in the first case a somatically determined affect is given a psychical interpretation; while in the other case, though the whole is psychically determined, the content which had been suppressed is easily replaced by a somatic interpretation appropriate to anxiety. The difficulties which all this offers to our understanding have little to do with dreams: they arise from the fact that we are here touching on the problem of the generation of anxiety and on the problem of repression.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

716

There can be no doubt that physical coenaesthesia is among the internal somatic stimuli which can dictate the content of dreams. It can do so, not in the sense that it can provide the dream’s content, but in the sense that it can force upon the dream-thoughts a choice of the material to be represented in the content by putting forward one part of the material as being appropriate to its own character and by holding back another part. Apart from this, the coenaesthetic feelings left over from the preceding day link themselves up, no doubt, with the psychical residues which have such an important influence on dreams. This general mood may persist unchanged in the dream or it may be mastered, and thus, if it is unpleasurable, may be changed into its opposite.

Thus, in my opinion, somatic sources of stimulation during sleep (that is to say, sensations during sleep), unless they are of unusual intensity, play a similar part in the formation of dreams to that played by recent but indifferent impressions left over from the previous day. I believe, that is, that they are brought in to help in the formation of a dream if they fit in appropriately with the ideational content derived from the dream’s psychical sources, but otherwise not. They are treated like some cheap material always ready to hand, which is employed whenever it is needed, in contrast to a precious material which itself prescribes the way in which it shall be employed. If, to take a simile, a patron of the arts brings an artist some rare stone, such as a piece of onyx, and asks him to create a work of art from it, then the size of the stone, its colour and markings, help to decide what head or what scene shall be represented in it. Whereas in the case of a uniform and plentiful material such as marble or sandstone, the artist merely follows some idea that is present in his own mind. It is only in this way, so it seems to me, that we can explain the fact that dream-content provided by somatic stimuli of no unusual intensity fails to appear in every dream or every night.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] Rank has shown in a number of papers that certain arousal dreams produced by organic stimuli (dreams with a urinary stimulus and dreams of emission or orgasm) are especially suited to demonstrate the struggle between the need to sleep and the claims of organic needs, as well as the influence of the latter upon the content of dreams.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

717

I can perhaps best illustrate my meaning by an example, which, moreover, will bring us back to dream-interpretation.

One day I had been trying to discover what might be the meaning of the feelings of being inhibited, of being glued to the spot, of not being able to get something done, and so on, which occur so often in dreams and are so closely akin to feelings of anxiety. That night I had the following dream:

I was very incompletely dressed and was going upstairs from a flat on the ground floor to a higher storey. I was going up three steps at a time and was delighted at my agility. Suddenly I saw a maid-servant coming down the stairs - coming towards me, that is. I felt ashamed and tried to hurry, and at this point the feeling of being inhibited set in: I was glued to the steps and unable to budge from the spot.

ANALYSIS. -The situation in the dream is taken from everyday reality. I occupy two flats in a house in Vienna, which are connected only by the public staircase. My consulting-room and study are on the upper ground floor and my living rooms are one storey higher. When, late in the evening, I have finished my work down below, I go up the stairs to my bedroom. On the evening before I had the dream, I had in fact made this short journey in rather disordered dress - that is to say, I had taken off my collar and tie and cuffs. In the dream this had been turned into a higher degree of undress, but, as usual, an indeterminate one. I usually go upstairs two or three steps at a time; and this was recognized in the dream itself as a wish-fulfilment: the ease with which I achieved it reassured me as to the functioning of my heart. Further, this method of going upstairs was an effective contrast to the inhibition in the second half of the dream. It showed me - what needed no proving - that dreams find no difficulty in representing motor acts carried out to perfection. (One need only recall dreams of flying.)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

718

The staircase up which I was going, however, was not the one in my house. At first I failed to recognize it and it was only the identity of the person who met me that made it clear to me what locality was intended. This person was the maid-servant of the old lady whom I was visiting twice a day in order to give her injections; and the staircase, too, was just like the one in her house which I had to go up twice a day.

Now how did this staircase and this female figure come to be in my dream? The feeling of shame at not being completely dressed is no doubt of a sexual nature; but the maid-servant whom I dreamt about was older than I am, surly and far from attractive. The only answer to the problem that occurred to me was this. When I paid my morning visits to this house I used as a rule to be seized with a desire to clear my throat as I went up the stairs and the product of my expectoration would fall on the staircase. For on neither of these floors was there a spittoon; and the view I took was that the cleanliness of the stairs should not be maintained at my expense but should be made possible by the provision of a spittoon. The concierge, an equally elderly and surly woman (but of cleanly instincts, as I was prepared to admit), looked at the matter in a different light. She would lie in wait for me to see whether I should again make free of the stairs, and, if she found that I did, I used to hear her grumbling audibly; and for several days afterwards she would omit the usual greeting when we met. The day before I had the dream the concierge’s party had received a reinforcement in the shape of the maid-servant. I had, as usual, concluded my hurried visit to the patient, when the servant stopped me in the hall and remarked: ‘You might have wiped your boots, doctor, before you came into the room to-day. You’ve made the red carpet all dirty again with your feet.’ This was the only claim the staircase and the maid-servant had to appearing in my dream.

There was an internal connection between my running up the stairs and my spitting on the stairs. Pharyngitis as well as heart trouble are both regarded as punishments for the vice of smoking. And on account of that habit my reputation for tidiness was not of the highest with the authorities in my own house any more than in the other; so that the two were fused into one in the dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

719

I must postpone my further interpretation of this dream till I can explain the origin of the typical dream of being incompletely dressed. I will only point out as a provisional conclusion to be drawn from the present dream that a sensation of inhibited movement in dreams is produced whenever the particular context requires it. The cause of this part of the dream’s content cannot have been that some special modification in my powers of movement had occurred during my sleep, since only a moment earlier I had seen myself (almost as though to confirm this fact) running nimbly up the stairs.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

720

(D)

TYPICAL DREAMS

We are not in general in a position to interpret another person’s dream unless he is prepared to communicate to us the unconscious thoughts that lie behind its content. The practical applicability of our method of interpreting dreams is in consequence severely restricted.¹ We have seen that, as a general rule, each person is at liberty to construct his dream-world according to his individual peculiarities and so to make it unintelligible to other people. It now appears, however, that, in complete contrast to this, there are a certain number of dreams which almost everyone has dreamt alike and which we are accustomed to assume must have the same meaning for everyone. A special interest attaches, moreover, to these typical dreams because they presumably arise from the same sources in every case and thus seem particularly well qualified to throw light on the sources of dreams.

It is therefore with quite particular anticipations that we shall attempt to apply our technique of dream-interpretation to these typical dreams; and it is with great reluctance that we shall have to confess that our art disappoints our expectations precisely in relation to this material. If we attempt to interpret a typical dream, the dreamer fails as a rule to produce the associations which would in other cases have led us to understand it, or else his associations become obscure and insufficient so that we cannot solve our problem with their help. We shall learn in a later portion of this work why this is so and how we can make up for this defect in our technique. My readers will also discover why it is that at the present point I am able to deal only with a few members of the group of typical dreams and must postpone my consideration of the rest until this later point in my discussion.

¹ [Footnote added 1925:] This assertion that our method of interpreting dreams cannot be applied unless we have access to the dreamer’s associative material requires supplementing: our interpretative activity is in one instance independent of these associations - if, namely, the dreamer has employed symbolic elements in the content of the dream. In such case we make use of what is, strictly speaking, a second and auxiliary method of dream-interpretation. (See below.)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

721

(a)  EMBARRASING DREAMS OF BEING NAKED

Dreams of being naked or insufficiently dressed in the presence of strangers sometimes occur with the additional feature of there being a complete absence of any such feeling as shame on the dreamer’s part. We are only concerned here, however, with those dreams of being naked in which one does feel shame and embarrassment and tries to escape or hide, and is then overcome by a strange inhibition which prevents one from moving and makes one feel incapable of altering one’s distressing situation. It is only with this accompaniment that the dream is typical; without it, the gist of its subject-matter may be included in every variety of context or may be ornamented with individual trimmings. Its essence lies in a distressing feeling in the nature of shame and in the fact that one wishes to hide one’s nakedness, as a rule by locomotion, but finds one is unable to do so. I believe the great majority of my readers will have found themselves in this situation in dreams.

The nature of the undress involved is customarily far from clear. The dreamer may say ‘I was in my chemise’, but this is rarely a distinct picture. The kind of undress is usually so vague that the description is expressed as an alternative: ‘I was in my chemise or petticoat.’ As a rule the defect in the dreamer’s toilet is not so grave as to appear to justify the shame to which it gives rise. In the case of a man who has worn the Emperor’s uniform, nakedness is often replaced by some breach of the dress regulations: ‘I was walking in the street without my sabre and saw some officers coming up’, or ‘I was without my necktie’, or ‘I was wearing civilian check trousers’, and so on.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

722

The people in whose presence one feels ashamed are almost always strangers, with their features left indeterminate. In the typical dream it never happens that the clothing which causes one so much embarrassment is objected to or so much as noticed by the onlookers. On the contrary, they adopt indifferent or (as I observed in one particularly clear dream) solemn and stiff expressions of face. This is a suggestive point.

The embarrassment of the dreamer and the indifference of the onlookers offer us, when taken together, a contradiction of the kind that is so common in dreams. It would after all be more in keeping with the dreamer’s feelings if strangers looked at him in astonishment and derision or with indignation. But this objectionable feature of the situation has, I believe, been got rid of by wish-fulfilment, whereas some force has led to the retention of the other features; and the two portions of the dream are consequently out of harmony with each other. We possess an interesting piece of evidence that the dream in the form in which it appears - partly distorted by wish-fulfilment - has not been rightly understood. For it has become the basis of a fairy tale which is familiar to us all in Hans Andersen’s version, The Emperor’s New Clothes, and which has quite recently been put into verse by Ludwig Fulda in his Der Talisman. Hans Andersen’s fairy tale tells us how two impostors weave the Emperor a costly garment which, they say, will be visible only to persons of virtue and loyalty. The Emperor walks out in this invisible garment, and all the spectators, intimidated by the fabric’s power to act as a touchstone, pretend not to notice the Emperor’s nakedness.

This is just the situation in our dream. It is hardly rash to assume that the unintelligibility of the dream’s content, as it exists in the memory has led to its being recast in a form designed to make sense of the situation. That situation, however, is in the process deprived of its original meaning and put to extraneous uses. But, as we shall see later, it is a common thing for the conscious thought-activity of a second psychical system to misunderstand the content of a dream in this way, and this misunderstanding must be regarded as one of the factors in determining the final form assumed by dreams. Moreover we shall learn that similar misunderstandings (taking place, once again, within one and the same psychical personality) play a major part in the construction of obsessions and phobias.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

723

In the case of our dream we are in a position to indicate the material upon which the misinterpretation is based. The impostor is the dream and the Emperor is the dreamer himself; the moralizing purpose of the dream reveals an obscure knowledge of the fact that the latent dream-content is concerned with forbidden wishes that have fallen victim to repression. For the context in which dreams of this sort appear during my analyses of neurotics leaves no doubt that they are based upon memories from earliest childhood. It is only in our childhood that we are seen in inadequate clothing both by members of our family and by strangers - nurses, maid-servants, and visitors; and it is only then that we feel no shame at our nakedness.¹ We can observe how undressing has an almost intoxicating effect on many children even in their later years, instead of making them feel ashamed. They laugh and jump about and slap themselves, while their mother, or whoever else may be there, reproves them and says: ‘Ugh! Shocking! You mustn’t ever do that!’ Children frequently manifest a desire to exhibit. One can scarcely pass through a country village in our part of the world without meeting some child of two or three who lifts up his little shirt in front of one - in one’s honour, perhaps. One of my patients has a conscious memory of a scene in his eighth year, when at bed-time he wanted to dance into the next room where his little sister slept, dressed in his night-shirt, but was prevented by his nurse. In the early history of neurotics an important part is played by exposure to children of the opposite sex; in paranoia delusions of being observed while dressing and undressing are to be traced back to experiences of this kind; while among persons who have remained at the stage of perversion there is one class in which this infantile impulse has reached the pitch of a symptom - the class of ‘exhibitionists’.

¹ A child plays a part in the fairy tale as well; for it was a small child who suddenly exclaimed: ‘But he has nothing on!’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

724

When we look back at this unashamed period of childhood it seems to us a Paradise; and Paradise itself is no more than a group phantasy of the childhood of the individual. That is why mankind were naked in Paradise and were without shame in one another’s presence; till a moment arrived when shame and anxiety awoke, expulsion followed, and sexual life and the tasks of cultural activity began. But we can regain this Paradise every night in our dreams. I have already expressed a suspicion that impressions of earliest childhood (that is, from the prehistoric epoch until about the end of the third year of life) strive to achieve reproduction, from their very nature and irrespectively perhaps of their actual content, and that their repetition constitutes the fulfilment of a wish. Thus dreams of being naked are dreams of exhibiting.¹

The core of a dream of exhibiting lies in the figure of the dreamer himself (not as he was as a child but as he appears at the present time) and his inadequate clothing (which emerges indistinctly, whether owing to superimposed layers of innumerable later memories of being in undress or as a result of the censorship). Added to these are the figures of the people in whose presence the dreamer feels ashamed. I know of no instance in which the actual spectators of the infantile scene of exhibiting have appeared in the dream; a dream is scarcely ever a simple memory. Curiously enough, the people upon whom our sexual interest was directed in childhood are omitted in all the reproductions which occur in dreams, in hysteria and in obsessional neurosis. It is only in paranoia that these spectators reappear and, though they remain invisible, their presence is inferred with fanatical conviction. What takes their place in dreams - ‘a lot of strangers’ who take no notice of the spectacle that is offered - is nothing more nor less than the wishful contrary of the single familiar individual before whom the dreamer exposed himself. Incidentally, ‘a lot of strangers’ frequently appear in dreams in many other connections, and they always stand as the wishful contrary of ‘secrecy’. It is to be noticed that even in paranoia, where the original state of things is restored, this reversal into a contrary is observed. The subject feels that he is no longer alone, he has no doubt that he is being observed, but the observers are ‘a lot of strangers’ whose identity is left curiously vague.

¹ [Footnote added 1911:] Ferenczi has recorded a number of interesting dreams of being naked dreamt by women. There was no difficulty in tracing these back to the infantile desire to exhibit; but they differed in some respects from the ‘typical’ dreams of being naked which I have discussed in the text.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

725

In addition to this, repression plays a part in dreams of exhibiting; for the distress felt in such dreams is a reaction on the part of the second system against the content of the scene of exhibiting having found expression in spite of the ban upon it. If the distress was to be avoided, the scene should never have been revived.

We shall return later to the feeling of being inhibited. It serves admirably in dreams to represent a conflict in the will or a negative. The unconscious purpose requires the exhibiting to proceed; the censorship demands that it shall be stopped.

There can be no doubt that the connections between our typical dreams and fairy tales and the material of other kinds of creative writing are neither few nor accidental. It sometimes happens that the sharp eye of a creative writer has an analytic realization of the process of transformation of which he is habitually no more than the tool. If so, he may follow the process in a reverse direction and so trace back the imaginative writing to a dream. One of my friends has drawn my attention to the following passage in Gottfried Keller’s Der grüner Heinrich: ‘I hope, my dear Lee, that you may never learn from your own personal experience the peculiar and piquant truth of the plight of Odysseus when he appeared, naked and covered with mud, before the eyes of Nausicaä and her maidens! Shall I tell you how that can happen? Let us look into our example. If you are wandering about in a foreign land, far from your home and from all that you hold dear, if you have seen and heard many things, have known sorrow and care, and are wretched and forlorn, then without fail you will dream one night that you are coming near to your home; you will see it gleaming and shining in the fairest colours, and the sweetest, dearest and most beloved forms will move towards you. Then suddenly you will become aware that you are in rags, naked and dusty. You will be seized with a nameless shame and dread, you will seek to find covering and to hide yourself, and you will awake bathed in sweat. This, so long as men breathe, is the dream of the unhappy wanderer; and Homer has evoked the picture of his plight from the deepest and eternal nature of man.’

The deepest and eternal nature of man, upon whose evocation in his hearers the poet is accustomed to rely, lies in those impulses of the mind which have their roots in a childhood that has since become prehistoric. Suppressed and forbidden wishes from childhood break through in the dream behind the exile’s unobjectionable wishes which are capable of entering consciousness; and that is why the dream which finds concrete expression in the legend of Nausicaä ends as a rule as an anxiety-dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

726

My own dream (recorded on p. 717) of running upstairs and of soon afterwards finding myself glued to the steps was equally a dream of exhibiting, since it bears the essential marks of being one. It should be possible, therefore, to trace it back to experiences during my childhood, and if these could be discovered they should enable us to judge how far the maid-servant’s behaviour to me - her accusing me of dirtying the carpet - helped to give her her place in my dream. I can, as it happens, provide the necessary particulars. In a psycho-analysis one learns to interpret propinquity in time as representing connection in subject-matter. Two thoughts which occur in immediate sequence without any apparent connection are in fact part of a single unity which has to be discovered; in just the same way, if I write an ‘a’ and a ‘b’ in succession, they have to be pronounced as a single syllable ‘ab’. The same is true of dreams. The staircase dream to which I have referred was one of a series of dreams; and I understood the interpretation of the other members of the series. Since this particular dream was surrounded by the others it must have dealt with the same subject. Now these other dreams were based on a recollection of a nurse in whose charge I had been from some date during my earliest infancy till I was two and a half. I even retain an obscure conscious memory of her. According to what I was told not long ago by my mother, she was old and ugly, but very sharp and efficient. From what I can infer from my own dreams her treatment of me was not always excessive in its amiability and her words could be harsh if I failed to reach the required standard of cleanliness. And thus the maid servant, since she had undertaken the job of carrying on this educational work, acquired the right to be treated in my dream as a reincarnation of the prehistoric old nurse. It is reasonable to suppose that the child loved the old woman who taught him these lessons, in spite of her rough treatment of him.¹

¹ Here is an ‘over-interpretation’ of the same dream. Since ‘spuken [haunting]’ is an activity of spirits, ‘spucken [spitting] on the stairs’ might be loosely rendered as ‘esprit d’escalier’. This last phrase is equivalent to lack of ready repartee [‘Schlagfertigkeit’, literally ‘readiness to strike’] - a failing to which I must in fact plead guilty. Was my nurse, I wonder, equally wanting in that quality?

The Interpretation Of Dreams

727

(b)  DREAMS OF THE DEATH OF PERSONS OF WHOM THE DREAMER IS FOND

Another group of dreams which may be described as typical are those containing the death of some loved relative - for instance, of a parent, of a brother or sister, or of a child. Two classes of such dreams must at once be distinguished: those in which the dreamer is unaffected by grief, so that on awakening he is astonished at his lack of feeling, and those in which the dreamer feels deeply pained by the death and may even weep bitterly in his sleep.

We need not consider the dreams of the first of these classes, for they have no claim to be regarded as ‘typical’. If we analyse them, we find that they have some meaning other than their apparent one, and that they are intended to conceal some other wish. Such was the dream of the aunt who saw her sister’s only son lying in his coffin. (See p. 647.)  It did not mean that she wished her little nephew dead; as we have seen, it merely concealed a wish to see a particular person of whom she was fond and whom she had not met for a long time - a person whom she had once before met after a similarly long interval beside the coffin of another nephew. This wish, which was the true content of the dream, gave no occasion for grief, and no grief, therefore, was felt in the dream. It will be noticed that the affect felt in the dream belongs to its latent and not to its manifest content, and that the dream’s affective content has remained untouched by the distortion which has overtaken its ideational content.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

728

Very different are the dreams of the other class - those in which the dreamer imagines the death of a loved relative and is at the same time painfully affected. The meaning of such dreams, as their content indicates, is a wish that the person in question may die. And since I must expect that the feelings of all of my readers and any others who have experienced similar dreams will rebel against my assertion, I must try to base my evidence for it on the broadest possible foundation.

I have already discussed a dream which taught us that the wishes which are represented in dreams as fulfilled are not always present-day wishes. They may also be wishes of the past which have been abandoned, overlaid and repressed, and to which we have to attribute some sort of continued existence only because of their re-emergence in a dream. They are not dead in our sense of the word but only like the shades in the Odyssey, which awoke to some sort of life as soon as they had tasted blood. In the dream of the dead child in the ‘case’ (p. 154) what was involved was a wish which had been an immediate one fifteen years earlier and was frankly admitted as having existed at that time. I may add - and this may not be without its bearing upon the theory of dreams - that even behind this wish there lay a memory from the dreamer’s earliest childhood. When she was a small child - the exact date could not be fixed with certainty - she had heard that her mother had fallen into a deep depression during the pregnancy of which she had been the fruit and had passionately wished that the child she was bearing might die. When the dreamer herself was grown-up and pregnant, she merely followed her mother’s example.

If anyone dreams, with every sign of pain, that his father or mother or brother or sister has died, I should never use the dream as evidence that he wishes for that person’s death of at the present time. The theory of dreams does not require as much as that; it is satisfied with the inference that this death has been wished for at some time or other during the dreamer’s childhood. I fear, however, that this reservation will not appease the objectors; they will deny the possibility of their ever having had such a thought with just as much energy as they insist that they harbour no such wishes now. I must therefore reconstruct a portion of the vanished mental life of children on the basis of the evidence of the present.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] Cf. my ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year Old Boy’ (1909b) and my paper ‘On the Sexual Theories of Children’ (1908c).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

729

Let us first consider the relation of children to their brothers and sisters. I do not know why we presuppose that that relation must be a loving one; for instances of hostility between adult brothers and sisters force themselves upon everyone’s experience and we can often establish the fact that the disunity originated in childhood or has always existed. But it is further true that a great many adults, who are on affectionate terms with their brothers and sisters and are ready to stand by them to-day, passed their childhood on almost unbroken terms of enmity with them. The elder child ill-treats the younger, maligns him and robs him of his toys; while the younger is consumed with impotent rage against the elder, envies and fears him, or meets his oppressor with the first stirrings of a love of liberty and a sense of justice. Their parents complain that the children do not get on with one another, but cannot discover why. It is easy to see that the character of even a good child is not what we should wish to find it in an adult. Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them - especially as against the rivals, other children, and first and foremost as against their brothers and sisters. But we do not on that account call a child ‘bad’, we call him ‘naughty’; he is no more answerable for his evil deeds in our judgement than in the eyes of the law. And it is right that this should be so; for we may expect that, before the end of the period which we count as childhood, altruistic impulses and morality will awaken in the little egoist and (to use Meynert’s terms) a secondary ego will overlay and inhibit the primary one. It is true, no doubt, that morality does not set in simultaneously all along the line and that the length of non-moral childhood varies in different individuals. If this morality fails to develop, we like to talk of ‘degeneracy’, though what in fact faces us is an inhibition in development. After the primary character has already been overlaid by later development, it can still be laid bare again, at all events in part, in cases of hysterical illness. There is a really striking resemblance between what is known as the hysterical character and that of a naughty child. Obsessional neurosis, on the contrary, corresponds to a super-morality imposed as a reinforcing weight upon fresh stirrings of the primary character.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

730

Many people, therefore, who love their brothers and sisters and would feel bereaved if they were to die, harbour evil wishes against them in their unconscious, dating from earlier times; and these are capable of being realized in dreams.

It is of quite particular interest, however, to observe the behaviour of small children up to the age of two or three or a little older towards their younger brothers and sisters. Here, for instance, was a child who had so far been the only one; and now he was told that the stork had brought a new baby. He looked the new arrival up and down and then declared decisively: ‘The stork can take him away again!’¹ I am quite seriously of the opinion that a child can form a just estimate of the set-back he has to expect at the hands of the little stranger. A lady of my acquaintance, who is on very good terms to-day with a sister four years her junior, tells me that she greeted the news of her first arrival with this qualification: ‘But all the same I shan’t give her my red cap!’ Even if a child only comes to realize the situation later on, his hostility will date from that moment. I know of a case in which a little girl of less than three tried to strangle an infant in its cradle because she felt that its continued presence boded her no good. Children at that time of life are capable of jealousy of any degree of intensity and obviousness. Again, if it should happen that the baby sister does in fact disappear after a short while, the elder child will find the whole affection of the household once more concentrated upon himself. If after that the stork should bring yet another baby, it seems only logical that the little favourite should nourish a wish that his new competitor may meet with the same fate as the earlier one, so that he himself may be as happy as he was originally and during the interval.² Normally, of course, this attitude of a child towards a younger brother or sister is a simple function of the difference between their ages. Where the gap in time is sufficiently long, an elder girl will already begin to feel the stirring of her maternal instincts towards the helpless new born baby.

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] The three-and-a-half-year-old Hans (whose phobia was the subject of the analysis mentioned in the preceding footnote) exclaimed shortly after the birth of a sister, while he was suffering from a feverish sore throat: ‘I don’t want a baby sister!’ During his neurosis eighteen months later he frankly confessed to a wish that his mother might drop the baby into the bath so that the would die. At the same time, Hans was a good-natured and affectionate child, who soon grew fond of this same sister and particularly enjoyed taking her under his wing.

² [Footnote added 1914:] Deaths that are experienced in this way in childhood may quickly be forgotten in the family; but psycho-analytic research shows that they have a very important influence on subsequent neuroses.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

731

Hostile feelings towards brothers and sisters must be far more frequent in childhood than the unseeing eye of the adult observer can perceive.¹

In the case of my own children, who followed each other in rapid succession, I neglected the opportunity of carrying out observations of this kind; but I am now making up for this neglect by observing a small nephew, whose autocratic rule was upset, after lasting for fifteen months, by the appearance of a female rival. I am told, it is true, that the young man behaves in the most chivalrous manner to his little sister, that he kisses her hand and strokes her; but I have been able to convince myself that even before the end of his second year he made use of his powers of speech for the purpose of criticizing someone whom he could not fail to regard as superfluous. Whenever the conversation touched upon her he used to intervene in it and exclaim petulantly: ‘Too ‘ickle! too ‘ickle!’ During the last few months the baby’s growth has made enough progress to place her beyond this particular ground for contempt, and the little boy has found a different basis for his assertion that she does not deserve so much attention: at every suitable opportunity he draws attention to the fact that she has no teeth.² We all of us recollect how the eldest girl of another of my sisters, who was then a child of six, spent half an hour in insisting upon each of her aunts in succession agreeing with her: ‘Lucie can’t understand that yet, can she?’ she kept asking. Lucie was her rival - two and a half years her junior.

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] Since this was written, a large number of observations have been made and recorded in the literature of psycho-analysis upon the originally hostile attitude of children towards their brothers and sisters and one of their parents. The author and poet Spitteler has given us a particularly genuine and naïve account of this childish attitude, derived from his own childhood: ‘Moreover there was a second Adolf there: a little creature who they alleged was my brother, though I could not see what use he was and still less why they made as much fuss of him as of me myself. I was sufficient so far as I was concerned; why should I want a brother? And he was not merely useless, he was positively in the way. When I pestered my grandmother, he wanted to pester her too. When I was taken out in the perambulator, he sat opposite to me and took up half the space, so that we were bound to kick each other with our feet.’

² [Footnote added 1909:] Little Hans, when he was three and a half, gave vent to a crushing criticism of his sister in the same words. It was because of her lack of teeth, he supposed, that she was unable to talk.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

732

In none of my women patients, to take an example, have I failed to come upon this dream of the death of a brother or sister, which tallies with an increase in hostility. I have only found a single exception; and it was easy to interpret this as a confirmation of the rule. On one occasion during an analytic session I was explaining this subject to a lady, since in view of her symptom its discussion seemed to me relevant. To my astonishment she replied that she had never had such a dream. Another dream, however, occurred to her, which ostensibly had no connection with the topic - a dream which she had first dreamt when she was four years old and at that time the youngest of the family, and which she had dreamt repeatedly since: A whole crowd of children - all her brothers, sisters and cousins of both sexes - were romping in a field. Suddenly they all grew wings, flew away and disappeared. She had no idea what this dream meant; but it is not hard to recognize that in its original form it had been a dream of the death of all her brothers and sisters, and had been only slightly influenced by the censorship. I may venture to suggest the following analysis. On the occasion of the death of one of this crowd of children (in this instance the children of two brothers had been brought up together as a single family) the dreamer, not yet four years old at the time, must have asked some wise grown-up person what became of children when they were dead. The reply must have been: ‘They grow wings and turn into little angels.’ In the dream which followed upon this piece of information all the dreamer’s brothers and sisters had wings like angels and - which is the main point - flew away. Our little baby-killer was left alone, strange to say: the only survivor of the whole crowd! We can hardly be wrong in supposing that the fact of the children romping in field before flying away points to butterflies. It is as though the child was led by the same chain of thought as the peoples of antiquity to picture the soul as having a butterfly’s wings.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

733

At this point someone will perhaps interrupt: ‘Granted that children have hostile impulses towards their brothers and sisters, how can a child’s mind reach such a pitch of depravity as to wish for the death of his rivals or of playmates stronger than himself, as though the death penalty were the only punishment for every crime?’ Anyone who talks like this has failed to bear in mind that a child’s idea of being ‘dead’ has nothing much in common with ours apart from the word. Children know nothing of the horrors of corruption, of freezing in the ice-cold grave, of the terrors of eternal nothingness - ideas which grown-up people find it so hard to tolerate, as is proved by all the myths of a future life. The fear of death has no meaning to a child; hence it is that he will play with the dreadful word and use it as a threat against a playmate: ‘If you do that again, you’ll die, like Franz!’ Meanwhile the poor mother gives a shudder and remembers, perhaps, that the greater half of the human race fail to survive their childhood years. It was actually possible for a child, who was over eight years old at the time, coming home from a visit to the Natural History Museum, to say to his mother: ‘I’m so fond of you, Mummy: when you die I’II have you stuffed and I’II keep you in this room, so that I can see you all the time.’ So little resemblance is there between a child’s idea of being dead and our own!¹

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] I was astonished to hear a highly intelligent boy often remark after the sudden death of his father: ‘I know father’s dead, but what I can’t understand is why he doesn’t come home to supper.' - [Added 1919:] Further material on this subject will be found in the first volumes of the periodical Imago, under the standing rubric of ‘Vom wahren Wesen der Kinderseele'.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

734

To children, who, moreover, are spared the sight of the scenes of suffering which precede death, being ‘dead’ means approximately the same as being ‘gone’ - not troubling the survivors any longer. A child makes no distinction as to how this absence is brought about: whether it is due to a journey, to a dismissal, to an estrangement, or to death.¹ If, during a child’s prehistoric epoch, his nurse has been dismissed, and if soon afterwards his mother has died, the two events are superimposed on each other in a single series in his memory as revealed in analysis. When people are absent, children do not miss them with any great intensity; many mothers have learnt this to their sorrow when, after being away from home for some weeks on a summer holiday, they are met on their return by the news that the children have not once asked after their mummy. If their mother does actually make the journey to that ‘undiscover’d country, from whose bourn no traveller returns’, children seem at first to have forgotten her, and it is only later on that they begin to call their dead mother to mind.

Thus if a child has reasons for wishing the absence of another, there is nothing to restrain him from giving his wish the form of the other child being dead. And the psychical reaction to dreams containing death-wishes proves that, in spite of the different content of these wishes in the case of children, they are nevertheless in some way or other the same as wishes expressed in the same terms by adults.

¹ [Footnote added 1919:] An observation made by a parent who had a knowledge of psycho-analysis caught the actual moment at which his highly intelligent four-year-old daughter perceived the distinction between being ‘gone’ and being ‘dead’. The little girl had been troublesome at meal-time and noticed that one of the maids at the pension where they were staying was looking at her askance. ‘I wish Josefine was dead’, was the child’s comment to her father. ‘Why dead?’ enquired her father soothingly; ‘wouldn’t it do if she went away?’ ‘No’, replied the child; ‘then she’d come back again.’ The unbounded self-love (the narcissism) of children regards any interference as an act of lèse majesté; and their feelings demand (like the Draconian code) that any such crime shall receive the one form of punishment which admits of no degrees.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

735

If, then, a child’s death-wishes against his brothers and sisters are explained by the childish egoism which makes him regard them as his rivals, how are we to explain his death-wishes against his parents, who surround him with love and fulfil his needs and whose preservation that same egoism should lead him to desire?

A solution of this difficulty is afforded by the observation that dreams of the death of parents apply with preponderant frequency to the parent who is of the same sex as the dreamer: that men, that is, dream mostly of their father’s death and women of their mother’s. I cannot pretend that this is universally so, but the preponderance in the direction I have indicated is so evident that it requires to be explained by a factor of general importance.¹ It is as though - to put it bluntly - a sexual preference were making itself felt at an early age: as though boys regarded their fathers and girls their mothers as their rivals in love, whose elimination could not fail to be to their advantage.

Before this idea is rejected as a monstrous one, it is as well in this case, too, to consider the real relations obtaining - this time between parents and children. We must distinguish between what the cultural standards of filial piety demand of this relation and what everyday observation shows it in fact to be. More than one occasion for hostility lies concealed in the relation between parents and children - a relation which affords the most ample opportunities for wishes to arise which cannot pass the censorship.

Let us consider first the relation between father and son. The sanctity which we attribute to the rules laid down in the Decalogue has, I think, blunted our powers of perceiving the real facts. We seem scarcely to venture to observe that the majority of mankind disobey the Fifth Commandment. Alike in the lowest and in the highest strata of human society filial piety is wont to give way to other interests. The obscure information which is brought to us by mythology and legend from the primaeval ages of human society gives an unpleasing picture of the father’s despotic power and of the ruthlessness with which he made use of it. Kronos devoured his children, just as the wild boar devours the sow’s litter; while Zeus emasculated his father² and made himself ruler in his place. The more unrestricted was the rule of the father in the ancient family, the more must the son, as his destined successor, have found himself in the position of an enemy, and the more impatient must he have been to become ruler himself though his father’s death. Even in our middle-class families fathers are as a rule inclined to refuse their sons independence and the means necessary to secure it and thus to foster the growth of the germ of hostility which is inherent in their relation. A physician will often be in a position to notice how a son’s grief at the loss of his father cannot suppress his satisfaction at having at length won his freedom. In our society to-day fathers are apt to cling desperately to what is left of a now sadly antiquated protestas patris familias; and an author who, like Ibsen, brings the immemorial struggle between fathers and sons into prominence in his writings may be certain of producing his effect.

¹ [Footnote added 1925:] The situation is often obscured by the emergence of a self-punitive impulse, which threatens the dreamer, by way of a moral reaction, with the loss of the parent whom he loves.

² [Footnote added 1909:] Or so he is reported to have done according to some myths. According to others, emasculation was only carried out by Kronos on his father Uranus. For the mythological significance of this theme, cf. Rank, 1909, [added 1914:] and Rank, 1912c, Chapter IX, Section 2.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

736

Occasions for conflict between a daughter and her mother arise when the daughter begins to grow up and long for sexual liberty, but finds herself under her mother’s tutelage; while the mother, on the other hand, is warned by her daughter’s growth that the time has come when she herself must abandon her claims to sexual satisfaction.

All of this is patent to the eyes of everyone. But it does not help us in our endeavour to explain dreams of a parent’s death in people whose piety towards their parents has long been unimpeachably established. Previous discussions, moreover, will have prepared us to learn that the death-wish against parents dates back to earliest childhood.

This supposition is confirmed with a certainty beyond all doubt in the case of psychoneurotics when they are subjected to analysis. We learn from them that a child’s sexual wishes - if in their embryonic stage they deserve to be so described - awaken very early, and that a girl’s first affection is for her father and a boy’s first childish desires are for his mother. Accordingly, the father becomes a disturbing rival to the boy and the mother to the girl; and I have already shown in the case of brothers and sisters how easily such feelings can lead to a death-wish. The parents too give evidence as a rule of sexual partiality: a natural predilection usually sees to it that a man tends to spoil his little daughters, while his wife take her sons’ part; though both of them, where their judgement is not disturbed by the magic of sex, keep a strict eye upon their children’s education. The child is very well aware of this partiality and turns against that one of his parents who is opposed to showing it. Being loved by an adult does not merely bring a child the satisfaction of a special need; it also means that he will get what he wants in every other respect as well. Thus he will be following his own sexual instinct and at the same time giving fresh strength to the inclination shown by his parents if his choice between them falls in with theirs.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

737

The signs of these infantile preferences are for the most part overlooked; yet some of them are to be observed even after the first years of childhood. An eight-year-old girl of my acquaintance, if her mother is called away from the table, makes use of the occasion to proclaim herself her successor: ‘I’m going to be Mummy now. Do you want some more greens, Karl? Well, help yourself, then!’ and so on. A particularly gifted and lively girl of four, in whom this piece of child psychology is especially transparent, declared quite openly: ‘Mummy can go away now. Then Daddy must marry me and I’II be his wife.’ Such a wish occurring in a child is not in the least inconsistent with her being tenderly attached to her mother. If a little boy is allowed to sleep beside his mother when his father is away from home, but has to go back to the nursery and to someone of whom he is far less fond as soon as his father returns, he may easily begin to form a wish that his father should always be away, so that he himself could keep his place beside his dear, lovely Mummy. One obvious way of attaining this wish would be if his father were dead; for the child has learnt one thing by experience namely that ‘dead’ people, such as Grandaddy, are always away and never come back.

Though observations of this kind on small children fit in perfectly with the interpretation I have proposed, they do not carry such complete conviction as is forced upon the physician by psycho-analyses of adult neurotics. In the latter case dreams of the sort we are considering are introduced into the analysis in such a context that it is impossible to avoid interpreting them as wishful dreams.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

738

One day one of my women patients was in a distressed and tearful mood. ‘I don’t want ever to see my relations again’, she said, ‘they must think me horrible.’ She then went on, with almost no transition, to say that she remembered a dream, though of course she had no idea what it meant. When she was four years old she had a dream that a lynx or a fox was walking on the roof; then something had fallen down or she had fallen down; and then her mother was carried out of the house dead - and then she wept bitterly. I told her that this dream must mean that when she was a child she had wished she could see her mother dead, and that it must be on account of the dream that she felt her relations must think her horrible. I had scarcely said this when she produced some material which threw light on the dream. ‘Lynx eye’ was a term of abuse that had been thrown at her by a street-urchin when she was a very small child. When she was three years old, a tile off the roof had fallen on her mother’s head and made it bleed violently.

I once had an opportunity of making a detailed study of a young woman who passed through a variety of psychical conditions. Her illness began with a state of confusional excitement during which she displayed a quite special aversion to her mother, hitting and abusing her whenever she came near her bed, while at the same period she was docile and affectionate towards a sister who was many years her senior. This was followed by a state in which she was lucid but somewhat apathetic and suffered from badly disturbed sleep. It was during this phase that I began treating her and analysing her dreams. An immense number of these dreams were concerned, with a greater or less degree of disguise, with the death of her mother: at one time she would be attending an old woman’s funeral, at another she and her sister would be sitting at table dressed in mourning. There could be no question as to the meaning of these dreams. As her condition improved still further, hysterical phobias developed. The most tormenting of these was a fear that something might have happened to her mother. She was obliged to hurry home, wherever she might be, to convince herself that her mother was still alive. This case, taken in conjunction with what I had learnt from other sources, was highly instructive: it exhibited, translated as it were into different languages, the various ways in which the psychical apparatus reacted to one and the same exciting idea. In the confusional state, in which, as I believe, the second psychical agency was overwhelmed by the normally suppressed first one, her unconscious hostility to her mother found a powerful motor expression. When the calmer condition set in, when the rebellion was suppressed and the domination of the censorship re-established, the only region left open in which her hostility could realize the wish for her mother’s death was that of dreaming . When a normal state was still more firmly established, it led to the production of her exaggerated worry about her mother as a hysterical counter-reaction and defensive phenomenon. In view of this it is no longer hard to understand why hysterical girls are so often attached to their mothers with such exaggerated affection.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

739

On another occasion I had an opportunity of obtaining a deep insight into the unconscious mind of a young man whose life was made almost impossible by an obsessional neurosis. He was unable to go out into the street because he was tortured by the fear that he would kill everyone he met. He spent his days in preparing his alibi in case he might be charged with one of the murders committed in the town. It is unnecessary to add that he was a man of equally high morals and education. The analysis (which, incidentally, led to his recovery) showed that the basis of this distressing obsession was an impulse to murder his somewhat over-severe father. This impulse, to his astonishment, had been consciously expressed when he was seven years old, but it had, of course, originated much earlier in his childhood. After his father’s painful illness and death, the patient’s obsessional self-reproaches appeared - he was in his thirty-first year at the time - taking the shape of a phobia transferred on to strangers. A person, he felt, who was capable of wanting to push his own father over a precipice from the top of a mountain was not to be trusted to respect the lives of those less closely related to him; he was quite right to shut himself up in his room.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

740

In my experience, which is already extensive, the chief part in the mental lives of all children who later become psychoneurotics is played by their parents. Being in love with the one parent and hating the other are among the essential constituents of the stock of psychical impulses which is formed at that time and which is of such importance in determining the symptoms of the later neurosis. It is not my belief, however, that psychoneurotics differ sharply in this respect from other human beings who remain normal - that they are able, that is, to create something absolutely new and peculiar to themselves. It is far more probable - and this is confirmed by occasional observations on normal children - that they are only distinguished by exhibiting on a magnified scale feelings of love and hatred to their parents which occur less obviously and less intensely in the minds of most children.

This discovery is confirmed by a legend that has come down to us from classical antiquity: a legend whose profound and universal power to move can only be understood if the hypothesis I have put forward in regard to the psychology of children has an equally universal validity. What I have in mind is the legend of King Oedipus and Sophocles’ drama which bears his name.

Oedipus, son of Laïus, King of Thebes, and of Jocasta, was exposed as an infant because an oracle had warned Laius that the still unborn child would be his father’s murderer. The child was rescued, and grew up as a prince in an alien court, until, in doubts as to his origin, he too questioned the oracle and was warned to avoid his home since he was destined to murder his father and take his mother in marriage. On the road leading away from what he believed was his home, he met King Laïus and slew him in a sudden quarrel. He came next to Thebes and solved the riddle set him by the Sphinx who barred his way. Out of gratitude the Thebans made him their king and gave him Jocasta’s hand in marriage. He reigned long in peace and honour, and she who, unknown to him, was his mother bore him two sons and two daughters. Then at last a plague broke out and the Thebans made enquiry once more of the oracle. It is at this point that Sophocles’ tragedy opens. The messengers bring back the reply that the plague will cease when the murderer of Laïus has been driven from the land.

But he, where is he? Where shall now be read

The fading record of this ancient guilt?

The action of the play consists in nothing other than the process of revealing, with cunning delays and ever-mounting excitement - a process that can be likened to the work of a psycho-analysis - that Oedipus himself is the murderer of Laïus, but further that he is the son of the murdered man and of Jocasta. Appalled at the abomination which he has unwittingly perpetrated, Oedipus blinds himself and forsakes his home. The oracle has been fulfilled.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

741

Oedipus Rex is what is known as a tragedy of destiny. Its tragic effect is said to lie in the contrast between the supreme will of the gods and the vain attempts of mankind to escape the evil that threatens them. The lesson which, it is said, the deeply moved spectator should learn from the tragedy is submission to the divine will and realization of his own impotence. Modern dramatists have accordingly tried to achieve a similar tragic effect by weaving the same contrast into a plot invented by themselves. But the spectators have looked on unmoved while a curse or an oracle was fulfilled in spite of all the efforts of some innocent man: later tragedies of destiny have failed in their effect.

If Oedipus Rex moves a modern audience no less than it did the contemporary Greek one, the explanation can only be that its effect does not lie in the contrast between destiny and human will, but is to be looked for in the particular nature of the material on which that contrast is exemplified. There must be something which makes a voice within us ready to recognize the compelling force of destiny in the Oedipus, while we can dismiss as merely arbitrary such dispositions as are laid down in Die Ahnfrau or other modern tragedies of destiny. And a factor of this kind is in fact involved in the story of King Oedipus. His destiny moves us only because it might have been ours - because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that that is so. King Oedipus, who slew his father Laïus and married his mother Jocasta, merely shows us the fulfilment of our own childhood wishes. But, more fortunate than he, we have meanwhile succeeded, in so far as we have not become psychoneurotics, in detaching our sexual impulses from our mothers and in forgetting our jealousy of our fathers. Here is one in whom these primaeval wishes of our childhood have been fulfilled, and we shrink back from him with the whole force of the repression by which those wishes have since that time been held down within us. While the poet, as he unravels the past, brings to light the guilt of Oedipus, he is at the same time compelling us to recognize our own inner minds, in which those same impulses, though suppressed, are still to be found. The contrast with which the closing Chorus leaves us confronted -

. . . Fix on Oedipus your eyes,

Who resolved the dark enigma, noblest champion and most wise.

Like a star his envied fortune mounted beaming far and wide:

Now he sinks in seas of anguish, whelmed beneath a raging tide . . .

- strikes as a warning at ourselves and our pride, at us who since our childhood have grown so wise and so mighty in our own eyes. Like Oedipus, we live in ignorance of these wishes, repugnant to morality, which have been forced upon us by Nature, and after their revelation we may all of us well seek to close our eyes to the scenes of our childhood.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] None of the findings of psycho-analytic research has provoked such embittered denials, such fierce opposition - or such amusing contortions - on the part of critics as this indication of the childhood impulses towards incest which persist in the unconscious. An attempt has even been made recently to make out, in the face of all experience, that the incest should only be taken as ‘symbolic’. - Ferenczi (1912) has proposed an ingenious ‘over-interpretation’ of the Oedipus myth, based on a passage in one of Schopenhauer’s letters. - [Added 1919:] Later studies have shown that the ‘Oedipus complex’, which was touched upon for the first time in the above paragraphs in the Interpretation of Dreams, throws a light of undreamt-of importance on the history of the human race and the evolution of religion and morality - (See my Totem and Taboo, 1912-13.)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

742

There is an unmistakable indication in the text of Sophocles’ tragedy itself that the legend of Oedipus sprang from some primaeval dream-material which had as its content the distressing disturbance of a child’s relation to his parents owing to the first stirrings of sexuality. At a point when Oedipus, though he is not yet enlightened, has begun to feel troubled by his recollection of the oracle, Jocasta consoles him by referring to a dream which many people dream, though, as she thinks, it has no meaning:

Many a man ere now in dreams hath lain

With her who bare him. He hath least annoy

Who with such omens troubleth not his mind.

To-day, just as then, many men dream of having sexual relations with their mothers, and speak of the fact with indignation and astonishment. It is clearly the key to the tragedy and the complement to the dream of the dreamer’s father being dead. The story of Oedipus is the reaction of the imagination to these two typical dreams. And just as these dreams, when dreamt by adults, are accompanied by feelings of repulsion, so too the legend must include horror and self-punishment. Its further modification originates once again in a misconceived secondary revision of the material, which has sought to exploit it for theological purposes. (Cf. the dream-material in dreams of exhibiting, p. 721 f.) The attempt to harmonize divine omnipotence with human responsibility must naturally fail in connection with this subject-matter just as with any other.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

743

Another of the great creations of tragic poetry, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, has its roots in the same soil as Oedipus Rex. But the changed treatment of the same material reveals the whole difference in the mental life of these two widely separated epochs of civilization: the secular advance of repression in the emotional life of mankind. In the Oedipus the child’s wishful phantasy that underlies it is brought into the open and realized as it would be in a dream. In Hamlet it remains repressed; and - just as in the case of a neurosis - we only learn of its existence from its inhibiting consequences. Strangely enough, the overwhelming effect produced by the more modern tragedy has turned out to be compatible with the fact that people have remained completely in the dark as to the hero’s character. The play is built up on Hamlet’s hesitations over fulfilling the task of revenge that is assigned to him; but its text offers no reasons or motives for these hesitations and an immense variety of attempts at interpreting them have failed to produce a result. According to the view which was originated by Goethe and is still the prevailing one to-day, Hamlet represents the type of man whose power of direct action is paralysed by an excessive development of his intellect. (He is ‘sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.’) According to another view, the dramatist has tried to portray a pathologically irresolute character which might be classed as neurasthenic. The plot of the drama shows us, however, that Hamlet is far from being represented as a person incapable of taking any action. We see him doing so on two occasions: first in a sudden outburst of temper, when he runs his sword through the eavesdropper behind the arras, and secondly in a premeditated and even crafty fashion, when, with all the callousness of a Renaissance prince, he sends the two courtiers to the death that had been planned for himself. What is it, then, that inhibits him in fulfilling the task set him by his father’s ghost? The answer, once again, is that it is the peculiar nature of the task. Hamlet is able to do anything - except take vengeance on the man who did away with his father and took that father’s place with his mother, the man who shows him the repressed wishes of his own childhood realized. Thus the loathing which should drive him on to revenge is replaced in him by self-reproaches, by scruples of conscience, which remind him that he himself is literally no better than the sinner whom he is to punish. Here I have translated into conscious terms what was bound to remain unconscious in Hamlet’s mind; and if any one is inclined to call him a hysteric, I can only accept the fact as one that is implied by my interpretation. The distaste for sexuality expressed by Hamlet in his conversation with Ophelia fits in very well with this: the same distaste which was destined to take possession of the poet’s mind more and more during the years that followed, and which reached its extreme expression in Timon of Athens. For it can of course only be the poet’s own mind which confronts us in Hamlet. I observe in a book on Shakespeare by Georg Brandes (1896) a statement that Hamlet was written immediately after the death of Shakespeare’s father (in 1601), that is, under the immediate impact of his bereavement and, as we may well assume, while his childhood feelings about his father had been freshly revived. It is known, too, that Shakespeare’s own son who died at an early age bore the name of ‘Hamnet’, which is identical with ‘Hamlet’. Just as Hamlet deals with the relation of a son to his parents, so Macbeth (written at approximately the same period) is concerned with the subject of childlessness. But just as all neurotic symptoms, and, for that matter, dreams, are capable of being ‘over-interpreted’ and indeed need to be, if they are to be fully understood, so all genuinely creative writings are the product of more than a single motive and more than a single impulse in the poet’s mind, and are open to more than a single interpretation. In what I have written I have only attempted to interpret the deepest layer of impulses in the mind of the creative writer.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1919:] The above indications of a psycho-analytic explanation of Hamlet have since been amplified by Ernest Jones and defended against the alternative views put forward in the literature of the subject. (See Jones, 1910a .) - [Added 1930:] Incidentally, I have in the meantime ceased to believe that the author of Shakespeare’s works was the man from Stratford. - [Added 1919:] Further attempts at an analysis of Macbeth will be found in a paper of mine and in one by Jekels (1917).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

744

I cannot leave the subject of typical dreams of the death of loved relatives, without adding a few more words to throw light on their significance for the theory of dreams in general. In these dreams we find the highly unusual condition realized of a dream-thought formed by a repressed wish entirely eluding censorship and passing into the dream without modification. There must be special factors at work to make this event possible, and I believe that the occurrence of these dreams is facilitated by two such factors. Firstly, there is no wish that seems more remote from us than this one: ‘we couldn’t even dream’ - so we believe - of wishing such a thing. For this reason the dream-censorship is not armed to meet such a monstrosity, just as Solon’s penal code contained no punishment for parricide. Secondly, in this case the repressed and unsuspected wish is particularly often met half-way by a residue from the previous day in the form of a worry about the safety of the person concerned. This worry can only make its way into the dream by availing itself of the corresponding wish; while the wish can disguise itself behind the worry that has become active during the day. We may feel inclined to think that things are simpler than this and that one merely carries on during the night and in dreams with what one has been turning over in one’s mind during the day; but if so we shall be leaving dreams of the death of people of whom the dreamer is fond completely in the air and without any connection with our explanation of dreams in general, and we shall thus be clinging quite unnecessarily to a riddle which is perfectly capable of solution.

It is also instructive to consider the relation of these dreams to anxiety-dreams. In the dreams we have been discussing, a repressed wish has found a means of evading censorship - and the distortion which censorship involves. The invariable concomitant is that painful feelings are experienced in the dream. In just the same way anxiety-dreams only occur if the censorship has been wholly or partly overpowered; and, on the other hand, the overpowering of the censorship is facilitated if anxiety has already been produced as an immediate sensation arising from somatic sources. We can thus plainly see the purpose for which the censorship exercises its office and brings about the distortion of dreams: it does so in order to prevent the generation of anxiety or other forms of distressing affect.

I have spoken above of the egoism of children’s minds, and I may now add, with a hint at a possible connection between the two facts, that dreams have the same characteristic. All of them are completely egoistic: the beloved ego appears in all of them, even though it may be disguised. The wishes that are fulfilled in them are invariably the ego’s wishes, and if a dream seems to have been provoked by an altruistic interest, we are only being deceived by appearances. Here are a few analyses of instances which seem to contradict this assertion.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

745

I

A child of under four years old reported having dreamt that he had seen a big dish with a big joint of roast meat and vegetables on it. All at once the joint had been eaten up - whole and without being cut up. He had not seen the person who ate it.¹

Who can the unknown person have been whose sumptuous banquet of meat was the subject of the little boy’s dream? His experiences during the dream-day must enlighten us on the subject. By doctor’s orders he had been put on a milk diet for the past few days. On the evening of the dream-day he had been naughty, and as a punishment he had been sent to bed without his supper. He had been through this hunger-cure once before and had been very brave about it. He knew he would get nothing, but would not allow himself to show by so much as a single word that he was hungry. Education had already begun to have an effect on him: it found expression in this dream, which exhibits the beginning of dream-distortion. There can be no doubt that the person whose wishes were aimed at this lavish meal - a meat meal, too - was himself. But since he knew he was not allowed it, he did not venture to sit down to the meal himself, as hungry children do in dreams. (Cf. my little daughter Anna’s dream of strawberries on p. 628.) The person who ate the meal remained anonymous.

II

I dreamt one night that I saw in the window of a book-shop a new volume in one of the series of monographs for connoisseurs which I am in the habit of buying - monographs on great artists, on world history, on famous cities, etc. The new series was called ‘Famous Speakers’ or ‘Speeches’ and its first volume bore the name of Dr. Lecher.

When I came to analyse this, it seemed to me improbable that I should be concerned in my dreams with the fame of Dr. Lecher, the non-stop speaker of the German Nationalist obstructionists in Parliament. The position was that a few days earlier I had taken on some new patients for psychological treatment, and was now obliged to talk for ten or eleven hours every day. So it was I myself who was a non-stop speaker.

¹ The appearance in dreams of things of great size and in great quantities and amounts, and of exaggeration generally, may be another childish characteristic. Children have no more ardent wish than to be big and grown-up and to get as much of things as grown-up people do. They are hard to satisfy, know no such word as `enough’ and insist insatiably on a repetition of things which they have enjoyed or whose taste they liked. It is only the civilizing influence of education that teaches them moderation and how to be content or resigned. Everyone knows that neurotics are equally inclined to be extravagant and immoderate.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

746

III

Another time I had a dream that a man I knew on the staff of the University said to me: ‘My son, the Myops.’ Then followed a dialogue made up of short remarks and rejoinders. After this, however, there was yet a third piece of dream in which I myself and my sons figured. So far as the dream’s latent content was concerned, Professor M. and his son were men of straw - a mere screen for me and my eldest son. I shall have to return to this dream later, on account of another of its features.

IV

The dream which follows is an instance of really low egoistic feelings concealed behind affectionate worry.

My friend Otto was looking ill. His face was brown and he had protruding eyes.

Otto is my family doctor, and I owe him more than I can ever hope to repay: he has watched over my children’s health for many years, he has treated them successfully when they have been ill, and, in addition, whenever circumstances have given him an excuse, he has given them presents. He had visited us on the dream-day, and my wife had remarked that he looked tired and strained. That night I had my dream, which showed him with some of the signs of Basedow’s disease. Anyone who interprets this dream without regard for my rules will conclude that I was worried about my friend’s health and that this worry was realized in the dream. This would not only contradict my assertion that dreams are wish-fulfilments, but my other assertion, too, that they are accessible only to egoistic impulses. But I should be glad if anyone interpreting the dream in this way would be good enough to explain to me why my fears on Otto’s behalf should have lighted on Basedow’s disease - a diagnosis for which his actual appearance gives not the slightest ground. My analysis, on the other hand, brought up the following material from an occurrence six years earlier. A small group of us, which included Professor R., were driving in pitch darkness through the forest of N., which lay some hours’ drive from the place at which we were spending our summer holidays. The coachman, who was not perfectly sober, spilt us, carriage and all, over an embankment, and it was only by a piece of luck that we all escaped injury. We were obliged, however, to spend the night in a neighbouring inn, at which the news of our accident brought us a lot of sympathy. A gentleman, with unmistakable signs of Basedow’s disease - incidentally, just as in the dream, only the brown discoloration of the skin of the face and the protruding eyes, but no goitre - placed himself entirely at our disposal and asked what he could do for us. Professor R. replied in his decisive manner: ‘Nothing except to lend me a night-shirt.’ To which the fine gentleman rejoined: ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t do that’, and left the room.

As I continued my analysis, it occurred to me that Basedow was the name not only of a physician but also of a famous educationalist. (In my waking state I no longer felt quite so certain about this.) But my friend Otto was the person whom I had asked to watch over my children’s physical education, especially at the age of puberty (hence the night-shirt), in case anything happened to me. By giving my friend Otto in the dream the symptoms of our noble helper, I was evidently saying that if anything happened to me he would do just as little for the children as Baron L. had done on that occasion in spite of his kind offers of assistance. This seems to be sufficient evidence of the egoistic lining of the dream.¹

But where was its wish-fulfilment to be found? Not in my avenging myself on my friend Otto, whose fate it seems to be to be ill-treated in my dreams; but in the following consideration. At the same time as I represented Otto in the dream as Baron L., I had identified myself with someone else, namely Professor R.; for just as in the anecdote R. had made a request to Baron L., so I had made a request to Otto. And that is the point. Professor R., with whom I should really not venture to compare myself in the ordinary way, resembled me in having followed an independent path outside the academic world and had only achieved his well-merited title late in life. So once again I was wanting to be a Professor! Indeed the words ‘late in life’ were themselves a wish-fulfilment; for they implied that I should live long enough to see my boys through the age of puberty myself.

¹ [Footnote added 1911:] When Ernest Jones was giving a scientific lecture on the egoism of dreams before an American audience, a learned lady objected to this unscientific generalization, saying that the author of the present work could only judge of the dreams of Austrians and had no business to speak of the dreams of Americans. So far as she was concerned, she was certain that all her dreams were strictly altruistic.- [Added 1925:] By way of excuse for this patriotic lady, I may remark that the statement that dreams are entirely egoistic must not be misunderstood. Since anything whatever that occurs in preconscious thought can pass into a dream (whether into its actual content or into the latent dream-thoughts) that possibility is equally open to altruistic impulses. In the same way, an affectionate or erotic impulse towards someone else, if it is present in the unconscious, can appear in a dream. The truth in the assertion made in the text above is thus restricted to the fact that among the unconscious instigators of a dream we very frequently find egoistic impulses which seem to have been overcome in waking life.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

747

I have no experience of my own of other kinds of typical dreams, in which the dreamer finds himself flying through the air to the accompaniment of agreeable feelings or falling with feelings of anxiety; and whatever I have to say on the subject is derived from psycho-analyses. The information provided by the latter forces me to conclude that these dreams, too, reproduce impressions of childhood; they relate, that is, to games involving movement, which are extraordinarily attractive to children. There cannot be a single uncle who has not shown a child how to fly by rushing across the room with him in his outstretched arms, or who has not played at letting him fall by riding him on his knee and then suddenly stretching out his leg, or by holding him up high and then suddenly pretending to drop him. Children are delighted by such experiences and never tire of asking to have them repeated, especially if there is something about them that causes a little fright or giddiness. In after years they repeat these experiences in dreams; but in the dreams they leave out the hands which held them up, so that they float or fall unsupported. The delight taken by young children in games of this kind (as well as in swings and see-saws) is well known; and when they come to see acrobatic feats in a circus their memory of such games is revived.¹ Hysterical attacks in boys sometimes consist merely in reproductions of feats of this kind, carried out with great skill. It not uncommonly happens that these games of movement, though innocent in themselves, give rise to sexual feelings.² Childish ‘romping’, if I may use a word which commonly describes all such activities, is what is being repeated in dreams of flying, falling, giddiness and so on; while the pleasurable feelings attached to these experiences are transformed into anxiety. But often enough, as every mother knows, romping among children actually ends in squabbling and tears.

Thus I have good grounds for rejecting the theory that what provokes dreams of flying and falling is the state of our tactile feelings during sleep or sensations of the movement of our lungs, and so on. In my view these sensations are themselves reproduced as part of the memory to which the dream goes back: that is to say, they are part of the content of the dream and not its source.

¹ [Footnote added 1925:] Analytic research has shown us that in addition to pleasure derived from the organs concerned, there is another factor which contributes to the delight taken by children in acrobatic performances and to their repetition in hysterical attacks. This other factor is a memory-image, often unconscious, of an observation of sexual intercourse, whether between human beings or animals.

² A young medical colleague, who is quite free from any kind of nervous trouble, has given me the following information on this point: ‘I know from my own experience that in my childhood I had a peculiar sensation in my genitals when I was on a swing and especially when the downward motion reached its greatest momentum. And though I cannot say I really enjoyed this sensation I must describe it as a pleasurable one.’ - Patients have often told me that the first pleasurable erections that they can remember occurred in their boyhood while they were climbing about. - Psycho-analysis makes it perfectly certain that the first sexual impulses frequently have their roots in games involving romping and wrestling played during childhood.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

748

I cannot, however, disguise from myself that I am unable to produce any complete explanation of this class of typical dreams. My material has left me in the lurch precisely at this point. I must, however, insist upon the general assertion that all the tactile and motor sensations which occur in these typical dreams are called up immediately there is any psychical reason for making use of them and that they can be disregarded when no such need for them arises. I am also of the opinion that the relation of these dreams to infantile experiences has been established with certainty from the indications I have found in the analyses of psychoneurotics. I am not able to say, however, what other meanings may become attached to the recollection of such sensations in the course of later life - different meanings, perhaps, in every individual case, in spite of the typical appearance of the dreams; and I should be glad to be able to fill up the gap by a careful analysis of clear instances. If anyone feels surprised that, in spite of the frequency precisely of dreams of flying, falling and pulling out teeth, etc., I should be complaining of lack of material on this particular topic, I must explain that I myself have not experienced any dreams of the kind since I turned my attention to the subject of dream-interpretation. The dreams of neurotics, moreover, of which I might otherwise avail myself, cannot always be interpreted not, at least, in many cases, so as to reveal the whole of their concealed meaning; a particular psychical force, which was concerned with the original constructing of the neurosis and is brought into operation once again when attempts are made at resolving it, prevents us from interpreting such dreams down to their last secret.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

749

(g)  EXAMINATION DREAMS

Everyone who has passed the matriculation examination at the end of his school studies complains of the obstinacy with which he is pursued by anxiety-dreams of having failed, or of being obliged to take the examination again, etc. In the case of those who have obtained a University degree this typical dream is replaced by another one which represents them as having failed in their University Finals; and it is in vain that they object, even while they are still asleep, that for years they have been practising medicine or working as University lecturers or heads of offices. The ineradicable memories of the punishments that we suffered for our evil deeds in childhood become active within us once more and attach themselves to the two crucial points in our studies - the ‘dies irae, dies illa’ of our stiffest examinations. The ‘examination anxiety’ of neurotics owes its intensification to these same childhood fears. After we have ceased to be school-children, our punishments are no longer inflicted on us by our parents or by those who brought us up or later by our schoolmasters. The relentless causal chains of real life take charge of our further education, and now we dream of Matriculation or Finals (and who has not trembled on those occasions, even if he was well-prepared for the examination?) whenever, having done something wrong or failed to do something properly, we expect to be punished by the event - whenever, in short, we feel the burden of responsibility.

For a further explanation of examination dreams I have to thank an experienced colleague, who once declared at a scientific meeting that so far as he knew dreams of Matriculation only occur in people who have successfully passed it and never in people who have failed in it. It would seem, then, that anxious examination dreams (which, as has been confirmed over and over again, appear when the dreamer has some responsible activity ahead of him next day and is afraid there may be a fiasco) search for some occasion in the past in which great anxiety has turned out to be unjustified and has been contradicted by the event. This, then, would be a very striking instance of the content of a dream being misunderstood by the waking agency. What is regarded as an indignant protest against the dream: ‘But I’m a doctor, etc., already!’ would in reality be the consolation put forward by the dream, and would accordingly run: ‘Don’t be afraid of tomorrow! Just think how anxious you were before your Matriculation, and yet nothing happened to you. You’re a doctor, etc., already.’ And the anxiety which is attributed to the dream would really have arisen from the day’s residues.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

750

Such tests as I have been able to make of this explanation on myself and on other people, though they have not been sufficiently numerous, have confirmed its validity. For instance, I myself failed in Forensic Medicine in my Finals; but I have never had to cope with this subject in dreams, whereas I have quite often been examined in Botany, Zoology or Chemistry. I went in for the examination in these subjects with well-founded anxiety; but, whether by the grace of destiny or of the examiners, I escaped punishment. In my dreams of school examinations, I am invariably examined in History, in which I did brilliantly - though only, it is true, because my kindly master (the one-eyed benefactor of another dream, see p. 531) did not fail to notice that on the paper of questions which I handed him back I had run my finger-nail through the middle one of the three questions included, to warn him not to insist upon that particular one. One of my patients, who decided not to sit for his Matriculation the first time but passed it later, and who subsequently failed in his army examination and never got a commission, has told me that he often dreams of the former of these examinations but never of the latter.

The interpretation of examination dreams is faced by the difficulty which I have already referred to as characteristic of the majority of typical dreams. It is but rarely that the material with which the dreamer provides us in associations is sufficient to interpret the dream. It is only by collecting a considerable number of examples of such dreams that we can arrive at a better understanding of them. Not long ago I came to the conclusion that the objection, ‘You’re a doctor, etc., already’, does not merely conceal a consolation but also signifies a reproach. This would have run: ‘You’re quite old now, quite far advanced in life, and yet you go on doing these stupid, childish things.’ This mixture of self-criticism and consolation would thus correspond to the latent content of examination dreams. If so, it would not be surprising if the self-reproaches for being ‘stupid’ and ‘childish’ in these last examples referred to the repetition of reprehensible sexual acts.

Wilhelm Stekel, who put forward the first interpretation of dreams of Matriculation [‘Matura’], was of the opinion that they regularly related to sexual tests and sexual maturity. My experience has often confirmed his view.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

751

CHAPTER VI

THE DREAM-WORK

Every attempt that has hitherto been made to solve the problem of dreams has dealt directly with their manifest content as it is presented in our memory. All such attempts have endeavoured to arrive at an interpretation of dreams from their manifest content or (if no interpretation was attempted) to form a judgement as to their nature on the basis of that same manifest content. We are alone in taking something else into account. We have introduced a new class of psychical material between the manifest content of dreams and the conclusions of our enquiry: namely, their latent content, or (as we say) the ‘dream-thoughts’, arrived at by means of our procedure. It is from these dream-thoughts and not from a dream’s manifest content that we disentangle its meaning. We are thus presented with a new task which had no previous existence: the task, that is, of investigating the relations between the manifest content of dreams and the latent dream-thoughts, and of tracing out the processes by which the latter have been changed into the former.

The dream-thoughts and the dream-content are presented to us like two versions of the same subject-matter in two different languages. Or, more properly, the dream-content seems like a transcript of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression, whose characters and syntactic laws it is our business to discover by comparing the original and the translation. The dream-thoughts are immediately comprehensible, as soon as we have learnt them. The dream-content, on the other hand, is expressed as it were in a pictographic script, the characters of which have to be transposed individually into the language of the dream-thoughts. If we attempted to read these characters according to their pictorial value instead of according to their symbolic relation, we should clearly be led into error. Suppose I have a picture-puzzle, a rebus, in front of me. It depicts a house with a boat on its roof, a single letter of the alphabet, the figure of a running man whose head has been conjured away, and so on. Now I might be misled into raising objections and declaring that the picture as a whole and its component parts are nonsensical. A boat has no business to be on the roof of a house, and a headless man cannot run. Moreover, the man is bigger than the house; and if the whole picture is intended to represent a landscape, letters of the alphabet are out of place in it since such objects do not occur in nature. But obviously we can only form a proper judgement of the rebus if we put aside criticisms such as these of the whole composition and its parts and if, instead, we try to replace each separate element by a syllable or word that can be represented by that element in some way or other. The words which are put together in this way are no longer nonsensical but may form a poetical phrase of the greatest beauty and significance. A dream is a picture puzzle of this sort and our predecessors in the field of dream interpretation have made the mistake of treating the rebus as a pictorial composition: and as such it has seemed to them nonsensical and worthless.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

752

(A)

THE WORK OF CONDENSATION

The first thing that becomes clear to anyone who compares the dream-content with the dream-thoughts is that a work of condensation on a large scale has been carried out. Dreams are brief, meagre and laconic in comparison with the range and wealth of the dream-thoughts. If a dream is written out it may perhaps fill half a page. The analysis setting out the dream-thoughts underlying it may occupy six, eight or a dozen times as much space. This relation varies with different dreams; but so far as my experience goes its direction never varies. As a rule one underestimates the amount of compression that has taken place, since one is inclined to regard the dream-thoughts that have been brought to light as the complete material, whereas if the work of interpretation is carried further it may reveal still more thoughts concealed behind the dream. I have already had occasion to point out that it is in fact never possible to be sure that a dream has been completely interpreted. Even if the solution seems satisfactory and without gaps, the possibility always remains that the dream may have yet another meaning. Strictly speaking, then, it is impossible to determine the amount of condensation.

There is an answer, which at first sight seems most plausible, to the argument that the great lack of proportion between the dream-content and the dream-thoughts implies that the psychical material has undergone an extensive process of condensation in the course of the formation of the dream. We very often have an impression that we have dreamt a great deal all through the night and have since forgotten most of what we dreamt. On this view, the dream which we remember when we wake up would only be a fragmentary remnant of the total dream-work; and this, if we could recollect it in its entirety, might well be as extensive as the dream-thoughts. There is undoubtedly some truth in this: there can be no question that dreams can be reproduced most accurately if we try to recall them as soon as we wake up and that our memory of them becomes more and more incomplete towards evening.But on the other hand it can be shown that the impression that we have dreamt a great deal more than we can reproduce is very often based on an illusion, the origin of which I shall discuss later. Moreover the hypothesis that condensation occurs during the dream-work is not affected by the possibility of dreams being forgotten, since this hypothesis is proved to be correct by the quantities of ideas which are related to each individual piece of the dream which has been retained. Even supposing that a large piece of the dream has escaped recollection, this may merely have prevented our having access to another group of dream-thoughts. There is no justification for supposing that the lost pieces of the dream would have related to the same thoughts which we have already reached from the pieces of the dream that have survived.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] The occurrence of condensation in dreams has been hinted at by many writers. Du Prel (1885, 85) has a passage in which he says it is absolutely certain that there has been a process of condensation of the groups of ideas in dreams.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

753

In view of the very great number of associations produced in analysis to each individual element of the content of a dream, some readers may be led to doubt whether, as a matter of principle, we are justified in regarding as part of the dream-thoughts all the associations that occur to us during the subsequent analysis - whether we are justified, that is, in supposing that all these thoughts were already active during the state of sleep and played a part in the formation of the dream. Is it not more probable that new trains of thought have arisen in the course of the analysis which had no share in forming the dream? I can only give limited assent to this argument. It is no doubt true that some trains of thought arise for the first time during the analysis. But one can convince oneself in all such cases that these new connections are only set up between thoughts which were already linked in some other way in the dream-thoughts. The new connections are, as it were, loop-lines or short-circuits, made possible by the existence of other and deeper-lying connecting paths. It must be allowed that the great bulk of the thoughts which are revealed in analysis were already active during the process of forming the dream; for, after working through a string of thoughts which seem to have no connection with the formation of a dream, one suddenly comes upon one which is represented in its content and is indispensable for its interpretation, but which could not have been reached except by this particular line of approach. I may here recall the dream of the botanical monograph, which strikes one as the product of an astonishing amount of condensation, even though I have not reported its analysis in full.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

754

How, then, are we to picture psychical conditions during the period of sleep which precedes dreams? Are all the dream-thoughts present alongside one another? or do they occur in sequence? or do a number of trains of thought start out simultaneously from different centres and afterwards unite? There is no need for the present, in my opinion, to form any plastic idea of psychical conditions during the formation of dreams. It must not be forgotten, however, that we are dealing with an unconscious process of thought, which may easily be different from what we perceive during purposive reflection accompanied by consciousness.

The unquestionable fact remains, however, that the formation of dreams is based on a process of condensation. How is that condensation brought about?

When we reflect that only a small minority of all the dream-thoughts revealed are represented in the dream by one of their ideational elements, we might conclude that condensation is brought about by omission: that is, that the dream is not a faithful translation or a point-for-point projection of the dream thoughts, but a highly incomplete and fragmentary version of them. This view, as we shall soon discover, is a most inadequate one. But we may take it as a provisional starting-point and go on to a further question. If only a few elements from the dream-thoughts find their way into the dream-content, what are the conditions which determine their selection?

In order to get some light on this question we must turn our attention to those elements of the dream-content which must have fulfilled these conditions. And the most favourable material for such an investigation will be a dream to the construction of which a particularly intense process of condensation has contributed. I shall accordingly begin by choosing for the purpose the dream which I have already recorded on p. 657 ff..

The Interpretation Of Dreams

755

I

THE DREAM OF THE BOTANICAL MONOGRAPH

CONTENT OF THE DREAM. - I had written a monograph on an (unspecified) genus of plants. The book lay before me and I was at the moment turning over a folded coloured plate. Bound up in the copy there was a dried specimen of the plant.

The element in this dream which stood out most was the botanical monograph. This arose from the impressions of the dream day: I had in fact seen a monograph on the genus Cyclamen in the window of a book-shop. There was no mention of this genus in the content of the dream; all that was left in it was the monograph and its relation to botany. The ‘botanical monograph’ immediately revealed its connection with the work upon cocaine which I had once written. From ‘cocaine’ the chains of thought led on the one hand to the Festschrift and to certain events in a University laboratory, and on the other hand to my friend Dr. Königstein, the eye surgeon, who had had a share in the introduction of cocaine. The figure of Dr. Königstein further reminded me of the interrupted conversation which I had had with him the evening before and of my various reflections upon the payment for medical services among colleagues. This conversation was the actual currently active instigator of the dream; the monograph on the cyclamen was also a currently active impression, but one of an indifferent nature. As I perceived, the ‘botanical monograph’ in the dream turned out to be an ‘intermediate common entity’ between the two experiences of the previous day: it was taken over unaltered from the indifferent impression and was linked with the psychically significant event by copious associative connections.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

756

Not only the compound idea, ‘botanical monograph’, however, but each of its components, ‘botanical’ and ‘monograph’ separately, led by numerous connecting paths deeper and deeper into the tangle of dream-thoughts. ‘Botanical’ was related to the figure of Professor Gärtner [Gardener], the blooming looks of his wife, to my patient Flora and to the lady of whom I had told the story of the forgotten flowers. Gärtner led in turn to the laboratory and to my conversation with Königstein. My two patients had been mentioned in the course of this conversation. A train of thought joined the lady with the flowers to my wife’s favourite flowers and thence to the title of the monograph which I had seen for a moment during the day. In addition to these, ‘botanical’ recalled an episode at my secondary school and an examination while I was at the University. A fresh topic touched upon in my conversation with Dr. Königstein - my favourite hobbies - was joined, through the intermediate link of what I jokingly called my favourite flower, the artichoke, with the train of thought proceeding from the forgotten flowers. Behind ‘artichokes’ lay, on the one hand, my thoughts about Italy and, on the other hand, a scene from my childhood which was the opening of what have since become my intimate relations with books. Thus ‘botanical’ was a regular nodal point in the dream. Numerous trains of thought converged upon it, which, as I can guarantee, had appropriately entered into the context of the conversation with Dr. Königstein. Here we find ourselves in a factory of thoughts where, as in the ‘weaver’s masterpiece’ -

Ein Tritt tausend Fäden regt,

Die Schifflein herüber hinüber schiessen,

Die Fäden ungesehen fliessen,

Ein Schlag tausend Verbindungen schlägt.¹

So, too, ‘monograph’ in the dream touches upon two subjects: the one-sidedness of my studies and the costliness of my favourite hobbies.

This first investigation leads us to conclude that the elements ‘botanical’ and ‘monograph’ found their way into the content of the dream because they possessed copious contacts with the majority of the dream-thoughts, because, that is to say, they constituted ‘nodal points’ upon which a great number of the dream-thoughts converged, and because they had several meanings in connection with the interpretation of the dream. The explanation of this fundamental fact can also be put in another way: each of the elements of the dream’s content turns out to have been ‘overdetermined’ - to have been represented in the dream-thoughts many times over.

¹ [. . . a thousand threads one treadle throws,

Where fly the shuttles hither and thither,

Unseen the threads are knit together,

And an infinite combination grows.]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

757

We discover still more when we come to examine the remaining constituents of the dream in relation to their appearance in the dream-thoughts. The coloured plate which I was unfolding led (see the analysis, p. 660 f.) to a new topic, my colleagues’ criticisms of my activities, and to one which was already represented in the dream, my favourite hobbies; and it led, in addition, to the childhood memory in which I was pulling to pieces a book with coloured plates. The dried specimen of the plant touched upon the episode of the herbarium at my secondary school and specially stressed that memory.

The nature of the relation between dream-content and dream thoughts thus becomes visible. Not only are the elements of a dream determined by the dream-thoughts many times over, but the individual dream-thoughts are represented in the dream by several elements. Associative paths lead from one element of the dream to several dream-thoughts, and from one dream thought to several elements of the dream. Thus a dream is not constructed by each individual dream-thought, or group of dream-thoughts, finding (in abbreviated form) separate representation in the content of the dream - in the kind of way in which an electorate chooses parliamentary representatives; a dream is constructed, rather, by the whole mass of dream-thoughts being submitted to a sort of manipulative process in which those elements which have the most numerous and strongest supports acquire the right of entry into the dream-content - in a manner analogous to election by scrutin de liste. In the case of every dream which I have submitted to an analysis of this kind I have invariably found these same fundamental principles confirmed: the elements of the dream are constructed out of the whole mass of dream-thoughts and each one of those elements is shown to have been determined many times over in relation to the dream-thoughts.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

758

It will certainly not be out of place to illustrate the connection between dream-content and dream-thoughts by a further example, which is distinguished by the specially ingenious interweaving of their reciprocal relations. It is a dream produced by one of my patients - a man whom I was treating for claustrophobia. It will soon become clear why I have chosen to give this exceptionally clever dream-production the title of

II

‘A LOVELY DREAM’

He was driving with a large party to X Street, in which there was an unpretentious inn. (This is not the case.) There was a play being acted inside it. At one moment he was audience, at another actor. When it was over, they had to change their clothes so as to get back to town. Some of the company were shown into rooms on the ground floor and others into rooms on the first floor. Then a dispute broke out. The ones up above were angry because the ones down below were not ready, and they could not come downstairs. His brother was up above and he was down below and he was angry with his brother because they were so much pressed. (This part was obscure.) Moreover it had been decided and arranged even when they first arrived who was to be up above and who was to be down below. Then he was walking by himself up the rise made by X Street in the direction of town. He walked with such difficulty and so laboriously that he seemed glued to the spot. An elderly gentleman came up to him and began abusing the King of Italy. At the top of the rise he was able to walk much more easily.

His difficulty in walking up the rise was so distinct that after waking up he was for some time in doubt whether it was a dream or reality.

We should not think very highly of this dream, judging by its manifest content. In defiance of the rules, I shall begin its interpretation with the portion which the dreamer described as being the most distinct.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

759

The difficulty which he dreamt of and probably actually experienced during the dream - the laborious climbing up the rise accompanied by dyspnoea - was one of the symptoms which the patient had in fact exhibited years before and which had at that time been attributed, along with certain other symptoms, to tuberculosis. (The probability is that this was hysterically simulated.) The peculiar sensation of inhibited movement that occurs in this dream is already familiar to us from dreams of exhibiting and we see once more that it is material available at any time for any other representational purpose. The piece of the dream-content which described how the climb began by being difficult and became easy at the end of the rise reminded me, when I heard it, of the masterly introduction to Alphonse Daudet’s Sappho. That well known passage describes how a young man carries his mistress upstairs in his arms; at first she is as light as a feather, but the higher he climbs the heavier grows her weight. The whole scene foreshadows the course of their love-affair, which was intended by Daudet as a warning to young men not to allow their affections to be seriously engaged by girls of humble origin and a dubious past.¹ Though I knew that my patient had been involved in a love-affair which he had recently broken off with a lady on the stage, I did not expect to find my guess at an interpretation justified. Moreover the situation in Sappho was the reverse of what it had been in the dream. In the dream the climbing had been difficult to begin with and had afterwards become easy; whereas the symbolism in the novel only made sense if something that had been begun lightly ended by becoming a heavy burden. But to my astonishment my patient replied that my interpretation fitted in very well with a piece he had seen at the theatre the evening before. It was called Rund um Wien [Round Vienna] and gave a picture of the career of a girl who began by being respectable, who then became a demi-mondaine and had liaisons with men in high positions and so ‘went up in the world’, but who ended by ‘coming down in the world.’ The piece had moreover reminded him of another, which he had seen some years earlier, called Von Stufe zu Stufe [Step by Step], and which had been advertised by a poster showing a staircase with a flight of steps.

To continue with the interpretation. The actress with whom he had had this latest, eventful liaison had lived in X Street. There is nothing in the nature of an inn in that street. But when he was spending part of the summer in Vienna on the lady’s account he had put up at a small hotel in the neighbourhood. When he left the hotel he had said to his cab-driver: ‘Anyhow I’m lucky not to have picked up any vermin.’ (This, incidentally, was another of his phobias.) To this the driver had replied: ‘How could any one put up at such a place! It’s not a hotel, it’s only an inn.’

¹ [Footnote added 1911:] What I have written below in the section on symbolism about the significance of dreams of climbing throws light upon the imagery chosen by the novelist.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

760

The idea of an inn at once recalled a quotation to his mind:

Bei einem Wirte wundermild,

Da war ich jüngst zu Gaste.¹

The host in Uhland’s poem was an apple tree; and a second quotation now carried on his train of thought:

FAUST (mit der Jungend tanzend):

Einst hatt’ ich einen schönen Traum;

Da sah ich einen Apfelbaum,

Zwei schöne Äpfel glänzten dran,

Sie reizten mich, ich stieg hinan.

DIE SCHÖNE:

Der Äpfelchen begehrt ihr sehr,

Und schon vom Paradiese her.

Von Freuden fühl’ ich mich bewegt,

Dass auch mein Garten solche trägt.²

There cannot be the faintest doubt what the apple-tree and the apples stood for. Moreover, lovely breasts had been among the charms which had attracted the dreamer to his actress.

The context of the analysis gave us every ground for supposing that the dream went back to an impression in childhood. If so, it must have referred to the wet-nurse of the dreamer, who was by now a man almost thirty years old. For an infant the breasts of his wet-nurse are nothing more nor less than an inn. The wet-nurse, as well as Daudet’s Sappho, seem to have been allusions to the mistress whom the patient had recently dropped.

The patient’s (elder) brother also appeared in the content of the dream, the brother being up above and the patient himself down below. This was once again the reverse of the actual situation; for, as I knew, the brother had lost his social position while the patient had maintained his. In repeating the content of the dream to me, the dreamer had avoided saying that his brother was up above and he himself ‘on the ground floor’. That would have put the position too clearly, since here in Vienna if we say someone is ‘on the ground floor’ we mean that he has lost his money and his position - in other words, that he has ‘come down in the world.’. Now there must have been a reason for some of this part of the dream being represented by its reverse. Further, the reversal must hold good of some other relation between dream-thoughts and dream-content as well; and we have a hint of where to look for this reversal. It must evidently be at the end of the dream, where once again there was a reversal of the difficulty in going upstairs as described in Sappho. We can then easily see what reversal is intended. In Sappho the man carried a woman who was in a sexual relation to him; in the dream-thoughts the position was reversed, and a woman was carrying a man. And since this can only happen in childhood, the reference was once more to the wet-nurse bearing the weight of the infant in her arms. Thus the end of the dream made a simultaneous reference to Sappho and to the wet-nurse.

¹ [Literally: ‘I was lately a guest at an inn with a most gentle host.’]

² [FAUST (dancing with the Young Witch):

A lovely dream once came to me,

And I beheld an apple-tree,

On which two lovely apples shone;

They charmed me so, I climbed thereon.

THE LOVELY WITCH:

Apples have been desired by you,

Since first in Paradise they grew;

And I am moved with joy to know

That much within my garden grow.]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

761

Just as the author of the novel, in choosing the name ‘Sappho’, had in mind an allusion to Lesbian practices, so too the pieces of the dream that spoke of people ‘up above’ and ‘down below’ alluded to phantasies of a sexual nature which occupied the patient’s mind and, as suppressed desires, were not without a bearing on his neurosis. (The interpretation of the dream did not itself show us that what were thus represented in the dream were phantasies and not recollections of real events; an analysis only gives us the content of a thought and leaves it to us to determine its reality. Real and imaginary events appear in dreams at first sight as of equal validity; and that is so not only in dreams but in the production of more important psychical structures.)

A ‘large party’ meant, as we already know, a secret. His brother was simply the representative (introduced into the childhood scene by a ‘retrospective phantasy’) of all his later rivals for a woman’s affection. The episode of the gentleman who abused the King of Italy related once again, via the medium of a recent and in itself indifferent experience, to people of lower rank pushing their way into higher society. It was just as though the child at the breast was being given a warning parallel to the one which Daudet had given to young men.¹

¹ The imaginary nature of the situation relating to the dreamer’s wet-nurse was proved by the objectively established fact that in his case the wet-nurse had been his mother. I may recall in this connection the anecdote, which I repeated on p. 688, of the young man who regretted that he had not made better use of his opportunities with his wet-nurse. A regret of the same kind was no doubt the source of the present dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

762

To provide a third opportunity for studying condensation in the formation of dreams, I will give part of the analysis of another dream, which I owe to an elderly lady undergoing psycho-analytic treatment. As was to be expected from the severe anxiety-states from which the patient suffered, her dreams contained a very large number of sexual thoughts, the first realization of which both surprised and alarmed her. Since I shall not be able to pursue the interpretation of the dream to the end, its material will appear to fall into several groups without any visible connection.

III

‘THE MAY-BEETLE DREAM’

CONTENT OF THE DREAM. - She called to mind that she had two may-beetles in a box and that she must set them free or they would suffocate. She opened the box and the may-beetles were in an exhausted state. One of them flew out of the open window; but the other was crushed by the casement while she was shutting it at someone’s request. (Signs of disgust.)

ANALYSIS. - Her husband was temporarily away from home, and her fourteen-year-old daughter was sleeping in the bed beside her. The evening before, the girl had drawn her attention to a moth which had fallen into her tumbler of water; but she had not taken it out and felt sorry for the poor creature next morning. The book she had been reading during the evening had told how some boys had thrown a cat into boiling water, and had described the animal’s convulsions. These were the two precipitating causes of the dream - in themselves indifferent. She then pursued the subject of cruelty to animals further. Some years before, while they were spending the summer at a particular place, her daughter had been very cruel to animals. She was collecting butterflies and asked the patient for some arsenic to kill them with. On one occasion a moth with a pin through its body had gone on flying about the room for a long time; another time some caterpillars which the child was keeping to turn into chrysalises starved to death. At a still more tender age the same child used to tear the wings off beetles and butterflies. But to-day she would be horrified at all these cruel actions she had grown so kind-hearted.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

763

The patient reflected over this contradiction. It reminded her of another contradiction, between appearance and character, as George Eliot displays it in Adam Bede: one girl who was pretty, but vain and stupid, and another who was ugly, but of high character; a nobleman who seduced the silly girl, and a working man who felt and acted with true nobility. How impossible it was, she remarked, to recognize that sort of thing in people! Who would have guessed, to look at her, that she was tormented by sensual desires?

In the same year in which the little girl had begun collecting butterflies, the district they were in had suffered from a serious plague of may-beetles. The children were furious with the beetles and crushed them unmercifully. At that time my patient had seen a man who tore the wings off may-beetles and then ate their bodies. She herself had been born in May and had been married in May. Three days after her marriage she had written to her parents at home saying how happy she was. But it had been far from true.

The evening before the dream she had been rummaging among some old letters and had read some of them - some serious and some comic - aloud to her children. There had been a most amusing letter from a piano-teacher who had courted her when she was a girl, and another from an admirer of noble birth.¹

¹ This had been the true instigator of the dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

764

She blamed herself because one of her daughters had got hold of a ‘bad’ book by Maupassant.¹ The arsenic that the girl had asked for reminded her of the arsenic pills which restored the Duc de Mora’s youthful strength in Le Nabab.

‘Set them free’ made her think of a passage in the Magic Flute:

Zur Liebe kann ich dich nicht zwingen,

Doch geb ich dir die Freiheit nicht.²

‘May-beetles’ also made her think of Kätchen’s words:

Verliebt ja wie ein Käfer bist du mir.³

And in the middle of all this came a quotation from Tannhäuser:

Weil du von böser Lust beseelt . . .4

She was living in a perpetual worry about her absent husband. Her fear that something might happen to him on his journey was expressed in numerous waking phantasies. A short time before, in the course of her analysis, she had lighted among her unconscious thoughts upon a complaint about her husband ‘growing senile’. The wishful thought concealed by her present dream will perhaps best be conjectured if I mention that, some days before she dreamt it, she was horrified, in the middle of her daily affairs, by a phrase in the imperative mood which came into her head and was aimed at her husband: ‘Go and hang yourself!’ It turned out that a few hours earlier she had read somewhere or other that when a man is hanged he gets a powerful erection. The wish for an erection was what had emerged from repression in this horrifying disguise. ‘Go and hang yourself!’ was equivalent to: ‘Get yourself an erection at any price!’ Dr. Jenkins’s arsenic pills in Le Nabab fitted in here. But my patient was also aware that the most powerful aphrodisiac, cantharides (commonly known as ‘Spanish flies’), was prepared from crushed beetles. This was the drift of the principal part of the dream’s content.

The opening and shutting of windows was one of the main subjects of dispute between her and her husband. She herself was aerophilic in her sleeping habits; her husband was aerophobic. Exhaustion was the chief symptom which she complained of at the time of the dream.

¹ An interpolation is required at this point: ‘books of that kind are poison to a girl.’ The patient herself had dipped into forbidden books a great deal when she was young.

² [Fear not, to love I’II ne’er compel thee;

Yet `tis too soon to set thee free.]

³ [‘You are madly in love with me.’ Literally: `You are in love with me like a beetle.’ ] - A further train of thought led to the same poet’s Penthesilia, and to the idea of cruelty to a lover.

4 [Literally: ‘Because thou wast inspired by such evil pleasure.’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

765

In all three of the dreams which I have just recorded, I have indicated by italics the points at which one of the elements of the dream-content reappears in the dream-thoughts, so as to show clearly the multiplicity of connections arising from the former. Since, however, the analysis of none of these dreams has been traced to its end, it will perhaps be worth while to consider a dream whose analysis has been recorded exhaustively, so as to show how its content is over-determined. For this purpose I will take the dream of Irma’s injection. It will be easy to see from that example that the work of condensation makes use of more than one method in the construction of dreams.

The principal figure in the dream-content was my patient Irma. She appeared with the features which were hers in real life, and thus, in the first instance, represented herself. But the position in which I examined her by the window was derived from someone else, the lady for whom, as the dream-thoughts showed, I wanted to exchange my patient. In so far as Irma appeared to have a diphtheritic membrane, which recalled my anxiety about my eldest daughter, she stood for that child and, behind her, through her possession of the same name as my daughter, was hidden the figure of my patient who succumbed to poisoning. In the further course of the dream the figure of Irma acquired still other meanings, without any alteration occurring in the visual picture of her in the dream. She turned into one of the children whom we had examined in the neurological department of the children’s hospital, where my two friends revealed their contrasting characters. The figure of my own child was evidently the stepping-stone towards this transition. The same ‘Irma’s’ recalcitrance over opening her mouth brought an allusion to another lady whom I had once examined, and, through the same connection, to my wife. Moreover, the pathological changes which I discovered in her throat involved allusions to a whole series of other figures.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

766

None of these figures whom I lighted upon by following up  ‘Irma’ appeared in the dream in bodily shape. They were concealed behind the dream figure of ‘Irma’, which was thus turned into a collective image with, it must be admitted, a number of contradictory characteristics. Irma became the representative of all these other figures which had been sacrificed to the work of condensation, since I passed over to her, point by point, everything that reminded me of them.

There is another way in which a ‘collective figure’ can be produced for purposes of dream-condensation, namely by uniting the actual features of two or more people into a single dream-image. It was in this way that the Dr. M. of my dream was constructed. He bore the name of Dr. M., he spoke and acted like him; but his physical characteristics and his malady belonged to someone else, namely to my eldest brother. One single feature, his pale appearance, was doubly determined, since it was common to both of them in real life.

Dr. R. in my dream about my uncle with the yellow beard was a similar composite figure. But in his case the dream-image was constructed in yet another way. I did not combine the features of one person with those of another and in the process omit from the memory-picture certain features of each of them. What I did was to adopt the procedure by means of which Galton produced family by portraits: namely by projecting two images on to a single plate, so that certain features common to both are emphasized, while those which fail to fit in with one another cancel one another out and are indistinct in the picture. In my dream about my uncle the fair beard emerged prominently from a face which belonged to two people and which was consequently blurred; incidentally, the beard further involved an allusion to my father and myself through the intermediate idea of growing grey.

The construction of collective and composite figures is one of the chief methods by which condensation operates in dreams. I shall presently have occasion to deal with them in another context.

The occurrence of the idea of ‘dysentery’ in the dream of Irma’s injection also had a multiple determination: first owing to its phonetic similarity to ‘diphtheria’, and secondly owing to its connection with the patient whom I had sent to the East and whose hysteria was not recognized.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

767

Another interesting example of condensation in this dream was the mention in it of ‘propyls’ . What was contained in the dream-thoughts was not ‘propyls’ but ‘amyls.’ It might be supposed that a single displacement had taken place at this point in the construction of the dream. This was indeed the case. But the displacement served the purposes of condensation, as is proved by the following addition to the analysis of the dream. When I allowed my attention to dwell for a moment longer on the word ‘propyls’, it occurred to me that it sounded like ‘Propylaea’. But there are Propylaea not only in Athens but in Munich. A year before the dream I had gone to Munich to visit a friend who was seriously ill at the time - the same friend who was unmistakably alluded to in the dream by the word ‘trimethylamin’ which occurred immediately after ‘propyls.’

I shall pass over the striking way in which here, as elsewhere in dream-analyses, associations of the most various inherent importance are used for laying down thought-connections as though they were of equal weight, and shall yield to the temptation to give, as it were, a plastic picture of the process by which the amyls in the dream-thoughts were replaced by propyls in the dream-content.

On the one hand we see the group of ideas attached to my friend Otto, who did not understand me, who sided against me, and who made me a present of liqueur with an aroma of amyl. On the other hand we see - linked to the former group by its very contrast - the group of ideas attached to my friend in Berlin, who did understand me, who would take my side, and to whom I owed so much valuable information, dealing, amongst other things, with the chemistry of the sexual processes.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

768

The recent exciting causes - the actual instigators of the dream - determined what was to attract my attention in the ‘Otto’ group; the amyl was among these selected elements, which were predestined to form part of the dream-content. The copious ‘ Wilhelm’ group was stirred up precisely through being in contrast to ‘Otto’, and those elements in it were emphasized which echoed those which were already stirred up in ‘Otto’. All though the dream, indeed, I kept on turning from someone who annoyed me to someone else who could be agreeably contrasted with him; point by point, I called up a friend against an opponent. Thus the amyl in the ‘Otto’ group produced memories from the field of chemistry in the other group; in this manner the trimethylamin, which was supported from several directions, found its way into the dream-content. ‘Amyls’ itself might have entered the dream-content unmodified; but it came under the influence of the ‘Wilhelm’ group. For the whole range of memories covered by that name was searched through in order to find some element which could provide a two-sided determination for ‘amyls.’ ‘Propyls’  was closely associated with ‘amyls’, and Munich from the ‘Wilhelm’ group with its ‘propylaea’ came half-way to meet it. The two groups of ideas converged in ‘propyls-propylaea’; and, as though by an act of compromise, this intermediate element was what found its way into the dream-content. Here an intermediate common entity had been constructed which admitted of multiple determination. It is obvious, therefore, that multiple determination must make it easier for an element to force its way into the dream-content. In order to construct an intermediate link of this kind, attention is without hesitation displaced from what is actually intended on to some neighbouring association.

Our study of the dream of Irma’s injection has already enabled us to gain some insight into the processes of condensation during the formation of dreams. We have been able to observe certain of their details, such as how preference is given to elements that occur several times over in the dream-thoughts, how new unities are formed (in the shape of collective figures and composite structures), and how intermediate common entities are constructed. The further questions of the purpose of condensation and of the factors which tend to produce it will not be raised till we come to consider the whole question of the psychical processes at work in the formation of dreams. We will be content for the present with recognizing the fact that dream-condensation is a notable characteristic of the relation between dream-thoughts and dream-content.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

769

The work of condensation in dreams is seen at its clearest when it handles words and names. It is true in general that words are frequently treated in dreams as though they were things, and for that reason they are apt to be combined in just the same way as are presentations of things. Dreams of this sort offer the most amusing and curious neologisms.

I

On one occasion a medical colleague had sent me a paper he had written, in which the importance of a recent physiological discovery was, in my opinion, overestimated, and in which, above all, the subject was treated in too emotional a manner. The next night I dreamt a sentence which clearly referred to this paper: ‘Its written in a positively norekdal style.’ The analysis of the word caused me some difficulty at first. There could be no doubt that it was a parody of the superlatives ‘kolossal’ and ‘pyramidal’; but its origin was not so easy to guess. At last I saw that the monstrosity was composed of the two names ‘Nora’ and ‘Ekdal’ - characters in two well-known plays of Ibsen’s. Some time before, I had read a newspaper article on Ibsen by the same author whose latest work I was criticizing in the dream.

II

One of my women patients told me a short dream which ended in a meaningless verbal compound. She dreamt she was with her husband at a peasant festivity and said: ‘This will end in a general "Maistollmütz."' In the dream she had a vague feeling that it was some kind of pudding made with maize - a sort of polenta. Analysis divided the word into ‘Mais’ [‘maize’], ‘toll’ [‘mad’], ‘mannstoll’ [‘nymphomaniac’ - literally ‘mad for men’] and Olmütz [a town in Moravia]. All these fragments were found to be remnants of a conversation she had had at table with her relatives. The following words lay behind ‘Mais’ (in addition to a reference to the recently opened Jubilee Exhibition): ‘Meissen’ (a Meissen porcelain figure representing a bird); ‘Miss’ (her relatives’ English governess had just gone to Olmütz); and ‘mies’ (a Jewish slang term, used jokingly to mean ‘disgusting’). A long chain of thoughts and associations led off from each syllable of this verbal hotch potch.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

770

III

A young man, whose door-bell had been rung late one night by an acquaintance who wanted to leave a visiting-card on him, had a dream that night: A man had been working till late in the evening to put his house-telephone in order. After he had gone, it kept on ringing - not continuously, but with detached rings. His servant fetched the man back, and the latter remarked: ‘It’s a funny thing that even people who are "tutelrein" as a rule are quite unable to deal with a thing like this.’

It will be seen that the indifferent exciting cause of the dream only covers one element of it. That episode only obtained any importance from the fact that the dreamer put it in the same series as an earlier experience which, though equally indifferent in itself, was given a substitutive meaning by his imagination. When he was a boy, living with his father, he had upset a glass of water over the floor while he was half-asleep. The flex of the house-telephone had been soaked through and its continuous ringing had disturbed his father’s sleep. Since the continuous ringing corresponded to getting wet, the ‘detached rings’ were used to represent drops falling. The word ‘tutelrein’ could be analysed in three directions, and led in that way to three of the subjects represented in the dream-thoughts. ‘Tutel’ is a legal term for ‘guardianship’ [‘tutelage’]. ‘Tutel’ (or possibly ‘Tuttel’) is also a vulgar term for a woman’s breast. The remaining portion of the word, ‘rein’ [‘clean’], combined with the first part of ‘Zimmertelegraph’ [‘house-telephone’], forms ‘zimmerrein’ [‘house-trained’] - which is closely connected with making the floor wet, and, in addition, sounded very much like the name of a member of the dreamer’s family.¹

¹ In waking life this same kind of analysis and synthesis of syllables - a syllabic chemistry, in fact - plays a part in a great number of jokes: ‘What is the cheapest way of obtaining silver? You go down an avenue of silver poplars [Pappeln, which means both "poplars" and "babbling"] and call for silence. The babbling then ceases and the silver is released.’ The first reader and critic of this book - and his successors are likely to follow his example - protested that ‘the dreamer seems to be too ingenious and amusing.’ This is quite true so long as it refers only to the dreamer; it would only be an objection if it were to be extended to the dream-interpreter. In waking reality I have little claim to be regarded as a wit. If my dreams seem amusing, that is not on my account, but on account of the peculiar psychological conditions under which dreams are constructed; and the fact is intimately connected with the theory of jokes and the comic. Dreams become ingenious and amusing because the direct and easiest pathway to the expression of their thoughts is barred: they are forced into being so. The reader can convince himself that my patients’ dreams seem at least as full of jokes and puns as my own, or even fuller. - [Added 1909:] Nevertheless this objection led me to compare the technique of jokes with the dream-work; and the results are to be found in the book which I published on Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905c).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

771

IV

In a confused dream of my own of some length, whose central point seemed to be a sea voyage, it appeared that the next stopping place was called ‘Hearsing’ and the next after that ‘Fliess.’ This last word was the name of my friend, who has often been the goal of my travels. ‘Hearsing’ was a compound. One part of it was derived from the names of places on the suburban railway near Vienna, which so often end in ‘ing’: Hietzing, Liesing, Mödling (Medelitz, ‘meae deliciae’, was its old name - that is ‘meine Freud’ [‘my delight’]). The other part was derived from the English word ‘hearsay.’ This suggested slander and established the dream’s connection with its indifferent instigator of the previous day: a poem in the periodical Fliegende Blätter about a slanderous dwarf called ‘Sagter Hatergesagt’ [‘He-says Says-he’]. If the syllable ‘ing’ were to be added to the name ‘Fliess’ we should get ‘Vlissingen’, which was in fact the stopping-place on the sea voyage made by my brother whenever he visited us from England. But the English name for Vlissingen is ‘Flushing’, which in English means ‘blushing’ and reminded me of the patients I have treated for ereutophobia, and also of a recent paper on that neurosis by Bechterew which had caused me some annoyance.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

772

V

On another occasion I had a dream which consisted of two separate pieces. The first piece was the word ‘Autodidasker’, which I recalled vividly. The second piece was an exact reproduction of a short and harmless phantasy which I had produced some days before. This phantasy was to the effect that when I next saw Professor N. I must say to him: ‘The patient about whose condition I consulted you recently is in fact only suffering from a neurosis, just as you suspected.’ Thus the neologism ‘Autodidasker’ must satisfy two conditions: firstly, it must bear or represent a composite meaning; and secondly, that meaning must be solidly related to the intention I had reproduced from waking life of making amends to Professor N.

The word ‘Autodidasker’ could easily be analysed into ‘Autor’ [author], ‘Autodidakt’ [self-taught] and ‘Lasker’, with which I also associated the name of Lassalle. The first of these words led to the precipitating cause of the dream - this time a significant one. I had given my wife several volumes by a well-known writer who was a friend of my brother’s, and who, as I have learnt, was a native of my own birthplace: J. J. David. One evening she had told me of the deep impression that had been made on her by the tragic story in one of David’s books of how a man of talent went to the bad; and our conversation had turned to a discussion of the gifts of which we saw signs in our own children. Under the impact of what she had been reading, my wife expressed concern about the children, and I consoled her with the remark that those were the very dangers which could be kept at bay by a good upbringing. My train of thought was carried further during the night; I took up my wife’s concern and wove all kinds of other things into it. A remark made by the author to my brother on the subject of marriage showed my thoughts a by-path along which they might come to be represented in the dream. This path led to Breslau, where a lady with whom we were very friendly had gone to be married and settle down. The concern I felt over the danger of coming to grief over a woman - for that was the kernel of my dream-thoughts - found an example in Breslau in the cases of Lasker and Lassalle which made it possible to give a simultaneous picture of the two ways in which this fatal influence can be exercised. ‘Cherchez la femme’, the phrase in which these thoughts could be summarized, led me, taken in another sense, to my still unmarried brother, whose name is Alexander. I now perceived that ‘Alex’, the shortened form of the name by which we call him, has almost the same sound as an anagram of ‘Lasker’, and that this factor must have had a share in leading my thoughts along the by-path by way of Breslau.

¹ Lasker died of tabes, that is, as a result of an infection (syphilis) contracted from a woman; Lassalle, as everyone knows, fell in a duel on account of a woman.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

773

The play which I was making here upon names and syllables had a still further sense, however. It expressed a wish that my brother might have a happy domestic life, and it did so in this way. In Zola’s novel of an artist’s life, L’oevre, the subject of which must have been close to my dream-thoughts, its author, as is well known, introduced himself and his own domestic happiness as an episode. He appears under the name of ‘Sandoz.’ The transformation was probably arrived at as follows. If ‘Zola’ is written backwards (the sort of thing children are so fond of doing), we arrive at ‘Aloz.’ No doubt this seemed too undisguised. He therefore replaced ‘Al’, which is the first syllable of ‘Alexander’ by ‘Sand’, which is the third syllable of the same name; and in this way ‘Sandoz’ came into being. My own ‘Autodidasker’ arose in much the same fashion.

I must now explain how my phantasy of telling Professor N. that the patient we had both examined was only suffering from a neurosis made its way into the dream. Shortly before the end of my working year, I began the treatment of a new patient who quite baffled my powers of diagnosis. The presence of a grave organic disease - perhaps some degeneration of the spinal cord - strongly suggested itself but could not be established. It would have been tempting to diagnose a neurosis (which would have solved every difficulty), if only the patient had not repudiated with so much energy the sexual history without which I refuse to recognize the presence of a neurosis. In my embarrassment I sought help from the physician whom I, like many other people, respect more than any as a man and before whose authority I am readiest to bow. He listened to my doubts, told me they were justified, and then gave his opinion: ‘Keep the man under observation; it must be a neurosis.’ Since I knew he did not share my views on the aetiology of the neuroses, I did not produce my counter-argument, but I made no concealment of my scepticism. A few days later I informed the patient that I could do nothing for him and recommended him to seek other advice. Whereupon, to my intense astonishment, he started apologizing for having lied to me. He had been too much ashamed of himself, he said, and went on to reveal precisely the piece of sexual aetiology which I had been expecting and without which I had been unable to accept his illness as a neurosis. I was relieved but at the same time humiliated. I had to admit that my consultant, not being led astray by considering the anamnesis, had seen more clearly than I had. And I proposed to tell him as much when I next met him - to tell him that he had been right and I wrong.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

774

This was precisely what I did in the dream. But what sort of a wish-fulfilment can there have been in confessing that I was wrong?. To be wrong was, however, just what I did wish. I wanted to be wrong in my fears, or, more precisely, I wanted my wife, whose fears I had adopted in the dream-thoughts, to be wrong. The subject round which the question of right or wrong revolved in the dream was not far removed from what the dream-thoughts were really concerned with. There was the same alternative between organic and functional damage caused by a woman, or, more properly, by sexuality: tabetic paralysis or neurosis? (The manner of Lassalle’s death could be loosely classed in the latter category.)

In this closely knit and, when it was carefully interpreted, very transparent dream, Professor N. played a part not only on account of this analogy and of my wish to be wrong, and on account of his incidental connections with Breslau and with the family of our friend who had settled there after her marriage but also on account of the following episode which occurred at the end of our consultation. When he had given his opinion and so concluded our medical discussion, he turned to more personal subjects: ‘How many children have you got now?’ - ‘Six.’ - He made a gesture of admiration and concern. - ‘Girls or boys?’ - ‘Three and three: they are my pride and my treasure.’ - ‘Well, now, be on your guard! Girls are safe enough, but bringing up boys leads to difficulties later on.’ - I protested that mine had been very well behaved so far. Evidently this second diagnosis, on the future of my boys, pleased me no more than the earlier one, according to which my patient was suffering from a neurosis. Thus these two impressions were bound up together by their contiguity, by the fact of their having been experienced both at once; and in taking the story of the neurosis into my dream, I was substituting it for the conversation about upbringing, which had more connection with the dream-thoughts, since it touched so closely upon the worries later expressed by my wife. So even my fear that N. might be right in what he said about the difficulty of bringing up boys had found a place in the dream, for it lay concealed behind the representation of my wish that I myself might be wrong in harbouring such fears. The same phantasy served unaltered to represent both of the opposing alternatives.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

775

VI

‘Early this morning,¹ between dreaming and waking, I experienced a very nice example of verbal condensation. In the course of a mass of dream-fragments that I could scarcely remember, I was brought up short, as it were, by a word which I saw before me as though it were half written and half printed. The word was "erzefilisch", and it formed part of a sentence which slipped into my conscious memory apart from any context and in complete isolation: "That has an erzefilisch influence on the sexual emotions." I knew at once that the word ought really to have been "erzieherisch" ["educational"]. And I was in doubt for some time whether the second "e" in "erzefilisch" should not have been an "i". In that connection the word "syphilis" occurred to me and, starting to analyse the dream while I was still half asleep, I racked my brains in an effort to make out how that word could have got into my dream, since I had nothing to do with the disease either personally or professionally. I then thought of "erzehlerisch [another nonsense word], and this explained the "e" of the second syllable of "erzefilisch" by reminding me that the evening before I had been asked by our governess [Erzieherin] to say something to her on the problem of prostitution, and had given her Hesse’s book on prostitution in order to influence her emotional life - for this had not developed quite normally; after which I had talked [erzählt] a lot to her on the problem. I then saw all at once that the word "syphilis" was not to be taken literally, but stood for "poison" - of course in relation to sexual life. When translated, therefore, the sentence in the dream ran quite logically: "My talk [Erzählung] was intended to have an educational [erzieherisch] influence on the emotional life of our governess [Erzieherin]; but I fear it may at the same time have had a poisonous effect." "Erzefilisch" was compounded from "erzäh-" and "erzieh-".’

¹ Quoted from Marcinowski.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

776

The verbal malformations in dreams greatly resemble those which are familiar in paranoia but which are also present in hysteria and obsessions. The linguistic tricks performed by children, who sometimes actually treat words as though they were objects and moreover invent new languages and artificial syntactic forms, are the common source of these things in dreams and psychoneuroses alike.

The analysis of the nonsensical verbal forms that occur in dreams is particularly well calculated to exhibit the dream work’s achievements in the way of condensation. The reader should not conclude from the paucity of the instances which I have given that material of this kind is rare or observed at all exceptionally. On the contrary, it is very common. But as a result of the fact that dream-interpretation is dependent upon psycho-analytic treatment, only a very small number of instances are observed and recorded and the analyses of such instances are as a rule only intelligible to experts in the pathology of the neuroses. Thus a dream of this kind was reported by Dr. von Karpinska (1914) containing the nonsensical verbal form: ‘Svingnum elvi.’ It is also worth mentioning those cases in which a word appears in a dream which is not in itself meaningless but which has lost its proper meaning and combines a number of other meanings to which it is related in just the same way as a ‘meaningless’ word would be. This is what occurred, for instance, in the ten-year-old boy’s dream of a ‘category’ which was recorded by Tausk (1913). ‘Category’ in that case meant ‘female genitals’, and to ‘categorate’ meant the same as ‘to micturate.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

777

Where spoken sentences occur in dreams and are expressly distinguished as such from thoughts, it is an invariable rule that the words spoken in the dream are derived from spoken words remembered in the dream-material. The text of the speech is either retained unaltered or expressed with some slight displacement. A speech in a dream is often put together from various recollected speeches, the text remaining the same but being given, if possible, several meanings, or one different from the original one. A spoken remark in a dream is not infrequently no more than an allusion to an occasion on which the remark in question was made.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] Not long ago I found a single exception to this rule in the case of a young man who suffered from obsessions while retaining intact his highly developed intellectual powers. The spoken words which occurred in his dreams were not derived from remarks which he had heard or made himself. They contained the undistorted text of his obsessional thoughts, which in his waking life only reached his consciousness in a modified form.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

778

(B)

THE WORK OF DISPLACEMENT

In making our collection of instances of condensation in dreams, the existence of another relation, probably of no less importance, had already become evident. It could be seen that the elements which stand out as the principal components of the manifest content of the dream are far from playing the same part in the dream-thoughts. And, as a corollary, the converse of this assertion can be affirmed: what is clearly the essence of the dream-thoughts need not be represented in the dream at all. The dream is, as it were, differently centred from the dream thoughts - its content has different elements as its central point. Thus in the dream of the botanical monograph, for instance, the central point of the dream-content was obviously the element ‘botanical’; whereas the dream-thoughts were concerned with the complications and conflicts arising between colleagues from their professional obligations, and further with the charge that I was in the habit of sacrificing too much for the sake of my hobbies. The element ‘botanical’ had no place whatever in this core of the dream-thoughts, unless it was loosely connected with it by an antithesis - the fact that botany never had a place among my favourite studies. In my patient’s Sappho dream the central position was occupied by climbing up and down and being up above and down below; the dream-thoughts, however, dealt with the dangers of sexual relations with people of an inferior social class. So that only a single element of the dream-thoughts seems to have found its way into the dream-content, though that element was expanded to a disproportionate extent. Similarly, in the dream of the may-beetles, the topic of which was the relations of sexuality to cruelty, it is true that the factor of cruelty emerged in the dream-content; but it did so in another connection and without any mention of sexuality, that is to say, divorced from its context and consequently transformed into something extraneous. Once again, in my dream about my uncle, the fair beard which formed its centre-point seems to have had no connection in its meaning with my ambitious wishes which, as we saw, were the core of the dream-thoughts. Dreams such as these give a justifiable impression of ‘displacement.’ In complete contrast to these examples, we can see that in the dream of Irma’s injection the different elements were able to retain, during the process of constructing the dream, the approximate place which they occupied in the dream-thoughts. This further relation between the dream-thoughts and the dream-content, wholly variable as it is in its sense or direction, is calculated at first to create astonishment. If we are considering a psychical process in normal life and find that one out of its several component ideas has been picked out and has acquired a special degree of vividness in consciousness, we usually regard this effect as evidence that a specially high amount of psychical value - some particular degree of interest - attaches to this predominant idea. But we now discover that, in the case of the different elements of the dream-thoughts, a value of this kind does not persist or is disregarded in the process of dream-formation. There is never any doubt as to which of the elements of the dream-thoughts have the highest psychical value, we learn that by direct judgement. In the course of the formation of a dream these essential elements, charged, as they are, with intense interest, may be treated as though they were of small value, and their place may be taken in the dream by other elements, of whose small value in the dream-thoughts there can be no question. At first sight it looks as though no attention whatever is paid to the psychical intensity¹ of the various ideas in making the choice among them for the dream, and as though the only thing considered is the greater or less degree of multiplicity of their determination. What appears in dreams, we might suppose, is not what is important in the dream-thoughts but what occurs in them several times over. But this hypothesis does not greatly assist our understanding of dream-formation, since from the nature of things it seems clear that the two factors of multiple determination and inherent psychical value must necessarily operate in the same sense. The ideas which are most important among the dream-thoughts will almost certainly be those which occur most often in them, since the different dream-thoughts will, as it were, radiate out from them. Nevertheless a dream can reject elements which are thus both highly stressed in themselves and reinforced from many directions, and can select for its content other elements which possess only the second of these attributes.

¹ Psychical intensity or value or the degree of interest of an idea is of course to be distinguished from sensory intensity or the intensity of the image presented.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

779

In order to solve this difficulty we shall make use of another impression derived from our enquiry into the overdetermination of the dream-content. Perhaps some of those who have read that enquiry may already have formed an independent conclusion that the overdetermination of the elements of dreams is no very important discovery, since it is a self-evident one. For in analysis we start out from the dream-elements and note down all the associations which lead off from them; so that there is nothing surprising in the fact that in the thought-material arrived at in this way we come across these same elements with peculiar frequency. I cannot accept this objection; but I will myself put into words something that sounds not unlike it. Among the thoughts that analysis brings to light are many which are relatively remote from the kernel of the dream and which look like artificial interpolations made for some particular purpose. That purpose is easy to divine. It is precisely they that constitute a connection, often a forced and far-fetched one, between the dream-content and the dream thoughts; and if these elements were weeded out of the analysis the result would often be that the component parts of the dream-content would be left not only without overdetermination but without any satisfactory determination at all. We shall be led to conclude that the multiple determination which decides what shall be included in a dream is not always a primary factor in dream-construction but is often the secondary product of a psychical force which is still unknown to us. Nevertheless multiple determination must be of importance in choosing what particular elements shall enter a dream, since we can see that a considerable expenditure of effort is used to bring it about in cases where it does not arise from the dream-material unassisted.

It thus seems plausible to suppose that in the dream-work a psychical force is operating which on the one hand strips the elements which have a high psychical value of their intensity, and on the other hand, by means of overdetermination, creates from elements of low psychical value new values, which afterwards find their way into the dream-content. If that is so, a transference and displacement of psychical intensities occurs in the process of dream-formation, and it is as a result of these that the difference between the text of the dream-content and that of the dream thoughts comes about. The process which we are here presuming is nothing less than the essential portion of the dream work; and it deserves to be described as ‘dream-displacement.’ Dream-displacement and dream-condensation are the two governing factors to whose activity we may in essence ascribe the form assumed by dreams.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

780

Nor do I think we shall have any difficulty in recognizing the psychical force which manifests itself in the facts of dream-displacement. The consequence of the displacement is that the dream-content no longer resembles the core of the dream-thoughts and that the dream gives no more than a distortion of the dream-wish which exists in the unconscious. But we are already familiar with dream-distortion. We traced it back to the censorship which is exercised by one psychical agency in the mind over another. Dream-displacement is one of the chief methods by which that distortion is achieved. Is fecit cui profuit. We may assume, then, that dream-displacement comes about through the influence of the same censorship - that is, the censorship of endopsychic defence.¹

The question of the interplay of these factors - of displacement, condensation and overdetermination - in the construction of dreams, and the question which is a dominant factor and which a subordinate one - all of this we shall leave aside for later investigation. But we can state provisionally a second condition which must be satisfied by those elements of the dream-thoughts which make their way into the dream: they must escape the censorship imposed by resistance. And henceforward in interpreting dreams we shall take dream-displacement into account as an undeniable fact.

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] Since I may say that the kernel of my theory of dreams lies in my derivation of dream-distortion from the censorship, I will here insert the last part of a story from Phantasien ein Realisten by ‘Lynkeus’ (Vienna, 2nd edition, 1900), in which I have found this principal feature of my theory once more expounded.

‘About a man who has the remarkable attribute of never dreaming nonsense . . .

‘"This splendid gift of yours, for dreaming as though you were waking, is a consequence of your virtue, of your kindness, your sense of justice, and your love of truth; it is the moral serenity of your nature which makes me understand all about you."

‘"But when I think the matter over properly," replied the other, "I almost believe that everyone is made like me, and that no one at all ever dreams nonsense. Any dream which one can remember clearly enough to describe it afterwards - any dream, that is to say, which is not a fever-dream - must always make sense, and it cannot possibly be otherwise. For things that were mutually contradictory could not group themselves into a single whole. The fact that time and space are often thrown into confusion does not affect the true content of the dream, since no doubt neither of them are of significance for its real essence. We often do the same thing in waking life. Only think of fairy tales and of the many daring products of the imagination, which are full of meaning and of which only a man without intelligence could say: ‘This is nonsense, for it’s impossible.’"

‘"If only one always knew how to interpret dreams in the right way, as you have just done with mine!" said his friend.

‘"That is certainly no easy task; but with a little attention on the part of the dreamer himself it should no doubt always succeed. -You ask why it is that for the most part it does not succeed? In you other people there seems always to be something that lies concealed in your dreams, something unchaste in a special and higher sense, a certain secret quality in your being which it is hard to follow. And that is why your dreams so often seem to be without meaning or even to be nonsense. But in the deepest sense this is not in the least so; indeed, it cannot be so at all - for it is always the same man, whether he is awake or dreaming."'

The Interpretation Of Dreams

781

(B)

THE MEANS OF REPRESENTATION IN DREAMS

In the process of transforming the latent thoughts into the manifest content of a dream we have found two factors at work: dream-condensation and dream-displacement. As we continue our investigation we shall, in addition to these, come across two further determinants which exercise an undoubted influence on the choice of the material which is to find access to the dream.

But first, even at the risk of appearing to bring our progress to a halt, I should like to take a preliminary glance at the processes involved in carrying out the interpretation of a dream. I cannot disguise from myself that the easiest way of making those processes clear and of defending their trustworthiness against criticism would be to take some particular dream as a sample, go through its interpretation (just as I have done with the dream of Irma’s injection in my second chapter), and then collect the dream-thoughts which I have discovered and so on to reconstruct from them the process by which the dream was formed - in other words, to complete a dream-analysis by a dream-synthesis. I have in fact carried out that task for my own instruction on several specimens; but I cannot reproduce them here, since I am forbidden to do so for reasons connected with the nature of the psychical material involved - reasons which are of many kinds and which will be accepted as valid by any reasonable person. Such considerations interfered less in the analysis of dreams, since an analysis could be incomplete and nevertheless retain its value, even though it penetrated only a small way into the texture of the dream. But in the case of the synthesis of a dream I do not see how it can be convincing unless it is complete. I could only give a complete synthesis of dreams dreamt by people unknown to the reading public. Since, however, this condition is fulfilled only by my patients, who are neurotics, I must postpone this part of my exposition of the subject till I am able - in another volume - to carry the psychological elucidation of neuroses to a point at which it can make contact with our present topic.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] Since writing the above words, I have published a complete analysis and synthesis of two dreams in my ‘Fragment of the Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’. [Added 1914:] Otto Rank’s analysis, ‘Ein Traum, der sich selbst deutet’, deserves mention as the most complete interpretation that has been published of a dream of considerable length.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

782

My attempts at building up dreams by synthesis from the dream-thoughts have taught me that the material which emerges in the course of interpretation is not all of the same value. One part of it is made up of the essential dream-thoughts - those, that is, which completely replace the dream, and which, if there were no censorship of dreams, would be sufficient in themselves to replace it. The other part of the material is usually to be regarded as of less importance. Nor is it possible to support the view that all the thoughts of this second kind had a share in the formation of the dream. On the contrary, there may be associations among them which relate to events that occurred after the dream, between the times of dreaming and interpreting. This part of the material includes all the connecting paths that led from the manifest dream-content to the latent dream-thoughts, as well as the intermediate and linking associations by means of which, in the course of the process of interpretation, we came to discover these connecting paths.

We are here interested only in the essential dream-thoughts. These usually emerge as a complex of thoughts and memories of the of the most intricate possible structure, with all the attributes of the trains of thought familiar to us in waking life. They are not infrequently trains of thought starting out from more than one centre, though having points of contact. Each train of thought is almost invariably accompanied by its contradictory counterpart, linked with it by antithetical association.

The different portions of this complicated structure stand, of course, in the most manifold logical relations to one another. They can represent foreground and background, digressions and illustrations, conditions, chains of evidence and counter-arguments. When the whole mass of these dream-thoughts is brought under the pressure of the dream-work, and its elements are turned about, broken into fragments and jammed together - almost like pack-ice - the question arises of what happens to the logical connections which have hitherto formed its framework. What representation do dreams provide for ‘if’, ‘because’, ‘just as’, ‘although’, ‘either-or’, and all the other conjunctions without which we cannot understand sentences or speeches?

In the first resort our answer must be that dreams have no means at their disposal for representing these logical relations between the dream-thoughts. For the most part dreams disregard all these conjunctions, and it is only the substantive content of the dream-thoughts that they take over and manipulate. The restoration of the connections which the dream-work has destroyed is a task which has to be performed by the interpretative process.

The incapacity of dreams to express these things must lie in the nature of the psychical material out of which dreams are made. The plastic arts of painting and sculpture labour, indeed, under a similar limitation as compared with poetry, which can make use of speech; and here once again the reason for their incapacity lies in the nature of the material which these two forms of art manipulate in their effort to express something. Before painting became acquainted with the laws of expression by which it is governed, it made attempts to get over this handicap. In ancient paintings small labels were hung from the mouths of the persons represented, containing in written characters the speeches which the artist despaired of representing pictorially.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

783

At this point an objection may perhaps be raised in dispute of the idea that dreams are unable to represent logical relations. For there are dreams in which the most complicated intellectual operations take place, statements are contradicted or confirmed, ridiculed or compared, just as they are in waking thought. But here again appearances are deceitful. If we go into the interpretation of dreams such as these, we find that the whole of this is part of the material of the dream-thoughts and is not a representation of intellectual work performed during the dream itself. What is reproduced by the ostensible thinking in the dream is the subject-matter of the dream-thoughts and not the mutual relations between them, the assertion of which constitutes thinking. I shall bring forward some instances of this. But the easiest point to establish in this connection is that all spoken sentences which occur in dreams and are specifically described as such are unmodified or slightly modified reproductions of speeches which are also to be found among the recollections in the material of the dream-thoughts. A speech of this kind is often no more than an allusion to some event included among the dream-thoughts, and the meaning of the dream may be a totally different one.

Nevertheless, I will not deny that critical thought-activity which is not a mere repetition of material in the dream-thoughts does have a share in the formation of dreams. I shall have to elucidate the part played by this factor at the end of the present discussion. It will then become apparent that this thought-activity is not produced by the dream-thoughts but by the dream itself after it has already, in a certain sense, been completed.

Provisionally, then, it may be said that the logical relations between the dream-thoughts are not given any separate representation in dreams. For instance, if a contradiction occurs in a dream, it is either a contradiction of the dream itself or a contradiction derived from the subject-matter of one of the dream-thoughts. A contradiction in a dream can only correspond in an exceedingly indirect manner to a contradiction between the dream-thoughts. But just as the art of painting eventually found a way of expressing, by means other than the floating labels, at least the intention of the words of the personages represented - affection, threats, warnings, and so on - so too there is a possible means by which dreams can take account of some of the logical relations between their dream-thoughts, by making an appropriate modification in the method of representation characteristic of dreams. Experience shows that different dreams vary greatly in this respect. While some dreams completely disregard the logical sequence of their material, others attempt to give as full an indication of it as possible. In doing so dreams depart sometimes more and some times less widely from the text that is at their disposal for manipulation. Incidentally dreams vary similarly in their treatment of the chronological sequence of the dream-thoughts, if such a sequence has been established in the unconscious (as, for instance, in the dream of Irma’s injection).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

784

What means does the dream-work possess for indicating these relations in the dream-thoughts which it is so hard to represent? I will attempt to enumerate them one by one.

In the first place, dreams take into account in a general way the connection which undeniably exists between all the portions of the dream-thoughts by combining the whole material into a single situation or event. They reproduce logical connection by simultaneity in time. Here they are acting like the painter who, in a picture of the School of Athens or of Parnassus, represents in one group all the philosophers or all the poets. It is true that they were never in fact assembled in a single hall or on a single mountain-top; but they certainly form a group in the conceptual sense.

Dreams carry this method of reproduction down to details. Whenever they show us two elements close together, this guarantees that there is some specially intimate connection between what correspond to them among the dream-thoughts. In the same way, in our system of writing, ‘ab’ means that the two letters are to be pronounced in a single syllable. If a gap is left between the ‘a’ and the ‘b’, it means that the ‘a’ is the last letter of one word and the ‘b’ is the first of the next one. So, too, collocations in dreams do not consist of any chance, disconnected portions of the dream-material, but of portions which are fairly closely connected in the dream-thoughts as well.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

785

For representing causal relations dreams have two procedures which are in essence the same. Suppose the dream-thoughts run like this: ‘Since this was so and so, such and such was bound to happen.’ Then the commoner method of representation would be to introduce the dependent clause as an introductory dream and to add the principal clause as the main dream. If I have interpreted aright, the temporal sequence may be reversed. But the more extensive part of the dream always corresponds to the principal clause.

One of my women patients once produced an excellent instance of this way of representing causality in a dream which I shall later record fully. It consisted of a short prelude and a very diffuse piece of dream which was centred to a marked degree on a single theme and might be entitled ‘The Language of Flowers.’

The introductory dream was as follows: She went into the kitchen, where her two maids were, and found fault with them for not having got her ‘bite of food’ ready. At the same time she saw a very large quantity of common kitchen crockery standing upside down in the kitchen to drain; it was piled up in heaps. The two maids went to fetch some water and had to step into a kind of river which came right up to the house or into the yard. The main dream then followed, beginning thus: She was descending from a height over some strangely constructed palisades, and felt glad that her dress was not caught in them . . . etc.

The introductory dream related to the dreamer’s parents’ home. No doubt she had often heard her mother using the words that occurred in the dream. The heaps of common crockery were derived from a modest hardware shop which was located in the same building. The other part of the dream contained a reference to her father, who used always to run after the maids and who eventually contracted a fatal illness during a flood. (The house stood near a river-bank.) Thus the thought concealed behind the introductory dream ran as follows: ‘Because I was born in this house, in such mean and depressing circumstances . . . ’ The main dream took up the same thought and presented it in a form modified by wish-fulfilment: ‘I am of high descent.’ Thus the actual underlying thought was: ‘Because I am of such low descent, the course of my life has been so and so.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

786

The division of a dream into two unequal parts does not invariably, so far as I can see, signify that there is a causal relation between the thoughts behind the two parts. It often seems as though the same material were being represented in the two dreams from different points of view. (This is certainly the case where a series of dreams during one night end in an emission or orgasm - a series in which the somatic need finds its way to progressively clearer expression.) Or the two dreams may have sprung from separate centres in the dream-material, and their content may overlap, so that what is the centre in one dream is present as a mere hint in the other, and vice versa. But in a certain number of dreams a division into a shorter preliminary dream and a longer sequel does in fact signify that there is a causal relation between the two pieces.

The other method of representing a causal relation is adapted to less extensive material and consists in one image in the dream, whether of a person or thing, being transformed into another. The existence of a causal relation is only to be taken seriously if the transformation actually occurs before our eyes and not if we merely notice that one thing has appeared in the place of another.

I have said that the two methods of representing a causal relation were in essence the same. In both cases causation is represented by temporal sequence: in one instance by a sequence of dreams and in the other by the direct transformation of one image into another. In the great majority of cases, it must be confessed, the causal relation is not represented at all but is lost in the confusion of elements which inevitably occurs in the process of dreaming.

The alternative ‘either-or’ cannot be expressed in dreams in any way whatever. Both of the alternatives are usually inserted in the text of the dream as though they were equally valid. The dream of Irma’s injection contains a classic instance of this. Its latent thoughts clearly ran: ‘I am not responsible for the persistence of Irma’s pains; the responsibility lies either in her recalcitrance to accepting my solution, or in the unfavourable sexual conditions under which she lives and which I cannot alter, or in the fact that her pains are not hysterical at all but of an organic nature.’ The dream, on the other hand, fulfilled all of these possibilities (which were almost mutually exclusive), and did not hesitate to add a fourth solution, based on the dream-wish. After interpreting the dream, I proceeded to insert the ‘either-or’ into the context of the dream thoughts.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

787

If, however, in reproducing a dream, its narrator feels inclined to make use of an ‘either-or’ - e.g. ‘it was either a garden or a sitting-room’ - what was present in the dream-thoughts was not an alternative but an ‘and’, a simple addition. An ‘either-or’ is mostly used to describe a dream-element that has a quality of vagueness - which, however, is capable of being resolved. In such cases the rule for interpretation is: treat the two apparent alternatives as of equal validity and link them together with an ‘and’.

For instance, on one occasion a friend of mine was stopping in Italy and I had been without his address for a considerable time. I then had a dream of receiving a telegram containing this address. I saw it printed in blue on the telegraph form. The first word was vague:

‘Via’, perhaps

or ‘Villa’                             ; the second was clear: ‘Secerno’

or possibly even (‘Casa’)

The second word sounded like some Italian name and reminded me of discussions I had had with my friend on the subject of etymology. It also expressed my anger with him for having kept his address secret from me for so long. On the other hand, each of the three alternatives for the first word turned out on analysis to be an independent and equally valid starting point for a chain of thoughts.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

788

During the night before my father’s funeral I had a dream of a printed notice, placard or poster - rather like the notices forbidding one to smoke in railway waiting-rooms - on which appeared either

‘You are requested to close the eyes’

or,        ‘You are requested to close an eye.’

I usually write this in the form:

the

‘You are requested to close       eye(s).’

an

Each of these two versions had a meaning of its own and led in a different direction when the dream was interpreted. I had chosen the simplest possible ritual for the funeral, for I knew my father’s own views on such ceremonies. But some other members of the family were not sympathetic to such puritanical simplicity and thought we should be disgraced in the eyes of those who attended the funeral. Hence one of the versions: ‘you are requested to close an eye’, i.e. to ‘wink at’ or ‘overlook.’ Here it is particularly easy to see the meaning of the vagueness expressed by the ‘either-or.’ The dream-work failed to establish a unified wording for the dream-thoughts which could at the same time be ambiguous, and the two main lines of thought consequently began to diverge even in the manifest content of the dream.

In a few instances the difficulty of representing an alternative is got over by dividing the dream into two pieces of equal length.

The way in which dreams treat the category of contraries and contradictories is highly remarkable. It is simply disregarded. ‘No’ seems not to exist so far as dreams are concerned. They show a particular preference for combining contraries into a unity or for representing them as one and the same thing. Dreams feel themselves at liberty, moreover, to represent any element by its wishful contrary; so that there is no way of deciding at a first glance whether any element that admits of a contrary is present in the dream-thoughts as a positive or as a negative.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1911:] I was astonished to learn from a pamphlet by K. Abel, The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words (1884) (cf. my review of it, 1910e) - and the fact has been confirmed by other philologists - that the most ancient languages behave exactly like dreams in this respect. In the first instance they have only a single word to describe the two contraries at the extreme ends of a series of qualities or activities (e.g. ‘strong-weak’, ‘old-young’, ‘far-near’, ‘bind-sever’); they only form distinct terms for the two contraries by a secondary process of making small modifications in the common word. Abel demonstrates this particularly from Ancient Egyptian; but he shows that there are distinct traces of the same course of development in the Semitic and Indo-Germanic languages as well.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

789

In one of the dreams recorded just above, the first clause of which has already been interpreted (‘because my descent was such and such’), the dreamer saw herself climbing down over some palisades holding a blossoming branch in her hand. In connection with this image she thought of the angel holding a spray of lilies in pictures of the Annunciation - her own name was Maria - and of girls in white robes walking in Corpus Christi processions, when the streets are decorated with green branches. Thus the blossoming branch in the dream without any doubt alluded to sexual innocence. However, the branch was covered with red flowers, each of which was like a camellia. By the end of her walk - so the dream went on - the blossoms were already a good deal faded. There then followed some unmistakable allusions to menstruation. Accordingly, the same branch which was carried like a lily and as though by an innocent girl was at the same time an allusion to the Dame aux camélias who, as we know, usually wore a white camellia, except during her periods, when she wore a red one. The same blossoming branch (cf. ‘des Mädchens Blüten’ [‘the maiden’s blossoms’] in Goethe’s poem ‘Der Müllerin Verrat’) represented both sexual innocence and its contrary. And the same dream which expressed her joy at having succeeded in passing through life immaculately gave one glimpses at certain points (e.g. in the fading of the blossoms) of the contrary train of ideas - of her having been guilty of various sins against sexual purity (in her childhood, that is). In analysing the dream it was possible clearly to distinguish the two trains of thought, of which the consoling one seemed the more superficial and the self-reproachful one the deeper-lying - trains of thought which were diametrically opposed to each other but whose similar though contrary elements were represented by the same elements in the manifest dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

790

One and one only of these logical relations is very highly favoured by the mechanism of dream-formation; namely, the relation of similarity, consonance or approximation - the relation of ‘just as’. This relation, unlike any other, is capable of being represented in dreams in a variety of ways.¹ Parallels or instances of ‘just as’ inherent in the material of the dream-thoughts constitute the first foundations for the construction of a dream; and no inconsiderable part of the dream-work consists in creating fresh parallels where those which are already present cannot find their way into the dream owing to the censorship imposed by resistance. The representation of the relation of similarity is assisted by the tendency of the dream-work towards condensation.

Similarity, consonance, the possession of common attributes - all these are represented in dreams by unification, which may either be present already in the material of the dream-thoughts or may be freshly constructed. The first of these possibilities may be described as ‘identification’ and the second as ‘composition.’ Identification is employed where persons are concerned; composition where things are the material of the unification. Nevertheless composition may also be applied to persons. Localities are often treated like persons.

In identification, only one of the persons who are linked by a common element succeeds in being represented in the manifest content of the dream, while the second or remaining persons seem to be suppressed in it. But this single covering figure appears in the dream in all the relations and situations which apply either to him or to the figures which he covers. In composition, where this is extended to persons, the dream-image contains features which are peculiar to one or other of the persons concerned but not common to them; so that the combination of these features leads to the appearance of a new unity, a composite figure. The actual process of composition can be carried out in various ways. On the one hand, the dream-figure may bear the name of one of the persons related to it - in which case we simply know directly, in a manner analogous to our waking knowledge, that this or that person is intended - while its visual features may belong to the other person. Or, on the other hand, the dream-image itself may be composed of visual features belonging in reality partly to the one person and partly to the other. Or again the second person’s share in the dream-image may lie, not in its visual features, but in the gestures that we attribute to it, the words that we make it speak, or the situation in which we place it. In this last case the distinction between identification and the construction of a composite figure begins to lose its sharpness. But it may also happen that the formation of a composite figure of this kind is unsuccessful. If so, the scene in the dream is attributed to one of the persons concerned, while the other (and usually the more important one) appears as an attendant figure without any other function. The dreamer may describe the position in such a phrase as: ‘My mother was there as well.’ (Stekel.) An element of this kind in the dream-content may be compared to the ‘determinatives’ used in hieroglyphic script, which are not meant to be pronounced but serve merely to elucidate other signs.

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] Cf. Aristotle’s remark on the qualifications of a dream-interpreter quoted above on p. 602 n. 2.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

791

The common element which justifies, or rather causes, the combination of the two persons may be represented in the dream or may be omitted from it. As a rule the identification or construction of a composite person takes place for the very purpose of avoiding the representation of the common element. Instead of saying: ‘A has hostile feelings towards me and so has B’, I make a composite figure out of A and B in the dream, or I imagine A performing an act of some other kind which is characteristic of B. The dream-figure thus constructed appears in the dream in some quite new connection, and the circumstance that it represents both A and B justifies me in inserting at the appropriate point in the dream the element which is common to both of them, namely a hostile attitude towards me. It is often possible in this way to achieve quite a remarkable amount of condensation in the content of a dream; I can save myself the need for giving a direct representation of very complicated circumstances relating to one person, if I can find another person to whom some of these circumstances apply equally. It is easy to see, too, how well this method of representation by means of identification can serve to evade the censorship due to resistance, which imposes such severe conditions upon the dream-work. What the censorship objects to may lie precisely in certain ideas which, in the material of the dream-thoughts, are attached to a particular person; so I proceed to find a second person, who is also connected with the objectionable material, but only with part of it. The contact between the two persons upon this censorable point now justifies me in constructing a composite figure characterized by indifferent features derived from both. This figure, arrived at by identification or composition, is then admissible to the dream-content without censorship, and thus, by making use of dream-condensation, I have satisfied the claims of the dream-censorship.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

792

When a common element between two persons is represented in a dream, it is usually a hint for us to look for another, concealed common element whose representation has been made impossible by the censorship. A displacement in regard to the common element has been made in order, as it were, to facilitate its representation. The fact that the composite figure appears in the dream with an indifferent common element leads us to conclude that there is another far from indifferent common element present in the dream-thoughts.

Accordingly, identification or the construction of composite figures serves various purposes in dreams: firstly to represent an element common to two persons, secondly to represent a displaced common element, and thirdly, too, to express a merely wishful common element. Since wishing that two persons had a common element frequently coincides with exchanging one for the other, this latter relation is also expressed in dreams by means of identification. In the dream of Irma’s injection, I wished to exchange her for another patient: I wished, that is, that the other woman might be my patient just as Irma was. The dream took this wish into account by showing me a person who was called Irma, but who was examined in a position in which I had only had occasion to see the other woman. In the dream about my uncle an exchange of this kind became the central point of the dream: I identified myself with the Minister by treating and judging my colleagues no better than he did.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

793

It is my experience, and one to which I have found no exception, that every dream deals with the dreamer himself. Dreams are completely egoistical.¹ Whenever my own ego does not appear in the content of the dream, but only some extraneous person, I may safely assume that my own ego lies concealed, by identification, behind this other person; I can insert my ego into the context. On other occasions, when my own ego does appear in the dream, the situation in which it occurs may teach me that some other person lies concealed, by identification behind my ego. In that case the dream should warn me to transfer on to myself, when I am interpreting the dream, the concealed common element attached to this other person. There are also dreams in which my ego appears along with other people who, when the identification is resolved, are revealed once again as my ego. These identifications should then make it possible for me to bring into contact with my ego certain ideas whose acceptance has been forbidden by the censorship. Thus my ego may be represented in a dream several times over, now directly and now through identification with extraneous persons. By means of a number of such identifications it becomes possible to condense an extraordinary amount of thought-material.² The fact that the dreamer’s own ego appears several times, or in several forms, in a dream is at bottom no more remarkable than that the ego should be contained in a conscious thought several times or in different places or connections - e.g. in the sentence ‘when I think what a healthy child I was’.

Identifications in the case of proper names of localities are resolved even more easily than in the case of persons, since here there is no interference by the ego, which occupies such a dominating place in dreams. In one of my dreams about Rome (see p. 680 f.), the place in which I found myself was called Rome, but I was astonished at the quantity of German posters at a street-corner. This latter point was a wish-fulfilment, which at once made me think of Prague; and the wish itself may perhaps have dated from a German-nationalist phase which I passed through during my youth, but have since got over. At the time at which I had the dream there was a prospect of my meeting my friend in Prague; so that the identification of Rome and Prague can be explained as a wishful common element: I would rather have met my friend in Rome than in Prague and I would have liked to exchange Prague for Rome for the purpose of this meeting.

¹ [Footnote added 1925:] Cf. the footnote on p. 746.

² When I am in doubt behind which of the figures appearing in the dream my ego is to be looked for, I observe the following rule: the person who in the dream feels an emotion which I myself experience in my sleep is the one who conceals my ego.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

794

The possibility of creating composite structures stands foremost among the characteristics which so often lend dreams a fantastic appearance, for it introduces into the content of dreams elements which could never have been objects of actual perception. The psychical process of constructing composite images in dreams is evidently the same as when we imagine or portray a centaur or a dragon in waking life. The only difference is that what determines the production of the imaginary figure in waking life is the impression which the new structure itself is intended to make; whereas the formation of the composite structure in a dream is determined by a factor extraneous to its actual shape - namely the common element in the dream-thoughts. Composite structures in dreams can be formed in a great variety of ways. The most naïve of these procedures merely represents the attributes of one thing to the accompaniment of a knowledge that they also belong to something else. A more painstaking technique combines the features of both objects into a new image and in so doing makes clever use of any similarities that the two objects may happen to possess in reality. The new structure may seem entirely absurd or may strike us as an imaginative success, according to the material and to the ingenuity with which it is put together. If the objects which are to be condensed into a single unity are much too incongruous, the dream-work is often content with creating a composite structure with a comparatively distinct nucleus, accompanied by a number of less distinct features. In that case the process of unification into a single image may be said to have failed. The two representations are superimposed and produce something in the nature of a contest between the two visual images. One might arrive at similar representations in a drawing, if one tried to illustrate the way in which a general concept is formed from a number of individual perceptual images.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

795

Dreams are, of course, a mass of these composite structures. I have given some examples of them in dreams that I have already analysed; and I will now add a few more. In the dream reported below on p. 816 ff., which describes the course of the patient’s life ‘in the language of flowers’ the dream-ego held a blossoming branch in her hand which, as we have seen, stood both for innocence and for sexual sinfulness. The branch, owing to the way in which the blossoms were placed on it, also reminded the dreamer of cherry-blossom; the blossoms themselves, regarded individually, were camellias, and moreover the general impression was of an exotic growth. The common factor among the elements of this composite structure was shown by the dream-thoughts. The blossoming branch was composed of allusions to gifts made to her in order to win, or attempt to win, her favour. Thus she had been given cherries in her childhood and, later in life, a camellia-plant; while ‘exotic’ was an allusion to a much-travelled naturalist who had tried to win her favour with a flower-drawing. - Another of my women patients produced in one of her dreams a thing that was intermediate between a bathing-hut at the seaside, an outside closet in the country and an attic in a town house. The first two elements have in common a connection with people naked and undressed; and their combination with the third element leads to the conclusion that (in her childhood) an attic had also been a scene of undressing. - Another dreamer, a man, produced a composite locality out of two places where ‘treatments’ are carried out: one of them being my consulting-room and the other the place of entertainment where he had first made his wife’s acquaintance. -A girl dreamt, after her elder brother had promised to give her a feast of caviare, that this same brother’s legs were covered all over with black grains of caviare. The element of ‘contagion’ (in the moral sense) and a recollection of a rash in her childhood, which had covered her legs all over with red spots, instead of black ones, had been combined with the grains of caviare into a new concept - namely the concept of ‘what she had got from her brother.’ In this dream, as in others, parts of the human body were treated like objects. - In a dream recorded by Ferenczi, a composite image occurred was made up from the figure of a doctor and of a horse and was also dressed in a nightshirt. The element common to these three components was arrived at in the analysis after the woman-patient had recognized that the night-shirt was an allusion to her father in a scene from her childhood. In all three cases it was a question of an object of her sexual curiosity. When she was a child she had often been taken by her nurse to a military stud-farm where she had ample opportunities of gratifying what was at that time her still uninhibited curiosity.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

796

I have asserted above that dreams have no means of expressing the relation of a contradiction, a contrary or a ‘no’. I shall now proceed to give a first denial of this assertion One class of cases which can be comprised under the heading of ‘contraries’ are, as we have seen, simply represented by identification - cases, that is, in which the idea of an exchange or substitution can be brought into connection with the contrast. I have given a number of instances of this. Another class of contraries in the dream-thoughts, falling into a category which may be described as ‘contrariwise’ or ‘just the reverse’, find their way into dreams in the following remarkable fashion, which almost deserves to be described as a joke. The ‘just the reverse’ is not itself represented in the dream-content, but reveals its presence in the material through the fact that some piece of the dream-content, which has already been constructed and happens (for some other reason) to be adjacent to it, is - as it were by an afterthought - turned round the other way. The process is more easily illustrated than described. In the interesting ‘Up and Down’ dream (p. 759 ff.) the representation of the climbing in the dream was the reverse of what it was in its prototype in the dream-thoughts - that is, in the introductory scene from Daudet’s Sappho: in the dream the climbing was difficult at first but easier later, while in the Daudet scene it was easy at first but more and more difficult later. Further, the ‘up above’ and ‘down below’ in the dreamer’s relation to his brother were represented the other way round in the dream. This pointed to the presence of a reversed or contrary relation between two pieces of the material in the dream-thoughts; and we found it in the dreamer’s childhood phantasy of being carried by his wet-nurse, which was the reverse of the situation in the novel, where the hero was carrying his mistress. So too in my dream of Goethe’s attack on Herr M. (see below, p. 886 ff.) there is a similar ‘just the reverse’ which has to be put straight before the dream can be successfully interpreted. In the dream Goethe made an attack on a young man, Herr M.; in the real situation contained in the dream-thoughts a man of importance, my friend, had been attacked by an unknown young writer. In the dream I based a calculation on the date of Goethe’s death; in reality the calculation had been made from the year of the paralytic patient’s birth. The thought which turned out to be the decisive one in the dream-thoughts was a contradiction of the idea that Goethe should be treated as though he were a lunatic. ‘Just the reverse’, said the dream, ‘if you don’t understand the book, it’s you that are feeble-minded, and not the author.’ I think, moreover, that all these dreams of turning things round the other way include a reference to the contemptuous implications of the idea of ‘turning one’s back on something.’ (E.g. the dreamer’s turning round in relation to his brother in the Sappho dream.) It is remarkable to observe, moreover, how frequently reversal is employed precisely in dreams arising from repressed homosexual impulses.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

797

Incidentally, reversal, or turning a thing into its opposite, is one of the means of representation most favoured by the dream-work and one which is capable of employment in the most diverse directions. It serves in the first place to give expression to the fulfilment of a wish in reference to some particular element of the dream-thoughts. ‘If only it had been the other way round!’ This is often the best way of expressing the ego’s reaction to a disagreeable fragment of memory. Again, reversal is of quite special use as a help to the censorship, for it produces a mass of distortion in the material which is to be represented, and this has a positively paralysing effect, to begin with, on any attempt at understanding the dream. For that reason, if a dream obstinately declines to reveal its meaning, it is always worth while to see the effect of reversing some particular elements in its manifest content, after which the whole situation often becomes immediately clear.

And, apart from the reversal of subject-matter, chronological reversal must not be overlooked. Quite a common technique of dream-distortion consists in representing the outcome of an event or the conclusion of a train of thought at the beginning of a dream and of placing at its end the premises on which the conclusion was based or the causes which led to the event. Anyone who fails to bear in mind this technical method adopted by dream-distortion will be quite at a loss when confronted with the task of interpreting a dream.¹

In some instances, indeed, it is only possible to arrive at the meaning of a dream after one has carried out quite a number of reversals of its content in various respects. For instance, in the case of a young obsessional neurotic, there lay concealed behind one of his dreams the memory of a death-wish dating from his childhood and directed against his father, of whom he had been afraid. Here is the text of the dream: His father was scolding him for coming home so late. The context in which the dream occurred in the psycho-analytic treatment and the dreamer’s associations showed, however, that the original wording must have been that he was angry with his father, and that in his view his father always came home too early (i.e. too soon). He would have preferred it if his father had not come home at all, and this was the same thing as a death-wish against his father. (See p. 733 f.)  For as a small boy, during his father’s temporary absence, he had been guilty of an act of sexual aggression against someone, and as a punishment had been threatened in these words: ‘Just you wait till your father comes back!’

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] Hysterical attacks sometimes make use of the same kind of chronological reversal in order to disguise their meaning from observers. For instance, a hysterical girl needed to represent something in the nature of a brief romance in one of her attacks - a romance of which she had had a phantasy in her unconscious after an encounter with someone on the suburban railway. She imagined how the man had been attracted by the beauty of her foot and had spoken to her while she was reading; whereupon she had gone off with him and had had a passionate love-scene. Her attack began with a representation of this love-scene by convulsive twitching of her body, accompanied by movements of her lips to represent kissing and tightening of her arms to represent embracing. She then hurried into the next room, sat down on a chair, raised her skirt so as to show her foot, pretended to be reading a book and spoke to me (that is, answered me). - [Added 1914:] Cf. in this connection what Artemidorus says: ‘In interpreting the images seen in dreams one must sometimes follow them from the beginning to the end and sometimes from the end to the beginning . . .’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

798

If we wish to pursue our study of the relations between dream-content and dream-thoughts further, the best plan will be to take dreams themselves as our point of departure and consider what certain formal characteristics of the method of representation in dreams signify in relation to the thoughts underlying them. Most prominent among these formal characteristics, which cannot fail to impress us in dreams, are the differences in sensory intensity between particular dream-images and in the distinctness of particular parts of dreams or of whole dreams as compared with one another.

The differences in intensity between particular dream-images cover the whole range extending between a sharpness of definition which we feel inclined, no doubt unjustifiably, to regard as greater than that of reality and an irritating vagueness which we declare characteristic of dreams because it is not completely comparable to any degree of indistinctness which we ever perceive in real objects. Furthermore we usually describe an impression which we have of an indistinct object in a dream as ‘fleeting’, while we feel that those dream-images which are more distinct have been perceived for a considerable length of time. The question now arises what it is in the material of the dream-thoughts that determines these differences in the vividness of particular pieces of the content of a dream.

We must begin by countering certain expectations which almost inevitably present themselves. Since the material of a dream may include real sensations experienced during sleep, it will probably be presumed that these, or the elements in the dream derived from them, are given prominence in the dream content by appearing with special intensity; or, conversely, that whatever is very specially vivid in a dream can be traced back to real sensations during sleep. In my experience, however, this has never been confirmed. It is not the case that the elements of a dream which are derivatives of real impressions during sleep (i.e. of nervous stimuli) are distinguished by their vividness from other elements which arise from memories. The factor of reality counts for nothing in determining the intensity of dream images.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

799

Again, it might be expected that the sensory intensity (that is, the vividness) of particular dream-images would be related to the psychical intensity of the elements in the dream-thoughts corresponding to them. In the latter, psychical intensity coincides with psychical value: the most intense elements are also the most important ones - those which form the centre-point of the dream-thoughts. We know, it is true, that these are precisely elements which, on account of the censorship, cannot as a rule make their way into the content of the dream; nevertheless, it might well be that their immediate derivatives which represent them in the dream might bear a higher degree of intensity, without necessarily on that account forming the centre of the dream. But this expectation too is disappointed by a comparative study of dreams and the material from which they are derived. The intensity of the elements in the one has no relation to the intensity of the elements in the other: the fact is that a complete ‘transvaluation of all psychical values’ takes place between the material of the dream-thoughts and the dream. A direct derivative of what occupies a dominating position in the dream-thoughts can often only be discovered precisely in some transitory element of the dream which is quite overshadowed by more powerful images.

The intensity of the elements of a dream turns out to be determined otherwise - and by two independent factors. In the first place, it is easy to see that the elements by which the wish-fulfilment is expressed are represented with special intensity. And in the second place, analysis shows that the most vivid elements of a dream are the starting-point of the most numerous trains of thought - that the most vivid elements are also those with the most numerous determinants. We shall not be altering the sense of this empirically based assertion if we put it in these terms: the greatest intensity is shown by those elements of a dream on whose formation the greatest amount of condensation has been expended. We may expect that it will eventually turn out to be possible to express this determinant and the other (namely relation to the wish-fulfilment) in a single formula.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

800

The problem with which I have just dealt - the causes of the greater or less intensity or clarity of particular elements of a dream - is not to be confounded with another problem, which relates to the varying clarity of whole dreams or sections of dreams. In the former case clarity is contrasted with vagueness, but in the latter case it is contrasted with confusion. Nevertheless it cannot be doubted that the increase and decrease of the qualities in the two scales run parallel. A section of a dream which strikes us as perspicuous usually contains intense elements; a dream which is obscure, on the other hand, is composed of elements of small intensity. Yet the problem presented by the scale which runs from what is apparently clear to what is obscure and confused is far more complicated than that of the varying degrees of vividness of dream-elements. Indeed, for reasons which will appear later, the former problem cannot yet be discussed.

In a few cases we find to our surprise that the impression of clarity or indistinctness given by a dream has no connection at all with the make-up of the dream itself but arises from the material of the dream-thoughts and is a constituent of it . Thus I remember a dream of mine which struck me when I woke up as being so particularly well-constructed, flawless and clear that, while I was still half-dazed with sleep, I thought of introducing a new category of dreams which were not subject to the mechanisms of condensation and displacement but were to be described as ‘phantasies during sleep.’ Closer examination proved that this rarity among dreams showed the same gaps and flaws in its structure as any other; and for that reason I dropped the category of ‘dream-phantasies.’ ¹ The content of the dream, when it was arrived at, represented me as laying before my friend a difficult and long-sought theory of bisexuality; and the wish-fulfilling power of the dream was responsible for our regarding this theory (which, incidentally, was not given in the dream) as clear and flawless. Thus what I had taken to be a judgement on the completed dream was actually a part, and indeed the essential part, of the dream-content. The dream-work had in this case encroached, as it were, upon my first waking thoughts and had conveyed to me as a judgement upon the dream the part of the material of the dream-thoughts which it had not succeeded in representing accurately in the dream. I once came across a precise counterpart to this in a woman patient’s dream during analysis. To begin with she refused altogether to tell it me, ‘because it was so indistinct and muddled’. At length, protesting repeatedly that she felt no certainty that her account was correct, she informed me that several people had come into the dream - she herself, her husband and her father - and that it was as though she had not known whether her husband was her father, or who her father was, or something of that sort. This dream, taken in conjunction with her associations during the analytic session, showed beyond a doubt that it was a question of the somewhat commonplace story of a servant-girl who was obliged to confess that she was expecting a baby but was in doubts as to ‘who the (baby’s) father really was’. ² Thus here again the lack of clarity shown by the dream was a part of the material which instigated the dream: part of this material, that is, was represented in the form of the dream. The form of a dream, or the form in which it is dreamt is used with quite surprising frequency for representing its concealed subject-matter.

¹ [Footnote added 1930:] Whether rightly I am now uncertain.

² Her accompanying hysterical symptoms were amenorrhoea and great depression (which was this patient’s chief symptom).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

801

Glosses on a dream, or apparently innocent comments on it, often serve to disguise a portion of what has been dreamt in the subtlest fashion, though in fact betraying it. For instance, a dreamer remarked that at one point ‘the dream had been wiped away’; and the analysis led to an infantile recollection of his listening to someone wiping himself after defaecating. Or here is another example which deserves to be recorded in detail. A young man had a very clear dream which reminded him of some phantasies of his boyhood that had remained conscious. He dreamt that it was evening and that he was in a hotel at a summer resort. He mistook the number of his room and went into one in which an elderly lady and her two daughters were undressing and going to bed. He proceeded: ‘Here there are some gaps in the dream; there’s something missing. Finally there was a man in the room who tried to throw me out, and I had to have a struggle with him.’ He made vain endeavours to recall the gist and drift of the boyish phantasy to which the dream was evidently alluding; until at last the truth emerged that what he was in search of was already in his possession in his remark about the obscure part of the dream. The ‘gaps’ were the genital apertures of the women who were going to bed; and ‘there’s something missing’ described the principal feature of the female genitalia. When he was young he had had a consuming curiosity to see a woman’s genitals and had been inclined to hold to the infantile sexual theory according to which women have male organs.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

802

An analogous recollection of another dreamer assumed a very similar shape. He dreamt as follows: ‘I was going into the Volkgarten Restaurant with Fräulein K. . . . . then came an obscure patch, an interruption . . ., then I found myself in the salon of a brothel, where I saw two or three women, one of them in her chemise and drawers.’

ANALYSIS. - Fräulein K. was the daughter of his former chief, and, as he himself admitted, a substitute sister of his own. He had seldom had an opportunity of talking to her, but they once had a conversation in which ‘it was just as though we had become aware of our sex, it was as though I were to say: "I’m a man and you’re a woman."' He had only once been inside the restaurant in question, with his brother-in-law’s sister, a girl who meant nothing at all to him. Another time he had gone with a group of three ladies as far as the entrance of the same restaurant. These ladies were his sister, his sister-in-law and the brother-in-law’s sister who has just been mentioned. All of them were highly indifferent to him, but all three fell into the class of ‘sister.’ He had only seldom visited a brothel - only two or three times in his life.

The interpretation was based on the ‘obscure patch’ and the ‘interruption’ in the dream, and put forward the view that in his boyish curiosity he had occasionally, though only seldom, inspected the genitals of a sister who was a few years his junior. Some days later he had a conscious recollection of the misdeed alluded to by the dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

803

The content of all dreams that occur during the same night forms part of the same whole; the fact of their being divided into several sections, as well as the grouping and number of those sections - all of this has a meaning and may be regarded as a piece of information arising from the latent dream-thoughts. In interpreting dreams consisting of several main sections or, in general, dreams occurring during the same night, the possibility should not be overlooked that separate and successive dreams of this kind may have the same meaning, and may be giving expression to the same impulses in different material. If so, the first of these homologous dreams to occur is often the more distorted and timid, while the succeeding one will be more confident and distinct.

Pharaoh’s dreams in the Bible of the kine and the ears of corn, which were interpreted by Joseph, were of this kind. They are reported more fully by Josephus (Ancient History of the Jews, Book 2, Chapter 5) than in the Bible. After the King had related his first dream, he said: ‘After I had seen this vision, I awaked out of my sleep; and, being in disorder, and considering with myself what this appearance should be, I fell asleep again, and saw another dream, more wonderful than the foregoing, which did more affright and disturb me . . .’ After hearing the King’s account of the dream, Joseph replied: ‘This dream, O King, although seen under two forms, signifies one and the same event . . .’

In his ‘Contribution to the Psychology of Rumour’, Jung (1910b) describes how the disguised erotic dream of a school-girl was understood by her school-friends without any interpreting and how it was further elaborated and modified. He remarks in connection with one of these dream stories: ‘The final thought in a long series of dream-images contains precisely what the first image in the series had attempted to portray. The censorship keeps the complex at a distance as long as possible by a succession of fresh symbolic screens, displacements, innocent disguises, etc.’ (Ibid., 87.) Scherner (1861, 166) was well acquainted with this peculiarity of the method of representation in dreams and describes it, in connection with his theory of organic stimuli, as a special law: ‘Lastly, however, in all symbolic dream-structures which arise from particular nervous stimuli, the imagination observes a general law: at the beginning of a dream it depicts the object from which the stimulus arises only by the remotest and most inexact allusions, but at the end, when the pictorial effusion has exhausted itself, it nakedly presents the stimulus itself, or, as the case may be, the organ concerned or the function of that organ, and therewith the dream, having designated its actual organic cause, achieves its end . . .’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

804

Otto Rank (1910) has produced a neat confirmation of this law of Scherner’s. A girl’s dream reported by him was composed of two separate dreams dreamt, with an interval between them, during the same night, the second of which ended with an orgasm. It was possible to carry out a detailed interpretation of this second dream even without many contributions from the dreamer; and the number of connections between the contents of the two dreams made it possible to see that the first dream represented in a more timid fashion the same thing as the second. So that the second, the dream with the orgasm, helped towards the complete explanation of the first. Rank rightly bases upon this example a discussion of the general significance of dreams of orgasm or emission for the theory of dreaming.

Nevertheless in my experience it is only rarely that one is in a position to interpret the clarity or confusion of a dream by the presence of certainty or doubt in its material. Later on I shall have to disclose a factor in dream-formation which I have not yet mentioned and which exercises the determining influence upon the scale of these qualities in any particular dream.

Sometimes, in a dream in which the same situation and setting have persisted for some time, an interruption will occur which is described in these words: ‘But then it was as though at the same time it was another place, and there such and such a thing happened.’ After a while the main thread of the dream may be resumed, and what interrupted it turns out to be a subordinate clause in the dream-material - an interpolated thought. A conditional in the dream-thoughts has been represented in the dream by simultaneity: ‘if’ has become ‘when’.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

805

What is the meaning of the sensation of inhibited movement which appears so commonly in dreams and verges so closely upon anxiety? One tries to move forward but finds oneself glued to the spot, or one tries to reach something but is held up by a series of obstacles. A train is on the point of departure but one is unable to catch it. One raises one’s hand to avenge an insult but finds it powerless and so forth. We have already met with this sensation in dreams of exhibiting, but have not as yet made any serious attempt to interpret it. An easy but insufficient answer would be to say that motor paralysis prevails in sleep and that we become aware of it in the sensation we are discussing. But it may be asked why in that case we are not perpetually dreaming of these inhibited movements; and it is reasonable to suppose that this sensation, though one which can be summoned up at any moment during sleep, serves to facilitate some particular kind of representation, and is only aroused when the material of the dream-thoughts needs to be represented in that way.

This ‘not being able to do anything’ does not always appear in dreams as a sensation but is sometimes simply a part of the content of the dream. A case of this sort seems to me particularly well qualified to throw light on the meaning of this feature of dreaming. Here is an abridged version of a dream in which I was apparently charged with dishonesty. The place was a mixture of a private sanatorium and several other institutions. A man-servant appeared to summon me to an examination. I knew in the dream that something had been missed and that the examination was due to a suspicion that I had appropriated the missing article. (The analysis showed that the examination was to be taken in two senses and included a medical examination.) Conscious of my innocence and of the fact that I held the position of a consultant in the establishment, I accompanied the servant quietly. At the door we were met by another servant who said, pointing to me: ‘Why have you brought him? He’s a respectable person.’ I then went, unattended, into a large hall, with machines standing in it, which reminded me of an Inferno with its hellish instruments of punishment. Stretched out on one apparatus I saw one of my colleagues, who had every reason to take some notice of me; but he paid no attention. I was then told I could go. But I could not find my hat and could not go after all.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

806

The wish-fulfilment of the dream evidently lay in my being recognized as an honest man and told I could go. There must therefore have been all kinds of material in the dream-thoughts containing a contradiction of this. That I could go was a sign of my absolution. If therefore something happened at the end of the dream which prevented my going, it seems plausible to suppose that the suppressed material containing the contradiction was making itself felt at that point. My not being able to find my hat meant accordingly: ‘After all you’re not an honest man.’ Thus the ‘not being able to do something’ in this dream was a way of expressing a contradiction - a ‘no’- so that my earlier statement that dreams cannot express a ‘no’ requires correction.¹

In other dreams, in which the ‘not carrying out’ of a movement occurs as a sensation and not simply as a situation, the sensation of the inhibition of a movement gives a more forcible expression to the same contradiction - it expresses a volition which is opposed by a counter-volition. Thus the sensation of the inhibition of a movement represents a conflict of will. We shall learn later that the motor paralysis accompanying sleep is precisely one of the fundamental determinants of the psychical process during dreaming. Now an impulse transmitted along the motor paths is nothing other than a volition, and the fact of our being so certain that we shall feel that impulse inhibited during sleep is what makes the whole process so admirably suited for representing an act of volition and a ‘no’ which opposes it. It is also easy to see, on my explanation of anxiety, why the sensation of an inhibition of will approximates so closely to anxiety and is so often linked with it in dreams. Anxiety is a libidinal impulse which has its origin in the unconscious and is inhibited by the preconscious.² When, therefore, the sensation of inhibition is linked with anxiety in a dream, it must be a question of an act of volition which was at one time capable of generating libido - that is, it must be a question of a sexual impulse.

¹ In the complete analysis there was a reference to an event in my childhood, reached by the following chain of association. ‘Der Mohr hat seine Schuldigkeit getan, der Mohr kahn gehen.’ [‘The Moor has done his duty, the Moor can go.’] Then came a facetious conundrum: ‘How old was the Moor when he had done his duty?’ - ‘One year old, because then he could go [‘gehen’ - both ‘to go’ and ‘ to walk’].’ (It appears that I came into the world with such a tangle of black hair that my young mother declared I was a little Moor.) - My not being able to find my hat was an occurrence from waking life which was used in more than one sense. Our housemaid, who was a genius at putting things away, had hidden it. -The end of this dream also concealed a rejection of some melancholy thoughts about death: ‘I am far from having done my duty, so I must not go yet.’ - Birth and death were dealt with in it, just as they had been in the dream of Goethe and the paralytic patient, which I had dreamt a short time before. (See pp. 797, 886 ff.)

² [Footnote added 1930:] In the light of later knowledge this statement can no longer stand.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

807

I shall deal elsewhere (see below) with the meaning and psychical significance of the judgement which often turns up in dreams expressed in the phrase ‘after all this is only a dream’. Here I will merely say in anticipation that it is intended to detract from the importance of what is being dreamt. The interesting and allied problem, as to what is meant when some of the content of a dream is described in the dream itself as ‘dreamt’ - the enigma of the ‘dream within a dream’ - has been solved in a similar sense by Stekel, who has analysed some convincing examples. The intention is, once again, to detract from the importance of what is ‘dreamt’ in the dream, to rob it of its reality. What is dreamt in a dream after waking from the ‘dream within a dream’ is what the dream-wish seeks to put in the place of an obliterated reality. It is safe to suppose, therefore, that what has been ‘dreamt’ in the dream is a representation of the reality, the true recollection, while the continuation of the dream, on the contrary, merely represents what the dreamer wishes. To include something in a ‘dream within a dream’ is thus equivalent to wishing that the thing described as a dream had never happened. In other words, if a particular event is inserted into a dream as a dream by the dream-work itself, this implies the most decided confirmation of the reality of the event - the strongest affirmation of it. The dream-work makes use of dreaming as a form of repudiation, and so confirms the discovery that dreams are wish-fulfilments.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

808

(D)

CONSIDERATIONS OF REPRESENTABILITY

We have been occupied so far with investigating the means by which dreams represent the relations between the dream-thoughts. In the course of this investigation, however, we have more than once touched upon the further topic of the general nature of the modifications which the material of the dream-thoughts undergoes for the purpose of the formation of a dream. We have learnt that that material, stripped to a large extent of its relations, is submitted to a process of compression, while at the same time displacements of intensity between its elements necessarily bring about a psychical transvaluation of the material. The displacements we have hitherto considered turned out to consist in the replacing of some one particular idea by another in some way closely associated with it, and they were used to facilitate condensation in so far as, by their means, instead of two elements, a single common element intermediate between them found its way into the dream. We have not yet referred to any other sort of displacement. Analyses show us, however, that another sort exists and that it reveals itself in a change in the verbal expression of the thoughts concerned. In both cases there is a displacement along a chain of associations; but a process of such a kind can occur in various psychical spheres, and the outcome of the displacement may in one case be that one element is replaced by another, while the outcome in another case may be that a single element has its verbal form replaced by another.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

809

This second species of displacement which occurs in dream-formation is not only of great theoretical interest but is also specially well calculated to explain the appearance of fantastic absurdity in which dreams are disguised. The direction taken by the displacement usually results in a colourless and abstract expression in the dream-thought being exchanged for a pictorial and concrete one. The advantage, and accordingly the purpose, of such a change jumps to the eyes. A thing that is pictorial is, from the point of view of a dream, a thing that is capable of being represented: it can be introduced into a situation in which abstract expressions offer the same kind of difficulties to representation in dreams as a political leading article in a newspaper would offer to an illustrator. But not only representability, but the interests of condensation and the censorship as well can be the gainers from this exchange. A dream-thought is unusable so long as it is expressed in an abstract form; but when once it has been transformed into pictorial language, contrasts and identifications of the kind which the dream-work requires, and which it creates if they are not already present, can be established more easily than before between the new form of expression and the remainder of the material underlying the dream. This is so because in every language concrete terms, in consequence of the history of their development, are richer in associations than conceptual ones. We may suppose that a good part of the intermediate work done during the formation of a dream, which seeks to reduce the dispersed dream-thoughts to the most succinct and unified expression possible, proceeds along the line of finding appropriate verbal transformations for the individual thoughts. Any one thought, whose form of expression may happen to be fixed for other reasons, will operate in a determinant and selective manner on the possible forms of expression allotted to the other thoughts, and it may do so, perhaps, from the very start - as is the case in writing a poem. If a poem is to be written in rhymes, the second line of a couplet is limited by two conditions: it must express an appropriate meaning, and the expression of that meaning must rhyme with the first line. No doubt the best poem will be one in which we fail to notice the intention of finding a rhyme, and in which the two thoughts have, by mutual influence, chosen from the very start a verbal expression which will allow a rhyme to emerge with only slight subsequent adjustment.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

810

In a few instances a change of expression of this kind assists dream-condensation even more directly, by finding a form of words which owing to its ambiguity is able to give expression to more than one of the dream-thoughts. In this way the whole domain of verbal wit is put at the disposal of the dream-work. There is no need to be astonished at the part played by words in dream-formation. Words, since they are the nodal point of numerous ideas, may be regarded as predestined to ambiguity; and the neuroses (e.g. in framing obsessions and phobias), no less than dreams, make unashamed use of the advantages thus offered by words for purposes of condensation and disguise.¹ It is easy to show that dream-distortion too profits from displacement of expression. If one ambiguous word is used instead of two unambiguous ones the result is misleading; and if our everyday, sober method of expression is replaced by a pictorial one, our understanding is brought to a halt, particularly since a dream never tells us whether its elements are to be interpreted literally or in a figurative sense or whether they are to be connected with the material of the dream-thoughts directly or through the intermediary of some interpolated phraseology. In interpreting any dream-element it is in general doubtful

(a) whether it is to be taken in a positive or negative sense (as an antithetic relation),

(b) whether it is to be interpreted historically (as a recollection),

(c) whether it is to be interpreted symbolically, or

(d) whether its interpretation is to depend on its wording.

Yet, in spite of all this ambiguity, it is fair to say that the productions of the dream-work, which, it must be remembered, are not made with the intention of being understood, present no greater difficulties to their translators than do the ancient hieroglyphic scripts to those who seek to read them.

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] See my volume on jokes (1905c) and the discussion there of the use of ‘verbal bridges’ in the solution of neurotic symptoms.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

811

I have already given several examples of representations in dreams which are only held together by the ambiguity of their wording. (For instance, ‘She opened her mouth properly’ in the dream of Irma’s injection and ‘I could not go after all’ in the dream which I last quoted.) I will now record a dream in which a considerable part was played by the turning of abstract thought into pictures. The distinction between dream-interpretation of this kind and interpretation by means of symbolism can still be drawn quite sharply. In the case of symbolic dream-interpretation the key to the symbolization is arbitrarily chosen by the interpreter; whereas in our cases of verbal disguise the keys are generally known and laid down by firmly established linguistic usage. If one has the right idea at one’s disposal at the right moment, one can solve dreams of this kind wholly or in part even independently of information from the dreamer.

A lady of my acquaintance had the following dream: She was at the Opera. A Wagner opera was being performed, and had lasted till a quarter to eight in the morning. There were tables set out in the stalls, at which people were eating and drinking. Her cousin, who had just got back from his honeymoon, was sitting at one of the tables with his young wife, and an aristocrat was sitting beside them. Her cousin’s wife, so it appeared, had brought him back with her from the honeymoon, quite openly, just as one might bring back a hat. In the middle of the stalls there was a high tower, which had a platform on top of it surrounded by an iron railing. High up at the top was the conductor, who had the features of Hans Richter. He kept running round the railing, and was perspiring violently; and from that position he was conducting the orchestra which was grouped about the base of the tower. She herself was sitting in a box with a woman friend (whom I knew). Her younger sister wanted to hand her up a large lump of coal from the stalls, on the ground that she had not known it would be so long, and must be simply freezing by now. (As though the boxes required to be heated during the long performance.)

Even though the dream was well focused on a single situation, yet in other respects it was sufficiently senseless: the tower in the middle of the stalls, for instance, with the conductor directing the orchestra from the top of it! And above all the coal that her sister handed up to her!  I deliberately refrained from asking for an analysis of the dream. But since I had some knowledge of the dreamer’s personal relations, I was able to interpret certain pieces of it independently of her. I knew she had had a great deal of sympathy for a musician whose career had been prematurely cut short by insanity. So I decided to take the tower in the stalls metaphorically. It then emerged that the man whom she had wanted to see in Hans Richter’s place towered high above the other members of the orchestra. The tower might be described as a composite picture formed by apposition. The lower part of its structure represented the man’s greatness; the railing at the top, behind which he was running round like a prisoner or an animal in a cage - this was an allusion to the unhappy man’s name¹ - represented his ultimate fate. The two ideas might have been brought together in the word ‘Narrenturm’.²

¹[Footnote added 1925:] Hugo Wolf.

² [Literally ‘Fools’ Tower’ - an old term for an insane asylum.]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

812

Having thus discovered the mode of representation adopted by the dream, we might attempt to use the same key for solving its second apparent absurdity - the coal handed up to the dreamer by her sister. ‘Coal’ must mean  ‘secret love’:

Kein Feuer, keine Kohle

kann brennen so heiss

als wie heimliche Liebe,

von der niemand nichts weiss.¹

She herself and her woman friend had been left unmarried. Her younger sister, who still had prospects of marriage, handed her up the coal ‘because she had not known it would be so long’. The dream did not specify what would be so long. If it were a story, we should say ‘the performance’; but since it is a dream, we may take the phrase as an independent entity, decide that it was used ambiguously and add the words ‘before she got married.’  Our interpretation of ‘secret love’ is further supported by the mention of the dreamer’s cousin sitting with his wife in the stalls, and by the open love-affair attributed to the latter. The dream was dominated by the antithesis between secret and open love and between the dreamer’s own fire and the coldness of the young wife. In both cases, moreover, there was someone ‘highly-placed’ - a term applying equally to the aristocrat and to the musician on whom such high hopes had been pinned.

¹[ No fire, no coal

So hotly glows

As secret love

Of which no one knows.]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

813

The foregoing discussion has led us at last to the discovery of a third factor whose share in the transformation of the dream thoughts into the dream-content is not to be underrated: namely, considerations of representability in the peculiar psychical material of which dreams make use  - for the most part, that is, representability in visual images. Of the various subsidiary thoughts attached to the essential dream-thoughts, those will be preferred which admit of visual representation; and the dream-work does not shrink from the effort of recasting unadaptable thoughts into a new verbal form - even into a less usual one - provided that that process facilitates representation and so relieves the psychological pressure caused by constricted thinking. This pouring of the content of a thought into another mould may at the same time serve the purposes of the activity of condensation and may create connections, which might not otherwise have been present, with some other thought; while this second thought itself may already have had its original form of expression changed, with a view to meeting the first one half-way.

Herbert Silberer (1909) has pointed out a good way of directly observing the transformation of thoughts into pictures in the process of forming dreams and so of studying this one factor of the dream-work in isolation. If, when he was in a fatigued and sleepy condition, he set himself some intellectual task, he found that it often happened that the thought escaped him and that in its place a picture appeared, which he was then able to recognize as a substitute for the thought. Silberer describes these substitutes by the not very appropriate term of ‘auto-symbolic.’ I will here quote a few examples from Silberer’s paper, and I shall have occasion, on account of certain characteristics of the phenomena concerned, to return to them later.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

814

‘Example 1. - I thought of having to revise an uneven passage in an essay.

‘Symbol. - I saw myself planing a piece of wood.’

‘Example 5. - I endeavoured to bring home to myself the aim of certain metaphysical studies which I was proposing to make. Their aim, I reflected, was to work one’s way through to ever higher forms of consciousness and layers of existence, in one’s search for the bases of existence.

‘Symbol. - I was pushing a long knife under a cake, as though to lift out a slice.

‘Interpretation. - My motion with the knife meant the "working my way through" which was in question. . . . Here is the explanation of the symbolism. It is from time to time my business at meals to cut up a cake and distribute the helpings. I perform the task with a long, flexible knife - which demands some care. In particular, to lift out the slices cleanly after they have been cut offers certain difficulties; the knife must be pushed carefully under the slice (corresponding to the slow "working my way through" to reach the "bases"). But there is yet more symbolism in the picture. For the cake in the symbol was a "Dobos" cake - a cake with a number of "layers" through which, in cutting it, the knife has to penetrate (the "layers" of consciousness and thought).’

‘Example 9. - I had lost the thread in a train of thought. I tried to find it again, but had to admit that the starting-point had completely escaped me.

‘Symbol. - Part of a compositor’s forme, with the last lines of type fallen away.’

In view of the part played by jokes, quotations, songs and proverbs in the mental life of educated people, it would fully agree with our expectations if disguises of such kinds were used with extreme frequency for representing dream-thoughts. What, for instance, is the meaning in a dream of a number of carts, each filled with a different sort of vegetable? They stand for a wishful contrast to ‘Kraut und Rüben’, that is to say to ‘higgledy-piggledy’, and accordingly signify ‘disorder.’ I am surprised that this dream has only been reported to me once.¹ A dream-symbolism of universal validity has only emerged in the case of a few subjects, on the basis of generally familiar allusions and verbal substitutes. Moreover a good part of this symbolism is shared by dreams with psychoneuroses, legends and popular customs.

¹ [Footnote added 1925:] I have in fact never met with this image again; so I have lost confidence in the correctness of the interpretation.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

815

Indeed, when we look into the matter more closely, we must recognize the fact that the dream-work is doing nothing original in making substitutions of this kind. In order to gain its ends - in this case the possibility of a representation hampered by censorship - it merely follows the paths which it finds already laid down in the unconscious; and it gives preference to those transformations of the repressed material which can also become conscious in the form of jokes or allusions and of which the phantasies of neurotic patients are so full. At this point we suddenly reach an understanding of Scherner’s dream interpretations, whose essential correctness I have defended elsewhere. The imagination’s pre-occupation with the subject’s own body is by no means peculiar to dreams or characteristic only of them. My analyses have shown me that it is habitually present in the unconscious thoughts of neurotics, and that it is derived from sexual curiosity, which, in growing youths or girls, is directed to the genitals of the other sex, and to those of their own as well. Nor, as Scherner and Volkelt have rightly insisted, is a house the only circle of ideas employed for symbolizing the body; and this is equally true of dreams and of the unconscious phantasies of neurosis. It is true that I know patients who have retained an architectural symbolism for the body and the genitals. ( Sexual interest ranges far beyond the sphere of the external genitalia.) For these patients pillars and columns represent the legs (as they do in the Song of Solomon), every gateway stands for one of the bodily orifices (a ‘hole’), every water-pipe is a reminder of the urinary apparatus, and so on. But the circle of ideas centring round plant-life or the kitchen may just as readily be chosen to conceal sexual images.¹ In the former case the way has been well prepared by linguistic usage, itself the precipitate of imaginative similes reaching back to remote antiquity: e.g. the Lord’s vineyard, the seed, and the maiden’s garden in the Song of Solomon. The ugliest as well as the most intimate details of sexual life may be thought and dreamt of in seemingly innocent allusions to activities in the kitchen; and the symptoms of hysteria could never be interpreted if we forgot that sexual symbolism can find its best hiding-place behind what is commonplace and inconspicuous. There is a valid sexual meaning behind the neurotic child’s intolerance of blood or raw meat, or his nausea at the sight of eggs or macaroni, and behind the enormous exaggeration in neurotics of the natural human dread of snakes. Wherever neuroses make use of such disguises they are following paths along which all humanity passed in the earliest periods of civilization - paths of whose continued existence today, under the thinnest of veils, evidence is to be found in linguistic usages, superstitions and customs.

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] Abundant evidence of this is to be found in the three supplementary volumes to Fuchs (1909-12).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

816

I will now append the ‘flowery’ dream dreamt by one of my women patients which I have already promised to record. I have indicated in small capitals those elements in it that are to be given a sexual interpretation. The dreamer quite lost her liking for this pretty dream after it had been interpreted.

(a) INTRODUCTORY DREAM: She went into the kitchen where her two maidservants were, and found fault with them for not having got her ‘bite of food’ ready. At the same time she saw quite a quantity of crockery standing upside down to drain, common crockery piled up in heaps. Later addition: The two maidservants went to fetch some water and had to step into a kind of river which came right up to the house into the yard.¹

(b) MAIN DREAM ²: She was descending from a height³ over some strangely constructed pallisades or fences, which were put together into large panels, and consisted of small squares of wattling^4. It was not intended for climbing over; she had trouble in finding a place to put her feet in and felt glad that her dress had not been caught anywhere, so that she had stayed respectable as she went along.5 She was holding a BIG BRANCH in her hand 6; actually, it was like a tree, covered over with RED BLOSSOMS, branching and spreading out.7 There was an idea of their being cherry-BLOSSOMS; but they also looked like double CAMELLIAS, though of course those do not grow on trees. As she went down, first she had ONE, then suddenly TWO, and later again ONE.8 When she got down, the lower BLOSSOMS were already a good deal FADED. Then she saw, after she had got down, a manservant who - she felt inclined to say - was combing a similar tree, that is to say, he was using a similar PIECE OF WOOD to drag out some THICK TUFTS OF HAIR that were hanging down from it like moss. Some other workmen had cut down some similar BRANCHES from a GARDEN and thrown them into the ROAD, where they LAY ABOUT, so that A LOT OF PEOPLE TOOK SOME. But she asked whether that was alright - whether she might TAKE ONE TOO.9 A young MAN (someone she knew, a stranger) was standing in the garden; she went up to him to ask him how BRANCHES of that kind could be TRANSPLANTED INTO HER OWN GARDEN.10 He embraced her; whereupon she struggled and asked him what he was thinking of and whether he thought people could embrace her like that. He said there was no harm in that: it was allowed.11 He then said that he was willing to go up into the OTHER GARDEN with her, to show her how the planting was done, and added something she could not quite understand: ‘Anyhow, I need three YARDS (later she gave it as: three square yards) or three fathoms of ground.’ It was as though he were asking her for something in return for his willingness, as though he intended to COMPENSATE HIMSELF IN HER GARDEN, or as though he wanted to CHEAT some law or other, to get some advantage from it without causing her harm. Whether he really showed her something, she had no idea.

¹ For the interpretation of this introductory dream, which is to be interpreted as a causal dependent clause, see p. 786.

² Describing the course of her life.

³ Her high descent: a wishful antithesis to the introductory dream.

4 A composite picture, uniting two localities: what were known as the ‘attics’ of her family home, where she used to play with her brother, the object of her later phantasies, and a farm belonging to a bad uncle who used to tease her.

5 A wishful antithesis to a real recollection of her uncle’s farm, where she used to throw off her clothes in her sleep.

6 Just as the angel carries a sprig of lilies in pictures of the Annunciation.

7 For the explanation of this composite image see p. 789: innocence, menstruation, La dame aux camélias.

8 Referring to the multiplicity of the people involved in her phantasy

9 That is whether she might pull one down, i. e. masturbate.

10 The branch had long since come to stand for the male genital organ; incidentally it also made a plain allusion to her family name.

11 This, as well as what next follows, related to marriage precautions.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

817

This dream, which I have brought forward on account of its symbolic elements, may be described as a ‘biographical’ one. Dreams of this kind occur frequently during psycho-analysis, but perhaps only rarely outside it.¹

I naturally have at my disposal a superfluity of material of this kind, but to report it would involve us too deeply in a consideration of neurotic conditions. It all leads to the same conclusion, namely that there is no necessity to assume that any peculiar symbolizing activity of the mind is operating in the dream-work, but that dreams make use of any symbolizations which are already present in unconscious thinking, because they fit in better with the requirements of dream-construction on account of their representability and also because as a rule they escape censorship.

¹ [Footnote added 1911:] A similar ‘biographical’ dream will be found below as the third of my examples of dream-symbolism. Another one has been recorded at length by Rank, and another, which must be read ‘in reverse’, by Stekel (1909, 486).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

818

(E)

REPRESENTATION BY SYMBOLS IN DREAMS

- SOME FURTHER TYPICAL DREAMS

The analysis of this last, biographical, dream is clear evidence that I recognized the presence of symbolism in dreams from the very beginning. But it was only by degrees and as my experience increased that I arrived at a full appreciation of its extent and significance, and I did so under the influence of the contributions of Wilhelm Stekel (1911), about whom a few words will not be out of place here.

That writer, who has perhaps damaged psycho-analysis as much as he has benefited it, brought forward a large number of unsuspected translations of symbols; to begin with they were met with scepticism, but later they were for the most part confirmed and had to be accepted. I shall not be belittling the value of Stekel’s services if I add that the sceptical reserve with which his proposals were received was not without justification. For the examples by which he supported his interpretations were often unconvincing, and he made use of a method which must be rejected as scientifically untrustworthy. Stekel arrived at his interpretations of symbols by way of intuition, thanks to a peculiar gift for the direct understanding of them. But the existence of such a gift cannot be counted upon generally, its effectiveness is exempt from all criticism and consequently its findings have no claim to credibility. It is as though one sought to base the diagnosis of infectious diseases upon olfactory impressions received at the patient’s bedside - though there have undoubtedly been clinicians who could accomplish more than other people by means of the sense of smell (which is usually atrophied) and were really able to diagnose a case of enteric fever by smell.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

819

Advances in psycho-analytic experience have brought to our notice patients who have shown a direct understanding of dream-symbolism of this kind to a surprising extent. They were often sufferers from dementia praecox, so that for a time there was an inclination to suspect every dreamer who had this grasp of symbols of being a victim of that disease. But such is not the case. It is a question of a personal gift or peculiarity which has no visible pathological significance.

When we have become familiar with the abundant use made of symbolism for representing sexual material in dreams, the question is bound to arise of whether many of these symbols do not occur with a permanently fixed meaning, like the ‘grammalogues’ in shorthand; and we shall feel tempted to draw up a new ‘dream-book’ on the decoding principle. On that point there is this to be said: this symbolism is not peculiar to dreams, but is characteristic of unconscious ideation, in particular among the people, and it is to be found in folklore, and in popular myths, legends, linguistic idioms, proverbial wisdom and current jokes, to a more complete extent than in dreams.

It would therefore carry us far beyond the sphere of dream-interpretation if we were to do justice to the significance of symbols and discuss the numerous, and to a large extent still unsolved, problems attaching to the concept of a symbol.¹ We must restrict ourselves here to remarking that representation by a symbol is among the indirect methods of representation, but that all kinds of indications warn us against lumping it in with other forms of indirect representation without being able to form any clear conceptual picture of their distinguishing features. In a number of cases the element in common between a symbol and what it represents is obvious; in others it is concealed and the choice of the symbol seems puzzling. It is precisely these latter cases which must be able to throw light upon the ultimate meaning of the symbolic relation, and they indicate that it is of a genetic character. Things that are symbolically connected to-day were probably united in prehistoric times by conceptual and linguistic identity.²  The symbolic relation seems to be a relic and a mark of former identity. In this connection we may observe how in a number of cases the use of a common symbol extends further than the use of a common language, as was already pointed out by Schubert (1814).³ A number of symbols are as old as language itself, while others (e.g. ‘airship’, ‘Zeppelin’) are being coined continuously down to the present time.

¹ [Footnote added 1911:] Cf. the works of Bleuler and of his Zurich pupils, Maeder, Abraham], etc., on symbolism, and the non-medical writers to whom they refer (Kleinpaul, etc.). [Added 1914:] What is most to the point on this subject will be found in Rank and Sachs (1913, Chapter I). [Added 1925:] See further Jones (1916).

² [Footnote added 1925:] This view would be powerfully supported by a theory put forward by Dr. Hans Sperber (1912). He is of the opinion that all primal words referred to sexual things but afterwards lost their sexual meaning though being applied to other things and activities which were compared with the sexual ones.

³ [Added 1914:] For instance, according to Ferenczi, a ship moving on the water occurs in dreams of micturition in Hungarian dreamers, though the term ‘schiffen’ is unknown in that language. (See also p. 829 f. below.) In dreams of speakers of French and other Romance languages a room is used to symbolize a woman, though these languages have nothing akin to the German expression ‘Frauenzimmer.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

820

Dreams make use of this symbolism for the disguised representation of their latent thoughts. Incidentally, many of the symbols are habitually or almost habitually employed to express the same thing. Nevertheless, the peculiar plasticity of the psychical material must never be forgotten. Often enough a symbol has to be interpreted in its proper meaning and not symbolically; while on other occasions a dreamer may derive from his private memories the power to employ as sexual symbols all kinds of things which are not ordinarily employed as such. If a dreamer has a choice open to him between a number of symbols, he will decide in favour of the one which is connected in its subject-matter with the rest of the material of his thoughts - which, that is to say, has individual grounds for its acceptance in addition to the typical ones.

Though the later investigations since the time of Scherner have made it impossible to dispute the existence of dream symbolism - even Havelock Ellis admits that there can be no doubt that our dreams are full of symbolism - yet it must be confessed that the presence of symbols in dreams not only facilitates their interpretation but also makes it more difficult. As a rule the technique of interpreting according to the dreamer’s free associations leaves us in the lurch when we come to the symbolic elements in the dream-content. Regard for scientific criticism forbids our returning to the arbitrary judgement of the dream-interpreter, as it was employed in ancient times and seems to have been revived in the reckless interpretations of Stekel. We are thus obliged, in dealing with those elements of the dream-content which must be recognized as symbolic, to adopt a combined technique, which on the one hand rests on the dreamer’s associations and on the other hand fills the gaps from the interpreter’s knowledge of symbols. We must combine a critical caution in resolving symbols with a careful study of them in dreams which afford particularly clear instances of their use, in order to disarm any charge of arbitrariness in dream-interpretation. The uncertainties which still attach to our activities as interpreters of dreams spring in part from our incomplete knowledge, which can be progressively improved as we advance further, but in part from certain characteristics of dream-symbols themselves. They frequently have more than one or even several meanings, and, as with Chinese script, the correct interpretation can only be arrived at on each occasion from the context. This ambiguity of the symbols links up with the characteristic of dreams for admitting of ‘over-interpretation’ - for representing in a single piece of content thoughts and wishes which are often widely divergent in their nature.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

821

Subject to these qualifications and reservations I will now proceed. The Emperor and Empress (or the King and Queen) as a rule really represent the dreamer’s parents; and a Prince or Princess represents the dreamer himself or herself. But the same high authority is attributed to great men as to the Emperor; and for that reason Goethe, for instance, appears as a father-symbol in some dreams (Hitschmann, 1913.) - All elongated objects, such as sticks, tree-trunks and umbrellas (the opening of these last being comparable to an erection) may stand for the male organ - as well as all long, sharp weapons, such as knives, daggers and pikes. Another frequent though not entirely intelligible symbol of the same thing is a nail-file - possibly on account of the rubbing up and down. - Boxes, cases, chests, cupboards and ovens represent the uterus, and also hollow objects, ships, and vessels of all kinds. - Rooms in dreams are usually women (‘Frauenzimmer’); if the various ways in and out of them are represented, this interpretation is scarcely open to doubt.¹ In this connection interest in whether the room is open or locked is easily intelligible. (Cf. Dora’s first dream in my ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’, 1905e.) There is no need to name explicitly the key that unlocks the room; in his ballad of Count Eberstein, Uhland has used the symbolism of locks and keys to construct a charming piece of bawdry. - A dream of going through a suite of rooms is a brothel or harem dream. But, as Sachs has shown by some neat examples, it can also be used (by antithesis) to represent marriage. - We find an interesting link with the sexual researches of childhood when a dreamer dreams of two rooms which were originally one, or when he sees a familiar room divided into two in the dream, or vice versa. In childhood the female genitals and the anus are regarded as a single area - the ‘bottom’ (in accordance with the infantile ‘cloaca theory’); and it is not until later that the discovery is made that this region of the body comprises two separate cavities and orifices. - Steps, ladders or staircases, or, as the case may be, walking up or down them, are representations of the sexual act.² - Smooth walls over which the dreamer climbs, the façades of houses, down which he lowers himself - often in great anxiety - correspond to erect human bodies, and are probably repeating in the dream recollections of a baby’s climbing up his parents or nurse. The ‘smooth’ walls are men; in his fear the dreamer often clutches hold of ‘projections’ in the façades of houses. Tables, tables laid for a meal, and boards also stand for women - no doubt by antithesis, since the contours of their bodies are eliminated in the symbols. ‘Wood’ seems, from its linguistic connections, to stand in general for female ‘material.’ The name of the Island of ‘Madeira’ means ‘wood’ in Portuguese. Since ‘bed and board’ constitute marriage, the latter often takes the place of the former in dreams and the sexual complex of ideas is, so far as may be, transposed on to the eating complex. - As regards articles of clothing, a woman’s hat can very often be interpreted with certainty as a genital organ, and, moreover, as a man’s. The same is true of an overcoat [German ‘Mantel’], though in this case it is not clear to what extent the use of the symbol is due to a verbal assonance. In men’s dreams a necktie often appears as a symbol for the penis. No doubt this is not only because neckties are long, dependent objects and peculiar to men, but also because they can be chosen according to taste - a liberty which, in the case of the object symbolized, is forbidden by Nature.³ Men who make use of this symbol in dreams are often very extravagant in ties in real life and own whole collections of them. - It is highly probable that all complicated machinery and apparatus occurring in dreams stand for the genitals (and as a rule male ones - in describing which dream-symbolism is as indefatigable as the ‘joke-work.’ Nor is there any doubt that all weapons and tools are used as symbols for the male organ: e.g. ploughs, hammers, rifles, revolvers, daggers, sabres, etc. - In the same way many landscapes in dreams, especially any containing bridges or wooded hills, may clearly be recognized as descriptions of the genitals. Marcinowski has published a collection of dreams illustrated by their dreamers with drawings that ostensibly represent landscapes and other localities occurring in the dreams. These drawings bring out very clearly the distinction between a dream’s manifest and latent meaning. Whereas to the innocent eye they appear as plans, maps, and so on, closer inspection shows that they represent the human body, the genitals, etc., and only then do the dreams become intelligible. (See in this connection Pfister’s papers on cryptograms and puzzle-pictures.) In the case of unintelligible neologisms, too, it is worth considering whether they may not be put together from components with a sexual meaning. -Children in dreams often stand for the genitals; and, indeed, both men and women are in the habit of referring to their genitals affectionately as their ‘little ones.’ Stekel is right in recognizing a ‘little brother’ as the penis. Playing with a little child, beating it, etc., often represent masturbation in dreams. - To represent castration symbolically, the dream-work makes use of baldness, hair-cutting, falling out of teeth and decapitation. If one of the ordinary symbols for a penis occurs in a dream doubled or multiplied, it is to be regarded as a warding-off of castration. The appearance in dreams of lizards - animals whose tails grow again if they are pulled off - has the same significance. (Cf. the lizard-dream on p. 525 f.) - Many of the beasts which are used as genital symbols in mythology and folklore play the same part in dreams: e.g. fishes, snails, cats, mice (on account of the pubic hair), and above all those most important symbols of the male organ - snakes. Small animals and vermin represent small children - for instance, undesired brothers and sisters. Being plagued with vermin is often a sign of pregnancy. - A quite recent symbol of the male organ in dreams deserves mention: the airship, whose use in this sense is justified by its connection with flying as well as sometimes by its shape.

¹ [Footnote added 1919:] ‘One of my patients, who was living in a boarding-house, dreamt that he met one of the maidservants and asked her what her number was. To his surprise she answered: "14". He had in fact started a liason with this girl and had paid several visits to her in her bedroom. She had not unnaturally been afraid that the landlady might become suspicious, and, on the day before the dream, she had proposed that they should meet in an unoccupied room. This room was actually "No. 14", while in the dream it was the woman herself who bore this number. It would hardly be possible to imagine clearer proof of an identification between a woman and a room.’ (Jones, 1914a.) Cf. Artemidorus, Oneirocritica, Book II, Chapter X: ‘Thus, for instance, a bed chamber stands for a wife, if such there be in the house.’ (Trans, F. S. Krauss, 1881, 110.)

² [Footnote added 1911:] I will repeat here what I have written on this subject elsewhere (Freud, 1910d): ‘A little time ago I heard that a psychologist whose views are somewhat different from ours had remarked to one of us that, when all was said and done, we did undoubtedly exaggerate the hidden sexual significance of dreams: his own commonest dream was of going upstairs, and surely there could not be anything sexual in that. We were put on the alert by this objection, and began to turn our attention to the appearance of steps, staircases and ladders in dreams, and were soon in a position to show that staircases (and analogous things) were unquestionably symbols of copulation. It is not hard to discover the basis of the comparison: we come to the top in a series of rhythmical movements and with increasing breathlessness and then, with a few rapid leaps, we can get to the bottom again. Thus the rhythmical pattern of copulation is reproduced in going upstairs. Nor must we omit to bring in the evidence of linguistic usage. It shows us that "mounting" [German "steigen"] is used as a direct equivalent for the sexual act. We speak of a man as a "Steiger" [a "mounter"] and of "nachsteigen" ["to run after", literally "to climb after"]. In French the steps on a staircase are called "marches" and "un vieux marcheur" has the same meaning as our "ein alter Steiger" ["an old rake"].’

³ [Footnote added 1914:] Compare the drawing made by a nineteen-year-old manic patient reproduced in Zbl. Psychoanal, 2, 675. It represents a man with a necktie consisting of a snake which is turning in the direction of a girl. See also the story of ‘The Bashful Man’ in Anthropophyteia, 6, 334: A lady went into a bathroom, and there she came upon a gentleman who scarcely had time to put on his shirt. He was very much embarrassed, but hurriedly covering his throat with the front part of his shirt, he exclaimed: ‘Excuse me, but I’ve not got my necktie on.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

822

A number of other symbols have been put forward, with supporting instances, by Stekel, but have not yet been sufficiently verified. Stekel’s writings, and in particular his Die Sprache des Traumes (1911), contain the fullest collection of interpretations of symbols. Many of these show penetration, and further examination has proved them correct: for instance, his section on the symbolism of death. But this author’s lack of a critical faculty and his tendency to generalization at all costs throw doubts upon others of his interpretations or render them unusable; so that it is highly advisable to exercise caution in accepting his conclusions. I therefore content myself with drawing attention to only a few of his findings.

According to Stekel, ‘right’ and ‘left’ in dreams have an ethical sense. ‘The right-hand path always means the path of righteousness and the left-hand one that of crime. Thus "left" may represent homosexuality, incest or perversion, and "right" may represent marriage, intercourse with a prostitute and so on, always looked at from the subject’s individual moral stand point.’ (Stekel, 1909, 466 ff.) - Relatives in dreams usually play the part of genitals (ibid., 473). I can only confirm this in the case of sons, daughters and younger sisters - that is only so far as they fall into the category of ‘little ones.’ On the other hand I have come across undoubted cases in which ‘sisters’ symbolized the breasts and ‘brothers’ the larger hemispheres. -Stekel explains failing to catch up with a carriage as regret at a difference in age which cannot be caught up with (ibid., 479). - Luggage that one travels with is a load of sin, he says, that weighs one down (loc. cit.). But precisely luggage often turns out to be an unmistakable symbol of the dreamer’s own genitals. - Stekel also assigns fixed symbolic meanings to numbers, such as often appear in dreams. But these explanations seem neither sufficiently verified nor generally valid, though his interpretations usually appear plausible in the individual cases. In any case the number three has been confirmed from many sides as a symbol of the male genitals.

One of the generalizations put forward by Stekel concerns the double significance of genital symbols. ‘Where’, he asks, ‘is there a symbol which - provided that the imagination by any means admits of it - cannot be employed both in a male and in a female sense?’ In any case the clause in parenthesis removes much of the certainty from this assertion, since in fact the imagination does not always admit of it. But I think it is worth while remarking that in my experience Stekel’s generalization cannot be maintained in the face of the greater complexity of the facts. In addition to symbols which can stand with equal frequency for the male and for the female genitals, there are some which designate one of the sexes predominantly or almost exclusively, and yet others which are known only with a male or a female meaning. For it is a fact that the imagination does not admit of long, stiff objects and weapons being used as symbols of the female genitals, or of hollow objects, such as chests, cases, boxes, etc., being used as symbols for the male ones. It is true that the tendency of dreams and of unconscious phantasies to employ sexual symbols bisexually betrays an archaic characteristic; for in childhood the distinction between the genitals of the two sexes is unknown and the same kind of genitals are attributed to both of them. But it is possible, too, to be misled into wrongly supposing that a sexual symbol is bisexual, if one forgets that in some dreams there is a general inversion of sex, so that what is male is represented as female and vice versa. Dreams of this kind may, for instance, express a woman’s wish to be a man.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

823

The genitals can also be represented in dreams by other parts of the body: the male organ by a hand or a foot and the female genital orifice by the mouth or an ear or even an eye. The secretions of the human body - mucus, tears, urine, semen, etc. - can replace one another in dreams. This last assertion of Stekel’s, which is on the whole correct, has been justifiably criticized by Reitler (1913b) as requiring some qualification: what in fact happens is that significant secretions, such as semen, are replaced by indifferent ones.

It is to be hoped that these very incomplete hints may serve to encourage others to undertake a more painstaking general study of the subject.¹ I myself have attempted to give a more elaborate account of dream-symbolism in my Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1916-17).

I shall now append a few examples of the use of these symbols in dreams, with the idea of showing how impossible it becomes to arrive at the interpretation of a dream if one excludes dream-symbolism, and how irresistibly one is driven to accept it in many cases. At the same time, however, I should like to utter an express warning against over-estimating the importance of symbols in dream-interpretation, against restricting the work of translating dreams merely to translating symbols and against abandoning the technique of making use of the dreamer’s associations. The two techniques of dream-interpretation must be complementary to each other; but both in practice and in theory the first place continues to be held by the procedure which I began by describing and which attributes a decisive significance to the comments made by the dreamer, while the translation of symbols, as I have explained it, is also at our disposal as an auxiliary method.

¹ [Footnote added 1911:] However much Scherner’s view of dream-symbolism may differ from the one developed in these pages, I must insist that he is to be regarded as the true discoverer of symbolism in dreams, and that the investigations of psycho-analysis have at last brought recognition to his book, published as it was so many years ago (in 1861), and for so long regarded as fantastic.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

824

I

A HAT AS A SYMBOL OF A MAN (OR OF MALE GENITALS)

(Extract from the dream of a young woman suffering from agoraphobia as a result of fears of seduction.)

‘I was walking in the street in the summer, wearing a straw hat of peculiar shape; its middle-piece was bent upwards and its side-pieces hung downwards’ (the description became hesitant at this point) ‘in such a way that one side was lower than the other. I was cheerful and in a self-confident frame of mind; and, as I passed a group of young officers, I thought: "None of you can do me any harm!"'

Since nothing occurred to her in connection with the hat in the dream, I said: ‘No doubt the hat was a male genital organ, with its middle-piece sticking up and its two side-pieces hanging down. It may seem strange, perhaps, that a hat should be a man, but you will remember the phrase "Unter die Haube kommen" ["to find a husband" (literally "to come under the cap")].’ I intentionally gave her no interpretation of the detail about the two side-pieces hanging down unevenly; though it is precisely details of this kind that must point the way in determining an interpretation. I went on to say that as she had a husband with such fine genitals there was no need for her to be afraid of the officers - no need, that is, for her to wish for anything from them, since as a rule she was prevented from going for a walk unprotected and unaccompanied owing to her phantasies of being seduced. I had already been able to give her this last explanation of her anxiety on several occasions upon the basis of other material.

The way in which the dreamer reacted to this material was most remarkable. She withdrew her description of the hat and maintained that she had never said that the two side-pieces hung down. I was too certain of what I had heard to be led astray, and stuck to my guns. She was silent for a while and then found enough courage to ask what was meant by one of her husband’s testes hanging down lower than the other and whether it was the same in all men. In this way the remarkable detail of the hat was explained and the interpretation accepted by her.

At the time my patient told me this dream I had long been familiar with the hat-symbol. Other, less transparent cases had led me to suppose that a hat can also stand for female genitals.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1911:] Cf. an example of this in Kirchgraber (1912). Stekel (1909, 475) records a dream in which a hat with a feather standing up crooked in the middle of it symbolized an (impotent) man.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

825

II

A ‘LITTLE ONE’ AS THE GENITAL ORGAN -

‘BEING RUN OVER’ AS A SYMBOL OF SEXUAL INTERCOURSE

(Another dream of the same agoraphobic patient.)

Her mother sent her little daughter away, so that she had to go by herself. Then she went in a train with her mother and saw her little one walk straight on to the rails so that she was bound to be run over. She heard the cracking of her bones. (This produced an uncomfortable feeling in her but no real horror.) Then she looked round out of the window of the railway-carriage to see whether the parts could no be seen behind. Then she reproached her mother for having made the little one go by herself.

ANALYSIS. - It is no easy matter to give a complete interpretation of the dream. It formed part of a cycle of dreams and can only be fully understood if it is taken in connection with the others. There is difficulty in obtaining in sufficient isolation the material necessary for establishing the symbolism. - In the first place, the patient declared that the train journey was to be interpreted historically, as an allusion to a journey she had taken when she was leaving a sanatorium for nervous diseases, with whose director, needless to say, she had been in love. Her mother had fetched her away, and the doctor had appeared at the station and handed her a bouquet of flowers as a parting present. It had been very awkward that her mother should have witnessed this tribute. At this point, then, her mother figured as interfering with her attempts at a love affair; and this had in fact been the part played by that severe lady during the patient’s girlhood. - Her next association related to the sentence: ‘she looked round to see whether the parts could not be seen from behind.’ The façade of the dream would of course lead one to think of the parts of her little daughter who had been run over and mangled. But her association led in quite another direction. She recollected having once seen her father naked in the bath room from behind; she went on to talk of the distinctions between the sexes, and laid stress on the fact that a man’s genitals can be seen even from behind but a woman’s cannot. In this connection she herself interpreted ‘the little one’ as meaning the genitals and ‘her little one’ - she had a four-year-old daughter - as her own genitals. She reproached her mother with having expected her to live as though she had no genitals, and pointed out that the same reproach was expressed in the opening sentence of the dream: ‘her mother sent her little one away, so that she had to go by herself.’ In her imagination ‘going by herself in the streets’ meant not having a man, not having any sexual relations (‘coire’ in Latin means literally ‘to go with’) - and she disliked that. Her accounts all went to show that when she was a girl she had in fact suffered from her mother’s jealousy owing to the preference shown her by her father.

The deeper interpretation of this dream was shown by another dream of the same night, in which the dreamer identified herself with her brother. She had actually been a boyish girl, and had often been told that she should have been a boy. This identification with her brother made it particularly clear that ‘the little one’ meant a genital organ. Her mother was threatening him (or her) with castration, which could only have been a punishment for playing with her penis; thus the identification also proved that she herself had masturbated as a child - a memory which till then she had only had as applied to her brother. The information supplied by the second dream showed that she must have come to know about the male organ at an early age and have afterwards forgotten it. Further, the second dream alluded to the infantile sexual theory according to which girls are boys who have been castrated. When I suggested to her that she had had this childish belief, she at once confirmed the fact by telling me that she had heard the anecdote of the little boy’s saying to the little girl: ‘Cut off?’ and of the little girl’s replying: ‘No, always been like that.’

Thus the sending away of the little one (of the genital organ) in the first dream was also related to the threat of castration. Her ultimate complaint against her mother was for not having given birth to her as a boy.

The fact that ‘being run over’ symbolizes sexual intercourse would not be obvious from this dream, though it has been confirmed from many other sources.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

826

III

THE GENITALS REPRESENTED BY BUILDINGS, STAIRS AND SHAFTS

He was going for a walk with his father in a place which must certainly have been the Prater, since he saw the ROTUNDA, with a SMALL ANNEX IN FRONT OF IT to which A CAPTIVE BALLOON was attached, though it looked rather LIMP. His father asked him what all this was for; he was surprised at his asking, but explained it to him. Then they came into a courtyard which had a large sheet laid out in it. His father wanted to PULL OFF a large piece of it, but first looked around to see if anyone was watching. He told him that he need only tell the foreman and he could take some without any bother. A STAIRCASE led down from this yard into A SHAFT, whose walls were cushioned in some soft material, rather like a leather armchair. A the end of the shaft was a longish platform and then another SHAFT started . . .

ANALYSIS. -This dreamer belonged to a type whose therapeutic prospects are not favourable: up to a certain point they offer no resistance at all to analysis, but from then onwards turn out to be almost inaccessible. He interpreted this dream almost unaided. ‘The Rotunda’, he said, ‘was my genitals and the captive balloon in front of it was my penis, whose limpness I have reason to complain of.’ Going into greater detail, then, we may translate the Rotunda as the bottom (habitually regarded by children as part of the genitals) and the small annex in front of it as the scrotum. His father asked him in the dream what all this was, that is, what was the purpose and function of the genitals. It seemed plausible to reverse this situation and turn the dreamer into the questioner. Since he had in fact never questioned his father in this way, we had to look upon the dream-thought as a wish, or take it as a conditional clause, such as: ‘If I had asked my father for sexual enlightenment. . .’ We shall presently find the continuation of this thought in another part of the dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

827

The courtyard in which the sheet of tin was spread out is not to be taken symbolically in the first instance. It was derived from the business premises of the dreamer’s father. For reasons of discretion I have substituted ‘tin’ for another material in which his father actually dealt: but I have made no other change in the wording of the dream. The dreamer had entered his father’s business and had taken violent objection to the somewhat dubious practices on which the firm’s earnings in part depended. Consequently the dream-thought I have just interpreted may have continued in this way: ‘(If I had asked him), he would have deceived me just as he deceives his customers.’ As regards the ‘pulling off’ which served to represent his father’s dishonesty in business, the dreamer himself produced a second explanation - namely that it stood for masturbating. Not only was I already familiar with this interpretation (see p. 817 n. above), but there was something to confirm it in the fact that the secret nature of masturbation was represented by its reverse: it might be done openly. Just as we should expect, the masturbatory activity was once again displaced on to the dreamer’s father, like the questioning in the first scene of the dream. He promptly interpreted the shaft as a vagina, having regard to the soft cushioning of its walls. I added from my own knowledge derived elsewhere that climbing down, like climbing up in other cases, described sexual intercourse in the vagina. (See my remarks, quoted above, p. 821 n.)

The dreamer himself gave a biographical explanation of the fact that the first shaft was followed by a longish platform and then by another shaft. He had practised intercourse for a time but had then given it up on account of inhibitions, and he now hoped to be able to resume it by the help of the treatment. The dream became more indistinct, however, towards the end, and it must seem probable to anyone who is familiar with these things that the influence of another topic was already making itself felt in the second scene of the dream, and was hinted at by the father’s business, by his deceitful conduct and by the interpretation of the first shaft as a vagina: all this pointed to a connection with the dreamer’s mother.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

828

IV

THE MALE ORGAN REPRESENTED BY PERSONS AND THE

FEMALE ORGAN BY A LANDSCAPE

(The dream of an uneducated woman whose husband was a policeman, reported by B. Dattner.)

‘ . . . Then someone broke into the house and she was frightened and called out for a policeman. But he had quietly gone into a church ¹, to which a number of steps ² led up, accompanied by two tramps. Behind the church there was a hill ³ and above it a thick wood.4 The policeman was dressed in a helmet, brass collar and cloak.5 He had a brown beard. The two tramps, who went along peaceably with the policeman, had sack-like aprons tied around their middles.6In front of the church a path led up to the hill; on both sides of it there grew grass and brushwood, which became thicker and thicker and, at the top of the hill, turned into a regular wood.’

V

DREAMS OF CASTRATION IN CHILDREN

(a) A boy aged three years and five months, who obviously disliked the idea of his father’s returning from the front, woke up one morning in a disturbed and excited state. He kept on repeating: ‘Why was Daddy carrying his head on a plate? Last night Daddy was carrying his head on a plate.’

(b) A student who is now suffering from a severe obsessional neurosis remembers having repeatedly had the following dream during his sixth year: He went to the hairdresser’s to have his hair cut. A big, severe-looking woman came up to him and cut his head off. He recognized the woman as his mother.

¹ ‘Or chapel (= vagina).’

² ‘Symbol of copulation.’

³ ‘Mons veneris.’

4 ‘Pubic hair.’

5 ‘According to an expert, demons in cloaks and hoods are of a phallic character.’

6 ‘The two halves of the scrotum.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

829

VI

URINARY SYMBOLISM

The series of drawings were found by Ferenczi in a Hungarian comic paper called Fidibusz, and he at once saw how well they could be used to illustrate the theory of dreams. Otto Rank has already reproduced them in a paper (1912a).

The drawings bear the title ‘A French Nurse’s Dream’; but it is only the last picture, showing the nurse being woken up by the child’s screams, that tells us that the seven previous pictures represent the phases of a dream. The first picture depicts the stimulus which should have caused the sleeper to wake: the little boy has become aware of a need and is asking for help in dealing with it. But in the dream the dreamer, instead of being in the bedroom, is taking the child for a walk. In the second picture she has already led him to a street corner where he is micturating - and she can go on sleeping. But the arousal stimulus continues; indeed, it increases. The little boy, finding he is not being attended to, screams louder and louder. The more imperiously he insists upon his nurse waking up and helping him, the more insistent becomes the dream’s assurance that everything is all right and that there is no need for her to wake up. At the same time, the dream translates the increasing stimulus into the increasing dimensions of its symbols. The stream of water produced by the micturating boy becomes mightier and mightier. In the fourth picture it is already large enough to float a rowing boat; but there follow a gondola, a sailing-ship and finally a liner. The ingenious artist has in this way cleverly depicted the struggle between an obstinate craving for sleep and an inexhaustible stimulus towards waking.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

830

VII

A STAIRCASE DREAM

(Reported and Interpreted by Otto Rank.)

‘I have to thank a colleague to whom I owe the dream with a dental-stimulus for an equally transparent emission dream:

‘"I was running down the staircase in pursuit of a little girl who had done something to me, in order to punish her. At the foot of the stairs someone (a grown-up woman?) stopped the child for me. I caught hold of her; but I don’t know whether I hit her, for I suddenly found myself in the middle of the staircase copulating with the child (as it were in the air). It was not a real copulation; I was only rubbing my genitals against her external genitals, and while I did so I saw them extremely distinctly, as well as her head, which was turned upwards and sideways. During the sexual act I saw hanging above me to my left (also as it were in the air) two small paintings - landscapes representing a house surrounded by trees. At the bottom of the smaller of these, instead of the painter’s signature, I saw my own first name, as though it were intended as a birthday-present for me. Then I saw a label in front of the two pictures, which said that the cheaper pictures were also to be had. (I then saw myself very indistinctly as though I were lying in bed on the landing) and I was woken up by the feeling of wetness caused by the emission I had had."

‘INTERPRETATION. -On the evening of the dream-day the dreamer had been in a book-shop, and as he was waiting to be attended to he had looked at some pictures which were on view there and which represented subjects similar to those in the dream. He went up close to one small picture which had particularly pleased him, to look at the artist’s name - but it had been quite unknown to him.

‘Later the same evening, when he was with some friends, he had heard a story of a Bohemian servant-girl who boasted that her illegitimate child had been "made on the stairs." The dreamer had enquired the details of this rather unusual event and had learnt that the servant-girl had gone home with her admirer to her parents’ house, where there had been no opportunity for sexual intercourse, and in his excitement the man had copulated with her on the stairs. The dreamer had made a joking allusion to a malicious expression used to describe adulterated wines, and had said that in fact the child came of a "cellar-stair vintage".

The Interpretation Of Dreams

831

‘So much for the connections with the previous day, which appeared with some insistence in the dream-content and were reproduced by the dreamer without any difficulty. But he brought up no less easily an old fragment of infantile recollection which had also found its use in the dream. The staircase belonged to the house where he had spent the greater part of his childhood and, in particular, where he had first made conscious acquaintance with the problems of sex. He had frequently played on this staircase and, among other things, used to slide down the banisters, riding astride on them - which had given him sexual feelings. In the dream, too, he rushed down the stairs extraordinarily fast - so fast, indeed, that, according to his own specific account, he did not put his feet down on the separate steps but "flew" down them, as people say. If the infantile experience is taken into account, the beginning part of the dream seems to represent the factor of sexual excitement. - But the dreamer had also often romped in a sexual way with the neighbours’ children on this same staircase and in the adjacent building, and had satisfied his desires in just the same way as he did in the dream.

‘If we bear in mind that Freud’s researches into sexual symbolism (1910d) have shown that stairs and going upstairs in dreams almost invariably stand for copulation, the dream becomes quite transparent. Its motive force, as indeed was shown by its outcome - an emission - was of a purely libidinal nature. The dreamer’s sexual excitement was awakened during his sleep - this being represented in the dream by his rushing down the stairs. The sadistic element in the sexual excitement, based on the romping in childhood, was indicated by the pursuit and overpowering of the child. The libidinal excitement increased and pressed towards sexual action - represented in the dream by his catching hold of the child and conveying it to the middle of the staircase. Up to that point the dream was only symbolically sexual and would have been quite unintelligible to any inexperienced dream-interpreter. But symbolic satisfaction of that kind was not enough to guarantee a restful sleep, in view of the strength of the libidinal excitation. The excitation led to an orgasm and thus revealed the fact that the whole staircase-symbolism represented copulation. -The present dream offers a specially clear confirmation of Freud’s view that one of the reasons for the use of going upstairs as a sexual symbol is the rhythmical character of both activities: for the dreamer expressly stated that the most clearly defined element in the whole dream was the rhythm of the sexual act and its up and down motion.

‘I must add a word with regard to the two pictures which, apart from their real meaning, also figured in a symbolic sense as "Weibsbilder". This was shown at once by there being a large picture and a small picture, just as a large (or grown-up) girl and a small one appeared in the dream. The fact that "cheaper pictures were also to be had" led to the prostitute complex; while on the other hand the appearance of the dreamer’s first name on the small picture and the idea of its being intended as a birthday present for him were hints at the parental complex. ("Born on the stairs" = "begotten by copulation".)

‘The indistinct final scene, in which the dreamer saw himself lying in bed on the landing and had a feeling of wetness, seems to have pointed the way beyond infantile masturbation still further back into childhood and to have had its prototype in similarly pleasurable scenes of bed-wetting.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

832

VIII

A MODIFIED STAIRCASE DREAM

One of my patients, a man whose sexual abstinence was imposed on him by a severe neurosis, and whose phantasies were fixed upon his mother, had repeated dreams of going upstairs in her company. I once remarked to him that a moderate amount of masturbation would probably do him less harm than his compulsive self-restraint, and this provoked the following dream:

His piano-teacher reproached him for neglecting his piano-playing, and for not practising Mocheles’ ‘Etudes’ and Clementi’s ‘Gradus ad Parnassum.’

By way of comment, he pointed out that ‘Gradus’ are also ‘steps’; and that the key-board itself is a staircase, since it contains scales.

It is fair to say that there is no group of ideas that is incapable of representing sexual facts and wishes.

IX

THE FEELING OF REALITY AND THE REPRESENTATION OF REPETITION

A man who is now thirty-five years old reported a dream which he remembered clearly and claimed to have had at the age of four. The lawyer who had charge of his father’s will - he had lost his father when he was three - brought two large pears. He was given one of them to eat; the other lay on the window-sill in the sitting-room. He awoke with a conviction of the reality of what he had dreamt and kept obstinately asking his mother for the second pear, and insisted that it was on the window-sill. His mother had laughed at this.

ANALYSIS. -The lawyer was a jovial old gentleman who, the dreamer seemed to remember, had really once brought some pears along. The window-sill was as he had seen it in the dream. Nothing else occurred to him in connection with it - only that his mother had told him a dream shortly before. She had had two birds sitting on her head and had asked herself when they would fly away; they did not fly away, but one of them flew to her mouth and sucked at it.

The failure of the dreamer’s associations gave us a right to attempt an interpretation by symbolic substitution. The two pears - ‘pommes ou poires’ - were his mother’s breasts which had given him nourishment; the window-sill was the projection formed by her bosom - like balconies in dreams of houses (see p. 821). His feeling of reality after waking was justified, for his mother had really suckled him, and had done so, in fact, for far longer than the usual time and his mother’s breast was still available to him. The dream must be translated: ‘Give (or show) me your breast again, Mother, that I used to drink from in the past.’ ‘In the past’ was represented by his eating one of the pears; ‘again’ was represented by his longing for the other. The temporal repetition of an act is regularly shown in dreams by the numerical multiplication of an object.

It is most remarkable, of course, that symbolism should already be playing a part in the dream of a four-year-old child. But this is the rule and not the exception. It may safely be asserted that dreamers have symbolism at their disposal from the very first.

The following uninfluenced recollection by a lady who is now twenty-seven shows at what an early age symbolism is employed outside dream-life as well as inside it. She was between three and four years old. Her nurse-maid took her to the lavatory along with a brother eleven months her junior and a girl cousin of an age between the other two, to do their small business before going out for a walk. Being the eldest, she sat on the seat, while the other two sat on chambers. She asked her cousin: ‘Have you got a purse too? Walter’s got a little sausage; I’ve got a purse.’ Her cousin replied: ‘Yes, I’ve got a purse too.’ The nurse-maid heard what they said with much amusement and reported the conversation to the children’s mother, who reacted with a sharp reprimand.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

833

I will here interpolate a dream (recorded in a paper by Alfred Robitsek, 1912) in which the beautifully chosen symbolism made an interpretation possible with only slight assistance from the dreamer.

X

‘THE QUESTION OF SYMBOLISM IN THE DREAMS OF NORMAL PERSONS’

‘One objection which is frequently brought forward by opponents of psycho-analysis, and which has lately been voiced by Havelock Ellis (1911, 168), argues that though dream-symbolism may perhaps occur as a product of the neurotic mind, it is not to be found in normal persons. Now psycho-analytic research finds no fundamental, but only quantitative, distinctions between normal and neurotic life; and indeed the analysis of dreams, in which repressed complexes are operative alike in the healthy and the sick, shows a complete identity both in their mechanisms and in their symbolism. The naive dreams of healthy people actually often contain a much simpler, more perspicuous and more characteristic symbolism than those of neurotics; for in the latter, as a result of the more powerful workings of the censorship and of the consequently more far-reaching dream-distortion, the symbolism may be obscure and hard to interpret. The dream recorded below will serve to illustrate this fact. It was dreamt by a girl who is not neurotic but is of a somewhat prudish and reserved character. In the course of conversation with her I learnt that she was engaged, but that there were some difficulties in the way of her marriage which were likely to lead to its postponement. Of her own accord she told me the following dream.

‘"I arrange the centre of a table with flowers for a birthday." In reply to a question she told me that in the dream she seemed to be in her own home (where she was not at present living) and had "a feeling of happiness."

‘"Popular" symbolism made it possible for me to translate the dream unaided. It was an expression of her bridal wishes: the table with its floral centre-piece symbolized herself and her genitals; she represented her wishes for the future as fulfilled, for her thoughts were already occupied with the birth of a baby; so her marriage lay a long way behind her.

‘I pointed out to her that "the ‘centre’ of a table" was an unusual expression (which she admitted), but I could not of course question her further directly on that point. I carefully avoided suggesting the meaning of the symbols to her, and merely asked her what came into her head in connection with the separate parts of the dream. In the course of the analysis her reserve gave place to an evident interest in the interpretation and to an openness made possible by the seriousness of the conversation.

‘When I asked what flowers they had been, her first reply was: "expensive flowers; one has to pay for them," and then that they had been "lilies of the valley, violets and pinks or carnations." I assumed that the word "lily" appeared in the dream in its popular sense as a symbol of chastity; she confirmed this assumption, for her association to "lily" was "purity". "Valley" is a frequent female symbol in dreams; so that the chance combination of the two symbols in the English name of the flower was used in the dream-symbolism to stress the preciousness of her virginity - "expensive flowers, one has to pay for them" - and to express her expectation that her husband would know how to appreciate its value. The phrase "expensive flowers, etc.”, as will be seen, had a different meaning in the case of each of the three flower-symbols.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

834

‘"Violets" was ostensibly quite asexual; but, very boldly, as it seemed to me, I thought I could trace a secret meaning for the word in an unconscious link with the French word "viol" ["rape"]. To my surprise the dreamer gave as an association the English word "violate". The dream had made use of the great chance similarity between the words "violet" and "violate" - the difference in their pronunciation lies merely in the different stress upon their final syllables - in order to express "in the language of flowers" the dreamer’s thoughts on the violence of defloration (another term that employs flower symbolism) and possibly also a masochistic trait in her character. A pretty instance of the "verbal bridges" crossed by the paths leading to the unconscious. The words "one has to pay for them" signified having to pay with her life for being a wife and a mother.

‘In connection with "pinks", which she went on to call "carnations", I thought of the connection between that word and "carnal." But the dreamer’s association to it was "colour". She added that "carnations" were the flowers which her fiancé gave her frequently and in great numbers. At the end of her remarks she suddenly confessed of her own accord that she had not told the truth: what had occurred to her had not been "colour" but "incarnation" - the word I had expected. Incidentally "colour" itself was not a very remote association, but was determined by the meaning of "carnation" (flesh-colour) - was determined, that is, by the same complex. This lack of straightforwardness showed that it was at this point that resistance was greatest, and corresponded to the fact that this was where the symbolism was most clear and that the struggle between libido and its repression was at its most intense in relation to this phallic theme. The dreamer’s comment to the effect that her fiancé frequently gave her flowers of that kind was an indication not only of the double sense of the word: carnation" but also of their phallic meaning in the dream. The gift of flowers, an exciting factor of the dream derived from her current life, was used to express an exchange of sexual gifts: she was making a gift of her virginity and expected a full emotional and sexual life in return for it. At this point, too, the words "expensive flowers, one has to pay for them" must have had what was no doubt literally a financial meaning. -Thus the flower symbolism in this dream included virginal femininity, masculinity and an allusion to defloration by violence. It is worth pointing out in this connection that sexual flower symbolism, which, indeed, occurs very commonly in other connections, symbolizes the human organs of sex by blossoms, which are the sexual organs of plants. It may perhaps be true in general that gifts of flowers between lovers have this unconscious meaning.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

835

‘The birthday for which she was preparing in the dream meant, no doubt, the birth of a baby. She was identifying herself with her fiancé, and was representing him as "arranging" her for a birth - that is, as copulating with her. The latent thought may have run: "If I were he, I wouldn’t wait - I would deflower my fianceé without asking her leave - I would use violence." This was indicated by the word "violate", and in this way the sadistic component of the libido found expression.

‘In a deeper layer of the dream, the phrase "I arrange . . ." must no doubt have an auto-erotic, that is to say, an infantile, significance.

‘The dreamer also revealed an awareness, which was only possible to her in a dream, of her physical deficiency: she saw herself like a table, without projections, and on that account laid all the more emphasis on the preciousness of the "centre" - on another occasion she used the words, "a centre-piece of flowers" - that is to say, on her virginity. The horizontal attribute of a table must also have contributed something to the symbol.

‘The concentration of the dream should be observed: there was nothing superfluous in it, every word was a symbol.

‘Later on the dreamer produced an addendum to the dream: "I decorate the flowers with green crinkled paper". She added that it was "fancy paper" of the sort used for covering common flower pots. She went on: "to hide untidy things, whatever was to be seen, which was not pretty to the eye; there is a gap, a little space in the flowers. The paper looks like velvet or moss." - To "decorate" she gave the association "decorum", as I had expected. She said the green colour predominated, and her association to it was "hope" - another link with pregnancy. -In this part of the dream the chief factor was not identification with a man; ideas of shame and self-revelation came to the fore. She was making herself beautiful for him and was admitting physical defects which she felt ashamed of and was trying to correct. Her associations "velvet" and "moss" were a clear indication of a reference to pubic hair.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

836

‘This dream, then, gave expression to thoughts of which the girl was scarcely aware in her waking life - thoughts concerned with sensual love and its organs. She was being "arranged for a birthday" - that is, she was being copulated with. The fear of being deflowered was finding expression, and perhaps, too, ideas of pleasurable suffering. She admitted her physical deficiencies to herself and overcompensated for them by an over-valuation of her virginity. Her shame put forward as an excuse for the signs of sensuality the fact that its purpose was the production of a baby. Material considerations, too, alien to a lover’s mind, found their way to expression. The affect attaching to this simple dream - a feeling of happiness - indicated that powerful emotional complexes had found satisfaction in it.’

Ferenczi (1917) has justly pointed out that the meaning of symbols and the significance of dreams can be arrived at with particular ease from the dreams of precisely those people who are uninitiated into psycho-analysis.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

837

At this point I shall interpose a dream dreamt by a contemporary historical figure. I am doing so because in it an object that would in any case appropriately represent a male organ has a further attribute which established it in the clearest fashion as a phallic symbol. The fact of a riding whip growing to an endless length could scarcely be taken to mean anything but an erection. Apart from this, too, the dream is an excellent instance of the way in which thoughts of a serious kind, far removed from anything sexual, can come to be represented by infantile sexual material.

XI

A DREAM OF BISMARCK’S¹

‘In his Gedanken und Errinnerungen Bismarck quotes a letter written by him to the Emperor William I on December 18th 1881, in the course of which the following passage occurs: "Your Majesty’s communication encourages me to relate a dream which I had in the Spring of 1863, in the hardest days of the Conflict, from which no human eye could see any possible way out. I dreamt (as I related the first thing next morning to my wife and other witnesses) that I was riding on a narrow Alpine path, precipice on the right, rocks on the left. The path grew narrower, so that the horse refused to proceed, and it was impossible to turn round or dismount, owing to lack of space. Then, with my whip in my left hand, I struck the smooth rock and called on God. The whip grew to an endless length, the rocky wall dropped like a piece of stage scenery and opened out a broad path, with a view over hills and forests, like a landscape in Bohemia; there were Prussian troops with banners, and even in my dream the thought came to me at once that I must report it to your Majesty. This dream was fulfilled, and I woke up rejoiced and strengthened. . . ."'

‘The action of this dream falls into two sections. In the first part the dreamer found himself in an impasse from which he was miraculously rescued in the second part. The difficult situation in which the horse and its rider were placed is an easily recognizable dream-picture of the statesman’s critical position, which he may have felt with particular bitterness as he thought over the problems of his policy on the evening before the dream. In the passage quoted above Bismarck himself uses the same simile in describing the hopelessness of his position at the time. The meaning of the dream picture must therefore have been quite obvious to him. We are at the same time presented with a fine example of Silberer’s "functional phenomenon". The process taking place in the dreamer’s mind - each of the solutions attempted by his thoughts being met in turn by insuperable obstacles, while nevertheless he could not and might not tear himself free from the consideration of those problems - were most appropriately depicted by the rider who could neither advance not retreat. His pride, which forbade his thinking of surrendering or resigning, was expressed in the dream by the words "it was impossible to turn round or dismount." In his quality of a man of action who exerted himself unceasingly and toiled for the good of others, Bismarck must have found it easy to liken himself to a horse; and in fact he did so on many occasions, for instance, in his well-known saying: "A good horse dies in harness." In this sense the words "the horse refused to proceed" meant nothing more nor less than that the over-tired statesman felt a need to turn away from the cares of the immediate present, or, to put it another way, that he was in the act of freeing himself from the bonds of the reality principle by sleeping and dreaming. The wish-fulfilment, which became so prominent in the second part of the dream, was already hinted at in the words "Alpine path." No doubt Bismarck already knew at that time that he was going to spend his next vacation in the Alps - at Gastein; thus the dream, by conveying him thither, set him free at one blow from all the burdens of State business.

¹ From a paper by Hanns Sachs.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

838

‘In the second part of the dream, the dreamer’s wishes were represented as fulfilled in two ways: undisguisedly and obviously, and, in addition, symbolically. Their fulfilment was represented symbolically by the disappearance of the obstructive rock and the appearance in its place of a broad path - the "way out", which he was in search of, in its most convenient form; and, it was represented undisguisedly in the picture of the advancing Prussian troops. In order to explain this prophetic vision there is no need whatever for constructing mystical hypotheses; Freud’s theory of wish-fulfilment fully suffices. Already at the time of this dream Bismarck desired a victorious war against Austria as the best escape from Prussia’s internal conflicts. Thus the dream was representing this wish as fulfilled, just as is postulated by Freud, when the dreamer saw the Prussian troops with their banners in Bohemia, that is, in enemy country. The only peculiarity of the case was that the dreamer with whom we are here concerned was not content with the fulfilment of his wish in a dream but knew how to achieve it in reality. One feature which cannot fail to strike anyone familiar with the psycho-analytic technique of interpretation is the riding whip - which grew to an "endless length." Whips, sticks, lances and similar objects are familiar to us as phallic symbols; but when a whip further possesses the most striking characteristic of a phallus, its extensibility, scarcely a doubt can remain. The exaggeration of the phenomenon, its growing to an "endless length," seems to hint at a hypercathexis from infantile sources. The fact that the dreamer took the whip in his hand was a clear allusion to masturbation, though the reference was not, of course, to the dreamer’s contemporary circumstances but to childish desires in the remote past. The interpretation discovered by Dr. Stekel that in dreams "left" stands for what is wrong, forbidden and sinful is much to the point here, for it might very well be applied to masturbation carried out in childhood in the face of prohibition. Between this deepest infantile stratum and the most superficial one, which was concerned with the statesman’s immediate plans, it is possible to detect an intermediate layer which was related to both the others. The whole episode of a miraculous liberation from need by striking a rock and at the same time calling on God as a helper bears a remarkable resemblance to the Biblical scene in which Moses struck water from a rock for the thirsting Children of Israel. We may unhesitatingly assume that this passage was familiar in all its details to Bismarck, who came of a Bible-loving Protestant family. It would not be unlikely that in this time of conflict Bismarck should compare himself with Moses, the leader, whom the people he sought to free rewarded with rebellion, hatred and ingratitude. Here, then, we should have the connection with the dreamer’s contemporary wishes. But on the other hand the Bible passage contains some details which apply well to a masturbation phantasy. Moses seized the rod in the face of God’s command and the Lord punished him for this transgression by telling him that he must die without entering the Promised Land. The prohibited seizing of the rod (in the dream an unmistakably phallic one), the production of fluid from its blow, the threat of death - in these we find all the principal factors of infantile masturbation united. We may observe with interest the process of revision which has welded together these two heterogeneous pictures (originating, the one from the mind of a statesman of genius, and the other from the impulse: of the primitive mind of a child) and which has by that means succeeded in eliminating all the distressing factors. The fact that seizing the rod was a forbidden and rebellious act was no longer indicated except symbolically by the "left" hand which performed it. On the other hand, God was called on in the manifest content of the dream as though to deny as ostentatiously as possible any thought of a prohibition or secret. Of the two prophecies made by God to Moses - that he should see the Promised Land but that he should not enter it - the first is clearly represented as fulfilled ("the view over hills and forests"), while the second, highly distressing one was not mentioned at all. The water was probably sacrificed to the requirements of secondary revision, which successfully endeavoured to make this scene and the former one into a single unity; instead of water, the rock itself fell.

‘We should expect that at the end of an infantile masturbation phantasy, which included the theme of prohibition, the child would wish that the people in authority in his environment should learn nothing of what had happened. In the dream this wish was represented by its opposite, a wish to report to the King immediately what had happened. But this reversal fitted in excellently and quite unobtrusively into the phantasy of victory contained in the superficial layer of dream-thoughts and in a portion of the manifest content of the dream. A dream such as this of victory and conquest is often a cover for a wish to succeed in an erotic conquest; certain features of the dream, such as, for instance, that an obstacle was set in the way of the dreamer’s advance but that after he had made use of the extensible whip a broad path opened out, might point in that direction, but they afford an insufficient basis for inferring that a definite trend of thoughts and wishes of that kind ran though the dream. We have here a perfect example of completely successful dream-distortion. Whatever was obnoxious in it was worked over so that it never emerged through the surface layer that was spread over it as a protective covering. In consequence of this it was possible to avoid any release of anxiety. The dream was an ideal case of a wish successfully fulfilled without infringing the censorship; so that we may well believe that the dreamer awoke from it "rejoiced and strengthened".’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

839

As a last example here is

XII

A CHEMIST’S DREAM

This was dreamt by a young man who was endeavouring to give up his habit of masturbating in favour of sexual relations with women.

PREAMBLE. - On the day before he had the dream he had been instructing a student on the subject of Grignard’s reaction, in which magnesium is dissolved in absolutely pure ether through the catalytic action of iodine. Two days earlier, when the same reaction was being carried out, an explosion had occurred which had burnt the hand of one of the workers.

DREAM. - (I) He was supposed to be making phenyl-magnesium-bromide. He saw the apparatus with particular distinctness, but had substituted himself for the magnesium. He now found himself in a singularly unstable state. He kept on saying to himself: ‘This is all right, things are working, my feet are beginning to dissolve already, my knees are getting soft.’ Then he put out his hands and felt his feet. Meanwhile (how, he could not tell) he pulled his legs out of the vessel and said to himself once more: ‘This can’t be right. Yes it is, though.’ At this point he partly woke up and went through the dream to himself, so as to be able to report it to me. He was positively frightened of the solution) of the dream. He felt very much excited during this period of semi-sleep and kept repeating: ‘Phenyl, phenyl.’

(II) He was at -----ing with his whole family and was due to be at the Schottentor at half-past eleven to meet a particular lady. But he only woke at half-past eleven, and said to himself: ‘It’s too late. You can’t get there before half-past twelve.’ The next moment he saw the whole family sitting round the table; he saw his mother particularly clearly and the maidservant carrying the sour-tureen. So he thought: ‘Well, as we’ve started dinner, its too late for me to go out.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

840

ANALYSIS. - He had no doubt that even the first part of the dream had some connection with the lady whom he was to meet. (He had had the dream during the night before the expected rendez-vous.) He thought the student to whom he had given the instructions a particularly unpleasant person. He had said to him: ‘That’s not right’, because the magnesium showed no signs of being affected. And the student had replied, as though he were quite unconcerned: ‘No, nor it is.’ The student must have stood for himself (the patient), who was just as indifferent about the analysis as the student was about the synthesis. The ‘he’ in the dream who carried out the operation stood for me. How unpleasant I must think him for being so indifferent about the result!

On the other hand, he (the patient) was the material which was being used for the analysis (or synthesis). What was in question was the success of the treatment. The reference to his legs in the dream reminded him of an experience of the previous evening. He had been having a dancing-lesson and had met a lady of whom he had been eager to make a conquest. He clasped her to himself so tightly that on one occasion she gave a scream. As he relaxed his pressure against her legs, he felt her strong responsive pressure against the lower part of his thighs as far down as his knees - the point mentioned in his dream. So that in this connection it was the woman who was the magnesium in the retort - things were working at last. He was feminine in relation to me, just as he was masculine in relation to the woman. If it was working with the lady it was working with him in the treatment. His feeling himself and the sensations in his knees pointed to masturbation and fitted in with his fatigue on the previous day. -His appointment with the lady had in fact been for half-past eleven. His wish to miss it by oversleeping and to stay with his sexual objects at home (that is, to keep to masturbation) corresponded to his resistance.

In connection with his repeating the word ‘phenyl’, he told me that he had always been very fond of all these radicals ending in ‘-yl’, because they were so easy to use: benzyl, acetyl, etc. This explained nothing. But when I suggested ‘Schlemihl’ to him as another radical in the series, he laughed heartily and told me that in the course of the summer he had read a book by Marcel Prevost in which there was a chapter on ‘Les exclus de l’amour’ which in fact included some remarks upon ‘les Schlémiliés’. When he read them he had said to himself: ‘This is just what I’m like.’ - If he had missed the appointment it would have been another example of his ‘Schlemihlness’.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

841

It would seem that the occurrence of sexual symbolism in dreams has already been experimentally confirmed by some work carried out by K. Schrötter, on lines proposed by H. Swoboda. Subjects under deep hypnosis were given suggestions by Schrötter, and these led to the production of dreams a large part of whose content was determined by the suggestions. If he gave a suggestion that the subject should dream of normal or abnormal sexual intercourse, the dream, in obeying the suggestion, would make use of symbols familiar to us from psycho-analysis in place of the sexual material. For instance, when a suggestion was made to a female subject that she should dream of having homosexual intercourse with a friend, the friend appeared in the dream carrying a shabby hand-bag with a label stuck on to it bearing the words ‘Ladies only.’ The woman who dreamt this was said never to have had any knowledge of symbolism in dreams or of their interpretation. Difficulties are, however, thrown in the way of our forming an opinion of the value of these interesting experiments by the unfortunate circumstance that Dr. Schrötter committed suicide soon after making them. The only record of them is to be found in a preliminary communication published in the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse (Schrötter, 1912).

Similar findings were published by Roffenstein in 1923. Some experiments made by Betlheim and Hartmann (1924) were of particular interest, since they made no use of hypnosis. These experimenters related anecdotes of a coarsely sexual character to patients suffering from Korsakoff’s syndrome and observed the distortions which occurred when the anecdotes were reproduced by the patients in these confusional states. They found that the symbols familiar to us from the interpretation of dreams made their appearance (e.g. going upstairs, stabbing and shooting as symbols of copulation, and knives and cigarettes as symbols of the penis). The authors attached special importance to the appearance of the symbol of a staircase, for, as they justly observed, ‘no conscious desire to distort could have arrived at a symbol of such a kind.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

842

It is only now, after we have properly assessed the importance of symbolism in dreams, that it becomes possible for us to take up the theme of typical dreams, which was broken off on p. 541 above. I think we are justified in dividing such dreams roughly into two classes: those which really always have the same meaning, and those which, in spite of having the same or a similar content, must nevertheless be interpreted in the greatest variety of ways. Among typical dreams of the first class I have already dealt in some detail with examination dreams.

Dreams of missing a train deserve to be put alongside examination dreams on account of the similarity of their affect, and their explanation shows that we shall be right in doing so. They are dreams of consolation for another kind of anxiety felt in sleep - the fear of dying. ‘Departing’ on a journey is one of the commonest and best authenticated symbols of death. These dreams say in a consoling way: ‘Don’t worry, you won’t die (depart)’, just as examination dreams say soothingly: ‘Don’t be afraid, no harm will come to you this time either.’ The difficulty of understanding both these kinds of dreams is due to the fact that the feeling of anxiety is attached precisely to the expression of consolation.

The meaning of dreams ‘with a dental stimulus’, which I often had to analyse in patients, escaped me for a long time because, to my surprise, there were invariably too strong resistances against their interpretation. Overwhelming evidence left me at last in no doubt that in males the motive force of these dreams was derived from nothing other than the masturbatory desires of the pubertal period. I will analyse two dreams of this kind, one of which is also a ‘flying dream.’ They were both dreamt by the same person, a young man with strong homosexual leanings, which were, however, inhibited in real life.

He was attending a performance of ‘Fidelio’ and was sitting in the stalls at the Opera besides L., a man who was congenial to him and with whom he would have liked to make friends. Suddenly he flew through the air right across the stalls, put his hand in his mouth and pulled out two of his teeth.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

843

He himself said of the flight that it was as though he was being ‘thrown’ into the air. Since it was a performance of Fidelio, the words:

Wer ein holdes Weib errungen . . .

might have seemed appropriate. But the gaining of even the loveliest woman was not among the dreamer’s wishes. Two other lines were more to the point:

Wem der grosse Wurf gelungen,

Eines Freundes Freund zu sein . . .¹

The dream in fact contained this ‘great throw’, which, however, was not only a wish-fulfilment. It also concealed the painful reflection that the dreamer had often been unlucky in his attempts at friendship, and had been ‘thrown out’. It concealed, too, his fear that this misfortune might be repeated in relation to the young man by whose side he was enjoying the performance of Fidelio. And now followed what the fastidious dreamer regarded as a shameful confession: that once, after being rejected by one of his friends, he had masturbated twice in succession in the state of sensual excitement provoked by his desire.

Here is the second dream: He was being treated by two University professors of his acquaintance instead of by me. One of them was doing something to his penis. He was afraid of an operation. The other was pushing against his mouth with an iron rod, so that he lost one or two of his teeth. He was tied up with four silk cloths.

It can scarcely be doubted that this dream had a sexual meaning. The silk cloths identified him with a homosexual whom he knew. The dreamer had never carried out coitus and had never aimed at having sexual intercourse with men in real life; and he pictured sexual intercourse on the model of the pubertal masturbation with which he had once been familiar.

¹ [ Wem der grosse Wurf gelungen,

Eines Freundes Freund zu sein,

Wer ein holdes Weib errungen . . .

‘He who has won the great throw of becoming the friend of a friend, he who has gained a lovely woman . . .!’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

844

The many modifications of the typical dream with a dental stimulus (dreams, for instance, of a tooth being pulled out by someone else, etc.) are, I think, to be explained in the same way.¹ It may, however, puzzle us to discover how ‘dental stimuli’ have come to have this meaning. But I should like to draw attention to the frequency with which sexual repression makes use of transpositions from a lower to an upper part of the body. Thanks to them it becomes possible in hysteria for all kinds of sensations and intentions to be put into effect, if not where they properly belong - in relation to the genitals, at least in relation to other, unobjectionable parts of the body. One instance of a transposition of this kind is the replacement of the genitals by the face in the symbolism of unconscious thinking. Linguistic usage follows the same line in recognizing the buttocks as homologous to the cheeks, and by drawing a parallel between the ‘labia’ and the lips which frame the aperture of the mouth. Comparisons between nose and penis are common, and the similarity is made more complete by the presence of hair in both places. The one structure which affords no possibility of an analogy is the teeth; and it is precisely this combination of similarity and dissimilarity which makes the teeth so appropriate for representational purposes when pressure is being exercised by sexual repression.

I cannot pretend that the interpretation of dreams with a dental stimulus as dreams of masturbation - an interpretation whose correctness seems to me beyond doubt - has been entirely cleared up.² I have given what explanation I can and must leave what remains unsolved. But I may draw attention to another parallel to be found in linguistic usage. In our part of the world the act of masturbation is vulgarly described as ‘sich einen ausreissen’ or ‘sich einen herunterreissen’.³ I know nothing of the source of this terminology or of the imagery on which it is based; but ‘a tooth’ would fit very well into the first of the two phrases.

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] A tooth being pulled out by someone else in a dream is as a rule to be interpreted as castration (like having one’s hair cut by a barber, according to Stekel). A distinction must in general be made between dreams with a dental stimulus and dentist dreams, such as those recorded by Coriat (1913).

² [Footnote added 1909:] A communication by C. G. Jung informs us that dreams with a dental stimulus occurring in women have the meaning of birth dreams. - [Added  1919:] Ernest Jones has brought forward clear confirmation of this. The element in common between this interpretation and the one put forward above lies in the fact that in both cases (castration and birth) what is in question is the separation of a part of the body from the whole.

³ [Footnote added 1911:] Cf. the ‘biographical’ dream on p. 817, n. 2.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

845

According to popular belief dreams of teeth being pulled out are to be interpreted as meaning the death of a relative, but psycho-analysis can at most confirm this interpretation only in the joking sense I have alluded to above. In this connection, however, I will quote a dream with a dental stimulus that has been put at my disposal by Otto Rank.

‘A colleague of mine, who has for some time been taking a lively interest in the problems of dream-interpretation, has sent me the following contribution to the subject of dreams with a dental stimulus.

‘"A short time ago I had a dream that I was at the dentist’s and he was drilling a back tooth in my lower jaw. He worked on it so long that the tooth became useless. He then seized it with a forceps and pulled it out with an effortless ease that excited my astonishment. He told me not to bother about it, for it was not the tooth that he was really treating, and put it on the table, where the tooth (as it now seemed to me, an upper incisor) fell apart into several layers. I got up from the dentist’s chair, went closer to it with a feeling of curiosity, and raised a medical question which interested me. The dentist explained to me, while he separated out the various portions of the strikingly white tooth and crushed them up (pulverized them) with an instrument, that it was connected with puberty and that it was only before puberty that teeth came out so easily, and that in the case of women the decisive factor was the birth of a child.

‘"I then became aware (while I was half asleep, I believe) that the dream had been accompanied by an emission, which I could not attach with certainty, however, to any particular part of the dream; I was most inclined to think that it had already occurred while the tooth was being pulled out.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

846

‘"I then went on to dream of an occurrence which I can no longer recall, but which ended with my leaving my hat and coat somewhere (possibly in the dentist’s cloakroom) in the hope that someone would bring them after me, and with my hurrying off, dressed only in my overcoat, to catch a train which was starting. I succeeded at the last moment in jumping on to the hindmost carriage where someone was already standing. I was not able, though, to make my way into the inside of the carriage, but was obliged to travel in an uncomfortable situation, from which I tried, successfully in the end, to escape. We entered a big tunnel and two trains, going in the opposite direction to us, passed through our train as if it were the tunnel. I was looking into a carriage window as though I were outside.

‘"The following experiences and thoughts from the previous day provide material for an interpretation of the dream:

‘"(I.) I had in fact been having dental treatment recently, and at the time of the dream I was having continual pain in the tooth in the lower jaw which was being drilled in the dream and at which the dentist had, again in reality, worked longer than I liked. On the morning of the dream-day I had once more been to the dentist on account of the pain; and he had suggested to me that I should have another tooth pulled out in the same jaw as the one he had been treating, saying that the pain probably came from this other one. This was a ‘wisdom tooth’ which I was cutting just then. I had raised a question touching his medical conscience in that connection.

‘"(II.) On the afternoon of the same day, I had been obliged to apologize to a lady for the bad temper I was in owing to my toothache; whereupon she had told me she was afraid of having a root pulled out, the crown of which had crumbled away almost entirely. She thought that pulling out ‘eye-teeth’ was especially painful and dangerous, although on the other hand one of her acquaintances had told her that it was easier to pull out teeth in the upper jaw, which was where hers was. This acquaintance had also told her that he had once had the wrong tooth pulled out under an anaesthetic, and this had increased her dread of the necessary operation. She had then asked me whether ‘eye-teeth’ were molars or canines, and what was known about them. I pointed out to her on the one hand the superstitious element in all these opinions, though at the same time I emphasized the nucleus of truth in certain popular views. She was then able to repeat to me what she believed was a very old and wide-spread popular belief - that if a pregnant woman had toothache she would have a boy.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

847

‘"(III.) This saying interested me in connection with what Freud says in his Interpretation of Dreams on the typical meaning of dreams with a dental stimulus as substitutes for masturbation, since in the popular saying a tooth and male genitals (or a boy) were also brought into relation with each other. On the evening of the same day, therefore, I read through the relevant passage in the Interpretation of Dreams and found there amongst other things the following statements whose influence upon my dream may be observed just as clearly as that of the other two experiences I have mentioned. Freud writes of dreams with a dental stimulus that ‘in males the motive force of these dreams was derived from nothing other than the masturbatory desires of the pubertal period’. And further: ‘The many modifications of the typical dream with a dental stimulus (dreams, for instance, of a tooth being pulled out by someone else, etc.) are, I think, to be explained in the same way. It may, however, puzzle us to discover how "dental stimuli" should have come to have this meaning. But I should like to draw attention to the frequency with which sexual repression makes use of transpositions from a lower to an upper part of the body.’ (In the present dream from the lower jaw to the upper jaw.) ‘Thanks to them it becomes possible in hysteria for all kinds of sensations and intentions to be put into effect, if not where they properly belong - in relation to the genitals, at least in relation to other, unobjectionable parts of the body’. And again: ‘But I may draw attention to another parallel to be found in linguistic usage. In our part of the world the act of masturbation is vulgarly described as "sich einen ausreissen" or "sich einen herunterreissen"'. I was already familiar with this expression in my early youth as a description of masturbation, and no experienced dream-interpreter will have any difficulty in finding his way from here to the infantile material underlying the dream. I will only add that the ease with which the tooth in the dream, which after its extraction turned into an upper incisor, came out, reminded me of an occasion in my childhood on which I myself pulled out a loose upper front tooth easily and without pain. This event, which I can still remember clearly to-day in all its details, occurred at the same early period to which my first conscious attempts at masturbation go back. (This was a screen memory.)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

848

‘"Freud’s reference to a statement by C. G. Jung to the effect that ‘dreams with a dental stimulus occurring in women have the meaning of birth dreams’, as well as the popular belief in the significance of toothache in pregnant women, accounted for the contrast drawn in the dream between the decisive factor in the case of females and of males (puberty). In this connection I recall an earlier dream of mine which I had soon after a visit to the dentist and in which I dreamt that the gold crowns which had just been fixed fell out; this annoyed me very much in the dream on account of the considerable expense in which I had been involved and which I had not yet quite got over at the time. This other dream now became intelligible to me (in view of a certain experience of mine) as a recognition of the material advantages of masturbation over object-love: the latter, from an economic point of view, was in every respect less desirable (cf. the gold crowns); and I believe that the lady’s remark about the significance of toothache in pregnant women had re-awakened these trains of thought in me."

‘So much for the interpretation put forward by my colleague, which is most enlightening and to which, I think, no objections can be raised. I have nothing to add to it, except, perhaps, a hint at the probable meaning of the second part of the dream. This seems to have represented the dreamer’s transition from masturbation to sexual intercourse, which was apparently accomplished with great difficulty - (cf. the tunnel through which the trains went in and out in various directions) as well as the danger of the latter (cf. pregnancy and the overcoat). The dreamer made use for this purpose of the verbal bridges "Zahn-ziehen (Zug)" and "Zahn-reissen (Reisen)".

‘On the other hand, theoretically, the case seems to me interesting in two respects. In the first place, it brings evidence in favour of Freud’s discovery that ejaculation in a dream accompanies the act of pulling out a tooth. In whatever form the emission may appear, we are obliged to regard it as a masturbatory satisfaction brought about without the assistance of any mechanical stimulation. Moreover, in this case, the satisfaction accompanying the emission was not, as it usually is, directed to an object, even if only to an imaginary one, but had no object, if one may say so; it was completely auto-erotic, or at the most showed a slight trace of homosexuality (in reference to the dentist).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

849

‘The second point which seems to me to deserve emphasis is the following. It may plausibly be objected that there is no need at all to regard the present case as confirming Freud’s view, since the events of the previous day would be sufficient in themselves to make the content of the dream intelligible. The dreamer’s visit to the dentist, his conversation with the lady and his reading of the Interpretation of Dreams would quite sufficiently explain how he came to produce this dream, especially as his sleep was disturbed by toothache; they would even explain, if need be, how the dream served to dispose of the pain which was disturbing his sleep - by means of the idea of getting rid of the painful tooth and by simultaneously drowning with libido the painful sensation which the dreamer feared. But even if we make the greatest possible allowance for all this, it cannot be seriously maintained that the mere reading of Freud’s explanations could have established in the dreamer the connection between pulling out a tooth and the act of masturbation, or could even have put that connection into operation, unless it had been laid down long since, as the dreamer himself admits it was (in the phrase "sich einen ausreissen"). This connection may have been revived not only by his conversation with the lady but by a circumstance which he reported subsequently. For in reading the Interpretation of Dreams he had been unwilling, for comprehensible reasons, to believe in this typical meaning of dreams with a dental stimulus, and had felt a desire to know whether that meaning applied to all dreams of that sort. The present dream confirmed the fact that this was so, at least as far as he was concerned, and thus showed him why it was that he had been obliged to feel doubts on the subject. In this respect too, therefore, the dream was the fulfilment of a wish namely, the wish to convince himself of the range of application and the validity of this view of Freud’s.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

850

The second group of typical dreams include those in which the dreamer flies or floats in the air, falls, swims, etc. What is the meaning of such dreams? It is impossible to give a general reply. As we shall hear, they mean something different in every instance; it is only the raw material of sensations contained in them which is always derived from the same source.

The information provided by psycho-analyses forces me to conclude that these dreams, too, reproduce impressions of childhood; they relate, that is, to games involving movement, which are extraordinarily attractive to children. There cannot be a single uncle who has not shown a child how to fly by rushing across the room with him in his outstretched arms, or who has not played at letting him fall by riding him on his knee and then suddenly stretching out his leg, or by holding him up high and then suddenly pretending to drop him. Children are delighted by such experiences and never tire of asking to have them repeated, especially if there is something about them that causes a little fright or giddiness. In after years they repeat these experiences in dreams; but in the dreams they leave out the hands which held them up, so that they float or fall unsupported. The delight taken by young children in games of this kind (as well as in swings and see-saws) is well known; when they come to see acrobatic feats in a circus their memory of such games is revived. Hysterical attacks in boys sometimes consist merely in reproductions of feats of this kind, carried out with great skill. It not uncommonly happens that these games of movement, though innocent in themselves, give rise to sexual feelings. Childish romping [‘Hetzen’], if I may use a word which commonly describes all such activities, is what is being repeated in dreams of flying, falling, giddiness and so on; while the pleasurable feelings attached to these experiences are transformed into anxiety. But, often enough, as every mother knows, romping among children actually ends in squabbling and tears.

Thus I have good grounds for rejecting the theory that what provokes dreams of flying and falling is the state of our tactile feelings during sleep or sensations of the movement of our lungs, and so on. In my view these sensations are themselves reproduced as part of the memory to which the dream goes back: that is to say, they are part of the content of the dream and not its source.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1930:] These remarks on dreams of movement are repeated here, since the present context requires them. See above, p. 747 f.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

851

This material, then, consisting of sensations of movement of similar kinds and derived from the same source, is used to represent dream-thoughts of every possible sort. Dreams of flying or floating in the air (as a rule, pleasurably toned) require the most various interpretations; with some people these interpretations have to be of an individual character, whereas with others they may even be of a typical kind. One of my women patients used very often to dream that she was floating at a certain height over the street without touching the ground. She was very short, and she dreaded the contamination involved in contact with other people. Her floating dream fulfilled her two wishes, by raising her feet from the ground and lifting her head into a higher stratum of air. In other women I have found that flying dreams expressed a desire ‘to be like a bird’; while other dreamers became angels during the night because they had not been called angels during the day. The close connection of flying with the idea of birds explains how it is that in men flying dreams usually have a grossly sensual meaning; and we shall not be surprised when we hear that some dreamer or other is very proud of his powers of flight.

Dr. Paul Federn (of Vienna ) has put forward the attractive theory that a good number of these flying dreams are dreams of erection; for the remarkable phenomenon of erection, around which the human imagination has constantly played, cannot fail to be impressive, involving as it does an apparent suspension of the laws of gravity. (Cf. in this connection the winged phalli of the ancients.)

It is a remarkable fact that Mourly Vold, a sober-minded investigator of dreams and one who is disinclined to interpretation of any kind, also supports the erotic interpretation of flying or floating dreams (Vold, 1910-12, 2, 791). He speaks of the erotic factor as ‘the most powerful motive for floating dreams’, draws attention to the intense feeling of vibration in the body that accompanies such dreams and points to the frequency with which they are connected with erections or emissions.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

852

Dreams of falling, on the other hand, are more often characterized by anxiety. Their interpretation offers no difficulty in the case of women, who almost always accept the symbolic use of falling as a way of describing a surrender to an erotic temptation. Nor have we yet exhausted the infantile sources of dreams of falling. Almost every child has fallen down at one time or other and afterwards been picked up and petted; or if he has fallen out of his cot at night, has been taken into bed with his mother or nurse.

People who have frequent dreams of swimming and who feel great joy in cleaving their way through the waves, and so on, have as a rule been bed-wetters and are repeating in their dreams a pleasure which they have long learnt to forgo. We shall learn presently from more than one example what it is that dreams of swimming are most easily used to represent.

The interpretation of dreams of fire justifies the nursery law which forbids a child to ‘play with fire’ - so that he shall not wet his bed at night. For in their case, too, there is an underlying recollection of the enuresis of childhood. In my ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’, I have given a complete analysis and synthesis of a fire dream of this kind in connection with the dreamer’s case history, and I have shown what impulses of adult years this infantile material can be used to represent.

It would be possible to mention a whole number of other ‘typical’ dreams if we take the term to mean that the same manifest dream-content is frequently to be found in the dreams of different dreamers. For instance we might mention dreams of passing though narrow streets or of walking through whole suites of rooms, and dreams of burglars - against whom, incidentally, nervous people take precautions before they go to sleep; dreams of being pursued by wild animals (or by bulls or horses) or of being threatened with knives, daggers or lances - these last two classes being characteristic of the manifest content of the dreams of people who suffer from anxiety - and many more. An investigation specially devoted to this material would thoroughly repay the labour involved. But instead of this I have two observations to make, though these do not apply exclusively to typical dreams.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

853

The more one is concerned with the solution of dreams, the more one is driven to recognize that the majority of the dreams of adults deal with sexual material and give expression to erotic wishes. A judgement on this point can be formed only by those who really analyse dreams, that is to say, who make their way through their manifest content to the latent dream-thoughts, and never by those who are satisfied with making a note of the manifest content alone (like Näcke, for instance, in his writings on sexual dreams). Let me say at once that this fact is not in the least surprising but is in complete harmony with the principles of my explanation of dreams. No other instinct has been subjected since childhood to so much suppression as the sexual instinct with its numerous components (cf. my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905d); from no other instinct are so many and such powerful unconscious wishes left over, ready to produce dreams in a state of sleep. In interpreting dreams we should never forget the significance of sexual complexes, though we should also, of course, avoid the exaggeration of attributing exclusive importance to them.

We can assert of many dreams, if they are carefully interpreted, that they are bisexual, since they unquestionably admit of an ‘over-interpretation’ in which the dreamer’s homosexual impulses are realized - impulses, that is, which are contrary to his normal sexual activities. To maintain, however, as do Stekel (1911) and Adler (1910, etc.), that all dreams are to be interpreted bisexually appears to me to be a generalization which is equally undemonstrable and unplausible and which I am not prepared to support. In particular, I cannot dismiss the obvious fact that there are numerous dreams which satisfy needs other than those which are erotic in the widest sense of the word: dreams of hunger and thirst, dreams of convenience, etc. So, too, such statements as that ‘the spectre of death is to be found behind every dream’ (Stekel), or that ‘every dream shows an advance from the feminine to the masculine line’ (Adler), appear to me to go far beyond anything that can be legitimately maintained in dream-interpretation.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

854

The assertion that all dreams require a sexual interpretation, against which critics rage so incessantly, occurs nowhere in my Interpretation of Dreams. It is not to be found in any of the numerous editions of this book and is in obvious contradiction to other views expressed in it.

I have already shown elsewhere that strikingly innocent dreams may embody crudely erotic wishes, and I could confirm this by many new instances. But it is also true that many dreams which appear to be indifferent and which one would not regard as in any respect peculiar lead back on analysis to wishful impulses which are unmistakably sexual and often of an unexpected sort. Who, for instance, would have suspected the presence of a sexual wish in the following dream before it had been interpreted? The dreamer gave this account of it: Standing back a little behind two stately palaces was a little house with closed doors. My wife led me along the piece of street up to the little house and pushed the door open; I then slipped quickly and easily into the inside of a court which rose in an incline. Anyone, however, who has had a little experience in translating dreams will at once reflect that penetrating into narrow spaces and opening closed doors are among the commonest sexual symbols, and will easily perceive in this dream a representation of an attempt at coitus a tergo (between the two stately buttocks of the female body). The narrow passage rising in an incline stood, of course, for the vagina. The assistance attributed by the dreamer to his wife forces us to conclude that in reality it was only consideration for her that restrained the dreamer from making attempts of this kind. It turned out that on the dream-day a girl had come to live in the dreamer’s household who had attracted him and had given him the impression that she would raise no great objections to an approach of that kind. The little house between the two palaces was a reminiscence of the Hradshin in Prague and was a further reference to the same girl, who came from that place.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

855

When I insist to one of my patients on the frequency of Oedipus dreams, in which the dreamer has sexual intercourse with his own mother, he often replies: ‘I have no recollection of having had any such dream.’  Immediately afterwards, however, a memory will emerge of some other inconspicuous and indifferent dream, which the patient has dreamt repeatedly. Analysis then shows that this is in fact a dream with the same content - once more an Oedipus dream. I can say with certainty that disguised dreams of sexual intercourse with the dreamer’s mother are many times more frequent than straightforward ones.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1911:] I have published elsewhere a typical example of a disguised Oedipus dream of this kind. [Reprinted below.] Another example, with a detailed analysis, has been published by Otto Rank (1911a). - [Added 1914:] For some other disguised Oedipus dreams, in which eye-symbolism is prominent, see Rank (1913). Other papers on eye-dreams and eye-symbolism, by Eder, Ferenczi and Reitler will be found in the same place. The blinding in the legend of Oedipus, as well as elsewhere, stands for castration. - [Added 1911:] Incidentally, the symbolic interpretation of undisguised Oedipus dreams was not unknown to the ancients. Rank (1910, 534) writes: ‘Thus Julius Caesar is reported to have had a dream of sexual intercourse with his mother which was explained by the dream-interpreters as a favourable augury for his taking possession of the earth (Mother Earth). The oracle given to the Tarquins is equally well known, which prophesied that the conquest of Rome would fall to that one of them who should first kiss his mother ("osculum matri tulerit"). This was interpreted by Brutus as referring to Mother Earth. ("Terram osculo contigit, scilicet quod ea communis mater omnium mortalium eeset" Livy, I, 56.)' - [Added 1914:] Compare in this connection the dream of Hippias reported by Herodotus (VI, 107)): ‘As for the Persians, they were guided to Marathon by Hippias son of Pisistratus. Hippias in the past night had seen a vision in his sleep wherein he thought that he lay with his own mother; he interpreted this dream to signify that he should return to Athens and recover his power, and so die an old man in his own mother-country.’ - [Added 1911:] These myths and interpretations reveal a true psychological insight. I have found that people who know that they are preferred or favoured by the mother give evidence in their lives of a peculiar self-reliance and an unshakeable optimism which often seem like heroic attributes and bring actual success to their possesors.

[Added 1925:] ‘TYPICAL EXAMPLE OF A DISGUISED OEDIPUS DREAM: A man dreamt that he had a secret liaison with a lady whom someone else wanted to marry. He was worried in case this other man might discover the liaison and the proposed marriage came to nothing. He therefore behaved in a very affectionate way to the man. He embraced him and kissed him.  - There was only one point of contact between the content of this dream and the facts of the dreamer’s life. He had a secret liaison with a married woman; and an ambiguous remark made by her husband, who was a friend of his, led him to suspect that the husband might have noticed something. But in reality there was something else involved, all mention of which was avoided in the dream but which alone provided a key to its understanding. The husband’s life was threatened by an organic illness. His wife was prepared for the possibility of his dying suddenly, and the dreamer was consciously occupied with an intention to marry the young widow after her husband’s death. This external situation placed the dreamer in the constellation of the Oedipus dream. His wish was capable of killing the man in order to get the woman as his wife. The dream expressed this wish in a hypocritically distorted form. Instead of her being married already, he made out that someone else wanted to marry her, which corresponded to his own secret intentions; and his hostile wishes towards her husband were concealed behind demonstrations of affection which were derived from his memory of his relations with his own father in childhood.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

856

In some dreams of landscapes or other localities emphasis is laid in the dream itself on a convinced feeling of having been there once before. (Occurrences of ‘déjà vu’ in dreams have a special meaning.) These places are invariably the genitals of the dreamer’s mother; there is indeed no other place about which one can assert with such conviction that one has been there once before.

On one occasion only I was perplexed by an obsessional neurotic who told me a dream in which he was visiting a house that he had been in twice before. But this particular patient had told me a considerable time before of an episode during his sixth year. On one occasion he had been sharing his mother’s bed and misused the opportunity by inserting his finger into her genitals while she was asleep.

A large number of dreams, often accompanied by anxiety and having as their content such subjects as passing though narrow spaces or being in water, are based upon phantasies of intra-uterine life, of existence in the womb and of the act of birth. What follows was the dream of a young man who, in his imagination, had taken advantage of an intra-uterine opportunity of watching his parents copulating.

He was in a deep pit with a window in it like the one in the Semmering Tunnel. At first he saw an empty landscape through the window, but then invented a picture to fit the space, which immediately appeared and filled in the gap. The picture represented a field which was being ploughed up deeply by some implement; and the fresh air together with the idea of hard work which accompanied the scene, and the blue-black clods of earth, produced a lovely impression. He then went on further and saw a book upon education open in front of him . . . and was surprised that so much attention was devoted in it to the sexual feelings (of children); and this led him to think of me.

And here is a pretty water dream, dreamt by a woman patient, which served a special purpose in the treatment. At her summer holiday resort, by the Lake of ----, she dived into the dark water just where the pale moon was mirrored in it.

Dreams like this one are birth dreams. Their interpretation is reached by reversing the event reported in the manifest dream; thus, instead of ‘diving into the water’ we have ‘coming out of the water’, i.e. being born.¹ We can discover the locality from which a child is born by calling to mind the slang use of the word ‘lune’ in French. The pale moon was thus the white bottom which children are quick to guess that they came out of. What was the meaning of the patient’s wishing to be born at her summer holiday resort? I asked her and she replied without hesitation: ‘Isn’t it just as though I had been reborn through the treatment?’ Thus the dream was an invitation to me to continue treating her at the holiday resort - that is, to visit her there. Perhaps there was a very timid hint in it, too, of the patient’s wish to become a mother herself.²

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] For the mythological significance of birth from the water see Rank (1909).

² [Footnote added 1909:] It was not for a long time that I learned to appreciate the importance of phantasies and unconscious thoughts about life in the womb. They contain an explanation of the remarkable dread that many people have of being buried alive; and they also afford the deepest unconscious basis for the belief in survival after death, which merely represents a projection into the future of this uncanny life before birth. Moreover, the act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

857

I will quote another birth-dream, together with its interpretation, from a paper by Ernest Jones.) ‘She stood on the sea-shore watching a small boy, who seemed to be hers, wading into the water. This he did till the water covered him and she could only see his head bobbing up and down near the surface. The scene then changed into a crowded hall of an hotel. Her husband left her, and she "entered into a conversation" with a stranger. The second half of the dream revealed itself in the analysis as representing a flight from her husband and the entering into intimate relations with a third person . . . . The first part of the dream was a fairly evident birth-phantasy. In dreams as in mythology, the delivery of the child from the uterine waters is commonly presented by distortion as the entry of the child into water; among many others, the births of Adonis, Osiris, Moses and Bacchus are well-known illustrations of this. The bobbing up and down of the head into the water at once recalled to the patient the sensation of quickening she had experienced in her only pregnancy. Thinking of the boy going into the water induced a reverie in which she saw herself taking him out of the water, carrying him to a nursery, washing him and dressing him, and installing him in her household.

‘The second half of the dream therefore represented thoughts concerning the elopement, that belonged to the first half of the underlying latent content; the first half of the dream corresponded with the second half of the latent content, the birth-phantasy. Besides this inversion in order, further inversions took place in each half of the dream. In the first half the child entered the water, and then his head bobbed; in the underlying dream-thoughts first the quickening occurred and then the child left the water (a double inversion). In the second half her husband left her; in the dream-thoughts she left her husband.’

Abraham (1909, 22 ff.) has reported another birth-dream, dreamt by a young woman who was facing her first confinement. A subterranean channel led direct into the water from a place in the floor of her room (genital canal-amniotic fluid). She raised a trap-door in the floor and a creature dressed in brown fur, very much resembling a seal, promptly appeared. This creature turned out to be the dreamer’s younger brother, to whom she had always been like a mother.

Rank has shown from a series of dreams that birth-dreams make use of the same symbolism as dreams with a urinary stimulus. The erotic stimulus is represented in the latter as a urinary stimulus; and the stratification of meaning in these dreams corresponds to a change that has come over the meaning of the symbol since infancy.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

858

This is an appropriate point at which to return to a topic that was broken off in an earlier chapter (p. 716): the problem of the part played in the formation of dreams by organic stimuli which disturb sleep. Dreams which come about under their influence openly exhibit not only the usual tendency to wish-fulfilment and to serving the end of convenience, but very often a perfectly transparent symbolism as well; for it not infrequently happens that a stimulus awakens a dreamer after a vain attempt has been made to deal with it in a dream under a symbolic disguise. This applies to dreams of emission or orgasm as well as to those provoked by a need to micturate or defaecate. ‘The peculiar nature of emission dreams not only puts us in a position to reveal directly certain sexual symbols which are already known as being typical, but which have nevertheless been violently disputed; it also enables us to convince ourselves that some apparently innocent situations in dreams are no more than a symbolic prelude to crudely sexual scenes. The latter are as a rule represented undisguisedly in the relatively rare emission dreams, whereas they culminate often enough in anxiety dreams, which have the same result of awakening the sleeper.’

The symbolism of dreams with a urinary stimulus is especially transparent and has been recognized from the earliest times. The view was already expressed by Hippocrates that dreams of fountains and springs indicate a disorder of the bladder (Havelock Ellis). Scherner studied the multiplicity of the symbolism of urinary stimuli and asserted that ‘any urinary stimulus of considerable strength invariably passes over into stimulation of the sexual regions and symbolic representations of them. . . . Dreams with a urinary stimulus are often at the same time representatives of sexual dreams.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

859

Otto Rank, whose discussion in his paper on the stratification of symbols in arousal dreams I am here following, has made it seem highly probable that a great number of dreams with a urinary stimulus have in fact been caused by a sexual stimulus which has made a first attempt to find satisfaction regressively in the infantile form of urethral erotism. Those cases are particularly instructive in which the urinary stimulus thus set up leads to awakening and emptying the bladder, but in which the dream is nevertheless continued and the need then expressed in undisguisedly erotic imagery.¹

Dreams with an intestinal stimulus throw light in an analogous fashion on the symbolism involved in them, and at the same time confirm the connection between gold and faeces which is also supported by copious evidence from social anthropology. (See Freud, 1908b; Rank, 1912a; Dattner, 1913; and Reik, 1915.) ‘Thus, for instance, a woman who was receiving medical treatment for an intestinal disorder dreamt of someone who was burying a treasure in the neighbourhood of a little wooden hut which looked like a rustic out-door closet. There was a second part to the dream in which she was wiping the behind of her little girl who had dirtied herself.’

Rescue dreams are connected with birth dreams. In women’s dreams, to rescue, and especially to rescue from the water, has the same significance as giving birth; but the meaning is modified if the dreamer is a man.²

Robbers, burglars and ghosts, of whom some people feel frightened before going to bed, and who sometimes pursue their victims after they are asleep, all originate from one and the same class of infantile reminiscence. They are the nocturnal visitors who rouse children and take them up to prevent their wetting their beds, or who lift the bed-clothes to make sure where they have put their hands in their sleep. Analyses of some of these anxiety-dreams have made it possible for me to identify these nocturnal visitors more precisely. In every case the robbers stood for the sleeper’s father, whereas the ghosts corresponded to female figures in white night-gowns.

¹ [Footnote added 1919:] ‘The same symbols which occur in their infantile aspect in bladder dreams, appear with an eminently sexual meaning in their "recent" aspects: Water = urine = semen = amniotic fluid; ship = "pump ship" (micturate) = uterus (box); to get wet = enuresis = copulation = pregnancy; to swim = full bladder = abode of the unborn; rain = micturate = symbol of fertility; travel (starting, getting out) = getting out of bed = sexual intercourse (honeymoon); micturate = emission.’ (Rank, 1912a, 95.)

² [Footnote added 1911:] A dream of this kind has been reported by Pfister (1909). For the symbolic meaning of rescuing see Freud, 1910d, and Freud, 1910h. [Added 1914:] See also Rank (1911b) and Reik (1911). [Added 1919:] See further, Rank (1914).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

860

(F)

SOME EXAMPLES - CALCULATIONS AND SPEECHES IN DREAMS

Before assigning the fourth of the factors which govern the formation of dreams to its proper place, I propose to quote a number of examples from my collection. These will serve partly to illustrate the interplay between the three factors already known to us and partly to provide confirmatory evidence for what have hitherto been unsupported assertions or to indicate some conclusions which inevitably follow from them. In giving an account of the dream-work, I have found very great difficulty in backing my findings by examples. Instances in support of particular propositions carry conviction only if they are treated in the context of the interpretation of a dream as a whole. If they are torn from their context they lose their virtue; while, on the other hand, a dream-interpretation which is carried even a little way below the surface quickly becomes so voluminous as to make us lose the thread of the train of thought which it was designed to illustrate. This technical difficulty must serve as my excuse if in what follows I string together all sorts of things, whose only common bond is their connection with the contents of the preceding sections of this chapter.

I will begin by giving a few instances of peculiar or unusual modes of representation in dreams.

A lady had the following dream: A servant girl was standing on a ladder as if she were cleaning a window, and had a chimpanzee with her and a gorilla-cat (the dreamer afterwards corrected this to an angora cat). She hurled the animals at the dreamer; the chimpanzee cuddled up to her, which was very disgusting. - This dream achieved its purpose by an extremely simple device: it took a figure of speech literally and gave an exact representation of its wording. ‘Monkey’, and animals’ names in general, are used as invectives; and the situation in the dream meant neither more nor less than ‘hurling invectives’. In the course of the present series of dreams we shall come upon a number of other instances of the use of this simple device during the dream-work.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

861

Another dream adopted a very similar procedure. A woman had a child with a remarkably deformed skull. The dreamer had heard that the child had grown like that owing to its position in the uterus. The doctor said that the skull might be given a better shape by compression, but that that would damage the child’s brain. She reflected that as he was a boy it would do him less harm. -This dream contained a plastic representation of the abstract concept of ‘impressions on children’ which the dreamer had met with in the course of the explanations given her during her treatment.

The dream-work adopted a slightly different method in the following instance. The dream referred to an excursion to the Hilmteich near Graz. The weather outside was fearful. There was a wretched hotel, water was dripping from the walls of the room, the bedclothes were damp. (The latter part of the dream was reported less directly than I have given it.) The meaning of the dream was ‘superfluous’. This abstract idea, which was present in the dream-thoughts, was in the first instance given a somewhat forced twist and put into some such form as ‘overflowing’, ‘flowing over’ or ‘fluid’ - after which it was represented in a number of similar pictures: water outside, water on the walls inside, water in the dampness of the bed-clothes-everything flowing or ‘overflowing.’

We shall not be surprised to find that, for the purpose of representation in dreams, the spelling of words is far less important than their sound, especially when we bear in mind that the same rule holds good in rhyming verse. Rank (1910, 482) has recorded in detail, and analysed very fully, a girl’s dream in which the dreamer described how she was walking through the fields and cutting off rich ears [‘Ähren’] of barley and wheat. A friend of her youth came towards her, but she tried to avoid meeting him. The analysis showed that the dream was concerned with a kiss - an ‘honourable kiss’ [‘Kuss in Ehren’ pronounced the same as ‘Ähren’]. In the dream itself the ‘Ähren’, which had to be cut off, not pulled off, figured as ears of corn, while, condensed with ‘Ehren’, they stood for a whole number of other thoughts.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

862

On the other hand, in other cases, the course of linguistic evolution has made things very easy for dreams. For language has a whole number of words at its command which originally had a pictorial and concrete significance, but are used to-day in a colourless and abstract sense. All that the dream need do is to give these words their former, full meaning or to go back a little way to an earlier phase in their development. A man had a dream, for instance, of his brother being in a Kasten [‘box’]. In the course of interpretation the Kasten was replaced by a Schrank [‘cupboard’ - also used abstractly for ‘barrier’, ‘restriction’]. The dream-thought had been to the effect that his brother ought to restrict himself [‘sich einschränken’] - instead of the dreamer doing so.

Another man dreamt that he climbed to the top of a mountain which commanded a quite unusually extensive view. Here he was identifying himself with a brother of his who was the editor of a survey which dealt with far Eastern affairs.

In Der Grüne Heinrich a dream is related in which a mettlesome horse was rolling about in a beautiful field of oats, each grain of which was ‘a sweet almond, a raisin and a new penny piece . . . wrapped up together in red silk and tied up with a bit of pig’s bristle.’ The author (or dreamer) gives us an immediate interpretation of this dream-picture: the horse felt agreeably tickled and called out ‘Der Hafer sticht mich!’

According to Henzen dreams involving puns and turns of speech occur particularly often in the old Norse sagas, in which scarcely a dream is to be found which does not contain an ambiguity or a play upon words.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

863

It would be a work in itself to collect these modes of representation and to classify them according to their underlying principles. Some of these representations might almost be described as jokes, and they give one a feeling that one would never have understood them without the dreamer’s help.

(1) A man dreamt that he was asked someone’s name but could not think of it. He himself explained that what this meant was that ‘he would never dream of such a thing’.

(2) A woman patient told me a dream in which all the people were especially big. ‘That means’, she went on, ‘that the dream must be to do with events in my early childhood, for at that time, of course, all grown-up people seemed to me enormously big.’ She herself did not appear in the content of this dream. - The fact of a dream referring to childhood may also be expressed in another way, namely by a translation of time into space. The characters and scenes are seen as though they were at a great distance, at the end of a long road, or as though they were being looked at through the wrong end of a pair of opera-glasses.

(3) A man who in his working life tended to use abstract and indefinite phraseology, though he was quite sharp-witted in general, dreamt on one occasion that he arrived at a railway station just as a train was coming in. What then happened was that the platform moved towards the train, while the train stopped still - an absurd reversal of what actually happens. This detail was no more than an indication that we should expect to find another reversal in the dream’s content. The analysis of the dream led to the patient’s recollecting some picture-books in which there were illustrations of men standing on their heads and walking on their hands.

(4) Another time the same dreamer told me a short dream which was almost reminiscent of the technique of a rebus. He dreamt that his uncle gave him a kiss in an automobile. He went on at once to give me the interpretation, which I myself would never have guessed: namely that it meant auto-erotism. The content of this dream might have been produced as a joke in waking life.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

864

(5) A man dreamt that he was pulling a woman out from behind a bed. The meaning of this was that he was giving her preference.

(6) A man dreamt that he was an officer sitting at a table opposite the Emperor. This meant that he was putting himself in opposition to his father.

(7) A man dreamt that he was treating someone for a broken limb. The analysis showed that the broken bone [‘Knochenbruch’] stood for a broken marriage [‘Ehebruch’, properly ‘adultery’].

(8) The time of day in dreams very often stands for the age of the dreamer at some particular period in his childhood. Thus, in one dream, ‘a quarter past five in the morning’ meant the age of five years and three months, which was significant, since that was the dreamer’s age at the time of the birth of his younger brother.

(9) Here is another method of representing ages in a dream. A woman dreamt that she was walking with two little girls whose ages differed by fifteen months. She was unable to recall any family of her acquaintance to whom this applied. She herself put forward the interpretation that the two children both represented herself and that the dream was reminding her that the two traumatic events of her childhood were separated from each other by precisely that interval. One had occurred when she was three and a half, the other when she was four and three-quarters.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

865

(10) It is not surprising that a person undergoing psycho-analytic treatment should often dream of it and be led to give expression in his dreams to the many thoughts and expectations to which the treatment gives rise. The imagery most frequently chosen to represent it is that of a journey, usually by motor-car, as being a modern and complicated vehicle. The speed of the car will then be used by the patient as an opportunity for giving vent to ironical comments. -If ‘the unconscious’, as an element in the subject’s waking thoughts, has to be represented in a dream, it may be replaced very appropriately by subterranean regions. -These, where they occur without any reference to analytic treatment, stand for the female body or the womb. -’Down below’ in dreams often relates to the genitals, ‘up above’, on the contrary, to the face, mouth or breast. -Wild beasts are as a rule employed by the dream-work to represent passionate impulses of which the dreamer is afraid, whether they are his own or those of other people. (It then needs only a slight displacement for the wild beasts to come to represent the people who are possessed by these passions. We have not far to go from here to cases in which a dreaded father is represented by a beast of prey or a dog or wild horse - a form of representation recalling totemism.) It might be said that the wild beasts are used to represent the libido, a force dreaded by the ego and combated by means of repression. It often happens, too, that the dreamer separates off his neurosis, his ‘sick personality’, from himself and depicts it as an independent person.

(11) Here is an example recorded by Hanns Sachs (1911): ‘We know from Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams that the dream-work makes use of different methods for giving a sensory form to words or phrases. If, for instance, the expression that is to be represented is an ambiguous one, the dream-work may exploit the fact by using the ambiguity as a switch-point: where one of the meanings of the word is present in the dream-thoughts the other one can be introduced into the manifest dream. This was the case in the following short dream in which ingenious use was made for representational purposes of appropriate impressions of the previous day. I was suffering from a cold on the "dream-day", and I had therefore decided in the evening that, if I possibly could, I would avoid getting out of bed during the night. I seemed in the dream merely to be continuing what I had been doing during the day. I had been engaged in sticking press-cuttings into an album and had done my best to put each one in the place where it belonged. I dreamt that I was trying to paste a cutting into the album. But it wouldn’t go on to the page ["er geht nicht auf die Seite"], which caused me much pain. I woke up and became aware that the pain in the dream persisted in the form of a pain in my inside, and I was compelled to abandon the decision I had made before going to bed. My dream, in its capacity of guardian of my sleep, had given me the illusion of a fulfilment of my wish to stop in bed, by means of a plastic representation of the ambiguous phrase "er geht nicht auf die Seite" ["he isn’t going to the lavatory"].’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

866

We can go so far as to say that the dream-work makes use, for the purpose of giving a visual representation of the dream-thoughts, of any methods within its reach, whether waking criticism regards them as legitimate or illegitimate. This lays the dream-work open to doubt and derision on the part of everyone who has only heard of dream-interpretation but never practised it. Stekel’s book, Die Sprache des Traumes (1911), is particularly rich in examples of this kind. I have, however, avoided quoting instances from it, on account of the author’s lack of critical judgement and of the arbitrariness of his technique, which give rise to doubts even if unprejudiced minds.

(12) The following examples are taken from a paper by V. Tausk (1914) on the use of clothes and colours in dreaming.

(a) A. dreamt of seeing a former governess of his in a dress of black lustre [‘Lüster’] which fitted very tight across her buttocks. - This was explained as meaning that the governess was lustful [‘lüstern’].

(b) C. dreamt of seeing a girl on the ----Road, who was bathed in white light and was wearing a white blouse. - The dreamer had had intimate relations with a Miss White for the first time on this road.

(c) Frau D. dreamt of seeing the eighty-year-old Viennese actor Blasel lying on a sofa in full armour [‘in voller Rüstung’]. He began jumping over tables and chairs, drew a dagger, looked at himself in the looking-glass and brandished the dagger in the air as though he was fighting an imaginary enemy. - Interpretation: The dreamer suffered from a long-standing affection of the bladder [‘Blase’]. She lay on a sofa for her analysis; when she looked at herself in a looking-glass, she thought privately that in spite of her age and illness she still looked hale and hearty [‘rüsting’].

The Interpretation Of Dreams

867

(13) A ‘GREAT ACHIEVEMENT’ IN A DREAM. - A man dreamt that he was a pregnant woman lying in bed. He found the situation very disagreeable. He called out: ‘I’d rather be . . .’ (during the analysis, after calling to mind a nurse, he completed the sentence with the words ‘breaking stones’). Behind the bed there was hanging a map, the bottom edge of which was kept stretched by a strip of wood. He tore the strip of wood down by catching hold of its two ends. It did not break across but split into two halves lengthways. This action relieved him and at the same time helped on delivery.

Without any assistance he interpreted tearing down the strip [‘Leiste’] as a great achievement [‘Leistung’]. He was escaping from his uncomfortable situation (in the treatment) by tearing himself out of his feminine attitude . . . . The absurd detail of the strip of wood not simply breaking but splitting lengthways was explained thus: the dreamer recalled that this combination of doubling and destroying was an allusion to castration. Dreams very often represent castration by the presence of two penis symbols as the defiant expression of an antithetical wish. Incidentally, the ‘Leiste’ [‘groin’] is a part of the body in the neighbourhood of the genitals. The dreamer summed up the interpretation of the dream as meaning that he had got the better of the threat of castration which had led to his adopting a feminine attitude.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

868

(14) In an analysis which I was conducting in French a dream came up for interpretation in which I appeared as an elephant. I naturally asked the dreamer why I was represented in that form. ‘Vous me trompez’ [‘you are deceiving me’] was his reply (‘trompe’ = ‘trunk’).

The dream-work can often succeed in representing very refractory material, such as proper names, by a far-fetched use of out-of-the-way associations. In one of my dreams old Brücke had set me the task of making a dissection; . . . I fished something out that looked like a piece of crumpled silver-paper. (I shall return to this dream later.) The association to this (at which I arrived with some difficulty) was ‘stanniol.’ I then perceived that I was thinking of the name of Stannius, the author of a dissertation on the nervous system of fish, which I had greatly admired in my youth. The first scientific task which my teacher set me was in fact concerned with the nervous system of a fish, Ammocoetes. It was clearly impossible to make use of the name of this fish in a picture puzzle.

At this point I cannot resist recording a very peculiar dream, which also deserves to be noticed as having been dreamt by a child, and which can easily be explained analytically. ‘I remember having often dreamt when I was a child’, said a lady, ‘that God wore a paper cocked-hat on his head. I used very often to have a hat of that sort put on my head at meals, to prevent my being able to look at the other children’s plates, to see how big their helpings were. As I had heard that God was omniscient, the meaning of the dream was that I knew everything - even in spite of the hat that had been put on my head.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

869

The nature of the dream-work and the way in which it plays about with its material, the dream-thoughts, are instructively shown when we come to consider numbers and calculations that occur in dreams. Moreover, numbers in dreams are regarded superstitiously as being especially significant in regard to the future. I shall therefore select a few instances of this kind from my collection.

I

Extract from a dream dreamt by a lady shortly before her treatment came to an end: She was going to pay for something. Her daughter took 3 florins and 65 kreuzers from her (the mother’s) purse. The dreamer said to her: ‘What are you doing? It only costs 21 kreuzers.’ Owing to my knowledge of the dreamer’s circumstances, this bit of dream was intelligible to me without any further explanation on her part. The lady came from abroad and her daughter was at school in Vienna. She was in a position to carry on her treatment with me as long as her daughter remained in Vienna. The girl’s school year was due to end in three weeks and this also meant the end of the lady’s treatment. The day before the dream, the headmistress had asked her whether she would not consider leaving her daughter at school for another year. From this suggestion she had evidently gone on to reflect that in that case she might also continue her treatment. This was what the dream referred to. One year is equal to 365 days. The three weeks which remained both of the school-year and of the treatment were equivalent to 21 days (though the hours of treatment would be less than this). The numbers, which in the dream-thoughts referred to periods of time, were attached in the dream itself to sums of money - not but what there was a deeper meaning involved, for ‘time is money.’ 365 kreuzers only amount to 3 florins and 65 kreuzers; and the smallness of the sums that occurred in the dream was obviously the result of wish-fulfilment. The dreamer’s wish reduced the cost both of the treatment and of the year’s school-fees.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

870

II

The numbers which occurred in another dream involved more complicated circumstances. A lady who, though she was still young, had been married for a number of years, received news that an acquaintance of hers, Elise L., who was almost exactly her contemporary, had just become engaged. Thereupon she had the following dream. She was at the theatre with her husband. One side of the stalls was completely empty. Her husband told her that Elise L. and her fiancé had wanted to go too; but had only been able to get bad seats - three for 1 florin 50 kreuzers - and of course they could not take those. She thought it would not really have done any harm if they had.

What was the origin of the 1 florin 50 kreuzers? It came from what was in fact an indifferent event of the previous day. Her sister-in-law had been given a present of 150 florins by her husband and had been in a hurry to get rid of them by buying a piece of jewellery. It is to be noticed that 150 florins is a hundred times as much as 1 florin 50 kreuzers. Where did the three come from which was the number of the theatre tickets? The only connection here was that her newly-engaged friend was the same number of months - three - her junior. The solution of the dream was arrived at with the discovery of the meaning of the empty stalls. They were an unmodified allusion to a small incident which had given her husband a good excuse for teasing her. She had planned to go to one of the plays that had been announced for the coming week and had taken the trouble to buy tickets several days ahead, and had therefore had to pay a booking fee. When they got to the theatre they found that one side of the house was almost empty. There had been no need for her to be in such a hurry.

Let me now put the dream-thoughts in place of the dream. ‘It was absurd to marry so early. There was no need for me to be in such a hurry. I see from Elise L.’s example that I should have got a husband in the end. Indeed, I should have got one a hundred times better’ (a treasure ) ‘if I had only waited’ (in antithesis to her sister-in-law’s hurry ). ‘My money’ (or dowry) ‘could have bought three men just as good.’

It will be observed that the meaning and context of the numbers have been altered to a far greater extent in this dream than in the former one. The processes of modification and distortion have gone further here; and this is to be explained by the dream-thoughts in this case having to overcome a specially high degree of endopsychic resistance before they could obtain representation. Nor should we overlook the fact that there was an element of absurdity in the dream, namely the three seats being taken by two people. I will anticipate my discussion of absurdity in dreams by pointing out that this absurd detail in the content of the dream was intended to represent the most strongly emphasized of the dream-thoughts, viz., ‘it was absurd to marry so early.’ The absurdity which had to find a place in the dream was ingeniously supplied by the number 3, which was itself derived from a quite immaterial point of distinction between the two people under comparison - the 3 months’ difference between their ages. The reduction of the actual 150 florins to 1 florin 50 corresponded to the low value assigned by the dreamer to her husband (or treasure), in her suppressed thoughts.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

871

III

The next example exhibits the methods of calculation employed by dreams, which have brought them into so much disrepute. A man had a dream that he was settled in a chair at the B.’s - a family with which he had been formerly acquainted - and said to them: ‘It was a great mistake your not letting me have Mali.’ - ‘How old are you?’ he then went on to ask the girl. - ‘I was born in 1882’, she replied. - ‘Oh, so you’re 28, then.’

Since the dream dates from 1898 this was evidently a miscalculation, and the dreamer’s inability to do sums would deserve to be compared with that of a general paralytic unless it could be explained in some other way. My patient was one of those people who, whenever they happen to catch sight of a woman, cannot let her alone in their thoughts. The patient who for some months used regularly to come next after him in my consulting room, and whom he thus ran into, was a young lady; he used constantly to make enquiries about her and was most anxious to create a good impression with her. It was she whose age he estimated at 28 years. So much by way of explanation of the result of the ostensible calculation. 1882, incidentally, was the year in which the dreamer had married. - I may add that he was unable to resist entering into conversation with the two other members of the female sex whom he came across in my house - the two maids (neither of them by any means youthful), one or other of whom used to open the door to him; he explained their lack of response as being due to their regarding him as an elderly gentleman of settled habits.

IV

Here is another dream dealing with figures, which is characterized by the clarity of the manner in which it was determined, or rather, overdetermined. I owe both the dream and its interpretation to Dr. B. Dattner. ‘The landlord of my block of flats, who is a police-constable, dreamt that he was on street-duty. (This was a wish-fulfilment.) An inspector came up to him, who had the number 22 followed by 62 or 26, on his collar. At any rate there were several twos on it.

‘The mere fact that in reporting the dream the dreamer broke up the number 2262 showed that its components had separate meanings. He recalled that the day before there had been some talk at the police station about the men’s length of service. The occasion for it was an inspector who had retired on his pension at the age of 62. The dreamer had only served for 22 years, and it would be 2 years and 2 months before he would be eligible for a 90 percent pension. The dream represented in the first place the fulfilment of a long-cherished wish of the dreamer’s to reach the rank of inspector. The superior officer with "2262" on his collar was the dreamer himself. He was on street duty - another favourite wish of his - he had served his remaining 2 years and 2 months and now, like the 62-year-old inspector, he could retire on a full pension.’¹

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] For analyses of other dreams containing numbers, see Jung, Marcinowski and others. These often imply very complicated operations with numbers, which have been carried out by the dreamer with astonishing accuracy. See also Jones (1912a)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

872

When we take together these and some other examples which I shall give later, we may safely say that the dream-work does not in fact carry out any calculations at all, whether correctly or incorrectly; it merely throws into the form of a calculation numbers which are present in the dream-thoughts and can serve as allusions to matter that cannot be represented in any other way. In this respect the dream-work is treating numbers as a medium for the expression of its purpose in precisely the same way as it treats any other idea, including proper names and speeches that occur recognizably as verbal presentations.

For the dream-work cannot actually create speeches. However much speeches and conversations, whether reasonable or unreasonable in themselves, may figure in dreams, analysis invariably proves that all that the dream has done is to extract from the dream-thoughts fragments of speeches which have really been made or heard. It deals with these fragments in the most arbitrary fashion. Not only does it drag them out of their context and cut them in pieces, incorporating some portions and rejecting others, but it often puts them together in a new order, so that a speech which appears in the dream to be a connected whole turns out in analysis to be composed of three or four detached fragments. In producing this new version, a dream will often abandon the meaning that the words originally had in the dream-thoughts and give them a fresh one.¹ If we look closely into a speech that occurs in a dream, we shall find that it consists on the one hand of relatively clear and compact portions and on the other hand of portions which serve as connecting matter and have probably been filled in at a later stage, just as, in reading, we fill in any letters or syllables that may have been accidentally omitted. Thus speeches in dreams have a structure similar to that of breccia, in which largish blocks of various kinds of stone are cemented together by a binding medium.

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] In this respect neuroses behave exactly like dreams. I know a patient one of whose symptoms is that, involuntarily and against her will she hears - i.e. hallucinates - songs or fragments of songs, without being able to understand what part they play in her mental life. (Incidentally, she is certainly not paranoic.) Analysis has shown that, by allowing herself a certain amount of licence, she puts the text of these songs to false uses. For instance in the lines ‘Leise, leise, Fromme Weise!’ [literally, ‘Softly, softly, devout melody’] the last word was taken by her unconscious as though it was spelt ‘Waise’ [= ‘orphan’, thus making the lines read ‘Softly, softly, pious orphan’], the orphan being herself. Again ‘O du selige, o du fröhliche’ [‘Oh thou blessed and happy . . .’] is the opening of a Christmas carol; by not continuing the quotation to the word ‘Christmastide’ she turned it into a bridal song. -The same mechanism of distortion can also operate in the occurrence of an idea unaccompanied by hallucination. Why was it that one of my patients was pestered by the recollection of a poem that he had had to learn in his youth: ‘Nächtlich am Busento lispeln . . .’ [‘By night on the Busento whispering . . .’]? Because his imagination went no further than the first part of this quotation: ‘Nächtlich am Busen’ [‘By night on the bosom’].

We are familiar with the fact that this same technical trick is used by parodists. Included in a series of ‘Illustrations to the German Classics’ published in Fliegende Blätter was one which illustrated Schiller’s ‘Siegesfest’, with the following quotation attached to it:

Und des frisch erkämpften Weibes

Freut sich der Atrid und strickt. . .

[The conqu’ring son of Atreus sits

At his fair captive’s side and knits . . .]

Here the quotation broke off. In the original the lines continue:

. . . Um den Reiz des schönen Leibes

Seine Arme hochbeglückt.

[.  . . His joyful and triumphant arms

About her body’s lovely charms. ]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

873

Strictly speaking, this description applies only to such speeches in dreams as possess something of the sensory quality of speech, and which are described by the dreamer himself as being speeches. Other sorts of speeches, which are not, as it were, felt by him as having been heard or spoken (that is, which have no acoustic or motor accompaniments in the dream), are merely thoughts such as occur in our waking thought-activity and are often carried over unmodified into our dreams. Another copious source of undifferentiated speeches of this kind, though one which it is difficult to follow up, seems to be provided by material that has been read. But whatever stands out markedly in dreams as a speech can be traced back to real speeches which have been spoken or heard by the dreamer.

Instances showing that speeches in dreams have this origin have already been given by me in the course of analysing dreams which I have quoted for quite other purposes. Thus, in the ‘innocent’ market dream reported on p. 670, the spoken words ‘that’s not obtainable any longer’ served to identify me with the butcher, while one portion of the other speech, ‘I don’t recognize that; I won’t take it’, was actually responsible for making the dream an ‘innocent’ one. The dreamer, it will be remembered, having had some suggestion made to her on the previous day by her cook, had replied with the words: ‘I don’t recognize that; behave yourself properly!’ The innocent-sounding first part of this speech was taken into the dream by way of allusion to its second part, which fitted excellently into the phantasy underlying the dream, but would at the same time have betrayed it.

Here is another example, which will serve instead of many, all of them leading to the same conclusion.

The dreamer was in a big courtyard in which some dead bodies were being burnt. ‘I’m off’, he said, ‘I can’t bear the sight of it.’ (This was definitely a speech.) He then met two butcher’s boys. ‘Well’, he asked, ‘did it taste nice?’ ‘No’, one of them answered, ‘not a bit nice’ - as though it had been human flesh.

The innocent occasion of the dream was as follows. The dreamer and his wife had paid a visit after supper to their neighbours, who were excellent people but not precisely appetizing. The hospitable old lady was just having her supper and had tried to force him (there is a phrase with a sexual sense used jokingly among men to render this idea¹) to taste some of it. He had declined, saying he had no appetite left: ‘Get along!’ she had replied, ‘you can manage it’, or words to that effect. He had therefore been obliged to taste it and had complimented her on it saying: ‘that was very nice.’ When he was once more alone with his wife he had grumbled at his neighbour’s insistence and also at the quality of the food. The thought, ‘I can’t bear the sight of it’, which in the dream too failed to emerge as a speech in the strict sense, was an allusion to the physical charms of the lady from which the invitation had come, and it must be taken as meaning that he had no desire to look at them.

¹ [‘Notzüchtigen’, ‘to force sexually’, ‘to rape’, is so used in place of ‘nötigen’, ‘to force’ (in the ordinary sense).]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

874

More instruction can be derived from another dream, which I shall report in this connection on account of the very distinct speech which formed its centre-point, although I shall have to put off explaining it fully till I come to discuss affect in dreams. I had a very clear dream. I had gone to Brücke’s laboratory at night, and, in response to a gentle knock on the door, I opened it to (the late) Professor Fleischl, who came in with a number of strangers and, after exchanging a few words, sat down at his table. This was followed by a second dream. My friend Fl. had come to Vienna unobtrusively in July. I met him in the street in conversation with my (deceased) friend P., and went with them to some place where they sat opposite each other as though they were at a small table. I sat in front at its narrow end. Fl. spoke about his sister and said that in three quarters of an hour she was dead, and added some such words as ‘that was the threshold.’ As P. failed to understand him, Fl. turned to me and asked me how much I had told P. about his affairs. Whereupon, overcome by strange emotions, I tried to explain to Fl, that P. (could not understand anything at all, of course, because he) was not alive. But what I actually said - and I myself noticed the mistake - was, ‘NON VIXIT’. I then gave P. a piercing look. Under my gaze he turned pale; his form grew indistinct and his eyes a sickly blue - and finally he melted away. I was highly delighted at this and I now realized that Ernst Fleischl, too, had been no more than an apparition, a ‘revenant’; and it seemed to me quite possible that people of that kind only existed as long as one liked and could be got rid of if someone else wished it.

This fine specimen includes many of the characteristics of dreams - the fact that I exercised my critical faculties during the dream and myself noticed my mistake when I said ‘Non vixit’ instead of ‘Non vivit’, my unconcerned dealings with people who were dead and were recognized as being dead in the dream itself, the absurdity of my final inference and the great satisfaction it gave me. This dream exhibits so many of these puzzling features, indeed, that I would give a great deal to be able to present the complete solution of its conundrums. But in point of fact I am incapable of doing so - of doing, that is to say, what I did in the dream, of sacrificing to my ambition people whom I greatly value. Any concealment, however, would destroy what I know very well to be the dream’s meaning; and I shall therefore content myself, both here and in a later context, with selecting only a few of its elements for interpretation.

The central feature of the dream was a scene in which I annihilated P. with a look. His eyes changed to a strange and uncanny blue and he melted away. This scene was unmistakably copied from one which I had actually experienced. At the time I have in mind I had been a demonstrator at the Physiological Institute and was due to start work early in the morning. It came to Brücke’s ears that I sometimes reached the students’ laboratory late. One morning he turned up punctually at the hour of opening and awaited my arrival. His words were brief and to the point. But it was not they that mattered. What overwhelmed me were the terrible blue eyes with which he looked at me and by which I was reduced to nothing - just as P. was in the dream, where, to my relief, the roles were reversed. No one who can remember the great man’s eyes, which retained their striking beauty even in his old age, and who has ever seen him in anger, will find it difficult to picture the young sinner’s emotions.

It was a long time, however, before I succeeded in tracing the origin of the ‘Non vixit’ with which I passed judgement in the dream. But at last it occurred to me that these two words possessed their high degree of clarity in the dream, not as words heard or spoken, but as words seen. I then knew at once where they came from. On the pedestal of the Kaiser Josef Memorial in the Hofburg in Vienna the following impressive words are inscribed:

Saluti patriae vixit

non diu sed totus.¹

I extracted from this inscription just enough to fit in with hostile train of ideas among the dream-thoughts, just enough to imply that ‘this fellow has no say in the matter - he isn’t even alive.’ And this reminded me that I had the dream only a few days after the unveiling of the memorial to Fleischl in the cloisters of the University. At that time I had seen the Brücke memorial once again and must have reflected (unconsciously) with regret on the fact that the premature death of my brilliant friend P., whose whole life had been devoted to science, had robbed him of a well-merited claim to a memorial in these same precincts. Accordingly, I gave him this memorial in my dream; and, incidentally, as I remembered, his first name was Josef.²

¹ [‘For the well-being of his country he lived not long but wholly.’  - Footnote added 1925:] The actual wording of the inscription is:

Saluti publicae vixit

non diu sed totus.

The reason for my mistake in putting ‘patriae’ for ‘publicae’ has probably been rightly guessed by Wittels.

² I may add as an example of over-determination that my excuse for arriving too late at the laboratory lay in the fact that after working far into the night I had in the morning to cover the long distance between the Kaiser Josef Strasse and the Währinger Strasse.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

875

By the rules of dream-interpretation I was even now not entitled to pass from the Non vixit derived from my recollection of the Kaiser Josef Memorial to the Non vixit required by the sense of the dream-thoughts. There must have been some other element in the dream-thoughts which would help to make the transition possible. It then struck me as noticeable that in the scene in the dream there was a convergence of a hostile and an affectionate current of feeling towards my friend P., the former being on the surface and the latter concealed, but both of them being represented in the single phrase Non vixit. As he had deserved well of science I built him a memorial; but as he was guilty of an evil wish (which was expressed at the end of the dream) I annihilated him. I noticed that this last sentence had a quite special cadence, and I must have had some model in my mind. Where was an antithesis of this sort to be found, a juxtaposition like this of two opposite reactions towards a single person, both of them claiming to be completely justified and yet not incompatible? Only in one passage in literature - but a passage which makes a profound impression on the reader: in Brutus’s speech of self-justification in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, ‘As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him; but, as he was ambitious, I slew him.’ Were not the formal structure of these sentences and their antithetical meaning precisely the same as in the dream-thought I had uncovered? Thus I had been playing the part of Brutus in the dream. If only I could find one other piece of evidence in the content of the dream to confirm this surprising collateral connecting link! A possible one occurred to me. ‘My friend Fl. came to Vienna in July.’ There was no basis in reality for this detail of the dream. So far as I knew, my friend Fl. had never been in Vienna in July. But the month of July was named after Julius Caesar and might therefore very well represent the allusion I wanted to the intermediate thought of my playing the part of Brutus.¹

¹ There was the further connection between ‘Caesar’ and ‘Kaiser’ .

The Interpretation Of Dreams

876

Strange to say, I really did once play the part of Brutus. I once acted in the scene between Brutus and Caesar from Schiller before an audience of children. I was fourteen years old at the time and was acting with a nephew who was a year my senior. He had come to us on a visit from England; and he, too, was a revenant, for it was the playmate of my earliest years who had returned in him. Until the end of my third year we had been inseparable. We had loved each other and fought with each other; and this childhood relationship, as I have already hinted above, had a determining influence on all my subsequent relations with contemporaries. Since that time my nephew John has had many reincarnations which revived now one side and now another of his personality, unalterably fixed as it was in my unconscious memory. There must have been times when he treated me very badly and I must have shown courage in the face of my tyrant; for in my later years I have often been told of a short speech made by me in my own defence when my father, who was at the same time John’s grandfather, had said to me accusingly: ‘Why are you hitting John? My reply - I was not yet two years old at the time - was ‘I hit him ‘cos he hit me.’ It must have been this scene from my childhood which diverted ‘Non vivit’ into ‘Non vixit’, for in the language of later childhood the word for to hit is ‘wichsen’. The dream-work is not ashamed to make use of links such as this one. There was little basis in reality for my hostility to my friend P., who was very greatly my superior and for that reason was well fitted to appear as a new edition of my early playmate. This hostility must therefore certainly have gone back to my complicated childhood relations to John.

As I have said, I shall return to this dream later.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

877

(G)

ABSURD DREAMS - INTELLECTUAL ACTIVITY IN DREAMS

In the course of our dream-interpretations we have so often come across the element of absurdity that we cannot postpone any longer the moment of investigating its source and significance, if it has any. For it will be remembered that the absurdity of dreams has provided those who deny the value of dreams with one of their principal arguments in favour of regarding them as the meaningless product of a reduced and fragmentary mental activity.

I shall begin by giving a few examples in which the absurdity is only an apparent one and disappears as soon as the meaning of the dream is more closely examined. Here are two or three dreams which deal (by chance, as it may seem at first sight) with the dreamer’s dead father.

I

This is the dream of a patient who had lost his father six years earlier. His father had met with a grave calamity. He had been travelling by the night train, which had been derailed. The carriage seats were forced together and his head was compressed from side to side. The dreamer then saw him lying in bed with a wound over his left eyebrow which ran in a vertical direction. He was surprised at his father’s having met with a calamity (since he was already dead, as he added in telling me the dream). How clear his eyes were!

According to the ruling theory of dreams we should have to explain the content of this dream as follows. To begin with, we should suppose, while the dreamer was imagining the accident, he must have forgotten that his father had been in his grave for several years; but, as the dream proceeded, the recollection must have emerged, and led to his astonishment at his own dream while he was still asleep. Analysis teaches us, however, that it is eminently useless to look for explanations of this kind. The dreamer had commissioned a bust of his father from a sculptor and had seen it for the first time two days before the dream. It was this that he had thought of as a calamity. The sculptor had never seen his father and had worked from photographs. On the day immediately before the dream the dreamer, in his filial piety, had sent an old family servant to the studio to see whether he would form the same opinion of the marble head, namely, that it was too narrow from side to side at the temples. He now proceeded to recall from his memory the material which had gone to the construction of the dream. Whenever his father was tormented by business worries or family difficulties, he had been in the habit of pressing his hands to the sides of his forehead, as though he felt that his head was too wide and wanted to compress it. -When the patient was four years old he had been present when a pistol, which had been accidentally loaded, had been discharged and had blackened his father’s eyes. (‘How clear his eyes were!’) - At the spot on his forehead at which the dream located his father’s injury, a deep furrow showed during his lifetime whenever he was thoughtful or sad. The fact that this furrow was replaced in the dream by a wound led back to the second exciting cause of the dream. The dreamer had taken a photograph of his little daughter. The plate had slipped through his fingers, and when he picked it up showed a crack which ran perpendicularly down the little girl’s forehead as far as her eyebrow. He could not help feeling superstitious about this, since a few days before his mother’s death he had broken a photographic plate with her portrait on it.

The absurdity of this dream was thus no more than the result of a piece of carelessness in verbal expression which failed to distinguish the bust and the photograph from the actual person. We might any of us say: ‘There’s something wrong with Father, don’t you think?’ The appearance of absurdity in the dream could easily have been avoided; and if we were to judge from this single example, we should be inclined to think that the apparent absurdity had been permitted or even designed.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

878

II

Here is another, almost exactly similar, example from a dream of my own. (I lost my father in 1896.) After his death my father played a political part among the Magyars and brought them together politically. Here I saw a small and indistinct picture: a crowd of men as though they were in the Reichstag; someone standing on one or two chairs, with other people round him. I remembered how like Garibaldi he had looked on his death-bed, and fell glad that that promise had come true.

What could be more absurd than this? It was dreamt at a time at which the Hungarians had been driven by parliamentary obstruction into a state of lawlessness and were plunged into the crisis from which they were rescued by Koloman Széll. The trivial detail of the scene in the dream appearing in pictures of such a small size was not without relevance to its interpretation. Our dream-thoughts are usually represented in visual pictures which appear to be more or less life-size. The picture which I saw in my dream, however, was a reproduction of a woodcut inserted in an illustrated history of Austria, which showed Maria Theresa at the Reichstag of Pressburg in the famous episode of ‘Moriamur pro rege nostro’. [‘We will die for our king!’]¹ Like Maria Theresa in the picture, so my father stood in the dream surrounded by the crowd. But he was standing on one or two chairs [‘chair’ = ‘Stuhl’]. He had brought them together, and was thus a presiding judge [‘Stuhlrichter’, literally ‘chair-judge’]. (A connecting link was provided by the common phrase ‘we shall need no judge.’) -Those of us who were standing round had in fact remarked how like Garibaldi my father looked on his death bed. He had had a post mortem rise of temperature, his cheeks had been flushed more and more deeply red. . . . As I recalled this, my thoughts involuntarily ran on:

Und hinter ihm in wesenlosem Scheine

Lag, was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine.²

¹ I cannot remember where I read an account of a dream which was filled with unusually small figures, and the source of which turned out to be one of Jacques Callot’s etchings seen by the dreamer during the day. These etchings do in fact contain a large number of very small figures. One series of them depicts the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War.

² [‘Behind him, a shadowy illusion, lay what holds us all in bondage - the things that are common.’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

879

These elevated thoughts prepared the way for the appearance of something that was common [‘gemein’] in another sense. My father’s post mortem rise of temperature corresponded to the words ‘after his death’ in the dream. His most severe suffering had been caused by a complete paralysis (obstruction) of the intestines during his last weeks. Disrespectful thoughts of all kinds followed from this. One of my contemporaries who lost his father while he was still at his secondary school - on that occasion I myself had been deeply moved and had offered to be his friend - once told me scornfully of how one of his female relatives had had a painful experience. Her father had fallen dead in the street and had been brought home; when his body was undressed it was found that at the moment of death, or post mortem, he had passed a stool [‘Stuhl’]. His daughter had been so unhappy about this that she could not prevent this ugly detail from disturbing her memory of her father. Here we have reached the wish that was embodied in this dream. ‘To stand before one’s children’s eyes, after one’s death, great and unsullied’ - who would not desire this? What has become of the absurdity of the dream? Its apparent absurdity is due only to the fact that it gave a literal picture of a figure of speech which is itself perfectly legitimate and in which we habitually overlook any absurdity involved in the contradiction between its parts. In this instance, once again, it is impossible to escape an impression that the apparent absurdity is intentional and has been deliberately produced.

The frequency with which dead people appear in dreams and act and associate with us as though they were alive has caused unnecessary surprise and has produced some remarkable explanations which throw our lack of understanding of dreams into strong relief. Yet the explanation of these dreams is a very obvious one. It often happens that we find ourselves thinking: ‘If my father were alive, what would he say to this?’ Dreams are unable to express an ‘if’ of this kind except by representing the person concerned as present in some particular situation. Thus, for instance, a young man who had been left a large legacy by his grandfather, dreamt, at a time when he was feeling self-reproaches for having spent a considerable sum of money, that his grandfather was alive again and calling him to account. And when, from our better knowledge, we protest that after all the person in question is dead, what we look upon as a criticism of the dream is in reality either a consoling thought that the dead person has not lived to witness the event, or a feeling of satisfaction that he can no longer interfere in it.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

880

There is another kind of absurdity, which occurs in dreams of dead relatives but which does not express ridicule and derision. It indicates an extreme degree of repudiation, and so makes it possible to represent a repressed thought which the dreamer would prefer to regard as utterly unthinkable. It seems impossible to elucidate dreams of this kind unless one bears in mind the fact that dreams do not differentiate between what is wished and what is real. For instance, a man who had nursed his father during his last illness and had been deeply grieved by his death, had the following senseless dream some time afterwards. His father was alive once more and talking to him in his usual way, but (the remarkable thing was that) he had really died, only he did not know it. This dream only becomes intelligible if, after the words ‘but he had really died’ we insert ‘in consequence of the dreamer’s wish’, and if we explain that what ‘he did not know’ was that the dreamer had had this wish. While he was nursing his father he had repeatedly wished his father were dead; that is to say, he had had what was actually a merciful thought that death might put an end to his sufferings. During his mourning, after his father’s death, even this sympathetic wish became a subject of unconscious self-reproach, as though by means of it he had really helped to shorten the sick man’s life. A stirring up of the dreamer’s earliest infantile impulses against his father made it possible for this self-reproach to find expression as a dream; but the fact that the instigator of the dream and the daytime thoughts were such worlds apart was precisely what necessitated the dream’s absurdity.¹

It is true that dreams of dead people whom the dreamer has loved raise difficult problems in dream-interpretation and that these cannot always be satisfactorily solved. The reason for this is to be found in the particularly strongly marked emotional ambivalence which dominates the dreamer’s relation to the dead person. It very commonly happens that in dreams of this kind the dead person is treated to begin with as though he were alive, that he then suddenly turns out to be dead and that in a subsequent part of the dream he is alive once more. This has a confusing effect, It eventually occurred to me that this alternation between death and life is intended to represent indifference on the part of the dreamer. (‘It’s all the same to me whether he’s alive or dead.’) This indifference is, of course, not real but merely desired; it is intended to help the dreamer to repudiate his very intense and often contradictory emotional attitudes and it thus becomes a dream-representation of his ambivalence. -In other dreams in which the dreamer associates with dead people, the following rule often helps to give us our bearings. If there is no mention in the dream of the fact that the dead man is dead, the dreamer is equating himself with him: he is dreaming of his own death. If, in the course of the dream, the dreamer suddenly says to himself in astonishment, ‘why, he died ever so long ago’, he is repudiating this equation and is denying that the dream signifies his own death. - But I willingly confess to a feeling that dream-interpretation is far from having revealed all the secrets of dreams of this character.

¹ [Footnote added 1911:] Cf. my paper on the two principles of mental functioning (1911b).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

881

III

In the example which I shall next bring forward I have been able to catch the dream-work in the very act of intentionally fabricating an absurdity for which there was absolutely no occasion in the material. It is taken from the dream which arose from my meeting with Count Thun as I was starting for my holidays. I was driving in a cab and ordered the driver to drive me to a station. ‘Of course I can’t drive with you along the railway line itself’, I said, after he had raised some objection, as though I had overtired him. It was as if I had already driven with him for some of the distance one normally travels by train. The analysis produced the following explanations of this confused and senseless story. The day before, I had hired a cab to take me to an out-of-the-way street in Dornbach. The driver, however, had not known where the street was and, as these excellent people are apt to do, had driven on and on until at last I had noticed what was happening and had told him the right way, adding a few sarcastic comments. A train of thought, to which I was later in the analysis to return, led from this cab-driver to aristocrats. For the moment it was merely the passing notion that what strikes us bourgeois plebs about the aristocracy is the preference they have for taking the driver’s seat. Count Thun, indeed, was the driver of the State Coach of Austria. The next sentence in the dream, however, referred to my brother, whom I was thus identifying with the cab-driver. That year I had called off a trip I was going to make with him to Italy. (‘I can’t drive with you along the railway line itself.’) And this cancellation had been a kind of punishment for the complaints he used to make that I was in the habit of overtiring him on such trips (this appeared in the dream unaltered) by insisting upon moving too rapidly from place to place and seeing too many beautiful things in a single day. On the evening of the dream my brother had accompanied me to the station; but he had jumped out shortly before we got there, at the suburban railway station adjoining the main line terminus, in order to travel to Purkersdorf by the suburban line. I had remarked to him that he might have stayed with me a little longer by travelling to Purkersdorf by the main line instead of the suburban one. This led to the passage in the dream in which I drove in the cab for some of the distance one normally travels by train. This was an inversion of what had happened in reality - a kind of ‘tu quoque’ argument. What I had said to my brother was: ‘you can travel on the main line in my company for the distance you would travel by the suburban line.’ I brought about the whole confusion in the dream by putting ‘cab’ instead of ‘suburban line’ (which, incidentally, was of great help in bringing together the figures of the cab-driver and my brother). In this way I succeeded in producing something senseless in the dream, which it seems scarcely possible to disentangle and which was almost a direct contradiction of an earlier remark of mine in the dream (‘I can’t drive with you along the railway line itself.’) Since, however, there was no necessity whatever for me to confuse the suburban railway and a cab, I must have arranged the whole of this enigmatic business in the dream on purpose.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

882

But for what purpose?  We are now to discover the significance of absurdity in dreams and the motives which lead to its being admitted or even created. The solution of the mystery in the present dream was as follows. It was necessary for me that there should be something absurd and unintelligible in this dream in connection with the word ‘fahren’¹ because the dream-thoughts included a particular judgement which called for representation. One evening, while I was at the house of the hospitable and witty lady who appeared as the ‘housekeeper’ in one of the other scenes in the same dream, I had heard two riddles which I had been unable to solve. Since they were familiar to the rest of the company, I cut a rather ludicrous figure in my vain attempts to find the answers. They depended upon puns on the words ‘Nachkommen’ and ‘Vorfahren’ and, I believe, ran as follows:

Der Herr befiehlt’s,

Der Kutscher tut’s.

Ein jeder hat’s,

Im Grabe ruht’s.

[With the master’s request

The driver complies:

By all men possessed

In the graveyard it lies.]

(Answer: ‘Vorfahren’ [‘Drive up’ and ‘Ancestry’; more literally ‘go in front’ and ‘predecessors’].)

It was particularly confusing that the first half of the second riddle was identical with that of the first:

Der Herr befiehlt’s,

Der Kutscher tut’s.

Nicht jeder hat’s,

In der Wiege ruht’s.

[With the master’s request

The driver complies:

Not by all men possessed

In the cradle it lies.]

(Answer: ‘Nachkommen’[‘Follow after’ and ‘Progeny’; more literally ‘come after’ and ‘successors’].)

¹ [The German word ‘fahren’’, which has already been used repeatedly in the dream and the analysis, is used for the English ‘drive’ (in a cab) and ‘travel’ (in a train) and has had to be translated by both of those words in different contexts.]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

883

When I saw Count Thun drive up so impressively and when I thereupon fell into the mood of Figaro, with his remarks on the goodness of great gentlemen in having taken the trouble to be born (to become progeny), these two riddles were adopted by the dream-work as intermediate thoughts. Since aristocrats could easily be confused with drivers and since there was a time in our part of the world when a driver was spoken of as ‘Schwager’ [‘coachman’ and ‘brother-in-law’], the work of condensation was able to introduce my brother into the same picture. The dream-thought, however, which was operating behind all this ran as follows: ‘It is absurd to be proud of one’s ancestry; it is better to be an ancestor oneself.’ This judgement, that something ‘is absurd’, was what produced the absurdity in the dream. And this also clears up the remaining enigma in this obscure region of the dream, namely why it was that I thought I had already driven with the driver before [vorhergefahren (‘driven before’) - vorgefahren (‘driven up’) -’Vorfahren’ (‘ancestry’)].

A dream is made absurd, then, if a judgement that something ‘is absurd’ is among the elements included in the dream thoughts - that is to say, if any one of the dreamer’s unconscious trains of thought has criticism or ridicule as its motive. Absurdity is accordingly one of the methods by which the dream-work represents a contradiction - alongside such other methods as the reversal in the dream-content of some material relation in the dream-thoughts, or the exploitation of the sensation of motor inhibition. Absurdity in a dream, however, is not to be translated by a simple ‘no’; it is intended to reproduce the mood of the dream-thoughts, which combines derision or laughter with the contradiction. It is only with such an aim in view that the dream-work produces anything ridiculous. Here once again it is a giving a manifest form to a portion of the latent content.¹

Actually we have already come across a convincing example of an absurd dream with this kind of meaning: the dream - I interpreted it without any analysis - of the performance of a Wagner opera which lasted till a quarter to eight in the morning and in which the orchestra was conducted from a tower, and so on (see p. 811 f.). It evidently meant to say: ‘This is a topsy-turvy world and a crazy society; the person who deserves something doesn’t get it, and the person who doesn’t care about something does get it’ - and there the dreamer was comparing her fate with her cousin’s. - Nor is it by any means a matter of chance that our first examples of absurdity in dreams related to a dead father. In such cases, the conditions for creating absurd dreams are found together in characteristic fashion. The authority wielded by a father provokes criticism from his children at an early age, and the severity of the demands he makes upon them leads them, for their own relief, to keep their eyes open to any weakness of their father’s; but the filial piety called up in our minds by the figure of a father, particularly after his death, tightens the censorship which prohibits any such criticism from being consciously expressed.

¹ The dream-work is thus parodying the thought that has been presented to it as something ridiculous, by the method of creating something ridiculous in connection with that thought. Heine adopted the same line when he wanted to ridicule some wretched verses written by the King of Bavaria. He did so in still more wretched ones:

Herr Ludwig ist ein grosser Poet,

Und singt er, so stürzt Apollo

Vor ihm auf die Kniee und bittet und fleht,

‘Halt ein! ich werde sonst toll, o!’

[Sir Ludwig is a magnificent bard

And, as soon as he utters, Apollo

Goes down on his knees and begs him: ‘Hold hard!

Or I’II shortly become a clod-poll oh!’

Lobgesänge auf König Ludwig, I]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

884

IV

Here is another absurd dream about a dead father. I received a communication from the town council of my birthplace concerning the fees due for someone’s maintenance in the hospital in the year 1851, which had been necessitated by an attack he had had in my house. I was amused by this since, in the first place, I was not yet alive in 1851 and, in the second place, my father, to whom it might have related, was already dead. I went to him in the next room, where he was lying on his bed, and told him about it. To my surprise, he recollected that in 1851 he had once got drunk and had had to be locked up or detained. It was at a time at which he had been working for the firm of T----. ‘So you used to drink as well?’ I asked; ‘did you get married soon after that?’ I calculated of course, I was born in 1856, which seemed to be the year which immediately followed the year in question.

We should conclude from the preceding discussion that the insistence with which this dream exhibited its absurdities could only be taken as indicating the presence in the dream-thoughts of a particularly embittered and passionate polemic. We shall therefore be all the more astonished to observe that in this dream the polemic was carried on in the open and that my father was the explicit object of the ridicule. Openness of this kind seems to contradict our assumptions as regards the working of the censorship in connection with the dream-work. The position will become clearer, however, when it is realized that in this instance my father was merely put forward as a show figure, and that the dispute was really being carried on with someone else, who only appeared in the dream in a single allusion. Whereas normally a dream deals with rebellion against someone else, behind whom the dreamer’s father is concealed, the opposite was true here. My father was made into a man of straw, in order to screen someone else; and the dream was allowed to handle in this undisguised way a figure who was as a rule treated as sacred, because at the same time I knew with certainty that it was not he who was really meant. That this was so was shown by the exciting cause of the dream. For it occurred after I had heard that a senior colleague of mine, whose judgement was regarded as beyond criticism, had given voice to disapproval and surprise at the fact that the psycho-analytic treatment of one of my patients had already entered its fifth year. The first sentences of the dream alluded under a transparent disguise to the fact that for some time this colleague had taken over the duties which my father could no longer fulfil (’fees due’, ‘maintenance in the hospital’), and that, when our relations began to be less friendly, I became involved in the same kind of emotional conflict which, when a misunderstanding arises between a father and son, is inevitably produced owing to the position occupied by the father and the assistance formerly given by him. The dream-thoughts protested bitterly against the reproach that I was not getting on faster - a reproach which, applying first to my treatment of the patient, extended later to other things. Did he know anyone, I thought, who could get on more quickly? Was he not aware that, apart from my methods of treatment, conditions of that kind are altogether incurable and last a life-time? What were four or five years in comparison with a whole life-time, especially considering that the patient’s existence had been so very much eased during the treatment?

The Interpretation Of Dreams

885

A great part of the impression of absurdity in this dream was brought about by running together sentences from different parts of the dream-thoughts without any transition. Thus the sentence ‘I went to him in the next room’, etc., dropped the subject with which the preceding sentences had been dealing and correctly reproduced the circumstances in which I informed my father of my having become engaged to be married without consulting him. This sentence was therefore reminding me of the admirable unselfishness displayed by the old man on that occasion, and contrasting it with the behaviour of someone else - of yet another person. It is to be observed that the dream was allowed to ridicule my father because in the dream-thoughts he was held up in unqualified admiration as a model to other people. It lies in the very nature of every censorship that of forbidden things it allows those which are untrue to be said rather than those which are true. The next sentence, to the effect that he recollected ‘having once got drunk and been locked up for it’, was no longer concerned with anything that related to my father in reality. Here the figure for whom he stood was no less a person than the great Meynert, in whose footsteps I had trodden with such deep veneration and whose behaviour towards me, after a short period of favour, had turned to undisguised hostility. The dream reminded me that he himself had told me that at one time in his youth he had indulged in the habit of making himself intoxicated with chloroform and that on account of it he had had to go into a home. It also reminded me of another incident with him shortly before his death. I had carried on an embittered controversy with him in writing, on the subject of male hysteria, the existence of which he denied. When I visited him during his fatal illness and asked after his condition, he spoke at some length about his state and ended with these words: ‘You know, I was always one of the clearest cases of male hysteria.’ He was thus admitting, to my satisfaction and astonishment, what he had for so long obstinately contested. But the reason why I was able in this scene of the dream to use my father as a screen for Meynert did not lie in any analogy that I had discovered between the two figures. The scene was a concise but entirely adequate representation of a conditional sentence in the dream-thoughts, which ran in full: ‘If only I had been the second generation, the son of a professor or Hofrat, I should certainly have got on faster.’ In the dream I made my father into a Hofrat and professor. -The most blatant and disturbing absurdity in the dream resides in its treatment of the date 1851, which seemed to me not to differ from 1856, just as though a difference of five years was of no significance whatever. But this last was precisely what the dream-thoughts sought to express. Four or five years was the length of time during which I enjoyed the support of the colleague whom I mentioned earlier in this analysis; but it was also the length of time during which I made my fiancée wait for our marriage; and it was also, by a chance coincidence which was eagerly exploited by the dream-thoughts, the length of time during which I made my patient of longest standing wait for a complete recovery. ‘What are five years?’ asked the dream-thoughts; ‘that’s no time at all, so far as I am concerned; it doesn’t count. I have time enough in front of me. And just as I succeeded in the end in that, though you would not believe it, so I shall achieve this, too.’ Apart from this, however, the number 51 by itself, without the number of the century, was determined in another, and indeed, in an opposite sense; and this, too, is why it appeared in the dream several times. 51 is the age which seems to be a particularly dangerous one to men; I have known colleagues who have died suddenly at that age, and amongst them one who, after long delays, had been appointed to a professorship only a few days before his death.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

886

V

Here is yet another absurd dream which plays about with numbers. One of my acquaintances, Herr M., had been attacked in an essay with an unjustifiable degree of violence, as we all thought - by no less a person than Goethe. Herr M. was naturally crushed by the attack. He complained of it bitterly to some company at table; his veneration for Goethe had not been affected, however, by this personal experience. I tried to throw a little light on the chronological data, which seemed to me improbable. Goethe died in 1832. Since his attack on Herr M. must naturally have been made earlier than that, Herr M. must have been quite a young man at the time. It seemed to be a plausible notion that he was eighteen. I was not quite sure, however, what year we were actually in, so that my whole calculation melted into obscurity. Incidentally, the attack was contained in Goethe’s well-known essay on ‘Nature’.

We shall quickly find means of justifying the nonsense in this dream. Herr M., whom I had got to know among some company at table, had not long before asked me to examine his brother, who was showing signs of general paralysis. The suspicion was correct; on the occasion of this visit an awkward episode occurred, for in the course of his conversation the patient for no accountable reason gave his brother away by talking of his youthful follies. I had asked the patient the year of his birth and made him do several small sums so as to test the weakness of his memory - though, incidentally, he was still able to meet the tests quite well. I could already see that I myself behaved like a paralytic in the dream. (I was not quite sure what year we were in.) Another part of the material of the dream was derived from another recent source. The editor of a medical journal, with whom I was on friendly terms, had printed a highly unfavourable, a ‘crushing’ criticism of my Berlin friend Fl.’s last book. The criticism had been written by a very youthful reviewer who possessed small judgement. I thought I had a right to intervene and took the editor to task over it. He expressed lively regret at having published the criticism but would not undertake to offer any redress. I therefore severed my connection with the journal, but in my letter of resignation expressed a hope that our personal relations would not be affected by the event. The third source of the dream was an account I had just heard from a woman patient of her brother’s mental illness, and of how he had broken out in a frenzy with cries of ‘Nature! Nature!’ The doctors believed that his exclamation came from his having read Goethe’s striking essay on that subject and that it showed he had been overworking at his studies in natural philosophy. I myself preferred to think of the sexual sense in which the word is used even by the less educated people here. This idea of mine was at least not disproved by the fact that the unfortunate young man subsequently mutilated his own genitals. He was eighteen at the time of his outbreak.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

887

I may add that my friend’s book which had been so severely criticized (‘one wonders whether it is the author or oneself who is crazy’, another reviewer had said) dealt with the chronological data of life and showed that the length of Goethe’s life was a multiple of a number that has a significance in biology. So it is easy to see that in the dream I was putting myself in my friend’s place. (I tried to throw a little light on the chronological data.) But I behaved like a paralytic, and the dream was a mass of absurdities. Thus the dream-thoughts were saying ironically: ‘Naturally, it’s he who is the crazy fool, and it’s you who are the men of genius and know better. Surely it can’t by any chance be the reverse?’ There were plenty of examples of this reversal in the dream. For instance, Goethe attacked the young man, which is absurd, whereas it is still easy for quite a young man to attack Goethe, who is immortal. And again, I calculated from the year of Goethe’s death, whereas I had made the paralytic calculate from the year of his birth.

But I have also undertaken to show that no dream is prompted by motives other than egoistic ones. So I must explain away the fact that in the present dream I made my friend’s cause my own and put myself in his place. The strength of my critical conviction in waking life is not enough to account for this. The story of the eighteen-year-old patient, however, and the different interpretations of his exclaiming ‘Nature!’ were allusions to the opposition in which I found myself to most doctors on account of my belief in the sexual aetiology of the psychoneuroses. I could say to myself: ‘The kind of criticism that has been applied to your friend will be applied to you - indeed, to some extent it already has been.’ The ‘he’ in the dream can therefore be replaced by ‘we’: ‘Yes, you’re quite right, it’s we who are the fools.’ There was a very clear reminder in the dream that ‘mea resagitur’, in the allusion to Goethe’s short but exquisitely written essay; for when at the end of my school-days I was hesitating in my choice of a career, it was hearing that essay read aloud at a public lecture that decided me to take up the study of natural science.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

888

VI

Earlier in this volume I undertook to show that another dream in which my own ego did not appear was nevertheless egoistic. On p. 746 I reported a short dream to the effect that Professor M. said: ‘My son, the Myops . . .’, and I explained that the dream was only an introductory one, preliminary to another in which I did play a part. Here is the missing main dream, which introduces an absurd and unintelligible verbal form which requires an explanation.

On account of certain events which had occurred in the city of Rome, it had become necessary to remove the children to safety, and this was done. The scene was then in front of a gateway, double doors in the ancient style (the ‘Porta Romana’ at Siena, as I was aware during the dream itself). I was sitting on the edge of a fountain and was greatly depressed and almost in tears. A female figure - an attendant or nun - brought two boys out and handed them over to their father, who was not myself. The elder of the two was clearly my eldest son; I did not see other one’s face. The woman who brought out the boy asked him to kiss her good-bye. She was noticeable for having a red nose. The boy refused to kiss her, but, holding out his hand in farewell, said ‘AUF GESERES’ to her, and then ‘AUF UNGESERES’ to the two of us (or to one of us). I had a notion that this last phrase denoted a preference.¹

¹ [The words ‘Geseres’ and ‘Ungeseres’, neither of them German, are discussed below.]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

889

This dream was constructed on a tangle of thoughts provoke by a play which I had seen, called Das neue Ghetto. The Jewish problem, concern about the future of one’s children, to whom one cannot give a country of their own, concern about educating them in such a way that they can move freely across frontiers - all of this was easily recognizable among the relevant dream-thoughts.

‘By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept.’ Siena, like Rome, is famous for its beautiful fountains. If Rome occurred in one of my dreams, it was necessary for me to find a substitute for it from some locality known to me (see p. 679 f.). Near the Port Romana in Siena we had seen a large and brightly lighted building. We learned that it was the Manicomio, the insane asylum. Shortly before I had the dream I had heard that a man of the same religious persuasion as myself had been obliged to resign the position which he had painfully achieved in a State asylum.

Our interest is aroused by the phrase ‘Auf geseres’ (at a point at which the situation in the dream would have led one to expect ‘Auf Wiedersehen’) as well as its quite meaningless opposite ‘Auf Ungeseres.’ According to information I have received from philologists, ‘Geseres’ is a genuine Hebrew word derived from a verb ‘goiser’, and is best translated by ‘imposed sufferings’ or ‘doom.’ The use of the word in slang would incline one to suppose that it meant ‘weeping and wailing.’ ‘Ungeseres’ was a private neologism of my own and was the first word to catch my attention, but to begin with I could make nothing of it. But the short remark at the end of the dream to the effect that ‘Ungeseres’ denoted a preference over ‘Geseres’ opened the door to associations and at the same time to an elucidation of the word. An analogous relationship occurs in the case of caviare; unsalted [‘ungesalzen’] caviare is esteemed more highly that salted [‘gesalzen’]. ‘Caviare to the general’, aristocratic pretensions; behind this lay a joking allusion to a member of my household who, since she was younger than I, would, I hoped look after my children in the future. This tallied with the fact that another member of my household, our excellent nurse, was recognizably portrayed in the female attendant or nun in the dream. There was still, however, no transitional idea between ‘salted - unsalted’ and ‘Geseres - Ungeseres.’ This was provided by ‘leavened - unleavened’ [‘gesäuert - ungesäuert’]. In their flight out of Egypt the Children of Israel had not time to allow their dough to rise and, in memory of this, they eat unleavened bread to this day at Easter. At this point I may insert a sudden association that occurred to me during this portion of the analysis. I remembered how, during the previous Easter, my Berlin friend and I had been walking through the streets of Breslau, a town in which we were strangers. A little girl asked me the way to a particular street, and I was obliged to confess that I did not know; and I remarked to my friend: ‘It is to be hoped that when she grows up that little girl will show more discrimination in her choice of the people whom she gets to direct her.’ Shortly afterwards, I caught sight of a door-plate bearing the words ‘Dr. Herodes. Consulting hours:. . .’ ‘Let us hope’, I remarked, ‘that our colleague does not happen to be a children’s doctor.’ At this same time my friend had been telling me his views on the biological significance of bilateral symmetry and had begun a sentence with the words ‘If we had an eye in the middle of our foreheads like a Cyclops . . .’ This led to the Professor’s remark in the introductory dream, ‘My son, the Myops . . .’¹ and I had now been led to the principal source of ‘Geseres’. Many years before, when this son of Professor M.’s, to-day an independent thinker, was still sitting at his school-desk, he was attacked by a disease of the eyes which, the doctor declared, gave cause for anxiety. He explained that so long as it remained on one side it was of no importance, but that if it passed over to the other eye it would be a serious matter. The affection cleared up completely in the one eye; but shortly afterwards signs in fact appeared of the other one being affected. The boy’s mother, terrified, at once sent for the doctor to the remote spot in the country where they were staying. The doctor, however, now went over to the other side. ‘Why are you making such a "Geseres"?’ he shouted at the mother, ‘if one side has got well, so will the other.’ And he was right.

¹ [The German ‘Myop’ is an ad hoc form constructed on the pattern of ‘Zyklop’.]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

890

And now we must consider the relation of all this to me and my family. The school-desk at which Professor M.’s son took his first steps in knowledge was handed over by his mother as a gift to my eldest son, into whose mouth I put the farewell phrases in the dream. It is easy to guess one of the wishes to which this transference gave rise. But the construction of the desk was also intended to save the child from being short-sighted and one-sided. Hence the appearance in the dream of ‘Myops’ (and, behind it, ‘Cyclops’) and the reference to bilaterality. My concern about one-sidedness had more than one meaning: it would refer not only to physical one-sidedness but also to one sidedness of intellectual development. May it not even be that it was precisely this concern which, in its crazy way, the scene in the dream was contradicting? After the child had turned to one side to say farewell words, he turned to the other side to say the contrary, as though to restore the balance. It was as though he was acting with due attention to bilateral symmetry!

Dreams, then, are often most profound when they seem most crazy. In every epoch of history those who have had something to say but could not say it without peril have eagerly assumed a fool’s cap. The audience at whom their forbidden speech was aimed tolerated it more easily if they could at the same time laugh and flatter themselves with the reflection that the unwelcome words were clearly nonsensical. The Prince in the play, who had to disguise himself as a madman, was behaving just as dreams do in reality; so that we can say of dreams what Hamlet said of himself, concealing the true circumstances under a cloak of wit and unintelligibility: ‘I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a hand-saw!’¹

Thus I have solved the problem of absurdity in dreams by showing that the dream-thoughts are never absurd - never, at all events, in the dreams of sane people - and that the dream-work produces absurd dreams and dreams containing individual absurd elements if it is faced with the necessity of representing any criticism, ridicule or derision which may be present in the dream-thoughts.

¹ This dream also provides a good example of the generally valid truth that dreams which occur during the same night, even though they are recollected as separate, spring from the ground-work of the same thoughts. Incidentally, the situation in the dream of my removing my children to safety from the City of Rome was distorted by being related back to an analogous event that occurred in my own childhood: I was envying some relatives who, many years earlier, had had an opportunity of removing their children to another country.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

891

My next task is to show that the dream-work consists in nothing more than a combination of the three factors I have mentioned - and of a fourth which I have still to mention; that it carries out no other function than the translation of dream-thoughts in accordance with the four conditions to which it is subject; and that the question whether the mind operates in dreams with all its intellectual faculties or with only a part of them is wrongly framed and disregards the facts. Since, however, there are plenty of dreams in whose content judgements are passed, criticisms made, and appreciations expressed, in which surprise is felt at some particular element of the dream, in which explanations are attempted and argumentations embarked upon, I must now proceed to meet the objections arising from facts of this kind by producing some chosen examples.

My reply is as follows: Everything that appears in dreams as the ostensible activity of the function of judgement is to be regarded not as an intellectual achievement of the dream-work but as belonging to the material of the dream-thoughts and as having been lifted from them into the manifest content of the dream as a ready-made structure. I can even carry this assertion further. Even the judgements made after waking upon a dream that has been remembered, and the feelings called up in us by the reproduction of such a dream, form part, to a great extent, of the latent content of the dream and are to be included in its interpretation.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

892

I

I have already quoted a striking example of this. A woman patient refused to tell me a dream of hers because ‘it was not clear enough.’ She had seen someone in the dream but did not know whether it was her husband or her father. There then followed a second piece of dream in which a dust-bin [Misttrügerl] appeared, and this gave rise to the following recollection. When she had first set up house she had jokingly remarked on one occasion in the presence of a young relative who was visiting in the house that her next job was to get hold of a new dust-bin. The next morning one arrived for her, but it was filled with lilies of the valley. This piece of the dream served to represent a common phrase ‘not grown on my own manure’.¹ When the analysis was completed, it turned out that the dream-thoughts were concerned with the after-effects of a story, which the dreamer had heard when she was young, of how a girl had had a baby and of how it was not clear who the father really was. Here, then, the dream-representation had overflowed into the waking thoughts: one of the elements of the dream-thoughts had found representation in a waking judgement passed upon the dream as a whole.

II

Here is a similar case. One of my patients had a dream which struck him as interesting, for immediately after waking he said to himself: ‘I must tell the doctor that.’ The dream was analysed and produced the clearest allusions to a liaison which he had started during the treatment and which he had decided to himself not to tell me about.²

¹ [’Nicht auf meinem eigenen Mist gewachsen’ - meaning ‘I am not responsible for that’, or ‘It’s not my baby.’ The German word ‘Mist’, properly meaning manure, is used in slang for ‘rubbish’ and occurs in this sense in the Viennese term for a dust-bin: ‘Misttrügerl.’]

² [Footnote added 1909:] If in the actual course of a dream dreamt during psycho-analytic treatment the dreamer says to himself: ‘I must tell the doctor that’, it invariably implies the presence of a strong resistance against confessing the dream - which is not infrequently thereupon forgotten.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

893

III

Here is a third example, one from my own experience. I was going to the hospital with P. through a district in which there were houses and gardens. At the same time I had a notion that I had often seen this district before in dreams. I did not know my way about very well. He showed me a road that led round the corner to a restaurant (indoors, not a garden). There I asked for Frau Doni and was told that she lived at the back in a small room with three children. I went towards it, but before I got there met an indistinct figure with my two little girls; I took them with me after I had stood with them for a little while. Some sort of reproach against my wife, for having left them there.

When I woke up I had a feeling of great satisfaction, the reason for which I explained to myself as being that I was going to discover from this analysis the meaning of ‘I’ve dreamt of that before.’¹ In fact, however, the analysis taught me nothing of the kind; what it did show me was that the satisfaction belonged to the latent content of the dream and not to any judgement upon it. My satisfaction was with the fact that my marriage had brought me children. P. was a person whose course in life lay for some time alongside mine, who then out distanced me both socially and materially, but whose marriage was childless. The two events which occasioned the dream will serve, instead of a complete analysis, to indicate its meaning. The day before, I had read in a newspaper the announcement of the death of Frau Dona A----y (which I turned into ‘Doni’ in the dream), who had died in childbirth. My wife told me that the dead woman had been looked after by the same midwife who had attended her at the birth of our two youngest children. The name ‘Dona’ had struck me because I had met it for the first time a short while before in an English novel. The second occasion for the dream was provided by the date on which it occurred. It was on the night before the birthday of my eldest boy - who seems to have some poetic gifts.

¹ A protracted discussion on this subject has run through recent volumes of the Revue Philosophique under the title of ‘Paramnesia in Dreams.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

894

IV

I was left with the same feeling of satisfaction when I woke from the absurd dream of my father having played a political part among the Magyars after his death; and the reason I gave myself for this feeling was that it was a continuation of the feeling that accompanied the last piece of the dream. I remembered how like Garibaldi he had looked on his death-bed and felt glad that it had come true. . . . (There was a continuation which I had forgotten). The analysis enabled me to fill in this gap in the dream. It was a mention of my second son, to who I had given the first name of a great historical figure who had powerfully attracted me in my boyhood, especially since my visit to England. During the year before the child’s birth I had made up my mind to use this name if it were a son and I greeted the new-born baby with it with a feeling of high satisfaction. (It is easy to see how the suppressed megalomania of fathers is transferred in their thoughts on to their children, and it seems quite probable that this is one of the ways in which the suppression of that feeling, which becomes necessary in actual life, is carried out.) The little boy’s right to appear in the context of this dream was derived from the fact that he had just had the same misadventure - easily forgivable both in a child and in a dying man - of soiling his bed-clothes. Compare in this connection Stuhlrichter [‘presiding judge’, literally ‘chair-' or ‘stool-judge’] and the wish expressed in the dream to stand before one’s children’s eyes great and unsullied. ]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

895

V

I now turn to consider expressions of judgement passed in the dream itself but not continued into waking life or transposed into it. In looking for examples of these, my task will be greatly assisted if I may make use of dreams which I have already recorded with other aims in view. The dream of Goethe’s attack on Herr M. appears to contain a whole number of acts of judgement. ‘I tried to throw a little light on the chronological data, which seemed to me improbable.’ This has every appearance of being a criticism of the absurd idea that Goethe should have made a literary attack on a young man of my acquaintance. ‘It seemed to be a plausible notion that he was eighteen.’ This, again, sounds exactly like the outcome of a calculation, though, it is true, of a feeble-minded one. Lastly, ‘I was not quite sure what year we were in’ seems like an instance of uncertainty or doubt in a dream.

Thus all of these seemed to be acts of judgement made for the first time in the dream. But analysis showed that their wording can be taken in another way, in the light of which they become indispensable for the dream’s interpretation, while at the same time every trace of absurdity is removed. The sentence ‘I tried to throw a little light on the chronological data’ put me in the place of my friend who was in fact seeking to throw light on the chronological data of life. This deprives the sentence of its significance as a judgement protesting against the absurdity of the preceding sentences. The interpolated phrase, ‘which seemed to me improbable’, belonged with the subsequent one, ‘It seemed to be a plausible notion’. I had used almost these precise words to the lady who had told her brother’s case-history. ‘It seems to me an improbable notion that his cries of "Nature! Nature !" had anything to do with Goethe; it seems to me far more plausible that the words had the sexual meaning you are familiar with.’ It is true that here a judgement was passed - not in the dream, however, but in reality, and on an occasion which was recollected and exploited by the dream-thoughts. The content of the dream took over this judgement just like any other fragment of the dream-thoughts. The number ‘18' to which the judgement in the dream was senselessly attached, retains a trace of the real context from which the judgement was torn. Lastly, ‘I was not quite sure what year we were in’ was intended merely to carry further my identification with the paralytic patient in my examination of whom this point had really arisen.

The resolution of what are ostensibly acts of judgement in dreams may serve to remind us of the rules laid down at the beginning of this book for carrying out the work of interpretation: namely, that we should disregard the apparent coherence between a dream’s constituents as an unessential illusion, and that we should trace back the origin of each of its elements on its own account. A dream is a conglomerate which, for purposes of investigation, must be broken up once more into fragments. On the other hand, however, it will be observed that a psychical force is at work in dreams which creates this apparent connectedness, which, that is to say, submits the material produced by the dream-work to a ‘secondary revision’. This brings us face to face with the manifestations of a force whose importance we shall later assess as the fourth of the factors concerned in the construction of dreams.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

896

VI

Here is a further instance of a process of judgement at work in a dream that I have already recorded. In the absurd dream of the communication from the town council I asked: ‘Did you get married soon after that?’ I calculated that, of course, I was born in 1856, which seemed to be the year which immediately followed the year in question. All of this was clothed in the form of a set of logical conclusions. My father had married in 1851, immediately after his attack; I, of course, was the eldest of the family and had been born in 1856; Q.E.D. As we know, this false conclusion was drawn in the interests of wish-fulfilment; and the predominant dream-thought ran: ‘Four or five years; that’s no time at all; it doesn’t count.’ Every step in this set of logical conclusions, however alike in their content and their form, could be explained in another way as having been determined by the dream-thoughts. It was the patient, of whose long analysis my colleague had fallen foul, who had decided to get married immediately the treatment was finished. The manner of my interview with my father in the dream was like an interrogation or examination, and reminded me too of a teacher at the University who used to take down exhaustive particulars from the students who were enrolling themselves for his lectures: ‘Date of birth?’ - ‘1856.’ - ‘Patre?’ In reply to this, one gave one’s father’s first name with a Latin termination; and we students assumed that the Hofrat drew conclusions from the first name of the father which could not always be drawn from that of the student himself. Thus the drawing of the conclusion in the dream was no more than a repetition of the drawing of a conclusion which appeared as a piece of the material of the dream-thoughts. Something new emerges from this. If a conclusion appears in the content of the dream there is no question that it is derived from the dream-thoughts; but it may either be present in these as a piece of recollected material or it may link a series of dream-thoughts together in a logical chain. In any case, however, a conclusion in a dream represents a conclusion in the dream-thoughts.¹

At this point we may resume our analysis of the dream. The interrogation by the professor led to a recollection of the register of University Students (which in my time was drawn up in Latin). It led further to thoughts upon the course of my academic studies. The five years which are prescribed for medical studies were once again too few for me. I quietly went on with my work for several more years; and in my circle of acquaintances I was regarded as an idler and it was doubted whether I should ever get through. Thereupon I quickly decided to take my examinations and I got through them in spite of the delay. Here was a fresh reinforcement of the dream-thoughts with which I was defiantly confronting my critics: ‘Even though you won’t believe it because I’ve taken my time, I shall get through: I shall bring my medical training to a conclusion. Things have often turned out like that before.’

¹ These findings are in some respects a correction of what I have said above (p. 783) on the representation of logical relations in dreams. This earlier passage describes the general behaviour of the dream-work but takes no account of the finer and more precise details of its functioning.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

897

This same dream in its opening passage contained some sentences which could hardly be refused the name of an argument. This argument was not even absurd; it might just as well have occurred in waking thought: I was amused in the dream at the communication from the town council since, in the first place, I was not yet in the world in 1851 and, in the second place, my father, to whom it might have related, was already dead. Both of these statements were not only correct in themselves but agreed precisely with the real arguments that I should bring up if I were actually to receive a communication of that kind. My earlier analysis of the dream showed that it grew out of deeply embittered and derisive dream-thoughts. If we may also assume that there were strong reasons present for the activity of the censorship, we shall understand that the dream-work had every motive for producing a perfectly valid refutation of an absurd suggestion on the model contained in the dream-thoughts. The analysis showed, however, that the dream-work did not have a free hand in framing this parallel but was obliged, for that purpose, to use material from the dream-thoughts. It was just as though there were an algebraic equation containing (in addition to numerals) plus and minus signs, indices and radical signs, and as though someone were to copy out the equation without understanding it, taking over both the operational symbols and the numerals into his copy but mixing them all up together. The two arguments could be traced back to the following material. It was distressing to me to think that some of the premises which underlay my psychological explanations of the psychoneuroses were bound to excite scepticism and laughter when they were first met with. For instance, I had been driven to assume that impressions from the second year of life, and sometimes even from the first, left a lasting trace on the emotional life of those who were later to fall ill, and that these impressions - though distorted and exaggerated in many ways by the memory - might constitute the first and deepest foundation for hysterical symptoms. Patients, to whom I explained this at some appropriate moment, used to parody this newly gained knowledge by declaring that they were ready to look for recollections dating from a time at which they were not yet alive. My discovery of the unexpected part played by their father in the earliest sexual impulses of female patients might well be expected to meet with a similar reception (see the discussion on p. 736 f.). Nevertheless, it was my well-grounded conviction that both of these hypotheses were true. By way of confirmation I called to mind some instances in which the death of the father occurred while the child was at a very early age and in which later events, otherwise inexplicable, proved that the child had nevertheless retained unconsciously recollections of the figure which had disappeared so early in his life. I was aware that these two assertions of mine rested on the drawing of conclusions whose validity would be disputed. It was therefore an achievement of wish-fulfilment when the material of precisely those conclusions which I was afraid would be contested was employed by the dream-work for drawing conclusions which it was impossible to contest.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

898

VII

At the beginning of a dream, which I have so far hardly touched upon, there was a clear expression of astonishment at the subject which had cropped up. Old Brücke must have set me some task; STRANGELY ENOUGH, it related to a dissection of the lower part of my own body, my pelvis and legs which I saw before me as though in the dissecting-room, but without noticing their absence in myself and also without a trace of any gruesome feeling. Louise N. was standing beside me and doing the work with me. The pelvis had been eviscerated, and it was visible now in its superior, now in its inferior, aspect, the two being mixed together. Thick flesh-coloured protuberances (which, in the dream itself, made me think of haemorrhoids) could be seen. Something which lay over it and was like crumpled silver-paper¹had also to be carefully fished out. I was then once more in possession of my legs and was making my way through the town. But (being tired) I took a cab. To my astonishment the cab drove in through the door of a house, which opened and allowed it to pass along a passage which turned a corner at its end and finally led into the open air again.² Finally I was making a journey through a changing landscape with an Alpine guide who was carrying my belongings. Part of the way he carried me too, out of consideration for my tired legs. The ground was boggy; we went round the edge; people were sitting on the ground like Red Indians or gypsies - among them a girl. Before this I had been making my own way forward over the slippery ground with a constant feeling of surprise that I was able to do it so well after the dissection. As we reached a small wooden house at the end of which was an open window. There the guide set me down and laid two wooden boards, which were standing ready, upon the window-sill, so as to bridge the chasm which had to be crossed over from the window. At that point I really became frightened about my legs, but instead of the expected crossing, I saw two grown-up men lying on wooden benches that were along the walls of the hut, and what seemed to be two children sleeping beside them. It was as though what was going to make the crossing possible was not the boards but the children. I awoke in a mental fright.

¹ Stanniol, which was an allusion to the book by Stannius on the nervous system of fishes. (Cf. loc. cit.)

² It was the place on the ground-floor of my block of flats where the tenants keep their perambulators; but it was over-determined in several other ways.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

899

Anyone who has formed even the slightest idea of the extent of condensation in dreams will easily imagine what a number of pages would be filled by a full analysis of this dream. Fortunately, however, in the present context I need only take up one point in it, which provides an example of astonishment in dreams, as exhibited in the interpolation ‘strangely enough’. The following was the occasion of the dream. Louise N., the lady who was assisting me in my job in the dream, had been calling on me. ‘Lend me something to read’, she had said. I offered her Rider Haggard’s She. ‘A strange book, but full of hidden meaning’, I began to explain to her; ‘the eternal feminine, the immortality of our emotions . . .’ Here she interrupted me: ‘I know it already. Have you nothing of your own?’ - ‘No, my own immortal works have not yet been written.’ - ‘Well, when are we to expect these so-called ultimate explanations of yours which you’ve promised even we shall find readable?’ she asked, with a touch of sarcasm. At that point I saw that someone else was admonishing me through her mouth and I was silent. I reflected on the amount of self-discipline it was costing me to offer the public even my book upon dreams - I should have to give away so much of my own private character in it.

Das Beste was du wissen kannst,

Darfst du den Buben doch nicht sagen.

The task which was imposed on me in the dream of carrying out a dissection of my own body was thus my self-analysis which was linked up with my giving an account of my dreams. Old Brücke came in here appropriately; even in the first years of my scientific work it happened that I allowed a discovery of mine to lie fallow until an energetic remonstrance on his part drove me into publishing it. The further thoughts which were started up by my conversation with Louise N. went too deep to become conscious. They were diverted in the direction of the material that had been stirred up in me by the mention of Rider Haggard’s She. The judgement ‘strangely enough’ went back to that book and to another one, Heart of the World, by the same author; and numerous elements of the dream were derived from these two imaginative novels. The boggy ground over which people had to be carried, and the chasm which they had to cross by means of boards brought along with them, were taken from She; the Red Indians, the girl and the wooden house were taken from Heart of the World. In both novels the guide is a woman; both are concerned with perilous journeys; while She describes an adventurous road that had scarcely ever been trodden before, leading into an undiscovered region. The tired feeling in my legs, according to a note which I find I made upon the dream, had been a real sensation during the day-time. It probably went along with a tired mood and a doubting thought: ‘How much longer will my legs carry me?’ The end of the adventure in She is that the guide, instead of finding immortality for herself and the others, perishes in the mysterious subterranean fire. A fear of that kind was unmistakably active in the dream-thoughts. The ‘wooden house’ was also, no doubt, a coffin, that is to say, the grave. But the dream-work achieved a masterpiece in its representation of this most unwished-for of all thoughts by a wish-fulfilment. For I had already been in a grave once, but it was an excavated Etruscan grave near Orvieto, a narrow chamber with two stone benches along its walls, on which the skeletons of two grown-up men were lying. The inside of the wooden house in the dream looked exactly like it, except that the stone was replaced by wood. The dream seems to have been saying: ‘If you must rest in a grave, let it be the Etruscan one.’ And, by making this replacement, it transformed the gloomiest of expectations into one that was highly desirable. Unluckily, as we are soon to hear, a dream can turn into its opposite the idea accompanying an affect but not always the affect itself. Accordingly, I woke up in a ‘mental fright’, even after the successful emergence of the idea that children may perhaps achieve what their father has failed to - a fresh allusion to the strange novel in which a person’s identity is retained through a series of generations for over two thousand years.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

900

VIII

Included in yet another of my dreams there was an expression of surprise at something I had experienced in it; but the surprise was accompanied by such a striking, far-fetched and almost brilliant attempt at an explanation that, if only on its account, I cannot resist submitting the whole dream to analysis, quite apart from the dream’s possessing two other points to attract our interest. I was travelling along the Südbahn railway line during the night of July 18-19th, and in my sleep I heard: ‘Hollthurn, ten minutes’ being called out. I at once thought of holothurians - of a natural history museum - that this was the spot at which valiant men had fought in vain against the superior power of the ruler of their country - yes, the Counter-Reformation in Austria - it was as though it were a place in Styria or the Tyrol. I then saw indistinctly a small museum, in which the relics or belongings of these men were preserved. I should have liked to get out, but hesitated to do so. There were women with fruit on the platform. They were crouching on the ground and holding up their baskets invitingly. - I hesitated because I was not sure whether there was time, but we were still not moving. - I was suddenly in another compartment, in which the upholstery and seats were so narrow that one’s back pressed directly against the back of the carriage.1Iwas surprised by this, but I reflected that I MIGHT HAVE CHANGED CARRIAGES WHILE I WAS IN A SLEEPING STATE. There were several people, including an English brother and sister; a row of books were distinctly visible on a shelf on the wall. I saw ‘The Wealth of Nations’ and ‘Matter and Motion’ (by Clerk-Maxwell), a thick volume and bound in brown cloth. The man asked his sister about a book by Schiller, whether she had forgotten it. It seemed as though the books were sometimes mine and sometimes theirs. I felt inclined at that point to intervene in the conversation in a confirmatory or substantiating sense. . . . I woke up perspiring all over because all the windows were shut. The train was drawn up at Marburg.

While I was writing the dream down a new piece of it occurred to me, which my memory had tried to pass over. I said to the brother and sister, referring to a ‘articular work: ‘It is from . . .’, but corrected myself: ‘It is by . . .’ ‘Yes’, the man commented to his sister’,he said that right.’

¹ This description was unintelligible even to myself; but I have followed the fundamental rule of reporting a dream in the words which occurred to me as I was writing it down. The wording chosen is itself part of what is represented by the dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

901

The dream opened with the name of the station, which must no doubt have partly woken me up. I replaced its name, Marburg, by Hollthurn. The fact that I heard ‘Marburg’ when it was first called out, or perhaps later, was proved by the mentioning in the dream of Schiller, who was born at Marburg, though not at the one in Styria.¹ I was making my journey on that occasion, although I was travelling first class, under very uncomfortable conditions. The train was packed full, and in my compartment I had found a lady and gentleman who appeared to be very aristocratic and had not the civility, or did not think it worth the trouble, to make any disguise of their annoyance at my intrusion. My polite greeting met with no response. Although the man and his wife were sitting side by side (with their backs to the engine) the woman nevertheless made haste, under my very eyes, to engage the window-seat facing her by putting an umbrella on it. The door was shut immediately, and pointed remarks were exchanged between them on the subject of opening windows. They had probably seen at once that I was longing for some fresh air. It was a hot night and the atmosphere in the completely closed compartment soon became suffocating. My experiences of travelling have taught me that conduct of this ruthless and overbearing kind is a characteristic of people who are travelling on a free or half-price ticket. When the ticket-collector came and I showed him the ticket I had bought at such expense, there fell from the lady’s mouth, in haughty and almost menacing tones, the words: ‘My husband has a free pass.’ She was an imposing figure with discontented features, of an age not far from the time of the decay of feminine beauty; the man uttered not a word but sat there motionless. I attempted to sleep. In my dream I took fearful vengeance on my disagreeable companions; no one could suspect what insults and humiliations lay concealed behind the broken fragments of the first half of the dream. When this need had been satisfied a second wish made itself felt - to change compartments. The scene is changed so often in dreams, and without the slightest objection being raised, that it would not have been in the least surprising if I had promptly replaced my travelling companions by more agreeable ones derived from my memory. But here was a case in which something resented the change of scene and thought it necessary to explain it. How did I suddenly come to be in another compartment? I had no recollection of having changed. There could be only one explanation: I must have left the carriage while I was in a sleeping state - a rare event, of which, however, examples are to be found in the experience of a neuropathologist. We know of people who have gone upon railway journeys in a twilight state, without betraying their abnormal condition by any signs, till at some point in the journey they have suddenly come to themselves completely and been amazed at the gap in their memory. In the dream itself, accordingly, I was declaring myself to be one of these cases of ‘automotisme ambulatoire’.

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] Schiller was not born at any Marburg, but at Marbach, as every German school-boy knows, and as I knew myself. This was one more of those mistakes (see above, p. 681 n.) which slip in as a substitute for an intentional falsification at some other point, and which I have tried to explain in my Psychopathology of Everyday Life.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

902

Analysis made it possible to find another solution. The attempt at an explanation, which seemed so striking when I was obliged to ascribe it to the dream-work, was not an original one of my own, but was copied from the neurosis of one of my patients. I have already spoken elsewhere of a highly educated and, in real life, soft-hearted man who, shortly after the death of his parents, began to reproach himself with having murderous inclinations, and then fell a victim to the precautionary measures which he was obliged to adopt as a safeguard. It was a case of severe obsessions accompanied by complete insight. To begin with, walking through the streets was made a burden to him by a compulsion to make certain where every single person he met disappeared to; if anyone suddenly escaped his watchful eye, he was left with a distressing feeling and the idea that he might possibly have got rid of him. What lay behind this was, among other things, a ‘Cain’ phantasy - for ‘all men are brothers.’ Owing to the impossibility of carrying out this task, he gave up going for walks and spent his life incarcerated between his own four walls. But reports of murders which had been committed outside were constantly being brought into his room by the newspapers, and his conscience suggested to him, in the form of a doubt, that he might be the wanted murderer. The certainty that he had in fact not left his house for weeks protected him from these charges for a while, till one day the possibility came into his head that he might have left his house while he was in an unconscious state and have thus been able to commit the murder without knowing anything about it. From that time onwards he locked the front door of the house and gave the key to his old housekeeper with strict instructions never to let it fall into his hands even if he asked for it.

This, then, was the origin of my attempted explanation to the effect that I had changed carriages while I was in an unconscious state; it had been carried over ready-made into the dream from the material of the dream-thoughts, and was evidently intended in the dream to serve the purpose of identifying me with the figure of this patient. My recollection of him had been aroused by an easy association. My last night-journey, a few weeks earlier, had been made in the company of this very man. He was cured, and was travelling with me into the provinces to visit his relatives, who had sent for me. We had a compartment to ourselves; we left all the windows open all through the night and had a most entertaining time for as long as I stayed awake. I knew that the root of his illness had been hostile impulses against his father, dating from his childhood and involving a sexual situation. In so far, therefore, as I was identifying myself with him, I was seeking to confess to something analogous. And in fact the second scene of the dream ended in a somewhat extravagant phantasy that my two elderly travelling companions had treated me in such a stand-offish way because my arrival had prevented the affectionate exchanges which they had planned for the night. This phantasy went back, however, to a scene of early childhood in which the child, probably driven by sexual curiosity, had forced his way into his parents’ bedroom and been turned out of it by his father’s orders.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

903

It is unnecessary, I think, to accumulate further examples. They would merely serve to confirm what we have gathered from those I have already quoted - that an act of judgement in a dream is only a repetition of some prototype in the dream-thoughts. As a rule, the repetition is ill-applied and interpolated into an inappropriate context, but occasionally, as in our last instances, it is so neatly employed that to begin with it may give the impression of independent intellectual activity in the dream. From this point we might turn our attention to the psychical activity which, though it does not appear to accompany the construction of dreams invariably, yet, whenever it does so, is concerned to fuse together elements in a dream which are of disparate origin into a whole which shall make sense and be without contradiction. Before approaching that subject, however, we are under an urgent necessity to consider the expressions of affect which occur in dreams and to compare them with the affects which analysis uncovers in the dream-thoughts.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

904

(H)

AFFECTS IN DREAMS

A shrewd observation made by Stricker has drawn our attention to the fact that the expression of affect in dreams cannot be dealt with in the same contemptuous fashion in which, after waking, we are accustomed to dismiss their content. ‘If I am afraid of robbers in a dream, the robbers, it is true, are imaginary - but the fear is real.’ And this is equally true if I feel glad in a dream. Our feeling tells us that an affect experienced in a dream is in no way inferior to one of equal intensity experienced in waking life; and dreams insist with greater energy upon their right to be included among our real mental experiences in respect to their affective than in respect to their ideational content. In our waking state, however, we cannot in fact include them in this way, because we cannot make any psychical assessment of an affect unless it is linked to a piece of ideational material. If the affect and the idea are incompatible in their character and intensity, our waking judgement is at a loss.

It has always been a matter for surprise that in dreams the ideational content is not accompanied by the affective consequences that we should regard as inevitable in waking thought. Strümpell declared that in dreams ideas are denuded of their psychical values. But there is no lack in dreams of instances of a contrary kind, where an intense expression of affect appears in connection with subject-matter which seems to provide no occasion for any such expression. In a dream I may be in a horrible, dangerous and disgusting situation without feeling any fear or repulsion; while another time, on the contrary, I may be terrified at something harmless and delighted at something childish.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

905

This particular enigma of dream-life vanishes more suddenly, perhaps, and more completely than any other, as soon as we pass over from the manifest to the latent content of the dream. We need not bother about the enigma, since it no longer exists. Analysis shows us that the ideational content has undergone displacements and substitutions, whereas the affects have remained unaltered. It is small wonder that the ideational material, which has been changed by dream-distortion, should no longer be compatible with the affect, which is retained unmodified; nor is there anything left to be surprised at after analysis has put the right material back into its former position.¹

In the case of a psychical complex which has come under the influence of the censorship imposed by resistance, the affects are the constituent which is least influenced and which alone can give us a pointer as to how we should fill in the missing thoughts. This is seen even more clearly in the psychoneuroses than in dreams. Their affects are always appropriate, at least in their quality though we must allow for their intensity being increased owing to displacements of neurotic attention. If a hysteric is surprised at having to be so frightened of something trivial or if a man suffering from obsessions is surprised at such distressing self-reproaches arising out of a mere nothing, they have both gone astray, because they regard the ideational content - the triviality or the mere nothing - as what is essential; and they put up an unsuccessful fight because they take this ideational content as the starting-point of their thought-activity. Psycho-analysis can put them upon the right path by recognizing the affect as being, on the contrary, justified and by seeking out the idea which belongs to it but has been repressed and replaced by a substitute. A necessary premise to all this is that the release of affect and the ideational content do not constitute the indissoluble organic unity as which we are in the habit of treating them, but that these two separate entities may be merely soldered together and can thus be detached from each other by analysis. Dream-interpretation shows that this is in fact the case.

¹ [Footnote added 1919:] If I am not greatly mistaken, the first dream that I was able to pick up from my grandson, at the age of one year and eight months, revealed a state of affairs in which the dream-work had succeeded in transforming the material of the dream-thoughts into a wish-fulfilment, whereas the affect belonging to them persisted unchanged during the state of sleep. On the night before the day on which his father was due to leave for the front, the child cried out, sobbing violently: ‘Daddy! Daddy! - baby!’ This can only have meant that Daddy and baby were remaining together; whereas the tears recognized the approaching farewell. At that time the child was already quite well able to express the concept of separation. ‘Fort’ [‘gone’] (replaced by a long-drawn-out and peculiarly stressed ‘o-o-o’) had been one of his first words, and several months before this first dream he had played at ‘gone’ with all his toys. This game went back to a successful piece of self-discipline which he had achieved at an early age in allowing his mother to leave him and be ‘gone.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

906

I shall begin by giving an example in which analysis explained the apparent absence of affect in a case where the ideational content should have necessitated its release.

I

She saw three lions in a desert, one of which was laughing; but she was not afraid of them. Afterwards, however, she must have run away from them, for she was trying to climb up a tree; but she found that her cousin, who was a French mistress, was up there already, etc.

The analysis brought up the following material. The indifferent precipitating cause of the dream was a sentence in her English composition: ‘The mane is the ornament of the lion.’ Her father wore a beard which framed his face like a mane. Her English mistress was called Miss Lyons. An acquaintance had sent her the ballads of Loewe. These, then, were the three lions; why should she be afraid of them? - She had read a story in which a negro, who had stirred up his companions to revolt, was hunted with blood hounds and climbed up a tree to save himself. She went on, in the highest spirits, to produce a number of fragmentary recollections, such as the advice on how to catch lions from Fliegende Blätter: ‘Take a desert and put it through a sieve and the lions will be left over.’ And again, the highly amusing but not very proper anecdote of an official who was asked why he did not take more trouble to ingratiate himself with the head of his department and replied that he had tried to make his way in, but his superior was up there already. The whole material became intelligible when it turned out that the lady had had a visit on the dream-day from her husband’s superior. He had been very polite to her and had kissed her hand and she had not been in the least bit afraid of him, although he was a very ‘big bug’, and played the part of a ‘social lion’ in the capital of the country she came from. So this lion was like the lion in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that concealed the figure of Snug the joiner; and the same is true of all dream-lions of which the dreamer is not afraid.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

907

II

As my second example I may quote the dream of the young girl who saw her sister’s little son lying dead in his coffin, but who, as I may now add, felt neither pain nor grief. We know from the analysis why this was. The dream merely disguised her wish to see the man she was in love with once more; and her affect had to be in tune with her wish and not with its disguise. There was thus no occasion for grief.

In some dreams the affect does at least remain in contact with the ideational material which has replaced that to which the affect was originally attached. In others, the dissolution of the complex has gone further. The affect makes its appearance completely detached from the idea which belongs to it and is introduced at some other point in the dream, where it fits in with the new arrangement of the dream-elements. The situation is then similar to the one we have found in the case of acts of judgement in dreams. If an important conclusion is drawn in the dream-thoughts, the dream also contains one; but the conclusion in the dream may be displaced on to quite different material. Such a displacement not infrequently follows the principle of antithesis.

This last possibility is exemplified in the following dream, which I have submitted to a most exhaustive analysis.

III

A castle by the sea; later it was no longer immediately on the sea, but on a narrow canal leading to the sea. The Governor was a Herr P. I was standing with him in a big reception room - with three windows in front of which there rose buttresses with what looked like crenellations. I had been attached to the garrison as something in the nature of a volunteer naval officer. We feared the arrival of enemy warships, since we were in a state of war. Herr P. intended to leave, and gave me instructions as to what was to be done if the event that we feared took place. His invalid wife was with their children in the threatened castle. If the bombardment began, the great hall was to be evacuated. He breathed heavily and turned to go; I held him back and asked him how I was to communicate with him in case of necessity. He added something in reply, but immediately fell down dead. No doubt I had put an unnecessary strain upon him with my questions. After his death, which made no further impression on me, I wondered whether his widow would remain in the castle, whether I should report his death to the Higher Command and whether I should take over command of the castle as being next in order of rank. I was standing at the window, and observing the ships as they went past. They were merchant vessels rushing past rapidly through the dark water, some of them with several funnels and others with bulging decks (just like the station buildings in the introductory dream - not reported here). Then my brother was standing beside me and we were both looking out of the window at the canal. At the sight of one ship we were frightened and cried out: ‘Here comes the warship!’ But it turned out that it was only the same ships that I already knew returning. There now came a small ship, cut off short, in a comic fashion, in the middle. On its deck some curious cup-shaped or box-shaped objects were visible. We called out with one voice: ‘That’s the breakfast-ship!’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

908

The rapid movements of the ships, the deep dark blue of the water and the brown smoke from the funnels - all of this combined to create a tense and sinister impression.

The localities in the dream were brought together from several trips of mine to the Adriatic (to Miramare, Duino, Venice and Aquileia). A short but enjoyable Easter trip which I had made to Aquileia with my brother a few weeks before the dream was still fresh in my memory. The dream also contained allusions to the maritime war between America and Spain and to anxieties to which it had given rise about the fate of my relatives in America. At two points in the dream affects were in question. At one point an affect that was to be anticipated was absent: attention was expressly drawn to the fact that the Governor’s death made no impression on me. At another point, when I thought I saw the warship, I was frightened and felt all the sensations of fright in my sleep. In this well-constructed dream the affects were distributed in such a way that any striking contradiction was avoided. There was no reason why I should be frightened at the death of the Governor and it was quite reasonable that as Commandant of the Castle I should be frightened at the sight of the warship. The analysis showed, however, that Herr P. was only a substitute for my own self. (In the dream I was the substitute for him.) I was the Governor who suddenly died. The dream-thoughts dealt with the future of my family after my premature death. This was the only distressing one among the dream-thoughts; and it must have been from it that the fright was detached and brought into connection in the dream with the sight of the warship. On the other hand, the analysis showed that the region of the dream-thoughts from which the warship was taken was filled with the most cheerful recollections. It was a year earlier, in Venice, and we were standing one magically beautiful day at the windows of our room on the Riva degli Schiavoni and were looking across the blue lagoon on which that day there was more movement than usual. English ships were expected and were to be given a ceremonial reception. Suddenly my wife cried out gaily as a child: ‘Here comes the English warship!’ In the dream I was frightened at these same words. (We see once again that speeches in a dream are derived from speeches in real life; I shall show shortly that the element ‘English’ in my wife’s exclamation did not elude the dream-work either.) Here, then, in the process of changing the dream-thoughts into the manifest dream-content, I have transformed cheerfulness into fear, and I need only hint that this transformation was itself giving expression to a portion of the latent dream-content. This example proves, however, that the dream-work is at liberty to detach an affect from its connections in the dream-thoughts and introduce it at any other point it chooses in the manifest dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

909

I take this opportunity of making a somewhat detailed analysis of the ‘breakfast-ship’, the appearance of which in the dream brought such a nonsensical conclusion to a situation which had up to then been kept at a rational level. When subsequently I called the dream-object more precisely to mind, it struck me that it was black and that, owing to the fact that it was cut off short where it was broadest in the middle, it bore a great resemblance at that end to a class of objects which had attracted our interest in the museums in the Etruscan towns. These were rectangular trays of black pottery, with two handles, on which there stood things like coffee- or tea-cups, not altogether unlike one of our modern breakfast-sets. In response to our enquiries we learned that this was the ‘toilette’ [toilet-set] of an Etruscan lady, with receptacles for cosmetics and powder on it, and we had jokingly remarked that it would be a good idea to take one home with us for the lady of the house. The object in the dream meant, accordingly, a black ‘toilette’, i.e. mourning dress, and made a direct reference to a death. The other end of the dream-object reminded me of the funeral boats¹ in which in early times dead bodies were placed and committed to the sea for burial. This led on to the point which explained why the ships returned in the dream:

Still, auf gerettetem Boot, treibt in den Hafen der Greis.²

It was the return after a shipwreck [‘Schiffbruch’, literally ‘ship-break’] - the breakfast-ship was broken off short in the middle. But what was the origin of the name ‘breakfast’-ship? It was here that the word ‘English’ came in, which was left over from the warships. The English word ‘breakfast’ means ‘breaking fast’. The ‘breaking’ related once more to the shipwreck [‘ship-break’] and the fasting was connected with the black dress or toilette.

But it was only the name of the breakfast-ship that was newly constructed by the dream. The thing had existed and reminded me of one of the most enjoyable parts of my last trip. Mistrusting the food that would be provided at Aquileia, we had brought provisions with us from Gorizia and had bought a bottle of excellent Istrian wine at Aquileia. And while the little mail steamer made its way slowly through the ‘Canale delle Mee’ across the empty lagoon to Grado we, who were the only passengers, ate our breakfast on deck in the highest spirits, and we had rarely tasted a better one. This, then, was the ‘breakfast-ship’, and it was precisely behind this memory of the most cheerful joie de vivre that the dream-concealed the gloomiest thoughts of an unknown and uncanny future.

¹ ‘Nachen’ [in German], a word which is derived, as a philological friend tells me, from the root ‘necnx‘ [corpse].

² [Safe on his ship, the old man quietly sails into port.]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

910

The detachment of affects from the ideational material which generated them is the most striking thing which occurs to them during the formation of dreams; but it is neither the only nor the most essential alteration undergone by them on their path from the dream-thoughts to the manifest dream. If we compare the affects of the dream-thoughts with those in the dream, one thing at once becomes clear. Whenever there is an affect in the dream, it is also to be found in the dream-thoughts. But the reverse is not true. A dream is in general poorer in affect than the psychical material from the manipulation of which it has proceeded. When I have reconstructed the dream-thoughts, I habitually find the most intense psychical impulses in them striving to make themselves felt and struggling as a rule against others that are sharply opposed to them. If I then turn back to the dream, it not infrequently appears colourless, and without emotional tone of any great intensity. The dream-work has reduced to a level of indifference not only the content but often the emotional tone of my thoughts as well. It might be said that the dream-work brings about a suppression of affects. Let us, for instance, take the dream of the botanical monograph. The thoughts corresponding to it consisted of a passionately agitated plea on behalf of my liberty to act as I chose to act and to govern my life as seemed right to me and me alone. The dream that arose from them has an indifferent ring about it: ‘I had written a monograph; it lay before me; it contained coloured plates; dried plants accompanied each copy.’ This reminds one of the peace that has descended upon a battle field strewn with corpses; no trace is left of the struggle which raged over it.

Things can be otherwise: lively manifestations of affect can make their way into the dream itself. For the moment, however, I will dwell upon the incontestable fact that large numbers of dreams appear to be indifferent, whereas it is never possible to enter into the dream-thoughts without being deeply moved.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

911

No complete theoretical explanation can here be given of this suppression of affect in the course of the dream-work. It would require to be preceded by a most painstaking investigation of the theory of affects and of the mechanism of repression. I will only permit myself a reference to two points. I am compelled - for other reasons - to picture the release of affects as a centrifugal process directed towards the interior of the body and analogous to the processes of motor and secretory innervation. Now just as in the state of sleep the sending out of motor impulses towards the external world appears to be suspended, so it may be that the centrifugal calling-up of affects by unconscious thinking may become more difficult during sleep. In that case the affective impulses occurring during the course of the dream-thoughts would from their very nature be weak impulses, and consequently those which found their was into the dream would be no less weak. On this view, then, the ‘suppression of affect’ would not in any way be the consequence of the dream-work but would result from the state of sleep. This may be true, but it cannot be the whole truth. We must also bear in mind that any relatively complex dream turns out to be a compromise produced by a conflict between psychical forces. For one thing, the thoughts constructing the wish are obliged to struggle against the opposition of a censoring agency; and for another thing, we have often seen that in unconscious thinking itself every train of thought is yoked with its contradictory opposite. Since all of these trains of thought are capable of carrying an affect, we shall by and large scarcely be wrong if we regard the suppression of affect as a consequence of the inhibition which these contraries exercise upon each other and which the censorship exercises upon the impulsions suppressed by it. The inhibition of affect, accordingly, must be considered as the second consequence of the censorship of dreams, just as dream-distortion is its first consequence.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

912

I will here give as an instance a dream in which the indifferent feeling-tone of the content of the dream can be explained by the antithesis between the dream-thoughts. It is a short dream, which will fill every reader with disgust.

IV

A hill, on which there was something like an open-air closet: a very long seat with a large hole at the end of it. Its back edge was thickly covered with small heaps of faeces of all sizes and degrees of freshness. There were bushes behind the seat. I micturated on the seat; a long stream of urine washed everything clean; the lumps of faeces came away easily and fell into the opening. It was as though at the end there was still some left.

Why did I feel no disgust during this dream?

Because, as the analysis showed, the most agreeable and satisfying thoughts contributed to bringing the dream about. What at once occurred to me in the analysis were the Augean stables which were cleansed by Hercules. This Hercules was I. The hill and bushes came from Aussee, where my children were stopping at the time. I had discovered the infantile aetiology of the neuroses and had thus saved my own children from falling ill. The seat (except, of course, for the hole) was an exact copy of a piece of furniture which had been given to me as a present by a grateful woman patient. It thus reminded me of how much my patients honoured me. Indeed, even the museum of human excrement could be given an interpretation to rejoice my heart. However much I might be disgusted by it in reality, in the dream it was a reminiscence of the fair land of Italy where, as we all know, the W.C.s in the small towns are furnished in precisely this way. The stream of urine which washed everything clean was an unmistakable sign of greatness. It was in that way that Gulliver extinguished the great fire in Lilliput though incidentally this brought him into disfavour with its tiny queen. But Gargantua, too, Rabelais’ superman, revenged himself in the same way on the Parisians by sitting astride on Notre Dame and turning his stream of urine upon the city. It was only on the previous evening before going to sleep that I had been turning over Garnier’s illustrations to Rabelais. And, strangely enough, here was another piece of evidence that I was the superman. The platform of Notre Dame was my favourite resort in Paris; every free afternoon I used to clamber about there on the towers of the church between the monsters and the devils. The fact that all the faeces disappeared so quickly under the stream recalled the motto: ‘Afflavit et dissipati sunt’, which I intended one day to put at the head of a chapter upon the therapy of hysteria.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

913

And now for the true exciting cause of the dream. It had been a hot summer afternoon; and during the evening I had delivered my lecture on the connection between hysteria and the perversions, and everything I had had to say displeased me intensely and seemed to me completely devoid of any value. I was tired and felt no trace of enjoyment in my difficult work; I longed to be away from all this grubbing about in human dirt and to be able to join my children and afterwards visit the beauties of Italy. In this mood I went from the lecture room to a café, where I had a modest snack in the open air, since I had no appetite for food. One of my audience, however, went with me and he begged leave to sit by me while I drank my coffee and choked over my crescent roll. He began to flatter me: telling me how much he had learnt from me, how he looked at everything now with fresh eyes, how I had cleansed the Augean stables of errors and prejudices in my theory of the neuroses. He told me, in short, that I was a very great man. My mood fitted ill with this paean of praise; I fought against my feeling of disgust, went home early to escape from him, and before going to sleep turned over the pages of Rabelais and read one of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer’s short stories, ‘Die Leiden eines Knaben’ [‘A Boy’s Sorrows’].

Such was the material out of which the dream emerged. Meyer’s short story brought up in addition a recollection of scenes from my childhood. (Cf. the last episode in the dream about Count Thun.) The day-time mood of revulsion and disgust persisted into the dream in so far as it was able to provide almost the entire material of its manifest content. But during the night a contrary mood of powerful and even exaggerated self-assertiveness arose and displaced the former one. The content of the dream had to find a form which would enable it to express both the delusions of inferiority and the megalomania in the same material. The compromise between them produced an ambiguous dream-content; but it also resulted in an indifferent feeling-tone owing to the mutual inhibition of these contrary impulses.

According to the theory of wish-fulfilment, this dream would not have become possible if the antithetical megalomanic train of thought (which, it is true, was suppressed, but had a pleasurable tone) had not emerged in addition to the feeling of disgust. For what is distressing may not be represented in a dream; nothing in our dream-thoughts which is distressing can force an entry into a dream unless it at the same time lends a disguise to the fulfilment of a wish.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

914

There is yet another alternative way in which the dream-work can deal with affects in the dream-thoughts, in addition to allowing them through or reducing them to nothing. It can turn them into their opposite. We have already become acquainted with the interpretative rule according to which every element in a dream can, for purposes of interpretation, stand for its opposite just as easily as for itself. We can never tell beforehand whether it stands for the one or for the other; only the context can decide. A suspicion of this truth has evidently found its way into popular consciousness: ‘dream books’ very often adopt the principle of contraries in their interpretation of dreams. This turning of a thing into its opposite is made possible by the intimate associative chain which links the idea of a thing with its opposite in our thoughts. Like my other kind of displacement it can serve the ends of the censorship; but it is also frequently a product of wish-fulfilment, for wish-fulfilment consists in nothing else than a replacement of a disagreeable thing by its opposite. Just as ideas of things can make their appearance in dreams turned into their opposite, so too can the affects attaching to dream-thoughts; and it seems likely that this reversal of affect is brought about as a rule by the dream-censorship. In social life, which has provided us with our familiar analogy with the dream-censorship, we also make use of the suppression and reversal of affect, principally for purposes of dissimulation. If I am talking to someone whom I am obliged to treat with consideration while wishing to say something hostile to him, it is almost more important that I should conceal any expression of my affect from him than that I should mitigate the verbal form of my thoughts. If I were to address him in words that were not impolite, but accompanied them with a look or gesture of hatred and contempt, the effect which I should produce on him would not be very different from what it would have been if I had thrown my contempt openly in his face. Accordingly, the censorship bids me above all suppress my affects; and, if I am a master of dissimulation, I shall assume the opposite affect - smile when I am angry and seem affectionate when I wish to destroy.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

915

We have already come across an excellent example of a reversal of affect of this kind carried out in a dream on behalf of the dream-censorship. In the dream of ‘my uncle with the yellow beard’ I felt the greatest affection for my friend R., whereas and because the dream-thoughts called him a simpleton. It was from this example of reversal of affect that we derived our first hint of the existence of a dream-censorship. Nor is it necessary to assume, in such cases either, that the dream-work creates contrary affects of this kind out of nothing; it finds them as a rule lying ready to hand in the material of the dream-thoughts, and merely intensifies them with the psychical force arising from a motive of defence, till they can predominate for the purposes of dream-formation. In the dream of my uncle which I have just mentioned, the antithetical, affectionate affect probably arose from an infantile source (as was suggested by the later part of the dream), for the uncle-nephew relationship, owing to the peculiar nature of the earliest experiences of my childhood (cf. the analysis on p. 876 f.) had become the source of all my friendships and all my hatreds.

An excellent example of a reversal of affect of this kind will be found in a dream recorded by Ferenczi (1916): ‘An elderly gentleman was awakened one night by his wife, who had become alarmed because he was laughing so loudly and unrestrainedly in his sleep. Subsequently the man reported that he had had the following dream: I was lying in bed and a gentleman who was known to me entered the room; I tried to turn on the light but was unable to: I tried over and over again, but in vain. Thereupon my wife got out of bed to help me, but she could not manage it either. But as she felt awkward in front of the gentleman owing to being "en négligé", she finally gave it up and went back to bed. All of this was so funny that I couldn’t help roaring with laughter at it. My wife said, ‘Why are you laughing? why are you laughing?’ but I went on laughing till I woke up. - Next day the gentleman was very depressed and had a headache: so much laughing had upset him, he thought.

‘The dream seems less amusing when it is considered analytically. The "gentleman known to him" who entered the room was, in the latent dream-thoughts, the picture of Death as the "great Unknown" - a picture which had been called up in his mind during the previous day. The old gentleman, who suffered from arterio-sclerosis, had had good reason the day before for thinking of dying. The unrestrained laughter took the place of sobbing and weeping at the idea that he must die. It was the light of life that he could no longer turn on. This gloomy thought may have been connected with attempts at copulation which he had made shortly before but which had failed even with the help of his wife en négligé. He realized that he was already going down hill. The dream-work succeeded in transforming the gloomy idea of impotence and death into a comic scene, and his sobs into laughter.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

916

There is one class of dreams which have a particular claim to be described as ‘hypocritical’ and which offer a hard test to the theory of wish-fulfilment. My attention was drawn to them when Frau Dr. M. Hilferding brought up the following record of a dream of Peter Rosegger’s for discussion by the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society.

Rosegger writes in his story ‘Fremd gemacht!’ [‘Dismissed!’]¹ ‘As a rule I am a sound sleeper but many a night I have lost my rest - for, along with my modest career as a student and man of letters, I have for many years dragged around with me, like a ghost from which I could not set myself free, the shadow of a tailor’s life.

‘It is not as though in the day-time I had reflected very often or very intensely on my past. One who had cast off the skin of a Philistine and was seeking to conquer Earth and Heaven had other things to do. Nor would I, when I was a dashing young fellow, have given more than a thought to my nightly dreams. Only later, when the habit had come to me of reflecting upon everything, or when the Philistine within me began to stir a trifle, did I ask myself why it should be that, if I dreamt at all, I was always a journeyman tailor and that I spent so long a time as such with my master and worked without pay in his workshop. I knew well enough, as I sat like that beside him, sewing and ironing, that my right place was no longer there and that as a townsman I had other things to occupy me. But I was always on vacation, I was always having summer holidays, and so it was that I sat beside my master as his assistant. It often irked me and I felt sad at the loss of time in which I might well have found better and more useful things to do. Now and then, when something went awry, I had to put up with a scolding from my master, though there was never any talk of wages. Often, as I sat there with bent back in the dark workshop, I thought of giving notice and taking my leave. Once I even did so; but my master paid no heed and I was soon sitting beside him again and sewing.

¹  In the second volume of Waldheimat, p. 303.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

917

‘After such tedious hours, what a joy it was to wake! And I determined that if this persistent dream should come again I would throw it from me with energy and call aloud: "This is mere hocus-pocus, I am lying in bed and want to sleep. . . ." But next night I was once more sitting in the tailor’s workshop.

‘And so it went on for years with uncanny regularity. Now it happened once that my master and I were working at Alpelhofer’s (the peasant in whose house I had worked when I was first apprenticed) and my master showed himself quite especially dissatisfied with my work. "I’d like to know where you’re wool-gathering," he said, and looked at me darkly. The most reasonable thing to do, I thought, would be to stand up and tell him that I was only with him to please him and then go off. But I did not do so. I made no objection when my master took on an apprentice and ordered me to make room for him on the bench. I moved into the corner and sewed. The same day another journeyman was taken on as well, a canting hypocrite - he was a Bohemian - who had worked at our place nineteen years before, and had fallen into the brook once on his way back from the inn. When he looked for a seat there was no more room. I turned to my master questioningly, and he said to me: "You’ve no gift for tailoring, you can go! you’re dismissed!" My fright at this was so overpowering that I awoke.

‘The grey light of morning was glimmering through the uncurtained windows into my familiar home. Works of art surrounded me; there in my handsome book-case stood the eternal Homer, the gigantic Dante, the incomparable Shakespeare, the glorious Goethe-all the magnificent immortals. From the next room rang out the clear young voices of the awakening children joking with their mother. I felt as though I had found afresh this idyllically sweet, this peaceful, poetic, spiritual life in which I had so often and so deeply felt a meditative human happiness. Yet it vexed me that I had not been beforehand with my master in giving him notice, but had been dismissed by him.

‘And how astonished I was! From the night on which my master dismissed me, I enjoyed peace; I dreamt no more of the tailoring days which lay so far back in my past-days which had been so cheerfully unassuming but had thrown such a long shadow over my later years.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

918

In this series of dreams dreamt by an author who had been a journeyman tailor in his youth, it is hard to recognize the dominance of wish-fulfilment. All the dreamer’s enjoyment lay in his day-time existence, whereas in his dreams he was still haunted by the shadow of an unhappy life from which he had at last escaped. Some dreams of my own of a similar kind have enabled me to throw a little light on the subject. As a young doctor I worked for a long time at the Chemical Institute without ever becoming proficient in the skills which that science demands; and for that reason in my waking life I have never liked thinking of this barren and indeed humiliating episode in my apprenticeship. On the other hand I have a regularly recurring dream of working in the laboratory, of carrying out analyses and of having various experiences there. These dreams are disagreeable in the same way as examination dreams and they are never very distinct. While I was interpreting one of them, my attention was eventually attracted by the word ‘analysis’, which gave me a key to their understanding. Since those days I have become an ‘analyst’, and I now carry out analyses which are very highly spoken of, though it is true that they are ‘psycho-analyses’. It was now clear to me: if I have grown proud of carrying out analyses of that kind in my daytime life and feel inclined to boast to myself of how successful I have become, my dreams remind me during the night of those other, unsuccessful analyses of which I have no reason to feel proud. They are the punishment dreams of a parvenu, like the dreams of the journeyman tailor who had grown into a famous author. But how does it become possible for a dream, in the conflict between a parvenu’s pride and his self-criticism, to side with the latter, and choose as its content a sensible warning instead of an unlawful wish-fulfilment? As I have already said, the answer to this question raises difficulties. We may conclude that the foundation of the dream was formed in the first instance by an exaggeratedly ambitious phantasy, but that humiliating thoughts that poured cold water on the phantasy found their way into the dream instead. It may be remembered that there are masochistic impulses in the mind, which may be responsible for a reversal such as this. I should have no objection to this class of dreams being distinguished from ‘wish-fulfilment dreams’ under the name of ‘punishment dreams’. I should not regard this as implying any qualification of the theory of dreams which I have hitherto put forward; it would be no more than a linguistic expedient for meeting the difficulties of those who find it strange that opposites should converge. But a closer examination of some of these dreams brings something more to light. In an indistinct part of the background of one of my laboratory dreams I was of an age which placed me precisely in the gloomiest and most unsuccessful year of my medical career. I was still without a post and had no idea how I could earn my living; but at the same time I suddenly discovered that I had a choice open to me between several women whom I might marry! So I was once more young, and, more than everything, she was once more young - the woman who had shared all these difficult years with me. The unconscious instigator of the dream was thus revealed as one of the constantly gnawing wishes of a man who is growing older. The conflict raging in other levels of the mind between vanity and self-criticism had, it is true, determined the content of the dream; but it was only the more deeply-rooted wish for youth that had made it possible for that conflict to appear as a dream. Even when we are awake we sometimes say to ourselves: ‘Things are going very well to-day and times were hard in the old days; all the same, it was lovely then - I was still young.’¹

¹ [Footnote added 1930:] Since psycho-analysis has divided the personality into an ego and a super-ego (Freud, 1921c ), it has become easy to recognize in these punishment dreams fulfilments of the wishes of the super-ego.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

919

Another group of dreams, which I have often come across in myself and recognized as hypocritical, have as their content a reconciliation with people with whom friendly relations have long since ceased. In such cases analysis habitually reveals some occasion which might urge me to abandon the last remnant of consideration for these former friends and to treat them as strangers or enemies. The dream, however, prefers to depict the opposite relationship.

In forming any judgement upon dreams recorded by an imaginative writer it is reasonable to suppose that he may have omitted from his account details in the content of the dream which he regards as unessential or distracting. His dreams will in that case raise problems which would be quickly solved if their content were reported in full.

Otto Rank has pointed out to me that the Grimms’ fairy tale of ‘The Little Tailor, or Seven at a Blow’ contains an exactly similar dream of a parvenu. The tailor, who has become a hero and the son-in-law of the King, dreams one night of his former handicraft, as he lies beside his wife, the Princess. She, becoming suspicious, posts armed guards the next night to listen to the dreamer’s words and to arrest him. But the little tailor is warned, and sees to it that his dream is corrected.

The complicated process of elimination, diminution and reversal, by means of which the affects in the dream-thoughts are eventually turned into those in the dream, can be satisfactorily followed in suitable syntheses of dreams that have been completely analysed. I will quote a few more examples of affects in dreams where some of the possibilities I have enumerated will be found realized.

V

If we turn back to the dream about the strange task set me by old Brücke of making a dissection of my own pelvis, it will be recalled that in the dream itself I missed the gruesome feeling [‘Grauen’] appropriate to it. Now this was a wish-fulfilment in more than one sense. The dissection meant the self-analysis which I was carrying out, as it were, in the publication of this present book about dreams - a process which had been so distressing to me in reality that I had postponed the printing of the finished manuscript for more than a year. A wish then arose that I might get over this feeling of distaste; hence it was that I had no gruesome feeling [‘Grauen’] in the dream. But I should also have been very glad to miss growing grey - ‘Grauen’ in the other sense of the word. I was already growing quite grey, and the grey of my hair was another reminder that I must not delay any longer. And, as we have seen, the thought that I should have to leave it to my children to reach the goal of my difficult journey forced its way through to representation at the end of the dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

920

Let us next consider the two dreams in which an expression of satisfaction was transposed to the moment after waking. In the one case the reason given for the satisfaction was an expectation that I should now discover what was meant by ‘I’ve dreamt of that before’, while the satisfaction really referred to the birth of my first children. In the other case the ostensible reason was my conviction that something that had been ‘prognosticated’ was now coming true, while the real reference was similar to that in the former dream: it was the satisfaction with which I greeted the birth of my second son. Here the affects which dominated the dream-thoughts persisted in the dreams; but it is safe to say that in no dream can things be as simple as all that. If we go a little more deeply into the two analyses we find that this satisfaction which had escaped censorship had received an accession from another source. This other source had grounds for fearing the censorship, and its affect would undoubtedly have aroused opposition if it had not covered itself by the similar, legitimate affect of satisfaction, arising from the permissible source, and slipped in, as it were, under its wing.

Unfortunately, I cannot demonstrate this in the actual case of these dreams, but an instance taken from another department of life will make my meaning clear. Let us suppose the following case. There is a person of my acquaintance whom I hate, so that I have a lively inclination to feel glad if anything goes wrong with him. But the moral side of my nature will not give way to this impulse. I do not dare to express a wish that he should be unlucky, and if he meets with some undeserved misfortune, I suppress my satisfaction at it and force myself to manifestations and thoughts of regret. Everyone must have found himself in this situation at some time or other. What now happens, however, is that the hated person, by a piece of misconduct of his own, involves himself in some well-deserved unpleasantness; when that happens, I may give free rein to my satisfaction that he has met with a just punishment and in this I find myself in agreement with many other people who are impartial. I may observe, however, that my satisfaction seems more intense than that of these other people; it has received an accession from the source of my hatred, which till then has been prevented from producing its affect, but in the altered circumstances is no longer hindered from doing so. In social life this occurs in general wherever antipathetic people or members of an unpopular minority put themselves in the wrong. Their punishment does not as a rule correspond to their wrongdoing but to their wrongdoings plus the ill-feeling directed against them which has previously been without any consequences. It is no doubt true that those who inflict the punishment are committing an injustice in this; but they are prevented from perceiving it by the satisfaction resulting from the removal of a suppression which has long been maintained within them. In cases such as this the affect is justified in its quality but not in its quantity; and self-criticism which is set at rest on the one point is only too apt to neglect examination of the second one. When once a door has been opened, it is easy for more people to push their way through it than there had originally been any intention of letting in.

A striking feature in neurotic characters - the fact that a cause capable of releasing an affect is apt to produce in them a result which is qualitatively justified but quantitatively excessive is to be explained along these same lines, in so far as it admits of any psychological explanation at all. The excess arises from sources of affect which had previously remained unconscious and suppressed. These sources have succeeded in setting up an associative link with the real releasing cause, and the desired path from the release of their own affect has been opened by the other source of affect, which is unobjectionable and legitimate. Our attention is thus drawn to the fact that in considering the suppressed and suppressing agencies, we must not regard their relation as being exclusively one of mutual inhibition. Just as much regard must be paid to cases in which the two agencies bring about a pathological effect by working side by side and by intensifying each other.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

921

Let us now apply these hints upon psychical mechanisms to an understanding of the expressions of affect in dreams. A satisfaction which is exhibited in a dream and can, of course, be immediately referred to its proper place in the dream-thoughts is not always completely elucidated by this reference alone. It is as a rule necessary to look for another source of it in the dream-thoughts, a source which is under the pressure of the censorship. As a result of that pressure, this source would normally have produced, not satisfaction, but the contrary affect. Owing to the presence of the first source of affect, however, the second source is enabled to withdraw its affect of satisfaction from repression and allow it to act as an intensification of the satisfaction from the first source. Thus it appears that affects in dreams are fed from a confluence of several sources and are over-determined in their reference to the material of the dream-thoughts. During the dream-work, sources of affect which are capable of producing the same affect come together in generating it.¹

We can gain a little insight into these complications from the analysis of that fine specimen of a dream of which the words ‘Non Vixit’ formed the centre-point. (See p. 874 ff.) In that dream manifestations of affect of various qualities were brought together at two points in its manifest content. Hostile and distressing feelings - ‘overcome by strange emotions’ were the words used in the dream itself - were piled up at the point at which I annihilated my opponent and friend with two words. And again, at the end of the dream, I was highly delighted, and I went on to approve the possibility, which in waking life I knew was absurd, of there being revenants who could be eliminated by a mere wish.

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] I have given an analogous explanation of the extraordinarily powerful pleasurable effect of tendentious jokes.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

922

I have not yet related the exciting cause of the dream. It was of great importance and led deep into an understanding of the dream. I had heard from my friend in Berlin, whom I have referred to as ‘Fl.’, that he was about to undergo an operation and that I should get further news of his condition from some of his relatives in Vienna. The first reports I received after the operation were not reassuring and made me feel anxious. I should have much preferred to go to him myself, but just at that time I was the victim of a painful complaint which made movement of any kind a torture to me. The dream-thoughts now informed me that I feared for my friend’s life. His only sister, whom I had never known, had, as I was aware, died in early youth after a very brief illness. (In the dream Fl. spoke about his sister and said that in three quarters of an hour she was dead.) I must have imagined that his constitution was not much more resistant than his sister’s and that, after getting some much worse news of him, I should make the journey after all - and arrive too late, for which I might never cease to reproach myself.¹ This reproach for coming too late became the central point of the dream but was represented by a scene in which Brücke, the honoured teacher of my student years, levelled this reproach at me with a terrible look from his blue eyes. It will soon appear what it was that caused the situation to be switched on to these lines. The scene itself could not be reproduced by the dream in the form in which I experienced it. The other figure in the dream was allowed to keep the blue eyes, but the annihilating role was allotted to me - a reversal which was obviously the work of wish-fulfilment. My anxiety about my friend’s recovery, my self-reproaches for not going to see him, the shame I felt about this - he had come to Vienna (to see me) ‘unobtrusively’ - the need I felt to consider that I was excused by my illness - all of this combined to produce the emotional storm which was clearly perceived in my sleep and which raged in this region of the dream-thoughts.

¹ It was this phantasy, forming part of the unconscious dream-thoughts, which so insistently demanded ‘Non vivit’ instead of ‘Non vixit’: ‘You have come too late, he is no longer alive’. I have already explained on pp. 874‑875 that ‘Non vivit’ was also required by the manifest situation in the dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

923

But there was something else in the exciting cause of the dream, which had a quite opposite effect upon me. Along with the unfavourable reports during the first few days after the operation, I was given a warning not to discuss the matter with anyone. I had felt offended by this because it implied an unnecessary distrust of my discretion. I was quite aware that these instructions had not emanated from my friend but were due to tactlessness or over-anxiety on the part of the intermediary, but I was very disagreeably affected by the veiled reproach because it was - not wholly without justification. As we all know, it is only reproaches which have something in them that ‘stick’; it is only they that upset us. What I have in mind does not relate, it is true, to this friend, but to a much earlier period of my life. On that occasion I caused trouble between two friends (both of whom had chosen to honour me, too, with that name ) by quite unnecessarily telling one of them, in the course of conversation, what the other had said about him. At that time, too, reproaches had been levelled at me, and they were still in my memory. One of the two friends concerned was Professor Fleischl; I may describe the other by his first name of ‘Josef’ - which was also that of P., my friend and opponent in the dream.

The reproach of being unable to keep anything to myself was attested in the dream by the element ‘unobtrusive’ and by Fl.’s question as to how much I had told P. about his affairs. But it was the intervention of this memory that transported the reproach against me for coming too late from the present time to the period at which I had worked in Brücke’s laboratory. And, by turning the second person in the scene of annihilation in the dream into a Josef, I made the scene represent not only the reproach against me for coming too late but also the far more strongly repressed reproach that I was unable to keep a secret. Here the processes of condensation and displacement at work in the dream, as well as the reasons for them, are strikingly visible.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

924

My present-day anger, which was only slight, over the warning I had been given not to give anything away received reinforcements from sources in the depth of my mind and thus swelled into a current of hostile feelings against persons of whom I was in reality fond. The source of this reinforcement flowed from my childhood. I have already shown how my warm friendships as well as my enmities with contemporaries went back to my relations in childhood with a nephew who was a year my senior; how he was my superior, how I early learned to defend myself against him, how we were inseparable friends, and how, according to the testimony of our elders, we sometimes fought with each other and - made complaints to them about each other. All my friends have in a certain sense been re-incarnations of this first figure who ‘früh sich einst dem trüben Blick gezeigt’¹: they have been revenants. My nephew himself re-appeared in my boyhood, and at that time we acted the parts of Caesar and Brutus together. My emotional life has always insisted that I should have an intimate friend and a hated enemy. I have always been able to provide myself afresh with both, and it has not infrequently happened that the ideal situation of childhood has been so completely reproduced that friend and enemy have come together in a single individual - though not, of course, both at once or with constant oscillations, as may have been the case in my early childhood.

I do not propose at this point to discuss how it is that in such circumstances as these a recent occasion for the generation of an affect can hark back to an infantile situation and be replaced by that situation as far as the production of affect is concerned. This question forms part of the psychology of unconscious thinking, and would find its proper place in a psychological elucidation of the neuroses. For the purposes of dream-interpretation let us assume that a childhood memory arose, or was constructed in phantasy, with some such content as the following. The two children had a dispute about some object. (What the object was may be left an open question, though the memory or pseudo-memory had a quite specific one in view.)  Each of them claimed to have got there before the other and therefore to have a better right to it. They came to blows and might prevailed over right. On the evidence of the dream, I may myself have been aware that I was in the wrong (‘I myself noticed the mistake’). However, this time I was the stronger and remained in possession of the field. The vanquished party hurried to his grandfather - my father - and complained about me, and I defended myself in the words which I know from my father’s account: ‘I hit him ‘cos he hit me.’ This memory, or more probably phantasy, which came into my mind while I was analysing the dream - without further evidence I myself could not tell how - constituted an intermediate element in the dream-thoughts, which gathered up the emotions raging in them as a well collects the water that flows into it. From this point the dream-thoughts proceeded along some such lines as these: ‘It serves you right if you had to make way for me. Why did you try to push me out of the way? I don’t need you, I can easily find someone else to play with’, and so on. These thoughts now entered upon the paths which led to their representation in the dream. There had been a time when I had had to reproach my friend Josef for an attitude of this same kind: ‘Ôte-toi que je m’y mette!’ He had followed in my footsteps as demonstrator in Brücke’s laboratory, but promotion there was slow and tedious. Neither of Brücke’s two assistants was inclined to budge from his place, and youth was impatient. My friend, who knew that he could not expect to live long, and whom no bonds of intimacy attached to his immediate superior, sometimes gave loud expression to his impatience, and, since this superior was seriously ill, P.’s wish to have him out of the way might have an uglier meaning than the mere hope for the man’s promotion. Not unnaturally, a few years earlier, I myself had nourished a still livelier wish to fill a vacancy. Wherever there is rank and promotion the way lies open for wishes that call for suppression. Shakespeare’s Prince Hal could not, even at his father’s sick-bed, resist the temptation of trying on the crown. But, as was to be expected, the dream punished my friend, and not me, for this callous wish.²

‘As he was ambitious, I slew him.’ As he could not wait for the removal of another man, he was himself removed. These had been my thoughts immediately after I attended the unveiling at the University of the memorial - not to him but to the other man. Thus a part of the satisfaction I felt in the dream was to be interpreted: ‘A just punishment! It serves you right!’

¹ [‘. . . long since appeared before my troubled gaze’]

² It will be noticed that the name Josef plays a great part in my dreams (cf. the dream about my uncle). My own ego finds it very easy to hide itself behind people of that name, since Joseph was the name of a man famous in the Bible as an interpreter of dreams.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

925

At my friend’s funeral, a young man had made what seemed to be an inopportune remark to the effect that the speaker who had delivered the funeral oration had implied that without this one man the world would come to an end. He was expressing the honest feelings of someone whose pain was being interfered with by an exaggeration. But this remark of his was the starting-point of the following dream-thoughts: ‘It’s quite true that no one’s irreplaceable. How many people I’ve followed to the grave already! But I’m still alive. I’ve survived them all; I’m left in possession of the field.’ A thought of this kind, occurring to me at a moment at which I was afraid might not find my friend alive if I made the journey to him, could only be construed as meaning that I was delighted because I had once more survived someone, because it was he and not I who had died, because I was left in possession of the field, as I had been in the phantasied scene from my childhood. This satisfaction, infantile in origin, at being in possession of the field constituted the major part of the affect that appeared in the dream. I was delighted to survive, and I gave expression to my delight with all the naïve egoism shown in the anecdote of the married couple one of whom said to the other: ‘If one of us dies, I shall move to Paris.’ So obvious was it to me that I should not be the one to die.

It cannot be denied that to interpret and report one’s dreams demands a high degree of self-discipline. One is bound to emerge as the only villain among the crowd of noble characters who share one’s life. Thus it seemed to me quite natural that the revenants should only exist for just so long as one likes and should be removable at a wish. We have seen what my friend Josef was punished for. But the revenants were a series of reincarnations of the friend of my childhood. It was therefore also a source of satisfaction to me that I had always been able to find successive substitutes for that figure; and I felt I should be able to find a substitute for the friend whom I was now on the point of losing: no one was irreplaceable.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

926

But what had become of the dream-censorship? Why had it not raised the most energetic objections against this blatantly egoistic train of thought? And why had it not transformed the satisfaction attached to that train of thought into severe unpleasure? The explanation was, I think, that other, unobjectionable, trains of thought in connection with the same people found simultaneous satisfaction and screened with their affect the affect which arose from the forbidden infantile source. In another stratum of my thoughts, during the ceremonial unveiling of the memorial, I had reflected thus: ‘What a number of valued friends I have lost, some through death, some through a breach of our friendship! How fortunate that I have found a substitute for them and that I have gained one who means more to me than ever the others could, and that, at a time of life when new friendships cannot easily be formed, I shall never lose his!’ My satisfaction at having found a substitute for these lost friends could be allowed to enter the dream without interference; but there slipped in, along with it, the hostile satisfaction derived from the infantile source. It is no doubt true that infantile affection served to reinforce my contemporary and justified affection. But infantile hatred, too, succeeded in getting itself represented.

In addition to this, however, the dream-contained a clear allusion to another train of thought which could legitimately lead to satisfaction. A short time before, after long expectation, a daughter had been born to my friend. I was aware of how deeply he had mourned the sister he had so early lost and I wrote and told him I was sure he would transfer the love he felt for her on to the child, and that the baby girl would allow him at last to forget his irreparable loss.

Thus this group of thoughts was connected once again with the intermediate thought in the latent content of the dream from which the associative paths diverged in contrary directions: ‘No one is irreplaceable!’ ‘There are nothing but revenants: all those we have lost come back!’ And now the associative links between the contradictory components of the dream-thoughts were drawn closer by the chance fact that my friend’s baby daughter had the same name as the little girl I used to play with as a child, who was of my age and the sister of my earliest friend and opponent. It gave me great satisfaction when I heard that the baby was to be called ‘Pauline.’ And as an allusion to this coincidence, I had replaced one Josef by another in the dream and found it impossible to suppress the similarity between the opening letters of the names ‘Fleischl’ and ‘FI.’ From here my thoughts went on to the subject of the names of my own children. I had insisted on their names being chosen, not according to the fashion of the moment, but in memory of people I have been fond of. Their names made the children into revenants. And after all, I reflected, was not having children our only path to immortality?

The Interpretation Of Dreams

927

I have only a few more remarks to add on the subject of affect in dreams from another point of view. A dominating element in a sleeper’s mind may be constituted by what we call a ‘mood’ - or tendency to some affect - and this may then have a determining influence upon his dreams. A mood of this kind may arise from his experiences or thoughts during the preceding day, or its sources may be somatic. In either case it will be accompanied by the trains of thought appropriate to it. From the point of view of dream-construction it is a matter of indifference whether, as sometimes happens, these ideational contents of the dream-thoughts determine the mood in a primary fashion, or whether they are themselves aroused secondarily by the dreamer’s emotional disposition which is in its turn to be explained on a somatic basis. In any case the construction of dreams is subject to the condition that it can only represent something which is the fulfilment of a wish and that it is only from wishes that it can derive its psychical motive force. A currently active mood is treated in the same way as a sensation arising and becoming currently active during sleep (cf. p. 714), which can be either disregarded or given a fresh interpretation in the sense of a wish-fulfilment. Distressing moods during sleep can become the motive force of a dream by arousing energetic wishes which the dream is supposed to fulfil. The material to which moods are attached is worked over until it can be used to express the fulfilment of a wish. The more intense and dominating a part is played in the dream-thoughts by the distressing mood, the more certain it becomes that the most strongly suppressed wishful impulses will make use of the opportunity in order to achieve representation. For, since the unpleasure which they would otherwise necessarily produce themselves is already present, they find the harder part of their task - the task of forcing their way through to representation - already accomplished for them. Here once more we are brought up against the problem of anxiety-dreams; and these, as we shall find, form a marginal case in the function of dreaming.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

928

(I)

SECONDARY REVISION

And now at last we can turn to the fourth of the factors concerned in the construction of dreams. If we pursue our investigation of the content of dreams in the manner in which we have begun it - that is, by comparing conspicuous events in the dream-content with their sources in the dream-thoughts, we shall come upon elements the explanation of which calls for an entirely new assumption. What I have in mind are cases in which the dreamer is surprised, annoyed or repelled in the dream, and, moreover, by a piece of the dream-content itself. As I have shown in a number of instances, the majority of these critical feelings in dreams are not in fact directed against the content of the dream, but turn out to be portions of the dream-thoughts which have been taken over and used to an appropriate end. But some material of this kind does not lend itself to this explanation; its correlate in the material of the dream-thoughts is nowhere to be found. What, for instance, is the meaning of a critical remark found so often in dreams: ‘This is only a dream’? Here we have a genuine piece of criticism of the dream, such as might be made in waking life. Quite frequently, too, it is actually a prelude to waking up; and still more frequently it has been preceded by some distressing feeling which is set at rest by the recognition that the state is one of dreaming. When the thought ‘this is only a dream’ occurs during a dream, it has the same purpose in view as when the words are pronounced on the stage by la belle Hélène in Offenbach’s comic opera of that name: it is aimed at reducing the importance of what has just been experienced and at making it possible to tolerate what is to follow. It serves to lull a particular agency to sleep which would have every reason at that moment to bestir itself and forbid the continuance of the dream - or the scene in the opera. It is more comfortable, however, to go on sleeping and tolerate the dream, because, after all, ‘it is only a dream.’ In my view the contemptuous critical judgement, ‘it’s only a dream’, appears in a dream when the censorship, which is never quite asleep, feels that it has been taken unawares by a dream which has already been allowed through. It is too late to suppress it, and accordingly the censorship uses these words to meet the anxiety or the distressing feeling aroused by it. The phrase is an example of esprit d’escalier on the part of the psychical censorship.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

929

This instance, however, provides us with convincing evidence that not everything contained in a dream is derived from the dream-thoughts, but that contributions to its content may be made by a psychical function which is indistinguishable from on our waking thoughts. The question now arises whether this only occurs in exceptional cases, or whether the psychical agency which otherwise operates only as a censorship plays a habitual part in the construction of dreams.

We can have no hesitation in deciding in favour of the second alternative. There can be no doubt that the censoring agency, whose influence we have so far only recognized in limitations and omissions in the dream-content, is also responsible for interpolations and additions in it. The interpolations are easy to recognize. They are often reported with hesitation, and introduced by an ‘as though’; they are not in themselves particularly vivid and are always introduced at points at which they can serve as links between two portions of the dream-content or to bridge a gap between two parts of the dream. They are less easily retained in the memory than genuine derivatives of the material of the dream-thoughts; if the dream is to be forgotten they are the first part of it to disappear, and I have a strong suspicion that the common complaint of having dreamt a lot, but of having forgotten most of it and of having only retained fragments, is based upon the rapid disappearance precisely of these connecting thoughts. In a complete analysis these interpolations are sometimes betrayed by the fact that no material connected with them is to be found in the dream-thoughts. But careful examination leads me to regard this as the less frequent case; as a rule the connecting thoughts lead back nevertheless to material in the dream-thoughts, but to material which could have no claim to acceptance in the dream either on its own account or owing to its being over-determined. Only in extreme cases, it seems, does the psychical function in dream-formation which we are now considering proceed to make new creations. So long as possible, it employs anything appropriate that it can find in the material of the dream-thoughts.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

930

The thing that distinguishes and at the same time reveals this part of the dream-work is its purpose. This function behaves in the manner which the poet maliciously ascribes to philosophers: it fills up the gaps in the dream-structure with shreds and patches. As a result of its efforts, the dream loses its appearance of absurdity and disconnectedness and approximates to the model of an intelligible experience. But its efforts are not always crowned with success. Dreams occur which, at a superficial view, may seem faultlessly logical and reasonable; they start from a possible situation, carry it on through a chain of consistent modifications and - though far less frequently - bring it to a conclusion which causes no surprise. Dreams which are of such a kind have been subjected to a far-reaching revision by this psychical function that is akin to waking thought; they appear to have a meaning, but that meaning is as far removed as possible from their true significance. If we analyse them, we can convince ourselves that it is in these dreams that the secondary revision has played about with the material the most freely, and has retained the relations present in that material to the least extent. They are dreams which might be said to have been already interpreted once, before being submitted to waking interpretation. In other dreams this tendentious revision has only partly succeeded; coherence seems to rule for a certain distance, but the dream then becomes senseless or confused, while perhaps later on in its course it may for a second time present an appearance of rationality. In yet other dreams the revision has failed altogether; we find ourselves hopelessly face to face with a heap of fragmentary material.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

931

I do not wish to deny categorically that this fourth power in dream-construction - which we shall soon recognize as all old acquaintance, since in fact it is the only one of the four with which we are familiar in other connections - I do not wish to deny that this fourth factor has the capacity to create new contributions to dreams. It is certain, however, that, like the others, it exerts its influence principally by its preferences and selections from psychical material in the dream-thoughts that has already been formed. Now there is one case in which it is to a great extent spared the labour of, as it were, building up a façade for the dream - the case, namely, in which a formation of that kind already exists, available for use in the material of the dream-thoughts. I am in the habit of describing the element in the dream-thoughts which I have in mind as a ‘phantasy.’ I shall perhaps avoid misunderstanding if I mention the ‘day-dream’ as something analogous to it in waking life.¹ The part played in our mental life by these structures has not yet been fully recognized and elucidated by psychiatrists, though M. Benedikt has made what seems to me a very promising start in that direction. The importance of day-dreams has not escaped the unerring vision of imaginative writers; there is, for instance, a well-known account by Alphonse Daudet in Le Nabab of the day-dreams of one of the minor characters in that story. The study of the psychoneuroses leads to the surprising discovery that these phantasies or day-dreams are the immediate forerunners of hysterical symptoms, or at least of a whole number of them. Hysterical symptoms are not attached to actual memories, but to phantasies erected on the basis of the basis of memories. The frequent occurrence of conscious daytime phantasies brings these structures to our knowledge; but just as there are phantasies of this kind which are conscious, so, too, there are unconscious ones in great numbers, which have to remain unconscious on account of their content and of their origin from repressed material. Closer investigation of the characteristics of these day-time phantasies shows us how right it is that these formations should bear the same name as we give to the products of our thought during the night - the name, that is, of ‘dreams.’ They share a large number of their properties with night-dreams, and their investigation might, in fact, have served as the shortest and best approach to an understanding of night-dreams.

¹ ‘Rêve’, ‘petit roman’, - ‘day-dream’, ‘[continuous] story’.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

932

Like dreams, they are wish-fulfilments; like dreams, they are based to a great extent on impressions of infantile experiences; like dreams, they benefit by a certain degree of relaxation of censorship. If we examine their structure, we shall perceive the way in which the wishful purpose that is at work in their production has mixed up the material of which they are built, has rearranged it and has formed it into a new whole. They stand in much the same relation to the childhood memories from which they are derived as do some of the Baroque palaces of Rome to the ancient ruins whose pavements and columns have provided the material for the more recent structures.

The function of ‘secondary revision’, which we have attributed to the fourth of the factors concerned in shaping the content of dreams, shows us in operation once more the activity which is able to find free vent in the creation of day-dreams without being inhibited by any other influences. We might put it simply by saying that this fourth factor of ours seeks to mould the material offered to it into something like a day-dream. If, however, a day-dream of this kind has already been formed within the nexus of the dream-thoughts, this fourth factor in the dream-work will prefer to take possession of the ready-made day-dream and seek to introduce it into the content of the dream. There are some dreams which consist merely in the repetition of a day-time phantasy which may perhaps have remained unconscious: such, for instance, as the boy’s dream of driving in a war-chariot with the heroes of the Trojan War. In my ‘Autodidasker’ dream the second part at all events was a faithful reproduction of a daytime phantasy, innocent in itself, of a conversation with Professor N. In view of the complicated conditions which a dream has to satisfy when it comes into existence, it happens more frequently that the ready-made phantasy forms only a portion of the dream, or that only a portion of the phantasy forces its way into the dream. Thereafter, the phantasy is treated in general like any other portion of the latent material, though it often remains recognizable as an entity in the dream. There are often parts of my dreams which stand out as producing a different impression from the rest. They strike me as being, as it were, more fluent, more connected and at the same time more fleeting than other parts of the same dream. These, I know, are unconscious phantasies which have found their way into the fabric of the dream, but I have never succeeded in pinning down a phantasy of this kind. Apart from this, these phantasies, like any other component of the dream-thoughts, are compressed, condensed, superimposed on one another, and so on. There are, however, transitional cases, between the case in which they constitute the content (or at least the façade) of the dream unaltered and the extreme opposite in which they are represented in the content of the dream only by one of their elements or by a distant allusion. What happens to phantasies present in the dream-thoughts is evidently also determined by any advantages they may have to offer the requirements of the censorship and of the urge towards condensation.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

933

In selecting examples of dream-interpretation I have so far as possible avoided dreams in which unconscious phantasies play any considerable part, because the introduction of this particular psychical element would have necessitated lengthy discussions on the psychology of unconscious thinking. Nevertheless, I cannot completely escape a consideration of phantasies in this connection, since they often make their way complete into dreams and since still more often clear glimpses of them can be seen behind the dream. I will therefore quote one more dream, which seems to be composed of two different and opposing phantasies which coincide with each other at a few points and of which one is superficial while the second is, as it were, an interpretation of the first.¹

The dream - it is the only one of which I possess no careful notes - ran roughly as follows. The dreamer, a young unmarried man, was sitting in the restaurant at which he usually ate and which was presented realistically in the dream. Several people then appeared, in order to fetch him away, and one of them wanted to arrest him. He said to his companions at table: ‘I’ll pay later; I’ll come back.’ But they exclaimed with derisive smiles: ‘We know all about that; that’s what they all say!’ One of the guests called out after him: ‘There goes another one!’ He was then led into a narrow room in which he found a female figure carrying a child. One of the people accompanying him said: ‘This is Herr Müller.’ A police inspector, or some such official, was turning over a bundle of cards or papers and as he did so repeated ‘Müller, Müller, Müller.’ Finally he asked the dreamer a question, which he answered with an ‘I will.’ He then turned round to look at the female figure and observed that she was now wearing a big beard.

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] In my ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (1905e), I have analysed a good specimen of a dream of this sort, made up of a number of superimposed phantasies. Incidentally, I underestimated the importance of the part played by these phantasies in the formation of dreams so long as I was principally working on my own dreams, which are usually based on discussions and conflict of thought and comparatively rarely on day-dreams. In the case of other people it is often much easier to demonstrate the complete analogy between night-dreams and day-dreams. With hysterical patients, a hysterical attack can often be replaced by a dream; and it is then easy to convince oneself that the immediate forerunner of both these psychical structures was a day-dream phantasy.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

934

Here there is no difficulty in separating the two components. The superficial one was a phantasy of arrest which appears as though it had been freshly constructed by the dream-work. But behind it some material is visible which had been only slightly re-shaped by the dream-work: a phantasy of marriage. Those features which were common to both phantasies emerge with special clarity, in the same way as in one of Galton’s composite photographs. The promise made by the young man (who up till then had been a bachelor) that he would come back and join his fellow-diners at their table, the scepticism of his boon-companions (whom experience had taught better), the exclamation ‘there goes another one '- all of these features fitted in easily with the alternative interpretation. So, too, did the ‘I will’ with which he replied to the official’s question. The turning over the bundle of papers, with the constant repetition of the same name corresponded to a less important but recognizable feature of wedding festivities, namely the reading out of a bundle of telegrams of congratulation, all of them with addresses bearing the same names. The phantasy of marriage actually scored a victory over the covering phantasy of arrest in the fact of the bride’s making a personal appearance in the dream. I was able to discover from an enquiry - the dream was not analysed - why it was that at the end of it the bride wore a beard. On the previous day the dreamer had been walking in the street with a friend who was as shy of marrying as he was himself, and he had drawn his friend’s attention to a darkhaired beauty who had passed them. ‘Yes’, his friend had remarked, ‘if only women like that didn’t grow beards like their fathers’ in a few years’ time.’ This dream did not, of course, lack elements in which dream-distortion had been carried deeper. It may well be, for instance, that the words ‘I’ll pay later’ referred to what he feared might be his father-in-law’s attitude on the subject of a dowry. In fact, all kinds of qualms were evidently preventing the dreamer from throwing himself into the phantasy of marriage with any enjoyment. One of these qualms, a fear that marriage might cost him his freedom, was embodied in the transformation into a scene of arrest.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

935

If we return for a moment to the point that the dream-work is glad to make use of a ready-made phantasy instead of putting one together out of the material of the dream-thoughts, we may perhaps find ourselves in a position to solve one of the most interesting puzzles connected with dreams. On pp. 568 f. I told the well-known anecdote of how Maury, having been struck in his sleep on the back of his neck by a piece of wood, woke up from a long dream which was like a full-length story set in the days of the French Revolution. Since the dream, as reported, was a coherent one and was planned entirely with an eye to providing an explanation of the stimulus which woke him and whose occurrence he could not have anticipated, the only possible hypothesis seems to be that the whole elaborate dream must have been composed and must have taken place in the short period of time between the contact of the board with Maury’s cervical vertebrae and his consequent awakening. We should never dare to attribute such rapidity to thought-activity in waking life, and we should therefore be driven to conclude that the dream-work possesses the advantage of accelerating our thought-processes to a remarkable degree.

Strong objections have been raised to what quickly became a popular conclusion by some more recent writers (Le Lorrain, 1894 and 1895, Egger, 1895, and others). On the one hand they throw doubts upon the accuracy of Maury’s account of his dream; and on the other hand they attempt to show that the rapidity of the operations of our waking thoughts is no less than in this dream when exaggerations have been discounted. The discussion raised questions of principle which do not seem to me immediately soluble. But I must confess that the arguments brought forward (by Egger, for instance), particularly against Maury’s guillotine dream, leave me unconvinced. I myself would propose the following explanation of this dream. Is it so highly improbable that Maury’s dream represents a phantasy which had been stored up ready-made in his memory for many years and which was aroused - or I would rather say ‘alluded to’ - at the moment at which he became aware of the stimulus which woke him? If this were so, we should have escaped the whole difficulty of understanding how such a long story with all its details could have been composed in the extremely short period of time which was at the dreamer’s disposal - for the story would have been composed already. If the piece of wood had struck the back of Maury’s neck while he was awake, there would have been an opportunity for some such thought as: ‘That’s just like being guillotined.’ But since it was in his sleep that he was struck by the board, the dream-work made use of the impinging stimulus in order rapidly to produce a wish-fulfilment; it was as though it thought (this is to he taken purely figuratively): ‘Here’s a good opportunity of realizing a wishful phantasy which was formed at such and such a time in the course of reading.’ It can hardly be disputed, I think, that the dream-story was precisely of a sort likely to be constructed by a young man under the influence of powerfully exciting impressions. Who - least of all what Frenchman or student of the history of civilization - could fail to be gripped by narratives of the Reign of Terror, when the men and women of the aristocracy, the flower of the nation, showed that they could die with a cheerful mind and could retain the liveliness of their wit and the elegance of their manners till the very moment of the fatal summons? How tempting for a young man to plunge into all this in his imagination - to picture himself bidding a lady farewell - kissing her hand and mounting the scaffold unafraid! Or, if ambition were the prime motive of the phantasy, how tempting for him to take the place of one of those formidable figures who, by the power alone of their thoughts and flaming eloquence, ruled the city in which the heart of humanity beat convulsively in those days - who were led by their convictions to send thousands of men to their death and who prepared the way for the transformation of Europe, while all the time their own heads were insecure and destined to fall one day beneath the knife of the guillotine - how tempting to picture himself as one of the Girondists, perhaps, or as the heroic Danton! There is one feature in Maury’s recollection of the dream, his being ‘led to the place of execution, surrounded by an immense mob’, which seems to suggest that his phantasy was in fact of this ambitious type.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

936

Nor is it necessary that this long-prepared phantasy should have been gone through during sleep; it would have been sufficient for it to be merely touched on. What I mean is this. If a few bars of music are played and someone comments that it is from Mozart’s Figaro (as happens in Don Giovanni) a number of recollections are roused in me all at once, none of which can enter my consciousness singly at the first moment. The key-phrase serves as a port of entry through which the whole network is simultaneously put in a state of excitation. It may well be the same in the case of unconscious thinking. The rousing stimulus excites the psychical port of entry which allows access to the whole guillotine phantasy. But the phantasy is not gone through during sleep but only in the recollection of the sleeper after his awakening. After waking he remembers in all its details the phantasy which was stirred up as a whole in his dream. One has no means of assuring oneself in such a case that one is really remembering something one has dreamt. This same explanation - that it is a question of ready-made phantasies which are brought into excitation as a whole by the rousing stimulus - can be applied to other dreams which are focused upon a rousing stimulus, such, for instance, as Napoleon’s battle dream before the explosion of the infernal machine.

Among the dreams collected by Justine Tobowolska in her dissertation on the apparent passage of time in dreams, the most informative seems to me to be the one reported by Macario (1857 ) as having been dreamt by a dramatic author, Casimir Bonjour. One evening Bonjour wanted to attend the first performance of one of his pieces; but he was so fatigued that as he was sitting behind the scenes he dozed off just at the moment the curtain went up. During his sleep he went through the whole five acts of the play, and observed all the various signs of emotion shown by the audience during the different scenes. At the end of the performance he was delighted to hear his name being shouted with the liveliest demonstrations of applause. Suddenly he woke up. He could not believe either his eyes or his ears, for the performance had not gone beyond the first few lines of the first scene; he could not have been asleep for longer than two minutes. It is surely not too rash to suppose in the case of this dream that the dreamer’s going through all five acts of the play and observing the attitude of the public to different passages in it need not have arisen from any fresh production of material during his sleep, but may have reproduced a piece of phantasy-activity (in the sense I have described) which had already been completed. Tobowolska, like other writers, emphasizes the fact that dreams with an accelerated passage of ideas have the common characteristic of seeming specially coherent, quite unlike other dreams, and that the recollection of them is summary far more than detailed. This would indeed be a characteristic which ready-made phantasies of this kind, touched upon by the dream-work, would be bound to possess, though this is a conclusion which the writers in question fail to draw. I do not assert, however, that all arousal dreams admit of this explanation, or that the problem of the accelerated passage of ideas in dreams can be entirely dismissed in this fashion.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

937

At this point it is impossible to avoid considering the relation between this secondary revision of the content of dreams and the remaining factors of the dream-work. Are we to suppose that what happens is that in the first instance the dream-constructing factors - the tendency towards condensation, the necessity for evading the censorship, and considerations of representability by the psychical means open to dreams - put together a provisional dream-content out of the material provided, and that this content is subsequently re-cast so as to conform so far as possible to the demands of a second agency! This is scarcely probable. We must assume rather that from the very first the demands of this second factor constitute one of the conditions which the dream must satisfy and that this condition, like those laid down by condensation, the censorship imposed by resistance, and representability, operates simultaneously in a conducive and selective sense upon the mass of material present in the dream-thoughts. In any case, however, of the four conditions for the formation of dreams, the one we have come to know last is the one whose demands appear to have the least cogent influence on dreams.

The following consideration makes it highly probable that the psychical function which carries out what we have described as the secondary revision of the content of dreams is to be identified with the activity of our waking thought. Our waking (preconscious) thinking behaves towards any perceptual material with which it meets in just the same way in which the function we are considering behaves towards the content of dreams. It is the nature of our waking thought to establish order in material of that kind, to set up relations in it and to make it conform to our expectations of an intelligible whole. In fact, we go too far in that direction. An adept in sleight of hand can trick us by relying upon this intellectual habit of ours. In our efforts at making an intelligible pattern of the sense-impressions that are offered to us, we often fall into the strangest errors or even falsify the truth about the material before us.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

938

The evidences of this are too universally known for there to be any need to insist upon them further. In our reading we pass over misprints which destroy the sense, and have the illusion that what we are reading is correct. The editor of a popular French periodical is said to have made a bet that he would have the words ‘in front’ or ‘behind’ inserted by the printer in every sentence of a long article without a single one of his readers noticing it. He won his bet. Many years ago I read in a newspaper a comic instance of a false connection. On one occasion during a sitting of the French Chamber a bomb thrown by an anarchist exploded in the Chamber itself and Dupuy subdued the consequent panic with the courageous words: ‘La séance continue.’ The visitors in the gallery were asked to give their impressions as witnesses of the outrage. Among them were two men from the provinces. One of these said that it was true that he had heard a detonation at the close of one of the speeches but had assumed that it was a parliamentary usage to fire a shot each time a speaker sat down. The second one, who had probably already heard several speeches, had come to the same conclusion, except that he supposed that a shot was only fired as a tribute to a particularly successful speech.

There is no doubt, then, that it is our normal thinking that is the psychical agency which approaches the content of dreams with a demand that it must be intelligible, which subjects it to a first interpretation and which consequently produces a complete misunderstanding of it. For the purposes of our interpretation it remains an essential rule invariably to leave out of account the ostensible continuity of a dream as being of suspect origin, and to follow the same path back to the material of the dream-thoughts, no matter whether the dream itself is clear or confused.

We now perceive, incidentally, on what it is that the range in the quality of dreams between confusion and clarity which was discussed on p. 779 f. depends. Those parts of a dream on which the secondary revision has been able to produce some effect are clear, while those parts on which its efforts have failed are confused. Since the confused parts of a dream are so often at the same time the less vivid parts, we may conclude that the secondary dream-work is also to be held responsible for a contribution to the plastic intensity of the different dream-elements.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

939

If I look around for something with which to compare the final form assumed by a dream as it appears after normal thought has made its contribution, I can think of nothing better than the enigmatic inscriptions with which Fliegende Blätter has for so long entertained its readers. They are intended to make the reader believe that a certain sentence - for the sake of contrast, a sentence in dialect and as scurrilous as possible - is a Latin inscription. For this purpose the letters contained in the words are torn out of their combination into syllables and arranged in a new order. Here and there a genuine Latin word appears; at other points we seem to see abbreviations of Latin words before us; and at still other points in the inscription we may allow ourselves to be deceived into overlooking the senselessness of isolated letters by parts of the inscription seeming to be defaced or showing lacunae. If we are to avoid being taken in by the joke, we must disregard everything that makes it seem like an inscription, look firmly at the letters, pay no attention to their ostensible arrangement, and so combine them into words belonging to our own mother tongue.

Secondary revision is the one factor in the dream-work which has been observed by the majority of writers on the subject and of which the significance has been appreciated. Havelock Ellis (1911, 10-11) has given an amusing account of its functioning: ‘Sleeping consciousness we may even imagine as saying to itself in effect: "Here comes our master, Waking Consciousness, who attaches such mighty importance to reason and logic and so forth. Quick! gather things up, put them in order - any order will do - before he enters to take possession."'

The identity of its method of working with that of waking thought has been stated with particular clarity by Delacroix (1904, 926): ‘Cette fonction d’interprétation n’est pas particulère au rêve; c’est le même travail de coordination logique que nous faisons sur nos sensations pendant la veille.’¹ James Sully is of the same opinion. So, too, is Tobowolska (1900, 93): ‘Sur ces successions incohérentes d’hallucinations, l’esprit s’efforce de faire le même travail de coordination logique qu’il fait pendant la veille sur les sensations. Il relie entre elles par un lien imaginaire toutes ces images décousues et bouche les écarts trop grands qui se trouvaient entre elles.’²

¹ [‘This interpretative function is not peculiar to dreams. It is the same work of logical co-ordination which we carry out upon our sensations while we are awake.’]

² [‘The mind endeavours to carry out upon these incoherent trains of hallucinations the same work of logical co-ordination that it carries out upon sensations during the daytime. It connects up all these detached images by an imaginary link and stops up any excessively wide gaps between them.’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

940

According to some writers, this process of arranging and interpreting begins during the dream itself and is continued after waking. Thus Paulhan (1894, 546): ‘Cependant j’ai souvent pensé qu’il pouvait y avoir une certaine déformation, ou plutôt reformation, du rêve dans le souvenir. . . . La tendence systématisante de l’imagination pourrait fort bien achever après le réveil ce qu’elle a ébauché pendant le sommeil. De la sorte, la rapidité réelle de la pensée serait augmentée en apparence par les perfectionnements dus à l’imagination éveillée.’¹ Bernard-Leroy and Tobowolska (1901, 592): ‘Dans le rêve, au contraire, l’interprétation et la coordination se font non selllement à l’aide des données du rêve, mais encore à l’aide de celles de la veille. . . .’²

Inevitably, therefore, this one recognized factor in the formation of dreams has had its importance over-estimated, so that it has been credited with the whole achievement of the creation of dreams. This act of creation, as Goblot (1896, 280 f.) and still more Foucault (1906) suppose, is performed at the moment of waking; for these two writers attribute to waking thought an ability to construct a dream out of the thoughts that emerge during sleep. Bernard-Leroy and Tobowolska (1901) comment on this view: ‘On a cru pouvoir placer le rêve au moment du réveil, et ils ont attribué à la pensée de la veille la fonction de construire le rêve avec les images présentes dans li pensée du sommeil.’³

¹ [‘I have often thought, however, that dreams may be to some extent misshaped, or rather reshaped, in memory. . . . The tendency of the imagination towards systematization might very well complete after waking what it had started upon in sleep. In that way the real speed of thought would be given an apparent increase by the improvements due to the waking imagination.’]

² [‘In a dream, on the contrary, interpretation and co-ordination are carried out by the help not only of the data presented in the dream, but of the data available in waking life. . . .’]

³ [‘It has been thought possible to locate dreams at the moment of waking, and have ascribed to waking thought the function of constructing dreams out of the images present in sleeping thought.’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

941

From this discussion of secondary revision I will go on to consider a further factor in the dream-work which has recently been brought to light by some finely perceptive observations carried out by Herbert Silberer. As I have mentioned earlier (p. 814 ff.), Silberer has, as it were, caught in the very act the process of transforming thoughts into images, by forcing himself into intellectual activity while he was in a state of fatigue and drowsiness. At such moments the thought with which he was dealing vanished and was replaced by a vision which turned out to be a substitute for what were as a rule abstract thoughts, (Cf. the examples in the passage just referred to.) Now it happened during these experiments that the image which arose, and which might be compared to an element of a dream, sometimes represented something other than the thought that was being dealt with - namely, the fatigue itself, the difficulty and unpleasure involved in the work. It represented, that is to say, the subjective state and mode of functioning of the person making the effort instead of the object of his efforts. Silberer described occurrences of this kind, which were very frequent in his case, as a ‘functional phenomenon’ in contrast to the ‘material phenomenon’ which would have been expected.

For instance: ‘One afternoon I was lying on my sofa feeling extremely sleepy; nevertheless I forced myself to think over a philosophical problem. I wanted to compare the views of Kant and Schopenhauer upon Time. As a result of my drowsiness I was unable to keep the arguments of both of them before my mind at once, which was necessary in order to make the comparison. After a number of vain attempts, I once more impressed Kant’s deductions upon my mind with all the strength of my will, so that I might apply them to Schopenhauer’s statement of the problem. I then directed my attention to the latter; but when I tried to turn back again to Kant, I found that his argument had once more escaped me and I tried vainly to pick it up once more. This vain effort at recovering the Kant dossier which was stored away somewhere in my head was suddenly represented before my closed eyes as a concrete and plastic symbol, as though it were a dream-picture: I was asking for information from a disobliging secretary who was bent over his writing-table and refused to put himself out at my insistent demand. He half straightened himself and gave me a disagreeable and uncomplying look’. (Silberer, 1909, 513 f.)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

942

Here are some other instances, which relate to the oscillation between sleeping and waking:

‘Example No. 2. - Circumstances: In the morning, at waking. While I was at a certain depth of sleep (a twilight state) and reflecting over a previous dream and in a sort of way continuing to dream it, I felt myself approaching nearer to waking consciousness but wanted to remain in the twilight state.

‘Scene: I was stepping across a brook with one foot but drew it back again at once with the intention of remaining on this side.’ (Silberer, 1912, 625.)

‘Example No. 6. - Conditions as in example No. 4' (in which he had wanted to lie in bed a little longer, though without oversleeping). ‘I wanted to give way to sleep for a little longer.

‘Scene: I was saying good-bye to someone and was arranging with him (or her) to meet him (or her) again soon.’ (Ibid., 627.)

The ‘functional’ phenomenon, ‘the representation of a state instead of an object’, was observed by Silberer principally in the two conditions of falling asleep and waking up. It is obvious that dream-interpretation is only concerned with the latter case. Silberer has given examples which show convincingly that in many dreams the last pieces of the manifest content, which are immediately followed by waking, represent nothing more nor less than an intention to wake or the process of waking. The representation may be in terms of such images as crossing a threshold (‘threshold symbolism’), leaving one room and entering another, departure, home-coming, parting with a companion, diving into water, etc. I cannot, however, refrain from remarking that I have come across dream-elements which can be related to threshold symbolism, whether in my own dreams or in those of subjects whom I have analysed, far less frequently than Silberer’s communications would have led one to expect.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

943

It is by no means inconceivable or improbable that this threshold symbolism might throw light upon some elements in the middle of the texture of dreams - in places, for instance, where there is a question of oscillations in the depth of sleep and of an inclination to break off the dream. Convincing instances of this, however, have not been produced. What seem to occur more frequently are cases of overdetermination, in which a part of a dream which has derived its material content from the nexus of dream-thoughts is employed to represent in addition some state of mental activity.

This very interesting functional phenomenon of Silberer’s has, through no fault of its discoverer’s, led to many abuses; for it has been regarded as lending support to the old inclination to give abstract and symbolic interpretations to dreams. The preference for the ‘functional category’ is carried so far by some people that they speak of the functional phenomenon wherever intellectual activities or emotional processes occur in the dream-thoughts, although such material has neither more nor less right than any other kind to find its way into a dream as residues of the previous day.

We are ready to recognize the fact that Silberer’s phenomena constitute a second contribution on the part of waking thought to the construction of dreams; though it is less regularly present and less significant than the first one, which has already been introduced under the name of ‘secondary revision.’ It has been shown that a part of the attention which operates during the day continues to be directed towards dreams during the state of sleep, that it keeps a check on them and criticizes them and reserves the power to interrupt them. It has seemed plausible to recognize in the mental agency which thus remains awake the censor to whom we have had to attribute such a powerful restricting influence upon the form taken by dreams. What Silberer’s observations have added to this is the fact that in certain circumstances a species of self-observation plays a part in this and makes a contribution to the content of the dream. The probable relations of this self-observing agency, which may be particularly prominent in philosophical minds, to endopsychic perception, to delusions of observation, to conscience and to the censor of dreams can be more appropriately treated elsewhere.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] ‘On Narcissism’ (Freud, 1914c).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

944

I will now try to sum up this lengthy disquisition on the dream-work. We were faced by the question whether the mind employs the whole of its faculties without reserve in constructing dreams or only a functionally restricted fragment of them. Our investigations led us to reject entirely the form in which the question was framed as being inadequate to the circumstances. If, however, we had to reply to the question on the basis of the terms in which it was stated, we should be obliged to reply in the affirmative to both the alternatives, mutually exclusive though they appear to be. Two separate functions may be distinguished in mental activity during the construction of a dream: the production of the dream-thoughts, and their transformation into the content of the dream. The dream-thoughts are entirely rational and are constructed with an expenditure of all the psychical energy of which we are capable. They have their place among thought-processes that have not become conscious - processes from which, after some modification, our conscious thoughts, too, arise. However many interesting and puzzling questions the dream-thoughts may involve, such questions have, after all, no special relation to dreams and do not call for treatment among the problems of dreams.¹On the other hand, the second function of mental activity during dream-construction, the transformation of the unconscious thoughts into the content of the dream, is peculiar to dream-life and characteristic of it. This dream-work proper diverges further from our picture of waking thought than has been supposed even by the most determined depreciator of psychical functioning during the formation of dreams. The dream-work is not simply more careless, more irrational, more forgetful and more incomplete than waking thought; it is completely different from it qualitatively and for that reason not immediately comparable with it. It does not think, calculate or judge in any way at all; it restricts itself to giving things a new form. It is exhaustively described by an enumeration of the conditions which it has to satisfy in producing its result. That product, the dream, has above all to evade the censorship, and with that end in view the dream-work makes use of a displacement of psychical intensities to the point of a transvaluation of all psychical values. The thoughts have to be reproduced exclusively or predominantly in the material of visual and acoustic memory-traces, and this necessity imposes upon the dream-work considerations of representability which it meets by carrying out fresh displacements. Greater intensities have probably to be produced than are available in the dream-thoughts at night, and this purpose is served by the extensive condensation which is carried out with the constituents of the dream-thoughts. Little attention is paid to the logical relations between the thoughts; those relations are ultimately given a disguised representation in certain formal characteristics of dreams. Any affect attached to the dream-thoughts undergoes less modification than their ideational content. Such affects are as a rule suppressed; when they are retained, they are detached from the ideas that properly belong to them, affects of a similar character being brought together. Only a single portion of the dream-work and one which operates to an irregular degree, the working over of the material by partly aroused waking thought, tallies to some extent with the view which other writers have sought to apply to the entire activity of dream-construction.

¹ [Footnote added 1925:] I used at one time to find it extraordinarily difficult to accustom readers to the distinction between the manifest content of dreams and the latent dream-thoughts. Again and again arguments and objections would be brought up based upon some uninterpreted dream in the form in which it had been retained in the memory, and the need to interpret it would be ignored. But now that analysts at least have become reconciled to replacing the manifest dream by the meaning revealed by its interpretation, many of them have become guilty of falling into another confusion which they cling to with equal obstinacy. They seek to find the essence of dreams in their latent content and in so doing they overlook the distinction between the latent dream-thoughts and the dream-work. At bottom, dreams are nothing other than a particular form of thinking, made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep. It is the dream-work which creates that form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming - the explanation of its peculiar nature. I say this in order to make it possible to assess the value of the notorious ‘prospective purpose’ of dreams. The fact that dreams concern themselves with attempts at solving the problems by which our mental life is faced is no more strange than that our conscious waking life should do so; beyond this it merely tells us that that activity can also be carried on in the preconscious - and this we already knew.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

945

CHAPTER VII

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM PROCESSES

Among the dreams which have been reported to me by other people, there is one which has special claims upon our attention at this point. It was told to me by a woman patient who had herself heard it in a lecture on dreams: its actual source is still unknown to me. Its content made an impression on the lady, however, and she proceeded to ‘re-dream’ it, that is, to repeat some of its elements in a dream of her own, so that, by taking it over in this way, she might express her agreement with it on one particular point.

The preliminaries to this model dream were as follows. A father had been watching beside his child’s sick-bed for days and nights on end. After the child had died, he went into the next room to lie down, but left the door open so that he could see from his bedroom into the room in which his child’s body was laid out, with tall candles standing round it. An old man had been engaged to keep watch over it, and sat beside the body murmuring prayers. After a few hours’ sleep, the father had a dream that his child was standing besides his bed, caught him by the arm and whispered to him reproachfully: ‘Father, don’t you see I’m burning?’ He woke up, noticed a bright glare of light from the next room, hurried into it and found that the old watchman had dropped off to sleep and that the wrappings and one of the arms of his beloved child’s dead body had been burned by a lighted candle that had fallen on them.

The explanation of this moving dream is simple enough and, so my patient told me, was correctly given by the lecturer. The glare of light shone though the open door into the sleeping man’s eyes and led him to the conclusion which he would have arrived at if he had been awake, namely that a candle had fallen over and set something alight in the neighbourhood of the body. It is even possible that he had felt some concern when he went to sleep as to whether the old man might not be incompetent to carry out his task.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

946

Nor have I any changes to suggest in this interpretation except to add that the content of the dream must have been overdetermined and that the words spoken by the child must have been made up of words which he had actually spoken in his lifetime and which were connected with important events in the father’s mind. For instance, ‘I’m burning’ may have been spoken during the fever of the child’s last illness, and ‘Father, don’t you see?’ may have been derived from some other highly emotional situation of which we are in ignorance.

But, having recognized that the dream was a process with a meaning, and that it can be inserted into the chain of the dreamer’s psychical experiences, we may still wonder why it was that a dream occurred at all in such circumstances, when the most rapid possible awakening was called for. And here we shall observe that this dream, too, contained the fulfilment of a wish. The dead child behaved in the dream like a living one: he himself warned his father, came to his bed, and caught him by the arm, just as he had probably done on the occasion from the memory of which the first part of the child’s words in the dream were derived. For the sake of the fulfilment of this wish the father prolonged his sleep by one moment. The dream was preferred to a waking reflection because it was able to show the child as once more alive. If the father had woken up first and then made the inference that led him to go into the next room, he would, as it were, have shortened his child’s life by that moment of time.

There can be no doubt what the peculiar feature is which attracts our interest to this brief dream. Hitherto we have been principally concerned with the secret meaning of dreams and the method of discovering it and with the means employed by the dream-work for concealing it. The problems of dream-interpretation have hitherto occupied the centre of the picture. And now we come upon a dream which raises no problem of interpretation and the meaning of which is obvious, but which, as we see, nevertheless retains the essential characteristics that differentiate dreams so strikingly from waking life and consequently call for explanation. It is only after we have disposed of everything that has to do with the work of interpretation that we can begin to realize the incompleteness of our psychology of dreams.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

947

But before starting off along this new path, it will be well to pause and look around, to see whether in the course of our journey up to this point we have overlooked anything of importance. For it must be clearly understood that the easy and agreeable portion of our journey lies behind us. Hitherto, unless I am greatly mistaken, all the paths along which we have travelled have led us towards the light - towards elucidation and fuller understanding. But as soon as we endeavour to penetrate more deeply into the mental process involved in dreaming, every path will end in darkness. There is no possibility of explaining dreams as a psychical process, since to explain a thing means to trace it back to something already known, and there is at the present time no established psychological knowledge under which we could subsume what the psychological examination of dreams enables us to infer as a basis for their explanation. On the contrary, we shall be obliged to set up a number of fresh hypotheses which touch tentatively upon the structure of the apparatus of the mind and upon the play of forces operating in it. We must be careful, however, not to pursue these hypotheses too far beyond their first logical links, or their value will be lost in uncertainties. Even if we make no false inferences and take all the logical possibilities into account, the probable incompleteness of our premises threatens to bring our calculation to a complete miscarriage. No conclusions upon the construction and working methods of the mental instrument can be arrived at or at least fully proved from even the most painstaking investigation of dreams or of any other mental function taken in isolation. To achieve this result, it will be necessary to correlate all the established implications derived from a comparative study of a whole series of such functions. Thus the psychological hypotheses to which we are led by an analysis of the processes of dreaming must be left, as it were, in suspense, until they can be related to the findings of other enquiries which seek to approach the kernel of the same problem from another angle.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

948

(A)

THE FORGETTING OF DREAMS

I suggest, therefore, that we should first turn to a topic that raises a difficulty which we have not hitherto considered but which is nevertheless capable of cutting the ground from under all our efforts at interpreting dreams. It has been objected on more than one occasion that we have in fact no knowledge of the dreams that we set out to interpret, or, speaking more correctly, that we have no guarantee that we know them as they actually occurred.(See p. 555 ff.)

In the first place, what we remember of a dream and what we exercise our interpretative arts upon has been mutilated by the untrustworthiness of our memory, which seems quite especially incapable of retaining a dream and may well have lost precisely the most important parts of its content. It quite frequently happens that when we seek to turn our attention to one of our dreams we find ourselves regretting the fact that, though we dreamt far more, we can remember nothing but a single fragment which is itself recollected with peculiar uncertainty.

Secondly, there is every reason to suspect that our memory of dreams is not only fragmentary but positively inaccurate and falsified. On the one hand it may be doubted whether what we dreamt was really as disconnected and hazy as our recollection of it; and on the other hand it may also be doubted whether a dream was really as connected as it is in the account we give of it, whether in attempting to reproduce it we do not fill in what was never there, or what has been forgotten, with new and arbitrarily selected material, whether we do not add embellishments and trimmings and round it off so that there is no possibility of deciding what its original content may have been. Indeed one author, Spitta (1882),¹ goes to the point of suggesting that in so far as a dream shows any kind of order or coherence, these qualities are only introduced into it when we try to recall it to mind. Thus there seems to be a danger that the very thing whose value we have undertaken to assess may slip completely through our fingers.

¹ So too Foucault and Talmery.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

949

Hitherto in interpreting dreams we have disregarded such warnings. On the contrary, we have accepted it as being just as important to interpret the smallest, least conspicuous and most uncertain constituents of the content of dreams as those that are most clearly and certainly preserved. The dream of Irma’s injection contained the phrase ‘I at once called in Dr. M.’; and we assumed that even this detail would not have found its way into the dream unless it had had some particular origin. It was thus that we came upon the story of the unfortunate patient to whose bedside I had ‘at once’ called in my senior colleague. In the apparently absurd dream which treated the difference between 51 and 56 as a negligible quantity, the number 51 was mentioned several times. Instead of regarding this as a matter of course or as something indifferent, we inferred from it that there was a second line of thought in the latent content of the dream leading to the number 51; and along this track we arrived at my fears of 51 years being the limit of my life, in glaring contrast to the dream’s dominant train of thought which was lavish in its boasts of a long life. In the ‘Non vixit’dream there was an inconspicuous interpolation which I overlooked at first: ‘As P. failed to understand him, Fl. asked me’, etc. When the interpretation was held up, I went back to these words and it was they that led me on to the childhood phantasy which turned out to be an intermediate nodal point in the dream-thoughts. This was arrived at by way of the lines:

Selten habt ihr mich verstanden,

Selten auch verstand ich Euch,

Nur wenn wir im Kot uns fanden,

So verstanden wir uns gleich.¹

Examples could be found in every analysis to show that precisely the most trivial elements of a dream are indispensable to its interpretation and that the work in hand is held up if attention is not paid to these elements until too late. We have attached no less importance in interpreting dreams to every shade of the form of words in which they were laid before us. And even when it happened that the text of the dream as we had it was meaningless or inadequate - as though the effort to give a correct account of it had been unsuccessful - we have taken this defect into account as well. In short, we have treated as Holy Writ what previous writers have regarded as an arbitrary improvisation, hurriedly patched together in the embarrassment of the moment. This contradiction stands in need of an explanation.

¹ [Literally: ‘Rarely have you understood me, and rarely too have I understood you. Not until we both found ourselves in the mud did we promptly understand each other.’ Heine, Buch der Lieder, ‘Die Heimkehr’, LXXVIII.]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

950

The explanation is in our favour, though without putting the other writers in the wrong. In the light of our newly-won understanding of the origin of dreams the contradiction disappears completely. It is true that we distort dreams in attempting to reproduce them; here we find at work once more the process which we have described as the secondary (and often ill-conceived) revision of the dream by the agency which carries out normal thinking. But this distortion is itself no more than a part of the revision to which the dream-thoughts are regularly subjected as a result of the dream-censorship. The other writers have at this point noticed or suspected the part of dream-distortion which operates manifestly; we are less interested, since we know that a much more far-reaching process of distortion, though a less obvious one, has already developed the dream out of the hidden dream-thoughts. The only mistake made by previous writers has been in supposing that the modification of the dream in the course of being remembered and put into words is an arbitrary one and cannot be further resolved and that it is therefore calculated to give us a misleading picture of the dream. They have underestimated the extent to which psychical events are determined. There is nothing arbitrary about them. It can be shown quite generally that if an element is left undetermined by one train of thought, its determination is immediately effected by a second one. For instance. I may try to think of a number arbitrarily. But this is impossible: the number that occurs to me will be unambiguously and necessarily determined by thoughts of mine, though they may be remote from my immediate intention.¹ The modifications to which dreams are submitted under the editorship of waking life are just as little arbitrary. They are associatively linked to the material which they replace, and serve to show us the way to that material, which may in its turn be a substitute for something else.

In analysing the dreams of my patients I sometimes put this assertion to the following test, which has never failed me. If the first account given me by a patient of a dream is too hard to follow I ask him to repeat it. In doing so he rarely uses the same words. But the parts of the dream which he describes in different terms are by that fact revealed to me as the weak spot in the dream’s disguise: they serve my purpose just as Hagen’s was served by the embroidered mark on Siegfried’s cloak. That is the point at which the interpretation of the dream can be started. My request to the patient to repeat his account of the dream has warned him that I was proposing to take special pains in solving it; under pressure of the resistance, therefore, he hastily covers the weak spots in the dream’s disguise by replacing any expressions that threaten to betray its meaning by other less revealing ones. In this way he draws my attention to the expression which he has dropped out. The trouble taken by the dreamer in preventing the solution of the dream gives me a basis for estimating the care with which its cloak has been woven.

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] See my Psychopathology of Everyday Life.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

951

Previous writers have had less justification in devoting so much space to the doubt with which our judgement receives accounts of dreams. For this doubt has no intellectual warrant. There is in general no guarantee of the correctness of our memory; and yet we yield to the compulsion to attach belief to its data far more often than is objectively justified. Doubt whether a dream or certain of its details have been correctly reported is once more a derivative of the dream-censorship, of resistance to the penetration of the dream-thoughts into consciousness. This resistance has not been exhausted even by the displacements and substitutions it has brought about; it persists in the form of doubt attaching to the material which has been allowed through. We are especially inclined to misunderstand this doubt since it is careful never to attack the more intense elements of a dream but only the weak and indistinct ones. As we already know, however, a complete reversal of all psychical values takes place between the dream-thoughts and the dream. Distortion is only made possible by a withdrawal of psychical value; it habitually expresses itself by that means and is occasionally content to require nothing more. If, then, an indistinct element of a dream’s content is in addition attacked by doubt, we have a sure indication that we are dealing with a comparatively direct derivative of one of the proscribed dream-thoughts. The state of things is what it was after some sweeping revolution in one of the republics of antiquity or the Renaissance. The noble and powerful families which had previously dominated the scene were sent into exile and all the high offices were filled by newcomers. Only the most impoverished and powerless members of the vanquished families, or their remote dependants, were allowed to remain in the city; and even so they did not enjoy full civic rights and were viewed with distrust. The distrust in this analogy corresponds to the doubt in the case we are considering. That is why in analysing a dream I insist that the whole scale of estimates of certainty shall be abandoned and that the faintest possibility that something of this or that sort may have occurred in the dream shall be treated as complete certainty. In tracing any element of a dream it will be found that unless this attitude is firmly adopted the analysis will come to a standstill. If any doubt is thrown upon the value of the element in question, the psychical result in the patient is that none of the involuntary ideas underlying that element comes into his head. This result is not a self-evident one. It would not make nonsense if someone were to say: ‘I don’t know for certain whether such and such a thing came into the dream, but here is what occurs to me in connection with it.’ But in fact no one ever does say this; and it is precisely the fact that doubt produces this interrupting effect upon an analysis that reveals it as a derivative and tool of psychical resistance. Psycho-analysis is justly suspicious. One of its rules is that whatever interrupts the progress of analytic work is a resistance.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1925:] The proposition laid down in these peremptory terms - ‘whatever interrupts the progress of analytic work is a resistance’ is easily open to misunderstanding. It is of course only to be taken as a technical rule, as a warning to analysts. It cannot be disputed that in the course of an analysis various events may occur the responsibility for which cannot be laid upon the patient’s intentions. His father may die without his having murdered him; or a war may break out which brings the analysis to an end. But behind its obvious exaggeration the proposition is asserting something both true and new. Even if the interrupting event is a real one and independent of the patient, it often depends on him how great an interruption it causes; and resistance shows itself unmistakably in the readiness with which he accepts an occurrence of this kind or the exaggerated use which he make of it.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

952

The forgetting of dreams, too, remains inexplicable unless the power of the psychical censorship is taken into account. In a number of cases the feeling of having dreamt a great deal during the night and of only having retained a little of it may in fact have some other meaning, such as that the dream-work has been perceptibly proceeding all through the night but has only left a short dream behind. It is no doubt true that we forget dreams more and more as time passes after waking; we often forget them in spite of the most painstaking efforts to recall them. But I am of opinion that the extent of this forgetting is as a rule overestimated; and there is a similar overestimation of the extent to which the gaps in a dream limit our knowledge of it. It is often possible by means of analysis to restore all that has been lost by the forgetting of the dream’s content; at least, in quite a number of cases one can reconstruct from a single remaining fragment not, it is true, the dream - which is in any case a matter of no importance - but all the dream-thoughts. This demands a certain amount of attention and self-discipline in carrying out the analysis; that is all - but it shows that there was no lack of a hostile purpose at work in the forgetting of the dream.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1919:] I may quote the following dream from my Introductory Lectures as an example of the meaning of doubt and uncertainty in a dream and of its content being at the same time shrunk down to a single element; in spite of this the dream was successfully analysed after a short delay:

‘A sceptical woman patient had a longish dream in the course of which some people told her about my book on jokes and praised it highly. Something came in then about a "channel", perhaps it was another book that mentioned a channel, or something else about a channel . . . she didn’t know . . . it was all so indistinct.

‘No doubt you will be inclined to expect that the element "channel," since it was so indistinct, would be inaccessible to interpretation. You are right in suspecting a difficulty; but the difficulty did not arise from the indistinctness: both the difficulty and the indistinctness arose from another cause. Nothing occurred to the dreamer in connection with "channel," and I could of course throw no light on it. A little later - it was the next day, in point of fact - she told me that she had thought of something that might have something to do with it. It was a joke, too - a joke she had heard. On the steamer between Dover and Calais a well-known author fell into conversation with an Englishman. The latter had occasion to quote the phrase: "Du sublime au ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas. [It is only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous.]" Yes, replied the author, "le Pas de Calais" - meaning that he thought France sublime and England ridiculous. But the Pas de Calais is a channel - the English Channel. You will ask whether I think this had anything to do with the dream. Certainly I think so; and it provides the solution of the puzzling element of the dream. Can you doubt that this joke was already present before the dream occurred, as the unconscious thought behind the element "channel"? Can you suppose that it was introduced as a subsequent invention? The association betrayed the scepticism which lay concealed behind the patient’s ostensible admiration; and her resistance against revealing this was no doubt the common cause both of her delay in producing the association and of the indistinctness of the dream-element concerned. Consider the relation of the dream-element to its unconscious background: it was, as it were, a fragment of that background, an allusion to it, but it was made quite incomprehensible by being isolated.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

953

Convincing evidence of the fact that the forgetting of dreams is tendentious and serves the purpose of resistance¹ is afforded when it is possible to observe in analyses a preliminary stage of forgetting. It not infrequently happens that in the middle of the work of interpretation an omitted portion of the dream comes to light and is described as having been forgotten till that moment. Now a part of a dream that has been rescued from oblivion in this way is invariably the most important part; it always lies on the shortest road to the dream’s solution and has for that reason been exposed to resistance more than any other part. Among the specimen dreams scattered through this volume, there is one in which a part of its content was added like this as an after-thought. It is the travel dream in which I revenged myself on two disagreeable fellow-travellers and which I had to leave almost uninterpreted on account of its gross indecency. The omitted portion ran as follows: ‘I said, referring to one of Schiller’s works: "It is from . . ." but, noticing the mistake, I corrected myself: "It is by . . ." "Yes", the man commented to his sister, "he said that right."‘²

¹ On the purposes of forgetting in general see my short paper on the psychical mechanism of forgetting (Freud, 1898b). [Added 1909:] Later included as the first chapter in my Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Freud, 1901b)

² [Footnote added 1914:] Corrections such as this in the usages of foreign languages are not infrequent in dreams but are more often attributed to other people. Maury (1878, 143) once dreamt, at a time when he was learning English, that, in telling someone that he had visited him the day before, he used the words ‘I called for you yesterday.’ Whereupon the other answered correctly: ‘You should have said "I called on you yesterday".’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

954

Self-corrections in dreams, which seem so marvellous to some writers, need not occupy our attention. I will indicate instead the recollection which served as the model for my verbal error in this dream. When I was nineteen years old I visited England for the first time and spent a whole day on the shore of the Irish Sea. I naturally revelled in the opportunity of collecting the marine animals left behind by the tide and I was occupied with a starfish - the words ‘Hollthurn’ and ‘holothurians [sea-slugs]’ occurred at the beginning of the dream - when a charming little girl came up to me and said: ‘Is it a starfish? Is it alive?’ ‘Yes’, I replied, ‘he is alive’, and at once, embarrassed at my mistake, repeated the sentence correctly [‘It is alive’]. The dream replaced the verbal error which I then made by another into which a German is equally liable to fall. ‘Das Buch ist von Schiller’ should be translated not with a ‘from’ but with a ‘by.’ After all that we have heard of the purposes of the dream-work and its reckless choice of methods for attaining them, we shall not be surprised to hear that it effected this replacement because of the magnificent piece of condensation that was made possible by the identity of sound of the English ‘from’ and the German adjective ‘fromm’ [‘pious’]. But how did my blameless memory of the sea-shore come to be in the dream? It served as the most innocent possible example of my using a word indicating gender or sex in the wrong place - of my bringing in sex (the word ‘he’) where it did not belong. This, incidentally, was one of the keys to the solution of the dream. No one who has heard, furthermore, the origin attributed to the title of Clerk-Maxwell’s ‘Matter and Motion’ will have any difficulty in filling in the gaps: Moliere’s ‘Le Malade Imaginaire’ - ‘La matière est-elle laudable?’¹ - A motion of the bowels.

¹ [‘Is the matter laudable?’ - Old medical terminology for ‘Is the excretion healthy?’ - The next phrase is in English in the original.]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

955

Moreover I am in a position to offer an ocular demonstration of the fact that the forgetting of dreams is to a great extent a product of resistance. One of my patients will tell me he has had a dream but has forgotten every trace of it: it is therefore just as though it had never happened. We proceed with our work. I come up against a resistance; I therefore explain something to the patient and help him by encouragement and pressure to come to terms with some disagreeable thought. Hardly have I succeeded in this than he exclaims: ‘Now I remember what it was I dreamt.’ The same resistance which interfered with our work that day also made him forget the dream. By overcoming this resistance I have recalled the dream to his memory.

In just the same way, when a patient reaches some particular point in his work, he may be able to remember a dream which he had dreamt three or four or even more days before and which had hitherto remained forgotten.¹

Psycho-analytic experience has provided us with yet an other proof that the forgetting of dreams depends far more upon resistance than upon the fact, stressed by the authorities, that the waking and sleeping states are alien to each other. It not infrequently happens to me, as well as to other analysts and to patients under treatment, that, having been woken up, as one might say, by a dream, I immediately afterwards, and in full possession of my intellectual powers, set about interpreting it. In such cases I have often refused to rest till I have arrived at a complete understanding of the dream; yet it has sometimes been my experience that after finally waking up in the morning I have entirely forgotten both my interpretative activity and the content of the dream, though knowing that I have had a dream and interpreted it. It happens far more often that the dream draws the findings of my interpretative activity back with it into oblivion than that my intellectual activity succeeds in preserving the dream in my memory. Yet there is no such psychical gulf between my interpretative activity and my waking thoughts as the authorities suppose to account for the forgetting of dreams.

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] Ernest Jones has described an analogous case which often occurs: while a dream is being analysed the patient may recollect a second one which was dreamt during the same night but whose very existence had not been suspected.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

956

Morton Prince (1910) has objected to my explanation of the forgetting of dreams on the ground that that forgetting is only a special case of the amnesia attaching to dissociated mental states, that it is impossible to extend my explanation of this special amnesia to other types and that my explanation is consequently devoid of value even for its immediate purpose. His readers are thus reminded that in the course of all his descriptions of these dissociated states he has never attempted to discover a dynamic explanation of such phenomena. If he had, he would inevitably have found that repression (or, more precisely, the resistance created by it) is the cause both of the dissociations and of the amnesia attaching to their psychical content.

An observation which I have been able to make in the course of preparing this manuscript has shown me that dreams are no more forgotten than other mental acts and can be compared, by no means to their disadvantage, with other mental functions in respect of their retention in the memory. I had kept records of a large number of my own dreams which for one reason or another I had not been able to interpret completely at the time or had left entirely uninterpreted. And now, between one and two years later, I have attempted to interpret some of them for the purpose of obtaining more material in illustration of my views. These attempts have been successful in every instance; indeed the interpretation may be said to have proceeded more easily after this long interval than it did at the time when the dream was a recent experience. A possible explanation of this is that in the meantime I have overcome some of the internal resistances which previously obstructed me. When making these subsequent interpretations I have compared the dream-thoughts that I elicited at the time of the dream with the present, usually far more copious, yield, and I have always found that the old ones are included among the new. My astonishment at this was quickly halted by the reflection that I had long been in the habit of getting my patients, who sometimes tell me dreams dating from earlier years, to interpret them - by the same procedure and with the same success - as though they had dreamt them the night before. When I come to discuss anxiety-dreams I shall give two examples of postponed interpretations like these. I was led into making my first experiment of this kind by the justifiable expectation that in this as in other respects dreams would behave like neurotic symptoms. When I treat a psychoneurotic - a hysteric, let us say - by psycho-analysis, I am obliged to arrive at an explanation for the earliest and long since vanished symptoms of his illness no less than for the contemporary ones which brought him to me for treatment; and I actually find the earlier problem easier to solve than the immediate one. As long ago as in 1895 I was able to give an explanation in Studies on Hysteria of the first hysterical attack which a woman of over forty had had in her fifteenth year.¹

¹ [Added in the text in 1919 and transferred to a footnote in 1930:] Dreams which occur in the earliest years of childhood and are retained in the memory for dozens of years, often with complete sensory vividness, are almost always of great importance in enabling us to understand the history of the subject’s mental development and of his neurosis. Analysis of such dreams protects the physician from errors and uncertainties which may lead, among other things, to theoretical confusion.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

957

And here I will mention a number of further, somewhat disconnected, points on the subject of interpreting dreams, which may perhaps help to give readers their bearings should they feel inclined to check my statements by subsequent work upon their own dreams.

No one should expect that an interpretation of his dreams will fall into his lap like manna from the skies. Practice is needed even for perceiving endoptic phenomena or other sensations from which our attention is normally withheld; and this is so even though there is no psychical motive fighting against such perceptions. It is decidedly more difficult to get hold of ‘involuntary ideas.’ Anyone who seeks to do so must familiarize himself with the expectations raised in the present volume and must, in accordance with the rules laid down in it, endeavour during the work to refrain from any criticism, any parti pris, and any emotional or intellectual bias. He must bear in mind Claude Bernard’s advice to experimenters in a physiological laboratory: ‘travailler comme une bête’ - he must work, that is, with as much persistence as an animal and with as much disregard of the result. If this advice is followed, the task will no longer be a hard one.

The interpretation of a dream cannot always be accomplished at a single sitting. When we have followed a chain of associations, it not infrequently happens that we feel our capacity exhausted; nothing more is to be learnt from the dream that day. The wisest plan then is to break off and resume our work another day: another part of the dream’s content may then attract our attention and give us access to another stratum of dream-thoughts. This procedure might be described as ‘fractional’ dream-interpretation.

It is only with the greatest difficulty that the beginner in the business of interpreting dreams can be persuaded that his task is not at an end when he has a complete interpretation in his hands - an interpretation which makes sense, is coherent and throws light upon every element of the dream’s content. For the same dream may perhaps have another interpretation as well, an ‘over-interpretation’, which has escaped him. It is, indeed, not easy to form any conception of the abundance of the unconscious trains of thought, all striving to find expression, which are active in our minds. Nor is it easy to credit the skill shown by the dream-work in always hitting upon forms of expression that can bear several meanings - like the Little Tailor in the fairy story who hit seven flies at a blow. My readers will always be inclined to accuse me of introducing an unnecessary amount of ingenuity into my interpretations; but actual experience would teach them better.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

958

On the other hand, I cannot confirm the opinion, first stated by Silberer, that all dreams (or many dreams, or certain classes of dreams) require two different interpretations, which are even stated to bear a fixed relation to each other. One of these interpretations, which Silberer calls the ‘psycho-analytic’ one, is said to give the dream some meaning or other, usually of an infantile-sexual kind; the other and more important interpretation, to which he gives the name of ‘anagogic’, is said to reveal the more serious thoughts, often of profound import, which the dream-work has taken as its material. Silberer has not given evidence in support of this opinion by reporting a series of dreams analysed in the two directions. And I must object that the alleged fact is non-existent. In spite of what he says, the majority of dreams require no ‘over-interpretation’ and, more particularly, are insusceptible to an anagogic interpretation. As in the case of many other theories put forward in recent years, it is impossible to overlook the fact that Silberer’s views are influenced to some extent by a purpose which seeks to disguise the fundamental circumstances in which dreams are formed and to divert interest from their instinctual roots. In a certain number of cases I have been able to confirm Silberer’s statements. Analysis showed that in such cases the dream-work found itself faced with the problem of transforming into a dream a series of highly abstract thoughts from waking life which were incapable of being given any direct representation. It endeavoured to solve the problem by getting hold of another group of intellectual material, somewhat loosely related (often in a manner which might be described as ‘allegorical’) to the abstract thoughts, and at the same time capable of being represented with fewer difficulties. The abstract interpretation of a dream that has arisen in this way is given by the dreamer without any difficulty; the correct interpretation of the material that has been interpolated must be looked for by the technical methods which are now familiar to us.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

959

The question whether it is possible to interpret every dream must be answered in the negative. It must not be forgotten that in interpreting a dream we are opposed by the psychical forces which were responsible for its distortion. It is thus a question of relative strength whether our intellectual interest, our capacity for self-discipline, our psychological knowledge and our practice in interpreting dreams enable us to master our internal resistances. It is always possible to go some distance: far enough, at all events, to convince ourselves that the dream is a structure with a meaning, and as a rule far enough to get a glimpse of what that meaning is. Quite often an immediately succeeding dream allows us to confirm and carry further the interpretation we have tentatively adopted for its predecessor. A whole series of dreams, continuing over a period of weeks or months, is often based upon common ground and must accordingly be interpreted in connection with one another. In the case of two consecutive dreams it can often be observed that one takes as its central point something that is only on the periphery of the other and vice versa, so that their interpretations too are mutually complementary. I have already given instances which show that different dreams dreamt on the same night are, as a quite general rule, to be treated in their interpretation as a single whole.

There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure; this is because we become aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unravelled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown. The dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are found to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

960

But we must return to the facts concerning the forgetting of dreams, for we have failed to draw one important conclusion from them. We have seen that waking life shows an unmistakable inclination to forget any dream that has been formed in the course of the night - whether as a whole directly after waking, or bit by bit in the course of the day; and we have recognized that the agent chiefly responsible for this forgetting is the mental resistance to the dream which has already done what it could against it during the night. But if all this is so, the question arises how it comes about that a dream can be formed at all in the face of this resistance. Let us take the most extreme case, in which waking life has got rid of a dream as though it had never occurred. A consideration of the interplay of psychical forces in this case must lead us to infer that the dream would in fact not have occurred at all if the resistance had been as strong during the night as during the day. We must conclude that during the night the resistance loses some of its power, though we know it does not lose the whole of it, since we have shown the part it plays in the formation of dreams as a distorting agent. But we are driven to suppose that its power may be diminished at night and that this makes the formation of dreams possible. This makes it easy to understand how, having regained its full strength at the moment of waking, it at once proceeds to get rid of what it was obliged to permit while it was weak. Descriptive psychology tells us that the principal sine qua non for the formation of dreams is that the mind shall be in a state of sleep; and we are now able to explain this fact: the state of sleep makes the formation of dreams possible because it reduces the power of the endopsychic censorship.

It is no doubt tempting to regard this as the only possible inference that can be drawn from the facts of the forgetting of dreams, and to make it the basis for further conclusions as to the conditions of energy prevailing during sleeping and waking. For the moment, however, we will stop at this point. When we have entered a little more deeply into the psychology of dreams we shall find that the factors making possible the formation of dreams can be viewed in another way as well. It may be that the resistance against the dream-thoughts becoming conscious can be evaded without any reduction having taken place in its power. And it seems a plausible idea that both of the two factors favouring the formation of dreams - the reduction and the evasion of the resistance - are simultaneously made possible by the state of sleep. I will break off here, though I shall pick up the argument again presently.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

961

There is another set of objections to our method of interpreting dreams with which we must now deal. Our procedure consists in abandoning all those purposive ideas which normally govern our reflections, in focusing our attention on a single element of the dream and in then taking note of whatever involuntary thoughts may occur to us in connection with it. We then take the next portion of the dream and repeat the process with it. We allow ourselves to be led on by our thoughts regardless of the direction in which they carry us and drift on in this way from one thing to another. But we cherish a confident belief that in the end, without any active intervention on our part, we shall arrive at the dream-thoughts from which the dream originated.

Our critics argue against this along the following lines. There is nothing wonderful in the fact that a single element of the dream should lead us somewhere; every idea can be associated with something. What is remarkable is that such an aimless and arbitrary train of thought should happen to bring us to the dream-thoughts. The probability is that we are deceiving ourselves. We follow a chain of associations from one element, till, for one reason or another, it seems to break off. If we then take up a second element, it is only to be expected that the originally unrestricted character of our associations will be narrowed. For we still have the earlier chain of thoughts in our memory, and for that reason, in analysing the second dream-idea, we are more likely to hit upon associations which have something in common with associations from the first chain. We then delude ourselves into thinking that we have discovered a thought which is a connecting point between two elements of the dream. Since we give ourselves complete liberty to connect thoughts as we please and since in fact the only transitions from one idea to another which we exclude are those which operate in normal thinking, we shall find no difficulty in the long run in concocting out of a number of ‘intermediate thoughts’ something which we describe as the dream-thoughts and which - though without any guarantee, since we have no other knowledge of what the dream-thoughts are - we allege to be the psychical substitute for the dream. But the whole thing is completely arbitrary; we are merely exploiting chance connections in a manner which gives an effect of ingenuity. In this way anyone who cares to take such useless pains can worry out any interpretation he pleases from any dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

962

If we were in fact met by objections such as these, we might defend ourselves by appealing to the impression made by our interpretations, to the surprising connections with other elements of the dream which emerge in the course of our pursuing a single one of its ideas, and to the improbability that anything which gives such an exhaustive account of the dream could have been arrived at except by following up psychical connections which had already been laid down. We might also point out in our defence that our procedure in interpreting dreams is identical with the procedure by which we resolve hysterical symptoms;; and there the correctness of our method is warranted by the coincident emergence and disappearance of the symptoms, or, to use a simile, the assertions made in the text are borne out by the accompanying illustrations. But we have no reason for evading the problem of how it is possible to reach a pre-existing goal by following the drift of an arbitrary and purposeless chain of thoughts; since, though we may not be able to solve the problem, we can completely cut the ground from under it.

For it is demonstrably untrue that we are being carried along a purposeless stream of ideas when, in the process of interpreting a dream, we abandon reflection and allow involuntary ideas to emerge. It can be shown that all that we can ever get rid of are purposive ideas that are known to us; as soon as we have done this, unknown - or, as we inaccurately say, ‘unconscious’ - purposive ideas take charge and thereafter determine the course of the involuntary ideas. No influence that we can bring to bear upon our mental processes can ever enable us to think without purposive ideas; nor am I aware of any states of psychical confusion which can do so.¹ Psychiatrists have been far too ready in this respect to abandon their belief in the connectedness of psychical processes. I know for a fact that trains of thought without purposive ideas no more occur in hysteria and paranoia than they do in the formation or resolution of dreams. It may be that they do not occur in any of the endogenous psychical disorders. Even the deliria of confusional states may have a meaning, if we are to accept Leuret’s brilliant suggestion that they are only unintelligible to us owing to the gaps in them. I myself have formed the same opinion when I have had the opportunity of observing them. Deliria are the work of a censorship which no longer takes the trouble to conceal its operation; instead of collaborating in producing a new version that shall be unobjectionable, it ruthlessly deletes whatever it disapproves of, so that what remains becomes quite disconnected. This censorship acts exactly like the censorship of newspapers at the Russian frontier, which allows foreign journals to fall into the hands of the readers whom it is its business to protect only after a quantity of passages have been blacked out.

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] It was not until later that my attention was drawn to the fact that Eduard von Hartmann takes the same view on thus important matter of psychology: ‘In discussing the part played by the unconscious in artistic creation, Eduard von Hartmann (1890, 1, Section B, Chapter V) made a clear statement of the law in accordance with which the association of ideas is governed by unconscious purposive ideas, though he was unaware of the scope of the law. He set out to prove that "every combination of sensuous presentations, when it is not left purely to chance, but is led to a definite end, requires the help of the unconscious", and that the part played by conscious interest is to stimulate the unconscious to select the most appropriate idea among the countless possible ones. It is the unconscious which makes the appropriate selection of a purpose for the interest and this "holds good of the association of ideas in abstract thinking as well as in sensuous imagining and artistic combination" and in the production of jokes. For this reason a limitation of the association of ideas to an exciting idea and an excited idea (in the sense of a pure association psychology) can not be upheld. Such a limitation could be justified "only if there are conditions in human life in which man is free not only from every conscious purpose, but also from the sway or co-operation of every unconscious interest, every passing mood. This is, however, a condition hardly ever occurring, for even if one in appearance completely abandons his train of thought to accident, or if one abandons oneself entirely to the involuntary dreams of fancy, yet always other leading interests, dominant feelings and moods prevail at one time rather than at another, and these will always exert an influence on the association of ideas." "In semi-conscious dreams always only such ideas as correspond to the main interest of the moment occur." The emphasis thus laid upon the influence of feelings and moods on the free sequence of thoughts make it possible to justify the methodological procedure of psycho-analysis completely from the standpoint of Hartmann’s psychology.’ (Pohorilles, 1913.) - Du Prel (1885, 107) refers to the fact that after we have vainly tried to recall a name, it often comes into our heads again suddenly and without any warning. He concludes from this that unconscious but none the less purposeful thinking has taken place and that its result has suddenly entered consciousness.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

963

It may be that free play of ideas with a fortuitous chain of associations is to be found in destructive organic cerebral processes; what is regarded as such in the psychoneuroses can always be explained as an effect of the censorship’s influence upon a train of thought which has been pushed into the foreground by purposive ideas that have remained hidden.¹ It has been regarded as an unfailing sign of an association being uninfluenced by purposive ideas if the associations (or images) in question seem to be interrelated in what is described as a ‘superficial’ manner - by assonance, verbal ambiguity, temporal coincidence without connection in meaning, or by any association of the kind that we allow in jokes or in play upon words. This characteristic is present in the chains of thought which lead from the elements of a dream to the intermediate thoughts and from these to the dream-thoughts proper; we have seen instances of this - not without astonishment - in many dream-analyses. No connection was too loose, no joke too bad, to serve as a bridge from one thought to another. But the true explanation of this easy-going state of things is soon found. Whenever one psychical element is linked with another by an objectionable or superficial association, there is also a legitimate and deeper link between them which is subjected to the resistance of the censorship.

The real reason for the prevalence of superficial associations is not the abandonment of purposive ideas but the pressure of the censorship. Superficial associations replace deep ones if the censorship makes the normal connecting paths impassable. We may picture, by way of analogy, a mountain region, where some general interruption of traffic (owing to floods, for instance) has blocked the main, major roads, but where communications are still maintained over inconvenient and steep footpaths normally used only by the hunter.

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] This assertion has received striking confirmation from C. G. Jung’s analyses in cases of dementia praecox. (Jung, 1907.)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

964

Two cases may here be distinguished, though in essence they are the same. In the first of these, the censorship is directed only against the connection between two thoughts, which are unobjectionable separately. If so, the two thoughts will enter consciousness in succession; the connection between them will remain concealed, but, instead, a superficial link between them will occur to us, of which we should otherwise never have thought. This link is usually attached to some part of the complex of ideas quite other than that on which the suppressed and essential connection is based. The second case is where the two thoughts are in themselves subject to censorship on account of their content. If so, neither of them appears in its true shape but only in a modified one which replaces it; and the two replacing thoughts are chosen in such a way that they have a superficial association that repeats the essential connection which relates the two thoughts that have been replaced. In both these cases the pressure of the censorship has resulted in a displacement from a normal and serious association to a superficial and apparently absurd one.

Since we are aware that displacements of this kind occur, we have no hesitation when we are interpreting dreams in relying upon superficial associations as much as upon others.¹

In the psycho-analysis of neuroses the fullest use is made of these two theorems - that, when conscious purposive ideas are abandoned, concealed purposive ideas assume control of the current of ideas, and that superficial associations are only substitutes by displacement for suppressed deeper ones. Indeed, these theorems have become basic pillars of psycho-analytic technique. When I instruct a patient to abandon reflection of any kind and to tell me whatever comes into his head, I am relying firmly on the presumption that he will not be able to abandon the purposive ideas inherent in the treatment and I feel justified in inferring that what seem to be the most innocent and arbitrary things which he tells me are in fact related to his illness. There is another purposive idea of which the patient has no suspicion - one relating to myself. The full estimate of the importance of these two theorems, as well as more detailed information about them, fall within the province of an account of the technique of psycho-analysis. Here, then, we have reached one of the frontier posts at which, in accordance with our programme, we must drop the subject of dream-interpretation.²

¹ The same considerations apply equally, of course, to cases in which the superficial associations appear openly in the content of the dream, as, for instance, in the two dreams of Maury’s quoted above on page 59. (Pélerinage - Pelletier- pelle; kilomètre - kilogramme - Gilolo - Lobelia - Lopez - lotto.) My work with neurotic patients has taught me the nature of the memories of which this is a favourite method of representation. They are occasions on which the subject has turned over the pages of encyclopaedias or dictionaries in order (like most people at the inquisitive age of puberty) to satisfy their craving for an answer to the riddles of sex.

² [Footnote added 1909:] These two theorems, which sounded most unplausible at the time they were made, have since been experimentally employed and confirmed by Jung and his pupils in their studies in word association.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

965

There is one true conclusion that we may glean from these objections, namely that we need not suppose that every association that occurs during the work of interpretation had a place in the dream-work during the night. It is true that in carrying out the interpretation in the waking state we follow a path which leads back from the elements of the dream to the dream-thoughts and that the dream-work followed one in the contrary direction. But it is highly improbable that these paths are passable both ways. It appears, rather, that in the daytime we drive shafts which follow along fresh chains of thought and that these shafts make contact with the intermediate thoughts and the dream-thoughts now at one point and now at another. We can see how in this manner fresh daytime material inserts itself into the interpretative chains. It is probable, too, that the increase in resistance that has set in since the night makes new and more devious detours necessary. The number and nature of the collaterals that we spin in this way during the day is of no psychological importance whatever, so long as they lead us to the dream-thoughts of which we are in search.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

966

(B)

REGRESSION

Having now repelled the objections that have been raised against us, or having at least indicated where our defensive weapons lie, we must no longer postpone the task of setting about the psychological investigations for which we have so long been arming ourselves. Let us summarize the principal findings of our enquiry so far as it has gone. Dreams are psychical acts of as much significance as any others; their motive force is in every instance a wish seeking fulfilment; the fact of their not being recognizable as wishes and their many peculiarities and absurdities are due to the influence of the psychical censorship to which they have been subjected during the process of their formation; apart from the necessity of evading this censorship, other factors which have contributed to their formation are a necessity for the condensation of their psychical material, a regard for the possibility of its being represented in sensory images and - though not invariably - a demand that the structure of the dream shall have a rational and intelligible exterior. Each of these propositions opens a way to fresh psychological postulates and speculations; the mutual relations between the wish which is the dream’s motive force and the four conditions to which the dream’s formation is subject, a well as the interrelations between the latter, require to be investigated; and the place of dreams in the nexus of mental life has to be assigned.

It was with a view to reminding us of the problems which have still to be solved that I opened the present chapter with an account of a dream. There was no difficulty in interpreting that dream - the dream of the burning child - even though it interpretation was not given fully in our sense. I raised the question of why the dreamer dreamt it at all instead of waking up, and recognized that one of his motives was a wish to represent his child as still alive. Our further discussions will show us that yet another wish also played a part. Thus it was in the first instance for the sake of fulfilling a wish that the process of thought during sleep was transformed into a dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

967

If we eliminate the wish-fulfilment, we shall see that only one feature is left to distinguish the two forms of psychical event. The dream-thought would have run: ‘I see a glare coming from the room where the dead body is lying. Perhaps a candle has fallen over and my child may be burning.’ The dream repeated these reflections unaltered, but it represented them in a situation which was actually present and which could be perceived through the senses like a waking experience. Here we have the most general and the most striking psychological characteristic of the process of dreaming: a thought, and as a rule a thought of something that is wished, is objectified in the dream, is represented as a scene, or, as it seems to us, is experienced.

How, then, are we to explain this characteristic peculiarity of the dream-work, or, to put the question more modestly, how are we to find a place for it in the nexus of psychical processes?

If we look into the matter more closely we shall observe that two almost independent features stand out as characteristic of the form taken by this dream. One is the fact that the thought is represented as an immediate situation with the ‘perhaps’ omitted, and the other is the fact that the thought is transformed into visual images and speech.

In this particular dream the change made in the thoughts by the conversion of the expectation expressed by them into the present tense may not seem particularly striking. This is because of what can only be described as the unusually subordinate part played in this dream by wish-fulfilment. Consider instead another one, in which the dream-wish was not detached from the waking thoughts that were carried over into sleep - for instance, the dream of Irma’s injection. There the dream-thought that was represented was in the optative: ‘If only Otto were responsible for Irma’s illness!’ The dream repressed the optative and replaced it by a straightforward present: ‘Yes, Otto is responsible for Irma’s illness.’ This, then, is the first of the transformations which is brought about in the dream-thoughts even by a distortionless dream. We need not linger long over this first peculiarity of dreams. We can deal with it by drawing attention to conscious phantasies - to day-dreams - which treat their ideational content in just the same manner. While Daudet’s Monsieur Joyeuse was wandering, out of work, through the streets of Paris (though his daughters believed that he had a job and was sitting in an office), he was dreaming of developments that might bring him influential help and lead to his finding employment - and he was dreaming in the present tense. Thus dreams make use of the present tense in the same manner and by the same right as day-dreams. The present tense is the one in which wishes are represented as fulfilled.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

968

But dreams differ from day-dreams in their second characteristic: namely, in the fact of their ideational content being transformed from thoughts into sensory images, to which belief is attached and which appear to be experienced. I must add at once that not every dream exhibits this transformation from idea into sensory image. There are dreams which consist only of thoughts but which cannot on that account be denied the essential nature of dreams. My ‘Autodidasker’ dream was of that kind; it included scarcely more sensory elements than if I had thought its content in the daytime. And in every dream of any considerable length there are elements which have not, like the rest, been given a sensory form, but which are simply thought or known, in the kind of way in which we are accustomed to think or know things in waking life. It should also be remembered here that it is not only in dreams that such transformations of ideas into sensory images occur: they are also found in hallucinations and visions, which may appear as independent entities, so to say, in health or as symptoms in the psychoneuroses. In short, the relation which we are examining now is not in any respect an exclusive one. Nevertheless it remains true that it would be impossible for us to imagine the dream-world without it. But in order to arrive at an understanding of it we must embark upon a discussion that will take us far afield.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

969

As the starting-point for our enquiry, I should like to pick out one from among many remarks made upon the theory of dreaming by those who have written on the subject. In the course of a short discussion on the topic of dreams, the great Fechner (1889, 2, 520-1) puts forward the idea that the scene of action of dreams is different from that of waking ideational life. This is the only hypothesis that makes the special peculiarities of dream-life intelligible.

What is presented to us in these words is the idea of psychical locality. I shall entirely disregard the fact that the mental apparatus with which we are here concerned is also known to us in the form of an anatomical preparation, and I shall carefully avoid the temptation to determine psychical locality in any anatomical fashion. I shall remain upon psychological ground, and I propose simply to follow the suggestion that we should picture the instrument which carries out our mental functions as resembling a compound microscope or a photographic apparatus, or something of the kind. On that basis, psychical locality will correspond to a point inside the apparatus at which one of the preliminary stages of an image comes into being. In the microscope and telescope, as we know, these occur in part at ideal points, regions in which no tangible component of the apparatus is situated. I see no necessity to apologize for the imperfections of this or of any similar imagery. Analogies of this kind are only intended to assist us in our attempt to make the complications of mental functioning intelligible by dissecting the function and assigning its different constituents to different component parts of the apparatus. So far as I know, the experiment has not hitherto been made of using this method of dissection in order to investigate the way in which the mental instrument is put together, and I can see no harm in it. We are justified, in my view, in giving free rein to our speculations so long as we retain the coolness of our judgement and do not mistake the scaffolding for the building. And since at our first approach to something unknown all that we need is the assistance of provisional ideas, I shall give preference in the first instance to hypotheses of the crudest and most concrete description.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

970

Accordingly, we will picture the mental apparatus as a compound instrument, to the components of which we will give the name of ‘agencies’, or (for the sake of greater clarity) ‘systems.’ It is to be anticipated, in the next place, that these systems may perhaps stand in a regular spatial relation to one another, in the same kind of way in which the various systems of lenses in a telescope are arranged behind one another. Strictly speaking there is no need for the hypothesis that the psychical systems are actually arranged in a spatial order. It would be sufficient if a fixed order were established by the fact that in a given psychical process the excitation passes through the systems in a particular temporal sequence. In other processes the sequence may perhaps be a different one; that is a possibility that we shall leave open. For the sake of brevity we will in future speak of the components of the apparatus as ‘Ψ-systems.’

The first thing that strikes us is that this apparatus, compounded of Ψ-systems, has a sense or direction. All our psychical activity starts from stimuli (whether internal or external) and ends in innervations. Accordingly, we shall ascribe a sensory and a motor end to the apparatus. At the sensory end there lies a system which receives perceptions; at the motor end there lies another, which opens the gateway to motor activity. Psychical processes advance in general from the perceptual end to the motor end. Thus the most general schematic picture of the psychical apparatus may be represented thus (Fig. 1):

Fig. 1.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

971

This, however, does no more than fulfil a requirement with which we have long been familiar, namely that the psychical apparatus must be constructed like a reflex apparatus. Reflex processes remain the model of every psychical function.

Next, we have grounds for introducing a first differentiation at the sensory end. A trace is left in our psychical apparatus of the perceptions which impinge upon it. This we may describe as a ‘memory-trace’; and to the function relating to it we give the name of ‘memory.’ If we are in earnest over our plan of attaching psychical processes to systems, memory-traces can only consist in permanent modifications of the elements of the systems. But, as has already been pointed out elsewhere, there are obvious difficulties involved in supposing that one and the same system can accurately retain modifications of its elements and yet remain perpetually open to the reception of fresh occasions for modification. In accordance, therefore, with the principle which governs our experiment, we shall distribute these two functions on to different systems. We shall suppose that a system in the very front of the apparatus receives the perceptual stimuli but retains no trace of them and thus has no memory, while behind it there lies a second system which transforms the momentary excitations of the first system into permanent traces. The schematic picture of our psychical apparatus would then be as follows (Fig. 2):

Fig. 2.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

972

It is a familiar fact that we retain permanently something more than the mere content of the perceptions which impinge upon the system Pcpt. Our perceptions are linked with one another in our memory - first and foremost according to simultaneity of occurrence. We speak of this fact as ‘association.’ It is clear, then, that, if the Pcpt. system has no memory whatever it cannot retain any associative traces; the separate Pcpt. elements would be intolerably obstructed in performing their function if the remnant of an earlier connection were to exercise an influence upon a fresh perception. We must therefore assume the basis of association lies in the mnemic systems. Association would thus consist in the fact that, as a result of a diminution in resistances and of the laying down of facilitating paths, an excitation is transmitted from a given Mnem. element more readily to one Mnem. element than to another.

Closer consideration will show the necessity for supposing the existence not of one but of several such Mnem. elements, in which one and the same excitation, transmitted by the Pcpt. elements, leaves a variety of different permanent records. The first of these Mnem. systems will naturally contain the record of association in respect to simultaneity in time; while the same perceptual material will be arranged in the later systems in respect to other kinds of coincidence, so that one of these later systems, for instance, will record relations of similarity, and so on with the others. It would of course be a waste of time to try to put the psychical significance of a system of this kind into words. Its character would lie in the intimate details of its relations to the different elements of the raw material of memory, that is - if we may hint at a theory of a more radical kind - in the degrees of conductive resistance which it offered to the passage of excitation from those elements.

At this point I will interpolate a remark of a general nature which may perhaps have important implications. It is the Pcpt. system, which is without the capacity to retain modifications and is thus without memory, that provides our consciousness with the whole multiplicity of sensory qualities. On the other hand, our memories - not excepting those which are most deeply stamped on our minds - are in themselves unconscious. They can be made conscious; but there can be no doubt that they can produce all their effects while in an unconscious condition. What we describe as our ‘character’ is based on the memory-traces of our impressions; and, moreover, the impressions which have had the greatest effect on us - those of our earliest youth - are precisely the ones which scarcely ever become conscious. But if memories become conscious once more they exhibit no sensory quality or a very slight one in comparison with perceptions. A most promising light would be thrown on the conditions governing the excitation of neurone if it could be confirmed that the Ψ-systems of memory and the quality that characterizes consciousness are mutually exclusive.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1925:] I have since suggested that consciousness actually arises instead of the memory-trace. See my ‘Note upon the "Mystic Writing-Pad"' (1925a).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

973

The assumptions we have so far put forward as to the construction of the psychical apparatus at its sensory end have been made without reference to dreams or to the psychological information that we have been able to infer from them. Evidence afforded by dreams will, however, help us towards understanding another portion of the apparatus. We have seen that we were only able to explain the formation of dreams by venturing upon the hypothesis of there being two psychical agencies, one of which submitted the activity of the other to a criticism which involved its exclusion from consciousness. The critical agency, we concluded, stands in a closer relation to consciousness than the agency criticized: it stands like a screen between the latter and consciousness. Further we found reasons for identifying the critical agency with the agency which directs our waking life and determines our voluntary, conscious actions. If, in accordance with our assumptions, we replace these agencies by systems, then our last conclusion must lead us to locate the critical system at the motor end of the apparatus. We will now introduce the two system into our schematic picture and give them names to express their relation to consciousness (Fig. 3):

Fig. 3.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

974

We will describe the last of the systems at the motor end as ‘the preconscious’, to indicate that the excitatory processes occurring in it can enter consciousness without further impediment provided that certain other conditions are fulfilled: for instance, that they reach a certain degree of intensity, that the function which can only be described as ‘attention’ is distributed in a particular way, and so on. This is at the same time the system which holds the key to voluntary movement. We will describe the system that lies behind it as ‘the unconscious’, because it has no access to consciousness except via the preconscious, in passing through which its excitatory process is obliged to submit to modifications.¹

In which of these systems, then, are we to locate the impetus to the construction of dreams? For simplicity’s sake, in the system Ucs. It is true that in the course of our future discussion we shall learn that this is not entirely accurate, and that the process of forming dreams is obliged to attach itself to dream-thoughts belonging to the preconscious system. But when we consider the dream-wish, we shall find that the motive force for producing dreams is supplied by the Ucs.; and owing to this latter factor we shall take the unconscious system as the starting-point of dream-formation. Like all other thought structures, this dream-instigator will make an effort to advance into the Pcs. and from there to obtain access to consciousness.

¹ [Footnote added 1919:] If we attempted to proceed further with this schematic picture, in which the systems are set out in linear succession, we should have to reckon with the fact that the system next beyond the Pcs. is the one to which consciousness must be ascribed - in other words, that Pcpt. = Cs.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

975

Experience shows us that this path leading through the preconscious to consciousness is barred to the dream-thoughts during the daytime by the censorship imposed by resistance. During the night they are able to obtain access to consciousness; but the question arises as to how they do so and thanks to what modification. If what enabled the dream-thoughts to achieve this were the fact that at night there is a lowering of the resistance which guards the frontier between the unconscious and the preconscious, we should have dreams which were in the nature of ideas and which were without the hallucinatory quality in which we are at the moment interested. Thus the lowering of the censorship between the two systems Ucs. and Pcs. can only explain dreams formed like ‘Autodidasker’ and not dreams like that of the burning child which we took as the starting-point of our investigations.

The only way in which we can describe what happens in hallucinatory dreams is by saying that the excitation moves in a backward direction. Instead of being transmitted towards the motor end of the apparatus it moves towards the sensory end and finally reaches the perceptual system. If we describe as ‘progressive’ the direction taken by psychical processes arising from the unconscious during waking life, then we may speak of dreams as having a ‘regressive’ character.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] The first hint at the factor of regression is to be found as far back as in Albertus Magnus. The ‘imaginatio’, he tells us, constructs dreams out of the stored-up images of sensory objects; and the process is carried out in a reverse direction to that in waking life. (Quoted by Diepgen, 1912, 14.) - Hobbes writes in the Leviathan (1651, Pt. I, Chapter 2): ‘In sum, our dreams are the reverse of our waking imaginations, the motion, when we are awake, beginning at one end, and when we dream at another.’ (Quoted by Havelock Ellis, 1911, 109.)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

976

This regression, then, is undoubtedly one of the psychological characteristics of the process of dreaming; but we must remember that it does not occur only in dreams. Intentional recollection and other constituent processes of our normal thinking involve a retrogressive movement in the psychical apparatus from a complex ideational act back to the raw material of the memory-traces underlying it. In the waking state, however, this backward movement never extends beyond the mnemic images; it does not succeed in producing a hallucinatory revival of the perceptual images. Why is it otherwise in dreams? When we were considering the work of condensation in dreams we were driven to suppose that the intensities attaching to ideas can be completely transferred by the dream-work from one idea to another. It is probably this alteration in the normal psychical procedure which makes possible the cathexis of the system Pcpt. in the reverse direction, starting from thoughts, to the pitch of complete sensory vividness.

We must not delude ourselves into exaggerating the importance of these considerations. We have done no more than give a name to an inexplicable phenomenon. We call it ‘regression’ when in a dream an idea is turned back into the sensory image from which it was originally derived. But even this step requires justification. What is the point of this nomenclature if it teaches us nothing new? I believe the name ‘regression’ is of help to us in so far as it connects a fact that was already known to us with our schematic picture, in which the mental apparatus was given a sense or direction. And it is at this point that that picture begins to repay us for having constructed it. For an examination of it, without any further reflection, reveals a further characteristic of dream-formation. If we regard the process of dreaming as a regression occurring in our hypothetical mental apparatus, we at once arrive at the explanation of the empirically established fact that all the logical relations belonging to the dream-thoughts disappear during the dream-activity or can only find expression with difficulty. According to our schematic picture, these relations are contained not in the first Mnem. systems but in later ones; and in case of regression they would necessarily lose any means of expression except in perceptual images. In regression the fabric of the dream-thoughts is resolved into its raw material.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

977

What modification is it that renders possible a regression which cannot occur in daytime? We must be content with some conjectures on this point. No doubt it is a question of changes in the cathexes of energy attaching to the different systems, changes which increase or diminish the facility with which those systems can be passed through by the excitatory process. But in any apparatus of this kind the same results upon the passage of excitations might be produced in more than one way. Our first thoughts will of course be of the state of sleep and the changes in cathexis which it brings about at the sensory end of the apparatus. During the day there is a continuous current from the Pcpt. Ψ-system flowing in the direction of motor activity; but this current ceases at night and could no longer form an obstacle to a current of excitation flowing in the opposite sense. Here we seem to have the ‘shutting-out of the external world’, which some authorities regard as the theoretical explanation of the psychological characteristics of dreams. (See p. 560.)

In explaining regression in dreams, however, we must bear in mind the regressions which also occur in pathological waking states; and here the explanation just given leaves us in the lurch. For in those cases regression occurs in spite of a sensory current flowing without interruption in a forward direction. My explanation of hallucinations in hysteria and paranoia and of visions in mentally normal subjects is that they are in fact regressions - that is, thoughts transformed into images - but that the only thoughts that undergo this transformation are those which are intimately linked with memories that have been suppressed of have remained unconscious.

For instance, one of my youngest hysterical patients, a twelve-year-old boy, was prevented from falling asleep by ‘green faces with red eyes’ which terrified him. The source of this phenomenon was a suppressed, though at one time conscious, memory of a boy whom he had often seen four years earlier. This boy had presented him with an alarming picture of the consequences of bad habits in children, including masturbation - a habit with which my patient was now reproaching himself in retrospect. His mother had pointed out at the time that the ill-behaved boy had a greenish face and red (i.e. red-rimmed) eyes. Here was the origin of his bogey, whose only purpose, incidentally, was to remind him of another of his mother’s predictions - that boys of that sort grow into idiots, can learn nothing at school and die young. My little patient had fulfilled one part of the prophecy, for he was making no progress at his school, and, as was shown from his account of the involuntary thoughts that occurred to him, he was terrified of the other part. I may add that after a short time the treatment resulted in his being able to sleep, in his nervousness disappearing and his being awarded a mark of distinction at the end of his school-year.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

978

In the same connection I will give the explanation of a vision that was described to me by another hysterical patient (a woman of forty) as having happened before she fell ill. One morning she opened her eyes and saw her brother in the room, though, as she knew, he was in fact in an insane asylum. Her small son was sleeping in the bed beside her. To save the child from having a fright and falling into convulsions when he saw his uncle, she pulled the sheet over his face, whereupon the apparition vanished. This vision was a modified version of a memory from the lady’s childhood; and, though it was conscious, it was intimately related to all the unconscious material in her mind. Her nurse had told her that her mother (who had died very young, when my patient was only eighteen months old) had suffered from epileptic or hysterical convulsions, which went back to a fright caused by her brother (my patient’s uncle) appearing to her disguised as a ghost with a sheet over his head. Thus the vision contained the same elements as the memory: the brother’s appearance, the sheet, the fright and its results. But the elements had been arranged in a different context and transferred on to other figures. The obvious motive of the vision, or of the thoughts which it replaced, was her concern lest her little boy might follow in the footsteps of his uncle, whom he greatly resembled physically.

The two instances that I have quoted are neither of them entirely devoid of connection with the state of sleep and for that reason are perhaps not well chosen for what I want them to prove. I will therefore refer the reader to my analysis of a woman suffering from hallucinatory paranoia (Freud, 1896b ) as well as to the findings in my still unpublished studies on the psychology of the psychoneuroses, for evidence that in such instances of the regressive transformation of thoughts we must not overlook the influence of memories, mostly from childhood, which have been suppressed or have remained unconscious. The thoughts which are connected with a memory of this kind and which are forbidden expression by the censorship are, as it were, attracted by the memory into regression as being the form of representation in which the memory itself is couched. I may also recall that one of the facts arrived at in the Studies on Hysteria was that when it was possible to bring infantile scenes (whether they were memories or phantasies) into consciousness, they were seen like hallucinations and lost that characteristic only in the process of being reported. It is moreover a familiar observation that, even in those whose memory is not normally of a visual type, the earliest recollections of childhood retain far into life the quality of sensory vividness.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

979

If we now bear in mind how great a part is played in the dream-thoughts by infantile experiences or by phantasies based upon them, how frequently portions of them re-emerge in the dream-content and how often the dream-wishes themselves are derived from them, we cannot dismiss the probability that in dreams too the transformation of thoughts into visual images may be in part the result of the attraction which memories couched in visual form and eager for revival bring to bear upon thoughts cut off from consciousness and struggling to find expression. On this view a dream might be described as a substitute for an infantile scene modified by being transferred on to a recent experience. The infantile scene is unable to bring about its own revival and has to be content with returning as a dream.

This indication of the way in which infantile scenes (or their reproductions as phantasies) function in a sense as models for the content of dreams, removes the necessity for one of the hypotheses put forward by Scherner and his followers in regard to internal sources of stimulation. Scherner supposes that, when dreams exhibit particularly vivid or particularly copious visual elements, there is present a state of ‘visual stimulation’, that is, of internal excitation in the organ of vision. We need not dispute this hypothesis, but can content ourselves with assuming that this state of excitation applies merely to the psychical perceptual system of the visual organ; we may, however, further point out that the state of excitation has been set up by a memory, that it is a revival of a visual excitation which was originally an immediate one. I cannot produce any good example from my own experience of an infantile memory producing this kind of result. My dreams are in general less rich in sensory elements than I am led to suppose is the case in other people. But in the case of my most vivid and beautiful dream of the last few years I was easily able to trace back the hallucinatory clarity of the dream’s content to the sensory qualities of recent or fairly recent impressions. On p. 907 ff. I recorded a dream in which the deep blue colour of the water, the brown of the smoke coming from the ship’s funnels, and the dark brown and red of the buildings left behind a profound impression on me. This dream, if any, should be traceable, to a visual stimulus. What was it that had brought my visual organ into this state of stimulation? A recent impression, which attached itself to a number of earlier ones. The colours which I saw were in the first instance those of a box of toy bricks with which, on the day before the dream, my children had put up a fine building and shown it off for my admiration. The big bricks were of the same dark red and the small ones were of the same blue and brown. This was associated with colour impressions from my last travels in Italy: the beautiful blue of the Isonzo and the lagoons and the brown of the Carso. The beauty of the colours in the dream was only a repetition of something seen in my memory.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

980

Let us bring together what we have found out about the peculiar propensity of dreams to recast their ideational content into sensory images. We have not explained this feature of the dream-work, we have not traced it back to any known psychological laws; but we have rather picked it out as something that suggests unknown implications and we have characterized it with the word ‘regressive.’ We have put forward the view that in all probability this regression, wherever it may occur, is an effect of a resistance opposing the progress of a thought into consciousness along the normal path, and of a simultaneous attraction exercised upon the thought by the presence of memories possessing great sensory force.¹ In the case of dreams, regression may perhaps be further facilitated by the cessation of the progressive current - which streams in during the daytime from the sense organs; in other forms of regression, the absence of this accessory factor must be made up for by a greater intensity of the other motives for regression. Nor must we forget to observe that in these pathological cases of regression as well as in dreams the process of transference of energy must differ from what it is in regressions occurring in normal mental life, since in the former cases that process makes possible a complete hallucinatory cathexis of the perceptual systems. What we have described, in our analysis of the dream-work, as ‘regard for representability’ might be brought into connection with the selective attraction exercised by the visually recollected scenes touched upon by the dream-thoughts.

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] In any account of the theory of repression it would have to be laid down that a thought become repressed as a result of the combined influence upon it of two factors. It is pushed from the one side (by the censorship of the Cs.) and pulled from the other (by the Ucs.), in the same kind of way in which people are conveyed to the top of the Great Pyramid. [Added 1919:] Cf. my paper on repression (Freud, 1915d).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

981

It is further to be remarked that regression plays a no less important part in the theory of the formation of neurotic symptoms than it does in that of dreams. Three kinds of regression are thus to be distinguished: (a) topographical regression, in the sense of the schematic picture of the Ψ-systems which we have explained above; (b) temporal regression, in so far as what is in question is a harking back to older psychical structures; and (c) formal regression, where primitive methods of expression and representation take the place of the usual ones. All these three kinds of regression are, however, one at bottom and occur together as a rule; for what is older in time is more primitive in form and in psychical topography lies nearer to the perceptual end.

Nor can we leave the subject of regression in dreams without setting down in words a notion by which we have already repeatedly been struck and which will recur with fresh intensity when we have entered more deeply into the study of the psycho-neuroses: namely that dreaming is on the whole an example of regression to the dreamer’s earliest condition, a revival of his childhood, of the instinctual impulses which dominated it and of the methods of expression which were then available to him. Behind this childhood of the individual we are promised a picture of a phylogenetic childhood - a picture of the development of the human race, of which the individual’s development is in fact an abbreviated recapitulation influenced by the chance circumstances of life. We can guess how much to the point is Nietzsche’s assertion that in dreams ‘some primaeval relic of humanity is at work which we can now scarcely reach any longer by a direct path’; and we may expect that the analysis of dreams will lead us to a knowledge of man’s archaic heritage, of what is psychically innate in him. Dreams and neuroses seem to have preserved more mental antiquities than we could have imagined possible; so that psycho-analysis may claim a high place among the sciences which are concerned with the reconstruction of the earliest and most obscure periods of the beginnings of the human race.

It may well be that this first portion of our psychological study of dreams will leave us with a sense of dissatisfaction. But we can console ourselves with the thought that we have been obliged to build our way out into the dark. If we are not wholly in error, other lines of approach are bound to lead us into much the same region and the time may then come when we shall find ourselves more at home in it.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

982

(C)

WISH-FULFILMENT

The dream of the burning child at the beginning of this chapter gives us a welcome opportunity of considering the difficulties with which the theory of wish-fulfilment is faced. It will no doubt have surprised all of us to be told that dreams are nothing other than fulfilments of wishes, and not only on account of the contradiction offered by anxiety-dreams. When analysis first revealed to us that a meaning and a psychical value lay concealed behind dreams, we were no doubt quite unprepared to find that that meaning was of such a uniform character. According to Aristotle’s accurate but bald definition, a dream is thinking that persists (in so far as we are asleep) in the state of sleep. Since, then, our daytime thinking produces psychical acts of such various sorts - judgements, inferences, denials, expectations, intentions, and so on - why should it be obliged during the night to restrict itself to the production of wishes alone? Are there not, on the contrary, numerous dreams which show us psychical acts of other kinds - worries, for instance - transformed into dream-shape? And was not the dream with which we began this chapter (a quite particularly transparent one) precisely a dream of this sort? When the glare of light fell on the eyes of the sleeping father, he drew the worrying conclusion that a candle had fallen over and might have set the dead body on fire. He turned this conclusion into a dream by clothing it in a sensory situation and in the present tense. What part was played in this by wish-fulfilment? Can we fail to see in it the predominating influence of a thought persisting from waking life or stimulated by a new sense-impression? All this is quite true and compels us to enter more closely into the part played by wish-fulfilment in dreams and into the importance of waking thoughts which persist into sleep.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

983

We have already been led by wish-fulfilment itself to divide dreams into two groups. We have found some dreams which appeared openly as wish-fulfilments, and others in which the wish-fulfilment was unrecognizable and often disguised by every possible means. In the latter we have perceived the dream censorship at work. We found the undistorted wishful dreams principally in children; though short, frankly wishful dreams seemed (and I lay emphasis upon this qualification) to occur in adults as well.

We may next ask where the wishes that come true in dreams originate. What contrasting possibilities or what alternatives have we in mind in raising this question? It is the contrast, I think, between the consciously perceived life of daytime and a psychical activity which has remained unconscious and of which we can only become aware at night. I can distinguish three possible origins for such a wish. (1) It may have been aroused during the day and for external reasons may not have been satisfied; in that case an acknowledged wish which has not been dealt with is left over for the night. (2) It may have arisen during the day but been repudiated; in that case what is left over is a wish which has not been dealt with but has been suppressed. (3) It may have no connection with daytime life and be one of those wishes which only emerge from the suppressed part of the mind and become active in us at night. If we turn again to our schematic picture of the psychical apparatus, we shall localize wishes of the first kind in the system Pcs.; we shall suppose that wishes of the second kind have been driven out of the system Pcs. into the Ucs., where, if at all, they continue to exist; and we shall conclude that wishful impulses of the third kind are altogether incapable of passing beyond the system Ucs. The question then arises whether wishes derived from these different sources are of equal importance for dreams and have equal power to instigate them.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

984

If we cast our minds over the dreams that are at our disposal for answering this question, we shall at once be reminded that we must add a fourth source of dream-wishes, namely the current wishful impulses that arise during the night (e.g. those stimulated by thirst or sexual needs). In the next place, we shall form the opinion that the place of origin of a dream-wish probably has no influence on its capacity for instigating dreams. I may recall the little girl’s dream which prolonged a trip on the lake that had been interrupted during the day and the other children’s dreams which I have recorded. They were explained as being due to unfulfilled, but unsuppressed, wishes from the previous day. Instances of a wish that has been suppressed in the daytime finding its way out in a dream are exceedingly numerous. I will add a further very simple example of this class. The dreamer was a lady who was rather fond of making fun of people and one of whose friends, a woman younger than herself, had just become engaged. All day long she had been asked by her acquaintances whether she knew the young man and what she thought of him. She had replied with nothing but praises, with which she had silenced her real judgement; for she would have liked to tell the truth - that he was a ‘Dutzendmensch’ [literally a ‘dozen man’, a very commonplace sort of person - people like him are turned out by the dozen]. She dreamt that night that she was asked the same question, and replied with the formula: ‘In the case of repeat orders it is sufficient to quote the number.’ We have learnt, lastly, from numerous analyses that wherever a dream has undergone distortion the wish has arisen from the unconscious and was one which could not be perceived during the day. Thus it seems at a first glance as though all wishes are of equal importance and equal power in dreams.

I cannot offer any proof here that the truth is nevertheless otherwise; but I may say that I am strongly inclined to suppose that dream-wishes are more strictly determined. It is true that children’s dreams prove beyond a doubt that a wish that has not been dealt with during the day can act as a dream-instigator. But it must not be forgotten that it is a child’s wish, a wishful impulse of the strength proper to children. I think it is highly doubtful whether in the case of an adult a wish that has not been fulfilled during the day would be strong enough to produce a dream. It seems to me, on the contrary, that, with the progressive control exercised upon our instinctual life by our thought-activity, we are more and more inclined to renounce as unprofitable the formation or retention of such intense wishes as children know. It is possible that there are individual differences in this respect, and that some people retain an infantile type of mental process longer than others, just as there are similar differences in regard to the diminution of visual imagery, which is so vivid in early years. But in general, I think, a wish that has been left over unfulfilled from the previous day is insufficient to produce a dream in the case of an adult. I readily admit that a wishful impulse originating in the conscious will contribute to the instigation of a dream, but it will probably not do more than that. The dream would not materialize if the preconscious wish did not succeed in finding reinforcement from elsewhere.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

985

From the unconscious, in fact. My supposition is that a conscious wish can only become a dream-instigator if it succeeds in awakening an unconscious wish with the same tenor and in obtaining reinforcement from it. From indications derived from the psycho-analysis of the neuroses, I consider that these unconscious wishes are always on the alert, ready at any time to find their way to expression when an opportunity arises for allying themselves with an impulse from the conscious and for transferring their own great intensity on to the latter’s lesser one.¹ It will then appear as though the conscious wish alone had been realized in the dream; only some small peculiarity in the dream’s configuration will serve as a finger-post to put us on the track of the powerful ally from the unconscious. These wishes in our unconscious, ever on the alert and, so to say, immortal, remind one of the legendary Titans, weighed down since primaeval ages by the massive bulk of the mountains which were once hurled upon them by the victorious gods and which are still shaken from time to time by the convulsion of their limbs. But these wishes, held under repression, are themselves of infantile origin, as we are taught by psychological research into the neuroses. I would propose, therefore, to set aside the assertion made just now, that the place of origin of dream-wishes is a matter of indifference and replace it by another one to the following effect: a wish which is represented in a dream must be an infantile one. In the case of adults it originates from the Ucs., in the case of children, where there is as yet no division or censorship between the Ucs. and the Pcs., or where that division is only gradually being set up, it is an unfulfilled, unrepressed wish from waking life. I am aware that this assertion cannot be proved to hold universally; but it can be proved to hold frequently, even in unsuspected cases, and it cannot be contradicted as a general proposition.

¹ They share this character of indestructibility with all other mental acts which are truly unconscious, i.e. which belong to the system Ucs. only. These are paths which have been laid down once and for all, which never fall into disuse and which, whenever an unconscious excitation re-cathects them, are always ready to conduct the excitatory process to discharge. If I may use a simile, they are only capable of annihilation in the same sense as the ghosts in the underworld of the Odyssey - ghosts which awoke to new life as soon as they tasted blood. Processes which are dependent on the preconscious system are destructible in quite another sense. The psychotherapy of the neuroses is based on this distinction.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

986

In my view, therefore, wishful impulses left over from conscious waking life must be relegated to a secondary position in respect to the formation of dreams. I cannot allow that, as contributors to the content of dreams, they play any other part than by the material of sensations which become currently active during sleep. (See pp. 707‑708.) I shall follow the same line of thought in now turning to consider those psychical instigations to dreaming, left over from waking life, which are other than wishes. When we decide to go to sleep, we may succeed in temporarily bringing to an end the cathexes of energy attaching to our waking thoughts. Anyone who can do this easily is a good sleeper; the first Napoleon seems to have been a model of this class. But we do not always succeed in doing so, nor do we always succeed completely. Unsolved problems, tormenting worries, overwhelming impressions - all these carry thought-activity over into sleep and sustain mental processes in the system that we have named the preconscious. If we wish to classify the thought-impulses which persist in sleep, we may divide them into the following groups: (1) what has not been carried to a conclusion during the day owing to some chance hindrance; (2) what has not been dealt with owing to the insufficiency of our intellectual power - what is unsolved; (3) what has been rejected and suppressed during the daytime. To these we must add (4) a powerful group consisting of what has been set in action in our Ucs. by the activity of the preconscious in the course of the day; and finally (5) the group of daytime impressions which are indifferent and have for that reason not been dealt with.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

987

There is no need to underestimate the importance of the psychical intensities which are introduced into the state of sleep by these residues of daytime life, and particularly of those in the group of unsolved problems. It is certain that these excitations continue to struggle for expression during the night; and we may assume with equal certainty that the state of sleep makes it impossible for the excitatory process to be pursued in the habitual manner in the preconscious and brought to an end by becoming conscious. In so far as our thought-processes are able to become conscious in the normal way at night, we are simply not asleep. I am unable to say what modification in the system Pcs. is brought about by the state of sleep;¹ but there can be no doubt that the psychological characteristics of sleep are to be looked for essentially in modifications in the cathexis of this particular system - a system that is also in control of access to the power of movement, which is paralysed during sleep. On the other hand, nothing in the psychology of dreams gives me reason to suppose that sleep produces any modifications other than secondary ones in the state of things prevailing in the Ucs. No other course, then, lies open to excitations occurring at night in the Pcs. than that followed by wishful excitations arising from the Ucs.; the preconscious excitations must find reinforcement from the Ucs. and must accompany the unconscious excitations along their circuitous paths. But what is the relation of the preconscious residues of the previous day to dreams? There is no doubt that they find their way into dreams in great quantity, and that they make use of the content of dreams in order to penetrate into consciousness even during the night. Indeed they occasionally dominate the content of a dream and force it to carry on the activity of daytime. It is certain, too, that the day’s residues may be of any other character just as easily as wishes; but it is highly instructive in this connection, and of positively decisive importance for the theory of wish-fulfilment, to observe the condition to which they must submit in order to be received into a dream.

¹ [Footnote added 1919:] I have tried to penetrate further into an understanding of the state of things prevailing during sleep and of the determining conditions of hallucination in a paper entitled ‘A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams’.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

988

Let us take one of the dreams I have already recorded - for instance, the one in which my friend Otto appeared with the signs of Graves’ disease. (See p. 746 ff.) I had been worried during the previous day by Otto’s looks; and, like everything else concerned with him, this worry affected me closely. And it pursued me, as I may assume, into my sleep. I was probably anxious to discover what could be wrong with him. This worry found expression during the night in the dream I have described, the content of which was in the first place nonsensical and in the second place was in no respect the fulfilment of a wish. I then began to investigate the origin of this inappropriate expression of the worry I had felt during the day, and by means of analysis I found a connection through the fact of my having identified my friend with a certain Baron L. and myself with Professor R. There was only one explanation of my having been obliged to choose this particular substitute for my daytime thought. I must have been prepared at all times in my Ucs. to identify myself with Professor R., since by means of that identification one of the immortal wishes of childhood - the megalomaniac wish - was fulfilled. Ugly thoughts hostile to my friend, which were certain to be repudiated during the day, had seized the opportunity of slipping through with the wish and getting themselves represented in the dream; but my daytime worry had also found some sort of expression in the content of the dream by means of a substitute. The daytime thought, which was not in itself a wish but on the contrary a worry, was obliged to find a connection in some way or other with an infantile wish which was now unconscious and suppressed, and which would enable it - suitably decocted, it is true - to ‘originate’ in consciousness. The more dominating was the worry, the more far-fetched a link could be established; there was no necessity for there being any connection whatever between the content of the wish and that of the worry, and in fact no such connection existed in our example.

It may perhaps be useful to continue our examination of the same question by considering how a dream behaves when the dream-thoughts present it with material which is the complete reverse of a wish-fulfilment - well-justified worries, painful reflections, distressing realizations. The many possible outcome can be classed under the two following groups. (A) The dream-work may succeed in replacing all the distressing ideas by contrary ones and in suppressing the unpleasurable affects attaching to them. The result will be a straightforward dream of satisfaction, a palpable ‘wish-fulfilment’, about which there seems no more to be said. (B) The distressing ideas may make their way, more or less modified but none the less quite recognizable, into the manifest content of the dream. This is the case which raises doubts as to the validity of the wish theory of dreams and needs further investigation. Dreams of this sort with a distressing content may either be experienced with indifference, or they may be accompanied by the whole of the distressing affect which their ideational content seems to justify, or they may even lead to the development of anxiety and to awakening.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

989

Analysis is able to demonstrate that these unpleasurable dreams are wish-fulfilments no less than the rest. An unconscious and repressed wish, whose fulfilment the dreamer’s ego could not fail to experience as something distressing, has seized the opportunity offered to it by the persisting cathexis of the distressing residues of the previous day; it has lent them its support and by that means rendered them capable of entering a dream. But whereas in Group A the unconscious wish coincided with the conscious one, in Group B the gulf between the unconscious and the conscious (between the repressed and the ego) is revealed and the situation in the fairy tale of the three wishes which were granted by the fairy to the husband and wife is realized. (See below, p. 1009 f. n.)  The satisfaction at the fulfilment of the repressed wish may turn out to be so great that it counterbalances the distressing feelings attaching to the day’s residues; in that case the feeling-tone of the dream is indifferent, in spite of its being on the one hand the fulfilment of a wish and on the other the fulfilment of a fear. Or it may happen that the sleeping ego takes a still larger share in the construction of the dream, that it reacts to the satisfying of the repressed wish with violent indignation and itself puts an end to the dream with an outburst of anxiety. Thus there is no difficulty in seeing that unpleasurable dreams and anxiety-dreams are just as much wish-fulfilments in the sense of our theory as are straightforward dreams of satisfaction.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

990

Unpleasurable dreams may also be ‘punishment-dreams’. It must be admitted that their recognition means in a certain sense a new addition to the theory of dreams. What is fulfilled in them is equally an unconscious wish, namely a wish that the dreamer may be punished for a repressed and forbidden wishful impulse. To that extent dreams of this kind fall in with the condition that has been laid down here that the motive force for constructing a dream must be provided by a wish belonging to the unconscious. A closer psychological analysis, however, shows how they differ from other wishful dreams. In the cases forming Group B the dream-constructing wish is an unconscious one and belongs to the repressed, while in punishment-dreams, though it is equally an unconscious one, it must be reckoned as belonging not to the repressed but to the ‘ego.’ Thus punishment-dreams indicate the possibility that the ego may have a greater share than was supposed in the construction of dreams. The mechanism of dream-formation would in general be greatly clarified if instead of the opposition between ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ we were to speak of that between the ‘ego’ and the ‘repressed.’ This cannot be done, however, without taking account of the processes underlying the psychoneuroses, and for that reason it has not been carried out in the present work. I will only add that punishment-dreams are not in general subject to the condition that the day’s residues shall be of a distressing kind. On the contrary, they occur most easily where the opposite is the case - where the day’s residues are thoughts of a satisfying nature but the satisfaction which they express is a forbidden one. The only trace of these thoughts that appears in the manifest dream is their diametric opposite, just as in the case of dreams belonging to Group A. The essential characteristic of punishment-dreams would thus be that in their case the dream-constructing wish is not an unconscious wish derived from the repressed (from the system Ucs.), but a punitive one reacting against it and belonging to the ego, though at the same time an unconscious (that is to say, preconscious) one.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1930:] This would be the appropriate point for a reference to the ‘super-ego’, one of the later findings of psycho-analysis.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

991

I will report a dream of my own in order to illustrate what I have just said, and in particular the way in which the dream-work deals with a residue of distressing anticipations from the previous day.

‘Indistinct beginning. I said to my wife that I had a piece of news for her, something quite special. She was alarmed and refused to listen. I assured her that on the contrary it was something that she would be very glad to hear, and began to tell her that our son’s officer’s mess had sent a sum of money (5000 Kronen?) . . . something about distinction . . . distribution. . . . Meanwhile I had gone with her into a small room, like a storeroom, to look for something. Suddenly I saw my son appear. He was not in uniform but in tight-fitting sports clothes (like a seal?), with a little cap. He climbed up on to a basket that was standing beside a cupboard, as though he wanted to put something on the cupboard. I called out to him: no reply. It seemed to me that his face or forehead was bandaged. He was adjusting something in his mouth, pushing something into it. And his hair was flecked with grey. I thought: "Could he be as exhausted as all that? And has he got false teeth?”’ Before I could call out again I woke up, feeling no anxiety but with my heart beating rapidly. My bedside clock showed that it was two thirty.’

Once again it is impossible for me to present a complete analysis. I must restrict myself to bringing out a few salient points. Distressing anticipations from the previous day were what gave rise to the dream: we had once more been without news of our son at the front for over a week. It is easy to see that the content of the dream expressed a conviction that he had been wounded or killed. Energetic efforts were clearly being made at the beginning of the dream to replace the distressing thoughts by their contrary. I had some highly agreeable news to communicate - something about money being sent . . . distinction . . . distribution. (The sum of money was derived from an agreeable occurrence in my medical practice; it was an attempt at a complete diversion from the topic.) But these efforts failed. My wife suspected something dreadful and refused to listen to me. The disguises were too thin and references to what it was sought to repress pierced through them everywhere. If my son had been killed, his fellow-officers would send back his belongings and I should have to distribute what he left among his brothers and sisters and other people. A ‘distinction’ is often awarded to an officer who has fallen in battle. Thus the dream set about giving direct expression to what it had first sought to deny, though the inclination towards wish-fulfilment was still shown at work in the distortions. (The change of locality during the dream is no doubt to be understood as what Silberer has described as ‘threshold symbolism’. We cannot tell, it is true, what it was that provided the dream with the motive force for thus giving expression to my distressing thoughts. My son did not appear as someone ‘falling’ but as someone ‘climbing.’ He had in fact been a keen mountaineer. He was not in uniform but in sports clothes; this meant that the place of the accident that I now feared had been taken by an earlier, sporting one; for he had had a fall during a skiing expedition and broken his thigh. The way in which he was dressed, on the other hand, which made him look like a seal, at once recalled someone younger - our funny little grandson; while the grey hair reminded me of the latter’s father, our son-in-law, who had been hard hit by the war. What could this mean? . . . but I have said enough of it. - The locality in a store-closet and the cupboard from which he wanted to take something (‘on which he wanted to put something’ in the dream) - these allusions reminded me unmistakably of an accident of my own which I had brought on myself when I was between two and three years old. I had climbed up on to a stool in the store-closet to get something nice that was lying on a cupboard or table. The stool had tipped over and its corner had struck me behind my lower jaw; I might easily, I reflected, have knocked out all my teeth. The recollection was accompanied by an admonitory thought: ‘that serves you right’; and this seemed as though it was a hostile impulse aimed at the gallant soldier. Deeper analysis at last enabled me to discover what the concealed impulse was which might have found satisfaction in the dreaded accident to my son: it was the envy which is felt for the young by those who have grown old, but which they believe they have completely stifled. And there can be no question that it was precisely the strength of the painful emotion which would have arisen if such a misfortune had really happened that caused that emotion to seek out a repressed wish-fulfilment of this kind in order to find some consolation.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

992

I am now in a position to give a precise account of the part played in dreams by the unconscious wish. I am ready to admit that there is a whole class of dreams the instigation to which arises principally or even exclusively from the residues of daytime life; and I think that even my wish that I might at long last become a Professor Extraordinarius might have allowed me to sleep through the night in peace if my worry over my friend’s health had not still persisted from the previous day. But the worry alone could not have made a dream. The motive force which the dream required had to be provided by a wish; it was the business of the worry to get hold of a wish to act as the motive force of the dream.

The position may be explained by an analogy. A daytime thought may very well play the part of entrepreneur for a dream; but the entrepreneur, who, as people say, has the idea and the initiative to carry it out, can do nothing without capital; he needs a capitalist who can afford the outlay, and the capitalist who provides the psychical outlay for the dream is invariably and indisputably, whatever may be the thoughts of the previous day, a wish from the unconscious.

Sometimes the capitalist is himself the entrepreneur, and indeed in the case of dreams this is the commoner event: an unconscious wish is stirred up by daytime activity and proceeds to construct a dream. So, too, the other possible variations in the economic situation that I have taken as an analogy have their parallel in dream-processes. The entrepreneur may himself make a small contribution to the capital; several entrepreneurs may apply to the same capitalist; several capitalists may combine to put up what is necessary for the entrepreneur. In the same way, we come across dreams that are supported by more than one dream-wish; and so too with other similar variations, which could easily be run through, but which would be of no further interest to us. We must reserve until later what remains to be said of the dream-wish.

The tertium comparationis in the analogy that I have just used - the quantity put at the disposal of the entrepreneur in an appropriate amount - is capable of being applied in still greater detail to the purpose of elucidating the structure of dreams. In most dreams it is possible to detect a central point which is marked by peculiar sensory intensity, as I have shown on p. 778. This central point is as a rule the direct representation of the wish-fulfilment, for, if we undo the displacements brought about by the dream-work, we find that the psychical intensity of the elements in the dream-thoughts has been replaced by the sensory intensity of the elements in the content of the actual dream. The elements in the neighbourhood of the wish-fulfilment often have nothing to do with its meaning, but turn out to be derivatives of distressing thoughts that run contrary to the wish. But owing to their being in what is often an artificially established connection with the central element, they have acquired enough intensity to become capable of being represented in the dream. Thus the wish-fulfilment’s power of bringing about representation is diffused over a certain sphere surrounding it, within which all the elements - including even those possessing no means of their own - become empowered to obtain representation. In the case of dreams that are actuated by several wishes, it is easy to delimit the spheres of the different wish-fulfilments, and gaps in the dream may often be understood as frontier zones between those spheres.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

993

Though the preceding considerations have reduced the importance of the part played by the day’s residues in dreams, it is worth while devoting a little more attention to them. It must be that they are essential ingredients in the formation of dreams, since experience has revealed the surprising fact that in the content of every dream some link with a recent daytime impression - often of the most insignificant sort - is to be detected. We have not hitherto been able to explain the necessity for this addition to the mixture that constitutes a dream (see p. 669). And it is only possible to do so if we bear firmly in mind the part played by the unconscious wish and then seek for information from the psychology of the neuroses. We learn from the latter that an unconscious idea is as such quite incapable of entering the preconscious and that it can only exercise any effect there by establishing a connection with an idea which already belongs to the preconscious, by transferring its intensity on to it and by getting itself ‘covered’ by it. Here we have the fact of ‘transference’, which provides an explanation of so many striking phenomena in the mental life of neurotics. The preconscious idea, which thus acquires an undeserved degree of intensity may either be left unaltered by the transference, or it may have a modification forced upon it, derived from the content of the idea which effects the transference. I hope I may be forgiven for drawing analogies from everyday life, but I am tempted to say that the position of a repressed idea resembles that of an American dentist in this country: he is not allowed to set up in practice unless he can make use of a legally qualified medical practitioner to serve as a stalking-horse and to act as a ‘cover’ in the eyes of the law. And just as it is not exactly the physicians with the largest practices who form alliances of this kind with dentists, so in the same way preconscious or conscious ideas which have already attracted a sufficient amount of the attention that is operating in the preconscious will not be the ones to be chosen to act as covers for a repressed idea. The unconscious prefers to weave its connections round preconscious impressions and ideas which are either indifferent and have thus had no attention paid to them, or have been rejected and have thus had attention promptly withdrawn from them. It is a familiar article in the doctrine of association, and one that is entirely confirmed by experience, that an idea which is bound by a very intimate tie in one direction, tends, as it were, to repel whole groups of new ties. I once attempted to base a theory of hysterical paralyses on this proposition.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

994

If we assume that the same need for transference on the part of repressed ideas which we have discovered in analysing the neuroses is also at work in dreams, two of the riddles of the dream are solved at a blow: the fact, namely, that every analysis of a dream shows some recent impression woven into its texture and that this recent element is often of the most trivial kind. I may add that (as we have already found elsewhere) the reason why these recent and indifferent elements so frequently find their way into dreams as substitutes for the most ancient of all the dream-thoughts is that they have least to fear from the censorship imposed by resistance. But while the fact that trivial elements are preferred is explained by their freedom from censorship, the fact that recent elements occur with such regularity points to the existence of a need for transference. Both groups of impressions satisfy the demand of the repressed for material that is still clear of associations - the indifferent ones because they have given no occasion for the formation of many ties, and the recent ones because they have not yet had time to form them.

It will be seen, then, that the day’s residues, among which we may now class the indifferent impressions, not only borrow something from the Ucs. when they succeed in taking a share in the formation of a dream - namely the instinctual force which is at the disposal of the repressed wish - but that they also offer the unconscious something indispensable - namely the necessary point of attachment for a transference. If we wished to penetrate more deeply at this point into the processes of the mind, we should have to throw more light upon the interplay of excitations between the preconscious and the unconscious a subject towards which the study of the psychoneuroses draws us, but upon which, as it happens, dreams have no help to offer.

I have only one thing more to add about the day’s residues. There can be no doubt that it is they that are the true disturbers of sleep and not dreams, which, on the contrary are concerned to guard it. I shall return to this point later.

We have so far been studying dream-wishes: we have traced them from their origin in the region of the Ucs. and have analysed their relations to the day’s residues, which in their turn may either be wishes or psychical impulses of some other kind or simply recent impressions. In this way we have allowed room for every claim that may be raised by any of the multifarious waking thought-activities on behalf of the importance of the part played by them in the process of constructing dreams. It is not impossible, even, that our account may have provided an explanation of the extreme cases in which a dream, pursuing the activities of daytime, arrives at a happy solution of some unsolved problem of waking life. All we need is an example of this kind, so that we might analyse it and trace the source of the infantile or repressed wishes whose help has been enlisted and has reinforced the efforts of preconscious activity with such success. But all this has not brought us a step nearer to solving the riddle of why it is that the unconscious has nothing else to offer during sleep but the motive force for the fulfilment of a wish. The answer to this question must throw light upon the psychical nature of wishes, and I propose to give the answer by reference to our schematic picture of the psychical apparatus.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

995

There can be no doubt that that apparatus has only reached its present perfection after a long period of development. Let us attempt to carry it back to an earlier stage of its functioning capacity. Hypotheses, whose justification must be looked for in other directions, tell us that at first the apparatus’s efforts were directed towards keeping itself so far as possible free from stimuli; consequently its first structure followed the plan of a reflex apparatus, so that any sensory excitation impinging on it could be promptly discharged along a motor path. But the exigencies of life interfere with this simple function, and it is to them, too, that the apparatus owes the impetus to further development. The exigencies of life confront it first in the form of the major somatic needs. The excitations produced by internal needs seek discharge in movement, which may be described as an ‘internal change’ or an ‘expression of emotion.’ A hungry baby screams or kicks helplessly. But the situation remains unaltered, for the excitation arising from an internal need is not due to a force producing a momentary impact but to one which is in continuous operation. A change can only come about if in some way or other (in the case of the baby, through outside help) an ‘experience of satisfaction’ can be achieved which puts an end to the internal stimulus. An essential component of this experience of satisfaction is a particular perception (that of nourishment, in our example) the mnemic image of which remains associated thenceforward with the memory trace of the excitation produced by the need. As a result of the link that has thus been established, next time this need arises a psychical impulse will at once emerge which will seek to re-cathect the mnemic image of the perception and to re-evoke the perception itself, that is to say, to re-establish the situation of the original satisfaction. An impulse of this kind is what we call a wish; the reappearance of the perception is the fulfilment of the wish; and the shortest path to the fulfilment of the wish is a path leading direct from the excitation produced by the need to a complete cathexis of the perception. Nothing prevents us from assuming that there was a primitive state of the psychical apparatus in which this path was actually traversed, that is, in which wishing ended in hallucinating. Thus the aim of this first psychical activity was to produce a ‘perceptual identity’ - a repetition of the perception which was linked with the satisfaction of the need.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

996

The bitter experience of life must have changed this primitive thought-activity into a more expedient secondary one. The establishment of a perceptual identity along the short path of regression within the apparatus does not have the same result elsewhere in the mind as does the cathexis of the same perception from without. Satisfaction does not follow; the need persists. An internal cathexis could only have the same value as an external one if it were maintained unceasingly, as in fact occurs in hallucinatory psychoses and hunger phantasies, which exhaust their whole psychical activity in clinging to the object of their wish. In order to arrive at a more efficient expenditure of psychical force, it is necessary to bring the regression to a halt before it becomes complete, so that it does not proceed beyond the mnemic image, and is able to seek out other paths which lead eventually to the desired perceptual identity being established from the direction of the external world.¹ This inhibition of the regression and the subsequent diversion of the excitation become the business of a second system, which is in control of voluntary movement - which for the first time, that is, makes use of movement for purposes remembered in advance. But all the complicated thought-activity which is spun out from the mnemic image to the moment at which the perceptual identity is established by the external world - all this activity of thought merely constitutes a roundabout path to wish-fulfilment which has been made necessary by experience.² Thought is after all nothing but a substitute for a hallucinatory wish; and it is self-evident that dreams must be wish-fulfilments, since nothing but a wish can set our mental apparatus at work. Dreams, which fulfil their wishes along the short path of regression, have merely preserved for us in that respect a sample of the psychical apparatus’s primary method of working, a method which was abandoned as being inefficient. What once dominated waking life, while the mind was still young and incompetent, seems now to have been banished into the night - just as the primitive weapons, the bows and arrows, that have been abandoned by adult men, turn up once more in the nursery. Dreaming is a piece of infantile mental life that has been superseded. These methods of working on the part of the psychical apparatus, which are normally suppressed in waking hours, become current once more in psychosis and then reveal their incapacity for satisfying our needs in relation to the external world.³

¹ [Footnote added 1919:] In other words, it becomes evident that there must be a means of ‘reality-testing’.

² The wish-fulfilling activity of dreams is justly extolled by Le Lorrain, who speaks of it as ‘sans fatigue sérieuse, sans être obligé de recourir à cette lutte opiniâtre et longue qui use et corrode les jouissances poursuivies [incurring no serious fatigue and not being obliged to embark upon the long and obstinate struggle that wears away and spoils enjoyments that have to be pursued].’

³ [Footnote added 1914:] I have elsewhere carried this train of thought further in a paper on the two principles of mental functioning (Freud 1911b) - the pleasure principle and the reality principle, as I have proposed calling them.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

997

The unconscious wishful impulses clearly try to make themselves effective in daytime as well, and the fact of transference, as well as the psychoses, show us that they endeavour to force their way by way of the preconscious system into consciousness and to obtain control of the power of movement. Thus the censorship between the Ucs. and the Pcs., the assumption of whose existence is positively forced upon us by dreams, deserves to be recognized and respected as the watchman of our mental health. Must we not regard it, however, as an act of carelessness on the part of that watchman that it relaxes its activities during the night, allows the suppressed impulses in the Ucs. to find expression, and makes it possible for hallucinatory regression to occur once more? I think not. For even though this critical watchman goes to rest - and we have proof that its slumbers are not deep - it also shuts the door upon the power of movement. No matter what impulses from the normally inhibited Ucs. may prance upon the stage, we need feel no concern; they remain harmless, since they are unable to set in motion the motor apparatus by which alone they might modify the external world. The state of sleep guarantees the security of the citadel that must be guarded. The position is less harmless when what brings about the displacement of forces is not the nightly relaxation in the critical censorship’s output of force, but a pathological reduction in that force or a pathological intensification of the unconscious excitations while the preconscious is still cathected and the gateway to the power of movement stands open. When this is so, the watchman is overpowered, the unconscious excitations overwhelm the Pcs., and thence obtain control over our speech and actions; or they forcibly bring about hallucinatory regression and direct the course of the apparatus (which was not designed for their use) by virtue of the attraction exercised by perceptions on the distribution of our psychical energy. To this state of things we give the name of psychosis.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

998

We are now well on the way to proceeding further with the erection of the psychological scaffolding, which we stopped at the point at which we introduced the two systems Ucs. and Pcs. But there are reasons for continuing a little with our consideration of wishes as the sole psychical motive force for the construction of dreams. We have accepted the idea that the reason why dreams are invariably wish-fulfilments is that they are products of the system Ucs., whose activity knows no other aim than the fulfilment of wishes and which has at its command no other forces than wishful impulses. If we insist, for even a moment longer, upon our right to base such far-reaching psychological speculations upon the interpretation of dreams, we are in duty found to prove that those speculations have enabled us to insert dreams into a nexus which can include other psychical structures as well. If such a thing as a system Ucs. exists (or something analogous to it for the purposes of our discussion), dreams cannot be its only manifestation; every dream may be a wish-fulfilment, but apart from dreams there must be other forms of abnormal wish-fulfilments. And it is a fact that the theory governing all psychoneurotic symptoms culminates in a single proposition, which asserts that they too are to be regarded as fulfilments of unconscious wishes.¹ Our explanation makes the dream only the first member of a class which is of the greatest significance to psychiatrists and an understanding of which implies the solution of the purely psychological side of the problem of psychiatry.²

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] Or more correctly, one portion of the symptom corresponds to the unconscious wish-fulfilment and another portion to the mental structure reacting against the wish.

² [Footnote added 1914:] As Hughlings Jackson said: ‘Find out all about dreams and you will have found out all about insanity.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

999

The other members of this class of wish-fulfilments - hysterical symptoms, for instance - possess one essential characteristic, however, which I cannot discover in dreams. I have learnt from the researches which I have mentioned so often in the course of this work that in order to bring about the formation of a hysterical symptom both currents of our mind must converge. A symptom is not merely the expression of a realized unconscious wish; a wish from the preconscious which is fulfilled by the same symptom must also be present. So that the symptom will have of at least two determinants, one arising from each of the systems involved in the conflict. As in the case of dreams, there are no limits to the further determinants that may be present - to the ‘overdetermination’ of the symptoms. The determinant which does not arise from the Ucs. is invariably, so far as I know, a train of thought reacting against the unconscious wish - a self-punishment, for instance. I can therefore make the quite general assertion that a hysterical symptom develops only where the fulfilments of two opposing wishes, arising each from a different psychical system, are able to converge in a single expression. (Compare in this connection my most recent formulations on the origin of hysterical symptoms in my paper on hysterical phantasies and their relation to bisexuality.) Examples would serve very little purpose here, since nothing but an exhaustive elucidation of the complications involved could carry conviction. I will therefore leave my assertion to stand for itself and only quote an example in order to make the point clear, and not to carry conviction. In one of my women patients, then, hysterical vomiting turned out to be on the one hand the fulfilment of an unconscious phantasy dating from her puberty - of a wish, that is, that she might be continuously pregnant and have innumerable children, with a further wish, added later, that she might have them by as many men as possible. A powerful defensive impulse had sprung up against this unbridled wish. And, since the patient might lose her figure and her good looks as a result of her vomiting, and so might cease to be attractive to anyone, the symptom was acceptable to the punitive train of thought as well; and since it was permitted by both sides it could become a reality. This was the same method of treating a wish-fulfilment as was adopted by the Parthian queen towards the Roman triumvir Crassus. Believing that he had embarked on his expedition out of love of gold, she ordered molten gold to be poured down his throat when he was dead: ‘Now’, she said, ‘you have what you wanted.’ But all that we so far know about dreams is that they express the fulfilment of a wish from the unconscious; it seems as though the dominant, preconscious system acquiesces in this after insisting upon a certain number of distortions. Nor is it possible as a general rule to find a train of thought opposed to the dream-wish and, like its counterpart, realized in the dream. Only here and there in dream-analyses do we come upon signs of reactive creations, like, for instance, my affectionate feelings for my friend R. in the dream of my uncle (cf. p. 637 ff.). But we can find the missing ingredient from the preconscious elsewhere. Whereas the wish from the Ucs. is able to find expression in the dream after undergoing distortions of every kind, the dominant system withdraws into a wish to sleep, realizes that wish by bringing about the modifications which it is able to produce in the cathexes within the psychical apparatus, and persists in that wish throughout the whole duration of sleep.¹

¹ I have borrowed this idea from the theory of sleep put forward by Liébeault (1889), to whom is due the revival in modern times of research into hypnotism.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1000

This determined wish on the part of the preconscious to sleep exercises a generally facilitating effect on the formation of dreams. Let me recall the dream dreamt by the man who was led to infer from the glare of light coming out of the next room that his child’s body might be on fire. The father drew this inference in a dream instead of allowing himself to be woken up by the glare; and we have suggested that one of the psychical forces responsible for this result was a wish which prolonged by that one moment the life of the child whom he pictured in the dream. Other wishes, originating from the repressed, probably escape us, since we are unable to analyse the dream. But we may assume that a further motive force in the production of the dream was the father’s need to sleep; his sleep, like the child’ s life, was prolonged by one moment by the dream. ‘Let the dream go on’ - such was his motive - ‘or I shall have to wake up.’ In every other dream, just as in this one, the wish to sleep lends its support to the unconscious wish. On p. 624 f. I described some dreams which appeared openly as dreams of convenience. But in fact all dreams can claim a right to the same description. The operation of the wish to continue sleeping is most easily to be seen in arousal dreams, which modify external sensory stimuli in such a way as to make them compatible with a continuance of sleep; they weave them into a dream in order to deprive them of any possibility of acting as reminders of the external world. That same wish must, however, play an equal part in allowing the occurrence of all other dreams, though it may only be from within that they threaten to shake the subject out of his sleep. In some cases, when a dream carries things too far, the Ucs. says to consciousness: ‘Never mind! go on sleeping! after all it’s only a dream!’ But this describes in general the attitude of our dominant mental activity towards dreams, though it may not be openly expressed. I am driven to conclude that throughout our whole sleeping state we know just as certainly that we are dreaming as we know that we are sleeping. We must not pay too much attention to the counter-argument that our consciousness is never brought to bear on the latter piece of knowledge and that it is only brought to bear on the former on particular occasions when the censorship feels that it has, as it were, been taken off its guard.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1001

On the other hand, there are some people who are quite clearly aware during the night that they are asleep and dreaming and who thus seem to possess the faculty of consciously directing their dreams. If, for instance, a dreamer of this kind is dissatisfied with the turn taken by a dream, he can break it off without waking up and start it again in another direction - just as a popular dramatist may under pressure give his play a happier ending. Or another time, if his dream has led him into a sexually exciting situation, he can think to himself: ‘I won’t go on with this dream any further and exhaust myself with an emission; I’II hold it back for a real situation instead.’

The Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys, quoted by Vaschide (1911, 139), claimed to have acquired the power of accelerating the course of his dreams just as he pleased, and of giving them any direction he chose. It seems as though in his case the wish to sleep had given place to another preconscious wish, namely to observe his dreams and enjoy them. Sleep is just as compatible with a wish of this sort as it is with a mental reservation to wake up if some particular condition is fulfilled (e.g. in the case of a nursing mother or wet-nurse). Moreover, it is a familiar fact that anyone who takes an interest in dreams remembers a considerably greater number of them after waking.

Ferenczi (1911), in the course of a discussion of some other observations upon the directing of dreams, remarks: ‘Dreams work over the thoughts which are occupying the mind at the moment from every angle; they will drop a dream-image if it threatens the success of a wish-fulfilment and will experiment with a fresh solution, till at last they succeed in constructing a wish-fulfilment which satisfies both agencies of the mind as a compromise.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1002

(B)

AROUSAL BY DREAMS - THE FUNCTION OF DREAMS - ANXIETY-DREAMS

Now that we know that all through the night the preconscious is concentrated upon the wish to sleep, we are in a position to carry our understanding of the process of dreaming a stage further. But first let us summarize what we have learnt so far.

The situation is this. Either residues of the previous day have been left over from the activity of waking life and it has not been possible to withdraw the whole cathexis of energy from them; or the activity of waking life during the course of the day has led to the stirring up of an unconscious wish; or these two events have happened to coincide. (We have already discussed the various possibilities in this connection.)  The unconscious wish links itself up with the day’s residues and effects a transference on to them; this may happen either in the course of the day or not until a state of sleep has been established. A wish now arises which has been transferred on to the recent material; or a recent wish, having been suppressed, gains fresh life by being reinforced from the unconscious. This wish seeks to force its way along the normal path taken by thought processes, though the Pcs. (to which, indeed, it in part belongs) to consciousness. But it comes up against the censorship, which is still functioning and to the influence of which it now submits. At this point it takes on the distortion for which the way has already been paved by the transference of the wish on to recent material. So far it is on the way to becoming an obsessive idea or a delusion or something of the kind - that is, a thought which has been intensified by transference and distorted in its expression by censorship. Its further advance is halted, however, by the sleeping state of the preconscious. (The probability is that that system has protected itself against the invasion by diminishing its own excitations.) The dream-process consequently enters on a regressive path, which lies open to it precisely owing to the peculiar nature of the state of sleep, and it is led along that path by the attraction exercised on it by groups of memories; some of these memories themselves exist only in the form of visual cathexes and not as translations into the terminology of the later systems. In the course of its regressive path the dream-process acquires the attribute of representability. (I shall deal later with the question of compression.) It has now completed the second portion of its zigzag journey. The first portion was a progressive one, leading from the unconscious scenes or phantasies to the preconscious; the second portion led from the frontier of the censorship back again to perceptions. But when the content of the dream process has become perceptual, by that fact it has, as it were, found a way of evading the obstacle put in its way by the censorship and the state of sleep in the Pcs. It succeeds in drawing attention to itself and in being noticed by consciousness.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1003

For consciousness, which we look upon in the light of a sense organ for the apprehension of psychical qualities, is capable in waking life of receiving excitations from two directions. In the first place, it can receive excitations from the periphery of the whole apparatus, the perceptual system; and in addition to this, it can receive excitations of pleasure and unpleasure, which prove to be almost the only psychical quality attaching to transpositions of energy in the inside of the apparatus. All other processes in the Ψ-systems, including the Pcs., are lacking in any psychical quality and so cannot be objects of consciousness, except in so far as they bring pleasure or unpleasure to perception. We are thus driven to conclude that these releases of pleasure and unpleasure automatically regulate the course of cathectic processes. But, in order to make more delicately adjusted performances possible, it later became necessary to make the course of ideas less dependent upon the presence or absence of unpleasure. For this purpose the Pcs. system needed to have qualities of its own which could attract consciousness; and it seems highly probable that it obtained them by linking the preconscious processes with the mnemic system of indications of speech, a system which was not without quality. By means of the qualities of that system, consciousness, which had hitherto been a sense organ for perceptions alone. Now, therefore, there are, as it were, two sensory surfaces, one directed towards perception and the other towards the preconscious thought-processes.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1004

I must assume that the state of sleep makes the sensory surface of consciousness which is directed towards the Pcs. far more insusceptible to excitation than the surface directed towards the Pcpt. systems. Moreover, this abandonment of interest in thought-processes during the night has a purpose: thinking is to come to a standstill, for the Pcs. requires sleep. Once, however, a dream has become a perception, it is in a position to excite consciousness, by means of the qualities it has now acquired. This sensory excitation proceeds to perform what is its essential function: it directs a part of the available cathectic energy in the Pcs. into attention to what is causing the excitation. It must therefore be admitted that every dream has an arousing effect, that it sets a part of the quiescent force of the Pcs. in action. The dream is then submitted by this force to the influence which we have described as secondary revision with an eye to consecutiveness and intelligibility. That is to say, the dream is treated by it just like any other perceptual content; it is met by the same anticipatory ideas, in so far as its subject-matter allows. So far as this third portion of the dream-process has any direction it is once again a progressive one.

To avoid misunderstandings, a word about the chronological relations of these dream-processes will not be out of place. A very attractive conjecture has been put forward by Goblot, suggested, no doubt, by the riddle of Maury’s guillotine dream. He seeks to show that a dream occupies no more than the transition period between sleeping and waking. The process of awakening takes a certain amount of time, and during that time the dream occurs. We imagine that the final dream-image was so powerful that it compelled us to wake; whereas in fact it was only so powerful because at that moment we were already on the point of waking. ‘Un rêve c’est un réveil qui commence.’¹

It has already been pointed out by Dugas that Goblot would have to disregard many facts before he could assert his thesis generally. Dreams occur from which we do not awaken for instance, some in which we dream that we are dreaming. With our knowledge of the dream-work, we could not possibly agree that it only covers the period of awakening. It seems probable, on the contrary, that the first portion of the dream-work has already begun during the day, under the control of the preconscious. Its second portion - the modification imposed by the censorship, the attraction exercised by unconscious scenes, and the forcing of its way to perception - no doubt proceeds all through the night; and in this respect we may perhaps always be right when we express a feeling of having been dreaming all night long, though we cannot say what.

¹ [‘A dream is an awakening that is beginning.’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1005

But it seems to me unnecessary to suppose that dream-processes really maintain, up to the moment of becoming conscious, the chronological order in which I have described them: that the first thing to appear is the transferred dream-wish, that distortion by the censorship follows, then the regressive change in direction, and so on. I have been obliged to adopt this order in my description; but what happens in reality is no doubt a simultaneous exploring of one path and another, a swinging of the excitation now this way and now that, until at last it accumulates in the direction that is most opportune and one particular grouping becomes the permanent one. Certain personal experiences of my own lead me to suspect that the dream-work often requires more than a day and a night in order to achieve its result; and if this is so, we need no longer feel any amazement at the extraordinary ingenuity shown in the construction of the dream. In my opinion even the demand for the dream to be made intelligible as a perceptual event may be put into effect before the dream attracts consciousness to itself. From then onwards, however, the pace is accelerated, for at that point a dream is treated in the same fashion as anything else that is perceived. It is like a firework, which takes hours to prepare but goes off in a moment.

The dream-process has by now either acquired sufficient intensity though the dream-work to attract consciousness to itself and arouse the preconscious, irrespectively of the time and depth of sleep; or its intensity is insufficient to achieve this and it must remain in a state of readiness until, just before waking, attention becomes more mobile and comes to meet it. The majority of dreams appear to operate with comparatively low psychical intensities, for they mostly wait until the moment of waking. But this also explains the fact that, if we are suddenly woken from deep sleep, we usually perceive something that we have dreamt. In such cases, just as when we wake of our own accord, the first thing we see is the perceptual content that has been constructed by the dream-work and immediately afterwards we see the perceptual content that is offered to us from outside ourselves.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1006

Greater theoretical interest, however, attaches to the dreams which have the power to rouse us in the middle of our sleep. Bearing in mind the expediency which is everywhere else the rule, we may ask why a dream, that is, an unconscious wish, is given the power to interfere with sleep, that is, with the fulfilment of the preconscious wish. The explanation no doubt lies in relations of energy of which we have no knowledge. If we possessed such knowledge, we should probably find that allowing the dream to take its course and expending a certain amount of more or less detached attention on it is an economy of energy compared with holding the unconscious as tightly under control at night as in the daytime. Experience shows that dreaming is compatible with sleeping, even if it interrupts sleep several times during the night. One wakes up for an instant and then falls asleep again at once. It is like brushing away a fly in one’s sleep: a case of ad hoc awakening. If one falls asleep again, the interruption has been disposed of. As is shown by such familiar examples as the sleep of a nursing mother or wet nurse, the fulfilment of the wish to sleep is quite compatible with maintaining a certain expenditure of attention in some particular direction.

At this point an objection arises, which is based on a better knowledge of unconscious processes. I myself have asserted that unconscious wishes are always active. But in spite of this they seem not to be strong enough to make themselves perceptible during the day. If, however, while a state of sleep prevails, an unconscious wish has shown itself strong enough to construct a dream and arouse the preconscious with it, why should this strength fail after the dream has been brought to knowledge? Should not the dream continue to recur perpetually, precisely as the vexatious fly keeps on coming back after it has been driven away? What right have we to assert that dreams get rid of the disturbance of sleep?

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1007

It is perfectly true that unconscious wishes always remain active. They represent paths which can always be traversed, whenever a quantity of excitation makes use of them. Indeed it is a prominent feature of unconscious processes that they are indestructible. In the unconscious nothing can be brought to an end, nothing is past or forgotten. This is brought most vividly home to one in studying the neuroses, and especially hysteria. The unconscious path of thoughts, which leads to discharge in a hysterical attack, immediately becomes traversable once more, when sufficient excitation has accumulated. A humiliation that was experienced thirty years ago acts exactly like a fresh one throughout the thirty years, as soon as it has obtained access to the unconscious sources of emotion. As soon as the memory of it is touched, it springs into life again and shows itself cathected with excitation which finds a motor discharge in an attack. This is precisely the point at which psychotherapy has to intervene. Its task is to make it possible for the unconscious processes to be dealt with finally and be forgotten. For the fading of memories and the emotional weakness of impressions which are no longer recent, which we are inclined to regard as self-evident and to explain as a primary effect of time upon mental memory-traces, are in reality secondary modifications which are only brought about by laborious work. What performs this work is the preconscious, and psychotherapy can pursue no other course than to bring the Ucs. under the domination of the Pcs.

Thus there are two possible outcomes for any particular unconscious excitatory process. Either it may be left to itself, in which case it eventually forces its way through at some point and on this single occasion finds discharge for its excitation in movement; or it may come under the influence of the preconscious, and its excitation, instead of being discharged, may be bound by the preconscious. This second alternative is the one which occurs in the process of dreaming. The cathexis from the Pcs. which goes halfway to meet the dream after it has become perceptual, having been directed on to it by the excitation in consciousness, binds the dream’s unconscious excitation and makes it powerless to act as a disturbance. If it is true that the dreamer wakes for an instant, yet he really has brushed away the fly that was threatening to disturb his sleep. It begins to dawn on us that it actually is more expedient and economical to allow the unconscious wish to take its course, to leave the path to regression open to it so that it can construct a dream, and then to bind the dream and dispose of it with a small expenditure of preconscious work - rather than to continue keeping a tight rein on the unconscious throughout the whole period of sleep. It was indeed to be expected that dreaming, even though it may originally have been a process without a useful purpose, would have procured itself some function in the interplay of mental forces. And we can now see what that function is. Dreaming has taken on the task of bringing back under control of the preconscious the excitation in the Ucs. which has been left free; in so doing, it discharges the Ucs. excitation, serves it as a safety valve and at the same time preserves the sleep of the preconscious in return for a small expenditure of waking activity. Thus, like all the other psychical structures in the series of which it is a member, it constitutes a compromise; it is in the service of both of the two systems since it fulfils the two wishes in so far as they are compatible with each other. If we turn back to the ‘excretion theory’ of dreams put forward by Robert, which I explained on p. 586 ff., we shall see at a glance that in its essence we must accept his account of the function of dreams, though differing from him in his premises and in his view of the dream-process itself.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] Is this the only function that can be assigned to dreams? I know of no other. It is true that Maeder has attempted to show that dreams have other, ‘secondary’, functions. He started out from the correct observation that some dreams contain attempts at solving conflicts, attempts which are later carried out in reality and which thus behave as though they were trial practices for waking actions. He therefore drew a parallel between dreams and the play of animals and children, which may be regarded as practice in the operation of innate instincts and as preparation for serious activity later on, and put forward the hypothesis that dreams have a ‘fonction ludique’ [‘play function’]. Shortly before Maeder, Alfred Adler, too, had insisted that dreams possessed a function of ‘thinking ahead.’ (In an analysis which I published in 1905, a dream, which could only be regarded as expressing an intention, was repeated every night until it was carried out.)

A little reflection will convince us, however, that this ‘secondary’ function of dreams has no claim to be considered as a part of the subject of dream-interpretation. Thinking ahead, forming intentions, framing attempted solutions which may perhaps be realized later in waking life, all these, and many other similar things, are products of the unconscious and preconscious activity of the mind; they may persist in the state of sleep as ‘the day’s residues’ and combine with an unconscious wish (cf. p. 982 ff.) in forming a dream. Thus the dream’s function of ‘thinking ahead’ is rather a function of preconscious waking thought, the products of which may be revealed to us by the analysis of dreams or of other phenomena. It has long been the habit to regard dreams as identical with their manifest content; but we must now beware equally of the mistake of confusing dreams with latent dream-thoughts.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1008

The qualification ‘in so far as the two wishes are compatible with each other’ implies a hint at the possible case in which the function of dreaming may come to grief. The dream-process is allowed to begin as a fulfilment of an unconscious wish; but if this attempted wish-fulfilment jars upon the preconscious so violently that it is unable to continue sleeping, then the dream has made a breach in the compromise and has failed to carry out the second half of its task. In that case the dream is immediately broken off and replaced by a state of complete waking. Here again it is not really the fault of the dream if it has now to appear in the role of a disturber of sleep instead of in its normal one of a guardian of sleep; and this fact need not prejudice us against its having a useful purpose. This is not the only instance in the organism of a contrivance which is normally useful becoming useless and disturbing as soon as the conditions that give rise to it are somewhat modified; and the disturbance at least serves the new purpose of drawing attention to the modification and of setting the organism’s regulative machinery in motion against it. What I have in mind is of course the case of anxiety-dreams, and in order that I may not be thought to be evading this evidence against the theory of wish-fulfilment whenever I come across it, I will at all events give some hints of their explanation.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1009

There is no longer anything contradictory to us in the notion that a psychical process which develops anxiety can nevertheless be the fulfilment of a wish. We know that it can be explained by the fact that the wish belongs to one system, the Ucs., while it has been repudiated and suppressed by the other system, the Pcs.¹ Even where psychical health is perfect, the subjugation of the Ucs. by the Pcs. is not complete; the measure of suppression indicates the degree of our psychical normality. Neurotic symptoms show that the two systems are in conflict with each other; they are the products of a compromise which brings the conflict to an end for the time being. On the one hand, they allow the Ucs. an outlet for the discharge of its excitation, and provide it with a kind of sally-port, while, on the other hand they make it possible for the Pcs. to control the Ucs. to some extent. It is instructive to consider, for instance, the significance of a hysterical phobia or an agoraphobia. Let us suppose that a neurotic patient is unable to cross the street alone - a condition which we rightly regard as a ‘symptom.’ If we remove this symptom by compelling him to carry out the act of which he believes himself incapable, the consequence will be an attack of anxiety; and indeed the occurrence of an anxiety-attack in the street is often the precipitating cause of the onset of an agoraphobia. We see, therefore, that the symptom has been constructed in order to avoid an outbreak of anxiety; the phobia is erected like a frontier fortification against the anxiety.

¹ [Footnote added 1919:] ‘A second factor, which is much more important and far-reaching, but which is equally overlooked by laymen is the following. No doubt a wish-fulfilment must bring pleasure; but the question then arises "To whom?" To the person who has the wish, of course. But, as we know, a dreamer’s relation to his wishes is a quite peculiar one. He repudiates them and censors them - he has no liking for them, in short. So that their fulfilment will give him no pleasure, but just the opposite; and experience shows that this opposite appears in the form of anxiety, a fact which has still to be explained. Thus a dreamer in his relation to his dream-wishes can only be compared to an amalgamation of two separate people who are linked by some important common element. Instead of enlarging on this, I will remind you of a familiar fairy tale in which you will find the same situation repeated. A good fairy promised a poor married couple to grant them the fulfilment of their first three wishes. They were delighted, and made up their minds to choose their three wishes carefully. But a smell of sausages being fried in the cottage next door tempted the woman to wish for a couple of them. They were there in a flash; and this was the first wish-fulfilment. But the man was furious, and in his rage wished that the sausages were hanging on his wife’s nose. This happened too; and the sausages were not to be dislodged from their new position. This was the second wish-fulfilment; but the wish was the man’s, and its fulfilment was most disagreeable for his wife. You know the rest of the story. Since after all they were in fact one - man and wife - the third wish was bound to be that the sausages should come away from the woman’s nose. This fairy tale might be used in many other connections; but here it serves only to illustrate the possibility that if two people are not at one with each other the fulfilment of a wish of one of them may bring nothing but unpleasure to the other.’ (Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Lecture XIV.)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1010

Our discussion cannot be carried any further without examining the part played by the affects in these processes; but we can only do so imperfectly in the present connection. Let us assume, then, that the suppression of the Ucs. is necessary above all because, if the course of ideas in the Ucs. were left to itself, it would generate an affect which was originally of a pleasurable nature, but became unpleasurable after the process of ‘repression’ occurred. The purpose, and the result too, of suppression is to prevent this release of unpleasure. The suppression extends over the ideational content of the Ucs., since the release of unpleasure might start from that content. This presupposes a quite specific assumption as to the nature of the generation of affect. It is viewed as a motor or secretory function, the key to whose innervation lies in the ideas in the Ucs. Owing to the domination established by the Pcs. these ideas are, as it were, throttled, and inhibited from sending out impulses which would generate affect. If, therefore, the cathexis from the Pcs. ceases, the danger is that the unconscious excitations may release affect of a kind which (as a result of the repression which has already occurred) can only be experienced as unpleasure, as anxiety.

This danger materializes if the dream-process is allowed to take its course. The conditions which determine its realization are that repressions must have occurred and that the suppressed wishful impulses shall be able to grow sufficiently strong. These determinants are thus quite outside the psychological framework of dream-formation. If it were not for the fact that our topic is connected with the subject of the generation of anxiety by the single factor of the liberation of the Ucs. during sleep, I should be able to omit any discussion of anxiety-dreams and avoid the necessity for entering in these pages into all the obscurities surrounding them.

The theory of anxiety-dreams, as I have already repeatedly declared, forms part of the psychology of the neuroses. We have nothing more to do with it when once we have indicated its point of contact with the topic of the dream-process. There is only one thing more that I can do. Since I have asserted that neurotic anxiety arises from sexual sources, I can submit some anxiety-dreams to analysis in order to show the sexual material present in their dream-thoughts.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1011

I have good reasons for leaving on one side in the present discussion the copious examples afforded by my neurotic patients, and for preferring to quote some anxiety-dreams dreamt by young people.

It is dozens of years since I myself had a true anxiety-dream, but I remember one from my seventh or eighth year, which I submitted to interpretation some thirty years later. It was a very vivid one, and in it I saw my beloved mother, with a peculiarly peaceful, sleeping expression on her features, being carried into the room by two (or three) people with bird’s beaks and laid upon the bed. I awoke in tears and screaming, and interrupted my parents’ sleep. The strangely draped and unnaturally tall figures with birds’ beaks were derived from the illustrations to Philippson’s Bible. I fancy they must have been gods with falcons’ heads from an ancient Egyptian funerary relief. Besides this, the analysis brought to mind an ill-mannered boy, a son of a concierge, who used to play with us on the grass in front of the house when we were children, and who I am inclined to think was called Philipp. It seems to me that it was from this boy that I first heard the vulgar term for sexual intercourse, instead of which educated people always use a Latin word, ‘to copulate’, and which was clearly enough indicated by the choice of the falcons’ heads. I must have guessed the sexual significance of the word from the face of my young instructor, who was well acquainted with the facts of life. The expression on my mother’s features in the dream was copied from the view I had had of any grandfather a few days before his death as he lay snoring in a coma. The interpretation carried out in the dream by the ‘secondary revision’ must therefore have been that my mother was dying; the funerary relief fitted in with this. I awoke in anxiety, which did not cease till I had woken my parents up. I remember that I suddenly grew calm when I saw my mother’s face, as though I had needed to be reassured that she was not dead. But this ‘secondary’ interpretation of the dream had already been made under the influence of the anxiety which had developed. I was not anxious because I had dreamt that my mother was dying; but I interpreted the dream in that sense in my preconscious revision of it because I was already under the influence of the anxiety. The anxiety can be traced back, when repression is taken into account, to an obscure and evidently sexual craving that had found appropriate expression in the visual content of the dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1012

A twenty-seven-year-old man, who had been seriously ill for a year, reported that when he was between eleven and thirteen he had repeatedly dreamt (to the accompaniment of severe anxiety) that a man with a hatchet was pursuing him; he tried to run away, but seemed to be paralysed and could not move from the spot. This is a good example of a very common sort of anxiety-dream, which would never be suspected of being sexual. In analysis, the dreamer first came upon a story (dating from a time later than the dream) told him by his uncle, of how he had been attacked in the street one night by a suspicious-looking individual; the dreamer himself concluded from this association that he may have heard of some similar episode at the time of the dream. In connection with the hatchet, he remembered that at about that time he had once injured his hand with a hatchet while he was chopping up wood. He then passed immediately to his relations with his younger brother. He used to ill-treat this brother and knock him down; and he particularly remembered an occasion when he had kicked him on the head with his boot and had drawn blood, and how his mother had said: ‘I’m afraid he’ll be the death of him one day.’ While he still seemed to be occupied with the subject of violence, a recollection from his ninth year suddenly occurred to him. His parents had come home late and had gone to bed while he pretended to be asleep; soon he had heard sounds of panting and other noises which had seemed to him uncanny, and he had also been able to make out their position in the bed. Further thoughts showed that he had drawn an analogy between this relation between his parents and his own relation to his younger brother. He had subsumed what happened between his parents under the concept of violence and struggling; and he had found evidence in favour of this view in the fact that he had often noticed blood in his mother’s bed.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1013

It is, I may say, a matter of daily experience that sexual intercourse between adults strikes any children who may observe it as something uncanny and that it arouses anxiety in them. I have explained this anxiety by arguing that what we are dealing with is a sexual excitation with which their understanding is unable to cope and which they also, no doubt, repudiate because their parents are involved in it, and which is therefore transformed into anxiety. At a still earlier period of life sexual excitations directed towards a parent of the opposite sex have not yet met with repression and, as we have seen, are freely expressed. (See p. 735 ff.)

I should have no hesitation in giving the same explanation of the attacks of night terrors accompanied by hallucinations (pavor nocturnus) which are so frequent in children. In this case too it can only be a question of sexual impulses which have not been understood and which have been repudiated. Investigation would probably show a periodicity in the occurrence of the attacks, since an increase in sexual libido can be brought about not only by accidental exciting impressions but also by successive waves of spontaneous developmental processes.

I lack a sufficiency of material based upon observation to enable me to confirm this explanation.¹

Paediatricians, on the other hand, seem to lack the only line of approach which can make this whole class of phenomena intelligible, whether from the somatic or from the psychical aspect. I cannot resist quoting an amusing instance of the way in which the blinkers of medical mythology can cause an observer to miss an understanding of such cases by a narrow margin. My instance is taken from a thesis on pavor nocturnus by Debacker (1881, 66):

A thirteen-year-old boy in delicate health began to be apprehensive and dreamy. His sleep became disturbed and was interrupted almost once a week by severe attacks of anxiety accompanied by hallucinations. He always retained a very clear recollection of these dreams. He said that the Devil had shouted at him: ‘Now we’ve got you, now we’ve got you!’ There was then a smell of pitch and brimstone and his skin was burnt by flames. He woke up from the dream in terror, and at first could not cry out. When he had found his voice he was clearly heard to say: ‘No, no, not me; I’ve not done anything!’ or ‘Please not! I won’t do it again!’ or sometimes: ‘Albert never did that!’ Later, he refused to undress ‘because the flames only caught him when he was undressed.’ While he was still having these devil-dreams, which were a threat to his health, he was sent into the country. There he recovered in the course of eighteen months, and once, when he was fifteen, he confessed: ‘Je n’osais pas l’avouer, mais j’éprouvais continuellement des picotements et des surexcitations aux parties; à la fin, cela m’énervait tant que plusieurs fois j’ai pensé me jeter par la fenêtre du dortoir.’³

¹ [Footnote added 1919:] Since I wrote this a great quantity of such material has been brought forward in psycho-analytic literature.

² I have italicized this word, but it is impossible to misunderstand it.

³ [‘I didn’t dare admit it; but I was continually having prickly feelings and overexcitement in my parts; in the end it got on my nerves so much that I often thought of jumping out of the dormitory window.’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1014

There is really very little difficulty in inferring: (1) that the boy had masturbated when he was younger, that he had probably denied it, and that he had been threatened with severe punishment for his bad habit (cf. his admission: ‘Je ne le ferais plus’, and his denial: ‘Albert n’a jamais fait ça’); (2) that with the onset of puberty the temptation to masturbate had revived with the tickling in his genitals; but (3) that a struggle for repression had broken out in him, which had suppressed his libido and transformed it into anxiety, and that the anxiety had taken over the punishments with which he had been threatened earlier.

And now let us see the inferences drawn by our author (ibid., 69): ‘The following conclusions can be drawn from this observation:

‘(1) The influence of puberty upon a boy in delicate health can lead to a condition of great weakness and can result in a considerable degree of cerebral anaemia.¹

‘(2) This cerebral anaemia produces character changes, demonomanic hallucinations and very violent nocturnal (and perhaps also diurnal) anxiety-states.

‘(3) The boy’s demonomania and self-reproaches go back to the influences of his religious education, which affected him as a child.

‘(4) All the symptoms disappeared in the course of a somewhat protracted visit to the country, as the result of physical exercise and the regaining of strength with the passage of puberty.

‘(5) A predisposing influence upon the origin of the child’s brain condition may perhaps be attributed to heredity and to a past syphilitic infection in his father.’

And here is the final conclusion: ‘Nous avons fait entrer cette observation dans le cadre des délires apyrétiques d’inanition, car c’est à l’ischémie cérébrale que nous rattachons cet état particulier.’²

¹ The italics are mine.

² [‘We have classified this case among the apyretic deliria of inanition, for we attribute this particular state to cerebral ischaemia.’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1015

(E)

THE PRIMARY AND SECONDARY PROCESSES - REPRESSION

In venturing on an attempt to penetrate more deeply into the psychology of dream-processes, I have set myself a hard task and one to which my powers of exposition are scarcely equal. Elements in this complicated whole which are in fact simultaneous can only be represented successively in my description of them, while, in putting forward each point, I must avoid appearing to anticipate the grounds on which it is based: difficulties such as these it is beyond my strength to master. In all this I am paying the penalty for the fact that in my account of dream-psychology I have been unable to follow the historical development of my own views. Though my own line of approach to the subject of dreams was determined by my previous work on the psychology of the neuroses, I had not intended to make use of the latter as a basis of reference in the present work. Nevertheless I am constantly being driven to do so, instead of proceeding, as I should have wished, in the contrary direction and using dreams as a means of approach to the psychology of the neuroses. I am conscious of all the trouble in which my readers are thus involved, but I can see no means of avoiding it.

In my dissatisfaction at this state of things, I am glad to pause for a little over another consideration which seems to put a higher value on my efforts. I found myself faced by a topic on which, as has been shown in my first chapter, the opinions of the authorities were characterized by the sharpest contradictions. My treatment of the problems of dreams has found room for the majority of these contradictory views. I have only found it necessary to give a categorical denial of two of them - the view that dreaming is a meaningless process and the view that it is a somatic one. Apart from this, I have been able to find a justification for all these mutually contradictory opinions at one point or other of my complicated thesis and to show that they had lighted upon some portion of the truth.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1016

The view that dreams carry on the occupations and interests of waking life has been entirely confirmed by the discovery of the concealed dream-thoughts. These are only concerned with what seems important to us and interests us greatly. Dreams are never occupied with minor details. But we have also found reason for accepting the contrary view, that dreams pick up indifferent refuse left over from the previous day and that they cannot get control of any major day time interest until it has been to some extent withdrawn from waking activity. We have found that this holds good of the dream’s content, which gives expression to the dream-thoughts in a form modified by distortion. For reasons connected with the mechanism of association, as we have seen, the dream-process finds it easier to get control of recent or indifferent ideational material which has not yet been requisitioned by waking thought-activity; and for reasons of censorship it transfers psychical intensity from what is important but objectionable on to what is indifferent.

The fact that dreams are hypermnesic and have access to material from childhood has become one of the corner-stones of our teaching. Our theory of dreams regards wishes originating in infancy as the indispensable motive force for the formation of dreams.

It has naturally not occurred to us to throw any doubt on the significance, which has been experimentally demonstrated, of external sensory stimuli during sleep; but we have shown that such material stands in the same relation to the dream-wish as do the residues of thought left over from day time activity. Nor have we seen any reason to dispute the view that dreams interpret objective sensory stimuli just as illusions do; but we have found the motive which provides the reason for that interpretation, a reason which has been left unspecified by other writers. Interpretation is carried out in such a way that the object perceived shall not interrupt sleep and shall be usable for purposes of wish-fulfilment. As regards subjective states of excitation in the sense organs during sleep, the occurrence of which seems to have been proved by Trumbull Ladd, it is true that we have not accepted them as a particular source of dreams; but we have been able to explain them as resulting from the regressive revival of memories that are in operation behind the dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1017

Internal organic sensations, which have commonly been taken as a cardinal point in explanations of dreaming, have retained a place, though a humbler one, in our theory. Such sensations - sensations of falling, for instance, or floating, or being inhibited - provide a material which is accessible at any time and of which the dream-work makes use, whenever it has need of it, for expressing the dream-thoughts.

The view that the dream-process is a rapid or instantaneous one is in our opinion correct as regards the perception by consciousness of the preconstructed dream-content; it seems probable that the preceding portions of the dream-process run a slow and fluctuating course. We have been able to contribute towards the solution of the riddle of dreams which contain a great amount of material compressed into the briefest moment of time; we have suggested that it is a question in such cases of getting hold of ready-made structures already present in the mind.

The fact that dreams are distorted and mutilated by memory is accepted by us but in our opinion constitutes no obstacle; for it is no more than the last and manifest portion of a distorting activity which has been in operation from the very start of the dream’s formation.

As regards the embittered and apparently irreconcilable dispute as to whether the mind sleeps at night or is as much in command of all its faculties as it is by day, we have found that both parties are right but that neither is wholly right. We have found evidence in the dream-thoughts of a highly complex intellectual function, operating with almost the whole resources of the mental apparatus. Nevertheless it cannot be disputed that these dream-thoughts originated during the day, and it is imperative to assume that there is such a thing as a sleeping state of the mind. Thus even the theory of partial sleep has shown its value, though we have found that what characterizes the state of sleep is not the disintegration of mental bonds but the concentration of the psychical system which is in command during the day upon the wish to sleep. The factor of withdrawal from the external world retains its significance in our scheme; it helps, though not as the sole determinant, to make possible the regressive character of representation in dreams. The renunciation of voluntary direction of the flow of ideas cannot be disputed; but this does not deprive mental life of all purpose, for we have seen how, after voluntary purposive ideas have been abandoned, involuntary ones assume command. We have not merely accepted the fact of the looseness of associative connections in dreams, but we have shown that it extends far further than had been suspected; we have found, however, that these loose connections are merely obligatory substitutes for others which are valid and significant. It is quite true that we have described dreams as absurd; but examples have taught us how sensible a dream can be even when it appears to be absurd.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1018

We have no difference of opinion over the functions that are to be assigned to dreams. The view that dreams act as a safety valve to the mind and that, in the words of Robert, all kinds of harmful things are made harmless by being presented in a dream - not only does this view coincide exactly with our theory of the double wish-fulfilment brought about by dreams, but the way in which it is phrased is more intelligible to us than to Robert himself. The view that the mind has free play in its functioning in dreams is represented in our theory by the fact of the preconscious activity allowing dreams to take their course. Such phrases as ‘the return of the mind in dreams to an embryonic point of view’ or the words used by Havelock Ellis to describe dreams - ‘an archaic world of vast emotions and imperfect thoughts’ - strike us as happy anticipations of our own assertions that primitive modes of activity which are suppressed during the day are concerned in the construction of dreams. We have been able to accept entirely as our own what Sully has written: ‘Our dreams are a means of conserving these successive personalities. When asleep we go back to the old ways of looking at things and of feeling about them, to impulses and activities which long ago dominated us’. For us no less than for Delage what has been ‘suppressed’ has become ‘the motive force of dreams.’

We have fully appreciated the importance of the part ascribed by Scherner to ‘dream-imagination’, as well as Scherner’s own interpretations, but we have been obliged to transport them, as it were, to a different position in the problem. The point is not that dreams create the imagination, but rather that the unconscious activity of the imagination has a large share in the construction of the dream-thoughts. We remain in Scherner’s debt for having indicated the source of the dream-thoughts; but nearly everything that he ascribes to the dream-work is really attributable to the activity of the unconscious during daytime, which is the instigating agent of dreams no less than of neurotic symptoms. We have been obliged to distinguish the ‘dream-work’ as something quite different and with a much narrower connotation.

Finally, we have by no means abandoned the relation between dreams and mental disorders, but have established it more firmly on fresh ground.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1019

We have thus been able to find a place in our structure for the most various and contradictory findings of earlier writers, thanks to the novelty of our theory of dreams, which combines them, as it were, into a higher unity. Some of those findings we have put to other uses, but we have wholly rejected only a few. Nevertheless our edifice is still uncompleted. Apart from the many perplexing questions in which we have become involved in making our way into the obscurities of psychology, we seem to be troubled by a fresh contradiction. On the one hand we have supposed that the dream-thoughts arise through entirely normal mental activity; but on the other hand we have discovered a number of quite abnormal processes of thought among the dream-thoughts, which extend into the dream-content, and which we then repeat in the course of our dream-interpretation. Everything that we have described as the ‘dream-work’  seems to depart so widely from what we recognize as rational thought-processes that the most severe strictures passed by earlier writers on the low level of psychical functioning in dreams must appear fully justified.

It may be that we shall only find enlightenment and assistance in this difficulty by carrying our investigation still further. And I will begin by picking out for closer examination one of the conjunctures which may lead to the formation of a dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1020

A dream, as we have discovered, takes the place of a number of thoughts which are derived from our daily life and which form a completely logical sequence. We cannot doubt, then, that these thoughts originate from our normal mental life. All the attributes which we value highly in our trains of thought, and which characterize them as complex achievements of a high order, are to be found once more in dream-thoughts. There is no need to assume, however, that this activity of thought is performed during sleep - a possibility which would gravely confuse what has hitherto been our settled picture of the psychical state of sleep. On the contrary, these thoughts may very well have originated from the previous day, they may have proceeded unobserved by our consciousness from their start, and may already have been completed at the onset of sleep. The most that we can conclude from this is that it proves that the most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness - a fact which we could not fail to learn in any case from every psycho-analysis of a patient suffering from hysteria or from obsessional ideas. These dream-thoughts are certainly not in themselves inadmissible to consciousness; there may have been a number of reasons for their not having become conscious to us during the day. Becoming conscious is connected with the application of a particular psychical function, that of attention - a function which, as it seems, is only available in a specific quantity, and this may have been diverted from the train of thought in question on to some other purpose. There is another way, too, in which trains of thought of this kind may be withheld from consciousness. The course of our conscious reflections shows us that we follow a particular path in our application of attention. If, as we follow this path, we come upon an idea which will not bear criticism, we break off: we drop the cathexis of attention. Now it seems that the train of thought which has thus been initiated and dropped can continue to spin itself out without attention being turned to it again, unless at some point or other it reaches a specially high degree of intensity which forces attention to it. Thus, if a train of thought is initially rejected (consciously, perhaps) by a judgement that it is wrong or that it is useless for the immediate intellectual purposes in view, the result may be that this train of thought will proceed, unobserved by consciousness, until the onset of sleep.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1021

To sum up - we describe a train of thought such as this as ‘preconscious’; we regard it as completely rational and believe that it may either have been simply neglected or broken off and suppressed. Let us add a frank account of how we picture the occurrence of a train of ideas. We believe that, starting from a purposive idea, a given amount of excitation, which we term ‘cathectic energy’, is displaced along the associative paths selected by that purposive idea. A train of thought which is ‘neglected’ is one which has not received this cathexis; a train of thought which is ‘suppressed’ or ‘repudiated’ is one from which this cathexis has been withdrawn. In both cases they are left to their own excitations. Under certain conditions a train of thought with a purposive cathexis is capable of attracting the attention of consciousness to itself and in that event, through the agency of consciousness, receives a ‘hypercathexis.’ We shall be obliged presently to explain our view of the nature and function of consciousness.

A train of thought that has been set going like this in the preconscious may either cease spontaneously or persist. We picture the first of these outcomes as implying that the energy attaching to the train of thought is diffused along all the associative paths that radiate from it; this energy sets the whole network of thoughts in a state of excitation which lasts for a certain time and then dies away as the excitation in search of discharge becomes transformed into a quiescent cathexis. If this first outcome supervenes, the process is of no further significance so far as dream-formation is concerned. Lurking in our preconscious, however, there are other purposive ideas, which are derived from sources in our unconscious and from wishes which are always on the alert. These may take control of the excitation attaching to the group of thoughts which has been left to its own devices, they may establish a connection between it and an unconscious wish, and they may  ‘transfer’ to it the energy belonging to the unconscious wish. Thenceforward the neglected or suppressed train of thought is in a position to persist, though the reinforcement it has received gives it no right of entry into consciousness. We may express this by saying that what has hitherto been a preconscious train of thought has now been ‘drawn into the unconscious.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1022

There are other conjunctures which may lead to the formation of a dream. The preconscious train of thought may have been linked to the unconscious wish from the first and may for that reason have been repudiated by the dominant purposive cathexis; or an unconscious wish may become active for other reasons (from somatic causes, perhaps) and may seek to effect a transference on to the psychical residues that are uncathected by the Pcs. without their coming halfway to meet it. But all three cases have the same final outcome: a train of thought comes into being in the preconscious which is without a preconscious cathexis but has received a cathexis from an unconscious wish.

From this point onwards the train of thought undergoes a series of transformations which we can no longer recognize as normal psychical processes and which lead to a result that bewilders us - a psychopathological structure. I will enumerate these processes and classify them.

(1) The intensities of the individual ideas become capable of discharge en bloc and pass over from one idea to another, so that certain ideas are formed which are endowed with great intensity. And since this process is repeated several times, the intensity of a whole train of thought may eventually be concentrated in a single ideational element. Here we have the fact of ‘compression’ or ‘condensation’, which has become familiar in the dream-work. It is this that is mainly responsible for the bewildering impression made on us by dreams, for nothing at all analogous to it is known to us in mental life that is normal and accessible to consciousness. In normal mental life too, we find ideas which, being the nodal points or end results of whole chains of thought, possess a high degree of psychical significance; but their significance is not expressed by any feature that is obvious in a sensory manner to internal perception; their perceptual presentation is not in any respect more intense on account of their psychical significance. In the process of condensation, on the other hand, every psychical interconnection is transformed into an intensification of its ideational content. The case is the same as when, in preparing a book for the press, I have some word which is of special importance for understanding the text printed in spaced or heavy type; or in speech I should pronounce the same word loudly and slowly and with special emphasis. The first of these two analogies reminds us at once of an example provided by the dream-work itself: the word ‘trimethylamin’ in the dream of Irma’s injection. Art historians have drawn our attention to the fact that the earliest historical sculptures obey a similar principle: they express the rank of the persons represented by their size. A king is represented twice or three times as large as his attendants or as his defeated enemies. A sculpture of Roman date would make use of subtler means for producing the same result. The figure of the Emperor would be placed in the middle, standing erect, and would be modelled with especial care, while his enemies would be prostrate at his feet; but he would no longer be a giant among dwarfs. The bows with which inferiors greet their superiors among ourselves to-day are an echo of the same ancient principle of representation.

The direction in which condensations in dreams proceed is determined on the one hand by the rational preconscious relations of the dream-thoughts, and on the other by the attraction exercised by visual memories in the unconscious. The outcome of the activity of condensation is the achievement of the intensities required for forcing a way through into the perceptual systems.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1023

(2) Owing, once more, to the freedom with which the intensities can be transferred, ‘intermediate ideas’, resembling compromises, are constructed under the sway of condensation. (Cf. the numerous instances I have given of this.) This is again something unheard-of in normal chains of ideas, where the main stress is laid on the selection and retention of the ‘right’ ideational element. On the other hand, composite structures and compromises occur with remarkable frequency when we try to express preconscious thoughts in speech. They are then regarded as species of ‘slips of the tongue.’

(3) The ideas which transfer their intensities to each other stand in the loosest mutual relations. They are linked by associations of a kind that is scorned by our normal thinking and relegated to the use of jokes. In particular, we find associations based on homonyms and verbal similarities treated as equal in value to the rest.

(4)  Thoughts which are mutually contradictory make no attempt to do away with each other, but persist side by side. They often combine to form condensations, just as though there were no contradiction between them, or arrive at compromises such as our conscious thoughts would never tolerate but such as are often admitted in our actions.

These are some of the most striking of the abnormal processes to which the dream-thoughts, previously constructed on rational lines, are subjected in the course of the dream-work. It will be seen that the chief characteristic of these processes is that the whole stress is laid upon making the cathecting energy mobile and capable of discharge; the content and the proper meaning of the psychical elements to which the cathexes are attached are treated as of little consequence. It might have been supposed that condensation and the formation of compromises is only carried out for the sake of facilitating regression, that is, when it is a question of transforming thoughts into images. But the analysis - and still more the synthesis - of dreams which include no such regression to images, e.g. the dream of ‘Autodidasker’, exhibits the same processes of displacement and condensation as the rest.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1024

Thus we are driven to conclude that two fundamentally different kinds of psychical process are concerned in the formation of dreams. One of these produces perfectly rational dream-thoughts, of no less validity than normal thinking; while the other treats these thoughts in a manner which is in the highest degree bewildering and irrational. We have already in Chapter VI segregated this second psychical process as being the dream-work proper. What light have we now to throw upon its origin?

It would not be possible for us to answer this question if we had not made some headway in the study of the psychology of the neuroses, and particularly of hysteria. We have found from this that the same irrational psychical processes, and others that we have not specified, dominate the production of hysterical symptoms. In hysteria, too, we come across a series of perfectly rational thoughts, equal in validity to our conscious thoughts; but to begin with we know nothing of their existence in this form and we can only reconstruct them subsequently. If they force themselves upon our notice at any point, we discover by analysing the symptom which has been produced that these normal thoughts have been submitted to abnormal treatment: they have been transformed into the symptom by means of condensation and the formation of compromises, by way of superficial associations and in disregard of contradictions, and also, it may be, along the path of regression. In view of the complete identity between the characteristic features of the dream-work and those of the psychical activity which issues in psychoneurotic symptoms, we feel justified in carrying over to dreams the conclusions we have been led to by hysteria.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1025

We accordingly borrow the following thesis from the theory of hysteria: a normal train of thought is only submitted to abnormal psychical treatment of the sort we have been describing if an unconscious wish, derived from infancy and in a state of repression has been transferred on to it. In accordance with this thesis we have constructed our theory of dreams on the assumption that the dream-wish which provides the motive power invariably originates from the unconscious - an assumption which, as I myself am ready to admit, cannot be proved to hold generally, though neither can it be disproved. But in order to explain what is meant by ‘repression’, a term with which we have already made play so many times, it is necessary to proceed a stage further with our psychological scaffolding.

We have already explored the fiction of a primitive psychical apparatus whose activities are regulated by an effort to avoid an accumulation of excitation and to maintain itself so far as possible without excitation. For that reason it is built upon the plan of a reflex apparatus. The power of movement, which is in the first instance a means of bringing about internal alterations in its body, is at its disposal as the path to discharge. We went on to discuss the psychical consequences of an ‘experience of satisfaction’; and in that connection we were already able to add a second hypothesis, to the effect that the accumulation of excitation (brought about in various ways that need not concern us) is felt as unpleasure and that it sets the apparatus in action with a view to repeating the experience of satisfaction, which involved a diminution of excitation and was felt as pleasure. A current of this kind in the apparatus, starting from unpleasure and aiming at pleasure, we have termed a ‘wish’; and we have asserted that only a wish is able to set the apparatus in motion and that the course of the excitation in it is automatically regulated by feelings of pleasure and unpleasure. The first wishing seems to have been a hallucinatory cathecting of the memory of satisfaction. Such hallucinations, however, if they were not to be maintained to the point of exhaustion, proved to be inadequate to bring about the cessation of the need or, accordingly, the pleasure attaching to satisfaction.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1026

A second activity - or, as we put it, the activity of a second system - became necessary, which would not allow the mnemic cathexis to proceed as far as perception and from there to bind the psychical forces; instead, it diverted the excitation arising from the need along a roundabout path which ultimately, by means of voluntary movement, altered the external world in such a way that it became possible to arrive at a real perception of the object of satisfaction. We have already outlined our schematic picture of the psychical apparatus up to this point; the two systems are the germ of what, in the fully developed apparatus, we have described as the Ucs. and Pcs.

In order to be able to employ the power of movement to make alterations in the external world that shall be effective, it is necessary to accumulate a great number of experiences in the mnemic systems and a multiplicity of permanent records of the associations called up in this mnemic material by different purposive ideas. We can now carry our hypotheses a step further. The activity of this second system, constantly feeling its way, and alternately sending out and withdrawing cathexes, needs on the one hand to have the whole of the material of memory freely at its command; but on the other hand it would be an unnecessary expenditure of energy if it sent out large quantities of cathexis along the various paths of thought and thus caused them to drain away to no useful purpose and diminish the quantity available for altering the external world. I therefore postulate that for the sake of efficiency the second system succeeds in retaining the major part of its cathexes of energy in a state of quiescence and in employing only a small part on displacement. The mechanics of these processes are quite unknown to me; anyone who wished to take these ideas seriously would have to look for physical analogies to them and find a means of picturing the movements that accompany excitation of neurones. All that I insist upon is the idea that the activity of the first Ψ-system is directed towards securing the free discharge of the quantities of excitation, while the second system, by means of the cathexes emanating from it, succeeds in inhibiting this discharge and in transforming the cathexis into a quiescent one, no doubt with a simultaneous raising of its level. I presume, therefore, that under the dominion of the second system the discharge of excitation is governed by quite different mechanical conditions from those in force under the dominion of the first system. When once the second system has concluded its exploratory thought-activity, it releases the inhibition and damming-up of the excitations and allows them to discharge themselves in movement.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1027

Some interesting reflections follow if we consider the relations between this inhibition upon discharge exercised by the second system and the regulation effected by the unpleasure principle. Let us examine the antithesis to the primary experience of satisfaction - namely, the experience of an external fright. Let us suppose that the primitive apparatus is impinged upon by a perceptual stimulus which is a source of painful excitation. Unco-ordinated motor manifestations will follow until one of them withdraws the apparatus from the perception and at the same time from the pain. If the perception reappears, the movement will at once be repeated (a movement of flight, it may be) till the perception has disappeared once more. In this case, no inclination will remain to recathect the perception of the source of pain, either hallucinatorily or in any other way. On the contrary, there will be an inclination in the primitive apparatus to drop the distressing mnemic image immediately, if anything happens to revive it, for the very reason that if its excitation were to overflow into perception it would provoke unpleasure (or, more precisely, would begin to provoke it). The avoidance of the memory, which is no more than a repetition of the previous flight from the perception, is also facilitated by the fact that the memory, unlike the perception, does not possess enough quality to excite consciousness and thus to attract fresh cathexis to itself. This effortless and regular avoidance by the psychical process of the memory of anything that had once been distressing affords us the prototype and first example of psychical repression. It is a familiar fact that much of this avoidance of what is distressing - this ostrich policy - is still to be seen in the normal mental life of adults.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1028

As a result of the unpleasure principle, then, the first Ψ-system is totally incapable of bringing anything disagreeable into the context of its thought. It is unable to do anything but wish. If things remained at that point, the thought-activity of the second system would be obstructed, since it requires free access to all the memories laid down by experience. Two possibilities now present themselves. Either the activity of the second system might set itself entirely free from the unpleasure principle and proceed without troubling about unpleasure of memories; or it might find a method of cathecting unpleasurable memories which would enable it to avoid releasing the unpleasure. We may dismiss the first of these possibilities, for the unpleasure principle clearly regulates the course of excitation in the second system as much as in the first. We are consequently left with the remaining possibility that the second system cathects memories in such a way that there is an inhibition of their discharge, including, therefore, an inhibition of discharge (comparable to that of a motor innervation) in the direction of the development of unpleasure. We have therefore been led from two directions to the hypothesis that cathexis by the second system implies a simultaneous inhibition of the discharge of excitation: we have been led to it by regard for the unpleasure principle and also by the principle of the least expenditure of innervation. Let us bear this firmly in mind, for it is the key to the whole theory of repression: the second system can only cathect an idea if it is a position to inhibit any development of unpleasure that may proceed from it. Anything that could evade that inhibition would be inaccessible to the second system as well as to the first; for it would promptly be dropped in obedience to the unpleasure principle. The inhibition of unpleasure need not, however, be a complete one: a beginning of it must be allowed, since that is what informs the second system of the nature of the memory concerned and of its possible unsuitability for the purpose which the thought-process has in view.

I propose to describe the psychical process of which the first system alone admits as the ‘primary process’, and the process which results from the inhibition imposed by the second system as the ‘secondary process’.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1029

There is yet another reason for which, as I can show, the second system is obliged to correct the primary process. The primary process endeavours to bring about a discharge of excitation in order that, with the help of the amount of excitation thus accumulated, it may establish a ‘perceptual identity’. The secondary process, however, has abandoned this intention and taken on another in its place - the establishment of a ‘thought identity’. All thinking is no more than a circuitous path from the memory of a satisfaction (a memory which has been adopted as a purposive idea) to an identical cathexis of the same memory which it is hoped to attain once more through an intermediate stage of motor experiences. Thinking must concern itself with the connecting paths between ideas, without being led astray by the intensities of those ideas. But it is obvious that condensations of ideas, as well as intermediate and compromise structures, must obstruct the attainment of the identity aimed at. Since they substitute one idea for another, they cause a deviation from the path which would have led on from the first idea. Processes of this kind are therefore scrupulously avoided in secondary thinking. It is easy to see, too, that the unpleasure principle, which in other respects supplies the thought-process with its most important signposts, puts difficulties in its path towards establishing ‘thought identity’. Accordingly, thinking must aim at freeing itself more and more from exclusive regulation by the unpleasure principle and at restricting the development of affect in thought-activity to the minimum required for acting as a signal. The achievement of this greater delicacy in functioning is aimed at by means of a further hypercathexis, brought about by consciousness. As we well know, however, that aim is seldom attained completely, even in normal mental life, and our thinking always remains exposed to falsification by interference from the unpleasure principle.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1030

This, however, is not the gap in the functional efficiency of our mental apparatus which makes it possible for thoughts, which represent themselves as products of the secondary thought activity, to become subject to the primary psychical process - for such is the formula in which we can now describe the activity which leads to dreams and to hysterical symptoms. Inefficiency arises from the convergence of two factors derived from our developmental history. One of these factors devolves entirely upon the mental apparatus and has had a decisive influence on the relation between the two systems, while the other makes itself felt to a variable degree and introduces instinctual forces of organic origin into mental life. Both of them originate in childhood and are a precipitate of the modifications undergone by our mental and somatic organism since our infancy.

When I described one of the psychical processes occurring in the mental apparatus as the ‘primary’ one, what I had in mind was not merely considerations of relative importance and efficiency; I intended also to choose a name which would give an indication of its chronological priority. It is true that, so far as we know, no psychical apparatus exists which possesses a primary process only and that such an apparatus is to that extent a theoretical fiction. But this much is a fact: the primary processes are present in the mental apparatus from the first, while it is only during the course of life that the secondary processes unfold, and come to inhibit and overlay the primary ones; it may even be that their complete domination is not attained until the prime of life. In consequence of the belated appearance of the secondary processes, the core of our being, consisting of unconscious wishful impulses, remains inaccessible to the understanding and inhibition of the preconscious; the part played by the latter is restricted once and for all to directing along the most expedient paths the wishful impulses that arise from the unconscious. These unconscious wishes exercise a compelling force upon all later mental trends, a force which those trends are obliged to fall in with or which they may perhaps endeavour to divert and direct to higher aims. A further result of the belated appearance of the secondary process is that a wide sphere of mnemic material is inaccessible to preconscious cathexis.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1031

Among these wishful impulses derived from infancy, which can neither be destroyed nor inhibited, there are some whose fulfilment would be a contradiction of the purposive ideas of secondary thinking. The fulfilment of these wishes would no longer generate an affect of pleasure but of unpleasure; and it is precisely this transformation of affect which constitutes the essence of what we term ‘repression’. The problem of repression lies in the question of how it is and owing to what motive forces that this transformation occurs; but it is a problem that we need only touch upon here. It is enough for us to be clear that a transformation of this kind does occur in the course of development - we have only to recall the way in which disgust emerges in childhood after having been absent to begin with - and that it is related to the activity of the secondary system. The memories on the basis of which the unconscious wish brings about the release of affect were never accessible to the Pcs., and consequently the release of the affect attaching to those memories cannot be inhibited either. It is for the very reason of this generation of affect that these ideas are now inaccessible even by way of the preconscious thoughts on to which they have transferred their wishful force. On the contrary, the unpleasure principle takes control and causes the Pcs. to turn away from the transference thoughts. They are left to themselves - ‘repressed’ - and thus it is that the presence of a store of infantile memories, which has from the first been held back from the Pcs., becomes a sine qua non for repression.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1032

In the most favourable cases the generation of unpleasure ceases along with the withdrawal of cathexis from the transference thoughts in the Pcs.; and this outcome signifies that the intervention of the unpleasure principle has served a useful purpose. But it is another matter when the repressed unconscious wish receives an organic reinforcement, which it passes on to its transference thoughts; in that way it may place them in a position to make an attempt at forcing their way through with their excitation, even if they have lost their cathexis from the Pcs. There then follows a defensive struggle - for the Pcs. in turn reinforces its opposition to the repressed thoughts (i.e. produces an ‘anticathexis’) - and thereafter the transference thoughts, which are the vehicles of the unconscious wish, force their way through in some form of compromise which is reached by the production of a symptom. But from the moment at which the repressed thoughts are strongly cathected by the unconscious wishful impulse and, on the other hand, abandoned by the preconscious cathexis, they become subject to the primary psychical process and their one aim is motor discharge or, if the path is open, hallucinatory revival of the desired perceptual identity. We have already found empirically that the irrational processes we have described are only carried out with thoughts that are under repression. We can now see our way a little further into the whole position. The irrational processes which occur in the psychical apparatus are the primary ones. They appear wherever ideas are abandoned by the preconscious cathexis, are left to themselves and can become charged with the uninhibited energy from the unconscious which is striving to find an outlet. Some other observations lend support to the view that these processes which are described as irrational are not in fact falsifications of normal processes - intellectual errors - but are modes of activity of the psychical apparatus that have been freed from an inhibition. Thus we find that the transition from preconscious excitation to movement is governed by the same processes, and that the linking of preconscious ideas to words may easily exhibit the same displacements and confusions, which are then attributed to inattention. Evidence, finally, of the increase in activity which becomes necessary when these primary modes of functioning are inhibited is to be found in the fact that we produce a comic effect, that is, a surplus of energy which has to be discharged in laughter, if we allow these modes of thinking to force their way through into consciousness.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1033

The theory of the psychoneuroses asserts as an indisputable and invariable fact that only sexual wishful impulses from infancy, which have undergone repression (i.e. a transformation of their affect) during the developmental period of childhood, are capable of being revived during later developmental periods (whether as a result of the subject’s sexual constitution, which is derived from an initial bisexuality, or as a result of unfavourable influences acting upon the course of his sexual life) and are thus able to furnish the motive force for the formation of psychoneurotic symptoms of every kind. It is only by reference to these sexual forces that we can close the gaps that are still patent in the theory of repression. I will leave it an open question whether these sexual and infantile factors are equally required in the theory of dreams: I will leave that theory incomplete at this point, since I have already gone a step beyond what can be demonstrated in assuming that dream-wishes are invariably derived from the unconscious.¹ Nor do I propose to enquire further into the nature of the distinction between the play of psychical forces in the formation of dreams and in that of hysterical symptoms: we are still without a sufficiently accurate knowledge of one of the two objects of the comparison.

¹ Here and elsewhere I have intentionally left gaps in the treatment of my theme because to fill them would on the one hand require too great an effort and on the other would involve my basing myself on material that is alien to the subject of dreams. For instance, I have omitted to state whether I attribute different meanings to the words ‘suppressed’ and ‘repressed.’ It should have been clear, however, that the latter lays more stress than the former upon the fact of attachment to the unconscious. Nor have I entered into the obvious problem of why the dream-thoughts are subjected to distortion by the censorship even in cases where they have abandoned the progressive path towards consciousness and have chosen the regressive one. And there are many similar omissions. What I was above all anxious to do was to create an impression of the problems to which a further analysis of the dream-work must lead and to give a hint of the other topics with which that further analysis would come into contact. It has not always been easy for me to decide the point at which to break off my pursuit of this line of exposition. There are special reasons, which may not be what my readers expect, why I have not given any exhaustive treatment to the part played in dreams by the world of sexual ideas and why I have avoided analysing dreams of obviously sexual content. Nothing could be further from my own views or from the theoretical opinions which I hold in neuropathology than to regard sexual life as something shameful, with which neither a physician nor a scientific research worker has any concern. Moreover, the moral indignation by which the translator of the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus of Daldis allowed himself to be led into withholding the chapter on sexual dreams from the knowledge a his readers strikes me as laughable. What governed my decision was simply my seeing that an explanation of sexual dreams would involve me deeply in the still unsolved problems of perversion and bisexuality; and I accordingly reserved this material for another occasion.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1034

There is, however, another point to which I attach importance; and I must confess that it is solely on its account that I have embarked here upon all these discussions of the two psychical systems and their modes of activity and of repression. It is not now a question of whether I have formed an approximately correct opinion of the psychological factors with which we are concerned, or whether, which is quite possible in such difficult matters, my picture of them is distorted and incomplete. However many changes may be made in our reading of the psychical censorship and of the rational and abnormal revisions made of the dream-content, it remains true that processes of this sort are at work in the formation of dreams and that they show the closest analogy in their essentials to the processes observable in the formation of hysterical symptoms. A dream, however, is no pathological phenomenon; it presupposes no disturbance of psychical equilibrium; it leaves behind it no loss of efficiency. The suggestion may be made that no conclusions as to the dreams of normal people can be drawn from my dreams or those of my patients; but this, I think, is an objection which can be safely disregarded. If, then, we may argue back from the phenomena to their motive forces, we must recognize that the psychical mechanism employed by neuroses is not created by the impact of a pathological disturbance upon the mind but is present already in the normal structure of the mental apparatus. The two psychical systems, the censorship upon the passage from one of them to the other, the inhibition and overlaying of one activity by the other, the relations of both of them to consciousness - or whatever more correct interpretations of the observed facts may take their place - all of these form part of the normal structure of our mental instrument, and dreams show us one of the paths leading to an understanding of its structure. If we restrict ourselves to the minimum of new knowledge which has been established with certainty, we can still say this of dreams: they have proved that what is suppressed continues to exist in normal people as well as abnormal, and remains capable of psychical functioning. Dreams themselves are among the manifestations of this suppressed material; this is so theoretically in every case, and it can be observed empirically in a great number of cases at least, and precisely in cases which exhibit most clearly the striking peculiarities of dream-life. In waking life the suppressed material in the mind is prevented from finding expression and is cut off from internal perception owing to the fact that the contradictions present in it are eliminated - one side being disposed of in favour of the other; but during the night, under the sway of an impetus towards the construction of compromises, this suppressed material finds methods and means of forcing its way into consciousness.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1035

Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.¹

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.

By analysing dreams we can take a step forward in our understanding of the composition of that most marvellous and most mysterious of all instruments. Only a small step, no doubt; but a beginning. And this beginning will enable us to proceed further with its analysis, on the basis of other structures which must be termed pathological. For illnesses - those, at least, which are rightly named ‘functional’ - do not presuppose the disintegration of the apparatus or the production of fresh splits in its interior. They are to be explained on a dynamic basis - by the strengthening and weakening of the various components in the interplay of forces, so many of whose effects are hidden from view while functions are normal. I hope to be able to show elsewhere how the compounding of the apparatus out of two agencies makes it possible for the normal mind too to function with greater delicacy than would be possible with only one of them.²

¹ [‘If I cannot bend the Higher Powers, I will move the Infernal Regions.’]

² Dreams are not the only phenomena which allow us to find a basis for psychopathology in psychology. In a short series of papers (1898b and 1899a) which is not yet completed, I have attempted to interpret number of phenomena of daily life as evidence in favour of the same conclusions. [Added 1909:] These, together with some further papers on forgetting, slips of the tongue, bungled actions, etc., have since been collected under the title of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1036

(F)

THE UNCONSCIOUS AND CONSCIOUSNESS - REALITY

It will be seen on closer consideration that what the psychological discussion in the preceding sections invites us to assume is not the existence of two systems near the motor end of the apparatus but the existence of two kinds of processes of excitation or modes of its discharge. It is all one to us, for we must always be prepared to drop our conceptual scaffolding if we feel that we are in a position to replace it by something that approximates more closely to the unknown reality. So let us try to correct some conceptions which might be misleading so long as we looked upon the two systems in the most literal and crudest sense as two localities in the mental apparatus - conceptions which have left their traces in the expressions ‘to repress’ and ‘to force a way through.’ Thus, we may speak of an unconscious thought seeking to convey itself into the preconscious so as to be able then to force its way through into consciousness. What we have in mind here is not the forming of a second thought situated in a new place, like a transcription which continues to exist alongside the original; and the notion of forcing a way through into consciousness must be kept carefully free from any idea of a change of locality. Again, we may speak of a preconscious thought being repressed or driven out and then taken over by the unconscious. These images, derived from a set of ideas relating to a struggle for a piece of ground, may tempt us to suppose that it is literally true that a mental grouping in one locality has been brought to an end and replaced by a fresh one in another locality. Let us replace these metaphors by something that seems to correspond better to the real state of affairs, and let us say instead that some particular mental grouping has had a cathexis of energy attached to it or withdrawn from it, so that the structure in question has come under the sway of a particular agency or been withdrawn from it. What we are doing here is once again to replace a topographical way of representing things by a dynamic one. What we regard as mobile is not the psychical structure itself but its innervation.¹

Nevertheless, I consider it expedient and justifiable to continue to make use of the figurative image of the two systems. We can avoid any possible abuse of this method of representation by recollecting that ideas, thoughts and psychical structures in general must never be regarded as localized in organic elements of the nervous system but rather, as one might say, between them, where resistances and facilitations [Bahnungen] provide the corresponding correlates. Everything that can be an object of our internal perception is virtual, like the image produced in a telescope by the passage of light-rays. But we are justified in assuming the existence of the systems (which are not in any way psychical entities themselves and can never be accessible to our psychical perception) like the lenses of the telescope, which cast the image. And, if we pursue this analogy, we may compare the censorship between two systems to the refraction which takes place when a ray of light passes into a new medium.

¹ [Footnote added 1925:] It became necessary to elaborate and modify thus view after it was recognized that the essential feature of a preconscious idea was the fact of its being connected with the residues of verbal presentations. Cf. ‘The Unconscious’ (1915e).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1037

So far we have been psychologizing on our own account. It is time now to consider the theoretical views which govern present-day psychology and to examine their relation to our hypotheses. The problem of the unconscious in psychology is, in the forcible words of Lipps (1897), less a psychological problem than the problem of psychology. So long as psychology dealt with this problem by a verbal explanation to the effect that ‘psychical’ meant ‘conscious’ and that to speak of ‘unconscious psychical processes’ was palpable nonsense, any psychological evaluation of the observations made by physicians upon abnormal mental states was out of the question. The physician and the philosopher can only come together if they both recognize that the term ‘unconscious psychical processes’ is ‘the appropriate and justified expression of a solidly established fact’. The physician can only shrug his shoulders when he is assured that ‘consciousness is an indispensable characteristic of what is psychical’, and perhaps, if he still feels enough respect for the utterances of philosophers, he may presume that they have not been dealing with the same thing or working at the same science. For even a single understanding observation of a neurotic’s mental life or a single analysis of a dream must leave him with an unshakeable conviction that the most complicated and most rational thought-processes, which can surely not be denied the name of psychical processes, can occur without exciting the subject’s consciousness.¹ It is true that the physical cannot learn of these unconscious processes until they have produced some effect upon consciousness which can be communicated or observed. But this conscious effect may exhibit a psychical character quite different from that of the unconscious process, so that internal perception cannot possibly regard the one as a substitute for the other. The physician must feel at liberty to proceed by inference from the conscious effect to the unconscious psychical process. He thus learns that the conscious effect is only a remote psychical result of the unconscious process and that the latter has not become conscious as such; and moreover that the latter was present and operative even without betraying its existence in any way to consciousness.

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] I am happy to be able to point to an author who has drawn from the study of dreams the same conclusions as I have on the relation between conscious and unconscious activity. Du Prel (1885, 47) writes: ‘The problem of the nature of the mind evidently calls for a preliminary investigation as to whether consciousness and mind are identical. This preliminary question is answered in the negative by dreams, which show that the concept of the mind is a wider one than that of consciousness, in the same kind of way in which the gravitational force of a heavenly body extends beyond its range of luminosity.’ And again (ibid., 306): ‘It is a truth which cannot be too distinctly borne in mind that consciousness is not co-extensive with mind.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1038

It is essential to abandon the overvaluation of the property of being conscious before it becomes possible to form any correct view of the origin of what is mental. In Lipps’s words, the unconscious must be assumed to be the general basis of psychical life. The unconscious is the larger sphere, which includes within it the smaller sphere of the conscious. Everything conscious has an unconscious preliminary stage; whereas what is unconscious may remain at that stage and nevertheless claim to be regarded as having the full value of a psychical process. The unconscious is the true psychical reality; in its innermost nature it is as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is as incompletely presented by the data of consciousness as is the external world by the communications of our sense organs.

Now that the old antithesis between conscious life and dream life has been reduced to its proper proportions by the establishment of unconscious psychical reality, a number of dream-problems with which earlier writers were deeply concerned have lost their significance. Thus some of the activities whose successful performance in dreams excited astonishment are now no longer to be attributed to dreams but to unconscious thinking, which is active during the day no less than at night. If, as Scherner has said, dreams appear to engage in making symbolic representations of the body, we now know that those representations are the product of certain unconscious phantasies (deriving, probably, from sexual impulses) which find expression not only in dreams but also in hysterical phobias and other symptoms. If a dream carries on the activities of the day and completes them and even brings valuable fresh ideas to light, all we need do is to strip it of the dream disguise, which is the product of dream-work and the mark of assistance rendered by obscure forces from the depths of the mind (cf. the Devil in Tartini’s sonata dream); the intellectual achievement is due to the same mental forces which produce every similar result during the daytime. We are probably inclined greatly to over-estimate the conscious character of intellectual and artistic production as well. Accounts given us by some of the most highly productive men, such as Goethe and Helmholtz, show rather that what is essential and new in their creations came to them without premeditation and as an almost ready-made whole. There is nothing strange if in other cases, where a concentration of every intellectual faculty was needed, conscious activity also contributed its share. But it is the much-abused privilege of conscious activity, wherever it plays a part, to conceal every other activity from our eyes.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1039

It would scarcely repay the trouble if we were to treat the historical significance of dreams as a separate topic. A dream may have impelled some chieftain to embark upon a bold enterprise the success of which has changed history. But this only raises a fresh problem so long as a dream is regarded as an alien power in contrast to the other more familiar forces of the mind; no such problem remains if a dream is recognized as a form of expression of impulses which are under the pressure of resistance during the day but which have been able to find reinforcement during the night from deep-lying sources of excitation.¹ The respect paid to dreams in antiquity is, however, based upon correct psychological insight and is the homage paid to the uncontrolled and indestructible forces in the human mind, to the ‘daemonic’ power which produces the dream-wish and which we find at work in our unconscious.

It is not without intention that I speak of ‘our’ unconscious. For what I thus describe is not the same as the unconscious of the philosophers or even the unconscious of Lipps. By them the term is used merely to indicate a contrast with the conscious: the thesis which they dispute with so much heat and defend with so much energy is the thesis that apart from conscious there are also unconscious psychical processes. Lipps carries things further with his assertion that the whole of what is psychical exists unconsciously and that a part of it also exists consciously. But it is not in order to establish this thesis that we have summoned up the phenomena of dreams and of the formation of hysterical symptoms; the observation of normal waking life would by itself suffice to prove it beyond any doubt. The new discovery that we have been taught by the analysis of psychopathological structures and of the first member of that class - the dream - lies in the fact that the unconscious (that is, the psychical) is found as a function of two separate systems and that this is the case in normal as well as in pathological life. Thus there are two kinds of unconscious, which have not yet been distinguished by psychologists. Both of them are unconscious in the sense used by psychology; but in our sense one of them, which we term the Ucs., is also inadmissible to consciousness, while we term the other the Pcs. because its excitations - after observing certain rules, it is true, and perhaps only after passing a fresh censorship, though nonetheless without regard to the Ucs. - are able to reach consciousness. The fact that excitations in order to reach consciousness must pass through a fixed series or hierarchy of agencies (which is revealed to us by the modifications made in them by censorship) has enabled us to construct a spatial analogy. We have described the relations of the two systems to each other and to consciousness by saying that the system Pcs. stands like a screen between the system Ucs. and consciousness. The system Pcs. not merely bars access to consciousness, it also controls access to the power of voluntary movement and has at its disposal for distribution a mobile cathectic energy, a part of which is familiar to us in the form of attention.²

¹ [Footnote added 1911:] Cf. in this connection AIexander the Great’s dream during his siege of Tyre ( ).

² [Footnote added 1914:] Cf. my remarks on the concept of the unconscious in psycho-analysis (Freud, 1912g), first published in English in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 26, in which I have distinguished the descriptive, dynamic and systematic meanings of the highly ambiguous word ‘unconscious’.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1040

We must avoid, too, the distinction between ‘supraconscious’ and ‘subconscious’, which has become so popular in the more recent literature of the psychoneuroses, for such a distinction seems precisely calculated to stress the equivalence of what is psychical to what is conscious.

But what part is there left to be played in our scheme by consciousness, which was once so omnipotent and hid all else from view? Only that of a sense-organ for the perception of psychical qualities. In accordance with the ideas underlying our attempt at a schematic picture, we can only regard conscious perception as the function proper to a particular system; and for this the abbreviation Cs. seems appropriate. In its mechanical properties we regard this system as resembling the perceptual systems Pcpt.: as being susceptible to excitation by qualities but incapable of retaining traces of alterations - that is to say, as having no memory. The psychical apparatus, which is turned towards the external world with its sense-organ of the Pcpt. systems, is itself the external world in relation to the sense-organ of the Cs., whose teleological justification resides in this circumstance. Here we once more meet the principle of the hierarchy of agencies, which seems to govern the structure of the apparatus. Excitatory material flows in to the Cs. sense-organ from two directions: from the Pcpt. system, whose excitation, determined by qualities, is probably submitted to a fresh revision before it becomes a conscious sensation, and from the interior of the apparatus itself, whose quantitative processes are felt qualitatively in the pleasure-unpleasure series when, subject to certain modifications, they make their way to consciousness.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1041

Those philosophers who have become aware that rational and highly complex thought-structures are possible without consciousness playing any part in them have found difficulty in assigning any function to consciousness; it has seemed to them that it can be no more than a superfluous reflected picture of the completed psychical process. We, on the other hand, are rescued from this embarrassment by the analogy between our Cs. system and the perceptual systems. We know that perception by our sense-organs has the result of directing a cathexis of attention to the paths along which the in-coming sensory excitation is spreading: the qualitative excitation of the Pcpt. system acts as a regulator of the discharge of the mobile quantity in the psychical apparatus. We can attribute the same function to the overlying sense-organ of the Cs. system. By perceiving new qualities, it makes a new contribution to directing the mobile quantities of cathexis and distributing them in an expedient fashion. By the help of its perception of pleasure and unpleasure it influences the discharge of the cathexes within what is otherwise an unconscious apparatus operating by means of the displacement of quantities. It seems probable that in the first instance the unpleasure principle regulates the displacement of cathexes automatically. But it is quite possible that consciousness of these qualities may introduce in addition a second and more discriminating regulation, which is even able to oppose the former one, and which perfects the efficiency of the apparatus by enabling it, in contradiction to its original plan, to cathect and work over even what is associated with the release of unpleasure. We learn from the psychology of the neuroses that these processes of regulation carried out by the qualitative excitation of the sense organs play a great part in the functional activity of the apparatus. The automatic domination of the primary unpleasure principle and the consequent restriction imposed upon efficiency are interrupted by the processes of sensory regulation, which are themselves in turn automatic in action. We find that repression (which, though it served a useful purpose to begin with, leads ultimately to a damaging loss of inhibition and mental control) affects memories so much more easily than perceptions because the former can receive no extra cathexis from the excitation of the psychical sense-organs. It is true on the one hand that a thought which has to be warded off cannot become conscious, because it has undergone repression; but on the other hand it sometimes happens that a thought of this kind is only repressed because for other reasons it has been withdrawn from conscious perception. Here are some hints of which we take advantage in our therapeutic procedure in order to undo repressions which have already been effected.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1042

The value of the hypercathexis which is set up in the mobile quantities by the regulating influence of the sense organ of the Cs. cannot be better illustrated in its teleological aspect than by the fact of its creation of a new series of qualities and consequently of a new process of regulation which constitutes the superiority of men over animals. Thought-processes are in themselves without quality, except for the pleasurable and unpleasurable excitations which accompany them, and which, in view of their possible disturbing effect upon thinking, must be kept within bounds. In order that thought-processes may acquire quality, they are associated in human beings with verbal memories, whose residues of quality are sufficient to draw the attention of consciousness to them and to endow the process of thinking with a new mobile cathexis from consciousness.

The whole multiplicity of the problems of consciousness can only be grasped by an analysis of the thought-processes in hysteria. These give one the impression that the transition from a preconscious to a conscious cathexis is marked by a censorship similar to that between the Ucs. and the Pcs. This censorship, too, only comes into force above a certain quantitative limit, so that thought-structures of low intensity escape it. Examples of every possible variety of how a thought can be withheld from consciousness or can force its way into consciousness under certain limitations are to be found included within the framework of psychoneurotic phenomena; and they all point to the intimate and reciprocal relations between censorship and consciousness. I will bring these psychological reflections to an end with a report of two such examples.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1043

I was called in to a consultation last year to examine an intelligent and unembarrassed-looking girl. She was most surprisingly dressed. For though as a rule a woman’s clothes are carefully considered down to the last detail, she was wearing one of her stockings hanging down and two of the buttons on her blouse were undone. She complained of having pains in her leg and, without being asked, exposed her calf. But what she principally complained of was, to use her own words, that she had a feeling in her body as though there was something ‘stuck into it’ which was ‘moving backwards and forwards’ and was ‘shaking’ her through and through: sometimes it made her whole body feel ‘stiff.’ My medical colleague, who was present at the examination, looked at me; he found no difficulty in understanding the meaning of her complaint. But what struck both of us as extraordinary was the fact that it meant nothing to the patient’s mother - though she must often have found herself in the situation which her child was describing. The girl herself had no notion of the bearing of her remarks; for if she had, she would never have given voice to them. In this case it had been possible to hoodwink the censorship into allowing a phantasy which would normally have been kept in the preconscious to emerge into consciousness under the innocent disguise of making a complaint.

Here is another example. A fourteen-year-old boy came to me for psycho-analytic treatment suffering from tic convulsif, hysterical vomiting, headaches, etc. I began the treatment by assuring him that if he shut his eyes he would see pictures or have ideas, which he was then to communicate to me. He replied in pictures. His last impression before coming to me was revived visually in his memory. He had been playing at draughts with his uncle and saw the board in front of him. He thought of various positions, favourable or unfavourable, and of moves that one must not make. He then saw a dagger lying on the board - an object that belonged to his father but which his imagination placed on the board. Then there was a sickle lying on the board and next a scythe. And there now appeared a picture of an old peasant mowing the grass in front of the patient’s distant home with a scythe. After a few days I discovered the meaning of this series of pictures. The boy had been upset by an unhappy family situation. He had a father who was a hard man, liable to fits of rage, who had been unhappily married to the patient’s mother, and whose educational methods had consisted of threats. His father had been divorced from his mother, a tender and affectionate woman, had married again and had one day brought a young woman home with him who was to be the boy’s new mother. It was during the first few days after this that the fourteen-year-old boy’s illness had come on. His suppressed rage against his father was what had constructed this series of pictures with their understandable allusions. The material for them was provided by a recollection from mythology. The sickle was the one with which Zeus castrated his father; the scythe and the picture of the old peasant represented Kronos, the violent old man who devoured his children and on whom Zeus took such unfilial vengeance. His father’s marriage gave the boy an opportunity of repaying the reproaches and threats which he had heard from his father long before because he had played with his genitals. (Cf. the playing at draughts; the forbidden moves; the dagger which could be used to kill.) In this case long-repressed memories and derivatives from them which had remained unconscious slipped into consciousness by a roundabout path in the form of apparently meaningless pictures.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1044

Thus I would look for the theoretical value of the study of dreams in the contributions it makes to psychological knowledge and in the preliminary light it throws on the problems of the psychoneuroses. Who can guess the importance of the results which might be obtained from a thorough understanding of the structure and functions of the mental apparatus, since even the present state of our knowledge allows us to exert a favourable therapeutic influence on the curable forms of psychoneurosis? But what of the practical value of this study - I hear the question raised - as a means towards an understanding of the mind, towards a revelation of the hidden characteristics of individual men? Have not the unconscious impulses brought out by dreams the importance of real forces in mental life? Is the ethical significance of suppressed wishes to be made light of - wishes which, just as they lead to dreams, may some day lead to other things?

I do not feel justified in answering these questions. I have not considered this side of the problem of dreams further. I think however, that the Roman emperor was in the wrong when he had one of his subjects executed because he had dreamt of murdering the emperor. He should have begun by trying to find out what the dream meant; most probably its meaning was not what it appeared to be. And even if a dream with another content had had this act of lèse majesté as its meaning, would it not be right to bear in mind Plato’s dictum that the virtuous man is content to dream what a wicked man really does? I think it is best, therefore, to acquit dreams. Whether we are to attribute reality to unconscious wishes, I cannot say. It must be denied, of course, to any transitional or intermediate thoughts. If we look at unconscious wishes reduced to their most fundamental and truest shape, we shall have to conclude, no doubt, that psychical reality is a particular form of existence not to be confused with material reality. Thus there seems to be no justification for people’s reluctance in accepting responsibility for the immorality of their dreams. When the mode of functioning of the mental apparatus is rightly appreciated and the relation between the conscious and the unconscious understood, the greater part of what is ethically objectionable in our dream and phantasy lives will be found to disappear. In the words of Hanns Sachs: ‘If we look in our consciousness at something that has been told up by a dream about a contemporary (real) situation, we ought not to be surprised to find that the monster which we saw under the magnifying glass of analysis turns out to be a tiny infusorian.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1045

Actions and consciously expressed opinions are as a rule enough for practical purposes in judging men’s characters. Actions deserve to be considered first and foremost; for many impulses which force their way through to consciousness are then brought to nothing by the real forces of mental life before they can mature into deeds. In fact, such impulses often meet with no psychical obstacles to their progress, for the very reason that the unconscious is certain that they will be stopped at some other stage. It is in any case instructive to get to know the much trampled soil from which our virtues proudly spring. Very rarely does the complexity of a human character, driven hither and thither by dynamic forces, submit to a choice between simple alternatives, as our antiquated morality would have us believe.

And the value of dreams for giving us knowledge of the future? There is of course no question of that. It would be truer to say instead that they give us knowledge of the past. For dreams are derived from the past in every sense. Nevertheless the ancient belief that dreams foretell the future is not wholly devoid of truth. By picturing our wishes as fulfilled, dreams are after all leading us into the future. But this future, which the dreamer pictures as the present, has been moulded by his indestructible wish into a perfect likeness of the past.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1046

APPENDIX A

A PREMONITORY DREAM FULFILLED

Frau B., an estimable woman who moreover possesses a critical sense, told me in another connection and without the slightest arrière pensée that once some years ago she dreamt she had met Dr. K., a friend and former family doctor of hers, in the Kärntnerstrasse in front of Hiess’s shop. The next morning, while she was walking along the same street, she in fact met the person in question at the very spot she had dreamt of. So much for my theme. I will only add that no subsequent event proved the importance of this miraculous coincidence, which cannot therefore be accounted for by what lay in the future.

Analysis of the dream was helped by questioning, which established the fact that there was no evidence of her having had any recollection at all of the dream on the morning after she dreamt it, until after her walk - evidence such as her having written the dream down or told it to someone before it was fulfilled. On the contrary, she was obliged to accept the following account of what happened, which seems to me more plausible, without raising any objection to it. She was walking along the Kärntnerstrasse one morning and met her old family doctor in front of Hiess’s shop. On seeing him she felt convinced that she had dreamt the night before of having this very meeting at that precise spot. According to the rules that apply to the interpretation of neurotic symptoms, her conviction must have been justified; its content may, however, require to be re-interpreted.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1047

The following is an episode with which Dr. K. is connected from Frau B.’s earlier life. When she was young she was married, without her wholehearted consent, to an elderly but wealthy man. A few years later he lost his money, fell ill of tuberculosis and died. For many years the young woman supported herself and her sick husband by giving music lessons. Among her friends in misfortune was her family doctor, Dr. K., who devoted himself to looking after her husband and helped her in finding her first pupils. Another friend was a barrister, also a Dr. K., who put the chaotic affairs of the ruined merchant in order, while at the same time he made love to the young woman and - for the first and last time - set her passion aflame. This love affair brought her no real happiness, for the scruples created by her upbringing and her cast of mind interfered with her complete surrender while she was married and later when she was a widow. In the same connection in which she told me the dream, she also told me of a real occurrence dating from this unhappy period of her life, an occurrence which in her opinion was a remarkable coincidence. She was in her room, kneeling on the floor with her head buried in a chair and sobbing in passionate longing for her friend and helper the barrister, when at that very moment the door opened and in he came to visit her. We shall find nothing at all remarkable in this coincidence when we consider how often she thought of him and how often he probably visited her. Moreover, accidents which seem preconcerted like this are to be found in every love story. Nevertheless this coincidence was probably the true content of her dream and the sole basis of her conviction that it had come true.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1048

Between the scene in which her wish had been fulfilled and the time of the dream more than twenty-five years elapsed. In the meantime Frau B. had become the widow of a second husband who left her with a child and a fortune. The old lady’s affection was still centred on Dr. K., who was now her adviser and the administrator of her estate and whom she saw frequently. Let us suppose that during the few days before the dream she had been expecting a visit from him, but that this had not taken place - he was no longer so pressing as he used to be. She may then have quite well had a nostalgic dream one night which took her back to the old days. Her dream was probably of a rendez-vous at the time of her love affair, and the chain of her dream-thoughts carried her back to the occasion when, without any pre-arrangement, he had come in at the very moment at which she had been longing for him. She probably had dreams of this kind quite often now; they were a part of the belated punishment with which a woman pays for her youthful cruelty. But such dreams - derivatives of a suppressed current of thought, filled with memories of rendez-vous of which, since her second marriage, she no longer liked to think - such dreams were put aside on waking. And that was what happened to our ostensibly prophetic dream. She then went out, and in the Kärntnerstrasse, at a spot which was in itself indifferent, she met her old family doctor, Dr. K. It was a very long time since she had seen him. He was intimately associated with the excitements of that happy-unhappy time. He too had been a helper, and we may suppose that he had been used in her thoughts, and perhaps in her dreams as well, as a screen figure behind which she concealed the better-loved figure of the other Dr. K. This meeting now revived her recollection of the dream. She must have thought: ‘Yes, I had a dream last night of my rendez-vous with Dr. K.’ But this recollection had to undergo the distortion which the dream escaped only because it had been completely forgotten. She inserted the indifferent K. (who had reminded her of the dream) in place of the beloved K. The content of the dream - the rendez-vous - was transferred to a belief that she had dreamt of that particular spot, for a rendez-vous consists in two people coming to the same spot at the same time. And if she then had an impression that a dream had been fulfilled, she was only giving effect in that way to her memory of the scene in which she had longed in her misery for him to come and her longing had at once been fulfilled.

Thus the creation of a dream after the event, which alone makes prophetic dreams possible, is nothing other than a form of censoring, thanks to which the dream is able to make its way through into consciousness.

10 Nov. 99

1049

ON DREAMS

(1901)

1050

Intentionally left blank

1051

ON DREAMS

I

During the epoch which may be described as pre-scientific, men had no difficulty in finding an explanation of dreams. When they remembered a dream after waking up, they regarded it as either a favourable or a hostile manifestation by higher powers, daemonic and divine. When modes of thought belonging to natural science began to flourish, all this ingenious mythology was transformed into psychology, and to-day only a small minority of educated people doubt that dreams are a product of the dreamer’s own mind.

Since the rejection of the mythological hypothesis, however, dreams have stood in need of explanation. The conditions of their origin, their relation to waking mental life, their dependence upon stimuli which force their way upon perception during the state of sleep, the many peculiarities of their content which are repugnant to waking thought, the inconsistency between their ideational images and the affects attaching to them, and lastly their transitory character, the manner in which waking thought pushes them on one side as something alien to it, and mutilates or extinguishes them in memory - all of these and other problems besides have been awaiting clarification for many hundreds of years, and till now no satisfactory solution of them has been advanced. But what stands in the foreground of our interest is the question of the significance of dreams, a question which bears a double sense. It enquires in the first place as to the psychical significance of dreaming, as to the relation of dreams to other mental processes, and as to any biological function that they may have; in the second place it seeks to discover whether dreams can be interpreted, whether the content of individual dreams has a ‘meaning’, such as we are accustomed to find in other psychical structures.

In the assessment of the significance of dreams three lines of thought can be distinguished. One of these, which echoes, as it were, the ancient overvaluation of dreams, is expressed in the writings of certain philosophers. They consider that the basis of dream-life is a peculiar state of mental activity, and even go so far as to acclaim that state as an elevation to a higher level. For instance, Schubert declares that dreams are a liberation of the spirit from the power of external nature, and a freeing of the soul from the bonds of the senses. Other thinkers, without going so far as this, insist nevertheless that dreams arise essentially from mental impulses and represent manifestations of mental forces which have been prevented from expanding freely during the daytime. (Cf. the ‘dream imagination’ of Scherner and Volkelt.) A large number of observers agree in attributing to dream-life a capacity for superior functioning in certain departments at least (e.g. in memory).

On Dreams

1052

In sharp contrast to this, the majority of medical writers adopt a view according to which dreams scarcely reach the level of being psychical phenomena at all. On their theory, the sole instigators of dreams are the sensory and somatic stimuli which either impinge upon the sleeper from outside or become active accidentally in his internal organs. What is dreamt, they contend, has no more claim to sense and meaning than, for instance, the sounds which would be produced if ‘the ten fingers of a man who knows nothing of music were wandering over the keys of a piano.’ Dreams are described by Binz as being no more than ‘somatic processes which are in every case useless and in many cases positively pathological.’ All the characteristics of dream-life would thus be explained as being due to the disconnected activity of separate organs or groups of cells in an otherwise sleeping brain, an activity forced upon them by physiological stimuli.

Popular opinion is but little affected by this scientific judgement, and is not concerned as to the sources of dreams; it seems to persist in the belief that nevertheless dreams have a meaning, which relates to the prediction of the future and which can be discovered by some process of interpretation of a content which is often confused and puzzling. The methods of interpretation employed consist in transforming the content of the dream as it is remembered, either by replacing it piecemeal in accordance with a fixed key, or by replacing the dream as a whole by another whole to which it stands in a symbolic relation. Serious-minded people smile at these efforts: ‘Träume sind Schäume’ - ‘dreams are froth’.

On Dreams

1053

II

One day I discovered to my great astonishment that the view of dreams which came nearest to the truth was not the medical but the popular one, half-involved though it still was in superstition. For I had been led to fresh conclusions on the subject of dreams by applying to them a new method of psychological investigation which had done excellent service in the solution of phobias, obsessions and delusions, etc. Since then, under the name of ‘psycho-analysis’, it has found acceptance by a whole school of research workers. The numerous analogies that exist between dream-life and a great variety of conditions of psychical illness in waking life have indeed been correctly observed by many medical investigators. There seemed, therefore, good ground for hoping that a method of investigation which had given satisfactory results in the case of psychopathic structures would also be of use in throwing light upon dreams. Phobias and obsessions are as alien to normal consciousness as dreams are to waking consciousness; their origin is as unknown to consciousness as that of dreams. In the case of these psychopathic structures practical considerations led to an investigation of their origin and mode of development; for experience had shown that the discovery of the trains of thought which, concealed from consciousness, connect the pathological ideas with the remaining contents of the mind is equivalent to a resolution of the symptoms and has as its consequence the mastering of ideas which till then could not be inhibited. Thus psychotherapy was the starting-point of the procedure of which I made use for the explanation of dreams.

This procedure is easily described, although instruction and practice would be necessary before it could be put into effect.

On Dreams

1054

If we make use of it on someone else, let us say on a patient with a phobia, we require him to direct his attention on to the idea in question, not, however, to reflect upon it as he has done so often already, but to take notice of whatever occurs to his mind without any exception and report it to the physician. If he should then assert that his attention is unable to grasp anything at all, we dismiss this with an energetic assurance that a complete absence of any ideational subject-matter is quite impossible. And in fact very soon numerous ideas will occur to him and will lead on to others; but they will invariably be prefaced by a judgement on the part of the self-observer to the effect that they are senseless or unimportant, that they are irrelevant, and that they occurred to him by chance and without any connection with the topic under consideration. We perceive at once that it was this critical attitude which prevented the subject from reporting any of these ideas, and which indeed had previously prevented them from becoming conscious. If we can induce him to abandon his criticism of the ideas that occur to him, and to continue pursuing the trains of thought which will emerge so long as he keeps his attention turned upon them, we find ourselves in possession of a quantity of psychical material, which we soon find is clearly connected with the pathological idea which was our starting-point; this material will soon reveal connections between the pathological idea and other ideas, and will eventually enable us to replace the pathological idea by a new one which fits into the nexus of thought in an intelligible fashion.

This is not the place in which to give a detailed account of the premises upon which this experiment was based, or the consequences which follow from its invariable success. It will therefore be enough to say that we obtain material that enables us to resolve any pathological idea if we turn our attention precisely to those associations which are ‘involuntary’, which ‘interfere with our reflection’, and which are normally dismissed by our critical faculty as worthless rubbish.

If we make use of this procedure upon ourselves, we can best assist the investigation by at once writing down what are at first unintelligible associations.

I will now show what results follow if I apply this method of investigation to dreams. Any example of a dream should in fact be equally appropriate for the purpose; but for particular reasons I will choose some dream of my own, one which seems obscure and meaningless as I remember it, and one which has the advantage of brevity. A dream which I actually had last night will perhaps meet these requirements. Its content, as I noted it down immediately after waking up, was as follows:

On Dreams

1055

Company at table or table d’hôte . . . spinach was being eaten . . . Frau E. L. was sitting beside me; she was turning her whole attention to me and laid her hand on my knee in an intimate manner. I removed her hand unresponsively. She then said: "But you’ve always had such beautiful eyes." . . . I then had an indistinct picture of two eyes, as though it were a drawing or like the outline of a pair of spectacles . . . .’

This was the whole of the dream, or at least all that I could remember of it. It seemed to me obscure and meaningless, but above all surprising. Frau E. L. is a person with whom I have hardly at any time been on friendly terms, nor, so far as I know, have I ever wished to have any closer relations with her. I have not seen her for a long time, and her name has not, I believe, been mentioned during the last few days. The dream-process was not accompanied by affects of any kind.

Reflecting over this dream brought me no nearer to understanding it. I determined, however, to set down without any premeditation or criticism the associations which presented themselves to my self-observation. As I have found, it is advisable for this purpose to divide a dream-into its elements and to find the associations attaching to each of these fragments separately.

Company at table or table d’hôte. This at once reminded me of an episode which occurred late yesterday evening. I came away from a small party in the company of a friend who offered to take a cab and drive me home in it. ‘I prefer taking a cab with a taximeter’, he said, ‘it occupies one’s mind so agreeably; one always has something to look at.’ When we had taken our places in the cab and the driver had set the dial, so that the first charge of sixty hellers became visible, I carried the joke further. ‘We’ve only just got in’, I said, ‘and already we owe him sixty hellers. A cab with a taximeter always reminds me of a table d’hôte. It makes me avaricious and selfish, because it keeps on reminding me of what I owe. My debt seems to be growing too fast, and I’m afraid of getting the worst of the bargain; and in just the same way at a table d’hôte I can’t avoid feeling in a comic way that I’m getting too little, and must keep an eye on my own interests.’ I went on to quote, somewhat discursively:

‘Ihr führt ins Leben uns hinein,

Ihr lasst den Armen schuldig werden.’¹

¹ [These lines are from one of the Harp-player’s songs in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. In the original the words are addressed to the Heavenly Powers and may be translated literally: ‘You lead us into life, you make the poor creature guilty.’ But the words ‘Armen’ and ‘schuldig’ are both capable of bearing another meaning. ‘Armen’ might mean ‘poor’ in the financial sense and ‘schulding’ might mean ‘in debt.’ So in the present context the last line could be rendered: ‘You make the poor man fall into debt.’]

On Dreams

1056

And now a second association to ‘table d’hôte.’ A few weeks ago, while we were at table in a hotel at a mountain resort in the Tyrol, I was very much annoyed because I thought my wife was not being sufficiently reserved towards some people sitting near us whose acquaintance I had no desire at all to make. I asked her to concern herself more with me than with these strangers. This was again as though I were getting the worst of the bargain at the table. I was struck too by the contrast between my wife’s behaviour at table and that of Frau E. L. in the dream, who ‘turned her whole attention to me.’

To proceed. I now saw that the events in the dream were a reproduction of a small episode of a precisely similar kind which occurred between my wife and me at the time at which I was secretly courting her. The caress which she gave me under the table-cloth was her reply to a pressing love letter. In the dream, however, my wife was replaced by a comparative stranger - E. L.

Frau E. L. is the daughter of a man to whom I was once in debt. I could not help noticing that this revealed an unsuspected connection between parts of the content of the dream and my associations. If one follows the train of association starting out from one element of a dream’s content, one is soon brought back to another of its elements. My associations to the dream were bringing to light connections which were not visible in the dream itself.

If a person expects one to keep an eye on his interests without any advantage to oneself, his artlessness is apt to provoke the scornful question: ‘Do you suppose I’m going to do this or that for the sake of your beaux yeux [beautiful eyes]?’ That being so, Frau E. L.’s speech in the dream, ‘You’ve always had such beautiful eyes’, can only have meant: ‘People have always done everything for you for love; you have always had everything without paying for it.’ The truth is, of course, just the contrary: I have always paid dearly for whatever advantage I have had from other people. The fact that my friend took me home yesterday in a cab without my paying for it must, after all, have made an impression on me.

On Dreams

1057

Incidentally, the friend whose guests we were yesterday has often put me in his debt. Only recently I allowed an opportunity of repaying him to slip by. He has had only one present from me - an antique bowl, round which there are eyes painted: what is known as an ‘occhiale’, to avert the evil eye. Moreover he is an eye surgeon. The same evening I asked him after a woman patient, whom I had sent on to him for a consultation to fit her with spectacles.

As I now perceived, almost all the elements of the dream’s content had been brought into the new context. For the sake of consistency, however, the further question might be asked of why spinach, of all things, was being served in the dream. The answer was that spinach reminded me of an episode which occurred not long ago at our family table, when one of the children - and precisely the one who really deserves to be admired for his beautiful eyes - refused to eat any spinach. I myself behaved in just the same way when I was a child; for a long time I detested spinach, till eventually my taste changed and promoted that vegetable into one of my favourite foods. My own early life and my child’s were thus brought together by the mention of this dish. ‘You ought to be glad to have spinach’, the little gourmet’s mother exclaimed; ‘there are children who would be only too pleased to have spinach.’ Thus I was reminded of the duties of parents to their children. Goethe’s words

‘Ihr führt ins Leben uns hinein,

Ihr lasst den Armen schuldig werden.’

gained a fresh meaning in this connection.

On Dreams

1058

I will pause here to survey the results I had so far reached in my dream-analysis. By following the associations which arose from the separate elements of the dream divorced from their context, I arrived at a number of thoughts and recollections, which I could not fail to recognize as important products of my mental life. This material revealed by the analysis of the dream was intimately connected with the dream’s content, yet the connection was of such a kind that I could never have inferred the fresh material from that content. The dream was unemotional, disconnected and unintelligible; but while I was producing the thoughts behind the dream, I was aware of intense and well-founded affective impulses; the thoughts themselves fell at once into logical chains, in which certain central ideas made their appearance more than once. Thus, the contrast between ‘selfish’ and ‘unselfish’, and the elements ‘being in debt’ and ‘without paying for it’ were central ideas of this kind, not represented in the dream itself. I might draw closer together the threads in the material revealed by the analysis, and I might then show that they converge upon a single nodal point, but considerations of a personal and not of a scientific nature prevent my doing so in public. I should be obliged to betray many things which had better remain my secret, for on my way to discovering the solution of the dream all kinds of things were revealed which I was unwilling to admit even to myself. Why then, it will be asked, have I not chosen some other dream, whose analysis is better suited for reporting, so that I could produce more convincing evidence of the meaning and connectedness of the material uncovered by analysis? The answer is that every dream with which I might try to deal would lead to things equally hard to report and would impose an equal discretion upon me. Nor should I avoid this difficulty by bringing up someone else’s dream for analysis, unless circumstances enabled me to drop all disguise without damage to the person who had confided in me.

At the point which I have now reached, I am led to regard the dream as a sort of substitute for the thought-processes, full of meaning and emotion, at which I arrived after the completion of the analysis. We do not yet know the nature of the process which has caused the dream to be generated from these thoughts, but we can see that it is wrong to regard it as purely physical and without psychical meaning, as a process which has arisen from the isolated activity of separate groups of brain cells aroused from sleep.

Two other things are already clear. The content of the dream is very much shorter than the thoughts for which I regard it as a substitute; and analysis has revealed that the instigator of the dream was an unimportant event of the evening before I dreamt it.

On Dreams

1059

I should, of course, not draw such far-reaching conclusions if only a single dream-analysis was at my disposal. If experience shows me, however, that by uncritically pursuing the associations arising from any dream I can arrive at a similar train of thoughts, among the elements of which the constituents of the dream re-appear and which are interconnected in a rational and intelligible manner, then it will be safe to disregard the slight possibility that the connections observed in a first experiment might be due to chance. I think I am justified, therefore, in adopting a terminology which will crystallize our new discovery. In order to contrast the dream as it is retained in my memory with the relevant material discovered by analysing it, I shall speak of the former as the ‘manifest content of the dream’ and the latter - without, in the first instance, making any further distinction - as the ‘latent content of the dream.’ I am now faced by two new problems which have not hitherto been formulated. (1) What is the psychical process which has transformed the latent content of the dream into the manifest one which is known to me from my memory? (2) What are the motive or motives which have necessitated this transformation? I shall describe the process which transforms the latent into the manifest content of dreams as the ‘dream-work.’ The counterpart to this activity - one which brings about a transformation in the opposite direction - is already known to us as the work of analysis. The remaining problems arising out of dreams - questions as to the instigators of dreams, as to the origin of their material, as to their possible meaning, as to the possible function of dreaming, and as to the reasons for dreams being forgotten - all these problems will be discussed by me on the basis, not of the manifest, but of the newly discovered latent dream-content. Since I attribute all the contradictory and incorrect views upon dream-life which appear in the literature of the subject to ignorance of the latent content of dreams as revealed by analysis, I shall be at the greatest pains henceforward to avoid confusing the manifest dream with the latent dream-thoughts.

On Dreams

1060

III

The transformation of the latent dream-thoughts into the manifest dream-content deserves all our attention, since it is the first instance known to us of psychical material being changed over from one mode of expression to another, from a mode of expression which is immediately intelligible to us to another which we can only come to understand with the help of guidance and effort, though it too must be recognized as a function of our mental activity.

Dreams can be divided into three categories in respect of the relation between their latent and manifest content. In the first place, we may distinguish those dreams which make sense and are at the same time intelligible, which, that is to say, can be inserted without further difficulty into the context of our mental life. We have numbers of such dreams. They are for the most part short and appear to us in general to deserve little attention, since there is nothing astonishing or strange about them. Incidentally, their occurrence constitutes a powerful argument against the theory according to which dreams originate from the isolated activity of separate groups of brain cells. They give no indication of reduced or fragmentary psychical activity, but nevertheless we never question the fact of their being dreams, and do not confuse them with the products of waking life. A second group is formed by those dreams which, though they are connected in themselves and have a clear sense, nevertheless have a bewildering effect, because we cannot see how to fit that sense into our mental life. Such would be the case if we were to dream, for instance, that a relative of whom we were fond had died of the plague, when we had no reason for expecting, fearing or assuming any such thing; we should ask in astonishment: ‘How did I get hold of such an idea?’ The third group, finally, contains those dreams which are without either sense or intelligibility, which seem disconnected, confused, and meaningless. The preponderant majority of the products of our dreaming exhibit these characteristics, which are the basis of the low opinion in which dreams are held and of the medical theory that they are the outcome of a restricted mental activity. The most evident signs of incoherence are seldom absent, especially in dream-compositions of any considerable length and complexity.

On Dreams

1061

The contrast between the manifest and latent content of dreams is clearly of significance only for dreams of the second and more particularly of the third category. It is there that we are faced by riddles which only disappear after we have replaced the manifest dream by the latent thoughts behind it; and it was on a specimen of the last category - a confused and unintelligible dream - that the analysis which I have just recorded was carried out. Contrary to our expectation, however, we came up against motives which prevented us from becoming fully acquainted with the latent dream-thoughts. A repetition of similar experiences may lead us to suspect that there is an intimate and regular relation between the unintelligible and confused nature of dreams and the difficulty of reporting the thoughts behind them. Before enquiring into the nature of this relation, we may with advantage turn our attention to the more easily intelligible dreams of the first category, in which the manifest and latent content coincide, and there appears to be a consequent saving in dream-work.

Moreover, an examination of these dreams offers advantages from another standpoint. For children’s dreams are of that kind - significant and not puzzling. Here, incidentally, we have a further argument against tracing the origin of dreams to dissociated cerebral activity during sleep. For why should a reduction in psychical functioning of this kind be a characteristic of the state of sleep in the case of adults but not in that of children? On the other hand, we shall be fully justified in expecting that an explanation of psychical processes in children, in whom they may well be greatly simplified, may turn out to be an indispensable prelude to the investigation of the psychology of adults.

On Dreams

1062

I will therefore record a few instances of dreams which I have collected from children. A little girl nineteen months old had been kept without food all day because she had had an attack of vomiting in the morning; her nurse declared that she had been upset by eating strawberries. During the night after this day of starvation she was heard saying her own name in her sleep and adding: ‘Stwawbewwies, wild stwawbewwies, omblet, pudden!’ She was thus dreaming of eating a meal, and she laid special stress in her menu on the particular delicacy of which, as she had reason to expect, she would only be allowed scanty quantities in the near future. - A little boy of twenty-two months had a similar dream of a feast which he had been denied. The day before, he had been obliged to present his uncle with a gift of a basket of fresh cherries, of which he himself, of course, had only been allowed to taste a single sample. He awoke with this cheerful news: ‘Hermann eaten all the chewwies!’ - One day a girl of three and a quarter made a trip across a lake. The voyage was evidently not long enough for her, for she cried when she had to get off the boat. Next morning she reported that during the night she had been for a trip on the lake: she had been continuing her interrupted voyage. - A boy of five and a quarter showed signs of dissatisfaction in the course of a walk in the neighbourhood of the Dachstein. Each time a new mountain came into view he asked if it was the Dachstein and finally refused to visit a waterfall with the rest of the company. His behaviour was attributed to fatigue; but it found a better explanation when next morning he reported that he had dreamt that he climbed up the Dachstein. He had evidently had the idea that the expedition would end in a climb up the Dachstein, and had become depressed when the promised mountain never came in view. He made up in his dream for what the previous day had failed to give him. - A six-year-old girl had an exactly similar dream. In the course of a walk her father had stopped short of their intended goal as the hour was getting late. On their way back she had noticed a signpost bearing the name of another landmark; and her father had promised to take her there as well another time. Next morning she met her father with the news that she had dreamt that he had been with her to both places.

The common element in all these children’s dreams is obvious. All of them fulfilled wishes which were active during the day but had remained unfulfilled. The dreams were simple and undisguised wish-fulfilments.

On Dreams

1063

Here is another child’s dream, which, though at first sight it is not quite easy to understand, is also nothing more than a wish-fulfilment. A little girl not quite four years old had been brought to town from the country because she was suffering from an attack of poliomyelitis. She spent the night with an aunt who had no children, and was put to sleep in a large bed - much too large for her, of course. Next morning she said she had had a dream that the bed had been far too small for her, and that there has been no room for her in it. It is easy to recognize this dream as a wishful dream if we remember that children very often express a wish ‘to be big.’ The size of the bed was a disagreeable reminder of her smallness to the would-be big child; she therefore corrected the unwelcome relation in her dream, and grew so big that even the large bed was too small for her.

Even when the content of children’s dreams becomes complicated and subtle, there is never any difficulty in recognizing them as wish-fulfilments. An eight-year-old boy had a dream that he was driving in a chariot with Achilles and that Diomede was the charioteer. It was shown that the day before he had been deep in a book of legends about the Greek heroes; and it was easy to see that he had taken the heroes as his models and was sorry not to be living in their days.

This small collection throws a direct light on a further characteristic of children’s dreams: their connection with daytime life. The wishes which are fulfilled in them are carried over from daytime and as a rule from the day before, and in waking life they have been accompanied by intense emotion. Nothing unimportant or indifferent, or nothing which would strike a child as such, finds its way into the content of their dreams.

On Dreams

1064

Numerous examples of dreams of this infantile type can be found occurring in adults as well, though, as I have said, they are usually brief in content. Thus a number of people regularly respond to a stimulus of thirst during the night with dreams of drinking, which thus endeavour to get rid of the stimulus and enable sleep to continue. In some people ‘dreams of convenience’ of this kind often occur before waking, when the necessity for getting up presents itself. They dream that they are already up and at the washing-stand, or that they are already at the school or office where they are due at some particular time. During the night before a journey we not infrequently dream of having arrived at our destination; so too, before a visit to the theatre or a party, a dream will often anticipate the pleasure that lies ahead - out of impatience, as it were. In other dreams the wish-fulfilment is expressed a stage more indirectly: some connection or implication must be established - that is, the work of interpretation must be begun - before the wish-fulfilment can be recognized. A man told me, for instance, that his young wife had had a dream that her period had started. I reflected that if this young woman had missed her period she must have known that she was faced with a pregnancy. Thus when she reported her dream she was announcing her pregnancy, and the meaning of the dream was to represent as fulfilled her wish that the pregnancy might be postponed for a while. Under unusual or extreme conditions dreams of this infantile character are particularly common. Thus the leader of a polar expedition has recorded that the members of his expedition, while they were wintering in the ice-field and living on a monotonous diet and short rations, regularly dreamt like children of large meals, of mountains of tobacco, and of being back at home.

It by no means rarely happens that in the course of a comparatively long, complicated and on the whole confused dream one particularly clear portion stands out, which contains an unmistakable wish-fulfilment, but which is bound up with some other, unintelligible material. But in the case of adults, anyone with some experience in analysing their dreams will find to his surprise that even those dreams which have an appearance of being transparently clear are seldom as simple as those of children, and that behind the obvious wish-fulfilment some other meaning may lie concealed.

It would indeed be a simple and satisfactory solution of the riddle of dreams if the work of analysis were to enable us to trace even the meaningless and confused dreams of adults back to the infantile type of fulfilment of an intensely felt wish of the previous day. There can be no doubt, however, that appearances do not speak in favour of such an expectation. Dreams are usually full of the most indifferent and strangest material, and there is no sign in their content of the fulfilment of any wish.

On Dreams

1065

But before taking leave of infantile dreams with their undisguised wish-fulfilments, I must not omit to mention one principal feature of dreams, which has long been evident and which emerges particularly clearly precisely in this group. Every one of these dreams can be replaced by an optative clause: ‘Oh, if only the trip on the lake had lasted longer!’ - ‘If only I were already washed and dressed!’ - ‘If only I could have kept the cherries instead of giving them to Uncle!’ But dreams give us more than such optative clauses. They show us the wish as already fulfilled; they represent its fulfilment as real and present; and the material employed in dream-representation consists principally, though not exclusively, of situations and of sensory images, mostly of a visual character. Thus, even in this infantile group, a species of transformation, which deserves to be described as dream-work, is not completely absent: a thought expressed in the optative has been replaced by a representation in the present tense.

On Dreams

1066

IV

We shall be inclined to suppose that a transformation of some such kind has occurred even in confused dreams, though we cannot tell whether what has been transformed was an optative in their case too. There are, however, two passages in the specimen dream which I have reported, and with whose analysis we have made some headway, that give us reason to suspect something of the kind. The analysis showed that my wife had concerned herself with some other people at table, and that I had found this disagreeable; the dream contained precisely the opposite of this - the person who took the place of my wife was turning her whole attention to me. But a disagreeable experience can give rise to no more suitable wish than that its opposite might have occurred - which was what the dream represented as fulfilled. There was an exactly similar relation between the bitter thought revealed in the analysis that I had never had anything free of cost and the remark made by the woman in the dream - ‘You’ve always had such beautiful eyes.’ Some part of the opposition between the manifest and latent content of dreams is thus attributable to wish-fulfilment.

But another achievement of the dream-work, tending as it does to produce incoherent dreams, is even more striking. If in any particular instance we compare the number of ideational elements or the space taken up in writing them down in the case of the dream and of the dream-thoughts to which the analysis leads us and of which traces are to be found in the dream itself, we shall be left in no doubt that the dream-work has carried out a work of compression or condensation on a large scale. It is impossible at first to form any judgement of the degree of this condensation; but the deeper we plunge into a dream-analysis the more impressive it seems. From every element in a dream’s content associative threads branch out in two or more directions; every situation in a dream seems to be put together out of two or more impressions or experiences. For instance, I once had a dream of a sort of swimming-pool, in which the bathers were scattering in all directions; at one point on the edge of the pool someone was standing and bending towards one of the people bathing, as though to help her out of the water. The situation was put together from a memory of an experience I had had at puberty and from two paintings, one of which I had seen shortly before the dream. One was a picture from Schwind’s series illustrating the legend of Mélusine, which showed the water-nymphs surprised in their pool (cf. the scattering bathers in the dream); the other was a picture of the Deluge by an Italian Master; while the little experience remembered from my puberty was of having seen the instructor at a swimming-school helping a lady out of the water who had stopped in until after the time set aside for men bathers. -In the case of the example which I chose for interpretation, an analysis of the situation led me to a small series of recollections each of which contributed something to the content of the dream. In the first place, there was the episode from the time of my engagement of which I have already spoken. The pressure upon my hand under the table, which was a part of that episode, provided the dream with the detail ‘under the table’ - a detail which I had to add as an afterthought to my memory of the dream. In the episode itself there was of course no question of ‘turning to me’; the analysis showed that this element was the fulfilment of a wish by presenting the opposite of an actual event, and that it related to my wife’s behaviour at the table d’hôte. But behind this recent recollection there lay concealed an exactly similar and far more important scene from the time of our engagement, which estranged us for a whole day. The intimate laying of a hand on my knee belonged to a quite different context and was concerned with quite other people. This element in the dream was in turn the starting-point of two separate sets of memories - and so on.

The material in the dream-thoughts which is packed together for the purpose of constructing a dream-situation must of course in itself be adaptable for that purpose. There must be one or more common elements in all the components. The dream-work then proceeds just as Francis Galton did in constructing his family photographs. It superimposes, as it were, the different components upon one another. The common element in them then stands out clearly in the composite picture, while contradictory details more or less wipe one another out. This method of production also explains to some extent the varying degrees of characteristic vagueness shown by so many elements in the content of dreams. Basing itself on this discovery, dream-interpretation has laid down the following rule: In analysing a dream, if an uncertainty can be resolved into an ‘either-or’, we must replace it for purposes of interpretation by an ‘and’, and take each of the apparent alternatives as an independent starting-point for a series of associations.

On Dreams

1067

If a common element of this kind between the dream-thoughts is not present, the dream-work sets about creating one, so that it may be possible for the thoughts to be given a common representation in the dream. The most convenient way of bringing together two dream-thoughts which, to start with, have nothing in common, is to alter the verbal form of one of them, and thus bring it half-way to meet the other, which may be similarly clothed in a new form of words. A parallel process is involved in hammering out a rhyme, where a similar sound has to be sought for in the same way as a common element is in our present case. A large part of the dream-work consists in the creation of intermediate thoughts of this kind which are often highly ingenious, though they frequently appear far-fetched; these then form a link between the composite picture in the manifest content of the dream and the dream-thoughts, which are themselves diverse both in form and essence and have been determined by the exciting factors of the dream. The analysis of our sample dream affords us an instance of this kind in which a thought has been given a new form in order to bring it into contact with another which is essentially foreign to it. In carrying out the analysis I came upon the following thought: ‘I should like to get something sometimes without paying for it’. But in that form the thought could not be employed in the dream-content. It was therefore given a fresh form: ‘I should like to get some enjoyment without cost ["Kosten"].’¹ Now the word ‘Kosten’ in its second sense fits into the ‘table d’hôte’ circle of ideas, and could thus be represented in the ‘spinach’ which was served in the dream. When a dish appears at our table and the children refuse it, their mother begins by trying persuasion, and urges them ‘just to taste [‘kosten’] a bit of it’. It may seem strange that the dream-work should make such free use of verbal ambiguity, but further experience will teach us that the occurrence is quite a common one.

¹ [The German word ‘Kosten’ means both ‘cost’ and ‘to taste.’]

On Dreams

1068

The process of condensation further explains certain constituents of the content of dreams which are peculiar to them and are not found in waking ideation. What I have in mind are ‘collective’ and ‘composite figures’ and the strange ‘composite structures’, which are creations not unlike the composite animals invented by the folk-imagination of the Orient. The latter, however, have already assumed stereotyped shapes in our thought, whereas in dreams fresh composite forms are being perpetually constructed in an inexhaustible variety. We are all of us familiar with such structures from our own dreams.

There are many sorts of ways in which figures of this kind can be put together. I may build up a figure by giving it the features of two people; or I may give it the form of one person but think of it in the dream as having the name of another person; or I may have a visual picture of one person, but put it in a situation which is appropriate to another. In all these cases the combination of different persons into a single representative in the content of the dream has a meaning; it is intended to indicate an ‘and’ or ‘just as’, or to compare the original persons with each other in some particular respect, which may even be specified in the dream itself. As a rule, however, this common element between the combined persons can only be discovered by analysis, and is only indicated in the contents of the dream by the formation of the collective figure.

The composite structures which occur in dreams in such immense numbers are put together in an equal variety of ways, and the same rules apply to their resolution. There is no need for me to quote any instances. Their strangeness disappears completely when once we have made up our minds not to class them with the objects of our waking perception, but to remember that they are products of dream-condensation and are emphasizing in an effectively abbreviated form some common characteristic of the objects which they are thus combining. Here again the common element has as a rule to be discovered by analysis. The content of the dream merely says as it were: ‘All these things have an element x in common.’ The dissection of these composite structures by means of analysis is often the shortest way to finding the meaning of a dream. - Thus, I dreamt on one occasion that I was sitting on a bench with one of my former University teachers, and that the bench, which was surrounded by other benches, was moving forward at a rapid pace. This was a combination of a lecture theatre and a trottoir roulant.¹ I will not pursue this train of ideas further. - Another time I was sitting in a railway carriage and holding on my lap an object in the shape of a top-hat [‘Zylinderhut’, literally ‘cylinder-hat’], which however was made of transparent glass. The situation made me think at once of the proverb: ‘Mit dem Hute in der Hand kommt man duchs ganze land.’² The glass cylinder led me by a short détour to think of an incandescent gas-mantle; and I soon saw that I should like to make a discovery which would make me as rich and independent as my fellow-countryman Dr. Auer von Welsbach was made by his, and that I should like to travel instead of stopping in Vienna. In the dream I was travelling with my discovery, the hat in the shape of a glass cylinder - a discovery which, it is true, was not as yet of any great practical use. - The dream-work is particularly fond of representing two contrary ideas by the same composite structure. Thus, for instance, a woman had a dream in which she saw herself carrying a tall spray of flowers, such as the angel is represented as holding in pictures of the Annunciation. (This stood for innocence; incidentally, her own name was Maria.) On the other hand, the spray was covered with large white flowers like camellias. (This stood for the opposite of innocence; it was associated with La dame aux camélias.)

¹ [The ‘trottoir roulant’ was a moving roadway installed at the Paris Exhibition of 1900.]

² [‘If you go hat in hand, you can cross the whole land.’]

On Dreams

1069

A good proportion of what we have learnt about condensation in dreams may be summarized in this formula: each element in the content of a dream is ‘overdetermined’ by material in the dream-thoughts; it is not derived from a single element in the dream-thoughts, but may be traced back to a whole number. These elements need not necessarily be closely related to each other in the dream-thoughts themselves; they may belong to the most widely separated regions of the fabric of those thoughts. A dream-element is, in the strictest sense of the word, the ‘representative’ of all this disparate material in the content of the dream. But analysis reveals yet another side of the complicated relation between the content of the dream and the dream-thoughts. Just as connections lead from each element of the dream to several dream-thoughts, so as a rule a single dream-thought is represented by more than one dream-element; the threads of association do not simply converge from the dream-thoughts to the dream-content, they cross and interweave with each other many times over in the course of their journey.

Condensation, together with the transformation of thoughts into situations (‘dramatization’), is the most important and peculiar characteristic of the dream-work. So far, however, nothing has transpired as to any motive necessitating this compression of the material.

On Dreams

1070

V

In the case of the complicated and confused dreams with which we are now concerned, condensation and dramatization alone are not enough to account for the whole of the impression that we gain of the dissimilarity between the content of the dream and the dream-thoughts. We have evidence of the operation of a third factor, and this evidence deserves careful sifting.

First and foremost, when by means of analysis we have arrived at a knowledge of the dream-thoughts, we observe that the manifest dream-content deals with quite different material from the latent thoughts. This, to be sure, is no more than an appearance, which evaporates under closer examination, for we find ultimately that the whole of the dream-content is derived from the dream-thoughts, and that almost all the dream-thoughts are represented in the dream-content. Nevertheless, something of the distinction still remains. What stands out boldly and clearly in the dream as its essential content must, after analysis, be satisfied with playing an extremely subordinate role among the dream-thoughts; and what, on the evidence of our feelings, can claim to be the most prominent among the dream-thoughts is either not present at all as ideational material in the content of the dream or is only remotely alluded to in some obscure region of it. We may put it in this way: in the course of the dream-work the psychical intensity passes over from the thoughts and ideas to which it properly belongs on to others which in our judgement have no claim to any such emphasis. No other process contributes so much to concealing the meaning of a dream and to making the connection between the dream-content and the dream-thoughts unrecognizable. In the course of this process, which I shall describe as ‘dream-displacement’, the psychical intensity, significance or affective potentiality of the thoughts is, as we further find, transformed into sensory vividness. We assume as a matter of course that the most distinct element in the manifest content of a dream is the most important one; but in fact it is often an indistinct element which turns out to be the most direct derivative of the essential dream-thought.

On Dreams

1071

What I have called dream-displacement might equally be described as ‘a transvaluation of psychical values.’ I shall not have given an exhaustive estimate of this phenomenon, however, unless I add that this work of displacement or transvaluation is performed to a very varying degree in different dreams. There are dreams which come about almost without any displacement. These are the ones which make sense and are intelligible, such, for instance, as those which we have recognized as undisguised wishful dreams. On the other hand, there are dreams in which not a single piece of the dream-thoughts has retained its own psychical value, or in which everything that is essential in the dream-thoughts has been replaced by something trivial. And we can find a complete series of transitional cases between these two extremes. The more obscure and confused a dream appears to be, the greater the share in its construction which may be attributed to the factor of displacement.

Our specimen dream exhibits displacement to this extent at least, that its content seems to have a different centre from its dream-thoughts. In the foreground of the dream-content a prominent place is taken by a situation in which a woman seems to be making advances to me; while in the dream-thoughts the chief emphasis is laid on a wish for once to enjoy unselfish love, love which ‘costs nothing’ - an idea concealed behind the phrase about ‘beautiful eyes’ and the far-fetched allusion to ‘spinach.’

If we undo dream-displacement by means of analysis, we obtain what seems to be completely trustworthy information on two much-disputed problems concerning dreams: as to their instigators and as to their connection with waking life. There are dreams which immediately reveal their derivation from events of the day; there are others in which no trace of any such derivation is to be discovered. If we seek the help of analysis, we find that every dream without any possible exception goes back to an impression of the past few days, or, it is probably more correct to say, of the day immediately preceding the dream, of the ‘dream-day.’ The impression which plays the part of dream-instigator may be such an important one that we feel no surprise at being concerned with it in the daytime, and in that case we rightly speak of the dream as carrying on with the significant interests of our waking life. As a rule, however, if a connection is to be found in the content of the dream with any impression of the previous day, that impression is so trivial, insignificant and unmemorable, that it is only with difficulty that we ourselves can recall it. And in such cases the content of the dream itself, even if it is connected and intelligible, seems to be concerned with the most indifferent trivialities, which would be unworthy of our interest if we were awake. A good deal of the contempt in which dreams are held is due to the preference thus shown in their content for what is indifferent and trivial.

On Dreams

1072

Analysis does away with the misleading appearance upon which this derogatory judgement is founded. If the content of a dream puts forward some indifferent impression as being its instigator, analysis invariably brings to light a significant experience, and one by which the dreamer has good reason to be stirred. This experience has been replaced by the indifferent one, with which it is connected by copious associative links. Where the content of the dream treats of insignificant and uninteresting ideational material, analysis uncovers the numerous associative paths connecting these trivialities with things that are of the highest psychical importance in the dreamer’s estimation. If what makes their way into the content of dreams are impressions and material which are indifferent and trivial rather than justifiably stirring and interesting, that is only the effect of the process of displacement. If we answer our questions about dream-instigators and the connection between dreaming and daily affairs on the basis of the new insight we have gained from replacing the manifest by the latent content of dreams, we arrive at these conclusions: dreams are never concerned with things with which we should not think it worth while to be concerned during the day, and trivialities which do no affect us during the day are unable to pursue us in our sleep.

What was the dream-instigator in the specimen that we have chosen for analysis? It was the definitely insignificant event of my friend giving me a drive in a cab free of cost. The situation in the dream at the table d’hôte contained an allusion to this insignificant precipitating cause, for in my conversation I had compared the taximeter cab with a table d’hôte. But I can also point to the important experience which was represented by this trivial one. A few days earlier I had paid out a considerable sum of money on behalf of a member of my family of whom I am fond. No wonder, said the dream-thoughts, if this person were to feel grateful to me: love of that sort would not be ‘free of cost.’ Love that is free of cost, however, stood in the forefront of the dream-thoughts. The fact that not long before I had had several cab-drives with the relative in question, made it possible for the cab-drive with my friend to remind me of my connections with this other person.

On Dreams

1073

The indifferent impression which becomes a dream-instigator owing to associations of this kind is subject to a further condition which does not apply to the true source of the dream: it must always be a recent impression, derived from the dream-day.

I cannot leave the subject of dream-displacement without drawing attention to a remarkable process which occurs in the formation of dreams and in which condensation and displacement combine to produce the result. In considering condensation we have already seen the way in which two ideas in the dream-thoughts which have something in common, some point of contact, are replaced in the dream-content by a composite idea, in which a relatively distinct nucleus represents what they have in common, while indistinct subordinate details correspond to the respects in which they differ from each other. If displacement takes place in addition to condensation, what is constructed is not a composite idea but an ‘intermediate common entity’, which stands in a relation to the two different elements similar to that in which the resultant in a parallelogram of forces stands to its components. For instance, in the content of one of my dreams there was a question of an injection with propyl. To begin with, the analysis only led me to an indifferent experience which had acted as dream-instigator, and in which a part was played by amyl. I was not yet able to justify the confusion between amyl and propyl . In the group of ideas behind this same dream, however, there was also a recollection of my first visit to Munich, where I had been struck by the Propylaea. The details of the analysis made it plausible to suppose that it was the influence of this second group of ideas upon the first one that was responsible for the displacement from amyl to propyl. Propyl is as it were an intermediate idea between amyl and Propylaea, and found its way into the content of the dream as a kind of compromise, by means of simultaneous condensation and displacement.

There is a still more urgent necessity in the case of the process of displacement than in that of condensation to discover the motive for these puzzling efforts on the part of the dream-work.

On Dreams

1074

VI

It is the process of displacement which is chiefly responsible for our being unable to discover or recognize the dream-thoughts in the dream-content, unless we understand the reason for their distortion. Nevertheless, the dream-thoughts are also submitted to another and milder sort of transformation, which leads to our discovering a new achievement on the part of the dream-work - one, however, which is easily intelligible. The dream-thoughts which we first come across as we proceed with our analysis often strike us by the unusual form in which they are expressed; they are not clothed in the prosaic language usually employed by our thoughts, but are on the contrary represented symbolically by means of similes and metaphors, in images resembling those of poetic speech. There is no difficulty in accounting for the constraint imposed upon the form in which the dream-thoughts are expressed. The manifest content of dreams consists for the most part in pictorial situations; and the dream-thoughts must accordingly be submitted in the first place to a treatment which will make them suitable for a representation of this kind. If we imagine ourselves faced by the problem of representing the arguments in a political leading article or the speeches of counsel before a court of law in a series of pictures, we shall easily understand the modifications which must necessarily be carried out by the dream-work owing to considerations of representability in the content of the dream.

The psychical material of the dream-thoughts habitually includes recollections of impressive experiences - not infrequently dating back to early childhood - which are thus themselves perceived as a rule as situations having a visual subject matter. Wherever the possibility arises, this portion of the dream-thoughts exercises a determining influence upon the form taken by the content of the dream; it constitutes, as it were, a nucleus of crystallization, attracting the material of the dream-thoughts to itself and thus affecting their distribution. The situation in a dream is often nothing other than a modified repetition, complicated by interpolations, of an impressive experience of this kind; on the other hand, faithful and straightforward reproductions of real scenes only rarely appear in dreams.

On Dreams

1075

The content of dreams, however, does not consist entirely of situations, but also includes disconnected fragments of visual images, speeches and even bits of unmodified thoughts. It may therefore perhaps be of interest to enumerate very briefly the modes of representation available to the dream-work for reproducing the dream-thoughts in the peculiar form of expression necessary in dreams.

The dream-thoughts which we arrive at by means of analysis reveal themselves as a psychical complex of the most intricate possible structure. Its portions stand in the most manifold logical relations to one another: they represent foreground and background, conditions, digressions and illustrations, chains of evidence and counter-arguments. Each train of thought is almost invariably accompanied by its contradictory counterpart. This material lacks none of the characteristics that are familiar to us from our waking thinking. If now all of this is to be turned into a dream, the psychical material will be submitted to a pressure which will condense it greatly, to an internal fragmentation and displacement which will, as it were, create new surfaces, and to a selective operation in favour of those portions of it which are the most appropriate for the construction of situations. If we take into account the genesis of the material, a process of this sort deserves to be described as a ‘regression.’ In the course of this transformation, however, the logical links which have hitherto held the psychical material together are lost. It is only, as it were, the substantive content of the dream-thoughts that the dream-work takes over and manipulates. The restoration of the connections which the dream-work has destroyed is a task which has to be performed by the work of analysis.

The modes of expression open to a dream may therefore be qualified as meagre by comparison with those of our intellectual speech; nevertheless a dream need not wholly abandon the possibility of reproducing the logical relations present in the dream-thoughts. On the contrary, it succeeds often enough in replacing them by formal characteristics in its own texture.

On Dreams

1076

In the first place, dreams take into account the connection which undeniably exists between all the portions of the dream-thoughts by combining the whole material into a single situation. They reproduce logical connection by approximation in space and time, just as a painter will represent all the poets in a single group in a picture of Parnassus. It is true that they were never in fact assembled on a single mountain-top; but they certainly form a conceptual group. Dreams carry this method of reproduction down to details; and often when they show us two elements in the dream-content close together, this indicates that there is some specially intimate connection between what correspond to them among the dream-thoughts. Incidentally, it is to be observed that all dreams produced during a single night will be found on analysis to be derived from the same circle of thoughts.

A causal relation between two thoughts is either left unrepresented or is replaced by a sequence of two pieces of dream of different lengths. Here the representation is often reversed, the beginning of the dream standing for the consequence and its conclusion for the premise. An immediate transformation of one thing into another in a dream seems to represent the relation of cause and effect.

The alternative ‘either-or’ is never expressed in dreams, both of the alternatives being inserted in the text of the dream as though they were equally valid. I have already mentioned that an ‘either-or’ used in recording a dream is to be translated by ‘and’.

Ideas which are contraries are by preference expressed in dreams by one and the same element.¹ ‘No’ seems not to exist so far as dreams are concerned. Opposition between two thoughts, the relation of reversal, may be represented in dreams in a most remarkable way. It may be represented by some other piece of the dream-content being turned into its opposite - as it were by an afterthought. We shall hear presently of a further method of expressing contradiction. The sensation of inhibition of movement which is so common in dreams also serves to express a contradiction between two impulses, a conflict of will.

¹ [Footnote added 1911:] It deserves to be remarked that well-known philologists have asserted that the most ancient human languages tended in general to express contradictory opposites by the same word. (E.g. ‘strong-weak’, ‘inside-outside.’ This has been described as ‘the antithetical meaning of primal words’.)

On Dreams

1077

One and one only of these logical relations - that of similarity, consonance, the possession of common attributes - is very highly favoured by the mechanism of dream-formation. The dream-work makes use of such cases as a foundation for dream-condensation, by bringing together everything that shows an agreement of this kind into a new unity.

This short series of rough comments is of course inadequate to deal with the full extent of the formal means employed by dreams for the expression of logical relations in the dream-thoughts. Different dreams are more or less carefully constructed in this respect; they keep more or less closely to the text presented to them; they make more or less use of the expedients that are open to the dream-work. In the second case they appear obscure, confused and disconnected. If, however, a dream strikes one as obviously absurd, if its content includes a piece of palpable nonsense, this is intentionally so; its apparent disregard of all the requirements of logic is expressing a piece of the intellectual content of the dream-thoughts. Absurdity in a dream signifies the presence in the dream-thoughts of contradiction, ridicule and derision. Since this statement is in the most marked opposition to the view that dreams are the product of a dissociated and uncritical mental activity, I will emphasize it by means of an example.

One of my acquaintances, Herr M., had been attacked in an essay with an unjustifiable degree of violence, as we all thought - by no less a person than Goethe. Herr M. was naturally crushed by the attack. He complained of it bitterly to some company at table; his veneration for Goethe had not been affected, however, by this personal experience. I now tried to throw a little light on the chronological data, which seemed to me improbable. Goethe died in 1832. Since his attack on Herr M. must have been made earlier than that, Herr M. must have been quite a young man at the time. It seemed to be a plausible notion that he was eighteen. I was not quite sure, however, what year we were actually in, so that my whole calculation melted into obscurity. Incidentally, the attack was contained in Goethe’s well-known essay on ‘Nature’.

The nonsensical character of this dream will be even more glaringly obvious, if I explain that Herr M. is a youngish business man, who is far removed from any poetical and literary interests. I have no doubt, however, that when I have entered into the analysis of the dream I shall succeed in showing how much ‘method’ there is in its nonsense.

On Dreams

1078

The material of the dream was derived from three sources:

(1) Herr M., whom I had got to know among some company at table, asked me one day to examine his elder brother, who was showing signs of general paralysis. In the course of my conversation with the patient an awkward episode occurred for he gave his brother away for no accountable reason by talking of his youthful follies. I had asked the patient the year of his birth (cf. the year of Goethe’s death in the dream) and had made him carry out a number of calculations in order to test the weakness of his memory.

(2) A medical journal, which bore my name among others on its title-page, had published a positively ‘crushing’ criticism by a youthful reviewer of a book by my friend F. in Berlin. I took the editor to task over this; but, though he expressed his regret, he would not undertake to offer any redress. I therefore severed my connection with the journal, but in my letter of resignation expressed a hope that our personal relations would not be affected by the event. This was the true source of the dream. The unfavourable reception of my friend’s work had made a profound impression on me. It contained, in my opinion, a fundamental biological discovery, which is only now - many years later beginning to find favour with the experts.

(3) A woman patient of mine had given me an account a short time before of her brother’s illness, and how he had broken out in a frenzy with cries of ‘Nature! Nature!’ The doctors believed that his exclamation came from his having read Goethe’s striking essay on that subject and that it showed he had been overworking at his studies. I had remarked that it seemed to me more plausible that his exclamation of the word ‘Nature’ should be taken in the sexual sense in which it is used by the less educated people here. This idea of mine was at least not disproved by the fact that the unfortunate young man subsequently mutilated his own genitals. He was eighteen at the time of his outbreak.

Behind my own ego in the dream-content there lay concealed, in the first instance, my friend who had been so badly treated by the critic. ‘I tried to throw a little light on the chronological data.’ My friend’s book dealt with the chronological data of life and among other things showed that the length of Goethe’s life was a multiple of a number of days that has a significance in biology. But this ego was compared with a paralytic: ‘I was not quite sure what year we were in.’ Thus the dream made out that my friend was behaving like a paralytic, and in this respect it was a mass of absurdities. The dream-thoughts, however, were saying ironically: ‘Naturally, it’s he who is the crazy fool and it’s you who are the men of genius and know better. Surely it couldn’t be the reverse?’ There were plenty of examples of this reversal in the dream. For instance, Goethe attacked the young man, which is absurd, whereas it is still easy for quite a young man to attack the great Goethe.

On Dreams

1079

I should like to lay it down that no dream is prompted by motives other than egoistic ones. In fact, the ego in the present dream does not stand only for my friend but for myself as well. I was identifying myself with him, because the fate of his discovery seemed to foreshadow the reception of my own findings. If I were to bring forward my theory emphasizing the part played by sexuality in the aetiology of psychoneurotic disorders (cf. the allusion to the eighteen-year-old patient’s cry of ‘Nature! Nature!’), I should come across the same criticisms; and I was already preparing to meet them with the same derision.

If we pursue the dream-thoughts further, we shall keep on finding ridicule and derision as correlates of the absurdities of the manifest dream. It is well known that it was the discovery of the split skull of a sheep on the Lido of Venice that gave Goethe the idea of the so-called ‘vertebral’ theory of the skull. My friend boasts that, when he was a student, he released a storm which led to the resignation of an old Professor who, though he had once been distinguished (among other things in connection precisely with the same branch of comparative anatomy), had become incapable of teaching owing to senile dementia. Thus the agitation which my friend promoted served to combat the mischievous system according to which there is no age limit for academic workers in German universities - for age is proverbially no defence against folly. - In the hospital here I had the honour of serving for years under a chief who had long been a fossil and had for decades been notoriously feeble minded, but who was allowed to continue carrying on his responsible duties. At this point I thought of a descriptive term based upon the discovery on the Lido.¹Some of my young contemporaries at the hospital concocted, in connection with this man, a version of what was then a popular song: ‘Das hat kein Goethe g’schrieben, das hat kein Schiller g’dicht . . .’ ²

¹ [‘Schafkopf’, literally ‘sheep’s head’, = ‘silly ass.’]

² [‘This was written by no Goethe, this was composed by no Schiller.’]

On Dreams

1080

VII

We have not yet come to the end of our consideration of the dream-work. In addition to condensation, displacement and pictorial arrangement of the psychical material, we are obliged to assign it yet another activity, though this is not to be found in operation in every dream. I shall not deal exhaustively with this part of the dream-work, and will therefore merely remark that the easiest way of forming an idea of its nature is to suppose - though the supposition probably does not meet the facts - that it only comes into operation after the dream-content has already been constructed. Its function would then consist in arranging the constituents of the dream in such a way that they form an approximately connected whole, a dream-composition. In this way the dream is given a kind of façade (though this does not, it is true, hide its content at every point), and thus receives a first, preliminary interpretation, which is supported by interpolations and slight modifications. Incidentally, this revision of the dream-content is only possible if it is not too punctiliously carried out; nor does it present us with anything more than a glaring misunderstanding of the dream-thoughts. Before we start upon the analysis of a dream we have to clear the ground of this attempt at an interpretation.

The motive for this part of the dream-work is particularly obvious. Considerations of intelligibility are what lead to this final revision of a dream; and this reveals the origin of the activity. It behaves towards the dream-content lying before it just as our normal psychical activity behaves in general towards any perceptual content that may be presented to it. It understands that content on the basis of certain anticipatory ideas, and arranges it, even at the moment of perceiving it, on the presupposition of its being intelligible; in so doing it runs a risk of falsifying it, and in fact, if it cannot bring it into line with anything familiar, is a prey to the strangest misunderstandings. As is well known, we are incapable of seeing a series of unfamiliar signs or of hearing a succession of unknown words, without at once falsifying the perception from considerations of intelligibility, on the basis of something already known to us.

On Dreams

1081

Dreams which have undergone a revision of this kind at the hands of a psychical activity completely analogous to waking thought may be described as ‘well-constructed.’ In the case of other dreams this activity has completely broken down; no attempt even has been made to arrange or interpret the material, and, since after we have woken up we feel ourselves identical with this last part of the dream-work, we make a judgement that the dream was ‘hopelessly confused.’ From the point of view of analysis, however, a dream that resembles a disordered heap of disconnected fragments is just as valuable as one that has been beautifully polished and provided with a surface. In the former case, indeed, we are saved the trouble of demolishing what has been superimposed upon the dream-content.

It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that these dream-façades are nothing other than mistaken and somewhat arbitrary revisions of the dream-content by the conscious agency of our mental life. In the erection of a dream-façade use is not infrequently made of wishful phantasies which are present in the dream-thoughts in a pre-constructed form, and are of the same character as the appropriately named ‘day-dreams’ familiar to us in waking life. The wishful phantasies revealed by analysis in night-dreams often turn out to be repetitions or modified versions of scenes from infancy; thus in some cases the façade of the dream directly reveals the dream’s actual nucleus, distorted by an admixture of other material.

On Dreams

1082

The dream-work exhibits no activities other than the four that have already been mentioned. If we keep to the definition of ‘dream-work’ as the process of transforming the dream-thoughts into the dream-content, it follows that the dream-work is not creative, that it develops no phantasies of its own, that it makes no judgements and draws no conclusions; it has no functions whatever other than condensation and displacement of the material and its modification into pictorial form, to which must be added as a variable factor the final bit of interpretative revision. It is true that we find various things in the dream-content which we should be inclined to regard as a product of some other and higher intellectual function; but in every case analysis shows convincingly that these intellectual operations have already been performed in the dream-thoughts and have only been TAKEN OVER by the dream-content. A conclusion drawn in a dream is nothing other than the repetition of a conclusion in the dream-thoughts; if the conclusion is taken over into the dream unmodified, it will appear impeccable; if the dream-work has displaced it on to some other material, it will appear nonsensical. A calculation in the dream-content signifies nothing more than that there is a calculation in the dream-thoughts; but while the latter is always rational, a dream-calculation may produce the wildest results if its factors are condensed or if its mathematical operations are displaced on to other material. Not even the speeches that occur in the dream-content are original compositions; they turn out to be a hotchpotch of speeches made, heard or read, which have been revived in the dream-thoughts and whose wording is exactly reproduced, while their origin is entirely disregarded and their meaning is violently changed.

It will perhaps be as well to support these last assertions by a few examples.

(I) Here is an innocent-sounding, well-constructed dream dreamt by a woman patient:

She dreamt she was going to the market with her cook, who was carrying the basket. After she had asked for something, the butcher said to her: ‘That’s not obtainable any longer’, and offered her something else, adding ‘This is good too.’ She rejected it and went on to the woman who sells vegetables, who tried to get her to buy a peculiar vegetable that was tied up in bundles but was of a black colour. She said: ‘I don’t recognize that; I won’t take it.’

The remark ‘That’s not obtainable any longer’ originated from the treatment itself . A few days earlier I had explained to the patient in those very words that the earliest memories of childhood were ‘not obtainable any longer as such’, but were replaced in analysis by ‘transferences’ and dreams. So I was the butcher.

The second speech - ‘I don’t recognize that’ - occurred in an entirely different connection. On the previous day she had reproved her cook, who incidentally also appeared in the dream, with the words: ‘Behave yourself properly! I don’t recognize that!’ meaning, no doubt, that she did not understand such behaviour and would not put up with it. As the result of a displacement, it was the more innocent part of this speech which made its way into the content of the dream; but in the dream-thoughts it was only the other part of the speech that played a part. For the dream-work had reduced to complete unintelligibility and extreme innocence an imaginary situation in which I was behaving improperly to the lady in a particular way. But this situation which the patient was expecting in her imagination was itself only a new edition of something she had once actually experienced.

On Dreams

1083

(II) Here is an apparently quite meaningless dream-containing figures. She was going to pay for something. Her daughter took 3 florins and 65 kreuzers from her (the mother’s) purse. The dreamer said to her: ‘What are you about? It only costs 21 kreuzers.’

The dreamer came from abroad and her daughter was at school here. She was in a position to carry on her treatment with me as long as her daughter remained in Vienna. The day before the dream the head-mistress had suggested to her that she should leave her daughter at school for another year. In that case she could also have continued her treatment for a year. The figures in the dream become significant if we remember that ‘time is money.’ One year is equal to 365 days, or, expressed in money, 365 kreuzers or 3 florins 65 kreuzers. The 21 kreuzers corresponded to the 3 weeks which had still to run between the dream-day and the end of the school term and also to the end of the patient’s treatment. It was clearly financial considerations which had induced the lady to refuse the head mistress’s proposal, and which were responsible for the smallness of the sums mentioned in the dream.

(III) A lady who, though she was still young, had been married for a number of years, received news that an acquaintance of hers, Fräulein Elise L., who was almost exactly her contemporary, had become engaged. This was the precipitating cause of the following dream:

She was at the theatre with her husband. One side of the stalls was completely empty. Her husband told her that Elise L. and her fiancé had wanted to go too; but had only been able to get bad seats - three for 1 florin 50 kreuzers - and of course they could not take those. She thought it would not really have done any harm if they had.

What interests us here is the source of the figures in the material of the dream-thoughts and the transformations which they underwent. What was the origin of the 1 florin 50 kreuzers? It came from what was in fact an indifferent event of the previous day. Her sister-in-law had been given a present of 150 florins by her husband and had been in a hurry to get rid of them by buying a piece of jewellery. It is to be noticed that 150 florins is a hundred times as much as 1 florin 50 kreuzers. The only connection with the ‘three’, which was the number of the theatre tickets, was that her newly engaged friend was that number of months - three - her junior. The situation in the dream was a repetition of a small incident which her husband often teased her about. On one occasion she had been in a great hurry to buy tickets for a play in advance, and when she got to the theatre she had found that one side of the stalls was almost completely empty. There had been no need for her to be in such a hurry. Finally, we must not overlook the absurdity in the dream of two people taking three tickets for a play.

Now for the dream-thoughts: ‘It was absurd to marry so early. There was no need for me to be in such a hurry. I see from Elise L.’s example that I should have got a husband in the end. Indeed, I should have got one a hundred times better’ (a treasure) ‘if I had only waited. My money’ (or dowry) ‘could have bought three men just as good.’

On Dreams

1084

VIII

Having been made acquainted with the dream-work by the foregoing discussion, we shall no doubt be inclined to pronounce it a quite peculiar psychical process, the like of which, so far as we are aware, does not exist elsewhere. It is as though we were carrying over on to the dream-work all the astonishment which used formerly to be aroused in us by its product, the dream. In fact, however, the dream-work is only the first to be discovered of a whole series of psychical processes, responsible for of hysterical symptoms, of phobias, obsessions and delusions. Condensation and, above all, displacement are invariable characteristics of these other processes as well. Modification into a pictorial form, on the other hand, remains a peculiarity of the dream-work. If this explanation places dreams in a single series alongside the structures produced by psychical illness, this makes it all the more important for us to discover the essential determining conditions of such processes as those of dream-formation. We shall probably be surprised to hear that neither the state of sleep nor illness is among these indispensable conditions. A whole number of the phenomena of the everyday life of healthy people - such as forgetting, slips of the tongue, bungled actions and a particular class of errors - owe their origin to a psychical mechanism analogous to that of dreams and of the other members of the series.

On Dreams

1085

The heart of the problem lies in displacement, which is by far the most striking of the special achievements of the dream-work. If we enter deeply into the subject, we come to realize that the essential determining condition of displacement is a purely psychological one: something in the nature of a motive. One comes upon its track if one takes into consideration certain experiences which one cannot escape in analysing dreams. In analysing my specimen dream I was obliged to break off my report of the dream-thoughts on p. 1059, because, as I confessed, there were some among them which I should prefer to conceal from strangers and which I could not communicate to other people without doing serious mischief in important directions. I added that nothing would be gained if I were to choose another dream instead of that particular one with a view to reporting its analysis: I should come upon dream-thoughts which required to be kept secret in the case of every dream with an obscure or confused content. If, however, I were to continue the analysis on my own account, without any reference to other people (whom, indeed, an experience so personal as my dream cannot possibly have been intended to reach), I should eventually arrive at thoughts which would surprise me, whose presence in me I was unaware of, which were not only alien but also disagreeable to me, and which I should therefore feel inclined to dispute energetically, although the chain of thoughts running through the analysis insisted upon them remorselessly. There is only one way of accounting for this state of affairs, which is of quite universal occurrence; and that is to suppose that these thoughts really were present in my mind, and in possession of a certain amount of psychical intensity or energy, but that they were in a peculiar psychological situation, as a consequence of which they could not become conscious to me. (I describe this particular condition as one of ‘repression.’) We cannot help concluding, then, that there is a causal connection between the obscurity of the dream-content and the state of repression (in admissibility to consciousness) of certain of the dream-thoughts, and that the dream had to be obscure so as not to betray the proscribed dream-thoughts. Thus we are led to the concept of a ‘dream-distortion’, which is the product of the dream-work and serves the purpose of dissimulation, that is, of disguise.

On Dreams

1086

I will test this on the specimen dream which I chose for analysis, and enquire what the thought was which made its way into that dream in a distorted form, and which I should be inclined to repudiate if it were undistorted. I recall that my free cab-drive reminded me of my recent expensive drive with a member of my family, that the interpretation of the dream was ‘I wish I might for once experience love that cost me nothing’, and that a short time before the dream I had been obliged to spend a considerable sum of money on this same person’s account. Bearing this context in mind, I cannot escape the conclusion that I regret having made that expenditure. Not until I have recognized this impulse does my wish in the dream for the love which would call for no expenditure acquire a meaning. Yet I can honestly say that when I decided to spend this sum of money I did not hesitate for a moment. My regret at having to do so - the contrary current of feeling - did not become conscious to me. Why it did not, is another and a far-reaching question, the answer to which is known to me but belongs in another connection.

If the dream that I analyse is not my own, but someone else’s, the conclusion will be the same, though the grounds for believing it will be different. If the dreamer is a healthy person, there is no other means open to me of obliging him to recognize the repressed ideas that have been discovered than by pointing out the context of the dream-thoughts; and I cannot help it if he refuses to recognize them. If, however, I am dealing with a neurotic patient, with a hysteric for instance, he will find the acceptance of the repressed thought forced upon him, owing to its connection with the symptoms of his illness, and owing to the improvement he experiences when he exchanges those symptoms for the repressed ideas. In the case, for instance, of the woman patient who had the dream I have just quoted about the three theatre tickets which cost 1 florin 50 kreuzers, the analysis led to the inevitable conclusion that she had a low estimate of her husband (cf. her idea that she could have got one ‘a hundred times better’), that she regretted having married him, and that she would have liked to exchange him for another one. It is true that she asserted that she loved her husband, and that her emotional life knew nothing of any such low estimate of him, but all her symptoms led to the same conclusion as the dream. And after her repressed memories had been revived of a particular period during which she had consciously not loved her husband, her symptoms cleared up and her resistance against the interpretation of the dream disappeared.

On Dreams

1087

IX

Now that we have established the concept of repression and have brought dream-distortion into relation with repressed psychical material, we can express in general terms the principal finding to which we have been led by the analysis of dreams. In the case of dreams which are intelligible and have a meaning, we have found that they are undisguised wish-fulfilments; that is, that in their case the dream-situation represents as fulfilled a wish which is known to consciousness, which is left over from daytime life, and which is deservedly of interest. Analysis has taught us something entirely analogous in the case of obscure and confused dreams: once again the dream-situation represents a wish as fulfilled - a wish which invariably arises from the dream-thoughts, but one which is represented in an unrecognizable form and can only be explained when it has been traced back in analysis. The wish in such cases is either itself a repressed one and alien to consciousness, or it is intimately connected with repressed thoughts and is based upon them. Thus the formula for such dreams is as follows: they are disguised fulfilments of repressed wishes. It is interesting in this connection to observe that the popular belief that dreams always foretell the future is confirmed. Actually the future which the dream shows us is not the one which will occur but the one which we should like to occur. The popular mind is behaving here as it usually does: what it wishes, it believes.

Dreams fall into three classes according to their attitude to wish-fulfilment. The first class consists of those which represent an unrepressed wish undisguisedly; these are the dreams of an infantile type which become ever rarer in adults. Secondly there are the dreams which express a repressed wish disguisedly; these no doubt form the overwhelming majority of all our dreams, and require analysis before they can be understood. In the third place there are the dreams which represent a repressed wish, but do so with insufficient or no disguise. These last dreams are invariably accompanied by anxiety, which interrupts them. In their case anxiety takes the place of dream distortion; and in dreams of the second class anxiety is only avoided owing to the dream-work. There is no great difficulty in proving that the ideational content which produces anxiety in us in dreams was once a wish but has since undergone repression.

On Dreams

1088

There are also clear dreams with a distressing content, which, however, is not felt[/experienced] as distressing in the dream itself. For this reason they cannot be counted as anxiety-dreams; but they have always been taken as evidence of the fact that dreams are without meaning and have no psychical value. An analysis of a dream of this kind will show that we are dealing with well-disguised fulfilments of repressed wishes, that is to say with a dream of the second class; it will also show how admirably the process of displacement is adapted for disguising wishes.

A girl had a dream of seeing her sister’s only surviving child lying dead in the same surroundings in which a few years earlier she had in fact seen the dead body of her sister’s first child. She felt no pain over this; but she naturally rejected the idea that this situation represented any wish of hers. Nor was there any need to suppose this. It had been beside the first child’s coffin, however, that, years before, she had seen and spoken to the man she was in love with; if the second child died, she would no doubt meet the man again in her sister’s house. She longed for such a meeting, but fought against the feeling. On the dream-day she had bought a ticket for a lecture which was to be given by this same man, to whom she was still devoted. Her dream was a simple dream of impatience of the kind that often occurs before journeys, visits to the theatre, and similar enjoyments that lie ahead. But in order to disguise this longing from her, the situation was displaced on to an event of a kind most unsuitable for producing a feeling of enjoyment, though it had in fact done so in the past. It is to be observed that the emotional behaviour in the dream was appropriate to the real content which lay in the background and not to what was pushed into the foreground. The dream-situation anticipated the meeting she had so long desired; it offered no basis for any painful feelings.

On Dreams

1089

X

Hitherto philosophers have had no occasion to concern themselves with a psychology of repression. We may therefore be permitted to make a first approach to this hitherto unknown topic by constructing a pictorial image of the course of events in dream-formation. It is true that the schematic picture we have arrived at - not only from the study of dreams - is a fairly complicated one; but we cannot manage with anything simpler. Our hypothesis is that in our mental apparatus there are two thought-constructing agencies, of which the second enjoys the privilege of having free access to consciousness for its products whereas the activity of the first is in itself unconscious and can only reach consciousness by way of the second. On the frontier between the two agencies, where the first passes over to the second, there is a censorship, which only allows what is agreeable to it to pass through and holds back everything else. According to our definition, then, what is rejected by the censorship is in a state of repression. Under certain conditions, of which the state of sleep is one, the relation between the strength of the two agencies is modified in such a way that what is repressed can no longer be held back. In the state of sleep this probably occurs owing to a relaxation of the censorship; when this happens it becomes possible for what has hitherto been repressed to make a path for itself to consciousness. Since, however, the censorship is never completely eliminated but merely reduced, the repressed material must submit to certain alterations which mitigate its offensive features. What becomes conscious in such cases is a compromise between the intentions of one agency and the demands of the other. Repression - relaxation of the censorship - the formation of a compromise, this is the fundamental pattern for the generation not only of dreams but of many other psychopathological structures; and in the latter cases too we may observe that the formation of compromises is accompanied by processes of condensation and displacement and by the employment of superficial associations, which we have become familiar with in the dream-work.

On Dreams

1090

We have no reason to disguise the fact that in the hypothesis which we have set up in order to explain the dream-work a part is played by what might be described as a ‘ daemonic’ element. We have gathered an impression that the formation of obscure dreams occurs as though one person who was dependent upon a second person had to make a remark which was bound to be disagreeable in the ears of this second one; and it is on the basis of this simile that we have arrived at the concepts of dream-distortion and censorship, and have endeavoured to translate our impression into a psychological theory which is no doubt crude but is at least lucid. Whatever it may be with which a further investigation of the subject may enable us to identify our first and second agencies, we may safely expect to find a confirmation of some correlate of our hypothesis that the second agency controls access to consciousness and can bar the first agency from such access.

When the state of sleep is over, the censorship quickly recovers its full strength; and it can now wipe out all that was won from it during the period of its weakness. This must be one part at least of the explanation of the forgetting of dreams, as is shown by an observation which has been confirmed on countless occasions. It not infrequently happens that during the narration of a dream or during its analysis a fragment of the dream-content which had seemed to be forgotten re-emerges. This fragment which has been rescued from oblivion invariably affords us the best and most direct access to the meaning of the dream. And that, in all probability, must have been the only reason for its having been forgotten, that is, for its having been once more suppressed.

On Dreams

1091

XI

When once we have recognized that the content of a dream is the representation of a fulfilled wish and that its obscurity is due to alterations in repressed material made by the censorship, we shall no longer have any difficulty in discovering the function of dreams. It is commonly said that sleep is disturbed by dreams; strangely enough, we are led to a contrary view and must regard dreams as the guardians of sleep.

In the case of children’s dreams there should be no difficulty in accepting this statement. The state of sleep or the psychical modification involved in sleep, whatever that may be, is brought about by a resolve to sleep which is either imposed upon the child or is reached on the basis of sensations of fatigue; and it is only made possible by the withholding of stimuli which might suggest to the psychical apparatus aims other than that of sleeping. The means by which external stimuli can be kept off are familiar to us; but what are the means available for controlling internal mental stimuli which set themselves against falling asleep? Let us observe a mother putting her child to sleep. The child gives vent to an unceasing stream of desires: he wants one more kiss, he wants to go on playing. His mother satisfies some of these desires, but uses her authority to postpone others of them to the next day. It is clear that any wishes or needs that may arise have an inhibiting effect upon falling asleep. We all know the amusing story told by Balduin Groller of the bad little boy who woke up in the middle of the night and shouted across the night nursery: ‘I want the rhino!’ A better behaved child, instead of shouting, would have dreamt that he was playing with the rhino. Since a dream that shows a wish as fulfilled is believed during sleep, it does away with the wish and makes sleep possible. It cannot be disputed that dream-images are believed in this way, for they are clothed in the psychical appearance of perceptions, and children have not yet acquired the later faculty of distinguishing hallucinations or phantasies from reality.

On Dreams

1092

Adults have learnt to make this distinction; they have also grasped the uselessness of wishing, and after lengthy practice know how to postpone their desires until they can find satisfaction by the long and roundabout path of altering the external world. In their case, accordingly, wish-fulfilments along the short psychical path are rare in sleep too; it is even possible, indeed, that they never occur at all, and that anything that may seem to us to be constructed on the pattern of a child’s dream in fact requires a far more complicated solution. On the other hand, in the case of adults - and this no doubt applies without exception to everyone in full possession of his senses - a differentiation has occurred in the psychical material, which was not present in children. A psychical agency has come into being, which, taught by experience of life, exercises a dominating and inhibiting influence upon mental impulses and maintains that influence with jealous severity, and which, owing to its relation to consciousness and to voluntary movement, is armed with the strongest instruments of psychical power. A portion of the impulses of childhood has been suppressed by this agency as being useless to life, and any thought-material derived from those impulses is in a state of repression.

Now while this agency, in which we recognize our normal ego, is concentrated on the wish to sleep, it appears to be compelled by the psycho-physiological conditions of sleep to relax the energy with which it is accustomed to hold down the repressed material during the day. In itself, no doubt, this relaxation does no harm; however much the suppressed impulses of the childish mind may prance around, their access to consciousness is still difficult and their access to movement is barred as the result of this same state of sleep. The danger of sleep being disturbed by them must, however, be guarded against. We must in any case suppose that even during deep sleep a certain amount of free attention is on duty as a guard against sensory stimuli, and that this guard may sometimes consider waking more advisable than a continuation of sleep. Otherwise there would be no explanation of how it is that we can be woken up at any moment by sensory stimuli of some particular quality. As the physiologist Burdach insisted long ago, a mother, for instance, will be roused by the whimpering of her baby, or a miller if his mill comes to a stop, or most people if they are called softly by their own name. Now the attention which is thus on guard is also directed towards internal wishful stimuli arising from the repressed material, and combines with them to form the dream which, as a compromise, simultaneously satisfies both of the two agencies. The dream provides a kind of psychical consummation for the wish that has been suppressed (or formed with the help of repressed material) by representing it as fulfilled; but it also satisfies the other agency by allowing sleep to continue. In this respect our ego is ready to behave like a child; it gives credence to the dream images, as though what it wanted to say was: ‘Yes, yes! you’re quite right, but let me go on sleeping!’ The low estimate which we form of dreams when we are awake, and which we relate to their confused and apparently illogical character, is probably nothing other than the judgement passed by our sleeping ego upon the repressed impulses, a judgement based, with better right, upon the motor impotence of these disturbers of sleep. We are sometimes aware in our sleep of this contemptuous judgement. If the content of a dream goes too far in overstepping the censorship, we think: ‘After all, it’s only a dream!’ - and go on sleeping.

On Dreams

1093

This view is not traversed by the fact that there are marginal cases in which the dream - as happens with anxiety-dreams - can no longer perform its function of preventing an interruption of sleep, but assumes instead the other function of promptly bringing sleep to an end. In doing so it is merely behaving like a conscientious night-watchman, who first carries out his duty by suppressing disturbances so that the townsmen may not be woken up, but afterwards continues to do his duty by himself waking the townsmen up, if the causes of the disturbance seem to him serious and of a kind that he cannot cope with alone.

The function of the dream as a guardian of sleep becomes particularly evident when an external stimulus impinges upon the senses of a sleeper. It is generally recognized that sensory stimuli arising during sleep influence the content of dreams; this can be proved experimentally and is among the few certain (but, incidentally, greatly overvalued) findings of medical investigation into dreams. But this finding involves a puzzle which has hitherto proved insoluble. For the sensory stimulus which the experimenter causes to impinge upon the sleeper is not correctly recognized in the dream; it is subjected to one of an indefinite number of possible interpretations, the choice being apparently left to an arbitrary psychical determination. But there is, of course, no such thing as arbitrary determination in the mind. There are several ways in which a sleeper may react to an external sensory stimulus. He may wake up or he may succeed in continuing his sleep in spite of it. In the latter case he may make use of a dream in order to get rid of the external stimulus, and here again there is more than one method open to him. For instance, he may get rid of the stimulus by dreaming that he is in a situation which is absolutely incompatible with the stimulus. Such was the line taken by a sleeper who was subject to disturbance by a painful abscess on the perineum. He dreamt that he was riding on a horse, making use of the poultice that was intended to mitigate his pain as a saddle, and in this way he avoided being disturbed. Or, as happens more frequently, the external stimulus is given an interpretation which brings it into the context of a repressed wish which is at the moment awaiting fulfilment; in this way the external stimulus is robbed of its reality and is treated as though it were a portion of the psychical material. Thus someone dreamt that he had written a comedy with a particular plot; it was produced in a theatre, the first act was over, and there were thunders of applause; the clapping was terrific. . . . The dreamer must have succeeded in prolonging his sleep till after the interference had ceased; for when he woke up he no longer heard the noise, but rightly concluded that someone must have been beating a carpet or mattress. Every dream which occurs immediately before the sleeper is woken by a loud noise has made an attempt at explaining away the arousing stimulus by providing another explanation of it and has thus sought to prolong sleep, even if only for a moment.

On Dreams

1094

XII

No one who accepts the view that the censorship is the chief reason for dream-distortion will be surprised to learn from the results of dream-interpretation that most of the dreams of adults are traced back by analysis to erotic wishes. This assertion is not aimed at dreams with an undisguised sexual content, which are no doubt familiar to all dreamers from their own experience and are as a rule the only ones to be described as ‘sexual dreams.’ Even dreams of this latter kind offer enough surprises in their choice of the people whom they make into sexual objects, in their disregard of all the limitations which the dreamer imposes in his waking life upon his sexual desires, and by their many strange details, hinting at what are commonly known as ‘perversions.’ A great many other dreams, however, which show no sign of being erotic in their manifest content, are revealed by the work of interpretation in analysis as sexual wish-fulfilments; and, on the other hand, analysis proves that a great many of the thoughts left over from the activity of waking life as ‘residues of the previous day’ only find their way to representation in dreams through the assistance of repressed erotic wishes.

There is no theoretical necessity why this should be so; but to explain the fact it may be pointed out that no other group of instincts has been submitted to such far-reaching suppression by the demands of cultural education, while at the same time the sexual instincts are also the ones which, in most people, find it easiest to escape from the control of the highest mental agencies. Since we have become acquainted with infantile sexuality: which is often so unobtrusive in its manifestations and is always overlooked and misunderstood, we are justified in saying that almost every civilized man retains the infantile forms of sexual life in some respect or other. We can thus understand how it is that repressed infantile sexual wishes provide the most frequent and strongest motive-forces for the construction of dreams.¹

¹ See my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d).

On Dreams

1095

There is only one method by which a dream which expresses erotic wishes can succeed in appearing innocently non-sexual in its manifest content. The material of the sexual ideas must not be represented as such, but must be replaced in the content of the dream by hints, allusions and similar forms of indirect representation. But, unlike other forms of indirect representation, that which is employed in dreams must not be immediately intelligible. The modes of representation which fulfil these conditions are usually described as ‘symbols’ of the things which they represent. Particular interest has been directed to them since it has been noticed that dreamers speaking the same language make use of the same symbols, and that in some cases, indeed, the use of the same symbols extends beyond the use of the same language. Since dreamers themselves are unaware of the meaning of the symbols they use, it is difficult at first sight to discover the source of the connection between the symbols and what they replace and represent. The fact itself, however, is beyond doubt, and it is important for the technique of dream-interpretation. For, with the help of a knowledge of dream-symbolism, it is possible to understand the meaning of separate elements of the content of a dream or separate pieces of a dream or in some cases even whole dreams, without having to ask the dreamer for his associations. Here we are approaching the popular ideal of translating dreams and on the other hand are returning to the technique of interpretation used by the ancients, to whom dream-interpretation was identical with interpretation by means of symbols.

Although the study of dream-symbols is far from being complete, we are in a position to lay down with certainty a number of general statements and a quantity of special information on the subject. There are some symbols which bear a single meaning almost universally: thus the Emperor and Empress (or the King and Queen) stand for the parents, rooms represent women¹ and their entrances and exits the openings of the body. The majority of dream-symbols serve to represent persons, parts of the body and activities invested with erotic interest; in particular, the genitals are represented by a number of often very surprising symbols, and the greatest variety of objects are employed to denote them symbolically. Sharp weapons, long and stiff objects, such as tree-trunks and sticks, stand for the male genital; while cupboards, boxes, carriages or ovens may represent the uterus. In such cases as these the tertium comparationis, the common element in these substitutions, is immediately intelligible; but there are other symbols in which it is not so easy to grasp the connection. Symbols such as a staircase or going upstairs to represent sexual intercourse, a tie or cravat for the male organ, or wood for the female one, provoke our unbelief until we can arrive at an understanding of the symbolic relation underlying them by some other means. Moreover a whole number of dream-symbols are bisexual and can relate to the male or female genitals according to the context.

¹ Cf. ‘Frauenzimmer’[literally ‘women’s apartment’, commonly used in German as a slightly derogatory word for ‘woman.’]

On Dreams

1096

Some symbols are universally disseminated and can be met with in all dreamers belonging to a single linguistic or cultural group; there are others which occur only within the most restricted and individual limits, symbols constructed by an individual out of his own ideational material. Of the former class we can distinguish some whose claim to represent sexual ideas is immediately justified by linguistic usage (such, for instance, as those derived from agriculture, e.g. ‘fertilization’ or ‘seed’) and others whose relation to sexual ideas appears to reach back into the very earliest ages and to the most obscure depths of our conceptual functioning. The power of constructing symbols has not been exhausted in our own days in the case of either of the two sorts of symbols which I have distinguished at the beginning of this paragraph. Newly discovered objects (such as airships) are, as we may observe, at once adopted as universally available sexual symbols.

It would, incidentally, be a mistake to expect that if we had a still profounder knowledge of dream-symbolism (of the ‘language of dreams’) we could do without asking the dreamer for his associations to the dream and go back entirely to the technique of dream-interpretation of antiquity. Quite apart from individual symbols and oscillations in the use of universal ones, one can never tell whether any particular element in the content of a dream is to be interpreted symbolically or in its proper sense, and one can be certain that the whole content of a dream is not to be interpreted symbolically. A knowledge of dream-symbolism will never do more than enable us to translate certain constituents of the dream-content, and will not relieve us of the necessity for applying the technical rules which I gave earlier. It will, however, afford the most valuable assistance to interpretation precisely at points at which the dreamer’s associations are insufficient or fail altogether.

On Dreams

1097

Dream-symbolism is also indispensable to an understanding of what are known as ‘typical’ dreams, which are common to everyone, and of ‘recurrent’ dreams in individuals.

If the account I have given in this short discussion of the symbolic mode of expression in dreams appears incomplete, I can justify my neglect by drawing attention to one of the most important pieces of knowledge that we possess on this subject. Dream-symbolism extends far beyond dreams: it is not peculiar to dreams, but exercises a similar dominating influence on representation in fairy-tales, myths and legends, in jokes and in folk-lore. It enables us to trace the intimate connections between dreams and these latter productions. We must not suppose that dream-symbolism is a creation of the dream-work; it is in all probability a characteristic of the unconscious thinking which provides the dream-work with the material for condensation, displacement and dramatization.¹

¹ Further information on dream-symbolism may be found in the works of early writers on dream-interpretation, e.g. Artemidorus of Daldis and Scherner (1861), and also in my own Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), in the mythological studies of the psycho-analytic school, as well as in some of W. Stekel’s writings (e.g. 1911).

On Dreams

1098

XIII

I lay no claim to having thrown light in these pages upon all the problems of dreams, nor to having dealt in a convincing way with those that I have discussed. Anyone who is interested in the whole extent of the literature of dreams may be referred to a work by Sante de Sanctis (I sogni, 1899); and anyone who wishes to hear more detailed arguments in favour of the view of dreams which I myself have put forward should turn to my volume The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900. It only remains for me now to indicate the direction in which my exposition of the subject of the dream-work calls for pursuit.

I have laid it down as the task of dream-interpretation to replace the dream by the latent dream-thoughts, that is, to unravel what the dream-work has woven. In so doing I have raised a number of new psychological problems dealing with the mechanism of this dream-work itself, as well as with the nature and conditions of what is described as repression; on the other hand I have asserted the existence of the dream-thoughts - a copious store of psychical structures of the highest order, which is characterized by all the signs of normal intellectual functioning, but is nevertheless withdrawn from consciousness till it emerges in distorted form in the dream-content. I cannot but assume that thoughts of this kind are present in everyone, since almost everyone, including the most normal people, is capable of dreaming. The unconscious material of the dream-thoughts and its relation to consciousness and to repression raise further questions of significance to psychology, the answers to which must no doubt be postponed until analysis has clarified the origin of other psychopathological structures, such as hysterical symptoms and obsessional ideas.

1099

THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE

Forgetting, Slips of the Tongue, Bungled Actions, Superstitions and Errors

(1901)

Nun ist die Luft von solchem Spuk so voll,

Dass niemand weiss, wie er ihn meiden soll.

Faust, Part II, Act V, Scene 5

Now fills the air so many a haunting shape,

That no one knows how best he may escape.

(Bayard Taylor’s translation)

1100

Intentionally left blank

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1101

CHAPTER I

THE FORGETTING OF PROPER NAMES

In the 1898 volume of the Monatschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie I published under the title of ‘The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness’ a short paper the substance of which I shall recapitulate here and take as the starting-point for more extensive discussions. In it I applied psychological analysis to the frequent circumstance of proper names being temporarily forgotten, by exploring a highly suggestive example drawn from my self-observation; and I reached the conclusion that this particular instance (admittedly commonplace and without much practical significance), in which a psychical function - the memory - refuses to operate, admits of an explanation much more far-reaching than that which the phenomenon is ordinarily made to yield.

If a psychologist were asked to explain why it is that on so many occasions a proper name which we think we know perfectly well fails to enter our heads, he would, unless I am much mistaken, be satisfied with answering that proper names succumb more easily to the process of being forgotten than other kinds of memory-content. He would bring forward the plausible reasons why proper names should thus be singled out for special treatment, but would not suspect that any other conditions played their part in such occurrences.

My close preoccupation with the phenomenon of names being temporarily forgotten arose out of my observation of certain characteristics which could be recognized sufficiently clearly in individual cases, though not, it is true, in all of them. These are cases in which a name is in fact not only forgotten, but wrongly remembered. In the course of our efforts to recover the name that has dropped out, other ones - substitute names - enter our consciousness; we recognize them at once, indeed, as incorrect, but they keep on returning and force themselves on us with great persistence. The process that should lead to the reproduction of the missing name has been so to speak displaced and has therefore led to an incorrect substitute. My hypothesis is that this displacement is not left to arbitrary psychical choice but follows paths which can be predicted and which conform to laws. In other words, I suspect that the name or names which are substituted are connected in a discoverable way with the missing name: and I hope, if I am successful in demonstrating this connection, to proceed to throw light on the circumstances in which names are forgotten.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1102

The name that I tried without success to recall in the example I chose for analysis in 1898 was that of the artist who painted the magnificent frescoes of the ‘Four Last Things’ in Orvieto cathedral. Instead of the name I was looking for - Signorelli - the names of two other painters - Botticelli and Boltraffio - thrust themselves on me, though they were immediately and decisively rejected by my judgement as incorrect. When I learnt the correct name from someone else, I recognized it at once and without hesitation. The investigation into the influences and the associative paths by which the reproducing of the name had been displaced in this way from Signorelli to Botticelli and Boltraffio led to the following results

(a)  The reason why the name Signorelli was lost is not to be found in anything special about the name itself or in any psychological characteristic of the context into which it was introduced. The name I had forgotten was just as familiar to me as one of the substitute names - Botticelli - and much more familiar than the other substitute name - Boltraffio - about whose owner I could scarcely produce any information other than that he belonged to the Milanese school. Moreover the context in which the name was forgotten seemed to me harmless and did not enlighten me further. I was driving in the company of a stranger from Ragusa in Dalmatia to a place in Herzegovina: our conversation turned to the subject of travel in Italy, and I asked my companion whether he had ever been to Orvieto and looked at the famous frescoes there, painted by . . .

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1103

(b) Light was only thrown on the forgetting of the name when I recalled the topic we had been discussing directly before, and it was revealed as a case in which a topic that has just been raised is disturbed by the preceding topic. Shortly before I put the question to my travelling companion whether he had ever been to Orvieto, we had been talking about the customs of the Turks living in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I had told him what I had heard from a colleague practising among those people - that they are accustomed to show great confidence in their doctor and great resignation to fate. If one has to inform them that nothing can be done for a sick person, their reply is: ‘Herr: what is there to be said? If he could be saved, I know you would have saved him.’ In these sentences we for the first time meet with the words and names Bosnia, Herzegovina and Herr, which can be inserted into an associative series between Signorelli and Botticelli-Boltraffio.

(c) I assume that the series of thoughts about the customs of the Turks in Bosnia, etc., acquired the capacity to disturb the next succeeding thought from the fact that I had withdrawn my attention from that series before it was brought to an end. I recall in fact wanting to tell a second anecdote which lay close to the first in my memory. These Turks place a higher value on sexual enjoyment than on anything else, and in the event of sexual disorders they are plunged in a despair which contrasts strangely with their resignation towards the threat of death. One of my colleague’s patients once said to him: ‘Herr, you must know that if that comes to an end then life is of no value.’ I suppressed my account of this characteristic trait, since I did not want to allude to the topic in a conversation with a stranger. But I did more: I also diverted my attention from thoughts which might have arisen in my mind from the topic of ‘death and sexuality.’ On this occasion I was still under the influence of a piece of news which had reached me a few weeks before while making a brief stay at Trafoi. A patient over whom I had taken a great deal of trouble had put an end to his life on account of an incurable sexual disorder. I know for certain that this melancholy event and everything related to it was not recalled to my conscious memory during my journey to Herzegovina. But the similarity between ‘Trafoi’ and ‘Boltraffio’ forces me to assume that this reminiscence, in spite of my attention being deliberately diverted from it, was brought into operation in me at the time.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1104

(d) It is no longer possible for me to take the forgetting of the name Signorelli as a chance event. I am forced to recognize the influence of a motive in the process. It was a motive which caused me to interrupt myself while recounting what was in my mind (concerning the customs of the Turks, etc.), and it was a motive which further influenced me so that I debarred the thoughts connected with them, the thoughts which had led to the news at Trafoi, from becoming conscious in my mind. I wanted, therefore, to forget something; I had repressed something. What I wanted to forget was not, it is true, the name of the artist at Orvieto but something else - something, however, which contrived to place itself in an associative connection with his name, so that my act of will missed its target and I forgot the one thing against my will, while I wanted to forget the other thing intentionally. The disinclination to remember was aimed against one content;  the inability to remember emerged in another. It would obviously be a simpler case if disinclination and inability to remember related to the same content . Moreover the substitute names no longer strike me as so entirely unjustified as they did before the matter was elucidated: by a sort of compromise they remind me just as much of what I wanted to forget as of what I wanted to remember; and they show me that my intention to forget something was neither a complete success nor a complete failure.

(e) The way in which the missing name and the repressed topic (the topic of death and sexuality, etc., in which the names of Bosnia, Herzegovina and Trafoi appeared)  became linked is very striking. The schematic diagram which I have inserted at this point, and which is repeated from the 1898 paper, aims at giving a clear picture of this.

Fig. 1.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1105

The name Signorelli has undergone a division into two pieces. One of the pairs of syllables (elli)  recurs without alteration in one of the substitute names: while the other, by means of the translation of Signor into Herr, has acquired a numerous and miscellaneous set of relations to the names contained in the repressed topic, but for this reason is not available for reproduction. The substitute for it has been arrived at in a way that suggests that a displacement along the connected names of ‘Herzegovina and Bosnia’ had taken place, without consideration for the sense or for the acoustic demarcation of the syllables. Thus the names have been treated in this process like the pictograms in a sentence which has had to be converted into a picture-puzzle (or rebus). Of the whole course of events that have in ways like these produced the substitute names instead of the name Signorelli no information has been given to consciousness. At first sight it seems impossible to discover any relation between the topic in which the name Signorelli occurred and the repressed topic which preceded it in time, apart from this recurrence of the same syllables (or rather sequence of letters).

Perhaps it is not superfluous to remark that the conditions which psychologists assume to be necessary for reproducing and for forgetting, and which they look for in certain relations and dispositions, are not inconsistent with the above explanation. All we have done is, in certain cases, to add a motive to the factors that have been recognized all along as being able to bring about the forgetting of a name; and, in addition, we have elucidated the mechanism of false recollection (paramnesia). These dispositions are indispensable to our case as well, in order to make it possible for the repressed element to get hold of the missing name by association and draw it with itself into repression. In the case of another name with more favourable conditions for reproduction this perhaps would not happen. It is probable indeed that a suppressed element always strives to assert itself elsewhere, but is successful in this only when suitable conditions meet it half way. At other times the suppression succeeds without any functional disturbance, or, as we can justly say, without any symptom.

The conditions necessary for forgetting a name, when forgetting it is accompanied by paramnesia, may then be summarized as follows: (1) a certain disposition for forgetting the name, (2) a process of suppression carried out shortly before, (3) the possibility of establishing an external association between the name and the element previously suppressed. The difficulty of fulfilling the last condition need probably not be rated very high, since, considering the low standards expected of an association of this kind, one could be established in the great majority of cases. There is, however, the profounder question whether an external association like this can really be a sufficient condition for the repressed element’s disturbing the reproduction of the lost name - whether some more intimate connection between the two topics is required. On a superficial consideration one would be inclined to reject the latter demand, and accept as sufficient a temporal contiguity between the two, even if the contents are completely different. On close enquiry, however, one finds more and more frequently that the two elements which are joined by an external association (the repressed element and the new one) possess in addition some connection of content; and such a connection is in fact demonstrable in the Signorelli example.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1106

The value of the insight that we have gained in analysing the Signorelli example naturally depends on whether we want to pronounce that instance as typical or as an isolated occurrence. I must affirm, that the forgetting of names, accompanied by paramnesia, takes place with uncommon frequency in the way in which we have explained it in the Signorelli case. In almost every instance in which I could observe this phenomenon in myself, I have also been able to explain it in the way described above, i.e. as motivated by repression. I must also draw attention to another consideration which supports the typical nature of our analysis. I think there is no justification for making a theoretical separation between those cases in which the forgetting of names is accompanied by paramnesia and the sort where incorrect substitute names have not presented themselves. These substitute names occur spontaneously in a number of cases; in others, where they have not emerged spontaneously, it is possible to force them to emerge by an effort of attention; and they then show the same relation to the repressed element and the missing name as they would if they had appeared spontaneously. Two factors seem to be decisive in bringing the substitute names to consciousness: first, the effort of attention, and secondly, an inner condition that attaches to the psychical material. We might look for the latter in the greater or lesser facility with which the necessary external association between the two elements establishes itself. A good portion of the cases of name-forgetting without paramnesia can thus be added to the cases in which substitute names are formed - to which the mechanism of the Signorelli example applies. I shall certainly not venture to affirm that all cases of name-forgetting are to be classed in the same group. There is no question that instances of it exist which are much simpler. We shall, I think, have stated the facts of the case with sufficient caution if we affirm: By the side of simple cases where proper names are forgotten there is a type which is motivated by repression.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1107

CHAPTER II

THE FORGETTING OF FOREIGN WORDS

The current vocabulary of our own language, when it is confined to the range of normal usage, seems to be protected against being forgotten. With the vocabulary of a foreign language it is notoriously otherwise. The disposition to forget it extends to all parts of speech, and an early stage in functional disturbance is revealed by the fluctuations in the control we have over our stock of foreign words - according to the general condition of our health and to the degree of our tiredness. In a number of cases this kind of forgetting exhibits the same mechanism disclosed to us by the Signorelli example. In proof of this I shall give only a single analysis, one which is distinguished, however, by some useful characteristics: it concerns the forgetting of a non-substantival word in a Latin quotation. Perhaps I may be allowed to present a full and clear account of this small incident.

Last summer - it was once again on a holiday trip - I renewed my acquaintance with a certain young man of academic background. I soon found that he was familiar with some of my psychological publications. We had fallen into conversation - how I have now forgotten - about the social status of the race to which we both belonged; and ambitious feelings prompted him to give vent to a regret that his generation was doomed (as he expressed it) to atrophy, and could not develop its talents or satisfy its needs. He ended a speech of impassioned fervour with the well-known line of Virgil’s in which the unhappy Dido commits to posterity her vengeance on Aeneas: ‘Exoriare . . .’ Or rather, he wanted to end it in this way, for he could not get hold of the quotation and tried to conceal an obvious gap in what he remembered by changing the order of the words: ‘Exoriar(e) ex nostris ossibus ultor.’ At last he said irritably: ‘Please don’t look so scornful: you seem as if you were gloating over my embarrassment. Why not help me? There’s something missing in the line; how does the whole thing really go?’

‘I’II help you with pleasure,’ I replied, and gave the quotation in its correct form: ‘Exoriar(e) ALIQUIS nostris ex ossibus ultor.’

‘How stupid to forget a word like that! By the way, you claim that one never forgets a thing without some reason. I should be very curious to learn how I came to forget the indefinite pronoun "aliquis" in this case.’

I took up this challenge most readily, for I was hoping for a contribution to my collection. So I said: ‘That should not take us long. I must only ask you to tell me, candidly and uncritically, whatever comes into your mind if you direct your attention to the forgotten word without any definite aim.’¹

‘Good. There springs to mind, then, the ridiculous notion of dividing up the word like this: a and liquis.’

‘What does that mean?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘And what occurs to you next?’ ‘What comes next is Reliquien [relics], liquefying, fluidity, fluid. Have you discovered anything so far?’

‘No. Not by any means yet. But go on.’

‘I am thinking,’ he went on with a scornful laugh, ‘of Simon of Trent, whose relics I saw two years ago in a church at Trent. I am thinking of the accusation of ritual blood-sacrifice which is being brought against the Jews again just now, and of Kleinpaul’s book in which he regards all these supposed victims as incarnations, one might say new editions, of the Saviour.’

¹ This is the general method of introducing concealed ideational elements to consciousness. Cf. my Interpretation of Dreams, p. 604.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1108

‘The notion is not entirely unrelated to the subject we were discussing before the Latin word slipped your memory.’

‘True. My next thoughts are about an article that I read lately in an Italian newspaper. Its title, I think, was "What St. Augustine says about Women." What do you make of that?’

‘I am waiting.’

‘And now comes something that is quite clearly unconnected with our subject.’

‘Please refrain from any criticism and---'

‘Yes, I understand. I am thinking of a fine old gentleman I met on my travels last week. He was a real original, with all the appearance of a huge bird of prey. His name was Benedict, if it’s of interest to you.’

‘Anyhow, here are a row of saints and Fathers of the Church: St. Simon, St. Augustine, St. Benedict. There was, I think, a Church Father called Origen. Moreover, three of these names are also first names, like Paul in Kleinpaul.’

‘Now it’s St. Januarius and the miracle of his blood that comes into mind - my thoughts seem to me to be running on mechanically.’

‘Just a moment: St. Januarius and St. Augustine both have to do with the calendar. But won’t you remind me about the miracle of his blood?’

‘Surely you must have heard of that? They keep the blood of St. Januarius in a phial inside a church at Naples, and on a particular holy day it miraculously liquefies. The people attach great importance to this miracle and get very excited if it’s delayed, as happened once at a time when the French were occupying the town. So the general in command - or have I got it wrong? was it Garibaldi? - took the reverend gentleman aside and gave him to understand, with an unmistakable gesture towards the soldiers posted outside, that he hoped the miracle would take place very soon. And in fact it did take place . . .

‘Well, go on. Why do you pause?’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1109

‘Well, something has come into my mind . . . but it’s too intimate to pass on. . . . Besides, I don’t see any connection, or any necessity for saying it.’

‘You can leave the connection to me. Of course I can’t force you to talk about something that you find distasteful; but then you mustn’t insist on learning from me how you came to forget your aliquis.’

‘Really? Is that what you think? Well then, I’ve suddenly, thought of a lady from whom I might easily hear a piece of news that would be very awkward for both of us.’

‘That her periods have stopped?’

‘How could you guess that?’

‘That’s not difficult any longer; you’ve prepared the way sufficiently. Think of the calendar saints, the blood that starts to flow on a particular day, the disturbance when the event fails to take place, the open threats that the miracle must be vouchsafed, or else . . . In fact you’ve made use of the miracle of St. Januarius to manufacture a brilliant allusion to women’s periods.’

‘Without being aware of it. And you really mean to say that it was this anxious expectation that made me unable to produce an unimportant word like aliquis?’

‘It seems to me undeniable. You need only recall the division you made into a-liquis, and your associations: relics, liquefying, fluid. St. Simon was sacrificed as a child - shall I go on and show how he comes in? You were led on to him by the subject of relics.

‘No, I’d much rather you didn’t. I hope you don’t take these thoughts of mine too seriously, if indeed I really had them. In return I will confess to you that the lady is Italian and that I went to Naples with her. But mayn’t all this just be a matter of chance?’

‘I must leave it to your own judgement to decide whether you can explain all these connections by the assumption that they are matters of chance. I can however tell you that every case like this that you care to analyse will lead you to "matters of chance" that are just as striking.’¹

¹ This short analysis has received much attention in the literature of the subject and has provoked lively discussion. Basing himself directly on it, Bleuler (1919) has attempted to determine mathematically the credibility of psycho-analytic interpretations, and has come to the conclusion that it has a higher probability value than thousands of medical ‘truths’ which have gone unchallenged, and that it owes its exceptional position only to the fact that we are not yet accustomed to take psychological probabilities into consideration in science.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1110

I have several reasons for valuing this brief analysis; and my thanks are due to my former travelling-companion who presented me with it. In the first place, this is because I was in this instance allowed to draw on a source that is ordinarily denied to me. For the examples collected here of disturbances of a psychical function in daily life I have to fall back mainly on self-observation. I am anxious to steer clear of the much richer material provided by my neurotic patients, since it might otherwise be objected that the phenomena in question are merely consequences and manifestations of neurosis. My purpose is therefore particularly well served when a person other than myself, not suffering from nervous illness, offers himself as the object of such an investigation. This analysis is significant in a further respect: it throws light on the case of a word being forgotten without a substitute for it appearing in the memory. It thus confirms my earlier assertion that the appearance or non-appearance in the memory of incorrect substitutes cannot be made the basis for any radical distinction.¹

¹ Closer scrutiny somewhat diminishes the contrast between the analyses of Signorelli and of aliquis in regard to substitutive memories. In the latter example too it appears that the forgetting was accompanied by a substitutive formation. When subsequently I asked my companion whether in the course of his efforts to recall the missing word no substitute whatever came into his mind, he reported that at first he had felt a temptation to introduce an ab into the line (perhaps the detached portion of a-liquis) - nostris ab ossibus; and he went on to say that the exoriare had thrust itself on him with peculiar clarity and obstinacy, ‘evidently,’ he added with his characteristic scepticism, ‘because it was the first word in the line.’ When I asked him to attend all the same to the associations starting from exoriare, he produced exorcism. I can therefore very well believe that the intensification of exoriare when it was reproduced actually had the value of a substitutive formation of this sort. This substitute would have been arrived at from the names of the saints viâ the association ‘exorcism.’ These however are refinements to which one need attach no importance. (On the other hand Wilson, 1922, stresses the fact that the intensification of exoriare is of great significance to the understanding of the case, since exorcism would be the best symbolic substitute for repressed thoughts about getting rid of the unwanted child by abortion. I gratefully accept this correction, which does not weaken the validity, of the analysis.) It seems possible, however, that the appearance of any kind of substitute memory is a constant sign - even though perhaps only a characteristic and revealing sign - of tendentious forgetfulness which is motivated by repression. It would seem that substitutive formation occurs even in cases not marked by the appearance of incorrect names as substitutes, and that in these it lies in the intensification of an element that is closely related to the forgotten name. For example, in the Signorelli case, so long as the painter’s name remained inaccessible, the visual memory that I had of the series of frescoes and of the self-portrait which is introduced into the corner of one of the pictures was ultra-clear - at any rate much more intense than visual memory-traces normally appear to me. In another case, also described in my 1898 paper, which concerned a visit which I was very reluctant to pay to an address in a strange town, I had forgotten the name of the street beyond all hope of recovery, but my memory of the house number, as if in derision, was ultra-clear, whereas normally I have the greatest difficulty in remembering numbers.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1111

The chief importance however of the aliquis example lies in another of the ways in which it differs from the Signorelli specimen. In the latter, the reproducing of a name was disturbed by the after-effect of a train of thought begun just before and then broken off, whose content, however, had no clear connection with the new topic containing the name of Signorelli. Contiguity in time furnished the only relation between the repressed topic and the topic of the forgotten name; but this was enough to enable the two topics to find a connection in an external association.¹ Nothing on the other hand can be seen in the aliquis example of an independent repressed topic of this sort, which had engaged conscious thinking directly before and then left its echoes in a disturbance. The disturbance in reproduction occurred in this instance from the very nature of the topic hit upon in the quotation, since opposition unconsciously arose to the wishful idea expressed in it. The circumstances must be construed as follows. The speaker had been deploring the fact that the present generation of his people was deprived of its full rights; a new generation, he prophesied like Dido, would inflict vengeance on the oppressors. He had in this way expressed his wish for descendants. At this moment a contrary thought intruded. ‘Have you really so keen a wish for descendants? That is not so. How embarrassed you would be if you were to get news just now that you were to expect descendants from the quarter you know of. No: no descendants - however much we need them for vengeance.’  This contradiction then asserts itself by exactly the same means as in the Signorelli example - by setting up an external association between one of its ideational elements and an element in the wish that has been repudiated; this time, indeed, it does so in a most arbitrary fashion by making use of a roundabout associative path which has every appearance of artificiality. A second essential in which the present case agrees with the Signorelli instance is that the contradiction has its roots in repressed sources and derives from thoughts that would lead to a diversion of attention.

So much for the dissimilarity and the inner affinity between these two typical specimens of the forgetting of words. We have got to know a second mechanism of forgetting - the disturbance of a thought by an internal contradiction which arises from the repressed. Of the two processes this is, I think, the easier to understand; and we shall repeatedly come across it again in the course of this discussion.

¹ I am not entirely convinced of the absence of any internal connection between the two groups of thoughts in the Signorelli case. After all, if the repressed thoughts on the topic of death and sexual life are carefully followed up, one will be brought face to face with an idea that is by no means remote from the topic of the frescoes at Orvieto.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1112

CHAPTER III

THE FORGETTING OF NAMES AND SETS OF WORDS

Observations such as those mentioned above, of what happens when a portion of a set of words in a foreign tongue is forgotten, may make us curious to know whether the forgetting of sets of words in our own language demands an essentially different explanation. We are not usually surprised, it is true, if a formula learnt by heart, or a poem, can be reproduced only inaccurately some time later, with alterations and omissions. Since, however, this forgetting does not have a uniform effect on what has been learnt as a whole but seems on the contrary to break off isolated portions of it, it may be worth the trouble to submit to analytic investigation a few instances of such faulty reproduction.

A younger colleague of mine told me in conversation that he thought it likely that the forgetting of poetry in one’s own language could very well have motives similar to the forgetting of single elements from a set of words in a foreign tongue. At the same time he offered to be the subject of an experiment. I asked him on what poem he would like to make the test, and he chose ‘Die Braut von Korinth,’ a poem of which he was very fond and of which he thought he knew at least some stanzas by heart. At the beginning of his reproduction he was overcome by a rather remarkable uncertainty. ‘Does it run "Travelling from Corinth to Athens",’ he asked, ‘or "Travelling to Corinth from Athens"?’ I also had a moment’s hesitation, until I laughingly observed that the title of the poem ‘The Bride of Corinth’ left no doubt which way the young man was travelling. The reproduction of the first stanza then proceeded smoothly or at any rate without any striking falsifications. My colleague seemed to search for a while for the first line of the second stanza; he soon continued, and recited as follows:

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1113

Aber wird er auch willkommen scheinen,

Jetzt jeder Tag was Neues bringt?

Denn er ist noch Heide mit den Seinen

Und sie sind Christen und - getauft.¹

Before he reached this point I had already pricked up my ears in surprise; and after the end of the last line we were both in agreement that some distortion had occurred here. But as we did not succeed in correcting it, we hurried to the bookcase to get hold of Goethe’s poems, and found to our surprise that the second line of the stanza had a completely different wording, which had, as it were, been expelled from my colleague’s memory and replaced by something that did not seem to belong. The correct version runs:

Aber wird er auch willkommen scheinen,

Wenn er teuer nicht die Gunst erkauft?²

‘Getauft’ [‘baptized,’ two lines below] rhymes with ‘erkauft’, and it struck me as singular that the connected group of ‘heathen’, ‘Christian’ and ‘baptized’ should have given him so little help in restoring the text.

‘Can you explain,’ I asked my colleague, ‘how you have so completely expunged a line in a poem that you claim you know so well, and have you any notion from what context you can have taken the substitute?’

¹ [Literally: ‘But will he in fact seem welcome,

Now, when every day brings something new?

For he is still a heathen with his kindred

And they are Christians and baptized.’]

² [‘But will he in fact seem welcome if he does not buy the favour dearly?’]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1114

He was in a position to provide an explanation, though obviously with some reluctance. ‘The line "Jetzt, wo jeder Tag was Neues bringt" seems familiar to me; I must have used the words a short time ago in referring to my practice - as you know, I am highly satisfied with its progress at the present time. But how does the sentence fit in here? I could think of a connection. The line "Wenn er teuer nicht die Gunst erkauft’ was obviously one which I found disagreeable. It is connected with a proposal of marriage which was turned down on the first occasion, and which, in view of the great improvement in my material position, I am now thinking of repeating. I cannot tell you any more, but if I am accepted now, it certainly cannot be enjoyable for me to reflect that some sort of calculation tipped the scale both then and now.’

This struck me as intelligible, even without my needing to know further particulars. But I continued with my questions: ‘How in any case have you and your private affairs become involved in the text of the "Bride of Corinth"? Is yours perhaps a case that involves differences in religious belief like those that play an important part in the poem?’

(Keimt ein Glaube neu,

Wird oft Lieb’ und Treu

Wie ein böses Unkraut ausgerauft.)¹

My guess was wrong; but it was curious to see how a single well-aimed question gave him a sudden perspicacity, so that he was able to bring me as an answer something of which he had certainly been unaware up to that time. He gave me a pained, even an indignant look, muttered a later passage from the poem:

Sieh sie an genau!

Morgen ist sie grau.²

and added shortly: ‘She is rather older than I.’ To avoid distressing him further I broke off the enquiry. The explanation struck me as sufficient. But it was certainly surprising that the attempt to trace a harmless failure of memory back to its cause should have had to come up against matters in the subject’s private life that were so remote and intimate, and that were cathected with such distressing affect.

¹ [‘When a faith is newly sprung up, love and troth are often torn out like an evil weed.’]

² [‘Look on her carefully. Tomorrow she will be grey.’] My colleague has incidentally made changes in this beautiful passage from the poem, somewhat altering both the wording and what the words refer to. The ghostly maiden says to her bridegroom:

‘Meine Kette hab’ ich dir gegeben;

Deine Locke nehm’ ich mit mir fort.

Sieh sie an genau!

Morgen bist du grau,

Und nur braun erscheinst du wieder dort.’

[‘My necklace I have given thee; your lock of hair I take away with me. Look on it carefully. Tomorrow you will be grey, and you will appear brown again only there.’ (The context shows that ‘sie’ (‘it’ or ‘her’) in the third line refers to the lock of hair. In a different context the line could mean: ‘Look on her carefully’.)]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1115

Here is another instance, given by Jung (1907, 64), of the forgetting of a set of words in a well-known poem. I shall quote the author’s own words.

‘A man was trying to recite the well-known poem that begins "Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam  . . ."¹ In the line beginning "Ihn schläfert"² he became hopelessly stuck; he had completely forgotten the words "mit weisser Decke ". Forgetting something in so familiar a verse struck me as surprising, and I therefore made him reproduce what occurred to him in connection with "mit weisser Decke". He had the following train of associations: "A white sheet makes one think of a shroud - a linen sheet to cover a dead body" - (a pause) - "now a close friend occurs to me - his brother died recently quite suddenly - he is supposed to have died of a heart attack - he was also very stout - my friend is also stout, and I have thought before now that it might also happen to him - probably he takes too little exercise - when I heard of his brother’s death I suddenly became anxious that it might also happen to me; for in our family we have in any case a tendency to fatness, and my grandfather, too, died of a heart attack; I have noticed that I too am over-stout and I have therefore begun a course of slimming recently."

‘Thus,’ comments Jung, ‘the man had, unconsciously, identified himself at once with the fir-tree wrapped in the white shroud.’

¹ [‘A fir-tree stands alone.’]

² [The relevant lines are:

Ihn schläfert; mit weisser Decke

Umhüllen ihn Eis und Schnee.

He slumbers; with a white sheet

Ice and snow cover him.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1116

The following example of the forgetting of a set of words which I owe to my friend Sándor Ferenczi of Budapest, differs from the preceding ones in that it concerns a phrase coined by the subject himself and not a sentence taken from a writer. It may also present us with the somewhat unusual case in which the forgetting ranges itself on the side of our good sense, when the latter threatens to succumb to a momentary desire. The parapraxis thus comes to serve a useful function. When we have sobered down once more we appreciate the rightness of this internal current, which had previously only been able to express itself in a failure to function - a forgetting, a psychical impotence.

‘At a social gathering someone quoted "Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner". I made the comment that the first part of the sentence was enough; "pardoning" was a piece of arrogance: it should be left to God and the priests. One of those present thought this observation very good, and this emboldened me to say - probably with the intention of securing the good opinion of the benevolent critic - that I had recently thought of something better. But when I tried to repeat it I found it had escaped me. I immediately withdrew from the company and wrote down the screen-associations. There first occurred to me the names of the friend and of the street in Budapest that witnessed the birth of the idea I was looking for; next came the name of another friend, Max, whom we usually call Maxi. This led me to the word "maxim" and to the recollection that what we were after was, like my original remark, a variation on a well-known maxim. Strangely enough my next thought was not a maxim but the following sentence: "God created man in His own image" and the same idea in reverse: "Man created God in his." Thereupon the memory of what I was looking for immediately appeared. On that occasion my friend had said to me in Andrássy Street: "Nothing human is foreign to me", whereupon I had answered, in allusion to the discoveries of psycho-analysis: "You ought to have gone further and have admitted that nothing animal is foreign to you."

‘But after I had at last remembered what I wanted, I was less than ever able to repeat it in the company I happened to be in. The young wife of the friend whom I had reminded of the animal nature of the unconscious was among those present, and I had to recognize that she was by no means prepared to receive such disagreeable truth. My forgetting spared me a number of unpleasant questions from her and a pointless discussion. This and nothing else must have been the motive for my "temporary amnesia".

‘It is interesting that a screen-association was provided by a sentence in which the Deity is debased to the status of a human invention, while in the missing sentence there is an allusion to the animal in man. Capitis diminutio is therefore the element common to both. The whole subject is clearly only the continuation of the train of thought about understanding and forgiving which the conversation had instigated.

‘The fact that what I was looking for in this case was so quick in presenting itself may perhaps be due also to my immediate withdrawal from the company where it was censored to an empty room.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1117

I have since undertaken numerous other analyses where forgetting or faulty reproduction of a set of words took place, and the consistent result of these investigations has inclined me to assume that the mechanism of forgetting demonstrated above in the instances of ‘aliquis’ and ‘The Bride of Corinth’ has an almost universal validity. It is generally a little awkward to give an account of such analyses since, like those just mentioned, they constantly lead to matters which are of an intimate sort and are distressing to the person analysed. I shall therefore not give any further examples. What is common to all these cases, irrespective of the material, is the fact that the forgotten or distorted matter is brought by some associative path into connection with an unconscious thought-content - a thought-content which is the source of the effect manifested in the form of forgetting.

I now return to the forgetting of names. So far we have not exhaustively considered either the case-material or the motives behind it. As this is exactly the kind of parapraxis that I can from time to time observe abundantly in myself, I am at no loss for examples. The mild attacks of migraine from which I still suffer usually announce themselves hours in advance by my forgetting names, and at the height of these attacks, during which I am not forced to abandon my work, it frequently happens that all proper names go out of my head. Now it is precisely cases like mine which could furnish the grounds for an objection on principle to our analytic efforts. Should it not necessarily be concluded from such observations that the cause of forgetfulness, and in particular of the forgetting of names, lies in circulatory and general functional disturbances of the cerebrum, and should we not therefore spare ourselves the search for psychological explanations of these phenomena? Not at all, in my view; that would be to confuse the mechanism of a process, which is of the same kind in all cases, with the factors favouring the process, which are variable and not necessarily essential. Instead of a discussion, however, I shall bring forward an analogy to deal with the objection.

Let us suppose that I have been imprudent enough to go for a walk at night in a deserted quarter of the city, and have been attacked and robbed of my watch and purse. I report the matter at the nearest police station in the following words: ‘I was in such and such a street, and there loneliness and darkness took away my watch and purse.’ Although I should not have said anything in this statement that was not true, the wording of my report would put me in danger of being thought not quite right in the head. The state of affairs could only be described correctly by saying that favoured by the loneliness of the place and under the shield of darkness unknown malefactors robbed me of my valuables. Now the state of affairs in the forgetting of names need not be any different; favoured by tiredness, circulatory disturbances and intoxication, an unknown psychical force robs me of my access to the proper names belonging to my memory - a force which can in other cases bring about the same failure of memory at a time of perfect health and unimpaired efficiency.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1118

If I analyse the cases of the forgetting of names that I observe in myself, I almost always find that the name which is withheld from me is related to a topic of close personal importance to me, and one capable of evoking in me strong and often distressing affects. In accordance with the convenient and commendable practice of the Zurich school (Bleuler, Jung, Riklin) I can also formulate this fact as follows: The lost name has touched on a ‘personal complex’ in me. The relation of the name to myself is one that I should not have expected and is usually arrived at through superficial associations (such as verbal ambiguity or similarity in sound); it can be characterized quite generally as an oblique relation. Its nature will best be illustrated by some simple examples.

(1) A patient asked me to recommend him a health resort on the Riviera. I knew of such a resort quite close to Genoa, and I also remembered the name of a German colleague of mine who practised there; but the name of the resort itself escaped me, well as I thought I knew that too. There was nothing left for me but to ask the patient to wait while I hurriedly consulted the ladies of my family. ‘What on earth is the name of the place near Genoa where Dr. N. has his little sanatorium, the one in which so and so was under treatment for so long?’ ‘Of course you of all people would be the one to forget the name. The place is called Nervi.’ I must admit I have plenty to do with nerves.

(2) Another patient was talking about a neighbouring summer resort, and declared that besides its two well-known inns there was a third one there with which a certain memory of his was connected; he would tell me the name in a moment. I disputed the existence of this third inn, and appealed to the fact that I had spent seven summers at the place and must therefore know it better than he did. But under the provocation of my contradiction he had already got hold of the name. The inn was called the ‘Hochwartner’. At this point I was obliged to give in and I even had to confess that I had lived for seven whole summers close by the inn whose existence I had denied. Why in this instance should I have forgotten both the name and the thing? I believe it was because the name was only too similar in sound to that of a colleague, a specialist in Vienna and, once again, had touched upon the ‘professional complex’ in me.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1119

(3) On another occasion, as I was on the point of booking a ticket at Reichenhall railway station, the name of the next main station would not come into my mind. It was perfectly familiar to me, and I had passed through it very frequently. I had actually to look it up in the time-table. It was ‘Rosenheim’. But I then knew at once owing to what association I had lost it. An hour before, I had paid a visit to my sister at her home close to Reichenhall; as my sister’s name is Rosa this was also a ‘Rosenheim’. The ‘family complex’ had robbed me of this name.

(4) I have a whole quantity of examples to illustrate further the positively predatory activities of the ‘family complex’.

There came to my consulting-room one day a young man who was the younger brother of a woman patient. I had seen him countless times and used to refer to him by his first name. When I wanted to speak about his visit I found I had forgotten his first name (which was, I knew, not at all an unusual one ), and nothing could help me to recover it. I thereupon went out into the street to read the names over the shops, and recognized his name the first time I ran across it. The analysis of the episode showed me that I had drawn a parallel between the visitor and my own brother, a parallel which was trying to come to a head in the repressed question: ‘Would my brother in the same circumstances have behaved in a similar way, or would he have done the opposite?’ The external link between the thoughts concerned with my own and with the other family was made possible by the chance fact that in both cases the mothers had the same first name of Amalia. Later in retrospect I also understood the substitute names, Daniel and Franz, which had forced themselves on me without making me any wiser. These, like Amalia too, are names from Schiller’s Die Räuber which were the subject of a jest made by Daniel Spitzer, the ‘Vienna walker’.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1120

(5) Another time I was unable to recall a patient’s name; it belonged to associations from my youth. My analysis followed a very devious path before it provided me with the name I was looking for. The patient had expressed a fear of losing his sight; this awoke the memory of a young man who had been blinded by a gunshot; and this in turn was connected with the figure of yet another youth, who had injured himself by shooting. This last person had the same name as the first patient, though he was not related to him. However, I did not find the name until I had become conscious that an anxious expectation was being transferred by me from these two young men who had been injured to a member of my own family.

There thus runs though my thoughts a continuous current of ‘personal reference’, of which I generally have no inkling, but which betrays itself by such instances of my forgetting names. It is as if I were obliged to compare everything I hear about other people with myself; as if my personal complexes were put on the alert whenever another person is brought to my notice. This cannot possibly be an individual peculiarity of my own: it must rather contain an indication of the way in which we understand ‘something other than ourself’ in general. I have reasons for supposing that other people are in this respect very similar to me.

The neatest instance of this sort was reported to me by a Herr Lederer, who had experienced it himself. While he was on his honeymoon in Venice he came across a gentleman with whom he was superficially acquainted and whom he had to introduce to his young wife. Since however he had forgotten the stranger’s name, he helped himself out the first time by means of an unintelligible mumble. On meeting the gentleman a second time, as he was bound to do in Venice, he drew him aside and asked him to save him from embarrassment by telling him his name, which he had unfortunately forgotten. The stranger’s reply gave evidence of an unusual knowledge of human nature. ‘I can readily imagine your failing to remember my name. I have the same name as you - Lederer!’ - One cannot help having a slightly disagreeable feeling when one comes across one’s own name in a stranger. Recently I was very sharply aware of it when a Herr S. Freud presented himself to me in my consulting hour. (However, I must record the assurance of one of my critics that in this respect his feelings are the opposite of mine.)

(6) The effects that can be produced by personal reference can also be seen in the following example, reported by Jung (1907, 52):

‘A Herr Y. fell in love with a lady; but he met with no success, and shortly afterwards she married a Herr S. There after, Herr Y., in spite of having known Herr X. for a long time and even having business dealings with him, forgot his name over and over again, so that several times he had to enquire what it was from other people when he wanted to correspond with Herr X’.

The motivation of the forgetting is however more transparent in this case than in the preceding ones that fall within the constellation of personal reference. Here the forgetting seems a direct consequence of Herr Y’s antipathy to his more fortunate rival; he wants to know nothing about him: ‘never thought of shall he be.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1121

(7) The motive for forgetting a name may also be a more refined one; it may consist in what might be called a ‘sublimated’ grudge against the bearer of it. A Fräulein I. von K. writes from Budapest as follows:

‘I have propounded a little theory of my own. I have noticed that people who have a talent for painting have no feeling for music, and vice versa. Some time ago I had a conversation with someone on this point, in which I remarked: "So far my observation has always held good, with the exception of only one person." When I wanted to recall that person’s name, I found it had been irretrievably forgotten, even though I knew that the owner of it was one of my closest friends. When I heard the name mentioned quite by chance a few days later, I knew at once, of course, that it was the destroyer of my theory who was being spoken of. The grudge I unconsciously bore against him was expressed by my forgetting his name, which, apart from that, I knew so well.’

(8) The following case, reported by Ferenczi, shows a somewhat different way in which the personal reference led to a name being forgotten. Its analysis is particularly instructive because of the explanation it gives of the substitute associations (like Botticelli and Boltraffio as substitutes for Signorelli).

‘A lady, who had heard something about psycho-analysis, could not recall the name of the psychiatrist Jung.¹

‘The following names came to her mind instead: Kl--- (a name), Wilde, Nietzsche, Hauptmann.

‘I did not tell her the name and invited her to give free associations to each name in turn.

‘Starting from Kl--- she immediately thought of Frau Kl---, and of how she was a prim and affected person, but looked very well for her age. "She’s not ageing." As a common characterization of Wilde and Nietzsche she named "insanity". Then she said chaffingly: "You Freudians will go on looking for the causes of insanity till you’re insane yourselves." Then: "I can’t bear Wilde and Nietzsche. I don’t understand them. I hear they were both homosexuals; Wilde had dealings with young people." (In spite of having uttered the correct name - in Hungarian, it is true - in this sentence, she was still unable t recall it.)

‘Starting from Hauptmann, first "Halbe" and then "Jungend’ occurred to her; and it was there for the first time, after I had drawn her attention to the word "Jungend", that she realized she had been in search of the name Jung.

‘This lady had lost her husband when she was thirty-nine and had no prospect of marrying again. Thus she had certainly reason enough to avoid recalling anything that reminded her of youth or age. It is striking that the ideas screening the missing name were associated entirely with its content and that associations with its sound were absent.’

¹ [‘Jung’ is also the German for ‘young’.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1122

(9) Here is an example of name-forgetting with yet another and a very subtle motivation, which the subject of it has explained himself:

‘When I was being examined in philosophy as a subsidiary subject I was questioned by the examiner about the teachings of Epicurus, and after that I was asked if I knew who had taken up his theories in later centuries. I answered with the name of Pierre Gassendi, whom I had heard described as a disciple of Epicurus while I was sitting in a café only a couple of days before. To the surprised question how I knew that, I boldly answered that I had long been interested in Gassendi. The result of this was a certificate magna cum laude, but also unfortunately a subsequent obstinate tendency to forget the name Gassendi. My guilty conscience is, I think, to blame for my inability to remember the name in spite of all my efforts; for I really ought not to have known it on that occasion either.’

In order to appreciate the intensity of our informant’s aversion to recalling this examination episode, the reader would have to know the high value he sets on his doctorate and for how many other things it has to serve as a substitute.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1123

(10) At this point I shall insert another example of the name of a town being forgotten. It is not perhaps as simple as the ones given above, but it will strike any one who is fairly well versed in investigations of this nature as authentic and valuable. The name of a town in Italy escaped the subject’s memory as a consequence of its great similarity in sound to a woman’s first name, with which a number of memories charged with affect were connected, which are doubtless not here reported in full. Sándor Ferenczi of Budapest, who observed this case of forgetting in himself, has treated it in the way in which one analyses a dream or a neurotic idea a - procedure which is fully justified.

‘To-day I was with a family that I know, and the conversation turned to cities of North Italy. Someone observed that they still showed traces of Austrian influence. A few of these cities were mentioned, and I wanted to give the name of one too, but it escaped me, although I knew I had spent two very pleasant days there - a fact which did not agree very well with Freud’s theory of forgetting. In place of the name I was looking for, the following associations forced themselves on me: Capua, Brescia, The Lion of Brescia.

‘The picture that I had of this "Lion" took the form of a marble statue standing before my eyes like a solid object; I noticed at once, however, that it had less of a resemblance to the lion on the Monument to Freedom at Brescia (of which I have only seen illustrations) than to the other celebrated marble lion which I have seen on the monument to the dead at Lucerne - the monument to the Swiss guards who fell at Tuileries, and of which I have a miniature replica on my bookcase. And now at last the missing name came back to me: it was Verona.

‘At the same time I knew at once who was to blame for my amnesia. It was no other than a former servant of the family whose guest I was at the time. Her name was Veronika (Verona in Hungarian), and I had a strong antipathy to her because of her repulsive looks, her shrill, raucous voice and her insufferable assertiveness, to which she believed herself entitled by her length of service. At the same time the tyrannical way in which she used to treat the children of the house was intolerable to me. I now also understood the meaning of the associations.

‘My immediate association to Capua was caput mortuum. I very often compared Veronika’s head to a death’s head. The Hungarian word "kapszi" (avaricious) doubtless provided an additional determinant for the displacement. I also, of course, found the much more direct associative paths which connect Capua and Verona as geographical idea and as Italian words that have the same rhythm.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1124

‘The same is true for Brescia; but here too there were winding by-paths in the linkage of ideas.

‘My antipathy was at one time so violent that I found Veronika positively nauseating, and I had more than once expressed my astonishment that all the same it was possible for her to have an erotic life and be loved by someone. "Why," I said, "to kiss her would make one feel sick!"¹ Nevertheless, she could certainly long since have been brought into connection with the idea of the fallen Swiss Guards.

‘Brescia is very often mentioned, at any rate here in Hungary, in connection not with the lion but with another wild animal. The most hated name in this country, and in the north of Italy too, is that of General Haynau, commonly known as the "Hyaena of Brescia". Thus one thread in my thoughts ran from the hated tyrant Haynau viâ Brescia to the town of Verona, while the other led, viâ the idea of the animal that haunts the graves of the dead (which helped to determine the emergence in my mind of a monument to the dead), to the death’s head and to the disagreeable voice of Veronika - the victim of such gross abuse by my unconscious - who in her time had acted almost as tyrannically in this house as had the Austrian general after the Hungarian and Italian struggles for freedom.

‘Lucerne is connected with the thought of the summer which Veronika spent with her employers in the neighbourhood of the town of Lucerne, on the lake of that name. The Swiss Guard in turn recalls that she knew how to play the tyrant not only to the children but also to the grown-up members of the family, and fancied herself in the part of a "Garde-Dame ".

‘I must expressly remark that this antipathy of mine towards Veronika is - consciously - something that has long been surmounted. Since those times both her appearance and her manner have changed, greatly to her advantage, and I can meet her, though I have in fact little occasion for doing so, with genuinely warm feelings. As usual, my unconscious clings more tenaciously to my impressions: it is "retrospective" and resentful.²

‘The Tuileries are an allusion to another person, an elderly French lady, who on many occasions actually "guarded" the women of the house; she was respected by everyone, young and old - and no doubt somewhat feared as well was feared. For a while I was her élève for French conversation. The word élève further recalls that when I was on a visit to the brother-in-law of my present host, in northern Bohemia, I was very much amused because the local country-people called the élèves at the school of forestry there by the name of "Löwen"³. This entertaining memory may also have played a part in the displacement from the hyaena to the lion.’

¹ [The first half of the German word for ‘nausea’ (‘Brechreiz’) has a sound similar to the first syllable of ‘Brescia’.]

² [In German: ‘"nachträglich"  und nachtragend.’]

³ [The dialect pronunciation of the first syllable of this word would resemble that of the second syllable of ‘élèves’.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1125

(11) The next example, too, shows how a personal complex which is dominating someone at the time may cause a name to be forgotten in some very remote connection.

‘Two men, an older and a younger one, who six months before had made a trip together in Sicily, were exchanging recollections of those pleasant and memorable days. "Let’s see," said the younger, "what was the name of the place where we spent the night before making our trip to Selinunte? Wasn’t it Calatafimi?" The older one rejected it: "No, it certainly wasn’t, but I’ve forgotten the name too, though I recall most clearly all the details of our stay there. I only need to find someone else has forgotten a name, and it at once makes me forget it too. Let’s look for the name. But the only thing that occurs to me is Caltanisetta, which certainly isn’t right." "No," said the younger man, "the name begins with a ‘w’ or has a ‘w’ in it." "But there’s no ‘w’ in Italian," objected the older. "I really meant a ‘v’, and I only said ‘w’ because I’m so used to it in my own language." The older man still opposed the "v". "As a matter of fact," he declared, "I believe I’ve forgotten a lot of the Sicilian names already; this would be a good time to make some experiments. For example, what was the name of the place on a hill that was called Enna in antiquity? Oh, I know - Castrogiovanni." The next moment the younger man had recalled the lost name as well. "Castelvetrano," he exclaimed, and was pleased at being able to point to the "v" he had insisted on. For a short while the older one had no sense of recognition; but after he had accepted the name it was for him to explain why he had forgotten it. "Obviously," he said, "because the second half, ’-vetrano’, sounds like ‘veteran’. I know I don’t much like to think about growing old, and I have strange reactions when I’m reminded of it. For instance, I recently charged a very dear friend of mine in the strangest terms with having ‘left his youth far behind him’, for the reason that once before, in the middle of the most flattering remarks about me, he had added that I was ‘no longer a young man’. Another sign that my resistance was directed against the second half of the name Castelvetrano is that the initial sound recurred in the substitute name Caltanisetta." "What about the name Caltanisetta itself?" asked the younger man. "That," confessed the older one, "has always seemed to me like a pet name for a young woman."

‘Some time later he added: "Of course the name for Enna was also a substitute name. And it occurs to me now that Castrogiovanni - a name that forced its way to the front with the help of a rationalization - sounds like ‘giovane’ (young) in exactly the same way as the lost name Castelvetrano sounds like ‘veteran’ (old)."

‘The older man believed that in this way he had accounted for his forgetting the name. No investigation was made of the motive for the similar failure of the younger man’s memory.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1126

Not only the motives, but also the mechanism governing the forgetting of names, deserve our interest. In a large number of cases a name is forgotten not because the name itself arouses such motives, but because - owing to similarity in sound and to assonance - it touches upon another name against which these motives do operate. If the determinants are relaxed in this way, the occurrence of the phenomenon will obviously be made very much easier, as the following examples show.

(12) Reported by Dr. Eduard Hitschmann (1913a): ‘Herr N. wanted to give someone the name of the firm of book sellers Gilhofer and Ranschburg. But however much he thought over it, only the name Ranschburg occurred to him, though he knew the firm perfectly well. He returned home feeling somewhat dissatisfied, and thought it sufficiently important to ask his brother (who was apparently already asleep) what the first half of the firm’s name was. His brother gave him the name without hesitation. Thereupon the word "Gallhof" immediately sprang to Herr N.’s mind as an association to "Gilhofer". Gallhof was the place where a few months before he had gone for a memorable walk with an attractive young lady. As a momento the lady had given him a present which was inscribed "A souvenir of the happy hours at Gallhof ". In the course of the days just before the name was forgotten, this present had been badly damaged, seemingly by accident, through N.’s shutting a drawer too hastily. He noticed this with a certain sense of guilt, for he was familiar with the meaning of symptomatic acts. At the time his feelings towards the lady were somewhat ambivalent: he certainly loved her, but he felt hesitation in the face of her desire that they should get married.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1127

(13) Reported by Dr. Hanns Sachs: ‘In a conversation about Genoa and its immediate surroundings, a young man wanted to mention the place called Pegli, but could only recall the name with an effort after racking his brains. On the way home he thought of the distressing manner in which so familiar a name had slipped away, and in doing so was led to a word sounding very similar: Peli. He knew that there was a South Sea island of that name, whose inhabitants still retained a few remarkable customs. He had read about them recently in an ethnological work and had at the time made up his mind to use the information in support of a hypothesis of his own. It then occurred to him that Peli was also the setting of a novel which he had read with interest and enjoyment - namely Van Zanten’s glücklichste Zeit by Laurids Bruun. The thoughts that had occupied his mind almost incessantly during the day centred round a letter he had received that same morning from a lady he was very fond of. This letter gave him reason to fear that he would have to forgo a meeting that had been arranged. After being in a very bad mood all day, he had gone out in the evening resolved not to plague himself any longer with the tiresome thought but to enjoy the social occasion in front of him, on which he in fact set an extremely high value, in as serene a mood as possible. It is clear that his resolution could have been gravely imperilled by the word Pegli, as its connection in sound with Peli was so close; and Peli in turn, having acquired a personal connection with himself by its ethnological interest, embodied not only Van Zanten’s but also his own "happiest time", and therefore the fears and anxieties as well which he had nursed all day long. It is characteristic that this simple explanation only became clear after a second letter from his friend had transformed his doubt into the happy certainty of seeing her again soon.’

This example may recall what might be described as its geographical neighbour, in which the name of the town of Nervi could not be remembered (Example 1). Thus we see how a pair of words that are similar in sound can have the same effect as a single word that has two meanings.

(14) When war broke out with Italy in 1915 I was able to make the observation upon myself that a whole quantity of Italian place-names which at ordinary times were readily available to me had suddenly been withdrawn from my memory. Like so many other Germans I had made it my habit to spend a part of my holidays on Italian soil, and I could not doubt that this large-scale forgetting of names was the expression of an understandable hostility to Italy which had now replaced my former partiality. In addition to this directly motivated forgetting of names, however, an indirect amnesia could also be detected, which it was possible to trace back to the same influence. I showed a tendency to forget non-Italian place-names as well; and on investigating the incidents I found that these names were in some way connected by means of remote similarities of sound with the proscribed enemy names. Thus I tormented myself one day in trying to recall the name of the Moravian town of Bisenz. When it finally came to my mind I at once recognized that this act of forgetting was to be laid to the charge of the Palazzo Bisenzi at Orvieto. The Hotel Belle Arti, where I had stayed on all my visits to Orvieto, is located in this palazzo. The most precious memories had naturally been the most severely damaged by the change in my emotional attitude.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1128

Some examples may also help to remind us of the variety of purposes that can be served by the parapraxis of name-forgetting.

(15) Reported by A. J. Storfer (1914): ‘One morning a lady who lived in Basle received news that a friend of her youth, Selma X. of Berlin, who was just then on her honeymoon, was passing through Basle, but staying only one day. The Basle lady hurried straight away to her hotel. When the friends separated, they made an arrangement to meet again in the afternoon and to be with each other up to the time of the Berlin lady’s departure.

‘In the afternoon the Basle lady forgot about the rendezvous. I do not know what determined her forgetting it, yet in this particular situation (a meeting with a school-friend who has just married) various typical constellations are possible which could determine an inhibition against the repetition of the meeting. The point of interest in this case lies in a further parapraxis, which represents an unconscious safeguarding of the first one. At the time when she was to have met her friend from Berlin the Basle lady happened to be in company at another place. The recent marriage of the Viennese opera singer Kurz came up in conversation; the Basle lady gave vent to some critical remarks (!) about this marriage, but when she wanted to mention the singer by name, she found to her very great embarrassment that she could not think of her first name. (There is, as is well known, a particular tendency to give the first name also, precisely in cases where the surname is a monosyllable.) The Basle lady was all the more put out by her lapse of memory since she had often heard Kurz sing and ordinarily knew her (whole) name perfectly well. Before anyone had mentioned the missing first name the conversation took another direction.

‘In the evening of the same day our Basle lady was among a number of people, some of whom were the same as those she had been with in the afternoon. By a coincidence the conversation again turned to the marriage of the Viennese singer; and without any difficulty the lady produced the name "Selma Kurz". "Oh dear!" she at once exclaimed, "it’s just struck me - I’ve completely forgotten I had an appointment with my friend Selma this afternoon." A glance at the clock showed that her friend must have left already.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1129

We are perhaps not ready yet to appreciate all the aspects of this pretty example. The following is a simpler specimen, though here it was not a name but a foreign word that was forgotten, from a motive arising out of the situation. (We can already see that we are dealing with the same processes, whether they apply to proper names, first names, foreign words or sets of words.) Here it was a case of a young man forgetting the English word for ‘Gold’ - which is identical with the German word - so as to find an opportunity for carrying out an action he desired.

(16) Reported by Dr. Hanns Sachs: ‘A young man became acquainted in a pension with an English lady, whom he took a liking to. On the first evening of their acquaintance he was having a conversation with her in her native language, which he knew fairly well; and in the course of it he wanted to use the English word for "Gold". In spite of strenuous efforts the word would not come to him. Instead, the French or, the Latin aurum and the Greek chrysos obstinately forced themselves on him as substitutes, so that it needed quite an effort to reject them, though he knew for certain that they were not related at all to the word he was looking for. In the end the only way he could find of making himself understood was by touching a gold ring on the lady’s hand; and he was very much abashed on learning from her that the long-lost word for gold was exactly the same as the German one, namely "gold". The great value of this touching, for which the forgetting gave an opportunity, did not lie merely in the unobjectionable satisfaction of the instinct for laying hold or touching - for there are other opportunities for this which are eagerly exploited by lovers. It lay much more in the way in which it assisted in clarifying the prospects of the courtship. The lady’s unconscious would divine the erotic aim of the forgetting, hidden by its mask of innocence, especially if her unconscious was sympathetically drawn to the man she was talking with. The manner in which she treated his touching of her and accepted its motivation could in this way become a means - unconscious for both of them, yet full of significance - of reaching an understanding on the chances of the flirtation just begun.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1130

(17) From J. Stärcke (1916) I report another interesting observation that concerns the forgetting and subsequent recovery of a proper name. This case is distinguished by the fact that the forgetting of the name was connected with the misquoting of a set of words from a poem, as in the example of the ‘Bride of Corinth’.

‘Z., an old jurist and philologist, was describing in company how in his student days in Germany he had known a quite exceptionally stupid student, and had some anecdotes to tell of his stupidity. He could not, however, recall the student’s name; he believed it began with a "W", but later took back the idea. He recalled that the stupid student later became a wine merchant. He then told another anecdote about the student’s stupidity, and once again expressed surprise that his name did not come back to him. "He was such an ass," he then remarked, "that I still don’t understand how I succeeded in drumming Latin into his head." A moment later he remembered that the name he was looking for ended in ". . . man". At this point we asked him if any other name ending in "man" occurred to him, and he gave "Erdmann ". "Who is that?" "That was another student of those days." His daughter, however, observed that there was also a Professor Erdmann. Some closer questioning revealed that this Professor Erdmann, who was the editor of a periodical, had recently refused to accept a piece of work submitted by Z., with which he partly disagreed, except in a shortened form; and Z. had been considerably put out. (In addition, I later discovered that years before, Z. had very probably expected to become professor in the same department in which Professor Erdmann now lectured. This, then, may have been another reason why the name touched on a sensitive spot.)

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1131

‘At this point the stupid student’s name suddenly came back to him: "Lindeman". Since he had already recalled that the name ended in "man", it was "Linde " that had remained repressed for longer. When he has asked what came to his mind when he thought of "Linde", he at first said "Absolutely nothing." When I urged that something connected with this word would no doubt occur to him, he remarked with an upward gaze and a gesture of his hand in the air: "A linden - well, a linden is a beautiful tree." Nothing further would come to his mind. No one spoke and everyone went on with their reading or other activity, till a few moments later Z. quoted the following passage in a dreamy voice:

Steht er mit festen

Gefügigen Knochen

Auf der erde,

So reicht er nicht auf

Nur mit der Linde

Oder der Rebe

Sich zu vergleichen.¹

‘I gave a cry of triumph. "There’s our Erdmann," I said. "The man who ‘stands on the earth’, that is to say the earthman or Erdmann, cannot reach up far enough to bear comparison with the linden (Lindeman) or the vine (wine merchant). In other words, our Lindeman, the stupid student, who later became a wine merchant, was certainly an ass, but our Erdmann is a much greater ass than that, and cannot even be compared with this Lindeman." - Such derisive or abusive language in the unconscious is quite usual; so it seemed to me that the chief cause of the name being forgotten had probably now been found.

¹ [Literally: ‘If he stands with firm, pliant bones on the earth, he does not reach up far enough to bear comparison even with the linden or the vine.’]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1132

‘I now asked what the poem was from which the lines were quoted. Z. said it was a poem by Goethe, which he thought began:

Edel sei der Mensch

Hilfreich und gut!¹

and which later contained the lines:

Und hebt er sich aufwärts,

So spielen mit ihm die Winde.²

‘The next day I looked up this poem of Goethe’s, and it turned out that the case was even prettier (though also more complex) than it had seemed at first.

(a) ‘The first lines that he quoted run (cf. above):

Steht er mit festen

Markigen Knochen . . .³

‘"Gefügige Knochen" would be a rather peculiar combination; but I shall not go further into this point.

(b) ‘The next lines of this stanza run (cf. above):

. . . Auf der wohlgegründeten

Dauernden Erde,

Reicht er nicht auf,

Nur mit der Eiche

Oder der Rebe

Sich zu vergleichen.4

So in the whole poem there is no mention of a linden. The change of "oak" into "linden" had taken place (in his unconscious) only in order to make the play on the words "earth-linden-vine" possible.

(c) ‘This poem is called "Grenzen der Menschheit" and compares the omnipotence of the gods with man’s puny strength. But the poem beginning:

Edel sei der Mensch,

Hilfreich und gut!

is a different one, appearing some pages further on. Its title is "Das Göttliche [The Divine Nature]", and it too contains thoughts about gods and men. As the matter was not gone into further I can at the most offer an opinion that thoughts about life and death, the temporal and the eternal, and the subject’s own frail life and future death also played a part in bringing about the occurrence of this case.’

¹ [‘Let Man be noble, helpful and good.’]

² [‘And if he raises himself upwards the winds play with him.’]

³ [‘If he stands with firm, sturdy bones . . .’]

4 [‘. . . on the firmly-based, enduring earth, he does not reach up far enough to bear comparison even with the oak or the vine.’]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1133

In some of these examples all the subtleties of psycho-analytic technique have to be called upon in order to explain the forgetting of a name. Anyone who wishes to learn more about such work may be referred to a paper by Ernest Jones of London (1911a). It has been translated into German.

(18) Ferenczi has observed that forgetting a name may also make its appearance as a hysterical symptom. In this situation it displays a very different mechanism from that of a parapraxis . The nature of this distinction may be seen from what he says:

‘At the moment I am treating a patient, a spinster getting on in years, in whose mind the most familiar and best-known proper names fail to appear, although her memory is otherwise good. In the course of the analysis it has become clear that this symptom is intended by her as a documentation of her ignorance. This demonstrative parade of her ignorance is, however, really a reproach against her parents, who did not let her have any higher education. Her tormenting obsession to clean things ("housewife’s psychosis") also comes in part from the same source. What she means by this is something like: "You have turned me into a housemaid."'

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1134

I could cite further instances of the forgetting of names and explore the matter much more fully if I were not reluctant to anticipate at this first stage almost all the points of view that will come up for discussion under later topics. But I may perhaps allow myself to summarize in a few sentences the conclusions to be drawn from the analyses that have been reported here:

The mechanism of names being forgotten (or, to be more accurate, the mechanism of names escaping the memory, of being temporarily forgotten) consists in the interference with the intended reproduction of the name by an alien train of thought which is not at the time conscious. Between the name interfered with and the interfering complex either a connection exists from the outset, or else such a connection has established itself, often in ways that appear artificial, viâ superficial (external) associations.

Among the interfering complexes those of personal reference (i.e. the personal, family and professional complexes) prove to have the greatest effect.

A name which has more than one meaning and consequently belongs to more than one group of thoughts (complexes)  is frequently interfered with in its connection with one train of thought owing to its participation in another, stronger complex.

Among the motives for these interferences the purpose of avoiding arousing unpleasure by remembering is conspicuous.

In general two main types of name-forgetting may be distinguished: those cases where the name itself touches on something unpleasant, and those where it is brought into connection with another name which has that effect. Thus names can have their reproduction interfered with on their own account, or because of their closer or remoter associative relations.

A survey of these general propositions shows us why the temporary forgetting of names is the most frequently to be observed of all our parapraxes.

(19) We are however far from having outlined all the characteristics of this phenomenon. There is a further point I wish to make. The forgetting of names is highly contagious. In a conversation between two people it is often sufficient for one of them merely to mention that he has forgotten such and such a name, and the result will be that it slips the other’s mind as well. In cases like these, however, where the forgetting is induced, the forgotten name returns more readily. - This ‘collective’ forgetting, strictly speaking a phenomenon of group psychology, his not yet been made the subject of psycho-analytic study. In a single instance (but an especially, neat one) Reik (1920) has been able to offer a good explanation of this curious phenomenon.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1135

‘In a small gathering of university people, which included two women students of philosophy, there was a discussion on the numerous questions raised in the fields of religious studies and the history of civilization by the origin of Christianity. One of the young ladies who took part in the conversation recalled that in an English novel she had read recently she had found an interesting picture of the many religious currents by which that age had been stirred. She added that the novel portrayed the whole of Christ’s life from his birth up to his death; but the name of the work refused to come to her mind. (The visual memory she had of the cover of the book and the appearance of the lettering in the title was excessively clear.) Three of the men who were present also said that they knew the novel, and they remarked that - strange to relate - they too were unable to produce the name.’

The young lady was the only one to subject herself to analysis in order to discover why this name was forgotten. The title of the book was Ben Hur, by Lewis Wallace. The ideas that had occurred to her as substitutes for it had been: ‘Ecce homo’ - ‘Homo sum’ - ‘Quo vadis?’ The girl herself realized that she had forgotten the name ‘because it contains an expression that I (like any other girl) do not care to use - especially in the company of young men’.¹ In the light of the very interesting analysis, this explanation took on a profounder significance. In the context already alluded to, the translation of ‘homo’ (man) also has a disreputable meaning. Reik’s conclusion is as follows: ‘The young lady treated the word as though by uttering the questionable title in front of young men she would have been acknowledging the wishes which she had rejected as out of keeping with her character and distressing to her. More briefly: saying the words "Ben Hur"² was unconsciously equated by her with a sexual offer, and her forgetting accordingly, corresponded to the fending-off of an unconscious temptation of that kind. We have reason for supposing that similarly unconscious processes had determined the young men’s forgetting. Their unconscious understood the real significance of the girl’s forgetting and, so to speak, interpreted it. The men’s forgetting shows respect for this modest behaviour. . . . It is as if the girl who was talking with them had by her sudden lapse of memory given a clear sign which the men had unconsciously understood well enough.’

¹ [‘Hure’ is the German for ‘whore’.]

² [The German words ‘bin Hure’ (‘I am a whore’) sound not unlike ‘Ben Hur’.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1136

A type of continued forgetting of names occurs also, in which whole chains of names are withdrawn from the memory. If in the attempt to recover a lost name other names closely connected with it are pursued, it frequently happens that these new names, which were to serve as stepping stones to the other one, disappear in just the same way. The forgetting thus jumps from one name to another, as if to prove the existence of an obstacle which cannot easily be surmounted.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1137

CHAPTER IV

CHILDHOOD MEMORIES AND SCREEN MEMORIES

In a second paper, which was published in the Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie (1899a), I was in a position to demonstrate at an unexpected point the tendentious nature of the workings of our memory. I started from the striking fact that a person’s earliest childhood memories seem frequently to have preserved what is indifferent and unimportant, whereas (frequently, though certainly not universally) no trace is found in an adult’s memory of impressions dating from that time which are important, impressive and rich in affect. It might be assumed from this - since it is known that the memory makes a selection from among the impressions offered to it - that in childhood the selection is conducted on entirely different principles from those which apply at the time of intellectual maturity. Careful investigation nevertheless shows that such an assumption is unnecessary. The indifferent memories of childhood owe their existence to a process of displacement: they are substitutes, in reproduction, for other impressions which are really significant. The memory of these significant impressions can be developed out of the indifferent ones by means of psychical analysis, but a resistance prevents them from being directly reproduced. As the indifferent memories owe their preservation not to their own content but to an associative relation between their content and another which is repressed, they have some claim to be called ‘screen memories’, the name by which I have described them.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1138

In the paper which I have mentioned I only touched on and in no way exhausted the multiplicity of the relations and meanings of screen memories. In the example quoted there, of which I gave a detailed analysis, I laid special stress on the peculiarity of the chronological relation between the screen memory and the content which is screened off by it. In that example the content of the screen memory belonged to one of the earliest years of childhood, while the mental experiences which were replaced by it in the memory and which had remained almost unconscious occurred in the subject’s later life, I described this sort of displacement as a retroactive or retrogressive one. The opposite relation is found perhaps still more frequently: an indifferent impression of recent date establishes itself in the memory as a screen memory, although it owes that privilege merely to its connection with an earlier experience which resistances prevent from being reproduced directly. These would be screen memories that have pushed ahead or been displaced forward. Here the essential thing with which the memory is occupied precedes the screen memory in time. Finally, we find yet a third possibility, in which the screen memory is connected with the impression that it screens not only by its content but also by contiguity in time: these are contemporary or contiguous screen memories.

How large a part of our store of memory falls into the category of screen memories, and what role they play in various neurotic thought-processes, are problems whose significance I neither discussed in my earlier paper nor shall enter into here. My only concern is to emphasize the similarity between the forgetting of proper names accompanied by paramnesia, and the formation of screen memories.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1139

At first sight the differences between the two phenomena are much more striking than any analogies that may be found. The former phenomenon relates to proper names; the latter to whole impressions, things experienced either in reality or in thought. In the former we have a manifest failure of the function of memory; in the latter, an act of memory that strikes us as strange. In the former it is a case of momentary disturbance - for the name that has just been forgotten may have been produced correctly a hundred times before, and from tomorrow may be produced once again; in the latter it is a case of a permanent and constant memory, since the indifferent childhood memories seem to have the power of staying with us through a large part of our life. The problem in these two cases appears to be quite differently focused. In the former it is the forgetting, in the latter the retention which arouses our scientific curiosity. Closer study reveals that in spite of the dissimilarity between the two phenomena in regard to their psychical material and their duration, the points at which they agree far outbalance it. Both have to do with mistakes in remembering: what the memory reproduces is not what it should correctly have reproduced, but something else as a substitute. In the case of the forgetting of names the act of memory occurs, though in the form of substitute names; the case of the formation of screen memories has as its basis a forgetting of other more important impressions. In both instances an intellectual feeling gives us information of interference by some disturbing factor; but it takes two different forms. With the forgetting of names we know that the substitute names are false: with screen memories we are surprised that we possess them at all. If, now, psychological analysis establishes that the substitutive formation has come about in the same way in both cases, by means of displacement along a superficial association, it is precisely the dissimilarities between the two phenomena, in regard to their material, their duration and their focal point, which serve to heighten our expectation that we have discovered something of importance and of general validity. This general principle would assert that when the reproducing function fails or goes astray, the occurrence points, far more frequently than we suspect, to interference by a tendentious factor - that is, by a purpose which favours one memory while striving to work against another.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1140

The subject of childhood memories seems to me to be of such significance and interest that I should like to devote to it a few additional observations which go beyond the views that I have so far expressed.

How far back into childhood do our memories extend? I am familiar with a few investigations into this question, such as those by V. and C. Henri (1897) and by Potwin (1901). They show that great individual differences exist among the persons examined: a few assign their earliest memories to the sixth month of life, while others remember nothing of their lives up to the end of their sixth or even eighth year. But with what are these differences in retaining childhood memories connected, and what significance attaches to them? Clearly it is not sufficient to assemble the material for answering these points by means of a questionnaire; what is required in addition is that it should be worked over - a process in which the person supplying the information must participate.

In my opinion we take the fact of infantile amnesia - the loss, that is, of the memories of the first years of our life - much too easily; and we fail to look upon it as a strange riddle. We forget how high are the intellectual achievements and how complicated the emotional impulses of which a child of some four years is capable, and we ought to be positively astonished that the memory of later years has as a rule preserved so little of these mental processes, especially as we have every reason to suppose that these same forgotten childhood achievements have not, as might be thought, slipped away without leaving their mark on the subject’s development, but have exercised a determining influence for the whole of his later life. And in spite of this unique efficacy they have been forgotten!  This suggests that there are conditions for remembering (in the sense of conscious reproducing) of a quite special kind, which have evaded recognition by us up to now. It may very well be that the forgetting of childhood can supply us with the key to the understanding of those amnesias which lie, according to our more recent discoveries, at the basis of the formation of all neurotic symptoms.

Of the childhood memories that have been retained a few strike us as perfectly understandable, while others seem odd or unintelligible. It is not difficult to correct certain errors regarding both sorts. If the memories that a person has retained are subjected to an analytic enquiry, it is easy to establish that there is no guarantee of their accuracy. Some of the mnemic images are certainly falsified, incomplete or displaced in time and place. Any such statement by the subjects of the enquiry as that their first recollection comes from about their second year is clearly not to be trusted. Moreover, motives can soon be discovered which make the distortion and displacement of the experience intelligible, but which show at the same time that these mistakes in recollection cannot be caused simply by a treacherous memory. Strong forces from later life have been at work on the capacity of childhood experiences for being remembered - probably the same forces which are responsible for our having become so far removed in general from understanding our years of childhood.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1141

Remembering in adults, as is well known, makes use of a variety of psychical material. Some people remember in visual images; their memories have a visual character . Other people can scarcely reproduce in their memory even the scantiest outlines of what they have experienced. Following Charcot’s proposal, such people are called auditifs and moteurs in contrast to the visuels. In dreams these distinctions disappear: we all dream predominantly in visual images. But this development is similarly reversed in the case of childhood memories: they are plastically visual even in people whose later function of memory has to do without any visual element. Visual memory accordingly preserves the type of infantile memory. In my own case the earliest childhood memories are the only ones of a visual character: they are regular scenes worked out in plastic form, comparable only to representations on the stage. In these scenes of childhood, whether in fact they prove to be true or falsified, what one sees invariably includes oneself as a child, with a child’s shape and clothes. This circumstance must cause surprise: in their recollections of later experiences adult visuels no longer see themselves.¹ Furthermore it contradicts all that we have learnt to suppose that in his experiences a child’s attention is directed to himself instead of exclusively to impressions from outside. One is thus forced by various considerations to suspect that in the so-called earliest childhood memories we possess not the genuine memory-trace but a later revision of it, a revision which may have been subjected to the influences of a variety of later psychical forces. Thus the ‘childhood memories’ of individuals come in general to acquire the significance of ‘screen memories’ and in doing so offer a remarkable analogy with the childhood memories that a nation preserves in its store of legends and myths.

¹ This statement is based on a number of enquiries I have made.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1142

Anyone who has investigated a number of people psychologically by the method of psycho-analysis will in the course of his work have collected numerous examples of every kind of screen memory. However, the reporting of these examples is made extraordinarily difficult owing to the nature of the relations, which I have just discussed, between childhood memories and later life. In order to show that a childhood memory is to be regarded as a screen memory, it would often be necessary to present the complete life history of the person in question. Only rarely is it possible to lift a single screen memory out of its context in order to give an account of it, as in the following good example.

A man of twenty-four has preserved the following picture from his fifth year. He is sitting in the garden of a summer villa, on a small chair beside his aunt, who is trying to teach him the letters of the alphabet. He is in difficulties over the difference between m and n and he asks his aunt to tell him how to know one from the other. His aunt points out to him that the m has a whole piece more than the n - the third stroke. There appeared to be no reason for challenging the trustworthiness of this childhood memory; it had, however, only acquired its meaning at a later date, when it showed itself suited to represent symbolically another of the boy’s curiosities. For just as at that time he wanted to know the difference between m and n, so later he was anxious to find out the difference between boys and girls, and would have been very willing for this particular aunt to be the one to teach him. He also discovered then that the difference was a similar one - that a boy, too, has a whole piece more than a girl; and at the time when he acquired this piece of knowledge he called up the recollection of the parallel curiosity of his childhood.

Here is another example, from the later years of childhood. A man who is severely inhibited in his erotic life, and who is now over forty, is the eldest of nine children. At the time that the youngest of his brothers and sisters was born he was fifteen, yet he maintains firmly and obstinately that he had never noticed any of his mother’s pregnancies. Under pressure from my scepticism a memory presented itself to him: once at the age of eleven or twelve he had seen his mother hurriedly unfasten her skirt in front of the mirror. He now added of his own accord that she had come in from the street and had been overcome by unexpected labour pains. The unfastening of the skirt was a screen memory for the confinement. We shall come across the use of ‘verbal bridges’ of this kind in further cases.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1143

I should like now to give a single example of the way in which a childhood memory, which previously appeared to have no meaning, can acquire one as a result of being worked over by analysis. When I began in my forty-third year to direct my interest to what was left of my memory of my own childhood there came to my mind a scene which had for a long while back (from the remotest past, as it seemed to me) come into consciousness from time to time, and which I had good evidence for assigning to a date before the end of my third year. I saw myself standing in front of a cupboard demanding something and screaming, while my half-brother, my senior by twenty years, held it open. Then suddenly my mother, looking beautiful and slim, walked into the room, as if she had come in from the street. These were the words in which I described the scene, of which I had a plastic picture, but I did not know what more I could make of it. Whether my brother wanted to open or shut the cupboard - in my first translation of the picture I called it a ‘wardrobe’ - why I was crying, and what the arrival of my mother had to do with it all this was obscure to me. The explanation I was tempted to give myself was that what was in question was a memory of being teased by my elder brother and of my mother putting a stop to it. Such misunderstandings of a childhood scene which is preserved in the memory are by no means rare: a situation is recalled, but it is not clear what its central point is, and one does not know on which of its elements the psychical accent is to be placed. Analytic effort led me to take a quite unexpected view of the picture. I had missed my mother, and had come to suspect that she was shut up in this wardrobe or cupboard; and it was for that reason that I was demanding that my brother should open the cupboard. When he did what I asked and I had made certain that my mother was not in the cupboard, I began to scream. This is the moment that my memory has held fast; and it was followed at once by the appearance of my mother, which allayed my anxiety or longing. But how did the child get the idea of looking for his absent mother in the cupboard? Dreams which I had at the same time contained obscure allusions to a nurse of whom I had other recollections, such as, for example, that she used to insist on my dutifully handing over to her the small coins I received as presents - a detail which can itself claim to have the value of a screen memory for later experiences. I accordingly resolved that this time I would make the problem of interpretation easier for myself and would ask my mother, who was by then grown old, about the nurse. I learned a variety of details, among them that this clever but dishonest person had carried out considerable thefts in the house during my mother’s confinement and had been taken to court on a charge preferred by my half-brother. This information threw a flood of light on the childhood scene, and so enabled me to understand it. The sudden disappearance of the nurse had not been a matter of indifference to me: the reason why I had turned in particular to this brother, and had asked him where she was, was probably because I had noticed that he played a part in her disappearance; and he had answered in the elusive and punning fashion that was characteristic of him: ‘She’s "boxed up".’ At the time, I understood this answer in a child’s way, but I stopped asking any more questions as there was nothing more to learn. When my mother left me a short while later, I suspected that my naughty brother had done the same thing to her that he had done to the nurse and I forced him to open the cupboard for me. I now understand, too, why in the translation of this visual childhood scene my mother’s slimness was emphasized: it must have struck me as having just been restored to her. I am two and a half years older than the sister who was born at that time, and when I was three years old my half-brother and I ceased living in the same place.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] Anyone who is interested in the mental life of these years of childhood will find it easy to guess the deeper determinant of the demand made on the big brother. The child of not yet three had understood that the little sister who had recently arrived had grown inside his mother. He was very far from approving of this addition to the family, and was full of mistrust and anxiety that his mother’s inside might conceal still more children. The wardrobe or cupboard was a symbol for him of his mother’s inside. So he insisted on looking into this cupboard, and turned for this to his big brother, who (as is clear from other material) had taken his father’s place as the child’s rival. Besides the well-founded suspicion that this brother had had the lost nurse ‘boxed up’, there was a further suspicion against him - namely that he had in some way introduced the recently born baby into his mother’s inside. The affect of disappointment when the cupboard was found to be empty derived, therefore, from the superficial motivation for the child’s demand. As regards the deeper trend of thought, the affect was in the wrong place. On the other hand, his great satisfaction over his mother’s slimness on her return can only be fully understood in the light of this deeper layer.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1144

CHAPTER V

SLIPS OF THE TONGUE

The ordinary material which we use for talking in our native language appears to be protected against being forgotten; but it succumbs all the more frequently to another disturbance, which is known as a ‘slip of the tongue’. The slips of the tongue that we observe in normal people give an impression of being the preliminary stages of the so-called ‘paraphasias’ that appear under pathological conditions. This is a subject on which I find myself in the exceptional position of being able to acknowledge the value of a previous work. In 1895 Meringer and C. Mayer published a study on ‘Slips in Speaking and Reading’. Their lines of approach differ widely from my own. One of the authors, who acts as spokesman in the text, is in fact a philologist, and it was his linguistic interests which led him to attempt to discover the rules that govern the making of slips of the tongue. He hoped to be able to conclude from these rules that there exists ‘a certain mental mechanism, in which the sounds of a word, or of a sentence, and the words as well, are mutually linked and connected in a quite peculiar way’ (10).¹

¹ [Page references in this chapter, unless otherwise specified, are to Meringer and Mayer (1895).]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1145

The examples of slips of the tongue collected by the authors are first grouped by them in purely descriptive categories. They are classed as transpositions (e. g. ‘the Milo of Venus’ instead of ‘the Venus of Milo’); pre-sonances or anticipations (e. g. ‘es war mir auf der Schwest . . . auf der Brust so schwer’¹); post-sonances or perseverations (e. g. ‘Ich fordere Sie auf; auf das Wohl unseres Chefs aufzustossen’ instead of ‘anzustossen’);² contaminations (e. g. ‘er setzt sich auf den Hinterkopf’, combined from ‘er setzt sich einen Kopf auf’ and ‘er stellt sich auf die Hinterbeine’);³ and substitutions (e. g. ‘ich gebe die Präparate in den Briefkasten’ instead of ‘Brütkasten’).4 There are in addition to these main categories a few others which are less important (or less significant from our own point of view). In the above arrangement into groups it makes no difference whether the transposition, distortion, amalgamation, etc., is concerned with single sounds in a word, with syllables, or with complete words forming part of the intended sentence.

To explain the various kinds of slips of the tongue he had observed, Meringer postulates that different spoken sounds hare a different psychical valency. When we innervate the first sound in a word or the first word in a sentence, the excitatory process already extends to the later sounds and the following words, and in so far as these innervations are simultaneous with one another they can exercise a modifying influence on one another. The excitation of the sound that is psychically more intense anticipates other excitations or perseverates after them, and in this way disturbs the less valent process of innervation. The question has therefore to be decided which sounds in a word have the highest valency. Here is Meringer’s view: ‘If we want to know which sound in a word has the highest intensity, we must observe ourselves when we are searching for a forgotten word, e. g. for a name. Whichever is the first to come back into consciousness is in every case the one that had the greatest intensity before the word was forgotten’ (160). ‘The sounds which are of high valency are the initial sound in the root syllable, and the initial sound in the word, and the accentuated vowel or vowels’ (162).

¹ [The intended phrase was: ‘it lay so heavily on my breast (Brust).’ The substituted ‘Schwest’ is a non-existent word.]

² [‘I call on you to hiccough to the health of our Principal’ instead of ‘drink to’.]

³ [‘He stands on the back of his head’ (a meaningless phrase) combined from ‘He is obstinate’ (Iiterally, ‘he puts on a head’) and ‘He gets on his hind legs’.]

4 [‘I put the preparation into the letter-box’ instead of ‘incubator’, literally ‘hatching-box’.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1146

I cannot help contradicting him here. Whether the initial sound of the name is one of the elements of highest valency: a word or not, it is certainly untrue that in a forgotten word; is the first to return to consciousness. The rule stated above is therefore inapplicable. If we observe ourselves while searching for a forgotten name, we are comparatively often obliged to express a conviction that it begins with a particular letter. This conviction proves to be unfounded just as often as not. Indeed I should like to assert that in the majority of cases the initial sound which we announce is a wrong one. In our example of ‘Signorelli’, in fact, the substitute names had lost the initial sound and the essential syllables: it was precisely the less valent pair of syllables - elli - which returned to memory in the substitute name Botticelli.

How little attention is paid by the substitute names to the initial sound of the missing name may be learned, for instance, from the following case:

One day I found it impossible to recall the name of the small country of which Monte Carlo is the chief town. The substitute names for it ran: Piedmont, Albania, Montevideo, Colico. Albania was soon replaced in my mind by Montenegro; and it then occurred to me that the syllable ‘Mont’ (pronounced ‘Mon’) was found in all the substitute names except the last. Thus it was easy for me, starting from the name of Prince Albert, to find the forgotten name Monaco. Colico gives a pretty close imitation of the sequence of syllables and the rhythm of the forgotten name.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1147

If we allow ourselves to suppose that a mechanism similar to that which has been demonstrated for the forgetting of names could also play a part in the phenomena of slips of the tongue, we are led to form a more deeply based judgement of instances of the latter. The disturbance in speaking which is manifested in a slip of the tongue can in the first place be caused by the influence of another component of the same speech - by an anticipatory sound, that is, or by a perseveration - or by another formulation of the ideas contained within the sentence or context that it is one’s intention to utter. This is the type to which all the above examples borrowed from Meringer and Mayer belong. The disturbance could, however, be of a second kind, analogous to the process in the Signorelli case; it could result from influences outside this word, sentence or context, and arise out of elements which are not intended to be uttered and of whose excitation we only learn precisely through the actual disturbance. What these two ways in which slips of the tongue arise have in common would be the simultaneity of the interfering excitation; what differentiates them would be the position of the excitation inside or outside the sentence or context. The difference does not at first appear great in so far as it concerns certain deductions that can be made from the symptomatology of slips of the tongue. It is clear, however, that only in the former case is there any prospect of drawing conclusions from the phenomena of slips of the tongue about a mechanism which links sounds and words with one another so that they mutually influence their articulation - conclusions, that is, such as the philologist hoped to arrive at from studying slips of the tongue. In the case of interference from influences outside the same sentence or context of what is being said, it would be above all a matter of getting to know that the interfering elements are - after which the question would arise whether the mechanism of this disturbance, too, can reveal the supposed laws of speech formation.

Meringer and Mayer cannot be said to have overlooked the possibility that disturbances of speech may be the result of ‘complicated psychical influences’, of elements outside the same word, sentence or sequence of spoken words. They were bound to observe that the theory which asserts that sounds are of unequal psychical valency is strictly speaking only adequate for explaining sound-disturbances, together with sound-anticipations and perseverations. Where word-disturbances cannot be reduced to sound-disturbances (as, for instance, in substitutions and contaminations of words), they have not hesitated to look outside the intended context for the cause of the slip - a procedure which they justify by some good examples. I quote the following passages:

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1148

‘Ru. was speaking of occurrences which, within himself he pronounced to be "Schweinereien [disgusting, literally piggish]". He tried, however, to express himself mildly, and began: "But then facts came to ‘Vorschwein’  . . ."¹ Mayer and I were present and Ru. confirmed his having thought "Schweinereien". The fact of this word which he thought being betrayed in "Vorschwein" and suddenly becoming operative is sufficiently explained by the similarity of the words.’ (62)

Just as in contaminations, so also - and probably to a much higher degree - in substitutions an important role is played by ‘floating" or "wandering" speech images. Even if they are beneath the threshold of consciousness they are still near enough to be operative, and can easily be brought into play by any resemblance they may have to the complex that is to be spoken. When this is so they cause a deviation in the train of words or cut across it. "Floating" or "wandering" speech images are often, as we have said, stragglers following after speech processes which have recently terminated (perseverations).’ (73)

‘Resemblance can also cause a deviation when another, similar word lies a short way below the threshold of consciousness, without a decision to speak it having been reached. This is the case with substitutions. - Thus I hope that my rules will of necessity be confirmed when they are tested. But for this it is necessary (if the speaker is someone else) that we should obtain a clear notion of everything that was in the speaker’s thoughts.² Here is an instructive case. Li., a schoolmaster, said in our presence: "Die Frau würde mir Furcht einlagen."³ I was taken aback, for the l struck me as inexplicable. I ventured to draw the speaker’s attention to his slip in saying "einlagen" for "einjagen", upon which he at once replied: "Yes, the reason was that I thought: I should not be ‘in der Lage [in a position]’, etc."

¹ [Ru. intended to say ‘came to “light”’ and should have used the word ‘Vorschein’. Instead he used the meaningless word ‘Vorschwein’.]

² My italics.

³ [He intended to say: ‘The lady would strike (einjagen) terror into me.’ But instead of ‘einjagen’ he said ‘einlagen’, which is a non-existent verb - though ‘Lage’ is a familiar noun meaning ‘position’.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1149

‘Here is another case. I asked R. von Schid. how his sick horse was getting on. He replied: "Ja, das draut  . . . dauert vielleicht noch einen Monat."¹ I could not understand the "draut", with an r, for the r in "dauert" could not possibly had had this result. So I drew his attention to it, whereupon he explained that his thought had been: "das ist eine traurige Geschichte [it’s a sad story]." Thus the speaker had two answers in his mind and they had been intermixed.’ (97)

It is pretty obvious that the consideration of ‘wandering’ speech images which lie below the threshold of consciousness and are not intended to be spoken, and the demand for information about everything that had been in the speaker’s mind, are procedures which constitute a very close approach to the state of affairs in our ‘analyses’. We too are looking for unconscious material; and we even look for it along the same path, except that, in proceeding from the ideas that enter the mind of the person who is being questioned to the discovery of the disturbing element, we have to follow a longer path, through a complicated series of associations.

I shall dwell for a moment on another interesting process, to which Meringer’s examples bear witness. The author himself holds that it is some sort of similarity between a word in the sentence intended to be spoken and another word not so intended which permits the latter to make itself felt in consciousness by bringing about a distortion, a composite figure, or a compromise‑formation (contamination):

jagen,                             dauert,                         Vorschein

lagen,                             traurig,                         . . . schwein.

Now in my Interpretation of Dreams (1900a) I have demonstrated the part played by the work of condensation in forming what is called the manifest dream-content out of the latent dream-thoughts. A similarity of any sort between two elements of the unconscious material - a similarity between the things themselves or between their verbal presentations - is taken as an opportunity for creating a third, which is a composite or compromise idea. In the dream-content this third element represents both its components; and it is as a consequence of its originating in this way that it so frequently has various contradictory characteristics. The formation of substitutions and contaminations which occurs in slips of the tongue is accordingly a beginning of the work of condensation which we find taking a most vigorous share in the construction of dreams.

¹ [What he intended to say was: ‘Well, it will last (dauerti) another month perhaps.’ Instead of ‘dauert’ he used the meaningless word ‘draut’]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1150

In a short essay designed for a wider circle of readers Meringer (1900) has claimed that a special practical significance attaches to particular cases in which one word is put for another - viz. to those cases in which a word is replaced by another that has the opposite meaning. ‘You probably still recall’, he writes, ‘the way in which the President of the Lower House of the Austrian Parliament opened the sitting a short while ago: "Gentlemen: I take notice that a full quorum of members is present and herewith declare the sitting closed!" His attention was only drawn by the general merriment and he corrected his mistake. In this particular case the explanation no doubt was that the President secretly wished he was already in a position to close the sitting, from which little good was to be expected. But this accompanying idea, as frequently happens, broke through, at least partially, and the result was "closed" instead of "open" - the opposite, that is, of what was intended to be expressed. Now extensive observations have taught me that words with opposite meanings are, quite generally, very often interchanged; they are already associated in our linguistic consciousness, they lie very close to each other and it is easy for the wrong one to be evoked.’

It cannot be said that in all cases where words are replaced by their opposites it is as easy as in this instance of the President to show the probability of the slip being a consequence of a contradiction arising in the speaker’s mind against the uttered sentence. We found an analogous mechanism in our analysis of the aliquis example. There the internal contradiction expressed itself in a word being forgotten, instead of its being replaced by its opposite. But in order to soften the distinction we may note that the word aliquis is in fact incapable of having an opposite like ‘to close’ and ‘to open’, and that ‘to open’ is a word that cannot be forgotten as it is too familiar a part of our vocabulary.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1151

If the last examples of Meringer and Mayer show that the disturbance of speech can arise on the one hand from the influence of anticipatory or perseverating sounds and words of the same sentence which are intended to be spoken, and on the other hand from the effect of words outside the intended sentence whose excitation would not otherwise have been revealed, the first thing we shall want to know is whether the two classes of slips of the tongue can be sharply divided, and how an example of one class can be distinguished from a case of the other. At this point in the discussion one must however bear in mind the views expressed by Wundt, who deals with the phenomena of slips of the tongue in the course of his comprehensive discussion of the laws of the development of speech.

According to him, a feature that is never missing from these and other related phenomena is the activity of certain psychical influences. ‘First of all they have a positive determinant in the form of the uninhibited stream of sound-associations and word-associations evoked by the spoken sounds. In addition there is a negative factor in the form of the suppression or relaxation of the inhibitory effects of the will on this current, and of the attention which is also active here as a function of the will. Whether this play of association manifests itself by a coming sound being anticipated, or by the preceding sounds being reproduced, or by a habitually practised sound being intercalated between others, or finally by quite different words, which stand in an associative relation to the sounds that are spoken, having an effect upon them - all these indicate only differences in the direction and at the most in the scope of the associations taking place, and not differences in their general nature. In some cases, too, it may be doubtful to which form a certain disturbance is to be assigned, or whether it would not be more justifiable, in accordance with the principle of the complication of causes,¹ to trace it back to a concurrence of several motive forces.’ (Wundt, 1900, 380-1.)

¹ My italics.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1152

I consider these observations of Wundt’s fully justified and very instructive. Perhaps it would be possible to emphasize more definitely than Wundt does that the positive factor favouring the slip of the tongue (the uninhibited stream of associations) and the negative factor (the relaxation of the inhibiting attention) invariably achieve their effect in combination, so that the two factors become merely different ways of regarding the same process. What happens is that, with the relaxation of the inhibiting attention - in still plainer terms, as a result of this relaxation - the uninhibited stream of associations comes into action.

Among the slips of the tongue that I have collected myself I can find hardly one in which I should be obliged to trace the disturbance of speech simply and solely to what Wundt calls the ‘contact effect of sounds’. I almost invariably discover a disturbing influence in addition which comes from something outside the intended utterance; and the disturbing element is either a single thought that has remained unconscious, which manifests itself in the slip of the tongue and which can often be brought to consciousness only by means of searching analysis, or it is a more general psychical motive force which is directed against the entire utterance.

(1) My daughter had made an ugly face when she took a bite at an apple, and I wanted to quote to her:

Der Affe gar possierlich ist,

Zumal wenn er vom Apfel frisst.¹

But I began: ‘Der Apfe . . .’ [a non-existent word]. This looks like a contamination of ‘Affe [ape]’ and ‘Apfel [apple]’ (a compromise-formation), or it might be regarded as an anticipation of the word ‘Apfel’ that was in preparation. The circumstances were, however, more precisely as follows. I had already begun the quotation once before and had not made a slip of the tongue the first time. I only made a slip when I repeated it. The repetition was necessary because the person I was addressing had had her attention distracted from another quarter and she had not been listening to me. I must include the fact of the repetition, together with my impatience to have done with my sentence, among the motives of the slip which made its appearance as a product of condensation.

¹ [The ape’s a very comic sight when from an apple he takes a bite.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1153

(2) My daughter said: ‘I am writing to Frau Schresinger . . .’ The lady’s name is Schlesinger. This slip of the tongue is probably connected with a trend towards making articulation easier, for an l is difficult to pronounce after a repeated r. I must add, however, that my daughter made this slip a few minutes after I had said ‘Apfe’ for ‘Affe’. Now slips of the tongue are in a high degree contagious, like the forgetting of names - a peculiar fact which Meringer and Mayer have noticed in the case of the latter. I cannot suggest any reason for this psychical contagiousness.

(3) ‘I shut up like a Tassenmescher - I mean Taschenmesser ', said a woman patient at the start of the hour of treatment. Here again a difficulty in articulation (cf. ‘Wiener Weiber Wäscherinnen waschen weisse Wäsche’, ‘Fischflosse’ and similar tongue-twisters) could serve as an excuse for her interchanging the sounds. When her attention was drawn to her slip, she promptly replied: ‘Yes, that’s only because you said "Ernscht" to-day.’ I had in fact received her with the remark: ‘To-day we shall really be in earnest ' (because it was going to be the last session before the holidays), and had jokingly broadened ‘Ernst’ into ‘Ernscht’. In the course of the hour she repeatedly made further slips of the tongue, and I finally observed that she was not merely imitating me but had a special reason for dwelling in her unconscious on the word ‘Ernst’ in its capacity as a name.¹

¹ In fact she turned out to be under the influence of unconscious thoughts about pregnancy and contraception. By the words ‘shut up like a pocket-knife’, which she uttered consciously as a complaint, she wanted to describe the position of a child in the womb. The word ‘Ernst’ in my opening remark had reminded her of the name (S. Ernst) of a well known Viennese firm in the Kärntnerstrasse which used to advertise the sale of contraceptives.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1154

(4) ‘I’ve got such a cold, I can’t durch die Ase natmen - I mean, Nase atmen’,¹ the same patient happened to say another time. She knew immediately how she had come to make the slip. ‘Every day I get on the tram in Hasenauer Street, and while I was waiting for one to come along this morning it struck me that if I was French I should say "Asenauer", as the French always drop their aitches at the beginning of a word.’ She then brought a series of reminiscences about French people of her acquaintance, and came in a very roundabout manner to a memory of having played the part of Picarde in the short play Kürmarker und Picarde when she was a girl of fourteen, and of having spoken broken German in the part. The chance arrival at her boarding house of a guest from Paris had awoken the whole series of memories. The interchanging of the sounds was therefore the result of a disturbance by an unconscious thought from an entirely different context.

(5) A slip of the tongue had a similar mechanism in the case of another woman patient, whose memory failed her in the middle of reproducing a long-lost recollection of childhood. Her memory would not tell her what part of her body had been grasped by a prying and lascivious hand. Immediately afterwards she called on a friend with whom she discussed summer residences. When she was asked where her cottage at M. was situated she answered: ‘on the Berglende [hill-thigh]’ instead of Berglehne [hill-side].

(6) When I asked another woman patient at the end of the session how her uncle was, she answered: ‘I don’t know, nowadays I only see him in flagranti.’ Next day she began: ‘I am really ashamed of myself for having given you such a stupid answer. You must of course have thought me a very uneducated person who is always getting foreign words mixed up. I meant to say: en passant.’ We did not as yet know the source of the foreign phrase which she had wrongly applied. In the same session, however, while continuing the previous day’s topic, she brought up a reminiscence in which the chief role was played by being caught in flagranti. The slip of the tongue of the day before had therefore anticipated the memory which at the time had not yet become conscious.

¹ [She meant to say: ‘I can’t breathe through my nose.’ Her actual last two words, ‘Ase natmen’, have no meaning.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1155

(7) At a certain point in the analysis of another woman patient I had to tell her that I suspected her of having been ashamed of her family during the period we were just then concerned with, and of having reproached her father with something we did not yet know about. She remembered nothing of the kind and moreover declared it was unlikely. However, she continued the conversation with some remarks about her family: ‘One thing must be granted them: they are certainly unusual people, they all possess Geiz  - I meant to say "Geist ".’ And this was in fact the reproach which she had repressed from her memory. It is a frequent occurrence for the idea one wants to withhold to be precisely the one which forces its way through in the form of a slip of the tongue. We may compare Meringer’s case of ‘zum Vorschwein gekommen’. The only difference is that Meringer’s speaker wanted to keep back something that was in his consciousness, whereas my patient did not know what was being kept back, or, to put it in another way, did not know she was keeping something back and what that something was.

(8) The next example of a slip of the tongue is also to be traced back to something intentionally withheld. I once met two old ladies in the Dolomites who were dressed up in walking clothes. I accompanied them part of the way, and we discussed the pleasures and also the trials of spending a holiday in that way. One of the ladies admitted that spending the day like that entailed a good deal of discomfort. ‘It is certainly not at all pleasant’, she said, ‘if one has been tramping all day in the sun and has perspired right through one’s blouse and chemise.’ In this sentence she had to overcome a slight hesitation at one point. Then she continued: ‘But then when one gets "nach Hose" and can change . . .’ No interpellation, I fancy, was necessary in order to explain this slip. The lady’s intention had obviously been to give a more complete list of her clothes: blouse, chemise and Hose. Reasons of propriety led her to suppress any mention of the third article of linen. But in the next sentence, with its different subject-matter, the suppressed word emerged against her will, in the form of a distortion of the similar word ‘nach Hause '.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1156

(9) ‘If you want to buy carpets,’ a lady said to me, ‘you must go to Kaufmann [a proper name, also meaning ‘merchant’] in the Matthäusgasse [Matthew Street]. I think I can give you recommendation there.’ ‘At Matthäus . . .’ I repeated, ‘I mean Kaufmann’s.’ My repeating one name in the other’s place looks like a result of my thoughts being distracted. They really were distracted by what the woman said, for she diverted my attention to something much more important to me than carpets. As a matter of fact, the house in which my wife lived when she was my fiancée was in the Matthäusgasse. The entrance to the house was in another street, and I now noticed that I had forgotten its name and could only make it conscious in a round about way. The name Matthäus, which I was lingering over, was therefore a substitute name for the forgotten street-name. It was more suitable for this purpose than the name Kaufmann, for Matthäus is exclusively a personal name, while Kaufmann is not, and the forgotten street also bears the name of a person: Radetzky.

(10) The following case could just as appropriately be included in the chapter below on ‘Errors’, but I quote it here, since the phonetic relations, which were the basis of one word being put in place of another, are quite unusually clear. A woman patient told me a dream: A child had resolved to kill itself by means of a snake-bite. It carried out its resolution. She watched it writhing in convulsions, and so on. She had now to find the impressions of the previous day which the dream had taken as its starting point. She immediately recalled that on the previous evening she had listened to a public lecture on first aid for snake-bites. If an adult and a child were bitten at the same time, the child’s injury should be attended to first. She also remembered what the lecturer had prescribed by way of treatment. It would very much depend, he had said, on what kind of snake caused the bite. I interrupted at this point and asked: Surely he must have said that we have very few poisonous kinds in these parts and he must have told you which are the dangerous ones? ‘Yes, he particularly mentioned the "Klapperschlange [rattlesnake]".’ My laughter drew her attention to her having said something wrong. She did not correct the name, but took back her statement: ‘Yes, of course, they aren’t found here; he was talking of the viper. How can I have got the idea of the rattlesnake?’ I suspected it was due to interference by the thoughts which had hidden behind her dream. Suicide by means of a snake-bite could hardly be anything other than an allusion to the beautiful Cleopatra [in German: ‘Kleopatra’]. The great similarity between the sound of the two words, the occurrence in both of the same letters ‘Kl. . .  p. . .’ in the same order, and of the same stressed ‘a’, was unmistakable. The close connection between the names ‘Klapperschlange’ and ‘Kleopatra’ resulted in her judgement being momentarily restricted, so that she saw no objection to asserting that the lecturer had given his audience in Vienna instructions on how to treat rattlesnake bites. In the ordinary way she knew as well as I did that that species of snake is not among the fauna of our country. We will not blame her for her equal lack of hesitation in transferring the rattlesnake to Egypt, for it is usual for us to lump together everything which is non-European and exotic, and I had myself to reflect for a moment before declaring that the rattlesnake is confined to the New World.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1157

The continuation of the analysis brought further confirmation. On the previous day the dreamer had for the first time inspected the Mark Antony monument by Strasser, which stood in the vicinity of her home. This then was the second exciting cause of the dream (the first having been the lecture on snake bites). In the continuation of the dream she was rocking a child in her arms. This scene reminded her of Gretchen. Further ideas which occurred to her brought reminiscences of Arria und Messalina. From the fact that the names of so many plays made their appearance in the dream-thoughts we may already have a suspicion that in her earlier years the dreamer had cherished a secret passion for the profession of actress. The beginning of the dream -’A child had resolved to put an end to its life by means of a snake-bite’ - had in fact no other meaning than that when she was a child she had made up her mind to become a famous actress one day. Finally, from the name ‘Messalina’ the path of thoughts branched off which led to the essential content of the dream. Certain recent events had made her apprehensive that her only brother might make a socially unsuitable marriage, a mésalliance with a non-Aryan [the latter from the ‘Arria’ part of the tragedy’s title]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1158

(11) I will reproduce here an entirely innocent example (of perhaps one whose motives were insufficiently elucidated), because it displays a transparent mechanism.

A German who was travelling in Italy needed a strap to tie up his damaged trunk. For ‘strap’ the dictionary gave him the Italian word ‘corregia’. It will be easy, he thought, to remember the word by thinking of the painter Corregio. After that he went into a shop and asked for ‘una ribera’.

He had apparently not been successful in replacing the German word by the Italian one in his memory but his efforts were nevertheless not entirely unsuccessful. He knew he had to keep in mind the name of a painter, and in this way he hit upon the name not of the painter who sounded much the same as the Italian word, but of another one who resembled the German word ‘Riemen’. I could of course have quoted the present case just as appropriately as an example of the for getting of a name rather than of a slip of the tongue.

When I was collecting slips of the tongue for the first edition of this book I proceeded by subjecting to analysis every case I was able to observe, and accordingly included the less impressive ones. Since then a number of other people have undertaken the amusing task of collecting and analysing slips of the tongue, and have thus enabled me to select from a richer material.

(12) A young man said to his sister: ‘I’ve completely fallen out with the D.’s now. We’re not on speaking terms any longer.’ ‘Yes indeed!’ she answered, ‘they’re a fine Lippschaft.’¹ She meant to say ‘Sippschaft’ [lot, crew]’, but in the slip she compressed two ideas: viz. that her brother had himself once begun a flirtation with the daughter of this family, and that this daughter was said to have recently become involved in a serious and irregular Liebschaft [love-affair].

¹ [A non-existent word.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1159

(13) A young man addressed a lady in the street in the following words: ‘If you will permit me, madam, I should like to "begleit-digen" you.’ It was obvious what his thoughts were: he would like to ‘begleiten ' her, but was afraid his offer would ‘beleidigen ' her. That these two conflicting emotional impulses found expression in one word - in the slip of the tongue, in fact - indicates that the young man’s real intentions were at any rate not of the purest, and were bound to seem, even to himself, insulting to the lady. But while he attempted to conceal this from her, his unconscious played a trick on him by betraying his real intentions. But on the other hand he in this way, as it were, anticipated the lady’s conventional retort: ‘Really! What do you take me for? How dare you insult me!’ (Reported by O. Rank.)

I will next quote a number of examples from an article by Stekel, entitled ‘Unconscious Admissions’, in the Berliner Tageblatt of January 4, 1904.

(14) ‘An unpleasant part of my unconscious thoughts is disclosed by the following example. I may start by stating that in my capacity as a doctor I never consider my remuneration but only have the patient’s interest in mind: that goes without saying. I was with a woman patient to whom I was giving medical attention in a period of convalescence after a serious illness. We had been though hard days and nights together. I was happy to find her improved; I painted a picture for her benefit of the delights of a stay in Abbazia, and concluded by saying: "If, as I hope, you will not leave your bed soon. . . ." This obviously owed its origin to an egoistic motive in the unconscious, namely that I should be able to continue treating this well-to-do patient some time longer - a wish that is entirely foreign to my waking consciousness and which I would indignantly repudiate.’

(15) Here is another example from Stekel. ‘My wife was engaging a French governess for the afternoons, and after agreement had been reached on the terms, wanted to retain her testimonials. The Frenchwoman asked to be allowed to keep them, giving as her reason: Je cherche encore pour les après-midis, pardon, pour le avant-midis [I am still looking for work in the afternoons - I mean, in the forenoons]. She obviously had the intention of looking round elsewhere and perhaps finding better terms - an intention which she in fact carried out.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1160

(16) From Stekel: ‘I had to give a stiff lecture to a wife; and her husband, at whose request I did it, stood outside the door listening. At the end of my sermon, which had made a visible impression, I said: "Good-bye, sir." To any well-informed person I was thus betraying the fact that my words were addressed to the husband and that I had spoken them for his benefit.’

(17) Stekel reports of himself that at one time he had two patients from Trieste in treatment whom he always used to address the wrong way round. ‘Good morning, Herr Peloni’, he would say to Askoli, and ‘Good morning, Herr Askoli’ to Peloni. He was at first inclined not to attribute any deeper motive to this confusion but to explain it as being due to the numerous points of resemblance between the two gentlemen. However it was easy for him to convince himself that the interchanging of the names corresponded in this case to a kind of boastfulness: he was able in this way to let each of his Italian patients know that he was not the only visitor from Trieste who had come to Vienna in search of his medical advice.

(18) Stekel reports that during a stormy General Meeting he said: ‘We shall now streiten ' (instead of ‘schreiten ') ‘to point four on the agenda.’

(19) A professor declared in his inaugural lecture: ‘I am not geneigt ' (instead of ‘geeignet ') ‘to describe the services of my most esteemed predecessor.’

(20) To a lady whom he suspected of having Graves’ disease Stekel said: ‘You are about a Kropf ' (instead of ‘Kopf ') ‘taller than your sister.’

(21) Stekel reports: ‘Someone wanted to describe the relationship of two friends and to bring out the fact that one of them was Jewish. He said: "They lived together like Castor and Pollak."¹ This was certainly not said as a joke; the speaker did not notice the slip himself until I drew his attention to it.’

¹ [Castor and Pollux were the ‘heavenly twins’ of Greek mythology. Pollak is a common Jewish name in Vienna.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1161

(22) Occasionally a slip of the tongue takes the place of a detailed characterization. A young woman who wore the breeches in her home told me that her sick husband had been to the doctor to ask what diet he ought to follow for his health. The doctor, however, had said that a special diet was not important. She added: ‘He can eat and drink what I want.’

The following two examples given by Reik (1915) have their origin in situations where slips of the tongue occur especially easily - situations in which more must be kept back than can be said.

(23) A gentleman was offering his condolences to a young lady whose husband had recently died, and he intended to add: ‘You will find consolation in devoting yourself entirely to your children.’ Instead he said ‘widwen’.¹ The suppressed thought referred to consolation of another kind: a young and pretty widow will soon enjoy fresh sexual pleasures.

(24) At an evening party the same gentleman was having a conversation with the same lady about the extensive preparations being made in Berlin for Easter, and asked: ‘Have you seen today’s display at Wertheim’s? The place is completely decollated.’ He had not dared to express his admiration for the beautiful lady’s décolletage, while the word ‘Auslage’ was used unconsciously in two senses.

The same condition applies to another case, observed by Dr. Hanns Sachs, of which he has tried to give an exhaustive account:

(25) ‘A lady was telling me about a common acquaintance. The last time she saw him, he was, she said, as elegantly dressed as ever: in particular he was wearing strikingly beautiful brown Halbschuhe. When I asked where she had met him she replied: "He rang at the door of my house and I saw him through the blinds, which were down. But I didn’t open the door or give any other sign of life, as I didn’t want him to know I was already back in town." While I was listening to her I had an idea that she was concealing something from me, most probably the fact that her reason for not opening the door was that she was not alone and not properly dressed to receive visitors; and I asked her somewhat ironically: "So you were able to admire his Hausschuhe  - Halbschuhe, I mean - through the blinds when they were drawn?" In Hausschuhe I was giving expression to the thought of her Hauskleid which I had refrained from uttering. There was on the other hand a temptation to set rid of the word "Halb " for the reason that it was precisely this word which contained the core of the forbidden answer: "You are only telling me half the truth and are hiding the fact that you were half dressed." The slip of the tongue was encouraged by the additional circumstance that we had been talking directly before about this particular gentleman’s married life, about his häuslich happiness; this no doubt helped to determine the displacement on to him. Finally, I must confess that envy on my part may perhaps have contributed to my placing this elegant gentleman in the street in house shoes; only recently I myself bought a pair of brown low shoes, which are certainly not "strikingly beautiful" any longer.’

¹ [A non-existent word.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1162

Times of war like the present produce numerous slips of the tongue which there is not much difficulty in understanding.

(26) ‘What regiment is your son with?’ a lady was asked. She replied: ‘With the 42nd murderers’.

(27) Lieutenant Henrik Haiman writes from the front (1917): ‘While I was reading an absorbing book, I was torn away to act temporarily as reconnaissance telephone operator. When the artillery post gave the signal to test the line I reacted with: "Duly tested and in order; Ruhe."¹ According to regulations the message should have run: "Duly tested and in order; Schluss." My aberration is to be explained by my annoyance at being interrupted while I was reading.’

(28) A sergeant instructed his men to give their people at home their correct addresses, so that ‘Gespeckstücke’ should not go astray.²

¹ [‘Quiet’; often used as an exclamation: ‘Silence!’]

² [He meant to say ‘Gepäckstücke’ (‘parcels’). ‘Gespeckstücke’ is a non-existent word; but ‘Speckstücke’ would mean ‘bits of bacon’. The vowel after the ‘p’ has practically the same sound in each case (whether written ‘e’ or ‘ä').]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1163

(29) The following exceedingly fine example, which is also significant in view of its most unhappy background, I owe to Dr. L. Czeszer, who observed it while he was living in neutral Switzerland during the war and who analysed it exhaustively. I quote his letter verbatim with some inessential omissions:

‘I am taking the liberty of sending you an account of a slip of the tongue of which Professor M. N. of O. University was the victim in one of the lectures that he gave on the psychology of feelings during the summer term which has just ended. I must start by saying that these lectures took place in the Aula of the University before a great crowd of interned French prisoners-of-war as well as of students, most of whom were French-Swiss whose sympathies lay strongly on the side of the Entente. In the town of O., as in France itself, "boche" is the name in universal and exclusive use for the Germans. But in public announcements, and in lectures and the like, senior public servants, professors and other persons in responsible positions make an effort, for the sake of neutrality, to avoid the ominous word.

‘Professor N, was in the middle of discussing the practical significance of affects, and intended to quote an example illustrating how an affect can be deliberately exploited in such a way that a muscular activity which is uninteresting in itself becomes charged with pleasurable feelings, and so made more intense. He accordingly told a story - he was, of course, speaking in French - which had just then been reproduced in the local papers from a German one. It concerned a German schoolmaster who had put his pupils to work in the garden, and in order to encourage them to work with greater intensity invited them to imagine that with every clod of earth that they broke up they were breaking a French skull. Every time the word for "German" came up in the course of his story N. of course said "allemand" quite correctly and not "boche". But when he came to the point of the story he gave the school-master’s words in the following form: Imaginez-vous qu’en chaque moche vous écrasez le cráne d’un Français. That is to say, instead of motte [the French word for ‘clod’] - moche!

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1164

‘One can see very clearly how this scrupulous scholar took a firm grip on himself at the beginning of his story, to prevent himself from yielding to habit - perhaps even to temptation and from permitting a word that had actually been expressly proscribed by a federal decree to fall from the rostrum of the University Aula! And at the precise moment at which he had successfully said "instituteur allemand " with perfect correctness for what was the last time, and was hurrying with an inward sigh of relief to the conclusion, which seemed to offer no pitfalls - the word which had been suppressed with so much effort caught hold of the similar-sounding ‘motte", and the damage was done. Anxiety about committing a political indiscretion, perhaps a suppressed desire to employ the usual word in spite of everything - the word that everyone expected - and the resentment of one who was born a republican and a democrat at every restriction on the free expression of opinion - all these interfered with his main intention of giving a punctilious rendering of the illustration. The interfering trend was known to the speaker and he had, as we cannot but suppose, thought of it directly before he made the slip of the tongue.

‘Professor N. did not notice his slip: at least he did not correct it, which is something one usually does quite automatically. On the other hand the slip was received by the mainly French audience with real satisfaction and its effect was exactly as though it had been an intentional play upon words. I myself followed this seemingly innocent occurrence with real inner excitement. For although I had for obvious reasons to forgo asking the professor the questions prompted by the psycho-analytic method, I nevertheless took his slip of the tongue as conclusive evidence of the correctness of your theory about the determining of parapraxes and the deep-lying analogies and connections between slips of the tongue and jokes.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1165

(30) The following slip of the tongue, which was reported by an Austrian officer, Lieutenant T., on his return home, also had its origin among the melancholy impressions of war-time:

‘For several months of the time that I was a prisoner-of-war in Italy I was one of two hundred officers accommodated in a small villa. During this time one of our number died of influenza. The impression made by this event was naturally a deep one, for the circumstances in which we found ourselves, the lack of medical assistance and the helplessness of our condition at the time made it more than probable that an epidemic would break out. - We had laid out the dead man in a cellar-room. In the evening, after I had taken a walk around our house with a friend, we both expressed a wish to see the dead body. The sight which greeted me on entering the cellar (I was the one in front) startled me violently, for I had not expected to find the bier so near the entrance and to be confronted at such close quarters with a face transformed by the play of the candle light into something set in movement. While the effects of this scene were still on us we continued our walk around the house. When we came to a place from where there was a view of the park bathed in the light of a full moon, a brightly-lit meadow and beyond it a thing veil of mist, I described the picture that it conjured up; it was as if I saw a ring of elves dancing under the fringe of the neighbouring pine trees.

‘The next afternoon we buried our dead comrade. The course of our walk from our prison to the cemetery of the small neighbouring village was both bitter and humiliating for us; for a mocking, jeering crowd made up of shouting half-grown lads and rough, noisy villagers took advantage of the occasion to give open vent to their emotions, which were a mixture of curiosity and hatred. My feeling that even in this defenceless condition we could not escape insults and my disgust at the demonstration of coarseness overwhelmed me with bitterness until the evening. At the same hour as on the previous day and with the same companion, I began to walk along the gravel path around our house, just as I had done before; and as we passed by the grating of the cellar behind which the dead body had lain I was seized by the memory of the impression which the sight of it had made on me. At the place where the brightly lit park once more lay before me, in the light of the same, full moon, I stopped and said to my companion: "We could sit down here in the grave - grass and sink a serenade." My attention was not caught until I made the second slip; I had corrected the first one without having become conscious of the meaning it contained. I now reflected on them and put them together: "in the grave - to sink!" The following pictures flashed through my mind with lightning rapidity: elves dancing and hovering in the moonlight; our comrade lying on his bier, the impression of movement; some scenes from the burial, the sensation of the disgust I had felt and of the disturbance of our mourning; the memory of some conversations about the infectious illness that had appeared, and the forebodings expressed by several of the officers. Later I remembered that it was the date of my father’s death; in view of my usually very poor memory for dates I found this striking.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1166

‘Subsequent reflection brought home to me the sameness of the external circumstances on the two evenings: the same time of day and lighting conditions, the identical place and companion. I recalled my uneasy feelings when there had been an anxious discussion of the possibility of the influenza spreading; and I remembered at the same time my inner prohibition against letting myself be overcome by fear. I also became conscious of the significance attaching to the order of the words "we could - in the grave - sink",¹ and I realized that only the initial correction of "grave" into "grass", which had taken place unobtrusively, had led to the second slip ("sink" for "sing") in order to ensure that the suppressed complex should have its full expression.

‘I may add that I suffered at the time from alarming dreams about a very close relative. I repeatedly saw her ill and once actually dead. Just before I was taken prisoner I had received news that the influenza was raging with particular virulence in her part of the world, and I had expressed my lively fears to her about it. Since then I had been out of touch with her. Some months later I received news that she had fallen a victim to the epidemic a fortnight before the episode I have described!’

(31) The next example of a slip of the tongue throws a flash of light on one of those painful conflicts which fall to the lot of a doctor. A man whose illness was in all probability a fatal one, though the diagnosis had not as yet been confirmed, had come to Vienna to await the solution of his problem, and had begged a friend whom he had known since his youth, and who had become a well-known physician, to undertake his treatment. This the friend had with some reluctance finally agreed to do. It was intended that the sick man should stay in a nursing home and the doctor proposed that it should be the ‘Hera’ sanatorium. ‘Surely’, objected the patient, ‘that is a home for a special type of case only (a maternity home).’ ‘Oh no!’ replied the doctor hastily, ‘in the "Hera" they can umbringen  - I mean, unterbringen  - every type of patient.’ He then violently disputed the interpretation of his slip. ‘Surely you won’t believe I have hostile impulses against you?’ A quarter of an hour later, as the doctor was going out with the lady who had undertaken to nurse the invalid, he said: ‘I can’t find anything, and I still don’t believe in it. But if it should be so, I am in favour of a strong dose of morphia and a peaceful finish.’ It emerged that his friend had stipulated that he (the doctor) should shorten his sufferings by means of a drug as soon as it was confirmed that he was past helping. Thus the doctor had in fact undertaken to put an end to his friend.

¹ [‘Wir könnten ins Grab sinken’ - ‘we could sink in the grave’. The order of the words, on which the present point turns, is different in English and in German.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1167

(32) Here is a quite especially instructive slip of the tongue which I should not like to omit, although according to my authority it is some twenty years old. ‘A lady once advanced the following opinion at a social gathering - and the words show that they were uttered with fervour and under the pressure of a host of secret impulses: "Yes, a woman must be pretty if she is to please men. A man is much better off; as long as he has his five straight limbs he needs nothing more!" This example allows us a good view of the intimate mechanism of a slip of the tongue that results from condensation or from a contamination (cf. p. 1144). It is plausible to suppose that we have here a fusion of two turns of phrase with similar meanings:

as long as he has his four straight limbs

as long as he has his five wits about him.

Or the element straight [‘gerade’] may have been common to two intended expressions which ran:

as long as he has his straight limbs

to treat all five(s) as even numbers¹

‘There is nothing in fact to prevent us from assuming that both turns of phrase, the one about his five wits and the one about ‘the even number five’, played their separate parts in causing first a number, and then the mysterious five instead of the simple four, to be introduced into the sentence dealing with the straight limbs. But this fusion would certainly not have come about if, in the form that appeared in the slip of the tongue, it had not had a good meaning of its own - one expressing a cynical truth which could not of course be admitted to undisguised, coming as it did from a woman. - Finally we should not omit to draw attention to the fact that the lady’s remark, as worded, could pass just as well for a capital joke as for an amusing slip of the tongue. It is simply a question of whether she spoke the words with a conscious or an unconscious intention. In our case the way the speaker behaved certainly ruled out any notion of conscious intention and excluded the idea of its being a joke.’

¹ [‘Alle fünf gerade sein lassen.’ The German ‘gerade’ means both ‘straight and ‘even’. The meaning of the phrase, literally translated in the text, is: ‘To close one’s eyes to irregularities.’]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1168

How closely a slip of the tongue can approximate to a joke is shown in the following case, reported by Rank (1913), in which the woman responsible for the slip actually ended by herself treating it as a joke and laughing at it.

(33) ‘A recently married man, whose wife was concerned about preserving her girlish appearance and only with reluctance allowed him to have frequent sexual intercourse, told me the following story which in retrospect both he and his wife found extremely funny. After a night in which he had once again disobeyed his wife’s rule of abstinence, he was shaving in the morning in the bedroom which they shared, while his wife was still in bed; and, as he had often done to save trouble, he made use of his wife’s powder-puff which was lying on the bedside table. His wife, who was extremely concerned about her complexion, had several times told him not to, and therefore called out angrily: "There you go again, powdering me with your puff!" Her husband’s laughter drew her attention to her slip (she had meant to say: "you are powdering yourself again with my puff") and she herself ended by joining in his laughter. "To powder" is an expression familiar to every Viennese for "to copulate"; and a powder-puff is an obvious phallic symbol.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1169

(34) In the following example, too - supplied by Storfer - it might be thought that a joke was intended:

Frau B., who was suffering from an affection of obviously psychogenic origin, was repeatedly recommended to consult a psycho-analyst, Dr. X. She persistently declined to do so, saying that such treatment could never be of any value, as the doctor would wrongly trace everything back to sexual things. A day finally came, however, when she was ready to follow the advice, and she asked: ‘Nun gut, wann ordinärt also dieser Dr. X.?’¹

(35) The connection between jokes and slips of the tongue is also shown in the fact that in many cases a slip of the tongue is nothing other than an abbreviation:

On leaving school, a girl had followed the ruling fashion of the time by taking up the study of medicine. After a few terms she had changed over from medicine to chemistry. Some years later she described her change of mind in the following words: ‘I was not on the whole squeamish about dissecting, but when I once had to pull the finger-nails off a dead body, I lost my pleasure in the whole of - chemistry.’

(36) At this point I insert another slip of the tongue which it needs little skill to interpret. ‘In an anatomy lesson the professor was endeavouring to explain the nasal cavities, which are notoriously a very difficult department of enterology. When he asked whether his audience had understood his presentation of the subject, he received a general reply in the affirmative. Whereupon the professor, who was known for his high opinion of himself, commented: ‘I can hardly believe that, since, even in Vienna with its millions of inhabitants, those who understand the nasal cavities can be counted on one finger, I mean on the fingers of one hand.’

(37) On another occasion the same professor said: ‘In the case of the female genitals, in spite of many Versuchungen [temptations] - I beg you pardon, Versuche [experiments] . . .’

¹ [What she meant to say was: ‘All right, then, when does this Dr. X. have his consulting hours?’ She should have used the word ‘ordiniert’ for ‘has his consulting hours’. Instead she said ‘ordinärt’, which is a non-existent word. ‘Ordinär’, however, means ‘common’, ‘vulgar’.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1170

(38) I am indebted to Dr. Alfred Robitsek of Vienna for drawing my attention to two slips of the tongue which were recorded by an old French writer. I reproduce them without translating them:

Brantôme (1527-1614), Vies des Dames galantes, Discours second: ‘Si ay-je cogneu une très-belle et honneste dame de par le monde, qui, devisant avec un honneste gentilhomme de la cour des affaires de la guerre durant ces civiles, elle luy dit: "J’ay ouy dire que le roy a faict rompre tous les c . . . de ce pays là." Elle vouloit dire les ponts. Pensez que, venant de coucher d’avec son mary, ou songeant à son amant, elle avoit encor ce nom frais en la bouche; et le gentilhomme s’en eschauffa en amours d’elle pour ce mot.

‘Une autre dame que i’ai cogneue, entretenant une autre grand’ dame plus qu’elle, et luy louant et exaltant ses beautez, elle luy dit après: "Non, madame, ce que je vous en dis, ce n’est point pour vous adultérer"; voulant dire adulater comme elle le rhabilla ainsi: pensez qu’elle songeoit à adultérer.’¹

(39) There are of course more modern examples as well of sexual doubles entendres originating in a slip of the tongue. Frau F. was describing her first hour in a language course. ‘It is very interesting; the teacher is a nice young Englishman. In the very first hour he gave me to understand "durch die Bluse" [through the blouse] - I mean, "durch die Blume" [literally, ‘through flowers’, i.e. ‘indirectly’] that he would rather take me for individual tuition.’ (From Storfer.)

¹ [‘Thus I knew a very beautiful and virtuous lady of the world who, discoursing with a virtuous gentleman on the court on the affairs of the war during those civil disturbances, said to him: "I have heard tell that the king had a breach made in all the c . . . of that region." She meant to say the ‘ponts’. One may suppose that, having just lain with her husband, or thinking of her lover, she had this word freshly on her tongue; and the gentleman was fired with love of her on account of this word.

‘Another lady whom I knew, entertaining another lady of higher rank than herself, and praising her and extolling her beauties, she said after to her: "No, madame, what I say to you is not in order to adulterate you"; meaning to say adulate, as she clad the word thus anew, one may suppose that she was thinking of adultery.’]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1171

In the psychotherapeutic procedure which I employ for resolving and removing neurotic symptoms I am very often faced with the task of discovering, from the patient’s apparently casual utterances and associations, a thought-content which is at pains to remain concealed but which cannot nevertheless avoid unintentionally betraying its existence in a whole variety of ways. Slips of the tongue often perform a most valuable service here, as I could show by some highly convincing and at the same time very singular examples. Thus, for instance, a patient will be speaking of his aunt and, without noticing the slip, will consistently call her ‘my mother’; or another will refer to her husband as her ‘brother’. In this way they draw my attention to the fact that they have ‘identified’ these persons with one another - that they have put them into a series which implies a recurrence of the same type in their emotional life. To give another example: a young man of twenty introduced himself to me during my consulting hours in these words: ‘I am the father of So-and-so who came to you for treatment. I beg your pardon, I meant to say I am his brother: he is four years older than I am.’ I inferred that he intended this slip to express the view that, like his brother, he had fallen ill through the fault of his father; that, like his brother, he wished to be cured; but that his father was the one who most needed to be cured. - At other times an arrangement of words that sounds unusual, or an expression that seems forced, is enough to reveal that a repressed thought is participating in the patient’s remarks, which had a different end in view.

What I find, therefore, both in grosser disturbances of speech and in those more subtle ones which can still be subsumed under the heading of ‘slips of the tongue’, is that it is not the influence of the ‘contact effects of the sounds’ but the influence of thoughts that lie outside the intended speech which determines the occurrence of the slip and provides an adequate explanation of the mistake. It is not my wish to throw doubt on the laws governing the way in which sounds modify one another; but by themselves these laws do not seem to me to be sufficiently effective to disturb the process of correct speaking. In the cases that I have studied and explored in some detail these laws represent no more than the preformed mechanism which a more remote psychical motive makes use of for its convenience, though without becoming subject to the sphere of influence of these relations. In a large number of substitutions resulting from slips of the tongue such phonetic laws are completely disregarded. In this respect I find myself in full agreement with Wundt, who assumes as I do that the conditions governing slips of the tongue are complex and extend far beyond the contact effects of the sounds.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1172

If I accept these ‘remoter psychical influences’ (as Wundt calls them ) as established, there is nothing, on the other hand, to prevent me at the same time from allowing that, in situations where speaking is hurried and attention is to some extent diverted, the conditions governing slips of the tongue may easily be confined within the limits defined by Meringer and Mayer. For some of the examples collected by these authors a more complicated explanation nevertheless seems more plausible. Take, for instance, one of those quoted above:

‘Es war mir auf der Schwest . . .

Brust so schwer.’

Was what happened here simply that the sound ‘schwe’ forced back the equally valent sound ‘bru’ by ‘anticipating’ it? The idea can hardly be dismissed that the sounds making up ‘schwe’ were further enabled to obtrude in this manner because of a special relation. That could only be the association Schwester  - Bruder; perhaps also Brust der Schwester, which leads one on to other groups of thoughts. It is this invisible helper behind the scenes which lends the otherwise innocent ‘schwe’ the strength to produce a mistake in speaking.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1173

There are other slips of the tongue where we may assume that the true disturbing factor is some similarity in sound to obscene words and meanings. Deliberate distortion and deformation of words and expressions, which is so dear to vulgar minds, has the sole purpose of exploiting innocent occasions for hinting at forbidden topics; and this playing with words is so frequent that there would be nothing remarkable in its occurring even when not intended and against one’s wishes. To this category no doubt belong such examples as Eischeissweibchen (for Eiweissscheibchen),¹ Apopos Fritz (for à propos),² Lokuskapitäl (for Lotuskapitäl),³ etc.; and perhaps also the Alabüsterbachse (Alabasterbüchse)4 of St. Mary Magdalen.5  -’Ich fordere Sie auf, auf das Wohl unseres Chefs auf zustossen’ can hardly be anything other than an unintentional parody which is a perseveration of an intended one. If I were the Principal who was being honoured at the ceremony to which the speaker contributed this slip, I should probably reflect on the cleverness of the Romans in permitting the soldiers of a general who was enjoying a Triumph openly to express in the form of satirical songs their inner criticisms of the man who was being honoured. - Meringer relates that he himself once said to someone, who by reason of being the eldest member of the company was addressed familiarly by the honorific title of ‘Senexl’ or ‘altes Senexl’: ‘Prost, Senex altesl!’ He was himself shocked at this mistake (Meringer and Mayer, 1895, 50). We can perhaps interpret his emotion if we reflect how close ‘Altesl’ comes to the insulting phrase ‘alter Esel’. There are powerful internal punishments for any breach of the respect due to age (that is, reduced to childhood terms, of the respect due to the father).

¹ [A meaningless term (literally: ‘egg-shit-female’), for ‘small slices of white of egg’.]

² [‘Apopos’ is a non-existent word; but ‘Popo’ is the nursery word for ‘buttocks’.]

³ [A meaningless word, literally: ‘W.C. capital’, for ‘lotus capital’, an architectural term] ‘,

4 [A non-existent word (though the middle part of it ‘Büste’ means ‘breast’), for ‘alabaster box’.]

5 Making slips of the tongue was a symptom of a woman patient of mine which persisted until it was traced back to the childhood joke of replacing ‘ruinieren [ruin]’ by ‘urinieren [urinate]’. - [Added 1924:] The temptation to employ the artifice of a slip of the tongue for enabling improper and forbidden words to be freely used forms the basis of Abraham’s observations on parapraxes ‘with an overcompensating purpose’ (Abraham, 1922a). A woman patient was very liable to duplicate the first syllable of proper names by stammering. She changed the name ‘Protagoras’ to ‘Protragoras’, shortly after having said ‘A-alexander’ instead of ‘AIexander’. Inquiry revealed that in childhood she had been especially fond of the vulgar joke of repeating the syllables ‘a’ and ‘po’ when they occurred at the beginnings of words, a form of amusement which quite commonly leads to stammering in children. [‘A-a’ and ‘Popo’ are the German nursery words for ‘faeces’ and ‘buttocks’.] On approaching the name ‘Protagoras’ she became aware of the risk that she might omit the ‘r’ in the first syllable and say ‘Po-potagoras’. As a protection against this danger she held on firmly to this ‘r’, and inserted another ‘r’ in the second syllable. She acted in the same way on other occasions, distorting the words ‘Parterre [ground floor]’ and ‘Kondolenz [condolence]’ so as to avoid ‘Pater (father)' and ‘Kondom [condom]’ which were closely linked to them in her associations. Another of Abraham’s patients confessed to an inclination to say ‘Angora’ every time for ‘angina’ - very probably because of a fear of being tempted to replace ‘angina’ by ‘vagina’. These slips of the tongue owed their existence therefore to the fact that a defensive trend had retained the upper hand instead of the distorting one; and Abraham justly draws attention to the analogy between this process and the formation of symptoms in obsessional neurosis.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1174

I hope that readers will not overlook the difference in value between these interpretations, of which no proof is possible, and the examples that I have myself collected and explained by means of an analysis. But if I still secretly cling to my expectation that even apparently simple slips of the tongue could be traced to interference by a half-suppressed idea that lies outside the intended context, I am tempted to do so by an observation of Meringer’s which is highly deserving of attention. This author says that it is a curious fact that no one is ready to admit having made a slip of the tongue. There are some very sensible and honest people who are offended if they are told they have made one. I would not venture to put it so generally as does Meringer in saying ‘no one’. But the trace of affect which follows the revelation of the slip, and which is clearly in the nature of shame, has a definite significance. It may be compared to the annoyance we feel when we cannot recall a forgotten name, and to our surprise at the tenacity of an apparently indifferent memory; and it invariably indicates that some motive has contributed to the occurrence of the interference.

The twisting round of a name when it is intentional amounts to an insult; and it might well have the same significance in a whole number of cases where it appears in the form of an unintentional slip of the tongue. The person who, as Mayer reports, said ‘Freuder’ on one occasion instead of ‘Freud’ because he had shortly before mentioned Breuer’s name (Meringer and Mayer, 1895, 38), and who another time spoke of the ‘Freuer-Breudian’ method of treatment (ibid., 28), was probably a professional colleague - and one who was not particularly enthusiastic about that method. In the chapter below on slips of the pen I shall report an instance of the distortion of a name which certainly cannot be explained in any other way.¹

In these cases the disturbing factor which intervenes is a criticism which has to be set aside since at the moment it does not correspond to the speaker’s intention.

¹ [Footnote added 1907:] It can in fact be observed that members of the aristocracy in particular are prone to distort the names of the doctors they consult. We may conclude from this that inwardly they despise them, in spite of the courtesy they habitually show them. - [Added  1912:] I quote here some pertinent observations on the forgetting of names which comes from an account of our subject written in English by Dr Ernest Jones, at that time in Toronto (Jones, 1911b):

‘Few people can avoid feeling a twinge of resentment when they find that their name has been forgotten, particularly if it is by some one with whom they had hoped or expected it would be remembered. They instinctively realize that if they had made a greater impression on the person’s mind he would certainly have remembered them again, for the name is an integral part of the personality. Similarly, few things are more flattering to most people than to find themselves addressed by name by a great personage where they could hardly have anticipated it. Napoleon, like most leaders of men, was a master of this art. In the midst of the disastrous Campaign of France, in 1814, he gave an amazing proof of his memory in this direction. When in a town near Craonne he recollected that he had met the mayor, De Bussy, over twenty years ago in the La Fère regiment; the delighted De Bussy at once threw himself into his service with extraordinary zeal. Conversely there is no surer way of affronting some one than by pretending to forget his name; the insinuation is thus conveyed that the person is so unimportant in our eyes that we cannot be bothered to remember his name. This device is often exploited in literature. In Turgenev’s Smoke the following passage occurs. "‘So you still find Baden entertaining, M’sieu-Litvinov.’ Ratmirov always uttered Litvinov’s surname with hesitation, every time, as though he had forgotten it, and could not at once recall it. In this way, as well as by the lofty flourish of his hat in saluting him, he meant to insult his pride." The same author in his Fathers and Sons writes: "The Governor invited Kirsanov and Bazarov to his ball, and within a few minutes invited them a second time, regarding them as brothers, and calling them Kisarov." Here the forgetting that he had spoken to them, the mistake in the names, and the inability to distinguish between the two young men, constitute a culmination of disparagement. Falsification of a name has the same significance as forgetting it; it is only a step towards complete amnesia.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1175

Conversely, replacing one name by another, assuming some one else’s name, identification by means of a slip over a name, must signify an appreciative feeling which has for some reason to remain in the background for the time being . An experience of this kind from his schooldays is described by Sándor Ferenczi:

‘When I was in the first form at the Gymnasium I had, for the first time in my life, to recite a poem in public (i.e. in front of the whole class). I was well prepared and was dismayed at being interrupted at the very start by a burst of laughter. The teacher subsequently told me why I had met with this strange reception. I gave the title of the poem "Aus der Ferne " quite correctly, but instead of attributing it to its real author I gave my own name. The poet’s name is Alexander (Sándor ) Petöfi. The exchange of names was helped by our having the same first name; but the real cause was undoubtedly the fact that at that time I identified myself in my secret wishes with the celebrated hero-poet. Even consciously my love and admiration for him bordered on idolatry. The whole wretched ambition-complex is of course to be found as well behind this parapraxis.’

A similar identification by means of an exchange of names was reported to me by a young doctor. He had timidly and reverently introduced himself to the famous Virchow as ‘Dr. Virchow’. The professor turned to him in surprise and asked: ‘Ah! is your name Virchow too?’ I do not know how the ambitious young man justified the slip of the tongue he had made - whether he relied upon the flattering excuse that he felt himself so small beside the great name that his own could not fail to slip away from him, or whether he had the courage to admit that he hoped one day to become as great a man as Virchow, and to beg the Professor not to treat him so contemptuously on that account. One of these two thoughts - or perhaps both of them simultaneously - may have confused the young man while he was introducing himself.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1176

From motives of an extremely personal nature I must leave it open whether a similar interpretation is applicable to the following case as well. At the International Congress at Amsterdam in 1907 my theory of hysteria was the subject of lively discussion. In a diatribe against me one of my most vigorous opponents repeatedly made slips of the tongue which took the form of putting himself in my place and speaking in my name. For example, he said: ‘It is well known that Breuer and I have proved . . .’ where he could only have meant ‘ . . . Breuer and Freud  . . .’ My opponent’s name bears not the least resemblance to my own. This example, together with many other cases where a slip of the tongue results in one name replacing another, may serve to remind us that such slips can entirely dispense with the assistance afforded by similarity in sound and can come about with no more support than is provided by hidden factors in the subject-matter.

In other, far more significant, cases it is self-criticism, internal opposition to one’s own utterance, that obliges one to make a slip of the tongue and even to substitute the opposite of what one had intended. One then observes in astonishment how the wording of an assertion cancels out its own intention, and how the slip has exposed an inner insincerity.¹ The slip of the tongue here becomes a mode of mimetic expression - often, indeed, for the expression of something one did not wish to say: it becomes a mode of self-betrayal. This was the case, for instance, when a man who did not care for what is called normal sexual intercourse in his relations with women broke into a conversation about a girl who was said to be a flirt, with the words: ‘If she had to do with me, she’d soon give up her koëttieren.’ There is no doubt that it can only have been another word, namely ‘koitieren’, whose influence was responsible for making this change in the word that was intended, ‘kokettieren’ [to flirt, coquette]. - Or take the following case: ‘We have an uncle who for months past had been very much offended because we never visited him. We took his move to a new house as an occasion for paying him a long overdue visit. He seemed very glad to see us, and as we were leaving he said with much feeling: "I hope from now on I shall see you still more seldom than in the past."'

¹ Slips of the tongue of this type are used, for instance, by Anzengruber in his Der G’wissenswurm to expose the character of the hypocritical legacy-hunter.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1177

When the linguistic material happens to be favourable, it often causes slips of the tongue to occur which have the positively shattering result of a revelation, or which produce the full comic effect of a joke. - This is the case in the following example observed and reported by Dr. Reitler:

‘"That smart new hat - I suppose you ‘aufgepatzt’ [instead of ‘aufgeputzt’ (trimmed)] it yourself?" said one lady in a voice of admiration to another. She could proceed no further with her intended praise; for the criticism she had silently felt that the hat’s trimmings were a "Patzerei " had been indicated much too clearly by the unfriendly slip of the tongue for any further phrases of conventional admiration to sound convincing.’

The criticism contained in the following example is milder but none the less unambiguous:

‘A lady who was visiting an acquaintance became very impatient and weary at her tedious and long-winded conversation. When at last she succeeded in tearing herself away and taking her leave she was detained by a fresh deluge of words from her companion, who had meanwhile accompanied her into the front hall and now forced her, as she was on the very point of departing, to stand at the door and listen once more. At last she interrupted her hostess with the question: "Are you at home in the front hall?" It was not till she saw the other’s astonished face that she noticed her slip of the tongue. Weary of being kept standing so long in the front hall she had meant to break off the conversation by asking: "Are you at home in the mornings?", and her slip betrayed her impatience at the further delay.’

The next example, which was witnessed by Dr. Max Graf, is a warning that one should keep a watch on oneself.

‘At the General Meeting of the "Concordia", the Society of Journalists, a young member who was invariably hard-up made a violently aggressive speech, and in his excitement spoke of the "Vorschussmitglieder " (instead of "Vorstandsmitglieder " or "Ausschussmitglieder "). The latter have the authority to sanction loans, and the young speaker had in fact put in an application for a loan.’

We have seen from the example of ‘vorschwein’ that a slip of the tongue can easily occur if an effort has been made to suppress insulting words. In this way one gives vent to one’s feelings:

A photographer who had made a resolution to refrain from zoological terms in dealing with his clumsy employees, addressed an apprentice - who tried to empty out a large dish that was full to the brim and in doing so naturally spilt half the contents on the floor - in the following words: ‘But, man, schöpsen sie¹ some of it off first.’ And soon after this, in the course of a tirade against a female assistant who had nearly spoilt a dozen valuable plates by her carelessness, he said: ‘Are you so hornverbrannt. . . .?’²

¹ [He meant to say ‘draw’, which would have been ‘schöpfen Sie’. Instead he used ‘schöpsen Sie’, which is meaningless. The word ‘Schöps’, however, means ‘sheep’ or ‘silly fellow’.]

² [Here he meant to say ‘hirnverbrannt’, ‘idiotic’, literally ‘with your brain (Hirn) burnt up’. The word he used instead, a non-existent term, would mean ‘with your horn (Horn) burnt up’. The word ‘Hornvieh’, literally ‘horned cattle’, is used in the sense of ‘fool’.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1178

The next example shows how a slip of the tongue resulted in a serious self-betrayal. Certain details in it justify its repetition in full from the account given by Brill in the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, Volume II.¹

‘I went for a walk one evening with Dr. Frink, and we discussed some of the business of the New York Psychoanalytic Society. We met a colleague, Dr. R., whom I had not seen for years and of whose private life I knew nothing. We were very pleased to meet again, and on my invitation he accompanied us to a café, where we spent two hours in lively conversation. He seemed to know some details about me, for after the usual greetings he asked after my small child and told me that he heard about me from time to time from a mutual friend and had been interested in my work ever since he had read about it in the medical press. To my question as to whether he was married he gave a negative answer, and added: "Why should a man like me marry?"

‘On leaving the café, he suddenly turned to me and said: "I should like to know what you would do in a case like this: I know a nurse who was named as co-respondent in a divorce case. The wife sued the husband and named her as co-respondent, and he got the divorce." I interrupted him, saying: "You mean she got the divorce." He immediately corrected himself saying: "Yes, of course, she got the divorce", and continued to tell how the nurse had been so affected by the divorce proceedings and the scandal that she had taken to drink, had become very nervous, and so on; and he wanted me to advise him how to treat her.

¹ In the Zentralblatt the paper was ascribed in error to Ernest Jones.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1179

‘As soon as I had corrected his mistake I asked him to explain it, but I received the usual surprised answers: had not everyone a right to make a slip of the tongue? it was only an accident there was nothing behind it, and so on. I replied that there must be a reason for every mistake in speaking, and that, had he not told me earlier that he was unmarried, I would be tempted to suppose he himself was the hero of the story; for in that case the slip could be explained by his wish that he had obtained the divorce rather than his wife, so that he should not have (by our matrimonial laws) to pay alimony, and so that he could marry again in New York State. He stoutly denied my conjecture, but the exaggerated emotional reaction which accompanied it, in which he showed marked signs of agitation followed by laughter, only strengthened my suspicions. To my appeal that he should tell the truth in the interests of science, he answered: "Unless you wish me to lie you must believe that I was never married, and hence your psycho-analytic interpretation is all wrong." He added that someone who paid attention to every triviality was positively dangerous. Then he suddenly remembered that he had another appointment and left us.

‘Both Dr. Frink and I were still convinced that my interpretation of his slip of the tongue was correct, and I decided to corroborate or disprove it by further investigation. Some days later I visited a neighbour, an old friend of Dr. R., who was able to confirm my explanation in every particular. The divorce proceedings had taken place some weeks before, and the nurse was cited as co-respondent. Dr. R. is to-day thoroughly convinced of the correctness of the Freudian mechanisms.’

The self-betrayal is equally unmistakable in the following case, reported by Otto Rank:

‘A father who was without any patriotic feelings, and who wished to educate his children so that they too should be free from what he regarded as a superfluous sentiment, was criticizing his sons for taking part in a patriotic demonstration; when they protested that their uncle had also taken part in it, he replied: "He is the one person you should not imitate: he is an idiot." On seeing his children’s look of astonishment at their father’s unusual tone, he realized that he had made a slip of the tongue, and added apologetically: "I meant to say ‘patriot’, of course."'

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1180

Here is a slip of the tongue which was interpreted as a self-betrayal by the other party to the conversation. It is reported by Stärcke, who adds a pertinent comment, though it goes beyond the task of interpreting the slip.

‘A woman dentist promised her sister that she would have a look some time to see if there was Kontakt between two of her molars (that is, to see if the lateral surfaces of the molars were touching each other so that no fragments of food could lodge in between). Her sister finally complained about having to wait so long for this inspection, and jokingly said: "She’s probably treating a colleague at the moment, but her sister has to go on waiting." The dentist eventually examined her, found there was in fact a small cavity in one of the molars, and said: "I didn’t think it was in such a bad way - I thought it was merely that you had no Kontant  - I mean Kontakt." "You see?" laughed her sister; "your greed is the only reason why you made me wait so much longer than your paying patients!"

‘(Obviously I should not add my own associations to hers or base any conclusions on them, but when I heard of this slip of the tongue it at once sprang to my mind that these two pleasant and gifted young ladies are unmarried and have in fact very little to do with young men, and I asked myself whether they would have more contact with young people if they had more ready money.)'

In the following example, too, reported by Reik (1915), the slip of the tongue amounts to a self-betrayal:

‘A girl was to become engaged to a young man whom she did not care for. To bring the two young people closer together, their parents arranged a meeting which was attended by the parties to the intended match. The young girl possessed sufficient self-control to prevent her suitor, who behaved in a very on-coming manner towards her, from detecting her antipathy to him. But when her mother asked her how she liked the young man, she answered politely: "Well enough. He’s most liebenswidrig!"'¹

¹ [She intended to say ‘liebenswürdig’, ‘agreeable’ (literally ‘worthy of love’). The word she actually used, ‘liebenswidrig’, would mean literally ‘repelling to love’.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1181

Equally self-revealing is the following, which Rank (1913) describes as a ‘witty slip of the tongue’.

‘A married woman, who enjoyed hearing anecdotes and who was said not to be altogether averse to extra-marital affairs if they were reinforced by adequate gifts, was told the following time-honoured story, not without design on his part, by a young man who was eager to obtain her favours. One of two business friends was trying to obtain the favours of his partner’s somewhat prudish wife. In the end she consented to grant them to him in exchange for a present of a thousand gulden. When, therefore, her husband was about to start on a journey, his partner borrowed a thousand gulden from him and promised to pay them back next day to his wife. He then, of course, paid the sum to the wife, implying that it was the reward for her favours; and she supposed she had been caught at last when her husband on his return asked for the thousand gulden and thus found insult added to injury. When the young man reached the point in his story at which the seducer says: "I’II repay the money to your wife tomorrow", his listener interrupted with the highly revealing words: "Let me see, haven’t you repaid me that - I’m sorry - I mean told me that already?" She could hardly have given a clearer indication, without actually putting it into words, of her willingness to offer herself on the same terms.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1182

A good example of this kind of self-betrayal, which did not lead to serious consequences, is reported by Tausk (1917) under the title of ‘The Faith of our Fathers’. ‘As my fiancée was a Christian’, Herr A. related, ‘and was unwilling to adopt the Jewish faith, I myself was obliged to be converted from Judaism to Christianity so that we could marry. I did not change my religion without some internal resistance, but I felt it was justified by the purpose behind it, the more so because it involved abandoning no more than an outward adherence to Judaism, not a religious conviction (which I had never had). Notwithstanding this, I always continued later on to acknowledge the fact of my being a Jew, and few of my acquaintances know I am baptized. I have two sons by this marriage, who were given Christian baptism. When the boys were sufficiently old they were told of their Jewish background, so as to prevent them from being influenced by anti-semitic views at their school and from turning against their father for such a superfluous reason. Some years ago I and my children, who were then at their primary school, were staying with the family of a teacher at the summer resort in D. One day while we were sitting at tea with our otherwise friendly hosts, the lady of the house, who had no inkling of her summer guests’ Jewish ancestry, launched some very sharp attacks on the Jews. I ought to have made a bold declaration of the facts in order to set my sons the example of "having the courage of one’s convictions", but I was afraid of the unpleasant exchanges that usually follow an avowal of this sort. Besides, I was alarmed at the possibility of having to leave the good lodgings we had found and of thus spoiling my own and my children’s in any case limited holiday period, should our hosts’ behaviour towards us take an unfriendly turn because of the fact that we were Jews. As however I had reason to expect that my sons, in their candid and ingenuous way, would betray the momentous truth if they heard any more of the conversation, I tried to get them to leave the company by sending them into the garden. I said: "Go into the garden, Juden ", quickly correcting it to "Jungen ". In this way I enabled the "courage of my convictions" to be expressed in a parapraxis. The others did not in fact draw any conclusions from my slip of the tongue, since they attached no significance to it; but I was obliged to learn the lesson that the "faith of our fathers" cannot be disavowed with impunity if one is a son and has sons of one’s own.’

The effect produced by the following slip of the tongue, which I would not report had not the magistrate himself made a note of it for this collection during the court proceedings, is anything but innocent:

A soldier charged with housebreaking stated in evidence: ‘Up to now I’ve not been discharged from military Diebsstellung;¹ so at the moment I’m still in the army.’

¹ [He meant to say ‘Dienststellung’, ‘service’, literally ‘service position '. Instead he said ‘Diebsstellung’, which would mean literally ‘thief position’.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1183

A slip of the tongue has a more cheering effect during psycho-analytic work, when it serves as a means of providing the doctor with a confirmation that may be very welcome to him if he is engaged in a dispute with the patient. I once had to interpret a patient’s dream in which the name ‘Jauner’ occurred. The dreamer knew someone of that name, but it was impossible to discover the reason for his appearing in the context of the dream; I therefore ventured to suggest that it might be merely because of his name, which sounds like the term of abuse ‘Gauner’. My patient hastily and vigorously contested this; but in doing so he made a slip of the tongue which confirmed my guess, since he confused the same letters once more. His answer was: ‘That seems to me too jewagt.’¹ When I had drawn his attention to his slip, he accepted my interpretation.

If one of the parties involved in a serious argument makes a slip of the tongue which reverses the meaning of what he intended to say, it immediately puts him at a disadvantage with his opponent, who seldom fails to make the most of his improved position.

This makes it clear that people give slips of the tongue and other parapraxes the same interpretation that I advocate in this book, even if they do not endorse theoretically the view I put forward, and even if they are disinclined, so far as it applies to themselves, to renounce the convenience that goes along with tolerating parapraxes. The amusement and derision which such oral slips are certain to evoke at the crucial moment can be taken as evidence against what purports to be the generally accepted convention that a mistake in speaking is a lapsus linguae and of no psychological significance. It was no less a person than the German Imperial Chancellor Prince Bülow who protested on these lines in an effort to save the situation, when the wording of his speech in defence of his Emperor (in November, 1907) was given the opposite meaning by a slip of the tongue. ‘As for the present, the new epoch of the Emperor Wilhelm II, I can only repeat what I said a year ago, namely that it would be unfair and unjust to speak of a coterie of responsible advisors round our Emperor  . . .’ (loud cries of ‘irresponsible’) ‘ . . . irresponsible advisors. Forgive the lapsus linguae.’ (Laughter.)

¹ [In vulgar speech, particularly in North Germany, ‘g’ at the beginning of a word is often pronounced like the German ‘i’ (English ‘y’) instead of like the hard English ‘g’.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1184

In this case, as a result of the accumulation of negatives, Prince Bülow’s sentence was somewhat obscure; sympathy for the speaker and consideration for his difficult position prevented this slip from being put to any further use against him. A year later another speaker in the same place was not so fortunate. He wished to appeal for a demonstration with no reserves in support of the Emperor, and in doing so was warned by a bad slip of the tongue that other emotions were to be found within his loyal breast. ‘Lattmann (German National Party): On the question of the Address our position is based on the standing orders of the Reichstag. According to them the Reichstag is entitled to tender such an address to the Emperor. It is our belief that the united thoughts and wishes of the German people are bent on achieving a united demonstration in this matter as well, and if we can do so in a form that takes the Emperor’s feelings fully into account, then we should do so spinelessly as well.’ (Loud laughter which continued for some minutes.) ‘Gentlemen, I should have said not "rückgratlos" but "rückhaltlos "' (laughter), ‘and at this difficult time even our Emperor accepts a manifestation by the people - one made without reserve - such as we should like to see.’

The Vorwärts of November 12, 1908, did not miss the opportunity of pointing to the psychological significance of this slip of the tongue: ‘Probably never before in any parliament has a member, through an involuntary self-accusation, characterized his own attitude and that of the parliamentary majority towards the Emperor so exactly as did the anti-Semitic Lattmann, when, speaking with solemn emotion on the second day of the debate, he slipped into an admission that he and his friends wished to express their opinion to the Emperor spinelessly. Loud laughter from all sides drowned the remaining words of this unhappy man, who thought it necessary explicitly to stammer out by way of apology that he really meant "unreservedly".’

I will add a further instance, in which the slip of the tongue assumed the positively uncanny characteristics of a prophecy. Early in 1923 there was a great stir in the world of finance when the very young banker X. - probably one of the newest of the ‘nouveaux riches’ in W., and at any rate the richest and youngest - obtained possession, after a short struggle, of a majority of the shares of the -- Bank; and as a further consequence, a remarkable General Meeting took place at which the old directors of the bank, financiers of the old type, were not re-elected, and young X. became president of the bank. In the valedictory speech which the managing director Dr. Y. went on to deliver in honour of the old president, who had not been re-elected, a number of the audience noticed a distressing slip of the tongue which occurred again and again. He continually spoke of the expiring president instead of the outgoing president. As it turned out, the old president who was not re-elected died a few days after this meeting. He was, however, over eighty years old! (From Storfer.)

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1185

A good example of a slip of the tongue whose purpose is not so much to betray the speaker as to give the listener in the theatre his bearings, is to be found in Wallenstein (Piccolomini, Act I, Scene 5); and it shows us that the dramatist, who here availed himself of this device, was familiar with the mechanism and meaning of slips of the tongue. In the preceding scene Max Piccolomini has ardently espoused the Duke’s cause, and has been passionately describing the blessings of peace, of which he has become aware on the course of a journey while escorting Wallenstein’s daughter to the camp. As he leaves the stage, his father and Questenberg, the emissary from the court, are plunged in consternation. Scene 5 continues:

QUESTENBERG  Alas, alas! and stands it so?

What friend! and do we let him go away

In this delusion - let him go away?

Not call him back immediately, not open

His eyes upon the spot?

OCTAVIO (recovering himself out of a deep study)

He has now open’d mine,

And I see more than pleases me.

QUEST.                                                  What is it?

OCT.      Curse on this journey!

QUEST.                                        But why so? What is it?

OCT.      Come, come along, friend! I must follow up

The ominous track immediately. Mine eyes

Are open’d now, and I must use them. Come!

(Draws Q. on with him)

QUEST    What now? Where go you then?

OCT.                                  To her herself.

QUEST.                                               To -

OCT. (correcting himself) To the Duke. Come let us go.

The small slip of saying ‘to her’ instead of ‘to him’ is meant to reveal to us that the father has seen through his son’s motive for espousing the Duke’s cause, while the courtier complains that he is ‘talking absolute riddles’ to him.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1186

Another example in which a dramatist makes use of a slip of the tongue has been discovered by Otto Rank (1910) in Shakespeare. I quote Rank’s account:

‘A slip of the tongue occurs in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (Act III, Scene 2), which is from the dramatic point of view extremely subtly motivated and which is put to brilliant technical use. Like the slip in Wallenstein to which Freud has drawn attention, it shows that dramatists have a clear understanding of the mechanism and meaning of this kind of parapraxis and assume that the same is true of their audience. Portia, who by her father’s will has been bound to the choice of a husband by lot, has so far escaped all her unwelcome suitors by a fortunate chance. Having at last found in Bassanio the suitor who is to her liking, she has cause to fear that he too will choose the wrong casket. She would very much like to tell him that even so he could rest assured of her love; but she is prevented by her vow. In this internal conflict the poet makes her say to the suitor she favours:

I pray you tarry; pause a day or two,

Before you hazard: for, in choosing wrong,

I lose your company; therefore, forbear a while:

There’s something tells me (but it is not love)

I would not lose you . . .

. . . I could teach you

How to choose right, but then I am forsworn;

So will I never be; so may you miss me;

But if you do you’ll make me wish a sin,

That I have been forsworn. Beshrew your eyes,

They have o’erlooked me, and divided me;

One half of me is yours, the other half yours, -

Mine own, I would say; but if mine, then yours,

And so all yours.

‘The thing of which she wanted to give him only a very subtle hint, because she should really have concealed it from him altogether, namely, that even before he made his choice she was wholly his and loved him - it is precisely this that the poet, with a wonderful psychological sensitivity, causes to break through openly in her slip of the tongue; and by this artistic device he succeeds in relieving both the lover’s unbearable uncertainty and the suspense of the sympathetic audience over the outcome of his choice.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1187

In view of the interest that is lent to our theory of slips of the tongue by support of this nature from great writers, I feel justified in citing a third such instance which has been reported by Ernest Jones (1911b, 496):

‘In a recently published article Otto Rank drew our attention to a pretty instance of how Shakespeare caused one of his characters, Portia, to make a slip of the tongue which revealed her secret thoughts to an attentive member of the audience. I propose to relate a similar example from The Egoist, the masterpiece of the greatest English novelist, George Meredith. The plot of the novel is, shortly, as follows: Sir Willoughby Patterne, an aristocrat greatly admired by his circle, becomes engaged to a Miss Constantia Durham. She discovers in him an intense egoism, which he skilfully conceals from the world, and to escape the marriage she elopes with a Captain Oxford. Some years later Patterne becomes engaged to a Miss Clara Middleton, and most of the book is taken up with a detailed description of the conflict that arises in her mind on also discovering his egoism. External circumstances, and her conception of honour, hold her to her pledge, while he becomes more and more distasteful in her eyes. She partly confides in his cousin and secretary, Vernon Whitford, the man whom she ultimately marries; but from loyalty to Patterne and other motives he stands aloof.

‘In a soliloquy about her sorrow Clara speaks as follows: "‘If some noble gentleman could see me as I am and not disdain to aid me! Oh! to be caught out of this prison of thorns and brambles. I cannot tear my own way out. I am a coward. A beckoning of a finger would change me, I believe. I could fly bleeding and through hootings to a comrade . . . Constantia met a soldier. Perhaps she prayed and her prayer was answered. She did ill. But, oh, how I love her for it! His name was Harry Oxford . . . She did not waver, she cut the links, she signed herself over. Oh, brave girl, what do you think of me? But I have no Harry Whitford; I am alone . . .’ The sudden consciousness that she had put another name for Oxford struck her a buffet, drowning her in crimson."

‘The fact that both men’s names end in "ford" evidently renders the confounding of them more easy, and would by many be regarded as an adequate cause for this, but the real underlying motive for it is plainly indicated by the author. In another passage the same lapsus occurs, and is followed by the spontaneous hesitation and sudden change of subject that one is familiar with in psycho-analysis and in Jung’s association experiments when a half-conscious complex is touched. Sir Willoughby patronisingly says of Whitford: "‘False alarm. The resolution to do anything unaccustomed is quite beyond poor old Vernon.’" Clara replies: "‘But if Mr Oxford - Whitford, . . . your swans, coming sailing up the lake, how beautiful they look when they are indignant! I was going to ask you, surely men witnessing a marked admiration for someone else will naturally be discouraged?’ Sir Willoughby stiffened with sudden enlightenment."

‘In still another passage, Clara by another lapsus betrays her secret wish that she was on a more intimate footing with Vernon Whitford. Speaking to a boy friend, she says: "‘Tell Mr. Vernon - tell Mr. Whitford.’"'¹

¹ [Footnote added 1920:] Other instances of slips of the tongue which the writer intends to be taken as having a meaning and usually as being self-revealing can be found in Shakespeare’s Richard II (Act II, Scene 2), and in Schiller’s Don Carlos (Act. II, Scene 8; a slip made by Princess Eboli). There would doubtless be no difficulty in extending this list.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1188

The view of slips of the tongue which is advocated here can meet the test even in the most trivial examples. I have repeatedly been able to show that the most insignificant and obvious errors in speaking have their meaning and can be explained in the same way as the more striking instances. A woman patient who was acting entirely against my wishes in planning a short trip to Budapest, but who was determined to have her own way, justified herself by telling me that she was going for only three days; but she made a slip of the tongue and actually said ‘only three weeks’. She was betraying the fact that, to spite me, she would rather spend three weeks than three days there in the company which I considered unsuitable for her. - One evening I wanted to excuse myself for not having fetched my wife home from the theatre, and said: ‘I was at the theatre at ten past ten.’ I was corrected: ‘You mean ten to ten.’ Of course I meant ten to ten. After ten o’clock would have been no excuse. I had been told that the theatre bills said the performance ended before ten. When I reached the theatre I found the entrance-hall in darkness and the theatre empty. The performance had in fact ended earlier and my wife had not waited for me. When I looked at the clock it was only five to ten. But I decided to make my case out more favourable when I got home and to say it had been ten to ten. Unfortunately, my slip of the tongue spoilt my plan and revealed my disingenuousness, by making me confess more than there was to confess.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1189

This leads on to those speech-disturbances which cannot any longer be described as slips of the tongue because what they affect is not the individual word but the rhythm and execution of a whole speech: disturbances like, for instance, stammering and stuttering caused by embarrassment. But here too, as in the former cases, it is a question of an internal conflict, which is betrayed to us by the disturbance in speech. I really do not think that anyone would make a slip of the tongue in an audience with his Sovereign, in a serious declaration of love of in defending his honour and name before a jury - in short, on all those occasions in which a person is heart and soul engaged. Even in forming an appreciation of an author’s style we are permitted and accustomed to apply the same elucidatory principle which we cannot dispense with in tracing the origins of individual mistakes in speech. A clear and unambiguous manner of writing shows us that here the author is at one with himself; where we find a forced and involved expression which (to use an apt phrase) is aimed at more than one target, we may recognize the intervention of an insufficiently worked-out, complicating thought, or we may hear the stifled voice of the author’s self-criticism.¹

Since this book first appeared friends and colleagues who speak other languages have begun to turn their attention to slips of the tongue which they have been able to observe in countries where their language is spoken. As was to be expected they have found that the laws governing parapraxes are independent of the linguistic material; and they have made the same interpretations that have been exemplified here in instances coming from speakers of the German language. Of countless examples I include only one:

Brill (1909) reports of himself: ‘A friend described to me a nervous patient and wished to know whether I could benefit him. I remarked: "I believe that in time I could remove all his symptoms by psycho-analysis because it is a durable case" - wishing to say "curable"!’

¹ [Footnote added 1910:]

Ce qu’on conçoit bien

S’announce clairement

Et les mots pour le dire

Arrivent aisément.

[What is well thought out

Presents itself with clarity,

And the words to express it

Come easily.]

Boileau: Art poétique.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1190

In conclusion, for the benefit of readers who are prepared to make a certain effort and to whom psycho-analysis is not unfamiliar, I will add an example which will enable them to form some picture of the mental depths into which the pursuit even of a slip of the tongue can lead. It has been reported by Jekels (1913).

‘On December 11, a lady of my acquaintance addressed me (in Polish) in a somewhat challenging and overbearing manner, as follows: "Why did I say to-day that I have twelve fingers?" At my request she gave an account of the scene in which the remark was made. She had got ready to go out with her daughter to pay a visit, and had asked her daughter - a case of dementia praecox then in remission - to change her blouse; and this she in fact did, in the adjoining room. On re-entering, the daughter found her mother busy cleaning her nails, and the following conversation ensued:

‘Daughter: "There! I’m ready now and you’re not!"

‘Mother: "Yes, but you have only one blouse and I have twelve nails."

‘Daughter: "What?"

‘Mother (impatiently): "Well, of course I have; after all, I have twelve fingers."

‘A colleague who heard the story at the same time as I did asked what occurred to her in connection with twelve. She answered equally quickly and definitely: "Twelve means nothing to me - it is not the date of anything (of importance).

‘To finger she gave the following association after a little hesitation: "Some of my husband’s family were born with six fingers on their feet (Polish has no specific word for ‘toe’). When our children were born they were immediately examined to see if they had six fingers." For external reasons the analysis was not continued that evening.

‘Next morning, December 12, the lady visited me and told me with visible excitement: "What do you suppose has happened? For about the last twenty years I have been sending congratulations to my husband’s elderly uncle on his birthday which is to-day, and I have always written him a letter on the 11th. This time I forgot about it and had to send a telegram just now."

‘I myself remembered, and I reminded the lady, how positive she had been the evening before in dismissing my colleague’s question about the number twelve - which was in fact very well fitted to remind her of the birthday - by remarking that the twelfth was not a date of importance to her.

‘She then admitted that this uncle of her husband’s was a wealthy man from whom she had in fact always expected to inherit something, quite especially in her present straitened financial circumstances. Thus, for instance, it was he, or rather his death, that had immediately sprung to her mind a few days before when an acquaintance of hers had predicted from cards that she would receive a large sum of money. It flashed through her mind at once that the uncle was the only person from whom money could possibly come to her or her children; and this same scene also instantly reminded her of the fact that this uncle’s wife had once promised to remember the lady’s children in her will. But in the meanwhile she had died intestate; had she perhaps given her husband appropriate instructions?

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1191

‘The death-wish against the uncle must clearly have emerged with very great intensity, for she said to the friend who made the prophecy: "You encourage people to make away with others." In the four or five days that elapsed between the prophecy and the uncle’s birthday she was constantly looking at the obituary columns in the newspapers from the town where the uncle lived. Not surprisingly, therefore, in view of the intensity of her wish for his death, the event and the date of the birthday he was about to celebrate were so strongly suppressed that not only was a resolution which had been carried out for years forgotten in consequence, but even my colleague’s question failed to bring them to consciousness.

‘In the slip "twelve fingers" the suppressed "twelve" had broken through and had helped to determine the parapraxis. I say "helped to determine", for the striking association to "finger" leads us to suspect the existence of some further motivations. It also explains why the "twelve" had falsified precisely this most innocent phrase, "ten fingers". The association ran: "Some members of my husband’s family were born with six fingers on their feet." Six toes are a sign of a particular abnormality. Thus six fingers mean one abnormal child and twelve fingers two abnormal children. And that was really the fact in this case. The lady had married at a very early age; and the only legacy left her by her husband, a highly eccentric and abnormal person who took his own life shortly after their marriage, were two children whom the doctors repeatedly pronounced to be abnormal and victims of a grave hereditary taint derived from their father. The elder daughter recently returned home after a severe catatonic attack; soon afterwards, the younger daughter, now at the age of puberty, also fell ill from a serious neurosis.

‘The fact that the children’s abnormality is here linked with the death-wish against the uncle, and is condensed with this far more strongly suppressed and psychically more powerful element, enables us to assume the existence of a second determinant for the slip of the tongue, namely a death-wish against abnormal children.

‘But the special significance of twelve as a death wish is already indicated by the fact that the uncle’s birthday was very intimately associated in the lady’s mind with the idea of his death. For her husband had taken his life on the 13th - one day, that is, after the uncle’s birthday; and the uncle’s wife had said to the young widow: "Yesterday he was sending his congratulations, so full of warmth and kindness - and to-day . . .!"

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1192

‘I may add that the lady had real enough reasons as well for wishing her children dead; for they brought her no pleasure at all, only grief and severe restrictions on her independence, and she had for their sake renounced all the happiness that love might have brought her. On this occasion she had in fact gone to exceptional lengths to avoid putting the daughter with whom she was going to pay the visit in a bad mood; and it may be imagined what demands this makes on anyone’s patience and self-denial where the case is one of dementia praecox, and how many angry impulses have to be suppressed in the process.

‘The meaning of the parapraxis would accordingly be:

‘"The uncle shall die, these abnormal children shall die (the whole of this abnormal family, as it were), and I will get their money."

‘This parapraxis bears, in my view, several indications of an unusual structure:

‘(a) Two determinants were present in it, condensed in a single element.

‘(b) The presence of the two determinants was reflected in the doubling of the slip of the tongue (twelve nails, twelve fingers).

‘(c) It is a striking point that one of the meanings of "twelve", viz., the twelve fingers which expressed the children’s abnormality, stood for an indirect form of representation; the psychical abnormality was here represented by the physical abnormality, and the highest part of the body by the lowest.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1193

CHAPTER VI

MISREADINGS AND SLIPS OF THE PEN

When we come to mistakes in reading and writing, we find that our general approach and our observations in regard to mistakes in speaking hold good here too - not surprisingly, in view of the close kinship between these functions. I shall confine myself here to reporting a few carefully analysed examples, and shall make no attempt to cover every aspect of the phenomena.

(A) MISREADINGS

(1) I was sitting in a café, turning over the pages of a copy of the Leipziger Illustrierte  (which I was holding up at an angle), when I read the following legend under a picture that stretched across the page: ‘A Wedding Celebration in the Odysee.’ It caught my attention; in surprise I took hold of the paper in the proper way and then corrected my error: ‘A Wedding Celebration on the Ostee.’  How did I come to make this absurd mistake in reading? My thoughts at once turned to a book by Ruths (1898), Experimentaluntersuchungen über Musikphantome . . . , which had occupied me a good deal recently since it trenches on the psychological problems that I have been concerned with. The author promised that he would shortly be bringing out a book to be called ‘Analysis and Principles of Dream Phenomena’. Seeing that I have just published an Interpretation of Dreams it is not surprising that I should await this book with the keenest interest. In Ruths’ work on music phantoms I found at the beginning of the list of contents an announcement of a detailed inductive proof that the ancient Greek myths and legends have their main source of origin in phantoms of sleep and music, in the phenomena of dreams and also in deliria. Thereupon I at once plunged into the text to find out whether he also realized that the scene in which Odysseus appears before Nausicaä was derived from the common dream of being naked. A friend had drawn my attention to the fine passage in Gottfried Keller’s Der Grüne Heinrich which explains this episode in the Odyssey as an objective representation of the dreams of a sailor wandering far from home; and I had pointed out the connection with exhibitionist dreams of being naked.¹ I found nothing on the subject in Ruths’ book. In this instance it is obvious that my thoughts were occupied with questions of priority.

¹ The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), p. 725-6.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1194

(2) How did I come to read in a newspaper one day: ‘Im Fass across Europe’, instead of ‘Zu Fuss '? Solving this problem caused me prolonged difficulties. The first associations, it is true, indicated that it must have been the tub of Diogenes that I had in mind; and I had recently been reading about the art of the age of Alexander in a history of art. From there it was easy to recall Alexander’s celebrated remark: ‘If I were not Alexander I should like to be Diogenes.’ I also had some dim recollection of a certain Hermann Zeitung¹ who had set out on his travels packed in a trunk. But the train of associations declined to run on further, and I did not succeed in rediscovering the page in the history of art on which the remark had caught my eye. It was not till months later that the problem, which I had meanwhile set aside, suddenly sprang to my mind once more; and this time it brought its solution with it. I recalled the comment of a newspaper article on the strange means of transport that people were then choosing in order to go to Paris for the International Exhibition; and the passage, I believe, went on with a joking account of now one gentleman intended to get himself rolled in a tub to Paris by another gentleman. Needless to say the only motive of these people would be to draw attention to themselves by such folly. Hermann Zeitung was in fact the name of the man who had provided the first instance of such extraordinary methods of transport. It then struck me that I once treated a patient whose pathological anxiety about reading newspapers was to be explained as a reaction against his pathological ambition to see himself in print and to read of his fame in the newspapers. Alexander of Macedon was undoubtedly one of the most ambitious men that ever lived. He even complained that he would find no Homer to sing of his exploits. But how could I possibly have failed to recall that there is another Alexander who is closer to me, that Alexander is the name of my younger brother? I now immediately found the objectionable thought about this other Alexander that had had to be repressed, and what it was that had given rise to it at the present time. My brother is an authority on matters connected with tariffs and transport, and at a certain date he was due to receive the title of professor for his work in teaching at a commercial college. Several years ago my own name had been suggested at the University for the same promotion, without my having obtained it. At the time, our mother expressed her surprise that her younger son was to become a professor before her elder. This had been the situation when I was unable to solve my mistake in reading. Subsequently my brother too met with difficulties; his prospects of becoming professor sank even lower than my own. But at that point the meaning of the misreading suddenly became clear to me; it was as though the fading of my brother’s prospects had removed an obstacle. I had behaved as if I was reading of my brother’s appointment in the newspaper and was saying to myself: ‘How curious that a person can appear in the newspaper (i.e. can be appointed professor) on account of such stupidities (which is what his profession amounts to)!’ Afterwards I had no difficulty in finding the passage about Hellenistic art in the age of Alexander, and to my astonishment convinced myself that in my previous search I had repeatedly read parts of the same page and had each time passed over the relevant sentence as if I was under the dominance of a negative hallucination. However, this sentence did not contain anything at all to enlighten me - anything that would have deserved to be forgotten. I suspect that the symptom consisting of my failure to find the passage in the book was only formed with the purpose of leading me astray. I was intended to search for a continuation of the train of thought in the place where my enquiries encountered an obstacle - that is, in some idea connected with Alexander of Macedon; in this way I was to be more effectively diverted from my brother of the same name. In fact the device was entirely successful; all my efforts were directed towards rediscovering the lost passage in the history of art.

In this case the ambiguity of the word ‘Beförderung’  forms the associative bridge between the two complexes, the unimportant one which was aroused by the newspaper article, and the more interesting but objectionable one which asserted itself here in the form of a disturbance of what was to be read. It can be seen from this example that it is not always easy to explain occurrences such as this mistake in reading. At times one is even forced to postpone solving the problem to a more favourable time. But the harder the work of solving it proves to be, the more certainly can one anticipate that the disturbing thought which is finally disclosed will be judged by our conscious thinking as something alien and opposed to it.

¹ [‘Zeitung’, here a proper name, is also the German for ‘newspaper’.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1195

(3) One day I received a letter from the neighbourhood of Vienna which brought me a piece of news that shocked me. I immediately called my wife and broke the news to her that ‘die arme¹ Wilhelm M.’ had fallen very seriously ill and been given up by the doctors. There must, however, have been a false ring about the words I chose to express my sorrow, for my wife grew suspicious, asked to see the letter, and declared she was certain it could not read as I had said it did, since no one called a wife by her husband’s first name, and in any case the lady who wrote the letter knew the wife’s first name perfectly well. I obstinately defended my assertion and referred to the very common use of visiting cards on which a woman styles herself by her husband’s first name. I was finally compelled to pick up the letter, and what we in fact read in it was ‘der² arme W. M.’, or rather something even plainer: ‘der arme Dr. W. M.’, which I had entirely overlooked. My mistake in reading therefore amounted to a kind of convulsive attempt to shift the sad news from the husband to the wife. The title that stood between the article, adjective and name did not fit in well with my requirement that the wife should be the one referred to. For this reason it was simply done away with in the process of reading. My motive for falsifying the message was not, however, that my feelings for the wife were less warm than those I had for her husband, but that the poor man’s fate had excited my fears for another person in close contact with me. This person shared with him what I knew to be one of the determinants of the illness.

¹ [The use of ‘die’, the feminine form of the definite article, implied that the person concerned was a woman.]

² [The masculine form of the definite article.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1196

(4) There is one misreading which I find irritating and laughable and to which I am prone whenever I walk through the streets of a strange town on my holidays. On these occasions I read every shop sign that resembles the word in any way as ‘Antiquities’. This betrays the questing spirit of the collector.

(5) Bleuler relates in his important book, Affektivität, Suggestibilität, Paranoia (1906, 121): ‘Once while I was reading I had an intellectual feeling that I saw my name two lines further down. To my astonishment I only found the word "Blutkörperchen ". I have analysed many thousands of misreadings in the peripheral as well as the central visual field; but this is the grossest instance. Whenever I imagined I saw my name, the word that gave rise to the notion usually resembled my name much more, and in most cases every single letter of my name had to be found close together before I could make such an error. In this case, however, the delusion of reference and the illusion could be explained very easily: what I had just read was the end of a comment on a type of bad style found in scientific works, from which I did not feel free.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1197

(6) Hanns Sachs reports having read: ‘The things that strike other people are passed over by him in his "Steifleinenheit ".’ ‘This last word’, Sachs proceeds, ‘surprised me, and on looking more closely I discovered that it was "Stilfeinheit ". The passage occurred in the course of some remarks by an author whom I admired, which were in extravagant praise of a historian whom I do not find sympathetic because he exhibits the "German professorial manner" in too marked a degree.’

(7) Dr. Marcell Eibenschütz (1911) describes an instance of misreading in the course of his philological studies. ‘I was engaged in studying the literary tradition of the Book of Martyrs, a Middle High German legendary which I had undertaken to edit in the series of "German Mediaeval Texts" published by the Prussian Akademie der Wissenschaften. Very little was known about the work, which had never seen print. There was a single essay on it in existence, by Joseph Haupt (1872, 101 ff.). Haupt based his work not on an old manuscript but on a copy of the principal source, Manuscript C (Klosterneuburg). This copy had been made at a comparatively recent date (in the nineteenth century ). It is preserved in the Hofbibliothek. At the end of the copy the following subscription¹ is to be found:

‘"Anno Domini MDCCCL in vigilia exaltacionis sancte crucis ceptus est iste liber et in vigilia pasce anni subsequentis finitus cum adiutorio omnipotentis per me Hartmanum de Krasna tunc temporis ecclesie niwenburgensis custodem."²

‘Now in his essay Haupt quotes this subscription in the belief that it comes from the writer of C himself, and supposes C to have been written in 1350 - a view involving a consistent misreading of the date 1850 in Roman numerals - in spite of his having copied the subscription perfectly correctly and in spite of its having been printed perfectly correctly (i.e. as MDCCCL) in the essay, in the passage referred to.

¹ [I.e. signature or explanatory paragraph at the end of a document.]

² [‘This book was begun on the Eve of Holy Cross Day in the Year of Our Lord 1850, and was finished on Easter Saturday in the following year; it was made, with the aid of the Almighty, by me, Hartman of Krasna, at that time sacrist of Klosterneuburg.’]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1198

‘Haupt’s information proved the source of much embarrassment to me. In the first place, being an entire novice in the world of scholarship, I was completely dominated by Haupt’s authority, and for a long time I read the date given in the subscription lying in front of me - which was perfectly clearly and correctly printed - as 1350 instead of 1850, just as Haupt had done. I did this even though no trace of any subscription could be found in the original Manuscript C, which I used, and though it further transpired that no monk by the name of Hartman had lived at Klosterneuburg at any time in the fourteenth century. And when at last the veil fell from before my eyes I guessed what had happened; and further investigation confirmed my suspicion. The subscription so often referred to is in fact to be found only in the copy used by Haupt, and is the work of its copyist, P. Hartman Zeibig, who was born at Krasna in Moravia, was Master of the Augustinian choir at Klosterneuburg, and who as sacrist of the monastery made a copy of Manuscript C and appended his name in the ancient fashion at the end of his copy. The mediaeval phraseology and the old orthography of the subscription doubtless played their part in inducing Haupt always to read 1350 instead of 1850, alongside his wish to be able to tell his readers as much as possible about the work he was discussing, and therefore also to date Manuscript C. (This was the motive for the parapraxis.)'

(8) In Lichtenberg’s Witzige und Satirische Einfälle a remark occurs which is no doubt derived from a piece of observation and which comprises virtually the whole theory of misreading: ‘He had read Homer so much that he always read "Agamemnon" instead of "angenommen  [supposed]".’

For in a very large number of cases it is the reader’s preparedness that alters the text and reads into it something which he is expecting or with which he is occupied. The only contribution towards a misreading which the text itself need make is that of affording some sort of resemblance in the verbal image, which the reader can alter in the sense he requires. Merely glancing at the text, especially with uncorrected vision, undoubtedly increases the possibility of such an illusion, but it is certainly not a necessary precondition for it.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1199

(9) I have an impression that no parapraxis was so greatly encouraged by war conditions - which brought us all such constant and protracted preoccupations - as this particular one of misreading. I have been able to observe a large number of instances of it, but unfortunately I have kept records of only a few of them. One day I picked up a mid-day or evening paper and saw in large print: ‘Der Friede von Görz [The Peace of Gorizia].’ But no, all it said was: ‘Der Feinde vor Görz [The Enemy before Gorizia].’ It is easy for someone who has two sons fighting at this very time in that theatre of operations to make such a mistake in reading. - Someone else found an ‘old Brotkarte [bread card]’ mentioned in a certain context; when he looked at this more attentively, he had to replace it by ‘old Brokate [brocades]’. It is perhaps worth mentioning that at a particular house, where this man is often a welcome guest, it is his habit to make himself agreeable to the mistress by handing his bread cards over to her. - An engineer, whose equipment had never stood up for long to the dampness in a tunnel that was under construction, was astonished to read a laudatory advertisement of goods made of ‘Schundleder [shoddy leather]’. But tradesmen are not usually so candid; what was being recommended was ‘Seehundleder [sealskin]’.

The reader’s profession or present situation, too, determines the outcome of his misreading. A philologist, whose most recent, and excellent, works had brought him into conflict with his professional colleagues, read ‘Sprachstrategie [language strategy]’ in mistake for ‘Schachstrategie [chess strategy]’. - A man who was taking a walk in a strange town just when the action of his bowels was timed to occur by a course of medical treatment read the word ‘Closet-House’ on a large sign on the first storey of a tall shop-building. His satisfaction on seeing it was mixed with a certain surprise that the obliging establishment should be in such an unusual place. The next moment, however, his satisfaction vanished; a more correct reading of the word on the sign was ‘Corset-House’.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1200

(10) In a second group of cases the part which the text contributes to the misreading is a much larger one. It contains something which rouses the reader’s defences - some information or imputation distressing to him - and which is therefore corrected by being misread so as to fit in with a repudiation or with the fulfilment of a wish. In such cases we are of course obliged to assume that the text was first correctly understood and judged by the reader before it underwent correction, although his consciousness learnt nothing of this first reading. Example (3) above is of this kind; and I include here a further, highly topical one given by Eitingon (1915), who was at the military hospital at Igló at the time.

‘Lieutenant X., who is in our hospital suffering from a traumatic war neurosis, was one day reading me a poem by the poet Walter Heymann, who fell in battle at so early an age. With visible emotion he read the last lines of the final stanza as follows.

Wo aber steht’s geschrieben, frag’ ich, dass von allen

Ich übrig bleiben soll, ein andrer für mich fallen?

Wer immer von euch fällt, der stirbt gewiss für mich;

Und ich soll übrig bleiben? warum denn nicht?¹

[But where is it decreed, I ask, that out of all

I should alone be left, my fellow for me fall?

Whoever of you falls, for me that man doth die;

And I - am I alone to live? Why should not I?]

‘My surprise caught his attention, and in some confusion he read the line correctly:

Und ich soll übrig bleiben? warum denn ich?

[And I - am I alone to live then? Why should I?]

‘I owe to Case X. some analytic insight into the psychical material of these "traumatic war neuroses", and in spite of the circumstances prevailing in a war hospital with a large number of patients and only a few doctors - circumstances so unfavourable to our way of working - it was then possible for me to see a little way beyond the shell explosions which were so highly esteemed as the "cause" of the illness.

‘In this case, too, were to be seen the severe tremors which give pronounced cases of these neuroses a similarity that is so striking at the first glance, as well as apprehensiveness, tearfulness, and a proneness to fits of rage, accompanied by convulsive infantile motor manifestations, and to vomiting ("at the least excitement").

‘The psychogenic nature of this last symptom in particular - above all in its contribution to the secondary gain from the illness - must have impressed everyone. The appearance in the ward of the hospital commandant who from time to time inspected the convalescent cases, or a remark made by an acquaintance in the street - "You look in really excellent form, you’re certainly fit now" - is enough to produce an immediate attack of vomiting.

‘"Fit . . . go back to service . . . why should I?"'

¹ From ‘Den Ausziehenden’ [‘To Those who have Gone Forth’] in Kriegsgedichte und Feldpostbriefe [War Poems and Letters from the Front] by Walter Heymann.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1201

(11) Dr. Hanns Sachs (1917) has reported some other cases of ‘war’ misreading:

‘A close acquaintance of mine had repeatedly declared to me that when his turn came to be called up he would not make any use of his specialist qualifications, which were attested by a diploma; he would waive any claim based on them for being found suitable employment behind the lines and he would enlist for service at the front. Shortly before the call-up date in fact arrived, he told me one day in the curtest way, and without giving any further reason, that he had submitted the evidence of his specialist training to the proper authorities and as a result would shortly be assigned to a post in industry. Next day we happened to meet in a post-office. I was standing up at a desk and writing; he came in, looked over my shoulder for a while and then said: "Oh! the word at the top there’s ‘Druckbogen [printer’s proofs]’ - I’d read it as ‘Drückeberger [shirker]’."'

(12) ‘I was sitting in a tram and reflecting on the fact that many of the friends of my youth who had always been taken as frail and weakly were now able to endure the most severe hardships - ones which would quite certainly be too much for me. While in the middle of this disagreeable train of thought, I read, only half attentively, a word in large black letters on a shop-sign that we were passing: "Iron Constitution". A moment later it struck me that this word was an inappropriate one to be found on the board of a business-firm; I turned round hastily and catching another glimpse of the sign saw that it really read: "Iron Construction".’ (Sachs, ibid.)

(13) ‘The evening papers carried a Reuter message, which subsequently proved to be incorrect, to the effect that Hughes had been elected President of the United States. This was followed by a short account of the supposed President’s career, in which I came across the information that Hughes had completed his studies at Bonn University. It struck me as strange that this fact had received no mention in the newspaper discussions during all the weeks before the day of the election. On taking a second look I found that all the text in fact contained was a reference to Brown University. The explanation of this gross case, in which the misreading had called for a fairly violent twist, depended - apart from my haste in reading the newspaper - chiefly upon my thinking it desirable that the new President’s sympathy for the Central European Powers, as the basis for good relations in the future, should be based on personal motives as well as political ones.’ (Sachs, ibid.)

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1202

(B) SLIPS OF THE PEN

(1) On a sheet of paper containing short daily notes mainly of a business kind I was surprised to find, among some entries correctly dated ‘September’, the wrongly written date ‘Thursday, October 20'. It is not difficult to explain this anticipation - and to explain it as the expression of a wish. A few days before, I had returned fresh from my holiday travels, and I felt ready for plenty of professional work; but there were not yet many patients. On my arrival I had found a letter from a patient to say she was coming on October 20. When I made an entry for the same day of the month in September I may well have thought: ‘X. should have been here already; what a waste of a whole month!’, and with that thought in mind I brought the date forward a month. In this case the disturbing thought can scarcely be called an objectionable one; and for this reason I knew the solution of the slip of the pen as soon as I had noticed it. - In the autumn of the following year I made another slip of the pen which was precisely analogous and had a similar motive. - Ernest Jones has made a study of slips like these in writing dates; in most cases they could be clearly recognized as having reasons.

(2) I had received the proofs of my contribution to the Jahresbericht für Neurologie und Psychiatrie, and I had naturally to revise the names of authors with particular care, since they are of various nationalities and therefore usually cause the compositor very great difficulty. I did in fact find some foreign sounding names which were still in need of correction; but strangely enough there was one name which the compositor had corrected by departing from my manuscript. He was perfectly right to do so. What I had in fact written was ‘Buckrhard’, which the compositor guessed should be ‘Burckhard’. I had actually praised the useful treatise which an obstetrician of that name had written on the influence of birth upon the origin of children’s palsies, and I was not aware of having anything to hold against him; but he has the same name as a writer in Vienna who had annoyed me by an unintelligent review of my Interpretation of Dreams. It is just as if in writing the name Burckhard, meaning the obstetrician, I had had a hostile thought about the other Burckhard, the writer;¹ for distorting names is very often a form of insulting their owners, as I have mentioned above in discussing slips of the tongue.

¹ Compare the scene in Julius Caesar, III, 3:

CINNA                     Truly, my name is Cinna.

A CITIZEN                Tear him to pieces; he’s a conspirator.

CINNA                      I am Cinna the poet . . .

I am not Cinna the conspirator.

ANOTHER CITIZEN.   It is no matter, his name’s Cinna; pluck but

his name out of his heart, and turn him going.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1203

(3) This assertion is very neatly confirmed by a self-observation of Storfer’s (1914), in which the author exposes with commendable frankness the motives that prompted him to recollect the name of a supposed rival wrongly and then to write it down in a distorted form:

‘In December, 1910, I saw a book by Dr. Eduard Hitschmann in the window of a bookshop in Zurich. Its subject was Freud’s theory of the neuroses and it was new at the time. Just then I was at work on the manuscript of a lecture on the basic principles of Freud’s psychology, which I was shortly to give before a University society. In the introductory part of the lecture which I had already written, I had referred to the historical development of Freud’s psychology from his researches in an applied field, to certain consequent difficulties in giving a comprehensive account of its basic principles, and also to the fact that no general account of them had yet appeared. When I saw the book (whose author was till then unknown to me) in the shop window, I did not at first think of buying it. Some days later, however, I decided to do so. The book was no longer in the window. I asked the bookseller for it and gave the author’s name as "Dr Eduard Hartmann". The bookseller corrected me: "I think you mean Hitschmann", and brought me the book.

‘The unconscious motive for the parapraxis was obvious. I had so to speak given myself the credit for having written a comprehensive account of the basic principles of psycho-analytic theory, and obviously regarded Hitschmann’s book with envy and annoyance since it took some of the credit away from me. I told myself, on the lines of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, that the changing of the name was an act of unconscious hostility. At the time I was satisfied with this explanation.

‘Some weeks later I noted down this parapraxis. On this occasion I raised the further question of why Eduard Hitschmann had been altered precisely to Eduard Hartmann. Could I have been brought to the name of the well-known philosopher merely because it was similar to the other one? My first association was the memory of a pronouncement which I once heard from Professor Hugo von Meltzl, an enthusiastic admirer of Schopenhauer, and which ran roughly as follows: "Eduard von Hartmann is a botched Schopenhauer, a Schopenhauer turned inside out." The affective trend by which the substitutive-formation for the forgotten name was determined was therefore: "No, there will probably not be much in this Hitschmann and his comprehensive account; he probably stands to Freud as Hartmann does to Schopenhauer."

‘I had, as I say, noted down this case of determined forgetting with the forgotten word replaced by a substitute.

‘Six months later I came upon the sheet of paper on which I had made the note. I then observed that instead of Hitschmann I had throughout written Hintschmann.’¹

¹ [‘Hintsch’ is a dialect word for ‘asthma’ or, more generally, ‘pest’.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1204

(4) Here is what seems to be a more serious slip of the pen: I might perhaps equally well have included it among ‘bungled actions’:

I intended to draw the sum of 300 kronen from the Post Office Savings Bank, which I wanted to send to an absent relative for purposes of medical treatment. At the same time I noticed that my account stood at 4, 380 kronen and decided to bring it down on this occasion to the round sum of 4,000 kronen which was not to be touched in the near future. After I had duly written out the cheque and cut off the figures corresponding to the sum, I suddenly noticed that I had not asked for 380 kronen as I intended, but for exactly 438 kronen and I took alarm at the unreliability of my conduct. I soon realized that my alarm was not called for; I was not now any poorer than I had been before. But it took me a good deal of reflection to discover what influence had disturbed my first intention, without making itself known to my consciousness. To begin with I started on the wrong line; I tried subtracting 380 from 438, but I had no idea afterwards what to do with the difference. Finally a thought suddenly struck me which showed me the true connection. Why, 438 was ten per cent of the total account, 4, 380 kronen! Now a ten per cent discount is given by booksellers. I recalled that a few days earlier I had picked out a number of medical books in which I was no longer interested in order to offer them to a bookseller for precisely 300 kronen. He thought the price I was asking was too high, and promised to give me a definite answer within the next few days. If he accepted my offer he would replace the exact sum which I was to spend on the invalid. There is no doubt that I regretted this expenditure. My affect on perceiving my error can be understood better as a fear of growing poor as a result of such expenditures. But both these feelings, my regret at the expenditure and my anxiety over becoming poor that was connected with it, were entirely foreign to my consciousness; I did not have a feeling of regret when I promised the sum of money, and would have found the reason for it laughable. I should probably not have believed myself in any way capable of such an impulse had I not become fairly familiar, through my psycho-analytic practice with patients, with the part played by the repressed in mental life, and had I not had a dream a few days before which called for the same solution.¹

¹ This is the one which I took as the specimen dream in my short work On Dreams (1901a).

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1205

(5) I quote the following case from Wilhelm Stekel, and can also vouch for its authenticity:

‘A simply incredible example of a slip of the pen and misreading occurred in the editing of a widely-read weekly periodical. The proprietors in question had been publicly described as "venil"; and an article in defence and vindication was clearly called for. One was in fact prepared: it was written with great warmth and feeling. The editor-in-chief read the article, while the author naturally read it several times in manuscript and then once more in galley-proof; everyone was perfectly satisfied. Suddenly the printer’s reader came forward and pointed out a small mistake which had escaped everyone’s notice. There it was, plainly enough: "Our readers will bear witness to the fact that we have always acted in the most self-seeking manner for the good of the community." It is obvious that it should have read: "in the most unself-seeking manner". But the true thoughts broke though the emotional statement with elemental force.’

(6) A reader of the Pester Lloyd, Frau Kata Levy of Budapest, recently came across a similar unintended display of candour in a telegram from Vienna which appeared in the paper on October 11, 1918:

‘In view of the complete mutual confidence which has prevailed between ourselves and our German allies throughout the war, it may be taken for certain that the two Powers would reach a unanimous decision in all circumstances. It is unnecessary to state specifically that active and interrupted co-operation between the allied diplomatists is taking place at the present stage as well.’

Only a few weeks later it was possible to express one’s opinion more frankly about this ‘mutual confidence’, and there was no longer any need to take refuge in a slip of the pen (or misprint).

(7) An American living in Europe who had left his wife on bad terms felt that he could now effect a reconciliation with her, and asked her to come across the Atlantic and join him on a certain date. ‘It would be fine,’ he wrote, ‘if you could come on the Mauretania as I did.’ He did not however dare to send the sheet of paper which had this sentence on it. He preferred to write it out again. For he did not want her to notice how he had had to correct the name of the ship. He had first written ‘Lusitania’.

This slip of the pen needs no explanation: its interpretation is perfectly plain. But a happy chance enables a further point to be added. Before the war his wife paid her first visit to Europe after the death of her only sister. If I am not mistaken, the Mauretania is the surviving sister-ship of the Lusitania, which was sunk in the war.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1206

(8) A doctor had examined a child and was making out a prescription for it, which included the word ‘alcohol’. While he was occupied in doing so the child’s mother pestered him with stupid and unnecessary questions. He privately determined not to let this make him angry, and actually succeeded in keeping his temper, but made a slip of the pen in the course of the interruptions. Instead of alcohol the word achol¹ could be read on the prescription.

(9) The following example, which Ernest Jones reports about A. A. Brill, has a similar subject-matter, and I therefore insert it here. Although by custom a total abstainer, he allowed himself to be persuaded by a friend to drink a little wine. Next morning an acute headache gave him cause to regret having yielded in this way. He had occasion to write the name of a patient called Ethel; instead he wrote Ethyl.² It was no doubt of some relevance that the lady in question used to drink more than was good for her.

¹ Approximately: ‘No choler.’

² I.e. ethyl alcohol.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1207

(10) Since a slip of the pen on the part of a doctor who is writing a prescription possesses a significance which goes far beyond the practical importance of ordinary parapraxes, I take the opportunity of reporting in full the only analysis published up to now of such a slip made by a doctor:

From Dr. Eduard Hitschmann (1913b): ‘A colleague tells me that several times over a period of years he had made an error in prescribing a certain drug for women patients of an advanced age. On two occasions he prescribed ten times the correct dose; only later did he suddenly realize this and was obliged, in the greatest anxiety in case he had harmed his patient and put himself in a very unpleasant position, to take the most hurried steps to recall the prescription. This singular symptomatic act deserves to be clarified by a more precise description of the individual instances and by an analysis.

‘First instance: In treating a poor woman bordering on extreme old age who was suffering from spastic constipation the doctor prescribed belladonna suppositories ten times too strong. He left the out-patients’ department, and his error suddenly sprang to his mind about an hour later while he was at home reading the paper and having lunch; he was overcome by anxiety, rushed first to the out-patients’ department to obtain the patient’s address and hastened from there to her home, which was a long way off. He was delighted to find that the old woman had not yet had the prescription made up, and he returned home much relieved. The excuse that he gave himself on this occasion was the not unjustified one that the talkative head of the out-patients’ department had looked over his shoulder while he was writing the prescription and had distracted him.

‘Second instance: The doctor was obliged to tear himself away from a consultation with a flirtatious and provocatively attractive patient in order to pay a professional visit to an elderly spinster. He took a taxi, not having much time to spare for the visit; for he was due to keep a secret rendezvous with a girl he was in love with, at a certain time, near her house. Here, too, belladonna was indicated because of troubles analogous to those in the first instance. Once again he made the mistake of prescribing a quantity ten times too strong. The patient raised a question that was of some interest but irrelevant to the matter in hand; the doctor, however, showed impatience, though his words denied it, and left the patient, so that he appeared at the rendezvous in very good time. Some twelve hours later, at about seven o’clock in the morning, the doctor woke up; the thought of his slip of the pen and a feeling of anxiety came almost simultaneously to his consciousness, and he sent a hasty message to the patient in the hope that the medicine had not yet been collected from the chemist’s, and asked for the prescription to be sent back in order to be revised. On receiving it however he found that the prescription had already been made up; with a somewhat stoical resignation and an optimism born of experience he went to the chemist, where the dispenser reassured him by explaining that he had naturally (or perhaps by mistake too?) made up the drug in a smaller dose.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1208

‘Third instance: The doctor wanted to prescribe a mixture of Tinct. belladonnae and Tinct. Opii in a harmless dose for his old aunt, his mother’s sister. The prescription was immediately taken to the chemist by the maid. A very short time later it occurred to the doctor that instead of "tincture" he had written "extract", and immediately afterwards the chemist telephoned to question him about the error. The doctor gave as an excuse the untruthful explanation that he had not completed the prescription - it had been carried off from his table with unexpected suddenness, so it was not his fault.

‘These three errors in making out prescriptions have the following striking points of resemblance. Up to now it has only happened to the doctor with this one drug; each time it involved a woman patient of advanced years, and each time the dose was too strong. From the brief analysis it emerged that the doctor’s relation to his mother must have been of decisive importance. For he recalled that on one occasion - one, moreover, which most probably occurred before these symptomatic acts - he had made out the same prescription for his mother, who was also an old woman; he had ordered a dose of 0.03, although he was more familiar with the usual dose of 0.02. This, as he told himself, was in order to give her radical help. His frail mother reacted to the drug with congestion in the head and an unpleasant dryness of the throat. She complained of this, alluding half-jokingly to the risks that could come from a consultation with a son. There were in fact other occasions when his mother, who was, incidentally, a doctor’s daughter, raised similar critical and half jocular objections to drugs recommended at various times by her doctor son, and spoke of being poisoned.

‘So far as the present writer can fathom this son’s relations with his mother, there is no doubt that he is an instinctively affectionate child, but his mental estimate of his mother and his personal respect for her are by no means exaggerated. He shares a household with a brother a year younger than himself and with his mother, and has felt for years that this arrangement was inhibiting his erotic freedom. We have, of course, learnt from psycho-analytic experience that such reasons are readily misused as an excuse for an internal attachment. The doctor accepted the analysis, being fairly well satisfied with the explanation, and laughingly suggested that the word ‘belladonna’ (i.e., beautiful woman) could also have an erotic reference. He had also occasionally used the drug himself in the past.’

In my judgement serious parapraxes like the present ones are brought about in exactly the same way as the innocent ones that we normally investigate.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1209

(11) The next slip of the pen, reported by Sándor Ferenczi, will be thought quite especially innocent. It can he understood as being an act of condensation, resulting from impatience (compare the slip of the tongue, ‘Der Apfe’, above, p. 1152); and this view might have been maintained if a penetrating analysis of the occurrence had not revealed a stronger disturbing factor:

‘"I am reminded of the Anektode",¹ I once wrote in my note book. Naturally I meant "Anekdote "; actually it was the one about a gipsy who had been sentenced to death, and who asked as a favour to be allowed himself to choose the tree from which he was to be hanged. (In spite of a keen search he failed to find any suitable tree.)'

(12) On the other hand there are times when the most insignificant slip in writing can serve to express a dangerous secret meaning. An anonymous correspondent reports:

‘I ended a letter with the words: "Herzlichste Grüsse an Ihre Frau Gemahlin und ihren Sohn."² Just before I put the sheet in the envelope I noticed the error I had made in the first letter of "ihren" and corrected it. On the way home from my last visit to this married couple the lady who was with me had remarked that the son bore a striking resemblance to a family friend and was in fact undoubtedly his child.’

¹ [A non-existent word; but the last part of it, ‘Tode’, means ‘death’.]

² [‘Warmest greetings to your wife and her son.’ The German possessive adjective ‘ihr’, as spelt with a small ‘i’, means ‘her’; when spelt with a capital ‘I’, it means ‘your’.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1210

(13) A lady sent her sister a message of good wishes on the occasion of her taking up residence in a new and spacious house. A friend who was present noticed that the writer had put the wrong address on the letter. She had not even addressed it to the house that her sister had just left, but to her first house which she had moved into immediately after her marriage and had given up long before. This friend drew the lady’s attention to the slip. ‘You’re right’, she was forced to confess; ‘but how did the idea come into my head? Why did I do it?’ ‘I think’, said her friend, ‘you probably grudge her the fine large home which will now be hers, while you feel yourself cramped for space; and therefore you put her back in her first home where she was no better off than you are.’ ‘I certainly grudge her her new home’, the other frankly admitted, and added: ‘What a pity one’s always so petty in such things!’

(14) Ernest Jones reports the following slip of the pen, which was supplied to him by A. A. Brill:

‘A patient wrote to him on the subject of his sufferings, which he tried to attribute to worry about his financial affairs induced by a cotton crisis: "My trouble is all due to that d---d frigid wave; there isn’t even any seed." (By "wave" he meant of course a trend in the money market.) What he really wrote, however, was not "wave" but "wife". In the bottom of his heart he cherished half-avowed reproaches against his wife on account of her sexual anaesthesia and childlessness, and he dimly realized, with right, that his life of enforced abstinence played a considerable part in the genesis of his symptoms.’

(15) Dr. R. Wagner (1911) relates of himself:

‘In reading through an old lecture note-book I found that I had made a small slip in the hurry of taking down the notes. Instead of "Epithel [epithelium]", I had written "Edithel". If we stress the first syllable we have the diminutive form of a girl’s name.¹ The retrospective analysis is simple enough. At the time I made the slip I was only very superficially acquainted with the lady of this name; it was not till much later that our relations became intimate. The slip of the pen is therefore a neat indication of the break-through of the unconscious attraction I felt to her at a time when I myself actually had no inkling of it, and my choice of the diminutive form at the same time showed the nature of the accompanying feelings.’

¹ [In Austria ‘l’ is the common diminutive termination.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1211

(16) From Frau Dr. von Hug-Hellmuth (1912):

‘A doctor prescribed "Leviticowasser " for a woman patient instead of "Levicowasser". This error, which gave a chemist a welcome opportunity for passing adverse comments, may very well be viewed in a milder light if one looks out for the possible motivations arising from the unconscious and is prepared at any rate to concede them a certain plausibility - even though they are merely the subjective conjectures of someone who is not closely acquainted with the doctor. In spite of his habit of using somewhat harsh language to scold his patients for their far-from-rational diet - to read them a lecture, so to speak - the doctor enjoyed great popularity, so that his waiting-room was crowded before and during his consulting hour; and this provided a justification for his wish that the patients he had seen should dress as quickly as possible - "vite, vite". If I remember correctly, his wife was French by birth: this lends some support to my seemingly rather bold assumption that he used French in his wish for greater speed from his patients. It is in any case a habit of many people to draw on foreign words to express such wishes: my own father hurried us along as children on our walks by calling out "avanti gioventù" [Italian for "forward, youth"] or "marchez au pas" [French for "forward march"]; while a very elderly physician, with whom I was in treatment for a throat complaint as a girl, used to try to inhibit my movements, which seemed much too hasty to him, by murmuring a soothing "piano, piano" [Italian for "gently, gently"]. Thus I can very easily imagine that the other doctor had the same habit too, and so made the slip of writing "Leviticowasser" instead of "Levicowasser".’

The same paper contains other examples recalled from its author’s youth (‘frazösisch’ instead of ‘französich’, and a slip in writing the name ‘Karl’).

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1212

(17) I have to thank Herr J. G., who also contributed an example mentioned above for the following account of a slip of the pen. In content it is identical with a notorious bad joke, but in this case the intention of making a joke could be definitely ruled out:

‘While I was a patient in a (lung-) sanatorium I learnt to my regret that the same illness which had forced me to seek treatment in an institution had been diagnosed in a close relative of mine. In a letter to my relative I recommended him to go to a specialist, a well-known professor, with whom I was myself in treatment, and of whose authority in medical matters I was fully satisfied, while having at the same time every reason to deplore his discourteousness: for, only a short time before, this same professor had refused to write me a testimonial which it was very important for me to have. In his reply to my letter my relative drew my attention to a slip of the pen which, since I immediately recognized the cause of it, gave me particular amusement. In my letter I had used the following phrase: "and so I advise you to insult Professor X. without delay". I had of course, intended to write "consult". I should perhaps point out that my knowledge of Latin and French rules out the possibility of explaining it as a mistake due to ignorance.’

(18) Omissions in writing have naturally a claim to be considered in the same light as slips of the pen. Dattner (1911) has reported a curious instance of a ‘historical parapraxis’. In one of the sections of the law dealing with the financial obligations of Austria and Hungary, settled in the ‘Compromise’ of 1867 between the two countries, the word ‘actual’ was left out of the Hungarian translation; and Dattner makes it plausible to suppose that the unconscious desire of the Hungarian parliamentary draftsmen to grant Austria the least possible advantages played a part in causing the omission.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1213

We have every reason to suppose, too, that the very frequent repetitions of the same word in writing and copying - ‘perseverations’ - are likewise not without significance. If the writer repeats a word he has already written, this is probably an indication that it was not so easy for him to get away from it: that he could have said more at that point but had omitted to do so, or something of the kind. Perseveration in copying seems to be a substitute for saying ‘I too’. I have had lengthy medico-legal ‘opinions’ before me which show perseverations on the copyist’s part at particularly important passages. The interpretation I should have liked to give them would be that, bored with his impersonal role, the copyist was introducing his own gloss: ‘Just my case’ or ‘it’s just the same with us.’

(19) Furthermore, there is nothing to prevent our treating misprints as ‘writing mistakes’ on the compositor’s part, and our regarding them as being in a very great measure motivated. I have not set about making a systematic collection of such parapraxes, which could be very amusing and instructive. In the work which I have already referred to a number of times, Jones has devoted a special section to misprints.

The distortions found in the text of telegrams can also at times be understood as writing mistakes on the telegraphist’s part. In the summer holidays I received a telegram from my publishers, the text of which was unintelligible to me. It ran: ‘Vorräte erhalten, Einladung X. dringend.’ The solution of the riddle starts from the name X. mentioned in it. X. was the author of a book to which I was to write an ‘Einleitung '. This ‘Einleitung’ was what had been turned into the ‘Einladung '. I was then able to recall that some days earlier I had sent my publishers a ‘Vorrede ' to another book; so this was the acknowledgement of its arrival. The true text had very probably run: ‘Vorrede erhalten, Einleitung X. dringend.’ We may assume that it had fallen victim to a revision by the telegraphist’s hunger-complex, in the course of which, moreover the two halves of the sentence became linked more closely than the sender had intended. It is, incidentally, a pretty instance of the ‘secondary revision’ that can be seen at work in most dreams.¹

¹ Cf. the chapter on the dream-work in my Interpretation of Dreams.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1214

The possibility of ‘tendentious misprints’ has been discussed by Herbert Silberer (1922).

(20) From time to time other writers have drawn attention to misprints the tendentiousness of which cannot easily be challenged. See, for example, Storfer’s paper ‘The Political Demon of Misprints’ (1914) and his short note (1915) which I reprint here:

‘A political misprint is to be found in the issue of März for April 25 of this year. A dispatch from Argyrokastron reported some remarks made by Zographos, the leader of the insurgent Epirotes in Albania (or, if that is preferred, the President of the Independent Government of the Epirus). It included the following phrase: "Believe me: a self-governing Epirus would be in the most fundamental interest of Prince Wied. He could fall down on it." Even without this fatal misprint the Prince of Albania is no doubt well aware that the acceptance of the support offered him by the Epirotes would mean his downfall '.

(21) I myself recently read an article in one of our Vienna daily papers, the title of which - ‘The Bukovina under Rumanian Rule’ - would have at least to be called premature, since at the time Rumania had not yet disclosed herself as an enemy. From the content of the article it was quite clear that the word should have been ‘Russian’, not ‘Rumanian’; yet the censor, too, seems to have found the phrase so little surprising that even he overlooked this misprint,

It is hard to avoid suspecting a ‘political’ misprint on coming across the following ‘literal’ misprint in a circular from the celebrated (formerly the Imperial and Royal) printing firm of Karl Prochaska in Teschen:

‘By a decree of the Entente Powers, fixing the frontier at the River Olsa, not only Silesia but Teschen as well have been divided into two parts, of which one zuviel¹ to Poland and the other to Czecho-Slovakia.’

¹ [‘Too much.’ The word should have been the similarly pronounced ‘zufiel’, ‘fell to the share of’.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1215

Theodor Fontane was once obliged to take up arms in an amusing way against a misprint which was only too full of meaning. On March 29, 1860, he wrote to the publisher Julius Springer:

‘Dear Sir,

‘I seem to be fated not to see my modest wishes fulfilled. A glance at the proof sheets¹ which I enclose will tell you what I mean. What is more, I have been sent only one set of proofs, although I need two, for reasons which I have already given. And my request that the first set should be returned to me for further revision - with special regard to the English words and phrases - has not been carried out. I set great store by this. For instance, on page 27 of the present sheets a scene between John Knox and the Queen contains the words: "worauf Maria aasrief."² In the face of such a fulminating mistake, it would be a relief to know that it has really been removed. The unfortunate "aas" for "aus" is made all the worse by there being no doubt that she (the queen) must really have called him that to herself.

‘Yours faithfully,

‘Theodor Fontane.’

Wundt (1900, 374) gives an explanation which deserves notice for the fact (which can easily be confirmed) that we make slips of the pen more readily than slips of the tongue. ‘In the course of normal speaking the inhibitory function of the will is continuously directed to bringing the course of ideas and the articulatory movements into harmony with each other. If the expressive movement which follows the ideas is retarded through mechanical causes, as is the case in writing . . ., such anticipations make their appearance with particular ease.’

¹ The book in question was Beyond the Tweed: Sketches and Letters from Scotland, which Julius Springer published in 1860.

² [‘On which Mary "aasrief"'‘: i. e., cried ‘Aas’ (literally, ‘carrion’; colloquially, ‘filthy blackguard’). The word should have been ‘Ausrief’ meaning simply ‘cried out’.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1216

Observation of the conditions under which misreadings occur gives rise to a doubt which I should not like to leave unmentioned, because it can, I think, become the starting-point for a fruitful investigation. Everyone knows how frequently the reader finds that in reading aloud his attention wanders from the text and turns to his own thoughts. As a result of this digression on the part of his attention he is often unable, if interrupted and questioned, to give any account of what he has read. He has read, as it were, automatically, but almost always correctly. I do not think that under such conditions mistakes in reading show a noticeable increase. There is in fact a whole series of functions which we are accustomed to assume will be performed most exactly when done automatically - that is, with scarcely any conscious attention. From this it seems to follow that the factor of attention in mistakes in speaking, reading and writing must be determined in a different way from that described by Wundt (cessation or diminution of attention). The examples which we have subjected to analysis have not really justified us in assuming that there was a quantitative lessening of attention; we found something which is perhaps not quite the same thing: a disturbance of attention by an alien thought which claims consideration.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1217

Between ‘slips of the pen’ and ‘forgetting’ may be inserted the case of someone who forgets to append a signature. An unsigned cheque comes to the same thing as a forgotten cheque. For the significance of a forgetting of a similar kind I will cite a passage from a novel, which Dr. Hanns Sachs came upon:

‘A very instructive and transparent example of the sureness with which imaginative writers know how to employ the mechanism of parapraxes and symptomatic acts in the psycho-analytic sense is contained in John Galsworthy’s novel The Island Pharisees. The story centres round the vacillations of a young man of the well-to-do middle-class between his strong social sympathy and the conventional attitudes of his class. Chapter XXVI portrays the way in which he reacts to a letter from a young ne’er-do-well, to whom - prompted by his original attitude to life - he had supplied help on two or three occasions. The letter contains no direct request for money, but paints a picture of great distress which can have no other meaning. Its recipient at first rejects the idea of throwing this money away on a hopeless case instead of using it to support charitable causes. "To give a helping hand, a bit of himself, a nod of fellowship to any fellow-being irrespective of a claim, merely because he happened to be down, was sentimental nonsense! The line must be drawn! But in the muttering of this conclusion he experienced a twinge of honesty. ‘Humbug! You don’t want to part with your money, that’s all!’"

‘Thereupon he wrote a friendly letter, ending with the words: "I enclose a cheque. Yours sincerely, Richard Shelton."

‘"Before he had written out the cheque, a moth fluttering round the candle distracted his attention, and by the time he had caught and put it out he had forgotten that the cheque was not enclosed." The letter was posted in fact just as it was.

‘There is however an even subtler motivation for the lapse of memory than the break-through of the selfish purpose, which, had apparently been surmounted, of avoiding giving away the money.

‘At the country seat of his future parents-in-law, surrounded by his fiancée, her family and their guests, Shelton felt isolated; his parapraxis indicates that he longed for his protégé who, as a result of his past and of his view of life, forms a complete contrast to the irreproachable company, uniformly moulded by one and the same set of conventions, that surround him. And in fact this person, who can no longer keep his place without being supported, does in fact arrive some days later to get an explanation of why the promised cheque was not there.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1218

CHAPTER VII

THE FORGETTING OF IMPRESSIONS AND INTENTIONS

If anyone should feel inclined to over-estimate the state of our present knowledge of mental life, a reminder of the function of memory is all that would be needed to force him to be more modest. No psychological theory has yet succeeded in giving a connected account of the fundamental phenomenon of remembering and forgetting; in fact, the complete analysis of what can actually be observed has so far scarcely been begun. To-day forgetting has perhaps become more of a puzzle than remembering, ever since we have learnt from the study of dreams and pathological phenomena that even something we thought had been forgotten long ago may suddenly re-emerge in consciousness.

There are, it is true, a few indications already in our possession which we expect to be accepted generally. We assume that forgetting is a spontaneous process which may be regarded as requiring a certain length of time. We lay stress on the fact that forgetting involves a certain selection taking place from among the impressions presented to us, and similarly from among the details of each impression or experience. We know some of the conditions enabling what would otherwise have been forgotten to be retained in the memory and to be re-awakened. Nevertheless, on countless occasions in daily life we can observe how imperfect and unsatisfactory our understanding of these conditions is. Thus we may listen to two people who were in receipt of the same external impressions - who took a journey together, for example - exchanging recollections at some later date. What has remained firm in the memory of one of them has often been forgotten by the other, as if it had never happened; and this is true even where there is no justification for assuming that the impression was psychically of greater importance for the one than for the other. A whole quantity of factors determining the choice of what is to be remembered are obviously still beyond our ken.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1219

With the aim of making a small contribution to our knowledge of the determinants of forgetting I make it my practice to submit to a psychological analysis those cases in which I myself forget something. I am as a rule only concerned with a certain group of these cases, namely those in which the forgetting surprises me because I should have expected to know the thing in question. I may add that I am not in general inclined to forget things (things I have experienced, that is, not things I have learned!), and that for a short period of my youth some unusual feats of memory were not beyond me. When I was a schoolboy I took it as a matter of course that I could repeat by heart the page I had been reading; and shortly before I entered the University I could write down almost verbatim popular Iectures on scientific subjects directly after hearing them. In the period of tension before my final medical examination I must have made use once more of what remained of this faculty, for in some subjects I gave the examiners, as though it were automatically, answers which faithfully followed the words of the textbook that I had skimmed through only once in the greatest haste.

Since then the command that I have over my store of memories has steadily deteriorated; yet right up to the most recent times I have convinced myself over and over again that with the aid of a certain device I can remember far more than I would otherwise have believed possible. When, for instance, a patient in my consulting hour claims that I have seen him before and I can recall neither the fact nor the time, I help myself by guessing: that is to say, I quickly think of a number of years, counting back from the present. In cases where records or more definite information from the patient enable me to check what has come to my mind, they show that I have rarely been more than half a year out in ten.¹ I have a similar experience when I meet a distant acquaintance and out of politeness enquire after his small children. If he describes their progress I try to think at random of the child’s present age. I afterwards check my estimate by what the father tells me; and at the most I am wrong by a month, or with older children by three months, although I am unable to say on what my estimate was based. I have latterly grown so bold that I always produce my estimate spontaneously without running any risk of offending the father by exposing my ignorance about his offspring. In this way I extend my conscious memory by invoking my unconscious memory, which is in any case far more extensive.

¹ In the course of the subsequent consultation the details of the previous visit usually emerge into my consciousness.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1220

I shall accordingly cite some striking examples of forgetting: most of which I observed in myself. I distinguish the forgetting of impressions and experiences - ie., of knowledge - from the forgetting of intentions - i.e., from omission to do things. I can state in advance the invariable result of the entire series of observations: in every case the forgetting turned out to be based on a motive of unpleasure.

(A) THE FORGETTING OF IMPRESSIONS AND KNOWLEDGE

(1) One summer holiday my wife made me greatly annoyed though the cause was innocent enough. We were sitting at table d’hôte opposite a gentleman from Vienna whom I knew and who no doubt remembered me too. However, I had reasons of my own for not renewing the acquaintance. My wife, who had heard no more than his distinguished name, revealed too plainly that she was listening to his conversation with his neighbours, for from time to time she turned to me with questions that took up the thread of their discussion. I became impatient and finally irritated. Some weeks later I was complaining to a relative about this behaviour on my wife’s part but was unable to recall a single word of the gentleman’s conversation. As I am normally rather apt to harbour grievances and can forget no detail of an incident that has annoyed me, my amnesia in the present case was probably motivated by consideration for my wife. A short time ago I had a similar experience. I wished to have a good laugh with an intimate friend over a remark made by my wife only a few hours before, but was prevented from doing so by the singular fact that I had utterly forgotten what she had said. I had first to ask my wife to remind me what it was. It is easy to understand my forgetfulness here as being analogous to the typical disturbance of judgement to which we are subject where those nearest to us are concerned.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1221

(2) I had undertaken to get a lady who was a stranger to Vienna a small strong-box for her documents and money. When I offered my services I had in my mind’s eye an unusually vivid picture of a shop-window in the Inner Town in which I was sure I had seen boxes of the kind. I could not, it was true, recall the name of the street, but I felt sure that I would find the shop if I walked through the town, since my memory told me I had passed it on countless occasions. To my chagrin I had no success in finding the shop-window with the strong-boxes, though I walked all over the Inner Town in every direction. I decided that the only course left was to look up the firms of safe-manufacturers in a trades directory, so as to be able to identify the shop on a second walk round the town. Such extreme measures, however, did not prove necessary; among the addresses given in the directory was one which I immediately recognized as the one I had forgotten. It was true that I had passed the shop-window innumerable times - every time, in fact, that I had visited the M. family, who have lived for many years in the same building. Our intimate friendship later gave place to a total estrangement; after that, I fell into the habit - the reasons for which I never considered - of also avoiding the neighbourhood and the house. On my walk through the town in search of the shop-window with the strong-boxes I had passed through every street in the district but this one, which I had avoided as if it were forbidden territory. The motive of unpleasure responsible in the present case for my failure to find my way is easy to recognize. The mechanism of forgetting, however, is not so simple here as in the preceding example. My aversion naturally applied not to the safe-manufacturer but to another person, whom I did not want to think about; and from this latter person it was then transferred to this occasion where it produced the forgetting. The case of ‘Burckhard’ was very similar; my grudge against one person of this name induced me to make a slip in writing the same name when it referred to someone else. The part there played by identity of name in establishing a connection between two essentially different groups of thoughts was able to be replaced in the example of the shop-window by spatial contiguity, inseparable proximity. This latter case was, incidentally, more firmly knit; there was a second connection there, one involving its subject-matter, for money played a part among the reasons for my estrangement from the family living in the building.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1222

(3) I was requested by the firm of B. and R. to pay a professional visit to one of their staff. On my way there I was possessed by the thought that I must repeatedly have been in the building where their firm had its premises. It was as if I had noticed their plate on a lower storey while I was paying a professional visit on a higher one. I could however recall neither what house it was nor whom I had visited there. Although the whole matter was of no importance or consequence, I nevertheless turned my mind to it and finally discovered in my usual roundabout way, by collecting the thoughts that occurred to me in connection with it, that the premises of the firm of B. and R. were on the floor below the Pension Fischer, where I have frequently visited patients. At the same time I also recalled the building that housed the offices and the pension. It was still a puzzle to me what motive was at work in this forgetting. I found nothing offensive to my memory in the firm itself or in the Pension Fischer or the patients who lived there. Moreover, I suspected that nothing very distressing could be involved; otherwise I would hardly have succeeded in recovering in a roundabout way what I had forgotten, without resorting to external assistance as I had in the previous example. It finally occurred to me that while I was actually on my way to this new patient, a gentleman whom I had difficulty in recognizing had greeted me in the street. I had seen this man some months before in an apparently grave condition and had passed sentence on him with a diagnosis of progressive paralysis; but later I heard he had recovered, so that my judgement must have been wrong. Unless, that is, there had been a remission of the type that is also found in dementia paralytica - in which case my diagnosis would be justified after all! The influence that made me forget where the offices of B. and R. were came from my meeting with this person, and my interest in solving the problem of what I had forgotten was transferred to it from this case of disputed diagnosis. But the associative link (for there was only a slender internal connection - the man who recovered contrary to expectation was also an official in a large firm which used to recommend patients to me) was provided by an identity of names. The physician with whom I had seen the supposed case of paralysis was also called Fischer, like the pension which was in the building and which I had forgotten.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1223

(4) Mislaying something is really the same as forgetting where it has been put. Like most people who are occupied with writing and books I know my way about on my writing-table and can lay my hands straight away on what I want. What appears to other people as disorder is for me order with a history behind it. Why, then, did I recently mislay a book-catalogue, which had been sent to me, so that it was impossible to find it? I had in fact intended to order a book, Über die Sprache, which was advertised in it, since it was by an author whose witty and lively style I like and whose insight in psychology and knowledge of the history of civilization I have learnt to value. I believe that this is precisely why I mislaid the catalogue. For it is my habit to lend books by this author to my acquaintances for their enlightenment, and a few days previously one of them had remarked as he returned a copy: ‘His style reminds me very much of your own, and his way of thinking, too, is the same as yours.’ The speaker did not know what he was touching on by that remark. Years before, when I was younger and in greater need of outside contacts, an elder colleague to whom I had praised the writings of a well-known medical author had made almost the same comment: ‘It’s just your style and your manner.’ Prompted by this remark I had written a letter to the author seeking closer relations with him, but had been put in my place by a chilly answer. Perhaps still earlier discouraging experiences as well lie concealed behind this one, for I never found the mislaid catalogue and was in fact deterred by this omen from ordering the advertised book, although the disappearance of the catalogue formed no real hindrance since I could remember the names of both book and author.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1224

(5) Another case of mislaying merits our interest on account of the conditions under which the mislaid object was rediscovered. A youngish man told me the following story: ‘Some years ago there were misunderstandings between me and my wife. I found her too cold, and although I willingly recognized her excellent qualities we lived together without any tender feelings. One day, returning from a walk, she gave me a book which she had bought because she thought it would interest me. I thanked her for this mark of ‘attention’, promised to read the book and put it on one side. After that I could never find it again. Months passed by, in which time I occasionally remembered the lost book and made vain attempts to find it. About six months later my dear mother, who was not living with us, fell ill. My wife left home to nurse her mother-in-law. The patient’s condition became serious and gave my wife an opportunity of showing the best side of herself. One evening I returned home full of enthusiasm and gratitude for what my wife had accomplished. I walked up to my desk, and without any definite intention but with a kind of somnambulistic certainty opened one of the drawers. On the very top I found the long lost book I had mislaid.’

(6)) A case of mislaying which shares the last characteristic of the above example - namely, the remarkable sureness shown in finding the object again once the motive for its being mislaid had expired - is reported by Stärcke (1916):

‘A girl had spoilt a piece of material in cutting it out to make a collar; so the dressmaker had to come and do her best to put it right. When she had arrived and the girl wanted to fetch the badly-cut collar, she went to the drawer where she thought she had put it; but she could not find it. She turned the contents upside down without discovering it. Sitting down in exasperation she asked herself why it had suddenly disappeared and whether there was not some reason why she did not want to find it. She came to the conclusion that of course she felt ashamed in front of the dressmaker for having bungled something so simple as a collar. After this reflection she stood up, went to another cupboard and was able to lay her hands straight away on the badly-cut collar.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1225

(7) The following example of ‘mislaying’ is of a type that has become familiar to every psycho-analyst. I may remark that the patient responsible for it found the solution himself:

‘A patient, whose psycho-analytic treatment was interrupted by the summer holidays at a time when he was in a state of resistance and felt unwell, put his bunch of keys in its usual place - or so he thought - when he undressed for the night. Then he remembered that there were a few more things that he needed for his journey next day - the last day of treatment and the date on which his fee was due - and he went to get them out of the writing-desk, in which he had also put his money. But the keys had disappeared. He began to make a systematic but increasingly agitated search of his small flat - with no success. Since he recognized the "mislaying" of the keys as a symptomatic act - that is, as something he had done intentionally - he woke his servant in order to continue the search with the aid of an "unprejudiced" person. After another hour he gave it up and was afraid he had lost the keys. Next morning he ordered new keys from the makers of the desk, and they were hastily made for him. Two friends, who had come home with him in the same cab, thought they remembered hearing something fall with a clink on the ground as he stepped out of the cab. He was convinced that his keys had fallen from his pocket. That evening the servant triumphantly presented him with the keys. They had been found lying between a thick book and a thin pamphlet (a work by one of my pupils) which he wanted to take away to read on his holiday. They were so cleverly placed that no one would have suspected they were there. He found himself afterwards unable to replace them so that they were equally invisible. The unconscious dexterity with which an object is mislaid on account of hidden but powerful motives is very reminiscent of "somnambulistic certainty". The motive, as one would expect, was ill-temper at the treatment being interrupted and secret rage at having to pay a high fee when he was feeling so unwell.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1226

(8) ‘A man’, Brill relates, ‘was urged by his wife to attend a social function in which he really took no interest . . . Yielding to his wife’s entreaties, he began to take his dress-suit from the trunk when he suddenly thought of shaving. After accomplishing this he returned to the trunk and found it locked. Despite a long, earnest search the key could not be discovered. No locksmith was available on Sunday evening, so that the couple had to send their regrets. When he had the trunk opened the next morning the lost key was found within. The husband had absent-mindedly dropped the key into the trunk and sprung the lock. He assured me that this was wholly unintentional and unconscious, but we know that he did not wish to go to this social affair. The mislaying of the key therefore lacked no motive.’

Ernest Jones observed in himself that he was in the habit of mislaying his pipe whenever he had smoked too much and felt unwell in consequence. The pipe then turned up in all sorts of places where it did not belong and where it was not normally put away.

(9) An innocent case, in which the motivation was admitted, is reported by Dora Müller (1915):

‘Fräulein Erna A. told me two days before Christmas: "Can you imagine? Yesterday evening I took a piece of my ginger-bread from the packet and ate it; at the same time I thought I would have to offer some to Fräulein S." (her mother’s companion) "when she came to say goodnight to me. I didn’t particularly want to, but I made up my mind to do so all the same. Later on when she came I reached out to get the packet from my table; but it was not there. I had a look for it and found it inside my cupboard. I had put the packet away there without realizing." No analysis was necessary; the narrator herself understood the sequence of events. The impulse of wanting to keep the cake all to herself, which had just been repressed, had nevertheless achieved its end in the automatic act, though in this case it was cancelled out once more by the subsequent conscious act.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1227

(10) Sachs describes how, by a similar act of mislaying, he once avoided the duty of working: ‘Last Sunday afternoon I hesitated for some time over whether I should work or take a walk and pay a visit at the end of it; but after a bit of a struggle I decided in favour of the former. After about an hour I noticed that my supply of paper was exhausted. I knew that somewhere in a drawer there was a stack of paper that I had had for years, but I looked in vain for it in my writing desk and in other places where I thought I might find it, although I went to a lot of trouble and rummaged round in every possible place - old books, pamphlets, letters and so on. Thus I finally found myself compelled to break off my work and go out after all. When I returned home in the evening, I sat down on the sofa, and, sunk in thought and half absent-mindedly, gazed at the book-case in front of me. A box caught my eye and I remembered that I had not examined its contents for a long time. So I went over and opened it. At the very top was a leather portfolio containing unused paper. But it was only when I had taken it out and was on the point of putting it in the drawer of my desk that it occurred to me that this was the very same paper I had been unsuccessfully looking for in the afternoon. I must add here that although I am not ordinarily thrifty I am very careful with paper and keep any scraps that can be used. It was obviously this practice of mine, which is nourished by an instinct, that enabled my forgetfulness to be corrected as soon as the immediate motive for it had disappeared.’

If a survey is made of cases of mislaying, it in fact becomes hard to believe that anything is ever mislaid except as a result of an unconscious intention.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1228

(11) One day in the summer of 1901 I remarked to a friend with whom I used at that time to have a lively exchange of scientific ideas: ‘These problems of the neuroses are only to be solved if we base ourselves wholly and completely on the assumption of the original bisexuality of the individual.’ To which he replied: ‘That’s what I told you two and a half years ago at Br. when we went for that evening walk. But you wouldn’t hear of it then.’ It is painful to be requested in this way to surrender one’s originality. I could not recall any such conversation or this pronouncement of my friend’s. One of us must have been mistaken and on the ‘cui prodest?’ principle¹ it must have been myself. Indeed, in the course of the next week I remembered the whole incident, which was just as my friend had tried to recall it to me; I even recollected the answer I had given him at the time: ‘I’ve not accepted that yet; I’m not inclined to go into the question.’ But since then I have grown a little more tolerant when, in reading medical literature, I come across one of the few ideas with which my name can be associated, and find that my name has not been mentioned.

Finding fault with one’s wife, a friendship which has turned into its opposite, a doctor’s error in diagnosis, a rebuff by some one with similar interests, borrowing someone else’s ideas - it can hardly be accidental that a collection of instances of forgetting, gathered at random, should require me to enter into such distressing subjects in explaining them. On the contrary, I suspect that everyone who is willing to enquire into the motives behind his lapses of memory will be able to record a similar sample list of objectionable subjects. The tendency to forget what is disagreeable seems to me to be a quite universal one; the capacity to do so is doubtless developed with different degrees of strength in different people. It is probable that many instances of disowning which we encounter in our medical work are to be traced to forgetting.¹ It is true that our view of such forgetting limits the distinction between the two forms of behaviour to purely psychological factors and allows us to see in both modes of reaction the expression of the same motive. Of all the numerous examples of the disavowal of unpleasant memories which I have observed on the part of relatives of patients, one remains in my recollection as especially singular. A mother was giving me information about the childhood of her neurotic son, now in his puberty, in the course of which she said that, like his brothers and sisters, he had been a bed-wetter till late on - a fact which is certainly of some significance in the case history of a neurotic patient. A few weeks later, when she was wanting to find out about the progress of the treatment, I had occasion to draw her attention to the signs of a constitutional disposition to illness on the young man’s part, and in doing so I referred to the bed-wetting which she had brought out in the anamnesis. To my astonishment she contested this fact in regard both to him and to the other children, and asked me how I could know it. Finally I told her that she herself had informed me a short time before. She must therefore have forgotten it.²

¹ [Footnote added 1907:] If we ask someone whether he suffered from a luetic infection ten or fifteen years ago, we are too apt to overlook the fact that, from a psychical point of view, he will have regarded this illness quite differently from, let us say, an acute attack of rheumatism. - In the anamneses which parents give about their daughters’ neurotic illnesses, it is hardly possible to distinguish with certainty between what has been forgotten and what is being concealed, since everything standing in the way of a girl’s future marriage is systematically set aside, i.e. repressed, by the parents. - [Added 1910:] A man who had recently lost his dearly-loved wife from an affection of the lungs reported the following instance to me in which misleading answers given to the doctor’s enquiries could only be ascribed to forgetting of this kind. ‘As my poor wife’s pleuritis had still not improved after many weeks, Dr. P. was called into consultation. In taking the anamnesis he asked the usual questions, including whether there were any cases of lung illness in my wife’s family. My wife said there were none and I could not recall any either. As Dr. P. was leaving, the conversation turned, as though accidentally, to the subject of excursions and my wife said: "Yes, it’s a long journey, too, to Langersdorf, where my poor brother’s buried." This brother died about fifteen years ago after suffering for years from tuberculosis. My wife was very fond of him and often spoken to me about him. In fact it now occurred to me that at the time that her pleuritis was diagnosed she was very worried and remarked gloomily: "My brother died of a lung complaint too." But now, the memory was so strongly repressed that even after her remark about the excursion to Langersdorf she was not led to correct the information she had given about illnesses in her family. I myself became aware of the lapse of memory at the very moment she spoke of Langersdorf.’ - [Added 1912:] A completely analogous experience is related by Jones in the work to which I have referred several times already. A physician, whose wife suffered from an abdominal complaint the diagnosis of which was uncertain, remarked by way of comforting her: ‘It is fortunate at any rate that there has been no tuberculosis in your family.’ ‘Have you forgotten’, answered his wife in the greatest astonishment, ‘that my mother died of tuberculosis and that my sister recovered from it only after having been given up by the doctors?’

² In the days while I was engaged in writing these pages the following almost incredible instance of forgetting happened to me. On the first of January I was going through my medical engagement book so that I could send out my accounts. Under the month of June I came across the name ‘M---l’ but could not recall who it belonged to. My bewilderment grew when I turned the pages and discovered that I treated the case in a sanatorium and made daily visits over a period of weeks. A patient treated under such conditions cannot be forgotten by a doctor after scarcely six months. Could it have been a man, I asked myself, a case of general paralysis, an uninteresting case? Finally the record of the fees I had received brought back to me all the facts that had striven to escape my memory. M---l was a fourteen-year-old girl, the most remarkable case I had had in recent years, one which taught me a lesson I am not likely ever to forget and whose outcome cost me moments of the greatest distress. The child fell ill of an unmistakable hysteria, which did in fact clear up quickly and radically under my care. After this improvement the child was taken away from me by her parents. She still complained of abdominal pains which had played the chief part in the clinical picture of her hysteria. Two months later she died of sarcoma of the abdominal glands. The hysteria, to which she was at the same time predisposed, used the tumour as a provoking cause, and I, with my attention held by the noisy but harmless manifestations of the hysteria, had perhaps overlooked the first signs of the insidious and incurable disease.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1229

There are thus abundant signs to be found in healthy, non-neurotic people that the recollection of distressing impressions and the occurrence of distressing thoughts are opposed by a resistance.¹ But the full significance of this fact can be estimated only when the psychology of neurotic people is investigated. We are forced to regard as one of the main pillars of the mechanism supporting hysterical symptoms an elementary endeavour of this kind to fend off ideas that can arouse feelings of unpleasure - an endeavour which can only be compared with the flight-reflex in the presence of painful stimuli. The assumption that a defensive trend of this kind exists cannot be objected to on the ground that one often enough finds it impossible, on the contrary, to get rid of distressing memories that pursue one, and to banish distressing affective impulses like remorse and the pangs of conscience. For we are not asserting that this defensive trend is able to put itself into effect in every case, that in the interplay of psychical forces it may not come up against factors which, for other purposes, aim at the opposite effect and bring it about in spite of the defensive trend. It may be surmised that the architectonic principle of the mental apparatus lies in a stratification - a building up of superimposed agencies; and it is quite possible that this defensive endeavour belongs to a lower psychical agency and is inhibited by higher agencies. At all events, if we can trace back processes such as those found in our examples of forgetting to this defensive trend, that fact speaks in favour of its existence and power.(As we have seen, a number of things are forgotten on their own account; where this is not possible, the defensive trend shifts its target and causes something else related to the target at least to be forgotten, something less important which has come into associative connection with the thing that is really objectionable.

¹ [Footnote added 1910:] A. Pick (1905) has recently brought together a number of quotations from authors who appreciate the influence of affective factors on the memory and who - more or less clearly - recognize the contribution towards forgetting made by the endeavour to fend off unpleasure. But none of us has been able to portray the phenomenon and its psychological basis so exhaustively and at the same time so impressively as Nietzsche in one of his aphorisms (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, IV, 68): ‘"I did this", says my Memory. "I cannot have done this", says my Pride and remains inexorable. In the end - Memory yields.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1230

The view developed here, that distressing memories succumb especially easily to motivated forgetting, deserves to find application in many spheres where no attention, or too little, has so far been paid to it. Thus it seems to me that it has still not yet been sufficiently strongly emphasized in assessing testimony in courts of law,¹ where the process of putting a witness on oath is clearly expected to have much too great a purifying influence on the play of his psychical forces. It is universally acknowledged that where the origin of a people’s traditions and legendary history are concerned, a motive of this kind, whose aim is to wipe from memory whatever is distressing to national feeling, must be taken into consideration. Closer investigation would perhaps reveal a complete analogy between the ways in which the traditions of a people and the childhood memories of the individual come to be formed. - The great Darwin laid down a ‘golden rule’ for the scientific worker based on his insight into the part played by unpleasure as a motive for forgetting.²

In a very similar way to the forgetting of names, the forgetting of impressions can be accompanied by faulty recollection; and this, where it finds credence, is described as paramnesia. Paramnesia in pathological cases - in paranoia it actually plays the part of a constituent factor in the formation of the delusion - has brought forth an extensive literature in which I have entirely failed to find any hint whatever as to its motivation. As this is also a subject which belongs to the psychology of the neuroses it is inappropriate to consider it in the present context. Instead, I shall describe a singular paramnesia of my own, in which the motivation provided by unconscious, repressed material and the manner and nature of the connection with this material can be recognized clearly enough.

¹ Cf. Gross (1898).

² [Footnote added 1912] Ernest Jones has drawn attention to the following passage in Darwin’s autobiography, which convincingly reflects his scientific honesty and his psychological acumen:

‘I had, during many years, followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1231

While I was writing the later chapters of my book on dream-interpretation, I happened to be at a summer resort without access to libraries and works of reference, and I was forced to incorporate in my manuscript from memory all sorts of references and quotations, subject to later correction. In writing the passage on day-dreams I thought of the excellent example of the poor book-keeper in Alphonse Daudet’s Le Nabab, in whose person the writer was probably portraying his own reveries. I imagined I had a distinct memory of one of the phantasies which this man - I called him Monsieur Jocelyn - hatched out on his walks through the streets of Paris; and I began to reproduce it from memory. It was a phantasy of how Monsieur Jocelyn boldly threw himself at the head of a runaway horse in the street, and brought it to a stop; how the carriage door opened and a great personage stepped out, pressed Monsieur Jocelyn’s hand and said: ‘You are my saviour. I owe my life to you. What can I do for you?’

Any inaccuracies in my own account of this phantasy could, I assured myself, easily be corrected at home when I had the book in front of me. But when I finally looked through Le Nabab to check this passage in my manuscript, which was ready to go to press, I found, to my very great shame and consternation, no mention of any such reverie on the part of Monsieur Jocelyn; in fact the poor book-keeper did not have this name at all but was called Monsieur Joyeuse. This second error quickly gave me the key to the solution of the first one - the paramnesia. ‘Joyeux’, of which ‘Joyeuse’ is the feminine form, is the only possible way in which I could translate my own name, Freud, into French. Where then could the phantasy, which I had remembered wrongly and ascribed to Daudet, have come from? It could only be a product of my own, a day-dream which I had formed myself and which had not become conscious or which had once been conscious and had since been totally forgotten. Perhaps I invented it myself in Paris where I frequently walked about the streets, lonely and full of longings, greatly in need of a helper and protector, until the great Charcot took me into his circle. Later I more than once met the author of Le Nabab in Charcot’s house.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] Some time ago one of my readers sent me a small volume from Franz Hoffmann’s Jugendbibliothek in which a rescue scene like the one in my phantasy in Paris is recounted in detail. The agreement between the two extends even to certain not quite ordinary expressions that occur in both. It is not easy to avoid suspecting that I had in fact read this children’s book while I was myself a boy. The library at my secondary school contained Hoffmann’s series and was always ready to offer these books to pupils in place of any other mental pabulum. The phantasy which, at the age of 43, I thought I remembered as having been produced by someone else, and which I was subsequently forced to recognize as a creation of my own at the age of 28, may therefore easily have been an exact reproduction of an impression which I had received somewhere between the ages of 11 and 13. After all, the rescue phantasy which I attributed to the unemployed book-keeper in Le Nabab was merely meant to prepare the way for the phantasy of my own rescue, to make my longing for a patron and protector tolerable to my pride. This being so, it will not surprise anyone with an understanding of the mind to hear that in my conscious life I myself was highly resistant to the idea of being dependent on a protector’s favour, and that I found it hard to tolerate the few real situations in which something of that nature occurred. Abraham (1922b) has brought to light the deeper meaning of phantasies with such a content and has provided an almost exhaustive explanation of their special features.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1232

Another paramnesia, which it was possible to explain satisfactorily, is reminiscent fausse reconnaissance, a subject that will be discussed later. I had told one of my patients, an ambitious and capable man, that a young student had recently gained admittance to the circle of my followers on the strength of an interesting work, ‘Der Künstler, Versuch einer Sexualpsychologie’. When this work appeared in print a year and a quarter later, my patient maintained that he could remember with certainty having read an announcement of this book somewhere (perhaps in a bookseller’s prospectus) even before - a month or six months before - I had first mentioned it to him. This announcement, he said, had come into his mind at the time; and he further remarked that the author had changed the title: it no longer read ‘Versuch’ but ‘Ansätze zu einer Sexualpsychologie. Careful enquiry of the author and a comparison of all the dates nevertheless showed that my patient was claiming to recall something impossible. No announcement of this work had appeared anywhere before publication, and certainly none a year and a quarter before it went to press. When I omitted to interpret this paramnesia, my patient produced a repetition of it of the same kind. He believed he had recently seen a work on agoraphobia in a bookshop window and was now looking through all the publishers’ catalogues in order to get a copy. I was then able to explain to him why his efforts were bound to be fruitless. The work on agoraphobia existed only in his phantasy, as an unconscious intention: he meant to write it himself. His ambition to emulate the young man and become one of my followers on the strength of a similar scientific work was responsible for the first paramnesia and then for its repetition. Whereupon he recalled that the bookseller’s announcement which had led him to make this false recognition dealt with a work entitled ‘Genesis, das Gesetz der Zeugung’. However, it was I who was responsible for the change in the title mentioned by him, for I could remember having myself been guilty of that inaccuracy - ‘Versuch’ instead of ‘Ansätze’ - in repeating the title.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1233

(B) THE FORGETTING OF INTENTIONS

No group of phenomena is better qualified than the forgetting of intentions for demonstrating the thesis that, in itself, lack of attention does not suffice to explain parapraxes. An intention is an impulse to perform an action: an impulse which has already found approval but whose execution is postponed to a suitable occasion. Now it can happen that during the interval thus created a change of such a kind occurs in the motives involved that the intention is not carried out; but in that case it is not forgotten: it is re-examined and cancelled. The forgetting of intentions, to which we are subject every day and in every possible situation, is not a thing that we are in the habit of explaining in terms of such a revision in the balance of motives. In general we leave it unexplained; or we try to find a psychological explanation by supposing that at the time when the intention was due to be carried out the attention necessary for the action was no longer at hand - attention which was, after all, an indispensable precondition for the coming into being of the intention and had therefore been available for the action at that time. Observation of our normal behaviour in regard to intentions leads us to reject this attempt at an explanation as being arbitrary. If I form an intention in the morning which is to be carried out in the evening, I may be reminded of it two or three times in the course of the day. It need not however become conscious at all throughout the day. When the time for its execution draws near, it suddenly springs to my mind and causes me to make the necessary preparations for the proposed action. If I am going for a walk and take a letter with me which has to be posted, it is certainly not necessary for me, as a normal individual, free from neurosis, to walk all the way with it in my hand and to be continually on the look-out for a letter-box in which to post it; on the contrary I am in the habit of putting it in my pocket, of walking along and letting my thoughts range freely, and I confidently expect that one of the first letter-boxes will catch my attention and cause me to put my hand in my pocket and take out the letter. Normal behaviour after an intention has been formed coincides fully with the experimentally-produced behaviour of people to whom what is described as a ‘post-hypnotic suggestion at long range’ has been given under hypnosis.¹ This phenomenon is usually described in the following way. The suggested intention slumbers on in the person concerned until the time for its execution approaches. Then it awakes and impels him to perform the action.

¹ Cf. Bernheim (1891).

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1234

There are two situations in life in which even the layman is aware that forgetting - as far as intentions are concerned - cannot in any way claim to be considered as an elementary phenomenon not further reducible, but entitles him to conclude that there are such things as unavowed motives. What I have in mind are love-relationships and military discipline. A lover who has failed to keep a rendezvous will find it useless to make excuses for himself by telling the lady that unfortunately he completely forgot about it. She will not fail to reply: ‘A year ago you wouldn’t have forgotten. You evidently don’t care for me any longer.’ Even if he should seize on the psychological explanation mentioned above and try to excuse his forgetfulness by pleading pressure of business, the only outcome would be that the lady, who will have become as sharp-sighted as a doctor is in psycho-analysis, would reply: ‘How curious that business distractions like these never turned up in the past!’ The lady is not of course wanting to deny the possibility of forgetting; it is only that she believes, not without reason, that practically the same inference - of there being some reluctance present - can be drawn from unintentional forgetting as from conscious evasion.

Similarly, under conditions of military service, the difference between a failure to carry out orders which is due to forgetting and one which is deliberate is neglected on principle - and justifiably so. A soldier must not forget what military service orders him to do. If he does forget in spite of knowing the order, that is because the motives that drive him to carry out the military order are opposed by other, counter-motives. A one year volunteer who at inspection tries to offer the excuse that he has forgotten to polish his buttons is sure to be punished. But this punishment is trifling in comparison to the one to which he would expose himself if he admitted to himself and his superiors that the motive for his failure to carry out orders was that ‘I’m heartily sick of this wretched spit-and-polish’. For the sake of this saving of punishment - for reasons of economy, so to speak - he makes use of forgetting as an excuse, or it comes about as a compromise.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1235

Both the service of women and military service demand that everything connected with them should be immune to forgetting. In this way they suggest the notion that, whereas in unimportant matters forgetting is permissible, in important matters it is a sign that one wishes to treat them as unimportant, i.e. to deny their importance.¹ This view, which takes psychical considerations into account, cannot in fact be rejected here. No one forgets to carry out actions that seem to himself important, without incurring suspicion of being mentally disordered. Our investigation can therefore only extend to the forgetting of intentions of a more or less minor character; we cannot consider any intention as being wholly indifferent, for otherwise it would certainly never have been formed.

As with the functional disturbances described on earlier pages, I have made a collection of the cases of omitting to do something as a result of forgetting which I have observed in myself, and I have endeavoured to explain them. I have invariably found that they could be traced to interference by unknown and unavowed motives - or, as one may say, to a counter-will. In a number of these cases I found myself in a position which was similar to being under conditions of service; I was under a constraint, against which I had not entirely given up struggling, so that I made a demonstration against it by forgetting. This accounts for the fact that I am especially prone to forget to send congratulations on occasions such as birthdays, anniversaries, wedding celebrations and promotions. I keep on making new resolutions on the subject and become more and more convinced that I shall not succeed. I am now on the point of giving the effort up and of yielding consciously to the motives that oppose it. While I was in a transitional stage, a friend asked me to send a congratulatory telegram on a certain day on his behalf along with my own, but I warned him that I should forget both; and it was not surprising that the prophecy came true. It is due to painful experiences in the course of my life that I am unable to manifest sympathy on occasions where the expression of sympathy must necessarily he exaggerated, as an expression corresponding to the slight amount of my feeling would not be allowable. Since I have come to recognize that I have often mistaken other people’s ostensible sympathy for their real feelings, I have been in revolt against these conventional expressions of sympathy, though on the other hand I recognize their social usefulness. Condolences in the case of death are excepted from this divided treatment: once I have decided to send them I do not fail to do so. Where my emotional activity no longer has anything to do with social duty, its expression is never inhibited by forgetting.

¹ [Footnote added 1912:] In Bernard Shaw’s play Caesar and Cleopatra, Caesar, as he is leaving Egypt, is worried for a time by the idea that there is something he has meant to do but has forgotten. Finally he remembers: he has forgotten to say goodbye to Cleopatra! This small detail is meant to illustrate - incidentally in complete contrast to the historical truth - how little Caesar cared for the young Egyptian princess. (From Jones, 1911b, 488 n.)

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1236

Writing from a prisoner-of-war camp, Lieutenant T. reports an instance of a forgetting of this kind, in which an intention that had in the first place been suppressed broke through in the form of ‘counter-will’ and led to an unpleasant situation:

‘The most senior officer in a prisoner-of-war camp for officers was insulted by one of his fellow prisoners. To avoid further complications he wished to use the only authoritative measure at his disposal and have the officer removed and transferred to another camp. It was only on the advice of several friends that he decided - contrary to his secret wish - to abandon his plan and seek to satisfy his honour immediately, although this was bound to have a variety of disagreeable results. The same morning, as senior officer, he had to call the roll of the officers, under the supervision of the camp-guard. He had known his fellow officers for quite a long time and had never before made any mistakes over this. This time he passed over the name of the man who had insulted him, with the result that when all the others had been dismissed this man alone was obliged to remain behind till the error was cleared up. The name that had been overlooked was perfectly plainly written in the middle of a sheet. The incident was regarded by one party as a deliberate insult, and by the other as an unfortunate accident that was likely to be misinterpreted. Later on, however, after making the acquaintance of Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life, the chief actor in the episode was able to form a correct picture of what had occurred.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1237

The conflict between a conventional duty and the unavowed view which we privately take of it similarly provides an explanation for those cases in which we forget to carry out actions that we promised to do as a favour to someone. Here the regular result is that it is only the would-be benefactor who believes that forgetting has the power to act as an excuse; the person who asked the favour gives what is unquestionably the right answer: ‘He is not interested in the matter, otherwise he would not have forgotten.’ There are some people who are known as being forgetful in general, and who are for that reason excused their lapses in the same kind of way as short-sighted people who fail to greet us in the street.¹ These people forget all their small promises, and they fail to carry out any of the commissions they receive. In this way they show themselves unreliable in little things, and they demand that we should not take these minor offences amiss - that is, that we should not attribute them to their character but refer them to an organic idiosyncracy.² I am not one of these people myself, and have had no opportunity of analysing the actions of a person of this kind, so that, by examining the choice of occasions for forgetting, I might discover its motivation. I cannot however help suspecting on the basis of analogy that in these cases the motive is an unusually large amount of unavowed contempt for other people which exploits the constitutional factor for its own ends.³

¹ Women, with their subtler understanding of unconscious mental processes, are as a rule more apt to take offence when someone does not recognize them in the street and therefore fails to greet them, than to think of the most obvious explanations - namely that the offender is short-sighted, or was so engrossed in his thoughts that he did not notice them. They conclude that he would have seen them if he had ‘set any store by them’.

² [Footnote added 1910:] Ferenczi reports that he himself was once an ‘absent-minded person’ [ein ‘Zerstreuter’] and that he was noted by acquaintances for the frequency and strangeness of his parapraxes. But, he says, the signs of this absent-mindedness have almost completely disappeared since he began treating patients by psycho-analysis and found himself obliged to turn his attention to the analysis of his own self as well. He thinks that one gives up these parapraxes in proportion as one learns to enlarge one’s own responsibility. He therefore justly maintains that absent-mindedness is a condition which is dependent on unconscious complexes and which can be cured by psycho-analysis. One day, however, he was blaming himself for having committed a technical error in a patient’s psycho-analysis. That day all his former absent-minded habits reappeared. He stumbled several times as he walked along the street (a representation of his faux pas [false step - blunder] in the treatment), left his pocket book at home, tried to pay a kreutzer too little for his tram-fare, found his clothes were not properly buttoned, and so on.

³ [Footnote added 1912:] In this connection Ernest Jones observes: ‘Often the resistance is of a general order. Thus a busy man forgets to post letters entrusted to him - to his slight annoyance - by his wife, just as he may "forget" to carry out her shopping orders.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1238

In other cases the motives for forgetting are less easy to discover, and when found arouse greater surprise. Thus, for instance, in former years I noticed that, out of a fairly large number of visits to patients, I only forgot those to non-paying patients or to colleagues. My shame at this discovery led me to adopt the habit of making a note beforehand in the morning of the visits I intended to make during the day. I do not know if other doctors have arrived at the same practice by the same road. But in this way we get some idea of what causes the so called neurasthenic patient to jot down, in his notorious ‘notes’, the various things he wants to tell the doctor. The ostensible reason is that he has no confidence in the reproductive capacity of his memory. That is perfectly correct, but the scene usually proceeds as follows. The patient has recounted his various complaints and enquiries in a very long-winded manner. After he has finished he pauses for a moment, then pulls out the jottings and adds apologetically: ‘I’ve made some notes, as I can’t remember things.’ As a rule he finds that they contain nothing new. He repeats each point and answers it himself: ‘Yes, I’ve asked about that already.’ With the notes he is probably only demonstrating one of his symptoms: the frequency with which his intentions are disturbed through the interference of obscure motives.

I pass on to ailments that afflict the greater number of my healthy acquaintances as well as myself. I confess that - especially in former years - I was very apt to forget to return borrowed books, which I kept for long periods, and that it came about especially easily that I put off paying bills by forgetting them. One morning not long ago I left the tobacconist’s where I had made my daily purchase of cigars without having paid for them. It was a most harmless omission, as I am well known there and could therefore expect to be reminded of my debt next day. But my trivial act of negligence, my attempt to contract a debt, was certainly not unconnected with budgetary thoughts which had occupied my mind during the preceding day. Among the majority even of what are called ‘respectable’ people traces of divided behaviour can easily be observed where money and property are concerned. It may perhaps be generally true that the primitive greed of the suckling, who wants to take possession of every object (in order to put it into his mouth), has only been incompletely overcome by civilization and upbringing.¹

¹ For the sake of preserving the unity of the subject I may perhaps interrupt the general arrangement I have adopted, and, in addition to what I have said above, point out that people’s memories show a particular partiality in money matters. Paramnesias of having already paid for something can often be very obstinate, as I know from my own experience. When free play is given to avaricious aims apart from the serious interests of life - for fun, in fact -, as in card-playing, the most honourable men show an inclination to make errors and mistakes in memory and counting, and, without quite knowing how, they even find themselves involved in petty cheating. The psychically refreshing nature of these games is partly due to liberties of this kind. We must admit the truth of the saying that in play we can get to know a person’s character - that is, if we are not thinking of his manifest character. - If waiters still make unintentional mistakes in the bill, the same explanation obviously applies to them. - In commercial circles a certain delay can frequently be observed in paying out sums of money (for settling accounts and so on) which in point of fact brings the owner no profit and can only be understood in psychological terms - as an expression of a counter-will against paying out money. - [The next sentence was added in 1912:] Brill puts the matter with epigrammatic brevity: ‘We are more apt to mislay letters containing bills than cheques.’ - The fact that women in particular evince a special amount of unpleasure at paying their doctor is connected with the most intimate impulses, which are very far from having been elucidated. Women patients have usually forgotten their purse and so cannot pay at the time of consultation; they then regularly forget to send the fee after they reach home, and thus arrange things so that one has treated them for nothing - ‘for the sake of their beaux yeux’. They pay one, as it were, by the sight of their countenance.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1239

I am afraid all the examples I have given up to now will seem merely commonplace. But after all it can only suit my aim if I come upon things that are familiar to everyone and that everyone understands in the same way, for my whole purpose is to collect everyday material and turn it to scientific use. I fail to see why the wisdom which is the precipitate of men’s common experience of life should be refused inclusion among the acquisitions of science. The essential character of scientific work derives not from the special nature of its objects of study but from its stricter method of establishing the facts and its search for far-reaching correlations.

Where intentions of some importance are concerned, we have found in general that they are forgotten when obscure motives rise against them. In the case of rather less important intentions we can recognize a second mechanism of forgetting: a counter-will is transferred to the intention from some other topic, after an external association has been formed between the other topic and the content of the intention. Here is an example. I set store by high-quality blotting paper and I decided one day to buy a fresh supply that afternoon in the course of my walk to the Inner Town. But I forgot for four days running, till I asked myself what reason I had for the omission. It was easy to find after I had recalled that though I normally write ‘Löschpapier’ I usually say ‘Fliesspapier’. ‘Fliess’ is the name of a friend in Berlin who had on the days in question given me occasion for a worrying and anxious thought. I could not rid myself of this thought, but the defensive tendency (cf. above, p. 1230) manifested itself by transferring itself, by means of the verbal similarity, to the indifferent intention which on account of its indifference offered little resistance.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1240

Direct counter-will and more remote motivation are found together in the following example of dilatoriness. I had written a short pamphlet On Dreams (1901a), summarizing the subject-matter of my Interpretation of Dreams, for the series Grenzfragen des Nerven- und Seelenlebens. Bergmann of Wiesbaden had sent me the proofs, and had asked for them back by return of post, as the book was to be issued before Christmas. I corrected the proofs the same night and placed them on my desk so as to take them with me next morning. In the morning I forgot about them, and only remembered them in the afternoon when I saw the wrapper on my desk. In the same way I forgot the proofs that afternoon, that evening and the following morning, till I pulled myself together and took them to a letter-box on the afternoon of the second day, wondering what could be the reason for my procrastination. It was obvious that I did not want to send them off, but I could not discover why. However, in the course of the same walk I called in at my publisher’s in Vienna - the firm that had published my Interpretation of Dreams, I placed an order for something and then said, as if impelled by a sudden thought: ‘I suppose you know I’ve written the dream-book over again?’ - ‘Oh, you can’t mean that!’ he said. ‘Don’t be alarmed’, I replied; ‘it’s only a short essay for the Löwenfeld-Kurella series.’ But he was still not satisfied; he was worried that the essay would interfere with the sales of the book. I disagreed with him and finally asked: ‘If I’d come to you before, would you have forbidden my publishing it?’ - ‘No, I certainly wouldn’t.’ Personally I believe I acted quite within my rights and did nothing contrary to common practice; nevertheless it seems certain that a misgiving similar to that expressed by the publisher was the motive for my delay in sending back the proofs. This misgiving goes back to an earlier occasion, on which a different publisher raised difficulties when it seemed unavoidable for me to introduce unaltered a few pages from are earlier work of mine on children’s palsies published by another firm, into my monograph on the same subject in Nothnagel’s Handbuch. But in this case, as well, the reproach was not justified; this time, too, I had loyally informed my first publisher (the same one who published The Interpretation of Dreams) of my intention. However, if this chain of memories is followed back still further, it brings to light an even earlier occasion involving a translation from the French, in which I really did infringe the rights of property that apply to publications. I added notes to the text which I translated, without asking the author’s permission, and some years later had reason to suspect that the author was displeased with my arbitrary action.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1241

There is a proverb which reveals the popular knowledge that the forgetting of intentions is not accidental: ‘If one forgets to do a thing once, one will forget to do it many times more.’

Indeed, sometimes we cannot avoid an impression that everything that can be said about forgetting and about parapraxes is already familiar and self-evident to everyone. It is sufficiently surprising that it is nevertheless necessary to present to consciousness things that are so well-known. How often have I heard people say: ‘Don’t ask me to do that, I’m certain to forget it!’ There is surely nothing mystical, then, if this prophecy is subsequently fulfilled. A person who talks in this way senses an intention not to carry out the request, and is merely refusing to admit it to himself.

Much light is thrown, moreover, on the forgetting of intentions by what may be called ‘the forming of spurious intentions’. I once promised a young author that I would write a review of his short work; but because of internal resistances, which I knew about, I put off doing so, till one day I yielded to pressure from him and promised it would be done that same evening. I really had seriously meant to do it then, but I had forgotten that I had set the evening aside for preparing a specialist report that could not be deferred. After this had shown me that my intention had been spurious, I gave up the struggle against my resistances and refused the author’s request.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1242

CHAPTER VIII

BUNGLED ACTIONS

I will quote another passage from the work by Meringer and Mayer (1895, 98) which I have already mentioned:

‘Slips of the tongue are not without their parallels. They correspond to the slips which often occur in other human activities and which are known by the somewhat foolish name of "oversights".’

Thus I am by no means the first to surmise that there is sense and purpose behind the minor functional disturbances in the daily life of healthy people.¹

If slips in speaking - which is clearly a motor function - can be thought of in this way, it is a short step to extend the same expectation to mistakes in our other motor activities. I have here formed two groups of cases. I use the term ‘bungled actions’ [‘Vergreifen’] to describe all the cases in which a wrong result - i.e. a deviation from what was intended - seems to be the essential element. The others, in which it is rather the whole action which seems to be inappropriate, I call ‘symptomatic and chance actions’. But no sharp line can be drawn between them, and we are indeed forced to conclude that all the divisions made in this study have no significance other than a descriptive one and run counter to the inner unity in this field of phenomena. It is clear that the psychological understanding of ‘bungled actions’ will not be conspicuously helped if we class them under the heading of ‘ataxia’ or, in particular, of ‘cortical ataxia’. Let us rather try to trace the individual examples back to their particular determinants. For this purpose I shall once more make use of self-observations, though in my case the occasions for these are not particularly frequent.

¹ [Footnote added 1910:] A second publication by Meringer has later shown me how great an injustice I did to that author when I credited him with any such understanding.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1243

(a) In former years I visited patients in their homes more frequently than I do at present; and on numerous occasions when I was at the front door, instead of knocking or ringing the bell, I pulled my own latch key out of my pocket, only to thrust it back again in some confusion. When I consider the patients at whose houses this happened, I am forced to think that the parapraxis - taking out my key instead of ringing the bell - was in the nature of a tribute to the house where I made the mistake. It was equivalent to the thought ‘Here I feel I am at home’, for it only occurred at places where I had taken a liking to the patient. (Of course I never ring my own door bell.)

Thus the parapraxis was a symbolic representation of a thought which was not after all really intended to be accepted seriously and consciously; for a nerve specialist is in fact well aware that his patients remain attached to him only so long as they expect to be benefited by him, and that he in turn allows himself to feel an excessively warm interest in them only with a view to giving them psychical help.

Numerous self-observations made by other people show that handling a key in this significantly incorrect way is certainly not a peculiarity of mine.

Maeder (1906) describes what is an almost identical repetition of my experiences: ‘II est arrivé à chacun de sortir son trousseau, en arrivant à la porte d’un ami particulièrement cher, de se surprendre pour ainsi dire, en train d’ouvrir avec sa clé comme chez soi. C’est un retard, puisqu’il faut sonner malgré tout, mais c’est une preuve qu’on se sent - ou qu’on voudrait se sentir - comme chez soi, auprès de cet ami.’¹

¹ [‘Everyone has had the experience of taking out his bunch of keys on reaching the door of a particularly dear friend, of catching himself, as it were, in the act of opening it with his key just as if he was at home. This causes a delay, as he has to ring the bell in the long run, but it is a sign that he feels - or would like to feel - at home with this friend.’]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1244

Jones (1911b, 509): ‘The use of keys is a fertile source of occurrences of this kind, of which two examples may be given. If I am disturbed in the midst of some engrossing work at home by having to go to the hospital to carry out some routine work, I am very apt to find myself trying to open the door of my laboratory there with the key of my desk at home, although the two keys are quite unlike each other. The mistake unconsciously demonstrates where I would rather be at the moment.

‘Some years ago I was acting in a subordinate position at a certain institution, the front door of which was kept locked, so that it was necessary to ring for admission. On several occasions I found myself making serious attempts to open the door with my house key. Each one of the permanent visiting staff, to which I aspired to be a member, was provided with a key, to avoid the trouble of having to wait at the door. My mistakes thus expressed my desire to be on a similar footing, and to be quite "at home" there.’

Dr. Hanns Sachs reports a similar experience: ‘I always have two keys on me, one for the door of my office and one for my flat. They are not at all easily confused with each other, for the office key is at least three times as big as the flat key. Moreover, I carry the former in my trouser pocket and the latter in my waistcoat pocket. Nevertheless it often happened that I noticed as I stood at the door that I had got out the wrong key on the stairs. I determined to make a statistical experiment. Since I stood in front of both the doors every day in more or less the same emotional state, the confusion between the two keys was bound to show a regular tendency, if, indeed, it was true that it had some psychical determinant. My observation of later instances then showed that I quite regularly took out my flat key at the door of the office, whereas the opposite happened only once. I came home tired, knowing that a guest would be waiting for me there. When I reached the door I made an attempt to unlock it with the office key - which was of course much too large.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1245

(b) There is a house where twice every day for six years, at regular hours, I used to wait to be let in outside a door on the second floor. During this long period it has happened to me on two occasions, with a short interval between them, that I have gone a floor too high - i.e. I have ‘climbed too high’.¹ On the first occasion I was enjoying an ambitious day-dream in which I was ‘climbing ever higher and higher’. On this occasion I even failed to hear that the door in question had opened as I put my foot on the first step of the third flight. On the other occasion, I again went too far while I was deep in thought; when I realized it, I turned back and tried to catch hold of the phantasy in which I had been absorbed. I found that I was irritated by a (phantasied) criticism of my writings in which I was reproached with always ‘going too far’. This I had now replaced by the not very respectful expression ‘climbing too high’.

(c) For many years a reflex hammer and a tuning fork have been lying side by side on my writing table. One day I left in a hurry at the end of my consulting hour as I wanted to catch a particular suburban train; and in broad daylight I put the tuning fork in my coat pocket instead of the hammer. The weight of the object pulling down my pocket drew my attention to my mistake. Anyone who is not in the habit of giving consideration to such minor occurrences will doubtless explain and excuse the mistake by pointing to the haste of the moment. Nevertheless I preferred to ask myself the question why it actually was that I took the tuning fork instead of the hammer. My haste could just as well have been a motive for picking up the right object so as not to have to waste time in correcting my mistake.

‘Who was the last person to take hold of the tuning fork?’ was the question that sprang to my mind at that point. It was an imbecile child, whom I had been testing some days before for his attention to sensory impressions; and he had been so fascinated by the tuning fork that I had had some difficulty in tearing it away from him. Could the meaning be, then, that I was an imbecile? It certainly seemed so, for my first association to ‘hammer’ was ‘Chamer’ (Hebrew for ‘ass’).

¹ [The German ‘versteigen’ would, on the analogy of ‘verlesen’, ‘verschreiben’, etc., mean ‘to mis-climb’; but its normal meaning is ‘to climb too high’ or, figuratively, ‘to over-reach oneself’.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1246

But why this abusive language? At this point we must look into the situation. I was hurrying to a consultation at a place on the Western railway line, to visit a patient who, according to the anamnesis I had received by letter, had fallen from a balcony some months earlier and had since then been unable to walk. The doctor who called me in wrote that he was nevertheless uncertain whether it was a case of spinal injury or of a traumatic neurosis - hysteria. That was what I was now to decide. It would therefore be advisable for me to be particularly wary in the delicate task of making a differential diagnosis. As it is, my colleagues are of the opinion that I make a diagnosis of hysteria far too carelessly where graver things are in question. But so far this did not justify the abusive language. Why, of course! it now occurred to me that the little railway station was at the same place at which some years before I had seen a young man who had not been able to walk properly after an emotional experience. At the time I made a diagnosis of hysteria and I subsequently took the patient on for psychical treatment. It then turned out that though my diagnosis had not, it is true, been incorrect, it had not been correct either. A whole number of the patient’s symptoms had been hysterical, and they rapidly disappeared in the course of treatment. But behind these a remnant now became visible which was inaccessible to my therapy; this remnant could only be accounted for by multiple sclerosis. It was easy for those who saw the patient after me to recognize the organic affection. I could hardly have behaved otherwise or formed a different judgement, yet the impression left was that a grave error had been made; the promise of a cure which I had given him could naturally not be kept.

The error of picking up the tuning fork instead of the hammer could thus be translated into words as follows; ‘You idiot! you ass! Pull yourself together this time, and see that you don’t diagnose hysteria again where there’s an incurable illness, as you did years ago with the poor man from that same place!’ And fortunately for this little analysis, if not fortunately for my mood, the same man, suffering from severe spastic paralysis, had visited me during my consulting hour a few days before, and a day after the imbecile child.

It will be observed that this time it was the voice of self-criticism which was making itself heard in the bungled action. A bungled action is quite specially suitable for use in this way as a self-reproach: the present mistake seeks to represent the mistake that has been committed elsewhere.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1247

(d) Bungled actions can, of course, also serve a whole number of other obscure purposes. Here is a first example. It is very rare for me to break anything. I am not particularly dextrous but a result of the anatomical integrity of my nerve-muscle apparatus is that there are clearly no grounds for my making clumsy movements of this kind, with their unwelcome consequences. I cannot therefore recall any object in my house that I have ever broken. Shortage of space in my study has often forced me to handle a number of pottery and stone antiquities (of which I have a small collection) in the most uncomfortable positions, so that onlookers have expressed anxiety that I should knock something down and break it. That however has never happened. Why then did I once dash the marble cover of my plain inkpot to the ground so that it broke?

My inkstand is made out of a flat piece of Untersberg marble which is hollowed out to receive the glass inkpot; and the inkpot has a cover with a knob made of the same stone. Behind this inkstand there is a ring of bronze statuettes and terra cotta figures. I sat down at the desk to write, and then moved the hand that was holding the pen-holder forward in a remarkably clumsy way, sweeping on to the floor the inkpot cover which was lying on the desk at the time.

The explanation was not hard to find. Some hours before, my sister had been in the room to inspect some new acquisitions. She admired them very much, and then remarked: ‘Your writing table looks really attractive now; only the inkstand doesn’t match. You must get a nicer one.’ I went out with my sister and did not return for some hours. But when I did I carried out, so it seems, the execution of the condemned inkstand. Did I perhaps conclude from my sister’s remark that she intended to make me a present of a nicer inkstand on the next festive occasion, and did I smash the unlovely old one so as to force her to carry out the intention she had hinted at? If that is so, my sweeping movement was only apparently clumsy; in reality it was exceedingly adroit and well-directed, and understood how to avoid damaging any of the more precious objects that stood around.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1248

It is in fact my belief that we must accept this judgement for a whole series of seemingly accidental clumsy movements. It is true that they make a show of something violent and sweeping, like a spastic-atactic movement, but they prove to be governed by an intention and achieve their aim with a certainty which cannot in general be credited to our conscious voluntary movements. Moreover they have both features - their violence and their unerring aim - in common with the motor manifestations of the hysterical neurosis, and partly, too, with the motor performances of somnambulism. This fact indicates that both in these cases and in the movements under consideration the same unknown modification of the innervatory process is present.

Another self-observation, reported by Frau Lou Andreas-Salomé, may give a convincing demonstration of how obstinate persistence in an act of ‘clumsiness’ serves unavowed purposes in a far from clumsy way:

‘Just at the time when milk had become scarce and expensive I found that I let it boil over time and time again, to my constant horror and vexation. My efforts to get the better of this were unsuccessful, though I cannot by any means say that on other occasions I have proved absent minded or inattentive. I should have had more reason to be so after the death of my dear white terrier (who deserved his name of "Druzhok" - the Russian for "Friend" - as much as any human being ever did). But - lo and behold! - never since his death has even a drop of milk boiled over. My first thought about this ran: "That’s lucky, for the milk spilt over on to the hearth or floor wouldn’t even be of any use!" And in the same moment I saw my "Friend" before my eyes, sitting eagerly watching the cooking, his head cocked a little to one side, his tail wagging expectantly, waiting in trustful confidence for the splendid mishap that was about to occur. And now everything was clear to me, and I realized too that I had been even more fond of him than I myself was aware.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1249

In the last few years, during which I have been collecting such observations, I have had a few more experiences of smashing or breaking objects of some value, but the investigation of these cases has convinced me that they were never the result of chance or of unintentional clumsiness on my part. One morning, for example, when I was passing through a room in my dressing-gown with straw slippers on my feet, I yielded to a sudden impulse and hurled one of my slippers from my foot at the wall, causing a beautiful little marble Venus to fall down from its bracket. As it broke into pieces, I quoted quite unmoved these lines from Busch:

‘Ach! die Venus ist perdü -

Klickeradoms! - von Medici!’¹

This wild conduct and my calm acceptance of the damage are to be explained in terms of the situation at the time. One of my family was gravely ill, and secretly I had already given up hope of her recovery. That morning I had learned that there had been a great improvement, and I know I had said to myself: ‘So she’s going to live after all!’ My attack of destructive fury served therefore to express a feeling of gratitude to fate and allowed me to perform a ‘sacrificial act’ - rather as if I had made a vow to sacrifice something or other as a thank-offering if she recovered her health! The choice of the Venus of Medici for this sacrifice was clearly only a gallant act of homage towards the convalescent; but even now it is a mystery to me how I made up my mind so quickly, aimed so accurately and avoided hitting anything else among the objects so close to it.

Another case of breaking something, for which I once again made use of a pen-holder that slipped from my hand, likewise had the significance of a sacrifice; but on this occasion it took the form of a propitiatory sacrifice to avert evil. I had once seen fit to reproach a loyal and deserving friend on no other grounds than the interpretation I placed on certain indications coming from his unconscious. He was offended and wrote me a letter asking me not to treat my friends psycho-analytically. I had to admit he was in the right, and wrote him a reply to pacify him. While I was writing this letter I had in front of me my latest acquisition, a handsome glazed Egyptian figure. I broke it in the way I have described, and then immediately realized that I had caused this mischief in order to avert a greater one. Luckily it was possible to cement both of them together - the friendship as well as the figure - so that the break would not be noticed.

¹ [‘Oh! the Venus! Lost is she!

Klickeradoms! of Medici!’]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1250

A third breakage was connected with less serious matters; it was only the disguised ‘execution’ - to borrow an expression from Vischer’s Auch Einer - of an object which no longer enjoyed my favour. For some time I used to carry a stick with a silver handle. On one occasion the thin metal got damaged, through no fault of mine, and was badly repaired. Soon after the stick came back, I used the handle in a mischievous attempt to catch one of my children by the leg - with the natural result that it broke, and I was thus rid of it.

The equanimity with which we accept the resulting damage in all these cases can no doubt be taken as evidence that there is an unconscious purpose behind the performance of these particular actions.

In investigating the reasons for the occurrence of even so trivial a parapraxis as the breaking of an object, one is liable to come across connections which, besides relating to a person’s present situation, lead deep into his prehistory. The following analysis by Jekels (1913) may serve as an example:

‘A doctor had in his possession an earthenware flower vase which, though not valuable, was of great beauty. It was among the many presents - including objects of value - which had been sent to him in the past by a (married) woman patient. When a psychosis became manifest in her, he restored all the presents to her relatives - except for this far less expensive vase, with which he could not bear to part, ostensibly because it was so beautiful. But this embezzlement cost a man of his scrupulousness a considerable internal struggle. He was fully aware of the impropriety of his action, and only managed to overcome his pangs of conscience by telling himself that the vase was not in fact of any real value, that it was too awkward to pack, etc. - Some months later he was on the point of getting a lawyer to claim and recover the arrears (which were in dispute) of the fees for the treatment of this same patient. Once again the self-reproaches made their appearance; and he suffered some momentary anxiety in case the relatives discovered what could be called his embezzlement and brought it against him during the legal proceedings. For a while indeed the first factor (his self-reproaches) was so strong that he actually thought of renouncing all claims on a sum of perhaps a hundred times the value of the vase - a compensation, as it were, for the object he had appropriated. However, he at once got the better of the notion and set it aside as absurd.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1251

‘While he was still in this mood he happened to be putting some fresh water in the vase; and despite the extreme infrequency with which he broke anything and the good control that he had over his muscular apparatus, he made an extraordinarily "clumsy" movement - one that was not in the least organically related to the action he was carrying out - which knocked the vase off the table, so that it broke into some five or six largish pieces. What is more, this was after he had made up his mind on the previous evening, though not without considerable hesitation, to put precisely this vase, filled with flowers, on the dining-room table before his guests. He had remembered it only just before it got broken, had noticed with anxiety that it was not in his living-room and had himself brought it in from the other room. After his first moments of dismay he picked up the pieces and by putting them together was just deciding that it would still be possible to make an almost complete repair of the vase, when the two or three larger fragments slipped from his hand; they broke into a thousand splinters, and with that vanished all hope for the vase.

‘There is no doubt that this parapraxis had the current purpose of assisting the doctor in his law-suit, by getting rid of something which he had kept back and which to some extent prevented his claiming what had been kept back from him.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1252

‘But apart from this direct determinant, every psycho-analyst will see in the parapraxis a further and much deeper and more important symbolic determinant; for a vase is an unmistakable symbol of a woman.

‘The hero of this little story had lost his young, beautiful and dearly-loved wife in a tragic manner. He fell ill of a neurosis whose main theme was that he was to blame for the misfortune ("he had broken a lovely vase"). Moreover, he had no further relations with women and took a dislike to marriage and lasting love-relationships, which unconsciously he thought of as being unfaithful to his dead wife but which he consciously rationalized in the idea that he brought misfortune to women, that a woman might kill herself on his account, etc. (Hence his natural reluctance to keep the vase permanently!)

‘In view of the strength of his libido it is therefore not surprising that the most adequate relationships appeared to him to be those - transient from their very nature - with married women (hence his keeping back of another person’s vase).

‘This symbolism is neatly confirmed by the two following factors. Because of his neurosis he entered psycho-analytic treatment. In the course of the session in which he gave an account of breaking the "earthenware" vase, he happened much later to be talking once more about his relations with women and said he thought he was quite unreasonably hard to please; thus for example he required women to have "unearthly beauty". This is surely a very clear indication that he was still dependent on his (dead, i. e., unearthly) wife and wanted to have nothing to do with "earthly beauty"; hence the breaking of the earthenware ("earthly") vase.

‘And at the exact time when in the transference he formed a phantasy of marrying his physician’s daughter, he made him a present of a vase, as though to drop a hint of the sort of return present he would like to have.

‘Probably the symbolic meaning of the parapraxis admits of a number of further variations - for example, his not wanting to fill the vase, etc. What strikes me, however, as more interesting is the consideration that the presence of several, at the least of two, motives (which probably operated separately out of the preconscious and the unconscious) is reflected in the doubling of the parapraxis - his knocking over the vase and then letting it fall from his hands.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1253

(e) Dropping, knocking over and breaking objects are acts which seem to be used very often to express unconscious trains of thought, as analysis can occasionally demonstrate, but as may more frequently be guessed from the superstitious or facetious interpretations popularly connected with them. The interpretations attached to salt being spilt, a wine-glass being knocked over, a dropped knife sticking in the ground, etc., are well known. I shall not discuss till later the question of what claims such superstitious interpretations have to being taken seriously. Here I need only remark that individual clumsy actions do not by any means always have the same meaning, but serve as a method of representing one purpose or another according to circumstances.

Recently we passed through a period in my house during which an unusually large amount of glass and china crockery was broken; I myself was responsible for some of the damage. But the little psychical epidemic could easily be explained: these were the days before my eldest daughter’s wedding. On such festive occasions it used to be the custom deliberately to break some utensil and at the same time utter a phrase to bring good luck. This custom may have the significance of a sacrifice and it may have another symbolic meaning as well.

When servants drop fragile articles and so destroy them, our first thought is certainly not of a psychological explanation, yet it is not unlikely that here, too, obscure motives play their part. Nothing is more foreign to uneducated people than an appreciation of art and works of art. Our servants are dominated by a mute hostility towards the manifestations of art, especially when the objects (whose value they do not understand) become a source of work for them. On the other hand people of the same education and origin often show great dexterity and reliability in handling delicate objects in scientific institutions, once they have begun to identify themselves with their chief and to consider themselves an essential part of the staff.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1254

I insert here a communication from a young technician which gives us some insight into the mechanism of a case of material damage:

‘Some time ago I worked with several fellow-students in the laboratory of the technical college on a series of complicated experiments in elasticity, a piece of work which we had undertaken voluntarily but which was beginning to take up more time than we had expected. One day as I returned to the laboratory with my friend F., he remarked how annoying it was to him to lose so much time on that particular day as he had so much else to do at home. I could not help agreeing with him and added half jokingly, referring to an incident the week before: "Let us hope that the machine will go wrong again so that we can stop work and go home early." - In arranging the work it happened that F. was given the regulation of the valve of the press; that is to say, he was, by cautiously opening the valve, to let the fluid under pressure flow slowly out of the accumulator into the cylinder of the hydraulic press. The man conducting the experiment stood by the manometer and when the right pressure was reached called out a loud "stop!". At the word of command F. seized the valve and turned it with all his might - to the left! (All valves without exception are closed by being turned to the right.) This caused the full pressure of the accumulator to come suddenly on to the press, a strain for which the connecting-pipes are not designed, so that one of them immediately burst - quite a harmless accident to the machine, but enough to oblige us to suspend work for the day and go home. - It is characteristic, by the way, that when we were discussing the affair some time later my friend F. had no recollection whatever of my remark, which I recalled with certainty.’

Similarly, falling, stumbling and slipping need not always be interpreted as purely accidental miscarriages of motor actions. The double meanings that language attaches to these expressions are enough to indicate the kind of phantasies involved, which can be represented by such losses of bodily equilibrium. I can recall a number of fairly mild nervous illnesses in women and girls which set in after a fall not accompanied by any injury, and which were taken to be traumatic hysterias resulting from the shock of the fall. Even at that time I had an impression that these events were differently connected and that the fall was already a product of the neurosis and expressed the same unconscious phantasies with a sexual content, which could be assumed to be the forces operating behind the symptoms. Is not the same thing meant by a proverb which runs: ‘When a girl falls she falls on her back’?

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1255

We can also count as bungled actions cases of giving a beggar a gold piece instead of a copper or small silver coin. The explanation of such mistakes is easy. They are sacrificial acts designed to appease fate, to avert harm, and so on. If a devoted mother or aunt, directly before going for a walk in the course of which she displays unwilling generosity of this kind, is heard to express concern over a child’s health, we can have no more doubts about the meaning of the apparently disagreeable accident. In this way our parapraxes make it possible for us to practise all those pious and superstitious customs that must shun the light of consciousness owing to opposition from our reason, which has now grown sceptical.

(f) There is no sphere in which the view that accidental actions are really intentional will command a more ready belief than that of sexual activity, where the border line between the two possibilities seems really to be a faint one. A good example from my own experience of a few years ago shows how an apparently clumsy movement can be most cunningly used for sexual purposes. In the house of some friends I met a young girl who was staying there as a guest and who aroused a feeling of pleasure in me which I had long thought was extinct. As a result I was in a jovial, talkative and obliging mood. At the time I also endeavoured to discover how this came about; a year before, the same girl had made no impression on me. As the girl’s uncle, a very old gentleman, entered the room, we both jumped to our feet to bring him a chair that was standing in the corner. She was nimbler than I was and, I think, nearer to the object; so she took hold of the chair first and carried it in front of her with its back towards her, gripping the sides of the seat with both hands. As I got there later, but still stuck to my intention of carrying the chair, I suddenly found myself standing directly behind her, and throwing my arms round her from behind; and for a moment my hands met in front of her waist. I naturally got out of the situation as rapidly as it had arisen. Nor does it seem to have struck anyone how dextrously I had taken advantage of this clumsy movement.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1256

Occasionally, too, I have had to tell myself that the irritating and clumsy process of dodging someone in the street, when for several seconds one steps first to one side and then to the other, but always to the same side as the other person, till finally one comes to a standstill face to face with him (or her) - this ‘getting in someone’s way’, I have had to tell myself, is once more a repetition of an improper and provocative piece of behaviour from earlier times and, behind a mask of clumsiness, pursues sexual aims. I know from my psycho-analyses of neurotics that what is described as the naïveté of young people and children is frequently only a mask of this sort, employed so that they may be able to say or do something improper without feeling embarrassed.

Wilhelm Stekel has reported very similar self-observations. ‘I entered a house and offered my right hand to my hostess. In a most curious way I contrived in doing so to undo the bow that held her loose morning-gown together. I was conscious of no dishonourable intention; yet I carried out this clumsy movement with the dexterity of a conjurer.’

I have already been able again and again to produce evidence that creative writers think of parapraxes as having a meaning and a motive, just as I am arguing here. We shall not be surprised, therefore, to see from a fresh example how a writer invests a clumsy movement with significance, too, and makes it foreshadow later events.

Here is a passage from Theodor Fontane’s novel L’Adultera ‘       Melanie jumped up and threw one of the large balls to her husband as though in greeting. But her aim was not straight, the ball flew to one side and Rubehn caught it.’ On the return from the outing that led to this little episode a conversation between Melanie and Rubehn takes place which reveals the first signs of a budding affection. This affection blossoms into passion, so that Melanie finally leaves her husband and gives herself entirely to the man she loves. (Communicated by H. Sachs.)

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1257

(g) The effects produced by the parapraxes of normal people are as a rule of the most harmless kind. Precisely for this reason it is an especially interesting question whether mistakes of considerable importance which may be followed by serious consequences - for example, mistakes made by a doctor or a chemist -(are in any way open to the approach presented here.

As I very rarely find myself undertaking medical treatment, I can report only one example from my personal experience of a bungled action of a medical kind. There is a very old lady whom I have been visiting twice a day for some years. On my morning visit my medical services are limited to two actions. I put a few drops of eye-lotion into her eye and give her a morphine injection. Two bottles are always prepared for me: a blue one with the collyrium and a white one with the morphine solution. During the two operations my thoughts are no doubt usually busy with something else; by now I have performed them so often that my attention behaves as if it were at liberty. One morning I noticed that the automaton had worked wrong. I had put the dropper into the white bottle instead of the blue one and had put morphine into the eye instead of collyrium. I was greatly frightened and then reassured myself by reflecting that a few drops of a two per cent solution of morphine could not do any harm even in the conjunctival sac. The feeling of fright must obviously have come from another source.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1258

In attempting to analyse this small mistake I first thought of the phrase ‘sich an der Alten vergreifen’,¹ which provided a short cut to the solution. I was under the influence of a dream which had been told me by a young man the previous evening and the content of which could only point to sexual intercourse with his own mother.² The strange fact that the legend finds nothing objectionable in Queen Jocasta’s age seemed to me to fit in well with the conclusion that in being in love with one’s own mother one is never concerned with her as she is in the present but with her youthful mnemic image carried over from one’s childhood. Such incongruities always appear when a phantasy that fluctuates between two periods is made conscious and so becomes definitely attached to one of the two periods. While absorbed in thoughts of this kind I came to my patient, who is over ninety, and I must have been on the way to grasping the universal human application of the Oedipus myth as correlated with the Fate which is revealed in the oracles; for at that point I did violence to or committed a blunder on ‘the old woman’. Here again the bungled action was a harmless one; of the two possible errors, using the morphine solution for the eye or the eye lotion for the injection, I had chosen by far the more harmless one. This still leaves the question open of whether we may admit the possibility of an unconscious intention in mistakes that can cause serious harm, in the same way as in the cases which I have discussed.

Here then my material leaves me in the lurch, as might be expected, and I have to fall back on conjectures and inferences. It is well known that in the severer cases of psychoneurosis instances of self-injury are occasionally found as symptoms and that in such cases suicide can never be ruled out as a possible outcome of the psychical conflict. I have now learnt and can prove from convincing examples that many apparently accidental injuries that happen to such patients are really instances of self-injury. What happens is that an impulse to self-punishment, which is constantly on the watch and which normally finds expression in self-reproach or contributes to the formation of a symptom, takes ingenious advantage of an external situation that chance happens to offer, or lends assistance to that situation until the desired injurious effect is brought about. Such occurrences are by no means uncommon in cases even of moderate severity, and they betray the part which the unconscious intention plays by a number of special features - e. g by the striking composure that the patients retain in what is supposed to be an accident.³

¹ [‘To do violence to the old woman.’ The German word ‘vergreifen’ means both ‘to make a blunder’ and ‘to commit an assault’.]

² The ‘Oedipus dream’, as I am in the habit of calling it, because it contains the key to the understanding of the legend of King Oedipus. In the text of Sophocles a reference to such a dream is put into Jocasta’s mouth. Cf. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), p. 739 ff..

³ In the present state of our civilization self-injury which does not have total self-destruction as its aim has no other choice whatever than to hide itself behind something accidental or to manifest itself by imitating the onset of a spontaneous illness. Formerly self-injury was a customary sign of mourning; at other periods it could express trends towards piety and renunciation of the world.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1259

Instead of a number of cases I will give a detailed report of only a single example from my medical experience. A young married woman broke her leg below the knee in a carriage accident, so that she was bed-ridden for weeks; what was striking was the absence of any expressions of pain and the calmness with which she bore her misfortune. This accident introduced a long and severe neurotic illness of which she was finally cured by psycho-analysis. In treating her I learnt of the circumstances surrounding the accident and of certain events that had preceded it. The young woman was staying with her very jealous husband on the estate of a married sister, in company with her numerous other sisters and brothers with their husbands and wives. One evening in this intimate circle she showed off one of her accomplishments: she gave an accurate performance of the can-can, which was received with hearty applause by her relatives but with scanty satisfaction by her husband, who afterwards whispered to her: ‘Carrying on like a tart again!’ The remark struck home - we will not enquire whether it was only on account of the dancing display. She spent a restless night. Next morning she felt a desire to go for a drive. She selected the horses herself, refusing one pair and asking for another. Her youngest sister wanted her baby and its nurse to go in the carriage with her; my patient vigorously opposed this. During the drive she showed signs of nerves; she warned the coachman that the horses were growing skittish, and when the restless animals were really causing a moment’s difficulty she jumped out in a fright and broke her leg, while the others who stayed in the carriage were unharmed. Although after learning these details we can hardly remain in doubt that this accident was really contrived, we cannot fail to admire the skill which forced chance to mete out a punishment that fitted the crime so well. For it had now been made impossible for her to dance the can-can for quite a long time.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1260

As regards self-injuries of my own, there is little that I can report in uneventful times; but in extraordinary circumstances I find that I am not incapable of them. When a member of my family complains to me of having bitten his tongue, pinched a finger, or the like, he does not get the sympathy he hopes for, but instead the question: ‘Why did you do that?’ I myself once gave my thumb a most painful pinch when a youthful patient told me during the hour of treatment of his intention (not of course to be taken seriously) of marrying my eldest daughter. I knew that at the time she was lying critically ill in a sanatorium.

One of my boys, whose lively temperament used to make it difficult to nurse him when he was ill, had a fit of anger one day because he was ordered to spend the morning in bed, and threatened to kill himself, a possibility that was familiar to him from the newspapers. In the evening he showed me a swelling on one side of his chest which he had got by bumping against a door-handle. To my ironical question as to why he had done it and what he meant by it, the eleven-year-old child answered as though it had suddenly dawned on him: ‘That was my attempt at suicide that I threatened this morning.’ I do not think, by the way, that my views on self-injury were accessible to my children at the time.

Anyone who believes in the occurrence of half-intentional self-injury - if I may use a clumsy expression - will be prepared also to assume that in addition to consciously intentional suicide there is such a thing as half-intentional self-destruction (self-destruction with an unconscious intention), capable of making skilful use of a threat to life and of disguising it as a chance mishap. There is no need to think such self-destruction rare. For the trend to self-destruction is present to a certain degree in very many more human beings than those in whom it is carried out; self-injuries are as a rule a compromise between this instinct and the forces that are still working against it, and even where suicide actually results, the inclination to suicide will have been present for a long time before in lesser strength or in the form of an unconscious and suppressed trend.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1261

Even a conscious intention of committing suicide chooses its time, means and opportunity; and it is quite in keeping with this that an unconscious intention should wait for a precipitating occasion which can take over a part of the causation and, by engaging the subject’s defensive forces, can liberate the intention from their pressure.¹ The views I am putting forward here are far from being idle ones. I have learned of more than one apparently chance mishap (on horseback or in a carriage) the details of which justify a suspicion that suicide was unconsciously allowed to come about. For example, an officer, riding in a race with some fellow-officers, fell from his horse and was so severely injured that he died some days later. His behaviour on regaining consciousness was striking in some ways; and his previous behaviour had been even more remarkable. He had been deeply depressed by the death of his beloved mother, had had fits of sobbing in the company of his fellow officers, and to his trusted friends had spoken of being weary of life. He had wanted to leave the service to take part in a war in Africa which had not interested him previously;² formerly a dashing rider, he now avoided riding whenever possible. Finally, before the race, from which he could not withdraw, he expressed gloomy forebodings; with the view that we hold in these matters, it will not remain a surprise to us that these forebodings turned out to be justified. I shall be told that it is not to be wondered at if a person in such a state of nervous depression cannot manage a horse as well as on normal days. I quite agree; but the mechanism of the motor inhibition produced by this state of ‘nerves’ should, I think, be looked for in the intention of self-destruction that I am insisting on.

¹ After all, the case is no different from that of a sexual assault upon a woman, where the man’s attack cannot be repelled by her full muscular strength because a portion of her unconscious impulses meets the attack with encouragement. It is said, as we know, that a situation of this kind paralyses a woman’s strength; all we need do is to add the reasons for this paralysis. To that extent the ingenious judgement delivered by Sancho Panza as governor of his island is psychologically unjust (Don Quixote, Part 2, Chapter 45). A woman dragged a man before the judge alleging he had robbed her of her honour by violence. In compensation Sancho gave her a full purse of money which he took from the accused; but after the woman’s departure he gave him permission to pursue her and snatch his purse back again from her. The two returned struggling, the woman priding herself on the fact that the villain had not been able to take the purse from her. Thereupon Sancho declared: ‘If you had defended your honour with half the determination with which you have defended this purse, the man could not have robbed you of it.’

² It is evident that conditions on a field of battle are such as to come to the help of a conscious intention to commit suicide which nevertheless shuns the direct way. Compare the words of the Swedish captain concerning the death of Max Piccolomini in Wallensteins Tod: ‘They say he wanted to die.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1262

S. Ferenczi of Budapest has handed over to me for publication the analysis of an ostensibly accidental injury by shooting, which he explains as an unconscious attempt at suicide. I can only declare my agreement with his view of the matter:

‘J. Ad., twenty-two years old, a journeyman carpenter, consulted me on January 18, 1908. He wanted to find out from me whether the bullet that penetrated his left temple on March 20, 1907 could or should be removed by operation. Apart from occasional, not too severe, headaches he felt perfectly well, and the objective examination revealed nothing at all apart from the characteristic powder-blackened bullet scar on the left temple, so I advised against an operation. When asked about the circumstances of the case he explained that he had injured himself accidentally. He was playing with his brother’s revolver, thought it was not loaded, pressed it with his left hand against his left temple (he is not left-handed,) put his finger on the trigger and the shot went off. There were three bullets in the six-shooter. I asked him how the idea of taking up the revolver came to him. He replied that it was the time of his medical examination for military service; the evening before, he took the weapon with him to the inn because he was afraid of brawls. At the examination he was found unfit because of varicose veins; he was very ashamed of this. He went home and played with the revolver, but had no intention of hurting him self - and then the accident happened. When questioned further whether he was otherwise satisfied with life, he sighed in answer and told the story of his love for a girl who also loved him but left him all the same. She emigrated to America simply out of desire for money. He wanted to follow her, but his parents prevented him. His sweetheart left on January 20, 1907; two months, that is, before the accident. In spite of all these suspicious factors the patient stuck to his point that the shooting was an "accident". I was however firmly convinced that his negligence in failing to make sure the weapon was not loaded before playing with it, as well as his self-inflicted injury, were psychically determined. He was still labouring under the depressing effects of his unhappy love affair and obviously wanted to "forget it all" in the army. When he was deprived of this hope as well, he took to playing with the revolver - i. e. to an unconscious attempt at suicide. His holding the revolver in his left and not his right hand is strong evidence that he was really only "playing" - that is, that he did not consciously wish to commit suicide.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1263

Another analysis of an apparently accidental self-inflicted injury, which its observer (Van Emden, 1911) has passed on to me, recalls the proverb: ‘He who digs a pit for others falls in it himself.’

‘Frau X., who comes of a good middle-class family, is married with three children. She suffers from her nerves, it is true, but has never needed any energetic treatment as she is sufficiently able to cope with life. One day she incurred a facial disfigurement which was somewhat striking at the time though it was only temporary. It happened as follows. She stumbled on a heap of stones in a street under repair and struck her face against the wall of a house. The whole of her face was scratched; her eyelids became blue and oedematous and as she was afraid that something might happen to her eyes she had the doctor called in. After she had been reassured on that score, I asked her: ‘But why did you in fact fall in that way?’ She replied that, directly before this, she had warned her husband, who had been suffering for some months from a joint affection and therefore had difficulty in walking, to take great care in that street, and it had been a fairly frequent experience of hers to find in cases of the kind that in some remarkable way the very thing happened to her that she had warned someone else against.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1264

‘I was not satisfied that this was what had determined her accident and asked if perhaps she had something more to tell me. Yes, just before the accident she had seen an attractive picture in a shop on the other side of the street; she had quite suddenly desired it as an ornament for the nursery and therefore wanted to buy it immediately. She walked straight towards the shop, without looking at the ground, stumbled over the heap of stones and in falling struck her face against the wall of the house without making even the slightest attempt to shield herself with her hands. The intention of buying the picture was immediately forgotten and she returned home as fast as possible. - "But why didn’t you keep a better look-out?" I asked. "Well," she answered, "perhaps it was a punishment - on account of that episode I told you about in confidence." - "Has it gone on worrying you so much then?" - "Yes - I regretted it very much afterwards; I considered myself wicked, criminal and immoral, but at the time I was almost crazy with my nerves."

‘The reference was to an abortion which she had had carried out with her husband’s consent, as, owing to their financial circumstances, the couple did not wish to be blessed with any further children. This abortion had been started by a woman quack but had had to be completed by a specialist.

‘"I often reproach myself by thinking ‘You really had your child killed’ and I was afraid such a thing couldn’t go unpunished. Now that you’ve assured me there’s nothing wrong with my eyes, my mind’s quite at rest: I’ve been sufficiently punished now in any case."

‘This accident was therefore a self-punishment, firstly to atone for her crime, but secondly also to escape from an unknown punishment of perhaps much greater severity of which she had been in continual dread for months. In the moment that she dashed towards the shop to buy the picture, the memory of the whole episode with all its fears, which had already been fairly strongly active in her unconscious when she had warned her husband, became overwhelming and might perhaps have been expressed in some words like these: "Why do you need an ornament for the nursery? - you had your child destroyed! You’re a murderess. The great punishment’s just coming down on you for certain!"

‘This thought did not become conscious; but instead of it she used the situation, at what I might call this psychological moment, for punishing herself unobtrusively with the help of the heap of stones which seemed suitable for the purpose. This is the reason why she did not even put out her hands as she fell and also why she was not seriously frightened. The second and probably less important determinant of her accident was no doubt self-punishment for her unconscious wish to be rid of her husband, who, incidentally, had been an accomplice in the crime. This wish was betrayed by her entirely superfluous warning to him to keep an eye open for the heap of stones in the street, since her husband walked with great care precisely because he was bad on his legs.’¹

¹ [Footnote added 1920:] A correspondent writes to me as follows on the subject of ‘self-punishment by means of parapraxes’: ‘If one studies the way people behave in the street one has a chance of seeing how often men who turn round to look back at passing women - not an unusual habit - meet with a minor accident. Sometimes they will sprain an ankle - on a level pavement; sometimes they will bump into a lamp post or hurt themselves in some other way.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1265

When the details of the case are considered one will also be likely to feel that Stärcke (1916) is right in regarding an apparently accidental self-injury by burning as a ‘sacrificial act’:

‘A lady whose son-in-law had to leave for Germany for military service scalded her foot in the following circumstances. Her daughter was expecting her confinement soon and reflections on the perils of war naturally did not put the family into a very cheerful mood. The day before his departure she had asked her son-in-law and daughter in for a meal. She herself prepared the meal in the kitchen after having first - strangely enough - changed her high, laced boots with arch-supports, which were comfortable for walking and which she usually wore indoors as well, for a pair of her husband’s slippers that were too large and were open at the top. While taking a large pan of boiling soup off the fire she dropped it and in this way scalded one foot fairly badly - especially the instep, which was not protected by the open slipper. - Everyone naturally put this accident down to her understandable "nerves". For the first few days after this burnt offering she was particularly careful with anything hot, but this did not prevent her some days later from scalding her wrist with hot gravy.’¹

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] In a very large number of cases like these of injury or death in accidents the explanation remains a matter of doubt. The outsider will find no occasion to see in the accident anything other than a chance occurrence, while someone who is closely connected with the victim and is familiar with intimate details has reason to suspect the unconscious intention behind the chance occurrence. The following account by a young man whose fiancée was run over in the street gives a good example of the kind of intimate knowledge that I mean and of the type of accessory details in question:

‘Last September I made the acquaintance of a Fräulein Z., aged 34. She was in well-to-do circumstances, and had been engaged before the war, but her fiancé had fallen in action in 1916 while serving as an officer. We came to know and become fond of each other, not at first with any thought of marrying, as the circumstances on both sides, in particular the difference in our ages (I myself was 27), seemed to rule that out. As we lived opposite each other in the same street and met every day, our relationship took an intimate turn in course of time. Thus the idea of marriage came more into view and I finally agreed to it myself. The betrothal was planned for this Easter; Fräulein Z., however, intended first to make a journey to her relatives at M., but this was suddenly prevented by a railway strike that had been called as a result of the Kapp Putsch. The gloomy prospects that the workers’ victory and its consequences appeared to hold out for the future had their effect for a brief time on our mood, too, but especially on Fräulein Z., always a person of very changeable moods, since she thought she saw new obstacles in the way of our future. On Saturday, March 20, however, she was in an exceptionally cheerful frame of mind - a state of affairs that took me quite by surprise and carried me along with her, so that we seemed to see everything in the rosiest colours. A few days before, we had talked of going to church together some time, without however having fixed a definite date. At 9. 15 the next morning, Sunday, March 21, she telephoned to ask me to fetch her to church straight away; but I refused, as I could not have got ready in time, and had, besides, work I wanted to finish. Fräulein Z. was noticeably disappointed; she then set out alone, met an acquaintance on the stairs at her house and walked with him for the short distance along the Tauentzienstrasse to the Rankestrasse, in the best of humour and without referring at all to our conversation. The gentleman bade her good-bye with a joking remark. Fräulein Z. had only to cross the Kurfürstendamm where it widened out and one could have a clear view along it; but, close to the pavement, she was run over by a horse-drawn cab. (Contusion of the liver, which led to her death a few hours later.) - We had crossed at that point hundreds of times before; Fräulein Z. was exceedingly careful, and very often prevented me from being rash; on this morning there was almost no traffic whatever, the trams, omnibuses, etc. were on strike. Just about that time there was almost absolute quiet; even if she did not see the cab she must at all events have heard it! Everybody supposed it was an "accident". My first thought was: "That’s impossible - but on the other hand there can be no question of its having been intentional." I tried to find a psychological explanation. After some considerable time I thought I had found it in your Psychopathology of Everyday Life. In particular, Fräulein Z. showed at various times a certain leaning in the direction of suicide and even tried to induce me to think the same way - thoughts from which I have often enough dissuaded her; for example, only two days before, after returning from a walk, she began, without any external reason at all, to talk about her death and the provisions for dealing with her estate. (She had not, by the way, done anything about this! - an indication that these remarks definitely did not have any intention behind them.) If I may venture on an opinion, I should regard this calamity not as an accident, nor as an effect of a clouding of consciousness, but as an intentional self-destruction performed with an unconscious purpose, and disguised as a chance mishap. This view of mine is confirmed by remarks which Fräulein Z. made to her relatives, both earlier, before she knew me, and also more recently, as well as by remarks to me up to within the last few days; so that I am tempted to regard the whole thing as an effect of the loss of her former fiancé, whom in her eyes nothing could replace.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1266

If a furious raging against one’s own integrity and one’s own life can be hidden in this way behind apparently accidental clumsiness and motor inefficiency, it is not a very large step to find it possible to transfer the same view to mistakes that seriously endanger the lives and health of other people. What evidence I have to show that this view is a valid one is drawn from my experience with neurotics, and thus does not wholly meet the demands of the situation. I will give an account of a case in which something that was not strictly a faulty action but that rather deserves the name of a symptomatic or chance action gave me the clue which subsequently made it possible to resolve the patient’s conflict. I once undertook the task of bringing an improvement to the marriage of a very intelligent man, whose disagreements with his fondly attached young wife could undoubtedly be shown to have a real basis, but could not, as he himself admitted, be completely accounted for in that way. He was continually occupied with the thought of a divorce, which he then dismissed once more because of his warm love for his two small children. In spite of this he constantly returned to his intention and made no attempt to find a way of making the situation tolerable to himself. Such inability to deal with a conflict is taken by me as proof that unconscious and repressed motives have lent a hand in strengthening the conscious ones which are struggling against each other, and I undertake in such cases to end the conflict by psychical analysis. One day the man told me of a small incident which had frightened him extremely. He was romping with his elder child, who was by far his favourite; he was swinging him high in the air and down again, and once he swung him so high while he was standing at a particular spot that the top of the child’s head almost struck the heavy gas chandelier that was hanging there. Almost, but not quite - or perhaps just! No harm came to the child, but it was made giddy with fright. The father stood horrified with the child in his arms, and the mother had a hysterical attack. The peculiar adroitness of this imprudent movement and the violence of the parents’ reaction prompted me to look for a symptomatic act in this accident - one which aimed at expressing an evil intention directed against the beloved child. I was able to remove the contradiction between this and the father’s contemporary affection for his child by shifting the impulse to injure it back to the time when this child had been the only one and had been so small that its father had not yet had any reason to take an affectionate interest in it. It was then easy for me to suppose that, as he was getting little satisfaction from his wife, he may at that time have had a thought or formed a decision of this kind: ‘If this little creature that means nothing at all to me dies, I shall be free and able to get a divorce.’ A wish for the death of the creature that he now loved so dearly must therefore have persisted unconsciously. From this point it was easy to find the path by which this wish had become unconsciously fixated. A powerful determinant was in fact provided by a memory from the patient’s childhood: namely that the death of a small brother, for which his mother blamed his father’s negligence, had led to violent quarrels between the parents and threats of a divorce. The subsequent course of my patient’s marriage, as well as my therapeutic success, confirmed my conjecture.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1267

Stärcke (1916) has given an example of the way in which creative writers do not hesitate to put a bungled action in the place of an intentional action and to make it in this way the source of the gravest consequences:

‘In one of Heijermans’ (1914) sketches there occurs an example of a bungled action, or, more precisely, of a faulty action which the author uses as a dramatic motif.

‘The sketch is called "Tom and Teddie". They are a pair of divers who appear in a variety theatre; their act is given in an iron tank with glass walls, in which they stay under water for a considerable time and perform tricks. Recently the wife has started an affair with another man, an animal-trainer. Her diver-husband has caught them together in the dressing-room just before the performance. Dead silence, menacing looks, with the diver saying: "Afterwards!" - The act begins. The diver is about to perform his hardest trick: he will remain "two and a half minutes under water in a hermetically sealed trunk". - This is a trick they had performed often enough; the trunk was locked and "Teddie used to show the key to the audience, who checked the time by their watches". She also used purposely to drop the key once or twice into the tank and then dive hurriedly after it, so as not to be too late when the time came for the trunk to be opened.

‘"This particular evening, January 31st, saw Tom locked up as usual by the neat fingers of his brisk and nimble wife. He smiled behind the peep-hole - she played with the key and waited for his warning sign. The trainer stood in the wings, in his impeccable evening dress, with his white tie and his horse-whip. Here was the ‘other man’. To catch her attention he gave a very short whistle. She looked at him, laughed, and with the clumsy gesture of someone whose attention is distracted she threw the key so wildly in the air that at exactly two minutes and twenty seconds, by an accurate reckoning, it fell by the side of the tank in the middle of the bunting covering the pedestal. No one had seen it. No one could see it. Viewed from the house the optical illusion was such that everyone saw the key fall into the water - and none of the stage hands heard it since the bunting muffled the sound.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1268

‘"Laughing, Teddie clambered without delay, over the edge of the tank. Laughing - Tom was holding out well - she came down the ladder. Laughing, she disappeared under the pedestal to look there and, when she did not find the key at once, she bowed in front of the bunting with a priceless gesture, and an expression on her face as if to say ‘Gracious me! what a nuisance this is!’.

‘"Meanwhile Tom was grimacing in his droll way behind the peep-hole, as if he too was becoming agitated. The audience saw the white of his false teeth, the champing of his lips under the flaxen moustache, the comical bubble-blowing that they had seen earlier, when he was eating the apple. They saw his pale knuckles as he grappled and clawed, and they laughed as they had laughed so often already that evening.

‘"Two minutes and fifty-eight seconds . . .

‘"Three minutes and seven seconds . . . twelve seconds . . .

‘"Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!

‘"Then consternation broke out in the house and there was a shuffling of feet, when the stage hands and the trainer began to search too and the curtain came down before the lid had been raised.

‘"Six English dancing-girls came on - then the man with the ponies, dogs and monkeys. And so on.

‘"It was not till the next morning that the public knew there had been an accident, that Teddie had been left a widow. . . ."

‘It is clear from this quotation what an excellent understanding the author must himself have had of the nature of a symptomatic act, seeing that he demonstrates to us so strikingly the deeper cause of the fatal clumsiness.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1269

CHAPTER IX

SYMPTOMATIC AND CHANCE ACTIONS

The actions described so far, in which we recognized the carrying out of an unconscious intention, made their appearance in the form of disturbances of other intended actions and concealed themselves behind the pretext of clumsiness. The ‘chance’ actions which are now to be discussed differ from ‘bungled’ actions merely in the fact that they scorn the support of a conscious intention and are therefore in no need of a pretext. They appear on their own account, and are permitted because they are not suspected of having any aim or intention. We perform them ‘without thinking there is anything in them’, ‘quite accidentally’, ‘just to have something to do’; and such information, it is expected, will put an end to any enquiry into the significance of the action. In order to be able to enjoy this privileged position, these actions, which no longer put forward the excuse of clumsiness, have to fulfil certain conditions: they must be unobtrusive and their effects must be slight.

I have collected a large number of such chance actions from myself and from others, and after closely examining the different examples I have come to the conclusion that the name of symptomatic acts is a better one for them. They give expression to something which the agent himself does not suspect in them, and which he does not as a rule intend to impart to other people but to keep to himself. Thus, exactly like all the other phenomena which we have so far considered, they play the part of symptoms.

The richest supply of such chance or symptomatic acts is in fact to be obtained during the psycho-analytic treatment of neurotics. I cannot resist quoting two examples from this source which show how extensively and in what detail these insignificant occurrences are determined by unconscious thoughts. The borderline between symptomatic acts and bungled actions is so ill-defined that I might equally well have included these examples in the last chapter.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1270

(1) During a session a young married woman mentioned by way of association that she had been cutting her nails the day before and ‘had cut into the flesh while she was trying to remove the soft cuticle at the bottom of the nail’. This is of so little interest that we ask ourselves in surprise why it was recalled and mentioned at all, and we begin to suspect that what we are dealing with is a symptomatic act. And in fact it turned out that the finger which was the victim of her small act of clumsiness was the ring-finger, the one on which a wedding ring is worn. What is more, it was her wedding anniversary; and in the light of this the injury to the soft cuticle takes on a very definite meaning, which can easily be guessed. At the same time, too, she related a dream which alluded to her husband’s clumsiness and her anaesthesia as a wife. But why was it the ring-finger on her left hand which she injured, whereas a wedding ring is worn on the right hand? Her husband is a lawyer, a ‘doctor of law’, and as a girl her affections belonged in secret to a physician (jokingly called ‘Doktor der Linke’ ). A ‘left-handed marriage’, too, has a definite meaning.

(2) A young unmarried lady said to me: ‘Yesterday I quite unintentionally tore a hundred florin note in two and gave half to a lady who was visiting me. Am I to take this as a symptomatic act as well?’ Closer investigation disclosed the following particulars. The hundred florin note: - She devoted part of her time and means to charitable work. Together with another lady she was providing for the bringing up of an orphan. The hundred florins were the contribution sent to her by the other lady. She had put them in an envelope and placed it on her writing table for the time being.

The visitor was a lady of good standing whom she was assisting in another charitable cause. This lady wished to make a note of the names of a number of people whose support could be enlisted. There was no paper at hand, so my patient reached for the envelope on her desk, and without thinking of what it contained tore it in two; one piece she kept herself, so as to have a duplicate set of names, and the other she handed to her visitor. It should be observed that her act, though certainly inappropriate, was perfectly harmless. If a hundred florin note is torn up, it does not, as is well known, lose any of its value so long as it can be put together again completely from the fragments. The importance of the names on the piece of paper was a guarantee that the lady would not throw it away, and it was equally certain that she would restore the valuable contents as soon as she noticed them.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1271

But what was the unconscious thought to which this chance action, made possible by forgetfulness, was meant to give expression? The visitor stood in a very definite relation to my patient’s treatment. It was this lady who had formerly recommended me to her as a doctor, and, if I am not mistaken, my patient felt herself under an obligation to her for this advice. Was the half of the hundred florin note perhaps meant to represent a fee for her services as an intermediary?  That would still be very strange.

Further material was however forthcoming. A little time before, a woman who was an intermediary of a very different kind had enquired of a relative of the patient’s whether the young lady would perhaps like to make a certain gentleman’s acquaintance; and that morning, a few hours before the lady’s visit, the suitor’s letter of proposal had arrived and had caused much amusement. So when the lady opened the conversation by enquiring after my patient’s health, the latter might well have thought: ‘You certainly found me the right doctor, but if you could help me to get the right husband’ (with the further thought: ‘and to get a child’) ‘I should be more grateful.’ This thought, which was kept repressed, formed the starting-point from which the two intermediaries became fused into one, and she handed her visitor the fee which her phantasy was ready to give the other woman. This solution becomes entirely convincing when I add that I had been telling the patient about such chance or symptomatic acts only the evening before. She thereupon took the first opportunity of producing something analogous.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1272

These extremely frequent chance and symptomatic acts might be arranged in three groups, according to whether they occur habitually, regularly under certain conditions, or sporadically. Actions of the first group (such as playing with one’s watch-chain, fingering one’s beard and so on), which can almost be taken as characteristics of the person concerned, trench upon the multifarious movements known as tics and no doubt deserve to be dealt with in connection with them. In the second group I include playing with a stick or scribbling with a pencil that one happens to be holding, jingling coins in one’s pocket, kneading bread-crumbs and other plastic materials, fiddling with one’s clothing in all kinds of ways and so forth. During psychical treatment idle play of this sort regularly conceals a sense and meaning which are denied any other form of expression. Generally the person concerned is quite unaware that he is doing anything of the kind or that he has modified his usual play in certain ways; and he fails to see and hear the effects of these actions. He does not, for example, hear the noise made by the jingling of coins, and, if his attention is drawn to it, he behaves as though he were astonished and incredulous. All the things that a person does with his clothing, often without realizing it, are no less important and deserve the doctor’s attention. Every change in the clothing usually worn, every small sign of carelessness - such as an unfastened button - every trace of exposure, is intended to express something which the wearer of the clothes does not want to say straight out and which for the most part he is unaware of. The interpretations of these small chance actions, and the evidence for these interpretations, emerge each time with sufficient certainty from the material which accompanies them during the session, from the topic that is under discussion and from the associations that occur when attention is drawn to the apparently chance action. Because of this I shall not proceed to support my assertions with examples accompanied by analyses; but I mention these actions because I believe that they have the same meaning in the case of normal people as they have in my patients.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1273

I cannot refrain from showing by at least one example how close the connection can be between a symbolic action performed through force of habit and the most intimate and important aspects of a healthy person’s life:¹

‘As Professor Freud has taught us, symbolism plays a greater role in the childhood of normal people than earlier psycho-analytical experiences had led one to expect. In this connection the following short analysis may be of some interest, especially in view of its medical subject-matter.

‘A doctor on rearranging his furniture in a new house came across an old-fashioned, straight wooden stethoscope, and, after pausing to decide where he should put it, was impelled to place it on the side of his writing-desk in such a position that it stood exactly between his chair and the one reserved for his patients. The act in itself was somewhat odd, for two reasons. In the first place he does not use a stethoscope at all often (he is in fact a neurologist) and if he needs one he uses a binaural one. In the second place all his medical apparatus and instruments were kept in drawers, with the sole exception of this one. However, he gave no further thought to the matter until one day a patient, who had never seen a straight stethoscope, asked him what it was. On being told, she asked why he kept it just there; he answered in an off-hand way that that place was as good as any other. This started him thinking, however, and he wondered whether there had been any unconscious motive in his action, and being familiar with the psycho-analytical method he decided to investigate the matter.

‘The first memory that occurred to him was the fact that when a medical student he had been struck by the habit his hospital interne had of always carrying in his hand a straight stethoscope on his ward visits, although he never used it. He greatly admired this interne, and was much attached to him. Later on, when he himself became an interne, he contracted the same habit, and would feel very uncomfortable if by mistake he left his room without having the instrument to swing in his hand. The aimlessness of the habit was however shown, not only by the fact that the only stethoscope he ever used was a binaural one, which he carried in his pocket, but also in that it was continued when he was a surgical interne and never needed any stethoscope at all. The significance of these observations immediately becomes clear if we refer to the phallic nature of this symbolic action.

¹ Ernest Jones (1910a).

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1274

‘He next recalled the fact that in his early childhood he had been struck by the family doctor’s habit of carrying a straight stethoscope inside his hat; he found it interesting that the doctor should always have his chief instrument handy when he went to see patients and only had to take off his hat (i. e. a part of his clothing) and "pull it out". As a small child he had been strongly attached to this doctor; and a brief self-analysis enabled him to discover that at the age of three and a half he had had a double phantasy concerning the birth of a younger sister - namely that she was the child, firstly, of himself and his mother, and secondly, of the doctor and himself. Thus in this phantasy he played both a masculine and a feminine part. He further recalled having been examined by the same doctor when he was six, and distinctly recollected the voluptuous sensation of feeling the doctor’s head near him pressing the stethoscope into his chest, and the rhythmic to-and-fro respiratory movement. At the age of three he had had a chronic chest affection which necessitated repeated examination, although he could not in fact still remember it.

‘At the age of eight he was impressed by being told by an older boy that it was the doctor’s custom to get into bed with his women patients. There certainly was some real basis for this rumour; at all events the women of the neighbourhood, including the subject’s own mother, were very attached to the young and handsome doctor. The subject had himself on several occasions experienced sexual temptations in regard to his women patients; he had twice fallen in love with one and finally had married one. It can hardly be doubted that his unconscious identification with the doctor was the chief motive for his adoption of the medical profession. Other analyses lead us to suppose that this is undoubtedly the commonest motive (though it is hard to determine just how common). In the present case it was doubly determined: firstly by the superiority of the doctor on several occasions over the father, of whom the son was very jealous, and secondly by the doctor’s knowledge of forbidden topics and his opportunities for sexual satisfaction.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1275

‘Then came a dream which I have already published elsewhere (Jones 1910b); it was plainly of a homosexual-masochistic nature. In this dream a man who was a substitutive figure for the doctor attacked the subject with a "sword". The sword reminded him of a passage in the Völsung Nibelungen Saga, where Sigurd places a naked sword between himself and the sleeping Brünhilde. The same episode occurs in the Arthurian legend which our subject also knows well.

‘The meaning of the symptomatic act now becomes clear. Our doctor placed his straight stethoscope between himself and his women patients exactly as Sigurd placed his sword between himself and the woman he was not to touch. The act was a compromise-formation: it satisfied two impulses. It served to satisfy in his imagination the suppressed wish to enter into sexual relations with any attractive woman patient, but at the same time it served to remind him that this wish could not become a reality. It was, so to speak, a charm against yielding to temptation.

‘I might add that the following lines from Lord Lytton’s Richeleau made a great impression on the boy:

Beneath the rule of men entirely great

The pen is mightier than the sword. . . .¹

and that he has become a prolific writer and uses an exceptionally large fountain pen. When I asked him why he needed it he gave the characteristic response: "I have so much to express."

‘This analysis again reminds us what profound insight is afforded into mental life by "innocent" and "meaningless" acts, and how early in life the tendency to symbolization develops.’

¹ Compare Oldham’s: ‘I wear my pen as others do their sword.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1276

I can quote a further instance from my psychotherapeutic experience in which eloquent testimony was borne by a hand playing with a lump of bread-crumb. My patient was a boy of not yet thirteen; for almost two years he had been severely hysterical and I finally took him for psycho-analytic treatment after a lengthy stay in a hydropathic institution had brought no success. I was going on the assumption that he must have had sexual experiences and be tormented by sexual questions, which was likely enough at his age; but I refrained from helping him with explanations as I wished to put my hypotheses once again to the test. I was therefore naturally curious as to the way in which he would bring out what I was looking for. One day it struck me that he was rolling something between the fingers of his right hand; he would thrust it in his pocket and continue playing with it there, and then take it out again, and so on. I did not ask what he had in his hand; but he suddenly opened his hand and showed me. It was bread-crumb kneaded into a lump. At the next session he again brought along a similar lump and this time, while we were talking, he modelled figures out of it which excited my interest; he did this with incredible rapidity, with his eyes closed. They were undoubtedly little men, with a head, two arms and two legs, like the crudest prehistoric idols, and with an appendage between the legs which he drew out into a long point. He had hardly completed this when he kneaded the figure together again; later he allowed it to remain, but drew out a similar appendage from the surface of the back and other parts of the body in order to disguise the meaning of the first one. I wanted to show him I had understood him, but at the same time I wanted to prevent him from pretending that he had not thought of anything while he was engaged in making these figures. With this in mind I suddenly asked him if he remembered the story of the Roman king who gave his son’s envoy an answer in dumb-show in his garden. The boy failed to recall it, although he must have learnt it so much more recently than I. He asked whether it was the story of the slave and the answer that was written on his shaven head. No, I answered, that is from Greek history, and I told him the story. King Tarquinius Superbus had made his son Sextus find his way secretly into a hostile Latin city. The son, who had meanwhile collected a following in the city, sent a messenger to the king asking what steps he should take next. The king did not answer, but went into his garden, had the question repeated to him there, and then silently struck off the heads of the tallest and finest poppies. All that the messenger could do was to report this to Sextus, who understood his father and arranged for the most distinguished citizens in the city to be removed by assassination.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1277

While I was speaking, the boy stopped kneading and, as I was on the point of describing what the king did in his garden and had reached the words ‘silently struck’, he made a lightning movement and tore the head off his little man. He had therefore understood me and had seen that he had been understood by me. I could now question him directly, I gave him the information he needed, and in a short time we had brought the neurosis to an end.

The symptomatic acts that can be observed in almost inexhaustible abundance in healthy people no less than in sick ones have more than one claim to our interest. To the doctor they often serve as valuable clues which enable him to get his bearings in new or unfamiliar situations; to the observer of human nature they often betray everything - and at times even more than he cares to know. A person who is familiar with their significance may at times feel like King Solomon who, according to oriental legend, understood the language of animals. One day I was to examine a young man, whom I did not know, at his mother’s house. As he came towards me I was struck by a large stain on his trousers - made by albumen, as I could tell from its peculiar stiff edges. After a moment’s embarrassment the young man apologized and said that he had felt hoarse and so had swallowed a raw egg; some of the slippery white of egg had probably fallen on his clothes. He was able to confirm this by pointing to the egg-shell, which was still visible in the room on a small plate. In this way the suspicious stain was given an innocent explanation; but when his mother had left us alone I thanked him for making my diagnosis so very much easier, and without more ado took as the basis of our discussion his confession that he was suffering from the troubles arising from masturbation. Another time I was paying a visit to a lady who was as rich as she was miserly and foolish, and who was in the habit of giving the doctor the task of working through a host of complaints before the simple cause of her condition could he reached. When I entered she was sitting at a small table and was busy arranging silver florins in little piles. On rising she knocked some of the coins on to the floor. I helped her to pick them up, and soon cut short her account of her sufferings by asking: ‘Has your noble son-in-law robbed you of so much money then?’ She denied this angrily, only to go on very soon afterwards to tell the sad story of the agitation which her son-in-law’s extravagance had caused her. She has not however sent for me since. I cannot claim that one always makes friends of those to whom one shows the meaning of their symptomatic acts.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1278

Dr. J. E. G. van Emden (The Hague) reports another case of ‘confession through a parapraxis’. ‘In making out my bill, the waiter in a small restaurant in Berlin announced that the price of a particular dish had been increased by ten pfennigs, owing to the war. When I asked why this was not shown on the menu he replied that that must just be an oversight - the price had certainly gone up. He pocketed the money clumsily and dropped a ten pfennig coin on the table right in front of me.

‘"Now I know for certain that you’ve charged me too much. Would you like me to enquire at the cash desk?"

‘"Excuse me . . . one moment, please," and he had gone.

‘Needless to say, I allowed him his retreat, and, after he had apologized a couple of minutes later for having for some unknown reason confused my dish with another one, I let him keep the ten pfennigs as a reward for his contribution to the psychopathology of everyday life.’

Anyone who cares to observe his fellow men while they are at table will be able to observe the neatest and most instructive symptomatic acts.

Thus Dr. Hanns Sachs relates: ‘I happened to be present when an elderly couple, relatives of mine, took their evening meal. The lady suffered from a gastric complaint and had to observe a very strict diet. A piece of roast meat had just been set before the husband, and he asked his wife, who was not allowed to join in this course, to pass him the mustard. His wife opened the cupboard, reached inside, and put her little bottle of stomach drops on the table in front of her husband. There was of course no resemblance between the barrel-shaped mustard pot and the little bottle of drops which might have accounted for her picking up the wrong one; yet the wife did not notice her confusion of the two until her husband laughingly called her attention to it. The meaning of the symptomatic act needs no explanation.’

I owe to Dr. B. Dattner, of Vienna, an excellent example of this kind which the observer made very skilful use of:

‘I was lunching in a restaurant with my colleague H., a doctor of philosophy. He spoke of the hardships of probationary students, and mentioned incidentally that before he had finished his studies he was given the post of secretary to the ambassador, or, more precisely, the minister plenipotentiary and extraordinary, of Chile. "But then the minister was transferred and I did not present myself to his successor." While he was uttering the last sentence he raised a piece of cake to his mouth, but let it drop from the knife in apparent clumsiness. I immediately grasped the hidden meaning of this symptomatic act, and, as it were casually, interjected to my colleague, who was unfamiliar with psycho-analysis: "You certainly allowed a tasty morsel to slip from you there." He did not, however, notice that my words could apply equally well to his symptomatic act, and repeated my exact words with a peculiarly charming and surprising liveliness just as if my remark had taken the words out of his mouth: "Yes, that was certainly a tasty morsel that I allowed to slip from me", and went on to unburden himself by means of a detailed description of the clumsiness which had lost him this well-paid position.

‘The meaning of the symbolic symptomatic act becomes clearer if it is realized that my colleague had scruples about telling a fairly remote acquaintance like myself of his precarious material situation, and that the obtrusive thought thereupon disguised itself as a symptomatic act which expressed symbolically what was meant to be hidden and in this way afforded the speaker relief which arose from unconscious sources.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1279

The following examples will show how much meaning may turn out to lie in an apparently unintentional act of carrying something off or taking something away with one.

Dr. B. Dattner relates: ‘A colleague paid a visit to a friend, a lady he had much admired in the days of his youth; it was the first visit after her marriage. He told me of this visit and expressed his surprise at the fact that he had not succeeded in keeping his resolution to stay only a very short time with her. He then went on to recount a singular parapraxis which had happened to him there. His friend’s husband, who had joined in the conversation, had looked for a box of matches which had quite definitely been on the top of the table when he arrived. My colleague, too, had looked through his pockets to see whether he had not accidentally "snapped it up",¹ but without avail. Some time later he had in fact found "it" in his pocket, and was struck by the fact that there was only a single match in the box. - A dream a few days later which prominently displayed the match-box symbolism and was concerned with this same friend of his youth confirmed my explanation that my colleague’s symptomatic act was intended to announce that he had prior rights and to demonstrate his claim to exclusive possession (only one match in the box).’

Dr. Hanns Sachs relates: ‘Our maid is particularly fond of a certain kind of cake. There is no possible doubt of this, as it is the only thing that she always makes well. One Sunday she brought in this particular cake, put it down on the sideboard, removed the plates and cutlery of the previous course and stacked them on the tray on which she had brought in the cake; she then put the cake back on the top of this pile instead of on the table, and disappeared with it into the kitchen. Our first idea was that she had noticed something that ought to be put right about the cake, but when she failed to appear again my wife rang and asked: "Betty, what has happened to the cake?" "How do you mean?" replied the maid, not understanding. We had first to point out to her that she had taken the cake away with her again. She had put it on the pile of dishes, carried it out and put it away "without noticing". - Next day, as we were about to eat what remained of this cake, my wife noticed that there was just as much as we had left the day before - in other words, that the maid had rejected her own share of her favourite dish. When asked why she had not eaten any of the cake she replied in some embarrassment that she had not wanted any. - The infantile attitude is very clear on both occasions: first the childish insatiability which did not want to share the object of her wishes with anyone, followed by the equally childish defiant reaction: "If you grudge it me, keep it for yourselves; I don’t want anything at all now.”'

¹ [In German the word for ‘box’ (‘Schatel’) is feminine; so that this might equally mean ‘snapped her up’.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1280

Chance actions and symptomatic acts occurring in matrimonial matters often have the most serious significance and might induce people who disregard the psychology of the unconscious to believe in omens. It is not a happy beginning when a young bride loses her wedding-ring on the honeymoon; but after all it is usually only mislaid and is soon found again. - I know a lady, now divorced from her husband, who in managing her money affairs frequently signed documents in her maiden name, many years before she in fact resumed it. - I was once the guest of a young married couple and heard the young woman laughingly describe her latest experience. The day after her return from the honeymoon she had called for her unmarried sister to go shopping with her as she used to do, while her husband went to his business. Suddenly she noticed a gentleman on the other side of the street, and nudging her sister had cried: ‘Look, there goes Herr L.’ She had forgotten that this gentleman had been her husband for some weeks. I felt a cold chill as I heard the story, but I did not dare to draw the inference. The little incident only occurred to my mind some years later when the marriage had come to a most unhappy end.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1281

The following observation is quoted from one of Alphonse Maeder’s valuable studies, published in French (Maeder, 1906). It might equally well have been included among the examples of forgetting:

‘Une dame nous racontait récemment qu’elle avait oublié d’essayer sa robe de noce et s’en souvint la veille du mariage à huit heures du soir; la couturière désespérait de voir sa cliente. Ce détail suffit a montrer que la fiancée ne se sentait pas très heureuse de porter une robe d’épouse, elle cherchait à oublier cette représentation pénible. Elle est aujourd’hui . . . divorcée.’¹

A friend who has learnt to read signs has told me that the great actress Eleonora Duse introduces into one of her parts a symptomatic act which clearly shows the depths from which she draws her artistry. It is a drama of adultery; she has just had an altercation with her husband and now stands apart deep in thought, before the seducer approaches. During the short interval she plays with her wedding ring, takes it off her finger, puts it on again, and then once more takes it off. She is now ready for the other man.

I add here an account by Theodor Reik (1915) of some other symptomatic acts involving rings.

‘We are familiar with the symptomatic acts of married people which consist in their taking off and replacing their wedding rings. My colleague M. produced a series of similar symptomatic acts. He had received a ring as a present from a girl he was in love with, with a note saying that he must not lose it or she would know that he did not love her any more. Subsequently he grew increasingly worried that he might lose the ring. If he had temporarily taken it off (for example while he was washing) it would regularly be mislaid, so that often it could only be found again after a long search. When he was posting a letter he could not suppress a slight fear that the ring might be pulled off by the edges of the letter-box. On one occasion he managed things so clumsily that the ring did fall into the box. The letter he was sending off on that occasion was a parting note to an earlier lady-love of his, and he fell guilty towards her. Simultaneously he was filled with a longing for this other lady which conflicted with his feelings towards his present love-object.’

¹ [‘A lady was telling us recently how she had forgotten to try on her wedding dress and remembered it at eight o’clock on the eve of her wedding. The dressmaker had given up hope of seeing her customer. This detail was enough to show that the bride did not feel very happy about wearing a wedding-dress; she was trying to forget the painful performance. To-day . . . she is divorced.’]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1282

The theme of the ring leaves one once again with the impression of how hard it is for a psycho-analyst to discover anything new that has not been known before by some creative writer. In Fontane’s novel Vor dem Sturm Justizrat Turgany declares during a game of forfeits: ‘You may be sure, ladies, that the deepest secrets of nature are revealed in the pledging of forfeits.’ Among the examples he uses to support his claim there is one that deserves our special interest: ‘I recall a professor’s wife - she had reached the age of embonpoint - who again and again pulled off her wedding ring to offer it as a forfeit. Do not ask me to describe the happiness of her marriage.’ He then went on: ‘In the same company there was a gentleman who never tired of depositing his English pocket-knife, with its ten blades, corkscrew and flint and steel, in the ladies’ laps, until the bladed monster, after tearing several silk dresses, finally disappeared amid general cries of indignation.’

We shall not be surprised if an object of such rich symbolic meaning as a ring should be made to play a part in some significant parapraxes, even where it does not, in the form of a wedding ring or an engagement ring, mark an erotic tie. The following example of an occurrence of this sort has been put at my disposal by Dr. M. Kardos:

‘Several years ago a man who is much my junior attached himself to me; he shares my intellectual endeavours and stands to me somewhat in the relation of a pupil to his teacher. On one particular occasion I presented him with a ring; and this ring has several times given rise to symptomatic acts or parapraxes, whenever anything in our relationship has met with his disapproval. A short time ago he was able to report the following case, which is particularly neat and transparent. We used to meet once a week, when he regularly came to see me and talk with me; but on one occasion he made an excuse to stay away, as a rendezvous with a young lady seemed more attractive to him. The following morning he noticed - not, however, until long after he had left the house - that the ring was not on his finger. He did not worry any more about it, since he assumed he had left it behind on his bedside table, where he put it every evening, and would find it there when he got home. As soon as he reached home he looked for it, without success, and then began a systematic search of the room, which was equally fruitless. At last it crossed his mind that the ring had been lying on the bedside table - just as had been the case, in fact, for more than a year - beside a small pocket-knife that he normally carried in his waistcoat pocket; the suspicion thus occurred to him that he might have "absent-mindedly" pocketed the ring with the knife. So he felt in his pocket and found that the missing ring was in fact there. "His wedding-ring in his waistcoat pocket" is a proverbial way of referring to the place where the ring is kept by a husband who intends to betray the wife who gave it to him. My friend’s feeling of guilt had therefore caused him first to punish himself ("you no longer deserve to wear this ring") and secondly to confess his unfaithfulness, though only in the form of an unwitnessed parapraxis. It was only in a roundabout way, while he was describing this parapraxis - an eventuality which could, incidentally, have been foreseen - that he came to confess his little "unfaithfulness".’

I also know of an elderly man who married a very young girl and who decided to spend the wedding night in a hotel in town instead of on the honeymoon journey. Hardly had they reached the hotel when he noticed in alarm that he was without his wallet, which contained all the money for the honeymoon; he had either mislaid it or lost it. He was still able to reach his servant by telephone; the latter found the missing wallet in the discarded wedding suit and brought it to the hotel to the waiting bridegroom who had accordingly entered upon his marriage without means. He was thus able to start his journey with his young bride next morning. In the night, however, he had, as he had apprehensively foreseen, proved ‘incapable '.¹

¹ [‘Unvermögend’, ‘without means’, ‘without power’, and so ‘impotent’.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1283

It is consoling to reflect that there is an unsuspected extension of the human habit of ‘losing things’ - namely, symptomatic acts, and that this habit is consequently welcome, at least to a secret intention of the loser’s. It is often only an expression of the low estimation in which the lost object is held, or of a secret antipathy towards it or towards the person that it came from; or else the inclination to lose the object has been transferred to it from other more important objects by a symbolic association of thoughts. Losing objects of value serves to express a variety of impulses; it may either be acting as a symbolic representation of a repressed thought - that is, it may be repeating a warning that one would be glad enough to ignore -, or (most commonly of all) it may be offering a sacrifice to the obscure powers of destiny to whom homage is still paid among us to-day.

Here are a few examples to illustrate these remarks about losing things.

Dr. B. Dattner: ‘A colleague told me he had unexpectedly lost his "Penkala" pencil which he had had for over two years and which he valued highly because of its superior quality. Analysis revealed the following facts. The day before, my colleague had received a thoroughly disagreeable letter from his brother-in-law, which concluded with the sentence: "I have neither the inclination nor the time at present to encourage you in your frivolity and laziness." The affect connected with this letter was so powerful that next day my colleague promptly sacrificed the pencil, which was a present from this brother-in-law, so as not to feel under too great an obligation to him.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1284

A lady of my acquaintance understandably refrained from visiting the theatre while in mourning for her old mother. There were only a few days still to elapse before the end of her year of mourning, and she allowed herself to be persuaded by her friends to buy a ticket for a particularly interesting performance. On reaching the theatre she made the discovery that she had lost the ticket. She thought afterwards that she had thrown it away with her tram ticket on leaving the tram. This lady used to pride herself on never losing anything through carelessness.

It is therefore fair to assume that another experience she had of losing something was not without a good reason either. On her arrival at a health resort she decided to pay a visit to a pension where she had stayed on an earlier occasion. She was welcomed there as an old friend and entertained, and when she wanted to pay she was told she was to look on herself as a guest; but this she did not feel was quite proper. It was agreed that she might leave something for the maid who had waited on her, so she opened her purse to put a one mark note on the table. In the evening the pension’s manservant brought her a five mark note which had been found under the table and which the proprietress thought must belong to the lady. She must therefore have dropped it from her purse in getting out the tip for the maid. She had probably wanted to pay her bill in spite of everything.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1285

An article of some length by Otto Rank (1911) makes use of dream-analysis to expose the sacrificial mood that forms the basis of this act, and to reveal its deeper motives.¹ It is of interest when he writes later that often not only losing objects but also, finding them appears to be determined. In what sense this is to be understood may be gathered from his story, which I include here (Rank, 1915a). It is obvious that in cases of losing, the object is already provided; in cases of finding, it has first to be looked for.

‘A girl who was materially dependent on her parents wished to buy a piece of cheap jewellery. She enquired in the shop about the price of the article she fancied, but was disappointed to find that it cost more than the sum she had saved. All the same, it was only a matter of two kronen that stood between her and this small pleasure. In a depressed mood she began to stroll home through the streets, which were thronged with the evening crowds. Though she describes herself as having been deep in thought, she suddenly noticed lying on the ground, in one of the busiest squares, a small piece of paper which she had just passed by without attending to it. She turned round, picked it up and was astonished to find it was a folded two kronen note. She thought: "This has been sent me by fate so that I can buy the jewellery", and started happily back with the idea of taking the hint. But at the same moment she told herself that she ought not to do so, since money that one finds is lucky money and should not be spent.

‘The bit of analysis which would make this "chance action" intelligible may probably be inferred from the situation described, even in the absence of personal information from the girl herself. Among the reflections that occupied her mind as she was walking home, the thought of her poverty and her restricted material position must no doubt have bulked large; moreover we may guess that that thought took the form of a wishful removal of her straitened circumstances. The idea of how the required sum could most easily be obtained will surely have arisen from her interest in satisfying her modest wish; and it will have suggested the simplest solution - namely, that of finding the money. In this way her unconscious (or preconscious) was predisposed towards "finding", even though - owing to claims on her attention from other quarters ("deep in thought") - the actual thought did not become fully conscious to her. We may go further and, on the strength of similar cases which have been analysed, actually assert that unconscious "readiness to look for something" is much more likely to lead to success than consciously directed attention. Otherwise it would be almost impossible to explain how it was that precisely this one person out of the many hundreds of passers-by - and with all the difficulties caused by the poor street-lighting and the dense crowds - was able to make the find that came as a surprise to her herself. Some indication of the actual strength of this unconscious or preconscious readiness may be obtained from the remarkable fact that after making this find - that is, at a time when the attitude had become superfluous and had certainly been removed from conscious attention - the girl found a handkerchief at a later point on her way home, in a dark and lonely part of a suburban street.’

¹ [Footnote added 1917:] Other articles on the same topic will be found in the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, 2, and in the Internationale Zetschrift für Psychoanalyse, 1 (1913).

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1286

It must be said that it is precisely such symptomatic acts that often offer the best approach to an understanding of people’s intimate mental life.

Turning now to the chance actions that occur sporadically, I will report an example which suggested a comparatively deep interpretation even without analysis. It gives a clear illustration of the conditions under which such symptoms can be produced entirely unobtrusively, and it enables me to subjoin a remark of practical importance. In the course of a summer holiday it happened that I had to wait a few days at a particular place for the arrival of my travelling companion. In the meantime I made the acquaintance of a young man who also seemed to be lonely and was willing enough to join me. As we were staying at the same hotel it was natural for us to take all our meals and walks together. On the afternoon of the third day he suddenly told me that he was expecting his wife to arrive by train that evening. My psychological interest was now aroused, for I had already been struck that morning by my companion’s rejecting my proposal for a longish expedition and objecting during our short walk to taking a certain path which he said was too steep and dangerous. On our afternoon walk he suddenly remarked that I must no doubt be hungry; I must certainly not delay my evening meal on his account - he was going to wait for his wife to arrive and have supper with her. I took the hint and sat down to dinner while he went to the station. Next morning we met in the hall of the hotel. He introduced me to his wife and then said: ‘You’ll have breakfast with us, won’t you?’ I had first to go on a small errand in the next street, but promised to be back soon. When I entered the breakfast room, I saw that the couple were both sitting on the same side of a small table by the window. On the opposite side there was only one chair; the husband’s big, heavy waterproof cape had been hung over the back of it, covering the seat. I understood very well the meaning of the coat’s being arranged in that way; it had certainly not been done deliberately and was therefore all the more expressive. It meant: ‘There’s no room for you here, you’re superfluous now.’ The husband failed to notice that I was standing in front of the table without sitting down; but his wife did, and quickly nudged her husband and whispered: ‘Look, you’ve taken up the gentleman’s seat.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1287

This and other similar experiences have led me to conclude that actions carried out unintentionally must inevitably become the source of misunderstandings in human relations. The agent, who knows nothing of there being an intention connected with these actions, does not feel that they are chargeable to him and does not hold himself responsible for them. The second party, on the other hand, since he regularly bases his conclusions as to the agent’s intentions and sentiments on such actions among others, knows more of the other’s psychical processes than that person himself is ready to admit or believes he has communicated. The agent, indeed, grows indignant if these conclusions drawn from his symptomatic acts are brought up against him; he declares them to be baseless, since he is not conscious of having had the intention at the time they were carried out, and complains of being misunderstood by the second party. Strictly considered, misunderstandings of his kind are based on too intimate and too extensive understanding. The more two people suffer from ‘nerves’, the more readily will they give each other cause for disputes, the responsibility for which each disclaims just as decidedly in regard to himself as he considers it certain in regard to the other person. And this is no doubt the punishment for people’s internal dishonesty in only giving expression under the pretext of forgetting, bungling and doing things unintentionally to impulses that would better be admitted to themselves and to others if they can no longer be controlled. It can in fact be said quite generally that everyone is continually practising psychical analysis on his neighbours and consequently learns to know them better than they know themselves. The road whose goal it is to observe the precept γυώθι σεαντόυ¹ runs viâ the study of one’s own apparently accidental actions and omissions.

¹ [‘Know thyself’]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1288

Of all the writers who have from time to time passed comment on our minor symptomatic acts and parapraxes, or who have made use of them, none has understood their secret nature so clearly or exhibited them in so uncannily lifelike a manner as Strindberg - a man whose genius in recognizing such things was, it is true, assisted by grave mental abnormality. Dr. Karl Weiss of Vienna (1913) has drawn attention to the following passage in one of his works:

‘After a while the Count did in fact come, and he approached Esther quietly, as though he had a rendezvous with her.

‘"Have you been waiting long?" he asked in his low voice.

‘"Six months, as you know," answered Esther; "but did you see me to-day?"

‘"Yes, just now, in the tram: and I looked into your eyes feeling that I was talking to you."

‘"A great deal has ‘happened’ since the last time."

‘"Yes, and I believed it was all over between us."

‘"How so?"

‘"All the little gifts that I had from you broke in pieces - in an occult way, what is more. But that is something that has been noticed long, long ago."

‘"Dear me! Now I remember a whole set of events that I took to be accidents. Once I was given a pair of pince-nez by my grandmother, at a time we were good friends. They were made of polished rock-crystal and were excellent for making post-mortems - a real miracle of which I took the greatest care. One day I broke with the old lady and she was angry with me. And during the next post-mortem the lenses happened to fall out for no reason. I thought they were simply broken and sent them to be repaired. But no, they went on refusing to help me; they were put in a drawer and got lost."

‘"Dear me! Strange that things that concern the eyes should be the most sensitive. I was once given some opera glasses by a friend; they suited my eyes so well that it was a pleasure to use them. This friend and I fell out. You know how it happens without visible cause; it seems as though one were not allowed to be in harmony. The next time I wanted to use the opera glasses I could not see clearly. The cross-piece was too short and I saw two images. I don’t need to tell you that the cross-piece had not grown shorter and my eyes had not grown further apart! It was a miracle that happens every day - one that bad observers do not notice. How can we explain it? The psychical power of hatred must be greater than we suppose. - What is more, the ring that I had from you has lost its stone and will not let itself be repaired; no, it will not. Do you want to part from me, then? . . ."’ (The Gothic Rooms, German trans., p. 258 f.)

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1289

In the field of symptomatic acts, too, psycho-analytic observation must concede priority to imaginative writers. It can only repeat what they have said long ago. Wilhelm Stross has drawn my attention to the following passage in Laurence Sterne’s celebrated humorous novel, Tristram Shandy (Volume VI, Chapter V):

‘. . . And I am not at all surprised that Gregory of Nazianzum, upon observing the hasty and untoward gestures of Julian, should foretell he would one day become an apostate; - or that St. Ambrose should turn his Amanuensis out of doors, because of an indecent motion of his head, which went backwards and forwards like a flail; - or that Democritus should conceive Protagoras to be a scholar, from seeing him bind up a faggot, and thrusting, as he did it, the small twigs inwards. - There are a thousand unnoticed openings, continued my father, which let a penetrating eye at once into a man’s soul; and I maintain it, added he, that a man of sense does not lay down his hat in coming into a room, - or take it up in going out of it, but something escapes, which discovers him.’

I add here a brief and varied collection of symptomatic acts found in healthy and neurotic people:

An elderly colleague who was not a good loser at cards had one evening paid up a largish sum of money that he had lost. He did this without complaining but in a peculiarly restrained mood. After his departure it was discovered that he had left behind at his seat more or less everything he had on him: spectacles, cigar-case and handkerchief. This no doubt calls for the translation: ‘You robbers! You have well and truly plundered me!’

A man suffering from occasional sexual impotence, which originated from the intimacy of his relations with his mother in childhood, related that he was in the habit of decorating pamphlets and notes with the letter S, his mother’s initial. He cannot bear letters from home coming in contact with other profane correspondence on his desk, and is therefore forced to put the former away separately.

A young lady suddenly flung open the door of the consulting room though the woman who preceded her had not yet left it. In apologizing she blamed her ‘thoughtlessness’; it soon turned out that she had been demonstrating the curiosity that in the past had caused her to make her way into her parents’ bedroom.

Girls who are proud of having beautiful hair are able to manage their combs and hairpins in such a way that their hair comes down in the middle of a conversation.

Some men scatter small change out of their trouser pockets while they are lying down during treatment and in that way pay whatever fee they think appropriate for the session.

People who forget to take away articles they have brought to the physician’s house, such as pince-nez, gloves and purses, are showing by this that they cannot tear themselves away and would like to come back soon. Ernest Jones says: ‘One can almost measure the success with which a physician is practising psychotherapy, for instance, by the size of the collection of umbrellas, handkerchiefs, purses, and so on, that he could make in a month.’

The slightest actions of a habitual nature which are performed with a minimum of attention, such as winding up one’s watch before going to sleep, switching off the light before leaving a room, etc., are subject from time to time to disturbances that unmistakably demonstrate the influence of unconscious complexes upon what would seem to be the most fixed habits. Maeder, writing in the periodical Coenobium, tells of a house-physician who decided to go into town one evening for an important engagement, although he was on duty and was not supposed to leave the hospital. When he returned he was surprised to find the light on in his room. He had forgotten to turn it off when he went out, which was something that he had never failed to do before. But he soon grasped the motive for his forgetfulness. The chief resident medical officer in the hospital would naturally have concluded from the light in the house-physician’s room that he was at home.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1290

A man overburdened with worries and subject to occasional depressions assured me that he regularly found in the morning that his watch had run down whenever the evening before life had seemed to be altogether too harsh and unfriendly. By omitting to wind up his watch he was giving symbolic expression to his indifference about living till the next day.

Another man, whom I do not know personally, writes: ‘After fate had dealt me a hard blow, life seemed so harsh and unfriendly that I imagined I had not sufficient strength to live through the next day. I then noticed that almost every day I forgot to wind up my watch. Previously I had never failed to do so; it was something I did regularly before going to bed, as an almost mechanical and unconscious act. But now I only very rarely remembered to do it, and that was when I had something important or specially interesting ahead of me. Should this too be considered a symptomatic act? I could not explain it to myself at all.’

If anyone takes the trouble, as Jung (1907) and Maeder (1909) have done, to note the tunes that he finds himself humming, unintentionally and often without noticing he is doing so, he will pretty regularly be able to discover the connection between the words of the song and a subject that is occupying his mind.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1291

The subtler determinants, too, of the expression of one’s thoughts in speaking or writing deserve careful attention. We believe that in general we are free to choose what words we shall use for clothing our thoughts or what images for disguising them. Closer observation shows that other considerations determine this choice, and that behind the form in which the thought is expressed a glimpse may be had of a deeper meaning - often one that is not intended. The images and turns of phrase to which a person is particularly given are rarely without significance when one is forming a judgement of him; and others often turn out to be allusions to a theme which is being kept in the background at the time, but which has powerfully affected the speaker. In the course of some theoretical discussions I heard someone at a particular time repeatedly using the expression: ‘If something suddenly shoots through one’s head’. I happened to know that he had recently received news that a Russian bullet had passed right through the cap hat his son was wearing on his head.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1292

CHAPTER X

ERRORS

Errors of memory are distinguished from forgetting accompanied by paramnesia by the single feature that in the former the error (the paramnesia) is not recognized as such but finds credence. The use of the term ‘error’, however, seems to depend on yet another condition. we have remembered it wrongly We speak of ‘being in error’ rather than of ‘remembering wrongly’ where we wish to emphasize the characteristic of objective reality in the psychical material which we are trying to reproduce - that is to say, where what we are trying to remember is something different from a fact of our own psychical life: something, rather, that is open to confirmation or refutation by the memory of other people. The antithesis to an error of memory in this sense is ignorance.

In my Interpretation of Dreams (1900a) I was responsible for a number of falsifications which I was astonished to discover after the book was published. They concerned historical points and, in general, points of fact. After closer examination I found that they did not owe their origin to my ignorance, but are traceable to errors of memory which analysis is able to explain.

(1) On page 979 I refer to the town of Marburg - a name also found in Styria - as Schiller’s birthplace. The error occurs in the analysis of a dream which I had during a journey by night and from which I was woken by the guard calling out the name of Marburg station. In the content of the dream someone asked a question about a book by Schiller. In fact Schiller was not born at the university town of Marburg [in Hesse] but at Marbach in Swabia. Moreover I can assert that I have always known this.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1293

(2) On page 681 Hannibal’s father is called Hasrubal. This error annoyed me especially, but it furnished me with the strongest corroboration of my view of such errors. There must be few readers of my book who are better acquainted with the history of the house of Barca than its author, who penned this error and who overlooked it in three sets of proofs. The name of Hannibal’s father was Hamilcar Barca - Hasrubal was the name of Hannibal’s brother, as well as of his brother-in-law and predecessor in command.

(3) On pages 735 and 1043 I state that Zeus emasculated his father Kronos and dethroned him. I was, however, erroneously carrying this atrocity a generation forward; according to Greek mythology it was Kronos who committed it on his father Uranus.¹

How is it to be explained that my memory provided me at these points with what was incorrect, while otherwise - as the reader of the book can see for himself - it put at my disposal the most out-of-the-way and unusual material? And how, too, did I pass over these errors while I carefully went through three sets of proofs - as if I had been struck blind?

Goethe said of Lichtenberg: ‘Where he makes a jest a problem lies concealed.’ Similarly it can be said of the passages in my book that I have quoted here: where an error makes its appearance a repression lies behind it - or more correctly, an insincerity, a distortion, which is ultimately rooted in repressed material. In analysing the dreams reported there I was compelled, by the very nature of the themes to which the dream-thoughts related, on the one hand to break off the analysis at some point before it had been rounded off, and on the other hand to take the edge off some indiscreet detail by mild distortion. I could not do otherwise, and I had in fact no other choice if I wished to bring forward examples and evidence at all. My awkward position was a necessary result of the peculiar character of dreams, which consists in giving expression to repressed material - in other words, to material that is inadmissible to consciousness. (In spite of this it would seem that enough was still left to give offence to some sensitive souls.) I did not succeed, however, in carrying through the distortion or concealment of the thoughts, whose continuation was known to me, without leaving some trace of them behind. What I wanted to suppress often succeeded against my will in gaining access to what I had chosen to relate and appeared in it in the form of an error that I failed to notice. Moreover, the same theme is at the bottom of all the three examples I have given: the errors are derivatives of repressed thoughts connected with my dead father.

¹ This was not a complete error. The Orphic version of the myth makes Zeus repeat the process of emasculation on his father Kronos. (See Roscher’s Lexicon of Mythology.)

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1294

(1) Anyone who reads through the dream-analysed on p. 744 will in part find undisguisedly, and will in part be able to guess from hints, that I have broken off at thoughts which would have contained an unfriendly criticism of my father. In the continuation of this train of thoughts and memories there in fact lies an annoying story in which books play a part, and a business friend of my father’s who bears the name of Marburg - the same name that woke me when it was called out at Marburg station on the Südbahn. In the analysis I tried to suppress this Herr Marburg from myself and from my readers; he took his revenge by intruding where he did not belong and changing the name of Schiller’s birthplace from Marbach to Marburg.

(2) The error of putting Hasrubal instead of Hamilcar, the brother’s name instead of the father’s, occurred precisely in a context that concerned the Hannibal-phantasies of my school years and my dissatisfaction with my father’s behaviour towards the `enemies of our people’. I could have gone on to tell how my relationship with my father was changed by a visit to England, which resulted in my getting to know my half-brother, the child of my father’s first marriage, who lived there. My brother’s eldest son is the same age as I am. Thus the relations between our ages were no hindrance to my phantasies of how different things would have been if I had been born the son not of my father but of my brother. These suppressed phantasies falsified the text of my book at the place where I broke off the analysis, by forcing me to put the brother’s name for the father’s.

(3) It is to the influence of the memory of this same brother that I attribute my error in advancing by a generation the mythological atrocities of the Greek pantheon. One of my brother’s admonitions lingered long in my memory. `One thing,’ he had said to me, `that you must not forget is that as far as the conduct of your life is concerned you really belong not to the second but to the third generation in relation to your father.’ Our father had married again in later life and was therefore much older than his children by his second marriage. I made the error already described at the exact point in the book at which I was discussing filial piety.

It has also occasionally happened that friends and patients, whose dreams I have reported, or have alluded to in the course of my dream-analyses, have drawn my attention to the fact that the details of the events experienced by us together have been inaccurately related by me. These again could be classified as historical errors. After being put right I have examined the various cases and here too I have convinced myself that my memory of the facts was incorrect only where I had purposely distorted or concealed something in the analysis. Here once again we find an unobserved error taking the place of an intentional concealment or repression.

These errors that derive from repression are to be sharply distinguished from others which are based on genuine ignorance. Thus, for example, it was ignorance which made me think during an excursion to the Wachau that I had come to the home of Fischhof, the revolutionary leader. The two places merely have the same name: Fischhof’s Emmersdorf is in Carinthia. I, however, knew no better.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1295

(4) Here is another instructive error that put me to shame, an example of what might be called temporary ignorance. One day a patient reminded me to give him the two books on Venice that I had promised him, as he needed them in preparing for a journey at Easter. ‘I have them ready,’ I replied, and went to the library to fetch them. The truth, however, was that I had forgotten to look them out, for I did not entirely approve of my patient’s journey, which I saw as an unnecessary interruption of the treatment and a material loss to the physician. I therefore took a hasty look round the library for two books I had had my eye on. One was ‘Venice, City of Art’; but besides this I thought I must own a historical work in a similar series. Quite right, there it was: ‘The Medici’. I took it and brought it to my waiting patient, only ashamedly to acknowledge the error. In reality I of course knew that the Medici have nothing to do with Venice, but for a short time it did not strike me as in any way incorrect. I now had to be fair; as I had so frequently confronted my patient with his own symptomatic acts I could only vindicate my authority in his eyes by being honest and showing him the motives (which I had kept secret) for my disapproval of his journey.

It may, in general, seem astonishing that the urge to tell the truth is so much stronger than is usually supposed. Perhaps, however, my being scarcely able to tell lies any more is a consequence of my occupation with psycho-analysis. As often as I try to distort something I succumb to an error or some other parapraxis that betrays my insincerity, as can be seen in this last example and in the previous ones.

Of all parapraxes errors seem to have the least rigid mechanism. That is to say, the occurrence of an error is a quite general indication that the mental activity in question has had to struggle with a disturbing influence of some sort or other; but the particular form that the error takes is not determined by the quality of the concealed disturbing idea. We may add here retrospectively that the same thing can be assumed to be true of many simple cases of slips of the tongue and pen. Every time we make a slip in talking or writing we may infer that there has been a disturbance due to mental processes lying outside our intention; but it must be admitted that slips of the tongue and of the pen often obey the laws of resemblance, of indolence or of the tendency to haste, without the disturbing element succeeding in imposing any part of its own character on the resulting mistake in speech or writing. It is the compliance of the linguistic material which alone makes the determining of the mistakes possible, and at the same time sets the limits up to which the determining can go.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1296

To avoid confining myself entirely to my own errors, I shall report a few examples that might indeed have been included just as well among slips of the tongue and bungled actions; this is, however, a matter of indifference, since all these forms of parapraxis are equivalent to one another.

(5) I forbade a patient to telephone to the girl he was in love with - but with whom he himself wanted to break off relations - since each conversation served only to renew the struggle about giving her up. He was to write his final decision to her though there were difficulties about delivering letters to her. He called on me at one o’clock to tell me he had found a way of getting round these difficulties, and amongst other things asked if he might quote my authority as a physician. At two o’clock he was occupied in composing the letter that was to end the relationship, when he suddenly broke off and said to his mother who was with him: ‘Oh! I’ve forgotten to ask the professor if I may mention his name in the letter.’ He rushed to the telephone, put through his call and said into the instrument: ‘May I speak to the professor, please, if he’s finished dinner?’ In answer he got an astonished: ‘Adolf, have you gone mad?’ It was the same voice which by my orders he should not have heard again. He had simply ‘made an error’, and instead of the physician’s number he had given the girl’s.

(6) A young lady was to pay a visit in the Habsburgergasse to a friend, a lady who had recently been married. She spoke about it while the family were at table, but said in error that she had to go to the Babenbergergasse. Some of those at the table laughingly drew her attention to her error - or slip of the tongue (according to choice) - which she had not noticed. In fact two days before this the republic had been proclaimed in Vienna; the black and yellow had vanished and been replaced by the colours of the old Ostmark - red, white and red - and the Hapsburgs had been deposed. Our speaker introduced the change of dynasty into her friend’s address. In Vienna there is indeed a very well known Babenbergerstrasse, but no Viennese would speak of it as a ‘Gasse’.¹

¹ [In Vienna two terms are used for ‘street’: ‘Strasse’ for the more important streets and ‘Gasse’ for the minor ones.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1297

(7) The local school-teacher at a summer resort, a quite poor but handsome young man, persisted in his courtship of the daughter of the proprietor of a villa, who came from the capital, until the girl fell passionately in love with him and even persuaded her family to give their approval to the marriage in spite of the differences in their social position and race. One day the teacher wrote a letter to his brother in which he said: ‘The girl is certainly no beauty; but she is very sweet, and it would be all right as far as that goes. But whether I shall be able to make up my mind to marry a Jewess I cannot yet tell you.’ This letter was received by his fiancée and it put an end to the engagement, while at the same time his brother was wondering at the protestations of love addressed to him. My informant assured me that this was an error and not a cunning device. I know of another case in which a lady who was dissatisfied with her old doctor but unwilling openly to get rid of him achieved her purpose by mixing up two letters. Here at least I can guarantee that it was error and not conscious cunning that made use of this motif which is such a familiar one in comedy.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1298

(8) Brill tells of a lady who asked him for news of a common acquaintance and in doing so called her in error by her maiden name. When her attention was drawn to the mistake she was forced to admit that she disliked the lady’s husband and had been very unhappy about her marriage.

(9) Here is an error which can also be described as a slip of the tongue. A young father presented himself before the registrar of births to give notice of the birth of his second daughter. When asked what the child’s name was to be he answered: ‘Hanna’, and had to be told by the official that he already had a child of that name. We may conclude that the second daughter was not quite so welcome as the first had been.

(10) I will add some other observations of confusion between names; they might of course have been equally well included in other chapters of this book.

A lady is the mother of three daughters two of whom have long been married; the youngest is still awaiting her destiny. At both weddings a lady who is a friend of the family gave the same present, an expensive silver tea-service. Every time the conversation turns to this tea-service the mother makes the error of saying that the third daughter owns it. It is clear that this error expresses the mother’s wish to see her last daughter married too - on the assumption that she would be given the same wedding present.

The frequent cases in which a mother confuses the names of her daughters, sons or sons-in-law are just as easy to interpret.

(11) Here is a good example of an obstinate interchange of names; I borrow it from a Herr J. G. who made the observation on himself during a stay in a sanatorium:

‘At dinner one day (at the sanatorium) I was having a conversation, which did not interest me much and was entirely conventional in tone, with the lady who was next to me at table, when in the course of it I used a phrase of special affability. The somewhat elderly spinster could not help commenting that it was not usually my habit to behave to her with such affability and gallantry - a rejoinder which contained not only a certain regret but also an obvious dig at a young lady we both knew to whom I was in the way of being somewhat attentive. Naturally I understood at once. In the course of our further conversation I had to have it repeatedly pointed out to me by my neighbour, to my great embarrassment, that I had addressed her by the name of the young lady whom she regarded with some justice as her more fortunate rival.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1299

(12) I will also report as an ‘error’ an incident with a serious background, which was told me by a witness who was closely involved. A lady spent an evening out of doors with her husband and two strangers. One of these two ‘strangers’ was an intimate friend of hers; but the others knew nothing of this and were meant to know nothing. The friends accompanied the married couple to the door of their house and while they were waiting for the door to be opened they took their leave of one another. The lady bowed to the stranger, gave him her hand and said a few polite words. Then she took the arm of her secret lover, turned to her husband and began to bid him good-bye in the same way. Her husband entered into the situation, raised his hat and said with exaggerated politeness: ‘Good-bye, dear lady!’ The horrified wife dropped her lover’s arm and before the concierge appeared had time to exclaim: ‘Goodness! What a stupid thing to happen!’ The husband was one of those married men who want to put an act of infidelity on their wife’s part beyond the bounds of possibility. He had repeatedly sworn that in such a case more than one life would be in jeopardy. He therefore had inner impediments of the strongest kind to prevent his noticing the challenge contained in this error.

(13) Here is an error of one of my patients: the fact that it was repeated in order to express a contrary meaning makes it particularly instructive. After protracted internal struggles this over-cautious young man brought himself to the point of proposing marriage to the girl who had long been in love with him, as he was with her. He escorted his fiancée home, said good-bye to her, and, in a mood of the greatest happiness, got on to a tram and asked the conductress for two tickets. About six months later he had got married but could not yet adjust himself to his conjugal bliss. He wondered whether he had done the right thing in marrying, missed his former relations with his friends, and had every sort of fault to find with his parents-in-law. One evening he fetched his young wife from her parents’ house, got on to a tram with her and contented himself with asking for one ticket only.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1300

(14)  How a wish that has been reluctantly suppressed can be satisfied by means of an ‘error’ is described in a good example of Maeder’s (1908). A colleague who had a day free from duties wanted to enjoy it without any interruptions; but he was due to pay a visit in Lucerne to which he did not look forward. After long deliberation he decided to go there all the same. He passed the time on the journey from Zurich to Arth-Goldau in reading the daily papers. At the latter station he changed trains and continued reading. He travelled on till the ticket-inspector informed him that he was in the wrong train - the one travelling back from Goldau to Zurich, though he had a ticket for Lucerne.

(15) An analogous, though not entirely successful, attempt to help a suppressed wish to find expression by means of the same mechanism of an error is described by Dr. V. Tausk (1917) under the title of ‘Travelling in the Wrong Direction’:

‘I had come to Vienna on leave from the front. An old patient had heard I was in town and invited me to visit him as he was ill in bed. I complied with his request and spent two hours with him. When I was leaving, the sick man asked how much he owed me. "I am here on leave and am not practising now," I replied. "Please regard my visit as a friendly turn." The patient hesitated, as he no doubt felt he had no right to claim my professional services in the form of an unremunerated act of friendship. But he finally accepted my answer by expressing the respectful opinion, which was dictated by his pleasure at saving money, that as a psycho-analyst I would no doubt do the right thing. A few moments later I myself had misgivings about the sincerity of my generosity, and with my mind full of doubts - which could hardly be explained in more than one way - I got on a tram of route X. After a short journey I had to change on to route Y. While waiting at the point where I was to change I forgot the business of the fee and was occupied with the symptoms of my patient’s illness. Meanwhile the tram I was waiting for came and I got on it. But at the next stop I had to get off again. I had in fact inadvertently and without noticing got on to an X tram instead of a Y tram, and had travelled back again in the direction I had just come from - in the direction of my patient from whom I did not wish to accept any fee. But my unconscious wanted to collect it.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1301

(16) A trick very similar to the one in Example 14 was once brought off by me myself. I had promised my strict eldest brother that that summer I would make my long due visit to him at an English seaside resort, and had undertaken, as time was limited, to travel by the shortest route, without breaking my journey anywhere. I asked if I might stop for a day in Holland, but he thought I might postpone that till my journey back. So I travelled from Munich viâ Cologne to Rotterdam and the Hook of Holland from where the boat starts at midnight for Harwich. I had to change at Cologne; I left my train to change into the Rotterdam express, but it was nowhere to be found. I asked various railway officials, was sent from one platform to another, fell into a mood of exaggerated despair and soon realized that during this fruitless search I must have missed my connection. After this was confirmed I considered whether I should spend the night in Cologne. Among other considerations in favour of that plan was one of filial piety, since according to an old family tradition my ancestors had once fled from that city during a persecution of the Jews. However I decided against it, travelled by a later train to Rotterdam, which I reached late in the night, and was then obliged to spend a day in Holland. That day brought me the fulfilment of a long cherished wish; I was able to see Rembrandt’s magnificent paintings at the Hague and in the Rijksmuseum at Amsterdam. It was only the next morning, when I was travelling in the train across England and could collect my impressions, that a clear memory emerged of my having seen a large notice in the station at Cologne - a few steps from the place where I had got off the train and on the same platform - which read ‘Rotterdam-Hook of Holland’. There, waiting for me, had been the train in which I ought to have continued my journey. My action in hurrying away in spite of this clear direction, and my search for the train in another place, would have to be described as an incomprehensible ‘blindness’ unless one is prepared to assume that - contrary to my brother’s instructions - I had really resolved to admire the Rembrandts on the journey out. Everything else - my well-acted perplexity, the emergence of the ‘pious’ intention to spend the night in Cologne - was merely a contrivance to keep my resolution hidden from myself till it had been completely carried out.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1302

(17) From his own personal experience J. Stärcke (1916) tells of a similar device produced by ‘forgetfulness’ for the purpose of fulfilling an ostensibly renounced wish.

‘I once had to give a lecture with lantern slides at a village; but the lecture was postponed for a week. I had answered the letter about the postponement and had entered the new date in my notebook. I should have been glad to go to this village in the afternoon, for then I should have had time to pay a visit to a writer I knew who lived there. To my regret, however, I had at the time no afternoon that I could keep free. Somewhat reluctantly, I gave up the idea of the visit.

‘When the evening of the lecture arrived I set out for the station in the greatest hurry with a case of lantern slides. I had to take a taxi to catch the train. (It happens frequently with me that I put things off so long that I have to take a taxi if I am to catch my train.) When I reached my destination I was a little surprised that there was no one at the station to meet me (as is the usual practice with lectures in smallish places). It suddenly occurred to me that the lecture had been postponed for a week and that I had made a fruitless journey on the date that had originally been fixed. After I had roundly cursed my forgetfulness, I debated whether I should return home by the next train. However, upon closer consideration I reflected that I now had a fine opportunity of paying the visit I had wanted to, and I thereupon did so. It was only when I was on my way that it struck me that my unfulfilled wish to have sufficient time for this visit had neatly hatched the plot. Being weighed down by the heavy case of lantern slides and hurrying to catch the train could serve excellently to hide the unconscious intention all the more effectively.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1303

It may perhaps be thought that the class of errors whose explanation I have given here is not very numerous or particularly significant. But I leave it open for question whether there is not some ground for extending the same line of approach to our assessment of the far more important errors of judgement made by human beings in their lives and in scientific work. Only for the rarest and best adjusted mind does it seem possible to preserve the picture of external reality, as it is perceived, against the distortion to which it is normally subjected in its passage though the psychical individuality of the percipient.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1304

CHAPTER XI

COMBINED PARAPRAXES

Two of the last-mentioned examples - my own error which transferred the Medici to Venice, and that of the young man who succeeded in getting a conversation with his fiancée on the telephone in defiance of my prohibition - have not in fact been described entirely accurately. Careful consideration reveals that they are a combination of an act of forgetting and an error. I can illustrate this combination still more clearly from some other examples.

(1) A friend tells me of the following experience. ‘Some years ago I allowed myself to be elected to the committee of a certain literary society, as I thought that the organization might one day be able to help me to have my play produced; and I took a regular part, though without being much interested, in the meetings, which were held every Friday. Then, a few months ago, I was given the promise of a production at the theatre at F.; and since then I have regularly forgotten the meetings of the society. When I read your book on the subject I felt ashamed of my forgetfulness. I reproached myself with the thought that it was shabby behaviour on my part to stay away now that I no longer needed these people, and resolved on no account to forget the next Friday. I kept on reminding myself of this resolution until I carried it into effect and stood at the door of the room where the meetings were held. To my astonishment it was locked; the meeting was over. I had in fact made a mistake over the day; it was now Saturday!’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1305

(2) The next example combines a symptomatic act with a case of mislaying. It reached me in a somewhat roundabout way, but comes from a reliable source.

A lady travelled to Rome with her brother-in-law, who is a famous artist. The visitor was received with great honour by the German community in Rome, and among other presents he was given an antique gold medal. The lady was vexed that her brother-in-law did not appreciate the lovely object sufficiently. When she returned home (her place in Rome having been taken by her sister) she discovered while unpacking that she had brought the medal with her - how, she did not know. She at once sent a letter with the news to her brother-in-law, and announced that she would send the article she had walked off with back to Rome next day. But next day the medal had been so cleverly mislaid that it could not be found and sent off; and it was at this point that the meaning of her ‘absent mindedness’ dawned on the lady: she wanted to keep the object for herself.

(3) There are some cases in which the parapraxis obstinately repeats itself, at the same time changing the method that it employs:

For reasons unknown to him, Ernest Jones (1911b, 483) once left a letter lying on his desk for several days without posting it. At last he decided to send it off, but he had it returned to him from the ‘Dead Letter Office’ since he had forgotten to address it. After he had addressed it he again took it to the post, but this time it had no stamp. He was then no longer able to over look his reluctance to sending the letter off at all.

(4) The vain attempts to carry out an action in opposition to an internal resistance are most impressively depicted in a short communication by Dr. Karl Weiss (1912) of Vienna:

‘The following episode will show how persistently the unconscious can make itself felt if it has a motive for preventing an intention from being carried out, and how hard it is to guard against that persistence. An acquaintance asked me to lend him a book and to bring it to him the next day. I immediately promised I would, but was aware of a lively feeling of unpleasure which I could not at first explain. Later on it became clear to me: the person in question had for years owed me a sum of money which he apparently had no idea of repaying. I thought no more of the matter, but I remembered it the next morning with the same feeling of unpleasure and at once said to myself "Your unconscious will arrange for you to forget the book; but you don’t want to be disobliging, so you will take all possible steps not to forget it." I came home, wrapped up the book and put it beside me on the desk where I write my letters. After some time I went out; I took a few steps and remembered I had left the letters I wanted to post on my desk. (One of them, by the way, was a letter in which I was obliged to write something disagreeable to someone from whom I was hoping to get support over a certain matter.) I turned back, took the letters and again set off. In the tram it occurred to me that I had promised my wife to buy something for her, and I was very pleased with the thought that it would only make a small parcel. At that point the association "parcel"-"book" suddenly occurred to me, and I now noticed that I was not carrying the book. So I had not only forgotten it the first time I went out, but had also persisted in overlooking it when I took the letters that it lay beside.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1306

(5) The same situation is found in an instance which Otto Rank (1912) analysed exhaustively:

‘A scrupulously orderly and pedantically precise man reported the following experience, which was quite unusual for him. One afternoon he was in the street and wanted to know the time; and he found he had left his watch at home - a thing he did not remember ever having done before. As he had an evening engagement for which he had to be punctual, and as he had not enough time to fetch his own watch before it, he took advantage of a visit to a lady, a friend of his, to borrow her watch for the evening. This was all the more feasible since he already had an engagement to visit the lady next morning, and he promised to return the watch on that occasion. Next day, however, when he wanted to hand over the watch he had borrowed to its owner, he found to his astonishment that now he had left it at home. This time he had his own watch on him. He then firmly resolved to return the ladies’ watch the same afternoon and actually carried out his resolution. But when he wanted to see the time upon leaving her, he found to his immense annoyance and astonishment that he had again forgotten his own watch.

‘The repetition of this parapraxis seemed so pathological to a man with his love of orderliness that he would have been glad to learn of its psychological motivation; and this was promptly revealed by the psycho-analytic enquiry as to whether anything disagreeable had happened to him on the crucial day when he was forgetful for the first time, and in what connection it had occurred. He immediately related how after lunch - shortly before he went out forgetting his watch - he had had a conversation with his mother, who told him that an irresponsible relative, who had already caused him much worry and expense, had pawned his [the relative’s] watch, but, as it was needed in the house, was asking him [the narrator] to provide the money to redeem it. He was very much upset by what was a more or less forced loan, and it recalled to his mind all the annoyances that the relative had caused him over many years. His symptomatic act therefore proves to have had more than one determinant. In the first place it gave expression to a train of thought that ran somewhat as follows: "I won’t allow money to be extorted from me in this way, and if a watch is needed I shall leave my own at home." But since he needed it in the evening for keeping an appointment, this intention could only come into effect by an unconscious path, in the form of a symptomatic act. In the second place, what the act of forgetting signified came to this: "The perpetual sacrifice of money on this good-for-nothing will be the utter ruin of me, so that I shall have to give up everything." Although, according to him, his indignation at this piece of news was only momentary, the repetition of the same symptomatic act nevertheless shows that it continued to operate intensively in the unconscious, somewhat as though his consciousness were saying: "I can’t get this story out of my head."¹ In view of this attitude of the unconscious, it will come as no surprise to us that the same thing should have happened to the borrowed ladies’ watch. But perhaps there were also special motives that favoured this transference on to the "innocent" ladies’ watch. Probably the most obvious motive is that he would no doubt have liked to keep it to take the place of the watch of his own which he had sacrificed, and that he therefore forgot to return it the next day. He would also perhaps have been glad to have the watch as a souvenir of the lady. Furthermore, forgetting the ladies’ watch gave him the opportunity of paying the lady he admired a second visit. He was in any case obliged to call on her in the morning in connection with another matter, and by forgetting the watch he seems, as it were, to indicate that it was a shame to use this visit, which had been arranged some time before, for the incidental purpose of returning the watch. Moreover, having twice forgotten his own watch, and in that way being able to return the other watch, goes to show that unconsciously he was trying to avoid carrying both watches at once. He was obviously seeking to avoid giving this appearance of superfluity, which would have been in striking contrast to his relative’s want. But on the other hand he contrived by these means to counter his apparent intentions of marrying the lady, by warning himself that he had indissoluble obligations to his family (his mother). Finally, another reason for forgetting a ladies’ watch may be sought in the fact that the evening before he had, as a bachelor, felt embarrassment in front of his friends about looking at the ladies’ watch, and only did so surreptitiously; and to avoid a repetition of this awkward situation he did not like to carry it any longer. But as he had on the other hand to return it, the result here too was an unconsciously performed symptomatic act, which proved to be a compromise-formation between conflicting emotional impulses, and a dearly-bought victory by the unconscious agency.’

¹ ‘The continued operation of an idea in the unconscious manifests itself sometimes in the form of a dream following the parapraxis, and sometimes in a repetition of the parapraxis or in a failure to correct it.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1307

Here are three cases observed by J. Stärcke (1916, 108-9):

(6) Mislaying, breaking and forgetting as an expression of a counter-will that has been pushed back. ‘I had got together a number of illustrations for a scientific work, when one day my brother asked me to lend him some which he wanted to use as lantern slides in a lecture. Though I was momentarily aware of thinking I would prefer it if the reproductions I had collected at much pains were not exhibited or published in any way before I could do so myself, I promised him I would look out the negatives of the pictures he wanted and make lantern slides from them. These negatives however I was unable to find. I looked through the whole pile of boxes full of the relevant negatives, and a good two hundred negatives passed through my hands, one after the other; but the negatives I was looking for were not there. I had a suspicion that in fact I seemed not to want my brother to have the pictures. After I had made this unfriendly thought conscious and had combated it, I noticed I had put the top box of the pile on one side, and had not looked through it; and this box contained the negatives I was looking for. On the lid of this box there was a brief note of the contents, and it is likely that I had given it a hasty glance before I put the box aside. The unfriendly thought, however, seemed not yet to have been totally subdued, for there were a variety of further happenings before the slides were dispatched. I pressed too hard on one of the slides and broke it, while I was holding it in my hand and was wiping the glass clean. (In the ordinary way I never break a lantern slide like that.) When I had made a new copy of this slide it fell from my hand, and was only saved from being smashed by my stretching out my foot and breaking its fall. When I mounted the lantern slides the whole pile fell to the ground once more, fortunately without any being broken. And finally, several days passed before I actually packed them and sent them off; for though I intended to do so afresh every day, each time I forgot my intention once again.’

(7) Repeated forgetfulness - eventual performance bungled. ‘One day I had to send a postcard to an acquaintance; but I kept on postponing doing so for several days. I strongly suspected that this was due to the following causes: he had informed me by letter that a certain person would come to see me in the course of the week from whom I was not particularly anxious to have a visit. When the week had passed and the prospect of the unwanted visit had become very slender I finally wrote the post card, in which I informed him when I should be free. When writing the postcard I thought at first of adding that I had been prevented from writing earlier by druk werk ("laborious, exacting or burdensome work"); but in the end I did not do so as no reasonable human being believes this stock excuse any longer. Whether this little untruth was nevertheless bound to makes its appearance I do not know; but when I pushed the postcard into the letter box I accidentally put it into the lower opening: Drukwerk ("printed matter").’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1308

(8) Forgetting and error. ‘One morning, in very fine weather, a girl went to the Rijksmuseum to draw some plaster-casts there. Though she would have preferred to go for a walk, as the weather was so fine, she nevertheless made up her mind to be industrious for once and to do some drawing. First she had to buy some drawing paper. She went to the shop (about ten minutes’ walk from the museum), and bought some pencils and other materials for sketching, but quite forgot to buy the drawing paper. Then she went to the museum, and as she was sitting on her stool ready to begin, she found she had no paper and had to go back to the shop. After fetching some paper she began to draw in earnest, made good progress and, after some time, heard the clock in the museum tower strike a large number of times. "That will be twelve o’clock", she thought, and continued working until the clock in the tower struck the quarter ("that", she thought, "will be a quarter past twelve"), packed up her drawing materials and decided to walk through the Vondelpark to her sister’s house and have coffee there (which, in Holland, is equivalent to luncheon). At the Suasso Museum she saw to her astonishment that it was only twelve o’clock, not half past! The temptingly fine weather had got the better of her industriousness, and in consequence she had not recalled, when the clock struck twelve times at half past eleven, that belfry clocks strike the hour at the half hour as well.’

(9) As some of the above instances have already shown, the unconsciously disturbing purpose can also achieve its aim by obstinately repeating the same kind of parapraxis. I borrow an amusing example of this from a small volume, Frank Wedekind und das Theater, which has been published in Munich by the Drei Masken Verlag; but I must leave the responsibility for the anecdote, which is told in Mark Twain’s manner, to the author of the book.

‘In Wedekind’s one act play Die Zensur [The Censorship] there occurs at its most solemn moment the pronouncement: "The fear of death is an intellectual error [‘Denkfehler’]." The author, who set much store by the passage, asked the performer at rehearsal to make a slight pause before the word "Denkfehler". On the night, the actor entered wholeheartedly into his part, and was careful to observe the pause; but he involuntarily said in the most solemn tones: "The fear of death is a Druckfehler [a misprint]." In reply to the actor’s enquiries at the end of the performance, the author assured him that he had not the smallest criticism to make; only the passage in question did not say that the fear of death is a misprint but that it is an intellectual error. - When Die Zensur was repeated on the following night, the actor, on reaching the same passage, declared, and once again in the most solemn tones: "The fear of death is a Denkzettel [a memorandum]." Wedekind once more showered unstinted praise on the actor, only remarking incidentally that what the text said was not that the fear of death was a memorandum but that it was an intellectual error. - Next night Die Zensur was given again, and the actor, with whom the author had meanwhile struck up a friendship and had exchanged views on artistic questions, declared when he came to the passage, with the most solemn face in the world: "The fear of death is a Druckzettel [a printed label]." The actor received the author’s unqualified appreciation, and the play was given many more performances; but the author had made up his mind that the notion of an "intellectual error" was a lost cause for good and all.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1309

Rank (1912 and 1915b) has also given attention to the very interesting relations between ‘Parapraxes and Dreams’, but they cannot be followed without a thorough analysis of the dream which is linked to the parapraxis. I once dreamt, as part of a longish dream, that I had lost my purse. In the morning while I was dressing I found that it was really missing. While undressing the night before I had the dream, I had forgotten to take it out of my trouser pocket and put it in its usual place. I was therefore not ignorant of my forgetfulness and it was probably meant to give expression to an unconscious thought which was prepared for making its appearance in the content of the dream.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] It is not so rare an event for a parapraxis like losing or mislaying something to be undone by means of a dream  - by one’s learning in the dream where the missing object is to be found; but this has nothing about it in the nature of the occult, so long as dreamer and loser are the same person. A young lady writes: ‘About four months ago at the bank I lost a very beautiful ring. I hunted in every nook and cranny of my room without finding it. A week ago I dreamt it was lying beside the cupboard by the radiator. Naturally the dream gave me no rest, and next morning I did in fact really find it in that very spot.’ She is surprised at this incident, and maintains that it often happens that her thoughts and wishes are fulfilled in this way, but omits to ask herself what change had occurred in her life between the loss and the recovery of the ring.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1310

I do not mean to assert that cases of combined parapraxes like these can teach us anything new that could not already be observed in the simple cases. And yet this situation, of there being a change in the form taken by the parapraxis while the outcome remains the same, gives a vivid impression of a will striving for a definite aim, and contradicts in a far more energetic way the notion that a parapraxis is a matter of chance and needs no interpretation. We may also be struck by the fact that a conscious intention should in these examples fail so completely to prevent the success of the parapraxis. My friend failed in spite of everything to attend the meeting of the society, and the lady found it impossible to part from the medal. The unknown factor that opposed these intentions found another outlet after the first path had been barred to it. For what was required to overcome the unconscious motive was something other than a conscious counter-intention; it called for a piece of psychical work, which could make what was unknown known to consciousness.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1311

CHAPTER XII

DETERMINISM, BELIEF IN CHANCE AND SUPERSTITION - SOME POINTS OF VIEW

The general conclusion that emerges from the previous individual discussions may be stated in the following terms. Certain shortcomings in our psychical functioning - whose common characteristics will in a moment be defined more closely - and certain seemingly unintentional performances prove, if psycho-analytic methods of investigation are applied to them, to have valid motives and to be determined by motives unknown to consciousness.

In order to be included in the class of phenomena explicable in this way, a psychical parapraxis must fulfil the following conditions:

(a) It must not exceed certain dimensions fixed by our judgement, which we characterize by the expression ‘within the limits of the normal’.

(b) It must be in the nature of a momentary and temporary disturbance. The same function must have been performed by us more correctly before, or we must at all times believe ourselves capable of carrying it out more correctly. If we are corrected by someone else, we must at once recognize the rightness of the correction and the wrongness of our own psychical process.

(c) If we perceive the parapraxis at all, we must not be aware in ourselves of any motive for it. We must rather be tempted to explain it by ‘inattentiveness’, or to put it down to ‘chance’.

There thus remain in this group the cases of forgetting [‘Vergessen’], the errors in spite of better knowledge, the slips of the tongue [‘Versprechen’], misreadings [‘Verlesen’], slips of the pen [‘Verschreiben’], bungled actions [‘Vergreifen’] and the so-called ‘chance actions’. Language points to the internal similarity between most of these phenomena: they are compounded alike [in German] with the prefix ‘ver-'.¹

The explanation of the psychical processes which are defined in this way leads on to a series of observations which should in part excite a wider interest.

¹ [The prefix ‘ver-' in German corresponds closely to the English prefix ‘mis-' in such words as ‘mis-hear’, ‘mis-lay’ and ‘mis-read’.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1312

(A) If we give way to the view that a part of our psychical functioning cannot be explained by purposive ideas, we are failing to appreciate the extent of determination in mental life. Both here and in other spheres this is more far-reaching than we suspect. In an article in Die Zeit by R. M. Meyer, the literary historian, which I came across in 1900, the view was put forward and illustrated by examples that it is impossible intentionally and arbitrarily to make up a piece of nonsense. I have known for some time that one cannot make a number occur to one at one’s own free choice any more than a name. Investigation of a number made up in an apparently arbitrary manner - one, let us say, of several digits uttered by someone as a joke or in a moment of high spirits - reveals that it is strictly determined in a way that would really never have been thought possible. I will begin by briefly discussing an instance of an arbitrarily chosen first name, and then analyse in some detail an analogous example of a number ‘thrown out without thinking’.

(1) With a view to preparing the case history of one of my women patients for publication I considered what first name I should give her in my account. There appeared to be a very wide choice; some names, it is true, were ruled out from the start - the real name in the first place, then the names of members of my own family, to which I should object, and perhaps some other women’s names with an especially peculiar sound. But otherwise there was no need for me to be at a loss for a name. It might have been expected - and I myself expected - that a whole host of women’s names would be at my disposal. Instead, one name and only one occurred to me - the name ‘Dora’.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1313

I asked myself how it was determined. Who else was there called Dora? I should have liked to dismiss with incredulity the next thought to occur to me - that it was the name of my sister’s nursemaid; but I have so much self-discipline or so much practice in analysing that I held firmly to the idea and let my thoughts run on from it. At once there came to my mind a trivial incident from the previous evening which provided the determinant I was looking for. I had seen a letter on my sister’s dining-room table addressed to ‘Fräulein Rosa W.’. I asked in surprise who there was of that name, and was told that the girl I knew as Dora was really called Rosa, but had had to give up her real name when she took up employment in the house, since my sister could take the name ‘Rosa’ as applying to herself as well. ‘Poor people,’ I remarked in pity, ‘they cannot even keep their own names!’ After that, I now recall, I fell silent for a moment and began to think of a variety of serious matters which drifted into obscurity, but which I was now easily able to make conscious. When next day I was looking for a name for someone who could not keep her own, ‘Dora’ was the only one to occur to me. The complete absence of alternatives was here based on a solid association connected with the subject-matter that I was dealing with: for it was a person employed in someone else’s house, a governess, who exercised a decisive influence on my patient’s story, and on the course of the treatment as well.

Years later this little incident had an unexpected sequel. Once, when I was discussing in a lecture the long since published case history of the girl now called Dora, it occurred to me that one of the two ladies in my audience had the same name Dora that I should have to utter so often in a whole variety of connections. I turned to my young colleague, whom I also knew personally, with the excuse that I had not in fact remembered that that was her name too, and added that I was very willing to replace it in my lecture by another name. I was now faced with the task of rapidly choosing another one, and I reflected that I must at all costs avoid selecting the first name of the other lady in the audience and so setting a bad example to my other colleagues, who were already well grounded in psycho-analysis. I was therefore very much pleased when the name ‘Erna’ occurred to me as a substitute for Dora, and I used it in the lecture. After the lecture I asked myself where the name Erna could possibly have come from, and I could not help laughing when I noticed that the possibility I had been afraid of when I was choosing the substitute name had nevertheless come about, at least to some extent. The other lady’s family name was Lucerna, of which Erna is a part.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1314

(2) In a letter to a friend I informed him I had just then finished correcting the proofs of The Interpretation of Dreams and did not intend to make any more changes in the work, ‘even if it contains 2467 mistakes’. I at once tried to explain this number to myself and added the little analysis as a postscript to my letter. The best plan will be to quote it as I wrote it down at the time, just after I had caught myself in the act:

‘Let me hastily add a contribution to the psychopathology of everyday life. You will find that in the letter I put down the number 2467 as a bold arbitrary estimate of the number of mistakes which will be found in the dream book. What I meant was some very big number; but that particular one emerged. However, nothing in the mind is arbitrary or undetermined. You will therefore rightly expect that the unconscious had hastened to determine the number which was left open by consciousness. Now, immediately before, I had read in the newspaper that a General E. M. had retired from the post of Master of Ordnance. I should explain that I am interested in this man. While I was serving as a medical officer-cadet he came to the sick quarters one day (he was then a colonel) and said to the medical officer: ‘You must make me well in a week, because I have some work to do for which the Emperor is waiting.’ After that episode I decided to follow his career, and lo and behold! now he has reached the end of it, having become Master of Ordnance, and is already (1899) on the retired list. I wanted to work out how long he had taken over this. Assuming that it was in 1882 that I saw him in hospital, it must have been seventeen years. I told my wife this and she remarked: "Oughtn’t you to be on the retired list too, then?" "Heaven forbid!" I exclaimed. After this conversation I sat down to write to you. But the earlier train of thought went on in my mind, and with good reason. I had miscalculated; I have a fixed point in my memory to prove it. I celebrated my majority, i. e. my twenty-fourth birthday, under military arrest (having been absent without leave). So that was in 1880, or nineteen years ago. That gives you the "24" in  2467. Now take my present age - 43 - add 24, and you have 67. In other words, in answer to the question whether I meant to retire too, my wish gave me another twenty-four years’ work. I was obviously annoyed at having failed to get very far myself during the period in which I have followed Colonel M.’s career; and yet I was celebrating a kind of triumph over his career being at an end, while I still have everything in front of me. So one can say with justice that not even the number 2467 which I threw out unthinkingly was without its determinants from the unconscious.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1315

(3) Since this first example in which an apparently arbitrarily chosen number was explained I have often repeated the same experiment, and with the same result; but the content of the majority of cases is so intimate that they cannot be reported.

For that very reason, however, I will take the opportunity of adding here a very interesting analysis of a ‘numerical association’, which Dr. Adler (1905) of Vienna obtained from a ‘perfectly healthy’ informant. ‘Yesterday evening’, this informant reports, ‘I got down to The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and would have read the whole of the book straight away if I had not been prevented by a remarkable incident. For what happened was that, when I read that every number which we summon seemingly arbitrarily into consciousness has a definite meaning, I decided to make an experiment. There came to my mind the number 1734. The following ideas then rapidly occurred to me: 1734÷17=102; 102÷17=6. I then divided the number into 17 and 34. I am 34 years old. I believe, as I think I once told you, that 34 is the last year of youth, and for that reason I felt very miserable on my last birthday. The end of my 17th year saw the beginning of a very pleasant and interesting period in my development. I divide my life into portions of 17 years. What do the divisions mean? In thinking of the number 102 it occurred to me that No. 102 in the Reclam Universal Library is Kotzebue’s play Menschenhass und Reue.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1316

‘My present psychical state is one of misanthropy and remorse. No. 6 in the U.L. (I know a whole quantity of its numbers by heart) is Müllner’s Die Schuld [Guilt]. The thought plagues me constantly that the guilt is mine for my failure to become what I could have been with my abilities. It further occurred to me that No. 34 in the U.L. contains a tale by the same Müllner entitled Der Kaliber [The Calibre]. I divided the word into "Ka" and "Liber"; it further occurred to me that it contains the words "Ali" and "Kali" ["potassium"]. This reminded me of my once making up rhymes with my (six-year old) son Ali. I asked him to find a rhyme to Ali. He could not think of any, and as he wanted me to give him one I said: "Ali reinigt den Mund mit hypermangansaurem Kali." ["Ali cleans his mouth with potassium permanganate."] We laughed a lot and Ali was very lieb [sweet]. During the last few days I have been obliged to notice with regret that he is "ka (kein) lieber Ali" ["not the sweet Ali" ("ka lieber" pronounced as "Kaliber")].

‘I then asked myself: what is No. 17 in the U.L.? but I could not bring it to mind. But I quite certainly knew it earlier, so I assumed I wanted to forget that number. All reflection was in vain. I wanted to go on reading, but I only read mechanically, without understanding a word, as the 17 was tormenting me. I put out the light and continued my search. Finally I came to the conclusion that No. 17 must be a play of Shakespeare’s. But which one? I thought of Hero and Leander - clearly a stupid attempt on the part of my will to lead me astray. Finally I got up and looked in the catalogue of the U.L.- No. 17 is Macbeth. To my bewilderment I was forced to realize that I knew almost nothing at all of the play, although I had given it as much attention as other plays of Shakespeare’s. I only thought of: murderer, Lady Macbeth, witches, "fair is foul" and that at one time I had found Schiller’s version of Macbeth very fine. There is no doubt then that I wished to forget the play. The further thought occurred to me that 17 and 34 divided by 17 gives the result 1 and 2. Numbers 1 and 2 in the U.L. are Goethe’s Faust. Formerly I found very much of Faust in myself.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1317

We must regret that the physician’s discretion did not allow us any insight into the significance of this series of associations. Adler observes that the man did not succeed in synthesizing his remarks. They would seem to us scarcely worth reporting if something had not emerged during their continuation which gave us the key to understanding the number 1734 and the whole series of associations.

‘This morning indeed I had an experience that strongly supports the correctness of the Freudian view. My wife, whom I had woken up when I got out of bed the night before, asked me why I had wanted the U.L. catalogue. I told her the story. She found it was all hair-splitting, only - a very interesting point - she accepted Macbeth, which I had resisted so forcibly. She said that nothing whatever came to her mind when she thought of a number. I answered: "Let us test it." She gave the number 117. I immediately replied: "17 is a reference to what I have told you. Moreover I said to you yesterday that when a wife is in her 82nd year and her husband in his 35th year there is gross incompatibility." For the last few days I have been teasing my wife by saying she is a little old woman of 82. 82 + 35 = 117.’

Thus the man, who was not able to find determinants for his own number, found the solution at once when his wife gave him a number purporting to be arbitrarily chosen. In reality the wife understood very well what complex her husband’s number was derived from, and chose her own number from the same complex - which was certainly common to both of them, for in his case it concerned their relative ages. It is therefore easy for us to translate the number that had occurred to the husband. It expresses, as Adler suggests, a suppressed wish of his which, fully developed, would run: ‘Only a wife of 17 is suitable for a man of 34 like me.’

In case anyone should think too lightly of such ‘trifles’, I may add that I recently learned from Dr. Adler that a year after the publication of this analysis the man was divorced from his wife.¹

Adler gives similar explanations of the origin of obsessive numbers.

¹ In explanation of Macbeth, No. 17 in the U. L., Adler informs me that in his seventeenth year this man joined a society of anarchists with regicide as its aim. This was no doubt why the content of Macbeth was forgotten. At that time, too, he had invented a code in which letters were replaced by numbers.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1318

(4) Moreover the choice of what have been called  ‘favourite numbers’ is not unrelated to the life of the person concerned and is not without a certain psychological interest. A man who admitted having a special preference for the numbers 17 and 19 was able to specify after a little reflection that at the age of 17 he had gone to the university and so attained the academic freedom he had long desired, and that at 19 he had taken his first long journey and soon after had made his first scientific discovery. But the fixation of this preference occurred a decade later, when the same numbers took on a significance in his erotic life. - Indeed, even those numbers which a person uses especially often in a particular connection, in an apparently arbitrary way, can be traced by analysis to an unexpected meaning. Thus it struck a patient of mine one day that when annoyed he was especially fond of saying: ‘I’ve told you that already from 17 to 36 times’, and he asked himself whether there was any motive for it. It at once occurred to him that he was born on the 27th day of the month whereas his younger brother was born on the 26th, and that he had reason to complain that fate so often robbed him of the good things in life in order to bestow them on this younger brother. He therefore represented this partiality on the part of fate by deducting ten from the date of his own birthday and adding it to his brother’s. ‘I am the elder and yet I am cut short like this.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1319

(5) I shall dwell longer on analyses of numerical associations, since I know of no other separate observations that would prove so forcefully the existence of highly composite thought-processes which are yet quite unknown to consciousness. At the same time I know of no better example of analyses in which the part contributed by the physician (suggestion) - so often held responsible - is so definitely ruled out. I shall therefore give a report here (with his consent) of the analysis of a number which occurred to a patient of mine. I need only add that he is the youngest child in a large family and at an early age lost his greatly admired father. While he was in a particularly cheerful mood the number 426718 came to his mind, and he asked himself: ‘What ideas occur to me in that connection? First of all, a joke I have heard: "When a doctor treats a cold it lasts for 42 days; when it is not treated, it lasts 6 weeks."' This corresponds to the first figures in the number (42 = 6 x 7). In the stoppage that followed this first solution I drew his attention to the fact that the six-figure number he had chosen contained all the first digits except for 3 and 5. He then immediately found the continuation of the interpretation. ‘There are 7 of us brothers and sisters, and I am the youngest. In the order of our age, 3 corresponds to my sister A., and 5 to my brother L.; they were my two enemies. As a child I used to pray to God every night for him to remove these two tormenting spirits from life. It seems to me now that in this choice of numbers I was myself fulfilling this wish; 3 and 5, the wicked brother and the hated sister, are passed over.’ - If the number represents the order of your brothers and sisters, what does the 18 at the end mean? There were only 7 of you after all, - ‘I have often thought that if my father had lived longer I should not have remained the youngest child. If there had been 1 more we should have been 8 and I should have had a younger child after me to whom I should have played the elder brother.’

With this the number was explained, but we had still to establish the connection between the first part of the interpretation and the second one. This followed very easily from the necessary precondition of the last figures: ‘if my father had lived longer’. ‘42 = 6 x 7' signified derision at the doctors who had not been able to help his father, and, in this form, therefore, it expressed his wish for his father to go on living. The whole number in fact corresponded to the fulfilment of his two infantile wishes about his family circle - that his bad brother and sister should die and that a baby should be born after him, or, expressed in the shortest form: ‘If only those two had died instead of my beloved father!’¹

¹ In the interests of simplicity I have omitted some of the patient’s intermediate associations which were equally to the point.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1320

(6) Here is a brief example from a correspondent. The manager of a telegraph office in L. writes that his eighteen and-a-half-year-old son, who wants to study medicine, is already taken up with the psychopathology of everyday life, and is trying to convince his parents of the correctness of my assertions. I reproduce one of the experiments he undertook, without expressing an opinion on the discussion attached to it.

‘My son was talking to my wife about what we call "chance" and was demonstrating to her that she could not name any song or any number that really occurred to her simply "by chance". The following conversation ensued. Son: "Give me any number you like." - Mother: "79." - Son: "What occurs to you in that connection?" - Mother: "I think of the lovely hat I was looking at yesterday." - Son: "What did it cost?" - Mother: "158 marks." - Son: "That explains it: 158 ÷ 2 = 79. The hat was too dear for you and no doubt you thought: ‘If it were half the price, I would buy it.’"

‘To these assertions of my son’s I first raised the objection that women are not in general particularly good at figures and that anyway his mother had certainly not worked out that 79 was half 158. His theory was therefore based on the sufficiently improbable fact that the subconscious is better at arithmetic than normal consciousness. "Not at all", was the answer I received; "it may well be that my mother did not work out the sum 158 ÷ 2 = 79, she may perfectly well have happened to see this equation - indeed she may have thought about the hat while dreaming and then realized what it would cost if it were only half the price."'

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1321

(7) I take another numerical analysis from Jones (1911b, 478). A gentleman of his acquaintance let the number 986 occur to him and then defied Jones to connect it with anything he thought of. ‘Using the free-association method he first recalled a memory, which had not previously been present in his mind, to the following effect: Six years ago, on the hottest day he could remember, he had seen a joke in an evening newspaper, which stated that the thermometer had stood at 986° F., evidently an exaggeration of 98. 6° F. We were at the time seated in front of a very hot fire from which he had just drawn back, and he remarked, probably quite correctly, that the heat had aroused this dormant memory. However, I was curious to know why this memory had persisted with such vividness as to be so readily brought out, for with most people it surely would have been forgotten beyond recall, unless it had become associated with some other mental experience of more significance. He told me that in reading the joke he had laughed uproariously, and that on many subsequent occasions he had recalled it with great relish. As the joke was obviously a very tenuous one, this strengthened my expectation that more lay behind. His next thought was the general reflection that the conception of heat had always greatly impressed him; that heat was the most important thing in the universe, the source of all life, and so on. This remarkable attitude of a quite prosaic young man certainly needed some explanation, so I asked him to continue his free associations. The next thought was of a factory-stack which he could see from his bedroom window. He often stood of an evening watching the flame and smoke issuing out of it, and reflecting on the deplorable waste of energy. Heat, fire, the source of life, the waste of vital energy issuing from an upright, hollow tube - it was not hard to divine from such associations that the ideas of heat and fire were unconsciously linked in his mind with the idea of love, as is so frequent in symbolic thinking, and that there was a strong masturbation complex present, a conclusion which he presently confirmed.’

Those who wish to get a good impression of the way in which the material of numbers is worked over in unconscious thinking may be referred to the papers by Jung (1911) and Jones (1912).

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1322

In analyses of this kind which I conduct on myself I find two things particularly striking: firstly, the positively somnambulistic certainty with which I set off for my unknown goal and plunge into an arithmetical train of thought which arrives all at once at the desired number, and the speed with which the entire subsequent work is completed; and secondly, the fact that the numbers are so freely at the disposal of my unconscious thinking, whereas I am a bad reckoner and have the greatest difficulties in consciously noting dates, house numbers and such things. Moreover in these unconscious thought-operations with numbers I find I have a tendency to superstition, whose origin for long remained unknown to me.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1920:] Herr Rudolf Schneider (1920) of Munich has raised an interesting objection to the conclusiveness of such analyses of numbers. He experimented with numbers that were presented to him - for example, with the number that first caught his eye when he opened a history book - or he presented someone else with a number he had chosen; and he then noticed whether associations emerged to the imposed number which had the appearance of having determined it. This was in fact what did happen. In one instance which he relates that concerned himself, the associations provided determinants just as abundant and full of meaning as in our analyses of numbers that have arisen spontaneously, whereas the number in Schneider’s experiments, having been presented from outside, called for no determinant. In a second experiment carried out on someone else, he clearly made the problem too easy, for the number he set him was 2, and everybody has some material which would enable him to find a determinant for that number. - From his experiments Schneider then draws two conclusions: first, that ‘the mind possesses the same potentialities for finding associations to numbers as to concepts’; and secondly, that the emergence of determining associations to numbers that occur to the mind spontaneously does not in any way prove that these numbers originated from the thoughts discovered in the ‘analysis’ of them. The former conclusion is undoubtedly correct. It is just as easy to find an appropriate association to a number which is presented as it is to a word which is called out - indeed it is perhaps easier, since the ability of the few digits to form connections is particularly great. The situation in which one finds oneself is then simply that of what are called ‘association experiments’, which have been studied from the greatest variety of angles by the school of Bleuler and Jung. In this situation the association (reaction) is determined by the word presented (stimulus-word). This reaction could however still be of very diverse kinds, and Jung’s experiments have shown that even these further distinctions are not left to ‘chance’, but that unconscious ‘complexes’ participate in the determination if they have been touched on by the stimulus-word. - Schneider’s second conclusion goes too far. The fact that appropriate associations arise to numbers (or words) which are presented tells us nothing more about the origin of numbers (or words) which emerge spontaneously than could already be taken into consideration before that fact was known. These spontaneous ideas (words or numbers) may be undetermined, or may have been determined by the thoughts that come out in the analysis, or by other thoughts not disclosed in the analysis - in which last case the analysis will have led us astray. The important thing is to get rid of the impression that this problem is different for numbers from what it is for verbal associations. A critical examination of the problem and with it a justification of the psycho-analytic technique of association lie outside the scope of this book. In analytic practice we proceed on the presupposition that the second of the possibilities mentioned above meets the facts and that in the majority of instances use can be made of it. The investigations of an experimental psychologist (Poppelreuter [1914]) have demonstrated that it is by far the most probable one. See further in this connection the valuable findings in Section 9 of Bleuler’s book on autistic thinking (1919).

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1323

It will not surprise us to find that not only numbers but also verbal associations of another kind regularly prove on analytic investigation to be fully determined.

(8) A good example of the derivation of an obsessive word - a word that cannot be got rid of - is to be found in Jung (1906). ‘A lady told me that for some days the word "Taganrog" had been constantly on her lips without her having any idea where it came from. I asked the lady for information about the affectively stressed events and repressed wishes of the very recent past. After some hesitation she told me that she would very much like a morning gown, but her husband did not take the interest in it that she had hoped. "Morgenrock", "Tag-an-rock" - their partial similarity in sound and meaning is obvious. The Russian form was determined by the fact that at about the same time the lady had come to know someone from Taganrog.’

(9) I am indebted to Dr. E. Hitschmann for the elucidation of another case, in which in a particular locality a line of poetry repeatedly forced its way up as an association, without its origin and connections having been apparent.

‘E., a doctor of law, relates: Six years ago I travelled from Biarritz to San Sebastian. The railway line crosses the River Bidassoa, which at this point forms the frontier between France and Spain. From the bridge there is a fine view - on one side, of a broad valley and the Pyrenees, and on the other, of the distant sea. It was a beautiful, bright summer’s day; everything was filled with sun and light, I was on my holiday travels and was happy to be coming to Spain. At that point the following lines occurred to me:

Aber frei ist schon die Seele,

Schwebet in dem Meer von Licht.¹

‘I recall that at the time I pondered on where the lines came from and could not recollect the place. To judge by the rhythm the words must have come from a poem, which, however, had entirely escaped my memory. I believe that later, when the lines came to my mind repeatedly, I asked a number of people about them without being able to learn anything.

‘Last year, when I was returning from Spain I passed over the same stretch of railway. It was a pitch-dark night and it was raining. I looked out of the window to see whether we were already coming into the frontier station, and noticed that we were on the Bidassoa bridge. Immediately the lines given above returned to my memory, and again I could not recall their origin.

‘Several months later when I was at home, I came across a copy of Uhland’s poems. I opened the volume and my glance fell on the lines: "Aber frei ist schon die Seele, schwebet in dem Meer von Licht", which form the conclusion of a poem called "Der Waller". I read the poem and had a very dim recollection of having once known it many years ago. The scene of action is in Spain and this seemed to me to form the only connection between the quoted lines and the place on the railway line described by me. I was only half satisfied with my discovery and went on mechanically turning the pages of the book. The lines "Aber frei ist schon . . ." etc. are printed at the bottom of a page. On turning over the page I found a poem on the other side with the title "Bidassoa Bridge".

‘I may add that the contents of this poem seemed almost more unfamiliar than those of its predecessor, and that its first lines run:

‘Auf der Bidassoabrücke steht ein Heiliger altersgrau,

Segnet rechts die span’schen Berge, segnet links den fränk’schen Gau.’²

¹ [‘But the soul is already free, it floats in the sea of light.’]

² [‘On the Bidassoa bridge there stands a saint grey with age: on the right he blesses the Spanish mountains, on the left he blesses the Frankish land.’]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1324

.

(B) Perhaps the insight we have gained into the determining of names and numbers that are chosen with apparent arbitrariness may help to solve another problem. Many people, as is well known, contest the assumption of complete psychical determinism by appealing to a special feeling of conviction that there is a free will. This feeling of conviction exists; and it does not give way before a belief in determinism. Like every normal feeling it must have something to warrant it. But so far as I can observe, it does not manifest itself in the great and important decisions of the will: on these occasions the feeling that we have is rather one of psychical compulsion, and we are glad to invoke it on our behalf. (‘Here I stand: I can do no other.’) On the other hand, it is precisely with regard to the unimportant, indifferent decisions that we would like to claim that we could just as well have acted otherwise: that we have acted of our free - and unmotivated - will. According to our analyses it is not necessary to dispute the right to the feeling of conviction of having a free will. If the distinction between conscious and unconscious motivation is taken into account, our feeling of conviction informs us that conscious motivation does not extend to all our motor decisions. De minimus non curat lex. But what is thus left free by the one side receives its motivation from the other side, from the unconscious; and in this way determination in the psychical sphere is still carried out without any gap.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1907:] These conceptions of the strict determination of apparently arbitrary psychical acts have already borne rich fruit in psychology, and perhaps also in the juridical field. By applying them, Bleuler and Jung have made intelligible the reactions in what is known as the ‘association experiment’, in which the subject of the test, when he hears a word called out (the stimulus-word), answers it with one that comes to his mind in connection with it (the reaction), the intervening time being measured (the reaction-time). In his Studies in Word Association (1906), Jung has shown what a subtle reagent for psychical states we possess in the association experiment as thus interpreted. Wertheimer and Klein, both pupils of Hans Gross, the Professor of Criminal Law in Prague, have developed out of these experiments a technique for the establishment of the facts in criminal proceedings which is at present being examined by psychologists and jurists.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1325

(C) Although the motivation of the parapraxes described in the preceding chapters is something of which from the very nature of the case conscious thought must lack knowledge, it would nevertheless be desirable to discover a psychological proof of the existence of that motivation; indeed, for reasons which a closer knowledge of the unconscious reveals, it is probable that such proofs are somewhere discoverable. There are in fact two spheres in which it is possible to demonstrate phenomena that appear to correspond to an unconscious, and therefore displaced, knowledge of that motivation.

(a) A striking and generally observed feature of the behaviour of paranoics is that they attach the greatest significance to the minor details of other people’s behaviour which we ordinarily neglect, interpret them and make them the basis of far-reaching conclusions. For example, the last paranoic seen by me concluded that there was a general understanding in his environment, because when his train was moving out of the station the people had made a particular movement with one hand. Another noted the way people walked in the street, how they flourished their walking sticks, and so on.¹

The category of what is accidental and requires no motivation, in which the normal person includes a part of his own psychical performances and parapraxes, is thus rejected by the paranoic as far as the psychical manifestations of other people are concerned. Everything he observes in other people is full of significance, everything can be interpreted. How does he reach this position? Probably here as in so many similar cases he projects on to the mental life of other people what is unconsciously present in his own. In paranoia many sorts of things force their way through to consciousness whose presence in the unconscious of normal and neurotic people we can demonstrate only through psycho-analysis.² In a certain sense, therefore, the paranoic is justified in this, for he recognizes something that escapes the normal person: he sees more clearly than someone of normal intellectual capacity, but the displacement on to other people of the state of affairs which he recognizes renders his knowledge worthless. I hope I shall not now be expected to justify the various paranoic interpretations. But the partial justification which we concede to paranoia in respect of this view taken by it of chance actions will help us towards a psychological understanding of the sense of conviction that the paranoic attaches to all these interpretations. There is in fact some truth in them; those, too, of our errors of judgement which are not to be counted as pathological acquire their sense of conviction in just the same way. This feeling is justified for a certain part of the erroneous train of thought, or for its source of origin; and it is then extended by us to the rest of the context.

¹ From other points of view this interpretation of immaterial and accidental indications given by other people has been classed as a ‘delusion of reference’.

² For example, the phantasies of hysterics concerning sexual and cruel maltreatment correspond, at times even down to details, with the complaints of persecuted paranoics. It is curious, but not unintelligible, that we meet the identical content in the form of reality in the contrivances of perverts for the satisfaction of their desires.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1326

(b) Another indication that we possess unconscious and displaced knowledge of the motivation in chance actions and parapraxes is to be found in the phenomenon of superstition. I will make my meaning clear by a discussion of the small experience that started me on these reflections.

On my return from my holidays my thoughts immediately turned to the patients who were to claim my attention in the year’s work that was just beginning. My first visit was to a very old lady for whom I had for many years performed the same professional services twice every day (p. 1245). Owing to the uniformity of the circumstances, unconscious thoughts have very often managed to find expression while I was on my way to the patient and while I was treating her. She is over ninety years old; it is therefore natural to ask oneself at the beginning of each year’s treatment how much longer she is likely to live. On the day I am speaking about I was in a hurry and called a cab to take me to her house. Every cabman on the rank in front of my house knew the old lady’s address, as they had all often taken me there. But on this day it happened that the cabman did not draw up in front of her house but in front of a house with the same number in a nearby street which ran parallel and was in fact of a similar appearance. I noticed the error and reproached the cabman with it, and he apologized. Now is it of any significance that I was driven to a house where the old lady was not to be found? Certainly not to me, but if I were superstitious I should see an omen in the incident, the finger of fate announcing that this year would be the old lady’s last. Very many omens recorded by history have been based on a symbolism no better than this. I of course explain the occurrence as an accident without any further meaning.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1327

The case would have been quite different if I had made the journey on foot, and while ‘deep in thought’, or through ‘absent-mindedness’ had come to the house in the parallel street instead of the right one. This I should not explain as an accident but as an action that had an unconscious aim and required interpretation. My interpretation of ‘going astray’ like thus would probably have had to be that I did not expect to see the old lady for much longer.

I am therefore different from a superstitious person in the following way:

I do not believe that an event in whose occurrence my mental life plays no part can teach me any hidden thing about the future shape of reality; but I believe that an unintentional manifestation of my own mental activity does on the other hand disclose something hidden, though again it is something that belongs only to my mental life. I believe in external (real) chance, it is true, but not in internal (psychical) accidental events. With the superstitious person it is the other way round. He knows nothing of the motivation of his chance actions and parapraxes, and believes in psychical accidental events; and, on the other hand, he has a tendency to ascribe to external chance happenings a meaning which will become manifest in real events, and to regard such chance happenings as a means of expressing something that is hidden from him in the external world. The differences between myself and the superstitious person are two: first, he projects outwards a motivation which I look for within; secondly, he interprets chance as due to an event, while I trace it back to a thought. But what is hidden from him corresponds to what is unconscious for me, and the compulsion not to let chance count as chance but to interpret it is common to both of us.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] At this point I may quote a neat example which Ossipow (1922) has used for discussing the difference between the superstitious, psycho-analytic and mystical point of view. He had been married in a small Russian provincial town and immediately afterwards started for Moscow with his young wife. At a station two hours before his destination he had a wish to go to the station exit and take a look at the town. The train was due to halt there long enough, as he thought, but when he returned a few minutes later it had already left with his young wife. When he told his old nurse at home of this accident she shook her head and declared: ‘No good will come of this marriage.’ At the time Ossipow laughed at this prophecy. But when, five months later, he was separated from his wife, he could not avoid in retrospect viewing his action in leaving the train as an ‘unconscious protest’ against his marriage. Years later, the town where this parapraxis happened took on a great importance for him, as a person lived there with whom fate later linked him closely. This person, and even the fact of this person’s existence, had been completely unknown to him at the time. But the mystical explanation of his behaviour would be that he had left the Moscow train and his wife at that town because the future that was in store for him in relation to this other person was seeking to declare itself.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1328

I assume that this conscious ignorance and unconscious knowledge of the motivation of accidental psychical events is one of the psychical roots of superstition. Because the superstitious person knows nothing of the motivation of his own chance actions, and because the fact of this motivation presses for a place in his field of recognition, he is forced to allocate it, by displacement, to the external world. If such a connection exists, it can hardly be limited to this single application. In point of fact I believe that a large part of the mythological view of the world, which extends a long way into the most modern religions, is nothing but psychology projected into the external world. The obscure recognition¹ (the endopsychic perception, as it were) of psychical factors and relations in the unconscious is mirrored - it is difficult to express it in other terms, and here the analogy with paranoia must come to our aid - in the construction of a supernatural reality, which is destined to be changed back once more by science into the psychology of the unconscious. One could venture to explain in this way the myths of paradise and the fall of man, of God, of good and evil, of immortality, and so on, and to transform metaphysics into metapsychology. The gap between the paranoic’s displacement and that of the superstitious person is less wide than it appears at first sight. When human beings began to think, they were, as is well known, forced to explain the external world anthropomorphically by means of a multitude of personalities in their own image; chance events, which they interpreted superstitiously, were thus actions and manifestations of persons. They behaved, therefore, just like paranoics, who draw conclusions from insignificant signs given them by other people, and just like all normal people, who quite rightly base their estimate of their neighbours’ characters on their chance and unintentional actions. It is only in our modern, scientific but as yet by no means perfected Weltanschauung that superstition seems so very much out of place; in the Weltanschauung of pre-scientific times and peoples it was justified and consistent.

¹ A recognition which, of course, has nothing of the character of a [true] recognition.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1329

The Roman who gave up an important undertaking if he saw an ill-omened flight of birds was therefore in a relative sense justified; his behaviour was consistent with his premisses. But if he withdrew from the undertaking because he had stumbled on the threshold of his door (‘un Romain retournerait’) he was also in an absolute sense superior to us unbelievers; he was a better psychologist than we are striving to be. For his stumbling must have revealed to him the existence of a doubt, a counter-current at work within him, whose force might at the moment of execution subtract from the force of his intention. For we are only sure of complete success if all our mental forces are united in striving towards the desired goal. How did Schiller’s Tell, who hesitated so long to shoot the apple on his son’s head, answer the Governor’s question why he had provided himself with a second arrow?

Mit diesem zweiten Pfeil durchschoss ich - Euch,

Wenn ich mein liebes Kind getroffen hätte,

Und Euer - wahrlich, hätt’ ich nicht gefehlt.¹

¹ [‘With this second arrow I would have transfixed - you, if I had struck my dear child; and you, truly, I should not have missed.’]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1330

(D) Anyone who has had the opportunity of studying the hidden mental impulses of human beings by means of psycho-analysis can also say something new about the quality of the unconscious motives that find expression in superstition. It can be recognized most clearly in neurotics suffering from obsessional thinking or obsessional states - people who are often of high intelligence - that superstition derives from suppressed hostile and cruel impulses. Superstition is in large part the expectation of trouble; and a person who has harboured frequent evil wishes against others, but has been brought up to be good and has therefore repressed such wishes into the unconscious, will be especially ready to expect punishment for his unconscious wickedness in the form of trouble threatening him from without.

Though we admit that these remarks of ours in no way exhaust the psychology of superstition, we shall at least have to touch on the question of whether we are to deny entirely that superstition has any real roots: whether there are definitely no such things as true presentiments, prophetic dreams, telepathic experiences, manifestations of supernatural forces and the like. I am far from meaning to pass so sweeping a condemnation of these phenomena, of which so many detailed observations have been made even by men of outstanding intellect, and which it would be best to make the subject of further investigations. We may even hope that some portion of these observations will then be explained by our growing recognition of unconscious mental processes, without necessitating radical alterations in the views we hold to-day. If the existence of still other phenomena - those, for example, claimed by spiritualists - were to be established, we should merely set about modifying our ‘laws’ in the way demanded by the new discovery, without being shaken in our belief in the coherence of things in the world.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1331

In the compass of these discussions the only answer I can give to the questions raised here is a subjective one - that is, one in accordance with my personal experience. To my regret I must confess that I am one of those unworthy people in whose presence spirits suspend their activity and the supernatural vanishes away, so that I have never been in a position to experience anything myself which might arouse a belief in the miraculous. Like every human being, I have had presentiments and experienced trouble, but the two failed to coincide with one another, so that nothing followed the presentiments, and the trouble came upon me unannounced. During the days when I was living alone in a foreign city - I was a young man at the time - I quite often heard my name suddenly called by an unmistakable and beloved voice; I then noted down the exact moment of the hallucination and made anxious enquiries of those at home about what had happened at that time. Nothing had happened. To balance this, there was a later occasion when I went on working with my patients without any disturbance or foreboding while one of my children was in danger of bleeding to death. Nor have I ever been able to regard any of the presentiments reported to me by patients as veridical. - I must however confess that in the last few years I have had a few remarkable experiences which might easily have been explained on the hypothesis of telepathic thought-transference.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1332

Belief in prophetic dreams can claim many adherents, because it can take support from the fact that a number of things do in reality turn out in the future in the way in which the wish had previously arranged them in the dream.¹ But there is little that is surprising in that, and as a rule, too, there are extensive differences between the dream and its fulfilment, which the dreamer’s credulity prefers to neglect. A good example of a dream which may justly be called prophetic was once brought to me for detailed analysis by an intelligent and truthful woman patient. Her story was that she had once dreamt she met a former friend of hers and family doctor in front of a certain shop in a certain street; and that when next morning she went into the Inner Town she in fact met him at the very spot named in the dream. I may observe that no subsequent event proved the importance of this miraculous coincidence,² which could not therefore be accounted for by what lay in the future.

Careful questioning established that there was no evidence of her having had any recollection of the dream on the morning after she dreamt it - that is, until after her walk and the meeting. She could produce no objection to an account of what happened which robbed the episode of anything miraculous and left nothing but an interesting psychological problem. She was walking along the street in question one morning and met her old family doctor in front of a particular shop, and thereupon, on seeing him, she felt convinced that she had dreamt the night before of having this meeting at that precise spot. Analysis was then able to show with great probability how she arrived at this sense of conviction, which, according to general rules, cannot fairly be denied a certain right to be considered authentic. A meeting at a particular place, which has been expected beforehand, amounts in fact to a rendezvous. The old family doctor awakened her memory of former days, when meetings with a third person, also a friend of the doctor, had played a very important part in her life. Since then she had continued her relations with that gentleman and had waited for him in vain on the day before the dream was supposed to have taken place. If I were able to report the circumstances of the case in greater detail it would be easy for me to show that her illusion, when she saw her friend of former days, of having had a prophetic dream was equivalent to some such remark as this; ‘Ah! doctor - you remind me now of past times when I never had to wait in vain for N. if we’d arranged a meeting.’

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] See my paper on ‘Dreams and Telepathy’ (1922a).

² [The German ‘Zusammentreffen’ means both ‘coincidence’ and meeting’.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1333

The ‘remarkable coincidence’ of meeting a person we were at that very moment thinking about is a familiar one. I have observed a simple and easily explained example of it in myself, which is probably a good model for similar occurrences. A few days after I had been awarded the title of professor - which carries considerable authority with it in countries under monarchical rule - my thoughts, while I was walking through the Inner Town, suddenly turned to a childish phantasy of revenge directed against a particular married couple. Some months earlier they had called me in to see their little daughter, who had developed an interesting obsessional symptom following upon a dream. I took a great interest in the case, whose genesis I thought I understood. My offer of treatment was however declined by her parents and I was given to understand that they thought of changing over to a foreign authority who effected cures by hypnotism. My present phantasy was that after the total failure of that attempt the parents begged me to start my treatment, saying that now they had complete confidence in me, and so on. I however answered: ‘Yes, now you have confidence in me - now that I too have become a professor. The title has done nothing to alter my capacities; if you could not make use of me as a university lecturer you can do without me as a professor as well.’ - At this point my phantasy was interrupted by a loud ‘Good day to you, Professor!’ and I looked up and saw walking past me the very married couple on whom I had just taken my revenge by rejecting their offer. Immediate reflection destroyed the impression of something miraculous. I had been walking towards the couple along a wide, straight and almost deserted street; when I was about twenty paces from them I had glanced up for a moment and caught a glimpse of their impressive figures and recognized them, but had set the perception aside - on the pattern of a negative hallucination - for the emotional reasons which then took effect in the phantasy that arose with apparent spontaneity.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1334

Here is another ‘resolution of an apparent presentiment’, this time from Otto Rank (1912):

‘Some time ago I myself experienced an unusual variation of the "remarkable coincidence" of meeting someone one was at the very moment thinking about. Shortly before Christmas I was on my way to the Austro-Hungarian Bank to get some change in the form of ten new silver kronen for giving as presents. While I was absorbed in ambitious phantasies which had to do with the contrast between my small assets and the piles of money stored in the bank building, I turned into a narrow street in which the bank stood. I saw a car standing at the door and many people going in and out. I said to myself: No doubt the cashiers will have time even for my few kronen. In any case I shall be quick about it. I shall put down the banknote I want changed and say "Let me have gold please". I immediately noticed my error - I should, of course, have asked for silver - and awoke from my phantasies. I was now only a few steps from the entrance and saw a young man coming towards me whom I thought I recognized, but as I am short-sighted I was not yet able to identify him for certain. As he drew nearer I recognized him as a school-friend of my brother’s called Gold. Gold’s brother was a well-known writer from whom I had expected considerable help at the beginning of my literary career. This help, however, had not been forthcoming and in consequence I failed to win the material success I had hoped for, which had been the subject of my phantasy on the way to the bank. While I was absorbed in my phantasies therefore, I must have unconsciously perceived the approach of Herr Gold; and this was represented in my consciousness (which was dreaming of material success) in such a form that I decided to ask for gold at the counter, instead of the less valuable silver. On the other hand, however, the paradoxical fact that my unconscious is able to perceive an object which my eyes can recognize only later seems partly to be explained by what Bleuler terms "complexive preparedness". This was, as we have seen, directed to material matters and had from the beginning, contrary to my better knowledge, directed my steps to the building where only gold and paper money is changed.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1335

We must also include in the category of the miraculous and the ‘uncanny’ the peculiar feeling we have, in certain moments and situations, of having had exactly the same experience once before or of having once before been in the same place, though our efforts never succeed in clearly remembering the previous occasion that announces itself in this way. I am aware that I am merely following loose linguistic usage when I call what arises in a person at such moments a ‘feeling’. What is no doubt in question is a judgement, and, more precisely, a perceptual judgement; but these cases have nevertheless a character quite of their own, and we must not leave out of account the fact that what is looked for is never remembered. I do not know whether this phenomenon of ‘déjà vu’ has ever been seriously offered in proof of an individual’s previous psychical existence; but psychologists have certainly turned their attention to it and have endeavoured to solve the problem in a whole variety of speculative ways. None of the attempted explanations which they have brought forward seems to me to be correct, because none of them takes into consideration anything other than the concomitant manifestations and the conditions which favour the phenomenon. Those psychical processes which according to my observations are alone responsible for the explanation of ‘déjà vu’ - namely, unconscious phantasies - are still generally neglected by psychologists even to-day.

It is in my view wrong to call the feeling of having experienced something before an illusion. It is rather that at such moments something is really touched on which we have already experienced once before, only we cannot consciously remember it because it has never been conscious. To put it briefly, the feeling of ‘déjà vu’ corresponds to the recollection of an unconscious phantasy. There exist unconscious phantasies (or day-dreams) just as there exist conscious creations of the same kind which everybody knows from his own experience.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1336

I know that the subject would merit the most exhaustive treatment; but I shall here do no more than give the analysis of a single case of ‘déjà vu’ where the feeling was characterized by especial intensity and persistence. A lady who is now thirty-seven claimed to have a most distinct memory of having at the age of twelve and a half paid her first visit to some school friends in the country. When she entered the garden, she had an immediate feeling of having been there before. This feeling was repeated when she went into the reception rooms, so that she felt she knew in advance what room would be the next one, what view there would be from it, and so on. But the possibility that this feeling of familiarity could have owed its origin to an earlier visit to the house and garden, perhaps one in her earliest childhood, was absolutely ruled out and was disproved as a result of her questioning her parents. The lady who reported this was not in search of any psychological explanation, but saw the occurrence of this feeling as a prophetic indication of the significance for her emotional life which these same school friends later acquired. However, a consideration of the circumstances in which the phenomenon occurred in her shows us the way to another view of the matter. At the time when she paid the visit she knew that these girls had an only brother, who was seriously ill. During the visit she actually set eyes on him, though he looked very ill and she said to herself that he would die soon. Now, her own only brother had been dangerously ill with diphtheria a few months earlier; during his illness she had spent several weeks away from her parents’ house, staying with a relative. She believed that her brother had been with her on this visit to the country; she even thought it had been his first considerable journey after his illness; but her memory was remarkably uncertain on these points while of all the other details, and in particular of the dress she was wearing that day, she had an ultra-clear picture. Anyone who is well-informed will find no difficulty in concluding from these hints that the expectation that her brother would die had at that time played an important part in the girl’s thoughts and either had never become conscious or, after the favourable termination of the illness, had succumbed to energetic repression. If things had turned out otherwise, she would have had to wear a different dress - mourning. She found an analogous situation in the home of her friends, whose only brother was in danger of dying soon, as in fact he did shortly after. She ought to have remembered consciously that she herself had lived through this situation a few months before: instead of remembering it - which was prevented by repression - she transferred her feeling of remembering something to her surroundings, the garden and the house, and fell a victim to the ‘fausse reconnaissance’ of having seen all this exactly the same once before. From the fact that repression occurred we may conclude that her former expectation of her brother’s death had not been far removed from a wishful phantasy. She would then have been the only child. In her later neurosis she suffered most severely from a fear of losing her parents, behind which, as usual, analysis was able to reveal the unconscious wish with the same content.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1337

I have been able in a similar way to derive my own fleeting experiences of ‘déjà vu’ from the emotional constellation of the moment. ‘This would once more be an occasion for wakening the (unconscious and unknown) phantasy which was formed in me at this or that time as a wish to improve the situation.’ - This explanation of ‘déjà vu’ has so far been taken into consideration by only one observer. Dr. Ferenczi, to whom the third edition of this book is indebted for so many valuable contributions, writes to me on this subject as follows: "From my own case, as well as that of others, I have convinced myself that the unaccountable feeling of familiarity is to be traced to unconscious phantasies of which one is unconsciously reminded in a situation of the present time. With one of my patients what happened was apparently something different, but in reality it was quite analogous. This feeling returned to him very often, but it regularly proved to have originated from a forgotten (repressed) portion of a dream of the preceding night. It seems therefore that "déjà vu" can derive not only from day-dreams but from night-dreams as well.’

I have later learnt that Grasset (1904) has given an explanation of the phenomenon which comes very close to my own.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1338

In 1913 I wrote a short paper describing another phenomenon that is very similar to ‘déjà vu’. This is ‘déjà raconté', the illusion of having already reported something of special interest when it comes up in the course of psycho-analytic treatment. On these occasions the patient maintains with every sign of subjective certainty that he has already recounted a particular memory a long time ago. The physician is however sure of the contrary and is as a rule able to convince the patient of his error. The explanation of this interesting parapraxis is probably that the patient has felt are urge to communicate this information and intended to do so, but has failed to carry it into effect, and that he now takes the memory of the former as a substitute for the latter, the carrying out of his intention.

A similar state of affairs, and probably also the same mechanism, is to be seen in what Ferenczi (1915) has called ‘supposed’ parapraxes. We believe there is something - some object - that we have forgotten or mislaid or lost; but we are able to convince ourselves we have done nothing of the kind and that everything is as it should be. For example, a woman patient returns to the doctor’s room, giving as a reason that she wants to collect the umbrella she has left behind there; but the doctor sees that she is in fact holding it in her hand. There was therefore an impulse towards this parapraxis, and the impulse was sufficient to serve as a substitute for its actual execution. Except for this difference, the supposed parapraxis is equivalent to the real one. It is, however, what one might call cheaper.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1339

(E)  When I recently had occasion to report some examples of the forgetting of names, with their analyses, to a colleague with a philosophical education, he hastened to reply: ‘That’s all very well; but in my case the forgetting of names happens differently.’ The matter can obviously not be dealt with as easily as this; I do not suppose that my colleague had ever before thought of analysing the forgetting of a name, nor could he say how it happened differently in his case. But his comment nevertheless touches on a problem which many people will be inclined to put in the foreground. Does the elucidation given here of parapraxes and chance actions apply quite generally or only in certain cases? and if the latter, what are the conditions under which it can be called in to explain phenomena that might also have been brought about in another way? In answering this question my experiences leave me in the lurch. I can but utter a warning against supposing that a connection of the kind here demonstrated is only rarely found; for every time I have made the test on myself or on my patients, a connection has been clearly shown to exist just as in the examples reported, or there have at least been good grounds for supposing that it did. It is not surprising if success in finding the hidden meaning of a symptomatic act is not achieved every time, for the magnitude of the internal resistances opposing the solution comes into account as a deciding factor. Equally, it is not possible to interpret every single dream of one’s own or of one’s patients; to prove that the theory holds good in general it is enough if one can penetrate a part of the way into the hidden connection. It often happens that a dream which proves refractory during an attempt to solve it the next day will allow its secret to be wrested from it a week or a month later, after a real change has come about in the meantime and has reduced the contending psychical values. The same applies to the solving of parapraxes and symptomatic acts. The example of misreading on page 1194 (‘Across Europe in a Tub’) gave me the opportunity of showing how a symptom that is at first insoluble becomes accessible to analysis when the real interest in the repressed thoughts has passed away.¹ As long as the possibility existed of my brother obtaining the envied title before me, this misreading resisted every one of my repeated efforts to analyse it; after it had turned out to be unlikely that he would be preferred to me in this way, the path that led to its solution was suddenly cleared. It would therefore be incorrect to maintain that all the cases which resist analysis are due to a mechanism other than the psychical mechanism disclosed here. Such an assumption would need more than negative evidence. Furthermore, the readiness to believe in a different explanation of parapraxes and symptomatic acts, which is probably to be found in all healthy people, is quite devoid of evidential value; it is obviously a manifestation of the same mental forces which produced the secret and which therefore also devote themselves to preserving it and resist its elucidation.

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] At this point very interesting problems of an economic nature come in, questions taking into consideration the fact that the psychical processes aim at gaining pleasure and removing unpleasure. There is already an economic problem in how it becomes possible by way of substitutive associations to recapture a name that has been forgotten through motives of unpleasure. An excellent paper by Tausk (1913) gives good examples of how the forgotten name becomes accessible once more if one succeeds in connecting it with a pleasurably-toned association, which can counterbalance the unpleasure to be expected from the reproduction of the name.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1340

On the other hand we must not overlook the fact that repressed thoughts and impulses certainly do not achieve expression in symptomatic acts and parapraxes by their own unaided efforts. The technical possibility for such side-slipping on the part of the innervations must be presented independently; this will then be readily exploited by the intention of the repressed to make itself felt consciously. In the case of verbal parapraxes, detailed investigations by philosophers and philologists have endeavoured to determine what are the structural and functional relations that put themselves at the service of such an intention. If we distinguish, among the determinants of parapraxes and symptomatic acts, between the unconscious motive on the one hand and the physiological and psycho-physical relations that come to meet it on the other, it remains an open question whether there are, within the range of normality, yet other factors that can - like the unconscious motive, and in place of it - create parapraxes and symptomatic acts along the lines of these relations. It is not my task to answer this question.

Nor is it my purpose to exaggerate the differences, sufficiently large as they are, between the psycho-analytic and the popular view of parapraxes. I would rather call attention to cases in which these differences lose much of their sharpness. As regards the simplest and most inconspicuous examples of slips made by the tongue or the pen - in which, perhaps, words are merely contracted, or words and letters left out - the more complicated interpretations come to nothing. From the point of view of psycho-analysis we must maintain that some disturbance of intention has revealed its existence in these cases, but we cannot say from what the disturbance derived and what its aim was. In fact it has achieved nothing apart from demonstrating its existence. In such cases we can also see how a parapraxis is encouraged by phonetic resemblances and close psychological associations: this is a fact that we have never disputed. It is, however, a reasonable scientific demand that such rudimentary cases of slips of the tongue or slips of the pen should be judged on the basis of the more clearly marked cases, whose investigation yields such unambiguous conclusions as to the way in which parapraxes are caused.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1341

(F) Since our discussion of slips of the tongue we have been content with demonstrating that parapraxes have a hidden motivation, and by the help of psycho-analysis we have traced our way to a knowledge of this motivation. We have so far left almost without consideration the general nature and the peculiarities of the psychical factors that find expression in parapraxes; at any rate we have not yet attempted to define them more closely and to test whether they conform to laws. Nor shall we attempt now to deal with the matter in a radical way, since the subject can better be explored from another angle, as our first steps will show us in a moment.¹ Here several questions can be raised which I will at least bring forward and describe in outline. (1) What is the content and origin of the thoughts and impulses which are indicated in erroneous and chance actions? (2) What are the determinants which compel a thought or an impulse to make use of such actions as a means of expression and which put it in a position to do so? (3) Is it possible to establish constant and unambiguous relations between the kind of parapraxis and the qualities of what is expressed by means of it?

I will begin by bringing together some material for answering the last question. In discussing the examples of slips of the tongue we found it necessary to go beyond the content of what was intended to be said, and were obliged to look for the cause of the speech-disturbance in something outside the intention. What this was was obvious in a number of cases, and was known to the speaker’s consciousness. In the examples that seemed simplest and most transparent it was another version of the same thought - one which sounded as if it had an equal right, and which disturbed the expression of the thought without its being possible to explain why the one version had succumbed and the other had won the day. (These are Meringer and Mayer’s ‘contaminations’.) In a second group of cases the motive for the defeat of one version was a consideration which, however, did not prove strong enough to withhold it completely (‘zum Vorschwein gekommen’). The version which was withheld was perfectly conscious too. Only of the third group can it be asserted unreservedly that the disturbing thought differed from the one intended, and only in their case can a distinction which is apparently essential be established. The disturbing thought is either connected with the disturbed thought by thought associations (disturbance as a result of internal contradiction), or it is unrelated to it in its nature and the disturbed word happens to be connected with the disturbing thought - which is often unconscious - by an unexpected external association. In the examples I have given from my psycho-analyses the entire speech is under the influence of thoughts which have become active but have at the same time remained entirely unconscious; either these are betrayed by the disturbance itself (‘Klapperschlange’ - ‘Kleopatra’) or they exercise an indirect influence by making it possible for the different parts of the consciously intended speech to disturb each other (‘Ase natmen’, where  ‘Hasenauer Street’ and reminiscences of a Frenchwoman are in the background). The withheld or unconscious thoughts from which the disturbance in speech derives are of the most varied origin. This survey therefore does not enable us to generalize in any direction.

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] This book is of an entirely popular character; it merely aims, by an accumulation of examples, at paving the way for the necessary assumption of unconscious yet operative mental processes, and it avoids all theoretical considerations on the nature of this unconscious.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1342

A comparative examination of my examples of misreading and slips of the pen leads to the same conclusions. As with slips of the tongue, certain cases appear to owe their origin to a work of condensation which has no further motivation (e.g. the ‘Apfe’ ). It would however be satisfactory to learn whether special conditions may not have to be fulfilled if such a condensation, which is normal in dream-work but a fault in our waking thought, is to take place. No information on this problem can be obtained from the examples themselves. I should however refuse to conclude from this that there are in fact no conditions other than, for instance, a relaxation of conscious attention, since I know from other sources that it is precisely automatic activities which are characterized by correctness and reliability. I should prefer to stress the fact that here, as so often in biology, normal circumstances or those approaching the normal are less favourable subjects for investigation than pathological ones. I expect that what remains obscure in the elucidation of these very slight disturbances will be illuminated by the explanation of serious disturbances.

In misreading and slips of the pen there are also plenty of examples in which we can discern a more remote and complicated motivation. ‘Across Europe in a Tub’ is a disturbance in reading which is explained as being due to the influence of a remote thought, foreign in its essence, arising from a repressed impulse of jealousy and ambition, and utilizing the ‘switch-word’ ‘Beförderung’ to form a connection with the indifferent and innocent topic that was being read. In the case of ‘Burckhard’ the name itself forms a ‘switch-word’ of this kind.

There is no doubt that disturbances in the functions of speech occur more readily, and make smaller demands on the disturbing forces, than do those in other psychical activities.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1343

One is on different ground when it comes to examining forgetting in its proper sense - that is, the forgetting of past experiences. (To distinguish them from forgetting in the stricter sense, we might speak of the forgetting of proper names and of foreign words, described in Chapter I and II, as ‘slipping the memory’, and the forgetting of intentions as ‘omissions’.) The basic determinants of the normal process of forgetting are unknown.¹ We are also reminded that not everything is forgotten that we believe to be. Our explanation has here to do only with cases where the forgetting causes us surprise, in so far as it breaks the rule that unimportant things are forgotten but important ones are preserved by memory. Analysis of the examples of forgetting that seem to require a special explanation reveals that the motive for forgetting is invariably an unwillingness to remember something which can evoke distressing feelings. We come to suspect that this motive aims at manifesting itself quite generally in mental life, but is prevented from putting itself into effect at all regularly by other forces which work against it. The extent and the significance of this unwillingness to remember distressing impressions would seem to deserve the most careful psychological examination; moreover we cannot separate from this wider context the question of what special conditions make this forgetting, that is universally aimed at, possible in individual cases.

¹ [Footnote added 1907:] I may perhaps put forward the following suggestions as regards the mechanism of forgetting in its proper sense. Mnemic material is subject in general to two influences, condensation and distortion. Distortion is the work of the dominant trends in mental life, and is directed above all against the memory traces which have remained affectively operative and which show considerable resistance to condensation. The traces that have grown indifferent succumb unresistingly to the process of condensation; yet it can be observed that in addition to this, the distorting trends feed on the indifferent material if they have remained unsatisfied at the place at which they sought to manifest themselves. As these processes of condensation and distortion continue for long periods, during which every fresh experience acts in the direction of transforming the mnemic content, it is generally thought that it is time which makes memory uncertain and indistinct. It is highly probable that there is no question at all of there being any direct function of time in forgetting. - In the case of repressed memory-traces it can be demonstrated that they undergo no alteration even in the course of the longest period of time. The unconscious is quite timeless. The most important as well as the strangest characteristic of psychical fixation is that all impressions are preserved, not only in the same form in which they were first received, but also in all the forms which they have adopted in their further developments. This is a state of affairs which cannot be illustrated by comparison with another sphere. Theoretically every earlier state of the mnemic content could thus be restored to memory again, even if its elements have long ago exchanged all their original connections for more recent ones.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1344

In the forgetting of intentions another factor comes into the foreground. The conflict, which could only be surmised in the repression of what was distressing to remember, here becomes tangible, and in the analysis of the examples a counter-will can regularly be recognized which opposes the intention without putting an end to it. As in the parapraxes already described, two types of psychical process can be recognized here. Either the counter-will is turned directly against the intention (in cases where the latter’s purpose is of some importance), or it is unrelated in its nature to the intention itself and establishes its connection with it by means of an external association (in the case of intentions that are almost indifferent).

The same conflict governs the phenomena of bungled actions. The impulsion which manifests itself in disturbing the action is often a counter-impulsion, but still more often it is an entirely unrelated one, which merely takes the opportunity of achieving expression by disturbing the action while it is being carried out. The cases where the disturbance results from an internal contradiction are the more significant ones; they also involve the more important actions.

In chance actions or in symptomatic actions the internal conflict becomes less and less important. These motor manifestations, to which consciousness attaches little value, or which it overlooks entirely, thus serve to express a wide variety of unconscious or withheld impulses; for the most part they are symbolic representations of phantasies or wishes.

In regard to the first question - as to what is the origin of the thoughts and impulses which find expression in parapraxes - we can say that in a number of cases it is easy to show that the disturbing thoughts are derived from suppressed impulses in mental life. In healthy people, egoistic, jealous and hostile feelings and impulsions, on which the pressure of moral education weighs heavily, make frequent use of the pathway provided by parapraxes in order to find some expression for their strength, which undeniably exists but is not recognized by higher mental agencies. Acquiescence in these parapraxes and chance actions is to a large extent equivalent to a compliant tolerance of the immoral. Among these suppressed impulses no small part is played by the various sexual currents. That these particular ones should in fact appear so rarely among the thoughts disclosed by analysis in my examples is an accident of my material. Since the examples I have analysed are to a great extent taken from my own mental life, the selection was partial from the first and aimed at excluding sexual matters. At other times it appears to be from perfectly innocent objections and considerations that the disturbing thoughts arise.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1345

We have now reached the moment for answering the second question - that is, what psychological determinants are responsible for a thought being compelled to seek expression not in its complete form but in a kind of parasitic form, as a modification and disturbance of another thought. The most striking examples of parapraxes make it seem probable that these determinants must be looked for in a relation to admissibility to consciousness: in the question, that is, of the greater or less degree to which they bear the marked character of being ‘repressed’. But if we follow this character through the series of examples, it dissolves into ever vaguer indications. The inclination to dismiss something as a waste of time, or the consideration that the thought in question is not properly relevant to the matter in hand, appear, as motives for pushing back a thought (which is then left to find expression by disturbing another thought), to play the same part as does the moral condemnation of an insubordinate emotional impulse or as does derivation from totally unconscious trains of thought. Insight into the general nature of how parapraxes and chance actions are determined cannot be gained along these lines. One single fact of significance emerges from these enquiries. The more innocent the motivation of a parapraxis, and the less objectionable - and therefore the less inadmissible to consciousness - the thought finding expression in it, the easier it is to explain the phenomenon, once one’s attention has been turned to it. The slightest cases of slips of the tongue are noticed immediately, and spontaneously corrected. Where the motivation comes from really repressed impulses, the case has to be elucidated by careful analysis, which may itself at times come up against difficulties or prove unsuccessful.

We are therefore no doubt justified in taking the result of this last enquiry as evidence that the satisfactory explanation of the psychological determinants of parapraxes and chance actions is to be looked for along other lines and by a different approach. The indulgent reader may accordingly see in these discussions signs of the broken edges where this subject has been somewhat artificially detached from a wider context.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1346

(G) A few words should be said to indicate at least in what direction this wider context lies. The mechanism of parapraxes and chance actions, as we have come to know it by our employment of analysis, can be seen to correspond in its most essential points with the mechanism of dream-formation which I have discussed in the chapter on the ‘dream-work’ in my Interpretation of Dreams. In both cases we find condensations and compromise-formations (contaminations). We have the same situation: by unfamiliar paths, and by the way of external associations, unconscious thoughts find expression as modifications of other thoughts. The incongruities, absurdities and errors of the dream-content, which result in the dream being scarcely recognized as the product of psychical activity, originate in the same way, though it is true with a freer use of the means at hand, as our common mistakes in everyday life. In both cases the appearance of an incorrect function is explained by the peculiar mutual interference between two or several correct functions.

An important conclusion can be drawn from this conformity. The peculiar mode of working, whose most striking achievement we see in the content of dreams, cannot be attributed to the sleeping state of mental life if we possess such abundant evidence in the form of parapraxes that it operates during our waking life as well. The same connection also forbids our assuming that these psychical processes, which strike us as abnormal and strange, are determined by a deep-seated decay in mental activity or by pathological states of functioning.¹

¹ See The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), p. 1034-5.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1347

We shall not be able to form a correct picture of the strange psychical work which brings about the occurrence of both parapraxes and dream images until we have learnt that psychoneurotic symptoms, and especially the psychical formations of hysteria and obsessional neurosis, repeat in their mechanism all the essential features of this mode of working. This is therefore the starting-point for the continuation of our researches. For us, however, there is yet another special interest in considering parapraxes, chance actions and symptomatic actions in the light of this last analogy. If we compare them to the products of the psychoneuroses, to neurotic symptoms, two frequently repeated statements - namely, that the borderline between the normal and the abnormal in nervous matters is a fluid one, and that we are all a little neurotic - acquire meaning and support. Without any medical experience we can construct various types of nervous illness of this kind which are merely hinted at - formes frustres¹ - of the neuroses: cases in which the symptoms are few, or occur rarely or not severely - in other words, cases whose comparative mildness is located in the number, intensity and duration of their pathological manifestations. But we might perhaps never arrive by conjecture at precisely the type that appears most frequently to form the transition between health and illness. For the type we are considering, whose pathological manifestations are parapraxes and symptomatic acts, is characterized by the fact that the symptoms are located in the least important psychical functions, while everything that can lay claim to higher psychical value remains free from disturbance. Where the symptoms are distributed in the reverse way - that is, where they make their appearance in the most important individual and social functions and are able to disturb nutrition, sexual intercourse, professional work and social life - this is the mark of severe cases of neurosis and is more characteristic of them than, for example, are the variety and vigour of their pathological manifestations.

But there is one thing which the severest and the mildest cases all have in common, and which is equally found in parapraxes and chance actions: the phenomena can be traced back to incompletely suppressed psychical material, which, although pushed away by consciousness, has nevertheless not been robbed of all capacity for expressing itself.

¹ [‘Blurred forms.’]

1348

FRAGMENT OF AN ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF HYSTERIA

(1905 [1901])

1349

Intentionally left blank

1350

FRAGMENT OF AN ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF HYSTERIA

PREFATORY REMARKS

In 1895 and 1896 I put forward certain views upon the pathogenesis of hysterical symptoms and upon the mental processes occurring in hysteria. Since that time several years have passed. In now proposing, therefore, to substantiate those views by giving a detailed report of the history of a case and its treatment, I cannot avoid making a few introductory remarks, for the purpose partly of justifying from various standpoints the step I am taking, and partly of diminishing the expectations to which it will give rise.

No doubt it was awkward that I was obliged to publish the results of my enquiries without there being any possibility of other workers in the field testing and checking them, particularly as those results were of a surprising and by no means gratifying character. But it will be scarcely less awkward now that I am beginning to bring forward some of the material upon which my conclusions were based and make it accessible to the judgement of the world. I shall not escape blame by this means. Only, whereas before I was accused of giving no information about my patients, now I shall be accused of giving information about my patients which ought not to be given. I can only hope that in both cases the critics will be the same, and that they will merely have shifted the pretext for their reproaches; if so I can resign in advance any possibility of ever removing their objections.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1351

Even if I ignore the ill-will of narrow-minded critics such as these, the presentation of my case histories remains a problem which is hard for me to solve. The difficulties are partly of a technical kind, but are partly due to the nature of the circumstances themselves. If it is true that the causes of hysterical disorders are to be found in the intimacies of the patients’ psycho-sexual life, and that hysterical symptoms are the expression of their most secret and repressed wishes, then the complete elucidation of a case of hysteria is bound to involve the revelation of those intimacies and the betrayal of those secrets. It is certain that the patients would never have spoken if it had occurred to them that their admissions might possibly be put to scientific uses; and it is equally certain that to ask them themselves for leave to publish their case would be quite unavailing. In such circumstances persons of delicacy, as well as those who were merely timid, would give first place to the duty of medical discretion and would declare with regret that the matter was one upon which they could offer science no enlightenment. But in my opinion the physician has taken upon himself duties not only towards the individual patient but towards science as well; and his duties towards science mean ultimately nothing else than his duties towards the many other patients who are suffering or will some day suffer from the same disorder. Thus it becomes the physician’s duty to publish what he believes he knows of the causes and structure of hysteria, and it becomes a disgraceful piece of cowardice on his part to neglect doing so, as long as he can avoid causing direct personal injury to the single patient concerned. I think I have taken every precaution to prevent my patient from suffering any such injury. I have picked out a person the scenes of whose life were laid not in Vienna but in a remote provincial town, and whose personal circumstances must therefore be practically unknown in Vienna. I have from the very beginning kept the fact of her being under my treatment such a careful secret that only one other physician - and one in whose discretion I have complete confidence - can be aware that the girl was a patient of mine. I have waited for four whole years since the end of the treatment and have postponed publication till hearing that a change has taken place in the patient’s life of such a character as allows me to suppose that her own interest in the occurrences and psychological events which are to be related here may now have grown faint. Needless to say, I have allowed no name to stand which could put a non-medical reader upon the scent; and the publication of the case in a purely scientific, and technical periodical should, further, afford a guarantee against unauthorized readers of this sort. I naturally cannot prevent the patient herself from being pained if her own case history should accidentally fall into her hands. But she will learn nothing from it that she does not already know; and she may ask herself who besides her could discover from it that she is the subject of this paper.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1352

I am aware that - in this city, at least - there are many physicians who (revolting though it may seem) choose to read a case history of this kind not as a contribution to the psychopathology of the neuroses, but as a roman à clef designed for their private delectation. I can assure readers of this species that every case history which I may have occasion to publish in the future will be secured against their perspicacity by similar guarantees of secrecy, even though this resolution is bound to put quite extraordinary restrictions upon my choice of material.

Now in this case history - the only one which I have hitherto succeeded in forcing through the limitations imposed by medical discretion and unfavourable circumstances - sexual questions will be discussed with all possible frankness, the organs and functions of sexual life will be called by their proper names, and the pure-minded reader can convince himself from my description that I have not hesitated to converse upon such subjects in such language even with a young woman. Am I then, to defend myself upon this score as well? I will simply claim for myself the rights of the gynaecologist - or rather, much more modest ones - and add that it would be the mark of a singular and perverse prurience to suppose that conversations of this kind are a good means of exciting or of gratifying sexual desire. For the rest, I feel inclined to express my opinion on this subject in a few borrowed words:

‘It is deplorable to have to make room for protestations and declarations of this sort in a scientific work; but let no one reproach me on this account but rather accuse the spirit of the age, owing to which we have reached a state of things in which no serious book can any longer be sure of survival.’ (Schmidt, 1902, Preface.)

I will now describe the way in which I have overcome the technical difficulties of drawing up the report of this case history. The difficulties are very considerable when the physician has to conduct six or eight psychotherapeutic treatments of the sort in a day, and cannot make notes during the actual session with the patient for fear of shaking the patient’s confidence and of disturbing his own view of the material under observation. Indeed, I have not yet succeeded in solving the problem of how to record for publication the history of a treatment of long duration. As regards the present case, two circumstances have come to my assistance. In the first place the treatment did not last for more than three months; and in the second place the material which elucidated the case was grouped around two dreams (one related in the middle of the treatment and one at the end). The wording of these dreams was recorded immediately after the session, and they thus afforded a secure point of attachment for the chain of interpretations and recollections which proceeded from them. The case history itself was only committed to writing from memory after the treatment was at an end, but while my recollection of the case was still fresh and was heightened by my interest in its publication. Thus the record is not absolutely - phonographically - exact, but it can claim to possess a high degree of trustworthiness. Nothing of any importance has been altered in it except in some places the order in which the explanations are given; and this has been done for the sake of presenting the case in a more connected form.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1353

I next proceed to mention more particularly what is to be found in this paper and what is not to be found in it. The title of the work was originally ‘Dreams and Hysteria’, for it seemed to me peculiarly well-adapted for showing how dream-interpretation is woven into the history of a treatment and how it can become the means of filling in amnesias and elucidating symptoms. It was not without good reasons that in the year 1900 I gave precedence to a laborious and exhaustive study of dreams (The Interpretation of Dreams) over the publications upon the psychology of the neuroses which I had in view. And incidentally I was able to judge from its reception with what an inadequate degree of comprehension such efforts are met by other specialists at the present time. In this instance there was no validity in the objection that the material upon which had based my assertions had been withheld and that it was therefore impossible to become convinced of their truth by testing and checking them. For every one can submit his own dreams to analytic examination, and the technique of interpreting dreams may be easily learnt from the instructions and examples which I have given. I must once more insist, just as I did at that time, that a thorough investigation of the problems of dreams is an indispensable prerequisite for any comprehension of the mental processes in hysteria and the other psychoneuroses, and that no one who wishes to shirk that preparatory labour has the smallest prospect of advancing even a few steps into this region of knowledge. Since, therefore, this case history presupposes a knowledge of the interpretation of dreams, it will seem highly unsatisfactory to any reader to whom this presupposition does not apply. Such a reader will find only bewilderment in these pages instead of the enlightenment he is in search of, and he will certainly be inclined to project the cause of his bewilderment on to the author and to pronounce his views fantastic. But in reality this bewildering character attaches to the phenomena of the neurosis itself; its presence there is only concealed by the physician’s familiarity with the facts, and it comes to light again with every attempt a explaining them. It could only be completely banished if we could succeed in tracing back every single element of a neurosis to factors with which we were already familiar. But everything tends to show that, on the contrary, we shall be driven by the study of neuroses to assume the existence of many new thing which will later on gradually become the subject of more certain knowledge. What is new has always aroused bewilderment and resistance.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1354

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to suppose that dreams and their interpretation occupy such a prominent position in all psycho-analyses as they do in this example.

While the case history before us seems particularly favoured as regards the utilization of dreams, in other respects it has turned out poorer than I could have wished. But its shortcomings are connected with the very circumstances which have made its publication possible. As I have already said, I should not have known how to deal with the material involved in the history of a treatment which had lasted, perhaps, for a whole year. The present history, which covers only three months could be recollected and reviewed; but its results remain incomplete in more than one respect. The treatment was not carried through to its appointed end, but was broken off at the patient’s own wish when it had reached a certain point. At that time some of the problems of the case had not even been attacked and others had only been imperfectly elucidated; whereas, if the work had been continued, we should no doubt have obtained the fullest possible enlightenment upon every particular of the case. In the following pages, therefore, I can present only a fragment of an analysis.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1355

Readers who are familiar with the technique of analysis as it was expounded in the Studies on Hysteria will perhaps be surprised that it should not have been possible in three months to find a complete solution at least for those of the symptoms which were taken in hand. This will become intelligible when I explain that since the date of the Studies psycho-analytic technique has been completely revolutionized. At that time the work of analysis started out from the symptoms, and aimed at clearing them up one after the other. Since then I have abandoned that technique, because I found it totally inadequate for dealing with the finer structure of a neurosis. I now let the patient himself choose the subject of the day’s work, and in that way I start out from whatever surface his unconscious happens to be presenting to his notice at the moment. But on this plan everything that has to do with the clearing-up of a particular symptom emerges piecemeal, woven into various contexts, and distributed over widely separated periods of time. In spite of this apparent disadvantage, the new technique is far superior to the old, and indeed there can be no doubt that it is the only possible one.

In face of the incompleteness of my analytic results, I had no choice but to follow the example of those discoverers whose good fortune it is to bring to the light of day after their long burial the priceless though mutilated relics of antiquity. I have restored what is missing, taking the best models known to me from other analyses; but, like a conscientious archaeologist, have not omitted to mention in each case where the authentic parts end and my constructions begin.

There is another kind of incompleteness which I myself have intentionally introduced. I have as a rule not reproduced the process of interpretation to which the patient’s associations and communications had to be subjected, but only the results of that process. Apart from the dreams, therefore, the technique of the analytic work has been revealed in only a very few places. My object in this case history was to demonstrate the intimate structure of a neurotic disorder and the determination of its symptoms; and it would have led to nothing but hopeless confusion if I had tried to complete the other task at the same time. Before the technical rules, most of which have been arrived at empirically, could be properly laid down, it would be necessary to collect material from the histories of a large number of treatments. Nevertheless, the degree of shortening produced by the omission of the technique is not to be exaggerated in this particular case. Precisely that portion of the technical work which is the most difficult never came into question with the patient; for the factor of ‘transference’, which is considered at the end of the case history, did not come up for discussion during the short treatment.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1356

For a third kind of incompleteness in this report neither the patient nor the author is responsible. It is, on the contrary, obvious that a single case history, even if it were complete and open to no doubt, cannot provide an answer to all the questions arising out of the problem of hysteria. It cannot give an insight into all the types of this disorder, into all the forms of internal structure of the neurosis, into all the possible kinds of relation between the mental and the somatic which are to be found in hysteria. It is not fair to expect from a single case more than it can offer. And any one who has hitherto been unwilling to believe that a psychosexual aetiology holds good generally and without exception for hysteria is scarcely likely to be convinced of the fact by taking stock of a single case history. He would do better to suspend his judgement until his own work has earned him the right to a conviction.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1923:] The treatment described in this paper was broken off on December 31st, 1899. [1900] My account of it was written during the two weeks immediately following, but was not published until 1905. It is not to be expected that after more than twenty years of uninterrupted work I should see nothing to alter in my view of such a case and in my presentment of it; but it would obviously be absurd to bring the case history ‘up to date’ by means of emendations and additions. In all essentials, therefore, I have left it as it was, and in the text I have merely corrected a few oversights and inaccuracies to which my excellent English translators, Mr. and Mrs. James Strachey, have directed my attention. Such critical remarks as I have thought it permissible to add I have incorporated in these additional notes: so that the reader will be justified in assuming that I still hold to the opinions expressed in the text unless he finds them contradicted in the footnotes. The problem of medical discretion which I have discussed in this preface does not touch the remaining case histories contained in this volume; for three of them were published with the express assent of the patients (or rather, as regards little Hans, with that of his father), while in the fourth case (that of Schreber) the subject of the analysis was not actually a person but a book produced by him. In Dora’s case the secret was kept until this year. I had long been out of touch with her, but a short while ago I heard that she had recently fallen ill again from other causes, and had confided to her physician that she had been analysed by me when she was a girl. This disclosure made it easy for my well-informed colleague to recognize her as the Dora of 1899. No fair judge of analytic therapy will make it a reproach that the three months’ treatment she received at that time effected no more than the relief of her current conflict and was unable to give her protection against subsequent illnesses.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1357

I

THE CLINICAL PICTURE

In my Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, I showed that dreams in general can be interpreted, and that after the work of interpretation has been completed they can be replaced by perfectly correctly constructed thoughts which can be assigned a recognizable position in the chain of mental events. I wish to give an example in the following pages of the only practical application of which the art of interpreting dreams seems to admit. I have already mentioned in my book¹ how it was that I came upon the problem of dreams. The problem crossed my path as I was endeavouring to cure psychoneuroses by means of a particular psychotherapeutic method. For, among their other mental experiences, my patients told me their dreams, and these dreams seemed to call for insertion in the long thread of connections which spun itself out between a symptom of the disease and a pathogenic idea. At that time I learnt how to translate the language of dreams into the forms of expression of our own thought-language, which can be understood without further help. And I may add that this knowledge is essential for the psycho-analyst; for the dream is one of the roads along which consciousness can be reached by the psychical material which, on account of the opposition aroused by its content, his been cut off from consciousness and repressed, and has thus become pathogenic. The dream, in short, is one of the détours by which repression can be evaded; it is one of the principal means employed by what is known as the indirect method of representation in the mind. The following fragment from the history of the treatment of a hysterical girl is intended to show the way in which the interpretation of dreams plays a part in the work of analysis. It will at the same time give me a first opportunity of publishing at sufficient length to prevent further misunderstanding some of my views upon the psychical processes of hysteria and upon its organic determinants. I need no longer apologize on the score of length, since it is now agreed that the exacting demands which hysteria makes upon physician and investigator can be met only by the most sympathetic spirit of inquiry and not by an attitude of superiority and contempt. For,

Nicht kunst und Wissenschaft allein,

Geduld will bei dem Werke sein!²

¹ The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter II.

² [ Not Art and Science serve, alone;

Patience must in the work be shown.]

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1358

If I were to begin by giving a full and consistent case history, it would place the reader in a very different situation from that of the medical observer. The reports of the patient’s relatives - in the present case I was given one by the eighteen-year-old girl’s father - usually afford a very indistinct picture of the course of the illness. I begin the treatment, indeed, by asking the patient to give me the whole story of his life and illness, but even so the information I receive is never enough to let me see my way about the case. This first account may be compared to an unnavigable river whose stream is at one moment choked by masses of rock and at another divided and lost among shallows and sandbanks. I cannot help wondering how it is that the authorities can produce such smooth and precise histories in cases of hysteria. As a matter of fact the patients are incapable of giving such reports about themselves. They can, indeed, give the physician plenty of coherent information about this or that period of their lives; but it is sure to be followed by another period as to which their communications run dry, leaving gaps unfilled, and riddles unanswered; and then again will come yet another period which will remain totally obscure and unilluminated by even a single piece of serviceable information. The connections - even the ostensible ones - are for the most part incoherent, and the sequence of different events is uncertain. Even during the course of their story patients will repeatedly correct a particular or a date, and then perhaps, after wavering for some time, return to their first version. The patients’ inability to give an ordered history of their life in so far as it coincides with the history of their illness is not merely characteristic of the neurosis.¹ It also possesses great theoretical significance. For this inability has the following grounds. In the first place, patients consciously and intentionally keep back part of what they ought to tell - things that are perfectly we known to them - because they have not got over their feelings of timidity and shame (or discretion, where what they say concerns other people); this is the share taken by conscious disingenuousness. In the second place, part of the anamnestic knowledge, which the patients have at their disposal at other times, disappears while they are actually telling their story, but without their making any deliberate reservations: the share taken by unconscious disingenuousness. In the third place, there are invariably true amnesias - gaps in the memory into which not only old recollections but even quite recent ones have fallen - and paramnesias, formed secondarily so as to fill in those gaps.² When the events themselves have been kept in mind, the purpose underlying the amnesias can be fulfilled just as surely by destroying a connection, and a connection is most surely broken by altering the chronological order of events. The latter always proves to be the most vulnerable element in the store of memory and the one which is most easily subject to repression. Again we meet with many recollections that are in what might be described as the first stage of repression, and these we find surrounded with doubts. At a later period the doubts would be replaced by a loss or a falsification of memory.³

¹ Another physician once sent his sister to me for psychotherapeutic treatment, telling me that she had for years been treated without success for hysteria (pains and defective gait). The short account which he gave me seemed quite consistent with the diagnosis. In my first hour with the patient I got her to tell me her history herself. When the story came out perfectly clearly and connectedly in spite of the remarkable events it dealt with, I told myself that the case could not be one of hysteria, and immediately instituted a careful physical examination. This led to the diagnosis of a not very advanced state of tabes, which was later treated with Hg injections (Ol. cinereum) by Professor Lang with markedly beneficial results.

² Amnesias and paramnesias stand in a complementary relation to each other. When there are large gaps in the memory there will be few mistakes in it. And conversely, paramnesias can at a first glance completely conceal the presence of amnesias.

³ If a patient exhibits doubts in the course of his narrative, an empirical rule teaches us to disregard such expressions of his judgement entirely. If the narrative wavers between two versions, we should incline to regard the first one as correct and the second as a product of repression.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1359

That this state of affairs should exist in regard to the memories relating to the history of the illness is a necessary correlate of the symptoms and one which is theoretically requisite. In the further course of the treatment the patient supplies the facts which, though he had known them all along, had been kept back by him or had not occurred to his mind. The paramnesias prove untenable, and the gaps in his memory are filled in. It is only towards the end of the treatment that we have before us all intelligible, consistent, and unbroken case history. Whereas the practical aim of the treatment is to remove all possible symptoms and to replace them by conscious thoughts, we may regard it as a second and theoretical aim to repair all the damages to the patient’s memory. These two aims are coincident. When one is reached, so is the other; and the same path leads to them both.

It follows from the nature of the facts which form the material of psycho-analysis that we are obliged to pay as much attention in our case histories to the purely human and social circumstances of our patients as to the somatic data and the symptoms of the disorder. Above all, our interest will be directed towards their family circumstances - and not only, as will be seen later, for the purpose of enquiring into their heredity.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1360

The family circle of the eighteen-year-old girl who is the subject of this paper included, besides herself, her two parents and a brother who was one and a half years her senior. Her father was the dominating figure in this circle, owing to his intelligence and his character as much as to the circumstances of his life. It was those circumstances which provided the framework for the history of the patient’s childhood and illness. At the time at which I began the girl’s treatment her father was in his late forties, a man of rather unusual activity and talents, a large manufacturer in very comfortable circumstances. His daughter was most tenderly attached to him, and for that reason her critical powers, which developed early, took all the more offence at many of his actions and peculiarities.

Her affection for him was still further increased by the many severe illnesses which he had been through since her sixth year. At that time he had fallen ill with tuberculosis and the family had consequently moved to a small town in a good climate situated in one of our southern provinces. There his lung trouble rapidly improved; but, on account of the precautions which were still considered necessary, both parents and children continued for the next ten years or so to reside chiefly in this spot, which I shall call B--. When her father’s health was good, he used at times to be away, on visits to his factories. During the hottest part of the summer the family used to move to a health resort in the hills.

When the girl was about ten years old, her father had to go through a course of treatment in a darkened room on account of a detached retina. As a result of this misfortune his vision was permanently impaired. His gravest illness occurred some two years later. It took the form of a confusional attack, followed by symptoms of paralysis and slight mental disturbances. A friend of his (who plays a part in the story with which we shall be concerned later on) persuaded him, while his condition had scarcely improved, to travel to Vienna with his physician and come to me for advice. I hesitated for some time as to whether I ought not to regard the case as one of tabo-paralysis, but I finally decided upon a diagnosis of a diffuse vascular affection; and since the patient admitted having had a specific infection before his marriage, I prescribed an energetic course of anti-luetic treatment, as a result of which all the remaining disturbances passed off. It is no doubt owing to this fortunate intervention of mine that four years later he brought his daughter, who had meanwhile grown unmistakably neurotic, and introduced her to me, and that after another two years he handed her over to me for psychotherapeutic treatment.

I had in the meantime also made the acquaintance in Vienna of a sister of his, who was a little older than himself. She gave clear evidence of a severe form of psychoneurosis without any characteristically hysterical symptoms. After a life which had been weighed down by an unhappy marriage, she died of a marasmus which made rapid advances and the symptoms of which were, as a matter of fact, never fully cleared up. An elder brother of the girl’s father, whom I once happened to meet, was a hypochondriacal bachelor.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1361

The sympathies of the girl herself, who, as I have said, became my patient at the age of eighteen, had always been with the father’s side of the family, and ever since she had fallen ill she had taken as her model the aunt who has just been mentioned. There could be no doubt, too, that it was from her father’s family that she had derived not only her natural gifts and her intellectual precocity but also the predisposition to her illness. I never made her mother’s acquaintance. From the accounts given me by the girl and her father I was led to imagine her as an uncultivated woman and above all as a foolish one, who had concentrated all her interests upon domestic affairs, especially since her husband’s illness and the estrangement to which it led. She presented the picture, in fact, of what might be called the ‘housewife’s psychosis’. She had no understanding of her children’s more active interests, and was occupied all day long in cleaning the house with its furniture and utensils and in keeping them clean - to such an extent as to make it almost impossible to use or enjoy them. This condition, traces of which are to be found often enough in normal housewives, inevitably reminds one of forms of obsessional washing and other kinds of obsessional cleanliness. But such women (and this applied to the patient’s mother) are entirely without insight into their illness, so that one essential characteristic of an ‘obsessional neurosis’ is lacking. The relations between the girl and her mother had been unfriendly for years. The daughter looked down on her mother and used to criticize her mercilessly, and she had withdrawn completely from her influence.¹

¹ I do not, it is true, adopt the position that heredity is the only aetiological factor in hysteria. But, on the other hand - and I say this with particular reference to some of my earlier publications, e.g. ‘Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses’ (1896n), in which I combated that view - I do not wish to give an impression of underestimating the importance of heredity in the aetiology of hysteria or of asserting that it can be dispensed with. In the case of the present patient the information I have given about her father and his brother and sister indicates a sufficiently heavy taint; and, indeed, if the view is taken that pathological conditions such as her mother’s must also imply a hereditary predisposition, the patient’s heredity may be regarded as a convergent one. To my mind, however, there is another factor which is of more significance in the girl’s hereditary or, properly speaking, constitutional predisposition. I have mentioned that her father had contracted syphilis before his marriage. Now a strikingly high percentage of the patients whom I have treated psycho-analytically come of fathers who have suffered from tabes or general paralysis. In consequence of the novelty of my therapeutic method, I see only the severest cases, which have already been under treatment for years without any success. In accordance with the Erb-Fournier theory, tabes or general paralysis in the male parent may be regarded as evidence of an earlier luetic infection; and indeed I was able to obtain direct confirmation of such an infection in a number of cases. In the most recent discussion on the offspring of syphilitic parents (Thirteenth International Medical Congress, held in Paris, August 2nd to 9th, 1900: papers by Finger, Tarnowsky, Jullien, etc.), I find no mention of the conclusion to which I have been driven by my experience as a neuro-pathologist - namely, that syphilis in the male parent is a very relevant factor in the aetiology of the neuropathic constitution of children.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1362

During the girl’s earlier years, her only brother (her elder by a year and a half) had been the model which her ambitions had striven to follow. But in the last few years the relations between the brother and sister had grown more distant. The young man used to try so far as he could to keep out of the family disputes; but when he was obliged to take sides he would support his mother. So that the usual sexual attraction had drawn together the father and daughter on the one side and the mother and son on the other.

The patient, to whom I shall in future give the name of ‘Dora’, had even at the age of eight begun to develop neurotic symptoms. She became subject at that time to chronic dyspnoea with occasional accesses in which the symptom was very much aggravated. The first onset occurred after a short expedition in the mountains and was accordingly put down to over-exertion. In the course of six months, during which she was made to rest and was carefully looked after, this condition gradually passed off. The family doctor seems to have had not a moment’s hesitation in diagnosing the disorder as purely nervous and in excluding any organic cause for the dyspnoea; but he evidently considered this diagnosis compatible with the aetiology of over-exertion.¹

The little girl went through the usual infectious diseases of childhood without suffering any lasting damage. As she herself told me - and her words were intended to convey a deeper meaning - her brother was as a rule the first to start the illness and used to have it very slightly, and she would then follow suit with a severe form of it. When she was about twelve she began to suffer from unilateral headaches in the nature of a migraine, and from attacks of nervous coughing. At first these two symptoms always appeared together, but they became separated later on and ran different courses. The migraine grew rarer, and by the time she was sixteen she had quite got over it. But attacks of tussis nervosa, which had no doubt been started by a common catarrh, continued to occur over the whole period. When, at the age of eighteen, she came to me for treatment, she was again coughing in a characteristic manner. The number of these attacks could not be determined; but they lasted from three to five weeks, and on one occasion for several months. The most troublesome symptom during the first half of an attack of this kind, at all events in the last few years, used to be a complete loss of voice. The diagnosis that this was once more a nervous complaint had been established long since; but the various methods of treatment which are usual, including hydrotherapy and the local application of electricity, had produced no result. It was in such circumstances as these that the child had developed into a mature young woman of very independent judgement, who had grown accustomed to laugh at the efforts of doctors, and in the end to renounce their help entirely. Moreover, she had always been against calling in medical advice, though she had no personal objection to her family doctor. Every proposal to consult a new physician aroused her resistance, and it was only her father’s authority which induced her to come to me at all.

I first saw her when she was sixteen, in the early summer. She was suffering from a cough and from hoarseness, and even at that time I proposed giving her psychological treatment. My proposal was not adopted, since the attack in question, like the others, passed off spontaneously, though it had lasted unusually long. During the next winter she came and stayed in Vienna with her uncle and his daughters after the death of the aunt of whom she had been so fond. There she fell ill of a feverish disorder which was diagnosed at the time as appendicitis.² In the following autumn, since her father’s health seemed to justify the step, the family left the health-resort of B--- for good and all. They first moved to the town where her father’s factory was situated, and then, scarcely a year later, settled permanently in Vienna.

¹ The probable precipitating cause of this first illness will be discussed later on.

² On this point see the analysis of the second dream.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1363

Dora was by that time in the first bloom of youth - a girl of intelligent and engaging looks. But she was a source of heavy trials for her parents. Low spirits and an alteration in her character had now become the main features of her illness. She was clearly satisfied neither with herself nor with her family; her attitude towards her father was unfriendly, and she was on very bad terms with her mother, who was bent upon drawing her into taking a share in the work of the house. She tried to avoid social intercourse, and employed herself - so far as she was allowed to by the fatigue and lack of concentration of which she complained - with attending lectures for women and with carrying on more or less serious studies. One day her parents were thrown into a state of great alarm by finding on the girl’s writing-desk, or inside it, a letter in which she took leave of them because, as she said, she could no longer endure her life.¹ Her father, indeed, being a man of some perspicacity, guessed that the girl had no serious suicidal intentions. But he was none the less very much shaken; and when one day, after a slight passage of words between him and his daughter, she had a first attack of loss of consciousness² - an event which was subsequently covered by an amnesia - it was determined, in spite of her reluctance, that she should come to me for treatment.

¹ As I have already explained, the treatment of the case, and consequently my insight into the complex of events composing it, remained fragmentary. There are therefore many questions to which I have no solution to offer, or in which I can only rely upon hints and conjectures. This affair of the letter came up in the course of one of our sessions, and the girl showed signs of astonishment. ‘How on earth’, he asked, ‘did they find the letter? It was shut up in my desk.’ But since she knew that her parents had read this draft of a farewell letter, I conclude that she had herself arranged for it to fall into their hands.

² The attack was, I believe, accompanied by convulsions and delirious states. But since this event was not reached by the analysis either, I have no trustworthy recollections on the subject to fall back upon.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1364

No doubt this case history, as I have so far outlined it, does not upon the whole seem worth recording. It is merely a case of ‘petite hystérie’ with the commonest of all somatic and mental symptoms: dyspnoea, tussis nervosa, aphonia, and possibly migraines, together with depression, hysterical unsociability, and a taedium vitae which was probably not entirely genuine. More interesting cases of hysteria have no doubt been published, and they have very often been more carefully described; for nothing will be found in the following pages on the subject of stigmata of cutaneous sensibility, limitation of the visual field, or similar matters. I may venture to remark, however, that all such collections of the strange and wonderful phenomena of hysteria have but slightly advanced our knowledge of a disease which still remains as great a puzzle as ever. What is wanted is precisely an elucidation of the commonest cases and of their most frequent and typical symptoms. I should have been very well satisfied if the circumstances had allowed me to give a complete elucidation of this case of petite hystérie. And my experiences with other patients leave me in ho doubt that my analytic method would have enabled me to do so.

In 1896, shortly after the appearance of my Studies on Hysteria (written in conjunction with Dr. J. Breuer, 1895), I asked an eminent fellow-specialist for his opinion on the psychological theory of hysteria put forward in that work. He bluntly replied that he considered it an unjustifiable generalization of conclusions which might hold good for a few cases. Since then I have seen an abundance of cases of hysteria, and I have been occupied with each case for a number of days, weeks, or years. In not a single one of them have I failed to discover the psychological determinants which were postulated in the Studies, namely, a psychical trauma, a conflict of affects, and an additional factor which I brought forward in later publications - a disturbance in the sphere of sexuality. It is of course not to be expected that the patient will come to meet the physician half-way with material which has become pathogenic for the very reason of its efforts to lie concealed; nor must the enquirer rest content with the first ‘No’ that crosses his path.¹

¹ Here is an instance of this. Another physician in Vienna, whose conviction of the unimportance of sexual factors in hysteria has probably been very much strengthened by such experiences as this, was consulted in the case of a fourteen-year-old girl who suffered from dangerous hysterical vomiting. He made up his mind to ask her the painful question whether by any chance she had ever had a love-affair with a man. ‘No!’ answered the child, no doubt with well-affected astonishment; and then repeated to her mother in her irreverent way: ‘Only fancy! the old stupid asked me if I was in love!’ She afterwards came to me for treatment, and proved - though not during our very first conversation, to be sure - to have been a masturbator for many years, with a considerable leucorrhoeal discharge (which had a close bearing on her vomiting). She had finally broken herself of the habit, but was tormented in her abstinence by the most acute sense of guilt, so that she looked upon every misfortune that befell her family as a divine punishment for her transgression. Besides this, she was under the influence of the romance of an unmarried aunt, whose pregnancy (a second determinant for her vomiting) was supposed to have been happily hidden from her. The girl was looked upon as a ‘mere child,’ but she turned out to be initiated into all the essentials of sexual relations.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1365

In Dora’s case, thanks to her father’s shrewdness which I have remarked upon more than once already, there was no need for me to look about for the points of contact between the circumstances of the patient’s life and her illness, at all events in its most recent form. Her father told me that he and his family while they were at B-- had formed an intimate friendship with a married couple who had been settled there for several years. Frau K. had nursed him during his long illness, and had in that way, he said, earned a title to his undying gratitude. Herr K. had always been most kind to Dora. He had gone walks with her when he was there, and had made her small presents; but no one had thought any harm of that. Dora had taken the greatest care of the K.’s two little children, and been almost a mother to them. When Dora and her father had come to see me two years before in the summer, they had been just on their way to stop with Herr and Frau K., who were spending the summer on one of our lakes in the Alps. Dora was to have spent several weeks at the K.’s, while her father had intended to return home after a few days. During that time Herr K. had been staying there as well. As her father was preparing for his departure the girl had suddenly declared with the greatest determination that she was going with him, and she had in fact put her decision into effect. It was not until some days later that she had thrown any light upon her strange behaviour. She had then told her mother - intending that what she said should be passed on to her father - that Herr K. had had the audacity to make her a proposal while they were on a walk after a trip upon the lake. Herr K. had been called to account by her father and uncle on the next occasion of their meeting, but he had denied in the most emphatic terms having on his side made any advances which could have been open to such a construction. He had then proceeded to throw suspicion upon the girl, saying that he had heard from Frau K. that she took no interest in anything but sexual matters, and that she used to read Mantegazza’s Physiology of Love and books of that sort in their house on the lake. It was most likely, he had added, that she had been over-excited by such reading and had merely ‘fancied’ the whole scene she had described.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1366

‘I have no doubt’, continued her father, ‘that this incident is responsible for Dora’s depression and irritability and suicidal ideas. She keeps pressing me to break off relations with Herr K. and more particularly with Frau K., whom she used positively to worship formerly. But that I cannot do. For, to begin with, I myself believe that Dora’s tale of the man’s immoral suggestions is a phantasy that has forced its way into her mind; and besides, I am bound to Frau K. by ties of honourable friendship and I do not wish to cause her pain. The poor woman is most unhappy with her husband, of whom, by the way, I have no very high opinion. She herself has suffered a great deal with her nerves, and I am her only support. With my state of health I need scarcely assure you that there is nothing wrong in our relations. We are just two poor wretches who give one another what comfort we can by an exchange of friendly sympathy. You know already that I get nothing out of my own wife. But Dora, who inherits my obstinacy, cannot be moved from her hatred of the K.’s. She had her last attack after a conversation in which she had again pressed me to break with them. Please try and bring her to reason.’

Her father’s words did not always quite tally with this pronouncement; for on other occasions he tried to put the chief blame for Dora’s impossible behaviour on her mother whose peculiarities made the house unbearable for every one. But I had resolved from the first to suspend my judgement of the true state of affairs till I had heard the other side as well.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1367

The experience with Herr K. - his making love to her and the insult to her honour which was involved - seems to provide in Dora’s case the psychical trauma which Breuer and I declared long ago to be the indispensable prerequisite for the production of a hysterical disorder. But this new case also presents all the difficulties which have since led me to go beyond that theory,¹ besides an additional difficulty of a special kind. For, as so often happens in histories of cases of hysteria, the trauma that we know of as having occurred in the patient’s past life is insufficient to explain or to determine the particular character of the symptoms; we should understand just as much or just as little of the whole business if the result of the trauma had been symptoms quite other than tussis nervosa, aphonia, depression, and taedium vitae. But there is the further consideration that some of these symptoms (the cough and the loss of voice) had been produced by the patient years before the time of the trauma, and that their earliest appearances belong to her childhood, since they occurred in her eighth year. If, therefore, the trauma theory is not to be abandoned, we must go back to her childhood and look about there for any influences or impressions which might have had an effect analogous to that of a trauma. Moreover, it deserves to be remarked that in the investigation even of cases in which the first symptoms had not already set in childhood I have been driven to trace back the patients’ life history to their earliest years.²

¹ I have gone beyond that theory, but I have not abandoned it; that is to say, I do not to-day consider the theory incorrect, but incomplete. All that I have abandoned is the emphasis laid upon the so-called ‘hypnoid state’, which was supposed to be occasioned in the patient by the trauma, and to be the foundation for all the psychologically abnormal events which followed. If, where a piece of joint work is in question, it is legitimate to make a subsequent division of property, I should like to take this opportunity of stating that the hypothesis of ‘hypnoid states’ - which many reviewers were inclined to regard as the central portion of our work - sprang entirely from the initiative of Breuer. I regard the use of such a term as superfluous and misleading, because it interrupts the continuity of the problem as to the nature of the psychological process accompanying the formation of hysterical symptoms.

² Cf. my paper on ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’ (1896c).

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1368

When the first difficulties of the treatment had been overcome, Dora told me of an earlier episode with Herr K., which was even better calculated to act as a sexual trauma. She was fourteen years old at the time. Herr K. had made an arrangement with her and his wife that they should meet him one afternoon at his place of business in the principal square of B-- so as to have a view of a church festival. He persuaded his wife, however, to stay at home, and sent away his clerks, so that he was alone when the girl arrived. When the time for the procession approached, he asked the girl to wait for him at the door which opened on to the staircase leading to the upper story, while he pulled down the outside shutters. He then came back, and, instead of going out by the open door, suddenly clasped the girl to him and pressed a kiss upon her lips. This was surely just the situation to call up a distinct feeling of sexual excitement in a girl of fourteen who had never before been approached. But Dora had at that moment a violent feeling of disgust, tore herself free from the man, and hurried past him to the staircase and from there to the street door. She nevertheless continued to meet Herr K. Neither of them ever mentioned the little scene; and according to her account Dora kept it a secret till her confession during the treatment. For some time afterwards, however, she avoided being alone with Herr K. The K.’s had just made plans for an expedition which was to last for some days and on which Dora was to have accompanied them. After the scene of the kiss she refused to join the party, without giving any reason.

In this scene - second in order of mention, but first in order of time - the behaviour of this child of fourteen was already entirely and completely hysterical. I should without question consider a person hysterical in whom an occasion for sexual excitement elicited feelings that were preponderantly or exclusively unpleasurable; and I should do so whether or no the person were capable of producing somatic symptoms. The elucidation of the mechanism of this reversal of affect is one of the most important and at the same time one of the most difficult problems in the psychology of the neuroses. In my own judgement I am still some way from having achieved this end; and I may add that within the limits of the present paper I shall be able to bring forward only a part of such knowledge on the subject as I do possess.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1369

In order to particularize Dora’s case it is not enough merely to draw attention to the reversal of affect; there has also been a displacement of sensation. Instead of the genital sensation which would certainly have been felt by a healthy girl in such circumstances,¹ Dora was overcome by the unpleasurable feeling which is proper to the tract of mucous membrane at the entrance to the alimentary canal - that is by disgust. The stimulation of her lips by the kiss was no doubt of importance in localizing the feeling at that particular place; but I think I can also recognize another factor in operation.²

The disgust which Dora felt on that occasion did not become a permanent symptom, and even at the time of the treatment it was only, as it were, potentially present. She was a poor eater and confessed to some disinclination for food. On the other hand, the scene had left another consequence behind it in the shape of a sensory hallucination which occurred from time to time and even made its appearance while she was telling me her story. She declared that she could still feel upon the upper part of her body the pressure of Herr K.’s embrace. In accordance with certain rules of symptom-formation which I have come to know, and at the same time taking into account certain other of the patient’s peculiarities, which were otherwise inexplicable, - such as her unwillingness to walk past any man whom she saw engaged in eager or affectionate conversation with a lady, - I have formed in my own mind the following reconstruction of the scene. I believe that during the man’s passionate embrace she felt not merely his kiss upon her lips but also the pressure of his erect member against her body. This perception was revolting to her; it was dismissed from her memory, repressed, and replaced by the innocent sensation of pressure upon her thorax, which in turn derived an excessive intensity from its repressed source. Once more, therefore, we find a displacement from the lower part of the body to the upper.³ On the other hand, the compulsive piece of behaviour which I have mentioned was formed as though it were derived from the undistorted recollection of the scene: she did not like walking past any man who she thought was in a state of sexual excitement, because she wanted to avoid seeing for a second time the somatic sign which accompanies it.

¹ Our appreciation of these circumstances will be facilitated when more light has been thrown upon them.

² The causes of Dora’s disgust at the kiss were certainly not adventitious, for in that case she could not have failed to remember and mention them. I happen to know Herr K., for he was the same person who had visited me with the patient’s father, and he was still quite young and of prepossessing appearance.

³ The occurrence of displacements of this kind has not been assumed for the purpose of this single explanation; the assumption has proved indispensable for the explanation of a large class of symptoms. Since treating Dora I have come across another instance of an embrace (this time without a kiss) causing a fright. It was a case of a young woman who had previously been devotedly fond of the man she was engaged to, but had suddenly begun to feel a coldness towards him, accompanied by severe depression, and on that account came to me for treatment. There was no difficulty in tracing the fright back to an erection on the man’s part, which she had perceived but had dismissed from her consciousness.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1370

It is worth remarking that we have here three symptoms - the disgust, the sensation of pressure on the upper part of the body, and the avoidance of men engaged in affectionate conversation - all of them derived from a single experience, and that it is only by taking into account the interrelation of these three phenomena that we can understand the way in which the formation of the symptoms came about. The disgust is the symptom of repression in the erotogenic oral zone, which, as we shall hear, had been over-indulged in Dora’s infancy by the habit of sensual sucking. The pressure of the erect member probably led to an analogous change in the corresponding female organ, the clitoris; and the excitation of this second erotogenic zone was referred by a process of displacement to the simultaneous pressure against the thorax and became fixed there. Her avoidance of men who might possibly be in a state of sexual excitement follows the mechanism of a phobia, its purpose being to safeguard her against any revival of the repressed perception.

In order to show that such a supplement to the story was possible, I questioned the patient very cautiously as to whether she knew anything of the physical signs of excitement in a man’ body. Her answer, as touching the present, was ‘Yes’, but, as touching the time of the episode, ‘I think not’. From the very beginning I took the greatest pains with this patient not to introduce her to any fresh facts in the region of sexual knowledge; and I did this, not from any conscientious motives, but because I was anxious to subject my assumptions to a rigorous test in this case. Accordingly, I did not call a thing by its name until her allusions to it had become so unambiguous that there seemed very slight risk in translating them into direct speech. Her answer was always prompt and frank: she knew about it already. But the question of where her knowledge came from was a riddle which her memories were unable to solve. She had forgotten the source of all her information on this subject.¹

If I may suppose that the scene of the kiss took place in this way, I can arrive at the following derivation for the feelings of disgust.² Such feelings seem originally to be a reaction to the smell (and afterwards also to the sight) of excrement. But the genitals can act as a reminder of the excretory functions; and this applies especially to the male member, for that organ performs the function of micturition as well as the sexual function. Indeed, the function of micturition is the earlier known of the two, and the only one known during the pre-sexual period. Thus it happens that disgust becomes one of the means of affective expression in the sphere of sexual life. The Early Christian Father’s ‘inter urinas et faeces nascimur’ clings to sexual life and cannot be detached from it in spite of every effort at idealization. I should like, however, expressly to emphasize my opinion that the problem is not solved by the mere pointing out of this path of association. The fact that this association can be called up does not show that it actually will be called up. And indeed in normal circumstances it will not be. A knowledge of the paths does not render less necessary a knowledge of the forces which travel along them.³

¹ See the second dream .

² Here, as in all similar cases, the reader must be prepared to be met not by one but by several causes - by overdetermination.

³ All these discussions contain much that is typical and valid for hysteria in general. The subject of erection solves some of the most interesting hysterical symptoms. The attention that women pay to the outlines of men’s genitals as seen through their clothing becomes, when it has been repressed, a source of the very frequent cases of avoiding company and of dreading society. - It is scarcely possible to exaggerate the pathogenic significance of the comprehensive tie uniting the sexual and the excremental, a tie which is at the basis of a very large number of hysterical phobias.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1371

I did not find it easy, however, to direct the patient’s attention to her relations with Herr K. She declared that she had done with him. The uppermost layer of all her associations during the sessions, and everything of which she was easily conscious and of which she remembered having been conscious the day before, was always connected with her father. It was quite true that she could not forgive her father for continuing his relations with Herr K. and more particularly with Frau K. But she viewed those relations in a very different light from that in which her father wished them to appear. In her mind there was no doubt that what bound her father to this young and beautiful woman was a common love-affair. Nothing that could help to confirm this view had escaped her perception, which in this connection was pitilessly sharp; here there were no gaps to be found in her memory. Their acquaintance with the K.’s had begun before her father’s serious illness; but it had not become intimate until the young woman had officially taken on the position of nurse during that illness, while Dora’s mother had kept away from the sick-room. During the first summer holidays after his recovery things had happened which must have opened everyone’s eyes to the true character of this ‘friendship’. The two families had taken a suite of rooms in common at the hotel. One day Frau K. had announced that she could not keep the bedroom which she had up till then shared with one of her children. A few days later Dora’s father had given up his bedroom, and they had both moved into new rooms - the end rooms, which were only separated by the passage, while the rooms they had given up had not offered any such security against interruption. Later on, whenever she had reproached her father about Frau K., he had been in the habit of saying that he could not understand her hostility and that, on the contrary, his children had every reason for being grateful to Frau K. Her mother, whom she had asked for an explanation of this mysterious remark, had told her that her father had been so unhappy at that time that he had made up his mind to go into the wood and kill himself, and that Frau K., suspecting as much, had gone after him and had persuaded him by her entreaties to preserve his life for the sake of his family. Of course, Dora went on, she herself did not believe this story; no doubt the two of them had been seen together in the wood, and her father had thereupon invented this fairy tale of his suicide so as to account for their rendezvous.¹

When they had returned to B--, her father had visited Frau K. every day at definite hours, while her husband was at his business. Everybody had talked about it and had questioned her about it pointedly. Herr K. himself had often complained bitterly to her mother, though he had spared her herself any allusions to the subject - which she seemed to attribute to delicacy of feeling on his part. When they had all gone for walks together, her father and Frau K. had always known how to manage things so as to be alone with each other. There could be no doubt that she had taken money from him, for she spent more than she could possibly have afforded out of her own purse or her husband’s. Dora added that her father had begun to make handsome presents to Frau K., and in order to make these less conspicuous had at the same time become especially liberal towards her mother and herself. And, while previously Frau K. had been an invalid and had even been obliged to spend months in a sanatorium for nervous disorders because she had been unable to walk, she had now become a healthy and lively woman.

¹ This is the point of connection with her own pretence at suicide, which may thus be regarded as the expression of a longing for a love of the same kind.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1372

Even after they had left B-- for the manufacturing town, these relations, already of many years’ standing, had been continued. From time to time her father used to declare that he could not endure the rawness of the climate, and that he must do something for himself; he would begin to cough and complain, until suddenly he would start off to B--, and from there write the most cheerful letters home. All these illnesses had only been pretexts for seeing his friend again. Then one day it had been decided that they were to move to Vienna and Dora began to suspect a hidden connection. And sure enough, they had scarcely been three weeks in Vienna when she heard that the K.’s had moved there as well. They were in Vienna, so she told me, at that very moment, and she frequently met her father with Frau K. in the street. She also met Herr K. very often, and he always used to turn round and look after her; and once when he had met her out by herself he had followed her for a long way, so as to make sure where she was going and whether she might not have a rendezvous.

On one occasion during the course of the treatment her father again felt worse, and went off to B-- for several weeks; and the sharp-sighted Dora had soon unearthed the fact that Frau K. had started off to the same place on a visit to her relatives there. It was at this time that Dora’s criticisms of her father were the most frequent: he was insincere, he had a strain of falseness in his character, he only thought of his own enjoyment, and he had a gift for seeing things in the light which suited him best.

I could not in general dispute Dora’s characterization of her father; and there was one particular respect in which it was easy to see that her reproaches were justified. When she was feeling embittered she used to be overcome by the idea that she had been handed over to Herr K. as the price of his tolerating the relations between her father and his wife; and her rage at her father’s making such a use of her was visible behind her affection for him. At other times she was quite well aware that she had been guilty of exaggeration in talking like this. The two men had of course never made a formal agreement in which she was treated as an object for barter; her father in particular would have been horrified at any such suggestion. But he was one of those men who know how to evade a dilemma by falsifying their judgement upon one of the conflicting alternatives. If it had been pointed out to him that there might be danger for a growing girl in the constant and unsupervised companionship of a man who had no satisfaction from his own wife, he would have been certain to answer that he could rely upon his daughter, that a man like K. could never be dangerous to her, and that his friend was himself incapable of such intentions, or that Dora was still a child and was treated as a child by K. But as a matter of fact things were in a position in which each of the two men avoided drawing any conclusions from the other’s behaviour which would have been awkward for his own plans. It was possible for Herr K. to send Dora flowers every day for a whole year while he was in the neighbourhood, to take every opportunity of giving her valuable presents, and to spend all his spare time in her company, without her parents noticing anything in his behaviour that was characteristic of love-making.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1373

When a patient brings forward a sound and incontestable train of argument during psycho-analytic treatment, the physician is liable to feel a moment’s embarrassment, and the patient may take advantage of it by asking: ‘This is all perfectly correct and true, isn’t it? What do you want to change in now that I’ve told it you?’ But it soon becomes evident that the patient is using thoughts of this kind, which the analysis cannot attack, for the purpose of cloaking others which are anxious to escape from criticism and from consciousness. A string of reproaches against other people leads one to suspect the existence of a string of self-reproaches with the same content. All that need be done is to turn back each particular reproach on to the speaker himself. There is something undeniably automatic about this method of defending oneself against a self-reproach by making the same reproach against some one else. A model of it is to be found in the tu quoque arguments of children; if one of them is accused of being a liar, he will reply without an instant’s hesitation: ‘You’re another.’ A grown-up person who wanted to throw back abuse would look for some really exposed spot in his antagonist and would not necessarily lay the chief stress upon the same content being repeated. In paranoia the projection of a reproach on to another person without any alteration in its content and therefore without any consideration for reality becomes manifest as the process of forming delusions.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1374

Dora’s reproaches against her father had a ‘lining’ or ‘backing’ of self-reproaches of this kind with a corresponding content in every case, as I shall show in detail. She was right in thinking that her father did not wish to look too closely into Herr K.’s behaviour to his daughter, for fear of being disturbed in his own love-affair with Frau K. But Dora herself had done precisely the same thing. She had made herself an accomplice in the affair, and had dismissed from her mind every sign which tended to show its true character. It was not until after her adventure by the lake that her eyes were opened and that she began to apply such a severe standard to her father. During all the previous years she had given every possible assistance to her father’s relations with Frau K. She would never go to see her if she thought her father was there; but, knowing that in that case the children would have been sent out, she would turn her steps in a direction where she would be sure to meet them, and would go for a walk with them. There had been some one in the house who had been anxious at an early stage to open her eyes to the nature of her father’s relations with Frau K., and to induce her to take sides against her. This was her last governess, an unmarried woman, no longer young, who was well-read and of advanced views.¹ The teacher and her pupil were for a while upon excellent terms, until suddenly Dora became hostile to her and insisted on her dismissal. So long as the governess had any influence she used it for stirring up feeling against Frau K. She explained to Dora’s mother that it was incompatible with her dignity to tolerate such an intimacy between her husband and another woman; and she drew Dora’s attention to all the obvious features of their relations. But her efforts were in vain. Dora remained devoted to Frau K. and would hear of nothing that might make her think ill of her relations with her father. On the other hand she very easily fathomed the motives by which her governess was actuated. She might be blind in one direction, but she was sharp-sighted enough in the other. She saw that the governess was in love with her father. When he was there, she seemed to be quite another person: at such times she could be amusing and obliging. While the family were living in the manufacturing town and Frau K. was not on the horizon, her hostility was directed against Dora’s mother, who was then her more immediate rival. Up to this point Dora bore her no ill-will. She did not become angry until she observed that she herself was a subject of complete indifference to the governess, whose pretended affection for her was really meant for her father. While her father was away from the manufacturing town the governess had no time to spare for her, would not go for walks with her, and took no interest in her studies. No sooner had her father returned from B-- than she was once more ready with every sort of service and assistance. Thereupon Dora dropped her.

¹ This governess used to read every sort of book on sexual life and similar subjects, and talked to the girl about them, at the same time asking her quite frankly not to mention their conversations to her parents, as one could never tell what line they might take about them. For some time I looked upon this woman as the source of all Dora’s secret knowledge, and perhaps I was not entirely wrong in this.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1375

The poor woman had thrown a most unwelcome light on a part of Dora’s own behaviour. What the governess had from time to time been to Dora, Dora had been to Herr K.’s children. She had been a mother to them, she had taught them, she had gone for walks with them, she had offered them a complete substitute for the slight interest which their own mother showed in them. Herr K. and his wife had often talked of getting a divorce; but it never took place, because Herr K., who was an affectionate father, would not give up either of the two children. A common interest in the children had from the first been a bond between Herr K. and Dora. Her preoccupation with his children was evidently a cloak for something else that Dora was anxious to hide from herself and from other people.

The same inference was to be drawn both from her behaviour towards the children, regarded in the light of the governess’s behaviour towards herself, and from her silent acquiescence in her father’s relations with Frau K. - namely, that she had all these years been in love with Herr K. When I informed her of this conclusion she did not assent to it. It is true that she at once told me that other people besides (one of her cousins, for instance - a girl who had stopped with them for some time at B--) had said to her: ‘Why you’re simply wild about that man!’ But she herself could not be got to recollect any feelings of the kind. Later on, when the quantity of material that had come up had made it difficult for her to persist in her denial, she admitted that she might have been in love with Herr K. at B--' but declared that since the scene by the lake it had all been over.¹ In any case it was quite certain that the reproaches which she made against her father of having been deaf to the most imperative calls of duty and of having seen things in the light which was most convenient from the point of view of his own passions - these reproaches recoiled on her own head.²

¹ Compare the second dream.

² The question then arises: If Dora loved Herr K., what was the reason for her refusing him in the scene by the lake? Or at any rate, why did her refusal take such a brutal form, as though she were embittered against him? And how could a girl who was in love feel insulted by a proposal which was made in a manner neither tactless nor offensive?.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1376

Her other reproach against her father was that his ill-health was only a pretext and that he exploited it for his own purposes. This reproach, too, concealed a whole section of her own secret history. One day she complained of a professedly new symptom, which consisted of piercing gastric pains. ‘Whom are you copying now?’ I asked her, and found I had hit the mark. The day before she had visited her cousins, the daughters of the aunt who had died. The younger one had become engaged, and this had given occasion to the elder one for falling ill with gastric pains, and she was to be sent off to Semmering. Dora thought it was all just envy on the part of the elder sister; she always got ill when she wanted something, and what she wanted now was to be away from home so as not to have to look on at her sister’s happiness.¹ But Dora’s own gastric pains proclaimed the fact that she identified herself with her cousin, who, according to her, was a malingerer. Her grounds for this identification were either that she too envied the luckier girl her love, or that she saw her own story reflected in that of the elder sister, who had recently had a love-affair which had ended unhappily.² But she had also learned from observing Frau K. what useful things illnesses could become. Herr K. spent part of the year in travelling. Whenever he came back, he used to find his wife in bad health, although, as Dora knew, she had been quite well only the day before. Dora realized that the presence of the husband had the effect of making his wife ill, and that she was glad to be ill so as to be able to escape the conjugal duties which she so much detested. At this point in the discussion Dora suddenly brought in an allusion to her own alternations between poor and bad health during the first years of her girlhood at B--; and I was thus driven to suspect that her states of health were to be regarded as depending upon something else, in the same way as Frau K.’s. (It is a rule of psycho-analytic technique that an internal connection which is still undisclosed will announce its presence by means of a contiguity - a temporal proximity of associations; just as in writing, if ‘a’ and ‘b’ are put side by side, it means that the syllable ‘ab’ is to be formed out of them.) Dora had had a very large number of attacks of coughing accompanied by loss of voice. Could it be that the presence or absence of the man she loved had had an influence upon the appearance and disappearance of the symptoms of her illness? If this were so, it must be possible to discover some coincidence or other which would betray the fact. I asked her what the average length of these attacks had been. ‘From three to six weeks, perhaps.’ How long had Herr K.’s absences lasted? ‘Three to six weeks, too’, she was obliged to admit. Her illness was therefore a demonstration of her love for K., just as his wife’s was a demonstration of her dislike. It was only necessary to suppose that her behaviour had been the opposite of Frau K.’s and that she had been ill when he was absent and well when he had come back. And this really seemed to have been so, at least during the first period of the attacks. Later on it no doubt became necessary to obscure the coincidence between her attacks of illness and the absence of the man she secretly loved, lest its regularity should betray her secret. The length of the attacks would then remain as a trace of their original significance.

¹ An event of everyday occurrence between sisters.

² I shall discuss later on what further conclusion I drew from these gastric pains.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1377

I remembered that long before, while I was working at Charcot’s clinic, I had seen and heard how in cases of hysterical mutism writing operated vicariously in the place of speech. Such patients were able to write more fluently, quicker, and better than others did or than they themselves had done previously. The same thing had happened with Dora. In the first days of her attacks of aphonia ‘writing had always come specially easy to her’. No psychological elucidation was really required for this peculiarity, which was the expression of a physiological substitutive function enforced by necessity; it was noticeable, however, that such an elucidation was easily to be found. Herr K. used to write to her at length while he was travelling and to send her picture post-cards. It used to happen that she alone was informed as to the date of his return, and that his arrival took his wife by surprise. Moreover, that a person will correspond with an absent friend whom he cannot talk to is scarcely less obvious than that if he has lost his voice he will try to make himself understood in writing. Dora’s aphonia, then, allowed of the following symbolic interpretation. When the man she loved was away she gave up speaking;  speech had lost its value since she could not speak to him. On the other hand, writing gained in importance, as being the only means of communication with him in his absence.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1378

Am I now going on to assert that in every instance in which there are periodical attacks of aphonia we are to diagnose the existence of a loved person who is at times away from the patient?  Nothing could be further from my intention. The determination of Dora’s symptoms is far too specific for it to be possible to expect a frequent recurrence of the same accidental aetiology. But, if so, what is the value of our elucidation of the aphonia in the present case? Have we not merely allowed ourselves to become the victims of a jeu d’esprit? I think not. In this connection we must recall the question which has so often been raised, whether the symptoms of hysteria are of psychical or of somatic origin, or whether, if the former is granted, they are necessarily all of them psychically determined. Like so many other questions to which we find investigators returning again and again without success, this question is not adequately framed. The alternatives stated in it do not cover the real essence of the matter. As far as I can see, every hysterical symptom involves the participation of both sides. It cannot occur without the presence of a certain degree of somatic compliance offered by some normal or pathological process in or connected with one of the bodily organs. And it cannot occur more than once - and the capacity for repeating itself is one of the characteristics of a hysterical symptom - unless it has a psychical significance, a meaning. The hysterical symptom does not carry this meaning with it, but the meaning is lent to it, soldered to it, as it were; and in every instance the meaning can be a different one, according to the nature of the suppressed thoughts which are struggling for expression. However, there are a number of factors at work which tend to make less arbitrary the relations between the unconscious thoughts and the somatic processes that are at their disposal as a means of expression, and which tend to make those relations approximate to a few typical forms. For therapeutic purposes the most important determinants are those given by the fortuitous psychical material; the clearing-up of the symptoms is achieved by looking for their psychical significance. When everything that can be got rid of by psycho-analysis has been cleared away, we are in a position to form all kinds of conjectures, which probably meet the facts, as regards the somatic basis of the symptoms - a basis which is as a rule constitutional and organic. Thus in Dora’s case we shall not content ourselves with a psycho-analytic interpretation of her attacks of coughing and aphonia; but we shall also indicate the organic factor which was the source of the ‘somatic compliance’ that enabled her to express her love for a man who was periodically absent. And if the connection between the symptomatic expression and the unconscious mental content should strike us as being in this case a clever tour de force, we shall be relieved to hear that it succeeds in creating the same impression in every other case and in every other instance.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1379

I am prepared to be told at this point that there is no very great advantage in having been taught by psycho-analysis that the clue to the problem of hysteria is to be found not in ‘a peculiar instability of the molecules of the nerves’ or in a liability to ‘hypnoid states’ - but in a ‘somatic compliance’. But in reply to the objection I may remark that this new view has not only to some extent pushed the problem further back, but has also to some extent diminished it. We have no longer to deal with the whole problem, but only with the portion of it involving that particular characteristic of hysteria which differentiates it from other psychoneuroses. The mental events in all psycho-neuroses proceed for a considerable distance along the same lines before any question arises of the ‘somatic compliance’ which may afford the unconscious mental processes a physical outlet. When this factor is not forthcoming, something other than a hysterical symptom will arise out of the total situation; yet it will still be something of an allied nature, a phobia, perhaps, or an obsession - in short, a psychical symptom.

I now return to the reproach of malingering which Dora brought against her father. It soon became evident that this reproach corresponded to self-reproaches not only concerning her earlier states of ill-health but also concerning the present time. At such points the physician is usually faced by the task of guessing and filling in what the analysis offers him in the shape only of hints and allusions. I was obliged to point out to the patient that her present ill-health was just as much actuated by motives and was just as tendentious as had been Frau K.’s illness, which she had understood so well. There could be no doubt, I said, that she had an aim in view which she hoped to gain by her illness. That aim could be none other than to detach her father from Frau K. She had been unable to achieve this by prayers or arguments; perhaps she hoped to succeed by frightening her father (there was her farewell letter), or by awakening his pity (there were her fainting-fits), or if all this was in vain, at least she would be taking her revenge on him. She knew very well, I went on, how much he was attached to her, and that tears used to come into his eyes whenever he was asked after his daughter’s health. I felt quite convinced that she would recover at once if only her father were to tell her that he had sacrificed Frau K, for the sake of her health. But, I added, I hoped he would not let himself be persuaded to do this, for then she would have learned what a powerful weapon she had in her hands, and she would certainly not fail on every future occasion to make use once more of her liability to ill health. Yet if her father refused to give way to her, I was quite sure she would not let herself be deprived of her illness so easily.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1380

I will pass over the details which showed how entirely correct all of this was, and I will instead add a few general remarks upon the part played in hysteria by the motives of illness. A motive for being ill is sharply to be distinguished as a concept from a potentiality for illness - from the material out of which symptoms are formed. The motives have no share in the formation of symptoms, and indeed are not present at the beginning of the illness. They only appear secondarily to it; but it is not until they have appeared that the disease is fully constituted.¹ Their presence can be reckoned upon in every case in which there is real suffering and which is of fairly long standing. A symptom comes into the patient’s mental life at first as an unwelcome guest; it has everything against it; and that is why it may vanish so easily, apparently of its own accord, under the influence of time. To begin with there is no use to which it can be put in the domestic economy of the mind; but very often it succeeds in finding one secondarily. Some psychical current or other finds it convenient to make use of it, and in that way the symptom manages to obtain a secondary function and remains, as it were, anchored fast in the patient’s mental life. And so it happens that any one who tries to make him well is to his astonishment brought up against a powerful resistance, which teaches him that the patient’s intention of getting rid of his complaint is not so entirely and completely serious as it seemed.² Let us imagine a workman, a bricklayer, let us say, who has fallen off a house and been crippled, and now earns his livelihood by begging at the street-corner. Let us then suppose that a miracle-worker comes along and promises him to make his crooked leg straight and capable of walking. It would be unwise, I think, to look forward to seeing an expression of peculiar bliss upon the man’s features. No doubt at the time of the accident he felt he was extremely unlucky, when he realized that he would never be able to do any more work and would have to starve or live upon charity. But since then the very thing which in the first instance threw him out of employment has become his source of income: he lives by his disablement. If that is taken from him he may become totally helpless. He has in the meantime forgotten his trade and lost his habits of industry; he has grown accustomed to idleness, and perhaps to drink as well.

¹ [Footnote added 1923:] This is not quite right. The statement that the motives of illness are not present at the beginning of the illness, but only appear secondarily to it, cannot be maintained. In the very next paragraph motives for being ill are mentioned which were in existence before the outbreak of illness, and were partly responsible for that outbreak. I subsequently found a better way of meeting the facts, by introducing a distinction between the primary advantage derived from the illness and the secondary one. The motive for being ill is, of course, invariably the gaining of some advantage. What follows in the later sentences of this paragraph applies to the secondary gain. But in every neurotic illness a primary gain has also to be recognized. In the first place, falling ill involves a saving of psychical effort; it emerges as being economically the most convenient solution where there is a mental conflict (we speak of a ‘flight into illness’), even though in most cases the ineffectiveness of such an escape becomes manifest at a later stage. This element in the primary gain may be described as the internal or psychological one, and it is, so to say, a constant one. But beyond this, external factors (such as in the instance given of the situation of a woman subjugated by her husband) may contribute motives for falling ill; and these will constitute the external element in the primary gain.

² A man of letters, who incidentally is also a physician - Arthur Schnitzler - has expressed this piece of knowledge very correctly in his Paracelsus.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1381

The motives for being ill often begin to be active even in childhood. A little girl in her greed for love does not enjoy having to share the affection of her parents with her brothers and sisters; and she notices that the whole of their affection is lavished on her once more whenever she arouses their anxiety by falling ill. She has now discovered a means of enticing out her parents’ love, and will make use of that means as soon as she has the necessary psychical material at her disposal for producing an illness. When such a child has grown up to be a woman she may find all the demands she used to make in her childhood countered owing to her marriage with an inconsiderate husband, who may subjugate her will, mercilessly exploit her capacity for work, and lavish neither his affection nor his money upon her. In that case ill-health will be her one weapon for maintaining her position. It will procure her the care she longs for; it will force her husband to make pecuniary sacrifices for her and to show her consideration, as he would never have done while she was well; and it will compel him to treat her with solicitude if she recovers, for otherwise a relapse will threaten. Her state of ill-health will have every appearance of being objective and involuntary - the very doctor who treats her will bear witness to the fact; and for that reason she will no need to feel any conscious self-reproaches at making such successful use of a means which she had found effective in her years of childhood.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1382

And yet illnesses of this kind are the result of intention for the purposes they serve . They are as a rule levelled at a particular person, and consequently vanish with that person’s departure. The crudest and most commonplace views on the character of hysterical disorder - such as are to be heard from uneducated relatives or nurses - are in a certain sense right. It is true that the paralysed and bedridden woman would spring to her feet if a fire were to break out in her room, and that the spoiled wife would forget all her sufferings if her child were to fall dangerously ill or if some catastrophe were to threaten the family circumstances. People who speak of the patients in this way are right except upon a single point: they overlook the psychological distinction between what is conscious and what is unconscious. This may be permissible where children are concerned, but with adults it is no longer possible. That is why all these asseverations that it is ‘only a question of willing’ and all the encouragements and abuse that are addressed to the patient are of no avail. An attempt must first be made by the roundabout methods of analysis to convince the patient herself of the existence in her of an intention to be ill.

It is in combating the motives of illness that the weak point in every kind of therapeutic treatment of hysteria lies. This in quite generally true, and it applies equally to psycho-analysis. Destiny has an easier time of it in this respect: it need not concern itself either with the patient’s constitution or with his pathogenic material; it has only to take away a motive for being ill, and the patient is temporarily or perhaps even permanently freed from his illness. How many fewer miraculous cures and spontaneous disappearances of symptoms should we physicians have to register in cases of hysteria, if we were more often given a sight of the human interests which the patient keeps hidden from us!  In one case, some stated period of time has elapsed; in a second, consideration for some other person has ceased to operate; in a third, the situation has been fundamentally changed by some external event - and the whole disorder which up till then had shown the greatest obstinacy, vanishes at a single blow, apparently of its own accord, but really because it has been deprived of its most powerful motive, one of the uses to which it has been put in the patient’s life.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1383

Motives that support the patient in being ill are probably to be found in all fully developed cases. But there are some in which the motives are purely internal - such as desire for self-punishment, that is, penitence and remorse. It will be found much easier to solve the therapeutic problem in such cases than in those in which the illness is related to the attainment of some external aim. In Dora’s case that aim was clearly to touch her father’s heart and to detach him from Frau K.

None of her father’s actions seemed to have embittered her so much as his readiness to consider the scene by the lake as a product of her imagination. She was almost beside herself at the idea of its being supposed that she had merely fancied something on that occasion. For a long time I was in perplexity as to what the self-reproach could be which lay behind her passionate repudiation of this explanation of the episode. It was justifiable to suspect that there was something concealed, for a reproach which misses the mark gives no lasting offence. On the other hand, I came to the conclusion that Dora’s story must correspond to the facts in every respect. No sooner had she grasped Herr K.’s intention than, without letting him finish what he had to say, she had given him a slap in the face and hurried away. Her behaviour must have seemed as incomprehensible to the man after she had left him as to us, for he must long before have gathered from innumerable small signs that he was secure of the girl’s affections. In our discussion of Dora’s second dream we shall come upon the solution of this riddle as well as upon the self-reproach which we have hitherto failed to discover.

As she kept on repeating her complaints against her father with a wearisome monotony, and as at the same time her cough continued, I was led to think that this symptom might have some meaning in connection with her father. And apart from this, the explanation of the symptom which I had hitherto obtained was far from fulfilling the requirements which I am accustomed to make of such explanations. According to a rule which I had found confirmed over and over again by experience, though I had not yet ventured to erect it into a general principle, a symptom signifies the representation - the realization - of a phantasy with a sexual content, that is to say, it signifies a sexual situation. It would be better to say that at least one of the meanings of a symptom is the representation of a sexual phantasy, but that no such limitation is imposed upon the content of its other meanings. Any one who takes up psycho-analytic work will quickly discover that a symptom has more than one meaning and serves to represent several unconscious mental processes simultaneously. And I should like to add that in my estimation a single unconscious mental process or phantasy will scarcely ever suffice for the production of a symptom.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1384

An opportunity very soon occurred for interpreting Dora’s nervous cough in this way by means of an imagined sexual situation. She had once again been insisting that Frau K. only loved her father because he was ‘ein vermögender Mann [‘a man of means’]. Certain details of the way in which she expressed herself (which I pass over here, like most other purely technical parts of the analysis) led me to see that behind this phrase its opposite lay concealed, namely, that her father was ‘ein unvermögender Mann’ [‘a man without means’]. This could only be meant in a sexual sense - that her father, as a man, was without means, was impotent.¹ Dora confirmed this interpretation from her conscious knowledge; whereupon I pointed out the contradiction she was involved in if on the one hand she continued to insist that her father’s relation with Frau K. was a common love-affair, and on the other hand maintained that her father was impotent, or in other words incapable of carrying on an affair of such a kind. Her answer showed that she had no need to admit the contradiction. She knew very well, she said, that there was more than one way of obtaining sexual gratification. (The source of this piece of knowledge, however, was once more untraceable.) I questioned her further, whether she referred to the use of organs other than the genitals for the purpose of sexual intercourse, and she replied in the affirmative. I could then go on to say that in that case she must be thinking of precisely those parts of the body which in her case were in a state of irritation, - the throat and the oral cavity. To be sure, she would not hear of going so far as this in recognizing her own thoughts; and indeed, if the occurrence of the symptom was to be made possible at all, it was essential that she should not be completely clear on the subject. But the conclusion was inevitable that with her spasmodic cough, which, as is usual, was referred for its exciting stimulus to a tickling in her throat, she pictured to herself a scene of sexual gratification per os between the two people whose love-affair occupied her mind so incessantly. A very short time after she had tacitly accepted this explanation her cough vanished - which fitted in very well with my view; but I do not wish to lay too much stress upon this development, since her cough had so often before disappeared spontaneously.

¹ [‘Unvermögend’ means literally ‘unable’, and is commonly used in the sense of both ‘not rich’ and ‘impotent’.]

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1385

This short piece of the analysis may perhaps have excited in the medical reader - apart from the scepticism to which he is entitled - feelings of astonishment and horror; and I am prepared at this point to look into these two reactions so as to discover whether they are justifiable. The astonishment is probably caused by my daring to talk about such delicate and unpleasant subjects to a young girl - or, for that matter, to any woman who is sexually active. The horror is aroused, no doubt, by the possibility that an inexperienced girl could know about practices of such a kind and could occupy her imagination with them. I would advise recourse to moderation and reasonableness upon both points. There is no cause for indignation either in the one case or in the other. It is possible for a man to talk to girls and women upon sexual matters of every kind without doing them harm and without bringing suspicion upon himself, so long as, in the first place, he adopts a particular way of doing it, and, in the second place, can make them feel convinced that it is unavoidable. A gynaecologist, after all, under the same conditions, does not hesitate to make them submit to uncovering every possible part of their body. The best way of speaking about such things is to be dry and direct; and that is at the same time the method furthest removed from the prurience with which the same subjects are handled in ‘society’, and to which girls and women alike are so thoroughly accustomed. I call bodily organs and processes by their technical names, and I tell these to the patient if they - the names, I mean - happen to be unknown to her. J’appelle un chat un chat. I have certainly heard of some people - doctors and laymen - who are scandalized by a therapeutic method in which conversations of this sort occur, and who appear to envy either me or my patients the titillation which, according to their notions, such a method must afford. But I am too well acquainted with the respectability of these gentry to excite myself over them. I shall avoid the temptation of writing a satire upon them. But there is one thing that I will mention: often, after I have for some time treated a patient who had not at first found it easy to be open about sexual matters, I have had the satisfaction of hearing her exclaim: ‘Why, after all, your treatment is far more respectable than Mr. X.’s conversation!’

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1386

No one can undertake the treatment of a case of hysteria until he is convinced of the impossibility of avoiding the mention of sexual subjects, or unless he is prepared to allow himself to be convinced by experience. The right attitude is: ‘pour faire une omlette il faut casser des oeufs.’ The patients themselves are easy to convince; and there are only too many opportunities of doing so in the course of the treatment. There is no necessity for feeling any compunction at discussing the facts of normal or abnormal sexual life with them. With the exercise of a little caution all that is done is to translate into conscious ideas what was already known in the unconscious; and, after all, the whole effectiveness of the treatment is based upon our knowledge that the affect attached to an unconscious idea operates more strongly and, since it cannot be inhibited, more injuriously than the affect attached to a conscious one. There is never any danger of corrupting an inexperienced girl. For where there is no knowledge of sexual processes even in the unconscious, no hysterical symptom will arise; and where hysteria is found there can no longer be any question of ‘innocence of mind’ in the sense in which parents and educators use the phrase. With children of ten, of twelve, or of fourteen, with boys and girls alike, I have satisfied myself that the truth of this statement can invariably be relied upon.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1387

As regards the second kind of emotional reaction, which is not directed against me this time, but against my patient - supposing that my view of her is correct - and which regards the perverse nature of her phantasies as horrible, I should like to say emphatically that a medical man has no business to indulge in such passionate condemnation. I may also remark in passing that it seems to me superfluous for a physician who is writing upon the aberrations of the sexual instincts to seize every opportunity of inserting into the text expressions of his personal repugnance at such revolting things. We are faced by a fact; and it is to be hoped that we shall grow accustomed to it, when we have put our own tastes on one side. We must learn to speak without indignation of what we call the sexual perversions - instances in which the sexual function has extended its limits in respect either to the part of the body concerned or to the sexual object chosen. The uncertainty in regard to the boundaries of what is to be called normal sexual life, when we take different races and different epochs into account, should in itself be enough to cool the zealot’s ardour. We surely ought not to forget that the perversion which is the most repellent to us, the sensual love of a man for a man, was not only tolerated by a people so far our superiors in cultivation as were the Greeks, but was actually entrusted by them with important social functions. The sexual life of each one of us extends to a slight degree - now in this direction, now in that - beyond the narrow lines imposed as the standard of normality. The perversions are neither bestial nor degenerate in the emotional sense of the word. They are a development of germs all of which are contained in the undifferentiated sexual disposition of the child, and which, by being suppressed or by being diverted to higher, asexual aims - by being ‘sublimated’ - are destined to provide the energy for a great number of our cultural achievements. When, therefore, any one has become a gross and manifest pervert, it would be more correct to say that he has remained one, for he exhibits a certain stage of inhibited development. All psychoneurotics are persons with strongly marked perverse tendencies, which have been repressed in the course of their development and have become unconscious. Consequently their unconscious phantasies show precisely the same content as the documentarily recorded actions of perverts - even though they have not read Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, to which simple-minded people attribute such a large share of the responsibility for the production of perverse tendencies. Psychoneuroses are, so to speak, the negative of perversions. In neurotics their sexual constitution, under which the effects of heredity are included, operates in combination with any accidental influences in their life which may disturb the development of normal sexuality. A stream of water which meets with an obstacle in the river-bed is dammed up and flows back into old channels which had formerly seemed fated to run dry. The motive forces leading to the formation of hysterical symptoms draw their strength not only from repressed normal sexuality but also from unconscious perverse activities.¹

¹ These remarks upon the sexual perversions had been written some years before the appearance of Bloch’s excellent book (Beiträge zur Äetiologie der Psychopathia sexualis, 1902 and 1903). See also my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, published this year.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1388

The less repellent of the so-called sexual perversions are very widely diffused among the whole population, as every one knows except medical writers upon the subject. Or, I should rather say, they know it too; only they take care to forget it at the moment when they take up their pens to write about it. So it is not to be wondered at that this hysterical girl of nearly nineteen, who had heard of the occurrence of such a method of sexual intercourse ( sucking at the male organ), should have developed an unconscious phantasy of this sort and should have given it expression by an irritation in her throat and by coughing. Nor would it have been very extraordinary if she had arrived at such a phantasy even without having had any enlightenment from external sources - an occurrence which I have quite certainly observed in other patients. For in her case a noteworthy fact afforded the necessary somatic prerequisite for this independent creation of a phantasy which would coincide with the practices of perverts. She remembered very well that in her childhood she had been a thumb-sucker. Her father, too recollected breaking her of the habit after it had persisted into her fourth or fifth year. Dora herself had a clear picture of a scene from her early childhood in which she was sitting on the floor in a corner sucking her left thumb and at the same time tugging with her right hand at the lobe of her brother’s ear as he sat quietly beside her. Here we have an instance of the complete form of self-gratification by sucking, as it has also been described to me by other patients, who had subsequently become anaesthetic and hysterical.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1389

One of these patients gave me a piece of information which sheds a clear light on the origin of this curious habit. This young woman had never broken herself of the habit of sucking. She retained a memory of her childhood, dating back, according to her, to the first half of her second year, in which she saw herself sucking at her nurse’s breast and at the same time pulling rhythmically at the lobe of her nurse’s ear. No one will feel inclined to dispute, I think, that the mucous membrane of the lips and mouth is to be regarded as a primary ‘erotogenic zone’, since it preserves this earlier significance in the act of kissing, which is looked upon as normal. An intense activity of this erotogenic zone at an early age thus determines the subsequent presence of a somatic compliance on the part of the tract of mucous membrane which begins at the lips. Thus, at a time when the sexual object proper, that is, the male organ, has already become known, circumstances may arise which once more increase the excitation of the oral zone, whose erotogenic character has, as we have seen, been retained. It then needs very little creative power to substitute the sexual object of the moment (the penis) for the original object (the nipple) or for the finger which does duty for it, and to place the current sexual object in the situation in which gratification was originally obtained. So we see that this excessively repulsive and perverted phantasy of sucking at a penis has the most innocent origin. It is a new version of what may be described as a prehistoric impression of sucking at the mother’s or nurse’s breast - an impression which has usually been revived by contact with children who are being nursed. In most instances a cow’s udder has aptly played the part of an image intermediate between a nipple and a penis.

The interpretation we have just been discussing of Dora’s throat symptoms may also give rise to a further remark. It may be asked how this sexual situation imagined by her can be compatible with our other explanation of the symptoms. That explanation, it will be remembered, was to the effect that the coming and going of the symptoms reflected the presence and absence of the man she was in love with, and, as regards his wife’s behaviour, expressed the following thought: ‘If I were his wife, I should love him in quite a different way; I should be ill (from longing, let us say) when he was away, and well (from joy) when he was home again.’ To this objection I must reply that my experience in the clearing-up of hysterical symptoms has shown that it is not necessary for the various meanings of a symptom to be compatible with one another, that is, to fit together into a connected whole. It is enough that the unity should be constituted by the subject-matter which has given rise to all the various phantasies. In the present case, moreover, compatibility even of the first kind is not out of the question. One of the two meanings is related more to the cough, and the other to the aphonia and the periodicity of the disorder. A closer analysis would probably have disclosed a far greater number of mental elements in relation to the details of the illness.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1390

We have already learnt that it quite regularly happens that a single symptom corresponds to several meanings simultaneously. We may now add that it can express several meanings in succession. In the course of years a symptom can change its meaning or its chief meaning, or the leading role can pass from one meaning to another. It is as though there were a conservative trait in the character of neuroses which ensures that a symptom that has once been formed shall if possible be retained, even though the unconscious thought to which it gave expression has lost its meaning . Moreover, there is no difficulty in explaining this tendency towards the retention of a symptom upon a mechanical basis. The production of a symptom of this kind is so difficult, the translation of a purely psychical excitation into physical terms - the process which I have called ‘conversion’ - depends on the concurrence of so many favourable conditions, the somatic compliance necessary for conversion is so seldom forthcoming, that an impulsion towards the discharge of an unconscious excitation will so far as possible make use of any channel for discharge which may already be in existence. It appears to be far more difficult to create a fresh conversion than to form paths of association between a new thought which is in need of discharge and the old one which is no longer in need of it. The current flows along these paths from the new source of excitation to the old point of discharge - pouring into the symptom, in the words of the Gospel, like new wine into an old bottle. These remarks would make it seem that the somatic side of a hysterical symptom is the more stable of the two and the harder to replace, while the psychical side is a variable element for which a substitute can more easily be found. Yet we should not try to infer anything from this comparison as regards the relative importance of the two elements. From the point of view of mental therapeutics the mental side must always be the more significant.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1391

Dora’s incessant repetition of the same thoughts about her father’s relations with Frau K. made it possible to derive still further important material from the analysis.

A train of thought such as this may be described as excessively intense, or better reinforced, or ‘supervalent’ [‘überwertig’] in Wernicke’s sense. It shows its pathological character in spite of its apparently reasonable content, by the single peculiarity that no amount of conscious and voluntary effort of thought on the patient’s part is able to dissipate or remove it. A normal train of thought, however intense it may be, can eventually be disposed of. Dora felt quite rightly that her thoughts about her father required to be judged in a special way. ‘I can think of nothing else’, she complained again and again. ‘I know my brother says we children have no right to criticize this behaviour of Father’s. He declares that we ought not to trouble ourselves about it, and ought even to be glad, perhaps, that he has found a woman he can love, since Mother understands him so little. I can quite see that, and I should like to think the same as my brother, but I can’t. I can’t forgive him for it.’¹

Now what is one to do in the face of a supervalent thought like this, after one has heard what its conscious grounds are and listened to the ineffectual protests made against it? Reflection will suggest that this excessively intense train of thought must owe its reinforcement to the unconscious. It cannot be resolved by any effort of thought, either because it itself reaches with its root down into unconscious, repressed material, or because another unconscious thought lies concealed behind it. In the latter case, the concealed thought is usually the direct contrary of the supervalent one. Contrary thoughts are always closely connected with each other and are often paired off in such a way that the one thought is excessively intensely conscious while its counterpart is repressed and unconscious. This relation between the two thoughts is an effect of the process of repression. For repression is often achieved by means of an excessive reinforcement of the thought contrary to the one which is to be repressed. This process I call reactive reinforcement, and the thought which asserts itself with excessive intensity in consciousness and (in the same way as a prejudice) cannot be removed I call a reactive thought. The two thoughts then act towards each other much like the two needles of an astatic galvanometer. The reactive thought keeps the objectionable one under repression by means of a certain surplus of intensity; but for that reason it itself is ‘damped’ and proof against conscious efforts of thought. So that the way to deprive the excessively intense thought of its reinforcement is by bringing its repressed contrary into consciousness.

¹ A supervalent thought of this kind is often the only symptom, beyond deep depression, of a pathological condition which is usually described as ‘melancholia’, but which can be cleared up by psycho-analysis like a hysteria.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1392

We must also be prepared to meet with instances in which the supervalence of a thought is due not to the presence of one only of these two causes but to a concurrence of both of them. Other complications, too, may arise, but they can easily be fitted into the general scheme.

Let us now apply our theory to the instance provided by Dora’s case. We will begin with the first hypothesis, namely, that her preoccupation with her father’s relations to Frau K, owed its obsessive character to the fact that its root was unknown to her and lay in the unconscious. It is not difficult to divine the nature of that root from her circumstances and her conduct. Her behaviour obviously went far beyond what would have been appropriate to filial concern. She felt and acted more like a jealous wife - in a way which would have been comprehensible in her mother. By her ultimatum to her father (‘either her or me’), by the scenes she used to make, by the suicidal intentions she allowed to transpire, - by all this she was clearly putting herself in her mother’s place. If we have rightly guessed the nature of the imaginary sexual situation which underlay her cough, in that phantasy she must have been putting herself in Frau K.’s place. She was therefore identifying herself both with the woman her father had once loved and with the woman he loved now. The inference is obvious that her affection for her father was a much stronger one than she knew or than she would have cared to admit: in fact, that she was in love with him.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1393

I have learnt to look upon unconscious love relations like this (which are marked by their abnormal consequences) - between a father and a daughter, or between a mother and a son - as a revival of germs of feeling in infancy. I have shown at length elsewhere¹ at what an early age sexual attraction makes itself felt between parents and children, and I have explained that the legend of Oedipus is probably to be regarded as a poetical rendering of what is typical in these relations. Distinct traces are probably to be found in most people of an early partiality of this kind - on the part of a daughter for her father, or on the part of a son for his mother; but it must be assumed to be more intense from the very first in the case of those children whose constitution marks them down for a neurosis, who develop prematurely and have a craving for love. At this point certain other influences, which need not be discussed here, come into play, and lead to a fixation of this rudimentary feeling of love or to a reinforcement of it; so that it turns into something (either while the child is still young or not until it has reached the age of puberty) which must be put on a par with a sexual inclination and which, like the latter, has the forces of the libido at its command.² The nature of her disposition had always drawn her towards her father, and his numerous illnesses were bound to have increased her affection for him. In some of these illnesses he would allow no one but her to discharge the lighter duties of nursing. He had been so proud of the early growth of her intelligence that he had made her his confidante while she was still a child. It was really she and not her mother whom Frau K.’s appearance had driven out of more than one position.

¹ In my Interpretation of Dreams, 1900a, and in the third of my Three Essays, 1905d.

² The decisive factor in this connection is no doubt the early appearance of true genital sensations, either spontaneously or as a result of seduction or masturbation. (See below.)

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1394

When I told Dora that I could not avoid supposing that her affection for her father must at a very early moment have amounted to her being completely in love with him, she of course gave me her usual reply: ‘I don’t remember that.’ But she immediately went on to tell me something analogous about a seven-year-old girl who was her cousin (on her mother’s side) and in whom she often thought she saw a kind of reflection of her own childhood. This little girl had (not for the first time) been the witness of a heated dispute between her parents, and, when Dora happened to come in on a visit soon afterwards, whispered in her ear: ‘You can’t think how I hate that person!’ (pointing to her mother), ‘and when she’s dead I shall marry Daddy.’ I am in the habit of regarding associations such as this, which bring forward something that agrees with the content of an assertion of mine, as a confirmation from the unconscious of what I have said. No other kind of ‘Yes’ can be extracted from the unconscious; there is no such thing at all as an unconscious ‘No’.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1923:] There is another very remarkable and entirely trustworthy form of confirmation from the unconscious, which I had not recognized at the time this was written: namely, an exclamation on the part of the patient of ‘I didn’t think that’, or ‘I didn’t think of that’. This can be translated point-blank into: ‘Yes, I was unconscious of that.’

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1395

For years on end she had given no expression to this passion for her father. On the contrary, she had for a long time been on the closest terms with the woman who had supplanted her with her father, and she had actually, as we know from her self-reproaches, facilitated this woman’s relations with her father. Her own love for her father had therefore been recently revived; and, if so, the question arises to what end this had happened. Clearly as a reactive symptom, so as to suppress something else - something, that is, that still exercised power in the unconscious. Considering how things stood, I could not help supposing in the first instance that what was suppressed in this manner was her love of Herr K. I could not avoid the assumption that she was still in love with him, but that, for unknown reasons, since the scene by the lake her love had aroused in her violent feelings of opposition, and that the girl had brought forward and reinforced her old affection for her father in order to avoid and further necessity for paying conscious attention to the love which she had felt in the first years of her girlhood and which had now become distressing to her. In this way I gained an insight into a conflict which was well calculated to unhinge the girl’s mind. On the one hand she was filled with regret at having rejected the man’s proposal, and with longing for his company and all the little signs of his affection; while on the other hand these feelings of tenderness and longing were combated by powerful forces, amongst which her pride was one of the most obvious. Thus she had succeeded in persuading herself that she had done with Herr K. - that was the advantage she derived from this typical process of repression; and yet she was obliged to summon up her infantile affection for her father and to exaggerate it, in order to protect herself against the feelings of love which were constantly pressing forward into consciousness. The further fact that she was almost incessantly a prey to the most embittered jealousy seemed to admit of still another determination.¹

¹ We shall come upon this.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1396

My expectations were by no means disappointed when this explanation of mine was met by Dora with a most emphatic negative. The ‘No’  uttered by a patient after a repressed thought has been presented to his conscious perception for the first time does no more than register the existence of a repression and its severity; it acts, as it were, as a gauge of the repression’s strength. If this ‘No’, instead of being regarded as the expression of an impartial judgement (of which, indeed, the patient is incapable), is ignored, and if work is continued, the first evidence soon begins to appear that in such a case ‘No’  signifies the desired ‘Yes’. Dora admitted that she found it impossible to be as angry with Herr K. as he had deserved. She told me that one day she had met Herr K. in the street while she was walking with a cousin of hers who did not know him. The other girl had exclaimed all at once: ‘Why, Dora, what’s wrong with you? You’ve gone as white as a sheet!’ She herself had felt nothing of this change of colour; but I explained to her that the expression of emotion and the play of features obey the unconscious rather than the conscious, and are a means of betraying the former.¹ Another time Dora came to me in the worst of tempers after having been uniformly cheerful for several days. She could give no explanation of this. She felt so contrary to-day, she said; it was her uncle’s birthday, and she could not bring herself to congratulate him, she did not know why. My powers of interpretation were at a low ebb that day; I let her go on talking, and she suddenly recollected that it was Herr K.’s birthday too - a fact which I did not fail to use against her. And it was then no longer hard to explain why the handsome presents she had had on her own birthday a few days before had given her no pleasure. One gift was missing, and that was Herr K.’s, the gift which had plainly once been the most prized of all.

Nevertheless Dora persisted in denying my contention for some time longer, until, towards the end of the analysis, the conclusive proof of its correctness came to light.

¹ Compare the lines:

Ruhig mag ich Euch erscheinen,

Ruhig gehen sehn.

[Quiet can I watch thy coming,

Quiet watch thee go.]

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1397

I must now turn to consider a further complication to which I should certainly give no space if I were a man of letters engaged upon the creation of a mental state like this for a short story, instead of being a medical man engaged upon its dissection. The element to which I must now allude can only serve to obscure and efface the outlines of the fine poetic conflict which we have been able to ascribe to Dora. This element would rightly fall a sacrifice to the censorship of a writer, for he, after all, simplifies and abstracts when he appears in the character of a psychologist. But in the world of reality, which I am trying to depict here, a complication of motives, an accumulation and conjunction of mental activities - in a word, overdetermination - is the rule. For behind Dora’s supervalent train of thought which was concerned with her father’s relations with Frau K. there lay concealed a feeling of jealousy which had that lady as its object - a feeling, that is, which could only be based upon an affection on Dora’s part for one of her own sex. It has long been known and often been pointed out that at the age of puberty boys and girls show clear signs, even in normal cases, of the existence of an affection for people of their own sex. A romantic and sentimental friendship with one of her school friends, accompanied by vows, kisses, promises of eternal correspondence, and all the sensibility of jealousy, is the common precursor of a girl’s first serious passion for a man. Thenceforward, in favourable circumstances, the homosexual current of feeling often runs completely dry. But if a girl is not happy in her love for a man, the current is often set flowing again by the libido in later years and is increased up to a greater or lesser degree of intensity. If this much can be established without difficulty of healthy persons, and if we take into account what has already been said about the fuller development in neurotics of the normal germs of perversion, we shall expect to find in these latter too a fairly strong homosexual predisposition. It must, indeed, be so; for I have never yet come through a single psycho-analysis of a man or a woman without having to take into account a very considerable current of homosexuality. When, in a hysterical woman or girl, the sexual libido which is directed towards men has been energetically suppressed, it will regularly be found that the libido which is directed towards women has become vicariously reinforced and even to some extent conscious.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1398

I shall not in this place go any further into this important subject, which is especially indispensable to an understanding of hysteria in men, because Dora’s analysis came to an end before it could throw any light on this side of her mental life. But I should like to recall the governess, whom I have already mentioned, and with whom Dora had at first enjoyed the closest interchange of thought, until she discovered that she was being admired and fondly treated not for her own sake but for her father’s; whereupon she had obliged the governess to leave. She used also to dwell with noticeable frequency and a peculiar emphasis on the story of another estrangement which appeared inexplicable even to herself. She had always been on particularly good terms with the younger of her two cousins the girl who had later on become engaged - and had shared all sorts of secrets with her. When, for the first time after Dora had broken off her stay by the lake, her father was going back to B--, she had naturally refused to go with him. This cousin had then been asked to travel with him instead, and she had accepted the invitation. From that time forward Dora had felt a coldness towards her, and she herself was surprised to find how indifferent she had become, although, as she admitted, she had very little ground for complaint against her. These instances of sensitiveness led me to inquire what her relations with Frau K. had been up till the time of the breach. I then found that the young woman and the scarcely grown girl had lived for years on a footing of the closest intimacy. When Dora stayed with the K.’s she used to share a bedroom with Frau K., and the husband used to be quartered elsewhere. She had been the wife’s confidante and adviser in all the difficulties of her married life. There was nothing they had not talked about. Medea had been quite content that Creusa should make friends with her two children; and she certainly did nothing to interfere with the relations between the girl and the children’s father. How Dora managed to fall in love with the man about whom her beloved friend had so many bad things to say is an interesting psychological problem. We shall not be far from solving it when we realize that thoughts in the unconscious live very comfortably side by side, and even contraries get on together without disputes - a state of things which persists often enough even in the conscious.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1399

When Dora talked about Frau K., she used to praise her ‘adorable white body’ in accents more appropriate to a lover than to a defeated rival. Another time she told me, more in sorrow than in anger, that she was convinced the presents her father had brought her had been chosen by Frau K., for she recognized her taste. Another time, again, she pointed out that, evidently through the agency of Frau K., she had been given a present of some jewellery which was exactly like some that she had seen in Frau K.’s possession and had wished for aloud at the time. Indeed, I can say in general that I never heard her speak a harsh or angry word against the lady, although from the point of view of her supervalent thought she should have regarded her as the prime author of her misfortunes. She seemed to behave inconsequently; but her apparent inconsequence was precisely the manifestation of a complicating current of feeling. For how had this woman to whom Dora was so enthusiastically devoted behaved to her? After Dora had brought forward her accusation against Herr K., and her father had written to him and had asked for an explanation, Herr K. had replied in the first instance by protesting sentiments of the highest esteem for her and by proposing that he should come to the manufacturing town to clear up every misunderstanding. A few weeks later, when her father spoke to him at B--, there was no longer any question of esteem. On the contrary, Herr K. spoke of her with disparagement, and produced as his trump card the reflection that no girl who read such books and was interested in such things could have any title to a man’s respect. Frau K., therefore, had betrayed her and had calumniated her; for it had only been with her that she had read Mantegazza and discussed forbidden topics. It was a repetition of what had happened with the governess: Frau K. had not loved her for her own sake but on account of her father. Frau K. had sacrificed her without a moment’s hesitation so that her relations with her father might not be disturbed. This mortification touched her, perhaps, more nearly and had a greater pathogenic effect than the other one, which she tried to use as a screen for it, - the fact that she had been sacrificed by her father. Did not the obstinacy with which she retained the particular amnesia concerning the sources of her forbidden knowledge point directly to the great emotional importance for her of the accusation against her upon that score, and consequently to her betrayal by her friend?

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1400

I believe, therefore, that I am not mistaken in supposing that Dora’s supervalent train of thought, which was concerned with her father’s relations with Frau K., was designed not only for the purpose of suppressing her love for Herr K., which had once been conscious, but also to conceal her love for Frau K., which was in a deeper sense unconscious. The supervalent train of thought was directly contrary to the latter current of feeling. She told herself incessantly that her father had sacrificed her to this woman, and made noisy demonstrations to show that she grudged her the possession of her father; and in this was she concealed from herself the contrary fact, which was that she grudged her father Frau K.’s love, and had not forgiven the woman she loved for the disillusionment she had been caused by her betrayal. The jealous emotions of a woman were linked in the unconscious with a jealousy such as might have been felt by a man. These masculine or, more properly speaking, gynaecophilic currents of feeling are to be regarded as typical of the unconscious erotic life of hysterical girls.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1401

II

THE FIRST DREAM

Just at a moment when there was a prospect that the material that was coming up for analysis would throw light upon an obscure point in Dora’s childhood, she reported that a few nights earlier she had once again had a dream which she had already dreamt in exactly the same way on many previous occasions. A periodically recurrent dream was by its very nature particularly well calculated to arouse my curiosity; and in any case it was justifiable in the interests of the treatment to consider the way in which the dream worked into the analysis as a whole. I therefore determined to make an especially careful investigation of it.

Here is the dream as related by Dora: ‘A house was on fire.¹ My father was standing beside my bed and woke me up. I dressed quickly. Mother wanted to stop and save her jewel-case; but Father said: "I refuse to let myself and my two children be burnt for the sake of your jewel-case." We hurried downstairs, and as soon as I was outside I woke up.’

As the dream was a recurrent one, I naturally asked her when she had first dreamt it. She told me she did not know. But she remembered having had the dream three nights in succession at L-- (the place on the lake where the scene with Herr K. had taken place ), and it had now come back again a few nights earlier, here.² My expectations from the clearing-up of the dream were naturally heightened when I heard of its connection with the events at L--. But I wanted to discover first what had been the exciting cause of its recent recurrence, and I therefore asked Dora to take the dream bit by bit and tell me what occurred to her in connection with it. She had already had some training in dream-interpretation from having previously analysed a few minor specimens.

¹ In answer to an inquiry Dora told me that there had never really been a fire at their house.

² The content of the dream makes it possible to establish that it in fact  occurred for the first time at L--.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1402

‘Something occurs to me,’ she said, ‘but it cannot belong to the dream, for it is quite recent, whereas I have certainly had the dream before.’

‘That makes no difference,’ I replied. ‘Start away! It will simply turn out to be the most recent thing that fits in with the dream.’

‘Very well, then. Father has been having a dispute with Mother in the last few days, because she locks the dining-room door at night. My brother’s room, you see, has no separate entrance, but can only be reached through the dining-room. Father does not want my brother to be locked in like that at night. He says it will not do: something might happen in the night so that it might be necessary to leave the room.’

‘And that made you think of the risk of fire?’

‘Yes.’

‘Now, I should like you to pay close attention to the exact words you used. We may have to come back to them. You said that "something might happen in the night so that it might be necessary to leave the room".’

But Dora had now discovered the connecting link between the recent exciting cause of the dream and the original one, for she continued:

‘When we arrived at L-- that time, Father and I, he openly said he was afraid of fire. We arrived in a violent thunderstorm, and saw the small wooden house without any lightning-conductor. So his anxiety was quite natural.’

What I now had to do was to establish the relation between the events at L-- and the recurrent dreams which she had had there. I therefore said: ‘Did you have the dream during your first nights at L-- or during your last ones? in other words, before or after the scene in the wood by the lake of which we have heard so much?’ (I must explain that I knew that the scene had not occurred on the very first day, and that she had remained at L-- for a few days after it without giving any hint of the incident.)

¹ I laid stress on these words because they took me aback. They seemed to have an ambiguous ring about them. Are not certain physical needs referred to in the same words?  Now, in a line of associations ambiguous words (or, as we may call them, ‘switch-words’) act like points at a junction. If the points are switched across from the position in which they appear to lie in the dream, then we find ourselves on another set of rails; and along this second track run the thoughts which we are in search of but which still lie concealed behind the dream.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1403

Her first reply was that she did not know, but after a while she added: ‘Yes. I think it was after the scene.’

So now I knew that the dream was a reaction to that experience. But why had it recurred there three times? I continued my questions: ‘How long did you stop on at L-- after the scene?’

‘Four more nights. On the following day I went away with Father.’

‘Now I am certain that the dream was an immediate effect of your experience with Herr K. It was at L-- that you dreamed it for the first time, and not before. You have only introduced this uncertainty in your memory so as to obliterate the connection in your mind.¹ But the figures do not quite fit in to my satisfaction yet. If you stayed at L-- for four nights longer, the dream might have occurred four times over. Perhaps this was so?’

She no longer disputed my contention; but instead of answering my question she proceeded:² ‘In the afternoon after our trip on the lake, from which we (Herr K. and I) returned at midday, I had gone to lie down as usual on the sofa in the bed room to have a short sleep. I suddenly awoke and saw Herr K. standing beside me . . .’

‘In fact, just as you saw your father standing beside your bed in the dream?’

‘Yes. I asked him sharply what it was he wanted there. By way of reply he said he was not going to be prevented from coming into his own bedroom when he wanted; besides, there was something he wanted to fetch. This episode put me on my guard, and I asked Frau K. whether there was not a key to the bedroom door. The next morning I locked myself in while I was dressing. That afternoon, when I wanted to lock myself in so as to lie down again on the sofa, the key was gone. I was convinced that Herr K. had removed it.’

‘Then here we have the theme of locking or not locking a room which appeared in the first association to the dream and also happened to occur in the exciting cause of the recent recurrence of the dream.³ I wonder whether the phrase "I dressed quickly" may not also belong to this context?’

¹ Compare what was said on p. 1359 on the subject of doubt accompanying a recollection.

² This was because a fresh piece of material had to emerge from her memory before the question I had put could be answered.

³ I suspected, though I did not as yet say so to Dora, that she had seized upon this element on account of a symbolic meaning which it possessed. ‘Zimmer’ [‘room’] in dreams stands very frequently for ‘Frauenzimmer’ [a slightly derogatory word for ‘woman’; literally, ‘women’s apartments’]. The question whether a woman is ‘open’ or ‘shut’ can naturally not be a matter of indifference. It is well known, too, what sort of ‘key’ effects the opening in such a case.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1404

‘It was then that I made up my mind not to stop on with the K.’s without Father. On the subsequent mornings I could not help feeling afraid that Herr K. would surprise me while I was dressing: so I always dressed very quickly. You see, Father lived at the hotel, and Frau K. used always to go out early so as to go on expeditions with him. But Herr K. did not annoy me again.’

‘I understand. On the afternoon of the day after the scene in the wood you formed your intention of escaping from his persecution, and during the second, third, and fourth nights you had time to repeat that intention in your sleep. (You already knew on the second afternoon - before the dream, therefore - that you would not have the key on the following morning to lock yourself in with while you were dressing; and you could then form the design of dressing as quickly as possible.) But your dream recurred each night, for the very reason that it corresponded to an intention. An intention remains in existence until it has been carried out. You said to yourself, as it were: "I shall have no rest and I can get no quiet sleep until I am out of this house." In your account of the dream you turned it the other way and said: "As soon as I was outside I woke up.".’

At this point I shall interrupt my report of the analysis in order to compare this small piece of dream-interpretation with the general statements I have made upon the mechanism of the formation of dreams. I argued in my book, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), that every dream is a wish which is represented as fulfilled, that the representation acts as a takes disguise if the wish is a repressed one, belonging to the unconscious, and that except in the case of children’s dreams only an unconscious wish or one which reaches down into the unconscious has the force necessary for the formation of a dream. I fancy my theory would have been more certain of general acceptance if I had contented myself with maintaining that every dream had a meaning, which could be discovered by means of a certain process of interpretation; and that when the interpretation had been completed the dream could be replaced by thoughts which would fall into place at an easily recognizable point in the waking mental life of the dreamer. I might then have gone on to say that the meaning of a dream turned out to be of as many different sorts as the processes of waking thought; that in one case it would be a fulfilled wish, in another a realized fear, or again a reflection persisting on into sleep, or an intention (as in the instance of Dora’s dream), or a piece of creative thought during sleep, and so on. Such a theory would no doubt have proved attractive from its very simplicity, and it might have been supported by a great many examples of dreams that had been satisfactorily interpreted, as for instance by the one which has been analysed in these pages.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1405

But instead of this I formulated a generalization according to which the meaning of dreams is limited to a single form, to the representation of wishes, and by so doing I aroused a universal inclination to dissent. I must, however, observe that I did not consider it either my right or my duty to simplify a psychological process so as to make it more acceptable to my readers, when my researches had shown me that it presented a complication which could not be reduced to uniformity until the inquiry had been carried into another field. It is therefore of special importance to me to show that apparent exceptions such as this dream of Dora’s, which has shown itself in the first instance to be the continuation into sleep of an intention formed during the day - nevertheless lend fresh support to the rule which is in dispute.

Much of the dream, however, still remained to be interpreted, and I proceeded with my questions: ‘What is this about the jewel-case that your mother wanted to save?’

‘Mother is very fond of jewellery and had had a lot given her by Father.’

‘And you?’

‘I used to be very fond of jewellery too, once; but I have not worn any since my illness. - Once, four years ago’ (a year before the dream), ‘Father and Mother had a great dispute about a piece of jewellery. Mother wanted to be given a particular thing - pearl drops to wear in her ears. But Father does not like that kind of thing, and he brought her a bracelet instead of the drops. She was furious, and told him that as he had spent so much money on a present she did not like he had better just give it to some one else.’

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1406

‘I dare say you thought to yourself you would accept it with pleasure.’

‘I don’t know.¹ I don’t in the least know how Mother comes into the dream; she was not with us at L-- at the time.’²

‘I will explain that to you presently. Does nothing else occur to you in connection with the jewel-case? So far you have only talked about jewellery and have said nothing about a case.’

‘Yes, Herr K. had made me a present of an expensive jewel-case a little time before.’

‘Then a return-present would have been very appropriate. Perhaps you do not know that "jewel-case" ["Schmuckkästchen"] is a favourite expression for the same thing that you alluded to not long ago by means of the reticule you were wearing³ - for the female genitals, I mean.’

‘I knew you would say that.’4

¹ The regular formula with which she confessed to anything that had been repressed.

² This remark gave evidence of a complete misunderstanding of the rules of dream-interpretation, though on other occasions Dora was perfectly familiar with them. This fact, coupled with the hesitancy and meagreness of her associations with the jewel-case, showed me that we were here dealing with material which had been very intensely repressed.

³ This reference to the reticule will be explained further on.

4 A very common way of putting aside a piece of knowledge that emerges from the repressed.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1407

‘That is to say, you knew that it was so. - The meaning of the dream is now becoming even clearer. You said to yourself: "This man is persecuting me; he wants to force his way into my room. My ‘jewel-case’  is in danger, and if anything happens it will be Father’s fault." For that reason in the dream you chose a situation which expresses the opposite - a danger from which your father is saving you. In this part of the dream everything is turned into its opposite; you will soon discover why. As you say, the mystery turns upon your mother. You ask how she comes into the dream?  She is, as you know, your former rival in your father’s affections. In the incident of the bracelet, you would have been glad to accept what your mother had rejected. Now let us just put "give" instead of "accept" and "withhold" instead of "reject". Then it means that you were ready to give your father what your mother withheld from him; and the thing in question was connected with jewellery.¹ Now bring your mind back to the jewel-case which Herr K. gave you. You have there the starting-point for a parallel line of thoughts, in which Herr K. is to be put in the place of your father just as he was in the matter of standing beside your bed. He gave you a jewel-case; so you are to give him your jewel-case. That was why I spoke just now of a "return-present". In this line of thoughts your mother must be replaced by Frau K. (You will not deny that she, at any rate, was present at the time.) So you are ready to give Herr K, what his wife withholds from him. That is the thought which has had to be repressed with so much energy, and which has made it necessary for every one of its elements to be turned into its opposite. The dream confirms once more what I had already told you before you dreamt it - that you are summoning up your old love for your father in order to protect yourself against your love for Herr K. But what do all these efforts show? Not only that you are afraid of Herr K., but that you are still more afraid of yourself, and of the temptation you feel to yield to him. In short, these efforts prove once more how deeply you loved him.’²

Naturally Dora would not follow me in this part of the interpretation. I myself, however, had been able to arrive at a further step in the interpretation, which seemed to me indispensable both for the anamnesis of the case and for the theory of dreams. I promised to communicate this to Dora at the next session.

¹ We shall be able later on to interpret even the drops in a way which will fit in with the context.

² I added: ‘Moreover, the re-appearance of the dream in the last few days forces me to the conclusion that you consider that the same situation has arisen once again, and that you have decided to give up the treatment - to which, after all, it is only your father who makes you come.’ The sequel showed how correct my guess had been. At this point my interpretation touches for a moment upon the subject of ‘transference’ - a theme which is of the highest practical and theoretical importance, but into which I shall not have much further opportunity of entering in the present paper.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1408

The fact was that I could not forget the hint which seemed to be conveyed by the ambiguous words already noticed - that it might be necessary to leave the room; that an accident might happen in the night. Added to this was the fact that the elucidation of the dream seemed to me incomplete so long as a particular requirement remained unsatisfied; for, though I do not wish to insist that this requirement is a universal one, I have a predilection for discovering a means of satisfying it. A regularly formed dream stands, as it were, upon two legs, one of which is in contact with the main and current exciting cause, and the other with some momentous event in the years of childhood. The dream sets up a connection between those two factors - the event during childhood and the event of the present day - and it endeavours to re-shape the present on the model of the remote past. For the wish which creates the dream always springs from the period of childhood; and it is continually trying to summon childhood back into reality and to correct the present day by the measure of childhood. I believed that I could already clearly detect those elements of Dora’s dream which could be pieced together into an allusion to an event in childhood.

I opened the discussion of the subject with a little experiment, which was, as usual, successful. There happened to be a large match-stand on the table. I asked Dora to look round and see whether she noticed anything special on the table, something that was not there as a rule. She noticed nothing. I then asked her if she knew why children were forbidden to play with matches.

‘Yes; on account of the risk of fire. My uncle’s children are very fond of playing with matches.’

‘Not only on that account. They are warned not to "play with fire", and a particular belief is associated with the warning.’

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1409

She knew nothing about it. - ‘Very well, then; the fear is that if they do they will wet their bed. The antithesis of "water" and "fire" must be at the bottom of this. Perhaps it is believed that they will dream of fire and then try and put it out with water. I cannot say exactly. But I notice that the antithesis of water and fire has been extremely useful to you in the dream. Your mother wanted to save the jewel-case so that it should not be burnt; while in the dream-thoughts it is a question of the "jewel-case" not being wetted. But fire is not only used as the contrary of water, it also serves directly to represent love (as in the phrase "to be consumed with love"). So that from "fire" one set of rails runs by way of this symbolic meaning to thoughts of love; while the other set runs by way of the contrary "water", and, after sending off a branch line which provides another connection with "love" (for love also makes things wet), leads in a different direction. And what direction can that be? Think of the expressions you used: that an accident might happen in the night, and that it might be necessary to leave the room. Surely the allusion must be to a physical need? And if you transpose the accident into childhood what can it be but bed-wetting? But what is usually done to prevent children from wetting their bed? Are they not woken up in the night out of their sleep, exactly as your father woke you up in the dream? This, then, must be the actual occurrence which enabled you to substitute your father for Herr K., who really, woke you up out of your sleep. I am accordingly driven to conclude that you were addicted to bed-wetting up to a later age than is usual with children. The same must also have been true of your brother; for your father said: "I refuse to let my two children go to their destruction. . . ." Your brother has no other sort of connection with the real situation at the K.’s; he had not gone with you to L--. And now, what have your recollections to say to this?’

‘I know nothing about myself,’ was her reply, ‘but my brother used to wet his bed up till his sixth or seventh year; and it used sometimes to happen to him in the daytime too.’

I was on the point of remarking to her how much easier it is to remember things of that kind about one’s brother than about oneself, when she continued the train of recollections which had been revived: ‘Yes. I used to do it too, for some time, but not until my seventh or eighth year. It must have been serious, because I remember now that the doctor was called in. It lasted till a short time before my nervous asthma.’

‘And what did the doctor say to it?’

‘He explained it as nervous weakness; it would soon pass off, he thought; and he prescribed a tonic.’¹

¹ This physician was the only one in whom she showed any confidence, because this episode showed her that he had not penetrated her secret. She felt afraid of any other doctor about whom she had not yet been able to form a judgement, and we can now see that the motive of her fear was the possibility that he might guess her secret.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1410

The interpretation of the dream now seemed to me to be complete.¹ But Dora brought me an addendum to the dream on the very next day. She had forgotten to relate, she said, that each time after waking up she had smelt smoke. Smoke, of course, fitted in well with fire, but it also showed that the dream had a special relation to myself; for when she used to assert that there was nothing concealed behind this or that, I would often say by way of rejoinder: ‘There can be no smoke without fire!’ Dora objected, however, to such a purely personal interpretation, saying that Herr K. and her father were passionate smokers - as I am too, for the matter of that. She herself had smoked during her stay by the lake, and Herr K. had rolled a cigarette for her before he began his unlucky proposal. She thought, too, that she clearly remembered having noticed the smell of smoke on the three occasions of the dream’s occurrence at L--, and not for the first time at its recent reappearance. As she would give me no further information, it was left to me to determine how this addendum was to be introduced into the texture of the dream-thoughts. One thing which I had to go upon was the fact that the smell of smoke had only come up as an addendum to the dream, and must therefore have had to overcome a particularly strong effort on the part of repression. Accordingly it was probably related to the thoughts which were the most obscurely presented and the most successfully repressed in the dream, to the thoughts, that is, concerned with the temptation to show herself willing to yield to the man. If that were so, the addendum to the dream could scarcely mean anything else than the longing for a kiss, which, with a smoker, would necessarily smell of smoke. But a kiss had passed between Herr K. and Dora some two years further back, and it would certainly have been repeated more than once if she had given way to him. So the thoughts of temptation seemed in this way to have harked back to the earlier scene, and to have revived the memory of the kiss against whose seductive influence the little ‘thumb-sucker’ had defended herself at the time, by the feeling of disgust. Taking into consideration, finally, the indications which seemed to point to there having been a transference on to me - since I am a smoker too - I came to the conclusion that the idea had probably occurred to her one day during a session that she would like to have a kiss from me. This would have been the exciting cause which led her to repeat the warning dream and to form her intention of stopping the treatment. Everything fits together very satisfactorily upon this view; but owing to the characteristics of ‘transference’ its validity is not susceptible of definite proof.

¹ The essence of the dream might perhaps be translated into words such as these: ‘The temptation is so strong. Dear Father, protect me again as you used to in my childhood, and prevent my bed from being wetted!’

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1411

I might at this point hesitate whether I should first consider the light thrown by this dream on the history of the case, or whether I should rather begin by dealing with the objection to my theory of dreams which may be based on it interpretation. I shall take the former course.

The significance of enuresis in the early history of neurotics is worth going into thoroughly. For the sake of clearness I will confine myself to remarking that Dora’s case of bed-wetting was not the usual one. The disorder was not simply that the habit had persisted beyond what is considered the normal period, but, according to her explicit account, it had begun by disappearing and had then returned at a relatively late age - after her sixth year. Bed-wetting of this kind has, to the best of my knowledge, no more likely cause than masturbation, a habit whose importance in the aetiology of bed-wetting in general is still insufficiently appreciated. In my experience, the children concerned have themselves at one time been very well aware of this connection, and all its psychological consequences follow from it as though they had never forgotten it. Now, at the time when Dora reported the dream, we were engaged upon a line of enquiry which led straight towards an admission that she had masturbated in childhood. A short while before, she had raised the question of why it was that precisely she had fallen ill, and, before I could answer, had put the blame on her father. The justification for this was forthcoming not out of her unconscious thoughts but from her conscious knowledge. It turned out, to my astonishment, that the girl knew what the nature of her father’s illness had been. After his return from consulting me she had overheard a conversation in which the name of the disease had been mentioned. At a still earlier period - at the time of the detached retina - an oculist who was called in must have hinted at a luetic aetiology; for the inquisitive and anxious girl overheard an old aunt of hers saying to her mother: ‘He was ill before his marriage, you know’, and adding something which she could not understand, but which she subsequently connected in her mind with improper subjects.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1412

Her father, then, had fallen ill through leading a loose life, and she assumed that he had handed on his bad health to her by heredity. I was careful not to tell her that, as I have already mentioned, I too was of opinion that the offspring of luetics were very specially predisposed to severe neuropsychoses. The line of thought in which she brought this accusation against her father was continued in her unconscious material. For several days on end she identified herself with her mother by means of slight symptoms and peculiarities of manner, which gave her an opportunity for some really remarkable achievements in the direction of intolerable behaviour. She then allowed it to transpire that she was thinking of a stay she had made at Franzensbad, which she had visited with her mother - I forget in what year. Her mother was suffering from abdominal pains and from a discharge (a catarrh) which necessitated a cure at Franzensbad. It was Dora’s view - and here again she was probably right - that this illness was due to her father, who had thus handed on his venereal disease to her mother. It was quite natural that in drawing this conclusion she should, like the majority of laymen, have confused gonorrhoea and syphilis, as well as what is contagious and what is hereditary. The persistence with which she held to this identification with her mother almost forced me to ask her whether she too was suffering from a venereal disease; and I then learnt that she was afflicted with a catarrh (leucorrhoea) whose beginning, she said, she could not remember.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1413

I then understood that behind the train of thought in which she brought these open accusations against her father there lay concealed as usual a self-accusation. I met her half-way by assuring her that in my view the occurrence of leucorrhoea in young girls pointed primarily to masturbation, and I considered that all the other causes which were commonly assigned to that complaint were put in the background by masturbation.¹ I added that she was now on the way to finding an answer to her own question of why it was that precisely she had fallen ill - by confessing that she had masturbated, probably in childhood. Dora denied flatly that she could remember any such thing. But a few days later she did something which I could not help regarding as a further step towards the confession. For on that day she wore at her waist - a thing she never did on any other occasion before or after - a small reticule of a shape which had just come into fashion; and, as she lay on the sofa and talked, she kept playing with it - opening it, putting a finger into it, shutting it again, and so on. I looked on for some time, and then explained to her the nature of a ‘symptomatic act’.² I give the name of symptomatic acts to those acts which people perform, as we say, automatically, unconsciously, without attending to them, or as if in a moment of distraction. They are actions to which people would like to deny any significance, and which, if questioned about them, they would explain as being indifferent and accidental. Closer observation, however, will show that these actions, about which consciousness knows nothing or wishes to know nothing, in fact give expression to unconscious thoughts and impulses, and are therefore most valuable and instructive as being manifestations of the unconscious which have been able to come to the surface. There are two sorts of conscious attitudes possible towards these symptomatic acts. If we can ascribe inconspicuous motives to them we recognize their existence; but if no such pretext can be found for conscious use we usually fail altogether to notice that we have performed them. Dora found no difficulty in producing a motive: ‘Why should I not wear a reticule like this, as it is now the fashion to do?’ But a justification of this kind does not dismiss the possibility of the action in question having an unconscious origin. Though on the other hand the existence of such an origin and the meaning attributed to the act cannot be conclusively established. We must content ourselves with recording the fact that such a meaning fits in quite extraordinarily well with the situation as a whole and with the programme laid down by the unconscious.

¹ [Footnote added 1923:] This is an extreme view which I should no longer maintain to-day.

² See my Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 1901b.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1414

On some other occasion I will publish a collection of these symptomatic acts as they are to be observed in the healthy and in neurotics. They are sometimes very easy to interpret. Dora’s reticule, which came apart at the top in the usual way, was nothing but a representation of the genitals, and her playing with it, her opening it and putting her finger in it, was an entirely unembarrassed yet unmistakable pantomimic announcement of what she would like to do with them - namely, to masturbate. A very entertaining episode of a similar kind occurred to me a short time ago. In the middle of a session the patient - a lady who was no longer young - brought out a small ivory box, ostensibly in order to refresh herself with a sweet. She made some efforts to open it, and then handed it to me so that I might convince myself how hard it was to open. I expressed my suspicion that the box must mean something special, for this was the very first time I had seen it, although its owner had been coming to me for more than a year. To this the lady eagerly replied: ‘I always have this box about me; I take it with me wherever I go.’ She did not calm down until I had pointed out to her with a laugh how well her words were adapted to quite another meaning. The box - Dose, πύξις -, like the reticule and the jewel-case, was once again only a substitute for the shell of Venus, for the female genitals.

There is a great deal of symbolism of this kind in life, but as a rule we pass it by without heeding it. When I set myself the task of bringing to light what human beings keep hidden within them, not by the compelling power of hypnosis, but by observing what they say and what they show, I thought the task was a harder one than it really is. He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore. And thus the task of making conscious the most hidden recesses of the mind is one which it is quite possible to accomplish.

Dora’s symptomatic act with the reticule did not immediately precede the dream. She started the session which brought us the narrative of the dream with another symptomatic act. As I came into the room in which she was waiting she hurriedly concealed a letter which she was reading. I naturally asked her whom the letter was from, and at first she refused to tell me. Something then came out which was a matter of complete indifference and had no relation to the treatment. It was a letter from her grandmother, in which she begged Dora to write to her more often. I believe that Dora only wanted to play ‘secrets’ with me, and to hint that she was on the point of allowing her secret to be torn from her by the doctor. I was then in a position to explain her antipathy to every new doctor. She was afraid lest he might arrive at the foundation of her illness, either by examining her and discovering her catarrh, or by questioning her and eliciting the fact of her addiction to bed-wetting - lest he might guess, in short, that she had masturbated. And afterwards she would speak very contemptuously of the doctor whose perspicacity she had evidently over-estimated beforehand.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1415

The reproaches against her father for having made her ill, together with the self-reproach underlying them, the leucorrhoea, the playing with the reticule, the bed-wetting after her sixth year, the secret which she would not allow the doctors to tear from her - the circumstantial evidence of her having masturbated in childhood seems to me complete and without a flaw. In the present case I had begun to suspect the masturbation when she had told me of her cousin’s gastric pains, and had then identified herself with her by complaining for days together of similar painful sensations. It is well known that gastric pains occur especially often in those who masturbate. According to a personal communication made to me by Wilhelm Fliess, it is precisely gastralgias of this character which can be interrupted by an application of cocaine to the ‘gastric spot’ discovered by him in the nose, and which can be cured by the cauterization of the same spot. In confirmation of my suspicion Dora gave me two facts from her conscious knowledge: she herself had frequently suffered from gastric pains, and she had good reasons for believing that her cousin was a masturbator. It is a very common thing for patients to recognize in other people a connection which, on account of their emotional resistances, they cannot perceive in themselves. And, indeed, Dora no longer denied my supposition, although she still remembered nothing. Even the date which she assigned to the bed-wetting, when she said that it lasted ‘till a short time before the appearance of the nervous asthma’, appears to me to be of clinical significance. Hysterical symptoms hardly ever appear so long as children are masturbating, but only afterwards, when a period of abstinence has set in;¹ they form a substitute for masturbatory satisfaction, the desire for which continues to persist in the unconscious until another and more normal kind of satisfaction appears - where that is still attainable. For upon whether it is still attainable or not depends the possibility of a hysteria being cured by marriage and normal sexual intercourse. But if the satisfaction afforded in marriage is again removed - as it may be owing to coitus interruptus, psychological estrangement, or other causes - then the libido flows back again into its old channel and manifests itself once more in hysterical symptoms.

¹ This is also true in principle of adults; but in their case a relative abstinence, a diminution in the amount of masturbation, is a sufficient cause, so that, if the libido is very strong, hysteria and masturbation may be simultaneously present.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1416

I should like to be able to add some definite information as to when and under what particular influence Dora gave up masturbating; but owing to the incompleteness of the analysis I have only fragmentary material to present. We have heard that the bed-wetting lasted until shortly before she first fell ill with dyspnoea. Now the only light she was able to throw upon this first attack was that at the time of its occurrence her father was away from home for the first time since his health had improved. In this small recollection there must be a trace of an allusion to the aetiology of the dyspnoea. Dora’s symptomatic acts and certain other signs gave me good reasons for supposing that the child, whose bedroom had been next door to her parents’, had overheard her father in his wife’s room at night and had heard him (for he was always short of breath) breathing hard while they had intercourse. Children, in such circumstances, divine something sexual in the uncanny sounds that reach their ears. Indeed, the movements expressive of sexual excitement lie within them ready to hand, as innate pieces of mechanism. I maintained years ago that the dyspnoea and palpitations that occur in hysteria and anxiety neurosis are only detached fragments of the act of copulation; and in many cases, as in Dora’s, I have been able to trace back the symptom of dyspnoea or nervous asthma to the same exciting cause - to the patient’s having overheard sexual intercourse taking place between adults. The sympathetic excitement which may be supposed to have occurred in Dora on such an occasion may very easily have made the child’s sexuality veer round and have replaced her inclination to masturbation by an inclination to anxiety. A little while later, when her father was away and the child, devotedly in love with him, was wishing him back, she must have reproduced in the form of an attack of asthma the impression she had received. She had preserved in her memory the event which had occasioned the first onset of the symptom, and we can conjecture from it the nature of the train of thought, charged with anxiety, which had accompanied the attack. The first attack had come on after she had over-exerted herself on an expedition in the mountains, so that she had probably been really a little out of breath. To this was added the thought that her father was forbidden to climb mountains and was not allowed to over-exert himself, because he suffered from shortness of breath; then came the recollection of how much he had exerted himself with her mother that night, and the question whether it might not have done him harm; next came concern whether she might not have over-exerted herself in masturbating - an act which, like the other, led to a sexual orgasm accompanied by slight dyspnoea - and finally came a return of the dyspnoea in an intensified form as a symptom. Part of this material I was able to obtain directly from the analysis, but the rest required supplementing. But the way in which the occurrence of masturbation in Dora’s case was verified has already shown us that material belonging to a single subject can only be collected piece by piece at various times and in different connections.¹

¹ The proof of infantile masturbation in other cases is established in a precisely similar way. The evidence for it is mostly of a similar nature: indications of the presence of leucorrhoea, bed-wetting, hand-ceremonials (obsessional washing), and such things. It is always possible to discover with certainty from the nature of the symptoms of the case whether the habit was discovered by the person in charge of the child or not, or whether this sexual activity was brought to an end by long efforts on the child’s part to break itself of the habit, or by a sudden change. In Dora’s case the masturbation had remained undiscovered, and had come to an end at a single blow (cf. her secret, her fear of doctors, and the replacement by dyspnoea). The patients, it is true, invariably dispute the conclusiveness of circumstantial evidence such as this, and they do so even when they have retained a conscious recollection of the catarrh or of their mother’s warning (e.g. ‘That makes people stupid; it’s dangerous’). But some time later the memory, which has been so long repressed, of this piece of infantile sexual life emerges with certainty, and it does so in every instance. I am reminded of the case of a patient of mine suffering from obsessions, which were direct derivatives of infantile masturbation. Her peculiarities, such as self-prohibitions and self-punishments, the feeling that if she had done this she must not do that, the idea that she must not be interrupted, the introduction of pauses between one procedure (with her hands) and the next, her hand-washing, etc, - all of these turned out to be unaltered fragments of her nurse’s efforts to break her of the habit. The only thing which had remained permanently in her memory were the words of warning: ‘Ugh! That’s dangerous!’ Compare also in this connection my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905d.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1417

There now arise a whole series of questions of the greatest importance concerning the aetiology of hysteria: is Dora’s case to be regarded as aetiologically typical?  does it represent the only type of causation? and so on. Nevertheless, I am sure that I am taking the right course in postponing my answer to such questions until a considerable number of other cases have been similarly analysed and published. Moreover, I should have to begin by criticizing the way in which the questions are framed. Instead of answering ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to the question whether the aetiology of this case is to be looked for in masturbation during childhood, I should first have to discuss the concept of aetiology as applied to the psychoneuroses. It would then become evident that the standpoint from which I should be able to answer the question would be very widely removed from the standpoint from which it was put. Let it suffice if we can reach the conviction that in this case the occurrence of masturbation in childhood is established, and that its occurrence cannot be an accidental element nor an immaterial one in the conformation of the clinical picture.¹

¹ Dora’s brother must have been concerned in some way with her having acquired the habit of masturbation; for in this connection she told me, with all the emphasis which betrays the presence of a ‘screen memory’, that her brother used regularly to pass on all his infectious illnesses to her, and that while he used to have them lightly she used, on the contrary, to have them severely. In the dream her brother as well as she was saved from ‘destruction’; he, too, had been subject to bed-wetting, but had got over the habit before his sister. Her declaration that she had been able to keep abreast with her brother up to the time of her first illness, but that after that she had fallen behind him in her studies, was in a certain sense also a ‘screen memory’. It was as though she had been a boy up till that moment, and had then become girlish for the first time. She had in truth been a wild creature; but after the ‘asthma’ she became quiet and well-behaved. That illness formed the boundary between two phases of her sexual life, of which the first was masculine in character, and the second feminine.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1418

A consideration of the significance of the leucorrhoea to which Dora admitted promises to give us a still better understanding of her symptoms. She had learnt to call her affection a ‘catarrh’ at the time when her mother had had to visit Franzensbad on account of a similar complaint; and the word ‘catarrh’ acted once again as a ‘switch-word’ and enabled the whole set of thoughts upon her father’s responsibility for her illness to manifest themselves in the symptom of the cough. The cough, which no doubt originated in the first instance from a slight actual catarrh, was, moreover, an imitation of her father (whose lungs were affected), and could serve as an expression of her sympathy and concern for him. But besides this, it proclaimed aloud, as it were, something of which she may then have been still unconscious: ‘I am my father’s daughter. I have a catarrh, just as he has. He has made me ill, just as he has made Mother ill. It is from him that I have got my evil passions, which are punished by illness.’¹

¹ This word played the same part with the fourteen-year old girl whose case history I have compressed into a few lines on p. 1365 n. I had established the child in a pension with an intelligent lady, who took charge of her for me. The lady reported that the little girl could not bear her to be in the room while she was going to bed, and that when she was in bed she had a marked cough, of which there was no trace in the daytime. When the girl was questioned about these symptoms, the only thing that occurred to her was that her grandmother coughed in the same way, and that she was said to have a catarrh. It was clear from this that the child herself had a catarrh, and that she did not want to be observed while she performed her evening ablutions. This catarrh which, thanks to its name, had been displaced from the lower to the upper part of her body, exhibited a quite unusual degree of intensity.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1419

Let us next attempt to put together the various determinants that we have found for Dora’s attacks of coughing and hoarseness. In the lowest stratum we must assume the presence of real and organically determined irritation of the throat - which acted like the grain of sand around which an oyster forms its pearl. This irritation was susceptible to fixation, because it concerned a part of the body which in Dora had to a high degree retained its significance as an erotogenic zone. And the irritation was consequently well fitted to give expression to excited states of the libido. It was brought to fixation by what was probably its first psychical coating - her sympathetic imitation of her father - and by her subsequent self-reproaches on account of her ‘catarrh’. The same group of symptoms, moreover, showed itself capable of representing her relations with Herr K.; it could express her regret at his absence and her wish to make him a better wife. After a part of her libido had once more turned towards her father, the symptom obtained what was perhaps its last meaning; it came to represent sexual intercourse with her father by means of Dora’s identifying herself with Frau K. I can guarantee that this series is by no means complete. Unfortunately, an incomplete analysis cannot enable us to follow the chronological sequence of the changes in a symptom’s meaning, or to display clearly the succession and coexistence of its various meanings. It may legitimately be expected of a complete analysis that it should fulfil these demands.

I must now proceed to touch upon some further relations existing between Dora’s genital catarrh and her hysterical symptoms. At a time when any psychological elucidation of hysteria was still very remote, I used to hear experienced fellow-doctors who were my seniors maintain that in the case of hysterical patients suffering from leucorrhoea any increase in the catarrh was regularly followed by an intensification of the hysterical troubles, and especially of loss of appetite and vomiting. No one was very clear about the nature of the connection but I fancy the general inclination was towards the opinion held by gynaecologists. According to their hypothesis, as is well known, disorders of the genitals exercise upon the nervous functions a direct and far-reaching influence in the nature of an organic disturbance - though a therapeutic test of this theory is apt to leave one in the lurch. In the light of our present knowledge we cannot exclude the possibility of the existence of a direct organic influence of this sort; but it is at all events easier to indicate its psychical coating. The pride taken by women in the appearance of their genitals is quite a special feature of their vanity; and disorders of the genitals which they think calculated to inspire feelings of repugnance or even disgust have an incredible power of humiliating them, of lowering their self-esteem, and of making them irritable, sensitive, and distrustful. An abnormal secretion of the mucous membrane of the vagina is looked upon as a source of disgust.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1420

It will be remembered that Dora had a lively feeling of disgust after being kissed by Herr K., and that we saw grounds for completing her story of the scene of the kiss by supposing that, while she was being embraced, she noticed the pressure of the man’s erect member against her body. We now learn further that the same governess whom Dora cast off on account of her faithlessness had, from her own experience of life, propounded to Dora the view that all men were frivolous and untrustworthy. To Dora that must mean that all men were like her father. But she thought her father suffered from venereal disease - for had he not handed it on to her and her mother? She might therefore have imagined to herself that all men suffered from venereal disease, and naturally her conception of venereal disease was modelled on her one experience of it - a personal one at that. To suffer from venereal disease, therefore, meant for her to be afflicted with a disgusting discharge. So may we not have here a further motive for the disgust she felt at the moment of the embrace? Thus the disgust which was transferred on to the contact of the man would be a feeling which had been projected according to the primitive mechanism I have already mentioned (p. 1373), and would be related ultimately to her own leucorrhoea.

I suspect that we are here concerned with unconscious processes of thought which are twined around a pre-existing structure of organic connections, much as festoons of flowers are twined around a wire; so that on another occasion one might find other lines of thought inserted between the same points of departure and termination. Yet a knowledge of the thought connections which have been effective in the individual case is of a value which cannot be exaggerated for clearing up the symptoms. It is only because the analysis was prematurely broken off that we have been obliged in Dora’s case to resort to framing conjectures and filling in deficiencies. Whatever I have brought forward for filling up the gaps is based upon other cases which have been more thoroughly analysed.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1421

The dream from the analysis of which we have derived this information corresponded, as we have seen, to an intention which Dora carried with her into her sleep. It was therefore repeated each night until the intention had been carried out; and it reappeared years later when an occasion arose for forming an analogous intention. The intention might have been consciously expressed in some such words as these: ‘I must fly from this house, for I see that my virginity is threatened here; I shall go away with my father, and I shall take precautions not to be surprised while I am dressing in the morning.’ These thoughts were clearly expressed in the dream; they formed part of a mental current which had achieved consciousness and a dominating position in waking life. Behind them can be discerned obscure traces of a train of thought which formed part of a contrary current and had consequently been suppressed. This other train of thought culminated in the temptation to yield to the man, out of gratitude for the love and tenderness he had shown her during the last few years, and it may perhaps have revived the memory of the only kiss she had so far had from him. But according to the theory which I developed in my Interpretation of Dreams such elements as these are not enough for the formation of a dream. On that theory a dream is not an intention represented as having been carried out, but a wish represented as having been fulfilled, and, moreover, in most cases a wish dating from childhood. It is our business now to discover whether this principle may not be contradicted by the present dream.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1422

The dream does in fact contain infantile material, though it is impossible at a first glance to discover any connections between that material and Dora’s intention of flying from Herr K.’s house and the temptation of his presence. Why should a recollection have emerged of her bed-wetting when she was a child and of the trouble her father used to take to teach the child clean habits? We may answer this by saying that it was only by the help of this train of thought that it was possible to suppress the other thoughts which were so intensely occupied with the temptation to yield or that it was possible to secure the dominance of the intention which had been formed of combating those other thoughts. The child decided to fly with her father; in reality she fled to her father because she was afraid of the man who was pursuing her; she summoned up an infantile affection for her father so that it might protect her against her present affection for a stranger. Her father was himself partly responsible for her present danger, for he had handed her over to this strange man in the interests of his own love-affair. And how much better it had been when that same father of hers had loved no one more than her, and had exerted all his strength to save her from the dangers that had then threatened her! The infantile, and now unconscious, wish to put her father in the strange man’s place had the potency necessary for the formation of a dream. If there were a past situation similar to a present one, and differing from it only in being concerned with one instead of with the other of the two persons mentioned in the wish, that situation would become the main one in the dream. But there had been such a situation. Her father had once stood beside her bed, just as Herr K. had the day before, and had woken her up, with a kiss perhaps, as Herr K. may have meant to do. Thus her intention of flying from the house was not in itself capable of producing a dream; but it became so by being associated with another intention which was founded upon infantile wishes. The wish to replace Herr K. by her father provided the necessary motive power for the dream. Let me recall the interpretation I was led to adopt of Dora’s reinforced train of thought about her father’s relations with Frau K. My interpretation was that she had at that point summoned up an infantile affection for her father so as to be able to keep her repressed love for Herr K. in its state of repression. This same sudden revulsion in the patient’s mental life was reflected in the dream.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1423

I have made one or two observations in my Interpretation of Dreams on the relation between the waking thoughts which are continued into sleep (the ‘day’s residues’) and the unconscious wish which forms the dream. I will quote them here as they stand, for I have nothing to add to them, and the analysis of this dream of Dora’s proves afresh that the facts are as I have supposed: ‘I am ready to admit that there is a whole class of dreams the instigation to which arises principally or even exclusively from the residues of daytime life; and I think that even my wish that I might at long last become a Professor Extraordinarius¹ might have allowed me to sleep through the night in peace if my worry over my friend’s health had not still persisted from the previous day. But the worry alone could not have made a dream. The motive force which the dream required had to be provided by a wish; it was the business of the worry to get hold of a wish to act as the motive force of the dream.

‘The position may be explained by an analogy. A daytime thought may very well play the part of entrepeneur for a dream; but the entrepeneur, who, as people say, has the idea and the initiative to carry it out, can do nothing without capital; he needs a capitalist who can afford the outlay, and the capitalist who provides the psychical outlay for the dream is invariably and indisputably, whatever may be the thoughts of the previous day, a wish from the unconscious.’

Any one who has learnt to appreciate the delicacy of the fabric of structures such as dreams will not be surprised to find that Dora’s wish that her father might take the place of the man who was her tempter called up in her memory not merely a casual collection of material from her childhood, but precisely such material as was most intimately bound up with the suppression of her temptation. For if Dora felt unable to yield to her love for the man, if in the end she repressed that love instead of surrendering to it, there was no factor upon which her decision depended more directly than upon her premature sexual enjoyment and its consequence - her bed-wetting, her catarrh, and her disgust. An early history of this kind can afford a basis for two kinds of behaviour in response to the demands of love in maturity - which of the two will depend upon the summation of constitutional determinants in the subject. He will either exhibit an abandonment to sexuality which is entirely without resistances and borders upon perversity; or there will be a reaction - he will repudiate sexuality, and will at the same time fall ill of a neurosis. In the case of our present patient, her constitution and the high level of her intellectual and moral upbringing decided in favour of the latter course.

¹ This is a reference to the analysis of a dream quoted in the book as an example.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1424

I should like, further, to draw special attention to the fact that the analysis of this dream has given us access to certain details of the pathogenically operative events which had otherwise been inaccessible to memory, or at all events to reproduction. The recollection of the bed-wetting in childhood had, as we have seen, already been repressed. And Dora had never mentioned the details of her persecution by Herr K.; they had never occurred to her mind.

I add a few remarks which may help towards the synthesis of this dream. The dream-work began on the afternoon of the day after the scene in the wood, after Dora had noticed that she was no longer able to lock the door of her room. She then said to herself: ‘I am threatened by a serious danger here,’ and formed her intention of not stopping on in the house alone but of going off with her father. This intention became capable of forming a dream, because it succeeded in finding a continuation in the unconscious. What corresponded to it there was her summoning up her infantile love for her father as a protection against the present temptation. The change which thus took place in her became fixed and brought her into the attitude shown by her supervalent train of thought - jealousy of Frau K. on her father’s account, as though she herself were in love with him. There was a conflict within her between a temptation to yield to the man’s proposal and a composite force rebelling against that feeling. This latter force was made up of motives of respectability and good sense, of hostile feelings caused by the governess’s disclosures (jealousy and wounded pride, as we shall see later), and of a neurotic element, namely, the tendency to a repudiation of sexuality which was already present in her and was based on her childhood history. Her love for her father, which she summoned up to protect her against the temptation, had its origin in this same childhood history.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1425

Her intention of flying to her father, which, as we have seen, reached down into the unconscious, was transformed by the dream into a situation which presented as fulfilled the wish that her father should save her from the danger. In this process it was necessary to put on one side a certain thought which stood in the way; for it was her father himself who had brought her into the danger. The hostile feeling against her father (her desire for revenge), which was here suppressed, was, as we shall discover, one of the motive forces of the second dream.

According to the necessary conditions of dream-formation the imagined situation must be chosen so as to reproduce a situation in infancy. A special triumph is achieved if a recent situation, perhaps even the very situation which is the exciting cause of the dream, can be transformed into an infantile one. This has actually been achieved in the present case, by a purely chance disposition of the material. Just as Herr K. had stood beside her sofa and woken her up, so her father had often done in her childhood. The whole trend of her thoughts could be most aptly symbolized by her substitution of her father for Herr K. in that situation.

But the reason for which her father used to wake her up long ago had been to prevent her from making her bed wet.

This ‘wet’ had a decisive influence on the further content of the dream; though it was represented in it only by a distant allusion and by its opposite.

The opposite of ‘wet’ and ‘water’ can easily be ‘fire’ and ‘burning’. The chance that, when they arrived at the place, her father had expressed his anxiety at the risk of fire, helped to decide that the danger from which her father was to rescue her should be a fire. The situation chosen for the dream-picture was based upon this chance, and upon the opposition to ‘wet’: ‘There was a fire. Her father was standing beside her bed to wake her.’ Her father’s chance utterance would, no doubt, not have obtained such an important position in the dream if it had not fitted in so excellently with the dominating current of feeling, which was determined to regard him at any cost as a protector and saviour. ‘He foresaw the danger from the very moment of our arrival!  He was in the right!’ (In actual fact, it was he who had brought the girl into danger.)

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1426

In consequence of certain connections which can easily be made from it, the word ‘wet’ served in the dream-thoughts as a nodal point between several groups of ideas. ‘Wet’ was connected not only with the bed-wetting, but also with the group of ideas relating to sexual temptation which lay suppressed behind the content of the dream. Dora knew that there was a kind of getting wet involved in sexual intercourse, and that during the act of copulation the man presented the woman with something liquid in the form of drops. She also knew that the danger lay precisely in that, and that it was her business to protect her genitals from being moistened.

‘Wet’ and ‘drops’ at the same time opened the way to the other group of associations - the group relating to the disgusting catarrh, which in her later years had no doubt possessed the same mortifying significance for her as the bed-wetting had in her childhood. ‘Wet’ in this connection had the same meaning as ‘dirtied’. Her genitals, which ought to have been kept clean, had been dirtied already by the catarrh - and this applied to her mother no less than to herself (p. 1412). She seemed to understand that her mother’s mania for cleanliness was a reaction against this dirtying.

The two groups of ideas met in this one thought: ‘Mother got both things from father: the sexual wetness and the dirtying discharge.’ Dora’s jealousy of her mother was inseparable from the group of thoughts relating to her infantile love for her father which she summoned up for her protection. But this material was not yet capable of representation. If, however, a recollection could be found which was equally closely connected with both the groups related to the word ‘wet’, but which avoided any offensiveness, then such a recollection would be able to take over the representation in the dream of the material in question.

A recollection of this sort was furnished by the episode of the ‘drops’ - the jewellery [‘Schmuck’] that Dora’s mother wanted to have. In appearance the connection between this reminiscence and the two groups of thoughts relating to sexual wetness and to being dirtied was a purely external and superficial one, of a verbal character. For ‘drops’ was used ambiguously as a ‘switch-word’, while ‘jewellery’ [‘Schmuck’] was taken as an equivalent to ‘clean’, and thus as a rather forced contrary of ‘dirtied’.¹ But in reality the most substantial connections can be shown to have existed between the things denoted themselves. The recollection originated from the material connected with Dora’s jealousy of her mother, which, though its roots were infantile, had persisted far beyond that period. By means of these two verbal bridges it was possible to transfer on to the single reminiscence of the ‘jewel-drops’ the whole of the significance attaching to the ideas of her parents’ sexual intercourse, and of her mother’s gonorrhoea and tormenting passion for cleanliness.

¹ [The German word ‘Schmuck’ has a much wider meaning than the English ‘jewellery’, though that is the sense in which it occurs in the compound ‘Schmuckkästchen’, ‘jewel-case’. As a substantive, ‘Schmuck’ denotes ‘finery’ of all kinds, not only personal adornments, but embellishments of objects and decorations in general. In an adjectival sense, it can mean ‘smart’, ‘ tidy’, or ‘neat’.]

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1427

But a still further displacement had to be effected before this material appeared in the dream. Though ‘drops’ is nearer to the original ‘wet’, it was the more distant ‘jewellery’ that found a place in the dream. When, therefore, this element had been inserted into the dream-situation which had already been established, the account might have run: ‘Mother wanted to stop and save her jewellery.’ But a subsequent influence now made itself felt, and led to the further alteration of ‘jewellery’ into ‘jewel-case’. This influence came from elements in the underlying group relating to the temptation offered by Herr K. He had never given her jewellery, but he had given her a ‘case’ for it, which meant for her all the marks of preference and all the tenderness for which she felt she ought now to have been grateful. And the composite word thus formed, ‘jewel-case’, had beyond this a special claim to be used as a representative element in the dream. Is not ‘jewel-case’ [‘Schmuckkästen’] a term commonly used to describe female genitals that are immaculate and intact? And is it not, on the other hand, an innocent word? Is it not, in short, admirably calculated both to betray and to conceal the sexual thoughts that lie behind the dream?

‘Mother’s jewel-case’ was therefore introduced in two places in the dream; and this element replaced all mention of Dora’s infantile jealousy, of the drops (that is, of the sexual wetness), of being dirtied by the discharge, and, on the other hand, of her present thoughts connected with the temptation - the thoughts which were urging her to reciprocate the man’s love, and which depicted the sexual situation (alike desirable and menacing) that lay before her. The element of ‘jewel-case’ was more than any other a product of condensation and displacement, and a compromise between contrary mental currents. The multiplicity of its origin - both from infantile and contemporary sources - is no doubt pointed to by its double appearance in the content of the dream.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1428

The dream was a reaction to a fresh experience of an exciting nature; and this experience must inevitably have revived the memory of the only previous experience which was at all analogous to it. The latter was the scene of the kiss in Herr K.’s place of business, when she had been seized with disgust. But this same scene was associatively accessible from other directions too, namely, from the group of thoughts relating to the catarrh (p. 83), and from her present temptation. The scene therefore brought to the dream a contribution of its own, which had to be made to fit in with the dream situation that had already been laid down: ‘There was a fire’ . . . no doubt the kiss smelt of smoke; so she smelt smoke in the dream, and the smell persisted till after she was awake.

By inadvertence, I unfortunately left a gap in the analysis of the dream. Dora’s father was made to say, ‘I refuse to let my two children go to their destruction . . .’ (‘as a result of masturbation’ should no doubt be added from the dream-thoughts). Such speeches in dreams are regularly constructed out of pieces of actual speeches which have either been made or heard. I ought to have made enquiries as to the actual source of this speech. The results of my enquiry would no doubt have shown that the structure of the dream was still more complicated, but would at the same time have made it easier to penetrate.

Are we to suppose that when this dream occurred at L-- it had precisely the same content as when it recurred during the treatment? It does not seem necessary to do so. Experience shows that people often assert that they have had the same dream, when as a matter of fact the separate appearances of the recurrent dream have differed from one another in numerous details and in other respects that were of no small importance. Thus one of my patients told me that she had had her favourite dream again the night before, and that it always recurred in the same form: she had dreamed of swimming in the blue sea, of joyfully cleaving her way through the waves, and so on. On closer investigation it turned out that upon a common background now one detail and now another was brought out; on one occasion, even, she was swimming in a frozen sea and was surrounded by icebergs. This patient had other dreams, which turned out to be closely connected with the recurrent one, though even she made no attempt to claim that they were identical with it. Once, for instance, she was looking at a view of Heligoland (based on a photograph, but life-size) which showed the upper and lower parts of the island simultaneously; on the sea was a ship, in which were two people whom she had known in her youth, and so on.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1429

What is certain is that in Dora’s case the dream which occurred during the treatment had gained a new significance connected with the present time, though perhaps its manifest content had not changed. The dream-thoughts behind it included a reference to my treatment, and it corresponded to a renewal of the old intention of withdrawing from a danger. If her memory was not deceiving her when she declared that even at L-- she had noticed the smoke after she woke up, it must be acknowledged that she had brought my proverb, ‘There can be no smoke without fire’, very ingeniously into the completed form of the dream, in which it seemed to serve as an overdetermination of the last element. It was undeniably a mere matter of chance that the most recent exciting cause - her mother’s locking the dining-room door so that her brother was shut into his bedroom - had provided a connection with her persecution by Herr K. at L--, where her decision had been made when she found she could not lock her bedroom door. It is possible that her brother did not appear in the dream on the earlier occasions, so that the words ‘my two children’ did not form part of its content until after the occurrence of its latest exciting cause.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1430

III

THE SECOND DREAM

A few weeks after the first dream the second occurred, and when it had been dealt with the analysis was broken off. It cannot be made as completely intelligible as the first, but it afforded a desirable confirmation of an assumption which had become necessary about the patient’s mental state, it filled up a gap in her memory, and it made it possible to obtain a deep insight into the origin of another of her symptoms.

Dora described the dream as follows: ‘I was walking about in a town which I did not know. I saw streets and squares which were strange to me.¹ l then came into a house where I lived, went to my room, and found a letter from Mother lying there. She wrote saying that as I had left home without my parents’ knowledge she had not wished to write to me to say that Father was ill. "Now he is dead, and if you like² you can come." I then went to the station ["Bahnhof"]and asked about a hundred times: " Where is the station?" I always got the answer: "Five minutes." I then saw a thick wood before me which I went into, and there I asked a man whom I met. He said to me: "Two and a half hours more." ³ He offered to accompany me. But I refused and went alone. I saw the station in front of me and could not reach it. At the same time I had the usual feeling of anxiety that one has in dreams when one cannot move forward. Then I was at home. I must have been travelling in the meantime, but I know nothing about that. I walked into the porter’s lodge, and enquired for our flat. The maidservant opened the door to me and replied that Mother and the others were already at the cemetery [“Friedhof"].’4

¹ To this she subsequently made an important addendum: ‘I saw a monument in one of the squares.’

² To this came the addendum: ‘There was a question-mark after this word, thus: “like?”.’

³ In repeating the dream she said: ‘Two hours.’

4 In the next session Dora brought me two addenda to this: ‘I saw myself particularly distinctly going up the stairs,’ and ‘After she had answered I went to my room, but not the least sadly, and began reading a big book that lay on my writing-table.’

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1431

It was not without some difficulty that the interpretation of this dream proceeded. In consequence of the peculiar circumstances in which the analysis was broken off - circumstances connected with the content of the dream - the whole of it was not cleared up. And for this reason, too, I am not equally certain at every point of the order in which my conclusions were reached. I will begin by mentioning the subject-matter with which the current analysis was dealing at the time when the dream intervened. For some time Dora herself had been raising a number of questions about the connection between some of her actions and the motives which presumably underlay them. One of these questions was: ‘Why did I say nothing about the scene by the lake for some days after it had happened?’ Her second question was: ‘Why did I then suddenly tell my parents about it?’ Moreover, her having felt so deeply injured by Herr K.’s proposal seemed to me in general to need explanation, especially as I was beginning to realize that Herr K. himself had not regarded his proposal to Dora as a mere frivolous attempt at seduction. I looked upon her having told her parents of the episode as an action which she had taken when she was already under the influence of a morbid craving for revenge. A normal girl, I am inclined to think, will deal with a situation of this kind by herself.

I shall present the material produced during the analysis of this dream in the somewhat haphazard order in which it recurs to my mind.

She was wandering about alone in a strange town and saw streets and squares. Dora assured me that it was certainly not B--, which I had first hit upon, but a town in which she had never been. It was natural to suggest that she might have seen some pictures or photographs and have taken the dream-pictures from them. After this remark of mine came the addendum about the monument in one of the squares and immediately afterwards her recognition of its source. At Christmas she had been sent an album from a German health-resort, containing views of the town; and the very day before the dream she had looked this out to show it to some relatives who were stopping with them. It had been put in a box for keeping pictures in, and she could not lay her hands on it at once. She had therefore said to her mother: ‘Where is the box?.’¹ One of the pictures was of a square with a monument in it. The present had been sent to her by a young engineer, with whom she had once had a passing acquaintance in the manufacturing town. The young man had accepted a post in Germany, so as to become sooner self-supporting; and he took every opportunity of reminding Dora of his existence. It was easy to guess that he intended to come forward as a suitor one day, when his position had improved. But that would take time, and it meant waiting.

¹ In the dream she said: ‘Where is the station?’ The resemblance between the two questions led me to make an inference which I shall go into presently.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1432

The wandering about in a strange town was overdetermined. It led back to one of the exciting causes from the day before. A young cousin of Dora’s had come to stay with them for the holidays, and Dora had had to show him round Vienna. This cause was, it is true, a matter of complete indifference to her. But her cousin’s visit reminded her of her own first brief visit to Dresden. On that occasion she had been a stranger and had wandered about, not failing, of course, to visit the famous picture gallery. Another cousin of hers, who was with them and knew Dresden, had wanted to act as a guide and take her round the gallery. But she declined and went alone, and stopped in front of the pictures that appealed to her. She remained two hours in front of the Sistine Madonna, rapt in silent admiration. When I asked her what had pleased her so much about the picture she could find no clear answer to make. At last she said: ‘The Madonna.’

There could be no doubt that these associations really belonged to the material concerned in forming the dream. They included portions which reappeared in the dream unchanged (‘she declined and went alone’ and ‘two hours’). I may remark at once that ‘pictures’ was a nodal point in the network of her dream-thoughts (the pictures in the album, the pictures at Dresden). I should also like to single out, with a view to subsequent investigation, the theme of the ‘Madonna’, of the virgin mother. But what was most evident was that in this first part of the dream she was identifying herself with a young man. This young man was wandering about in a strange place, he was striving to reach a goal, but he was being kept back, he needed patience and must wait. If in all this she had been thinking of the engineer, it would have been appropriate for the goal to have been the possession of a woman, of herself. But instead of this it was - a station. Nevertheless, the relation of the question in the dream to the question which had been put in real life allows us to substitute ‘box’ for ‘station’. A box and a woman: the notions begin to agree better.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1433

She asked quite a hundred times.  . . . This led to another exciting cause of the dream, and this time to one that was less indifferent. On the previous evening they had had company, and afterwards her father had asked her to fetch him the brandy: he could not get to sleep unless he had taken some brandy. She had asked her mother for the key of the sideboard; but the latter had been deep in conversation, and had not answered her, until Dora had exclaimed with the exaggeration of impatience: ‘I’ve asked you a hundred times already where the key is.’ As a matter of fact, she had of course only repeated the question about five times.¹

‘Where is the key?’ seems to me to be the masculine counterpart to the question ‘Where is the box?'² They are therefore questions referring to - the genitals.

Dora went on to say that during this same family gathering some one had toasted her father and had expressed the hope that he might continue to enjoy the best of health for many years to come, etc. At this a strange quiver passed over her father’s tired face, and she had understood what thoughts he was having to keep down. Poor sick man! who could tell what span of life was still to be his?

This brings us to the contents of the letter in the dream. Her father was dead, and she had left home by her own choice. In connection with this letter I at once reminded Dora of the farewell letter which she had written to her parents or had at least composed for their benefit. This letter had been intended to give her father a fright, so that he should give up Frau K.; or at any rate to take revenge on him if he could not be induced to do that. We are here concerned with the subject of her death and of her father’s death. (Cf. ‘cemetery’ later on in the dream.) Shall we be going astray if we suppose that the situation which formed the façade of the dream was a phantasy of revenge directed against her father?  The feelings of pity for him which she remembered from the day before would be quite in keeping with this. According to the phantasy she had left home and gone among strangers, and her father’s heart had broken with grief and with longing for her. Thus she would be revenged. She understood very clearly what it was that her father needed when he could not get to sleep without a drink of brandy.³ We will make a note of Dora’s craving for revenge as a new element to be taken into account in any subsequent synthesis of her dream-thoughts.

¹ In the dream the number five occurs in the mention of the period of ‘five minutes’. In my book on the interpretation of dreams I have given several examples of the way in which numbers occurring in the dream-thoughts are treated by dreams. We frequently find them torn out of their true context and inserted into a new one.

² See the first dream, p. 1403.

³ There can be no doubt that sexual satisfaction is the best soporific, just as sleeplessness is almost always the consequence of lack of satisfaction. Her father could not sleep because he was debarred from sexual intercourse with the woman he loved. (Compare in this connection the phrase discussed just below: ‘I get nothing out of my wife.’)

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1434

But the contents of the letter must be capable of further determination. What was the source of the words ‘if you like’? It was at this point that the addendum of there having been a question-mark after the word ‘like’ occurred to Dora, and she then recognized these words as a quotation out of the letter from Frau K. which had contained the invitation to L--, the place by the lake. In that letter there had been a question-mark placed, in a most unusual fashion, in the very middle of a sentence, after the intercalated words ‘if you would like to come’.

So here we were back again at the scene by the lake and at the problems connected with it. I asked Dora to describe the scene to me in detail. At first she produced little that was new. Herr K.’s exordium had been somewhat serious; but she had not let him finish what he had to say. No sooner had she grasped the purport of his words than she had slapped him in the face and hurried away. I enquired what his actual words had been. Dora could only remember one of his pleas: ‘You know I get nothing out of my wife.’¹ In order to avoid meeting him again she had wanted to get back to L-- on foot, by walking round the lake, and she had asked a man whom she met how far it was. On his replying that it was ‘Two and a half hours’, she had given up her intention and had after all gone back to the boat, which left soon afterwards. Herr K. had been there too and had come up to her and begged her to forgive him and not to mention the incident. But she had made no reply. - Yes. The wood in the dream had been just like the wood by the shore of the lake, the wood in which the scene she had just described once more had taken place. But she had seen precisely the same thick wood the day before, in a picture at the Secessionist exhibition. In the background of the picture there were nymphs.²

¹ These words will enable us to solve one of our problems.

² Here for the third time we come upon ‘picture’ (views of towns, the Dresden gallery), but in a much more significant connection. Because of what appears in the picture (the wood, the nymphs), the ‘Bild’ [‘picture’] is turned into a ‘Weibsbild’ [literally, ‘picture of a woman’- a somewhat derogatory expression for ‘woman’].

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1435

At this point a certain suspicion of mine became a certainty. The use of ‘Bahnhof’ [‘station’; literally, ‘railway-court’]¹ and ‘Friedhof’ [‘cemetery’; literally, ‘peace-court’] to represent the female genitals was striking enough in itself, but it also served to direct my awakened curiosity to the similarly formed ‘Vorhof’ [‘vestibulum’; literally, ‘fore-court’] - an anatomical term for a particular region of the female genitals. This might have been no more than mistaken ingenuity. But now, with the addition of ‘nymphs’ visible in the background of a ‘thick wood’, no further doubts could be entertained. Here was a symbolic geography of sex!  ‘Nymphae’, as is known to physicians though not to laymen (and even by the former the term is not very commonly used), is the name given to the labia minora, which lie in the background of the ‘thick wood’ of the pubic hair. But any one who employed such technical names as ‘vestibulum’ and ‘nymphae’ must have derived his knowledge from books, and not from popular ones either, but from anatomical text-books or from an encyclopaedia - the common refuge of youth when it is devoured by sexual curiosity. If this interpretation were correct, therefore, there lay concealed behind the first situation in the dream a phantasy of defloration, the phantasy of a man seeking to force an entrance into the female genitals.²

¹ Moreover, a ‘station’ is used for purposes of ‘Verkehr’ [‘traffic’, intercourse’, ‘sexual intercourse’]: this fact determines the psychical coating in a number of cases of railway phobia.

² The phantasy of defloration formed the second component of the situation. The emphasis upon the difficulty of getting forward and the anxiety felt in the dream indicated the stress which the dreamer was so ready to lay upon her virginity - a point alluded to in another place by means of the Sistine Madonna. These sexual thoughts gave an unconscious ground-colouring to the wishes (which were perhaps merely kept secret ) concerned with the suitor who was waiting for her in Germany. We have already recognized the phantasy of revenge as the first component of the same situation in the dream. The two components do not coincide completely, but only in part. We shall subsequently come upon the traces of a third and still more important train of thought.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1436

I informed Dora of the conclusions I had reached. The impression made upon her must have been forcible, for there immediately appeared a piece of the dream which had been forgotten: she went calmly to her room, and began reading a big book that lay on her writing table.¹ The emphasis here was upon the two details ‘calmly’ and ‘big’ in connection with ‘book’. I asked whether the book was in encyclopaedia format, and she said it was. Now children never read about forbidden subjects in an encyclopaedia calmly. They do it in fear and trembling, with an uneasy look over their shoulder to see if some one may not be coming. Parents are very much in the way while reading of this kind is going on. But this uncomfortable situation had been radically improved, thanks to the dream’s power of fulfilling wishes. Dora’s father was dead, and the others had already gone to the cemetery. She might calmly read whatever she chose. Did not this mean that one of her motives for revenge was a revolt against her parents’ constraint? If her father was dead she could read or love as she pleased.

At first she would not remember ever having read anything in an encyclopaedia; but she then admitted that a recollection of an occasion of the kind did occur to her, though it was of an innocent enough nature. At the time when the aunt she was so fond of had been so seriously ill and it had already been settled that Dora was to go to Vienna, a letter had come from another uncle, to say that they could not go to Vienna, as a boy of his, a cousin of Dora’s therefore, had fallen dangerously ill with appendicitis. Dora had thereupon looked up in the encyclopaedia to see what the symptoms of appendicitis were. From what she had then read she still recollected the characteristic localization of the abdominal pain.

¹ On another occasion, instead of ‘calmly’ she said ‘not the least sadly’ (p. 1430 n.) - I can quote this dream as fresh evidence for the correctness of an assertion made in my Interpretation of Dreams (Chapter VII, Section A; p. 953) to the effect that those pieces of a dream which are at first forgotten and are only subsequently remembered are invariably the most important from the point of view of understanding the dream. In the same place I went on to the conclusion that the forgetting of dreams must also be explained as an effect of endopsychic resistance.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1437

I then remembered that shortly after her aunt’s death Dora had had an attack of what had been alleged to be appendicitis. Up till then I had not ventured to count that illness among her hysterical productions. She told me that during the first few days she had had high fever and had felt the pain in her abdomen that she had read about in the encyclopaedia. She had been given cold fomentations but had not been able to bear them. On the second day her period had set in, accompanied by violent pains. (Since her health had been bad, the periods had been very irregular.) At that time she used to suffer continually from constipation.

It was not really possible to regard this state as a purely hysterical one. Although hysterical fever does undoubtedly occur, yet it seemed too arbitrary to put down the fever accompanying this questionable illness to hysteria instead of to some organic cause operative at the time. I was on the point of abandoning the track, when she herself helped me along it by producing her last addendum to the dream: she saw herself particularly distinctly going up the stairs.

I naturally required a special determinant for this. Dora objected that she would anyhow have had to go upstairs if she had wanted to get to her flat, which was on an upper floor. It was easy to brush aside this objection (which was probably not very seriously intended) by pointing out that if she had been able to travel in her dream from the unknown town to Vienna without making a railway journey she ought also to have been able to leave out a flight of stairs. She then proceeded to relate that after the appendicitis she had not been able to walk properly and had dragged her right foot. This state of things had continued for a long time, and on that account she had been particularly glad to avoid stairs. Even now her foot sometimes dragged. The doctors whom she had consulted at her father’s desire had been very much astonished at this most unusual after-effect of an appendicitis, especially as the abdominal pains had not recurred and did not in any way accompany the dragging of the foot.¹

¹ We must assume the existence of some somatic connection between the painful abdominal sensations known as ‘ovarian neuralgia’ and locomotor disturbances in the leg on the same side; and we must suppose that in Dora’s case the somatic connection had been given an interpretation of a particularly specialized sort, that is to say, that it had been overlaid with and brought into the service of a particular psychological meaning. The reader is referred to my analogous remarks in connection with the analysis of Dora’s symptom of coughing and with the relation between catarrh and loss of appetite.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1438

Here, then, we have a true hysterical symptom. The fever may have been organically determined - perhaps by one of those very frequent attacks of influenza that are not localized in any particular part of the body. Nevertheless it was now established that the neurosis had seized upon this chance event and made use of it for an utterance of its own. Dora had therefore given herself an illness which she had read up about in the encyclopaedia, and she had punished herself for dipping into its pages. But she was forced to recognize that the punishment could not possibly apply to her reading the innocent article in question. It must have been inflicted as the result of a process of displacement, after another occasion of more guilty reading had become associated with this one; and the guilty occasion must lie concealed in her memory behind the contemporaneous innocent one.¹ It might still be possible, perhaps, to discover the nature of the subjects she had read about on that other occasion.

What, then, was the meaning of this condition, of this attempted simulation of a perityphlitis?  The remainder of the disorder, the dragging of one leg, was entirely out of keeping with perityphlitis. It must, no doubt, fit in better with the secret and possibly sexual meaning of the clinical picture; and if it were elucidated might in its turn throw light on the meaning which we were in search of. I looked about for a method of approaching the puzzle. Periods of time had been mentioned in the dream; and time is assuredly never a matter of indifference in any biological event. I therefore asked Dora when this attack of appendicitis had taken place; whether it had been before or after the scene by the lake. Every difficulty was resolved at a single blow by her prompt reply: ‘Nine months later.’ The period of time is sufficiently characteristic. Her supposed attack of appendicitis had thus enabled the patient with the modest means at her disposal (the pains and the menstrual flow) to realize a phantasy of childbirth.² Dora was naturally aware of the significance of this period of time, and could not dispute the probability of her having, on the occasion under discussion, read up in the encyclopaedia about pregnancy and childbirth. But what was all this about her dragging her leg? I could now hazard a guess. That is how people walk when they have twisted a foot. So she had made a ‘false step’: which was true indeed if she could give birth to a child nine months after the scene by the lake. But there was still another requirement upon the fulfilment of which I had to insist. I am convinced that a symptom of this kind can only arise where it has an infantile prototype. All my experience hitherto has led me to hold firmly to the view that recollections derived from the impressions of later years do not possess sufficient force to enable them to establish themselves as symptoms. I scarcely dared hope that Dora would provide me with the material that I wanted from her childhood, for the fact is that I am not yet in a position to assert the general validity of this rule, much as I should like to be able to do so. But in this case there came an immediate confirmation of it. Yes, said Dora, once when she was a child she had twisted the same foot; she had slipped on one of the steps as she was going downstairs. The foot - and it was actually the same one that she afterwards dragged - had swelled up and had to be bandaged and she had had to lie up for some weeks. This had been a short time before the attack of nervous asthma in her eighth year.

¹ This is quite a typical example of the way in which symptoms arise from exciting causes which appear to be entirely unconnected with sexuality.

² I have already indicated that the majority of hysterical symptoms, when they have attained their full pitch of development, represent an imagined situation of sexual life - such as a scene of sexual intercourse, pregnancy, childbirth, confinement, etc.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1439

The next thing to do was to turn to account our knowledge of the existence of this phantasy: ‘If it is true that you were delivered of a child nine months after the scene by the lake, and that you are going about to this very day carrying the consequences of your false step with you, then it follows that in your unconscious you must have regretted the upshot of the scene. In your unconscious thoughts, that is to say, you have made an emendation in it. The assumption that underlies your phantasy of childbirth is that on that occasion something took place,¹ that on that occasion you experienced and went through everything that you were in fact obliged to pick up later on from the encyclopaedia. So you see that your love for Herr K. did not come to an end with the scene, but that (as I maintained) it has persisted down to the present day - though it is true that you are unconscious of it.’ - And Dora disputed the fact no longer.²

¹ The phantasy of defloration is thus found to have an application to Herr K., and we begin to see why this part of the dream contained material taken from the scene by the lake - the refusal, two and a half hours, the wood, the invitation to L--.

² I may here add a few supplementary interpretations to those that have already been given: The ‘Madonna’ was obviously Dora herself; in the first place because of the ‘adorer’ who had sent her the pictures, in the second place because she had won Herr K.’s love chiefly by the motherliness she had shown towards his children, and lastly because she had had a child though she was still a girl (this being a direct allusion to the phantasy of childbirth). Moreover, the notion of the ‘Madonna’ is a favourite counter-idea in the mind of girls who feel themselves oppressed by imputations of sexual guilt, - which was the case with Dora. A first suspicion of this connection came to me while I was working as a physician at the Psychiatric Clinic of the University. I there came across a case of confusional insanity with hallucinations, in which the attack, which ran a rapid course, turned out to be a reaction to a reproach made against the patient by her fiancé. - If the analysis had been continued, Dora’s maternal longing for a child would probably have been revealed as an obscure though powerful motive in her behaviour. The numerous questions which she had been raising latterly seem to have been belated derivatives of questions inspired by the sexual curiosity which she had tried to gratify with the encyclopaedia. The subjects which she read up in it were presumably pregnancy, childbirth, virginity, and so on. - In reproducing the dream Dora had forgotten one of the questions which need to be inserted into the course of the second situation in the dream. This question could only be; ‘Does Herr -- live here?’ or ‘Where does Herr -- live?’ There must have been some reason for her having forgotten this apparently innocent question, especially as she need not have brought it into the dream at all. This reason, it seems to me, lay in her surname itself, which also denoted an object and in fact more than one kind of object, and which could therefore be regarded as an ‘ambiguous’ word. Unluckily I cannot give the name and show how well designed it was to indicate something ‘ambiguous’ and ‘improper’. This interpretation was supported by the discovery of a similar play upon words in another part of the dream, where the material was derived from Dora’s recollections of her aunt’s death (‘they have already gone to the cemetery’) and where there was similarly a play upon her aunt’s name. These improper words seemed to point to a second and oral source of information, since the encyclopaedia would not cover them. I should not have been surprised to hear that this source had been Frau K. herself, Dora’s calumniator. In that case she would have been the one person whom Dora generously spared, while she pursued the others with an almost malignant vindictiveness. Behind the almost limitless series of displacements which were thus brought to light, it was possible to divine the operation of a single simple factor - Dora’s deep-rooted homosexual love for Frau K.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1440

The labour of elucidating the second dream had so far occupied two hours. At the end of the second session, when I expressed my satisfaction at the result, Dora replied in a depreciatory tone: ‘Why, has anything so very remarkable come out?’ These words prepared me for the advent of fresh revelations.

She opened the third session with these words: ‘Do you know that I am here for the last time to-day?’ - ‘How can I know, as you have said nothing to me about it?’ - ‘Yes. I made up my mind to put up with it till the New Year.¹ But I shall wait no longer than that to be cured.’ - ‘You know that you are free to stop the treatment at any time. But for to-day we will go on with our work. When did you come to this decision?’ - ‘A fortnight ago, I think.’ - ‘That sounds just like a maidservant or a governess - a fortnight’s notice.’ - ‘There was a governess who gave notice with the K.’s, when I was on my visit to them that time at L--, by the lake.’ - ‘Really? You have never told me about her. Tell me.’

‘Well, there was a young girl in the house, who was the children’s governess; and she behaved in the most extraordinary way to Herr K. She never said good morning to him, never answered his remarks, never handed him anything at table when he asked for it, and in short treated him like thin air. For that matter he was hardly any politer to her. A day or two before the scene by the lake, the girl took me aside and said she had something to tell me. She then told me that Herr K. had made advances to her at a time when his wife was away for several weeks; he had made violent love to her and had implored her to yield to his entreaties, saying that he got nothing from his wife, and so on.’ - ‘Why, those are the very words he used afterwards, when he made his proposal to you and you gave him the slap in his face’. - ‘Yes. She had given way to him, but after a little while he had ceased to care for her, and since then she hated him.’ - ‘And this governess had given notice?’ - ‘No. She meant to give notice. She told me that as soon as she felt she was thrown over she had told her parents what had happened. They were respectable people living in Germany somewhere. Her parents said that she must leave the house instantly; and, as she failed to do so, they wrote to her saying that they would have nothing more to do with her, and that she was never to come home again.’ - ‘And why had she not gone away?’ - ‘She said she meant to wait a little longer, to see if there might not be some change in Herr K. She could not bear living like that any more, she said, and if she saw no change she should give notice and go away.’ - ‘And what became of the girl?’ - ‘I only know that she went away.’ - ‘And she did not have a child as a result of the adventure? ‘ - ‘No.’

¹ It was December 31st.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1441

Here, therefore (and quite in accordance with the rules), was a piece of material information coming to light in the middle of the analysis and helping to solve problems which had previously been raised. I was able to say to Dora: ‘Now I know your motive for the slap in the face with which you answered Herr K.’s proposal. It was not that you were offended at his suggestions; you were actuated by jealousy and revenge. At the time when the governess was telling you her story you were still able to make use of your gift for putting on one side everything that is not agreeable to your feelings. But at the moment when Herr K. used the words "I get nothing out of my wife" - which were the same words he had used to the governess - fresh emotions were aroused in you and tipped the balance. "Does he dare", you said to yourself, "to treat me like a governess, like a servant?" Wounded pride added to jealousy and to the conscious motives of common sense - it was too much.¹ To prove to you how deeply impressed you were by the governess’s story, let me draw your attention to the repeated occasions upon which you have identified yourself with her both in your dream and in your conduct. You told your parents what happened - a fact which we have hitherto been unable to account for - just as the governess wrote and told her parents. You give me a fortnight’s notice, just like a governess. The letter in the dream which gave you leave to go home is the counterpart of the governess’s letter from her parents forbidding her to do so.’

¹ It is not a matter of indifference, perhaps, that Dora may have heard her father make the same complaint about his wife, just as I myself did from his own lips. She was perfectly well aware of its meaning.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1442

‘Then why did I not tell my parents at once?’

‘How much time did you allow to elapse? ‘

‘The scene took place on the last day of June; I told my mother about it on July 14th.’

‘Again a fortnight, then - the time characteristic for a person in service. Now I can answer your question. You understood the poor girl very well. She did not want to go away at once, because she still had hopes, because she expected that Herr K.’s affections would return to her again. So that must have been your motive too. You waited for that length of time so as to see whether he would repeat his proposals; if he had, you would have concluded that he was in earnest, and did not mean to play with you as he had done with the governess.’

‘A few days after I had left he sent me a picture post-card.’¹

‘Yes, but when after that nothing more came, you gave free rein to your feelings of revenge. I can even imagine that at that time you were still able to find room for a subsidiary intention, and thought that your accusation might be a means of inducing him to travel to the place where you were living. - ‘As he actually offered to do at first,’ Dora threw in. - ‘In that way your longing for him would have been appeased’ - here she nodded assent, a thing which I had not expected - ‘and he might have made you the amends you desired.’

‘What amends?’

‘The fact is, I am beginning to suspect that you took the affair with Herr K. much more seriously than you have been willing to admit so far. Had not the K.’s often talked of getting a divorce?’

‘Yes, certainly. At first she did not want to, on account of the children. And now she wants to, but he no longer does.’

¹ Here is the point of contact with the engineer, who was concealed behind the figure of Dora herself in the first situation in the dream.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1443

‘May you not have thought that he wanted to get divorced from his wife so as to marry you? And that now he no longer wants to because he has no one to replace her? It is true that two years ago you were very young. But you told me yourself that your mother was engaged at seventeen and then waited two years for her husband. A daughter usually takes her mother’s love-story as her model. So you too wanted to wait for him, and you took it that he was only waiting till you were grown up enough to be his wife.¹ I imagine that this was a perfectly serious plan for the future in your eyes. You have not even got the right to assert that it was out of the question for Herr K. to have had any such intention; you have told me enough about him that points directly towards his having such an intention.² Nor does his behaviour at L-- contradict this view. After all, you did not let him finish his speech and do not know what he meant to say to you. Incidentally, the scheme would by no means have been so impracticable. Your father’s relations with Frau K.- and it was probably only for this reason that you lent them your support for so long - made it certain that her consent to a divorce could be obtained; and you can get anything you like out of your father. Indeed, if your temptation at L-- had had a different upshot, this would have been the only possible solution for all the parties concerned. And I think that is why you regretted the actual event so deeply and emended it in the phantasy which made its appearance in the shape of the appendicitis. So it must have been a bitter piece of disillusionment for you when the effect of your charges against Herr K. was not that he renewed his proposals but that he replied instead with denials and slanders. You will agree that nothing makes you so angry as having it thought that you merely fancied the scene by the lake. I know now - and this is what you do not want to be reminded of - that you did fancy that Herr K.’s proposals were serious, and that he would not leave off until you had married him.’

¹ The theme of waiting till the goal is reached occurs in the content of the first situation in the dream. I recognize in this phantasy of waiting for a fiancée a portion of the third component of that situation. I have already alluded to the existence of this third component.

² In particular there was a speech which he had made in presenting Dora with a letter-case for Christmas in the last year in which they lived together at B.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1444

Dora had listened to me without any of her usual contradictions. She seemed to be moved; she said good-bye to me very warmly, with the heartiest wishes for the New Year, and - came no more. Her father, who called on me two or three times afterwards, assured me that she would come back again, and said it was easy to see that she was eager for the treatment to continue. But it must be confessed that Dora’s father was never entirely straightforward. He had given his support to the treatment so long as he could hope that I should ‘talk’ Dora out of her belief that there was something more than a friendship between him and Frau K. His interest faded when he observed that it was not my intention to bring about that result. I knew Dora would not come back again. Her breaking off so unexpectedly, just when my hopes of a successful termination of the treatment were at their highest, and her thus bringing those hopes to nothing - this was an unmistakable act of vengeance on her part. Her purpose of self-injury also profited by this action. No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed. Might I perhaps have kept the girl under my treatment if I myself had acted a part, if I had exaggerated the importance to me of her staying on, and had shown a warm personal interest in her - a course which, even after allowing for my position as her physician, would have been tantamount to providing her with a substitute for the affection she longed for? I do not know. Since in every case a portion of the factors that are encountered under the form of resistance remains unknown, I have always avoided acting a part, and have contented myself with practising the humbler arts of psychology. In spite of every theoretical interest and of every endeavour to be of assistance as a physician, I keep the fact in mind that there must be some limits set to the extent to which psychological influence may be used, and I respect as one of these limits the patient’s own will and understanding.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1445

Nor do I know whether Herr K. would have done any better if it had been revealed to him that the slap Dora gave him by no means signified a final ‘No’ on her part, but that it expressed the jealousy which had lately been roused in her, while her strongest feelings were still on his side. If he had disregarded that first ‘No’, and had continued to press his suit with a passion which left room for no doubts, the result might very well have been a triumph of the girl’s affection for him over all her internal difficulties. But I think she might just as well have been merely provoked into satisfying her craving for revenge upon him all the more thoroughly. It is never possible to calculate towards which side the decision will incline in such a conflict of motives: whether towards the removal of the repression or towards its reinforcement. Incapacity for meeting a real erotic demand is one of the most essential features of a neurosis. Neurotics are dominated by the opposition between reality and phantasy. If what they long for the most intensely in their phantasies is presented to them in reality, they none the less flee from it; and they abandon themselves to their phantasies the most readily where they need no longer fear to see them realized. Nevertheless, the barrier erected by repression can fall before the onslaught of a violent emotional excitement produced by a real cause; it is possible for a neurosis to be overcome by reality. But we have no general means of calculating through what person or what event such a cure can be effected.¹

¹ I will add a few remarks on the structure of this dream, though it is not possible to understand it thoroughly enough to allow of a synthesis being attempted. A prominent piece of the dream is to be seen in the phantasy of revenge against her father, which stands out like a façade in front of the rest. (She had gone away from home by her own choice; her father was ill, and then dead. . . Then she went home; all the others were already at the cemetery. She went to her room, not the least sadly, and calmly began reading the encyclopaedia.) This part of the material also contained two allusions to her other act of revenge, which she had actually carried out, when she let her parents discover a farewell letter from her. (The letter - from her mother, in the dream and the mention of the funeral of the aunt who had always been her model.) Behind this phantasy lie concealed her thoughts of revenge against Herr K., for which she found an outlet in her behaviour to me. (The maidservant, the invitation, the wood, the two and a half hours - all these came from material connected with the events at L--.) Her recollection of the governess, and of the latter’s exchange of letters with her parents, is related, no less than her farewell letter, to the letter in the dream allowing her to come home. Her refusal to let herself be accompanied and her decision to go alone may perhaps be translated into these words: ‘Since you have treated me like a servant, I shall take no more notice of you, I shall go my own way by myself, and not marry.’ - Screened by these thoughts of revenge, glimpses can be caught in other places of material derived from tender phantasies based upon the love for Herr K. which still persisted unconsciously in Dora. (‘I would have waited for you till I could be your wife’ - defloration - childbirth.) -Finally, we can see the action of the fourth and most deeply buried group of thoughts - those relating to her love for Frau K. - in the fact that the phantasy of defloration is represented from the man’s point of view (her identification of herself with her admirer who lived abroad) and in the fact that in two places there are the clearest allusions to ambiguous speeches (‘Does Herr -- live here?’) and to that source of her sexual knowledge which had not been oral (the encyclopaedia). - Cruel and sadistic tendencies find satisfaction in this dream.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1446

IV

POSTSCRIPT

It is true that I have introduced this paper as a fragment of an analysis; but the reader will have discovered that it is incomplete to a far greater degree than its title might have led him to expect. It is therefore only proper that I should attempt to give a reason for the omissions - which are by no means accidental.

A number of the results of the analysis have been omitted, because at the time when work was broken off they had either not been established with sufficient certainty or they required further study before any general statement could be made about them. At other points, where it seemed to be permissible, I have indicated the direction along which some particular solution would probably have been found to lie. I have in this paper left entirely out of account the technique, which does not at all follow as a matter of course, but by whose means alone the pure metal of valuable unconscious thoughts can be extracted from the raw material of the patient’s associations. This brings with it the disadvantage of the reader being given no opportunity of testing the correctness of my procedure in the course of this exposition of the case. I found it quite impracticable, however, to deal simultaneously with the technique of analysis and with the internal structure of a case of hysteria: I could scarcely have accomplished such a task, and if I had, the result would have been almost unreadable. The technique of analysis demands an entirely separate exposition, which would have to be illustrated by numerous examples chosen from a very great variety of cases and which would not have to take the results obtained in each particular case into account. Nor have I attempted in this paper to substantiate the psychological postulates which will be seen to underlie my descriptions of mental phenomena. A cursory attempt to do so would have effected nothing; an exhaustive one would have been a volume in itself. I can only assure the reader that I approached the study of the phenomena revealed by observation of the psychoneuroses without being pledged to any particular psychological system, and that I then proceeded to adjust my views until they seemed adapted for giving an account of the collection of facts which had been observed. I take no pride in having avoided speculation; the material for my hypotheses was collected by the most extensive and laborious series of observations. The decidedness of my attitude on the subject of the unconscious is perhaps specially likely to cause offence, for I handle unconscious ideas, unconscious trains of thought, and unconscious impulses as though they were no less valid and unimpeachable psychological data than conscious ones. But of this I am certain - that any one who sets out to investigate the same region of phenomena and employs the same method will find himself compelled to take up the same position, however much philosophers may expostulate.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1447

Some of my medical colleagues have looked upon my theory of hysteria as a purely psychological one, and have for that reason pronounced it ipso facto incapable of solving a pathological problem. They may perhaps discover from this paper that their objection was based upon their having unjustifiably transferred what is a characteristic of the technique on to the theory itself. It is the therapeutic technique alone that is purely psychological; the theory does not by any means fail to point out that neuroses have an organic basis - though it is true that it does not look for that basis in any pathological anatomical changes, and provisionally substitutes the conception of organic functions for the chemical changes which we should expect to find but which we are at present unable to apprehend. No one, probably, will be inclined to deny the sexual function the character of an organic factor, and it is the sexual function that I look upon as the foundation of hysteria and of the psychoneuroses in general. No theory of sexual life will, I suspect, be able to avoid assuming the existence of some definite sexual substances having an excitant action. Indeed, of all the clinical pictures which we meet with in clinical medicine, it is the phenomena of intoxication and abstinence in connection with the use of certain chronic poisons that most closely resemble the genuine psychoneuroses.

But, once again, in the present paper I have not gone fully into all that might be said to-day about ‘somatic compliance’, about the infantile germs of perversion, about the erotogenic zones, and about our predisposition towards bisexuality; I have merely drawn attention to the points at which the analysis comes into contact with these organic bases of the symptoms. More than this could not be done with a single case. And I had the same reasons that I have already mentioned for wishing to avoid a cursory discussion of these factors. There is a rich opportunity here for further works, based upon the study of a large number of analyses.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1448

Nevertheless, in publishing this paper, incomplete though it is, I had two objects in view. In the first place, I wished to supplement my book on the interpretation of dreams by showing how an art, which would otherwise be useless, can be turned to account for the discovery of the hidden and repressed parts of mental life. (Incidentally, in the process of analysing the two dreams dealt with in the paper, the technique of dream-interpretation, which is similar to that of psycho-analysis, has come under consideration.) In the second place, I wished to stimulate interest in a whole group of phenomena of which science is still in complete ignorance to-day because they can only be brought to light by the use of this particular method. No one, I believe, can have had any true conception of the complexity of the psychological events in a case of hysteria - the juxtaposition of the most dissimilar tendencies, the mutual dependence of contrary ideas, the repressions and displacements, and so on. The emphasis laid by Janet upon the ‘idée fixe’ which becomes transformed into a symptom amounts to no more than an extremely meagre attempt at schematization. Moreover, it is impossible to avoid the suspicion that, when the ideas attaching to certain excitations are incapable of becoming conscious, those excitations must act upon one another differently, run a different course, and manifest themselves differently from those other excitations which we describe as ‘normal’ and which have ideas attaching to them of which we become conscious. When once things have been made clear up to this point, no obstacle can remain in the way of an understanding of a therapeutic method which removes neurotic symptoms by transforming ideas of the former kind into normal ones.

I was further anxious to show that sexuality does not simply intervene, like a deus ex machina, on one single occasion, at some point in the working of the processes which characterize hysteria, but that it provides the motive power for every single symptom, and for every single manifestation of a symptom. The symptoms of the disease are nothing else than the patient’s sexual activity. A single case can never be capable of proving a theorem so general as this one; but I can only repeat over and over again - for I never find it otherwise - that sexuality is the key to the problem of the psychoneuroses and of the neuroses in general. No one who disdains the key will ever be able to unlock the door. I still await news of the investigations which are to make it possible to contradict this theorem or to limit its scope. What I have hitherto heard against it have been expressions of personal dislike or disbelief. To these it is enough to reply in the words of Charcot: ‘Ça n’empêche pas d’exister.’

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1449

Nor is the case of whose history and treatment I have published a fragment in these pages well calculated to put the value of psycho-analytic therapy in its true light. Not only the briefness of the treatment (which hardly lasted three months) but another factor inherent in the nature of the case prevented results being brought about such as are attainable in other instances, where the improvement will be admitted by the patient and his relatives and will approximate more or less closely to a complete recovery. Satisfactory results of this kind are reached when the symptoms are maintained solely by the internal conflict between the impulses concerned with sexuality. In such cases the patient’s condition will be seen improving in proportion as he is helped towards a solution of his mental problems by the translation of pathogenic into normal material. The course of events is very different when the symptoms have become enlisted in the service of external motives, as had happened with Dora during the two preceding years. It is surprising, and might easily be misleading, to find that the patient’s condition shows no noticeable alteration even though considerable progress has been made with the work of analysis. But in reality things are not as bad as they seem. It is true that the symptoms do not disappear while the work is proceeding; but they disappear a little while later, when the relations between patient and physician have been dissolved. The postponement of recovery or improvement is really only caused by the physician’s own person.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1450

I must go back a little, in order to make the matter intelligible. It may be safely said that during psycho-analytic treatment the formation of new symptoms is invariably stopped. But the productive powers of the neurosis are by no means extinguished; they are occupied in the creation of a special class of mental structures, for the most part unconscious, to which the name of ‘transferences’ may be given.

What are transferences? They are new editions or facsimiles of the impulses and phantasies which are aroused and made conscious during the progress of the analysis; but they have this peculiarity, which is characteristic for their species, that they replace some earlier person by the person of the physician. To put it another way: a whole series of psychological experiences are revived, not as belonging to the past, but as applying to the person of the physician at the present moment. Some of these transferences have a content which differs from that of their model in no respect whatever except for the substitution. These then - to keep to the same metaphor - are merely new impressions or reprints. Others are more ingeniously constructed; their content has been subjected to a moderating influence - to sublimation, as I call it - and they may even become conscious, by cleverly taking advantage of some real peculiarity in the physician’s person or circumstances and attaching themselves to that. These, then, will no longer be new impressions, but revised editions.

If the theory of analytic technique is gone into, it become, evident that transference is an inevitable necessity. Practical experience, at all events, shows conclusively that there is no means of avoiding it, and that this latest creation of the disease must be combated like all the earlier ones. This happens, however, to be by far the hardest part of the whole task. It is easy to learn how to interpret dreams, to extract from the patient’s associations his unconscious thoughts and memories, and to practise similar explanatory arts: for these the patient himself will always provide the text. Transference is the one thing the presence of which has to be detected almost without assistance and with only the slightest clues to go upon, while at the same time the risk of making arbitrary inferences has to be avoided. Nevertheless, transference cannot be evaded, since use is made of it in setting up all the obstacles that make the material inaccessible to treatment, and since it is only after the transference has been resolved that a patient arrives at a sense of conviction of the validity of the connections which have been constructed during the analysis.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1451

Some people may feel inclined to look upon it as a serious objection to a method which is in any case troublesome enough that it itself should multiply the labours of the physician by creating a new species of pathological mental products. They may even be tempted to infer from the existence of transferences that the patient will be injured by analytic treatment. Both these suppositions would be mistaken. The physician’s labours are not multiplied by transference; it need make no difference to him whether he has to overcome any particular impulse of the patient’s in connection with himself or with some one else. Nor does the treatment force upon the patient, in the shape of transference, any new task which he would not other wise have performed. It is true that neuroses may be cured in institutions from which psycho-analytic treatment is excluded, that hysteria may be said to be cured not by the method but by the physician, and that there is usually a sort of blind dependence and a permanent bond between a patient and the physician who has removed his symptoms by hypnotic suggestion; but the scientific explanation of all these facts is to be found in the existence of ‘transferences’ such as are regularly directed by patients on to their physicians. Psycho-analytic treatment does not create transferences, it merely brings them to light, like so many other hidden psychical factors. The only difference is this - that spontaneously a patient will only call up affectionate and friendly transferences to help towards his recovery; if they cannot be called up, he feels the physician is ‘antipathetic’ to him, and breaks away from him as fast as possible and without having been influenced by him. In psycho-analysis, on the other hand, since the play of motives is different, all the patient’s tendencies, including hostile ones, are aroused; they are then turned to account for the purposes of the analysis by being made conscious, and in this way the transference is constantly being destroyed. Transference, which seems ordained to be the greatest obstacle to psycho-analysis, becomes its most powerful ally, if its presence can be detected each time and explained to the patient.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1923:] A continuation of these remarks upon transference is contained in my technical paper on ‘transference-love’ (Freud, 1915a).

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1452

I have been obliged to speak of transference, for it is only by means of this factor that I can elucidate the peculiarities of Dora’s analysis. Its great merit, namely, the unusual clarity which makes it seem so suitable as a first introductory publication, is closely bound up with its great defect, which led to its being broken off prematurely. I did not succeed in mastering the transference in good time. Owing to the readiness with which Dora put one part of the pathogenic material at my disposal during the treatment, I neglected the precaution of looking out for the first signs of transference, which was being prepared in connection with another part of the same material a part of which I was in ignorance. At the beginning it was clear that I was replacing her father in her imagination, which was not unlikely, in view of the difference between our ages. She was even constantly comparing me with him consciously, and kept anxiously trying to make sure whether I was being quite straightforward with her, for her father ‘always preferred secrecy and roundabout ways’. But when the first dream came, in which she gave herself the warning that she had better leave my treatment just as she had formerly left Herr K.’s house, I ought to have listened to the warning myself. ‘Now,’ I ought to have said to her, ‘it is from Herr K. that you have made a transference on to me. Have you noticed anything that leads you to suspect me of evil intentions similar (whether openly or in some sublimated form) to Herr K.’s? Or have you been struck by anything about me or got to know anything about me which has caught your fancy, as happened previously with Herr K.’ Her attention would then have been turned to some detail in our relations, or in my person or circumstances, behind which there lay concealed something analogous but immeasurably more important concerning Herr K. And when this transference had been cleared up, the analysis would have obtained access to new memories, dealing, probably, with actual events. But I was deaf to this first note of warning, thinking I had ample time before me, since no further stages of transference developed and the material for the analysis had not yet run dry. In this way the transference took me unawares, and, because of the unknown quantity in me which reminded Dora of Herr K., she took her revenge on me as she wanted to take her revenge on him, and deserted me as she believed herself to have been deceived and deserted by him. Thus she acted out an essential part of her recollections and phantasies instead of reproducing it in the treatment. What this unknown quantity was I naturally cannot tell. I suspect that it had to do with money, or with jealousy of another patient who had kept up relations with my family after her recovery. When it is possible to work transferences into the analysis at an early stage, the course of the analysis is retarded and obscured, but its existence is better guaranteed against sudden and overwhelming resistances.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1453

In Dora’s second dream there are several clear allusions to transference. At the time she was telling me the dream I was still unaware (and did not learn until two days later) that we had only two hours more work before us. This was the same length of time which she had spent in front of the Sistine Madonna, and which (by making a correction and putting ‘two hours’ instead of ‘two and a half hours’) she had taken as the length of the walk which she had not made round the lake. The striving and waiting in the dream, which related to the young man in Germany, and had their origin in her waiting till Herr K. could marry her, had been expressed in the transference a few days before. The treatment, she had thought, was too long for her; she would never have the patience to wait so long. And yet in the first few weeks she had had discernment enough to listen without making any such objections when I informed her that her complete recovery would require perhaps a year. Her refusing in the dream to be accompanied, and preferring to go alone, also originated from her visit to the gallery at Dresden, and I was myself to experience them on the appointed day. What they meant was, no doubt: ‘Men are all so detestable that I would rather not marry. This is my revenge.’¹

¹ The longer the interval of time that separates me from the end of this analysis, the more probable it seems to me that the fault in my technique lay in this omission: I failed to discover in time and to inform the patient that her homosexual (gynaecophilic) love for Frau K. was the strongest unconscious current in her mental life. I ought to have guessed that the main source of her knowledge of sexual matters could have been no one but Frau K. - the very person who later on charged her with being interested in those same subjects. Her knowing all about such things and, at the same time, her always pretending not to know where her knowledge came from was really too remarkable. I ought to have attacked this riddle and looked for the motive of such an extraordinary piece of repression. If I had done this, the second dream would have given me my answer. The remorseless craving for revenge expressed in that dream was suited as nothing else was to conceal the current of feeling that ran contrary to it - the magnanimity with which she forgave the treachery of the friend she loved and concealed from every one the fact that it was this friend who had herself revealed to her the knowledge which had later been the ground of the accusations against her. Before I had learnt the importance of the homosexual current of feeling in psychoneurotics, I was often brought to a standstill in the treatment of my cases or found myself in complete perplexity.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1454

If cruel impulses and revengeful motives, which have already been used in the patient’s ordinary life for maintaining her symptoms, become transferred on to the physician during treatment, before he has had time to detach them from himself by tracing them back to their sources, then it is not to be wondered at if the patient’s condition is unaffected by his therapeutic efforts. For how could the patient take a more effective revenge than by demonstrating upon her own person the helplessness and incapacity of the physician? Nevertheless, I am not inclined to put too low a value on the therapeutic results even of such a fragmentary treatment as Dora’s.

It was not until fifteen months after the case was over and this paper composed that I had news of my patient’s condition and the effects of my treatment. On a date which is not a matter of complete indifference, on the first of April (times and dates, as we know, were never without significance for her), Dora came to see me again: to finish her story and to ask for help once more. One glance at her face, however, was enough to tell me that she was not in earnest over her request. For four or five weeks after stopping the treatment she had been ‘all in a muddle’, as she said. A great improvement had then set in; her attacks had become less frequent and her spirits had risen. In the May of that year one of the K.’s two children (it had always been delicate) had died. She took the opportunity of their loss to pay them a visit of condolence, and they received her as though nothing had happened in the last three years. She made it up with them, she took her revenge on them and she brought her own business to a satisfactory conclusion. To the wife she said: ‘I know you have an affair with my father’; and the other did not deny it. From the husband she drew an admission of the scene by the lake which he had disputed, and brought the news of her vindication home to her father. Since then she had not resumed her relations with the family.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1455

After this she had gone on quite well till the middle of October, when she had had another attack of aphonia which had lasted for six weeks. I was surprised at this news, and, on my asking her whether there had been any exciting cause, she told me that the attack had followed upon a violent fright. She had seen some one run over by a carriage. Finally she came out with the fact that the accident had occurred to no less a person than Herr K. himself. She had come across him in the street one day; they had met in a place where there was a great deal of traffic; he had stopped in front of her as though in bewilderment, and in his abstraction he had allowed himself to be knocked down by a carriage.¹ She had been able to convince herself, however, that he escaped without serious injury. She still felt some slight emotion if she heard any one speak of her father’s affair with Frau K., but otherwise she had no further concern with the matter. She was absorbed in her work, and had no thoughts of marrying.

She went on to tell me that she had come for help on account of a right-sided facial neuralgia, from which she was now suffering day and night. ‘How long has it been going on?’ ‘Exactly a fortnight.’² I could not help smiling; for I was able to show her that exactly a fortnight earlier she had read a piece of news that concerned me in the newspaper. (This was in 1902.) And this she confirmed.

¹ We have here an interesting contribution to the problem of indirect attempts at suicide, which I have discussed in my Psychopathology of Everyday Life.

² For the significance of this period of time and its relation to the theme of revenge, see the analysis of the second dream.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1456

Her alleged facial neuralgia was thus a self-punishment -  remorse at having once given Herr K. a box on the ear, and at having transferred her feelings of revenge on to me. I do not know what kind of help she wanted from me, but I promised to forgive her for having deprived me of the satisfaction of affording her a far more radical cure for her troubles.

Years have again gone by since her visit. In the meantime the girl has married, and indeed - unless all the signs mislead me - she has married the young man who came into her associations at the beginning of the analysis of the second dream. Just as the first dream represented her turning away from the man she loved to her father - that is to say, her flight from life into disease - so the second dream announced that she was about to tear herself free from her father and had been reclaimed once more by the realities of life.

1457

THREE ESSAYS ON THE THEORY OF SEXUALITY

(1905)

1458

Intentionally left blank

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1459

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

The author is under no illusion as to the deficiencies and obscurities of this little work. Nevertheless he has resisted the temptation of introducing into it the results of the researches of the last five years, since this would have destroyed its unity and documentary character. He is, therefore, reprinting the original text with only slight alterations, and has contented himself with adding a few footnotes which are distinguished from the older ones by an asterisk.¹ It is, moreover, his earnest wish that the book may age rapidly - that what was once new in it may become generally accepted, and that what is imperfect in it may be replaced by something better.

VIENNA, December 1909

¹ [The distinction was dropped in all subsequent editions.]

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1460

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

I have now been watching for more than ten years the effects produced by this work and the reception accorded to it; and I take the opportunity offered by the publication of its third edition to preface it with a few remarks intended to prevent misunderstandings and expectations that cannot be fulfilled. It must above all be emphasized that the exposition to be found in the following pages is based entirely upon everyday medical observation, to which the findings of psycho-analytic research should lend additional depth and scientific significance. It is impossible that these Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality should contain anything but what psycho-analysis makes it necessary to assume or possible to establish. It is, therefore, out of the question that they could ever be extended into a complete ‘theory of sexuality’, and it is natural that there should be a number of important problems of sexual life with which they do not deal at all. But the reader should not conclude from this that the branches of this large subject which have been thus passed over are unknown to the author or have been neglected by him as of small importance.

The fact that this book is based upon the psycho-analytic observations which led to its composition is shown, however, not only in the choice of the topics dealt with, but also in their arrangement. Throughout the entire work the various factors are placed in a particular order of precedence: preference is given to the accidental factors while disposition is left in the background, and more weight is attached to ontogenesis than to phylogenesis. For it is the accidental factors that play the principal part in analysis: they are almost entirely subject to its influence. The dispositional ones only come to light after them, as something stirred into activity by experience: adequate consideration of them would lead far beyond the sphere of psycho-analysis.

The relation between ontogenesis and phylogenesis is a similar one. Ontogenesis may be regarded as a recapitulation of phylogenesis, in so far as the latter has not been modified by more recent experience. The phylogenetic disposition can be seen at work behind the ontogenetic process. But disposition is ultimately the precipitate of earlier experience of the species to which the more recent experience of the individual, as the sum of the accidental factors, is super-added.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1461

I must, however, emphasize that the present work is characterized not only by being completely based upon psycho-analytic research, but also by being deliberately independent of the findings of biology. I have carefully avoided introducing my preconceptions, whether derived from general sexual biology or from that of particular animal species, into this study - a study which is concerned with the sexual functions of human beings and which is made possible through the technique of psycho-analysis. Indeed, my aim has rather been to discover how far psychological investigation can throw light upon the biology of the sexual life of man. It was legitimate for me to indicate points of contact and agreement which came to light during my investigation, but there was no need for me to be diverted from my course if the psycho-analytic method led in a number of important respects to opinions and findings which differed largely from those based on biological considerations.

In this third edition I have introduced a considerable amount of fresh matter, but have not indicated it in any special way, as I did in the previous edition. Progress in our field of scientific work is at present less rapid; nevertheless it was essential to make a certain number of additions to this volume if it was to be kept in touch with recent psycho-analytic literature.

VIENNA, October 1914

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1462

PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION

Now that the flood-waters of war have subsided, it is satisfactory to be able to record the fact that interest in psycho-analytic research remains unimpaired in the world at large. But the different parts of the theory have not all had the same history. The purely psychological theses and findings of psycho-analysis on the unconscious, repression, conflict as a cause of illness, the advantage accruing from illness, the mechanisms of the formation of symptoms, etc., have come to enjoy increasing recognition and have won notice even from those who are in general opposed to our views. That part of the theory, however, which lies on the frontiers of biology and the foundations of which are contained in this little work is still faced with undiminished contradiction. It has even led some who for a time took a very active interest in psycho-analysis to abandon it and to adopt fresh views which were intended to restrict once more the part played by the factor of sexuality in normal and pathological mental life.

Nevertheless I cannot bring myself to accept the idea that this part of psycho-analytic theory can be very much more distant than the rest from the reality which it is its business to discover. My recollections, as well as a constant re-examination of the material, assure me that this part of the theory is based upon equally careful and impartial observation. There is, moreover, no difficulty in finding an explanation of this discrepancy in the general acceptance of my views. In the first place, the beginnings of human sexual life which are here described can only be confirmed by investigators who have enough patience and technical skill to trace back an analysis to the first years of a patient’s childhood. And there is often no possibility of doing this, since medical treatment demands that an illness should, at least in appearance, be dealt with more rapidly. None, however, but physicians who practise psycho-analysis can have any access whatever to this sphere of knowledge or any possibility of forming a judgement that is uninfluenced by their own dislikes and prejudices. If mankind had been able to learn from a direct observation of children, these three essays could have remained unwritten.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1463

It must also be remembered, however, that some of what this book contains - its insistence on the importance of sexuality in all human achievements and the attempt that it makes at enlarging the concept of sexuality - has from the first provided the strongest motives for the resistance against psycho-analysis. People have gone so far in their search for high-sounding catch words as to talk of the ‘pan-sexualism’ of psycho-analysis and to raise the senseless charge against it of explaining ‘everything’ by sex. We might be astonished at this, if we ourselves could forget the way in which emotional factors make people confused and forgetful. For it is some time since Arthur Schopenhauer, the philosopher, showed mankind the extent to which their activities are determined by sexual impulses - in the ordinary sense of the word. It should surely have been impossible for a whole world of readers to banish such a startling piece of information so completely from their minds. And as for the ‘stretching’ of the concept of sexuality which has been necessitated by the analysis of children and what are called perverts, anyone who looks down with contempt upon psycho-analysis from a superior vantage-point should remember how closely the enlarged sexuality of psycho-analysis coincides with the Eros of the divine Plato. (Cf. Nachmansohn, 1915.)

VIENNA, May 1920

1464

THREE ESSAYS ON THE THEORY OF SEXUALITY

I

THE SEXUAL ABERRATIONS¹

The fact of the existence of sexual needs in human beings and animals is expressed in biology by the assumption of a ‘sexual instinct’, on the analogy of the instinct of nutrition, that is of hunger. Everyday language possesses no counterpart to the word ‘hunger’, but science makes use of the word ‘libido’ for that purpose.²

Popular opinion has quite definite ideas about the nature and characteristics of this sexual instinct. It is generally understood to be absent in childhood, to set in at the time of puberty in connection with the process of coming to maturity and to be revealed in the manifestations of an irresistible attraction exercised by one sex upon the other; while its aim is presumed to be sexual union, or at all events actions leading in that direction. We have every reason to believe, however, that these views give a very false picture of the true situation. If we look into them more closely we shall find that they contain a number of errors, inaccuracies and hasty conclusions flaws.

I shall at this point introduce two technical terms. Let up call the person from whom sexual attraction proceeds the sexual object and the act towards which the instinct tends the sexual aim. Scientifically sifted observation, then, shows that numerous deviations occur in respect of both of these - the sexual object and the sexual aim. The relation between these deviations and what is assumed to be normal requires thorough investigation.

¹ The information contained in this first essay is derived from the well-known writings of Krafft-Ebing, Moll, Moebius, Havelock Ellis, Schrenck-Notzing, Löwenfeld, Eulenburg, Bloch and Hirschfeld, and from the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, published under the direction of the last-named author. Since full bibliographies of the remaining literature of the subject will be found in the works of these writers, I have been able to spare myself the necessity for giving detailed references. [Added 1910:] The data obtained from the psycho-analytic investigation of inverts are based upon material supplied to me by I Sadger and upon my own findings.

² [Footnote added 1910:] The only appropriate word in the German language, ‘Lust’, is unfortunately ambiguous, and is used to denote the experience both of a need and of a gratification.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1465

(1)  DEVIATIONS IN RESPECT OF THE SEXUAL OBJECT

(A)  INVERSION

The popular view of the sexual instinct is beautifully reflected in the poetic fable which tells how the original human beings were cut up into two halves - man and woman - and how these are always striving to unite again in love. It comes as a great surprise therefore to learn that there are men whose sexual object is a man and not a woman, and women whose sexual object is a woman and not a man. People of this kind are described as having ‘contrary sexual feelings’, or better, as being ‘inverts’, and the fact is described as ‘inversion’. The number of such people is very considerable, though there are difficulties in establishing it precisely.¹

BEHAVIOUR OF INVERTS   Such people vary greatly in their behaviour in several respects.

( a) They may be absolute inverts. In that case their sexual objects are exclusively of their own sex. Persons of the opposite sex are never the object of their sexual desire, but leave them cold, or even arouse sexual aversion in them. As a consequence of this aversion, they are incapable, if they are men, of carrying out the sexual act, or else they derive no enjoyment from it.

(b) They may be amphigenic inverts, that is psychosexual hermaphrodites. In that case their sexual objects may equally well be of their own or of the opposite sex. This kind of inversion thus lacks the characteristic of exclusiveness.

(c) They may be contingent inverts. In that case, under certain external conditions - of which inaccessibility of any normal sexual object and imitation are the chief - they are capable of taking as their sexual object someone of their own sex and of deriving satisfaction from sexual intercourse with him.

¹ On these difficulties and on the attempts which have been made to arrive at the proportional number of inverts, see Hirschfeld (1904).

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1466

Again, inverts vary in their views as to the peculiarity of their sexual instinct. Some of them accept their inversion as something in the natural course of things, just as a normal person accepts the direction of his libido, and insist energetically that inversion is as legitimate as the normal attitude; others rebel against their inversion and feel it as a pathological compulsion.¹

Other variations occur which relate to questions of time. The trait of inversion may either date back to the very beginning, as far back as the subject’s memory reaches, or it may not have become noticeable till some particular time before or after puberty.² It may either persist throughout life, or it may go into temporary abeyance, or again it may constitute an episode on the way to a normal development. It may even make its first appearance late in life after a long period of normal sexual activity. A periodic oscillation between a normal and an inverted sexual object has also sometimes been observed. Those cases are of particular interest in which the libido changes over to an inverted sexual object after a distressing experience with a normal one.

As a rule these different kinds of variations are found side by side independently of one another. It is, however, safe to assume that the most extreme form of inversion will have been present from a very early age and that the person concerned will feel at one with his peculiarity.

Many authorities would be unwilling to class together all the various cases which I have enumerated and would prefer to lay stress upon their differences rather than their resemblances, in accordance with their own preferred view of inversion. Nevertheless, though the distinctions cannot be disputed, it is impossible to overlook the existence of numerous intermediate examples of every type, so that we are driven to conclude that we are dealing with a connected series.

¹ The fact of a person struggling in this way against a compulsion towards inversion may perhaps determine the possibility of his being influenced by suggestion [Added 1910:] or psycho-analysis.

² Many writers have insisted with justice that the dates assigned by inverts themselves for the appearance of their tendency to inversion are untrustworthy, since they may have repressed the evidence of their heterosexual feelings from their memory. [Added 1910:] These suspicions have been confirmed by psycho-analysis in those cases of inversion to which it has had access; it has produced decisive alterations in their anamnesis by filling in their infantile amnesia.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1467

NATURE OF INVERSION   The earliest assessments regarded inversion as an innate indication of

nervous degeneracy. This corresponded to the fact that medical

observers first came across it in persons suffering, or appearing to suffer, from nervous diseases. This characterization of inversion involves two suppositions, which must be considered separately: that it is innate and that it is degenerate.

DEGENERACY   The attribution of degeneracy in this connection is open to the objections which

can be raised against the indiscriminate use of the word in general. It has become the fashion to regard any symptom which is not obviously due to trauma or infection as a sign of degeneracy. Magnan’s classification of degenerates is indeed of such a kind as not to exclude the possibility of the concept of degeneracy being applied to a nervous system whose general functioning is excellent. This being so, it may well be asked whether an attribution of ‘degeneracy’ is of any value or adds anything to our knowledge. It seems wiser only to speak of it where

(1) several serious deviations from the normal are found together, and

(2) the capacity for efficient functioning and survival seem to be severely impaired.¹

¹ Moebius (1900) confirms the view that we should be chary in making a diagnosis of degeneracy and that it has very little practical value: ‘If we survey the wide field of degeneracy upon which some glimpses of revealing light have been thrown in these pages, it will at once be clear that there is small value in ever making a diagnosis of degeneracy.’

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1468

Several facts go to show that in this legitimate sense of the word inverts cannot be regarded as degenerate:

(1) Inversion is found in people who exhibit no other serious deviations from the normal.

(2) It is similarly found in people whose efficiency is unimpaired, and who are indeed distinguished by specially high intellectual development and ethical culture.¹

(3) If we disregard the patients we come across in our medical practice, and cast our eyes round a wider horizon, we shall come in two directions upon facts which make it impossible to regard inversion as a sign of degeneracy:

(a) Account must be taken of the fact that inversion was a frequent phenomenon - one might almost say an institution charged with important functions - among the peoples of antiquity at the height of their civilization.

(b) It is remarkably widespread among many savage and primitive races, whereas the concept of degeneracy is usually restricted to states of high civilization (cf. Bloch); and, even amongst the civilized peoples of Europe, climate and race exercise the most powerful influence on the prevalence of inversion and upon the attitude adopted towards it.²

INNATE CHARACTER   As may be supposed, innateness is only attributed to the first, most

extreme, class of inverts, and the evidence for it rests upon assurances given by them that at no time in their lives has their sexual instinct shown any sign of taking another course. The very existence of the two other classes, and especially the third, is difficult to reconcile with the hypothesis of the innateness of inversion. This explains why those who support this view tend to separate out the group of absolute inverts from all the rest, thus abandoning any attempt at giving an account of inversion which shall have universal application. In the view of these authorities inversion is innate in one group of cases, while in others it may have come about in other ways.

¹ It must be allowed that the spokesmen of ‘Uranism’ are justified in asserting that some of the most prominent men in all recorded history were inverts and perhaps even absolute inverts.

² The pathological approach to the study of inversion has been displaced by the anthropological. The merit for bringing about this change is due to Bloch (1902-3), who has also laid stress on the occurrence of inversion among the civilizations of antiquity.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1469

The reverse of this view is represented by the alternative one that inversion is an acquired character of the sexual instinct. This second view is based on the following considerations:

(1) In the case of many inverts, even absolute ones, it is possible to show that very early in their lives a sexual impression occurred which left a permanent after-effect in the shape of a tendency to homosexuality.

(2) In the case of many others, it is possible to point to external influences in their lives, whether of a favourable or inhibiting character, which have led sooner or later to a fixation of their inversion. (Such influences are exclusive relations with persons of their own sex, comradeship in war, detention in prison, the dangers of heterosexual intercourse, celibacy, sexual weakness, etc.)

(3) Inversion can be removed by hypnotic suggestion, which would be astonishing in an innate characteristic.

In view of these considerations it is even possible to doubt the very existence of such a thing as innate inversion. It can be argued (cf. Havelock Ellis ) that, if the cases of allegedly innate inversion were more closely examined, some experience of their early childhood would probably come to light which had a determining effect upon the direction taken by their libido. This experience would simply have passed out of the subject’s conscious recollection, but could be recalled to his memory under appropriate influence. In the opinion of these writers inversion can only be described as a frequent variation of the sexual instinct, which can be determined by a number of external circumstances in the subject’s life.

The apparent certainty of this conclusion is, however, completely countered by the reflection that many people are subjected to the same sexual influences (e.g. to seduction or mutual masturbation, which may occur in early youth) without becoming inverted or without remaining so permanently. We are therefore forced to a suspicion that the choice between ‘innate’ and ‘acquired’ is not an exclusive one or that it does not cover all the issues involved in inversion.

EXPLANATION OF INVERSION   The nature of inversion is explained neither by the hypothesis

that it is innate nor by the alternative hypothesis that it is acquired. In the former case we must ask in what respect it is innate, unless we are to accept the crude explanation that everyone is born with his sexual instinct attached to a particular sexual object. In the latter case it may be questioned whether the various accidental influences would be sufficient to explain the acquisition of inversion without the co-operation of something in the subject himself. As we have already shown, the existence of this last factor is not to be denied.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1470

BISEXUALITY   A fresh contradiction of popular views is involved in the considerations put

forward by Lydston, Kiernan and Chevalier in an endeavour to account for the possibility of sexual inversion. It is popularly believed that a human being is either a man or a woman. Science, however, knows of cases in which the sexual characters are obscured, and in which it is consequently difficult to determine the sex. This arises in the first instance in the field of anatomy. The genitals of the individuals concerned combine male and female characteristics. (This condition is known as hermaphroditism.) In rare cases both kinds of sexual apparatus are found side by side fully developed (true hermaphroditism); but far more frequently both sets of organs are found in an atrophied condition.¹

The importance of these abnormalities lies in the unexpected fact that they facilitate our understanding of normal development. For it appears that a certain degree of anatomical hermaphroditism occurs normally. In every normal male or female individual, traces are found of the apparatus of the opposite sex. These either persist without function as rudimentary organs or become modified and take on other functions.

These long-familiar facts of anatomy lead us to suppose that an originally bisexual physical disposition has, in the course of evolution, become modified into a unisexual one, leaving behind only a few traces of the sex that has become atrophied.

It was tempting to extend this hypothesis to the mental sphere and to explain inversion in all its varieties as the expression of a psychical hermaphroditism. All that was required further in order to settle the question was that inversion should be regularly accompanied by the mental and somatic signs of hermaphroditism.

¹ For the most recent descriptions of somatic hermaphroditism, see Taruffi (1903), and numerous papers by Neugebauer in various volumes of the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1471

But this expectation was disappointed. It is impossible to demonstrate so close a connection between the hypothetical psychical hermaphroditism and the established anatomical one. A general lowering of the sexual instinct and a slight anatomical atrophy of the organs is found frequently in inverts (cf. Havelock Ellis, 1915). Frequently, but by no means regularly or even usually. The truth must therefore be recognized that inversion and somatic hermaphroditism are on the whole independent of each other.

A great deal of importance, too, has been attached to what are called the secondary and tertiary sexual characters and to the great frequency of the occurrence of those of the opposite sex in inverts (cf. Havelock Ellis, 1915). Much of this, again, is correct; but it should never be forgotten that in general the secondary and tertiary sexual characters of one sex occur very frequently in the opposite one. They are indications of hermaphroditism, but are not attended by any change of sexual object in the direction of inversion.

Psychical hermaphroditism would gain substance if the inversion of the sexual object were at least accompanied by a parallel change-over of the subject’s other mental qualities, instincts and character traits into those marking the opposite sex. But it is only in inverted women that character-inversion of this kind can be looked for with any regularity. In men the most complete mental masculinity can be combined with inversion. If the belief in psychical hermaphroditism is to be persisted in, it will be necessary to add that its manifestations in various spheres show only slight signs of being mutually determined. Moreover the same is true of somatic hermaphroditism: according to Halban (1903),¹ occurrences of individual atrophied organs and of secondary sexual characters are to a considerable extent independent of one another.

¹ His paper includes a bibliography of the subject.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1472

The theory of bisexuality has been expressed in its crudest form by a spokesman of the male inverts: ‘a feminine brain in a masculine body’. But we are ignorant of what characterizes a feminine brain. There is neither need nor justification for replacing the psychological problem by the anatomical one. Krafft-Ebing’s attempted explanation seems to be more exactly framed than that of Ulrichs but does not differ from it in essentials. According to Krafft-Ebing (1895, 5), every individual’s bisexual disposition endows him with masculine and feminine brain centres as well as with somatic organs of sex: these centres develop only at puberty, for the most part under the influence of the sex-gland, which is independent of them in the original disposition. But what has just been said of masculine and feminine brains applies equally to masculine and feminine ‘centres’; and incidentally we have not even any grounds for assuming that certain areas of the brain (‘centres’) are set aside for the functions of sex, as is the case, for instance with those of speech.¹

Nevertheless, two things emerge from these discussions. In the first place, a bisexual disposition is somehow concerned in inversion, though we do not know in what that disposition consists, beyond anatomical structure. And secondly, we have to deal with disturbances that affect the sexual instinct in the course of its development.

¹ It appears (from a bibliography given in the sixth volume of the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen) that E. Gley was the first writer to suggest bisexuality as an explanation of inversion. As long ago as in January, 1884, he published a paper, ‘Les aberrations de l’instinct sexuel’, in the Revue Philosophique. It is, moreover, noteworthy that the majority of authors who derive inversion from bisexuality bring forward that factor not only in the case of inverts, but also for all those who have grown up to be normal, and that, as a logical consequence, they regard inversion as the result of a disturbance in development. Chevalier (1893) already writes in this sense. Krafft-Ebing (1895, 10) remarks that there are a great number of observations ‘which prove at least the virtual persistence of this second centre (that of the subordinated sex).’ A Dr. Arduin (1900) asserts that ‘there are masculine and feminine elements in every human being (cf. Hirschfeld, 1899); but one set of these - according to the sex of the person in question - is incomparably more strongly developed than the other, so far as heterosexual individuals are concerned. . . .’ Herman (1903) is convinced that ‘masculine elements and characteristics are present in every woman and feminine ones in every man’, etc. [Added 1910:] Fliess (1906) subsequently claimed the idea of bisexuality (in the sense of duality of sex) as his own. [Added 1924:] In lay circles the hypothesis of human bisexuality is regarded as being due to O. Weininger, the philosopher, who died at an early age, and who made the idea the basis of a somewhat unbalanced book (1903). The particulars which I have enumerated above will be sufficient to show how little justification there is for the claim.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1473

SEXUAL OBJECT OF INVERTS   The theory of psychical hermaphroditism presupposes that

the sexual object of an invert is the opposite of that of a normal person. An inverted man, it holds, is like a woman in being subject to the charm that proceeds from masculine attributes both physical and mental: he feels he is a woman in search of a man.

But however well this applies to quite a number of inverts, it is, nevertheless, far from revealing a universal characteristic of inversion. There can be no doubt that a large proportion of male inverts retain the mental quality of masculinity, that they possess relatively few of the secondary characters of the opposite sex and that what they look for in their sexual object are in fact feminine mental traits. If this were not so, how would it be possible to explain the fact that male prostitutes who offer themselves to inverts - to-day just as they did in ancient times imitate women in all the externals of their clothing and behaviour? Such imitation would otherwise inevitably clash with the ideal of the inverts. It is clear that in Greece, where the most masculine men were numbered among the inverts, what excited a man’s love was not the masculine character of a boy, but his physical resemblance to a woman as well as his feminine mental qualities - his shyness, his modesty and his need for instruction and assistance. As soon as the boy became a man he ceased to be a sexual object for men and himself, perhaps, became a lover of boys. In this instance, therefore, as in many others, the sexual object is not someone of the same sex but someone who combines the characters of both sexes; there is as, it were, a compromise between an impulse that seeks for a man and one that seeks for a woman, while it remains a paramount condition that the object’s body (i.e. genitals) shall be masculine. Thus the sexual object is a kind of reflection of the subject’s own bisexual nature.¹

The position in the case of women is less ambiguous; for among them the active inverts exhibit masculine characteristics, both physical and mental, with peculiar frequency and look for femininity in their sexual objects - though here again a closer knowledge of the facts might reveal greater variety.

¹ [Footnote added 1910:] It is true that psycho-analysis has not yet produced a complete explanation of the origin of inversion; nevertheless, it has discovered the psychical mechanism of its development, and has made essential contributions to the statement of the problems involved. In all the cases we have examined we have established the fact that the future inverts, in the earliest years of their childhood, pass through a phase of very intense but short lived fixation to a woman (usually their mother), and that, after leaving this behind, they identify themselves with a woman and take themselves as their sexual object. That is to say, they proceed from a narcissistic basis, and look for a young man who resembles themselves and whom they may love as their mother loved them. Moreover, we have frequently found that alleged inverts have been by no means insusceptible to the charms of women, but have continually transposed the excitation aroused by women on to a male object. They have thus repeated all through their lives the mechanism by which their inversion arose. Their compulsive longing for men has turned out to be determined by their ceaseless flight from women.

[Added 1915:] Psycho-analytic research is most decidedly opposed to any attempt at separating off homosexuals from the rest of mankind as a group of a special character. By studying sexual excitations other than those that are manifestly displayed, it has found that all human beings are capable of making a homosexual object-choice and have in fact made one in their unconscious. Indeed, libidinal attachments to persons of the same sex play no less a part as factors in normal mental life, and a greater part as a motive force for illness, than do similar attachments to the opposite sex. On the contrary, psycho-analysis considers that a choice of an object independently of its sex - freedom to range equally over male and female objects - as it is found in childhood, in primitive states of society and early periods of history, is the original basis from which, as a result of restriction in one direction or the other, both the normal and the inverted types develop. Thus from the point of view of psycho-analysis the exclusive sexual interest felt by men for women is also a problem that needs elucidating and is not a self-evident fact based upon an attraction that is ultimately of a chemical nature. A person’s final sexual attitude is not decided until after puberty and is the result of a number of factors, not all of which are yet known; some are of a constitutional nature but others are accidental. No doubt a few of these factors may happen to carry so much weight that they influence the result in their sense. But in general the multiplicity of determining factors is reflected in the variety of manifest sexual attitudes in which they find their issue in mankind. In inverted types, a predominance of archaic constitutions and primitive psychical mechanisms is regularly to be found. Their most essential characteristics seem to be a coming into operation of narcissistic object-choice and a retention of the erotic significance of the anal zone. There is nothing to be gained, however, by separating the most extreme types of inversion from the rest on the basis of constitutional peculiarities of that kind. What we find as an apparently sufficient explanation of these types can be equally shown to be present, though less strongly, in the constitution of transitional types and of those whose manifest attitude is normal. The differences in the end-products may be of a qualitative nature, but analysis shows that the differences between their determinants are only quantitative. Among the accidental factors that influence object-choice we have found that frustration (in the form of an early deterrence, by fear, from sexual activity) deserves attention, and we have observed that the presence of both parents plays an important part. The absence of a strong father in childhood not infrequently favours the occurrence of inversion. Finally, it may be insisted that the concept of inversion in respect of the sexual object should be sharply distinguished from that of the occurrence in the subject of a mixture of sexual characters. In the relation between these two factors, too, a certain degree of reciprocal independence is unmistakably present.

[Added 1920:] Ferenczi (1914) has brought forward a number of interesting points on the subject of inversion. He rightly protests that, because they have in common the symptom of inversion, a large number of conditions, which are very different from one another and which are of unequal importance both in organic and psychical respects, have been thrown together under the name of ‘homosexuality’ (or, to follow him in giving it a better name, ‘homo-erotism’). He insists that a sharp distinction should at least be made between two types: ‘subject homo-erotics’, who feel and behave like women, and ‘object homo-erotics’, who are completely masculine and who have merely exchanged a female for a male object. The first of these two types he recognizes as true ‘sexual intermediates’ in Hirschfeld’s sense of the word; the second he describes, less happily, as obsessional neurotics. According to him, it is only in the case of object homo-erotics that there is any question of their struggling against their inclination to inversion or of the possibility of their being influenced psychologically. While granting the existence of these two types, we may add that there are many people in whom a certain quantity of subject homo-erotism is found in combination with a proportion of object homo-erotism.

During the last few years work carried out by biologists, notably by Steinach, has thrown a strong light on the organic determinants of homo-erotism and of sexual characters in general. By carrying out experimental castration and subsequently grafting the sex-glands of the opposite sex, it was possible in the case of various species of mammals to transform a male into a female and vice versa. The transformation affected more or less completely both the somatic sexual characters and the psychosexual attitude (that is, both subject and object erotism). It appeared that the vehicle of the force which thus acted as a sex-determinant was not the part of the sex-gland which forms the sex-cells but what is known as its interstitial tissue (the ‘puberty-gland’). In one case this transformation of sex was actually effected in a man who had lost his testes owing to tuberculosis. In his sexual life he behaved in a feminine manner, as a passive homosexual, and exhibited very clearly marked feminine sexual characters of a secondary kind (e.g. in regard to growth of hair and beard and deposits of fat on the breasts and hips). After an undescended testis from another male patient had been grafted into him, he began to behave in a masculine manner and to direct his libido towards women in a normal way. Simultaneously his somatic feminine characters disappeared. (Lipschütz, 1919, 356-7.)

It would be unjustifiable to assert that these interesting experiments put the theory of inversion on a new basis, and it would be hasty to expect them to offer a universal means of ‘curing’ homosexuality. Fliess has rightly insisted that these experimental findings do not invalidate the theory of the general bisexual disposition of the higher animals. On the contrary, it seems to me probable that further research of a similar kind will produce a direct confirmation of this presumption of bisexuality.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1474

SEXUAL AIM OF INVERTS   The important fact to bear in mind is that no one single aim can be

laid down as applying in cases of inversion. Among men, intercourse per annum by no means coincides with inversion; masturbation is quite as frequently their exclusive aim, and it is even true that restrictions of sexual aim - to the point of its being limited to simple outpourings of emotion - are commoner among them than among heterosexual lovers. Among women, too, the sexual aims of inverts are various: there seems to be a special preference for contact with the mucous membrane of the mouth.

CONCLUSION   It will be seen that we are not in a position to base a satisfactory explanation of

the origin of inversion upon the material at present before us. Nevertheless our investigation has put us in possession of a piece of knowledge which may turn out to be of greater importance to us than the solution of that problem. It has been brought to our notice that we have been in the habit of regarding the connection between the sexual instinct and the sexual object as more intimate than it in fact is. Experience of the cases that are considered abnormal has shown us that in them the sexual instinct and the sexual object are merely soldered together - a fact which we have been in danger of overlooking in consequence of the uniformity of the normal picture, where the object appears to form part and parcel of the instinct. We are thus warned to loosen the bond that exists in our thoughts between instinct and object. It seems probable that the sexual instinct is in the first instance independent of its object; nor is its origin likely to be due to its object’s attractions.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1475

(B)  SEXUALLY IMMATURE PERSONS AND ANIMALS AS SEXUAL OBJECTS

People whose sexual objects belong to the normally inappropriate sex - that is, inverts - strike the observer as a collection of individuals who may be quite sound in other respects. On the other hand, cases in which sexually immature persons (children) are chosen as sexual objects are instantly judged as sporadic aberrations. It is only exceptionally that children are the exclusive sexual objects in such a case. They usually come to play that part when someone who is cowardly or has become impotent adopts them as a substitute, or when an urgent instinct (one which will not allow of postponement) cannot at the moment get possession of any more appropriate object. Nevertheless, a light is thrown on the nature of the sexual instinct by the fact that it permits of so much variation in its objects and such a cheapening of them - which hunger, with its far more energetic retention of its objects, would only permit in the most extreme instances. A similar consideration applies to sexual intercourse with animals, which is by no means rare, especially among country people, and in which sexual attraction seems to override the barriers of species.

One would be glad on aesthetic grounds to be able to ascribe these and other severe aberrations of the sexual instinct to insanity; but that cannot be done. Experience shows that disturbances of the sexual instinct among the insane do not differ from those that occur among the healthy and in whole races or occupations. Thus the sexual abuse of children is found with uncanny frequency among school teachers and child attendants, simply because they have the best opportunity for it. The insane merely exhibit any such aberration to an intensified degree; or, what is particularly significant, it may become exclusive and replace normal sexual satisfaction entirely.

The very remarkable relation which thus holds between sexual variations and the descending scale from health to insanity gives us plenty of material for thought. I am inclined to believe that it may be explained by the fact that the impulses of sexual life are among those which, even normally, are the least controlled by the higher activities of the mind. In my experience anyone who is in any way, whether socially or ethically, abnormal mentally is invariably abnormal also in his sexual life. But many people are abnormal in their sexual life who in every other respect approximate to the average, and have, along with the rest, passed through the process of human cultural development, in which sexuality remains the weak spot.

The most general conclusion that follows from all these discussions seems, however, to be this. Under a great number of conditions and in surprisingly numerous individuals, the nature and importance of the sexual object recedes into the background. What is essential and constant in the sexual instinct is something else.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1910:] The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own no doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the stress upon the instinct itself, whereas we emphasize its object. The ancients glorified the instinct and were prepared on its account to honour even an inferior object; while we despise the instinctual activity in itself, and find excuses for it only in the merits of the object.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1476

(2) DEVIATIONS IN RESPECT OF THE SEXUAL AIM

The normal sexual aim is regarded as being the union of the genitals in the act known as copulation, which leads to a release of the sexual tension and a temporary extinction of the sexual instinct - a satisfaction analogous to the sating of hunger. But even in the most normal sexual process we may detect rudiments which, if they had developed, would have led to the deviations described as ‘perversions’. For there are certain intermediate relations to the sexual object, such as touching and looking at it, which lie on the road towards copulation and are recognized as being preliminary sexual aims. On the one hand these activities are themselves accompanied by pleasure, and on the other hand they intensify the excitation, which should persist until the final sexual aim is attained. Moreover, the kiss, one particular contact of this kind, between the mucous membrane of the lips of the two people concerned, is held in high sexual esteem among many nations (including the most highly civilized ones), in spite of the fact that the parts of the body involved do not form part of the sexual apparatus but constitute the entrance to the digestive tract. Here, then, are factors which provide a point of contact between the perversions and normal sexual life and which can also serve as a basis for their classification. Perversions are sexual activities which either (a) extend, in an anatomical sense, beyond the regions of the body that are designed for sexual union, or (b) linger over the intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1477

(A)  ANATOMICAL EXTENSIONS

OVERVALUATION OF THE SEXUAL OBJECT   It is only in the rarest instances that the psychical

valuation that is set on the sexual object, as being the goal of the sexual instinct, stops short at its genitals. The appreciation extends to the whole body of the sexual object and tends to involve every sensation derived from it. The same overvaluation spreads over into the psychological sphere: the subject becomes, as it were, intellectually infatuated (that is, his powers of judgement are weakened) by the mental achievements and perfections of the sexual object and he submits to the latter’s judgements with credulity. Thus the credulity of love becomes in important, if not the most fundamental, source of authority.¹

This sexual overvaluation is something that cannot be easily reconciled with a restriction of the sexual aim to union of the actual genitals and it helps to turn activities connected with other parts of the body into sexual aims.²

The significance of the factor of sexual overvaluation can be best studied in men, for their erotic life alone has become accessible to research. That of women - partly owing to the stunting effect of civilized conditions and partly owing to their conventional secretiveness and insincerity - is still veiled in an impenetrable obscurity.³

¹ In this connection I cannot help recalling the credulous submissive less shown by a hypnotized subject towards his hypnotist. This leads one to suspect that the essence of hypnosis lies in an unconscious fixation of the subject’s libido to the figure of the hypnotist, through the medium of the masochistic components of the sexual instinct. [Added 1910:] Ferenczi (1909) has brought this characteristic of suggestibility into relation with the ‘parental complex’.

² It must be pointed out, however, that sexual overvaluation is not developed in the case of every mechanism of object-choice. We shall become acquainted later on with another and more direct explanation of the sexual role assumed by the other parts of the body. The factor of ‘craving for stimulation’ has been put forward by Noche and Bloch as an explanation of the extension of sexual interest to parts of the body other than the genitals; but it does not seem to me to deserve such an important place. The various channels along which the libido passes are related to each other from the very first like inter-communicating pipes, and we must take the phenomenon of collateral flow into account.

³ [Footnote added 1920:] In typical cases women fail to exhibit any sexual overvaluation towards men; but they scarcely ever fail to do so towards their own children.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1478

SEXUAL USE OF THE MUCOUS MEMBRANE OF THE LIPS AND MOUTH   The use of the mouth as a

sexual organ is regarded as a perversion if the lips (or tongue) of one person are brought into contact with the genitals of another, but not if the mucous membranes of the lips of both of them come together. This exception is the point of contact with what is normal. Those who condemn the other practices (which have no doubt been common among mankind from primaeval times) as being perversions, are giving way to an unmistakable feeling of disgust, which protects them from accepting sexual aims of the kind. The limits of such disgust are, however, often purely conventional: a man who will kiss a pretty girl’s lips passionately, may perhaps be disgusted at the idea of using her tooth-brush, though there are no grounds for supposing that his own oral cavity, for which he feels no disgust, is any cleaner than the girl’s. Here, then, our attention is drawn to the factor of disgust, which interferes with the libidinal overvaluation of the sexual object but can in turn be overridden by libido. Disgust seems to be one of the forces which have led to a restriction of the sexual aim. These forces do not as a rule extend to the genitals themselves. But there is no doubt that the genitals of the opposite sex can in themselves be an object of disgust and that such an attitude is one of the characteristics of all hysterics, and especially of hysterical women. The sexual instinct in its strength enjoys overriding this disgust. (See below.)

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1479

SEXUAL USE OF THE ANAL ORIFICE   Where the anus is concerned it becomes still clearer that it

is disgust which stamps that sexual aim as a perversion. I hope, however, I shall not be accused of partisanship when I assert that people who try to account for this disgust by saying that the organ in question serves the function of excretion and comes in contact with excrement - a thing which is disgusting in itself - are not much more to the point than hysterical girls who account for their disgust at the male genital by saying that it serves to void urine.

The playing of a sexual part by the mucous membrane of the anus is by no means limited to intercourse between men: preference for it is in no way characteristic of inverted feeling. On the contrary, it seems that paedecatio with a male owes its origin to an analogy with a similar act performed with a woman; while mutual masturbation is the sexual aim most often found in intercourse between inverts.

SIGNIFICANCE OF OTHER REGIONS OF THE BODY   The extension of sexual interest to other

regions of the body, with all its variations, offers us nothing that is new in principle; it adds nothing to our knowledge of the sexual instinct, which merely proclaims its intention in this way of getting possession of the sexual object in every possible direction. But these anatomical extensions inform us that, besides sexual overvaluation, there is a second factor at work which is strange to popular knowledge. Certain regions of the body, such as the mucous membrane of the mouth and anus, which are constantly appearing in these practices, seem, as it were, to be claiming that they should themselves be regarded and treated as genitals. We shall learn later that this claim is justified by the history of the development of the sexual instinct and that it is fulfilled in the symptomatology of certain pathological states.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1480

UNSUITABLE SUBSTITUTES FOR THE SEXUAL OBJECT - FETISHISM   There are some cases

which are quite specially remarkable - those in which the normal sexual object is replaced by another which bears some relation to it, but is entirely unsuited to serve the normal sexual aim. From the point of view of classification, we should no doubt have done better to have mentioned this highly interesting group of aberrations of the sexual instinct among the deviations in respect of the sexual object. But we have postponed their mention till we could become acquainted with the factor of sexual overvaluation, on which these phenomena, being connected with an abandonment of the sexual aim, are dependent.

What is substituted for the sexual object is some part of the body (such as the foot or hair) which is in general very inappropriate for sexual purposes, or some inanimate object which bears an assignable relation to the person whom it replaces and preferably to that person’s sexuality (e.g. a piece of clothing or underlinen ). Such substitutes are with some justice likened to the fetishes in which savages believe that their gods are embodied.

A transition to those cases of fetishism in which the sexual aim, whether normal or perverse, is entirely abandoned is afforded by other cases in which the sexual object is required to fulfil a fetishistic condition - such as the possession of some particular hair-colouring or clothing, or even some bodily defect if the sexual aim is to be attained. No other variation of the sexual instinct that borders on the pathological can lay so much claim to our interest as this one, such is the peculiarity of the phenomena to which it gives rise. Some degree of diminution in the urge towards the normal sexual aim (an executive weakness of the sexual apparatus) seems to be a necessary precondition in every case.¹ The point of contact with the normal is provided by the psychologically essential overvaluation of the sexual object, which inevitably extends to everything that is associated with it. A certain degree of fetishism is thus habitually present in normal love, especially in those stages of it in which the normal sexual aim seems unattainable or its fulfilment prevented:

Schaff’ mir ein Halstuch von ihrer Brust,

Ein Strumpfband meiner Liebeslust!²

¹ [Footnote added 1915:] This weakness would represent the constitutional precondition. Psycho-analysis has found that the phenomenon can also be accidentally determined, by the occurrence of an early deterrence from sexual activity owing to fear, which may divert the subject from the normal sexual aim and encourage him to seek a substitute for it.

² [ Get me a kerchief from her breast,

A garter that her knee has pressed.]

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1481

The situation only becomes pathological when the longing for the fetish passes beyond the point of being merely a necessary condition attached to the sexual object and actually takes the place of the normal aim, and, further, when the fetish becomes detached from a particular individual and becomes the sole sexual object. These are, indeed, the general conditions under which mere variations of the sexual instinct pass over into pathological aberrations.

Binet (1888) was the first to maintain (what has since been confirmed by a quantity of evidence) that the choice of a fetish is an after-effect of some sexual impression received as a rule in early childhood. (This may be brought into line with the proverbial durability of first loves: on revient toujours à ses premiers amours.) This derivation is particularly obvious in cases where there is merely a fetishistic condition attached to the sexual object. We shall come across the importance of early sexual impressions again in another connection.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1920:] Deeper-going psycho-analytic research has raised a just criticism of Binet’s assertion. All the observations dealing with this point have recorded a first meeting with the fetish at which it already aroused sexual interest without there being anything in the accompanying circumstances to explain the fact. Moreover, all of these ‘early’ sexual impressions relate to a time after the age of five or six, whereas psycho-analysis makes it doubtful whether fresh pathological fixations can occur so late as this. The true explanation is that behind the first recollection of the fetish’s appearance there lies a submerged and forgotten phase of sexual development. The fetish, like a ‘screen memory’, represents this phase and is thus a remnant and precipitate of it. The fact that this early infantile phase turns in the direction of fetishism, as well as the choice of the fetish itself, are constitutionally determined.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1482

In other cases the replacement of the object by a fetish is determined by a symbolic connection of thought, of which the person concerned is usually not conscious. It is not always possible to trace the course of these connections with certainty (The foot, for instance, is an age-old sexual symbol which occurs even in mythology;¹ no doubt the part played by fur as a fetish owes its origin to an association with the hair of the mons Veneris.) None the less even symbolism such as this is not always unrelated to sexual experiences in childhood.²

¹ [Footnote added 1910:] The shoe or slipper is a corresponding symbol of the female genitals.

²  Psycho-analysis has cleared up one of the remaining gaps in our understanding of fetishism. It has shown the importance, as regards the choice of a fetish, of a coprophilic pleasure in smelling which has disappeared owing to repression. Both the feet and the hair are objects with a strong smell which have been exalted into fetishes after the olfactory sensation has become unpleasurable and been abandoned. Accordingly, in the perversion that corresponds to foot fetishism, it is only dirty and evil-smelling feet that become sexual objects. Another factor that helps towards explaining the fetishistic preference for the foot is to be found among the sexual theories of children (see below p. 1514): the foot represents a woman’s penis, the absence of which is deeply felt. [Added 1915:] In a number of cases of foot-fetishism it has been possible to show that the scopophilic instinct, seeking to reach its object (originally the genitals) from underneath, was brought to a halt in its pathway by prohibition and repression. For that reason it became attached to a fetish in the form of a foot or shoe, the female genitals (in accordance with the expectations of childhood/children) being imagined as male ones.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1483

(B)  FIXATIONS OF PRELIMINARY SEXUAL AIMS

APPEARANCE OF NEW AIMS   Every external or internal factor that hinders or postpones the

attainment of the normal sexual aim (such as impotence, the high price of the sexual object or the danger of the sexual act) will evidently lend support to the tendency to linger over the preparatory activities and to turn them into new sexual aims that can take the place of the normal one. Attentive examination always shows that even what seem to be the strangest of these new aims are already hinted at in the normal sexual process.

TOUCHING AND LOOKING   A certain amount of touching is indispensable (at all events among

human beings) before the normal sexual aim can be attained. And everyone knows what a source of pleasure on the one hand and what an influx of fresh excitation on the other is afforded by tactile sensations of the skin of the sexual object. So that lingering over the stage of touching can scarcely be counted a perversion, provided that in the long run the sexual act is carried further.

The same holds true of seeing - an activity that is ultimately derived from touching. Visual impressions remain the most frequent pathway along which libidinal excitation is aroused; indeed, natural selection counts upon the accessibility of this pathway - if such a teleological form of statement is permissible - when it encourages the development of beauty in the sexual object. The progressive concealment of the body which goes along with civilization keeps sexual curiosity awake. This curiosity seeks to complete the sexual object by revealing its hidden parts. It can, however, be diverted (‘sublimated’) in the direction of art, if its interest can be shifted away from the genitals on to the shape of the body as a whole.¹ It is usual for most normal people to linger to some extent over the intermediate sexual aim of a looking that has a sexual tinge to it; indeed, this offers them a possibility of directing some proportion of their libido on to higher artistic aims. On the other hand, this pleasure in looking becomes a perversion (a) if it is restricted exclusively to the genitals, or (b) if it is connected with the overriding of disgust (as in the case of voyeurs or people who look on at excretory functions), or (c) if, instead of being preparatory to the normal sexual aim, it supplants it. This last is markedly true of exhibitionists, who, if I may trust the findings of several analyses, exhibit their own genitals in order to obtain a reciprocal view of the genitals of the other person.²

In the perversions which are directed towards looking and being looked at, we come across a very remarkable characteristic with which we shall be still more intensely concerned in the aberration that we shall consider next: in these perversions the sexual aim occurs in two forms, an active and a passive one.

The force which opposes scopophilia, but which may be overridden by it (in a manner parallel to what we have previously seen in the case of disgust), is shame.

¹ [Footnote added 1915:] There is to my mind no doubt that the concept of ‘beautiful’ has its roots in sexual excitation and that its original meaning was ‘sexually stimulating’. This is related to the fact that we never regard the genitals themselves, which produce the strongest sexual excitation, as really ‘beautiful’.

² [Footnote added 1920:] Under analysis, these perversions - and indeed most others - reveal a surprising variety of motives and determinants. The compulsion to exhibit, for instance, is also closely dependent on the castration complex: it is a means of constantly insisting upon the integrity of the subject’s own (male) genitals and it reiterates his infantile satisfaction at the absence of a penis in those of women.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1484

SADISM AND MASOCHISM   The most common and the most significant of all the perversions -

the desire to inflict pain upon the sexual object, and its reverse - received from Krafft-Ebing the names of ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’ for its active and passive forms respectively. Other writers have preferred the narrower term ‘algolagnia’. This emphasizes the pleasure in pain, the cruelty; whereas the names chosen by Krafft-Ebing bring into prominence the pleasure in any form of humiliation or subjection.

As regards active algolagnia, sadism, the roots are easy to detect in the normal. The sexuality of most male human beings contains an element of aggressiveness - a desire to subjugate; the biological significance of it seems to lie in the need for overcoming the resistance of the sexual object by means other than the process of wooing. Thus sadism would correspond to an aggressive component of the sexual instinct which has become independent and exaggerated and, by displacement, has usurped the leading position.

In ordinary speech the connotation of sadism oscillates between, on the one hand, cases merely characterized by an active or violent attitude to the sexual object, and, on the other hand, cases in which satisfaction is entirely conditional on the humiliation and maltreatment of the object. Strictly speaking, it is only this last extreme instance which deserves to be described as a perversion.

Similarly, the term masochism comprises any passive attitude towards sexual life and the sexual object, the extreme instance of which appears to be that in which satisfaction is conditional upon suffering physical or mental pain at the hands of the sexual object. Masochism, in the form of a perversion, seems to be further removed from the normal sexual aim than its counterpart; it may be doubted at first whether it can ever occur as a primary phenomenon or whether, on the contrary, it may not invariably arise from a transformation of sadism.¹  It can often be shown that masochism is nothing more than an extension of sadism turned round upon the subject’s own self, which thus, to begin with, takes the place of the sexual object. Clinical analysis of extreme cases of masochistic perversion show that a great number of factors (such as the castration complex and the sense of guilt) have combined to exaggerate and fixate the original passive sexual attitude.

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] My opinion of masochism has been to a large extent altered by later reflection, based upon certain hypotheses as to the structure of the apparatus of the mind and the classes of instincts operating in it. I have been led to distinguish a primary or erotogenic masochism, out of which two later forms, feminine and moral masochism, have developed. Sadism which cannot find employment in actual life is turned round upon the subject’s own self and so produces a secondary masochism, which is superadded to the primary kind. (Cf. Freud, 1924c.)

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1485

Pain, which is overridden in such cases, thus falls into line with disgust and shame as a force that stands in opposition and resistance to the libido.

Sadism and masochism occupy a special position among the perversions, since the contrast between activity and passivity which lies behind them is among the universal characteristics of sexual life.

The history of human civilization shows beyond any doubt that there is an intimate connection between cruelty and the sexual instinct; but nothing has been done towards explaining the connection, apart from laying emphasis on the aggressive factor in the libido. According to some authorities this aggressive element of the sexual instinct is in reality a relic of cannibalistic desires - that is, it is a contribution derived from the apparatus for obtaining mastery, which is concerned with the satisfaction of the other and, ontogenetically, the older of the great instinctual needs.¹ It has also been maintained that every pain contains in itself the possibility of a feeling of pleasure. All that need be said is that no satisfactory explanation of this perversion has been put forward and that it seems possible that a number of mental impulses are combined in it to produce a single resultant.²

But the most remarkable feature of this perversion is that its active and passive forms are habitually found to occur together in the same individual. A person who feels pleasure in producing pain in someone else in a sexual relationship is also capable of enjoying as pleasure any pain which he may himself derive from sexual relations. A sadist is always at the same time a masochist, although the active or the passive aspect of the perversion may be the more strongly developed in him and may represent his predominant sexual activity.³

We find, then, that certain among the impulses to perversion occur regularly as pairs of opposites; and this, taken in conjunction with material which will be brought forward later, has a high theoretical significance.4 It is, moreover, a suggestive fact that the existence of the pair of opposites formed by sadism and masochism cannot be attributed merely to the element of aggressiveness. We should rather be inclined to connect the simultaneous presence of these opposites with the opposing masculinity and femininity which are combined in bisexuality - a contrast which often has to be replaced in psycho-analysis by that between activity and passivity.

¹ [Footnote added 1915:] Cf. my remarks below on the pregenital phases of sexual development, which confirm this view.

² [Footnote added 1924:] The enquiry mentioned above has led me to assign a peculiar position, based upon the origin of the instincts, to the pair of opposites constituted by sadism and masochism, and to place them outside the class of the remaining ‘perversions’.

³ Instead of multiplying the evidence for this statement, I will quote a passage from Havelock Ellis (1913, 119): ‘The investigation of histories of sadism and masochism, even those given by Krafft-Ebing (as indeed Colin Scott and Féré have already pointed out), constantly reveals traces of both groups of phenomena in the same individual.’

4 [Footnote added 1915:] Cf. my discussion of ‘ambivalence’ below.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1486

(3) THE PERVERSIONS IN GENERAL

VARIATION AND DISEASE   It is natural that medical men, who first studied perversions in

outstanding examples and under special conditions, should have been inclined to regard them, like inversion, as indications of degeneracy or disease. Nevertheless, it is even easier to dispose of that view in this case than in that of inversion. Everyday experience has shown that most of these extensions, or at any rate the less severe of them, are constituents which are rarely absent from the sexual life of healthy people, and are judged by them no differently from other intimate events. If circumstances favour such an occurrence, normal people too can substitute a perversion of this kind for the normal sexual aim for quite a time, or can find place for the one alongside the other. No healthy person, it appears, can fail to make some addition that might be called perverse to the normal sexual aim; and the universality of this finding is in itself enough to show how inappropriate it is to use the word perversion as a term of reproach. In the sphere of sexual life we are brought up against peculiar and, indeed, insoluble difficulties as soon as we try to draw a sharp line to distinguish mere variations within the range of what is physiological from pathological symptoms.

Nevertheless, in some of these perversions the quality of the new sexual aim is of a kind to demand special examination. Certain of them are so far removed from the normal in their content that we cannot avoid pronouncing them ‘pathological’. This is especially so where (as, for instance, in cases of licking excrement or of intercourse with dead bodies ) the sexual instinct goes to astonishing lengths in successfully overriding the resistances of shame, disgust, horror or pain. But even in such cases we should not be too ready to assume that people who act in this way will necessarily turn out to be insane or subject to grave abnormalities of other kinds. Here again we cannot escape from the fact that people whose behaviour is in other respects normal can, under the domination of the most unruly of all the instincts, put themselves in the category of sick persons in the single sphere of sexual life. On the other hand, manifest abnormality in the other relations of life can invariably be shown to have a background of abnormal sexual conduct.

In the majority of instances the pathological character in a perversion is found to lie not in the content of the new sexual aim but in its relation to the normal. If a perversion, instead of appearing merely alongside the normal sexual aim and object, and only when circumstances are unfavourable to them and favourable to it - if, instead of this, it ousts them completely and takes their place in all circumstances - if, in short, a perversion has the characteristics of exclusiveness and fixation - then we shall usually be justified in regarding it as a pathological symptom.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1487

THE MENTAL FACTOR IN THE PERVERSIONS   It is perhaps in connection precisely with the most

repulsive perversions that the mental factor must be regarded as playing its largest part in the transformation of the sexual instinct. It is impossible to deny that in their case a piece of mental work has been performed which, in spite of its horrifying result, is the equivalent of an idealization of the instinct. The omnipotence of love is perhaps never more strongly proved than in such of its aberrations as these. The highest and the lowest are always closest to each other in the sphere of sexuality: ‘vom Himmel durch die Welt zur Hölle.’¹

TWO CONCLUSIONS   Our study of the perversions has shown us that the sexual instinct has to

struggle against certain mental forces which act as resistances, and of which shame and disgust are the most prominent. It is permissible to suppose that these forces play a part in restraining that instinct within the limits that are regarded as normal; and if they develop in the individual before the sexual instinct has reached its full strength, it is no doubt they that will determine the course of its development.²

In the second place we have found that some of the perversions which we have examined are only made intelligible if we assume the convergence of several motive forces. If such perversions admit of analysis, that is, if they can be taken to pieces, then they must be of a composite nature. This gives us a hint that perhaps the sexual instinct itself may be no simple thing, but put together from components which have come apart again in the perversions. If this is so, the clinical observation of these abnormalities will have drawn our attention to amalgamations which have been lost to view in the uniform behaviour of normal people.³

¹ [‘From Heaven, across the world, to Hell.’]

² [Footnote added 1915:] On the other hand, these forces which act like dams upon sexual development - disgust, shame and morality - must also be regarded as historical precipitates of the external inhibitions to which the sexual instinct has been subjected during the psychogenesis of the human race. We can observe the way in which, in the development of individuals, they arise at the appropriate moment, as though spontaneously, when upbringing and external influence give the signal.

³ [Footnote added 1920:] As regards the origin of the perversions, I will add a word in anticipation of what is to come. There is reason to suppose that, just as in the case of fetishism, abortive beginnings of normal sexual development occur before the perversions become fixated. Analytic investigation has already been able to show in a few cases that perversions are a residue of development towards the Oedipus complex and that after the repression of that complex the components of the sexual instinct which are strongest in the disposition of the individual concerned emerge once more.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1488

(4)  THE SEXUAL INSTINCT IN NEUROTICS

PSYCHO-ANALYSIS   An important addition to our knowledge of the sexual instinct in certain

people who at least approximate to the normal can be obtained from a source which can only be reached in one particular way. There is only one means of obtaining exhaustive information that will not be misleading about the sexual life of the persons known as ‘psychoneurotics’ - sufferers from hysteria, from obsessional neurosis, from what is wrongly described as neurasthenia, and, undoubtedly, from dementia praecox and paranoia was well. They must be subjected to psycho-analytic investigation, which is employed in the therapeutic procedure introduced by Josef Breuer and myself in 1893 and known at that time as ’catharsis’.

I must first explain - as I have already done in other writings - that all my experience shows that these psychoneuroses are based on sexual instinctual forces. By this I do not merely mean that the energy of the sexual instinct makes a contribution to the forces that maintain the pathological manifestations (the symptoms). I mean expressly to assert that that contribution is the most important and only constant source of energy of the neurosis and that in consequence the sexual life of the persons in question is expressed - whether exclusively or principally or only partly - in these symptoms. As I have put it elsewhere, the symptoms constitute the sexual activity of the patient. The evidence for this assertion is derived from the ever-increasing number of psycho-analyses of hysterical and other neurotics which I have carried out during the last 25 years and of whose findings I have given (and shall continue to give) a detailed account in other publications.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1920:] It implies no qualification of the above assertion, but rather an amplification of it, if I restate it as follows: neurotic symptoms are based on the one hand on the demands of the libidinal instincts and on the other hand on those made by the ego by way of reaction to them.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1489

The removal of the symptoms of hysterical patients by psycho-analysis proceeds on the supposition that those symptoms are substitutes - transcriptions as it were - for a number of emotionally cathected mental processes, wishes and desires, which, by the operation of a special psychical procedure (repression), have been prevented from obtaining discharge in psychical activity that is admissible to consciousness. These mental processes, therefore, being held back in a state of unconsciousness, strive to obtain an expression that shall be appropriate to their emotional importance - to obtain discharge; and in the case of hysteria they find such an expression (by means of the process of ‘conversion’) in somatic phenomena, that is, in hysterical symptoms. By systematically turning these symptoms back (with the help of a special technique ) into emotionally cathected ideas - ideas that will now have become conscious - it is possible to obtain the most accurate knowledge of the nature and origin of these formerly unconscious psychical structures.

FINDINGS OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS   In this manner the fact has emerged that symptoms represent

a substitute for impulses the source of whose strength is derived from the sexual instinct. What we know about the nature of hysterics before they fall ill - and they may be regarded as typical of all psychoneurotics - and about the occasions which precipitate their falling ill, is in complete harmony with this view. The character of hysterics shows a degree of sexual repression in excess of the normal quantity, an intensification of resistance against the sexual instinct (which we have already met with in the form of shame, disgust and morality), and what seems like an instinctive aversion on their part to any intellectual consideration of sexual problems. As a result of this, in especially marked cases, the patients remain in complete ignorance of sexual matters right into the period of sexual maturity.¹

On a cursory view, this trait, which is so characteristic of hysteria, is not uncommonly screened by the existence of a second constitutional character present in hysteria, namely the predominant development of the sexual instinct. Psycho-analysis, however, can invariably bring the first of these factors to light and clear up the enigmatic contradiction which hysteria presents, by revealing the pair of opposites by which it is characterized - exaggerated sexual craving and excessive aversion to sexuality.

¹ Breuer writes of the patient in connection with whom he first adopted the cathartic method: ‘The factor of sexuality was astonishingly undeveloped in her.’

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1490

In the case of anyone who is predisposed to hysteria, the onset of his illness is precipitated when, either as a result of his own progressive maturity or of the external circumstances of his life, he finds himself faced by the demands of a real sexual situation. Between the pressure of the instinct and his antagonism to sexuality, illness offers him a way of escape. It does not solve his conflict, but seeks to evade it by transforming his libidinal impulses into symptoms. The exception is only an apparent one when a hysteric - a male patient it may be - falls ill as a result of some trivial emotion, some conflict which does not centre around any sexual interest. In such cases psycho-analysis is regularly able to show that the illness has been made possible by the sexual component of the conflict, which has prevented the mental processes from reaching a normal issue.

NEUROSIS AND PERVERSION   There is no doubt that a large part of the opposition to these

views of mine is due to the fact that sexuality, to which I trace back psycho-neurotic symptoms, is regarded as though it coincided with the normal sexual instinct. But psycho-analytic teaching goes further than this. It shows that it is by no means only at the cost of the so-called normal sexual instinct that these symptoms originate - at any rate such is not exclusively or mainly the case; they also give expression (by conversion) to instincts which would be described as perverse in the widest sense of the word if they could be expressed directly in phantasy and action without being diverted from consciousness. Thus symptoms are formed in part at the cost of abnormal sexuality; neuroses are, so to say, the negative of the perversions.¹

¹ The contents of the clearly conscious phantasies of perverts (which in favourable circumstances can be transformed into manifest behaviour), of the delusional fears of paranoics (which are projected in a hostile sense on to other people) and of the unconscious phantasies of hysterics (which psycho-analysis reveals behind their symptoms) - all of these coincide with one another even down to their details.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1491

The sexual instinct of psychoneurotics exhibits all the aberrations which we have studied as variations of normal, and as manifestations of abnormal, sexual life.

(a) The unconscious mental life of all neurotics (without exception) shows inverted impulses, fixation of their libido upon persons of their own sex. It would be impossible without deep discussion to give any adequate appreciation of the importance of this factor in determining the form taken by the symptoms of the illness. I can only insist that an unconscious tendency to inversion is never absent and is of particular value in throwing light upon hysteria in men.¹

(b) It is possible to trace in the unconscious of psychoneurotics tendencies to every kind of anatomical extension of sexual activity and to show that those tendencies are factors in the formation of symptoms. Among them we find occurring with particular frequency those in which the mucous membrane of the mouth and anus are assigned the role of genitals.

(c) An especially prominent part is played as factors in the formation of symptoms in psychoneuroses by the component instincts, which emerge for the most part as pairs of opposites and which we have met with as introducing new sexual aims - the scopophilic instinct and exhibitionism and the active and passive forms of the instinct for cruelty. The contribution made by the last of these is essential to the understanding of the fact that symptoms involve suffering, and it almost invariably dominates a part of the patient’s social behaviour. It is also through the medium of this connection between libido and cruelty that the transformation of love into hate takes place, the transformation of affectionate into hostile impulses, which is characteristic of a great number of cases of neurosis, and indeed, it would seem, of paranoia in general.

The interest of these findings is still further increased by certain special facts.

(α) Whenever we find in the unconscious an instinct of this sort which is capable of being paired off with an opposite one, this second instinct will regularly be found in operation as well. Every active perversion is thus accompanied by its passive counterpart: anyone who is an exhibitionist in his unconscious is at the same time a voyeur; in anyone who suffers from the consequences of repressed sadistic impulses there is sure to be another determinant of his symptoms which has its source in masochistic inclinations. The complete agreement which is here shown with what we have found to exist in the corresponding ‘positive’ perversions is most remarkable, though in the actual symptoms one or other of the opposing tendencies plays the predominant part.

(β) In any fairly marked case of psychoneurosis it is unusual for only a single one of these perverse instincts to be developed. We usually find a considerable number and as a rule traces of them all. The degree of development of each particular instinct is, however, independent of that of the others. Here, too, the study of the ‘positive’ perversions provides an exact counterpart.

¹ Psychoneuroses are also very often associated with manifest inversion. In such cases the heterosexual current of feeling has undergone complete suppression. It is only fair to say that my attention was first drawn to the necessary universality of the tendency to inversion in psychoneurotics by Wilhelm Fliess of Berlin, after I had discussed its presence in individual cases. - [Added 1920:] This fact, which has not been sufficiently appreciated, cannot fail to have a decisive influence on any theory of homosexuality.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1492

(5)  COMPONENT INSTINCTS AND EROTOGENIC ZONES

If we put together what we have learned from our investigation of positive and negative perversions, it seems plausible to trace them back to a number of ‘component instincts’, which, however, are not of a primary nature, but are susceptible to further analysis. By an ‘instinct’ is provisionally to be understood the psychical representative of an endosomatic, continuously flowing source of stimulation, as contrasted with a ‘stimulus’, which is set up by single excitations coming from without. The concept of instinct is thus one of those lying on the frontier between the mental and the physical. The simplest and likeliest assumption as to the nature of instincts would seem to be that in itself an instinct is without quality, and, so far as mental life is concerned, is only to be regarded as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work. What distinguishes the instincts from one another and endows them with specific qualities is their relation to their somatic sources and to their aims. The source of an instinct is a process of excitation occurring in an organ and the immediate aim of the instinct lies in the removal of this organic stimulus.¹

There is a further provisional assumption that we cannot escape in the theory of the instincts. It is to the effect that excitations of two kinds arise from the somatic organs, based upon differences of a chemical nature. One of these kinds of excitation we describe as being specifically sexual, and we speak of the organ concerned as the ‘erotogenic zone’ of the sexual component instinct arising from it.²

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] The theory of the instincts is the most important but at the same time the least complete portion of psycho-analytic theory. I have made further contributions to it in my later works Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g) and The Ego and the Id (1923b).

² [Footnote added 1915:] It is not easy in the present place to justify these assumptions, derived as they are from the study of a particular class of neurotic illness. But on the other hand, if I omitted all mention of them, it would be impossible to say anything of substance about the instincts.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1493

The part played by the erotogenic zones is immediately obvious in the case of those perversions which assign a sexual significance to the oral and anal orifices. These behave in every respect like a portion of the sexual apparatus. In hysteria these parts of the body and the neighbouring tracts of mucous membrane become the seat of new sensations and of changes in innervation - indeed, of processes that can be compared to erection - in just the same way as do the actual genitalia under the excitations of the normal sexual processes.

The significance of the erotogenic zones as apparatuses subordinate to the genitals and as substitutes for them is, among all the psychoneuroses, most clearly to be seen in hysteria; but this does not imply that that significance is any the less in the other forms of illness. It is only that in them it is less recognizable, because in their case (obsessional neurosis and paranoia) the formation of the symptoms takes place in regions of the mental apparatus which are more remote from the particular centres concerned with somatic control. In obsessional neurosis what is more striking is the significance of those impulses which create new sexual aims and seem independent of erotogenic zones. Nevertheless, in scopophilia and exhibitionism the eye corresponds to an erotogenic zone; while in the case of those components of the sexual instinct which involve pain and cruelty the same role is assumed by the skin - the skin, which in particular parts of the body has become differentiated into sense organs or modified into mucous membrane, and is thus the erotogenic zone par excellence.¹

¹ We are reminded at this point of Moll’s analysis of the sexual instinct into an instinct of ‘contrectation’ and an instinct of ‘detumescence’. Contrectation represents a need for contact with the skin.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1494

(6) REASONS FOR THE APPARENT PREPONDERANCE OF

PERVERSE SEXUALITY IN THE PSYCHONEUROSES

The preceding discussion may perhaps have placed the sexuality of psychoneurotics in a false light. It may have given the impression that, owing to their disposition, psychoneurotics approximate closely to perverts in their sexual behaviour and are proportionately remote from normal people. It may indeed very well be that the constitutional disposition of these patients (apart from their exaggerated degree of sexual repression and the excessive intensity of their sexual instinct)  includes an unusual tendency to perversion, using that word in its widest sense. Nevertheless, investigation of comparatively slight cases shows that this last assumption is not absolutely necessary, or at least that in forming a judgement on these pathological developments there is a factor to be considered which weighs in the other direction. Most psychoneurotics only fall ill after the age of puberty as a result of the demands made upon them by normal sexual life. (It is most particularly against the latter that repression is directed.) Or else illnesses of this kind set in later, when the libido fails to obtain satisfaction along normal lines. In both these cases the libido behaves like a stream whose main bed has become blocked. It proceeds to fill up collateral channels which may hitherto have been empty. Thus, in the same way, what appears to be the strong tendency (though, it is true, a negative one) of psychoneurotics to perversion may be collaterally determined, and must, in any case, be collaterally intensified. The fact is that we must put sexual repression as an internal factor alongside such external factors as limitation of freedom, inaccessibility of a normal sexual object, the dangers of the normal sexual act, etc., which bring about perversions in persons who might perhaps otherwise have remained normal.

In this respect different cases of neurosis may behave differently: in one case the preponderating factor may be the innate strength of the tendency to perversion, in another it may be the collateral increase of that tendency owing to the libido being forced away from a normal sexual aim and sexual object. It would be wrong to represent as opposition what is in fact a co-operative relation. Neurosis will always produce its greatest effects when constitution and experience work together in the same direction. Where the constitution is a marked one it will perhaps not require the support of actual experiences; while a great shock in real life will perhaps bring about a neurosis even in an average constitution. (Incidentally, this view of the relative aetiological importance of what is innate and what is accidentally experienced applies equally in other fields.)

If we prefer to suppose, nevertheless, that a particularly strongly developed tendency to perversion is among the characteristics of psychoneurotic constitutions, we have before us the prospect of being able to distinguish a number of such constitutions according to the innate preponderance of one or the other of the erotogenic zones or of one or the other of the component instincts. The question whether a special relation holds between the perverse disposition and the particular form of illness adopted, has, like so much else in this field, not yet been investigated.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1495

(7) INTIMATION OF THE INFANTILE CHARACTER OF SEXUALITY

By demonstrating the part played by perverse impulses in the formation of symptoms in the psychoneuroses, we have quite remarkably increased the number of people who might be regarded as perverts. It is not only that neurotics in themselves constitute a very numerous class, but it must also be considered that an unbroken chain bridges the gap between the neuroses in all their manifestations and normality. After all, Moebius could say with justice that we are all to some extent hysterics. Thus the extraordinarily wide dissemination of the perversions forces us to suppose that the disposition to perversions is itself of no great rarity but must form a part of what passes as the normal constitution.

It is, as we have seen, debatable whether the perversions go back to innate determinants or arise, as Binet assumed was the case with fetishism, owing to chance experiences. The conclusion now presents itself to us that there is indeed something innate lying behind the perversions but that it is something innate in everyone, though as a disposition it may vary in its intensity and may be increased by the influences of actual life. What is in question are the innate constitutional roots of the sexual instinct. In one class of cases (the perversions) these roots may grow into the actual vehicles of sexual activity; in others they may be submitted to an insufficient suppression (repression) and thus be able in a roundabout way to attract a considerable proportion of sexual energy to themselves as symptoms; while in the most favourable cases, which lie between these two extremes, they may by means of effective restriction and other kinds of modification bring about what is known as normal sexual life.

We have, however, a further reflection to make. This postulated constitution, containing the germs of all the perversions, will only be demonstrable in children, even though in them it is only with modest degrees of intensity that any of the instincts can emerge. A formula begins to take shape which lays it down that the sexuality of neurotics has remained in, or been brought back to, an infantile state. Thus our interest turns to the sexual life of children, and we will now proceed to trace the play of influences which govern the evolution of infantile sexuality till its outcome in perversion, neurosis or normal sexual life.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1496

II

INFANTILE SEXUALITY

NEGLECT OF THE INFANTILE FACTOR   One feature of the popular view of the sexual instinct is

that it is absent in childhood and only awakens in the period of life described as puberty. This, however, is not merely a simple error but one that has had grave consequences, for it is mainly to this idea that we owe our present ignorance of the fundamental conditions of sexual life. A thorough study of the sexual manifestations of childhood would probably reveal the essential characters of the sexual instinct and would show us the course of its development and the way in which it is put together from various sources.

It is noticeable that writers who concern themselves with explaining the characteristics and reactions of the adult have devoted much more attention to the primaeval period which is comprised in the life of the individual’s ancestors - have, that is, ascribed much more influence to heredity - than to the other primaeval period, which falls within the lifetime of the individual himself - that is, to childhood. One would surely have supposed that the influence of this latter period would be easier to understand and could claim to be considered before that of heredity.¹ It is true that in the literature of the subject one occasionally comes across remarks upon precocious sexual activity in small children - upon erections, masturbation and even activities resembling coitus. But these are always quoted only as exceptional events, as oddities or as horrifying instances of precocious depravity. So far as I know, not a single author has clearly recognized the regular existence of a sexual instinct in childhood; and in the writings that have become so numerous on the development of children, the chapter on ‘Sexual Development’ is as a rule omitted.²

¹ [Footnote added 1915:] Nor is it possible to estimate correctly the part played by heredity until the part played by childhood has been assessed.

² The assertion made in the text has since struck me myself as being so bold that I have undertaken the task of testing its validity by looking through the literature once more. The outcome of this is that I have allowed my statement to stand unaltered. The scientific examination of both the physical and mental phenomena of sexuality in childhood is still in its earliest beginnings. One writer, Bell (1902, 327), remarks: ‘I know of no scientist who has given a careful analysis of the emotion as it is seen in the adolescent.’ Somatic sexual manifestations from the period before puberty have only attracted attention in connection with phenomena of degeneracy and as indications of degeneracy. In none of the accounts which I have read of the psychology of this period of life is a chapter to be found on the erotic life of children; and this applies to the well-known works of Preyer, Baldwin (1898), Perez (1886), Strümpell (1899), Groos (1904), Heller (1904), Sully (1895) and others. We can obtain the clearest impression of the state of things in this field to-day from the periodical Die Kinderfehler from 1896 onwards. Nevertheless the conviction is borne in upon us that the existence of love in childhood stands in no need of discovery. Perez (1886, 272 ff.) argues in favour of its existence. Groos (1899, 326) mentions as a generally recognized fact that ‘some children are already accessible to sexual impulses at a very early age and feel an urge to have contact with the opposite sex’. The earliest instance of the appearance of ‘sex-love’ recorded by Bell (1902, 330) concerns a child in the middle of his third year. On this point compare further Havelock Ellis (1913, Appendix B).

[Added 1910:] This judgement upon the literature of infantile sexuality need no longer be maintained since the appearance of Stanley Hall’s exhaustive work (1904). No such modification is necessitated by Moll’s recent book (1909). See, on the other hand, Bleuler (1908). [Added 1915:] Since this was written, a book by Hug-Hellmuth (1913) has taken the neglected sexual factor fully into account.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1497

INFANTILE AMNESIA   The reason for this strange neglect is to be sought, I think, partly in

considerations of propriety, which the authors obey as a result of their own upbringing, and partly in a psychological phenomenon which has itself hitherto eluded explanation. What I have in mind is the peculiar amnesia which, in the case of most people, though by to means all, hides the earliest beginnings of their childhood up to their sixth or eighth year. Hitherto it has not occurred to us to feel any astonishment at the fact of this amnesia, though we might have had good grounds for doing so. For we learn from other people that during these years, of which at a later date we retain nothing in our memory but a few unintelligible and fragmentary recollections, we reacted in a lively manner to impressions, that we were capable of expressing pain and joy in a human fashion, that we gave evidence of love, jealousy and other passionate feelings by which we were strongly moved at the time, and even that we gave utterance to remarks which were regarded by adults as good evidence of our possessing insight and the beginnings of a capacity for judgement. And of all this we, when we are grown up, have no knowledge of our own! Why should our memory lag so far behind the other activities of our minds? We have, on the contrary, good reason to believe that there is no period at which the capacity for receiving and reproducing impressions is greater than precisely during the years of childhood.¹

¹ I have attempted to solve one of the problems connected with the earliest memories of childhood in a paper on ‘ Screen Memories’ (1899a). [Added 1924:] See also Chapter IV of my Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b).

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1498

On the other hand we must assume, or we can convince ourselves by a psychological examination of other people, that the very same impressions that we have forgotten have none the less left the deepest traces on our minds and have had a determining effect upon the whole of our later development. There can, therefore, be no question of any real abolition of the impressions of childhood, but rather of an amnesia similar to that which neurotics exhibit for later events, and of which the essence consists in a simple withholding of these impressions from consciousness, viz., in their repression. But what are the forces which bring about this repression of the impressions of childhood? Whoever could solve this riddle would, I think, have explained hysterical amnesia as well.

Meanwhile we must not fail to observe that the existence of infantile amnesia provides a new point of comparison between the mental states of children and psychoneurotics. We have already come across another such point in the formula to which we were led, to the effect that the sexuality of psychoneurotics has remained at, or been carried back to, an infantile stage. Can it be, after all, that infantile amnesia, too, is to be brought into relation with the sexual impulses of childhood?

Moreover, the connection between infantile and hysterical amnesia is more than a mere play upon words. Hysterical amnesia, which occurs at the bidding of repression, is only explicable by the fact that the subject is already in possession of a store of memory-traces which have been withdrawn from conscious disposal, and which are now, by an associative link, attracting to themselves the material which the forces of repression are engaged in repelling from consciousness.¹ It may be said that without infantile amnesia there would be no hysterical amnesia.

I believe, then, that infantile amnesia, which turns everyone’s childhood into something like a prehistoric epoch and conceals from him the beginnings of his own sexual life, is responsible for the fact that in general no importance is attached to childhood in the development of sexual life. The gaps in our knowledge which have arisen in this way cannot be bridged by a single observer. As long ago as in the year 1896 I insisted on the significance of the years of childhood in the origin of certain important phenomena connected with sexual life, and since then I have never ceased to emphasize the part played in sexuality, by the infantile factor.

¹ [Footnote added 1915:] The mechanism of repression cannot be understood unless account is taken of both of these two concurrent processes. They may be compared with the manner in which tourists are conducted to the top of the Great Pyramid of Giza by being pushed from one direction and pulled from the other.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1499

THE PERIOD OF SEXUAL LATENCY IN CHILDHOOD AND ITS INTERRUPTIONS

The remarkably frequent reports of what are described as irregular and exceptional sexual impulses in childhood, as well as the uncovering in neurotics of what have hitherto been unconscious memories of childhood, allow us to sketch out the sexual occurrences of that period in some such way as this.¹

There seems no doubt that germs of sexual impulses are already present in the new-born child and that these continue to develop for a time, but are then overtaken by a progressive process of suppression; this in turn is itself interrupted by periodical advances in sexual development or may be held up by individual peculiarities. Nothing is known for certain concerning the regularity and periodicity of this oscillating course of development. It seems, however, that the sexual life of children usually emerges in a form accessible to observation round about the third or fourth year of life.²

¹ We are able to make use of the second of these two sources material since we are justified in expecting that the early years of children who are later to become neurotic are not likely in this respect to differ essentially from those of children who are to grow up into normal adults, [added 1915:] but only in the intensity and clarity of the phenomena involved.

² There is a possible anatomical analogy to what I believe to be the course of development of the infantile sexual function in Bayer’s discovery (1902) that the internal sexual organs (i.e. the uterus) are as a rule larger in new-born children than in older ones. It is not certain, however, what view we should take of this involution that occurs after birth (which has been shown by Halban to apply also to other portions of the genital apparatus). According to Halban (1904) the process of involution comes to an end after a few weeks of extra-uterine life. [Added 1920:] Those authorities who regard the interstitial portion of the sex-gland as the organ that determines sex have on their side been led by anatomical researches to speak of infantile sexuality and a period of sexual latency. I quote a passage from Lipschütz’s book (1919, 168), which I mentioned on p. 1473 n.: ‘We shall be doing more justice to the facts if we say that the maturation of the sexual characters which is accomplished at puberty is only due to a great acceleration which occurs at that time of processes which began much earlier - in my view as early as during intra-uterine life.’ ‘What has hitherto been described in a summary way as puberty is probably only a second major phase of puberty which sets in about the middle of the second decade of life . . . Childhood, from birth until the beginning of this second major phase, might be described as "the intermediate phase of puberty"' (ibid., 170). Attention was drawn to this coincidence between anatomical findings and psychological observation in a review by Ferenczi (1920). The agreement is marred only by the fact that the ‘first peak’ in the development of the sexual organ occurs during the early intra-uterine period, whereas the early efflorescence of infantile sexual life must be ascribed to the third and fourth years of life. There is, of course, no need to expect that anatomical growth and psychical development must be exactly simultaneous. The researches in question were made on the sex-glands of human beings. Since a period of latency in the psychological sense does not occur in animals, it would be very interesting to know whether the anatomical findings which have led these writers to assume the occurrence of two peaks in sexual development are also demonstrable in the higher animals.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1500

SEXUAL INHIBITIONS   It is during this period of total or only partial latency that are built up the

mental forces which are later to impede the course of the sexual instinct and, like dams, restrict its flow - disgust, feelings of shame and the claims of aesthetic and moral ideals. One gets an impression from civilized children that the construction of these dams is a product of education, and no doubt education has much to do with it. But in reality this development is organically determined and fixed by heredity, and it can occasionally occur without any help at all from education. Education will not be trespassing beyond its appropriate domain if it limits itself to following the lines which have already been laid down organically and to impressing them somewhat more clearly and deeply.

REACTION-FORMATION AND SUBLIMATION   What is it that goes to the making of these

constructions which are so important for the growth of a civilized and normal individual? They probably emerge at the cost of the infantile sexual impulses themselves. Thus the activity of those impulses does not cease even during this period of latency, though their energy is diverted, wholly or in great part, from their sexual use and directed to other ends. Historians of civilization appear to be at one in assuming that powerful components are acquired for every kind of cultural achievement by this diversion of sexual instinctual forces from sexual aims and their direction to new ones - a process which deserves the name of ‘sublimation’. To this we would add, accordingly, that the same process plays a part in the development of the individual and we would place its beginning in the period of sexual latency of childhood.¹

It is possible further to form some idea of the mechanism of this process of sublimation. On the one hand, it would seem, the sexual impulses cannot be utilized during these years of childhood, since the reproductive functions have been deferred - a fact which constitutes the main feature of the period of latency. On the other hand, these impulses would seem in themselves to be perverse - that is, to arise from erotogenic zones and to derive their activity from instincts which, in view of the direction of the subject’s development, can only arouse unpleasurable feelings. They consequently evoke opposing mental forces (reacting impulses) which, in order to suppress this unpleasure effectively, build up the mental dams that have already mentioned - disgust, shame and morality.²

¹ Once again, it is from Fliess that I have borrowed the term ‘period of sexual latency’.

² [Footnote added 1915:] In the case which I am here discussing, the sublimation of sexual instinctual forces takes place along the path of reaction-formation. But in general it is possible to distinguish the concepts of sublimation and reaction-formation from each other as two different processes. Sublimation can also take place by other and simpler mechanisms.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1501

INTERRUPTIONS OF THE LATENCY PERIOD   We must not deceive ourselves as to the

hypothetical nature and insufficient clarity of our knowledge concerning the processes of the infantile period of latency or deferment; but we shall be on firmer ground in pointing out that such an application of infantile sexuality represents an educational ideal from which individual development usually diverges at some point and often to a considerable degree. From time to time a fragmentary manifestation of sexuality which has evaded sublimation may break through; or some sexual activity may persist through the whole duration of the latency period until the sexual instinct emerges with greater intensity at puberty. In so far as educators pay any attention at all to infantile sexuality, they behave exactly as though they shared our views as to the construction of the moral defensive forces at the cost of sexuality, and as though they knew that sexual activity makes a child ineducable: for they stigmatize every sexual manifestation by children as a ‘vice’, without being able to do much against it. We, on the other hand, have every reason for turning our attention to these phenomena which are so much dreaded by education, for we may expect them to help us to discover the original configuration of the sexual instincts.

THE MANIFESTATIONS OF INFANTILE SEXUALITY

THUMB-SUCKING   For reasons which will appear later, I shall take thumb-sucking (or sensual

sucking) as a sample of the sexual manifestations of childhood. (An excellent study of this subject has been made by the Hungarian paediatrician, Lindner, 1879.)

Thumb-sucking appears already in early infancy and may continue into maturity, or even persist all through life. It consists in the rhythmic repetition of a sucking contact by the mouth (or lips). There is no question of the purpose of this procedure being the taking of nourishment. A portion of the lip itself, the tongue, or any other part of the skin within reach - even the big toe - may be taken as the object upon which this sucking is carried out. In this connection a grasping-instinct may appear and may manifest itself as a simultaneous rhythmic tugging at the lobes of the ears or a catching hold of some part of another person (as a rule the ear) for the same purpose. Sensual sucking involves a complete absorption of the attention and leads either to sleep or even to a motor reaction in the nature of an orgasm.¹ It is not infrequently combined with rubbing some sensitive part of the body such as the breast or the external genitalia. Many children proceed by this path from sucking to masturbation.

¹ Thus we find at this early stage, what holds good all through life, that sexual satisfaction is the best soporific. Most cases of nervous insomnia can be traced back to lack of sexual satisfaction. It is well known that unscrupulous nurses put crying children to sleep by stroking their genitals.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1502

Lindner himself clearly recognized the sexual nature of this activity and emphasized it without qualification. In the nursery, sucking is often classed along with the other kinds of sexual ‘naughtiness’ of children. This view has been most energetically repudiated by numbers of paediatricians and nerve-specialists, though this is no doubt partly due to a confusion between ‘sexual’ and ‘genital’. Their objection raises a difficult question and one which cannot be evaded: what is the general characteristic which enables us to recognize the sexual manifestations of children? The concatenation of phenomena into which we have been given an insight by psycho-analytic investigation justifies us, in my opinion, in regarding thumb-sucking as a sexual manifestation and in choosing it for our study of the essential features of infantile sexual activity.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1920:] In 1919, a Dr. Galant published, under the title of ‘Das Lutscherli’, the confession of a grown-up girl who had never given up this infantile sexual activity and who represents the satisfaction to be gained from sucking as something completely analogous to sexual satisfaction, particularly when this is obtained from a lover’s kiss: ‘Not every kiss is equal to a "Lutscherli" - no, no, not by any means! It is impossible to describe what a lovely feeling goes through your whole body when you suck; you are right away from this world. You are absolutely satisfied, and happy beyond desire. It is a wonderful feeling; you long for nothing but peace - uninterrupted peace. It is just unspeakably lovely: you feel no pain and no sorrow, and ah! you are carried into another world.’

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1503

AUTO-EROTISM   We are in duty bound to make a thorough examination of this example. It must

be insisted that the most striking feature of this sexual activity is that the instinct is not directed towards other people, but obtains satisfaction from the subject’s own body. It is ‘auto-erotic’, to call it by a happily chosen term introduced by Havelock Ellis (1910).¹

Furthermore, it is clear that the behaviour of a child who indulges in thumb-sucking is determined by a search for some pleasure which has already been experienced and is now remembered. In the simplest case he proceeds to find this satisfaction by sucking rhythmically at some part of the skin or mucous membrane. It is also easy to guess the occasions on which the child had his first experiences of the pleasure which he is now striving to renew. It was the child’s first and most vital activity, his sucking at his mother’s breast, or at substitutes for it, that must have familiarized him with this pleasure. The child’s lips, in our view, behave like an erotogenic zone, and no doubt stimulation by the warm flow of milk is the cause of the pleasurable sensation. The satisfaction of the erotogenic zone is associated, in the first instance, with the satisfaction of the need for nourishment. To begin with, sexual activity attaches itself to functions serving the purpose of self-preservation and does not become independent of them until later. No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life. The need for repeating the sexual satisfaction now becomes detached from the need for taking nourishment - a separation which becomes inevitable when the teeth appear and food is no longer taken in only by sucking, but is also chewed up. The child does not make use of an extraneous body for his sucking, but prefers a part of his own skin because it is more convenient, because it mikes him independent of the external world, which he is not yet able to control, and because in that way he provides himself, as it were, with a second erotogenic zone, though one of an inferior kind. The inferiority of this second region is among the reasons why at a later date he seeks the corresponding part - the lips - of another person. (‘It’s a pity I can’t kiss myself’, he seems to be saying.)

It is not every child who sucks in this way. It may be assumed that those children do so in whom there is a constitutional intensification of the erotogenic significance of the labial region. If that significance persists, these same children when they are grown up will become epicures in kissing, will be inclined to perverse kissing, or, if males, will have a powerful motive for drinking and smoking. If, however, repression ensues, they will feel disgust at food and will produce hysterical vomiting. The repression extends to the nutritional instinct owing to the dual purpose served by the labial zone. Many of my women patients who suffer from disturbances of eating, globus hystericus, constriction of the throat and vomiting, have indulged energetically in sucking during their childhood.

Our study of thumb-sucking or sensual sucking has already given us the three essential characteristics of an infantile sexual manifestation. At its origin it attaches itself to one of the vital somatic functions; it has as yet no sexual object, and is thus auto-erotic; and its sexual aim is dominated by an erotogenic zone. It is to be anticipated that these characteristics will be found to apply equally to most of the other activities of the infantile sexual instincts.

¹ [Footnote added 1920:] Havelock Ellis, it is true, uses the word ‘auto-erotic’ in a somewhat different sense, to describe an excitation which is not provoked from outside but arises internally. What psycho-analysis regards as the essential point is not the genesis of the excitation, but the question of its relation to an object.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1504

THE SEXUAL AIM OF INFANTILE SEXUALITY

CHARACTERISTICS OF EROTOGENIC ZONES   The example of thumb-sucking shows us still

more about what constitutes an erotogenic zone. It is a part of the skin or mucous membrane in which stimuli of a certain sort evoke a feeling of pleasure possessing a particular quality. There can be no doubt that the stimuli which produce the pleasure are governed by special conditions, though we do not know what those are. A rhythmic character must play a part among them and the analogy of tickling is forced upon our notice. It seems less certain whether the character of the pleasurable feeling evoked by the stimulus should be described as a ‘specific’ one - a ‘specific’ quality in which the sexual factor would precisely lie. Psychology is still so much in the dark in questions of pleasure and unpleasure that the most cautious assumption is the one most to be recommended. We may later come upon reasons which seem to support the idea that the pleasurable feeling does in fact possess a specific quality.

The character of erotogenicity can be attached to some parts of the body in a particularly marked way. There are predestined erotogenic zones, as is shown by the example of sucking. The same example, however, also shows us that any other part of the skin or mucous membrane can take over the functions of an erotogenic zone, and must therefore have some aptitude in that direction. Thus the quality of the stimulus has more to do with producing the pleasurable feeling than has the nature of the part of the body concerned. A child who is indulging in sensual sucking searches about his body and chooses some part of it to suck - a part which is afterwards preferred by him from force of habit; if he happens to hit upon one of the predestined regions (such as the nipples or genitals) no doubt it retains the preference. A precisely analogous tendency to displacement is also found in the symptomatology of hysteria. In that neurosis repression affects most of all the actual genital zones and these transmit their susceptibility to stimulation to other erotogenic zones (normally neglected in adult life), which then behave exactly like genitals. But besides this, precisely as in the case of sucking, any other part of the body can acquire the same susceptibility to stimulation as is possessed by the genitals and can become an erotogenic zone. Erotogenic and hysterogenic zones show the same characteristics.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1915:] After further reflection and after taking other observations into account, I have been led to ascribe the quality of erotogenicity to all parts of the body and to all the internal organs. Cf. also in this connection what is said below on narcissism.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1505

THE INFANTILE SEXUAL AIM   The sexual aim of the infantile instinct consists in obtaining

satisfaction by means of an appropriate stimulation of the erotogenic zone which has been selected in one way or another. This satisfaction must have been previously experienced in order to have left behind a need for its repetition; and we may expect that Nature will have made safe provisions so that this experience of satisfaction shall not be left to chance.¹ We have already learnt what the contrivance is that fulfils this purpose in the case of the labial zone: it is the simultaneous connection which links this part of the body with the taking in of food. We shall come across other, similar contrivances as sources of sexuality. The state of being in need of a repetition of the satisfaction reveals itself in two ways: by a peculiar feeling of tension, possessing, rather, the character of unpleasure, and by a sensation of itching or stimulation which is centrally conditioned and projected on to the peripheral erotogenic zone. We can therefore formulate a sexual aim in another way: it consists in replacing the projected sensation of stimulation in the erotogenic zone by an external stimulus which removes that sensation by producing a feeling of satisfaction. This external stimulus will usually consist in some kind of manipulation that is analogous to the sucking.

The fact that the need can also be evoked peripherally, by a real modification of the erotogenic zone, is in complete harmony with our physiological knowledge. This strikes us as somewhat strange only because, in order to remove one stimulus, it seems necessary to adduce a second one at the same spot.

¹ [Footnote added 1920:] In biological discussions it is scarcely possible to avoid a teleological way of thinking, even though one is aware that in any particular instance one is not secure against error.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1506

MASTURBATORY SEXUAL MANIFESTATIONS¹

It must come as a great relief to find that, when once we have understood the nature of the instinct arising from a single one of the erotogenic zones, we shall have very little more to learn of the sexual activity of children. The clearest distinctions as between one zone and another concern the nature of the contrivance necessary for satisfying the instinct; in the case of the labial zone it consisted of sucking, and this has to be replaced by other muscular actions according to the position and nature of the other zones.

ACTIVITY OF THE ANAL ZONE   Like the labial zone, the anal zone is well suited by its position to

act as a medium through which sexuality may attach itself to other somatic functions. It is to be presumed that the erotogenic significance of this part of the body is very great from the first. We learn with some astonishment from psycho-analysis of the transmutations normally undergone by the sexual excitations arising from this zone and of the frequency with which it retains a considerable amount of susceptibility to genital stimulation throughout life.² The intestinal disturbances which are so common in childhood see to it that the zone shall not lack intense excitations. Intestinal catarrhs at the tenderest age make children ‘nervy’, as people say, and in cases of later neurotic illness they have a determining influence on the symptoms in which the neurosis is expressed, and they put at its disposal the whole range of intestinal disturbances. If we bear in mind the erotogenic significance of the outlet of the intestinal canal, which persists, at all events in a modified form, we shall not be inclined to scoff at the influence of haemorrhoids, to which old-fashioned medicine used to attach so much importance in explaining neurotic conditions.

¹ Cf. the very copious literature on the subject of masturbation, which for the most part, however, is at sea upon the main issues, e.g. Rohleder (1899). [Added 1915:] See also the report of the discussion on the subject in the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society (Diskussionen, 1912).

² [Footnote added 1910:] Cf. my papers on ‘Character and Anal Erotism’ (1908b) [added 1920:] and ‘On Transformations of Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Erotism’ (1917c).

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1507

Children who are making use of the susceptibility to erotogenic stimulation of the anal zone betray themselves by holding back their stool till its accumulation brings about violent muscular contractions and, as it passes through the anus, is able to produce powerful stimulation of the mucous membrane. In so doing it must no doubt cause not only painful but also highly pleasurable sensations. One of the clearest signs of subsequent eccentricity or nervousness is to be seen when a baby obstinately refuses to empty his bowels when he is put on the pot - that is, when his nurse wants him to - and holds back that function till he himself chooses to exercise it. He is naturally not concerned with dirtying the bed, he is only anxious not to miss the subsidiary pleasure attached to defaecating. Educators are once more right when they describe children who keep the process back as ‘naughty’.

The contents of the bowels, which act as a stimulating mass upon a sexually sensitive portion of mucous membrane, behave like forerunners of another organ, which is destined to come into action after the phase of childhood. But they have other important meanings for the infant. They are clearly treated as a part of the infant’s own body and represent his first ‘gift’: by producing them he can express his active compliance with his environment and, by withholding them, his disobedience. From being a ‘gift’ they later come to acquire the meaning of ‘baby’ - for babies, according to one of the sexual theories of children, are acquired by eating and are born through the bowels.

The retention of the faecal mass, which is thus carried out intentionally by the child to begin with, in order to serve, as it were, as a masturbatory stimulus upon the anal zone or to be employed in his relation to the people looking after him, is also one of the roots of the constipation which is so common among neuropaths. Further, the whole significance of the anal zone is reflected in the fact that few neurotics are to be found without their special scatological practices, ceremonies, and so on, which they carefully keep secret.¹

Actual masturbatory stimulation of the anal zone by means of the finger, provoked by a centrally determined or peripherally maintained sensation of itching, is by no means rare among older children.

¹ [Footnote added 1920:] Lou Andreas-Salomé (1916), in a paper which has given us a very much deeper understanding of the significance of anal erotism, has shown how the history of the first prohibition which a child comes across - the prohibition against getting pleasure from anal activity and its products - has a decisive effect on his whole development. This must be the first occasion on which the infant has a glimpse of an environment hostile to his instinctual impulses, on which he learns to separate his own entity from this alien one and on which he carries out the first ‘repression’ of his possibilities for pleasure. From that time on, what is ‘anal’ remains the symbol of everything that is to be repudiated and excluded from life. The clear-cut distinction between anal and genital processes which is later insisted upon is contradicted by the close anatomical and functional analogies and relations which hold between them. The genital apparatus remains the neighbour of the cloaca, and actually ‘in the case of women is only taken from it on lease’.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1508

ACTIVITY OF THE GENITAL ZONES   Among the erotogenic zones that form part of the child’s

body there is one which certainly does not play the opening part, and which cannot be the vehicle of the oldest sexual impulses, but which is destined to great things in the future. In both male and female children it is brought into connection with micturition (in the glans and clitoris) and in the former is enclosed in a pouch of mucous membrane, so that there can be no lack of stimulation of it by secretions which may give an early start to sexual excitation. The sexual activities of this erotogenic zone, which forms part of the sexual organs proper, are the beginning of what is later to become ‘normal’ sexual life. The anatomical situation of this region, the secretions in which it is bathed, the washing and rubbing to which it is subjected in the course of a child’s toilet, as well as accidental stimulation (such as the movement of intestinal worms in the case of girls), make it inevitable that the pleasurable feeling which this part of the body is capable of producing should be noticed by children even during their earliest infancy, and should give rise to a need for its repetition. If we consider this whole range of contrivances and bear in mind that both making a mess and measures for keeping clean are bound to operate in much the same way, it is scarcely possible to avoid the conclusion that the foundations for the future primacy over sexual activity exercised by this erotogenic zone are established by early infantile masturbation, which scarcely a single individual escapes. The action which disposes of the stimulus and brings about satisfaction consists in a rubbing movement with the hand or in the application of pressure (no doubt on the lines of a pre-existing reflex) either from the hand or by bringing the thighs together. This last method is by far the more common in the case of girls. The preference for the hand which is shown by boys is already evidence of the important contribution which the instinct for mastery is destined to make to masculine sexual activity.¹

It will be in the interests of clarity if I say at once that three phases of infantile masturbation are to be distinguished. The first of these belongs to early infancy, and the second to the brief efflorescence of sexual activity about the fourth year of life; only the third phase corresponds to pubertal masturbation, which is often the only kind taken into account.

¹ [Footnote added 1915:] Unusual techniques in carrying out masturbation in later years seem to point to the influence of a prohibition against masturbation which has been overcome.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1509

SECOND PHASE OF INFANTILE MASTURBATION   The masturbation of early infancy seems to

disappear after a short time; but it may persist uninterruptedly until puberty, and this would constitute the first great deviation from the course of development laid down for civilized men. At some point of childhood after early infancy, as a rule before the fourth year, the sexual instinct belonging to the genital zone usually revives and persists again for a time until it is once more suppressed, or it may continue without interruption. This second phase of infantile sexual activity may assume a variety of different forms which can only be determined by a precise analysis of individual cases. But all its details leave behind the deepest (unconscious) impressions in the subject’s memory, determine the development of his character, if he is to remain healthy, and the symptomatology of his neurosis, if he is to fall ill after puberty.¹ In the latter case we find that this sexual period has been forgotten and that the conscious memories that bear witness to it have been displaced. (I have already mentioned that I am also inclined to relate normal infantile amnesia to this infantile sexual activity.) Psycho-analytic investigation enables us to make what has been forgotten conscious and thus do away with a compulsion that arises from the unconscious psychical material.

¹ [Footnote added 1915:] The problem of why the sense of guilt of neurotics is, as Bleuler recently recognized, regularly attached to the memory of some masturbatory activity, usually at puberty, still awaits an exhaustive analytic explanation. [Added 1920:] The most general and most important factor concerned must no doubt be that masturbation represents the executive agency of the whole of infantile sexuality and is, therefore, able to take over the sense of guilt attaching to it.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1510

RETURN OF EARLY INFANTILE MASTURBATION   During the years of childhood with which I am

now dealing, the sexual excitation of early infancy returns, either as a centrally determined tickling stimulus which seeks satisfaction in masturbation, or as a process in the nature of a nocturnal emission which, like the nocturnal emissions of adult years, achieves satisfaction without the help of any action by the subject. The latter case is the more frequent with girls and in the second half of childhood; its determinants are not entirely intelligible and often, though not invariably, it seems to be conditioned by a period of earlier active masturbation. The symptoms of these sexual manifestations are scanty; they are mostly displayed on behalf of the still undeveloped sexual apparatus by the urinary apparatus, which thus acts, as it were, as the former’s trustee. Most of the so-called bladder disorders of this period are sexual disturbances: nocturnal enuresis, unless it represents an epileptic fit, corresponds to a nocturnal emission.

The reappearance of sexual activity is determined by internal causes and external contingencies, both of which can be guessed in cases of neurotic illness from the form taken by their symptoms and can be discovered with certainty by psycho-analytic investigation. I shall have to speak presently of the internal causes; great and lasting importance attaches at this period to the accidental external contingencies. In the foreground we find the effects of seduction, which treats a child as a sexual object prematurely and teaches him, in highly emotional circumstances, how to obtain satisfaction from his genital zones, a satisfaction which he is then usually obliged to repeat again and again by masturbation. An influence of this kind may originate either from adults or from other children. I cannot admit that in my paper on ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’ (1896c) I exaggerated the frequency or importance of that influence, though I did not then know that persons who remain normal may have had the same experiences in their childhood, and though I consequently overrated the importance of seduction in comparison with the factors of sexual constitution and development.¹ Obviously seduction is not required in order to arouse a child’s sexual life; that can also come about spontaneously from internal causes.

POLYMORPHOUSLY PERVERSE DISPOSITION   It is an instructive fact that under the influence of

seduction children can become polymorphously perverse, and can be led into all possible kinds of sexual irregularities. This shows that an aptitude for them is innately present in their disposition. There is consequently little resistance towards carrying them out, since the mental dams against sexual excesses - shame, disgust and morality - have either not yet been constructed at all or are only in course of construction, according to the age of the child. In this respect children behave in the same kind of way as an average uncultivated woman in whom the same polymorphously perverse disposition persists. Under ordinary conditions she may remain normal sexually, but if she is led on by a clever seducer she will find every sort of perversion to her taste, and will retain them as part of her own sexual activities. Prostitutes exploit the same polymorphous, that is, infantile, disposition for the purposes of their profession; and, considering the immense number of women who are prostitutes or who must be supposed to have an aptitude for prostitution without becoming engaged in it, it becomes impossible not to recognize that this same disposition to perversions of every kind is a general and fundamental human characteristic.

¹ Havelock Ellis has published a number of autobiographical narratives written by people who remained predominantly normal in later life and describing the first sexual impulses of their childhood and the occasions which gave rise to them. These reports naturally suffer from the fact that they omit the prehistoric period of the writers' sexual lives, which is veiled by infantile amnesia and which can only be filled in by psycho-analysis in the case of an individual who has developed a neurosis. In more than one respect, nevertheless, the statements are valuable, and similar narratives were what led me to make the modification in my aetiological hypotheses which I have mentioned in the text.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1511

COMPONENT INSTINCTS   Moreover, the effects of seduction do not help to reveal the early

history of the sexual instinct; they rather confuse our view of it by presenting children prematurely with a sexual object for which the infantile sexual instinct at first shows no need. It must, however, be admitted that infantile sexual life, in spite of the preponderating dominance of erotogenic zones, exhibits components which from the very first involve other people as sexual objects. Such are the instincts of scopophilia, exhibitionism and cruelty, which appear in a sense independently of erotogenic zones; these instincts do not enter into intimate relations with genital life until later, but are already to be observed in childhood as independent impulses, distinct in the first instance from erotogenic sexual activity. Small children are essentially without shame, and at some periods of their earliest years show an unmistakable satisfaction in exposing their bodies, with especial emphasis on the sexual parts. The counterpart of this supposedly perverse inclination, curiosity to see other people’s genitals, probably, does not become manifest until somewhat later in childhood, when the obstacle set up by a sense of shame has already reached a certain degree of development. Under the influence of seduction the scopophilic perversion can attain great importance in the sexual life of a child. But my researches into the early years of normal people, as well as of neurotic patients, force me to the conclusion that scopophilia can also appear in children as a spontaneous manifestation. Small children whose attention has once been drawn - as a rule by masturbation - to their own genitals usually take the further step without help from outside and develop a lively interest in the genitals of their playmates. Since opportunities for satisfying curiosity of this kind usually occur only in the course of satisfying the two kinds of need for excretion, children of this kind turn into voyeurs, eager spectators of the processes of micturition and defaecation. When repression of these inclinations sets in, the desire to see other people’s genitals (whether of their own or the opposite sex) persists as a tormenting compulsion, which in some cases of neurosis later affords the strongest motive force for the formation of symptoms.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1512

The cruel component of the sexual instinct develops in childhood even more independently of the sexual activities that are attached to erotogenic zones. Cruelty in general comes easily to the childish nature, since the obstacle that brings the instinct for mastery to a halt at another person’s pain - namely a capacity for pity - is developed relatively late. The fundamental psychological analysis of this instinct has, as we know, not yet been satisfactorily achieved. It may be assumed that the impulse of cruelty arises from the instinct for mastery and appears at a period of sexual life at which the genitals have not yet taken over their later role. It then dominates a phase of sexual life which we shall later describe as a pregenital organization. Children who distinguish themselves by special cruelty towards animals and playmates usually give rise to a just suspicion of an intense and precocious sexual activity arising from erotogenic zones; and, though all the sexual instincts may display simultaneous precocity, erotogenic sexual activity seems, nevertheless, to be the primary one. The absence of the barrier of pity brings with it a danger that the connection between the cruel and the erotogenic instincts, thus established in childhood, may prove unbreakable in later life. Ever since Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, it has been well known to all educationalists that the painful stimulation of the skin of the buttocks is one of the erotogenic roots of the passive instinct of cruelty (masochism). The conclusion has rightly been drawn by them that corporal punishment, which is usually applied to this part of the body, should not be inflicted upon any children whose libido is liable to be forced into collateral channels by the later demands of cultural education.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1910:] When the account which I have given above of infantile sexuality was first published in 1905, it was founded for the most part on the results of psycho-analytic research upon adults. At that time it was impossible to make full use of direct observation on children: only isolated hints and some valuable pieces of confirmation came from that source. Since then it has become possible to gain direct insight into infantile psycho-sexuality by the analysis of some cases of neurotic illness during the early years of childhood. It is gratifying to be able to report that direct observation has fully confirmed the conclusions arrived at by psycho-analysis - which is incidentally good evidence of the trustworthiness of that method of research. In addition to this, the ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’ (1909b) has taught us much that is new for which we have not been prepared by psycho-analysis: for instance, the fact that sexual symbolism - the representation of what is sexual by non-sexual objects and relations - extends back into the first years of possession of the power of speech.

I was further made aware of a defect in the account I have given in the text, which, in the interests of lucidity, describes the conceptual distinction between the two phases of auto-erotism and object-love as though it were also a separation in time. But the analyses that I have just mentioned, as well as the findings of Bell quoted on p. 1496 n., above, show that children between the ages of three and five are capable of very clear object-choice, accompanied by strong affects.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1513

THE SEXUAL RESEARCHES OF CHILDHOOD

THE INSTINCT FOR KNOWLEDGE   At about the same time as the sexual life of children reaches

its first peak, between the ages of three and five, they also begin to show signs of the activity which may be ascribed to the instinct for knowledge or research. This instinct cannot be counted among the elementary instinctual components, nor can it be classed as exclusively belonging to sexuality. Its activity corresponds on the one hand to a sublimated manner of obtaining mastery, while on the other hand it makes use of the energy of scopophilia. Its relations to sexual life, however, are of particular importance, since we have learnt from psycho-analysis that the instinct for knowledge in children is attracted unexpectedly early and intensively to sexual problems and is in fact possibly first aroused by them.

THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX   It is not by theoretical interests but by practical ones that activities

of research are set going in children. The threat to the bases of a child’s existence offered by the discovery or the suspicion of the arrival of a new baby and the fear that he may, as a result of it, cease to be cared for and loved, make him thoughtful and clear-sighted. And this history of the instinct’s origin is in line with the fact that the first problem with which it deals is not the question of the distinction between the sexes but the riddle of where babies come from. (This, in a distorted form which can easily be rectified, is the same riddle that was propounded by the Theban Sphinx.) On the contrary, the existence of two sexes does not to begin with arouse any difficulties or doubts in children. It is self-evident to a male child that a genital like his own is to be attributed to everyone he knows, and he cannot make its absence tally with his picture of these other people.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1514

CASTRATION COMPLEX AND PENIS ENVY   This conviction is energetically maintained by boys,

is obstinately defended against the contradictions which soon result from observation, and is only abandoned after severe internal struggles (the castration complex). The substitutes for this penis which they feel is missing in women play a great part in determining the form taken by many perversions.¹

The assumption that all human beings have the same (male) form of genital is the first of the many remarkable and momentous sexual theories of children. It is of little use to a child that the science of biology justifies his prejudice and has been obliged to recognize the female clitoris as a true substitute for the penis.

Little girls do not resort to denial of this kind when they see that boys’ genitals are formed differently from their own. They are ready to recognize them immediately and are overcome by envy for the penis - an envy culminating in the wish, which is so important in its consequences, to be boys themselves.

¹ [Footnote added 1920:] We are justified in speaking of a castration complex in women as well. Both male and female children form a theory that women no less than men originally had a penis, but that they have lost it by castration. The conviction which is finally reached by males that women have no penis often leads them to an enduringly low opinion of the other sex.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1515

THEORIES OF BIRTH   Many people can remember clearly what an intense interest they took

during the prepubertal period in the question of where babies come from. The anatomical answers to the question were at the time very various: babies come out of the breast, or are cut out of the body, or the navel opens to let them through.¹ Outside analysis, there are very seldom memories of any similar researches having been carried out in the early years of childhood. These earlier researches fell a victim to repression long since, but all their findings were of a uniform nature: people get babies by eating some particular thing (as they do in fairy tales) and babies are born through the bowel like a discharge of faeces. These infantile theories remind us of conditions that exist in the animal kingdom - and especially of the cloaca in types of animals lower than mammals.

SADISTIC VIEW OF SEXUAL INTERCOURSE   If children at this early age witness sexual

intercourse between adults - for which an opportunity is provided by the conviction of grown-up people that small children cannot understand anything sexual - they inevitably regard the sexual act as a sort of ill-treatment or act of subjugation: they view it, that is, in a sadistic sense. Psycho-analysis also shows us that an impression of this kind in early childhood contributes a great deal towards a predisposition to a subsequent sadistic displacement of the sexual aim. Furthermore, children are much concerned with the problem of what sexual intercourse - or, as they put it, being married - consists in: and they usually seek a solution of the mystery in some common activity concerned with the function of micturition or defaecation.

TYPICAL FAILURE OF INFANTILE SEXUAL RESEARCHES   We can say in general of the sexual

theories of children that they are reflections of their own sexual constitution, and that in spite of their grotesque errors the theories show more understanding of sexual processes than one would have given their creators credit for. Children also perceive the alterations that take place in their mother owing to pregnancy and are able to interpret them correctly. The fable of the stork is often told to an audience that receives it with deep, though mostly silent, mistrust. There are, however, two elements that remain undiscovered by the sexual researches of children: the fertilizing role of semen and the existence of the female sexual orifice - the same elements, incidentally, in which the infantile organization is itself undeveloped. It therefore follows that the efforts of the childish investigator are habitually fruitless, and end in a renunciation which not infrequently leaves behind it a permanent injury to the instinct for knowledge. The sexual researches of these early years of childhood are always carried out in solitude. They constitute a first step towards taking an independent attitude in the world, and imply a high degree of alienation of the child from the people in his environment who formerly enjoyed his complete confidence.

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] In these later years of childhood there is a great wealth of sexual theories, of which only a few examples are given in the text.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1516

THE PHASES OF DEVELOPMENT OF THE SEXUAL ORGANIZATION

The characteristics of infantile sexual life which we have hitherto emphasized are the facts that it is essentially auto-erotic (i.e. that it finds its object in the infant’s own body) and that its individual component instincts are upon the whole disconnected and independent of one another in their search for pleasure. The final outcome of sexual development lies in what is known as the normal sexual life of the adult, in which the pursuit of pleasure comes under the sway of the reproductive function and in which the component instincts, under the primacy of a single erotogenic zone, form a firm organization directed towards a sexual aim attached to some extraneous sexual object.

PREGENITAL ORGANIZATIONS   The study, with the help of psycho-analysis, of the inhibitions

and disturbances of this process of development enables us to recognize abortive beginnings and preliminary stages of a firm organization of the component instincts such as this - preliminary stages which themselves constitute a sexual regime of a sort. These phases of sexual organization are normally passed through smoothly, without giving more than a hint of their existence. It is only in pathological cases that they become active and recognizable to superficial observation.

We shall give the name of ‘pregenital’ to organizations of sexual life in which the genital zones have not yet taken over their predominant part. We have hitherto identified two such organizations, which almost seem as though they were harking back to early animal forms of life.

The first of these is the oral or, as it might be called, cannibalistic pregenital sexual organization. Here sexual activity has not yet been separated from the ingestion of food; nor are opposite currents within the activity differentiated. The object of both activities is the same; the sexual aim consists in the incorporation of the object - the prototype of a process which, in the form of identification, is later to play such an important psychological part. A relic of this constructed phase of organization, which is forced upon our notice by pathology, may be seen in thumb-sucking, in which the sexual activity, detached from the nutritive activity, has substituted for the extraneous object one situated in the subject’s own body.¹

A second pregenital phase is that of the sadistic-anal organization. Here the opposition between two currents, which runs through all sexual life, is already developed: they cannot yet, however, be described as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, but only as ‘active’ and ‘passive’. The activity is put into operation by the instinct for mastery through the agency of the somatic musculature; the organ which, more than any other, represents the passive sexual aim is the erotogenic mucous membrane of the anus. Both of these currents have objects, which, however, are not identical. Alongside these, other component instincts operate in an auto-erotic manner. In this phase, therefore, sexual polarity and an extraneous object are already observable. But organization and subordination to the reproductive function are still absent.²

¹ [Footnote added 1920:] For remnants of this phase in adult neurotics, cf. Abraham (1916). [Added 1924:] In another, later work (1924) the same writer has divided both this oral phase, and also the later sadistic anal one, into two sub-divisions, which are characterized by differing attitudes towards the object.

² [Footnote added 1924:] Abraham, in the paper last quoted (1924), points out that the anus is developed from the embryonic blastopore - a fact which seems like a biological prototype of psychosexual development.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1517

AMBIVALENCE   This form of sexual organization can persist throughout life and can permanently

attract a large portion of sexual activity to itself. The predominance in it of sadism and the cloacal part played by the anal zone give it a quite peculiarly archaic colouring. It is further characterized by the fact that in it the opposing pairs of instincts are developed to an approximately equal extent, a state of affairs described by Bleuler’s happily chosen term ‘ambivalence’.

The assumption of the existence of pregenital organizations of sexual life is based on the analysis of the neuroses, and without a knowledge of them can scarcely be appreciated. Further analytic investigation may be expected to provide us with far more information on the structure and development of the normal sexual function.

In order to complete our picture of infantile sexual life, we must also suppose that the choice of an object, such as we have shown to be characteristic of the pubertal phase of development, has already frequently or habitually been effected during the years of childhood: that is to say, the whole of the sexual currents have become directed towards a single person in relation to whom they seek to achieve their aims. This then is the closest approximation possible in childhood to the final form taken by sexual life after puberty. The only difference lies in the fact that in childhood the combination of the component instincts and their subordination under the primacy of the genitals have been effected only very incompletely or not at all. Thus the establishment of that primacy in the service of reproduction is the last phase through which the organization of sexuality passes.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] At a later date (1923), I myself modified this account by inserting a third phase in the development of childhood, subsequent to the two pregenital organizations. This phase, which already deserves to be described as genital, presents a sexual object and some degree of convergence of the sexual impulses upon that object; but it is differentiated from the final organization of sexual maturity in one essential respect. For it knows only one kind of genital: the male one. For that reason I have named it the ‘phallic’ stage of organization. (Freud, 1923e.) According to Abraham, it has a biological prototype in the embryo’s undifferentiated genital disposition, which is the same for both sexes.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1518

DIPHASIC CHOICE OF OBJECT   It may be regarded as typical of the choice of an object that the

process is diphasic, that is, that it occurs in two waves. The first of these begins between the ages of two and five, and is brought to a halt or to a retreat by the latency period; it is characterized by the infantile nature of the sexual aims. The second wave sets in with puberty and determines the final outcome of sexual life.

Although the diphasic nature of object-choice comes down in essentials to no more than the operation of the latency period, it is of the highest importance in regard to disturbances of that final outcome. The resultants of infantile object-choice are carried over into the later period. They either persist as such or are revived at the actual time of puberty. But as a consequence of the repression which has developed between the two phases they prove unutilizable. Their sexual aims have become mitigated and they now represent what may be described as the ‘affectionate current’ of sexual life. Only psycho-analytic investigation can show that behind this affection, admiration and respect there lie concealed the old sexual longings of the infantile component instincts which have now become unserviceable. The object-choice of the pubertal period is obliged to dispense with the objects of childhood and to start afresh as a ‘sensual current’. Should these two currents fail to converge, the result is often that one of the ideals of sexual life, the focusing of all desires upon a single object, will be unattainable.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1519

THE SOURCES OF INFANTILE SEXUALITY

Our efforts to trace the origins of the sexual instinct have shown us so far that sexual excitation arises (a) as a reproduction of a satisfaction experienced in connection with other organic processes, (b)  through appropriate peripheral stimulation of erotogenic zones and (c) as an expression of certain ‘instincts’ (such as the scopophilic instinct and the instinct of cruelty) of which the origin is not yet completely intelligible. Psycho-analytic investigation, reaching back into childhood from a later time, and contemporary observation of children combine to indicate to us still other regularly active sources of sexual excitation. The direct observation of children has the disadvantage of working upon data which are easily misunderstandable; psycho-analysis is made difficult by the fact that it can only reach its data, as well as its conclusions, after long detours. But by co-operation the two methods can attain a satisfactory degree of certainty in their findings.

We have already discovered in examining the erotogenic zones that these regions of the skin merely show a special intensification of a kind of susceptibility to stimulus which is possessed in a certain degree by the whole cutaneous surface. We shall therefore not be surprised to find that very definite erotogenic effects are to be ascribed to certain kinds of general stimulation of the skin. Among these we may especially mention thermal stimuli, whose importance may help us to understand the therapeutic effects of warm baths.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1520

MECHANICAL EXCITATIONS   At this point we must also mention the production of sexual

excitation by rhythmic mechanical agitation of the body. Stimuli of this kind operate in three different ways: on the sensory apparatus of the vestibular nerves, on the skin, and on the deeper parts (e.g. the muscles and articular structures). The existence of these pleasurable sensations - and it is worth emphasizing the fact that in this connection the concepts of ‘sexual excitation’ and ‘satisfaction’ can to a great extent be used without distinction, a circumstance which we must later endeavour to explain - the existence, then, of these pleasurable sensations, caused by forms of mechanical agitation of the body, is confirmed by the fact that children are so fond of games of passive movement, such as swinging and being thrown up into the air, and insist on such games being incessantly repeated.¹ It is well known that rocking is habitually used to induce sleep in restless children. The shaking produced by driving in carriages and later by railway-travel exercises such a fascinating effect upon older children that every boy, at any rate, has at one time or other in his life wanted to be an engine driver or a coachman. It is a puzzling fact that boys take such an extraordinarily intense interest in things connected with railways, and, at the age at which the production of phantasies is most active (shortly before puberty), use those things as the nucleus of a symbolism that is peculiarly sexual. A compulsive link of this kind between railway-travel and sexuality is clearly derived from the pleasurable character of the sensations of movement. In the event of repression, which turns so many childish preferences into their opposite, these same individuals, when they are adolescents or adults, will react to rocking or swinging with a feeling of nausea, will be terribly exhausted by a railway journey, or will be subject to attacks of anxiety on the journey and will protect themselves against a repetition of the painful experience by a dread of railway-travel.

Here again we must mention the fact, which is not yet understood, that the combination of fright and mechanical agitation produces the severe, hysteriform, traumatic neurosis. It may at least be assumed that these influences, which, when they are of small intensity, become sources of sexual excitation, lead to a profound disorder in the sexual mechanism or chemistry if they operate with exaggerated force.

¹ Some people can remember that in swinging they felt the impact of moving air upon their genitals as an immediate sexual pleasure.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1521

MUSCULAR ACTIVITY   We are all familiar with the fact that children feel a need for a large

amount of active muscular exercise and derive extraordinary pleasure from satisfying it. Whether this pleasure has any connection with sexuality, whether it itself comprises sexual satisfaction or whether it can become the occasion of sexual excitation - all of this is open to critical questioning, which may indeed also be directed against the view maintained in the previous paragraphs that the pleasure derived from sensations of passive movement is of a sexual nature or may produce sexual excitation. It is, however, a fact that a number of people report that they experienced the first signs of excitement in their genitals while they were romping or wrestling with playmates - a situation in which, apart from general muscular exertion, there is a large amount of contact with the skin of the opponent. An inclination to physical struggles with some one particular person, just as in later years an inclination to verbal disputes,¹ is a convincing sign that object-choice has fallen on him. One of the roots of the sadistic instinct would seem to lie in the encouragement of sexual excitation by muscular activity. In many people the infantile connection between romping and sexual excitation is among the determinants of the direction subsequently taken by their sexual instinct.²

AFFECTIVE PROCESSES   The further sources of sexual excitation in children are open to less

doubt. It is easy to establish, whether by contemporary observation or by subsequent research, that all comparatively intense affective processes, including even terrifying ones, trench upon sexuality - a fact which may incidentally help to explain the pathogenic effect of emotions of that kind. In schoolchildren dread of going in for an examination or tension over a difficult piece of work can be important not only in affecting the child’s relations at school but also in bringing about an irruption of sexual manifestations. For quite often in such circumstances a stimulus may be felt which urges the child to touch his genitals, or something may take place akin to a nocturnal emission with all its bewildering consequences. The behaviour of children at school, which confronts a teacher with plenty of puzzles, deserves in general to be brought into relation with their budding sexuality. The sexually exciting effect of many emotions which are in themselves unpleasurable, such as feelings of apprehension, fright or horror, persists in a great number of people throughout their adult life. There is no doubt that this is the explanation of why so many people seek opportunities for sensations of this kind, subject to the proviso that the seriousness of the unpleasurable feeling is damped down by certain qualifying facts, such as its occurring in an imaginary world, in a book or in a play.

If we assume that a similar erotogenic effect attaches even to intensely painful feelings, especially when the pain is toned down or kept at a distance by some accompanying condition, we should here have one of the main roots of the masochistic-sadistic instinct, into whose numerous complexities we are very gradually gaining some insight.³

INTELLECTUAL WORK   Finally, it is an unmistakable fact that concentration of the attention upon

an intellectual task and intellectual strain in general produce a concomitant sexual excitation in many young people as well as adults. This is no doubt the only justifiable basis for what is in other respects the questionable practice of ascribing nervous disorders to intellectual ‘overwork’.

¹ ‘Was sich liebt, das neckt sich.’ [Lovers’ quarrels are proverbial.]

² [Footnote added 1910:] The analysis of cases of neurotic abasia and agoraphobia removes all doubt as to the sexual nature of pleasure in movement. Modern education, as we know, makes great use of games in order to divert young people from sexual activity. It would be more correct to say that in these young people it replaces sexual enjoyment by pleasure in movement - and forces sexual activity back to one of its auto-erotic components.

³ [Footnote added 1924:] I am here referring to what is known as ‘erotogenic’ masochism.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1522

If we now cast our eyes over the tentative suggestions which I have made as to the sources of infantile sexual excitation, though I have not described them completely nor enumerated them fully, the following conclusions emerge with more or less certainty. It seems that the fullest provisions are made for setting in motion the process of sexual excitation - a process the nature of which has, it must be confessed, become highly obscure to us. The setting in motion of this process is first and foremost provided for in a more or less direct fashion by the excitations of the sensory surfaces - the skin and the sense organs - and, most directly of all, by the operation of stimuli on certain areas known as erotogenic zones. The decisive element in these sources of sexual excitation is no doubt the quality of the stimuli, though the factor of intensity, in the case of pain, is not a matter of complete indifference. But apart from these sources there are present in the organism contrivances which bring it about that in the case of a great number of internal processes sexual excitation arises as a concomitant effect, as soon as the intensity of those processes passes beyond certain quantitative limits. What we have called the component instincts of sexuality are either derived directly from these internal sources or are composed of elements both from those sources and from the erotogenic zones. It may well be that nothing of considerable importance can occur in the organism without contributing some component to the excitation of the sexual instinct.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1523

It does not seem to me possible at present to state these general conclusions with any greater clarity or certainty. For this I think two factors are responsible: first, the novelty of the whole method of approach to the subject, and secondly, the fact that the whole nature of sexual excitation is completely unknown to us. Nevertheless I am tempted to make two observations which promise to open out wide future prospects:

VARIETIES OF SEXUAL CONSTITUTION      (a) Just as we saw previously that it was

possible to derive a multiplicity of innate sexual constitutions from variety in the development of the erotogenic zones, so we can now make a similar attempt by including the indirect sources of sexual excitation. It may be assumed that, although contributions are made from these sources in the case of everyone, they are not in all cases of equal strength, and that further help towards the differentiation of sexual constitutions may be found in the varying development of the individual sources of sexual excitation.¹

PATHWAYS OF MUTUAL INFLUENCE       (b) If we now drop the figurative expression that we

have so long adopted in speaking of the ‘sources’ of sexual excitation, we are led to the suspicion that all the connecting pathways that lead from other functions to sexuality must also be traversable in the reverse direction. If, for instance, the common possession of the labial zone by the two functions is the reason why sexual satisfaction arises during the taking of nourishment, then the same factor also enables us to understand why there should be disorders of nutrition if the erotogenic functions of the common zone are disturbed. Or again, if we know that concentration of attention may give rise to sexual excitation, it seems plausible to assume that by making use of the same path, but in a contrary direction, the condition of sexual excitation may influence the possibility of directing the attention. A good portion of the symptomatology of the neuroses, which I have traced to disturbances of the sexual processes, is expressed in disturbances of other, non-sexual, somatic functions; and this circumstance, which has hitherto been unintelligible, becomes less puzzling if it is only the counterpart of the influences which bring about the production of sexual excitation.

The same pathways, however, along which sexual disturbances trench upon the other somatic functions must also perform another important function in normal health. They must serve as paths for the attraction of sexual instinctual forces to aims that are other than sexual, that is to say, for the sublimation of sexuality. But we must end with a confession that very little is as yet known with certainty of these pathways, though they certainly exist and can probably be traversed in both directions.

¹ [Footnote added 1920:] An inevitable consequence of these considerations is that we must regard each individual as possessing an oral erotism, an anal erotism, a urethral erotism, etc., and that the existence of mental complexes corresponding to these implies no judgement of abnormality or neurosis. The differences separating the normal from the abnormal can lie only in the relative strength of the individual components of the sexual instinct and in the use to which they are put in the course of development.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1524

III

THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF PUBERTY

With the arrival of puberty, changes set in which are destined to give infantile sexual life its final, normal shape. The sexual instinct has hitherto been predominantly auto-erotic; it now finds a sexual object. Its activity has hitherto been derived from a number of separate instincts and erotogenic zones, which, independently of one another, have pursued a certain sort of pleasure as their sole sexual aim. Now, however, a new sexual aim appears, and all the component instincts combine to attain it, while the erotogenic zones become subordinated to the primacy of the genital zone.¹ Since the new sexual aim assigns very different functions to the two sexes, their sexual development now diverges greatly. That of males is the more straightforward and the more understandable, while that of females actually enters upon a kind of involution. A normal sexual life is only assured by an exact convergence of the two currents directed towards the sexual object and sexual aim, the affectionate current and the sensual one. (The former, the affectionate current, comprises what remains over of the infantile efflorescence of sexuality.) It is like the completion of a tunnel which has been driven through a hill from both directions.

The new sexual aim in men consists in the discharge of the sexual products. The earlier one, the attainment of pleasure, is by no means alien to it; on the contrary, the highest degree of pleasure is attached to this final act of the sexual process. The sexual instinct is now subordinated to the reproductive function; it becomes, so to say, altruistic. If this transformation is to succeed, the original dispositions and all the other characteristics of the instincts must be taken into account in the process. Just as on any other occasion on which the organism should by rights make new combinations and adjustments leading to complicated mechanisms, here too there are possibilities of pathological disorders if these new arrangements are not carried out. Every pathological disorder of sexual life is rightly to be regarded as an inhibition in development.

¹ [Footnote added 1915:] The schematic picture which I have given in the text aims at emphasizing differences. I have already shown on p. 1517 the extent to which infantile sexuality, owing to its choice of object [added 1924:] and to the development of the phallic phase, approximates to the final sexual organization.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1525

THE PRIMACY OF THE GENITAL ZONES AND FORE-PLEASURE

The starting-point and the final aim of the process which I have described are clearly visible. The intermediate steps are still in many ways obscure to us. We shall have to leave more than one of them as an unsolved riddle.

The most striking of the processes at puberty has been picked upon as constituting its essence: the manifest growth of the external genitalia. (The latency period of childhood is, on the other hand, characterized by a relative cessation of their growth.) In the meantime the development of the internal genitalia has advanced far enough for them to be able to discharge the sexual products or, as the case may be, to bring about the formation of a new living organism. Thus a highly complicated apparatus has been made ready and awaits the moment of being put into operation.

This apparatus is to be set in motion by stimuli, and observation shows us that stimuli can impinge on it from three directions: from the external world by means of the excitation of the erotogenic zones with which we are already familiar, from the organic interior by ways which we have still to explore, and from mental life, which is itself a storehouse for external impressions and a receiving-post for internal excitations. All three kinds of stimuli produce the same effect, namely a condition described as ‘sexual excitement’, which shows itself by two sorts of indication, mental and somatic. The mental indications consist in a peculiar feeling of tension of an extremely compelling character; and among the numerous somatic ones are first and foremost a number of changes in the genitals, which have the obvious sense of being preparations for the sexual act - the erection of the male organ and the lubrication of the vagina.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1526

SEXUAL TENSION   The fact that sexual excitement possesses the character of tension raises a

problem the solution of which is no less difficult than it would be important in helping us to understand the sexual processes. In spite of all the differences of opinion that reign on the subject among psychologists, I must insist that a feeling of tension necessarily involve unpleasure. What seems to me decisive is the fact that a feeling of this kind is accompanied by an impulsion to make a change in the psychological situation, that it operates in an urgent way which is wholly alien to the nature of the feeling of pleasure. If, however, the tension of sexual excitement is counted as an unpleasurable feeling, we are at once brought up against the fact that it is also undoubtedly felt as pleasurable. In every case in which tension is produced by sexual processes it is accompanied by pleasure; even in the preparatory changes in the genitals a feeling of satisfaction of some kind is plainly to be observed. How, then, are this unpleasurable tension and this feeling of pleasure to be reconciled?

Everything relating to the problem of pleasure and unpleasure touches upon one of the sorest spots of present-day psychology. It will be my aim to learn as much as possible from the circumstances of the instance with which we are at present dealing, but I shall avoid any approach to the problem as a whole.¹

Let us begin by casting a glance at the way in which the erotogenic zones fit themselves into the new arrangement. They have to play an important part in introducing sexual excitation. The eye is perhaps the zone most remote from the sexual object, but it is the one which, in the situation of wooing an object, is liable to be the most frequently stimulated by the particular quality of excitation whose cause, when it occurs in a sexual object, we describe as beauty. (For the same reason the merits of a sexual object are described as ‘attractions’.) This stimulation is on the one hand already accompanied by pleasure, while on the other hand it leads to an increase of sexual excitement or produces it if it is not yet present. If the excitation now spreads to another erotogenic zone - to the hand, for instance, through tactile sensations - the effect is the same: a feeling of pleasure on the one side, which is quickly intensified by pleasure arising from the preparatory changes, and on the other side an increase of sexual tension, which soon passes over into the most obvious unpleasure if it cannot be met by a further accession of pleasure. Another instance will perhaps make this even clearer. If an erotogenic zone in a person who is not sexually excited (e.g. the skin of a woman’s breast) is stimulated by touch, the contact produces a pleasurable feeling; but it is at the same time better calculated than anything to arouse a sexual excitation that demands an increase of pleasure. The problem is how it can come about that an experience of pleasure can give rise to a need for greater pleasure.

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] I have made an attempt at solving this problem in the first part of my paper on ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’ (1924c).

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1527

THE MECHANISM OF FORE-PLEASURE   The part played in this by the erotogenic zones,

however, is clear. What is true of one of them is true of all. They are all used to provide a certain amount of pleasure by being stimulated in the way appropriate to them. This pleasure then leads to an increase in tension which in its turn is responsible for producing the necessary motor energy for the conclusion of the sexual act. The penultimate stage of that act is once again the appropriate stimulation of an erotogenic zone ( the genital zone itself, in the glans penis) by the appropriate object (the mucous membrane of the vagina); and from the pleasure yielded by this excitation the motor energy is obtained, this time by a reflex path, which brings about the discharge of the sexual substances. This last pleasure is the highest in intensity, and its mechanism differs from that of the earlier pleasure. It is brought about entirely by discharge: it is wholly a pleasure of satisfaction and with it the tension of the libido is for the time being extinguished.

This distinction between the one kind of pleasure due to the excitation of erotogenic zones and the other kind due to the discharge of the sexual substances deserves, I think, to be made more concrete by a difference in nomenclature. The former may be suitably described as ‘fore-pleasure’ in contrast to the ‘end-pleasure’ or pleasure of satisfaction derived from the sexual act. Fore-pleasure is thus the same pleasure that has already been produced, although on a smaller scale, by the infantile sexual instinct; end-pleasure is something new and is thus probably conditioned by circumstances that do not arise till puberty. The formula for the new function of the erotogenic zones runs therefore: they are used to make possible, through the medium of the fore-pleasure which can be derived from them (as it was during infantile life), the production of the greater pleasure of satisfaction.

I was able recently to throw light upon another instance, in a quite different department of mental life, of a slight feeling of pleasure similarly making possible the attainment of a greater resultant pleasure, and thus operating as an ‘incentive bonus’. In the same connection I was also able to go more deeply into the nature of pleasure.¹

¹ See my volume on Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious which appeared in 1905. The ‘fore-pleasure’ attained by the technique of joking is used in order to liberate a greater pleasure derived from the removal of internal inhibitions.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1528

DANGERS OF FORE-PLEASURE   The connection between fore-pleasure and infantile sexual life

is, however, made clearer by the pathogenic part which it can come to play. The attainment of the normal sexual aim can clearly be endangered by the mechanism in which fore-pleasure is involved. This danger arises if at any point in the preparatory sexual processes the fore-pleasure turns out to be too great and the element of tension too small. The motive for proceeding further with the sexual process then disappears, the whole path is cut short, and the preparatory act in question takes the place of the normal sexual aim. Experience has shown that the precondition for this damaging event is that the erotogenic zone concerned or the corresponding component instinct shall already during childhood have contributed an unusual amount of pleasure. If further factors then come into play, tending to bring about a fixation, a compulsion may easily arise in later life which resists the incorporation of this particular fore-pleasure into a new context. Such is in fact the mechanism of many perversions, which consist in a lingering over the preparatory acts of the sexual process.

This failure of the function of the sexual mechanism owing to fore-pleasure is best avoided if the primacy of the genitals too is adumbrated in childhood; and indeed things seem actually arranged to bring this about in the second half of childhood (from the age of eight to puberty). During these years the genital zones already behave in much the same way as in maturity; they become the seat of sensations of excitation and of preparatory changes whenever any pleasure is felt from the satisfaction of other erotogenic zones, though this result is still without a purpose - that is to say, contributes nothing to a continuation of the sexual process. Already in childhood, therefore, alongside of the pleasure of satisfaction there is a certain amount of sexual tension, although it is less constant and less in quantity. We can now understand why, in discussing the sources of sexuality, we were equally justified in saying of a given process that it was sexually satisfying or sexually exciting. It will be noticed that in the course of our enquiry we began by exaggerating the distinction between infantile and mature sexual life, and that we are now setting this right. Not only the deviations from normal sexual life but its normal form as well are determined by the infantile manifestations of sexuality.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1529

THE PROBLEM OF SEXUAL EXCITATION

We remain in complete ignorance both of the origin and of the nature of the sexual tension which arises simultaneously with the pleasure when erotogenic zones are satisfied.¹ The most obvious explanation, that this tension arises in some way out of the pleasure itself, is not only extremely improbable in itself but becomes untenable when we consider that in connection with the greatest pleasure of all, that which accompanies the discharge of the sexual products, no tension is produced, but on the contrary all tension is removed. Thus pleasure and sexual tension can only be connected in an indirect manner.

PART PLAYED BY THE SEXUAL SUBSTANCES   Apart from the fact that normally it is only the

discharge of the sexual substances that brings sexual excitation to an end, there are other points of contact between sexual tension and the sexual products. In the case of a man living a continent life, the sexual apparatus, at varying intervals, which, however, are not ungoverned by rules, discharges the sexual substances during the night, to the accompaniment of a pleasurable feeling and in the course of a dream which hallucinates a sexual act. And in regard to this process (nocturnal emission) it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the sexual tension, which succeeds in making use of the short cut of hallucination as a substitute for the act itself, is a function of the accumulation of semen in the vesicles containing the sexual products. Our experience in connection with the exhaustibility of the sexual mechanism argues in the same sense. If the store of semen is exhausted, not only is it impossible to carry out the sexual act, but the susceptibility of the erotogenic zones to stimulus ceases, and their appropriate excitation no longer gives rise to any pleasure. We thus learn incidentally that a certain degree of sexual tension is required even for the excitability of the erotogenic zones.

This would seem to lead to what is, if I am not mistaken, the fairly wide-spread hypothesis that the accumulation of the sexual substances creates and maintains sexual tension; the pressure of these products upon the walls of the vesicles containing them might be supposed to act as a stimulus upon a spinal centre, the condition of which would be perceived by higher centres and would then give rise in consciousness to the familiar sensation of tension. If the excitation of the erotogenic zones increases sexual tension, this could only come about on the supposition that the zones in question are in an anatomical connection that has already been laid down with these centres, that they increase the tonus of the excitation in them, and, if the sexual tension is sufficient, set the sexual act in motion or, if it is insufficient, stimulate the production of the sexual substances.

The weakness of this theory, which we find accepted, for instance, in Krafft-Ebing’s account of the sexual processes, lies in the fact that, having been designed to account for the sexual activity of adult males, it takes too little account of three sets of conditions which it should also be able to explain. These are the conditions in children, in females and in castrated males. In none of these three cases can there be any question of an accumulation of sexual products in the same sense as in males, and this makes a smooth application of the theory difficult. Nevertheless it may at once be admitted that it is possible to find means by which the theory may be made to cover these cases as well. In any case we are warned not to lay more weight on the factor of the accumulation of the sexual products than it is able to bear.

¹ It is a highly instructive fact that the German language in its use of the word ‘Lust’ takes into account the part played by the preparatory sexual excitations which, as has been explained above, simultaneously produce an element of satisfaction and a contribution to sexual tension. ‘Lust’ has two meanings, and is used to describe the sensation of sexual tension (‘Ich habe lust’ = ‘I should like to’, ‘I feel an impulse to’) as well as the feeling of satisfaction.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1530

IMPORTANCE OF THE INTERNAL SEXUAL ORGANS   Observations on castrated males seem to

show that sexual excitation can occur to a considerable degree independently of the production of the sexual substances. The operation of castration occasionally fails to bring about a limitation of libido, although such limitation, which provides the motive for the operation, is the usual outcome. Moreover, it has long been known that diseases which abolish the production of the masculine sex-cells leave the patient, though he is now sterile, with his libido and potency undamaged. It is therefore by no means as astonishing as Rieger represents it to be that the loss of the masculine sex-glands in an adult may have no further effect upon his mental behaviour. It is true that if castration is performed at a tender age, before puberty, it approximates in its effect to the aim of obliterating the sexual characters; but here too it is possible that what is in question is, besides the actual loss of the sex-glands, an inhibition (connected with that loss) in the development of other factors.

CHEMICAL THEORY   Experiments in the removal of the sex-glands (testes and ovaries) of

animals, and in the grafting into vertebrates of sex-glands from other individuals of the opposite sex,¹ have at last thrown a partial light on the origin of sexual excitation, and have at the same time still further reduced the significance of a possible accumulation of cellular sexual products. It has become experimentally possible (E. Steinach) to transform a male into a female, and conversely a female into a male. In this process the psychosexual behaviour of the animal alters in accordance with the somatic sexual characters and simultaneously with them. It seems, however, that this sex-determining influence is not an attribute of that part of the sex-glands which gives rise to the specific sex-cells (spermatozoa and ovum) but of their interstitial tissue, upon which special emphasis is laid by being described in the literature as the ‘puberty-gland’. It is quite possible that further investigation will show that this puberty-gland has normally a hermaphrodite disposition. If this were so, the theory of the bisexuality of the higher animals would be given anatomical foundation. It is already probable that the puberty-gland is not the only organ concerned with the production of sexual excitation and sexual characters. In any case, what we already know of the part played by the thyroid gland in sexuality fits in with this new biological discovery. It seems probable, then, that special chemical substances are produced in the interstitial portion of the sex-glands; these are then taken up in the blood stream and cause particular parts of the central nervous system to be charged with sexual tension. (We are already familiar with the fact that other toxic substances, introduced into the body from outside, can bring about a similar transformation of a toxic condition into a stimulus acting on a particular organ.) The question of how sexual excitation arises from the stimulation of erotogenic zones, when the central apparatus has been previously charged, and the question of what interplay arises in the course of these sexual processes between the effects of purely toxic stimuli and of physiological ones - none of this can be treated, even hypothetically, in the present state of our knowledge. It must suffice us to hold firmly to what is essential in this view of the sexual processes: the assumption that substances of a peculiar kind arise from the sexual metabolism. For this apparently arbitrary supposition is supported by a fact which has received little attention but deserves the closest consideration. The neuroses, which can be derived only from disturbances of sexual life, show the greatest clinical similarity to the phenomena of intoxication and abstinence that arise from the habitual use of toxic, pleasure-producing substances (alkaloids).

¹ Cf. Lipschütz’s work (1919), referred to on p. 1474 n.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1531

THE LIBIDO THEORY

The conceptual scaffolding which we have set up to help us in dealing with the psychical manifestations of sexual life tallies well with these hypotheses as to the chemical basis of sexual excitation. We have defined the concept of libido as a quantitatively variable force which could serve as a measure of processes and transformations occurring in the field of sexual excitation. We distinguish this libido in respect of its special origin from the energy which must be supposed to underlie mental processes in general, and we thus also attribute a qualitative character to it. In thus distinguishing between libidinal and other forms of psychical energy we are giving expression to the presumption that the sexual processes occurring in the organism are distinguished from the nutritive processes by a special chemistry. The analysis of the perversions and psychoneuroses has shown us that this sexual excitation is derived not from the so-called sexual parts alone, but from all the bodily organs. We thus reach the idea of a quantity of libido, to the mental representation of which we give the name of ‘ego-libido’, and whose production, increase or diminution, distribution and displacement should afford us possibilities for explaining the psychosexual phenomena observed.

This ego-libido is, however, only conveniently accessible to analytic study when it has been put to the use of cathecting sexual objects, that is, when it has become object-libido. We can then perceive it concentrating upon objects, becoming fixed upon them or abandoning them, moving from one object to another and, from these situations, directing the subject’s sexual activity, which leads to the satisfaction, that is, to the partial and temporary extinction, of the libido. The psycho-analysis of what are termed transference neuroses (hysteria and obsessional neurosis) affords us a clear insight at this point.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1532

We can follow the object-libido through still further vicissitudes. When it is withdrawn from objects, it is held in suspense in peculiar conditions of tension and is finally drawn back into the ego, so that it becomes ego-libido once again. In contrast to object-libido, we also describe ego-libido as ‘narcissistic’ libido. From the vantage-point of psycho-analysis we can look across a frontier, which we may not pass, at the activities of narcissistic libido, and may form some idea of the relation between it and object-libido.¹ Narcissistic or ego-libido seems to be the great reservoir from which the object-cathexes are sent out and into which they are withdrawn once more; the narcissistic libidinal cathexis of the ego is the original state of things, realized in earliest childhood, and is merely covered by the later extrusions of libido, but in essentials persists behind them.

It should be the task of a libido theory of neurotic and psychotic disorders to express all the observed phenomena and inferred processes in terms of the economics of the libido. It is easy to guess that the vicissitudes of the ego-libido will have the major part to play in this connection, especially when it is a question of explaining the deeper psychotic disturbances. We are then faced by the difficulty that our method of research, psycho-analysis, for the moment affords us assured information only on the transformations that take place in the object-libido,² but is unable to make any immediate distinction between the ego-libido and the other forms of energy operating in the ego.³

For the present, therefore, no further development of the libido theory is possible, except upon speculative lines. It would, however, be sacrificing all that we have gained hitherto from psycho-analytic observation, if we were to follow the example of C. G. Jung and water down the meaning of the concept of libido itself by equating it with psychical instinctual force in general. The distinguishing of the sexual instinctual impulses from the rest and the consequent restriction of the concept of libido to the former receives strong support from the assumption which I have already discussed that there is a special chemistry of the sexual function.

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] Since neuroses other than the transference neuroses have become to a greater extent accessible to psycho-analysis, this limitation has lost its earlier validity.

² [Footnote added 1924:] See the previous footnote.

³ [Footnote added 1915:] Cf. my paper on narcissism (1914c). [Added 1920:] The term ‘narcissism’ was not introduced, as I erroneously stated in that paper, by Näcke, but by Havelock Ellis.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1533

THE DIFFERENTIATION BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN

As we all know, it is not until puberty that the sharp distinction is established between the masculine and feminine characters. From that time on, this contrast has a more decisive influence than any other upon the shaping of human life. It is true that the masculine and feminine dispositions are already easily recognizable in childhood. The development of the inhibitions of sexuality (shame, disgust, pity, etc.) takes place in little girls earlier and in the face of less resistance than in boys; the tendency to sexual repression seems in general to be greater; and, where the component instincts of sexuality appear, they prefer the passive form. The auto-erotic activity of the erotogenic zones is, however, the same in both sexes, and owing to this uniformity there is no possibility of a distinction between the two sexes such as arises after puberty. So far as the auto-erotic and masturbatory manifestations of sexuality are concerned, we might lay it down that the sexuality of little girls is of a wholly masculine character. Indeed, if we were able to give a more definite connotation to the concepts of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, it would even be possible to maintain that libido is invariably and necessarily of a masculine nature, whether it occurs in men or in women and irrespective of whether its object is a man or a woman.¹

Since I have become acquainted with the notion of bisexuality I have regarded it as the decisive factor, and without taking bisexuality into account I think it would scarcely be possible to arrive at an understanding of the sexual manifestations that are actually to be observed in men and women.

¹ [Footnote added 1915:] It is essential to understand clearly that the concepts of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, whose meaning seems so unambiguous to ordinary people, are among the most confused that occur in science. It is possible to distinguish at least three uses. ‘Masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are used sometimes in the sense of activity and passivity, sometimes in a biological, and sometimes, again, in a sociological sense. The first of these three meanings is the essential one and the most serviceable in psycho-analysis. When, for instance, libido was described in the text above as being ‘masculine’, the word was being used in this sense, for an instinct is always active even when it has a passive aim in view. The second, or biological, meaning of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ is the one whose applicability can be determined most easily. Here ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are characterized by the presence of spermatozoa or ova respectively and by the functions proceeding from them. Activity and its concomitant phenomena (more powerful muscular development, aggressiveness, greater intensity of libido) are as a rule linked with biological masculinity; but they are not necessarily so, for there are animal species in which these qualities are on the contrary assigned to the female. The third, or sociological, meaning receives its connotation from the observation of actually existing masculine and feminine individuals. Such observation shows that in human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or a biological sense. Every individual on the contrary displays a mixture of the character-traits belonging to his own and to the opposite sex; and he shows a combination of activity and passivity whether or not these last character-traits tally with his biological ones.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1534

LEADING ZONES IN MEN AND WOMEN   Apart from this I have only the following to add. The

leading erotogenic zone in female children is located at the clitoris, and is thus homologous to the masculine genital zone of the glans penis. All my experience concerning masturbation in little girls has related to the clitoris and not to the regions of the external genitalia that are important in later sexual functioning. I am even doubtful whether a female child can be led by the influence of seduction to anything other than clitoridal masturbation. If such a thing occurs, it is quite exceptional. The spontaneous discharges of sexual excitement which occur so often precisely in little girls are expressed in spasms of the clitoris. Frequent erections of that organ make it possible for girls to form a correct judgement, even without any instruction, of the sexual manifestations of the other sex: they merely transfer on to boys the sensations derived from their own sexual processes.

If we are to understand how a little girl turns into a woman, we must follow the further vicissitudes of this excitability of the clitoris. Puberty, which brings about so great an accession of libido in boys, is marked in girls by a fresh wave of repression, in which it is precisely clitoridal sexuality that is affected. What is thus overtaken by repression is a piece of masculine sexuality. The intensification of the brake upon sexuality brought about by pubertal repression in women serves as a stimulus to the libido in men and causes an increase of its activity. Along with this heightening of libido there is also an increase of sexual overvaluation which only emerges in full force in relation to a woman who holds herself back and who denies her sexuality. When at last the sexual act is permitted and the clitoris itself becomes excited, it still retains a function: the task, namely, of transmitting the excitation to the adjacent female sexual parts, just as - to use a simile - pine shavings can be kindled in order to set a log of harder wood on fire. Before this transference can be effected, a certain interval of time must often elapse, during which the young woman is anaesthetic. This anaesthesia may become permanent if the clitoridal zone refuses to abandon its excitability, an event for which the way is prepared precisely by an extensive activity of that zone in childhood. Anaesthesia in women, as is well known, is often only apparent and local. They are anaesthetic at the vaginal orifice but are by no means incapable of excitement originating in the clitoris or even in other zones. Alongside these erotogenic determinants of anaesthesia must also be set the psychical determinants, which equally, arise from repression.

When erotogenic susceptibility to stimulation has been successfully transferred by a woman from the clitoris to the vaginal orifice, it implies that she has adopted a new leading zone for the purposes of her later sexual activity. A man, on the other hand, retains his leading zone unchanged from childhood. The fact that women change their leading erotogenic zone in this way, together with the wave of repression at puberty, which, as it were, puts aside their childish masculinity, are the chief determinants of the greater proneness of woman to neurosis and especially to hysteria. These determinants, therefore, are intimately related to the essence of femininity.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1535

THE FINDING OF AN OBJECT

The processes at puberty thus establish the primacy of the genital zones; and, in a man, the penis, which has now become capable of erection, presses forward insistently towards the new sexual aim - penetration into a cavity in the body which excites his genital zone. Simultaneously on the psychical side the process of finding an object, for which preparations have been made from earliest childhood, is completed. At a time at which the first beginnings of sexual satisfaction are still linked with the taking of nourishment, the sexual instinct has a sexual object outside the infant’s own body in the shape of his mother’s breast. It is only later that the instinct loses that object, just at the time, perhaps, when the child is able to form a total idea of the person to whom the organ that is giving him satisfaction belongs. As a rule the sexual instinct then becomes auto-erotic, and not until the period of latency has been passed through is the original relation restored. There are thus good reasons why a child sucking at his mother’s breast has become the prototype of every relation of love. The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1915:] Psycho-analysis informs us that there are two methods of finding an object. The first, described in the text, is the ‘anaclitic’ or ‘attachment’ one, based on attachment to early infantile prototypes. The second is the narcissistic one, which seeks for the subject’s own ego and finds it again in other people. This latter method is of particularly great importance in cases where the outcome is a pathological one, but it is not relevant to the present context.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1536

THE SEXUAL OBJECT DURING EARLY INFANCY   But even after sexual activity has become

detached from the taking of nourishment, an important part of this first and most significant of all sexual relations is left over, which helps to prepare for the choice of an object and thus to restore the happiness that has been lost. All through the period of latency children learn to feel for other people who help them in their helplessness and satisfy their needs a love which is on the model of, and a continuation of, their relation as sucklings to their nursing mother. There may perhaps be an inclination to dispute the possibility of identifying a child’s affection and esteem for those who look after him with sexual love. I think, however, that a closer psychological examination may make it possible to establish this identity beyond any doubt. A child’s intercourse with anyone responsible for his care affords him an unending source of sexual excitation and satisfaction from his erotogenic zones. This is especially so since the person in charge of him, who, after all, is as a rule his mother, herself regards him with feelings that are derived from her own sexual life: she strokes him, kisses him, rocks him and quite clearly treats him as a substitute for a complete sexual object.¹ A mother would probably be horrified if she were made aware that all her marks of affection were rousing her child’s sexual instinct and preparing for its later intensity. She regards what she does as asexual, ‘pure’ love, since, after all, she carefully avoids applying more excitations to the child’s genitals than are unavoidable in nursery care. As we know, however, the sexual instinct is not aroused only by direct excitation of the genital zone. What we call affection will unfailingly show its effects one day on the genital zones as well. Moreover, if the mother understood more of the high importance of the part played by instincts in mental life as a whole - in all its ethical and psychical achievements - she would spare herself any self-reproaches even after her enlightenment. She is only fulfilling her task in teaching the child to love. After all, he is meant to grow up into a strong and capable person with vigorous sexual needs and to accomplish during his life all the things that human beings are urged to do by their instincts. It is true that an excess of parental affection does harm by causing precocious sexual maturity and also because, by spoiling the child, it makes him incapable in later life of temporarily doing without love or of being content with a smaller amount of it. One of the clearest indications that a child will later become neurotic is to be seen in an insatiable demand for his parents’ affection. And on the other hand neuropathic parents, who are inclined as a rule to display excessive affection, are precisely those who are most likely by their caresses to arouse the child’s disposition to neurotic illness. Incidentally, this example shows that there are ways more direct than inheritance by which neurotic parents can hand their disorder on to their children.

¹ Anyone who considers this ‘sacrilegious’ may be recommended to read Havelock Ellis’s views on the relation between mother and child, which agree almost completely with mine.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1537

INFANTILE ANXIETY   Children themselves behave from an early age as though their dependence

on the people looking after them were in the nature of sexual love. Anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact that they are feeling the loss of the person they love. It is for this reason that they are frightened of every stranger. They are afraid in the dark because in the dark they cannot see the person they love; and their fear is soothed if they can take hold of that person’s hand in the dark. To attribute to bogeys and blood-curdling stories told by nurses the responsibility for making children timid is to over-estimate their efficacy. The truth is merely that children who are inclined to be timid are affected by stories which would make no impression what ever upon others, and it is only children with a sexual instinct that is excessive or has developed prematurely or has become vociferous owing to too much petting who are inclined to be timid. In this respect a child, by turning his libido into anxiety when he cannot satisfy it, behaves like an adult. On the other hand an adult who has become neurotic owing to his libido being unsatisfied behaves in his anxiety like a child: he begins to be frightened when he is alone, that is to say when he is away from someone of whose love he had felt secure, and he seeks to assuage this fear by the most childish measures.¹

¹ For this explanation of the origin of infantile anxiety I have to thank a three-year-old boy whom I once heard calling out of a dark room: ‘Auntie, speak to me! I’m frightened because it’s so dark.’ His aunt answered him: ‘What good would that do? You can’t see me.’ ‘That doesn’t matter,’ replied the child, ‘if anyone speaks, it gets light.’ Thus what he was afraid of was not the dark, but the absence of someone he loved; and he could feel sure of being soothed as soon as he had evidence of that person’s presence. [Added 1920:] One of the most important results of psycho-analytic research is this discovery that neurotic anxiety arises out of libido, that it is the product of a transformation of it, and that it is thus related to it in the same kind of way as vinegar is to wine. A further discussion of this problem will be found in my Introductory Lectures (1916-17), Lecture XXV, though even there it must be confessed, the question is not finally cleared up.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1538

THE BARRIER AGAINST INCEST   We see, therefore, that the parents’ affection for their child may

awaken his sexual instinct prematurely (i.e. before the somatic conditions of puberty are present) to such a degree that the mental excitation breaks through in an unmistakable fashion to the genital system. If, on the other hand, they are fortunate enough to avoid this, then their affection can perform its task of directing the child in his choice of a sexual object when he reaches maturity. No doubt the simplest course for the child would be to choose as his sexual objects the same persons whom, since his childhood, he has loved with what may be described as damped-down libido.¹ But, by the postponing of sexual maturation, time has been gained in which the child can erect, among other restraints on sexuality, the barrier against incest, and can thus take up into himself the moral precepts which expressly exclude from his object-choice, as being blood relations, the persons whom he has loved in his childhood. Respect for this barrier is essentially a cultural demand made by society. Society must defend itself against the danger that the interests which it needs for the establishment of higher social units may be swallowed up by the family; and for this reason, in the case of every individual, but in particular of adolescent boys, it seeks by all possible means to loosen their connection with their family - a connection which, in their childhood, is the only important one.²

¹ [Footnote added 1915:] Cf. what has been said on p. 1518 about children’s object-choice and the ‘affectionate current’.

² [Footnote added 1915:] The barrier against incest is probably among the historical acquisitions of mankind, and, like other moral taboos, has no doubt already become established in many persons by organic inheritance. (Cf. my Totem and Taboo, 1912-13.) Psycho-analytic investigation shows, however, how intensely the individual struggles with the temptation to incest during his period of growth and how frequently the barrier is transgressed in phantasies and even in reality.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1539

It is in the world of ideas, however, that the choice of an object is accomplished at first; and the sexual life of maturing youth is almost entirely restricted to indulging in phantasies, that is, in ideas that are not destined to be carried into effect.¹ In these phantasies the infantile tendencies invariably emerge once more, but this time with intensified pressure from somatic sources. Among these tendencies the first place is taken with uniform frequency by the child’s sexual impulses towards his parents, which are as a rule already differentiated owing to the attraction of the opposite sex - the son being drawn towards his mother and the daughter towards her father.² At the same time as these plainly incestuous phantasies are overcome and repudiated, one of the most significant, but also one of the most painful, psychical achievements of the pubertal period is completed: detachment from parental authority, a process that alone makes possible the opposition, which is so important for the progress of civilization, between the new generation and the old. At every stage in the course of development through which all human beings ought by rights to pass, a certain number are held back; so there are some who have never got over their parents’ authority and have withdrawn their affection from them either very incompletely or not at all. They are mostly girls, who, to the delight of their parents, have persisted in all their childish love far beyond puberty. It is most instructive to find that it is precisely these girls who in their later marriage lack the capacity to give their husbands what is due to them; they make cold wives and remain sexually anaesthetic. We learn from this that sexual love and what appears to be non-sexual love for parents are fed from the same sources; the latter, that is to say, merely corresponds to an infantile fixation of the libido.

The closer one comes to the deeper disturbances of psychosexual development, the more unmistakably the importance of incestuous object-choice emerges. In psychoneurotics a large portion or the whole of their psychosexual activity in finding an object remains in the unconscious as a result of their repudiation of sexuality. Girls with an exaggerated need for affection and an equally exaggerated horror of the real demands made by sexual life have an irresistible temptation on the one hand to realize the ideal of asexual love in their lives and on the other hand to conceal their libido behind an affection which they can express without self-reproaches, by holding fast throughout their lives to their infantile fondness, revived at puberty, for their parents or brothers and sisters. Psycho-analysis has no difficulty in showing persons of this kind that they are in love, in the everyday sense of the word, with these blood-relations of theirs; for, with the help of their symptoms and other manifestations of their illness, it traces their unconscious thoughts and translates them into conscious ones. In cases in which someone who has previously been healthy falls ill after an unhappy experience in love it is also possible to show with certainty that the mechanism of his illness consists in a turning-back of his libido on to those whom he preferred in his infancy.

¹ [Footnote added 1920:] The phantasies of the pubertal period have as their starting-point the infantile sexual researches that were abandoned in childhood. No doubt, too, they are also present before the end of the latency period. They may persist wholly, or to a great extent, unconsciously and for that reason it is often impossible to date them accurately. They are of great importance in the origin of many symptoms, since they precisely constitute preliminary stages of these symptoms and thus lay down the forms in which the repressed libidinal components find satisfaction. In the same way, they are the prototypes of the nocturnal phantasies which become conscious as dreams. Dreams are often nothing more than revivals of pubertal phantasies of this kind under the influence of, and in relation to, some stimulus left over from the waking life of the previous day (the ‘day’s residues’). Some among the sexual phantasies of the pubertal period are especially prominent, and are distinguished by their very general occurrence and by being to a great extent independent of individual experience. Such are the adolescent’s phantasies of overhearing his parents in sexual intercourse, of having been seduced at an early age by someone he loves and of having been threatened with castration; such, too, are his phantasies of being in the womb, and even of experiences there, and the so-called ‘Family Romance’, in which he reacts to the difference between his attitude towards his parents now and in his childhood. The close relations existing between these phantasies and myths has been demonstrated in the case of the last instance by Otto Rank (1909).

It has justly been said that the Oedipus complex is the nuclear complex of the neuroses, and constitutes the essential part of their content. It represents the peak of infantile sexuality, which, through its after-effects, exercises a decisive influence on the sexuality of adults. Every new arrival on this planet is faced by the task of mastering the Oedipus complex; anyone who fails to do so falls a victim to neurosis. With the progress of psycho-analytic studies the importance of the Oedipus complex has became more and more clearly evident; its recognition has become the shibboleth that distinguishes the adherents of psycho-analysis from its opponents.

[Added 1924:] In another work (1924), Rank has traced attachment to the mother back to the prehistoric intra-uterine period and has thus indicated the biological foundation of the Oedipus complex. He differs from what has been said above, by deriving the barrier against incest from the traumatic effect of anxiety at birth.

² Cf. my remarks in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), on the inevitability of Fate in the fable of Oedipus.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1540

AFTER-EFFECTS OF INFANTILE OBJECT-CHOICE   Even a person who has been fortunate enough

to avoid an incestuous fixation of his libido does not entirely escape its influence. It often happens that a young man falls in love seriously for the first time with a mature woman, or a girl with an elderly man in a position of authority; this is clearly an echo of the phase of development that we have been discussing, since these figures are able to re-animate pictures of their mother or father.¹ There can be no doubt that every object-choice whatever is based, though less closely, on these prototypes. A man, especially, looks for someone who can represent his picture of his mother, as it has dominated his mind from his earliest childhood; and accordingly, if his mother is still alive, she may well resent this new version of herself and meet her with hostility. In view of the importance of a child’s relations to his parents in determining his later choice of a sexual object, it can easily be understood that any disturbance of those relations will produce the gravest effects upon his adult sexual life. Jealousy in a lover is never without an infantile root or at least an infantile reinforcement. If there are quarrels between the parents or if their marriage is unhappy, the ground will be prepared in their children for the severest predisposition to a disturbance of sexual development or to a neurotic illness.

A child’s affection for his parents is no doubt the most important infantile trace which, after being revived at puberty, points the way to his choice of an object; but it is not the only one. Other starting-points with the same early origin enable a man to develop more than one sexual line, based no less upon his childhood, and to lay down very various conditions for his object-choice.²

¹ [Footnote added 1920:] Cf. my paper ‘A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men’ (1910h).

² [Footnote added 1915:] The innumerable peculiarities of the erotic life of human beings as well as the compulsive character of the process of falling in love itself are quite unintelligible except by reference back to childhood and as being residual effects of childhood.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1541

PREVENTION OF INVERSION   One of the tasks implicit in object-choice is that it should find its

way to the opposite sex. This, as we know, is not accomplished without a certain amount of fumbling. Often enough the first impulses after puberty go astray, though without any permanent harm resulting. Dessoir has justly remarked upon the regularity with which adolescent boys and girls form sentimental friendships with others of their own sex. No doubt the strongest force working against a permanent inversion of the sexual object is the attraction which the opposing sexual characters exercise upon one another. Nothing can be said within the framework of the present discussion to throw light upon it.¹ This factor is not in itself, however, sufficient to exclude inversion; there are to doubt a variety of other contributory factors. Chief among these is its authoritative prohibition by society. Where inversion is not regarded as a crime it will be found that it answers fully to the sexual inclinations of no small number of people. It may be presumed, in the next place, that in the case of men a childhood recollection of the affection shown them by their mother and others of the female sex who looked after them when they were children contributes powerfully to directing their choice towards women; on the other hand their early experience of being deterred by their father from sexual activity and their competitive relation with him deflect them from their own sex. Both of these two factors apply equally to girls, whose sexual activity is particularly subject to the watchful guardianship of their mother. They thus acquire a hostile relation to their own sex which influences their object-choice decisively in what is regarded as the normal direction. The education of boys by male persons ( by slaves, in antiquity) seems to encourage homosexuality. The frequency of inversion among the present-day aristocracy is made somewhat more intelligible by their employment of menservants, as well as by the fact that their mothers give less personal care to their children. In the case of some hysterics it is found that the early loss of one of their parents, whether by death, divorce or separation, with the result that the remaining parent absorbs the whole of the child’s love, determines the sex of the person who is later to be chosen as a sexual object, and may thus open the way to permanent inversion.

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] This is the place at which to draw attention to Ferenczi’s Versuch einer Genitaltheorie (1924), a work which, though somewhat fanciful, is nevertheless of the greatest interest, and in which the sexual life of the higher animals is traced back to their biological evolution.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1542

SUMMARY

The time has arrived for me to attempt to summarize what I have said. We started out from the aberrations of the sexual instinct in respect of its object and of its aim and we were faced by the question of whether these arise from an innate disposition or are acquired as a result of experiences in life. We arrived at an answer to this question from an understanding, derived from psycho-analytic investigation, of the workings of the sexual instinct in psychoneurotics, a numerous class of people and one not far removed from the healthy. We found that in them tendencies to every kind of perversion can be shown to exist as unconscious forces and betray their presence as factors leading to the formation of symptoms. It was thus possible to say that neurosis is, as it were, the negative of perversion. In view of what was now seen to be the wide dissemination of tendencies to perversion we were driven to the conclusion that a disposition to perversions is an original and universal disposition of the human sexual instinct and that normal sexual behaviour is developed out of it as a result of organic changes and psychical inhibitions occurring in the course of maturation; we hoped to be able to show the presence of this original disposition in childhood. Among the forces restricting the direction taken by the sexual instinct we laid emphasis upon shame, disgust, pity and the structures of morality and authority erected by society. We were thus led to regard any established aberration from normal sexuality as an instance of developmental inhibition and infantilism. Though it was necessary to place in the foreground the importance of the variations in the original disposition, a co-operative and not an opposing relation was to be assumed as existing between them and the influences of actual life. It appeared, on the other hand, that since the original disposition is necessarily a complex one, the sexual instinct itself must be something put together from various factors, and that in the perversions it falls apart, as it were, into its components. The perversions were thus seen to be on the one hand inhibitions, and on the other hand dissociations, of normal development. Both these aspects were brought together in the supposition that the sexual instinct of adults arises from a combination of a number of impulses of childhood into a unity, an impulsion with a single aim.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1543

After having explained the preponderance of perverse tendencies in psychoneurotics by recognizing it as a collateral filling of subsidiary channels when the main current of the instinctual stream has been blocked by ‘repression’,¹ we proceeded to a consideration of sexual life in childhood. We found it a regrettable thing that the existence of the sexual instinct in childhood has been denied and that the sexual manifestations not infrequently to be observed in children have been described as irregularities. It seemed to us on the contrary that children bring germs of sexual activity with them into the world, that they already enjoy sexual satisfaction when they begin to take nourishment and that they persistently seek to repeat the experience in the familiar activity of ‘thumb-sucking’. The sexual activity of children, however, does not, it appeared, develop pari passu with their other functions, but, after a short period of efflorescence from the ages of two to five, enters upon the so-called period of latency. During that period the production of sexual excitation is not by any means stopped but continues and produces a store of energy which is employed to a great extent for purposes other than sexual - namely, on the one hand in contributing the sexual components to social feelings and on the other hand (through repression and reaction-forming) in building up the subsequently developed barriers against sexuality. On this view, the forces destined to retain the sexual instinct upon certain lines are built up in childhood chiefly at the cost of perverse sexual impulses and with the assistance of education. A certain portion of the infantile sexual impulses would seem to evade these uses and succeed in expressing itself as sexual activity. We next found that sexual excitation in children springs from a multiplicity of forces. Satisfaction arises first and foremost from the appropriate sensory excitation of what we have described as erotogenic zones. It seems probable that any part of the skin and any sense-organ - probably, indeed, any organ - can function as an erotogenic zone, though there are some particularly marked erotogenic zones whose excitation would seem to be secured from the very first by certain organic contrivances. It further appears that sexual excitation arises as a by-product, as it were, of a large number of processes that occur in the organism, as soon as they reach a certain degree of intensity, and most especially of any relatively powerful emotion, even though it is of a distressing nature. The excitations from all these sources are not yet combined; but each follows its own separate aim, which is merely the attainment of a certain sort of pleasure. In childhood, therefore, the sexual instinct is not unified and is at first without an object, that is, auto-erotic.

¹ [Footnote added 1915:] This does not apply only to the ‘negative’ tendencies to perversion which appear in neuroses but equally to the ‘positive,’ properly so-called, perversions. Thus these latter are to be derived not merely from a fixation of infantile tendencies but also from a regression to those tendencies as a result of other channels of the sexual current being blocked. It is for this reason that the positive perversions also are accessible to psycho-analytic therapy.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1544

The erotogenic zone of the genitals begins to make itself noticeable, it seems, even during the years of childhood. This may happen in two ways. Either, like any other erotogenic zone, it yields satisfaction in response to appropriate sensory stimulation; or, in a manner which is not quite understandable, when satisfaction is derived from other sources, a sexual excitation is simultaneously produced which has a special relation to the genital zone. We were reluctantly obliged to admit that we could not satisfactorily explain the relation between sexual satisfaction and sexual excitation, or that between the activity of the genital zone and the activity of the other sources of sexuality.

We found from the study of neurotic disorders that beginnings of an organization of the sexual instinctual components can be detected in the sexual life of children from its very beginning. During a first, very early phase, oral erotism occupies most of the picture. A second of these pregenital organizations is characterized by the predominance of sadism and anal erotism. It is not until a third phase has been reached that the genital zones proper contribute their share in determining sexual life, and in children this last phase is developed only so far as to a primacy of the phallus.

We were then obliged to recognize, as one of our most surprising findings, that this early efflorescence of infantile sexual life (between the ages of two and five) already gives rise to the choice of an object, with all the wealth of mental activities which such a process involves. Thus, in spite of the lack of synthesis between the different instinctual components and the uncertainty of the sexual aim, the phase of development corresponding to that period must be regarded as an important precursor of the subsequent final sexual organization.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1545

The fact that the onset of sexual development in human beings occurs in two phases, i.e. that the development is interrupted by the period of latency, seemed to call for particular notice. This appears to be one of the necessary conditions of the aptitude of men for developing a higher civilization, but also of their tendency to neurosis. So far as we know, nothing analogous is to be found in man’s animal relatives. It would seem that the origin of this peculiarity of man must be looked for in the prehistory of the human species.

It was not possible to say what amount of sexual activity can occur in childhood without being described as abnormal or detrimental to further development. The nature of these sexual manifestations was found to be predominantly masturbatory. Experience further showed that the external influences of seduction are capable of provoking interruptions of the latency period or even its cessation, and that in this connection the sexual instinct of children proves in fact to be polymorphously perverse; it seems, moreover, that any such premature sexual activity diminishes a child’s educability.

In spite of the gaps in our knowledge of infantile sexual life, we had to proceed to an attempt at examining the alterations brought about in it by the arrival of puberty. We selected two of these as being the decisive ones: the subordination of all the other sources of sexual excitation under the primacy of the genital zones and the process of finding an object. Both of these are already adumbrated in childhood. The first is accomplished by the mechanism of exploiting fore-pleasure: what were formerly self-contained sexual acts, attended by pleasure and excitation, become acts preparatory to the new sexual aim (the discharge of the sexual products), the attainment of which, enormously pleasurable, brings the sexual excitation to an end. In this connection we had to take into account the differentiation of sexuality into masculine and feminine; and we found that in order to become a woman a further stage of repression is necessary, which discards a portion of infantile masculinity and prepares the woman for changing her leading genital zone. As regards object-choice, we found that it is given its direction by the childhood hints (revived at puberty) of the child’s sexual inclination towards his parents and others in charge of him, but that it is diverted away from them, on to other people who resemble them, owing to the barrier against incest which has meanwhile been erected. Finally it must be added that during the transition period of puberty the processes of somatic and of psychical development continue for a time side by side independently, until the irruption of an intense mental erotic impulse, leading to the innervation of the genitals, brings about the unity of the erotic function which is necessary for normality.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1546

FACTORS INTERFERING WITH DEVELOPMENT   Every step on this long path of development can

become a point of fixation, every juncture in this involved combination can be an occasion for a dissociation of the sexual instinct, as we have already shown from numerous instances. It remains for us to enumerate the various factors, internal and external, that interfere with development, and to indicate the place in the mechanism on which the disturbance arising from each of them impinges. The factors that we shall enumerate can evidently not be of equal importance, and we must be prepared for difficulties in assigning an appropriate value to each.

CONSTITUTION AND HEREDITY   First and foremost we must name the innate variety of sexual

constitutions, upon which it is probable that the principal weight falls, but which can clearly only be inferred from their later manifestations and even then not always with great certainty. We picture this variety as a preponderance of one or another of the many sources of sexual excitation, and it is our view that a difference in disposition of this kind is always bound to find expression in the final result, even though that result may not overstep the limits of what is normal. No doubt it is conceivable that there may also be variations in the original disposition of a kind which must necessarily, and without the concurrence of any other factors, lead to the development of an abnormal sexual life. These might be described as ‘degenerative’ and be regarded as an expression of inherited degeneracy. In this connection I have a remarkable fact to record. In more than half of the severe cases of hysteria, obsessional neurosis, etc., which I have treated psychotherapeutically, I have been able to prove with certainty that the patient’s father suffered from syphilis before marriage, whether there was evidence of tabes or general paralysis, or whether the anamnesis indicated in some other way the presence of syphilitic disease. I should like to make it perfectly plain that the children who later became neurotic bore no physical signs of hereditary syphilis, so that it was their abnormal sexual constitution that was to be regarded as the last echo of their syphilitic heritage. Though I am far from wishing to assert that descent from syphilitic parents is an invariable or indispensable aetiological condition of a neuropathic constitution, I am nevertheless of opinion that the coincidence which I have observed is neither accidental nor unimportant.

The hereditary conditions in the case of positive perverts are less well known, for they know how to avoid investigation. Yet there are good reasons to suppose that what is true of the neuroses applies also to the perversions. For it is no rare thing to find perversions and psychoneuroses occurring in the same family, and distributed between the two sexes in such a way that the male members of the family, or one of them, are positive perverts, while the females, true to the tendency of their sex to repression, are negative perverts, that is, hysterics. This is good evidence of the essential connections which we have shown to exist between the two disorders.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1547

FURTHER MODIFICATION   On the other hand, it is not possible to adopt the view that the form to

be taken by sexual life is unambiguously decided, once and for all, with the inception of the different components of the sexual constitution. On the contrary, the determining process continues, and further possibilities arise according to the vicissitudes of the tributary streams of sexuality springing from their separate sources. This further modification is clearly what brings the decisive outcome, and constitutions which might be described as the same can lead to three different final results:-

If the relation between all the different dispositions - a relation which we will assume to be abnormal - persists and grows stronger at maturity, the result can only be a perverse sexual life. The analysis of abnormal constitutional dispositions of this kind has not yet been properly taken in hand. But we already know cases which can easily be explained on such a basis as this. Writers on the subject, for instance, have asserted that the necessary precondition of a whole number of perverse fixations lies in an innate weakness of the sexual instinct. In this form the view seems to me untenable. It makes sense, however, if what is meant is a constitutional weakness of one particular factor in the sexual instinct, namely the genital zone - a zone which takes over the function of combining the separate sexual activities for the purposes of reproduction. For if the genital zone is weak, this combination, which is required to take place at puberty, is bound to fail, and the strongest of the other components of sexuality will continue its activity as a perversion.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1915:] In such circumstances one often finds that at puberty a normal sexual current begins to operate at first, but that, as a result of its internal weakness, it breaks down in face of the first external obstacles and is then replaced by regression to the perverse fixation.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1548

REPRESSION   A different result is brought about if in the course of development some of the

components which are of excessive strength in the disposition are submitted to the process of repression (which, it must be insisted, is not equivalent to their being abolished). If this happens, the excitations concerned continue to be generated as before; but they are prevented by psychical obstruction from attaining their aim and are diverted into numerous other channels till they find their way to expression as symptoms. The outcome may be an approximately normal sexual life - though usually a restricted one - but there is in addition psychoneurotic illness. These particular cases have become familiar to us from the psycho-analytic investigation of neurotics. Their sexual life begins like that of perverts, and a considerable part of their childhood is occupied with perverse sexual activity which occasionally extends far into maturity. A reversal due to repression then occurs, owing to internal causes (usually before puberty, but now and then even long afterwards), and from that time onwards neurosis takes the place of perversion, without the old impulses being extinguished. We are reminded of the proverb ‘Junge Hure, alte Betschwester’,¹ only that here youth has lasted all too short a time. The fact that perversion can be replaced by neurosis in the life of the same person, like the fact which we have already mentioned that perversion and neurosis can be distributed among different members of the same family, tallies with the view that neurosis is the negative of perversion.

¹ [‘A young whore makes an old nun.’]

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1549

SUBLIMATION   The third alternative result of an abnormal constitutional disposition is made

possible by the process of sublimation. This enables excessively strong excitations arising from particular sources of sexuality to find an outlet and use in other fields, so that a not inconsiderable increase in psychical efficiency results from a disposition which is itself is perilous. Here we have one of the origins of artistic activity; and, according to the completeness or incompleteness of the sublimation, a characterological analysis of a highly gifted individual, and in particular of one with an artistic disposition, may reveal a mixture, in every proportion, of efficiency, perversion and neurosis. A sub-species of sublimation is to be found in suppression by reaction-formation, which, as we have seen, begins during a child’s period of latency and continues in favourable cases throughout his whole life. What we describe as a person’s ‘character’ is built up to a considerable extent from the material of sexual excitations and is composed of instincts that have been fixed since childhood, of constructions achieved by means of sublimation, and of other constructions, employed for effectively holding in check perverse impulses which have been recognized as being unutilizable.¹ The multifariously perverse sexual disposition of childhood can accordingly be regarded as the source of a number of our virtues, in so far as through reaction-formation it stimulates their development.²

¹ [Footnote added 1920:] In the case of some character-traits it has even been possible to trace a connection with particular erotogenic components. Thus, obstinacy, thrift and orderliness arise from an exploitation of anal erotism, while ambition is determined by a strong urethral-erotic disposition.

² Emile Zola, a keen observer of human nature, describes in La joie de vivre how a girl, cheerfully and selflessly and without thought of reward, sacrificed to those she loved everything that she possessed or could lay claim to - her money and her hopes. This girl’s childhood was dominated by an insatiable thirst for affection, which was transformed into cruelty on an occasion when she found herself slighted in favour of another girl.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1550

ACCIDENTAL EXPERIENCES   No other influences on the course of sexual development can

compare in importance with releases of sexuality, waves of repression and sublimations - the two latter being processes of which the inner causes are quite unknown to us. It might be possible to include repressions and sublimations as a part of the constitutional disposition, by regarding them as manifestations of it in life; and anyone who does so is justified in asserting that the final shape taken by sexual life is principally the outcome of the innate constitution. No one with perception will, however, dispute that an interplay of factors such as this also leaves room for the modifying effects of accidental events experienced in childhood and later. It is not easy to estimate the relative efficacy of the constitutional and accidental factors. In theory one is always inclined to overestimate the former; therapeutic practice emphasizes the importance of the latter. It should, however, of no account be forgotten that the relation between the two is a co-operative and not a mutually exclusive one. The constitutional factor must await experiences before it can make itself felt; the accidental factor must have a constitutional basis in order to come into operation. To cover the majority of cases we can picture what has been described as a ‘complemental series’, in which the diminishing intensity of one factor is balanced by the increasing intensity of the other; there is, however, no reason to deny the existence of extreme cases at the two ends of the series.

We shall be in even closer harmony with psycho-analytic research if we give a place of preference among the accidental factors to the experiences of early childhood. The single aetiological series then falls into two, which may be called the dispositional and the definitive. In the first the constitution and the accidental experiences of childhood interact in the same manner as do the disposition and later traumatic experiences in the second. All the factors that impair sexual development show their effects by bringing about a regression, a return to an earlier phase of development.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1551

Let us now resume our task of enumerating the factors which we have found to exercise an influence on sexual development, whether they are themselves operative forces or merely manifestations of such forces.

PRECOCITY   One such factor is spontaneous sexual precocity, whose presence at least can be

demonstrated with certainty in the aetiology of the neuroses though, like other factors, it is not in itself a sufficient cause. It is manifested in the interruption, abbreviation or bringing to an end of the infantile period of latency; and it is a cause of disturbances by occasioning sexual manifestations which, owing on the one hand to the sexual inhibitions being incomplete and on the other hand to the genital system being undeveloped, are bound to be in the nature of perversions. These tendencies to perversion may thereafter either persist as such or, after repressions have set in, become the motive forces of neurotic symptoms. In any case sexual precocity makes more difficult the later control of the sexual instinct by the higher mental agencies which is so desirable, and it increases the impulsive quality which, quite apart from this, characterizes the psychical representations of the instinct. Sexual precocity often runs parallel with premature intellectual development and, linked in this way, is to be found in the childhood history of persons of the greatest eminence and capacity; under such conditions its effects do not seem to be so pathogenic as when it appears in isolation.

TEMPORAL FACTORS   Other factors which, along with precocity, may be classed as temporal

also deserve attention. The order in which the various instinctual impulses come into activity seems to be phylogenetically determined; so, too, does the length of time during which they are able to manifest themselves before they succumb to the effects of some freshly emerging instinctual impulse or to some typical repression. Variations, however, seem to occur both in temporal sequence and in duration, and these variations must exercise a determining influence upon the final result. It cannot be a matter of indifference whether a given current makes its appearance earlier or later than a current flowing in the opposite direction, for the effect of a repression cannot be undone. Divergences in the temporal sequence in which the components come together invariably produce a difference in the outcome. On the other hand, instinctual impulses which emerge with special intensity often run a surprisingly short course - as, for instance, the heterosexual attachment of persons who later become manifest homosexuals. There is no justification for the fear that trends which set in with the greatest violence in childhood will permanently dominate the adult character; it is just as likely that they will disappear and make way for an opposite tendency. (‘Gestrenge Herren regieren nicht Lange.’)¹

We are not in a position to give so much as hint as to the causes of these temporal disturbances of the process of development. A prospect opens before us at this point upon a whole phalanx of biological and perhaps, too, of historical problems of which we have not even come within striking distance.

¹ [‘Harsh rulers have short reigns.’]

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1552

PERTINACITY OF EARLY IMPRESSIONS   The importance of all early sexual manifestations is

increased by a psychical factor of unknown origin, which at the moment, it must be admitted, can only be brought forward as a provisional psychological concept. I have in mind the fact that, in order to account for the situation, it is necessary to assume that these early impressions of sexual life are characterized by an increased pertinacity or susceptibility to fixation in persons who are later to become neurotics or perverts. For the same premature sexual manifestations, when they occur in other persons, fail to make so deep an impression; they do not tend in a compulsive manner towards repetition nor do they lay down the path to be taken by the sexual instinct for a whole lifetime. Part of the explanation of this pertinacity of early impressions may perhaps lie in another psychical factor which we must not overlook in the causation of the neuroses, namely the preponderance attaching in mental life to memory-traces in comparison with recent impressions. This factor is clearly dependent on intellectual education and increases in proportion to the degree of individual culture. The savage has been described in contrast as ‘das unglückselige Kind des Augenblickes’ [‘The hapless child of the moment.’].¹ In consequence of the inverse relation holding between civilization and the free development of sexuality, of which the consequences can be followed far into the structure of our existences, the course taken by the sexual life of a child is just as unimportant for later life where the cultural or social level is relatively low as it is important where that level is relatively high.

FIXATION   The ground prepared by the psychical factors which have just been enumerated

affords a favourable basis for such stimulations of infantile sexuality as are experienced accidentally. The latter (first and foremost, seduction by other children or by adults) provide the material which, with the help of the former, can become fixated as a permanent disorder. A good proportion of the deviations from normal sexual life which are later observed both in neurotics and in perverts are thus established from the very first by the impressions of childhood - a period which is regarded as being devoid of sexuality. The causation is shared between a compliant constitution, precocity, the characteristic of increased pertinacity of early impressions and the chance stimulation of the sexual instinct by extraneous influences.

The unsatisfactory conclusion, however, that emerges from these investigations of the disturbances of sexual life is that we know far too little of the biological processes constituting the essence of sexuality to be able to construct from our fragmentary information a theory adequate to the understanding alike of normal and of pathological conditions.

¹ Increase in pertinacity may also possibly be the effect of an especially intense somatic manifestation of sexuality in early years.

1553

FREUD’S PSYCHO-ANALYTIC PROCEDURE

(1904)

1554

Intentionally left blank

1555

FREUD’S PSYCHO-ANALYTIC PROCEDURE

The particular psychotherapeutic procedure which Freud practises and describes as ‘psycho-analysis’ is an outgrowth of what was known as the ‘cathartic’ method and was discussed by him in collaboration with Josef Breuer in their Studies on Hysteria (1895). This cathartic therapy was a discovery of Breuer’s, and was first used by him some ten years earlier in the successful treatment of a hysterical woman patient, in the course of which he obtained an insight into the pathogenesis of her symptoms. As the result of a personal suggestion from Breuer, Freud revived this procedure and tested it on a considerable number of patients.

The cathartic method of treatment presupposed that the patient could be hypnotized, and was based on the widening of consciousness that occurs under hypnosis. Its aim was the removal of the pathological symptoms, and it achieved this by inducing the patient to return to the psychical state in which the symptom had appeared for the first time. When this was done, there emerged in the hypnotized patient’s mind memories, thoughts and impulses which had previously dropped out of his consciousness; and, as soon as he had related these to the physician, to the accompaniment of intense expressions of emotion, the symptom was overcome and its return prevented. This experience, which could be regularly repeated, was taken by the authors in their joint paper to signify that the symptom takes the place of suppressed processes which have not reached consciousness, that is, that it represents a transformation (‘conversion’) of these processes. They explained the therapeutic effectiveness of their treatment as due to the discharge of what had previously been, as it were, ‘strangulated’ affect attaching to the suppressed mental acts ( ‘abreaction’). But in practice the simple schematic outline of the therapeutic operation was almost always complicated by the circumstance that it was not a single (‘traumatic’) impression, but in most cases a series of impressions - not easily scanned - which had participated in the creation of the symptom.

Freud's Psycho-Analytic Procedure

1556

The main characteristic of the cathartic method, in contrast to all other methods used in psychotherapy, consists in the fact that its therapeutic efficacy does not lie in The expectation is rather that the symptoms will disappear automatically as soon as the operation, based on certain hypotheses concerning the psychical mechanism, succeeds in diverting the course of mental processes from their previous channel, which found an outlet in the formation of the symptom.

The changes which Freud introduced in Breuer’s cathartic method of treatment were at first changes in technique; these, however, led to new findings and have finally necessitated a different though not contradictory conception of the therapeutic process.

The cathartic method had already renounced suggestion; Freud went a step further and gave up hypnosis as well. At the present time he treats his patients as follows. Without exerting my other kind of influence, he invites them to lie down in a comfortable attitude on a sofa, while he himself sits on a chair behind them outside their field of vision. He does not even ask them to close their eyes, and avoids touching them in any way, as well as any other procedure which might be reminiscent of hypnosis. The session thus proceeds like a conversation between two people equally awake, but one of whom is spared every muscular exertion and every distracting sensory impression which might divert his attention from his own mental activity.

Since, as we all know, it depends upon the choice of the patient whether he can be hypnotized or not, no matter what the skill of the physician may be, and since a large number of neurotic patients cannot be hypnotized by any means whatever, it followed that with the abandonment of hypnosis the applicability of the treatment was assured to an unlimited number of patients. On the other hand, the widening of consciousness, which had supplied the physician with precisely the psychical material of memories and images by the help of which the transformation of the symptoms and the liberation of the affects was accomplished, was now missing. Unless a substitute could be produced for this missing element, any therapeutic effect was out of the question.

Freud's Psycho-Analytic Procedure

1557

Freud found such a substitute - and a completely satisfactory one - in the ‘associations’ of his patients; that is, in the involuntary thoughts (most frequently regarded as disturbing elements and therefore ordinarily pushed aside) which so often break across the continuity of a consecutive narrative.

In order to secure these ideas and associations he asks the patient to ‘let himself go’ in what he says, ‘as you would do in a conversation in which you were rambling on quite disconnectedly and at random’. Before he asks them for a detailed account of their case history he insists that they must include in it whatever comes into their heads, even if they think it unimportant or irrelevant or nonsensical; he lays special stress on their not omitting any thought or idea from their story because to relate it would be embarrassing or distressing to them. In the course of collecting this material of otherwise neglected ideas Freud made the observations which became the determining factor of his entire theory. Gaps appear in the patient’s memory even while he narrates his case: actual occurrences are forgotten, the chronological order is confused, or causal connections are broken, with unintelligible results. No neurotic case history is without amnesia of some kind or other. If the patient is urged to fill these gaps in his memory by an increased application of attention, it is noticed that all the ideas which occur to him are pushed back by every possible critical expedient, until at last he feels positive discomfort when the memory really returns. From this experience Freud concludes that the amnesias are the result of a process which he calls ‘repression’ and the motive for which he finds in feelings of unpleasure. The psychical forces which have brought about this repression can also be detected, according to him, in the ‘resistance’ which operates against the recovery of the lost memories.

The factor of resistance has become one of the corner-stones of his theory. The ideas which are normally pushed aside on every sort of excuse - such as those mentioned above - are regarded by him as derivatives of the repressed psychical phenomena (thoughts and impulses), distorted owing to the resistance against their reproduction. Ideas which are normally pushed aside on every sort of excuse - such as those mentioned above - are regarded by him as derivatives of the repressed psychical phenomena (thoughts and impulses), distorted owing to the resistance against their reproduction.

Freud's Psycho-Analytic Procedure

1558

The greater the resistance, the greater is the distortion. The value of these unintentional thoughts for the purposes of therapeutic technique lies in this relation of theirs to the repressed psychical material. If one possesses a procedure which makes it possible to arrive at the repressed material from the associations, at the distorted material from the distortions, then what was formerly unconscious in mental life can be made accessible to consciousness even without hypnosis.

Freud has developed on this basis an art of interpretation which takes on the task of, as it were, extracting the pure metal of the repressed thoughts from the ore of the unintentional ideas. This work of interpretation is applied not only to the patient’s ideas but also to his dreams, which open up the most direct approach to a knowledge of the unconscious, to his unintentional as well as to his purposeless actions (symptomatic acts) and to the blunders he makes in everyday life (slips of the tongue, bungled actions, and so on). The details of this technique of interpretation or translation have not yet been published by Freud. According to indications he has given, they comprise a number of rules, reached empirically, of how the unconscious material may be reconstructed from the associations, directions on how to know what it means when the patient’s ideas cease to flow, and experiences of the most important typical resistances that arise in the course of such treatments. A bulky volume called The Interpretation of Dreams, published by Freud in 1900, may be regarded as the forerunner of an initiation into his technique.

From these remarks on the technique of the psycho-analytic method the conclusion might be drawn that its inventor has given himself needless trouble and has made a mistake in abandoning the less complicated hypnotic mode of procedure. However, in the first place, the technique of psycho-analysis is much easier in practice, when once one has learnt it, than any description of it would indicate; and, secondly, there is no other way which leads to the desired goal, so that the hard road is still the shortest one to travel. The objection to hypnosis is that it conceals the resistance and for that reason has obstructed the physician’s insight into the play of psychical forces. Hypnosis does not do away with the resistance but only evades it and therefore yields only incomplete information and transitory therapeutic success.

Freud's Psycho-Analytic Procedure

1559

The task which the psycho-analytic method seeks to perform may be formulated in different ways, which are, however, in their essence equivalent. It may, for instance, be stated thus: the task of the treatment is to remove the amnesias. When all gaps in memory have been filled in, all the enigmatic products of mental life elucidated, the continuance and even a renewal of the morbid condition are made impossible. Or the formula may be expressed in this fashion: all repressions must be undone. The mental condition is then the same as one in which all amnesias have been removed. Another formulation reaches further: the task consists in making the unconscious accessible to consciousness, which is done by overcoming the resistances. But it must be remembered that an ideal condition such as this is not present even in the normal, and further that it is only rarely possible to carry the treatment to a point approaching it. Just as health and sickness are not different from each other in essence but are only separated by a quantitative line of demarcation which can be determined in practice, so the aim of the treatment will never be anything else but the practical recovery of the patient, the restoration of his ability to lead an active life and of his capacity for enjoyment. In a treatment which is incomplete or in which success is not perfect, one may at any rate achieve a considerable improvement in the general mental condition, while the symptoms (though now of smaller importance to the patient) may continue to exist without stamping him as a sick man.

The therapeutic procedure remains the same, apart from insignificant modifications, for all the various clinical pictures that may be presented in hysteria, and all forms of obsessional neurosis. This does not imply, however, that it can have an unlimited application. The nature of the psycho-analytic method involves indications and contra-indications with respect to the person to be treated as well as with respect to the clinical picture. Chronic cases of psychoneuroses without any very violent or dangerous symptoms are the most favourable ones for psycho-analysis: thus in the first place every species of obsessional neurosis, obsessive thinking and acting, and cases of hysteria in which phobias and aboulias play the most important part; further, all somatic expressions of hysteria whenever they do not, as in anorexia, require the physician to attend promptly to the speedy removal of symptoms. In acute cases of hysteria it will be necessary to wait for a calmer stage; in all cases where nervous exhaustion dominates the clinical picture a treatment which in itself demands effort, brings only slow improvement and for a time cannot take the persistence of the symptoms into account, will have to be avoided.

Freud's Psycho-Analytic Procedure

1560

Various qualifications are required of anyone who is to be beneficially affected by psycho-analysis. To begin with, he must be capable of a psychically normal condition; during periods of confusion or melancholic depression nothing can be accomplished even in cases of hysteria. Furthermore, a certain measure of natural intelligence and ethical development are to be required of him; if the physician has to deal with a worthless character, he soon loses the interest which makes it possible for him to enter profoundly into the patient’s mental life. Deep-rooted malformations of character, traits of an actually degenerate constitution, show themselves during treatment as sources of a resistance that can scarcely be overcome. In this respect the constitution of the patient sets a general limit to the curative effect of psychotherapy. If the patient’s age is in the neighbourhood of the fifties the conditions for psycho-analysis become unfavourable. The mass of psychical material is then no longer manageable; the time required for recovery is too long; and the ability to undo psychical processes begins to grow weaker.

In spite of all these limitations, the number of persons suitable for psycho-analytic treatment is extraordinarily large and the extension which has come to our therapeutic powers from this method is, according to Freud, very considerable. Freud requires long periods, six months to three years, for an effective treatment; yet he informs us that up to the present, owing to various circumstances which can easily be guessed, he has for the most part been in a position to try his treatment only on very severe cases: patients have come to him after many years of illness, completely incapacitated for life, and, after being disappointed by all kinds of treatments, have had recourse as a last resort to a method which is novel and has been greeted with many doubts. In cases of less severe illness the duration of the treatment might well be much shorter, and very great advantage in the direction of future prevention might be achieved.

1561

ON PSYCHOTHERAPY

(1905)

1562

Intentionally left blank

1563

ON PSYCHOTHERAPY

Gentlemen, - Some eight years have passed since I had the opportunity, on the invitation of your much respected chairman, Professor von Reder, of speaking here on the subject of hysteria. Shortly before that occasion I had published, in 1895, in collaboration with Dr. Josef Breuer, the Studies on Hysteria in which, on the basis of the new knowledge which we owe to his researches, an attempt was made to introduce a new method of treating the neuroses. I am glad to be able to say that the efforts we made in our Studies have met with success; the ideas expressed in them concerning the effects produced by psychical traumas owing to retention of affect, as well as the conception of hysterical symptoms as the results of an excitation transposed from the sphere of the mental to the physical - ideas for which we coined the terms ‘abreaction’ and ‘conversion’ - are to-day generally known and understood. There is, at least in German speaking countries, no presentation of hysteria to-day that does not take them to some extent into account, and we have no colleagues who do not, for a short distance at least, follow the road pointed out by us. And yet, while they were still new, these theorems and this terminology must have sounded not a little strange.

I cannot say the same of the therapeutic procedure which was introduced to our colleagues at the same time as our theory; it is still struggling for recognition. There may be special reasons for this. At that time the technique of the method was as yet undeveloped; it was impossible for me to give medical readers of the book the directions necessary to enable them to carry through the treatment completely. But causes of a general nature have certainly also played a part. To many physicians, even to-day, psychotherapy seems to be a product of modern mysticism and, compared with our physico-chemical remedies which are applied on the basis of physiological knowledge, appears positively unscientific and unworthy of the attention of a serious investigator. Allow me, therefore, to defend the cause of psychotherapy before you, and to point out to you what may be described as unjust or mistaken in this condemnation of it.

On Psychotherapy

1564

In the first place, let me remind you that psychotherapy is in no way a modern method of treatment. On the contrary, it is the most ancient form of therapy in medicine. In Löwenfeld’s instructive Lehrbuch der gesamten Psychotherapie many of the methods of primitive and ancient medical science are described. The majority of them must be classed under the head of psychotherapy; in order to effect a cure a condition of ‘expectation coloured by faith’ was induced in sick persons - a condition which answers a similar purpose for us to-day. Even since physicians have come upon other remedies, psychotherapeutic endeavours of one kind or another have never completely disappeared from medicine.

Secondly, let me draw your attention to the fact that we physicians cannot discard psychotherapy, if only because another person intimately concerned in the process of recovery - the patient - has no intention of discarding it. You will know of the increase in knowledge on this subject that we owe to the Nancy school, to Liébeault and Bernheim. A factor dependent on the psychical disposition of the patient contributes, without any intention on our part, to the effect of every therapeutic process initiated by a physician; most frequently it is favourable to recovery, but often it acts as an inhibition. We have learned to use the word ‘suggestion’ for this phenomenon, and Möbius has taught us that the unreliability which we deplore in so many of our therapeutic measures may be traced back to the disturbing influence of this very powerful factor. All physicians, therefore, yourselves included, are continually practising psychotherapy, even when you have no intention of doing so and are not aware of it; it is a disadvantage, however, to leave the mental factor in your treatment so completely in the patient’s hands. Thus it is impossible to keep a check on it, to administer it in doses or to intensify it. Is it not then a justifiable endeavour on the part of a physician to seek to obtain command of this factor, to use it with a purpose, and to direct and strengthen it? This and nothing else is what scientific psychotherapy proposes.

On Psychotherapy

1565

And, in the third place, Gentlemen, I would remind you of the well-established fact that certain diseases, in particular the psychoneuroses, are far more readily accessible to mental influences than to any other form of medication. It is not a modern dictum but an old saying of physicians that these diseases are not cured by the drug but by the physician, that is, by the personality of the physician, inasmuch as through it he exerts a mental influence. I am well aware that you favour the view which Vischer, the professor of aesthetics, expressed so well in his parody of Faust:

Ich weiß, das Physikalische

Wirkt öfters aufs Moralische¹

But would it not be more to the point to say - and is it not more often the case - moral (that is, mental) means can influence a man’s moral side?

There are many ways and means of practising psychotherapy. All that lead to recovery are good. Our usual word of comfort, which we dispense so liberally to our patients - ‘You’ll soon be all right again’ -, corresponds to one of these psychotherapeutic methods; but now that we have deeper insight into the neuroses, we are no longer obliged to confine ourselves to the word of comfort. We have developed the technique of hypnotic suggestion, and psychotherapy by mental distraction, by exercise, and by eliciting suitable affects. I despise none of these methods and would use them all in appropriate circumstances. If I have actually come to confine myself to one form of treatment, to the method which Breuer called cathartic, but which I myself prefer to call ‘analytic’, it is because I have allowed myself to be influenced by purely subjective motives. Because of the part I have played in founding this therapy, I feel a personal obligation to devote myself to closer investigation of it and to the development of its technique. And I may say that the analytic method of psychotherapy is the one that penetrates most deeply and carries farthest, the one by means of which the most extensive transformations can be effected in patients. Putting aside for a moment the therapeutic point of view, I may also say of it that it is the most interesting method, the only one which informs us at all about the origin and inter-relation of morbid phenomena. Owing to the insight which we gain into mental illness by this method, it alone should be capable of leading us beyond its own limits and of pointing out the way to other forms of therapeutic influence.

¹ [I know that the physical

Often influences the moral.]

On Psychotherapy

1566

Permit me now to correct a few mistakes that have been made in regard to this cathartic or analytic method of psychotherapy, and to give a few explanations on the subject.

(a) I have observed that this method is very often confused with hypnotic treatment by suggestion; I have noticed this because it happens comparatively often that colleagues who do not ordinarily confide their cases to me send me patients refractory patients, of course - with a request that I should hypnotize them. Now I have not used hypnosis for therapeutic purposes for some eight years (except for a few special experiments) so that I habitually send back these cases with the recommendation that anyone who relies upon hypnosis may employ it himself. There is, actually, the greatest possible antithesis between suggestive and analytic technique - the same antithesis which, in regard to the fine arts, the great Leonardo da Vinci summed up in the formulas: per via di porre and per via di levare. Painting, says Leonardo, works per via di porre, for it applies a substance - particles of colour - where there was no thing before, on the colourless canvas; sculpture, however, proceeds per via di levare, since it takes away from the block of stone all that hides the surface of the statue contained in it. In a similar way, the technique of suggestion aims at proceeding per via di porre; it is not concerned with the origin, strength and meaning of the morbid symptoms, but instead, it superimposes something - a suggestion - in the expectation that it will be strong enough to restrain the pathogenic idea from coming to expression. Analytic therapy, on the other hand, does not seek to add or to introduce anything new, but to take away something, to bring out something; and to this end concerns itself with the genesis of the morbid symptoms and the psychical context of the pathogenic idea which it seeks to remove. It is by the use of this mode of investigation that analytic therapy has increased our knowledge so notably. I gave up the suggestive technique, and with it hypnosis, so early in my practice because I despaired of making suggestion powerful and enduring enough to effect permanent cures. In every severe case I saw the suggestions which had been applied crumble away again; after which the disease or some substitute for it was back once more. Besides all this I have another reproach to make against this method, namely, that it conceals from us all insight into the play of mental forces; it does not permit us, for example, to recognize the resistance with which the patient clings to his disease and thus even fights against his own recovery; yet it is this phenomenon of resistance which alone makes it possible to understand his behaviour in daily life.

On Psychotherapy

1567

(b) It seems to me that there is a widespread and erroneous impression among my colleagues that this technique of searching for the origins of an illness and removing its manifestations by that means is an easy one which can be practised off-hand, as it were. I conclude this from the fact that not one of all the people who have shown an interest in my therapy and passed definite judgements upon it has ever asked me how I actually go about it. There can be only one reason for this: that they think there is nothing to enquire about, that the thing is perfectly self-evident. Again, I am now and then astonished to hear that in this or that department of a hospital a young assistant has received an order from his chief to undertake a ‘psycho-analysis’ of a hysterical patient. I am sure he would not be allowed to examine an extirpated tumour unless he had convinced his chiefs that he was conversant with histological technique. Similarly, reports reach my ears that this or that colleague has arranged appointments with a patient in order to undertake a mental treatment of the case, though I am certain he knows nothing of the technique of any such therapy. His expectation must be therefore that the patient will make him a present of his secrets, or perhaps that he is looking for salvation in some sort of confession or confidence. I should not be surprised if a patient were injured rather than benefited by being treated in such a fashion. For it is not so easy to play upon the instrument of the mind. I am reminded on such occasions of the words of a world-famous neurotic - though it is true that he was never treated by a physician but existed only in a poet’s imagination - Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The King has ordered two courtiers, Rosenkranz and Guildenstern, to follow him, to question him and drag the secret of his depression out of him. He wards them off. Then some recorders are brought on the stage and Hamlet, taking one of them, begs one of his tormentors to play upon it, telling him that it is as easy as lying. The courtier excuses himself, for he knows no touch of the instrument, and when he cannot be persuaded to try it, Hamlet finally breaks out with these words: ‘Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; . . . you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ; yet you cannot make it speak. ‘Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.’ (Act III, Scene 2.)

On Psychotherapy

1568

(c) From certain of my remarks you will have gathered that there are many characteristics in the analytic method which prevent it from being an ideal form of therapy. Tuto, cito, jucunde: investigation and probing do not indicate speedy results, and the resistance I have mentioned would prepare you to expect unpleasantness of various kinds. Psycho-analytic treatment certainly makes great demands upon the patient as well as upon the physician. From the patient it requires perfect sincerity - a sacrifice in itself; it absorbs time and is therefore also costly; for the physician it is no less time-absorbing, and the technique which he must study and practise is fairly laborious. I consider it quite justifiable to resort to more convenient methods of treatment as long as there is any prospect of achieving anything by their means. That, after all, is the only point at issue. If the more difficult and lengthy method accomplishes considerably more than the short and easy one, then, in spite of everything, the use of the former is justified. Only consider, Gentlemen, how much more inconvenient and costly is the Finsen therapy of lupus than the method of cauterizing and scraping previously employed; and yet the use of the former signifies a great advance, for it performs a radical cure. Although I do not wish to carry this comparison to extremes, the psycho-analytic method may claim a similar privilege. Actually, I have been able to elaborate and to test my therapeutic method only on severe, indeed on the severest cases; at first my material consisted entirely of patients who had tried everything else without success, and had spent long years in sanatoria. I have scarcely been able to bring together sufficient material to enable me to say how my method works with those slighter, episodic cases which we see recovering under all kinds of influences and even spontaneously. Psycho-analytic therapy was created through and for the treatment of patients permanently unfit for existence, and its triumph has been that it has made a satisfactorily large number of these permanently fit for existence. In the face of such an achievement all the effort expended seems trivial. We cannot conceal from ourselves what, as physicians, we are in the habit of denying to our patients, namely, that a severe neurosis is no less serious for the sufferer than any cachexia or any of the dreaded major diseases.

On Psychotherapy

1569

(d) The conditions under which this method is indicated, or contra-indicated, can scarcely be definitely laid down as yet, because of the many practical limitations to which my activities have been subjected. Nevertheless, I will attempt to discuss a few of them here:

(1) One should look beyond the patient’s illness and form an estimate of his whole personality; those patients who do not possess a reasonable degree of education and a fairly reliable character should be refused. It must not be forgotten that there are healthy people as well as unhealthy ones who are good for nothing in life, and that there is a temptation to ascribe to their illness everything that incapacitates them, if they show any sign of neurosis. In my opinion a neurosis is by no means a stamp of degeneracy, though it may often enough be found in one person along with the signs of degeneracy. Now analytic psychotherapy is not a process suited to the treatment of neuropathic degeneracy; on the contrary, degeneracy is a barrier to its effectiveness. Nor is the method applicable to people who are not driven to seek treatment by their own sufferings, but who submit to it only because they are forced to by the authority of relatives. The qualification which is the determining factor of fitness for psycho-analytic treatment - that is, whether the patient is educable - must be discussed further from another standpoint.

(2) To be quite safe, one should limit one’s choice of patients to those who possess a normal mental condition, since in the psycho-analytic method this is used as a foothold from which to obtain control of the morbid manifestations. Psychoses, states of confusion and deeply-rooted (I might say toxic) depression are therefore not suitable for psycho-analysis; at least not for the method as it has been practised up to the present. I do not regard it as by any means impossible that by suitable changes in the method we may succeed in overcoming this contraindication - and so be able to initiate a psychotherapy of the psychoses.

(3) The age of patients has this much importance in determining their fitness for psycho-analytic treatment, that, on the one hand, near or above the age of fifty the elasticity of the mental processes, on which the treatment depends, is as a rule lacking - old people are no longer educable - and, on the other hand, the mass of material to be dealt with would prolong the duration of the treatment indefinitely. In the other direction the age limit can be determined only individually; youthful persons under the age of adolescence are often exceedingly amenable to influence.

(4) Psycho-analysis should not be attempted when the speedy removal of dangerous symptoms is required, as, for example, in a case of hysterical anorexia.

On Psychotherapy

1570

By this time you will have formed an impression that the field of analytic psychotherapy is a very narrow one, since you have in fact heard nothing from me except indications that point against it. There remain, however, cases and types of disease enough on which this therapy may be tested - as, for instance, all chronic forms of hysteria with residual manifestations, the broad field of obsessive conditions, aboulias, and the like.

It is gratifying that precisely the most valuable and most highly developed persons are best suited for this procedure; and one may also safely claim that in cases where analytic psychotherapy has been able to achieve but little, any other therapy would certainly not have been able to effect anything at all.

(e) You will no doubt wish to enquire about the possibility of doing harm by undertaking a psycho-analysis. In reply to this I may say that if you are willing to judge impartially, if you will consider this procedure in the same spirit of critical fairness that you show to our other therapeutic methods, you will have to agree with me that no injury to the patient is to be feared when the treatment is conducted with comprehension. Anyone who is accustomed, like the lay public, to blame the treatment for whatever happens during an illness will doubtless judge differently. It is not so very long since the same prejudice was directed against our hydropathic establishments. Many patients who were advised to go into an establishment of that kind hesitated because they had known someone who had entered the place as a nervous invalid and had become insane there. As you may guess, these were cases of early general paralysis that could still in their first stage be sent to a hydropathic establishment; once there, they had run their inevitable course until manifest mental disorder supervened: but the public blamed the water for this disastrous change. When it is a matter of new kinds of therapeutic treatment even physicians are not always free from such errors of judgement. I recall once making an attempt at psychotherapy with a woman who had passed the greater part of her life in a state alternating between mania and melancholia. I took on the case at the close of a period of melancholia and for two weeks things seemed to go smoothly; in the third week we were already at the beginning of the next attack of mania. This was undoubtedly a spontaneous transformation of the clinical picture, since in two weeks analytic psychotherapy cannot accomplish anything. And yet the eminent physician (now deceased) who saw the case with me could not refrain from the remark that psychotherapy was probably to blame for this ‘relapse’. I am quite convinced that in other circumstances he would have shown a more critical judgement.

On Psychotherapy

1571

(f) Finally, Gentlemen, I must confess that it is hardly fair to take up your attention for so long on the subject of psycho-analytic therapy without telling you in what this treatment consists and on what it is based. Still, as I am forced to be brief, I can only hint at this: This therapy, then, is based on the recognition that unconscious ideas - or better, the unconsciousness of certain mental processes - are the direct cause of the morbid symptoms. We share this opinion with the French school (Janet) who, by the way, owing to excessive schematization, refer the cause of hysterical symptoms to an unconscious idée fixe. Now please do not be afraid that this is going to land us in the depths of philosophical obscurities. Our unconscious is not quite the same thing as that of philosophers and, moreover, the majority of philosophers will hear nothing of ‘unconscious mental processes’. If, however, you will look at the matter from our point of view, you will understand that the transformation of this unconscious material in the mind of the patient into conscious material must have the result of correcting his deviation from normality and of lifting the compulsion to which his mind has been subjected. For conscious will-power governs only conscious mental processes, and every mental compulsion is rooted in the unconscious. Nor need you ever fear that the patient will be harmed by the shock accompanying the introduction of the unconscious into consciousness, for you can convince yourselves theoretically that the somatic and emotional effect of an impulse that has become conscious can never be so powerful as that of an unconscious one. It is only by the application of our highest mental functions, which are bound up with consciousness, that we can control all our impulses.

There is, however, another angle from which you may seek to understand the psycho-analytic method. The uncovering and translating of the unconscious occurs in the face of a continuous resistance on the part of the patient. The process of bringing this unconscious material to light is associated with unpleasure, and because of this the patient rejects it again and again. It is for you then to interpose in this conflict in the patient’s mental life. If you succeed in persuading him to accept, by virtue of a better understanding, something that up to now, in consequence of this automatic regulation by unpleasure, he has rejected (repressed), you will have accomplished something towards his education. For it is education even to induce someone who dislikes getting up early to do so all the same. Psycho-analytic treatment may in general be conceived of as such a re-education in overcoming internal resistances. Re-education of this kind is, however, in no respect more necessary to nervous patients than in regard to the mental element in their sexual life. For nowhere else have civilization and education done so much harm as in this field, and this is the point, as experience will show you, at which to look for those aetiologies of the neuroses that are amenable to influence; for the other aetiological factor, the constitutional component, consists of something fixed and unalterable. And from this it follows that one important qualification is required of the physician in this work: not only must his own character be irreproachable - ‘As to morals, that goes without saying’, as the hero of Vischer’s novel Auch Einer was in the habit of declaring - but he must also have overcome in his own mind that mixture of prurience and prudery with which, unfortunately, so many people habitually consider sexual problems.

On Psychotherapy

1572

At this juncture another remark is perhaps not out of place. I know that the emphasis which I lay upon the part played by sexuality in creating the psychoneuroses has become generally known. But I know, too, that qualifications and exact particularization are of little use with the general public; there is very little room in the memory of the multitude; it only retains the bare gist of any thesis and fabricates an extreme version which is easy to remember. It may be, too, that some physicians vaguely apprehend the content of my doctrine to be that I regard sexual privation as the ultimate cause of the neuroses. In the conditions of life in modern society there is certainly no lack of sexual privation. On this basis, would it not be simpler to aim directly at recovery by recommending sexual activity as a therapeutic measure, instead of pursuing the circuitous and laborious path of mental treatment?(I know of nothing which could impel me to suppress such an inference if it were justified. The real state of things, however, is otherwise. Sexual need and privation are merely one factor at work in the mechanism of neurosis; if there were no others the result would be dissipation, not disease. The other, no less essential, factor, which is all too readily forgotten, is the neurotic’s aversion from sexuality, his incapacity for loving, that feature of the mind which I have called ‘repression’. Not until there is a conflict between the two tendencies does nervous illness break out, and therefore to advise sexual activity in the psychoneuroses can only very rarely be described as good advice.

Let me end upon this defensive note. And let us hope that your interest in psychotherapy, when freed from every hostile prejudice, may lend us support in our endeavour to achieve success in treating even severe cases of psychoneurosis.

1573

MY VIEWS ON THE PART PLAYED BY SEXUALITY

IN THE AETIOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

(1906)

1574

Intentionally left blank

1575

MY VIEWS ON THE PART PLAYED BY SEXUALITY

IN THE AETIOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES

My theory of the aetiological importance of the sexual factor in the neuroses can best be appreciated, in my opinion, by following the history of its development. For I have no desire whatever to deny that it has gone through a process of evolution and been modified in the course of it. My professional colleagues may find a guarantee in this admission that the theory is nothing other than the product of continuous and ever deeper-going experience. What is born of speculation, on the contrary, may easily spring into existence complete and there after remain unchangeable.

Originally my theory related only to the clinical pictures comprised under the term ‘neurasthenia’, among which I was particularly struck by two, which occasionally appear as pure types and which I described as ‘neurasthenia proper’ and ‘anxiety neurosis’. It had, to be sure, always been a matter of common knowledge that sexual factors may play a part in the causation of these forms of illness; but those factors were not regarded as invariably operative, nor was there any idea of giving them precedence over other aetiological influences. I was surprised to begin with at the frequency of gross disturbances in the vita sexualis of nervous patients; the more I set about looking for such disturbances - bearing in mind the fact that everyone hides the truth in matters of sex - and the more skilful I became at pursuing my enquiries in the face of a preliminary denial, the more regularly was I able to discover pathogenic factors in sexual life, till little seemed to stand in the way of my assuming their universal occurrence. It was necessary, however, to presuppose from the start that sexual irregularities occurred with similar frequency in our ordinary society under the pressure of social conditions; and a doubt might remain as to the degree of deviation from normal sexual functioning which should be regarded as pathogenic. I was therefore obliged to attach less importance to the invariable evidence of sexual noxae than to a second discovery which seemed to me less ambiguous. It emerged that the form taken by the illness - neurasthenia or anxiety neurosis - bore a constant relation to the nature of the sexual noxa involved. In typical cases of neurasthenia a history of regular masturbation or persistent emissions was found; in anxiety neurosis factors appeared such as coitus interruptus, ‘unconsummated excitation’, and other conditions - in all of which there seemed to be the common element of an insufficient discharge of the libido that had been produced. It was only after this discovery, which was easy to make and could be confirmed as often as one liked, that I had the courage to claim a preferential position for sexual influences in the aetiology of the neuroses. Furthermore, in the mixed forms of neurasthenia and anxiety neurosis which are so common it was possible to trace a combination of the aetiologies which I had assumed for the two pure forms. Moreover, this twofold form assumed by the neurosis seemed to tally with the polar (i.e. the masculine and feminine)  character of sexuality.

My Views On The Part Played By Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

1576

At the time at which I was attributing to sexuality this important part in the production of the simple neuroses,¹ I was still faithful to a purely psychological theory in regard to the psychoneuroses  - a theory in which the sexual factor was regarded as no more significant than any other emotional source of feeling. On the basis of some observations made by Josef Breuer on a hysterical patient more than ten years earlier, I collaborated with him in a study of the mechanism of the generation of hysterical symptoms, using the method of awakening the patient’s memories in a state of hypnosis; and we reached conclusions which enabled us to bridge the gap between Charcot’s traumatic hysteria and common non-traumatic hysteria (Breuer and Freud, 1895). We were led to the assumption that hysterical symptoms are the permanent results of psychical traumas, the sum of affect attaching to which has, for particular reasons, been prevented from being worked over consciously and has therefore found an abnormal path into somatic innervation. The terms ‘strangulated affect’, ‘conversion’ and ‘abreaction’ cover the distinctive features of this hypothesis.

But in view of the close connections between the psychoneuroses and the simple neuroses, which go so far, indeed, that a differential diagnosis is not always easy for inexperienced observers, it could not be long before the knowledge arrived at in the one field was extended to the other. Moreover, apart from this consideration, a deeper investigation of the psychical mechanism of hysterical symptoms led to the same result. For if the psychical traumas from which the hysterical symptoms were derived were pursued further and further by means of the ‘cathartic’ procedure initiated by Breuer and me, experiences were eventually reached which belonged to the patient’s childhood and related to his sexual life. And this was so, even in cases in which the onset of the illness had been brought about by some commonplace emotion of a non-sexual kind. Unless these sexual traumas of childhood were taken into account it was impossible either to elucidate the symptoms (to understand the way in which they were determined) or to prevent their recurrence. In this way the unique significance of sexual experiences in the aetiology of the psychoneuroses seemed to be established beyond a doubt; and this fact remains to this day one of the corner-stones of my theory.

¹ In my paper on anxiety neurosis (1895b).

My Views On The Part Played By Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

1577

This theory might be expressed by saying that the cause of life-long hysterical neuroses lies in what are in themselves for the most part the trivial sexual experiences of early childhood; and, put in this way, it might no doubt sound strange. But if we take the historical development of the theory into account, and see as its essence the proposition that hysteria is the expression of a particular behaviour of the individual’s sexual function and that this behaviour is decisively determined by the first influences and experiences brought to bear in childhood, we shall be a paradox the poorer but the richer by a motive for turning our attention to something of the highest importance (though it has hitherto been grossly neglected) - the after-effects of the impressions of childhood.

I will postpone until later in this paper a more thorough going discussion of the question whether we are to regard the sexual experiences of childhood as the causes of hysteria (and obsessional neurosis), and I will now return to the form taken by the theory in some of my shorter preliminary publications during the years 1895 and 1896 (Freud, 1896b and 1896c). By laying stress on the supposed aetiological factors it was possible at that time to draw a contrast between the common neuroses as disorders with a contemporary aetiology and psychoneuroses whose aetiology was chiefly to be looked for in the sexual experiences of the remote past. The theory culminated in this thesis: if the vita sexualis is normal, there can be no neurosis.

My Views On The Part Played By Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

1578

Though even to-day I do not consider these assertions incorrect, it is not to be wondered at that, in the course of ten years of continuous effort at reaching an understanding of these phenomena, I have made a considerable step forward from the views I then held, and now believe that I am in a position, on the basis of deeper experience, to correct the insufficiencies, the displacements and the misunderstandings under which my theory then laboured. At that time my material was still scanty, and it happened by chance to include a disproportionately large number of cases in which sexual seduction by an adult or by older children played the chief part in the history of the patient’s childhood. I thus over-estimated the frequency of such events (though in other respects they were not open to doubt). Moreover, I was at that period unable to distinguish with certainty between falsifications made by hysterics in their memories of childhood and traces of real events. Since then I have learned to explain a number of phantasies of seduction as attempts at fending off memories of the subject’s own sexual activity ( infantile masturbation). When this point had been clarified, the ‘traumatic’ element in the sexual experiences of childhood lost its importance and what was left was the realization that infantile sexual activity (whether spontaneous or provoked ) prescribes the direction that will be taken by later sexual life after maturity. The same clarification (which corrected the most important of my early mistakes) also made it necessary to modify my view of the mechanism of hysterical symptoms. They were now no longer to be regarded as direct derivatives of the repressed memories of childhood experiences; but between the symptoms and the childish impressions there were inserted the patient’s phantasies (or imaginary memories), mostly produced during the years of puberty, which on the one side were built up out of and over the childhood memories and on the other side were transformed directly into the symptoms. It was only after the introduction of this element of hysterical phantasies that the texture of the neurosis and its relation to the patient’s life became intelligible; a surprising analogy came to light, too, between these unconscious phantasies of hysterics and the imaginary creations of paranoics which become conscious as delusions.

My Views On The Part Played By Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

1579

After I had made this correction, ‘infantile sexual traumas’ were in a sense replaced by the ‘infantilism of sexuality’. A second modification of the original theory lay not far off. Along with the supposed frequency of seduction in childhood, I ceased also to lay exaggerated stress on the accidental influencing of sexuality on to which I had sought to thrust the main responsibility for the causation of the illness, though I had not on that account denied the constitutional and hereditary factors. I had even hoped to solve the problem of choice of neurosis (the decision to which form of psychoneurosis the patient is to fall a victim) by reference to the details of the sexual experiences of childhood. I believed at that time - though with reservations - that a passive attitude in these scenes produced a predisposition to hysteria and, on the other hand, an active one a predisposition to obsessional neurosis. Later on I was obliged to abandon this view entirely, even though some facts demand that in some way or other the supposed correlation between passivity and hysteria and between activity and obsessional neurosis shall be maintained. Accidental influences derived from experience having thus receded into the background, the factors of constitution and heredity necessarily gained the upper hand once more; but there was this difference between my views and those prevailing in other quarters, that on my theory the ‘sexual constitution’ took the place of a ‘general neuropathic disposition’. In my recently published Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d ) I have tried to give a picture of the variegated nature of this sexual constitution as well as of the composite character of the sexual instinct in general and its derivation from contributory sources from different parts of the organism.

My Views On The Part Played By Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

1580

As a further corollary to my modified view of  ‘sexual traumas in childhood’, my theory now developed further in a direction which had already been indicated in my publications between 1894 and 1896. At that time, and even before sexuality had been given its rightful place as an aetiological factor, I had maintained that no experience could have a pathogenic effect unless it appeared intolerable to the subject’s ego and gave rise to efforts at defence (Freud, 1894a). It was to this defence that I traced back the split in the psyche (or, as we said in those days, in consciousness) which occurs in hysteria. If the defence was successful, the intolerable experience with its affective consequences was expelled from consciousness and from the ego’s memory. In certain circumstances, however, what had been expelled pursued its activities in what was now an unconscious state, and found its way back into consciousness by means of symptoms and the affects attaching to them, so that the illness corresponded to a failure in defence. This view had the merit of entering into the interplay of the psychical forces and of thus bringing the mental processes in hysteria nearer to normal ones, instead of characterizing the neurosis as nothing more than a mysterious disorder insusceptible to further analysis.

Further information now became available relating to people who had remained normal; and this led to the unexpected finding that the sexual history of their childhood did not necessarily differ in essentials from that of neurotics, and, in particular, that the part played by seduction was the same in both cases. As a consequence, accidental influences receded still further into the background as compared with ‘repression’ (as I now began to say instead of ‘defence’). Thus it was no longer a question of what sexual experiences a particular individual had had in his childhood, but rather of his reaction to those experiences - of whether he had reacted to them by ‘repression’ or not. It could be shown how in the course of development a spontaneous infantile sexual activity was often broken off by an act of repression. Thus a mature neurotic individual was invariably pursued by a certain amount of ‘sexual repression’ from his childhood; this found expression when he was faced by the demands of real life, and the psycho-analyses of hysterics showed that they fell ill as a result of the conflict between their libido and their sexual repression and that their symptoms were in the nature of compromises between the two mental currents.

My Views On The Part Played By Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

1581

I could not further elucidate this part of my theory without a detailed discussion of my views on repression. It will be enough here to refer to my Three Essays (1905d), in which I have attempted to throw some light - if only a feeble one - on the somatic processes in which the essential nature of sexuality is to be looked for. I have there shown that the constitutional sexual disposition of children is incomparably more variegated than might have been expected, that it deserves to be described as ‘polymorphously perverse’ and that what is spoken of as the normal behaviour of the sexual function emerges from this disposition after certain of its components have been repressed. By pointing out the infantile elements in sexuality I was able to establish a simple correlation between health, perversion and neurosis. I showed that normality is a result of the repression of certain component instincts and constituents of the infantile disposition and of the subordination of the remaining constituents under the primacy of the genital zones in the service of the reproductive function. I showed that perversions correspond to disturbances of this coalescence owing to the overpowering and compulsive development of certain of the component instincts, while neuroses can be traced back to an excessive repression of the libidinal trends. Since almost all the perverse instincts of the infantile disposition can be recognized as the forces concerned in the formation of symptoms in neuroses, though in a state of repression, I was able to describe neurosis as being the ‘negative’ of perversion.

My Views On The Part Played By Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

1582

I think it is worth emphasizing the fact that, whatever modifications my views on the aetiology of the psychoneuroses have passed through, there are two positions which I have never repudiated or abandoned - the importance of sexuality and of infantilism. Apart from this, accidental influences have been replaced by constitutional factors and ‘defence’ in the purely psychological sense has been replaced by organic ‘sexual repression’. The question may, however, be raised of where convincing evidence is to be found in favour of the alleged aetiological importance of sexual factors in the psychoneuroses, in view of the fact that the onset of these illnesses may be observed in response to the most commonplace emotions or even to somatic precipitating causes, and since I have had to abandon a specific aetiology depending on the particular form of the childhood experiences concerned. To such a question I would reply that the psycho-analytic examination of neurotics is the source from which this disputed conviction of mine is derived. If we make use of that irreplaceable method of research, we discover that the patient’s symptoms constitute his sexual activity (whether wholly or in part), which arises from the sources of the normal or perverse component instincts of sexuality. Not only is a large part of the symptomatology of hysteria derived directly from expressions of sexual excitement, not only do a number of erotogenic zones attain the significance of genitals during neuroses owing to an intensification of infantile characteristics, but the most complicated symptoms are themselves revealed as representing, by means of ‘conversion’, phantasies which have a sexual situation as their subject-matter. Anyone who knows how to interpret the language of hysteria will recognize that the neurosis is concerned only with the patient’s repressed sexuality. The sexual function must, however, be understood in its true extent, as it is laid down by disposition in infancy. Wherever some commonplace emotion must be included among the determinants of the onset of the illness, analysis invariably shows that it is the sexual component of the traumatic experience - a component that is never lacking which has produced the pathogenic result.

We have been led on imperceptibly from the question of the causation of the psychoneuroses to the problem of their essential nature. If we are prepared to take into account what has been learnt from psycho-analysis, we can only say that the essence of these illnesses lies in disturbances of the sexual processes, the processes which determine in the organism the formation and utilization of sexual libido. It is scarcely possible to avoid picturing these processes as being in the last resort of a chemical nature; so that in what are termed the ‘actual’ neuroses we may recognize the somatic effects of disturbances of the sexual metabolism, and in the psychoneuroses the psychical effects of those disturbances as well. The similarity of the neuroses to the phenomena of intoxication and abstinence after the use of certain alkaloids, as well as to Graves’ disease and Addison’s disease, is forced upon our notice clinically. And just as these last two illnesses should no longer be described as ‘nervous diseases’, so also the ‘neuroses’ proper, in spite of their name, may soon have to be excluded from that category as well.

My Views On The Part Played By Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses

1583

Accordingly, the aetiology of the neuroses comprises everything which can act in a detrimental manner upon the processes serving the sexual function. In the forefront, then, are to be ranked the noxae which affect the sexual function itself - in so far as these are regarded as injurious by the sexual constitution, varying as it does with different degrees of culture and education. In the next place comes every other kind of noxa and trauma which, by causing general damage to the organism, may lead secondarily to injury to its sexual processes. It should not, however, be forgotten that the aetiological problem in the case of the neuroses is at least as complicated as the causative factors of any other illness. A single pathogenic influence is scarcely ever sufficient; in the large majority of cases a number of aetiological factors are required, which support one another and must therefore not be regarded as being in mutual opposition. For this reason a state of neurotic illness cannot be sharply differentiated from health. The onset of the illness is the product of a summation and the necessary total of aetiological determinants can be completed from any direction. To look for the aetiology of the neuroses exclusively in heredity or in the constitution would be just as one-sided as to attribute that aetiology solely to the accidental influences brought to bear upon sexuality in the course of the subject’s life - whereas better insight shows that the essence of these illnesses lies solely in a disturbance of the organism’s sexual processes.

VIENNA, June 1905.

1584

PSYCHICAL (OR MENTAL) TREATMENT

(1890)

1585

Intentionally left blank

1586

PSYCHICAL (OR MENTAL) TREATMENT

‘Psyche’ is a Greek word which may be translated ‘mind’. Thus ‘psychical treatment’ means ‘mental treatment’. The term might accordingly be supposed to signify ‘treatment of the pathological phenomena of mental life’. This, however, is not its meaning. ‘Psychical treatment’ denotes, rather, treatment taking its start in the mind, treatment (whether of mental or physical disorders) by measures which operate in the first instance and immediately upon the human mind.

Foremost among such measures is the use of words; and words are the essential tool of mental treatment. A layman will no doubt find it hard to understand how pathological disorders of the body and mind can be eliminated by ‘mere’ words. He will feel that he is being asked to believe in magic. And he will not be so very wrong, for the words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered-down magic. But we shall have to follow a roundabout path in order to explain how science sets about restoring to words a part at least of their former magical power.

It is only comparatively recently, too, that physicians with a scientific training have learnt to appreciate the value of mental treatment. And we can easily see why this was so when we reflect on the evolution of medicine during the last half-century. After a somewhat unfruitful period during which it was dependent on what was known as ‘Natural Philosophy’, it came under the happy influence of the natural sciences and has achieved the greatest advances alike as a science and as an art: it has shown that the organism is built up from microscopically small elements (the cells), it has learnt to understand the physics and chemistry of the various vital processes (functions), it has distinguished the visible and observable modifications which are brought about in the bodily organs by different morbid processes, and has discovered, on the other hand, the signs that reveal the operation of deep-lying morbid processes in the living body; moreover it has identified a great number of the micro-organisms which cause illness and, with the help of its newly acquired knowledge, it has reduced to a quite extraordinary degree the dangers arising from severe surgical operations. All of these advances and discoveries were related to the physical side of man, and it followed, as a result of an incorrect though easily understandable trend of thought, that physicians came to restrict their interest to the physical side of things and were glad to leave the mental field to be dealt with by the philosophers whom they despised.

Psychical (Or Mental) Treatment

1587

Modern medicine, it is true, had reason enough for studying the indisputable connection between the body and the mind; but it never ceased to represent mental events as determined by physical ones and dependent on them. Thus stress was laid on the fact that intellectual functioning was conditional upon the presence of a normally developed and sufficiently nourished brain, that any disease of that organ led to disturbances of intellectual functioning, that the introduction of toxic substances into the circulation could produce certain states of mental illness, or - to descend to more trivial matters - that dreams could be modified by stimuli brought to bear upon a sleeper for experimental purposes.

The relation between body and mind (in animals no less than in human beings) is a reciprocal one; but in earlier times the other side of this relation, the effect of the mind upon the body, found little favour in the eyes of physicians. They seemed to be afraid of granting mental life any independence, for fear of that implying an abandonment of the scientific ground on which they stood.

This one-sided attitude of medicine towards the body has undergone a gradual change in the course of the last decade and a half, a change brought about directly by clinical experience. There are a large number of patients, suffering from affections of greater or less severity, whose disorders and complaints make great demands on the skill of their physicians, but in whom no visible or observable signs of a pathological process can be discovered either during their life or after their death, in spite of all the advances in the methods of investigation made by scientific medicine. One group of these patients are distinguished by the copiousness and variety of their symptoms: they are incapable of intellectual work because of headaches or inability to concentrate their attention, their eyes ache when they read, their legs become fatigued when they walk, develop dull pains or go to sleep, their digestion is disturbed by distressing sensations, by eructations or gastric spasms, they cannot defaecate without aperients, they are subject to sleeplessness, and so on. They may suffer from all these disorders simultaneously or in succession, or from only a selection of them; but in every case the illness is evidently the same. Moreover, its signs are often variable and replace one another. A patient who has hitherto been incapacitated by headaches but has had a fairly good digestion may next day enjoy a clear head but may thenceforward be unable to manage most kinds of food. Again, his sufferings may suddenly cease if there is a marked change in the circumstances of his existence. If he is travelling he may feel perfectly well and be able to enjoy the most varied diet without any ill effects, but when he gets home he may once more have to restrict himself to sour milk. In a few cases the disorder - whether it is a pain or a weakness resembling a paralysis - may suddenly pass from one side of the body to the other: it may jump from his right side to the corresponding part of the body on his left side. But in every instance it is to be observed that the symptoms are very clearly influenced by excitement, emotion, worry, etc., and also that they can disappear and give place to perfect health without leaving any traces, even if they have persisted over a long period.

Medical research has at last shown that people of this kind are not to be looked upon as suffering from a disease of the stomach or of the eyes or whatever it may be, but that it must be a question in their case of an illness of the nervous system as a whole. Examination of the brain and nerves of these patients has so far, however, revealed no perceptible changes; and, indeed, some of the features of their symptomatology prohibit any expectation that even more accurate methods of investigation could ever discover changes of a sort that would throw light upon the illness. This condition has been described as ‘nervousness’ (neurasthenia or hysteria) and has been characterized as a merely ‘functional’ disorder of the nervous system.¹ Incidentally, an exhaustive examination of the brain (after the patient’s death) has been equally without results in the case of many more permanent nervous disorders, as well as in illnesses with exclusively mental symptoms, such as what are known as obsessions and delusional insanity.

¹ See Volume II, Part X, Chapter 4 [of the work, Die Gesundheit, in which this paper of Freud’s first appeared.]

Psychical (Or Mental) Treatment

1588

Physicians were thus faced by the problem of investigating the nature and origin of the symptoms shown by these nervous or neurotic patients. In the course of this investigation it was found that in some at least of these patients the signs of their illness originate from nothing other than a change in the action of their minds upon their bodies and that the immediate cause of their disorder is to be looked for in their minds. What may be the remoter causes of the disturbance which affects their minds is another question, with which we need not now concern ourselves. But medical science was here provided with an opportunity for directing its full attention to what had previously been the neglected side of the mutual relation between body and mind.

It is not until we have studied pathological phenomena that we can get an insight into normal ones. Many things which had long been known of the influence of the mind on the body were only now brought into their true perspective. The commonest, everyday example of the mind’s action on the body, and one that is to be observed in everyone, is offered by what is known as the ‘expression of the emotions’. A man’s states of mind are manifested, almost without exception, in the tensions and relaxations of his facial muscles, in the adaptations of his eyes, in the amount of blood in the vessels of his skin, in the modifications in his vocal apparatus and in the movements of his limbs and in particular of his hands. These concomitant physical changes are for the most part of no advantage to the person concerned; on the contrary, they often stand in his way if he wishes to conceal his mental processes from other people. But they serve these other people as trustworthy indications from which his mental processes can be inferred and in which more confidence can be placed than in any simultaneous verbal expressions that may be made deliberately. If we are able to submit anyone to a more accurate examination during certain of his mental activities, we come upon further physical consequences, in the shape of changes in his heart-action, alterations in the distribution of blood in his body, and so on.

Psychical (Or Mental) Treatment

1589

In certain mental states described as ‘affects’, the part played by the body is so obvious and on so large a scale that some psychologists have even adopted the view that the essence of these affects consists only in their physical manifestations. It is a matter of common knowledge that extraordinary changes occur in the facial expression, in the circulation, in the excretions and in the state of tension of the voluntary muscles under the influence of fear, of rage, of mental pain and of sexual delight. What is less well known, though equally well established, is the occurrence of other physical results of the affects which cannot be counted as their expression. Persistent affective states of a distressing or ‘depressive’ nature (as they are called), such as sorrow, worry or grief, reduce the state of nourishment of the whole body, cause the hair to turn white, the fat to disappear and the walls of the blood-vessels to undergo morbid changes. On the other hand, under the influence of feelings of joy, of ‘happiness’, we find that the whole body blossoms out and shows signs of a renewal of youth. The major affects evidently have a large bearing on the capacity to resist infectious illness; a good example of this is to be seen in the medical observation that there is a far greater liability to contract such diseases as typhus and dysentery in defeated armies than in victorious ones. The affects, moreover, - this applies almost exclusively to depressive affects - are often sufficient in themselves to bring about both diseases of the nervous system accompanied by manifest anatomical changes and also diseases of other organs. In such cases it must be assumed that the patient already had a predisposition, though hitherto an inoperative one, to the disease in question.

States of illness that are already present can be very considerably influenced by violent affects. Such changes are usually for the worse; but there is no lack of instances in which a severe shock or a sudden bereavement brings about a peculiar alteration in the tone of the organism which may have a favourable influence on some well-established pathological condition or may even bring it to an end. Finally, there can be no doubt that the duration of life can be appreciably shortened by depressive affects and that a violent shock, or a deep humiliation or disgrace, may put a sudden end to life. Strange to say, this same result may be found to follow too from the unexpected impact of a great joy.

Psychical (Or Mental) Treatment

1590

The affects in the narrower sense are, it is true, characterized by a quite special connection with somatic processes; but, strictly speaking, all mental states, including those that we usually regard as ‘processes of thought’, are to some degree ‘affective’, and not one of them is without its physical manifestations or is incapable of modifying somatic processes. Even when a person is engaged in quietly thinking in a string of ‘ideas’, there are a constant series of excitations, corresponding to the content of these ideas, which are discharged into the smooth or striated muscles. These excitations can be made apparent if they are appropriately reinforced, and certain striking and, indeed, ostensibly ‘supernatural’ phenomena can be explained by this means. Thus, what is known as ‘thought-reading’ [Gedanken erraten] may be explained by small, involuntary muscular movements carried out by the ‘medium’ in the course of an experiment - when, for instance, he has to make someone discover a hidden object. The whole phenomenon might more suitably be described as ‘thought-betraying’ [Gedanken verraten].

The processes of volition and attention are also capable of exercising a profound effect on somatic processes and of playing a large part in promoting or hindering physical illnesses. A famous English physician has reported that he can succeed in producing a great variety of sensations and pains in any part of his body to which he may choose to direct his attention, and the majority of people appear to behave similarly. It is in general true that in forming a judgement of pains (which are usually regarded as physical phenomena) we must bear in mind their unmistakable dependence upon mental determinants. Laymen, who like to sum up mental influences of this kind under the name of ‘imagination’, are inclined to have little respect for pains that are due to imagination as contrasted with those caused by injury, illness or inflammation. But this is clearly unjust. However pains may be caused - even by imagination - they themselves are no less real and no less violent on that account.

Psychical (Or Mental) Treatment

1591

Just as pains are produced or increased by having attention paid to them, so, too, they disappear if attention is diverted from them. This experience can always be employed as a means of soothing children; adult soldiers do not feel the pain of a wound in the feverish heat of battle; martyrs are probably quite impervious to the pain of their tortures in the over-excitement of their religious feeling and in the concentration of all their thoughts upon the heavenly reward that awaits them. It is not so easy to produce evidence of the influence of volition on pathological somatic processes; but it is quite possible that a determination to recover or a will to die may have an effect on the outcome even of severe and precarious illnesses.

Our interest is most particularly engaged by the mental state of expectation, which puts in motion a number of mental forces that have the greatest influence on the onset and cure of physical diseases. Fearful expectation is certainly not without its effect on the result. It would be of importance to know with certainty whether it has as great a bearing as is supposed on falling ill; for instance, whether it is true that during an epidemic those who are afraid of contracting the illness are in the greatest danger. The contrary state of mind, in which expectation is coloured by hope and faith, is an effective force with which we have to reckon, strictly speaking, in all our attempts at treatment and cure. We could not otherwise account for the peculiar results which we find produced by medicaments and therapeutic procedures.

The most noticeable effects of this kind of expectation coloured by faith are to be found in the ‘miraculous’ cures which are brought about even to-day under our own eyes without the help of any medical skill. Miraculous cures properly so-called take place in the case of believers under the influence of adjuncts calculated to intensify religious feelings - that is to say, in places where a miracle-working image is worshipped, or where a holy or divine personage has revealed himself to men and has promised them relief from their sufferings in return for their worship, or where the relics of a saint are preserved as a treasure. Religious faith alone does not seem to find it easy to suppress illness by means of expectation; for as a rule other contrivances as well are brought into play in the case of miraculous cures. The times and seasons at which divine mercy is sought must be specially indicated; the patient must submit to physical toil, to the trials and sacrifices of a pilgrimage, before he can become worthy of this divine mercy.

Psychical (Or Mental) Treatment

1592

It would be convenient, but quite wrong, simply to refuse all credence to these miraculous cures and to seek to explain the accounts of them as a combination of pious fraud and inaccurate observation. Though an explanation of this kind may often be justified, it is not enough to enable us to dismiss entirely the fact of miraculous cures. They do really occur and have occurred at every period of history. And they concern not merely illnesses of mental origin - those, that is, which are based on ‘imagination’ and are therefore likely to be especially affected by the circumstances of a pilgrimage - but also illnesses with an ‘organic’ basis which had previously resisted all the efforts of physicians.

There is no need, however, to bring forward anything other than mental forces in order to explain miraculous cures. Even under conditions such as these, nothing happens that can be considered as beyond our understanding. Everything proceeds naturally. Indeed, the power of religious faith is reinforced in these cases by a number of eminently human motive forces. The individual’s pious belief is intensified by the enthusiasm of the crowd of people in whose midst he makes his way as a rule to the sacred locality. All the mental impulses of an individual can be enormously magnified by group influence such as this. In cases in which someone proceeds to the holy place by himself, the reputation of the place and the respect in which it is held act as substitutes for the influence of the group, so that in fact the power of a group is once more in operation. And there is yet another way in which this influence makes itself felt. Since it is well known that divine mercy is always shown only to a few of the many who seek it, each of these is eager to be among the chosen few; the ambition that lies hidden in everyone comes to the help of pious faith. Where so many powerful forces converge, we need feel no surprise if the goal is sometimes really reached.

Even those who are without religious faith need not forgo miraculous cures. In their case reputation and group-influence act as a complete substitute for faith. There are always fashionable treatments and fashionable physicians, and these play an especially dominant part in high society, where the most powerful psychological motive forces are the endeavour to excel and to do what the ‘best’ people do. Fashionable treatments of this kind produce therapeutic results which are outside the scope of their actual power, and the same procedures effect far more in the hands of a fashionable doctor (who, for instance, may have become well-known as an attendant upon some prominent personality) than in those of another physician. Thus there are human as well as divine miracle-workers. Such men, however, who have reached eminence owing to the favour of fashion and of imitation, soon lose their power, as is to be expected from the nature of the forces which give it to them.

Psychical (Or Mental) Treatment

1593

An intelligible dissatisfaction with the frequent inadequacy of the help afforded by medical skill, and perhaps, too, an internal rebellion against the duress of scientific thought, which reflects the remorselessness of nature, have in all periods (and in our own once more) imposed a strange condition on the therapeutic powers alike of persons and of procedures. The necessary faith only emerges if the practitioner is not a doctor, if he can boast of having no knowledge of the scientific basis of therapeutics, if the procedure has not been subjected to accurate testing but is recommended by some popular prejudice. Hence it is that we find a swarm of ‘nature cures’ and ‘nature healers’, who compete with physicians in the exercise of their profession and of whom we can at least say with some degree of certainty that they do far more harm than good. If this gives us grounds for blaming the patients’ faith, we must yet not be so ungrateful as to forget that the same force is constantly at work in support of our own medical efforts. The results of every procedure laid down by the physician and of every treatment that he undertakes are probably composed of two portions. And one of these, which is sometimes greater and sometimes less, but can never be completely disregarded, is determined by the patient’s mental attitude. The faith with which he meets the immediate effect of a medical procedure depends on the one hand on the amount of his own desire to be cured, and on the other hand on his confidence that he has taken the right steps in that direction - of his general respect, that is, for medical skill - and, further, on the power which he attributes to his doctor’s personality, and even on the purely human liking aroused in him by the doctor. There are some physicians who have a greater capacity than others for winning their patients’ confidence; a patient will often feel better the very moment the doctor enters his room.

Psychical (Or Mental) Treatment

1594

Physicians have practised mental treatment from the beginning of time, and in early days to a far greater extent even than to-day. If by mental treatment we mean an endeavour to produce such mental states and conditions in the patient as will be the most propitious for his recovery, this kind of medical treatment is historically the oldest. Psychical treatment was almost the only sort at the disposal of the peoples of antiquity, and they invariably reinforced the effects of therapeutic potions and other therapeutic measures by intensive mental treatment. Such familiar procedures as the use of magical formulas and purificatory baths, or the elicitation of oracular dreams by sleeping in the temple precincts, can only have had a curative effect by psychical means. The physician’s personality acquired a reputation derived directly from divine power, since in its beginnings the art of healing lay in the hands of priests. So that then as now the physician’s personality was one of the chief instruments for bringing the patient into a state of mind favourable for his recovery.

Now, too, we begin to understand the ‘magic’ of words. Words are the most important media by which one man seeks to bring his influence to bear on another; words are a good method of producing mental changes in the person to whom they are addressed. So that there is no longer anything puzzling in the assertion that the magic of words can remove the symptoms of illness, and especially such as are themselves founded on mental states.

All the mental influences which have proved effective in curing illnesses have something incalculable about them. Affects, concentration of the will, distracting the attention, expectation coloured by faith - all of these forces, which occasionally remove an illness, sometimes fail to do so without there being anything in the character of the illness to account for the different result. What stands in the way of regularity in the therapeutic results achieved is evidently the autocratic nature of the personalities of the subjects, with their variety of mental differences. Since physicians came to realize clearly the important part played in recovery by the patient’s state of mind, the idea naturally occurred to them of no longer leaving it to the patient to decide how much mental compliance he should show but of deliberately imposing a propitious state of mind by suitable methods. It is from this attempt that modern mental treatment has taken its start.

Psychical (Or Mental) Treatment

1595

Quite a number of different methods of treatment have thus arisen, some of them simple to arrive at and others which could only be reached on the basis of complex hypotheses. It is easy to see, for instance, that the physician, who can no longer command respect as a priest or as the possessor of secret knowledge, should use his personality in such a way as to gain his patient’s confidence and, to some degree, his affection. He himself may succeed in doing this with only a limited number of patients, whereas other patients, according to their inclinations and degree of education, will be attracted to other physicians. Such a distribution will serve a useful purpose; but if the right of a patient to make a free choice of his doctor were suspended, an important precondition for influencing him mentally would be abolished.

There are many very effective mental procedures which the physician is obliged to renounce. He either has not the power or has not the right to invoke them. This applies in particular to the provocation of strong affects - the most powerful of all the means by which the mind affects the body. The vicissitudes of life often cure illnesses through the experience of great joy, through the satisfaction of needs or the fulfilment of wishes. The physician, who is often impotent outside his profession, cannot compete along these lines. It might be more within his power to employ fear and fright for therapeutic ends; but, except in the case of children, he must have the gravest doubts about the use of such double-edged tools. On the other hand, the physician must rule out any relations with his patient that are bound up with tender feelings, owing to their implications in practical life. Thus from the first his power to bring about mental changes in his patients seems so restricted that mental treatment conducted on a deliberate plan would seem to offer no advantages over the earlier haphazard method.

The physician can seek to direct his patient’s volition and attention, and he has good grounds for doing so in the case of various pathological conditions. He may, for instance, persistently oblige a person who believes he is paralysed to carry out the movements of which he professes himself incapable; or he may refuse to fall in with the wishes of an anxious patient who insists on being examined for an illness from which he is quite certainly not suffering. In these instances the physician will be taking the right course, but such isolated cases would scarcely justify us in setting up mental treatment as a special therapeutic procedure. There exists, nevertheless, a queer and unforeseeable method which offers the physician a possibility of exercising a profound, even though transitory, influence on the mental life of his patients and of employing that influence for therapeutic purposes.

Psychical (Or Mental) Treatment

1596

It has long been known, though it has only been established beyond all doubt during the last few decades, that it is possible, by certain gentle means, to put people into a quite peculiar mental state very similar to sleep and on that account described as ‘hypnosis’. The various means by which hypnosis can be brought about have at first sight little in common. It is possible to hypnotize someone by getting him to stare fixedly at a bright object for some minutes, or by holding a watch to his ear for a similar length of time, or by repeatedly passing the open hands, at a short distance away, over his face and limbs. But the same result can be brought about by describing the onset of the state of hypnosis and its characteristics quietly and firmly to the subject - that is, by ‘talking him into’ hypnosis. The two procedures may also be combined. We may make the subject sit down, hold a finger in front of his eyes, tell him to gaze at it fixedly and then say to him: ‘You’re feeling tired. Your eyes are closing; you can’t hold them open. Your limbs are heavy; you can’t move them any more. You’re falling asleep---' and so on. It will be observed that all the procedures have in common a fixing of the attention; in those first mentioned the attention is fatigued by slight and monotonous sensory stimuli. It is not yet satisfactorily explained, however, how it comes about that mere talking produces exactly the same state as the other procedures. Experienced hypnotists assert that by these means a definite hypnotic change can be brought about in some eighty per cent of subjects. There is no way of telling beforehand, however, which subjects are hypnotizable and which are not. Illness is far from being one of the necessary preconditions of hypnosis: normal people are said to be particularly easy to hypnotize, while some neurotics can only be hypnotized with great difficulty and the insane are completely resistant. The hypnotic state exhibits a great variety of gradations. In its lightest degree the hypnotic subject is aware only of something like a slight insensibility, while the most extreme degree, which is marked by special peculiarities, is known as ‘somnambulism’, on account of its resemblance to the natural phenomenon of sleep-walking. But hypnosis is in no sense a sleep like our nocturnal sleep or like the sleep produced by drugs. Changes occur in it and mental functions are retained during it which are absent in normal sleep.

Psychical (Or Mental) Treatment

1597

Some of the phenomena of hypnosis (for instance, alterations in muscular activity) possess a merely scientific interest. But the most significant indication of hypnosis, and the most important one from our point of view, lies in the hypnotic subject’s attitude to his hypnotist. While the subject behaves to the rest of the external world as though he were asleep, that is, as though all his senses were diverted from it, he is awake in his relation to the person who hypnotized him; he hears and sees him alone, and him he understands and answers. This phenomenon, which is described as rapport in the case of hypnosis, finds a parallel in the way in which some people sleep - for instance, a mother who is nursing her baby. It is so striking that it may well lead us to an understanding of the relation between the hypnotic subject and the hypnotist.

But the fact that the subject’s universe is, so to say, confined to the hypnotist is not the whole story. There is the further fact of the former’s docility in relation to the latter: he becomes obedient and credulous - in the case of deep hypnosis, to an almost unlimited extent. And the manner in which this obedience and credulity are carried out reveals a characteristic of the hypnotic state, namely that in the hypnotized subject the influence of the mind over the body is extraordinarily increased. If the hypnotist says ‘You can’t move your arm’, the arm drops motionless; the subject obviously tries with all his strength but is unable to move it. If the hypnotist says: ‘Your arm’s moving of its own accord, you can’t stop it’, the arm moves and the subject is seen making vain efforts to keep it still. The idea which the hypnotist has given to the subject by his words has produced in him precisely the mental-physical behaviour corresponding to the idea’s content. This implies on the one hand obedience but on the other an increase in the physical influence of an idea. Words have once more regained their magic.

Psychical (Or Mental) Treatment

1598

The same thing happens in the domain of sense perceptions. The hypnotist says: ‘You see a snake; you’re smelling a rose; you’re listening to the loveliest music’, and the hypnotic subject sees, smells and hears what is required of him by the idea that he has been given. How do we know that the subject really has these perceptions? It might be thought that he is only pretending to have them. But after all we have no reason for doubts on the point; for he behaves exactly as though he had them, he expresses all the appropriate emotions, and in some circumstances he can even describe his imaginary perceptions and experiences after the hypnosis is at an end. We then perceive that he has been seeing and hearing just as we see and hear in dreams - he has been ‘hallucinating’. He was evidently so credulous in relation to the hypnotist that he was convinced that there must be a snake to be seen when the hypnotist told him so; and this conviction had such a strong effect on his body that he really saw the snake - a thing which, incidentally, can sometimes happen even to people who have not been hypnotized.

It may be remarked, by the way, that, outside hypnosis and in real life, credulity such as the subject has in relation to his hypnotist is shown only by a child towards his beloved parents, and that an attitude of similar subjection on the part of one person towards another has only one parallel, though a complete one - namely in certain love-relationships where there is extreme devotion. A combination of exclusive attachment and credulous obedience is in general among the characteristics of love.

Psychical (Or Mental) Treatment

1599

Some further points may be mentioned in connection with the state of hypnosis. The words spoken by the hypnotist which have the magical results that I have described are known as a ‘suggestion’ and it has become customary to apply the term as well where there is merely an intention to produce a similar effect. Not only do the hypnotic subject’s movements and feelings obey suggestions, but all his other mental activities; and he does not as a rule take any action on his own initiative. Hypnotic obedience can be employed in making a number of highly remarkable experiments, which afford a deep insight into the workings of the mind and produce in the observer an ineradicable conviction of the unsuspected power of the mind over the body. Just as a hypnotized subject can be obliged to see what is not there, so he can be forbidden to see what is there and is seeking to impress itself on his senses - some particular person, for instance. (This is known as a ‘negative hallucination’.) The person in question then finds it impossible to attract the subject’s attention by any kind of stimulation; he is treated as though he were ‘thin air’. Again, a suggestion may be made to the subject to carry out some action a certain length of time after waking from hypnosis (‘post-hypnotic suggestion’); the subject keeps to the allotted time and performs the suggested action in the middle of his waking state without being able to give any reason for it. If he is asked why he has done what he has, he will either refer to an obscure impulse which he was unable to resist, or he will invent some half-satisfactory excuse without remembering the real explanation - namely the suggestion he has been given.

The state of hypnosis is brought to an end without any difficulty by the hypnotist’s authority asserted in the words: ‘Wake up!’ After the deepest hypnosis there is no recollection of anything that has been experienced during it under the hypnotist’s influence. That portion of the subject’s mental life remains cut off, as it were, from the rest. Other subjects retain a dream-like memory, and yet others remember everything but report that they have been under an irresistible mental compulsion.

Psychical (Or Mental) Treatment

1600

The scientific gain brought to physicians and psychologists by a knowledge of the facts of hypnotism can scarcely be exaggerated. But in order to gauge the practical importance of the new discoveries we must put a physician in place of the hypnotist and a patient in place of the hypnotic subject. Hypnosis would then seem pre-ordained to fulfil all the physician’s requirements, in so far as he seeks to act towards the patient as a ‘mind-doctor’. Hypnosis endows the physician with an authority such as was probably never possessed by the priest or the miracle man, since it concentrates the subject’s whole interest upon the figure of the physician; it does away with the autocratic power of the patient’s mind which, as we have seen, interferes so capriciously with the influence of the mind over the body; it automatically produces an increase of the mind’s control over the body, such as is normally to be observed only as an effect of the most powerful emotions; and, owing to the possibility of arranging that the instructions given to the patient during hypnosis shall only become manifest subsequently, in his normal state - owing, that is, to post-hypnotic suggestion -, hypnosis enables the physician to use the great power he wields during hypnosis in order to bring about changes in the patient in his waking condition. A simple pattern of procedure would thus seem to emerge for the purposes of mental treatment: the physician puts the patient into a state of hypnosis, he suggests to him (according to the particular circumstances) that he is not ill and that after waking he will not be aware of his symptoms. The physician then wakes the patient up and may feel confident that the suggestion has done its duty against the illness. And if a single application of this procedure were not sufficient, it could be repeated as many times as necessary.

There is only one consideration that might discourage the physician and the patient from making use of such a promising therapeutic method: the possibility that the advantages of hypnotism might be balanced by some damage - if, for instance, it left behind it a permanent disorder or weakness in the subject’s mind. But enough experience has already been gained to set aside such doubts: single hypnotic treatments are completely harmless and even if they are frequently repeated they are on the whole without bad effects. Only one point is to be noticed: if circumstances demand a persistent use of hypnotism, the patient falls into a habit of hypnosis and dependence on the physician which cannot be among the purposes of the therapeutic procedure.

Psychical (Or Mental) Treatment

1601

Thus hypnotic treatment really implies a great extension of medical power and consequently an advance in therapy. Every sufferer may be advised to entrust himself to it, so long as it is carried out by an experienced and trustworthy physician. Hypnosis should, however, be used in a manner different from what is usual to-day. As a rule this method of treatment is only embarked upon after every other method has failed and when the patient is already despondent and dejected. He has then to leave his own doctor, who cannot or does not employ hypnotism, and turn to a strange doctor, who as a rule does not or cannot employ anything else. Both practices are disadvantageous to the patient. The family doctor should himself be familiar with hypnotic procedure and he should make use of it from the first, as soon as he judges the illness and the patient appropriate for it. Wherever hypnotism can be employed it should be on a par with other therapeutic procedures and should not be regarded as a last resort or even as a descent from science to quackery. But hypnotism can be employed not only in all nervous conditions and in disorders due to the ‘imagination’, as well as for breaking morbid habits (such as alcoholism, morphine addiction, or sexual aberrations), but also in many organic diseases, even of an inflammatory nature, in which, though the underlying disorder persists, there is a prospect of relieving the symptoms (such as pains or impediments to movement) which are troubling the patient. The selection of cases for hypnotic treatment must depend entirely on the judgement of the physician.

The time has now come, however, to dissipate the notion that with the expedient of hypnosis a period of easy miracle-working has dawned for the physician. A number of circumstances must be taken into account which are calculated to lower our expectations from hypnotic therapy considerably, and to reduce to their proper proportions the hopes that may have been raised in patients. First and foremost, one of the basic assumptions turns out to be untenable: namely, that hypnosis makes it possible to deprive patients of the interfering autocratic element in their mental behaviour. In fact they retain it, and manifest it even in their attitude to the attempt to hypnotize them. It was stated above that some eighty per cent of people can be hypnotized; but that high figure is only reached by including among the positive cases any that show the slightest sign of being influenced. Really deep hypnoses, with complete tractability, such as are chosen as examples in describing the state, are actually rare or at all events not as frequent as one would wish from the therapeutic point of view. The impression made by this fact can, however, in turn be modified when it is borne in mind that depth of hypnosis and tractability to suggestions do not go pari passu; so that one often sees good suggestive results where there is no more than a slight hypnotic insensibility. But even if we consider hypnotic tractability independently, as being the more essential feature of the condition, it has to be admitted that different people show their idiosyncrasies by only letting themselves be influenced up to a certain degree of tractability, at which point they come to a halt. Thus different people show a very varying degree of suitability for hypnotic treatment. If it were possible to find a means by which all these various grades of the hypnotic state could be intensified to the point of complete hypnosis, the idiosyncrasies of patients would once more have been eliminated and the ideal of mental treatment would have been attained. But this advance has not yet been made; it still depends far more on the patient than on the physician with what degree of tractability a suggestion will be received - it depends once more, that is, upon the patient’s choice.

Psychical (Or Mental) Treatment

1602

And there is another, still more important consideration. In describing the very remarkable results of suggestion, people are only too ready to forget that here, as in all mental operations, relative size and strength must be taken into account. If we put a healthy person into deep hypnosis and then tell him to take a bite out of a potato under the impression that it is a pear, or if we tell him that he is meeting one of his acquaintances and must greet him as such, he is likely to prove completely tractable, because the hypnotized subject has no serious reason for resisting the suggestion. But in the case of other instructions - if, for instance, we ask a naturally modest girl to uncover herself or if we ask an honest man to steal some valuable object - we may already find the subject putting up a resistance, which may even go to the length of his refusing to obey the suggestion. This teaches us that even in the best hypnosis suggestion does not exercise unlimited power but only power of a definite strength. The hypnotic subject will make small sacrifices, but, just as though he were awake, he hesitates before making great ones. If, then, we are dealing with a patient, and urge him by suggestion to give up his illness, we perceive that this means a great sacrifice to him and not a small one. Here the power of suggestion is contending against the force which created the symptom, and maintains them, and experience shows that that force is of quite a different order of strength from hypnotic influences. The same patient who is perfectly tractable in putting himself into any dream-situation one may suggest to him (if it is not actually objectionable) may remain completely recalcitrant towards a suggestion which denies the reality of, let us say, an imaginary paralysis. There is the further fact, moreover, that precisely neurotic patients are for the most part bad hypnotic subjects, so that the struggle against the powerful forces by which the illness is rooted in the patient’s mind has to be waged not by a complete hypnotic influence but only by a fragment of it.

Psychical (Or Mental) Treatment

1603

Thus suggestion is not certain as a matter of course of defeating the illness as soon as hypnosis (even deep hypnosis) has been achieved. A further battle has to be fought, and its outcome is very often uncertain. A single hypnotic treatment will accordingly effect nothing against severe disturbances of mental origin. If, however, hypnosis is repeated, it loses some of the miraculous effect which the patient may perhaps have anticipated. A succession of hypnoses may eventually bring about by degrees the influence over the illness which was lacking at first, till in the end a satisfactory result is achieved. But a hypnotic treatment such as this may be just as tedious and wearisome as a treatment of any other kind.

There is yet another way in which the relative weakness of suggestion is betrayed as compared with the illnesses it has to combat. It is true that suggestion can bring about a cessation of the symptoms of an illness - but only for a short time. At the end of this time they return and have to be repelled once again by renewed hypnosis and suggestion. If this course of events is repeated often enough, it usually exhausts the patience both of the patient and the physician and ends in the abandonment of hypnotic treatment. These, too, are the cases in which the patient becomes dependent on the physician and a kind of addiction to hypnosis is established.

Psychical (Or Mental) Treatment

1604

It is a good thing for patients to be aware of these weaknesses in hypnotic therapy and of the possibilities of disappointment in its use. The curative power of hypnotic suggestion is something real and it needs no exaggerated recommendation. On the other hand, it is not surprising that physicians, to whom hypnotic mental treatment promised so much more than it could give, are indefatigable in their search for other procedures, which would make possible a deeper, or at least a less unpredictable, influence on a patient’s mind. It may safely be anticipated that systematic modern mental treatment, which is a quite recent revival of ancient therapeutic methods, will provide physicians with far more powerful weapons for the fight against illness. A deeper insight into the processes of mental life, the beginnings of which are based precisely on hypnotic experience, will point out the ways and means to this end.

1605

PSYCHOPATHIC CHARACTERS ON THE STAGE

(1942 [1905 or 1906])

1606

Intentionally left blank

1607

PSYCHOPATHIC CHARACTERS ON THE STAGE

If, as has been assumed since the time of Aristotle, the purpose of drama is to arouse ‘terror and pity’ and so ‘to purge the emotions’, we can describe that purpose in rather more detail by saying that it is a question of opening up sources of pleasure or enjoyment in our emotional life, just as, in the case of intellectual activity, joking or fun open up similar sources, many of which that activity had made inaccessible. In this connection the prime factor is unquestionably the process of getting rid of one’s own emotions by ‘blowing off steam’; and the consequent enjoyment corresponds on the one hand to the relief produced by a thorough discharge and on the other hand, no doubt, to an accompanying sexual excitation; for the latter, as we may suppose, appears as a by-product whenever an affect is aroused, and gives people the sense, which they so much desire, of a raising of the potential of their psychical state. Being present as an interested spectator at a spectacle or play does for adults what play does for children, whose hesitant hopes of being able to do what grown-up people do are in that way gratified. The spectator is a person who experiences too little, who feels that he is a ‘poor wretch to whom nothing of importance can happen’, who has long been obliged to damp down, or rather displace, his ambition to stand in his own person at the hub of world affairs; he longs to feel and to act and to arrange things according to his desires - in short, to be a hero. And the playwright and actor enable him to do this by allowing him to identify himself with a hero. They spare him something, too. For the spectator knows quite well that actual heroic conduct such as this would be impossible for him without pains and sufferings and acute fears, which would almost cancel out the enjoyment. He knows, moreover, that he has only one life and that he might perhaps perish even in a single such struggle against adversity. Accordingly, his enjoyment is based on an illusion; that is to say, his suffering is mitigated by the certainty that, firstly, it is someone other than himself who is acting and suffering on the stage, and, secondly, that after all it is only a game, which can threaten no damage to his personal security. In these circumstances he can allow himself to enjoy being a ‘great man’, to give way without a qualm to such suppressed impulses as a craving for freedom in religious, political, social and sexual matters, and to ‘blow off steam’ in every direction in the various grand scenes that form part of the life represented on the stage.

Psychopathic Characters On The Stage

1608

Several other forms of creative writing, however, are equally subject to these same preconditions for enjoyment. Lyric poetry serves the purpose, more than anything, of giving vent to intense feelings of many sorts - just as was at one time the case with dancing. Epic poetry aims chiefly at making it possible to feel the enjoyment of a great heroic character in his hour of triumph. But drama seeks to explore emotional possibilities more deeply and to give an enjoyable shape even to forebodings of misfortune; for this reason it depicts the hero in his struggles, or rather (with masochistic satisfaction) in defeat. This relation to suffering and misfortune might be taken as characteristic of drama, whether, as happens in serious plays, it is only concern that is aroused, and afterwards allayed, or whether, as happens in tragedies, the suffering is actually realized. The fact that drama originated out of sacrificial rites (cf. the goat and the scapegoat) in the cult of the gods cannot be unrelated to this meaning of drama. It appeases, as it were, a rising rebellion against the divine regulation of the universe, which is responsible for the existence of suffering. Heroes are first and foremost rebels against God or against something divine; and pleasure is derived, as it seems, from the affliction of a weaker being in the face of divine might - a pleasure due to masochistic satisfaction as well as to direct enjoyment of a character whose greatness is insisted upon in spite of everything. Here we have a mood like that of Prometheus, but alloyed with a paltry readiness to let oneself be soothed for the moment by a temporary satisfaction.

Psychopathic Characters On The Stage

1609

Suffering of every kind is thus the subject-matter of drama, and from this suffering it promises to give the audience pleasure. Thus we arrive at a first precondition of this form of art: that it should not cause suffering to the audience, that it should know how to compensate, by means of the possible satisfactions involved, for the sympathetic suffering which is aroused. (Modern writers have particularly often failed to obey this rule.) But the suffering represented is soon restricted to mental suffering; for no one wants physical suffering who knows how quickly all mental enjoyment is brought to an end by the changes in somatic feeling that physical suffering brings about. If we are sick we have one wish only: to be well again and to be quit of our present state. We call for the doctor and medicine, and for the removal of the inhibition on the play of phantasy which has pampered us into deriving enjoyment even from our own sufferings. If a spectator puts himself in the place of someone who is physically ill he finds himself without any capacity for enjoyment or psychical activity. Consequently a person who is physically ill can only figure on the stage as a piece of stage property and not as a hero, unless, indeed, some peculiar physical aspects of his illness make psychical activity possible - such, for instance, as the sick man’s forlorn state in the Philoctetes or the hopelessness of the sufferers in the class of plays that centre round consumptives.

People are acquainted with mental suffering principally in connection with the circumstances in which it is acquired; accordingly, dramas dealing with it require some event out of which the illness shall arise and they open with an exposition of this event. It is only an apparent exception that some plays, such as the Ajax and the Philoctetes, introduce the mental illness as already fully established; for in Greek tragedies, owing to the familiarity of the material, the curtain rises, as one might say, in the middle of the play. It is easy to give an exhaustive account of the preconditions governing an event of the kind that is here in question. It must be an event involving conflict and it must include an effort of will together with resistance. This precondition found its first and grandest fulfilment in a struggle against divinity. I have already said that a tragedy of this kind is one of rebellion, in which the dramatist and the audience take the side of the rebel. The less belief there comes to be in divinity, the more important becomes the human regulation of affairs; and it is this which, with increasing insight, comes to be held responsible for suffering. Thus the hero’s next struggle is against human society, and here we have the class of social tragedies. Yet another fulfilment of the necessary precondition is to be found in a struggle between individual men. Such are tragedies of character, which exhibit all the excitement of an ‘agon’, and which are best played out between outstanding characters who have freed themselves from the bond of human institutions - which, in fact, must have two heroes. Fusions between these two last classes, with a hero struggling against institutions embodied in powerful characters, are of course admissible without question. Pure tragedies of character lack the rebellious source of enjoyment, but this emerges once again no less forcibly in social dramas (in Ibsen for instance) than it did in the historical plays of the Greek classical tragedians.

Psychopathic Characters On The Stage

1610

Thus religious drama, social drama and drama of character differ essentially in the terrain on which the action that leads to the suffering is fought out. And we can now follow the course of drama on to yet another terrain, where it becomes psychological drama. Here the struggle that causes the suffering is fought out in the hero’s mind itself - a struggle between different impulses, and one which must have its end in the extinction, not of the hero, but of one of his impulses; it must end, that is to say, in a renunciation. Combinations of any kind between this precondition and the earlier types are, of course, possible; thus institutions, for instance, can themselves be the cause of internal conflicts. And this is where we have tragedies of love; for the suppression of love by social culture, by human conventions, or the struggle between ‘love and duty’, which is so familiar to us in opera, are the starting-point of almost endless varieties of situations of conflict: just as endless, in fact, as the erotic day-dreams of men.

But the series of possibilities grows wider; and psychological drama turns into psychopathological drama when the source of the suffering in which we take part and from which we are meant to derive pleasure is no longer a conflict between two almost equally conscious impulses but between a conscious impulse and a repressed one. Here the precondition of enjoyment is that the spectator should himself be a neurotic, for it is only such people who can derive pleasure instead of simple aversion from the revelation and the more or less conscious recognition of a repressed impulse. In anyone who is not neurotic this recognition will meet only with aversion and will call up a readiness to repeat the act of repression which has earlier been successfully brought to bear on the impulse: for in such people a single expenditure of repression has been enough to hold the repressed impulse completely in check. But in neurotics the repression is on the brink of failing; it is unstable and needs a constant renewal of expenditure, and this expenditure is spared if recognition of the impulse is brought about. Thus it is only in neurotics that a struggle can occur of a kind which can be made the subject of a drama; but even in them the dramatist will provoke not merely an enjoyment of the liberation but a resistance to it as well.

Psychopathic Characters On The Stage

1611

The first of these modern dramas is Hamlet. It has as its subject the way in which a man who has so far been normal becomes neurotic owing to the peculiar nature of the task by which he is faced, a man, that is, in whom an impulse that has hitherto been successfully suppressed endeavours to make its way into action. Hamlet is distinguished by three characteristics which seem important in connection with our present discussion. (1) The hero is not psychopathic, but only becomes psychopathic in the course of the action of the play. (2) The repressed impulse is one of those which are similarly repressed in all of us, and the repression of which is part and parcel of the foundations of our personal evolution. It is this repression which is shaken up by the situation in the play. As a result of these two characteristics it is easy for us to recognize ourselves in the hero: we are susceptible to the same conflict as he is, since ‘a person who does not lose his reason under certain conditions can have no reason to lose’. (3) It appears as a necessary precondition of this form of art that the impulse that is struggling into consciousness, however clearly it is recognizable, is never given a definite name; so that in the spectator too the process is carried through with his attention averted, and he is in the grip of his emotions instead of taking stock of what is happening. A certain amount of resistance is no doubt saved in this way, just as, in an analytic treatment, we find derivatives of the repressed material reaching consciousness, owing to a lower resistance, while the repressed material itself is unable to do so. After all, the conflict in Hamlet is so effectively concealed that it was left to me to unearth it.

Psychopathic Characters On The Stage

1612

It may be in consequence of disregarding these three preconditions that so many other psychopathic characters are as unserviceable on the stage as they are in real life. For the victim of a neurosis is someone into whose conflict we can gain no insight if we first meet it in a fully established state. But, per contra, if we recognize the conflict, we forget that he is a sick man, just as, if he himself recognizes it, he ceases to be ill. It would seem to be the dramatist’s business to induce the same illness in us; and this can best be achieved if we are made to follow the development of the illness along with the sufferer. This will be especially necessary where the repression does not already exist in us but has first to be set up; and this represents a step further than Hamlet in the use of neurosis on the stage. If we are faced by an unfamiliar and fully established neurosis, we shall be inclined to send for the doctor (just as we do in real life) and pronounce the character inadmissible to the stage.

This last mistake seems to occur in Bahr’s Die Andere, apart from a second one which is implicit in the problem presented in the play - namely, that it is impossible for us to put ourselves with conviction into the position of believing that one particular person has a prescriptive right to give the girl complete satisfaction. So that her case cannot become ours. Moreover, there remains a third mistake: namely that there is nothing left for us to discover and that our entire resistance is mobilized against this predetermined condition of love which is so unacceptable to us. Of the three formal preconditions that I have been discussing, the most important seems to be that of the diversion of attention.

In general, it may perhaps be said that the neurotic instability of the public and the dramatist’s skill in avoiding resistances and offering fore-pleasures can alone determine the limits set upon the employment of abnormal characters on the stage.

1613

JOKES AND THEIR RELATION TO THE UNCONSCIOUS

(1905)

1614

Intentionally left blank

1615

JOKES AND THEIR RELATION TO THE UNCONSCIOUS

A.  ANALYTIC PART

I

INTRODUCTION

Anyone who has at any time had occasion to enquire from the literature of aesthetics and psychology what light can be thrown on the nature of jokes and on the position they occupy will probably have to admit that jokes have not received nearly as much philosophical consideration as they deserve in view of the part they play in our mental life. Only a small number of thinkers can be named who have entered at all deeply into the problems of jokes. Among those who have discussed jokes, however, are such famous names as those of the novelist Jean Paul (Richter) and of the philosophers Theodor Vischer, Kuno Fischer and Theodor Lipps. But even with these writers the subject of jokes lies in the background, while the main interest of their enquiry is turned to the more comprehensive and attractive problem of the comic.

The first impression one derives from the literature is that it is quite impracticable to deal with jokes otherwise than in connection with the comic.

According to Lipps (1898),¹ a joke is ‘something comic which is entirely subjective’ - that is, something comic ‘which we produce, which is attached to action of ours as such, to which we invariably stand in the relation of subject and never of object, not even of voluntary object’ (ibid., 80). This is explained further by a remark to the effect that in general we call a joke ‘any conscious and successful evocation of what is comic, whether the comic of observation or of situation’ (ibid., 78).

¹ It is this book that has given me the courage to undertake this attempt as well as the possibility of doing so.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1616

Fischer (1889) illustrates the relation of jokes to the comic with the help of caricature, which in his account he places between them. The comic is concerned with the ugly in one of its manifestations: ‘If it is concealed, it must be uncovered in the light of the comic way of looking at things; if it is noticed only a little or scarcely at all, it must be brought forward and made obvious, so that it lies clear and open to the light of day . . . In this way caricature comes about.’ (Ibid., 45.)  - ’Our whole spiritual world, the intellectual kingdom of our thoughts and ideas, does not unfold itself before the gaze of external observation, it cannot be directly imagined pictorially and visibly; and yet it too contains its inhibitions, its weaknesses and its deformities - a wealth of ridiculous and comic contrasts. In order to emphasize these and make them accessible to aesthetic consideration, a force is necessary which is able not merely to imagine objects directly but itself to reflect on these images and to clarify them: a force that can illuminate thoughts. The only such force is judgement. A joke is a judgement which produces a comic contrast; it has already played a silent part in caricature, but only in judgement does it attain its peculiar form and the free sphere of its unfolding.’ (Ibid., 49-50.)

It will be seen that the characteristic which distinguishes the joke within the class of the comic is attributed by Lipps to action, to the active behaviour of the subject, but by Fischer to its relation to its object, which he considers is the concealed ugliness of the world of thoughts. It is impossible to test the validity of these definitions of the joke - indeed, they are scarcely intelligible - unless they are considered in the context from which they have been torn. It would therefore be necessary to work through these authors’ accounts of the comic before anything could be learnt from them about jokes. Other passages, however, show us that these same authors are able to describe essential and generally valid characteristics of the joke without any regard to its connection with the comic.

The characterization of jokes which seems best to satisfy Fischer himself is as follows: ‘A joke is a playful judgement.’ (Ibid., 51.) By way of illustration of this, we are given an analogy: ‘just as aesthetic freedom lies in the playful contemplation of things’ (ibid., 50). Elsewhere (ibid., 20) the aesthetic attitude towards an object is characterized by the condition that we do not ask anything of the object, especially no satisfaction of our serious needs, but content ourselves with the enjoyment of contemplating it. The aesthetic attitude is playful in contrast to work. - ‘It might be that from aesthetic freedom there might spring too a sort of judging released from its usual rules and regulations, which, on account of its origin, I will call a "playful judgement", and that in this concept is contained the first determinant, if not the whole formula, that will solve our problem. "Freedom produces jokes and jokes produce freedom", wrote Jean Paul. "Joking is merely playing with ideas."' (Ibid., 24.)

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1617

A favourite definition of joking has long been the ability to find similarity between dissimilar things - that is, hidden similarities. Jean Paul has expressed this thought itself in a joking form: ‘Joking is the disguised priest who weds every couple.’ Vischer carries this further: ‘He likes best to wed couples whose union their relatives frown upon.’ Vischer objects, however, that there are jokes where there is no question of comparing - no question, therefore, of finding a similarity. So he, slightly diverging from Jean Paul, defines joking as the ability to bind into a unity, with surprising rapidity, several ideas which are in fact alien to one another both in their internal content and in the nexus to which they belong. Fischer, again, stresses the fact that in a large number of joking judgements differences rather than similarities are found, and Lipps points out that these definitions relate to joking as an ability possessed by the joker and not to the jokes which he makes.

Other more or less interrelated ideas which have been brought up as defining or describing jokes are: ‘a contrast of ideas’, ‘sense in nonsense’, ‘bewilderment and illumination’.

Definitions such as that of Kraepelin lay stress on contrasting ideas. A joke is ‘the arbitrary connecting or linking, usually by means of a verbal association, of two ideas which in some way contrast with each other’. A critic like Lipps had no difficulty in showing the total inadequacy of this formula; but he does not himself exclude the factor of contrast, but merely displaces it elsewhere. ‘The contrast remains, but it is not some contrast between the ideas attached to the words, but a contrast or contradiction between the meaning and the meaninglessness of the words.’ (Lipps, 1898, 87.) He gives examples to show how this is to be understood. ‘A contrast arises only because . . . we grant its words a meaning which, again, we nevertheless cannot grant them.’ (Ibid., 90.)

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1618

If this last point is developed further, the contrast between ‘sense and nonsense’ becomes significant. ‘What at one moment has seemed to us to have a meaning, we now see is completely meaningless. That is what, in this case, constitutes the comic process . . . A remark seems to us to be a joke, if we attribute a significance to it that has psychological necessity and, as soon as we have done so, deny it again. Various things can be understood by this "significance". We attach sense to a remark and know that logically it cannot have any. We discover truth in it, which nevertheless, according to the laws of experience or our general habits of thought, we cannot find in it. We grant it logical or practical consequences in excess of its true content, only to deny these consequences as soon as we have clearly recognized the nature of the remark. In every instance, the psychological process which the joking remark provokes in us, and on which the feeling of the comic rests, consists in the immediate transition, from this attaching of sense, from this discovering of truth, and from this granting of consequences, to the consciousness or impression of relative nothingness.’ (Ibid., 85.)

However penetrating this discussion may sound the question may be raised here whether the contrast between what has meaning and what is meaningless, on which the feeling of the comic is said to rest, also contributes to defining the concept of the joke in so far as it differs from that of the comic.

The factor of ‘bewilderment and illumination’, too, leads us deep into the problem of the relation of the joke to the comic. Kant says of the comic in general that it has the remarkable characteristic of being able to deceive us only for a moment. Heymans (1896) explains how the effect of a joke comes about through bewilderment being succeeded by illumination. He illustrates his meaning by a brilliant joke of Heine’s, who makes one of his characters, Hirsch-Hyacinth, the poor lottery-agent, boast that the great Baron Rothschild had treated him quite as his equal - quite ‘famillionairely’. Here the word that is the vehicle of the joke appears at first simply to be a wrongly constructed word, something unintelligible, incomprehensible, puzzling. It accordingly bewilders. The comic effect is produced by the solution of this bewilderment, by understanding the word. Lipps (1898, 95) adds to this that this first stage of enlightenment - that the bewildering word means this or that  - is followed by a second stage, in which we realize that this meaningless word has bewildered us and has then shown us its true meaning. It is only this second illumination, this discovery that a word which is meaningless by normal linguistic usage has been responsible for the whole thing - this resolution of the problem into nothing - it is only this second illumination that produces the comic effect.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1619

Whether the one or the other of these two views seems to us to throw more light on the question, the discussion of bewilderment and enlightenment brings us closer to a particular discovery. For if the comic effect of Heine’s ‘famillionairely’ depends on the solution of the apparently meaningless word, the ‘joke’ must no doubt be ascribed to the formation of that word and to the characteristics of the word thus formed.

Another peculiarity of jokes, quite unrelated to what we have just been considering, is recognized by all the authorities as essential to them. ‘Brevity is the body and the soul of wit, it is its very self,’ says Jean Paul (1804, Part II, Paragraph 42), merely modifying what the old chatterbox Polonius says in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (II, 2):

‘Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit

And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,

I will be brief.’

In this connection the account given by Lipps (1898, 90) of the brevity of jokes is significant: ‘A joke says what it has to say, not always in few words, but in too few words - that is, in words that are insufficient by strict logic or by common modes of thought and speech. It may even actually say what it has to say by not saying it.’

We have already learnt from the connection of jokes with caricature that they ‘must bring forward something that is concealed or hidden’ (Fischer, 1889, 51). I lay stress on this determinant once more, because it too has more to do with the nature of jokes than with their being part of the comic.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1620

I am well aware that these scanty extracts from the works of writers upon jokes cannot do them justice. In view of the difficulties standing in the way of my giving an unmistakably correct account of such complicated and subtle trains of thought, I cannot spare curious enquirers the labour of obtaining the information they desire from the original sources. But I am not sure that they will come back fully satisfied. The criteria and characteristics of jokes brought up by these authors and collected above - activity, relation to the content of our thoughts, the characteristic of playful judgement, the coupling of dissimilar things, contrasting ideas, ‘sense in nonsense’, the succession of bewilderment and enlightenment, the bringing forward of what is hidden, and the peculiar brevity of wit - all this, it is true, seems to us at first sight so very much to the point and so easily confirmed by instances that we cannot be in any danger of underrating such views. But they are dijecta membra, which we should like to see combined into an organic whole. When all is said and done, they contribute to our knowledge of jokes no more than would a series of anecdotes to the description of some personality of whom we have a right to ask for a biography. We are entirely without insight into the connection that presumably exists between the separate determinants - what, for instance, the brevity of a joke can have to do with its characteristic of being a playful judgement. We need to be told, further, whether a joke must satisfy all these determinants in order to be a proper joke, or need only satisfy some, and if so which can be replaced by others and which are indispensable. We should also wish to have a grouping and classification of jokes on the basis of the characteristics considered essential. The classification that we find in the literature rests on the one hand on the technical methods employed in them (e.g. punning or play upon words) and on the other hand on the use made of them in speech (e.g. jokes used for the purposes of caricature or of characterization, or joking snubs).

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1621

We should thus find no difficulty in indicating the aims of any new attempt to throw light on jokes. To be able to count on success, we should have either to approach the work from new angles or to endeavour to penetrate further by increased attention and deeper interest. We can resolve that we will at least not fail in this last respect. It is striking with what a small number of instances of jokes recognized as such the authorities are satisfied for the purposes of their enquiries, and how each of them takes the same ones over from his predecessors. We must not shirk the duty of analysing the same instances that have already served the classical authorities on jokes. But it is our intention to turn besides to fresh material so as to obtain a broader foundation for our conclusions. It is natural then that we should choose as the subjects of our investigation examples of jokes by which we ourselves have been most struck in the course of our lives and which have made us laugh the most.

Is the subject of jokes worth so much trouble? There can, I think, be no doubt of it. Leaving on one side the personal motives which make me wish to gain an insight into the problems of jokes and which will come to light in the course of these studies, I can appeal to the fact that there is an intimate connection between all mental happenings - a fact which guarantees that a psychological discovery even in a remote field will be of an unpredictable value in other fields. We may also bear in mind the peculiar and even fascinating charm exercised by jokes in our society. A new joke acts almost like an event of universal interest; it is passed from one person to another like the news of the latest victory. Even men of eminence who have thought it worth while to tell the story of their origins, of the cities and countries they have visited, and of the important people with whom they have associated, are not ashamed in their autobiographies to report their having heard some excellent joke.¹

¹ Von Falke’s Memoirs, 1897.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1622

II

THE TECHNIQUE OF JOKES

Let us follow up a lead presented to us by chance and consider the first example of a joke that we came across in the preceding chapter.

In the part of his Reisebilder entitled ‘Die Bäder von Lucca’ Heine introduces the delightful figure of the lottery-agent and extractor of corns, Hirsch-Hyacinth of Hamburg, who boasts to the poet of his relations with the wealthy Baron Rothschild, and finally say: ‘And, as true as God shall grant me all good things, Doctor, I sat beside Salomon Rothschild and he treated me quite as his equal - quite famillionairely.’

Heymans and Lipps used this joke (which is admittedly an excellent and most amusing one) to illustrate their view that the comic effect of jokes is derived from ‘bewilderment and illumination’ (see above). We, however, will leave that question on one side and ask another: ‘What is it that makes Hirsch-Hyacinth’s remark into a joke?’ There can be only two possible answers: either the thought expressed in the sentence possesses in itself the character of being a joke or the joke resides in the expression which the thought has been given in the sentence. In whichever of these directions the character of being a joke may lie, we will pursue it further and try to lay hands on it.

A thought can in general be expressed in various linguistic forms - in various words, that is - which can represent it with equal aptness. Hirsch-Hyacinth’s remark presents his thought in a particular form of expression and, as it seems to us, a specially odd form and not the one which is most easily intelligible. Let us try to express the same thought as accurately as possible in other words. Lipps has already done so, and in that way has to some extent explained the poet’s intention. He writes (1898, 87): ‘Heine, as we understand it, means to say that his reception was on familiar terms - of the not uncommon kind, which does not as a rule gain in agreeableness from having a flavour of millionairedom about it.’ We shall not be altering the sense of this if we give it another shape which perhaps fits better into Hirsch-Hyacinth’s speech: ‘Rothschild treated me quite as his equal, quite familiarly that is, so far as a millionaire can.’ ‘A rich man’s condescension’, we should add, ‘always involves something not quite pleasant for whoever experiences it.’¹

¹ We shall return to this same joke later on; and we shall then have occasion to make a correction in the translation of it given by Lipps which our own version has taken as its starting-point. This, however, will not affect the discussion that follows here.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1623

Whether, now, we keep to the one or the other of the two equally valid texts of the thought, we can see that the question we asked ourselves is already decided. In this example the character of being a joke does not reside in the thought. What Heine has put into Hirsch-Hyacinth’s mouth is a correct and acute observation, an observation of unmistakable bitterness, which is understandable in a poor man faced by such great wealth; but we should not venture to describe it as in the nature of a joke. If anyone is unable in considering the translation to get away from his recollection of the shape given to the thought by the poet, and thus feels that nevertheless the thought in itself is also in the nature of a joke, we can point to a sure criterion of the joking character having been lost in the translation. Hirsch-Hyacinth’s remark made us laugh aloud, whereas its accurate translation by Lipps or our own version of it, though it may please us and make us reflect, cannot possibly raise a laugh.

But if what makes our example a joke is not anything that resides in its thought, we must look for it in the form, in the wording in which it is expressed. We have only to study the peculiarity of its form of expression to grasp what may be termed the verbal or expressive technique of this joke, something which must stand in an intimate relation with the essence of the joke, since, if it is replaced by something else, the character and effect of the joke disappear. Moreover, in attributing so much importance to the verbal form of jokes we are in complete agreement with the authorities. Thus Fischer (1889, 72) writes: ‘It is in the first place its sheer form that makes a judgement into a joke, and we are reminded of a saying of Jean Paul’s which, in a single aphorism, explains and exemplifies this precise characteristic of jokes - "Such is the victorious power of sheer position, whether among warriors or words.”’

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1624

In what, then, does the ‘technique’ of this joke consist? What has happened to the thought, as expressed, for instance, in our version, in order to turn it into a joke that made us laugh so heartily? Two things - as we learn by comparing our version with the poet’s text. First, a considerable abbreviation has occurred. In order to express fully the thought contained in the joke, we were obliged to add to the words ‘R. treated me quite as his equal, quite familiarly’ a postscript which, reduced to its shortest terms, ran ‘that is, so far as a millionaire can’. And even so we felt the need for a further explanatory sentence.¹ The poet puts it far more shortly: ‘R. treated me quite as his equal - quite famillionairely.’ In the joke, the whole limitation added by the second sentence to the first, which reports the familiar treatment, has disappeared.

But not quite without leaving a substitute from which we can reconstruct it. For a second change has also been made. The word ‘familiär [familiarly]’ in the unjoking expression of the thought has been transformed in the text of the joke into ‘famillionär [famillionairly]’; and there can be no doubt that it is precisely on this verbal structure that the joke’s character as a joke and its power to cause a laugh depend. The newly constructed word coincides in its earlier portion with the ‘familiär’ of the first sentence, and in its final syllables with the ‘Millionär ' of the second sentence. It stands, as it were, for the ‘Millionär’ portion of the second sentence and thus for the whole second sentence, and so puts us in a position to infer the second sentence that has been omitted in the text of the joke. It can be described as a ‘composite structure’ made up of the two components ‘familiär’ and ‘Millionär’, and it is tempting to give a diagrammatic picture of the way in which it is derived from those two words:²

F A M I L I        Ä R

M I L I O N Ä R

F A M I L I  ON Ä R

¹ This is equally true of Lipps’s translation.

² The two words are printed one in Roman and the other in Italic type, and the syllables common to them both are printed in thick type. The second ‘l’, which is scarcely pronounced, could of course be left out of account. It seems probable that the fact of the two words having several syllables in common offered the joke-technique the occasion for constructing the composite word.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1625

The process which has converted the thought into a joke can then be represented in the following manner, which may at first sight seem fantastic, but nevertheless produces precisely the outcome that is really before us:

‘R. treated me quite familiär,

that is, so far as a Millionär can.’

Let us now imagine that a compressing force is brought to bear on these sentences and that for some reason the second is the less resistant one. It is thereupon made to disappear, while its most important constituent, the word ‘Millionär’, which has succeeded in rebelling against being suppressed, is, as it were, pushed up against the first sentence, and fused with the element of that sentence which is so much like it - ‘familiär’. And the chance possibility, which thus arises, of saving the essential part of the second sentence actually favours the dissolution of its other, less important, constituents. The joke is thus generated:

‘R. treated me quite famili  on  är.’

/   \

(mili)  (är)

If we leave out of account any such compressing force, which indeed is unknown to us, the process by which the joke is formed - that is, the joke-technique - in this instance might be described as ‘condensation accompanied by the formation of a substitute’; and in the present example the formation of the substitute consists in the making of a ‘composite word’. This composite word ‘famillionär’, which is unintelligible in itself but is immediately understood in its context and recognized as being full of meaning, is the vehicle of the joke’s laughter compelling effect - the mechanism of which, however, is not made in any way clearer by our discovery of the joke-technique. In what way can a linguistic process of condensation, accompanied by the formation of a substitute by means of a composite word, give us pleasure and make us laugh?  This is evidently a different problem, whose treatment we may postpone till we have found a way of approaching it. For the present we will keep to the technique of jokes.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1626

Our expectation that the technique of jokes cannot be a matter of indifference from the point of view of discovering their essence leads us at once to enquire whether there are other examples of jokes constructed like Heine’s ‘famillionär’. There are not very many of them, but nevertheless enough to make up a small group which are characterized by the formation of composite words. Heine himself has derived a second joke from the word ‘Millionär’ - copying from himself, as it were. In Chapter XIV of his ‘Ideen’ he speaks of a ‘Millionarr’, which is an obvious combination of ‘Millionär’ and ‘Narr’¹ and, just as in the first example, brings out a suppressed subsidiary thought.

Here are some other examples I have come upon. - There is a certain fountain [Brunnen] in Berlin, the erection of which brought the Chief Burgomaster Forckenbeck into much disfavour. The Berliners call it the ‘Forckenbecken’, and there is certainly a joke in this description, even though it was necessary to replace the word ‘Brunnen’ by its obsolete equivalent ‘Becken’ in order to combine it into a whole with the name of the Burgomaster. - The voice of Europe once made the cruel joke of changing a potentate’s name from Leopold to Cleopold, on account of the relations he had at one time with a lady with the first name of Cleo. This undoubted product of condensation keeps alive an annoying allusion at the cost of a single letter. - Proper names in general fall easy victims to this kind of treatment by the joke-technique. There were in Vienna two brothers named Salinger, one of whom was a Börsensensal. This provided a handle for calling him ‘Sensalinger’, while his brother, to distinguish him, was given the unflattering name of ‘Scheusalinger’² This was convenient, and certainly a joke; I cannot say whether it was justified. But jokes do not as a rule enquire much into that.

¹ [The German for ‘fool’.]

² [‘Scheusal’ means ‘monstrous creature’.]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1627

I have been told the following condensation joke. A young man who had hitherto led a gay life abroad paid a call, after a considerable absence, on a friend living here. The latter was surprised to see an Ehering [wedding-ring] on his visitor’s hand, ‘What?’ he exclaimed, ‘are you married?’ ‘Yes’, was the reply, ‘Trauring but true.’¹ The joke is an excellent one. The word ‘Trauring’ combines both components: ‘Ehering’ changed into ‘Trauring’ and the sentence ‘traurig, aber wahr [sad but true]’. The effect of the joke is not interfered with by the fact that here the composite word is not, like ‘famillionär’, an unintelligible and otherwise non-existent structure, but one which coincides entirely with one of the two elements represented.

In the course of conversation I myself once unintentionally provided the material for a joke that is once again quite analogous to ‘famillionär’. I was talking to a lady about the great services that had been rendered by a man of science who I considered had been unjustly neglected. ‘Why,’ she said, ‘the man deserves a monument.’ ‘Perhaps he will get one some day,’ I replied, ‘but momentan he has very little success.’ ‘Monument’ and ‘momentan’ are opposites. The lady proceeded to unite them: ‘Well, let us wish him a monumentan² success.’

¹ [‘Traurig’ would have meant ‘sad’. ‘Trauring’ is a synonym for ‘Ehering.’]

² [A non-existing word. ‘Monumental’ (as in English) would have been expected.]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1628

I owe a few examples in foreign languages, which show the same mechanism of condensation as our ‘famillionär’, to an excellent discussion of the same subject in English by A. A. Brill (1911).

The English author De Quincey, Brill tells us, somewhere remarked that old people are inclined to fall into their ‘anecdotage’. This word is a fusion of the partly overlapping words

ANECDOTE

and                                        DOTAGE.

In an anonymous short story Brill once found the Christmas season described as ‘the alcoholidays’ - a similar fusing of

ALCOHOL

and                                        HOLIDAYS.

After Flaubert had published his celebrated novel Salammbô, the scene of which is laid in ancient Carthage, Sainte-Beuve laughed at it, on account of its elaboration of detail, as being ‘Carthaginoiserie’;

CARTHAGINOIS

CHINOISERIE.

But the best example of a joke of this group originated from one of the leading men in Austria, who, after important scientific and public work, now fills one of the highest offices in the State. I have ventured to make use of the jokes which are ascribed to him, and all of which in fact bear the same impress, as material for these researches,¹ above all because it would have been hard to find any better.

Herr N.’s attention was drawn one day to the figure of a writer who had become well-known from a series of undeniably boring essays which he had contributed to a Vienna daily paper. All of these essays dealt with small episodes in the relations of the first Napoleon with Austria. The author had red hair. As soon as Herr N. heard his name mentioned he asked: ‘Is not that the roter Fadian² that runs through the story of the Napoleonids?’

¹ Have I the right to do so? At least I have not obtained my knowledge of these jokes through an indiscretion. They are generally known in this city (Vienna) and are to be found in everyone’s mouth. A number of them have been given publicity by Eduard Hanslick in the Neue Freie Presse and in his autobiography. As regards the others, I must offer my apologies for any possible distortions, which, in the case of oral tradition, are scarcely to be avoided.

² [‘Roter’ means ‘red’, ‘scarlet’. ‘Fadian’ means ‘dull fellow’. The termination ‘-ian’ is occasionally added to an adjective, giving the somewhat contemptuous sense of ‘fellow’. Thus ‘grob’ means ‘coarse’, ‘Grobian’ means ‘coarse fellow: ‘dumm’ means ‘stupid’, ‘Dummian’ means ‘stupid fellow’. The adjective ‘fade’ or ‘fad’ means (like its French equivalent) ‘insipid’, ‘dull’. Finally, ‘Faden’ means ‘thread’.]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1629

In order to discover the technique of this joke, we must apply to it the process of reduction which gets rid of the joke by changing the mode of expression and instead introducing the original complete meaning, which can be inferred with certainty from a good joke. Herr N.’s joke about the ‘roter Fadian’ proceeds from two components - a depreciatory judgement upon the writer and a recollection of the famous simile with which Goethe introduces the extracts ‘From Ottilie’s Diary’ in the Wahlverwandtschaften.¹ The ill-tempered criticism may have run: ‘So this is the person who is for ever and ever writing nothing but boring stories about Napoleon in Austria!’ Now this remark is not in the least a joke. Nor is Goethe’s pretty analogy a joke, and it is certainly not calculated to make us laugh. It is only when the two are brought into connection with each other and submitted to the peculiar process of condensation and fusion that a joke emerges - and a joke of the first order.²

¹ ‘We hear of a peculiar practice in the English Navy. Every rope in the king’s fleet, from the strongest to the weakest, is woven in such a way that a roter Faden [scarlet thread] runs through its whole length. It cannot be extracted without undoing the whole rope, and it proves that even the smallest piece is crown property. In just the same way a thread of affection and dependence runs through Ottilie’s diary, binding it all together and characterizing the whole of it.’ Goethe, Sophienausgabe, 20, 212.)

² I need hardly point out how little this observation, which can invariably be made, fits in with the assertion that a joke is a playful judgement.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1630

The linking of the disparaging judgement upon the boring historian with the pretty analogy in the Wahlverwandtschaften must have taken place (for reasons which I cannot yet make intelligible) in a less simple manner than in many similar cases. I shall try to represent what was probably the actual course of events by the following construction. First, the element of the constant recurrence of the same theme in the stories may have awoken a faint recollection in Herr N. of the familiar passage in the Wahlverwandtschaften, which is as a rule wrongly quoted: ‘it runs like a roter Faden [scarlet thread].’ The ‘roter Faden’ of the analogy now exercised a modifying influence of the expression of the first sentence, as a result of the chance circumstance that the person insulted was also rot [red] - that is to say had red hair. It may then have run: ‘So it is that red person who writes the boring stories about Napoleon!’ And now the process began which brought about the condensation of the two pieces. Under its pressure, which had found its first fulcrum in the sameness of the element ‘rot’, the ‘boring’ was assimilated to the ‘Faden [thread]’ and was changed into ‘fad [dull]’; after this the two components were able to fuse together into the actual text of the joke, in which, in this case, the quotation has an almost greater share than the derogatory judgement, which was undoubtedly present alone to begin with.

‘So it is that red person who writes this fade stuff about N[apoleon].

The             red                                  Faden that runs through everything.’

—————————————————————————————————-

‘Is not that the red Fadian that runs through the story of the N[apoleonids]?’

In a later chapter I shall add a justification, but also a correction, to this account, when I come to analyse this joke from points of view other than purely formal ones. But whatever else about it may be in doubt, there can be no question that a condensation has taken place. The result of the condensation is, on the one hand, once again a considerable abbreviation; but on the other hand, instead of the formation of a striking composite word, there is an interpenetration of the constituents of the two components. It is true that ‘roter Faden’ would be capable of existing as a mere term of abuse; but in our instance it is certainly a product of condensation.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1631

If at this point a reader should become indignant at a method of approach which threatens to ruin his enjoyment of jokes without being able to throw any light on the source of that enjoyment, I would beg him to be patient for the moment. At present we are only dealing with the technique of jokes; and the investigation even of this promises results, if we pursue it sufficiently far.

The analysis of the last example has prepared us to find that, if we meet with the process of condensation in still other examples, the substitute for what is suppressed may be not a composite structure, but some other alteration of the form of expression. We can learn what this other form of substitute may be from another of Herr N.’s jokes.

‘I drove with him tête-à-bête.’ Nothing can be easier than the reduction of this joke. Clearly it can only mean: ‘I drove with X tête-à-tête, and X is a stupid ass.’

Neither of these sentences is a joke. They could be put together: ‘I drove with that stupid ass X tête-à-tête’, and that is not a joke either. The joke only arises if the ‘stupid ass’ is left out, and, as a substitute for it, the ‘t’ in one ‘tête’ is turned into a ‘b’. With this slight modification the suppressed ‘ass’ has nevertheless once more found expression. The technique of this group of jokes can be described as ‘condensation accompanied by slight modification’, and it may be suspected that the slighter the modification the better will be the joke.

The technique of another joke is similar, though not without its complication. In the course of a conversation about someone in whom there was much to praise, but much to find fault with, Herr N. remarked: ‘Yes, vanity is one of his four Achilles heels.’¹ In this case the slight modification consists in the fact that, instead of the one Achilles heel which the hero himself must have possessed, four are here in question. Four heels - but only an ass has four heels. Thus the two thoughts that are condensed in the joke ran: ‘Apart from his vanity, Y is an eminent man; all the same I don’t like him - he’s an ass rather than a man.’²

¹ [Footnote added 1912:] It seems that this joke was applied earlier by Heine to Alfred de Musset.

² One of the complications in the technique of this example lies in the fact that the modification by which the omitted insult is replaced must be described as an allusion to the latter, since it only leads to it by a process of inference. For another factor that complicates the technique here, see below.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1632

I happened to hear another similar, but much simpler, joke in statu nascendi in a family circle. Of two brothers at school, one was an excellent and the other a most indifferent scholar. Now it happened once that the exemplary boy too came to grief at school; and their mother referred to this while expressing her concern that it might mean the beginning of a lasting deterioration. The boy who had hitherto been overshadowed by his brother readily grasped the opportunity. ‘Yes’, he said, ‘Karl’s going backwards on all fours.’

The modification here consists in a short addition to the assurance that he too was of the opinion that the other boy was going backwards. But this modification represented and replaced a passionate plea on his own behalf: ‘You mustn’t think he’s so much cleverer than I am simply because he’s more successful at school. After all he’s only a stupid ass - that’s to say, much stupider than I am.’

Another, very well-known joke of Herr N.’s offers a neat example of condensation with slight modification. He remarked of a personage in public life: ‘he has a great future behind him.’ The man to whom this joke referred was comparatively young, and he had seemed destined by his birth, education and personal qualities to succeed in the future to the leadership of a great political party and to enter the government at its head. But times changed; the party became inadmissible as a government, and it could be foreseen that the man who had been predestined to be its leader would come to nothing as well. The shortest reduced version by which this joke could be replaced would run: ‘The man has had a great future before him, but he has it no longer.’ Instead of the ‘had’ and the second clause, there was merely the small change made in the principal clause of replacing ‘before’ by its contrary, ‘behind’.¹

¹ There is another factor operating in the technique of this joke which I reserve for later discussion. It concerns the actual nature of the modification (representation by the opposite or by something absurd). There is nothing to prevent the joke-technique from simultaneously employing several methods; but these we can only get to know one by one.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1633

Herr N. made use of almost the same modification in the case of a gentleman who became Minister for Agriculture with the sole qualification of being himself a farmer. Public opinion had occasion to recognize that he was the least gifted holder of the office that there had ever been. When he had resigned his office and retired to his farming interests, Herr N. said of him, ‘Like Cincinnatus, he has gone back to his place before the plough.’

The Roman, however, who had also been called away to office from the plough, returned to his place behind the plough. What went before the plough, both then and to-day, was only - an ox.¹

Karl Kraus was responsible for another successful condensation with slight modification. He wrote of a certain yellow-press journalist that he had travelled to one of the Balkan States by ‘Orienterpresszug’.² There is no doubt that this word combines two others: ‘Orientexpresszug [Orient Express]’ and ‘Erpressung [blackmail]’. Owing to the context, the element ‘Erpressung’ emerges only as a modification of the ‘Orientexpresszug’ - a word called for by the verb [‘travelled’]. This joke, which presents itself in the guise of a misprint, has yet another claim on our interest.

This series of examples could easily be further increased; but I do not think we require any fresh instances to enable us to grasp clearly the characteristics of the technique in this second group - condensation with modification. If we compare the second group with the first, whose technique consisted in condensation with the formation of composite words, we shall easily see that the difference between them is not an essential one and that the transitions between them are fluid. Both the formation of composite words and modification can be subsumed under the concept of the formation of substitutes; and, if we care to, we can also describe the formation of a composite word as a modification of the basic word by a second element.

¹ [‘Ochs’ in German has much the same meaning as ‘ass’ in English.]

² [A non-existent word.]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1634

But here we may make a first stop and ask ourselves with what factor known to us from the literature of the subject this first finding of ours coincides, wholly or in part. Evidently with the factor of brevity, which Jean Paul describes as ‘the soul of wit’ (p. 1619 above). But brevity does not in itself constitute a joke, or otherwise every laconic remark would be one. The joke’s brevity must be of a particular kind. It will be recalled that Lipps has tried to describe this particular brevity of jokes more precisely (p. 1619). Here our investigation contributes something and shows that the brevity of jokes is often the outcome of a particular process which has left behind in the wording of the joke a second trace - the formation of a substitute. By making use of the procedure of reduction, which seeks to undo the peculiar process of condensation, we also find, however, that the joke depends entirely on its verbal expression as established by the process of condensation. Our whole interest now turns, of course, to this strange process, which has hitherto scarcely been examined. Nor can we in the least understand how all that is valuable in a joke, the yield of pleasure that the joke brings us, can originate from that process.

Are processes similar to those which we have described here as the technique of jokes known already in any other field of mental events? They are - in a single field, and an apparently very remote one. In 1900 I published a book which, as its title (The Interpretation of Dreams) indicates, attempted to throw light on what is puzzling in dreams and to establish them as derivatives of our normal mental functioning. I found occasion there to contrast the manifest, and often strange, content of the dream with the latent, but perfectly logical, dream-thoughts from which the dream is derived; and I entered into an investigation of the processes which make the dream out of the latent dream-thoughts, as well as of the psychical forces which are involved in that transformation. To the totality of these transforming processes I gave the name of the ‘dream-work’; and I have described as a part of this dream-work a process of condensation which shows the greatest similarity to the one found in the technique of jokes - which, like it, leads to abbreviation, and creates substitute-formations of the same character. Everyone will be familiar, from a recollection of his own dreams, with the composite structures both of people and of things which emerge in dreams. Indeed, dreams even construct them out of words, and they can then be dissected in analysis. (For instance, ‘Autodidasker’ = ‘Autodidakt’ + ‘Lasker’.) On other occasions - much more often, in fact - what the work of condensation in dreams produces is not composite structures but pictures which exactly resemble one thing or one person except for an addition or alteration derived from another source - modifications, that is, just like those in Herr N.’s jokes. We cannot doubt that in both cases we are faced by the same psychical process, which we may recognize from its identical results. Such a far-reaching analogy between the technique of jokes and the dream-work will undoubtedly increase our interest in the former and raise an expectation in us that a comparison between jokes and dreams may help to throw light on jokes. But we will refrain from entering upon this task, for we must reflect that so far we have investigated the technique of only a very small number of jokes, so that we cannot tell whether the analogy by which we are proposing to be guided will in fact hold good. We will therefore turn away from the comparison with dreams and go back to the technique of jokes, though at this point we shall, as it were, be leaving a loose end to our enquiry, which at some later stage we may perhaps pick up once more.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1635

The first thing that we want to learn is whether the process of condensation with substitute-formation is to be discovered in every joke, and can therefore be regarded as a universal characteristic of the technique of jokes.

Here I recall a joke which has remained in my memory owing to the special circumstances in which I heard it. One of the great teachers of my young days, whom we thought incapable of appreciating a joke and from whom we had never heard a joke of his own, came into the Institute one day laughing, and, more readily than usual, explained to us what it was that had caused his cheerful mood. ‘I have just read an excellent joke’, he said. ‘A young man was introduced into a Paris salon, who was a relative of the great Jean-Jacques Rousseau and bore his name. Moreover he was red-haired. But he behaved so awkwardly that the hostess remarked critically to the gentleman who had introduced him: "Vous m’avez fait connaître un jeune homme roux et sot, mais non pas un Rousseau."'¹ And he laughed again.

By the nomenclature of the authorities this would be classed as a ‘Klangwitz’,² and one of an inferior sort, with a play upon a proper name - not unlike the joke, for instance, in the Capuchin monk’s sermon in Wallensteins Lager, which, as is well known, is modelled on the style of Abraham a Santa Clara:

Lässt sich nennen den Wallenstein,

ja freilich ist er uns allen ein Stein

des Anstosses und Ärgernisses.³

But what is the technique of this joke? We see at once that the characteristic that we may have hoped to be able to prove was a universal one is absent on the very first fresh occasion. There is no omission here, and scarcely an abbreviation. The lady herself says straight out in the joke almost everything that we can attribute to her thoughts. ‘You had raised my expectations about a relative of Jean-Jacques Rousseau - perhaps a spiritual relative - and here he is: a red-haired silly young man, a roux et sot.’ It is true that I have been able to make an interpolation; but this attempt at a reduction has not got rid of the joke. It remains, and is attached to the identity of sound of the words

ROSSEAU

—————

ROUX SOT

It thus proved that condensation with substitute-formation has no share in the production of this joke.

¹ [‘You have made me acquainted with a young man who is roux (red-haired) and sot (silly), but not a Rousseau.’ ‘Roux-sot’ would be pronounced exactly like ‘Rousseau’.]

² [‘Sound-joke.’]

³ [Literally: ‘He gets himself called Wallenstein, and indeed he is for allen (all) of us a Stein (stone) of offence and trouble.’] - Nevertheless, as a result of another factor, this joke deserves to be more highly thought of. But this can only be indicated later on.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1636

What besides? Fresh attempts at reduction can teach me that the joke remains resistant until the name ‘Rousseau’ is replaced by another. If, for instance, I put ‘Racine’ instead of it, the lady’s criticism, which remains just as possible as before, loses every trace of being a joke. I now know where I have to look for the technique of this joke, though I may still hesitate over formulating it. I will try this: the technique of the joke lies in the fact that one and the same word - the name - appears in it used in two ways, once as a whole, and again cut up into its separate syllables like a charade.

I can bring up a few examples which have an identical technique.

An Italian lady is said to have revenged herself for a tactless remark of the first Napoleon’s with a joke having this same technique of the double use of a word. At a court ball, he said to her, pointing to her fellow countrymen: ‘Tutti gli Italiani danzano si male.’ To which she made the quick repartee: ‘Non tutti, ma buona parte.’¹ (Brill, 1911.)

Once when the Antigone was produced in Berlin, the critics complained that the production was lacking in the proper character of antiquity. Berlin wit made the criticism its own in the following words: ‘Antik? Oh, nee.’² (Vischer, 1846-57, 1, 429, and Fischer, 1889.)

An analogous dividing-up joke is at home in medical circles. If one enquires from a youthful patient whether he has ever had anything to do with masturbation, the answer is sure to be: ‘O na, nie!’³

¹ [‘All Italians dance so badly!’ ‘Not all, but buona parte (a good part)' - the original, Italian version of Napoleon’s surname.]

² [‘Antique? Oh, no.’ The words, in Berlin dialect, approximate in pronunciation to ‘Antigone’.]

³ [‘Oh, no, never!’ ‘Onanie (onanism)' is the common German word for ‘masturbation’.]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1637

In all three of these examples, which should suffice for this species, we see the same joke-technique: in each of them a name is used twice, once as a whole and again divided up into its separate syllables, which, when they are thus separated, give another sense.¹

The multiple use of the same word, once as a whole and again in the syllables into which it falls, is the first instance we have come across of a technique differing from that of condensation. But the profusion of examples that have met us must convince us after a little reflection that the newly-discovered technique can scarcely be limited to this one method. There are a number of possible ways - how many it is as yet quite impossible to guess - in which the same word or the same verbal material can be put to multiple uses in one sentence. Are all these possibilities to be regarded as technical methods of making jokes? It seems to be so. And the examples of jokes which follow will prove it.

¹ The goodness of these jokes depends on the fact that another technical method of a far higher order is simultaneously brought into use (see below). - At this point I may also draw attention to a connection between jokes and riddles. The philosopher Brentano composed a kind of riddle in which a small number of syllables had to be guessed which when they were put together into words gave a different sense according as they were grouped in one way or another. For instance: ‘. . . liess mich das Platanenblatt ahnen’ [‘the plane-tree leaf (Platanenblatt) led me to think (ahnen)', where ‘Platanen’ and ‘blatt ahnen’ sound almost the same]. Or: ‘wie du dem Inder hast verschrieben, in der Hast verschrieben’ [‘when you wrote a prescription for the Indian, in your haste you made a slip of the pen’, where ‘Inder hast (have to the Indian)' and ‘in der hast (in your haste)' sound the same.]

The syllables to be guessed were inserted into the appropriate place in the sentence under the disguise of the repeated sound ‘dal’. [Thus the English example would be stated: ‘he said he would daldaldaldal daldaldaldal.’] A colleague of the philosopher’s took a witty revenge on him when he heard of the elderly man’s engagement. He asked: ‘Daldaldal daldaldal?’ - ‘Brentano brennt-a-no?’ [‘Brentano - does he still burn?’]

What is the difference between these daldal riddles and the jokes in the text above? In the former the technique is given as a precondition and the wording has to be guessed; while in the jokes the wording is given and the technique is disguised.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1638

In the first place, one can take the same verbal material and merely make some alteration in its arrangement. The slighter the alteration - the more one has the impression of something different being said in the same words - the better is the joke technically.

‘Mr. and Mrs. X live in fairly grand style. Some people think that the husband has earned a lot and so has been able to lay by a bit [sich etwas zurückgelegt]; others again think that the wife has lain back a bit [sich etwas zurückgelegt] and so has been able to earn a lot.’¹

A really diabolically ingenious joke! And achieved with such an economy of means! ‘Earned a lot - lay by a bit [sich etwas zurückgelegt]; lain back a bit [sich etwas zurückgelegt] - earned a lot.’ It is merely the inversion of these two phrases that distinguishes what is said about the husband from what is hinted about the wife. Here again, by the way, this is not the whole technique of the joke.²

A wide field of play lies open to the technique of jokes if we extend the ‘multiple use of the same material’ to cover cases in which the word (or words) in which the joke resides may occur once unaltered but the second time with a slight modification. Here, for instance, is another of Herr N.’s jokes:

He heard a gentleman who was himself born a Jew make a spiteful remark about the Jewish character. ‘Herr Hofrat’, he said, ‘your antesemitism was well-known to me; your anti-semitism is new to me.’

Here only a single letter is altered, whose modification could scarcely be noticed in careless speech. The example reminds us of Herr N.’s other modification jokes (on p. 1631 ff.), but the difference is that here there is no condensation; everything that has to be said is said in the joke itself: ‘I know that earlier you were yourself a Jew; so I am surprised that you should speak ill of Jews.’

¹ Daniel Spitzer, 1912, 1, 280.

² [Footnote added 1912:] This is also true of the excellent joke reported by Brill from Oliver Wendell Holmes: ‘Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.’ Here there is promise of an antithesis but it does not materialize. The second part of the sentence cancels the antithesis. Incidentally, this is a good instance of the untranslatability of jokes with this technique.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1639

An admirable example of a modification joke of this kind is the well-known cry: ‘Traduttore - Traditore!’¹ The similarity, amounting almost to identity, of the two words represents most impressively the necessity which forces a translator into crimes against his original.²

The variety of possible slight modifications in such jokes is so great that none of them exactly resembles another.

Here is a joke that is said to have been made during an examination in jurisprudence. The candidate had to translate a passage in the Corpus Juris: ‘"Labeo ait" . . . I fall, says he.’ ‘You fail, say I’, replied the examiner, and the examination was at an end. Anyone who mistakes the name of the great jurist for a verbal form, and moreover one wrongly recalled, no doubt deserves nothing better. But the technique of the joke lies in the fact that almost the same words which proved the ignorance of the candidate were used to pronounce his punishment by the examiner. The joke is, moreover, an example of ‘ready repartee’, the technique of which, as we shall see, does not differ greatly from what we are illustrating here.

Words are a plastic material with which one can do all kinds of things. There are words which, when used in certain connections, have lost their original full meaning, but which regain it in other connections. A joke of Lichtenberg’s carefully singles out circumstances in which the watered-down words are bound to regain their full meaning:

‘"How are you getting along?"³ the blind man asked the lame man. "As you see", the lame man replied to the blind man.’

There are, too, words in German that can be taken, according as they are ‘full’ or ‘empty’, in a different sense, and, indeed, in more than one. For there can be two different derivatives from the same stem, one of which has developed into a word with a full meaning and the other into a watered-down final syllable or suffix, both of which, however, are pronounced exactly the same. The identity of sound between a full word and a watered-down syllable may also be a chance one. In both cases the joke-technique can take advantage of the conditions thus prevailing in the linguistic material.

¹ [‘Translator - traitor!’]

² [Footnote added 1912:] Brill quotes a quite analogous modification joke: Amantes amentes (lovers are fools).

³ [‘Wie geht’s?’ Literally, ‘how do you walk?’]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1640

A joke, for instance, which is attributed to Schleiermacher, is of importance to us as being an almost pure example of these technical methods: ‘Eifersucht [jealousy] is a Leidenschaft [passion] which mit Eifer sucht [with eagerness seeks] what Leiden schafft [causes pain].’

This is undeniably in the nature of a joke, though not particularly effective as one. A quantity of factors are absent here which might mislead us in analysing other jokes so long as we examined each of those factors separately. The thought expressed in the wording is worthless; the definition it gives of jealousy is in any case thoroughly unsatisfactory. There is not a trace of ‘sense in nonsense’, of ‘hidden meaning’ or of ‘bewilderment and illumination’. No efforts will reveal a ‘contrast of ideas’: a contrast between the words and what they mean can be found only with great difficulty. There is no sign of abbreviation; on the contrary, the wording gives an impression of prolixity. And yet it is a joke, and even a very perfect one. At the same time, its only striking characteristic is the one in the absence of which the joke disappears: the fact that here the same words are put to multiple uses. We can then choose whether to include this joke in the sub-class of those in which words are used first as a whole and then divided up (e.g. Rousseau or Antigone) or in the other sub-class in which the multiplicity is produced by the full or the watered-down meaning of the verbal constituents. Apart from this, only one other factor deserves notice from the point of view of the technique of jokes. We find here an unusual state of things established: a kind of ‘unification’ has taken place, since ‘Eifersucht [jealousy]’ is defined by means of its own name - by means of itself, as it were. This, as we shall see, is also a technique of jokes. These two factors, therefore, must in themselves be sufficient to give a remark the character of a joke.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1641

If now we enter still further into the variety of forms of the ‘multiple use’ of the same word, we suddenly notice that we have before us examples of ‘double meaning’ or ‘play upon words’ - forms which have long been generally known and recognized as a technique of jokes. Why have we taken the trouble to discover afresh what we might have gathered from the most superficial essay on jokes? To begin with, we can only plead in our own justification that we have nevertheless brought out another aspect of the same phenomenon of linguistic expression. What is supposed by the authorities to show the character of jokes as a kind of ‘play’ has been classified by us under the heading of ‘multiple use’.

The further cases of multiple use, which can also be brought together under the title of ‘double meaning’ as a new, third group, can easily be divided into sub-classes, which, it is true, cannot be separated from one another by essential distinctions any more than can the third group as a whole from the second. We find:

(a) Cases of the double meaning of a name and of a thing denoted by it. For instance: ‘Discharge thyself of our company, Pistol!‘ (Shakespeare.)

‘More Hof than Freiung ' said a witty Viennese about a number of pretty girls who had been admired for many years but had never found a husband. ‘Hof’ and ‘Freiung’ are the names of two neighbouring squares in the centre of Vienna.

‘Vile Macbeth does not rule here in Hamburg: the ruler here is Banko.’ (Heine.)

Where the name cannot be used (we should perhaps say ‘misused’) unaltered, a double meaning can be got out of it by one of the slight modifications we are familiar with:

‘Why’, it was asked, in times that are now past, ‘have the French rejected Lohengrin?’ ‘On Elsa’s (Elsass [Alsace]) account.’

(b) Double meaning arising from the literal and metaphorical meanings of a word. This is one of the most fertile sources for the technique of jokes. I will quote only one example:

A medical friend well-known for his jokes once said to Arthur Schnitzler the dramatist: ‘I’m not surprised that you’ve become a great writer. After all your father held a mirror up to his contemporaries.’ The mirror which was handled by the dramatist’s father, the famous Dr. Schnitzler, was the laryngoscope. A well-known remark of Hamlet’s tells us that the purpose of a play, and so also of the dramatist who creates it, is ‘to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.’ (III, 2.)

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1642

(c) Double meaning proper, or play upon words. This may be described as the ideal case of ‘multiple use’. Here no violence is done to the word; it is not cut up into its separate syllables, it does not need to be subjected to any modification, it does not have to be transferred from the sphere it belongs to (the sphere of proper names, for instance) to another one. Exactly as it is and as it stands in the sentence, it is able, thanks to certain favourable circumstances, to express two different meanings.

Examples of this are at our disposal in plenty:

One of Napoleon III’s first acts when he assumed power was to seize the property of the House of Orleans. This excellent play upon words was current at the time: ‘C’est le premier vol de l’aigle.’ [‘It is the eagle’s first vol.’] ‘Vol’ means ‘flight’ but also ‘theft’. (Quoted by Fischer, 1889.)

Louis XV wanted to test the wit of one of his courtiers, of whose talent he had been told. At the first opportunity he commanded the gentleman to make a joke of which he, the king, should be the ‘sujet '. The courtier at once made the clever reply: ‘Le roi n’est pas sujet.’ [‘The King is not a subject.’]

A doctor, as he came away from a lady’s bedside, said to her husband with a shake of his head: ‘I don’t like her looks.’ ‘I’ve not liked her looks for a long time’, the husband hastened to agree.

The doctor was of course referring to the lady’s condition; but he expressed his anxiety about the patient in words which the husband could interpret as a confirmation of his own marital aversion.

Heine said of a satirical comedy: ‘This satire would not have been so biting if its author had had more to bite.’ This joke is more an example of metaphorical and literal double meaning than of a play upon words proper. But what is to be gained by drawing a sharp distinction here?

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1643

Another good example of play upon words is told by the authorities (Heymans and Lipps) in a form which makes it unintelligible. Not long ago I came upon the correct version and setting of the anecdote in a collection of jokes which has not proved of much use apart from this.¹

‘One day Saphir and Rothschild met each other. After they had chatted for a little while, Saphir said: "Listen, Rothschild, my funds have got low, you might lend me a hundred ducats." "Oh well!", said Rothschild, "that’ll suit me all right - but only on condition that you make a joke." "That’ll suit me all right too", replied Saphir. "Good. Then come to my office tomorrow." Saphir appeared punctually. "Ah!", said Rothschild, when he saw him come in, "Sie kommen um Ihre 100 Dukaten." "No", answered Saphir, "Sie kommen um Ihre 100 Dukaten because I shan’t dream of paying you back before the Day of Judgement.’²

¹ Hermann, 1904.

² [‘Sie kommen um  . . .’ may mean equally ‘You are coming about’ or ‘You are losing’.] -’"Saphir", so Heymans tells us, "was asked by a rich creditor whom he had come to visit: ‘Sie kommen wohl um die 300 Gulden? [No doubt you’ve come about the 300 florins?]’ and he replied: ‘Nein, Sie kommen um die 300 Gulden [No, you’re going to lose the 300 florins].’ In giving this answer he was expressing his meaning in a perfectly correct and by no means unusual form." That is in fact the case. Saphir’s answer, considered in itself, is in perfect order. We understand, too, what he means to say - namely that he has no intention of paying his debt. Rut Saphir makes use of the same words that had previously been used by his creditor. We therefore cannot avoid also taking them in the sense in which they had been used by the latter. And in that case Saphir’s answer no longer has any meaning whatever. The creditor is not "coming" at all. Nor can he be coming "about the 300 florins" - that is, he cannot be coming to bring 300 florins. Moreover, as a creditor, it is not his business to bring but to demand. Since Saphir’s words are in this way recognized as being at once sense and nonsense, a comic situation arises.’ (Lipps, 1898, 97.)

The version which I have given in full in the text above for the sake of clarity shows that the technique of the joke is far simpler than Lipps supposes. Saphir does not come to bring the 300 florins but to fetch them from the rich man. Accordingly the discussions of ‘sense and nonsense’ in this joke become irrelevant.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1644

‘What do these statues vorstellen [represent or put forward]?’ asked a stranger to Berlin of a native Berliner, looking at a row of monuments in a public square. ‘Oh, well,’ was the reply: ‘either their right leg or their left leg.’

‘At this moment I cannot recall all the students’ names, and of the professors there are some who still have no name at all.’ (Heine, Harzreise.)

We shall be giving ourselves practice, perhaps, in diagnostic differentiation if at this point we insert another well-known joke about professors. ’The distinction between Professors Ordinary [ordentlich] and Professors Extraordinary [ausserordentlich] is that the ordinary ones do nothing extraordinary and the extraordinary ones do nothing properly [ordentlich].’ This, of course, is a play on the two meanings of the words ‘ordentlich’ and ‘ausserordentlich’: viz. on the one hand ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the ‘ordo (the Establishment)' and on the other hand ‘efficient’ and ‘outstanding’. But the conformity between this joke and some others we have already met reminds us that here the ‘multiple use’ is far more noticeable than the ‘double meaning’. All through the sentence we hear nothing but a constantly recurring ‘ordentlich’, sometimes in that form and sometimes modified in a negative sense. (Cf. p. 1639.) Moreover, the feat is again achieved here of defining a concept by means of its own wording (cf. the example of ‘Eifersucht’, p. 1640), or, more precisely, of defining (even if only negatively) two correlative concepts by means of one another, which produces an ingenious interlacement. Finally, the aspect of ‘unification’ can also be stressed here - the eliciting of a more intimate connection between the elements of the statement than one would have had a right to expect from their nature.

‘The beadle¹ Sch[äfer] greeted me quite as a colleague, for he too is a writer, and has often mentioned me in his half-yearly writings; and apart from that, he has often cited ²) me, and if he did not find me at home he was always kind enough to write the citation in chalk on my study door.’ (Heine, Harzreise.)

¹ [A university officer (at Göttingen) in charge of undergraduate discipline.]

² [For breaches of discipline.]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1645

Daniel Spitzer, in Wiener Spaziergänge, produced a laconic biographical description, which is certainly also a good joke, of a social type which flourished at the time of the outbreak of speculation: ‘Iron front - iron cash-box - Iron Crown.’ (This last was an order which carried noble rank with it.) A striking example of ‘unification’ - everything, as it were, made of iron! The various, but not very markedly contrasting, meanings of the epithet ‘iron’ make these ‘multiple uses’ possible.

Another example of a play upon words may make the transition to a fresh sub-species of the technique of double meaning easier. The joking medical colleague already mentioned above (on p. 1640) was responsible for this joke at the time of the Dreyfus case: ‘This girl reminds me of Dreyfus. The army doesn’t believe in her innocence.’

The word ‘innocence’, on the double meaning of which the joke is constructed, has in the one context its usual meaning, with ‘fault’ or ‘crime’ as its opposite; but in the other context it has a sexual meaning, of which the opposite is ‘sexual experience’. Now there are a very large number of similar examples of double meaning, in all of which the effect of the joke depends quite specially on the sexual meaning. For this group we may reserve the name of ‘double entendre [Zweideutigkeit]’.

An excellent example of a double entendre of this kind is Spitzer’s joke which has already been recorded on p. 1639: ‘Some people think that the husband has earned a lot and so has been able to lay by a bit [sich etwas zurückgelegt]; others again think that the wife has lain back a bit [sich etwas zurückgelegt] and so has been able to earn a lot.’

But if we compare this example of double meaning accompanied by double entendre with other examples, a distinction becomes evident which is not without its interest from the point of view of technique. In the ‘innocence’ joke, the one meaning of the word was just as obvious as the other; it would really be hard to decide whether its sexual or non-sexual meaning was the more usual and familiar. But it is otherwise with Spitzer’: example. In this the commonplace meaning of the words ‘sich etwas zurückgelegt’ is by far the more prominent, whereas their sexual meaning is, as it were, covered and hidden and might even escape the notice of an unsuspecting person altogether. By way of a sharp contrast let us take another example of double meaning, in which no attempt is made at thus concealing the sexual meaning: for instance, Heine’s description of the character of a complaisant lady: ‘She could abschlagen¹ nothing except her own water.’ This sounds like a piece of obscenity and hardly gives the impression of a joke.² This peculiarity, however, where in a case of double meaning the two meanings are not equally obvious, can also occur in jokes with no sexual reference - whether because one meaning is more usual than the other or because it is brought to the front by a connection with the other parts of the sentence. (Cf., for instance, ‘C’est le premier vol de l’aigle’.) I propose to describe all these as ‘double meaning with an allusion.’

¹ [‘To refuse’; vulgarly ‘to urinate’.]

² Cf. on this Fischer (1889, 86). He gives the name of ‘Zweideutigkeit’, which I have applied differently in the text, to jokes with a double meaning in which the two meanings are not equally prominent but in which one lies behind the other. Nomenclature of this kind is a matter of convention; linguistic usage has arrived at no firm decision.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1646

We have already made the acquaintance of such a large number of different joke-techniques that I fear there is some danger of losing our grasp of them. Let us therefore try to summarize them:

I.   Condensation:

(a) with formation of composite word,

(b) with modification.

II. Multiple use of the same material:

(c) as a whole and in parts,

(d) in a different order,

(e) with slight modification,

(f) of the same words full and empty.

III. Double meaning:

(g) Meaning as a name and as a thing,

(h) metaphorical and literal meanings,

(i) double meaning proper (play upon words),

(j) double entendre,

(k) double meaning with an allusion.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1647

This variety and number of techniques has a confusing effect. It might make us feel annoyed at having devoted ourselves to a consideration of the technical methods of jokes, and might make us suspect that after all we have exaggerated their importance as a means for discovering the essential nature of jokes. If only this convenient suspicion were not contradicted by the one incontestable fact that the joke invariably disappears as soon as we eliminate the operation of these techniques from its form of expression! So, in spite of everything, we are led to look for the unity in this multiplicity. It ought to be possible to bring all these techniques under a single heading. As we have already said, it is not difficult to unite the second and third groups. Double meaning (play upon words) is indeed only the ideal case of the multiple use of the same material. Of these the latter is evidently the more inclusive concept. The examples of dividing up, of re-arrangement of the same material and of multiple use with slight modification (c, d and e) might - though only with some difficulty - be brought under the concept of double meaning. But what is there in common between the technique of the first group (condensation with substitute formation) and that of the two others (multiple use of the same material)?

Well, something very simple and obvious, I should have thought. The multiple use of the same material is, after all, only a special case of condensation; play upon words is nothing other than a condensation without substitute-formation; condensation remains the wider category. All these techniques are dominated by a tendency to compression, or rather to saving. It all seems to be a question of economy. In Hamlet’s words: ‘Thrift, thrift, Horatio!’

Let us test this economy on the different examples. ‘C’est le premier vol de l’aigle.’ It is the eagle’s first flight. Yes, but it is a thieving flight. Luckily for the existence of this joke, ‘vol ' means not only ‘flight’ but ‘theft’ as well. Has no condensation and economy been made? Most certainly. There has been a saving of the whole of the second thought and it has been dropped without leaving a substitute. The double meaning of the word ‘vol ' has made such a substitute unnecessary; or it would be equally true to say that the word ‘vol ' contains the substitute for the suppressed thought without any addition of change having to be made to the first one. That is the advantage of a double meaning.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1648

Another example: ‘Iron front - iron cash-box - Iron Crown’. What an extraordinary saving compared with an expression of the same thought in which ‘iron’ finds no place: ‘With the help of the necessary boldness and lack of conscience it is not difficult to amass a large fortune, and for such services a title will of course be a suitable reward.’

Condensation, and therefore economy, is indeed quite unmistakably present in these examples. But it should be present in every example. Where is the economy hidden in such jokes as ‘Rousseau - roux et sot’ or ‘Antigone - antik? oh nee’, in which we first noticed the absence of condensation and which were our principal motive for putting forward the technique of the repeated use of the same material? It is true that here we should not find that condensation would meet the case; but if instead of it we take the more inclusive concept of economy, we can manage without difficulty. It is easy to point out what we save in the case of Rousseau, Antigone, etc. We save having to express a criticism or give shape to a judgement; both are already there in the name itself. In the example of ‘Leidenschaft - Eifersucht [passion-jealousy]’ we save ourselves the trouble of laboriously constructing a definition: ‘Eifersucht, Leidenschaft - ‘Eifer sucht [‘eagerness seeks’], ‘Leidenschafft’ [‘causes pain’]. We have only to add the linking words and there we have our definition ready made. The case is similar in all the other examples that have so far been analysed. Where there is least saving, as in Saphir’s play upon words ‘Sie kommen um Ihre 100 Dukaten’, there is at any rate a saving of the necessity for framing a new wording for the reply; the wording of the question is sufficient for the answer. The saving is not much, but in it the joke lies. The multiple use of the same words for question and answer is certainly an ‘economy’. Like Hamlet’s view of the rapid sequence of his father’s death and his mother’s marriage:

The funeral baked-meats

Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1649

But before we accept the ‘tendency to economy’ as the most general characteristic of the technique of jokes and ask such questions as where it comes from, what it signifies and how the joke’s yield of pleasure arises from it, we must find space for a doubt which has a right to be heard. It may be that every joke technique shows the tendency to save something in expression: but the relation is not reversible. Not every economy of expression, not every abbreviation, is on that account a joke as well. We reached this point once before, when we were still hoping to find the process of condensation in every joke, and raised the justifiable objection that a laconic remark is not enough to constitute a joke. There must therefore be some peculiar kind of abbreviation and economy on which the characteristic of being a joke depends; and until we know the nature of that peculiarity our discovery of the common element in the techniques of jokes brings us no nearer to a solution of our problem. And let us, further, have the courage to admit that the economies made by the joke-technique do not greatly impress us. They may remind us, perhaps, of the way in which some housewives economize when they spend time and money on a journey to a distant market because vegetables are to be had there a few farthings cheaper. What does a joke save by its technique? The putting together of a few new words, which would mostly have emerged without any trouble. Instead of that, it has to take the trouble to search out the one word which covers the two thoughts. Indeed, it must often first transform one of the thoughts into an unusual form which will provide a basis for its combination with the second thought. Would it not have been simpler, easier, and, in fact, more economical to have expressed the two thoughts as they happened to come, even if this involved no common form of expression?  Is not the economy in words uttered more than balanced by the expenditure on intellectual effort? And who saves by that? Who gains by it?

We can evade these doubts provisionally if we transpose them to another place. Have we really already discovered all the kinds of joke-technique? It will certainly be more prudent to collect fresh examples and subject them to analysis.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1650

We have in fact not yet considered a large - perhaps the most numerous - group of jokes, influenced, perhaps, by the contempt with which they are regarded. They are the kind which are generally known as ‘Kalauer’ (‘calembourgs’) [‘puns’] and which pass as the lowest form of verbal joke, probably because they are the ‘cheapest’ - can be made with the least trouble. And they do in fact make the least demand on the technique of expression, just as the play upon words proper makes the highest. While in the latter the two meanings should find their expression in identically the same word, which on that account is usually said only once, it is enough for a pun if the two words expressing the two meanings recall each other by some vague similarity, whether they have a general similarity of structure or a rhyming assonance, or whether they share the same first few letters, and so on. A quantity of examples like this of what are not very appropriately described as ‘Klangwitze [sound-jokes]’ occur in the Capuchin monk’s sermon in Wallensteins Lager:

Kümmert sich mehr um den Krug als den Krieg,

Wetzt lieber den Schnabel als den Sabel

. . . . . . . .

Frisst den Ochsen lieber als den Oxenstirn’,

. . . . . . . .

Der Rheinstrom ist worden zu einem Peinstrom,

Die Klöster sind ausgenommene Nester,

Die Bistümer sind verwandelt in Wüsttümer.

. . . . . . . .

Und alle die gesegneten deutschen Länder

Sind verkehrt worden in Elender.¹

¹ [Literally:-

He cares more for the bottle than the battle,

Would rather whet his nose than his sword

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

Would rather eat oxen than Oxenstirn’,

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

The Rhine stream has become a pain stream,

The monastries are robbed bird’s nests,

The bishoprics are transformed into desertrics.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

And all the blessed German lands

Have been turned into wretched places.]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1651

Jokes are particularly apt to change one of the vowels in a word. Thus Hevesi (1888, 87) writes of an anti-Imperial Italian poet who was nevertheless obliged later to eulogize a German emperor in hexameters: ‘Since he could not exterminate the Cäsaren [Caesars], he at least eliminated the Cäsuren [caesuras].

Out of the profusion of puns at our disposal, it will perhaps be of special interest to bring up a really bad example, of which Heine is guilty. Having for a long time represented himself to his lady as an ‘Indian prince’, he throws off the mask and confesses: ‘Madame, I have deceived you . . . I have no more ever been in Kalkutta [Calcutta] than the Kalkuttenbraten [roast Calcutta fowl] that I ate for luncheon yesterday.’ The mistake in this joke clearly lies in the fact that the two similar words in it are not merely similar but actually identical. The bird which he had eaten roast is so called, because it comes, or is supposed to come, from the same Calcutta.

Fischer (1889, 78) has devoted much attention to these forms of joke, and tries to distinguish them sharply from ‘play upon words’. ‘A pun is a bad play upon words, since it plays upon the word not as a word but as a sound.’ The play upon words, however, ‘passes from the sound of the word to the word ‘itself.’ On the other hand, he classes such jokes as famillionär, Antigone (antik? oh nee), etc. among the ‘sound jokes’. I see no necessity for following him in this. In a play upon words, in our view, the word is also only a sound-image, to which one meaning or another is attached. But here, too, linguistic usage makes no sharp distinctions; and if it treats ‘puns’ with contempt and ‘play upon words’ with a certain respect, these judgements of value seem to be determined by considerations other than technical ones. It is worth while paying attention to the kind of jokes that are told one as ‘puns’. There are some people who, when they are in high spirits, can for considerable periods of time, answer every remark addressed to them with a pun. One of my friends, who is a model of discretion where his serious achievements in science are concerned, is apt to boast of this ability. When on one occasion he was holding the company breathless in this way and admiration was expressed for his staying power: ‘Yes’, he said ‘I am lying here auf der Ka-Lauer.’² And when he was finally begged to stop, he agreed to on condition that he was appointed ‘Poeta Ka-laureatus’. Both of these, however, are excellent jokes of condensation with formation of composite words. (‘I am lying here auf der Lauer for making Kalauer [puns].’)

In any case we can already gather from the disputes about the delimitation of puns and play upon words that the former will not be able to help us to discover a completely new joke technique. If, in the case of puns, we give up the claim for the use of the same material in more than one sense, nevertheless the accent falls on rediscovering what is familiar, on the correspondence between the two words that make up the pun; and consequently puns merely form a sub-species of the group which reaches its peak in the play upon words proper.

¹ ‘Ideen’, Chapter V.

² [‘Kalauer’ = ‘pun’. ‘Auf der Lauer’ = ‘on the look-out’.]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1652

But there really are jokes whose technique resists almost any attempt to connect it with the groups that have so far been considered.

‘The story is told of Heine that he was in a Paris salon one evening conversing with the dramatist Soulié, when there came into the room one of those financial kings of Paris whom people compare with Midas - and not merely on account of their wealth. He was soon surrounded by a crowd who treated him with the greatest deference. "Look there!" Soulié remarked to Heine, "Look at the way the nineteenth century is worshipping the Golden Calf!" With a glance at the object of so much admiration, Heine replied, as though by way of correction: "Oh, he must be older than that by now!"' (Fischer, 1889, 82-3.)

Where shall we look for the technique of this excellent joke? In a play upon words, thinks Fischer: ‘Thus, for instance, the words "Golden Calf" can mean both Mammon and idolatry. In the one case the gold is the main thing and in the other the statue of the animal; it may also serve to characterize, in not precisely flattering terms, someone who has a great deal of money and very little sense.’ (Loc. cit.) If we make the experiment of removing the expression ‘Golden Calf’, we certainly get rid of the joke at the same time. We make Soulié say: ‘Look there! Look at the way the people are crowding round the stupid fellow simply because he’s rich!’ This is no longer a joke and Heine’s reply is also made impossible.

But we must recall that what we are concerned with is not Soulié’s simile - which is a possible joke - but Heine’s reply, which is certainly a much better one. That being so, we have no right to touch the phrase about the Golden Calf: it remains as the precondition of Heine’s mot and our reduction must be directed only to the latter. If we expand the words ‘Oh, he must be older than that by now!’ we can only replace them by something like: ‘Oh, he’s not a calf any longer; he’s a full-grown ox!’ Thus what was necessary for Heine’s joke was that he should no longer take the ‘Golden Calf’ in a metaphorical but in a personal sense and should apply it to the rich man himself. It may even be that this double meaning was already present in Soulié’s remark.

But just a moment! It looks now as though this reduction has not done away with Heine’s joke completely, but on the contrary has left its essence untouched. The position now is that Soulié says: ‘Look there! Look at the way the nineteenth century is worshipping the Golden Calf!’ and Heine replies: ‘Oh, he’s not a calf any longer; he’s an ox already!’ And in this reduced version it is still a joke. But no other reduction of Heine’s mot is possible.

It is a pity that this fine example involves such complicated technical conditions. We can arrive at no clarification of it. So we will leave it and look for another one in which we seem to detect an internal kinship with its predecessor.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1653

It is one of the ‘bath jokes’ which treat of the Galician Jews’ aversion to baths. For we do not insist upon a patent of nobility from our examples. We make no enquiries about their origin but only about their efficiency - whether they are capable of making us laugh and whether they deserve our theoretical interest. And both these two requirements are best fulfilled precisely by Jewish jokes.

‘Two Jews met in the neighbourhood of the bath-house. "Have you taken a bath?" asked one of them. "What?" asked the other in return, "is there one missing?"'

If one laughs at a joke really heartily, one is not in precisely the best mood for investigating its technique. Hence some difficulties arise over making one’s way into these analyses. ‘It was a comical misunderstanding’, we are inclined to say. Yes but what is the technique of the joke? Clearly the use of the word ‘take’ in two meanings. For one of the speakers ‘take’ was the colourless auxiliary; for the other it was the verb with its sense unwatered down. Thus it is a case of the same word used ‘full’ and ‘empty’ (Group II (f)). If we replace the expression ‘taken a bath’ by the equivalent and simpler ‘bathed’, the joke vanishes. The reply no longer fits. Thus the joke is once again attached to the form of expression ‘taken a bath’.

That is so. But nevertheless it seems as though in this case too the reduction has been applied at the wrong point. The joke lies not in the question but in the answer - the second question: ‘What? is there one missing?’ And this answer cannot be robbed of being a joke by any extension or modification, so long as its sense is not interfered with. We have an impression, too, that in the second Jew’s reply the disregarding of the bath is more important than the misunderstanding of the word ‘take’. But here once more we cannot see our way clearly, and we will look for a third example.

It is again a Jewish joke; but this time it is only the setting that is Jewish, the core belongs to humanity in general. No doubt this example too has its unwanted complications, but fortunately they are not the same ones that have so far prevented us from seeing clearly.

‘An impoverished individual borrowed 25 florins from a prosperous acquaintance, with many asseverations of his necessitous circumstances. The very same day his benefactor met him again in a restaurant with a plate of salmon mayonnaise in front of him. The benefactor reproached him: "What? You borrow money from me and then order yourself salmon mayonnaise? Is that what you’ve used my money for?" "I don’t understand you", replied the object of the attack; "if I haven’t any money I can’t eat salmon mayonnaise, and if I have some money I mustn’t eat salmon mayonnaise. Well, then, when am I to eat salmon mayonnaise?"'

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1654

Here at last no more trace of a double meaning is to be found. Nor can the repetition of ‘salmon mayonnaise’ contain the joke’s technique, for it is not ‘multiple use’ of the same material but a real repetition of identical material called for by the subject-matter of the anecdote. We may for a time be quite baffled by this analysis and may even think of taking refuge in denying that the anecdote - though it made us laugh - possesses the character of a joke.

What more is there deserving of comment in the impoverished person’s reply? That it has been very markedly given the form of a logical argument. But quite unjustifiably, for the reply is in fact illogical. The man defends himself for having spent the money lent to him on a delicacy and asks, with an appearance of reason, when he is to eat salmon. But that is not the correct answer. His benefactor is not reproaching him with treating himself to salmon precisely on the day on which he borrowed the money; he is reminding him that in his circumstances he has no right to think of such delicacies at all. The impoverished bon vivant disregards this only possible meaning of the reproach, and answers another question as though he had misunderstood the reproach.

Can it be that the technique of this joke lies precisely in this diverting of the reply from the meaning of the reproach? If so, a similar change of standpoint, a similar shifting of the psychical emphasis, may perhaps be traceable in the two earlier examples, which we felt were akin to this one.

And, lo and behold! this suggestion is an easy success and in fact reveals the technique of those examples. Soulié pointed out to Heine that society in the nineteenth century worshipped the ‘Golden Calf’ just as did the Jews in the Wilderness. An appropriate answer by Heine might have been ‘Yes, such is human nature; thousands of years have made no change in it’ or something similar by way of assent. But Heine diverted his answer from the thought suggested to him and made no reply to it at all. He made use of the double meaning of which the phrase ‘Golden Calf’ is capable to branch off along a side-track. He caught hold of one component of the phrase, ‘Calf’, and replied, as though the emphasis in Soulié’s remark had been upon it: ‘Oh, he’s not a calf any longer’ . . etc.¹

¹ Heine’s answer combines two joke-techniques: a diversion combined with an allusion. He did not say straight out: ‘He’s an ox.’

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1655

The diversion in the bath-joke is even plainer. This example calls for a graphic presentation:

The first Jew asks: ‘Have you taken a bath?’ The emphasis is on the element ‘bath’.

The second replies as though the question had been: ‘Have you taken a bath?’

This shifting of the emphasis is only made possible by the wording ‘taken a bath’. If it had run ‘have you bathed?’ no displacement would have been possible. The non-joking answer would then have been: ‘Bathed? What d’you mean? I don’t know what that is.’ But the technique of the joke lies in the displacement of the accent from ‘bath’ to ‘taken’.¹

Let us go back to the ‘Salmon Mayonnaise’, since it is the most straightforward example. What is new in it deserves our attention in various directions. First we must give a name to the technique brought to light in it. I propose to describe it as ‘displacement’, since its essence lies in the diversion of the train of thought, the displacement of the psychical emphasis on to a topic other than the opening one. Our next task is to enquire into the relation between the technique of displacement and the form of expression of the joke. Our example (‘Salmon Mayonnaise’) shows us that a displacement joke is to a high degree independent of verbal expression. It depends not on words but on the train of thought. No replacement of the words will enable us to get rid of it so long as the sense of the answer is retained. Reduction is only possible if we change the train of thought and make the gourmet reply directly to the reproach which he has evaded in the version represented in the joke. The reduced version would then run: ‘I can’t deny myself what tastes good to me, and it’s a matter of indifference to me where I get the money from to pay for it. There you have the explanation of why I’m eating salmon mayonnaise on the very day you’ve lent me the money.’ But that would not be a joke; it would be a piece of cynicism.

¹ The word ‘take [nehmen]’ is very well adapted to form a basis for play upon words owing to the variety of ways in which it can be used. I will give a plain example, as a contrast to the displacement jokes reported above: ‘A well-known stock-exchange speculator and bank-director was walking with a friend along the Ringstrasse. As they went past a cafe he remarked: "Let’s go inside and take something!" His friend held him back: "But, Herr Hofrat, the place is full of people!" ‘

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1656

It is instructive to compare this joke with another that is very close to it in meaning:

‘A man who had taken to drink supported himself by tutoring in a small town. His vice gradually became known, however, and as a result he lost most of his pupils. A friend was commissioned to urge him to mend his ways. "Look, you could get the best tutoring in the town if you would give up drinking. So do give it up!" "Who do you think you are?" was the indignant reply. "I do tutoring so that I can drink. Am I to give up drinking so that I can get tutoring?"'

This joke gives the same appearance of being logical that we saw in the ‘Salmon Mayonnaise’; but it is not a displacement joke. The reply was a direct one. The cynicism which was concealed in the former joke is openly admitted in this one: ‘Drinking is the most important thing for me.’ Actually the technique of this joke is extremely scanty and cannot explain its effectiveness. It consists simply in the rearrangement of the same material or, more precisely, in the reversal of the relation of means and ends between drinking and doing or getting tutoring. As soon as my reduction ceases to emphasize this factor in its form of expression, the joke fades; for instance: ‘What a senseless suggestion! The important thing for me is the drinking, not the tutoring. After all, tutoring is only a means to enable me to go on drinking.’ So the joke did in fact depend on its form of expression.

In the bath-joke the dependence of the joke on its wording (‘Have you taken a bath?’) is unmistakable, and a change in it involves the disappearance of the joke. For in this case the technique is a more complicated one - a combination of double meaning (sub-species f) and displacement. The wording of the question admits a double meaning, and the joke is produced by the answer disregarding the meaning intended by the questioner and catching on to the subsidiary meaning. We are accordingly in a position to find a reduction which allows the double meaning of the wording to persist and yet destroys the joke; we can do this merely by undoing the displacement:

‘Have you taken a bath?’ - ‘What do you think I’ve taken? A bath? What’s that?’ But this is no longer a joke, but a malicious or facetious exaggeration.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1657

A precisely similar part is played by the double meaning in Heine’s joke about the ‘Golden Calf’. It enables the answer to make a diversion from the suggested train of thought (which is effected in the ‘Salmon Mayonnaise’ joke without any such assistance from the wording). In the reduction Souliés remark and Heine’s reply would perhaps run: ‘The way in which the people here are crowding round the man simply because he’s rich reminds one vividly of the worship of the Golden Calf.’ And Heine: ‘That he should be honoured in this way because of his wealth doesn’t strike me as the worst of it. In what you say you’re not putting enough stress on the fact that because of his wealth people forgive him his stupidity.’ In this way the double meaning would be retained but the displacement joke would be destroyed.

But at this point we must be prepared to meet an objection which will assert that these fine distinctions are seeking to tear apart what belongs together. Does not every double meaning give occasion for a displacement - for a diversion of the train of thought from one meaning to the other? And are we prepared, then, to allow ‘double meaning’ and ‘displacement’ to be set up as representatives of two quite different types of joke-technique? Well, it is true that this relation between double meaning and displacement does exist, but it has nothing to do with our distinguishing the different joke-techniques. In the case of double meaning a joke contains nothing other than a word capable of multiple interpretation, which allows the hearer to find the transition from one thought to another - a transition which, stretching a point, might be equated with a displacement. In the case of a displacement joke, however, the joke it self contains a train of thought in which a displacement of this kind has been accomplished. Here the displacement is part of the work which has created the joke; it is not part of the work necessary for understanding it. If this distinction is not clear to us, we have an unfailing means of bringing it tangibly before our eyes in our attempts at reduction. But there is one merit which we will not deny to this objection. It draws our attention to the necessity of not confusing the psychical processes involved in the construction of the joke (the ‘joke-work’) with the psychical processes involved in taking in the joke (the work of understanding). Our present enquiry is only concerned with the former.¹

¹ For the latter, see later chapters of this book. - A few further words of explanation are perhaps not unnecessary here. Displacement habitually takes place between a remark and a reply which pursues the train of thought in a direction other than that in which it was started by the original remark. The justification for distinguishing displacement from double meaning is most convincingly shown by the examples in which the two are combined - where, that is, the wording of the remark admits of a double meaning which is not intended by the speaker, but which points the way for the reply to make a displacement. (See the examples.)

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1658

Are there other examples of the displacement technique? They are not easy to find. A straightforward instance is afforded by the following joke, which moreover is not characterized by the appearance of logic which was so much overstressed in our model case:

‘A horse-dealer was recommending a saddle-horse to a customer. "If you take this horse and get on it at four in the morning you’ll be at Pressburg by half-past six." - "What should I be doing in Pressburg at half-past six in the morning?"'

Here the displacement leaps to the eye. The dealer obviously mentions the early hour of arriving at the provincial town simply in order to demonstrate the horse’s capacity by an example. The customer disregards the animal’s capacity, which he does not question, and merely enters into the data of the example that has been chosen. The reduction of this joke is accordingly easy to give.

Greater difficulties are presented by another example the technique of which is most obscure, but which can nevertheless be solved as double meaning combined with displacement. The joke describes the prevarication of a ‘Schadchen’ (a Jewish marriage-broker), and is thus one of a group with which we shall often be concerned.

‘The Schadchen had assured the suitor that the girl’s father was no longer living. After the betrothal it emerged that the father was still alive and was serving a prison sentence. The suitor protested to the Schadchen, who replied: "Well, what did I tell you? You surely don’t call that living?"'

The double meaning lies in the word ‘living’, and the displacement consists in the Schadchen shifting the meaning of the word from its ordinary sense, as a contrast to ‘dead’, to the sense which it has in the phrase ‘that’s not living’. In doing so he explains his former pronouncement retrospectively as having had a double meaning, though any such multiple meaning was decidedly remote in this particular case. So far the technique would seem similar to that in the ‘Golden Calf’ joke and the bath-joke. But here there is another factor to be considered which by its prominence interferes with our understanding of the technique. It might be described as a ‘characterizing’ joke: it seeks by an example to illustrate a marriage-broker’s characteristic mixture of mendacious impudence and readiness of repartee. We shall find that this is only the outer shell, the façade, of the joke; its meaning - that is to say, its purpose - is something different. And we must postpone the attempt at a reduction of it.¹

After these complicated examples, which have been so hard to analyse, it will be with satisfaction that we are able to turn once more to an example which can be recognized as a perfectly straightforward and transparent sample of a displacement joke:

‘A Schnorrer [someone who is reluctant to part with his own money] approached a wealthy baron with a request for the grant of some assistance for his journey to Ostend. The doctors, he said, had recommended him sea-bathing to restore his health. "Very well", said the rich man, "I’II give you something towards it. But must you go precisely to Ostend, which is the most expensive of all sea-bathing resorts?" - "Herr Baron", was the reproachful reply, "I consider nothing too expensive for my health."' This is no doubt a correct point of view, but not correct for a petitioner. The answer is given from the point of view of a rich man. The Schnorrer behaves as though it was his own money that he was to sacrifice for his health, as though the money and the health were the concern of the same person.

¹ See Chapter III below.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1659

Let us start once more from that highly instructive example ‘Salmon Mayonnaise’. It, too, presented us with a façade, in which a striking parade of logical thinking was exhibited; and we learnt from analysing it that this logic was used to conceal a piece of faulty reasoning - namely, a displacement of the train of thought. This may serve to remind us, if only by means of a contrasting connection, of other jokes which, quite the other way, undisguisedly exhibit a piece of nonsense or stupidity. We shall be curious to learn what may be the technique of such jokes.

I will begin with the most forcible and at the same time the plainest example of the whole group. Once again it is a Jewish joke:

‘Itzig had been declared fit for service in the artillery. He was clearly an intelligent lad, but intractable and without any interest in the service. One of his superior officers, who was friendlily disposed to him, took him on one side and said to him: "Itzig, you’re no use to us. I’II give you a piece of advice: buy yourself a cannon and make yourself independent!"'

This advice, which may raise a hearty laugh, is obvious nonsense. Cannons are not to be bought and an individual cannot make himself independent as a military unit - set himself up in business, as it were. But it is impossible to doubt for a moment that the advice is not mere nonsense but joking nonsense - an excellent joke. How then is the nonsense turned into a joke?

Not much reflection is needed. We can infer from the authorities’ comments indicated above in the introduction that there is sense behind joking nonsense such as this, and that it is this sense that makes the nonsense into a joke. The sense in our example is easy to find. The officer who gives Artilleryman Itzig this nonsensical advice is only making himself out stupid to show Itzig how stupidly he himself is be having. He is copying Itzig: ‘I’II give you some advice that’s as stupid as you are.’ He enters into Itzig’s stupidity and makes it clear to him by taking it as the basis of a suggestion which would fit in with Itzig’s wishes: if Itzig possessed a cannon of his own and carried out military duties on his own account, how useful his intelligence and ambition would be to him! In what good order he would keep his cannon and how familiar he would make himself with its mechanism so as to meet the competition of the other possessors of cannons!

I will interrupt the analysis of this example, to point out the same sense in nonsense in a shorter and simpler, though less glaring, case of a nonsensical joke:

‘Never to be born would be the best thing for mortal men.’ ‘But’, adds the philosophical comment in Fliegende Blätter, ‘this happens to scarcely one person in a hundred thousand.’

This modern addition to an ancient saw is an evident piece of nonsense, made sillier by the ostensibly cautious ‘scarcely’. But the addition is attached to the original statement as an indisputably correct limitation, and is thus able to open our eyes to the fact that this solemnly accepted piece of wisdom is itself not much better than a piece of nonsense. Anyone who is not born is not a mortal man at all, and there is no good and no best for him. Thus the nonsense in the joke serves to uncover and demonstrate another piece of nonsense, just as in the example of Artilleryman Itzig.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1660

And here I can add a third instance, which, from its content, would scarcely deserve the lengthy description that it requires, but which once again exemplifies with special clarity the use of nonsense in a joke to demonstrate another piece of nonsense.

‘A man who was obliged to go on a journey confided his daughter to a friend with the request that he should watch over her virtue during his absence. Some months later he returned, and found that she was pregnant. As was natural, he reproached his friend, who, however, seemed unable to explain the misfortune. "Well", asked the father at last, "where did she sleep?" - "In the room with my son." - "But how could you let her sleep in the same room as your son after I’d begged you so to look after her?" - "After all there was a screen between them. Your daughter’s bed was on one side and my son’s bed on the other, with the screen between them." - "And suppose he walked round the screen?" - "Yes, there is that", replied the other thoughtfully; "it might have happened like that."'

We can arrive with the greatest ease at the reduction of this joke, whose qualities have otherwise little to recommend it. It would obviously run: ‘You have no right to reproach me. How could you be so stupid as to leave your daughter in a house where she is bound to live in the constant company of a young man? How would it be possible for an outsider to answer for a girl’s virtue in such circumstances?’ Here, then, the friend’s apparent stupidity is only a reflection of the father’s stupidity. The reduction has disposed of the stupidity in the joke and at the same time of the joke itself. The element ‘stupidity’ itself has not been got rid of: it is to be found at another point in the context of the sentence after it has been reduced to its original meaning.

We can now attempt a reduction of the joke about the cannon. The officer should have said: ‘Itzig, I know you’re an intelligent man of business. But I assure you it is very stupid of you if you can’t see that it is impossible to behave in the army in the same way as in business life, where each person acts for himself and against the others. In military life subordination and co-operation are the rule.’

The technique of the nonsensical jokes which we have so far considered really consists, therefore, in presenting something that is stupid and nonsensical, the sense of which lies in the revelation and demonstration of something else that is stupid and nonsensical.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1661

Has this use of absurdity in joke technique always the same significance? Here is one more example which gives an affirmative reply:

‘When on one occasion Phocion was applauded after making a speech, he turned to his friends and asked: "What have I said that’s stupid, then?"'

The question sounds absurd. But we see its meaning at once: ‘What have I said, then, that can have pleased these stupid people so much? I ought to feel ashamed of the applause. If what I said has pleased stupid people, it cannot itself have been very sensible.’

Other examples, however, can teach us that absurdity is very often used in joke-technique without serving the purpose of demonstrating another piece of nonsense:

‘A well-known University teacher, who was in the habit of peppering his unattractive special subject with numerous jokes, was congratulated on the birth of his youngest child, who was granted to him when he had already reached an advanced age. "Yes", he replied to his well-wishers, "it is remarkable what human hands can accomplish.’ - This answer seems quite specially nonsensical and out of place. Children, after all, are regarded as a blessing of God, quite in contrast to human handiwork. But it soon occurs to us that after all the answer has a meaning and, at that, an obscene one. There is no question here of the happy father making himself out stupid in order to show that something or someone else is stupid. The apparently senseless answer makes a surprising, a bewildering impression on us, as the authorities would say. As we have seen they attribute the whole effect of jokes like this to an alternation between ‘bewilderment and illumination’. We shall try later to form a judgement on this; for the moment we must be content to stress the fact that the technique of this joke lies in its presentation of something bewildering and nonsensical.

A joke of Lichtenberg’s takes a quite special place among these ‘stupid’ jokes:

‘He wondered how it is that cats have two holes cut in their skin precisely at the place where their eyes are.’ To wonder about something that is in fact only the statement of an identity is undoubtedly a piece of stupidity. It reminds one of Michelet’s exclamation¹ which was meant to be taken seriously, and which to the best of my recollection runs: ‘How beautifully Nature has arranged it that as soon as a child comes into the world it finds a mother ready to take care of it!’ Michelet’s pronouncement is a real piece of stupidity, but Lichtenberg’s is a joke which makes use of stupidity for some purpose and behind which something lies. But what? For the moment, we must admit, no answer can be given.

¹ La Femme

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1662

We have now already found from two groups of examples that the joke-work makes use of deviations from normal thinking - of displacement and absurdity - as technical methods for producing a joking form of expression. It is no doubt justifiable to expect that other kinds of faulty reasoning may find a similar use. And it is in fact possible to produce a few examples of the sort:

‘A gentleman entered a pastry-cook’s shop and ordered a cake; but he soon brought it back and asked for a glass of liqueur instead. He drank it and began to leave without having paid. The proprietor detained him. "What do you want?" asked the customer. - "You’ve not paid for the liqueur." - "But I gave you the cake in exchange for it." - "You didn’t pay for that either." - "But I hadn’t eaten it."'

This anecdote too has an appearance of logic about it, which, as we already know, is a suitable façade for a piece of faulty reasoning. The mistake evidently lies in the crafty customer’s constructing a connection which did not exist between the giving back of the cake and the taking of the liqueur in its place. The episode in fact fell into two processes, which were independent of each other so far as the vendor was concerned and were substitutes for each other only from the point of view of the purchaser’s intention. First he took the cake and gave it back, and therefore owed nothing for it; then he took the liqueur, and for it he owed payment. We might say that the customer used the relation ‘in exchange for’ with a double meaning. But it would be more correct to say that by means of a double meaning he constructed a connection which was not in reality valid.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1912:] A similar nonsensical technique appears if a joke seeks to maintain a connection which seems to be excluded by the special conditions implied in its content. Such, for instance, is Lichtenberg’s knife without a blade which has no handle. So, too, the joke repeated by Von Falke: ‘Is this the place where the Duke of Wellington spoke those words?’  - ‘Yes, it is the place; but he never spoke the words.’

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1663

This is an opportunity for making a not unimportant admission. We are engaged in investigating the technique of jokes as shown in examples; and we should therefore be certain that the examples we have chosen are really genuine jokes. It is the case, however, that in a number of instances we are in doubt whether the particular example ought to be called a joke or not. We have no criterion at our disposal before our investigation has given us one. Linguistic usage is untrustworthy and itself needs to have its justification examined. In coming to our decision we can base ourselves on nothing but a certain ‘feeling’, which we may interpret as meaning that the decision is made in our judgement in accordance with particular criteria that are not yet accessible to our knowledge. In the case of our last example we must feel a doubt whether it should be represented as a joke, or perhaps as a ‘sophistical’ joke, or simply as a piece of sophistry. For the fact is that we do not yet know in what the characteristic of being a joke resides.

On the other hand, the next example, which exhibits a type of faulty reasoning that may be said to be complementary to the former instance, is an undoubted joke. It is once again a story of a marriage-broker:

‘The Schadchen was defending the girl he had proposed against the young man’s protests. "I don’t care for the mother-in-law", said the latter. "She’s a disagreeable, stupid person." - "But after all you’re not marrying the mother-in-law. What you want is her daughter." - "Yes, but she’s not young any longer, and she’s not precisely a beauty." - "No matter. If she’s neither young nor beautiful she’ll be all the more faithful to you."- "And she hasn’t much money." - "Who’s talking about money? Are you marrying money then? After all it’s a wife that you want." - "But she’s got a hunchback too." - "Well, what do you want? Isn’t she to have a single fault?"'

What was really in question, then, was an unbeautiful girl, no longer young, with a scanty dowry and an unpleasant mother, who was moreover the victim of a serious deformity - not very inviting conditions for contracting a marriage. The marriage broker was able, in the case of each one of these defects, to point out how it would be possible to come to terms with it. He was then able to claim that the inexcusable hunch back was the single defect that every individual must be allowed to possess. Once more there is the appearance of logic which is characteristic of a piece of sophistry and which is intended to conceal the faulty reasoning. Clearly the girl had a number of defects - several that might be overlooked and one that it was impossible to disregard; she was unmarriageable. The broker behaved as though each separate defect was got rid of by his evasions, whereas in fact each one of them left a certain amount of depreciation behind which had to be added to the next one. He insisted on treating each defect in isolation and refused to add them up into a total.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1664

The same omission is the core of another piece of sophistry which has been much laughed over, but whose right to be called a joke might be doubted:

‘A. borrowed a copper kettle from B. and after he had returned it was sued by B. because the kettle now had a big hole in it which made it unusable. His defence was: "First, I never borrowed a kettle from B. at all; secondly, the kettle had a hole in it already when I got it from him; and thirdly, I gave him back the kettle undamaged."' Each one of these defences is valid in itself, but taken together they exclude one another. A. was treating in isolation what had to be regarded as a connected whole, just as the marriage-broker treated the girl’s defects. We might also say: ‘A. has put an "and" where only an "either-or" is possible.’

We find another piece of sophistry in the following marriage broker story:

‘The would-be bridegroom complained that the bride had one leg shorter than the other and limped. The Schadchen contradicted him: "You’re wrong. Suppose you marry a woman with healthy, straight limbs! What do you gain from it? You never have a day’s security that she won’t fall down, break a leg and afterwards be lame all her life. And think of the suffering then, the agitation, and the doctor’s bill! But if you take this one, that can’t happen to you. Here you have a fait accompli.’

The appearance of logic is very thin in this case, and no one will be ready to prefer an already ‘accomplished misfortune’ to one that is merely a possibility. The fault in this train of thought can be more easily shown in another example - a story which I cannot entirely divest of its dialect:

‘In the temple at Cracow the Great Rabbi N. was sitting and praying with his disciples. Suddenly he uttered a cry, and, in reply to his disciples’ anxious enquiries, exclaimed: "At this very moment the Great Rabbi L. has died in Lemberg." The community put on mourning for the dead man. In the course of the next few days people arriving from Lemberg were asked how the Rabbi had died and what had been wrong with him; but they knew nothing about it, and had left him in the best of health. At last it was established with certainty that the Rabbi L. in Lemberg had not died at the moment at which the Rabbi N. had observed his death by telepathy, since he was still alive. A stranger took the opportunity of jeering at one of the Cracow Rabbi’s disciples about this occurrence: "Your Rabbi made a great fool of himself that time, when he saw the Rabbi L. die in Lemberg. The man’s alive to this day." "That makes no difference", replied the disciple. "Whatever you may say, the Kück¹ from Cracow to Lemberg was a magnificent one."'

The faulty reasoning common to the last two examples is here undisguisedly admitted. The value of phantasy is exalted unduly in comparison with reality; a possibility is almost equated with an actual event. The distant look across the stretch of country separating Cracow and Lemberg would have been an impressive telepathic achievement if it had produced something that was true. But the disciple was not concerned with that. It might after all have possibly happened that the Rabbi in Lemberg had died at the moment at which the Cracow Rabbi announced his death; and the disciple displaced the emphasis from the condition subject to which the teacher’s achievement deserved admiration on to an unconditional admiration of the achievement. ‘In magnis rebus voluisse sat est’ ² expresses a similar point of view. Just as in this example reality is disregarded in favour of possibility, so in the former one the marriage-broker suggests to the would-be bridegroom that the possibility of a woman being made lame by an accident should be regarded as something far more important than the question of whether she is really lame or not.

¹ [A Yiddish word] from the German ‘gucken [to look or peep]’: ‘look’, ‘distant look’.

² [‘In great things it is enough to have wished.’]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1665

This group of ‘sophistical’ pieces of faulty reasoning is resembled by another interesting group in which the faulty reasoning can be described as ‘automatic’. It may be due to no more than a whim of chance that all the examples that I shall bring forward of this new group are once more Schadchen stories:

‘A Schadchen had brought an assistant with him to the discussion about the proposed bride, to bear out what he had to say. "She is straight as a pine-tree", said the Schadchen. - "As a pine-tree", repeated the echo. - "And she has eyes that ought to be seen!" - "What eyes she has!" confirmed the echo.- "And she is better educated than anyone!" - "What an education!" - "It’s true there’s one thing", admitted the broker, "she has a small hump." - "And what a hump!" the echo confirmed once more.’ The other stories are analogous, but have more sense.

‘The bridegroom was most disagreeably surprised when the bride was introduced to him, and drew the broker on one side and whispered his remonstrances: "Why have you brought me here?" he asked reproachfully. "She’s ugly and old, she squints and has bad teeth and bleary eyes . . ." - "You needn’t lower your voice", interrupted the broker, "she’s deaf as well."'

‘The bridegroom was paying his first visit to the bride’s house in the company of the broker, and while they were waiting in the salon for the family to appear, the broker drew attention to a cupboard with glass doors in which the finest set of silver plate was exhibited. "There! Look at that! You can see from these things how rich these people are." - "But", asked the suspicious young man, "mightn’t it be possible that these fine things were only collected for the occasion - that they were borrowed to give an impression of wealth?" - "What an idea!" answered the broker protestingly. "Who do you think would lend these people anything?"'

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1666

The same thing happens in all three cases. A person who has reacted in the same way several times in succession repeats this mode of expression on the next occasion, when it is unsuitable and defeats his own intentions. He neglects to adapt himself to the needs of the situation, by giving way to the automatic action of habit. Thus, in the first story the assistant forgets that he was brought along in order to prejudice the would-be bridegroom in favour of the proposed bride. And since to begin with he has performed his task and underlined the bride’s advantages by repeating each one as it is brought forward, he goes on to underline her timidly admitted hump, which he should have minimized. The broker in the second story is so much fascinated by the enumeration of the bride’s defects and infirmities that he completes the list out of his own knowledge, though that was certainly not his business or purpose. In the third story, finally, he allows himself to be so much carried away by his eagerness to convince the young man of the family’s wealth that, in order to establish one confirmatory point, he brings up something that is bound to upset all his efforts. In every case automatic action triumphs over the expedient modification of thought and expression.

This is easy to see; but it is bound to have a confusing effect when we notice that these three stories have as much right to be called ‘comic’ as we had to produce them as ‘jokes’. The uncovering of psychical automatism is one of the techniques of the comic, just as is any kind of revelation or self-betrayal. We suddenly find ourselves faced at this point with the problem of the relation of jokes to the comic which we intended to evade. (See the introduction.) Are these stories perhaps only ‘comic’ and not ‘jokes’? Is the comic operating here by the same methods as jokes do? And, once again, what constitutes the peculiar characteristics of jokes?

We must keep to our view that the technique of this last group of jokes that we have examined lies in nothing else than in bringing forward ‘faulty reasoning’. But we are obliged to admit that their examination has so far led us more into obscurity than understanding. Nevertheless we do not abandon our expectation that a more complete knowledge of the techniques of jokes will lead us to a result which can serve as a starting point for further discoveries.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1667

The next examples of jokes, with which we shall pursue our enquiry, offer an easier task. Their technique, in particular, reminds us of what we already know.

First, here is a joke of Lichtenberg’s:

‘January is the month in which we offer our dear friends wishes, and the rest are the months in which they are not fulfilled.’

Since these jokes are to be described as refined rather than strong, and work by methods that are unobtrusive, we will begin by presenting a number of them in order to intensify their effect:

‘Human life falls into two halves. In the first half we wish the second one would come; and in the second we wish the first one were back.’

‘Experience consists in experiencing what we do not wish to experience.’

(Both these last two are from Fischer, 1889.)

These examples cannot fail to remind us of a group with which we have already dealt and which is distinguished by the ‘multiple use of the same material’. The last example in particular will raise the question of why we did not include it in that group instead of introducing it here in a fresh connection. ‘Experience’ is once again described in its own terms, just as ‘jealousy’ was earlier (p. 1640). I should not be inclined to dispute this classification very seriously. But as regards the other two examples (which are of a similar nature), I think another factor is more striking and more important than the multiple use of the same words, in which in this case there is nothing that fringes on double meaning. I should like in particular to stress the fact that here new and unexpected unities are set up, relations of ideas to one another, definitions made mutually or by reference to a common third element. I should like to name this process ‘unification’. It is clearly analogous to condensation by compression into the same words. Thus the two halves of human life are described by a mutual relation discovered to exist between them: in the first we wish the second would come and in the second we wish the first were back. Speaking more precisely, two very similar mutual relations have been chosen for representation. To the similarity of the relations there corresponds a similarity of the words, which may indeed remind us of the multiple use of the same material: ‘wish . . . would come’ - ‘wish . . . back’. In Lichtenberg’s joke January and the months contrasted with it are characterized by a (once again, modified) relation to a third element; these are the good wishes, which are received in the first month and not fulfilled in the remaining ones. Here the distinction from the multiple use of the same material (which approximates to double meaning) is very clear.¹

¹ In order to give a better description of ‘unification’ than the examples above allow of, I will make use of something I have already mentioned - namely the peculiar negative relation that holds between jokes and riddles, according to which the one conceals what the other exhibits. Many of the riddles with the production of which G. T. Fechner, the philosopher, passed his time when he was blind, are characterized by a high degree of unification, which lends them a special charm. Take, for instance, as a neat example, Riddle No. 203 (Dr. Mises’ Rätselbüchlein, 4th edition, enlarged, N.D.):

Die beiden ersten finden ihre Ruhestätte

Im Paar der andern, und das Ganze macht ihr Bette.

[My two first (Toten, the dead) find their resting-place in my two last (Gräber, graves), and my whole (Totengräber, grave-digger) makes their bed.]

We are told nothing about the two pairs of syllables that have to be guessed except a relation that holds between them, and about the whole we are only told its relation to the first pair.

The following are two examples of description by relation to the same or a slightly modified third element:

Die erste Silb’hat Zähn’ und Haare,

Die zweite Zähne in den Haaren,

Wer auf den Zähnen nicht hat Haare,

Vom Ganzen kaufe keine Waren.        No. 170.

[The first syllable has teeth and hair (Ross, horse), the second has teeth in the hair (Kamm, comb). No one who has not hair on his teeth (i.e. who is not able to look after his interests) should buy goods from the whole (Rosskamm, horse-dealer).]

Die erste Silbe frisst,

Die andere Silbe isst,

Die dritte wird gefressen,

Das Ganze wird gegessen.                No. 168.

[The first syllable gobbles (Sau, sow), the second syllable eats (Er, he), the third is gobbled (Kraut, weeds), the whole is eaten (Sauerkraut).]

The most perfect instance of unification is to be found in a riddle of Schleiermacher’s, which cannot be denied the character of a joke:

Von der letzten umschlungen

Schwebt das vollendete Ganze

Zu den zwei ersten empor.

[Entwined by my last (Strick, rope), my completed whole (Galgenstrick, rogue) swings to the top of my two first (Galgen, gallows).]

The great majority of all such riddles lack unification. That is to say, the clue by which one syllable is to be guessed is quite independent of those that point to the second or third, as well as of the indication which is to lead to the separate discovery of the whole.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1668

Here is a neat example of a unification joke which needs no explanation:

‘The French poet J. B. Rousseau wrote an Ode to Posterity. Voltaire was not of opinion that the poem merited survival, and jokingly remarked: "This poem will not reach its destination."' (Fischer, 1889.)

This last example draws attention to the fact that it is essentially unification that lies at the bottom of jokes that can be described as ‘ready repartees’. For repartee consists in the defence going to meet the aggression, in ‘turning the tables on someone’ or ‘paying someone back in his own coin’ - that is, in establishing an unexpected unity between attack and counter-attack. For instance:

‘An innkeeper had a whitlow on his finger and the baker said to him: "You must have got that by putting your finger in your beer." "It wasn’t that", replied the innkeeper, "I got a piece of your bread under my nail."' (From Überhorst (1900, 2).)

‘Serenissimus was making a tour through his provinces and noticed a man in the crowd who bore a striking resemblance to his own exalted person. He beckoned to him and asked: "Was your mother at one time in service in the Palace?"- "No, your Highness," was the reply, "but my father was."'

‘Duke Charles of Württemberg happened on one of his rides to come upon a dyer who was engaged on his job. Pointing to the grey horse he was riding, the Duke called out: "Can you dye him blue?" "Yes, of course, your Highness," came the answer, "if he can stand boiling."'

In this excellent tu quoque, in which a nonsensical question is met by an equally impossible condition, there is another technical factor at work which would have been absent if the dyer had answered: ‘No, your Highness. I’m afraid the horse wouldn’t stand boiling.’

Unification has another, quite specially interesting technical instrument at its disposal: stringing things together with the conjunction ‘and’. If things are strung together in this way it implies that they are connected: we cannot help understanding it so. For instance, when Heine, speaking of the city of Göttingen in the Harzreise, remarks: ‘Speaking generally, the inhabitants of Göttingen are divided into students, professors, philistines and donkeys’, we take this grouping in precisely the sense which Heine emphasizes in an addition to the sentence: ‘and these four classes are anything but sharply divided.’ Or, again, when he speaks of the school in which he had to put up with ‘so much Latin, caning and Geography’, this series, which is made even more transparent by the position of the ‘caning’ between the two educational subjects, tells us that the unmistakable view taken by the schoolboys of the caning certainly extended to Latin and Geography was well.

Among the examples given by Lipps of ‘joking enumeration’ (‘co-ordination’), we find the following lines quoted as being closely akin to Heine’s ‘students, professors, philistines and donkeys’:

Mit einer Gabel und mit Müh’

Zos ihn die Mutter aus der Brüh.

[With a fork and much to-do

His mother dragged him from the stew.]

It is as though (Lipps comments), the Müh [trouble, to-do] were an instrument like the fork. We have a feeling, however, that these lines, though they are very comic, are far from being a joke, while Heine’s list undoubtedly is one. We may perhaps recall these examples later, when we need no longer evade the problem of the relation between the comic and jokes.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1669

We observed in the example of the Duke and the dyer that it would remain a joke by unification if the dyer had replied: ‘No, I’m afraid the horse wouldn’t stand boiling.’ But his actual reply was: ‘ Yes, your Highness, if he can stand boiling.’ The replacement of the really appropriate ‘no’ by a ‘yes’ constitutes a new technical method of joking, the employment of which we will pursue in some other examples.

A joke similar to the one we have just mentioned (also quoted by Fischer) is simpler:

‘Frederick the Great heard of a preacher in Silesia who had the reputation of being in contact with spirits. He sent for the man and received him with the question "You can conjure up spirits?" The reply was: "At your Majesty’s command. But they don’t come."' It is quite obvious here that the method used in the joke lay in nothing else than the replacing of the only possible answer ‘no’ by its opposite. In order to carry out the replacement, it was necessary to add a ‘but’ to the ‘yes’; so that ‘yes’ and ‘but’ are equivalent in sense to ‘no’.

This ‘representation by the opposite’, as we shall call it, serves the joke-work in various forms. In the next two examples it appears almost pure:

‘This lady resembles the Venus of Milo in many respects: she, too, is extraordinarily old, like her she has no teeth, and there are white patches on the yellowish surface of her body.’ (Heine.)

Here we have a representation of ugliness through resemblances to what is most beautiful. It is true that these resemblances can only exist in qualities that are expressed in terms with a double meaning or in unimportant details. This latter feature applies to our second example - ‘The Great Spirit’, by Lichtenberg:

‘He united in himself the characteristics of the greatest men. He carried his head askew like Alexander; he always had to wear a toupet like Caesar; he could drink coffee like Leibnitz; and once he was properly settled in his armchair, he forgot eating and drinking like Newton, and had to be woken up like him; he wore his wig like Dr. Johnson, and he always left a breeches-button undone like Cervantes.’

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1670

Von Falke (1897, 271) brought home a particularly good example of representation by the opposite from a journey to Ireland, an example in which no use whatever is made of words with a double meaning. The scene was a wax-work show (as it might be, Madame Tussaud’s). A guide was conducting a company of old and young visitors from figure to figure and commenting on them: ‘This is the Duke of Wellington and his horse’, he explained. Whereupon a young lady asked: ‘Which is the Duke of Wellington and which is his horse?’ ‘Just as you like, my pretty child,’ was the reply. ‘You pays your money and you takes your choice.’

The reduction of this Irish joke would be: ‘Shameless the things these wax-work people dare to offer the public! One can’t distinguish between the horse and its rider! (Facetious exaggeration.) And that’s what one pays one’s money for!’ This indignant exclamation is then dramatized, based on a small occurrence. In place of the public in general an individual lady appears and the figure of the rider is particularized: he must be the Duke of Wellington, who is so extremely popular in Ireland. But the shamelessness of the proprietor or guide, who takes money out of people’s pockets and offers them no thing in return, is represented by the opposite - by a speech in which he boasts himself a conscientious man of business, who has nothing more closely at heart than regard for the rights which the public has acquired by its payment. And now we can see that the technique of this joke is not quite a simple one. In so far as it enables the swindler to insist on his conscientiousness it is a case of representation by the opposite; but in so far as it effects this on an occasion on which something quite different is demanded of him - so that he replies with business like respectability where what we expect of him is the identification of the figures - it is an instance of displacement. The technique of the joke lies in a combination of the two methods.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1671

No great distance separates this example from a small group which might be described as ‘overstatement’ jokes. In these the ‘yes’ which would be in place in the reduction is replaced by a ‘no’, which, however, on account of its content, has the force of an intensified ‘yes’, and vice versa. A denial is a substitute for an overstated confirmation. Thus, for instance, in Lessing’s epigram:¹

Die gute Galathee! Man sagt, sie schwärz’ ihr Haar;

Da doch ihr Haar schon schwarz, als sie es kaufte, war.

[Good Galathea blacks her hair, ‘tis thought;

And yet her hair was black when it was bought.]

Or Lichtenberg’s malicious defence of philosophy:

‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy’, said Prince Hamlet contemptuously. Lichtenberg knew that this condemnation is not nearly severe enough, for it does not take into account all the objections that can be made to philosophy. He therefore added what was missing: ‘But there is much, too, in philosophy that is not to be found in heaven or earth.’ His addition, it is true, emphasizes the way in which philosophy compensates us for the insufficiency for which Hamlet censures it. But this compensation implies another and still greater reproach.

Two Jewish jokes, though they are of a coarse type, are even clearer, since they are free from any trace of displacement:

‘Two Jews were discussing baths. "I have a bath every year", said one of them, "whether I need one or not."'

It is obvious that this boastful insistence on his cleanliness only serves to convict him of uncleanliness.

‘A Jew noticed the remains of some food in another one’s beard. "I can tell you what you had to eat yesterday." - "Well, tell me." - "Lentils, then." - "Wrong: the day before yesterday! "'

The following example is an excellent ‘overstatement’ joke, which can easily be traced back to representation by the opposite:

‘The King condescended to visit a surgical clinic and came on the professor as he was carrying out the amputation of a leg. He accompanied all its stages with loud expressions of his royal satisfaction: "Bravo! bravo! my dear Professor!" When the operation was finished, the professor approached him and asked him with a deep bow: "Is it your Majesty’s command that I should remove the other leg too?" ‘

¹ Modelled on one in the Greek Anthology.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1672

The professor’s thoughts during the royal applause could certainly not have been expressed unaltered: ‘This makes it look as though I were taking off the poor fellows bad leg by royal command and only for the royal satisfaction. After all I really have other reasons for the operation.’ But he then goes to the King and says: ‘I have no reasons for carrying out an operation other than your Majesty’s command. The applause you honoured me with has made me so happy that I only await your Majesty’s orders to amputate the sound limb too.’ In this way he succeeds in making himself understood by saying the opposite of what he thinks but must keep to himself. This opposite is an overstatement that cannot be believed.

As these examples show, representation by the opposite is an instrument of joke-technique that is used frequently and works powerfully. But there is something else that we should not overlook: namely that this technique is by no means peculiar to jokes. When Mark Antony, after he has made a long speech in the Forum and has reversed the emotional attitude of his audience round Caesar’s corpse, finally exclaims once more:

‘For Brutus is an honourable man . . .’

he knows that the people will now shout back to him the true sense of his words:

‘They were traitors: honourable men!’

Or when Simplicissimus describes a collection of incredible pieces of brutality and cynicism as the expressions of ‘men of feeling’, this too is a representation by the opposite. But we call this ‘irony’ and no longer a joke. The only technique that characterizes irony is representation by the opposite. Moreover we read and hear of ‘ironical jokes’. So it can no longer be doubted that technique alone is insufficient to characterize the nature of jokes. Something further is needed which we have not yet discovered. But on the other hand it remains an uncontradicted fact that if we undo the technique of a joke it disappears. For the time being we may find difficulty in thinking how these two fixed points that we have arrived at in explaining jokes can be reconciled.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1673

If representation by the opposite is one of the technical methods of jokes, we can expect that jokes may also make use of its contrary - representation by something similar or akin. A further pursuit of our enquiry will in fact show us that this is the technique of a fresh and particularly comprehensive group of conceptual jokes. We shall describe the peculiarity of this technique far more appropriately if, instead of representation by something ‘akin’, we say by something ‘correlated’ or ‘connected’. We will take our start, in fact, with this latter characteristic and illustrate it at once by an example.

Here is an American anecdote: ‘Two not particularly scrupulous business men had succeeded, by dint of a series of highly risky enterprises, in amassing a large fortune, and they were now making efforts to push their way into good society. One method, which struck them as a likely one, was to have their portraits painted by the most celebrated and highly paid artist in the city, whose pictures had an immense reputation. The precious canvases were shown for the first time at a large evening party, and the two hosts themselves led the most influential connoisseur and art critic up to the wall upon which the portraits were hanging side by side, to extract his admiring judgement on them. He studied the works for a long time, and then, shaking his head, as though there was something he had missed, pointed to the gap between the pictures and asked quietly: "But where’s the Saviour?"' (I.e. ‘I don’t see the picture of the Saviour’.)

The meaning of this remark is clear. It is once again a question of the representation of something that cannot be expressed directly. How does this ‘indirect representation’ come about?  Starting from the representation in the joke, we trace the path backwards through a series of easily established associations and inferences.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1674

We can guess from the question ‘Where’s the Saviour: Where’s the picture of the Saviour?’ that the sight of the two pictures had reminded the speaker of a similar sight, familiar to him, as to us, which however, included an element that was missing here - the picture of the Saviour between two other pictures. There is only one such situation: Christ hanging between the two thieves. The missing element is brought into prominence by the joke. The similarity lies in the pictures, hanging to the right and left of the Saviour, which the joke passes over; it can only consist in the fact that the pictures hanging on the walls are pictures of thieves. What the critic wanted to say but could not say was: ‘You are a couple of rascals’ or, in greater detail: ‘What do I care about your pictures? You are a couple of rascals - I know that!’ And he did in fact end by saying it by means of a few associations and inferences, using the method which we speak of as an ‘allusion’.

We at once recall where we have already come across allusion -  in connection, namely, with double meaning. When two meanings are expressed in one word and one of them is so much more frequent and usual that it occurs to us at once, while the second is more out of the way and therefore less prominent, we proposed to speak of this as ‘double meaning with an allusion’. In a whole number of the examples we have already examined we remarked that the technique was not a simple one, and we now perceive that the ‘allusion’ was the complicating factor in them. (See, for instance, the inversion joke about the wife who has lain back a bit and so has been able to earn a lot or the nonsensical joke about the man who replied to congratulations on the birth of his youngest child by saying that it was remarkable what human hands could accomplish.)

In the American anecdote we now have before us an allusion without any double meaning, and we see that its characteristic is replacement by something linked to it in a conceptual connection. It may easily be guessed that the utilizable connection can be of more than one kind. In order not to lose ourselves in a maze of detail, we will discuss only the most marked variants and these only in a few examples.

The connection used for the replacement may be merely a resemblance in sound, so that this sub-species becomes analogous to puns among verbal jokes. Here, however, it is not the resemblance in sound between two words, but between whole sentences, characteristic phrases, and so on.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1675

For instance, Lichtenberg coined the saying: ‘New spas cure well’, which at once reminds us of the proverb: ‘New brooms sweep clean.’ The two phrases share the first one and a half words and the last word, as well as the whole structure of the sentence.¹ And there is no doubt that the sentence came into the witty philosopher’s head as an imitation of the familiar proverb. Thus Lichtenberg’s saying becomes an allusion to the proverb. By means of this allusion something is suggested that is not said straight out - namely that something else is responsible for the effects produced by spas besides the unvarying characteristics of thermal springs.

A similar technical solution applies to another jest [Scherz] or joke [Witz] of Lichtenberg’s: ‘A girl scarcely twelve Moden old.’ This sounds like ‘twelve Monden [moons]’, i.e. months, and may originally have been a slip of the pen for the latter, which is a permissible expression in poetry. But it also makes good sense to use the changing fashion instead of the changing moon as a method of determining a woman’s age.

The connection may also consist in similarity except for a ‘slight modification’. So that this technique, too, is parallel to a verbal technique. Both species of joke make almost the same impression, but they can be better distinguished from each other if we consider the processes of the joke-work.

Here is an example of a verbal joke or pun of this kind: Marie Wilt was a great singer, famous, however, for the compass not only of her voice. She suffered the humiliation of having the title of a play based on Jules Verne’s well-known novel used as an allusion to her misshapen figure: ‘Round the Wilt in 80 Days’.²

Or: ‘Every fathom a queen’, a modification of Shakespeare’s familiar ‘Every inch a king’. The allusion to this quotation was made with reference to an aristocratic and over-life-size lady. No very serious objection could really be made if anyone were to prefer to include this joke among the ‘condensations accompanied by modifications as substitute’. (See ‘tête-à-bête’, p. 1631.)

¹ [In the German the first syllables of ‘spas (Bäder)' and ‘brooms (Besen)' sound alike; and in the German proverb the last word is ‘well (gut)'.]

² [The German for ‘world’ is ‘Welt '.]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1676

A friend said of someone who had lofty views but was obstinate in the pursuit of his aims: ‘Er hat ein Ideal vor dem Kopf.’ The current phrase is: ‘Ein Brett vor dem Kopf haben’. The modification alludes to this phrase and makes use of its meaning for its own purposes. Here, once more, the technique might be described as ‘condensation with modification’.

It is almost impossible to distinguish between ‘allusion by means of modification’ and ‘condensation with substitution’, if the modification is limited to a change of letters. For instance: ‘Dichteritis’¹ This allusion to the scourge of ‘Diphteritis ' represents authorship by unqualified persons as another public danger.

Negative particles make very neat allusions possible at the cost of slight alterations:

‘My fellow-unbeliever Spinoza’, says Heine. ‘We, by the ungrace of God, day-labourers, serfs, negroes, villeins . . .’ is how Lichtenberg begins a manifesto (which he carries no further) made by these unfortunates - who certainly have more right to this title than kings and princes have to its unmodified form.

Finally, another kind of allusion consists in  ‘omission’, which may be compared to condensation without the formation of a substitute. Actually, in every allusion something is omitted, viz. the train of thought leading to the allusion. It only depends on whether the more obvious thing is the gap in the wording of the allusion or the substitute which partly fills the gap. Thus a series of examples would lead us back from blatant omission to allusion proper.

¹ [A non-existent word, which might be translated ‘authoritis’ - from ‘Dichter (an author)'.]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1677

Omission without a substitute is shown in the following example: There is a witty and pugnacious journalist in Vienna, whose biting invective has repeatedly led to his being physically maltreated by the subjects of his attacks. On one occasion, when a fresh misdeed on the part of one of his habitual opponents was being discussed, somebody exclaimed: ‘If X hears of this, he’ll get his ears boxed again.’ The technique of this joke includes, in the first place, bewilderment at its apparent nonsense, since we cannot see how getting one’s ears boxed can be an immediate consequence of having heard something. The absurdity of the remark disappears if we insert in the gap: ‘he’ll write such a scathing article upon the man that . . . etc.’ Allusion by means of omission, combined with nonsense, are accordingly the technical methods used in this joke.

‘He praises himself so much that the price of fumigating candles is going up.’ (Heine.) This gap is easy to fill. What is omitted has been replaced by an inference, which then leads back to what has been omitted, in the form of an allusion: ‘self-praise stinks.’

And now once again two Jews outside the bath-house:

One of them sighed: ‘Another year gone by already!’

These examples leave us in no doubt that here the omission forms part of the allusion.

There is still quite a marked gap to be seen in our next example, though it is a genuine and correct allusive joke. After an artists’ carnival in Vienna a jest-book was circulated, in which, among others, the following highly remarkable epigram appeared:

‘A wife is like an umbrella. Sooner or later one takes a cab.’

An umbrella is not enough protection against rain. The ‘sooner or later’ can only mean ‘if it rains hard’, and a cab is a public vehicle. But since we are only concerned here with the form of the analogy, we will postpone the closer examination of this joke to a later moment.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1678

Heine’s ‘Bäder von Lucca’ contains a regular wasp’s next of the most stinging allusions and makes the most ingenious use of this form of joke for polemical purposes (against Count Platen). Long before the reader can suspect what is afoot, there are foreshadowings of a particular theme, peculiarly ill-adapted for direct representation, by allusions to material of the most varied kind, - for instance, in Hirsch-Hyacinth’s verbal contortions: ‘You are too stout and I am too thin; you have a good deal of imagination and I have all the more business sense; I am a practicus and you are a diarrheticus; in short you are my complete antipodex.’ - ‘Venus Urinia’ - ‘the stout Gudel von Dreckwall’ of Hamburg, and so on. In what follows, the events described by the author take a turn which seems at first merely to display his mischievous spirit but soon reveals its symbolic relation to his polemical purpose and at the same time shows itself as allusive. Eventually the attack on Platen bursts out, and thenceforward allusions to the theme (with which we have already been made acquainted) of the Count’s love for men gushes out and overflows in every sentence of Heine’s attack on his opponent’s talents and character. For instance:

‘Even though the Muses do not favour him, he has the Genius of Speech in his power, or rather he knows how to do violence to him. For he does not possess the free love of that Genius, he must unceasingly pursue this young man, too, and he knows how to capture only the outer forms, which, despite their lovely curves never speak nobly.’

‘He is like the ostrich, which believes he is well hidden if he sticks his head in the sand, so that only his behind can be seen. Our exalted bird would have done better to hide his behind in the sand and show us his head.’

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1679

Allusion is perhaps the commonest and most easily manageable method of joking and is at the bottom of the majority of short-lived jokes which we are accustomed to weaving into our conversations and which will not bear being uprooted from their original soil and kept in isolation. But it precisely reminds us once more of the fact that had begun to puzzle us in our consideration of the technique of jokes. An allusion in itself does not constitute a joke; there are correctly constructed allusions which have no claim to such a character. Only allusions that possess that character can be described as jokes. So that the criterion of jokes, which we have pursued into their technique, eludes us there once again.

I have occasionally described allusion as  ‘indirect representation’; and we may now observe that the various species of allusion, together with representation by the opposite and other techniques that have still to be mentioned, may be united into a single large group, for which ‘indirect representation’ would be the most comprehensive name. ‘Faulty reasoning’, ‘unification’, ‘indirect representation’ - these, then, are the headings under which we can classify those techniques of conceptual jokes which we have come to know.

If we examine our material further, we seem to recognize a fresh sub-species of indirect representation which can be precisely characterized but of which few examples can be adduced. This is representation by something small or very small - which performs the task of giving full expression to a whole characteristic by means of a tiny detail. This group can be brought under the classification of ‘allusion’, if we bear in mind that this smallness is related to what has to be represented, and can be seen to proceed from it. For instance:

‘A Galician Jew was travelling in a train. He had made himself really comfortable, had unbuttoned his coat and put his feet up on the seat. Just then a gentleman in modern dress entered the compartment. The Jew promptly pulled himself together and took up a proper pose. The stranger fingered through the pages of a notebook, made some calculations, reflected for a moment and then suddenly asked the Jew: "Excuse me, when is Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement)?" "Oho!", said the Jew, and put his feet up on the seat again before answering.’

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1680

It cannot be denied that this representation by something small is related to the ‘tendency to economy’ which we were left with as the last common element after our investigation of verbal technique.

Here is a very similar example:

‘The doctor, who had been asked to look after the Baroness at her confinement, pronounced that the moment had not come, and suggested to the Baron that in the meantime they should have a game of cards in the next room. After a while a cry of pain from the Baroness struck the ears of the two men: "Ah, mon Dieu, que je souffre!" Her husband sprang up, but the doctor signed to him to sit down: "It’s nothing. Let’s go on with the game!" A little later there were again sounds from the pregnant woman: "Mein Gott, mein Gott, what terrible pains!" - "Aren’t you going in, Professor?" asked the Baron. - "No, no. It’s not time yet." - At last there came from next door an unmistakable cry of "Aa-ee, aa-ee, aa-ee!" The doctor threw down his cards and exclaimed: "Now it’s time."'

This successful joke demonstrates two things from the example of the way in which the cries of pain uttered by an aristocratic lady in child-birth changed their character little by little. It shows how pain causes primitive nature to break through all the layers of education, and how an important decision can be properly made to depend on an apparently trivial phenomenon.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1681

There is another kind of indirect representation used by jokes, namely the ‘analogy’. We have kept it back so long because the consideration of it comes up against new difficulties, or makes particularly evident difficulties that we have already come up against in other connections. We have already admitted that in some of the examples we have examined we have not been able to banish a doubt as to whether they ought to be regarded as jokes at all; and in this uncertainty we have recognized that the foundations of our enquiry have been seriously shaken. But I am aware of this uncertainty in no other material more strongly or more frequently than in jokes of analogy. There is a feeling - and this is probably true of a large number of other people under the same conditions - which tells me ‘this is a joke, I can pronounce this to be a joke’ even before the hidden essential nature of jokes has been discovered. This feeling leaves me in the lurch most often in the case of joking analogies. If to begin with I unhesitatingly pronounce an analogy to be a joke, a moment later I seem to notice that the enjoyment it gives me is of a quality different from what I am accustomed to derive from a joke. And the circumstance that joking analogies are very seldom able to provoke the explosive laugh which signalizes a good joke makes it impossible for me to resolve the doubt in my usual way - by limiting myself to the best and most effective examples of a species.

It is easy to demonstrate that there are remarkably fine and effective examples of analogies that do not in the least strike us as being jokes. The fine analogy between the tenderness in Ottilie’s diary and the scarlet thread of the English navy (p. 1629 n.) is one such. And I cannot refrain from quoting in the same sense another one, which I am never tired of admiring and the effect of which I have not grown out of. It is the analogy with which Ferdinand Lassalle ended one of his celebrated speeches for the defence (‘Science and the Workers’): ‘Upon a man such as I have shown you this one to be, who has devoted his life to the watchword "Science and the Workers", being convicted, if it were his lot, would make no more impression than would the bursting of a retort upon a chemist deep in his scientific experiments. As soon as the interruption is past, with a slight frown over the rebelliousness of his material, he will quietly pursue his researches and his labours.’

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1682

A rich selection of apt and joking analogies are to be found among Lichtenberg’s writings (the second volume of the Göttingen edition of 1853), and it is from there that I shall take the material for our investigation.

‘It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing someone’s beard.’

No doubt that seems to be a joke; but on closer examination we, notice that the joking effect does not arise from the analogy itself but from a subsidiary characteristic. ‘The torch of truth’ is not a new analogy but one that has been common for a very long time and has become reduced to a cliché - as always happens when an analogy is lucky and accepted into linguistic usage. Though we scarcely notice the analogy any longer in the phrase ‘the torch of truth’, it is suddenly given back its full original force by Lichtenberg, since an addition is now made to the analogy and a consequence is drawn from it. But we are already familiar with a process like this of giving its full meaning to a watered-down expression as a technique of joking. It finds a place in the multiple use of the same material (p. 1639 f.). It might quite well be that the joking impression produced by Lichtenberg’s remark arises only from its dependence on this joke-technique.

The same judgement may certainly apply as well to another joking analogy by the same author:

‘To be sure, the man was not a great light [Licht], but a great candlestick [Leuchter] . . . He was a Professor of Philosophy.’

To describe a man of learning as a great light, a lumen mondi, has long ceased to be an effective analogy, whether or not it originally had an effect as a joke. But the analogy is refreshed, it is given back its full force, if a modification is derived from it and a second, new, analogy is thus obtained from it. The way in which this second analogy comes about seems to be what determines the joke, not the two analogies themselves. This would be an instance of the same joke-technique as in the example of the torch.

The following example seems to have the character of a joke for another reason, but one that must be judged similarly:

‘Reviews seem to me to be a kind of childish illness to which new-born books are more or less liable. There are examples of the healthiest dying of it; and the weakest often get through it. Some escape it altogether. Attempts have often been made to guard against it by the amulets of preface and dedication, or even to inoculate against it by judgements of one’s own. But this does not always help.’

The comparison of reviews to a childish illness is founded in the first instance on the fact of being exposed to them shortly after first seeing the light of day. I cannot venture to decide whether up to this point the comparison has the character of a joke. But it is then carried further: it turns out that the subsequent fate of new books can be represented within the framework of the same analogy or through related analogies. A prolongation like this of an analogy is undoubtedly in the nature of a joke, but we already know what technique it has to thank for this - it is a case of unification, the making of an unsuspected connection. The character of the unification is not altered by the fact that here it consists in making an addition to a previous analogy.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1683

In another group of analogies one is tempted to shift what is undoubtedly an impression that has the character of a joke on to another factor, which once again has in itself nothing to do with the nature of the analogy. These are analogies which contain a striking juxtaposition, often a combination that sounds absurd, or which are replaced by something of the sort as the outcome of the analogy. The majority of the Lichtenberg examples belong to this group.

‘It is a pity that one cannot see the learned entrails of authors so as to discover what they have eaten.’ The ‘learned’ entrails is a bewildering and indeed absurd epithet, which is only explained by the analogy. What if the impression of its being a joke were due entirely to the bewildering character of the juxtaposition? If so, it would correspond to a method of joking with which we are quite familiar - ‘representation by absurdity’

Lichtenberg has used the same analogy between the ingestion of reading and instructive matter and the ingestion of physical nourishment for another joke:

‘He thought very highly of learning at home, and was therefore entirely in favour of learned stall-feeding.’

Other analogies by the same author exhibit the same absurd, or at least remarkable, assignment of epithets, which, as we now begin to see, are the true vehicles of the joke:

‘That is the weather side of my moral constitution; I can stand things there quite well.’

‘Everyone has his moral backside, which he does not show except in case of need and which he covers as long as possible with the breeches of respectability.’

‘Moral backside’ - the assignment of this remarkable epithet is the outcome of an analogy. But in addition, the analogy is continued further with an actual play upon words - ‘need’ - and a second even more unusual juxtaposition (‘the breeches of respectability’), which is perhaps a joke in itself; for the breeches, since they are the breeches of respectability, themselves, as it were, become a joke. We need not be surprised, then, if the whole gives us the impression of being an analogy that is a very good joke. We begin to notice that we are inclined, quite generally, where a characteristic attaches only to a part of a whole, to extend it in our estimation to the whole itself. The ‘breeches of respectability’, incidentally, recall some similarly bewildering lines of Heine’s:

. . . Bis mir endlich,

endlich alle Knopfe rissen

an der Hose der Geduld.¹

There can be no doubt that these last two analogies have a characteristic that we do not find in every good (that is to say, in every apt) analogy. They are to a great degree ‘debasing’, as we might put it. They juxtapose something of a high category, something abstract (in these instances, ‘respectability’ and ‘patience’), with something of a very concrete and even low kind (‘breeches’). We shall have to consider in another connection whether this peculiarity has anything to do with the joke. Here we will try to analyse another example in which this disparaging characteristic is quite specially plain. Weinberl, the clerk in Nestroy’s farce Einen Jux will er sich machen [He wants to have a spree], pictures to himself how one day, when he is a respectable old business man, he will remember the days of his youth: ‘When the ice in front of the warehouse of memory has been hacked up like this in a friendly talk’, he says, ‘when the arched doorway of old times has been unlocked again and the showcase of the imagination is fully stocked with goods from the past. . . .’ These are, to be sure, analogies between abstract and very commonplace concrete things; but the joke depends - whether entirely or in part - on the fact that a clerk is making use of analogies taken from the domain of his everyday activities. But the bringing of these abstractions into connection with the ordinary things with which his life is normally filled is an act of unification.

¹ [ . . . Till at last,

at last every button bursts

on my breeches of patience.]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1684

Let us return to the Lichtenberg analogies:

‘The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds [= points of the compass] and might be given names in a similar way: for instance, "bread-bread fame" or "fame-fame-bread". As is so often the case with Lichtenberg’s jokes, the impression of something apt, witty and shrewd is so prominent that our judgement upon the nature of what constitutes the joke is misled by it. If some amount of joke is admixed with the admirable meaning in a remark of this kind, we are probably led into declaring that the whole thing is an excellent joke. I should like, rather, to hazard the statement that everything in it that is really in the nature of a joke arises from our surprise at the strange combination ‘bread bread-fame’. As a joke, therefore, it would be a ‘representation by absurdity’.

A strange juxtaposition or the attribution of an absurd epithet can stand by itself as the outcome of an analogy:

‘A zweischläfrige woman.’ ‘An einschläfriger church-pew.’¹ (Both by Lichtenberg.) Behind both these there is an analogy with a bed; in both of them, besides the ‘bewilderment’ the technical factor of ‘allusion’ is in operation - an allusion in one case to the sleepy effects of sermons and in the other to the inexhaustible topic of sexual relations.

So far we have found that whenever an analogy strikes us as being in the nature of a joke it owes this impression to the admixture of one of the joke-techniques that are familiar to us. But a few other examples seem at last to provide evidence that an analogy can in itself be a joke.

This is how Lichtenberg describes certain odes:

‘They are in poetry what Jakob Böhme’s immortal works are in prose - a kind of picnic, in which the author provides the words and the reader the sense.’

‘When he philosophizes, he throws as a rule an agreeable moonlight over things, which pleases in general but shows no single thing clearly.’

¹ [These two German words - meaning literally ‘that can sleep two’ and ‘that can sleep one’ - are ordinarily applied to beds, i.e. ‘double’ and ‘single’. Einschläfrig, however, can also mean ‘soporific’.]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1685

Or here is Heine:

‘Her face resembled a palimpsest, on which, beneath the fresh black monastic manuscript of the text of a Church Father there lurk the half-obliterated lines of an ancient Greek love poem.’

Or let us take the lengthy analogy, with a highly degrading purpose, in the ‘Bäder von Lucca’

‘A catholic cleric behaves rather like a clerk with a post in a large business house. The Church, the big firm, of which the Pope is head, gives him a fixed job and, in return, a fixed salary. He works lazily, as everyone does who is not working for his own profit, who has numerous colleagues and can easily escape notice in the bustle of a large concern. All he has at heart is the credit of the house and still more its maintenance, since if it should go bankrupt he would lose his livelihood. A protestant cleric, on the other hand, is in every case his own principal and carries on the business of religion for his own profit. He does not, like his catholic fellow-traders, carry on a wholesale business but only retail. And since he must himself manage it alone, he cannot be lazy. He must advertise his articles of faith, he must depreciate his competitors’ articles, and, genuine retailer that he is, he stands in his retail shop, full of business envy of all the great houses, and particularly of the great house in Rome, which pays the wages of so many thousands of book-keepers and packers and has its factories in all four quarters of the globe.’

In the face of this and many other examples, we can no longer dispute the fact that an analogy can in itself possess the characteristic of being a joke, without this impression being accounted for by a complication with one of the familiar joke techniques. But, that being so, we are completely at a loss to see what it is that determines the joking characteristic of analogies, since that characteristic certainly does not reside in analogy as a form of expression of thought or in the operation of making a comparison. All we can do is to include analogy among the species of ‘indirect representation’ used by the joke-technique and we must leave unresolved the problem which we have met with much more clearly in the case of analogies than in the methods of joking that we came across earlier. No doubt, moreover, there must be some special reason why the decision whether something is a joke or not offers greater difficulties in analogies than in other forms of expression.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1686

This gap in our understanding gives us no grounds, however, for complaining that this first investigation has been without results. In view of the intimate connection which we must be prepared to attribute to the different characteristics of jokes, it would be imprudent to expect that we could completely explain one side of the problem before we have so much as cast a glance at the others. We shall no doubt have now to attack the problem from another direction.

Can we feel sure that none of the possible techniques of jokes has escaped our investigation? Of course not. But a continued examination of fresh material can convince us that we have got to know the commonest and most important technical methods of the joke-work - at all events as much as is required for forming a judgement on the nature of that psychical process. So far we have not arrived at any such judgement; but on the other hand we are now in possession of an important indication of the direction from which we may expect to receive further light upon the problem. The interesting processes of condensation accompanied by the formation of a substitute, which we have recognized as the core of the technique of verbal jokes, point towards the formation of dreams, in the mechanism of which the same psychical processes have been discovered. This is equally true, however, of the techniques of conceptual jokes - displacement, faulty reasoning, absurdity, indirect representation, representation by the opposite - which re-appear one and all in the technique of the dream-work. Displacement is responsible for the puzzling appearance of dreams, which prevents our recognizing that they are a continuation of our waking life. The use of absurdity and nonsense in dreams has cost them the dignity of being regarded as psychical products and has led the authorities to suppose that a disintegration of the mental activities and a cessation of criticism, morality and logic are necessary conditions of the formation of dreams. Representation by the opposite is so common in dreams that even the popular books of dream-interpretation, which are on a completely wrong tack, are in the habit of taking it into account. Indirect representation - the replacement of a dream-thought by an allusion, by something small, a symbolism akin to analogy - is precisely what distinguishes the mode of expression of dreams from that of our waking life.¹ So far-reaching an agreement between the methods of the joke-work and those of the dream-work can scarcely be a matter of chance. To demonstrate this agreement in detail and to examine its basis will be one of our later tasks.

¹ Cf. Chapter VI (‘The Dream-Work’) of my Interpretation of Dreams.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1687

III

THE PURPOSES OF JOKES

When at the end of my last chapter I wrote down Heine’s comparison of a catholic priest to an employee in a wholesale business and of a protestant one to a retail merchant, I was aware of an inhibition which was trying to induce me not to make use of the analogy. I told myself that among my readers there would probably be a few who felt respect not only for religion but for its governors and assistants. Such readers would merely be indignant about the analogy and would get into an emotional state which would deprive them of all interest in deciding whether the analogy had the appearance of being a joke on its own account or as a result of something extra added to it. With other analogies - for instance, the neighbouring one of the agreeable moonlight which a particular philosophy throws over things - there seemed to be no need for worry about the disturbing effect they might have on a section of my readers. The most pious man would remain in a state of mind in which he could form a judgement on our problem.

It is easy to divine the characteristic of jokes on which the difference in their hearers’ reaction to them depends. In the one case the joke is an end in itself and serves no particular aim, in the other case it does serve such an aim - it becomes tendentious. Only jokes that have a purpose run the risk of meeting with people who do not want to listen to them.

Non-tendentious jokes were described by Vischer as ‘abstract’ jokes. I prefer to call them ‘innocent’ jokes.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1688

Since we have already divided jokes into ‘verbal’ and ‘conceptual’ jokes according to the material handled by their technique, it devolves on us now to examine the relation between that classification and the new one that we are introducing. The relation between verbal and conceptual jokes on the one hand and abstract and tendentious jokes on the other is not one of mutual influence; they are two wholly independent classifications of joking products. Some people may perhaps have gained an impression that innocent jokes are predominantly verbal jokes, but that the more complex technique of conceptual jokes is mostly employed for definite purposes. But there are innocent jokes that work with play upon words and similarity of sound, and equally innocent ones that employ all the methods of conceptual jokes. And it is just as easy to show that a tendentious joke need be nothing other than a verbal joke as regards its technique. For instance, jokes that ‘play about’ with proper names often have an insulting and wounding purpose, though, needless to say, they are verbal jokes. But the most innocent of all jokes are once more verbal jokes; for instance, the Schüttelreime¹, which have recently become so popular and in which the multiple use of the same material with a modification entirely peculiar to it constitutes the technique:

Und weil er Geld in Menge hatte,

lag stets er in der Hängematte.²

It may be hoped that no one will question that the enjoyment derived from these otherwise unpretentious rhymes is the same as that by which we recognize jokes.

¹ [Literally, ‘shaking-up rhymes’.]

² [And because he had money in quantities

He always lay in a hammock.]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1689

Good examples of abstract or innocent conceptual jokes are to be found in plenty among the Lichtenberg analogies, with some of which we have already become acquainted. I add a few more:

‘They had sent a small octavo volume to Göttingen, and had got back something that was a quarto in body and soul.’

‘In order to erect this building properly, it is above all necessary that good foundations shall be laid; and I know of none firmer than if, upon every course of masonry pro, one promptly lays a course contra.’

‘One person procreates a thought, a second carries it to be baptized, a third begets children by it, a fourth visits it on its deathbed and a fifth buries it.’ (Analogy with unification.)

‘Not only did he disbelieve in ghosts; he was not even frightened of them.’ Here the joke lies entirely in the nonsensical form of representation, which puts what is commonly thought less of into the comparative and uses the positive for what is regarded as more important. If this joking envelope is removed, we have: ‘it is much easier to get rid of a fear of ghosts intellectually than to escape it when the occasion arises.’ This is no longer in the least a joke, though it is a correct and still too little appreciated psychological discovery - the same one which Lessing expressed in a well-known sentence:

‘Not all are free who mock their chains.’

I may take the opportunity that this affords of getting rid of what is nevertheless a possible misunderstanding. For ‘innocent’ or ‘abstract’ jokes are far from having the same meaning as jokes that are ‘trivial’ or ‘lacking in substance’; they merely connote the opposite of the ‘tendentious’ jokes that will be discussed presently. As our last example shows, an innocent - that is, a non-tendentious - joke may also be of great substance it may assert something of value. But the substance of a joke is independent of the joke and is the substance of the thought which is here, by means of a special arrangement, expressed as a joke. No doubt, just as watch-makers usually provide a particularly good movement with a similarly valuable case, so it may happen with jokes that the best achievements in the way of jokes are used as an envelope for thoughts of the greatest substance.

If now we draw a sharp distinction in the case of conceptual jokes between the substance of the thought and the joking envelope, we shall reach a discovery which may throw light of much of our uncertainty in judging jokes. For it turns out - and this is a surprising thing - that our enjoyment of a joke is based on a combined impression of its substance and of its effectiveness as a joke and that we let ourselves be deceived by the one factor over the amount of the other. Only after the joke has been reduced do we become aware of this false judgement.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1690

Moreover, the same thing is true of verbal jokes. When we are told that ‘experience consists in experiencing what one does not wish to experience’, we are bewildered and think we have learnt a new truth. It is a little time before we recognize under this disguise the platitude of ‘Injury makes one wise’. (Fischer.) The apt way in which the joke succeeds in defining ‘experience’ almost purely by the use of the word ‘to experience’ deceives us into overvaluing the substance of the sentence. Just the same thing is true of Lichtenberg’s ‘January’ joke of unification (p. 1667), which has nothing more to tell us than something we have already long known - that New Year’s wishes come true as seldom as other wishes. So too in many similar cases.

And we find just the contrary with other jokes, in which the aptness and truth of the thought tricks us into calling the whole sentence a brilliant joke - whereas only the thought is brilliant and the joke’s achievement is often feeble. Precisely in Lichtenberg’s jokes the kernel of thought is frequently far more valuable than the joking envelope to which we unjustifiably extend our appreciation. Thus, for instance, the remark about the ‘ torch of truth’ (p. 1682) is an analogy that scarcely amounts to a joke, but it is so apt that we are inclined to insist that the sentence is a particularly good joke.

Lichtenberg’s jokes are outstanding above all on account of their intellectual content and the certainty with which they hit their mark. Goethe was quite right in saying of that author that in fact his joking and jesting ideas concealed problems; it would have been even more correct to say that they touch on the solution of problems. When, for instance, he remarked as a joke: ‘He had read Homer so much that he always read "Agamemnon" instead of "angenommen "‘ - the technique used is ‘stupidity’ plus ‘similarity of sound’ - Lichtenberg had discovered nothing less than the secret of misreading.¹

Similarly with a joke the technique of which struck us as most unsatisfactory (p. 1661): ‘He wondered how it is that cats have two holes cut in their skin precisely at the place where their eyes are’. The stupidity that is paraded here is only apparent. In fact, behind this simple remark lies the great problem of teleology in the structure of animals. It was by no means so completely a matter of course that the palpebral fissure should open at the point at which the cornea is exposed, until the theory of evolution had thrown light on the coincidence.

We shall bear in mind the fact that we receive from joking remarks a total impression in which we are unable to separate the share taken by the thought content from the share taken by the joke-work. It may be that later on we shall find a still more significant parallel to this.

¹ See my Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b)

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1691

From the point of view of throwing theoretical light on the nature of jokes, innocent jokes are bound to be of more value to us than tendentious ones, and trivial jokes of more value than profound ones. Innocent and trivial jokes are likely to put the problem of jokes before us in its purest form, since with them we avoid the danger of being confused by their purpose or having our judgement misled by their good sense. On the basis of such material our discoveries can make fresh advances.

I will select the most innocent possible example of a verbal joke:

‘A girl to whom a visitor was announced while she was at her toilet complained: "Oh, what a shame that one mayn’t let oneself be seen just when one’s at one’s most anziehend"'¹ (Kleinpaul, 1890.)

Since, however, doubts arise in me after all as to whether I have a right to describe this joke as being non-tendentious, I will replace it by another one which is extremely simple and should really not be open to that objection.

At the end of a meal in a house to which I had been invited as a guest, a pudding of the kind known as a ‘roulard’ was served. It requires some skill on the part of the cook to make it; so one of the guests asked: ‘Made in the house?’ To which the host replied: ‘Yes, indeed. A home-roulard.’

¹ [‘Anziehend’ means both ‘dressing’ and ‘attractive’.]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1692

This time we will not examine the technique of the joke; we propose to turn our attention to another factor, which is actually the most important one. When those of us present heard this improvised joke it gave us pleasure - which I can clearly recall - and made us laugh. In this instance, as in countless others, the hearers’ feeling of pleasure cannot have arisen from the purpose of the joke or from its intellectual content; there is nothing left open to us but to bring that feeling of pleasure into connection with the technique of the joke. The technical methods of joking which we have earlier described - condensation, displacement, indirect representation and so on - thus possess the power of evoking a feeling of pleasure in the hearer, though we cannot in the least see how they may have acquired this power. In this simple way we arrive at the second thesis in our clarification of jokes; the first (p. 1623) asserted that the characteristic of jokes lay in their form of expression. Let us further reflect that this second thesis has in fact taught us nothing new. It merely isolates what was already included in an observation we had made earlier. It will be recalled that when we had succeeded in reducing a joke (that is, in replacing its form of expression by another one, while carefully preserving its sense) it had lost not only its character as a joke but also its power to make us laugh - our enjoyment of the joke.

We cannot proceed further at this point without a discussion with our philosophical authorities.

The philosophers, who count jokes a part of the comic and who treat of the comic itself under the heading of aesthetics, define an aesthetic idea by the condition that in it we are not trying to get anything from things or do anything with them, that we are not needing things in order to satisfy one of our major vital needs, but that we are content with contemplating them and with the enjoyment of the idea. ‘This enjoyment, this kind of ideation, is the purely aesthetic one, which lies only in itself, which has its aim only in itself and which fulfils none of the other aims of life.’ (Fischer, 1889, 20.)

We shall scarcely be contradicting this statement of Fischer’s - we shall perhaps be doing no more than translating his thoughts into our mode of expression - if we insist that the joking activity should not, after all, be described as pointless or aimless, since it has the unmistakable aim of evoking pleasure in its hearers. I doubt if we are in a position to undertake anything without having an intention in view. If we do not require our mental apparatus at the moment for supplying one of our indispensable satisfactions, we allow it itself to work in the direction of pleasure and we seek to derive pleasure from its own activity. I suspect that this is in general the condition that governs all aesthetic ideation, but I understand too little of aesthetics to try to enlarge on this statement. As regards joking, however, I can assert, on the basis of the two discoveries we have already made, that it is an activity which aims at deriving pleasure from mental processes, whether intellectual or otherwise. No doubt there are other activities which have the same aim. They are perhaps differentiated according to the fields of mental activity from which they seek to derive pleasure or perhaps according to the methods of which they make use. We cannot for the moment decide about this; but we hold firmly to the view that the joke technique and the tendency towards economy by which it is partly governed (p. 1647 ff.) have been brought into connection with the production of pleasure.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1693

But before we set about solving the riddle of how the technical methods of the joke-work are able to excite pleasure in the hearer, we have to recall the fact that, with a view to simplification and greater perspicuity, we have left tendentious jokes entirely on one side. We must, after all, try to throw light on the question of what the purposes of jokes are, and how they serve those purposes.

There is, first and foremost, one observation which warns us not to leave tendentious jokes on one side in our investigation of the origin of the pleasure we take in jokes. The pleasurable effect of innocent jokes is as a rule a moderate one; a clear sense of satisfaction, a slight smile, is as a rule all it can achieve in its hearers. And it may be that a part even of this effect is to be attributed to the joke’s intellectual content, as we have seen from suitable examples (p. 1690). A non-tendentious joke scarcely ever achieves the sudden burst of laughter which makes tendentious ones so irresistible. Since the technique of both can be the same, a suspicion may be aroused in us that tendentious jokes, by virtue of their purpose, must have sources of pleasure at their disposal to which innocent jokes have no access.

The purposes of jokes can easily be reviewed. Where a joke is not an aim in itself - that is, where it is not an innocent one - there are only two purposes that it may serve, and these two can themselves be subsumed under a single heading. It is either a hostile joke (serving the purpose of aggressiveness, satire, or defence) or an obscene joke (serving the purpose of exposure). It must be repeated in advance that the technical species of the joke - whether it is a verbal or a conceptual joke - bears no relation to these two purposes.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1694

It is a much lengthier business to show the way in which jokes serve these two purposes. In this investigation I should prefer to deal first not with the hostile jokes but with the exposing jokes. It is true that these have been far more rarely deemed worthy of investigation, as though aversion to the thing itself had here been transferred to the discussion of it. But we will not allow ourselves to be disconcerted by this, for we shall immediately come upon a marginal case of joking which promises to bring us enlightenment on more than one obscurity,

We know what is meant by ‘smut’: the intentional bringing into prominence of sexual facts and relations by speech. This definition, however, is no more valid than other definitions. In spite of this definition, a lecture on the anatomy of the sexual organs or the physiology of procreation need not have a single point of contact with smut. It is a further relevant fact that smut is directed to a particular person, by whom one is sexually excited and who, on hearing it, is expected to become aware of the speaker’s excitement and as a result to become sexually excited in turn. Instead of this excitement the other person may be led to feel shame or embarrassment, which is only a reaction against the excitement and, in a roundabout way, is an admission of it. Smut is thus originally directed towards women and may be equated with attempts at seduction. If a man in a company of men enjoys telling or listening to smut, the original situation, which owing to social inhibitions cannot be realized, is at the same time imagined. A person who laughs at smut that he hears is laughing as though he were the spectator of an act of sexual aggression.

The sexual material which forms the content of smut includes more than what is peculiar to each sex; it also includes what is common to both sexes and to which the feeling of shame extends - that is to say, what is excremental in the most comprehensive sense. This is, however, the sense covered by sexuality in childhood, an age at which there is, as it were, a cloaca within which what is sexual and what is excremental are barely or not at all distinguished.¹ Throughout the whole range of the psychology of the neuroses, what is sexual includes what is excremental, and is understood in the old, infantile, sense.

¹ See my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d), which is appearing at the same time as the present work.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1695

Smut is like an exposure of the sexually different person to whom it is directed. By the utterance of the obscene words it compels the person who is assailed to imagine the part of the body or the procedure in question and shows her that the assailant is himself imagining it. It cannot be doubted that the desire to see what is sexual exposed is the original motive of smut.

It can only help to clarify things if at this point we go back to fundamental facts. A desire to see the organs peculiar to each sex exposed is one of the original components of our libido. It may itself be a substitute for something earlier and go back to a hypothetical primary desire to touch the sexual parts. As so often, looking has replaced touching.¹ The libido for looking and touching is present in everyone in two forms, active and passive, male and female; and, according to the preponderance of the sexual character, one form or the other predominates. It is easy to observe the inclination to self-exposure in young children. In cases in which the germ of this inclination escapes its usual fate of being buried and suppressed, it develops in men into the familiar perversion known as exhibitionism. In women the inclination to passive exhibitionism is almost invariably buried under the imposing reactive function of sexual modesty, but not without a loophole being left for it in relation to clothes. I need only hint at the elasticity and variability in the amount of exhibitionism that women are permitted to retain in accordance with differing convention and circumstances.

In men a high degree of this trend persists as a portion of their libido, and it serves to introduce the sexual act. When this urge makes itself felt at the first approach to a woman, it must make use of words, for two reasons; firstly, to announce itself to her, and secondly, because if the idea is aroused by speech it may induce a corresponding excitement in the woman herself and may awaken an inclination in her to passive exhibitionism. A wooing speech like this is not yet smut, but it passes over into it. If the woman’s readiness emerges quickly the obscene speech has a short life; it yields at once to a sexual action. It is otherwise if quick readiness on the woman’s part is not to be counted on, and if in place of it defensive reactions appear. In that case the sexually exciting speech becomes an aim in itself in the shape of smut. Since the sexual aggressiveness is held up in its advance towards the act, it pauses at the evocation of the excitement and derives pleasure from the signs of it in the woman. In so doing, the aggressiveness is no doubt altering its character as well, just as any libidinal impulse will if it is met by an obstacle. It becomes positively hostile and cruel, and it thus summons to its help against the obstacle the sadistic components of the sexual instinct.

The woman’s inflexibility is therefore the first condition for the development of smut, although, to be sure, it seems merely to imply a postponement and does not indicate that further efforts will be in vain. The ideal case of a resistance of this kind on the woman’s part occurs if another man is present at the same time - a third person -, for in that case an immediate surrender by the woman is as good as out of the question. This third person soon acquires the greatest importance in the development of the smut; to begin with, however, the presence of the woman is not to be overlooked. Among country people or in inns of the humbler sort it will be noticed that it is not until the entrance of the barmaid or the innkeeper’s wife that smuttiness starts up. Only at higher social levels is the opposite found, and the presence of a woman brings the smut to an end. The men save up this kind of entertainment, which originally presupposed the presence of a woman who was feeling ashamed, till they are ‘alone together’. So that gradually, in place of the woman, the onlooker, now the listener, becomes the person to whom the smut is addressed, and owing to this transformation it is already near to assuming the character of a joke.

From this point onwards our attention will be drawn to two factors: the part played by the third person, the listener, and the conditions governing the subject-matter of the smut itself.

¹ Cf. Moll’s instinct of ‘contrectation’ (Moll, 1898).

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1696

Generally speaking, a tendentious joke calls for three people: in addition to the one who makes the joke, there must be a second who is taken as the object of the hostile or sexual aggressiveness, and a third in whom the joke’s aim of producing pleasure is fulfilled. We shall have later to examine the deeper reasons for this state of things; for the moment let us keep to the fact to which this testifies - namely that it is not the person who makes the joke who laughs at it and who therefore enjoys its pleasurable effect, but the inactive listener. In the case of smut the three people are in the same relation. The course of events may be thus described. When the first person finds his libidinal impulse inhibited by the woman, he develops a hostile trend against that second person and calls on the originally interfering third person as his ally. Through the first person’s smutty speech the woman is exposed before the third, who, as listener, has now been bribed by the effortless satisfaction of his own libido.

It is remarkable how universally popular a smutty interchange of this kind is among the common people and how it unfailingly produces a cheerful mood. But it also deserves to be noticed that in this complicated procedure, which involves so many of the characteristics of tendentious jokes, none of the formal requirements which characterize jokes are made of the smut itself. The uttering of an undisguised indecency gives the first person enjoyment and makes the third person laugh.

Only when we rise to a society of a more refined education do the formal conditions for jokes play a part. The smut becomes a joke and is only tolerated when it has the character of a joke. The technical method which it usually employs is the allusion - that is, replacement by something small, something remotely connected, which the hearer reconstructs in his imagination into a complete and straightforward obscenity. The greater the discrepancy between what is given directly in the form of smut and what it necessarily calls up in the hearer, the more refined becomes the joke and the higher, too, it may venture to climb into good society. As can easily be shown from examples, smut which has the characteristics of a joke has at its disposal, apart from allusion, whether coarse or refined, all the other methods of verbal and conceptual jokes.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1697

And here at last we can understand what it is that jokes achieve in the service of their purpose. They make possible the satisfaction of an instinct (whether lustful or hostile) in the face of an obstacle that stands in its way. They circumvent this obstacle and in that way draw pleasure from a source which the obstacle had made inaccessible. The obstacle standing in the way is in reality nothing other than women’s incapacity to tolerate undisguised sexuality, an incapacity correspondingly increased with a rise in the educational and social level. The woman who is thought of as having been present in the initial situation is afterwards retained as though she were still present, or in her absence her influence still has an intimidating effect on the men. We can observe how men of a higher class are at once induced, when they are in the company of girls of an inferior class, to reduce their smutty jokes to the level of simple smut.

The power which makes it difficult or impossible for women, and to a lesser degree for men as well, to enjoy undisguised obscenity is termed by us ‘repression’; and we recognize in it the same psychical process which, in cases of serious illness, keeps whole complexes of impulses, together with their derivatives, away from consciousness, and which has turned out to be the main factor in the causation of what are known as psycho-neuroses. It is our belief that civilization and higher education have a large influence in the development of repression, and we suppose that, under such conditions, the psychical organization undergoes an alteration (that can also emerge as an inherited disposition) as a result of which what was formerly felt as agreeable now seems unacceptable and is rejected with all possible psychical force. The repressive activity of civilization brings it about that primary possibilities of enjoyment, which have now, however, been repudiated by the censorship in us, are lost to us. But to the human psyche all renunciation is exceedingly difficult, and so we find that tendentious jokes provide a means of undoing the renunciation and retrieving what was lost. When we laugh at a refined obscene joke, we are laughing at the same thing that makes a peasant laugh at a coarse piece of smut. In both cases the pleasure springs from the same source. We, however, could never bring ourselves to laugh at the coarse smut; we should feel ashamed or it would seem to us disgusting. We can only laugh when a joke has come to our help.

Thus what we suspected to begin with seems to be confirmed: namely that tendentious jokes have sources of pleasure at their disposal besides those open to innocent jokes, in which all the pleasure is in some way linked to their technique. And we may also once more repeat that with tendentious jokes we are not in a position to distinguish by our feeling what part of the pleasure arises from the sources of their technique and what part from those of their purpose. Thus, strictly speaking, we do not know what we are laughing at. With all obscene jokes we are subject to glaring errors of judgement about the ‘goodness’ of jokes so far as this depends on formal determinants; the technique of such jokes is often quite wretched, but they have immense success in provoking laughter.

We will now examine the question of whether jokes play the same part in the service of a hostile purpose.

Here, from the outset, we come upon the same situation. Since our individual childhood, and, similarly, since the childhood of human civilization, hostile impulses against our fellow men have been subject to the same restrictions, the same progressive repression, as our sexual urges. We have not yet got so far as to be able to love our enemies or to offer our left cheek after being struck on the right. Furthermore, all moral rules for the restriction of active hatred give the clearest evidence to this day that they were originally framed for a small society of fellow clansmen. In so far as we are all able to feel that we are members of one people, we allow ourselves to disregard most of these restrictions in relation to a foreign people. Nevertheless, within our own circle we have made some advances in the control of hostile impulses. As Lichtenberg puts it in drastic terms: ‘Where we now say "Excuse me!" we used to give a box on the ears.’ Brutal hostility, forbidden by law, has been replaced by verbal invective; and a better knowledge of the interlinking of human impulses is more and more robbing us - by its consistent ‘tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner’ - of the capacity for feeling angry with a fellow man who gets in our way. Though as children we are still endowed with a powerful inherited disposition to hostility, we are later taught by a higher personal civilization that it is an unworthy thing to use abusive language; and even where fighting has in itself remained permissible, the number of things which may not be employed as methods of fighting has extraordinarily increased. Since we have been obliged to renounce the expression of hostility by deeds - held back by the passionless third person, in whose interest it is that personal security shall be preserved - we have, just as in the case of sexual aggressiveness, developed a new technique of invective, which aims at enlisting this third person against our enemy. By making our enemy small, inferior, despicable or comic, we achieve in a roundabout way the enjoyment of overcoming him - to which the third person, who has made no efforts, bears witness by his laughter.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1698

We are now prepared to realize the part played by jokes in hostile aggressiveness. A joke will allow us to exploit something ridiculous in our enemy which we could not, on account of obstacles in the way, bring forward openly or consciously; once again, then, the joke will evade restrictions and open sources of pleasure that have become inaccessible. It will further bribe the hearer with its yield of pleasure into taking sides with us without any very close investigation, just as on other occasions we ourselves have often been bribed by an innocent joke into over estimating the substance of a statement expressed jokingly. This is brought out with perfect aptitude in the common phrase ‘die Lacher auf seine Seite ziehen [to bring the laughers over to our side]’.

Let us, for instance, consider Herr N.’s jokes, which were scattered over the last chapter. They are all of them pieces of invective. It is as though Herr N. wanted to exclaim aloud: ‘The Minister for Agriculture is himself an ox!’ ‘Don’t talk to me about * * * *! He’s bursting with vanity!’ ‘I’ve never in my life read anything more boring than this historian’s essays on Napoleon in Austria!’ But the high position he occupies makes it impossible for him to give out his judgements in that form. They therefore bring in a joke to their help, and this in turn guarantees them a reception with the hearer which they would never have found in a non-joking form, in spite of the truth they might contain. One of these jokes is particularly instructive - the one about the ‘red Fadian’, perhaps the most impressive of all of them. What is there about it that makes us laugh and diverts our interest so completely from the question of whether or not an injustice has been done to the poor author? The joking form, of course - that is to say, the joke; but what is there about it that we are laughing at? No doubt at the person himself, who is introduced to us as the ‘red Fadian’, and in particular at his having red hair. Educated people have broken themselves of the habit of laughing at physical defects, and moreover they do not include having red hair among the laughable physical failings. But there is no doubt that it is so regarded by schoolboys and the common people - and this is still true even at the level of education of certain municipal and parliamentary representatives. And now Herr N. has made it possible in the most ingenious manner for us, grown-up and sensitive people, to laugh like the schoolboys at the historian X’s red hair. This was certainly not Herr N.’s intention; but it is most doubtful whether a person who gives free play to a joke must necessarily know its precise intention.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1699

If in these cases the obstacle to the aggressiveness which the joke helped to evade was an internal one - an aesthetic objection to the invective - elsewhere it can be of a purely external sort. This was so in the case in which Serenissimus asked a stranger by whose similarity to his own person he had been struck: ‘Was your mother in the Palace at one time?’ and the repartee was: ‘No, but my father was.’ The person to whom the question was put would no doubt have liked to knock down the impertinent individual who dared by such an allusion to cast a slur on his beloved mother’s memory. But the impertinent individual was Serenissimus, whom one may not knock down or even insult unless one is prepared to purchase that revenge at the price of one’s whole existence. The insult must therefore, it would seem, be swallowed in silence. But fortunately a joke shows the way in which the insult may be safely avenged - by making use of the technical method of unification in order to take up the allusion and turn it back against the aggressor. Here the impression of a joke is so much determined by its purpose that, in face of the joking character of the rejoinder, we are inclined to forget that the question asked by the aggressor had itself the character of a joke with the technique of allusion.

The prevention of invective or of insulting rejoinders by external circumstances is such a common case that tendentious jokes are especially favoured in order to make aggressiveness or criticism possible against persons in exalted positions who claim to exercise authority. The joke then represents a rebellion against that authority, a liberation from its pressure. The charm of caricatures lies in this same factor: we laugh at them even if they are unsuccessful simply because we count rebellion against authority as a merit.

If we bear in mind the fact that tendentious jokes are so highly suitable for attacks on the great, the dignified and the mighty, who are protected by internal inhibitions and external circumstances from direct disparagement, we shall be obliged to take a special view of certain groups of jokes which seem to be concerned with inferior and powerless people. I am thinking of the anecdotes about marriage-brokers, some of which we became acquainted with in the course of our investigation of the various techniques of conceptual jokes. In a few of them, for instance in the examples ‘She’s deaf as well’ and ‘Who would lend these people anything?’, the broker is laughed at for his improvidence and thoughtlessness and he becomes comic because the truth escapes him as it were automatically. But does what we have learnt of the nature of tendentious jokes on the one hand and on the other hand our great enjoyment of these stories fit in with the paltriness of the people whom these jokes seem to laugh at? Are they worthy opponents of the jokes? Is it not rather the case that the jokes only put forward the marriage-brokers in order to strike at something more important?  Is it not a case of saying one thing and meaning another? It is really not possible to reject this view.

This interpretation of the broker anecdotes may be carried further. It is true that there is no necessity for my entering into them, that I can content myself with regarding these anecdotes as ‘Schwänke [funny stories]’ and deny that they have the character of a joke. Thus jokes can also have a subjective determinant of this kind. Our attention has now been drawn to that possibility and we shall have to examine it later. It declares that only what I allow to be a joke is a joke. What is a joke to me may be merely a comic story to other people. But if a joke admits of this doubt, the reason can only be that it has a façade - in these instances a comic one - in the contemplation of which one person is satiated while another may try to peer behind it. A suspicion may arise, moreover, that this façade is intended to dazzle the examining eye and that these stories have therefore something to conceal.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1700

In any case, if our marriage-broker anecdotes are jokes, they are all the better jokes because, thanks to their façade, they are in a position to conceal not only what they have to say but also the fact that they have something - forbidden - to say. The continuation of this interpretation - and this uncovers the hidden meaning and reveals these anecdotes with a comic façade as tendentious jokes - would be as follows. Anyone who has allowed the truth to slip out in an unguarded moment is in fact glad to be free of pretence. This is a correct and profound piece of psychological insight. Without this internal agreement no one lets himself be mastered by the automatism which in these cases brings the truth to light.¹ But this converts the laughable figure of the Schadchen into a sympathetic one, deserving of pity. How happy the man must be to be able at last to throw off the burden of pretence, since he makes use of the first chance of shouting out the very last scrap of truth! As soon as he sees that the case is lost, that the bride does not please the young man, he gladly betrays yet another concealed defect which has escaped notice, or he takes the opportunity of producing an argument that settles a detail in order to express his contempt for the people he is working for: ‘I ask you - who would lend these people anything?’ The whole of the ridicule in the anecdote now falls upon the parents, barely touched on in it, who think this swindle justified in order to get their daughter a husband, upon the pitiable position of girls who let themselves be married on such terms, and upon the disgracefulness of marriages contracted on such a basis. The marriage-broker is the right man to express such criticisms, for he knows most about these abuses; but he must not say them aloud, for he is a poor man whose existence depends on exploiting them. The popular mind, which created these stories, and others like them, is torn by a similar conflict; for it knows that the sacredness of marriages after they have been contracted is grievously affected by the thought of what happened at the time when they were arranged.

¹ This is the same mechanism that governs slips of the tongue and other phenomena of self-betrayal. See The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b).

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1701

Let us recall, too, what we observed while we were investigating the technique of jokes: that in jokes nonsense often replaces ridicule and criticism in the thoughts lying behind the joke. (In this respect, incidentally, the joke-work is doing the same thing as the dream-work.) Here we find the fact confirmed once again. That the ridicule and criticism are not directed against the figure of the broker, who only appears in the examples we have quoted as a whipping-boy, is shown by another class of jokes in which the marriage-broker is represented, on the contrary, as a superior person, whose dialectical powers prove sufficient to meet any difficulty. They are anecdotes with a logical instead of a comic façade - sophistical conceptual jokes. In one of them (p. 1664 f.) the broker succeeds in arguing away the bride’s defect of being lame. It is at least a ‘fait accompli’; another wife, with straight limbs, would on the contrary be in constant danger of falling down and breaking her leg, and this would be followed by illness, pains, and the expenses of treatment, all of which would be spared in the case of the woman who is lame already. Or there is another anecdote, in which he succeeds in repelling a whole series of complaints made by the suitor against the bride, meeting each one with good arguments till he replies to the last, which cannot be countered: ‘What do you want? Isn’t she to have a single fault?’, as though there were not necessarily something left over from the earlier objections. There is no difficulty in showing the weak spot in the argument in these two examples, and we did so in examining their technique. But what interests us now is something different. If the broker’s speech is given such a marked appearance of logic which, on careful examination, is recognizable as being only an appearance, the truth behind it is that the joke declares the broker to be in the right; the thought does not venture to do so seriously but replaces the seriousness by the appearance which the joke presents. But here, as so often, a jest betrays something serious. We shall not be mistaken if we assume of all these anecdotes with a logical façade that they really mean what they assert for reasons that are intentionally faulty. It is only this employment of sophistry for the disguised representation of the truth that gives it the character of a joke, which is thus essentially dependent on its purpose. For what is hinted at in the two anecdotes is that it is really the suitor who is making himself ridiculous when he collects the bride’s different advantages together with so much care, though all of them are weak, and when, in doing so, he forgets that he must be prepared to take as his wife a human being with her inevitable defects; while, on the other hand, the one characteristic that would make marriage with the woman’s more or less imperfect personality tolerable - mutual attraction and readiness for affectionate adaptation - is quite left out of account in the whole transaction.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1702

The mockery directed at the suitor in these examples, in which the broker quite appropriately plays the part of a superior, is expressed much more plainly in other anecdotes. The plainer these stories are, the less joke-technique do they contain; they are, as it were, only marginal cases of jokes, with the technique of which they no longer have anything in common but the construction of a façade. But owing to their having the same purpose and to its being concealed behind the facade, they produce the complete effect of a joke. Moreover, the poverty of their technical methods explains how it is that many of these jokes cannot, without suffering damage, dispense with the element of dialect, which has an effect similar to the joke technique.

A story of this sort, which, while possessing all the force of a tendentious joke, exhibits nothing of its technique, is the following: ‘The marriage-broker asked: "What do you require of your bride?" - Answer: "She must be beautiful, she must be rich, and educated." - "Very good", said the broker, "but I count that as making three matches."' Here the rebuke to the man is delivered openly, and is no longer clothed as a joke.

In the examples we have considered hitherto, the disguised aggressiveness has been directed against people - in the broker jokes against everyone involved in the business of arranging a marriage: the bride and bridegroom and their parents. But the object of the joke’s attack may equally well be institutions, people in their capacity as vehicles of institutions, dogmas of morality or religion, views of life which enjoy so much respect that objections to them can only be made under the mask of a joke and indeed of a joke concealed by its façade. Though the themes at which these tendentious jokes are aimed may be few, their forms and envelopes are very many and various. I think we shall do well to distinguish this class of tendentious joke by a special name. The appropriate name will emerge after we have interpreted a few examples of the class.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1703

I may recall the two stories - one of the impoverished gourmet who was caught eating ‘salmon mayonnaise’ and the other of the dipsomaniac tutor - which we learnt to know as sophistical displacement jokes. I will now continue their interpretation. We have since heard that if an appearance of logic is tacked on to the façade of a story the thought would like to say seriously ‘the man is right’, but, owing to an opposing contradiction, does not venture to declare the man right except on a single point, on which it can easily be shown that he is wrong. The ‘point’ chosen is the correct compromise between his rightness and his wrongness; this, indeed, is no decision, but corresponds to the conflict within ourselves. The two anecdotes are simply epicurean. They say: ‘Yes. The man is right. There is nothing higher than enjoyment and it is more or less a matter of indifference how one obtains it.’ This sounds shockingly immoral and is no doubt not much better. But at bottom it is nothing other than the poet’s ‘Carpe diem’, which appeals to the uncertainty of life and the unfruitfulness of virtuous renunciation. If the idea that the man in the ‘salmon mayonnaise’ joke was right has such a repellent effect on us, this is only because the truth is illustrated by an enjoyment of the lowest kind, which it seems to us we could easily do without. In reality each of us has had hours and times at which he has admitted the rightness of this philosophy of life and has reproached moral doctrine with only understanding how to demand without offering any compensation. Since we have ceased any longer to believe in the promise of a next world in which every renunciation will be rewarded by a satisfaction - there are, incidentally, very few pious people if we take renunciation as the sign of faith - ‘Carpe diem’ has become a serious warning. I will gladly put off satisfaction: but do I know whether I shall still be here tomorrow? ‘Di doman’ non c’è certezza.’¹

¹ [‘There is no certainty about tomorrow.’] Lorenzo de’ Medici.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1704

I will gladly renounce all the methods of satisfaction proscribed by society, but am I certain that society will reward this renunciation by offering me one of the permitted methods - even after a certain amount of postponement? What these jokes whisper may be said aloud: that the wishes and desires of men have a right to make themselves acceptable alongside of exacting and ruthless morality. And in our days it has been said in forceful and stirring sentences that this morality is only a selfish regulation laid down by the few who are rich and powerful and who can satisfy their wishes at any time without any postponement. So long as the art of healing has not gone further in making our life safe and so long as social arrangements do no more to make it more enjoyable, so long will it be impossible to stifle the voice within us that rebels against the demands of morality. Every honest man will end by making this admission, at least to himself. The decision in this conflict can only be reached by the roundabout path of fresh insight. One must bind one’s own life to that of others so closely and be able to identify oneself with others so intimately that the brevity of one’s own life can be overcome; and one must not fulfil the demands of one’s own needs illegitimately, but must leave them unfulfilled, because only the continuance of so many unfulfilled demands can develop the power to change the order of society. But not every personal need can be postponed in this way and transferred to other people, and there is no general and final solution of the conflict.

We now know the name that must be given to jokes like those that we have last interpreted. They are cynical jokes and what they disguise are cynicisms.

Among the institutions which cynical jokes are in the habit of attacking none is more important or more strictly guarded by moral regulations but at the same time more inviting to attack than the institution of marriage, at which, accordingly, the majority of cynical jokes are aimed. There is no more personal claim than that for sexual freedom and at no point has civilization tried to exercise severer suppression than in the sphere of sexuality. A single example will be enough for our purposes - the one mentioned on p. 1678, ‘An Entry in Prince Carnival’s Album’:

‘A wife is like an umbrella - sooner or later one takes a cab.’

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1705

We have already discussed the complicated technique of this example: a bewildering and apparently impossible simile, which however, as we now see, is not in itself a joke; further, an allusion (a cab is a public vehicle); and, as its most powerful technical method, an omission which increases the unintelligibility. The simile may be worked out as follows. One marries in order to protect oneself against the temptations of sensuality, but it turns out nevertheless that marriage does not allow of the satisfaction of needs that are somewhat stronger than usual. In just the same way, one takes an umbrella with one to protect oneself from the rain and nevertheless gets wet in the rain. In both cases one must look around for a stronger protection: in the latter case one must take a public vehicle, and in the former a woman who is accessible in return for money. The joke has now been almost entirely replaced by a piece of cynicism. One does not venture to declare aloud and openly that marriage is not an arrangement calculated to satisfy a man’s sexuality, unless one is driven to do so perhaps by the love of truth and eagerness for reform of a Christian von Ehrenfels.¹ The strength of this joke lies in the fact that nevertheless - in all kinds of roundabout ways - it has declared it.

A particularly favourable occasion for tendentious jokes is presented when the intended rebellious criticism is directed against the subject himself, or, to put it more cautiously, against someone in whom the subject has a share - a collective person, that is (the subject’s own nation, for instance). The occurrence of self-criticism as a determinant may explain how it is that a number of the most apt jokes (of which we have given plenty of instances) have grown up on the soil of Jewish popular life. They are stories created by Jews and directed against Jewish characteristics. The jokes made about Jews by foreigners are for the most part brutal comic stories in which a joke is made unnecessary by the fact that Jews are regarded by foreigners as comic figures. The Jewish jokes which originate from Jews admit this too; but they know their real faults as well as the connection between them and their good qualities, and the share which the subject has in the person found fault with creates the subjective determinant (usually so hard to arrive at) of the joke-work. Incidentally, I do not know whether there are many other instances of a people making fun to such a degree of its own character.

¹ See his essays (1903).

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1706

As an example of this I may take the anecdote, quoted on p. 1679 f., of a Jew in a railway train promptly abandoning all decent behaviour when he discovered that the newcomer into his compartment was a fellow-believer. We made the acquaintance of this anecdote as evidence of something being demonstrated by a detail, of representation by something very small. It is meant to portray the democratic mode of thinking of Jews, which recognizes no distinction between lords and serfs, but also, alas, upsets discipline and co-operation.

Another, especially interesting group of jokes portrays the relation of poor and rich Jews to one another. Their heroes are the ‘Schnorrer ' and the charitable householder or the Baron.

‘A Schnorrer, who was allowed as a guest into the same house every Sunday, appeared one day in the company of an unknown young man who gave signs of being about to sit down to table. "Who is this?" asked the householder. "He’s been my son-in law", was the reply, "since last week. I’ve promised him his board for the first year."'

The purpose of these stories is always the same; it emerges most clearly in the next one:

‘The Schnorrer begged the Baron for some money for a journey to Ostend; his doctor had recommended sea-bathing for his troubles. The Baron thought Ostend was a particularly expensive resort; a cheaper one would do equally well. The Schnorrer, however, rejected the proposal with the words: "Herr Baron, I consider nothing too expensive for my health."' This is an excellent displacement joke which we might have taken as a model for that class.¹ The Baron evidently wants to save his money, but the Schnorrer answers as though the Baron’s money was his own, which he may then quite well value less than his health. Here we are expected to laugh at the impertinence of the demand; but it is rarely that these jokes are not equipped with a façade to mislead the understanding. The truth that lies behind is that the Schnorrer, who in his thoughts treats the rich man’s money as his own, has actually, according to the sacred ordinances of the Jews, almost a right to make this confusion. The indignation raised by this joke is of course directed against a Law which is highly oppressive even to pious people.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1707

Here is another anecdote:

‘A Schnorrer on his way up a rich man’s staircase met a fellow member of his profession, who advised him to go no further. "Don’t go up to-day," he said, "the Baron is in a bad mood to-day; he’s giving nobody more than one florin." - "I’II go up all the same", said the first Schnorrer "Why should I give him a florin? Does he give me anything?" ‘

This joke employs the technique of absurdity, since it makes the Schnorrer assert that the Baron gives him nothing at the very moment at which he is preparing to beg him for a gift. But the absurdity is only apparent. It is almost true that the rich man gives him nothing, since he is obliged by the Law to give him alms and should, strictly speaking, be grateful to him for giving him an opportunity for beneficence. The ordinary, middle-class view of charity is in conflict here with the religious one; it is in open rebellion against the religious one in the other story, of the Baron who, deeply moved by a Schnorrer’s tale of woe, rang for his servants: ‘Throw him out! he’s breaking my heart!’ This open revelation of its purpose constitutes once more a marginal case of a joke. It is only in the fact that they present the matter as applied to individual cases that these last stories differ from a complaint which is no longer a joke: ‘There is really no advantage in being a rich man if one is a Jew. Other people’s misery makes it impossible to enjoy one’s own happiness.’

Other stories, which are once again technically frontier cases of jokes, give evidence of a profoundly pessimistic cynicism. For instance:

‘A man who was hard of hearing consulted the doctor, who correctly diagnosed that the patient probably drank too much brandy and was on that account deaf. He advised him against it and the deaf man promised to take his advice to heart. After a while the doctor met him in the street and asked him in a loud voice how he was. "Thank you", was the answer. "You needn’t shout so loud, doctor. I’ve given up drinking and hear quite well again." A little while later they met once more. The doctor asked him how he was in his ordinary voice, but noticed that his question had not been understood. "Eh? What was that?" - "It seems to me you’re drinking brandy again", shouted the doctor in his ear, "and that’s why you’re deaf again." "You may be right," replied the deaf man, "I have begun drinking brandy again and I’II tell you why. So long as I didn’t drink I was able to hear. But nothing I heard was as good as the brandy."' Technically this joke is nothing other than an object-lesson: dialect or skill in narrative are necessary for raising a laugh, but in the background lies the sad question: may not the man have been right in his choice?

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1708

It is on account of the allusion made by these pessimistic stories to the manifold and hopeless miseries of the Jews that I must class them with tendentious jokes.

Other jokes, which are in the same sense cynical and which are not only Jewish anecdotes, attack religious dogmas and even the belief in God. The story of the Rabbi’s ‘Kück, the technique of which lay in the faulty thinking which equated phantasy and reality (another possible view was to regard it as a displacement), is a cynical or critical joke of this kind, directed against miracle-workers and certainly against the belief in miracles as well. Heine is said to have made a definitely blasphemous joke on his death-bed. When a friendly priest reminded him of God’s mercy and gave him hope that God would forgive him his sins, he is said to have replied: ‘Bien sûr qu’il me pardonnera: c’est son métier.’¹ This is a disparaging comparison (technically perhaps only having the value of an allusion), since a ‘métier’, a trade or profession, is what a workman or a doctor has - and he has only a single métier. But the force of the joke lies in its purpose. What it means to say is nothing else than: ‘Of course he’ll forgive me. That’s what he’s there for, and that’s the only reason I’ve taken him on (as one engages one’s doctor or one’s lawyer).’ So in the dying man, as he lay there powerless, a consciousness stirred that he had created God and equipped him with power so as to make use of him when the occasion arose. What was supposed to be the created being revealed itself just before its annihilation as the creator.

¹ [‘Of course he’ll forgive me: that’s his job.’]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1709

To the classes of tendentious jokes that we have considered so far -

exposing or obscene jokes,

aggressive (hostile) jokes,

cynical (critical, blasphemous) jokes -

I should like to add another, the fourth and rarest, the nature of which can be illustrated by a good example:

‘Two Jews met in a railway carriage at a station in Galicia. "Where are you going?" asked one. "To Cracow", was the answer. "What a liar you are!" broke out the other. "If you say you’re going to Cracow, you want me to believe you’re going to Lemberg. But I know that in fact you’re going to Cracow. So why are you lying to me?"'

This excellent story, which gives an impression of over-subtlety, evidently works by the technique of absurdity. The second Jew is reproached for lying because he says he is going to Cracow, which is in fact his destination! But the powerful technical method of absurdity is here linked with another technique, representation by the opposite, for, according to the uncontradicted assertion of the first Jew, the second is lying when he tells the truth and is telling the truth by means of a lie. But the more serious substance of the joke is the problem of what determines the truth. The joke, once again, is pointing to a problem and is making use of the uncertainty of one of our commonest concepts. Is it the truth if we describe things as they are without troubling to consider how our hearer will understand what we say? Or is this only jesuitical truth, and does not genuine truth consist in taking the hearer into account and giving him a faithful picture of our own knowledge? I think that jokes of this kind are sufficiently different from the rest to be given a special position. What they are attacking is not a person or an institution but the certainty of our knowledge itself, one of our speculative possessions. The appropriate name for them would therefore be ‘sceptical’ jokes.

In the course of our discussion of the purposes of jokes we have perhaps thrown light on a number of questions and have certainly come upon plenty of suggestions for further enquiries. But the findings of this chapter combine with those of the last one to present us with a difficult problem. If it is correct to say that the pleasure provided by jokes depends on the one hand on their technique and on the other hand on their purpose, from what common point of view can such different sources of the pleasure in jokes be brought together?

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1710

B.  SYNTHETIC PART

IV

THE MECHANISM OF PLEASURE AND THE PSYCHOGENESIS OF JOKES

We can now start out from an assured knowledge of the sources of the peculiar pleasure given us by jokes. We are aware that we may be deceived into confusing our enjoyment of the intellectual content of what is stated with the pleasure proper to jokes; but we know that that pleasure itself has at bottom two sources - the technique and the purposes of jokes. What we now want to discover is the way in which the pleasure arises from these sources, the mechanism of the pleasurable effect.

We shall, I think, find the explanation we are in search of far easier from tendentious jokes than from innocent ones. We will therefore begin with the former.

The pleasure in the case of a tendentious joke arises from a purpose being satisfied whose satisfaction would otherwise not have taken place. That a satisfaction such as this is a source of pleasure calls for no further remark. But the manner in which a joke leads to this satisfaction is linked with particular conditions, from which we may perhaps arrive at some further information. Two cases are to be distinguished here. The simpler one is where the satisfaction of the purpose is opposed by an external obstacle which is evaded by the joke. We found this, for instance, in the reply received by Serenissimus to his question of whether the mother of the man he was speaking to had ever lived in the Palace and in the critic’s rejoinder to the two rich rascals who showed him their portraits: ‘But where’s the Saviour?’ In the former case the purpose was to answer one insult by another, and in the latter it was to hand across an insult instead of the assessment that had been asked for. What opposed the purpose were purely external factors - the powerful position of the people at whom the insults were directed. It may nevertheless strike us that, however much these and analogous jokes of a tendentious nature may satisfy us, they are not able to provoke much laughter.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1711

It is otherwise when what stands in the way of the direct realization of the purpose is not an external factor but an internal obstacle, when an internal impulse opposes the purpose. This condition would seem, on our hypothesis, to be fulfilled in the jokes of Herr N., in whom a strong inclination to invective is held in check by a highly developed aesthetic culture. By the help of a joke, this internal resistance is overcome in the particular case and the inhibition lifted. By that means, as in the instance of the external obstacle, the satisfaction of the purpose is made possible and its suppression, together with the ‘psychical damming-up’ that this would involve, is avoided. To that extent the mechanism of the generation of pleasure would be the same in the two cases.

Nevertheless, we are inclined here to go more deeply into the distinctions between the psychological situation in the cases of an external and an internal obstacle, for we have a suspicion that the removal of an internal obstacle may make an incomparably higher contribution to the pleasure. But I suggest that at this point we should exercise moderation and be satisfied for the moment with establishing what remains the essential point for us. The cases of an external and an internal obstacle differ only in the fact that in the latter an already existing inhibition is lifted and that in the former the erection of a new one is avoided. That being so, we shall not be relying too much on speculation if we assert that both for erecting and for maintaining a psychical inhibition some ‘psychical expenditure’ is required. And, since we know that in both cases of the use of tendentious jokes pleasure is obtained, it is therefore plausible to suppose that this yield of pleasure corresponds to the psychical expenditure that is saved.

Here then we have once more come upon the principle of economy which we met first in discussing the technique of verbal jokes. But whereas in the earlier case we seemed to find the economy in the use of as few words as possible or of words as much alike as possible, we now have a suspicion of an economy in the far more comprehensive sense of psychical expenditure in general; and we must regard it as possible that a closer understanding of what is still the very obscure concept of ‘psychical expenditure’ may bring us nearer to the essential nature of jokes.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1712

A certain lack of clarity which we have been unable to overcome in our handling of the mechanism of pleasure in tendentious jokes may be taken as an appropriate punishment for our having tried to clear up the more complex problem before the simpler one, tendentious jokes before innocent ones. We take note of the fact that ‘economy in expenditure on inhibition or suppression’ appears to be the secret of the pleasurable effect of tendentious jokes, and pass on to the mechanism of pleasure in innocent jokes.

On the basis of suitable specimens of innocent jokes, in which there was no fear of our judgement being disturbed by their content or purpose, we were driven to conclude that the techniques of jokes are themselves sources of pleasure; and we shall now try to discover whether it may perhaps be possible to trace that pleasure back to economy in psychical expenditure. In one group of these jokes (play upon words) the technique consisted in focusing our psychical attitude upon the sound of the word instead of upon its meaning - in making the (acoustic) word presentation itself take the place of its significance as given by its relations to thing-presentations. It may really be suspected that in doing so we are bringing about a great relief in psychical work and that when we make serious use of words we are obliged to hold ourselves back with a certain effort from this comfortable procedure. We can observe how pathological states of thought-activity, in which the possibility of concentrating psychical expenditure on a particular point is probably restricted, do in fact give this sort of sound-presentation of the word greater prominence than its meaning, and that sufferers in such states proceed in their speech on the lines (as the formula runs) of the ‘external’ instead of the ‘internal’ associations of the word-presentation. We notice, too, that children, who, as we know, are in the habit of still treating words as things, tend to expect words that are the same or similar to have the same meaning behind them - which is a source of many mistakes that are laughed at by grown-up people. If, therefore, we derive unmistakable enjoyment in jokes from being transported by the use of the same or a similar word from one circle of ideas to another, remote one (in the ‘Home-Roulard’, for instance, from the kitchen to politics), this enjoyment is no doubt correctly to be attributed to economy in psychical expenditure. The pleasure in a joke arising from a ‘short-circuit’ like this seems to be the greater the more alien the two circles of ideas that are brought together by the same word - the further apart they are, and thus the greater the economy which the joke’s technical method provides in the train of thought. We may notice, too, that here jokes are making use of a method of linking things up which is rejected and studiously avoided by serious thought.¹

In a second group of technical methods used in jokes - unification, similarity of sound, multiple use, modification of familiar phrases, allusions to quotations - we can single out as their common characteristic the fact that in each of them something familiar is rediscovered, where we might instead have expected something new. This rediscovery of what is familiar is pleasurable, and once more it is not difficult for us to recognize this pleasure as a pleasure in economy and to relate it to economy in psychical expenditure.

¹ If I may be allowed to anticipate the exposition in the text, I can at this point throw light on the condition which seems to determine whether a joke is to be called a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ one. If, by means of a word with two meanings or a word that is only slightly modified, I take a short cut from one circle of ideas to another, and if there is not at the same time a link between those circles of ideas which has a significant sense, then I shall have made a ‘bad’ joke. In a bad joke like this the only existing link between the two disparate ideas is the one word - the ‘point’ of the joke. The example of ‘Home-Roulard’ quoted above is a joke of this kind. A ‘good’ joke, on the other hand, comes about when what children expect proves correct and the similarity between the words is shown to be really accompanied by another, important similarity in their sense. Such, for instance, is the example ‘Traduttore - Traditore’. The two disparate ideas, which are here linked by an external association, are also united in a significant relation which indicates an essential kinship between them. The external association merely takes the place of the internal connection; it serves to point it out or make it clear. A ‘translator’ is not only called by a similar name to a ‘traitor’; he actually in a kind of traitor and bears the name, as it were by right.

The distinction that is here developed coincides with the one which is to be introduced later between a ‘jest’ and a ‘joke’. But it would be unjust to exclude examples like ‘Home-Roulard’ from the discussion of the nature of jokes. As soon as we take into consideration the peculiar pleasure derived from jokes, we find that the ‘bad’ jokes are by no means bad as jokes - that is, unsuitable for producing pleasure.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1713

It seems to be generally agreed that the rediscovery of what is familiar, ‘recognition’, is pleasurable. Groos (1899, 153) writes: ‘Recognition is always, unless it is too much mechanized (as, for instance, in dressing, . . .), linked with feelings of pleasure. The mere quality of familiarity is easily accompanied by the quiet sense of comfort which Faust felt when, after an uncanny encounter, he entered his study once again . . . If the act of recognition thus gives rise to pleasure, we might expect that men would hit on the idea of exercising this capacity for its own sake - that is, would experiment with it in play. And in fact Aristotle regarded joy in recognition as the basis of the enjoyment of art, and it cannot be disputed that this principle should not be overlooked, even if it does not possess such far-reaching significance as Aristotle attributes to it.’

Groos goes on to discuss games whose characteristic lies in the fact that they intensify the joy in recognition by putting obstacles in its way - that is to say, by creating a ‘psychical damming up’, which is got rid of by the act of recognition. His attempt at an explanation, however, abandons the hypothesis that recognition is pleasurable in itself, since, by referring to these games, he is tracing back the enjoyment of recognition to a joy in power, a joy in the overcoming of a difficulty. I regard the latter factor as secondary, and I see no reason to depart from the simpler view that recognition is pleasurable in itself i.e., through relieving psychical expenditure - and that the games founded on this pleasure make use of the mechanism of damming up only in order to increase the amount of such pleasure.

It is also generally acknowledged that rhymes, alliterations, refrains, and other forms of repeating similar verbal sounds which occur in verse, make use of the same source of pleasure - the rediscovery of something familiar. The ‘sense of power’ plays no perceptible part in these techniques, which show so much similarity to that of ‘multiple use’ in the case of jokes.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1714

In view of the close connection between recognizing and remembering, it is not rash to suppose that there may also be a pleasure in remembering - that the act of remembering is in itself accompanied by a feeling of pleasure of similar origin. Groos seems not to be averse to such a hypothesis, but he derives it once again from the ‘sense of power’, to which he attributes (wrongly, in my view) the chief reason for enjoyment in almost all games.

The ‘rediscovery of what is familiar’ is the basis for the use of another technical resource in jokes, which we have not yet mentioned. I refer to the factor of ‘topicality’, which is a fertile source of pleasure in a great many jokes and which explains a few of the peculiarities in the life-history of jokes. There are jokes which are completely independent of this condition, and in a monograph on jokes we are obliged to make almost exclusive use of examples of that kind. But we cannot forget that, in comparison with these perennial jokes, we have perhaps laughed even more heartily at others which it is difficult for us to use now because they would call for long commentaries and even with such help would not produce their original effect. These latter jokes contained allusions to people and events which at the time were ‘topical’, which had aroused general interest and still kept it alive. When this interest had ceased and the business in question had been settled, these jokes too lost a part of their pleasurable effect and indeed a very considerable part. For instance, the joke made by my friendly host when he called a pudding that was being served a ‘Home-Roulard’ does not seem to me to-day nearly so good as it did at the time when ‘Home Rule’ provided a standing head-line in the political columns of our daily papers. In attempting to estimate the merits of this joke I now attribute them to the fact that a single word has transported us, with the economy of a long detour in thought, from the circle of ideas of the kitchen to the remote one of politics. But at the time my account would have had to be different, and I should have said that this word transported us from the circle of ideas of the kitchen to that of politics, which was remote from it but was certain of our lively interest because we were constantly concerned with it. Another joke, ‘This girl reminds me of Dreyfus; the army doesn’t believe in her innocence’, has also faded to-day, though its technical methods must have remained unaltered. The bewilderment caused by the comparison and the double-entendre in the word ‘innocence’ cannot compensate for the fact that the allusion, which at the time touched on an event cathected with fresh excitement, to-day recalls a question that is settled. Here is a joke which is still topical: ‘The Crown Princess Louise approached the crematorium in Gotha with the question of how much a Verbrennung [cremation] costs. The management replied: "Five thousand marks normally; but we will only charge you three thousand as you have been durchgebrannt [literally ‘been burnt through’ - slang for ‘eloped’] once already.’ A joke like this sounds irresistible to-day; in a short time it will have sunk very considerably in our estimation; and some time later still, in spite of its good play upon words, it will lose its effect entirely, for it will be impossible to repeat it without adding a commentary to explain who Princess Louise was and the sense in which she was durchgebrannt.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1715

Thus a great number of the jokes in circulation have a certain length of life: their life runs a course made up of a period of flowering and a period of decay and it ends in complete oblivion. The need which men feel for deriving pleasure from their processes of thought is therefore constantly creating new jokes based on the new interests of the day. The vital force of topical jokes is not their own; it is borrowed, by the method of allusion, from those other interests, the expiry of which determines the fate of the joke as well. The factor of topicality is a source of pleasure, ephemeral it is true but particularly abundant, which supplements the sources inherent in the joke itself. It cannot be simply equated with the rediscovery of what is familiar. It is concerned rather with a particular category of what is familiar, which must in addition possess the characteristic of being fresh, recent and untouched by forgetting. In the formation of dreams, too, we come across a special preference for what is recent and we cannot escape a suspicion that association with what is recent is rewarded, and so facilitated, by a peculiar bonus of pleasure.

Unification, which is after all no more than repetition in the sphere of thought-connections instead of in that of subject-matter, was given special recognition by Fechner as a source of the pleasure in jokes. He writes (Fechner, 1897, 1, Chapter XVII): ‘In my opinion the chief part in the field we are now considering is played by the principle of the unified linking of multiplicities; it requires support, however, from auxiliary determinants in order that the enjoyment which can be derived from these cases, with its peculiar character, may be carried over the threshold.’¹

In all these cases of repeating the same connections or the same subject-matter in the words, or of rediscovering what is familiar or recent, it seems impossible to avoid deriving the pleasure felt in them from economy in psychical expenditure provided that this line of approach turns out to be fruitful in throwing light on details and in arriving at new generalities. We are aware that we have still to make it clear how the economy comes about and what the meaning is of the expression ‘psychical expenditure’.

The third group of techniques of jokes - for the most part of conceptual jokes - which comprises faulty thinking, displacements, absurdity, representation by the opposite, etc., may at a first glance seem to bear a special impress and to betray no kinship with the techniques of rediscovery of what is familiar or the replacement of object-associations by word-associations. Nevertheless it is particularly easy here to bring into play the theory of economy or relief in psychical expenditure.

¹ The title of Chapter XVII is ‘On significant and joking similes, play upon words and other cases which bear the character of being amusing, funny or ridiculous.’

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1716

It cannot be doubted that it is easier and more convenient to diverge from a line of thought we have embarked on than to keep to it, to jumble up things that are different rather than to contrast them - and, indeed, that it is specially convenient to admit as valid methods of inference that are rejected by logic and, lastly, to put words or thoughts together without regard to the condition that they ought also to make sense. This cannot be doubted; and these are precisely the things that are done by the joke-techniques which we are discussing. But the hypothesis that behaviour of this kind by the joke-work provides a source of pleasure will strike us as strange, since apart from jokes all such inefficient intellectual functioning produces in us nothing but unpleasurable defensive feelings.

‘Pleasure in nonsense’, as we may call it for short, is concealed in serious life to a vanishing point. In order to demonstrate it we must investigate two cases - one in which it is still visible and one in which it becomes visible again: the behaviour of a child in learning, and that of an adult in a toxically altered state of mind.

During the period in which a child is learning how to handle the vocabulary of his mother-tongue, it gives him obvious pleasure to ‘experiment with it in play’, to use Groos’s words. And he puts words together without regard to the condition that they should make sense, in order to obtain from them the pleasurable effect of rhythm or rhyme. Little by little he is forbidden this enjoyment, till all that remains permitted to him are significant combinations of words. But when he is older attempts still emerge at disregarding the restrictions that have been learnt on the use of words. Words are disfigured by particular little additions being made to them, their forms are altered by certain manipulations (e.g. by reduplications or ‘Zittersprache’), or a private language may even be constructed for use among playmates. These attempts are found again among certain categories of mental patients.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1717

Whatever the motive may have been which led the child to begin these games, I believe that in his later development he gives himself up to them with the consciousness that they are nonsensical, and that he finds enjoyment in the attraction of what is forbidden by reason. He now uses games in order to withdraw from the pressure of critical reason. But there is far more potency in the restrictions which must establish themselves in the course of a child’s education in logical thinking and in distinguishing between what is true and false in reality; and for this reason the rebellion against the compulsion of logic and reality is deep-going and long-lasting. Even the phenomena of imaginative activity must be included in this category. The power of criticism has increased so greatly in the later part of childhood and in the period of learning which extends over puberty that the pleasure in ‘liberated nonsense’ only seldom dares to show itself directly. One does not venture to say anything absurd. But the characteristic tendency of boys to do absurd or silly things seems to me to be directly derived from the pleasure in nonsense. In pathological cases we often see this tendency so far intensified that once more it dominates the schoolboy’s talk and answers. I have been able to convince myself in the case of a few boys of secondary school age who had developed neuroses that the unconscious workings of their pleasure in the nonsense they produced played no less a part in their inefficiency than did their real ignorance.

Nor, later on, does the University student cease these demonstrations against the compulsion of logic and reality, the dominance of which, however, he feels growing ever more intolerant and unrestricted. A large amount of student ‘rags’ are a part of this reaction. For man is a ‘tireless pleasure-seeker’ - I forget where I came across this happy expression - and any renunciation of a pleasure he has once enjoyed comes hard to him. With the cheerful nonsense of his Bierschwefel,¹ for instance, the student tries to rescue his pleasure in freedom of thinking, of which he is being more and more deprived by the schooling of academic instruction. Much later still, indeed, when as a grown man he meets others in scientific congresses and once more feels himself a learner, after the meeting is over there comes the Kneipzeitung,² which distorts the new discoveries into nonsense, and offers him a compensation for the fresh addition to his intellectual inhibition.

¹ [‘Bierschwefel’: ludicrous speech delivered at a beer party.]

² [A comic set of minutes. Literally, ‘tavern newspaper’.]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1718

The Bierschwefel and the Kneipzeitung give evidence by their names to the fact that the criticism which has repressed pleasure in nonsense has already grown so powerful that it cannot be put aside even temporarily without toxic assistance. A change in mood is the most precious thing that alcohol achieves for mankind, and on that account this ‘poison’ is not equally indispensable for everyone. A cheerful mood, whether it is produced endogenously or toxically, reduces the inhibiting forces, criticism among them, and makes accessible once again sources of pleasure which were under the weight of suppression. It is most instructive to observe how the standards of joking sink as spirits rise. For high spirits replace jokes, just as jokes must try to replace high spirits, in which possibilities of enjoyment which are otherwise inhibited - among them the pleasure in nonsense - can come into their own: ‘Mit wenig Witz und viel Behagen.’¹ Under the influence of alcohol the grown man once more becomes a child, who finds pleasure in having the course of his thoughts freely at his disposal without paying regard to the compulsion of logic.

I hope I have now also shown that the absurdity-techniques of jokes are a source of pleasure. It need only be repeated that this pleasure arises from an economy in psychical expenditure or a relief from the compulsion of criticism.

If we look back once more at the three separate groups of joke-techniques, we see that the first and third of these groups - the replacement of thing-associations by word-associations and the use of absurdity - can be brought together as re-establishing old liberties and getting rid of the burden of intellectual upbringing; they are psychical reliefs, which can in a sense be contrasted with the economizing which constitutes the technique of the second group. Relief from psychical expenditure that is already there and economizing in psychical expenditure that is only about to be called for - from these two principles all the techniques of jokes, and accordingly all pleasure from these techniques, are derived. The two species of technique and of obtaining pleasure coincide - in the main at all events - with the distinction between verbal and conceptual jokes.

¹ [‘With little wit and much enjoyment.’]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1719

The preceding discussion has given us unawares an insight into the evolution or psychogenesis of jokes, which we will now examine more closely. We have made the acquaintance of preliminary stages of jokes, and their development into tendentious jokes will probably uncover fresh relations between the various characteristics of jokes. Before there is such a thing as a joke, there is something that we may describe as ‘play’ or as ‘a jest’.

Play - let us keep to that name - appears in children while they are learning to make use of words and to put thoughts together. This play probably obeys one of the instincts which compel children to practise their capacities (Groos). In doing so they come across pleasurable effects, which arise from a repetition of what is similar, a rediscovery of what is familiar, similarity of sound, etc., and which are to be explained as unsuspected economies in psychical expenditure. It is not to be wondered at that these pleasurable effects encourage children in the pursuit of play and cause them to continue it without regard for the meaning of words or the coherence of sentences. Play with words and thoughts, motivated by certain pleasurable effects of economy, would thus be the first stage of jokes.

This play is brought to an end by the strengthening of a factor that deserves to be described as the critical faculty or reasonableness. The play is now rejected as being meaningless or actually absurd; as a result of criticism it becomes impossible. Now, too, there is no longer any question of deriving pleasure, except accidentally, from the sources of rediscovery of what is familiar, etc., unless it happens that the growing individual is overtaken by a pleasurable mood which, like the child’s cheerfulness, lifts the critical inhibition. Only in such a case does the old game of getting pleasure become possible once more; but the individual does not want to wait for this to happen nor to renounce the pleasure that is familiar to him. He thus looks about for means of making himself independent of the pleasurable mood, and the further development towards jokes is governed by the two endeavours: to avoid criticism and to find a substitute for the mood.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1720

And with this the second preliminary stage of jokes sets in - the jest. It is now a question of prolonging the yield of pleasure from play, but at the same time of silencing the objections raised by criticism which would not allow the pleasurable feeling to emerge. There is only one way of reaching this end: the meaningless combination of words or the absurd putting together of thoughts must nevertheless have a meaning. The whole ingenuity of the joke-work is summoned up in order to find words and aggregations of thoughts in which this condition is fulfilled. All the technical methods of jokes are already employed here - in jests; moreover linguistic usage draws no consistent line between a jest and a joke. What distinguishes a jest from a joke is that the meaning of the sentence which escapes criticism need not be valuable or new or even good; it need merely be permissible to say the thing in this way, even though it is unusual, unnecessary or useless to say it in this way. In jests what stands in the foreground is the satisfaction of having made possible what was forbidden by criticism.

It is, for instance, simply a jest when Schleiermacher defines Eifersucht [jealousy] as the Leidenschaft [passion] which mit eifer Sucht [with eagerness seeks] what Leiden schafft [causes pain]. It was a jest when Professor Kästner, who taught physics (and made jokes) at Göttingen in the eighteenth century, asked a student named Kriegk, when he was enrolling himself for his lectures, how old he was. ‘Thirty years old’ was the reply, whereupon Kästner remarked: ‘Ah! so I have the honour of meeting the Thirty Years’ War [Krieg].’ (Kleinpaul, 1890.) It was with a jest that the great Rokitansky replied to the question of what were the professions of his four sons: ‘Two heilen [heal] and two heulen [howl]’ (two doctors and two singers). The information was correct and therefore not open to criticism; but it added nothing to what might have been expressed in the words in brackets. There can be no mistaking the fact that the answer was given the other form only on account of the pleasure which was produced by the unification and the similar sound of the two words.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1721

I think now at length we see our way clearly. All through our consideration of the techniques of jokes we have been disturbed by the fact that they were not proper to jokes only; and yet the essence of jokes seemed to depend on them, since when they were got rid of by reduction the characteristics and the pleasure of the joke were lost. We now see that what we have described as the techniques of jokes - and we must in a certain sense continue to describe them so - are rather the sources from which jokes provide pleasure; and we feel that there is nothing strange in other procedures drawing from the same sources for the same end. The technique which is characteristic of jokes and peculiar to them, however, consists in their procedure for safeguarding the use of these methods of providing pleasure against the objections raised by criticism which would put an end to the pleasure. There is little that we can say in general about this procedure. The joke-work, as we have already remarked, shows itself in a choice of verbal material and conceptual situations which will allow the old play with words and thoughts to withstand the scrutiny of criticism; and with that end in view every peculiarity of vocabulary and every combination of thought-sequences must be exploited in the most ingenious possible way. We may be in a position later to characterize the joke-work by a particular property; for the moment it remains unexplained how the selection favourable for jokes can be made. The purpose and function of jokes, however - namely, the protection of sequences of words and thoughts from criticism - can already be seen in jests as their essential feature. Their function consists from the first in lifting internal inhibitions and in making sources of pleasure fertile which have been rendered inaccessible by those inhibitions; and we shall find that they remain loyal to this characteristic throughout their development.

We are also in a position now to assign its correct place to the factor of ‘sense in nonsense’ (cf. the introduction, p. 1618), to which the authorities attribute such great importance as a distinguishing mark of jokes and as an explanation of their pleasurable effect. The two fixed points in what determines the nature of jokes - their purpose of continuing pleasurable play and their effort to protect it from the criticism of reason immediately explain why an individual joke, though it may seem senseless from one point of view, must appear sensible, or at least allowable, from another. How it does so remains the affair of the joke-work; if it fails to do so, it is simply rejected as ‘nonsense’. But there is no necessity for us to derive the pleasurable effect of jokes from the conflict between the feelings which arise (whether directly or along the path of ‘bewilderment and enlightenment’) from the simultaneous sense and nonsense of jokes. Nor have we any need to enter further into the question of how pleasure could arise from the alternation between ‘thinking it senseless’ and ‘recognizing it as sensible’. The psychogenesis of jokes has taught us that the pleasure in a joke is derived from play with words or from the liberation of nonsense, and that the meaning of the joke is merely intended to protect that pleasure from being done away with by criticism.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1722

In this way the problem of the essential character of jokes is already explained in jests. We may now turn to the further development of jests, to the point at which they reach their height in tendentious jokes. Jests still give the foremost place to the purpose of giving us enjoyment, and are content if what they say does not appear senseless or completely devoid of substance. If what a jest says possesses substance and value, it turns into a joke. A thought which would deserve our interest even if it were expressed in the most unpretentious form is now clothed in a form which must give us enjoyment on its own account.¹ A combination like this can certainly not, we must suppose, have come about unintentionally; and we must try to discover the intention underlying the construction of the joke. An observation which we made earlier (in passing, as it seemed) will put us on the track. We said above (p. 1691) that a good joke makes, as it were, a total impression of enjoyment on us, without our being able to decide at once what share of the pleasure arises from its joking form and what share from its apt thought-content. We are constantly making mistakes in this apportionment. Sometimes we over-estimate the goodness of the joke on account of our admiration of the thought it contains; another time, on the contrary, we over-estimate the value of the thought on account of the enjoyment given us by its joking envelope. We do not know what is giving us enjoyment and what we are laughing at. This uncertainty in our judgement, which must be assumed to be a fact, may have provided the motive for the construction of jokes in the proper sense of the word. The thought seeks to wrap itself in a joke because in that way it recommends itself to our attention and can seem more significant and more valuable, but above all because this wrapping bribes our powers of criticism and confuses them. We are inclined to give the thought the benefit of what has pleased us in the form of the joke; and we are no longer inclined to find anything wrong that has given us enjoyment and so to spoil the source of a pleasure. If the joke has made us laugh, moreover, a disposition most unfavourable for criticism will have been established in us; for in that case something will have forced us into the mood which play has previously sufficed to produce, and for which the joke has tried by every possible means to make itself a substitute. Even though we have earlier asserted that such jokes are to be described as innocent and not yet tendentious, we must not forget that strictly speaking only jests are non-tendentious - that is, serve solely the aim of producing pleasure. Jokes, even if the thought contained in them is non-tendentious and thus only serves theoretical intellectual interests, are in fact never non-tendentious. They pursue the second aim: to promote the thought by augmenting it and guarding it against criticism. Here they are once again expressing their original nature by setting themselves up against an inhibiting and restricting power - which is now the critical judgement.

¹ As an example which shows the difference between a jest and a joke proper we may take the excellent joking remark with which a member of the ‘Bürger’ Ministry in Austria answered a question about the cabinet’s solidarity: ‘How can we einstehen [stand up] for one another if we can’t ausstehen [stand] one another?’ Technique: use of the same material with slight (contrary) modification. Logical and apposite thought: there can be no solidarity without mutual understanding. The contrary nature of the modification (ein [in] - aus [out]) corresponds to the incompatibility asserted in the thought and serves as a representation of it.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1723

This, the first use of jokes that goes beyond the production of pleasure, points the way to their further uses. A joke is now seen to be a psychical factor possessed of power: its weight, thrown into one scale or the other, can be decisive. The major purposes and instincts of mental life employ it for their own ends. The originally non-tendentious joke, which began as play, is secondarily brought into relation with purposes from which nothing that takes form in the mind can ultimately keep away. We know already what it is able to achieve in the service of the purpose of exposure, and of hostile, cynical and sceptical purposes. In the case of obscene jokes, which are derived from smut, it turns the third person who originally interfered with the sexual situation into an ally, before whom the woman must feel shame, by bribing him with the gift of its yield of pleasure. In the case of aggressive purposes it employs the same method in order to turn the hearer, who was indifferent to begin with, into a co-hater or co-despiser, and creates for the enemy a host of opponents where at first there was only one. In the first case it overcomes the inhibitions of shame and respectability by means of the bonus of pleasure which it offers; in the second it upsets the critical judgement which would otherwise have examined the dispute. In the third and fourth cases, in the service of cynical and sceptical purposes, it shatters respect for institutions and truths in which the hearer has believed, on the one hand by reinforcing the argument, but on the other by practising a new species of attack. Where argument tries to draw the hearer’s criticism over on to its side, the joke endeavours to push the criticism out of sight. There is no doubt that the joke has chosen the method which is psychologically the more effective.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1724

In this survey of the achievements of tendentious jokes, most prominence has been assumed by - what is more easily seen - the effect of jokes on the person who hears them. More important, however, from the point of view of our understanding, are the functions accomplished by jokes in the mind of the person who makes them or, to put it in the only correct way, the person to whom they occur. We have already proposed - and here we have occasion to repeat the notion - that we should try to study the psychical phenomena of jokes with reference to their distribution between two people. We will make a provisional suggestion that the psychical process provoked by the joke in the hearer is in most cases modelled on that which occurs in its creator. The external obstacle which is to be overcome in the hearer corresponds to an internal inhibition in the maker of the joke. At the least the expectation of an external obstacle is present in the latter as an inhibiting idea. In certain cases the internal obstacle which is overcome by the tendentious joke is obvious; in Herr N.’s jokes, for instance, we were able to assume (p. 1699) that not only did they make it possible for their hearers to enjoy aggressiveness in the form of insults, but that above all they made it possible for him to produce them. Among the various kinds of internal inhibition or suppression there is one which deserves our special interest, because it is the most far-reaching. It is given the name of ‘repression’, and is recognized by its function of preventing the impulses subjected to it, and their derivatives, from becoming conscious. Tendentious jokes, as we shall see, are able to release pleasure even from sources that have undergone repression. If, as has been suggested above, the overcoming of external obstacles can in this way be traced back to the overcoming of internal inhibitions and repressions, we may say that tendentious jokes exhibit the main characteristic of the joke-work - that of liberating pleasure by getting rid of inhibitions more clearly than any other of the developmental stages of jokes. Either they strengthen the purposes which they serve, by bringing assistance to them from impulses that are kept suppressed, or they put themselves entirely at the service of suppressed purposes.

We may be ready to admit that this is what tendentious jokes achieve; yet we must bear in mind that we do not understand how they are able to put these achievements into effect. Their power lies in the yield of pleasure which they draw from the sources of play upon words and of liberated nonsense; but if we are to judge by the impressions gained from non-tendentious jests, we cannot possibly think the amount of this pleasure great enough to attribute to it the strength to lift deeply-rooted inhibitions and repressions. What we have before us here is in fact no simple effect of force but a more complex situation of release. Instead of setting out the long detour by which I reached an understanding of this situation, I will try to give a short synthetic exposition of it.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1725

Fechner (1897, 1, Chapter V) has put forward a ‘principle of aesthetic assistance or intensification’, which he has expressed as follows: ‘If determinants of pleasure that in themselves produce little effect converge without mutual contradiction, there results a greater, and often a much greater, outcome of pleasure than corresponds to the pleasure-value of the separate determinants - a greater pleasure than could be explained as the sum of the separate effects. Indeed, a convergence of this kind can even lead to a positive resultant of pleasure and the threshold of pleasure may be crossed, where the separate factors are too weak to do so: though they must, in comparison with others, show a perceptible advantage in enjoyableness.’ (Ibid., 51. The italics are Fechner’s.)

The topic of jokes does not, I think, give us much opportunity of confirming the correctness of this principle, which can be shown to hold good in many other aesthetic structures. As regards jokes we have learnt something else, which at least fringes upon this principle: namely, that where several pleasure-giving factors operate together we are not able to attribute to each of them the share it has really taken in bringing about the result. (p. 1691.) We can, however, vary the situation that is assumed in the ‘principle of assistance’ and, as a result of these fresh conditions, arrive at a number of questions which would deserve reply. What happens in general if, in a combination, determinants of pleasure and determinants of unpleasure converge? On what does the outcome depend and what decides whether that outcome is in pleasure or unpleasure?

The case of tendentious jokes is a special one among these possibilities. An impulse or urge is present which seeks to release pleasure from a particular source and, if it were allowed free play, would release it. Besides this, another urge is present which works against this generation of pleasure - inhibits it, that is, or suppresses it. The suppressing current must, as the outcome shows, be a certain amount stronger than the suppressed one, which, however, is not on that account abolished. Now let us suppose that yet another urge makes its appearance which would release pleasure through the same process, though from other sources, and which thus operates in the same sense as the suppressed urge. What can the result be in such a case?

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1726

An example will give us our bearings better than this schematic discussion. Let us assume that there is an urge to insult a certain person; but this is so strongly opposed by feelings of propriety or of aesthetic culture that the insult cannot take place. If, for instance, it were able to break through as a result of some change of emotional condition or mood, this break through by the insulting purpose would be felt subsequently with unpleasure. Thus the insult does not take place. Let us now suppose, however, that the possibility is presented of deriving a good joke from the material of the words and thoughts used for the insult - the possibility, that is, of releasing pleasure from other sources which are not obstructed by the same suppression. This second development of pleasure could, nevertheless, not occur unless the insult were permitted; but as soon as the latter is permitted the new release of pleasure is also joined to it. Experience with tendentious jokes shows that in such circumstances the suppressed purpose can, with the assistance of the pleasure from the joke, gain sufficient strength to overcome the inhibition, which would otherwise be stronger than it. The insult takes place, because the joke is thus made possible. But the enjoyment obtained is not only that produced by the joke: it is incomparably greater. It is so much greater than the pleasure from the joke that we must suppose that the hitherto suppressed purpose has succeeded in making its way through, perhaps without any diminution whatever. It is in such circumstances that the tendentious joke is received with the heartiest laughter.

An examination of the determinants of laughing will perhaps lead us to a plainer idea of what happens when a joke affords assistance against suppression. Even now, however, we can see that the case of tendentious jokes is a special case of the ‘principle of assistance’. A possibility of generating pleasure supervenes in a situation in which another possibility of pleasure is obstructed so that, as far as the latter alone is concerned, no pleasure would arise. The result is a generation of pleasure far greater than that offered by the supervening possibility. This has acted, as it were, as an incentive bonus with the assistance of the offer of a small amount of pleasure, a much greater one, which would otherwise have been hard to achieve, has been gained. I have good reason to suspect that this principle corresponds with an arrangement that holds good in many widely separated departments of mental life and it will, I think, be expedient to describe the pleasure that serves to initiate the large release of pleasure as ‘fore-pleasure’, and the principle as the ‘fore-pleasure principle’.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1727

We are now able to state the formula for the mode of operation of tendentious jokes. They put themselves at the service of purposes in order that, by means of using the pleasure from jokes as a fore-pleasure, they may produce new pleasure by lifting suppressions and repressions. If now we survey the course of development of the joke, we may say that from its beginning to its perfecting it remains true to its essential nature. It begins as play, in order to derive pleasure from the free use of words and thoughts. As soon as the strengthening of reasoning puts an end to this play with words as being senseless, and with thoughts as being nonsensical, it changes into a jest, in order that it may retain these sources of pleasure and be able to achieve fresh pleasure from the liberation of nonsense. Next, as a joke proper, but still a non-tendentious one, it gives its assistance to thoughts and strengthens them against the challenge of critical judgement, a process in which the ‘principle of confusion of sources of pleasure’ is of use to it. And finally it comes to the help of major purposes which are combating suppression, in order to lift their internal inhibitions by the ‘principle of fore-pleasure’. Reason, critical judgement, suppression - these are the forces against which it fights in succession; it holds fast to the original sources of verbal pleasure and, from the stage of the jest onwards, opens new sources of pleasure for itself by lifting inhibitions. The pleasure that it produces, whether it is pleasure in play or pleasure in lifting inhibitions, can invariably be traced back to economy in psychical expenditure, provided that this view does not contradict the essential nature of pleasure and that it proves itself fruitful in other directions.¹

¹ Nonsense jokes, which have not had due attention paid to them in my account, deserve some supplementary consideration.

The importance which our views attach to the factor of ‘sense in nonsense’ might lead to a demand that every joke must be a nonsense joke. But this is not necessary, because it is only playing with thoughts that inevitably leads to nonsense; the other source of pleasure in jokes, playing with words, only gives that impression occasionally and does not invariably provoke the implied criticism. The twofold root of the pleasure in jokes - from playing with words and playing with thoughts, which corresponds to the very important distinction between verbal and conceptual jokes - makes it perceptibly more difficult to arrive at a concise formulation of general statements about jokes. Playing with words produces manifest pleasure as a result of the factors that have been enumerated above (recognition, and so on), and is consequently only to a small degree liable to suppression. Playing with thoughts cannot have its motive in this kind of pleasure; it meets with very energetic suppression, and the pleasure which it can yield is only pleasure in the lifting of an inhibition. It can accordingly be said that the pleasure in jokes exhibits a core of original pleasure in play and a casing of pleasure in lifting inhibitions. - We naturally do not perceive that our pleasure in a nonsense joke arises from our having succeeded in liberating a piece of nonsense in spite of its suppression; whereas we see directly that playing with words has given us pleasure. - The nonsense that still remains in a conceptual joke acquires secondarily the function of increasing our attention by bewildering us. It serves as a means of intensifying the effect of the joke, but only when it acts obtrusively, so that the bewilderment can hurry ahead of the understanding by a perceptible moment of time. The examples on p. 1659 ff. have shown that in addition to this, nonsense in a joke can be used to represent a judgement contained in the thought. But this, too, is not the primary significance of nonsense in jokes.

[Added 1912:] A number of productions resembling jokes can be classed alongside of nonsense jokes. There is no appropriate name for them, but they might well be described as ‘idiocy masquerading as a joke’. There are countless numbers of them, and I will only select two samples:

‘A man at the dinner table who was being handed fish dipped his two hands twice in the mayonnaise and then ran them through his hair. When his neighbour looked at him in astonishment, he seemed to notice his mistake and apologized: "I’m so sorry, I thought it was spinach."'

Or: ‘"Life is a suspension bridge", said one man. - "Why is that?" asked the other. - "How should I know?" was the reply.’

These extreme examples have an effect because they rouse the expectation of a joke, so that one tries to find a concealed sense behind the nonsense. But one finds none: they really are nonsense. The pretence makes it possible for a moment to liberate the pleasure in nonsense. These jokes are not entirely without a purpose; they are a ‘take-in’, and give the person who tells them a certain amount of pleasure in misleading and annoying his hearer. The latter then damps down his annoyance by determining to tell them himself later on.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1728

V

THE MOTIVES OF JOKES - JOKES AS A SOCIAL PROCESS

It might seem superfluous to talk about the motives of jokes, since the aim of getting pleasure must be recognized as a sufficient motive for the joke-work. But on the one hand the possibility cannot be excluded of other motives as well having a share in the production of jokes, and on the other hand, bearing in mind some familiar experiences, we must raise the general question of the subjective determinants of jokes.

Two facts in particular make this necessary. Although the joke-work is an excellent method of getting pleasure out of psychical processes, it is nevertheless evident that not everyone is equally capable of making use of that method, the joke-work is not at everyone’s command, and altogether only a few people have a plentiful amount of it; and these are distinguished by being spoken of as having ‘wit’ [Witz]. ‘Wit’ appears in this connection as a special capacity - rather in the class of the old mental ‘faculties’; and it seems to emerge fairly independently of the others, such as intelligence, imagination, memory, etc. We must therefore presume the presence in these ‘witty’ people of special inherited dispositions or psychical determinants which permit or favour the joke-work.

I fear that we shall not get very far in exploring this question. We can only succeed here and there in advancing from an understanding of a particular joke to a knowledge of the subjective determinants in the mind of the person who made it. It is a remarkable coincidence that precisely the example of the joke on which we began our investigations of the technique of jokes also gives us a glimpse into the subjective determinants of jokes. I refer to Heine’s joke, which has also been considered by Heymans and Lipps:

‘. . . I sat beside Salomon Rothschild and he treated me quite as his equal - quite famillionairely.’ (‘Bäder von Lucca.’)

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1729

Heine puts this remark into the mouth of a comic character, Hirsch-Hyacinth, a Hamburg lottery-agent, extractor of corns and professional valuer, the valet of the aristocratic Baron Gristoforo Gumpelino (formerly Gumpel). The poet evidently takes the greatest satisfaction in this creation of his, for he makes Hirsch-Hyacinth into a great talker and gives him the most amusing and plain-spoken speeches, and even lets him display the practical philosophy of a Sancho Panza. It is a pity that Heine, who seems to have had no taste for dramatic construction, dropped this delightful character so soon. There are not a few passages in which the poet himself seems to be speaking, under a thing disguise, through the mouth of Hirsch-Hyacinth, and it soon becomes a certainty that this character is only a self-parody. Hirsch explains his reasons for having given up his former name and why he now calls himself ‘Hyacinth’. He goes on: ‘There’s the further advantage that I already have an "H" on my signet, so that I don’t need to have a new one cut.’ But Heine himself effected the same economy when, at his baptism, he changed his first name from ‘Harry’ to ‘Heinrich’. Everyone, too, who is familiar with the poet’s biography, will recall that Heine had an uncle of the same name in Hamburg (a place which provides another connection with the figure of Hirsch-Hyacinth) who, as the rich man of the family, played a large part in his life. This uncle was also called ‘Salomon’, just like the old Rothschild who treated Hirsch so famillionairely. What seemed in Hirsch-Hyacinth’s mouth no more than a jest soon reveals a background of serious bitterness if we ascribe it to the nephew, Harry-Heinrich. After all, he was one of the family, and we know that he had a burning wish to marry a daughter of this uncle’s; but his cousin rejected him, and his uncle always treated him a little famillionairely, as a poor relation. His rich cousins in Hamburg never took him seriously. I recall a story told by an old aunt of my own, who had married into the Heine family, how one day, when she was an attractive young woman, she found sitting next her at the family dinner-table a person who struck her as uninviting and whom the rest of the company treated contemptuously. She herself felt no reason to be any more affable towards him. It was only many years later that she realized that this negligent and neglected cousin had been the poet Heinrich Heine. There is not a little evidence to show how much Heine suffered both in his youth and later from this rejection by his rich relations. It was from the soil of this subjective emotion that the ‘famillionairely’ joke sprang.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1730

The presence of similar subjective determinants may be suspected in some other of the great scoffer’s jokes; but I know of no other one in which this can be demonstrated so convincingly. For this reason it is not easy to try to make any more definite statement about the nature of these personal determinants. Indeed, we shall be disinclined in general to claim such complicated determinants for the origin of every individual joke. Nor are the jokes produced by other famous men any more easily accessible to our examination. We get an impression that the subjective determinants of the joke-work are often not far removed from those of neurotic illness - when we learn, for instance, of Lichtenberg that he was a severely hypochrondriacal man, with all kinds of eccentricities. The great majority of jokes, and especially those that are constantly being newly produced in connection with the events of the day, are circulated anonymously; one would be curious to learn from what sort of people such productions originate. If one has occasion as doctor to make the acquaintance of one of those people who, though not remarkable in other ways, are well known in their circle as jokers and the originators of many viable jokes, one may be surprised to discover that the joker is a disunited personality, disposed to neurotic disorders. The insufficiency of documentary evidence, however, will certainly prevent our setting up a hypothesis that a psychoneurotic constitution of this kind is a habitual or necessary subjective condition for the construction of jokes.

A more transparent case is offered, once more, by the Jewish jokes, which, as I have already mentioned (p. 1705), are ordinarily made by Jews themselves, while the anecdotes about them from other sources scarcely ever rise above the level of comic stories or of brutal derision. What determines their participating in the jokes themselves seems to be the same as in the case of Heine’s ‘famillionairely’ joke; and its significance seems to lie in the fact that the person concerned finds criticism or aggressiveness difficult so long as they are direct, and possible only along circuitous paths.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1731

Other subjective factors which determine or favour the joke-work are less wrapped in obscurity. The motive force for the production of innocent jokes is not infrequently an ambitious urge to show one’s cleverness, to display oneself - an instinct that may be equated with exhibitionism in the sexual field. The presence of numerous inhibited instincts, whose suppression has retained a certain degree of instability, will provide the most favourable disposition for the production of tendentious jokes. Thus individual components of a person’s sexual constitution in particular, can appear as motives for the construction of a joke. A whole class of obscene jokes allows one to infer the presence of a concealed inclination to exhibitionism in their inventors; aggressive tendentious jokes succeed best in people in whose sexuality a powerful sadistic component is demonstrable, which is more or less inhibited in real life.

The second fact which makes an enquiry into the subjective determination of jokes necessary is the generally recognized experience that no one can be content with having made a joke for himself alone. An urge to tell the joke to someone is inextricably bound up with the joke-work; indeed, this urge is so strong that often enough it is carried through in disregard of serious misgivings. In the case of the comic as well, telling it to someone else produces enjoyment; but the demand is not peremptory. If one comes across something comic, one can enjoy it by oneself. A joke, on the contrary, must be told to someone else. The psychical process of constructing a joke seems not to be completed when the joke occurs to one: something remains over which seeks, by communicating the idea, to bring the unknown process of constructing the joke to a conclusion.

We cannot in the first instance guess what the basis may be of this urge to communicate the joke. But we can see another peculiarity in jokes which distinguishes them from the comic. If I come across something comic, I myself can laugh heartily at it, though it is true that I am also pleased if I can make someone else laugh by telling it to him. But I myself cannot laugh at a joke that has occurred to me, that I have made, in spite of the unmistakable enjoyment that the joke gives me. It is possible that my need to communicate the joke to someone else is in some way connected with the laughter produced by it, which is denied to me but is manifest in the other person.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1732

Why is it, then, that I do not laugh at a joke of my own? And what part is played in this by the other person?

Let us take the second question first. In the case of the comic, two persons are in general concerned: besides myself, the person in whom I find something comic. If inanimate things seem to me comic, that is on account of a kind of personification which is not of rare occurrence in our ideational life. The comic process is content with these two persons: the self and the person who is the object; a third person may come into it, but is not essential. Joking as a play with one’s own words and thoughts is to begin with without a person as an object. But already at the preliminary stage of the jest, if it has succeeded in making play and nonsense safe from the protests of reason, it demands another person to whom it can communicate its result. But this second person in the case of jokes does not correspond to the person who is the object, but to the third person, the ‘other’ person in the case of the comic. It seems as though in the case of a jest the other person has the decision passed over to him on whether the joke-work has succeeded in its task - as though the self did not feel certain in its judgement on the point. Innocent jokes, too, jokes that serve to reinforce a thought, require another person to test whether they have attained their aim. If a joke enters the service of the purpose of exposing or of a hostile purpose, it may be described as a psychical process between three persons, who are the same as in the case of the comic, though the part played by the third person is different; the psychical process in jokes is accomplished between the first person (the self) and the third (the outside person) and not, as in the case of the comic, between the self and the person who is the object.

Jokes are confronted by subjective determinants in the case of the third person too, and these may make their aim of producing pleasurable excitation unattainable. As Shakespeare (Love’s Labour Lost, V, 2) reminds us:

A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear

Of him that hears it, never in the tongue

Of him that makes it . . .

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1733

A person who is dominated by a mood concerned with serious thoughts is not fitted to confirm the fact that a jest has succeeded in rescuing the verbal pleasure. He must himself be in a cheerful or at least in an indifferent state of feeling in order to act as the jest’s third person. The same obstacle applies to innocent and to tendentious jokes; but in the latter there is a further obstacle in the form of opposition to the purpose which the joke is trying to serve. The third person cannot be ready to laugh at an excellent obscene joke if the exposure applies to a highly respected relative of his own; before a gathering of priests and ministers no one would venture to produce Heine’s comparison of catholic and protestant clerics to retail tradesmen and employees of a wholesale business; and an audience composed of my opponent’s devoted friends would receive my most successful pieces of joking invective against him not as jokes but as invective, and would meet them with indignation and not with pleasure. Some degree of benevolence or a kind of neutrality, an absence of any factor that could provoke feelings opposed to the purpose of the joke, is an indispensable condition if the third person is to collaborate in the completion of the process of making the joke.

Where there are no such obstacles to the operation of the joke, the phenomenon which is now the subject of our enquiry emerges: the pleasure which the joke has produced is more evident in the third person than in the creator of the joke. We must be content to say more ‘evident’ where we should be inclined to ask whether the hearer’s pleasure is not more ‘intense than that of the maker of the joke, since we naturally have no means of measuring and comparing. We see, however, that the hearer gives evidence of his pleasure with a burst of laughter, after the first person has as a rule produced the joke with a tensely serious look. If I repeat a joke that I have heard myself, I must, if I am not to spoil its effect, behave in telling it exactly like the person who made it. The question now arises whether we can draw any conclusions about the psychical process of constructing jokes from this factor of laughing at jokes.

It cannot be our design to consider at this point all that has been propounded and published on the nature of laughter. We may well be deterred from any such plan by the remarks with which Dugas, a pupil of Ribot’s, prefaces his book La psychologie du rire (1902, 1): ‘Il n’est pas de fait plus banal et plus étudié que le rire; il n’en est pas qui ait eu le don d’exciter davantage la curiosité du vulgaire et celle des philosophes; il n’en est pas sur lequel on ait receuilli plus d’observations et bâti plus de théories, et avec cela il n’en est pas qui demeure plus inexpliqué. On serait tenté de dire avec les sceptiques qu’il faut être content de rire et de ne pas chercher à savoir pourquoi on rit, d’autant que peut-être la réflexion tue le rire, et qu’il serait alors contradictoire qu’elle en découvrît les causes.’¹

¹ [‘There is no action that is more commonplace or that has been more widely studied than laughter. There is none that has succeeded more in exciting the curiosity both of ordinary people and of philosophers. There is none on which more observations have been collected and more theories built. But at the same time there is none that remains more unexplained. It would be tempting to say with the sceptics that we must be content to laugh and not try to know why we laugh, since it may be that reflection kills laughter and it would thus be a contradiction to think that it could discover its causes.’]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1734

On the other hand we shall not miss the opportunity of making use for our purposes of an opinion on the mechanism of laughter which fits in excellently with our own line of thought. I have in mind the attempt at an explanation made by Herbert Spencer in his essay on ‘The Physiology of Laughter’ (1860). According to Spencer, laughter is a phenomenon of the discharge of mental excitation and a proof that the psychical employment of this excitation has suddenly come up against an obstacle. He describes the psychological situation which ends in laughter in the following words: ‘Laughter naturally results only when consciousness is unawares transferred from great things to small - only when there is what we may call a descending incongruity.’¹

¹ Various points in this definition would call for detailed examination in an investigation of comic pleasure; this has already been undertaken by other authors and in any case does not concern us here. - I do not think Spencer has been happy in his explanation of why the discharge takes the particular paths whose excitation produces the somatic picture of laughter. The theme of the physiological explanation of laughter - that is, the tracing back or interpretation of the muscular actions characteristic of laughter - has been treated at length both before and since Darwin, but has still not been finally cleared up. I have one contribution to make to this theme. So far as I know, the grimace characteristic of smiling, which twists up the corners of the mouth, appears first in an infant at the breast when it is satisfied and satiated and lets go of the breast as it falls asleep. Here it is a genuine expression of the emotions, for it corresponds to a decision to take no more nourishment, and represents as it were an ‘enough’ or rather a ‘more than enough’. This original meaning of pleasurable satiety may have brought the smile, which is after all the basic phenomenon of laughter, into its later relation with pleasurable processes of discharge.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1735

In a quite similar sense French authors (e.g. Dugas) describe laughter as a ‘détente’, a phenomenon of relaxation of tension. So too the formula proposed by Bain - ‘laughter a release from constraint’ - seems to me to diverge from Spencer’s view much less than some authorities would have us believe.

Nevertheless, we feel a need to modify Spencer’s notion, in part to give a more definite form to the ideas contained in it and in part to change them. We should say that laughter arises if a quota of psychical energy which has earlier been used for the cathexis of particular psychical paths has become unusable, so that it can find free discharge. We are well aware what ‘evil looks’ we are inviting with such a hypothesis; but we will venture to quote in our defence an apposite sentence from Lipps’s book Komik und Humor (1898, 71), from which illumination is to be derived on more subjects than that of the comic and humour: ‘Finally, specific psychological problems always lead fairly deep into psychology, so that at bottom no psychological problem can be treated in isolation.’ The concepts of ‘psychical energy’ and ‘discharge’ and the treatment of psychical energy as a quantity have become habitual in my thoughts since I began to arrange the facts of psychopathology philosophically; and already in my Interpretation of Dreams (1900a) I tried (in the same sense as Lipps) to establish the fact that what are ‘really psychically effective’ are psychical processes which are unconscious in themselves, not the contents of consciousness.¹ It is only when I speak of the ‘cathexis of psychical paths’ that I seem to depart from the analogies commonly used by Lipps. My experiences of the displaceability of psychical energy along certain paths of association, and of the almost indestructible persistence of the traces of psychical processes, have in fact suggested to me an attempt at picturing the unknown in some such way. To avoid misunderstanding, I must add that I am making no attempt to proclaim that the cells and nerve fibres, or the systems of neurones which are taking their place to-day, are these psychical paths, even though it would have to be possible in some manner which cannot yet be indicated to represent such paths by organic elements of the nervous system.

¹ Cf. the sections ‘On Psychical Force’, etc. in Chapter VIII of Lipps’s book quoted above. ‘Thus the following general statement holds good: The factors of psychical life are not the contents of consciousness but the psychical processes which are in themselves unconscious. The task of psychology, if it does not merely wish to describe the contents of consciousness, must therefore consist in inferring the nature of these unconscious processes from the character of the contents of consciousness and their temporal connections. Psychology must be a theory of these processes. But a psychology of this kind will very soon find that there are quite a number of characteristics of these processes which are not represented in the corresponding contents of consciousness.’ (Lipps, ibid., 123-4.) See also Chapter VII of my Interpretation of Dreams.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1736

In laughter, therefore, on our hypothesis, the conditions are present under which a sum of psychical energy which has hitherto been used for cathexis is allowed free discharge. And since laughter - not all laughter, it is true, but certainly laughter at a joke - is an indication of pleasure, we shall be inclined to relate this pleasure to the lifting of the cathexis which has previously been present. If we see that the hearer of a joke laughs but that its creator cannot laugh, this may amount to telling us that in the hearer a cathectic expenditure has been lifted and discharged, while in the construction of the joke there have been obstacles either to the lifting or to the possibility of discharge. The psychical process in the hearer, the joke’s third person, can scarcely be more aptly described than by stressing the fact that he has bought the pleasure of the joke with very small expenditure on his own part. He might be said to have been presented with it. The words of the joke he hears necessarily bring about in him the idea or train of thought to the construction of which great internal inhibitions were opposed in him too. He would have had to make an effort of his own in order to bring it about spontaneously as the first person, he would have had to use at least as much psychical expenditure on doing so as would correspond to the strength of the inhibition, suppression or repression of the idea. He has saved this psychical expenditure. On the basis of our earlier discussions (p. 1711) we should say that his pleasure corresponds to this economy. Our insight into the mechanism of laughter leads us rather to say that, owing to the introduction of the proscribed idea by means of an auditory perception, the cathectic energy used for the inhibition has now suddenly become superfluous and has been lifted, and is therefore now ready to be discharged by laughter. The two ways of expressing the facts amount to the same thing in essentials, since the expenditure economized corresponds exactly to the inhibition that has become superfluous. But the second method of expression is the more illuminating, since it allows us to say that the hearer of the joke laughs with the quota of psychical energy which has become free through the lifting of the inhibitory cathexis; we might say that he laughs this quota off.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1737

If the person in whom the joke is formed cannot laugh, this, as we have already said, points to a divergence from what happens in the third person that lies either in the lifting of the inhibitory cathexis or in the possibility of its discharge. But the first of these alternatives will not meet the case, as we shall see at once. The inhibitory cathexis must have been lifted in the first person as well, or otherwise no joke would have come about, since its formation was precisely in order to overcome a resistance of that kind; otherwise, too, it would be impossible for the first person to feel the pleasure in the joke which we have been obliged to trace back precisely to the lifting of the inhibition. All that remains, then, is the other alternative, namely that the first person cannot laugh, although he feels pleasure, because there is an interference with the possibility of discharge. An interference of this kind with the possibility of discharge, which is a necessary precondition of laughter, may arise from the liberated cathectic energy being immediately applied to some other endopsychic use. It is a good thing that our attention has been drawn to that possibility; and our interest in it will very soon be further engaged. Another condition, however, leading to the same result, may be realized in the first person of a joke. It is possible that no quota of energy at all that is capable of being manifested may be liberated, in spite of the lifting of the inhibitory cathexis. In the first person of a joke the joke-work is performed, which must correspond to a certain quota of new psychical expenditure. Thus the first person himself produces the force which lifts the inhibition. This no doubt results in a yield of pleasure for him, and even, in the case of tendentious jokes, a very considerable one, since the fore-pleasure obtained by the joke-work itself takes over the lifting of further inhibitions; but the expenditure on the joke-work is in every case deducted from the yield resulting from the lifting of the inhibition - an expenditure which is the same as the one which the hearer of the joke avoids. What I have just said may be confirmed by observing that a joke loses its effect of laughter even in the third person as soon as he is required to make an expenditure on intellectual work in connection with it. The allusions made in a joke must be obvious and the omissions easy to fill; an awakening of conscious intellectual interest usually makes the effect of the joke impossible. There is an important distinction here between jokes and riddles. Perhaps the psychical constellation during the joke-work is in general not favourable to the free discharge of what has been gained. We are not, it seems, in a position to see further on this point; we have been more successful in throwing light on one part of our problem - on why the third person laughs - than on its other part - on why the first person does not laugh.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1738

Nevertheless, if we firmly accept these views on the determinants of laughter and on the psychical process in the third person, we are now in a position to give a satisfactory explanation of a whole number of peculiarities which jokes have been known to possess but which have not been understood. If a quota of cathectic energy capable of discharge is to be liberated in the third person, there are several conditions which must be fulfilled or which are desirable in order to act as encouragements: (1) It must be ensured that the third person is really making this cathectic expenditure. (2) It is necessary to guard against the cathectic expenditure, when it is liberated, finding some other psychical use instead of offering itself for motor discharge. (3) It cannot but be an advantage if the cathexis which is to be liberated in the third person is intensified before hand, raised to a greater height. All these aims are served by particular methods of the joke-work, which may be classed together as secondary or auxiliary techniques:-

The first of these conditions lays down one of the necessary qualifications of the third person as hearer of the joke. It is essential that he should be in sufficient psychical accord with the first person to possess the same internal inhibitions, which the joke-work has overcome in the latter. A person who is responsive to smut will be unable to derive any pleasure from witty jokes of exposure; Herr N.’s attacks will not be understood by uneducated people who are accustomed to give free play to their desire to insult. Thus every joke calls for a public of its own and laughing at the same jokes is evidence of far reaching psychical conformity. Here moreover we have arrived at a point which enables us to guess still more precisely what takes place in the third person. He must be able as a matter of habit to erect in himself the same inhibition which the first person’s joke has overcome, so that, as soon as he hears the joke, the readiness for this inhibition will compulsively or automatically awaken. This readiness for inhibition, which I must regard as a real expenditure, analogous to mobilization in military affairs, will at the same moment be recognized as superfluous or too late, and so be discharged in statu nascendi by laughter.¹

The second condition for making free discharge possible - that the liberated energy shall be prevented from being used in any other way - seems very much the more important. It provides the theoretical explanation of the uncertainty of the effect of jokes when the thoughts expressed in a joke arouse powerfully exciting ideas in the hearer; in that case the question whether the purposes of the joke agree with or contradict the circle of thoughts by which the hearer is dominated will decide whether his attention will remain with the joking process or be withdrawn from it. Of still greater theoretical interest, however, are a class of auxiliary techniques which clearly serve the end of entirely detaching the hearer’s attention from the joking process, and of allowing that process to run its course automatically. I deliberately say ‘automatically’ and not ‘unconsciously’, because the latter description would be misleading. It is only a question here of holding back an increased cathexis of attention from the psychical process when the joke is heard; and the usefulness of these auxiliary techniques rightly leads us to suspect that precisely the cathexis of attention has a great share in the supervision and fresh employment of liberated cathectic energy.

¹ The notion of the status nascendi has been used by Heymans (1896) in a somewhat different connection.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1739

It appears to be far from easy to avoid the endopsychic employment of cathexes that have become superfluous, for in our thought-processes we are constantly in the habit of displacing such cathexes from one path to another without losing any of their energy by discharge. Jokes make use of the following methods with that aim in view. Firstly, they try to keep their expression as short as possible, so as to offer fewer points of attack to the attention. Secondly, they observe the condition of being easy to understand (see above); as soon as they call for intellectual work which would demand a choice between different paths of thought, they would endanger their effect not only by the unavoidable expenditure of thought but also by the awakening of attention. But besides this they employ the device of distracting attention by putting forward something in the joke’s form of expression which catches it, so that in the meantime the liberation of the inhibitory cathexis and its discharge may be completed without interruption. This aim is already fulfilled by the omissions in the joke’s wording; they offer an incitement to filling up the gaps and in that way succeed in withdrawing the joking process from attention. Here the technique of riddles, which attract the attention, is, as it were, brought into the service of the joke-work. Far more effective even are the façades which we have found especially in some groups of tendentious jokes (p. 1699 ff.). The syllogistic façades admirably fulfil the aim of holding the attention by setting it a task. While we are beginning to wonder what was wrong with the reply, we are already laughing; our attention has been caught unawares and the discharge of the liberated inhibitory cathexis has been completed. The same is true of jokes with a comic façade, in which the comic comes to the help of the joke-technique. A comic façade encourages the effectiveness of a joke in more than one way; not only does it make the automatism of the joking process possible, by holding the attention, but it also facilitates the discharge by the joke, by sending on ahead a discharge of a comic kind. The comic is here operating exactly like a bribing fore-pleasure, and we can in this way understand how some jokes are able to renounce entirely the fore-pleasure produced by the ordinary methods of joking and make use only of the comic for fore-pleasure. Among the joke-techniques proper, it is in particular displacement and representation by something absurd which, apart from their other qualifications, give rise, too, to a distraction of the attention which is desirable for the automatic course of the joking process.¹

¹ I should like to discuss yet another interesting characteristic of joke-technique, in connection with an example of a displacement joke. Once when Gallmeyer, that actress of genius, was asked the unwelcome question ‘Your age?’ she is said to have replied ‘in the tone of voice of a Gretchen and with her eyes bashfully cast down: "at Brünn".’ This is a model displacement. When she was asked her age she replied by giving the place of her birth. She was thus anticipating the next question and was letting it be understood that she would be glad to know that this one question had been passed over. Yet we feel that in this instance the characteristic of jokes is not expressed in all its purity. It is too clear that the question is being evaded, the displacement is too obvious. Our attention understands at once that what is in question is an intentional displacement. In the other displacement jokes the displacement is disguised; our attention is held by the effort to detect it. In the displacement joke recorded on p. 1658, in the reply made to a recommendation of a riding horse ‘What should I be doing in Pressburg at half-past six?’ the displacement is also prominent. But to make up for this it has a confusing effect on the attention through its nonsensical nature, whereas in the actress’s examination we are able to recognize her displacement-reply immediately. - [Added 1912] What are known as ‘Scherzfragen [facetious questions]’ deviate from jokes in another direction, though apart from this they may make use of the best techniques. Here is an example of one of them, which uses the technique of displacement: ‘What is a cannibal who has eaten his father and his mother?’ - ‘An orphan.’ - ‘And if he, has eaten all his other relations as well?’ - ‘The sole heir.’ - ‘And where will a monster of that kind find sympathy?’ - ‘In the dictionary under "S".’ ‘Facetious questions’ of this kind are not proper jokes because the joking answers that they call for cannot be guessed in the same way as are the allusions, omissions, etc. of jokes.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1740

As we can already guess, and as we shall see more clearly later on, we have discovered in the condition of distracting the attention a by no means unessential feature of the psychical process in the hearer of a joke. In connection with this there are still other things that we can understand. Firstly, there is the question why we scarcely ever know what we are laughing at in a joke, though we can discover it by an analytic investigation. The laughter is in fact the product of an automatic process which is only made possible by our conscious attention’s being kept away from it. Secondly, we are able to understand the peculiar fact about jokes that they only produce their full effect on the hearer if they are new to him, if they come as a surprise to him. This characteristic of jokes (which determines the shortness of their life and stimulates the constant production of new jokes) is evidently due to the fact that the very nature of surprising someone or taking him unawares implies that it cannot succeed a second time. When a joke is repeated, the attention is led back to the first occasion of hearing it as the memory of it arises. And from this we are carried on to an understanding of the urge to tell a joke one has heard to other people who have not yet heard it. One probably recovers from the impression the joke makes on a new-comer some of the possibility of enjoyment that has been lost owing to its lack of novelty. And it may be that it was an analogous motive that drove the creator of the joke in the first instance to tell it to someone else.

In the third place I shall bring forward - but this time not as necessary conditions but only as encouragements to the process of joking - the auxiliary technical methods of the joke-work which are calculated to increase the quota which obtains discharge and in that way intensify the effect of the joke. These, it is true, also for the most part increase the attention that is paid to the joke, but they make this effect innocuous once more by simultaneously holding it and inhibiting its mobility. Anything that provokes interest and bewilderment works in these two directions - thus, in particular, nonsense, and contradiction, too, the ‘contrast of ideas’ which some authorities have tried to make into the essential characteristic of jokes, but which I can only regard as a means of intensifying their effect. Anything that bewilders calls up in the hearer the state of distribution of energy which Lipps has called ‘psychical damming up’; and he is no doubt also correct in supposing that the discharge is the more powerful, the higher was the preceding damming up. Lipps’s account, it is true, does not relate specifically to jokes but to the comic in general; but we may regard it as most probable that in jokes, too, the discharge of an inhibitory cathexis is similarly increased by the height of the damming up.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1741

It now begins to dawn on us that the technique of jokes is in general determined by two sorts of purposes - those that make the construction of the joke possible in the first person and those that are intended to guarantee the joke the greatest possible pleasurable effect on the third person. The Janus-like, two-way-facing character of jokes, which protects their original yield of pleasure from the attacks of critical reason, and the mechanism of fore-pleasure belong to the first of these purposes; the further complication of the technique by the conditions that have been enumerated in the present chapter takes place out of regard for the joke’s third person. A joke is thus a double-dealing rascal who serves two masters at once. Everything in jokes that is aimed at gaining pleasure is calculated with an eye to the third person, as though there were internal and unsurmountable obstacles to it in the first person. And this gives us a full impression of how indispensable this third person is for the completion of the joking process. But whereas we have been able to obtain a fairly good insight into the nature of this process in the third person, the corresponding process in the first person seems still to be veiled in obscurity. Of the two questions we asked, ‘Why are we unable to laugh at a joke we have made ourselves?’ and ‘Why are we driven to tell our own joke to someone else?’, the first has so far evaded our reply. We can only suspect that there is an intimate connection between the two facts that have to be explained: that we are compelled to tell our joke to someone else because we are unable to laugh at it ourselves. Our insight into the conditions for obtaining and discharging pleasure which prevail in the third person enables us to infer as regards the first person that in him the conditions for discharge are lacking and those for obtaining pleasure only incompletely fulfilled. That being so, it cannot be disputed that we supplement our pleasure by attaining the laughter that is impossible for us by the roundabout path of the impression we have of the person who has been made to laugh. As Dugas has put it, we laugh as it were ‘par ricochet [on the rebound]’. Laughter is among the highly infectious expressions of psychical states. When I make the other person laugh by telling him my joke, I am actually making use of him to arouse my own laughter; and one can in fact observe that a person who has begun by telling a joke with a serious face afterwards joins in the other person’s laughter with a moderate laugh. Accordingly, telling my joke to another person would seem to serve several purposes: first, to give me objective certainty that the joke-work has been successful; secondly, to complete my own pleasure by a reaction from the other person upon myself; and thirdly - where it is a question of repeating a joke that one has not produced oneself - to make up for the loss of pleasure owing to the joke’s lack of novelty.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1742

At the conclusion of these discussions of the psychical processes in jokes in so far as they take place between two persons, we may glance back at the factor of economy, which has been in our mind as being of importance in arriving at a psychological view of jokes ever since our first explanation of their technique. We have long since abandoned the most obvious but simplest view of this economy - that it is a question of an avoidance of psychical expenditure in general, such as would be involved by the greatest possible restriction in the use of words and in the establishment of chains of thought. Even at that stage we told ourselves that being concise or laconic was not enough to make a joke. A joke’s brevity is of a peculiar kind - ‘joking’ brevity. It is true that the original yield of pleasure, produced by playing with words and thoughts, was derived from mere economy in expenditure; but with the development of play into a joke the tendency to economy too must alter its aims, for the amount that would be saved by the use of the same word or the avoidance of a new way of joining ideas together would certainly count for nothing as compared with the immense expenditure on our intellectual activity. I may perhaps venture on a comparison between psychical economy and a business enterprise. So long as the turnover in the business is very small, the important thing is that outlay in general shall be kept low and administrative costs restricted to the minimum. Economy is concerned with the absolute height of expenditure. Later, when the business has expanded, the importance of the administrative cost diminishes; the height reached by the amount of expenditure is no longer of significance provided that the turnover and profits can be sufficiently increased. It would be niggling, and indeed positively detrimental, to be conservative over expenditure on the administration of the business. Nevertheless it would be wrong to assume that when expenditure was absolutely great there would be no room left for the tendency to economy. The mind of the manager, if it is inclined to economy, will now turn to economy over details. He will feel satisfaction if a piece of work can be carried out at smaller cost than previously, however small the saving may seem to be in comparison with the size of the total expenditure. In a quite analogous fashion, in our complex psychical business too, economy in detail remains a source of pleasure, as may be seen from everyday happenings. Anyone who used to have his room lighted by gas and has now had electricity installed will for quite a time be aware of a definite feeling of pleasure when he switches on the electric light; he will feel it as long as the memory is revived in him at that moment of the complicated manoeuvres that were necessary for lighting the gas. Similarly, the economies in psychical inhibitory expenditure brought about by a joke - though they are small in comparison with our total psychical expenditure - will remain a source of pleasure for us because they save us a particular expenditure which we have been accustomed to make and which we were already prepared to make on this occasion as well. The factor of the expenditure’s being one that was expected and prepared for moves unmistakably into the foreground.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1743

A localized economy, such as we have just been considering, will not fail to give us momentary pleasure; but it will not bring a lasting relief so long as what has been saved at this point can be put to use elsewhere. It is only if this disposal elsewhere can be avoided that this specialized economy is transformed into a general relief of psychical expenditure. Thus, as we come to a better understanding of the psychical processes of jokes, the factor of relief takes the place of economy. It is obvious that the former gives a greater feeling of pleasure. The process in the joke’s first person produces pleasure by lifting inhibition and diminishing local expenditure; but it seems not to come to rest until, through the intermediary of the interpolated third person, it achieves general relief through discharge.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1744

C.  THEORETIC PART

VI

THE RELATION OF JOKES TO DREAMS AND TO THE UNCONSCIOUS

At the end of the chapter in which I was concerned with discovering the technique of jokes, I remarked (p. 1686 f.) that the processes of condensation, with or without the formation of substitutes, of representation by nonsense and by the opposite, of indirect representation, and so on, which, as we found, play a part in producing jokes, show a very far-reaching agreement with the processes of the ‘dream-work’. I further promised on the one hand that we would study these similarities more closely and on the other hand that we would examine the common element in jokes and dreams which seems to be thus suggested. It would be much easier for me to carry out this comparison if I could assume that one of the two objects of comparison - the ‘dream-work’ - was already familiar to my readers. But it will probably be wiser not to make that assumption. I have an impression that my Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, provoked more ‘bewilderment’ than ‘enlightenment’ among my fellow-specialists; and I know that wider circles of readers have been content to reduce the contents of the book to a catch-word (‘wish-fulfilment’) which can be easily remembered and conveniently misused.

Continued concern with the problems treated there - for which my medical practice as a psychotherapist has given me abundant opportunity - has not brought me up against anything that might have called for alterations or improvements in my lines of thought; I can therefore wait quietly till my readers’ understanding catches up with me or till judicious criticism has shown me the fundamental errors in my view. For the purpose of making the comparison with jokes, I will now repeat, briefly and concisely, the most essential information about dreams and the dream-work.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1745

We know a dream from what seems as a rule a fragmentary memory of it which we have after waking. It appears as a mesh-work of sense-impressions, mostly visual but also of other kinds, which have simulated an experience, and with which thought-processes (‘knowledge’ in the dream) and expressions of affect may be mingled. What we thus remember of the dream I call ‘the dream’s manifest content’. It is often entirely absurd and confused - sometimes only the one or the other. But even if it is quite coherent, as it is in the case of some anxiety-dreams, it confronts our mental life as something alien, for whose origin one cannot in any way account. The explanation of these characteristics of dreams has hitherto been looked for in dreams themselves, by regarding them as indications of a disordered, dissociated and so to say ‘sleepy’ activity of the nervous elements.

I have on the contrary shown that this strange ‘manifest’ content of the dream can regularly be made intelligible as a mutilated and altered transcript of certain rational psychical structures which deserve the name of ‘latent dream-thoughts’. We arrive at a knowledge of these by dividing the dream’s manifest content into its component parts, without considering any apparent meaning it may have, and by then following the associative threads which start from each of what are now isolated elements. These interweave with one another and finally lead to a tissue of thoughts which are not only perfectly rational but can also be easily fitted into the known context of our mental processes. In the course of this ‘analysis’, the content of the dream will have cast off all the peculiarities that puzzled us. But if the analysis is to succeed, we must, while it proceeds, firmly reject the critical objections which will unceasingly arise to the reproduction of the various intermediary associations.

A comparison of the recollected manifest content of the dream with the latent dream-thoughts thus discovered gives rise to the concept of the ‘dream-work’. The dream-work is the name for the whole sum of transforming processes which have converted the dream-thoughts into the manifest dream. The surprise with which we formerly regarded the dream now attaches to the dream-work.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1746

The achievements of the dream-work can, however, be described as follows. A tissue of thoughts, usually a very complicated one, which has been built up during the day and has not been completely dealt with - ‘a day’s residue’ - continues during the night to retain the quota of energy - the ‘interest’- claimed by it, and threatens to disturb sleep. This ‘day’s residue’ is transformed by the dream-work into a dream and made innocuous to sleep. In order to provide a fulcrum for the dream-work, the ‘day’s residue’ must be capable of constructing a wish - which is not a very hard condition to fulfil. The wish arising from the dream-thoughts forms the preliminary stage and later the core of the dream. Experience derived from analyses - and not the theory of dreams - informs us that in children any wish left over from waking life is sufficient to call up a dream, which emerges as connected and ingenious but usually short, and which is easily recognized as a ‘wish-fulfilment’. In the case of adults it seems to be a generally binding condition that the wish which creates the dream shall be one that is alien to conscious thinking - a repressed wish - or will possibly at least have reinforcements that are unknown to consciousness. Without assuming the existence of the unconscious in the sense explained above, I should not be able to develop the theory of dreams further or to interpret the material met with in dream-analyses. The action of this unconscious wish upon the consciously rational material of the dream-thoughts produces the dream. While this happens, the dream is, as it were, dragged down into the unconscious, or, more precisely, is submitted to a treatment such as is met with at the level of unconscious thought-processes and is characteristic of that level. Hitherto it is only from the results of the ‘dream-work’ that we are in fact acquainted with the characteristics of unconscious thinking and its differences from thinking that is capable of becoming conscious - ‘preconscious’ thinking.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1747

A theory which is novel, which lacks simplicity and which runs counter to our habits of thought, can scarcely gain in clarity from a concise presentation. All I can aim at in these remarks, therefore, is to draw attention to the fuller treatment of the unconscious in my Interpretation of Dreams and to the writings of Lipps, which seem to me of the highest importance. I am aware that anyone who is under the spell of a good academic philosophical education, or who takes his opinions at long range from some so-called system of philosophy, will be opposed to the assumption of an ‘unconscious psychical’ in the sense in which Lipps and I use the term, and will prefer to prove its impossibility on the basis of a definition of the psychical. But definitions are a matter of convention and can be altered. I have often found that people who dispute the unconscious as being something absurd and impossible have not formed their impressions from the sources from which I at least was brought to the necessity of recognizing it. These opponents of the unconscious had never witnessed the effect of a post-hypnotic suggestion, and when I have told them examples from my analyses with non-hypnotized neurotics they have been filled with the greatest astonishment. They had never realized the idea that the unconscious is something which we really do not know, but which we are obliged by compelling inferences to supply; they had understood it as being something capable of becoming conscious but which was not being thought of at the moment, which did not occupy ‘the focal point of attention’. Nor had they ever tried to convince themselves of the existence in their own minds of unconscious thoughts like these by analysing one of their own dreams; and when I attempted to do so with them they could only greet their own associations with surprise and confusion. I have also formed an impression that fundamental emotional resistances stand in the way of accepting the ‘unconscious’, and that these are based on the fact that no one wants to get to know his unconscious and that the most convenient plan is to deny its possibility altogether.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1748

The dream-work, then - to which I return after this digression - submits the thought-material, which is brought forward in the optative mood, to a most strange revision. First, it takes the step from the optative to the present indicative; it replaces ‘Oh! if only . . .’ by ‘It is’. The ‘It is’ is then given a hallucinatory representation; and this I have called the ‘regression’ in the dream-work - the path that leads from thoughts to perceptual images, or, to use the terminology of the still unknown topography of the mental apparatus (which is not to be taken anatomically), from the region of thought-structures to that of sensory perceptions. On this path, which is in the reverse direction to that taken by the course of development of mental complications, the dream-thoughts are given a pictorial character; and eventually a plastic situation is arrived at which is the core of the manifest ‘dream-picture’. In order for it to be possible for the dream-thoughts to be represented in sensory form, their expression has to undergo far-reaching modifications. But while the thoughts are being changed back into sensory images still further alterations occur in them, some of which can be seen to be necessary while others are surprising. We can understand that, as a subsidiary result of regression, almost all the internal relations between the thoughts which linked them together will be lost in the manifest dream. The dream-work, as we might say, only undertakes to represent the raw material of the ideas and not the logical relations in which they stand to one another; or at all events it reserves the liberty to disregard the latter. On the other hand, there is another part of the dream-work which we cannot attribute to regression, to the change back into sensory images; and it is precisely this part which has an important bearing on our analogy with the formation of jokes. In the course of the dream-work the material of the dream-thoughts is subjected to a quite extraordinary compression or condensation. A starting point for it is provided by any common elements that may be present in the dream-thoughts, whether by chance or from the nature of their content. Since these are not as a rule sufficient for any considerable condensation, new artificial and transient common elements are created in the dream-work, and to this end there is actually a preference for the use of words the sound of which expresses different meanings. The newly-created common elements of condensation enter the manifest content of the dream as representatives of the dream-thoughts, so that an element in the dream corresponds to a nodal point or junction in the dream-thoughts, and, as compared with these latter, must quite generally be described as ‘overdetermined’. The fact of condensation is the piece of the dream-work which can be most easily recognized; it is only necessary to compare the text of a dream as it is noted down with the record of the dream-thoughts arrived at by analysis in order to get a good impression of the extensiveness of dream-condensation.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1749

It is less easy to convince oneself of the second great modification of the dream-thoughts that is brought about by the dream-work - the process that I have named ‘dream-displacement’. This is exhibited in the fact that things that lie on the periphery of the dream-thoughts and are of minor importance occupy a central position and appear with great sensory intensity in the manifest dream, and vice versa. This gives the dream the appearance of being displaced in relation to the dream-thoughts, and this displacement is precisely what brings it about that the dream confronts waking mental life as something alien and incomprehensible. In order that a displacement of this kind may occur, it must be possible for the cathectic energy to pass over uninhibited from the important ideas to the unimportant ones - which, in normal thought that is capable of being conscious, can only give an impression of ‘faulty reasoning’.

Transformation with a view to the possibility of representation, condensation and displacement are the three major achievements that may be ascribed to the dream-work. A fourth, which was perhaps too shortly considered in The Interpretation of Dreams, is not relevant for our present purposes. If the ideas of a ‘topography of the mental apparatus’ and of ‘regression’ are consistently followed up (and only in that way could these working hypotheses come to have any value), we must attempt to determine the stages of regression at which the various transformations of the dream-thoughts take place. This attempt has not yet been seriously undertaken; but it can at least be stated with certainty that displacement must take place in the thought-material while it is at the stage of the unconscious processes, while condensation must probably be pictured as a process stretching over the whole course of events till the perceptual region is reached. But in general we must be content to assume that all the forces which take part in the formation of dreams operate simultaneously. Though one must, as will be realized, exercise reserve in dealing with such problems, and though there are fundamental doubts, which cannot be entered into here, as to whether the question should be framed in this manner, yet I should like to venture on the assertion that the process of the dream-work preparatory to the dream must be located in the region of the unconscious. Thus, speaking roughly, there would in all be three stages to be distinguished in the formation of a dream: first, the transplanting of the preconscious day’s residues into the unconscious, in which the conditions governing the state of sleep must play a part; then, the dream-work proper in the unconscious; and thirdly, the regression of the dream-material, thus revised, to perception, in which form the dream becomes conscious.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1750

The following forces may be recognized as having a share in the formation of dreams: the wish to sleep, the cathexis of energy that still remains in the day’s residues after it has been lowered by the state of sleep, the psychical energy of the dream-constructing unconscious wish and the opposing force of the ‘censorship’, which dominates daytime life and is not completely lifted during sleep. The task of dream-formation is above all to overcome the inhibition from the censorship; and it is precisely this task which is solved by the displacements of psychical energy within the material of the dream-thoughts.

Let us now recall what it was during our investigation of jokes that gave us occasion to think of dreams. We found that the characteristics and effects of jokes are linked with certain forms of expression or technical methods, among which the most striking are condensation, displacement and indirect representation. Processes, however, which lead to the same results - condensation, displacement and indirect representation - have become known to us as peculiarities of the dream-work. Does not this agreement suggest the conclusion that joke-work and dream-work must, at least in some essential respect, be identical? The dream-work has, I think, been revealed to us as regards its most important characteristics. Of the psychical processes in jokes the part that is hidden from us is precisely the one that may be compared to the dream-work - namely, what happens during the formation of a joke in the first person. Shall we not yield to the temptation to construct that process on the analogy of the formation of a dream? A few of the characteristics of dreams are so alien to jokes that the part of the dream-work corresponding to those characteristics cannot be transferred to the formation of jokes. There is no doubt that the regression of the train of thought to perception is absent in jokes. But the other two stages of dream-formation, the sinking of a preconscious thought into the unconscious and its unconscious revision, if they could be supposed to occur in joke-formation, would present the precise outcome that we can observe in jokes. Let us decide, then, to adopt the hypothesis that this is the way in which jokes are formed in the first person: a preconscious thought is given over for a moment to unconscious revision and the outcome of this is at once grasped by conscious perception.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1751

Before we examine this hypothesis in detail, we will consider an objection which might threaten our premiss. We have started from the fact that the techniques of jokes indicate the same processes that are known to us as peculiarities of the dream-work. Now it is easy to argue against this that we should not have described the techniques of jokes as condensation, displacement, etc., and should not have arrived at such far reaching conformities between the methods of representation in jokes and dreams, if our previous knowledge of the dream-work had not prejudiced our view of the technique of jokes; so that at bottom we are only finding in jokes a confirmation of the expectations with which we approached them from dreams. If this was the basis of the conformity, there would be no certain guarantee of its existence apart from our prejudice. Nor indeed have condensation, displacement and indirect representation been taken by any other author as explaining the forms of expression of jokes. This would be a possible objection, but not on that account a just one. It would be equally possible that it was indispensable for our views to be sharpened by a knowledge of the dream-work before we could recognize the real conformity. A decision will after all depend only on whether a critical examination can prove on the basis of individual examples that this view of the technique of jokes is a forced one in whose favour other more plausible and deeper-going views have been suppressed, or whether such an examination is obliged to admit that the expectations derived from dreams can really be confirmed in jokes. I am of the opinion that we have nothing to fear from such criticism and that our procedure of ‘reduction’ (p. 1629) has shown us reliably in what forms of expression to look for the techniques of jokes. And if we gave those techniques names which already anticipated the discovery of the conformity between joke-technique and dream-work, we had a perfect right to do so and it was in fact nothing more than an easily justifiable simplification.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1752

There is another objection which would not affect our case so seriously but which is also not so open to a fundamental disproof. It might be said that, while it is true that these techniques of joking which fit in so well with our scheme deserve to be recognized, they are nevertheless not the only possible techniques of joking nor the only ones used in practice. It might be argued that under the influence of the model of the dream-work we have only looked for techniques of joking which fitted in with it, while others, overlooked by us, would have proved that this conformity was not invariably present. I really cannot venture to assert that I have succeeded in elucidating the technique of every joke in circulation; and I must therefore leave open the possibility that my enumeration of joke-techniques will show some incompleteness. But I have not intentionally excluded from discussion any kind of technique that was clear to me, and I can declare that the commonest, most important and most characteristic methods of joking have not escaped my attention.

Jokes possess yet another characteristic which fits satisfactorily into the view of the joke-work which we have derived from dreams. We speak, it is true, of ‘making’ a joke; but we are aware that when we do so our behaviour is different from what it is when we make a judgement or make an objection. A joke has quite outstandingly the characteristic of being a notion that has occurred to us ‘involuntarily’. What happens is not that we know a moment beforehand what joke we are going to make, and that all it then needs is to be clothed in words. We have an indefinable feeling, rather, which I can best compare with an ‘absence’¹, a sudden release of intellectual tension, and then all at once the joke is there - as a rule ready-clothed in words. Some of the techniques of jokes can be employed apart from them in the expression of a thought - for instance, the techniques of analogy or allusion. I can deliberately decide to make an allusion. In such a case I begin by having a direct expression of my thought in my mind (in my inner ear); I inhibit myself from expressing it owing to a misgiving related to the external situation, and can almost be said to make up my mind to replace the direct expression by another form of indirect expression; and I then produce an allusion. But the allusion which arises in this way and which is formed under my continuous supervision is never a joke, however serviceable it may be in other ways. A joking allusion, on the other hand, emerges without my being able to follow these preparatory stages in my thoughts. I will not attach too much importance to this behaviour; it is scarcely decisive, though it agrees well with our hypothesis that in the formation of a joke one drops a train of thought for a moment and that it then suddenly emerges from the unconscious as a joke.

¹ [The French term.]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1753

Jokes show a special way of behaving, too, in regard to association. Often they are not at the disposal of our memory when we want them; but at other times, to make up for this, they appear involuntarily, as it were, and at points in our train of thought where we cannot see their relevance. These, again, are only small features, but nevertheless indicate their origin from the unconscious.

Let us now bring together those characteristics of jokes which can be referred to their formation in the unconscious. First and foremost there is the peculiar brevity of jokes - not, indeed, an essential, but an extremely distinctive feature. When we first came across it, we were inclined to regard it as an expression of the tendency to economy, but abandoned this view ourselves owing to obvious objections. It now seems to us rather a mark of the unconscious revision to which the joke-thought has been subjected. For we cannot connect what corresponds to it in dreams, condensation, with any factor other than localization in the unconscious; and we must suppose that the determinants for such condensations, which are absent in the preconscious, are present in the unconscious thought-process.¹ It is to be expected that in the process of condensation a few of the elements subjected to it will be lost, while others, which take over the cathectic energy of the former, will become intensified or over-intensified through the condensation. Thus the brevity of jokes, like that of dreams, would be a necessary concomitant of the condensations which occur in both of them - in both cases a result of the process of condensation. This origin would also account for the special character of the brevity of jokes, a character that cannot be further defined but which is felt as a striking one.

¹ Apart from the dream-work and the technique of jokes, there is another kind of mental event in which I have been able to show that condensation is a regular and important process: namely the mechanism of normal (non-tendentious) forgetting. Unique impressions offer difficulties to forgetting; those that are analogous in any way are forgotten by being condensed in regard to their points of resemblance. Confusion between analogous impressions is one of the preliminary stages of forgetting.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1754

In an earlier passage (p. 1715) we regarded one of the outcomes of condensation - multiple use of the same material, play upon words, and similarity of sound - as a localized economy, and the pleasure produced by an (innocent) joke as derived from that economy, and later we inferred that the original intention of jokes was to obtain a yield of pleasure of this kind from words - a thing which had been permitted at the stage of play but had been dammed up by rational criticism in the course of intellectual development. We have now adopted the hypothesis that condensations of this kind, such as serve the technique of jokes, arise automatically, without any particular intention, during thought-processes in the unconscious. Have we not before us here two different views of the same fact which seem incompatible with each other? I do not think so. It is true that they are two different views, and that they need to be brought into harmony with each other; but they are not contradictory. One of them is merely foreign to the other; and when we have established a connection between them, we shall probably have made some advance in knowledge. The fact that such condensations are sources for a yield of pleasure is far from incompatible with the hypothesis that conditions for their production are easily found in the unconscious. We can, on the contrary, see a reason for the plunge into the unconscious in the circumstance that the pleasure-yielding condensations of which jokes are in need arise there easily. There are, moreover, two other factors which at a first glance seem to be completely foreign to each other and to have come together as though by some undesired chance, but which on deeper investigation turn out to be intimately linked and indeed essentially one. I have in mind the two assertions that, on the one hand, jokes during their development at the stage of play (that is, during the childhood of reason) are able to bring about these pleasurable condensations and that, on the other hand, at higher stages they accomplish the same effect by plunging the thought into the unconscious. For the infantile is the source of the unconscious, and the unconscious thought-processes are none other than those - the one and only ones - produced in early childhood. The thought which, with the intention of constructing a joke, plunges into the unconscious is merely seeking there for the ancient dwelling-place of its former play with words. Thought is put back for a moment to the stage of childhood so as once more to gain possession of the childish source of pleasure. If we did not already know it from research into the psychology of the neuroses, we should be led by jokes to a suspicion that the strange unconscious revision is nothing else than the infantile type of thought-activity. It is merely that it is not very easy for us to catch a glimpse in children of this infantile way of thinking, with its peculiarities that are retained in the unconscious of adults, because it is for the most part corrected, as it were, in statu nascendi. But in a number of cases we succeed in doing so, and we then laugh at the children’s ‘silliness’. Any uncovering of unconscious material of this kind strikes us in general as ‘comic’.¹

¹ Many of my neurotic patients who are under psycho-analytic treatment are regularly in the habit of confirming the fact by a laugh when I have succeeded in giving a faithful picture of their hidden unconscious to their conscious perception; and they laugh even when the content of what is unveiled would by no means justify this. This is subject, of course, to their having arrived close enough to the unconscious material to grasp it after the doctor has detected it and presented it to them.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1755

It is easier to perceive the characteristics of these unconscious thought-processes in the remarks made by sufferers from certain mental diseases. We should most probably be able (as Griesinger suggested long ago) to understand the deliria of the insane and to make use of them as pieces of information, if we ceased to apply the demands of conscious thinking to them and if we treated them, like dreams, with our interpretative technique.¹ Indeed we have confirmed the fact that ‘there is a return of the mind in dreams to an embryonic point of view’.²

We have entered so closely, in connection with the processes of condensation, into the importance of the analogy between jokes and dreams that we may be briefer in what follows. As we know, the displacements in the dream-work point to the operation of the censorship of conscious thinking, and accordingly, when we come across displacement among the techniques of jokes, we shall be inclined to suppose that an inhibitory force plays a part in the formation of jokes as well. And we already know that this is quite generally the case. The effort made by jokes to recover the old pleasure in nonsense or the old pleasure in words finds itself inhibited in normal moods by objections raised by critical reason; and in every individual case this has to be overcome. But the manner in which the joke-work accomplishes this task shows a sweeping distinction between jokes and dreams. In the dream-work it is habitually accomplished by displacements, by the selection of ideas which are sufficiently remote from the objectionable one for the censorship to allow them to pass, but which are nevertheless derivatives of that idea and have taken over its psychical cathexis by means of a complete transference. For this reason displacements are never absent in a dream and are far more comprehensive.

Among displacements are to be counted not merely diversions from a train of thought but every sort of indirect representation as well, and in particular the replacement of an important but objectionable element by one that is indifferent and that appears innocent to the censorship, something that seems like a very remote allusion to the other one - substitution by a piece of symbolism, or an analogy, or something small. It cannot be disputed that portions of such indirect representation are already present in the dream’s preconscious thoughts - for instance, representation by symbols or analogies - because otherwise the thought would not have reached the stage of preconscious expression at all. Indirect representations of this kind, and allusions whose reference to the thing intended is easy to discover, are indeed permissible and much-used methods of expression in our conscious thinking as well. The dream-work, however, exaggerates this method of indirect expression beyond all bounds. Under the pressure of the censorship, any sort of connection is good enough to serve as a substitute by allusion, and displacement is allowed from any element to any other. Replacement of internal associations (similarity, causal connection, etc.) by what are known as external ones (simultaneity in time, contiguity in space, similarity of sound) is quite specially striking and characteristic of the dream-work.

¹ In doing so we should not forget to take into account the distortion due to the censorship which is still at work even in psychoses.

² The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a).

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1756

All these methods of displacement appear too as techniques of joking. But when they appear, they usually respect the limits imposed on their employment in conscious thinking; and they may be altogether absent, although jokes too have invariably a task to accomplish of dealing with an inhibition. We can understand the subordinate place taken by displacements in the joke-work when we recall that jokes always have another technique at their command for keeping off inhibition and indeed that we have found nothing more characteristic of them than precisely this technique. For jokes do not, like dreams, create compromises; they do not evade the inhibition, but they insist on maintaining play with words or with nonsense unaltered. They restrict themselves, however, to a choice of occasions in which this play or this nonsense can at the same time appear allowable (in jests) or sensible (in jokes), thanks to the ambiguity of words and the multiplicity of conceptual relations. Nothing distinguishes jokes more clearly from all other psychical structures than this double-sidedness and this duplicity in speech. From this point of view at least the authorities come closest to an understanding of the nature of jokes when they lay stress on ‘sense in nonsense’.

In view of the universal predominance in jokes of this peculiar technique for overcoming their inhibitions, it might be thought superfluous for them ever to make use in particular cases of the technique of displacement. But, on the one hand, certain species of that technique remain of value to jokes as aims and as sources of pleasure - for instance, displacement proper (diversion of thoughts), which indeed partakes of the nature of nonsense. On the other hand, it should not be forgotten that the highest stage of jokes, tendentious jokes, often have to overcome two kinds of inhibition, those opposed to the joke itself and those opposed to its purpose (p. 1696), and that allusions and displacements are well qualified to make this latter task possible.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1757

The abundant and unrestrained use in the dream-work of indirect representation, of displacements, and especially of allusions, has a result which I mention not for its own importance but because it became my subjective reason for taking up the problem of jokes. If one gives an account to an uninformed or unaccustomed person of a dream-analysis, in which are set out, therefore, the strange processes of allusions and displacements - processes so obnoxious to waking life - of which the dream-work has made use, the reader receives an uncomfortable impression and declares that these interpretations are ‘in the nature of a joke’. But he clearly does not regard them as successful jokes, but as forced, and in some way violating the rules of jokes. It is easy to explain this impression. It arises from the fact that the dream-work operates by the same methods as jokes, but in its use of them it transgresses the limits that are respected by jokes. We shall presently learn that, as a result of the part played by the third person, jokes are bound by a certain condition which does not apply to dreams.

Among the techniques common to jokes and dreams, representation by the opposite and the use of nonsense claim some amount of our interest. The former is one of the more effective methods employed in jokes, as may be seen among others by the examples of ‘overstatement jokes’ (p. 1670 f.). Incidentally, representation by the opposite is not able, like most other joke-techniques, to escape conscious attention. A person who tries to bring the joke-work into operation in himself as deliberately as possible - a professional wag - soon discovers as a rule that the easiest way of replying to an assertion by a joke is by asserting its contrary and by leaving it to the inspiration of the moment to get rid of the objection which his contradiction is likely to provoke, by giving what he has said a fresh interpretation. It may be that representation by the opposite owes the favour it enjoys to the fact that it forms the core of another pleasurable way of expressing a thought, which can be understood without any need for bringing in the unconscious. I am thinking of irony, which comes very close to joking and is counted among the sub-species of the comic. Its essence lies in saying the opposite of what one intends to convey to the other person, but in sparing him contradiction by making him understand - by one’s tone of voice, by some accompanying gesture, or (where writing is concerned) by some small stylistic indications - that one means the opposite of what one says. Irony can only be employed when the other person is prepared to hear the opposite, so that he cannot fail to feel an inclination to contradict. As a result of this condition, irony is exposed particularly easily to the danger of being misunderstood. It brings the person who uses it the advantage of enabling him readily to evade the difficulties of direct expression, for instance in invectives. It produces comic pleasure in the hearer, probably because it stirs him into a contradictory expenditure of energy which is at once recognized as being unnecessary. A comparison like this between jokes and a closely related type of the comic may confirm our assumption that what is peculiar to jokes is their relation to the unconscious and that this may perhaps distinguish them from the comic as well.¹

In the dream-work, representation by the opposite plays a far greater part even than in jokes. Dreams are not merely fond of representing two contraries by one and the same composite structure, but they so often change something in the dream-thoughts into its opposite that this leads to a great difficulty in the work of interpretation. ‘There is no way of deciding at a first glance whether any element that admits of a contrary is present in the dream-thoughts as a positive or as a negative.’²

¹ The characteristic of the comic which is described as its ‘dryness’ depends likewise on the distinction between a statement and the gestures (in the widest sense of the word) accompanying it.

² The Interpretation of Dreams.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1758

I must state emphatically that this fact has not up to now met with any recognition. But it seems to point to an important characteristic of unconscious thinking, in which in all probability no process that resembles ‘judging’ occurs. In the place of rejection by a judgement, what we find in the unconscious is ‘repression’. Repression may, without doubt, be correctly described as the intermediate stage between a defensive reflex and a condemning judgement.¹

Nonsense, absurdity, which appears so often in dreams and has brought them into so much undeserved contempt, never arises by chance through the ideational elements being jumbled together, but can always be shown to have been admitted by the dream-work intentionally and to be designed to represent embittered criticism and contemptuous contradiction in the dream-thoughts. Thus the absurdity in the content of the dream takes the place of the judgement ‘this is a piece of nonsense’ in the dream-thoughts. I laid great stress on the evidence of this in my Interpretation of Dreams because I thought that in this way I could make the most forcible attack on the error of believing that the dream is not a psychical phenomenon at all - an error which blocks the way to a knowledge of the unconscious. We have now learned, in the course of solving certain tendentious jokes (p. 1660 ff.), that nonsense in jokes is made to serve the same aims of representation. We know too that a senseless façade to a joke is particularly well suited to increase the hearer’s psychical expenditure and so to raise the quota liberated for discharge by laughing. But besides this, it must not be forgotten that the nonsense in a joke is an end in itself, since the intention of recovering the old pleasure in nonsense is among the joke-work’s motives. There are other ways of recovering the nonsense and of deriving pleasure from it: caricature, exaggeration, parody and travesty make use of them and so create ‘comic nonsense’. If we submit these forms of expression to an analysis similar to the one we have applied to jokes, we shall find that in none of these cases is there any occasion for bringing in unconscious processes in our sense in order to explain them. We can now understand too how it is that the characteristic of being a joke can come as an extra addition to a caricature, exaggeration or parody; what makes this possible is a difference in the ‘psychical scene of action’.²

¹ The highly remarkable and still insufficiently appreciated behaviour of the relation between contraries in the unconscious is no doubt likely to help our understanding of ‘negativism’ in neurotic and insane patients. (Cf. the two last works on the subject: Bleuler, 1904 and Gross, 1904. [Added 1912:] See also my review of ‘The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words’ (1910e).)

² An expression used by Fechner which has acquired importance as a support for my views.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1759

The assignment of the joke-work to the system of the unconscious has, I think, become of considerably greater importance to us now that it has enabled us to understand the fact that the techniques to which jokes admittedly cling are, on the other hand, not their exclusive property. Some doubts which we were obliged to hold over until later in our original examination of these techniques now find a comfortable solution. For that very reason another doubt that arises is all the more deserving of our consideration. This suggests that the undeniable relation of jokes to the unconscious is in fact only valid for certain categories of tendentious jokes, whereas we are prepared to extend it to every species and every developmental stage of jokes. We must not evade an examination of this objection.

It can be assumed with certainty that jokes are formed in the unconscious when it is a question of jokes in the service of unconscious purposes or of purposes reinforced by the unconscious - that is, of most ‘cynical’ jokes. For in such cases the unconscious purpose drags the preconscious thought down into the unconscious and there gives it a new shape - a process to which the study of the psychology of the neuroses has taught us numerous analogies. In the case, however, of tendentious jokes of other kinds, of innocent jokes and of jests, this downward dragging force seems absent and the relation of jokes to the unconscious is accordingly called in question.

But let us now consider the case in which a thought, not worthless in itself, arises in the course of a train of thought and is expressed as a joke. In order to enable this thought to be turned into a joke, it is clearly necessary to select from among the possible forms of expression the precise one which brings along with it a yield of verbal pleasure. We know from self-observation that this selection is not made by conscious attention; but it will certainly help the selection if the cathexis of the preconscious thought is reduced to an unconscious one, for, as we have learnt from the dream-work, the connecting paths which start out from words are in the unconscious treated in the same way as connections between things. An unconscious cathexis offers far more favourable conditions for selecting the expression. Moreover, we can immediately assume that the possible form of expression that involves a yield of verbal pleasure exercises the same downward drag on the still unsettled wording of the preconscious thought as did the unconscious purpose in the earlier case. To meet the simpler case of the jest, we may suppose that an intention which is all the time on the look-out to achieve a yield of verbal pleasure grasps the occasion offered in the preconscious for dragging the cathectic process down into the unconscious according to the familiar pattern.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1760

I should be very glad if it were possible for me on the one hand to give a clearer exposition of this single decisive point in my view of jokes and on the other hand to reinforce it with conclusive arguments. But in fact what I am faced with here is not a two-fold failure but one and the same failure. I cannot give a clearer exposition because I have no further proof of my view. I arrived at it on the basis of a study of the technique and of a comparison with the dream-work, and on no other basis; and I then found that on the whole it fits in excellently with the characteristics of jokes. Thus this view has been arrived at by inference; and if from an inference of this kind one is led, not to a familiar region, but on the contrary, to one that is alien and new to one’s thought, one calls the inference a ‘hypothesis’ and rightly refuses to regard the relation of the hypothesis to the material from which it was inferred as a ‘proof’ of it. It can only be regarded as ‘proved’ if it is reached by another path as well and if it can be shown to be the nodal point of still other connections. But proof of this sort is not to be had, in view of the fact that our knowledge of unconscious processes has scarcely begun. In the realization that we are standing upon ground which has never before been trodden, we are thus content, from our point of observation, to take one single, short and uncertain step forward into the unexplored region.

On such a foundation we cannot build a great deal. If we bring the various stages of the joke into relation to the mental states that are favourable to them we can perhaps proceed as follows. The jest springs from a cheerful mood, which seems to be characterized by an inclination to diminish mental cathexes. It already employs all the characteristic techniques of jokes and already fulfils their fundamental condition by selecting verbal material or connections of thoughts which will meet both the demands for a yield of pleasure and those made by rational criticism. We shall conclude that the lowering of the thought cathexis to the unconscious level, facilitated by the cheerful mood, is present already in jests. In the case of innocent jokes that are linked to the expression of a valuable thought, the encouraging effect of mood no longer applies. Here we must presume the occurrence of a special personal aptitude, which is manifested in the ease with which the preconscious cathexis is dropped and exchanged for a moment for the unconscious one. A purpose that is all the time on the watch for renewing the original yield of pleasure from jokes exercises a downward drag on the still unsettled preconscious expression of the thought. No doubt most people are capable of producing jests when they are in a cheerful mood; the aptitude for making jokes is present in only a few people independently of their mood. Lastly, the joke-work receives its most powerful stimulus when strong purposes reaching down into the unconscious are present, which represent a special aptitude for the production of jokes and which may explain to us how it is that the subjective determinants of jokes are so often fulfilled in neurotic people. Under the influence of strong purposes even those who otherwise have the least aptitude for it become capable of making jokes.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1761

With this last contribution, however, which explains, even though still only hypothetically, the joke-work in the first person, our interest in jokes is, strictly speaking, at an end. It remains for us to make a further short comparison between jokes and the better-known dream; and we may expect that, apart from the single conformity we have already considered, two such dissimilar mental functions will only reveal differences. The most important difference lies in their social behaviour. A dream is a completely asocial mental product; it has nothing to communicate to anyone else; it arises within the subject as a compromise between the mental forces struggling in him, it remains unintelligible to the subject himself and is for that reason totally uninteresting to other people. Not only does it not need to set any store by intelligibility, it must actually avoid being understood, for otherwise it would be destroyed; it can only exist in masquerade. For that reason it can without hindrance make use of the mechanism that dominates unconscious mental processes, to the point of a distortion which can no longer be set straight. A joke, on the other hand, is the most social of all the mental functions that aim at a yield of pleasure. It often calls for three persons and its completion requires the participation of someone else in the mental process it starts. The condition of intelligibility is, therefore, binding on it; it may only make use of possible distortion in the unconscious through condensation and displacement up to the point at which it can be set straight by the third person’s understanding. Moreover, jokes and dreams have grown up in quite different regions of mental life and must be allotted to points in the psychological system far remote from each other. A dream still remains a wish, even though one that has been made unrecognizable; a joke is developed play. Dreams, in spite of all their practical nonentity, retain their connection with the major interests of life; they seek to fulfil needs by the regressive detour of hallucination, and they are permitted to occur for the sake of the one need that is active during the night - the need to sleep. Jokes, on the other hand, seek to gain a small yield of pleasure from the mere activity, untrammelled by needs, of our mental apparatus. Later they try to catch hold of that pleasure as a by-product during the activity of that apparatus and thus arrive secondarily at not unimportant functions directed to the external world. Dreams serve predominantly for the avoidance of unpleasure, jokes for the attainment of pleasure; but all our mental activities converge in these two aims.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1762

VII

JOKES AND THE SPECIES OF THE COMIC

We have approached the problems of the comic in an unusual way. It seemed to us that jokes, which are ordinarily regarded as a sub-species of the comic, offer enough peculiarities to be attacked directly; thus we have avoided their relation to the more inclusive category of the comic so long as that was possible, though we have not failed to pick out en passant a few hints that might throw light on the comic. We have had no difficulty in discovering that socially the comic behaves differently from jokes. It can be content with two persons: a first who finds what is comic and a second in whom it is found. The third person, to whom the comic thing is told, intensifies the comic process but adds nothing new to it. In a joke this third person is indispensable for the completion of the pleasure-producing process; but on the other hand the second person may be absent, except where a tendentious, aggressive joke is concerned. A joke is made, the comic is found - and first and foremost in people, only by a subsequent transference in things, situations, and so on, as well. As regards jokes, we know that the sources of the pleasure that is to be fostered lie in the subject himself and not in outside people. We have seen, too, that jokes can sometimes re-open sources of the comic which have become inaccessible, and that the comic often serves as a façade for a joke and replaces the fore-pleasure which has otherwise to be produced by the familiar technique (p. 1739). None of this precisely suggests that the relations between jokes and the comic are very simple. On the other hand, the problems of the comic have proved so complicated and all the efforts of the philosophers at solving them have been so unsuccessful that we cannot hold out any prospect that we shall be able to master them in a sudden onslaught, as it were, by approaching them from the direction of jokes. Moreover, for our investigation of jokes we brought with us an instrument of which no one else had hitherto made use - a knowledge of the dream-work. We have no similar advantage at our command to help us to understand the comic, and we must therefore expect that we shall discover no more about the nature of the comic than what we have already found in jokes, in so far as they form part of the comic and possess in their own nature certain of its features unchanged or merely modified.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1763

The type of the comic which stands nearest to jokes is the naïve. Like the comic in general, the naïve is ‘found’ and not, like a joke, ‘made’. Indeed, the naïve cannot be made at all, whereas alongside the pure comic we have to take into account the case in which something is made comic - an evocation of the comic. The naïve must arise, without our taking any part in it, in the remarks and actions of other people, who stand in the position of the second person in the comic or in jokes. The naïve occurs if someone completely disregards an inhibition because it is not present in him - if, therefore, he appears to overcome it without any effort. It is a condition for the naïve’s producing its effect that we should know that the person concerned does not possess the inhibition; otherwise we call him not naïve but impudent. We do not laugh at him but are indignant at him. The effect produced by the naïve is irresistible, and seems simple to understand. An inhibitory expenditure which we usually make suddenly becomes unutilizable owing to our hearing the naïve remark, and it is discharged by laughter. There is no need here for the attention to be distracted, probably because the lifting of the inhibition occurs directly and not through the intermediary of an operation that has been provoked. In this we are behaving like the third person in a joke, who is presented with the economy in inhibition without any effort on his own part.

In view of the insight we have gained into the genesis of inhibitions from following the course of development from play to jokes, it will not surprise us to find that the naïve occurs far the most often in children, and is then carried over to uneducated adults, whom we may regard as childish so far as their intellectual development is concerned. Naive remarks are, of course, better suited for comparison with jokes than naïve actions, since remarks and not actions are the usual form in which jokes are expressed. It is illuminating to find that naïve remarks like those made by children may also be described as ‘naïve jokes’. The conformity between jokes and naïveté, as well as the reasons for their dissimilarity, will be made clearer to us by a few examples.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1764

A three-and-a-half-year-old girl gave this warning to her brother: ‘I say, don’t eat so much of that pudding or you’ll get ill and have to have some "Bubizin".’ ‘"Bubizin"?’ asked her mother, ‘What’s that?’ ‘When I was ill’, answered the child in self-justification, ‘I had to have some Medizin.’ The child thought that what the doctor prescribed was called ‘Mädi-zin’ when it was for a ‘Mädi’ [little girl] and concluded that if it was for a ‘Bubi’ [little boy] it would be called ‘Bubi-zin’. This is constructed like a verbal joke working with the technique of similarity of sound, and indeed it might have occurred as a real joke, in which case we should have greeted it, half-unwillingly, with a smile. As an example of naïveté it strikes us as quite excellent and it raises a laugh. What is it that makes the difference here between a joke and something naïve? Evidently not the wording or the technique, which would be the same for both possibilities, but a factor, rather, which at first sight seems quite remote from both of them. It is merely a question of whether we assume that the speaker has intended to make a joke or whether we suppose that he - the child - has tried in good faith to draw a serious conclusion on the basis of his uncorrected ignorance. Only the latter case is one of naïveté. Here for the first time our attention is drawn to the other person putting himself into the psychical process that occurs in the person who produces the remark.

This view will be confirmed if we examine another example. A brother and sister - a twelve-year-old girl and a ten-year-old boy - were performing a drama composed by themselves before an audience of uncles and aunts. The scene represented a hut by the sea-shore. In the first act the two author-actors, a poor fisherman and his honest wife, are complaining about the hard times and their small earnings. The husband decides to cross the wide seas in his boat to seek his fortune elsewhere, and, after tender farewells between the two of them, the curtain falls. The second act takes place a few years later. The fisherman has returned a wealthy man with a big bag of money; and he tells his wife, who awaits his arrival outside the hut, what good fortune he has met with in foreign lands. His wife interrupts him proudly: ‘I too have not been idle.’ And thereupon she opens the door of the hut and reveals to his eyes twelve large dolls lying asleep on the floor. . . . At this point in the drama the actors were interrupted by a storm of laughter from the audience, which they were unable to understand. They stared disconcerted at their fond relatives, who had behaved properly till then and had listened with eager attention. The laughter is explained on the supposition that the audience assumed that the young authors still knew nothing of the conditions governing the origin of children and were therefore able to believe that a wife could boast of the offspring born during her husband’s long absence and that a husband could rejoice with her over them. What the authors produced on the basis of this ignorance might be described as nonsense or absurdity.

A third example will show us yet another technique, the acquaintance of which we have made in jokes, in the service of the naïve. A ‘Frenchwoman’¹ was engaged as governess for a little girl, but did not meet with her personal approval. Scarcely had the newcomer left the room when the little girl gave voice to loud criticism: ‘That a Frenchwoman? She may call herself one because she once lay beside a Frenchman!’ This might have been a joke - even a tolerably good one (double meaning or allusion, with double entendre) if the child had had the slightest notion of the possibility of the double meaning. In fact she had merely transferred to the stranger she disliked a facetious way of describing a thing as ungenuine which she had often heard: ‘That genuine gold? It may once have lain beside gold.’ Owing to the child’s ignorance, which so completely altered the psychical process in her understanding hearers, her remark became a naïve one. In consequence of this condition, there is the possibility of a misleading naïveté. We may assume in the child an ignorance that no longer exists; and children often represent themselves as naïve, so as to enjoy a liberty that they would not otherwise be granted.

¹ [‘Französin.’ The ordinary term for a French governess in Austria.]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1765

We can illustrate from these examples the position occupied by the naïve between jokes and the comic. The naïve (in speech) agrees with jokes as regards wording and content: it brings about a misuse of words, a piece of nonsense, or a piece of smut. But the psychical process in the first person, who produces it, which raised so many interesting and puzzling questions for us in regard to jokes, is here completely absent. A naïve person thinks he has used his means of expression and trains of thought normally and simply, and he has no arrière pensée in mind; nor does he derive any yield of pleasure from producing something naïve. None of the characteristics of the naïve exist except in the apprehension of the person who hears it - a person who coincides with the third person in jokes. Moreover the person who produces it does so without any effort. The complicated technique, which in jokes is designed to paralyse the inhibition arising from rational criticism, is absent in him; he does not possess this inhibition as yet, so that he can produce nonsense and smut directly and without compromise. In that respect the naïve is a marginal case of the joke; it arises if in the formula for the construction of jokes we reduce the value of the censorship to zero.

Whereas it was a condition for the effectiveness of a joke that both persons should be subject to approximately the same inhibitions or internal resistances, it will be seen that it is a condition for the naïve that the one person should possess inhibitions which the other is without. The apprehension of the naïve lies with the person provided with inhibitions, and he alone obtains the yield of pleasure which the naïve brings about. We have come near to guessing that that pleasure arises from the lifting of inhibitions. Since the pleasure from jokes has the same origin - a core of verbal pleasure and pleasure from nonsense, and a casing of pleasure in the lifting of inhibitions or in the relief of psychical expenditure - this similar relation to inhibition explains the internal kinship between the naïve and jokes. In both of them the pleasure arises through the lifting of internal inhibition.

The psychical process in the receptive person, however, is as much more complicated in the case of the naïve as it is simplified in comparison with jokes in the productive person. (In the case of the naïve, incidentally, our own self invariably coincides with the receptive person, while in the case of jokes we may equally occupy the position of the productive one.) When the receptive person hears something naïve, it must on the one hand affect him like a joke - and our examples give evidence precisely of this - for, as with a joke, the lifting of the censorship is made possible for him by no more than the effort of listening. But only a part of the pleasure created by the naïve can be explained in this way; and even this might be endangered in certain instances - for example, at hearing a naïve piece of smut. We might react to this at once with the same indignation that might be felt against a real piece of smut, if it were not that another factor spares us this indignation and at the same time offers us the more important part of our pleasure in the naïve. This other factor is the condition already mentioned that, in order to recognize the naïve, we must know that the internal inhibition is absent in the producing person. Only when this is certain do we laugh instead of being indignant. Thus we take the producing person’s psychical state into consideration, put ourselves into it and try to understand it by comparing it with our own. It is these processes of empathy and comparison that result in the economy in expenditure which we discharge by laughing.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1766

It would be possible to prefer a simpler account - that our indignation is made superfluous by the fact that the other person has had no need to overcome a resistance; in that case the laughter would occur at the cost of the economy in indignation. In order to discourage this view, which is on the whole misleading, I will make a sharper distinction between two cases which I have treated together above. The naïve which we come across can either be in the nature of a joke, as it was in our examples, or in the nature of smut (or of what is in general objectionable); and the latter will occur especially when it is expressed not in speech but in action. This second alternative is really misleading: one could suppose, as far as it is concerned, that the pleasure arises from the economized and transformed indignation. But the first alternative throws more light on things. A naïve remark - e.g. ‘Bubizin - can in itself act like a minor joke and give no cause for indignation. This alternative is certainly the less frequent; but it is the purer and by far the more instructive. In so far as what we are concerned with is the fact that the child has seriously and without arrière pensée believed that the syllable ‘Medi’ in ‘Medizin’ is identical with her own name ‘Mädi’, our pleasure in what we hear receives an increase which has no longer anything to do with pleasure in a joke. We now look at what has been said from two points of view - once in the way it happened in the child and once in the way it would have happened to us; and in making this comparison we see that the child has found an identity and that she has overcome a barrier that exists for us; and we then seem to go further and say to ourselves: ‘If you choose to understand what you’ve heard, you can economize the expenditure on keeping up this barrier.’ The expenditure liberated in a comparison like this is the source of pleasure in the naïve and it is discharged by laughter; and it is, incidentally, the same pleasure that we should otherwise have transformed into indignation, if this had not been excluded by our understanding of the producing person and, in this case, by the nature of what was said as well. But if we take the instance of a naïve joke as a model for the other alternative, of something naïve that is objectionable, we shall see that there too the economy in inhibition can arise directly from the comparison, that there is no necessity for us to assume an indignation that begins and is then stifled, and that this indignation in fact only corresponds to using the liberated expenditure in another way - against which in the case of jokes complicated protective arrangements were necessary.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1767

This comparison, and this economy in expenditure by putting oneself into the mental process of the producing person, can only claim to be of significance for the naïve, however, if it is not in it alone that they are found. A suspicion occurs to us, in fact, that this mechanism, which is wholly alien to jokes, may be a part and perhaps an essential part of the psychical process in the comic. Looked at from this point of view - and this is undoubtedly the most important aspect of the naïve - the naïve thus presents itself as a species of the comic. The extra element in our examples of naïve speeches that is added to the pleasure of a joke is ‘comic’ pleasure. We should be inclined to assume of it quite generally that it arises from expenditure economized in a comparison of someone else’s remarks with our own. But since this leads us to far-reaching considerations, we will first conclude our discussion of the naïve. The naïve, then, would be a species of the comic in so far as its pleasure springs from the difference in expenditure which arises in trying to understand someone else; and it would approach the joke in being subject to the condition that the expenditure economized in the comparison must be an inhibitory expenditure.¹

Let us hastily add a few points of agreement and of difference between the concepts that we have just reached and those which have long been familiar in the psychology of the comic. The putting of oneself in the other person’s place and trying to understand him is clearly nothing other than the ‘comic lending’ which since Jean Paul has played a part in the analysis of the comic; the ‘comparing’ of someone else’s mental process with one’s own corresponds to the ‘psychological contrast’ which we can at last find a place for here, after not knowing what to do with it in jokes. But we differ in our explanation of comic pleasure from many authorities who regard it as arising from the oscillation of attention backwards and forwards between contrasting ideas. A mechanism of pleasure like this would seem incomprehensible to us;² but we may point out that in a comparison between contrasts a difference in expenditure occurs which, if it is not used for some other purpose, becomes capable of discharge and may thus become a source of pleasure.

¹ In what I have written, I have all the time identified the naïve with the naïve-comic, which is certainly not in every case admissible. But it is enough for our purposes to study the character of the naïve in ‘naïve jokes’ and in ‘naïve smut’. Any further investigation would imply an intention on my part of using this as a basis for my explanation of the comic.

² Bergson, too, rejects the idea of comic pleasure having any such derivation, which is evidently influenced by an effort to establish an analogy with the laughter caused by tickling; and he supports his view with some good arguments (1900, 99). - The explanation of comic pleasure given by Lipps is on a quite different plane: in accordance with his view of the comic, he would regard it as something that is ‘unexpectedly small’.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1768

It is only with misgivings that I venture to approach the problem of the comic itself. It would be presumptuous to expect that my efforts would be able to make any decisive contribution to its solution when the works of a great number of eminent thinkers have failed to produce a wholly satisfactory explanation. My intention is in fact no more than to pursue the lines of thought that have proved valuable with jokes a short distance further into the sphere of the comic.

The comic arises in the first instance as an unintended discovery derived from human social relations. It is found in people - in their movements, forms, actions and traits of character, originally in all probability only in their physical characteristics but later in their mental ones as well or, as the case may be, in the expression of those characteristics. By means of a very common sort of personification, animals become comic too, and inanimate objects. At the same time, the comic is capable of being detached from people, in so far as we recognize the conditions under which a person seems comic. In this way the comic of situation comes about, and this recognition affords the possibility of making a person comic at one’s will by putting him in situations in which his actions are subject to these comic conditions. The discovery that one has it in one’s power to make someone else comic opens the way to an undreamt-of yield of comic pleasure and is the origin of a highly developed technique. One can make oneself comic, too, as easily as other people. The methods that serve to make people comic are: putting them in a comic situation, mimicry, disguise, unmasking, caricature, parody, travesty, and so on. It is obvious that these techniques can be used to serve hostile and aggressive purposes. One can make a person comic in order to make him become contemptible, to deprive him of his claim to dignity and authority. But even if such an intention habitually underlies making people comic, this need not be the meaning of what is comic spontaneously.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1769

This irregular survey of the occurrences of the comic will already show us that a very extensive field of origin is to be ascribed to it and that such specialized conditions as we found, for instance, in the naïve are not to be expected in it. In order to get on the track of the determining condition that is valid for the comic, the most important thing is the choice of an introductory case. We shall choose the comic of movement, because we recollect that the most primitive kind of stage performance - the pantomime - uses that method for making us laugh. The answer to the question of why we laugh at the clown’s movements is that they seem to us extravagant and inexpedient. We are laughing at an expenditure that is too large. Let us look now for the determining condition outside the comic that is artificially constructed - where it can be found unintended. A child’s movements do not seem to us comic, although he kicks and jumps about. On the other hand, it is comic where a child who is learning to write follows the movements of his pen with his tongue stuck out; in these associated motions we see an unnecessary expenditure of movement which we should spare ourselves if we were carrying out the same activity. Similarly, other such associated motions, or merely exaggerated expressive movements, seem to us comic in adults too. Pure examples of this species of the comic are to be seen, for instance, in the movements of someone playing skittles who, after he has released the ball, follows its course as though he could still continue to direct it. Thus, too, all grimaces are comic which exaggerate the normal expression of the emotions, even if they are produced involuntarily as in sufferers from St. Vitus’s dance (chorea). And in the same way, the passionate movements of a modern conductor seem comic to any unmusical person who cannot understand their necessity. Indeed, it is from this comic of movement that the comic of bodily shapes and facial features branches off; for these are regarded as though they were the outcome of an exaggerated or pointless movement. Staring eyes, a hooked nose hanging down to the mouth, ears sticking out, a hump-back - all such things probably only produce a comic effect in so far as movements are imagined which would be necessary to bring about these features; and here the nose, the ears and other parts of the body are imagined as more movable than they are in reality. There is no doubt that it is comic if someone can ‘waggle his ears’, and it would certainly be still more comic if he could move his nose up and down. A good deal of the comic effect produced on us by animals comes from our perceiving in them movements such as these which we cannot imitate ourselves.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1770

But how is it that we laugh when we have recognized that some other person’s movements are exaggerated and inexpedient? By making a comparison, I believe, between the movement I observe in the other person and the one that I should have carried out myself in his place. The two things compared must of course be judged by the same standard, and this standard is my expenditure of innervation, which is linked to my idea of the movement in both of the two cases. This statement calls for elucidation and expansion.

What we are here comparing is on the one hand the psychical expenditure while we are having a certain idea and on the other hand the content of the thing that we are having the idea of. Our statement says that the former is not in general and in theory independent of the latter, the content of the idea, and in particular that the idea of something large demands more expenditure than the idea of something small. So long as it is only a matter of the idea of different large movements, there should be no difficulties over the theoretical grounds for our statement or over proving it by observation. We shall see that in this case an attribute of the idea in fact coincides with an attribute of what we have an idea of, though psychology warns us as a rule against such a confusion.

I have acquired the idea of a movement of a particular size by carrying the movement out myself or by imitating it, and through this action I have learnt a standard for this movement in my innervatory sensations.¹

When, now, I perceive a movement like this of greater or lesser size in someone else, the securest way to an understanding (an apperception) of it will be for me to carry it out by imitation, and I can then decide from the comparison on which of the movements my expenditure was the greater. An impulsion of this kind to imitation is undoubtedly present in perceptions of movements. But actually I do not carry the imitation through, any more than I still spell words out if I learnt to read by spelling. Instead of imitating the movement with my muscles, I have an idea of it though the medium of my memory-traces of expenditures on similar movements. Ideation or ‘thinking’ differs from acting or performing above all in the fact that it displaces far smaller cathectic energies and holds back the main expenditure from discharge.

¹ The memory of this innervatory expenditure will remain the essential part of my idea of this movement, and there will always be modes of thinking in my mental life in which the idea will be represented by nothing else than this expenditure. In other circumstances, indeed, this element may be replaced by another - for instance, by visual images of the aim of the movement or by a verbal image; and in certain kinds of abstract thinking a token will suffice instead of the full content of the idea.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1771

But how is the quantitative factor - the greater or lesser size - of the perceived movement to be given expression in the idea? And if there can be no representation of quantity in the idea, which is made up of qualities, how can I distinguish the ideas of movements of different sizes? - how can I make the comparison on which everything here depends? The way is pointed out by physiology, for it teaches us that even during the process of ideation innervations run out to the muscles, though these, it is true, correspond to a very modest expenditure of energy. Now it becomes very plausible to suppose that this innervatory energy that accompanies the process of ideation is used to represent the quantitative factor of the idea: that it is larger when there is an idea of a large movement than when it is a question of a small one. Thus the idea of the larger movement would in this case in fact be the larger one - that is, it would be the idea accompanied by the larger expenditure of energy.

Direct observation shows that human beings are in the habit of expressing the attributes of largeness and smallness in the contents of their ideas by means of a varying expenditure in a kind of ideational mimetics. If a child or a man from the common people, or a member of certain races, narrates or describes something, it is easy to see that he is not content to make his idea plain to the hearer by the choice of clear words, but that he also represents its subject-matter in his expressive movements: he combines the mimetic and the verbal forms of representation. And he especially demonstrates quantities and intensities: ‘a high mountain’ - and he raises his hand over his head, ‘a little dwarf’ - and he holds it near the ground. He may have broken himself of the habit of painting with his hands, yet for that reason he will do it with his voice; and if he exercises self-control in this too, it may be wagered that he will open his eyes wide when he describes something large and squeeze them shut when he comes to something small. What he is thus expressing is not his affects but actually the content of what he is having an idea of.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1772

Are we to suppose, then, that this need for mimetics is only aroused by the requirements of communicating something, in spite of the fact that a good part of this method of representation altogether escapes the hearer’s attention? On the contrary, I believe that these mimetics exist, even if with less liveliness, quite apart from any communication, that they occur as well when the subject is forming an idea of something for his own private benefit and is thinking of something pictorially, and that he then expresses ‘large’ and ‘small’ in his own body just as he does in speech, at all events by a change in the innervation of his features and sense organs. I can even believe that the somatic innervation which is commensurate with the content of what he is having an idea of may have been the beginning and origin of mimetics for purposes of communication; it only needed to be intensified and made noticeable to other people in order to be able to serve that end. If I support the view that to the ‘expression of the emotions’, which is well known as the physical concomitant of mental processes, there should be added the ‘expression of the ideational content’, I can see quite clearly that my remarks relating to the category of large and small do not exhaust the subject. I might myself add a variety of points even before arriving at the phenomena of tension by which a person indicates somatically the concentration of his attention and the level of abstraction at which his thinking is at the moment proceeding. I regard the matter as a really important one, and I believe that if ideational mimetics are followed up, they may be as useful in other branches of aesthetics as they are here for an understanding of the comic.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1773

To return now to the comic of movement. When, I repeat, a particular movement is perceived, the impulsion is given to forming an idea of it by means of a certain expenditure of energy. In ‘trying to understand’, therefore, in apperceiving this movement, I make a certain expenditure, and in this portion of the mental process I behave exactly as though I were putting myself in the place of the person I am observing. But at the same moment, probably, I bear in mind the aim of this movement, and my earlier experience enables me to estimate the scale of expenditure required for reaching that aim. In doing so I disregard the person whom I am observing and behave as though I myself wanted to reach the aim of the movement. These two possibilities in my imagination amount to a comparison between the observed movement and my own. If the other person’s movement is exaggerated and inexpedient, my increased expenditure in order to understand i| is inhibited in statu nascendi, as it were in the act of being mobilized; it is declared superfluous and is free for use elsewhere or perhaps for discharge by laughter. This would be the way in which, other circumstances being favourable, pleasure in a comic movement is generated - an innervatory expenditure which has become an unusable surplus when a comparison is made with a movement of one’s own.

It will be seen that our discussions must proceed in two different directions: first, to establish the conditions governing the discharge of the surplus, and second, to examine whether the other cases of the comic can be looked at in the same way as the comic of movement.

We will take the second question first and will turn from the comic of movement and action to the comic which is found in the intellectual functions and the character traits of other people.

As a sample of this class we may choose comic nonsense, as it is produced by ignorant candidates in an examination; it is no doubt more difficult to give a simple example of character traits. We should not be confused if we find that nonsense and stupidity, which so often produce a comic effect, are nevertheless not felt as comic in every case, just as the same characters which on one occasion can be laughed at as comic may on another occasion strike one as contemptible or hateful. This fact, of which we must not lose sight, merely points out that other factors are concerned in producing the comic effect besides the comparison we know about - factors which we may be able to trace out in another connection.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1774

The comic that is found in someone else’s intellectual and mental characteristics is evidently once again the outcome of a comparison between him and my own self, though, curiously enough, a comparison which has as a rule produced the opposite result to that in the case of a comic movement or action. In this latter case it was comic if the other person had made a greater expenditure than I thought I should need. In the case of a mental function, on the contrary, it becomes comic if the other person has spared himself expenditure which I regard as indispensable (for nonsense and stupidity are inefficiencies of function). In the former case I laugh because he has taken too much trouble, in the latter because he has taken too little. The comic effect apparently depends, therefore, on the difference between the two cathectic expenditures - one’s own and the other person’s as estimated by ‘empathy’ - and not on which of the two the difference favours. But this peculiarity, which at first sight confuses our judgement, vanishes when we bear in mind that a restriction of our muscular work and an increase of our intellectual work fit in with the course of our personal development towards a higher level of civilization. By raising our intellectual expenditure we can achieve the same result with a diminished expenditure on our movements. Evidence of this cultural success is provided by our machines.¹

Thus a uniform explanation is provided of the fact that a person appears comic to us if, in comparison with ourselves, he makes too great an expenditure on his bodily functions and too little on his mental ones; and it cannot be denied that in both these cases our laughter expresses a pleasurable sense of the superiority which we feel in relation to him. If the relation in the two cases is reversed - if the other person’s physical expenditure is found to be less than ours or his mental expenditure greater - then we no longer laugh, we are filled with astonishment and admiration.²

¹ As the proverb says: ‘Was man nicht im Kopfe hat, muss man in den Beinen haben.’ [Literally: ‘What one hasn’t in one’s head one must have in one’s legs,’]

² The contradictoriness with which the determining conditions of the comic are pervaded - the fact that sometimes an excess and sometimes an insufficiency seems to be the source of comic pleasure - has contributed no little to the confusion of the problem. Cf. Lipps (1898, 47).

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1775

The origin of comic pleasure which has been discussed here - its derivation from a comparison of another person with our self, from the difference between our own psychical expenditure and the other person’s as estimated by empathy - is probably the most important genetically. It is certain, however, that it has not remained the only one. We have learnt at one time or other to disregard this comparison between the other person and ourself and to derive the pleasurable difference from the one side only, whether from the empathy or from the processes in ourself - which proves that the feeling of superiority bears no essential relation to comic pleasure. A comparison is indispensable for the generation of this pleasure. We find that it is made between two cathectic expenditures that occur in rapid succession and are concerned with the same function, and these expenditures are either brought about in us through empathy into someone else or, without any such relation, are discovered in our own mental processes.

The first of these cases - in which, therefore, the other person still plays a part, though no longer in comparison with our own self - arises when the pleasurable difference in cathectic expenditures is brought about by external influences, which we may sum up as a ‘situation’. For that reason, this species of the comic is also known as ‘the comic of situation’. The characteristics of the person who provides the comic effect do not in this case play an essential part: we laugh even if we have to confess that we should have had to do the same in that situation. We are here extracting the comic from the relation of human beings to the often over-powerful external world; and so far as the mental processes of a human being are concerned, this external world also comprises social conventions and necessities and even his own bodily needs. A typical instance of the latter kind is provided if, in the middle of an activity which makes demands on a person’s mental powers, he is suddenly interrupted by a pain or an excretory need. The contrast which, through empathy, offers us the comic difference is that between the high degree of interest taken by him before the interruption and the minimal one that he has left over for his mental activity when the interruption has occurred. The person who offers us this difference becomes comic to us once again for his inferiority; but he is inferior only in comparison with his earlier self and not in comparison with us, for we know that in the same circumstances we could not have behaved otherwise. But it is noteworthy that we only find someone’s being put in a position of inferiority comic where there is empathy - that is, where someone else is concerned: if we ourselves were in similar straits we should be conscious only of distressing feelings. It is probably only by keeping such feelings away from ourselves that we are able to enjoy pleasure from the difference arising out of a comparison between these changing cathexes.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1776

The other source of the comic, which we find in the transformations of our own cathexes, lies in our relations with the future, which we are accustomed to anticipate with our expectant ideas. I assume that a quantitatively definite expenditure underlies each of our ideas - an expenditure which, in the event of a disappointment, is therefore diminished by a definite difference. Here I may once again recall the remarks I made earlier on ‘ideational mimetics’. But it seems to me to be easier to prove a real mobilization of cathectic energy in the case of expectation. It is quite obviously true of a number of cases that motor preparations are what form the expression of expectation - above all in all cases in which the expected event makes demands on my motility - and that these preparations can be at once determined quantitatively. If I am expecting to catch a ball which is being thrown to me, I put my body into tensions which will enable it to meet the impact of the ball; and, should the ball when it is caught turn out to be too light, my superfluous movements make me comic to the spectators. I have let myself be enticed by my expectation into an exaggerated expenditure of movement. The same is true if, for instance, I lift a fruit which I have judged to be heavy out of a basket, but which, to my disappointment, turns out to be a sham one, hollow and made of wax. My hand, by jumping up, betrays the fact that I had prepared an innervation too large for the purpose - and I am laughed at for it. There is at least one case in which the expenditure on expectation can be directly demonstrated measurably by physiological experiments on animals. In Pavlov’s experiments on salivary secretions, various kinds of food are set before dogs in whom a salivary fistula has been opened; the amounts of saliva secreted then vary according to whether the experimental conditions confirm or disappoint the dogs’ expectations of being fed with the food set before them.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1777

Even when what is expected makes demands on my sense organs and not on my motility, I may assume that the expectation is expressed in a certain motor expenditure towards making the senses tense and towards holding back other impressions that are not expected; and, in general, I may regard an attitude of attention as being a motor function equivalent to a certain expenditure. I may further take it as a premiss that the preparatory activity of expectation will not be independent of the magnitude of the impression that is expected, but that I shall represent its largeness or smallness mimetically by a larger or smaller preparatory expenditure, as in the case of making a communication and in the case of thinking unaccompanied by expectation. The expenditure on expectation is, however, put together from several components, and in the case of my disappointment, too, various points will be involved - not only whether what happens is perceptually greater or smaller than what is expected, but also whether it is worthy of the great interest which I had expended on the expectation. In this way I shall perhaps be led to take into account, besides the expenditure on the representation of large and small (the ideational mimetics), the expenditure on tightening the attention (the expenditure on expectation), and beyond this in other cases the expenditure on abstraction. But these other kinds of expenditure can easily be traced back to that on large and small, since what is more interesting, more sublime and even more abstract are only special cases, with particular qualities, of what is larger. If we consider in addition that, according to Lipps and other writers, quantitative (and not qualitative) contrast is to be regarded primarily as the source of comic pleasure, we shall on the whole feel glad that we chose the comic of movement as the starting-point of our enquiry.

Lipps, in the volume which has been so often quoted in these pages, has attempted, as an amplification to Kant’s statement that the comic is ‘an expectation that has turned to nothing’, to derive comic pleasure quite generally from expectation. In spite, however, of the many instructive and valuable findings which this attempt has brought to light, I should like to support the criticism made by other authorities that Lipps has taken the field of origin of the comic far too narrowly and has been obliged to use great violence in order to bring its phenomena within the scope of his formula.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1778

Mankind have not been content to enjoy the comic where they have come upon it in their experience; they have also sought to bring it about intentionally, and we can learn more about the nature of the comic if we study the means which serve to make things comic. First and foremost, it is possible to produce the comic in relation to oneself in order to amuse other people - for instance, by making oneself out clumsy or stupid. In that way one produces a comic effect exactly as though one really were these things, by fulfilling the condition of the comparison which leads to the difference in expenditure. But one does not in this way make oneself ridiculous or contemptible, but may in some circumstances even achieve admiration. The feeling of superiority does not arise in the other person if he knows that one has only been pretending; and this affords fresh evidence of the fundamental independence of the comic from the feeling of superiority.

As regards making other people comic, the principal means is to put them in situations in which a person becomes comic as a result of human dependence on external events, particularly on social factors, without regard to the personal characteristics of the individual concerned - that is to say, by employing the comic of situation. This putting of someone in a comic situation may be a real one (a practical joke¹) - by sticking out a leg so that someone trips over it as though he were clumsy, by making him seem stupid by exploiting his credulity, or trying to convince him of something nonsensical, and so on - or it may be simulated by speech or play. The aggressiveness, to which making a person comic usually ministers, is much assisted by the fact that the comic pleasure is independent of the reality of the comic situation, so that everyone is in fact exposed, without any defence, to being made comic.

¹ [In English in the original.]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1779

But there are yet other means of making things comic which deserve special consideration and also indicate in part fresh sources of comic pleasure. Among these, for instance, is mimicry, which gives quite extraordinary pleasure to the hearer and makes its object comic even if it is still far from the exaggeration of a caricature. It is much easier to find a reason for the comic effect of caricature than for that of mere mimicry. Caricature, parody and travesty (as well as their practical counterpart, unmasking) are directed against people and objects which lay claim to authority and respect, which are in some sense ‘sublime’. They are procedures for Herabsetzung, as the apt German expression has it.¹ What is sublime is something large in the figurative, psychical sense; and I should like to suggest, or rather to repeat my suggestion, that, like what is somatically large, it is represented by an increased expenditure. It requires little observation to establish that when I speak of something sublime I innervate my speech in a different way, I make different facial expressions, and I try to bring the whole way in which I hold myself into harmony with the dignity of what I am having an idea of. I impose a solemn restraint upon myself - not very different from what I should adopt if I were to enter the presence of an exalted personality, a monarch, or a prince of science. I shall hardly be wrong in assuming that this different innervation in my ideational mimetics corresponds to an increased expenditure. The third instance of an increased expenditure of this kind is no doubt to be found when I proceed in abstract trains of thought instead of in the habitual concrete and plastic ones. When, therefore, the procedures that I have discussed for the degradation of the sublime allow me to have an idea of it as though it were something commonplace, in whose presence I need not pull myself together but may, to use the military formula, ‘stand easy’, I am being spared the increased expenditure of the solemn restraint; and the comparison between this new ideational method (instigated by empathy) and the previously habitual one, which is simultaneously trying to establish itself - this comparison once again creates the difference in expenditure which can be discharged by laughter.

¹ ‘Degradation’ [in English in the original]. Bain (1865, 248) writes: ‘The occasion of the Ludicrous is the Degradation of some person or interest, possessing dignity, in circumstances that excite no other strong emotion.’

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1780

Caricature, as is well known, brings about degradation by emphasizing in the general impression given by the exalted object a single trait which is comic in itself but was bound to be overlooked so long as it was only perceivable in the general picture. By isolating this, a comic effect can be attained which extends in our memory over the whole object. This is subject to the condition that the actual presence of the exalted object himself does not keep us in a reverential attitude. If a comic trait of this kind that has been overlooked is lacking in reality, a caricature will unhesitatingly create it by exaggerating one that is not comic in itself; and the fact that the effect of the caricature is not essentially diminished by this falsification of reality is once again an indication of the origin of comic pleasure.

Parody and travesty achieve the degradation of something exalted in another way: by destroying the unity that exists between people’s characters as we know them and their speeches and actions, by replacing either the exalted figures or their utterances by inferior ones. They are distinguished from caricature in this, but not in the mechanism of their production of comic pleasure. The same mechanism is also used for unmasking, which only applies where someone has seized dignity and authority by a deception and these have to be taken from him in reality. We have already met with a few examples of the comic effect of unmasking in jokes - for instance, in the story of the aristocratic lady who, at the first onset of her labour-pains, exclaimed ‘Ah! mon Dieu!’ but whom the doctor would not assist till she cried out ‘Aa-ee, aa-ee!’. Having come to know the characteristics of the comic, we can no longer dispute that this anecdote is in fact an example of comic unmasking and has no justifiable claim to be called a joke. It only recalls jokes by its setting and by the technical method of ‘representation by something very small’ - in this case the patient’s cry, which is found sufficient to establish the indication for treatment. It nevertheless remains true that our linguistic sense, if we call on it for a decision, raises no objection to our calling a story like this a joke. We may explain this by reflecting that linguistic usage is not based on the scientific insight into the nature of jokes that we have arrived at in this laborious investigation. Since one of the functions of jokes is to make hidden sources of comic pleasure accessible once more (p. 1698), any device that brings to light something that is not manifestly comic may, by a loose analogy, be termed a joke. This applies preferably, however, to unmasking as well as to other methods of making people comic.¹

¹ ‘Thus every conscious and ingenious evocation of the comic (whether the comic of contemplation or of situation) is in general described as a joke. We, of course, cannot here make use of this concept of the joke either.’ (Lipps, 1898, 78.)

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1781

Under the heading of ‘unmasking’ we may also include a procedure for making things comic with which we are already acquainted - the method of degrading the dignity of individuals by directing attention to the frailties which they share with all humanity, but in particular the dependence of their mental functions on bodily needs. The unmasking is equivalent here to an admonition: such and such a person, who is admired as a demigod, is after all only human like you and me. Here, too, are to be placed the efforts at laying bare the monotonous psychical automatism that lies behind the wealth and apparent freedom of psychical functions. We came across examples of ‘unmasking’ of this kind in the marriage-broker jokes, and felt a doubt at the time whether these anecdotes have a right to be counted as jokes. We are now able to decide with greater certainty that the anecdote of the echo who reinforced all the assertions of the marriage-broker and finally confirmed his admission that the bride had a hump with the exclamation ‘And what a hump!’ - that this anecdote is essentially a comic story, an example of the unmasking of a psychical automatism. Here, however, the comic story is only serving as a façade. For anyone who will attend to the hidden meaning of the marriage-broker anecdotes, the whole thing remains an admirably staged joke; anyone who does not penetrate so far is left with a comic story. The same thing applies to the other joke, about the marriage-broker who, in order to answer an objection, ended by confessing the truth with a cry of ‘But I ask you, who would lend such people anything?’. Here again we have a comic unmasking as the façade for a joke, though in this instance the characteristic of a joke is much more unmistakable, since the marriage-broker’s remark is at the same time a representation by the opposite. In trying to prove that the people are rich he at the same time proves that they are not rich, but very poor. Here a joke and the comic are combined, and teach us that the same remark can be both things at once.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1782

We are glad to seize the opportunity of returning to jokes from the comic of unmasking, since our true problem is not to determine the nature of the comic but to throw light on the relation between jokes and the comic. We have discussed the uncovering of psychical automatism, in a case in which our feeling as to whether something is comic or a joke left us in the lurch. And we will now add another case in which there is a similar confusion between jokes and the comic - the case of nonsensical jokes. But our investigation will show us in the end that as regards this second case the convergence between jokes and the comic can be theoretically accounted for.

In discussing the techniques of jokes we found that giving free play to modes of thought which are usual in the unconscious but which can only be judged as examples of ‘faulty reasoning’ in the conscious is the technical method adopted in many jokes; and about these, once again, we felt doubts whether they possessed the true character of jokes, so that we were inclined to classify them simply as comic stories. We were unable to reach a decision about our doubts because at the time we were ignorant of the essential characteristic of jokes. Subsequently, led by an analogy with the dream-work, we discovered that it lay in the compromise effected by the joke-work between the demands of reasonable criticism and the urge not to renounce the ancient pleasure in words and nonsense. What came about in this way as a compromise, when the preconscious start of the thought was left for a moment to unconscious revision, satisfied both claims in every instance, but presented itself to criticism in various forms and had to put up with various judgements at its hands. Sometimes a joke would succeed in slipping on the appearance of an insignificant but nevertheless permissible assertion, another time it would smuggle itself in as the expression of a valuable thought. But, in the marginal case of effecting a compromise, it would give up attempting to satisfy criticism. Boasting of the sources of pleasure at its command, it would appear before criticism as sheer nonsense and not be afraid to provoke contradiction from it; for the joke could reckon on the hearer straightening out the disfigurement in the form of its expression by unconscious revision and so giving it back its meaning.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1783

In what instances, then, will a joke appear before criticism as nonsense? Particularly when it makes use of the modes of thought which are usual in the unconscious but are proscribed in conscious thought - faulty reasoning, in fact. For certain modes of thought proper to the unconscious have also been retained by the conscious - for instance, some kinds of indirect representation, allusion, and so on - even though their conscious employment is subject to considerable restrictions. When a joke makes use of these techniques it will raise little or no objection on the part of criticism; objections will only appear if it also makes use for its technique of the methods with which conscious thought will have nothing more to do. A joke can still avoid objection, if it conceals the faulty reasoning it has used and disguises it under a show of logic, as happened in the anecdotes of the cake and the liqueur, of the salmon mayonnaise, and similar ones. But if it produces the faulty reasoning undisguised, then the objections of criticism will follow with certainty.

In such cases the joke has another resource. The faulty reasoning, which it uses for its technique as one of the modes of thought of the unconscious, strikes criticism - even though not invariably so - as being comic. Consciously giving free play to unconscious modes of thought (which have been rejected as faulty) is a means of producing comic pleasure; and it is easy to understand this, since it certainly requires a greater expenditure of energy to establish a preconscious cathexis than to give free play to an unconscious one. When, on hearing a thought which has, as it were, been formed in the unconscious, we compare it with its correction, a difference in expenditure emerges for us from which comic pleasure arises. A joke which makes use of faulty reasoning like this for its technique, and therefore appears nonsensical, can thus produce a comic effect at the same time. If we fail to detect the joke, we are once again left with only the comic or funny story.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1784

The story of the borrowed kettle which had a hole in it when it was given back (p. 1664) is an excellent example of the purely comic effect of giving free play to the unconscious mode of thought. It will be recalled that the borrower, when he was questioned, replied firstly that he had not borrowed a kettle at all, secondly that it had had a hole in it already when he borrowed it, and thirdly that he had given it back undamaged and without a hole. This mutual cancelling-out by several thoughts, each of which is in itself valid, is precisely what does not occur in the unconscious. In dreams, in which the modes of thought of the unconscious are actually manifest, there is accordingly no such thing as an ‘either-or’,¹ only a simultaneous juxtaposition. In the example of a dream, which, in spite of its complication, I chose in my Interpretation of Dreams as a specimen of the work of interpretation, I tried to rid myself of the reproach of having failed to relieve a patient of her pains by psychical treatment. My reasons were: (1) that she herself was responsible for her illness because she would not accept my solution, (2) that her pains were of organic origin and were therefore no concern of mine, (3) that her pains were connected with her widowhood, for which I was evidently not responsible and (4) that her pains were due to an injection from a contaminated syringe, which had been given her by someone else. All these reasons stood side by side, as though they were not mutually exclusive. I was obliged to replace the ‘and’ of the dream by an ‘either-or’ in order to escape a charge of nonsense.

There is a similar comic story of a Hungarian village in which the blacksmith had been guilty of a capital offence. The burgomaster, however, decided that as a penalty a tailor should be hanged and not the blacksmith, because there were two tailors in the village but no second blacksmith, and the crime must be expiated. A displacement of this kind from the figure of the guilty person to another naturally contradicts every law of conscious logic but by no means the mode of thought of the unconscious. I do not hesitate to call this story comic, and yet I have included the one about the kettle among the jokes. I will now admit that this latter story too is far more correctly described as ‘comic’ rather than as a joke. But I now understand how it is that my feeling, which is as a rule so sure, can leave me in doubt as to whether this story is comic or a joke. This is a case in which I cannot come to a decision on the basis of my feeling - when, that is, the comic arises from the uncovering of a mode of thought that is exclusively proper to the unconscious. A story like this may be comic and a joke at the same time; but it will give me the impression of being a joke, even if it is merely comic, because the use of the faulty reasoning of the unconscious reminds me of jokes, just as did the manoeuvres for uncovering what is not manifestly comic (p. 1781).

I set great store by clarifying this most delicate point in my arguments - the relation of jokes to the comic; and I will therefore supplement what I have said with a few negative statements. I may first draw attention to the fact that the instance of the convergence of jokes and the comic which I am dealing with here is not identical with the former one (p. 1781). It is true that the distinction is a rather narrow one, but it can be made with certainty. In the earlier case the comic arose from the uncovering of psychical automatism. This, however, is by no means peculiar to the unconscious alone, nor does it play any striking part in the technique of jokes. Unmasking only comes into relation with jokes accidentally, when it serves some other joke-technique, such as representation by the opposite. But in the case of giving free play to unconscious modes of thought the convergence of jokes and the comic is a necessary one, since the same method which is used here by the first person of the joke as a technique for releasing pleasure must from its very nature produce comic pleasure in the third person.

¹ At the most, it is introduced by the narrator by way of interpretation.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1785

One might be tempted to generalize from this last case and look for the relation of jokes to the comic in the notion that the effect of jokes on the third person takes place according to the mechanism of comic pleasure. But there is no question of this being so. Contact with the comic is by no means to be found in all jokes or even in the majority of them; in most cases, on the contrary, a clear distinction is to be made between jokes and the comic. Whenever a joke succeeds in escaping the appearance of nonsense - that is, in most jokes accompanied by double meaning and allusion - there is no trace to be found in the hearer of any effect resembling the comic. This may be tested in the examples I have given earlier, or on a few new ones that I can bring up:

Telegram of congratulations to a gambler on his seventieth Birthday: ‘Trente et quarante.’ (Dividing-up with allusion.)

Hevesi somewhere describes the process of tobacco manufacture: ‘The bright yellow leaves . . . were dipped in a sauce and were sauced in this dip.’ (Multiple use of the same material).

Madame de Maintenon was known as ‘Madame de Maintenant’. (Modification of a name.)

Professor Kästner said to a prince who stood in front of a telescope during a demonstration: ‘Your Highness, I know quite well that you are "durchläuchtig [illustrious]",¹ but you are not "durchsigtig [transparent]."'

Count Andrássy was known as ‘ Minister of the Fine Exterior’.

It might further be thought that at any rate all jokes with a façade of nonsense will seem comic and must produce a comic affect. But I must recall that jokes of this kind very often affect the hearer in another way and provoke bewilderment and a tendency to repudiation (see p. 1727 n.). Thus it evidently depends on whether the nonsense of a joke appears as comic or as sheer ordinary nonsense - and we have not yet investigated what determines this. We therefore stick to our conclusion that jokes are from their nature to be distinguished from the comic and only converge with it, on the one hand in certain special cases, and on the other hand in their aim of obtaining pleasure from intellectual sources.

During these enquiries into the relations between jokes and the comic the distinction has become plain to us which we must emphasize as the most important and which points at the same time to a main psychological characteristic of the comic. We found ourselves obliged to locate the pleasure in jokes in the unconscious; no reason is to be found for making the same localization in the case of the comic. On the contrary, all the analyses we have hitherto made have pointed to the source of comic pleasure being a comparison between two expenditures both of which must be ascribed to the preconscious. Jokes and the comic are distinguished first and foremost in their psychical localization; the joke, it may be said, is the contribution made to the comic from the realm of the unconscious.

¹ [An adjective derived from ‘Durchlaucht’, a title applied to minor royalty: ‘Serene Highness’.]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1786

There is no need to apologize for this digression, since the relation of jokes to the comic was the reason for our being forced into an investigation of the comic. But it is certainly time we returned to our previous topic - the discussion of the methods which serve for making things comic. We considered caricature and unmasking first, because we can derive some indications from these two for the analysis of the comic of mimicry. As a rule, no doubt, mimicry is permeated with caricature - the exaggeration of traits that are not otherwise striking -, and it also involves the characteristic of degradation. But this does not seem to exhaust its nature. It cannot be disputed that it is in itself an extraordinarily fertile source of comic pleasure, for we laugh particularly at the faithfulness of a piece of mimicry. It is not easy to give a satisfactory explanation of this unless one is prepared to adopt the view held by Bergson (1900), which approximates the comic of mimicry to the comic due to the discovery of psychical automatism. Bergson’s opinion is that everything in a living person that makes one think of an inanimate mechanism has a comic effect. His formula for this runs ‘mécanisation de la vie’. He explains the comic of mimicry by starting out from a problem raised by Pascal in his Pensées of why it is that one laughs when one compares two similar faces neither of which has a comic effect by itself. ‘What is living should never, according to our expectation, be repeated exactly the same. When we find such a repetition we always suspect some mechanism lying behind the living thing.’ When one sees two faces that resemble each other closely, one thinks of two impressions from the same mould or of some similar mechanical procedure. In short, the cause of laughter in such cases would be the divergence of the living from the inanimate, or, as we might say, the degradation of the living to the inanimate (ibid., 35). If, moreover, we were to accept these plausible suggestions of Bergson’s, we should not find it difficult to include his view under our own formula. Experience has taught us that every living thing is different from every other and calls for a kind of expenditure by our understanding; and we find ourselves disappointed if, as a result of complete conformity or deceptive mimicry, we need make no fresh expenditure. But we are disappointed in the sense of a relief, and the expenditure on expectation which has become superfluous is discharged by laughter. The same formula would also cover all the cases which Bergson considers of comic rigidity (‘raideur’), of professional customs, fixed ideas, and turns of speech repeated on every possible occasion. All these cases would go back to a comparison between the expenditure on expectation and the expenditure actually required for an understanding of something that has remained the same; and the larger amount needed for expectation would be based on observation of the multiplicity and plasticity of living things. In the case of mimicry, accordingly, the source of the comic pleasure would be not the comic of situation but of expectation.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1787

Since we derive comic pleasure in general from a comparison, it is incumbent on us to examine the comic of comparison itself; and this, indeed, serves as a method of making things comic. Our interest in this question will be increased when we recall that in the case of analogies, too, we often found that our ‘feeling’ left us in the lurch as to whether something was to be called a joke or merely comic (p. 1680 f.).

The subject would, it must be admitted, deserve more careful treatment than our interests can devote to it. The main attribute that we enquire after in an analogy is whether it is apt - that is, whether it draws attention to a conformity which is really present in two different objects. The original pleasure in rediscovering the same thing (Groos, 1899, 153) is not the only motive that favours the use of analogies; there is the further fact that analogies are capable of a use which brings with it a relief of intellectual work - if, that is to say, one follows the usual practice of comparing what is less known with what is better known or the abstract with the concrete, and by the comparison elucidates what is more unfamiliar or more difficult. Every such comparison, especially of something abstract with something concrete, involves a certain degradation and a certain economy in expenditure on abstraction (in the sense of ideational mimetics), but this is of course not sufficient to allow the characteristic of the comic to come clearly into prominence. It does not emerge suddenly but gradually from the pleasure of the relief brought about by the comparison. There are plenty of cases which merely fringe on the comic and in which doubt might be felt whether they show the characteristic of the comic. The comparison becomes undoubtedly comic if there is a rise in the level of difference between the expenditure on abstraction in the two things that are being compared, if something serious and unfamiliar, especially if it is of an intellectual or moral nature, is brought into comparison with something commonplace and inferior. The previous pleasure of the relief and the contribution from the determinants of ideational mimetics may perhaps explain the gradual transition, conditioned by quantitative factors, from general pleasure to comic pleasure during the comparison. I shall no doubt avoid misunderstandings if I stress the fact that I do not trace the comic pleasure in analogies to the contrast between the two things compared but to the difference between the two expenditures on abstraction. When an unfamiliar thing that is hard to take in, a thing that is abstract and in fact sublime in an intellectual sense, is alleged to tally with something familiar and inferior, in imagining which there is a complete absence of any expenditure on abstraction, then that abstract thing is itself unmasked as something equally inferior. The comic of comparison is thus reduced to a case of degradation.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1788

A comparison can, however, as we have already seen, be in the nature of a joke, without a trace of comic admixture - precisely, that is, when it avoids degradation. Thus the comparison of truth with a torch that cannot be carried through a crowd without singeing someone’s beard is purely in the nature of a joke, because it takes a watered-down turn of speech (‘the torch of truth’) at its full value, and it is not comic, because a torch as an object, though it is a concrete thing, is not without a certain distinction. But a comparison can just as easily be a joke and comic as well, and can be each independently of the other, since a comparison can be of help to certain techniques of jokes, such as unification or allusion. In this way Nestroy’s comparison of memory to a ‘warehouse’ (p. 1683) is at once comic and a joke - the former because of the extraordinary degradation which the psychological concept has to put up with in being compared to a ‘warehouse’, and the latter because the person making use of the comparison is a clerk, who thus establishes in the comparison a quite unexpected unification between psychology and his profession. Heine’s phrase ‘till at last all the buttons burst on the breeches of my patience’ seems at first sight to be no more than a remarkable example of a comically degrading comparison; but on further consideration we must also allow it the characteristics of a joke, since the comparison, as a means of allusion, impinges on the region of the obscene and so succeeds in liberating pleasure in the obscene. The same material, by what is admittedly not an entirely chance coincidence, provides us with a yield of pleasure which is simultaneously comic and of the character of a joke. If the conditions of the one favour the generation of the other, their union has a confusing effect on the ‘feeling’ which is supposed to tell us whether we are being offered a joke or something comic, and a decision can only be arrived at by an attentive investigation that has been freed from any predisposition to a particular kind of pleasure.

However attractive it may be to follow up these more intimate determinants of the yield of comic pleasure, the author must bear in mind that neither his education nor his daily occupation justify his extending his enquiries far beyond the sphere of jokes; and he must confess that the topic of comic comparisons makes him particularly aware of his inability.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1789

We therefore readily recall that many authorities do not recognize the sharp conceptual and material distinction between jokes and the comic to which we have found ourselves led, and that they regard jokes as simply ‘the comic of speech’ or ‘of words’. In order to test this view we will choose one example each of something intentionally and of something involuntarily comic in words to compare with jokes. We have remarked earlier that we believe ourselves very well able to distinguish a comic remark from a joke:

‘With a fork and much to-do

His mother dragged him from the stew’

is merely comic; Heine’s remark about the four castes among the inhabitants of Göttingen - ‘professors, students, philistines and donkeys’ is par excellence a joke.

For something intentionally comic I will take as a model Stettenheim’s ‘Wippchen’. People speak of Stettenheim as ‘witty’ because he possesses to a special degree the gift of evoking the comic. This capacity does in fact aptly determine the ‘wit’ that one ‘has’ in contrast to the ‘joke’ that one ‘makes’.¹ It cannot be disputed that the letters of Wippchen, the Correspondent from Bernau, are also ‘witty’ in so far as they are abundantly sprinkled with jokes of every kind, among them some that are genuinely successful (e.g. of a display by savages: ‘in ceremonial undress’). But what gives these productions their peculiar character is not these separate jokes but the almost too abundant comic of speech which flows through them. ‘Wippchen’ was no doubt originally intended as a satirical figure, a modification of Gustav Freytag’s ‘Schmock’, one of those uneducated people who misuse and trade away the nation’s store of culture; but the author’s enjoyment of the comic effects achieved in his picture of this character has evidently pushed the satirical purpose little by little into the background. Wippchen’s productions are for the most part ‘comic nonsense’. The author has made use of the pleasurable mood brought about by the piling up of these successes to introduce (justifiably, it must be said), alongside perfectly permissible material, all kinds of insipidities which could not be tolerated on their own account. Wippchen’s nonsense produces a specific effect on account of a peculiar technique. If one looks more closely at these ‘jokes’ one is specially struck by a few kinds which give the whole production its stamp. Wippchen makes use predominantly of combinations (amalgamations), modifications of familiar turns of speech and quotations and replacements of a few commonplace elements in them by more pretentious and weighty forms of expression. This incidentally is coming near to the techniques of jokes.

¹ [The same German word ‘Witz’ is used here for both ‘wit’ and ‘joke’.]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1790

Here, for instance, are some amalgamations (taken from the preface and the first pages of the whole series):

‘Turkey has money wie Heu am Meere.’ This is made up of the two expressions: ‘Money wie Heu’ and ‘Money wie Sand am Meer '.¹

Or, ‘I am no more than a column stripped of its leaves,² which bears witness to its vanished glory’ - condensed from ‘a tree stripped of its leaves’ and ‘a column which . . . etc.’

Or, ‘Where is the thread of Ariadne which will lead me from the Scylla of this Augean stable?’ to which three Greek legends have each contributed an element.

The modifications and substitutions can be summarized without much difficulty. Their nature can be seen from the following examples, which are characteristic of Wippchen and behind which we have a glimpse of another, more current and usually more commonplace wording, which has been reduced to a cliché:

‘Mier Papier und Tinte höher zu hängen.’ We use the phrase ‘einem den Brotkorb höher hängen ' metaphorically for ‘to put someone in more difficult circumstances’. So why should not the metaphor be extended to other material?

¹ [These are two common expressions in German, equivalent to ‘money like dirt’ or ‘oceans of money’.]

² [‘Eine entlaubte Säule’ - an echo of ‘Eine entleibte Seele’, ‘a disembodied spirit’.]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1791

‘Battles in which the Russians sometimes draw the shorter and sometimes the longer.’ Only the first of these expressions [‘den Kürzeren ziehen’, ‘draw the shorter’] is in common use; but in view of its derivation there would be no absurdity in bringing the second into use as well.

‘While I was still young, Pegasus stirred within me.’ If we put back ‘the poet’ instead of ‘Pegasus’ we find an autobiographical cliché well-worn by frequent use. It is true that ‘Pegasus’ is not a suitable substitute for ‘the poet’, but it has a conceptual relation with it and is a high-sounding word.

‘Thus I lived through the thorny shoes of childhood.’ A simile instead of a simple statement. ‘Die Kinderschuhe austreten’ [‘to wear out the shoes of childhood’, ‘to leave the nursery behind’] is one of the images connected with the concept of childhood.

From the profusion of Wippchen’s other productions some can be stressed as pure examples of the comic. For instance, as a comic disappointment: ‘For hours the fight fluctuated, until at last it remained undecided.’ Or, as a comic unmasking (of ignorance): ‘Clio, the Medusa of History.’ Or quotations such as: ‘Habent sua fata morgana.’¹ But our interest is more aroused by the amalgamations and modifications, because they repeat familiar joke-techniques. We may, for instance, compare with the modifications such jokes as ‘he has a great future behind him’, or ‘er hat ein Ideal vor dem Kopf’, or Lichtenberg’s modification joke ‘new spas cure well’, and so on. Are Wippchen’s productions which have the same technique now to be called jokes? or how do they differ from these?

¹ [Habent sua fata libelli (books have their destinies)' is a Latin saying attributed to Terence. ‘Fata Morgana’ is the Italian name for a particular kind of mirage seen in the Straits of Messina: from Morgan le Fey (fairy), King Arthur’s sister.]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1792

It is not difficult to answer. Let us recall that jokes present a double face to their hearer, force him to adopt two different views of them. In a nonsense joke, like the ones last mentioned, the one view, which only takes the wording into account, regards it as nonsense; the other view, following the hints that are given, passes through the hearer’s unconscious and finds an excellent sense in it. In Wippchen’s joke-like productions one face of the joke is blank, as though it were rudimentary: a Janus head but with only one face developed on it. If we allow the technique to lure us into the unconscious, we come upon nothing. The amalgamations lead us to no instance in which the two things that are amalgamated really yield a new meaning; if we attempt an analysis, they fall completely apart. The modifications and substitutions lead, as they do in jokes, to a usual and familiar wording; but the modification or substitution itself tells us nothing fresh and as a rule, indeed, nothing possible or serviceable. So that only the one view of these ‘jokes’ is left over - that they are nonsense. We can merely decide whether we choose to call such productions, which have freed themselves from one of the most essential characteristics of jokes, ‘bad’ jokes or not jokes at all.

Rudimentary jokes of this kind undoubtedly produce a comic effect, which we can account for in more than one way. Either the comic arises from the uncovering of the modes of thought of the unconscious, as in cases we considered earlier, or the pleasure comes from the comparison with a complete joke. Nothing prevents our supposing that both these ways of generating comic pleasure converge here. It is not impossible that here the inadequacy of support from a joke is precisely what makes the nonsense into comic nonsense.

For there are other easily intelligible cases in which inadequacy of this kind as compared with what ought to be effected makes the nonsense irresistibly comic. The counterpart of jokes - riddles - can perhaps offer us better examples of this than jokes themselves. For instance, here is a ‘facetious question’: ‘What is it that hangs on the wall and that one can dry one’s hands on?’ It would be a stupid riddle if the answer were ‘a hand-towel’. But that answer is rejected. - ‘No, a herring.’ - ‘But for heaven’s sake’, comes the infuriated protest ‘a herring doesn’t hang on the wall.’ - ‘You can hang it up there.’ - ‘But who in the world is going to dry his hands on a herring?’ - ‘Well’, is the soothing reply, ‘you don’t have to.’ This explanation, given by means of two typical displacements, shows how far this question falls short of a genuine riddle; and on account of its absolute inadequacy it strikes us as being - instead of simply nonsensically stupid - irresistibly comic. In this way, by failing to comply with essential conditions, jokes, riddles, and other things, which do not produce comic pleasure in themselves, are made into sources of comic pleasure.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1793

There is still less difficulty in understanding the case of the involuntary comic of speech, which we can find realized as often as we please in, for instance, the poems of Friederike Kempner (1891):

Against Vivisection

Ein unbekanntes Band der Seelen kettet

Den Menschen an das arme Tier.

Das Tier hat einen Willen - ergo Seele -

Wenn auch 'ne kleinere als wir.¹

Or a conversation between a loving married couple:

The Contrast

‘Wie glücklich bin ich’, ruft sie leise,

‘Auch ich’, sagt lauter ihr Gemahl,

‘Es macht mich deine Art und Weise

Sehr stolz auf meine gute Wahl!’ ²

There is nothing here to make us think of jokes. But there is no doubt that it is the inadequacy of these ‘poems’ that makes them comic - the quite extraordinary clumsiness of their expression, which is linked with the tritest or most journalistic turns of phrase, the simple-minded limitation of their thought, the absence of any trace of poetic matter or form. In spite of all this, however, it is not obvious why we find Kempner’s poems comic. We find many similar products nothing but shockingly bad; they do not make us laugh but annoy us. But it is precisely the greatness of the distance that separates them from what we expect of a poem that imposes the comic view on us; if this difference struck us as smaller we should be more inclined to criticize than to laugh. Furthermore, the comic effect of Kempner’s poems is assured by a subsidiary circumstance - the authoress’s unmistakably good intentions and a peculiar sincerity of feeling which disarms our ridicule or our annoyance and which we sense behind her helpless phrases.

Here we are reminded of a problem whose consideration we have postponed. Difference in expenditure is undoubtedly the basic determining condition of comic pleasure; but observation shows that this difference does not invariably give rise to pleasure. What further conditions must be present or what disturbances must be kept back, in order that comic pleasure may actually arise from the difference in expenditure? Before we turn to answering this question, we will conclude this discussion with a clear assertion that the comic of speech does not coincide with jokes, and that jokes must therefore be something other than the comic of speech.

¹ [ Between mankind and poor dumb beasts there stretches

A chain of souls impossible to see.

Poor dumb beasts have a will - ergo a soul too -

E’en though they have a soul smaller than we.]

² [ ‘How fortunate am I!’ she softly cried.

‘I too’, declared her husband’s louder voice:

‘Your many qualities fill me with pride

At having made so excellent a choice.’]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1794

Now that we are on the point of approaching an answer to our last question, as to the necessary conditions for the generating of comic pleasure from the difference in expenditure, we may allow ourselves a relief which cannot fail to give us pleasure. An accurate reply to the question would be identical with an exhaustive account of the nature of the comic, for which we can claim neither capacity nor authority. We shall once more be content to throw light on the problem of the comic only so far as it contrasts clearly with the problem of jokes.

Every theory of the comic is objected to by its critics on the score that its definition overlooks what is essential to the comic; ‘The comic is based on a contrast between ideas.’ ‘Yes, in so far as the contrast has a comic and not some other effect.’ ‘The feeling of the comic arises from the disappointment of an expectation.’ ‘Yes, unless the disappointment is in fact a distressing one.’ No doubt the objections are justified; but we shall be over-estimating them if we conclude from them that the essential feature of the comic has hitherto escaped detection. What impairs the universal validity of these definitions are conditions which are indispensable for the generating of comic pleasure; but we do not need to look for the essence of the comic in them. In any case, it will only become easy for us to dismiss the objections and throw light on the contradictions to the definitions of the comic if we suppose that the origin of comic pleasure lies in a comparison of the difference between two expenditures. Comic pleasure and the effect by which it is known - laughter - can only come about if this difference is unutilizable and capable of discharge. We obtain no pleasurable effect but at most a transient sense of pleasure in which the characteristic of being comic does not emerge, if the difference is put to another use as soon as it is recognized. Just as special contrivances have to be adopted in the case of jokes in order to prevent the use elsewhere of the expenditure that is recognized as superfluous, so, too, comic pleasure can only appear in circumstances that guarantee this same condition. For this reason occasions on which these differences in expenditure occur in our ideational life are uncommonly numerous, but the occasions on which the comic emerges from those differences are relatively quite rare.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1795

Two observations force themselves on anyone who studies even cursorily the conditions for the generation of the comic from difference in expenditure. Firstly, there are cases in which the comic appears habitually and as though by force of necessity, and on the contrary others in which it seems entirely dependent on the circumstances and on the standpoint of the observer. But secondly, unusually large differences very often break through unfavourable conditions, so that the comic feeling emerges in spite of them. In connection with the first of these points it would be possible to set up two classes - the inevitably comic and the occasionally comic - though one must be prepared from the first to renounce the notion of finding the inevitability of the comic in the first class free from exceptions. It would be tempting to enquire into the determining conditions for the two classes.

The conditions, some of which have been brought together as the ‘isolation’ of the comic situation, apply essentially to the second class. A closer analysis elicits the following facts:

(a) The most favourable condition for the production of comic pleasure is a generally cheerful mood in which one is ‘inclined to laugh’. In a toxic mood of cheerfulness almost everything seems comic, probably by comparison with the expenditure in a normal state. Indeed, jokes, the comic and all similar methods of getting pleasure from mental activity are no more than ways of regaining this cheerful mood - this euphoria - from a single point of approach, when it is not present as a general disposition of the psyche.

(b) A similarly favourable effect is produced by an expectation of the comic, by being attuned to comic pleasure. For this reason, if an intention to make something comic is communicated to one by someone else, differences of such a low degree are sufficient that they would probably be overlooked if they occurred in one’s experience unintentionally. Anyone who starts out to read a comic book or goes to the theatre to see a farce owes to this intention his ability to laugh at things which would scarcely have provided him with a case of the comic in his ordinary life. In the last resort it is in the recollection of having laughed and in the expectation of laughing that he laughs when he sees the comic actor come on to the stage, before the latter can have made any attempt at making him laugh. For that reason, too, one admits feeling ashamed afterwards over what one has been able to laugh at the play.

(c) Unfavourable conditions for the comic arise from the kind of mental activity with which a particular person is occupied at the moment. Imaginative or intellectual work that pursues serious aims interferes with the capacity of the cathexes for discharge - cathexes which the work requires for its displacements - so that only unexpectedly large differences in expenditure are able to break through to comic pleasure. What are quite specially unfavourable for the comic are all kinds of intellectual processes which are sufficiently remote from what is perceptual to bring ideational mimetics to a stop. There is no place whatever left for the comic in abstract reflection except when that mode of thought is suddenly interrupted.

(d) The opportunity for the release of comic pleasure disappears, too, if the attention is focused precisely on the comparison from which the comic may emerge. In such circumstances what would otherwise have the most certain comic effect loses its comic force. A movement or a function cannot be comic for a person whose interest is directed to comparing it with a standard which he has clearly before his mind. Thus the examiner does not find the nonsense comic which the candidate produces in his ignorance; he is annoyed by it, while the candidate’s fellow students, who are far more interested in what luck he will have than in how much he knows, laugh heartily at the same nonsense. A gymnastic or dancing instructor seldom has an eye for the comic in his pupils’ movements; and a clergyman entirely overlooks the comic in the human weaknesses which the writer of comedies can bring to light so effectively. The comic process will not bear being hypercathected by attention; it must be able to take its course quite unobserved in this respect, incidentally, just like jokes. It would, however, contradict the nomenclature of the ‘processes of consciousness’ of which I made use, with good reason, in my Interpretation of Dreams if one sought to speak of the comic process as a necessarily unconscious one. It forms part, rather, of the preconscious; and such processes, which run their course in the preconscious but lack the cathexis of attention with which consciousness is linked, may aptly be given the name of ‘automatic’. The process of comparing expenditures must remain automatic if it is to produce comic pleasure.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1796

(e) The comic is greatly interfered with if the situation from which it ought to develop gives rise at the same time to a release of strong affect. A discharge of the operative difference is as a rule out of the question in such a case. The affects, disposition and attitude of the individual in each particular case make it understandable that the comic emerges and vanishes according to the standpoint of each particular person, and that an absolute comic exists only in exceptional instances. The contingency or relativity of the comic is therefore far greater than that of a joke, which never happens of its own accord but is invariably made, and in which the conditions under which it can find acceptance can be observed at the time at which it is constructed. The generation of affect is the most intense of all the conditions that interfere with the comic and its importance in this respect has been nowhere overlooked.¹ For this reason it has been said that the comic feeling comes easiest in more or less indifferent cases where the feelings and interests are not strongly involved. Yet precisely in cases where there is a release of affect one can observe a particularly strong difference in expenditure bring about the automatism of release. When Colonel Butler answers Octavio’s warnings by exclaiming ‘with a bitter laugh’: ‘Thanks from the House of Austria!’, his embitterment does not prevent his laughing. The laugh applies to his memory of the disappointment he believes he has suffered; and on the other hand the magnitude of the disappointment cannot be portrayed more impressively by the dramatist than by his showing it capable of forcing a laugh in the midst of the storm of feelings that have been released. I am inclined to think that this explanation would apply to every case in which laughter occurs in circumstances other than pleasurable ones and accompanied by intensely distressing or strained emotions.

(f) If we add to this that the generating of comic pleasure can be encouraged by any other pleasurable accompanying circumstance as though by some sort of contagious effect (working in the same kind of way as the fore-pleasure principle with tendentious jokes), we shall have mentioned enough of the conditions governing comic pleasure for our purposes, though certainly not all of them. We can then see that these conditions, as well as the inconstancy and contingency of the comic effect, cannot be explained so easily by any other hypothesis than that of the derivation of comic pleasure from the discharge of a difference which, under the most varying circumstances, is liable to be used in ways other than discharge.

¹ ‘It is easy for you to laugh; it means nothing more to you.’

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1797

The comic of sexuality and obscenity would deserve more detailed consideration; but we can only touch upon it here with a few comments. The starting-point would once more be exposure. A chance exposure has a comic effect on us because we compare the ease with which we have enjoyed the sight with the great expenditure which would otherwise be required for reaching this end. Thus the case approaches that of the naïvely comic, but is simpler. Every exposure of which we are made the spectator (or audience in the case of smut) by a third person is equivalent to the exposed person being made comic. We have seen that it is the task of jokes to take the place of smut and so once more to open access to a lost source of comic pleasure. As opposed to this, witnessing an exposure is not a case of the comic for the witness, because his own effort in doing so does away with the determining condition of comic pleasure: nothing is left but the sexual pleasure in what is seen. If the witness gives an account to someone else, the person who has been witnessed becomes comic once more, because there is a predominant sense that the latter has omitted the expenditure which would have been in place for concealing his secret. Apart from this, the spheres of sexuality and obscenity offer the amplest occasions for obtaining comic pleasure alongside pleasurable sexual excitement; for they can show human beings in their dependence on bodily needs (degradation) or they can reveal the physical demands lying behind the claim of mental love (unmasking).

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1798

An invitation to us to look for an understanding of the comic in its psychogenesis is also to be found, surprisingly enough, in Bergson’s charming and lively volume Le rire. We have already made the acquaintance of Bergson’s formulas for grasping the characteristics of the comic: ‘mécanisation de la vie’, ‘substitution quelconque de l’artificial au naturel’.¹ He proceeds by a plausible train of thought from automatism to automata, and tries to trace back a number of comic effects to the faded recollection of a children’s toy. In this connection he reaches for a moment a point of view, which, it is true, he soon abandons: he endeavours to explain the comic as an after-effect of the joys of childhood. ‘Peut-être même devrions-nous pousser la simplification plus loin encore, remonter à nos souvenirs les plus anciens, chercher dans les jeux qui amusèrent l’enfant la première ébauche des combinaisons qui font rire l’homme . . . Trop souvent surtout nous méconnaissons ce qu’il y a d’encore enfantin, pour ainsi dire, dans la plupart de nos émotions joyeuses.’ (Bergson, 1900, 68 ff.)² Since we have traced back jokes to children’s play with words and thoughts which has been frustrated by rational criticism we cannot help feeling tempted to investigate the infantile roots which Bergson suspects in the case of the comic as well.

¹ [‘Mechanization of life’ - ‘some kind of substitution of the artificial for the natural.’]

² [‘Perhaps we should even carry simplification further still, go back to our oldest memories, and trace in the games that amused the child the first sketch of the combinations which make the grown man laugh . . . Above all, we too often fail to recognize how much of childishness, so to speak, there still is in most of our joyful emotions.’]

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1799

And, in fact, if we examine the relation of the comic to the child we come upon a whole number of connections which seem promising. Children themselves do not strike us as in any way comic, though their nature fulfils all the conditions which, if we compare it with our own nature, yield a comic difference: the excessive expenditure on movement as well as the small intellectual expenditure, the domination of the mental functions by the bodily ones, and other features. A child only produces a comic effect on us when he conducts himself not as a child but as a serious adult, and he produces it then in the same way as other people who disguise themselves. But so long as he retains his childish nature the perception of him affords us a pure pleasure, perhaps one that reminds us slightly of the comic. We call him naïve, in so far as he shows us his lack of inhibition, and we describe as naïvely comic those of his utterances which in another person we should have judged obscenities or jokes.

On the other hand, children are without a feeling for the comic. This assertion seems to say no more than that the comic feeling, like such a number of other things, only starts at some point in the course of mental development; and this would be by no means surprising, especially as it has to be admitted that the feeling already emerges clearly at an age which has to be counted as part of childhood. But it can nevertheless be shown that the assertion that children lack the feeling of the comic contains more than something self-evident. In the first place, it is easy to see that it could not be otherwise if our view is correct which derives the comic feeling from a difference in expenditure that arises in the course of understanding another person. Let us once again take the comic of movement as an example. The comparison which provides the difference runs (stated in conscious formulas): ‘That is how he does it’ and ‘This is how I should do it, how I did it’. But a child is without the standard contained in the second sentence; he understands simply by mimicry: he does it in just the same way. The child’s upbringing presents him with a standard: ‘this is how you ought to do it.’ If he now makes use of this standard in making the comparison, he will easily conclude: ‘he did not do it right’ and ‘I can do it better’. In this case he laughs at the other person, he laughs at him in the feeling of his own superiority. There is nothing to prevent our deriving this laughter too from a difference in expenditure; but on the analogy of the cases of laughing at people that we have come across we may infer that the comic feeling is not present in a child’s superior laughter. It is a laughter of pure pleasure. In our own case when we have a clear judgement of our own superiority, we merely smile instead of laughing, or, if we laugh, we can nevertheless distinguish this becoming conscious of our superiority from the comic that makes us laugh.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1800

It is probably right to say that children laugh from pure pleasure in a variety of circumstances that we feel as ‘comic’ and cannot find the motive for, whereas a child’s motives are clear and can be stated. For instance, if someone slips in the street and falls down we laugh because the impression - we do not know why - is comic. A child laughs in the same case from a feeling of superiority or from Schadenfreude: ‘You’ve fallen down, I haven’t.’ Certain motives for pleasure in children seem to be lost to us adults, and instead in the same circumstances we have the ‘comic’ feeling as a substitute for the lost one.

If one might generalize, it would seem most attractive to place the specific characteristic of the comic which we are in search of in an awakening of the infantile - to regard the comic as the regained ‘lost laughter of childhood’. One could then say: ‘I laugh at a difference in expenditure between another person and myself, every time I rediscover the child in him.’ Or, put more exactly, the complete comparison which leads to the comic would run: ‘That is how he does it - I do it in another way - he does it as I used to do it as a child.’

Thus the laughter would always apply to the comparison between the adult’s ego and the child’s ego. Even the lack of uniformity in the comic difference - the fact that what seems to me comic is sometimes a greater and sometimes a smaller expenditure - would fit in with the infantile determinant; actually what is comic is invariably on the infantile side.

This is not contradicted by the fact that, when children themselves are the object of the comparison, they do not give me a comic impression but a purely pleasurable one; nor is it contradicted because the comparison with the infantile only produces a comic effect if any other use of the difference is avoided. For these are matters concerned with the conditions governing discharge. Whatever brings a psychical process into connection with others operates against the discharge of the surplus cathexis and puts it to some other use; whatever isolates a psychical act encourages discharge. A conscious attitude to children as objects of comparison therefore makes impossible the discharge that is necessary for comic pleasure. Only when the cathexis is preconscious is there an approximation to an isolation such as, incidentally, we may ascribe to the mental processes in children as well. The addition to the comparison (‘I did it like that as a child too’) from which the comic effect is derived would thus only come into consideration, as far as differences of medium magnitude are concerned, if no other nexus could gain control over the liberated surplus.

If we pursue our attempt to discover the essence of the comic in a preconscious link with the infantile, we must go a step further than Bergson and admit that a comparison need not, in order to produce the comic, arouse old childish pleasures and childish play; it will be enough for it to touch upon childish nature in general, and perhaps even on childish suffering. Here we shall be parting from Bergson but remaining in agreement with ourselves if we connect comic pleasure not with recollected pleasure but once more with a comparison. It may be that cases of the former kind may coincide with the invariably and irresistibly comic.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1801

Let us at this point review the scheme which we drew up earlier of the various comic possibilities. We remarked that the comic difference was found either

(a) by a comparison between another person and oneself, or

(b) by a comparison entirely within the other person, or

(c) by a comparison entirely within oneself.

In the first of these cases the other person would appear to me as a child; in the second he would reduce himself to a child; and in the third I should discover the child in myself.

The first case would include the comic of movement and form, of mental functioning and of character. The corresponding infantile factors would be the urge to movement and the child’s inferior mental and moral development. So that, for instance, a stupid person would be comic to me in so far as he reminded me of a lazy child and a bad person in so far as he reminded me of a naughty child. There could only be a question of a childish pleasure lost to adults in the single instance in which the child’s own joy in movement was concerned.

The second case, in which the comic depends entirely on ‘empathy’, includes the most numerous possibilities - the comic of situation, of exaggeration (caricature), of mimicry, of degradation and of unmasking. This is the case in which the introduction of the infantile point of view proves most useful. For the comic of situation is mostly based on embarrassments, in which we rediscover the child’s helplessness. The worst of the embarrassments, the interference by the peremptory demands of natural needs with other functions, corresponds to the child’s incomplete control over his bodily functions. Where the comic of situation operates by means of repetitions, it is based on the child’s peculiar pleasure in constant repetition (of questions or of being told stories) which make him a nuisance to the adult. Exaggeration, which still gives pleasure to adults in so far as it can find justification with their critical faculty, is connected with the child’s peculiar lack of a sense of proportion, his ignorance of all quantitative relations, which he comes to know later than qualitative ones. The use of moderation and restraint, even in the case of permitted impulses, is a late fruit of education and is acquired by the mutual inhibition of mental activities brought together in a combination. Where such combinations are weakened, as in the unconscious of dreams or in the mono-ideism of psychoneuroses, the child’s lack of moderation re-emerges.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1802

We found relatively great difficulties in understanding the comic of mimicry so long as we left the infantile factor out of account. But mimicry is the child’s best art and the driving motive of most of his games. A child’s ambition aims far less at excelling among his equals than at mimicking the grown-ups. The relation of children to adults is also the basis of the comic of degradation, which corresponds to the condescension shown by adults in their attitude to the life of children. There is little that gives children greater pleasure than when a grown-up lets himself down to their level, renounces his oppressive superiority and plays with them as an equal. This relief, which gives the child pure pleasure, becomes in adults, in the form of degradation, a means of making things comic and a source of comic pleasure. As regards unmasking, we know that it goes back to degradation.

We come up against the most difficulties in finding the infantile basis of the third case, the comic of expectation, which no doubt explains why those authorities who have put this case first in their discussion of the comic have found no occasion for taking account of the infantile factor in the comic. The comic of expectation is no doubt the remotest in children; the capacity to grasp it is the latest to appear. In most of the instances which seem comic to an adult a child would probably feel only disappointment. We might, however, take the child’s power of blissful expectation and credulity as a basis for understanding how we appear to ourselves comic ‘as a child’ when we meet with a comic disappointment.

What we have said would seem to suggest a certain probability for a translation of the comic feeling that might run; ‘Those things are comic which are not proper for an adult.’ Nevertheless I do not feel bold enough, in virtue of my whole attitude to the problem of the comic, to defend this last assertion with as much seriousness as my earlier ones. I am unable to decide whether degradation to being a child is only a special case of comic degradation, or whether everything comic is based fundamentally on degradation to being a child.¹

¹ The fact that comic pleasure has its source in the ‘quantitative contrast’ of a comparison between small and large, which after all also expresses the essential relation between a child and an adult - this would certainly be a strange coincidence if the comic had no other connection with the infantile.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1803

An enquiry which deals with the comic, however cursorily, would be seriously incomplete if it did not find room for at least a few remarks about humour. The essential kinship between the two is so little open to doubt that an attempt at explaining the comic is bound to make at least some contribution to an understanding of humour. However much that is pertinent and impressive may have been brought forward in the appreciation of humour (which, itself one of the highest psychical achievements, enjoys the particular favour of thinkers), yet we cannot evade an attempt at giving expression to its nature by an approach to the formulas for jokes and for the comic.

We have seen that the release of distressing affects is the greatest obstacle to the emergence of the comic. As soon as the aimless movement does damage, or the stupidity leads to mischief, or the disappointment causes pain, the possibility of a comic effect is at an end. This is true, at all events, for a person who cannot ward off such unpleasure, who is himself its victim or is obliged to have a share in it; whereas a person who is not concerned shows by his demeanour that the situation involved contains everything that is required for a comic effect. Now humour is a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing affects that interfere with it; it acts as a substitute for the generation of these affects, it puts itself in their place. The conditions for its appearance are given if there is a situation in which, according to our usual habits, we should be tempted to release a distressing affect and if motives then operate upon us which suppress that affect in statu nascendi. In the cases that have just been mentioned the person who is the victim of the injury, pain, and so on, might obtain humorous pleasure, while the unconcerned person laughs from comic pleasure. The pleasure of humour, if this is so, comes about - we cannot say otherwise - at the cost of a release of affect that does not occur: it arises from an economy in the expenditure of affect.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1804

Humour is the most easily satisfied among the species of the comic. It completes its course within a single person; another person’s participation adds nothing new to it. I can keep to myself the enjoyment of the humorous pleasure that has arisen in me, without feeling obliged to communicate it. It is not easy to say what happens in a person when humorous pleasure is generated; but we can obtain some insight if we examine the cases in which humour is communicated or sympathized with, cases in which, by an understanding of the humorous person, we arrive at the same pleasure as his. The crudest case of humour - what is known as Galgenhumor  - may be instructive in this connection. A rogue who was being led out to execution on a Monday remarked: ‘Well, this week’s beginning nicely.’ This is actually a joke, since the remark is quite apt in itself, but on the other hand, is misplaced in a nonsensical way, since for the man himself there would be no further events that week. But humour is concerned in the making of such a joke - that is, in disregarding what it is that distinguishes the beginning of this week from others, in denying the distinction which might give rise to motives for quite special emotions. The case was the same when the rogue on his way to execution asked for a scarf for his bare throat so as not to catch cold - an otherwise laudable precaution but one which, in view of what lay in store so shortly for the neck, was remarkably superfluous and unimportant. It must be confessed that there is something like magnanimity in this blague, in the man’s tenacious hold upon his customary self and his disregard of what might overthrow that self and drive it to despair. This kind of grandeur of humour appears unmistakably in cases in which our admiration is not inhibited by the circumstances of the humorous person.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1805

In Victor Hugo’s Hernani, the bandit who has become involved in a conspiracy against his King, Charles I of Spain (the Emperor Charles V), has fallen into the hands of this powerful enemy. He foresees that, convicted of high treason, it is his fate to lose his head. But this fore-knowledge does not prevent his letting himself be known as a Hereditary Grandee of Spain and declaring that he has no intention of renouncing any of the privileges that are his due. A Grandee of Spain might cover his head in the presence of his royal master. Very well, then:

. . . . Nos têtes ont le droit

De tomber couvertes devant de toi.¹

This is humour on the grand scale, and if when we hear it we do not laugh, that is because our admiration covers the humorous pleasure. In the case of the rogue who refuses to catch cold on the way to execution we laugh heartily. The situation that ought to drive the criminal to despair might rouse intense pity in us; but that pity is inhibited because we understand that he, who is more closely concerned, makes nothing of the situation. As a result of this understanding, the expenditure on the pity, which was already prepared, becomes unutilizable and we laugh it off. We are, as it were, infected by the rogue’s indifference - though we notice that it has cost him a great expenditure of psychical work.

An economy of pity is one of the most frequent sources of humorous pleasure. Mark Twain’s humour usually works with his mechanism. In an account of his brother’s life, for instance, he tells us how he was at one time employed on a great road-making enterprise. The premature explosion of a mine blew him up into the air and he came down again far away from the place where he had been working. We are bound to have feelings of sympathy for the victim of the accident and would like to ask whether he was injured by it. But when the story goes on to say that his brother had a half-day’s wages deducted for being ‘absent from his place of employment’ we are entirely distracted from our pity and become almost as hard-hearted as the contractor and almost as indifferent to possible damage to the brother’s health. On another occasion Mark Twain presents us with his family tree, which he traces back to one of Columbus’s fellow-voyagers. He then describes this ancestor’s character and how his baggage consisted entirely of a number of pieces of washing each of which had a different laundry-mark - here we cannot help laughing at the cost of an economy of the feelings of piety into which we were prepared to enter at the beginning of this family history. The mechanism of the humorous pleasure is not interfered with by our knowledge that this pedigree is a fictitious one and that the fiction serves the satirical purpose of exposing the embellishments in similar accounts by other people: it is as independent of the condition that it must be real as in the case of making things comic. In yet another story, Mark Twain describes how his brother constructed a subterranean dwelling, into which he brought a bed, a table and a lamp and which he roofed over with a large piece of sailcloth with a hole in the middle. At night, however, after the hut was finished, a cow that was being driven home fell through the opening of the roof on to the table and put out the lamp. His brother patiently helped to get the beast out and put the establishment to rights again. Next night the same interruption was repeated and his brother behaved as before. And so it was every following night. Repetition makes the story comic, but Mark Twain ends it by reporting that on the forty-sixth night, when the cow fell through again, his brother finally remarked: ‘The thing’s beginning to get monotonous.’ At this our humorous pleasure cannot be kept back, for what we had long expected to hear was that this obstinate set of misfortunes would make his brother angry. And indeed the small contributions of humour that we produce ourselves are as a rule made at the cost of anger - instead of getting angry.²

¹ [‘Our heads have the right to fall before you covered.’]

² The grandiose humorous effect of a figure like that of the fat knight Sir John Falstaff rests on an economy in contempt and indignation. We recognize him as an undeserving gormandizer and swindler, but our condenmation is disarmed by a whole number of factors. We can see that he knows himself as well as we do; he impresses us by his wit, and, besides this, his physical misproportion has the effect of encouraging us to take a comic view of him instead of a serious one, as though the demands of morality and honour must rebound from so fat a stomach. His doings are on the whole harmless, and are almost excused by the comic baseness of the people he cheats. We admit that the poor fellow has a right to try to live and enjoy himself like anyone else, and we almost pity him because in the chief situations we find him a plaything in the hands of someone far his superior. So we cannot feel angry with him and we add all that we economize in indignation with him to the comic pleasure which he affords us apart from this. Sir John’s own humour arises in fact from the superiority of an ego which neither his physical nor his moral defects can rob of its cheerfulness and assurance.

The ingenious knight Don Quixote de la Mancha is, on the contrary, a figure who possesses no humour himself but who with his seriousness offers us a pleasure which could be called humorous, though its mechanism shows an important divergence from that of humour. Don Quixote is originally a purely comic figure, a big child; the phantasies from his books of chivalry have gone to his head. It is well known that to begin with the author intended nothing else of him and that his creation gradually grew far beyond its creator’s first intentions. But after the author had equipped this ridiculous figure with the deepest wisdom and the noblest purposes and had made him into the symbolic representative of an idealism which believes in the realization of its aims and takes duties seriously and takes promises literally, this figure ceased to have a comic effect. Just as in other cases humorous pleasure arises from the prevention of an emotion, so it does here from the interference with comic pleasure. But it is clear that these examples have already carried us a long way from the simple cases of humour.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1806

The species of humour are extraordinarily variegated according to the nature of the emotion which is economized in favour of the humour: pity, anger, pain, tenderness, and so on. Their number seems to remain uncompleted because the kingdom of humour is constantly being enlarged whenever an artist or writer succeeds in submitting some hitherto unconquered emotions to the control of humour, in making them, by devices like those in the examples we have given, into sources of humorous pleasure. The artists in Simplicissismus, for instance, have had astonishing results in achieving humour at the cost of horror and disgust. The forms in which humour is manifested are, moreover, determined by two peculiarities which are connected with the conditions under which it is generated. Humour may, in the first place, appear merged with a joke or some other species of the comic; in that case its task is to get rid of a possibility implicit in the situation that an affect may be generated which would interfere with the pleasurable outcome. In the second place, it may stop this generating of an affect entirely or only partially; this last is actually the commoner case since it is easier to bring about, and it produces the various forms of ‘broken’¹ humour - the humour that smiles through tears. It withdraws a part of its energy from the affect and in exchange gives it a tinge of humour.

The humorous pleasure derived from sympathy originates, as can be seen from the examples above, from a peculiar technique comparable to displacement, by means of which the release of affect that is already in preparation is disappointed and the cathexis diverted on to something else, often on to something of secondary importance. But this does not help us at all to understand the process by which the displacement away from the generating of affect takes place in the humorous person himself. We can see that the receiver imitates the creator of the humour in his mental processes, but this tells us nothing of the forces which make the process possible in the latter.

¹ A term which is used in quite another sense in Vischer’s aesthetics.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1807

We can only say that if someone succeeds, for instance, in disregarding a painful affect by reflecting on the greatness of the interests of the world as compared with his own smallness, we do not regard this as an achievement of humour but of philosophical thought, and if we put ourselves into his train of thought, we obtain no yield of pleasure. Humorous displacement is thus just as impossible under the glare of conscious attention as is comic comparison; like the latter, it is tied to the condition of remaining preconscious or automatic.

We can gain some information about humorous displacement if we look at it in the light of a defensive process. Defensive processes are the psychical correlative of the flight reflex and perform the task of preventing the generation of unpleasure from internal sources. In fulfilling this task they serve mental events as an automatic regulation, which in the end, incidentally, turns out to be detrimental and has to be subjected to conscious thinking. I have indicated one particular form of this defence, repression that has failed, as the operative mechanism for the development of psychoneuroses. Humour can be regarded as the highest of these defensive processes. It scorns to withdraw the ideational content bearing the distressing affect from conscious attention as repression does, and thus surmounts the automatism of defence. It brings this about by finding a means of withdrawing the energy from the release of unpleasure that is already in preparation and of transforming it, by discharge, into pleasure. It is even conceivable that once again it may be a connection with the infantile that puts the means for achieving this at its disposal. Only in childhood have there been distressing affects at which the adult would smile to-day - just as he laughs, as a humorist, at his present distressing affects. The exaltation of his ego, to which the humorous displacement bears witness, and of which the translation would no doubt be ‘I am too big (too fine) to be distressed by these things’, might well be derived from his comparing his present ego with his childish one. This view is to some extent supported by the part played by the infantile in neurotic processes of repression.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1808

On the whole humour is closer to the comic than to jokes. It shares with the former its psychical localization in the preconscious whereas jokes, as we have had to suppose, are formed as a compromise between the unconscious and the preconscious. On the other hand humour does not participate in a peculiar characteristic common to jokes and the comic, on which we have perhaps not yet laid sufficient stress. It is a necessary condition for generating the comic that we should be obliged, simultaneously or in rapid succession, to apply to one and the same act of ideation two different ideational methods, between which the ‘comparison’ is then made and the comic difference emerges. Differences in expenditure of this kind arise between that belongs to someone else and to oneself, between what is as usual and what has been changed, between what is expected and what happens.¹ In the case of jokes, the difference between two simultaneous methods of viewing things, which operate with a different expenditure, applies to the process in the person who hears the joke. One of these two views, following the hints contained in the joke, passes along the path of thought through the unconscious; the other stays on the surface and views the joke like any other wording that has emerged from the preconscious and become conscious. We should perhaps be justified in representing the pleasure from a joke that is heard as being derived from the difference between these two methods of viewing it.² Here we are saying of jokes what we described as their possessing a Janus head, while the relation between jokes and the comic had still to be cleared up.³

¹ If we are prepared to do a little violence to the concept of ‘expectation’, we can, following Lipps, include a very large region of the comic under the comic of expectation. But what are probably the most basic instances of the comic, those arising from a comparison between someone else’s expenditure and one’s own, would be the very ones that fitted in least easily to this grouping.

² We can accept this formula without question, since it leads to nothing that would contradict our earlier discussions. The difference between the two expenditures must in essence come down to the inhibitory expenditure that is saved. The lack of this economy in inhibition in the case of the comic, and the absence of quantitative contrast in the case of jokes, would determine the distinction between the comic feeling and the impression of a joke, in spite of their agreeing in the characteristic of using two kinds of ideational activity for the same view.

³ This peculiarity of the ‘double face’ [in French in the original] has naturally not escaped the authorities. Mélinand (1895), from whom I have borrowed this phrase, states the determinants of laughter in the following formula: ‘Ce qui fait rire c’est ce qui est à la fois, d’un côté, absurde et de l’autre, familier.’ [‘What makes one laugh is what is on the one hand absurd, and on the other familiar.’] This formula fits jokes better than the comic, but does not completely cover the former either. - Bergson (1900, 98) defines the comic situation by the ‘interférence des séries’: ‘Une situation est toujours comique quand elle appartient en même temps à deux séries d’événements absolument indépendantes, et qu’elle peut s’interpréter à la fois dans deux sens tout différents.’ [‘A situation is always comic when it belongs at the same time to two series of events that are absolutely independent, and where it can be interpreted simultaneously in two quite different senses.’] - Lipps regards the comic as ‘the bigness and smallness of the same thing’.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1809

In the case of humour the characteristic which we have just brought forward becomes effaced. It is true that we feel humorous pleasure when an emotion is avoided which we should have expected because it usually accompanies the situation, and to that extent humour too comes under the extended concept of the comic of expectation. But with humour it is no longer a question of two different methods of viewing the same subject matter. The fact that the situation is dominated by the emotion that is to be avoided, which is of an unpleasurable character, puts an end to the possibility of comparing it with the characteristics of the comic and of jokes. Humorous displacement is in fact a case of a liberated expenditure being used elsewhere - a case which has been shown to be so perilous to a comic effect.

We are now at the end of our task, having reduced the mechanism of humorous pleasure to a formula analogous to those for comic pleasure and for jokes. The pleasure in jokes has seemed to us to arise from an economy in expenditure upon inhibition, the pleasure in the comic from an economy in expenditure upon ideation (upon cathexis) and the pleasure in humour from an economy in expenditure upon feeling. In all three modes of working of our mental apparatus the pleasure is derived from an economy. All three are agreed in representing methods of regaining from mental activity a pleasure which has in fact been lost through the development of that activity. For the euphoria which we endeavour to reach by these means is nothing other than the mood of a period of life in which we were accustomed to deal with our psychical work in general with a small expenditure of energy - the mood of our childhood, when we were ignorant of the comic, when we were incapable of jokes and when we had no need of humour to make us feel happy in our life.

1810

DELUSIONS AND DREAMS IN JENSEN’S GRADIVA

(1907)

1811

Intentionally left blank

1812

DELUSIONS AND DREAMS IN JENSEN’S GRADIVA

I

A group of men who regarded it as a settled fact that the essential riddles of dreaming have been solved by the efforts of the author of the present work¹ found their curiosity aroused one day by the question of the class of dreams that have never been dreamt at all - dreams created by imaginative writers and ascribed to invented characters in the course of a story. The notion of submitting this class of dreams to an investigation might seem a waste of energy and a strange thing to undertake; but from one point of view it could be considered justifiable. It is far from being generally believed that dreams have a meaning and can be interpreted. Science and the majority of educated people smile if they are set the task of interpreting a dream. Only the common people, who cling to superstitions and who on this point are carrying on the convictions of antiquity, continue to insist that dreams can be interpreted. The author of The Interpretation of Dreams has ventured, in the face of the reproaches of strict science, to become a partisan of antiquity and superstition. He is, it is true, far from believing that dreams foretell the future, for the unveiling of which men have vainly striven from time immemorial by every forbidden means. But even he has not been able entirely to reject the relation of dreams to the future. For the dream, when the laborious work of translating it had been accomplished, revealed itself to him as a wish of the dreamer’s represented as fulfilled; and who could deny that wishes are predominantly turned towards the future?

I have just said that dreams are fulfilled wishes. Anyone who is not afraid of making his way through an abstruse book, and who does not insist on a complicated problem being represented to him as easy and simple in order to save him trouble and at the cost of honesty and truth, may find the detailed proof of this thesis in the work I have mentioned. Meanwhile, he may set on one side the objections which will undoubtedly occur to him against equating dreams and wish-fulfilments.

¹ See Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a).

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1813

But we have gone a long way ahead. It is not a question yet of establishing whether the meaning of a dream can always be rendered by a fulfilled wish, or whether it may not just as often stand for an anxious expectation, an intention, a reflection, and so on. On the contrary, the question that first arises is whether dreams have a meaning at all, whether they ought to be assessed as mental events. Science answers ‘no’: it explains dreaming as a purely physiological process, behind which, accordingly, there is no need to look for sense, meaning or purpose. Somatic stimuli, so it says, play upon the mental instrument during sleep and thus bring to consciousness now one idea and now another, robbed of all mental content: dreams are comparable only to twitchings, not to expressive movements, of the mind.

Now in this dispute as to the estimation in which dreams should be held, imaginative writers seem to be on the same side as the ancients, as the superstitious public and as the author of The Interpretation of Dreams. For when an author makes the characters constructed by his imagination dream, he follows the everyday experience that people’s thoughts and feelings are continued in sleep and he aims at nothing else than to depict his heroes’ states of mind by their dreams. But creative writers are valuable allies and their evidence is to be prized highly, for they are apt to know a whole host of things between heaven and earth of which our philosophy has not yet let us dream. In their knowledge of the mind they are far in advance of us everyday people, for they draw upon sources which we have not yet opened up for science. If only this support given by writers in favour of dreams having a meaning were less ambiguous! A strictly critical eye might object that writers take their stand neither for nor against particular dreams having a psychical meaning; they are content to show how the sleeping mind twitches under the excitations which have remained active in it as off-shoots of waking life.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1814

But even this sobering thought does not damp our interest in the fashion in which writers make use of dreams. Even if thus enquiry should teach us nothing new about the nature of dreams, it may perhaps enable us from this angle to gain some small insight into the nature of creative writing. Real dreams were already regarded as unrestrained and unregulated structures - and now we are confronted by unfettered imitations of these dreams! There is far less freedom and arbitrariness in mental life, however, than we are inclined to assume - there may even be none at all. What we call chance in the world outside can, as is well known, be resolved into laws. So, too, what we call arbitrariness in the mind rests upon laws, which we are only now beginning dimly to suspect. Let us, then, see what we find!

There are two methods that we might adopt for this inquiry. One would be to enter deeply into a particular case, into the dream-creations of one author in one of his works. The other would be to bring together and contrast all the examples that could be found of the use of dreams in the works of different authors. The second method would seem to be far the more effective and perhaps the only justifiable one, for it frees us at once from the difficulties involved in adopting the artificial concept of ‘writers’ as a class. On investigation this class falls apart into individual writers of the most various worth - among them some whom we are accustomed to honour as the deepest observers of the human mind. In spite of this, however, these pages will be devoted to an enquiry of the first sort. It happened that in the group of men among whom the notion first arose there was one who recalled that in the work of fiction that had last caught his fancy there were several dreams which had, as it were, looked at him with familiar faces and invited him to attempt to apply to them the method of The Interpretation of Dreams. He confessed that the subject-matter of the little work and the scene in which it was laid may no doubt have played the chief part in creating his enjoyment. For the story was set in the frame of Pompeii and dealt with a young archaeologist who had surrendered his interest in life in exchange for an interest in the remains of classical antiquity and who was now brought back to real life by a roundabout path which was strange but perfectly logical. During the treatment of this genuinely poetic material the reader had been stirred by all kinds of thoughts akin to it and in harmony with it. The work was a short tale by Wilhelm Jensen - Gradiva - which its author himself described as a ‘Pompeian phantasy’.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1815

And now I ought properly to ask all my readers to put aside this little essay and instead to spend some time in acquainting themselves with Gradiva (which first appeared in the bookshops in 1903), so that what I refer to in the following pages may be familiar to them. But for the benefit of those who have already read Gradiva I will recall the substance of the story in a brief summary; and I shall count upon their memory to restore to it all the charm of which this treatment will deprive it.

A young archaeologist, Norbert Hanold, had discovered in a museum of antiquities in Rome a relief which had so immensely attracted him that he was greatly pleased at obtaining an excellent plaster cast of it which he could hang in his study in a German university town and gaze at with interest. The sculpture represented a fully-grown girl stepping along, with her flowing dress a little pulled up so as to reveal her sandalled feet. One foot rested squarely on the ground; the other, lifted from the ground in the act of following after, touched it only with the tips of the toes, while the sole and heel rose almost perpendicularly. It was probably the unusual and peculiarly charming gait thus presented that attracted the sculptor’s notice and that still, after so many centuries, riveted the eyes of its archaeological admirer.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1816

The interest taken by the hero of the story in this relief is the basic psychological fact in the narrative. It was not immediately explicable. ‘Dr. Norbert Hanold, Lecturer in Archaeology, did not in fact find in the relief anything calling for special notice from the point of view of his branch of science.’ (3.)¹ ‘He could not explain to himself what there was in it that had provoked his attention. He only knew that he had been attracted by something and that the effect had continued unchanged ever since.’ But his imagination was occupied with the sculpture without ceasing. He found something ‘of to-day’ about it, as though the artist had had a glimpse in the street and captured it ‘from the life’. He gave the girl thus pictured as she stepped along the name of ‘Gradiva’ - ‘the girl who steps along’. He made up a story that she was no doubt the daughter of an aristocratic family, perhaps ‘of a patrician aedile, who carried out his office in the service of Ceres’, and that she was on her way to the goddess’s temple. Then he found it hard to fit her quiet, calm nature into the busy life of a capital city. He convinced himself, rather, that she must be transported to Pompeii, and that somewhere there she was stepping across the curious stepping-stones which have been dug up and which made it possible to cross dry-foot from one side of the street to the other in rainy weather, though allowing carriage-wheels to pass between them as well. Her features struck him as having a Greek look and he had no doubt that she was of Hellenic origin. Little by little he brought the whole of his archaeological learning into the service of these and other phantasies relating to the original who had been the model for the relief.

¹ [Plain numbers in brackets are page references to Jensen, Gradiva, 1903.]

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1817

But now he found himself confronted by an ostensibly scientific problem which called for a solution. It was a question of his arriving at a critical judgement as to ‘whether Gradiva’s gait as she stepped along had been reproduced by the sculptor in a life-like manner’. He found that he himself was not capable of imitating it, and in his quest for the ‘reality’ of this gait he was led ‘to make observations of his own from the life in order to clear the matter up’. (9.) This, however, forced him into a course of behaviour that was quite foreign to him. ‘Hitherto, the female sex had been to him no more than the concept of something made of marble or bronze, and he had never paid the slightest attention to its contemporary representatives.’ Social duties had always seemed to him an unavoidable nuisance; he saw and heard young ladies whom he came across in society so little that when he next met them he would pass them by without a sign; and this, of course, made no favourable impression on them. Now, however, the scientific task which he had taken on compelled him, in dry, but more especially in wet, weather, to look eagerly in the street at women’s and girls’ feet as they came into view - an activity which brought him some angry, and some encouraging, glances from those who came under his observation; ‘but he was aware of neither the one nor the other.’ (10.) As an outcome of these careful studies he was forced to the conclusion that Gradiva’s gait was not discoverable in reality; and this filled him with regret and vexation.

Soon afterwards he had a terrifying dream, in which he found himself in ancient Pompeii on the day of the eruption of Vesuvius and witnessed the city’s destruction. ‘As he was standing at the edge of the forum beside the Temple of Jupiter, he suddenly saw Gradiva at no great distance from him. Till then he had had no thought of her presence, but now it occurred to him all at once and as though it was something natural that, since she was a Pompeian, she was living in her native town, and, without his having suspected it, living as his contemporary.’ (12.) Fear of the fate that lay before her provoked him to utter a warning cry, whereupon the figure, as she calmly stepped along, turned her face towards him. But she then proceeded on her way untroubled, till she reached the portico of the temple; there she took her seat on one of the steps and slowly laid her head down on it, while her face grew paler and paler, as though it were turning into marble. When he hurried after her, he found her stretched out on the broad step with a peaceful expression, like someone asleep, till the rain of ashes buried her form.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1818

When he awoke, the confused shouts of the inhabitants of Pompeii calling for help still seemed to echo in his ears, and the dull muttering of the breakers in the agitated sea. But even after his returning reflection recognized the sounds as the awakening signs of noisy life in a great city, he retained his belief for a long time in the reality of what he had dreamt. When at length he had freed himself of the notion that he himself had been present at the destruction of Pompeii almost two thousand years earlier, he was nevertheless left with what seemed a true conviction that Gradiva had lived in Pompeii and been buried there with the others in the year 79 A.D. The dream had as its result that now for the first time in his phantasies about Gradiva he mourned for her as someone who was lost.

While he was leaning out of the window, absorbed in these thoughts, his attention was caught by a canary warbling its song from a cage in the open window of the house opposite. Suddenly something passed with a start through the mind of the young man, who seems not yet to have fully woken from his dream. He thought he saw in the street a form like his Gradiva, and thought he even recognized her characteristic gait. Without thinking, he hurried into the street so as to catch up with her; and it was only the laughter and jeers of the passers-by at his early-morning attire that quickly drove him back into his house. When he was in his room again, the singing of the canary in its cage once more caught his attention and suggested a comparison with himself. He too, so it seemed to him, was like someone sitting in a cage, though it was easier for him to escape from it. As though as a further aftermath of his dream, and perhaps, too, under the influence of the mild air of spring, a resolve took shape in him to make a spring-time journey to Italy. A scientific excuse for it soon presented itself, even though ‘the impulse to make this journey had arisen from a feeling he could not name.’ (24.)

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1819

Let us pause for a moment at this journey, planned for such remarkably uncogent reasons, and take a closer look at our hero’s personality and behaviour. He still appears to us as incomprehensible and foolish; we have no idea how his peculiar folly will be linked to human feeling and so arouse our sympathy. It is an author’s privilege to be allowed to leave us in such uncertainty. The charm of his language and the ingenuity of his ideas offer us a provisional reward for the reliance we place in him and for the still unearned sympathy which we are ready to feel for his hero. Of this hero we are further told that he was pre-ordained by family tradition to become an archaeologist, that in his later isolation and independence he was wholly absorbed in his studies and had turned completely away from life and its pleasures. Marble and bronze alone were truly alive for him; they alone expressed the purpose and value of human life. But nature, perhaps with benevolent intent, had infused into his blood a corrective of an entirely unscientific sort - an extremely lively imagination, which could show itself not only in his dreams but often in his waking life as well. This division between imagination and intellect destined him to become an artist or a neurotic; he was one of those whose kingdom is not of this world. Thus it was that it could come about that his interest was attached to a relief representing a girl stepping along in a peculiar fashion, that he wove his phantasies around her, imagined a name and origin for her, placed the figure he had created in the setting of the Pompeii that was buried more than eighteen hundred years before, and finally, after a strange anxiety-dream, magnified his phantasy of the existence and death of this girl named Gradiva into a delusion, which gained an influence over his actions. Such products of the imagination would seem to us astonishing and inexplicable if we met them in someone in real life. Since our hero, Norbert Hanold, is a fictitious person, we may perhaps put a timid question to his author, and ask whether his imagination was determined by forces other than its own arbitrary choice.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1820

We had left our hero at the moment when he was apparently being led by the song of a canary to decide on a journey to Italy, the purpose of which was evidently not clear to him. We learn further that he had no fixed plan or goal for his journey. An inner restlessness and dissatisfaction drove him from Rome to Naples and from thence further still. He found himself among the swarm of honeymooners and was forced to notice the loving couples of ‘Edwins’ and ‘Angelinas’,¹ but was quite unable to understand their goings-on. He came to the conclusion that of all the follies of mankind ‘getting married takes first place, as the greatest and most incomprehensible, and the senseless honeymoon trips to Italy are, in a way, the crowning touch of this idiocy’. (27.) Having been disturbed in his sleep by the proximity of a loving couple in Rome, he hurriedly fled to Naples, only to find other ‘Edwins’ and ‘Angelinas’ there. Having gathered from their conversation that the majority of these pairs of birds had no intention of nesting among the ruins of Pompeii, but were flying towards Capri, he determined to do what they did not, and only a few days after his departure found himself ‘contrary to his expectation and intentions’ in Pompeii.

But without finding there the repose he was in search of. The part which had so far been played by the honeymoon couples, who had troubled his spirits and harassed his thoughts, was now taken over by the house-flies, which he was inclined to regard as the incarnation of all that is absolutely evil and unnecessary. The two sorts of tormenting spirits melted into a unity: some of the pairs of flies reminded him of the honeymooners, and he suspected that they too were addressing each other in their language as ‘dearest Edwin’ and ‘darling Angelina’. Eventually, he could not but realize that ‘his dissatisfaction was not caused only by his surroundings but that its source was in part derived from within himself’. (42.) He felt that ‘he was discontented because he lacked something, though it was not clear to him what’.

¹ [‘August’ and ‘Grete’ in the original. The names recur frequently in the course of the story and it has seemed best to replace them by those conventionally applied to English honeymoon couples of the late Victorian age.]

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1821

Next morning he passed through the ‘Ingresso’ into Pompeii, and, after getting rid of the guide, strolled aimlessly through the town, without, strangely enough, remembering that only a short time before he had been present in his dream at its burial. When later on, at the ‘hot and holy’ mid-day hour, which the ancients regarded as the hour of ghosts, the other visitors had taken flight and the heaps of ruins lay before him desolate and bathed in sunlight, he found that he was able to carry himself back into the life that had been buried - but not by the help of science. ‘What it taught was a lifeless, archaeological way of looking at things, and what came from its mouth was a dead, philological language. These were of no help to an understanding through the spirit, the feelings, the heart - put it as you please. Whoever had a longing for that must stand here alone, the only living creature, in the hot silence of mid-day, among the relics of the past, and look, but not with bodily eyes, and listen, but not with physical ears. And then . . . the dead wakened and Pompeii began to live once more.’ (55.)

While he was thus animating the past with his imagination, he suddenly saw the unmistakable Gradiva of his relief come out of a house and step trippingly over the lava stepping stones to the other side of the street, just as he had seen her do in his dream the other night, when she had lain down as though to sleep, on the steps of the Temple of Apollo. ‘And together with his memory something else came into his consciousness for the first time: without being aware himself of the impulse within him, he had come to Italy and had travelled on to Pompeii, without stopping in Rome or Naples, in order to see whether he could find any traces of her. And "traces" literally; for with her peculiar gait she must have left behind an imprint of her toes in the ashes distinct from all the rest.’ (58.)

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1822

At this point the tension in which the author has hitherto held us grows for a moment into a painful sense of bewilderment. It is not only our hero who has evidently lost his balance; we too have lost our bearings in the face of the apparition of Gradiva, who was first a marble figure and then an imaginary one. Is she a hallucination of our hero, led astray by his delusions? It she a ‘real’ ghost? or a living person? Not that we need believe in ghosts when we draw up this list. The author, who has called his story a ‘phantasy’, has found no occasion so far for informing us whether he intends to leave us in our world, decried for being prosaic and governed by the laws of science, or whether he wishes to transport us into another and imaginary world, in which spirits and ghosts are given reality. As we know from the examples of Hamlet and Macbeth, we are prepared to follow him there without hesitation. If so, the imaginative archaeologist’s delusion would have to be measured by another standard. Indeed, when we consider how improbable it must be that a real person could exist who bore an exact resemblance to the antique sculpture, our list of alternatives shrinks to two: a hallucination or a mid-day ghost. A small detail in the account soon cancels the first possibility. A large lizard was lying motionless, stretched out in the sunshine, but fled at the approach of Gradiva’s foot and darted away across the lava paving-stones. So it was no hallucination, but something outside our dreamer’s mind. But could the reality of a rediviva startle a lizard?

Gradiva disappeared in front of the House of Meleager. We shall not be surprised to hear that Norbert Hanold pursued his delusion that Pompeii had come to life around him at the mid-day hour of ghosts and supposed that Gradiva too had come to life again and had entered the house in which she had lived before the fatal August day in 79 A.D. Ingenious speculations upon the personality of its owner (after whom the house was probably named), and upon Gradiva’s relationship to him, shot through his head, and proved that his science was now completely in the service of his imagination. He entered the house, and suddenly found the apparition once more, sitting on some low steps between two yellow columns. ‘There was something white stretched out across her knees; he could not clearly discern what it was; it seemed to be a sheet of papyrus . . .’ On the basis of his latest theories if her origin he addressed her in Greek, and waited with trepidation to learn whether, in her phantom presence she possessed the power of speech. Since she made no reply, he addressed her instead in Latin. Then, with a smile on her lips: ‘If you want to speak to me’, she said, ‘you must do it in German.’

What a humiliation for us readers! So the author has been making fun of us, and, with the help, as it were, of a reflection of the Pompeian sunshine, has inveigled us into a delusion on a small scale, so that we may be forced to pass a milder judgement on the poor wretch on whom the mid-day sun was really shining. Now, however, that we have been cured of our brief confusion, we know that Gradiva was a German girl of flesh and blood - a solution which we were inclined to reject as the most improbable one. And now, with a quiet sense of superiority, we may wait to learn what the relation was between the girl and her marble image, and how our young archaeologist arrived at the phantasies which pointed towards her real personality.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1823

But our hero was not torn from his delusion as quickly as we have been, for, as the author tells us, ‘though his belief made him happy, he had to take the acceptance of quite a considerable number of mysteries into the bargain’. (140.) Moreover, this delusion probably had internal roots in him of which we know nothing and which do not exist in ourselves. In his case, no doubt, energetic treatment would seem necessary before he could be brought back to reality. Meanwhile all he could do was to fit his delusion into the wonderful experience he had just had. Gradiva, who had perished with the rest in the destruction of Pompeii, could be nothing other than a mid-day ghost who had returned to life for the brief ghostly hour. But why was it that, after hearing her reply delivered in German, he exclaimed ‘I knew your voice sounded like that’? Not only we, but the girl herself was bound to ask the question, and Hanold had to admit that he had never heard it, though he had expected to in his dream, when he called to her as she lay down to sleep on the temple steps. He begged her to do the same thing again as she had then; but now she rose, gave him a strange look, and in a few paces disappeared between the columns of the court. A pretty butterfly had shortly before fluttered round her for a while; and he interpreted it as a messenger from Hades reminding the dead girl that she must return, since the mid-day hour of ghosts was at an end. Hanold still had time to call after the girl as she vanished: ‘Will you return here to morrow at the mid-day hour?’ To us, however, who can now venture upon more sober interpretations, it looks as though the young lady had seen something improper in the remark addressed to her by Hanold and had left him with a sense of having been insulted; for after all she could have known nothing of his dream. May not her sensibility have detected the erotic nature of his request, whose motive in Hanold’s eyes lay in its relation to his dream?

After Gradiva’s disappearance our hero had a careful look at all the guests congregated for their mid-day meal at the Hotel Diomède and went on to do the same at the Hotel Suisse, and he was then able to feel assured that in neither of the only two hotels known to him in Pompeii was there anyone bearing the remotest resemblance to Gradiva. He would of course have rejected as nonsensical the idea that he might actually meet Gradiva in one of the two inns. And presently the wine pressed from the hot soil of Vesuvius helped to intensify the whirl of feeling in which he spent the day.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1824

For the following day one thing only was fixed: that Hanold must once more be in the House of Meleager at mid-day; and, in expectation of that moment, he made his way into Pompeii by an irregular route - over the ancient city wall. A sprig of asphodel, hung about with its white bell shaped blossoms, seemed to him significant enough, as the flower of the underworld, for him to pluck it and carry it with him. But as he waited, the whole science of archaeology seemed to him the most pointless and indifferent thing in the world, for another interest had taken possession of him: the problem of ‘what could be the nature of the bodily apparition of a being like Gradiva, who was at once dead and, even though only at the mid-day hour, alive’. (80.) He was fearful, too, that he might not meet her that day, for perhaps her return could be permitted only at long intervals; and when he perceived her once again between the columns, he thought her apparition was only a trick of his imagination, and in his pain exclaimed: ‘Oh! if only you still existed and lived!’ This time, however, he had evidently been too critical, for the apparition possessed a voice, which asked him if he was meaning to bring her the white flower, and engaged him, disconcerted once again, in a long conversation.

To his readers, however, to whom Gradiva has already grown of interest as a living person, the author explains that the displeased and repelling look which she had given him the day before had yielded to an expression of searching interest and curiosity. And indeed she now proceeded to question him, asked for an explanation of his remark on the previous day and enquired when it was that he had stood beside her as she lay down to sleep. In this way she learnt of his dream, in which she had perished along with her native city, and then of the marble relief and the posture of the foot which had so much attracted the archaeologist. And now she showed herself ready to demonstrate her gait, and this proved that the only divergence from the original portrait of Gradiva was that her sandals were replaced by light sand-coloured shoes of fine leather - which she explained as being an adaptation to the present day. She was evidently entering into his delusion, the whole compass of which she elicited from him, without ever contradicting it. Only once did she seem to be distracted from the part she was playing, by an emotion of her own; and this was when, with his thoughts on the relief, he declared that he had recognized her at the first glance. Since at this stage of their conversation she still knew nothing about the relief, it was natural for her to misunderstand Hanold’s words; but she quickly recovered herself, and it is only to us that some of her remarks sound as though they had a double sense, as though besides their meaning in the context of the delusion they also meant something real and present-day - for instance, when she regretted that he had not succeeded in confirming the Gradiva gait in his experiments in the streets: ‘What a pity! perhaps you would not have had to make the long journey here!’ (89.) She also learned that he had given her portrait on the relief the name of ‘Gradiva’, and told him her real name, ‘Zoe’. ‘The name suits you beautifully, but it sounds to me like a bitter mockery, for Zoe means life.’ ‘One must bow to the inevitable’, was her reply, ‘and I have long grown used to being dead.’ Promising to be at the same place again at the mid-day hour next day, she bade him farewell after once more asking him for the sprig of asphodel: ‘to those who are more fortunate people give roses in the spring; but to me it is right that you should give the flower of forgetfulness.’ No doubt melancholy suited some one who had been so long dead and had returned to life again for a few short hours.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1825

We are beginning to understand now, and to feel some hope. If the young lady in whose form Gradiva had come to life again accepted Hanold’s delusion so fully, she was probably doing so in order to set him free from it. There was no other way of doing so; to contradict it would have put an end to any such possibility. Even the serious treatment of a real case of illness of the kind could proceed in no other way than to begin by taking up the same ground as the delusional structure and then investigating it as completely as possible. If Zoe was the right person for the job, we shall soon learn, no doubt, how to cure a delusion like our hero’s. We should also be glad to know how such delusions arise. It would be a strange coincidence - but, nevertheless, not without an example or parallel - if the treatment of the delusion were to coincide with its investigation and if the explanation of its origin were to be revealed precisely while it was being dissected. We may suspect, of course, that, if so, our case of illness might end up as a ‘commonplace’ love-story. But the healing power of love against a delusion is not to be despised - and was not our hero’s infatuation for his Gradiva sculpture a complete instance of being in love, though of being in love with something past and lifeless?

After Gradiva’s disappearance, there was only a distant sound, like the laughing call of a bird flying over the ruined city. The young man, now by himself, picked up a white object that had been left behind by Gradiva: not a sheet of papyrus, but a sketch-book with pencil drawings of various scenes in Pompeii. We should be inclined to regard her having forgotten the book there as a pledge of her return, for it is our belief that no one forgets anything without some secret reason or hidden motive.

The remainder of the day brought Hanold all manner of strange discoveries and confirmations, which he failed to synthesize into a whole. He perceived to-day in the wall of the portico where Gradiva had vanished a narrow gap, which was wide enough, however, to allow someone unusually slim to pass through it. He recognized that Zoe-Gradiva need not have sunk into the earth here - an idea which now seemed to him so unreasonable that he felt ashamed of having once believed in it; she might well have used the gap as a way of reaching her grave. A slight shadow seemed to him to melt away at the end of the Street of the Tombs in front of what is known as the Villa of Diomedes.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1826

In the same whirl of feeling as on the previous day and deep in the same problems, he now strolled round the environs of Pompeii. What, he wondered, might be the bodily nature of Zoe-Gradiva? Would one feel anything if one touched her hand? A strange urge drove him to a determination to put this experiment to the test. Yet an equally strong reluctance held him back even from the very idea.

On a sun-bathed slope he met an elderly gentleman who, from his accoutrements, must be a zoologist or botanist and who seemed to be engaged in a hunt. This individual turned towards him and said: ‘Are you interested in faraglionensis as well? I should hardly have suspected it, but it seems to be quite probable that it occurs not only on the Faraglioni Islands off Capri, but has established itself on the mainland too. The method prescribed by our colleague Eimer is a really good one; I have made use of it many times already, with excellent results. Please keep quite still . . .’ (96.) Here the speaker broke off and placed a snare made of a long blade of grass in front of a crack in the rocks out of which the small iridescent blue head of a lizard was peering. Hanold left the lizard-hunter with a critical feeling that it was scarcely credible what foolish and strange purposes could lead people to make the long journey to Pompeii - without, needless to say, including in his criticism himself and his intention of searching in the ashes of Pompeii for Gradiva’s footprints. Moreover, the gentleman’s face seemed familiar, as though he had had a glimpse of it in one of the two hotels; his manner of address, too, had been as though he were speaking to an acquaintance.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1827

In the course of his further walk, he arrived by a side road at a house which he had not yet discovered and which turned out to be a third hotel, the ‘Albergo del Sole’. The landlord, with nothing else to do, took the opportunity of showing off his house and the excavated treasures it contained to their best advantage. He asserted that he had been present when the pair of young lovers had been found in the neighbourhood of the Forum, who, in the knowledge of their inevitable doom, had awaited death closely embraced in each other’s arms. Hanold had heard of this before, and had shrugged his shoulders over it as a fabulous tale invented by some imaginative story-teller; but to-day the landlord’s words aroused his belief and this was increased when a metal clasp was produced, covered with a green patina, which was said to have been retrieved from the ashes beside the girl’s remains. He purchased this clasp without any further critical doubts, and when, as he left the albergo, he saw in an open window a nodding sprig of asphodel covered with white blossoms, the sight of the funeral flowers came over him as a confirmation of the genuineness of his new possession.

But with the clasp a new delusion took possession of him, or rather the old one had a small piece added to it - no very good augury, it would seem, for the treatment that had been begun. A pair of young lovers in an embrace had been dug out not far from the Forum, and it was in that very neighbourhood, by the Temple of Apollo, that in his dream he had seen Gradiva lie down to sleep. Was it not possible that in fact she had gone further along from the Forum and had met someone and that they had then died together? A tormenting feeling, which we might perhaps liken to jealousy, arose out of this suspicion. He appeased it by reflecting on the uncertainty of the construction, and brought himself to his senses far enough to be able to take his evening meal at the Hotel Diomède. There his attention was drawn by two newly-arrived visitors, a He and a She, whom he was obliged to regard as a brother and sister on account of a certain resemblance between them - in spite of the difference in the colour of their hair. They were the first people he had met on his journey who made a sympathetic impression on him. A red Sorrento rose worn by the girl aroused some kind of memory in him, but he could not think what. At last he went to bed and had a dream. It was a remarkably senseless affair, but was obviously hashed up from his day’s experiences. ‘Somewhere in the sun Gradiva was sitting, making a snare out of a blade of grass to catch a lizard in, and said: "Please keep quite still. Our lady colleague is right; the method is a really good one and she has made use of it with excellent results."' He fended off this dream while he was still asleep, with the critical thought that it was utter madness, and he succeeded in freeing himself from it with the help of an invisible bird which uttered a short laughing call and carried off the lizard in its beak.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1828

In spite of all this turmoil, he woke up in a rather clearer and steadier frame of mind. A branch of a rose-tree bearing flowers of the sort he had seen the day before on the young lady’s breast reminded him that during the night someone had said that people give roses in the spring. Without thinking, he picked a few of the roses, and there must have been something connected with them that had a relaxing effect on his mind. He felt relieved of his unsociable feelings, and went by the usual way to Pompeii, burdened with the roses, the metal clasp and the sketch-book, and occupied with a number of problems concerning Gradiva. The old delusion had begun to show cracks: he was beginning to wonder whether she might be in Pompeii, not at the mid-day hour only, but at other times as well. The stress had shifted, however, to the latest addition, and the jealousy attaching to it tormented him in all sorts of disguises. He could almost have wished that the apparition might remain visible to his eyes alone, and elude the perception of others: then, in spite of everything, he could look on her as his own exclusive property. While he was strolling about, waiting for the mid-day hour, he had an unexpected encounter. In the Casa del Fauno he came upon two figures in a corner in which they must have thought themselves out of sight, for they were embraced in each other’s arms and their lips were pressed together. He was astonished to recognize in them the sympathetic couple from the previous evening. But their behaviour now did not seem to fit a brother and sister: their embrace and their kiss seemed to him to last too long. So after all they were a pair of lovers, presumably a young honeymoon couple - yet another Edwin and Angelina. Curiously enough, however, this time the sight of them caused him only satisfaction; and with a sense of awe, as though he had interrupted some secret act of devotion, he withdrew unobserved. An attitude of respectfulness, which he had long been without, had returned to him.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1829

When he reached the House of Meleager, he was once more overcome by such a violent dread of finding Gradiva in someone else’s company that when she appeared the only words he found to greet her with were: ‘Are you alone?’ It was with difficulty that he allowed her to bring him to realize that he had picked the roses for her. He confessed his latest delusion to her - that she was the girl who had been found in the forum in a lover’s embrace and who had owned the green clasp. She enquired, not without a touch of mockery, whether he had found the thing in the sun perhaps: the sun (and she used the [Italian] word ‘sole’) produced all kinds of things like that. He admitted that he was feeling dizzy in his head, and she suggested as a cure that he should share her small picnic meal with her. She offered him half of a roll wrapped up in tissue paper and ate the other half herself with an obviously good appetite. At the same time her perfect teeth flashed between her lips and made a slight crunching sound as they bit through the crust. ‘I feel as though we had shared a meal like this once before, two thousand years ago’, she said; ‘can’t you remember?’ (118.) He could think of no reply, but the improvement in his head brought about by the food, and the many indications she gave of her actual presence, were not without their effect on him. Reason began to rise in him and to throw doubt on the whole delusion of Gradiva’s being no more than a mid-day ghost - though no doubt it might be argued on the other hand that she herself had just said that she had shared a meal with him two thousand years ago. As a means of settling the conflict an experiment suggested itself: and this he carried out craftily and with regained courage. Her left hand, with its delicate fingers, was resting on her knees, and one of the house-flies whose impertinence and uselessness had so much roused his indignation alighted on it. Suddenly Hanold’s hand was raised in the air and descended with a vigorous slap on the fly and Gradiva’s hand.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1830

This bold experiment had two results: first, a joyful conviction that he had without any doubt touched a real, living, warm human hand, but afterwards a reproof that made him jump up in a fright from his seat on the steps. For, from Gradiva’s lips, when she had recovered from her astonishment, there rang out these words: ‘There’s no doubt you’re out of your mind, Norbert Hanold!’ As everyone knows, the best method of waking a sleeper or a sleep-walker is to call him by his own name. But unluckily there was no chance of observing the effects produced on Norbert Hanold by Gradiva’s calling him by his name (which he had told no one in Pompeii). For at this critical moment the sympathetic pair of lovers from the Casa del Fauno appeared, and the young lady exclaimed in a tone of joyful surprise: ‘Zoe! Are you here too? And on your honeymoon like us? You never wrote me a word about it!’ In face of this new evidence of Gradiva’s living reality, Hanold took flight.

Nor was Zoe-Gradiva very agreeably surprised by this unexpected visit, which interrupted her in what was apparently an important task. But she quickly pulled herself together and made a fluent reply to the question, in which she explained the situation to her friend - and even more to us - and which enabled her to get rid of the young couple. She congratulated them; but she was not on her honeymoon. ‘The young man who’s just gone off is labouring, like you, under a remarkable aberration. He seems to think there’s a fly buzzing in his head. Well, I expect everyone has some sort of insect there. It’s my duty to know something about entomology, so I can help a little in cases like that. My father and I are staying at the Sole. Something got into his head too, and the brilliant idea occurred to him besides of bringing me here with him on condition that I amused myself on my own at Pompeii and made no demands of any kind on him. I told myself I should dig out something interesting here even by myself. Of course I hadn’t counted on making the find that I have - I mean my luck in meeting you, Gisa.’ (124.) But now, she added, she must hurry off, so as to be company for her father at his lunch in the ‘Sun’. And she departed, after having introduced herself to us as the daughter of the zoologist and lizard-catcher and after having, by all kinds of ambiguous remarks, admitted her therapeutic intention and other secret designs as well.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1831

The direction she took, however, was not towards the Hotel of the Sun, where her father was waiting for her. But it seemed to her too as though a shadowy form was seeking its grave near the Villa of Diomedes, and was vanishing beneath one of the monuments. And for that reason she directed her steps towards the Street of the Tombs, with her foot lifted almost perpendicularly at each step. It was to this same place that Hanold had fled in his shame and confusion. He wandered ceaselessly up and down in the portico of the garden, engaged in the task of disposing of the remains of his problem by an intellectual effort. One thing had become undeniably clear to him: that he had been totally without sense or reason in believing that he had been associating with a young Pompeian woman who had come to life again in a more or less physical shape. It could not be disputed that this clear insight into his delusion was an essential step forward on his road back to a sound understanding. But, on the other hand, this living woman, with whom other people communicated as though she were as physically real as themselves, was Gradiva, and she knew his name; and his scarcely awakened reason was not strong enough to solve this riddle. He was hardly calm enough emotionally, either, to show himself capable of facing so hard a task, for he would have preferred to have been buried along with the rest two thousand years before in the Villa of Diomedes, so as to be quite certain of not meeting Zoe-Gradiva again.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1832

Nevertheless, a violent desire to see her again struggled against what was left of the inclination to flight still lingering in him.

As he turned one of the four corners of the colonnade, he suddenly recoiled. On a broken fragment of masonry was sitting one of the girls who had perished here in the Villa of Diomedes. This, however, was a last attempt, quickly rejected, at taking flight into the realm of delusion. No, it was Gradiva, who had evidently come to give him the final portion of her treatment. She quite correctly interpreted his first instinctive movement as an attempt to leave the building, and showed him that it was impossible for him to run away, for a terrific downpour of rain had begun outside. She was ruthless, and began her examination by asking him what he had been trying to do with the fly on her hand. He had not the courage to make use of a particular pronoun,¹ but he did have the courage for something more important - for asking her the decisive question:

‘As someone said, I was rather confused in my head, and I must apologize for treating the hand   . I can’t understand how I could be so senseless . . . but I can’t understand either how its owner could point out my . . . my unreasonableness to me by my own name.’ (134.)

‘So your understanding has not got as far as that, Norbert Hanold. But I can’t say I’m surprised at it, you’ve accustomed me to it so long. I needn’t have come to Pompeii to discover it again, and you could have confirmed it a good hundred miles nearer home.

‘A hundred miles nearer’, she explained, as he still failed to understand, ‘diagonally across the street from where you live - in the house at the corner. There’s a cage in my window with a canary in it.’

These last words, as he heard them, affected him like a distant memory: that must have been the same bird whose song had given him the idea of his journey to Italy.

‘My father lives in that house: the Professor of Zoology, Richard Bertgang.’

¹ [The pronoun of the second person singular. The point of some of what follows is necessarily lost in English. In all his remarks to Gradiva hitherto, Hanold had used the second person singular, partly, no doubt, because that would be the classical usage. Now, however, that he was beginning to realize that he was talking to a modern German girl, he felt that the second person singular was far too familiar and affectionate. Gradiva, on the other hand, has used the second person singular throughout in speaking to him.]

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1833

So, since she was his neighbour, she knew him by sight and by name. We feel a sense of disillusionment: the solution falls flat and seems unworthy of our expectations.

Norbert Hanold showed that he had not yet regained his independence of thought when he replied: ‘So you¹ . . . you are Fräulein Zoe Bertgang? But she looked quite different . . .’

Fräulein Bertgang’s answer shows us that all the same there had been other relations between the two of them besides their simply being neighbours. She could argue in favour of the familiar ‘du’, which he had used naturally to the mid-day ghost but had drawn back from in speaking to the live girl, but on behalf of which she claimed ancient rights: ‘If you find this formal mode of address more suitable, I can use it too. But I find the other comes to my lips more naturally. I don’t know if I looked different in the early days when we used to run about together in a friendly way or sometimes, by way of a change, used to bump and thump each other. But if you² had even once looked at me attentively in recent years, it might have dawned on you that I’ve looked like this for quite a time.’

¹ [‘Sie’, the German pronoun of the third person plural, which is always used in formal speech instead of the ‘du’ of the second person singular.]

² [From this point to the middle of her next speech, when, as will be seen, she finally rebels, Zoe makes a valiant attempt to use the formal ‘Sie’.]

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1834

So there had been a childhood friendship between them - perhaps a childhood love - which justified the ‘du’. This solution, it may be, falls just as flat as the one we first suspected. We are brought to a much deeper level, however, when we realize that this childhood relationship unexpectedly explains a number of details in what had happened in their contemporary contact. Consider, for instance, the slapping of Zoe-Gradiva’s hand. Norbert Hanold found a most convincing reason for it in the necessity for reaching an experimental answer to the problem of the apparition’s physical reality. But was it not at the same time remarkably like a revival of the impulse for the ‘bumping and thumping’ whose dominance in their childhood was shown by Zoe’s words? And think, again, of how Gradiva asked the archaeologist whether it did not seem to him that they had shared a meal like this two thousand years before. This unintelligible question suddenly seems to have a sense, if we once more replace the historical past by the personal one - childhood -, of which the girl still had lively memories but which the young man appeared to have forgotten. And now the discovery dawns upon us that the young archaeologist’s phantasies about his Gradiva may have been an echo of his forgotten childhood memories. If so, they were not capricious products of his imagination, but determined, without his knowing it, by the store of childhood impressions which he had forgotten, but which were still at work in him. It should be possible for us to show the origin of the phantasies in detail, even though we can only guess at them. He imagined, for instance, that Gradiva must be of Greek origin and that she was the daughter of a respected personage - a priest of Ceres, perhaps. This seems to fit in pretty well with his knowing that she bore the Greek name of Zoe and that she belonged to the family of a Professor of Zoology. But if Hanold’s phantasies were transformed memories, we may expect to find an indication of the source of those phantasies in the information given us by Zoe Bertgang. Let us listen to what she has to say. She has told us of their intimate friendship in their childhood, and we shall now hear of the further course taken by this childhood relationship.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1835

‘At that time, as a matter of fact, up to about the age when, I don’t know why, people begin to call us "Backfisch",¹ I had got accustomed to being remarkably dependent on you and believed I could never in the world find a more agreeable friend. I had no mother or sister or brother, my father found a slow-worm in spirits considerably more interesting than me; and everyone (and I include girls) must have something to occupy their thoughts and whatever goes along with them. That was what you were then. But when archaeology took hold of you I discovered - you must forgive me, but really your polite innovation sounds to me too ridiculous and, besides, it doesn’t fit in with what I want to express - as I was saying, it turned out that you’d² become an unbearable person who (at any rate so far as I was concerned) no longer had any eyes in his head or tongue in his mouth, or any memory, where my memory had stuck, of our friendship when we were children. No doubt that was why I looked different from before. For when from time to time I met you in society - it happened once as recently as last winter - you didn’t see me, still less did I hear you say a word. Not that there was any distinction for me in that, for you treated everyone else alike. I was thin air for you, and you - with your tuft of fair hair that I’d rumpled for you often enough in the past - you were as dull, as dried-up, and as tongue-tied as a stuffed cockatoo, and at the same time as grandiose as an - archeopteryx - yes, that’s right, that’s what they call the antediluvian bird-monstrosity they’ve dug up. Only there was one thing I hadn’t suspected: that there was an equally grandiose phantasy lodged in your head of looking on me too, here in Pompeii, as something that had been dug up and come to life again. And when all at once there you were standing in front of me quite unexpectedly, it took me quite a lot of trouble at first to make out what an incredible cobweb your imagination had spun in your brain. After that, it amused me and quite pleased me in spite of its lunacy. For, as I told you, I hadn’t suspected it of you.’

¹ [Literally ‘fish for frying’. The common German slang term equivalent to ‘flapper’ or ‘teenager’.]

² [From this point onwards she finally reverts to ‘du’.]

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1836

Thus she tells us plainly enough what with the years had become of their childhood friendship. In her it grew until she was thoroughly in love, for a girl must have something to which she can give her heart. Fräulein Zoe, the embodiment of cleverness and clarity, makes her own mind quite transparent to us. While it is in any case the general rule for a normally constituted girl to turn her affection towards her father in the first instance, Zoe, who had no one in her family but her father, was especially ready to do so. But her father had nothing left over for her; all his interest was engrossed by the objects of his science. So she was obliged to cast her eyes around upon other people, and became especially attached to her young playmate. When he too ceased to have any eyes for her, her love was not shaken by it but rather increased, for he had become like her father, was, like him, absorbed by science and held apart by it from life and from Zoe. Thus it was made possible for her to remain faithful in her unfaithfulness - to find her father once more in her loved one, to include both of them with the same emotion, or, as we may say, to identify both of them in her feeling. What is our justification for this piece of psychological analysis, which might well seem arbitrary? The author has presented us with it in a single, but highly characteristic, detail. When Zoe described the transformation in her former playmate which had so greatly disturbed her, she abused him by comparing him to an archaeopteryx, the bird-like monstrosity which belongs to the archaeology of zoology. In that way she found a single concrete expression of the identity of the two figures. Her complaint applies with the same word to the man she loved and to her father. The archaeopteryx is, we might say, a compromise idea or an intermediate idea in which her thought about the folly of the man she loved coincided with the analogous thought about her father.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1837

With the young man, things had taken a different turn. Archaeology took hold of him and left him with an interest only in women of marble and bronze. His childhood friendship, instead of being strengthened into a passion, was dissolved, and his memories of it passed into such profound forgetfulness that he did not recognize or notice his early playmate when he met her in society. It is true that when we look further we may doubt whether ‘forgetfulness’ is the correct psychological description of the fate of these memories in our young archaeologist. There is a kind of forgetting which is distinguished by the difficulty with which the memory is awakened even by a powerful external summons, as though some internal resistance were struggling against its revival. A forgetting of this kind has been given the name of ‘repression’ in psychopathology; and the case which our author has put before us seems to be an example of this repression. Now we do not know in general whether the forgetting of an impression is linked with the dissolution of its memory-trace in the mind; but we can assert quite definitely of ‘repression’ that it does not coincide with the dissolution or extinction of the memory. What is repressed cannot, it is true, as a rule make its way into memory without more ado; but it retains a capacity for effective action, and, under the influence of some external event, it may one day bring about psychical consequences which can be regarded as products of a modification of the forgotten memory and as derivatives of it and which remain unintelligible unless we take this view of them. We have already seemed to recognize in Norbert Hanold’s phantasies about Gradiva derivatives of his repressed memories of his childhood friendship with Zoe Bertgang. A return like this of what has been repressed is to be expected with particular regularity when a person’s erotic feelings are attached to the repressed impressions - when his erotic life has been attacked by repression. In such cases the old Latin saying holds true, though it may have been coined first to apply to expulsion by external influences and not to internal conflicts: ‘Naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret.’¹ But it does not tell us everything. It only informs us of the fact of the return of the piece of nature that has been repressed; it does not describe the highly remarkable manner of that return, which is accomplished by what seems like a piece of malicious treachery. It is precisely what was chosen as the instrument of repression - like the ‘furca’ of the Latin saying - that becomes the vehicle for the return: in and behind the repressing force, what is repressed proves itself victor in the end. This fact, which has been so little noticed and deserves so much consideration, is illustrated - more impressively than it could be by many examples - in a well known etching by Félicien Rops; and it is illustrated in the typical case of repression in the life of saints and penitents. An ascetic monk has fled, no doubt from the temptations of the world, to the image of the crucified Saviour. And now the cross sinks down like a shadow, and in its place, radiant, there rises instead the image of a voluptuous, naked woman, in the same crucified attitude. Other artists with less psychological insight have, in similar representations of temptation, shown Sin, insolent and triumphant, in some position alongside of the Saviour on the cross. Only Rops has placed Sin in the very place of the Saviour on the cross. He seems to have known that, when what has been repressed returns, it emerges from the repressing force itself.

¹ [‘You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork, but she will always return.’]

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1838

It is worth while pausing in order to convince oneself from pathological cases how sensitive a human mind becomes in states of repression to any approach by what has been repressed, and how even trivial similarities suffice for the repressed to emerge behind the repressing force and take effect by means of it. I once had under medical treatment a young man - he was still almost a boy - who, after he had first unwillingly become acquainted with the processes of sex, had taken flight from every sexual desire that arose in him. For that purpose he made use of various methods of repression-: he intensified his zeal in learning, exaggerated his dependence on his mother, and in general assumed a childish character. I will not here enter into the manner in which his repressed sexuality broke through once more precisely in his relation to his mother; but I will describe a rarer and stranger instance of how another of his bulwarks collapsed on an occasion which could scarcely be regarded as sufficient. Mathematics enjoys the greatest reputation as a diversion from sexuality. This had been the very advice to which Jean Jacques Rousseau was obliged to listen from a lady who was dissatisfied with him: ‘Lascia le donne e studia la matematica!’¹ So too our fugitive threw himself with special eagerness into the mathematics and geometry which he was taught at school, till suddenly one day his powers of comprehension were paralysed in the face of some apparently innocent problems. It was possible to establish two of these problems: ‘Two bodies come together, one with a speed of . . . etc.’ and ‘On a cylinder, the diameter of whose surface is m, describe a cone . . . etc.’ Other people would certainly not have regarded these as very striking allusions to sexual events; but he felt that he had been betrayed by mathematics as well, and took flight from it too.

¹ [‘Give up women and study mathematics!’]

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1839

If Norbert Hanold were someone in real life who had in this way banished love and his childhood friendship with the help of archaeology, it would have been logical and according to rule that what revived in him the forgotten memory of the girl he had loved in his childhood should be precisely antique sculpture. It would have been his well-deserved fate to fall in love with the marble portrait of Gradiva, behind which, owing to an unexplained similarity, the living Zoe whom he had neglected made her influence felt.

Fräulein Zoe seems herself to have shared our view of the young archaeologist’s delusion, for the satisfaction she expressed at the end of her ‘frank, detailed and instructive speech of castigation’ could scarcely have been based on anything but a recognition that from the very first his interest in Gradiva had related to herself. It was this which she had not expected of him, but which, in spite of all its delusional disguise, she saw for what it was. The psychical treatment she had carried out, however, had now accomplished its beneficent effect on him. He felt free, for his delusion had now been replaced by the thing of which it could only have been a distorted and inadequate copy. Nor did he any longer hesitate to remember her and to recognize her as the kind, cheerful, clever playmate who in essentials was not in any way changed. But he found something else very strange-

‘You mean’, said the girl, ‘the fact of someone having to die so as to come alive; but no doubt that must be so for archaeologists.’ (141.) Evidently she had not forgiven him yet for the roundabout path by way of archaeology which he had followed from their childhood friendship to the new relation that was forming.

‘No, I mean your name . . . Because "Bertgang" means the same as "Gradiva" and describes someone "who steps along brilliantly".’¹ (142.)

We ourselves were unprepared for this. Our hero was beginning to cast off his humility and to play an active part. Evidently he was completely cured of his delusion and had risen above it; and he proved this by himself tearing the last threads of the cobweb of his delusion. This, too, is just how patients behave when one has loosened the compulsion of their delusional thoughts by revealing the repressed material lying behind them. Once they have understood, they themselves bring forward the solutions of the final and most important riddles of their strange condition in a number of ideas that suddenly occur to them. We had already guessed that the Greek origin of the imaginary Gradiva was an obscure result of the Greek name ‘Zoe’; but we had not ventured to approach the name ‘Gradiva’ itself, and had let it pass as the untrammelled creation of Norbert Hanold’s imagination. But, to and behold! that very name now turns out to have been a derivative - indeed a translation - of the repressed surname of the girl he had loved in the childhood which he was supposed to have forgotten.

¹ [The German root ‘bert’ or ‘brecht’ is akin to the English ‘bright’; similarly ‘gang’ is akin to ‘go’ (in Scotland ‘gang’).]

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1840

The tracing back of the delusion and its resolution were now complete. What the author now adds is no doubt designed to serve as a harmonious end to his story. We cannot but feel reassured about the future when we hear that the young man, who had earlier been obliged to play the pitiable part of a person in urgent need of treatment, advanced still further on the road to recovery and succeeded in arousing in her some of the feelings under which he himself had suffered before. Thus it was that he made her jealous by mentioning the sympathetic young lady who had previously interrupted their tête-à-tête in the House of Meleager, and by confessing that she had been the first woman for whom he had felt a very great liking. Whereupon Zoe prepared to take a chilly leave of him, remarking that everything had now returned to reason - she herself not least; he could look up Gisa Hartleben (or whatever she was now called) again and give her some scientific assistance over the purpose of her visit to Pompeii; she herself, however, must go back to the Albergo del Sole where her father was expecting her for lunch; perhaps they would meet again some time at a party in Germany or in the moon. But once more he was able to make the troublesome fly an excuse for taking possession first of her cheek and then of her lips, and to set in motion the aggressiveness which is a man’s inevitable duty in love making. Once only a shadow seemed to fall on their happiness, when Zoe declared that now she really must go back to her father or he will starve at the Sole. ‘Your father? . . . what will happen? . . .’ (147.) But the clever girl was able swiftly to quiet his concern. ‘Probably nothing will happen. I’m not an indispensable part of his zoological collection. If I had been, perhaps I shouldn’t have been so foolish as to give my heart to you.’ In the exceptional event, however, of her father taking a different view from hers, there was a safe expedient. Hanold need only cross to Capri, catch a Lacerta faraglionensis there (he could practise the technique on her little finger), set the creature free over here, catch it again before the zoologist’s eyes, and let him choose between a faraglionensis on the mainland and his daughter. The scheme, it is easy to see, was one in which the mockery was tinged with bitterness; it was a warning, as it were, to her fiancé not to keep too closely to the model on which she had chosen him. Here again Norbert Hanold reassures us, by showing by all sorts of apparently small signs the great transformation that had taken place in him. He proposed that he and his Zoe should come for their honeymoon to Italy and Pompeii, just as though he had never been indignant with the honeymooning Edwins and Angelinas. He had completely lost from his memory all his feelings against those happy pairs, who had so unnecessarily travelled more than a hundred miles from their German home. The author is certainly right in bringing forward a loss of memory like this as the most trustworthy sign of a change of attitude. Zoe’s reply to the plan for the scene of their honeymoon suggested by ‘her childhood friend who had also in a sense been dug out of the ruins again’ (150.) was that she did not feel quite alive enough yet to make a geographical decision of that sort.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1841

The delusion had now been conquered by a beautiful reality; but before the two lovers left Pompeii it was still to be honoured once again. When they reached the Herculanean Gate, where, at the entrance to the Via Consolare, the street is crossed by some ancient stepping-stones, Norbert Hanold paused and asked the girl to go ahead of him. She understood him ‘and, pulling up her dress a little with her left hand, Zoe Bertgang, Gradiva rediviva, walked past, held in his eyes, which seemed to gaze as though in a dream; so, with her quietly tripping gait, she stepped through the sunlight over the stepping-stones to the other side of the street.’ With the triumph of love, what was beautiful and precious in the delusion found recognition as well.

In his last simile, however, - of the ‘childhood friend who had been dug out of the ruins’ - the author has presented us with the key to the symbolism of which the hero’s delusion made use in disguising his repressed memory. There is, in fact, no better analogy for repression, by which something in the mind is at once made inaccessible and preserved, than burial of the sort to which Pompeii fell a victim and from which it could emerge once more through the work of spades. Thus it was that the young archaeologist was obliged in his phantasy to transport to Pompeii the original of the relief which reminded him of the object of his youthful love. The author was well justified, indeed, in lingering over the valuable similarity which his delicate sense had perceived between a particular mental process in the individual and an isolated historical event in the history of mankind.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1842

II

But after all, what we really intended to do originally was only to investigate two or three dreams that are to be found here and there in Gradiva with the help of certain analytic methods. How has it come about, then, that we have been led into dissecting the whole story and examining the mental processes in the two chief characters? This has not in fact been an unnecessary piece of work; it was an essential preliminary. It is equally the case that when we try to understand the real dreams of a real person we have to concern ourselves intensively with his character and his career, and we must get to know not only his experiences shortly before the dream but also those dating far back into the past. It is even my view that we are still not free to turn to our proper task, but that we must linger a little more over the story itself and carry out some further preliminary work.

My readers will no doubt have been puzzled to notice that so far I have treated Norbert Hanold and Zoe Bertgang, in all their mental manifestations and activities, as though they were real people and not the author’s creations, as though the author’s mind were an absolutely transparent medium and not a refractive or obscuring one. And my procedure must seem all the more puzzling since the author has expressly renounced the portrayal of reality by calling his story a ‘phantasy’. We have found, however, that all his descriptions are so faithfully copied from reality that we should not object if Gradiva were described not as a phantasy but as a psychiatric study. Only at two points has the author availed himself of the licence open to him of laying down premisses which do not seem to have their roots in the laws of reality. The first time is where he makes the young archaeologist come upon what is undoubtedly an ancient relief but which so closely resembles a person living long afterwards, not only in the peculiarity of the posture of the foot as it steps along but in every detail of facial structure and bodily attitude, that the young man is able to take the physical appearance of that person to be the sculpture come to life. And the second time is where he makes the young man meet the living woman precisely in Pompeii; for the dead woman had been placed there only by his imagination, and the journey to Pompeii had in fact carried him away from the living woman, whom he had just seen in the street of the town in which he lived. This second provision of the author’s, however, involves no violent departure from actual possibility; it merely makes use of chance, which unquestionably plays a part in many human histories; and furthermore he uses it to good purpose, for this chance reflects the fatal truth that has laid it down that flight is precisely an instrument that delivers one over to what one is fleeing from. The first premiss seems to lean more towards phantasy and to spring entirely from the author’s arbitrary decision - the premiss on which all that follows depends, the far-reaching resemblance between the sculpture and the live girl, which a more sober choice might have restricted to the single feature of the posture of the foot as it steps along. We might be tempted here to allow the play of our own phantasy to forge a link with reality. The name of ‘Bertgang’ might point to the fact that the women of that family had already been distinguished in ancient days by the peculiarity of their graceful gait; and we might suppose that the Germanic Bertgangs were descended from a Roman family one member of which was the woman who had led the artist to perpetuate the peculiarity of her gait in the sculpture. Since, however, the different variations of the human form are not independent of one another, and since in fact even among ourselves the ancient types re-appear again and again (as we can see in art collections), it would not be totally impossible that a modern Bertgang might reproduce the shape of her ancient ancestress in all the other features of her bodily structure as well. But it would no doubt be wiser, instead of such speculations, to enquire from the author himself what were the sources from which this part of his creation was derived; we should then have a good prospect of showing once again how what was ostensibly an arbitrary decision rested in fact upon law. But since access to the sources in the author’s mind is not open to us, we will leave him with an undiminished right to construct a development that is wholly true to life upon an improbable premiss - a right of which Shakespeare, for instance, availed himself in King Lear.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1843

Apart from this, it must be repeated, the author has presented us with a perfectly correct psychiatric study, on which we may measure our understanding of the workings of the mind - a case history and the history of a cure which might have been designed to emphasize certain fundamental theories of medical psychology. It is strange enough that the author should have done this. But how if, on being questioned, he were completely to deny any such purpose? It is so easy to draw analogies and to read meanings into things. Is it not rather we who have slipped into this charming poetic story a secret meaning very far from its author’s intentions? Possibly. We shall come back to the question later. For the moment, however, we have tried to save ourselves from making any such tendentious interpretation by giving the story almost entirely in the author’s own words. Anyone who compares our reproduction with the actual text of Gradiva will have to concede us that much.

Perhaps, too, in most people’s eyes we are doing our author a poor service in declaring his work to be a psychiatric study. An author, we hear them say, should keep out of the way of any contact with psychiatry and should leave the description of pathological mental states to the doctors. The truth is that no truly creative writer has ever obeyed this injunction. The description of the human mind is indeed the domain which is most his own; he has from time immemorial been the precursor of science, and so too of scientific psychology. But the frontier between states of mind described as normal and pathological is in part a conventional one and in part so fluctuating that each of us probably crosses it many times in the course of a day. On the other hand, psychiatry would be doing wrong if it tried to restrict itself permanently to the study of the severe and gloomy illnesses that arise from gross injuries to the delicate apparatus of the mind. Deviations from health which are slighter and capable of correction, and which to-day we can trace back no further than to disturbances in the interplay of mental forces, arouse its interest no less. Indeed, only through the medium of these can it understand either normal states or the phenomena of severe illness. Thus the creative writer cannot evade the psychiatrist nor the psychiatrist the creative writer, and the poetic treatment of a psychiatric theme can turn out to be correct without any sacrifice of its beauty.

And it is really correct - this imaginative picture of the history of a case and its treatment. Now that we have finished telling the story and satisfied our own suspense, we can get a better view of it, and we shall now reproduce it with the technical terminology of our science, and in doing so we shall not feel disconcerted at the necessity for repeating what we have said before.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1844

Norbert Hanold’s condition is often spoken of by the author as a ‘delusion’, and we have no reason to reject that designation. We can state two chief characteristics of a ‘delusion’, which do not, it is true, describe it exhaustively, but which distinguish it recognizably from other disorders. In the first place it is one of the group of pathological states which do not produce a direct effect upon the body but are manifested only by mental indications. And secondly it is characterized by the fact that in it ‘phantasies’ have gained the upper hand - that is, have obtained belief and have acquired an influence on action. If we recall Hanold’s journey to Pompeii in order to look for Gradiva’s peculiarly formed footprints in the ashes, we shall have a fine example of an action under the dominance of a delusion. A psychiatrist would perhaps place Norbert Hanold’s delusion in the great group of ‘paranoia’ and possibly describe it as ‘fetishistic erotomania’, because the most striking thing about it was his being in love with the piece of sculpture and because in the psychiatrist’s view, with its tendency to coarsen everything, the young archaeologist’s interest in feet and the postures of feet would be bound to suggest ‘fetishism’. Nevertheless all such systems of nomenclature and classification of the different kinds of delusion according to their subject-matter have something precarious and barren about them.¹

Furthermore, since our hero was a person capable of developing a delusion on the basis of such a strange preference, a strict psychiatrist would at once stamp him as a dégénéré and would investigate the heredity which had remorselessly driven him to this fate. But here the author does not follow the psychiatrist, and with good reason. He wishes to bring the hero closer to us so as to make ‘empathy’ easier; the diagnosis of ‘dégénéré', whether it is right or wrong, at once puts the young archaeologist at a distance from us, for we readers are the normal people and the standard of humanity. Nor is the author greatly concerned with the hereditary and constitutional preconditions of the state, but on the other hand he plunges deep into the personal mental make-up which can give rise to such a delusion.

¹ In point of fact, the case of N. H. would have to be described as a hysterical delusion, not a paranoic one. The indications of paranoia are absent from it.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1845

In one important respect Norbert Hanold behaved quite differently from an ordinary human being. He took no interest in living women; the science of which he was the servant had taken that interest away from him and displaced it on to women of marble or bronze. This is not to be regarded as a trivial peculiarity; on the contrary, it was the basic precondition of the events to be described. For one day it came about that one particular sculpture of that kind laid claim to the whole of the interest which is ordinarily directed only to a living woman, and with that his delusion was there. We then see unrolled before our eyes the manner in which his delusion is cured through a happy turn of events, and his interest displaced back from the marble to a living woman. The author does not let us follow the influences which led our hero to turn away from women; he only informs us that his attitude was not explained by his innate disposition, which, on the contrary, included some amount of imaginative (and, we might add, erotic) needs. And, as we learn later in the story, he did not avoid other children in his childhood: he had a friendship at that age with a little girl, was her inseparable companion, shared his little meals with her, used to thump her too and let her rumple his hair. It is in attachments such as this, in combinations like this of affection and aggressiveness, that the immature erotism of childhood finds its expression; its consequences only emerge later, but then they are irresistible, and during childhood itself it is as a rule recognized as erotism only by doctors and creative writers. Our own writer shows us clearly that he too is of the same opinion; for he makes his hero suddenly develop a lively interest in women’s feet and their way of placing them. This interest was bound to bring him a bad reputation both among scientists and among the women of the town he lived in, a reputation of being a foot-fetishist; but we cannot avoid tracing the interest back to the memory of his childhood playmate. For there can be no doubt that even in her childhood the girl showed the same peculiarity of a graceful gait, with her toes almost perpendicularly raised as she stepped along; and it was because it represented that same gait that an ancient marble relief acquired such great importance for Norbert Hanold. Incidentally we may add that in his derivation of the remarkable phenomenon of fetishism the author is in complete agreement with science. Ever since Binet we have in fact tried to trace fetishism back to erotic impressions in childhood.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1846

The state of permanently turning away from women produces a personal susceptibility, or, as we are accustomed to say, a ‘disposition’ to the formation of a delusion. The development of the mental disorder sets in at the moment when a chance impression arouses the childhood experiences which have been forgotten and which have traces, at least, of an erotic colouring. ‘Arouses’, however, is certainly not the right description, if we take into account what follows. We must repeat the author’s accurate account in correct psychological technical terms. When Norbert Hanold saw the relief, he did not remember that he had already seen a similar posture of the foot in his childhood friend; he remembered nothing at all, but all the effects brought about by the relief originated from this link that was made with the impression of his childhood. Thus the childhood impression was stirred up, it became active, so that it began to produce effects, but it did not come into consciousness - it remained ‘unconscious’, to use a term which has to-day become unavoidable in psychopathology. We are anxious that this unconscious shall not be involved in any of the disputes of philosophers and natural philosophers, which have often no more than an etymological importance. For the time being we possess no better name for psychical processes which behave actively but nevertheless do not reach the consciousness of the person concerned, and that is all we mean by our ‘unconsciousness’. When some thinkers try to dispute the existence of an unconscious of this kind, on the ground that it is nonsensical, we can only suppose that they have never had to do with the corresponding mental phenomena, that they are under the spell of the regular experience that everything mental that becomes active and intense becomes at the same time conscious as well, and that they have still to learn (what our author knows very well) that there are most certainly mental processes which, in spite of being intense and producing effects, none the less remain apart from consciousness.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1847

We said a little earlier that Norbert Hanold’s memories of his childhood relations with Zoe were in a state of ‘repression’; and here we have called them ‘unconscious’ memories. So we must now pay a little attention to the relation between these two technical terms, which, indeed, appear to coincide in their meaning. It is not difficult to make the matter plain. ‘Unconscious’ is the wider concept; ‘repressed’ is the narrower one. Everything that is repressed is unconscious; but we cannot assert that everything unconscious is repressed. If when Hanold saw the relief he had remembered his Zoe’s gait, what had earlier been an unconscious memory of his would have become simultaneously active and conscious, and this would have shown that it had not earlier been repressed. ‘Unconscious’ is a purely descriptive term, one that is indefinite in some respects and, as we might say, static. ‘Repressed’ is a dynamic expression, which takes account of the interplay of mental forces; it implies that there is a force present which is seeking to bring about all kinds of psychical effects, including that of becoming conscious, but that there is also an opposing force which is able to obstruct some of these psychical effects, once more including that of becoming conscious. The mark of something repressed is precisely that in spite of its intensity it is unable to enter consciousness. In Hanold’s case, therefore, from the moment of the appearance of the relief onwards, we are concerned with something unconscious that is repressed, or, more briefly with something repressed.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1848

Norbert Hanold’s memories of his childhood relations with the girl with the graceful gait were repressed; but this is not yet the correct view of the psychological situation. We remain on the surface so long as we are dealing only with memories and ideas. What is alone of value in mental life is rather the feelings. No mental forces are significant unless they possess the characteristic of arousing feelings. Ideas are only repressed because they are associated with the release of feelings which ought not to occur. It would be more correct to say that repression acts upon feelings, but we can only be aware of these in their association with ideas. So that it was Norbert Hanold’s erotic feelings that were repressed; and since his erotism knew and had known no other object than Zoe Bertgang in his childhood, his memories of her were forgotten. The ancient relief aroused the slumbering erotism in him, and made his childhood memories active. On account of a resistance to erotism that was present in him, these memories could only become operative as unconscious ones. What now took place in him was a struggle between the power of erotism and that of the forces that were repressing it; the manifestation of this struggle was a delusion.

Our author has omitted to give the reasons which led to the repression of the erotic life of his hero; for of course Hanold’s concern with science was only the instrument which the repression employed. A doctor would have to dig deeper here, but perhaps without hitting upon the reason in this case. But, as we have insisted with admiration, the author has not failed to show us how the arousing of the repressed erotism came precisely from the field of the instruments that served to bring about the repression. It was right that an antique, the marble sculpture of a woman, should have been what tore our archaeologist away from his retreat from love and warned him to pay off the debt to life with which we are burdened from our birth.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1849

The first manifestations of the process that had been set going in Hanold by the relief were phantasies, which played around the figure represented in it. The figure seemed to him to have something ‘of to-day’ about her, in the best sense of the words, and it was as though the artist had captured her ‘from the life’ stepping along the street. He gave the girl in the ancient relief the name of ‘Gradiva’, which he constructed on the model of an epithet of the war-god striding into battle - ‘Mars Gradivus’. He endowed her personality with more and more characteristics. She may have been the daughter of a respected personage, of a patrician, perhaps, who was connected with the temple service of a deity. He thought he could trace a Greek origin in her features; and finally he felt compelled to remove her from the busy life of a capital and to transport her to the more peaceful Pompeii, and there he made her step across the lava stepping-stones which made it possible to cross from one side of the street to the other. These products of his phantasy seem arbitrary enough, but at the same time innocently unsuspicious. And, indeed, even when for the first time they gave rise to an incitement to action - when the archaeologist, obsessed by the problem of whether this posture of the feet corresponded to reality, began to make observations from life in order to examine the feet of contemporary women and girls - even this action was screened by conscious scientific motives, as though all his interest in the sculpture of Gradiva had sprung from the soil of his professional concern with archaeology. The women and girls in the street, whom he chose as the subjects of his investigation, must, of course, have taken another, crudely erotic view of his behaviour, and we cannot but think them right. We ourselves can be in no doubt that Hanold was as much in ignorance of the motives of his researches as he was of the origin of his phantasies about Gradiva. These, as we learned later, were echoes of his memories of his youthful love, derivatives of those memories, transformations and distortions of them, after they had failed to make their way into his consciousness in an unmodified form. The ostensibly aesthetic judgement that the sculpture had something ‘of to-day’ about it took the place of his knowledge that a gait of that kind belonged to a girl whom he knew and who stepped across the street at the present time. Behind the impression of the sculpture being ‘from the life’ and the phantasy of its subject being Greek lay his memory of the name Zoe, which means ‘life’ in Greek. ‘Gradiva’, as we learn from our hero himself at the end of the story, after he has been cured of his delusion, is a good translation of the surname ‘Bertgang’ which means something like ‘someone who steps along brilliantly or splendidly’. The details about Gradiva’s father originated from Hanold’s knowledge that Zoe Bertgang was the daughter of a respected teacher at the University, which can well be translated into classical terms as ‘temple-service’. Finally, his phantasy transported her to Pompeii, not ‘because her quiet, calm nature seemed to demand it’, but because no other or better analogy could be found in his science for his remarkable state, in which he became aware of his memories of his childhood friendship through obscure channels of information. Once he had made his own childhood coincide with the classical past (which it was so easy for him to do), there was a perfect similarity between the burial of Pompeii - the disappearance of the past combined with its preservation - and repression, of which he possessed a knowledge through what might be described as ‘endopsychic’ perception. In this he was employing the same symbolism that the author makes the girl use consciously towards the conclusion of the story: ‘I told myself I should be able to dig out something interesting here even by myself. Of course I hadn’t counted on making the find that I have . . .’ (124.) And at the very end she replied to Hanold’s plan for their honeymoon with a reference to ‘her childhood friend who had also in a sense been dug out of the ruins again’. (150.)

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1850

Thus in the very first products of Hanold’s delusional phantasies and actions we already find a double set of determinants, a derivation from two different sources. One of these is the one that was manifest to Hanold himself, the other is the one which is revealed to us when we examine his mental processes. One of them, looked at from Hanold’s point of view, was conscious to him, the other was completely unconscious to him. One of them was derived wholly from the circle of ideas of the science of archaeology, the other arose from the repressed childhood memories that had become active in him and from the emotional instincts attached to them. One might be described as lying on the surface and covering the other, which was, as it were, concealed behind it. The scientific motivation might be said to serve as a pretext for the unconscious erotic one, and science had put itself completely at the service of the delusion. It should not be forgotten, however, that the unconscious determinants could not effect anything that did not simultaneously satisfy the conscious, scientific ones. The symptoms of a delusion - phantasies and actions alike - are in fact the products of compromise between the two mental currents, and in a compromise account is taken of the demands of each of the two parties to it; but each side must also renounce a part of what it wanted to achieve. Where a compromise comes about it must have been preceded by a struggle - in this case it was the conflict we have assumed between suppressed erotism and the forces that were keeping it in repression. In the formation of a delusion this struggle is in fact unending. Assault and resistance are renewed after the construction of each compromise, which is never, so to speak, entirely satisfying. Our author too is aware of this, and that is why he makes a peculiar unrest dominate this stage of his hero’s disorder, as a precursor and guarantee of further developments.

These significant peculiarities - the double motivation of phantasies and decisions, and the construction of conscious pretexts for actions to whose motivation the repressed has made the major contribution - will meet us often, and perhaps more clearly, in the further course of the story. And this is just as it should be, for the author has thus grasped and represented the unfailing chief characteristic of pathological mental processes.

The development of Norbert Hanold’s delusion proceeded with a dream which, since it was not occasioned by any new event, seems to have arisen entirely out of his mind, filled as it was by a conflict. But let us pause before we enquire whether, in the construction of his dreams, too, the author meets our expectation that he possesses a deep understanding. Let us ask first what psychiatric science has to say to his hypotheses about the origin of a delusion and what attitude it takes to the part played by repression and the unconscious, to conflict and to the formation of compromises. In short, let us ask whether this imaginative representation of the genesis of a delusion can hold its own before the judgement of science.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1851

And here we must give what will perhaps be an unexpected answer. In fact the situation is quite the reverse: it is science that cannot hold its own before the achievement of the author. Science allows a gulf to yawn between the hereditary and constitutional preconditions of a delusion and its creations, which seem to emerge ready-made - a gulf which we find that our author has filled. Science does not as yet suspect the importance of repression, it does not recognize that in order to explain the world of psychopathological phenomena the unconscious is absolutely essential, it does not look for the basis of delusions in a psychical conflict, and it does not regard their symptoms as compromises. Does our author stand alone, then, in the face of united science? No, that is not the case (if, that is, I may count my own works as part of science), since for a number of years - and, until recently, more or less alone¹ - I myself have supported all the views that I have here extracted from Jensen’s Gradiva and stated in technical terms. I indicated, in most detail in connection with the states known as hysteria and obsessions, that the individual determinant of these psychical disorders is the suppression of a part of instinctual life and the repression of the ideas by which the suppressed instinct is represented, and soon afterwards I repeated the same views in relation to some forms of delusion.² The question whether the instincts concerned in this causation are always components of the sexual instinct or may be of another kind as well is a problem which may be regarded as a matter of indifference in the particular case of the analysis of Gradiva; for in the instance chosen by our author what was at issue was quite certainly nothing other than the suppression of erotic feelings. The validity of the hypotheses of psychical conflict and of the formation of symptoms by means of compromises between the two mental currents struggling against each other has been demonstrated by me in the case of patients observed and medically treated in real life, just as I have been able to in the imaginary case of Norbert Hanold.³ Even before me, Pierre Janet, a pupil of the great Charcot, and Josef Breuer, in collaboration with me, had traced back the products of neurotic, and especially of hysterical, illness to the power of unconscious thoughts.4

When, from the year 1893 onwards, I plunged into investigations such as these of the origin of mental disturbances, it would certainly never have occurred to me to look for a confirmation of my findings in imaginative writings. I was thus more than a little surprised to find that the author of Gradiva, which was published in 1903, had taken as the basis of its creation the very thing that I believed myself to have freshly discovered from the sources of my medical experience. How was it that the author arrived at the same knowledge as the doctor - or at least behaved as though he possessed the same knowledge?

¹ See Bleuler’s important work, Affektivität, Suggestibilität, Paranoia and C. G. Jung’s Diagnostische Assoziationsstudien, both published in Zurich in 1906. - [Added 1912:] To-day, in 1912, I am able to retract what is said above as being no longer true. Since it was written, the ‘psycho-analytic movement’ started by me has become widely extended, and it is constantly growing.

² See the author’s Sammlung Kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, 1906.

³ Cf. ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (1905e).

4 Cf. Studies on Hysteria (Freud, 1895d, with Breuer).

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1852

Norbert Hanold’s delusion, as I was saying, was carried a step further by a dream which occurred in the middle of his efforts to discover a gait like Gradiva’s in the streets of the town where he lived. It is easy to give the content of this dream in brief. The dreamer found himself in Pompeii on the day on which that unhappy city was destroyed, and experienced its horrors without being in danger himself; he suddenly saw Gradiva stepping along there, and understood all at once, as though it was something quite natural, that since she was a Pompeian, she was living in her native town, and ‘without his having suspected it, living as his contemporary’. He was seized with fear on her account and gave a warning cry, whereupon she turned her face towards him for a moment. But she proceeded on her way without paying any attention to him, lay down on the steps of the Temple of Apollo, and was buried in the rain of ashes after her face had lost its colour, as though it were turning into white marble, until it had become just like a piece of sculpture. As he was waking up, he interpreted the noises of a big city penetrating into his bedroom as the cries for help of the despairing inhabitants of Pompeii and the thunder of the wildly agitated sea. The feeling that what he had dreamt had really happened to him would not leave him for some time after he had awoken, and a conviction that Gradiva had lived in Pompeii and had perished there on the fatal day was left over with him by the dream as a fresh starting-point for his delusion.

It is not so easy for us to say what the author intended with this dream and what caused him to link the development of the delusion precisely to a dream. Zealous investigators, it is true, have collected plenty of examples of the way in which mental disturbances are linked to dreams and arise out of dreams.¹ It appears, too, that in the lives of a few eminent men impulses to important actions and decisions have originated from dreams. But these analogies are not of much help to our understanding; so let us keep to our present case, our author’s imaginary case of Norbert Hanold the archaeologist. By which end are we to take hold of a dream like this so as to fit it into the whole context, if it is not to remain no more than an unnecessary decoration of the story?

¹ Sante de Sanctis (1899).

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1853

I can well imagine that at this point a reader may exclaim: ‘The dream is quite easily explained - it is a simple anxiety dream, occasioned by the noises of the city, which were misinterpreted into the destruction of Pompeii by the archaeologist, whose mind was occupied with his Pompeian girl.’ In view of the low opinion generally prevailing of the performances of dreams, all that is usually asked from an explanation of one is that some external stimulus shall be found that more or less coincides with a piece of the dream’s content. This external stimulus to dreaming would be supplied by the noise which woke the sleeper; and with this, interest in the dream would be exhausted. If only we had some reason for supposing that the town was noisier than usual that morning! If only, for instance, the author had not omitted to tell us that Hanold, against his usual practice, had slept that night with his windows open! What a pity the author did not take the trouble to do that! And if only anxiety-dreams were as simple as that! But no, interest in the dream is not so easily exhausted.

There is nothing essential for the construction of a dream in a link with an external sensory stimulus. A sleeper can disregard a stimulus of this kind from the external world, or he can allow himself to be awakened by it without constructing a dream, or, as happened here, he can weave it into his dream if that suits him for some other reason; and there are numerous dreams of which it is impossible to show that their content was determined in this way by a stimulus impinging on the sleeper’s senses. No, we must try another path.

We may perhaps find a starting-point in the after-effects left by the dream in Hanold’s waking life. Up to then he had had a phantasy that Gradiva had been a Pompeian. This hypothesis now became a certainty for him, and a second certainty followed - that she was buried along with the rest in the year 79 A.D.¹ Melancholy feelings accompanied this extension of the delusional structure, like an echo of the anxiety which had filled the dream. This fresh pain about Gradiva does not seem very intelligible to us; Gradiva would have been dead for many centuries even if she had been saved from destruction in the year 79 A.D. Or ought we not to argue in this kind of way either with Norbert Hanold or with the author himself? Here again there seems no path to an understanding. Nevertheless it is worth remarking that the increment which the delusion acquired from this dream was accompanied by a feeling with a highly painful colouring.

¹ See the text of Gradiva (15).

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1854

Apart from that, however, we are as much at a loss as before. This dream is not self-explanatory, and we must resolve to borrow from my Interpretation of Dreams and apply to the present example a few of the rules to be found in it for the solution of dreams.

One of these rules is to the effect that a dream is invariably related to the events of the day before the dream. Our author seems to be wishing to show that he has followed this rule, for he attaches the dream immediately to Hanold’s ‘pedestrian researches’. Now these had no meaning other than a search for Gradiva, whose characteristic gait he was trying to recognize. So the dream ought to have contained an indication of where Gradiva was to be found. And it does so, by showing her in Pompeii; but that is no novelty to us.

Another rule tells as that, if a belief in the reality of the dream-images persists unusually long, so that one cannot tear oneself out of the dream, this is not a mistaken judgement provoked by the vividness of the dream-images, but is a psychical act on its own: it is an assurance, relating to the content of the dream, that something in it is really as one has dreamt it; and it is right to have faith in this assurance. If we keep to these two rules, we must conclude that the dream gave some information as to the whereabouts of the Gradiva he was in search of, and that that information tallied with the real state of things. We know Hanold’s dream: does the application of these two rules to it yield any reasonable sense?

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1855

Strange to say, it does. The sense is merely disguised in a particular way so that it is not immediately recognizable. Hanold learned in the dream that the girl he was looking for was living in a town and contemporaneously with him. Now this was true of Zoe Bertgang; only in the dream the town was not the German university town but Pompeii, and the time was not the present but the year 79 A.D. It is, as it were, a distortion by displacement: what we have is not Gradiva in the present but the dreamer transported into the past. Nevertheless, in this manner, the essential and new fact is stated: he is in the same place and time as the girl he is looking for. But whence come this displacement and disguise which were bound to deceive both us and the dreamer over the true meaning and content of the dream? Well, we already have the means at our disposal for giving a satisfactory answer to that question.

Let us recall all that we have heard about the nature and origin of the phantasies which are the precursors of delusions. They are substitutes for and derivatives of repressed memories which a resistance will not allow to enter consciousness unaltered, but which can purchase the possibility of becoming conscious by taking account, by means of changes and distortions, of the resistance’s censorship. When this compromise has been accomplished, the memories have turned into the phantasies, which can easily be misunderstood by the conscious personality - that is, understood so as to fit in with the dominant psychical current. Now let us suppose that dream-images are what might be described as the creations of people’s physiological delusions - the products of the compromise in the struggle between what is repressed and what is dominant which is probably present in every human being, including those who in the day-time are perfectly sound in mind. We shall then understand that dream-images have to be regarded as something distorted, behind which something else must be looked for, something not distorted, but in some sense objectionable, like Hanold’s repressed memories behind his phantasies. We can give expression to the contrast which we have thus recognized, by distinguishing what the dreamer remembers when he wakes up as the manifest content of the dream from what constituted the basis of the dream before the distortion imposed by the censorship - namely, the latent dream-thoughts. Thus, interpreting a dream consists in translating the manifest content of the dream into the latent dream-thoughts, in undoing the distortion which the dream-thoughts have had to submit to from the censorship of the resistance. If we apply these notions to the dream we are concerned with, we shall find that its latent dream-thoughts can only have been: ‘the girl you are looking for with the graceful gait is really living in this town with you.’ But in that form the thought could not become conscious. It was obstructed by the fact that a phantasy had laid it down, as the result of an earlier compromise, that Gradiva was a Pompeian; consequently, if the real fact that she was living in the same place and at the same time was to be affirmed, there was no choice but to adopt the distortion: ‘You are living at Pompeii at the time of Gradiva.’ This then was the idea which was realized by the manifest content of the dream, and was represented as a present event actually being experienced.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1856

It is only rarely that a dream represents, or, as we might say, ‘stages’, a single thought: there are usually a number of them, a tissue of thoughts. Another component of the content of Hanold’s dream can be detached, the distortion of which can easily be got rid of, so that the latent idea represented by it can be detected. This is a piece of the dream to which once again it is possible to extend the assurance of reality with which the dream ended. In the dream Gradiva as she steps along is transformed into a marble sculpture. This is no more than an ingenious and poetical representation of the real event. Hanold had in fact transferred his interest from the living girl to the sculpture: the girl he loved had been transformed for him into a marble relief. The latent dream-thoughts, which were bound to remain unconscious, sought to change the sculpture back into the living girl; what they were saying to him accordingly was something like: ‘After all, you’re only interested in the statue of Gradiva because it reminds you of Zoe, who is living here and now.’ But if this discovery could have become conscious, it would have meant the end of the delusion.

Are we perhaps under an obligation to replace in this way each separate piece of the manifest content of the dream by unconscious thoughts? Strictly speaking, yes; if we were interpreting a dream that had really been dreamt, we could not avoid that duty. But in that case, too, the dreamer would have to give us the most copious explanations. Clearly, we cannot carry out this requirement in the case of the author’s creation; nevertheless, we shall not overlook the fact that we have not yet submitted the main content of the dream to the process of interpretation or translation.

For Hanold’s dream was an anxiety-dream. Its content was frightening, the dreamer felt anxiety while he slept and he was left with painful feelings afterwards. Now this is far from convenient for our attempt at an explanation; and we must once again borrow heavily from the theory of dream-interpretation. We are warned by that theory not to fall into the error of tracing the anxiety that may be felt in a dream to the content of the dream, and not to treat the content of the dream as though it were the content of an idea occurring in waking life. It points out to us how often we dream the most ghastly things without feeling a trace of anxiety. The true situation, we learn, is quite a different one, which cannot be easily guessed, but which can be proved with certainty. The anxiety in anxiety-dreams, like neurotic anxiety in general, corresponds to a sexual affect, a libidinal feeling, and arises out of libido by the process of repression.¹  When we interpret a dream, therefore, we must replace anxiety by sexual excitement. The anxiety that originates in this way has - not invariably, but frequently - a selective influence on the content of the dream and introduces into it ideational elements which seem, when the dream is looked at from a conscious and mistaken point of view, to be appropriate to the affect of anxiety. As I have said, this is not invariably so, for there are plenty of anxiety-dreams in which the content is not in the least frightening and where it is therefore impossible to give an explanation on conscious lines of the anxiety that is felt.

¹ Cf. my first paper on the anxiety neurosis (1895b) and The Interpretation of Dreams.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1857

I am aware that this explanation of anxiety in dreams sounds very strange and is not easy to credit; but I can only advise the reader to come to terms with it. Moreover it would be a very remarkable thing if Norbert Hanold’s dream could be reconciled with this view of anxiety and could be explained in that way. On that basis, we should say that the dreamer’s erotic longings were stirred up during the night and made a powerful effort to make conscious his memory of the girl he loved and so to tear him out of his delusion, but that those longings met with a fresh repudiation and were transformed into anxiety, which in its turn introduced into the content of the dream the terrifying pictures from the memories of his schooldays. In this manner the true unconscious content of the dream, his passionate longing for the Zoe he had once known, became transformed into its manifest content of the destruction of Pompeii and the loss of Gradiva.

So far, I think, it sounds plausible. But it might justly be insisted that, if erotic wishes constitute the undistorted content of the dream, it ought also to be possible to point at least to some recognizable residue of those wishes concealed somewhere in the transformed dream. Well, even that may be possible, with the help of a hint from a later part of the story. When Hanold had his first meeting with the supposed Gradiva, he recollected the dream and begged the apparition to lie down again as he had seen her do then.¹ Thereupon, however, the young lady rose indignantly and left her strange companion, for she had detected the improper erotic wish behind what he had said under the domination of his delusion. We must, I think, accept Gradiva’s interpretation; even in a real dream we cannot always expect to find a more definite expression of an erotic wish.

¹ ‘No, I didn’t hear you speak. But I called to you when you lay down to sleep, and I stood beside you then - your face was as peaceful and beautiful as marble. May I beg of you - lie down once more on the step as you did then.’ (70.)

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1858

The application of a few of the rules of dream-interpretation to Hanold’s first dream has thus resulted in making it intelligible to us in its main features and in inserting it into the nexus of the story. Surely, then, the author must have observed these rules in creating it? We might ask another question, too: why did the author introduce a dream at all to bring about the further development of the delusion? In my opinion it was an ingenious notion and once again true to reality. We have already heard that in real illnesses a delusion very often arises in connection with a dream, and, after what we have learnt about the nature of dreams, there is no need to see a fresh riddle in this fact. Dreams and delusions arise from the same source - from what is repressed. Dreams are, as one might say, the physiological delusions of normal people. Before what is repressed has become strong enough to break through into waking life as a delusion, it may easily have achieved a first success, under the more favourable conditions of the state of sleep, in the form of a dream with persisting effects. For during sleep, along with a general lowering of mental activity, there is a relaxation in the strength of the resistance with which the dominant psychical forces oppose what is repressed. It is this relaxation that makes the formation of dreams possible, and that is why dreams give us our best access to a knowledge of the unconscious part of the mind - except that, as a rule, with the re-establishment of the psychical cathexes of waking life, the dream once more takes to flight and the ground that had been won by the unconscious is evacuated once again.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1859

III

In the further course of the story there is yet another dream, which may perhaps tempt us even more than the first to try to translate it and insert it into the train of events in the hero’s mind. But we should save very little by diverging from the author’s account and hurrying on immediately to this second dream; for no one who wishes to analyse some one else’s dream can avoid turning his attention in the greatest detail to all the dreamer’s experiences, both external and internal. It will probably be best, therefore, to keep close to the thread of the story and to intersperse it with our glosses as we proceed.

The construction of the fresh delusion about Gradiva’s death during the destruction of Pompeii in the year 79 A.D. was not the only result of the first dream, which we have already analysed. Immediately after it Hanold decided on his journey to Italy, which eventually brought him to Pompeii. But, before that, something else happened to him. As he was leaning out of the window, he thought he saw a figure in the street with the bearing and gait of his Gradiva. In spite of being insufficiently dressed, he hurried after her, but failed to overtake her, and was driven back into the house by the jeers of the passers-by. When he was in his room once more, the song of a canary from its cage in the window of a house opposite stirred up in him a mood in which he too seemed to be a prisoner longing for freedom; and his spring-time journey was no sooner decided on than it was carried out.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1860

The author has thrown a particularly clear light on this journey of Hanold’s and has allotted him to have a partial insight into his own internal processes. Hanold of course found himself a scientific pretext for his journey, but this did not last long. After all, he was in fact aware that ‘the impulse to make this journey had arisen from a feeling he could not name’. A strange restlessness made him dissatisfied with everything he came across, and drove him from Rome to Naples and from there to Pompeii; but even at this last halting-place he was still uneasy in his mood. He was annoyed at the folly of the honeymooners, and enraged at the impertinence of the house-flies which inhabit Pompeii’s hotels. But at last he could no longer disguise from himself ‘that his dissatisfaction could not be caused solely by what was around him but that there was something that sprang from himself as well’. He thought he was over-excited, felt ‘that he was discontented because he lacked something, but he had no idea what. And this ill-humour followed him about everywhere.’ In this frame of mind he was even furious with his mistress - with Science. When in the heat of the mid-day sun he wandered for the first time through Pompeii, ‘the whole of his science had not merely abandoned him, but had left him without the slightest desire to find her again. He remembered her only as something in the far distance, and he felt that she had been an old, dried-up, tedious aunt, the dullest and most unwanted creature in the world.’ (55.)

And then, while he was in this disagreeable and confused state of feeling, one of the problems attaching to his journey was solved for him - at the moment when he first saw Gradiva stepping through Pompeii. Something ‘came into his consciousness for the first time: without being aware himself of the impulse within him, he had come to Italy and had travelled on to Pompeii, without stopping in Rome or Naples, in order to see whether he could find any traces of her. And "traces" literally; for with her peculiar gait she must have left behind an imprint of her toes in the ashes distinct from all the rest.’ (58.)

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1861

Since the author has taken so much trouble over describing the journey, it must be worth while too to discuss its relation to Hanold’s delusion and its position in the chain of events. The journey was undertaken for reasons which its subject did not recognize at first and only admitted to himself later on, reasons which the author describes in so many words as ‘unconscious’. This is certainly taken from the life. One does not need to be suffering from a delusion in order to behave like this. On the contrary, it is an event of daily occurrence for a person - even a healthy person - to deceive himself over the motives for an action and to become conscious of them only after the event, provided only that a conflict between several currents of feeling furnishes the necessary condition for such a confusion. Accordingly, Hanold’s journey was from the first calculated to serve the delusion, and was intended to take him to Pompeii, where he could proceed further with his search for Gradiva. It will be recalled that his mind was occupied with that search both before and immediately after the dream, and that the dream itself was simply an answer to the question of Gradiva’s whereabouts, though an answer which was stifled by his consciousness. Some power which we do not recognize was, however, also inhibiting him to begin with from becoming aware of his delusional intention; so that, for the conscious reasons for his journey, he was left only with insufficient pretexts which had to be renewed from place to place. The author presents us with a further puzzle by making the dream, the discovery of the supposed Gradiva in the street, and the decision to undertake the journey as a result of the singing canary succeed one another as a series of chance events without any internal connection with one another.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1862

This obscure region of the story is made intelligible to us by some explanations which we derive from the later remarks of Zoe Bertgang. It was in fact the original of Gradiva, Fräulein Zoe herself, whom Hanold saw out of his window walking past in the street (89.) and whom he nearly overtook. If this had happened, the information given him by the dream - that she was in fact living at the same time and in the same town as he was - would by a lucky chance have received an irresistible confirmation, which would have brought about the collapse of his internal struggle. But the canary, whose singing sent Hanold off on his distant journey, belonged to Zoe, and its cage stood in her window diagonally across the street from Hanold’s house. (135.) Hanold, who, according to the girl’s accusation, had the gift of ‘negative hallucination’, who possessed the art of not seeing and not recognizing people who were actually present, must from the first have had an unconscious knowledge of what we only learned later. The indications of Zoe’s proximity (her appearance in the street and her bird’s singing so near his window) intensified the effect of the dream, and in this position, so perilous for his resistance to his erotic feelings, he took to flight. His journey was a result of his resistance gathering new strength after the surge forward of his erotic desires in the dream; it was an attempt at flight from the physical presence of the girl he loved. In a practical sense it meant a victory for repression, just as his earlier activity, his ‘pedestrian researches’ upon women and girls, had meant a victory for erotism. But everywhere in these oscillations in the struggle the compromise character of the outcome was preserved: the journey to Pompeii, which was supposed to lead him away from the living Zoe, led him at least to her surrogate, to Gradiva. The journey which was undertaken in defiance of the latent dream-thoughts, was nevertheless following the path to Pompeii that was pointed out by the manifest content of the dream. Thus at every fresh struggle between erotism and resistance we find the delusion triumphant.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1863

This view of Hanold’s journey as a flight from his awakening erotic longing for the girl whom he loved and who was so close to him is the only one which will fit in with the description of his emotional states during his stay in Italy. The repudiation of erotism which dominated him was expressed there in his disgust at the honeymooners. A short dream which he had in his albergo in Rome, and which was occasioned by the proximity of a German loving couple, ‘Edwin and Angelina’, whose evening conversation he could not help hearing through the thin partition-wall, throws a retrospective light, as it were, on the erotic drift of his first major dream. In the new dream he was once again in Pompeii and Vesuvius was once again erupting, and it was thus linked to the earlier dream whose effects persisted during the journey. This time, however, among the people imperilled were - not, as on the former occasion, himself and Gradiva but - the Apollo Belvedere and the Capitoline Venus, no doubt by way of an ironical exaltation of the couple in the next room. Apollo lifted Venus up, carried her out, and laid her down on some object in the dark which seemed to be a carriage or cart, since it emitted ‘a creaking noise’. Apart from this, the interpretation of the dream calls for no special skill. (31.)

Our author, who, as we have long since realized, never introduces a single idle or unintentional feature into history, has given us another piece of evidence of the asexual current which dominated Hanold during his journey. As he roamed about for hours in Pompeii, ‘strangely enough it never once recurred to his memory that a short time before he had dreamt of being present at the burial of Pompeii in the eruption of 79 A.D.’ (47.) It was only when he caught sight of Gradiva that he suddenly remembered the dream and became conscious at the same time of the delusional reason for his puzzling journey. How could this forgetting of the dream, this barrier of repression between the dream and his mental state during the journey, be explained, except by supposing that the journey was undertaken not at the direct inspiration of the dream but as a revolt against it, as an emanation of a mental power that refused to know anything of the secret meaning of the dream?

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1864

But on the other hand Hanold did not enjoy this victory over his erotism. The suppressed mental impulse remained powerful enough to revenge itself on the suppressing one with discontent and inhibition. His longings turned into restlessness and dissatisfaction, which made his journey seem pointless to him. His insight into his reasons for the journey at the bidding of the delusion was inhibited and his relations with his science, which in such a spot should have stirred all his interest, were interfered with. So the author shows us his hero after his flight from love in a kind of crisis, in a state of complete confusion and distraction, in a turmoil such as we usually find at the climax of an illness, when neither of the two conflicting powers has any longer a sufficiently superior strength over the other for the margin between them to make it possible to establish a vigorous mental régime. But here the author intervenes helpfully, and smoothes things out by making Gradiva appear at this juncture and undertake the cure of the delusion. By the power he possesses of guiding the people of his creation towards a happy destiny, in spite of all the laws of necessity which he makes them obey, he arranges that the girl, to avoid whom Hanold had fled to Pompeii, shall be transported to that very place. In this way he corrects the folly to which the young man was led by his delusion - the folly of exchanging the home of the living girl whom he loved for the burial-place of her imaginary substitute.

With the appearance of Zoe Bertgang as Gradiva, which marks the climax of tension in the story, our interest, too, soon takes a new direction. So far we have been assisting at the development of a delusion; now we are to witness its cure. And we may ask whether the author has given a purely fanciful account of the course of this cure or whether he his constructed it in accordance with possibilities actually present. Zoe’s own words during her conversation with her newly-married friend give us a definite right to ascribe to her an intention to bring about the cure. (124.) But how did she set about it? When she had got over the indignation aroused in her by his suggestion that she should lie down to sleep again as she had ‘then’, she returned next day at the same mid-day hour to the same spot, and proceeded to entice out of Hanold all the secret knowledge her ignorance of which had prevented her from understanding his behaviour the day before. She learnt about his dream, about the sculpture of Gradiva, and about the peculiarity of gait which she herself shared with it. She accepted the role of the ghost awakened to life for a brief hour, a role for which, as she perceived, his delusion had cast her, and, by accepting the flowers of the dead which he had brought without conscious purpose, and by expressing a regret that he had not given her roses, she gently hinted in ambiguous words at the possibility of his taking up a new position. (90.)

This unusually clever girl, then, was determined to win her childhood’s friend for her husband, after she had recognized that the young man’s love for her was the motive force behind the delusion. Our interest in her behaviour, however, will probably yield for the moment to the surprise which we may feel at the delusion itself. The last form taken by it was that Gradiva, who had been buried in 79 A.D., was now able, as a mid-day ghost, to exchange words with him for an hour, at the end of which she must sink into the ground or seek her grave once more. This mental cobweb, which was not brushed away either by his perceiving that the apparition was wearing modern shoes or by her ignorance of the ancient languages and her command of German, which was not in existence in her day, certainly seems to justify the author’s description of his story as a ‘Pompeian phantasy’, but it seems also to exclude any possibility of measuring it by the standards of clinical reality.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1865

Nevertheless, on closer consideration this delusion of Hanold’s seems to me to lose the greater part of its improbability. The author, indeed, has made himself responsible for one part of it by basing his story on the premiss that Zoe was in every detail a duplicate of the relief. We must therefore avoid shifting the improbability of this premiss on to its consequence - that Hanold took the girl for Gradiva come to life. Greater value is given to the delusional explanation by the fact that the author has put no rational one at our disposal. Moreover the author has adduced contributory and mitigating circumstances on behalf of his hero’s excesses in the shape of the glare of the campagna sunlight and the intoxicating magic of the wine grown on the slopes of Vesuvius. But the most important of all the explanatory and exculpatory factors remains the ease with which our intellect is prepared to accept something absurd provided it satisfies powerful emotional impulses. It is an astonishing fact, and one that is too generally overlooked, how readily and frequently under these psychological conditions people of even the most powerful intelligence react as though they were feeble-minded; and anyone who is not too conceited may see this happening in himself as often as he pleases. And this is far more so if some of the mental processes concerned are linked with unconscious or repressed motives. In this connection I am happy to quote the words of a philosopher, who writes to me: ‘I have been noting down the instances I myself experience of striking mistakes and unthinking actions, for which one finds motives afterwards (in a most unreasonable way). It is an alarming thing, but typical, to find how much folly this brings to light.’ It must be remembered, too, that the belief in spirits and ghosts and the return of the dead, which finds so much support in the religions to which we have all been attached, at least in our childhood, is far from having disappeared among educated people, and that many who are sensible in other respects find it possible to combine spiritualism with reason. A man who has grown rational and sceptical, even, may be ashamed to discover how easily he may for a moment return to a belief in spirits under the combined impact of strong emotion and perplexity. I know of a doctor who had once lost one of his women patients suffering from Graves’ disease, and who could not get rid of a faint suspicion that he might perhaps have contributed to the unhappy outcome by a thoughtless prescription. One day, several years later, a girl entered his consulting-room, who, in spite of all his efforts, he could not help recognizing as the dead one. He could frame only a single thought: ‘So after all it’s true that the dead can come back to life.’ His dread did not give way to shame till the girl introduced herself as the sister of the one who had died of the same disease as she herself was suffering from. The victims of Graves’ disease, as has often been observed, have a marked facial resemblance to one another; and in this case this typical likeness was reinforced by a family one. The doctor to whom this occurred was, however, none other than myself; so I have a personal reason for not disputing the clinical possibility of Norbert Hanold’s temporary delusion that Gradiva had come back to life. The fact, finally, is familiar to every psychiatrist that in severe cases of chronic delusions (in paranoia) the most extreme examples occur of ingeniously elaborated and well-supported absurdities.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1866

After his first meeting with Gradiva, Norbert Hanold had drunk his wine first in one and then in the other of the two restaurants that he knew in Pompeii, while the other visitors were engaged in eating the main meal of the day. ‘Of course it never came into his head to think of the nonsensical idea’ that he was doing it in order to discover in which of the hotels Gradiva was living and taking her meals. But it is difficult to say what other sense his actions could have had. On the day after their second meeting in the House of Meleager, he had all kinds of strange and apparently unconnected experiences. He found a narrow gap in the wall of the portico, at the point where Gradiva had disappeared. He met a foolish lizard-catcher who addressed him as though he were an acquaintance. He discovered a third hotel, in an out-of-the-way situation, the ‘Albergo del Sole’, whose proprietor palmed off on him a metal clasp with a green patina as a find from beside the remains of a Pompeian girl. And, lastly, in his own hotel he noticed a newly-arrived young couple whom he diagnosed as a brother and sister and whom he found sympathetic. All these impressions were afterwards woven together into a ‘remarkably senseless’ dream, which ran as follows:

‘Somewhere in the sun Gradiva was sitting, making a snare out of a blade of grass to catch a lizard in, and said: "Please keep quite still. Our lady colleague is right; the method is a really good one and she has made use of it with excellent results."'

He fended off this dream while he was still asleep, with the critical thought that it was utter madness, and cast around in all directions to get free from it. He succeeded in doing so with the help of an invisible bird, which uttered a short laughing call and carried off the lizard in its beak.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1867

Are we to venture on an attempt at interpreting this dream too - that is, at replacing it by the latent thoughts from whose distortion it must have arisen? It is as senseless as only a dream can be expected to be; and this absurdity of dreams is the mainstay of the view which refuses to characterize dreams as completely valid psychical acts and maintains that they arise out of a purposeless excitation of the elements of the mind.

We are able to apply to this dream the technique which may be described as the regular procedure for interpreting dreams. It consists in paying no attention to the apparent connections in the manifest dream but in fixing our eyes upon each portion of its content independently, and in looking for its origin in the dreamer’s impressions, memories, and free associations. Since, however, we cannot question Hanold, we shall have to content ourselves with referring to his impressions, and we may very tentatively put our own association in place of his.

‘Somewhere in the sun Gradiva was sitting, catching lizards and speaking.’ What impression of the previous day finds an echo in this part of the dream? Undoubtedly the encounter with the elderly gentleman, the lizard-catcher, who was thus replaced in the dream by Gradiva. He sat or lay ‘on a sun-bathed slope’ and he, too, spoke to Hanold. Furthermore, Gradiva’s remarks in the dream were copied from this man’s remarks: viz. ‘The method prescribed by our colleague Eimer is a really good one; I have made use of it many times already with excellent results. Please keep quite still.’ Gradiva used much the same words in the dream, except that  ‘our colleague Eimer’ was replaced by an unnamed ‘lady colleague’; moreover, the ‘many times’ in the zoologist’s speech was omitted in the dream and the order of the sentences was somewhat altered. It seems, therefore, that this experience of the previous day was transformed into the dream with the help of a few changes and distortions. Why this particular experience? And what is the meaning of the changes - the replacement of the elderly gentleman by Gradiva and the introduction of the enigmatic ‘lady colleague’?

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1868

There is a rule in interpreting dreams which runs as follows: ‘A speech heard in a dream is always derived from one that has been heard or made by the dreamer in waking life.’ This rule seems to have been observed here: Gradiva’s speech is only a modification of the old zoologist’s speech which Hanold had heard the day before. Another rule in dream-interpretation would tell us that when one person is replaced by another or when two people are mixed up together (for instance, by one of them being shown in a situation that is characteristic of the other), it means that the two people are being equated, that there is a similarity between them. If we venture to apply this rule too to our dream, we should arrive at this translation: ‘Gradiva catches lizards just like the old man; she is skilled in lizard-catching just as he is.’ This result cannot exactly be said to be intelligible as yet; but we have yet another puzzle to solve. To what impression of the previous day are we to relate the ‘lady colleague’ who in the dream replaces the famous zoologist Eimer? Fortunately we have very little choice here. A ‘lady colleague’ can only mean another girl - that is to say, represents/represented the sympathetic young lady whom Hanold had taken for a sister travelling with her brother. ‘She was wearing a red Sorrento rose in her dress, the sight of which reminded him of something as he looked across from his corner of the dining-room, but he could not think what.’ This remark of the author’s gives us a right to regard her as the ‘lady colleague’ in the dream. What Hanold could not recall were, it cannot be doubted, the words spoken by the supposed Gradiva, who had told him, as she asked him for the white flowers of the dead, that in the spring people give happier girls roses. But behind those words there had lain a hint of wooing. So what sort of lizard-catching was it that the happier ‘lady colleague’ had carried out so successfully?

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1869

Next day Hanold came upon the supposed brother and sister in an affectionate embrace, and was thus able to correct his earlier mistake. They were in fact a pair of lovers, and moreover on their honeymoon, as we discovered later when they so unexpectedly interrupted Hanold’s third interview with Zoe. If now we are willing to assume that Hanold, though consciously taking them for a brother and sister, had immediately recognized their true relationship (which was unambiguously betrayed next day) in his unconscious, Gradiva’s speech in the dream acquires a clear meaning. The red rose had become the symbol of a love-relation. Hanold understood that the couple were already what he and Gradiva had yet to become; the lizard-catching had come to signify man-catching; and Gradiva’s speech meant something like: ‘Only let me alone: I know how to win a man just as well as the other girl does.’

But why was it necessary for this penetration of Zoe’s intentions to appear in the dream in the form of the old zoologist’s speech?   the old gentleman’s skill in lizard-catching? Well, we can have no difficulty in answering that question. We guessed long ago that the lizard-catcher was none other than Bertgang, the professor of Zoology and Zoe’s father, who, incidentally, must have known Hanold too - which explains how he came to address him as an acquaintance. Let us assume, once again, that in his unconscious Hanold at once recognized the Professor. ‘He had a vague notion that he had already had a passing glimpse of the lizard hunter’s face, probably in one of the two hotels.’ This, then, is the explanation of the strange disguise under which the intention attributed to Zoe made its appearance: she was the lizard-catcher’s daughter and had acquired her skill from him.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1870

The replacement of the lizard-catcher by Gradiva in the content of the dream is accordingly a representation of the relation between the two figures which was known to Hanold in his unconscious; the introduction of the ‘lady colleague’ instead of ‘our colleague Eimer’ allowed the dream to express Hanold’s realization that she was wooing a man. So far the dream welded together (‘condensed’, as we say) two experiences of the previous day into one situation, in order to bring to expression (in a very obscure way, it is true) two discoveries which were not allotted to become conscious. But we can go further, we can diminish the strangeness of the dream still more and we can demonstrate the influence of his other experiences of the previous day on the form taken by the manifest dream.

We may declare ourselves dissatisfied with the explanation that has hitherto been given of why it was that precisely the scene of the lizard-catching was made into the nucleus of the dream, and we may suspect that still other elements of the dream-thoughts were bringing their influence to bear in the emphasis that was laid on the ‘lizard’ in the manifest dream. Indeed, it may easily have been so. It will be recalled that Hanold had discovered a gap in the wall at the point where Gradiva had seemed to vanish - a gap ‘which was nevertheless wide enough to allow a form that was unusually slim’ to slip through. This observation led him in daytime to make an alteration in his delusion - an alteration to the effect that when Gradiva disappeared from his sight she did not sink into the earth but used the gap as a way of reaching her grave. In his unconscious thoughts he may have told himself that he had now discovered the natural explanation of the girl’s surprising disappearance. But must not the idea of slipping through narrow gaps and disappearing in them have recalled the behaviour of lizards? Was not Gradiva herself in this way behaving like an agile little lizard? In our view, then, the discovery of the gap in the wall contributed to determining the choice of the element ‘lizard’ in the manifest content of the dream. The lizard situation in the dream represented this impression of the previous day as well as the encounter with Zoe’s father, the zoologist.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1871

And what if now, growing bold, we were to try to find a representation in the content of the dream of the one experience of the previous day which has not yet been exploited - the discovery of the third inn, the Albergo del Sole? The author has treated this episode at such length and has linked so many things to it that it would surprise us if it alone had made no contribution to the construction of the dream. Hanold went into this inn, which, owing to its out-of-the-way situation and its distance from the railway station, had remained unknown to him, to purchase a bottle of soda-water to cool his heated blood. The landlord took the opportunity of displaying his antiquities, and showed him a clasp which the pretended had belonged to the Pompeian girl who had been found in the neighbourhood of the Forum closely embraced by her lover. Hanold, who had never hitherto believed this often-repeated tale, was now compelled by a power unknown to him to believe in the truth of this moving story and in the genuineness of the find; he purchased the brooch and left the inn with his acquisition. As he was going out, he saw, standing in a glass of water in a window, a nodding sprig of asphodel covered with white blossoms, and took the sight of it as a confirmation of the genuineness of his new possession. He now felt a positive conviction that the green clasp had belonged to Gradiva and that she had been the girl who had died in her lover’s arms. He quieted the jealousy which thereupon seized him, by deciding that next day he would show the clasp to Gradiva herself and arrive at certainty about his suspicion. It cannot be denied that this was a curious new piece of delusion; yet are we to suppose that no trace of it was to be found in his dream of the same night?

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1872

It will certainly be worth while to explain the origin of this addition to the delusion and to look for the fresh piece of unconscious discovery which was replaced by the fresh piece of delusion. The delusion appeared under the influence of the landlord of the ‘Sun Hotel’ to whom Hanold behaved in such a remarkably credulous fashion that it was almost as though he had been given a hypnotic suggestion by him. The landlord showed him a metal clasp for a garment, represented it as genuine and as having belonged to the girl who had been found buried in the arms of her lover; and Hanold, who was capable of being sufficiently critical to doubt both the truth of the story and the genuineness of the clasp, was at once taken in, and purchased the highly dubious antique. Why he should have behaved in this way is quite incomprehensible, and there is nothing to suggest that the landlord’s personality might offer us a solution. But there is yet another riddle about the incident, and two riddles often solve each other. As he was leaving the albergo he saw a sprig of asphodel standing in a glass in a window and took it as a confirmation of the genuineness of the metal clasp. How could that have come about? But fortunately this last point is easy to solve. The white flower was no doubt the one which he had given to Gradiva at mid-day, and it is perfectly true that something was confirmed by the sight of it in the window of the inn. Not, it is true, the genuineness of the clasp, but something else that had already become clear to him when he discovered this albergo after having previously overlooked it. Already on the day before he had behaved as though he was searching in the two Pompeii hotels to find the person who appeared to him as Gradiva. And now, since he had so unexpectedly come upon a third one, he must have said to himself in his unconscious: ‘So this is where she is staying!’ And added, as he was going out: ‘Yes, that’s right! There’s the asphodel that I gave her! So that’s her window!’ This then was the new discovery which was replaced by the delusion, and which could not become conscious because its underlying postulate that Gradiva was a living person whom he had once known could not become conscious.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1873

But how did the replacement of the new discovery by the delusion take place? What happened, I think, was that the sense of conviction attaching to the discovery was able to persist and was retained, while the discovery itself, which was inadmissible to consciousness, was replaced by another ideational content connected with it by associations of thought. Thus the sense of conviction became attached to a content which was in fact foreign to it and this, in the form of a delusion, won a recognition which did not apply to it. Hanold transferred his conviction that Gradiva lived in the house to other impressions which he had received in the house; this led to his credulity in regard to the landlord’s remarks, the genuineness of the metal clasp and the truth of the anecdote about the discovery of the embracing lovers - but only through his linking what he heard in the house with Gradiva. The jealousy which was already latent in him seized upon this material and the consequence was the delusion (though it contradicted his first dream) that Gradiva was the girl who had died in her lover’s arms and that the clasp he had bought had belonged to her.

It will be observed that his conversation with Gradiva and her hint at wooing him (her ‘saying it with flowers’) had already brought about important changes in Hanold. Traits of masculine desire - components of the libido - had awakened in him, though it is true that they could not yet dispense with the disguise of conscious pretexts. But the problem of the ‘bodily nature’ of Gradiva, which pursued him all that day, cannot disavow its origin in a young man’s erotic curiosity about a woman’s body, even if it is involved in a scientific question by the conscious insistence on Gradiva’s peculiar oscillation between death and life. His jealousy was a further sign of the increasingly active aspect of Hanold’s love; he expressed this jealousy at the beginning of their conversation the next day and with the help of a fresh pretext proceeded to touch the girl’s body and, as he used to do in the far-off past, to hit her.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1874

But it is now time to ask ourselves whether the method of constructing a delusion which we have inferred from our author’s account is one that is known from other sources, or whether, indeed, it is possible at all. From our medical knowledge we can only reply that it is certainly the correct method, and perhaps the sole method, by which a delusion acquires the unshakable conviction which is one of its clinical characteristics. If a patient believes in his delusion so firmly, this is not because his faculty of judgement has been overturned and does not arise from what is false in the delusion. On the contrary, there is a grain of truth concealed in every delusion, there is something in it that really deserves belief, and this is the source of the patient’s conviction, which is therefore to that extent justified. This true element, however, has long been repressed. If eventually it is able to penetrate into consciousness, this time in a distorted form, the sense of conviction attaching to it is over-intensified as though by way of compensation and is now attached to the distorted substitute of the repressed truth, and protects it from any critical attacks. The conviction is displaced, as it were, from the unconscious truth on to the conscious error that is linked to it, and remains fixated there precisely as a result of this displacement. The instance of the formation of a delusion which arose from Hanold’s first dream is no more than a similar, though not identical, example of such a displacement. Indeed, the method described here by which conviction arises in the case of a delusion does not differ fundamentally from the method by which a conviction is formed in normal cases, where repression does not come into the picture. We all attach our conviction to thought-contents in which truth is combined with error, and let it extend from the former over the latter. It becomes diffused, as it were, from the truth over the error associated with it and protects the latter, though not so unalterably as in the case of a delusion, against deserved criticism. In normal psychology, too, being well-connected - ‘having influence’, so to speak - can take the place of true worth.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1875

I will now return to the dream and bring out a small but not uninteresting feature in it, which forms a connection between two of its provoking causes. Gradiva had drawn a kind of contrast between the white asphodel blossoms and the red rose. Seeing the asphodel again in the window of the Albergo del Sole became an important piece of evidence in support of Hanold’s unconscious discovery, which was expressed in the new delusion; and alongside this was the fact that the red rose in the dress of the sympathetic girl helped Hanold in his unconscious to a correct view of her relation to her companion, so that he was able to make her appear in the dream as the ‘lady colleague’.

But where in the manifest content of the dream, it will be asked, do we find anything to indicate and replace the discovery for which, as we have seen, Hanold’s new delusion was a substitute - the discovery that Gradiva was staying with her father in the third, concealed Pompeii hotel, the Albergo del Sole? Nevertheless it is all there in the dream, and not even very much distorted, and I merely hesitate to point to it because I know that even those of my readers who have followed me patiently so far will begin to rebel strongly against my attempts at interpretation. Hanold’s discovery, I repeat, is fully announced in the dream, but so cleverly concealed that it is bound to be overlooked. It is hidden behind a play upon words, an ambiguity. ‘Somewhere in the sun Gradiva was sitting.’ We have quite correctly related this to the spot where Hanold met her father, the zoologist. But could it not also mean in the ‘Sun’ - that is, Gradiva is staying in the Albergo del Sole, the Sun Hotel? And was not the ‘somewhere’, which had no bearing on the encounter with her father, made to sound so hypocritically indefinite precisely because it introduced a definite piece of information about the place where Gradiva was staying? From my experience elsewhere of real dreams, I myself am perfectly certain that this is how the ambiguity is to be understood. But I should not in fact have ventured to present this piece of interpretative work to my readers, if the author had not at this point lent me his powerful assistance. He puts the very same play upon words into the girl’s mouth when next day she saw the metal clasp: ‘Did you find it in the sun, perhaps, which produces things of this kind?’ And since Hanold failed to understand what she had said, she explained that she meant the Sun Hotel, which they call ‘Sole’ here, and where she had already seen the supposititious antique.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1876

And now let us make a bold attempt at replacing Hanold’s ‘remarkably senseless’ dream by the unconscious thoughts that lay behind it and were as unlike it as possible. They ran, perhaps, as follows: ‘She is staying in the "Sun" with her father. Why is she playing this game with me? Does she want to make fun of me? Or can it possibly be that she loves me and wants to have me as her husband?’ - And no doubt while he was still asleep there came an answer dismissing this last possibility as ‘the merest madness’, a comment which was ostensibly directed against the whole manifest dream.

Critical readers will now justly enquire about the origin of the interpolation (for which I have so far given no grounds) of the reference to being ridiculed by Gradiva. The answer to this is given in The Interpretation of Dreams, which explains that if ridicule, derision, or embittered contradiction occurs in the dream-thoughts, this is expressed by the manifest dream being given a senseless form, by absurdity in the dream. This absurdity does not mean, therefore, that there is any paralysis of psychical activity: it is a method of representation employed by the dream-work. As always happens at specially difficult points, the author once more comes to our help here. The senseless dream had a short epilogue, in which a bird uttered a laughing call and carried the lizard away in its beak. But Hanold had heard a similar laughing call after Gradiva’s disappearance. It had in fact come from Zoe, who with this laugh was shaking off the gloomy seriousness of her underworld role. Gradiva had really laughed at him. But the dream-image of the bird carrying off the lizard may have been a recollection of the earlier dream, in which the Apollo Belvedere carried off the Capitoline Venus.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1877

There may still be some readers who feel that the translation of the situation of lizard-catching by the idea of wooing has not been sufficiently well established. Some further support for it may be afforded by the consideration that Zoe in her conversation with her newly-married friend admitted precisely what Hanold’s thoughts about her suspected - when she told her she had felt sure that she would ‘dig out’ something interesting in Pompeii. Here she was trespassing into the field of archaeology, just as he had trespassed, with his simile of lizard-catching, into the field of zoology; it was as though they were struggling towards each other and each were trying to assume the other’s character.

Here then we seem to have finished off the interpretation of this second dream as well. Both of them have been made intelligible to us on the presupposition that a dreamer knows in his unconscious thoughts all that he has forgotten in his conscious ones, and that in the former he judges correctly what in the latter he misunderstands in a delusion. In the course of our arguments we have no doubt been obliged to make some assertions which have seemed strange to the reader because of their unfamiliarity; and we have probably often roused a suspicion that what we pretended was the author’s meaning was in fact only our own. I am anxious to do all I can to dissipate this suspicion, and for that reason I will gladly enter into more detail over one of the most delicate points - I mean the use of ambiguous words and phrases, such as: ‘Somewhere in the Sun Gradiva was sitting.’

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1878

Anyone who reads Gradiva must be struck by the frequency with which the author puts ambiguous remarks into the mouths of his two principal characters. In Hanold’s case these remarks are intended by him unambiguously and it is only the heroine, Gradiva, who is struck by their second meaning. Thus, for instance, when in reply to her first answer he exclaimed ‘I knew your voice sounded like that’, Zoe, who was still in ignorance, could not but ask how that could be, since he had not heard her speak before. In their second conversation the girl was for a moment thrown into doubt about his delusion, when he told her that he had recognized her at once. She could not help taking these words in the sense (correct so far as his unconscious was concerned) of being a recognition that their acquaintance went back to their childhood; whereas he, of course, knew nothing of this implication of his remark and explained it only by reference to his dominant delusion. On the other hand, the remarks made by the girl, whose personality shows the most lucid clarity of mind in contrast to Hanold’s delusion, exhibit an intentional ambiguity. One of their meanings chimes in with Hanold’s delusion, so as to be able to penetrate into his conscious understanding, but the other rises above the delusion and gives us as a rule its translation into the unconscious truth for which it stands. It is a triumph of ingenuity and wit to be able to express the delusion and the truth in the same turn of words.

Zoe’s speech in which she explains the situation to her friend and at the same time succeeds in getting rid of the interrupter is full of ambiguities of this kind. It is in reality a speech made by the author and aimed more at the reader than at Zoe’s newly-married ‘colleague’. In her conversations with Hanold the ambiguity is usually effected by Zoe’s using the same symbolism that we found in Hanold’s first dream - the equation of repression and burial, and of Pompeii and childhood. Thus she is able in her speeches on the one hand to remain in the role for which Hanold’s delusion has cast her, and on the other hand to make contact with the real circumstances and awaken an understanding of them in Hanold’s unconscious.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1879

‘I have long grown used to being dead.’ (90.) ‘To me it is right that you should give the flower of forgetfulness.’ [Ibid.] In these sentences there was a faint foretaste of the reproaches which broke out clearly enough later on in her final lecture to him, in which she compared him to an archaeopteryx. ‘The fact of someone having to die so as to come alive; but no doubt that must be so for archaeologists.’ She made this last remark after the delusion had been cleared up, as though to give a key to her ambiguous speeches. But she made her neatest use of her symbolism when she asked: ‘I feel as though we had shared a meal like this once before, two thousand years ago; can’t you remember?’ (118.) Here the substitution of the historical past for childhood and the effort to awaken the memory of the latter are quite unmistakable.

But whence comes this striking preference for ambiguous speeches in Gradiva? It is no chance event, so it seems to us, but a necessary consequence of the premisses of the story. It is nothing other than a counterpart to the twofold determination of symptoms, in so far as speeches are themselves symptoms and, like them, arise from compromises between the conscious and the unconscious. It is simply that this double origin is more easily noticed in speeches than, for instance, in actions. And when, as is often made possible by the malleable nature of the material of speech, each of the two intentions lying behind the speech can be successfully expressed in the same turn of words, we have before us what we call an ‘ambiguity’.

In the course of the psychotherapeutic treatment of a delusion or of an analogous disorder, ambiguous speeches of this kind are often produced by the patient, as new symptoms of the briefest duration; and it can happen that the doctor finds himself too in the position of making use of them. In that way it not infrequently happens that with the meaning that is intended for the patient’s conscious he stirs up an understanding of the meaning that applies to his unconscious. I know from experience that the part thus played by ambiguity is apt to raise the greatest objection in the uninitiated and to give rise to the greatest misunderstandings. But in any case our author was right in giving a place in his creation to a picture of this characteristic feature of what takes place in the formation of dreams and delusions.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1880

IV

The emergence of Zoe as a physician, as I have already remarked, arouses a new interest in us. We shall be anxious to learn whether a cure of the kind she performed upon Hanold is conceivable or even possible, and whether the author has taken as correct a view of the conditions for the disappearance of a delusion as he has of those for its genesis.

We shall unquestionably be met at this point by an opinion which denies that the case presented by the author possesses any such general interest and disputes the existence of any problem requiring solution. Hanold, it will be said, had no alternative but to abandon his delusion, after its subject, the supposed ‘Gradiva’ herself, had shown him that all his hypotheses were incorrect and after she had given him the most natural explanations of everything puzzling - for instance, of how it was that she had known his name. This would be the logical end of the matter; but since the girl had incidentally revealed her love to him, the author, no doubt to the satisfaction of his female readers, arranged that his story, a not uninteresting one otherwise, should have the usual happy ending in marriage. It would have been more consistent and equally possible, the argument will proceed, if the young scientist, after his error had been pointed out, had taken his leave of the lady with polite thanks and given as the reason for refusing her love the fact that he was able to feel an intense interest in antique women made of bronze or marble, and in their originals if they were accessible to contact, but that he did not know what to do with contemporary girls of flesh and blood. The author, in short, had quite arbitrarily tacked a love story on to his archaeological phantasy.

In rejecting this view as an impossible one, we observe in the first place that the beginnings of a change in Hanold were not shown only in his abandoning his delusion. Simultaneously, and indeed before his delusion was cleared up, an unmistakable craving for love awakened in him, which found its outcome, naturally as it were, in his courting the girl who had freed him from his delusion. We have already laid emphasis on the pretexts and disguises under which his curiosity about her ‘bodily nature’, his jealousy, and his brutal masculine instinct for mastery were expressed in the midst of his delusion, after his repressed erotic desire had led to his first dream. As further evidence of this we may recall that on the evening after his second interview with Gradiva a live woman for the first time struck him as sympathetic, though he still made a concession to his earlier horror of honeymooning couples by not recognizing her as being newly married. Next morning, however, he was a chance witness of an exchange of endearments between the girl and her supposed brother, and he withdrew with a sense of awe as though he had interrupted some sacred act. His derision of ‘ Edwin and Angelina’ was forgotten, and he had acquired a sense of respect for the erotic side of life.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1881

Thus the author has drawn the closest link between the clearing up of the delusion and the outbreak of a craving for love, and he has paved the way for the inevitable outcome in a courtship. He knows the essential nature of the delusion better than his critics: he knows that a component of loving desire had combined with a component of resistance to it in bringing about the delusion, and he makes the girl who undertakes the cure sensitive to the element in Hanold’s delusion which is agreeable to her. It was only this knowledge which could decide her to devote herself to the treatment; it was only the certainty of being loved by him that could induce her to admit her love to him. The treatment consisted in giving him back from outside the repressed memories which he could not set free from inside; but it would have had no effect if in the course of it the therapist had not taken his feelings into account and if her ultimate translation of the delusion had not been: ‘Look, all this only means that you love me.

The procedure which the author makes his Zoe adopt for curing her childhood friend’s delusion shows a far-reaching similarity - no, a complete agreement in its essence - with a therapeutic method which was introduced into medical practice in 1895 by Dr. Josef Breuer and myself, and to the perfecting of which I have since then devoted myself. This method of treatment, to which Breuer first gave the name of ‘cathartic’ but which I prefer to describe as ‘analytic’, consists, as applied to patients suffering from disorders analogous to Hanold’s delusion, in bringing to their consciousness, to some extent forcibly, the unconscious whose repression led to their falling ill - exactly as Gradiva did with the repressed memories of their childhood relations. Gradiva, it is true, could carry out this task more easily than a doctor: in several respects she was in what may be described as an ideal position for it. The doctor, who has no pre-existing knowledge of his patient and possesses no conscious memory of what is unconsciously at work in him, must call a complicated technique to his help in order to make up for this disadvantage. He must learn how to infer with great certainty from the conscious associations and communications of the patient what is repressed in him, how to discover his unconscious as it betrays itself behind his conscious words and acts. He then brings about something like what Norbert Hanold grasped at the end of the story when he translated back the name ‘Gradiva’ into ‘Bertgang’. The disorder vanishes while being traced back to its origin; analysis, too, brings simultaneous cure.

But the similarity between Gradiva’s procedure and the analytic method of psychotherapy is not limited to these two points - the making conscious of what has been repressed and the coinciding of explanation with cure. It also extends to what turns out to be the essence of the whole change - to the awakening of feelings. Every disorder analogous to Hanold’s delusion, what in scientific terms we are in the habit of calling ‘psychoneuroses’, has as its precondition the repression of a portion of instinctual life, or, as we can safely say, of the sexual instinct. At every attempt to introduce the unconscious and repressed causes of the illness into consciousness, the instinctual component concerned is necessarily aroused to a renewed struggle with the repressing powers, only to come to terms with them in the final outcome, often to the accompaniment of violent manifestations of reaction. The process of cure is accomplished in a relapse into love, if we combine all the many components of the sexual instinct under the term ‘love’; and such a relapse is indispensable, for the symptoms on account of which the treatment has been undertaken are nothing other than precipitates of earlier struggles connected with repression or the return of the repressed, and they can only be resolved and washed away by a fresh high tide of the same passions. Every psycho-analytic treatment is an attempt at liberating repressed love which has found a meagre outlet in the compromise of a symptom. Indeed, the agreement between such treatments and the process of cure described by the author of Gradiva reaches its climax in the further fact that in analytic psychotherapy too the re-awakened passion, whether it is love or hate, invariably chooses as its object the figure of the doctor.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1882

It is here that the differences begin, which made the case of Gradiva an ideal one which medical technique cannot attain. Gradiva was able to return the love which was making its way from the unconscious into consciousness, but the doctor cannot. Gradiva had herself been the object of the earlier, repressed love; her figure at once offered the liberated current of love a desirable aim. The doctor has been a stranger, and must endeavour to become a stranger once more after the cure; he is often at a loss what advice to give the patients he has cured as to how in real life they can use their recovered capacity to love. To indicate the expedients and substitutes of which the doctor therefore makes use to help him to approximate with more or less success to the model of a cure by love which has been shown us by our author - all this would take us much too far away from the task before us.

And now for the final question, whose answer we have already evaded more than once. Our views on repression, on the genesis of delusions and allied disorders, on the formation and solution of dreams, on the part played by erotic life, and on the method by which such disorders are cured, are far from being the common property of science, let alone the assured possession of educated people. If the insight which has enabled the author to construct his ‘phantasy’ in such a way that we have been able to dissect it like a real case history is in the nature of knowledge, we should be curious to learn what were the sources of that knowledge. One of our circle - the one who, as I said at the beginning, was interested in the dreams in Gradiva and their possible interpretation - approached the author with the direct question whether he knew anything of such scientific theories as these. The author replied, as was to be expected, in the negative, and, indeed, somewhat brusquely. His imagination, he said, had inspired Gradiva, and he had enjoyed it; if there was anyone whom it did not please, let him simply leave it alone. He had no suspicion of how greatly it had in fact pleased his readers.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1883

It is quite possible that the author’s disavowal does not stop at this. He may perhaps altogether deny any knowledge of the rules which we have shown that he has followed, and he may repudiate all the purposes we have recognized in his work. I do not regard this as improbable; but if it is so, there are only two possible explanations. It may be that we have produced a complete caricature of an interpretation by introducing into an innocent work of art purposes of which its creator had no notion, and by so doing have shown once more how easy it is to find what one is looking for and what is occupying one’s own mind - a possibility of which the strangest examples are to be found in the history of literature. Let every reader now make up his mind whether he is able to accept this explanation. We ourselves, of course, hold to the other view, the remaining alternative. Our opinion is that the author need have known nothing of these rules and purposes, so that he could disavow them in good faith, but that nevertheless we have not discovered anything in his work that is not already in it. We probably draw from the same source and work upon the same object, each of us by another method. And the agreement of our results seems to guarantee that we have both worked correctly. Our procedure consists in the conscious observation of abnormal mental processes in other people so as to be able to elicit and announce their laws. The author no doubt proceeds differently. He directs his attention to the unconscious in his own mind, he listens to its possible developments and lends them artistic expression instead of suppressing them by conscious criticism. Thus he experiences from himself what we learn from others - the laws which the activities of this unconscious must obey. But he need not state these laws, nor even be clearly aware of them; as a result of the tolerance of his intelligence, they are incorporated within his creations. We discover these laws by analysing his writings just as we find them from cases of real illness; but the conclusion seems inescapable that either both of us, the writer and the doctor, have misunderstood the unconscious in the same way, or we have both understood it correctly. This conclusion is of great value to us, and it is on its account that it has been worth while to investigate by the methods of medical psycho-analysis the way in which the formation and the cure of the delusions as well as the dreams are represented in Jensen’s Gradiva.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1884

We would seem to have reached the end. But an attentive reader might remind us that at the beginning we threw out an assertion that dreams are wishes represented as fulfilled and that we gave no proof of this. Well, is our reply, what we have described in these pages might show how little justification there is for trying to cover the explanations we have to give of dreams with the single formula that dreams are wish-fulfilments. Nevertheless the assertion stands and can easily be proved too for the dreams in Gradiva. The latent dream-thoughts - we know now what is meant by them - may be of the most various kinds; in Gradiva they are  ‘days’ residues’, thoughts that have been left over unnoticed and undealt-with from the mental activities of waking life. But in order for a dream to develop out of them, the co-operation of a wish (usually an unconscious one) is required; this contributes the motive force for constructing the dream, while the day’s residues provide the material. In Norbert Hanold’s first dream two wishes competed with each other in making the dream; one of them was actually admissible to consciousness, while the other belonged to the unconscious and operated from out of repression. The first was a wish, understandable in any archaeologist, to have been present as an eye-witness at the catastrophe in the year 79 A.D. What sacrifice would an archaeologist think too great if this wish could be realized in any way other than in a dream! The other wish, the other constructor of the dream, was of an erotic nature: it might be crudely and also incompletely stated as a wish to be there when the girl he loved lay down to sleep. This was the wish the rejection of which caused the dream to become an anxiety-dream. The wishes that were the motive forces of the second dream are perhaps less conspicuous; but if we recall its translation we shall not hesitate to describe them too as erotic. The wish to be taken captive by the girl he loved, to fall in with her wishes and to be subjected to her - for so we may construe the wish behind the situation of the lizard-catching - was in fact of a passive, masochistic character. Next day the dreamer hit the girl, as though he was dominated by the contrary erotic current . . . But we must stop here, or we may really forget that Hanold and Gradiva are only creatures of their author’s mind.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1885

POSTSCRIPT TO THE SECOND EDITION

(1912)

In the five years that have passed since this study was completed, psycho-analytic research has summoned up the courage to approach the creations of imaginative writers with yet another purpose in view. It no longer merely seeks in them for confirmations of the findings it has made from unpoetic, neurotic human beings; it also demands to know the material of impressions and memories from which the author has built the work, and the methods and processes by which he has converted this material into a work of art. It has turned out that these questions can be most easily answered in the case of writers who (like our Wilhelm Jensen, who died in 1911) were in the habit of giving themselves over to their imagination in a simple-minded joy in creating. Soon after the publication of my analytic examination of Gradiva I attempted to interest the elderly author in these new tasks of psycho-analytic research. But he refused his co-operation.

A friend of mine has since then drawn my attention to two other of the author’s short stories, which might stand in a genetic relation to Gradiva, as preliminary studies or earlier attempts at a satisfactory poetical solution of the same problem in the psychology of love. The first of these stories, ‘Der rote Schirm’,¹ recalls Gradiva by the recurrence in it of a number of small motifs, such as white flowers of the dead, a forgotten object (Gradiva’s sketch-book), and a significant small animal (the butterfly and the lizard in Gradiva), but more especially by the repetition of the main situation - the apparition in the mid-day glare of a summer’s day of a girl who had died (or was believed to have died). In ‘Der rote Schirm’ the scene of the apparition is a ruined castle, just as are the ruins of the excavated Pompeii in Gradiva. The other story, ‘Im gotischen Hause’,² shows no such resemblances either to Gradiva or to ‘Der rote Schirm’ in its manifest content. But the fact that it was given an external unity with the latter story by being published with it under a common title³ points unmistakably to their having a closely related latent meaning. It is easy to see that all three stories treat of the same theme: the development of a love (in ‘Der rote Schirm’ the inhibition of a love) as an after-effect of an intimate association in childhood of a brother‑and‑sister kind. I gather further from a review by Eva, Countess Baudissin (in the Vienna daily paper Die Zeit of February 11, 1912) that Jensen’s last novel Fremdlinge unter den Menschen,4 which contains much material from the author’s own childhood, describes the history of a man who ‘sees a sister in the woman he loves’. In neither of the two earlier stories is there a trace of the main motif of Gradiva: the girl’s peculiarly charming gait with the nearly perpendicular posture of her foot.

The relief of the girl who steps along in this way, which Jensen describes as being Roman, and to which he gives the name of ‘Gradiva’, is in fact derived from the zenith of Greek art. It is in the Museo Chiaramonti in the Vatican (No. 644), and has been restored and interpreted by Hauser. By the combination of ‘Gradiva’ and some other fragments, in Florence and Munich, two reliefs were obtained, each representing three figures, who seem to be identified as the Horae, the goddesses of vegetation, and the deities of the fertilizing dew who are allied to them.

¹ [‘The Red Parasol.’]

² [‘In the Gothic House.’]

³ Übermächte. Two short stories by Wilhelm Jensen, Berlin, Emil Felber, 1892.

4 [Strangers among Men.]

1886

PSYCHO-ANALYSIS AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE FACTS

IN LEGAL PROCEEDINGS

(1906)

1887

Intentionally left blank

1888

PSYCHO-ANALYSIS AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE FACTS

IN LEGAL PROCEEDINGS

Gentlemen, -There is a growing recognition of the untrustworthiness of statements made by witnesses, on which, nevertheless, so many convictions are based to-day in court cases; and this has quickened in all of you, future judges and defending counsel, an interest in a new method of investigation, the aim of which is to compel the accused person himself to establish his own guilt or innocence by objective signs. This method consists in a psychological experiment and is based on psychological research. It is closely connected with certain views which have only recently come to the notice of medical psychology. I understand that you are already engaged in testing the use and possibilities of this new method by means of what might be called ‘dummy exercises’, and I have gladly accepted the invitation of your President, Professor Löffler, to explain to you more fully the relation of this method to psychology.

You are all acquainted with the game played at parties or among children in which a word is called out at random and someone has to add a second word, which, when it is added to the first, results in a compound word being formed. For instance, ‘steam’ - ‘ship’, making ‘steam-ship’. The ‘association experiment’ introduced into psychology by the school of Wundt is nothing more than a modification of this children’s game, merely omitting one rule of the game.

The experiment is as follows: a word (termed the ‘stimulus word’) is called out to the subject and he replies as quickly as possible with some other word that occurs to him (the so called ‘reaction’), his choice of this reaction not being restricted by anything. The points to be observed are the time required for the reaction and the relation - which may be of many different kinds - between the stimulus-word and the reaction-word. It cannot be claimed that in the first instance very much came of these experiments. This was to be expected, however, since they were carried out without framing any definite question and without any guiding idea which could be brought to bear on the results. They only became significant and fruitful when Bleuler in Zurich and his pupils, especially Jung, began to turn their attention to these ‘association experiments’. The experiments which they carried out acquired their value from the fact that they assumed that the reaction to the stimulus-word could not be a chance one but must be determined by an ideational content present in the mind of the reacting subject.

Psycho-Analysis And The Establishment Of The Facts In Legal Proceedings

1889

It has become customary to speak of an ideational content of this kind, which is able to influence the reaction to the stimulus-word, as a ‘complex’. This influence works either by the stimulus-word touching the complex directly or by the complex succeeding in making a connection with the word through intermediate links. Such a determination of the reaction is a very remarkable fact; you will find undisguised astonishment expressed at it in the literature of the subject. But its truth admits of no doubt. For as a rule you can lay bare the particular complex at work, and so explain reactions which could not otherwise be understood, by asking the subject himself to give the reasons for his reaction. Examples like those given by Jung (1906, 6 and 8-9) are well calculated to make us doubt the occurrence of chance or of what is alleged to be arbitrary in mental events.

Let us now glance at the earlier history of this view of Bleuler and Jung that the reaction of the subject under examination is determined by his complex. In 19011 published a work¹ in which I demonstrated that a whole number of actions which were held to be unmotivated are on the contrary strictly determined, and to that extent I contributed towards restricting the arbitrary factor in psychology. I took as examples slight failures of memory, slips of the tongue or pen, and the mislaying of objects. I showed that when someone makes a slip of the tongue it is not chance, nor simply difficulty in articulation or similarity in sound, that is responsible, but that in every case a disturbing ideational content - a complex - can be brought to light which has altered the sense of the intended speech under the apparent form of a slip of the tongue. Furthermore, I examined the small actions which are performed apparently by chance and without any purpose - habits of playing or fiddling with things, and so on - and revealed them as ‘symptomatic actions’ linked with a hidden meaning and intended to give unobtrusive expression to it. I found, moreover, that not even a first name can occur arbitrarily to the mind, without having been determined by some powerful ideational complex. Even arithmetical numbers that one believes one has chosen at random can be traced to the influence of a hidden complex of this kind. A few years after this, a colleague of mine, Dr. Alfred Adler, was able to substantiate this most astonishing of my assertions by some very striking examples (Adler, 1905). Once one has accustomed oneself to this view of determinism in psychical life, one is justified in inferring from the findings in the psychopathology of everyday life that the ideas which occur to the subject in an association experiment may not be arbitrary either, but determined by an ideational content that is operative in him.

¹ The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.

Psycho-Analysis And The Establishment Of The Facts In Legal Proceedings

1890

And now, Gentlemen, let us return to the association experiment. In the kind of experiment we have referred to so far, it was the person under examination who explained to us the origin of his reactions, and the experiments, if they are subject to this condition, will be of no interest from the point of view of judicial procedure. But how would it be if we were to make a change in our planning of the experiment? Might we not proceed as one does in solving an equation which involves several quantities, where one can take any one of them as the starting-point - by making either the a or the b into the x we are looking for? Up to now in our experiments it has been the complex that has been unknown to us. We have used stimulus-words selected at random, and the subject under examination has revealed to us the complex brought to expression by those stimulus-words. But let us now set about it differently. Let us take a complex that is known to us and ourselves react to it with stimulus-words deliberately chosen; and let us then transfer the x to the person who is reacting. Will it then be possible to decide, from the way in which he reacts, whether the complex we have chosen is also present in him?  You can see that this way of planning the experiment corresponds exactly to the method adopted by an examining magistrate who is trying to find out whether something of which he is aware is also known to the accused as an agent. Wertheimer and Klein, two pupils of Hans Gross, the Professor of Criminal Law in Prague, seem to have been the first to adopt this change, which is of such importance for your purposes, in the planning of the experiment.¹

¹ Cf. Jung, 1906.

Psycho-Analysis And The Establishment Of The Facts In Legal Proceedings

1891

You already know from your own experiments that in this question of the subject’s reactions, several points are to be taken into account in deciding whether he possesses the complex to which you are reacting with your stimulus-words. I will enumerate these points for you one by one. (1) The content of the reaction may be unusual, which requires explanation. (2) The reaction-time may be prolonged; for it appears that stimulus-words which have touched the complex produce a reaction only after a considerable delay (a delay which may be several times as long as the ordinary reaction-time). (3) There may be a mistake in reproducing the reaction. You know the remarkable fact that is meant by this. If the subject has been given an association experiment consisting of a comparatively long list of stimulus-words, and if a short time after the end of the experiment the stimulus words are once more presented to him, he will produce the same reactions as on the first occasion except when the stimulus-word has touched a complex, in which case he is very liable to replace his first reaction by another one. (4) The phenomenon of perseveration (or it might be better to use the term ‘after-effect’) may occur. When a complex is aroused by a stimulus-word which touches it - by a ‘critical’ stimulus-word - it often happens that the effects of this (for instance, a prolonging of the reaction-time) persist and alter the subject’s reactions to the next, non-critical words as well. When all or several of these indications are present together, it proves that the complex which is known to us is present as a disturbing factor in the person who is being questioned. This disturbance is taken by you to mean that the complex in his mind is cathected with affect and is able to distract his attention from the task of reacting; thus you see in the disturbance a ‘psychical self-betrayal’.

I know that you are at the moment concerned with the potentialities and difficulties of this procedure, whose aim is to lead the accused into an objective self-betrayal. I should therefore like to bring to your notice the fact that an exactly similar method of disclosing psychical material which is buried away or kept secret has been practised for more than a decade in another field. My purpose is to lay before you the resemblances and differences between conditions in the two fields.

Psycho-Analysis And The Establishment Of The Facts In Legal Proceedings

1892

The field I have in mind is indeed very different from yours. I am referring to the therapy employed for certain ‘nervous diseases’ - what are known as the psychoneuroses - of which hysteria and obsessional ideas may be taken as samples. The method is called ‘psycho-analysis’; it was evolved by me from the ‘cathartic’ method of therapy first practised by Josef Breuer in Vienna.¹ To combat your surprise, I must draw an analogy between the criminal and the hysteric. In both we are concerned with a secret, with something hidden. But in order not to be paradoxical I must at once point out the difference. In the case of the criminal it is a secret which he knows and hides from you, whereas in the case of the hysteric it is a secret which he himself does not know either, which is hidden even from himself. How is this possible? Now we know, through laborious research, that all these illnesses are the result of the patient’s having succeeded in repressing certain ideas and memories that are strongly cathected with affect, together with the wishes that arise from them, in such a way that they play no part in his thinking - do not enter into his consciousness - and thus remain unknown to him. But from this repressed psychical material (these ‘complexes’) are generated the somatic and psychical symptoms which plague the patient in just the same way as a guilty conscience does. In this one respect, therefore, the difference between the criminal and the hysteric is fundamental.

The task of the therapist, however, is the same as that of the examining magistrate. We have to uncover the hidden psychical material; and in order to do this we have invented a number of detective devices, some of which it seems that you gentlemen of the law are now about to copy from us.

¹ Cf. Breuer and Freud, Studies on Hysteria, 1895.

Psycho-Analysis And The Establishment Of The Facts In Legal Proceedings

1893

It will interest you, from the point of view of your own profession, to hear how we doctors proceed in psycho-analysis. After the patient has given us a first account of his history, we ask him to give himself up to the thoughts that occur to him spontaneously and to say without any critical reserve whatever comes into his head. We start, as you see, on the assumption, which he does not share in the least, that these spontaneous thoughts will not be arbitrarily chosen but will be determined by their relation to his secret - to his ‘complex’ - and may, as it were, be regarded as derivatives of that complex. You will note that this is the same assumption as the one with the help of which you were able to interpret the association experiments. But although we have instructed the patient to follow the rule of communicating all the thoughts that occur to him, he seems to be unable to do so. He soon begins to hold back first one thought and then another. He gives various reasons to account for this: either the thought was quite unimportant, or it was irrelevant or it was totally meaningless. We thereupon demand that he shall tell us the thought in spite of these objections and shall follow it up; for the very fact of his criticism proves to us that the thought belongs to the ‘complex’ which we are seeking to uncover. We recognize in this behaviour of the patient’s a manifestation of the ‘resistance’ present in him, which we are never free from through the whole duration of the treatment. I will merely indicate briefly that this concept of resistance has acquired the highest importance for us in understanding the origin of an illness as well as the mechanism of its cure.

In your experiments you do not directly observe criticisms like these of his spontaneous ideas by the subject; while we, on the other hand, are able in our psycho-analyses to observe all the indications of a complex which come to your notice. When the patient no longer ventures to evade the rule which has been laid down for him, we nevertheless note that he stops or hesitates from time to time or pauses in the reproduction of his ideas. Every hesitation of this kind is, as we see it, an expression of his resistance and serves as an indication of a connection with the ‘complex’. Indeed, we regard it as the most important sign of such a connection, just as is in your case the analogous prolongation of the reaction-time. We are accustomed to interpret hesitation in this sense even when the content of the idea that is being held back does not seem to be at all objectionable and when the patient assures us he cannot imagine why he should hesitate to tell it to us. The pauses which occur in psycho-analysis are as a rule many times longer than the delays that you observe in the reaction experiments.

Psycho-Analysis And The Establishment Of The Facts In Legal Proceedings

1894

Another of your indications of a complex - the change in the content of the reaction - also plays its part in the technique of psycho-analysis. We quite generally regard even slight deviations in our patients from the ordinary forms of expression as a sign of some hidden meaning, and we are quite willing to expose ourselves for a while to the patient’s ridicule by making interpretations in that sense., all that we require in order to uncover the complex.

The third of your indications of a complex (mistakes - that is, changes - in the reproduction) is also employed, though in a more restricted field, in the technique of psycho-analysis. One task which often faces us is the interpretation of dreams - that is, the translation of the remembered content of a dream into its hidden meaning. It sometimes happens that we are uncertain at which point to set about the task, and in that case we may make use of a rule, discovered empirically, which recommends us to get the dreamer to tell us his dream once more. In doing so, he usually alters his modes of expression in some parts of it while repeating the rest accurately. The points at which his reproduction is defective owing to changes, and often owing to omissions as well, are the points which we fasten upon, because the inaccuracy guarantees a connection with the complex and promises the best approach to the secret meaning of the dream.¹

¹ See my Interpretation of Dreams (1900a).

Psycho-Analysis And The Establishment Of The Facts In Legal Proceedings

1895

You must not get the impression that we have come to an end of the points of agreement which I have been following up, if I admit to you that no phenomenon similar to perseveration is manifested in psycho-analysis. This apparent difference only arises from the special conditions of your experiments. For you do not allow the effect of the complex time to develop. Scarcely has it begun to act than you distract the subject’s attention by a new and probably innocent stimulus word; and then you may observe that he sometimes continues to be occupied with the complex in spite of your interference. In psycho-analysis, on the other hand, we avoid such interferences and keep the patient occupied with the complex. Since in our procedure everything, so to speak, is perseveration, we cannot observe that phenomenon as an isolated occurrence.

We may justly claim that, in principle, techniques of the kind I have described enable us to make the patient conscious of what is repressed in him - of his secret - and thus to remove the psychological causation of the symptoms from which he is suffering. But before you draw any conclusions from these successful results as to the possibilities of your own work, we will examine some points of difference between the psychological situations in the two cases.

The chief difference has already been named. In the neurotic the secret is hidden from his own consciousness; in the criminal it is hidden only from you. In the former there is a genuine ignorance, though not an ignorance in every sense, while in the latter there is nothing but a pretence of ignorance. Connected with this is another difference, which is in practice of importance. In psycho-analysis the patient assists with his conscious efforts to combat his resistance, because he expects to gain something from the investigation, namely, his recovery. The criminal, on the other hand, does not work with you; if he did, he would be working against his whole ego. As though to make up for this, however, all you are endeavouring to arrive at in your investigation is an objective certainty on your part, whereas our therapy demands that the patient himself should also arrive at the same certainty. But it remains to be seen how far your procedure will be rendered more difficult or be altered by the lack of co-operation on the part of the subject of your examination. This is a situation which you can never create in your experiments in seminars, since the colleague who is playing the part of the accused man remains a fellow-worker after all, and assists you in spite of his conscious determination not to betray himself.

Psycho-Analysis And The Establishment Of The Facts In Legal Proceedings

1896

If you look more deeply into the comparison between the two situations it will become clear to you in general that psycho-analysis is concerned with a simpler, special, form of the task of uncovering what is hidden in the mind; whereas in your work the task is a more comprehensive one. That the case of the psychoneurotic is invariably concerned with a repressed sexual complex (in the widest sense) is a difference which you need not take into account. But there is something else that you must. The aim of psycho-analysis is absolutely uniform in every case: complexes have to be uncovered which have been repressed because of feelings of unpleasure and which produce signs of resistance if an attempt is made to bring them into consciousness. This resistance is as it were localized; it arises at the frontier between unconscious and conscious. In your cases what is concerned is a resistance which comes entirely from consciousness. You cannot dismiss this difference out of hand. You will first have to determine experimentally whether conscious resistance is betrayed by exactly the same indications as unconscious resistance. Further, you cannot yet be certain, in my opinion, whether you may interpret your objective indications of a complex as a ‘resistance’, as we psycho-therapists do. It may happen with your experimental subjects - even though not very frequently with criminals - that the complex you touch on is pleasurably toned; and the question then arises whether such a complex will produce the same reaction as a complex that is unpleasurably toned.

Psycho-Analysis And The Establishment Of The Facts In Legal Proceedings

1897

I should also like to point out that your test may possibly be subject to a complication which does not, by its very nature, arise in psycho-analysis. In your examination you may be led astray by a neurotic who, although he is innocent, reacts as if he were guilty, because a lurking sense of guilt that already exists in him seizes upon the accusation made in the particular instance. You must not regard this possibility as an idle fiction; you have only to think of life in the nursery, where such events can often enough be observed. It some times happens that a child who has been accused of a misdeed strongly denies the charge but at the same time weeps like a detected sinner. You may perhaps think that the child is lying when he asserts his innocence; but this is not necessarily so. It can be that he has in fact not committed the particular crime with which you have charged him but that he has committed one of which you know nothing and of which you are not accusing him. He therefore quite truthfully denies being guilty of the one misdeed, while at the same time betraying his sense of guilt on account of the other. In this respect - as in so many others - the adult neurotic behaves just like a child. Many people are like this, and it is still open to question whether your technique will succeed in distinguishing self-accusing individuals of this kind from those who are really guilty. Finally, one more point. You know that, according to the rules governing criminal proceedings, you may not subject the accused to any procedure which takes him by surprise. He will therefore have been made aware that in this experiment it is a matter for him of not betraying himself. It must then be asked whether one can expect the same reactions when the subject’s attention is directed towards the complex as when it is directed away from it, and how far the intention to conceal something may affect modes of reaction in different people.

Psycho-Analysis And The Establishment Of The Facts In Legal Proceedings

1898

It is precisely because the situations which underlie your investigation are so various that psychology takes a very lively interest in its results, and I should like to beg you not to despair of their practical utility too soon. Although my work is so far removed from the practical administration of justice, perhaps you will allow me to make one further suggestion. However indispensable experiments in seminars may be for preparatory purposes and for the formulation of problems, you will never be able to reproduce in them the same psychological situation as in the examination of a defendant in a criminal case. The experiments remain dummy exercises and they can never afford a basis for practical application in criminal trials. If we do not want to abandon such an application of them, the following expedient suggests itself. You might be allowed - indeed, it might be made your duty - to undertake such examinations over a number of years in every actual instance of a criminal prosecution, without their results being allowed to influence the verdict of the Court. It would, indeed, be best if the Court were never informed of the conclusion which you had drawn from your examination on the question of the defendant’s guilt. After years of collecting and comparing the results so obtained, all doubts about the serviceability of this psychological method of investigation would surely be resolved. I know, of course, that the realization of a proposal such as this does not rest only with you and your valued teachers.

1899

OBSESSIVE ACTIONS AND RELIGIOUS PRACTICES

(1907)

1900

Intentionally left blank

1901

OBSESSIVE ACTIONS AND RELIGIOUS PRACTICES

I am certainly not the first person to have been struck by the resemblance between what are called obsessive actions in sufferers from nervous affections and the observances by means of which believers give expression to their piety. The term ‘ceremonial’, which has been applied to some of these obsessive actions, is evidence of this. The resemblance, however, seems to me to be more than a superficial one, so that an insight into the origin of neurotic ceremonials may embolden us to draw inferences by analogy about the psychological processes of religious life.

People who carry out obsessive actions or ceremonials belong to the same class as those who suffer from obsessive thinking, obsessive ideas, obsessive impulses and the like. Taken together, these form a particular clinical entity, to which the name of ‘obsessional neurosis’ [‘Zwangsneurose’] is customarily applied.¹ But one should not attempt to deduce the character of the illness from its name; for, strictly speaking, other kinds of morbid mental phenomena have an equal claim to possessing what are spoken of as ‘obsessional’ characteristics. In place of a definition we must for the time being be content with obtaining a detailed knowledge of these states, since we have not yet been able to arrive at a criterion of obsessional neuroses; it probably lies very deep, although we seem to sense its presence everywhere in the manifestations of the illness.

¹ See Löwenfeld (1904).

Obsessive Actions And Religious Practices

1902

Neurotic ceremonials consist in making small adjustments to particular everyday actions, small additions or restrictions or arrangements, which have always to be carried out in the same, or in a methodically varied, manner. These activities give the impression of being mere formalities, and they seem quite meaningless to us. Nor do they appear otherwise to the patient himself; yet he is incapable of giving them up, for any deviation from the ceremonial is visited by intolerable anxiety, which obliges him at once to make his omission good. Just as trivial as the ceremonial actions themselves are the occasions and activities which are embellished, encumbered and in any case prolonged by the ceremonial - for instance, dressing and undressing, going to bed or satisfying bodily needs. The performance of a ceremonial can be described by replacing it, as it were, by a series of unwritten laws. For instance, to take the case of the bed ceremonial: the chair must stand in a particular place beside the bed; the clothes must lie upon it folded in a particular order; the blanket must be tucked in at the bottom and the sheet smoothed out; the pillows must be arranged in such and such a manner, and the subject’s own body must lie in a precisely defined position. Only after all this may he go to sleep. Thus in slight cases the ceremonial seems to be no more than an exaggeration of an orderly procedure that is customary and justifiable; but the special conscientiousness with which it is carried out and the anxiety which follows upon its neglect stamp the ceremonial as a ‘sacred act’. Any interruption of it is for the most part badly tolerated, and the presence of other people during its performance is almost always ruled out.

Any activities whatever may become obsessive actions in the wider sense of the term if they are elaborated by small additions or given a rhythmic character by means of pauses and repetitions. We shall not expect to find a sharp distinction between ‘ceremonials’ and ‘obsessive actions’. As a rule obsessive actions have grown out of ceremonials. Besides these two, prohibitions and hindrances (abulias) make up the content of the disorder; these, in fact, only continue the work of the obsessive actions, inasmuch as some things are completely forbidden to the patient and others only allowed subject to his following a prescribed ceremonial.

Obsessive Actions And Religious Practices

1903

It is remarkable that both compulsions and prohibitions (having to do something and having not to do something) apply in the first instance only to the subject’s solitary activities and for a long time leave his social behaviour unaffected. Sufferers from this illness are consequently able to treat their affliction as a private matter and keep it concealed for many years. And, indeed, many more people suffer from these forms of obsessional neurosis than doctors hear of. For many sufferers, too, concealment is made easier from the fact that they are quite well able to fulfil their social duties during a part of the day, once they have devoted a number of hours to their secret doings, hidden from view like Mélusine.

It is easy to see where the resemblances lie between neurotic ceremonials and the sacred acts of religious ritual: in the qualms of conscience brought on by their neglect, in their complete isolation from all other actions (shown in the prohibition against interruption) and in the conscientiousness with which they are carried out in every detail. But the differences are equally obvious, and a few of them are so glaring that they make the comparison a sacrilege: the greater individual variability of ceremonial actions in contrast to the stereotyped character of rituals (prayer, turning to the East, etc.), their private nature as opposed to the public and communal character of religious observances, above all, however, the fact that, while the minutiae of religious ceremonial are full of significance and have a symbolic meaning, those of neurotics seem foolish and senseless. In this respect an obsessional neurosis presents a travesty, half comic and half tragic, of a private religion. But it is precisely this sharpest difference between neurotic and religious ceremonial which disappears when, with the help of the psycho-analytic technique of investigation, one penetrates to the true meaning of obsessive actions.¹ In the course of such an investigation the appearance which obsessive actions afford of being foolish and senseless is completely effaced, and the reason for their having that appearance is explained. It is found that the obsessive actions are perfectly significant in every detail, that they serve important interests of the personality and that they give expression to experiences that are still operative and to thoughts that are cathected with affect. They do this in two ways, either by direct or by symbolic representation; and they are consequently to be interpreted either historically or symbolically.

¹ See the collection of my shorter papers on the theory of the neuroses published in 1906.

Obsessive Actions And Religious Practices

1904

I must give a few examples to illustrate my point. Those who are familiar with the findings of psycho-analytic investigation into the psychoneuroses will not be surprised to learn that what is being represented in obsessive actions or in ceremonials is derived from the most intimate, and for the most part from the sexual, experiences of the patient.

(a) A girl whom I was able to observe was under a compulsion to rinse round her wash-basin several times after washing. The significance of this ceremonial action lay in the proverbial saying: ‘Don’t throw away dirty water till you have clean.’ Her action was intended to give a warning to her sister, of whom she was very fond, and to restrain her from getting divorced from her unsatisfactory husband until she had established a relationship with a better man.

(b) A woman who was living apart from her husband was subject to a compulsion, whenever she ate anything, to leave what was the best of it behind: for example, she would only take the outside of a piece of roast meat. This renunciation was explained by the date of its origin. It appeared on the day after she had refused marital relations with her husband - that is to say, after she had given up what was the best.

(c) The same patient could only sit on one particular chair and could only get up from it with difficulty. In regard to certain details of her married life, the chair symbolized her husband, to whom she remained faithful. She found an explanation of her compulsion in this sentence: ‘It is so hard to part from anything (a husband, a chair) upon which one has once settled.’

Obsessive Actions And Religious Practices

1905

(d) Over a period of time she used to repeat an especially noticeable and senseless obsessive action. She would run out of her room into another room in the middle of which there was a table. She would straighten the table-cloth on it in a particular manner and ring for the housemaid. The latter had to come up to the table, and the patient would then dismiss her on some indifferent errand. In the attempts to explain this compulsion, it occurred to her that at one place on the table-cloth there was a stain, and that she always arranged the cloth in such a way that the housemaid was bound to see the stain. The whole scene proved to be a reproduction of an experience in her married life which had later on given her thoughts a problem to solve. On the wedding-night her husband had met with a not unusual mishap. He found himself impotent, and ‘many times in the course of the night he came hurrying from his room into hers’ to try once more whether he could succeed. In the morning he said he would feel ashamed in front of the hotel housemaid who made the beds, and he took a bottle of red ink and poured its contents over the sheet; but he did it so clumsily that the red stain came in a place that was very unsuitable for his purpose. With her obsessive action, therefore, she was representing the wedding-night. ‘Bed and board’ between them make up marriage.

(e) Another compulsion which she started - of writing down the number of every bank-note before parting with it - had also to be interpreted historically. At a time when she was still intending to leave her husband if she could find another more trustworthy man, she allowed herself to receive advances from a man whom she met at a watering-place, but she was in doubt as to whether his intentions were serious. One day, being short of small change, she asked him to change a five kronen piece for her. He did so, pocketed the large coin and declared with a gallant air that he would never part with it, since it had passed through her hands. At their later meetings she was frequently tempted to challenge him to show her the five-kronen piece, as though she wanted to convince herself that she could believe in his intentions. But she refrained, for the good reason that it is impossible to distinguish between coins of the same value. Thus her doubt remained unresolved; and it left her with the compulsion to write down the number of each bank-note, by which it can be distinguished from all others of the same value.

Obsessive Actions And Religious Practices

1906

These few examples, selected from the great number I have met with, are merely intended to illustrate my assertion that in obsessive actions everything has its meaning and can be interpreted. The same is true of ceremonials in the strict sense, only that the evidence for this would require a more circumstantial presentation. I am quite aware of how far our explanations of obsessive actions are apparently taking us from the sphere of religious thought.

It is one of the conditions of the illness that the person who is obeying a compulsion carries it out without understanding its meaning - or at any rate its chief meaning. It is only thanks to the efforts of psycho-analytic treatment that he becomes conscious of the meaning of his obsessive action and, with it, of the motives that are impelling him to it. We express this important fact by saying that the obsessive action serves to express unconscious motives and ideas. In this, we seem to find a further departure from religious practices; but we must remember that as a rule the ordinary pious individual, too, performs a ceremonial without concerning himself with its significance, although priests and scientific investigators may be familiar with the - mostly symbolic - meaning of the ritual. In all believers, however, the motives which impel them to religious practices are unknown to them or are represented in consciousness by others which are advanced in their place.

Analysis of obsessive actions has already given us some sort of an insight into their causes and into the chain of motives which bring them into effect. We may say that the sufferer from compulsions and prohibitions behaves as if he were dominated by a sense of guilt, of which, however, he knows nothing, so that we must call it an unconscious sense of guilt, in spite of the apparent contradiction in terms. This sense of guilt has its source in certain early mental events, but it is constantly being revived by renewed temptations which arise whenever there is a contemporary provocation. Moreover, it occasions a lurking sense of expectant anxiety, an expectation of misfortune, which is linked, through the idea of punishment, with the internal perception of the temptation. When the ceremonial is first being constructed, the patient is still conscious that he must do this or that lest some ill should befall, and as a rule the nature of the ill that is to be expected is still known to his consciousness. But what is already hidden from him is the connection - which is always demonstrable - between the occasion on which this expectant anxiety arises and the danger which it conjures up. Thus a ceremonial starts as an action for defence or insurance, a protective measure.

The sense of guilt of obsessional neurotics finds its counterpart in the protestations of pious people that they know that at heart they are miserable sinners; and the pious observances (such as prayers, invocations, etc.) with which such people preface every daily act, and in especial every unusual undertaking, seem to have the value of defensive or protective measures.

Obsessive Actions And Religious Practices

1907

A deeper insight into the mechanism of obsessional neurosis is gained if we take into account the primary fact which lies at the bottom of it. This is always the repression of an instinctual impulse (a component of the sexual instinct) which was present in the subject’s constitution and which was allowed to find expression for a while during his childhood but later succumbed to suppression. In the course of the repression of this instinct a special conscientiousness is created which is directed against the instinct’s aims; but this psychical reaction-formation feels insecure and constantly threatened by the instinct which is lurking in the unconscious. The influence of the repressed instinct is felt as a temptation, and during the process of repression itself anxiety is generated, which gains control over the future in the form of expectant anxiety. The process of repression which leads to obsessional neurosis must be considered as one which is only partly successful and which increasingly threatens to fail. It may thus be compared to an unending conflict; fresh psychical efforts are continually required to counterbalance the forward pressure of the instinct. Thus the ceremonial and obsessive actions arise partly as a defence against the temptation and partly as a protection against the ill which is expected. Against the temptation the protective measures seem soon to become inadequate; then the prohibitions come into play, with the purpose of keeping at a distance situations that give rise to temptation. Prohibitions take the place of obsessive actions, it will be seen, just as a phobia is designed to avert a hysterical attack. Again, a ceremonial represents the sum of the conditions subject to which something that is not yet absolutely forbidden is permitted, just as the Church’s marriage ceremony signifies for the believer a sanctioning of sexual enjoyment which would otherwise be sinful. A further characteristic of obsessional neurosis, as of all similar affections, is that its manifestations (its symptoms, including the obsessive actions)  fulfil the condition of being a compromise between the warring forces of the mind. They thus always reproduce something of the pleasure which they are designed to prevent; they serve the repressed instinct no less than the agencies which are repressing it. As the illness progresses, indeed, actions which were originally mostly concerned with maintaining the defence come to approximate more and more to the proscribed actions through which the instinct was able to find expression in childhood.

Obsessive Actions And Religious Practices

1908

Some features of this state of affairs may be seen in the sphere of religious life as well. The formation of a religion, too, seems to be based on the suppression, the renunciation, of certain instinctual impulses. These impulses, however, are not, as in the neuroses, exclusively components of the sexual instinct; they are self-seeking, socially harmful instincts, though, even so, they are usually not without a sexual component. A sense of guilt following upon continual temptation and an expectant anxiety in the form of fear of divine punishment have, after all, been familiar to us in the field of religion longer than in that of neurosis. Perhaps because of the admixture of sexual components, perhaps because of some general characteristics of the instincts, the suppression of instinct proves to be an inadequate and interminable process in religious life also. Indeed, complete backslidings into sin are more common among pious people than among neurotics and these give rise to a new form of religious activity, namely acts of penance, which have their counterpart in obsessional neurosis.

We have noted as a curious and derogatory characteristic of obsessional neurosis that its ceremonials are concerned with the small actions of daily life and are expressed in foolish regulations and restrictions in connection with them. We cannot understand this remarkable feature of the clinical picture until we have realized that the mechanism of psychical displacement, which was first discovered by me in the construction of dreams,¹ dominates the mental processes of obsessional neurosis. It is already clear from the few examples of obsessive actions given above that their symbolism and the detail of their execution are brought about by a displacement from the actual, important thing on to a small one which takes its place - for instance, from a husband on to a chair. It is this tendency to displacement which progressively changes the clinical picture and eventually succeeds in turning what is apparently the most trivial matter into something of the utmost importance and urgency. It cannot be denied that in the religious field as well there is a similar tendency to a displacement of psychical values, and in the same direction, so that the petty ceremonials of religious practice gradually become the essential thing and push aside the underlying thoughts. That is why religions are subject to reforms which work retroactively and aim at a re-establishment of the original balance of values.

¹ See The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), Chapter VI, Section B.

Obsessive Actions And Religious Practices

1909

The character of compromise which obsessive actions possess in their capacity as neurotic symptoms is the character least easily detected in corresponding religious observances. Yet here, too, one is reminded of this feature of neuroses when one remembers how commonly all the acts which religion forbids - the expressions of the instincts it has suppressed - are committed precisely in the name of, and ostensibly for the sake of, religion.

In view of these similarities and analogies one might venture to regard obsessional neurosis as a pathological counterpart of the formation of a religion, and to describe that neurosis as an individual religiosity and religion as a universal obsessional neurosis. The most essential similarity would reside in the underlying renunciation of the activation of instincts that are constitutionally present; and the chief difference would lie in the nature of those instincts, which in the neurosis are exclusively sexual in their origin, while in religion they spring from egoistic sources.

A progressive renunciation of constitutional instincts, whose activation might afford the ego primary pleasure, appears to be one of the foundations of the development of human civilization. Some part of this instinctual repression is effected by its religions, in that they require the individual to sacrifice his instinctual pleasure to the Deity: ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.’ In the development of the ancient religions one seems to discern that many things which man kind had renounced as ‘iniquities’ had been surrendered to the Deity and were still permitted in his name, so that the handing over to him of bad and socially harmful instincts was the means by which man freed himself from their domination. For this reason, it is surely no accident that all the attributes of man, along with the misdeeds that follow from them, were to an unlimited amount ascribed to the ancient gods. Nor is it a contradiction of this that nevertheless man was not permitted to justify his own iniquities by appealing to divine example.

VIENNA, February 1907

1910

THE SEXUAL ENLIGHTENMENT OF CHILDREN

(AN OPEN LETTER TO DR. M. FÜRST)

(1907)

1911

Intentionally left blank

1912

THE SEXUAL ENLIGHTENMENT OF CHILDREN

(AN OPEN LETTER TO DR. M. FÜRST)

Dear Dr. Fürst,

When you ask me for an expression of opinion on ‘the sexual enlightenment of children’, I assume that what you want is not a regular, formal treatise on the subject which shall take into account the excessive mass of literature that has grown up around it, but the independent judgement of an individual doctor whose professional activities have offered him special opportunities for concerning himself with sexual problems. I know that you have followed my scientific efforts with interest and that, unlike many of our colleagues, you do not dismiss my ideas without examining them because I regard the psychosexual constitution and certain noxae of sexual life as the most important causes of the neurotic disorders that are so common. My Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, too, where I have described the way in which the sexual instinct is compounded and the disturbances which may occur in its development into the function of sexuality, have recently had a friendly reception in your journal.

I am expected, therefore, to answer questions on the following points: whether children ought to be given any enlightenment at all about the facts of sexual life, at what age this ought to happen and in what manner it should be carried out. Let me admit to you at once that I find a discussion of the second and third points perfectly reasonable, but that to my mind it is quite incomprehensible how there could be a difference of opinion on the first point. What can be the purpose of withholding from children - or, let us say, from young people - enlightenment of this kind about the sexual life of human beings? Is it from a fear of arousing their interest in these matters prematurely, before it awakens in them spontaneously? Is it from a hope that a concealment of this kind may retard the sexual instinct altogether until such time as it can find its way into the only channels open to it in our middle-class social order? Is it supposed that children would show no interest or understanding for the facts and riddles of sexual life if they were not prompted to do so by outside influences? Is it thought possible that the knowledge which is withheld from them will not reach them in other ways?  Or is it genuinely and seriously intended that later on they should regard everything to do with sex as something degraded and detestable from which their parents and teachers wished to keep them away as long as possible?

The Sexual Enlightenment Of Children (An Open Letter To Dr. M. Furst)

1913

I really do not know in which of these purposes to look for the motive for the concealment of what is sexual from children that is in fact carried out. I only know that they are all equally absurd and that I find it difficult to honour them with a serious refutation. I remember, however, that in the family letters of that great thinker and humanitarian Multatuli, I once found a few lines which are a more than adequate answer:

‘To my mind, certain things are in general too much wrapped in a veil. It is right to keep a child’s imagination pure, but this purity will not be preserved by ignorance. On the contrary, I think that concealment leads a boy or girl to suspect the truth more than ever. Curiosity leads us to pry into things which, if they had been told us without any great to do, would have aroused little or no interest in us. If this ignorance could be maintained even, I might become reconciled to it, but that is impossible. The child comes into contact with other children, books come his way which lead him to reflect, and the mystery-making with which his parents treat what he has nevertheless discovered actually increases his desire to know more. This desire, which is only partly satisfied and only in secret, excites his feeling and corrupts his imagination, so that the child already sins while his parents still believe that he does not know what sin is.’¹

¹ Multatuli, 1906, 1, 26.

The Sexual Enlightenment Of Children (An Open Letter To Dr. M. Furst)

1914

I do not know how the case could be better stated, but perhaps I may add a few remarks. It is undoubtedly nothing else but the customary prudishness and their own bad conscience over sexual matters that causes adults to adopt this attitude of ‘mystery-making’ in front of children; but possibly a part is also played by a piece of theoretical ignorance on their part, which we can counteract by giving the adults some enlightenment. It is commonly believed that the sexual instinct is absent in children and only begins to emerge in them at puberty when the sexual organs mature. This is a gross error, equally serious in its effects both on knowledge and on practice; and it is so easily corrected by observation that one wonders how it could ever have been made. As a matter of fact, the new-born baby brings sexuality with it into the world, certain sexual sensations accompany its development as a suckling and during early childhood, and only very few children would seem to escape sexual activities and sensations before puberty. Anyone who would like to find a detailed exposition of these statements can do so in my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, to which I have referred above. There he will learn that the organs of reproduction proper are not the only parts of the body which provide sexual sensations of pleasure, and that nature has even so ordered matters that actual stimulations of the genitals are unavoidable during early childhood. This period of life, during which a certain quota of what is undoubtedly sexual pleasure is produced by the excitation of various parts of the skin (erotogenic zones), by the activity of certain biological instincts and as an accompanying excitation in many affective states, is called the period of auto-erotism, to use a term introduced by Havelock Ellis. All that puberty does is to give the genitals primacy among all the other zones and sources which produce pleasure, and thus to force erotism into the service of the function of reproduction. This process can naturally undergo certain inhibitions, and in many people (those who later become perverts and neurotics) it is only incompletely accomplished. On the other hand, the child is capable long before puberty of most of the psychical manifestations of love-tenderness, for example, devotion and jealousy. Often enough, too, an irruption of these mental states is associated with the physical sensations of sexual excitation, so that the child cannot remain in doubt as to the connection between the two. In short, except for his reproductive power, a child has a fully-developed capacity for love long before puberty; and it may be asserted that the ‘mystery-making’ merely prevents him from being able to gain an intellectual grasp of activities for which he is psychically prepared and physically adjusted.

The Sexual Enlightenment Of Children (An Open Letter To Dr. M. Furst)

1915

A child’s intellectual interest in the riddles of sex, his desire for sexual knowledge, shows itself accordingly at an unexpectedly early age. If it has not been possible to make observations such as I am now going to put before you more frequently, that can only be because parents are either afflicted with blindness in regard to this interest on the part of their children, or, because, if they cannot overlook it, they at once take steps to stifle it. I know a delightful little boy, now four years old, whose understanding parents abstain from forcibly suppressing one part of the child’s development. Little Hans has certainly not been exposed to anything in the nature of seduction by a nurse, yet he has already for some time shown the liveliest interest in the part of the body which he calls his ‘widdler’. When he was only three he asked his mother: ‘ Mummy, have you got a widdler too?’ His mother answered: ‘Of course. What did you think?’ He also asked his father the same question repeatedly. At the same age he was taken to a cow-shed for the first time and saw a cow being milked. ‘Oh look!’ he said, in surprise, ‘there’s milk coming out of its widdler!’ At the age of three and three quarters he was on the way to making an independent discovery of correct categories by means of his observations. He saw some water being let out of an engine and said, ‘Oh, look, the engine’s widdling. Where’s it got its widdler?’ He added afterwards in reflective tones: ‘A dog and a horse have widdlers; a table and a chair haven’t.’ Recently he was watching his seven-day-old little sister being given a bath. ‘But her widdler’s still quite small’, he remarked; ‘when she grows up it’ll get bigger all right.’ (I have been told of this same attitude towards the problem of sex distinction in other boys of similar age.) I should like to say explicitly that little Hans is not a sensual child or at all pathologically disposed. The fact is simply, I think, that, not having been intimidated or oppressed with a sense of guilt, he gives expression quite ingenuously to what he thinks.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] The history of little Hans’s later illness and recovery is described in my ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’ (1909b).

The Sexual Enlightenment Of Children (An Open Letter To Dr. M. Furst)

1916

The second great problem which exercises a child’s mind - only at a somewhat later age, no doubt - is the question of the origin of babies. This is usually started by the unwelcome arrival of a small brother or sister. It is the oldest and most burning question that confronts immature humanity. Those who understand how to interpret myths and legends can detect it in the riddle which the Theban Sphinx set to Oedipus. The customary answers given to the child in the nursery damage his genuine instinct of research and as a rule deal the first blow, too, at his confidence in his parents. From that time on he usually begins to mistrust grown-up people, and to keep his most intimate interests secret from them. The following little document shows how tormenting this curiosity can become in older children. It is a letter written by a motherless girl of eleven and a half who had been speculating on the problem with her younger sister.

‘Dear Aunt Mali,

‘Will you please be so kind as to tell me how you got Christel and Paul. You must know because you are married. We were arguing about it yesterday evening and we want to know the truth. We have nobody else to ask. When are you coming to Salzburg? You know, Aunt Mali, we simply can’t understand how the stork brings babies. Trudel thought the stork brings them in a shirt. Then we want to know as well if the stork gets them out of the pond and why one never sees babies in ponds. And will you please tell me, too, how one knows beforehand when one is going to have one. Write and tell me everything about it.

‘With thousands of greetings and kisses from us all,

‘Your inquisitive niece,

Lili.’

I do not believe that this touching letter brought the two sisters the enlightenment they wanted. Later on the writer of it fell ill of the neurosis that arises from unanswered unconscious questions - of obsessional brooding.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] After some years, however, her obsessional brooding gave way to a dementia praecox.

The Sexual Enlightenment Of Children (An Open Letter To Dr. M. Furst)

1917

There does not seem to me to be a single good reason for denying children the enlightenment which their thirst for knowledge demands. To be sure, if it is the purpose of educators to stifle the child’s power of independent thought as early as possible, in favour of the ‘goodness’ which they think so much of, they cannot set about this better than by deceiving him in sexual matters and intimidating him in matters of religion. The stronger natures will, it is true, withstand these influences and become rebels against the authority of their parents and later against every other authority. If children are not given the explanations for which they turn to their elders, they go on tormenting themselves with the problem in secret and produce attempts at solution in which the truth they have guessed is mingled in the most extraordinary way with grotesque untruths; or they whisper information to one another in which, because of the young enquirers’ sense of guilt, everything sexual is stamped as being horrible and disgusting. These infantile sexual theories would be well worth collecting and examining. From this time on, children usually lose the only proper attitude to sexual questions, and many of them never regain it.

It seems that the large majority of authors, both men and women, who have written about the sexual enlightenment of youth have concluded in favour of it. But the clumsiness of most of their proposals as to when and how this enlightenment is to take place tempts one to think that they have not found it easy to arrive at this conclusion. So far as my knowledge of the literature goes, a single outstanding exception is provided by the charming letter of explanation which a certain Frau Emma Eckstein quotes as having been written by her to her son when he was about ten years old.¹ The customary method is obviously not quite the right one: all sexual knowledge is kept from children as long as possible, and then on one single occasion a disclosure is made to them in solemn and turgid language, and even so is only half the truth and generally comes too late. Most of the answers to the question ‘How am I to tell my children?’ make such a miserable impression, on me at least, that I should prefer parents not to embark on the business of enlightenment at all. What is really important is that children should never get the idea that one wants to make more of a secret of the facts of sexual life than of any other matter which is not yet accessible to their understanding; and to ensure this it is necessary that from the very first what has to do with sexuality should be treated like anything else that is worth knowing about. Above all, it is the duty of schools not to evade the mention of sexual matters. The main facts of reproduction and their significance should be included in lessons about the animal kingdom, and at the same time stress should be laid on the fact that man shares every essential in his organization with the higher animals. Then, provided that the child’s home environment does not aim directly at frightening him off thinking, something that I once overheard in a nursery will probably happen more often. I heard a boy saying to his little sister: ‘How can you think babies are brought by the stork! You know man’s a mammal; d’you think storks bring other mammals their babies too?’

¹ Emma Eckstein, 1904.

The Sexual Enlightenment Of Children (An Open Letter To Dr. M. Furst)

1918

The child’s curiosity will never reach a very high degree of intensity provided it finds appropriate satisfaction at each stage of his learning. Enlightenment about the specific facts of human sexuality and an indication of its social significance should, therefore, be given to the child at the end of his time at his elementary school [Volksschule] and before he enters his intermediate school [Mittelschule] - that is to say, before he is ten years old. The period of confirmation would be a more suitable time than any other at which to instruct the child, who will by that time have a full knowledge of all the physical facts, in the moral obligations which are attached to the actual satisfaction of the instinct. Enlightenment about sexual life carried out along such lines as this, proceeding step by step and without any real interruption, and in which the school takes the initiative, seems to me to be the only kind which takes into account the child’s development and thus successfully avoids the dangers involved.

I consider it the most significant advance in child education that in France the State should have introduced, in place of the catechism, a primer which gives the child his first instruction in his position as a citizen and in the ethical duties which will later devolve on him. But such elementary instruction is seriously deficient, so long as it does not include the field of sexuality. Here is the gap which educators and reformers should set about filling. In countries which have placed the education of children wholly or in part in the hands of the clergy, it will, of course, be impossible to ask for this. A priest will never admit that men and animals have the same nature, since he cannot do without the immortality of the soul, which he requires as the basis for moral precepts. Here, once again, we see the unwisdom of sewing a single silk patch on to a tattered coat - the impossibility of carrying out an isolated reform without altering the foundations of the whole system.

1919

CREATIVE WRITERS AND DAY-DREAMING

(1908)

1920

Intentionally left blank

1921

CREATIVE WRITERS AND DAY-DREAMING

We laymen have always been intensely curious to know like the Cardinal who put a similar question to Ariosto - from what sources that strange being, the creative writer, draws his material, and how he manages to make such an impression on us with it and to arouse in us emotions of which, perhaps, we had not even thought ourselves capable. Our interest is only heightened the more by the fact that, if we ask him, the writer himself gives us no explanation, or none that is satisfactory; and it is not at all weakened by our knowledge that not even the clearest insight into the determinants of his choice of material and into the nature of the art of creating imaginative form will ever help to make creative writers of us.

If we could at least discover in ourselves or in people like ourselves an activity which was in some way akin to creative writing! An examination of it would then give us a hope of obtaining the beginnings of an explanation of the creative work of writers. And, indeed, there is some prospect of this being possible. After all, creative writers themselves like to lessen the distance between their kind and the common run of humanity; they so often assure us that every man is a poet at heart and that the last poet will not perish till the last man does.

Should we not look for the first traces of imaginative activity as early as in childhood The child’s best-loved and most intense occupation is with his play or games. Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, re-arranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him? It would be wrong to think he does not take that world seriously; on the contrary, he takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real. In spite of all the emotion with which he cathects his world of play, the child distinguishes it quite well from reality; and he likes to link his imagined objects and situations to the tangible and visible things of the real world. This linking is all that differentiates the child’s ‘play’ from ‘phantasying’.

Creative Writers And Day-Dreaming

1922

The creative writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously - that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion while separating it sharply from reality. Language has preserved this relationship between children’s play and poetic creation. It gives [in German] the name of ‘Spiel’ [‘play’] to those forms of imaginative writing which require to be linked to tangible objects and which are capable of representation. It speaks of a ‘Lustspiel’ or ‘Trauerspiel’ [‘comedy’ or ‘tragedy’: literally, ‘pleasure play’ or ‘mourning play’] and describes those who carry out the representation as ‘Schauspieler’ [‘players’: literally ‘show-players’]. The unreality of the writer’s imaginative world, however, has very important consequences for the technique of his art; for many things which, if they were real, could give no enjoyment, can do so in the play of phantasy, and many excitements which, in themselves, are actually distressing, can become a source of pleasure for the hearers and spectators at the performance of a writer’s work.

There is another consideration for the sake of which we will dwell a moment longer on this contrast between reality and play. When the child has grown up and has ceased to play, and after he has been labouring for decades to envisage the realities of life with proper seriousness, he may one day find himself in a mental situation which once more undoes the contrast between play and reality. As an adult he can look back on the intense seriousness with which he once carried on his games in childhood; and, by equating his ostensibly serious occupations of to-day with his childhood games, he can throw off the too heavy burden imposed on him by life and win the high yield of pleasure afforded by humour.

Creative Writers And Day-Dreaming

1923

As people grow up, then, they cease to play, and they seem to give up the yield of pleasure which they gained from playing. But whoever understands the human mind knows that hardly anything is harder for a man than to give up a pleasure which he has once experienced. Actually, we can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another. What appears to be a renunciation is really the formation of a substitute or surrogate. In the same way, the growing child, when he stops playing, gives up nothing but the link with real objects; instead playing, he now phantasies. He builds castles in the air and creates what are called day-dreams. I believe that most people construct phantasies at times in their lives. This is a fact which has long been overlooked and whose importance has therefore not been sufficiently appreciated.

People’s phantasies are less easy to observe than the play of children. The child, it is true, plays by himself or forms a closed psychical system with other children for the purposes of a game; but even though he may not play his game in front of the grown-ups, he does not, on the other hand, conceal it from them. The adult, on the contrary, is ashamed of his phantasies and hides them from other people. He cherishes his phantasies as his most intimate possessions, and as a rule he would rather confess his misdeeds than tell anyone his phantasies. It may come about that for that reason he believes he is the only person who invents such phantasies and has no idea that creations of this kind are widespread among other people. This difference in the behaviour of a person who plays and a person who phantasies is accounted for by the motives of these two activities, which are nevertheless adjuncts to each other.

Creative Writers And Day-Dreaming

1924

A child’s play is determined by wishes: in point of fact by a single wish-one that helps in his upbringing - the wish to be big and grown up. He is always playing at being ‘grown up’, and in his games he imitates what he knows about the lives of his elders. He has no reason to conceal this wish. With the adult, the case is different. On the one hand, he knows that he is expected not to go on playing or phantasying any longer, but to act in the real world; on the other hand, some of the wishes which give rise to his phantasies are of a kind which it is essential to conceal. Thus he is ashamed of his phantasies as being childish and as being unpermissible.

But, you will ask, if people make such a mystery of their phantasying, how is it that we know such a lot about it? Well, there is a class of human beings upon whom, not a god, indeed, but a stern goddess - Necessity - has allotted the task of telling what they suffer and what things give them happiness. These are the victims of nervous illness, who are obliged to tell their phantasies, among other things, to the doctor by whom they expect to be cured by mental treatment. This is our best source of knowledge, and we have since found good reason to suppose that our patients tell us nothing that we might not also hear from healthy people.

Let us now make ourselves acquainted with a few of the characteristics of phantasying. We may lay it down that a happy person never phantasies, only an unsatisfied one. The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfilment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality. These motivating wishes vary according to the sex, character and circumstances of the person who is having the phantasy; but they fall naturally into two main groups. They are either ambitious wishes, which serve to elevate the subject’s personality; or they are erotic ones. In young women the erotic wishes predominate almost exclusively, for their ambition is as a rule absorbed by erotic trends. In young men egoistic and ambitious wishes come to the fore clearly enough alongside of erotic ones. But we will not lay stress on the opposition between the two trends; we would rather emphasize the fact that they are often united. Just as, in many altar-pieces, the portrait of the donor is to be seen in a corner of the picture, so, in the majority of ambitious phantasies, we can discover in some corner or other the lady for whom the creator of the phantasy performs all his heroic deeds and at whose feet all his triumphs are laid. Here, as you see, there are strong enough motives for concealment; the well-brought-up young woman is only allowed a minimum of erotic desire, and the young man has to learn to suppress the excess of self-regard which he brings with him from the spoilt days of his childhood, so that he may find his place in a society which is full of other individuals making equally strong demands.

Creative Writers And Day-Dreaming

1925

We must not suppose that the products of this imaginative activity - the various phantasies, castles in the air and day-dreams - are stereotyped or unalterable. On the contrary, they fit themselves in to the subject’s shifting impressions of life, change with every change in his situation, and receive from every fresh active impression what might be called a ‘date-mark’. The relation of a phantasy to time is in general very important. We may say that it hovers, as it were, between three times - the three moments of time which our ideation involves. Mental work is linked to some current impression, some provoking occasion in the present which has been able to arouse one of the subject’s major wishes. From there it harks back to a memory of an earlier experience (usually an infantile one) in which this wish was fulfilled; and it now creates a situation relating to the future which represents a fulfilment of the wish. What it thus creates is a day-dream or phantasy, which carries about it traces of its origin from the occasion which provoked it and from the memory. Thus past, present and future are strung together, as it were, on the thread of the wish that runs through them.

A very ordinary example may serve to make what I have said clear. Let us take the case of a poor orphan boy to whom you have given the address of some employer where he may perhaps find a job. On his way there he may indulge in a day-dream appropriate to the situation from which it arises. The content of his phantasy will perhaps be something like this. He is given a job, finds favour with his new employer, makes himself indispensable in the business, is taken into his employer’s family, marries the charming young daughter of the house, and then himself becomes a director of the business, first as his employer’s partner and then as his successor. In this phantasy, the dreamer has regained what he possessed in his happy childhood - the protecting house, the loving parents and the first objects of his affectionate feelings. You will see from this example the way in which the wish makes use of an occasion in the present to construct, on the pattern of the past, a picture of the future.

There is a great deal more that could be said about phantasies; but I will only allude as briefly as possible to certain points. If phantasies become over-luxuriant and over-powerful, the conditions are laid for an onset of neurosis or psychosis. Phantasies, moreover, are the immediate mental precursors of the distressing symptoms complained of by our patients. Here a broad by-path branches off into pathology.

I cannot pass over the relation of phantasies to dreams. Our dreams at night are nothing else than phantasies like these, as we can demonstrate from the interpretation of dreams.¹ Language, in its unrivalled wisdom, long ago decided the question of the essential nature of dreams by giving the name of ‘day-dreams’ to the airy creations of phantasy. If the meaning of our dreams usually remains obscure to us in spite of this pointer, it is because of the circumstance that at night there also arise in us wishes of which we are ashamed; these we must conceal from ourselves, and they have consequently been repressed, pushed into the unconscious. Repressed wishes of this sort and their derivatives are only allowed to come to expression in a very distorted form. When scientific work had succeeded in elucidating this factor of dream-distortion, it was no longer difficult to recognize that night-dreams are wish-fulfilments in just the same way as day-dreams - the phantasies which we all know so well.

¹ Cf. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a).

Creative Writers And Day-Dreaming

1926

So much for phantasies. And now for the creative writer. May we really attempt to compare the imaginative writer with the ‘dreamer in broad daylight’, and his creations with day-dreams? Here we must begin by making an initial distinction. We must separate writers who, like the ancient authors of epics and tragedies, take over their material ready-made, from writers who seem to originate their own material. We will keep to the latter kind, and, for the purposes of our comparison, we will choose not the writers most highly esteemed by the critics, but the less pretentious authors of novels, romances and short stories, who nevertheless have the widest and most eager circle of readers of both sexes. One feature above all cannot fail to strike us about the creations of these story-writers: each of them has a hero who is the centre of interest, for whom the writer tries to win our sympathy by every possible means and whom he seems to place under the protection of a special Providence. If, at the end of one chapter of my story, I leave the hero unconscious and bleeding from severe wounds, I am sure to find him at the beginning of the next being carefully nursed and on the way to recovery; and if the first volume closes with the ship he is in going down in a storm at sea, I am certain, at the opening of the second volume, to read of his miraculous rescue - a rescue without which the story could not proceed. The feeling of security with which I follow the hero through his perilous adventures is the same as the feeling with which a hero in real life throws himself into the water to save a drowning man or exposes himself to the enemy’s fire in order to storm a battery. It is the true heroic feeling, which one of our best writers has expressed in an inimitable phrase: ‘Nothing can happen to me!’ It seems to me, however, that through this revealing characteristic of invulnerability we can immediately recognize His Majesty the Ego, the hero alike of every day-dream and of every story.

Creative Writers And Day-Dreaming

1927

Other typical features of these egocentric stories point to the same kinship. The fact that all the women in the novel invariably fall in love with the hero can hardly be looked on as a portrayal of reality, but it is easily understood as a necessary constituent of a day-dream. The same is true of the fact that the other characters in the story are sharply divided into good and bad, in defiance of the variety of human characters that are to be observed in real life. The ‘good’ ones are the helpers, while the ‘bad’ ones are the enemies and rivals, of the ego which has become the hero of the story.

We are perfectly aware that very many imaginative writings are far removed from the model of the naïve day-dream; and yet I cannot suppress the suspicion that even the most extreme deviations from that model could be linked with it through an uninterrupted series of transitional cases. It has struck me that in many of what are known as ‘psychological’ novels only one person - once again the hero - is described from within. The author sits inside his mind, as it were, and looks at the other characters from outside. The psychological novel in general no doubt owes its special nature to the inclination of the modern writer to split up his ego, by self-observation, into many part-egos, and, in consequence, to personify the conflicting currents of his own mental life in several heroes. Certain novels, which might be described as ‘eccentric’, seem to stand in quite special contrast to the type of the day-dream. In these, the person who is introduced as the hero plays only a very small active part; he sees the actions and sufferings of other people pass before him like a spectator. Many of Zola’s later works belong to this category. But I must point out that the psychological analysis of individuals who are not creative writers, and who diverge in some respects from the so-called norm, has shown us analogous variations of the day-dream, in which the ego contents itself with the role of spectator.

Creative Writers And Day-Dreaming

1928

If our comparison of the imaginative writer with the day-dreamer, and of poetical creation with the day-dream, is to be of any value, it must, above all, show itself in some way or other fruitful. Let us, for instance, try to apply to these authors’ works the thesis we laid down earlier concerning the relation between phantasy and the three periods of time and the wish which runs through them; and, with its help, let us try to study the connections that exist between the life of the writer and his works. No one has known, as a rule, what expectations to frame in approaching this problem; and often the connection has been thought of in much too simple terms. In the light of the insight we have gained from phantasies, we ought to expect the following state of affairs. A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work. The work itself exhibits elements of the recent provoking occasion as well as of the old memory.

Do not be alarmed at the complexity of this formula. I suspect that in fact it will prove to be too exiguous a pattern. Nevertheless, it may contain a first approach to the true state of affairs; and, from some experiments I have made, I am inclined to think that this way of looking at creative writings may turn out not unfruitful. You will not forget that the stress it lays on childhood memories in the writer’s life - a stress which may perhaps seem puzzling - is ultimately derived from the assumption that a piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood.

Creative Writers And Day-Dreaming

1929

We must not neglect, however, to go back to the kind of imaginative works which we have to recognize, not as original creations, but as the re-fashioning of ready-made and familiar material. Even here, the writer keeps a certain amount of independence, which can express itself in the choice of material and in changes in it which are often quite extensive. In so far as the material is already at hand, however, it is derived from the popular treasure-house of myths, legends and fairy tales. The study of constructions of folk-psychology such as these is far from being complete, but it is extremely probable that myths, for instance, are distorted vestiges of the wishful phantasies of whole nations, the secular dreams of youthful humanity.

You will say that, although I have put the creative writer first in the title of my paper, I have told you far less about him than about phantasies. I am aware of that, and I must try to excuse it by pointing to the present state of our knowledge. All I have been able to do is to throw out some encouragements and suggestions which, starting from the study of phantasies, lead on to the problem of the writer’s choice of his literary material. As for the other problem - by what means the creative writer achieves the emotional effects in us that are aroused by his creations - we have as yet not touched on it at all. But I should like at least to point out to you the path that leads from our discussion of phantasies to the problems of poetical effects.

You will remember how I have said that the day-dreamer carefully conceals his phantasies from other people because he feels he has reasons for being ashamed of them. I should now add that even if he were to communicate them to us he could give us no pleasure by his disclosures. Such phantasies, when we learn them, repel us or at least leave us cold. But when a creative writer presents his plays to us or tells us what we are inclined to take to be his personal day dreams, we experience a great pleasure, and one which probably arises from the confluence of many sources. How the writer accomplishes this is his innermost secret; the essential ars poetica lies in the technique of overcoming the feeling of repulsion in us which is undoubtedly connected with the barriers that rise between each single ego and the others. We can guess two of the methods used by this technique. The writer softens the character of his egoistic day-dreams by altering and disguising it, and he bribes us by the purely formal - that is, aesthetic - yield of pleasure which he offers us in the presentation of his phantasies. We give the name of an incentive bonus, or a fore-pleasure, to a yield of pleasure such as this, which is offered to us so as to make possible the release of still greater pleasure arising from deeper psychical sources. In my opinion, all the aesthetic pleasure which a creative writer affords us has the character of a fore-pleasure of this kind, and our actual enjoyment of an imaginative work proceeds from a liberation of tensions in our minds. It may even be that not a little of this effect is due to the writer’s enabling us thenceforward to enjoy our own day-dreams without self-reproach or shame. This brings us to the threshold of new, interesting and complicated enquiries; but also, at least for the moment, to the end of our discussion.

1930

HYSTERICAL PHANTASIES AND THEIR RELATION TO BISEXUALITY

(1908)

1931

Intentionally left blank

1932

HYSTERICAL PHANTASIES AND THEIR RELATION TO BISEXUALITY

We are all familiar with the delusional imaginings of the paranoic, which are concerned with the greatness and the sufferings of his own self and which appear in forms that are quite typical and almost monotonous. We have also become acquainted, through numerous accounts, with the strange performances with which certain perverts stage their sexual satisfaction, whether in idea or reality. Nevertheless, it may be new to some readers to hear that quite analogous psychical structures are regularly present in all the psychoneuroses, particularly in hysteria, and that these latter - which are known as hysterical phantasies - can be seen to have important connections with the causation of the neurotic symptoms.

A common source and normal prototype of all these creations of phantasy is to be found in what are called the day-dreams of youth. These have already received some, though as yet insufficient, notice in the literature of the subject.¹ They occur with perhaps equal frequency in both sexes, though it seems that while in girls and women they are invariably of an erotic nature, in men they may be either erotic or ambitious. Nevertheless the importance of the erotic factor in men, too, should not be given a secondary rating; a closer investigation of a man’s day-dreams generally shows that all his heroic exploits are carried out and all his successes achieved only in order to please a woman and to be preferred by her to other men.² These phantasies are satisfactions of wishes proceeding from deprivation and longing. They are justly called ‘day-dreams’, for they give us the key to an understanding of night-dreams - in which the nucleus of the dream-formation consists of nothing else than complicated day-time phantasies of this kind that have been distorted and are misunderstood by the conscious psychical agency.³

¹ Cf. Breuer and Freud (1895), Pierre Janet (1898, 1), Havelock Ellis (1899), Freud (1900a), Pick (1896).

² Havelock Ellis (1899) is of the same opinion.

³ Cf. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a)..

Hysterical Phantasies And Their Relation To Bisexuality

1933

These day-dreams are cathected with a large amount of interest; they are carefully cherished by the subject and usually concealed with a great deal of sensitivity, as though they were among the most intimate possessions of his personality. It is easy to recognize a person who is absorbed in day-dreaming in the street, however, by his sudden, as it were absent-minded, smile, his way of talking to himself, or by the hastening of his steps which marks the climax of the imagined situation. Every hysterical attack which I have been able to investigate up to the present has proved to be an involuntary irruption of day-dreams of this kind. For our observations no longer leave any room for doubt that such phantasies may be unconscious just as well as conscious; and as soon as the latter have become unconscious they may also become pathogenic - that is, they may express themselves in symptoms and attacks. In favourable circumstances, the subject can still capture an unconscious phantasy of this sort in consciousness. After I had drawn the attention of one of my patients to her phantasies, she told me that on one occasion she had suddenly found herself in tears in the street and that, rapidly considering what it was she was actually crying about, she had got hold of a phantasy to the following effect. In her imagination she had formed a tender attachment to a pianist who was well known in the town (though she was not personally acquainted with him); she had had a child by him (she was in fact childless); and he had then deserted her and her child and left them in poverty. It was at this point in her romance that she had burst into tears.

Hysterical Phantasies And Their Relation To Bisexuality

1934

Unconscious phantasies have either been unconscious all along and have been formed in the unconscious; or - as is more often the case - they were once conscious phantasies, day-dreams, and have since been purposely forgotten and have become unconscious through ‘repression’. Their content may afterwards either have remained the same or have undergone alterations, so that the present unconscious phantasies are derivatives of the once conscious ones. Now an unconscious phantasy has a very important connection with the subject’s sexual life; for it is identical with the phantasy which served to give him sexual satisfaction during a period of masturbation. At that time the masturbatory act (in the widest sense of the term) was compounded of two parts. One was the evocation of a phantasy and the other some active behaviour for obtaining self-gratification at the height of the phantasy. This compound, as we know, was itself merely soldered together.¹ Originally the action was a purely auto-erotic procedure for the purpose of obtaining pleasure from some particular part of the body, which could be described as erotogenic. Later, this action became merged with a wishful idea from the sphere of object-love and served as a partial realization of the situation in which the phantasy culminated. When, subsequently, the subject renounces this type of satisfaction, composed of masturbation and phantasy, the action is given up, while the phantasy, from being conscious, becomes unconscious. If no other mode of sexual satisfaction supervenes, the subject remains abstinent; and if he does not succeed in sublimating his libido - that is, in deflecting his sexual excitation to higher aims -, the condition is now fulfilled for his unconscious phantasy to be revived and to proliferate, and, at least as regards some part of its content, to put itself into effect, with the whole force of his need for love, in the form of a pathological symptom.

¹ Cf. Freud, Three Essays (1905d).

Hysterical Phantasies And Their Relation To Bisexuality

1935

In this way, unconscious phantasies are the immediate psychical precursors of a whole number of hysterical symptoms. Hysterical symptoms are nothing other than unconscious phantasies brought into view through  ‘conversion’; and in so far as the symptoms are somatic ones, they are often enough taken from the circle of the same sexual sensations and motor innervations as those which had originally accompanied the phantasy when it was still conscious. In this way the giving up of the habit of masturbation is in fact undone, and the purpose of the whole pathological process, which is a restoration of the original, primary sexual satisfaction, is achieved - though never completely, it is true, but always in a sort of approximation.

Anyone who studies hysteria, therefore, soon finds his interest turned away from its symptoms to the phantasies from which they proceed. The technique of psycho-analysis enables us in the first place to infer from the symptoms what those unconscious phantasies are and then to make them conscious to the patient. By this means it has been found that the content of the hysteric’s unconscious phantasies corresponds completely to the situations in which satisfaction is consciously obtained by perverts; and if anyone is at a loss for examples of such situations he has only to recall the world-famous performances of the Roman Emperors, the wild excesses of which were, of course, determined only by the enormous and unrestrained power possessed by the authors of the phantasies. The delusions of paranoics are phantasies of the same nature, though they are phantasies which have become directly conscious. They rest on the sado-masochistic components of the sexual instinct, and they, too, may find their complete counterpart in certain unconscious phantasies of hysterical subjects. We also know of cases - cases which have their practical importance as well - in which hysterics do not give expression to their phantasies in the form of symptoms but as conscious realizations, and in that way devise and stage assaults, attacks or acts of sexual aggression.

This method of psycho-analytic investigation, which leads from the conspicuous symptoms to the hidden unconscious phantasies, tells us everything that can be known about the sexuality of psychoneurotics, including the fact which is to be the main subject-matter of this short preliminary publication.

Hysterical Phantasies And Their Relation To Bisexuality

1936

Owing, probably, to the difficulties which the unconscious phantasies meet with in their endeavour to find expression, the relationship of the phantasies to the symptoms is not simple, but on the contrary, complicated in many ways.¹ As a rule - when, that is, the neurosis is fully developed and has persisted for some time - a particular symptom corresponds, not to a single unconscious phantasy, but to several such phantasies; and it does so not in an arbitrary manner but in accordance with a regular pattern. At the beginning of the illness these complications are, no doubt, not all fully developed.

For the sake of general interest I will at this point go outside the framework of this paper and interpolate a series of formulas which attempt to give a progressively fuller description of the nature of hysterical symptoms. These formulas do not contradict one another, but some represent an increasingly complete and precise approach to the facts, while others represent the application of different points of view:

(1) Hysterical symptoms are mnemic symbols of certain operative (traumatic) impressions and experiences.

(2) Hysterical symptoms are substitutes, produced by ‘conversion’, for the associative return of these traumatic experiences.

(3) Hysterical symptoms are - like other psychical structures - an expression of the fulfilment of a wish.

(4) Hysterical symptoms are the realization of an unconscious phantasy which serves the fulfilment of a wish.

(5) Hysterical symptoms serve the purpose of sexual satisfaction and represent a portion of the subject’s sexual life (a portion which corresponds to one of the constituents of his sexual instinct).

(6) Hysterical symptoms correspond to a return of a mode of sexual satisfaction which was a real one in infantile life and has since been repressed.

(7) Hysterical symptoms arise as a compromise between two opposite affective and instinctual impulses, of which one is attempting to bring to expression a component instinct or a constituent of the sexual constitution, and the other is attempting to suppress it.

(8) Hysterical symptoms may take over the representation of various unconscious impulses which are not sexual, but they can never be without a sexual significance.

¹ The same is true of the relation between the ‘latent’ dream-thoughts and the elements of the ‘manifest’ content of a dream. See the section of my Interpretation of Dreams which deals with the ‘dream-work’.

Hysterical Phantasies And Their Relation To Bisexuality

1937

Among these various definitions the seventh brings out the nature of hysterical symptoms most completely as the realization of an unconscious phantasy; and the eighth recognizes the proper significance of the sexual factor. Some of the preceding formulas lead up to these two and are contained in them.

This connection between symptoms and phantasies makes it easy to arrive from a psycho-analysis of the former at a knowledge of the components of the sexual instincts which dominate the individual, as I have demonstrated in my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In some cases, however, investigation by this means yields an unexpected result. It shows that there are many symptoms where the uncovering of a sexual phantasy (or of a number of phantasies, one of which, the most significant and the earliest, is of a sexual nature) is not enough to bring about a resolution of the symptoms. To resolve it one has to have two sexual phantasies, of which one has a masculine and the other a feminine character. Thus one of these phantasies springs from a homosexual impulse. This new finding does not alter our seventh formula. It remains true that a hysterical symptom must necessarily represent a compromise between a libidinal and a repressing impulse; but it may also represent a union of two libidinal phantasies of an opposite sexual character.

Hysterical Phantasies And Their Relation To Bisexuality

1938

I shall refrain from giving examples in support of this thesis. I have found from experience that short analyses, condensed into extracts, can never have the convincing effect which they are designed to produce. And on the other hand, accounts of fully analysed cases must be left for another occasion.

I will therefore content myself with stating the following formula and explaining its significance:

(9) Hysterical symptoms are the expression on the one hand of a masculine unconscious sexual phantasy, and on the other hand of a feminine one.

I must expressly state that I cannot claim the same general validity for this formula as I have done for the others. As far as I can see, it applies neither to all the symptoms of a given case nor to all cases. On the contrary, it is not hard to adduce cases in which the impulses belonging to the opposite sexes have found separate symptomatic expression, so that the symptoms of heterosexuality and those of homosexuality can be as clearly distinguished from each other as the phantasies concealed behind them. Nevertheless, the condition of things stated in the ninth formula is common enough, and, when it occurs, important enough to deserve special emphasis. It seems to me to mark the highest degree of complexity to which the determination of a hysterical symptom can attain, and one may therefore only expect to find it in a neurosis which has persisted for a long time and within which a great deal of organization has taken place.¹

The bisexual nature of hysterical symptoms, which can in any event be demonstrated in numerous cases, is an interesting confirmation of my view that the postulated existence of an innate bisexual disposition in man is especially clearly visible in the analysis of psychoneurotics.² An exactly analogous state of affairs occurs in the same field when a person who is masturbating tries in his conscious phantasies to have the feelings both of the man and of the woman in the situation which he is picturing. Further counterparts are to be found in certain hysterical attacks in which the patient simultaneously plays both parts in the underlying sexual phantasy. In one case which I observed, for instance, the patient pressed her dress up against her body with one hand (as the woman), while she tried to tear it off with the other (as the man). This simultaneity of contradictory actions serves to a large extent to obscure the situation, which is otherwise so plastically portrayed in the attack, and it is thus well suited to conceal the unconscious phantasy that is at work.

¹ Sadger (1907) has recently discovered this formula independently in his own psycho-analyses. He, however, maintains that it has general validity.

² Cf. my Three Essays.

Hysterical Phantasies And Their Relation To Bisexuality

1939

In psycho-analytic treatment it is very important to be prepared for a symptom’s having a bisexual meaning. We need not then be surprised or misled if a symptom seems to persist undiminished although we have already resolved one of its sexual meanings; for it is still being maintained by the - perhaps unsuspected - one belonging to the opposite sex. In the treatment of such cases, moreover, one may observe how the patient avails himself, during the analysis of the one sexual meaning, of the convenient possibility of constantly switching his associations, as though on to an adjoining track, into the field of the contrary meaning.

1940

CHARACTER AND ANAL EROTISM

(1908)

1941

Intentionally left blank

1942

CHARACTER AND ANAL EROTISM

Among those whom we try to help by our psycho-analytic efforts we often come across a type of person who is marked by the possession of a certain set of character-traits, while at the same time our attention is drawn to the behaviour in his childhood of one of his bodily functions and the organ concerned in it. I cannot say at this date what particular occasions began to give me an impression that there was some organic connection between this type of character and this behaviour of an organ, but I can assure the reader that no theoretical expectation played any part in that impression.

Accumulated experience has so much strengthened my belief in the existence of such a connection that I am venturing to make it the subject of a communication.

The people I am about to describe are noteworthy for a regular combination of the three following characteristics. They are especially orderly, parsimonious and obstinate. Each of these words actually covers a small group or series of interrelated character-traits. ‘Orderly’ covers the notion of bodily cleanliness, as well as of conscientiousness in carrying out small duties and trustworthiness. Its opposite would be ‘untidy’ and ‘neglectful’. Parsimony may appear in the exaggerated form of avarice; and obstinacy can go over into defiance, to which rage and revengefulness are easily joined. The two latter qualities - parsimony and obstinacy are linked with each other more closely than they are with the first - with orderliness. They are, also, the more constant element of the whole complex. Yet it seems to me incontestable that all three in some way belong together.

Character And Anal Erotism

1943

It is easy to gather from these people’s early childhood history that they took a comparatively long time to overcome their infantile incontinentia alvi [faecal incontinence], and that even in later childhood they suffered from isolated failures of this function. As infants, they seem to have belonged to the class who refuse to empty their bowels when they are put on the pot because they derive a subsidiary pleasure from defaecating;¹ for they tell us that even in somewhat later years they enjoyed holding back their stool, and they remember - though more readily about their brothers and sisters than about themselves - doing all sorts of unseemly things with the faeces that had been passed. From these indications we infer that such people are born with a sexual constitution in which the erotogenicity of the anal zone is exceptionally strong. But since none of these weaknesses and idiosyncracies are to be found in them once their childhood has been passed, we must conclude that the anal zone had lost its erotogenic significance in the course of development; and it is to be suspected that the regularity with which this triad of properties is present in their character may be brought into relation with the disappearance of their anal erotism.

I know that no one is prepared to believe in a state of things so long as it appears to be unintelligible and to offer no angle from which an explanation can be attempted. But we can at least bring the underlying factors nearer to our understanding by the help of the postulates I laid down in my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905. I there attempted to show that the sexual instinct of man is highly complex and is put together from contributions made by numerous constituents and component instincts. Important contributions to ‘sexual excitation’ are furnished by the peripheral excitations of certain specially designated parts of the body (the genitals, mouth, anus, urethra), which therefore deserve to be described as ‘erotogenic zones’. But the amounts of excitation coming in from these parts of the body do not all undergo the same vicissitudes, nor is the fate of all of them the same at every period of life. Generally speaking, only a part of them is made use of in sexual life; another part is deflected from sexual aims and directed towards others - a process which deserves the name of ‘sublimation’. During the period of life which may be called the period of ‘sexual latency’ - i.e. from the completion of the fifth year to the first manifestations of puberty (round about the eleventh year) - reaction-formations, or counter-forces, such as shame, disgust and morality, are created in the mind. They are actually formed at the expense of the excitations proceeding from the erotogenic zones, and they rise like dams to oppose the later activity of the sexual instincts. Now anal erotism is one of the components of the instinct which, in the course of development and in accordance with the education demanded by our present civilization, have become unserviceable for sexual aims. It is therefore plausible to suppose that these character-traits of orderliness, parsimony and obstinacy, which are so often prominent in people who were formerly anal erotics, are to be regarded as the first and most constant results of the sublimation of anal erotism.²

¹ Cf. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d).

² Since it is precisely the remarks in my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality about the anal erotism of infants that have particularly scandalized uncomprehending readers, I venture at this point to interpolate an observation for which I have to thank a very intelligent patient. ‘A friend of mine’, he told me, ‘who has read your Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, was talking about the book. He entirely agreed with it, but there was one passage, which - though of course he accepted and understood its meaning like that of the rest - struck him as so grotesque and comic that he sat down and laughed over it for a quarter of an hour. This passage ran: "One of the clearest signs of subsequent eccentricity or nervousness is to be seen when a baby obstinately refuses to empty his bowels when he is put on the pot - that is, when his nurse wants him to - and holds back that function till he himself chooses to exercise it. He is naturally not concerned with dirtying the bed, he is only anxious not to miss the subsidiary pleasure attached to defaecating." The picture of this baby sitting on the pot and deliberating whether he would put up with a restriction of this kind upon his personal freedom of will, and feeling anxious, too, not to miss the pleasure attached to defaecating, - this caused my friend the most intense amusement. About twenty minutes afterwards, as we were having some cocoa, he suddenly remarked without any preliminary: "I say, seeing the cocoa in front of me has suddenly made me think of an idea that I always had when I was a child. I used always to pretend to myself that I was the cocoa-manufacturer Van Houten" (he pronounced the name Van "Hauten") "and that I possessed a great secret for the manufacture of this cocoa. Everybody was trying to get hold of this secret that was a boon to humanity but I kept it carefully to myself. I don’t know why I should have hit specially upon Van Houten. Probably his advertisements impressed me more than any others." Laughing, and without thinking at the time that my words had any deep meaning, I said: "Wann haut’n die Mutter?" [‘When does mother smack?’ The first two words in the German phrase are pronounced exactly like ‘Van Houten’.] It was only later that I realized that my pun in fact contained the key to the whole of my friend’s sudden childhood recollection, and I then recognized it as a brilliant example of a screen-phantasy. My friend’s phantasy, while keeping to the situation, actually involved (the nutritional process) and making use of phonetic associations ("Kakao" [‘cocoa’. - ‘Kaka’ is the common German nursery word for ‘faeces’] and "Wann haut’n"), pacified his sense of guilt by making a complete reversal in the content of his recollection: there was a displacement from the back of the body to the front, excreting food became taking food in, and something that was shameful and had to be concealed became a secret that was a boon to humanity. I was interested to see how, only a quarter of an hour after my friend had fended the phantasy off (though, it is true, in the comparatively mild form of raising an objection on formal grounds) - he was, quite involuntarily, presented with the most convincing evidence by his own unconscious.’

Character And Anal Erotism

1944

The intrinsic necessity for this connection is not clear, of course, even to myself. But I can make some suggestions which may help towards an understanding of it. Cleanliness, orderliness and trustworthiness give exactly the impression of a reaction-formation against an interest in what is unclean and disturbing and should not be part of the body. (‘Dirt is matter in the wrong place.’)¹ To relate obstinacy to an interest in defaecation would seem no easy task; but it should be remembered that even babies can show self-will about parting with their stool, as we have seen above, and that it is a general practice in children’s upbringing to administer painful stimuli to the skin of the buttocks which is linked up with the erotogenic anal zone - in order to break their obstinacy and make them submissive. An invitation to a caress of the anal zone is still used to-day, as it was in ancient times, to express defiance or defiant scorn, and thus in reality signifies an act of tenderness that has been overtaken by repression. An exposure of the buttocks represents a softening down of this spoken invitation into a gesture; in Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen both words and gesture are introduced at the most appropriate point as an expression of defiance.

The connections between the complexes of interest in money and of defaecation, which seem so dissimilar, appear to be the most extensive of all. Every doctor who has practised psycho-analysis knows that the most refractory and long-standing cases of what is described as habitual constipation in neurotics can be cured by that form of treatment. This is less surprising if we remember that that function has shown itself similarly amenable to hypnotic suggestion. But in psycho-analysis one only achieves this result if one deals with the patients’ money complex and induces them to bring it into consciousness with all its connections. It might be supposed that the neurosis is here only following as indication of common usage in speech, which calls a person who keeps too careful a hold on his money ‘dirty’ or ‘filthy’.² But this explanation would be far too superficial. In reality, wherever archaic modes of thought have predominated or persist - in the ancient civilizations, in myths, fairy tales and superstitions, in unconscious thinking, in dreams and in neuroses - money is brought into the most intimate relationship with dirt. We know that the gold which the devil gives his paramours turns into excrement after his departure, and the devil is certainly nothing else than the personification of the repressed unconscious instinctual life.³ We also know about the superstition which connects the finding of treasure with defaecation, and everyone is familiar with the figure of the ‘shitter of ducats [Dukatenscheisser]’.4 Indeed, even according to ancient Babylonian doctrine gold is ‘the faeces of Hell’ (Mammon = ilu manman^5). Thus in following the usage of language, neurosis, here as elsewhere, is taking words in their original, significant sense, and where it appears to be using a word figuratively it is usually simply restoring its old meaning.

¹ [In English in the original.]

² [The English ‘filthy’ as well as the German ‘filzig’ appears in the original.]

³ Compare hysterical possession and demoniac epidemics.

4 [A term vulgarly used for a wealthy spendthrift.]

5 Cf. Jeremias (1904, 115n.).’"Mamon" ("Mammon") is "Manman" in Babylonian and is another name for Nergal, the God of the Underworld. According to Oriental mythology, which has passed over into popular legends and fairy tales, gold is the excrement of Hell.’

Character And Anal Erotism

1945

It is possible that the contrast between the most precious substance known to men and the most worthless, which they reject as waste matter (‘refuse’¹), has led to this specific identification of gold with faeces.

Yet another circumstance facilitates this equation in neurotic thought. The original erotic interest in defaecation is, as we know, destined to be extinguished in later years. In those years the interest in money makes its appearance as a new interest which had been absent in childhood. This makes it easier for the earlier impulsion, which is in process of losing its aim, to be carried over to the newly emerging aim.

If there is any basis in fact for the relation posited here between anal erotism and this triad of character-traits, one may expect to find no very marked degree of ‘anal character’ in people who have retained the anal zone’s erotogenic character in adult life, as happens, for instance, with certain homosexuals. Unless I am much mistaken, the evidence of experience tallies quite well on the whole with this inference.

We ought in general to consider whether other character complexes, too, do not exhibit a connection with the excitations of particular erotogenic zones. At present I only know of the intense ‘burning’ ambition of people who earlier suffered from enuresis. We can at any rate lay down a formula for the way in which character in its final shape is formed out of the constituent instincts: the permanent character-traits are either unchanged prolongations of the original instincts, or sublimations of those instincts, or reaction-formations against them.

¹ [In English in the original.]

1946

‘CIVILIZED’ SEXUAL MORALITY AND MODERN NERVOUS ILLNESS

(1908)

1947

Intentionally left blank

1948

‘CIVILIZED’ SEXUAL MORALITY AND MODERN NERVOUS ILLNESS

In his recently published book, Sexual Ethics, Von Ehrenfels (1907) dwells on the difference between ‘natural’ and ‘civilized’ sexual morality. By natural sexual morality we are to understand, according to him, a sexual morality under whose dominance a human stock is able to remain in lasting possession of health and efficiency, while civilized sexual morality is a sexual morality obedience to which, on the other hand, spurs men on to intense and productive cultural activity. This contrast, he thinks, is best illustrated by comparing the innate character of a people with their cultural attainments. I may refer the reader to Von Ehrenfels’s own work for a more extensive consideration of this significant line of thought, and I shall extract from it here only as much as I need as a starting-point for my own contribution to the subject.

It is not difficult to suppose that under the domination of a civilized sexual morality the health and efficiency of single individuals may be liable to impairment and that ultimately this injury to them, caused by the sacrifices imposed on them, may reach such a pitch that, by this indirect path, the cultural aim in view will be endangered as well. And Von Ehrenfels does in fact attribute a number of ill-effects to the sexual morality which dominates our Western society to-day, ill-effects for which he is obliged to make that morality responsible; and, although he fully acknowledges its high aptitude for the furtherance of civilization, he is led to convict it of standing in need of reform. In his view, what is characteristic of the civilized sexual morality that dominates us is that the demands made on women are carried over to the sexual life of men and that all sexual intercourse is prohibited except in monogamous marriage. Nevertheless, consideration of the natural difference between the sexes makes it necessary to visit men’s lapses with less severity and thus in fact to admit a double morality for them. But a society which accepts this double morality cannot carry ‘the love of truth, honesty and humanity’ (Von Ehrenfels, ibid. 32 ff.) beyond a definite and narrow limit, and is bound to induce in its members concealment of the truth, false optimism, self-deception and deception of others. And civilized sexual morality has still worse effects, for, by glorifying monogamy, it cripples the factor of selection by virility - the factor whose influence alone can bring about an improvement of the individual’s innate constitution, since in civilized peoples selection by vitality has been reduced to a minimum by humanity and hygiene (ibid., 35).

'Civilized' Sexual Morality And Modern Nervous Illness

1949

Among the damaging effects which are here laid at the door of civilized sexual morality, the physician will miss a particular one whose significance will be discussed in detail in the present paper. I refer to the increase traceable to it of modern nervous illness - of the nervous illness, that is, which is rapidly spreading in our present-day society. Occasionally a nervous patient will himself draw the doctor’s attention to the part played in the causation of his complaint by the opposition between his constitution and the demands of civilization and will say: ‘In our family we’ve all become neurotic because we wanted to be something better than what, with our origin, we are capable of being.’ Often, too, the physician finds food for thought in observing that those who succumb to nervous illness are precisely the offspring of fathers who, having been born of rough but vigorous families, living in simple, healthy, country conditions, had successfully established themselves in the metropolis, and in a short space of time had brought their children to a high level of culture. But, above all, nerve specialists themselves have loudly proclaimed the connection between ‘increasing nervous illness’ and modern civilized life. The grounds to which they attribute this connection will be shown by a few extracts from statements that have been made by some eminent observers.

W. Erb (1893): ‘The original question, then, is whether the causes of nervous illness that have been put before you are present in modern life to such a heightened degree as to account for a marked increase in that form of illness. The question can be answered without hesitation in the affirmative, as a cursory glance at our present-day existence and its features will show.

‘This is already clearly demonstrated by a number of general facts. The extraordinary achievements of modern times, the discoveries and inventions in every sphere, the maintenance of progress in the face of increasing competition - these things have only been gained, and can only be held, by great mental effort. The demands made on the efficiency of the individual in the struggle for existence have greatly increased and it is only by putting out all his mental powers that he can meet them. At the same time, the individual’s needs and his demands for the enjoyments of life have increased in all classes; unprecedented luxury has spread to strata of the population who were formerly quite untouched by it; irreligion, discontent and covetousness have grown up in wide social spheres. The immense extension of communications which has been brought about by the network of telegraphs and telephones that encircle the world has completely altered the conditions of trade and commerce. All is hurry and agitation; night is used for travel, day for business, even ‘holiday trips’ have become a strain on the nervous system. Important political, industrial and financial crises carry excitement into far wider circles of people than they used to do; political life is engaged in quite generally; political, religious and social struggles, party-politics, electioneering, and the enormous spread of trade-unionism inflame tempers, place an ever greater strain on the mind, and encroach upon the hours for recreation, sleep and rest. City life is constantly becoming more sophisticated and more restless. The exhausted nerves seek recuperation in increased stimulation and in highly-spiced pleasures, only to become more exhausted than before. Modern literature is predominantly concerned with the most questionable problems which stir up all the passions, and which encourage sensuality and a craving for pleasure, and contempt for every fundamental ethical principle and every ideal. It brings before the reader’s mind pathological figures and problems concerned with psychopathic sexuality, and revolutionary and other subjects. Our ears are excited and overstimulated by large doses of noisy and insistent music. The theatres captivate all our senses with their exciting performances. The plastic arts, too, turn by preference to what is repellent, ugly and suggestive, and do not hesitate to set before our eyes with revolting fidelity the most horrible sights that reality has to offer.

‘This general description is already enough to indicate a number of dangers presented by the evolution of our modern civilization. Let me now fill in the picture with a few details.’

'Civilized' Sexual Morality And Modern Nervous Illness

1950

Binswanger (1896): ‘Neurasthenia in particular has been described as an essentially modern disorder, and Beard, to whom we are indebted for a first comprehensive account of it believed that he had discovered a new nervous disease which had developed specifically on American soil. This supposition was of course a mistaken one; nevertheless, the fact that it was an American physician who was first able to grasp and describe the peculiar features of this illness, as the fruit of a wide experience, indicates, no doubt, the close connections which exist between it and modern life, with its unbridled pursuit of money and possessions, and its immense advances in the field of technology which have rendered illusory every obstacle, whether temporal or spatial, to our means of intercommunication.’

Von Krafft-Ebing (1895): ‘The mode of life of countless civilized people exhibits nowadays an abundance of anti-hygienic factors which make it easy to understand the fateful increase of nervous illness; for those injurious factors take effect first and foremost on the brain. In the course of the last decades changes have taken place in the political and social - and especially in the mercantile, industrial and agricultural - conditions of civilized nations which have brought about great changes in people’s occupations, social position and property, and this at the cost of the nervous system, which is called upon to meet the increased social and economic demands by a greater expenditure of energy, often with quite inadequate opportunity for recuperation.’

The fault I have to find with these and many other similarly-worded opinions is not that they are mistaken but that they prove insufficient to explain the details in the picture of nervous disturbances and that they leave out of account precisely the most important of the aetiological factors involved. If we disregard the vaguer ways of being ‘nervous’ and consider the specific forms of nervous illness, we shall find that the injurious influence of civilization reduces itself in the main to the harmful suppression of the sexual life of civilized peoples (or classes) through the ‘civilized’ sexual morality prevalent in them.

I have tried to bring forward the evidence for this assertion in a number of technical papers.¹ I cannot repeat it here. I will, however, quote the most important of the arguments arising from my investigations.

Careful clinical observation allows us to distinguish two groups of nervous disorders: the neuroses proper and the psychoneuroses. In the former the disturbances (the symptoms), whether they show their effects in somatic or mental functioning, appear to be of a toxic nature. They behave exactly like the phenomena accompanying an excess or a deprivation of certain nerve poisons. These neuroses - which are commonly grouped together as ‘neurasthenia’ - can be induced by certain injurious influences in sexual life, without any hereditary taint being necessarily present; indeed, the form taken by the disease corresponds to the nature of these noxae, so that often enough the particular sexual aetiology can at once be deduced from the clinical picture. There is a total absence, on the other hand, of any such regular correspondence between the form of a nervous illness and the other injurious influences of civilization which are blamed by the authorities. We may, therefore, regard the sexual factor as the essential one in the causation of the neuroses proper.

¹ See my collection of short papers on the theory of the neuroses (1906).

'Civilized' Sexual Morality And Modern Nervous Illness

1951

With the psychoneuroses, the influence of heredity is more marked and the causation less transparent. A peculiar method of investigation known as psycho-analysis has, however, enabled us to recognize that the symptoms of these disorders (hysteria, obsessional neurosis, etc.) are psychogenic and depend upon the operation of unconscious (repressed) ideational complexes. This same method has also taught us what those unconscious complexes are and has shown that, quite generally speaking, they have a sexual content. They spring from the sexual needs of people who are unsatisfied and represent for them a kind of substitutive satisfaction. We must therefore view all factors which impair sexual life, suppress its activity or distort its aims as being pathogenic factors in the psychoneuroses as well.

The value of a theoretical distinction between toxic and psychogenic neuroses is, of course, not diminished by the fact that, in most people suffering from nervous illness, disturbances arising from both sources are to be observed.

The reader who is prepared to agree with me in looking for the aetiology of nervous illness pre-eminently in influences which damage sexual life, will also be ready to follow the further discussion, which is intended to set the theme of increasing nervous illness in a wider context.

Generally speaking, our civilization is built up on the suppression of instincts. Each individual has surrendered some part of his possessions - some part of the sense of omnipotence or of the aggressive or vindictive inclinations in his personality. From these contributions has grown civilization’s common possession of material and ideal property. Besides the exigencies of life, no doubt it has been family feelings, derived from erotism, that have induced the separate individuals to make this renunciation. The renunciation has been a progressive one in the course of the evolution of civilization. The single steps in it were sanctioned by religion; the piece of instinctual satisfaction which each person had renounced was offered to the Deity as a sacrifice, and the communal property thus acquired was declared ‘sacred’. The man who, in consequence of his unyielding constitution, cannot fall in with this suppression of instinct, becomes a ‘criminal’, an ‘outlaw’,¹ in the face of society - unless his social position or his exceptional capacities enable him to impose himself upon it as a great man, a ‘hero’.

¹ [In English in the original]

'Civilized' Sexual Morality And Modern Nervous Illness

1952

The sexual instinct - or, more correctly, the sexual instincts, for analytic investigation teaches us that the sexual instinct is made up of many separate constituents or component instincts - is probably more strongly developed in man than in most of the higher animals; it is certainly more constant, since it has almost entirely overcome the periodicity to which it is tied in animals. It places extraordinarily large amounts of force at the disposal of civilized activity, and it does this in virtue of its especially marked characteristic of being able to displace its aim without materially diminishing in intensity. This capacity to exchange its originally sexual aim for another one, which is no longer sexual but which is psychically related to the first aim, is called the capacity for sublimation. In contrast to this displaceability, in which its value for civilization lies, the sexual instinct may also exhibit a particularly obstinate fixation which renders it unserviceable and which sometimes causes it to degenerate into what are described as abnormalities. The original strength of the sexual instinct probably varies in each individual; certainly the proportion of it which is suitable for sublimation varies. It seems to us that it is the innate constitution of each individual which decides in the first instance how large a part of his sexual instinct it will be possible to sublimate and make use of. In addition to this, the effects of experience and the intellectual influences upon his mental apparatus succeed in bringing about the sublimation of a further portion of it. To extend this process of displacement indefinitely is, however, certainly not possible, any more than is the case with the transformation of heat into mechanical energy in our machines. A certain amount of direct sexual satisfaction seems to be indispensable for most organizations, and a deficiency in this amount, which varies from individual to individual, is visited by phenomena which, on account of their detrimental effects on functioning and their subjective quality of unpleasure, must be regarded as an illness.

'Civilized' Sexual Morality And Modern Nervous Illness

1953

Further prospects are opened up when we take into consideration the fact that in man the sexual instinct does not originally serve the purposes of reproduction at all, but has as its aim the gaining of particular kinds of pleasure.¹ It manifests itself in this way in human infancy, during which it attains its aim of gaining pleasure not only from the genitals but from other parts of the body (the erotogenic zones), and can therefore disregard any objects other than these convenient ones. We call this stage the stage of auto-erotism, and the child’s upbringing has, in our view, the task of restricting it, because to linger in it would make the sexual instinct uncontrollable and unserviceable later on. The development of the sexual instinct then proceeds from auto-erotism to object-love and from the autonomy of the erotogenic zones to their subordination under the primacy of the genitals, which are put at the service of reproduction. During this development a part of the sexual excitation which is provided by the subject’s own body is inhibited as being unserviceable for the reproductive function and in favourable cases is brought to sublimation. The forces that can be employed for cultural activities are thus to a great extent obtained through the suppression of what are known as the perverse elements of sexual excitation.

If this evolution of the sexual instinct is borne in mind, three stages of civilization can be distinguished: a first one, in which the sexual instinct may be freely exercised without regard to the aims of reproduction; a second, in which all of the sexual instinct is suppressed except what serves the aims of reproduction; and a third, in which only legitimate reproduction is allowed as a sexual aim. This third stage is reflected in our present-day ‘civilized’ sexual morality.

If we take the second of these stages as an average, we must point out that a number of people are, on account of their organization, not equal to meeting its demands. In whole classes of individuals the development of the sexual instinct, as we have described it above, from auto-erotism to object-love with its aim of uniting the genitals, has not been carried out correctly and sufficiently fully. As a result of these disturbances of development two kinds of harmful deviation from normal sexuality - that is, sexuality which is serviceable to civilization - come about; and the relation between these two is almost that of positive and negative.¹

In the first place (disregarding people whose sexual instinct is altogether excessive and uninhibitable) there are the different varieties perverts, in whom an infantile fixation to a preliminary sexual aim has prevented the primacy of the reproductive function from being established, and the homosexuals or inverts, in whom, in a manner that is not yet quite understood, the sexual aim has been deflected away from the opposite sex. If the injurious effects of these two kinds of developmental disturbance are less than might be expected, this mitigation can be ascribed precisely to the complex way in which the sexual instinct is put together, which makes it possible for a person’s sexual life to reach a serviceable final form even if one or more components of the instinct have been shut off from development. The constitution of people suffering from inversion - the homosexuals - is, indeed, often distinguished by their sexual instinct’s possessing a special aptitude for cultural sublimation.

¹ Cf. my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d).

'Civilized' Sexual Morality And Modern Nervous Illness

1954

More pronounced forms of the perversions and of homosexuality, especially if they are exclusive, do, it is true, make those subject to them socially useless and unhappy, so that it must be recognized that the cultural requirements even of the second stage are a source of suffering for a certain proportion of mankind. The fate of these people who differ constitutionally from the rest varies, and depends on whether they have been born with a sexual instinct which by absolute standards is strong or comparatively weak. In the latter case - where the sexual instinct is in general weak - perverts succeed in totally suppressing the inclinations which bring them into conflict with the moral demands of their stage of civilization. But this, from the ideal point of view, is also the only thing they succeed in achieving; for, in order to effect this suppression of their sexual instinct, they use up the forces which they would otherwise employ in cultural activities. They are, as it were, inwardly inhibited and outwardly paralysed. What we shall be saying again later on about the abstinence demanded of men and women in the third stage of civilization applies to them too.

Where the sexual instinct is fairly intense, but perverse, there are two possible outcomes. The first, which we shall not discuss further, is that the person affected remains a pervert and has to put up with the consequences of his deviation from the standard of civilization. The second is far more interesting. It is that, under the influence of education and social demands, a suppression of the perverse instincts is indeed achieved, but it is a kind of suppression which is really no suppression at all. It can better be described as a suppression that has failed. The inhibited sexual instincts are, it is true, no longer expressed as such - and this constitutes the success of the process - but they find expression in other ways, which are quite as injurious to the subject and make him quite as useless for society as satisfaction of the suppressed instincts in an unmodified form would have done. This constitutes the failure of the process, which in the long run more than counterbalances its success. The substitutive phenomena which emerge in consequence of the suppression of the instinct amount to what we call nervous illness, or, more precisely, the psychoneuroses.¹ Neurotics are the class of people who, since they possess a recalcitrant organization, only succeed, under the influence of cultural requirements, in achieving a suppression of their instincts which is apparent and which becomes increasingly unsuccessful. They therefore only carry on their collaboration with cultural activities by a great expenditure of force and at the cost of an internal impoverishment, or are obliged at times to interrupt it and fall ill. I have described the neuroses as the ‘negative’ of the perversions because in the neuroses the perverse impulses, after being repressed, manifest themselves from the unconscious part of the mind - because the neuroses contain the same tendencies, though in a state of ‘repression’, as do the positive perversions.

¹ Cf. my introductory remarks above.

'Civilized' Sexual Morality And Modern Nervous Illness

1955

Experience teaches us that for most people there is a limit beyond which their constitution cannot comply with the demands of civilization. All who wish to be more noble-minded than their constitution allows fall victims to neurosis; they would have been more healthy if it could have been possible for them to be less good. The discovery that perversions and neuroses stand in the relation of positive and negative is often unmistakably confirmed by observations made on the members of one generation of a family. Quite frequently a brother is a sexual pervert, while his sister, who, being a woman, possesses a weaker sexual instinct, is a neurotic whose symptoms express the same inclinations as the perversions of her sexually more active brother. And correspondingly, in many families the men are healthy, but from a social point of view immoral to an undesirable degree, while the women are high-minded and over-refined, but severely neurotic.

It is one of the obvious social injustices that the standard of civilization should demand from everyone the same conduct of sexual life - conduct which can be followed without any difficulty by some people, thanks to their organization, but which imposes the heaviest psychical sacrifices on others; though, indeed, the injustice is as a rule wiped out by disobedience to the injunctions of morality.

These considerations have been based so far on the requirement laid down by the second of the stages of civilization which we have postulated, the requirement that every sexual activity of the kind described as perverse is prohibited, while what is called normal sexual intercourse is freely permitted. We have found that even when the line between sexual freedom and restriction is drawn at this point, a number of individuals are ruled out as perverts, and a number of others, who make efforts not to be perverts whilst constitutionally they should be so, are forced into nervous illness. It is easy to predict the result that will follow if sexual freedom is still further circumscribed and the requirements of civilization are raised to the level of the third stage, which bans all sexual activity outside legal marriage. The number of strong natures who openly oppose the demands of civilization will increase enormously, and so will the number of weaker ones who, faced with the conflict between the pressure of cultural influences and the resistance of their constitution, take flight into neurotic illness.

'Civilized' Sexual Morality And Modern Nervous Illness

1956

Let us now try to answer three questions that arise here:

(1) What is the task that is set to the individual by the requirements of the third stage of civilization?

(2) Can the legitimate sexual satisfaction that is permissible offer acceptable compensation for the renunciation of all other satisfactions?

(3) In what relation do the possible injurious effects of this renunciation stand to its exploitation in the cultural field?

The answer to the first question touches on a problem which has often been discussed and cannot be exhaustively treated here - that of sexual abstinence. Our third stage of civilization demands of individuals of both sexes that they shall practise abstinence until they are married and that all who do not contract a legal marriage shall remain abstinent throughout their lives. The position, agreeable to all the authorities, that sexual abstinence is not harmful and not difficult to maintain, has also been widely supported by the medical profession. It may be asserted, however, that the task of mastering such a powerful impulse as that of the sexual instinct by any other means than satisfying it is one which can call for the whole of a man’s forces. Mastering it by sublimation, by deflecting the sexual instinctual forces away from their sexual aim to higher cultural aims, can be achieved by a minority and then only intermittently, and least easily during the period of ardent and vigorous youth. Most of the rest become neurotic or are harmed in one way or another. Experience shows that the majority of the people who make up our society are constitutionally unfit to face the task of abstinence. Those who would have fallen ill under milder sexual restrictions fall ill all the more readily and more severely before the demands of our cultural sexual morality of to-day; for we know no better safe-guard against the threat to normal sexual life offered by defective innate dispositions or disturbances of development than sexual satisfaction itself. The more a person is disposed to neurosis, the less can he tolerate abstinence; instincts which have been withdrawn from normal development, in the sense in which it has been described above, become at the same time all the more uninhibitable. But even those people who would have retained their health under the requirements of the second stage of civilization will now succumb to neurosis in great numbers. For the psychical value of sexual satisfaction increases with its frustration. The dammed-up libido is now put in a position to detect one or other of the weaker spots which are seldom absent in the structure of sexual life, and there to break through and obtain substitutive satisfaction of a neurotic kind in the form of pathological symptoms. Anyone who is able to penetrate the determinants of nervous illness will soon become convinced that its increase in our society arises from the intensification of sexual restrictions.

'Civilized' Sexual Morality And Modern Nervous Illness

1957

This brings us to the question whether sexual intercourse in legal marriage can offer full compensation for the restrictions imposed before marriage. There is such an abundance of material supporting a reply in the negative that we can give only the briefest summary of it. It must above all be borne in mind that our cultural sexual morality restricts sexual intercourse even in marriage itself, since it imposes on married couples the necessity of contenting themselves, as a rule, with a very few procreative acts. As a consequence of this consideration, satisfying sexual intercourse in marriage takes place only for a few years; and we must subtract from this, of course, the intervals of abstention necessitated by regard for the wife’s health. After these three, four or five years, the marriage becomes a failure in so far as it has promised the satisfaction of sexual needs. For all the devices hitherto invented for preventing conception impair sexual enjoyment, hurt the fine susceptibilities of both partners and even actually cause illness. Fear of the consequences of sexual intercourse first brings the married couple’s physical affection to an end; and then, as a remoter result, it usually puts a stop as well to the mental sympathy between them, which should have been the successor to their original passionate love. The spiritual disillusionment and bodily deprivation to which most marriages are thus doomed puts both partners back in the state they were in before their marriage, except for being the poorer by the loss of an illusion, and they must once more have recourse to their fortitude in mastering and deflecting their sexual instinct. We need not enquire how far men, by then in their maturer years, succeed in this task. Experience shows that they very frequently avail themselves of the degree of sexual freedom which is allowed them - although only with reluctance and under a veil of silence - by even the strictest sexual code. The ‘double’ sexual morality which is valid for men in our society is the plainest admission that society itself does not believe in the possibility of enforcing the precepts which it itself has laid down. But experience shows as well that women, who, as being the actual vehicle of the sexual interests of mankind, are only endowed in a small measure with the gift of sublimating their instincts, and who, though they may find a sufficient substitute for the sexual object in an infant at the breast, do not find one in a growing child - experience shows, I repeat, that women, when they are subjected to the disillusionments of marriage, fall ill of severe neuroses which permanently darken their lives.(Under the cultural conditions of to-day, marriage has long ceased to be a panacea for the nervous troubles of women; and if we doctors still advise marriage in such cases, we are nevertheless aware that, on the contrary, a girl must be very healthy if she is to be able to tolerate it, and we urgently advise our male patients not to marry any girl who has had nervous trouble before marriage. On the contrary, the cure for nervous illness arising from marriage would be marital unfaithfulness. But the more strictly a woman has been brought up and the more sternly she has submitted to the demands of civilization, the more she is afraid of taking this way out; and in the conflict between her desires and her sense of duty, she once more seeks refuge in a neurosis. Nothing protects her virtue as securely as an illness. Thus the married state, which is held out as a consolation to the sexual instinct of the civilized person in his youth, proves to be inadequate even to the demands of the actual period of life covered by it. There is no question of its being able to compensate for the deprivation which precedes it.

'Civilized' Sexual Morality And Modern Nervous Illness

1958

But even if the damage done by civilized sexual morality is admitted, it may be argued in reply to our third question that the cultural gain derived from such an extensive restriction of sexuality probably more than balances these sufferings, which, after all, only affect a minority in any severe form. I must confess that I am unable to balance gain against loss correctly on this point, but I could advance a great many more considerations on the side of the loss. Going back to the subject of abstinence, which I have already touched on, I must insist that it brings in its train other noxae besides those involved in the neuroses and that the importance of the neuroses has for the most part not been fully appreciated.

The retardation of sexual development and sexual activity at which our education and civilization aim is certainly not injurious to begin with. It is seen to be a necessity, when one considers the late age at which young people of the educated classes reach independence and are able to earn a living. (This reminds one, incidentally, of the intimate interconnection between all our cultural institutions and of the difficulty of altering any part of them without regard to the whole.) But abstinence continued long after the age of twenty is no longer unobjectionable for a young man; and it leads to other damage even when it does not lead to neurosis. People say, to be sure, that the struggle against such a powerful instinct, and the strengthening of all the ethical and aesthetic forces which are necessary for this struggle, ‘steel’ the character; and this is true for a few specially favourably organized natures. It must also be admitted that the differentiation of individual character, which is so marked in our day, has only become possible with the existence of sexual restriction. But in the vast majority of cases the struggle against sexuality eats up the energy available in a character and this at the very time when a young man is in need of all his forces in order to win his share and place in society. The relationship between the amount of sublimation possible and the amount of sexual activity necessary naturally varies very much from person to person and even from one calling to another. An abstinent artist is hardly conceivable; but an abstinent young savant is certainly no rarity. The latter can, by his self-restraint, liberate forces for his studies; while the former probably finds his artistic achievements powerfully stimulated by his sexual experience. In general I have not gained the impression that sexual abstinence helps to bring about energetic and self-reliant men of action or original thinkers or bold emancipators and reformers. Far more often it goes to produce well-behaved weaklings who later become lost in the great mass of people that tends to follow, unwillingly, the leads given by strong individuals.

'Civilized' Sexual Morality And Modern Nervous Illness

1959

The fact that the sexual instinct behaves in general in a self-willed and inflexible fashion is also seen in the results produced by efforts at abstinence. Civilized education may only attempt to suppress the instinct temporarily, till marriage, intending to give it free rein afterwards with the idea of then making use of it. But extreme measures are more successful against it than attempts at moderating it; thus the suppression often goes too far, with the unwished-for result that when the instinct is set free it turns out to be permanently impaired. For this reason complete abstinence in youth is often not the best preparation for marriage for a young man. Women sense this, and prefer among their suitors those who have already proved their masculinity with other women. The harmful results which the strict demand for abstinence before marriage produces in women’s natures are quite especially apparent. It is clear that education is far from underestimating the task of suppressing a girl’s sensuality till her marriage, for it makes use of the most drastic measures. Not only does it forbid sexual intercourse and set a high premium on the preservation of female chastity, but it also protects the young woman from temptation as she grows up, by keeping her ignorant of all the facts of the part she is to play and by not tolerating any impulse of love in her which cannot lead to marriage. The result is that when the girl’s parental authorities suddenly allow her to fall in love, she is unequal to this psychical achievement and enters marriage uncertain of her own feelings. In consequence of this artificial retardation in her function of love, she has nothing but disappointments to offer the man who has saved up all his desire for her. In her mental feelings she is still attached to her parents, whose authority has brought about the suppression of her sexuality; and in her physical behaviour she shows herself frigid, which deprives the man of any high degree of sexual enjoyment. I do not know whether the anaesthetic type of woman exists apart from civilized education, though I consider it probable. But in any case such education actually breeds it, and these women who conceive without pleasure show little willingness afterwards to face the pains of frequent childbirth. In this way, the preparation for marriage frustrates the aims of marriage itself. When later on the retardation in the wife’s development has been overcome and her capacity to love is awakened at the climax of her life as a woman, her relations to her husband have long since been ruined; and, as a reward for her previous docility, she is left with the choice between unappeased desire, unfaithfulness or a neurosis.

'Civilized' Sexual Morality And Modern Nervous Illness

1960

The sexual behaviour of a human being often lays down the pattern for all his other modes of reacting to life. If a man is energetic in winning the object of his love, we are confident that he will pursue his other aims with an equally unswerving energy; but if, for all sorts of reasons, he refrains from satisfying his strong sexual instincts, his behaviour will be conciliatory and resigned rather than vigorous in other spheres of life as well. A special application of this proposition that sexual life lays down the pattern for the exercise of other functions can easily be recognized in the female sex as a whole. Their upbringing forbids their concerning themselves intellectually with sexual problems though they nevertheless feel extremely curious about them, and frightens them by condemning such curiosity as unwomanly and a sign of a sinful disposition. In this way they are scared away from any form of thinking, and knowledge loses its value for them. The prohibition of thought extends beyond the sexual field, partly through unavoidable association, partly automatically, like the prohibition of thought about religion among men, or the prohibition of thought about loyalty among faithful subjects. I do not believe that women’s ‘physiological feeble-mindedness’ is to be explained by a biological opposition between intellectual work and sexual activity, as Moebius has asserted in a work which has been widely disputed. I think that the undoubted intellectual inferiority of so many women can rather be traced back to the inhibition of thought necessitated by sexual suppression.

In considering the question of abstinence, the distinction is not nearly strictly enough made between two forms of it - namely abstention from any sexual activity whatever and abstention from sexual intercourse with the opposite sex. Many people who boast of succeeding in being abstinent have only been able to do so with the help of masturbation and similar satisfactions which are linked with the auto-erotic sexual activities of early childhood. But precisely because of this connection such substitutive means of sexual satisfaction are by no means harmless; they predispose to the numerous varieties of neuroses and psychoses which are conditional on an involution of sexual life to its infantile forms. Masturbation, moreover, is far from meeting the ideal demands of civilized sexual morality, and consequently drives young people into the same conflicts with the ideals of education which they hoped to escape by abstinence. Furthermore, it vitiates the character through indulgence, and this in more than one way. In the first place, it teaches people to achieve important aims without taking trouble and by easy paths instead of through an energetic exertion of force - that is, it follows the principle that sexuality lays down the pattern of behaviour; secondly, in the phantasies that accompany satisfaction the sexual object is raised to a degree of excellence which is not easily found again in reality. A witty writer (Karl Kraus in the Vienna paper Die Fackel) once expressed this truth in reverse by cynically remarking: ‘Copulation is no more than an unsatisfying substitute for masturbation.’

'Civilized' Sexual Morality And Modern Nervous Illness

1961

The sternness of the demands of civilization and the difficulty of the task of abstinence have combined to make avoidance of the union of the genitals of the two opposite sexes into the central point of abstinence and to favour other kinds of sexual activity, which, it might be said, are equivalent to semi-obedience. Since normal intercourse has been so relentlessly persecuted by morality - and also, on account of the possibilities of infection, by hygiene - what are known as the perverse forms of intercourse between the two sexes, in which other parts of the body take over the role of the genitals, have undoubtedly increased in social importance. These activities cannot, however, be regarded as being as harmless as analogous extensions in love-relationships. They are ethically objectionable, for they degrade the relationships of love between two human beings from a serious matter to a convenient game, attended by no risk and no spiritual participation. A further consequence of the aggravation of the difficulties of normal sexual life is to be found in the spread of homosexual satisfaction; in addition to all those who are homosexuals in virtue of their organization, or who became so in their childhood, there must be reckoned the great number of those in whom, in their maturer years, a blocking of the main stream of their libido has caused a widening in the side-channel of homosexuality.

All these unavoidable and unintended consequences of the requirement for abstinence converge in the one common result of completely ruining the preparation for marriage - marriage, which civilized sexual morality thinks should be the sole heir to the sexual impulsions. Every man whose libido, as a result of masturbatory or perverse sexual practices, has become habituated to situations and conditions of satisfaction which are not normal, develops diminished potency in marriage. Women, too, who have been able to preserve their virginity with the help of similar measures, show themselves anaesthetic to normal intercourse in marriage. A marriage begun with a reduced capacity to love on both sides succumbs to the process of dissolution even more quickly than others. As a result of the man’s weak potency, the woman is not satisfied, and she remains anaesthetic even in cases where her disposition to frigidity, derived from her education, could have been overcome by a powerful sexual experience. A couple like this finds more difficulties, too, in the prevention of children than a healthy one, since the husband’s diminished potency tolerates the use of contraceptives badly. In this perplexity, sexual intercourse, as being the source of all their embarrassments, is soon given up, and with this the basis of married life is abandoned.

I ask any well-informed person to bear witness to the fact that I am not exaggerating but that I am describing a state of affairs of which equally bad instances can be observed over and over again. To the uninitiated it is hardly credible how seldom normal potency is to be found in a husband and how often a wife is frigid among married couples who live under the dominance of our civilized sexual morality, what a degree of renunciation, often on both sides, is entailed by marriage, and to what narrow limits married life - the happiness that is so ardently desired - is narrowed down. I have already explained that in these circumstances the most obvious outcome is nervous illness; but I must further point out the way in which a marriage of this kind continues to exercise its influence on the few children, or the only child born of it. At a first glance, it seems to be a case of transmission by inheritance; but closer inspection shows that it is really a question of the effect of powerful infantile impressions. A neurotic wife who is unsatisfied by her husband is, as a mother, over-tender and over-anxious towards her child, on to whom she transfers her need for love; and she awakens it to sexual precocity. The bad relations between its parents, moreover, excite its emotional life and cause it to feel love and hatred to an intense degree while it is still at a very tender age. Its strict upbringing, which tolerates no activity of the sexual life that has been aroused so early, lends support to the suppressing force and this conflict at such an age contains everything necessary for bringing about lifelong nervous illness.

'Civilized' Sexual Morality And Modern Nervous Illness

1962

I return now to my earlier assertion that, in judging the neuroses, their full importance is not as a rule taken into account. I do not mean by this the undervaluation of these states shown in their frivolous dismissal by relatives and in the boasting assurances by doctors that a few weeks of cold water treatment or a few months of rest and convalescence will cure the condition. These are merely the opinions of quite ignorant doctors and laymen and are mostly no more than words intended to give the sufferer a short-lived consolation. It is, on the contrary, a well-known fact that a chronic neurosis, even if it does not totally put an end to the subject’s capacity for existence, represents a severe handicap in his life, of the same order, perhaps, as tuberculosis or a cardiac defect. The situation would even be tolerable if neurotic illness were to exclude from civilized activities only a number of individuals who were in any case of the weaker sort, and allowed the rest to play their part in it at the cost of troubles that were merely subjective. But, far from this being so, I must insist upon the view that neuroses, whatever their extent and wherever they occur, always succeed in frustrating the purposes of civilization, and in that way actually perform the work of the suppressed mental forces that are hostile to civilization. Thus, when society pays for obedience to its far-reaching regulations by an increase in nervous illness, it cannot claim to have purchased a gain at the price of sacrifices; it cannot claim a gain at all. Let us, for instance, consider the very common case of a woman who does not love her husband, because, owing to the conditions under which she entered marriage, she has no reason to love him, but who very much wants to love him, because that alone corresponds to the ideal of marriage to which she has been brought up. She will in that case suppress every impulse which would express the truth and contradict her endeavours to fulfil her ideal, and she will make special efforts to play the part of a loving, affectionate and attentive wife. The outcome of this self-suppression will be a neurotic illness; and this neurosis will in a short time have taken revenge on the unloved husband and have caused him just as much lack of satisfaction and worry as would have resulted from an acknowledgement of the true state of affairs. This example is completely typical of what a neurosis achieves. A similar failure to obtain compensation is to be seen after the suppression of impulses inimical to civilization which are not directly sexual. If a man, for example, has become over-kind as a result of a violent suppression of a constitutional inclination to harshness and cruelty, he often loses so much energy in doing this that he fails to carry out all that his compensatory impulses require, and he may, after all, do less good on the whole than he would have done without the suppression.

'Civilized' Sexual Morality And Modern Nervous Illness

1963

Let us add that a restriction of sexual activity in a community is quite generally accompanied by an increase of anxiety about life and of fear of death which interferes with the individual’s capacity for enjoyment and does away with his readiness to face death for any purpose. A diminished inclination to beget children is the result, and the community or group of people in question is thus excluded from any share in the future. In view of this, we may well raise the question whether our ‘civilized’ sexual morality is worth the sacrifice which it imposes on us, especially if we are still so much enslaved to hedonism as to include among the aims of our cultural development a certain amount of satisfaction of individual happiness. It is certainly not a physician’s business to come forward with proposals for reform; but it seemed to me that I might support the urgency of such proposals if I were to amplify Von Ehrenfels’s description of the injurious effects of our ‘civilized’ sexual morality by pointing to the important bearing of that morality upon the spread of modern nervous illness.

1964

ON THE SEXUAL THEORIES OF CHILDREN

(1908)

1965

Intentionally left blank

1966

ON THE SEXUAL THEORIES OF CHILDREN

The material on which the following synthesis is based is derived from several sources. Firstly, from the direct observation of what children say and do; secondly, from what adult neurotics consciously remember from their childhood and relate during psycho-analytic treatment; and thirdly, from the inferences and constructions, and from the unconscious memories translated into conscious material, which result from the psycho-analysis of neurotics.

That the first of these three sources has not by itself supplied all that is worth knowing on the subject is due to the attitude which the adult adopts towards the sexual life of children. He does not credit them with having any sexual activity and therefore takes no trouble to observe any such thing while, on the other hand, he suppresses any manifestation of such an activity which might claim his attention. Consequently the opportunity of obtaining information from this, the most unequivocal and fertile source of all, is a very restricted one. Whatever comes from the uninfluenced communications made by adults concerning their own conscious childhood memories is at the best subject to the objection that it may have been falsified in retrospect; but, in addition to thus, it has to be viewed in the light of the fact that the informants have subsequently become neurotic. The material that comes from the third source is open to all the criticisms which it is the custom to marshal against the trustworthiness of psycho-analysis and the reliability of the conclusions that are drawn from it. Thus I cannot attempt to justify it here; I can only give an assurance that those who know and practise the psycho-analytic technique acquire an extensive confidence in its findings.

On The Sexual Theories Of Children

1967

I cannot guarantee the completeness of my results, but I can answer for the care taken in arriving at them.

There remains a difficult question to decide. How far may one assume that what is here reported of children generally is true of all children - that is, of every particular child? Pressure of education and varying intensity of the sexual instinct certainly make great individual variations in the sexual behaviour of children possible, and, above all, influence the date at which a child’s sexual interest appears. For this reason, I have not divided my presentation of the material according to the successive epochs of childhood, but have combined into a single account things that come into play in different children sometimes earlier and sometimes later. It is my conviction that no child - none, at least, who is mentally normal and still less one who is intellectually gifted - can avoid being occupied with the problems of sex in the years before puberty.

I do not think much of the objection that neurotics are a special class of people, marked by an innate disposition that is ‘degenerate’, from whose childhood life we must not be allowed to infer anything about the childhood of other people. Neurotics are people much like others. They cannot be sharply differentiated from normal people, and in their childhood they are not always easily distinguishable from those who remain healthy in later life. It is one of the most valuable results of our psycho-analytic investigations to have discovered that the neuroses of such people have no special mental content that is peculiar to them, but that, as Jung has expressed it, they fall ill of the same complexes against which we healthy people struggle as well. The only difference is that healthy people know how to overcome those complexes without any gross damage demonstrable in practical life, whereas in nervous cases the suppression of the complexes succeeds only at the price of costly substitutive formations - that is to say, from a practical point of view it is a failure. In childhood neurotic and normal people naturally approximate to each other much more closely than they do in later life, so that I cannot regard it as a methodological error to make use of the communications of neurotics about their childhood for drawing conclusions by analogy about normal childhood life. But since those who later become neurotics very often have in their inborn constitution an especially strong sexual instinct and a tendency to precocity and to a premature expression of that instinct, they make it possible for us to recognize a great deal of infantile activity more sharply and clearly than our capacity for observation (which is in any case a blunted one) would enable us to do in other children. But we shall of course only be able to assess the true value of these communications made by neurotic adults when, following Havelock Ellis’s example, we shall have thought it worth while to collect the childhood memories of healthy adults as well.

On The Sexual Theories Of Children

1968

In consequence of unfavourable circumstances, both of an external and an internal nature, the following observations apply chiefly to the sexual development of one sex only - that is, of males. The value of a compilation such as I am attempting here need not, however, be a purely descriptive one. A knowledge of infantile sexual theories in the shapes they assume in the thoughts of children can be of interest in various ways - even, surprisingly enough, for the elucidation of myths and fairy tales. They are indispensable, moreover, for an understanding of the neuroses themselves; for in them these childish theories are still operative and acquire a determining influence upon the form taken by the symptoms.

If we could divest ourselves of our corporeal existence, and could view the things of this earth with a fresh eye as purely thinking beings, from another planet for instance, nothing perhaps would strike our attention more forcibly than the fact of the existence of two sexes among human beings, who, though so much alike in other respects, yet mark the difference between them with such obvious external signs. But it does not seem that children choose this fundamental fact in the same way as the starting-point of their researches into sexual problems. Since they have known a father and mother as far back as they can remember in life, they accept their existence as a reality which needs no further enquiry, and a boy has the same attitude towards a little sister from whom he is separated by only a slight difference of age of one or two years. A child’s desire for knowledge on this point does not in fact awaken spontaneously, prompted perhaps by some inborn need for established causes; it is aroused under the goad of the self-seeking instincts that dominate him, when - perhaps after the end of his second year - he is confronted with the arrival of a new baby. And a child whose own nursery has received no such addition is able, from observations made in other homes, to put himself in the same situation. The loss of his parents’ care, which he actually experiences or justly fears, and the presentiment that from now on he must for evermore share all his possessions with the newcomer, have the effect of awakening his emotions and sharpening his capacities for thought. The elder child expresses unconcealed hostility towards his rival, which finds vent in unfriendly criticisms of it, in wishes that ‘the stork should take it away again’ and occasionally even in small attacks upon the creature lying helpless in the cradle. A wider difference in age usually softens the expression of this primary hostility. In the same way, at a rather later age, if no small brother or sister has appeared, the child’s wish for a playmate, such as he has seen in other families, may gain the upper hand.

On The Sexual Theories Of Children

1969

At the instigation of these feelings and worries, the child now comes to be occupied with the first, grand problem of life and asks himself the question: ‘Where do babies come from?’ - a question which, there can be no doubt, first ran: ‘Where did this particular, intruding baby come from?’ We seem to hear the echoes of this first riddle in innumerable riddles of myth and legend. The question itself is, like all research, the product of a vital exigency, as though thinking were entrusted with the task of preventing the recurrence of such dreaded events. Let us assume, however, that the child’s thinking soon becomes independent of this instigation, and henceforward goes on operating as a self-sustained instinct for research. Where a child is not already too much intimidated, he sooner or later adopts the direct method of demanding an answer from his parents or those in charge of him, who are in his eyes the source of all knowledge. This method, however, fails. The child receives either evasive answers or a rebuke for his curiosity, or he is dismissed with the mythologically significant piece of information which, in German countries, runs: ‘The stork brings the babies; it fetches them out of the water.’ I have reason to believe that far more children than their parents suspect are dissatisfied with this solution and meet it with energetic doubts, which, however, they do not always openly admit. I know of a three-year-old boy who, after receiving this piece of enlightenment, disappeared - to the terror of his nurse. He was found at the edge of the big pond adjoining the country house, to which he had hurried in order to see the babies in the water. I also know of another boy who could only allow his disbelief to find expression in a hesitant remark that he knew better, that it was not a stork that brought babies but a heron. It seems to me to follow from a great deal of information I have received that children refuse to believe the stork theory and that from the time of this first deception and rebuff they nourish a distrust of adults and have a suspicion of there being something forbidden which is being withheld from them by the ‘grown-ups’, and that they consequently hide their further researches under a cloak of secrecy. With this, however, the child also experiences the first occasion for a ‘psychical conflict’, in that views for which he feels an instinctual kind of preference, but which are not ‘right’ in the eyes of the grown-ups, come into opposition with other views, which are supported by the authority of the grown-ups without being acceptable to him himself. Such a psychical conflict may soon turn into a ‘psychical dissociation’. The set of views which are bound up with being ‘good’, but also with a cessation of reflection, become the dominant and conscious views; while the other set, for which the child’s work of research has meanwhile obtained fresh evidence, but which are not supposed to count, become the suppressed and ‘unconscious’ ones. The nuclear complex of a neurosis is in this way brought into being.

On The Sexual Theories Of Children

1970

Recently, the analysis of a five-year-old boy, which his father undertook and which he has handed over to me for publication, has given me irrefutable proof of the correctness of a view towards which the psycho-analysis of adults had long been leading me. I now know that the change which takes place in the mother during pregnancy does not escape the child’s sharp eyes and that he is very well able before long to establish the true connection between the increase in his mother’s stoutness and the appearance of the baby. In the case just mentioned the boy was three and a half years old when his sister was born and four and three quarters when he showed his better knowledge by the most unmistakable allusions. This precocious discovery, however, is always kept secret, and later, in conformity with the further vicissitudes of the child’s sexual researches, it is repressed and forgotten.

The ‘stork fable’, therefore, is not one of the sexual theories of children. On the contrary, it is the child’s observation of animals, who hide so little of their sexual life and to whom he feels so closely akin, that strengthens his disbelief in it. With his knowledge, independently obtained, that babies grow inside the mother’s body, he would be on the right road to solving the problem on which he first tries out his powers of thinking. But this further progress is inhibited by a piece of ignorance which cannot be made good and by false theories which the state of his own sexuality imposes on him.

These false sexual theories, which I shall now discuss, all have one very curious characteristic. Although they go astray in a grotesque fashion, yet each one of them contains a fragment of real truth; and in this they are analogous to the attempts of adults, which are looked at as strokes of genius, at solving the problems of the universe which are too hard for human comprehension. What is correct and hits the mark in such theories is to be explained by their origin from the components of the sexual instinct which are already stirring in the childish organism. For it is not owing to any arbitrary mental act or to chance impressions that those notions arise, but to the necessities of the child’s psychosexual constitution; and this is why we can speak of sexual theories in children as being typical, and why we find the same mistaken beliefs in every child whose sexual life is accessible to us.

On The Sexual Theories Of Children

1971

The first of these theories starts out from the neglect of the differences between the sexes on which I laid stress at the beginning of this paper as being characteristic of children. It consists in attributing to everyone, including females, the possession of a penis, such as the boy knows from his own body. It is precisely in what we must regard as the ‘normal’ sexual constitution that already in childhood the penis is the leading erotogenic zone and the chief auto-erotic sexual object; and the boy’s estimate of its value is logically reflected in his inability to imagine a person like himself who is without this essential constituent. When a small boy sees his little sister’s genitals, what he says shows that his prejudice is already strong enough to falsify his perception. He does not comment on the absence of a penis, but invariably says, as though by way of consolation and to put things right: ‘Her ---'s still quite small. But when she gets bigger it’ll grow all right.’ The idea of a woman with a penis returns in later life, in the dreams of adults: the dreamer, in a state of nocturnal sexual excitation, will throw a woman down, strip her and prepare for intercourse - and then, in place of the female genitals, he beholds a well-developed penis and breaks off the dream and the excitation. The numerous hermaphrodites of classical antiquity faithfully reproduce this idea, universally held in childhood; one may observe that to most normal people they cause no offence, while the real hermaphroditic formations of the genitals which are permitted to occur by Nature nearly always excite the greatest abhorrence.

If this idea of a woman with a penis becomes ‘fixated’ in an individual when he is a child, resisting all the influences of later life and making him as a man unable to do without a penis in his sexual object, then, although in other respects he may lead a normal sexual life, he is bound to become a homosexual, and will seek his sexual object among men who, owing to some other physical and mental characteristics, remind him of women. Real women, when he comes to know them later, remain impossible as sexual objects for him, because they lack the essential sexual attraction; indeed, in connection with another impression of his childhood life, they may even become abhorrent to him. The child, having been mainly dominated by excitations in the penis, will usually have obtained pleasure by stimulating it with his hand; he will have been detected in this by his parents or nurse and terrorized by the threat of having his penis cut off. The effect of this ‘threat of castration’ is proportionate to the value set upon that organ and is quite extraordinarily deep and persistent. Legends and myths testify to the upheaval in the child’s emotional life and to the horror which is linked with the castration complex - a complex which is subsequently remembered by consciousness with corresponding reluctance. The woman’s genitalia, when seen later on, are regarded as a mutilated organ and recall this threat, and they therefore arouse horror instead of pleasure in the homosexual. This reaction cannot be altered in any way when the homosexual comes to learn from science that his childish assumption that women had a penis too was not so far wrong after all. Anatomy has recognized the clitoris within the female pudenda as being an organ that is homologous to the penis; and the physiology of the sexual processes has been able to add that this small penis which does not grow any bigger behaves in fact during childhood like a real and genuine penis - that it becomes the seat of excitations which lead to its being touched, that its excitability gives the little girl’s sexual activity a masculine character and that a wave of repression in the years of puberty is needed in order for this masculine sexuality to be discarded and the woman to emerge. Since the sexual function of many women is crippled, whether by their obstinate clinging on to this excitability of the clitoris so that they remain anaesthetic in intercourse, or by such excessive repression occurring that its operation is partly replaced by hysterical compensatory formations - all this seems to show that there is some truth in the infantile sexual theory that women, like men, possess a penis.

On The Sexual Theories Of Children

1972

It is easy to observe that little girls fully share their brother’s opinion of it. They develop a great interest in that part of the boy’s body. But this interest promptly falls under the sway of envy. They feel themselves unfairly treated. They make attempts to micturate in the posture that is made possible for boys by their possessing a big penis; and when a girl declares that ‘she would rather be a boy’, we know what deficiency her wish is intended to put right.

If children could follow the hints given by the excitation of the penis they would get a little nearer to the solution of their problem. That the baby grows inside the mother’s body is obviously not a sufficient explanation. How does it get inside? What starts its development? That the father has something to do with it seems likely; he says that the baby is his baby as well.¹ Again, the penis certainly has a share, too, in these mysterious happenings; the excitation in it which accompanies all these activities of the child’s thoughts bears witness to this. Attached to this excitation are impulsions which the child cannot account for - obscure urges to do something violent, to press in, to knock to pieces, to tear open a hole somewhere. But when the child thus seems to be well on the way to postulating the existence of the vagina and to concluding that an incursion of this kind by his father’s penis into his mother is the act by means of which the baby is created in his mother’s body - at this juncture his enquiry is broken off in helpless perplexity. For standing in its way is his theory that his mother possesses a penis just as a man does, and the existence of the cavity which receives the penis remains undiscovered by him. It is not hard to guess that the lack of success of his intellectual efforts makes it easier for him to reject and forget them. This brooding and doubting, however, becomes the prototype of all later intellectual work directed towards the solution of problems, and the first failure has a crippling effect on the child’s whole future.

¹ Cf. the ‘Analysis of a Five-Year-Old Boy’ (1909b).

On The Sexual Theories Of Children

1973

Their ignorance of the vagina also makes it possible for children to believe in the second of their sexual theories. If the baby grows in the mother’s body and is then removed from it, this can only happen along the one possible pathway -the anal aperture. The baby must be evacuated like a piece of excrement, like a stool. When, in later childhood, the same question is the subject of solitary reflection or of a discussion between two children, the explanations probably arrived at are that the baby emerges from the navel, which comes open, or that the abdomen is slit up and the baby taken out - which was what happened to the wolf in the story of Little Red Riding-Hood. These theories are expressed aloud and also consciously remembered later on;  they no longer contain anything objectionable. These same children have by then completely forgotten that in earlier years they believed in another theory of birth, which is now obstructed by the repression of the anal sexual components that has meanwhile occurred. At that time a motion was something which could be talked about in the nursery without shame. The child was still not so distant from his constitutional coprophilic inclinations. There was nothing degraded about coming into the world like a heap of faeces, which had not yet been condemned by feelings of disgust. The cloacal theory, which, after all, is valid for so many animals, was the most natural theory, and it alone could obtrude upon the child as being a probable one.

This being so, however, it was only logical that the child should refuse to grant women the painful prerogative of giving birth to children. If babies are born through the anus, then a man can give birth just as well as a woman. It is therefore possible for a boy to imagine that he, too, has children of his own, without there being any need to accuse him on that account of having feminine inclinations. He is merely giving evidence in this of the anal erotism which is still alive in him.

On The Sexual Theories Of Children

1974

If the cloacal theory of birth is preserved in consciousness during later years of childhood, as occasionally happens, it is accompanied too by a solution - no longer, it is true, a primary one - of the problem of the origin of babies. Here it is like being in a fairy story; one eats some particular thing and gets a child from it. This infantile theory of birth is revived in cases of insanity. A manic woman, for instance, will lead the visiting doctor to a little heap of faeces which she has deposited in a corner of her cell, and say to him with a laugh: ‘That’s the baby I had to-day.’

The third of the typical sexual theories arises in children if, through some chance domestic occurrence, they become witnesses of sexual intercourse between their parents. Their perceptions of what is happening are bound, however, to be only very incomplete. Whatever detail it may be that comes under their observation - whether it is the relative positions of the two people, or the noises they make, or some accessory circumstance - children arrive in every case at the same conclusion. They adopt what may be called a sadistic view of coition. They see it as something that the stronger participant is forcibly inflicting on the weaker, and they (especially boys) compare it to the romping familiar to them from their childish experience - romping which, incidentally, is not without a dash of sexual excitation. I have not been able to ascertain that children recognize this behaviour which they have witnessed between their parents as the missing link needed for solving the problem of babies; it appears more often that the connection is overlooked by them for the very reason that they have interpreted the act of love as an act of violence. But this view of it itself gives an impression of being a return of the obscure impulse towards cruel behaviour which became attached to the excitations of the child’s penis when he first began to think about the problem of where babies came from. The possibility, too, cannot be excluded that this premature sadistic impulse, which might so nearly have led to the discovery of coition, itself first emerged under the influence of extremely obscure memories of parental intercourse, for which the child had obtained the material - though at the time he made no use of it - while he was still in his first years and was sharing his parents’ bedroom.¹

¹ Restif de la Bretonne, in his autobiographical work Monsiur Nocholas (1794), tells a story of an impression he received at the age of four, which confirms this sadistic misunderstanding of coitus.

On The Sexual Theories Of Children

1975

The sadistic theory of coitus which, taken in isolation, is misleading where it might have provided confirmatory evidence, is, once again, the expression of one of the innate components of the sexual instinct, any of which may be strongly marked to a greater or lesser degree in each particular child. For this reason the theory is correct up to a certain point; it has in part divined the nature of the sexual act and the ‘sex-battle’ that precedes it. Not infrequently, too, the child is in a position to support this view by accidental observations which he understands in part correctly, but also in part incorrectly and indeed in a reversed sense. In many marriages the wife does in fact recoil from her husband’s embraces, which bring her no pleasure, but the risk of a fresh pregnancy. And so the child who is believed to be asleep (or who is pretending to be asleep) may receive an impression from his mother which he can only interpret as meaning that she is defending herself against an act of violence. At other times the whole marriage offers an observant child the spectacle of an unceasing quarrel, expressed in loud words and unfriendly gestures; so that he need not be surprised if the quarrel is carried on at night as well, and finally settled by the same method which he himself is accustomed to use in his relations with his brothers and sisters or playmates.

Moreover, if the child discovers spots of blood in his mother’s bed or on her underclothes, he regards it as a confirmation of his view. It proves to him that his father has made another similar assault on his mother during the night (whereas we should rather take the fresh spots of blood to mean that there had been a temporary cessation of sexual intercourse). Much of the otherwise inexplicable ‘horror of blood’ shown by neurotics finds its explanation from this connection. Once again, however, the child’s mistake contains a fragment of truth. For in certain familiar circumstances a trace of blood is in fact judged as a sign that sexual intercourse has been begun.

A question connected somewhat indirectly with the insoluble problem of where babies come from also engages the child - the question as to the nature and content of the state called ‘being married’; and he answers the question differently according as his chance perceptions in relation to his parents have coincided with instincts of his own which are still pleasurably coloured. All that these answers seem to have in common is that the child promises himself pleasurable satisfaction from being married and supposes that it involves a disregard of modesty. The notion I have most frequently met with is that each of the married couple urinate in front of the other. A variation of this, which sounds as if it was meant to indicate a greater knowledge symbolically, is that the man urinates into the woman’s chamber-pot. In other instances the meaning of marriage is supposed to be that the two people show their behinds to each other (without being ashamed). In one case, in which education had succeeded in postponing sexual knowledge especially late, a fourteen-year-old girl, who had already begun to menstruate, arrived from the books she had read at the idea that being married consisted in a ‘mixing of blood’; and since her own sister had not yet started her periods, the lustful girl made an assault on a female visitor who had confessed that she was just then menstruating, so as to force her to take part in this ‘blood mixing’.

On The Sexual Theories Of Children

1976

Childhood opinions about the nature of marriage, which are not seldom retained by conscious memory, have great significance for the symptomatology of later neurotic illness. At first they find expression in children’s games in which each child does with another whatever it is that in his view constitutes being married; and then, later on, the wish to be married may choose the infantile form of expression and so make its appearance in a phobia which is at first sight unrecognizable, or in some corresponding symptom.¹

These seem to be the most important of the typical sexual theories that children produce spontaneously in early childhood, under the sole influence of the components of the sexual instinct. I know that I have not succeeded in making my material complete or in establishing an unbroken connection between it and the rest of infantile life. But I may add one or two supplementary observations, whose absence would otherwise be noticed by any well-informed person. Thus, for instance, there is the significant theory that a baby is got by a kiss - a theory which obviously betrays the predominance of the erotogenic zone of the mouth. In my experience this theory is exclusively feminine and is sometimes found to be pathogenic in girls whose sexual researches have been subjected to exceedingly strong inhibitions in childhood. Again, through an accidental observation, one of my women patients happened upon the theory of the ‘couvade’, which, as is well known, is a general custom among some races and is probably intended to contradict the doubts as to paternity which can never be entirely overcome. A rather eccentric uncle of this patient’s stayed at home for days after the birth of his child and received visitors in his dressing-gown, from which she concluded that both parents took part in the birth of their children and had to go to bed.

¹ The games that are most significant for subsequent neuroses are playing at ‘doctor’ and at ‘father and mother’.

On The Sexual Theories Of Children

1977

In about their tenth or eleventh year, children get to hear about sexual matters. A child who has grown up in a comparatively uninhibited social atmosphere, or who has found better opportunities for observation, tells other children what he knows, because this makes him feel mature and superior. What children learn in this way is mostly correct - that is, the existence of the vagina and its purpose is revealed to them; but otherwise the explanations they get from one another are not infrequently mixed with false ideas and burdened with remains of the older infantile sexual theories. They are scarcely ever complete or sufficient to solve the primordial problem. Just as formerly it was ignorance of the vagina which prevented the whole process from being understood, so now is it ignorance of the semen. The child cannot guess that another substance besides urine is excreted from the male sexual organ, and occasionally an ‘innocent’ girl on her wedding night is still indignant at her husband ‘urinating into her’. This information acquired in the years of pre-puberty is followed by a new access of sexual researches by the child. But the theories which he now produces no longer have the typical and original stamp which was characteristic of the primary theories of early childhood as long as the infantile sexual components could find expression in theories in an uninhibited and unmodified fashion. The child’s later intellectual efforts at solving the puzzles of sex have not seemed to me worth collecting, nor can they have much claim to a pathogenic significance. Their multiplicity is of course mainly dependent on the nature of the enlightenment which a child receives; but their significance consists rather in the fact that they re-awaken the traces, which have since become unconscious, of his first period of sexual interest; so that it is not infrequent for masturbatory sexual activity and some degree of emotional detachment from his parents to be linked up with them. Hence the condemnatory judgement of teachers that enlightenment of such a kind at this age ‘corrupts’ children.

On The Sexual Theories Of Children

1978

Let me give a few examples to show what elements often enter into these late speculations by children about sexual life. A girl had heard from her schoolmates that the husband gives his wife an egg, which she hatches out in her body. A boy, who had also heard of the egg, identified it with the testicle, which [in German] is vulgarly called by the same word [Ei]; and he racked his brains to make out how the contents of the scrotum could be constantly renewed. The information given seldom goes far enough to prevent important uncertainties about sexual events. Thus a girl may arrive at an expectation that intercourse occurs on one occasion only, but that it lasts a very long time - twenty-four hours - and that all the successive babies come from this single occasion. One would suppose that this child had got her knowledge of the reproductive process from certain insects; but it turned out that this was not so and that the theory emerged as a spontaneous creation. Other girls are ignorant of the period of gestation, the life in the womb, and assume that the baby appears immediately after the first night of intercourse. Marcel Prevost has turned this girlhood mistake into an amusing story in one of his ‘Lettres de femmes’. These later sexual researches of children, or of adolescents who have been retarded at the stage of childhood, offer an almost inexhaustible theme and one which is perhaps not uninteresting in general;  but it is more remote from my present interest. I must only lay stress on the fact that in this field children produce many incorrect ideas in order to contradict older and better knowledge which has become unconscious and is repressed.

The way in which children react to the information they are given also has its significance. In some, sexual repression has gone so far that they will not listen to anything; and these succeed in remaining ignorant even in later life - apparently ignorant, at least - until, in the psycho-analysis of neurotics, the knowledge that originated in early childhood comes to light. I also know of two boys between ten and thirteen years old who, though it is true that they listened to the sexual information, rejected it with the words: ‘ Your father and other people may do something like that, but I know for certain my father never would.’ But however widely children’s later reactions to the satisfaction of their sexual curiosity may vary, we may assume that in the first years of childhood their attitude was absolutely uniform, and we may feel certain that at that time all of them tried most eagerly to discover what it was that their parents did with each other so as to produce babies.

1979

SOME GENERAL REMARKS ON HYSTERICAL ATTACKS

(1909)

1980

Intentionally left blank

1981

SOME GENERAL REMARKS ON HYSTERICAL ATTACKS

A

When one carries out the psycho-analysis of a hysterical woman patient whose complaint is manifested in attacks, one soon becomes convinced that these attacks are nothing else but phantasies translated into the motor sphere, projected on to motility and portrayed in pantomime. It is true that the phantasies are unconscious; but apart from this they are of the same nature as the phantasies which can be observed directly in day-dreams or which can be elicited by interpretation from dreams at night. Often a dream takes the place of an attack, and still more often it explains it, since the same phantasy finds a different expression in a dream and in an attack. We might expect then that by observing an attack we should be able to get to know the phantasy represented in it; but this is seldom possible. As a rule, owing to the influence of the censorship, the pantomimic portrayal of the phantasy has undergone distortions which are completely analogous to the hallucinatory distortions of a dream, so that both of them have, in the first resort, become unintelligible to the subject’s own consciousness as well as to the observer’s comprehension. A hysterical attack, therefore, needs to be subjected to the same interpretative revision as we employ for night-dreams. But not only are the forces from which the distortion proceeds and the purpose of the distortion the same as those we have come to know through the interpretation of dreams; the technique employed in the distortion is the same too.

Some General Remarks On Hysterical Attacks

1982

(1) The attack becomes unintelligible through the fact that it represents several phantasies in the same material simultaneously - that is to say through condensation. The elements common to the two (or more) phantasies constitute the nucleus of the representation, as they do in dreams. The phantasies which are thus made to coincide are often of quite a different nature. They may, for instance, be a recent wish and the re-activation of an infantile impression. The same innervations are in that case made to serve both purposes, often in a most ingenious way. Hysterical patients who make a very extensive use of condensation may find a single form of attack sufficient; others express their numerous pathogenic phantasies by a multiplication of the forms of attack.

(2) The attack becomes obscured through the fact that the patient attempts to carry out the activities of both the figures who appear in the phantasy, that is to say, through multiple identification. Compare, for instance, the example I mentioned in my paper on ‘Hysterical Phantasies and their Relation to Bisexuality’ (1908a), in which the patient tore off her dress with one hand (as the man) while she pressed it to her body with the other (as the woman).

(3) A particularly extensive distortion is effected by an antagonistic inversion of the innervations. This is analogous to the transformation of an element into its opposite, which commonly happens in the dream-work. For instance, an embrace may be represented in the attack by drawing back the arms convulsively till the hands meet over the spinal column. It is possible that the well-known arc de cercle which occurs during attacks in major hysteria is nothing else than an energetic repudiation like this, through antagonistic innervation, of a posture of the body that is suitable for sexual intercourse.

(4) Scarcely less confusing and misleading is a reversal of the chronological order within the phantasy that is portrayed, which once more has its complete counterpart in a number of dreams which begin with the end of the action and end with its beginning. Supposing, for instance, that a hysterical woman has a phantasy of seduction in which she is sitting reading in a park with her skirt slightly lifted so that her foot is visible; a gentleman approaches and speaks to her; they then go somewhere and make love to one another. This phantasy is acted out in the attack by her beginning with the convulsive stage, which corresponds to the coitus, by her then getting up, going into another room, sitting down and reading and presently answering an imaginary remark addressed to her.

The two last-mentioned forms of distortion give us some idea of the intensity of the resistances which the repressed material must take into account even when it breaks through in a hysterical attack.

Some General Remarks On Hysterical Attacks

1983

B

The onset of hysterical attacks follows laws that are easily understandable. Since the repressed complex consists of a libidinal cathexis and an ideational content (the phantasy), the attack can be evoked (1) associatively, when the content of the complex (if sufficiently cathected) is touched on by something connected with it in conscious life; (2) organically, when, for internal somatic reasons and as a result of psychical influences from outside, the libidinal cathexis rises above a certain degree; (3) in the service of the primary purpose - as an expression of a ‘flight into illness’, when reality becomes distressing or frightening - that is, as a consolation; (4) in the service of the secondary purposes, with which the illness allies itself, as soon as, by producing an attack, the patient can achieve an aim that is useful to him. In the last case the attack is directed at particular individuals; it can be put off till they are present, and it gives an impression of being consciously simulated.

C

Investigation of the childhood history of hysterical patients shows that the hysterical attack is designed to take the place of an auto-erotic satisfaction previously practised and since given up. In a great number of cases this satisfaction (masturbation by contact or by pressure of the thighs, or, again, by movements of the tongue, and so on) recurs during the attack itself, while the subject’s consciousness is deflected. Moreover, the onset of an attack that is due to an increase of libido and is in the service of the primary purpose - as a consolation - exactly repeats the conditions under which, at the earlier time, the patient had intentionally sought this auto-erotic satisfaction. The anamnesis of the patient shows the following stages: (a) auto-erotic satisfaction, without ideational content; (b) the same satisfaction, connected with a phantasy which leads to the act of satisfaction; (c) renunciation of the act, with retention of the phantasy; (d) repression of the phantasy, which then comes into effect as a hysterical attack, either in an unchanged form, or in a modified one and adapted to new environmental impressions. Furthermore, (e) the phantasy may even reinstate the act of satisfaction belonging to it which had ostensibly been given up. This is a typical cycle of infantile sexual activity: repression, failure of repression, and return of the repressed.

Some General Remarks On Hysterical Attacks

1984

The involuntary passing of urine is certainly not to be regarded as incompatible with the diagnosis of a hysterical attack; it is merely repeating the infantile form of a violent pollution. Moreover, biting the tongue may also be met with in undoubted cases of hysteria. It is no more inconsistent with hysteria than it is with love-making. It occurs more readily in attacks if the patient’s attention had been drawn by the doctor’s questions to the difficulties of making a differential diagnosis. Self-injury may occur in hysterical attacks (more frequently in the case of men) where it repeats an accident in childhood - as, for instance, the result of a romp.

The loss of consciousness, the ‘absence’¹, in a hysterical attack is derived from the fleeting but unmistakable lapse of consciousness which is observable at the climax of every intense sexual satisfaction, including auto-erotic ones. This course of development can be traced with most certainty where hysterical absences arise from the onset of pollutions in young people of the female sex. The so-called ‘hypnoid states’ - absences during day-dreaming -, which are so common in hysterical subjects, show the same origin. The mechanism of these absences is comparatively simple. All the subject’s attention is concentrated to begin with on the course of the process of satisfaction; with the occurrence of the satisfaction, the whole of this cathexis of attention is suddenly removed, so that there ensues a momentary void in her consciousness. This gap in consciousness, which might be termed a physiological one, is then widened in the service of repression, till it can swallow up everything that the repressing agency rejects.

D

What points the way for the motor discharge of the repressed libido in a hysterical attack is the reflex mechanism of the act of coition - a mechanism which is ready to hand in everybody, including women, and which we see coming into manifest operation when an unrestrained surrender is made to sexual activity. Already in ancient times coition was described as a ‘minor epilepsy’. We might alter this and say that a convulsive hysterical attack is an equivalent of coition. The analogy with an epileptic fit helps us little, since its genesis is even less understood than that of hysterical attacks.

Speaking as a whole, hysterical attacks, like hysteria in general, revive a piece of sexual activity in women which existed during their childhood and at that time revealed an essentially masculine character. It can often be observed that girls who have shown a boyish nature and inclinations up to the years before puberty are precisely those who become hysterical from puberty onwards. In a whole number of cases the hysterical neurosis merely represents an excessive accentuation of the typical wave of repression which, by doing away with her masculine sexuality, allows the woman to emerge.²

¹ [The French term.]

² Cf. my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d).

1985

FAMILY ROMANCES

(1909)

1986

Intentionally left blank

1987

FAMILY ROMANCES

The liberation of an individual, as he grows up, from the authority of his parents is one of the most necessary though one of the most painful results brought about by the course of his development. It is quite essential that that liberation should occur and it may be presumed that it has been to some extent achieved by everyone who his reached a normal state. Indeed, the whole progress of society rests upon the opposition between successive generations. On the other hand, there is a class of neurotics whose condition is recognizably determined by their having failed in this task.

For a small child his parents are at first the only authority and the, source of all belief. The child’s most intense and most momentous wish during these early years is to be like his parents (that is, the parent of his own sex) and to be big like his father and mother. But as intellectual growth increases, the child cannot help discovering by degrees the category to which his parents belong. He gets to know other parents and compares them with his own, and so acquires the right to doubt the incomparable and unique quality which he had attributed to them. Small events in the child’s life which make him feel dissatisfied afford him provocation for beginning to criticize his parents, and for using, in order to support his critical attitude, the knowledge which he has acquired that other parents are in some respects preferable to them. The psychology of the neuroses teaches us that, among other factors, the most intense impulses of sexual rivalry contribute to this result. A feeling of being slighted is obviously what constitutes the subject-matter of such provocations. There are only too many occasions on which a child is slighted, or at least feels he has been slighted, on which he feels he is not receiving the whole of his parents’ love, and, most of all, of which he feels regrets at having to share it with brothers and sisters. His sense that his own affection is not being fully reciprocated then finds a vent in the idea, often consciously recollected later from early childhood, of being a step-child or an adopted child. People who have not developed neuroses very frequently remember such occasions, on which - usually as a result of something they have read - they interpreted and responded to their parent’s hostile behaviour in this fashion. But here the influence of sex is already in evidence, for a boy is far more inclined to feel hostile impulses towards his father than towards his mother and has a far more intense desire to get free from him than from her. In this respect the imagination of girls is apt to show itself much weaker. These consciously remembered mental impulses of childhood embody the factor which enables us to understand the nature of myths.

Family Romances

1988

The later stage in the development of the neurotic’s estrangement from his parents, begun in this manner, might be described as ‘the neurotic’s family romance’. It is seldom remembered consciously but can almost always be revealed by psycho-analysis. For a quite peculiarly marked imaginative activity is one of the essential characteristics of neurotics and also of all comparatively highly gifted people. This activity emerges first in children’s play, and then, starting roughly from the period before puberty, takes over the topic of family relations. A characteristic example of this peculiar imaginative activity is to be seen in the familiar day-dreaming¹ which persists far beyond puberty. If these day-dreams are carefully examined, they are found to serve as the fulfilment of wishes and as a correction of actual life. They have two principal aims, an erotic and an ambitious one - though an erotic aim is usually concealed behind the latter too. At about the period I have mentioned, then, the child’s imagination becomes engaged in the task of getting free from the parents of whom he now has a low opinion and of replacing them by others, who, as a rule, are of higher social standing. He will make use in this connection of any opportune coincidences from his actual experience, such as his becoming acquainted with the Lord of the Manor or some landed proprietor if he lives in the country or with some member of the aristocracy if he lives in town. Chance occurrences of this kind arouse the child’s envy, which finds expression in a phantasy in which both his parents are replaced by others of better birth. The technique used in developing phantasies like this (which are, of course, conscious at this period) depends upon the ingenuity and the material which the child has at his disposal. There is also the question of whether the phantasies are worked out with greater or less effort to obtain verisimilitude. This state is reached at a time at which the child is still in ignorance of the sexual determinants of procreation.

¹ Cf. ’Hysterical Phantasies and their Relation to Bisexuality’ (1908a), where a reference will be found to the literature of the subject.

Family Romances

1989

When presently the child comes to know the difference in the parts played by fathers and mothers in their sexual relations, and realizes that ‘pater semper incertus est’, while the mother is ‘certissima’,¹ the family romance undergoes a curious curtailment: it contents itself with exalting the child’s father, but no longer casts any doubts on his maternal origin, which is regarded as something unalterable. This second (sexual) stage of the family romance is actuated by another motive as well, which is absent in the first (asexual) stage. The child, having learnt about sexual processes, tends to picture to himself erotic situations and relations, the motive force behind this being his desire to bring his mother (who is the subject of the most intense sexual curiosity) into situations of secret infidelity and into secret love-affairs. In this way the child’s phantasies, which started by being, as it were, asexual, are brought up to the level of his later knowledge.

Moreover the motive of revenge and retaliation, which was in the foreground at the earlier state, is also to be found at the later one. It is, as a rule, precisely these neurotic children who were punished by their parents for sexual naughtiness and who now revenge themselves on their parents by means of phantasies of this kind.

¹ [An old legal tag: ‘paternity is always uncertain, maternity is most certain.’]

Family Romances

1990

A younger child is very specially inclined to use imaginative stories such as these in order to rob those born before him of their prerogatives - in a way which reminds one of historical intrigues; and he often has no hesitation in attributing to his mother as many fictitious love-affairs as he himself has competitors. An interesting variant of the family romance may then appear, in which the hero and author returns to legitimacy himself while his brothers and sisters are eliminated by being bastardized. So too if there are any other particular interests at work they can direct the course to be taken by the family romance; for its many-sidedness and its great range of applicability enable it to meet every sort of requirement. In this way, for instance, the young phantasy-builder can get rid of his forbidden degree of kinship with one of his sisters if he finds himself sexually attracted by her.

If anyone is inclined to turn away in horror from this depravity of the childish heart or feels tempted, indeed, to dispute the possibility of such things, he should observe that these works of fiction, which seem so full of hostility, are none of them really so badly intended, and that they still preserve, under a slight disguise, the child’s original affection for his parents. The faithlessness and ingratitude are only apparent. If we examine in detail the commonest of these imaginative romances, the replacement of both parents or of the father alone by grander people, we find that these new and aristocratic parents are equipped with attributes that are derived entirely from real recollections of the actual and humble ones; so that in fact the child is not getting rid of his father but exalting him. Indeed the whole effort at replacing the real father by a superior one is only an expression of the child’s longing for the happy, vanished days when his father seemed to him the noblest and strongest of men and his mother the dearest and loveliest of women. He is turning away from the father whom he knows to-day to the father in whom he believed in the earlier years of his childhood; and his phantasy is no more than the expression of a regret that those happy days have gone. Thus in these phantasies the overvaluation that characterizes a child’s earliest years comes into its own again. An interesting contribution to this subject is afforded by the study of dreams. We learn from their interpretation that even in later years, if the Emperor and Empress appear in dreams, those exalted personages stand for the dreamer’s father and mother.¹ So that the child’s overvaluation of his parents survives as well in the dreams of normal adults.

¹ Cf. my Interpretation of Dreams (1900a).

1991

CONTRIBUTION TO A QUESTIONNAIRE ON READING

(1907)

You ask me to name ‘ten good books’ for you, and refrain from adding to this any word of explanation. Thus you leave to me not only the choice of the books but also the interpretation of your request. Accustomed to paying attention to small signs, I must then trust the wording in which you couch your enigmatical demand. You did not say: ‘the ten most magnificent works (of world literature)', in which case I should have been obliged to reply, with so many others: Homer, the tragedies of Sophocles, Goethe’s Faust, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth, etc. Nor did you say the ‘ten most significant books’, among which scientific achievements like those of Copernicus, of the old physician Johann Weier on the belief in witches, Darwin’s Descent of Man, and others, would then have found a place. You did not even ask for ‘favourite books’, among which I should not have forgotten Milton’s Paradise Lost and Heine’s Lazarus. I think, therefore, that a particular stress falls on the ‘good’ in your phrase, and that with this predicate you intend to designate books to which one stands in rather the same relationship as to ‘good’ friends, to whom one owes a part of one’s knowledge of life and view of the world - books which one has enjoyed oneself and gladly commends to others, but in connection with which the element of timid reverence, the feeling of one’s own smallness in the face of their greatness, is not particularly prominent.

I will therefore name ten such ‘good’ books for you which have come to my mind without a great deal of reflection.

Multatuli, Letters and Works.

Kipling, Jungle Book.

Anatole France, Sur la pierre blanche.

Zola, Fécondité.

Merezhkovsky, Leonardo da Vinci.

G. Keller, Leute von Seldwyla.

C. F. Meyer, Huttens letzte Tage.

Macaulay, Essays.

Gomperz, Griechische Denker.

Mark Twain, Sketches.

Contribution To A Questionnaire On Reading

1992

I do not know what you intend to do with this list. It seems a most peculiar one even to me; I really cannot let it go without comment. The problem of why precisely these and not other equally ‘good’ books I will not begin to tackle; I merely wish to throw light on the relation between the author and his work. The connection is not in every case as firm as it is, for instance, with Kipling’s Jungle Book. For the most part I could just as well have singled out another work by the same author - for instance, in the case of Zola, Docteur Pascal - and the like. The same man who has given us one good book has often presented us with several good books. In the case of Multatuli I felt in two minds whether to reject the private letters in favour of the ‘Love Letters’ or the latter in favour of the former, and for that reason wrote: ‘Letters and Works’. Genuinely creative writing of purely, poetical value has been excluded from this list, probably because your charge - good books - did not seem exactly aimed at such; for in the case of C. F. Meyer’s Hutten I must set its ‘goodness’ far above its beauty: ‘edification’ above aesthetic enjoyment.

You have touched on something, with your request to name for you ‘ten good books’, on which an immeasurable amount could be said. And so I will conclude, in order not to become even more informative.

Yours sincerely,

FREUD.

1993

PROSPECTUS FOR SCHRIFTEN ZUR ANGEWANDTEN SEELENKUNDE

(1907)

The Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde, the first number of which is published herewith, are aimed at that wider circle of educated people who without actually being philosophers or medical men are nevertheless able to appreciate the science of the human mind for its significance in the understanding and deepening of our lives. The papers will appear in no prescribed order, but will present in each instance a single study, which will undertake the application of psychological knowledge to subjects in art and literature, in the history of civilizations and religions, and in analogous fields. These studies will sometimes bear the character of exact investigations, sometimes that of speculative efforts, attempting now to embrace a larger problem, now to penetrate into a more restricted one; but in every case they will be in the nature of original achievements and will avoid resembling mere reviews or compilations.

The Editor feels himself in duty bound to vouch for the originality and general merit of the articles appearing in this series. For the rest, he does not wish either to interfere with the independence of his contributors or to be held answerable for what they express. The fact that the first numbers of the series take particular account of the theories which he himself has advocated in the sphere of science should not determine the view taken of this enterprise. On the contrary, the series is open to the exponents of divergent opinions and hopes to be able to give expression to the variety of points of view and principles in contemporary science.

THE PUBLISHER THE EDITOR

1994

PREFACE TO WILHELM STEKEL’S

NERVOUS ANXIETY-STATES AND THEIR TREATMENT

(1908)

My investigations into the aetiology and psychical mechanism of neurotic illnesses, which I have pursued since 1893, attracted little notice to begin with among my fellow specialists. At length, however, those investigations have met with recognition from a number of medical research workers and have also drawn attention to the psycho-analytic methods of examination and treatment to which I owe my findings. Dr. Wilhelm Stekel, who was one of the first of the colleagues to whom I was able to impart a knowledge of psycho-analysis, and who has himself become familiar with its technique through many years of practice in it, has now undertaken the task of working over one topic in the clinical aspect of these neuroses on the basis of my views and of presenting medical readers with the experiences he has obtained through the psycho-analytic method. If I am glad to take the responsibility for his work in the sense which I have just indicated, I think it is only right to declare explicitly that my direct influence upon the volume on nervous states of anxiety which lies before us has been a very slight one. The observations and all the detailed opinions and interpretations are the author’s own. My share has been limited to proposing the use of the term ‘anxiety hysteria’.

I will add that Dr. Stekel’s work is founded upon rich experience and is calculated to stimulate other physicians into confirming by their own efforts our views on the aetiology of these conditions. His work reveals many unexpected glimpses of the realities of life, which so often lie concealed behind neurotic symptoms; and it may well convince our colleagues that the attitude they choose to adopt to the hints and explanations given in these pages cannot be a matter of indifference from the point of view either of their understanding or of their therapeutic efficiency.

VIENNA, March 1908

1995

PREFACE TO SANDOR FERENCZI’S

PSYCHO-ANALYSIS: ESSAYS IN THE FIELD OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

(1910)

Psycho-analytic research into the neuroses (the various forms of nervous illness with a mental causation) has endeavoured to trace their connection with instinctual life and the restrictions imposed on it by the claims of civilization, with the activities of the normal individual in phantasies and dreams, and with the creations of the popular mind in religion., myths and fairy tales. The psycho-analytic treatment of neurotic patients, based on this method of research, makes far higher demands on doctor and patient than the methods hitherto in common use, which operate through medicaments, diet, hydropathy and suggestion. But it brings the patients so much more relief and permanent strengthening in the face of life’s problems, that there is no cause for surprise at the continual advances made by this therapeutic method in spite of violent opposition.

The author of the following essays, who is a close acquaintance of mine, and who is familiar, to an extent that few others are, with all the difficulties of psycho-analytic problems, is the first Hungarian to undertake the task of creating an interest in psycho-analysis among doctors and men of education in his own country through writings composed in their mother tongue. It is our cordial wish that this attempt of his may succeed and may result in gaining for this new field of work new workers from the body of his compatriots.

1996

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE NEUE FREIE PRESSE

(1903-4)

I

REVIEW OF GEORG BIEDENKAPP’S IM KAMPFE GEGEN HIRNBACILLEN

Concealed behind this somewhat unpromising title is the book of a brave man who succeeds in telling the reader much that is worthy of consideration. The sub-title of the work reveals more of its content: ‘A Philosophy of Small Words’. The author is in fact fighting against those ‘little words and arrangements of words which exclude or include too much’ and which reveal, in people who have the habit of using them for preference, a tendency towards ‘exclusive or superlative judgements’. It is self-evident - our author would contest even this phrase - that the fight is not concerned with these harmless words but with the tendency to become intoxicated by them and to forget, on account of the exaggerated representation thus achieved, the necessary limitations on our pronouncements and the inevitable relativity of our judgements. It really serves as a useful warning if one is shown how much that was described by people of an earlier generation as ‘self-evident’ or as ‘nonsensical’ ranks with us to-day conversely as nonsensical or self-evident; or if we observe, in a series of well-chosen examples, to what a narrowing of their mental horizon even important writers must plead guilty, as a result of their misuse of superlatives. The exhortation to moderation in judgement and expression actually serves our author only as a point of departure for further discussions on other ‘errors of thought’ of human beings - on the central delusion, faith, on atheistic morality, and the like. In all these observations is manifest the author’s honest endeavour to take seriously the implications of the particular view of the world necessitated by the discoveries of modern science, in particular of the theory of evolution. A lot that is psychologically accurate is included, and many truths of the kind that have often been said before but cannot be often enough repeated. The author has set himself the thankless task ‘of improving and converting people’ by means of exerting a sober influence, without seeking to move them to laughter by humour or sweep them along with him by passion. Let us wish him all success.

Contributions To The Neue Freie Presse

1997

II

REVIEW OF JOHN BIGELOW’S THE MYSTERY OF SLEEP

Solving the mystery of sleep might well have been reserved to science; the pious author, however, operates with biblical arguments and teleological causes. For example: it would be an idea unworthy of divine providence to suppose that it would allow human beings to spend a full third of their life in spiritual inactivity. Sleep is rather that state in which divine influence penetrates most freely and most effectively into human mental life. But in spite of all objections to the author’s way of thinking we will not omit to emphasize the kernel of truth in his assertion. Scientific studies of the state of mental life during sleep, too, oblige us to relinquish as inadequate our previous assumption that sleep reduces the play of mental activity to a minimum. The important processes of unconscious mental and even intellectual activity continue - as the elucidation of dreams given by your reviewer demonstrates - even during profound sleep. This unconscious mental activity deserves to be called ‘daemonic’ but scarcely divine.

Contributions To The Neue Freie Presse

1998

III

OBITUARY OF PROFESSOR S. HAMMERSCHLAG

S. Hammerschlag, who relinquished his activity as a Jewish religious teacher about thirty years ago, was one of those personalities who possess the gift of leaving ineradicable impressions on the development of their pupils. A spark from the same fire which animated the spirit of the great Jewish seers and prophets burned in him and was not extinguished until old age weakened his powers. But the passionate side of his nature was happily tempered by the ideal of humanism of our German classical period which governed him, and his method of education was based on the foundation of the philological and classical studies to which he had devoted his own youth. Religious instruction served him as a way of educating towards love of the humanities, and from the material of Jewish history he was able to find means of tapping the sources of enthusiasm hidden in the hearts of young people and of making it flow out far beyond the limitations of nationalism or dogma. Those of his pupils who were later allowed to seek him out in his own home gained a paternally solicitous friend in him and were able to perceive that sympathetic kindness was the fundamental characteristic of his nature. Feelings of gratitude towards a revered teacher - undiminished through the course of decades - received most dignified expression over his grave from Dr. Friedjung the historian.

1999

ANALYSIS OF A PHOBIA IN A FIVE-YEAR-OLD BOY

(1909)

2000

Intentionally left blank

2001

ANALYSIS OF A PHOBIA IN A FIVE-YEAR-OLD BOY

I

INTRODUCTION

In the following pages I propose to describe the course of the illness and recovery of a very youthful patient. The case history is not, strictly speaking, derived from my own observation. It is true that I laid down the general lines of the treatment, and that on one single occasion, when I had a conversation with the boy, I took a direct share in it; but the treatment itself was carried out by the child’s father, and it is to him that I owe my sincerest thanks for allowing me to publish his notes upon the case. But his services go further than this. No one else, in my opinion, could possibly have prevailed on the child to make any such avowals; the special knowledge by means of which he was able to interpret the remarks made by his five-year-old son was indispensable, and without it the technical difficulties in the way of conducting a psycho-analysis upon so young a child would have been insuperable. It was only because the authority of a father and of a physician were united in a single person, and because in him both affectionate care and scientific interest were combined, that it was possible in this one instance to apply the method to a use to which it would not otherwise have lent itself.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2002

But the peculiar value of this observation lies in the considerations which follow. When a physician treats an adult neurotic by psycho-analysis, the process he goes through of uncovering the psychical formations, layer by layer, eventually enables him to frame certain hypotheses as to the patient’s infantile sexuality; and it is in the components of the latter that he believes he has discovered the motive forces of all the neurotic symptoms of later life. I have set out these hypotheses in my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d), and I am aware that they seem as strange to an outside reader as they seem incontrovertible to a psycho-analyst. But even a psycho-analyst may confess to the wish for a more direct and less roundabout proof of these fundamental theorems. Surely there must be a possibility of observing in children at first hand and in all the freshness of life the sexual impulses and wishes which we dig out so laboriously in adults from among their own débris - especially as it is also our belief that they are the common property of all men, a part of the human constitution, and merely exaggerated or distorted in the case of neurotics.

With this end in view I have for many years been urging my pupils and my friends to collect observations of the sexual life of children - the existence of which has as a rule been cleverly overlooked or deliberately denied. Among the material which came into my possession as a result of these requests, the reports which I received at regular intervals about little Hans soon began to take a prominent place. His parents were both among my closest adherents, and they had agreed that in bringing up their first child they would use no more coercion than might be absolutely necessary for maintaining good behaviour. And, as the child developed into a cheerful, good-natured and lively little boy, the experiment of letting him grow up and express himself without being intimidated went on satisfactorily. I shall now proceed to reproduce his father’s records of little Hans just as I received them; and I shall of course refrain from any attempt at spoiling the naïveté and directness of the nursery by making any conventional emendations.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2003

The first reports of Hans date from a period when he was not quite three years old. At that time, by means of various remarks and questions, he was showing a quite peculiarly lively interest in that portion of his body which he used to describe as his ‘widdler’.¹ Thus he once asked his mother this question:

Hans: ‘Mummy, have you got a widdler too?’

Mother: ‘Of course. Why?’

Hans: ‘I was only just thinking.’

At the same age he went into a cow-shed once and saw a cow being milked. ‘Oh, look!’ he said, ‘there’s milk coming out of its widdler!’

Even these first observations begin to rouse an expectation that much, if not most, of what little Hans shows us will turn out to be typical of the sexual development of children in general. I once put forward the view² that there was no need to be too much horrified at finding in a woman the idea of sucking at a male organ. This repellent impulse, I argued, had a most innocent origin, since it was derived from sucking at the mother’s breast; and in this connection, I went on, a cows udder plays an apt part as an intermediate image, being in its nature a mamma and in its shape and position a penis. Little Hans’s discovery confirms the latter part of my contention.

Meanwhile his interest in widdlers was by no means a purely theoretical one; as might have been expected, it also impelled him to touch his member. When he was three and a half his mother found him with his hand on his penis. She threatened him in these words: ‘If you do that, I shall send for Dr. A. to cut off your widdler. And then what’ll you widdle with?’

Hans: ‘With my bottom.’

¹ [‘Wiwimacher’ in the original.]

² See my ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (1905e).

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2004

He made this reply without having any sense of guilt as yet. But this was the occasion of his acquiring the ‘castration complex’, the presence of which we are so often obliged to infer in analysing neurotics, though they one and all struggle violently against recognizing it. There is much of importance to be said upon the significance of this element in the life of a child. The ‘castration complex’ has left marked traces behind it in myths (and not only in Greek myths); in a passage in my Interpretation of Dreams, and elsewhere, I have touched upon the part it plays.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1923:] - Since this was written, the study of the castration complex has been further developed in contributions to the subject by Lou Andreas-Salomé, A. Stärcke, F. Alexander, and others. It has been urged that every time his mother’s breast is withdrawn from a baby he is bound to feel it as castration (that is to say, as the loss of what he regards as an important part of his own body); that, further, he cannot fail to be similarly affected by the regular loss of his faeces; and, finally, that the act of birth itself (consisting as it does in the separation of the child from his mother, with whom he has hitherto been united) is the prototype of all castration. While recognizing all of these roots of the complex, I have nevertheless put forward the view that the term ‘castration complex’ ought to be confined to those excitations and consequences which are bound up with the loss of the penis. Any one who, in analysing adults, has become convinced of the invariable presence of the castration complex, will of course find difficulty in ascribing its origin to a chance threat - of a kind which is not, after all, of such universal occurrence; he will be driven to assume that children construct this danger for themselves out of the slightest hints, which will never be wanting. This circumstance is also the motive, indeed, that has stimulated the search for those deeper roots of the complex which are universally forthcoming. But this makes it all the more valuable that in the case of little Hans the threat of castration is reported by his parents themselves, and moreover at a date before there was any question of his phobia.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2005

At about the same age (three and a half), standing in front of the lions’ cage at Schönbrunn, little Hans called out in a joyful and excited voice: ‘I saw the lion’s widdler.’

Animals owe a good deal of their importance in myths and fairy tales to the openness with which they display their genitals and their sexual functions to the inquisitive little human child. There can be no doubt about Hans’s sexual curiosity; but it also roused the spirit of enquiry in him and enabled him to arrive at genuine abstract knowledge.

When he was at the station once (at three and three quarters) he saw some water being let out of an engine. ‘Oh, look,’ he said, ‘the engine’s widdling. Where’s it got its widdler?’

After a little he added in reflective tones: ‘A dog and a horse have widdlers; a table and a chair haven’t.’ He had thus got hold of an essential characteristic for differentiating between animate and inanimate objects.

Thirst for knowledge seems to be inseparable from sexual curiosity. Hans’s curiosity was particularly directed towards his parents.

Hans (aged three and three-quarters): ‘Daddy, have you got a widdler too?’

Father: ‘Yes, of course.’

Hans: ‘But I’ve never seen it when you were undressing.’

Another time he was looking on intently while his mother undressed before going to bed. ‘What are you staring like that for?’ she asked.

Hans: ‘I was only looking to see if you’d got a widdler too.’

Mother: ‘Of course. Didn’t you know that?’

Hans: ‘No. I thought you were so big you’d have a widdler like a horse.’

This expectation of little Hans’s deserves to be borne in mind; it will become important later on.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2006

But the great event of Hans’s life was the birth of his little sister Hanna when he was exactly three and a half.¹ His behaviour on that occasion was noted down by his father on the spot: ‘At five in the morning’, he writes, ‘labour began, and Hans’s bed was moved into the next room. He woke up there at seven, and, hearing his mother groaning, asked: "Why’s Mummy coughing?" Then, after a pause, "The stork’s coming to-day for certain."

‘Naturally he has often been told during the last few days that the stork is going to bring a little girl or a little boy; and he quite rightly connected the unusual sounds of groaning with the stork’s arrival.

‘Later on he was taken into the kitchen. He saw the doctor’s bag in the front hall and asked: "What’s that?" "A bag," was the reply. Upon which he declared with conviction: "The stork’s coming to-day." After the baby’s delivery the midwife came into the kitchen and Hans heard her ordering some tea to be made. At this he said: "I know! Mummy’s to have some tea because she’s coughing." He was then called into the bedroom. He did not look at his mother, however, but at the basins and other vessels, filled with blood and water, that were still standing about the room. Pointing to the blood-stained bed-pan, he observed in a surprised voice: "But blood doesn’t come out of my widdler."

‘Everything he says shows that he connects what is strange in the situation with the arrival of the stork. He meets everything he sees with a very suspicious and intent look, and there can be no question that his first doubts about the stork have taken root.

‘Hans is very jealous of the new arrival, and whenever any one praises her, says she is a lovely baby, and so on, he at once declares scornfully: "But she’s not got any teeth yet."² And in fact when he saw her for the first time he was very much surprised that she was unable to speak, and decided that this was because she had no teeth. During the first few days he was naturally put very much in the background. He was suddenly taken ill with a sore throat. In his fever he was heard saying: "But I don’t want a baby sister!"

¹ April 1903 to October 1906.

² This again is a typical mode of behaviour. Another little boy, only two years his sister’s senior, used to parry similar remarks with an angry cry of ‘Too 'ickle! too 'ickle!’

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2007

‘Some six months later he had got over his jealousy, and his brotherly affection for the baby was only equalled by his sense of his own superiority over her.¹

‘A little later Hans was watching his seven-day-old sister being given a bath. "But her widdler’s still quite small," he remarked; and then added, as though by way of consolation: "When she grows up it’ll get bigger all right."²

¹ Another child, rather older than Hans, welcomed his younger brother with the words: ‘The stork can take him away again.’ Compare in this connection my remarks in The Interpretation of Dreams on dreams of the death of loved relatives.

² Two other boys were reported to me as having made the same judgement, expressed in identical words and followed by the same anticipation, when they were allowed to satisfy their curiosity and look at their baby sister’s body for the first time. One might well feel horrified at such signs of the premature decay of a child’s intellect. Why was it that these young enquirers did not report what they really saw - namely, that there was no widdler there? In little Hans’s case, at all events, we can account completely for the faulty perception. We are aware that by a process of careful induction he had arrived at the general proposition that every animate object, in contradistinction to inanimate ones, possesses a widdler. His mother had confirmed him in this conviction by giving him corroborative information in regard to persons inaccessible to his own observation. He was now utterly incapable of surrendering what he had achieved merely on the strength of this single observation made upon his little sister. He therefore made a judgement that in that instance also there was a widdler present, only that it was still very small, but that it would grow till it was as big as a horse’s.

We can go a step further in vindicating little Hans’s honour. As a matter of fact, he was behaving no worse than a philosopher of the school of Wundt. In the view of that school, consciousness is the invariable characteristic of what is mental, just as in the view of little Hans a widdler is the indispensable criterion of what is animate. If now the philosopher comes across mental processes whose existence cannot but be inferred, but about which there is not a trace of consciousness to be detected - for the subject, in fact, knows nothing of them, although it is impossible to avoid inferring their existence - then, instead of saying that they are unconscious mental processes, he calls them semi-conscious. The widdler’s still very small! And in this comparison the advantage is in favour of little Hans. For, as is so often the case with the sexual researches of children, behind the mistake a piece of genuine knowledge lies concealed. Little girls do possess a small widdler, which we call a clitoris, though it does not grow any larger but remains permanently stunted. Compare my short paper on ‘The Sexual Theories of Children’ (1908c).

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2008

‘At the same age (when he was three and three-quarters) Hans produced his first account of a dream: "To-day when I was asleep I thought I was at Gmunden with Mariedl."

‘Mariedl was the thirteen-year-old daughter of our landlord and used often to play with him.’

As Hans’s father was telling his mother the dream in his presence, he corrected him, saying: ‘Not with Mariedl, but quite alone with Mariedl.’

In this connection we learn: ‘In the summer of 1906 Hans was at Gmunden, and used to run about all day long with our landlord’s children. When we left Gmunden we thought he would be very much upset by having to come away and move back to town. To our surprise this was not so. He seemed glad of the change, and for several weeks he talked very little about Gmunden. It was not until after some weeks had passed that there began to emerge reminiscences - often vividly coloured - of the time he had spent at Gmunden. During the last four weeks or so he has been working these reminiscences up into phantasies. He imagines that he is playing with the other children, with Berta, Olga, and Fritzl; he talks to them as though they were really with him, and he is capable of amusing himself in this way for hours at a time. Now that he has got a sister and is obviously taken up with the problem of the origin of children, he always calls Berta and Olga "his children"; and once he added: "my children Berta and Olga were brought by the stork too." The dream, occurring now, after six months’ absence from Gmunden, is evidently to be read as an expression of a longing to go back there.’

Thus far his father. I will anticipate what is to come by adding that when Hans made this last remark about his children having been brought by the stork, he was contradicting aloud a doubt that was lurking within him.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2009

His father luckily made a note of many things which turned out later on to be of unexpected value. ‘I drew a giraffe for Hans, who has been to Schönbrunn several times lately. He said to me: "Draw its widdler too." "Draw it yourself," I answered; whereupon he added this line to my picture (see Fig. 1). He began by drawing a short stroke, and then added a bit on to it, remarking: "Its widdler’s longer."

Fig 1.

‘Hans and I walked past a horse that was micturating, and he said: "The horse has got its widdler underneath like me."

‘He was watching his three-months-old sister being given a bath, and said in pitying tones: "She has got a tiny little widdler."

‘He was given a doll to play with and undressed it. He examined it carefully and said: "Her widdler’s ever so tiny."'

As we already know, this formula made it possible for him to go on believing in his discovery (see p. 2005).

Every investigator runs the risk of falling into an occasional error. It is some consolation for him if, like little Hans in the next example, he does not err alone but can quote a common linguistic usage in his support. For Hans saw a monkey in his picture-book one day, and pointing to its up-curled tail, said: ‘Daddy, look at its widdler!’

His interest in widdlers led him to invent a special game of his own. ‘Leading out of the front hall there is a lavatory and also a dark storeroom for keeping wood in. For some time past Hans has been going into this wood-cupboard and saying: "I’m going to my W.C." I once looked in to see what he was doing in the dark storeroom. He showed me his parts and said: "I’m widdling." That is to say, he has been "playing" at W.C. That it is in the nature of a game is shown not merely by the fact that he was only pretending to widdle, but also by the fact that he does not go into the W.C., which would after all be far simpler, but prefers the wood-cupboard and calls it "his W.C."'

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2010

We should be doing Hans an injustice if we were to trace only the auto-erotic features of his sexual life. His father has detailed information to give us on the subject of his love relationships with other children. From these we can discern the existence of an ‘object-choice’ just as in the case of an adult; and also, it must be confessed, a very striking degree of inconstancy and a disposition to polygamy.

‘In the winter (at the age of three and three-quarters) I took Hans to the skating rink and introduced him to my friend N.’s two little daughters, who were about ten years old. Hans sat down beside them, while they, in the consciousness of their mature age, looked down on the little urchin with a good deal of contempt; he gazed at them with admiration, though this proceeding made no great impression on them. In spite of this Hans always spoke of them afterwards as "my little girls". "Where are my little girls? When are my little girls coming?" And for some weeks he kept tormenting me with the question: "When am I going to the rink again to see my little girls?"

A five-year-old boy cousin came to visit Hans, who had by then reached the age of four. Hans was constantly putting his arms round him, and once, as he was giving him one of these tender embraces, said: ‘I am so fond of you.’

This is the first trace of homosexuality that we have come across in him, but it will not be the last. Little Hans seems to be a positive paragon of all the vices.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2011

‘When Hans was four years old we moved into a new flat. A door led out of the kitchen on to a balcony, from which one could see into a flat on the opposite side of the courtyard. In this flat Hans discovered a little girl of about seven or eight. He would sit on the step leading on to the balcony so as to admire her, and would stop there for hours on end. At four o’clock in the afternoon in particular, when the little girl came home from school, he was not to be kept in the room, and nothing could induce him to abandon his post of observation. Once, when the little girl failed to make her appearance at the window at her usual hour, Hans grew quite restless, and kept pestering the servants with questions. "When’s the little girl coming? Where’s the little girl?" and so on. When she did appear at last, he was quite blissful and never took his eyes off the flat opposite. The violence with which this "long-range love"¹ came over him is to be explained by his having no playmates of either sex. Spending a good deal of time with other children clearly forms part of a child’s normal development.

‘Hans obtained some companionship of this kind when, shortly afterwards (he was by then four and a half), we moved to Gmunden for the summer holidays. In our house there his playmates were our landlord’s children: Franzl (about twelve years old), Fritzl (eight), Olga (seven), and Berta (five). Besides these there were the neighbour’s children, Anna (ten), and two other little girls of nine and seven whose names I have forgotten. Hans’s favourite was Fritzl; he often hugged him and made protestations of his love. Once when he was asked: ‘"Which of the girls are you fondest of?" he answered: "Fritzl!" At the same time he treated the girls in a most aggressive, masculine and arrogant way, embracing them and kissing them heartily - a process to which Berta in particular offered no objection. When Berta was coming out of the room one evening he put his arms round her neck and said in the fondest tones: "Berta, you are a dear!" This, by the way, did not prevent his kissing the others as well and assuring them of his love. He was fond, too, of the fourteen-year-old Mariedl - another of our landlord’s daughters - who used to play with him. One evening as he was being put to bed he said: "I want Mariedl to sleep with me." On being told that would not do, he said: "Then she shall sleep with Mummy or with Daddy." He was told that would not do either, but that Mariedl must sleep with her own father and mother. Upon which the following dialogue took place:

‘Hans: "Oh, then I’II just go downstairs and sleep with Mariedl."

‘Mother: "You really want to go away from Mummy and sleep downstairs?"

‘Hans: "Oh, I’II come up again in the morning to have breakfast and do number one."

‘Mother: "Well, if you really want to go away from Daddy and Mummy, then take your coat and knickers - and good-bye!"

‘Hans did in fact take his clothes and go towards the staircase, to go and sleep with Mariedl, but, it need hardly be said, he was fetched back.

‘(Behind his wish, "I want Mariedl to sleep with us," there of course lay another one: "I want Mariedl" (with whom he liked to be so much) "to become one of our family." But Hans’s father and mother were in the habit of taking him into their bed, though only occasionally, and there can be no doubt that lying beside them had aroused erotic feelings in him; so that his wish to sleep with Mariedl had an erotic sense as well. Lying in bed with his father or mother was a source of erotic feelings in Hans just as it is in every other child.’

In spite of his accesses of homosexuality, little Hans bore himself like a true man in the face of his mother’s challenge.

¹  Und die Liebe per Distanz,

Kurzgesagt, missfällt mir ganz.

WILHELM BUSCH

[Long-range love, I must admit, Does not suit my taste a bit.]

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2012

‘In the next instance, too, Hans said to his mother: "I say, I should so like to sleep with the little girl." This episode has given us a great deal of entertainment, for Hans has really behaved like a grown-up person in love. For the past few days a pretty little girl of about eight has been coming to the restaurant where we have lunch. Of course Hans fell in love with her on the spot. He keeps constantly turning round in his chair to take furtive looks at her; when he has finished eating, he stations himself in her vicinity so as to flirt with her, but if he finds he is being observed, he blushes scarlet. If his glances are returned by the little girl, he at once looks shamefacedly the other way. His behaviour is naturally a great joy to every one lunching at the restaurant. Every day as he is taken there he says: "Do you think the little girl will be there to-day?" And when at last she appears, he goes quite red, just as a grown-up person would in such a case. One day he came to me with a beaming face and whispered in my ear: "Daddy, I know where the little girl lives. I saw her going up the steps in such-and-such a place." Whereas he treats the little girls at home aggressively, in this other affair he appears in the part of a platonic and languishing admirer. Perhaps this has to do with the little girls at home being village children, while the other is a young lady of refinement. As I have already mentioned, he once said he would like to sleep with her.

‘Not wanting Hans to be left in the overwrought state to which he had been brought by his passion for the little girl, I managed to make them acquainted, and invited the little girl to come and see him in the garden after he had finished his afternoon sleep. Hans was so much excited at the prospect of the little girl coming, that for the first time he could not get off to sleep in the afternoon, but tossed about restlessly on his bed. When his mother asked, "Why aren’t you asleep? Are you thinking about the little girl?" he said "Yes" with a happy look. And when he came home from the restaurant he said to every one in the house: "I say, my little girl’s coming to see me to-day." The fourteen-year-old Mariedl reported that he had repeatedly kept asking her: "I say, do you think she’ll be nice to me? Do you think she’ll kiss me if I kiss her?" and so on.

‘But in the afternoon it rained, so that the visit did not come off, and Hans consoled himself with Berta and Olga.’

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2013

Other observations, also made at the time of the summer holidays, suggest that all sorts of new developments were going on in the little boy.

‘Hans, four and a quarter. This morning Hans was given his usual daily bath by his mother and afterwards dried and powdered. As his mother was powdering round his penis and taking care not to touch it, Hans said: "Why don’t you put your finger there?"

‘Mother: "Because that’d be piggish."

‘Hans: "What’s that? Piggish? Why?"

‘Mother: "Because it’s not proper."

‘Hans (laughing): "But it’s great fun."¹

At about the same period Hans had a dream which was in striking contrast with the boldness he had shown towards his mother. It was the first dream of his that was made unrecognizable by distortion. His father’s penetration, however, succeeded in clearing it up.

‘Hans, four and a quarter. Dream. This morning Hans woke up and said: "I say, last night I thought: Some one said: ‘Who wants to come to me?’ Then some one said: ‘I do.’ Then he had to make him widdle."

¹ Another mother, a neurotic, who was unwilling to believe in infantile masturbation, told me of a similar attempt at seduction on the part of her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter. She had had a pair of drawers made for the little girl, and was trying them on her to see whether they were not too tight for walking. To do this she passed her hand upwards along the inner surface of the child’s thigh. Suddenly the little girl shut her legs together on her mother’s hand, saying: ‘Oh, Mummy, do leave your hand there. It feels so lovely.’

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2014

‘Further questions made it clear that there was no visual content whatever in this dream, and that it was of the purely auditory type. During the last few days Hans has been playing parlour games and "forfeits" with our landlord’s children, amongst whom are his friends Olga (aged seven) and Berta (aged five). (The game of forfeits is played in this way: A: "Whose is this forfeit in my hand?" B: "Mine." Then it is decided what B must do.) The dream was modelled on this game; only what Hans wished was that the person to whom the forfeit belonged should be condemned, not to give the usual kiss or be given the usual box on the ear, but to widdle, or rather to be made to widdle by someone.

‘I got him to tell me the dream again. He told it in the same words, except that instead of "then some one said" this time he said "then she said". This "she" is obviously Berta or Olga, one of the girls he had been playing with. Translated, the dream ran as follows: "I was playing forfeits with the little girls. I asked: ‘Who wants to come to me?’ She (Berta or Olga) replied: ‘I do.’ Then she had to make me widdle." (That is, she had to assist him in micturating, which is evidently agreeable for Hans.)

‘It is clear that being made to widdle - having his knickers unbuttoned and his penis taken out - is a pleasurable process for Hans. On walks it is mostly his father who assists Hans in this way; and this gives the child an opportunity for the fixation of homosexual inclinations upon him.

‘Two days ago, as I have already reported, while his mother was washing and powdering his genital region, he asked her: "Why don’t you put your finger there?" Yesterday, when I was helping Hans to do number one, he asked me for the first time to take him to the back of the house so that no one should see him. He added: "Last year when I widdled, Berta and Olga watched me." This meant, I think, that last year he had enjoyed being watched by the girls, but that this was no longer so. His exhibitionism has now succumbed to repression. The fact that the wish that Berta and Olga should watch him widdling (or make him widdle) is now repressed in real life is the explanation of its appearance in the dream, where it was neatly disguised under the game of forfeits. - I have repeatedly observed since then that he does not like to be seen widdling.’

I will only add that this dream obeys the rule I have given in The Interpretation of Dreams, to the effect that speeches occurring in dreams are derived from speeches heard or spoken by the dreamer during the preceding days.

Hans’s father has noted down one other observation, dating from the period immediately after their return to Vienna: ‘Hans (aged four and a half) was again watching his little sister being given her bath, when he began laughing. On being asked why he was laughing, he replied: "I’m laughing at Hanna’s widdler." "Why?" "Because her widdler’s so lovely."

‘Of course his answer was a disingenuous one. In reality her widdler had seemed to him funny. Moreover, this is the first time he has recognized in this way the distinction between male and female genitals instead of denying it.’

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2015

II

CASE HISTORY AND ANALYSIS

My dear Professor, I am sending you a little more about Hans - but this time, I am sorry to say, material for a case history. As you will see, during the last few days he has developed a nervous disorder, which has made my wife and me most uneasy, because we have not been able to find any means of dissipating it. I shall venture to call upon you tomorrow, . . . but in the meantime . . . I enclose a written record of the material available.

‘No doubt the ground was prepared by sexual over-excitation due to his mother’s tenderness; but I am not able to specify the actual exciting cause. He is afraid a horse will bite him in the street, and this fear seems somehow to be connected with his having been frightened by a large penis. As you know from a former report, he had noticed at a very early age what large penises horses have, and at that time he inferred that as his mother was so large she must have a widdler like a horse.

‘I cannot see what to make of it. Has he seen an exhibitionist somewhere? Or is the whole thing simply connected with his mother? It is not very pleasant for us that he should begin setting us problems so early. Apart from his being afraid of going into the street and from his being in low spirits in the evening, he is in other respects the same Hans, as bright and cheerful as ever.’

We will not follow Hans’s father either in his easily comprehensible anxieties or in his first attempts at finding an explanation; we will begin by examining the material before us. It is not in the least our business to ‘understand’ a case at once: this is only possible at a later stage, when we have received enough impressions of it. For the present we will suspend our judgement and give our impartial attention to everything that there is to observe.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2016

The earliest accounts, dating from the first days in January of the present year (1908), run as follows:

‘Hans (aged four and three-quarters) woke up one morning in tears. Asked why he was crying, he said to his mother: "When I was asleep I thought you were gone and I had no Mummy to coax with."¹

‘An anxiety dream, therefore.

‘I had already noticed something similar at Gmunden in the summer. When he was in bed in the evening he was usually in a very sentimental state. Once he made a remark to this effect: "Suppose I was to have no Mummy", or "Suppose you were to go away", or something of the sort; I cannot remember the exact words. Unfortunately, when he got into an elegiac mood of that kind, his mother used always to take him into bed with her.

‘On about January 5th he came into his mother’s bed in the morning, and said: "Do you know what Aunt M. said? She said: ‘He has got a dear little thingummy.’"² (Aunt M. was stopping with us four weeks ago. Once while she was watching my wife giving the boy a bath she did in fact say these words to her in a low voice. Hans had overheard them and was now trying to put them to his own uses.)

‘On January 7th he went to the Stadtpark with his nurse maid as usual. In the street he began to cry and asked to be taken home, saying that he wanted to "coax" with his Mummy. At home he was asked why he had refused to go any farther and had cried, but he would not say. Till the evening he was cheerful, as usual. But in the evening he grew visibly frightened; he cried and could not be separated from his mother, and wanted to "coax" with her again. Then he grew cheerful again, and slept well.

¹ ‘Hans’ expression for "to caress".’

² Meaning his penis. It is one of the commonest things - psycho-analyses are full of such incidents - for children’s genitals to be caressed, not only in word but in deed, by fond relatives, including even parents themselves.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2017

‘On January 8th my wife decided to go out with him herself, so as to see what was wrong with him. They went to Schönbrunn, where he always likes going. Again he began to cry, did not want to start, and was frightened. In the end he did go; but was visibly frightened in the street. On the way back from Schönbrunn he said to his mother, after much internal struggling: "I was afraid a horse would bite me." (He had, in fact, become uneasy at Schönbrunn when he saw a horse.) In the evening he seems to have had another attack similar to that of the previous evening, and to have wanted to be "coaxed" with. He was calmed down. He said, crying: "I know I shall have to go for a walk again to-morrow." And later: "The horse’ll come into the room."

‘On the same day his mother asked: "Do you put your hand to your widdler?" and he answered: "Yes. Every evening, when I’m in bed." The next day, January 9th, he was warned, before his afternoon sleep, not to put his hand to his widdler. When he woke up he was asked about it, and said he had put it there for a short while all the same.’

Here, then, we have the beginning of Hans’s anxiety as well as of his phobia. As we see, there is good reason for keeping the two separate. Moreover, the material seems to be amply sufficient for giving us our bearings; and no moment of time is so favourable for the understanding of a case as its initial stage, such as we have here, though unluckily that stage is as a rule neglected or passed over in silence. The disorder set in with thoughts that were at the same time fearful and tender, and then followed an anxiety dream on the subject of losing his mother and so not being able to coax with her any more. His affection for his mother must therefore have become enormously intensified. This was the fundamental phenomenon in his condition. In support of this, we may, recall his two attempts at seducing his mother, the first of which dated back to the summer, while the second (a simple commendation of his penis) occurred immediately before the outbreak of his street-anxiety. It was this increased affection for his mother which turned suddenly into anxiety - which, as we should say, succumbed to repression. We do not yet know from what quarter the impetus towards repression may have come. Perhaps it was merely the result of the intensity of the child’s emotions, which had become greater than he could control; or perhaps other forces which we have not yet recognized were also at work. This we shall learn as we go on. Hans’s anxiety, which thus corresponded to a repressed erotic longing, was, like every infantile anxiety, without an object to begin with: it was still anxiety and not yet fear. The child cannot tell what he is afraid of; and when Hans, on the first walk with the nursemaid, would not say what he was afraid of, it was simply that he himself did not yet know. He said all that he knew, which was that in the street he missed his mother, whom he could coax with, and that he did not want to be away from her. In saying this he quite straightforwardly confessed the primary meaning of his dislike of streets.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2018

Then again, there were the states into which he fell on two consecutive evenings before going to sleep, and which were characterized by anxiety mingled with clear traces of tenderness. These states show that at the beginning of his illness there was as yet no phobia whatever present, whether of streets or of walking or even of horses. If there had been, his evening states would be inexplicable; for who bothers at bed time about streets and walking? On the other hand it becomes quite clear why he was so fearful in the evening, if we suppose that at bedtime he was overwhelmed by an intensification of his libido - for its object was his mother, and its aim may perhaps have been to sleep with her. He had besides learnt from his experience that at Gmunden his mother could be prevailed upon, when he got into such moods, to take him into her bed, and he wanted to gain the same ends here in Vienna. Nor must we forget that for part of the time at Gmunden he had been alone with his mother, as his father had not been able to spend the whole of the holidays there, and further, that in the country his affections had been divided among a number of playmates and friends of both sexes, while in Vienna he had none, so that his libido was in a position to return undivided to his mother.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2019

His anxiety, then, corresponded to repressed longing. But it was not the same thing as the longing: the repression must be taken into account too. Longing can be completely transformed into satisfaction if it is presented with the object longed for. Therapy of that kind is no longer effective in dealing with anxiety. The anxiety remains even when the longing can be satisfied. It can no longer be completely retransformed into libido; there is something that keeps the libido back under repression.¹ This was shown to be so in the case of Hans on the occasion of his next walk, when his mother went with him. He was with his mother, and yet he still suffered from anxiety - that is to say, from an unsatisfied longing for her. It is true that the anxiety was less; for he did allow himself to be induced to go for the walk, whereas he had obliged the nursemaid to turn back. Nor is a street quite the right place for ‘coaxing’, or whatever else this young lover may have wanted. But his anxiety had stood the test; and the next thing for it to do was to find an object. It was on this walk that he first expressed a fear that a horse would bite him. Where did the material for this phobia come from?  Probably from the complexes, as yet unknown to us, which had contributed to the repression and were keeping under repression his libidinal feelings towards his mother. That is an unsolved problem, and we shall now have to follow the development of the case in order to arrive at its solution. Hans’s father has already given us certain clues, probably trustworthy ones, such as that Hans had always observed horses with interest on account of their large widdlers, that he had supposed that his mother must have a widdler like a horse, and so on. We might thus be led to think that the horse was merely a substitute for his mother. But if so, what would be the meaning of his being afraid in the evening that a horse would come into the room?  A small boy’s foolish fears, it will be said. But a neurosis never says foolish things, any more than a dream. When we cannot understand something, we always fall back on abuse. An excellent way of making a task lighter.

¹ To speak quite frankly, this is actually the criterion according to which we decide whether such feelings of mingled apprehension and longing are normal or not: we begin to call them ‘pathological anxiety’ from the moment at which they can no longer be relieved by the attainment of the object longed for.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2020

There is another point in regard to which we must avoid giving way to this temptation. Hans admitted that every night before going to sleep he amused himself with playing with his penis. ‘Ah!’ the family doctor will be inclined to say, ‘now we have it. The child masturbated: hence his pathological anxiety.’ But gently. That the child was getting pleasure for himself by masturbating does not by any means explain his anxiety; on the contrary, it makes it more problematical than ever. States of anxiety are not produced by masturbation or by getting satisfaction in any shape. Moreover, we may presume that Hans, who was now four and three-quarters, had been indulging in this pleasure every evening for at least a year (see p. 2003). And we shall find that at this moment he was actually engaged in a struggle to break himself of the habit - a state of things which fits in much better with repression and the generation of anxiety.

We must say a word, too, on behalf of Hans’s excellent and devoted mother. His father accuses her, not without some show of justice, of being responsible for the outbreak of the child’s neurosis, on account of her excessive display of affection for him and her too frequent readiness to take him into her bed. We might as easily blame her for having precipitated the process of repression by her energetic rejection of his advances (‘that’d be piggish’). But she had a predestined part to play, and her position was a hard one.

I arranged with Hans’s father that he should tell the boy that all this business about horses was a piece of nonsense and nothing more. The truth was, his father was to say, that he was very fond of his mother and wanted to be taken into her bed. The reason he was afraid of horses now was that he had taken so much interest in their widdlers. He himself had noticed that it was not right to be so very much preoccupied with widdlers, even with his own, and he was quite right in thinking this. I further suggested to his father that he should begin giving Hans some enlightenment in the matter of sex knowledge. The child’s past behaviour justified us in assuming that his libido was attached to a wish to see his mother’s widdler; so I proposed to his father that he should take away this aim from Hans by informing him that his mother and all other female beings (as he could see from Hanna) had no widdler at all. This last piece of enlightenment was to be given him on a suitable occasion when it had been led up to by some question or some chance remark on Hans’s part.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2021

The next batch of news about Hans covers the period from March 1st to March 17th. The interval of more than a month will be accounted for directly.

‘After Hans had been enlightened,¹ there followed a fairly quiet period, during which he could be induced without any particular difficulty to go for his daily walk in the Stadtpark. His fear of horses became transformed more and more into a compulsion to look at them. He said: "I have to look at horses, and then I’m frightened."

‘After an attack of influenza, which kept him in bed for two weeks, his phobia increased again so much that he could not be induced to go out, or at any rate no more than on to the balcony. Every Sunday he went with me to Lainz,² because on that day there is not much traffic in the streets, and it is only a short way to the station. On one occasion in Lainz he refused to go for a walk outside the garden because there was a carriage standing in front of it. After another week which he has had to spend indoors because he has had his tonsils cut, the phobia has grown very much worse again. He goes out on to the balcony, it is true, but not for a walk. As soon as he gets to the street door he hurriedly turns round.

‘On Sunday, March 1st, the following conversation took place on the way to the station. I was once more trying to explain to him that horses do not bite. He: "But white horses bite. There’s a white horse at Gmunden that bites. If you hold your finger to it it bites." (I was struck by his saying "finger" instead of "hand".) He then told me the following story, which I give here in a connected form: "When Lizzi had to go away, there was a cart with a white horse in front of her house, to take her luggage to the station." (Lizzi, he tells me, was a little girl who lived in a neighbouring house.) "Her father was standing near the horse, and the horse turned its head round (to touch him), and he said to Lizzi: ‘Don’t put your finger to the white horse or it’ll bite you’" Upon this I said: "I say, it strikes me that it isn’t a horse you mean, but a widdler, that one mustn’t put one’s hand to."

¹ As to the meaning of his anxiety; not yet as to women having no widdlers.

² A suburb of Vienna where Hans’s grandparents lived.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2022

‘He: "But a widdler doesn’t bite."

‘I: "Perhaps it does, though." He then went on eagerly to try and prove to me that it really was a white horse.¹

‘On March 2nd, as he again showed signs of being afraid, I said to him: "Do you know what? This nonsense of yours" (that is how he speaks of his phobia) "will get better if you go for more walks. It’s so bad now because you haven’t been able to go out because you were ill."

‘He: "Oh no, it’s so bad because I still put my hand to my widdler every night."'

Doctor and patient, father and son, were therefore at one in ascribing the chief share in the pathogenesis of Hans’s present condition to his habit of masturbating. Indications were not wanting, however, of the presence of other significant factors.

‘On March 3rd we got in a new maid, whom he is particularly pleased with. She lets him ride on her back while she cleans the floor, and so he always calls her "my horse", and holds on to her dress with cries of "Gee-up". On about March 10th he said to this new nursemaid: "If you do such-and-such a thing you’ll have to undress altogether, and take off your chemise even." (He meant this as a punishment, but it is easy to recognize the wish behind it.)

‘She: "And what’d be the harm? I’d just say to myself I haven’t got any money to spend on clothes."

‘He: "Why, it’d be shameful. People’d see your widdler." ‘

Here we have the same curiosity again, but directed on to a new object, and (appropriately to a period of repression) cloaked under a moralizing purpose.

‘On March 13th in the morning I said to Hans: "You know, if you don’t put your hand to your widdler any more, this nonsense of yours’ll soon get better."

¹ Hans’s father had no reason to doubt that it was a real event that the boy was describing. -I may also mention that the sensations of itching in the glans penis, which lead children to touch their genitals, are usually described by them in the phrase ‘Es beisst mich’ [‘I’m itching’, literally ‘it bites me’].

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2023

‘Hans: "But I don’t put my hand to my widdler any more."

‘I: "But you still want to."

‘Hans: "Yes, I do. But wanting’s not doing, and doing’s not wanting." (!!)

‘I: "Well, but to prevent your wanting to, this evening you’re going to have a bag to sleep in."

‘After this we went out in front of the house. Hans was still afraid, but his spirits were visibly raised by the prospect of having his struggles made easier for him, and he said: "Oh, if I have a bag to sleep in my nonsense’ll have gone to-morrow." And, in fact, he was much less afraid of horses, and was fairly calm when vehicles drove past.

‘Hans had promised to go with me to Lainz the next Sunday, March 15th. He resisted at first, but finally went with me all the same. He obviously felt all right in the street, as there was not much traffic, and said: "How sensible! God’s done away with horses now." On the way I explained to him that his sister has not got a widdler like him. Little girls and women, I said, have no widdlers: Mummy has none, Anna has none, and so on.

‘Hans: "Have you got a widdler?"

‘I: "Of course. Why, what do you suppose?"

‘Hans (after a pause): "But how do little girls widdle, if they have no widdlers?"

‘I: "They don’t have widdlers like yours. Haven’t you noticed already, when Hanna was being given her bath?"

‘All day long he was in very high spirits, went tobogganing, and so on. It was only towards evening that he fell into low spirits again and seemed to be afraid of horses.

‘That evening his attack of nerves and his need for being coaxed with were less pronounced than on previous days. Next day his mother took him with her into town and he was very much frightened in the streets. The day after, he stopped at home and was very cheerful. Next morning he woke up in a fright at about six o’clock. When he was asked what was the matter he said: "I put my finger to my widdler just a very little. I saw Mummy quite naked in her chemise, and she let me see her widdler. I showed Grete,¹ my Grete, what Mummy was doing, and showed her my widdler. Then I took my hand away from my widdler quick." When I objected that he could only mean "in her chemise" or "quite naked", Hans said: "She was in her chemise, but the chemise was so short that I saw her widdler."'

This was none of it a dream, but a masturbatory phantasy, which was, however, equivalent to a dream. What he made his mother do was evidently intended as a piece of self-justification: ‘If Mummy shows her widdler, I may too.’

We can gather two things from this phantasy: first, that his mother’s reproof had produced a powerful result on him at the time it was made, and secondly, that the enlightenment he had been given to the effect that women have no widdlers was not accepted by him at first. He regretted that it should be so, and in his phantasy he stuck to his former view. He may also perhaps have had his reasons for refusing to believe his father for the moment.

¹ ‘Grete is one of the little girls at Gmunden about whom Hans is having phantasies just now; he talks and plays with her.’

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2024

Weekly report from Hans’s father: ‘My dear Professor, I enclose the continuation of Hans’s story - quite an interesting instalment. I shall perhaps take the liberty of calling upon you during your consulting hours on Monday and if possible of bringing Hans with me - assuming that he will come. I said to him to-day: "Will you come with me on Monday to see the Professor, who can take away your nonsense for you?"

‘He: "No."

‘I: "But he’s got a very pretty little girl." - Upon which he willingly and gladly consented.

‘Sunday, March 22nd. With a view to extending the Sunday programme, I proposed to Hans that we should go first to Schönbrunn, and only go on from there to Lainz at midday. He had, therefore, to make his way not only from our house to the Hauptzollamt station on the Stadtbahn, but also from the Hietzing station to Schönbrunn, and again from there to the Hietzing steam tramway station. And he managed all this, looking hurriedly away whenever any horses came along, for he was evidently feeling nervous. In looking away he was following a piece of advice given him by his mother.

‘At Schönbrunn he showed signs of fear at animals which on other occasions he had looked at without any alarm. Thus he absolutely refused to go into the house in which the giraffe is kept, nor would he visit the elephant, which used formerly to amuse him a great deal. He was afraid of all the large animals, whereas he was very much entertained by the small ones. Among the birds, he was also afraid of the pelican this time - which had never happened before - evidently because of its size again.

‘I therefore said to him: "Do you know why you’re afraid of big animals? Big animals have big widdlers, and you’re really afraid of big widdlers."

‘Hans: "But I’ve never seen the big animals’ widdlers yet."¹

‘I: "But you have seen a horse’s, and a horse is a big animal."

‘Hans: "Oh, a horse’s often. Once at Gmunden when the cart was standing at the door, and once in front of the Head Customs House."

‘I: "When you were small, you most likely went into a stable at Gmunden . . ."

‘Hans (interrupting): "Yes, I went into the stable every day at Gmunden when the horses had come home."

‘I: ". . . and you were most likely frightened when you saw the horse’s big widdler one time. But there’s no need for you to be frightened of it. Big animals have big widdlers, and little animals have little widdlers."

‘Hans: "And every one has a widdler. And my widdler will get bigger as I get bigger; it’s fixed in, of course."

‘Here the talk came to an end. During the next few days it seemed as though his fears had again somewhat increased. He hardly ventured out of the front door, to which he was taken after luncheon.’

¹ This was untrue. See his exclamation in front of the lions’ cage on p. 2005. It was probably the beginning of amnesia resulting from repression.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2025

Hans’s last words of comfort throw a light upon the situation and allow us to make some small corrections in his father’s assertions. It is true that he was afraid of big animals because he was obliged to think of their big widdlers; but it cannot really be said that he was afraid of big widdlers themselves. Formerly the idea of them had been decidedly pleasurable to him, and he used to make every effort to get a glimpse of one. Since that time this enjoyment had been spoiled for him, owing to the general reversal of pleasure into unpleasure which had come over the whole of his sexual researches - in a way which has not yet been explained - and also owing to something which is clearer to us, namely, to certain experiences and reflections which had led to distressing conclusions. We may infer from his self-consolatory words (‘my widdler will get bigger as I get bigger’) that during his observations he had constantly been making comparisons, and that he had remained extremely dissatisfied with the size of his own widdler. Big animals reminded him of his defect, and were for that reason disagreeable to him. But since the whole train of thought was probably incapable of becoming clearly conscious, this distressing feeling, too, was transformed into anxiety, so that his present anxiety was erected both upon his former pleasure and his present unpleasure. When once a state of anxiety establishes itself, the anxiety swallows up all other feelings; with the progress of repression, and the more those ideas which are charged with affect and which have been conscious move down into the unconscious, all affects are capable of being changed into anxiety.

Hans’s singular remark, ‘it’s fixed in, of course’, makes it possible to guess many things in connection with his consolatory speech which he could not express in words and did not express during the course of the analysis. I shall bridge the gap for a little distance by means of my experiences in the analyses of grown-up people; but I hope the interpolation will not be considered arbitrary or capricious. ‘It’s fixed in, of course’: if the motives of the thought were solace and defiance, we are reminded of his mother’s old threat that she should have his widdler cut off if he went on playing with it. At the time it was made, when he was three and a half, this threat had no effect. He calmly replied that then he should widdle with his bottom. It would be the most completely typical procedure if the threat of castration were to have a deferred effect, and if he were now, a year and a quarter later, oppressed by the fear of having to lose this precious piece of his ego. In other cases of illness we can observe a similar deferred operation of commands and threats made in childhood, where the interval covers as many decades or more. I even know cases in which a ‘deferred obedience’ under the influence of repression has had a principal share in determining the symptoms of the disease.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2026

The piece of enlightenment which Hans had been given a short time before to the effect that women really do not possess a widdler was bound to have had a shattering effect upon his self-confidence and to have aroused his castration complex. For this reason he resisted the information, and for this reason it had no therapeutic results. Could it be that living beings really did exist which did not possess widdlers? If so, it would no longer be so incredible that they could take his own widdler away, and, as it were, make him into a woman!¹

¹ I cannot interrupt the discussion so far as to demonstrate the typical character of the unconscious train of thought which I think there is here reason for attributing to little Hans. The castration complex is the deepest unconscious root of anti-semitism; for even in the nursery little boys hear that a Jew has something cut off his penis - a piece of his penis, they think - and this gives them a right to despise Jews. And there is no stronger unconscious root for the sense of superiority over women. Weininger (the young philosopher who, highly gifted but sexually deranged, committed suicide after producing his remarkable book, Geschlecht und Charakter), in a chapter that attracted much attention, treated Jews and women with equal hostility and overwhelmed them with the same insults. Being a neurotic, Weininger was completely under the sway of his infantile complexes; and from that standpoint what is common to Jews and women is their relation to the castration complex.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2027

‘During the night of 27th-28th Hans surprised us by getting out of bed while it was quite dark and coming into our bed. His room is separated from our bedroom by another small room. We asked him why: whether he had been afraid, perhaps. "No," he said; "I’II tell you to-morrow." He went to sleep in our bed and was then carried back to his own.

‘Next day I questioned him closely to discover why he had come in to us during the night; and after some reluctance the following dialogue took place, which I immediately took down in shorthand:

‘He: "In the night there was a big giraffe in the room and a crumpled one; and the big one called out because I took the crumpled one away from it. Then it stopped calling out; and then I sat on top of the crumpled one."

‘I (puzzled): "What? A crumpled giraffe? How was that?"

‘He: "Yes." (He quickly fetched a piece of paper, crumpled it up, and said:) "It was crumpled like that."

‘I: "And you sat down on top of the crumpled giraffe? How?"

‘He again showed me, by sitting down on the ground.

‘I: "Why did you come into our room?"

‘He: "I don’t know myself."

‘I: "Were you afraid?"

‘He: "No. Of course not."

‘I: "Did you dream about the giraffe?"

‘He: "No. I didn’t dream. I thought it. I thought it all. I’d woken up earlier."

‘I: "What can it mean: a crumpled giraffe? You know you can’t squash a giraffe together like a piece of paper."

‘He: "Of course I know. I just thought it. Of course there aren’t any really and truly.¹ The crumpled one was all lying on the floor, and I took it away - took hold of it with my hands."

I: "What? Can you take hold of a big giraffe like that with your hands?"

‘He: "I took hold of the crumpled one with my hand."

‘I: "Where was the big one meanwhile?"

‘He: "The big one just stood farther off."

‘I: "What did you do with the crumpled one?"

‘He: "I held it in my hand for a bit, till the big one had stopped calling out. And when the big one had stopped calling out, I sat down on top of it."

¹ In is own language Hans was saying quite definitely that it was a phantasy.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2028

‘I: "Why did the big one call out?"

‘He: "Because I’d taken away the little one from it." (He noticed that I was taking everything down, and asked:) "Why are you writing that down?"

‘I: "Because I shall send it to a Professor, who can take away your ‘nonsense’ for you."

‘He: "Oho! So you’ve written down as well that Mummy took off her chemise, and you’ll give that to the Professor too."

‘I: "Yes. But he won’t understand how you can think that a giraffe can be crumpled up."

‘He: ‘Just tell him I don’t know myself, and then he won’t ask. But if he asks what the crumpled giraffe is, then he can write to us, and we can write back, or let’s write at once that I don’t know myself."

‘I: "But why did you come in in the night?"

‘He: "I don’t know."

‘I: "Just tell me quickly what you’re thinking of."

‘He (jokingly): "Of raspberry syrup."

‘I: "What else?"                                                } His wishes.

‘He: "A gun for shooting people dead with."¹

‘I: "You’re sure you didn’t dream it?"

‘He: "Quite sure; no, I’m quite certain of it."

‘He proceeded: "Mummy begged me so long to tell her why I came in in the night. But I didn’t want to say, because I felt ashamed with Mummy at first."

‘I: "Why?"

‘He: "I didn’t know."

‘My wife had in fact examined him all the morning, till he had told her the giraffe story.’

¹ At this point his father in his perplexity was trying to practise the classical technique of psycho-analysis. This did not lead to much; but the result, such as it was, can be given a meaning in the light of later disclosures.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2029

That same day his father discovered the solution of the giraffe phantasy.

‘The big giraffe is myself, or rather my big penis (the long neck), and the crumpled giraffe is my wife, or rather her genital organ. It is therefore the result of the enlightenment he has had.

‘Giraffe: see the expedition to Schönbrunn. Moreover, he has a picture of a giraffe and an elephant hanging over his bed.

‘The whole thing is a reproduction of a scene which has been gone through almost every morning for the last few days. Hans always comes in to us in the early morning, and my wife cannot resist taking him into bed with her for a few minutes. Thereupon I always begin to warn her not to take him into bed with her ("the big one called out because I’d taken the crumpled one away from it"); and she answers now and then, rather irritated, no doubt, that it’s all nonsense, that after all one minute is of no importance, and so on. Then Hans stays with her a little while. ("Then the big giraffe stopped calling out; and there I sat down on top of the crumpled one.")

‘Thus the solution of this matrimonial scene transposed into giraffe life is this: he was seized in the night with a longing for his mother, for her caresses, for her genital organ, and came into our bedroom for that reason. The whole thing is a continuation of his fear of horses.’

I have only this to add to his father’s penetrating interpretation. The ‘sitting down on top of’ was probably Hans’s representation of taking possession. But the whole thing was a phantasy of defiance connected with his satisfaction at the triumph over his father’s resistance. ‘Call out as much as you like! But Mummy takes me into bed all the same, and Mummy belongs to me!’ It is therefore justifiable, as his father suspected, to divine behind the phantasy a fear that his mother did not like him, because his widdler was not comparable to his father’s.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2030

Next morning his father was able to get his interpretation confirmed.

‘On Sunday, March 29th, I went with Hans to Lainz. I jokingly took leave of my wife at the door with the words: "Good-bye, big giraffe!" "Why giraffe?" asked Hans. "Mummy’s the big giraffe," I replied; to which Hans rejoined: "Oh yes! And Hanna’s the crumpled giraffe, isn’t she?"

‘In the train I explained the giraffe phantasy to him, upon which he said: "Yes, that’s right." And when I said to him that I was the big giraffe, and that its long neck had reminded him of a widdler, he said: "Mummy has a neck like a giraffe, too. I saw, when she was washing her white neck."¹

‘On Monday, March 30th, in the morning, Hans came to me and said: "I say! I thought two things this morning!" "What was the first?" "I was with you at Schönbrunn where the sheep are; and then we crawled through under the ropes, and then we told the policeman at the end of the garden, and he grabbed hold of us." He had forgotten the second thing.

‘I can add the following comment on this. When we wanted to visit the sheep on Sunday, we found that a space in the gardens was shut off by a rope, so that we were unable to get to them. Hans was very much astonished that the space should be shut off only with a rope, which it would be quite easy to slip under. I told him that respectable people didn’t crawl under the rope. He said it would be quite easy; whereupon I replied that a policeman might come along and take one off. There is a lifeguardsman on duty at the entrance of Schönbrunn; and I once told Hans that he arrested naughty children.

‘After we returned from our visit to you, which took place the same day, Hans confessed to yet another little bit of craving to do something forbidden: "I say, I thought something this morning again." "What?" "I went with you in the train, and we smashed a window and the policeman took us off with him."'

A most suitable continuation of the giraffe phantasy. He had a suspicion that to take possession of his mother was forbidden; he had come up against the barrier against incest. But he regarded it as forbidden in itself. His father was with him each time in the forbidden exploits which he carried out in his imagination, and was locked up with him. His father, he thought, also did that enigmatic forbidden something with his mother which he replaced by an act of violence such as smashing a window-pane or forcing a way into an enclosed space.

¹ Hans only confirmed the interpretation of the two giraffes as his father and mother, and not the sexual symbolism, according to which the giraffe itself represented the penis. This symbolism was probably correct, but we really cannot ask more of Hans.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2031

That afternoon the father and son visited me during my consulting hours. I already knew the funny little fellow, and with all his self-assurance he was yet so amiable that I had always been glad to see him. I do not know whether he remembered me, but he behaved irreproachably and like a perfectly reasonable member of human society. The consultation was a short one. His father opened it by remarking that, in spite of all the pieces of enlightenment we had given Hans, his fear of horses had not yet diminished. We were also forced to confess that the connections between the horses he was afraid of and the affectionate feelings towards his mother which had been revealed were by no means abundant. Certain details which I now learnt - to the effect that he was particularly bothered by what horses wear in front of their eyes and by the black round their mouths - were certainly not to be explained from what we knew. But as I saw the two of them sitting in front of me and at the same time heard Hans’s description of his anxiety-horses, a further piece of the solution shot through my mind, and a piece which I could well understand might escape his father. I asked Hans jokingly whether his horses wore eyeglasses, to which he replied that they did not. I then asked him whether his father wore eyeglasses, to which, against all the evidence, he once more said no. Finally I asked him whether by ‘the black round the mouth’ he meant a moustache; and I then disclosed to him that he was afraid of his father, precisely because he was so fond of his mother. It must be, I told him, that he thought his father was angry with him on that account; but this was not so, his father was fond of him in spite of it, and he might admit everything to him without any fear. Long before he was in the world, I went on, I had known that a little Hans would come who would be so fond of his mother that he would be bound to feel afraid of his father because of it; and I had told his father this. ‘But why do you think I’m angry with you?’ his father interrupted me at this point; ‘have I ever scolded you or hit you?’ Hans corrected him: ‘Oh yes! You have hit me.’ ‘That’s not true. When was it, anyhow?’ ‘This morning,’ answered the little boy; and his father recollected that Hans had quite unexpectedly butted his head into his stomach, so that he had given him as it were a reflex blow with his hand. It was remarkable that he had not brought this detail into connection with the neurosis; but he now recognized it as an expression of the little boy’s hostile disposition towards him, and perhaps also as a manifestation of a need for getting punished for it.¹

¹ Later on the boy repeated his reaction towards his father in a clearer and more complete manner, by first hitting his father on the hand and then affectionately kissing the same hand.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2032

‘Does the Professor talk to God,’ Hans asked his father on the way home, ‘as he can tell all that beforehand?’ I should be extraordinarily proud of this recognition out of the mouth of a child, if I had not myself provoked it by my joking boastfulness. From the date of this consultation I received almost daily reports of the alterations in the little patient’s condition. It was not to be expected that he should be freed from his anxiety at a single blow by the information I gave him; but it became apparent that a possibility had now been offered him of bringing forward his unconscious productions and of unfolding his phobia. From that time forward he carried out a programme which I was able to announce to his father in advance.

‘April 2nd. The first real improvement is to be noted. While formerly he could never be induced to go out of the street door for very long, and always ran back into the house with every sign of fright if horses came along, this time he stayed in front of the street-door for an hour - even while carts were driving past, which happens fairly often in our street. Every now and then he ran into the house when he saw a cart approaching in the distance, but he turned round at once as though he were changing his mind. In any case there is only a trace of the anxiety left, and the progress since his enlightenment is unmistakable.

‘In the evening he said: "We get as far as the street-door now, so we’ll go into the Stadtpark too."

‘On April 3rd, in the morning he came into bed with me, whereas for the last few days he had not been coming any more and had even seemed to be proud of not doing so. "And why have you come to-day?" I asked.

‘Hans: "When I’m not frightened I shan’t come any more."

‘I: "So you come in to me because you’re frightened?"

‘Hans: "When I’m not with you I’m frightened; when I’m not in bed with you, then I’m frightened. When I’m not frightened any more I shan’t come any more."

I: "So you’re fond of me and you feel anxious when you’re in your bed in the morning? and that’s why you come in to me?"

Hans: "Yes. Why did you tell me I’m fond of Mummy and that’s why I’m frightened, when I’m fond of you?"‘

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2033

Here the little boy was displaying a really unusual degree of clarity. He was bringing to notice the fact that his love for his father was wrestling with his hostility towards him in his capacity of rival with his mother; and he was reproaching his father with not having yet drawn his attention to this interplay of forces, which was bound to end in anxiety. His father did not entirely understand him as yet, for during this conversation he only succeeded in convincing himself of the little boy’s hostility towards him, the existence of which I had asserted during our consultation. The following dialogue, which I nevertheless give without alteration, is really of more importance in connection with the progress of the father’s enlightenment than with the little patient.

‘Unfortunately I did not immediately grasp the meaning of this reproach. Because Hans is fond of his mother he evidently wants to get me out of the way, and he would then be in his father’s place. This suppressed hostile wish is turned into anxiety about his father, and he comes in to me in the morning to see if I have gone away. Unfortunately at the moment I did not understand this, and said to him:

‘"When you’re alone, you’re just anxious for me and come in to me."

‘Hans: "When you’re away, I’m afraid you’re not coming home."

‘I: "And have I ever threatened you that I shan’t come home?"

‘Hans: "Not you, but Mummy. Mummy’s told me she won’t come back." (He had probably been naughty, and she had threatened to go away.)

‘I: "She said that because you were naughty."

‘Hans: "Yes."

‘I: "So you’re afraid I’m going away because you were naughty; that’s why you come in to me."

‘When I got up from table after breakfast Hans said: "Daddy, don’t trot away from me!" I was struck by his saying "trot" instead of "run", and replied: "Oho! So you’re afraid of the horse trotting away from you." Upon which he laughed.’

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2034

We know that this portion of Hans’s anxiety had two constituents: there was fear of his father and fear for his father. The former was derived from his hostility towards his father, and the latter from the conflict between his affection, which was exaggerated at this point by way of compensation, and his hostility.

His father proceeds: ‘This is no doubt the beginning of an important phase. His motive for at the most just venturing outside the house but not going away from it, and for turning round at the first attack of anxiety when he is half-way, is his fear of not finding his parents at home because they have gone away. He sticks to the house from love of his mother, and he is afraid of my going away because of the hostile wishes that he nourishes against me - for then he would be the father.

‘In the summer I used to be constantly leaving Gmunden for Vienna on business, and he was then the father. You will remember that his fear of horses is connected with the episode at Gmunden when a horse was to take Lizzi’s luggage to the station. The repressed wish that I should drive to the station, for then he would be alone with his mother (the wish that "the horse should drive off"), is turned into fear of the horse’s driving off; and in fact nothing throws him into greater alarm than when a cart drives off from the courtyard of the Head Customs House (which is just opposite our flat) and the horses start moving.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2035

‘This new phase (hostile sentiments towards his father) could only come out after he knew that I was not angry because he was so fond of his mother.

‘In the afternoon I went out in front of the street-door with him again; he again went out in front of the house, and stayed there even when carts went past. In the case of a few carts only he was afraid, and ran into the entrance-hall. He also said to me in explanation: "Not all white horses bite." That is to say: owing to the analysis some white horses have already been recognized as "Daddy", and they no longer bite; but there are others still left over which do bite.

Fig. 2.

‘The position of our street-door is as follows: Opposite it is the warehouse of the Office for the Taxation of Food-Stuffs, with a loading dock at which carts are driving up all day long to fetch away boxes, packing-cases, etc. This courtyard is cut off from the street by railings; and the entrance gates to the courtyard are opposite our house (Fig. 2). I have noticed for some days that Hans is specially frightened when carts drive into or out of the yard, a process which involves their taking a corner. I asked at the time why he was so much afraid, and he replied: "I’m afraid the horses will fall down when the cart turns" (a). He is equally frightened when carts standing at the loading dock start moving in order to drive off (b). Further (c), he is more frightened of large dray-horses than of small horses, and of rough farm-horses than of smart horses (such as those in a carriage and pair). He is also more frightened when a vehicle drives past quickly (d) than when the horses trot up slowly. These differentiations have, of course, only come to light clearly during the last few days.’

I should be inclined to say that, in consequence of the analysis, not only the patient but his phobia too had plucked up courage and was venturing to show itself.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2036

‘On April 5th Hans came in to our bedroom again, and was sent back to his own bed. I said to him: "As long as you come into our room in the mornings, your fear of horses won’t get better." He was defiant, however, and replied: "I shall come in all the same, even if I am afraid." So he will not let himself be forbidden to visit his mother.

‘After breakfast we were to go downstairs. Hans was delighted, and planned that, instead of stopping in front of the street-door as usual, he should go across the street into the yard, where he had often enough seen street-boys playing. I told him I should be pleased if he were to go across, and took the opportunity of asking him why he is so much afraid when the loaded carts at the loading dock start moving (b).

‘Hans: "I’m afraid of standing by the cart and the cart driving off quick, and of my standing on it and wanting to get on to the board (the loading dock), and my driving off in the cart."

‘I: ‘And if the cart stands still? Aren’t you afraid then? Why not?"

‘Hans: "If the cart stands still, then I can get on to the cart quick and get on to the board."

‘(So Hans is planning to climb over a cart on to the loading dock, and is afraid of the cart driving away while he is on it.)

‘I: "Perhaps you’re afraid you won’t come home any more if you drive away in the cart?"

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2037

Hans’s projected route

Fig. 3.

‘Hans: "Oh no! I can always come back to Mummy, in the cart or in a cab. I can tell him the number of the house too."

‘I: "Then why are you afraid?"

‘Hans: "I don’t know. But the Professor’ll know. D’you think he’ll know?"

‘I: "And why do you want to get over on to the board?"

‘Hans: "Because I’ve never been up there, and I should so much like to be there; and d’you know why I should like to go there? Because I should like to load and unload the boxes, and I should like to climb about on the boxes there. I should so like to climb about there. D’you know who I learnt the climbing about from? Some boys climbed on the boxes, and I saw them, and I want to do it too."

‘His wish was not fulfilled. For when Hans ventured once more in front of the street-door, the few steps across the street and into the courtyard awoke too great resistances in him, because carts were constantly driving into the yard.’

The Professor only knows that the game which Hans intended to play with the loaded carts must have stood in the relation of a symbolic substitute to some other wish as to which he had so far uttered no word. But, if it did not seem too daring, this wish might already, even at this stage, be constructed.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2038

‘In the afternoon we again went out in front of the street door, and when I returned I asked Hans:

‘"Which horses are you actually most afraid of?"

‘Hans: "All of them."

‘I: "That’s not true."

‘Hans: "I’m most afraid of horses with a thing on their mouths."

‘I: "What do you mean? The piece of iron they have in their mouths?"

‘Hans: "No. They have something black on their mouths." (He covered his mouth with his hand.)

‘I: "What? A moustache, perhaps?"

‘Hans (laughing): "Oh no!"

‘I: "Have they all got it?"

‘Hans: "No, only a few of them."

‘I: "What is it that they’ve got on their mouths?"

‘Hans: "A black thing." (I think in reality it must be the thick piece of harness that dray-horses wear over their noses.)

Fig. 4.

‘"And I’m most afraid of furniture-vans, too."

‘I :"Why?"

‘Hans: "I think when furniture-horses are dragging a heavy van they’ll fall down."

‘I: "So you’re not afraid with a small cart?"

‘Hans: "No. I’m not afraid with a small cart or with a post-office van. I’m most afraid too when a bus comes along."

‘I: "Why? Because its so big?"

‘Hans: "No. Because once a horse in a bus fell down."

‘I: "When?"

‘Hans: "Once when I went out with Mummy in spite of my ‘nonsense’, when I bought the waistcoat." (This was subsequently confirmed by his mother.)

‘I: "What did you think when the horse fell down?"

‘Hans: "Now it’ll always be like this. All horses in buses’ll fall down."

‘I: "In all buses?"

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2039

‘Hans: "Yes. And in furniture-vans too. Not often in furniture-vans."

‘I: "You had your nonsense already at that time?"

‘Hans: "No. I only got it then. When the horse in the bus fell down, it gave me such a fright, really! That was when I got the nonsense."

‘I: "But the nonsense was that you thought a horse would bite you. And now you say you were afraid a horse would fall down."

‘Hans: "Fall down and bite."¹

‘I: "Why did it give you such a fright?"

‘Hans: "Because the horse went like this with its feet," (He lay down on the ground and showed me how it kicked about.) "It gave me a fright because it made a row with its feet."

‘I: "Where did you go with Mummy that day?"

‘Hans: "First to the Skating Rink, then to a café, then to buy a waistcoat, then to the pastry-cook’s with Mummy, and then home in the evening; we went back through the Stadtpark." (All of this was confirmed by my wife, as well as the fact that the anxiety broke out immediately afterwards.)

‘I: "Was the horse dead when it fell down?"

‘Hans: Yes!"

‘I: "How do you know that?"

‘Hans: "Because I saw it." (He laughed.) "No, it wasn’t a bit dead."

‘I: "Perhaps you thought it was dead?"

‘Hans: "No. Certainly not. I only said it as a joke." (His expression at the moment, however, had been serious.)

‘As he was tired, I let him run off. He only told me besides this that he had first been afraid of bus-horses, then of all others, and only in the end of furniture-van horses.

¹ Hans was right, however improbable this collocation may sound. The train of thought, as we shall see, was that the horse (his father) would bite him because of his wish that it (his father) should fall down.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2040

‘On the way back from Lainz there were a few more questions:

‘I: "When the bus-horse fell down, what colour was it: white, red, brown, grey?"

‘Hans: "Black. Both horses were black."

‘I: "Was it big or little?"

‘Hans: "Big."

‘I: "Fat or thin?"

‘Hans: "Fat. Very big and fat."

‘I: "When the horse fell down, did you think of your daddy?"

‘Hans: "Perhaps. Yes. It’s possible."'

His father’s investigations may have been without success at some points; but it does no harm to make acquaintance at close quarters with a phobia of this sort - which we may feel inclined to name after its new objects. For in this way we get to see how diffuse it really is. It extends on to horses and on to carts, on to the fact that horses fall down and that they bite, on to horses of a particular character, on to carts that are heavily loaded. I will reveal at once that all these characteristics were derived from the circumstance that the anxiety originally had no reference at all to horses but was transposed on to them secondarily and had now become fixed upon those elements of the horse-complex which showed themselves well adapted for certain transferences. We must specially acknowledge one most important result of the boy’s examination by his father. We have learned the immediate precipitating cause after which the phobia broke out. This was when the boy saw a big heavy horse fall down; and one at least of the interpretations of this impression seems to be that emphasized by his father, namely, that Hans at that moment perceived a wish that his father might fall down in the same way - and be dead. His serious expression as he was telling the story no doubt referred to this unconscious meaning. May there not have been yet another meaning concealed behind all this? And what can have been the significance of the making a row with its legs?

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2041

‘For some time Hans has been playing horses in the room; he trots about, falls down, kicks about with his feet, and neighs. Once he tied a small bag on like a nose-bag. He has repeatedly run up to me and bitten me.’

In this way he was accepting the last interpretations more decidedly than he could in words, but naturally with a change of parts, for the game was played in obedience to a wishful phantasy. Thus he was the horse, and bit his father, and in this way was identifying himself with his father.

‘I have noticed for the last two days that Hans has been defying me in the most decided manner, not impudently, but in the highest spirits. Is it because he is no longer afraid of me - the horse?

‘April 6th. Went out with Hans in front of the house in the afternoon. At every horse that passed I asked him if he saw the "black on its mouth"; he said "no" every time. I asked him what the black really looked like; he said it was black iron. My first idea, that he meant the thick leather straps that are part of the harness of dray-horses, is therefore unconfirmed. I asked him if the "black" reminded him of a moustache, and he said: "Only by its colour." So I do not yet know what it really is.

‘The fear has diminished; this time he ventured as far as the next-door house, but turned round quickly when he heard the sound of horses’ hooves in the distance. When a cart drew up at our door and came to a stop, he became frightened and ran into the house, because the horse began pawing with its foot. I asked him why he was afraid, and whether perhaps he was nervous because the horse had done like this (and I stamped with my foot). He said: "Don’t make such a row with your feet!" Compare his remark about the fallen bus-horse.

‘He was particularly terrified by a furniture-van passing by. At that he ran right inside the house. "Doesn’t a furniture-van like that," I asked him unconcernedly, "really look like a bus?" He said nothing. I repeated the question, and he then said: "Why, of course! Otherwise I shouldn’t be so afraid of a furniture-van."

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2042

‘April 7th. I asked again to-day what the "black on the horses’ mouths" looked like. Hans said: "Like a muzzle." The curious thing is that for the last three days not a single horse has passed on which he could point out this "muzzle". I myself have seen no such horse on any of my walks, although Hans asseverates that such horses do exist. I suspect that some sort of horses’ bridle - the thick piece of harness round their mouths, perhaps - really reminded him of a moustache, and that after I alluded to this this fear disappeared as well.

‘Hans’s improvement is constant. The radius of his circle of activity with the street-door as its centre grows ever wider. He has even accomplished the feat, which has hitherto been impossible for him, of running across to the pavement opposite. All the fear that remains is connected with the bus scene, the meaning of which is not yet clear to me.

‘April 9th. This morning Hans came in to me while I was washing and bare to the waist.

‘Hans: "Daddy, you are lovely! You’re so white."

‘I: "Yes. Like a white horse."

‘Hans: "The only black thing’s your moustache." (Continuing) "Or perhaps it’s a black muzzle?"

‘I told him then that I had been to see the Professor the evening before, and said: "There’s one thing he wants to know." "I am curious," remarked Hans.

‘I told him I knew on what occasions it was that he made a row with his feet. "Oh, yes!" he interrupted me, "when I’m cross, or when I have to do ‘lumf’ and would rather play." (He has a habit, it is true, of making a row with his feet, i.e. of stamping, when he is angry. - "Doing lumf" means doing number two. When Hans was small he said one day when he got off the chamber: "Look at the lumf [German: ‘Lumpf’]." He meant "stocking" [German: "Strumpf"], because of its shape and colour. This designation has been preserved to this day. - In very early days, when he had to be put on the chamber, and refused to leave off playing, he used to stamp his feet in a rage, and kick about, and sometimes throw himself on the ground.)

‘"And you kick about with your feet as well, when you have to widdle and don’t want to go, because you’d rather go on playing."

‘He: "Oh, I must widdle." And he went out of the room by way of confirmation, no doubt.’

In the course of his visit his father had asked me what Hans could have been reminded of by the fallen horse kicking about with its feet. I had suggested that that may have been his own reaction when he retained his urine. Hans now confirmed this by means of the re-emergence during the conversation of a desire to micturate; and he added some other meanings of the making a row with the feet.

‘We then went out in front of the street-door. When a coal-cart came along, he said to me: "Daddy, I’m very much afraid of coal-carts, too."

‘I: "Perhaps that’s because they’re as big as buses, too."

‘Hans: "Yes; and because they’re so heavily loaded, and the horses have so much to drag and might easily fall down. If a cart’s empty, I’m not afraid." It is a fact, as I have already remarked, that only heavy vehicles throw him into a state of anxiety.’

Nevertheless, the situation was decidedly obscure. The analysis was making little progress; and I am afraid the reader will soon begin to find this description of it tedious. Every analysis, however, has dark periods of this kind. But Hans was now on the point of leading us into an unexpected region.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2043

‘I came home and was speaking to my wife, who had made various purchases which she was showing me. Among them was a pair of yellow ladies’ drawers. Hans exclaimed "Ugh!" two or three times, threw himself on the ground, and spat. My wife said he had done this two or three times already when he had seen the drawers.

‘"Why do you say ‘Ugh’?" I asked.

‘Hans: "Because of the drawers."

‘I: "Why? Because of their colour? Because they’re yellow?’, and remind you of lumf or widdle?"

‘Hans: "Lumf isn’t yellow. It’s white or black." - Immediately afterwards: "I say, is it easy to do lumf if you eat cheese?" (I had once told him so, when he asked me why I ate cheese.)

‘I: "Yes."

‘Hans: "That’s why you go straight off every morning and do lumf? I should so much like to eat cheese with my bread-and-butter."

‘He had already asked me yesterday as he was jumping about in the street: "I say, it’s true, isn’t it, if you jump about a lot you can do lumf easily?" - There has been trouble with his stools from the very first; and aperients and enemas have frequently been necessary. At one time his habitual constipation was so great that my wife called in Dr. L. He was of opinion that Hans was overfed, which was in fact the case, and recommended a more moderate diet - and the condition was at once brought to an end. Recently the constipation has again made its appearance more frequently.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2044

‘After luncheon I said to him: "We’ll write to the Professor again," and he dictated to me: "When I saw the yellow drawers I said ‘Ugh! that makes me spit!’ and threw myself down and shut my eyes and didn’t look."

‘I: "Why?"

‘Hans: "Because I saw the yellow drawers; and I did the same sort of thing with the black drawers too.¹ The black ones are the same sort of drawers, only they were black." (Interrupting himself) "I say, I am glad. I’m always so glad when I can write to the Professor."

‘I: "Why did you say ‘Ugh’? Were you disgusted?"

‘Hans: "Yes, because I saw that. I thought I should have to do lumf."

‘I: "Why?"

‘Hans: "I don’t know."

‘I: "When did you see the black drawers?"

‘Hans: "Once, when Anna (our maid) had been here a long time - with Mummy - she brought them home just after she’d bought them." (This statement was confirmed by my wife.)

‘I: "Were you disgusted then, too?"

‘Hans: "Yes."

‘I: "Have you seen Mummy in drawers like that?"

‘Hans: "No."

‘I: "When she was dressing?"

‘Hans: "When she bought the yellow ones I’d seen them once before already." (This is contradicted. He saw the yellow ones for the first time when his mother bought them.) "She’s got the black ones on to-day too" (correct), "because I saw her take them off in the morning."

¹ ‘For the last few weeks my wife has possessed a pair of black bloomers for wearing on cycling tours.’

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2045

‘I: "What? She took off the black drawers in the morning?"

‘Hans: "In the morning when she went out she took off the black drawers, and when she came back she put the black ones on again."

‘I asked my wife about this, as it seemed to me absurd. She said it was entirely untrue. Of course she had not changed her drawers when she went out.

‘I at once asked Hans about it: "You told me that Mummy had put on some black drawers, and that when she went out she took them off, and that when she came back she put them on again. But Mummy says it’s not true."

‘Hans: "I think perhaps I may have forgotten she didn’t take them off." (Impatiently) "Oh, do let me alone."'

I have a few comments to make at this point on the business of the drawers. It was obviously mere hypocrisy on Hans’s part to pretend to be so glad of the opportunity of giving an account of the affair. In the end he threw the mask aside and was rude to his father. It was a question of things which had once afforded him a great deal of pleasure, but of which, now that repression had set in, he was very much ashamed, and at which he professed to be disgusted. He told some downright lies so as to disguise the circumstances in which he had seen his mother change her drawers. In reality, the putting on and taking off of her drawers belonged to the ‘lumf’ context. His father was perfectly aware of what it was all about and of what Hans was trying to conceal.

‘I asked my wife whether Hans was often with her when she went to the W.C. "Yes," she said, "often. He goes on pestering me till I let him. Children are all like that."'

Nevertheless, it is worth bearing carefully in mind the desire, which Hans had already repressed, for seeing his mother doing lumf.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2046

‘We went out in front of the house. He was in very good spirits and was prancing about all the time like a horse. So I said: "Now, who is it that’s the bus-horse? Me, you or Mummy?"

‘Hans (promptly): "I am; I’m a young horse."

‘During the period when his anxiety was at its height, and he was frightened at seeing horses frisking, he asked me why they did it; and to reassure him I said: "Those are young horses, you see, and they frisk about like little boys. You frisk about too, and you’re a little boy." Since then, whenever he has seen horses frisking, he has said: "That’s right; those are young horses!"

‘As we were going upstairs I asked him almost without thinking: "Used you to play at horses with the children at Gmunden?"

‘He: "Yes." (Thoughtfully) "I think that was how I got the nonsense."

‘I: "Who was the horse?"

‘He: "I was; and Berta was the coachman."

‘I: "Did you fall down by any chance, when you were a horse?"

‘Hans: "No. When Berta said ‘Gee-up’, I ran ever so quick; I just raced along."¹

‘I: "You never played at buses?"

‘Hans: "No. At ordinary carts, and horses without carts. When a horse has a cart, it can go without a cart just as well, and the cart can stay at home."

‘I: "Used you often to play at horses?"

‘Hans: "Very often. Fritzl² was the horse once, too, and Franzl the coachman; and Fritzl ran ever so fast and all at once he hit his foot on a stone and bled."

‘I: "Perhaps he fell down?"

¹ ‘Hans had a set of toy harness with bells.’

² Another of the landlord’s children, as we already know.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2047

‘Hans: "No. He put his foot in some water and then wrapped it up."¹

‘I: "Were you often the horse?"

‘Hans: "Oh, yes."

‘I: "And that was how you got the nonsense?"

‘Hans: "Because they kept on saying ‘ 'cos of the horse, ‘ 'cos of the horse’ " (he put a stress on the ‘'cos’); "so perhaps I got the nonsense because they talked like that; ‘'cos of the horse.’"'²

For a while Hans’s father pursued his enquiry fruitlessly along other paths.

‘I: "Did they tell you anything about horses?"

‘Hans: "Yes."

‘I: "What?"

‘Hans: "I’ve forgotten."

‘I: "Perhaps they told you about their widdlers?"

‘Hans: "Oh, no."

‘I; "Were you frightened of horses already then?"

‘Hans: "Oh, no. I wasn’t frightened at all."

‘I: "Perhaps Berta told you that horses ---?"

‘Hans (interrupting): "---widdle? No."

¹ See below. His father was quite right in suspecting that Fritzl fell down.

² [‘Wegen dem Pferd’.] I may explain that Hans was not maintaining that he had got the nonsense at that time but in that connection. Indeed, it must have been so, for theoretical considerations require that what is to-day the object of a phobia must at one time in the past have been the source of a high degree of pleasure. I may at the same time complete what the child was unable to express, and add that the little word ‘wegen’ [‘because of’, ‘ 'cos of’] was the means of enabling the phobia to extend from horses on to ‘Wagen’ [‘vehicles’] or, as Hans was accustomed to pronounce the word and hear it pronounced, ‘Wägen’ [pronounced exactly like ‘wegen’]. It must never be forgotten how much more concretely children treat words than grown-up people do, and consequently how much more significant for them are similarities of sound in words.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2048

‘On April 10th I took up our conversation of the day before, and tried to discover what his "'cos of the horse" meant. Hans could not remember; he only knew that some children had stood outside the front door one morning and had said, "'cos of the horse, 'cos of the horse!" He had been there himself. When I pressed him more closely, he declared that they had not said "'cos of the horse" at all, but that he had remembered wrong.

‘I: "But you and the others were often in the stables. You must surely have talked about horses there." - "We didn’t." - "What did you talk about?" - "Nothing." - "Such a lot of children, and nothing to talk about?" - "We did talk about something, but not about horses." - "Well, what was it?" - "I don’t remember any more."

‘I allowed the matter to drop, as the resistances were evidently too great,¹ and went on to the following question: "Did you like playing with Berta?"

‘He: "Yes, very much; but not with Olga. D’you know what Olga did? I was given a paper ball once by Grete up there at Gmunden, and Olga tore it all to pieces. Berta would never have torn my ball. I liked playing with Berta very much."

‘I: "Did you see what Berta’s widdler looked like?"

‘He: "No, but I saw the horses’; because I was always in the stables, and so I saw the horses’ widdlers."

‘I: "And so you were curious and wanted to know what Berta’s and Mummy’s widdlers looked like?"

‘He: "Yes."

‘I reminded him of how he had once complained to me that the little girls always wanted to look on while he was widdling.

¹ In point of fact there was nothing more to be got out of it than Hans’s verbal association, and this had escaped his father. Here is a good instance of conditions under which an analyst’s efforts are wasted.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2049

‘He: "Berta always looked on at me too" (he spoke with great satisfaction and not at all resentfully); "often she did, I used to widdle in the little garden where the radishes were, and she stood outside the front door and looked on at me."

‘I: "And when she widdled, did you look on?"

‘He: "She used to go to the W.C."

‘I: "And you were curious?"

‘He: "I was inside the W.C. when she was in it."

‘(This was a fact. The servants told us about it once, and I recollect that we forbade Hans to do it.)

‘I: "Did you tell her you wanted to go in?"

‘He: "I went in alone and because Berta let me. There’s nothing shameful in that."

‘I: "And you’d have liked to see her widdler?"

‘He: "Yes, but I didn’t see it."

‘I then reminded him of the dream about playing forfeits that he had had at Gmunden, and said: "When you were at Gmunden did you want Berta to make you widdle?"

‘He: "I never said so to her."

‘I: "Why didn’t you ever say so to her?"

‘He: "Because I didn’t think of it." (Interrupting himself) "If I write everything to the Professor, my nonsense’ll soon be over, won’t it?"

‘I: "Why did you want Berta to make you widdle?"

‘He: "I don’t know. Because she looked on at me."

‘I: "Did you think to yourself she should put her hand to your widdler?"

‘He: "Yes." (Changing the subject)("It was such fun at Gmunden. In the little garden where the radishes were there was a little sand-heap; I used to play there with my spade."

‘(This was the garden where he used always to widdle.)

"I: ‘Did you put your hand to your widdler at Gmunden, when you were in bed?"

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2050

‘He: "No. Not then; I slept so well at Gmunden that I never thought of it at all. The only times I did it was at --- Street¹ and now."

‘I: "But Berta never put her hand to your widdler?"

‘He: "She never did, no; because I never told her to."

‘I: "Well, and when was it you wanted her to?"

‘He: "Oh, at Gmunden once."

‘I: "Only once?"

‘He: "Well, now and then."

‘I: "She used always to look on at you when you widdled; perhaps she was curious to know how you did it?"

‘He: "Perhaps she was curious to know what my widdler looked like."

‘I: "But you were curious too. Only about Berta?"

‘He: "About Berta, and about Olga."

‘I: "About who else?"

‘He: "About no one else."

‘I: "You know that’s not true. About Mummy too."

‘He: "Oh, yes, about Mummy."

‘I: "But now you’re not curious any more. You know what Hanna’s widdler looks like, don’t you?"

‘He: "It’ll grow, though, won’t it?"²

‘I: "Yes, of course. But when it’s grown it won’t look like yours."

‘He: "I know that. It’ll be the same" (sc. as it now is) "only bigger."

‘I: "When we were at Gmunden, were you curious when your Mummy undressed?"

‘He: "Yes. And then when Hanna was in her bath I saw her widdler."

‘I: "And Mummy’s too?"

‘He: "No."

‘I: "You were disgusted when you saw Mummy’s drawers?"

¹ The flat they were in before the move.

² Hans wants to be assured that his own widdler will grow.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2051

‘He: "Only when I saw the black ones - when she bought them - then I spat. But I don’t spit when she puts her drawers on or takes them off. I spit because the black drawers are like a lumf and the yellow ones like a widdle, and then I think I’ve got to widdle. When Mummy has her drawers on I don’t see them; she’s got her clothes on over them."

‘I: "And when she takes off her clothes?"

‘He: "I don’t spit then either. But when her drawers are new they look like a lumf. When they’re old, the colour goes away and they get dirty. When you buy them they’re quite clean, but at home they’ve been made dirty. When they’re bought they’re new, and when they’re not bought they’re old."

‘I: "Then you aren’t disgusted by old ones?"

‘He: "When they’re old they’re much blacker than a lumf, aren’t they? They’re just a bit blacker."¹

‘I: "Have you often been into the W.C. with Mummy?"

‘He: "Very often."

‘I: "And were you disgusted?"

‘He: "Yes. . . . No."

‘I: "You like being there when Mummy widdles or does lumf?"

‘He: "Yes, very much."

‘I: "Why do you like it so much?"

‘He: "I don’t know."

‘I: "Because you think you’ll see her widdler."

‘He: "Yes, I do think that."

‘I: "But why won’t you ever go into the W.C. at Lainz?"

‘(At Lainz he always begs me not to take him into the W.C.; he was frightened once by the noise of the flush.)

¹ Our young man was here wrestling with a subject of which he was not equal to giving a clear exposition; so that there is some difficulty in understanding him. He may perhaps have meant that the drawers only recalled his feelings of disgust when he saw them on their own account; as soon as his mother had them on, he ceased to connect them with lumf or widdle, and they then interested him in a different way.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2052

‘He: "Perhaps it’s because it makes a row when you pull the plug."

‘I: "And then you’re afraid."

‘He: "Yes."

‘I: "And what about our W.C. here?"

‘He: "Here I’m not. At Lainz it gives me a fright when you pull the plug. And when I’m inside and the water rushes down, then it gives me a fright too."

‘And, "just to show me that he wasn’t frightened in our flat," he made me go into the W.C. and set the flush in motion. He then explained to me:

‘"First there’s a loud row, and then a loose one." (This is when the water comes down.) "When there’s a loud row I’d rather stay inside, and when there’s a soft one I’d rather go out."

‘I: "Because you’re afraid?"

‘He: "Because if there’s a loud row I always so much like to see it" - (correcting himself) "to hear it; so I’d rather stay inside and hear it properly."

‘I: "What does a loud row remind you of?"

‘He: "That I’ve got to do lumf in the W.C." (The same thing, that is, that the black drawers reminded him of.)

‘I: "Why?"

‘He: "I don’t know. A loud row sounds as though you were doing lumf. A big row reminds me of lumf, and a little one of widdle." (Cf. the black and the yellow drawers.)

‘I: "I say, wasn’t the bus-horse the same colour as a lumf" (According to his account it had been black.)

‘He (very much struck): "Yes."'

At this point I must put in a few words. Hans’s father was asking too many questions, and was pressing the inquiry along his own lines instead of allowing the little boy to express his thoughts. For this reason the analysis began to be obscure and uncertain. Hans went his own way and would produce nothing if attempts were made to draw him off it. For the moment his interest was evidently centred upon lumf and widdle, but we cannot tell why. Just as little satisfactory light was thrown upon the business of the row as upon that of the yellow and black drawers. I suspect that the boy’s sharp ears had clearly detected the difference between the sounds made by a man micturating and a woman. The analysis succeeded in forcing the material somewhat artificially into an expression of the distinction between the two different calls of nature. I can only advise those of my readers who have not as yet themselves conducted an analysis not to try to understand everything at once, but to give a kind of unbiased attention to every point that arises and to await further developments.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2053

‘April 11th. This morning Hans came into our room again and was sent away, as he always has been for the last few days.

‘Later on, he began: "Daddy, I thought something: I was in the bath,¹ and the plumber came and unscrewed it.² Then he took a bigger borer and stuck it into my stomach."

Hans’s father translated this phantasy as follows: ‘"I was in bed with Mummy. Then Daddy came and drove me away. With his big penis he pushed me out of my place by Mummy."'

Let us suspend our judgement for the present.

‘He went on to relate a second idea that he had had: "We were travelling in the train to Gmunden. In the station we put on our clothes; but we couldn’t get it done in time, and the train carried us on."

‘Later on, I asked: "Have you ever seen a horse doing lumf?"

‘Hans: "Yes, very often."

‘I: "Does it make a loud row when it does lumf?"

‘Hans: "Yes."

‘I: "What does the row remind you of?"

‘Hans: "Like when lumf falls into the chamber."

‘The bus-horse that falls down and makes a row with its feet is no doubt - a lumf falling and making a noise. His fear of defaecation and his fear of heavily loaded carts is equivalent to the fear of a heavily loaded stomach.’

In this roundabout way Hans’s father was beginning to get a glimmering of the true state of affairs.

¹ ‘Hans’s mother gives him his bath.’

² ‘To take it away to be repaired.’

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2054

‘April 11th. At luncheon Hans said: "If only we had a bath at Gmunden, so that I didn’t have to go to the public baths!" It is a fact that at Gmunden he was always taken to the neighbouring public baths to be given a hot bath - a proceeding against which he used to protest with passionate tears. And in Vienna, too, he always screams if he is made to sit or lie in the big bath. He must be given his bath kneeling or standing.’

Hans was now beginning to bring fuel to the analysis in the shape of spontaneous utterances of his own. This remark of his established the connection between his two last phantasies - that of the plumber who unscrewed the bath and that of the unsuccessful journey to Gmunden. His father had correctly inferred from the latter that Hans had some aversion to Gmunden. This, by the way, is another good reminder of the fact that what emerges from the unconscious is to be understood in the light not of what goes before but of what comes after.

‘I asked him whether he was afraid, and if so of what.

‘Hans: "Because of falling in."

‘I: "But why were you never afraid when you had your bath in the little bath?"

‘Hans: "Why, I sat in that one. I couldn’t lie down in it, it was too small."

‘I: "When you went in a boat at Gmunden weren’t you afraid of falling into the water?"

‘Hans: "No, because I held on, so I couldn’t fall in. It’s only in the big bath that I’m afraid of falling in."

‘I: "But Mummy baths you in it. Are you afraid of Mummy dropping you in the water?"

‘Hans: "I’m afraid of her letting go and my head going in."

‘I: "But you know Mummy’s fond of you and won’t let go of you."

‘Hans: "I only just thought it."

‘I: "Why?"

‘Hans: "I don’t know at all."

‘I: "Perhaps it was because you’d been naughty and thought she didn’t love you any more?"

‘Hans: "Yes."

‘I: "When you were watching Mummy giving Hanna her bath, perhaps you wished she would let go of her so that Hanna should fall in?"

‘Hans: "Yes."'

Hans’s father, we cannot help thinking, had made a very good guess.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2055

‘April 12th. As we were coming back from Lainz in a second-class carriage, Hans looked at the black leather upholstery of the seats, and said: "Ugh! that makes me spit! Black drawers and black horses make me spit too, because I have to do lumf."

‘I: "Perhaps you saw something of Mummy’s that was black, and it frightened you?"

‘Hans: "Yes."

‘I: "Well, what was it?"

‘Hans: "I don’t know. A black blouse or black stockings."

‘I: "Perhaps it was black hair near her widdler, when you were curious and looked."

‘Hans (defending himself): "But I didn’t see her widdler."

‘Another time, he was frightened once more at a cart driving out of the yard gates opposite. "Don’t the gates look like a behind?" I asked.

‘He: "And the horses are the lumfs!" Since then, whenever he sees a cart driving out, he says: "Look, there’s a ‘lumfy’ coming!" This form of the word ("lumfy") is quite a new one to him; it sounds like a term of endearment. My sister-in-law always calls her child "Wumfy".

‘On April 13th he saw a piece of liver in the soup and exclaimed: "Ugh! A lumf!" Meat croquettes, too, he eats with evident reluctance, because their form and colour remind him of lumf.

‘In the evening my wife told me that Hans had been out on the balcony and had said: "I thought to myself Hanna was on the balcony and fell down off it." I had once or twice told him to be careful that Hanna did not get too near the balustrade when she was out on the balcony; for the railing was designed in the most unpractical way (by a metal-worker of the Secessionist movement) and had big gaps in it which I had to have filled in with wire netting. Hans’s repressed wish was very transparent. His mother asked him if he would rather Hanna were not there, to which he said "Yes".

‘April 14th. The theme of Hanna is uppermost. As you may remember from earlier records, Hans felt a strong aversion to the new-born baby that robbed him of a part of his parents’ love. This dislike has not entirely disappeared and is only partly overcompensated by an exaggerated affection.¹ He has already several times expressed a wish that the stork should bring no more babies and that we should pay him money not to bring any more "out of the big box" where babies are. (Compare his fear of furniture-vans. Does not a bus look like a big box?) Hanna screams such a lot, he says, and that’s a nuisance to him.

¹ The ‘Hanna’ theme immediately succeeded the ‘lumf’ theme, and the explanation of this at length begins to dawn upon us: Hanna was a lumf herself - babies were lumfs.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2056

‘Once he suddenly said: "Can you remember when Hanna came? She lay beside Mummy in bed, so nice and good." (His praise rang suspiciously hollow.)

‘And then as regards downstairs, outside the house. There is again great progress to be reported. Even drays cause him less alarm. Once he called out, almost with joy: "Here comes a horse with something black on its mouth!" And I was at last able to establish the fact that it was a horse with a leather muzzle. But Hans was not in the least afraid of this horse.

‘Once he knocked on the pavement with his stick and said: "I say, is there a man underneath? - some one buried? - or is that only in the cemetery?" So he is occupied not only with the riddle of life but with the riddle of death.

‘When we got indoors again I saw a box standing in the front hall, and Hans said: "Hanna travelled with us to Gmunden in a box like that. Whenever we travelled to Gmunden she travelled with us in the box. You don’t believe me again? Really, Daddy. Do believe me. We got a big box and it was full of babies; they sat in the bath." (A small bath had been packed inside the box.) "I put them in it. Really and truly. I can remember quite well."¹

‘I: "What can you remember?"

‘Hans: "That Hanna travelled in the box; because I haven’t forgotten about it. My word of honour!"

‘I: "But last year Hanna travelled with us in the railway carriage."

‘Hans: "But before that she always travelled with us in the box."

¹ Hans was now going off into a phantasy. As we can see, a box and a bath have the same meaning for him: they both represent the space which contains the babies. We must bear in mind Hans’s repeated assurances on this point.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2057

‘I: "Didn’t Mummy have the box?"

‘Hans: "Yes. Mummy had it."

‘I: "Where?"

‘Hans: "At home in the attic."

‘I: "Perhaps she carried it about with her?"¹

‘Hans: "No. And when we travel to Gmunden this time Hanna’ll travel in the box again."

‘I: "And how did she get out of the box, then?"

‘Hans: "She was taken out."

‘I: "By Mummy?"

‘Hans: "Mummy and me. Then we got into the carriage, and Hanna rode on the horse, and the coachman said ‘Gee-up’. The coachman sat up in front. Were you there too? Mummy knows all about it. Mummy doesn’t know; she’s forgotten about it already, but don’t tell her anything!"

‘I made him repeat the whole of this.

‘Hans: "Then Hanna got out."

‘I: "Why, she couldn’t walk at all then."

‘Hans: "Well then, we lifted her down."

‘I: "But how could she have sat on the horse? She couldn’t sit up at all last year."

‘Hans: "Oh yes, she sat up all right, and called out ‘Gee-up’, and whipped with her whip - ‘Gee-up! Gee-up!’ - the whip I used to have. The horse hadn’t any stirrups, but Hanna rode it. I’m not joking, you know, Daddy."'

What can be the meaning of the boy’s obstinate persistence in all this nonsense? Oh no, it was no nonsense: it was parody, it was Hans’s revenge upon his father. It was as much as to say: ‘If you really expect me to believe that the stork brought Hanna in October, when even in the summer, while we were travelling to Gmunden, I’d noticed how big Mother’s stomach was, - then I expect you to believe my lies.’ What can be the meaning of the assertion that even the summer before the last Hanna had travelled with them to Gmunden ‘in the box’, except that he knew about his mother’s pregnancy? His holding out the prospect of a repetition of this journey in the box in each successive year exemplifies a common way in which unconscious thoughts from the past emerge into consciousness; or it may have special reasons and express his dread of seeing a similar pregnancy repeated on their next summer holiday. We now see, moreover, what the circumstances were that had made him take a dislike to the journey to Gmunden, as his second phantasy had indicated.

¹ The box was of course the womb. (Hans’s father was trying to let him know that he understood this.) And the same is true of the caskets in which so many of the heroes of mythology were exposed, from the time of King Sargon of Agade onwards. - [Added 1923:] Cf. Rank’s study, Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden, 1909.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2058

‘Later on, I asked him how Hanna had actually come into his mother’s bed after she was born.’

This gave Hans a chance of letting himself go and fairly ‘stuffing’ his father.

‘Hans: "Hanna just came. Frau Kraus" (the midwife) "put her in the bed. She couldn’t walk, of course. But the stork carried her in his beak. Of course she couldn’t walk." (He went on without a pause.) "The stork came up the stairs up to the landing, and then he knocked and everybody was asleep, and he had the right key and unlocked the door and put Hanna in your¹ bed, and Mummy was asleep - no, the stork put her in her bed. It was the middle of the night, and then the stork put her in the bed very quietly, he didn’t trample about at all, and then he took his hat and went away again. No, he hadn’t got a hat."

‘I: "Who took his hat? The doctor, perhaps?"

‘Hans: "Then the stork went away; he went home, and then he rang at the door, and every one in the house stopped sleeping. But don’t tell this to Mummy or Tini" (the cook). "It’s a secret."

‘I: "Are you fond of Hanna?"

¹ Ironical, of course. Like his subsequent request that none of the secret should be betrayed to his mother.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2059

‘Hans: "Oh yes, very fond."

‘I: "Would you rather that Hanna weren’t alive or that she were?"

‘Hans: "I’d rather she weren’t alive."

‘I: "Why?"

‘Hans: "At any rate she wouldn’t scream so, and I can’t bear her screaming."

‘I: "Why, you scream yourself."

‘Hans: "But Hanna screams too."

‘I: "Why can’t you bear it?"

‘Hans: "Because she screams so loud."

‘I: "Why, she doesn’t scream at all."

‘Hans: "When she’s whacked on her bare bottom, then she screams."

‘I: "Have you ever whacked her?"

‘Hans: "When Mummy whacks her on her bottom, then she screams."

‘I: "And you don’t like that?"

‘Hans: "No. . . . Why? Because she makes such a row with her screaming."

‘I: "If you’d rather she weren’t alive, you can’t be fond of her at all."

‘Hans (assenting): "H’m, well."

‘I: "That was why you thought when Mummy was giving her her bath, if only she’d let go, Hanna would fall into the water . . ."

‘Hans (taking me up): ". . . and die."

‘I: "And then you’d be alone with Mummy. A good boy doesn’t wish that sort of thing, though."

‘Hans: "But he may THINK it."

‘I: "But that isn’t good."

‘Hans: "If he thinks it, it IS good all the same, because you can write it to the Professor."¹

¹ Well done, little Hans! I could wish for no better understanding of psycho-analysis from any grown-up.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2060

‘Later on I said to him: "You know, when Hanna gets bigger and can talk, you’ll be fonder of her."

‘Hans: "Oh no. I am fond of her. In the autumn, when she’s big, I shall go with her to the Stadtpark quite alone, and explain everything to her."

‘As I was beginning to give him some further enlightenment, he interrupted me, probably with the intention of explaining to me that it was not so wicked of him to wish that Hanna was dead.

‘Hans: "You know, all the same, she’d been alive a long time even before she was here. When she was with the stork she was alive too."

‘I: "No. Perhaps she wasn’t with the stork after all."

‘Hans: "Who brought her, then? The stork had got her."

‘I: "Where did he bring her from, then?"

‘Hans: "Oh - from him."

‘I: "Where had he got her, then?"

‘Hans: "In the box; in the stork-box."

‘I: "Well, and what does the box look like?"

‘Hans: "Red. Painted red." (Blood?)

‘I: "Who told you that?"

‘Hans: "Mummy . . . I thought it to myself . . . it’s in the book."

‘I: "In what book?"

‘Hans: "In the picture-book." (I made him fetch his first picture-book. In it was a picture of a stork’s nest with storks, on a red chimney. This was the box. Curiously enough, on the same page there was also a picture of a horse being shod. Hans had transferred the babies into the box, as they were not to be seen in the nest.)

‘I: "And what did the stork do with her?"

‘Hans: "Then the stork brought Hanna here. In his beak. You know, the stork that’s at Schönbrunn, and that bit the umbrella." (A reminiscence of an episode at Schönbrunn.)

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2061

‘I: "Did you see how the stork brought Hanna?"

‘Hans: ‘Why, I was still asleep, you know. A stork can never bring a little girl or a little boy in the morning."

‘I: "Why?"

‘Hans: "He can’t. A stork can’t do it. Do you know why: So that people shan’t see. And then, all at once, in the morning, there’s a little girl there."¹

‘I: "But, all the same, you were curious at the time to know how the stork did it?"

‘Hans: "Oh yes."

‘I: "What did Hanna look like when she came?"

‘Hans (hypocritically): "All white and lovely. So pretty"

‘I: "But when you saw her the first time you didn’t like her."

‘Hans: "Oh, I did; very much!"

‘I: "You were surprised that she was so small, though."

‘Hans: "Yes."

‘I: "How small was she?"

‘Hans: "Like a baby stork."

‘I: "Like what else? Like a lumf, perhaps?"

‘Hans: "Oh no. A lumf’s much bigger . . . a bit smaller than Hanna, really."'

I had predicted to his father that it would be possible to trace back Hans’s phobia to thoughts and wishes occasioned by the birth of his baby sister. But I had omitted to point out that according to the sexual theory of children a baby is a ‘lumf’, so that Hans’s path would lie through the excremental complex. It was owing to this neglect on my part that the progress of the case became temporarily obscured. Now that the matter had been cleared up, Hans’s father attempted to examine the boy a second time upon this important point.

¹ There is no need to find fault with Hans’s inconsistencies. In the previous conversation his disbelief in the stork had emerged from his unconscious and had been coupled with the exasperation he felt against his father for making so many mysteries. But he had now become calmer and was answering his father’s questions with official thoughts in which he had worked out glosses upon the many difficulties involved in the stork hypothesis.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2062

The next day, ‘I got Hans to repeat what he had told me yesterday. He said: "Hanna travelled to Gmunden in the big box, and Mummy travelled in the railway carriage, and Hanna travelled in the luggage train with the box; and then when we got to Gmunden Mummy and I lifted Hanna out and put her on the horse. The coachman sat up in front, and Hanna had the old whip" (the whip he had last year) "and whipped the horse and kept on saying ‘Gee-up’, and it was such fun, and the coachman whipped too. -The coachman didn’t whip at all, because Hanna had the whip. -The coachman had the reins - Hanna had the reins too." (On each occasion we drove in a carriage from the station to the house. Hans was here trying to reconcile fact and fancy.) "At Gmunden we lifted Hanna down from the horse, and she walked up the steps by herself." (Last year, when Hanna was at Gmunden, she was eight months old. The year before that - and Hans’s phantasy evidently related to that time his mother had been five months gone with child when we arrived at Gmunden.)

‘I: "Last year Hanna was there."

‘Hans: "Last year she drove in the carriage; but the year before that, when she was living with us . . ."

‘I: "Was she with us already then?"

‘Hans: "Yes. You were always there; you used always to go in the boat with me, and Anna was our servant."

‘I: "But that wasn’t last year. Hanna wasn’t alive then."

‘Hans: "Yes, she was alive then. Even while she was still travelling in the box she could run about and she could say ‘Anna’." (She has only been able to do so for the last four months.)

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2063

‘I: "But she wasn’t with us at all then."

‘Hans: "Oh yes, she was; she was with the stork."

‘I: "How old is she, then?"

‘Hans: "She’ll be two years old in the autumn. Hanna was there, you know she was."

‘I: "And when was she with the stork in the stork-box?"

‘Hans: "A long time before she travelled in the box, a very long time."

‘I: "How long has Hanna been able to walk, then? When she was at Gmunden she couldn’t walk yet."

‘Hans: "Not last year; but other times she could."

‘I: "But Hanna’s only been at Gmunden once."

‘Hans: "No. She’s been twice. Yes, that’s it. I can remember quite well. Ask Mummy, she’ll tell you soon enough."

‘I: "It’s not true, all the same."

‘Hans: "Yes, it is true. When she was at Gmunden the first time she could walk and ride, and later on she had to be carried. -No. It was only later on that she rode, and last year she had to be carried."

‘I: "But it’s only quite a short time that she’s been walking. At Gmunden she couldn’t walk."

‘Hans: "Yes. Just you write it down. I can remember quite well. -Why are you laughing?"

‘I: "Because you’re a fraud; because you know quite well that Hanna’s only been at Gmunden once."

‘Hans: "No, that isn’t true. The first time she rode on the horse . . . and the second time . . ." (He showed signs of evident uncertainty.)

‘I: "Perhaps the horse was Mummy?"

‘Hans: "No, a real horse in a fly."

‘I: "But we used always to have a carriage with two horses."

‘Hans: "Well, then, it was a carriage and pair."

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2064

‘I: "What did Hanna eat inside the box?"

‘Hans: "They put in bread-and-butter for her, and herring, and radishes" (the sort of thing we used to have for supper at Gmunden), "and as Hanna went along she buttered her bread-and-butter and ate fifty meals."

‘I: "Didn’t Hanna scream?"

‘Hans: "No."

‘I: "What did she do, then?"

‘Hans: "Sat quite still inside."

‘I: "Didn’t she push about?"

‘Hans: "No, she kept on eating all the time and didn’t stir once. She drank up two big mugs of coffee - by the morning it was all gone, and she left the bits behind in the box, the leaves of the two radishes and a knife for cutting the radishes. She gobbled everything up like a hare: one minute and it was all finished. It was a joke. Hanna and I really travelled together in the box; I slept the whole night in the box." (We did in fact, two years ago, make the journey to Gmunden by night.) "And Mummy travelled in the railway carriage. And we kept on eating all the time when we were driving in the carriage, too; it was jolly. - She didn’t ride on a horse at all . . ." (he now became undecided, for he knew that we had driven with two horses) " . . . she sat in the carriage. Yes, that’s how it was, but Hanna and I drove quite by ourselves . . . Mummy rode on the horse, and Karoline" (our maid last year) "on the other . . . I say, what I’m telling you isn’t a bit true."

‘I: "What isn’t true?"

‘Hans: "None of it is. I say, let’s put Hanna and me in the box¹ and I’II widdle into the box. I’II just widdle into my knickers; I don’t care a bit; there’s nothing at all shameful in it. I say, that isn’t a joke, you know; but it’s great fun, though."

¹ ‘The box standing in the front hall which we had taken to Gmunden as luggage.’

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2065

‘Then he told me the story of how the stork came - the same story as yesterday, except that he left out the part about the stork taking his hat when he went away.

‘I: "Where did the stork keep his latch-key?"

‘Hans: "In his pocket."

‘I: "And where’s the stork’s pocket?"

‘Hans: "In his beak."

‘I: "It’s in his beak! I’ve never seen a stork yet with a key in his beak."

‘Hans; "How else could he have got in? How did the stork come in at the door, then? No, it isn’t true; I just made a mistake. The stork rang at the front door and some one let him in."

‘I: "And how did he ring?"

‘Hans: "He rang the bell."

‘I: "How did he do that?"

‘Hans: "He took his beak and pressed on it with his beak."

‘I: "And did he shut the door again?"

‘Hans: "No, a maid shut it. She was up already, you see, and opened the door for him and shut it."

‘I: "Where does the stork live!"

‘Hans: "Where? In the box where he keeps the little girls. At Schönbrunn, perhaps."

‘I: "I’ve never seen a box at Schönbrunn."

‘Hans: "It must be farther off, then. -Do you know how the stork opens the box? He takes his beak - the box has got a key, too - he takes his beak, lifts up one’ ‘ (i.e. one-half of the beak) "and unlocks it like this." (He demonstrated the process on the lock of the writing-table.) "There’s a handle on it too."

‘I: "Isn’t a little girl like that too heavy for him?"

‘Hans: "Oh no."

‘I: "I say, doesn’t a bus look like a stork-box?"

‘Hans: "Yes,"

‘I: "And a furniture-waggon?"

‘Hans: "And a scallywaggon" ("scallywag" - a term of abuse for naughty children) "too."

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2066

‘April 17th. Yesterday Hans carried out his long-premeditated scheme of going across into the courtyard opposite. He would not do it to-day, as there was a cart standing at the loading dock exactly opposite the entrance gates. "When a cart stands there," he said to me, "I’m afraid I shall tease the horses and they’ll fall down and make a row with their feet."

‘I: "How does one tease horses!"

‘Hans: "When you’re cross with them you tease them, and when you shout ‘Gee-up’."¹

‘I: "Have you ever teased horses?"

‘Hans: "Yes, quite often. I’m afraid I shall do it, but I don’t really."

‘I: "Did you ever tease horses at Gmunden?"

‘Hans: "No."

‘I: "But you like teasing them?"

‘Hans: "Oh yes, very much."

‘I: "Would you like to whip them?"

‘Hans: "Yes."

‘I: "Would you like to beat the horses as Mummy beats Hanna? You like that too, you know."

‘Hans: "It doesn’t do the horses any harm when they’re beaten." (I said this to him once to mitigate his fear of seeing horses whipped.) "Once I really did it. Once I had the whip, and whipped the horse, and it fell down and made a row with its feet."

‘I: "When?"

‘Hans: "At Gmunden."

‘I: "A real horse? Harnessed to a cart?"

‘Hans: "It wasn’t in the cart."

¹ ‘Hans has often been very much terrified when drivers beat their horses and shout "Gee-up".’

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2067

‘I: "Where was it, then?"

‘Hans: "I just held it so that it shouldn’t run away." (Of course, all this sounded most improbable.)

‘I: "Where was that?"

‘Hans: "Near the trough."

‘I: "Who let you? Had the coachman left the horse standing there?"

‘Hans: "It was just a horse from the stables."

‘I: "How did it get to the trough?"

‘Hans: "I took it there."

‘I: "Where from? Out of the stables?"

‘Hans: "I took it out because I wanted to beat it."

‘I: "Was there no one in the stables?"

‘Hans: "Oh yes, Loisl." (The coachman at Gmunden.)

‘I: "Did he let you?"

‘Hans: "I talked nicely to him, and he said I might do it."

‘I: "What did you say to him?"

‘Hans: "Could I take the horse and whip it and shout at it. And he said ‘Yes’."

‘I: "Did you whip it a lot?"

‘Hans: "What I’ve told you isn’t the least true."

‘I: "How much of it’s true?"

‘Hans: "None of it’s true; I only told it you for fun."

‘I: "You never took a horse out of the stables?"

‘Hans: "Oh no."

‘I: "But you wanted to."

‘Hans: "Oh yes, wanted to. I’ve thought it to myself."

‘I: "At Gmunden?"

‘Hans: "No, only here. I thought it in the morning when I was quite undressed; no, in the morning in bed."

‘I: "Why did you never tell me about it?"

‘Hans: "I didn’t think of it."

‘I: "You thought it to yourself because you saw it in the street."

‘Hans: "Yes."

‘I: "Which would you really like to beat? Mummy, Hanna, or me?"

‘Hans: "Mummy."

‘I: "Why?"

‘Hans: "I should just like to beat her."

‘I: "When did you ever see any one beating their Mummy?"

‘Hans: "I’ve never seen any one do it, never in all my life."

‘I: "And yet you’d just like to do it. How would you like to set about it?"

‘Hans: "With a carpet-beater." (His mother often threatens to beat him with the carpet-beater.)

‘I was obliged to break off the conversation for to-day.

‘In the street Hans explained to me that buses, furniture vans, and coal-carts were stork-box carts.’

That is to say, pregnant women. Hans’s access of sadism immediately before cannot be unconnected with the present theme.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2068

‘April 21st. This morning Hans said that he had thought as follows: "There was a train at Lainz and I travelled with my Lainz Grandmummy to the Hauptzollamt station. You hadn’t got down from the bridge yet, and the second train was already at St. Veit. When you came down, the train was there already, and we got in."

‘(Hans was at Lainz yesterday. In order to get on to the departure platform one has to cross a bridge. From the platform one can see along the line as far as St. Veit station. The whole thing is a trifle obscure. Hans’s original thought had no doubt been that he had gone off by the first train, which I had missed, and that then a second train had come in from Unter St. Veit and that I had gone after him in it. But he had distorted a part of this runaway phantasy, so that he said finally: "Both of us only got away by the second train."

‘This phantasy is related to the last one, which was not interpreted, and according to which we took too long to put on our clothes in the station at Gmunden, so that the train carried us on.)

‘Afternoon, in front of the house. Hans suddenly ran indoors as a carriage with two horses came along. I could see nothing unusual about it, and asked him what was wrong. "The horses are so proud," he said, "that I’m afraid they’ll fall down." (The coachman was reining the horses in tight, so that they were trotting with short steps and holding their heads high. In fact their action was "proud".)

‘I asked him who it really was that was so proud.

‘He: "You are, when I come into bed with Mummy."

‘I: "So you want me to fall down?"

‘Hans: "Yes. You’ve got to be naked" (meaning "bare foot", as Fritzl had been) "and knock up against a stone and bleed, and then I’II be able to be alone with Mummy for a little bit at all events. When you come up into our flat I’II be able to run away quick so that you don’t see."

‘I: "Can you remember who it was that knocked up against the stone?"

‘He: "Yes, Fritzl."

‘I: "When Fritzl fell down, what did you think?"¹

‘He: "That you should hit the stone and tumble down."

‘I: "So you’d like to go to Mummy?"

‘He: "Yes."

‘I: "What do I really scold you for?"

‘He: "I don’t know." (!!)

‘I: "Why?"

‘He: "Because you’re cross."

‘I: "But that’s not true."

‘Hans: "Yes, it is true. You’re cross. I know you are. It must be true."

¹ So that in fact Fritzl did fall down - which he at one time denied.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2069

‘Evidently, therefore, my explanation that only little boys come into bed with their Mummies and that big ones sleep in their own beds had not impressed him very much.

‘I suspect that his desire to "tease" the horse, i.e. to beat it and shout at it, does not apply to his mother, as he pretended, but to me. No doubt he only put her forward because he was unwilling to admit the alternative to me. For the last few days he has been particularly affectionate to me.’

Speaking with the air of superiority which is so easily acquired after the event, we may correct Hans’s father, and explain that the boy’s wish to ‘tease’ the horse had two constituents; it was compounded of an obscure sadistic desire for his mother and of a clear impulse for revenge against his father. The latter could not be reproduced until the former’s turn had come to emerge in connection with the pregnancy complex. In the process of the formation of a phobia from the unconscious thoughts underlying it, condensation takes place; and for that reason the course of the analysis can never follow that of the development of the neurosis.

‘April 22nd. This morning Hans again thought something to himself: "A street-boy was riding on a truck, and the guard came and undressed the boy quite naked and made him stand there till next morning, and in the morning the boy gave the guard 50,000 florins so that he could go on riding on the truck."

‘(The Nordbahn runs past opposite our house. In a siding there stood a trolley on which Hans once saw a street-boy riding. He wanted to do so too; but I told him it was not allowed, and that if he did the guard would be after him. A second element in this phantasy is Hans’s repressed wish to be naked.)'

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2070

It has been noticeable for some time that Hans’s imagination was being coloured by images derived from traffic, and was advancing systematically from horses, which draw vehicles, to railways. In the same way a railway-phobia eventually becomes associated with every street-phobia.

‘At lunch-time I was told that Hans had been playing all the morning with an india-rubber doll which he called Grete. He had pushed a small penknife in through the opening to which the little tin squeaker had originally been attached, and had then torn the doll’s legs apart so as to let the knife drop out. He had said to the nurse-maid, pointing between the doll’s legs: "Look, there’s its widdler!"

‘I: "What was it you were playing at with your doll to-day?"

‘Hans: "I tore its legs apart. Do you know why? Because there was a knife inside it belonging to Mummy. I put it in at the place where the button squeaks, and then I tore apart its legs and it came out there."

‘I: "Why did you tear its legs apart? So that you could see its widdler?"

‘He: "Its widdler was there before; I could have seen it anyhow."

‘I: "What did you put the knife in for?"

‘He: "I don’t know."

‘I: "Well, what does the knife look like?"

‘He brought it to me.

‘I: "Did you think it was a baby, perhaps?"

‘He: "No, I didn’t think anything at all; but I believe the stork got a baby once - or some one."

‘I: "When?"

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2071

‘He: "Once. I heard so - or didn’t I hear it at all? - or did I say it wrong?"

‘I: "What does ‘say it wrong’ mean?"

‘He: "That it’s not true."

‘I: "Everything one says is a bit true."

‘He: "Well, yes, a little bit."

‘I (after changing the subject): "How do you think chickens are born?"

‘He: "The stork just makes them grow; the stork makes chickens grow - no, God does."

‘I explained to him that chickens lay eggs, and that out of the eggs there come other chickens.

‘Hans laughed.

‘I: "Why do you laugh?"

‘He: "Because I like what you’ve told me."

‘He said he had seen it happen already.

‘I: "Where?"

‘Hans: "You did it."

‘I: "Where did I lay an egg?"

‘Hans: "At Gmunden; you laid an egg in the grass, and all at once a chicken came hopping out. You laid an egg once; I know you did, I know it for certain. Because Mummy said so."

‘I: "I’II ask Mummy if that’s true."

‘Hans: "It isn’t true a bit. But I once laid an egg, and a chicken came hopping out."

‘I: "Where?"

‘Hans: "At Gmunden I lay down in the grass - no, I knelt down - and the children didn’t look on at me, and all at once in the morning I said: ‘Look for it, children; I laid an egg yesterday.’ And all at once they looked, and all at once they saw an egg, and out of it there came a little Hans. Well, what are you laughing for? Mummy didn’t know about it, and Karoline didn’t know, because no one was looking on, and all at once I laid an egg, and all at once it was there. Really and truly. Daddy, when does a chicken grow out of an egg? When it’s left alone? Must it be eaten?"

‘I explained the matter to him.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2072

‘Hans: "All right, let’s leave it with the hen; then a chicken’ll grow. Let’s pack it up in the box and let’s take it to Gmunden."'

As his parents still hesitated to give him the information which was already long overdue, little Hans had by a bold stroke taken the conduct of the analysis into his own hands. By means of a brilliant symptomatic act, ‘Look!’ he had said to them, ‘this is how I imagine that a birth takes place.’ What he had told the maid-servant about the meaning of his game with the doll had been insincere; to his father he explicitly denied that he had only wanted to see its widdler. After his father had told him, as a kind of payment on account, how chickens come out of eggs, Hans gave a combined expression to his dissatisfaction, his mistrust, and his superior knowledge in a charming piece of persiflage, which culminated with his last words in an unmistakable allusion to his sister’s birth.

‘I: "What were you playing at with your doll?"

‘Hans: "I said ‘Grete’ to her."

‘I: "Why?"

‘Hans: "Because I said ‘Grete’ to her."

‘I: "How did you play?"

‘Hans: ‘"I just looked after her like a real baby."

‘I: "Would you like to have a little girl?"

‘Hans: "Oh yes. Why not? I should like to have one, but Mummy mustn’t have one; I don’t like that."

(He has often expressed this view before. He is afraid of losing still more of his position if a third child arrives.)

‘I: "But only women have children."

‘Hans: "I’m going to have a little girl."

‘I: "Where will you get her, then?"

‘Hans: "Why, from the stork. He takes the little girl out, and all at once the little girl lays an egg, and out of the egg there comes another Hanna - another Hanna. Out of Hanna there comes another Hanna. No, one Hanna comes out."

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2073

‘I: "You’d like to have a little girl."

‘Hans: "Yes, next year I’m going to have one, and she’ll be called Hanna too."

‘I: "But why isn’t Mummy to have a little girl?"

‘Hans: "Because I want to have a little girl for once."

‘I: "But you can’t have a little girl."

‘Hans: "Oh yes, boys have girls and girls have boys."¹

‘I: "Boys don’t have children. Only women, only Mummies have children."

‘Hans: "But why shouldn’t I?"

‘I: "Because God’s arranged it like that."

‘Hans: "But why don’t you have one? Oh yes, you’ll have one all right. Just you wait."

‘I: "I shall have to wait some time."

‘Hans: "But I belong to you."

‘I: "But Mummy brought you into the world. So you belong to Mummy and me."

‘Hans: "Does Hanna belong to me or to Mummy?"

‘I: "To Mummy."

‘Hans: "No, to me. Why not to me and Mummy?"

‘I: "Hanna belongs to me, Mummy, and you."

‘Hans: "There you are, you see."'

So long as the child is in ignorance of the female genitals, there is naturally a vital gap in his comprehension of sexual matters.

‘On April 24th my wife and I enlightened Hans up to a certain point: we told him that children grow inside their Mummy, and are then brought into the world by being pressed out of her like a "lumf", and that this involves a great deal of pain.

‘In the afternoon we went out in front of the house. There was a visible improvement in his state. He ran after carts, and the only thing that betrayed a remaining trace of his anxiety was the fact that he did not venture away from the neighbourhood of the street-door and could not be induced to go for any considerable walk.

¹ Here is another bit of infantile sexual theory with an unsuspected meaning.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2074

‘On April 25th Hans butted me in the stomach with his head, as he has already done once before. I asked him if he was a goat.

‘"Yes," he said, "a ram." I enquired where he had seen a ram.

‘He: "At Gmunden: Fritzl had one." (Fritzl had a real lamb to play with.)

‘I: "You must tell me about the lamb. What did it do?"

‘Hans: "You know, Fräulein Mizzi" (a school-mistress who lived in the house) "used always to put Hanna on the lamb, but it couldn’t stand up then and it couldn’t butt. If you went up to it it used to butt, because it had horns. Fritzl used to lead it on a string and tie it to a tree. He always tied it to a tree."

‘I: "Did the lamb butt you?"

‘Hans: "It jumped up at me; Fritzl took me up to it once. . . . I went up to it once and didn’t know, and all at once it jumped up at me. It was such fun - I wasn’t frightened."

‘This was certainly untrue.

‘I: "Are you fond of Daddy?"

‘Hans: "Oh yes."

‘I: "Or perhaps not."

‘Hans was playing with a little toy horse. At that moment the horse fell down, and Hans shouted out: "The horse has fallen down! Look what a row it’s making!"

‘I: "You’re a little vexed with Daddy because Mummy’s fond of him."

‘Hans: "No."

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2075

‘I: "Then why do you always cry whenever Mummy gives me a kiss? It’s because you’re jealous."

‘Hans: "Jealous, yes."

‘I: "You’d like to be Daddy yourself."

‘Hans: "Oh yes."

‘I: "What would you like to do if you were Daddy?"

‘Hans: "And you were Hans? I’d like to take you to Lainz every Sunday - no, every week-day too. If I were Daddy I’d be ever so nice and good."

‘I: "But what would you like to do with Mummy?"

‘Hans: "Take her to Lainz, too."

‘I: "And what besides?"

‘Hans: "Nothing."

‘I: "Then why were you jealous?"

‘Hans: "I don’t know."

‘I: "Were you jealous at Gmunden, too?"

‘Hans: "Not at Gmunden." (This is not true.) "At Gmunden I had my own things. I had a garden at Gmunden and children too."

‘I: "Can you remember how the cow got a calf?"

‘Hans: "Oh yes. It came in a cart." (No doubt he had been told this at Gmunden; another attack on the stork theory.) "And another cow pressed it out of its behind." (This was already the fruit of his enlightenment, which he was trying to bring into harmony with the cart theory.)

‘I: "It isn’t true that it came in a cart; it came out of the cow in the cow-shed."

‘Hans disputed this, saying that he had seen the cart in the morning. I pointed out to him that he had probably been told this about the calf having come in a cart. In the end he admitted this, and said: "Most likely Berta told me, or not - or perhaps it was the landlord. He was there and it was at night, so it is true after all, what I’ve been telling you - or it seems to me nobody told me; I thought it to myself in the night."

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2076

‘Unless I am mistaken, the calf was taken away in a cart; hence the confusion.

‘I: "Why didn’t you think it was the stork that brought it?"

‘Hans: "I didn’t want to think that."

‘I: "But you thought the stork brought Hanna?"

‘Hans: "In the morning" (of the confinement) "I thought so. - I say, Daddy, was Herr Reisenbichler" (our landlord) "there when the calf came out of the cow?"¹

‘I: "I don’t know. Do you think he was?"

‘Hans: "I think so. . . . Daddy, have you noticed now and then that horses have something black on their mouths?"

‘I: "I’ve noticed it now and then in the street at Gmunden."

‘I: "Did you often get into bed with Mummy at Gmunden?"

‘Hans: "Yes."

‘I: "And you used to think to yourself you were Daddy?"

‘Hans: "Yes."

‘I: "And then you felt afraid of Daddy?"

‘Hans: "You know everything. I didn’t know anything."

‘I: "When Fritzl fell down you thought: ‘If only Daddy would fall down like that! ‘ And when the lamb butted you you thought: ‘If only it would butt Daddy!’ Can you remember the funeral at Gmunden?" (The first funeral that Hans had seen. He often recalls it, and it is no doubt a screen memory.)

‘Hans: "Yes. What about it?"

‘I: "You thought then that if only Daddy were to die you’d be Daddy."

‘Hans: "Yes."

‘I: "What carts are you still afraid of?"

¹ Hans, having good reason to mistrust information given him by grown-up people, was considering whether the landlord might not be more trustworthy than his father.

² The train of thought is as follows. For a long time his father had refused to believe what he said about there being something black on horses’ mouths, but finally it had been verified.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2077

‘Hans: "All of them."

‘I: "You know that’s not true."

‘Hans: "I’m not afraid of carriages and pair or cabs with one horse. I’m afraid of buses and luggage-carts, but only when they’re loaded up, not when they’re empty. When there’s one horse and the cart’s loaded full up, then I’m afraid; but when there are two horses and it’s loaded full up, then I’m not afraid."

‘I: "Are you afraid of buses because there are so many people inside?"

‘Hans: "Because there’s so much luggage on the top."

‘I: "When Mummy was having Hanna, was she loaded full up too?"

‘Hans: "Mummy’ll be loaded full up again when she has another one, when another one begins to grow, when another one’s inside her."

‘I: "And you’d like that?"

‘Hans: "Yes."

‘I: "You said you didn’t want Mummy to have another baby."

‘Hans: "Well, then she won’t be loaded up again. Mummy said if Mummy didn’t want one, God didn’t want one either. If Mummy doesn’t want one she won’t have one." (Hans naturally asked yesterday if there were any more babies inside Mummy. I told him not, and said that if God did not wish it none would grow inside her.)

‘Hans: "But Mummy told me if she didn’t want it no more’d grow, and you say if God doesn’t want it."

‘So I told him it was as I had said, upon which he observed: "You were there, though, weren’t you? You know better, for certain." He then proceeded to cross-question his mother, and she reconciled the two statements by declaring that if she didn’t want it God didn’t want it either.¹

¹ Ce que femme veut Dieu veut. But Hans, with his usual acumen, had once more put his finger upon a most serious problem.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2078

‘I: "It seems to me that, all the same, you do wish Mummy would have a baby."

‘Hans: "But I don’t want it to happen."

‘I: "But you wish for it?"

‘Hans: "Oh yes, wish."

‘I: "Do you know why you wish for it? It’s because you’d like to be Daddy."

‘Hans: "Yes. . . . How does it work?"

‘I: "How does what work?"

‘Hans: "You say Daddies don’t have babies; so how does it work, my wanting to be Daddy?"

‘I: "You’d like to be Daddy and married to Mummy; you’d like to be as big as me and have a moustache; and you’d like Mummy to have a baby."

‘Hans: "And, Daddy, when I’m married I’II only have one if I want to, when I’m married to Mummy, and if I don’t want a baby, God won’t want it either, when I’m married."

‘I: "Would you like to be married to Mummy?"

‘Hans: "Oh yes."'

It is easy to see that Hans’s enjoyment of his phantasy was interfered with by his uncertainty as to the part played by fathers and by his doubts as to whether the begetting of children would be under his control.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2079

‘On the evening of the same day, as Hans was being put to bed, he said to me: "I say, d’you know what I’m going to do now? Now I’m going to talk to Grete till ten o’clock; she’s in bed with me. My children are always in bed with me. Can you tell me why that is?" -As he was very sleepy already, I promised him that we should write it down next day, and he went to sleep.

‘I have already noticed in earlier records that since Hans’s return from Gmunden he has constantly been having phantasies about "his children", has carried on conversations with them, and so on.¹

‘So on April 26th I asked him why he was always thinking of his children.

‘Hans: "Why? Because I should so like to have children; but I don’t ever want it; I shouldn’t like to have them."²

‘I: "Have you always imagined that Berta and Olga and the rest were your children?"

‘Hans: "Yes. Franzl, and Fritzl, and Paul too" (his playmates at Lainz), "and Lodi." This is an invented girl’s name, that of his favourite child, whom he speaks of most often - I may here emphasize the fact that the figure of Lodi is not an invention of the last few days, but existed before the date of his receiving the latest piece of enlightenment (April 24th).

‘I: "Who is Lodi? Is she at Gmunden?"

‘Hans: "No."

‘I: "Is there a Lodi?"

‘Hans: "Yes, I know her."

‘I: "Who is she, then?"

‘Hans: "The one I’ve got here."

‘I: "What does she look like?"

‘Hans: "Look like? Black eyes, black hair. . . . I met her once with Mariedl" (at Gmunden) "as I was going into the town."

¹ There is no necessity on this account to assume in Hans the presence of a feminine strain of desire for having children. It was with his mother that Hans had had his most blissful experience as a child, and he was now repeating them, and himself playing the active part, which was thus necessarily that of mother.

² This startling contradiction was one between phantasy and reality, between wishing and having. Hans knew that in reality he was a child and that the other children would only be in his way; but in phantasy he was a mother and wanted children with whom he could repeat the endearments that he had himself experienced.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2080

‘When I went into the matter it turned out that this was an invention.¹

‘I: "So you thought you were their Mummy?"

‘Hans: "And really I was their Mummy."

‘I: "What did you do with your children?"

‘Hans: "I had them to sleep with me, the girls and the boys."

‘I: "Every day?"

‘Hans: "Why, of course."

‘I: "Did you talk to them?"

‘Hans: "When I couldn’t get all the children into the bed, I put some of the children on the sofa, and some in the pram, and if there were still some left over I took them up to the attic and put them in the box, and if there were any more I put them in the other box."

‘I: "So the stork-baby-boxes were in the attic?"

‘Hans: "Yes."

‘I: "When did you get your children? Was Hanna alive already?"

‘Hans: "Yes, she had been a long time."

‘I: "But who did you think you’d got the children from?"

‘Hans: "Why from me."²

‘I: "But at that time you hadn’t any idea that children came from some one."

‘Hans: "I thought the stork had brought them." (Clearly a lie and an evasion.)³

¹ It is possible, however, that Hans had exalted into his ideal some one whom he had met casually at Gmunden. The colour of this ideal’s eyes and hair, by the way, was copied from his mother.

² Hans could not help answering from the auto-erotic point of view.

³ They were the children of his phantasy, that is to say, of his masturbation.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2081

‘I: "You had Grete in bed with you yesterday, but you know quite well that boys can’t have children."

‘Hans: "Well, yes. But I believe they can, all the same."

‘I: "How did you hit upon the name Lodi? No girl’s called that. Lotti, perhaps?"

‘Hans: "Oh no, Lodi. I don’t know; but it’s a beautiful name, all the same."

‘I (jokingly): "Perhaps you mean a Schokolodi?"¹

‘Hans (promptly): "No, a Saffalodi,² . . . because I like eating sausages so much, and salami too."

‘I: "I say, doesn’t a Saffalodi look like a lumf"

‘Hans: "Yes."

‘I: "Well, what does a lumf look like?"

‘Hans: "Black. You know" (pointing at my eyebrows and moustache), "like this and like this."

‘I: "And what else? Round like a Saffaladi?"

‘Hans: "Yes."

‘I: "When you sat on the chamber and a lumf came, did you think to yourself you were having a baby?"

‘Hans (laughing): "Yes. Even at --- Street, and here as well."

‘I: "You know when the bus-horses fell down? The bus looked like a baby-box, and when the black horse fell down it was just like . . ."

‘Hans (taking me up): ". . . like having a baby."

‘I: "And what did you think when it made a row with its feet?"

‘Hans: "Oh, when I don’t want to sit on the chamber and would rather play, then I make a row like this with my feet." (He stamped his feet.)

‘This was why he was so much interested in the question whether people liked or did not like having children.

¹ [’Schokolade’ is the German for ‘chocolate’.]

² ‘"Saffaladi" means "Zervelatwurst"" ["saveloy", a kind of sausage]. My wife is fond of relating how her aunt always calls it "Soffilodi". Hans may have heard this.’

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2082

‘All day long to-day Hans has been playing at loading and unloading packing-cases; he said he wished he could have a toy waggon and boxes of that kind to play with. What used most to interest him in the courtyard of the Customs House opposite was the loading and unloading of the carts. And he used to be frightened most when a cart had been loaded up and was on the point of driving off. "The horses’ll fall down,"¹ he used to say. He used to call the doors of the Head Customs House shed "holes" (e.g. the first hole, second hole, third hole, etc.). But now, instead of "hole", he says "behind-hole".

‘The anxiety has almost completely disappeared, except that he likes to remain in the neighbourhood of the house, so as to have a line of retreat in case he is frightened. But he never takes flight into the house now, but stops in the street all the time. As we know, his illness began with his turning back in tears while he was out for a walk; and when he was obliged to go for a second walk he only went as far as the Hauptzollamt station on the Stadtbahn, from which our house can still be seen. At the time of my wife’s confinement he was of course kept away from her; and his present anxiety, which prevents him from leaving the neighbourhood of the house, is in reality the longing for her which he felt then.

‘April 30th. Seeing Hans playing with his imaginary children again, "Hullo," I said to him, "are your children still alive? You know quite well a boy can’t have any children."

‘Hans: "I know. I was their Mummy before, now I’m their Daddy."

‘I: "And who’s the children’s Mummy?"

‘Hans: "Why, Mummy, and you’re their Grandaddy."

‘I: "So then you’d like to be as big as me, and be married to Mummy, and then you’d like her to have children."

‘Hans: "Yes, that’s what I’d like, and then my Lainz Grandmummy" (my mother) "will be their Grannie."'

Things were moving towards a satisfactory conclusion. The little Oedipus had found a happier solution than that prescribed by destiny. Instead of putting his father out of the way, he had granted him the same happiness that he desired himself: he made him a grandfather and married him to his own mother too.

¹ Do we not use the word ‘niederkommen’ [literally, ‘to come down’] when a woman is delivered?

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2083

‘On May 1st Hans came to me at lunch-time and said: "D’you know what? Let’s write something down for the Professor."

‘I: "Well, and what shall it be?"

‘Hans: "This morning I was in the W.C. with all my children. First I did lumf and widdled, and they looked on. Then I put them on the seat and they widdled and did lumf, and I wiped their behinds with paper. D’you know why? Because I’d so much like to have children; then I’d do everything for them - take them to the W.C., clean their behinds, and do everything one does with children."'

After the admission afforded by this phantasy, it will scarcely be possible to dispute the fact that in Hans’s mind there was pleasure attached to the excretory functions.

‘In the afternoon he ventured into the Stadtpark for the first time. As it is the First of May, no doubt there was less traffic than usual, but still quite enough to have frightened him up to now. He was very proud of his achievement, and after tea I was obliged to go with him to the Stadtpark once again. On the way we met a bus; Hans pointed it out to me, saying: "Look! a stork-box cart!" If he goes with me to the Stadtpark again to-morrow, as we have planned, we shall really be able to regard his illness as cured.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2084

‘On May 2nd Hans came to me in the morning. "I say," he said, "I thought something to-day." At first he had forgotten it; but later on he related what follows, though with signs of considerable resistance: "The plumber came; and first he took away my behind with a pair of pincers, and then gave me another, and then the same with my widdler. He said: ‘Let me see your behind!’ and I had to turn round, and he took it away; and then he said: ‘Let me see your widdler!’"'

Hans’s father grasped the nature of this wishful phantasy, and did not hesitate a moment as to the only interpretation it could bear.

‘I: "He gave you a bigger widdler and a bigger behind."

‘Hans: "Yes."

‘I: "Like Daddy’s; because you’d like to be Daddy."

‘Hans: "Yes, and I’d like to have a moustache like yours and hairs like yours." (He pointed to the hairs on my chest.)

‘In the light of this, we may review the interpretation of Hans’s earlier phantasy to the effect that the plumber had come and unscrewed the bath and had stuck a borer into his stomach. The big bath meant a "behind", the borer or screwdriver was (as was explained at the time) a widdler.¹ The two phantasies are identical. Moreover, a new light is thrown upon Hans’s fear of the big bath. (This, by the way, has already diminished.) He dislikes his "behind" being too small for the big bath.’

In the course of the next few days Hans’s mother wrote to me more than once to express her joy at the little boy’s recovery.

¹ Perhaps, too, the word ‘borer’ [‘Bohrer’] was not chosen without regard for its connection with ‘born’ [‘geboren’] and ‘birth’ [‘Geburt’]. If so, the child could have made no distinction between ‘bored’ [‘gebohrt’] and ‘born’ [‘geboren’]. I accept this suggestion, made by an experienced fellow-worker, but I am not in a position to say whether we have before us here a deep and universal connection between the two ideas or merely the employment of a verbal coincidence peculiar to German. Prometheus (Pramantha), the creator of man, is also etymologically ‘the borer’. (Cf. Abraham, Traum und Mythus, 1909.)

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2085

A week later came a postscript from Hans’s father.

‘My dear Professor, I should like to make the following additions to Hans’s case history:

‘(1) The remission after he had been given his first piece of enlightenment was not so complete as I may have represented it. It is true that Hans went for walks; but only under compulsion and in a state of great anxiety. Once he went with me as far as the Hauptzollamt station, from which our house can still be seen, but could not be induced to go any farther.

‘(2) As regards "raspberry syrup" and "a gun for shooting with". Hans is given raspberry syrup when he is constipated. He also frequently confuses the words "shooting" and "shitting".¹

‘(3) Hans was about four years old when he was moved out of our bedroom into a room of his own.

‘(4) A trace of his disorder still persists, though it is no longer in the shape of fear but only in that of the normal instinct for asking questions. The questions are mostly concerned with what things are made of (trams, machines, etc.), who makes things, etc. Most of his questions are characterized by the fact that Hans asks them although he has already answered them himself. He only wants to make sure. Once when he had tired me out with his questions and I had said to him: "Do you think I can answer every question you ask?" he replied: "Well, I thought as you knew that about the horse you’d know this too."

‘(5) Hans only refers to his illness now as a matter of past history - "at the time when I had my nonsense".

‘(6) An unsolved residue remains behind; for Hans keeps cudgelling his brains to discover what a father has to do with his child, since it is the mother who brings it into the world. This can be seen from his questions, as, for instance: "I belong to you, too, don’t I?" (meaning, not only to his mother). It is not clear to him in what way he belongs to me. On the other hand, I have no direct evidence of his having, as you suppose, overheard his parents in the act of intercourse.

‘(7) In presenting the case one ought perhaps to insist upon the violence of his anxiety. Otherwise it might be said that the boy would have gone out for walks soon enough if he had been given a sound thrashing.’

¹ [In German ‘schiessen’ and ‘scheissen’.]

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2086

In conclusion let me add these words. With Hans’s last phantasy the anxiety which arose from his castration complex was also overcome, and his painful expectations were given a happier turn. Yes, the Doctor (the plumber) did come, he did take away his penis, - but only to give him a bigger one in exchange for it. For the rest, our young investigator has merely come somewhat early upon the discovery that all knowledge is patchwork, and that each step forward leaves an unsolved residue behind.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2087

III

DISCUSSION

I shall now proceed to examine this observation of the development and resolution of a phobia in a boy under five years of age, and I shall have to do so from three points of view. In the first place I shall consider how far it supports the assertions which I put forward in my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d). Secondly, I shall consider to what extent it can contribute towards our understanding of this very frequent form of disorder. And thirdly, I shall consider whether it can be made to shed any light upon the mental life of children or to afford any criticism of our educational aims.

(I)

My impression is that the picture of a child’s sexual life presented in this observation of little Hans agrees very well with the account I gave of it (basing my views upon psycho-analytic examinations of adults) in my Three Essays. But before going into the details of this agreement I must deal with two objections which will be raised against my making use of the present analysis for this purpose. The first objection is to the effect that Hans was not a normal child, but (as events - the illness itself, in fact - showed) had a predisposition to neurosis, and was a young ‘degenerate’; it would be illegitimate, therefore, to apply to other, normal children conclusions which might perhaps be true of him. I shall postpone consideration of this objection, since it only limits the value of the observation, and does not completely nullify it. According to the second and more uncompromising objection, an analysis of a child conducted by his father, who went to work instilled with my theoretical views and infected with my prejudices, must be entirely devoid of any objective worth. A child, it will be said, is necessarily highly suggestible, and in regard to no one, perhaps, more than to his own father; he will allow anything to be forced upon him, out of gratitude to his father for taking so much notice of him; none of his assertions can have any evidential value, and everything he produces in the way of associations, phantasies, and dreams will naturally take the direction into which they are being urged by every possible means. Once more, in short, the whole thing is simply ‘suggestion’ - the only difference being that in the case of a child it can be unmasked much more easily than in that of an adult.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2088

A singular thing. I can remember, when I first began to meddle in the conflict of scientific opinions twenty-two years ago, with what derision the older generation of neurologists and psychiatrists of those days received assertions about suggestion and its effects. Since then the situation has fundamentally changed. The former aversion has been converted into an only too ready acceptance; and this has happened not only as a consequence of the impression which the work of Liébeault and Bernheim and their pupils could not fail to create in the course of these two decades, but also because it has since been discovered how great an economy of thought can be effected by the use of the catchword ‘suggestion’. Nobody knows and nobody cares what suggestion is, where it comes from, or when it arises, - it is enough that everything awkward in the region of psychology can be labelled ‘suggestion’. I do not share the view which is at present fashionable that assertions made by children are invariably arbitrary and untrustworthy. The arbitrary has no existence in mental life. The untrustworthiness of the assertions of children is due to the predominance of their imagination, just as the untrustworthiness of the assertions of grown-up people is due to the predominance of their prejudices. For the rest, even children do not lie without a reason, and on the whole they are more inclined to a love of truth than are their elders. If we were to reject little Hans’s statements root and branch we should certainly be doing him a grave injustice. On the contrary, we can quite clearly distinguish from one another the occasions on which he was falsifying the facts or keeping them back under the compelling force of a resistance, the occasions on which, being undecided himself, he agreed with his father (so that what he said must not be taken as evidence), and the occasions on which, freed from every pressure, he burst into a flood of information about what was really going on inside him and about things which until then no one but himself had known. Statements made by adults offer no greater certainty. It is a regrettable fact that no account of a psycho-analysis can reproduce the impressions received by the analyst as he conducts it, and that a final sense of conviction can never be obtained from reading about it but only from directly experiencing it. But this disability attaches in an equal degree to analyses of adults.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2089

Little Hans is described by his parents as a cheerful, straightforward child, and so he should have been, considering the education given him by his parents, which consisted essentially in the omission of our usual educational sins. So long as he was able to carry on his researches in a state of happy naïveté, without a suspicion of the conflicts which were soon to arise out of them, he kept nothing back; and the observations made during the period before the phobia admit of no doubt or demur. It was with the outbreak of the illness and during the analysis that discrepancies began to make their appearance between what he said and what he thought; and this was partly because unconscious material, which he was unable to master all at once, was forcing itself upon him, and partly because the content of his thoughts provoked reservations on account of his relation to his parents. It is my unbiased opinion that these difficulties, too, turned out no greater than in many analyses of adults.

It is true that during the analysis Hans had to be told many things that he could not say himself, that he had to be presented with thoughts which he had so far shown no signs of possessing, and that his attention had to be turned in the direction from which his father was expecting something to come. This detracts from the evidential value of the analysis; but the procedure is the same in every case. For a psycho-analysis is not an impartial scientific investigation, but a therapeutic measure. Its essence is not to prove anything, but merely to alter something. In a psycho-analysis the physician always gives his patient (sometimes to a greater and some times to a less extent) the conscious anticipatory ideas by the help of which he is put in a position to recognize and to grasp the unconscious material. For there are some patients who need more of such assistance and some who need less; but there are none who get through without some of it. Slight disorders may perhaps be brought to an end by the subject’s unaided efforts, but never a neurosis - a thing which has set itself up against the ego as an element alien to it. To get the better of such an element another person must be brought in, and in so far as that other person can be of assistance the neurosis will be curable. If it is in the very nature of any neurosis to turn away from the ‘other person’ - and this seems to be one of the characteristics of the states grouped together under the name of dementia praecox - then for that very reason such a state will be incurable by any efforts of ours. It is true that a child, on account of the small development of his intellectual systems, requires especially energetic assistance. But, after all, the information which the physician gives his patient is itself derived in its turn from analytical experience; and indeed it is sufficiently convincing if, at the cost of this intervention by the physician, we are enabled to discover the structure of the pathogenic material and simultaneously to dissipate it.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2090

And yet, even during the analysis, the small patient gave evidence of enough independence to acquit him upon the charge of ‘suggestion’. Like all other children, he applied his childish sexual theories to the material before him without having received any encouragement to do so. These theories are extremely remote from the adult mind. Indeed, in this instance I actually omitted to warn Hans’s father that the boy would be bound to approach the subject of childbirth by way of the excretory complex. This negligence on my part, though it led to an obscure phase in the analysis, was nevertheless the means of producing a good piece of evidence of the genuineness and independence of Hans’s mental processes. He suddenly became occupied with ‘lumf’, without his father, who is supposed to have been practising suggestion upon him, having the least idea how he had arrived at that subject or what was going to come of it. Nor can his father be saddled with any responsibility for the production of the two plumber phantasies, which arose out of Hans’s early acquired ‘castration complex’. And I must here confess that, out of theoretical interest, I entirely concealed from Hans’s father my expectation that there would turn out to be some such connection, so as not to interfere with the value of a piece of evidence such as does not often come within one’s grasp.

If I went more deeply into the details of the analysis I could produce plenty more evidence of Hans’s independence of ‘suggestion’; but I shall break off the discussion of this preliminary objection at this point. I am aware that even with this analysis I shall not succeed in convincing any one who will not let himself be convinced, and I shall proceed with my discussion of the case for the benefit of those readers who are already convinced of the objective reality of unconscious pathogenic material. And I do this with the agreeable assurance that the number of such readers is steadily increasing.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2091

The first trait in little Hans which can be regarded as part of his sexual life was a quite peculiarly lively interest in his ‘widdler’ - an organ deriving its name from that one of its two functions which, scarcely the less important of the two, is not to be eluded in the nursery. This interest aroused in him the spirit of enquiry, and he thus discovered that the presence or absence of a widdler made it possible to differentiate between animate and inanimate objects. He assumed that all animate objects were like himself, and possessed this important bodily organ; he observed that it was present in the larger animals, suspected that this was so too in both his parents, and was not deterred by the evidence of his own eyes from authenticating the fact in his new-born sister. One might almost say that it would have been too shattering a blow to his ‘Weltanschauung’ if he had had to make up his mind to forgo the presence of this organ in a being similar to him; it would have been as though it were being torn away from himself. It was probably on this account that a threat of his mother’s, which was concerned precisely with the loss of his widdler, was hastily dismissed from his thoughts and only succeeded in making its effects apparent at a later period. The reason for his mother’s intervention had been that he used to like giving himself feelings of pleasure by touching his member: the little boy had begun to practise the commonest - and most normal - form of auto-erotic sexual activity.

The pleasure which a person takes in his own sexual organ may become associated with scopophilia (or sexual pleasure in looking) in its active and passive forms, in a manner which has been very aptly described by Alfred Adler (1908) as ‘confluence of instincts’. So little Hans began to try to get a sight of other people’s widdlers; his sexual curiosity developed, and at the same time he liked to exhibit his own widdler. One of his dreams, dating from the beginning of his period of repression, expressed a wish that one of his little girl friends should assist him in widdling, that is, that she should share the spectacle. The dream shows, therefore, that up till then this wish had subsisted unrepressed, and later information confirmed the fact that he had been in the habit of gratifying it. The active side of his sexual scopophilia soon became associated in him with a definite theme. He repeatedly expressed both to his father and his mother his regret that he had never yet seen their widdlers; and it was probably the need for making a comparison which impelled him to do this. The ego is always the standard by which one measures the external world; one learns to understand it by means of a constant comparison with oneself. Hans had observed that large animals had widdlers that were correspondingly larger than his; he consequently suspected that the same was true of his parents, and was anxious to make sure of this. His mother, he thought, must certainly have a widdler ‘like a horse’. He was then prepared with the comforting reflection that his widdler would grow with him. It was as though the child’s wish to be bigger had been concentrated on his genitals.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2092

Thus in little Hans’s sexual constitution the genital zone was from the outset the one among his erotogenic zones which afforded him the most intense pleasure. The only other similar pleasure of which he gave evidence was excretory pleasure, the pleasure attached to the orifices through which micturition and evacuation of the bowels are effected. In his final phantasy of bliss, with which his illness was overcome, he imagined he had children, whom he took to the W.C., whom he made to widdle, whose behinds he wiped - for whom, in short, he did ‘everything one can do with children’; it therefore seems impossible to avoid the assumption that during the period when he himself had been looked after as an infant these same performances had been the source of pleasurable sensations for him. He had obtained this pleasure from his erotogenic zones with the help of the person who had looked after him - his mother, in fact; and thus the pleasure already pointed the way to object-choice. But it is just possible that at a still earlier date he had been in the habit of giving himself this pleasure auto-erotically - that he had been one of those children who like retaining their excreta till they can derive a voluptuous sensation from their evacuation. I say no more than that it is possible, because the matter was not cleared up in the analysis; the ‘making a row with the legs’ (kicking about), of which he was so much frightened later on, points in that direction. But in any case these sources of pleasure had no particularly striking importance with Hans, as they so often have with other children. He early became clean in his habits, and neither bed-wetting nor diurnal incontinence played any part during his first years; no trace was observed in him of any inclination to play with his excrement, a propensity which is so revolting in adults, and which commonly makes its reappearance at the termination of processes of psychical involution.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2093

At this juncture it is as well to emphasize at once the fact that during his phobia there was an unmistakable repression of these two well-developed components of his sexual activity. He was ashamed of micturating before other people, accused himself of putting his finger to his widdler, made efforts to give up masturbating, and showed disgust at ‘lumf’ and ‘widdle’ and everything that reminded him of them. In his phantasy of looking after his children he undid this latter repression.

A sexual constitution like that of little Hans does not appear to carry with it a predisposition to the development either of perversions or of their negative (we will limit ourselves to a consideration of hysteria). As far as my experience goes (and there is still a real need for speaking with caution on this point) the innate constitution of hysterics - that this is also true of perverts is almost self-evident - is marked by the genital zone being relatively less prominent than the other erotogenic zones. But we must expressly except from this rule one particular ‘aberration’ of sexual life. In those who later become homosexuals we meet with the same predominance in infancy of the genital zone (and especially of the penis) as in normal persons.¹ Indeed it is the high esteem felt by the homosexual for the male organ which decides his fate. In his childhood he chooses women as his sexual object, so long as he assumes that they too possess what in his eyes is an indispensable part of the body; when he becomes convinced that women have deceived him in this particular, they cease to be acceptable to him as a sexual object. He cannot forgo a penis in any one who is to attract him to sexual intercourse; and if circumstances are favourable he will fix his libido upon the ‘woman with a penis’, a youth of feminine appearance. Homosexuals, then, are persons who, owing to the erotogenic importance of their own genitals, cannot do without a similar feature in their sexual object. In the course of their development from auto-erotism to object-love, they have remained at a point of fixation between the two.

¹ As my expectations led me to suppose, and as Sadger’s observations have shown, all such people pass through an amphigenic phase in childhood.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2094

There is absolutely no justification for distinguishing a special homosexual instinct. What constitutes a homosexual is a peculiarity not in his instinctual life but in his choice of an object. Let me recall what I have said in my Three Essays to the effect that we have mistakenly imagined the bond between instinct and object in sexual life as being more intimate than it really is. A homosexual may have normal instincts, but he is unable to disengage them from a class of objects defined by a particular determinant. And in his childhood, since at that period this determinant is taken for granted as being of universal application, he is able to behave like little Hans, who showed his affection to little boys and girls indiscriminately, and once described his friend Fritzl as ‘the girl he was fondest of’. Hans was a homosexual (as all children may very well be), quite consistently with the fact, which must always be kept in mind, that he was acquainted with only one kind of genital organ - a genital organ like his own.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1923:] I have subsequently (1923e) drawn attention to the fact that the period of sexual development which our little patient was passing through is universally characterized by acquaintance with only one sort of genital organ, namely, the male one. In contrast to the later period of maturity, this period is marked not by a genital primacy but by a primacy of the phallus.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2095

In his subsequent development, however, it was not to homosexuality that our young libertine proceeded, but to an energetic masculinity with traits of polygamy; he knew how to vary his behaviour, too, with his varying feminine objects - audaciously aggressive in one case, languishing and bashful in another. His affection had moved from his mother on to other objects of love, but at a time when there was a scarcity of these it returned to her, only to break down in a neurosis. It was not until this happened that it became evident to what a pitch of intensity his love for his mother had developed and through what vicissitudes it had passed. The sexual aim which he pursued with his girl playmates, of sleeping with them, had originated in relation to his mother. It was expressed in words which might be retained in maturity, though they would then bear a richer connotation.¹ The boy had found his way to object-love in the usual manner from the care he had received when he was an infant; and a new pleasure had now become the most important for him - that of sleeping beside his mother. I should like to emphasize the importance of pleasure derived from cutaneous contact as a component in this new aim of Hans’s, which, according to the nomenclature (artificial to my mind) of Moll, would have to be described as satisfaction of the instinct of contrectation.

¹ [The German ‘bei jemandem schlafen’, literally ‘to sleep with some one’, is used (like the English ‘to lie with’) in the sense of ‘to copulate with’.]

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2096

In his attitude towards his father and mother Hans confirms in the most concrete and uncompromising manner what I have said in my Interpretation of Dreams and in my Three Essays with regard to the sexual relations of a child to his parents. Hans really was a little Oedipus who wanted to have his father ‘out of the way’, to get rid of him, so that he might be alone with his beautiful mother and sleep with her. This wish had originated during his summer holidays, when the alternating presence and absence of his father had drawn Hans’s attention to the condition upon which depended the intimacy with his mother which he longed for. At that time the form taken by the wish had been merely that his father should ‘go away’; and at a later stage it became possible for his fear of being bitten by a white horse to attach itself directly on to this form of the wish, owing to a chance impression which he received at the moment of some one else’s departure. But subsequently (probably not until they had moved back to Vienna, where his father’s absences were no longer to be reckoned on) the wish had taken the form that his father should be permanently away - that he should be ‘dead’. The fear which sprang from this death-wish against his father, and which may thus be said to have had a normal motive, formed the chief obstacle to the analysis until it was removed during the conversation in my consulting-room.¹

¹ It is quite certain that Hans’s two associations, ‘raspberry syrup’ and ‘a gun for shooting people dead with’ must have had more than one set of determinants. They probably had just as much to do with his hatred of his father as with his constipation complex. His father, who himself guessed the latter connection, also suggested that ‘raspberry syrup’ might be related to ‘blood’.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2097

But Hans was not by any means a bad character; he was not even one of those children who at his age still give free play to the propensity towards cruelty and violence which is a constituent of human nature. On the contrary, he had an unusually kind-hearted and affectionate disposition; his father reported that the transformation of aggressive tendencies into feelings of pity took place in him at a very early age. Long before the phobia he had become uneasy when he saw the horses in a merry-go-round being beaten; and he was never unmoved if any one wept in his presence. At one stage in the analysis a piece of suppressed sadism made its appearance in a particular context:¹ but it was suppressed sadism, and we shall presently have to discover from the content what it stood for and what it was meant to replace. And Hans deeply loved the father against whom he cherished these death-wishes; and while his intellect demurred to such a contradiction,² he could not help demonstrating the fact of its existence, by hitting his father and immediately afterwards kissing the place he had hit. We ourselves, too, must guard against making a difficulty of such a contradiction. The emotional life of man is in general made up of pairs of contraries such as these.³ Indeed, if it were not so, repressions and neuroses would perhaps never come about. In the adult these pairs of contrary emotions do not as a rule become simultaneously conscious except at the climaxes of passionate love; at other times they usually go on suppressing each other until one of them succeeds in keeping the other altogether out of sight. But in children they can exist peaceably side by side for quite a considerable time.

¹ His wanting to beat and tease horses.

² See the critical question he addressed to his father (p. 2033).

³              Das heisst, ich bin kein ausgeklügelt Buch.

Ich bin ein Mensch mit seinem Widerspruch.

C. F. Meyer, Huttens letzte Tage.

[In fact, I am no clever work of fiction;

I am a man, with all his contradiction.]

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2098

The most important influence upon the course of Hans’s psychosexual development was the birth of a baby sister when he was three and a half years old. That event accentuated his relations to his parents and gave him some insoluble problems to think about; and later, as he watched the way in which the infant was looked after, the memory-traces of his own earliest experiences of pleasure were revived in him. This influence, too, is a typical one: in an unexpectedly large number of life-histories, normal as well as pathological, we find ourselves obliged to take as our starting-point an outburst of sexual pleasure and sexual curiosity connected, like this one, with the birth of the next child. Hans’s behaviour towards the new arrival was just what I have described in The Interpretation of Dreams. In his fever a few days later he betrayed how little he liked the addition to the family. Affection for his sister might come later,¹ but his first attitude was hostility. From that time forward fear that yet another baby might arrive found a place among his conscious thoughts. In the neurosis, his hostility, already suppressed, was represented by a special fear - a fear of the bath. In the analysis he gave undisguised expression to his death-wish against his sister, and was not content with allusions which required supplementing by his father. His inner conscience did not consider this wish so wicked as the analogous one against his father; but it is clear that in his unconscious he treated both persons in the same way, because they both took his mummy away from him, and interfered with his being alone with her.

Moreover, this event and the feelings that were revived by it gave a new direction to his wishes. In his triumphant final phantasy he summed up all of his erotic wishes, both those derived from his auto-erotic phase and those connected with his object-love. In that phantasy he was married to his beautiful mother and had innumerable children whom he could look after in his own way.

¹ Cf. his plans of what he would do when his sister was old enough to speak (p. 2060).

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2099

(II)

One day while Hans was in the street he was seized with an attack of anxiety. He could not yet say what it was he was afraid of; but at the very beginning of this anxiety-state he betrayed to his father his motive for being ill, the advantage he derived from it. He wanted to stay with his mother and to coax with her; his recollection that he had also been separated from her at the time of the baby’s birth may also, as his father suggests, have contributed to his longing. It soon became evident that his anxiety was no longer reconvertible into longing; he was afraid even when his mother went with him. In the meantime indications appeared of what it was to which his libido (now changed into anxiety) had become attached. He gave expression to the quite specific fear that a white horse would bite him.

Disorders of this kind are called ‘phobias’, and we might classify Hans’s case as an agoraphobia if it were not for the fact that it is a characteristic of that complaint that the locomotion of which the patient is otherwise incapable can always be easily performed when he is accompanied by some specially selected person - in the last resort, by the physician. Hans’s phobia did not fulfil this condition; it soon ceased having any relation to the question of locomotion and became more and more clearly concentrated upon horses. In the early days of his illness, when the anxiety was at its highest pitch, he expressed a fear that ‘the horse’ll come into the room’, and it was this that helped me so much towards understanding his condition.

In the classificatory system of the neuroses no definite position has hitherto been assigned to ‘phobias’. It seems certain that they should only be regarded as syndromes which may form part of various neuroses and that we need not rank them as an independent pathological process. For phobias of the kind to which little Hans’s belongs, and which are in fact the most common, the name of ‘anxiety-hysteria’ seems to me not inappropriate; I suggested the term to Dr. W. Stekel when he was undertaking a description of neurotic anxiety states,¹ and I hope it will come into general use. It finds its justification in the similarity between the psychological structure of these phobias and that of hysteria - a similarity which is complete except upon a single point. That point, however, is a decisive one and well adapted for purposes of differentiation. For in anxiety-hysteria the libido which has been liberated from the pathogenic material by repression is not converted (that is, diverted from the mental sphere into a somatic innervation), but is set free In the clinical cases that we meet with, this ‘anxiety-hysteria’ may be combined with ‘conversion-hysteria’ in any proportion. There exist cases of pure conversion-hysteria without any trace of anxiety, just as there are cases of simple anxiety-hysteria, which exhibit feelings of anxiety and phobias, but have no admixture of conversion. The case of little Hans is one of the latter sort.

¹ Nervöse Angstzustände und ihre Behandlung, 1908.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2100

Anxiety-hysterias are the most common of all psychoneurotic disorders. But, above all, they are those which make their appearance earliest in life; they are par excellence the neuroses of childhood. When a mother uses such phrases as that her child’s ‘nerves’ are in a bad state, we can be certain that in nine cases out of ten the child is suffering from some kind of anxiety or from many kinds at once. Unfortunately the finer mechanism of these highly significant disorders has not yet been sufficiently studied. It has not yet been established whether anxiety-hysteria is determined, in contradistinction to conversion-hysteria and other neuroses, solely by constitutional factors or solely by accidental experiences, or by what combination of the two.¹ It seems to me that of all neurotic disorders it is the least dependent upon a special constitutional predisposition and that it is consequently the most easily acquired at any time of life.

One essential characteristic of anxiety-hysterias is very easily pointed out. An anxiety-hysteria tends to develop more and more into a ‘phobia’. In the end the patient may have got rid of all his anxiety, but only at the price of subjecting himself to all kinds of inhibitions and restrictions. From the outset in anxiety-hysteria the mind is constantly at work in the direction of once more psychically binding the anxiety which has become liberated; but this work can neither bring about a retransformation of the anxiety into libido, nor can it establish any contact with the complexes which were the source of the libido. Nothing is left for it but to cut off access to every possible occasion that might lead to the development of anxiety, by erecting mental barriers in the nature of precautions, inhibitions, or prohibitions; and it is these defensive structures that appear to us in the form of phobias and that constitute to our eyes the essence of the disease.

The treatment of anxiety-hysteria may be said hitherto to have been a purely negative one. Experience has shown that it is impossible to effect the cure of a phobia (and even in certain circumstances dangerous to attempt to do so) by violent means, that is, by first depriving the patient of his defences and then putting him in a situation in which he cannot escape the liberation of his anxiety. Consequently, nothing can be done but to leave the patient to look for protection wherever he thinks he may find it; and he is merely regarded with a not very helpful contempt for his ‘incomprehensible cowardice’.

Little Hans’s parents were determined from the very beginning of his illness that he was neither to be laughed at nor bullied, but that access must be obtained to his repressed wishes by means of psycho-analysis. The extraordinary pains taken by Hans’s father were rewarded by success, and his reports will give us an opportunity of penetrating into the fabric of this type of phobia and of following the course of its analysis.

¹ [Footnote added 1923:] The question which is raised here has not been pursued further. But there is no reason to suppose that anxiety-hysteria is an exception to the rule that both predisposition and experience must co-operate in the aetiology of a neurosis. Rank’s view of the effects of the trauma of birth seems to throw special light upon the predisposition to anxiety-hysteria which is so strong in childhood.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2101

I think it is not unlikely that the extensive and detailed character of the analysis may have made it somewhat obscure to the reader. I shall therefore begin by giving a brief resume of it, in which I shall omit all distracting side-issues and shall draw attention to the results as they came to light one after the other.

The first thing we learn is that the outbreak of the anxiety state was by no means so sudden as appeared at first sight. A few days earlier the child had woken from an anxiety-dream to the effect that his mother had gone away, and that now he had no mother to coax with. This dream alone points to the presence of a repressive process of ominous intensity. We cannot explain it, as we can so many other anxiety-dreams, by supposing that the child had in his dream felt anxiety arising from some somatic cause and had made use of the anxiety for the purpose of fulfilling an unconscious wish which would otherwise have been deeply repressed.¹ We must regard it rather as a genuine punishment and repression dream, and, moreover, as a dream which failed in its function, since the child woke from his sleep in a state of anxiety. We can easily reconstruct what actually occurred in the unconscious. The child dreamt of exchanging endearments with his mother and of sleeping with her; but all the pleasure was transformed into anxiety, and all the ideational content into its opposite. Repression had defeated the purpose of the mechanism of dreaming.

But the beginnings of this psychological situation go back further still. During the preceding summer Hans had had similar moods of mingled longing and apprehension, in which he had said similar things; and at that time they had secured him the advantage of being taken by his mother into her bed. We may assume that since then Hans had been in a state of intensified sexual excitement, the object of which was his mother. The intensity of this excitement was shown by his two attempts at seducing his mother (the second of which occurred just before the outbreak of his anxiety); and he found an incidental channel of discharge for it by masturbating every evening and in that way obtaining gratification. Whether the sudden change-over of this excitement into anxiety took place spontaneously, or as a result of his mother’s rejection of his advances, or owing to the accidental revival of earlier impressions by the ‘precipitating cause’ of his illness (about which we shall hear presently) - this we cannot decide; and, indeed, it is a matter of indifference, for these three alternative possibilities cannot be regarded as mutually incompatible. The fact remains that his sexual excitement suddenly changed into anxiety.

¹ See my Interpretation of Dreams.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2102

We have already described the child’s behaviour at the beginning of his anxiety, as well as the first content which he assigned to it, namely, that a horse would bite him. It was at this point that the first piece of therapy was interposed. His parents represented to him that his anxiety was the result of masturbation, and encouraged him to break himself of the habit. I took care that when they spoke to him great stress was laid upon his affection for his mother, for that was what he was trying to replace by his fear of horses. This first intervention brought a slight improvement, but the ground was soon lost again during a period of physical illness. Hans’s condition remained unchanged. Soon afterwards he traced back his fear of being bitten by a horse to an impression he had received at Gmunden. A father had addressed his child on her departure with these words of warning: ‘Don’t put your finger to the horse; if you do, it’ll bite you.’ The words, ‘don’t put your finger to’, which Hans used in reporting this warning, resembled the form of words in which the warning against masturbation had been framed. It seemed at first, therefore, as though Hans’s parents were right in supposing that what he was frightened of was his own masturbatory indulgence. But the whole nexus remained loose, and it seemed to be merely by chance that horses had become his bugbear.

I had expressed a suspicion that Hans’s repressed wish might now be that he wanted at all costs to see his mother’s widdler. As his behaviour to a new maid fitted in with this hypothesis, his father gave him his first piece of enlightenment, namely, that women have no widdlers. He reacted to this first effort at helping him by producing a phantasy that he had seen his mother showing her widdler.¹ This phantasy and a remark made by him in conversation, to the effect that his widdler was ‘fixed in, of course’, allow us our first glimpse into the patient’s unconscious mental processes. The fact was that the threat of castration made to him by his mother some fifteen months earlier was now having a deferred effect upon him. For his phantasy that his mother was doing the same as he had done (the familiar tu quoque repartee of inculpated children) was intended to serve as a piece of self-justification; it was a protective or defensive phantasy. At the same time we must remark that it was Hans’s parents who had extracted from the pathogenic material operating in him the particular theme of his interest in widdlers. Hans followed their lead in this matter, but he had not yet taken any line of his own in the analysis. And no therapeutic success was to be observed. The analysis had passed far away from the subject of horses; and the information that women have no widdlers was calculated, if anything, to increase his concern for the preservation of his own.

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] The context enables us to add: ‘and touching it’ (p. 2024). After all, he himself could not show his widdler without touching it.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2103

Therapeutic success, however, is not our primary aim; we endeavour rather to enable the patient to obtain a conscious grasp of his unconscious wishes. And this we can achieve by working upon the basis of the hints he throws out, and so, with the help of our interpretative technique, presenting the unconscious complex to his consciousness in our own words. There will be a certain degree of similarity between that which he hears from us and that which he is looking for, and which, in spite of all resistances, is trying to force its way through to consciousness; and it is this similarity that will enable him to discover the unconscious material. The physician is a step in front of him in knowledge; and the patient follows along his own road, until the two meet at the appointed goal. Beginners in psycho-analysis are apt to assimilate these two events, and to suppose that the moment at which one of the patient’s unconscious complexes has become known to them is also the moment at which the patient himself recognizes it. They are expecting too much when they think that they will cure the patient by informing him of this piece of knowledge; for he can do no more with the information than make use of it to help himself in discovering the unconscious complex where it is anchored in his unconscious. A first success of this sort had now been achieved with Hans. Having partly mastered his castration complex, he was now able to communicate his wishes in regard to his mother. He did so, in what was still a distorted form, by means of the phantasy of the two giraffes, one of which was calling out in vain because Hans had taken possession of the other. He represented the ‘taking possession of’ pictorially as ‘sitting down on’. His father recognized the phantasy as a reproduction of a bedroom scene which used to take place in the morning between the boy and his parents; and he quickly stripped the underlying wish of the disguise which it still wore. The boy’s father and mother were the two giraffes. The reason for the choice of a giraffe-phantasy for the purposes of disguise was fully explained by a visit that the boy had paid to those same large beasts at Schönbrunn a few days earlier, by the giraffe-drawing, belonging to an earlier period, which had been preserved by his father, and also, perhaps, by an unconscious comparison based upon the giraffe’s long, stiff neck.¹ It may be remarked that the giraffe, as being a large animal and interesting on account of its widdler, was a possible competitor with the horse for the role of bugbear; moreover, the fact that both his father and his mother appeared as giraffes offered a hint which had not yet been followed up, as regards the interpretation of the anxiety-horses.

¹ Hans’s admiration of his father’s neck later on would fit in with this.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2104

Immediately after the giraffe story Hans produced two minor phantasies: one of his forcing his way into a forbidden space at Schönbrunn, and the other of his smashing a railway-carriage window on the Stadtbahn. In each case the punishable nature of the action was emphasized, and in each his father appeared as an accomplice. Unluckily his father failed to interpret either of these phantasies, so that Hans himself gained nothing from telling them. In an analysis, however, a thing which has not been understood inevitably reappears; like an unlaid ghost, it cannot rest until the mystery has been solved and the spell broken.

There are no difficulties in the way of our understanding these two criminal phantasies. They belonged to Hans’s complex of taking possession of his mother. Some kind of vague notion was struggling in the child’s mind of something that he might do with his mother by means of which his taking possession of her would be consummated; for this elusive thought he found certain pictorial representations, which had in common the qualities of being violent and forbidden, and the content of which strikes us as fitting in most remarkably well with the hidden truth. We can only say that they were symbolic phantasies of intercourse, and it was no irrelevant detail that his father was represented as sharing in his actions: ‘I should like’, he seems to have been saying, ‘to be doing something with my mother, something forbidden; I do not know what it is, but I do know that you are doing it too.’

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2105

The giraffe phantasy strengthened a conviction which had already begun to form in my mind when Hans expressed his fear that ‘the horse’ll come into the room’; and I thought the right moment had now arrived for informing him that he was afraid of his father because he himself nourished jealous and hostile wishes against him - for it was essential to postulate this much with regard to his unconscious impulses. In telling him this, I had partly interpreted his fear of horses for him: the horse must be his father - whom he had good internal reasons for fearing. Certain details of which Hans had shown he was afraid, the black on horses’ mouths and the things in front of their eyes (the moustaches and eyeglasses which are the privilege of a grown-up man), seemed to me to have been directly transposed from his father on to the horses.

By enlightening Hans on this subject I had cleared away his most powerful resistance against allowing his unconscious thoughts to be made conscious; for his father was himself acting as his physician. The worst of the attack was now over; there was a plentiful flow of material; the little patient summoned up courage to describe the details of his phobia, and soon began to take an active share in the conduct of the analysis.¹

¹ Even in analyses in which the physician and the patient are strangers, fear of the father plays one of the most important parts as a resistance against the reproduction of the unconscious pathogenic material. Resistances are sometimes in the nature of ‘motifs’. But sometimes, as in the present instance, one piece of the unconscious material is capable from its actual content of operating as an inhibition against the reproduction of another piece.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2106

It was only then that we learnt what the objects and impressions were of which Hans was afraid. He was not only afraid of horses biting him - he was soon silent upon that point - but also of carts, of furniture-vans, and of buses (their common quality being, as presently became clear, that they were all heavily loaded), of horses that started moving, of horses that looked big and heavy, and of horses that drove quickly. The meaning of these specifications was explained by Hans himself: he was afraid of horses falling down, and consequently incorporated in his phobia everything that seemed likely to facilitate their falling down.

It not at all infrequently happens that it is only after doing a certain amount of psycho-analytic work with a patient that an analyst can succeed in learning the actual content of a phobia, the precise form of words of an obsessional impulse, and so on. Repression has not only descended upon the unconscious complexes, but it is continually attacking their derivatives as well, and even prevents the patient from becoming aware of the products of the disease itself. The analyst thus finds himself in the position, curious for a doctor, of coming to the help of a disease, and of procuring it its due of attention. But only those who entirely misunderstand the nature of psycho-analysis will lay stress upon this phase of the work and suppose that on its account harm is likely to be done by analysis. The fact is that you must catch your thief before you can hang him, and that it requires some expenditure of labour to get securely hold of the pathological structures - at the destruction of which the treatment is aimed.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2107

I have already remarked in the course of my running commentary on the case history that it is most instructive to plunge in this way into the details of a phobia, and thus arrive at a conviction of the secondary nature of the relation between the anxiety and its objects. It is this that accounts for phobias being at once so curiously diffuse and so strictly conditioned. It is evident that the material for the particular disguises which Hans’s fear adopted was collected from the impressions to which he was all day long exposed owing to the Head Customs House being situated on the opposite side of the street. In this connection, too, he showed signs of an impulse - though it was now inhibited by his anxiety - to play with the loads on the carts, with the packages, casks and boxes, like the street-boys.

It was at this stage of the analysis that he recalled the event, insignificant in itself, which immediately preceded the outbreak of the illness and may no doubt be regarded as the precipitating cause of its outbreak. He went for a walk with his mother, and saw a bus-horse fall down and kick about with its feet. This made a great impression on him. He was terrified, and thought the horse was dead; and from that time on he thought that all horses would fall down. His father pointed out to him that when he saw the horse fall down he must have thought of him, his father, and have wished that he might fall down in the same way and be dead. Hans did not dispute this interpretation; and a little while later he played a game consisting of biting his father, and so showed that he accepted the theory of his having identified his father with the horse he was afraid of. From that time forward his behaviour to his father was unconstrained and fearless, and in fact a trifle overbearing. Nevertheless his fear of horses persisted; nor was it yet clear through what chain of associations the horse’s falling down had stirred up his unconscious wishes.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2108

Let me summarize the results that had so far been reached. Behind the fear to which Hans first gave expression, the fear of a horse biting him, we had discovered a more deeply seated fear, the fear of horses falling down; and both kinds of horses, the biting horse and the falling horse, had been shown to represent his father, who was going to punish him for the evil wishes he was nourishing against him. Meanwhile the analysis had moved away from the subject of his mother.

Quite unexpectedly, and certainly without any prompting from his father, Hans now began to be occupied with the ‘lumf’ complex, and to show disgust at things that reminded him of evacuating his bowels. His father, who was reluctant to go with him along that line, pushed on with the analysis through thick and thin in the direction in which he wanted to go. He elicited from Hans the recollection of an event at Gmunden, the impression of which lay concealed behind that of the falling bus-horse. While they were playing at horses, Fritzl, the playmate of whom he was so fond, but at the same time, perhaps, his rival with his many girl friends, had hit his foot against a stone and had fallen down, and his foot had bled. Seeing the bus-horse fall had reminded him of this accident. It deserves to be noticed that Hans, who was at the moment concerned with other things, began by denying that Fritzl had fallen down (though this, was the event which formed the connection between the two scenes) and only admitted it at a later stage of the analysis. It is especially interesting, however, to observe the way in which the transformation of Hans’s libido into anxiety was projected on to the principal object of his phobia, on to horses. Horses interested him the most of all the large animals; playing at horses was his favourite game with the other children. I had a suspicion - and this was confirmed by Hans’s father when I asked him - that the first person who had served Hans as a horse must have been his father; and it was this that had enabled him to regard Fritzl as a substitute for his father when the accident happened at Gmunden. When repression had set in and brought a revulsion of feeling along with it, horses, which had till then been associated with so much pleasure, were necessarily turned into objects of fear.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2109

But, as we have already said, it was owing to the intervention of Hans’s father that this last important discovery was made of the way in which the precipitating cause of the illness had operated. Hans himself was occupied with his lumf interests, and thither at last we must follow him. We learn that formerly Hans had been in the habit of insisting upon accompanying his mother to the W. C., and that he had revived this custom with his friend Berta at a time when she was filling his mother’s place, until the fact became known and he was forbidden to do so. Pleasure taken in looking on while some one one loves performs the natural functions is once more a ‘confluence of instincts’, of which we have already noticed an instance in Hans. In the end his father went into the lumf symbolism, and recognized that there was an analogy between a heavily loaded cart and a body loaded with faeces, between the way in which a cart drives out through a gateway and the way in which faeces leave the body, and so on.

By this time, however, the position occupied by Hans in the analysis had become very different from what it had been at an earlier stage. Previously, his father had been able to tell him in advance what was coming, while Hans had merely followed his lead and come trotting after; but now it was Hans who was forging ahead, so rapidly and steadily that his father found it difficult to keep up with him. Without any warning, as it were, Hans produced a new phantasy: the plumber unscrewed the bath in which Hans was, and then stuck him in the stomach with his big borer. Henceforward the material brought up in the analysis far outstripped our powers of understanding it. It was not until later that it was possible to guess that this was a remoulding of a phantasy of procreation, distorted by anxiety. The big bath of water, in which Hans imagined himself, was his mother’s womb; the ‘borer’, which his father had from the first recognized as a penis, owed its mention to its connection with ‘being born’. The interpretation that we are obliged to give to the phantasy will of course sound very curious: ‘With your big penis you "bored" me’ (i.e. ‘gave birth to me’) ‘and put me in my mother’s womb.’ For the moment, however, the phantasy eluded interpretation, and merely served Hans as a starting point from which to continue giving information.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2110

Hans showed fear of being given a bath in the big bath; and this fear was once more a composite one. One part of it escaped us as yet, but the other part could at once be elucidated in connection with his baby sister having her bath. Hans confessed to having wished that his mother might drop the child while she was being given her bath, so that she should die. His own anxiety while he was having his bath was a fear of retribution for this evil wish and of being punished by the same thing happening to him. Hans now left the subject of lumf and passed on directly to that of his baby sister. We may well imagine what this juxtaposition signified: nothing less, in fact, than that little Hanna was a lumf herself - that all babies were lumfs and were born like lumfs. We can now recognize that all furniture-vans and drays and buses were only stork-box carts, and were only of interest to Hans as being symbolic representations of pregnancy; and that when a heavy or heavily loaded horse fell down he can have seen in it only one thing - a childbirth, a delivery [‘ein Niederkommen’]. Thus the falling horse was not only his dying father but also his mother in childbirth.

And at this point Hans gave us a surprise, for which we were not in the very least prepared. He had noticed his mother’s pregnancy, which had ended with the birth of his little sister when he was three and a half years old, and had, at any rate after the confinement, pieced the facts of the case together - without telling any one, it is true, and perhaps without being able to tell any one. All that could be seen at the time was that immediately after the delivery he had taken up an extremely sceptical attitude towards everything that might be supposed to point to the presence of the stork. But that - in complete contradiction to his official speeches - he knew in his unconscious where the baby came from and where it had been before, is proved beyond a shadow of doubt by the present analysis; indeed, this is perhaps its most unassailable feature.

The most cogent evidence of this is furnished by the phantasy (which he persisted in with so much obstinacy, and embellished with such a wealth of detail) of how Hanna had been with them at Gmunden the summer before her birth, of how she had travelled there with them, and of how she had been able to do far more then than she had a year later, after she had been born. The effrontery with which Hans related this phantasy and the countless extravagant lies with which he interwove it were anything but meaningless. All of this was intended as a revenge upon his father, against whom he harboured a grudge for having misled him with the stork fable. It was just as though he had meant to say: ‘If you really thought I was as stupid as all that, and expected me to believe that the stork brought Hanna, then in return I expect you to accept my inventions as the truth.’ This act of revenge on the part of our young enquirer upon his father was succeeded by the clearly correlated phantasy of teasing and beating horses. This phantasy, again, had two constituents. On the one hand, it was based upon the teasing to which he had submitted his father just before; and, on the other hand, it reproduced the obscure sadistic desires directed towards his mother, which had already found expression (though they had not at first been understood) in his phantasies of doing something forbidden. Hans even confessed consciously to a desire to beat his mother.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2111

There are not many more mysteries ahead of us now. An obscure phantasy of missing a train seems to have been a forerunner of the later notion of handing over Hans’s father to his grandmother at Lainz, for the phantasy dealt with a visit to Lainz, and his grandmother appeared in it. Another phantasy, in which a boy gave the guard 50,000 florins to let him ride on the truck, almost sounds like a plan of buying his mother from his father, part of whose power, of course, lay in his wealth. At about this time, too, he confessed, with a degree of openness which he had never before reached, that he wished to get rid of his father, and that the reason he wished it was that his father interfered with his own intimacy with his mother. We must not be surprised to find the same wishes constantly reappearing in the course of an analysis. The monotony only attaches to the analyst’s interpretations of these wishes. For Hans they were not mere repetitions, but steps in a progressive development from timid hinting to fully conscious, undistorted perspicuity.

What remains are just such confirmations on Hans’s part of analytical conclusions which our interpretations had already established. In an entirely unequivocal symptomatic act, which he disguised slightly from the maid but not at all from his father, he showed how he imagined a birth took place; but if we look into it more closely we can see that he showed something else, that he was hinting at something which was not alluded to again in the analysis. He pushed a small penknife which belonged to his mother in through a round hole in the body of an india-rubber doll, and then let it drop out again by tearing apart the doll’s legs. The enlightenment which he received from his parents soon afterwards, to the effect that children do in fact grow inside their mother’s body and are pushed out of it like a lumf, came too late; it could tell him nothing new. Another symptomatic act, happening as though by accident, involved a confession that he had wished his father dead; for, just at the moment his father was talking of this death-wish, Hans let a horse that he was playing with fall down - knocked it over in fact. Further, he confirmed in so many words the hypothesis that heavily loaded carts represented his mother’s pregnancy to him, and the horse’s falling down was like having a baby. The most delightful piece of confirmation in this connection - a proof that, in his view, children were ‘lumfs’ - was his inventing the name of ‘Lodi’ for his favourite child. There was some delay in reporting this fact, for it then appeared that he had been playing with this sausage child of his for a long time past.¹

¹ I remember a set of drawings by T. T. Heine in a copy of Simplicissimus, in which that brilliant illustrator depicted the fate of the pork-butcher’s child, who fell into the sausage machine, and then, in the shape of a small sausage, was mourned over by his parents, received the Church’s blessing, and flew up to Heaven. The artist’s idea seems a puzzling one at first, but the Lodi episode in this analysis enables us to trace it back to its infantile root.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2112

We have already considered Hans’s two concluding phantasies, with which his recovery was rounded off. One of them, that of the plumber giving him a new and, as his father guessed, a bigger widdler, was not merely a repetition of the earlier phantasy concerning the plumber and the bath. The new one was a triumphant, wishful phantasy, and with it he overcame his fear of castration. His other phantasy, which confessed to the wish to be married to his mother and to have many children by her, did not merely exhaust the content of the unconscious complexes which had been stirred up by the sight of the falling horse and which had generated his anxiety. It also corrected that portion of those thoughts which was entirely unacceptable; for, instead of killing his father, it made him innocuous by promoting him to a marriage with Hans’s grandmother. With this phantasy both the illness and the analysis came to an appropriate end.

While the analysis of a case is in progress it is impossible to obtain any clear impression of the structure and development of the neurosis. That is the business of a synthetic process which must be performed subsequently. In attempting to carry out such a synthesis of little Hans’s phobia we shall take as our basis the account of his mental constitution, of his governing sexual wishes, and of his experiences up to the time of his sister’s birth, which we have given in an earlier part of this paper.

The arrival of his sister brought into Hans’s life many new elements, which from that time on gave him no rest. In the first place he was obliged to submit to a certain degree of privation: to begin with, a temporary separation from his mother, and later a permanent diminution in the amount of care and attention which he had received from her and which thenceforward he had to grow accustomed to sharing with his sister. In the second place, he experienced a revival of the pleasures he had enjoyed when he was looked after as an infant; for they were called up by all that he saw his mother doing for the baby. As a result of these two influences his erotic needs became intensified, while at the same time they began to obtain insufficient satisfaction. He made up for the loss which his sister’s arrival had entailed on him by imagining that he had children of his own; and so long as he was at Gmunden - on his second visit there - and could really play with these children, he found a sufficient outlet for his affections. But after his return to Vienna he was once more alone, and set all his hopes upon his mother. He had meanwhile suffered another privation, having been exiled from his parents’ bedroom at the age of four and a half. His intensified erotic excitability now found expression in phantasies, by which in his loneliness he conjured up his playmates of the past summer, and in regular auto-erotic satisfaction obtained by a masturbatory stimulation of his genitals.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2113

But in the third place his sister’s birth stimulated him to an effort of thought which, on the one hand, it was impossible to bring to a conclusion, and which, on the other hand, involved him in emotional conflicts. He was faced with the great riddle of where babies come from, which is perhaps the first problem to engage a child’s mental powers, and of which the riddle of the Theban Sphinx is probably no more than a distorted version. He rejected the proffered solution of the stork having brought Hanna. For he had noticed that months before the baby’s birth his mother’s body had grown big, that then she had gone to bed, and had groaned while the birth was taking place, and that when she got up she was thin again. He therefore inferred that Hanna had been inside his mother’s body, and had then come out like a ‘lumf’. He was able to imagine the act of giving birth as a pleasurable one by relating it to his own first feelings of pleasure in passing stool; and he was thus able to find a double motive for wishing to have children of his own: the pleasure of giving birth to them and the pleasure (the compensatory pleasure, as it were) of looking after them. There was nothing in all of this that could have led him into doubts or conflicts.

But there was something else, which could not fail to make him uneasy. His father must have had something to do with little Hanna’s birth, for he had declared that Hanna and Hans himself were his children. Yet it was certainly not his father who had brought them into the world, but his mother. This father of his came between him and his mother. When he was there Hans could not sleep with his mother, and when his mother wanted to take Hans into bed with her, his father used to call out. Hans had learnt from experience how well-off he could be in his father’s absence, and it was only justifiable that he should wish to get rid of him. And then Hans’s hostility had received a fresh reinforcement. His father had told him the lie about the stork and so made it impossible for him to ask for enlightenment upon these things. He not only prevented his being in bed with his mother, but also kept from him the knowledge he was thirsting for. He was putting Hans at a disadvantage in both directions, and was obviously doing so for his own benefit.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2114

But this father, whom he could not help hating as a rival, was the same father whom he had always loved and was bound to go on loving, who had been his model, had been his first playmate, and had looked after him from his earliest infancy: and this it was that gave rise to the first conflict. Nor could this conflict find an immediate solution. For Hans’s nature had so developed that for the moment his love could not but keep the upper hand and suppress his hate - though it could not kill it, for his hate was perpetually kept alive by his love for his mother.

But his father not only knew where children came from, he actually performed it - the thing that Hans could only obscurely divine. The widdler must have something to do with it, for his own grew excited whenever he thought of these things - and it must be a big widdler too, bigger than Hans’s own. If he listened to these premonitory sensations he could only suppose that it was a question of some act of violence performed upon his mother, of smashing something, of making an opening into something, of forcing a way into an enclosed space - such were the impulses that he felt stirring within him. But although the sensations of his penis had put him on the road to postulating a vagina, yet he could not solve the problem, for within his experience no such thing existed as his widdler required. On the contrary, his conviction that his mother possessed a penis just as he did stood in the way of any solution. His attempt at discovering what it was that had to be done with his mother in order that she might have children sank down into his unconscious; and his two active impulses - the hostile one towards his father and the sadistic-tender one towards his mother - could be put to no use, the first because of the love that existed side by side with the hatred, and the second because of the perplexity in which his infantile sexual theories left him.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2115

This is how, basing my conclusions upon the findings of the analysis, I am obliged to reconstruct the unconscious complexes and wishes, the repression and reawakening of which produced little Hans’s phobia. I am aware that in so doing I am attributing a great deal to the mental capacity of a child between four and five years of age; but I have let myself be guided by what we have recently learned, and I do not consider myself bound by the prejudices of our ignorance. It might perhaps have been possible to make use of Hans’s fear of the ‘making a row with the legs’ for filling up a few more gaps in our adjudication upon the evidence. Hans, it is true, declared that it reminded him of his kicking about with his legs when he was compelled to leave off playing so as to do lumf; so that this element of the neurosis becomes connected with the problem whether his mother liked having children or was compelled to have them. But I have an impression that this is not the whole explanation of the ‘making a row with the legs’. Hans’s father was unable to confirm my suspicion that there was some recollection stirring in the child’s mind of having observed a scene of sexual intercourse between his parents in their bedroom. So let us be content with what we have discovered.

It is hard to say what the influence was which, in the situation we have just sketched, led to the sudden change in Hans and to the transformation of his libidinal longing into anxiety - to say from what direction it was that repression set in. The question could probably only be decided by making a comparison between this analysis and a number of similar ones. Whether the scales were turned by the child’s intellectual inability to solve the difficult problem of the begetting of children and to cope with the aggressive impulses that were liberated by his approaching its solution, or whether the effect was produced by a somatic incapacity, a constitutional intolerance of the masturbatory gratification in which he regularly indulged (whether, that is, the mere persistence of sexual excitement at such a high pitch of intensity was bound to bring about a revulsion) - this question must be left open until fresh experience can come to our assistance.

Chronological considerations make it impossible for us to attach any great importance to the actual precipitating cause of the outbreak of Hans’s illness, for he had shown signs of apprehensiveness long before he saw the bus-horse fall down in the street.

Nevertheless, the neurosis took its start directly from this chance event and preserved a trace of it in the circumstance of the horse being exalted into the object of his anxiety. In itself the impression of the accident which he happened to witness carried no ‘traumatic force’; it acquired its great effectiveness only from the fact that horses had formerly been of importance to him as objects of his predilection and interest, from the fact that he associated the event in his mind with an earlier event at Gmunden which had more claim to be regarded as traumatic, namely, with Fritzl’s falling down while he was playing at horses, and lastly from the fact that there was an easy path of association from Fritzl to his father. Indeed, even these connections would probably not have been sufficient if it had not been that, thanks to the pliability and ambiguity of associative chains, the same event showed itself capable of stirring the second of the complexes that lurked in Hans’s unconscious, the complex of his pregnant mother’s confinement. From that moment the way was clear for the return of the repressed; and it returned in such a manner that the pathogenic material was remodelled and transposed on to the horse-complex, while the accompanying affects were uniformly transformed into anxiety.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2116

It deserves to be noticed that the ideational content of Hans’s phobia as it then stood had to be submitted to one further process of distortion and substitution before his consciousness took cognizance of it. Hans’s first formulation of his anxiety was: ‘the horse will bite me’; and this was derived from another episode at Gmunden, which was on the one hand related to his hostile wishes towards his father and on the other hand was reminiscent of the warning he had been given against masturbation. Some interfering influence, emanating from his parents perhaps, had made itself felt. I am not certain whether the reports upon Hans were at that time drawn up with sufficient care to enable us to decide whether he expressed his anxiety in this form before or not until after his mother had taken him to task on the subject of masturbating. I should be inclined to suspect that it was not until afterwards, though this would contradict the account given in the case history. At any rate, it is evident that at every point Hans’s hostile complex against his father screened his lustful one about his mother, just as it was the first to be disclosed and dealt with in the analysis.

In other cases of this kind there would be a great deal more to be said upon the structure, the development, and the diffusion of the neurosis. But the history of little Hans’s attack was very short; almost as soon as it had begun, its place was taken by the history of its treatment. And although during the treatment the phobia appeared to develop further and to extend over new objects and to lay down new conditions, his father, since he was himself treating the case, naturally had sufficient penetration to see that it was merely a question of the emergence of material that was already in existence, and not of fresh productions for which the treatment might be held responsible. In the treatment of other cases it would not always be possible to count upon so much penetration.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2117

Before I can regard this synthesis as completed I must turn to yet another aspect of the case, which will take us into the very heart of the difficulties that lie in the way of our understanding of neurotic states. We have seen how our little patient was overtaken by a great wave of repression and that it caught precisely those of his sexual components that were dominant.¹ He gave up masturbation, and turned away in disgust from everything that reminded him of excrement and of looking on at other people performing their natural functions. But these were not the components which were stirred up by the precipitating cause of the illness (his seeing the horse fall down) or which provided the material for the symptoms, that is, the content of the phobia.

This allows us, therefore, to make a radical distinction. We shall probably come to understand the case more deeply if we turn to those other components which do fulfil the two conditions that have just been mentioned. These other components were tendencies in Hans which had already been suppressed and which, so far as we can tell, had never been able to find uninhibited expression: hostile and jealous feelings towards his father, and sadistic impulses (premonitions, as it were, of copulation) towards his mother. These early suppressions may perhaps have gone to form the predisposition for his subsequent illness. These aggressive propensities of Hans’s found no outlet, and as soon as there came a time of privation and of intensified sexual excitement, they tried to break their way out with reinforced strength. It was then that the battle which we call his ‘phobia’ burst out. During the course of it a part of the repressed ideas, in a distorted form and transposed on to another complex, forced their way into consciousness as the content of the phobia. But it was a decidedly paltry success. Victory lay with the forces of repression; and they made use of the opportunity to extend their domain over components other than those that had rebelled. This last circumstance, however, does not in the least alter the fact that the essence of Hans’s illness was entirely dependent upon the nature of the instinctual components that had to be repulsed. The content of his phobia was such as to impose a very great measure of restriction upon his freedom of movement, and that was its purpose. It was therefore a powerful reaction against the obscure impulses to movement which were especially directed against his mother. For Hans horses had always typified pleasure in movement (‘I’m a young horse’, he had said as he jumped about); but since this pleasure in movement included the impulse to copulate, the neurosis imposed a restriction on it and exalted the horse into an emblem of terror. Thus it would seem as though all that the repressed instincts got from the neurosis was the honour of providing pretexts for the appearance of the anxiety in consciousness. But however clear may have been the victory in Hans’s phobia of the forces that were opposed to sexuality, nevertheless, since such an illness is in its very nature a compromise, this cannot have been all that the repressed instincts obtained. After all, Hans’s phobia of horses was an obstacle to his going into the street, and could serve as a means of allowing him to stay at home with his beloved mother. In this way, therefore, his affection for his mother triumphantly achieved its aim. In consequence of his phobia, the lover clung to the object of his love - though, to be sure, steps had been taken to make him innocuous. The true character of a neurotic disorder is exhibited in this twofold result.

¹ Hans’s father even observed that simultaneously with this repression a certain amount of sublimation set in. From the time of the beginning of his anxiety Hans began to show an increased interest in music and to develop his inherited musical gift.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2118

Alfred Adler, in a suggestive paper,¹ has recently developed the view that anxiety arises from the suppression of what he calls the ‘aggressive instinct’, and by a very sweeping synthetic process he ascribes to that instinct the chief part in human events, ‘in real life and in the neuroses’. As we have come to the conclusion that in our present case of phobia the anxiety is to be explained as being due to the repression of Hans’s aggressive propensities (the hostile ones against his father and the sadistic ones against his mother), we seem to have produced a most striking piece of confirmation of Adler’s view. I am nevertheless unable to assent to it, and indeed I regard it as a misleading generalization. I cannot bring myself to assume the existence of a special aggressive instinct alongside of the familiar instincts of self-preservation and of sex, and on an equal footing with them.² It appears to me that Adler has mistakenly promoted into a special and self-subsisting instinct what is in reality a universal and indispensable attribute of all instincts - their instinctual [triebhaft] and ‘pressing’ character, what might be described as their capacity for initiating movement. Nothing would then remain of the other instincts but their relation to an aim, for their relation to the means of reaching that aim would have been taken over from them by the ‘aggressive instinct’. In spite of all the uncertainty and obscurity of our theory of instincts I should prefer for the present to adhere to the usual view, which leaves each instinct its own power of becoming aggressive; and I should be inclined to recognize the two instincts which became repressed in Hans as familiar components of the sexual libido.

¹ ‘Der Aggressionsbetrieb im Leben und in der Neurose’ (1908). This is the same paper from which I have borrowed the term ‘confluence of instincts’. (See above, p. 2091)

² [Footnote added 1923:] The above passage was written at a time when Adler seemed still to be taking his stand upon the ground of psycho-analysis, and before he had put forward the masculine protest and disavowed repression. Since then I have myself been obliged to assert the existence of an  ‘aggressive instinct’, but it is different from Adler’s. I prefer to call it the ‘destructive’ or ‘death instinct’. See Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g) and The Ego and the Id (1923b). Its opposition to the libidinal instincts finds an expression in the familiar polarity of love and hate. My disagreement with Adler’s view, which results in a universal characteristic of instincts in general being reduced to be the property of a single one of them, remains unaltered.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2119

(III)

I shall now proceed to what I hope will be a brief discussion of how far little Hans’s phobia offers any contribution of general importance to our views upon the life and upbringing of children. But before doing so I must return to the objection which has so long been held over, and according to which Hans was a neurotic, a ‘degenerate’ with a bad heredity, and not a normal child, knowledge about whom could be applied to other children. I have for some time been thinking with pain of the way in which the adherents of ‘the normal person’ will fall upon poor little Hans as soon as they are told that he can in fact be shown to have had a hereditary taint. His beautiful mother fell ill with a neurosis as a result of a conflict during her girlhood. I was able to be of assistance to her at the time, and this had in fact been the beginning of my connection with Hans’s parents. It is only with the greatest diffidence that I venture to bring forward one or two considerations in his favour.

In the first place Hans was not what one would understand, strictly speaking, by a degenerate child, condemned by his heredity to be a neurotic. On the contrary, he was well formed physically, and was a cheerful, amiable, active-minded young fellow who might give pleasure to more people than his own father. There can be no question, of course, as to his sexual precocity; but on that point there is very little material upon which a fair comparison can be based. I gather, for instance, from a piece of collective research conducted in America, that it is by no means such a rare thing to find object-choice and feelings of love in boys at a similarly early age; and the same may be learnt from studying the records of the childhood of men who have later come to be recognized as ‘great’. I should therefore be inclined to believe that sexual precocity is a correlate, which is seldom absent, of intellectual precocity, and that it is therefore to be met with in gifted children more often than might be expected.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2120

Furthermore, let me say in Hans’s favour (and I frankly admit my partisan attitude) that he is not the only child who has been overtaken by a phobia at some time or other in his childhood. Troubles of that kind are well known to be quite extraordinarily frequent, even in children the strictness of whose upbringing has left nothing to be desired. In later life these children either become neurotic or remain healthy. Their phobias are shouted down in the nursery because they are inaccessible to treatment and are decidedly inconvenient. In the course of months or years they diminish, and the child seems to recover; but no one can tell what psychological changes are necessitated by such a recovery, or what alterations in character are involved in it. When, however, an adult neurotic patient comes to us for psycho-analytic treatment (and let us assume that his illness has only become manifest after he has reached maturity), we find regularly that his neurosis has as its point of departure an infantile anxiety such as we have been discussing, and is in fact a continuation of it; so that, as it were, a continuous and undisturbed thread of psychical activity, taking its start from the conflicts of his childhood, has been spun through his life - irrespective of whether the first symptom of those conflicts has persisted or has retreated under the pressure of circumstances. I think, therefore, that Hans’s illness may perhaps have been no more serious than that of many other children who are not branded as ‘degenerates’; but since he was brought up without being intimidated, and with as much consideration and as little coercion as possible, his anxiety dared to show itself more boldly. With him there was no place for such motives as a bad conscience or a fear of punishment, which with other children must no doubt contribute to making the anxiety less. It seems to me that we concentrate too much upon symptoms and concern ourselves too little with their causes. In bringing up children we aim only at being left in peace and having no difficulties, in short, at training up a model child, and we pay very little attention to whether such a course of development is for the child’s good as well. I can therefore quite imagine that it may have been to Hans’s advantage to have produced this phobia. For it directed his parents’ attention to the unavoidable difficulties by which a child is confronted when in the course of his cultural training he is called upon to overcome the innate instinctual components of his mind; and his trouble brought his father to his assistance. It may be that Hans now enjoys an advantage over other children, in that he no longer carries within him that seed in the shape of repressed complexes which must always be of some significance for a child’s later life, and which undoubtedly brings with it a certain degree of deformity of character if not a predisposition to a subsequent neurosis. I am inclined to think that this is so, but I do not know if many others will share my opinion; nor do I know whether experience will prove me right.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2121

But I must now enquire what harm was done to Hans by dragging to light in him complexes such as are not only repressed by children but dreaded by their parents. Did the little boy proceed to take some serious action as regards what he wanted from his mother? or did his evil intentions against his father give place to evil deeds? Such misgivings will no doubt have occurred to many doctors, who misunderstand the nature of psycho-analysis and think that wicked instincts are strengthened by being made conscious. Wise men like these are being no more than consistent when they implore us for heaven’s sake not to meddle with the evil things that lurk behind a neurosis. In so doing they forget, it is true, that they are physicians, and their words bear a fatal resemblance to Dogberry’s, when he advised the Watch to avoid all contact with any thieves they might happen to meet: ‘for such kind of men, the less you meddle or make with them, why, the more is for your honesty.’¹

On the contrary, the only results of the analysis were that Hans recovered, that he ceased to be afraid of horses, and that he got on to rather familiar terms with his father, as the latter reported with some amusement. But whatever his father may have lost in the boy’s respect he won back in his confidence: ‘I thought’, said Hans, ‘you knew everything, as you knew that about the horse.’ For analysis does not undo the effects of repression. The instincts which were formerly suppressed remain suppressed; but the same effect is produced in a different way. Analysis replaces the process of repression, which is an automatic and excessive one, by a temperate and purposeful control on the part of the highest agencies of the mind. In a word, analysis replaces repression by condemnation. This seems to bring us the long-looked-for evidence that consciousness has a biological function, and that with its entrance upon the scene an important advantage is secured.²

¹ At this point I cannot keep back an astonished question. Where do my opponents obtain their knowledge, which they produce with so much confidence, on the question whether the repressed sexual instincts play a part, and if so what part, in the aetiology of the neuroses, if they shut their patients’ mouths as soon as they begin to talk about their complexes or their derivatives? For the only alternative source of knowledge remaining open to them are my own writings and those of my adherents.

² [Footnote added 1923:] I am here using the word ‘consciousness’ in a sense which I later avoided, namely, to describe our normal processes of thought - such, that is, as are capable of consciousness. We know that thought processes of this kind may also take place preconsciously; and it is wiser to regard their actual ‘consciousness’ from a purely phenomenological standpoint. By this I do not, of course, mean to contradict the expectation that consciousness in this more limited sense of the word must also fulfil some biological function.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2122

If matters had lain entirely in my hands, I should have ventured to give the child the one remaining piece of enlightenment which his parents withheld from him. I should have confirmed his instinctive premonitions, by telling him of the existence of the vagina and of copulation; thus I should have still further diminished his unsolved residue, and put an end to his stream of questions. I am convinced that this new piece of enlightenment would have made him lose neither his love for his mother nor his own childish nature, and that he would have understood that his preoccupation with these important, these momentous things must rest for the present - until his wish to be big had been fulfilled. But the educational experiment was not carried so far.

That no sharp line can be drawn between ‘neurotic’ and ‘normal’ people - whether children or adults - that our conception of ‘disease’ is a purely practical one and a question of summation, that predisposition and the eventualities of life must combine before the threshold of this summation is overstepped, and that consequently a number of individuals are constantly passing from the class of healthy people into that of neurotic patients, while a far smaller number also make the journey in the opposite direction, - all of these are things which have been said so often and have met with so much agreement that I am certainly not alone in maintaining their truth. It is, to say the least of it, extremely probable that a child’s upbringing can exercise a powerful influence for good or for evil upon the predisposition which we have just mentioned as one of the factors in the occurrence of ‘disease’; but what that upbringing is to aim at and at what point it is to be brought to bear seem at present to be very doubtful questions. Hitherto education has only set itself the task of controlling, or, it would often be more proper to say, of suppressing, the instincts. The results have been by no means gratifying, and where the process has succeeded it has only been to the advantage of a small number of favoured individuals who have not been required to suppress their instincts. Nor has any one enquired by what means and at what cost the suppression of the inconvenient instincts has been achieved. Supposing now that we substitute another task for this one, and aim instead at making the individual capable of becoming a civilized and useful member of society with the least possible sacrifice of his own activity; in that case the information gained by psycho-analysis, upon the origin of pathogenic complexes and upon the nucleus of every nervous affection, can claim with justice that it deserves to be regarded by educators as an invaluable guide in their conduct towards children. What practical conclusions may follow from this, and how far experience may justify the application of those conclusions within our present social system, are matters which I leave to the examination and decision of others.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2123

I cannot take leave of our small patient’s phobia without giving expression to a notion which has made its analysis, leading as it did to a recovery, seem of especial value to me. Strictly speaking, I learnt nothing new from this analysis, nothing that I had not already been able to discover (though often less distinctly and more indirectly) from other patients analysed at a more advanced age. But the neuroses of these other patients could in every instance be traced back to the same infantile complexes that were revealed behind Hans’s phobia. I am therefore tempted to claim for this neurosis of childhood the significance of being a type and a model, and to suppose that the multiplicity of the phenomena of repression exhibited by neuroses and the abundance of their pathogenic material do not prevent their being derived from a very limited number of processes concerned with identical ideational complexes.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2124

POSTSCRIPT (1922)

A few months ago - in the spring of 1922 - a young man introduced himself to me and informed me that he was the ‘little Hans’ whose infantile neurosis had been the subject of the paper which I published in 1909. I was very glad to see him again, for about two years after the end of his analysis I had lost sight of him and had heard nothing of him for more than ten years. The publication of this first analysis of a child had caused a great stir and even greater indignation, and a most evil future had been foretold for the poor little boy, because he had been ‘robbed of his innocence’ at such a tender age and had been made the victim of a psycho-analysis.

But none of these apprehensions had come true. Little Hans was now a strapping youth of nineteen. He declared that he was perfectly well, and suffered from no troubles or inhibitions. Not only had he come through his puberty without any damage, but his emotional life had successfully undergone one of the severest of ordeals. His parents had been divorced and each of them had married again. In consequence of this he lived by himself; but he was on good terms with both of his parents, and only regretted that as a result of the breaking-up of the family he had been separated from the younger sister he was so fond of.

One piece of information given me by little Hans struck me as particularly remarkable; nor do I venture to give any explanation of it. When he read his case history, he told me, the whole of it came to him as something unknown; he did not recognize himself; he could remember nothing; and it was only when he came upon the journey to Gmunden that there dawned on him a kind of glimmering recollection that it might have been he himself that it happened to. So the analysis had not preserved the events from amnesia, but had been overtaken by amnesia itself. Any one who is familiar with psycho-analysis may occasionally experience something similar in sleep. He will be woken up by a dream, and will decide to analyse it then and there; he will then go to sleep again feeling quite satisfied with the result of his efforts; and next morning dream and analysis will alike be forgotten.

2125

NOTES UPON A CASE OF OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS

(1909)

2126

Intentionally left blank

2127

NOTES UPON A CASE OF OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS

The matter contained in the following pages will be of two kinds. In the first place I shall give some fragmentary extracts from the history of a case of obsessional neurosis. This case judged by its length, the injuriousness of its effects, and the patient’s own view of it, deserves to be classed as a moderately severe one; the treatment, which lasted for about a year, led to the complete restoration of the patient’s personality, and to the removal of his inhibitions. In the second place, starting out from this case, and also taking other cases into account which I have previously analysed, I shall make some disconnected statements of an aphoristic character upon the genesis and finer psychological mechanism of obsessional processes, and I shall thus hope to develop my first observations on the subject, published in 1896.¹

A programme of this kind seems to me to require some justification. For it might otherwise be thought that I regard this method of making a communication as perfectly correct and as one to be imitated; whereas in reality I am only accommodating myself to obstacles, some external and others inherent in the subject, and I should gladly have communicated more if it had been right or possible for me to do so. I cannot give a complete history of the treatment, because that would involve my entering in detail into the circumstances of my patient’s life. The importunate interest of a capital city, focused with particular attention upon my medical activities, forbids my giving a faithful picture of the case. On the other hand I have come more and more to regard the distortions usually resorted to in such circumstances as useless and objectionable. If the distortions are slight, they fail in their object of protecting the patient from indiscreet curiosity; while if they go beyond this they require too great a sacrifice, for they destroy the intelligibility of the material, which depends for its coherence precisely upon the small details of real life. And from this latter circumstance follows the paradoxical truth that it is far easier to divulge the patient’s most intimate secrets than the most innocent and trivial facts about him; for, whereas the former would not throw any light on his identity, the latter, by which he is generally recognized, would make it obvious to every one.

¹ ‘Further Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’, 1896b (Section II. ‘The Nature and Mechanism of Obsessional Neurosis’).

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2128

Such is my excuse for having curtailed so drastically the history of this case and its treatment. And I can offer still more cogent reasons for having confined myself to the statement only of some disconnected results of the psycho-analytic investigation of obsessional neuroses. I must confess that I have not yet succeeded in completely penetrating the complicated texture of a severe case of obsessional neurosis, and that, if I were to reproduce the analysis, it would be impossible for me to make the structure, such as by the help of analysis we know or suspect it to be, visible to others through the mass of therapeutic work superimposed upon it. What add so greatly to the difficulty of doing this are the resistances of the patients and the forms in which they are expressed. But even apart from this it must be admitted that an obsessional neurosis is in itself not an easy thing to understand - much less so than a case of hysteria. Actually, indeed, we should have expected to find the contrary. The language of an obsessional neurosis - the means by which it expresses its secret thoughts - is, as it were, only a dialect of the language of hysteria; but it is a dialect in which we ought to be able to find our way about more easily, since it is more nearly related to the forms of expression adopted by our conscious thought than is the language of hysteria. Above all, it does not involve the leap from a mental process to a somatic innervation - hysterical conversion - which can never be fully comprehensible to us.

Perhaps it is only because we are less familiar with obsessional neuroses that we do not find these expectations confirmed by the facts. Persons suffering from a severe degree of obsessional neurosis present themselves far less frequently for analytic treatment than hysterical patients. They dissimulate their condition in daily life, too, as long as they possibly can, and often call in a physician only when their complaint has reached such an advanced stage as, had they been suffering, for instance, from tuberculosis of the lungs, would have led to their being refused admission to a sanatorium. I make this comparison, moreover, because, as with the chronic infectious disease which I have just mentioned, we can point to a number of brilliant therapeutic successes in severe no less than in light cases of obsessional neurosis, where these have been taken in hand at an early stage.

In these circumstances there is no alternative but to report the facts in the imperfect and incomplete fashion in which they are known and in which it is legitimate to communicate them. The crumbs of knowledge offered in these pages, though they have been laboriously enough collected, may not in themselves prove very satisfying; but they may serve as a starting-point for the work of other investigators, and common endeavour may bring the success which is perhaps beyond the reach of individual effort.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2129

I

EXTRACTS FROM THE CASE HISTORY

A youngish man of university education introduced himself to me with the statement that he had suffered from obsessions ever since his childhood, but with particular intensity for the last four years. The chief features of his disorder were fears that something might happen to two people of whom he was very fond - his father and a lady whom he admired. Besides this he was aware of compulsive impulses - such as an impulse, for instance, to cut his throat with a razor; and further he produced prohibitions, sometimes in connection with quite unimportant things. He had wasted years, he told me, in fighting against these ideas of his, and in this way had lost much ground in the course of his life. He had tried various treatments, but none had been of any use to him except a course of hydrotherapy at a sanatorium near ---; and this, he thought, had probably only been because he had made an acquaintance there which had led to regular sexual intercourse. Here he had no opportunities of the sort, and he seldom had intercourse and only at irregular intervals. He felt disgust at prostitutes. Altogether, he said, his sexual life had been stunted; masturbation had played only a small part in it, in his sixteenth or seventeenth year. His potency was normal; he had first had intercourse at the age of twenty-six.

He gave me the impression of being a clear-headed and shrewd person. When I asked him what it was that made him lay such stress upon telling me about his sexual life, he replied that that was what he knew about my theories. Actually, however, he had read none of my writings, except that a short time before he had been turning over the pages of one of my books¹ and had come across the explanation of some curious verbal associations which had so much reminded him of some of his own ‘efforts of thought’ in connection with his ideas that he had decided to put himself in my hands.

¹ The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2130

(A)  THE BEGINNING OF THE TREATMENT

The next day I made him pledge himself to submit to the one and only condition of the treatment - namely, to say everything that came into his head, even if it was unpleasant to him, or seemed unimportant or irrelevant or senseless. I then gave him leave to start his communications with any subject he pleased, and he began thus:¹

He had a friend, he told me, of whom he had an extraordinarily high opinion. He used always to go to him when he was tormented by some criminal impulse, and ask him whether he despised him as a criminal. His friend used then to give him moral support by assuring him that he was a man of irreproachable conduct, and had probably been in the habit, from his youth onwards, of taking a dark view of his own life. At an earlier date, he went on, another person had exercised a similar influence over him. This was a nineteen-year-old student (he himself had been fourteen or fifteen at the time) who had taken a liking to him, and had raised his self-esteem to an extraordinary degree, so that he appeared to himself to be a genius. This student had subsequently become his tutor, and had suddenly altered his behaviour and begun treating him as though he were an idiot. At length he had noticed that the student was interested in one of his sisters, and had realized that he had only taken him up in order to gain admission into the house. This had been the first great blow of his life.

He then proceeded without any apparent transition:-

¹ What follows is based upon notes made on the evening of the day of treatment, and adheres as closely as possible to my recollection of the patient’s words. - I feel obliged to offer a warning against the practice of noting down what the patient says during the actual time of treatment. The consequent withdrawal of the physician’s attention does the patient more harm than can be made up for by any increase in accuracy that may be achieved in the reproduction of his case history.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2131

(B)  INFANTILE SEXUALITY

‘My sexual life began very early. I can remember a scene during my fourth or fifth year. (From my sixth year onwards I can remember everything.) This scene came into my head quite distinctly, years later. We had a very pretty young governess called Fräulein Peter.¹ One evening she was lying on the sofa lightly dressed, and reading. I was lying beside her, and begged her to let me creep under her skirt. She told me I might, so long as I said nothing to any one about it. She had very little on, and I fingered her genitals and the lower part of her body, which struck me as very queer. After this I was left with a burning and tormenting curiosity to see the female body. I can still remember the intense excitement with which I waited at the Baths (which I was still allowed to go to with the governess and my sisters) for the governess to undress and get into the water. I can remember more things from my sixth year onwards. At that time we had another governess, who was also young and good-looking. She had abscesses on her buttocks which she was in the habit of pressing out at night. I used to wait eagerly for that moment, to appease my curiosity. It was just the same at the Baths - though Fräulein Lina was more reserved than her predecessor.’ (In reply to a question which I threw in, ‘As a rule,’ the patient told me, ‘I did not sleep in her room, but mostly with my parents.’) ‘I remember a scene which must have taken place when I was seven years old.² We were sitting together one evening - the governess, the cook, another servant-girl, myself and my brother, who was eighteen months younger than me. The young women were talking, and I suddenly became aware of Fräulein Lina saying: "It could be done with the little one; but Paul" (that was I) "is too clumsy, he would be sure to miss it." I did not understand clearly what was meant, but I felt the slight and began to cry. Lina comforted me, and told me how a girl, who had done something of the kind with a little boy she was in charge of, had been put in prison for several months. I do not believe she actually did anything wrong with me, but I took a great many liberties with her. When I got into her bed I used to uncover her and touch her, and she made no objections. She was not very intelligent, and clearly had very strong sexual cravings. At twenty-three she had already had a child. She afterwards married its father, so that to-day she is a Frau Hofrat. Even now I often see her in the street.

¹ Dr. Alfred Adler, who was formerly an analyst, once drew attention in a privately delivered paper to the peculiar importance which attaches to the very first communications made by patients. Here is an instance of this. The patient’s opening words laid stress upon the influence exercised over him by men, that is to say, upon the part played in his life by homosexual object-choice; but immediately afterwards they touched upon a second motif, which was to become of great importance later on, namely, the conflict between man and woman and the opposition of their interests. Even the fact that he remembered his first pretty governess by her surname, which happened to be a man’s first name, must be taken into account in this connection. In middle-class circles in Vienna it is more usual to call a governess by her first name, and it is by that name that she is more commonly remembered.

² The patient subsequently admitted that this scene probably occurred one or two years later.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2132

‘When I was six years old I already suffered from erections, and I know that once I went to my mother to complain about them. I know too that in doing so I had some misgivings to get over, for I had a feeling that there was some connection between this subject and my ideas and inquisitiveness, and at that time I used to have a morbid idea that my parents knew my thoughts; I explained this to myself by supposing that I had spoken them out loud, without having heard myself do it. I look on this as the beginning of my illness. There were certain people, girls, who pleased me very much, and I had a very strong wish to see them naked. But in wishing this I had an uncanny feeling, as though something must happen if I thought such things, and as though I must do all sorts of things to prevent it.’

(In reply to a question he gave an example of these fears: ‘For instance, that my father might die.’) ‘Thoughts about my father’s death occupied my mind from a very early age and for a long period of time, and greatly depressed me.’

At this point I learnt with astonishment that the patient’s father, with whom his obsessional fears were, after all, occupied now, had died several years previously.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2133

The events in his sixth or seventh year which the patient described in the first hour of his treatment were not merely, as he supposed, the beginning of his illness, but were already the illness itself. It was a complete obsessional neurosis, wanting in no essential element, at once the nucleus and the prototype of the later disorder, - an elementary organism, as it were, the study of which could alone enable us to obtain a grasp of the complicated organization of his subsequent illness. The child, as we have seen, was under the domination of a component of the sexual instinct, the desire to look, as a result of which there was a constant recurrence in him of a very intense wish connected with persons of the female sex who pleased him - the wish, that is, to see them naked. This wish corresponds to the later obsessional or compulsive idea; and if the quality of compulsion was not yet present in the wish, this was because the ego had not yet placed itself in complete opposition to it and did not yet regard it as something foreign to itself. Nevertheless, opposition to this wish from some source or other was already in activity, for its occurrence was regularly accompanied by a distressing affect.¹ A conflict was evidently in progress in the mind of this young libertine. Side by side with the obsessive wish, and intimately associated with it, was an obsessive fear: every time he had a wish of this kind he could not help fearing that something dreadful would happen. This something dreadful was already clothed in a characteristic indeterminateness which was thenceforward to be an invariable feature of every manifestation of the neurosis. But in a child it is not hard to discover what it is that is veiled behind an indeterminateness of this kind. If the patient can once be induced to give a particular instance in place of the vague generalities which characterize an obsessional neurosis, it may be confidently assumed that the instance is the original and actual thing which has tried to hide itself behind the generalization. Our present patient’s obsessive fear, therefore, when restored to its original meaning, would run as follows: ‘If I have this wish to see a woman naked, my father will be bound to die.’ The distressing affect was distinctly coloured with a tinge of uncanniness and superstition, and was already beginning to give rise to impulses to do something to ward off the impending evil. These impulses were subsequently to develop into the protective measures which the patient adopted.

¹ Yet attempts have been made to explain obsessions without taking the affects into account!

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2134

We find, accordingly: an erotic instinct and a revolt against it; a wish which has not yet become compulsive and, struggling against it, a fear which is already compulsive; a distressing affect and an impulsion towards the performance of defensive acts. The inventory of the neurosis has reached its full muster. Indeed, something more is present, namely, a kind of delusion or delirium with the strange content that his parents knew his thoughts because he spoke them out loud without his hearing himself do it. We shall not go far astray if we suppose that in making this attempt at an explanation the child had some inkling of those remarkable mental processes which we describe as unconscious and which we cannot dispense with if we are to throw any scientific light upon this obscure subject. ‘I speak my thoughts out loud, without hearing them’ sounds like a projection into the external world of our own hypothesis that he had thoughts without knowing anything about them; it sounds like an endopsychic perception of what has been repressed.

For the situation is clear. This elementary neurosis of childhood already involved a problem and an apparent absurdity, like any complicated neurosis of maturity. What can have been the meaning of the child’s idea that if he had this lascivious wish his father would be bound to die? Was it sheer nonsense? Or are there means of understanding the words and of perceiving them as a necessary consequence of earlier events and premises?

If we apply knowledge gained elsewhere to this case of childhood neurosis, we shall not be able to avoid a suspicion that in this instance as in others (that is to say, before the child had reached his sixth year) there had been conflicts and repressions, which had themselves been overtaken by amnesia, but had left behind them as a residuum the particular content of this obsessive fear. Later on we shall learn how far it is possible for us to rediscover those forgotten experiences or to reconstruct them with some degree of certainty. In the meantime stress may be laid on the fact, which is probably more than a mere coincidence, that the patient’s infantile amnesia ended precisely with his sixth year.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2135

To find a chronic obsessional neurosis beginning like this in early childhood, with lascivious wishes of this sort connected with uncanny apprehensions and an inclination to the performance of defensive acts, is no new thing to me. I have come across it in a number of other cases. It is absolutely typical, although probably not the only possible type. Before proceeding to the events of the second session, I should like to add one more word on the subject of the patient’s early sexual experiences. It will hardly be disputed that they may be described as having been considerable both in themselves and in their consequences. But it has been the same with the other cases of obsessional neurosis that I have had the opportunity of analysing. Such cases, unlike those of hysteria, invariably possess the characteristic of premature sexual activity. Obsessional neuroses make it much more obvious than hysterias that the factors which go to form a psychoneurosis are to be found in the patient’s infantile sexual life and not in his present one. The current sexual life of an obsessional neurotic may often appear perfectly normal to a superficial observer; indeed, it frequently offers to the eye far fewer pathogenic elements and abnormalities than in the instance we are now considering.

(C)  THE GREAT OBSESSIVE FEAR

‘I think I will begin to-day with the experience which was the immediate occasion of my coming to you. It was in August, during the manoeuvres in ---. I had been suffering before, and tormenting myself with all kinds of obsessional thoughts, but they had quickly passed off during the manoeuvres. I was keen to show the regular officers that people like me had not only learnt a good deal but could stand a good deal too. One day we started from --- on a short march. During a halt I lost my pince-nez, and, although I could easily have found them, I did not want to delay our start, so I gave them up. But I wired to my opticians in Vienna to send me another pair by the next post. During that same halt I sat between two officers, one of whom, a captain with a Czech name, was to be of no small importance to me. I had a kind of dread of him, for he was obviously fond of cruelty. I do not say he was a bad man, but at the officers’ mess he had repeatedly defended the introduction of corporal punishment, so that I had been obliged to disagree with him very sharply. Well, during this halt we got into conversation, and the captain told me he had read of a specially horrible punishment used in the East . . .’

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2136

Here the patient broke off, got up from the sofa, and begged me to spare him the recital of the details. I assured him that I myself had no taste whatever for cruelty, and certainly had no desire to torment him, but that naturally I could not grant him something which was beyond my power. He might just as well ask me to give him the moon. The overcoming of resistances was a law of the treatment, and on no consideration could it be dispensed with. (I had explained the idea of ‘resistance’ to him at the beginning of the hour, when he told me there was much in himself which he would have to overcome if he was to relate this experience of his.) I went on to say that I would do all I could, nevertheless, to guess the full meaning of any hints he gave me. Was he perhaps thinking of impalement? - ‘No, not that; . . . the criminal was tied up . . .’ - he expressed himself so indistinctly that I could not immediately guess in what position - ‘a pot was turned upside down on his buttocks . . . some rats were put into it . . . and they . . .’ - he had again got up, and was showing every sign of horror and resistance - ‘. . . bored their way in  . . .’ - Into his anus, I helped him out.

At all the more important moments while he was telling his story his face took on a very strange, composite expression. I could only interpret it as one of horror at pleasure of his own of which he himself was unaware. He proceeded with the greatest difficulty: ‘At that moment the idea flashed through my mind that this was happening to a person who was very dear to me.’¹ In answer to a direct question he said that it was not he himself who was carrying out the punishment, but that it was being carried out as it were impersonally. After a little prompting I learnt that the person to whom this ‘idea’ of his related was the lady whom he admired.

¹ He said ‘idea’ - the stronger and more significant term ‘wish’, or rather ‘fear’, having evidently been censored. Unfortunately I am not able to reproduce the peculiar indeterminateness of all his remarks.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2137

He broke off his story in order to assure me that these thoughts were entirely foreign and repugnant to him, and to tell me that everything which had followed in their train had passed through his mind with the most extraordinary rapidity. Simultaneously with the idea there always appeared a ‘sanction’, that is to say, the defensive measure which he was obliged to adopt in order to prevent the phantasy from being fulfilled. When the captain had spoken of this ghastly punishment, he went on, and these ideas had come into his head, by employing his usual formulas (a ‘but’ accompanied by a gesture of repudiation, and the phrase ‘whatever are you thinking of?’) he had just succeeded in warding off both of them.

This ‘both’ took me aback, and it has no doubt also mystified the reader. For so far we have heard only of one idea - of the rat punishment being carried out upon the lady. He was now obliged to admit that a second idea had occurred to him simultaneously, namely, the idea of the punishment being applied to his father. As his father had died many years previously, this obsessive fear was much more nonsensical even than the first, and accordingly it had attempted to escape being confessed to for a little while longer.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2138

That evening, he continued, the same captain had handed him a packet that had arrived by the post and had said: ‘Lieutenant A.¹ has paid the charges for you. You must pay him back.’ The packet had contained the pince-nez that he had wired for. At that instant, however, a ‘sanction’ had taken shape in his mind, namely, that he was not to pay back the money or it would happen - (that is, the phantasy about the rats would come true as regards his father and the lady). And immediately, in accordance with a type of procedure with which he was familiar, to combat this sanction there had arisen a command in the shape of a vow: ‘You must pay back the 3.80 Kronen to Lieutenant A.’ He had said these words to himself almost half aloud.

Two days later the manoeuvres had come to an end. He had spent the whole of the intervening time in efforts at repaying Lieutenant A. the small amount in question; but a succession of difficulties of an apparently external nature had arisen to prevent it. First he had tried to effect the payment though another officer who had been going to the post office. But he had been much relieved when this officer brought him back the money, saying that he had not met Lieutenant A. there, for this method of fulfilling his vow had not satisfied him, as it did not correspond with the wording, which ran: ‘You must pay back the money to Lieutenant A.’ Finally, he had met Lieutenant A., the person he was looking for; but that officer had refused to accept the money, declaring that he had not paid anything for him, and had nothing whatever to do with the post, which was the business of Lieutenant B. This had thrown my patient into great perplexity, for it meant that he was unable to keep his vow, since it had been based upon false premises. He had excogitated a very curious means of getting out of his difficulty, namely, that he should go to the post office with both the men, A. and B., that A. should give the young lady there the 3.80 kronen, that the young lady should give them to B., and that then he himself should pay back the 3.80 kronen to A. according to the wording of his vow.

¹ The names are of little consequence here.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2139

It would not surprise me to hear that at this point the reader had ceased to be able to follow. For even the detailed account which the patient gave me of the external events of these days and of his reactions to them was full of self-contradictions and sounded hopelessly confused. It was only when he told the story for the third time that I could get him to realize its obscurities and could lay bare the errors of memory and the displacements in which he had become involved. I shall spare myself the trouble of reproducing these details, the essentials of which we shall easily be able to pick up later on, and I will only add that at the end of this second session the patient behaved as though he were dazed and bewildered. He repeatedly addressed me as ‘Captain’, probably because at the beginning of the hour I had told him that I myself was not fond of cruelty like Captain N., and that I had no intention of tormenting him unnecessarily.

The only other piece of information that I obtained from him during this hour was that from the very first, on all the previous occasions on which he had had a fear that something would happen to people he loved no less than on the present one, he had referred the punishments not only to our present life but also to eternity - to the next world. Up to his fourteenth or fifteenth year he had been devoutly religious, but from that time on he had gradually developed into the free-thinker that he was to-day. He reconciled the contradiction between his beliefs and his obsessions by saying to himself: ‘What do you know about the next world? Nothing can be known about it. You’re not risking anything - so do it.’ This form of argument seemed unobjectionable to a man who was in other respects particularly clear-headed, and in this way he exploited the uncertainty of reason in the face of these questions to the benefit of the religious attitude which he had outgrown.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2140

At the third session he completed his very characteristic story of his efforts at fulfilling his obsessional vow. That evening the last gathering of officers had taken place before the end of the manoeuvres. It had fallen to him to reply to the toast of ‘The Gentlemen of the Reserve’. He had spoken well, but as if he were in a dream, for at the back of his mind he was being incessantly tormented by his vow. He had spent a terrible night. Arguments and counter-arguments had struggled with one another. The chief argument, of course, had been that the premise upon which his vow had been based - that Lieutenant A. had paid the money for him - had proved to be false. However, he had consoled himself with the thought that the business was not yet finished, as A. would be riding with him next morning part of the way to the railway station at P--, so that he would still have time to ask him the necessary favour. As a matter of fact he had not done this, and had allowed A. to go off without him; but he had given instructions to his orderly to let A. know that he intended to pay him a visit that afternoon. He himself had reached the station at half-past nine in the morning. He had deposited his luggage there and had seen to various things he had to do in the small town, with the intention of afterwards paying his visit to A. The village in which A. was stationed was about an hour’s drive from the town of P--. The railway journey to the place where the post office was would take three hours. He had calculated, therefore, that the execution of his complicated plan would just leave him time to catch the evening train from P--- to Vienna. The ideas that were struggling within him had been, on the one hand, that he was simply being cowardly and was obviously only trying to save himself the unpleasantness of asking A. to make the sacrifice in question and of cutting a foolish figure before him, and that that was why he was disregarding his vow; and, on the other hand, that it would, on the contrary, be cowardly of him to fulfil his vow, since he only wanted to do so in order to be left in peace by his obsessions. When in the course of his deliberations, the patient added, he found the arguments so evenly balanced as these, it was his custom to allow his actions to be decided by chance events as though by the hand of God. When, therefore, a porter at the station had addressed him with the words, ‘Ten o’clock train, sir? ‘ he had answered ‘Yes’, and in fact had gone off by the ten o’clock train. In this way he had produced fait accompli and felt greatly relieved. He had proceeded to book a seat for luncheon in the restaurant car. At the first station they had stopped at it had suddenly struck him that he still had time to get out, wait for the next down train, travel back in it to P--, drive to the place where Lieutenant A. was quartered, from there make the three hours’ train journey with him to the post office, and so forth. It had only been the consideration that he had booked his seat for luncheon with the steward of the restaurant car that had prevented his carrying out this design. He had not abandoned it, however; he had only put off getting out until a later stop. In this way he had struggled through from station to station, till he had reached one at which it had seemed to him impossible to get out because he had relatives living there. He had then determined to travel through to Vienna, to look up his friend there and lay the whole matter before him, and then, after his friend had made his decision, to catch the night train back to P--. When I expressed a doubt whether this would have been feasible, he assured me that he would have had half an hour to spare between the arrival of the one train and the departure of the other. When he had arrived in Vienna, however, he had failed to find his friend at the restaurant at which he had counted on meeting him, and had not reached his friend’s house till eleven o’clock at night. He told him the whole story that very night. His friend had held up his hands in amazement to think that he could still be in doubt whether he was suffering from an obsession, and had calmed him down for the night, so that he had slept excellently. Next morning they had gone together to the post office, to dispatch the 3.80 kronen to the post office at which the packet containing the pince-nez had arrived.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2141

It was this last statement which provided me with a starting-point from which I could begin straightening out the various distortions involved in his story. After his friend had brought him to his senses he had dispatched the small sum of money in question neither to Lieutenant A. nor to Lieutenant B., but direct to the post office. He must therefore have known that he owed the amount of the charges due upon the packet to no one but the official at the post office, and he must have known this before he started on his journey. It turned out that in fact he had known it before the captain made his request and before he himself made his vow; for he now remembered that a few hours before meeting the cruel captain he had had occasion to introduce himself to another captain, who had told him how matters actually stood. This officer, on hearing his name, had told him that he had been at the post office a short time before, and that the young lady there had asked him whether he knew a Lieutenant L. (the patient, that is), for whom a packet had arrived, to be paid for on delivery. The officer had replied that he did not, but the young lady had been of opinion that she could trust the unknown lieutenant and had said that in the meantime she would pay the charges herself. It had been in this way that the patient had come into possession of the pince-nez he had ordered. The cruel captain had made a mistake when, as he handed him over the packet, he had asked him to pay back the 3.80 kronen to A., and the patient must have known it was a mistake. In spite of this he had made a vow founded upon this mistake, a vow that was bound to be a torment to him. In so doing he had suppressed to himself, just as in telling the story he had suppressed to me, the episode of the other captain and the existence of the trusting young lady at the post office. I must admit that when this correction has been made his behaviour becomes even more senseless and unintelligible than before.

After he had left his friend and returned to his family his doubts had overtaken him afresh. His friend’s arguments, he saw, had been no different from his own, and he was under no delusion that his temporary relief was attributable to anything more than his friend’s personal influence. His determination to consult a doctor was woven into his delirium in the following ingenious manner. He thought he would get a doctor to give him a certificate to the effect that it was necessary for him, in order to recover his health, to perform some such action as he had planned in connection with Lieutenant A.; and the lieutenant would no doubt let himself be persuaded by the certificate into accepting the 3.80 crowns from him. The chance that one of my books happened to fall into his hands just at that moment directed his choice to me. There was no question of getting a certificate from me, however; all that he asked of me was, very reasonably, to be freed of his obsessions. Many months later, when his resistance was at its height, he once more felt a temptation to travel to P-- after all, to look up Lieutenant A. and to go through the farce of returning him the money.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2142

(D)  INITIATION INTO THE NATURE OF THE TREATMENT

The reader must not expect to hear at once what light I have to throw upon the patient’s strange and senseless obsessions about the rats. The true technique of psycho-analysis requires the physician to suppress his curiosity and leaves the patient complete freedom in choosing the order in which topics shall succeed each other during the treatment. At the fourth session, accordingly, I received the patient with the question: ‘And how do you intend to proceed to-day?’

‘I have decided to tell you something which I consider most important and which has tormented me from the very first.’ He then told me at great length the story of the last illness of his father, who had died of emphysema nine years previously. One evening, thinking that the condition was one which would come to a crisis, he had asked the doctor when the danger could be regarded as over. ‘The evening of the day after to-morrow’, had been the reply. It had never entered his head that his father might not survive that limit. At half-past eleven at night he had lain down for an hour’s rest. He had woken up at one o’clock, and had been told by a medical friend that his father had died. He had reproached himself with not having been present at his death; and the reproach had been intensified when the nurse told him that his father had spoken his name once during the last days, and had said to her as she came up to the bed: ‘Is that Paul?’ He had thought he noticed that his mother and sisters had been inclined to reproach themselves in a similar way; but they had never spoken about it. At first, however, the reproach had not tormented him. For a long time he had not realized the fact of his father’s death. It had constantly happened that, when he heard a good joke, he would say to himself: ‘I must tell Father that.’ His imagination, too, had been occupied with his father, so that often, when there was a knock at the door, he would think: ‘Here comes Father’, and when he walked into a room he would expect to find his father in it. And although he had never forgotten that his father was dead, the prospect of seeing a ghostly apparition of this kind had had no terrors for him; on the contrary, he had greatly desired it. It had not been until eighteen months later that the recollection of his neglect had recurred to him and begun to torment him terribly, so that he had come to treat himself as a criminal. The occasion of this happening had been the death of an aunt by marriage and of a visit of condolence that he had paid at her house. From that time forward he had extended the structure of his obsessional thoughts so as to include the next world. The immediate consequence of this development had been that he became seriously incapacitated from working.¹ He told me that the only thing that had kept him going at that time had been the consolation given him by his friend, who had always brushed his self-reproaches aside on the ground that they were grossly exaggerated. Hearing this, I took the opportunity of giving him a first glance at the underlying principles of psycho-analytic therapy. When there is a mésalliance, I began, between an affect and its ideational content (in this instance, between the intensity of the self-reproach and the occasion for it ), a layman will say that the affect is too great for the occasion - that it is exaggerated and that consequently the inference following from the self-reproach (the inference that the patient is a criminal) is false. On the contrary, the physician says: ‘No. The affect is justified. The sense of guilt is not in itself open to further criticism. But it belongs to some other content, which is unknown (unconscious), and which requires to be looked for. The known ideational content has only got into its actual position owing to a false connection. We are not used to feeling strong affects without their having any ideational content, and therefore, if the content is missing, we seize as a substitute upon some other content which is in some way or other suitable, much as our police, when they cannot catch the right murderer, arrest a wrong one instead. Moreover, this fact of there being a false connection is the only way of accounting for the powerlessness of logical processes to combat the tormenting idea.’ I concluded by admitting that this new way of looking at the matter gave immediate rise to some hard problems; for how could he admit that his self-reproach of being a criminal towards his father was justified, when he must know that as a matter of fact he had never committed any crime against him?

¹ A more detailed description of the episode, which the patient gave me later on, made it possible to understand the effect that it produced on him. His uncle, lamenting the loss of his wife, had exclaimed: ‘Other men allow themselves every possible indulgence, but I lived for this woman alone!’ The patient had assumed that his uncle was alluding to his father and was casting doubts upon his conjugal fidelity; and although his uncle had denied this construction of his words most positively, it was no longer possible to counteract their effect.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2143

At the next session the patient showed great interest in what I had said, but ventured, so he told me, to bring for ward a few doubts. - How, he asked, could the information that the self-reproach, the sense of guilt, was justified have a therapeutic effect? - I explained that it was not the information that had this effect, but the discovery of the unknown content to which the self-reproach was really attached. - Yes, he said, that was the precise point to which his question had been directed. - I then made some short observations upon the psychological differences between the conscious and the unconscious, and upon the fact that everything conscious was subject to a process of wearing-away, while what was unconscious was relatively unchangeable; and I illustrated my remarks by pointing to the antiques standing about in my room. They were, in fact, I said, only objects found in a tomb, and their burial had been their preservation: the destruction of Pompeii was only beginning now that it had been dug up. - Was there any guarantee, he next enquired, of what one’s attitude would be towards what was discovered? One man, he thought, would no doubt behave in such a way as to get the better of his self-reproach, but another would not. - No, I said, it followed from the nature of the circumstances that in every case the affect would be overcome - for the most part during the progress of the work itself. Every effort was made to preserve Pompeii, whereas people were anxious to be rid of tormenting ideas like his. - He had said to himself, he went on, that a self-reproach could only arise from a breach of a person’s own inner moral principles and not from that of any external ones. - I agreed, and said that the man who merely breaks an external law often regards himself as a hero. - Such an occurrence, he continued, was thus only possible where a disintegration of the personality was already present. Was there a possibility of his effecting a reintegration of his personality? If this could be done, he thought he would be able to make a success of his life, perhaps more of one than most people. - I replied that I was in complete agreement with this notion of a splitting of his personality. He had only to assimilate this new contrast, between a moral self and an evil one, with the contrast I had already mentioned, between the conscious and the unconscious. The moral self was the conscious, the evil self was the unconscious.¹ - He then said that, though he considered himself a moral person, he could quite definitely remember having done things in his childhood which came from his other self. - I remarked that here he had incidentally hit upon one of the chief characteristics of the unconscious, namely, its relation to the infantile. The unconscious, I explained, was the infantile; it was that part of the self which had become separated off from it in infancy, which had not shared the later stages of its development, and which had in consequence become repressed. It was the derivatives of this repressed unconscious that were responsible for the involuntary thoughts which constituted his illness. He might now, I added, discover yet another characteristic of the unconscious; it was a discovery which I should be glad to let him make for himself. - He found nothing more to say in this immediate connection, but instead he expressed a doubt whether it was possible to undo modifications of such long standing. What, in particular, could be done against his idea about the next world, for it could not be refuted by logic? - I told him I did not dispute the gravity of his case nor the significance of his pathological constructions; but at the same time his youth was very much in his favour as well as the intactness of his personality. In this connection I said a word or two upon the good opinion I had formed of him, and this gave him visible pleasure.

¹ All of this is of course only true in the roughest way, but it serves as a first introduction to the subject.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2144

At the next session he began by saying that he must tell me an event in his childhood. From the age of seven, as he had already told me, he had had a fear that his parents guessed his thoughts, and this fear had in fact persisted all through his life. When he was twelve years old he had been in love with a little girl, the sister of a friend of his. (In answer to a question he said that his love had not been sensual; he had not wanted to see her naked for she was too small.) But she had not shown him as much affection as he had desired. And thereupon the idea had come to him that she would be kind to him if some misfortune were to befall him; and as an instance of such a misfortune his father’s death had forced itself upon his mind. He had at once rejected the idea with energy. And even now he could not admit the possibility that what had arisen in this way could have been a ‘wish’; it had clearly been no more than a ‘train of thought’¹ - By way of objection I asked him why, if it had not been a wish, he had repudiated it. - Merely, he replied, on account of the content of the idea, the notion that his father might die. - I remarked that he was treating the phrase as though it were one that involved lèse-majesté; it was well known, of course, that it was equally punishable to say ‘The Emperor is an ass’ or to disguise the forbidden words by saying ‘If any one says, etc., . . . then he will have me to reckon with.’ I added that I could easily insert the idea which he had so energetically repudiated into a context which would exclude the possibility of any such repudiation: for instance, ‘If my father dies, I shall kill myself upon his grave.’ - He was shaken, but did not abandon his objection. I therefore broke off the argument with the remark that I felt sure this had not been the first occurrence of his idea of his father’s dying; it had evidently originated at an earlier date, and some day we should have to trace back its history. - He then proceeded to tell me that a precisely similar thought had flashed through his mind a second time, six months before his father’s death. At that time² he had already been in love with his lady, but financial obstacles made it impossible to think of an alliance with her. The idea had then occurred to him that his father’s death might make him rich enough to marry her. In defending himself against this idea he had gone to the length of wishing that his father might leave him nothing at all, so that he might have no compensation for his terrible loss. The same idea, though in a much milder form, had come to him for a third time, on the day before his father’s death. He had then thought: ‘Now I may be going to lose what I love most’; and then had come the contradiction: ‘No, there is some one else whose loss would be even more painful to you.’³ These thoughts surprised him very much, for he was quite certain that his father’s death could never have been an object of his desire but only of his fear. - After his forcible enunciation of these words I thought it advisable to bring a fresh piece of theory to his notice. According to psycho-analytic theory, I told him, every fear corresponded to a former wish which was now repressed; we were therefore obliged to believe the exact contrary of what he had asserted. This would also fit in with another theoretical requirement, namely, that the unconscious must be the precise contrary of the conscious. - He was much agitated at this and very incredulous. He wondered how he could possibly have had such a wish, considering that he loved his father more than any one else in the world; there could be no doubt that he would have renounced all his own prospects of happiness if by so doing he could have saved his father’s life. - I answered that it was precisely such intense love as his that was the necessary precondition of the repressed hatred. In the case of people to whom he felt indifferent he would certainly have no difficulty in maintaining side by side inclinations to a moderate liking and to an equally moderate dislike: supposing, for instance, that he were an official, he might think that his chief was agreeable as a superior, but at the same time pettifogging as a lawyer and inhuman as a judge. (Shakespeare makes Brutus speak in a similar way of Julius Caesar: ‘As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him; but, as he was ambitious, I slew him.’ But these words already strike us as rather strange, and for the very reason that we had imagined Brutus’s feeling for Caesar as something deeper.) In the case of some one who was closer to him, of his wife for instance, he would wish his feelings to be unmixed, and consequently, as was only human, he would overlook her faults, since they might make him dislike her - he would ignore them as though he were blind to them. So it was precisely the intensity of his love that would not allow his hatred - though to give it such a name was to caricature the feeling - to remain conscious. To be sure, the hatred must have a source, and to discover that source was certainly a problem; his own statements pointed to the time when he was afraid that his parents guessed his thoughts. On the other hand, too, it might be asked why this intense love of his had not succeeded in extinguishing his hatred, as usually happened where there were two opposing impulses. We could only presume that the hatred must flow from some source, must be connected with some particular cause, which made it indestructible. On the one hand, then, some connection of this sort must be keeping his hatred for his father alive, while on the other hand, his intense love prevented it from becoming conscious. Therefore nothing remained for it but to exist in the unconscious, though it was able from time to time to flash out for a moment into consciousness.

¹ Obsessional neurotics are not the only people who are satisfied with euphemisms of this kind.

² That is, ten years ago.

³ There is here an unmistakable indication of an opposition between the two objects of his love, his father and the ‘lady’.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2145

He admitted that all of this sounded quite plausible, but he was naturally not in the very least convinced by it.¹ He would venture to ask, he said, how it was that an idea of this kind could have remissions, how it could appear for a moment when he was twelve years old, and again when he was twenty, and then once more two years later, this time for good. He could not believe that his hostility had been extinguished in the intervals, and yet during them there had been no sign of self-reproaches. - To this I replied that whenever any one asked a question like that, he was already prepared with an answer; he needed only to be encouraged to go on talking. - He then proceeded, somewhat disconnectedly as it seemed, to say that he had been his father’s best friend, and that his father had been his. Except on a few subjects, upon which fathers and sons usually hold aloof from one another - (What could he mean by that?) -, there had been a greater intimacy between them than there now was between him and his best friend. As regards the lady for whose sake he had sacrificed his father in that idea of his, it was true that he had loved her very much, but he had never felt really sensual wishes towards her, such as he had constantly had in his childhood. Altogether, in his childhood his sensual impulses had been much stronger than during his puberty. - At this I told him I thought he had now produced the answer we were waiting for, and had at the same time discovered the third great characteristic of the unconscious. The source from which his hostility to his father derived its indestructibility was evidently something in the nature of sensual desires, and in that connection he must have felt his father as in some way or other an interference. A conflict of this kind, I added, between sensuality and childish love was entirely typical. The remissions he had spoken of had occurred because the premature explosion of his sensual feelings had had as its immediate consequence a considerable diminution of their violence. It was not until he was once more seized with intense erotic desires that his hostility reappeared again owing to the revival of the old situation. I then got him to agree that I had not led him on to the subject either of childhood or of sex, but that he had raised them both of his own free will. - He then went on to ask why he had not simply come to a decision, at the time he was in love with the lady, that his father’s interference with that love could not for a moment weigh against his love of his father. - I replied that it was scarcely possible to destroy a person in absentia. Such a decision would only have been possible if the wish that he took objection to had made its first appearance on that occasion; whereas, as a matter of fact, it was a long-repressed wish, towards which he could not behave otherwise than he had formerly done, and which was consequently immune from destruction. This wish (to get rid of his father as being an interference) must have originated at a time when circumstances had been very different - at a time, perhaps, when he had not loved his father more than the person whom he desired sensually, or when he was incapable of making a clear decision. It must have been in his very early childhood, therefore, before he had reached the age of six, and before the date at which his memory became continuous; and things must have remained in the same state ever since. - With this piece of construction our discussion was broken off for the time being.

¹ It is never the aim of discussions like this to create conviction. They are only intended to bring the repressed complexes into consciousness, to set the conflict going in the field of conscious mental activity, and to facilitate the emergence of fresh material from the unconscious. A sense of conviction is only attained after the patient has himself worked over the reclaimed material, and so long as he is not fully convinced the material must be considered as unexhausted.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2146

At the next session, which was the seventh, he took up the same subject once more. He could not believe, he said, that he had ever entertained such a wish against his father. He remembered a story of Sudermann’s, he went on, that had made a deep impression upon him. In this story there was a woman who, as she sat by her sister’s sick-bed, felt a wish that her sister should die so that she herself might marry her husband. The woman thereupon committed suicide, thinking she was not fit to live after being guilty of such baseness. He could understand this, he said, and it would be only right if his thoughts were the death of him, for he deserved nothing less.¹ - I remarked that it was well known to us that patients derived a certain satisfaction from their sufferings, so that in reality they all resisted their own recovery to some extent. He must never lose sight of the fact that a treatment like ours proceeded to the accompaniment of a constant resistance; I should be repeatedly reminding him of this fact.

He then went on to say that he would like to speak of a criminal act, whose author he did not recognize as himself, though he quite clearly recollected committing it. He quoted a saying of Nietzsche’s:² ‘"I did this," says my Memory. "I cannot have done this," says my Pride and remains inexorable. In the end - Memory yields.’ ‘Well,’ he continued, ‘my memory has not yielded on this point.’ - ‘That is because you derive pleasure from your self-reproaches as a means of self-punishment.’ - ‘My younger brother - I am really very fond of him now, and he is causing me a great deal of worry just at present, for he wants to make what I consider a preposterous match; I have thought before now of going and killing the person concerned so as to prevent his marrying her -well, my younger brother and I used to fight a lot when we were children. We were very fond of each other at the same time, and were inseparable; but I was plainly filled with jealousy, as he was the stronger and better-looking of the two and consequently the favourite.’ - ‘Yes. You have already given me a description of a scene of jealousy in connection with Fräulein Lina.’ - ‘Very well then, on some such occasion (it was certainly before I was eight years old, for I was not going to school yet, which I began to do when I was eight) - on some such occasion, this is what I did. We both had toy guns of the usual make. I loaded mine with the ram rod and told him that if he looked up the barrel he would see something. Then, while he was looking in, I pulled the trigger. He was hit on the forehead and not hurt; but I had meant to hurt him very much indeed. Afterwards I was quite beside myself, and threw myself on the ground and asked myself however I could have done such a thing. But I did do it.’ - I took the opportunity of urging my case. If he had preserved the recollection of an action so foreign to him as this, he could not, I maintained, deny the possibility of something similar, which he had now forgotten entirely, having happened at a still earlier age in relation to his father. - He then told me he was aware of having felt other vindictive impulses, this time towards the lady he admired so much, of whose character he painted a glowing picture. It might be true, he said, that she could not love easily; but she was reserving her whole self for the one man to whom she would some day belong. She did not love him. When he had become certain of that, a conscious phantasy had taken shape in his mind of how he should grow very rich and marry some one else, and should then take her to call on the lady in order to hurt her feelings. But at that point the phantasy had broken down, for he had been obliged to own to himself that the other woman, his wife, was completely indifferent to him; then his thoughts had become confused, till finally it had been clearly borne in upon him that this other woman would have to die. In this phantasy, just as in his attempt upon his brother, he recognized the quality of cowardice which was so particularly horrible to him.³ - In the further course of our conversation I pointed out to him that he ought logically to consider himself as in no way responsible for any of these traits in his character; for all of these reprehensible impulses originated from his infancy, and were only derivatives of his infantile character surviving in his unconscious; and he must know that moral responsibility could not be applied to children. It was only by a process of development, I added, that a man, with his moral responsibility, grew up out of the sum of his infantile predispositions.4 He expressed a doubt, however, whether all his evil impulses had originated from that source. But I promised to prove it to him in the course of the treatment.

He went on to adduce the fact of his illness having become so enormously intensified since his father’s death; and I said I agreed with him in so far as I regarded his sorrow at his father’s death as the chief source of the intensity of his illness. His sorrow had found, as it were, a pathological expression in his illness. Whereas, I told him, a normal period of mourning would last from one to two years, a pathological one like this would last indefinitely.

This is as much of the present case history as I am able to report in a detailed and consecutive manner. It coincides roughly with the expository portion of the treatment; this lasted in all for more than eleven months.

¹ This sense of guilt involves the most glaring contradiction of his opening denial that he had ever entertained such an evil wish against his father. This is a common type of reaction to repressed material which has become conscious: the ‘No’ with which the fact is first denied is immediately followed by a confirmation of it, though, to begin with, only an indirect one.

² Jenseits von Gut und Böse, iv. 68.

³ This quality of his will find an explanation later on.

4 I only produced these arguments so as once more to demonstrate to myself their inefficacy. I cannot understand how other psychotherapists can assert that they successfully combat neuroses with such weapons as these.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2147

(E)  SOME OBSESSIONAL IDEAS AND THEIR EXPLANATION

Obsessional ideas, as is well known, have an appearance of being either without motive or without meaning, just a dreams have. The first problem is how to give them a sense and a status in the subject’s mental life, so as to make them comprehensible and even obvious. The problem of translating them may seem insoluble; but we must never let ourselves be misled by that illusion. The wildest and most eccentric obsessional ideas can be cleared up if they are investigated deeply enough. The solution is effected by bringing the obsessional ideas into temporal relationship with the patient’s experiences, that is to say, by enquiring when a particular obsessional idea made its first appearance and in what external circumstances it is apt to recur. When, as so often happens, an obsessional idea has not succeeded in establishing itself permanently, the task of clearing it up is correspondingly simplified. We can easily convince ourselves that, when once the interconnections between an obsessional idea and the patient’s experiences have been discovered, there will be no difficulty in obtaining access to whatever else may be puzzling or worth knowing in the pathological structure we are dealing with - its meaning, the mechanism of its origin, and its derivation from the preponderant motive forces of the patient’s mind.

As a particularly clear example I will begin with one of the suicidal impulses which appeared so frequently in our patient. This instance almost analysed itself in the telling. He had once, he told me, lost some weeks of study owing to his lady’s absence: she had gone away to nurse her grandmother, who was seriously ill. Just as he was in the middle of a very hard piece of work the idea had occurred to him: ‘If you received a command to take your examination this term at the first possible opportunity, you might manage to obey it. But if you were commanded to cut your throat with a razor, what then?’ He had at once become aware that this command had already been given, and was hurrying to the cupboard to fetch his razor when he thought: ‘No, it’s not so simple as that. You must¹ go and kill the old woman.’ Upon that, he had fallen to the ground, beside himself with horror.

In this instance the connection between the compulsive idea and the patient’s life is contained in the opening words of his story. His lady was absent, while he was working very hard for an examination so as to bring the possibility of an alliance with her nearer. While he was working he was overcome by a longing for his absent lady, and he thought of the cause of her absence. And now there came over him something which, if he had been a normal man, would probably have been some kind of feeling of annoyance with her grandmother: ‘Why must the old woman get ill just at the very moment when I’m longing for her so frightfully?’ We must suppose that something similar but far more intense passed through our patient’s mind - an unconscious fit of rage which could combine with his longing and find expression in the exclamation: ‘Oh, I should like to go and kill that old woman for robbing me of my love!’ Thereupon followed the command: ‘Kill yourself, as a punishment for these savage and murderous passions!’ The whole process then passed into the obsessional patient’s consciousness accompanied by the most violent affect and in a reverse order - the punitive command coming first, and the mention of the guilty outburst afterwards. I cannot think that this attempt at an explanation will seem forced or that it involves many hypothetical elements.

¹ The sense requires that the word ‘first’ should be interpolated here.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2148

Another impulse, which might be described as indirectly suicidal and which was of longer duration, was not so easily explicable. For its relation to the patient’s experiences succeeded in concealing itself behind one of those purely external associations which are so obnoxious to our consciousness. One day while he was away on his summer holidays the idea suddenly occurred to him that he was too fat [German ‘dick’] and that he must make himself slimmer. So he began getting up from table before the pudding came round and tearing along the road without a hat in the blazing heat of an August sun. Then he would dash up a mountain at the double, till, dripping with perspiration, he was forced to come to a stop. On one occasion his suicidal intentions actually emerged without any disguise from behind this mania for slimming: as he was standing on the edge of a steep precipice he suddenly received a command to jump over, which would have been certain death. Our patient could think of no explanation of this senseless obsessional behaviour until it suddenly occurred to him that at that time his lady had also been stopping at the same resort; but she had been in the company of an English cousin, who was very attentive to her and of whom the patient had been very jealous. This cousin’s name was Richard, and, according to the usual practice in England, he was known as Dick. Our patient, then, had wanted to kill this Dick; he had been far more jealous of him and enraged with him than he could admit to himself, and that was why he had imposed on himself this course of slimming by way of a punishment. This obsessional impulse may seem very different from the directly suicidal command which was discussed above, but they have nevertheless one important feature in common. For they both arose as reactions to a tremendous feeling of rage, which was inaccessible to the patient’s consciousness and was directed against some one who had cropped up as an interference with the course of his love.¹

¹ Names and words are not nearly so frequently or so recklessly employed in obsessional neuroses as in hysteria for the purpose of establishing a connection between unconscious thoughts (whether they are impulses or phantasies) and symptoms. I happen, however, to recollect another instance in which the very same name, Richard, was similarly used by a patient whom I analysed a long time since. After a quarrel with his brother he began brooding over the best means of getting rid of his fortune, and declaring that he did not want to have anything more to do with money, and so on. His brother was called Richard, and ‘richard’ is the French for ‘a rich man’.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2149

Some other of the patient’s obsessions, however, though they too were centred upon his lady, exhibited a different mechanism and owed their origin to a different instinct. Besides his slimming mania he produced a whole series of other obsessional activities at the period during which the lady was stopping at his summer resort; and, in part at least, these directly related to her. One day, when he was out with her in a boat and there was a stiff breeze blowing, he was obliged to make her put on his cap, because a command had been formulated in his mind that nothing must happen to her.¹ This was a kind of obsession for protecting, and it bore other fruit besides this. Another time, as they were sitting together during a thunderstorm, he was obsessed, he could not tell why, with the necessity for counting up to forty or fifty between each flash of lightning and its accompanying thunder-clap. On the day of her departure he knocked his foot against a stone lying in the road, and was obliged to put it out of the way by the side of the road, because the idea struck him that her carriage would be driving along the same road in a few hours’ time and might come to grief against this stone. But a few minutes later it occurred to him that this was absurd, and he was obliged to go back and replace the stone in its original position in the middle of the road. After her departure he became a prey to an obsession for understanding, which made him a curse to all his companions. He forced himself to understand the precise meaning of every syllable that was addressed to him, as though he might otherwise be missing some priceless treasure. Accordingly he kept asking: ‘What was it you said just then?‘ And after it had been repeated to him he could not help thinking it had sounded different the first time, so he remained dissatisfied.

¹ The words ‘for which he might be to blame’ must be added to complete the sense.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2150

All of these products of his illness depended upon a certain circumstance which at that time dominated his relations to his lady. When he had been taking leave of her in Vienna before the summer holidays, she had said something which he had construed into a desire on her part to disown him before the rest of the company; and this had made him very unhappy. During her stay at the holiday resort there had been an opportunity for discussing the question, and the lady had been able to prove to him that these words of hers which he had misunderstood had on the contrary been intended to save him from looking ridiculous. This made him very happy again. The clearest allusion to this incident was contained in the obsession for understanding. It was constructed as though he were saying to himself: ‘After such an experience you must never misunderstand any one again, if you want to spare yourself unnecessary distress.’ This resolution was not merely a generalization from a single occasion, but it was also displaced - perhaps on account of the lady’s absence - from a single highly valued individual on to all the remaining inferior ones. And the obsession cannot have arisen solely from his satisfaction at the explanation she had given him; it must have expressed something else besides, for it ended in an unsatisfying doubt as to whether what he had heard had been correctly repeated.

The other compulsive commands that have been mentioned put us upon the track of this other element. His obsession for protecting can only have been a reaction - as an expression of remorse and penitence - to a contrary, that is a hostile, impulse which he must have felt towards his lady before they had their éclaircissement. His obsession for counting during the thunderstorm can be interpreted, with the help of some material which he produced, as having been a defensive measure against fears that some one was in danger of death. The analysis of the obsessions which we first considered has already warned us to regard our patient’s hostile impulses as particularly violent and as being in the nature of senseless rage; and now we find that even after their reconciliation his rage against the lady continued to play a part in the formation of his obsessions. His doubting mania as to whether he had heard correctly was an expression of the doubt still lurking in his mind, whether he had really understood his lady correctly this time and whether he had been justified in taking her words as a proof of her affection for him. The doubt implied in his obsession for understanding was a doubt of her love. A battle between love and hate was raging in the lover’s breast, and the object of both these feelings was one and the same person. The battle was represented in a plastic form by his compulsive and symbolic act of removing the stone from the road along which she was to drive, and then of undoing this deed of love by replacing the stone where it had lain, so that her carriage might come to grief against it and she herself be hurt. We shall not be forming a correct judgement of this second part of the compulsive act if we take it at its face value as having merely been a critical repudiation of a pathological action. The fact that it was accompanied by a sense of compulsion betrays it as having itself been a part of the pathological action, though a part which was determined by a motive contrary to that which produced the first part.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2151

Compulsive acts like this, in two successive stages, of which the second neutralizes the first, are a typical occurrence in obsessional neuroses. The patient’s consciousness naturally misunderstands them and puts forward a set of secondary motives to account for them - rationalizes them, in short. (Cf. Jones, 1908.) But their true significance lies in their being a representation of a conflict between two opposing impulses of approximately equal strength: and hitherto I have invariably found that this opposition has been one between love and hate. Compulsive acts of this sort are theoretically of special interest, for they show us a new type of method of constructing symptoms. What regularly occurs in hysteria is that a compromise is arrived at which enables both the opposing tendencies to find expression simultaneously - which kills two birds with one stone;¹ whereas here each of the two opposing tendencies finds satisfaction singly, first one and then the other, though naturally an attempt is made to establish some sort of logical connection (often in defiance of all logic) between the antagonists.²

¹ Cf. ‘Hysterical Phantasies and their Relation to Bisexuality’ (Freud, 1908a).

² Another obsessional patient once told me the following story. He was walking one day in the park at Schönbrunn when he kicked his foot against a branch that was lying on the ground. He picked it up and flung it into the hedge that bordered the path. On his way home he was suddenly seized with uneasiness that the branch in its new position might perhaps be projecting a little from the hedge and might cause an injury to some one passing by the same place after him. He was obliged to jump off his tram, hurry back to the park, find the place again, and put the branch back in its former position - although any one else but the patient would have seen that, on the contrary, it was bound to be more dangerous to passers-by in its original position than where he had put it in the hedge. The second and hostile act, which he carried out under compulsion, had clothed itself to his conscious view with the motives that really belonged to the first and philanthropic one.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2152

The conflict between love and hatred showed itself in our patient by other signs as well. At the time of the revival of his piety he made up prayers for himself, which took up more and more time and eventually lasted for an hour and a half. The reason for this was that he found, like an inverted Balaam, that something always inserted itself into his pious phrases and turned them into their opposite. E.g., if he said, ‘May God protect him’, an evil spirit would hurriedly insinuate a ‘not’.¹ On one such occasion the idea occurred to him of cursing instead, for in that case, he thought, the contrary words would be sure to creep in. His original intention, which had been repressed by his praying, was forcing its way through in this last idea of his. In the end he found his way out of his embarrassment by giving up the prayers and replacing them by a short formula concocted out of the initial letters or syllables of various prayers. He then recited this formula so quickly that nothing could slip into it.

He once brought me a dream which represented the same conflict in relation to his transference on to the physician. He dreamt that my mother was dead; he was anxious to offer me his condolences, but was afraid that in doing so he might break into an impertinent laugh, as he had repeatedly done on similar occasions in the past. He preferred, therefore, to leave a card on me with ‘p. c.’ written on it; but as he was writing them the letters turned into ‘p. f.’²

¹ Compare the similar mechanism in the familiar case of sacrilegious thoughts entering the minds of devout persons.

² [The customary abbreviations for ‘pour condoler’ and ‘pour féliciter’ respectively.] This dream provides the explanation of the compulsive laughter which so often occurs on mournful occasions and which is regarded as such an unaccountable phenomenon.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2153

The mutual antagonism between his feelings for his lady was too marked to have escaped his conscious perception entirely, although we may conclude from the obsessions in which it was manifested that he did not rightly appreciate the depth of his negative impulses. The lady had refused his first proposal, ten years earlier. Since then he had to his own knowledge passed through alternating periods, in which he either believed that he loved her intensely, or felt indifferent to her. Whenever in the course of the treatment he was faced by the necessity of taking some step which would bring him nearer the successful end of his courtship, his resistance usually began by taking the form of a conviction that after all he did not very much care for her - though this resistance, it is true, used soon to break down. Once when she was lying seriously ill in bed and he was most deeply concerned about her, there crossed his mind as he looked at her a wish that she might lie like that for ever. He explained this idea by an ingenious piece of sophistry: maintaining that he had only wished her to be permanently ill so that he might be relieved of his intolerable fear that she would have a repeated succession of attacks!¹ Now and then he used to occupy his imagination with day-dreams, which he himself recognized as ‘phantasies of revenge’ and felt ashamed of. Believing, for instance, that the lady set great store by the social standing of a suitor, he made up a phantasy in which she was married to a man of that kind, who was in some government office. He himself then entered the same department, and rose much more rapidly than her husband, who eventually became his subordinate. One day, his phantasy proceeded, this man committed some act of dishonesty. The lady threw herself at his feet and implored him to save her husband. He promised to do so, and informed her that it had only been for love of her that he had entered the service, because he had foreseen that such a moment would occur; and now that her husband was saved, his own mission was fulfilled and he would resign his post.

He produced other phantasies in which he did the lady some great service without her knowing that it was he who was doing it. In these he only recognized his affection, without sufficiently appreciating the origin and aim of his magnanimity, which was designed to repress his thirst for revenge, after the manner of Dumas’ Count of Monte-Cristo. Moreover he admitted that occasionally he was overcome by quite distinct impulses to do some mischief to the lady he admired. These impulses were mostly in abeyance when she was there, and only appeared in her absence.

¹ It cannot be doubted that another contributory motive to this compulsive idea was a wish to know that she was powerless against his designs.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2154

(F)  THE PRECIPITATING CAUSE OF THE ILLNESS

One day the patient mentioned quite casually an event which I could not fail to recognize as the precipitating cause of his illness, or at least as the immediate occasion of the attack which had begun some six years previously and had persisted to that day. He himself had no notion that he had brought forward anything of importance; he could not remember that he had ever attached any importance to the event; and moreover he had never forgotten it. Such an attitude on his part calls for some theoretical consideration.

In hysteria it is the rule that the precipitating causes of the illness are overtaken by amnesia no less than the infantile experiences by whose help the precipitating causes are able to transform their affective energy into symptoms. And where the amnesia cannot be complete, it nevertheless subjects the recent traumatic precipitating cause to a process of erosion and robs it at least of its most important components. In this amnesia we see the evidence of the repression which has taken place. The case is different in obsessional neuroses. The infantile preconditions of the neurosis may be overtaken by amnesia, though this is often an incomplete one; but the immediate occasions of the illness are, on the contrary, retained in the memory. Repression makes use of another, and in reality a simpler, mechanism. The trauma, instead of being forgotten, is deprived of its affective cathexis; so that what remains in consciousness is nothing but its ideational content, which is perfectly colourless and is judged to be unimportant. The distinction between what occurs in hysteria and in an obsessional neurosis lies in the psychological processes which we can reconstruct behind the phenomena; the result is almost always the same, for the colourless mnemic content is rarely reproduced and plays no part in the patient’s mental activity. In order to differentiate between the two kinds of repression we have on the surface nothing to rely upon but the patient’s assurance that he has a feeling in the one case of having always known the thing and in the other of having long ago forgotten it.¹

¹ It must therefore be admitted that in an obsessional neurosis there are two kinds of knowledge, and it is just as reasonable to hold that the patient ‘knows’ his traumas as that he does not ‘know’ them. For he knows them in that he has not forgotten them, and he does not know them in that he is unaware of their significance. It is often the same in ordinary life. The waiters who used to serve Schopenhauer at his regular restaurant ‘knew’ him in a certain sense, at a time when, apart from that, he was not known either in Frankfurt or outside it; but they did not ‘know’ him in the sense in which we speak to-day of ‘knowing’ Schopenhauer.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2155

For this reason it not uncommonly happens that obsessional neurotics, who are troubled with self-reproaches but have connected their affects with the wrong causes, will also tell the physician the true causes, without any suspicion that their self-reproaches have simply become detached from them. In relating such an incident they will sometimes add with astonishment or even with an air of pride: ‘But I think nothing of that.’ This happened in the first case of obsessional neurosis which gave me an insight many years ago into the nature of the malady. The patient, who was a government official, was troubled by innumerable scruples. He was the man whose compulsive act in connection with the branch in the park at Schönbrunn I have already described. I was struck by the fact that the florin notes with which he paid his consultation fees were invariably clean and smooth. (This was before we had a silver coinage in Austria.) I once remarked to him that one could always tell a government official by the brand-new florins that he drew from the State treasury, and he then informed me that his florins were by no means new, but that he had them ironed out at home. It was a matter of conscience with him, he explained, not to hand any one dirty paper florins; for they harboured all sorts of dangerous bacteria and might do some harm to the recipient. At that time I already had a vague suspicion of the connection between neuroses and sexual life, so on another occasion I ventured to ask the patient how he stood in regard to that matter. ‘Oh, that’s quite all right,’ he answered airily, ‘I’m not at all badly off in that respect. I play the part of a dear old uncle in a number of respectable families, and now and then I make use of my position to invite some young girl to go out with me for a day’s excursion in the country. Then I arrange that we shall miss the train home and be obliged to spend the night out of town. I always engage two rooms - I do things most handsomely; but when the girl has gone to bed I go in to her and masturbate her with my fingers.’ - ‘But aren’t you afraid of doing her some harm, fiddling about in her genitals with your dirty hand?’ - At this he flared up: ‘Harm? Why, what harm should it do her? It hasn’t done a single one of them any harm yet, and they’ve all of them enjoyed it. Some of them are married now, and it hasn’t done them any harm at all.’ - He took my remonstrance in very bad part, and never appeared again. But I could only account for the contrast between his fastidiousness with the paper florins and his unscrupulousness in abusing the girls entrusted to him by supposing that the self-reproachful affect had become displaced. The aim of this displacement was obvious enough: if his self-reproaches had been allowed to remain where they belonged he would have had to abandon a form of sexual gratification to which he was probably impelled by some powerful infantile determinants. The displacement therefore ensured his deriving a considerable advantage from his illness.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2156

But I must now return to a more detailed examination of the precipitating cause of our present patient’s illness. His mother was brought up in a wealthy family with which she was distantly connected. This family carried on a large industrial concern. His father, at the time of his marriage, had been taken into the business, and had thus by his marriage made himself a fairly comfortable position. The patient had learnt from some chaff exchanged between his parents (whose marriage was an extremely happy one) that his father, some time before making his mother’s acquaintance, had made advances to a pretty but penniless girl of humble birth. So much by way of introduction. After his father’s death the patient’s mother told him one day that she had been discussing his future with her rich relations, and that one of her cousins had declared himself ready to let him marry one of his daughters when his education was completed; a business connection with the firm would offer him a brilliant opening in his profession. This family plan stirred up in him a conflict as to whether he should remain faithful to the lady he loved in spite of her poverty, or whether he should follow in his father’s footsteps and marry the lovely, rich, and well-connected girl who had been assigned to him. And he resolved this conflict, which was in fact one between his love and the persisting influence of his father’s wishes, by falling ill; or, to put it more correctly, by falling ill he avoided the task of resolving it in real life.¹

¹ It is worth emphasizing that his flight into illness was made possible by his identifying himself with his father. The identification enabled his affects to regress on to the residue of his childhood.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2157

The proof that this view was correct lies in the fact that the chief result of his illness was an obstinate incapacity for work, which allowed him to postpone the completion of his education for years. But the results of such an illness are never unintentional; what appears to be the consequence of the illness is in reality the cause or motive of falling ill.

As was to be expected, the patient did not, to begin with, accept my elucidation of the matter. He could not imagine, he said, that the plan of marriage could have had any such effects: it had not made the slightest impression on him at the time. But in the further course of treatment he was forcibly brought to believe in the truth of my suspicion, and in a most singular manner. With the help of a transference phantasy, he experienced, as though it were new and belonged to the present, the very episode from the past which he had forgotten, or which had only passed though his mind unconsciously. There came an obscure and difficult period in the treatment; eventually it turned out that he had once met a young girl on the stairs in my house and had on the spot promoted her into being my daughter. She had pleased him, and he pictured to himself that the only reason I was so kind and incredibly patient with him was that I wanted to have him for a son-in-law. At the same time he raised the wealth and position of my family to a level which agreed with the model he had in mind. But his undying love for his lady fought against the temptation. After we had gone though a series of the severest resistances and bitterest vituperations on his part, he could no longer remain blind to the overwhelming effect of the perfect analogy between the transference phantasy and the actual state of affairs in the past. I will repeat one of the dreams which he had at this period, so as to give an example of his manner of treating the subject. He dreamt that he saw my daughter in front of him; she had two patches of dung instead of eyes. No one who understands the language of dreams will find much difficulty in translating this one: it declared that he was marrying my daughter not for her ‘beaux yeux’ but for her money.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2158

(G)  THE FATHER COMPLEX AND THE SOLUTION OF THE RAT IDEA

From the precipitating cause of the patient’s illness in his adult years there was a thread leading back to his childhood. He had found himself in a situation similar to that in which, as he knew or suspected, his father had been before his marriage; and he had thus been able to identify himself with his father. But his dead father was involved in his recent attack in yet another way. The conflict at the root of his illness was in essentials a struggle between the persisting influence of his father’s wishes and his own amatory predilections. If we take into consideration what the patient reported in the course of the first hours of his treatment, we shall not be able to avoid a suspicion that this struggle was a very ancient one and had arisen as far back as in his childhood.

By all accounts our patient’s father was a most excellent may. Before his marriage he had been a non-commissioned officer, and, as relics of that period of his life, he had retained a straightforward soldierly manner and a penchant for using downright language. Apart from those virtues which are celebrated upon every tombstone, he was distinguished by a hearty sense of humour and a kindly tolerance towards his fellow-men. That he could be hasty and violent was certainly not inconsistent with his other qualities, but was rather a necessary complement to them; but it occasionally brought down the most severe castigations upon the children, while they were young and naughty. When they grew up, however, he differed from other fathers in not attempting to exalt himself into a sacrosanct authority, but in sharing with them a knowledge of the little failures and misfortunes of his life with good-natured candour. His son was certainly not exaggerating when he declared that they had lived together like the best of friends, except upon a single point (p. 2145). And it must no doubt have been in connection with that very point that thoughts about his father’s death had occupied his mind when he was a small boy with unusual and undue intensity (p. 2133), and that those thoughts made their appearance in the wording of the obsessional ideas of his childhood; and it can only have been in that same connection that he was able to wish for his father’s death, in order that a certain little girl’s sympathy might be aroused and that she might behave more kindly towards him (p. 2144).

There can be no question that there was something in the sphere of sexuality that stood between the father and son, and that the father had come into some sort of opposition to the son’s prematurely developed erotic life. Several years after his father’s death, the first time he experienced the pleasurable sensations of copulation, an idea sprang into his mind: ‘This is glorious! One might murder one’s father for this!’ This was at once an echo and an elucidation of the obsessional ideas of his childhood. Moreover, his father, shortly before his death, had directly opposed what later became our patient’s dominating passion. He had noticed that his son was always in the lady’s company, and had advised him to keep away from her, saying that it was imprudent of him and that he would only make a fool of himself.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2159

To this unimpeachable body of evidence we shall be able to add fresh material, if we turn to the history of the masturbatory side of our patient’s sexual activities. There is a conflict between the opinions of doctors and patients on this subject which has not hitherto been properly appreciated. The patients are unanimous in their belief that masturbation, by which they mean masturbation during puberty, is the root and origin of all their troubles. The doctors are, upon the whole, unable to decide what line to take; but, influenced by the knowledge that not only neurotics but most normal people pass through a period of masturbation during their puberty, the majority of them are inclined to dismiss the patients’ assertions as gross exaggerations. In my opinion the patients are once again nearer to a correct view than the doctors; for the patients have some glimmering notion of the truth, while the doctors are in danger of overlooking an essential point. The thesis propounded by the patients certainly does not correspond to the facts in the sense in which they themselves construe it, namely, that masturbation during puberty (which may almost be described as a typical occurrence) is responsible for all neurotic disturbances. Their thesis requires interpretation. The masturbation of puberty is in fact no more than a revival of the masturbation of infancy, a subject which has hitherto invariably been neglected. Infantile masturbation reaches a kind of climax, as a rule, between the ages of three and four or five; and it is the clearest expression of a child’s sexual constitution, in which the aetiology of subsequent neuroses must be sought. In this disguised way, therefore, the patients are putting the blame for their illnesses upon their infantile sexuality; and they are perfectly right in doing so. On the other hand, the problem of masturbation becomes insoluble if we attempt to treat it as a clinical unit, and forget that it can represent the discharge of every variety of sexual component and of every sort of phantasy to which such components can give rise. The injurious effects of masturbation are only in a very small degree autonomous - that is to say, determined by its own nature. They are in substance merely part and parcel of the pathogenic significance of the subject’s sexual life as a whole. The fact that so many people can tolerate masturbation - that is, a certain amount of it - without injury merely shows that their sexual constitution and the course of development of their sexual life have been such as to allow them to exercise the sexual function within the limits of what is culturally permissible; whereas other people, because their sexual constitution has been less favourable or their development has been disturbed, fall ill as a result of their sexuality - they cannot, that is, achieve the necessary suppression or sublimation of their sexual components without having recourse to inhibitions or substitutes.¹

¹ See Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905d.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2160

Our present patient’s behaviour in the matter of masturbation was most remarkable. He did not practise it during puberty and therefore, according to one set of views, he might have expected to be exempt from neurosis. On the other hand, an impulsion towards masturbatory activities came over him in his twenty-first year, shortly after his father’s death. He felt very much ashamed of himself each time he gave way to this kind of gratification, and soon foreswore the habit. From that time onwards it reappeared only upon rare and extraordinary occasions. It was provoked, he told me, when he experienced especially fine moments, or when he read especially fine passages. It occurred once, for instance, on a lovely summer’s afternoon when, in the middle of Vienna, he heard a postilion blowing his horn in the most wonderful way - until a policeman stopped him, because blowing horns is not allowed in the centre of the town. And another time it happened when he read in Dichtung und Warheit how the young Goethe had freed himself in a burst of tenderness from the effects of a curse which a jealous mistress had pronounced upon the next woman who should kiss his lips after her; he had long, almost superstitiously, suffered the curse to hold him back, but now he broke his bonds and kissed his love joyfully again and again.

It seemed to the patient not a little strange that he should be impelled to masturbate precisely upon such beautiful and uplifting occasions as these. But I could not help pointing out that these two occasions had something in common - a prohibition, and the defiance of a command.

We must also consider in the same connection his curious behaviour at a time when he was working for an examination and toying with his favourite phantasy that his father was still alive and might at any moment reappear. He used to arrange that his working hours should be as late as possible in the night. Between twelve and one o’clock at night he would interrupt his work, and open the front door of the flat as though his father were standing outside it; then, coming back into the hall, he would take out his penis and look at it in the looking-glass. This crazy conduct becomes intelligible if we suppose that he was acting as though he expected a visit from his father at the hour when ghosts are abroad. He had on the whole been idle at his work during his father’s lifetime, and this had often been a cause of annoyance to his father. And now that he was returning as a ghost, he was to be delighted at finding his son hard at work. But it was impossible that his father should be delighted at the other part of his behaviour; in this therefore he must be defying him. Thus, in a single unintelligible obsessional act, he gave expression to the two sides of his relation with his father, just as he did subsequently with regard to his lady by means of his obsessional act with the stone.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2161

Starting from these indications and from other data of a similar kind, I ventured to put forward a construction to the effect that when he was a child of under six he had been guilty of some sexual misdemeanour connected with masturbation and had been soundly castigated for it by his father. This punishment, according to my hypothesis, had, it was true, put an end to his masturbating, but on the other hand it had left behind it an ineradicable grudge against his father and had established him for all time in his role of an interferer with the patient’s sexual enjoyment.¹ To my great astonishment the patient then informed me that his mother had repeatedly described to him an occurrence of this kind which dated from his earliest childhood and had evidently escaped being forgotten by her on account of its remarkable consequences. He himself, however, had no recollection of it whatever. The tale was as follows. When he was very small - it became possible to establish the date more exactly owing to its having coincided with the fatal illness of an elder sister - he had done something naughty, for which his father had given him a beating. The little boy had flown into a terrible rage and had hurled abuse at his father even while he was under his blows. But as he knew no bad language, he had called him all the names of common objects that he could think of, and had screamed: ‘You lamp! You towel! You plate!’ and so on. His father, shaken by such an outburst of elemental fury, had stopped beating him, and had declared: ‘The child will be either a great man or a great criminal!’² The patient believed that the scene made a permanent impression upon himself as well as upon his father. His father, he said, never beat him again; and he also attributed to this experience a part of the change which came over his own character. From that time forward he was a coward - out of fear of the violence of his own rage. His whole life long, moreover, he was terribly afraid of blows, and used to creep away and hide, filled with terror and indignation, when one of his brothers or sisters was beaten.

¹ Compare my suspicions to a similar effect in one of the first sessions (p. 2145).

² These alternatives did not exhaust the possibilities. His father had overlooked the commonest outcome of such premature passions - a neurosis.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2162

The patient subsequently questioned his mother again. She confirmed the story, adding that at the time he had been between three and four years old and that he had been given the punishment because he had bitten some one. She could remember no further details, except for a very uncertain idea that the person the little boy had hurt might have been his nurse. In her account there was no suggestion of his misdeed having been of a sexual nature.¹

¹ In psycho-analyses we frequently come across occurrences of this kind, dating back to the earliest years of the patient’s childhood, in which his infantile sexual activity appears to reach its climax and often comes to a catastrophic end owing to some misfortune or punishment. Such occurrences are apt to appear in a shadowy way in dreams. Often they will become so clear that the analyst thinks he has a firm hold of them, and will nevertheless evade any final elucidation; and unless he proceeds with the greatest skill and caution he may be compelled to leave it undecided whether the scene in question actually took place or not. It will help to put us upon the right track in interpreting it, if we recognize that more than one version of the scene (each often differing greatly from the other) may be detected in the patient’s unconscious phantasies. If we do not wish to go astray in our judgement of their historical reality, we must above all bear in mind that people’s ‘childhood memories’ are only consolidated at a later period, usually at the age of puberty; and that this involves a complicated process of remodelling, analogous in every way to the process by which a nation constructs legends about its early history. It at once becomes evident that in his phantasies about his infancy the individual as he grows up endeavours to efface the recollection of his auto-erotic activities; and this he does by exalting their memory-traces to the level of object-love, just as a real historian will view the past in the light of the present. This explains why these phantasies abound in seductions and assaults, where the facts will have been confined to auto-erotic activities and the caresses or punishments that stimulated them. Furthermore, it becomes clear that in constructing phantasies about his childhood the individual sexualizes his memories; that is, he brings commonplace experiences into relation with his sexual activity, and extends his sexual interest to them - though in doing this he is probably following upon the traces of a really existing connection. No one who remembers my ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’ will need to be told that it is not my intention in these remarks to detract from the importance which I have hitherto attached to infantile sexuality by reducing it to nothing more than sexual interest at the age of puberty. I merely wish to give some technical advice that may help to clear up a class of phantasy which is calculated to falsify the picture of infantile sexual activity.

It is seldom that we are in the fortunate position of being able, as in the present instance, to establish the facts upon which these tales of the individual’s prehistoric past are based, by recourse to the unimpeachable testimony of a grown-up person. Even so, the statement made by our patient’s mother leaves the way open to various possibilities. That she did not proclaim the sexual character of the offence for which the child was punished may have been due to the activity of her own censorship; for with all parents it is precisely this sexual element in their children’s past that their own censorship is most anxious to eliminate. But it is just as possible that the child was reproved by his nurse or by his mother herself for some commonplace piece of naughtiness of a non-sexual nature, and that his reaction was so violent that he was castigated by his father. In phantasies of this kind nurses and servants are regularly replaced by the superior figure of the mother. A deeper interpretation of the patient’s dreams in relation to this episode revealed the clearest traces of the presence in his mind of an imaginative production of a positively epic character. In this his sexual desires for his mother and sister and his sister’s premature death were linked up with the young hero’s chastisement at his father’s hand. It was impossible to unravel this tissue of phantasy thread by thread; the therapeutic success of the treatment was precisely what stood in the way of this. The patient recovered, and his ordinary life began to assert its claims: there were many tasks before him, which he had already neglected far too long, and which were incompatible with a continuation of the treatment. I am not to be blamed, therefore, for this gap in the analysis. The scientific results of psycho-analysis are at present only a by-product of its therapeutic aims, and for that reason it is often just in those cases where treatment fails that most discoveries are made.

The content of the sexual life of infancy consists in auto-erotic activity on the part of the dominant sexual components, in traces of object-love, and in the formation of that complex which deserves to be called the nuclear complex of the neuroses. It is the complex which comprises the child’s earliest impulses, alike tender and hostile, towards its parents and brothers and sisters, after its curiosity has been awakened - usually by the arrival of a new baby brother or sister. The uniformity of the content of the sexual life of children, together with the unvarying character of the modifying tendencies which are later brought to bear upon it, will easily account for the constant sameness which as a rule characterizes the phantasies that are constructed around the period of childhood, irrespective of how greatly or how little real experiences have contributed towards them. It is entirely characteristic of the nuclear complex of infancy that the child’s father should be assigned the part of a sexual opponent and of an interferer with auto-erotic sexual activities; and real events are usually to a large extent responsible for bringing this about.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2163

A discussion of this childhood scene will be found in the footnote, and here I will only remark that its emergence shook the patient for the first time in his refusal to believe that at some prehistoric period in his childhood he had been seized with fury (which had subsequently become latent) against the father whom he loved so much. I must confess that I had expected it to have a greater effect, for the incident had been described to him so often - even by his father himself - that there could be no doubt of its objective reality. But, with that capacity for being illogical which never fails to bewilder one in such highly intelligent people as obsessional neurotics, he kept urging against the evidential value of the story the fact that he himself could not remember the scene. And so it was only along the painful road of transference that he was able to reach a conviction that his relation to his father really necessitated the postulation of this unconscious complement. Things soon reached a point at which, in his dreams, his waking phantasies, and his associations, he began heaping the grossest and filthiest abuse upon me and my family, though in his deliberate actions he never treated me with anything but the greatest respect. His demeanour as he repeated these insults to me was that of a man in despair. ‘How can a gentleman like you, sir,’ he used to ask, ‘let yourself be abused in this way by a low, good-for-nothing fellow like me? You ought to turn me out: that’s all I deserve.’ While he talked like this, he would get up from the sofa and roam about the room, - a habit which he explained at first as being due to delicacy of feeling: he could not bring himself, he said, to utter such horrible things while he was lying there so comfortably. But soon he himself found a more cogent explanation, namely, that he was avoiding my proximity for fear of my giving him a beating. If he stayed on the sofa he behaved like some one in desperate terror trying to save himself from castigations of terrific violence; he would bury his head in his hands, cover his face with his arm, jump up suddenly and rush away, his features distorted with pain, and so on. He recalled that his father had had a passionate temper, and sometimes in his violence had not known where to stop. Thus, little by little, in this school of suffering, the patient won the sense of conviction which he had lacked - though to any disinterested mind the truth would have been almost self-evident.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2164

And now the path was clear to the solution of his rat idea. The treatment had reached its turning-point, and a quantity of material information which had hitherto been withheld became available, and so made possible a reconstruction of the whole concatenation of events.

In my description I shall, as I have already said, content myself with the briefest possible summary of the circumstances. Obviously the first problem to be solved was why the two speeches of the Czech captain - his rat story, and his request to the patient that he should pay back the money to Lieutenant A. - should have had such an agitating effect on him and should have provoked such violently pathological reactions. The presumption was that it was a question of ‘complexive sensitiveness’, and that the speeches had jarred upon certain hyperaesthetic spots in his unconscious. And so it proved to be. As always happened with the patient in connection with military matters, he had been in a state of unconscious identification with his father, who had seen many years’ service and had been full of stories of his soldiering days. Now it happened by chance - for chance may play a part in the formation of a symptom, just as the wording may help in the making of a joke - that one of his father’s little adventures had an important element in common with the captain’s request. His father, in his capacity as non-commissioned officer, had control over a small sum of money and had on one occasion lost it at cards. (Thus he had been a ‘Spielratte’.¹) He would have found himself in a serious position if one of his comrades had not advanced him the amount. After he had left the army and become well-off, he had tried to find this friend in need so as to pay him back the money, but had not managed to trace him. The patient was uncertain whether he had ever succeeded in returning the money. The recollection of this sin of his father’s youth was painful to him, for, in spite of appearances, his unconscious was filled with hostile strictures upon his father’s character. The captain’s words, ‘You must pay back the 3.80 kronen to Lieutenant A.’, had sounded to his ears like an allusion to this unpaid debt of his father’s.

¹ [Literally, ‘play-rat’. Colloquial German for ‘gambler’.]

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2165

But the information that the young lady at the post office at Z-- had herself paid the charges due upon the packet, with a complimentary remark about himself,¹ had intensified his identification with his father in quite another direction. At this stage in the analysis he brought out some new information, to the effect that the landlord of the inn at the little place where the post office was had had a pretty daughter. She had been decidedly encouraging to the smart young officer, so that he had thought of returning there after the manoeuvres were over and of trying his luck with her. Now, however, she had a rival in the shape of the young lady at the post office. Like his father in the tale of his marriage, he could afford now to hesitate upon which of the two he should bestow his favours when he had finished his military service. We can see at once that his singular indecision whether he should travel to Vienna or go back to the place where the post office was, and the constant temptation he felt to turn back while he was on the journey (p. 2140), were not so senseless as they seemed to us at first. To his conscious mind, the attraction exercised upon him by Z--, the place where the post office was, was explained by the necessity of seeing Lieutenant A. and fulfilling the vow with his assistance. But in reality what was attracting him was the young lady at the post office, and the lieutenant was merely a good substitute for her, since he had lived at the same place and had himself been in charge of the military postal service. And when subsequently he heard that it was not Lieutenant A. but another officer B., who had been on duty at the post office that day, he drew him into his combination as well; and he was then able to reproduce in his deliria in connection with the two officers the hesitation he felt between the two girls who were so kindly disposed towards him.²

¹ It must not be forgotten that he had learnt this before the captain, owing to a misapprehension, requested him to pay back the money to Lieutenant A. This circumstance was the vital point of the story, and by suppressing it the patient reduced himself to a state of the most hopeless muddle and for some time prevented me from getting any idea of the meaning of it all.

² (Footnote added 1923:) My patient did his very best to throw confusion over the little episode of the repayment of the charges for his pince-nez, so that perhaps my own account of it may also have failed to clear it up entirely. I therefore reproduce here a little map (Fig. 5), by means of which Mr. and Mrs. Strachey have endeavoured to make the situation at the end of the manoeuvres plainer. My translators have justly observed that the patient’s behaviour remains unintelligible so long as a further circumstance is not expressly stated, namely, that Lieutenant A. had formerly lived at the place Z-- where the post office was situated and had been in charge of the military post office there, but that during the last few days he had handed over this billet to Lieutenant B. and had been transferred to another village. The ‘cruel’ captain had been in ignorance of this transfer, and this was the explanation of his mistake in supposing that the charges had to be paid back to Lieutenant A.

Fig. 5.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2166

In elucidating the effects produced by the captain’s rat story we must follow the course of the analysis more closely. The patient began by producing an enormous mass of associative material, which at first, however, threw no light upon the circumstances in which the formation of his obsession had taken place. The idea of the punishment carried out by means of rats had acted as a stimulus to a number of his instincts and had called up a whole quantity of recollections; so that, in the short interval between the captain’s story and his request to him to pay back the money, rats had acquired a series of symbolic meanings, to which, during the period which followed, fresh ones were continually being added. I must confess that I can only give a very incomplete account of the whole business. What the rat punishment stirred up more than anything else was his anal erotism, which had played an important part in his childhood and had been kept in activity for many years by a constant irritation due to worms. In this way rats came to have the meaning of ‘money’.¹ The patient gave an indication of this connection by reacting to the word ‘Ratten’ [‘rats’] with the association ‘Raten’ [‘instalments’]. In his obsessional deliria he had coined himself a regular rat currency. When, for instance, in reply to a question, I told him the amount of my fee for an hour’s treatment, he said to himself (as I learned six months later): ‘So many florins, so many rats’. Little by little he translated into this language the whole complex of money interests which centred round his father’s legacy to him, that is to say, all his ideas connected with that subject were, by way of the verbal bridge ‘Raten - Ratten’, carried over into his obsessional life and brought under the dominion of his unconscious. Moreover, the captain’s request to him to pay back the charges due upon the packet served to strengthen the money significance of rats, by way of another verbal bridge ‘Spielratte’, which led back to his father’s gambling debt.

¹ See my paper on ‘Character and Anal Erotism’ (1908b).

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2167

But the patient was also familiar with the fact that rats are carriers of dangerous infectious diseases; he could therefore employ them as symbols of his dread (justifiable enough in the army) of syphilitic infection. This dread concealed all sorts of doubts as to the kind of life his father had led during his term of military service. Again, in another sense, the penis itself is a carrier of syphilitic infection; and in this way he could consider the rat as a male organ of sex. It had a further title to be so regarded; for a penis (especially a child’s penis) can easily be compared to a worm, and the captain’s story had been about rats burrowing in some one’s anus, just as the large round-worms had in his when he was a child. Thus the penis significance of rats was based, once more, upon anal erotism. And apart from this, the rat is a dirty animal, feeding upon excrement and living in sewers.¹ It is perhaps unnecessary to point out how great an extension of the rat delirium became possible owing to this new meaning. For instance, ‘So many rats, so many florins’ could serve as an excellent characterization of a certain female profession which he particularly detested. On the other hand, it is certainly not a matter of indifference that the substitution of a penis for a rat in the captain’s story resulted in a situation of intercourse per anum, which could not fail to be especially revolting to him when brought into connection with his father and the woman he loved. And when we consider that the same situation was reproduced in the compulsive threat which had formed in his mind after the captain had made his request, we shall be forcibly reminded of certain curses in use among the Southern Slavs.² Moreover, all of this material, and more besides, was woven into the fabric of the rat discussions behind the screen-association ‘heiraten’ [‘to marrry’].

¹ If the reader feels tempted to shake his head at the possibility of such leaps of imagination in the neurotic mind, I may remind him that artists have sometimes indulged in similar freaks of fancy. Such, for instance, are Le Poitevin’s Diableries érotiques.

² The exact terms of these curses will be found in the periodical Anthropophyteia, edited by F. S. Krauss.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2168

The story of the rat punishment, as was shown by the patient’s own account of the matter and by his facial expression as he repeated the story to me, had fanned into a flame all his prematurely suppressed impulses of cruelty, egoistic and sexual alike. Yet, in spite of all this wealth of material, no light was thrown upon the meaning of his obsessional idea until one day the Rat-Wife in Ibsen’s Little Eyolf came up in the analysis, and it became impossible to escape the inference that in many of the shapes assumed by his obsessional deliria rats had another meaning still - namely, that of children.¹ Enquiry into the origin of this new meaning at once brought me up against some of the earliest and most important roots. Once when the patient was visiting his father’s grave he had seen a big beast, which he had taken to be a rat, gliding along over the grave.² He assumed that it had actually come out of his father’s grave, and had just been having a meal off his corpse. The notion of a rat is inseparably bound up with the fact that it has sharp teeth with which it gnaws and bites.³ But rats cannot be sharp-toothed, greedy and dirty with impunity: they are cruelly persecuted and mercilessly put to death by man, as the patient had often observed with horror. He had often pitied the poor creatures. But he himself had been just such a nasty, dirty little wretch, who was apt to bite people when he was in a rage, and had been fearfully punished for doing so (p. 2162). He could truly be said to find ‘a living likeness of himself’ in the rat. It was almost as though Fate, when the captain told him his story, had been putting him through an association test: she had called out a ‘complex stimulus-word’, and he had reacted to it with his obsessional idea.

¹ Ibsen’s Rat-Wife must certainly be derived from the legendary Pied Piper of Hamelin, who first enticed away the rats into the water, and then, by the same means, lured the children out of the town, never to return. So too, Little Eyolf threw himself into the water under the spell of the Rat-Wife. In legends generally the rat appears not so much as a disgusting creature but as something uncanny - as a chthonic animal, one might almost say; and it is used to represent the souls of the dead.

² It was no doubt a weasel, of which there are great numbers in the Zentralfriedhof [the principal cemetery] in Vienna.

³ Compare the words of Mephistopheles:

Doch dieser Schwelle Zauber zu zerspalten

Bedarf ich eines Rattenzahns.

.     .    .     .     .     .     .     .

Noch einen Biss, so ist’s geschehn!

[But to break through the magic of this threshold

I need a rat’s tooth. (He conjures up a rat.)

.     .    .     .     .     .     .     .

Another bite, and it is done!]

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2169

According, then, to his earliest and most momentous experiences, rats were children. And at this point he brought out a piece of information which he had kept away from its context long enough, but which now fully explained the interest he was bound to feel in children. The lady, whose admirer he had been for so many years, but whom he had nevertheless not been able to make up his mind to marry, was condemned to childlessness by reason of a gynaecological operation which had involved the removal of both ovaries. This indeed - for he was extraordinarily fond of children - had been the chief reason for his hesitation.

It was only then that it became possible to understand the inexplicable process by which his obsessional idea had been formed. With the assistance of our knowledge of infantile sexual theories and of symbolism (as learnt from the interpretation of dreams) the whole thing could be translated and given a meaning. When, at the afternoon halt (during which he had lost his pince-nez), the captain had told him about the rat punishment, the patient had only been struck at first by the combined cruelty and lasciviousness of the situation depicted. But immediately afterwards a connection had been set up with the scene from his childhood in which he himself had bitten some one. The captain - a man who could defend such punishments - had become a substitute for his father, and had thus drawn down upon himself a part of the reviving animosity which had burst out, on the original occasion, against his cruel father. The idea which came into his consciousness for a moment, to the effect that something of the sort might happen to some one he was fond of, is probably to be translated into a wish such as ‘You ought to have the same thing done to you!’ aimed at the teller of the story, but through him at his father. A day and a half later,¹ when the captain had handed him the packet upon which the charges were due and had requested him to pay back the 3.80 kronen to Lieutenant A., he had already been aware that his ‘cruel superior’ was making a mistake, and that the only person he owed anything to was the young lady at the post office. It might easily, therefore, have occurred to him to think of some derisive reply, such as, ‘Will I, though?’ or ‘Pay your grandmother!’ or ‘Yes! You bet I’II pay him back the money!’ - answers which would have been subject to no compulsive force. But instead, out of the stirrings of his father-complex and out of his memory of the scene from his childhood, there formed in his mind some such answer as: ‘Yes! I’II pay back the money to A. when my father and the lady have children!’ or ‘As sure as my father and the lady can have children, I’ll pay him back the money!’ In short, a derisive affirmation attached to an absurd condition which could never be fulfilled.²

¹ Not that evening, as he first told me. It was quite impossible that the pince-nez he had ordered could have arrived the same day. The patient shortened the interval of time retrospectively, because it was the period during which the decisive mental connections had been set up, and during which the repressed episode had taken place - the episode of his interview with the officer who told him of the friendly conduct of the young lady at the post office.

² Thus absurdity signifies derision in the language of obsessional thought, just as it does in dreams. See my Interpretation of Dreams.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2170

But now the crime had been committed; he had insulted the two persons who were dearest to him - his father and his lady. The deed had called for punishment, and the penalty had consisted in his binding himself by a vow which it was impossible for him to fulfil and which entailed literal obedience to his superior’s ill-founded request. The vow ran as follows: ‘Now you must really pay back the money to A.’ In his convulsive obedience he had repressed his better knowledge that the captain’s request had been based upon erroneous premises: ‘Yes, you must pay back the money to A., as your father’s surrogate has required. Your father cannot be mistaken.’ So too the king cannot be mistaken; if he addresses one of his subjects by a title which is not his, the subject bears that title ever afterwards.

Only vague intelligence of these events reached the patient’s consciousness. But his revolt against the captain’s order and the sudden transformation of that revolt into its opposite were both represented there. First had come the idea that he was not to pay back the money, or it (that is, the rat punishment) would happen; and then had come the transformation of this idea into a vow to the opposite effect, as a punishment for his revolt.

Let us, further, picture to ourselves the general conditions under which the formation of the patient’s great obsessional idea occurred. His libido had been increased by a long period of abstinence coupled with the friendly welcome which a young officer can always reckon upon receiving when he goes among women. Moreover, at the time when he had started for the manoeuvres, there had been a certain coolness between himself and his lady. This intensification of his libido had inclined him to a renewal of his ancient struggle against his father’s authority, and he had dared to think of having sexual intercourse with other women. His loyalty to his father’s memory had grown weaker, his doubts as to his lady’s merits had increased; and in that frame of mind he let himself be dragged into insulting the two of them, and had then punished himself for it. In doing so he had copied an old model. And when at the end of the manoeuvres he had hesitated so long whether he should travel to Vienna or whether he should stop and fulfil his vow, he had represented in a single picture the two conflicts by which he had from the very first been torn - whether or no he should remain obedient to his father and whether or no he should remain faithful to his beloved.¹

¹ It is perhaps not uninteresting to observe that once again obedience to his father coincided with abandoning the lady. If he had stopped and paid back the money to A., he would have made atonement to his father, and at the same time he would have deserted his lady in favour of some one else more attractive. In this conflict the lady had been victorious - with the assistance, to be sure, of the patient’s own normal good sense.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2171

I may add a word upon the interpretation of the ‘sanction’ which, it will be remembered, was to the effect that ‘otherwise the rat punishment will be carried out on both of them’. It was based upon the influence of two infantile sexual theories, which I have discussed elsewhere.¹ The first of these theories is that babies come out of the anus; and the second, which follows logically from the first, is that men can have babies just as well as women. According to the technical rules for interpreting dreams, the notion of coming out of the rectum can be represented by the opposite notion of creeping into the rectum (as in the rat punishment), and vice versa.

We should not be justified in expecting such severe obsessional ideas as were present in this case to be cleared up in any simpler manner or by any other means. When we reached the solution that has been described above, the patient’s rat delirium disappeared.

¹ ‘On the Sexual Theories of Children’ (1908c).

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2172

II

THEORETICAL

(A)  SOME GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF OBSESSIONAL STRUCTURES ¹

In the year 1896 I defined obsessional ideas as ‘transformed self-reproaches which have re-emerged from repression and which always relate to some sexual act that was performed with pleasure in childhood’. This definition now seems to me to be open to criticism upon formal grounds, though its component elements are unobjectionable. It was aiming too much at unification, and took as its model the practice of obsessional neurotics themselves, when, with their characteristic liking for indeterminateness, they heap together under the name of ‘obsessional ideas’ the most heterogeneous psychical structures.² In point of fact, it would be more correct to speak of ‘obsessive thinking’, and to make it clear that obsessional structures can correspond to every sort of psychical act. They can be classed as wishes, temptations, impulses, reflections, doubts, commands, or prohibitions. Patients endeavour in general to tone down such distinctions and to regard what remains of these psychical acts after they have been deprived of their affective index simply as ‘obsessional ideas’. Our present patient gave an example of this type of behaviour in one of his first sessions, when he attempted to reduce a wish to the level of a mere ‘train of thought’ (p. 2144).

¹ Several of the points dealt with in this and the following section have already been mentioned in the literature on the subject of obsessional neuroses, as may be gathered from Löwenfeld’s exhaustive study, Die psychischen Zwangserscheinungen, 1904, which is the standard work upon this form of disease.

² This fault in my definition is to some extent corrected in the paper itself. The following passage will be found: ‘The re-activated memories, however, and the self-reproaches formed from them never re-emerge into consciousness unchanged: what become conscious as obsessional ideas and affects, and take the place of the pathogenic memories so far as conscious life is concerned, are structures in the nature of a compromise between the repressed ideas and the repressing ones.’ In the definition, that is to say, especial stress is to be laid on the word ‘transformed’.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2173

It must be confessed, moreover, that even the phenomenology of obsessional thinking has not yet had sufficient attention paid to it. During the secondary defensive struggle, which the patient carries on against the ‘obsessional ideas’ that have forced their way into his consciousness, psychical structures make their appearance which deserve to be given a special name. (Such, for example, were the sequences of thoughts that occupied our patient’s mind on his journey back from the manoeuvres.) They are not purely reasonable considerations arising in opposition to the obsessional thoughts, but, as it were, hybrids between the two species of thinking; they accept certain of the premises of the obsession they are combating, and thus, while using the weapons of reason, are established upon a basis of pathological thought. I think such structures as these deserve to be given the name of ‘deliria’. To make the distinction clear, I will give an instance, which should be inserted into its proper context in the patient’s case history. I have already described the crazy conduct to which he gave way at one time when he was preparing for an examination - how, after working till far into the night, he used to go and open the front door to his father’s ghost, and then look at his genitals in the looking-glass (p. 2160). He tried to bring himself to his senses by asking himself what his father would say to it all if he were really still alive. But the argument had no effect so long as it was put forward in this rational shape. The spectre was not laid until he had transformed the same idea into a ‘delirious’ threat to the effect that if he ever went through this nonsense again some evil would befall his father in the next world.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2174

The distinction between a primary and a secondary defensive struggle is no doubt well founded, but we find its value unexpectedly diminished when we discover that the patients themselves do not know the wording of their own obsessional ideas. This may sound paradoxical, but it is perfectly good sense. During the progress of a psycho-analysis it is not only the patient who plucks up courage, but his disease as well; it grows bold enough to speak more plainly than before. To drop the metaphor, what happens is that the patient, who his hitherto turned his eyes away in terror from his own pathological productions, begins to attend to them and obtains a clearer and more detailed view of them.¹

There are, besides this, two special ways in which a more precise knowledge of obsessional structures can be gained. In the first place, experience shows that an obsessional command (or whatever it may be), which in waking life is known only in a truncated and distorted form, like a mutilated telegraph message, may have its actual text brought to light in a dream. Such texts appear in dreams in the shape of speeches, and are thus an exception to the rule that speeches in dreams are derived from speeches in real life.² Secondly, in the course of the analytic examination of a case history, one becomes convinced that if a number of obsessions succeed one another they are often - even though their wording is not identical - ultimately one and the same. The obsession may have been successfully shaken off on its first appearance, but it comes back a second time in a distorted form and without being recognized, and may then perhaps be able to hold its own in the defensive struggle more effectively, precisely because of its distortion. But the original form is the correct one, and often displays its meaning quite openly. When we have at great pains elucidated an unintelligible obsessional idea, it often happens that the patient informs us that just such a notion, wish, or temptation as the one we have constructed did in fact make its appearance on one occasion before the obsessional idea had arisen, but that it did not persist. It would unfortunately involve us in too lengthy a digression if we were to give instances of this from the history of our present patient.

¹ Some patients carry the diversion of their attention to such lengths that they are totally unable to give the content of an obsessional idea or to describe an obsessional act though they have performed it over and over again.

² See The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900a, Chapter VI, Section F.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2175

What is officially described as an ‘obsessional idea’ exhibits, therefore, in its distortion from its original wording, traces of the primary defensive struggle. Its distortion enables it to persist, since conscious thought is thus compelled to misapprehend it, just as though it were a dream; for dreams also are a product of compromise and distortion, and are also misapprehended by waking thought.

This misapprehension on the part of consciousness can be seen at work not only in reference to the obsessional ideas themselves, but also in reference to the products of the secondary defensive struggle, such, for instance, as the protective formulas. I can produce two good examples of this. Our patient used to employ as a defensive formula a rapidly pronounced ‘aber’ [‘but’] accompanied by a gesture of repudiation. He told me on one occasion that this formula had become altered recently; he now no longer said ‘áber’ but ‘abér’. When he was asked to give the reason for this new departure, he declared that the mute ‘e’ of the second syllable gave him no sense of security against the intrusion, which he so much dreaded, of some foreign and contradictory element, and that he had therefore decided to accent the ‘e’. This explanation (an excellent sample of the obsessional neurotic style) was, however, clearly inadequate; the most that it could claim to be was a rationalization. The truth was that ‘abér’ was an approximation towards the similar-sounding ‘abwehr’ [’defence’], a term which he had learnt in the course of our theoretical discussions of psycho-analysis. He had thus put the treatment to an illegitimate and ‘delirious’ use in order to strengthen a defensive formula. Another time he told me about his principal magic word, which was an apotropaic against every evil; he had put it together out of the initial letters of the most powerfully beneficent of his prayers and had clapped on an ‘amen’ at the end of it. I cannot reproduce the word itself, for reasons which will become apparent immediately. For, when he told it me, I could not help noticing that the word was in fact an anagram of the name of his lady. Her name contained an ‘s’, and this he had put last, that is, immediately before the ‘amen’ at the end. We may say, therefore, that by this process he had brought his ‘Samen’ [‘semen’] into contact with the woman he loved; in imagination, that is to say, he had masturbated with her. He himself, however, had never noticed this very obvious connection; his defensive forces had allowed themselves to be fooled by the repressed ones. This is also a good example of the rule that in time the thing which is meant to be warded off invariably finds its way into the very means which is being used for warding it off.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2176

I have already asserted that obsessional thoughts have undergone a distortion similar to that undergone by dream-thoughts before they become the manifest content of a dream. The technique of this distortion may therefore be of interest to us, and there should be nothing to prevent our exhibiting its various modes by means of a series of obsessions which have been translated and made clear. But here again the conditions governing the publication of this case make it impossible for me to give more than a few specimens. Not all of the patient’s obsessions were so complicated in their structure and so difficult to solve as the great rat idea. In some of the others a very simple technique was employed - namely, that of distortion by omission or ellipsis. This technique is pre-eminently applicable to jokes, but in our present case, too, it did useful work as a means of protecting things from being understood.

For instance, one of the patient’s oldest and favourite obsessions (which corresponded to an admonition or warning) ran as follows: ‘If I marry the lady, some misfortune will befall my father (in the next world).’ If we insert the intermediate steps, which had been skipped but were known to us from the analysis, we get the following train of thought: ‘If my father were alive, he would be as furious over my design of marrying the lady as he was in the scene in my childhood; so that I should fly into a rage with him once more and wish him every possible evil; and thanks to the omnipotence of my wishes¹ these evils would be bound to come upon him.’

Here is another instance in which a solution can be reached by filling out an ellipsis. It is once more in the nature of a warning or an ascetic prohibition. The patient had a charming little niece of whom he was very fond. One day this idea came into his head: ‘If you indulge in intercourse, something will happen to Ella’ (i.e. she will die). When the omissions have been made good, we have: ‘Every time you copulate, even with a stranger, you will not be able to avoid the reflection that in your married life sexual intercourse can never bring you a child (on account of the lady’s sterility). This will grieve you so much that you will become envious of your sister on account of little Ella, and you will grudge her the child. These envious impulses will inevitably lead to the child’s death.’²

¹ This omnipotence is discussed further on.

² An example from another of my works, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, will recall to the reader the manner in which this elliptical technique is employed in making jokes: ‘There is a witty and pugnacious journalist in Vienna, whose biting invective has repeatedly led to his being physically maltreated by the subjects of his attacks. On one occasion, when a fresh misdeed on the part of one of his habitual opponents was being discussed, somebody exclaimed: "If X hears of this, he’ll get his ears boxed again." . . . The apparent absurdity of this remark disappears if between the two clauses we insert the words: "he’ll write such a scathing article upon the man, that, etc."' - This elliptical joke, we may note, is similar in its content, as well as in its form, to the first example quoted in the text.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2177

The technique of distortion by ellipsis seems to be typical of obsessional neuroses; I have come across it in the obsessional thoughts of other patients as well. One example, a particularly transparent one, is of especial interest on account of a certain structural similarity with the rat idea. It was a case of doubting, and occurred in a lady who suffers principally from obsessional acts. This lady was going for a walk with her husband in Nuremberg, and made him take her into a shop, where she purchased various objects for her child and amongst them a comb. Her husband, finding that the shopping was too long a business for his taste, said that he had noticed some coins in an antique shop on the way which he was anxious to secure, adding that after he had made his purchase he would come and fetch her in the shop in which they at present were. But he stayed away, as she thought, far too long. When he came back she accordingly asked him where he had been. ‘Why,’ he replied, ‘at the antique shop I told you about.’ At the same instant she was seized by a tormenting doubt whether she had not as a matter of fact always possessed the comb which she had just bought for her child. She was naturally quite unable to discover the simple mental link that was involved. There is nothing for it but to regard the doubt as having become displaced, and to reconstruct the complete chain of unconscious thoughts as follows: ‘If it is true that you were only at the antique shop, if I am really to believe that, then I may just as well believe that this comb that I bought a moment ago has been in my possession for years.’ Here, therefore, the lady was drawing a derisive and ironical parallel, just as when our patient thought: ‘Oh yes, as sure as those two’ (his father and the lady) ‘will have children, I shall pay back the money to A.’ In the lady’s case the doubt was dependent upon her unconscious jealousy, which led her to suppose that her husband had spent the interval of his absence in paying a visit of gallantry.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2178

I shall not in the present paper attempt any discussion of the psychological significance of obsessional thinking. Such a discussion would be of extraordinary value in its results, and would do more to clarify our ideas upon the nature of the conscious and the unconscious than any study of hysteria or the phenomena of hypnosis. It would be a most desirable thing if the philosophers and psychologists who develop brilliant theoretical views on the unconscious upon a basis of hearsay knowledge or from their own conventional definitions would first submit to the convincing impressions which may be gained from a first-hand study of the phenomena of obsessional thinking. We might almost go to the length of requiring it of them, if the task were not so far more laborious than the methods of work to which they are accustomed. I will only add here that in obsessional neuroses the unconscious mental processes occasionally break through into consciousness in their pure and undistorted form, that such incursions may take place at every possible stage of the unconscious process of thought, and that at the moment of the incursion the obsessional ideas can, for the most part, be recognized as formations of very long standing. This accounts for the striking circumstance that, when the analyst tries, with the patient’s help, to discover the date of the first occurrence of an obsessional idea, the patient is obliged to place it further and further back as the analysis proceeds, and is constantly finding fresh ‘first’ occasions for the appearance of the obsession.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2179

(B)  SOME PSYCHOLOGICAL PECULIARITIES OF OBSESSIONAL NEUROTICS:

THEIR ATTITUDE TOWARD REALITY, SUPERSTITION AND DEATH

In this section I intend to deal with a few mental characteristics of obsessional neurotics which, though they do not seem important in themselves, nevertheless lie upon the road to a comprehension of more important things. They were strongly marked in our present patient; but I know that they are not attributable to his individual character, but to his disorder, and that they are to be met with quite typically in other obsessional patients.

Our patient was to a high degree superstitious, and this although he was a highly educated and enlightened man of considerable acumen, and although he was able at times to assure me that he did not believe a word of all this rubbish. Thus he was at once superstitious and not superstitious; and there was a clear distinction between his attitude and the superstition of uneducated people who feel themselves at one with their belief. He seemed to understand that his superstition was dependent upon his obsessional thinking, although at times he gave way to it completely. The meaning of this inconsistent and vacillating behaviour can be most easily, grasped if it is regarded in the light of a hypothesis which I shall now proceed to mention. I did not hesitate to assume that the truth was not that the patient still had an open mind upon this subject, but that he had two separate and contradictory convictions upon it. His oscillation between these two views quite obviously depended upon his momentary attitude towards his obsessional disorder. As soon as he had got the better of one of these obsessions, he used to smile in a superior way at his own credulity, and no events then occurred that were calculated to shake his firmness; but the moment he came under the sway of another obsession which had not been cleared up - or, what amounts to the same thing, of a resistance - the strangest coincidences would happen, to support him in his credulous belief.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2180

His superstition was nevertheless that of an educated man, and he avoided such vulgar prejudices as being afraid of Friday or of the number thirteen, and so on. But he believed in premonitions and in prophetic dreams; he would constantly meet the very person of whom, for some inexplicable reason, he had just been thinking; or he would receive a letter from some one who had suddenly come into his mind after being forgotten for many years. At the same time he was honest enough - or rather, he was loyal enough to his official conviction - not to have forgotten instances in which he strangest forebodings had come to nothing. On one occasion, for instance, when he went away for his summer holidays, he had felt morally certain that he would never return to Vienna alive. He also admitted that the great majority of his premonitions related to things which had no special personal importance to him, and that, when he met an acquaintance of whom, until a few moments previously, he had not thought for a very long time, nothing further took place between himself and the miraculous apparition. And he naturally could not deny that all the important events of his life had occurred without his having had any premonition of them, and that, for instance, his father’s death had taken him entirely by surprise. But arguments such as these had no effect upon the discrepancy in his convictions. They merely served to prove the obsessional nature of his superstitions, and that could already be inferred from the way in which they came and went with the increase and decrease of his resistance.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2181

I was not in a position, of course, to give a rational explanation of all the miraculous stories of his remoter past. But as regards the similar things that happened during the time of his treatment, I was able to prove to him that he himself invariably had a hand in the manufacture of these miracles, and I was able to point out to him the methods that he employed. He worked by means of peripheral vision and reading, forgetting, and, above all, errors of memory. In the end he used himself to help me in discovering the little sleight-of-hand tricks by which these wonders were performed. I may mention one interesting infantile root of his belief that forebodings and premonitions came true. It was brought to light by his recollection that very often, when a date was being fixed for something, his mother used to say: ‘I shan’t be able to on such-and-such a day. I shall have to stop in bed then.’ And in fact when the day in question arrived she had invariably stayed in bed!

There can be no doubt that the patient felt a need for finding experiences of this kind to act as props for his superstition, and that it was for that reason that he occupied himself so much with the inexplicable coincidences of everyday life with which we are all familiar, and helped out their shortcomings with unconscious activity of his own. I have come across a similar need in many other obsessional patients and have suspected its presence in many more besides. It seems to me easily explicable in view of the psychological characteristics of the obsessional neurosis. In this disorder, as I have already explained (p. 2155), repression is effected not by means of amnesia but by a severance of causal connections brought about by a withdrawal of affect. These repressed connections appear to persist in some kind of shadowy form (which I have elsewhere compared to an endopsychic perception),¹ and they are thus transferred, by a process of projection, into the external world, where they bear witness to what has been effaced from consciousness.

¹ The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b), Chapter XII, Section C (b).

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2182

Another mental need, which is also shared by obsessional neurotics and which is in some respects related to the one just mentioned, is the need for uncertainty in their life, or for doubt. An enquiry into this characteristic leads deep into the investigation of instinct. The creation of uncertainty is one of the methods employed by the neurosis for drawing the patient away from reality and isolating him from the world - which is among the objects of every psychoneurotic disorder. Again, it is only too obvious what efforts are made by the patients themselves in order to be able to avoid certainty and remain in doubt. Some of them, indeed, give a vivid expression to this tendency in a dislike of clocks and watches (for these at least make the time of day certain), and in the unconscious artifices which they employ in order to render these doubt removing instruments innocuous. Our present patient had developed a peculiar talent for avoiding a knowledge of any facts which would have helped him in deciding his conflict. Thus he was in ignorance upon those matters relating to his lady which were the most relevant to the question of his marriage: he was ostensibly unable to say who had operated upon her and whether the operation had been unilateral or bilateral. He had to be forced into remembering what he had forgotten and into finding out what he had overlooked.

The predilection felt by obsessional neurotics for uncertainty and doubt leads them to turn their thoughts by preference to those subjects upon which all mankind are uncertain and upon which our knowledge and judgements must necessarily remain open to doubt. The chief subjects of this kind are paternity, length of life, life after death, and memory - in the last of which we are all in the habit of believing, without having the slightest guarantee of its trustworthiness.¹

¹ As Lichtenberg says, ‘An astronomer knows whether the moon is inhabited or not with about as much certainty as he knows who was his father, but not with so much certainty as he knows who was his mother’. A great advance was made in civilization when men decided to put their inferences upon a level with the testimony of their senses and to make the step from matriarchy to patriarchy. The prehistoric figures which show a smaller person sitting upon the head of a larger one are representations of patrilineal descent; Athena had no mother, but sprang from the head of Zeus. A witness who testifies to something before a court of law is still called ‘Zeuge’ [literally, ‘begetter’] in German, after the part played by the male in the act of procreation; so too in hieroglyphics the word for a ‘witness’ is written with a representation of the male organ.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2183

In obsessional neuroses the uncertainty of memory is used to the fullest extent as a help in the formation of symptoms; and we shall learn directly the part played in the actual content of the patients’ thoughts by the questions of length of life and life after death. But as an appropriate transition I will first consider one particular superstitious trait in our patient to which I have already alluded (p. 2176) and which will no doubt have puzzled more than one of my readers.

I refer to the omnipotence which he ascribed to his thoughts and feelings, and to his wishes, whether good or evil. It is, I must admit, decidedly tempting to declare that this idea was a delusion and that it oversteps the limits of obsessional neurosis. I have, however, come across the same conviction in another obsessional patient; and he was long ago restored to health and is leading a normal life. Indeed, all obsessional neurotics behave as though they shared this conviction. It will be our business to throw some light upon these patients’ over-estimation of their powers. Assuming, without more ado, that this belief is a frank acknowledgement of a relic of the old megalomania of infancy, we will proceed to ask our patient for the grounds of his conviction. In reply, he adduces two experiences. When he returned for a second visit to the hydropathic establishment at which his disorder had been relieved for the first and only time, he asked to be given his old room, for its position had facilitated his relations with one of the nurses. He was told that the room was already taken and that it was occupied by an old professor. This piece of news considerably diminished his prospects of successful treatment, and he reacted to it with the unamiable thought: ‘I wish he may be struck dead for it!’ A fortnight later he was woken up from his sleep by the disturbing idea of a corpse; and in the morning he heard that the professor had really had a stroke, and that he had been carried up into his room at about the time he himself had woken up. The second experience related to an unmarried woman, no longer young, though with a great desire to be loved, who had paid him a great deal of attention and had once asked him point blank whether he could not love her. He had given her an evasive answer. A few days afterwards he heard that she had thrown herself out of a window. He then began to reproach himself, and said to himself that it would have been in his power to save her life by giving her his love. I n this way he became convinced of the omnipotence of his love and of his hatred. Without denying the omnipotence of love we may point out that both these instances were concerned with death, and we may adopt the obvious explanation that, like other obsessional neurotics, our patient was compelled to overestimate the effects of his hostile feelings upon the external world, because a large part of their internal, mental effects escaped his conscious knowledge. His love - or rather his hatred - was in truth overpowering; it was precisely they that created the obsessional thoughts, of which he could not understand the origin and against which he strove in vain to defend himself.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1923:] The omnipotence of thoughts, or, more accurately speaking, of wishes, has since been recognized as an essential element in the mental life of primitive people. See Totem and Taboo (1912-13).

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2184

Our patient had a quite peculiar attitude towards the question of death. He showed the deepest sympathy whenever any one died, and religiously attended the funeral; so that among his brothers and sisters he earned the nickname of ‘carrion crow’. In his imagination, too, he was constantly making away with people so as to show his heartfelt sympathy for their bereaved relatives. The death of an elder sister, which took place when he was between three and four years old, played a great part in his phantasies, and was brought into intimate connection with his childish misdemeanours during the same period. We know, moreover, at what an early age thoughts about his father’s death had occupied his mind, and we may regard his illness itself as a reaction to that event, for which he had felt an obsessional wish fifteen years earlier. The strange extension of his obsessional fears to the ‘next world’ was nothing else than a compensation for these death-wishes which he had felt against his father. It was introduced eighteen months after his father had died, at a time when there had been a revival of his sorrow at the loss, and it was designed - in defiance of reality, and in deference to the wish which had previously been showing itself in phantasies of every kind - were intended to undo the fact of his father’s death. We have had occasion in several places (pp. 2173, and 2176) to translate the phrase ‘in the next world’ by the words ‘if my father were still alive’.

But the behaviour of other obsessional neurotics does not differ greatly from that of our present patient, even though it has not been their fate to come face to face with the phenomenon of death at such an early age. Their thoughts are unceasingly occupied with other people’s length of life and possibility of death; their superstitious propensities have had no other content to begin with, and have perhaps no other source whatever. But these neurotics need the help of the possibility of death chiefly in order that it may act as a solution of conflicts they have left unsolved. Their essential characteristic is that they are incapable of coming to a decision, especially in matters of love; they endeavour to postpone every decision, and, in their doubt which person they shall decide for or what measures they shall take against a person, they are obliged to choose as their model the old German courts of justice, in which the suits were usually brought to an end, before judgement had been given, by the death of the parties to the dispute. Thus in every conflict which enters their lives they are on the look out for the death of some one who is of importance to them, usually of some one they love - such as one of their parents, or a rival, or one of the objects of their love between which their inclinations are wavering. But at this point our discussion of the death-complex in obsessional neuroses touches upon the problem of the instinctual life of obsessional neurotics. And to this problem we must now turn.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2185

(C)  THE INSTINCTUAL LIFE OF OBSESSIONAL NEUROTICS,

AND THE ORIGINS OF COMPULSION AND DOUBT

If we wish to obtain a grasp of the psychical forces whose interplay built up this neurosis, we must turn back to what we have learnt from the patient on the subject of the precipitating causes of his falling ill as a grown-up man and as a child. He fell ill when he was in his twenties on being faced with a temptation to marry another woman instead of the one whom he had loved so long; and he avoided a decision of this conflict by postponing all the necessary preliminary actions. The means for doing this was given him by his neurosis. His hesitation between the lady he loved and the other girl can be reduced to a conflict between his father’s influence and his love for his lady, or, in other words, to a conflicting choice between his father and his sexual object, such as had already subsisted (judging from his recollections and obsessional ideas) in his remote childhood. All through his life, moreover, he was unmistakably victim to a conflict between love and hatred, in regard both to his lady and to his father. His phantasies of revenge and such obsessional phenomena as his obsession for understanding and his exploit with the stone in the road bore witness to his divided feelings; and they were to a certain degree comprehensible and normal, for the lady by her original refusal and subsequently by her coolness had given him some excuse for hostility. But his relations with his father were dominated by a similar division of feeling, as we have seen from our translation of his obsessional thoughts; and his father, too, must have given him an excuse for hostility in his childhood, as indeed we have been able to establish almost beyond question. His attitude towards the lady - a compound of tenderness and hostility - came to a great extent within the scope of his conscious knowledge; at most he deceived himself over the degree and violence of his negative feelings. But his hostility towards his father, on the contrary, though he had once been acutely conscious of it, had long since vanished from his ken, and it was only in the teeth of the most violent resistance that it could be brought back into his consciousness. We may regard the repression of his infantile hatred of his father as the event which brought his whole subsequent career under the dominion of the neurosis.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2186

The conflicts of feeling in our patient which we have here enumerated separately were not independent of each other, but were bound together in pairs. His hatred of his lady was inevitably coupled with his attachment to his father, and inversely his hatred of his father with his attachment to his lady. But the two conflicts of feeling which result from this simplification - namely, the opposition between his relation to his father and to his lady, and the contradiction between his love and his hatred within each of these relations - had no connection whatever with each other, either in their content or in their origin. The first of these two conflicts corresponds to the normal vacillation between male and female which characterizes every one’s choice of a love-object. It is first brought to the child’s notice by the time-honoured question: ‘Which do you love most, Daddy or Mummy?’ and it accompanies him through his whole life, whatever may be the relative intensity of his feelings to the two sexes or whatever may be the sexual aim upon which he finally becomes fixed. But normally this opposition soon loses the character of a hard-and-fast contradiction, of an inexorable ‘either-or’. Room is found for satisfying the unequal demands of both sides, although even in a normal person the higher estimation of one sex is always thrown into relief by a depreciation of the other.

The other conflict, that between love and hatred, strikes us more strangely. We know that incipient love is often perceived as hatred, and that love, if it is denied satisfaction, may easily be partly converted into hatred, and poets tell us that in the more tempestuous stages of love the two opposed feelings may subsist side by side for a while as though in rivalry with each other. But the chronic co-existence of love and hatred, both directed towards the same person and both of the highest degree of intensity, cannot fail to astonish us. We should have expected that the passionate love would long ago have conquered the hatred or been devoured by it. And in fact such a protracted survival of two opposites is only possible under quite peculiar psychological conditions and with the co-operation of the state of affairs in the unconscious. The love has not succeeded in extinguishing the hatred but only in driving it down into the unconscious; and in the unconscious the hatred, safe from the danger of being destroyed by the operations of consciousness, is able to persist and even to grow. In such circumstances the conscious love attains as a rule, by way of reaction, an especially high degree of intensity, so as to be strong enough for the perpetual task of keeping its opponent under repression. The necessary condition for the occurrence of such a strange state of affairs in a person’s erotic life appears to be that at a very early age, somewhere in the prehistoric period of his infancy, the two opposites should have been split apart and one of them, usually the hatred, have been repressed.¹

¹ Compare the discussion on this point during one of the first sessions. - (Added 1923:) Bleuler subsequently introduced the appropriate term ‘ambivalence’ to describe this emotional constellation. See also a further development of this line of thought in my paper ‘The Predisposition to Obsessional Neurosis’ (1913I).

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2187

If we consider a number of analyses of obsessional neurotics we shall find it impossible to escape the impression that a relation between love and hatred such as we have found in our present patient is among the most frequent, the most marked, and probably, therefore, the most important characteristics of obsessional neurosis. But however tempting it may be to bring the problem of the ‘choice of neurosis’ into connection with instinctual life, there are reasons enough for avoiding such a course. For we must remember that in every neurosis we come upon the same suppressed instincts behind the symptoms. After all, hatred, kept suppressed in the unconscious by love, plays a great part in the pathogenesis of hysteria and paranoia. We know too little of the nature of love to be able to arrive at any definite conclusion here; and, in particular, the relation between the negative factor¹ in love and the sadistic components of the libido remains completely obscure. What follows is therefore to be regarded as no more than a provisional explanation. We may suppose, then, that in the cases of unconscious hatred with which we are concerned the sadistic components of love have, from constitutional causes, been exceptionally strongly developed, and have consequently undergone a premature and all too thorough suppression, and that the neurotic phenomena we have observed arise on the one hand from conscious feelings of affection which have become exaggerated as a reaction, and on the other hand from sadism persisting in the unconscious in the form of hatred.

¹ Alcibiades says of Socrates in the Symposium: ‘Many a time have I wished that he were dead, and yet I know that I should be much more sorry than glad if he were to die: so that I am at my wits’ end,’

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2188

But in whatever way this remarkable relation of love and hatred is to be explained, its occurrence is established beyond any possibility of doubt by the observations made in the present case; and it is gratifying to find how easily we can now follow the puzzling processes of an obsessional neurosis by bringing them into relation with this one factor. If an intense love is opposed by an almost equally powerful hatred, and is at the same time inseparably bound up with it, the immediate consequence is certain to be a partial paralysis of the will and an incapacity for coming to a decision upon any of those actions for which love ought to provide the motive power. But this indecision will not confine itself for long to a single group of actions. For, in the first place, what actions of a lover are not brought into relation with his one principal motive? And secondly a man’s attitude in sexual things has the force of a model to which the rest of his reactions tend to conform. And thirdly, it is an inherent characteristic in the psychology of an obsessional neurotic to make the fullest possible use of the mechanism of displacement. So the paralysis of his powers of decision gradually extends itself over the entire field of the patient’s behaviour.

And here we have the domination of compulsion and doubt such as we meet with in the mental life of obsessional neurotics.

The doubt corresponds to the patient’s internal perception of his own indecision, which, in consequence of the inhibition of his love by his hatred, takes possession of him in the face of every intended action. The doubt is in reality a doubt of his own love - which ought to be the most certain thing in his whole mind; and it becomes diffused over everything else, and is especially apt to become displaced on to what is most insignificant and small.¹  A man who doubts his own love may, or rather must, doubt every lesser thing.²

¹ Compare the use of ‘representation by something very small’ as a technique in making jokes. Cf. Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious.

² So in the love-verses addressed by Hamlet to Ophelia:

Doubt thou the stars are fire;

Doubt that the sun doth move;

Doubt truth to be a liar;

But never doubt I love.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2189

It is this same doubt that leads the patient to uncertainty about his protective measures, and to his continual repetition of them in order to banish that uncertainty; and it is this doubt, too, that eventually brings it about that the patient’s protective acts themselves become as impossible to carry out as his original inhibited decision in connection with his love. At the beginning of my investigations I was led to assume another and more general origin for the uncertainty of obsessional neurotics and one which seemed to be nearer the normal. If, for instance, while I am writing a letter some one interrupts me with questions, I afterwards feel a quite justifiable uncertainty as to what I may not have written under the influence of the disturbance, and, to make sure, I am obliged to read the letter over after I have finished it. In the same way I might suppose that the uncertainty of obsessional neurotics, when they are praying, for instance, is due to unconscious phantasies constantly mingling with their prayers and disturbing them. This hypothesis is correct, but it may be easily reconciled with what I have just said. It is true that the patient’s uncertainty whether he has carried through a protective measure is due to the disturbing effect of unconscious phantasies; but the content of these phantasies is precisely the contrary impulse - which it was the very aim of the prayer to ward off. This became clearly evident in our patient on one occasion, for the disturbing element did not remain unconscious but made its appearance openly. The words he wanted to use in his prayer were, ‘May God protect her’, but a hostile ‘not’ suddenly darted out of his unconscious and inserted itself into the sentence; and he understood that this was an attempt at a curse (p. 2152). If the ‘not’ had remained mute, he would have found himself in a state of uncertainty and would have kept on prolonging his prayers indefinitely. But since it became articulate he eventually gave up praying. Before doing so, however, he, like other obsessional patients, tried every kind of method for preventing the opposite feeling from insinuating itself. He shortened his prayers, for instance, or said them more rapidly. And similarly other patients will endeavour to ‘isolate’ all such protective acts from other things. But none of these technical procedures are of any avail in the long run. If the impulse of love achieves any success by displacing itself on to some trivial act, the impulse of hostility will very soon follow it on to its new ground and once more proceed to undo all that it has done.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2190

And when the obsessional patient lays his finger on the weak spot in the security of our mental life - on the untrustworthiness of our memory - the discovery enables him to extend his doubt over everything, even over actions which have already been performed and which have so far had no connection with the love-hatred complex, and over the entire past. I may recall the instance of the woman who had just bought a comb for her little daughter in a shop, and, becoming suspicious of her husband, began to doubt whether she had not as a matter of fact been in possession of the comb for a long time. Was not this woman saying point-blank: ‘If I can doubt your love’ (and this was only a projection of her doubt of her own love for him), ‘then I can doubt this too, then I can doubt everything’ - thus revealing to us the hidden meaning of neurotic doubt?

The compulsion on the other hand is an attempt at a compensation for the doubt and at a correction of the intolerable conditions of inhibition to which the doubt bears witness. If the patient, by the help of displacement, succeeds at last in bringing one of his inhibited intentions to a decision, then the intention must be carried out. It is true that this intention is not his original one, but the energy dammed up in the latter cannot let slip the opportunity of finding an outlet for its discharge in the substitutive act. Thus this energy makes itself felt now in commands and now in prohibitions, according as the affectionate impulse or the hostile one snatches control of the pathway leading to discharge. If it happens that a compulsive command cannot be obeyed, the tension becomes intolerable and is perceived by the patient in the form of extreme anxiety.(But the pathway leading to a substitutive act, even where the displacement has been on to something very small, is so hotly contested, that such an act can as a rule be carried out only in the shape of a protective measure intimately associated with the very impulse which it is designed to ward off.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2191

Furthermore, by a sort of regression, preparatory acts become substituted for the final decision, thinking replaces acting, and, instead of the substitutive act, some thought preliminary to it asserts itself with all the force of compulsion. According as this regression from acting to thinking is more or less marked, a case of obsessional neurosis will exhibit the characteristics of obsessive thinking (that is, of obsessional ideas) or of obsessive acting in the narrower sense of the word. True obsessional acts such as these, however, are only made possible because they constitute a kind of reconciliation, in the shape of a compromise, between the two antagonistic impulses. For obsessional acts tend to approximate more and more - and the longer the disorder lasts the more evident does this become - to infantile sexual acts of a masturbatory character. Thus in this form of the neurosis acts of love are carried out in spite of everything, but only by the aid of a new kind of regression; for such acts no longer relate to another person, the object of love and hatred, but are auto-erotic acts such as occur in infancy.

The first kind of regression, that from acting to thinking, is facilitated by another factor concerned in the production of the neurosis. The histories of obsessional patients almost invariably reveal an early development and premature repression of the sexual instinct of looking and knowing; and, as we know, a part of the infantile sexual activity of our present patient was governed by that instinct.¹

We have already mentioned the important part played by the sadistic instinctual components in the genesis of obsessional neuroses. Where the epistemophilic instinct is a preponderant feature in the constitution of an obsessional patient, brooding becomes the principal symptom of the neurosis. The thought-process itself becomes sexualized, for the sexual pleasure which is normally attached to the content of thought becomes shifted on to the act of thinking itself, and the satisfaction derived from reaching the conclusion of a line of thought is experienced as a sexual satisfaction. In the various forms of obsessional neurosis in which the epistemophilic instinct plays a part, its relation to thought-processes makes it particularly well adapted to attract the energy which is vainly endeavouring to make its way forward into action, and divert it into the sphere of thought, where there is a possibility of its obtaining pleasurable satisfaction of another sort. In this way, with the help of the epistemophilic instinct, the substitutive act may in its turn be replaced by preparatory acts of thought. But procrastination in action is soon replaced by lingering over thoughts, and eventually the whole process, together with all its peculiarities, is transferred into the new sphere, just as in America an entire house will sometimes be shifted from one site to another.

¹ The very high average of intellectual capacity among obsessional patients is probably also connected with this fact.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2192

I may now venture, upon the basis of the preceding discussion, to determine the psychological characteristic, so long sought after, which lends to the products of an obsessional neurosis their ‘obsessive’ or compulsive quality. A thought-process is obsessive or compulsive when, in consequence of an inhibition (due to a conflict of opposing impulses) at the motor end of the psychical system, it is undertaken with an expenditure of energy which (as regards both quality and quantity) is normally reserved for actions alone; or, in other words, an obsessive or compulsive thought is one whose function it is to represent an act regressively. No one, I think, will question my assumption that processes of thought are ordinarily conducted (on grounds of economy) with smaller displacements of energy, probably at a higher level, than are acts intended to bring about discharge or to modify the external world.

The obsessive thought which has forced its way into consciousness with such excessive violence has next to be secured against the efforts made by conscious thought to resolve it. As we already know, this protection is afforded by the distortion which the obsessive thought has undergone before becoming conscious. But this is not the only means employed. In addition, each separate obsessional idea is almost invariably removed from the situation in which it originated and in which, in spite of its distortion, it would be most easily comprehensible. With this end in view, in the first place an interval of time is inserted between the pathogenic situation and the obsession that arises from it, so as to lead astray any conscious investigation of its causal connections, and in the second place the content of the obsession is taken out of its particular setting by being generalized. Our patient’s ‘obsession for understanding’ is an example of this (p. 2150). But perhaps a better one is afforded by another patient. This was a woman who prohibited herself from wearing any sort of personal adornment, though the exciting cause of the prohibition related only to one particular piece of jewellery: she had envied her mother the possession of it and had had hopes that one day she would inherit it. Finally, if we care to distinguish verbal distortion from distortion of content, there is yet another means by which the obsession is protected against conscious attempts at solution. And that is the choice of an indefinite or ambiguous wording. After being misunderstood, the wording may find its way into the patient’s ‘deliria’, and whatever further processes of development or substitution his obsession undergoes will then be based upon the misunderstanding and not upon the proper sense of the text. Observation will show, however, that the deliria constantly tend to form new connections with that part of the matter and wording of the obsession which is not present in consciousness.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2193

I should like to go back once more to the instinctual life of obsessional neurotics and add one more remark upon it. It turned out that our patient, besides all his other characteristics, was a renifleur. By his own account, when he was a child he had recognized every one by their smell, like a dog; and even when he was grown up he was more susceptible to sensations of smell than most people.¹ I have met with the same characteristic in other neurotics, both in hysterical and in obsessional patients, and I have come to recognize that a tendency to taking pleasure in smell, which has become extinct since childhood, may play a part in the genesis of neurosis.² And here I should like to raise the general question whether the atrophy of the sense of smell (which was an inevitable result of man’s assumption of an erect posture) and the consequent organic repression of his pleasure in smell may not have had a considerable share in the origin of his susceptibility to nervous disease. This would afford us some explanation of why, with the advance of civilization, it is precisely the sexual life that must fall a victim to repression. For we have long known the intimate connection in the animal organization between the sexual instinct and the function of the olfactory organ.

¹ I may add that in his childhood he had been subject to strong coprophilic propensities. In this connection his anal erotism has already been noticed (p. 2166).

² For instance, in certain forms of fetishism.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2194

In bringing this paper to a close I may express a hope that, though my communication is incomplete in every sense, it may at least stimulate other workers to throw more light upon the obsessional neurosis by a deeper investigation of the subject. What is characteristic of this neurosis - what differentiates it from hysteria - is not, in my opinion, to be found in instinctual life but in the psychological field. I cannot take leave of my patient without putting on paper my impression that he had, as it were, disintegrated into three personalities: into one unconscious personality, that is to say, and into two preconscious ones between which his consciousness could oscillate. His unconscious comprised those of his impulses which had been suppressed at an early age and which might be described as passionate and evil impulses. In his normal state he was kind, cheerful, and sensible - an enlightened and superior kind of person - while in his third psychological organization he paid homage to superstition and asceticism. Thus he was able to have two different creeds and two different outlooks upon life. This second preconscious personality comprised chiefly the reaction-formations against his repressed wishes, and it was easy to foresee that it would have swallowed up the normal personality if the illness had lasted much longer. I have at present an opportunity of studying a lady suffering severely from obsessional acts. She has become similarly disintegrated into an easy-going and lively personality and into an exceedingly gloomy and ascetic one. She puts forward the first of them as her official ego, while in fact she is dominated by the second. Both of these psychical organizations have access to her consciousness, but behind her ascetic personality may be discerned the unconscious part of her being - quite unknown to her and composed of ancient and long-repressed wishful impulses.¹

¹ (Footnote added 1923:) The patient’s mental health was restored to him by the analysis which I have reported upon in these pages. Like so many other young men of value and promise, he perished in the Great War.

2195

FIVE LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

(1910)

2196

Intentionally left blank

2197

FIVE LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

Delivered on the Occasion of the Celebration

of the Twentieth Anniversary of the Foundation

of

CLARK UNIVERSITY, WORCESTER

MASSACHUSETTS

September 1909

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2198

To

DR. G. STANLEY HALL, PH.D., LL.D.

President of Clark University

Professor of Psychology and Pedagogics

This Work is Gratefully Dedicated

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2199

FIRST LECTURE

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - It is with novel and bewildering feelings that I find myself in the New World, lecturing before an audience of expectant enquirers. No doubt I owe this honour only to the fact that my name is linked with the topic of psycho-analysis; and it is of psycho-analysis, therefore, that I intend to speak to you. I shall attempt to give you, as succinctly as possible, a survey of the history and subsequent development of this new method of examination and treatment.

If it is a merit to have brought psycho-analysis into being that merit is not mine.¹ I had no share in its earliest beginnings. I was a student and working for my final examinations at the time when another Viennese physician, Dr. Josef Breuer,² first (in 1880-2) made use of this procedure on a girl who was suffering from hysteria. Let us turn our attention straightaway to the history of this case and its treatment, which you will find set out in detail in the Studies on Hysteria³ which were published later by Breuer and myself.

But I should like to make one preliminary remark. It is not without satisfaction that I have learnt that the majority of my audience are not members of the medical profession. You have no need to be afraid that any special medical knowledge will be required for following what I have to say. It is true that we shall go along with the doctors on the first stage of our journey, but we shall soon part company with them and, with Dr. Breuer, shall pursue a quite individual path.

¹ [Footnote added 1923:] See, however, in this connection my remarks in ‘A History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement’ (1914d), where I assumed the entire responsibility for psycho-analysis.

² Dr. Josef Breuer, born in 1842, a Corresponding Member of the Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, is well known for his work on respiration and on the physiology of the sense of equilibrium.

³ Some of my contributions to this book have been translated into English by Dr. A. A. Brill of New York: Selected Papers on Hysteria (New York, 1909).

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2200

Dr. Breuer’s patient was a girl of twenty-one, of high intellectual gifts. Her illness lasted for over two years, and in the course of it she developed a series of physical and psychological disturbances which decidedly deserved to be taken seriously. She suffered from a rigid paralysis, accompanied by loss of sensation, of both extremities on the right side of her body; and the same trouble from time to time affected her on her left side. Her eye movements were disturbed and her power of vision was subject to numerous restrictions. She had difficulties over the posture of her head; she had a severe nervous cough. She had an aversion to taking nourishment, and on one occasion she was for several weeks unable to drink in spite of a tormenting thirst. Her powers of speech were reduced, even to the point of her being unable to speak or understand her native language. Finally, she was subject to conditions of ‘absence’,¹ of confusion, of delirium, and of alteration of her whole personality, to which we shall have presently to turn our attention.

When you hear such an enumeration of symptoms, you will be inclined to think it safe to assume, even though you are not doctors, that what we have before us is a severe illness, probably affecting the brain, that it offers small prospect of recovery and will probably lead to the patient’s early decease. You must be prepared to learn from the doctors, however, that, in a number of cases which display severe symptoms such as these, it is justifiable to take a different and a far more favourable view. If a picture of this kind is presented by a young patient of the female sex, whose vital internal organs (heart, kidneys, etc.) are shown on objective examination to be normal, but who has been subjected to violent emotional shocks - if, moreover, her various symptoms differ in certain matters of detail from what would have been expected - then doctors are not inclined to take the case too seriously. They decide that what they have before them is not an organic disease of the brain, but the enigmatic condition which, from the time of ancient Greek medicine, has been known as ‘hysteria’ and which has the power of producing illusory pictures of a whole number of serious diseases. They consider that there is then no risk to life but that a return to health - even a complete one - is probable. It is not always quite easy to distinguish a hysteria like this from a severe organic illness. There is no need for us to know, however, how a differential diagnosis of that kind is made; it will suffice to have an assurance that the case of Breuer’s patient was precisely of a kind in which no competent physician could fail to make a diagnosis of hysteria. And here we may quote from the report of the patient’s illness the further fact that it made its appearance at a time when she was nursing her father, of whom she was devotedly fond, through the grave illness which led to his death, and that, as a result of her own illness, she was obliged to give up nursing him.

¹ [The French term.]

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2201

So far it has been an advantage to us to accompany the doctors; but the moment of parting is at hand. For you must not suppose that a patient’s prospects of medical assistance are improved in essentials by the fact that a diagnosis of hysteria has been substituted for one of severe organic disease of the brain. Medical skill is in most cases powerless against severe diseases of the brain; but neither can the doctor do anything against hysterical disorders. He must leave it to kindly Nature to decide when and how his optimistic prognosis shall be fulfilled.¹

Thus the recognition of the illness as hysteria makes little difference to the patient; but to the doctor quite the reverse. It is noticeable that his attitude towards hysterical patients is quite other than towards sufferers from organic diseases. He does not have the same sympathy for the former as for the latter: for the hysteric’s ailment is in fact far less serious and yet it seems to claim to be regarded as equally so. And there is a further factor at work. Through his studies, the doctor has learnt many things that remain a sealed book to the layman: he has been able to form ideas on the causes of illness and on the changes it brings about - e.g. in the brain of a person suffering from apoplexy or from a malignant growth - ideas which must to some degree meet the case, since they allow him to understand the details of the illness. But all his knowledge - his training in anatomy, in physiology and in pathology - leaves him in the lurch when he is confronted by the details of hysterical phenomena. He cannot understand hysteria, and in the face of it he is himself a layman. This is not a pleasant situation for anyone who as a rule sets so much store by his knowledge. So it comes about that hysterical patients forfeit his sympathy. He regards them as people who are transgressing the laws of his science - like heretics in the eyes of the orthodox. He attributes every kind of wickedness to them, accuses them of exaggeration, of deliberate deceit, of malingering. And he punishes them by withdrawing his interest from them.

¹ I am aware that this is no longer the case; but in my lecture I am putting myself and my hearers back into the period before 1880. If things are different now, that is to a great extent the result of the activities whose history I am now sketching.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2202

Dr. Breuer’s attitude towards his patient deserved no such reproach. He gave her both sympathy and interest, even though, to begin with, he did not know how to help her. It seems likely that she herself made his task easier by the admirable qualities of intellect and character to which he has testified in her case history. Soon, moreover, his benevolent scrutiny showed him the means of bringing her a first instalment of help.

It was observed that, while the patient was in her states of ‘absence (altered personality accompanied by confusion), she was in the habit of muttering a few words to herself which seemed as though they arose from some train of thought that was occupying her mind. The doctor, after getting a report of these words, used to put her into a kind of hypnosis and then repeat them to her so as to induce her to use them as a starting point. The patient complied with the plan, and in this way reproduced in his presence the mental creations which had been occupying her mind during the ‘absences’ and which had betrayed their existence by the fragmentary words which she had uttered. They were profoundly melancholy phantasies - ‘day dreams’ we should call them - sometimes characterized by poetic beauty, and their starting-point was as a rule the position of a girl at her father’s sick-bed. When she had related a number of these phantasies, she was as if set free, and she was brought back to normal mental life. The improvement in her condition, which would last for several hours, would be succeeded next day by a further attack of ‘absence’; and this in turn would be removed in the same way by getting her to put into words her freshly constructed phantasies. It was impossible to escape the conclusion that the alteration in her mental state which was expressed in the ‘absences’ was a result of the stimulus proceeding from these highly emotional phantasies. The patient herself, who, strange to say, could at this time only speak and understand English, christened this novel kind of treatment the ‘talking cure’¹ or used to refer to it jokingly as ‘chimney sweeping’.¹

¹ [In English in the original.]

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2203

It soon emerged, as though by chance, that this process of sweeping the mind clean could accomplish more than the merely temporary relief of her ever-recurring mental confusion. It was actually possible to bring about the disappearance of the painful symptoms of her illness, if she could be brought to remember under hypnosis, with an accompanying expression of affect, on what occasion and in what connection the symptom had first appeared. ‘It was in the summer during a period of extreme heat, and the patient was suffering very badly from thirst; for, without being able to account for it in any way, she suddenly found it impossible to drink. She would take up the glass of water that she longed for, but as soon as it touched her lips she would push it away like someone suffering from hydrophobia. As she did this, she was obviously in an absence for a couple of seconds. She lived only on fruit, such as melons, etc., so as to lessen her tormenting thirst. This had lasted for some six weeks, when one day during hypnosis she grumbled about her English "lady-companion", whom she did not care for, and went on to describe, with every sign of disgust, how she had once gone into this lady’s room and how her little dog - horrid creature! - had drunk out of a glass there. The patient had said nothing, as she had wanted to be polite. After giving further energetic expression to the anger she had held back, she asked for something to drink, drank a large quantity of water without any difficulty, and awoke from her hypnosis with the glass at her lips; and thereupon the disturbance vanished, never to return.’¹

With your permission, I should like to pause a moment over this event. Never before had anyone removed a hysterical symptom by such a method or had thus gained so deep an insight into its causation. It could not fail to prove a momentous discovery if the expectation were confirmed that others of the patient’s symptoms - perhaps the majority of them - had arisen and could be removed in this same manner. Breuer spared no pains in convincing himself that this was so, and he proceeded to a systematic investigation of the pathogenesis of the other and more serious symptoms of the patient’s illness. And it really was so. Almost all the symptoms had arisen in this way as residues - ‘precipitates’ they might be called - of emotional experiences. To these experiences, therefore, we later gave the name of ‘psychical traumas’, while the particular nature of the symptoms was explained by their relation to the traumatic scenes which were their cause. They were, to use a technical term, ‘determined’ by the scenes of whose recollection they represented residues, and it was no longer necessary to describe them as capricious or enigmatic products of the neurosis. One unexpected point, however, must be noticed. What left the symptom behind was not always a single experience. On the contrary, the result was usually brought about by the convergence of several traumas, and often by the repetition of a great number of similar ones. Thus it was necessary to reproduce the whole chain of pathogenic memories in chronological order, or rather in reversed order, the latest ones first and the earliest ones last; and it was quite impossible to jump over the later traumas in order to get back more quickly to the first, which was often the most potent one.

¹ Studies on Hysteria.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2204

No doubt you will now ask me for some further instances of the causation of hysterical symptoms besides the one I have already given you of a fear of water produced by disgust at a dog drinking out of a glass. But if I am to keep to my programme I shall have to restrict myself to very few examples. In regard to the patient’s disturbances of vision, for instance, Breuer describes how they were traced back to occasions such as one on which, ‘when she was sitting by her father’s bedside with tears in her eyes, he suddenly asked her what time it was. She could not see clearly; she made a great effort, and brought her watch near to her eyes. The face of the watch now seemed very big - thus accounting for her macropsia and convergent squint. Or again, she tried hard to suppress her tears so that the sick man should not see them.’¹ Moreover, all of the pathogenic impressions came from the period during which she was helping to nurse her sick father. ‘She once woke up during the night in great anxiety about the patient, who was in a high fever; and she was under the strain of expecting the arrival of a surgeon from Vienna who was to operate. Her mother had gone away for a short time and Anna was sitting at the bedside with her right arm over the back of her chair. She fell into a waking dream and saw a black snake coming towards the sick man from the wall to bite him. (It is most likely that there were in fact snakes in the field behind the house and that these had previously given the girl a fright; they would thus have provided the material for her hallucination.) She tried to keep the snake off, but it was as though she was paralysed. Her right arm, over the back of the chair, had gone to sleep, and had become anaesthetic and paretic; and when she looked at it the fingers turned into little snakes with death’s heads (the nails). (It seems probable that she had tried to use her paralysed right hand to drive off the snake and that its anaesthesia and paralysis has consequently become associated with the hallucination of the snake.) When the snake vanished, in her terror she tried to pray. But language failed her: she could find no tongue in which to speak, till at last she thought of some children’s verses in English and then found herself able to think and pray in that language.’¹ When the patient had recollected this scene in hypnosis, the rigid paralysis of her left arm, which had persisted since the beginning of her illness, disappeared, and the treatment was brought to an end.

¹ Studies on Hysteria.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2205

When, some years later, I began to employ Breuer’s method of examination and treatment on patients of my own, my experiences agreed entirely with his. A lady, aged about forty, suffered from a tic consisting of a peculiar ‘clacking’ sound which she produced whenever she was excited, or sometimes for no visible reason. It had its origin in two experiences, whose common element lay in the fact that at the moment of their occurrence she had formed a determination not to make any noise, and in the fact that on both these occasions a kind of counter-will led her to break the silence with this same sound. On the first of these occasions one of her children had been ill, and, when she had at last with great difficulty succeeded in getting it off to sleep, she had said to herself that she must keep absolutely still so as not to wake it. On the other occasion, while she was driving with her two children in a thunderstorm, the horses had bolted and she had carefully tried to avoid making any noise for fear of frightening them even more.¹ I give you this one example out of a number of others which are reported in the Studies on Hysteria.²

¹ Studies on Hysteria.

² Extracts from that volume, together with some later writings of mine on hysteria, are now to be had in an English translation prepared by Dr. A. A. Brill of New York.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2206

Ladies and Gentlemen, if I may be allowed to generalize - which is unavoidable in so condensed an account as this - I should like to formulate what we have learned so far as follows: our hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences. Their symptoms are residues and mnemic symbols of particular (traumatic) experiences. We may perhaps obtain a deeper understanding of this kind of symbolism if we compare them with other mnemic symbols in other fields. The monuments and memorials with which large cities are adorned are also mnemic symbols. If you take a walk through the streets of London, you will find, in front of one of the great railway termini, a richly carved Gothic column - Charing Cross. One of the old Plantagenet kings of the thirteenth century ordered the body of his beloved Queen Eleanor to be carried to Westminster; and at every stage at which the coffin rested he erected a Gothic cross. Charing Cross is the last of the monuments that commemorate the funeral cortège.¹ At another point in the same town, not far from London Bridge, you will find a towering, and more modern, column, which is simply known as ‘The Monument’. It was designed as a memorial of the Great Fire, which broke out in that neighbourhood in 1666 and destroyed a large part of the city. These monuments, then, resemble hysterical symptoms in being mnemic symbols; up to that point the comparison seems justifiable. But what should we think of a Londoner who paused to-day in deep melancholy before the memorial of Queer Eleanor’s funeral instead of going about his business in the hurry that modern working conditions demand or instead of feeling joy over the youthful queen of his own heart? Or again what should we think of a Londoner who shed tears before the Monument that commemorates the reduction of his beloved metropolis to ashes although it has long since risen again in far greater brilliance? Yet every single hysteric and neurotic behaves like these two unpractical Londoners. Not only do they remember painful experiences of the remote past, but they still cling to them emotionally; they cannot get free of the past and for its sake they neglect what is real and immediate. This fixation of mental life to pathogenic traumas is one of the most significant and practically important characteristics of neurosis.

I am quite ready to allow the justice of an objection that you are probably raising at this moment on the basis of the case history of Breuer’s patient. It is quite true that all her traumas dated from the period when she was nursing her sick father and that her symptoms can only be regarded as mnemic signs of his illness and death. Thus they correspond to a display of mourning, and there is certainly nothing pathological in being fixated to the memory of a dead person so short a time after his decease; on the contrary, it would be a normal emotional process. I grant you that in the case of Breuer’s patient there is nothing striking in her fixation to her trauma. But in other cases - such as that of the tic that I treated myself, where the determinants dated back more than fifteen and ten years - the feature of an abnormal attachment to the past is very clear; and it seems likely that Breuer’s patient would have developed a similar feature if she had not received cathartic treatment so soon after experiencing the traumas and developing the symptoms.

¹ Or rather, it is a modern copy of one of these monuments. As Dr. Ernest Jones tells me, the name ‘Charing’ is believed to be derived from the words ‘chère reine’.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2207

So far we have only been discussing the relations between a patient’s hysterical symptoms and the events of her life. There are, however, two further factors in Breuer’s observation which enable up to form some notion of how the processes of falling ill and of recovering occur.

In the first place, it must be emphasized that Breuer’s patient, in almost all her pathogenic situations, was obliged to suppress a powerful emotion instead of allowing its discharge in the appropriate signs of emotion, words or actions. In the episode of her lady-companion’s dog, she suppressed any manifestation of her very intense disgust, out of consideration for the woman’s feelings; while she watched at her father’s bedside she was constantly on the alert to prevent the sick man from observing her anxiety and her painful depression. When subsequently she reproduced these scenes in her doctor’s presence the affect which had been inhibited at the time emerged with peculiar violence, as though it had been saved up for a long time. Indeed, the symptom which was left over from one of these scenes would reach its highest pitch of intensity at the time when its determining cause was being approached, only to vanish when that cause had been fully ventilated. On the other hand, it was found that no result was produced by the recollection of a scene in the doctor’s presence if for some reason the recollection took place without any generation of affect. Thus it was what happened to these affects, which might be regarded as displaceable magnitudes, that was the decisive factor both for the onset of illness and for recovery. One was driven to assume that the illness occurred because the affects generated in the pathogenic situations had their normal outlet blocked, and that the essence of the illness lay in the fact that these ‘strangulated’ affects were then put to an abnormal use. In part they remained as a permanent burden upon the patient’s mental life and a source of constant excitation for it; and in part they underwent a transformation into unusual somatic innervations and inhibitions, which manifested themselves as the physical symptoms of the case. For this latter process we coined the term ‘hysterical conversion’. Quite apart from this, a certain portion of our mental excitation is normally directed along the paths of somatic innervation and produces what we know as an ‘expression of the emotions’. Hysterical conversion exaggerates this portion of the discharge of an emotionally cathected mental process; it represents a far more intense expression of the emotions, which has entered upon a new path. When the bed of a stream is divided into two channels, then, if the current in one of them is brought up against an obstacle, the other will at once be overfilled. As you see, we are on the point of arriving at a purely psychological theory of hysteria, with affective processes in the front rank.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2208

A second observation of Breuer’s, again, compels us to attach great importance, among the characteristics of the pathological chain of events, to states of consciousness. Breuer’s patient exhibited, alongside of her normal state, a number of mental peculiarities: conditions of ‘absence’, confusion, and alterations of character. In her normal state she knew nothing of the pathogenic scenes or their connection with her symptoms; she had forgotten the scenes, or at all events had severed the pathogenic link. When she was put under hypnosis, it was possible, at the expense of a considerable amount of labour, to recall the scenes to her memory; and, through this work of recollecting, the symptoms were removed. The explanation of this fact would be a most awkward business, were it not that the way is pointed by experiences and experiments in hypnotism. The study of hypnotic phenomena has accustomed us to what was at first a bewildering realization that in one and the same individual there can be several mental groupings, which can remain more or less independent of one another, which can ‘know nothing’ of one another and which can alternate with one another in their hold upon consciousness. Cases of this kind, too, occasionally appear spontaneously, and are then described as examples of ‘double conscience’.¹ If, where a splitting of the personality such as this has occurred, consciousness remains attached regularly to one of the two states, we call it the conscious mental state and the other, which is detached from it, the unconscious one. In the familiar condition known as ‘post-hypnotic suggestion’, a command given under hypnosis is slavishly carried out subsequently in the normal state. This phenomenon affords an admirable example of the influences which the unconscious state can exercise over the conscious one; moreover, it provides a pattern upon which we can account for the phenomena of hysteria. Breuer adopted a hypothesis that hysterical symptoms arise in peculiar mental conditions to which he gave the name of ‘hypnoid’. On this view, excitations occurring during these hypnoid states can easily become pathogenic because such states do not provide opportunities for the normal discharge of the process of excitation. There consequently arises from the process of excitation an unusual product - the symptom. This finds its way, like a foreign body, into the normal state, which in turn is in ignorance of the hypnoid pathogenic situation. Wherever there is a symptom there is also an amnesia, a gap in the memory, and filling up this gap implies the removal of the conditions which led to the production of the symptom.

¹ [The French term for ‘dual consciousness’.]

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2209

This last part of my account will not, I fear, strike you as particularly clear. But you should bear in mind that we are dealing with novel and difficult considerations, and it may well be that it is not possible to make them much clearer - which shows that we still have a long way to go in our knowledge of the subject. Moreover, Breuer’s theory of ‘hypnoid states’ turned out to be impeding and unnecessary, and it has been dropped by psycho-analysis to-day. Later on, you will at least have a hint of the influences and processes that were to be discovered behind the screen of hypnoid states erected by Breuer. You will have rightly formed the opinion, too, that Breuer’s investigation has only succeeded in offering you a very incomplete theory and an unsatisfying explanation of the phenomena observed. But complete theories do not fall ready-made from the sky and you would have even better grounds for suspicion if anyone presented you with a flawless and complete theory at the very beginning of his observations. Such a theory could only be a child of his speculation and could not be the fruit of an unprejudiced examination of the facts.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2210

SECOND LECTURE

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - At about the same time at which Breuer was carrying on the ‘talking cure’ with his patient, the great Charcot in Paris had begun the researches into hysterical patients at the Salpêtrière which were to lead to a new understanding of the disease. There was no possibility of his findings being known in Vienna at that time. But when, some ten years later, Breuer and I published our ‘Preliminary Communication’ on the psychical mechanism of hysterical phenomena, we were completely under the spell of Charcot’s researches. We regarded the pathogenic experiences of our patients as psychical traumas, and equated them with the somatic traumas whose influence on hysterical paralyses had been established by Charcot; and Breuer’s hypothesis of hypnoid states was itself nothing but a reflection of the fact that Charcot had reproduced those traumatic paralyses artificially under hypnosis.

The great French observer, whose pupil I became in 1885-6, was not himself inclined to adopt a psychological outlook. It was his pupil, Pierre Janet, who first attempted a deeper approach to the peculiar psychical processes present in hysteria, and we followed his example when we took the splitting of the mind and dissociation of the personality as the centre of our position. You will find in Janet a theory of hysteria which takes into account the prevailing views in France on the part played by heredity and degeneracy. According to him, hysteria is a form of degenerate modification of the nervous system, which shows itself in an innate weakness in the power of psychical synthesis. Hysterical patients, he believes, are inherently incapable of holding together the multiplicity of mental processes into a unity, and hence arises the tendency to mental dissociation. If I may be allowed to draw a homely but clear analogy, Janet’s hysterical patient reminds one of a feeble woman who has gone out shopping and is now returning home laden with a multitude of parcels and boxes. She cannot contain the whole heap of them with her two arms and ten fingers. So first of all one object slips from her grasp; and when she stoops to pick it up, another one escapes her in its place, and so on. This supposed mental weakness of hysterical patients is not confirmed when we find that, alongside these phenomena of diminished capacity, examples are also to be observed of a partial increase in efficiency: as though by way of compensation. At the time when Breuer’s patient had forgotten her mother tongue and every other language but English, her grasp of English reached such heights that, if she was handed a German book, she was able straight away to read out a correct and fluent translation of it.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2211

When, later on, I set about continuing on my own account the investigations that had been begun by Breuer, I soon arrived at another view of the origin of hysterical dissociation (the splitting of consciousness). A divergence of this kind, which was to be decisive for everything that followed, was inevitable, since I did not start out, like Janet, from laboratory experiments, but with therapeutic aims in mind.

I was driven forward above all by practical necessity. The cathartic procedure, as carried out by Breuer, presupposed putting the patient into a state of deep hypnosis; for it was only in a state of hypnosis that he attained a knowledge of the pathogenic connections which escaped him in his normal state. But I soon came to dislike hypnosis, for it was a temperamental and, one might almost say, a mystical ally. When I found that, in spite of all my efforts, I could not succeed in bringing more than a fraction of my patients into a hypnotic state, I determined to give up hypnosis and to make the cathartic procedure independent of it. Since I was not able at will to alter the mental state of the majority of my patients, I set about working with them in their normal state. At first, I must confess, this seemed a senseless and hopeless undertaking. I was set the task of learning from the patient something that I did not know and that he did not know himself. How could one hope to elicit it? But there came to my help a recollection of a most remarkable and instructive experiment which I had witnessed when I was with Bernheim at Nancy. Bernheim showed us that people whom he had put into a state of hypnotic somnambulism, and who had had all kinds of experiences while they were in that state, only appeared to have lost the memory of what they had experienced during somnambulism; it was possible to revive these memories in their normal state. It is true that, when he questioned them about their somnambulistic experiences, they began by maintaining that they knew nothing about them; but if he refused to give way, and insisted, and assured them that they did know about them, the forgotten experiences always reappeared.

So I did the same thing with my patients. When I reached a point with them at which they maintained that they knew nothing more, I assured them that they did know it all the same, and that they had only to say it; and I ventured to declare that the right memory would occur to them at the moment at which I laid my hand on their forehead. In that way I succeeded, without using hypnosis, in obtaining from the patients whatever was required for establishing the connection between the pathogenic scenes they had forgotten and the symptoms left over from those scenes. But it was a laborious procedure, and in the long run an exhausting one; and it was unsuited to serve as a permanent technique.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2212

I did not abandon it, however, before the observations I made during my use of it afforded me decisive evidence. I found confirmation of the fact that the forgotten memories were not lost. They were in the patient’s possession and were ready to emerge in association to what was still known by him; but there was some force that prevented them from becoming conscious and compelled them to remain unconscious. The existence of this force could be assumed with certainty, since one became aware of an effort corresponding to it if, in opposition to it, one tried to introduce the unconscious memories into the patient’s consciousness. The force which was maintaining the pathological condition became apparent in the form of resistance on the part of the patient.

It was on this idea of resistance, then, that I based my view of the course of psychical events in hysteria. In order to effect a recovery, it had proved necessary to remove these resistances. Starting out from the mechanism of cure, it now became possible to construct quite definite ideas of the origin of the illness. The same forces which, in the form of resistance, were now offering opposition to the forgotten material’s being made conscious, must formerly have brought about the forgetting and must have pushed the pathogenic experiences in question out of consciousness. I gave the name of ‘repression’ to this hypothetical process, and I considered that it was proved by the undeniable existence of resistance.

The further question could then be raised as to what these forces were and what the determinants were of the repression in which we now recognized the pathogenic mechanism of hysteria. A comparative study of the pathogenic situations which we had come to know through the cathartic procedure made it possible to answer this question. All these experiences had involved the emergence of a wishful impulse which was in sharp contrast to the subject’s other wishes and which proved incompatible with the ethical and aesthetic standards of his personality. There had been a short conflict, and the end of this internal struggle was that the idea which had appeared before consciousness as the vehicle of this irreconcilable wish fell a victim to repression, was pushed out of consciousness with all its attached memories, and was forgotten. Thus the incompatibility of the wish in question with the patient’s ego was the motive for the repression; the subject’s ethical and other standards were the repressing forces. An acceptance of the incompatible wishful impulse or a prolongation of the conflict would have produced a high degree of unpleasure; this unpleasure was avoided by means of repression, which was thus revealed as one of the devices serving to protect the mental personality.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2213

To take the place of a number of instances, I will relate a single one of my cases, in which the determinants and advantages of repression are sufficiently evident. For my present purpose I shall have once again to abridge the case history and omit some important underlying material. The patient was a girl, who had lost her beloved father after she had taken a share in nursing him - a situation analogous to that of Breuer’s patient. Soon afterwards her elder sister married, and her new brother-in-law aroused in her a peculiar feeling of sympathy which was easily masked under a disguise of family affection. Not long afterwards her sister fell ill and died, in the absence of the patient and her mother. They were summoned in all haste without being given any definite information of the tragic event. When the girl reached the bedside of her dead sister, there came to her for a brief moment an idea that might be expressed in these words: ‘Now he is free and can marry me.’ We may assume with certainty that this idea, which betrayed to her consciousness the intense love for her brother-in-law of which she had not herself been conscious, was surrendered to repression a moment later, owing to the revolt of her feelings. The girl fell ill with severe hysterical symptoms; and while she was under my treatment it turned out that she had completely forgotten the scene by her sister’s bedside and the odious egoistic impulse that had emerged in her. She remembered it during the treatment and reproduced the pathogenic moment with signs of the most violent emotion, and, as a result of the treatment, she became healthy once more.

Perhaps I may give you a more vivid picture of repression and of its necessary relation to resistance, by a rough analogy derived from our actual situation at the present moment. Let us suppose that in this lecture-room and among this audience, whose exemplary quiet and attentiveness I cannot sufficiently commend, there is nevertheless someone who is causing a disturbance and whose ill-mannered laughter, chattering and shuffling with his feet are distracting my attention from my task. I have to announce that I cannot proceed with my lecture; and thereupon three or four of you who are strong men stand up and, after a short struggle, put the interrupter outside the door. So now he is ‘repressed’, and I can continue my lecture. But in order that the interruption shall not be repeated, in case the individual who has been expelled should try to enter the room once more, the gentlemen who have put my will into effect place their chairs up against the door and thus establish a ‘resistance’ after the repression has been accomplished. If you will now translate the two localities concerned into psychical terms as the ‘conscious’ and the ‘unconscious’, you will have before you a fairly good picture of the process of repression.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2214

You will now see in what it is that the difference lies between our view and Janet’s. We do not derive the psychical splitting from an innate incapacity for synthesis on the part of the mental apparatus; we explain it dynamically, from the conflict of opposing mental forces and recognize it as the outcome of an active struggling on the part of the two psychical groupings against each other. But our view gives rise to a large number of fresh problems. Situations of mental conflict are, of course, exceedingly common; efforts by the ego to ward off painful memories are quite regularly to be observed without their producing the result of a mental split. The reflection cannot be escaped that further determinants must be present if the conflict is to lead to dissociation. I will also readily grant you that the hypothesis of repression leaves us not at the end but at the beginning of a psychological theory. We can only go forward step by step however, and complete knowledge must await the results of further and deeper researches.

Nor is it advisable to attempt to explain the case of Breuer’s patient from the point of view of repression. That case history is not suited to this purpose, because its findings were reached with the help of hypnotic influence. It is only if you exclude hypnosis that you can observe resistances and repressions and form an adequate idea of the truly pathogenic course of events. Hypnosis conceals the resistance and renders a certain area of the mind accessible; but, as against this, it builds up the resistance at the frontiers of this area into a wall that makes everything beyond it inaccessible.

Our most valuable lesson from Breuer’s observation was what it proved concerning the relation between symptoms and pathogenic experiences or psychical traumas, and we must not omit now to consider these discoveries from the standpoint of the theory of repression. At first sight it really seems impossible to trace a path from repression to the formation of symptoms. Instead of giving a complicated theoretical account, I will return here to the analogy which I employed earlier for my explanation of repression. If you come to think of it, the removal of the interrupter and the posting of the guardians at the door may not mean the end of the story. It may very well be that the individual who has been expelled, and who has now become embittered and reckless, will cause us further trouble. It is true that he is no longer among us; we are free from his presence, from his insulting laughter and his sotto voce comments. But in some respects, nevertheless, the repression has been unsuccessful; for now he is making an intolerable exhibition of himself outside the room, and his shouting and banging on the door with his fists interfere with my lecture even more than his bad behaviour did before. In these circumstances we could not fail to be delighted if our respected president, Dr. Stanley Hall, should be willing to assume the role of mediator and peacemaker. He would have a talk with the unruly person outside and would then come to us with a request that he should be re-admitted after all: he himself would guarantee that the man would now behave better. On Dr. Hall’s authority we decide to lift the repression, and peace and quiet are restored. This presents what is really no bad picture of the physician’s task in the psycho-analytic treatment of the neuroses.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2215

To put the matter more directly. The investigation of hysterical patients and of other neurotics leads us to the conclusion that their repression of the idea to which the intolerable wish is attached has been a failure. It is true that they have driven it out of consciousness and out of memory and have apparently saved themselves a large amount of unpleasure. But the repressed wishful impulse continues to exist in the unconscious. It is on the look-out for an opportunity of being activated, and when that happens it succeeds in sending into consciousness a disguised and unrecognizable substitute for what had been repressed, and to this there soon become attached the same feelings of unpleasure which it was hoped had been saved by the repression. This substitute for the repressed idea - the symptom - is proof against further attacks from the defensive ego; and in place of the short conflict an ailment now appears which is not brought to an end by the passage of time. Alongside the indication of distortion in the symptom, we can trace in it the remains of some kind of indirect resemblance to the idea that was originally repressed. The paths along which the substitution was effected can be traced in the course of the patient’s psycho-analytic treatment; and in order to bring about recovery, the symptom must be led back along the same paths and once more turned into the repressed idea. If what was repressed is brought back again into conscious mental activity - a process which presupposes the overcoming of considerable resistances - the resulting psychical conflict, which the patient had tried to avoid, can, under the physician’s guidance, reach a better outcome than was offered by repression. There are a number of such opportune solutions, which may bring the conflict and the neurosis to a happy end, and which may in certain instances be combined. The patient’s personality may be convinced that it has been wrong in rejecting the pathogenic wish and may be led into accepting it wholly or in part; or the wish itself may be directed to a higher and consequently unobjectionable aim (this is what we call its ‘sublimation’); or the rejection of the wish may be recognized as a justifiable one, but the automatic and therefore inefficient mechanism of repression may be replaced by a condemning judgement with the help of the highest human mental functions - conscious control of the wish is attained.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2216

You must forgive me if I have not succeeded in giving you a more clearly intelligible account of these basic positions adopted by the method of treatment that is now described as ‘psycho-analysis’. The difficulties have not lain only in the novelty of the subject. The nature of the incompatible wishes which, in spite of repression, succeed in making their existence in the unconscious perceptible, and the subjective and constitutional determinants which must be present in anyone before a failure of repression can occur and a substitute or symptom be formed - on all this I shall have more light to throw in some of my later observations.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2217

THIRD LECTURE

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - It is not always easy to tell the truth especially when one has to be concise; and I am thus to-day obliged to correct a wrong statement that I made in my last lecture. I said to you that, having dispensed with hypnosis, I insisted on my patients nevertheless telling me what occurred to them in connection with the subject under discussion, and assured them that they really knew everything that they had ostensibly forgotten and that the idea that occurred to them would infallibly contain what we were in search of; and I went on to say to you that I found that the first idea occurring to my patients did in fact produce the right thing and turned out to be the forgotten continuation of the memory. This, however, is not in general the case, and I only put the matter so simply for the sake of brevity. Actually it was only for the first few times that the right thing which had been forgotten turned up as a result of simple insistence on my part. When the procedure we carried further, ideas kept on emerging that could not be the right ones, since they were not appropriate and were rejected as being wrong by the patients themselves. Insistence was of no further help at this point, and I found myself once more regretting my abandonment of hypnosis.

While I was thus at a loss, I clung to a prejudice the scientific justification for which was proved years later by my friend C. G. Jung and his pupils in Zurich. I am bound to say that it is sometimes most useful to have prejudices. I cherished a high opinion of the strictness with which mental processes are determined, and I found it impossible to believe that an idea produced by a patient while his attention was on the stretch could be an arbitrary one and unrelated to the idea we were in search of. The fact that the two ideas were not identical could be satisfactorily explained from the postulated psychological state of affairs. In the patient under treatment two forces were in operation against each other: on the one hand, his conscious endeavour to bring into consciousness the forgotten idea in his unconscious, and on the other hand, the resistance we already know about, which was striving to prevent what was repressed or its derivatives from thus becoming conscious. If this resistance amounted to little or nothing, what had been forgotten became conscious without distortion. It was accordingly plausible to suppose that the greater the resistance against what we were in search of becoming conscious, the greater would be its distortion. The idea which occurred to the patient in place of what we were in search of had thus itself originated like a symptom: it was a new, artificial and ephemeral substitute for what had been repressed, and was dissimilar to it in proportion to the degree of distortion it had undergone under the influence of the resistance. But, owing to its nature as a symptom, it must nevertheless have a certain similarity to what we were in search of; and if the resistance were not too great, we ought to be able to guess the latter from the former. The idea occurring to the patient must be in the nature of an allusion to the repressed element, like a representation of it in indirect speech.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2218

We know cases in the field of normal mental life in which situations analogous to the one we have just assumed produce similar results. One such case is that of jokes. The problems of psycho-analytic technique have compelled me to investigate the technique of making jokes. I will give you one example of this - incidentally, a joke in English.

This is the anecdote.¹ Two not particularly scrupulous business men had succeeded, by dint of a series of highly risky enterprises, in amassing a large fortune, and they were now making efforts to push their way into good society. One method, which struck them as a likely one, was to have their portraits painted by the most celebrated and highly-paid artist in the city, whose pictures had an immense reputation. The precious canvases were shown for the first time at a large evening party, and the two hosts themselves led the most influential connoisseur and art critic up to the wall on which the portraits were hanging side by side. He studied the works for a long time, and then, shaking his head, as though there was something he had missed, pointed to the gap between the pictures and asked quietly: ‘But where’s the Saviour?’² I see you are all much amused at this joke. Let us now proceed to examine it. Clearly what the connoisseur meant to say was: ‘You are a couple of rogues, like the two thieves between whom the Saviour was crucified.’ But he did not say this. Instead he made a remark which seems at first sight strangely inappropriate and irrelevant, but which we recognize a moment later as an allusion to the insult that he had in mind and as a perfect substitute for it. We cannot expect to find in jokes all the characteristics that we have attributed to the ideas occurring to our patients, but we must stress the identity of the motive for the joke and for the idea. Why did the critic not tell the rogues straight out what he wanted to say? Because he had excellent counter-motives working against his desire to say it to their faces. There are risks attendant upon insulting people who are one’s hosts and who have at their command the fists of a large domestic staff. One might easily meet with the fate which I suggested in my last lecture as an analogy for repression. That was the reason why the critic did not express the insult he had in mind directly but in the form of an ‘allusion accompanied by omission’; and the same state of things is responsible for our patients’ producing a more or less distorted substitute instead of the forgotten idea we are in search of.

¹ Cf. Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, 1905c.

² [In English in the original.]

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2219

It is highly convenient, Ladies and Gentlemen, to follow the Zurich school (Bleuler, Jung, etc.) in describing a group of interdependent ideational elements cathected with affect as a ‘complex’. We see, then, that if in our search for a repressed complex in one of our patients we start out from the last thing he remembers, we shall have every prospect of discovering the complex, provided that the patient puts a sufficient number of his free associations at our disposal. Accordingly, we allow the patient to say whatever he likes, and hold fast to the postulate that nothing can occur to him which is not in an indirect fashion dependent on the complex we are in search of. If this method of discovering what is repressed strikes you as unduly circumstantial, I can at least assure you that it is the only practicable one.

When we come to putting this procedure into effect, we are subject to yet another interference. For the patient will often pause and come to a stop, and assert that he can think of nothing to say, and that nothing whatever occurs to his mind. If this were so and if the patient were right, then our procedure would once again have proved ineffective. But closer observation shows that such a stoppage of the flow of ideas never in fact occurs. It appears to happen only because the patient holds back or gets rid of the idea that he has become aware of, under the influence of the resistances which disguise themselves as various critical judgements about the value of the idea that has occurred to him. We can protect ourselves against this by warning him beforehand of this behaviour and requiring him to take no notice of such criticisms. He must, we tell him, entirely renounce any critical selection of this kind and say whatever comes into his head, even if he considers it incorrect or irrelevant or nonsensical, and above all if he finds it disagreeable to let himself think about what has occurred to him. So long as this ordinance is carried out we are certain of obtaining the material which will put us on the track of the repressed complexes.

This associative material, which the patient contemptuously rejects when he is under the influence of the resistance instead of under the doctor’s, serves the psycho-analyst, as it were, as ore from which, with the help of some simple interpretative devices, he extracts its content of precious metal. If you are anxious to gain a rapid and provisional knowledge of a patient’s repressed complexes, without as yet entering into their arrangement and interconnection, you will employ as a method of examination the ‘association experiment’ as it has been developed by Jung (1906) and his pupils. This procedure offers the psycho-analyst what qualitative analysis offers the chemist. In the treatment of neurotic patients it can be dispensed with; but it is indispensable for the objective demonstration of complexes and in the examination of the psychoses, which has been embarked on with so much success by the Zurich school.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2220

Working over the ideas that occur to patients when they submit to the main rule of psycho-analysis is not our only technical method of discovering the unconscious. The same purpose is served by two other procedures: the interpretation of patients’ dreams and the exploitation of their faulty and haphazard actions.

I must admit, Ladies and Gentlemen, that I hesitated for a long time whether, instead of giving you this condensed general survey of the whole field of psycho-analysis, it might not be better to present you with a detailed account of dream-interpretation.¹ I was held back by a purely subjective and seemingly secondary motive. It seemed to me almost indecent in a country which is devoted to practical aims to make my appearance as a ‘dream-interpreter’, before you could possibly know the importance that can attach to that antiquated and derided art. The interpretation of dreams is in fact the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious; it is the securest foundation of psycho-analysis and the field in which every worker must acquire his convictions and seek his training. If I am asked how one can become a psycho-analyst, I reply: ‘By studying one’s own dreams.’ Every opponent of psycho-analysis hitherto has, with a nice discrimination, either evaded any consideration of The Interpretation of Dreams, or has sought to skirt over it with the most superficial objections. If, on the contrary, you can accept the solutions of the problems of dream-life, the novelties with which psycho-analysis confronts your minds will offer you no further difficulties.

You should bear in mind that the dreams which we produce at night have, on the one hand, the greatest external similarity and internal kinship with the creations of insanity, and are, on the other hand, compatible with complete health in waking life. There is nothing paradoxical in the assertion that no one who regards these ‘normal’ illusions, delusions and character-changes with astonishment instead of comprehension has the slightest prospect of understanding the abnormal structures of pathological mental states otherwise than as a layman. You may comfortably count almost all psychiatrists among such laymen.

¹ The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a).

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2221

I invite you now to follow me on a brief excursion through the region of dream-problems. When we are awake we are in the habit of treating dreams with the same contempt with which patients regard the associations that are demanded of them by the psycho-analyst. We dismiss them, too, by forgetting them as a rule, quickly and completely. Our low opinion of them is based on the strange character even of those dreams that are not confused and meaningless, and on the obvious absurdity and nonsensicalness of other dreams. Our dismissal of them is related to the uninhibited shamelessness and immorality of the tendencies openly exhibited in some dreams. It is well known that the ancient world did not share this low opinion of dreams. Nor are the lower strata of our own society to-day in any doubt about the value of dreams; like the peoples of antiquity, they expect them to reveal the future. I confess that I feel no necessity for making any mystical assumptions in order to fill the gaps in our present knowledge, and accordingly I have never been able to find anything to confirm the prophetic nature of dreams. There are plenty of other things - sufficiently wonderful too - to be said about them.

In the first place, not all dreams are alien to the dreamer, incomprehensible and confused. If you inspect the dreams of very young children, from eighteen months upwards, you will find them perfectly simple and easy to explain. Small children always dream of the fulfilment of wishes that were aroused in them the day before but not satisfied. You will need no interpretative art in order to find this simple solution; all you need do is to enquire into the child’s experiences on the previous day (the ‘dream-day’). Certainly the most satisfactory solution of the riddle of dreams would be to find that adults’ dreams too were like those of children - fulfilments of wishful impulses that had come to them on the dream-day. And such in fact is the case. The difficulties in the way of this solution can be overcome step by step if dreams are analysed more closely.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2222

The first and most serious objection is that the content of adults’ dreams is as a rule unintelligible and could not look more unlike the fulfilment of a wish. And here is the answer. Such dreams have been subjected to distortion; the psychical process underlying them might originally have been expressed in words quite differently. You must distinguish the manifest content of the dream, as you vaguely recollect it in the morning and laboriously (and, as it seems, arbitrarily) clothe it in words, and the latent dream-thoughts, which you must suppose were present in the unconscious. This distortion in dreams is the same process that you have already come to know in investigating the formation of hysterical symptoms. It indicates, too, that the same interplay of mental forces is at work in the formation of dreams as in that of symptoms. The manifest content of the dream is the distorted substitute for the unconscious dream-thoughts and this distortion is the work of the ego’s forces of defence - of resistances. In waking life these resistances altogether prevent the repressed wishes of the unconscious from entering consciousness; and during the lowered state of sleep they are at least strong enough to oblige them to adopt a veil of disguise. Thereafter, the dreamer can no more understand the meaning of his dreams than the hysteric can understand the connection and significance of his symptoms.

You can convince yourself that there are such things as latent dream-thoughts and that the relation between them and the manifest content of the dream is really as I have described it, if you carry out an analysis of dreams, the technique of which is the same as that of psycho-analysis. You entirely disregard the apparent connections between the elements in the manifest dream and collect the ideas that occur to you in connection with each separate element of the dream by free association according to the psycho-analytic rule of procedure. From this material you arrive at the latent dream-thoughts, just as you arrived at the patient’s hidden complexes from his associations to his symptoms and memories. The latent dream-thoughts which have been reached in this way will at once show you how completely justified we have been in tracing back adults’ dreams to children’s dreams. The true meaning of the dream, which has now taken the place of its manifest content, is always clearly intelligible; it has its starting-point in experiences of the previous day, and proves to be a fulfilment of unsatisfied wishes. The manifest dream, which you know from your memory when you wake up, can therefore only be described as a disguised fulfilment of repressed wishes.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2223

You can also obtain a view, by a kind of synthetic work, of the process which has brought about the distortion of the unconscious dream-thoughts into the manifest content of the dream. We call this process the ‘dream-work’. It deserves our closest theoretical interest, since we are able to study in it, as nowhere else, what unsuspected psychical processes can occur in the unconscious, or rather, to put it more accurately, between two separate psychical systems like the conscious and unconscious. Among these freshly discovered psychical processes those of condensation and displacement are especially noticeable. The dream-work is a special case of the effects produced by two different mental groupings on each other - that is, of the consequences of mental splitting; and it seems identical in all essentials with the process of distortion which transforms the repressed complexes into symptoms where there is unsuccessful repression.

You will also learn with astonishment from the analysis of dreams (and most convincingly from that of your own) what an unsuspectedly great part is played in human development by impressions and experiences of early childhood. In dream-life the child that is in man pursues its existence, as it were, and retains all its characteristics and wishful impulses, even such as have become unserviceable in later life. There will be brought home to you with irresistible force the many developments, repressions, sublimations and reaction-formations, by means of which a child with a quite other innate endowment grows into what we call a normal man, the bearer, and in part the victim, of the civilization that has been so painfully acquired.

I should like you to notice, too, that the analysis of dreams has shown us that the unconscious makes use of a particular symbolism, especially for representing sexual complexes. This symbolism varies partly from individual to individual; but partly it is laid down in a typical form and seems to coincide with the symbolism which, as we suspect, underlies our myths and fairy tales. It seems not impossible that these creations of the popular mind might find an explanation through the help of dreams.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2224

Lastly, I must warn you not to let yourselves be put out by the objection that the occurrence of anxiety-dreams contradicts our view of dreams as the fulfilments of wishes. Apart from the fact that these anxiety-dreams, like the rest, require interpretation before any judgement can be formed on them, it must be stated quite generally that the anxiety does not depend on the content of the dream in such a simple manner as one might imagine without having more knowledge and taking more account of the determinants of neurotic anxiety. Anxiety is one of the ego’s reactions in repudiation of repressed wishes that have become powerful; and its occurrence in dreams as well is very easily explicable when the formation of the dream has been carried out with too much of an eye to the fulfilment of these repressed wishes.

As you see, research into dreams would be justified for its own sake merely by the information it gives us on matters that can with difficulty be discovered in other ways. But we were in fact led to the subject in connection with the psycho-analytic treatment of neurotics. You will easily understand from what I have already said how it is that dream-interpretation, if it is not made too difficult by the patient’s resistances, leads to a knowledge of his hidden and repressed wishes and of the complexes nourished by them; and I can now pass on to the third group of mental phenomena whose study has become one of the technical instruments of psycho-analysis.

The phenomena in question are the small faulty actions performed by both normal and neurotic people, to which as a rule no importance is attached: forgetting things that might be known and sometimes in fact are known (e.g. the occasional difficulty in recalling proper names), slips of the tongue in talking, by which we ourselves are so often affected, analogous slips of the pen and misreadings, bungling the performance of actions, losing objects or breaking them. All of these are things for which as a rule no psychological determinants are sought and which are allowed to pass without criticism as consequences of distraction or inattention or similar causes. Besides these there are the actions and gestures which people carry out without noticing them at all, to say nothing of attributing any psychological importance to them: playing about and fiddling with things, humming tunes, fingering parts of one’s own body or one’s clothing and so on.¹ These small things, faulty actions and symptomatic or haphazard actions alike, are not so insignificant as people, by a sort of conspiracy of silence, are ready to suppose. They always have a meaning, which can usually be interpreted with ease and certainty from the situation in which they occur. And it turns out that once again they give expression to impulses and intentions which have to be kept back and hidden from one’s own consciousness, or that they are actually derived from the same repressed wishful impulses and complexes which we have already come to know as the creators of symptoms and the constructors of dreams. They therefore deserve to be rated as symptoms, and if they are examined they may lead, just as dreams do, to the uncovering of the hidden part of the mind. A man’s most intimate secrets are as a rule betrayed by their help. If they occur particularly easily and frequently even in healthy people in whom the repression of unconscious impulses has on the whole been quite successful, they have their triviality and inconspicuousness to thank for it. But they can claim a high theoretical value, since they prove that repression and the formation of substitutes occur even under healthy conditions.

¹ Cf. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b).

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2225

As you already see, psycho-analysts are marked by a particularly strict belief in the determination of mental life. For them there is nothing trivial, nothing arbitrary or haphazard. They expect in every case to find sufficient motives where, as a rule, no such expectation is raised. Indeed, they are prepared to find several motives for one and the same mental occurrence, whereas what seems to be our innate craving for causality declares itself satisfied with a single psychical cause.

If you will now bring together the means we possess for uncovering what is concealed, forgotten and repressed in the mind (the study of the ideas occurring to patients under free association, of their dreams and of their faulty and symptomatic actions), and if you will add to these the exploitation of certain other phenomena which occur during psycho-analytic treatment and on which I shall have a few remarks to make later under the heading of ‘transference’ - if you bear all these in mind, you will agree with me in concluding that our technique is already efficient enough to fulfil its task, to bring the pathogenic psychical material into consciousness and so to get rid of the ailments that have been brought about by the formation of substitutive symptoms. And if, in the course of our therapeutic endeavours, we extend and deepen our knowledge of the human mind both in health and sickness, that can, of course, only be regarded as a peculiar attraction in our work.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2226

You may have formed an impression that the technique through whose armoury I have just conducted you is particularly difficult. In my opinion that technique is entirely in conformity with the material with which it has to deal. But this much at least is clear: it is not a self-evident one and it must be learnt just as the techniques of histology or surgery must be learnt. You will perhaps be surprised to hear that in Europe we have heard a large number of judgements on psycho-analysis from people who know nothing of this technique and do not employ it; and who go on to demand with apparent scorn that we shall prove to them the correctness of our findings. Among these adversaries there are no doubt some to whom a scientific mode of thought is not as a rule alien, who, for instance, would not reject the results of a microscopic examination because it could not be confirmed on the anatomical preparation with the naked eye, but who would first form a judgement on the matter themselves with the help of a microscope. But, where psycho-analysis is concerned, the prospects of recognition are in truth less favourable. Psycho-analysis is seeking to bring to conscious recognition the things in mental life which are repressed; and everyone who forms a judgement on it is himself a human being, who possesses similar repressions and may perhaps be maintaining them with difficulty. They are therefore bound to call up the same resistance in him as in our patients; and that resistance finds it easy to disguise itself is an intellectual rejection and to bring up arguments like those which we ward off in our patients by means of the fundamental rule of psycho-analysis. We often become aware in our opponents, just as we do in our patients, that their power of judgement is very noticeably influenced affectively in the sense of being diminished. The arrogance of consciousness (in rejecting dreams with such contempt, for instance) is one of the most powerful of the devices with which we are provided as a universal protection against the incursion of unconscious complexes. That is why it is so hard to convince people of the reality of the unconscious and to teach them to recognize something new which is in contradiction to their conscious knowledge.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2227

FOURTH LECTURE

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - You will want to know now what we have found out about the pathogenic complexes and repressed wishful impulses of neurotics with the help of the technical methods I have described.

First and foremost we have found out one thing. Psycho-analytic research traces back the symptoms of patients’ illnesses with really surprising regularity to impressions from their erotic life. It shows us that the pathogenic wishful impulses are in the nature of erotic instinctual components; and it forces us to suppose that among the influences leading to the illness the predominant significance must be assigned to erotic disturbances, and that this is the case in both sexes.

I am aware that this assertion of mine will not be willingly believed. Even workers who are ready to follow my psychological studies are inclined to think that I over-estimate the part played by sexual factors; they meet me with the question why other mental excitations should not lead to the phenomena I have described of repression and the formation of substitutes. I can only answer that I do not know why they should not, and that I should have no objection to their doing so; but experience shows that they do not carry this weight, that at most they support the operation of the sexual factors but cannot replace them. Far from this position having been postulated by me theoretically, at the time of the joint publication of the Studies with Dr. Breuer in 1895 I had not yet adopted it; and I was only converted to it when my experiences became more numerous and penetrated into the subject more deeply. There are among my present audience a few of my closest friends and followers, who have travelled with me here to Worcester. Enquire from them, and you will hear that they all began by completely disbelieving my assertion that sexual aetiology was of decisive importance, until their own analytic experiences compelled them to accept it.

A conviction of the correctness of this thesis was not precisely made easier by the behaviour of patients. Instead of willingly presenting us with information about their sexual life, they try to conceal it by every means in their power. People are in general not candid over sexual matters. They do not show their sexuality freely, but to conceal it they wear a heavy overcoat woven of a tissue of lies, as though the weather were bad in the world of sexuality. Nor are they mistaken. It is a fact that sun and wind are not favourable to sexual activity in this civilized world of ours; none of us can reveal his erotism freely to others. But when your patients discover that they can feel quite easy about it while they are under your treatment, they discard this veil of lies, and only then are you in a position to form a judgement on this debatable question. Unluckily even doctors are not preferred above other human creatures in their personal relation to questions of sexual life, and many of them are under the spell of the combination of prudery and prurience which governs the attitude of most ‘civilized people’ in matters of sexuality.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2228

Let me now proceed with my account of our findings. In another set of cases psycho-analytic investigation traces the symptoms back, it is true, not to sexual experiences but to commonplace traumatic ones. But this distinction loses its significance owing to another circumstance. For the work of analysis required for the thorough explanation and complete recovery of a case never comes to a stop at events that occurred at the time of the onset of the illness, but invariably goes back to the patient’s puberty and early childhood; and it is only there that it comes upon the impressions and events which determined the later onset of the illness. It is only experiences in childhood that explain susceptibility to later traumas and it is only by uncovering these almost invariably forgotten memory-traces and by making them conscious that we acquire the power to get rid of the symptoms. And here we reach the same conclusion as in our investigation of dreams: the imperishable, repressed wishful impulses of childhood have alone provided the power for the construction of symptoms, and without them the reaction to later traumas would have taken a normal course. But these powerful wishful impulses of childhood may without exception be described as sexual.

And now at last I am quite certain that I have surprised you. ‘Is there such a thing, then, as infantile sexuality?’ you will ask ‘Is not childhood on the contrary the period of life that is marked by the absence of the sexual instinct?’ No, Gentlemen, it is certainly not the case that the sexual instinct enters into children at the age of puberty in the way in which, in the Gospel, the devil entered into the swine. A child has its sexual instincts and activities from the first; it comes into the world with them; and, after an important course of development passing through many stages, they lead to what is known as the normal sexuality of the adult. There is even no difficulty in observing the manifestations of these sexual activities in children; on the contrary, it calls for some skill to overlook them or explain them away.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2229

By a lucky chance I am in a position to call a witness in favour of my assertions from your very midst. I have here in my hand a paper written by a Dr. Sanford Bell, which was published in The American Journal of Psychology in 1902. The author is a Fellow of Clark University, of the very institution in whose lecture-room we are now assembled. In this work, which is entitled ‘A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the Sexes’, and which appeared three years before my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, the author says exactly what I have just told you: ‘The emotion of sex-love . . . does not make its appearance for the first time at the period of adolescence, as has been thought.’ He carried out his work in what we in Europe would call ‘the American manner’, collecting no fewer than 2,500 positive observations in the course of fifteen years, among them 800 of his own. Concerning the signs by which these instances of falling in love are revealed he writes as follows: ‘The unprejudiced mind in observing these manifestations in hundreds of couples of children cannot escape referring them to sex origin. The most exacting mind is satisfied when to these observations are added the confessions of those who have, as children, experienced the emotion to a marked degree of intensity and whose memories of childhood are relatively distinct.’ But those of you who do not wish to believe in infantile sexuality will be most of all surprised to hear that not a few of these children who have fallen in love so early are of the tender age of three, four and five.

It would not astonish me if you were to attach more credence to these observations made by one of your closest neighbours than to mine. I myself have recently been fortunate enough to obtain a fairly complete picture of the somatic instinctual manifestations and mental products at an early stage of a child’s erotic life from the analysis of a five-year-old boy, suffering from anxiety - an analysis carried out with a correct technique by his own father.¹ And I may remind you that only a few hours ago, in this same room, my friend Dr. C. G. Jung reported an observation to you made on a still younger girl who, with a precipitating cause similar to my patient’s (the birth of a younger child in the family), made it possible to infer with certainty the presence of almost the same sensual impulses, wishes and complexes. I do not despair, therefore, of your becoming reconciled to what seems at first sight the strange idea of infantile sexuality. And I should like to quote to you the praiseworthy example of the Zurich psychiatrist, Dr. E. Bleuler, who declared publicly not many years ago that he was ‘unable to comprehend my theories of sexuality’, and who has since then confirmed the existence of infantile sexuality to its full extent from his own observations. (Cf. Bleuler, 1908.)

It is only too easy to explain why most people (whether medical observers or others) will hear nothing of the sexual life of children. They have forgotten their own infantile sexual activity under the pressure of their education to a civilized life, and they do not wish to be reminded of what has been repressed. They would arrive at other convictions if they were to begin their enquiry with a self-analysis, a revision and interpretation of their childhood memories.

¹ ‘The Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2230

Put away your doubts, then, and join me in a consideration of infantile sexuality from the earliest age.¹ A child’s sexual instinct turns out to be put together out of a number of factors; it is capable of being divided up into numerous components which originate from various sources. Above all, it is still independent of the reproductive function, into the service of which it will later be brought. It serves for the acquisition of different kinds of pleasurable feeling, which, basing ourselves on analogies and connections, we bring together under the idea of sexual pleasure. The chief source of infantile sexual pleasure is the appropriate excitation of certain parts of the body that are especially susceptible to stimulus: apart from the genitals, these are the oral, anal and urethral orifices, as well as the skin and other sensory surfaces. Since at this first phase of infantile sexual life satisfaction is obtained from the subject’s own body and extraneous objects are disregarded, we term this phase (from a word coined by Havelock Ellis) that of auto-erotism. We call the parts of the body that are important in the acquisition of sexual pleasure ‘erotogenic zones’. Thumb-sucking (or sensual sucking) in the youngest infants is a good example of this auto-erotic satisfaction from an erotogenic zone. The first scientific observer of this phenomenon, a paediatrician in Budapest named Lindner (1879), already interpreted it correctly as sexual satisfaction and described exhaustively its transition to other and higher forms of sexual activity. Another sexual satisfaction at this period of life is the masturbatory excitation of the genitals, which retains so much importance in later life and by many people is never completely conquered. Alongside these and other auto-erotic activities, we find in children at a very early age manifestations of those instinctual components of sexual pleasure (or, as we like to say, of libido) which presuppose the taking of an extraneous person as an object. These instincts occur in pairs of opposites, active and passive. I may mention as the most important representatives of this group the desire to cause pain (sadism) with its passive counterpart (masochism) and the active and passive desire for looking, from the former of which curiosity branches off later on and from the latter the impulsion to artistic and theatrical display. Others of a child’s sexual activities already imply the making of an ‘object-choice’, where an extraneous person becomes the main feature, a person who owes his importance in the first instance to considerations arising from the self-preservative instinct. But at this early period of childhood difference in sex plays no decisive part as yet. Thus you can attribute some degree of homosexuality to every child without doing him an injustice. This widespread and copious but dissociated sexual life of children, in which each separate instinct pursues its own acquisition of pleasure independently of all the rest, is now brought together and organized in two main directions, so that by the end of puberty the individual’s final sexual character is as a rule completely formed. On the one hand, the separate instincts become subordinated to the dominance of the genital zone, so that the whole sexual life enters the service of reproduction, and the satisfaction of the separate instincts retains its importance only as preparing for and encouraging the sexual act proper. On the other hand, object-choice pushes auto-erotism into the background, so that in the subject’s erotic life all the components of the sexual instinct now seek satisfaction in relation to the person who is loved. Not all of the original sexual components, however, are admitted to take part in this final establishment of sexuality. Even before puberty extremely energetic repressions of certain instincts have been effected under the influence of education, and mental forces such as shame, disgust and morality have been set up, which, like watchmen, maintain these repressions. So that when at puberty the high tide of sexual demands is reached, it is met by these mental reactive or resistant structures like dams, which direct its flow into what are called normal channels and make it impossible for it to reactivate the instincts that have undergone repression. It is in particular the coprophilic impulses of childhood - that is to say, the desires attaching to the excreta - which are submitted the most rigorously to repression, and the same is true, furthermore, of fixation to the figures to which the child’s original object-choice was attached.

¹ Cf. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d).

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2231

There is a dictum in general pathology, Gentlemen, which asserts that every developmental process carries with it the seed of a pathological disposition, in so far as that process may be inhibited, delayed, or may run its course incompletely. The same thing is true of the highly complicated development of the sexual function. It does not occur smoothly in every individual; and, if not, it leaves behind it either abnormalities or a predisposition to fall ill later, along the path of involution (i.e. regression). It may happen that not all the component instincts submit to the dominance of the genital zone. An instinct which remains in this way independent leads to what we describe as a perversion, and may substitute its own sexual aim for the normal one. It very often happens, as I have already said, that auto-erotism is not completely conquered, and evidence of this is given by a great variety of subsequent disturbances. The originally equal value attached to the two sexes as sexual objects may persist, and this will lead to a tendency in adult life to homosexual activity, which can in certain circumstances be intensified into exclusive homosexuality. These classes of disturbance represent direct inhibitions in the development of the sexual function; they comprise the perversions and, what is by no means rare, general infantilism in sexual life.

The predisposition to neurosis is traceable to impaired sexual development in a different way. Neuroses are related to perversions as negative to positive. The same instinctual components as in the perversions can be observed in the neuroses as vehicles of complexes and constructors of symptoms, but in the latter case they operate from the unconscious. Thus they have undergone repression, but have been able, in defiance of it, to persist in the unconscious. Psycho-analysis makes it clear that an excessively strong manifestation of these instincts at a very early age leads to a kind of partial fixation, which then constitutes a weak point in the structure of the sexual function. If in maturity the performance of the normal sexual function comes up against obstacles, the repression that took place during the course of development will be broken through at the precise points at which the infantile fixations occurred.

But here you will perhaps protest that all this is not sexuality. I have been using the word in a far wider sense than that in which you have been accustomed to understand it. So much I am quite ready to grant you. But the question arises whether it is not rather you who have been using the word in far too narrow a sense by restricting it to the sphere of reproduction. It means that you are sacrificing an understanding of the perversions and the connection between the perversions, the neuroses and normal sexual life; and you are making it impossible for you to recognize in its true significance the easily observable beginnings of the somatic and mental erotic life of children. But however you may choose to decide the verbal usage, you should bear firmly in mind that psycho-analysts understand sexuality in the full sense to which one is led by a consideration of infantile sexuality.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2232

Let us return to the sexual development of children. We have some arrears to make up owing to our having paid more attention to the somatic than to the mental phenomena of sexual life. The child’s first choice of an object, which derives from its need for help, claims our further interest. Its choice is directed in the first instance to all those who look after it, but these soon give place to its parents. Children’s relations to their parents, as we learn alike from direct observations of children and from later analytic examination of adults, are by no means free from elements of accompanying sexual excitation. The child takes both of its parents, and more particularly one of them, as the object of its erotic wishes. In so doing, it usually follows some indication from its parents, whose affection bears the clearest characteristics of a sexual activity, even though of one that is inhibited in its aims. As a rule a father prefers his daughter and a mother her son; the child reacts to this by wishing, if he is a son, to take his father’s place, and, if she is a daughter, her mother’s. The feelings which are aroused in these relations between parents and children and in the resulting ones between brothers and sisters are not only of a positive or affectionate kind but also of a negative or hostile one. The complex which is thus formed is doomed to early repression; but it continues to exercise a great and lasting influence from the unconscious. It is to be suspected that, together with its extensions, it constitutes the nuclear complex of every neurosis, and we may expect to find it no less actively at work in other regions of mental life. The myth of King Oedipus, who killed his father and took his mother to wife, reveals, with little modification, the infantile wish, which is later opposed and repudiated by the barrier against incest. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is equally rooted in the soil of the incest-complex, but under a better disguise.

During the time when the child is dominated by the still unrepressed nuclear complex, an important part of his intellectual activity is brought into the service of his sexual interests. He begins to enquire where babies come from, and, on the basis of the evidence presented to him, guesses more of the true facts than the grown-ups imagine. His interest in these researches is usually set going by the very real threat offered to him by the arrival of a new baby, which to begin with he regards merely as a competitor. Under the influence of the component instincts that are active in himself, he arrives at a number of ‘infantile sexual theories’ - such as attributing a male genital organ to both sexes alike, or supposing that babies are conceived by eating and born through the end of the bowel, or regarding sexual intercourse as a hostile act, a kind of violent subjugation. But as a result precisely of the incompleteness of his sexual constitution, and of the gap in his knowledge due to the hidden nature of the female sexual channel, the young investigator is obliged to abandon his work as a failure. The fact of this childish research itself, as well as the different infantile sexual theories that it brings to light, remain of importance in determining the formation of the child’s character and the content of any later neurotic illness.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2233

It is inevitable and perfectly normal that a child should take his parents as the first objects of his love. But his libido should not remain fixated to these first objects; later on, it should merely take them as a model, and should make a gradual transition from them on to extraneous people when the time for the final choice of an object arrives. The detachment of the child from his parents is thus a task that cannot be evaded if the young individual’s social fitness is not to be endangered. During the time at which repression is making its selection among the component instincts, and later, when there should be a slackening of the parents’ influence, which is essentially responsible for the expenditure of energy on these repressions, the task of education meets with great problems, which at the present time are certainly not always dealt with in an understanding and unobjectionable manner.

You must not suppose, Ladies and Gentlemen, that these discussions on sexual life and the psychosexual development of children have led us too far from psycho-analysis and the problem of curing nervous disorders. You can, if you like, regard psycho-analytic treatment as no more than a prolongation of education for the purpose of overcoming the residues of childhood.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2234

FIFTH LECTURE

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - With the discovery of infantile sexuality and the tracing back of neurotic symptoms to erotic instinctual components we have arrived at some unexpected formulas concerning the nature and purposes of neurotic illnesses. We see that human beings fall ill when, as a result of external obstacles or of an internal lack of adaptation, the satisfaction of their erotic needs in reality frustrated. We see that they then take flight into illness in order that by its help they may find a satisfaction to take the place of what has been frustrated. We recognize that the pathological symptoms constitute a portion of the subject’s sexual activity or even the whole of his sexual life, and we find that the withdrawal from reality is the main purpose of the illness but also the main damage caused by it. We suspect that our patients’ resistance to recovery is no simple one, but compounded of several motives. Not only does the patient’s ego rebel against giving up the repressions by means of which it has risen above its original disposition, but the sexual instincts are unwilling to renounce their substitutive satisfaction so long as it is uncertain whether reality will offer them anything better.

The flight from unsatisfactory reality into what, on account of the biological damage involved, we call illness (though it is never without an immediate yield of pleasure to the patient) takes place along the path of involution, of regression, of a return to earlier phases of sexual life, phases from which at one time satisfaction was not withheld. This regression appears to be a twofold one: a temporal one, in so far as the libido, the erotic needs, hark back to stages of development that are earlier in time, and a formal one, in that the original and primitive methods of psychical expression are employed in manifesting those needs. Both these kinds of regression, however, lead back to childhood and unite in bringing about an infantile condition of sexual life.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2235

The deeper you penetrate into the pathogenesis of nervous illness, the more you will find revealed the connection between the neuroses and other productions of the human mind, including the most valuable. You will be taught that we humans, with the high standards of our civilization and under the pressure of our internal repressions, find reality unsatisfying quite generally, and for that reason entertain a life of phantasy in which we like to make up for the insufficiencies of reality by the production of wish-fulfilments. These phantasies include a great deal of the true constitutional essence of the subject’s personality as well as of those of his impulses which are repressed where reality is concerned. The energetic and successful man is one who succeeds by his efforts in turning his wishful phantasies into reality. Where this fails, as a result of the resistances of the external world and of the subject’s own weakness, he begins to turn away from reality and withdraws into his more satisfying world of phantasy, the content of which is transformed into symptoms should he fall ill. In certain favourable circumstances, it still remains possible for him to find another path leading from these phantasies to reality, instead of becoming permanently estranged from it by regressing to infancy. If a person who is at loggerheads with reality possesses an artistic gift (a thing that is still a psychological mystery to us), he can transform his phantasies into artistic creations instead of into symptoms. In this manner he can escape the doom of neurosis and by this roundabout path regain his contact with reality. (Cf. Rank, 1907.) If there is persistent rebellion against the real world and if this precious gift is absent or insufficient, it is almost inevitable that the libido, keeping to the sources of the phantasies, will follow the path of regression, and will revive infantile wishes and end in neurosis. To-day neurosis takes the place of the monasteries which used to be the refuge of all whom life had disappointed or who felt too weak to face it.

Let me at this point state the principal finding to which we have been led by the psycho-analytic investigation of neurotics. The neuroses have no psychical content that is peculiar to them and that might not equally be found in healthy people. Or, as Jung has expressed it, neurotics fall ill of the same complexes against which we healthy people struggle as well. Whether that struggle ends in health, in neurosis, or in a countervailing superiority of achievement, depends on quantitative considerations, on the relative strength of the conflicting forces.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2236

I have not yet told you, Ladies and Gentlemen, of the most important of the observations which confirm our hypothesis of the sexual instinctual forces operating in neuroses. In every psycho-analytic treatment of a neurotic patient the strange phenomenon that is known as ‘transference’ makes its appearance. The patient, that is to say, directs towards the physician a degree of affectionate feeling (mingled, often enough, with hostility) which is based on no real relation between them and which - as is shown by every detail of its emergence - can only be traced back to old wishful phantasies of the patient’s which have become unconscious. Thus the part of the patient’s emotional life which he can no longer recall to memory is re-experienced by him in his relation to the physician; and it is only this re-experiencing in the ‘transference’ that convinces him of the existence and of the power of these unconscious sexual impulses. His symptoms, to take an analogy from chemistry, are precipitates of earlier experiences in the sphere of love (in the widest sense of the word), and it is only in the raised temperature of his experience of the transference that they can be resolved and reduced to other psychical products. In this reaction the physician, if I may borrow an apt phrase from Ferenczi (1909), plays the part of a catalytic ferment, which temporarily attracts to itself the affects liberated in the process. A study of transference, too, can give you the key to an understanding of hypnotic suggestion, which we employed to begin with as a technical method for investigating the unconscious in our patients. At that time hypnosis was found to be a help therapeutically, but a hindrance to the scientific understanding of the facts; for it cleared away the psychical resistances in a certain area while building them up into an unscalable wall at its frontiers. You must not suppose, moreover, that the phenomenon of transference (of which, unfortunately, I can tell you all too little to-day) is created by psycho-analytic influence. Transference arises spontaneously in all human relationships just as it does between the patient and the physician. It is everywhere the true vehicle of therapeutic influence; and the less its presence is suspected, the more powerfully it operates. So psycho-analysis does not create it, but merely reveals it to consciousness and gains control of it in order to guide psychical processes towards the desired goal. I cannot, however, leave the topic of transference without stressing the fact that this phenomenon plays a decisive part in bringing conviction not only to the patient but also to the physician. I know it to be true of all my followers that they were only convinced of the correctness of my assertions on the pathogenesis of the neuroses by their experiences with transference; and I can very well understand that such certainty of judgement cannot be attained before one has carried out psycho-analyses and has oneself observed the workings of transference.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2237

Ladies and Gentlemen, from the intellectual point of view we must, I think, take into account two special obstacles to recognizing psycho-analytic trains of thought. In the first place, people are unaccustomed to reckoning with a strict and universal application of determinism to mental life; and in the second place, they are ignorant of the peculiarities which distinguish unconscious mental processes from the conscious ones that are familiar to us. One of the most widespread resistances to psycho-analytic work, in the sick and healthy alike, can be traced to the second of these two factors. People are afraid of doing harm by psycho-analysis; they are afraid of bringing the repressed sexual instincts into the patient’s consciousness, as though that involved a danger of their overwhelming his higher ethical trends and of their robbing him of his cultural acquisitions. People notice that the patient has sore spots in his mind, but shrink from touching them for fear of increasing his sufferings. We can accept this analogy. It is no doubt kinder not to touch diseased spots if it can do nothing else but cause pain. But, as we know, a surgeon does not refrain from examining and handling a focus of disease, if he is intending to take active measures which he believes will lead to a permanent cure. No one thinks of blaming him for the inevitable suffering caused by the examination or for the reactions to the operation, if only it gains its end and the patient achieves a lasting recovery as a result of the temporary worsening of his state. The case is similar with psycho-analysis. It may make the same claims as surgery: the increase in suffering which it causes the patient during treatment is incomparably less than what a surgeon causes, and is quite negligible in proportion to the severity of the underlying ailment. On the other hand, the final outcome that is so much dreaded - the destruction of the patient’s cultural character by the instincts which have been set free from repression - is totally impossible. For alarm on this score takes no account of what our experiences have taught us with certainty - namely that the mental and somatic power of a wishful impulse, when once its repression has failed, is far stronger if it is unconscious than if it is conscious; so that to make it conscious can only be to weaken it. An unconscious wish cannot be influenced and it is independent of any contrary tendencies, whereas a conscious one is inhibited by whatever else is conscious and opposed to it. Thus the work of psycho-analysis puts itself at the orders of precisely the highest and most valuable cultural trends, as a better substitute for the unsuccessful repression.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2238

What, then, becomes of the unconscious wishes which have been set free by psycho-analysis? Along what paths do we succeed in making them harmless to the subject’s life? There are several such paths. The most frequent outcome is that, while the work is actually going on, these wishes are destroyed by the rational mental activity of the better impulses that are opposed to them. Repression is replaced by a condemning judgement carried out along the best lines. That is possible because what we have to get rid of is to a great extent only the consequences arising from earlier stages of the ego’s development. The subject only succeeded in the past in repressing the unserviceable instinct because he himself was at that time still imperfectly organized and feeble. In his present-day maturity and strength, he will perhaps be able to master what is hostile to him with complete success.

A second outcome of the work of psycho-analysis is that it then becomes possible for the unconscious instincts revealed by it to be employed for the useful purposes which they would have found earlier if development had not been interrupted. For the extirpation of the infantile wishful impulses is by no means the ideal aim of development. Owing to their repressions, neurotics have sacrificed many sources of mental energy whose contributions would have been of great value in the formation of their character and in their activity in life. We know of a far more expedient process of development, called ‘sublimation’, in which the energy of the infantile wishful impulses is not cut off but remains ready for use - the unserviceable aim of the various impulses being replaced by one that is higher, and perhaps no longer sexual. It happens to be precisely the components of the sexual instinct that are specially marked by a capacity of this kind for sublimation, for exchanging their sexual aim for another one which is comparatively remote and socially valuable. It is probable that we owe our highest cultural successes to the contributions of energy made in this way to our mental functions. Premature repression makes the sublimation of the repressed instinct impossible; when the repression is lifted, the path to sublimation becomes free once more.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2239

We must not omit to consider the third of the possible outcomes of the work of psycho-analysis. A certain portion of the repressed libidinal impulses has a claim to direct satisfaction and ought to find it in life. Our civilized standards make life too difficult for the majority of human organizations. Those standards consequently encourage the retreat from reality and the generating of neuroses, without achieving any surplus of cultural gain by this excess of sexual repression. We ought not to exalt ourselves so high as completely to neglect what was originally animal in our nature. Nor should we forget that the satisfaction of the individual’s happiness cannot be erased from among the aims of our civilization. The plasticity of the components of sexuality, shown by their capacity for sublimation, may indeed offer a great temptation to strive for still greater cultural achievements by still further sublimation. But, just as we do not count on our machines converting more than a certain fraction of the heat consumed into useful mechanical work, we ought not to seek to alienate the whole amount of the energy of the sexual instinct from its proper ends. We cannot succeed in doing so; and if the restriction upon sexuality were to be carried too far it would inevitably bring with it all the evils of soil-exhaustion.

It may be that you for your part will regard the warning with which I close as an exaggeration. I shall only venture on an indirect picture of my conviction by telling you an old story and leaving you to make what use you like of it. German literature is familiar with a little town called Schilda, to whose inhabitants clever tricks of every possible sort are attributed. The citizens of Schilda, so we are told, possessed a horse with whose feats of strength they were highly pleased and against which they had only one objection - that it consumed such a large quantity of expensive oats. They determined to break it of this bad habit very gently by reducing its ration by a few stalks every day, till they had accustomed it to complete abstinence. For a time things went excellently: the horse was weaned to the point of eating only one stalk a day, and on the succeeding day it was at length to work without any oats at all. On the morning of that day the spiteful animal was found dead; and the citizens of Schilda could not make out what it had died of.

We should be inclined to think that the horse was starved and that no work at all could be expected of an animal without a certain modicum of oats.

I must thank you for your invitation and for the attention with which you have listened to me.

2240

LEONARDO DA VINCI AND A MEMORY OF HIS CHILDHOOD

(1910)

2241

Intentionally left blank

2242

LEONARDO DA VINCI AND A MEMORY OF HIS CHILDHOOD

I

When psychiatric research, normally content to draw on frailer men for its material, approaches one who is among the greatest of the human race, it is not doing so for the reasons so frequently ascribed to it by laymen. ‘To blacken the radiant and drag the sublime into the dust’ is no part of its purpose, and there is no satisfaction for it in narrowing the gulf which separates the perfection of the great from the inadequacy of the objects that are its usual concern. But it cannot help finding worthy of understanding everything that can be recognized in those illustrious models, and it believes there is no one so great as to be disgraced by being subject to the laws which govern both normal and pathological activity with equal cogency.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was admired even by his contemporaries as one of the greatest men of the Italian renaissance; yet in their time he had already begun to seem an enigma, just as he does to us to-day. He was a universal genius ‘whose outlines can only be surmised, - never defined’.¹ In his own time his most decisive influence was in painting, and it was left to us to recognize the greatness of the natural scientist (and engineer) that was combined in him with the artist. Though he left behind him masterpieces of painting, while his scientific discoveries remained unpublished and unused, the investigator in him never in the course of his development left the artist entirely free, but often made severe encroachments on him and perhaps in the end suppressed him. In the last hour of his life, according to the words that Vasari gives him, he reproached himself with having offended God and man by his failure to do his duty in his art.² And even if this story of Vasari’s has neither external nor much internal probability but belongs to the legend which began to be woven around the mysterious Master even before his death, it is still of incontestable value as evidence of what men believed at the time.

¹ The words are Jacob Burckhardt’s, quoted by Konstantinowa (1907).

² ‘Egli per reverenza, rizzatosi a sedere sul letto, contando il mal suo e gli accidenti di quello, mostrava tuttavia quanto avea offeso Dio e gli uomini del mondo, non avendo operato nell’ arte come si conveniva.’ [‘He having raised himself out of reverence so as to sit on the bed, and giving an account of his illness and its circumstances, yet showed how much he had offended God and mankind in not having worked at his art as he should have done.’] Vasari.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2243

What was it that prevented Leonardo’s personality from being understood by his contemporaries? The cause of this was certainly not the versatility of his talents and the range of his knowledge, which enabled him to introduce himself to the court of the Duke of Milan, Lodovico Sforza, called Il Moro, as a performer on a kind of lute of his own invention, or allowed him to write the remarkable letter to the same duke in which he boasted of his achievements as architect and military engineer. For the days of the renaissance were quite familiar with such a combination of wide and diverse abilities in a single individual - though we must allow that Leonardo himself was one of the most brilliant examples of this. Nor did he belong to the type of genius who has received a niggardly outward endowment from nature, and who in his turn places no value on the outward forms of life, but in a spirit of painful gloom flies from all dealings with mankind. On the contrary, he was tall and well proportioned; his features were of consummate beauty and his physical strength unusual; he was charming in his manner, supremely eloquent, and cheerful and amiable to everyone. He loved beauty in the things that surrounded him; he was fond of magnificent clothing and valued every refinement of living. In a passage from the treatise on painting, which reveals his lively capacity for enjoyment, he compares painting with its sister arts and describes the hardships that await the sculptor: ‘For his face is smeared and dusted all over with marble powder so that he looks like a baker, and he is completely covered with little chips of marble, so that it seems as if his back had been snowed on; and his house is full of splinters of stone and dust. In the case of the painter it is quite different... for the painter sits in front of his work in perfect comfort. He is well-dressed and handles the lightest of brushes which he dips in pleasant colours. He wears the clothes he likes; and his house is full of delightful paintings, and is spotlessly clean. He is often accompanied by music or by men who read from a variety of beautiful works, and he can listen to these with great pleasure and without the din of hammers and other noises.’¹

¹ Trattato della Pittura.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2244

It is indeed quite possible that the idea of a radiantly happy and pleasure-loving Leonardo is only applicable to the first and longer period of the artist’s life. Afterwards, when the downfall of Lodovico Moro’s rule forced him to leave Milan, the city that was the centre of his activity and where his position was assured, and to pursue a life lacking in security and not rich in external successes, until he found his last asylum in France, the sparkle of his temperament may have grown dim and some strange sides of his nature may have been thrown into prominence. Moreover the turning of his interests from his art to science, which increased as time went on, must have played its part in widening the gulf between himself and his contemporaries. All the efforts in which in their opinion he frittered away his time when he could have been industriously painting to order and becoming rich (as, for example, his former fellow-student Perugino did) seemed to them to be merely capricious trifling or even caused him to be suspected of being in the service of the ‘black art’. We are in a position to understand him better, for we know from his notes what were the arts that he practised. In an age which was beginning to replace the authority of the Church by that of antiquity and which was not yet familiar with any form of research not based on presuppositions, Leonardo - the forerunner and by no means unworthy rival of Bacon and Copernicus - was necessarily isolated. In his dissection of the dead bodies of horses and human beings, in his construction of flying machines, and in his studies on the nutrition of plants and their reactions to poisons, he certainly departed widely from the commentators on Aristotle, and came close to the despised alchemists, in whose laboratories experimental research had found some refuge at least in those unfavourable times.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2245

The effect that this had on his painting was that he took up his brush with reluctance, painted less and less, left what he had begun for the most part unfinished and cared little about the ultimate fate of his works. And this was what he was blamed for by his contemporaries: to them his attitude towards his art remained a riddle.

Several of Leonardo’s later admirers have made attempts to acquit his character of the flaw of instability. In his defence they claim that he is blamed for what is a general feature of great artists: even the energetic Michelangelo, a man entirely given up to his labours, left many of his works incomplete, and it was no more his fault than it was Leonardo’s in the parallel instance. Moreover, in the case of some of the pictures, they urge, it is not so much a question of their being unfinished as of his declaring them to be so. What appears to the layman as a masterpiece is never for the creator of the work of art more than an unsatisfactory embodiment of what he intended; he has some dim notion of a perfection, whose likeness time and again he despairs of reproducing. Least of all, they claim, is it right to make the artist responsible for the ultimate fate of his works.

Valid as some of these excuses may be, they still do not cover the whole state of affairs that confronts us in Leonardo. The same distressing struggle with a work, the final flight from it and the indifference to its future fate may recur in many other artists, but there is no doubt that this behaviour is shown in Leonardo in an extreme degree. Solmi (1910, 12) quotes the remark of one of his pupils: ‘Pareva che ad ogni ora tremasse, quando si poneva a dipingere, e però non diede mai fine ad alcuna cosa cominciata, considerando la grandezza dell’arte, tal che egli scorgeva errori in quelle cose, che ad altri parevano miracoli.’¹ His last pictures, he goes on, the Leda, the Madonna di Sant’ Onofrio, Bacchus, and the young St. John the Baptist, remained unfinished ‘come quasi intervenne di tutte le cose sue . . .’² Lomazzo, who made a copy of the Last Supper, refers in a sonnet to Leonardo’s notorious inability to finish his works:

Protogen che il pennel di sue pitture

Non levava, agguaglio il Vinci Divo

Di cui opra non è finita pure.³

¹ [‘He appeared to tremble the whole time when he set himself to paint, and yet he never completed any work he had begun, having so high a regard for the greatness of art that he discovered faults in things that to others seemed miracles.’]

² [‘As happened more or less to all his works.’]

³ [‘Protogenes, who never lifted his brush from his work, was the equal of the divine Vinci, who never finished anything at all.’] Quoted by Scognamiglio (1900).

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2246

The slowness with which Leonardo worked was proverbial. He painted at the Last Supper in the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, after the most thorough preparatory studies, for three whole years. One of his contemporaries, Matteo Bandelli, the story-writer, who at the time was a young monk in the convent, tells how Leonardo often used to climb up the scaffolding early in the morning and remain there till twilight never once laying his brush aside, and with no thought of eating or drinking. Then days would pass without his putting his hand to it. Sometimes he would remain for hours in front of the painting, merely examining it in his mind. At other times he would come straight to the convent from the court in the castle at Milan, where he was making the model of the equestrian statue for Francesco Sforza, in order to add a few strokes of the brush to a figure, and then immediately break off.¹ According to Vasari he spent four years in painting the portrait of Mona Lisa, the wife of the Florentine Francesco del Giocondo, without being able to bring it to final completion. This circumstance may also account for the fact that the picture was never delivered to the man who commissioned it, but instead remained with Leonardo and was taken to France by him.² It was bought by King Francis I, and to-day forms one of the greatest treasures of the Louvre.

If these reports of the way in which Leonardo worked are compared with the evidence of the extraordinarily numerous sketches and studies which he left behind him and which exhibit every motif appearing in his paintings in a great variety of forms, we are bound totally to reject the idea that traits of hastiness and unsteadiness acquired the slightest influence over Leonardo’s relation to his art. On the contrary, it is possible to observe a quite extraordinary profundity, a wealth of possibilities between which a decision can only be reached with hesitation, demands which can hardly be satisfied, and an inhibition in the actual execution which is not in fact to be explained even by the artist inevitably falling short of his ideal. The slowness which had all along been conspicuous in Leonardo’s work is seen to be a symptom of this inhibition and to be the forerunner of his subsequent withdrawal from painting.³ It was this too which determined the fate of the Last Supper - a fate that was not undeserved. Leonardo could not become reconciled to fresco painting, which demands rapid work while the ground is still moist, and this was the reason why he chose oil colours, the drying of which permitted him to protract the completion of the painting to suit his mood and leisure. These pigments however detached themselves from the ground on which they were applied and which separated them from the wall. Added to this, the defects in the wall, and the later fortunes of the building itself, determined what seems to be the inevitable ruin of the picture.4

¹ Von Seidlitz (1909, 1, 203).

² Von Seidlitz (1909, 2, 48).

³ Pater: ‘But it is certain that at one period of his life he had almost ceased to be an artist.’

4 See von Seidlitz (1909, 1) for the history of the attempts to restore and preserve the picture.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2247

The miscarriage of a similar technical experiment appears to have caused the destruction of the Battle of Anghiari, the painting which, in competition with Michelangelo, he began to paint some time afterwards on a wall of the Sala del Consiglio in Florence, and which he also abandoned in an unfinished condition. Here it seems as if an alien interest - in experimentation - at first reinforced the artistic one, only to damage the work later on.

The character of Leonardo the man showed some other unusual traits and apparent contradictions. A certain inactivity and indifference seemed obvious in him. At a time when everyone was trying to gain the widest scope for his activity - a goal unattainable without the development of energetic aggressiveness towards other people - Leonardo was notable for his quiet peaceableness and his avoidance of all antagonism and controversy. He was gentle and kindly to everyone; he declined, it is said, to eat meat, since he did not think it justifiable to deprive animals of their lives; and he took particular pleasure in buying birds in the market and setting them free.¹ He condemned war and bloodshed and described man as not so much the king of the animal world but rather the worst of the wild beasts.² But this feminine delicacy of feeling did not deter him from accompanying condemned criminals on their way to execution in order to study their features distorted by fear and to sketch them in his notebook. Nor did it stop him from devising the cruellest offensive weapons and from entering the service of Cesare Borgia as chief military engineer. He often gave the appearance of being indifferent to good and evil, or he insisted on measurement by a special standard. He accompanied Cesare in a position of authority during the campaign that brought the Romagna into the possession of that most ruthless and faithless of adversaries. There is not a line in Leonardo’s notebooks which reveals any criticism of the events of those days, or any concern in them. A comparison suggests itself here with Goethe during the French campaign.

¹ Müntz (1899, 18). A letter of a contemporary from India to one of the Medici alludes to this characteristic behaviour of Leonardo. (See J. P. Richter.)

² Bottazzi (1910, 186).

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2248

If a biographical study is really intended to arrive at an understanding of its hero’s mental life it must not - as happens in the majority of biographies as a result of discretion or prudishness - silently pass over its subject’s sexual activity or sexual individuality. What is known of Leonardo in this respect is little: but that little is full of significance. In an age which saw a struggle between sensuality without restraint and gloomy asceticism, Leonardo represented the cool repudiation of sexuality - a thing that would scarcely be expected of an artist and a portrayer of feminine beauty. Solmi quotes the following sentence of his which is evidence of his frigidity: ‘The act of procreation and everything connected with it is so disgusting that mankind would soon die out if it were not an old-established custom and if there were not pretty faces and sensuous natures.’¹ His posthumous writings, which not only deal with the greatest scientific problems but also contain trivialities that strike us as scarcely worthy of so great a mind (an allegorical natural history, animal fables, jokes, prophecies),² are chaste - one might say even abstinent - to a degree that would cause surprise in a work of belles lettres even to-day. So resolutely do they shun everything sexual that it would seem as if Eros alone, the preserver of all living things, was not worthy material for the investigator in his pursuit of knowledge.³ It is well known how frequently great artists take pleasure in giving vent to their phantasies in erotic and even crudely obscene pictures. In Leonardo’s case on the contrary we have only some anatomical sketches of the internal female genitals, the position of the embryo in the womb and so on.4

¹ Solmi (1908).

² Herzfeld (1906).

³ An exception to this (though an unimportant one) is perhaps to be found in his collected witticisms - belle facezie - which have not been translated. See Herzfeld (1906, 151).

4 [Footnote added 1919:] Some remarkable errors are visible in a drawing made by Leonardo of the sexual act seen in anatomical sagittal section, which certainly cannot be called obscene. They were discovered by Reitler (1917) and discussed by him in the light of the account which I have given here of Leonardo’s character:

‘It is precisely in the process of portraying the act of procreation that this excessive instinct for research has totally failed - obviously only as a result of his even greater sexual repression. The man’s body is drawn in full, the woman’s only in part. If the drawing reproduced in Fig. 1 is shown to an unprejudiced onlooker with the head visible but all the lower parts covered up, it may be safely assumed that the head will be taken to be a woman’s. The wavy locks on the forehead, and the others, which flow down the back approximately to the fourth or fifth dorsal vertebra, mark the head as more of a woman’s than a man’s.

‘The woman’s breast reveals two defects. The first indeed is an artistic one, for its outline gives it the appearance of a breast that is flabby and hangs down unpleasingly. The second defect is anatomical, for Leonardo the researcher had obviously been prevented by his fending off of sexuality from ever making a close examination of a nursing woman’s nipples. Had he done so he would have been bound to notice that the milk flows out of a number of separate excretory ducts. Leonardo, however, drew only a single duct extending far down into the abdominal cavity and probably in his view drawing the milk from the cisterna chyli and perhaps also connected in some way with the sex organs. It must of course be taken into consideration that the study of the internal organs of the human body was at that time made extremely difficult, since the dissection of bodies was regarded as desecration of the dead and was most severely punished. Whether Leonardo, who had certainly only very little material for dissection at his disposal, knew anything at all of the existence of a lymph-reservoir in the abdominal cavity is therefore in fact highly questionable, although in his drawing he included a cavity that is no doubt intended to be something of the sort. But from his making the lactiferous duct extend still further downwards till it reaches the internal sex organs we may suspect that he was trying to represent the synchronization of the beginning of the secretion of milk and the end of pregnancy by means of visible anatomical connections as well. However, even if we are ready to excuse the artist’s defective knowledge of anatomy by referring it to the circumstances of his time, the striking fact still remains that it is precisely the female genital that Leonardo has treated so carelessly. The vagina and something that looks like the portio uteri can no doubt be made out, but the lines indicating the uterus itself are completely confused.

Fig. 1

‘The male genital on the other hand is depicted by Leonardo much more correctly. Thus, for instance, he was not satisfied with drawing the testis but also put in the epididymis, which he drew with perfect accuracy.

‘What is especially remarkable is the posture in which Leonardo makes coitus take place. Pictures and drawings by famous artists exist which depict coitus a tergo, a latere, etc., but when it comes to a drawing of the sexual act being performed standing up, we must surely suppose that there was a sexual repression of quite special strength to have caused it to be represented in this isolated and almost grotesque way. If one wants to enjoy oneself it is usual to make oneself as comfortable as possible: this of course is true for both the primal instincts, hunger and love. Most of the peoples of antiquity took their meals in a lying position and it is normal in coitus to-day to lie down just as comfortably as did our ancestors. Lying down implies more or less a wish to stay in the desired situation for some time.

‘Moreover the features of the man with the feminine head are marked by a resistance that is positively indignant. His brows are wrinkled and his gaze is directed sideways with an expression of repugnance. The lips are pressed together and their corners are then drawn down. In this face can be seen neither the pleasure of love’s blessings nor the happiness of indulgence: it expresses only indignation and aversion.

‘The clumsiest blunder, however, was made by Leonardo in drawing the two lower extremities. The man’s foot should in point of fact have been his right one; for since Leonardo depicted the act of union in an anatomical sagittal section it follows of course that the man’s left foot would be above the plane of the picture. Conversely, and for the same reason, the woman’s foot should have belonged to her left side. But in fact Leonardo has interchanged male and female. The male figure has a left foot and the female one a right foot. This interchange is easiest to grasp if one recalls that the big toes lie on the inner sides of the feet.

‘This anatomical drawing alone would have made it possible to deduce the repression of libido - a repression which threw the great artist and investigator into something approaching confusion.’

[Added 1923:] These remarks of Reitler’s have been criticized, it is true, on the ground that such serious conclusions should not be drawn from a hasty sketch, and that it is not even certain whether the different parts of the drawing really belong together.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2249

It is doubtful whether Leonardo ever embraced a woman in passion; nor is it known that he had any intimate mental relationship with a woman, such as Michelangelo’s with Vittoria Colonna. While he was still an apprentice, living in the house of his master Verrocchio, a charge of forbidden homosexual practices was brought against him, along with some other young people, which ended in his acquittal. He seems to have fallen under this suspicion because he had employed a boy of bad reputation as a model.¹ When he had become a Master, he surrounded himself with handsome boys and youths whom he took as pupils. The last of these pupils, Francesco Melzi, accompanied him to France, remained with him up to his death and was named by him as his heir. Without sharing in the certainty of his modern biographers, who naturally reject the possibility that there was a sexual relationship between him and his pupils as a baseless insult to the great man, we may take it as much more probable that Leonardo’s affectionate relations with the young men who - as was the custom with pupils at that time - shared his existence did not extend to sexual activity. Moreover a high degree of sexual activity is not to be attributed to him.

¹ According to Scognamiglio (1900, 49) there is a reference to this episode in an obscure and even variously read passage in the Codex Atlanticus: ‘Quando io feci Domeneddio putto voi mi metteste in prigione, ora s’io lo fo grande, voi mi farete peggio.’ [‘When I represented the Lord God as a baby, you put me in prison; now if I represent him as an adult you will do worse to me. ‘]

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2250

There is only one way in which the peculiarity of this emotional and sexual life can be understood in connection with Leonardo’s double nature as an artist and as a scientific investigator. Among his biographers, to whom a psychological approach is often very alien, there is to my knowledge only one, Edmondo Solmi, who has approached the solution of the problem; but a writer who has chosen Leonardo as the hero of a great historical novel, Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky, has made a similar reading of this unusual man the basis of his portrait and has given clear expression to his conception, not indeed in plain language, but (after the way of writers of imagination) in plastic terms.¹ Solmi’s verdict on Leonardo is as follows (1908, 46): ‘But his insatiable desire to understand everything around him, and to fathom in a spirit of cold superiority the deepest secret of all that is perfect, had condemned Leonardo’s work to remain for ever unfinished.’

In an essay in the Conferenze Fiorentine the following pronouncement of Leonardo’s is quoted, which represents his confession of faith and provides the key to his nature: ‘Nessuna cosa si può amare nè odiare, se prima non si ha cognition di quella.’² That is to say: One has no right to love or hate anything if one has not acquired a thorough knowledge of its nature. And the same is repeated by Leonardo in a passage in the treatise on painting where he seems to be defending himself against the charge of irreligion: ‘But such carping critics would do better to keep silent. For that (line of conduct) is the way to become acquainted with the Creator of so many wonderful things, and this is the way to love so great an Inventor. For in truth great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you know it but little you will be able to love it only a little or not at all . . .’³

¹ Merezhkovsky (1902; German trans., 1903). Leonardo da Vinci forms the second work of a great historical trilogy entitled Christ and Antichrist. The two other volumes are Julian the Apostate and Peter and Alexis.

² Bottazzi (1910, 193).

³ Trattato della Pittura.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2251

The value of these remarks of Leonardo’s is not to be looked for in their conveying an important psychological fact; for what they assert is obviously false, and Leonardo must have known thus as well as we do. It is not true that human beings delay loving or hating until they have studied and become familiar with the nature of the object to which these affects apply. On the contrary they love impulsively, from emotional motives which have nothing to do with knowledge, and whose operation is at most weakened by reflection and consideration. Leonardo, then, could only have meant that the love practised by human beings was not of the proper and unobjectionable kind: one should love in such a way as to hold back the affect, subject it to the process of reflection and only let it take its course when it has stood up to the test of thought. And at the same time we understand that he wishes to tell us that it happens so in his case and that it would be worth while for everyone else to treat love and hatred as he does.

And in his case it really seems to have been so. His affects were controlled and subjected to the instinct for research; he did not love and hate, but asked himself about the origin and significance of what he was to love or hate. Thus he was bound at first to appear indifferent to good and evil, beauty and ugliness. During this work of investigation love and hate threw off their positive or negative signs and were both alike transformed into intellectual interest. In reality Leonardo was not devoid of passion; he did not lack the divine spark which is directly or indirectly the driving force - il primo motore - behind all human activity. He had merely converted his passion into a thirst for knowledge; he then applied himself to investigation with the persistence, constancy and penetration which is derived from passion, and at the climax of intellectual labour, when knowledge had been won, he allowed the long restrained affect to break loose and to flow away freely, as a stream of water drawn from a river is allowed to flow away when its work is done. When, at the climax of a discovery, he could survey a large portion of the whole nexus, he was overcome by emotion, and in ecstatic language praised the splendour of the part of creation that he had studied, or - in religious phraseology - the greatness of his Creator. This process of transformation in Leonardo has been rightly understood by Solmi. After quoting a passage of this sort in which Leonardo celebrates the sublime law of nature (‘O mirabile necessità . . .’), he writes (1910, 11) ‘Tale trasfigurazione della scienza della natura in emozione, quasi direi, religiosa, è uno dei tratti caratteristici de’ manoscritti vinciani, e si trova cento e cento volte espressa . . .’¹

¹ [’Such a transfiguration of natural science into a sort of religious emotion is one of the characteristic features of Leonardo’s manuscripts, and there are hundreds and hundreds of examples of it.’]

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2252

Because of his insatiable and indefatigable thirst for knowledge Leonardo has been called the Italian Faust. But quite apart from doubts about a possible transformation of the instinct to investigate back into an enjoyment of life - a transformation which we must take as fundamental in the tragedy of Faust - the view may be hazarded that Leonardo’s development approaches Spinoza’s mode of thinking.

A conversion of psychical instinctual force into various forms of activity can perhaps no more be achieved without loss than a conversion of physical forces. The example of Leonardo teaches us how many other things we have to take into account in connection with these processes. The postponement of loving until full knowledge is acquired ends in a substitution of the latter for the former. A man who has won his way to a state of knowledge cannot properly be said to love and hate; he remains beyond love and hatred. He has investigated instead of loving. And that is perhaps why Leonardo’s life was so much poorer in love than that of other great men, and of other artists. The stormy passions of a nature that inspires and consumes, passions in which other men have enjoyed their richest experience, appear not to have touched him.

There are some further consequences. Investigating has taken the place of acting and creating as well. A man who has begun to have an inkling of the grandeur of the universe with all its complexities and its laws readily forgets his own insignificant self. Lost in admiration and filled with true humility, he all too easily forgets that he himself is a part of those active forces and that in accordance with the scale of his personal strength the way is open for him to try to alter a small portion of the destined course of the world - a world in which the small is still no less wonderful and significant than the great.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2253

Leonardo’s researches had perhaps first begun, as Solmi believes, in the service of his art;¹ he directed his efforts to the properties and laws of light, colours, shadows and perspective in order to ensure mastery in the imitation of nature and to point the same way to others. It is probable that at that time he already overrated the value to the artist of these branches of knowledge. Still constantly following the lead given by the requirements of his painting he was then driven to investigate the painter’s subjects, animals and plants, and the proportions of the human body, and, passing from their exterior, to proceed to gain a knowledge of their internal structure and their vital functions, which indeed also find expression in their appearance and have a claim to be depicted in art. And finally the instinct, which had become overwhelming, swept him away until the connection with the demands of his art was severed, so that he discovered the general laws of mechanics and divined the history of the stratification and fossilization in the Arno valley, and until he could enter in large letters in his book the discovery: Il sole non si move.² His investigations extended to practically every branch of natural science, and in every single one he was a discoverer or at least a prophet and pioneer.³ Yet his urge for knowledge was always directed to the external world; something kept him far away from the investigation of the human mind. In the ‘Academia Vinciana’, for which he drew some cleverly intertwined emblems, there was little room for psychology.

¹ Solmi (1910, 8): ‘Leonardo aveva posto, come regola al pittore, lo studio della natura . . . poi la passione dello studio era divenuta dominante, egli aveva voluto acquistare non più la scienza per l’arte, ma la scienza per la scienza.’ [‘Leonardo had prescribed the study of nature as a rule for the painter . . ., then the passion for study had become dominant, he had no longer wished to acquire learning for the sake of art, but learning for the sake of learning.’]

² [‘The sun does not move.’]

³ See the enumeration of his scientific achievements in the fine biographical introduction by Marie Herzfeld (1906), in the various essays of the Conferenze Fiorentine (1910), and elsewhere.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2254

Then, when he made the attempt to return from investigation to his starting point, the exercise of his art, he found himself disturbed by the new direction of his interests and the changed nature of his mental activity. What interested him in a picture was above all a problem; and behind the first one he saw countless other problems arising, just as he used to in his endless and inexhaustible investigation of nature. He was no longer able to limit his demands, to see the work of art in isolation and to tear it from the wide context to which he knew it belonged. After the most exhausting efforts to bring to expression in it everything which was connected with it in his thoughts, he was forced to abandon it in an unfinished state or to declare that it was incomplete.

The artist had once taken the investigator into his service to assist him; now the servant had become the stronger and suppressed his master.

When we find that in the picture presented by a person’s character a single instinct has developed an excessive strength, as did the craving for knowledge in Leonardo, we look for the explanation in a special disposition - though about its determinants (which are probably organic) scarcely anything is yet known. Our psycho-analytic studies of neurotic people have however led us to form two further expectations which it would be gratifying to find confirmed in each particular case. We consider it probable that an instinct like this of excessive strength was already active in the subject’s earliest childhood, and that its supremacy was established by impressions in the child’s life. We make the further assumption that it found reinforcement from what were originally sexual instinctual forces, so that later it could take the place of a part of the subject’s sexual life. Thus a person of this sort would, for example, pursue research with the same passionate devotion that another would give to his love, and he would be able to investigate instead of loving. We would venture to infer that it is not only in the example of the instinct to investigate that there has been a sexual reinforcement, but also in most other cases where an instinct is of special intensity.

Observation of men’s daily lives shows us that most people succeed in directing very considerable portions of their sexual instinctual forces to their professional activity. The sexual instinct is particularly well fitted to make contributions of this kind since it is endowed with a capacity for sublimation: that is, it has the power to replace its immediate aim by other aims which may be valued more highly and which are not sexual. We accept this process as proved whenever the history of a person’s childhood - that is, the history of his mental development - shows that in childhood this over-powerful instinct was in the service of sexual interests. We find further confirmation if a striking atrophy occurs in the sexual life of maturity, as though a portion of sexual activity had now been replaced by the activity of the over-powerful instinct.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2255

There seem to be special difficulties in applying these expectations to the case of an over-powerful instinct for investigation, since precisely in the case of children there is a reluctance to credit them with either this serious instinct or any noteworthy sexual interests. However, these difficulties are easily overcome. The curiosity of small children is manifested in their untiring love of asking questions; this is bewildering to the adult so long as he fails to understand that all these questions are merely circumlocutions and that they cannot come to an end because the child is only trying to make them take the place of a question which he does not ask. When he grows bigger and becomes better informed this expression of curiosity often comes to a sudden end. Psycho-analytic investigation provides us with a full explanation by teaching us that many, perhaps most children, or at least the most gifted ones, pass through a period, beginning when they are about three, which may be called the period of infantile sexual researches. So far as we know, the curiosity of children of this age does not awaken spontaneously, but is aroused by the impression made by some important event - by the actual birth of a little brother or sister, or by a fear of it based on external experiences - in which the child perceives a threat to his selfish interests. Researches are directed to the question of where babies come from, exactly as if the child were looking for ways and means to avert so undesired an event. In this way we have been astonished to learn that children refuse to believe the bits of information that are given them - for example that they energetically reject the fable of the stork with its wealth of mythological meaning -, that they date their intellectual independence from this act of disbelief, and that they often feel in serious opposition to adults and in fact never afterwards forgive them for having deceived them here about the true facts of the case. They investigate along their own lines, divine the baby’s presence inside its mother’s body, and following the lead of the impulses of their own sexuality form theories of babies originating from eating, of their being born through the bowels, and of the obscure part played by the father. By that time they already have a notion of the sexual act, which appears to them to be something hostile and violent. But since their own sexual constitution has not yet reached the point of being able to produce babies, their investigation of where babies come from must inevitably come to nothing too and be abandoned as insoluble. The impression caused by this failure in the first attempt at intellectual independence appears to be of a lasting and deeply depressing kind.¹

¹ These improbable-sounding assertions can be confirmed from a study of my ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’ (1909b) and of similar observations. In a paper on ‘The Sexual Theories of Children’ (1908c) I wrote: ‘This brooding and doubting, however, becomes the prototype of all later intellectual work directed towards the solution of problems, and the first failure has a crippling effect on the child’s whole future.’

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2256

When the period of infantile sexual researches has been terminated by a wave of energetic sexual repression, the instinct for research has three distinct possible vicissitudes open to it owing to its early connection with sexual interests. In the first of these, research shares the fate of sexuality; thenceforward curiosity remains inhibited and the free activity of intelligence may be limited for the whole of the subject’s lifetime, especially as shortly after this the powerful religious inhibition of thought is brought into play by education. This is the type characterized by neurotic inhibition. We know very well that the intellectual weakness which has been acquired in this way gives an effective impetus to the outbreak of a neurotic illness. In a second type the intellectual development is sufficiently strong to resist the sexual repression which has hold of it. Some time after the infantile sexual researches have come to an end, the intelligence, having grown stronger, recalls the old association and offers its help in evading sexual repression, and the suppressed sexual activities of research return from the unconscious in the form of compulsive brooding, naturally in a distorted and unfree form, but sufficiently powerful to sexualize thinking itself and to colour intellectual operations with the pleasure and anxiety that belong to sexual processes proper. Here investigation becomes a sexual activity, often the exclusive one, and the feeling that comes from settling things in one’s mind and explaining them replaces sexual satisfaction; but the interminable character of the child’s researches is also repeated in the fact that this brooding never ends and that the intellectual feeling, so much desired, of having found a solution recedes more and more into the distance.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2257

In virtue of a special disposition, the third type, which is the rarest and most perfect, escapes both inhibition of thought and neurotic compulsive thinking. It is true that here too sexual repression comes about, but it does not succeed in relegating a component instinct of sexual desire to the unconscious. Instead, the libido evades the fate of repression by being sublimated from the very beginning into curiosity and by becoming attached to the powerful instinct for research as a reinforcement. Here, too, the research becomes to some extent compulsive and a substitute for sexual activity; but owing to the complete difference in the underlying psychical processes (sublimation instead of an irruption from the unconscious ) the quality of neurosis is absent; there is no attachment to the original complexes of infantile sexual research, and the instinct can operate freely in the service of intellectual interest. Sexual repression, which has made the instinct so strong through the addition to it of sublimated libido, is still taken into account by the instinct, in that it avoids any concern with sexual themes.

If we reflect on the concurrence in Leonardo of his over-powerful instinct for research and the atrophy of his sexual life (which was restricted to what is called ideal homosexuality) we shall be disposed to claim him as a model instance of our third type. The core of his nature, and the secret of it, would appear to be that after his curiosity had been activated in infancy in the service of sexual interests he succeeded in sublimating the greater part of his libido into an urge for research. But it is not easy, to be sure, to prove that this view is right. To do so we should need some picture of his mental development in the first years of his childhood, and it seems foolish to hope for material of that sort when the accounts of his life are so meagre and so unreliable, and when moreover it is a question of information about circumstances that escape the attention of observers even in relation to people of our own generation.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2258

About Leonardo’s youth we know very little. He was born in 1452 in the little town of Vinci between Florence and Empoli; he was an illegitimate child, which in those days was certainly not considered a grave social stigma; his father was Ser Piero da Vinci, a notary and descended from a family of notaries and farmers who took their name from the locality of Vinci; his mother was a certain Caterina, probably a peasant girl, who later married another native of Vinci. This mother does not occur again in the history of Leonardo’s life, and it is only Merezhkovsky - the novelist - who believes that he has succeeded in finding some trace of her. The only definite piece of information about Leonardo’s childhood comes in an official document of the year 1457; it is a Florentine land-register for the purpose of taxation, which mentions Leonardo among the members of the household of the Vinci family as the five-year old illegitimate child of Ser Piero.¹ The marriage of Ser Piero with a certain Donna Albiera remained childless, and it was therefore possible for the young Leonardo to be brought up in his father’s house. He did not leave this house till - at what age is not known - he entered Andrea del Verrocchio’s studio as an apprentice. In the year 1472 Leonardo’s name was already to be found in the list of members of the ‘Compagnia dei Pittori’. That is all.

¹ Scognamiglio (1900, 15).

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2259

II

There is, so far as I know, only one place in his scientific note books where Leonardo inserts a piece of information about his childhood. In a passage about the flight of vultures he suddenly interrupts himself to pursue a memory from very early years which had sprung to his mind:

‘It seems that I was always destined to be so deeply concerned with vultures; for I recall as one of my very earliest memories that while I was in my cradle a vulture came down to me, and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail against my lips.’¹

What we have here then is a childhood memory; and certainly one of the strangest sort. It is strange on account of its content and on account of the age to which it is assigned. That a person should be able to retain a memory of his suckling period is perhaps not impossible, but it cannot by any means be regarded as certain. What, however, this memory of Leonardo’s asserts - namely that a vulture opened the child’s mouth with its tail - sounds so improbable, so fabulous, that another view of it, which at a single stroke puts an end to both difficulties, has more to commend it to our judgement. On this view the scene with the vulture would not be a memory of Leonardo’s but a phantasy, which he formed at a later date and transposed to his childhood.²

¹ ‘Questo scriver si distintamente del nibio par che sia mio destino, perchè nella mia prima recordatione della mia infantia e’ mi parea che, essendo io in culla, che un nibio venissi a me e mi aprissi la bocca colla sua coda e molte volte mi percuotesse con tal coda dentro alle labbra.’ (Codex Atlanticus, F. 65 v., as given by Scognamiglio.

² [Footnote added 1919:] In a friendly notice of this book Havelock Ellis (1910) has challenged the view put forward above. He objects that this memory of Leonardo’s may very well have had a basis of reality: since children’s memories often reach very much further back than is commonly supposed; the large bird in question need not of course have been a vulture. This is a point that I will gladly concede, and as a step towards lessening the difficulty I in turn will offer a suggestion - namely that his mother observed the large bird’s visit to her child - an event which may easily have had the significance of an omen in her eyes - and repeatedly told him about it afterwards. As a result, I suggest, he retained the memory of his mother’s story, and later, as so often happens, it became possible for him to take it for a memory of an experience of his own. However, this alteration does no damage to the force of my general account. It happens, indeed, as a general rule that the phantasies about their childhood which people construct at a late date are attached to trivial but real events of this early, and normally forgotten, period. There must thus have been some secret reason for bringing into prominence a real event of no importance and for elaborating it in the sort of way Leonardo did in his story of the bird, which he dubbed a vulture, and of its remarkable behaviour.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2260

This is often the way in which childhood memories originate. Quite unlike conscious memories from the time of maturity, they are not fixed at the moment of being experienced and afterwards repeated, but are only elicited at a later age when childhood is already past; in the process they are altered and falsified, and are put into the service of later trends, so that generally speaking they cannot be sharply distinguished from phantasies. Their nature is perhaps best illustrated by a comparison with the way in which the writing of history originated among the peoples of antiquity. As long as a nation was small and weak it gave no thought to the writing of its history. Men tilled the soil of their land, fought for their existence against their neighbours, and tried to gain territory from them and to acquire wealth. It was an age of heroes, not of historians. Then came another age, an age of reflection: men felt themselves to be rich and powerful, and now felt a need to learn where they had come from and how they had developed. Historical writing, which had begun to keep a continuous record of the present, now also cast a glance back to the past, gathered traditions and legends, interpreted the traces of antiquity that survived in customs and usages, and in this way created a history of the past. It was inevitable that this early history should have been an expression of present beliefs and wishes rather than a true picture of the past; for many things had been dropped from the nation’s memory, while others were distorted, and some remains of the past were given a wrong interpretation in order to fit in with contemporary ideas. Moreover people’s motive for writing history was not objective curiosity but a desire to influence their contemporaries, to encourage and inspire them, or to hold a mirror up before them. A man’s conscious memory of the events of his maturity is in every way comparable to the first kind of historical writing; while the memories that he has of his childhood correspond, as far as their origins and reliability are concerned, to the history of a nation’s earliest days, which was compiled later and for tendentious reasons.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2261

If, then, Leonardo’s story about the vulture that visited him in his cradle is only a phantasy from a later period, one might suppose it could hardly be worth while spending much time on it. One might be satisfied with explaining it on the basis of his inclination, of which he makes no secret, to regard his preoccupation with the flight of birds as pre-ordained by destiny. Yet in underrating this story one would be committing just as great an injustice as if one were carelessly to reject the body of legends, traditions and interpretations found in a nation’s early history. In spite of all the distortions and misunderstandings, they still represent the reality of the past: they are what a people forms out of the experience of its early days and under the dominance of motives that were once powerful and still operate to-day; and if it were only possible, by a knowledge of all the forces at work, to undo these distortions, there would be no difficulty in disclosing the historical truth lying behind the legendary material. The same holds good for the childhood memories or phantasies of an individual. What someone thinks he remembers from his childhood is not a matter of indifference; as a rule the residual memories - which he himself does not understand - cloak priceless pieces of evidence about the most important features in his mental development.¹ As we now possess in the techniques of psycho-analysis excellent methods for helping us to bring this concealed material to light, we may venture to fill in the gap in Leonardo’s life story by analysing his childhood phantasy. And if in doing so we remain dissatisfied with the degree of certainty which we achieve, we shall have to console ourselves with the reflection that so many other studies of this great and enigmatic man have met with no better fate.

¹ [Footnote added 1919:] Since I wrote the above words I have attempted to make similar use of an unintelligible memory dating from the childhood of another man of genius. In the account of his life that Goethe wrote when he was about sixty (‘Dichtung und Warheit’) there is a description in the first few pages of how, with the encouragement of his neighbours, he slung first some small and then some large pieces of crockery out of the window into the street, so that they were smashed to pieces. This is, indeed, the only scene that he reports from the earliest years of childhood. The sheer inconsequentiality of its content, the way in which it corresponded with the childhood memories of other human beings who did not become particularly great, and the absence in this passage of any mention of the young brother who was born when Goethe was three and three-quarters, and who died when he was nearly ten - all this induced me to undertake an analysis of this childhood memory. (This child is in fact mentioned at a later point in the book, where Goethe dwells on the many illnesses of childhood.) I hoped to be able as a result to replace it by something which would be more in keeping with the context of Goethe’s account and whose content would make it worthy of preservation and of the place he has given it in the history of his life. The short analysis made it possible for the throwing-out of the crockery to be recognized as a magical act directed against a troublesome intruder; and at the place in the book where he describes the episode the intention is to triumph over the fact that a second son was not in the long run permitted to disturb Goethe’s close relation with his mother. If the earliest memory of childhood, preserved in disguises such as these, should be concerned - in Goethe’s case as well as in Leonardo’s - with the mother, what would be so surprising in that?

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2262

If we examine with the eyes of a psycho-analyst Leonardo’s phantasy of the vulture, it does not appear strange for long. We seem to recall having come across the same sort of thing in many places, for example in dreams; so that we may venture to translate the phantasy from its own special language into words that are generally understood. The translation is then seen to point to an erotic content. A tail, ‘coda’, is one of the most familiar symbols and substitutive expressions for the male organ, in Italian no less than in other languages; the situation in the phantasy, of a vulture opening the child’s mouth and beating about inside it vigorously with its tail, corresponds to the idea of an act of fellatio, a sexual act in which the penis is put into the mouth of the person involved. It is strange that this phantasy is so completely passive in character; moreover it resembles certain dreams and phantasies found in women or passive homosexuals (who play the part of the woman in sexual relations).

I hope the reader will restrain himself and not allow a surge of indignation to prevent his following psycho-analysis any further because it leads to an unpardonable aspersion on the memory of a great and pure man the very first time it is applied to his case. Such indignation, it is clear, will never be able to tell us the significance of Leonardo’s childhood phantasy; at the same time Leonardo has acknowledged the phantasy in the most unambiguous fashion, and we cannot abandon our expectation - or, if it sounds better, our prejudice - that a phantasy of this kind must have some meaning, in the same way as any other psychical creation: a dream, a vision or a delirium. Let us rather therefore give a fair hearing for a while to the work of analysis, which indeed has not yet spoken its last word.

The inclination to take a man’s sexual organ into the mouth and suck at it, which in respectable society is considered a loathsome sexual perversion, is nevertheless found with great frequency among women of to-day - and of earlier times as well, as ancient sculptures show -, and in the state of being in love it appears completely to lose its repulsive character. Phantasies derived from this inclination are found by doctors even in women who have not become aware of the possibilities of obtaining sexual satisfaction in this way by reading Krafft Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis or from other sources of information. Women, it seems, find no difficulty in producing this kind of wishful phantasy spontaneously.¹ Further investigation in forms us that this situation, which morality condemns with such severity, may be traced to an origin of the most innocent kind. It only repeats in a different form a situation in which we all once felt comfortable - when we were still in our suckling days (‘essendo io in culla’)² and took our mother’s (or wet-nurse’s) nipple into our mouth and sucked at it. The organic impression of this experience - the first source of pleasure in our life - doubtless remains indelibly printed on us; and when at a later date the child becomes familiar with the cow’s udder whose function is that of a nipple, but whose shape and position under the belly make it resemble a penis, the preliminary stage has been reached which will later enable him to form the repellent sexual phantasy.

¹ On this point compare my ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (1905e).

² [‘While I was in my cradle.’]

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2263

Now we understand why Leonardo assigned the memory of his supposed experience with the vulture to his suckling period. What the phantasy conceals is merely a reminiscence of sucking - or being suckled - at his mother’s breast, a scene of human beauty that he, like so many artists, undertook to depict with his brush, in the guise of the mother of God and her child. There is indeed another point which we do not yet understand and which we must not lose sight of: this reminiscence, which has the same importance for both sexes, has been transformed by the man Leonardo into a passive homosexual phantasy. For the time being we shall put aside the question of what there may be to connect homosexuality with sucking at the mother’s breast, merely recalling that tradition does in fact represent Leonardo as a man with homosexual feelings. In this connection, it is irrelevant to our purpose whether the charge brought against the young Leonardo was justified or not. What decides whether we describe someone as an invert is not his actual behaviour, but his emotional attitude.

Our interest is next claimed by another unintelligible feature of Leonardo’s childhood phantasy. We interpret the phantasy as one of being suckled by his mother, and we find his mother replaced by - a vulture. Where does this vulture come from and how does it happen to be found in its present place?

At this point a thought comes to the mind from such a remote quarter that it would be tempting to set it aside. In the hieroglyphics of the ancient Egyptians the mother is represented by a picture of a vulture.¹ The Egyptians also worshipped a Mother Goddess, who was represented as having a vulture’s head, or else several heads, of which at least one was a vulture’s.² This goddess’s name was pronounced Mut. Can the similarity to the sound of our word Mutter [‘mother’] be merely a coincidence? There is, then, some real connection between vulture and mother - but what help is that to us? For have we any right to expect Leonardo to know of it, seeing that the first man who succeeded in reading hieroglyphics was François Champollion (1790-1832)?³

It would be interesting to enquire how it could be that the ancient Egyptians came to choose the vulture as a symbol of motherhood. Now the religion and civilization of the Egyptians were objects of scientific curiosity even to the Greeks and the Romans: and long before we ourselves were able to read the monuments of Egypt we had at our disposal certain pieces of information about them derived from the extant writings of classical antiquity. Some of these writings were by well-known authors, such as Strabo, Plutarch and Ammianus Marcellinus; while others bear unfamiliar names and are uncertain in their source of origin and their date of composition, like the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo Nilous and the book of oriental priestly wisdom which has come down to us under the name of the god Hermes Trismegistos. We learn from these sources that the vulture was regarded as a symbol of motherhood because only female vultures were believed to exist; there were, it was thought, no males of this species.4 A counterpart to this restriction to one sex was also known to the natural history of antiquity: in the case of the scarabaeus beetle, which the Egyptians worshipped as divine, it was thought that only males existed.5

¹ Horapollo (Hieroglyphica  1, 11): ‘Μητέgα δε γgάΦουτες . . . γΰπαζωγgαΦοΰσιυ.’ [‘To denote a mother . . . they delineate a vulture.’]

² Roscher (1894-97), Lanzone (1882).

³ Hartleben (1906).

4 ‘γΰπα δε άggευα σΰ Φασι γιυέσθαι ποτε άλλά θηλείας άπάσας.’ [‘They say that no male vulture has ever existed but all are females.’] Quoted by von Römer (1903, 732).

5 Plutarch: ‘Veluti scarabaeos mares tantum esse putarunt Aegyptii sic inter vultures mares non inveniri statuerunt.’ [‘Just as they believed that only male scarabs existed, so the Egyptians concluded that no male vultures were to be found.’]

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2264

How then were vultures supposed to be impregnated if all of them were female? This is a point fully explained in a passage in Horapollo.¹ At a certain time these birds pause in mid-flight, open their vagina and are impregnated by the wind.

We have now unexpectedly reached a position where we can take something as very probable which only a short time before we had to reject as absurd. It is quite possible that Leonardo was familiar with the scientific fable which was responsible for the vulture being used by the Egyptians as a pictorial representation of the idea of mother. He was a wide reader and his interest embraced all branches of literature and learning. In the Codex Atlanticus we find a catalogue of all the books he possessed at a particular date,² and in addition numerous jottings on other books that he had borrowed from friends; and if we may judge by the extracts from his notes by Richter,³ the extent of his reading can hardly be overestimated. Early works on natural history were well represented among them in addition to contemporary books; and all of them were already in print at the time. Milan was in fact the leading city in Italy for the new art of printing.

On proceeding further we come across a piece of information which can turn the probability that Leonardo knew the fable of the vulture into a certainty. The learned editor and commentator on Horapollo has the following note on the text already quoted above: ‘Caeterum hanc fabulam de vulturibus cupide amplexi sunt Patres Ecclesiastici, ut ita argumento ex rerum natura petito refutarent eos, qui Virginis partum negabant; itaque apud omnes fere hujus rei mentio occurit.’4

¹ Horapollonis Niloi Hieroglyphica, ed. Leemans (1835, 14). The words that refer to the vulture’s sex run:

‘πητέgα μέυ, έπειδή άggευ έυ τούτφ τvγέυει τώυ ζώωυ σύχ ύπάgχει.’ [‘(They use the picture of a vulture to denote) a mother, because in this race of creatures there are no males.’]

² Müntz (1899, 282).

³ Müntz, (ibid.).

4 [‘But this story about the vulture was eagerly taken up by the Fathers of the Church, in order to refute, by means of a proof drawn from the natural order, those who denied the Virgin Birth. The subject is therefore mentioned in almost all of them.’]

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2265

So the fable of the single sex of vultures and their mode of conception remained something very far from an unimportant anecdote like the analogous tale of the scarabaeus beetle; it had been seized on by the Fathers of the Church so that they could have at their disposal a proof drawn from natural history to confront those who doubted sacred history. If vultures were described in the best accounts of antiquity as depending on the wind for impregnation, why could not the same thing have also happened on one occasion with a human female? Since the fable of the vulture could be turned to this account ‘almost all’ the Fathers of the Church made a practice of telling it, and thus it can hardly be doubted that Leonardo too came to know of it through its being favoured by so wide a patronage.

We can now reconstruct the origin of Leonardo’s vulture phantasy. He once happened to read in one of the Fathers or in a book on natural history the statement that all vultures were females and could reproduce their kind without any assistance from a male: and at that point a memory sprang to his mind, which was transformed into the phantasy we have been discussing, but which meant to signify that he also had been such a vulture-child - he had had a mother, but no father. With this memory was associated, in the only way in which impressions of so great an age can find expression, an echo of the pleasure he had had at his mother’s breast. The allusion made by the Fathers of the Church to the idea of the Blessed Virgin and her child - an idea cherished by every artist - must have played its part in helping the phantasy to appear valuable and important to him. Indeed in this way he was able to identify himself with the child Christ, the comforter and saviour not of this one woman alone.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2266

Our aim in dissecting a childhood phantasy is to separate the real memory that it contains from the later motives that modify and distort it. In Leonardo’s case we believe that we now know the real content of the phantasy: the replacement of his mother by the vulture indicates that the child was aware of his father’s absence and found himself alone with his mother. The fact of Leonardo’s illegitimate birth is in harmony with his vulture phantasy; it was only on this account that he could compare himself to a vulture-child. But the next reliable fact that we possess about his youth is that by the time he was five he had been received into his father’s household. We are completely ignorant when that happened - whether it was a few months after his birth or whether it was a few weeks before the drawing-up of the land-register. It is here that the interpretation of the vulture phantasy comes in: Leonardo, it seems to tell us, spent the critical first years of his life not by the side of his father and stepmother, but with his poor, forsaken, real mother, so that he had time to feel the absence of his father. This seems a slender and yet a somewhat daring conclusion to have emerged from our psycho-analytic efforts, but its significance will increase as we continue our investigation. Its certainty is reinforced when we consider the circumstances that did in fact operate in Leonardo’s childhood. In the same year that Leonardo was born, the sources tell us, his father, Ser Piero da Vinci, married Donna Albiera, a lady of good birth; it was to the childlessness of this marriage that the boy owed his reception into his father’s (or rather his grandfather’s) house - an event which had taken place by the time he was five years old, as the document attests. Now it is not usual at the start of a marriage to put an illegitimate offspring into the care of the young bride who still expects to be blessed with children of her own. Years of disappointment must surely first have elapsed before it was decided to adopt the illegitimate child - who had probably grown up an attractive young boy - as a compensation for the absence of the legitimate children that had been hoped for. It fits in best with the interpretation of the vulture phantasy if at least three years of Leonardo’s life, and perhaps five, had elapsed before he could exchange the solitary person of his mother for a parental couple. And by then it was too late. In the first three or four years of life certain impressions become fixed and ways of reacting to the outside world are established which can never be deprived of their importance by later experiences.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2267

If it is true that the unintelligible memories of a person’s childhood and the phantasies that are built on them invariably emphasize the most important elements in his mental development, then it follows that the fact which the vulture phantasy confirms, namely that Leonardo spent the first years of his life alone with his mother, will have been of decisive influence in the formation of his inner life. An inevitable effect of this state of affairs was that the child - who was confronted in his early life with one problem more than other children - began to brood on this riddle with special intensity, and so at a tender age became a researcher, tormented as he was by the great question of where babies come from and what the father has to do with their origin. It was a vague suspicion that his researches and the history of his childhood were connected in this way which later prompted him to exclaim that he had been destined from the first to investigate the problem of the flight of birds since he had been visited by a vulture as he lay in his cradle. Later on it will not be difficult to show how his curiosity about the flight of birds was derived from the sexual researches of his childhood.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2268

III

In Leonardo’s childhood phantasy we have taken the element of the vulture to represent the real content of his memory, while the context in which Leonardo himself placed his phantasy his thrown a bright light on the importance which that content had for his later life. In proceeding with our work of interpretation we now come up against the strange problem of why this content has been recast into a homosexual situation. The mother who suckles her child - or to put it better, at whose breast the child sucks - has been turned into a vulture that puts its tail into the child’s mouth. We have asserted that, according to the usual way in which language makes use of substitutes, the vulture’s ‘coda’ cannot possibly signify anything other than a male genital, a penis. But we do not understand how imaginative activity can have succeeded in endowing precisely this bird which is a mother with the distinguishing mark of masculinity; and in view of this absurdity we are at a loss how to reduce this creation of Leonardo’s phantasy to any rational meaning.

However, we should not despair, as we reflect on the number of apparently absurd dreams that we have in the past compelled to give up their meaning. Is there any reason why a memory of childhood should offer us more difficulty than a dream?

Remembering that it is unsatisfactory when a peculiar feature is found singly, let us hasten to add another to it which is even more striking.

The vulture-headed Egyptian goddess Mut, a figure without any personal character according to Drexler’s article in Roscher’s lexicon, was often merged with other mother goddesses of a more strongly marked individuality, like Isis and Hathor, but at the same time she maintained her separate existence and cult. A special feature of the Egyptian pantheon was that the individual gods did not disappear in the process of syncretization. Alongside the fusion of gods the individual divinities continued to exist in independence. Now this vulture-headed mother goddess was usually represented by the Egyptians with a phallus;¹ her body was female, as the breasts indicated, but it also had a male organ in a state of erection.

¹ See the illustrations in Lanzone (1882, Plates CXXXVI - CXXXXVIII).

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2269

In the goddess Mut, then, we find the same combination of maternal and masculine characteristics as in Leonardo’s phantasy of the vulture. Are we to explain this coincidence by assuming that from studying his books Leonardo had also learnt of the androgynous nature of the maternal vulture? Such a possibility is more than questionable; it appears that the sources to which he had access contained no information about this remarkable feature. It is more plausible to trace the correspondence back to a common factor operative in both cases but still unknown.

Mythology can teach us that an androgynous structure, a combination of male and female sex characters, was an attribute not only of Mut but also of other deities like Isis and Hathor - though perhaps of these only in so far as they too had a maternal nature and became amalgamated with Mut (Römer, 1903). It teaches us further that other Egyptian deities, like Neith of Sais - from whom the Greek Athene was later derived - were originally conceived of as androgynous, i.e. as hermaphrodite, and that the same was true of many of the Greek gods, especially of those associated with Dionysus, but also of Aphrodite, who was later restricted to the role of a female goddess of love. Mythology may then offer the explanation that the addition of a phallus to the female body is intended to denote the primal creative force of nature, and that all these hermaphrodite divinities are expressions of the idea that only a combination of male and female elements can give a worthy representation of divine perfection. But none of these considerations gives us an explanation of the puzzling psychological fact that the human imagination does not boggle at endowing a figure which is intended to embody the essence of the mother with the mark of male potency which is the opposite of everything maternal.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2270

Infantile sexual theories provide the explanation. There was once a time when the male genital was found compatible with the picture of the mother. When a male child first turns his curiosity to the riddles of sexual life, he is dominated by his interest in his own genital. He finds that part of his body too valuable and too important for him to be able to believe that it could be missing in other people whom he feels he resembles so much. As he cannot guess that there exists another type of genital structure of equal worth, he is forced to make the assumption that all human beings, women as well as men, possess a penis like his own. This preconception is so firmly planted in the youthful investigator that it is not destroyed even when he first observes the genitals of little girls. His perception tells him, it is true, that there is something different from what there is in him, but he is incapable of admitting to himself that the content of this perception is that he cannot find a penis in girls. That the penis could be missing strikes him as an uncanny and intolerable idea, and so in an attempt at a compromise he comes to the conclusion that little girls have a penis as well, only it is still very small; it will grow later.¹ If it seems from later observations that this expectation is not realized, he has another remedy at his disposal: little girls too had a penis, but it was cut off and in its place was left a wound. This theoretical advance already makes use of personal experiences of a distressing kind: the boy in the meantime has heard the threat that the organ which is so dear to him will be taken away from him if he shows his interest in it too plainly. Under the influence of this threat of castration he now sees the notion he has gained of the female genitals in a new light; henceforth he will tremble for his masculinity, but at the same time he will despise the unhappy creatures on whom the cruel punishment has, as he supposes, already fallen.²

¹ Compare the observations in the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen [added 1919:], in the Internationale Zeitschrift für ärtzliche Psychoanalyse and in Imago.

² [Footnote added 1919:] The conclusion strikes me as inescapable that here we may also trace one of the roots of the anti-semitism which appears with such elemental force and finds such irrational expression among the nations of the West. Circumcision is unconsciously equated with castration. If we venture to carry our conjectures back to the primaeval days of the human race we can surmise that originally circumcision must have been a milder substitute, designed to take the place of castration.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2271

Before the child comes under the dominance of the castration-complex - at a time when he still holds women at full value - he begins to display an intense desire to look, as an erotic instinctual activity. He wants to see other people’s genitals, at first in all probability to compare them with his own. The erotic attraction that comes from his mother soon culminates in a longing for her genital organ, which he takes to be a penis. With the discovery, which is not made till later, that women do not have a penis, this longing often turns into its opposite and gives place to a feeling of disgust which in the years of puberty can become the cause of psychical impotence, misogyny and permanent homosexuality. But the fixation on the object that was once strongly desired, the woman’s penis, leaves indelible traces on the mental life of the child, who has pursued that portion of his infantile sexual researches with particular thoroughness. Fetishistic reverence for a woman’s foot and shoe appears to take the foot merely as a substitutive symbol for the woman’s penis which was once revered and later missed; without knowing it, ‘coupeurs de nattes’¹ play the part of people who carry out an act of castration on the female genital organ.

People will not reach a proper understanding of the activities of children’s sexuality and will probably take refuge in declaring that what has been said here is incredible, so long as they cling to the attitude taken up by our civilization of depreciating the genitals and the sexual functions. To understand the mental life of children we require analogies from primitive times. Through a long series of generations the genitals have been for us the ‘pudenda’, objects of shame, and even (as a result of further successful sexual repression) of disgust. If one makes a broad survey of the sexual life of our time and in particular of the classes who sustain human civilization, one is tempted to declare that it is only with reluctance that the majority of those alive to-day obey the command to propagate their kind; they feel that their dignity as human beings suffers and is degraded in the process. What is to be found among us in the way of another view of sexual life is confined to the uncultivated lower strata of society; among the higher and more refined classes it is concealed, since it is considered culturally inferior, and it ventures to put itself into practice only in the face of a bad conscience. In the primaeval days of the human race it was a different story. The laborious compilations of the student of civilization provide convincing evidence that originally the genitals were the pride and hope of living beings; they were worshipped as gods and transmitted the divine nature of their functions to all newly learned human activities. As a result of the sublimation of their basic nature there arose innumerable divinities; and at the time when the connection between official religions and sexual activity was already hidden from the general consciousness, secret cults devoted themselves to keeping it alive among a number of initiates. In the course of cultural development so much of the divine and sacred was ultimately extracted from sexuality that the exhausted remnant fell into contempt. But in view of the indelibility that is characteristic of all mental traces, it is surely not surprising that even the most primitive forms of genital-worship can be shown to have existed in very recent times and that the language, customs and superstitions of mankind to-day contain survivals from every phase of this process of development.²

¹ [Perverts who enjoy cutting off females’ hair.]

² Cf. Knight.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2272

Impressive analogies from biology have prepared us to find that the individual’s mental development repeats the course of human development in an abbreviated form; and the conclusions which psycho-analytic research into the child’s mind has reached concerning the high value set on the genitals in infancy will not therefore strike us as improbable. The child’s assumption that his mother has a penis is thus the common source from which are derived the androgynously-formed mother goddesses such as the Egyptian Mut and the vultures’ ‘coda’ in Leonardo’s childhood phantasy. It is in fact only due to a misunderstanding that we describe these representations of gods as hermaphrodite in the medical sense of the word. In none of them is there a combination of the true genitals of both sexes - a combination which, to the abhorrence of all beholders, is found in some cases of malformation; all that has happened is that the male organ has been added to the breasts which are the mark of a mother, just as it was present in the child’s first idea of his mother’s body. This form of the mother’s body, the revered creation of primaeval phantasy, has been preserved for the faithful by mythology. We can now provide the following translation of the emphasis given to the vulture’s tail in Leonardo’s phantasy: ‘That was a time when my fond curiosity was directed to my mother, and when I still believed she had a genital organ like my own.’ Here is more evidence of Leonardo’s early sexual researches, which in our opinion had a decisive effect on the whole of his later life.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2273

At this point a little reflection will remind us that we ought not to feel satisfied yet with the way the vulture’s tail in Leonardo’s childhood phantasy has been explained. Something more seems to be contained in it which we do not yet understand. Its most striking feature, after all, was that it changed sucking at the mother’s breast into being suckled, that is, into passivity, and thus into a situation whose nature is undoubtedly homosexual. When we remember the historical probability of Leonardo having behaved in his life as one who was emotionally homosexual, the question is forced upon us whether this phantasy does not indicate the existence of a causal connection between Leonardo’s relation with his mother in childhood and his later manifest, if ideal, homosexuality. We should not venture to infer a connection of this sort from Leonardo’s distorted reminiscence if we did not know from the psycho-analytic study of homosexual patients that such a connection does exist and is in fact an intimate and necessary one.

Homosexual men, who have in our times taken vigorous action against the restrictions imposed by law on their sexual activity, are fond of representing themselves, through their theoretical spokesmen, as being from the outset a distinct sexual species, as an intermediate sexual stage, as a ‘third sex’. They are, they claim, men who are innately compelled by organic determinants to find pleasure in men and have been debarred from obtaining it in women. Much as one would be glad on grounds of humanity to endorse their claims, one must treat their theories with some reserve, for they have been advanced without regard for the psychical genesis of homosexuality. Psycho-analysis offers the means of filling this gap and of putting the assertions of homosexuals to the test. It has succeeded in the task only in the case of a small number of persons, but all the investigations undertaken so far have yielded the same surprising result.¹ In all our male homosexual cases the subjects had had a very intense erotic attachment to a female person, as a rule their mother, during the first period of childhood, which is afterwards forgotten; this attachment was evoked or encouraged by too much tenderness on the part of the mother herself, and further reinforced by the small part played by the father during their childhood. Sadger emphasizes the fact that the mothers of his homosexual patients were frequently masculine women, women with energetic traits of character, who were able to push the father out of his proper place. I have occasionally seen the same thing, but I was more strongly impressed by cases in which the father was absent from the beginning or left the scene at an early date, so that the boy found himself left entirely under feminine influence. Indeed it almost seems as though the presence of a strong father would ensure that the son made the correct decision in his choice of object, namely someone of the opposite sex.²

¹ I refer in particular to the investigations of I. Sadger, which I can in the main confirm from my own experience. I am also aware that Wilhelm Stekel of Vienna and Sándor Ferenczi of Budapest have arrived at the same results.

² [Footnote added 1919:] Psycho-analytic research has contributed two facts that are beyond question to the understanding of homosexuality, without at the same time supposing that it has exhausted the causes of this sexual aberration. The first is the fixation of the erotic needs on the mother which has been mentioned above; the other is contained in the statement that everyone, even the most normal person, is capable of making a homosexual object-choice, and has done so at some time in his life, and either still adheres to it in his unconscious or else protects himself against it by vigorous counter-attitudes. These two discoveries put an end both to the claim of homosexuals to be regarded as a ‘third sex’ and to what has been believed to be the important distinction between innate and acquired homosexuality. The presence of somatic characters of the other sex (the quota provided by physical hermaphroditism) is highly conducive to the homosexual object-choice becoming manifest; but it is not decisive. It must be stated with regret that those who speak for the homosexuals in the field of science have been incapable of learning anything from the established findings of psycho-analysis.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2274

After this preliminary stage a transformation sets in whose mechanism is known to us but whose motive forces we do not yet understand. The child’s love for his mother cannot continue to develop consciously any further; it succumbs to repression. The boy represses his love for his mother: he puts himself in her place, identifies himself with her, and takes his own person as a model in whose likeness he chooses the new objects of his love. In this way he has become a homosexual. What he has in fact done is to slip back to auto-erotism: for the boys whom he now loves as he grows up are after all only substitutive figures and revivals of himself in childhood - boys whom he loves in the way in which his mother loved him when he was a child. He finds the objects of his love along the path of narcissism, as we say; for Narcissus, according to the Greek legend, was a youth who preferred his own reflection to everything else and who was changed into the lovely flower of that name.

Psychological considerations of a deeper kind justify the assertion that a man who has become a homosexual in this way remains unconsciously fixated to the mnemic image of his mother. By repressing his love for his mother he preserves it in his unconscious and from now on remains faithful to her. While he seems to pursue boys and to be their lover, he is in reality running away from the other women, who might cause him to be unfaithful. In individual cases direct observation has also enabled us to show that the man who gives the appearance of being susceptible only to the charms of men is in fact attracted by women in the same way as a normal man; but on each occasion he hastens to transfer the excitation he has received from women on to a male object, and in this manner he repeats over and over again the mechanism by which he acquired his homosexuality.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2275

We are far from wishing to exaggerate the importance of these explanations of the psychical genesis of homosexuality. It is quite obvious that they are in sharp contrast to the official theories of those who speak for homosexuals, but we know that they are not sufficiently comprehensive to make a conclusive explanation of the problem possible. What is for practical reasons called homosexuality may arise from a whole variety of psychosexual inhibitory processes; the particular process we have singled out is perhaps only one among many, and is perhaps related to only one type of ‘homosexuality’. We must also admit that the number of cases of our homosexual type in which it is possible to point to the determinants which we require far exceeds the number of those where the deduced effect actually, takes place; We should not have had any cause at all for entering into the psychical genesis of the form of homosexuality we have studied if there were not a strong presumption that Leonardo, whose phantasy of the vulture was our starting point, was himself a homosexual of this very type.

Few details are known about the sexual behaviour of the great artist and scientist, but we may place confidence in the probability that the assertions of his contemporaries were not grossly erroneous. In the light of these traditions, then, he appears as a man whose sexual need and activity were exceptionally reduced, as if a higher aspiration had raised him above the common animal need of mankind. It may remain open to doubt whether he ever sought direct sexual satisfaction - and if so, in what manner - or whether he was able to dispense with it altogether. We are however justified in looking in him too for the emotional currents which drive other men imperatively on to perform the sexual act; for we cannot imagine the mental life of any human being in the formation of which sexual desire in the broadest sense - libido - did not have its share, even if that desire has departed far from its original aim, or has refrained from putting itself into effect.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2276

We cannot expect to find in Leonardo anything more than traces of untransformed sexual inclination. But these point in one direction and moreover allow him to be reckoned as a homosexual. It has always been emphasized that he took only strikingly handsome boys and youths as pupils. He treated them with kindness and consideration, looked after them, and when they were ill nursed them himself, just as a mother nurses her children and just as his own mother might have tended him. As he had chosen them for their beauty and not for their talent, none of them - Cesare da Sesto, Boltraffio, Andrea Salaino, Francesco Melzi and others - became a painter of importance. Generally they were unable to make themselves independent of their master, and after his death they disappeared without having left any definite mark on the history of art. The others, whose works entitled them to be called his pupils, like Luini and Bazi, called Sodoma, he probably did not know personally.

We realize that we shall have to meet the objection that Leonardo’s behaviour towards his pupils has nothing at all to do with sexual motives and that it allows no conclusions to be drawn about his particular sexual inclination. Against this we wish to submit with all caution that our view explains some peculiar features of the artist’s behaviour which would otherwise have to remain a mystery. Leonardo kept a diary; he made entries in his small hand (written from right to left) which were meant only for himself. It is noteworthy that in this diary he addressed himself in the second person. ‘Learn the multiplication of roots from Master Luca.’ (Solmi, 1908, 152). ‘Get Master d’Abacco to show you how to square the circle.’ (Loc. cit.) Or on the occasion of a journey: ‘I am going to Milan on business to do with my garden . . . Have two baggage trunks made. Get Boltraffio to show you the turning-lathe and get him to polish a stone on it. Leave the book for Master Andrea il Todesco.’ (Ibid., 203.)¹ Or a resolution of very different importance: ‘You have to show in your treatise that the earth is a star, like the moon or something like it, and thus prove the nobility of our world.’ (Herzfeld, 1906, 141.)

¹ Leonardo is behaving here like someone whose habit it was to make his daily confession to another person and who uses his diary as a substitute for him. For a conjecture as to who this person may have been, see Merezhkovsky (1903, 367).

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2277

In this diary, which, by the way, like the diaries of other mortals, often dismisses the most important events of the day in a few words or else passes them over in complete silence, there are some entries which on account of their strangeness are quoted by all Leonardo’s biographers. They are notes of small sums of money spent by the artist - notes recorded with a minute exactness, as if they were made by a pedantically strict and parsimonious head of a household. There is on the other hand no record of the expenditure of larger sums or any other evidence that the artist was at home in keeping accounts. One of these notes has to do with a new cloak which he bought for his pupil Andrea Salaino:¹

Silver brocade     .     .     .     .     15  lire    4 soldi

Crimson velvet for trimming   .   9  lire    - soldi

Braid              .     .     .     .        .      -  lire    9 soldi

Buttons          .     .     .     .     .        -  lire   12 soldi

Another very detailed note brings together all the expenses he incurred through the bad character and thievish habits of another pupil:² ‘On the twenty-first day of April, 1490, I began this book and made a new start on the horse.³ Jacomo came to me on St. Mary Magdalen’s day, 1490: he is ten years old.’ (Marginal note: ‘thievish, untruthful, selfish, greedy.’) ‘On the second day I had two shirts cut out for him, a pair of trousers and a jacket, and when I put the money aside to pay for these things, he stole the money from my purse, and it was never possible to make him own up, although I was absolutely sure of it.’ (Marginal note: ‘4 lire . . .’) The report of the child’s misdeeds runs on in this way and ends with the reckoning of expenses: ‘In the first year, a cloak, 2 lire; 6 shirts, 4 lire; 3 jackets, 6 lire; 4 pairs of stockings, 7 lire; etc.’4

¹ The text is that given by Merezhkovsky (1903, 282).

² Or model.

³ For the equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza.

4 The full text is to be found in Herzfeld (1906, 45).

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2278

Nothing is further from the wishes of Leonardo’s biographers than to try to solve the problems in their hero’s mental life by starting from his small weaknesses and peculiarities; and the usual comment that they make on these singular accounts is one which lays stress on the artist’s kindness and consideration for his pupils. They forget that what calls for explanation is not Leonardo’s behaviour, but the fact that he left these pieces of evidence of it behind him. As it is impossible to believe that his motive was that of letting proofs of his good nature fall into our hands, we must assume that it was another motive, an affective one, which led him to write these notes down. What motive it was is not easy to guess, and we should be unable to suggest one if there were not another account found among Leonardo’s papers which throws a vivid light on these strangely trifling notes about his pupils’ clothing, etc.:

Expenses after Caterina’s death for her funeral          27 florins

2 pounds of wax              .         .          .          .          .      18     “

For transporting and erecting the cross      .          .      12     “

Catafalque                       .         .           .          .          .        4     ”

Pall-bearers                     .         .           .          .          .        8     ”

For 4 priests and 4 clerks       .           .          .          .      20     ”

Bell-ringing                      .         .           .          .           .        2     ”

For the grave-diggers    .         .           .          .           .     16     ”

For the licence - to the officials          .          .           .       1     ”

—————

Total          108 florins

Previous expenses

For the doctor             .         .          4 florins

For sugar and candles        .        12     ”

16 florins

—————

Grand total          124 florins.¹

¹ Merezhkovsky (1903, 372). - As a melancholy example of the uncertainty that surrounds the information, which is in any case scanty enough, about Leonardo’s private life, I may mention the fact that the same account is quoted by Solmi (1908, 104) with considerable variations. The most serious one is that soldi are given instead of florins. It may be assumed that florins in this account do not mean the old ‘gold florins’ but the monetary units which were used later and were worth 1 2/3 lire or 33 1/3 soldi. Solmi makes Caterina a servant who had looked after Leonardo’s household for some time. The source from which the two versions of these accounts were taken was not accessible to me.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2279

The novelist Merezhkovsky alone is able to tell us who this Caterina was. From two other short notes¹ he concludes that Leonardo’s mother, the poor peasant woman of Vinci, came to Milan in 1493 to visit her son, who was then 41; that she fell ill there, was taken to hospital by Leonardo, and when she died was honoured by him with this costly funeral.

This interpretation by the psychological novelist cannot be put to the proof, but it can claim so much inner probability, and is so much in harmony with all that we otherwise know of Leonardo’s emotional activity, that I cannot refrain from accepting it as correct. He had succeeded in subjecting his feelings to the yoke of research and in inhibiting their free utterance; but even for him there were occasions when what had been suppressed obtained expression forcibly. The death of the mother he had once loved so dearly was one of these. What we have before us in the account of the costs of the funeral is the expression - distorted out of all recognition - of his mourning for his mother. We wonder how such distortion could come about, and indeed we cannot understand it if we treat it as a normal mental process. But similar processes are well known to us in the abnormal conditions of neurosis and especially of what is known as ‘obsessional neurosis’. There we can see how the expression of intense feelings, which have however become unconscious through repression, is displaced on to trivial and even foolish actions. The expression of these repressed feelings has been lowered by the forces opposed to them to such a degree that one would have had to form a most insignificant estimate of their intensity; but the imperative compulsiveness with which this trivial expressive act is performed betrays the real force of the impulses - a force which is rooted in the unconscious and which consciousness would like to deny. Only a comparison such as this with what happens in obsessional neurosis can explain Leonardo’s account of the expenses of his mother’s funeral. In his unconscious he was still tied to her by erotically coloured feelings, as he had been in childhood. The opposition that came from the subsequent repression of this childhood love did not allow him to set up a different and worthier memorial to her in his diary. But what emerged as a compromise from this neurotic conflict had to be carried out; and thus it was that the account was entered in the diary, and has come to the knowledge of posterity as something unintelligible.

¹ ‘Caterina arrived on July 16, 1493.’ - ‘Giovannina - a fabulous face - Call on Caterina in the hospital and make enquiries.’

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2280

It does not seem a very extravagant step to apply what we have learnt from the funeral account to the reckonings of the pupils’ expenses. They would then be another instance of the scanty remnants of Leonardo’s libidinal impulses finding expression in a compulsive manner and in a distorted form. On that view, his mother and his pupils, the likenesses of his own boyish beauty, had been his sexual objects - so far as the sexual repression which dominated his nature allows us so to describe them - and the compulsion to note in laborious detail the sums he spent on them betrayed in this strange way his rudimentary conflicts. From this it would appear that Leonardo’s erotic life did really belong to the type of homosexuality whose psychical development we have succeeded in disclosing, and the emergence of the homosexual situation in his phantasy of the vulture would become intelligible to us: for its meaning was exactly what we have already asserted of that type. We should have to translate it thus: ‘It was through this erotic relation with my mother that I became a homosexual.’¹

¹ The forms of expression in which Leonardo’s repressed libido was allowed to show itself - circumstantiality and concern over money - are among the traits of character which result from anal erotism. See my ‘Character and Anal Erotism’ (1908b).

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2281

IV

We have not yet done with Leonardo’s vulture phantasy. In words which only too plainly recall a description of a sexual act (‘and struck me many times with its tail against my lips’), Leonardo stresses the intensity of the erotic relations between mother and child. From this linking of his mother’s (the vulture’s) activity with the prominence of the mouth zone it is not difficult to guess that a second memory is contained in the phantasy. This may be translated: ‘My mother pressed innumerable passionate kisses on my mouth.’ The phantasy is compounded from the memory of being suckled and being kissed by his mother.

Kindly nature has given the artist the ability to express his most secret mental impulses, which are hidden even from himself, by means of the works that he creates; and these works have a powerful effect on others who are strangers to the artist, and who are themselves unaware of the source of their emotion. Can it be that there is nothing in Leonardo’s life work to bear witness to what his memory preserved as the strongest impression of his childhood? One would certainly expect there to be something. Yet if one considers the profound transformations through which an impression in an artist’s life has to pass before it is allowed to make its contribution to a work of art, one will be bound to keep any claim to certainty in one’s demonstration within very modest limits; and this is especially so in Leonardo’s case.

Anyone who thinks of Leonardo’s paintings will be reminded of a remarkable smile, at once fascinating and puzzling, which he conjured up on the lips of his female subjects. It is an unchanging smile, on long, curved lips; it has become a mark of his style and the name ‘Leonardesque’ has been chosen for it.¹ In the strangely beautiful face of the Florentine Mona Lisa del Giocondo it has produced the most powerful and confusing effect on whoever looks at it. This smile has called for an interpretation, and it has met with many of the most varied kinds, none of which has been satisfactory. ‘Voilà quatre siècles bientôt que Monna Lisa fait perdre la tête à tous ceux qui parlent d’elle, après l’avoir longtemps regardée.’²

¹ [Footnote added 1919:] The connoisseur of art will think here of the peculiar fixed smile found in archaic Greek sculptures - in those, for example, from Aegina; he will perhaps also discover something similar in the figures of Leonardo’s teacher Verrocchio and therefore have some misgivings in accepting the arguments that follow.

² [‘For almost four centuries now Mona Lisa has caused all who talk of her, after having gazed on her for long, to lose their heads.’] The words are Gruyer’s, quoted by von Seidlitz (1909, 2, 280).

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2282

Muther (1909, 1, 314) writes: ‘What especially casts a spell on the spectator is the daemonic magic of this smile. Hundreds of poets and authors have written about this woman who now appears to smile on us so seductively, and now to stare coldly and without soul into space; and no one has solved the riddle of her smile, no one has read the meaning of her thoughts. Everything, even the landscape, is mysteriously dream-like, and seems to be trembling in a kind of sultry sensuality.’

The idea that two distinct elements are combined in Mona Lisa’s smile is one that has struck several critics. They accordingly find in the beautiful Florentine’s expression the most perfect representation of the contrasts which dominate the erotic life of women; the contrast between reserve and seduction, and between the most devoted tenderness and a sensuality that is ruthlessly demanding - consuming men as if they were alien beings. This is the view of Müntz (1899, 417): ‘On sait quelle énigme indéchiffrable et passionnante Monna Lisa Gioconda ne cesse depuis bientôt quatre siècles de proposer aux admirateurs pressés devant elle. Jamais artiste (j’emprunte la plume du délicat écrivain qui se cache sous le pseudonyme de Pierre de Corlay) "a-t-il traduit ainsi l’essence même de la fémininité: tendresse et coquetterie, pudeur et sourde volupté, tout le mystère d’un coeur qui se réserve, d’un cerveau qui réfléchit, d’une personnalité qui se garde et ne livre d’elle-même que son rayonnement . . ."'¹ The Italian writer Angelo Conti (1910, 93) saw the picture in the Louvre brought to life by a ray of sunshine. ‘La donna sorrideva in una calma regale: i suoi istinti di conquista, di ferocia, tutta l’eredità della specie, la volontà della seduzione e dell’ agguato, la grazia del inganno, la bontà che cela un proposito crudele, tutto ciò appariva alternativamente e scompariva dietro il velo ridente e si fondeva nel poema del suo sorriso . . . Buona e malvagia, crudele e compassionevole, graziosa e felina, ella rideva . . .’²

¹ [‘We know what an insoluble and enthralling enigma Mona Lisa Gioconda has never ceased through nearly four centuries to pose to the admirers that throng in front of her. No artist (I borrow the words from the sensitive writer who conceals himself behind the pseudonym of Pierre de Corlay) "has ever expressed so well the very essence of femininity: tenderness and coquetry, modesty and secret sensuous joy, all the mystery of a heart that holds aloof, a brain that meditates, a personality that holds back and yields nothing of itself save its radiance".’]

² [‘The lady smiled in regal calm: her instincts of conquest, of ferocity, all the heredity of the species, the will to seduce and to ensnare, the charm of deceit, the kindness that conceals a cruel purpose, - all this appeared and disappeared by turns behind the laughing veil and buried itself in the poem of her smile . . . Good and wicked, cruel and compassionate, graceful and feline, she laughed . . .’]

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2283

Leonardo spent four years painting at this picture, perhaps from 1503 to 1507, during his second period of residence in Florence, when he was over fifty. According to Vasari he employed the most elaborate artifices to keep the lady amused during the sittings and to retain the famous smile on her features. In its present condition the picture has preserved but little of all the delicate details which his brush reproduced on the canvas at that time; while it was being painted it was considered to be the highest that art could achieve, but it is certain that Leonardo himself was not satisfied with it, declaring it to be incomplete, and did not deliver it to the person who had commissioned it, but took it to France with him, where his patron, Francis I, acquired it from him for the Louvre.

Let us leave unsolved the riddle of the expression on Mona Lisa’s face, and note the indisputable fact that her smile exercised no less powerful a fascination on the artist than on all who have looked at it for the last four hundred years. From that date the captivating smile reappears in all his pictures and in those of his pupils. As Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is a portrait, we cannot assume that he added on his own account such an expressive feature to her face - a feature that she did not herself possess. The conclusion seems hardly to be avoided that he found this smile in his model and fell so strongly under its spell that from then on he bestowed it on the free creations of his phantasy. This interpretation, which cannot be called far-fetched, is put forward, for example, by Konstantinowa (1907, 44):

‘During the long period in which the artist was occupied with the portrait of Mona Lisa del Giocondo, he had entered into the subtle details of the features on this lady’s face with such sympathetic feeling that he transferred its traits - in particular the mysterious smile and the strange gaze - to all the faces that he painted or drew afterwards. The Gioconda’s peculiar facial expression can even be perceived in the picture of John the Baptist in the Louvre; but above all it may be clearly recognized in the expression on Mary’s face in the "Madonna and Child with St. Anne".’

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2284

Yet this situation may also have come about in another way. The need for a deeper reason behind the attraction of La Gioconda’s smile, which so moved the artist that he was never again free from it, has been felt by more than one of his biographers. Walter Pater, who sees in the picture of Mona Lisa a ‘presence . . . expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire’, and who writes very sensitively of ‘the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of something sinister in it, which plays over all Leonardo’s work’, leads us to another clue when he declares (loc. cit.):

‘Besides, the picture is a portrait. From childhood we see this image defining itself on the fabric of his dreams; and but for express historical testimony, we might fancy that this was but his ideal lady, embodied and beheld at last . . .’

Marie Herzfeld (1906, 88) has no doubt something very similar in mind when she declares that in the Mona Lisa Leonardo encountered his own self and for this reason was able to put so much of his own nature into the picture ‘whose features had lain all along in mysterious sympathy within Leonardo’s mind’.

Let us attempt to clarify what is suggested here. It may very well have been that Leonardo was fascinated by Mona Lisa’s smile for the reason that it awoke something in him which had for long lain dormant in his mind - probably an old memory. This memory was of sufficient importance for him never to get free of it when it had once been aroused; he was continually forced to give it new expression. Pater’s confident assertion that we can see, from childhood, a face like Mona Lisa’s defining itself on the fabric of his dreams, seems convincing and deserves to be taken literally.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2285

Vasari mentions that ‘teste di femmine, che ridono’¹ formed the subject of Leonardo’s first artistic endeavours. The passage - which, since it is not intended to prove anything, is quite beyond suspicion - runs more fully according to Schorn’s translation (1843, 3, 6): ‘In his youth he made some heads of laughing women out of clay, which were reproduced in plaster, and some children’s heads which were as beautiful as if they had been modelled by the hand of a master . . .’

Thus we learn that he began his artistic career by portraying two kinds of objects; and these cannot fail to remind us of the two kinds of sexual objects that we have inferred from the analysis of his vulture-phantasy. If the beautiful children’s heads were reproductions of his own person as it was in his childhood, then the smiling women are nothing other than repetitions of his mother Caterina, and we begin to suspect the possibility that it was his mother who possessed the mysterious smile - the smile that he had lost and that fascinated him so much when he found it again in the Florentine lady.²

The painting of Leonardo’s which stands nearest to the Mona Lisa in point of time is the so-called ‘St. Anne with Two Others’, St. Anne with the Madonna and child. In it the Leonardesque smile is most beautifully and markedly portrayed on both the women’s faces. It is not possible to discover how long before or after the painting of the Mona Lisa Leonardo began to paint this picture. As both works extended over years, it may, I think, be assumed that the artist was engaged on them at the same time. It would best agree with our expectation if it was the intensity of Leonardo’s preoccupation with the features of Mona Lisa which stimulated him to create the composition of St. Anne out of his phantasy. For if the Gioconda’s smile called up in his mind the memory of his mother, it is easy to understand how it drove him at once to create a glorification of motherhood, and to give back to his mother the smile he had found in the noble lady. We may therefore permit our interest to pass from Mona Lisa’s portrait to this other picture - one which is hardly less beautiful, and which to-day also hangs in the Louvre.

¹ [’Heads of laughing women.’] Quoted by Scognamiglio (1900, 32).

² The same assumption is made by Merezhkovsky. But the history of Leonardo’s childhood as he imagines it departs at the essential points from the conclusions we have drawn from the phantasy of the vulture. Yet if the smile had been that of Leonardo himself tradition would hardly have failed to inform us of the coincidence.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2286

St. Anne with her daughter and her grandchild is a subject that is rarely handled in Italian painting. At all events Leonardo’s treatment of it differs widely from all other known versions. Muther (1909, 1, 309) writes:

‘Some artists, like Hans Fries, the elder Holbein and Girolamo dai Libri, made Anne sit beside Mary and put the child between them. Others, like Jakob Cornelisz in his Berlin picture, painted what was truly a "St. Anne with Two Others"; in other words, they represented her as holding in her arms the small figure of Mary upon which the still smaller figure of the child Christ is sitting.’ In Leonardo’s picture Mary is sitting on her mother’s lap, leaning forward, and is stretching out both arms towards the boy, who is playing with a young lamb and perhaps treating it a little unkindly. The grandmother rests on her hip the arm that is not concealed and gazes down on the pair with a blissful smile. The grouping is certainly not entirely unconstrained. But although the smile that plays on the lips of the two women is unmistakably the same as that in the picture of Mona Lisa, it has lost its uncanny and mysterious character; what it expresses is inward feeling and quiet blissfulness.¹

After we have studied this picture for some time, it suddenly dawns on us that only Leonardo could have painted it, just as only he could have created the phantasy of the vulture. The picture contains the synthesis of the history of his childhood: its details are to be explained by reference to the most personal impressions in Leonardo’s life. In his father’s house he found not only his kind stepmother, Donna Albiera, but also his grandmother, his father’s mother, Monna Lucia, who - so we will assume - was no less tender to him than grandmothers usually are. These circumstances might well suggest to him a picture representing childhood watched over by mother and grandmother. Another striking feature of the picture assumes even greater significance. St. Anne, Mary’s mother and the boy’s grandmother, who must have been a matron, is here portrayed as being perhaps a little more mature and serious than the Virgin Mary, but as still being a young woman of unfaded beauty. In point of fact Leonardo has given the boy two mothers, one who stretches her arms out to him, and another in the background; and both are endowed with the blissful smile of the joy of motherhood. This peculiarity of the picture has not failed to surprise those who have written about it; Muther, for example, is of the opinion that Leonardo could not bring himself to paint old age, lines and wrinkles, and for this reason made Anne too into a woman of radiant beauty. But can we be satisfied with this explanation? Others have had recourse to denying that there is any similarity in age between the mother and daughter.² But Muther’s attempt at an explanation is surely enough to prove that the impression that St. Anne has been made more youthful derives from the picture and is not an invention for an ulterior purpose.

¹ Konstantinowa (1907): ‘Mary gazes down full of inward feeling on her darling, with a smile that recalls the mysterious expression of La Gioconda.’ In another passage she says of Mary: ‘The Gioconda’s smile hovers on her features.’

² Von Seidlitz (1909, 2, 274, notes).

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2287

Leonardo’s childhood was remarkable in precisely the same way as this picture. He had had two mothers: first, his true mother Caterina, from whom he was torn away when he was between three and five, and then a young and tender stepmother, his father’s wife, Donna Albiera. By his combining this fact about his childhood with the one mentioned above (the presence of his mother and grandmother) and by his condensing them into a composite unity, the design of ‘St. Anne with Two Others’ took shape for him. The maternal figure that is further away from the boy - the grandmother - corresponds to the earlier and true mother, Caterina, in its appearance and in its special relation to the boy. The artist seems to have used the blissful smile of St. Anne to disavow and to cloak the envy which the unfortunate woman felt when she was forced to give up her son to her better-born rival, as she had once given up his father as well.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1919:] If an attempt is made to separate the figures of Anne and Mary in this picture and to trace the outline of each, it will not be found altogether easy. One is inclined to say that they are fused with each other like badly condensed dream-figures, so that in some places it is hard to say where Anne ends and where Mary begins. But what appears to a critic’s eye as a fault, as a defect in composition, is vindicated in the eyes of analysis by reference to its secret meaning. It seems that for the artist the two mothers of his childhood were melted into a single form.

[Added 1923:] It is especially tempting to compare the ‘St. Anne with Two Others’ of the Louvre with the celebrated London cartoon, where the same material is used to form a different composition. Here the forms of the two mothers are fused even more closely and their separate outlines are even harder to make out, so that critics, far removed from any attempt to offer an interpretation, have been forced to say that it seems ‘as if two heads were growing from a single body’.

Fig. 2.

Most authorities are in agreement in pronouncing the London cartoon to be the earlier work and in assigning its origin to Leonardo’s first period in Milan (before 1500). Adolf Rosenberg (1898), on the other hand, sees the composition of the cartoon as a later - and more successful - version of the same theme, and follows Anton Springer in dating it even after the Mona Lisa. It would fit in excellently with our arguments if the cartoon were to be much the earlier work. It is also not hard to imagine how the picture in the Louvre arose out of the cartoon, while the reverse course of events would make to sense. If we take the composition shown in the cartoon as our starting point, we can see how Leonardo may have felt the need to undo the dream-like fusion of the two women - a fusion corresponding to his childhood memory - and to separate the two heads in space. This came about as follows: From the group formed by the mothers he detached Mary’s head and the upper part of her body and bent them downwards. To provide a reason for this displacement the child Christ had to come down from her lap on to the ground. There was then no room for the little St. John, who was replaced by the lamb.

[Added 1919:] A remarkable discovery has been made in the Louvre picture by Oskar Pfister, which is of undeniable interest, even if one may not feel inclined to accept it without reserve. In Mary’s curiously arranged and rather confusing drapery he has discovered the outline of a vulture and he interprets it as an unconscious picture-puzzle:-

‘In the picture that represents the artist’s mother the vulture, the symbol of motherhood, is perfectly clearly visible.

‘In the length of blue cloth, which is visible around the hip of the woman in front and which extends in the direction of her lap and her right knee, one can see the vulture’s extremely characteristic head, its neck and the sharp curve where its body begins. Hardly any observer whom I have confronted with my little find has been able to resist the evidence of this picture-puzzle.’ (Pfister, 1913, 147.)

At this point the reader will not, I feel sure, grudge the effort of looking at the accompanying illustration, to see if he can find in it the outlines of the vulture seen by Pfister. The piece of blue cloth, whose border marks the edges of the picture-puzzle, stands out in the reproduction as a light grey field against the darker ground of the rest of the drapery.

Fig. 3.

Pfister continues: ‘The important question however is: How far does the picture-puzzle extend? If we follow the length of cloth, which stands out so sharply from its surroundings, starting at the middle of the wing and continuing from there, we notice that one part of it runs down to the woman’s foot, while the other part extends in an upward direction and rests on her shoulder and on the child. The former of these parts might more or less represent the vulture’s wing and tail, as it is in nature; the latter might be a pointed belly and - especially when we notice the radiating lines which resemble the outlines of feathers - a bird’s outspread tail, whose right-hand end, exactly as in Leonardo’s fateful childhood dream [sic], leads to the mouth of the child, i.e. of Leonardo himself.’

The author goes on to examine the interpretation in greater detail, and discusses the difficulties to which it gives rise.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2288

We thus find a confirmation in another of Leonardo’s works of our suspicion that the smile of Mona Lisa del Giocondo had awakened in him as a grown man the memory of the mother of his earliest childhood. From that time onward, madonnas and aristocratic ladies were depicted in Italian painting humbly bowing their heads and smiling the strange, blissful smile of Caterina, the poor peasant girl who had brought into the world the splendid son who was destined to paint, to search and to suffer.

If Leonardo was successful in reproducing on Mona Lisa’s face the double meaning which this smile contained, the promise of unbounded tenderness and at the same time sinister menace (to quote Pater’s phrase), then here too he had remained true to the content of his earliest memory. For his mother’s tenderness was fateful for him; it determined his destiny and the privations that were in store for him. The violence of the caresses, to which his phantasy of the vulture points, was only too natural. In her love for her child the poor forsaken mother had to give vent to all her memories of the caresses she had enjoyed as well as her longing for new ones; and she was forced to do so not only to compensate herself for having no husband, but also to compensate her child for having no father to fondle him. So, like all unsatisfied mothers, she took her little son in place of her husband, and by the too early maturing of his erotism robbed him of a part of his masculinity. A mother’s love for the infant she suckles and cares for is something far more profound than her later affection for the growing child. It is in the nature of a completely satisfying love-relation, which not only fulfils every mental wish but also every physical need; and if it represents one of the forms of attainable human happiness, that is in no little measure due to the possibility it offers of satisfying, without reproach, wishful impulses which have long been repressed and which must be called perverse.¹ In the happiest young marriage the father is aware that the baby, especially if he is a baby son, has become his rival, and this is the starting-point of an antagonism towards the favourite which is deeply rooted in the unconscious.

¹ See my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d).

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2289

When, in the prime of life, Leonardo once more encountered the smile of bliss and rapture which had once played on his mother’s lips as she fondled him, he had for long been under the dominance of an inhibition which forbade him ever again to desire such caresses from the lips of women. But he had become a painter, and therefore he strove to reproduce the smile with his brush, giving it to all his pictures (whether he in fact executed them himself or had them done by his pupils under his direction) - to Leda, to John the Baptist and to Bacchus. The last two are variants of the same type. ‘Leonardo has turned the locust-eater of the Bible’, says Muther, ‘into a Bacchus, a young Apollo, who, with a mysterious smile on his lips, and with his smooth legs crossed, gazes at us with eyes that intoxicate the senses.’ These pictures breathe a mystical air into whose secret one dares not penetrate; at the very most one can attempt to establish their connection with Leonardo’s earlier creations. The figures are still androgynous, but no longer in the sense of the vulture-phantasy. They are beautiful youths of feminine delicacy and with effeminate forms; they do not cast their eyes down, but gaze in mysterious triumph, as if they knew of a great achievement of happiness, about which silence must be kept. The familiar smile of fascination leads one to guess that it is a secret of love. It is possible that in these figures Leonardo has denied the unhappiness of his erotic life and has triumphed over it in his art, by representing the wishes of the boy, infatuated with his mother, as fulfilled in this blissful union of the male and female natures.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2290

V

Among the entries in Leonardo’s notebooks there is one which catches the reader’s attention owing to the importance of what it contains and to a minute formal error.

In July 1504 he writes:

‘Adì 9 di Luglio 1504 mercoledi a ore 7 morì Ser Piero da Vinci, notalio al palazzo del Potestà, mio padre, a ore 7. Era d’età d’anni 80, lasciò 10 figlioli maschi e 2 femmine.’¹

As we see, the note refers to the death of Leonardo’s father. The small error in its form consists of the repetition of the time of day ‘a ore 7' [at 7 o’clock], which is given twice, as if Leonardo had forgotten at the end of the sentence that he had already written it at the beginning. It is only a small detail, and anyone who was not a psycho-analyst would attach no importance to it. He might not even notice it, and if his attention was drawn to it he might say that a thing like, that can happen to anyone in a moment of distraction or of strong feeling, and that it has no further significance.

The psycho-analyst thinks differently. To him nothing is too small to be a manifestation of hidden mental processes. He his learnt long ago that such cases of forgetting or repetition are significant, and that it is the ‘distraction’ which allows impulses that are otherwise hidden to be revealed.

We would say that this note, like the account for Caterina’s funeral and the bills of the pupils’ expenses, is a case in which Leonardo was unsuccessful in suppressing his affect and in which something that had long been concealed forcibly obtained a distorted expression. Even the form is similar: there is the same pedantic exactness, and the same prominence given to numbers.²

¹ [’On July 9, 1504, Wednesday at 7 o’clock died Ser Piero da Vinci, notary at the palace of the Podestà, my father, at 7 o’clock. He was 80 years old, and left 10 sons and 2 daughters.’] After Müntz (1899, 13 n.).

² I am leaving on one side a greater error made by Leonardo in this note by giving his father’s age as 80 instead of 77.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2291

We call a repetition of this kind a perseveration. It is an excellent means of indicating affective colour. One recalls, for example, St. Peter’s tirade in Dante’s Paradiso against his unworthy representative on earth:

Quegli ch’usurpa in terra il luogo mio,

Il luogo mio, il luogo mio, che vaca

Nella presenza del Figliuol di Dio,

Fatto ha del cimiterio mio cloaca.¹

Without Leonardo’s affective inhibition the entry in his diary might have run somewhat as follows: ‘To-day at 7 o’clock my father died - Ser Piero da Vinci, my poor father!’ But the displacement of the perseveration on to the most indifferent detail in the report of his death, the hour at which he died, robs the entry of all emotion, and further lets us see that here was something to be concealed and suppressed.

Ser Piero da Vinci, notary and descendant of notaries, was a man of great energy who reached a position of esteem and prosperity. He was married four times. His first two wives died childless, and it was only his third wife who presented him with his first legitimate son, in 1476, by which time Leonardo had reached the age of 24 and had long ago exchanged his father’s home for the studio of his master Verrocchio. By his fourth and last wife, whom he married when he was already in his fifties, he had nine more sons and two daughters.²

It cannot be doubted that his father too came to play an important part in Leonardo’s psychosexual development, and not only negatively by his absence during the boy’s first childhood years, but also directly by his presence in the later part of Leonardo’s childhood. No one who as a child desires his mother can escape wanting to put himself in his father’s place, can fail to identify himself with him in his imagination, and later to make it his task in life to gain ascendancy over him. When Leonardo was received into his grandfather’s house before he had reached the age of five, his young step-mother Albiera must certainly have taken his mother’s place where his feelings were concerned, and he must have found himself in what may be called the normal relationship of rivalry with his father. As we know, a decision in favour of homosexuality only takes place round about the years of puberty. When this decision had been arrived at in Leonardo’s case, his identification with his father lost all significance for his sexual life, but it nevertheless continued in other spheres of non-erotic activity. We hear that he was fond of magnificence and fine clothes, and kept servants and horses, although, in Vasari’s words, ‘he possessed almost nothing and did little work’. The responsibility for these tastes is not to be attributed solely to his feeling for beauty: we recognize in them at the same time a compulsion to copy and to outdo his father. His father had been a great gentleman to the poor peasant girl, and the son, therefore, never ceased to feel the spur to play the great gentleman as well, the urge ‘to out-herod Herod’,³ to show his father what a great gentleman really looks like.

¹ [‘He who usurps on earth my place, my place, my place, which in the presence of the Son of God is vacant, has made a sewer of the ground where I am buried.’] Canto XXVII, 22-25.

² Leonardo has apparently made a further mistake in this passage in his diary over the number of his brothers and sisters - a remarkable contrast to the apparent exactness of the passage.

³ [The last three words are in English in the original.]

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2292

There is no doubt that the creative artist feels towards his works like a father. The effect which Leonardo’s identification with his father had on his paintings was a fateful one. He created them and then cared no more about them, just as his father had not cared about him. His father’s later concern could change nothing in this compulsion; for the compulsion derived from the impressions of the first years of childhood, and what has been repressed and has remained unconscious cannot be corrected by later experiences.

In the days of the Renaissance -(and even much later - every artist stood in need of a gentleman of rank, a benefactor and patron, who gave him commissions and in whose hands his fortune rested. Leonardo found his patron in Lodovico Sforza, called Il Moro, a man of ambition and a lover of splendour, astute in diplomacy, but of erratic and unreliable character. At his court in Milan Leonardo passed the most brilliant period of his life, and in his service his creative power attained its most uninhibited expansion, to which the Last Supper and the equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza bore witness. He left Milan before catastrophe overtook Lodovico Sforza, who died a prisoner in a French dungeon. When the news of his patron’s fate reached Leonardo, he wrote in his diary: ‘The duke lost his dukedom and his property and his liberty, and none of the works that he undertook was completed.’¹ It is remarkable, and certainly not without significance, that he here cast the same reproach at his patron which posterity was to bring against himself. It is as if he wanted to make someone from the class of his fathers responsible for the fact that he himself left his works unfinished. In point of fact he was not wrong in what he said about the duke.

¹ ‘II duca perse to stato e la roba e libertà e nessuna sua opera si finì per lui.’ Quoted by Von Seidlitz (1909, 2, 270).

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2293

But if his imitation of his father did him damage as an artist, his rebellion against his father was the infantile determinant of what was perhaps an equally sublime achievement in the field of scientific research. In Merezhkovsky’s admirable simile (1903, 348), he was like a man who had awoken too early in the darkness, while everyone else was still asleep. He dared to utter the bold assertion which contains within itself the justification for all independent research: ‘He who appeals to authority when there is a difference of opinion works with his memory rather than with his reason.’¹ Thus he became the first modern natural scientist, and an abundance of discoveries and suggestive ideas rewarded his courage for being the first man since the time of the Greeks to probe the secrets of nature while relying solely on observation and his own judgement. But in teaching that authority should be looked down on and that imitation of the ‘ancients’ should be repudiated, and in constantly urging that the study of nature was the source of all truth, he was merely repeating - in the highest sublimation attainable by man - the one-sided point of view which had already forced itself on the little boy as he gazed in wonder on the world. If we translate scientific abstraction back again into concrete individual experience, we see that the ‘ancients’ and authority simply correspond to his father, and nature once more becomes the tender and kindly mother who had nourished him. In most other human beings - no less to-day than in primaeval times - the need for support from an authority of some sort is so compelling that their world begins to totter if that authority is threatened. Only Leonardo could dispense with that support; he would not have been able to do so had he not learnt in the first years of his life to do without his father. His later scientific research, with all its boldness and independence, presupposed the existence of infantile sexual researches uninhibited by his father, and was a prolongation of them with the sexual element excluded.

¹ ‘Chi disputa allegando l’autorità non adopra l’ingegno ma piuttosto la memoria.’ Quoted by Solmi (1910, 13).

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2294

When anyone has, like Leonardo, escaped being intimidated by his father during his earliest childhood, and has in his researches cast away the fetters of authority, it would be in the sharpest contradiction to our expectation if we found that he had remained a believer and had been unable to escape from dogmatic religion. Psycho-analysis has made us familiar with the intimate connection between the father-complex and belief in God; it has shown us that a personal God is, psychologically, nothing other than an exalted father, and it brings us evidence every day of how young people lose their religious beliefs as soon as their father’s authority breaks down. Thus we recognize that the roots of the need for religion are in the parental complex; the almighty and just God, and kindly Nature, appear to us as grand sublimations of father and mother, or rather, as revivals and restorations of the young child’s ideas of them. Biologically speaking, religiousness is to be traced to the small human child’s long-drawn-out helplessness and need of help; and when at a later date he perceives how truly forlorn and weak he is when confronted with the great forces of life, he feels his condition as he did in childhood, and attempts to deny his own despondency by a regressive revival of the forces which protected his infancy. The protection against neurotic illness, which religion vouchsafes to those who believe in it, is easily explained: it removes their parental complex, on which the sense of guilt in individuals as well as in the whole human race depends, and disposes of it, while the unbeliever has to grapple with the problem on his own.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2295

It does not seem as if the instance of Leonardo could show this view of religious belief to be mistaken. Accusations charging him with unbelief or (what at that time came to the same thing) with apostasy from Christianity were brought against him while he was still alive, and are clearly described in the first biography which Vasari wrote of him, (Müntz, 1899, 292 ff.) In the second (1568) edition of his Vite Vasari omitted these observations. In view of the extraordinary sensitiveness of his age where religious matters were in question, we can understand perfectly why even in his notebooks Leonardo should have refrained from directly stating his attitude to Christianity. In his researches he did not allow himself to be led astray in the slightest degree by the account of the Creation in Holy Writ; he challenged, for example, the possibility of a universal Deluge, and in geology he calculated in terms of hundreds of thousands of years with no more hesitation than men in modern times.

Among his ‘prophecies’ there are some things that would have been bound to offend the sensitive feelings of a Christian believer. Take for example, ‘On the practice of praying to the images of saints’:

‘Men will speak to men that perceive nothing, that have their eyes open and see nothing; they will talk to them and receive no answer; they will implore the grace of those that have ears and hear not; they will kindle lights for one that is blind.’ (After Herzfeld, 1906, 292.)

Or ‘On the mourning on Good Friday’:

‘In every part of Europe great people will weep for the death of a single man who died in the East.’ (Ibid., 297.)

The view has been expressed about Leonardo’s art that he took from the sacred figures the last remnant of their connection with the Church and made them human, so as to represent by their means great and beautiful human emotions. Muther praises him for overcoming the prevailing mood of decadence and for restoring to man his right to sensuality and the joy of living. In the notes that show Leonardo engrossed in fathoming the great riddles of nature there is no lack of passages where he expresses his admiration for the Creator, the ultimate cause of all these noble secrets; but there is nothing which indicates that he wished to maintain any personal relation with this divine power. The reflections in which he has recorded the deep wisdom of his last years of life breathe the resignation of the human being who subjects himself to ‘’Ανάγχη', to the laws of nature, and who expects no alleviation from the goodness or grace of God. There is scarcely any doubt that Leonardo had prevailed over both dogmatic and personal religion, and had by his work of research removed himself far from the position from which the Christian believer surveys the world.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2296

The findings, mentioned above, which we have reached concerning the development of the mental life of children suggest the view that in Leonardo’s case too the first researches of childhood were concerned with the problems of sexuality. Indeed he himself gives this away in a transparent disguise by connecting his urge for research with the vulture phantasy, and by singling out the problem of the flight of birds as one to which, as the result of a special chain of circumstances, he was destined to turn his attention. A highly obscure passage in his notes which is concerned with the flight of birds, and which sounds like a prophecy, gives a very good demonstration of the degree of affective interest with which he clung to his wish to succeed in imitating the art of flying himself: ‘The great bird will take its first flight from the back of its Great Swan; it will fill the universe with stupefaction, and all writings with renown, and be the eternal glory of the nest where it was born.’¹ He probably hoped that he himself would be able to fly one day, and we know from wish-fulfilling dreams what bliss is expected from the fulfilment of that hope.

But why do so many people dream of being able to fly? The answer that psycho-analysis gives is that to fly or to be a bird is only a disguise for another wish, and that more than one bridge, involving words or things, leads us to recognize what it is. When we consider that inquisitive children are told that babies are brought by a large bird, such as the stork; when we find that the ancients represented the phallus as having wings; that the commonest expression in German for male sexual activity is ‘vögeln’ [‘to bird’: ‘Vogel’ is the German for ‘bird’]; that the male organ is actually called ‘l’uccello’ [‘the bird’] in Italian - all of these are only small fragments from a whole mass of connected ideas, from which we learn that in dreams the wish to be able to fly is to be understood as nothing else than a longing to be capable of sexual performance.² This is an early infantile wish. When an adult recalls his childhood it seems to him to have been a happy time, in which one enjoyed the moment and looked to the future without any wishes; it is for this reason that he envies children. But if children themselves were able to give us information earlier they would probably tell a different story. It seems that childhood is not the blissful idyll into which we distort it in retrospect, and that, on the contrary, children are goaded on through the years of childhood by the one wish to get big and do what grown-ups do. This wish is the motive of all their games. Whenever children feel in the course of their sexual researches that in the province which is so mysterious but nevertheless so important there is something wonderful of which adults are capable but which they are forbidden to know of and do, they are filled with a violent wish to be able to do it, and they dream of it in the form of flying, or they prepare this disguise of their wish to be used in their later flying dreams. Thus aviation, too, which in our day is at last achieving its aim, has its infantile erotic roots.

¹ After Herzfeld (1906, 32). ‘The Great Swan’ seems to mean Monte Cecero, a hill near Florence.

² [Footnote added 1919:] This statement is based on the researches of Paul Federn and of Mourly Vold (1912), a Norwegian man of science who had no contact with psycho-analysis.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2297

In admitting to us that ever since his childhood he felt bound up in a special and personal way with the problem of flight, Leonardo gives us confirmation that his childhood researches were directed to sexual matters; and this is what we were bound to expect as a result of our investigations on children in our own time. Here was one problem at least which had escaped the repression that later estranged him from sexuality. With slight changes in meaning, the same subject continued to interest him from his years of childhood until the time of his most complete intellectual maturity; and it may very well be that the skill that he desired was no more attainable by him in its primary sexual sense than in its mechanical one, and that he remained frustrated in both wishes.

Indeed, the great Leonardo remained like a child for the whole of his life in more than one way; it is said that all great men are bound to retain some infantile part. Even as an adult he continued to play, and this was another reason why he often appeared uncanny and incomprehensible to his contemporaries. It is only we who are unsatisfied that he should have constructed the most elaborate mechanical toys for court festivities and ceremonial receptions, for we are reluctant to see the artist turning his power to such trifles. He himself seems to have shown no unwillingness to spend his time thus, for Vasari tells us that he made similar things when he had not been commissioned to do so: ‘There (in Rome) he got a soft lump of wax, and made very delicate animals out of it, filled with air; when he blew into them they flew around, and when the air ran out they fell to the ground. For a peculiar lizard which was found by the wine-grower of Belvedere he made wings from skin torn from other lizards, and filled them with quicksilver, so that they moved and quivered when it walked. Next he made eyes, a beard and horns for it, tamed it and put it in a box and terrified all his friends with it.’¹ Such ingenuities often served to express thoughts of a serious kind. ‘He often had a sheep’s intestines cleaned so carefully that they could have been held in the hollow of the hand. He carried them into a large room, took a pair of blacksmith’s bellows into an adjoining room, fastened the intestines to them and blew them up, until they took up the whole room and forced people to take refuge in a corner. In this way he showed how they gradually became transparent and filled with air; and from the fact that at first they were limited to a small space and gradually spread through the whole breadth of the room, he compared them to genius.’² The same playful delight in harmlessly concealing things and giving them ingenious disguises is illustrated by his fables and riddles. The latter are cast into the form of ‘prophecies’: almost all are rich in ideas and to a striking degree devoid of any element of wit.

¹ Vasari, from Schorn’s translation (1843, 39).

² Ibid., 39.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2298

The games and pranks which Leonardo allowed his imagination have in some cases led his biographers, who misunderstood this side of his character, grievously astray. In Leonardo’s Milanese manuscripts there are, for example, some drafts of letters to the ‘Diodario of Sorio (Syria), Viceroy of the Holy Sultan of Babylonia’, in which Leonardo presents himself as an engineer sent to those regions of the East to construct certain works; defends himself against the charge of laziness; supplies geographical descriptions of towns and mountains, and concludes with an account of a great natural phenomenon that occurred while he was there.¹

In 1883 an attempt was made by J. P. Richter to prove from these documents that it was really a fact that Leonardo had made these observations while travelling in the service of the Sultan of Egypt, and had even adopted the Mohammedan religion when in the East. On this view his visit there took place in the period before 1483 - that is, before he took up residence at the court of the Duke of Milan. But the acumen of other authors has had no difficulty in recognizing the evidences of Leonardo’s supposed Eastern journey for what they are - imaginary productions of the youthful artist, which he created for his own amusement and in which he may have found expression for a wish to see the world and meet with adventures.

Another probable example of a creation of his imagination is to be found in the ‘Academia Vinciana’ which has been postulated from the existence of five or six emblems, intertwined patterns of extreme intricacy, which contain the Academy’s name. Vasari mentions these designs but not the Academy.² Müntz, who put one of these ornaments on the cover of his large work on Leonardo, is among the few who believe in the reality of an ‘Academia Vinciana’.

It is probable that Leonardo’s play-instinct vanished in his maturer years, and that it too found its way into the activity of research which represented the latest and highest expansion of his personality. But its long duration can teach us how slowly anyone tears himself from his childhood if in his childhood days he has enjoyed the highest erotic bliss, which is never again attained.

¹ For these letters and the various questions connected with them see Müntz (1899, 82 ff.); the actual texts and other related notes will be found in Herzfeld (1906, 223 ff.).

² ‘Besides, he lost some time by even making a drawing of knots of cords, in which it was possible to trace the thread from one end to the other until it formed a completely circular figure. A very complex and beautiful design of this sort is engraved on copper; in the middle can be read the words "Leonardus Vinci Academia".’ Schorn (1843, 8).

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2299

VI

It would be futile to blind ourselves to the fact that readers to-day find all pathography unpalatable. They clothe their aversion in the complaint that a pathographical review of a great man never results in an understanding of his importance and his achievements, and that it is therefore a piece of useless impertinence to make a study of things in him that could just as easily be found in the first person one came across. But this criticism is so manifestly unjust that it is only understandable when taken as a pretext and a disguise.(Pathography does not in the least aim at making the great man’s achievements intelligible; and surely no one should be blamed for not carrying out something he has never promised to do. The real motives for the opposition are different. We can discover them if we bear in mind that biographers are fixated on their heroes in a quite special way. In many cases they have chosen their hero as the subject of their studies because - for reasons of their personal emotional life - they have felt a special affection for him from the very first. They then devote their energies to a task of idealization, aimed at enrolling the great man among the class of their infantile models - at reviving in him, perhaps, the child’s idea of his father. To gratify this wish they obliterate the individual features of their subject’s physiognomy; they smooth over the traces of his life’s struggles with internal and external resistances, and they tolerate in him no vestige of human weakness or imperfection. They thus present us with what is in fact a cold, strange, ideal figure, instead of a human being to whom we might feel ourselves distantly related. That they should do this is regrettable, for they thereby sacrifice truth to an illusion, and for the sake of their infantile phantasies abandon the opportunity of penetrating the most fascinating secrets of human nature.¹

Leonardo himself, with his love of truth and his thirst for knowledge, would not have discouraged an attempt to take the trivial peculiarities and riddles in his nature as a starting-point, for discovering what determined his mental and intellectual development. We do homage to him by learning from him. It does not detract from his greatness if we make a study of the sacrifices which his development from childhood must have entailed, and if we bring together the factors which have stamped him with the tragic mark of failure.

¹ This criticism applies quite generally and is not to be taken as being aimed at Leonardo’s biographers in particular.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2300

We must expressly insist that we have never reckoned Leonardo as a neurotic or a ‘nerve case’, as the awkward phrase goes. Anyone who protests at our so much as daring to examine him in the light of discoveries gained in the field of pathology is still clinging to prejudices which we have to-day rightly abandoned. We no longer think that health and illness, normal and neurotic people, are to be sharply distinguished from each other, and that neurotic traits must necessarily be taken as proofs of a general inferiority. To-day we know that neurotic symptoms are structures which are substitutes for certain achievements of repression that we have to carry out in the course of our development from a child to a civilized human being. We know too that we all produce such substitutive structures, and that it is only their number, intensity and distribution which justify us in using the practical concept of illness and in inferring the presence of constitutional inferiority. From the slight indications we have about Leonardo’s personality we should be inclined to place him close to the type of neurotic that we describe as ‘obsessional’; and we may compare his researches to the ‘obsessive brooding’ of neurotics, and his inhibitions to what are known as their ‘abulias’.

The aim of our work has been to explain the inhibitions in Leonardo’s sexual life and in his artistic activity. With this in view we may be allowed to summarize what we have been able to discover about the course of his psychical development.

We have no information about the circumstances of his heredity; on the other hand we have seen that the accidental conditions of his childhood had a profound and disturbing effect on him. His illegitimate birth deprived him of his father’s influence until perhaps his fifth year, and left him open to the tender seductions of a mother whose only solace he was. After being kissed by her into precocious sexual maturity, he must no doubt have embarked on a phase of infantile sexual activity of which only one single manifestation is definitely attested - the intensity of his infantile sexual researches. The instinct to look and the instinct to know were those most strongly excited by the impressions of his early childhood; the erotogenic zone of the mouth was given an emphasis which it never afterwards surrendered. From his later behaviour in the contrary direction, such as his exaggerated sympathy for animals, we can conclude that there was no lack of strong sadistic traits in this period of his childhood.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2301

A powerful wave of repression brought this childhood excess to an end, and established the dispositions which were to become manifest in the years of puberty. The most obvious result of the transformation was the avoidance of every crudely sensual activity; Leonardo was enabled to live in abstinence and to give the impression of being an asexual human being. When the excitations of puberty came in their flood upon the boy they did not, however, make him ill by forcing him to develop substitutive structures of a costly and harmful kind. Owing to his very early inclination towards sexual curiosity the greater portion of the needs of his sexual instinct could be sublimated into a general urge to know, and thus evaded repression. A much smaller portion of his libido continued to be devoted to sexual aims and represented a stunted adult sexual life. Because his love for his mother had been repressed, this portion was driven to take up a homosexual attitude and manifested itself in ideal love for boys. The fixation on his mother and on the blissful memories of his relations with her continued to be preserved in the unconscious, but for the time being it remained in an inactive state. In this way repression, fixation and sublimation all played their part in disposing of the contributions which the sexual instinct made to Leonardo’s mental life.

Leonardo emerges from the obscurity of his boyhood as an artist, a painter and a sculptor, owing to a specific talent which may have been reinforced by the precocious awakening in the first years of childhood of his scopophilic instinct. We should be most glad to give an account of the way in which artistic activity derives from the primal instincts of the mind if it were not just here that our capacities fail us. We must be content to emphasize the fact - which it is hardly any longer possible to doubt - that what an artist creates provides at the same time an outlet for his sexual desire; and in Leonardo’s case we can point to the information which comes from Vasari, that heads of laughing women and beautiful boys - in other words, representations of his sexual objects - were notable among his first artistic endeavours. In the bloom of his youth Leonardo appears at first to have worked without inhibition. Just as he modelled himself on his father in the outward conduct of his life, so too he passed through a period of masculine creative power and artistic productiveness in Milan, where a kindly fate enabled him to find a father substitute in the duke Lodovico Moro. But soon we and confirmation of our experience that the almost total repression of a real sexual life does not provide the most favourable conditions for the exercise of sublimated sexual trends. The pattern imposed by sexual life made itself felt. His activity and his ability to form quick decisions began to fail; his tendency towards deliberation and delay was already noticeable as a disturbing element in the ‘Last Supper’, and by influencing his technique it had a decisive effect on the fate of that great painting. Slowly there occurred in him a process which can only be compared to the regressions in neurotics. The development that turned him into an artist at puberty was overtaken by the process which led him to be an investigator, and which had its determinants in early infancy. The second sublimation of his erotic instinct gave place to the original sublimation for which the way had been prepared on the occasion of the first repression. He became an investigator, at first still in the service of his art, but later independently of it and away from it. With the loss of his patron, the substitute for his father, and with the increasingly sombre colours which his life took on, this regressive shift assumed larger and larger proportions. He became ‘impacientissimo al pennello’,¹ as we are told by a correspondent of the Countess Isabella d’Este, who was extremely eager to possess a painting from his hand. His infantile past had gained control over him. But the research which now took the place of artistic creation seems to have contained some of the features which distinguish the activity of unconscious instincts - insatiability, unyielding rigidity and the lack of an ability to adapt to real circumstances.

¹ [‘Very impatient of painting.’] Von Seidlitz (1909, 2, 271).

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2302

At the summit of his life, when he was in his early fifties - a time when in women the sexual characters have already under gone involution and when in men the libido not infrequently makes a further energetic advance - a new transformation came over him. Still deeper layers of the contents of his mind became active once more: but this further regression was to the benefit of his art, which was in the process of becoming stunted. He met the woman who awakened his memory of his mother’s happy smile of sensual rapture; and, influenced by this revived memory, he recovered the stimulus that guided him at the beginning of his artistic endeavours, at the time when he modelled the smiling women. He painted the Mona Lisa, the ‘St. Anne with Two Others’ and the series of mysterious pictures which are characterized by the enigmatic smile. With the help of the oldest of all his erotic impulses he enjoyed the triumph of once more conquering the inhibition in his art. This final development is obscured from our eyes in the shadows of approaching age. Before this his intellect had soared upwards to the highest realizations of a conception of the world that left his epoch far behind it.

In the preceding chapters I have shown what justification can be found for giving this picture of Leonardo’s course of development - for proposing these subdivisions of his life and for explaining his vacillation between art and science in this way. If in making these statements I have provoked the criticism, even from friends of psycho-analysis and from those who are expert in it, that I have merely written a psycho-analytic novel, I shall reply that I am far from over-estimating the certainty of these results. Like others I have succumbed to the attraction of this great and mysterious man, in whose nature one seems to detect powerful instinctual passions which can nevertheless only express themselves in so remarkably subdued a manner.

But whatever the truth about Leonardo’s life may be, we cannot desist from our endeavour to find a psycho-analytic explanation for it until we have completed another task. We must stake out in a quite general way the limits which are set to what psycho-analysis can achieve in the field of biography: otherwise every explanation that is not forthcoming will be held up to us as a failure. The material at the disposal of a psycho-analytic enquiry consists of the data of a person’s life history: on the one hand the chance circumstances of events and background influences, and, on the other hand, the subject’s reported reactions. Supported by its knowledge of psychical mechanisms it then endeavours to establish a dynamic basis for his nature on the strength of his reactions, and to disclose the original motive forces of his mind, as well as their later transformations and developments. If this is successful the behaviour of a personality in the course of his life is explained in terms of the combined operation of constitution and fate, of internal forces and external powers. Where such an undertaking does not provide any certain results - and this is perhaps so in Leonardo’s case - the blame rests not with the faulty or inadequate methods of psycho-analysis, but with the uncertainty and fragmentary nature of the material relating to him which tradition makes available. It is therefore only the author who is to be held responsible for the failure, by having forced psycho-analysis to pronounce an expert opinion on the basis of such insufficient material.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2303

But even if the historical material at our disposal were very abundant, and if the psychical mechanisms could be dealt with with the greatest assurance, there are two important points at which a psycho-analytic enquiry would not be able to make us understand how inevitable it was that the person concerned should have turned out in the way he did and in no other way. In Leonardo’s case we have had to maintain the view that the accident of his illegitimate birth and the excessive tenderness of his mother had the most decisive influence on the formation of his character and on his later fortune, since the sexual repression which set in after this phase of childhood caused him to sublimate his libido into the urge to know, and established his sexual inactivity for the whole of his later life. But this repression after the first erotic satisfactions of childhood need not necessarily have taken place; in someone else it might perhaps not have taken place or might have assumed much less extensive proportions. We must recognize here a degree of freedom which cannot be resolved any further by psycho-analytic means. Equally, one has no right to claim that the consequence of this wave of repression was the only possible one. It is probable that another person would not have succeeded in withdrawing the major portion of his libido from repression by sublimating it into a craving for knowledge; under the same influences he would have sustained a permanent injury to his intellectual activity or have acquired an insurmountable disposition to obsessional neurosis. We are left, then, with these two characteristics of Leonardo which are inexplicable by the efforts of psycho-analysis: his quite special tendency towards instinctual repressions, and his extraordinary capacity for sublimating the primitive instincts.

Instincts and their transformations are at the limit of what is discernible by psycho-analysis. From that point it gives place to biological research. We are obliged to look for the source of the tendency to repression and the capacity for sublimation in the organic foundations of character on which the mental structure is only afterwards erected. Since artistic talent and capacity are intimately connected with sublimation we must admit that the nature of the artistic function is also inaccessible to us along psycho-analytic lines. The tendency of biological research to-day is to explain the chief features in a person’s organic constitution as being the result of the blending of male and female dispositions, based on substances. Leonardo’s physical beauty and his left-handedness might be quoted in support of this view. We will not, however, leave the ground of purely psychological research. Our aim remains that of demonstrating the connection along the path of instinctual activity between a person’s external experiences and his reactions. Even if psycho-analysis does not throw light on the fact of Leonardo’s artistic power, it at least renders its manifestations and its limitations intelligible to us. It seems at any rate as if only a man who had had Leonardo’s childhood experiences could have painted the Mona Lisa and the St. Anne, have secured so melancholy a fate for his works and have embarked on such an astonishing career as a natural scientist, as if the key to all his achievements and misfortunes lay hidden in the childhood phantasy of the vulture.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2304

But may one not take objection to the findings of an enquiry which ascribes to accidental circumstances of his parental constellation so decisive an influence on a person’s fate - which, for example, makes Leonardo’s fate depend on his illegitimate birth and on the barrenness of his first stepmother Donna Albiera? I think one has no right to do so. If one considers chance to be unworthy of determining our fate, it is simply a relapse into the pious view of the Universe which Leonardo himself was on the way to overcoming when he wrote that the sun does not move. We naturally feel hurt that a just God and a kindly providence do not protect us better from such influences during the most defenceless period of our lives. At the same time we are all too ready to forget that in fact everything to do with our life is chance, from our origin out of the meeting of spermatozoon and ovum onwards - chance which nevertheless has a share in the law and necessity of nature, and which merely lacks any connection with our wishes and illusions. The apportioning of the determining factors of our life between the ‘necessities’ of our constitution and the ‘chances’ of our childhood may still be uncertain in detail; but in general it is no longer possible to doubt the importance precisely of the first years of our childhood. We all still show too little respect for Nature which (in the obscure words of Leonardo which recall Hamlet’s lines) ‘is full of countless causes [‘ragioni’] that never enter experience’.¹

Every one of us human beings corresponds to one of the countless experiments in which these ‘ragioni’ of nature force their way into experience.

¹ ‘La natura è piena d’infinite ragioni che non furono mai in isperienza’ (Herzfeld, 1906, 11).

2305

THE FUTURE PROSPECTS OF PSYCHO-ANALYTIC THERAPY

(1910)

2306

Intentionally left blank

2307

THE FUTURE PROSPECTS OF PSYCHO-ANALYTIC THERAPY

GENTLEMEN, - Since the objects for which we are assembled here to-day are mainly practical, I shall choose a practical theme for my introductory address and appeal to your medical, not to your scientific, interest. I can imagine your probable views on the results of our therapy, and I assume that most of you have already passed through the two stages which all beginners go through, the stage of enthusiasm at the unexpected increase in our therapeutic achievements, and the stage of depression at the magnitude of the difficulties which stand in the way of our efforts. At whatever point in this development, however, each of you may happen to be, my intention to-day is to show you that we have by no means come to the end of our resources for combating the neuroses, and that we may expect a substantial improvement in our therapeutic prospects before long.

This reinforcement will come, I think, from three directions:

(1) from internal progress,

(2) from increased authority, and

(3) from the general effect of our work.

(1) Under ‘internal progress’ I include advances (a) in our analytic knowledge, (b) in our technique.

(a) Advances in our knowledge. We are, of course, still a long way from knowing all that is required for an understanding of the unconscious in our patients. It is clear that every advance in our knowledge means an increase in our therapeutic power. As long as we have understood nothing, we have accomplished nothing; the more we understand, the more we shall achieve. At its beginning psycho-analytic treatment was inexorable and exhausting. The patient had to say everything himself, and the physician’s activity consisted of urging him on incessantly. To-day things have a more friendly air. The treatment is made up of two parts - what the physician infers and tells the patient, and the patient’s working-over of what he has heard. The mechanism of our assistance is easy to understand: we give the patient the conscious anticipatory idea and he then finds the repressed unconscious idea in himself on the basis of its similarity to the anticipatory one. This is the intellectual help which makes it easier for him to overcome the resistances between conscious and unconscious. Incidentally, I may remark that it is not the only mechanism made use of in analytic treatment; you all know the far more powerful one which lies in the use of the ‘transference’. It is my intention in the near future to deal with these various factors, which are so important for an understanding of the treatment, in an Allgemeine Methodik der Psychoanalyse. And further, in speaking to you I need not rebut the objection that the evidential value in support of the correctness of our hypotheses is obscured in our treatment as we practise it to-day; you will not forget that this evidence is to be found elsewhere, and that a therapeutic procedure cannot be carried out in the same way as a theoretical investigation.

The Future Prospects Of Psycho-Analytic Therapy

2308

Let me now touch upon one or two fields in which we have new things to learn and do in fact discover new things every day. Above all, there is the field of symbolism in dreams and in the unconscious - a fiercely contested subject, as you know. It is no small merit in our colleague, Wilhelm Stekel, that, untroubled by all the objections raised by our opponents, he has undertaken a study of dream-symbols. There is indeed still much to learn here; my Interpretation of Dreams, which was written in 1899, awaits important amplification from researches into symbolism.

I will say a few words about one of the symbols that has newly been recognized. A little time ago I heard that a psychologist whose views are somewhat different from ours had remarked to one of us that, when all was said and done, we did undoubtedly exaggerate the hidden sexual significance of dreams: his own commonest dream was of going upstairs, and surely there could not be anything sexual in that. We were put on the alert by this objection, and began to turn our attention to the appearance of steps, staircases and ladders in dreams and were soon in a position to show that staircases (and analogous things) were unquestionably symbols of copulation. It is not hard to discover the basis of the comparison: we come to the top in a series of rhythmical movements and with increasing breathlessness and then, with a few rapid leaps, we can get to the bottom again. Thus the rhythmical pattern of copulation is reproduced in going upstairs. Nor must we omit to bring in the evidence of linguistic usage. It shows us that ‘mounting’ [German ‘steigen’] is used as a direct equivalent for the sexual act. We speak of a man as a ‘Steiger’ [a ‘mounter’] and of ‘nachsteigen’ [‘to run after’, literally ‘to climb after’]. In French the steps on a staircase are called ‘marches’ and ‘un vieux marcheur’ has the same meaning as our ‘ein alter Steiger’ [‘an old rake’]. The dream-material from which these newly recognized symbols are derived will in due time be put before you by the committee we are about to form for a collective study of symbolism. You will find some remarks on another interesting symbol, on ‘rescue’ and its changes in significance, in the second volume of our Jahrbuch. But I must break off here or I shall not get to my other points.

The Future Prospects Of Psycho-Analytic Therapy

2309

Every one of you will know from his own experience what a very different attitude he has towards a new case of illness when once he has thoroughly grasped the structure of a few typical cases. Imagine that we had arrived at a succinct formula of the factors regularly concerned in constructing the various forms of neuroses, as we have so far succeeded in doing for the construction of hysterical symptoms, and consider how firmly it would establish our prognostic judgement! Just as an obstetrician can tell by examining the placenta whether it has been completely expelled or whether noxious fragments of it still remain, so should we, independently of the outcome and of the patient’s condition at the moment, be able to say whether our work had been definitely successful or whether we had to expect relapses and fresh onsets of illness.

(b) I will hasten on to the innovations in the field of technique, where indeed nearly everything still awaits final settlement, and much is only now beginning to become clear. There are now two aims in psycho-analytic technique: to save the physician effort and to give the patient the most unrestricted access to his unconscious. As you know, our technique has undergone a fundamental transformation. At the time of the cathartic treatment what we aimed at was the elucidation of the symptoms; we then turned away from the symptoms and devoted ourselves instead to uncovering the ‘complexes’, to use a word which Jung has made indispensable; now, however, our work is aimed directly at finding out and overcoming the ‘resistances’, and we can justifiably rely on the complexes coming to light without difficulty as soon as the resistances have been recognized and removed. Some of you have since felt a need to be able to make a survey of these resistances and classify them. I will ask you to examine your material and see whether you can confirm the generalized statement that in male patients the most important resistances in the treatment seem to be derived from the father-complex and to express themselves in fear of the father, in defiance of the father and in disbelief of the father.

Other innovations in technique relate to the physician himself. We have become aware of the ‘counter-transference’, which arises in him as a result of the patient’s influence on his unconscious feelings, and we are almost inclined to insist that he shall recognize this counter-transference in himself and overcome it. Now that a considerable number of people are practising psycho-analysis and exchanging their observations with one another, we have noticed that no psycho-analyst goes further than his own complexes and internal resistances permit; and we consequently require that he shall begin his activity with a self-analysis and continually carry it deeper while he is making his observations on his patients. Anyone who fails to produce results in a self-analysis of this kind may at once give up any idea of being able to treat patients by analysis.

The Future Prospects Of Psycho-Analytic Therapy

2310

We are also now coming to the opinion that analytic technique must be modified in certain ways according to the nature of the disease and the dominant instinctual trends in the patient. We started out from the treatment of conversion hysteria; in anxiety hysteria (phobias) we must to some extent alter our procedure. For these patient cannot bring out the material necessary for resolving their phobia so long as they feel protected by obeying the condition which it lays down. One cannot, of course, succeed in getting them to give up their protective measures and work under the influence of anxiety from the beginning of the treatment. One must therefore help them by interpreting their unconscious to them until they can make up their minds to do without the protection of their phobia and expose themselves to a now greatly mitigated anxiety. Only after they have done so does the material become accessible, which, when it has been mastered, leads to a solution of the phobia. Other modifications of technique, which seem to me not yet ripe for discussion, will be required in the treatment of obsessional neurosis. In this connection very important questions arise, which have not hitherto been elucidated: how far the instincts which the patient is combating are to be allowed some satisfaction during the treatment, and what difference it makes whether these impulses are active (sadistic) or passive (masochistic) in their nature.

I hope you will have formed an impression that, when we know all that we now only suspect and when we have carried out all the improvements in technique to which deeper observation of our patients is bound to lead us, our medical procedure will reach a degree of precision and certainty of success which is not to be found in every specialized field of medicine.

The Future Prospects Of Psycho-Analytic Therapy

2311

(2) I have said that we had much to expect from the increase in authority which must accrue to us as time goes on. I need not say much to you about the importance of authority. Only very few civilized people are capable of existing without reliance on others or are even capable of coming to an independent opinion. You cannot exaggerate the intensity of people’s inner lack of resolution and craving for authority. The extraordinary increase in neuroses since the power of religions has waned may give you a measure of it. The impoverishment of the ego due to the large expenditure of energy on repression demanded of every individual by civilization may be one of the principal causes of this state of things.

Hitherto, this authority, with its enormous weight of suggestion, has been against us. All our therapeutic successes have been achieved in the face of this suggestion: it is surprising that any successes at all could be gained in such circumstances. I must not let myself be led into describing my agreeable experiences during the period when I alone represented psycho-analysis. I can only say that when I assured my patients that I knew how to relieve them permanently of their sufferings they looked round my modest abode, reflected on my lack of fame and title, and regarded me like the possessor of an infallible system at a gambling-resort, of whom people say that if he could do what he professes he would look very different himself. Nor was it really pleasant to carry out a psychical operation while the colleagues whose duty it should have been to assist took particular pleasure in spitting into the field of operation, and while at the first signs of blood or restlessness in the patient his relatives began threatening the operating surgeon. An operation is surely entitled to produce reactions; in surgery we became accustomed to that long ago. People simply did not believe me, just as even to-day people do not much believe any of us. Under such conditions not a few attempts were bound to fail. To estimate the increase in our therapeutic prospects when we have received general recognition, you should think of the position of a gynaecologist in Turkey and in the West. In Turkey, all he may do is to feel the pulse of all arm stretched out to him through a hole in the wall: and his medical achievements are in proportion to the inaccessibility of their object. Our opponents in the West wish to allow us much the same degree of access to our patient’s minds. But now that the force of social suggestion drives sick women to the gynaecologist, he has become their helper and saviour. I trust you will not say that the fact of the authority of society coming to our aid and increasing our successes so greatly would do nothing to prove the validity of our hypotheses - arguing as you might that, since suggestion is supposed to be able to do anything, our successes would then be successes of suggestion and not of psycho-analysis. Social suggestion is at present favourable to treating nervous patients by hydropathy, dieting and electro-therapy, but that does not enable such measures to get the better of neuroses. Time will show whether psycho-analytic treatment can accomplish more.

Now, however, I must once more damp your expectations. Society will not be in a hurry to grant us authority. It is bound to offer us resistance, for we adopt a critical attitude towards it; we point out to it that it itself plays a great part in causing neuroses. Just as we make an individual our enemy by uncovering what is repressed in him, so society cannot respond with sympathy to a relentless exposure of its injurious effects and deficiencies. Because we destroy illusions we are accused of endangering ideals. It might seem, therefore, as though the condition from which I expect such great advantages for our therapeutic prospects will never be fulfilled. And yet the situation is not so hopeless as one might think at the present time. Powerful though men’s emotions and self-interest may be, yet intellect is a power too - a power which makes itself felt, not, it is true, immediately, but all the more certainly in the end. The harshest truths are heard and recognized at last, after the interests they have injured and the emotions they have roused have exhausted their fury. It has always been so, and the unwelcome truths which we psycho-analysts have to tell the world will have the same fate. Only it will not happen very quickly; we must be able to wait.

The Future Prospects Of Psycho-Analytic Therapy

2312

(3) Finally, I have to explain to you what I mean by the ‘general effect’ of our work, and how I come to set hopes on it. What we have here is a very remarkable therapeutic constellation, the like of which is perhaps not to be found anywhere else and which will appear strange to you too at first, until you recognize in it something you have long been familiar with. You know, of course, that the psychoneuroses are substitutive satisfactions of some instinct the presence of which one is obliged to deny to oneself and others. Their capacity to exist depends on this distortion and lack of recognition. When the riddle they present is solved and the solution is accepted by the patients these diseases cease to be able to exist. There is hardly anything like this in medicine, though in fairy tales you hear of evil spirits whose power is broken as soon as you can tell them their name - the name which they have kept secret.

In place of a single sick person let us put society - suffering as a whole from neuroses, though composed of sick and healthy members; and in place of individual acceptance in the one case let us put general recognition in the other. A little reflection will then show you that this substitution cannot in any way alter the outcome. The success which the treatment can have with the individual must occur equally with the community. Sick people will not be able to let their various neuroses become known - their anxious over-tenderness which is meant to conceal their hatred, their agoraphobia which tells of disappointed ambition, their obsessive actions which represent self-reproaches for evil intentions and precautions against them - if all their relatives and every stranger from whom they wish to conceal their mental processes know the general meaning of such symptoms, and if they themselves know that in the manifestations of their illness they are producing nothing that other people cannot instantly interpret. The effect, however, will not be limited to the concealment of the symptoms which, incidentally, it is often impossible to carry out; for this necessity for concealment destroys the use of being ill. Disclosure of the secret will have attacked, at its most sensitive point, the ‘aetiological equation’ from which neuroses arise - it will have made the gain from the illness illusory; and consequently the final outcome of the changed situation brought about by the physician’s indiscretion can only be that the production of the illness will be brought to a stop.

The Future Prospects Of Psycho-Analytic Therapy

2313

If this hope seems Utopian to you, you may remember that neurotic phenomena have actually been dispelled already by this means, although only in quite isolated instances. Think how common hallucinations of the Virgin Mary used to be among peasant girls in former times. So long as such a phenomenon brought a flock of believers and might lead to a chapel being built on the sacred spot, the visionary state of these girls was inaccessible to influence. To-day even our clergy have changed their attitude to such things; they allow police and doctors to examine the visionary, and now the Virgin makes only very rare appearances.

Or let me examine these developments, which I have been describing as taking place in the future, in an analogous situation which is on a smaller scale and consequently easier to take in. Suppose a number of ladies and gentlemen in good society have planned to have a picnic one day at an inn in the country. The ladies have arranged among themselves that if one of them wants to relieve a natural need she will announce that she is going to pick flowers. Some malicious person, however, has got wind of this secret and has had printed on the programme which is sent round to the whole party: ‘Ladies who wish to retire are requested to announce that they are going to pick flowers.’ After this, of course, no lady will think of availing herself of this flowery pretext, and, in the same way, other similar formulas, which may be freshly agreed upon, will be seriously compromised. What will be the result? The ladies will admit their natural needs without shame and none of the men will object.

The Future Prospects Of Psycho-Analytic Therapy

2314

Let us return to our more serious case. A certain number of people, faced in their lives by conflicts which they have found too difficult to solve, have taken flight into neurosis and in this way won an unmistakable, although in the long run too costly, gain from illness. What will these people have to do if their flight into illness is barred by the indiscreet revelations of psycho-analysis? They will have to be honest, confess to the instincts that are at work in them, face the conflict, fight for what they want, or go without it; and the tolerance of society, which is bound to ensue as a result of psycho-analytic enlightenment, will help them in their task.

Let us remember, however, that our attitude to life ought not to be that of a fanatic for hygiene or therapy. We must admit that the ideal prevention of neurotic illnesses which we have in mind would not be of advantage to every individual. A good number of those who now take flight into illness would not, under the conditions we have assumed, support the conflict but would rapidly succumb or would cause a mischief greater than their own neurotic illness. Neuroses have in fact their biological function as a protective contrivance and they have their social justification: the ‘gain from illness’ they provide is not always a purely subjective one. Is there one of you who has not at some time looked into the causation of a neurosis and had to allow that it was the mildest possible outcome of the situation? And should such heavy sacrifices be made in order to eradicate the neuroses in particular, when the world is full of other unavoidable misery?

Are we, then, to abandon our efforts to explain the hidden meaning of neurosis as being in the last resort dangerous to the individual and harmful to the workings of society? Are we to give up drawing the practical conclusion from a piece of scientific insight? No; I think that in spite of this our duty lies in the other direction. The gain from illness provided by the neuroses is nevertheless on the whole and in the end detrimental to individuals as well as to society. The unhappiness that our work of enlightenment may cause will after all only affect some individuals. The change-over to a more realistic and creditable attitude on the part of society will not be bought too dearly by these sacrifices. But above all, all the energies which are to-day consumed in the production of neurotic symptoms serving the purposes of a world of phantasy isolated from reality, will, even if they cannot at once be put to uses in life, help to strengthen the clamour for the changes in our civilization through which alone we can look for the well-being of future generations.

The Future Prospects Of Psycho-Analytic Therapy

2315

I should therefore like to let you go with an assurance that in treating your patients psycho-analytically you are doing your duty in more senses than one. You are not merely working in the service of science, by making use of the one and only opportunity for discovering the secrets of the neuroses; you are not only giving your patients the most efficacious remedy for their sufferings that is available to-day; you are contributing your share to the enlightenment of the community from which we expect to achieve the most radical prophylaxis against neurotic disorders along the indirect path of social authority.

2316

THE ANTITHETICAL MEANING OF PRIMAL WORDS

(1910)

2317

Intentionally left blank

2318

THE ANTITHETICAL MEANING OF PRIMAL WORDS

In my Interpretation of Dreams I made a statement about one of the findings of my analytic work which I did not then understand. I will repeat it here by way of preface to this review:

‘The way in which dreams treat the category of contraries and contradictories is highly remarkable. It is simply disregarded. "No" seems not to exist so far as dreams are concerned. They show a particular preference for combining contraries into a unity or for representing them as one and the same thing. Dreams feel themselves at liberty, moreover, to represent any element by its wishful contrary; so that there is no way of deciding at a first glance whether any element that admits of a contrary is present in the dream-thoughts as a positive or as a negative.’¹

The dream-interpreters of antiquity seem to have made the most extensive use of the notion that a thing in a dream can mean its opposite. This possibility has also occasionally been recognized by modern students of dreams, in so far as they concede at all that dreams have a meaning and can be interpreted.² Nor do I think that I shall be contradicted if I assume that all who have followed me in interpreting dreams on scientific lines have found confirmation of the statement quoted above.

I did not succeed in understanding the dream-work’s singular tendency to disregard negation and to employ the same means of representation for expressing contraries until I happened by chance to read a work by the philologist Karl Abel, which was published in 1884 as a separate pamphlet and included in the following year in the author’s Sprachwissenschaftliche Abhandlungen [Philological Essays]. The subject is of sufficient interest to justify my quoting here the full text of the crucial passages in Abel’s paper (omitting, however, most of the examples). We obtain from them the astonishing information that the behaviour of the dream-work which I have just described is identical with a peculiarity in the oldest languages known to us.

¹ The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), p. 787.

² Cf. G. H. von Schubert (1814, Chapter II).

The Antithetical Meaning Of Primal Words

2319

After stressing the antiquity of the Egyptian language which must have been developed a very long time before the first hieroglyphic inscriptions, Abel goes on (1884, 4):

‘Now in the Egyptian language, this sole relic of a primitive world, there are a fair number of words with two meanings, one of which is the exact opposite of the other. Let us suppose, if such an obvious piece of nonsense can be imagined, that in German the word "strong" meant both "strong" and "weak"; that in Berlin the noun "light" was used to mean both "light" and "darkness"; that one Munich citizen called beer "beer", while another used the same word to speak of water: this is what the astonishing practice amounts to which the ancient Egyptians regularly followed in their language. How could anyone be blamed for shaking his head in disbelief? . . .’ (Examples omitted.)

(Ibid., 7): ‘In view of these and many similar cases of antithetical meaning (see the Appendix) it is beyond doubt that in one language at least there was a large number of words that denoted at once a thing and its opposite. However astonishing it may be, we are faced with the fact and have to reckon with it.’

The author goes on to reject an explanation of these circumstances which suggests that two words might happen by chance to have the same sound, and is equally firm in repudiating an attempt to refer it to the low stage of mental development in Egypt:

(Ibid., 9): ‘But Egypt was anything but a home of nonsense. On the contrary, it was one of the cradles of the development of human reason. . . . It recognized a pure and dignified morality and formulated a great part of the Ten Commandments at a time when the peoples in whose hands civilization rests to-day were in the habit of slaughtering human victims as a sacrifice to bloodthirsty idols. A people that kindled the torch of justice and culture in so dark an age cannot surely have been completely stupid in everyday speech and thought. . . . Men who were able to make glass and raise and move huge blocks by machinery must at least have possessed sufficient sense not to regard a thing as being simultaneously both itself and its opposite. How are we then to reconcile this with the fact that the Egyptians allowed themselves such a strangely contradictory language? . . . that they used to give one and the same phonetic vehicle to the most mutually inimical thoughts, and used to bind together in a kind of indissoluble union things that were in the strongest opposition to each other?’

The Antithetical Meaning Of Primal Words

2320

Before any explanation is attempted, mention must also be made of a further stage in this unintelligible behaviour of the Egyptian language. ‘Of all the eccentricities of the Egyptian vocabulary perhaps the most extraordinary feature is that, quite apart from the words that combine antithetical meanings, it possesses other compound words in which two vocables of antithetical meanings are united so as to form a compound which bears the meaning of only one of its two constituents. Thus in this extraordinary language there are not only words meaning equally "strong" or "weak", and "command" or "obey"; but there are also compounds like "old-young", "far-near", "bind-sever", "outside-inside" . . . which, in spite of combining the extremes of difference, mean only "young", "near", "bind" and "inside" respectively       So that in these compound words contradictory concepts have been quite intentionally combined, not in order to produce a third concept, as occasionally happens in Chinese, but only in order to use the compound to express the meaning of one of its contradictory parts - a part which would have had the same meaning by itself . . .’

However, the riddle is easier to solve than it appears to be. Our concepts owe their existence to comparisons. ‘If it were always light we should not be able to distinguish light from dark, and consequently we should not be able to have either the concept of light or the word for it . . .’ ‘It is clear that everything on this planet is relative and has an independent existence only in so far as it is differentiated in respect of its relations to other things . . .’ ‘Since every concept is in this way the twin of its contrary, how could it be first thought of and how could it be communicated to other people who were trying to conceive it, other than by being measured against its contrary . . .’ (Ibid., 15): ‘Since the concept of strength could not be formed except as a contrary to weakness, the word denoting "strong" contained a simultaneous recollection of "weak", as the thing by means of which it first came into existence. In reality this word denoted neither "strong" nor "weak", but the relation and difference between the two, which created both of them equally . . .’ ‘Man was not in fact able to acquire his oldest and simplest concepts except as contraries to their contraries, and only learnt by degrees to separate the two sides of an antithesis and think of one without conscious comparison with the other.’

The Antithetical Meaning Of Primal Words

2321

Since language serves not only to express one’s own thoughts but essentially to communicate them to others the question may be raised how it was that the ‘primal Egyptian’ made his neighbour understand ‘which side of the twin concept he meant on any particular occasion’. In the written language this was done with the help of the so-called ‘determinative’ signs which, placed after the alphabetical ones, assign their meaning to them and are not themselves intended to be spoken. (Ibid., 18): ‘If the Egyptian word "ken" is to mean "strong", its sound, which is written alphabetically, is followed by the picture of an upright armed man; if the same word has to express "weak", the letters which represent the sound are followed by the picture of a squatting, limp figure. The majority of other words with two meanings are similarly accompanied by explanatory pictures.’ Abel thinks that in speech the desired meaning of the spoken word was indicated by gesture.

According to Abel it is in the ‘oldest roots’ that antithetical double meanings are found to occur. In the subsequent course of the language’s development this ambiguity disappeared and, in Ancient Egyptian at any rate, all the intermediate stages can be followed, down to the unambiguousness of modern vocabularies. ‘A word that originally bore two meanings separates in the later language into two words with single meanings, in a process whereby each of the two opposed meanings takes over a particular phonetic "reduction" (modification) of the original root.’ Thus, for example, in hieroglyphics the word ‘ken’, ‘strong-weak’, already divides into ‘ken’, ‘strong’ and ‘kan’, ‘weak’. ‘In other words, the concepts which could only be arrived at by means of an antithesis became in course of time sufficiently familiar to men’s minds to make an independent existence possible for each of their two parts and accordingly to enable a separate phonetic representative to be formed for each part.

The Antithetical Meaning Of Primal Words

2322

Proof of the existence of contradictory primal meanings, which is easily established in Egyptian, extends, according to Abel, to the Semitic and Indo-European languages as well. ‘How far this may happen in other language-groups remains to be seen; for although antithesis must have been present originally to the thinking minds of every race, it need not necessarily have become recognizable or have been retained everywhere in the meanings of words.’

Abel further calls attention to the fact that the philosopher Bain, apparently without knowledge that the phenomenon actually existed, claimed this double meaning of words on purely theoretical grounds as a logical necessity. The passage in question¹ begins with these sentences:

‘The essential relativity of all knowledge, thought or consciousness cannot but show itself in language. If everything that we can know is viewed as a transition from something else, every experience must have two sides; and either every name must have a double meaning, or else for every meaning there must be two names.’

From the ‘Appendix of Examples of Egyptian, Indo-Germanic and Arabic Antithetical Meanings’ I select a few instances which may impress even those of us who are not experts in philology. In Latin ‘altus’ means ‘high’ and ‘deep’, ‘sacer’ ‘sacred’ and ‘accursed’; here accordingly we have the complete antithesis in meaning without any modification of the sound of the word. Phonetic alteration to distinguish contraries is illustrated by examples like ‘clamare’ (‘to cry’) - ‘clam’ (‘softly’, ‘secretly’); ‘siccus’ (‘dry’) - ‘succus’ (‘juice’). In German ‘Boden’ [‘garret’ or ‘ground’] still means the highest as well as the lowest thing in the house. Our ‘bös’ (‘bad’) is matched by a word ‘bass’ (‘good’); in Old Saxon ‘bat’ (‘good’) corresponds to the English ‘bad’, and the English ‘to lock’ to the German ‘Lücke’,’Loch’ [‘hole’]. We can compare the German ‘kleben’ [‘to stick’] with the English ‘to cleave’ (‘to split’); the German words ‘stumm’ [‘dumb’] and ‘Stimme’ [‘voice’], and so on. In this way perhaps even the much derided derivation lucus a non lucendo² would have some sense in it.

¹ Bain (1870, 1, 54).

² [‘Lucus’ (Latin for ‘a grove’) is said to be derived from ‘lucere’ (‘to shine’) because it does not shine there. (Attributed to Quintilian.)]

The Antithetical Meaning Of Primal Words

2323

In his essay on ‘The Origin of Language’ Abel (1885, 305) calls attention to further traces of ancient difficulties in thinking. Even to-day the Englishman in order to express ‘ohne’ says ‘without’ (‘mitohne’ [‘with-without’] in German), and the East Prussian does the same. The word ‘with’ itself, which to-day corresponds to the German ‘mit’, originally meant ‘without’ as well as ‘with’, as can be recognized from ‘withdraw and ‘withhold’. The same transformation can be seen in the German ‘wider’ (‘against’) and ‘wieder’ (‘together with’).

For comparison with the dream-work there is another extremely strange characteristic of the ancient Egyptian language which is significant. ‘In Egyptian, words can - apparently, we will say to begin with - reverse their sound as well as their sense. Let us suppose that the German word "gut" ["good"] was Egyptian: it could then mean "bad" as well as "good", and be pronounced "tug" as well as "gut". Numerous examples of such reversals of sound, which are too frequent to be explained as chance occurrences, can be produced from the Aryan and Semitic languages as well. Confining ourselves in the first instance to Germanic languages we may note: Topf [pot] - pot; boat - tub; wait - täuwen [tarry]; hurry - Ruhe [rest]; care - reck; Balken [beam] - Klobe [log], club. If we take the other Indo-Germanic languages into consideration, the number of relevant instances grows accordingly; for example, capere [Latin for "take"] - packen [German for "seize"]; ren [Latin for "kidney"] - Niere [German for "kidney"]; leaf - folium [Latin for "leaf"]; dum-a [Russian for "thought"], q υμός [Greek for "spirit", "courage"] - mêdh, mûdha [Sanscrit for "mind"], Mut [German for "courage"]; rauchen [German for "to smoke"] - Kur-ít [Russian for "to smoke"]; kreischen [German for "to shriek"] - to shriek, etc.’

Abel tries to explain the phenomenon of reversal of sound as a doubling or reduplication of the root. Here we should find some difficulty in following the philologist. We remember in this connection how fond children are of playing at reversing the sound of words and how frequently the dream-work makes use of a reversal of the representational material for various purposes. (Here it is no longer letters but images whose order is reversed.) We should therefore be more inclined to derive reversal of sound from a factor of deeper origin.¹

In the correspondence between the peculiarity of the dream-work mentioned at the beginning of the paper and the practice discovered by philology in the oldest languages, we may see a confirmation of the view we have formed about the regressive, archaic character of the expression of thoughts in dreams. And we psychiatrists cannot escape the suspicion that we should be better at understanding and translating the language of dreams if we knew more about the development of language.²

¹ For the phenomenon of reversal of sound (metathesis), which it perhaps even more intimately related to the dream-work than are contradictory meanings (antithesis), compare also Meyer-Rinteln (1909).

² It is plausible to suppose, too, that the original antithetical meaning of words exhibits the ready-made mechanism which is exploited for various purposes by slips of the tongue that result in the opposite being said.

2324

A SPECIAL TYPE OF CHOICE OF OBJECT MADE BY MEN

(CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LOVE I)

(1910)

2325

Intentionally left blank

2326

A SPECIAL TYPE OF CHOICE OF OBJECT MADE BY MEN

(CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LOVE I)

Up till now we have left it to the creative writer to depict for us the ‘necessary conditions for loving’ which govern people’s choice of an object, and the way in which they bring the demands of their imagination into harmony with reality. The writer can indeed draw on certain qualities which fit him to carry out such a task: above all, on a sensitivity that enables him to perceive the hidden impulses in the minds of other people, and the courage to let his own unconscious speak. But there is one circumstance which lessens the evidential value of what he has to say. Writers are under the necessity to produce intellectual and aesthetic pleasure, as well as certain emotional effects. For this reason they cannot reproduce the stuff of reality unchanged, but must isolate portions of it, remove disturbing associations, tone down the whole and fill in what is missing. These are the privileges of what is known as ‘poetic licence’. Moreover they can show only slight interest in the origin and development of the mental states which they portray in their completed form. In consequence it becomes inevitable that science should concern herself with the same materials whose treatment by artists has given enjoyment to mankind for thousands of years, though her touch must be clumsier and the yield of pleasure less. These observations will, it may be hoped, serve to justify us in extending a strictly scientific treatment to the field of human love. Science is, after all, the most complete renunciation of the pleasure principle of which our mental activity is capable.

A Special Type Of Choice Of Object Made By Men

2327

In the course of psycho-analytic treatment there are ample opportunities for collecting impressions of the way in which neurotics behave in love; while at the same time we can recall having observed or heard of similar behaviour in people of average health or even in those with outstanding qualities. When the material happens to be favourable and thus leads to an accumulation of such impressions, distinct types emerge more clearly. I will begin here with a description of one such type of object-choice - which occurs in men - since it is characterized by a number of ‘necessary conditions for loving’ whose combination is unintelligible, and indeed bewildering, and since it admits of a simple explanation on psycho-analytic lines.

(1) The first of these preconditions for loving can be described as positively specific: wherever it is found, the presence of the other characteristics of this type may be looked for. It may be termed the precondition that there should be ‘an injured third party’; it stipulates that the person in question shall never choose as his love-object a woman who is disengaged - that is, an unmarried girl or an unattached married woman - but only one to whom another man can claim right of possession as her husband, fiancé or friend. In some cases this precondition proves so cogent that a woman can be ignored, or even rejected, so long as she does not belong to any man, but becomes the object of passionate feelings immediately she comes into one of these relationships with another man.

(2) The second precondition is perhaps a less constant one, but it is no less striking. It has to be found in conjunction with the first for the type to be realized, whereas the first precondition seems very often to occur independently as well. This second precondition is to the effect that a woman who is chaste and whose reputation is irreproachable never exercises an attraction that might raise her to the status of a love-object, but only a woman who is in some way or other of bad repute sexually, whose fidelity and reliability are open to some doubt. This latter characteristic may vary within substantial limits, from the faint breath of scandal attaching to a married woman who is not averse to a flirtation up to the openly promiscuous way of life of a cocotte or of an adept in the art of love; but the men who belong to our type will not be satisfied without something of the kind. This second necessary condition may be termed, rather crudely, ‘love for a prostitute’.

A Special Type Of Choice Of Object Made By Men

2328

While the first precondition provides an opportunity for gratifying impulses of rivalry and hostility directed at the man from whom the loved woman is wrested, the second one, that of the woman’s being like a prostitute, is connected with the experiencing of jealousy which appears to be a necessity for lovers of this type. It is only when they are able to be jealous that their passion reaches its height and the woman acquires her full value, and they never fail to seize on an occasion that allows them to experience these most powerful emotions. What is strange is that it is not the lawful possessor of the loved one who becomes the target of this jealousy, but strangers, making their appearance for the first time, in relation to whom the loved one can be brought under suspicion. In glaring instances the lover shows no wish for exclusive possession of the woman and seems to be perfectly comfortable in the triangular situation. One of my patients, who had been made to suffer terribly by his lady’s escapades, had no objection to her getting married, and did all he could to bring it about; in the years that followed he never showed a trace of jealousy towards her husband. Another typical patient had, it is true, been very jealous of the husband in his first love affair, and had forced the lady to stop having marital relations; but in his numerous subsequent affairs he behaved like the other members of this type and no longer regarded the lawful husband as an interference.

So much for the conditions required in the love-object. The following points describe the lover’s behaviour towards the object he has chosen.

(3) In normal love the woman’s value is measured by her sexual integrity, and is reduced by any approach to the characteristic of being like a prostitute [German Dirne]. Hence the fact that women with this characteristic are considered by men of our type to be love-objects of the highest value seems to be a striking departure from the normal. Their love-relationships with these women are carried on with the highest expenditure of mental energy, to the exclusion of all other interests; they are felt as the only people whom it is possible to love, and the demand for fidelity which the lover makes upon himself is repeated again and again, however often it may be broken in reality. These features of the love-relationships which I am here describing show their compulsive nature very clearly, though that is something which is found up to a certain degree whenever anyone falls in love. But the fidelity and intensity that mark the attachment must not lead one to expect that a single love-relationship of this kind will make up the whole erotic life of the person in question or occur only once in it. On the contrary, passionate attachments of this sort are repeated with the same peculiarities - each an exact replica of the others - again and again in the lives of men of this type; in fact, owing to external events such as changes of residence and environment, the love-objects may replace one another so frequently that a long series of them is formed.

A Special Type Of Choice Of Object Made By Men

2329

(4) What is most startling of all to the observer in lovers of this type is the urge they show to ‘rescue’ the woman they love. The man is convinced that she is in need of him, that without him she would lose all moral control and rapidly sink to a lamentable level. He rescues her, therefore, by not giving her up. In some individual cases the idea of having to rescue her can be justified by reference to her sexual unreliability and the dangers of her social position: but it is no less conspicuous where there is no such basis in reality. One man of the type I am describing, who knew how to win his ladies by clever methods of seduction and subtle arguments, spared no efforts in the subsequent course of these affairs to keep the woman he was for the time being in love with on the path of ‘virtue’ by presenting her with tracts of his own composition.

If we survey the different features of the picture presented here - the conditions imposed on the man that his loved one should not be unattached and should be like a prostitute, the high value he sets on her, his need for feeling jealousy, his fidelity, which is nevertheless compatible with being broken down into a long series of instances, and the urge to rescue the woman - it will seem scarcely probable that they should all be derived from a single source. Yet psycho-analytic exploration into the life-histories of men of this type has no difficulty in showing that there is such a single source. The object-choice which is so strangely conditioned, and this very singular way of behaving in love, have the same psychical origin as we find in the loves of normal people. They are derived from the infantile fixation of tender feelings on the mother, and represent one of the consequences of that fixation. In normal love only a few characteristics survive which reveal unmistakably the maternal prototype of the object-choice, as, for instance, the preference shown by young men for maturer women; the detachment of libido from the mother has been effected relatively swiftly. In our type, on the other hand, the libido has remained attached to the mother for so long, even after the onset of puberty, that the maternal characteristics remain stamped on the love-objects that are chosen later, and all these turn into easily recognizable mother-surrogates. The comparison with the way in which the skull of a newly born child is shaped springs to mind at this point: after a protracted labour it always takes the form of a cast of the narrow part of the mother’s pelvis.

A Special Type Of Choice Of Object Made By Men

2330

We have now to show the plausibility of our assertion that the characteristic features of our type - its conditions for loving and its behaviour in love - do in fact arise from the psychical constellation connected with the mother. This would seem to be easiest where the first precondition is concerned - the condition that the woman should not be unattached, or that there should be an injured third party. It is at once clear that for the child who is growing up in the family circle the fact of the mother belonging to the father becomes an inseparable part of the mother’s essence, and that the injured third party is none other than the father himself. The trait of overvaluing the loved one, and regarding her as unique and irreplaceable, can be seen to fall just as naturally into the context of the child’s experience, for no one possesses more than one mother, and the relation to her is based on an event that is not open to any doubt and cannot be repeated.

If we are to understand the love-objects chosen by our type as being above all mother-surrogates, then the formation of a series of them, which seems so flatly to contradict the condition of being faithful to one, can now also be understood. We have learnt from psycho-analysis in other examples that the notion of something irreplaceable, when it is active in the unconscious, frequently appears as broken up into an endless series: endless for the reason that every surrogate nevertheless fails to provide the desired satisfaction. This is the explanation of the insatiable urge to ask questions shown by children at a certain age: they have one single question to ask, but it never crosses their lips. It explains, too, the garrulity of some people affected by neurosis; they are under the pressure of a secret which is burning to be disclosed but which, despite all temptation, they never reveal.

A Special Type Of Choice Of Object Made By Men

2331

On the other hand the second precondition for loving - the condition that the object chosen should be like a prostitute - seems energetically to oppose a derivation from the mother complex. The adult’s conscious thought likes to regard his mother as a person of unimpeachable moral purity; and there are few ideas which he finds so offensive when they come from others, or feels as so tormenting when they spring from his own mind, as one which calls this aspect of his mother in question. This very relation of the sharpest contrast between ‘mother’ and ‘prostitute’ will however encourage us to enquire into the history of the development of these two complexes and the unconscious relation between them, since we long ago discovered that what, in the conscious, is found split into a pair of opposites often occurs in the unconscious as a unity. Investigation then leads us back to the time in a boy’s life at which he first gains a more or less complete knowledge of the sexual relations between adults, somewhere about the years of pre-puberty. Brutal pieces of information, which are undisguisedly intended to arouse contempt and rebelliousness, now acquaint him with the secret of sexual life and destroy the authority of adults, which appears incompatible with the revelation of their sexual activities. The aspect of these disclosures which affects the newly initiated child most strongly is the way in which they apply to his own parents. This application is often flatly rejected by him, in some such words as these: ‘Your parents and other people may do something like that with one another, but my parents can’t possibly do it.

A Special Type Of Choice Of Object Made By Men

2332

As an almost invariable corollary to this sexual enlightenment, the boy at the same time gains a knowledge of the existence of certain women who practise sexual intercourse as a means of livelihood, and who are for this reason held in general contempt. The boy himself is necessarily far from feeling this contempt: as soon as he learns that he too can be initiated by these unfortunates into sexual life, which till then he accepted as being reserved exclusively for ‘grown-ups’, he regards them only with a mixture of longing and horror. When after this he can no longer maintain the doubt which makes his parents an exception to the universal and odious norms of sexual activity, he tells himself with cynical logic that the difference between his mother and a whore is not after all so very great, since basically they do the same thing. The enlightening information he has received has in fact awakened the memory-traces of the impressions and wishes of his early infancy, and these have led to a reactivation in him of certain mental impulses. He begins to desire his mother herself in the sense with which he has recently become acquainted, and to hate his father anew as a rival who stands in the way of this wish; he comes, as we say, under the dominance of the Oedipus complex. He does not forgive his mother for having granted the favour of sexual intercourse not to himself but to his father, and he regards it as an act of unfaithfulness. If these impulses do not quickly pass, there is no outlet for them other than to run their course in phantasies which have as their subject his mother’s sexual activities under the most diverse circumstances; and the consequent tension leads particularly readily to his finding relief in masturbation. As a result of the constant combined operation of the two driving forces, desire and thirst for revenge, phantasies of his mother’s unfaithfulness are by far the most preferred; the lover with whom she commits her act of infidelity almost always exhibits the features of the boy’s own ego, or more accurately, of his own idealized personality, grown up and so raised to a level with his father. What I have elsewhere¹ described as the ‘family romance’ comprises the manifold ramifications of this imaginative activity and the way in which they are interwoven with various egoistic interests of this period of life.

¹ In Rank’s The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1909).

A Special Type Of Choice Of Object Made By Men

2333

Now that we have gained an insight into this piece of mental development we can no longer regard it as contradictory and incomprehensible that the precondition of the loved one’s being like a prostitute should derive directly from the mother complex. The type of male love which we have described bears the traces of this evolution and is simple to understand as a fixation on the phantasies formed by the boy in puberty - phantasies which have later after all found a way out into real life. There is no difficulty in assuming that the masturbation assiduously practised in the years of puberty has played its part in the fixation of the phantasies.

To these phantasies which have succeeded in dominating the man’s love in real life, the urge to rescue the loved one seems to bear merely a loose and superficial relation, and one that is fully accounted for by conscious reasons. By her propensity to be fickle and unfaithful the loved one brings herself into dangerous situations, and thus it is understandable that the lover should be at pains to protect her from these dangers by watching over her virtue and counteracting her bad inclinations. However, the study of people’s screen-memories, phantasies and nocturnal dreams shows that we have here a particularly felicitous ‘rationalization’ of an unconscious motive, a process which may be compared to a successful secondary revision of a dream. In actual fact the ‘rescue-motif’ has a meaning and history of its own, and is an independent derivative of the mother-complex, or more accurately, of the parental complex. When a child hears that he owes his life to his parents, or that his mother gave him life, his feelings of tenderness unite with impulses which strive at power and independence, and they generate the wish to return this gift to the parents and to repay them with one of equal value. It is as though the boy’s defiance were to make him say: ‘I want nothing from my father; I will give him back all I have cost him.’ He then forms the phantasy of rescuing his father from danger and saving his life; in this way he puts his account square with him. This phantasy is commonly enough displaced on to the emperor, king or some other great man; after being thus distorted it becomes admissible to consciousness, and may even be made use of by creative writers. In its application to a boy’s father it is the defiant meaning in the idea of rescuing which is by far the most important; where his mother is concerned it is usually its tender meaning. The mother gave the child life, and it is not easy to find a substitute, of equal value for this unique gift. With a slight change of meaning, such as is easily effected in the unconscious and is comparable to the way in which in consciousness concepts shade into one another, rescuing his mother takes on the significance of giving her a child or making a child for her - needless to say, one like himself. This is not too remote from the original sense of rescuing, and the change in meaning is not an arbitrary one. His mother gave him a life - his own life - and in exchange he gives her another life, that of a child which has the greatest resemblance to himself. The son shows his gratitude by wishing to have by his mother a son who is like himself: in other words, in the rescue-phantasy he is completely identifying himself with his father. All his instincts, those of tenderness, gratitude, lustfulness, defiance and independence, find satisfaction in the single wish to be his own father. Even the element of danger has not been lost in the change of meaning; for the act of birth itself is the danger from which he was saved by his mother’s efforts. Birth is both the first of all dangers to life and the prototype of all the later ones that cause us to feel anxiety, and the experience of birth has probably left behind in us the expression of affect which we call anxiety. Macduff of the Scottish legend, who was not born of his mother but ripped from her womb, was for that reason unacquainted with anxiety.

A Special Type Of Choice Of Object Made By Men

2334

Artemidorus, the dream-interpreter of antiquity, was certainly right in maintaining that the meaning of a dream depends on who the dreamer happens to be. Under the laws governing the expression of unconscious thoughts, the meaning of rescuing may vary, depending on whether the author of the phantasy is a man or a woman. It can equally mean (in a man) making a child, i.e. causing it to be born, or (in a woman) giving birth oneself to a child. These various meanings of rescuing in dreams and phantasies can be recognized particularly clearly when they are found in connection with water. A man rescuing a woman from the water in a dream means that he makes her a mother, which in the light of the preceding discussion amounts to making her his own mother. A woman rescuing someone else (a child) from the water acknowledges herself in this way as the mother who bore him, like Pharoah’s daughter in the legend of Moses (Rank, 1909). At times there is also a tender meaning contained in rescue-phantasies directed towards the father. In such cases they aim at expressing the subject’s wish to have his father as a son - that is, to have a son who is like his father.

It is on account of all these connections between the rescue-motif and the parental complex that the urge to rescue the loved one forms an important feature of the type of loving which I have been discussing.

I do not feel that it is necessary for me to justify my method of work on this subject; as in my presentation of anal erotism, so here too I have in the first place aimed at singling out from the observational material extreme and sharply defined types. In both cases we find a far greater number of individuals in whom only a few features of the type can be recognized, or only features which are not distinctly marked, and it is obvious that a proper appreciation of these types will not be possible until the whole context to which they belong has been explored.

2335

ON THE UNIVERSAL TENDENCY TO DEBASEMENT IN THE SPHERE OF LOVE

(CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LOVE II)

(1912)

2336

Intentionally left blank

2337

ON THE UNIVERSAL TENDENCY TO DEBASEMENT IN THE SPHERE OF LOVE

(CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LOVE II)

I

If the practising psycho-analyst asks himself on account of what disorder people most often come to him for help, he is bound to reply - disregarding the many forms of anxiety - that it is psychical impotence. This singular disturbance affects men of strongly libidinous natures, and manifests itself in a refusal by the executive organs of sexuality to carry out the sexual act, although before and after they may show themselves to be intact and capable of performing the act, and although a strong psychical inclination to carry it out is present. The first clue to understanding his condition is obtained by the sufferer himself on making the discovery that a failure of this kind only arises when the attempt is made with certain individuals; whereas with others there is never any question of such a failure. He now becomes aware that it is some feature of the sexual object which gives rise to the inhibition of his male potency, and sometimes he reports that he has a feeling of an obstacle inside him, the sensation of a counter-will which successfully interferes with his conscious intention. However, he is unable to guess what this internal obstacle is and what feature of the sexual object brings it into operation. If he has had repeated experience of a failure of this kind, he is likely, by the familiar process of ‘erroneous connection’, to decide that the recollection of the first occasion evoked the disturbing anxiety-idea and so caused the failure to be repeated each time; while he derives the first occasion itself from some ‘accidental’ impression.

On The Universal Tendency To Debasement In The Sphere Of Love

2338

Psycho-analytic studies of psychical impotence have already been carried out and published by several writers.¹ Every analyst can confirm the explanations provided by them from his own clinical experience. It is in fact a question of the inhibitory influence of certain psychical complexes which are withdrawn from the subject’s knowledge. An incestuous fixation on mother or sister, which has never been surmounted, plays a prominent part in this pathogenic material and is its most universal content. In addition there is the influence to be considered of accidental distressing impressions connected with infantile sexual activity, and also those factors which in a general way reduce the libido that is to be directed on to the female sexual object.²

When striking cases of psychical impotence are exhaustively investigated by means of psycho-analysis, the following information is obtained about the psychosexual processes at work in them. Here again - as very probably in all neurotic disturbances - the foundation of the disorder is provided by an inhibition in the developmental history of the libido before it assumes the form which we take to be its normal termination. Two currents whose union is necessary to ensure a completely normal attitude in love have, in the cases we are considering, failed to combine. These two may be distinguished as the affectionate and the sensual current.

The affectionate current is the older of the two. It springs from the earliest years of childhood; it is formed on the basis of the interests of the self-preservative instinct and is directed to the members of the family and those who look after the child. From the very beginning it carries along with it contributions from the sexual instincts - components of erotic interest - which can already be seen more or less clearly even in childhood and in any event are uncovered in neurotics by psycho-analysis later on. It corresponds to the child’s primary object-choice. We learn in this way that the sexual instincts find their first objects by attaching themselves to the valuations made by the ego-instincts, precisely in the way in which the first sexual satisfactions are experienced in attachment to the bodily functions necessary for the preservation of life. The ‘affection’ shown by the child’s parents and those who look after him, which seldom fails to betray its erotic nature (‘the child is an erotic plaything’), does a very great deal to raise the contributions made by erotism to the cathexes of his ego-instincts, and to increase them to an amount which is bound to play a part in his later development, especially when certain other circumstances lend their support.

¹ Steiner (1907), Stekel (1908), Ferenczi (1908).

² Stekel (1908, 191 ff.).

On The Universal Tendency To Debasement In The Sphere Of Love

2339

These affectionate fixations of the child persist throughout childhood, and continually carry along with them erotism, which is consequently diverted from its sexual aims. Then at the age of puberty they are joined by the powerful ‘sensual’ current which no longer mistakes its aims. It never fails, apparently, to follow the earlier paths and to cathect the objects of the primary infantile choice with quotas of libido that are now far stronger. Here, however, it runs up against the obstacles that have been erected in the meantime by the barrier against incest; consequently it will make efforts to pass on from these objects which are unsuitable in reality, and find a way as soon as possible to other, extraneous objects with which a real sexual life may be carried on. These new objects will still be chosen on the model (imago) of the infantile ones, but in the course of time they will attract to themselves the affection that was tied to the earlier ones. A man shall leave his father and his mother - according to the biblical command - and shall cleave unto his wife; affection and sensuality are then united. The greatest intensity of sensual passion will bring with it the highest psychical valuation of the object - this being the normal overvaluation of the sexual object on the part of a man.

Two factors will decide whether this advance in the developmental path of the libido is to fail. First, there is the amount of frustration in reality, which opposes the new object-choice and reduces its value for the person concerned. There is after all no point in embarking upon an object-choice if no choice is to be allowed at all or if there is no prospect of being able to choose anything suitable. Secondly, there is the amount of attraction which the infantile objects that have to be relinquished are able to exercise, and which is in proportion to the erotic cathexis attaching to them in childhood. If these two factors are sufficiently strong, the general mechanism by which the neuroses are formed comes into operation. The libido turns away from reality, is taken over by imaginative activity (the process of introversion), strengthens the images of the first sexual objects and becomes fixated to them. The obstacle raised against incest, however, compels the libido that has turned to these objects to remain in the unconscious. The masturbatory activity carried out by the sensual current, which is now part of the unconscious, makes its own contribution in strengthening this fixation. Nothing is altered in this state of affairs if the advance which has miscarried in reality is now completed in phantasy, and if in the phantasy-situations that lead to masturbatory satisfaction the original sexual objects are replaced by different ones. As a result of this substitution the phantasies become admissible to consciousness, but no progress is made in the allocation of the libido in reality. In this way it can happen that the whole of a young man’s sensuality becomes tied to incestuous objects in the unconscious, or to put it another way, becomes fixated to unconscious incestuous phantasies. The result is then total impotence, which is perhaps further ensured by the simultaneous onset of an actual weakening of the organs that perform the sexual act.

On The Universal Tendency To Debasement In The Sphere Of Love

2340

Less severe conditions are required to bring about the state known specifically as psychical impotence. Here the fate of the sensual current must not be that its whole charge has to conceal itself behind the affectionate current; it must have remained sufficiently strong or uninhibited to secure a partial outlet into reality. The sexual activity of such people shows the clearest signs, however, that it has not the whole psychical driving force of the instinct behind it. It is capricious, easily disturbed, often not properly carried out, and not accompanied by much pleasure. But above all it is forced to avoid the affectionate current. A restriction has thus been placed on object-choice. The sensual current that has remained active seeks only objects which do not recall the incestuous figures forbidden to it;  if someone makes an impression that might lead to a high psychical estimation of her, this impression does not find an issue in any sensual excitation but in affection which has no erotic effect. The whole sphere of love in such people remains divided in the two directions personified in art as sacred and profane (or animal) love. Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love. They seek objects which they do not need to love, in order to keep their sensuality away from the objects they love; and, in accordance with the laws of ‘complexive sensitiveness’ and of the return of the repressed, the strange failure shown in psychical impotence makes its appearance whenever an object which has been chosen with the aim of avoiding incest recalls the prohibited object through some feature, often an inconspicuous one.

The main protective measure against such a disturbance which men have recourse to in this split in their love consists in a psychical debasement of the sexual object, the overvaluation that normally attaches to the sexual object being reserved for the incestuous object and its representatives. As soon as the condition of debasement is fulfilled, sensuality can be freely expressed, and important sexual capacities and a high degree of pleasure can develop. There is a further factor which contributes to this result. People in whom there has not been a proper confluence of the affectionate and the sensual currents do not usually show much refinement in their modes of behaviour in love; they have retained perverse sexual aims whose non-fulfilment is felt as a serious loss of pleasure, and whose fulfilment on the other hand seems possible only with a debased and despised sexual object.

We can now understand the motives behind the boy’s phantasies mentioned in the first of these ‘Contributions’ (above, p. 2331), which degrade the mother to the level of a prostitute. They are efforts to bridge the gulf between the two currents in love, at any rate in phantasy, and by debasing the mother to acquire her as an object of sensuality.

On The Universal Tendency To Debasement In The Sphere Of Love

2341

2

In the preceding section we have approached the study of psychical impotence from a medico-psychological angle of which the title of this paper gives no indication. It will how ever become clear that this introduction was required by us to provide an approach to our proper subject.

We have reduced psychical impotence to the failure of the affectionate and the sensual currents in love to combine, and this developmental inhibition has in turn been explained as being due to the influences of strong childhood fixations and of later frustration in reality through the intervention of the barrier against incest. There is one principal objection to the theory we advance; it does too much. It explains why certain people suffer from psychical impotence, but it leaves us with the apparent mystery of how others have been able to escape this disorder. Since we must recognize that all the relevant factors known to us - the strong childhood fixation, the incest-barrier and the frustration in the years of development after puberty - are to be found in practically all civilized human beings, we should be justified in expecting psychical impotence to be a universal affliction under civilization and not a disorder confined to some individuals.

It would be easy to escape from this conclusion by pointing to the quantitative factor in the causation of illness - to the greater or lesser extent of the contribution made by the various elements which determine whether a recognizable illness results or not. But although I accept this answer as correct, it is not my intention to make it a reason for rejecting the conclusion itself. On the contrary, I shall put forward the view that psychical impotence is much more widespread than is supposed, and that a certain amount of this behaviour does in fact characterize the love of civilized man.

If the concept of psychical impotence is broadened and is not restricted to failure to perform the act of coitus in circumstances where a desire to obtain pleasure is present and the genital apparatus is intact, we may in the first place add all those men who are described as psychanaesthetic: men who never fail in the act but who carry it out without getting any particular pleasure from it - a state of affairs that is more common than one would think. Psycho-analytic examination of such cases discloses the same aetiological factors as we found in psychical impotence in the narrower sense, without at first arriving at any explanation of the difference between their symptoms. An easily justifiable analogy takes one from these anaesthetic men to the immense number of frigid women; and there is no better way to describe or understand their behaviour in love than by comparing it with the more conspicuous disorder of psychical impotence in men.¹

¹ I am at the same time very willing to admit that frigidity in women s a complex subject which can also be approached from another angle.

On The Universal Tendency To Debasement In The Sphere Of Love

2342

If however we turn our attention not to an extension of the concept of psychical impotence, but to the gradations in its symptomatology, we cannot escape the conclusion that the behaviour in love of men in the civilized world to-day bears the stamp altogether of psychical impotence. There are only a very few educated people in whom the two currents of affection and sensuality have become properly fused; the man almost always feels his respect for the woman acting as a restriction on his sexual activity, and only develops full potency when he is with a debased sexual object; and this in its turn is partly caused by the entrance of perverse components into his sexual aims, which he does not venture to satisfy with a woman he respects. He is assured of complete sexual pleasure only when he can devote himself unreservedly to obtaining satisfaction, which with his well-brought-up wife, for instance, he does not dare to do. This is the source of his need for a debased sexual object, a woman who is ethically inferior, to whom he need attribute no aesthetic scruples, who does not know him in his other social relations and cannot judge him in them. It is to such a woman that he prefers to devote his sexual potency, even when the whole of his affection belongs to a woman of a higher kind. It is possible, too, that the tendency so often observed in men of the highest classes of society to choose a woman of a lower class as a permanent mistress or even as a wife is nothing but a consequence of their need for a debased sexual object, to whom, psychologically, the possibility of complete satisfaction is linked.

On The Universal Tendency To Debasement In The Sphere Of Love

2343

I do not hesitate to make the two factors at work in psychical impotence in the strict sense - the factors of intense incestuous fixation in childhood and the frustration by reality in adolescence - responsible, too, for this extremely common characteristic of the love of civilized men. It sounds not only disagreeable but also paradoxical, yet it must nevertheless be said that anyone who is to be really free and happy in love must have surmounted his respect for women and have come to terms with the idea of incest with his mother or sister. Anyone who subjects himself to a serious self-examination on the subject of this requirement will be sure to find that he regards the sexual act basically as something degrading, which defiles and pollutes not only the body. The origin of this low opinion, which he will certainly not willingly acknowledge, must be looked for in the period of his youth in which the sensual current in him was already strongly developed but its satisfaction with an object outside the family was almost as completely prohibited as it was with an incestuous one.

In our civilized world women are under the influence of a similar after-effect of their upbringing, and, in addition, of their reaction to men’s behaviour. It is naturally just as unfavourable for a woman if a man approaches her without his full potency as it is if his initial overvaluation of her when he is in love gives place to undervaluation after he has possessed her. In the case of women there is little sign of a need to debase their sexual object. This is no doubt connected with the absence in them as a rule of anything similar to the sexual overvaluation found in men. But their long holding back from sexuality and the lingering of their sensuality in phantasy has another important consequence for them. They are subsequently often unable to undo the connection between sensual activity and the prohibition, and prove to be psychically impotent, that is, frigid, when such activity is at last allowed them. This is the origin of the endeavour made by many women to keep even legitimate relations secret for a while; and of the capacity of other women for normal sensation as soon as the condition of prohibition is re-established by a secret love affair: unfaithful to their husband, they are able to keep a second order of faith with their lover.

On The Universal Tendency To Debasement In The Sphere Of Love

2344

The condition of forbiddenness in the erotic life of women is, I think, comparable to the need on the part of men to debase their sexual object. Both are consequences of the long period of delay, which is demanded by education for cultural reasons, between sexual maturity and sexual activity. Both aim at abolishing the psychical impotence that results from the failure of affectionate and sensual impulses to coalesce. That the effect of the same causes should be so different in men and in women may perhaps be traced to another difference in the behaviour of the two sexes. Civilized women do not usually transgress the prohibition on sexual activity in the period during which they have to wait, and thus they acquire the intimate connection between prohibition and sexuality. Men usually break through this prohibition if they can satisfy the condition of debasing the object, and so they carry on this condition into their love in later life.

In view of the strenuous efforts being made in the civilized world to-day to reform sexual life, it will not be superfluous to give a reminder that psycho-analytic research is as remote from tendentiousness as any other kind of research. It has no other end in view than to throw light on things by tracing what is manifest back to what is hidden. It is quite satisfied if reforms make use of its findings to replace what is injurious by something more advantageous; but it cannot predict whether other institutions may not result in other, and perhaps graver, sacrifices.

3

The fact that the curb put upon love by civilization involves a universal tendency to debase sexual objects will perhaps lead us to turn our attention from the object to the instincts themselves. The damage caused by the initial frustration of sexual pleasure is seen in the fact that the freedom later given to that pleasure in marriage does not bring full satisfaction. But at the same time, if sexual freedom is unrestricted from the outset the result is no better. It can easily be shown that the psychical value of erotic needs is reduced as soon as their satisfaction becomes easy. An obstacle is required in order to heighten libido; and where natural resistances to satisfaction have not been sufficient men have at all times erected conventional ones so as to be able to enjoy love. This is true both of individuals and of nations. In times in which there were no difficulties standing in the way of sexual satisfaction, such as perhaps during the decline of the ancient civilizations, love became worthless and life empty, and strong reaction-formations were required to restore indispensable affective values. In this connection it may be claimed that the ascetic current in Christianity created psychical values for love which pagan antiquity was never able to confer on it. This current assumed its greatest importance with the ascetic monks, whose lives were almost entirely occupied with the struggle against libidinal temptation.

On The Universal Tendency To Debasement In The Sphere Of Love

2345

One’s first inclination is no doubt to trace back the difficulties revealed here to universal characteristics of our organic instincts. It is no doubt also true in general that the psychical importance of an instinct rises in proportion to its frustration. Suppose a number of totally different human beings were all equally exposed to hunger. As their imperative need for food mounted, all the individual differences would disappear and in their place one would see the uniform manifestations of the one unappeased instinct. But is it also true that with the satisfaction of an instinct its psychical value always falls just as sharply? Consider, for example, the relation of a drinker to wine. Is it not true that wine always provides the drinker with the same toxic satisfaction, which in poetry has so often been compared to erotic satisfaction - a comparison acceptable from the scientific point of view as well? Has one ever heard of the drinker being obliged constantly to change his drink because he soon grows tired of keeping to the same one? On the contrary, habit constantly tightens the bond between a man and the kind of wine he drinks. Does one ever hear of a drinker who needs to go to a country where wine is dearer or drinking is prohibited, so that by introducing obstacles he can reinforce the dwindling satisfaction that he obtains? Not at all. If we listen to what our great alcoholics, such as Böcklin,¹ say about their relation to wine, it sounds like the most perfect harmony, a model of a happy marriage. Why is the relation of the lover to his sexual object so very different?

It is my belief that, however strange it may sound, we must reckon with the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavourable to the realization of complete satisfaction. If we consider the long and difficult developmental history of the instinct, two factors immediately spring to mind which might be made responsible for this difficulty Firstly, as a result of the diphasic onset of object-choice, and the interposition of the barrier against incest, the final object of the sexual instinct is never any longer the original object but only a surrogate for it. Psycho-analysis has shown us that when the original object of a wishful impulse has been lost as a result of repression, it is frequently represented by an endless series of substitutive objects none of which, however, brings full satisfaction. This may explain the inconstancy in object-choice, the ‘craving for stimulation’ which is so often a feature of the love of adults.

¹ Floerke (1902, 16).

On The Universal Tendency To Debasement In The Sphere Of Love

2346

Secondly, we know that the sexual instinct is originally divided into a great number of components - or rather, it develops out of them - some of which cannot be taken up into the instinct in its later form, but have at an earlier stage to be suppressed or put to other uses. These are above all the coprophilic instinctual components, which have proved incompatible with our aesthetic standards of culture, probably since, as a result of our adopting an erect gait, we raised our organ of smell from the ground. The same is true of a large portion of the sadistic urges which are a part of erotic life. But all such developmental processes affect only the upper layers of the complex structure. The fundamental processes which produce erotic excitation remain unaltered. The excremental is all too intimately and inseparably bound up with the sexual; the position of the genitals - inter unrinas et faeces - remains the decisive and unchangeable factor. One might say here, varying a well-known saying of the great Napoleon: ‘Anatomy is destiny.’ The genitals themselves have not taken part in the development of the human body in the direction of beauty: they have remained animal, and thus love, too, has remained in essence just as animal as it ever was. The instincts of love are hard to educate; education of them achieves now too much, now too little. What civilization aims at making out of them seems unattainable except at the price of a sensible loss of pleasure; the persistence of the impulses that could not be made use of can be detected in sexual activity in the form of non-satisfaction.

Thus we may perhaps be forced to become reconciled to the idea that it is quite impossible to adjust the claims of the sexual instinct to the demands of civilization; that in consequence of its cultural development renunciation and suffering, as well as the danger of extinction in the remotest future, cannot be avoided by the human race. This gloomy prognosis rests, it is true, on the single conjecture that the non-satisfaction that goes with civilization is the necessary consequence of certain peculiarities which the sexual instinct has assumed under the pressure of culture. The very incapacity of the sexual instinct to yield complete satisfaction as soon as it submits to the first demands of civilization becomes the source, however, of the noblest cultural achievements which are brought into being by ever more extensive sublimation of its instinctual components. For what motive would men have for putting sexual instinctual forces to other uses if, by any distribution of those forces, they could obtain fully satisfying pleasure? They would never abandon that pleasure and they would never make any further progress. It seems, therefore, that the irreconcilable difference between the demands of the two instincts - the sexual and the egoistic - has made men capable of ever higher achievements, though subject, it is true, to a constant danger, to which, in the form of neurosis, the weaker are succumbing to-day.

It is not the aim of science either to frighten or to console. But I myself am quite ready to admit that such far-reaching conclusions as those I have drawn should be built on a broader foundation, and that perhaps developments in other directions may enable mankind to correct the results of the developments I have here been considering in isolation.

2347

THE TABOO OF VIRGINITY

(CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LOVE III)

(1918)

2348

Intentionally left blank

2349

THE TABOO OF VIRGINITY

(CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LOVE III)

Few details of the sexual life of primitive peoples are so alien to our own feelings as their estimate of virginity, the state in a woman of being untouched. The high value which her suitor places on a woman’s virginity seems to us so firmly rooted, so much a matter of course, that we find ourselves almost at a loss if we have to give reasons for this opinion. The demand that a girl shall not bring to her marriage with a particular man any memory of sexual relations with another is, indeed, nothing other than a logical continuation of the right to exclusive possession of a woman, which forms the essence of monogamy, the extension of this monopoly to cover the past.

From this point we have no trouble in justifying what looked at first like a prejudice, by referring to our views on the erotic life of women. Whoever is the first to satisfy a virgin’s desire for love, long and laboriously held in check, and who in doing so overcomes the resistances which have been built up in her through the influences of her milieu and education, that is the man she will take into a lasting relationship, the possibility of which will never again be open to any other man. This experience creates a state of bondage in the woman which guarantees that possession of her shall continue undisturbed and makes her able to resist new impressions and enticements from outside.

The expression ‘sexual bondage’ was chosen by von Krafft Ebing (1892) to describe the phenomenon of a person’s acquiring an unusually high degree of dependence and lack of self-reliance in relation to another person with whom he has a sexual relationship. This bondage can on occasion extend very far, as far as the loss of all independence will and as far as causing a person to suffer the greatest sacrifices of his own interests; the author, however, does not fail to remark that a certain measure of such dependence ‘is absolutely necessary, if the tie is to last for any length of time’. Some such measure of sexual bondage is, indeed, indispensable to the maintenance of civilized marriage and to holding at bay the polygamous tendencies which threaten it, and in our social communities this factor is regularly reckoned upon.

The Taboo Of Virginity

2350

Von Krafft-Ebing derives the formation of sexual bondage from a conjunction of an ‘uncommon degree of the state of being in love and of weakness of character’ in one person and unbounded egoism in the other. Analytic experience, however, will not let us rest satisfied with this simple attempt at explanation. We can see, rather, that the decisive factor is the amount of sexual resistance that is overcome and in addition the fact that the process of overcoming the resistance is concentrated and happens only once. This state of bondage is, accordingly, far more frequent and more intense in women than in men, though it is true it occurs in the latter more often nowadays than it did in ancient times. Wherever we have been able to study sexual bondage in men it has shown itself as resulting from an overcoming of psychical impotence through one particular woman, to whom the man in question has remained subsequently bound. Many strange marriages and not a few tragic events - even some with far-reaching consequences - seem to owe their explanation to this origin.

Turning to the attitude of primitive peoples, it is incorrect to describe it by declaring that they set no value on virginity and to submit as proof of this the fact that they perform the defloration of girls outside marriage and before the first act of marital intercourse. On the contrary, it appears that for them, too, defloration is a significant act; but it has become the subject of a taboo - of a prohibition which may be described as religious. Instead of reserving it for the girl’s bridegroom and future partner in marriage, custom demands that he shall shun the performance of it.¹

It is no part of my purpose to make a full collection of the literary evidence for the existence of this custom of prohibition, to pursue its geographical distribution and to enumerate all the forms in which it is expressed. I shall content myself, therefore, with stating the fact that the practice of rupturing the hymen in this way outside the subsequent marriage is very widespread among primitive races living to-day. As Crawley says ‘This marriage ceremony consists in perforation of the hymen by some appointed person other than the husband; it is most common in the lowest stages of culture, especially in Australia.’ (Crawley, 1902, 347.)

¹ Cf. Crawley (1902), Ploss and Bartels (1891), Frazer (1911) and Havelock Ellis.

The Taboo Of Virginity

2351

If, however, defloration is not to result from the first act of marital intercourse, then it must have been carried out beforehand - whatever the way and whoever the agent may have been. I shall quote a few passages from Crawley’s book, mentioned above, which provide information on these points but also give grounds for some critical observations.

(Ibid., 191.) ‘Thus in the Dieri and neighbouring tribes (in Australia) it is the universal custom when a girl reaches puberty to rupture the hymen (Journal of the Royal Antrhopological Institute, 24, 169). In the Portland and Glenelg tribes this is done to the bride by an old woman; and sometimes white men are asked for this reason to deflower maidens (Brough Smith, 2, 319).’

(Ibid., 307.) ‘The artificial rupture of the hymen sometimes takes place in infancy, but generally at puberty. . . . It is often combined, as in Australia, with a ceremonial act of intercourse.’

(Ibid., 348.) (Of Australian tribes among which the well known exogamous marriage-restrictions are in force, from communications by Spencer and Gillen:) ‘The hymen is artificially perforated, and then the assisting men have access (ceremonial, be it observed) to the girl in a stated order. . . . The act is in two parts, perforation and intercourse.’

(Ibid., 349.) ‘An important preliminary of marriage amongst the Masai (in Equatorial Africa) is the performance of this operation on the girl (J. Thomson, 2, 258). This defloration is performed by the father of the bride amongst the Sakais (Malay), Battas (Sumatra), and Alfoers of Celebes (Ploss and Bartels, 2, 490). In the Philippines there were certain men whose profession it was to deflower brides, in case the hymen had not been ruptured in childhood by an old woman who was sometimes employed for this (Featherman, 2, 474). The defloration of the bride was amongst some Eskimo tribes entrusted to the angekok, or priest (ibid., 3, 406).’

The Taboo Of Virginity

2352

The critical remarks I referred to are concerned with two points. Firstly, it is a pity that in these reports a more careful distinction is not made between simple rupture of the hymen without intercourse, and intercourse for the purpose of effecting this rupture. There is only one passage in which we are told expressly that the procedure falls into two actions: defloration (carried out by hand or with some instrument) and the act of intercourse which follows it. The material in Ploss and Bartels (1891), in other respects so rich, is almost useless for our purpose, because in their presentation of it the psychological importance of the act of defloration is completely displaced in favour of its anatomical results. Secondly, we should be glad to be informed how the ‘ceremonial’ (purely formal, ritual, or official) coitus, which takes place on these occasions, differs from ordinary sexual intercourse. The authors to whom I have had access either have been too embarrassed to discuss the matter or have once again underestimated the psychological importance of such sexual details. It is to be hoped that the first-hand accounts of travellers and missionaries may be more complete and less ambiguous, but since this literature, which is for the most part foreign, is for the time being inaccessible I cannot say anything definite on the subject. Besides, we may get round the problem arising over this second point if we bear in mind the fact that a ceremonial mock-coitus would after all only represent a substitute for, and perhaps replace altogether, an act that in earlier times would have been carried out completely.¹

There are various factors which can be adduced to explain this taboo of virginity and which I will enumerate and consider briefly. When a virgin is deflowered, her blood is as a rule shed; the first attempt at explanation, then, is based on the horror of blood among primitive races who consider blood as the seat of life. This blood taboo is seen in numerous kinds of observances which have nothing to do with sexuality; it is obviously connected with the prohibition against murder and forms a protective measure against the primal thirst for blood, primaeval man’s pleasure in killing. According to this view the taboo of virginity is connected with the taboo of menstruation which is almost universally maintained. Primitive people cannot dissociate the puzzling phenomenon of this monthly flow of blood from sadistic ideas. Menstruation, especially its first appearance, is interpreted as the bite of some spirit-animal, perhaps as a sign of sexual intercourse with this spirit. Occasionally some report gives grounds for recognizing the spirit as that of an ancestor and then, supported by other findings,² we understand that the menstruating girl is taboo because she is the property of this ancestral spirit.

¹ In numerous other examples of marriage ceremonies there can be no doubt that people other than the bridegroom, for example his assistants and companions (our traditional ‘groomsmen’ [‘Kranzelherrn’]), are granted full sexual access to the bride.

² Cf. Totem and Taboo (1912-13).

The Taboo Of Virginity

2353

Other considerations, however, warn us not to over-estimate the influence of a factor such as the horror of blood. It has not, after all, been strong enough to suppress practices like the circumcision of boys and the still more cruel equivalent with girls (excision of the clitoris and labia minora) which are to some extent the custom in these same races, nor to abolish the prevalence of other ceremonies involving bloodshed. It would not therefore be surprising, either, if this horror were overcome for the benefit of the husband on the occasion of the first cohabitation.

There is a second explanation, also unconcerned with sexuality, which has, however, a much more general scope than the first. It suggests that primitive man is prey to a perpetual lurking apprehensiveness, just as in the psycho-analytic theory of the neuroses we claim to be the case with people suffering from anxiety neurosis. This apprehensiveness will appear most strongly on all occasions which differ in any way from the usual, which involve something new or unexpected, something not understood or uncanny. This is also the origin of the ceremonial practices, widely adopted in later religions, which are connected with the beginning of every new undertaking, the start of every new period of time, the first-fruits of human, animal and plant life. The dangers which the anxious man believes to be threatening him never appear more vivid in his expectation than on the threshold of a dangerous situation, and then, too, is the only time when protecting himself against them is of any use. The first act of intercourse in marriage can certainly claim, on grounds of importance, to be preceded by such precautionary measures. These two attempts at explanation, based on horror of blood and on fear of first occurrences, do not contradict but rather reinforce each other. The first occasion of sexual intercourse is certainly a critical action, all the more so if it is to involve a flow of blood.

The Taboo Of Virginity

2354

A third explanation - the one which Crawley prefers - draws attention to the fact that the taboo of virginity is part of a large totality which embraces the whole of sexual life. It is not only the first coitus with a woman which is taboo but sexual intercourse in general; one might almost say that women are altogether taboo. A woman is not only taboo in particular situations arising from her sexual life such as menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth and lying-in; apart from these situations, intercourse with women is subject to such solemn and numerous restrictions that we have every reason to doubt the reputed sexual freedom of savages. It is true that, on particular occasions, primitive man’s sexuality will override all inhibitions; but for the most part it seems to be more strongly held in check by prohibitions than it is at higher levels of civilization. Whenever the man undertakes some special enterprise, like setting out on an expedition, a hunt or a campaign, he is obliged to keep away from his wife and especially from sexual intercourse with her; otherwise she will paralyse his strength and bring him bad luck. In the usages of daily life as well there is an unmistakable tendency to keep the sexes apart. Women live with women, men with men; family life, in our sense, seems scarcely to exist in many primitive tribes. This separation sometimes goes so far that one sex is not allowed to say aloud the personal names of members of the other sex, and that the women develop a language with a special vocabulary. Sexual needs will from time to time break through these barriers of separation afresh, but in some tribes even the encounters of husband and wife have to take place outside the house and in secret.

Wherever primitive man has set up a taboo he fears some danger and it cannot be disputed that a generalized dread of women is expressed in all these rules of avoidance. Perhaps this dread is based on the fact that woman is different from man, forever incomprehensible and mysterious, strange and therefore apparently hostile. The man is afraid of being weakened by the woman, infected with her femininity and of then showing himself incapable. The effect which coitus has on discharging tensions and causing flaccidity may be the prototype of what the man fears; and realization of the influence which the woman gains over him through sexual intercourse, the consideration she thereby forces from him, may justify the extension of this fear. In all this there is nothing obsolete, nothing which is not still alive among ourselves.

The Taboo Of Virginity

2355

Many observers of primitive races living to-day have put forward the view that their impulsions in love are relatively weak and never reach the degree of intensity which we are accustomed to meet with in civilized men. Other observers have contradicted this opinion, but in any case the practice of the taboos we have described testifies to the existence of a force which opposes love by rejecting women as strange and hostile.

Crawley, in language which differs only slightly from the current terminology of psycho-analysis, declares that each individual is separated from the others by a ‘taboo of personal isolation’, and that it is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of strangeness and hostility between them. It would be tempting to pursue this idea and to derive from this ‘narcissism of minor differences’ the hostility which in every human relation we see fighting successfully against feelings of fellowship and overpowering the commandment that all men should love one another. Psycho-analysis believes that it has discovered a large part of what underlies the narcissistic rejection of women by men, which is so much mixed up with despising them, in drawing attention to the castration complex and its influence on the opinion in which women are held.

We can see, however, that these latter considerations have led us to range far beyond our subject. The general taboo of women throws no light on the particular rules concerning the first sexual act with a virgin. As far as they are concerned, we have not got beyond the first two explanations, based on horror of blood and fear of first occurrences, and even these, we must point out, do not touch the core of the taboo in question. It is quite clear that the intention underlying this taboo is that of denying or sparing precisely the future husband something which cannot be dissociated from the first sexual act, although according to our introductory observations this very relation would lead to the woman becoming specially bound to this one man.

The Taboo Of Virginity

2356

It is not our task on this occasion to discuss the origin and ultimate significance of taboo observances. I have done this in my book Totem and Taboo, where I have given due consideration to the part played by primal ambivalence in determining the formation of taboo and have traced the genesis of the latter from the prehistoric events which led to the founding of the human family. We can no longer recognize an original meaning of this kind in taboos observed among primitive tribes to-day. We forget all too easily, in expecting to find any such thing, that even the most primitive peoples exist in a culture far removed from that of primaeval days, which is just as old as our own from the point of view of time and like ours corresponds to a later, if different, stage of development.

To-day we find taboos among primitive peoples already elaborated into an intricate system of just the sort that neurotics among ourselves develop in their phobias, and we find old motifs replaced by new ones that fit together harmoniously. Leaving aside these genetic problems, then, we will go back to the idea that primitive man institutes a taboo where he fears some danger. Taking it generally this danger is a psychical one, for primitive man is not impelled at this point to make two distinctions, which to us it seems cannot be disregarded. He does not separate material from psychical danger, nor real from imaginary. In his consistently applied animistic view of the universe, every danger springs from the hostile intention of some being with a soul like himself, and this is as much the case with dangers which threaten him from some natural force as it is with those from other human beings or animals. But on the other hand he is accustomed to project his own internal impulses of hostility on to the external world, to ascribe them, that is, to the objects which he feels to be disagreeable or even merely strange. In this way women also are regarded as being a source of such dangers, and the first act of sexual intercourse with a woman stands out as a danger of particular intensity.

The Taboo Of Virginity

2357

Now I believe that we shall receive some indication as to what this heightened danger is and why it threatens precisely the future husband, if we examine more closely the behaviour under the same circumstances of women of our own stage of civilization to-day. I will submit in advance, as the result of this examination, that such a danger really exists, so that with the taboo of virginity primitive man is defending himself against a correctly sensed, although psychical, danger.

We consider it to be the normal reaction for a woman after intercourse to embrace the man, pressing him to her at the climax of satisfaction, and we see this as an expression of her gratitude and a token of lasting bondage. But we know it is by no means the rule that the first occasion of intercourse should lead to this behaviour; very frequently it means only disappointment for the woman, who remains cold and unsatisfied, and it usually requires quite a long time and frequent repetition of the sexual act before she too begins to find satisfaction in it. There is an unbroken series from these cases of mere initial frigidity which soon vanishes, up to the cheerless phenomenon of permanent and obstinate frigidity which no tender efforts on the part of the husband can overcome. I believe this frigidity in women is not yet sufficiently understood and, except for those cases which must be blamed on the man’s insufficient potency, calls for elucidation, possibly through allied phenomena.

I do not want to introduce at this point the attempts - which are so frequent - to take flight from the first occasion of sexual intercourse, because they are open to several interpretations and are in the main, although not altogether, to be understood as an expression of the general female tendency to take a defensive line. As against this, I do believe that light is thrown on the riddle of female frigidity by certain pathological cases in which, after the first and indeed after each repeated instance of sexual intercourse, the woman gives unconcealed expression to her hostility towards the man by abusing him, raising her hand against him or actually striking him. In one very clear case of this kind, which I was able to submit to a thorough analysis, this happened although the woman loved the man very much, used to demand intercourse herself and unmistakably found great satisfaction in it. I think that this strange, contradictory reaction is the result of the very same impulses which ordinarily can only find expression as frigidity - which, that is, can hold back the tender reaction without at the same time being able to put themselves into effect. In the pathological case we find separated so to speak into its two components what in the far more common instance of frigidity is united to produce an inhibiting effect, just like the process we have long recognized in the so-called ‘diphasic symptoms’ of obsessional neurosis. The danger which is thus aroused through the defloration of a woman would consist in drawing her hostility down upon oneself, and the prospective husband is just the person who would have every reason to avoid such enmity.

The Taboo Of Virginity

2358

Now analysis enables us to infer without difficulty which impulses in women take part in bringing about this paradoxical behaviour, in which I expect to find the explanation of frigidity. The first act of intercourse mobilizes a number of impulses which are out of place in the desired feminine attitude, some of which, incidentally, need not recur during subsequent intercourse. In the first place we think of the pain which defloration causes a virgin, and we are perhaps even inclined to consider this factor as decisive and to give up the search for any others. But we cannot well ascribe such importance to this pain; we must rather substitute for it the narcissistic injury which proceeds from the destruction of an organ and which is even represented in a rationalized form in the knowledge that loss of virginity brings a diminution of sexual value. The marriage customs of primitive peoples, however, contain a warning against over-estimating this. We have heard that in some cases the rite falls into two phases: after the hymen has been ruptured (by hand or with some instrument) there follows a ceremonial act of coitus or mock-intercourse with the representatives of the husband, and this proves to us that the purpose of the taboo observance is not fulfilled by avoiding anatomical defloration, that the husband is to be spared something else as well as the woman’s reaction to the painful injury.

We find a further reason for the disappointment experienced in the first act of intercourse in the fact that, with civilized women at least, fulfilment cannot be in accordance with expectations. Before this, sexual intercourse has been associated in the strongest possible way with prohibitions; lawful and permissible intercourse is not, therefore, felt to be the same thing. Just how close this association can be is demonstrated in an almost comic fashion by the efforts of so many girls about to be married to keep their new love-relationship secret from everyone outside, and indeed even from their parents, where there is no real necessity to do so and no objection can be looked for. Girls often say openly that their love loses value for them if other people know of it. On occasion this feeling can become dominating and can completely prevent the development of any capacity for love in a marriage. The woman only recovers her susceptibility to tender feelings in an illicit relationship which has to be kept secret, and in which alone she knows for certain that her own will is uninfluenced.

However, this motive does not go deep enough either; besides, being bound up with civilized conditions, it fails to provide a satisfactory connection with the state of affairs among primitive people. All the more important, therefore, is the next factor, which is based on the evolution of the libido. We have learnt from analytic researches how universal and how powerful the earliest allocations of libido are. In these we are concerned with infantile sexual wishes which are clung to (in women usually a fixation of the libido on the father or a brother who takes his place) - wishes which frequently enough were directed towards other things than intercourse, or included it only as a dimly perceived goal. The husband is almost always so to speak only a substitute, never the right man; it is another man - in typical cases the father - who has first claim to a woman’s love, the husband at most takes second place. It depends on how intense this fixation is and on how obstinately it is maintained whether the substitute is rejected as unsatisfying. Frigidity is thus among the genetic determinants of neuroses. The more powerful the psychical element in a woman’s sexual life is, the greater will be the capacity for resistance shown by her distribution of libido to the upheaval of the first sexual act, and the less overpowering will be the effect which bodily possession of her can produce. Frigidity may then become established as a neurotic inhibition or provide the foundation for the development of other neuroses and even a moderate diminution of potency in the man will greatly contribute to help this process.

The Taboo Of Virginity

2359

The customs of primitive peoples seem to take account of this motif of the early sexual wish by handing over the task of defloration to an elder, priest or holy man, that is, to a substitute for the father (see above). There seems to me to be a direct path leading from this custom to the highly vexed question of the jus primae noctis of the mediaeval lord of the manor. A. J. Storfer (1911) has put forward the same view and has in addition, as Jung (1909) had already done before him, interpreted the widespread tradition of the ‘Tobias nights’ (the custom of continence during the first three nights of marriage) as an acknowledgement of the privilege of the patriarch. It agrees with our expectations, therefore, when we find the images of gods included among the father-surrogates entrusted with defloration. In some districts of India, the newly-married woman was obliged to sacrifice her hymen to the wooden lingam, and, according to St. Augustine’s account, the same custom existed in the Roman marriage ceremony (of his time?), but modified so that the young wife only had to seat herself on the gigantic stone phallus of Priapus.¹

There is another motive, reaching down into still deeper layers, which can be shown to bear the chief blame for the paradoxical reaction towards the man, and which, in my view, further makes its influence felt in female frigidity. The first act of intercourse activates in a woman other impulses of long standing as well as those already described, and these are in complete opposition to her womanly role and function.

We have learnt from the analysis of many neurotic women that they go through an early age in which they envy their brothers their sign of masculinity and feel at a disadvantage and humiliated because of the lack of it (actually because of its diminished size) in themselves. We include this ‘envy for the penis’ in the ‘castration complex’. If we understand ‘masculine’ as including the idea of wishing to be masculine, then the designation ‘masculine protest’ fits this behaviour; the phrase was coined by Adler with the intention of proclaiming this factor as being responsible for neurosis in general. During this phase, little girls often make no secret of their envy, nor of the hostility towards their favoured brothers which arises from it. They even try to urinate standing upright like their brothers in order to prove the equality which they lay claim to. In the case already described in which the woman used to show uncontrolled aggression after intercourse towards her husband, whom otherwise she loved, I was able to establish that this phase had existed before that of object-choice. Only later was the little girl’s libido directed towards her father, and then, instead of wanting to have a penis, she wanted - a child.²

¹ Ploss and Bartels (1891, 1, xii) and Dulaure (1905, 142).

² Cf. ‘On Transformations of Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Erotism’ (1917c).

The Taboo Of Virginity

2360

I should not be surprised if in other cases the order in which these impulses occurred were reversed and this part of the castration complex only became effective after a choice of object had been successfully made. But the masculine phase in the girl in which she envies the boy for his penis is in any case developmentally the earlier, and it is closer to the original narcissism than it is to object-love.

Some time ago I chanced to have an opportunity of obtaining insight into a dream of a newly-married woman which was recognizable as a reaction to the loss of her virginity. It betrayed spontaneously the woman’s wish to castrate her young husband and to keep his penis for herself. Certainly there was also room for the more innocent interpretation that what she wished for was the prolongation and repetition of the act, but several details of the dream did not fit into this meaning and the character as well as the subsequent behaviour of the woman who had the dream gave evidence in favour of the more serious view. Behind this envy for the penis, there comes to light the woman’s hostile bitterness against the man, which never completely disappears in the relations between the sexes, and which is clearly indicated in the strivings and in the literary productions of ‘emancipated’ women. In a palaeo-biological speculation, Ferenczi has traced back this hostility of women - I do not know if he is the first to do so - to the period in time when the sexes became differentiated. At first, in his opinion, copulation took place between two similar individuals, one of which, however, developed into the stronger and forced the weaker one to submit to sexual union. The feelings of bitterness arising from this subjection still persist in the present-day disposition of women. I do not think there is any harm in employing such speculations, so long as one avoids setting too much value on them.

The Taboo Of Virginity

2361

After this enumeration of the motives for the paradoxical reaction of women to defloration, traces of which persist in frigidity, we may sum up by saying that a woman’s immature sexuality, is discharged on to the man who first makes her acquainted with the sexual act. This being so, the taboo of virginity is reasonable enough and we can understand the rule which decrees that precisely the man who is to enter upon a life shared with this woman shall avoid these dangers. At higher stages of civilization the importance attributed to this danger diminishes in face of her promise of bondage and no doubt of other motives and inducements; virginity is looked upon as a possession which the husband is not called upon to renounce. But analysis of disturbed marriages teaches us that the motives which seek to drive a woman to take vengeance for her defloration are not completely extinguished even in the mental life of civilized women. I think it must strike the observer in how uncommonly large a number of cases the woman remains frigid and feels unhappy in a first marriage, whereas after it has been dissolved she becomes a tender wife, able to make her second husband happy. The archaic reaction has, so to speak, exhausted itself on the first object.

The taboo of virginity, however, even apart from this has not died out in our civilized existence. It is known to the popular mind and writers have on occasion made use of this material. A comedy by Anzengruber shows how a simple peasant lad is deterred from marrying his intended bride be cause she is ‘a wench who’ll cost her first his life’. For this reason he agrees to her marrying another man and is ready to take her when she is a widow and no longer dangerous. The title of the play, Das Jungferngift [‘Virgin’s Venom’], reminds us of the habit of snake-charmers, who make poisonous snakes first bite a piece of cloth in order to handle them afterwards without danger.¹

¹ A masterly short story by Arthur Schnitzler (Das Schicksal des Freiherrn von Leisenbogh) [‘The Fate of Freiherr von Leisenbogh’] deserves to be included here, in spite of the rather different situation. The lover of an actress who is very experienced in love is dying as the result of an accident. He creates a sort of new virginity for her, by putting a curse of death on the man who is the first to possess her after himself. For a time the woman with this taboo upon her does not venture on any love-affair. However, after she has fallen in love with a singer, she hits on the solution of first granting a night to the Freiherr von Leisenbogh, who has been pursuing her for years. And the curse falls on him: he has a stroke as soon as he learns the motive behind his unexpected good fortune in love.

The Taboo Of Virginity

2362

The taboo of virginity and something of its motivation has been depicted most powerfully of all in a well-known dramatic character, that of Judith in Hebbel’s tragedy Judith und Holofernes. Judith is one of those women whose virginity is protected by a taboo. Her first husband was paralysed on the bridal night by a mysterious anxiety, and never again dared to touch her, ‘My beauty is like belladonna,’ she says. ‘Enjoyment of it brings madness and death.’ When the Assyrian general is besieging her city, she conceives the plan of seducing him by her beauty and of destroying him, thus employing a patriotic motive to conceal a sexual one. After she has been deflowered by this powerful man, who boasts of his strength and ruthlessness, she finds the strength in her fury to strike off his head, and thus becomes the liberator of her people. Beheading is well known to us as a symbolic substitute for castrating; Judith is accordingly the woman who castrates the man who has deflowered her, which was just the wish of the newly-married woman expressed in the dream I reported. It is clear that Hebbel has intentionally sexualized the patriotic narrative from the Apocrypha of the Old Testament, for there Judith is able to boast after her return that she has not been defiled, nor is there in the Biblical text any mention of her uncanny wedding night. But probably, with the fine perception of a poet, he sensed the ancient motive, which had been lost in the tendentious narrative, and has merely restored its earlier content to the material.

Sadger (1912) has shown in a penetrating analysis how Hebbel was determined in his choice of material by his own parental complex, and how he came to take the part of the woman so regularly in the struggle between the sexes, and to feel his way into the most hidden impulses of her mind. He also quotes the motives which the poet himself gives for the alteration he has made in the material, and he rightly finds them artificial and as though intended to justify outwardly something the poet himself is unconscious of, while at bottom concealing it. I will not dispute Sadger’s explanation of why Judith, who according to the Biblical narrative is a widow, has to become a virgin widow. He refers to the purpose found in childish phantasies of denying the sexual intercourse of the parents and of turning the mother into an untouched virgin. But I will add: after the poet has established his heroine’s virginity, his sensitive imagination dwells on the hostile reaction released by the violation of her maidenhood.

The Taboo Of Virginity

2363

We may say, then, in conclusion that defloration has not only the one, civilized consequence of binding the woman lastingly to the man; it also unleashes an archaic reaction of hostility towards him, which can assume pathological forms that are frequently enough expressed in the appearance of inhibitions in the erotic side of married life, and to which we may ascribe the fact that second marriages so often turn out better than first. The taboo of virginity, which seems so strange to us, the horror with which, among primitive peoples, the husband avoids the act of defloration, are fully justified by this hostile reaction.

It is interesting that in one’s capacity as analyst one can meet with women in whom the opposed reactions of bondage and hostility both find expression and remain intimately associated with each other. There are women of this kind who seem to have fallen out with their husbands completely and who all the same can only make vain efforts to free themselves. As often as they try to direct their love towards some other man, the image of the first, although he is no longer loved, intervenes with inhibiting effect. Analysis then teaches us that these women, it is true, still cling to their first husbands in a state of bondage, but no longer through affection. They cannot get away from them, because they have not completed their revenge upon them, and in pronounced cases they have not even brought the impulses for vengeance to consciousness.

2364

THE PSYCHO-ANALYTIC VIEW OF PSYCHOGENIC DISTURBANCE OF VISION

(1910)

2365

Intentionally left blank

2366

THE PSYCHO-ANALYTIC VIEW OF PSYCHOGENIC DISTURBANCE OF VISION

GENTLEMEN, - I propose to take the example of psychogenic disturbance of vision, in order to show you the modifications which have taken place in our view of the genesis of disorders of this kind under the influence of psycho-analytic methods of investigation. As you know, hysterical blindness is taken as the type of a psychogenic visual disturbance. It is generally believed, as a result of the researches of the French School (including such men as Charcot, Janet and Binet), that the genesis of these cases is understood. For we are in a position to produce blindness of this kind experimentally if we have at our disposal someone who is susceptible to somnambulism. If we put him into deep hypnosis and suggest the idea to him that he sees nothing with one of his eyes, he will in fact behave as though he had become blind in that eye, like a hysteric who has developed a visual disturbance spontaneously. We may thus construct the mechanism of spontaneous hysterical disturbances of vision on the model of suggested hypnotic ones. In a hysteric the idea of being blind arises, not from the prompting of a hypnotist, but spontaneously - by autosuggestion, as people say; and in both cases this idea is so powerful that it turns into reality, exactly like a suggested hallucination, paralysis, etc.

This seems perfectly sound and will satisfy anyone who can ignore the many enigmas that lie concealed behind the concepts of hypnosis, suggestion and autosuggestion. Autosuggestion in particular raises further questions. When and under what conditions does an idea become so powerful that it is able to behave like a suggestion and turn into reality without more ado? Closer investigation has taught us that we cannot answer this question without calling the concept of the ‘unconscious’ to our assistance. Many philosophers rebel against the assumption of a mental unconscious of this kind, because they have not concerned themselves with the phenomena which compel us to make that assumption. Psychopathologists have found that they cannot avoid working with such things as unconscious mental processes, unconscious ideas, and so on.

The Psycho-Analytic View Of Psychogenic Disturbance Of Vision

2367

Appropriate experiments have shown that people who are hysterically blind do nevertheless see in some sense, though not in the full sense. Excitations of the blind eye may have certain psychical consequences (for instance, they may produce affects) even though they do not become conscious. Thus hysterically blind people are only blind as far as consciousness is concerned; in their unconscious they see. It is precisely observations such as this that compel us to distinguish between conscious and unconscious mental processes.

How does it happen that such people develop the unconscious ‘autosuggestion’ that they are blind, while nevertheless they see in their unconscious?  The reply given by the French researches is to explain that in patients predisposed to hysteria there is an inherent tendency to dissociation - to a falling apart of the connections in their mental field - as a consequence of which some unconscious processes do not continue as far as into the conscious. Let us leave entirely on one side the value that this attempted explanation may have as regards an understanding of the phenomena in question, and let us look at the matter from another angle. As you see, Gentlemen, the identity of hysterical blindness with the blindness provoked by suggestion, on which so much stress was laid to begin with, has now been given up. The hysterical patient is blind, not as the result of an autosuggestive idea that he cannot see, but as the result of a dissociation between unconscious and conscious processes in the act of seeing; his idea that he does not see is the well-founded expression of the psychical state of affairs and not its cause.

If, Gentlemen, you complain of the obscurity of this exposition I shall not find it easy to defend. I have tried to give you a synthesis of the views of different investigators, and in doing so I have probably coupled them together too closely. I wanted to condense into a single composite whole the concepts that have been brought up to make psychogenic disturbances intelligible - their origin from excessively powerful ideas, the distinction between conscious and unconscious mental processes and the assumption of mental dissociation. And I have been no more successful in this than the French writers, at whose head stands Pierre Janet. I hope, therefore, that you will excuse not only the obscurity but the inaccuracy of my exposition, and will allow me to tell you how psycho-analysis has led us to a view of psychogenic disturbances of vision which is more self-consistent and probably closer to the facts.

The Psycho-Analytic View Of Psychogenic Disturbance Of Vision

2368

Psycho-analysis, too, accepts the assumptions of dissociation and the unconscious, but relates them differently to each other. Its view is a dynamic one, which traces mental life back to an interplay between forces that favour or inhibit one another. If in any instance one group of ideas remains in the unconscious, psycho-analysis does not infer that there is a constitutional incapacity for synthesis which is showing itself in this particular dissociation, but maintains that the isolation and state of unconsciousness of this group of ideas have been caused by an active opposition on the part of other groups. The process owing to which it has met with this fate is known as ‘repression’ and we regard it as something analogous to a condemnatory judgement in the field of logic. Psycho-analysis points out that repressions of this kind play an extraordinarily important part in our mental life, but that they may also frequently fail and that such failures of repression are the precondition of the formation of symptoms.

If, then, as we have learnt, psychogenic disturbances of vision depend on certain ideas connected with seeing being cut off from consciousness, we must, on the psycho-analytic view, assume that these ideas have come into opposition to other, more powerful ones, for which we use the collective concept of the ‘ego’- a compound which is made up variously at different times - and have for that reason come under repression. But what can be the origin of this opposition, which makes for repression, between the ego and various groups of ideas? You will no doubt notice that it was not possible to frame such a question before the advent of psycho-analysis, for nothing was known earlier of psychical conflict and repression. Our researches, however, have put us in a position to give us the desired answer. Our attention has been drawn to the importance of the instincts in ideational life. We have discovered that every instinct tries to make itself effective by activating ideas that are in keeping with its aims. These instincts are not always compatible with one another; their interests often come into conflict. Opposition between ideas is only an expression of struggles between the various instincts. From the point of view of our attempted explanation, a quite specially important part is played by the undeniable opposition between the instincts which subserve sexuality, the attainment of sexual pleasure, and those other instincts, which have as their aim the self-preservation of the individual - the ego-instincts. As the poet has said, all the organic instincts that operate in our mind may be classified as ‘hunger’ or ‘love’. We have traced the ‘sexual instinct’ from its first manifestations in children to its final form, which is described as ‘normal’. We have found that it is put together from numerous ‘component instincts’ which are attached to excitations of regions of the body; and we have come to see that these separate instincts have to pass through a complicated development before they can be brought effectively to serve the aims of reproduction. The light thrown by psychology on the evolution of our civilization has shown us that it originates mainly at the cost of the sexual component instincts, and that these must be suppressed, restricted, transformed and directed to higher aims, in order that the mental constructions of civilization may be established. We have been able to recognize as a valuable outcome of these researches something that our colleagues have not yet been willing to believe, namely that the human ailments known as ‘neuroses’ are derived from the many different ways in which these processes of transformation in the sexual component instincts may miscarry. The ‘ego’ feels threatened by the claims of the sexual instincts and fends them off by repressions; these, however, do not always have the desired result, but lead to the formation of dangerous substitutes for the repressed and to burdensome reactions on the part of the ego. From these two classes of phenomena taken together there emerge what we call the symptoms of neuroses.

The Psycho-Analytic View Of Psychogenic Disturbance Of Vision

2369

We have apparently digressed widely from our problem, though in doing so we have touched on the manner in which neurotic pathological conditions are related to our mental life as a whole. But let us now return to the narrower question. The sexual and ego-instincts alike have in general the same organs and systems of organs at their disposal. Sexual pleasure is not attached merely to the function of the genitals. The mouth serves for kissing as well as for eating and communication by speech; the eyes perceive not only alterations in the external world which are important for the preservation of life, but also characteristics of objects which lead to their being chosen as objects of love - their charms. The saying that it is not easy for anyone to serve two masters is thus confirmed. The closer the relation into which an organ with a dual function of this kind enters with one of the major instincts, the more it with holds itself from the other. This principle is bound to lead to pathological consequences if the two fundamental instincts are disunited and if the ego maintains a repression of the sexual component instinct concerned. It is easy to apply this to the eye and to seeing. Let us suppose that the sexual component instinct which makes use of looking - sexual pleasure in looking - has drawn upon itself defensive action by the ego-instincts in consequence of its excessive demands, so that the ideas in which its desires are expressed succumb to repression and are prevented from becoming conscious; in that case there will be a general disturbance of the relation of the eye and of the act of seeing to the ego and consciousness. The ego will have lost its dominance over the organ, which will now be wholly at the disposal of the repressed sexual instinct. It looks as though the repression had been carried too far by the ego, as though it had emptied the baby out with the bath-water: the ego refuses to see anything at all any more, now that the sexual interest in seeing has made itself so prominent. But the alternative picture seems more to the point. This attributes the active role instead to the repressed pleasure in looking. The repressed instinct takes its revenge for being held back from further psychical expansion, by becoming able to extend its dominance over the organ that is in its service. The loss of conscious dominance over the organ is the detrimental substitute for the repression which had miscarried and was only made possible at that price.

The Psycho-Analytic View Of Psychogenic Disturbance Of Vision

2370

This relation of an organ with a double claim on it - its relation to the conscious ego and to repressed sexuality - is to be seen even more clearly in motor organs than in the eye: as when, for instance, a hand which has tried to carry out an act of sexual aggression, and has become paralysed hysterically, is unable, after that act has been inhibited, to do anything else as though it were obstinately insisting on carrying out a repressed innervation; or as when the fingers of people who have given up masturbation refuse to learn the delicate movements required for playing the piano or the violin. As regards the eye, we are in the habit of translating the obscure psychical processes concerned in the repression of sexual scopophilia and in the development of the psychogenic disturbance of vision as though a punishing voice was speaking from within the subject, and saying: ‘Because you sought to misuse your organ of sight for evil sensual pleasures, it is fitting that you should not see anything at all any more’, and as though it was in this way approving the outcome of the process. The idea of talion punishment is involved in this, and in fact our explanation of psychogenic visual disturbance coincides with what is suggested by myths and legends. The beautiful legend of Lady Godiva tells how all the town’s inhabitants hid behind their shuttered windows, so as to make easier the lady’s task of riding naked through the streets in broad daylight, and how the only man who peeped through the shutters at her revealed loveliness was punished by going blind. Nor is this the only example which suggests that neurotic illness holds the hidden key to mythology as well.

Psycho-analysis is unjustly reproached, Gentlemen, for leading to purely psychological theories of pathological problems. The emphasis which it lays on the pathogenic role of sexuality, which, after all, is certainly not an exclusively psychical factor should alone protect it from this reproach. Psycho-analysts never forget that the mental is based on the organic, although their work can only carry them as far as this basis and no beyond it. Thus psycho-analysis is ready to admit, and indeed to postulate, that not all disturbances of vision need be psychogenic, like those that are evoked by the repression of erotic scopophilia. If an organ which serves the two sorts of instinct increases its erotogenic role, it is in general to be expected that this will not occur without the excitability and innervation of the organ undergoing changes which will manifest themselves as disturbances of its function in the service of the ego. Indeed, if we find that an organ normally serving the purpose of sense-perception begins to behave like an actual genital when its erotogenic role is increased, we shall not regard it as improbable that toxic changes are also occurring in it. For lack of a better name we must retain the old unsuitable term of ‘neurotic’ disturbances for both classes of functional disturbances - those of physiological as well as those of toxic origin - which follow from an increase in the erotogenic factor. Generally speaking, the neurotic disturbances of vision stand in the same relation to the psychogenic ones as the ‘actual neuroses’ do to the psychoneuroses: psychogenic visual disturbances can no doubt hardly ever appear without neurotic ones, but the latter can appear without the former. These neurotic symptoms are unfortunately little appreciated and understood even today; for they are not directly accessible to psycho-analysis, and other methods of research have left the standpoint of sexuality out of account.

The Psycho-Analytic View Of Psychogenic Disturbance Of Vision

2371

Yet another line of thought extending into organic research branches off from psycho-analysis. We may ask ourselves whether the suppression of sexual component instincts which is brought about by environmental influences is sufficient in itself to call up functional disturbances in organs, or whether special constitutional conditions must be present in order that the organs may be led to an exaggeration of their erotogenic role and consequently provoke repression of the instincts. We should have to see in those conditions the constitutional part of the disposition to fall ill of psychogenic and neurotic disorders. This is the factor to which, as applied to hysteria, I gave the provisional name of ‘somatic compliance’.

2372

‘WILD’ PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

(1910)

2373

Intentionally left blank

2374

‘WILD’ PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

A few days ago a middle-aged lady, under the protection of a female friend, called upon me for a consultation, complaining of anxiety-states. She was in the second half of her forties, fairly well preserved, and had obviously not yet finished with her womanhood. The precipitating cause of the outbreak of her anxiety-states had been a divorce from her last husband; but the anxiety had become considerably intensified, according to her account, since she had consulted a young physician in the suburb she lived in, for he had informed her that the cause of her anxiety was her lack of sexual satisfaction. He said that she could not tolerate the loss of intercourse with her husband, and so there were only three ways by which she could recover her health - she must either return to her husband, or take a lover, or obtain satisfaction from herself. Since then she had been convinced that she was incurable, for she would not return to her husband, and the other two alternatives were repugnant to her moral and religious feelings. She had come to me, however, because the doctor had said that this was a new discovery for which I was responsible, and that she had only to come and ask me to confirm what he said, and I should tell her that this and nothing else was the truth. The friend who was with her, an older, dried-up and unhealthy-looking woman, then implored me to assure the patient that the doctor was mistaken; it could not possibly be true, for she herself had been a widow for many years, and had nevertheless remained respectable without suffering from anxiety.

I will not dwell on the awkward predicament in which I was placed by this visit, but instead will consider the conduct of the practitioner who sent this lady to me. First, however, let us bear a reservation in mind which may possibly not be superfluous - indeed we will hope so. Long years of experience have taught me - as they could teach everyone else - not to accept straight away as true what patients, especially nervous patients, relate about their physician. Not only does a nerve-specialist easily become the object of many of his patients’ hostile feelings, whatever method of treatment he employs; he must also sometimes resign himself to accepting responsibility, by a kind of projection, for the buried repressed wishes of his nervous patients. It is a melancholy but significant fact that such accusations nowhere find credence more readily than among other physicians.

'Wild' Psycho-Analysis

2375

I therefore have reason to hope that this lady gave me a tendentiously distorted account of what her doctor had said and that I do a man who is unknown to me an injustice by connecting my remarks about ‘wild’ psycho-analysis with this incident. But by doing so I may perhaps prevent others from doing harm to their patients.

Let us suppose, therefore, that her doctor spoke to the patient exactly as she reported. Everyone will at once bring us the criticism that if a physician thinks it necessary to discuss the question of sexuality with a woman he must do so with tact and consideration. Compliance with this demand, however, coincides with carrying out certain technical rules of psycho-analysis. Moreover, the physician in question was ignorant of a number of the scientific theories of psycho-analysis or had misapprehended them, and thus showed how little he had penetrated into an understanding of its nature and purposes.

Let us start with the latter, the scientific errors. The doctor’s advice to the lady shows clearly in what sense he understands the expression ‘sexual life’ - in the popular sense, namely, in which by sexual needs nothing is meant but the need for coitus or analogous acts producing orgasm and emission of the sexual substances. He cannot have remained unaware, however, that psycho-analysis is commonly reproached with having extended the concept of what is sexual far beyond its usual range. The fact is undisputed; I shall not discuss here whether it may justly be used as a reproach. In psycho-analysis the concept of what is sexual comprises far more; it goes lower and also higher than its popular sense. This extension is justified genetically; we reckon as belonging to ‘sexual life’ all the activities of the tender feelings which have primitive sexual impulses as their source, even when those impulses have become inhibited in regard to their original sexual aim or have exchanged this aim for another which is no longer sexual. For this reason we prefer to speak of psychosexuality, thus laying stress on the point that the mental factor in sexual life should not be overlooked or underestimated. We use the word ‘sexuality’ in the same comprehensive sense as that in which the German language uses the word lieben [‘to love’]. We have long known, too, that mental absence of satisfaction with all its consequences can exist where there is no lack of normal sexual intercourse; and as therapists we always bear in mind that the unsatisfied sexual trends (whose substitutive satisfactions in the form of nervous symptoms we combat) can often find only very inadequate outlet in coitus or other sexual acts.

'Wild' Psycho-Analysis

2376

Anyone not sharing this view of psychosexuality has no right to adduce psycho-analytic theses dealing with the aetiological importance of sexuality. By emphasizing exclusively the somatic factor in sexuality he undoubtedly simplifies the problem greatly, but he alone must bear the responsibility for what he does.

A second and equally gross misunderstanding is discernible behind the physician’s advice.

It is true that psycho-analysis puts forward absence of sexual satisfaction as the cause of nervous disorders. But does it not say more than this? Is its teaching to be ignored as too complicated when it declares that nervous symptoms arise from a conflict between two forces - on the one hand, the libido (which has as a rule become excessive), and on the other, a rejection of sexuality, or a repression which is over-severe? No one who remembers this second factor, which is by no means secondary in importance, can ever believe that sexual satisfaction in itself constitutes a remedy of general reliability for the sufferings of neurotics. A good number of these people are, indeed, either in their actual circumstances or in general incapable of satisfaction. If they were capable of it, if they were without their inner resistances, the strength of the instinct itself would point the way to satisfaction for them even though no doctor advised it. What is the good, therefore, of medical advice such as that supposed to have been given to this lady?

Even if it could be justified scientifically, it is not advice that she can carry out. If she had had no inner resistances against masturbation or against a liaison she would of course have adopted one of these measures long before. Or does the physician think that a woman of over forty is unaware that one can take a lover, or does he over-estimate his influence so much as to think that she could never decide upon such a step without medical approval?

'Wild' Psycho-Analysis

2377

All this seems very clear, and yet it must be admitted the there is one factor which often makes it difficult to form a judgement. Some nervous states which we call the ‘actual neuroses’, such as typical neurasthenia and pure anxiety neurosis, obviously depend on the somatic factor in sexual life, while we have no certain picture as yet of the part played in them by the psychical factor and by repression. In such cases it is natural that the physician should first consider some ‘actual’ therapy, some alteration in the patient’s somatic sexual activity, and he does so with perfect justification if his diagnosis is correct. The lady who consulted the young doctor complained chiefly of anxiety-states, and so he probably assumed that she was suffering from an anxiety neurosis, and felt justified in recommending a somatic therapy to her. Again a convenient misapprehension!  A person suffering from anxiety is not for that reason necessarily suffering from anxiety neurosis; such a diagnosis of it cannot be based on the name; one has to know what signs constitute an anxiety neurosis, and be able to distinguish it from other pathological states which are also manifested by anxiety. My impression was that the lady in question was suffering from anxiety hysteria, and the whole value of such nosographical distinctions, one which quite justifies them, lies in the fact that they indicate a different aetiology and a different treatment. No one who took into consideration the possibility of anxiety hysteria in this case would have fallen into the error of neglecting the mental factors, as this physician did with his three alternatives.

'Wild' Psycho-Analysis

2378

Oddly enough, the three therapeutic alternatives of this so-called psycho-analyst leave no room for - psycho-analysis! This woman could apparently only be cured of her anxiety by returning to her husband, or by satisfying her needs by masturbation or with a lover. And where does analytic treatment come in, the treatment which we regard as the main remedy in anxiety-states?

This brings us to the technical errors which are to be seen in the doctor’s procedure in this alleged case. It is a long superseded idea, and one derived from superficial appearances, that the patient suffers from a sort of ignorance, and that if one removes this ignorance by giving him information (about the causal connection of his illness with his life, about his experiences in childhood, and so on) he is bound to recover. The pathological factor is not his ignorance in itself, but the root of this ignorance in his inner resistances; it was they that first called this ignorance into being, and they still maintain it now. The task of the treatment lies in combating these resistances. Informing the patient of what he does not know because he has repressed it is only one of the necessary preliminaries to the treatment. If knowledge about the unconscious were as important for the patient as people inexperienced in psycho-analysis imagine, listening to lectures or reading books would be enough to cure him. Such measures, however, have as much influence on the symptoms of nervous illness as a distribution of menu-cards in a time of famine has upon hunger. The analogy goes even further than its immediate application; for informing the patient of his unconscious regularly results in an intensification of the conflict in him and an exacerbation of his troubles.

'Wild' Psycho-Analysis

2379

Since, however, psycho-analysis cannot dispense with giving this information, it lays down that this shall not be done before two conditions have been fulfilled. First, the patient must, through preparation, himself have reached the neighbourhood of what he has repressed, and secondly, he must have formed a sufficient attachment (transference) to the physician for his emotional relationship to him to make a fresh flight impossible.

Only when these conditions have been fulfilled is it possible to recognize and to master the resistances which have led to the repression and the ignorance. Psycho-analytic intervention, therefore, absolutely requires a fairly long period of contact with the patient. Attempts to ‘rush’ him at first consultation, by brusquely telling him the secrets which have been discovered by the physician, are technically objectionable. And they mostly bring their own punishment by inspiring a hearty enmity towards the physician on the patient’s part and cutting him off from having any further influence.

Besides all this, one may sometimes make a wrong surmise, and one is never in a position to discover the whole truth. Psycho-analysis provides these definite technical rules to replace the indefinable ‘medical tact’ which is looked upon as some special gift.

It is not enough, therefore, for a physician to know a few of the findings of psycho-analysis; he must also have familiarized himself with its technique if he wishes his medical procedure to be guided by a psycho-analytic point of view. This technique cannot yet be learnt from books, and it certainly cannot be discovered independently without great sacrifices of time, labour and success. Like other medical techniques, it is to be learnt from those who are already proficient in it. It is a matter of some significance, therefore, in forming a judgement on the incident which I took as a starting-point for these remarks, that I am not acquainted with the physician who is said to have given the lady such advice and have never heard his name.

'Wild' Psycho-Analysis

2380

Neither I myself nor my friends and co-workers find it agreeable to claim a monopoly in this way in the use of a medical technique. But in face of the dangers to patients and to the cause of psycho-analysis which are inherent in the practice that is to be foreseen of a ‘wild’ psycho-analysis, we have had no other choice. In the spring of 1910 we founded an International Psycho-Analytical Association, to which its members declare their adherence by the publication of their names, in order to be able to repudiate responsibility for what is done by those who do not belong to us and yet call their medical procedure ‘psycho-analysis’. For as a matter of fact ‘wild’ analysts of this kind do more harm to the cause of psycho-analysis than to individual patients. I have often found that a clumsy procedure like this, even if at first it produced an exacerbation of the patient’s condition, led to a recovery in the end. Not always but still often. When he has abused the physician enough and feels far enough away from his influence, his symptoms give way, or he decides to take some step which leads along the path to recovery. The final improvement then comes about ‘of itself’, or is ascribed to some totally indifferent treatment by some other doctor to whom the patient has later turned. In the case of the lady whose complaint against her physician we have heard, I should say that, despite everything, the ‘wild’ psycho-analyst did more for her than some highly respected authority who might have told her she was suffering from a ‘vasomotor neurosis’. He forced her attention to the real cause of her trouble, or in that direction, and in spite of all her opposition this intervention of his cannot be without some favourable results. But he has done himself harm and helped to intensify the prejudices which patients feel, owing to their natural affective resistances, against the methods of psycho-analysis. And this can be avoided.

2381

CONTRIBUTIONS TO A DISCUSSION ON SUICIDE

I. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

Gentlemen, - You have all listened with much satisfaction to the plea put forward by an educationalist who will not allow an unjustified charge to be levelled against the institution that is so dear to him. But I know that in any case you were not inclined to give easy credence to the accusation that schools drive their pupils to suicide. Do not let us be carried too far, however, by our sympathy with the party which has been unjustly treated in this instance. Not all the arguments put forward by the opener of the discussion seem to me to hold water. If it is the case that youthful suicide occurs not only among pupils in secondary schools but also among apprentices and others, this fact does not acquit the secondary schools; it must perhaps be interpreted as meaning that as regards its pupils the secondary school takes the place of the traumas with which other adolescents meet in other walks of life. But a secondary school should achieve more than not driving its pupils to suicide. It should give them a desire to live and should offer them support and backing at a time of life at which the conditions of their development compel them to relax their ties with their parental home and their family. It seems to me indisputable that schools fail in this, and in many respects fall short of their duty of providing a substitute for the family and of arousing interest in life in the world outside. This is not a suitable occasion for a criticism of secondary schools in their present shape; but perhaps I may emphasize a single point. The school must never forget that it has to deal with immature individuals who cannot be denied a right to linger at certain stages of development and even at certain disagreeable ones. The school must not take on itself the inexorable character of life: it must not seek to be more than a game of life.

II. CONCLUDING REMARKS

Gentlemen, - I have an impression that, in spite of all the valuable material that has been brought before us in this discussion, we have not reached a decision on the problem that interests us. We were anxious above all to know how it becomes possible for the extraordinarily powerful life instinct to be overcome: whether this can only come about with the help of a disappointed libido or whether the ego can renounce its self-preservation for its own egoistic motives. It may be that we have failed to answer this psychological question because we have no adequate means of approaching it. We can, I think, only take as our starting-point the condition of melancholia, which is so familiar to us clinically, and a comparison between it and the affect of mourning. The affective processes in melancholia, however, and the vicissitudes undergone by the libido in that condition, are totally unknown to us. Nor have we arrived at a psycho-analytic understanding of the chronic affect of mourning. Let us suspend our judgement till experience has solved this problem.

2382

LETTER TO DR. FRIEDRICH S. KRAUS ON ANTHROPOPHYTEIA

My Dear Dr. Krauss,

You have asked me what scientific value can in my opinion be claimed by collections of erotic jokes, witticisms, funny stories, etc. I know you have not felt any doubt of being able to justify the making of such collections. You merely wanted me to bear witness from the standpoint of a psychologist to the fact that material of this kind is not only useful but indispensable.

There are two points upon which I should principally like to insist. When all is said and done, the erotic quips and comic anecdotes that you have collected and published in Anthropophyteia have only been produced and repeated because they gave pleasure both to their narrators and their hearers. It is not difficult to guess which components of the sexual instinct (compounded as it is from so many elements) find satisfaction in this manner. These tales give us direct information as to which of the component instincts of sexuality are retained in a given group of people as particularly efficient in producing pleasure; and in this way they give the neatest confirmation of the findings reached by the psycho-analytic examination of neurotics. Allow me to indicate the most important example of this kind. Psycho-analysis has led us to assert that the anal region - normally and not only in perverse individuals - is the site of an erotogenic sensitivity, and that in certain ways it behaves exactly like a genital organ. Doctors and psychologists, when told of there being an anal erotism and an anal character derived from it, have been highly indignant. At this point Anthropophyteia comes to the help of psycho-analysis by showing how universally people dwell with pleasure upon this part of the body, its performances and indeed the product of its function. If this were not so, all these anecdotes would be bound to give rise to disgust in their hearers or else the whole mass of the population would have to be ‘perverse’ in the sense in which the word is used in works dealing with ‘psychopathia sexualis’ in a moralizing tone. It would not be hard to give other instances of how the material collected by the authors of Anthropophyteia has been of value for the researches of sexual psychology. Its value may even be increased, perhaps, by the circumstance (not in itself an advantage) that the collectors know nothing of the theoretical findings of psycho-analysis and have brought together the material without any guiding principles.

Another advantage of a wider character is presented in particular by erotic jokes, in the strict sense, just as it is by jokes in general. I have shown in my study of jokes that the revelation of what is normally the repressed unconscious element in the mind can, under certain provisions, become a source of pleasure and thus a technique for the construction of jokes. In psycho-analysis to-day we describe a congeries of ideas and its associated affect as a ‘complex’; and we are prepared to assert that many of the most admired jokes are ‘complexive jokes’ and that they owe their exhilarating and cheerful effect to the ingenious uncovering of what are as a rule repressed complexes. It would carry me too far afield if I were to bring forward instances here in proof of this thesis, but I can assert that the outcome of such an examination of the evidence is that the jokes, both erotic and of other sorts, which are in popular circulation provide an excellent auxiliary means of investigating the unconscious human mind - in the same way as do dreams, myths and legends, with the exploitation of which psycho-analysis is already actively

engaged.

It is therefore safe to hope that the psychological importance of folklore will be more and more clearly recognized, and that the relations between that branch of study and psycho-analysis will soon become more intimate.

I remain, dear Dr. Krauss, yours very sincerely,

FREUD

June 26,1910

2383

TWO INSTANCES OF PATHOGENIC PHANTASIES

REVEALED BY THE PATIENTS THEMSELVES

A

A short while ago I saw a patient, about twenty years of age, who gave an unmistakable picture (confirmed by other opinions) of a dementia praecox (hebephrenia). During the initial stages of his illness he had exhibited periodic changes of mood and had made a considerable improvement. While he was in this favourable condition he was removed from the institution by his parents and for about a week he was regaled with entertainments of every kind to celebrate his supposed recovery. His relapse followed immediately upon this week of festivities. When he was brought back to the institution, he said that the consulting physician had advised him ‘to flirt with his mother a little’. There can be no doubt that in this delusory paramnesia he was giving expression to the excitement which had been provoked in him by being in his mother’s company and which had been the immediate provocation of his relapse.

B

More than ten years ago, at a time when the findings and hypotheses of psycho-analysis were known to only a few people, the following events were reported to me from a trustworthy source. A girl, who was the daughter of a medical man, fell ill of hysteria with local symptoms. Her father denied that it was hysteria and arranged for various somatic treatments to be initiated, which brought little improvement. One day a woman friend of the patient’s said to her: ‘Have you never thought of consulting Dr. F.?’ To which the patient replied: ‘What good would that be? I know he’d say to me: "Have you ever had the idea of having sexual intercourse with your father?"' - It seems unnecessary for me to say explicitly that it has never been my practice and is not my practice to-day to ask such questions. But it is worth remarking that much of what patients report of the words and actions of their physicians may be understood as revelations of their own pathogenic phantasies.

2384

REVIEW OF WILHELM NEUTRA’S LETTERS TO NEUROTIC WOMEN

It should be taken as an encouraging sign of the awakening interest in psychotherapy that a second edition of this book has been called for so quickly. Unluckily we cannot hail the book itself as an encouraging phenomenon. The author, who is an assistant physician in the Gainfarn hydropathic institute near Vienna, has borrowed the form of Oppenheim’s Psychotherapeutische Briefe and has given that form a psycho-analytic content. This is in a sense ill-judged, since psycho-analysis cannot be satisfactorily combined with Oppenheim’s (or, if that is preferred, Dubois’) technique of ‘persuasion’; it looks for it therapeutic results along quite other paths. What is more important, however, is the fact that the author fails to attain the merits of his model - tact and moral seriousness - and that in his presentation of psycho-analytic theory he often drops into empty rhetoric and is also guilty of some misstatements. Nevertheless much of what he writes is neatly and aptly expressed; and the book may pass muster as a work for popular consumption. In a more serious, scientific exposition of the subject the author would have had to indicate the sources of his views and assertions with greater conscientiousness.

2385

PSYCHO-ANALYTIC NOTES ON AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNT

OF A CASE OF PARANOIA

(DEMENTIA PARANOIDES)

(1911)

2386

Intentionally left blank

2387

PSYCHO-ANALYTIC NOTES ON AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNT

OF A CASE OF PARANOIA

(DEMENTIA PARANOIDES)

The analytic investigation of paranoia presents difficulties of a peculiar nature to physicians who, like myself, are not attached to public institutions. We cannot accept patients suffering from this complaint, or, at all events, we cannot keep them for long, since we cannot offer treatment unless there is some prospect of therapeutic success. It is only in exceptional circumstances, therefore, that I succeed in getting more than a superficial view of the structure of paranoia - when, for instance, the diagnosis (which is not always an easy matter) is uncertain enough to justify an attempt at influencing the patient, or when, in spite of an assured diagnosis, I yield to the entreaties of the patient’s relatives and undertake to treat him for a time. Apart from this, of course, I see plenty of cases of paranoia and of dementia praecox, and I learn as much about them as other psychiatrists do about their cases; but that is not enough, as a rule, to lead to any analytic conclusions.

The psycho-analytic investigation of paranoia would be altogether impossible if the patients themselves did not possess the peculiarity of betraying (in a distorted form, it is true) precisely those things which other neurotics keep hidden as a secret. Since paranoics cannot be compelled to overcome their internal resistances, and since in any case they only say what they choose to say, it follows that this is precisely a disorder in which a written report or a printed case history can take the place of personal acquaintance with the patient. For this reason I think it is legitimate to base analytic interpretations upon the case history of a patient suffering from paranoia (or, more precisely, from dementia paranoides) whom I have never seen, but who has written his own case history and brought it before the public in print.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2388

I refer to Dr. jur. Daniel Paul Schreber, formerly Senatspräsident in Dresden, whose book, Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken [Memoirs of a Nerve Patient], was published in 1903, and, if I am rightly informed, aroused considerable interest among psychiatrists. It is possible that Dr. Schreber may still be living to-day and that he may have dissociated himself so far from the delusional system which he put forward in 1903 as to be pained by these notes upon his book. In so far, however, as he still retains his identity with his former personality, I can rely upon the arguments with which he himself - ‘a man of superior mental gifts and endowed with an unusual keenness alike of intellect and of observation’¹ - countered the efforts that were made to restrain him from publishing his memoirs: ‘I have been at no pains’, he writes, ‘to close my eyes to the difficulties that would appear to lie in the path of publication, and in particular to the problem of paying due regard to the susceptibilities of certain persons still living. On the other hand, I am of opinion that it might well be to the advantage both of science and of the recognition of religious truths if, during my life-time, qualified authorities were enabled to undertake some examination of my body and to hold some enquiry into my personal experiences. To this consideration all feelings of a personal character must yield.’² He declares in another passage that he has decided to keep to his intention of publishing the book, even if the consequence were to be that his physician, Geheimrat Dr. Flechsig of Leipzig, brought an action against him. He urges upon Dr. Flechsig, however, the same considerations that I am now urging upon him himself: ‘I trust’, he says, ‘that even in the case of Geheimrat Prof. Dr. Flechsig any personal susceptibilities that he may feel will be outweighed by a scientific interest in the subject-matter of my memoirs.’ (446.)³

Though all the passages from the Denkwürdigkeiten upon which my interpretations are based will be quoted verbatim in the following pages, I would ask my readers to make themselves acquainted with the book by reading it through at least once beforehand.

¹ This piece of self-portraiture, which is certainly not unjustified, will be found on page 35 of his book.

² Preface, iii.

³ [Throughout this paper figures in brackets with no preceding ‘p.’ are page references to the original German edition of Schreber’s memoirs - Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken, Leipzig, Oswald Mutze.]

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2389

I

CASE HISTORY

‘I have suffered twice from nervous disorders’, writes Dr. Schreber, ‘and each time as a result of mental overstrain. This was due on the first occasion to my standing as a candidate for election to the Reichstag while I was Landgerichtsdirektor at Chemnitz, and on the second occasion to the very heavy burden of work that fell upon my shoulders when I entered on my new duties as Senatspräsident in the Oberlandesgericht in Dresden.’ (34.)

Dr. Schreber’s first illness began in the autumn of 1884, and by the end of 1885 he had completely recovered. During this period he spent six months in Flechsig’s clinic, and the latter, in a formal report which he drew up at a later date, described the disorder as an attack of severe hypochondria. Dr. Schreber assures us that this illness ran its course ‘without the occurrence of any incidents bordering upon the sphere of the supernatural’. (35.)

Neither the patient’s own account, nor the reports of the physicians which are reprinted at the end of his book, tell us enough about his previous history or his personal circumstances. I am not even in a position to give the patient’s age at the time of his illness, though the high judicial position which he had attained before his second illness establishes some sort of lower limit. We learn that Dr. Schreber had been married long before the time of his ‘hypochondria’. ‘The gratitude of my wife’, he writes, ‘was perhaps even more heartfelt; for she revered Professor Flechsig as the man who had restored her husband to her, and hence it was that for years she kept his portrait standing upon her writing-table.’ (36.) And in the same place: ‘After my recovery from my first illness I spent eight years with my wife - years, upon the whole, of great happiness, rich in outward honours, and only clouded from time to time by the oft repeated disappointment of our hope that we might be blessed with children.’

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2390

In June, 1893, he was notified of his prospective appointment as Senatspräsident, and he took up his duties on the first of October of the same year. Between these two dates¹ he had some dreams, though it was not until later that he came to attach any importance to them. He dreamt two or three times that his old nervous disorder had come back; and this made him as miserable in the dream as the discovery that it was only a dream made him happy when he woke up. Once, in the early hours of the morning, moreover, while he was in a state between sleeping and waking, the idea occurred to him ‘that after all it really must be very nice to be a woman submitting to the act of copulation’. (36.) This idea was one which he would have rejected with the greatest indignation if he had been fully conscious.

The second illness set in at the end of October 1893 with a torturing bout of sleeplessness. This forced him to return to the Flechsig clinic, where, however, his condition grew rapidly worse. The further course of the illness is described in a Report drawn up subsequently by the director of the Sonnenstein Asylum: ‘At the commencement of his residence there² he expressed more hypochondriacal ideas, complained that he had softening of the brain, that he would soon be dead, etc. But ideas of persecution were already finding their way into the clinical picture, based upon sensory illusions which, however, seemed only to appear sporadically at first; while simultaneously a high degree of hyperaesthesia was observable - great sensitiveness to light and noise. - Later, the visual and auditory illusions became much more frequent, and, in conjunction with coenaesthetic disturbances, dominated the whole of his feeling and thought. He believed that he was dead and decomposing, that he was suffering from the plague; he asserted that his body was being handled in all kinds of revolting ways; and, as he himself declares to this day, he went through worse horrors than any one could have imagined, and all on behalf of a holy purpose. The patient was so much pre-occupied with these pathological experiences that he was inaccessible to any other impression and would sit perfectly rigid and motionless for hours (hallucinatory stupor). On the other hand, they tortured him to such a degree that he longed for death. He made repeated attempts at drowning himself in his bath, and asked to be given the "cyanide that was intended for him". His delusional ideas gradually assumed a mystical and religious character; he was in direct communication with God, he was the plaything of devils, he saw "miraculous apparitions", he heard "holy music", and in the end he even came to believe that he was living in another world.’ (380.)

¹ And therefore before he could have been affected by the overwork caused by his new post, to which he attributes his illness.

² In Professor Flechsig’s clinic at Leipzig.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2391

It may be added that there were certain people by whom he thought he was being persecuted and injured, and upon whom he poured abuse. The most prominent of these was his former physician, Flechsig, whom he called a ‘soul-murderer’; and he used to call out over and over again: ‘Little Flechsig!’ putting a sharp stress upon the first word (383). He was moved from Leipzig, and, after a short interval spent in another institution, was brought in June 1894 to the Sonnenstein Asylum, near Pirna, where he remained until his disorder assumed its final shape. In the course of the next few years the clinical picture altered in a manner which can best be described in the words of Dr. Weber, the director of the asylum.

‘I need not enter any further into the details of the course of the disease. I must, however, draw attention to the manner in which, as time went on, the initial comparatively acute psychosis, which had directly involved the patient’s entire mental life and deserved the name of "hallucinatory insanity", developed more and more clearly (one might almost say crystallized out) into the paranoic clinical picture that we have before us to-day.’ (385.) The fact was that, on the one hand, he had developed an ingenious delusional structure, in which we have every reason to be interested, while, on the other hand, his personality had been reconstructed and now showed itself, except for a few isolated disturbances, capable of meeting the demands of everyday life.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2392

Dr. Weber, in his Report of 1899, makes the following remarks: ‘It thus appears that at the present time, apart from certain obvious psychomotor symptoms which cannot fail to strike even the superficial observer as being pathological, Herr Senatspräsident Dr. Schreber shows no signs of confusion or of psychical inhibition, nor is his intelligence noticeably impaired. His mind is collected, his memory is excellent, he has at his disposal a very considerable store of knowledge (not merely upon legal questions, but in many other fields), and he is able to reproduce it in a connected train of thought. He takes an interest in following events in the world of politics, science and art, etc., and is constantly occupied with such matters . . . and an observer who was uninstructed upon his general condition would scarcely notice anything peculiar in these directions. In spite of all this, however, the patient is full of ideas of pathological origin, which have formed themselves into a complete system; they are more or less fixed, and seem to be inaccessible to correction by means of any objective appreciation and judgement of the external facts.’ (305-6.)

Thus the patient’s condition had undergone a great change, and he now considered himself capable of carrying on an independent existence. He accordingly took appropriate steps with a view to regaining control over his own affairs and to securing his discharge from the asylum. Dr. Weber set himself to prevent the fulfilment of these intentions and drew up reports in opposition to them. Nevertheless, in his Report dated 1900, he felt obliged to give this appreciative account of the patient’s character and conduct: ‘Since for the last nine months Herr Präsident Schreber has taken his meals daily at my family board, I have had the most ample opportunities of conversing with him upon every imaginable topic, Whatever the subject was that came up for discussion (apart, of course, from his delusional ideas), whether it concerned events in the field of administration and law, of politics, art, literature or social life - in short, whatever the topic, Dr. Schreber gave evidence of a lively interest, a well-informed mind, a good memory, and a sound judgement; his ethical outlook, moreover, was one which it was impossible not to endorse. So, too, in his lighter talk with the ladies of the party, he was both courteous and affable, and when he touched upon matters in a more humorous vein he invariably displayed tact and decorum. Never once, during these innocent talks round the dining-table, did he introduce subjects which should more properly have been raised at a medical consultation.’ (397-8.) Indeed, on one occasion during this period when a business question arose which involved the interests of his whole family, he entered into it in a manner which showed both his technical knowledge and his common sense (401 and 510).

In the numerous applications to the courts, by which Dr. Schreber endeavoured to regain his liberty, he did not in the least disavow his delusions or make any secret of his intention of publishing the Denkwürdigkeiten. On the contrary, he dwelt upon the importance of his ideas to religious thought, and upon their invulnerability to the attacks of modern science; but at the same time he laid stress upon the ‘absolute harmlessness’ (430) of all the actions which, as he was aware, his delusions obliged him to perform. Such, indeed, were his acumen and the cogency of his logic that finally, and in spite of his being an acknowledged paranoic, his efforts were crowned with success. In July, 1902, Dr. Schreber’s civil rights were restored, and in the following year his Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken appeared, though in a censored form and with many valuable portions omitted.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2393

The Court Judgement that gave Dr. Schreber back his liberty summarizes the content of his delusional system in a few sentences: ‘He believed that he had a mission to redeem the world and to restore it to its lost state of bliss. This, however, he could only bring about if he were first transformed from a man into a woman.’ (475.)

For a more detailed account of his delusions as they appeared in their final shape we may turn to Dr. Weber’s Report of 1899: ‘The culminating point of the patient’s delusional system is his belief that he has a mission to redeem the world, and to restore mankind to their lost state of bliss. He was called to this task, so he asserts, by direct inspiration from God, just as we are taught that the Prophets were; for nerves in a condition of great excitement, as his were for a long time, have precisely the property of exerting an attraction upon God - though this is touching on matters which human speech is scarcely, if at all, capable of expressing, since they lie entirely outside the scope of human experience and, indeed, have been revealed to him alone. The most essential part of his mission of redemption is that it must be preceded by his transformation into a woman. It is not to be supposed that he wishes to be transformed into a woman; it is rather a question of a "must" based upon the Order of Things, which there is no possibility of his evading, much as he would personally prefer to remain in his own honourable and masculine station in life. But neither he nor the rest or mankind can regain the life beyond except by his being transformed into a woman (a process which may occupy many years or even decades) by means of divine miracles. He himself, of this he is convinced, is the only object upon which divine miracles are worked, and he is thus the most remarkable human being who has ever lived upon earth. Every hour and every minute for years he has experienced these miracles in his body, and he has had them confirmed by the voices that have conversed with him. During the first years of his illness certain of his bodily organs suffered such destructive injuries as would inevitably have led to the death of any other man: he lived for a long time without a stomach, without intestines, almost without lungs, with a torn oesophagus, without a bladder, and with shattered ribs, he used sometimes to swallow part of his own larynx with his food, etc. But divine miracles ("rays") always restored what had been destroyed, and therefore, as long as he remains a man, he is altogether immortal. These alarming phenomena have ceased long ago, and his "femaleness" has become prominent instead. This is a matter of a process of development which will probably require decades, if not centuries, for its completion, and it is unlikely that anyone now living will survive to see the end of it. He has a feeling that enormous numbers of "female nerves" have already passed over into his body, and out of them a new race of men will proceed, through a process of direct impregnation by God. Not until then, it seems, will he be able to die a natural death, and, along with the rest of mankind, will he regain a state of bliss. In the meantime not only the sun, but trees and birds, which are in the nature of "bemiracled residues of former human souls", speak to him in human accents, and miraculous things happen everywhere around him.’ (386-8.)

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2394

The interest felt by the practical psychiatrist in such delusional formations as these is, as a rule, exhausted when once he has ascertained the character of the products of the delusion and has formed an estimate of their influence on the patient’s general behaviour: in his case marvelling is not the beginning of understanding. The psycho-analyst, in the light of his knowledge of the psychoneuroses, approaches the subject with a suspicion that even thought-structures so extraordinary as these and so remote from our common modes of thinking are nevertheless derived from the most general and comprehensible impulses of the human mind; and he would be glad to discover the motives of such a transformation as well as the manner in which it has been accomplished. With this aim in view, he will wish to go more deeply into the details of the delusion and into the history of its development.

(a) The medical officer lays stress upon two points as being of chief importance: the patient’s assumption of the role of Redeemer, and his transformation into a woman. The Redeemer delusion is a phantasy that is familiar to us through the frequency with which it forms the nucleus of religious paranoia. The additional factor, which makes the redemption dependent upon the man being previously transformed into a woman, is unusual and in itself bewildering, since it shows such a wide divergence from the historical myth which the patient’s phantasy is setting out to reproduce. It is natural to follow the medical report in assuming that the motive force of this delusional complex was the patient’s ambition to play the part of Redeemer, and that his emasculation was only entitled to be regarded as a means for achieving that end. Even though this may appear to be true of his delusion in its final form, a study of the Denkwürdigkeiten compels us to take a very different view of the matter. For we learn that the idea of being transformed into a woman (that is, of being emasculated) was the primary delusion, that he began by regarding that act as constituting a serious injury and persecution, and that it only became related to his playing the part of Redeemer in a secondary way. There can be no doubt, moreover, that originally he believed that the transformation was to be effected for the purpose of sexual abuse and not so as to serve higher designs. The position may be formulated by saying that a sexual delusion of persecution was later on converted in the patient’s mind into a religious delusion of grandeur. The part of persecutor was at first assigned to Professor Flechsig, the physician in whose charge he was; later, his place was taken by God Himself.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2395

I will quote the relevant passages from the Denkwürdigkeiten in full: ‘In this way a conspiracy against me was brought to a head (in about March or April, 1894). Its object was to contrive that, when once my nervous complaint had been recognized as incurable or assumed to be so, I should be handed over to a certain person in a particular manner: my soul was to be delivered up to him, but my body - owing to a misapprehension of what I have described above as the purpose underlying the Order of Things - was to be transformed into a female body: and as such surrendered to the person in question¹ with a view to sexual abuse, and was then simply to be "left on one side" - that is to say, no doubt, given over to corruption.’ (56.)

‘It was, moreover, perfectly natural that from the human standpoint (which was the one by which at that time I was still chiefly governed) I should regard Professor Flechsig or his soul as my only true enemy - at a later date there was also the von W. soul, about which I shall have more to say presently - and that I should look upon God Almighty as my natural ally. I merely fancied that He was in great straits as regards Professor Flechsig, and consequently felt myself bound to support him by every conceivable means, even to the length of sacrificing myself. It was not until very much later that the idea forced itself upon my mind that God Himself had played the part of accomplice, if not of instigator, in the plot whereby my soul was to be murdered and my body used like a strumpet. I may say, in fact, that this idea has in part become clearly conscious to me only in the course of writing the present work.’ (59.)

‘Every attempt at murdering my soul, or at emasculating me for purposes contrary to the Order of Things (that is, for the gratification of the sexual appetites of a human individual), or later at destroying my understanding - every such attempt has come to nothing. From this apparently unequal struggle between one weak man and God Himself, I have emerged as the victor - though not without undergoing much bitter suffering and privation - because the Order of Things stands upon my side.’ (61.)

In a footnote attached to the words ‘contrary to the Order of Things’ in the above passage, the author foreshadows the subsequent transformation in his delusion of emasculation and in his relation to God: ‘I shall show later on that emasculation for quite another purpose - a purpose in consonance with the Order of Things - is within the bounds of possibility, and, indeed, that it may quite probably afford the solution of the conflict.’

¹ It is shown from the context in this and other passages that ‘the person in question’ who was to practise this abuse was none other than Flechsig. (See below.)

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2396

These statements are of decisive importance in determining the view we are to take of the delusion of emasculation and in thus giving us a general understanding of the case. It may be added that the ‘voices’ which the patient heard never treated his transformation into a woman as anything but a sexual disgrace, which gave them an excuse for jeering at him. ‘Rays of God¹ not infrequently thought themselves entitled to mock at me by calling me "Miss² Schreber", in allusion to the emasculation which, it was alleged, I was about to undergo.’ (127.) Or they would say: ‘So this sets up to have been a Senatspräsident, this person who lets himself be f--d!’³ Or again: ‘Don’t you feel ashamed in front of your wife?’

That the emasculation phantasy was of a primary nature and originally independent of the Redeemer motif becomes still more probable when we recollect the ‘idea’ which, as I mentioned on an earlier page, occurred to him while he was half asleep, to the effect that it must be nice to be a woman submitting to the act of copulation (36.) This phantasy appeared during the incubation period of his illness, and before he had begun to feel the effects of overwork in Dresden.

Schreber himself gives the month of November, 1895, as the date at which the connection was established between the emasculation phantasy and the Redeemer idea and the way thus paved for his becoming reconciled to the former. ‘Now, however,’ he writes, ‘I became clearly aware that the Order of Things imperatively demanded my emasculation, whether I personally liked it or no, and that no reasonable course lay open to me but to reconcile myself to the thought of being transformed into a woman. The further consequence of my emasculation could, of course, only be my impregnation by divine rays to the end that a new race of men might be created.’ (177.)

¹ The ‘rays of God’, as we shall see, are identical with the voices which talked the ‘basic language’.

² [In English in the original.]

³ I reproduce this omission from the Denkwürdigkeiten, just as I do all the peculiarities of their author’s way of writing. I myself should have found no reason for being so shamefaced over a serious matter.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2397

The idea of being transformed into a woman was the salient feature and the earliest germ of his delusional system. It also proved to be the one part of it that persisted after his cure, and the one part that was able to retain a place in his behaviour in real life after he had recovered. ‘The only thing which could appear unreasonable in the eyes of other people is the fact, already touched upon in the expert’s report, that I am sometimes to be found standing before the mirror or elsewhere with the upper portion of my body bared, and wearing sundry feminine adornments, such as ribbons, false necklaces, and the like. This only occurs, I may add, when I am by myself; and never, at least so far as I am able to avoid it, in the presence of other people.’ (429.) The Herr Senatspräsident confesses to this frivolity at a date (July, 1901) at which he was already in a position to express very aptly the completeness of his recovery in the region of practical life: ‘I have now long been aware that the persons I see about me are not "cursorily improvised men" but real people, and that I must therefore behave towards them as a reasonable man is used to behave towards his fellows.’ (409.) In contrast to the way in which he put his emasculation phantasy into action, the patient never took any steps towards inducing people to recognize his mission as Redeemer, beyond the publication of his Denkwürdigkeiten.

(b) The attitude of our patient towards God is so singular and so full of internal contradictions that it requires more than a little faith to persist in the belief that there is nevertheless ‘method’ in his ‘madness’. With the help of what Dr. Schreber tells us in the Denkwürdigkeiten, we must now endeavour to arrive at a more exact view of his theologico-psychological system, and we must expound his opinions concerning nerves, the state of bliss, the divine hierarchy, and the attributes of God, in their manifest (delusional) nexus. At every point in his theory we shall be struck by the astonishing mixture of the commonplace and the clever, of what has been borrowed and what is original.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2398

The human soul is comprised in the nerves of the body. These are to be conceived of as structures of extraordinary fineness, comparable to the finest thread. Some of these nerves are suited only for the reception of sense-perceptions, while others (the nerves of understanding) carry out all the functions of the mind; and in this connection it is to be noticed that each single nerve of understanding represents a person’s entire mental individuality, and that the presence of a greater or lesser number of nerves of understanding has no influence except upon the length of time during which the mind can retain its impressions.¹

Whereas men consist of bodies and nerves, God is from His very nature nothing but nerve. But the nerves of God are not, as is the case with human bodies, present in limited numbers, but are infinite or eternal. They possess all the properties of human nerves to an enormously intensified degree. In their creative capacity - that is, their power of turning themselves into every imaginable object in the created world - they are known as rays. There is an intimate relation between God and the starry heaven and the sun.²

¹ The words in which Schreber states this theory are italicized by him, and he adds a footnote, in which he insists that it can be used as an explanation of heredity: ‘The male semen’, he declares, ‘contains a nerve belonging to the father, and it unites with a nerve taken from the mother’s body to form a new entity.’ (7.) Here, therefore, we find a quality properly belonging to the spermatozoon transferred on to the nerves, which makes it probable that Schreber’s ‘nerves’ are derived from the sphere of ideas connected with sexuality. It not infrequently happens in the Denkwürdigkeiten that an incidental note upon some piece of delusional theory gives us the desired indication of the genesis of the delusion and so of its meaning.

² In this connection see my discussion below on the significance of the sun. - The comparison between (or rather the condensation of) nerves and rays may well have been based on the linear extension which they have in common. The ray-nerves, by the way, are no less creative than the spermatozoon-nerves.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2399

When the work of creation was finished, God withdrew to an immense distance (10-11 and 252) and, in general, resigned the world to its own laws. He limited His activities to drawing up to Himself the souls of the dead. It was only in exceptional instances that He would enter into relations with particular, highly gifted persons,¹ or would intervene by means of a miracle in the destinies of the world. God does not have any regular communication with human souls, in accordance with the Order of Things, till after death.² When a man dies, his spiritual parts (that is, his nerves) undergo a process of purification before being finally reunited with God Himself as ‘fore-courts of Heaven’. Thus it comes about that everything moves in an eternal round, which lies at the basis of the Order of Things. In creating anything, God is parting with a portion of Himself, or is giving a portion of His nerves a different shape. The apparent loss which He thus sustains is made good when, after hundreds and thousands of years, the nerves of dead men, that have entered the state of bliss, once more accrue to Him as ‘fore-courts of Heaven’ (18 and 19 n.).

Souls that have passed through the process of purification enter into the enjoyment of a state of bliss.³ In the meantime they have lost some of their individual consciousness, and have become fused together with other souls into higher unities. Important souls, such as those of men like Goethe, Bismarck, etc., may have to retain their sense of identity for hundreds of years to come, before they too can become resolved into higher soul-complexes, such as ‘Jehovah rays’ in the case of ancient Jewry: or ‘Zoroaster rays’ in the case of ancient Persia. In the course of their purification ‘souls learn the language which is spoken by God himself, the so-called "basic language", a vigorous though somewhat antiquated German, which is especially characterized by its great wealth of euphemisms’.4 (13.)

¹ In the ‘basic language’ (see below) this is described as ‘making a nerve-connection with them’.

² We shall find later that certain criticisms against God are based on this fact.

³ This consists essentially in a feeling of voluptuousness (see below).

4 On one single occasion during his illness the patient was vouchsafed the privilege of seeing, with his spiritual eyes, God Almighty clear and undisguised before him. On that occasion God uttered what was a very current word in the basic language, and a forcible though not an amiable one - the word ‘Slut!’ (136). [In German ‘Luder’. This term of abuse is occasionally applied to males, though much more often to females.]

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2400

God Himself is not a simple entity. ‘Above the "fore-courts of Heaven" hovered God Himself, who, in contradistinction to these "anterior realms of God", was also described as the "posterior realms of God". The posterior realms of God were, and still are, divided in a strange manner into two parts, so that a lower God (Ahriman) was differentiated from an upper God (Ormuzd).’ (19.) As regards the significance of this division Schreber can tell us no more than that the lower God was more especially attached to the peoples of a dark race (the Semites) and the upper God to those of a fair race (the Aryans); nor would it be reasonable, in such sublime matters, to expect more of human knowledge. Nevertheless, we are also told that ‘in spite of the fact that in certain respects God Almighty forms a unity, the lower and the upper God must be regarded as separate Beings, each of which possesses its own particular egoism and its own particular instinct of self-preservation, even in relation to the other, and each of which is therefore constantly endeavouring to thrust itself in front of the other’ (140 n.). Moreover, the two divine Beings behaved in quite different ways towards the unlucky Schreber during the acute stage of his illness.¹

In the days before his illness Senatspräsident Schreber had been a doubter in religious matters (29 and 64); he had never been able to persuade himself into a firm belief in the existence of a personal God. Indeed, he adduces this fact about his earlier life as an argument in favour of the complete reality of his delusions.² But any one who reads the account which follows of the character-traits of Schreber’s God will have to allow that the transformation effected by the paranoic disorder was no very fundamental one, and that in the Redeemer of to-day much remains of the doubter of yesterday.

¹ A footnote on page 20 leads us to suppose that a passage in Byron’s Manfred may have determined Schreber’s choice of the names of Persian divinities. We shall later come upon. further evidence of the influence of this poem on him.

² ‘That it was simply a matter of illusions seems to me to be in my case, from the very nature of things, psychologically unthinkable. For illusions of holding communication with God or with departed souls can properly only arise in the minds of persons who, before falling into their condition of pathological nervous excitement, already have a firm belief in God and in the immortality of the soul. This was not by any means so, however, in my case, as has been explained at the beginning of this chapter.’ (79.)

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2401

For there is a flaw in the Order of Things, as a result of which the existence of God Himself seems to be endangered. Owing to circumstances which are incapable of further explanation, the nerves of living men, especially when in a condition of intense excitement, may exercise such a powerful attraction upon the nerves of God that He cannot get free from them again, and thus His own existence may be threatened (11). This exceedingly rare occurrence took place in Schreber’s case and involved him in the greatest sufferings. The instinct of self-preservation was aroused in God (30), and it then became evident that God was far removed from the perfection ascribed to him by religions. Through the whole of Schreber’s book there runs the bitter complaint that God, being only accustomed to communication with the dead, does not understand living men.

‘In this connection, however, a fundamental misunderstanding prevails, which has since run through my whole life like a scarlet thread. It is based precisely upon the fact that, in accordance with the Order of Things, God really knows nothing about living men and did not need to know; consonantly with the Order of Things, He needed only to have communication with corpses.’ (55.) - ‘This state of things . . . I am convinced, is once more to be brought into connection with the fact that God was, if I may so express it, quite incapable of dealing with living men, and was only accustomed to communicate with corpses, or at most with men as they lay asleep (that is, in their dreams).’ (141.) - ‘I myself feel inclined to exclaim: "Incredibile scriptu!" Yet it is all literally true, however difficult it may be for other people to grasp the idea of God’s complete inability to judge living men correctly, and however long I myself took to accustom myself to this idea after my innumerable observations upon the subject.’ (246.)

But as a result of God’s misunderstanding of living men it was possible for Him Himself to become the instigator of the plot against Schreber, to take him for an idiot, and to subject him to these severe ordeals (264). To avoid being set down as an idiot, he submitted himself to an extremely burdensome system of ‘enforced thinking’. For ‘every time that my intellectual activities ceased, God jumped to the conclusion that my mental faculties were extinct and that the destruction of my understanding (the idiocy), for which He was hoping, had actually set in, and that a withdrawal had now become possible’ (206).

The behaviour of God in the matter of the urge to evacuate (or ‘sh--’) rouses him to a specially high pitch of indignation. The passage is so characteristic that I will quote it in full. But to make it clear I must first explain that both the miracles and the voices proceed from God, that is, from the divine rays.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2402

‘Although it will necessitate my touching upon an unsavoury subject, I must devote a few more words to the question that I have just quoted ("Why don’t you sh--?") on account of the typical character of the whole business. The need for evacuation, like all else that has to do with my body, is evoked by a miracle. It is brought about by my faeces being forced forwards (and sometimes backwards again) in my intestines; and if, owing to there having already been an evacuation, enough material is not present, then such small remains as there may still be of the contents of my intestines are smeared over my anal orifice. This occurrence is a miracle performed by the upper God, and it is repeated several dozens of times at the least every day. It is associated with an idea which is utterly incomprehensible to human beings and can only be accounted for by God’s complete ignorance of living man as an organism. According to this idea "sh--ing" is in a certain sense the final act; that is to say, when once the urge to sh-- has been miracled up, the aim of destroying the understanding is achieved and a final withdrawal of the rays becomes possible. To get to the bottom of the origin of this idea, we must suppose, as it seems to me, that there is a misapprehension in connection with the symbolic meaning of the act of evacuation, a notion, in fact, that any one who has been in such a relation as I have with divine rays is to some extent entitled to sh-- upon the whole world.

‘But now what follows reveals the full perfidy¹ of the policy that has been pursued towards me. Almost every time the need for evacuation was miracled up in me, some other person in my vicinity was sent (by having his nerves stimulated for that purpose) to the lavatory, in order to prevent my evacuating. This is a phenomenon which I have observed for years and upon such countless occasions - thousands of them - and with such regularity, as to exclude any possibility of its being attributable to chance. And thereupon comes the question: "Why don’t you sh--?" to which the brilliant repartee is made that I am "so stupid or something". The pen well-nigh shrinks from recording so monumental a piece of absurdity as that God, blinded by His ignorance of human nature, can positively go to such lengths as to suppose that there can exist a man too stupid to do what every animal can do - too stupid to be able to sh--. When, upon the occasion of such an urge, I actually succeed in evacuating - and as a rule, since I nearly always find the lavatory engaged, I use a pail for the purpose - the process is always accompanied by the generation of an exceedingly strong feeling of spiritual voluptuousness. For the relief from the pressure caused by the presence of the faeces in the intestines produces a sense of intense well-being in the nerves of voluptuousness; and the same is equally true of making water. For this reason, even down to the present day, while I am passing stool or making water, all the rays are always without exception united; for this very reason, whenever I address myself to these natural functions, an attempt is invariably made, though as a rule in vain, to miracle backwards the urge to pass stool and to make water.’² (225-7.)

¹ In a footnote at this point the author endeavours to mitigate the harshness of the word ‘perfidy’ by a reference to one of his arguments in justification of God. These will be discussed presently.

² This confession to a pleasure in the excretory processes, which we have learnt to recognize as one of the auto-erotic components of infantile sexuality, may be compared with the remarks made by little Hans in my ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy’.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2403

Furthermore, this singular God of Schreber’s is incapable of learning anything by experience: ‘Owing to some quality or other inherent in his nature, it seems to be impossible for God to derive any lessons for the future from the experience thus gained.’ (186.) He can therefore go on repeating the same tormenting ordeals and miracles and voices, without alteration, year after year, until He inevitably becomes a laughing-stock to the victim of His persecutions.

‘The consequence is that, now that the miracles have to a great extent lost the power which they formerly possessed of producing terrifying effects, God strikes me above all, in almost everything that happens to me, as being ridiculous or childish. As regards my own behaviour, this often results in my being obliged in self-defence to play the part of a scoffer at God, and even, on occasion, to scoff at Him aloud.’ (333.)¹

This critical and rebellious attitude towards God is, however, opposed in Schreber’s mind by an energetic counter-current, which finds expression in many places: ‘But here again I must most emphatically declare that this is nothing more than an episode, which will, I hope, terminate at the latest with my decease, and that the right of scoffing at God belongs in consequence to me alone and not to other men. For them He remains the almighty creator of Heaven and earth, the first cause of all things, and the salvation of their future, to whom - not withstanding that a few of the conventional religious ideas may require revision - worship and the deepest reverence are due.’ (333-4.)

Repeated attempts are therefore made to find a justification for God’s behaviour to the patient. In these attempts, which display as much ingenuity as every other theodicy, the explanation is based now upon the general nature of souls, and now upon the necessity for self-preservation under which God lay, and upon the misleading influence of the Flechsig soul (60-1 and 160). In general, however, the illness is looked upon as a struggle between Schreber the man and God, in which victory lies with the man, weak though he is, because the Order of Things is on his side (61).

The medical report might easily lead us to suppose that Schreber exhibited the everyday form of Redeemer phantasy, in which the patient believes he is the son of God, destined to save the world from its misery or from the destruction that is threatening it, and so on. It is for this reason that I have been careful to present in detail the peculiarities of Schreber’s relation to God. The significance of this relation for the rest of mankind is only rarely alluded to in the Denkwürdigkeiten and not until the last phase of his delusional formation. It consists essentially in the fact that no one who dies can enter the state of bliss so long as the greater part of the rays of God are absorbed in his (Schreber’s) person, owing to his powers of attraction (32). It is only at a very late stage, too, that his identification with Jesus Christ makes an undisguised appearance (338 and 431).

No attempt at explaining Schreber’s case will have any chance of being correct which does not take into account these peculiarities in his conception of God, this mixture of reverence and rebelliousness in his attitude towards Him.

¹ Even in the basic language it occasionally happened that God was not the abuser but the abused. For instance: ‘Deuce take it! What a thing to have to say - that God lets himself be f--d!’ (194.)

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2404

I will now turn to another subject, which is closely related to God, namely, the state of bliss. This is also spoken of by Schreber as ‘the life beyond’ to which the human soul is raised after death by the process of purification. He describes it as a state of uninterrupted enjoyment, bound up with the contemplation of God. This is not very original, but on the other hand it is surprising to learn that Schreber makes a distinction between a male and a female state of bliss.¹ ‘The male state of bliss was superior to the female, which seems to have consisted chiefly in an uninterrupted feeling of voluptuousness.’ (18.) In other passages this coincidence between the state of bliss and voluptuousness is expressed in plainer language and without reference to sex-distinction; and moreover that element of the state of bliss which consists in the contemplation of God is not further discussed. Thus, for instance: ‘The nature of the nerves of God, is such that the state of bliss . . . is accompanied by a very intense sensation of voluptuousness, even though it does not consist exclusively of it.’ (51.) And again: ‘Voluptuousness may be regarded as a fragment of the state of bliss given in advance, as it were, to men and other living creatures.’ (281.) So the state of heavenly bliss is to be understood as being in its essence an intensified continuation of sensual pleasure upon earth!

This view of the state of bliss was far from being an element in Schreber’s delusion that originated in the first stages of his illness and was later eliminated as being incompatible with the rest. So late as in the Statement of his Case, drawn up by the patient for the Appeal Court in July, 1901, he emphasizes as one of his greatest discoveries the fact ‘that voluptuousness stands in a close relationship (not hitherto perceptible to the rest of mankind) to the state of bliss enjoyed by departed spirits’.²

¹ It would be much more in keeping with the wish-fulfilment offered by the life beyond that in it we shall at last be free from the difference between the sexes.

Und jene himmlischen Gestalten

sie fragen nicht nach Mann und Weib.

[And those calm shining sons of morn

They ask not who is maid or boy.]

² The possibility of this discovery of Schreber’s having a deeper meaning is discussed below.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2405

We shall find, indeed, that this ‘close relationship’ is the rock upon which the patient builds his hopes of an eventual reconciliation with God and of his sufferings being brought to an end. The rays of God abandon their hostility as soon as they are certain that in becoming absorbed into his body they will experience spiritual voluptuousness (133); God Himself demands that He shall be able to find voluptuousness in him (283), and threatens him with the withdrawal of His rays if he neglects to cultivate voluptuousness and cannot offer God what He demands (320).

This surprising sexualization of the state of heavenly bliss suggests the possibility that Schreber’s concept of the state of bliss is derived from a condensation of the two principal meanings of the German word ‘selig’ - namely, ‘dead’ and ‘sensually happy’.¹ But this instance of sexualization will also give us occasion to examine the patient’s general attitude to the erotic side of life and to questions of sexual indulgence. For we psycho-analysts have hitherto supported the view that the roots of every nervous and mental disorder are chiefly to be found in the patient’s sexual life - some of us merely upon empirical grounds, others influenced in addition by theoretical considerations.

¹ Extreme instances of the two uses of the word are to be found in the phrase ‘mein seliger Vater’ [‘my late father’] and in these lines from the duet in Don Giovanni:

Ja, dein zu sein auf ewig,

wie selig werd’ ich sein.

[Ah, to be thine for ever -

How blissful I should be!]

But the fact that the same word should be used in our language in two such different situations cannot be without significance.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2406

The samples of Schreber’s delusions that have already been given enable us without more ado to dismiss the suspicion that it might be precisely this paranoid disorder which would turn out to be the ‘negative case’ which has so long been sought for - a case in which sexuality plays only a very minor part. Schreber himself speaks again and again as though he shared our prejudice. He is constantly talking in the same breath of ‘nervous disorder’ and erotic lapses, as though the two things were inseparable.¹

Before his illness Senatspräsident Schreber had been a man of strict morals: ‘Few people’, he declares, and I see no reason to doubt his assertion, ‘can have been brought up upon such strict moral principles as I was, and few people, all through their lives, can have exercised (especially in sexual matters) a self-restraint conforming so closely to those principles as I may say of myself that I have done.’ (281.) After the severe spiritual struggle, of which the phenomena of his illness were the outward signs, his attitude towards the erotic side of life was altered. He had come to see that the cultivation of voluptuousness was incumbent upon him as a duty, and that it was only by discharging this duty that he could end the grave conflict which had broken out within him - or, as he thought, about him. Voluptuousness, so the voices assured him, had become ‘God-fearing’ and he could only regret that he was not able to devote himself to its cultivation the whole day long.² (285.)

¹ ‘When moral corruption ("voluptuous excesses") or perhaps nervous disorder had taken a strong enough hold upon the whole population of any terrestrial body’, then, thinks Schreber, bearing in mind the Biblical stories of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Deluge, etc., the world in question might come to a catastrophic end (52). - ‘[A rumour] sowed fear and terror among men, wrecked the foundations of religion, and spread abroad general nervous disorders and immorality, so that devastating pestilences have descended upon mankind.’ (91.) - ‘Thus it seems probable that by a "Prince of Hell" the souls meant the uncanny Power that was able to develop in a sense hostile to God as a result of moral depravity among men or of a general state of excessive nervous excitement following upon over-civilization.’ (163.)

² In connection with his delusions he writes: ‘This attraction, however, lost its terrors for the nerves in question, if, and in so far as, upon entering my body, they encountered a feeling of spiritual voluptuousness in which they themselves shared. For, if this happened, they found an equivalent or approximately equivalent substitute in my body for the state of heavenly bliss which they had lost, and which itself consisted in a kind of voluptuous enjoyment.’ (179-80.)

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2407

Such then, was the result of the changes produced in Schreber by his illness, as we find them expressed in the two main features of his delusional system. Before it he had been inclined to sexual asceticism and had been a doubter in regard to God; while after it he was a believer in God and a devotee of voluptuousness. But just as his re-conquered belief in God was of a peculiar kind, so too the sexual enjoyment which he had won for himself was of a most unusual character. It was not the sexual liberty of a man, but the sexual feelings of a woman. He took up a feminine attitude towards God; he felt that he was God’s wife.¹

No other part of his delusions is treated by the patient so exhaustively, one might almost say so insistently, as his alleged transformation into a woman. The nerves absorbed by him have, so he says, assumed in his body the character of female nerves of voluptuousness, and have given to his body a more or less female stamp, and more particularly to his skin a softness peculiar to the female sex (87). If he presses lightly with his fingers upon any part of his body, he can feel these nerves, under the surface of the skin, as a tissue of a thread-like or stringy texture; they are especially present in the region of the chest, where, in a woman, her breasts would be. ‘By applying pressure to this tissue, I am able to evoke a sensation of voluptuousness such as women experience, and especially in I think of something feminine at the same time.’ (277.) He knows with certainty that this tissue was originally nothing else than nerves of God, which could hardly have lost the character of nerves merely through having passed over into his body (279). By means of what he calls ‘drawing’ (that is, by calling up visual images) he is able to give both himself and the rays an impression that his body is fitted out with female breasts and genitals: ‘It has become so much a habit with me to draw female buttocks on to my body - honi soit qui mal y pense - that I do it almost involuntarily every time I stoop.’ (233.) He is ‘bold enough to assert that anyone who should happen to see me before the mirror with the upper portion of my torso bared - especially if the illusion is assisted by my wearing a little feminine finery - would receive an unmistakable impression of a female bust’. (280.) He calls for a medical examination, in order to establish the fact that his whole body has nerves of voluptuousness dispersed over it from head to foot, a state of things which is only to be found, in his opinion, in the female body, whereas, in the male, to the best of his knowledge, nerves of voluptuousness exist only in the sexual organs and their immediate vicinity (274). The spiritual voluptuousness which has been developed owing to this accumulation of nerves in his body is so intense that it only requires a slight effort of his imagination (especially when he is lying in bed) to procure him a feeling of sensual well-being that affords a tolerably clear adumbration of the sexual pleasure enjoyed by a woman during copulation (269).

¹ ‘Something occurred in my own body similar to the conception of Jesus Christ in an immaculate virgin, that is, in a woman who had never had intercourse with a man. On two separate occasions (and while I was still in Professor Flechsig’s institution) I have possessed female genitals, though somewhat imperfectly developed ones, and have felt a stirring in my body, such as would arise from the quickening of a human embryo. Nerves of God corresponding to male semen had, by a divine miracle, been projected into my body, and impregnation had thus taken place.’ (Introduction, 4.)

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2408

If we now recall the dream which the patient had during the incubation period of his illness, before he had moved to Dresden, it will become clear beyond a doubt that his delusion of being transformed into a woman was nothing else than a realization of the content of that dream. At that time he had rebelled against the dream with masculine indignation, and in the same way he began by striving against its fulfilment in his illness and looked upon his transformation into a woman as a disgrace with which he was threatened with hostile intention. But there came a time (it was in November, 1895) when he began to reconcile himself to the transformation and bring it into harmony with the higher purposes of God: ‘Since then, and with a full consciousness of what I did, I have inscribed upon my banner the cultivation of femaleness.’ (177-8.)

He then arrived at the firm conviction that it was God Himself who, for His own satisfaction, was demanding femaleness from him:

‘No sooner, however, am I alone with God (if I may so express it), than it becomes a necessity for me to employ every imaginable device and to summon up the whole of my mental faculties, and especially my imagination, in order to bring it about that the divine rays may have the impression as continuously as possible (or, since this is beyond mortal power at least at certain times of day) that I am a woman luxuriating in voluptuous sensations.’ (281.)

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2409

‘On the other hand, God demands a constant state of enjoyment, such as would be in keeping with the conditions of existence imposed upon souls by the Order of Things; and it is my duty to provide Him with this . . . in the shape of the greatest possible generation of spiritual voluptuousness. And if, in this process, a little sensual pleasure falls to my share, I feel justified in accepting it as some slight compensation for the inordinate measure of suffering and privation that has been mine for so many past years . . .’ (283.)

‘. . . I think I may even venture to advance the view based upon impressions I have received, that God would never take any steps towards effecting a withdrawal - the first result of which is invariably to alter my physical condition markedly for the worse - but would quietly and permanently yield to my powers of attraction, if it were possible for me always to be playing the part of a woman lying in my own amorous embraces, always to be casting my looks upon female forms, always to be gazing at pictures of women, and so on.’ (284-5.)

In Schreber’s system the two principal elements of his delusions (his transformation into a woman and his favoured relation to God) are linked in his assumption of a feminine attitude towards God. It will be an unavoidable part of our task to show that there is an essential genetic relation between these two elements. Otherwise our attempts at elucidating Schreber’s delusions will leave us in the absurd position described in Kant’s famous simile in the Critique of Pure Reason - we shall be like a man holding a sieve under a he-goat while some one else milks it.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2410

II

ATTEMPTS AT INTERPRETATION

There are two angles from which we could attempt to reach an understanding of this history of a case of paranoia and to lay bare in it the familiar complexes and motive forces of mental life. We might start either from the patient’s own delusional utterances or from the exciting causes of his illness.

The former method must seem enticing since the brilliant example given us by Jung in his interpretation of a case of dementia praecox which was far severer than this one and which exhibited symptoms far more remote from the normal. The high level of our present patient’s intelligence, too, and his communicativeness, seem likely to facilitate the accomplishment of our task along these lines. He himself not in frequently presses the key into our hands, by adding a gloss, a quotation or an example to some delusional proposition in an apparently incidental manner, or even by expressly denying some parallel to it that has arisen in his own mind. For when this happens, we have only to follow our usual psycho-analytic technique - to strip his sentence of its negative form, to take his example as being the actual thing, or his quotation or gloss as being the original source - and we find ourselves in possession of what we are looking for, namely a translation of the paranoid mode of expression into the normal one.

It is perhaps worth giving a more detailed illustration of this procedure. Schreber complains of the nuisance created by the so-called ‘miracled birds’ or ‘talking birds’, to which he ascribes a number of very remarkable qualities (208-14). It is his belief that they are composed of former ‘fore-courts of Heaven’, that is, of human souls which have entered into a state of bliss, and that they have been loaded with ptomaine¹ poison and set on to him. They have been brought to the condition of repeating ‘meaningless phrases which they have learnt by heart’ and which have been ‘dinned into them’. Each time that they have discharged their load of ptomaine poison on to him - that is each time that they have ‘reeled off the phrases which have been dinned into them, as it were’ - they become to some extent absorbed into his soul, with the words ‘The deuce of a fellow!’ or ‘Deuce take it!’ which are the only words they are still capable of using to express a genuine feeling. They cannot understand the meaning of the words they speak, but they are by nature susceptible to similarity of sounds, though the similarity need not necessarily be a complete one. Thus it is immaterial to them whether one says:

‘Santiago’ or ‘Karthago’,

‘Chinesentum’ or ‘Jesum Christum’,

‘Abendrot’ or ‘Atemnot’,

‘Ariman’ or ‘Ackermann’ etc.² (210.)

As we read this description, we cannot avoid the idea that what it really refers to must be young girls. In a carping mood people often compare them to geese, ungallantly accuse then of having ‘the brains of a bird’ and declare that they can say nothing but phrases learnt by rote and they betray their lack of education by confusing foreign words that sound alike. The phrase ‘The deuce of a fellow!’, which is the only thing that they are serious about, would in that case be an allusion to the triumph of the young man who has succeeded in impressing them. And, sure enough, a few pages later we come upon a passage in which Schreber confirms this interpretation: ‘For purposes of distinction, I have as a joke given girls’ names to a great number of the remaining bird-souls; since by their inquisitiveness, their voluptuous bent, etc., they one and all most readily suggest a comparison with little girls. Some of these girls’ names have since been adopted by the rays of God and have been retained as a designation of the bird-souls in question.’ (214.) This easy interpretation of the ‘miracled birds’ gives us a hint which may help us towards understanding the enigmatic ‘fore-courts of Heaven’.

¹ [German ‘Leichengift’, literally ‘corpse poison’.]

² [ Santiago’ or ‘Carthage’,

‘Chinese-dom’ or ‘Jesus Christ’,

‘Sunset’ or ‘Breathlessness’,

‘Ahriman’ or ‘Farmer’.]

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2411

I am quite aware that a psycho-analyst needs no small amount of tact and restraint whenever in the course of his work he goes beyond the typical instances of interpretation and that his listeners or readers will only follow him as far a their own familiarity with analytic technique will allow them. He has every reason, therefore, to guard against the risk that an increased display of acumen on his part may be accompanied by a diminution in the certainty and trustworthiness of his results. It is thus only natural that one analyst will tend too much in the direction of caution and another too much in the direction of boldness. It will not be possible to define the proper limits of justifiable interpretation until many experiments have been made and until the subject has become more familiar. In working upon the case of Schreber I have had a policy of restraint forced on me by the circumstance that the opposition to his publishing the Denkwürdigkeiten was so far effective as to withhold a considerable portion of the material from our knowledge - the portion, too, which would in all probability have thrown the most important light upon the case.¹ Thus, for instance, the third chapter of the book opens with this promising announcement: ‘I shall now proceed to describe certain events which occurred to other members of my family and which may conceivably have been connected with the soul-murder I have postulated; for there is at any rate something more or less problematical about all of them, something not easily explicable upon the lines of ordinary human experience.’ (33.) But the next sentence, which is also the last of the chapter, is as follows: ‘The remainder of this chapter has been withheld from print as being unsuitable for publication.’ I shall therefore have to be satisfied if I can succeed in tracing back at any rate the nucleus of the delusional structure with some degree of certainty to familiar human motives.

¹ ‘When we survey the contents of this document’, writes Dr. Weber in his report, ‘and consider the mass of indiscretions in regard to himself and other persons which it contains, when we observe the unblushing manner in which he describes situations and events which are of the most delicate nature and indeed, in an aesthetic sense, utterly impossible, when we reflect upon his use of strong language of the most offensive kind, and so forth, we shall find it quite impossible to understand how a man, distinguished apart from this by his tact and refinement, could contemplate taking a step so compromising to himself in the public eye, unless we bear in mind the fact that . . .’ etc. etc. (402.) Surely we can hardly expect that a case history which sets out to give a picture of deranged humanity and its struggles to rehabilitate itself should exhibit ‘discretion’ and ‘aesthetic’ charm.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2412

With this object in view I shall now mention a further small piece of the case history to which sufficient weight is not given in the reports, although the patient himself has done all he can to put it in the foreground. I refer to Schreber’s relations to his first physician, Geheimrat Prof. Flechsig of Leipzig.

As we already know, Schreber’s case at first took the form of delusions of persecution, and did not begin to lose it until the turning-point of his illness (the time of his ‘reconciliation’). From that time onwards the persecutions became less and less intolerable, and the ignominious purpose which at first underlay his threatened emasculation began to be superseded by a purpose in consonance with the Order of Things. But the first author of all these acts of persecution was Flechsig, and he remains their instigator throughout the whole course of the illness.¹

Of the actual nature of Flechsig’s enormity and its motives the patient speaks with the characteristic vagueness and obscurity which may be regarded as marks of an especially intense work of delusion-formation, if it is legitimate to judge paranoia on the model of a far more familiar mental phenomenon - the dream. Flechsig, according to the patient, committed, or attempted to commit, ‘soul-murder’ upon him - an act which, he thought, was comparable with the effort made by the devil or by demons to gain possession of a soul and may have had its prototype in events which occurred between members of the Flechsig and Schreber families long since deceased (22 ff.). We should be glad to learn more of the meaning of this ‘soul-murder’, but at this point our sources relapse once more into a tendentious silence: ‘As to what constitutes the true essence of soul-murder, and as to its technique, if I may so describe it, I am able to say nothing beyond what has already been indicated. There is only this, perhaps, to be added . . . (The passage which follows is unsuitable for publication.)’ (28.) As a result of this omission we are left in the dark on the question of what is meant by ‘soul-murder’. We shall refer later on to the only hint upon the subject which has evaded censorship.

¹ ‘Even now the voices that talk with me call out your name to me hundreds of times each day. They name you in certain constantly recurring connections, and especially as being the first author of the injuries I have suffered. And yet the personal relations which existed between us for a time have, so far as I am concerned, long since faded into the background; so that I myself could have little enough reason to be for ever recalling you to my mind, and still less for doing so with any feelings of resentment.’ (‘Open Letter to Professor Flechsig’, viii.)

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2413

However this may be, a further development of Schreber’s delusions soon took place, which affected his relations to God without altering his relations to Flechsig. Hitherto he had regarded Flechsig (or rather his soul) as his only true enemy and had looked upon God Almighty as his ally; but now he could not avoid the thought that God Himself had played the part of accessory, if not of instigator, in the plot against him. (59.) Flechsig, however, remained the first seducer, to whose influence God had yielded (60). He had succeeded in making his way up to heaven with his whole soul or a part of it and in becoming a ‘leader of rays’, without dying or undergoing any preliminary purification.¹ (56.) The Flechsig soul continued to play this role even after the patient had been moved from the Leipzig clinic to Dr. Pierson’s asylum. The influence of the new environment was shown by the Flechsig soul being joined by the soul of the chief attendant, whom the patient recognized as a person who had formerly lived in the same block of flats as himself. This was represented as being the von W. soul.² The Flechsig soul then introduced the system of ‘soul-division’, which assumed large proportions. At one time there were as many as forty to sixty sub-divisions of the Flechsig soul; two of its larger divisions were known as the ‘upper Flechsig’ and the ‘middle Flechsig’. The von W. soul (the chief attendant’s) behaved in just the same fashion (111). It was sometimes most entertaining to notice the way in which these two souls, in spite of their alliance, carried on a feud with one another, the aristocratic pride of the one pitted against the professorial vanity of the other (113). During his first weeks at Sonnenstein (to which hr, was finally moved in the summer of 1894) the soul of his new physician, Dr. Weber, came into play; and shortly afterwards the change-over took place in the development of his delusions which we have come to know as his ‘reconciliation’.

¹ According to another and significant version, which, however, was soon rejected, Professor Flechsig had shot himself either at Weissenburg in Alsace or in a police cell at Leipzig. The patient saw his funeral go past, though not in the direction that was to be expected in view of the relative positions of the University Clinic and the cemetery. On other occasions Flechsig appeared to him in the company of a policeman, or in conversation with his wife. Schreber was a witness of this conversation by the method of ‘nerve-connection’, and in the course of it Professor Flechsig called himself ‘God Flechsig’ to his wife, so that she was inclined to think he had gone mad. (82.)

² The voices informed him that in the course of an official enquiry this von W. had made some untrue statements about him, either deliberately or out of carelessness, and in particular had accused him of masturbation. As a punishment for this he was now obliged to wait on the patient (108).

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2414

During this later stay at Sonnenstein, when God had begun to appreciate him better, a raid was made upon the souls, which had been multiplied so much as to become a nuisance. As a result of this, the Flechsig soul survived in only one or two shapes, and the von W. soul in only a single one. The latter soon disappeared altogether. The divisions of the Flechsig soul, which slowly lost both their intelligence and their power, then came to be described as the ‘posterior Flechsig’ and the ‘"Oh well!" Party’. That the Flechsig soul retained its importance to the last, is made clear by Schreber’s prefatory ‘Open Letter to Herr Geheimrat Prof. Dr. Flechsig’.

In this remarkable document Schreber expresses his firm conviction that the physician who influenced him had the same visions and received the same disclosures upon supernatural things as he himself. He protests on the very first page that the author of the Denkwürdigkeiten has not the remotest intention of making an attack upon the doctor’s honour, and the same point is earnestly and emphatically repeated in the patient’s presentations of his position (343, 445). It is evident that he is endeavouring to distinguish the ‘soul Flechsig’ from the living man of the same name, the Flechsig of his delusions from the real Flechsig.¹

¹ ‘I am accordingly obliged to admit as a possibility that everything in the first chapters of my Denkwürdigkeiten which is connected with the name of Flechsig may only refer to the soul Flechsig as distinguished from the living man. For that his soul has a separate existence is a certain fact, though it cannot be explained upon any natural basis.’ (342-3.)

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2415

The study of a number of cases of delusions of persecution has led me as well as other investigators to the view that the relation between the patient and his persecutor can be reduced to a simple formula.¹ It appears that the person to whom the delusion ascribes so much power and influence, in whose hands all the threads of the conspiracy converge, is, if he is definitely named, either identical with some one who played an equally important part in the patient’s emotional life before his illness, or is easily recognizable as a substitute for him. The intensity of the emotion is projected in the shape of external power, while its quality is changed into the opposite. The person who is now hated and feared for being a persecutor was at one time loved and honoured. The main purpose of the persecution asserted by the patient’s delusion is to justify the change in his emotional attitude.

Bearing this point of view in mind, let us now examine the relations which had formerly existed between Schreber and his physician and persecutor, Flechsig. We have already heard that, in the years 1884 and 1885, Schreber suffered from a first attack of nervous disorder, which ran its course ‘without the occurrence of any incidents bordering upon the sphere of the supernatural’ (35). While he was in this condition, which was described as ‘hypochondria’ and seems not to have overstepped the limits of a neurosis, Flechsig acted as his doctor. At that time Schreber spent six months in the University Clinic at Leipzig. We learn that after his recovery he had cordial feelings towards his doctor. ‘The main thing was that, after a fairly long period of convalescence which I spent in travelling, I was finally cured; and it was therefore impossible that I should feel anything at that time but the liveliest gratitude towards Professor Flechsig. I gave a marked expression to this feeling both in a personal visit which I subsequently paid him and in what I deemed to be an appropriate honorarium.’ (35-6.) It is true that Schreber’s encomium in the Denkwürdigkeiten upon this first treatment of Flechsig’s is not entirely with out reservations; but that can easily be understood if we consider that his attitude had in the meantime been reversed. The passage immediately following the one that has just been quoted bears witness to the original warmth of his feelings towards the physician who had treated him so successfully: ‘The gratitude of my wife was perhaps even more heartfelt; for she revered Professor Flechsig as the man who had restored her husband to her, and hence it was that for years she kept his portrait standing upon her writing-table.’ (36.)

¹ Cf. Abraham, 1908. In the course of this paper its author, referring to a correspondence between us, scrupulously attributes to myself an influence upon the development of his views.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2416

Since we cannot obtain any insight into the causes of the first illness (a knowledge of which is undoubtedly indispensable for properly elucidating the second and severer illness) we must now plunge at random into an unknown concatenation of circumstances. During the incubation period of his illness, as we are aware (that is, between June 1893, when he was appointed to his new post, and the following October, when he took up his duties), he repeatedly dreamt that his old nervous disorder had returned. Once, moreover, when he was half asleep, he had a feeling that after all it must be nice to be a woman submitting to the act of copulation. The dreams and the phantasy are reported by Schreber in immediate succession; and if we also bring together their subject-matter, we shall be able to infer that, at the same time as his recollection of his illness, a recollection of his doctor was also aroused in his mind, and that the feminine attitude which he assumed in the phantasy was from the first directed towards the doctor. Or it may be that the dream of his illness having returned simply expressed some such longing as: ‘I wish I could see Flechsig again!’ Our ignorance of the mental content of the first illness bars our way in this direction. Perhaps that illness had left behind in him a feeling of affectionate dependence upon his doctor, which had now, for some unknown reason, become intensified to the pitch of an erotic desire. This feminine phantasy which was still kept impersonal, was met at once by an indignant repudiation - a true ‘masculine protest’, to use Adler’s expression, but in a sense different from his.¹ But in the severe psychosis which broke out soon afterwards the feminine phantasy carried everything before it; and it only requires a slight correction of the characteristic paranoic indefiniteness of Schreber’s mode of expression to enable us to divine the fact that the patient was in fear of sexual abuse at the hands of his doctor himself. The exciting cause of his illness, then, was an outburst of homosexual libido; the object of this libido was probably from the very first his doctor, Flechsig; and his struggles against the libidinal impulse produced the conflict which gave rise to the symptoms.

¹ Adler (1910). According to Adler the masculine protest has a share in the production of the symptom, whereas in the present instance the patient is protesting against a symptom that is already fully fledged.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2417

I will pause here for a moment to meet a storm of remonstrances and objections. Any one acquainted with the present state of psychiatry must be prepared to face trouble.

‘Is it not an act of irresponsible levity, an indiscretion and a calumny, to charge a man of such high ethical standing as the former Senatspräsident Schreber with homosexuality?’ - No. The patient has himself informed the world at large of his phantasy of being transformed into a woman, and he has allowed all personal considerations to be outweighed by interests of a higher nature. Thus he has himself given us the right to occupy ourselves with his phantasy, and in translating it into the technical terminology of medicine we have not made the slightest addition to its content.

‘Yes, but he was not in his right mind when he did it. His delusion that he was being transformed into a woman was a pathological idea.’ - We have not forgotten that. Indeed our only concern is with the meaning and origin of this pathological idea. We will appeal to the distinction he himself draws between the man Flechsig and the ‘Flechsig soul’. We are not making reproaches of any kind against him - whether for having had homosexual impulses or for having endeavoured to suppress them. Psychiatrists should at last take a lesson from this patient, when they see him trying, in spite of his delusions, not to confuse the world of the unconscious with the world of reality.

‘But it is nowhere expressly stated that the transformation into a woman which he so much dreaded was to be carried out for the benefit of Flechsig.’ - That is true; and it is not difficult to understand why, in preparing his memoirs for publication, since he was anxious not to insult the ‘man Flechsig’, he should have avoided so gross an accusation. But the toning-down of his language owing to these considerations did not go so far as to be able to conceal the true meaning of his accusation. Indeed, it may be maintained that after all it is expressed openly in such a passage as the following: ‘In this way a conspiracy against me was brought to a head (in about March or April, 1894). Its object was to contrive that, when once my nervous complaint had been recognized as incurable or assumed to be so, I should be handed over to a certain person in such a manner that my soul should be delivered up to him, but my body . . . should be transformed into a female body, and as such surrendered to the person in question with a view to sexual abuse . . .’¹ (56). It is unnecessary to remark that no other individual is ever named who could be put in Flechsig’s place. Towards the end of Schreber’s stay in the clinic at Leipzig, a fear occurred to his mind that he ‘was to be thrown to the attendants’ for the purpose of sexual abuse (98). Any remaining doubts that we have upon the nature of the part originally attributed to the doctor are dispelled when, in the later stages of his delusion, we find Schreber outspokenly admitting his feminine attitude towards God. The other accusation against Flechsig echoes over-loudly through the book. Flechsig, he says, tried to commit soul-murder upon him. As we already know, the patient was himself not clear as to the actual nature of that crime, but it was connected with matters of discretion which precluded their publication (as we see from the suppressed third chapter). From this point a single thread takes us further. Schreber illustrates the nature of soul-murder by referring to the legends embodied in Goethe’s Faust, Byron’s Manfred, Weber’s Freischütz, etc. (22), and one of these instances is further cited in another passage. In discussing the division of God into two persons, Schreber identifies his ‘lower God’ and ‘upper God’ with Ahriman and Ormuzd respectively (19); and a little later a casual footnote occurs: ‘Moreover, the name of Ahriman also appears in connection with a soul-murder in, for example, Lord Byron’s Manfred.’ (20.) In the play which is thus referred to there is scarcely anything comparable to the bartering of Faust’s soul, and I have searched it in vain for the expression ‘soul-murder’. But the essence and the secret of the whole work lies in - an incestuous relation between a brother and a sister. And here our thread breaks off short.²

¹ The italics in this passage are mine.

² By way of substantiating the above assertion I will quote a passage from the last scene of the play, in which Manfred says to the demon who has come to fetch him away:

. . . my past power

Was purchased by no compact with thy crew.

There is thus a direct contradiction of a soul having been bartered. This mistake on Schreber’s part was probably not without its significance. - It is plausible, by the way, to connect the plot of Manfred with the incestuous relations which have repeatedly been asserted to exist between the poet and his half-sister. And it is not a little striking that the action of Byron’s other play, his celebrated Cain, should be laid in the primal family, where no objections could exist to incest between brother and sister. - Finally, we cannot leave the subject of soul-murder without quoting one more passage from the Denkwürdigkeiten: ‘in this connection Flechsig used formerly to be named as the first author of soul-murder, whereas for some time past the facts have been deliberately inverted and an attempt has been made to "represent" myself as being the one who practises soul-murder . . .’ (23.)

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2418

At a later stage in this paper I intend to return to a discussion of some further objections; but in the meantime I shall consider myself justified in maintaining the view that the basis of Schreber’s illness was the outburst of a homosexual impulse. This hypothesis harmonizes with a noteworthy detail of the case history, which remains otherwise inexplicable. The patient had a fresh ‘nervous collapse’, which exercised a decisive effect upon the course of his illness, at a time when his wife was taking a short holiday on account of her own health. Up till then she had spent several hours with him every day and had taken her mid-day meal with him. But when she returned after an absence of four days, she found him most sadly altered: so much so, indeed, that he himself no longer wished to see her. ‘What especially determined my mental break-down was a particular night, during which I had a quite extraordinary number of emissions - quite half a dozen, all in that one night.’ (44.) It is easy to understand that the mere presence of his wife must have acted as a protection against the attractive power of the men about him; and if we are prepared to admit that an emission cannot occur in an adult without some mental concomitant, we shall be able to supplement the patient’s emissions that night by assuming that they were accompanied by homosexual phantasies which remained unconscious.

The question of why this outburst of homosexual libido overtook the patient precisely at this period (that is, between the dates of his appointment and of his move to Dresden) cannot be answered in the absence of more precise knowledge of the story of his life. Generally speaking, every human being oscillates all through his life between heterosexual and homosexual feelings, and any frustration or disappointment in the one direction is apt to drive him over into the other. We know nothing of these factors in Schreber’s case, but we must not omit to draw attention to a somatic factor which may very well have been relevant. At the time of this illness Dr. Schreber was fifty-one years old, and he had therefore reached an age which is of critical importance in sexual life. It is a period at which in women the sexual function, after a phase of intensified activity, enters upon a process of far-reaching involution; nor do men appear to be exempt from its influence, for men as well as women are subject to a ‘climacteric’ and to the susceptibilities to disease which go along with it.¹

¹ I owe my knowledge of Schreber’s age at the time of his illness to some information which was kindly given me by one of his relatives, through the agency of Dr. Stegmann of Dresden. Apart from this one fact, however, I have made use of no material in this paper that is not derived from the actual text of the Denkwürdigkeiten.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2419

I can well imagine what a dubious hypothesis it must appear to be to suppose that a man’s friendly feeling towards his doctor can suddenly break out in an intensified form after a lapse of eight years¹ and become the occasion of such a severe mental disorder. But I do not think we should be justified in dismissing such a hypothesis merely on account of its inherent improbability, if it recommends itself to us on other grounds; we ought rather to inquire how far we shall get if we follow it up. For the improbability may be of a passing kind and may be due to the fact that the doubtful hypothesis has not as yet been brought into relation with any other pieces of knowledge and that it is the first hypothesis with which the problem has been approached. But for the benefit of those who are unable to hold their judgement in suspense and who regard our hypothesis as altogether untenable, it is easy to suggest a possibility which would rob it of its bewildering character. The patient’s friendly feeling towards his doctor may very well have been due to a process of ‘transference’, by means of which an emotional cathexis became transposed from some person who was important to him on to the doctor who was in reality indifferent to him; so that the doctor will have been chosen as a deputy or surrogate for some one much closer to him. To put the matter in a more concrete form: the patient was reminded of his brother or father by the figure of the doctor, he rediscovered them in him; there will then be nothing to wonder at if, in certain circumstances, a longing for the surrogate figure reappeared in him and operated with a violence that is only to be explained in the light of its origin and primary significance.

With a view to following up this attempt at an explanation, I naturally thought it worth while discovering whether the patient’s father was still alive at the time at which he fell ill, whether he had had a brother, and if so whether he was then living or among the ‘blest’. I was pleased, therefore, when, after a prolonged search through the pages of the Denkwürdigkeiten, I came at last upon a passage in which the patient sets these doubts at rest: ‘The memory of my father and my brother . . . is as sacred to me as . . .’ etc. (442.) So that both of them were dead at the time of the onset of his second illness (and, it may be, of his first illness as well).

We shall therefore, I think, raise no further objections to the hypothesis that the exciting cause of the illness was the appearance in him of a feminine (that is, a passive homosexual) wishful phantasy, which took as its object the figure of his doctor. An intense resistance to this phantasy arose on the part of Schreber’s personality, and the ensuing defensive struggle, which might perhaps just as well have assumed some other shape, took on, for reasons unknown to us, that of a delusion of persecution. The person he longed for now became his persecutor, and the content of his wishful phantasy became the content of his persecution. It may be presumed that the same schematic outline will turn out to be applicable to other cases of delusions of persecution. What distinguishes Schreber’s case from others, however, is its further development and the transformation it underwent in the course of it.

¹ This was the length of the interval between Schreber’s first and second illnesses.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2420

One such change was the replacement of Flechsig by the superior figure of God. This seems at first as though it were a sign of aggravation of the conflict, an intensification of the unbearable persecution, but it soon becomes evident that it was preparing the way for the second change and, with it, the solution of the conflict. It was impossible for Schreber to become reconciled to playing the part of a female wanton towards his doctor; but the task of providing God Himself with the voluptuous sensations that He required called up no such resistance on the part of his ego. Emasculation was now no longer a disgrace; it became ‘consonant with the Order of Things’, it took its place in a great cosmic chain of events, and was instrumental in the re-creation of humanity after its extinction. ‘A new race of men, born from the spirit of Schreber’ would, so he thought, revere as their ancestor this man who believed himself the victim of persecution. By this means an outlet was provided which would satisfy both of the contending forces. His ego found compensation in his megalomania, while his feminine wishful phantasy made its way through and became acceptable. The struggle and the illness could cease. The patient’s sense of reality, however, which had in the meantime become stronger, compelled him to postpone the solution from the present to the remote future, and to content himself with what might be described as an asymptotic wish-fulfilment.¹ Some time or other, he anticipated, his transformation into a woman would come about; until then the personality of Dr. Schreber would remain indestructible.

In textbooks of psychiatry we frequently come across statements to the effect that megalomania can develop out of delusions of persecution. The process is supposed to be as follows. The patient is primarily the victim of a delusion that he is being persecuted by powers of the greatest might. He then feels a need to account to himself for this, and in that way hits on the idea that he himself is a very exalted personage and worthy of such persecution. The development of megalomania is thus attributed by the textbooks to a process which (borrowing a useful word from Ernest Jones) we may describe as ‘rationalization’. But to ascribe such important affective consequences to a rationalization is, as it seems to us, an entirely unpsychological proceeding; and we would consequently draw a sharp distinction between our opinion and the one which we have quoted from the textbooks. We are making no claim, for the moment, to knowing the origin of the megalomania.

¹ ‘It is only, he writes towards the end of the book, ‘as possibilities which must be taken into account, that I mention that my emasculation may even yet be accomplished and may result in a new generation issuing from my womb by divine impregnation.’ (293.)

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2421

Turning once more to the case of Schreber, we are bound to admit that any attempt at throwing light upon the transformation in his delusion brings us up against extraordinary difficulties. In what manner and by what means was the ascent from Flechsig to God brought about? From what source did he derive the megalomania which so fortunately enabled him to become reconciled to his persecution, or, in analytical phraseology, to accept the wishful phantasy which had had to be repressed? The Denkwürdigkeiten give us a first clue; for they show us that in the patient’s mind ‘Flechsig’ and ‘God’ belonged to the same class. In one of his phantasies he overheard a conversation between Flechsig and his wife, in which the former asserted that he was ‘God Flechsig’, so that his wife thought he had gone mad (82). But there is another feature in the development of Schreber’s delusions which claims our attention. If we take a survey of the delusions as a whole we see that the persecutor is divided into Flechsig and God; in just the same way Flechsig himself subsequently splits up into two personalities, the ‘upper’ and the ‘middle’ Flechsig, and God into the ‘lower’ and the ‘upper’ God. In the later stages of the illness the decomposition of Flechsig goes further still (193). A process of decomposition of this kind is very characteristic of paranoia. Paranoia decomposes just as hysteria condenses. Or rather, paranoia resolves once more into their elements the products of the condensations and identifications which are effected in the unconscious. The frequent repetition of the decomposing process in Schreber’s case would, according to Jung, be an expression of the importance which the person in question possessed for him.¹ All of this dividing up of Flechsig and God into a number of persons thus had the same meaning as the splitting of the persecutor into Flechsig and God. They were all duplications of one and the same important relationship.² But, in order to interpret all these details, we must further draw attention to our view of this decomposition of the persecutor into Flechsig and God as a paranoid reaction to a previously established identification of the two figures or their belonging to the same class. If the persecutor Flechsig was originally a person whom Schreber loved, then God must also simply be the reappearance of some one else whom he loved, and probably some one of greater importance.

¹ Jung (1910a). Jung is probably right when he goes on to say that the decomposition follows the general lines taken by schizophrenia in that it uses a process of analysis in order to produce a watering-down effect, and is thus designed to prevent the occurrence of unduly powerful impressions. When, however, one of his patients said to him: ‘Oh, are you Dr. J. too? There was some one here this morning who said he was Dr. J.’, we must interpret it as being an admission to this effect: ‘You remind me now of a different member of the class of my transferences from the one you reminded me of when you visited me last.’

² Otto Rank (1909) has found the same process at work in the formation of myths.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2422

If we pursue this train of thought, which seems to be a legitimate one, we shall be driven to the conclusion that the other person must have been his father; this makes it all the clearer that Flechsig must have stood for his brother - who, let us hope, may have been older than himself.¹ The feminine phantasy, which aroused such violent opposition in the patient, thus had its root in a longing, intensified to an erotic pitch, for his father and brother. This feeling, so far as it referred to his brother, passed, by a process of transference, on to his doctor, Flechsig; and when it was carried back on to his father a settlement of the conflict was reached.

We shall not feel that we have been justified in thus introducing Schreber’s father into his delusions, unless the new hypothesis shows itself of some use to us in understanding the case and in elucidating details of the delusions which are as yet unintelligible. It will be recalled that Schreber’s God and his relations to Him exhibited the most curious features: how they showed the strangest mixture of blasphemous criticism and mutinous insubordination on the one hand and of reverent devotion on the other. God, according to him, had succumbed to the misleading influence of Flechsig: He was incapable of learning anything by experience, and did not understand living men because He only knew how to deal with corpses; and He manifested His power in a succession of miracles which, striking though they might be, were none the less futile and silly.

¹ No information on this point is to be found in the Denkwürdigkeiten.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2423

Now the father of Senatspräsident Dr. Schreber was no insignificant person. He was the Dr. Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber whose memory is kept green to this day by the numerous Schreber Associations which flourish especially in Saxony; and, moreover, he was a physician. His activities in favour of promoting the harmonious upbringing of the young, of securing co-ordination between education in the home and in the school, of introducing physical culture and manual work with a view to raising the standards of health - all this exerted a lasting influence upon his contemporaries.¹ His great reputation as the founder of therapeutic gymnastics in Germany is still shown by the wide circulation of his Ärtzliche Zimmergymnastik in medical circles and the numerous editions through which it has passed.

Such a father as this was by no means unsuitable for transfiguration into a God in the affectionate memory of the son from whom he had been so early separated by death. It is true that we cannot help feeling that there is an impassable gulf between the personality of God and that of any human being, however eminent he may be. But we must remember that this has not always been so. The gods of the peoples of antiquity stood in a closer human relationship to them. The Romans used to deify their dead emperors as a matter of routine; and the Emperor Vespasian, a sensible and competent man, exclaimed when he was first taken ill: ‘Alas! Methinks I am becoming a God!’²

¹ I have to thank my colleague Dr. Stegmann of Dresden for his kindness in letting me see a copy of a journal entitled Der Freund der Schreber-Vereine [The Friend of the Schreber Associations]. This number (Vol. II. No. 10) celebrates the centenary of Dr. Schreber’s birth, and some biographical data are contained in it. Dr. Schreber senior was born in 1808 and died in 1861, at the age of only fifty-three. From the source which I have already mentioned I know that our patient was at that time nineteen years old.

² Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, Book VIII, Chapter 23. This practice of deification began with Julius Caesar. Augustus styled himself ‘Divi filius’ [‘the son of the God’] in his inscriptions.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2424

We are perfectly familiar with the infantile attitude of boys towards their father; it is composed of the same mixture of reverent submission and mutinous insubordination that we have found in Schreber’s relation to his God, and is the unmistakable prototype of that relation, which is faithfully copied from it. But the circumstance that Schreber’s father was a physician, and a most eminent physician, and one who was no doubt highly respected by his patients, is what explains the most striking characteristics of his God and those upon which he dwells in such a critical fashion. Could more bitter scorn be shown for such a physician than by declaring that he understands nothing about living men and only knows how to deal with corpses? No doubt it is an essential attribute of God to perform miracles; but a physician performs miracles too; he effects miraculous cures, as his enthusiastic clients proclaim. So that when we see that these very miracles (the material for which was provided by the patient’s hypochondria) turn out to be incredible, absurd, and to some extent positively silly, we are reminded of the assertion in my Interpretation of Dreams that absurdity in dreams expresses ridicule and derision.¹ Evidently, therefore, it is used for the same purposes in paranoia. As regards some of the other reproaches which he levelled against God, such, for instance, as that He learned nothing by experience, it is natural to suppose that they are examples of the tu quoque mechanism used by children,² which, when they receive a reproof, flings it back unchanged upon the person who originated it. Similarly, the voices give us grounds for suspecting that the accusation of soul-murder brought against Flechsig was in the first instance a self-accusation.³

¹ p. 891.

² It looks remarkably like a revanche of this sort when we find the patient writing out the following memorandum one day: ‘Any attempt at exercising an educative influence must be abandoned as hopeless.’ (188.) The uneducable one was God.

³ ‘Whereas for some time past the facts have been deliberately inverted and an attempt has been made to "represent" myself as being the one who practises soul-murder . . .’ etc. (23).

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2425

Emboldened by the discovery that his father’s profession helps to explain the peculiarities of Schreber’s God, we shall now venture upon an interpretation which may throw some light upon the remarkable structure of that Being. The heavenly world consisted, as we know, of the ‘anterior realms of God’ which were also called the ‘fore-courts of Heaven’ and which contained the souls of the dead, and of the ‘lower’ and the ‘upper’ God, who together constituted the ‘posterior realms of God’ (19). Although we must be prepared to find that there is a condensation here which we shall not be able to resolve, it is nevertheless worth while referring to a clue that is already in our hands. If the ‘miracled’ birds, which have been shown to be girls, were originally fore-courts of Heaven, may it not be that the anterior realms of God and the fore-courts¹ of Heaven are to be regarded as a symbol of what is female, and the posterior realms of God as a symbol of what is male? If we knew for certain that Schreber’s dead brother was older than himself, we might suppose that the decomposition of God into the lower and the upper God gave expression to the patient’s recollection that after his father’s early death his elder brother had stepped into his place.

In this connection, finally, I should like to draw attention to the subject of the sun, which, through its ‘rays’, came to have so much importance in the expression of his delusions. Schreber has a quite peculiar relation to the sun. It speaks to him in human language, and thus reveals itself to him as a living being, or as the organ of a yet higher being lying behind it (9). We learn from a medical report that at one time he ‘used to shout threats and abuse at it and positively bellow at it’ (382)² and used to call out to it that it must crawl away from him and hide. He himself tells us that the sun turns pale before him.³ The manner in which it is bound up with his fate is shown by the important alterations it undergoes as soon as changes begin to occur in him, as, for instance, during his first weeks at Sonnenstein (135). Schreber makes it easy for us to interpret this solar myth of his. He identifies the sun directly with God, sometimes with the lower God (Ahriman),4 and sometimes with the upper. ‘On the following day . . . I saw the upper God (Ormuzd), and this time not with my spiritual eyes but with my bodily ones. It was the sun, but not the sun in its ordinary aspect, as it is known to all men; it was . . .’ etc. (137-8.) It is therefore no more than consistent of him to treat it in the same way as he treats God Himself.

¹ [The German word ‘Vorhof’ besides having the literal meaning of ‘fore-court’, is used in anatomy as a synonym for the ‘vestibulum’, a region of the female genitals.]

² ‘The sun is a whore’, he used to exclaim (384).

³ ‘To some extent, moreover, even to this day the sun presents a different picture to my eyes from what it did before my illness. When I stand facing it and speak aloud, its rays turn pale before me. I can gaze at it without any difficulty and without being more than slightly dazzled by it; whereas in my healthy days it would have been as impossible for me as for anyone else to gaze at it for a minute at a time.’ (139, footnote.)

4 ‘Since July, 1894, the voices that talk to me have identified him directly with the sun.’ (88.)

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2426

The sun, therefore, is nothing but another sublimated symbol for the father; and in pointing this out I must disclaim all responsibility for the monotony of the solutions provided by psycho-analysis. In this instance symbolism overrides grammatical gender - at least so far as German goes,¹ for in most other languages the sun is masculine. Its counterpart in this picture of the two parents is ‘Mother Earth’ as she is generally called. We frequently come upon confirmations of this assertion in resolving the pathogenic phantasies of neurotics by psycho-analysis. I can make no more than the barest allusion to the relation of all this to cosmic myths. One of my patients, who had lost his father at a very early age, was always seeking to rediscover him in what was grand and sublime in Nature. Since I have known this, it has seemed to me probable that Nietzsche’s hymn ‘Vor Sonnenaufgang’ [‘Before Sunrise’] is an expression of the same longing.² Another patient, who became neurotic after his father’s death, was seized with his first attack of anxiety and giddiness while the sun shone upon him as he was working in the garden with a spade. He spontaneously put forward as an interpretation that he had become frightened because his father had looked at him while he was at work upon his mother with a sharp instrument. When I ventured upon a mild remonstrance, he gave an air of greater plausibility to his view by telling me that even in his father’s lifetime he had compared him with the sun, though then it had been in a satirical sense. Whenever he had been asked where his father was going to spend the summer he had replied in these sonorous words from the ‘Prologue in Heaven’:

Und seine vorgeschrieb’ne Reise

Vollendet er mit Donnergang.³

His father, acting on medical advice, had been in the habit of paying an annual visit to Marienbad. This patient’s infantile attitude towards his father took effect in two successive phases. As long as his father was alive it showed itself in unmitigated rebelliousness and open discord, but immediately after his death it took the form of a neurosis based upon abject submission and deferred obedience to him.

¹ [The German word for ‘sun’ is feminine: ‘die Sonne’.]

² Also Sprach Zarathustra, Part III. It was only as a child that Nietzsche too knew his father.

³ [’And with a tread of thunder he accomplishes his prescribed journey.’]

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2427

Thus in the case of Schreber we find ourselves once again on the familiar ground of the father-complex.¹ The patient’s struggle with Flechsig became revealed to him as a conflict with God, and we must therefore construe it as an infantile conflict with the father whom he loved; the details of that conflict (of which we know nothing) are what determined the content of his delusions. None of the material which in other cases of the sort is brought to light by analysis is absent in the present one: every element is hinted at in one way or another. In infantile experiences such as this the father appears as an interferer with the satisfaction which the child is trying to obtain; this is usually of an auto-erotic character, though at a later date it is often replaced in phantasy by some other satisfaction of a less inglorious kind.² In the final stage of Schreber’s delusion a magnificent victory was scored by the infantile sexual urge; for voluptuousness became God-fearing, and God Himself (his father) never tired of demanding it from him. His father’s most dreaded threat, castration, actually provided the material for his wishful phantasy (at first resisted but later accepted) of being transformed into a woman. His allusion to an offence covered by the surrogate idea ‘soul-murder’ could not be more transparent. The chief attendant was discovered to be identical with his neighbour von W., who, according to the voices, had falsely accused him of masturbation (108). The voices said, as though giving grounds for the threat of castration: ‘For you are to be represented as being given over to voluptuous excesses.’³ (127-8.) Finally, we come to the enforced thinking (47) to which the patient submitted himself because he supposed that God would believe he had become an idiot and would withdraw from him if he ceased thinking for a moment. This is a reaction (with which we are also familiar in other connections) to the threat or fear of losing one’s reason^4 as a result of indulging in sexual practices and especially in masturbation. Considering the enormous number of delusional ideas of a hypochondriacal nature^5 which the patient developed, no great importance should perhaps be attached to the fact that some of them coincide word for word with the hypochondriacal fears of masturbators.6

¹ In the same way, Schreber’s ‘feminine wishful phantasy’ is simply one of the typical forms taken by the infantile nuclear complex.

² See some remarks on this subject in my analysis of the ‘Rat Man’.

³ The systems of ‘representing’ and of ‘noting down’ (126), taken in conjunction with the ‘proved souls’, point back to experiences in the patient’s school days.

4 ‘This was the end in view, as was frankly admitted at an earlier date in the phrase "We want to destroy your reason", which I have heard proceeding from the upper God upon countless occasions.’ (206 n.)

5 I must not omit to remark at this point that I shall not consider any theory of paranoia trustworthy unless it also covers the hypochondriacal symptoms by which that disorder is almost invariably accompanied. It seems to me that hypochondria stands in the same relation to paranoia as anxiety neurosis does to hysteria.

6 ‘For this reason attempts were made to pump out my spinal cord. This was done by means of so-called "little men" who were placed in my feet. I shall have more to say presently on the subject of these "little men", who showed some resemblance to the phenomena of the same name which I have already discussed in Chapter VI. There used as a rule to be two of them - a "little Flechsig" and a "little von W." - And I used to hear their voices, too, in my feet.’ (154.) Von W. was the man who was supposed to have accused Schreber of masturbation. The ‘little men’ are described by Schreber himself as being among the most remarkable and, in some respects, the most puzzling phenomena of his illness (157). It looks as though they were the product of a condensation of children and - spermatozoa.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2428

Any one who was more daring than I am in making interpretations, or who was in touch with Schreber’s family and consequently better acquainted with the society in which he moved and the small events of his life, would find it an easy matter to trace back innumerable details of his delusions to their sources and so discover their meaning, and this in spite of the censorship to which the Denkwürdigkeiten have been subjected. But as it is, we must necessarily content ourselves with this shadowy sketch of the infantile material which was used by the paranoic disorder in portraying the current conflict.

Perhaps I may be allowed to add a few words with a view to establishing the causes of this conflict that broke out it relation to the feminine wishful phantasy. As we know, when a wishful phantasy makes its appearance, our business is to bring it into connection with some frustration, some privation in real life. Now Schreber admits having suffered a privation of the kind. His marriage, which he describes as being in other respects a happy one, brought him no children; and in particular it brought him no son who might have consoled him for the loss of his father and brother and upon whom he might have drained off his unsatisfied homosexual affections.¹ His family line threatened to die out, and it seems that he felt no little pride in his birth and lineage. ‘Both the Flechsigs and the Schrebers were members of "the highest nobility of Heaven", as the phrase went. The Schrebers in particular bore the title of "Margraves of Tuscany and Tasmania"; for souls, urged by some sort of personal vanity, have a custom of adorning themselves with somewhat high-sounding titles borrowed from this world.’² (24.) The great Napoleon obtained a divorce from Josephine (though only after severe internal struggles) because she could not propagate the dynasty.³ Dr. Schreber may have formed a phantasy that if he were a woman he would manage the business of having children more successfully; and he may thus have found his way back into the feminine attitude towards his father which he had exhibited in the earliest years of his childhood. If that were so, then his delusion that as a result of his emasculation the world was to be peopled with ‘a new race of men, born from the spirit of Schreber’ (288) - a delusion the realization of which he was continually postponing to a more and more remote future - would also be designed to offer him an escape from his childlessness. If the ‘little men’ whom Schreber himself finds so puzzling were children, then we should have no difficulty in understanding why they were collected in such great numbers on his head (158): they were in truth the ‘children of his spirit’.4

¹ ‘After my recovery from my first illness I spent eight years with my wife - years, upon the whole, of great happiness, rich in outward honours, and only clouded from time to time by the oft-repeated disappointment of our hope that we might be blessed with children.’ (36).

² He goes on from this remark, which preserves in his delusions the good-natured irony of his saner days, to trace back through former centuries the relations between the Flechsig and Schreber families. In just the same way a young man who is newly engaged, and cannot understand how he can have lived so many years without knowing the girl he is now in love with, will insist that he really made her acquaintance at some earlier time.

³ In this connection it is worth mentioning a protest entered by the patient against some statements made in the medical report: ‘I have never trifled with the idea of obtaining a divorce, nor have I displayed any indifference to the maintenance of our marriage tie, such as might be inferred from the expression used in the report to the effect that "I am always ready with the rejoinder that my wife can get a divorce if she likes".’ (436.)

4 Cf. what I have said about the method of representing patrilineal descent and about the birth of Athena in my analysis of the ‘Rat Man’ (1909d), p. 2183 n.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2429

III

ON THE MECHANISM OF PARANOIA

We have hitherto been dealing with the father-complex, which was the dominant element in Schreber’s case and with the wishful phantasy round which the illness centred. But in all of this there is nothing characteristic of the form of disease known as paranoia, nothing that might not be found (and that has not in fact been found) in other kinds of neuroses. The distinctive character of paranoia (or of dementia paranoides) must be sought for elsewhere - namely, in the particular form assumed by the symptoms; and we shall expect to find that this is determined, not by the nature of the complexes themselves, but by the mechanism by which the symptoms are formed or by which repression is brought about. We should be inclined to say that what was characteristically paranoic about the illness was the fact that the patient, as a means of warding off a homosexual wishful phantasy, reacted precisely with delusions of persecution of this kind.

These considerations therefore lend an added weight to the circumstance that we are in point of fact driven by experience to attribute to homosexual wishful phantasies an intimate (perhaps an invariable) relation to this particular form of disease. Distrusting my own experience on the subject, I have during the last few years joined with my friends C. G. Jung of Zurich and Sándor Ferenczi of Budapest in investigating upon this single point a number of cases of paranoid disorder which have come under observation. The patients whose histories provided the material for this enquiry included both men and women, and varied in race, occupation, and social standing. Yet we were astonished to find that in all of these cases defence against a homosexual wish was clearly recognizable at the very centre of the conflict which underlay the disease and that it was in an attempt to master an unconsciously reinforced current of homosexuality that they had all of them come to grief.¹ This was certainly not what we had expected. Paranoia is precisely a disorder in which a sexual aetiology is by no means obvious; far from this, the strikingly prominent features in the causation of paranoia, especially among males, are social humiliations and slights. But if we go into the matter only a little more deeply, we shall be able to see that the really operative factor in these social injuries lies in the part played in them by the homosexual components of emotional life. So long as the individual is functioning normally and it is consequently impossible to see into the depths of his mental life, we may doubt whether his emotional relations to his neighbours in society have anything to do with sexuality, either actually or in their genesis. But delusions never fail to uncover these relations and to trace back the social feelings to their roots in a directly sensual erotic wish. So long as he was healthy, Dr. Schreber, too, whose delusions culminated in a wishful phantasy of an unmistakably homosexual nature, had, by all accounts, shown no signs of homosexuality in the ordinary sense of the word.

¹ Further confirmation is afforded by Maeder’s analysis of a paranoid patient J. B. (1910). The present paper, I regret to say, was completed before I had an opportunity of reading Maeder’s work.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2430

I shall now endeavour (and I think the attempt is neither unnecessary nor unjustifiable) to show that the knowledge of psychological processes, which, thanks to psycho-analysis, we now possess, already enables us to understand the part played by a homosexual wish in the development of paranoia. Recent investigations¹ have directed our attention to a stage in the development of the libido which it passes through on the way from auto-erotism to object-love.² This stage has been given the name of narcissism. What happens is this. There comes a time in the development of the individual at which he unifies his sexual instincts (which have hitherto been engaged in auto-erotic activities) in order to obtain a love-object; and he begins by taking himself, his own body, as his love-object, and only subsequently proceeds from this to the choice of some person other than himself as his object. This half-way phase between auto-erotism and object-love may perhaps be indispensable normally; but it appears that many people linger unusually long in this condition, and that many of its features are carried over by them into the later stages of their development. What is of chief importance in the subject’s self thus chosen as a love object may already be the genitals. The line of development then leads on to the choice of an external object with similar genitals - that is, to homosexual object-choice - and thence to heterosexuality. People who are manifest homosexuals in later life have, it may be presumed, never emancipated themselves from the binding condition that the object of their choice must possess genitals like their own; and in this connection the infantile sexual theories which attribute the same kind of genitals to both sexes exert much influence.

¹ Sadger (1910) and Freud (1910c).

² Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d).

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2431

After the stage of heterosexual object-choice has been reached, the homosexual tendencies are not, as might be supposed, done away with or brought to a stop; they are merely deflected from their sexual aim and applied to fresh uses. They now combine with portions of the ego-instincts and, as ‘attached’ components, help to constitute the social instincts, thus contributing an erotic factor to friendship and comradeship, to esprit de corps and to the love of mankind in general. How large a contribution is in fact derived from erotic sources (with the sexual aim inhibited) could scarcely be guessed from the normal social relations of mankind. But it is not irrelevant to note that it is precisely manifest homosexuals, and among them again precisely those that set themselves against an indulgence in sensual acts, who are distinguished by taking a particularly active share in the general interests of humanity - interests which have themselves sprung from a sublimation of erotic instincts.

In my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality I have expressed the opinion that each stage in the development of psychosexuality affords a possibility of ‘fixation, and thus of a dispositional point. People who have not freed themselves completely from the stage of narcissism - who, that is to say, have at that point a fixation which may operate as a disposition to a later illness - are exposed to the danger that some unusually intense wave of libido, finding no other outlet, may lead to a sexualization of their social instincts and so undo the sublimations which they had achieved in the course of their development. This result may be produced by anything that causes the libido to flow backwards (i.e. that causes a ‘regression’): whether, on the one hand, the libido becomes collaterally reinforced owing to some disappointment over a woman, or is directly dammed up owing to a mishap in social relations with other men - both of these being instances of ‘frustration’; or whether, on the other hand, there is a general intensification of the libido, so that it becomes too powerful to find an outlet along the channels which are already open to it, and consequently bursts through its banks at the weakest spot. Since our analyses show that paranoics endeavour to protect themselves against any such sexualization of their social instinctual cathexes, we are driven to suppose that the weak spot in their development is to be looked for somewhere between the stages of auto-erotism, narcissism and homosexuality, and that their disposition to illness (which may perhaps be susceptible of more precise definition) must be located in that region. A similar disposition would have to be assigned to patients suffering from Kraepelin’s dementia praecox or (as Bleuler has named it) schizophrenia; and we shall hope later on to find clues which will enable us to trace back the differences between the two disorders (as regards both the form they take and the course they run) to corresponding differences in the patients’ dispositional fixations.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2432

In taking the view, then, that what lies at the core of the conflict in cases of paranoia among males is a homosexual wishful phantasy of loving a man, we shall certainly not forget that the confirmation of such an important hypothesis can only follow upon the investigation of a large number of instances of every variety of paranoic disorder. We must therefore be prepared, if need be, to limit our assertion to a single type of paranoia. Nevertheless, it is a remarkable fact that the familiar principal forms of paranoia can all be represented as contradictions of the single proposition: ‘I (a man) love him (a man)’; and indeed that they exhaust all the possible ways in which such contradictions could be formulated.

The proposition ‘I (a man) love him’ is contradicted by:

(a) Delusions of persecution; for they loudly assert:

‘I do not love him - I hate him.’

This contradiction, which must have run thus in the unconscious,¹ cannot, however, become conscious to a paranoiac in this form. The mechanism of symptom-formation in paranoia requires that internal perceptions - feelings - shall be replaced by external perceptions. Consequently the proposition ‘I hate him’ becomes transformed by projection into another one: ‘He hates (persecutes) me, which will justify me in hating him.’ And thus the impelling unconscious feeling makes its appearance as though it were the consequence of an external perception:

‘I do not love him - I hate him, because HE PERSECUTES ME.’

Observation leaves room for no doubt that the persecutor is some one who was once loved.

(b) Another element is chosen for contradiction in erotomania, which remains totally unintelligible on any other view:

‘I do not love him - I love her.’

And in obedience to the same need for projection, the proposition is transformed into: ‘I observe that she loves me.’

‘I do not love him - I love her, because SHE LOVES ME.’

Many cases of erotomania might give an impression that they could be satisfactorily explained as being exaggerated or distorted heterosexual fixations, if our attention were not attracted by the circumstance that these infatuations invariably begin, not with any internal perception of loving, but with an external perception of being loved. But in this form of paranoia the intermediate proposition ‘I love her’ can also become conscious, because the contradiction between it and the original proposition is not a diametrical one, not so irreconcilable as that between love and hate: it is, after all, possible to love her as well as him. It can thus come about that the proposition which has been substituted by projection (‘she loves me’) may make way again for the ‘basic language’ proposition ‘I love her’.

¹ Or in the ‘basic language’, as Schreber would say.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2433

(c) The third way in which the original proposition can be contradicted would be by delusions of jealousy, which we can study in the characteristic forms in which they appear in each sex.

(α) Alcoholic delusions of jealousy. The part played by alcohol in this disorder is intelligible in every way. We know that that source of pleasure removes inhibitions and undoes sublimations. It is not infrequently disappointment over a woman that drives a man to drink - but this means, as a rule, that he resorts to the public-house and to the company of men, who afford him the emotional satisfaction which he has failed to get from his wife at home. If now these men become the objects of a strong libidinal cathexis in his unconscious, he will ward it off with the third kind of contradiction:

‘It is not I who love the man - she loves him’, and he suspects the woman in relation to all the men whom he himself is tempted to love.

Distortion by means of projection is necessarily absent in this instance, since, with the change of the subject who loves, the whole process is in any case thrown outside the self. The fact that the woman loves the men is a matter of external perception to him; whereas the facts that he himself does not love but hates, or that he himself loves not this but that person, are matters of internal perception.

(β) Delusions of jealousy in women are exactly analogous.

‘It is not I who love the women - he loves them.’ The jealous woman suspects her husband in relation to all the women by whom she is herself attracted owing to her homosexuality and the dispositional effect of her excessive narcissism. The influence of the time of life at which her fixation occurred is clearly shown by the selection of the love-objects which she imputes to her husband; they are often old and quite inappropriate for a real love relation - revivals of the nurses and servants and girls who were her friends in childhood, or sisters who were her actual rivals.

[(d)] Now it might be supposed that a proposition consisting of three terms, such as ‘I love him’, could only be contradicted in three different ways. Delusions of jealousy contradict the subject, delusions of persecution contradict the verb, and erotomania contradicts the object. But in fact a fourth kind of contradiction is possible - namely, one which rejects the proposition as a whole:

‘I do not love at all - I do not love any one.’ And since, after all, one’s libido must go somewhere, this proposition seems to be the psychological equivalent of the proposition: ‘I love only myself.’ So that this kind of contradiction would give us megalomania, which we may regard as a sexual overvaluation of the ego and may thus set beside the overvaluation of the love-object with which we are already familiar.¹

It is of some importance in connection with other parts of the theory of paranoia to notice that we can detect an element of megalomania in most other forms of paranoic disorder. We are justified in assuming that megalomania is essentially of an infantile nature and that, as development proceeds, it is sacrificed to social considerations. Similarly, an individual’s megalomania is never so vehemently suppressed as when he is in the grip of an overpowering love:

Denn wo die Lieb’ erwachet, stirbt

das Ich, der finstere Despot.²

After this discussion of the unexpectedly important part played by homosexual wishful phantasies in paranoia, let us return to the two factors in which we expected from the first to find the distinguishing marks of paranoia, namely, the mechanism by which the symptoms are formed and the mechanism by which repression is brought about.

We certainly have no right to begin by assuming that these two mechanisms are identical, and that symptom-formation follows the same path as repression, each proceeding along it, perhaps, in an opposite direction. Nor does there seem to be any great probability that such an identity exists. Nevertheless, we shall refrain from expressing any opinion on the subject until we have completed our investigation.

¹ Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. The same view and the same formulation will be found in the papers by Abraham and Maeder to which I have already referred.

² From the Ghazals of Muhammad ibn Muhammad (Jãlal al-Din) Rumi, translated by Rückert.

[For when the flames of love arise,

Then Self, the gloomy tyrant, dies.]

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2434

The most striking characteristic of symptom-formation in paranoia is the process which deserves the name of projection. An internal perception is suppressed, and, instead, its content, after undergoing a certain kind of distortion, enters consciousness in the form of an external perception. In delusions of persecution the distortion consists in a transformation of affect; what should have been felt internally as love is perceived externally as hate. We should feel tempted to regard this remarkable process as the most important element in paranoia and as being absolutely pathognomonic for it, if we were not opportunely reminded of two things. In the first place, projection does not play the same part in all forms of paranoia; and, in the second place, it makes its appearance not only in paranoia but under other psychological conditions as well, and in fact it has a regular share assigned to it in our attitude towards the external world. For when we refer the causes of certain sensations to the external world, instead of looking for them (as we do in the case of others) inside ourselves, this normal proceeding, too, deserves to be called projection. Having thus been made aware that more general psychological problems are involved in the question of the nature of projection, let us make up our minds to postpone the investigation of it (and with it that of the mechanism of paranoic symptom-formation in general) until some other occasion; and let up now turn to consider what ideas we can collect on the subject of the mechanism of repression in paranoia. I should like to say at once, in justification of this temporary renunciation, that we shall find that the manner in which the process of repression occurs is far more intimately connected with the developmental history of the libido and with the disposition to which it gives rise than is the manner in which symptoms are formed.

In psycho-analysis we have been accustomed to look upon pathological phenomena as being derived in a general way from repression. If we examine what is spoken of as ‘repression’ more closely, we shall find reason to split the process up into three phases which are easily distinguishable from one another conceptually.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2435

(1) The first phase consists in fixation, which is the precursor and necessary condition of every ‘repression’. Fixation can be described in this way. One instinct or instinctual component fails to accompany the rest along the anticipated normal path of development, and, in consequence of this inhibition in its development, it is left behind at a more infantile stage. The libidinal current in question then behaves in relation to later psychological structures like one belonging to the system of the unconscious, like one that is repressed. We have already shown that these instinctual fixations constitute the basis for the disposition to subsequent illness, and we may now add that they constitute above all the basis for the determination of the outcome of the third phase of repression.

(2) The second phase of repression is that of repression proper - the phase to which most attention has hitherto been given. It emanates from the more highly developed systems of the ego - systems which are capable of being conscious - and may in fact be described as a process of ‘after-pressure’. It gives an impression of being an essentially active process, while fixation appears in fact to be a passive lagging behind. What undergo repression may either be the psychical derivatives of the original lagging instincts, when these have become reinforced and so come into conflict with the ego (or ego-syntonic instincts), or they may be psychical trends which have for other reasons aroused strong aversion. But this aversion would not in itself lead to repression, unless some connection had been established between the unwelcome trends which have to be repressed and those which have been repressed already. Where this is so, the repulsion exercised by the conscious system and the attraction exercised by the unconscious one tend in the same direction towards bringing about repression. The two possibilities which are here treated separately may in practice, perhaps, be less sharply differentiated, and the distinction between them may merely depend upon the greater or lesser degree in which the primarily repressed instincts contribute to the result.

(3) The third phase, and the most important as regards pathological phenomena, is that of failure of repression, of irruption, of return of the repressed. This irruption takes its start from the point of fixation, and it implies a regression of the libidinal development to that point.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2436

We have already alluded to the multiplicity of the possible points of fixation; there are, in fact, as many as there are stages in the development of the libido. We must be prepared to find a similar multiplicity of the mechanisms of repression proper and of the mechanisms of irruption (or of symptom-formation), and we may already begin to suspect that it will not be possible to trace back all of these multiplicities to the developmental history of the libido alone.

It is easy to see that this discussion is beginning to trench upon the problem of ‘choice of neurosis’, which, however, cannot be taken in hand until preliminary work of another kind has been accomplished. Let us bear in mind for the present that we have already dealt with fixation, and that we have postponed the subject of symptom-formation; and let us restrict ourselves to the question of whether the analysis of Schreber’s case throws any light upon the mechanism of repression proper which predominates in paranoia.

At the climax of his illness, under the influence of visions which were ‘partly of a terrifying character, but partly, too, of an indescribable grandeur’ (73), Schreber became convinced of the imminence of a great catastrophe, of the end of the world. Voices told him that the work of the past 14,000 years had now come to nothing, and that the earth’s allotted span was only 212 years more (71); and during the last part of his stay in Flechsig’s clinic he believed that that period had already elapsed. He himself was ‘the only real man left alive’, and the few human shapes that he still saw - the doctor, the attendants, the other patients - he explained as being ‘miracled up, cursorily improvised men’. Occasionally the converse current of feeling also made itself apparent: a newspaper was put into his hands in which there was a report of his own death (81); he himself existed in a second, inferior shape, and in this second shape he one day quietly passed away (73). But the form of his delusion in which his ego was retained and the world sacrificed proved itself by far the more powerful. He had various theories of the cause of the catastrophe. At one time he had in mind a process of glaciation owing to the withdrawal of the sun; at another it was to be destruction by an earthquake, in the occurrence of which he, in his capacity of ‘seer of spirits’, was to act a leading part, just as another seer was alleged to have done in the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 (91). Or again, Flechsig was the culprit, since through his magic arts he had sown fear and terror among men, had wrecked the foundations of religion, and spread abroad general nervous disorders and immorality, so that devastating pestilences had descended upon mankind (91). In any case the end of the world was the consequence of the conflict which had broken out between him and Flechsig, or, according to the aetiology adopted in the second phase of his delusion, of the indissoluble bond which had been formed between him and God; it was, in fact, the inevitable result of his illness. Years afterwards, when Dr. Schreber had returned to human society, and could find no trace in the books, the musical scores, or the other articles of daily use which fell into his hands once more, of anything to bear out his theory that there had been a gap of vast duration in the history of mankind, he admitted that his view was no longer tenable: ’. . . I can no longer avoid recognizing that, externally considered, everything is as it used to be. Whether, nevertheless, there may not have been a profound internal change is a question to which I shall recur later.’ (84-5.) He could not bring himself to doubt that during his illness the world had come to an end and that, in spite of everything, the one that he now saw before him was a different one.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2437

A world-catastrophe of this kind is not infrequent during the agitated stage in other cases of paranoia.¹ If we base ourselves on our theory of libidinal cathexis, and if we follow the hint given by Schreber’s view of other people as being ‘cursorily improvised men’, we shall not find it difficult to explain these catastrophes.² The patient has withdrawn from the people in his environment and from the external world generally the libidinal cathexis which he has hitherto directed on to them. Thus everything has become indifferent and irrelevant to him, and has to be explained by means of a secondary rationalization as being ‘miracled up, cursorily improvised’. The end of the world is the projection of this internal catastrophe; his subjective world has come to an end since his withdrawal of his love from it.³

After Faust has uttered the curses which free him from the world, the Chorus of Spirits sings:

Weh! Weh!

Du hast sie zerstört,

die schöne Welt,

mit mächtiger Faust!

sie stürzt, sie zerfällt!

Ein Halbgott hat sie zerschlagen!

.    .    .    .    .    .

Mächtiger

der Erdensöhne,

Prächtiger

baue sie wieder,

in deinem Busen baue sie auf!4

And the paranoic builds it again, not more splendid, it is true, but at least so that he can once more live in it. He builds it up by the world of his delusions. The delusional formation, which we take to be the pathological product, is in reality an attempt at recovery, a process of reconstruction. Such a reconstruction after the catastrophe is successful to a greater or lesser extent, but never wholly so; in Schreber’s words, there has been a ‘profound internal change’ in the world. But the human subject has recaptured a relation, and often a very intense one, to the people and things in the world, even though the relation is a hostile one now, where formerly it was hopefully affectionate. We may say, then, that the process of repression proper consists in a detachment of the libido from people - and things - that were previously loved. It happens silently; we receive no intelligence of it, but can only infer it from subsequent events. What forces itself so noisily upon our attention is the process of recovery, which undoes the work of repression and brings back the libido again on to the people it had abandoned. In paranoia this process is carried out by the method of projection. It was incorrect to say that the perception which was suppressed internally is projected outwards; the truth is rather, as we now see, that what was abolished internally returns from without. The thorough examination of the process of projection which we have postponed to another occasion will clear up our remaining doubts on this subject.

¹ An ‘end of the world’ based upon other motives is to be found at the climax of the ecstasy of love (cf. Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde); in this case it is not the ego but the single love-object which absorbs all the cathexes directed upon the external world.

² Cf. Abraham (1908) and Jung (1907). Abraham’s short paper contains almost all the essential views put forward in the present study of the case of Schreber.

³ He has perhaps withdrawn from it not only his libidinal cathexis, but his interest in general - that is, the cathexes that proceed from his ego as well. This question is discussed below.

4 [Woe! Woe!

Thou hast it destroyed,

The beautiful world,

With powerful fist!

In ruins 'tis hurled,

By the blow of a demigod shattered!

.    .    .    .    .

Mightier

For the children of men,

More splendid

Build it again,

In thine own bosom build it anew!]

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2438

In the meantime, however, it is a source of some satisfaction to find that our newly acquired knowledge involves us in a number of further discussions.

(1) Our first reflection will tell us that it cannot be the case that this detachment of the libido occurs exclusively in paranoia; nor can it be that, where it occurs elsewhere, it has such disastrous consequences. It is quite possible that a detachment of the libido is the essential and regular mechanism of every repression. We can have no positive knowledge on that point until the other disorders that are based upon repression have been similarly examined. But it is certain that in normal mental life (and not only in periods of mourning) we are constantly detaching our libido in this way from people or from other objects without falling ill. When Faust freed himself from the world by uttering his curses, the result was not a paranoia or any other neurosis but simply a certain general frame of mind. The detachment of the libido, therefore, cannot in itself be the pathogenic factor in paranoia; there must be some special characteristic which distinguishes a paranoic detachment of the libido from other kinds. It is not difficult to suggest what that characteristic may be. What use is made of the libido after it has been set free by the process of detachment? A normal person will at once begin looking about for a substitute for the lost attachment; and until that substitute has been found the liberated libido will be kept in suspension within his mind, and will there give rise to tensions and colour his mood. In hysteria the liberated libido becomes transformed into somatic innervations or into anxiety. But in paranoia the clinical evidence goes to show that the libido, after it has been withdrawn from the object, is put to a special use. It will be remembered that the majority of cases of paranoia exhibit traces of megalomania, and that megalomania can by itself constitute a paranoia. From this it may be concluded that in paranoia the liberated libido becomes attached to the ego, and is used for the aggrandizement of the ego. A return is thus made to the stage of narcissism (known to us from the development of the libido), in which a person’s only sexual object is his own ego. On the basis of this clinical evidence we can suppose that paranoics have brought along with them a fixation at the stage of narcissism, and we can assert that the length of the step back from sublimated homosexuality to narcissism is a measure of the amount of regression characteristic of paranoia.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2439

(2) An equally plausible objection can be based upon Schreber’s case history, as well as upon many others. For it can be urged that the delusions of persecution (which were directed against Flechsig ) unquestionably made their appearance at an earlier date than the phantasy of the end of the world; so that what is supposed to have been a return of the repressed actually preceded the repression itself - and this is patent nonsense. In order to meet this objection we must leave the high ground of generalization and descend to the detailed consideration of actual circumstances, which are undoubtedly very much more complicated. We must admit the possibility that a detachment of the libido such as we are discussing might just as easily be a partial one, a drawing back from some single complex, as a general one. A partial detachment should be by far the commoner of the two, and should precede a general one, since to begin with it is only for a partial detachment that the influences of life provide a motive. The process may then stop at the stage of a partial detachment or it may spread to a general one, which will loudly proclaim its presence in the symptoms of megalomania. Thus the detachment of the libido from the figure of Flechsig may nevertheless have been what was primary in the case of Schreber; it was immediately followed by the appearance of the delusion, which brought back the libido on to Flechsig again (though with a negative sign to mark the fact that repression had taken place) and thus annulled the work of repression. And now the battle of repression broke out anew, but this time with more powerful weapons. In proportion as the object of contention became the most important thing in the external world, trying on the one hand to draw the whole of the libido on to itself, and on the other hand mobilizing all the resistances against itself, so the struggle raging around this single object became more and more comparable to a general engagement; till at length a victory for the forces of repression found expression in a conviction that the world had come to an end and that the self alone survived. If we review the ingenious constructions which were raised by Schreber’s delusion in the domain of religion - the hierarchy of God, the proved souls, the fore-courts of Heaven, the lower and the upper God - we can gauge in retrospect the wealth of sublimations which were brought down in ruin by the catastrophe of the general detachment of his libido.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2440

(3) A third consideration which arises from the views that have been developed in these pages is as follows. Are we to suppose that a general detachment of the libido from the external world would be an effective enough agent to account for the ‘end of the world’? Or would not the ego-cathexes which still remained in existence have been sufficient to maintain rapport with the external world? To meet this difficulty we should either have to assume that what we call libidinal cathexis (that is, interest emanating from erotic sources) coincides with interest in general, or we should have to consider the possibility that a very widespread disturbance in the distribution of libido may bring about a corresponding disturbance in the ego-cathexes. But these are problems which we are still quite helpless and incompetent to solve. It would be otherwise if we could start out from some well-grounded theory of instincts; but in fact we have nothing of the kind at our disposal. We regard instinct as being the concept on the frontier-line between the somatic and the mental, and see in it the psychical representative of organic forces. Further, we accept the popular distinction between ego-instincts and a sexual instinct; for such a distinction seems to agree with the biological conception that the individual has a double orientation, aiming on the one hand at self-preservation and on the other at the preservation of the species. But beyond this are only hypotheses, which we have taken up - and are quite ready to drop again - in order to help us to find our bearings in the chaos of the obscurer processes of the mind. What we expect from psycho-analytic investigations of pathological mental processes is precisely that they shall drive us to some conclusions on questions connected with the theory of instincts. These investigations, however, are in their infancy and are only being carried out by isolated workers, so that the hopes we place in them must still remain unfulfilled. We can no more dismiss the possibility that disturbances of the libido may react upon the ego-cathexes than we can overlook the converse possibility - namely, that a secondary or induced disturbance of the libidinal processes may result from abnormal changes in the ego. Indeed, it is probable that processes of this kind constitute the distinctive characteristic of psychoses. How much of all this may apply to paranoia it is impossible at present to say. There is one consideration, however, on which I should like to lay stress. It cannot be asserted that a paranoic, even at the height of the repression, withdraws his interest from the external world completely - as must be considered to occur in certain other kinds of hallucinatory psychosis (such a Meynert’s amentia). The paranoic perceives the external world and takes into account any alterations that may happen in it, and the effect it makes upon him stimulates him to invent explanatory theories (such as Schreber’s ‘cursorily improvised men’). It therefore appears to me far more probable that the paranoic’s altered relation to the world is to be explained entirely or in the main by the loss of his libidinal interest.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2441

(4) It is impossible to avoid asking, in view of the close connection between the two disorders, how far this conception of paranoia will affect our conception of dementia praecox. I am of opinion that Kraepelin was entirely justified in taking the step of separating off a large part of what had hitherto been called paranoia and merging it, together with catatonia and certain other forms of disease, into a new clinical unit - though ‘dementia praecox’ was a particularly unhappy name to choose for it. The designation chosen by Bleuler for the same group of forms - ‘schizophrenia’ - is also open to the objection that the name appears appropriate only so long as we forget its literal meaning. For otherwise it prejudices the issue, since it is based on a characteristic of the disease which is theoretically postulated - a characteristic, moreover, which does not belong exclusively to that disease, and which, in the light of other considerations, cannot be regarded as the essential one. However, it is not on the whole of very great importance what names we give to clinical pictures. What seems to me more essential is that paranoia should be maintained as an independent clinical type, however frequently the picture it offers may be complicated by the presence of schizophrenic features. For, from the standpoint of the libido theory, while it would resemble dementia praecox in so far as the repression proper would in both disorders have the same principal feature - detachment of the libido, together with its regression on to the ego - it would be distinguished from dementia praecox by having its dispositional fixation differently located and by having a different mechanism for the return of the repressed (that is, for the formation of symptoms). It would seem to me the most convenient plan to give dementia praecox the name of paraphrenia. This term has no special connotation, and it would serve to indicate a relationship with paranoia (a name which cannot be changed) and would further recall hebephrenia, an entity which is now merged in dementia praecox. It is true that the name has already been proposed for other purposes; but this need not concern us, since the alternative applications have not passed into general use.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2442

Abraham has very convincingly shown ¹ that the turning away of the libido from the external world is a particularly clearly-marked feature in dementia praecox. From this feature we infer that the repression is effected by means of detachment of the libido. Here once more we may regard the phase of violent hallucinations as a struggle between repression and an attempt at recovery by bringing the libido back again on to its objects. Jung, with extraordinary analytic acumen, has perceived that the deliria² and motor stereotypes occurring in this disorder are the residues of former object-cathexes, clung to with great persistence. This attempt at recovery, which observers mistake for the disease itself, does not, as in paranoia, make use of projection, but employs a hallucinatory (hysterical) mechanism. This is one of the two major respects in which dementia praecox differs from paranoia; and this difference can be explained genetically from another direction. The second difference is shown by the outcome of the disease in those cases where the process has not remained too restricted. The prognosis is on the whole more unfavourable than in paranoia. The victory lies with repression and not, as in the former, with reconstruction. The regression extends not merely to narcissism (manifesting itself in the shape of megalomania) but to a complete abandonment of object-love and a return to infantile auto-erotism. The dispositional fixation must therefore be situated further back than in paranoia, and must lie some where at the beginning of the course of development from auto-erotism to object-love. Moreover, it is not at all likely that homosexual impulsions, which are so frequently - perhaps invariably - to be found in paranoia, play an equally important part in the aetiology of that far more comprehensive disorder, dementia praecox.

¹ In the paper already quoted.

² [In French and German psychiatry the word ‘delirium’ is often used of delusional states.]

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2443

Our hypotheses as to the dispositional fixations in paranoia and paraphrenia make it easy to see that a case may begin with paranoic symptoms and may yet develop into a dementia praecox, and that paranoid and schizophrenic phenomena may be combined in any proportion. And we can understand how a clinical picture such as Schreber’s can come about, and merit the name of a paranoid dementia, from the fact that in its production of a wishful phantasy and of hallucinations it shows paraphrenic traits, while in its exciting cause, in its use of the mechanism of projection, and in its outcome it exhibits a paranoid character. For it is possible for several fixations to be left behind in the course of development, and each of these in succession may allow an irruption of the libido that has been pushed off - beginning, perhaps, with the later acquired fixations, and going on, as the illness develops, to the original ones that lie nearer the starting-point. We should be glad to know to what conditions the relatively favourable issue of the present case is due; for we cannot willingly attribute the whole responsibility for the outcome to anything so casual as the ‘improvement due to change in domicile’,¹ which set in after the patient’s removal from Flechsig’s clinic. But our insufficient acquaintance with the intimate circumstances of the history of the case makes it impossible to give an answer to this interesting question. It may be suspected, however, that what enabled Schreber to reconcile himself to his homosexual phantasy, and so made it possible for his illness to terminate in something approximating to a recovery, may have been the fact that his father-complex was in the main positively toned and that in real life the later years of his relationship with an excellent father had probably been unclouded.

¹ Cf. Riklin (1905).

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2444

Since I neither fear the criticism of others nor shrink from criticizing myself, I have no motive for avoiding the mention of a similarity which may possibly damage our libido theory in the estimation of many of my readers. Schreber’s ‘rays of God’, which are made up of a condensation of the sun’s rays, of nerve fibres, and of spermatozoa, are in reality nothing else than a concrete representation and projection outwards of libidinal cathexes; and they thus lend his delusions a striking conformity with our theory. His belief that the world must come to an end because his ego was attracting all the rays to itself, his anxious concern at a later period, during the process of reconstruction, lest God should sever His ray-connection with him, - these and many other details of Schreber’s delusional structure sound almost like endopsychic perceptions of the processes whose existence I have assumed in these page as the basis of our explanation of paranoia. I can nevertheless call a friend and fellow-specialist to witness that I had developed my theory of paranoia before I became acquainted with the contents of Schreber’s book. It remains for the future to decide whether there is more delusion in my theory than I should like to admit, or whether there is more truth in Schreber’s delusion than other people are as yet prepared to believe.

Lastly, I cannot conclude the present work, which is once again only a fragment of a larger whole, without foreshadowing the two chief theses towards the establishment of which the libido theory of the neuroses and psychoses is advancing: namely, that the neuroses arise in the main from a conflict between the ego and the sexual instinct, and that the forms which the neuroses assume retain the imprint of the course of development followed by the libido - and by the ego.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2445

POSTSCRIPT

(1912)

In dealing with the case history of Senatspräsident Schreber I purposely restricted myself to a minimum of interpretation and I feel confident that every reader with a knowledge of psycho-analysis will have learned from the material which I presented more than was explicitly stated by me, and that he will have found no difficulty in drawing the threads closer and in reaching conclusions at which I no more than hinted. By a happy chance the same issue of this periodical as that in which my own paper appeared showed that the attention of some other contributors had been directed to Schreber’s autobiography, and made it easy to guess how much more material remains to be gathered from the symbolic content of the phantasies and delusions of this gifted paranoic.¹

Since I published my work upon Schreber, a chance acquisition of knowledge has put me in a position to appreciate one of his delusional beliefs more adequately, and to recognize the wealth of its bearing upon mythology. I mentioned on p. 2425 the patient’s peculiar relation to the sun, and I was led to explain the sun as a sublimated ‘father-symbol’. The sun used to speak to him in human language and thus revealed itself to him as a living being. Schreber was in the habit of abusing it and shouting threats at it; he declares, moreover, that when he stood facing it and spoke aloud, its rays would turn pale before him. After his ‘recovery’ he boasts that he can gaze at it without any difficulty and without being more than slightly dazzled by it, a thing which would naturally have been impossible for him formerly.²

It is to this delusional privilege of being able to gaze at the sun without being dazzled that the mythological interest attaches. We read in Reinach³ that the natural historians of antiquity attributed this power to the eagle alone, who, as a dweller in the highest regions of the air, was brought into especially intimate relation with the heavens, with the sun, and with lightning.4 We learn from the same sources, moreover, that the eagle puts his young to a test before recognizing them as his legitimate offspring. Unless they can succeed in looking into the sun without blinking they are thrown out of the eyrie.

¹ Cf. Jung (1911, 164 and 207); and Spielrein (1911, 350).

² See the footnote to page 139 of Schreber’s book.

³ Reinach (1905-12, 3, 80), quoting Keller (1887).

4 Representations of eagles were set up at the highest points of temples, so as to serve as ‘magical’ lightning-conductors. (Cf. Reinach, loc. cit.)

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2446

There can be no doubt about the meaning of this animal myth. It is certain that this is merely ascribing to animals something that is a hallowed custom among men. The procedure gone through by the eagle with his young is an ordeal, a test of lineage, such as is reported of the most various races of antiquity. Thus the Celts living on the banks of the Rhine used to entrust their new-born babies to the waters of the river, in order to ascertain whether they were truly of their own blood. The clan of Psylli, who inhabited what is now Tripoli, boasted that they were descended from snakes, and used to expose their infants to contact with them; those who were true-born children of the clan were either not bitten or recovered rapidly from the effects of the bite.¹ The assumption underlying these trials leads us deep into the totemic habits of thought of primitive peoples. The totem - an animal, or a natural force animistically conceived, to which the tribe traces back its origin - spares the members of the tribe as being its own children, just as it itself is honoured by them as being their ancestor and is spared by them. We have here arrived at the consideration of matters which, as it seems to me, may make it possible to arrive at a psycho-analytic explanation of the origins of religion.

The eagle, then, who makes his young look into the sun and requires of them that they shall not be dazzled by its light, is behaving as though he were himself a descendant of the sun and were submitting his children to a test of their ancestry. And when Schreber boasts that he can look into the sun unscathed and undazzled, he has rediscovered the mythological method of expressing his filial relation to the sun, and has confirmed us once again in our view that the sun is a symbol of the father. It will be remembered that during his illness Schreber gave free expression to his family pride,² and that we discovered in the fact of his childlessness a human motive for his having fallen ill with a feminine wishful phantasy. Thus the connection between his delusional privilege and the basis of his illness becomes evident.

¹ For lists of references see Reinach, loc. cit. and ibid., 1, 74.

² The Schrebers are ‘members of the highest nobility of Heaven’ (24). - ‘Adel’ is the attribute of an ‘Adler’. [‘Adel’ means ‘nobility’ or ‘noble’. ‘Adler’ means ‘eagle’ or ‘noble (person)’.]

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2447

This short postscript to my analysis of a paranoid patient may serve to show that Jung had excellent grounds for his assertion that the mythopoeic forces of mankind are not extinct, but that to this very day they give rise in the neuroses to the same psychical products as in the remotest past ages. I should like to take up a suggestion that I myself made some time ago,¹ and add that the same holds good of the forces that construct religions. And I am of opinion that the time will soon be ripe for us to make an extension of a thesis which has long been asserted by psycho-analysts, and to complete what has hitherto had only an individual and ontogenetic application by the addition of its anthropological counterpart, which is to be conceived phylogenetically. ‘In dreams and in neuroses’, so our thesis has run, ‘ we come once more upon the child and the peculiarities which characterize his modes of thought and his emotional life.’ ‘And we come upon the savage too,’ we may now add, ‘upon the primitive man, as he stands revealed to us in the light of the researches of archaeology and of ethnology.’

¹ ‘Obsessive Acts and Religious Practices’ (1907b).

2448

THE HANDLING OF DREAM-INTERPRETATION IN PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

(1911)

2449

Intentionally left blank

2450

THE HANDLING OF DREAM-INTERPRETATION IN PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

The Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse was not designed solely to keep its readers informed of the advances made in psycho-analytic knowledge, and itself to publish comparatively short contributions to the subject; it aims also at accomplishing the further tasks of presenting to the student a clear outline of what is already known, and of economizing the time and effort of beginners in analytic practice by offering them suitable instructions. Henceforward, therefore, articles of a didactic nature and on technical subjects, not necessarily containing new matter, will appear as well in this journal.

The question with which I now intend to deal is not that of the technique of dream-interpretation: neither the methods by which dreams should be interpreted nor the use of such interpretations when made will be considered, but only the way in which the analyst should employ the art of interpretation in the psycho-analytic treatment of patients. There are undoubtedly different ways of going to work in the matter, but then the answer to questions of technique in analysis is never a matter of course. Although there may perhaps be more than one good road to follow, still there are very many bad ones, and a comparison of the various methods cannot fail to be illuminating, even if it should not lead to a decision in favour of any particular one.

Anyone coming from dream-interpretation to analytic practice will retain his interest in the content of dreams, and his inclination will be to interpret as fully as possible every dream related by the patient. But he will soon remark that he is now working under quite different conditions, and that if he attempts to carry out his intention he will come into collision with the most immediate tasks of the treatment. Even if a patient’s first dream proves to be admirably suited for the introduction of the first explanations to be given, other dreams will promptly appear, so long and so obscure that the full meaning cannot be extracted from them in the limited session of one day’s work. If the doctor continues the work of interpretation during the following days, fresh dreams will be produced in the meantime and these will have to be put aside until he can regard the first dream as finally resolved. The production of dreams is at times so copious, and the patient’s progress towards comprehension of them so hesitant, that a suspicion will force itself on the analyst that the appearance of the material in this manner may be simply a manifestation of the patient’s resistance taking advantage of the discovery that the method is unable to master what is so presented. Moreover, the treatment will meanwhile have fallen quite a distance behind the present and have lost touch with actuality. In opposition to such a technique stands the rule that it is of the greatest importance for the treatment that the analyst should always be aware of the surface of the patient’s mind at any given moment, that he should know what complexes and resistances are active in him at the time and what conscious reaction to them will govern his behaviour. It is scarcely ever right to sacrifice this therapeutic aim to an interest in dream-interpretation.

The Handling Of Dream-Interpretation In Psycho-Analysis

2451

What then, if we bear this rule in mind, is to be our attitude to interpreting dreams in analysis? More or less as follows: The amount of interpretation which can be achieved in one session should be taken as sufficient and it is not to be regarded as a loss if the content of the dream is not fully discovered. On the following day, the interpretation of the dream is not to be taken up again as a matter of course, until it has become evident that nothing else has meanwhile forced its way into the foreground of the patient’s thoughts. Thus no exception in favour of an interrupted dream-interpretation is to be made to the rule that the first thing that comes into the patient’s head is the first thing to be dealt with. If fresh dreams occur before the earlier ones have been disposed of, the more recent productions are to be attended to, and no uneasiness need be felt about neglecting the older ones. If the dreams become altogether too diffuse and voluminous, all hope of completely unravelling them should tacitly be given up from the start. One must in general guard against displaying very special interest in the interpretation of dreams, or arousing an idea in the patient that the work would come to a standstill if he were to bring up no dreams; otherwise there is a danger of the resistance being directed to the production of dreams, with a consequent cessation of them. The patient must be brought to believe, on the contrary, that the analysis invariably finds material for its continuation, regardless of whether or no he brings up dreams or what amount of attention is devoted to them.

It will now be asked whether we shall not be giving up too much valuable material which might throw light on the unconscious if dream-interpretation is only to be carried out subject to such restrictions of method. The answer to this is that the loss is by no means so great as might appear from a superficial view of the matter. To begin with, it must be recognized that in cases of severe neurosis any elaborate dream-productions must from the nature of things be regarded as incapable of complete solution. A dream of this kind is often based on the entire pathogenic material of the case, as yet unknown to both doctor and patient (so called ‘programme-dreams’ and biographical dreams), and is sometimes equivalent to a translation into dream-Ianguage of the whole content of the neurosis. In the attempt to interpret such a dream all the latent, as yet untouched, resistances will be roused to activity and soon set a limit to its understanding. The full interpretation of such a dream will coincide with the completion of the whole analysis; if a note is made of it at the beginning, it may be possible to understand it at the end, many months later. It is the same as with the elucidation of a single symptom (the main symptom, perhaps). The whole analysis is needed to explain it; in the course of the treatment one must endeavour to lay hold first of this, then of that, fragment of the symptom’s meaning, one after another, until they can all be pieced together. Similarly, no more can be expected of a dream occurring in the early stages of the analysis; one must be content if the attempt at interpretation brings a single pathogenic wishful impulse to light.

The Handling Of Dream-Interpretation In Psycho-Analysis

2452

Thus nothing attainable is renounced if one gives up the idea of a complete dream-interpretation; nor is anything lost as a rule if one breaks off the interpretation of a comparatively old dream and turns to a more recent one. We have found from fine examples of fully analysed dreams that several successive scenes of one dream may have the same content, which may find expression in them with increasing clarity; and we have learnt, too, that several dreams occurring in the same night need be nothing more than attempts, expressed in various forms, to represent one meaning. In general, we may rest assured that every wishful impulse which creates a dream to-day will re-appear in other dreams as long as it has not been understood and withdrawn from the domination of the unconscious. It often happens, therefore, that the best way to complete the interpretation of a dream is to leave it and to devote one’s attention to a new dream, which may contain the same material in a possibly more accessible form. I know that it is asking a great deal, not only of the patient but also of the doctor, to expect them to give up their conscious purposive aims during the treatment, and to abandon themselves to a guidance which, in spite of everything, still seems to us ‘accidental’. But I can answer for it that one is rewarded every time one resolves to have faith in one’s own theoretical principles, and prevails upon oneself not to dispute the guidance of the unconscious in establishing connecting links.

I submit, therefore, that dream-interpretation should not be pursued in analytic treatment as an art for its own sake, but that its handling should be subject to those technical rules that govern the conduct of the treatment as a whole. Occasionally, of course, one can act otherwise and allow a little free play to one’s theoretical interest; but one should always be aware of what one is doing. Another situation to be considered is one which has arisen since we have acquired more confidence in our understanding of dream-symbolism, and know ourselves to be more independent of the patient’s associations. An unusually skilful dream-interpreter will sometimes find himself in the position of being able to see through every one of a patient’s dreams without requiring him to go through the tedious and time-absorbing process of working over them. Such an analyst is thus exempt from any conflict between the demands of dream-interpretation and those of the treatment. Moreover he will(be tempted to make full use of dream-interpretation on every occasion, by telling the patient everything he has detected in his dreams. In doing so, however, he will have adopted a method of treatment which departs considerably from the established one, as I shall point out in another connection. Beginners in psycho-analytic practice, at any rate, are advised not to take this exceptional case as a model.

The Handling Of Dream-Interpretation In Psycho-Analysis

2453

Every analyst is in the position of the superior dream-interpreter, whom we have been imagining, in regard to the very first dreams that his patients bring, before they have learnt anything of the technique of translating dreams. These initial dreams may be described as unsophisticated: they betray a great deal to the listener, like the dreams of so-called healthy people. The question then arises whether the analyst is at once to translate to the patient all that he himself reads from them. This, however, is not the place for answering this question, for it evidently forms part of a wider one: at what stage in the treatment and how rapidly should the analyst introduce the patient to the knowledge of what lies veiled in his mind?  The more the patient has learnt of the practice of dream-interpretation, the more obscure do his later dreams as a rule become. All the knowledge acquired about dreams serves also to put the dream-constructing process on its guard.

In the ‘scientific’ works about dreams, which in spite of their repudiation of dream-interpretation have received a new stimulus from psycho-analysis, one constantly finds that scrupulous care is most unnecessarily attached to the accurate preservation of the text of the dream. This is supposed to need protection from distortions and attritions in the hours immediately after waking. Some psycho-analysts, even, in giving the patient instructions to write down every dream immediately upon waking, seem not to rely consistently enough upon their knowledge of the conditions of dream-formation. In therapeutic work this rule is superfluous; and patients are glad to make use of it to disturb their sleep and to display great zeal where it can serve no useful purpose. For even if the text of a dream is in this way laboriously rescued from oblivion, it is easy enough to convince oneself that nothing has been achieved for the patient. Associations will not come to the text, and the result is the same as if the dream had not been preserved. No doubt the doctor has acquired some knowledge which he would not have done otherwise. But it is not the same thing whether the analyst knows something or the patient knows it; the importance of this distinction for the technique of psycho-analysis will be more fully considered elsewhere.

The Handling Of Dream-Interpretation In Psycho-Analysis

2454

In conclusion, I will mention a particular type of dream which, in the nature of the case, occurs only in the course of psycho-analytic treatment, and may bewilder or mislead beginners. These are the corroborative dreams which, as it were ‘tag along behind’; they are easily accessible to analysis, and their translation merely presents what the treatment has inferred during the last new days from the material of the daily associations. When this happens, it looks as though the patient has been amiable enough to bring us in dream-form exactly what we had been ‘suggesting’ to him immediately before. The more experienced analyst will no doubt have some difficulty in attributing any such amiability to the patient; he accepts such dreams as hoped-for confirmations, and recognizes that they are only observed under certain conditions brought about by the influence of the treatment. The great majority of dreams forge ahead of the analysis; so that, after subtraction of everything in them which is already known and understood, there still remains a more or less clear hint at something which has hitherto been hidden.

2455

THE DYNAMICS OF TRANSFERENCE

(1912)

2456

Intentionally left blank

2457

THE DYNAMICS OF TRANSFERENCE

The almost inexhaustible topic of transference has recently been dealt with by Wilhelm Stekel in this journal on descriptive lines. I should like in the following pages to add a few remarks to explain how it is that transference is necessarily brought about during a psycho-analytic treatment, and how it comes to play its familiar part in it.

It must be understood that each individual, through the combined operation of his innate disposition and the influences brought to bear on him during his early years, has acquired a specific method of his own in his conduct of his erotic life - that is, in the preconditions to falling in love which he lays down, in the instincts he satisfies and the aims he sets himself in the course of it.¹ This produces what might be described as a stereotype plate (or several such), which is constantly repeated - constantly reprinted afresh - in the course of the person’s life, so far as external circumstances and the nature of the love objects accessible to him permit, and which is certainly not entirely insusceptible to change in the face of recent experiences. Now, our observations have shown that only a portion of these impulses which determine the course of erotic life have passed through the full process of psychical development. That portion is directed towards reality, is at the disposal of the conscious personality, and forms a part of it. Another portion of the libidinal impulses has been held up in the course of development; it has been kept away from the conscious personality and from reality, and has either been prevented from further expansion except in phantasy or has remained wholly in the unconscious so that it is unknown to the personality’s consciousness. If someone’s need for love is not entirely satisfied by reality, he is bound to approach every new person whom he meets with libidinal anticipatory ideas; and it is highly probable that both portions of his libido, the portion that is capable of becoming conscious as well as the unconscious one, have a share in forming that attitude.

¹ I take this opportunity of defending myself against the mistaken charge of having denied the importance of innate (constitutional) factors because I have stressed that of infantile impressions. A charge such as this arises from the restricted nature of what men look for in the field of causation: in contrast to what ordinarily holds good in the real world, people prefer to be satisfied with a single causative factor. Psycho-analysis has talked a lot about the accidental factors in aetiology and little about the constitutional ones; but that is only because it was able to contribute something fresh to the former, while, to begin with, it knew no more than was commonly known about the latter. We refuse to posit any contrast in principle between the two sets of aetiological factors; on the contrary, we assume that the two sets regularly act jointly in bringing about the observed result. Δαίμωυ καì Τύχη [Endowment and Chance] determine a man’s fate - rarely or never one of these powers alone. The amount of aetiological effectiveness to be attributed to each of them can only be arrived at in every individual case separately. These cases may be arranged in a series according to the varying proportion in which the two factors are present, and this series will no doubt have its extreme cases. We shall estimate the share taken by constitution or experience differently in individual cases according to the stage reached by our knowledge; and we shall retain the right to modify our judgement along with changes in our understanding. Incidentally, one might venture to regard constitution itself as a precipitate from the accidental effects produced on the endlessly long chain of our ancestors.

The Dynamics Of Transference

2458

Thus it is a perfectly normal and intelligible thing that the libidinal cathexis of someone who is partly unsatisfied, a cathexis which is held ready in anticipation, should be directed as well to the figure of the doctor. It follows from our earlier hypothesis that this cathexis will have recourse to prototypes, will attach itself to one of the stereotype plates which are present in the subject; or, to put the position in another way, the cathexis will introduce the doctor into one of the psychical ‘series’ which the patient has already formed. If the ‘father-imago’, to use the apt term introduced by Jung (1911, 164) is the decisive factor in bringing this about, the outcome will tally with the real relations of the subject to his doctor. But the transference is not tied to this particular prototype: it may also come about on the lines of the mother-imago or brother-imago. The peculiarities of the transference to the doctor, thanks to which it exceeds, both in amount and nature, anything that could be justified on sensible or rational grounds, are made intelligible if we bear in mind that this transference has precisely been set up not only by the conscious anticipatory ideas but also by those that have been held back or are unconscious.

There would be nothing more to discuss or worry about in this behaviour of transference, if it were not that two points remain unexplained about it which are of particular interest to psycho-analysis. Firstly, we do not understand why transference is so much more intense with neurotic subjects in analysis than it is with other such people who are not being analysed; and secondly, it remains a puzzle why in analysis transference emerges as the most powerful resistance to the treatment, whereas outside analysis it must be regarded as the vehicle of cure and the condition of success. For our experience has shown us - and the fact can be confirmed as often as we please - that if a patient’s free associations fail¹ the stoppage can invariably be removed by an assurance that he is being dominated at the moment by an association which is concerned with the doctor himself or with something connected with him. As soon as this explanation is given, the stoppage is removed, or the situation is changed from one in which the associations fail into one in which they are being kept back. At first sight it appears to be an immense disadvantage in psycho-analysis as a method that what is elsewhere the strongest factor towards success is changed in it into the most powerful medium of resistance. If, however, we examine the situation more closely, we can at least clear away the first of our two problems. It is not a fact that transference emerges with greater intensity and lack of restraint during psycho-analysis than outside it. In institutions in which nerve patients are treated non-analytically, we can observe transference occurring with the greatest intensity and in the most unworthy forms, extending to nothing less than mental bondage, and moreover showing the plainest erotic colouring. Gabriele Reuter, with her sharp powers of observation, described this at a time when there was no such thing as psycho-analysis, in a remarkable book which betrays in every respect the clearest insight into the nature and genesis of neuroses.² These characteristics of transference are therefore to be attributed not to psycho-analysis but to neurosis itself.

¹ I mean when they really cease, and not when, for instance, the patient keeps them back owing to ordinary feelings of unpleasure.

² Aus guter Familie, Berlin, 1895.

The Dynamics Of Transference

2459

Our second problem - the problem of why transference appears in psycho-analysis as resistance - has been left for the moment untouched; and we must now approach it more closely. Let us picture the psychological situation during the treatment. An invariable and indispensable precondition of every onset of a psychoneurosis is the process to which Jung has given the appropriate name of ‘introversion’.¹ That is to say: the portion of libido which is capable of becoming conscious and is directed towards reality is diminished, and the portion which is directed away from reality and is unconscious, and which, though it may still feed the subject’s phantasies, nevertheless belongs to the unconscious, is proportionately increased. The libido (whether wholly or in part) has entered on a regressive course and has revived the subject’s infantile imagos.² The analytic treatment now proceeds to follow it; it seeks to track down the libido, to make it accessible to consciousness and, in the end, serviceable for reality. Where the investigations of analysis come upon the libido withdrawn into its hiding-place, a struggle is bound to break out; all the forces which have caused the libido to regress will rise up as ‘resistances’ against the work of analysis, in order to conserve the new state of things. For if the libido’s introversion or regression had not been justified by a particular relation between the subject and the external world - stated in the most general terms, by the frustration of satisfaction - and if it had not for the moment even become expedient, it could never have taken place at all. But the resistances from this source are not the only ones or indeed the most powerful. The libido at the disposal of the subject’s personality had always been under the influence of the attraction of his unconscious complexes (or more correctly, of the portions of those complexes belonging to the unconscious), and it entered on a regressive course because the attraction of reality had diminished. In order to liberate it, this attraction of the unconscious has to be overcome; that is, the repression of the unconscious instincts and of their productions, which has meanwhile been set up in the subject, must be removed. This is responsible for by far the largest part of the resistance, which so often causes the illness to persist even after the turning away from reality has lost its temporary justification. The analysis has to struggle against the resistances from both these sources. The resistance accompanies the treatment step by step. Every single association, every act of the person under treatment must reckon with the resistance and represents a compromise between the forces that are striving towards recovery and the opposing ones which I have described.

¹ Even though some of Jung’s remarks give the impression that he regards this introversion as something which is characteristic of dementia praecox and does not come into account in the same way in other neuroses.

² It would be convenient if we could say ‘it has recathected his infantile complexes’. But this would be incorrect: the only justifiable way of putting it would be ‘the unconscious portions of those complexes’. The topics dealt with in this paper are so extraordinarily involved that it is tempting to embark on a number of contiguous problems whose clarification would in point of fact be necessary before it would be possible to speak in unambiguous terms of the psychical processes that are to be described here. These problems include the drawing of a line of distinction between introversion and regression, the fitting of the theory of complexes into the libido theory, the relations of phantasying to the conscious and the unconscious as well as to reality - and others besides. I need not apologize for having resisted this temptation in the present paper.

The Dynamics Of Transference

2460

If now we follow a pathogenic complex from its representation in the conscious (whether this is an obvious one in the form of a symptom or something quite inconspicuous) to its root in the unconscious, we shall soon enter a region in which the resistance makes itself felt so clearly that the next association must take account of it and appear as a compromise between its demands and those of the work of investigation. It is at this point, on the evidence of our experience, that transference enters on the scene. When anything in the complexive material (in the subject-matter of the complex) is suitable for being transferred on to the figure of the doctor, that transference is carried out; it produces the next association, and announces itself by indications of a resistance - by a stoppage, for instance. We infer from this experience that the transference-idea has penetrated into consciousness in front of any other possible associations because it satisfies the resistance. An event of this sort is repeated on countless occasions in the course of an analysis. Over and over again, when we come near to a pathogenic complex, the portion of that complex which is capable of transference is first pushed forward into consciousness and defended with the greatest obstinacy.¹

¹ This, however, should not lead us to conclude in general that the element selected for transference-resistance is of peculiar pathogenic importance. If in the course of a battle there is a particularly embittered struggle over the possession of some little church or some individual farm, there is no need to suppose that the church is a national shrine perhaps, or that the house shelters the army’s pay-chest. The value to the object may be a purely tactical one and may perhaps emerge only in this one battle.

The Dynamics Of Transference

2461

After it has been overcome, the overcoming of the other portions of the complex raises few further difficulties. The longer an analytic treatment lasts and the more clearly the patient realizes that distortions of the pathogenic material cannot by themselves offer any protection against its being uncovered, the more consistently does he make use of the one sort of distortion which obviously affords him the greatest advantages - distortion through transference. These circumstances tend towards a situation in which finally every conflict has to be fought out in the sphere of transference.

Thus transference in the analytic treatment invariably appears to us in the first instance as the strongest weapon of the resistance, and we may conclude that the intensity and persistence of the transference are an effect and an expression of the resistance. The mechanism of transference is, it is true, dealt with when we have traced it back to the state of readiness of the libido, which has remained in possession of infantile imagos; but the part transference plays in the treatment can only be explained if we enter into its relations with resistance.

How does it come about that transference is so admirably suited to be a means of resistance? It might be thought that the answer can be given without difficulty. For it is evident that it becomes particularly hard to admit to any proscribed wishful impulse if it has to be revealed in front of the very person to whom the impulse relates. Such a necessity gives rise to situations which in the real world seem scarcely possible. But it is precisely this that the patient is aiming at when he makes the object of his emotional impulses coincide with the doctor. Further consideration, however, shows that this apparent gain cannot provide the solution of the problem. Indeed, a relation of affectionate and devoted dependence can, on the contrary help a person over all the difficulties of making an admission In analogous real situations people will usually say: ‘I feel no shame in front of you: I can say anything to you.’ Thus the transference to the doctor might just as easily serve to facilitate admissions, and it is not clear why it should make things more difficult.

The Dynamics Of Transference

2462

The answer to the question which has been repeated so often in these pages is not to be reached by further reflection but by what we discover when we examine individual transference resistances occurring during treatment. We find in the end that we cannot understand the employment of transference as resistance so long as we think simply of ‘transference’. We must make up our minds to distinguish a ‘positive’ transference from a ‘negative’ one, the transference of affectionate feelings from that of hostile ones, and to treat the two sorts of transference to the doctor separately. Positive transference is then further divisible into transference of friendly or affectionate feelings which are admissible to consciousness and transference of prolongations of those feelings into the unconscious. As regards the latter, analysis shows that they invariably go back to erotic sources. And we are thus led to the discovery that all the emotional relations of sympathy, friendship, trust, and the like, which can be turned to good account in our lives, are genetically linked with sexuality and have developed from purely sexual desires through a softening of their sexual aim, however pure and unsensual they may appear to our conscious self-perception. Originally we knew only sexual objects; and psycho-analysis shows us that people who in our real life are merely admired or respected may still be sexual objects for our unconscious.

Thus the solution of the puzzle is that transference to the doctor is suitable for resistance to the treatment only in so far as it is a negative transference or a positive transference of repressed erotic impulses. If we ‘remove’ the transference by making it conscious, we are detaching only these two components of the emotional act from the person of the doctor; the other component, which is admissible to consciousness and unobjectionable, persists and is the vehicle of success in psycho-analysis exactly as it is in other methods of treatment. To this extent we readily admit that the results of psycho-analysis rest upon suggestion; by suggestion, however, we must understand, as Ferenczi (1909) does, the influencing of a person by means of the transference phenomena which are possible in his case. We take care of the patient’s final independence by employing suggestion in order to get him to accomplish a piece of psychical work which has as its necessary result a permanent improvement in his psychical situation.

The Dynamics Of Transference

2463

The further question may be raised of why it is that the resistance phenomena of transference only appear in psycho-analysis and not in indifferent forms of treatment (e.g. in institutions) as well. The reply is that they do show themselves in these other situations too, but they have to be recognized as such. The breaking out of a negative transference is actually quite a common event in institutions. As soon as a patient comes under the dominance of the negative transference he leaves the institution in an unchanged or relapsed condition. The erotic transference does not have such an inhibiting effect in institutions, since in them, just as in ordinary life, it is glossed over instead of being uncovered. But it is manifested quite clearly as a resistance to recovery, not, it is true, by driving the patient out of the institution - on the contrary, it holds him back in it - but by keeping him at a distance from life. For, from the point of view of recovery, it is a matter of complete indifference whether the patient overcomes this or that anxiety or inhibition in the institution; what matters is that he shall be free of it in his real life as well.

The negative transference deserves a detailed examination, which it cannot be given within the limits of the present paper. In the curable forms of psychoneurosis it is found side by side with the affectionate transference, often directed simultaneously towards the same person. Bleuler has coined the excellent term ‘ambivalence’ to describe this phenomenon.¹ Up to a point, ambivalence of feeling of this sort seems to be normal; but a high degree of it is certainly a special peculiarity of neurotic people. In obsessional neurotics an early separation of the ‘pairs of opposites’ seems to be characteristic of their instinctual life and to be one of their constitutional preconditions. Ambivalence in the emotional trends of neurotics is the best explanation of their ability to enlist their transferences in the service of resistance. Where the capacity for transference has become essentially limited to a negative one, as is the case with paranoics, there ceases to be any possibility of influence or cure.

¹ Bleuler, 1911, 43-4 and 305-6. - Cf. a lecture on ambivalence delivered by him in Berne in 1910, reported in the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, 1, 266. - Stekel has proposed the term ‘bipolarity’ for the same phenomenon.

The Dynamics Of Transference

2464

In all these reflections, however, we have hitherto dealt only with one side of the phenomenon of transference; we must turn our attention to another aspect of the same subject. Anyone who forms a correct appreciation of the way in which a person in analysis, as soon as he comes under the dominance of any considerable transference-resistance, is flung out of his real relation to the doctor, how he feels at liberty then to disregard the fundamental rule of psycho-analysis which lays it down that whatever comes into one’s head must be reported without criticizing it, how he forgets the intentions with which he started the treatment, and how he regards with indifference logical arguments and conclusions which only a short time before had made a great impression on him - anyone who has observed all this will feel it necessary to look for an explanation of his impression in other factors besides those that have already been adduced. Nor are such factors far to seek: they arise once again from the psychological situation in which the treatment places the patient.

In the process of seeking out the libido which has escaped from the patient’s conscious, we have penetrated into the realm of the unconscious. The reactions which we bring about reveal at the same time some of the characteristics which we have come to know from the study of dreams. The unconscious impulses do not want to be remembered in the way the treatment desires them to be, but endeavour to reproduce themselves in accordance with the timelessness of the unconscious and its capacity for hallucination. Just as happens in dreams, the patient regards the products of the awakening of his unconscious impulses as contemporaneous and real; he seeks to put his passions into action without taking any account of the real situation. The doctor tries to compel him to fit these emotional impulses into the nexus of the treatment and of his life-history, to submit them to intellectual consideration and to understand them in the light of their psychical value. This struggle between the doctor and the patient, between intellect and instinctual life, between understanding and seeking to act, is played out almost exclusively in the phenomena of transference. It is on that field that the victory must be won - the victory whose expression is the permanent cure of the neurosis. It cannot be disputed that controlling the phenomena of transference presents the psycho-analyst with the greatest difficulties. But it should not be forgotten that it is precisely they that do us the inestimable service of making the patient’s hidden and forgotten erotic impulses immediate and manifest. For when all is said and done, it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigie.

2465

RECOMMENDATIONS TO PHYSICIANS PRACTISING PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

(1912)

2466

Intentionally left blank

2467

RECOMMENDATIONS TO PHYSICIANS PRACTISING PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

The technical rules which I am putting forward here have been arrived at from my own experience in the course of many years after unfortunate results had led me to abandon other methods. It will easily be seen that they (or at least many of them) may be summed up in a single precept. My hope is that observance of them will spare physicians practising analysis much unnecessary effort and guard them against some oversights. I must however make it clear that what I am asserting is that this technique is the only one suited to my individuality; I do not venture to deny that a physician quite differently constituted might find himself driven to adopt a different attitude to his patients and to the task before him.

(a) The first problem confronting an analyst who is treating more than one patient in the day will seem to him the hardest. It is the task of keeping in mind all the innumerable names, dates, detailed memories and pathological products which each patient communicates in the course of months and years of treatment, and of not confusing them with similar material produced by other patients under treatment simultaneously or previously. If one is required to analyse six, eight, or even more patients daily, the feat of memory involved in achieving this will provoke incredulity, astonishment or even commiseration in uninformed observers. Curiosity will in any case be felt about the technique which makes it possible to master such an abundance of material, and the expectation will be that some special expedients are required for the purpose.

The technique, however, is a very simple one. As we shall see, it rejects the use of any special expedient (even that of taking notes). It consists simply in not directing one’s notice to anything in particular and in maintaining the same ‘evenly-suspended attention’ (as I have called it) in the face of all that one hears. In this way we spare ourselves a strain on our attention which could not in any case be kept up for several hours daily, and we avoid a danger which is inseparable from the exercise of deliberate attention. For as soon as anyone deliberately concentrates his attention to a certain degree, he begins to select from the material before him; one point will be fixed in his mind with particular clearness and some other will be correspondingly disregarded, and in making this selection he will be following his expectations or inclinations. This, however, is precisely what must not be done. In making the selection, if he follows his expectations he is in danger of never finding anything but what he already knows; and if he follows his inclinations he will certainly falsify what he may perceive. It must not be forgotten that the things one hears are for the most part things whose meaning is only recognized later on.

Recommendations To Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis

2468

It will be seen that the rule of giving equal notice to everything is the necessary counterpart to the demand made on the patient that he should communicate everything that occurs to him without criticism or selection. If the doctor behaves otherwise, he is throwing away most of the advantage which results from the patient’s obeying the ‘fundamental rule of psycho- analysis’. The rule for the doctor may be expressed: ‘He should withhold all conscious influences from his capacity to attend, and give himself over completely to his "unconscious memory".’ Or, to put it purely in terms of technique: ‘He should simply listen, and not bother about whether he is keeping anything in mind.’

What is achieved in this manner will be sufficient for all requirements during the treatment. Those elements of the material which already form a connected context will be at the doctor’s conscious disposal; the rest, as yet unconnected and in chaotic disorder, seems at first to be submerged, but rises readily into recollection as soon as the patient brings up something new to which it can be related and by which it can be continued. The undeserved compliment of having ‘a remarkably good memory’ which the patient pays one when one reproduces some detail after a year and a day can then be accepted with a smile, whereas a conscious determination to recollect the point would probably have resulted in failure. Mistakes in this process of remembering occur only at times and places at which one is disturbed by some personal consideration (see below) - that is, when one has fallen seriously below the standard of an ideal analyst. Confusion with material brought up by other patients occurs very rarely. Where there is a dispute with the patient as to whether or how he has said some particular thing, the doctor is usually in the right.¹

¹ A patient will often assert that he has already told the doctor something on a previous occasion, while the doctor can assure him with a quiet feeling of superiority that it has come up now for the first time. It then turns out that the patient had previously had the intention of saying it, but had been prevented from performing his intention by a resistance which was still present. His recollection of his intention is indistinguishable to him from a recollection of its performance.

Recommendations To Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis

2469

(b) I cannot advise the taking of full notes, the keeping of a shorthand record, etc., during analytic sessions. Apart from the unfavourable impression which this makes on some patients, the same considerations as have been advanced with regard to attention apply here too. A detrimental selection from the material will necessarily be made as one writes the notes or shorthand, and part of one’s own mental activity is tied up in this way, which would be better employed in interpreting what one has heard. No objection can be raised to making exceptions to this rule in the case of dates, the text of dreams, or particular noteworthy events which can easily be detached from their context and are suitable for independent use as instances. But I am not in the habit of doing this either. As regards instances, I write them down from memory in the evening after work is over; as regards texts of dreams to which I attach importance, I get the patient to repeat them to me after he has related them so that I can fix them in my mind.

(c) Taking notes during the session with the patient might be justified by an intention of publishing a scientific study of the case. On general grounds this can scarcely be denied. Nevertheless it must be borne in mind that exact reports of analytic case histories are of less value than might be expected. Strictly speaking, they only possess the ostensible exactness of which ‘modern’ psychiatry affords us some striking examples. They are, as a rule, fatiguing to the reader and yet do not succeed in being a substitute for his actual presence at an analysis. Experience invariably shows that if readers are willing to believe an analyst they will have confidence in any slight revision to which he has submitted his material; if, on the other hand, they are unwilling to take analysis and the analyst seriously, they will pay no attention to accurate verbatim records of the treatment either. This is not the way, it seems, to remedy the lack of convincing evidence to be found in psycho-analytic reports.

(d) One of the claims of psycho-analysis to distinction is, no doubt, that in its execution research and treatment coincide; nevertheless, after a certain point, the technique required for the one opposes that required for the other. It is not a good thing to work on a case scientifically while treatment is still proceeding - to piece together its structure, to try to foretell its further progress, and to get a picture from time to time of the current state of affairs, as scientific interest would demand. Cases which are devoted from the first to scientific purposes and are treated accordingly suffer in their outcome; while the most successful cases are those in which one proceeds, as it were, without any purpose in view, allows oneself to be taken by surprise by any new turn in them, and always meets them with an open mind, free from any presuppositions. The correct behaviour for an analyst lies in swinging over according to need from the one mental attitude to the other, in avoiding speculation or brooding over cases while they are in analysis, and in submitting the material obtained to a synthetic process of thought only after the analysis is concluded. The distinction between the two attitudes would be meaningless if we already possessed all the knowledge (or at least the essential knowledge) about the psychology of the unconscious and about the structure of the neuroses that we can obtain from psycho-analytic work. At present we are still far from that goal and we ought not to cut ourselves off from the possibility of testing what we have already learnt and of extending our knowledge further.

Recommendations To Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis

2470

(e) I cannot advise my colleagues too urgently to model themselves during psycho-analytic treatment on the surgeon, who puts aside all his feelings, even his human sympathy, and concentrates his mental forces on the simple aim of performing the operation as skilfully as possible. Under present-day conditions the feeling that is most dangerous to a psycho-analyst is the therapeutic ambition to achieve by this novel and much disputed method something that will produce a convincing effect upon other people. This will not only put him into a state of mind which is unfavourable for his work, but will make him helpless against certain resistances of the patient, whose recovery, as we know, primarily depends on the interplay of forces in him. The justification for requiring this emotional coldness in the analyst is that it creates the most advantageous conditions for both parties: for the doctor a desirable protection for his own emotional life and for the patient the largest amount of help that we can give him to-day. A surgeon of earlier times took as his motto the words: ‘Je le pansai, Dieu le guérit.’¹ The analyst should be content with something similar.

(f) It is easy to see upon what aim the different rules I have brought forward converge. They are all intended to create for the doctor a counterpart to the ‘fundamental rule of psycho-analysis’ which is laid down for the patient. Just as the patient must relate everything that his self-observation can detect, and keep back all the logical and affective objections that seek to induce him to make a selection from among them, so the doctor must put himself in a position to make use of everything he is told for the purposes of interpretation and of recognizing the concealed unconscious material without substituting a censorship of his own for the selection that the patient has forgone. To put it in a formula: he must turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the transmitting unconscious of the patient. He must adjust himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the transmitting microphone. Just as the receiver converts back into sound waves the electric oscillations in the telephone line which were set up by sound waves, so the doctor’s unconscious is able, from the derivatives of the unconscious which are communicated to him, to reconstruct that unconscious, which has determined the patient’s free associations.

¹ [‘I dressed his wounds, God cured him.’]

Recommendations To Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis

2471

But if the doctor is to be in a position to use his unconscious in this way as an instrument in the analysis, he must himself fulfil one psychological condition to a high degree. He may not tolerate any resistances in himself which hold back from his consciousness what has been perceived by his unconscious; otherwise he would introduce into the analysis a new species of selection and distortion which would be far more detrimental than that resulting from concentration of conscious attention. It is not enough for this that he himself should be an approximately normal person. It may be insisted, rather, that he should have undergone a psycho-analytic purification and have become aware of those complexes of his own which would be apt to interfere with his grasp of what the patient tells him. There can be no reasonable doubt about the disqualifying effect of such defects in the doctor; every unresolved repression in him constitutes what has been aptly described by Stekel as a ‘blind spot’ in his analytic perception.

Some years ago I gave as an answer to the question of how one can become an analyst: ‘By analysing one’s own dreams.’ This preparation is no doubt enough for many people, but not for everyone who wishes to learn analysis. Nor can everyone succeed in interpreting his own dreams without outside help. I count it as one of the many merits of the Zurich school of analysis that they have laid increased emphasis on this requirement, and have embodied it in the demand that everyone who wishes to carry out analyses on other people shall first himself undergo an analysis by someone with expert knowledge. Anyone who takes up the work seriously should choose this course, which offers more than one advantage; the sacrifice involved in laying oneself open to another person without being driven to it by illness is amply rewarded. Not only is one’s aim of learning to know what is hidden in one’s own mind far more rapidly attained and with less expense of affect, but impressions and convictions will be gained in relation to oneself which will be sought in vain from studying books and attending lectures. And lastly, we must not under-estimate the advantage to be derived from the lasting mental contact that is as a rule established between the student and his guide.

An analysis such as this of someone who is practically healthy will, as may be imagined, remain incomplete. Anyone who can appreciate the high value of the self-knowledge and increase in self-control thus acquired will, when it is over, continue the analytic examination of his personality in the form of a self-analysis, and be content to realize that, within himself as well as in the external world, he must always expect to find something new. But anyone who has scorned to take the precaution of being analysed himself will not merely be punished by being incapable of learning more than a certain amount from his patients, he will risk a more serious danger and one which may become a danger to others. He will easily fall into the temptation of projecting outwards some of the peculiarities of his own personality, which he has dimly perceived, into the field of science, as a theory having universal validity; he will bring the psycho-analytic method into discredit, and lead the inexperienced astray.

Recommendations To Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis

2472

(g) I shall now add a few other rules, that will serve as a transition from the attitude of the doctor to the treatment of the patient.

Young and eager psycho-analysts will no doubt be tempted to bring their own individuality freely into the discussion, in order to carry the patient along with them and lift him over the barriers of his own narrow personality. It might be expected that it would be quite allowable and indeed useful, with a view to overcoming the patient’s existing resistances, for the doctor to afford him a glimpse of his own mental defects and conflicts and, by giving him intimate information about his own life, enable him to put himself on an equal footing. One confidence deserves another, and anyone who demands intimacy from someone else must be prepared to give it in return.

But in psycho-analytic relations things often happen differently from what the psychology of consciousness might lead us to expect. Experience does not speak in favour of an affective technique of this kind. Nor is it hard to see that it involves a departure from psycho-analytic principles and verges upon treatment by suggestion. It may induce the patient to bring forward sooner and with less difficulty things he already knows but would otherwise have kept back for a time through conventional resistances. But this technique achieves nothing towards the uncovering of what is unconscious to the patient. It makes him even more incapable of overcoming his deeper resistances, and in severer cases it invariably fails by encouraging the patient to be insatiable: he would like to reverse the situation, and finds the analysis of the doctor more interesting than his own. The resolution of the transference, too - one of the main tasks of the treatment - is made more difficult by an intimate attitude on the doctor’s part, so that any gain there may be at the beginning is more than outweighed at the end. I have no hesitation, therefore, in condemning this kind of technique as incorrect. The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him. In practice, it is true, there is nothing to be said against a psychotherapist combining a certain amount of analysis with some suggestive influence in order to achieve a perceptible result in a shorter time - as is necessary, for instance, in institutions. But one has a right to insist that he himself should be in no doubt about what he is doing and should know that his method is not that of true psycho-analysis.

Recommendations To Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis

2473

(h) Another temptation arises out of the educative activity which, in psycho-analytic treatment, devolves on the doctor without any deliberate intention on his part. When the developmental inhibitions are resolved, it happens of itself that the doctor finds himself in a position to indicate new aims for the trends that have been liberated. It is then no more than a natural ambition if he endeavours to make something specially excellent of a person whom he has been at such pains to free from his neurosis and if he prescribes high aims for his wishes. But here again the doctor should hold himself in check, and take the patient’s capacities rather than his own desires as guide. Not every neurotic has a high talent for sublimation; one can assume of many of them that they would not have fallen ill at all if they had possessed the art of sublimating their instincts. If we press them unduly towards sublimation and cut them off from the most accessible and convenient instinctual satisfactions, we shall usually make life even harder for them than they feel it in any case. As a doctor, one must above all be tolerant to the weakness of a patient, and must be content if one has won back some degree of capacity for work and enjoyment for a person even of only moderate worth. Educative ambition is of as little use as therapeutic ambition. It must further be borne in mind that many people fall ill precisely from an attempt to sublimate their instincts beyond the degree permitted by their organization and that in those who have a capacity for sublimation the process usually takes place of itself as soon as their inhibitions have been overcome by analysis. In my opinion, therefore, efforts invariably to make use of the analytic treatment to bring about sublimation of instinct are, though no doubt always laudable, far from being in every case advisable.

Recommendations To Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis

2474

(i) To what extent should the patient’s intellectual co-operation be sought for in the treatment?  It is difficult to say anything of general applicability on this point: the patient’s personality is the determining factor. But in any case caution and self-restraint must be observed in this connection. It is wrong to set a patient tasks, such as collecting his memories or thinking over some particular period of his life. On the contrary, he has to learn above all - what never comes easily to anyone - that mental activities such as thinking something over or concentrating the attention solve none of the riddles of a neurosis; that can only be done by patiently obeying the psycho-analytic rule, which enjoins the exclusion of all criticism of the unconscious or of its derivatives. One must be especially unyielding about obedience to that rule with patients who practise the art of sheering off into intellectual discussion during their treatment, who speculate a great deal and often very wisely about their condition and in that way avoid doing anything to overcome it. For this reason I dislike making use of analytic writings as an assistance to my patients; I require them to learn by personal experience, and I assure them that they will acquire wider and more valuable knowledge than the whole literature of psycho-analysis could teach them. I recognize, however, that under institutional conditions it may be of great advantage to employ reading as a preparation for patients in analysis and as a means of creating an atmosphere of influence.

I must give a most earnest warning against any attempt to gain the confidence or support of parents or relatives by giving them psycho-analytic books to read, whether of an introductory or an advanced kind. This well-meant step usually has the effect of bringing on prematurely the natural opposition of the relatives to the treatment - an opposition which is bound to appear sooner or later - so that the treatment is never ever begun.

Let me express a hope that the increasing experience of psycho-analysts will soon lead to agreement on questions of technique and on the most effective method of treating neurotic patients. As regards the treatment of their relatives I must confess myself utterly at a loss, and I have in general little faith in any individual treatment of them.

2475

ON BEGINNING THE TREATMENT

(FURTHER RECOMMENDATIONS ON THE TECHNIQUE OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS I)

(1913)

2476

Intentionally left blank

2477

ON BEGINNING THE TREATMENT

(FURTHER RECOMMENDATIONS ON THE TECHNIQUE OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS I)

Anyone who hopes to learn the noble game of chess from book will soon discover that only the openings and end-games admit of an exhaustive systematic presentation and that the infinite variety of moves which develop after the opening defy any such description. This gap in instruction can only be filled by a diligent study of games fought out by masters. The rules which can be laid down for the practice of psycho-analytic treatment are subject to similar limitations.

In what follows I shall endeavour to collect together for the use of practising analysts some of the rules for the beginning of the treatment. Among them there are some which may seem to be petty details, as, indeed, they are. Their justification is that they are simply rules of the game which acquire their importance from their relation to the general plan of the game. I think I am well-advised, however, to call these rules ‘recommendations’ and not to claim any unconditional acceptance for them. The extraordinary diversity of the psychical constellations concerned, the plasticity of all mental processes and the wealth of determining factors oppose any mechanization of the technique; and they bring it about that a course of action that is as a rule justified may at times prove ineffective, whilst one that is usually mistaken may once in a while lead to the desired end. These circumstances, however, do not prevent us from laying down a procedure for the physician which is effective on the average.

Some years ago I set out the most important indications for selecting patients¹ and I shall therefore not repeat them here. They have in the meantime been approved by other psycho-analysts. But I may add that since then I have made it my habit, when I know little about a patient, only to take him on at first provisionally, for a period of one to two weeks. If one breaks off within this period one spares the patient the distressing impression of an attempted cure having failed. One has only been undertaking a ‘sounding’ in order to get to know the case and to decide whether it is a suitable one for psycho-analysis. No other kind of preliminary examination but this procedure is at our disposal; the most lengthy discussions and questionings in ordinary consultations would offer no substitute. This preliminary experiment, however, is itself the beginning of a psycho-analysis and must conform to its rules. There may perhaps be this distinction made, that in it one lets the patient do nearly all the talking and explains nothing more than what is absolutely necessary to get him to go on with what he is saying.

¹ ‘On Psychotherapy’ (1905a).

On Beginning The Treatment

2478

There are also diagnostic reasons for beginning the treatment with a trial period of this sort lasting for one or two weeks. Often enough, when one sees a neurosis with hysterical or obsessional symptoms, which is not excessively marked and has not been in existence for long - just the type of case, that is, that one would regard as suitable for treatment - one has to, reckon with the possibility that it may be a preliminary stage of what is known as dementia praecox (‘schizophrenia’, in Bleuler’s terminology; ‘paraphrenia’, as I have proposed to call it), and that sooner or later it will show a well-marked picture of that affection. I do not agree that it is always possible to make the distinction so easily. I am aware that there are psychiatrists who hesitate less often in their differential diagnosis, but I have become convinced that just as often they make mistakes. To make a mistake, moreover, is of far greater moment for the psycho-analyst than it is for the clinical psychiatrist, as he is called. For the latter is not attempting to do anything that will be of use, whichever kind of case it may be. He merely runs the risk of making a theoretical mistake, and his diagnosis is of no more than academic interest. Where the psycho-analyst is concerned, however, if the case is unfavourable he has committed a practical error; he has been responsible for wasted expenditure and has discredited his method of treatment. He cannot fulfil his promise of cure if the patient is suffering, not from hysteria or obsessional neurosis, but from paraphrenia, and he therefore has particularly strong motives for avoiding mistakes in diagnosis. In an experimental treatment of a few weeks he will often observe suspicious signs which may determine him not to pursue the attempt any further. Unfortunately I cannot assert that an attempt of this kind always enables us to arrive at a certain decision; it is only one wise precaution the more.¹

¹ There is a great deal to be said about this uncertainty in diagnosis, about the prospects of success in analysing mild forms of paraphrenia and about the reasons for the similarity between the two disorders; but I cannot enlarge on these subjects in the present context. I should be glad to follow Jung in contrasting hysteria and obsessional neurosis as ‘transference neuroses’ with the paraphrenic affections as ‘introversion neuroses’, if it were not that such a usage would deprive the concept of ‘introversion’ (of the libido) of its sole legitimate meaning.

On Beginning The Treatment

2479

Lengthy preliminary discussions before the beginning of the analytic treatment, previous treatment by another method and also previous acquaintance between the doctor and the patient who is to be analysed, have special disadvantageous consequences for which one must be prepared. They result in the patient’s meeting the doctor with a transference attitude which is already established and which the doctor must first slowly uncover instead of having the opportunity to observe the growth and development of the transference from the outset. In this way the patient gains a temporary start upon us which we do not willingly grant him in the treatment.

One must mistrust all prospective patients who want to make a delay before beginning their treatment. Experience show that when the time agreed upon has arrived they fail to put in an appearance, even though the motive for the delay - i.e. their rationalization of their intention - seems to the uninitiated to be above suspicion.

Special difficulties arise when the analyst and his new patient or their families are on terms of friendship or have social ties with one another. The psycho-analyst who is asked to undertake the treatment of the wife or child of a friend must be prepared for it to cost him that friendship, no matter what the outcome of the treatment may be: nevertheless he must make the sacrifice if he cannot find a trustworthy substitute.

Both lay public and doctors - still ready to confuse psycho-analysis with treatment by suggestion - are inclined to attribute great importance to the expectations which the patient brings to the new treatment. They often believe in the case of one patient that he will not give much trouble, because he has great confidence in psycho-analysis and is fully convinced of its truth and efficacy; whereas in the case of another, they think that he will undoubtedly prove more difficult, because he has a sceptical outlook and will not believe anything until he has experienced its successful results on his own person. Actually, however, this attitude on the part of the patient has very little importance. His initial trust or distrust is almost negligible compared with the internal resistances which hold the neurosis firmly in place. It is true that the patient’s happy trustfulness makes our earliest relationship with him a very pleasant one; we are grateful to him for that, but we warn him that his favourable prepossession will be shattered by the first difficulty that arises in the analysis. To the sceptic we say that the analysis requires no faith, that he may be as critical and suspicious as he pleases and that we do not regard his attitude as the effect of his judgement at all, for he is not in a position to form a reliable judgement on these matters; his distrust is only a symptom like his other symptoms and it will not be an interference, provided he conscientiously carries out what the rule of the treatment requires of him.

No one who is familiar with the nature of neurosis will be astonished to hear that even a man who is very well able to carry out an analysis on other people can behave like any other mortal and be capable of producing the most intense resistances as soon as he himself becomes the object of analytic investigation. When this happens we are once again reminded of the dimension of depth in the mind, and it does not surprise us to find that the neurosis has its roots in psychical strata to which an intellectual knowledge of analysis has not penetrated.

On Beginning The Treatment

2480

Points of importance at the beginning of the analysis are arrangements about time and money.

In regard to time, I adhere strictly to the principle of leasing a definite hour. Each patient is allotted a particular hour of my available working day; it belongs to him and he is liable for it, even if he does not make use of it. This arrangement, which is taken as a matter of course for teachers of music or languages in good society, may perhaps seem too rigorous in a doctor, or even unworthy of his profession. There will be an inclination to point to the many accidents which may prevent the patient from attending every day at the same hour and it will be expected that some allowance shall be made for the numerous intercurrent ailments which may occur in the course of a longish analytic treatment. But my answer is: no other way is practicable. Under a less stringent régime the ‘occasional’ non-attendances increase so greatly that the doctor finds his material existence threatened; whereas when the arrangement is adhered to, it turns out that accidental hindrances do not occur at all and intercurrent illnesses only very seldom. The analyst is hardly ever put in the position of enjoying a leisure hour which he is paid for and would be ashamed of; and he can continue his work without interruptions, and is spared the distressing and bewildering experience of finding that a break for which he cannot blame himself is always bound to happen just when the work promises to be especially important and rich in content. Nothing brings home to one so strongly the significance of the psychogenic factor in the daily life of men, the frequency of malingering and the non-existent of chance, as a few years’ practice of psycho-analysis on the strict principle of leasing by the hour. In cases of undoubted organic illnesses, which, after all, cannot be excluded by the patient’s having a psychical interest in attending, I break off the treatment, consider myself entitled to dispose elsewhere of the hour which becomes free, and take the patient back again as soon as he has recovered and I have another hour vacant.

I work with my patients every day except on Sundays and public holidays - that is, as a rule, six days a week. For slight cases or the continuation of a treatment which is already well advanced, three days a week will be enough. Any restrictions of time beyond this bring no advantage either to the doctor or the patient; and at the beginning of an analysis they are quite out of the question. Even short interruptions have a slightly, obscuring effect on the work. We used to speak jokingly of the ‘Monday crust’ when we began work again after the rest on Sunday. When the hours of work are less frequent, there is a risk of not being able to keep pace with the patient’s real life and of the treatment losing contact with the present and being forced into by-paths. Occasionally, too, one comes across patients to whom one must give more than the average time of one hour a day, because the best part of an hour is gone before they begin to open up and to become communicative at all.

On Beginning The Treatment

2481

An unwelcome question which the patient asks the doctor at the outset is: ‘How long will the treatment take? How much time will you need to relieve me of my trouble?’ If one has proposed a trial treatment of a few weeks one can avoid giving a direct answer to this question by promising to make a more reliable pronouncement at the end of the trial period. Our answer is like the answer given by the Philosopher to the Wayfarer in Aesop’s fable. When the Wayfarer asked how long a journey lay ahead, the Philosopher merely answered ‘Walk!’ and afterwards explained his apparently unhelpful reply on the ground that he must know the length of the Wayfarer’s stride before he could tell how long his journey would take. This expedient helps one over the first difficulties; but the comparison is not a good one, for the neurotic can easily alter his pace and may at times make only very slow progress. In point of fact, the question as to the probable duration of a treatment is almost unanswerable.

As the combined result of lack of insight on the part of patients and disingenuousness on the part of doctors, analysis finds itself expected to fulfil the most boundless demands, and that in the shortest time. Let me, as an example, give some details from a letter which I received a few days ago from a lady in Russia. She is 53 years old, her illness began twenty-three years ago and for the last ten years she has no longer been able to do any continuous work. ‘Treatment in a number of institutions for nervous cases’ have not succeeded in making an ‘active life’ possible for her. She hopes to be completely cured by psycho-analysis, which she has read about, but her illness has already cost her family so much money that she cannot manage to come to Vienna for longer than six weeks or two months. Another added difficulty is that she wishes from the very start to ‘explain’ herself in writing only, since any discussion of her complexes would cause an explosion of feeling in her or ‘render her temporarily unable to speak’. - No one would expect a man to lift a heavy table with two fingers as if it were a light stool, or to build a large house in the time it would take to put up a wooden hut; but as soon as it becomes a question of the neuroses - which do not seem so far to have found a proper place in human thought - even intelligent people forget that a necessary proportion must be observed between time, work and success. This, incidentally, is an understandable result of the deep ignorance which prevails about the aetiology of the neuroses. Thanks to this ignorance, neurosis is looked or as a kind of ‘maiden from afar’. ‘None knew whence she came’; so they expected that one day she would vanish.

On Beginning The Treatment

2482

Doctors lend support to these fond hopes. Even the informed among them often fail to estimate properly the severity of nervous disorders. A friend and colleague of mine, to whose great credit I account it that after several decades of scientific work on other principles he became converted to the merits of psycho-analysis, once wrote to me: ‘What we need is a short, convenient, out-patient treatment for obsessional neurosis.’ I could not supply him with it and felt ashamed; so I tried to excuse myself with the remark that specialists in internal diseases, too, would probably be very glad of a treatment for tuberculosis or carcinoma which combined these advantages.

To speak more plainly, psycho-analysis is always a matter of long periods of time, of half a year or whole years - of longer periods than the patient expects. It is therefore our duty to tell the patient this before he finally decides upon the treatment. I consider it altogether more honourable, and also more expedient, to draw his attention - without trying to frighten him off, but at the very beginning - to the difficulties and sacrifices which analytic treatment involves, and in this way to deprive him of any right to say later on that he has been inveigled into a treatment whose extent and implications he did not realize. A patient who lets himself be dissuaded by this information would in any case have shown himself unsuitable later on. It is a good thing to institute a selection of this kind before the beginning of the treatment. With the progress of understanding among patients the number of those who successfully meet this first test increases.

I do not bind patients to continue the treatment for a certain length of time; I allow each one to break off whenever he likes. But I do not hide it from him that if the treatment is stopped after only a small amount of work has been done it will not be successful and may easily, like an unfinished operation, leave him in an unsatisfactory state. In the early years of my psycho-analytic practice I used to have the greatest difficulty in prevailing on my patients to continue their analysis. This difficulty has long since been shifted, and I now have to take the greatest pains to induce them to give it up.

On Beginning The Treatment

2483

To shorten analytic treatment is a justifiable wish, and its fulfilment, as we shall learn, is being attempted along various lines. Unfortunately, it is opposed by a very important factor, namely, the slowness with which deep-going changes in the mind are accomplished - in the last resort, no doubt, the ‘timelessness’ of our unconscious processes. When patients are faced with the difficulty of the great expenditure of time required for analysis they not infrequently manage to propose a way out of it. They divide up their ailments and describe some as unbearable, and others as secondary, and then say: ‘If only you will relieve me from this one (for instance, a headache or a particular fear) I can deal with the other one on my own in my ordinary life.’ In doing this, however, they over-estimate the selective power of analysis. The analyst is certainly able to do a great deal, but he cannot determine beforehand exactly what results he will effect. He sets in motion a process, that of the resolving of existing repressions. He can supervise this process, further it, remove obstacles in its way, and he can undoubtedly vitiate much of it. But on the whole, once begun, it goes its own way and does not allow either the direction it takes or the order in which it picks up its points to be prescribed for it. The analyst’s power over the symptoms of the disease may thus be compared to male sexual potency. A man can, it is true, beget a whole child, but even the strongest man cannot create in the female organism a head alone or an arm or a leg; he cannot even prescribe the child’s sex. He, too, only sets in motion a highly complicated process, determined by events in the remote past, which ends with the severance of the child from its mother. A neurosis as well has the character of an organism. Its component manifestations are not independent of one another; they condition one another and give one another mutual support. A person suffers from one neurosis only, never from several which have accidentally met together in a single individual. The patient freed, according to his wish, from his one unendurable symptom might easily find that a symptom which had previously been negligible had now increased and grown unendurable. The analyst who wishes the treatment to owe its success as little as possible to its elements of suggestion (i.e. to the transference) will do well to refrain from making use of even the trace of selective influence upon the results of the therapy which may perhaps be open to him. The patients who are bound to be most welcome to him are those who ask him to give them complete health, in so far as that is attainable, and who place as much time at his disposal as is necessary for the process of recovery. Such favourable conditions as these are, of course, to be looked for in only a few cases.

On Beginning The Treatment

2484

The next point that must be decided at the beginning of the treatment is the one of money, of the doctor’s fee. An analyst does not dispute that money is to be regarded in the first instance as a medium for self-preservation and for obtaining power; but he maintains that, besides this, powerful sexual factors are involved in the value set upon it. He can point out the money matters are treated by civilized people in the same way as sexual matters - with the same inconsistency, prudishness and hypocrisy. The analyst is therefore determined from the first not to fall in with this attitude, but, in his dealings with his patients, to treat of money matters with the same matter-of-course frankness to which he wishes to educate them in things relating to sexual life. He shows them that he himself has cast off false shame on these topics, by voluntarily telling them the price at which he values his time. Ordinary good sense cautions him, furthermore, not to allow large sums of money to accumulate, but to ask for payment at fairly short regular intervals - monthly, perhaps. (It is a familiar fact that the value of the treatment is not enhanced in the patient’s eyes if a very low fee is asked.) This is, of course, not the usual practice of nerve specialists or other physicians in our European society. But the psycho-analyst may put himself in the position of a surgeon, who is frank and expensive because he has at his disposal methods of treatment which can be of use. It seems to me more respectable and ethically less objectionable to acknowledge one’s actual claims and needs rather than, as is still the practice among physicians, to act the part of the disinterested philanthropist - a position which one is not, in fact, able to fill, with the result that one is secretly aggrieved, or complains aloud, at the lack of consideration and the desire for exploitation evinced by one’s patients. In fixing his fee the analyst must also allow for the fact that, hard as he may work, he can never earn as much as other medical specialists.

On Beginning The Treatment

2485

For the same reason he should also refrain from giving treatment free, and make no exceptions to this in favour of his colleagues or their families. This last recommendation will seem to offend against professional amenities. It must be remembered, however, that a gratuitous treatment means much more to a psycho-analyst than to any other medical man; it means the sacrifice of a considerable portion - an eighth or a seventh part, perhaps - of the working time available to him for earning his living, over a period of many months. A second free treatment carried on at the same time would already deprive him of a quarter or a third of his earning capacity, and this would be comparable to the damage inflicted by a severe accident.

The question then arises whether the advantage gained by the patient would not to some extent counterbalance the sacrifice made by the physician. I may venture to form a judgement about this, since for ten years or so I set aside one hour a day, and sometimes two, for gratuitous treatments, because I wanted, in order to find my way about in the neuroses, to work in the face of as little resistance as possible. The advantages I sought by this means were not forthcoming. Free treatment enormously increases some of a neurotic’s resistances - in young women, for instance, the temptation which is inherent in their transference-relation, and in young men, their opposition to an obligation to feel grateful, an opposition which arises from their father-complex and which presents one of the most troublesome hindrances to the acceptance of medical help. The absence of the regulating effect offered by the payment of a fee to the doctor makes itself very painfully felt; the whole relationship is removed from the real world, and the patient is deprived of a strong motive for endeavouring to bring the treatment to an end.

On Beginning The Treatment

2486

One may be very far from the ascetic view of money as a curse and yet regret that analytic therapy is almost inaccessible to poor people, both for external and internal reasons. Little can be done to remedy this. Perhaps there is truth in the widespread belief that those who are forced by necessity to a life of hard toil are less easily overtaken by neurosis. But on the other hand experience shows without a doubt that when once a poor man has produced a neurosis it is only with difficulty that he lets it be taken from him. It renders him too good a service in the struggle for existence; the secondary gain from illness which it brings him is much too important. He now claims by right of his neurosis the pity which the world has refused to his material distress, and he can now absolve himself from the obligation of combating his poverty by working. Anyone therefore who tries to deal with the neurosis of a poor person by psychotherapy usually discovers that what is here required of him is a practical therapy of a very different kind - the kind which, according to our local tradition, used to be dispensed by the Emperor Joseph II. Naturally, one does occasionally come across deserving people who are helpless from no fault of their own, in whom unpaid treatment does not meet with any of the obstacles that I have mentioned and in whom it leads to excellent results.

As far as the middle classes are concerned, the expense involved in psycho-analysis is excessive only in appearance. Quite apart from the fact that no comparison is possible between restored health and efficiency on the one hand and a moderate financial outlay on the other, when we add up the unceasing costs of nursing-homes and medical treatment and contrast them with the increase of efficiency and earning capacity which results from a successfully completed analysis, we are entitled to say that the patients have made a good bargain. Nothing in life is so expensive as illness - and stupidity.

On Beginning The Treatment

2487

Before I wind up these remarks on beginning analytic treatment, I must say a word about a certain ceremonial which concerns the position in which the treatment is carried out. I hold to the plan of getting the patient to lie on a sofa while I sit behind him out of his sight. This arrangement has a historical basis; it is the remnant of the hypnotic method out of which psycho-analysis was evolved. But it deserves to be maintained for many reasons. The first is a personal motive, but one which others may share with me. I cannot put up with being stared at by other people for eight hours a day (or more). Since, while I am listening to the patient, I, too, give myself over to the current of my unconscious thoughts, I do not wish my expressions of face to give the patient material for interpretations or to influence him in what he tells me. The patient usually regards being made to adopt this position as a hardship and rebels against it, especially if the instinct for looking (scopophilia) plays an important part in his neurosis. I insist on this procedure, however, for its purpose and result are to prevent the transference from mingling with the patient’s associations imperceptibly, to isolate the transference and to allow it to come forward in due course sharply defined as a resistance. I know that many analysts work in a different way, but I do not know whether this deviation is due more to a craving for doing things differently or to some advantage which they find they gain by it.

The conditions of treatment having been regulated in this manner, the question arises at what point and with what material is the treatment to begin?

What the material is with which one starts the treatment is on the whole a matter of indifference - whether it is the patient’s life-history or the history of his illness or his recollections of childhood. But in any case the patient must be left to do the talking and must be free to choose at what point he shall begin. We therefore say to him: ‘Before I can say anything to you I must know a great deal about you; please tell me what you know about yourself.’

On Beginning The Treatment

2488

The only exception to this is in regard to the fundamental rule of psycho-analytic technique which the patient has to observe. This must be imparted to him at the very beginning: ‘One more thing before you start. What you tell me must differ in one respect from an ordinary conversation. Ordinarily you rightly try to keep a connecting thread running through your remarks and you exclude any intrusive ideas that may occur to you and any side-issues, so as not to wander too far from the point. But in this case you must proceed differently. You will notice that as you relate things various thoughts will occur to you which you would like to put aside on the ground of certain criticisms and objections. You will be tempted to say to yourself that this or that is irrelevant here, or is quite up important, or nonsensical, so that there is no need to say it. You must never give in to these criticisms, but must say it in spite of them - indeed, you must say it precisely because you feel an aversion to doing so. Later on you will find out and learn to understand the reason for this injunction, which is really the only one you have to follow. So say whatever goes through your mind. Act as though, for instance, you were a traveller sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views which you see outside. Finally, never forget that you have promised to be absolutely honest, and never leave anything out because, for some reason or other, it is unpleasant to tell it.’¹

¹ Much might be said about our experiences with the fundamental rule of psycho-analysis. One occasionally comes across people who behave as if they had made this rule for themselves. Others offend against it from the very beginning. It is indispensable, and also advantageous, to lay down the rule in the first stages of the treatment. Later, under the dominance of the resistances, obedience to it weakens, and there comes a time in every analysis when the patient disregards it. We must remember from our own self-analysis how irresistible the temptation is to yield to these pretexts put forward by critical judgement for rejecting certain ideas. How small is the effect of such agreements as one makes with the patient in laying down the fundamental rule is regularly demonstrated when something intimate about a third person comes up in his mind for the first time. He knows that he is supposed to say everything, but he turns discretion about other people into a new obstacle! ‘Must I really say everything? I thought that only applied to things that concern myself.’ It is naturally impossible to carry out analysis if the patient’s relations with other people and his thoughts about them are excluded. Pour faire une omelette il faut casser des oeufs. An honourable man readily forgets such of the private affairs of strangers as do not seem to him important to know. Nor can an exception be made in the case of names. Otherwise the patient’s narratives became a little shadowy, like the scenes in Goethe’s play Die natürliche Tochter [The Natural Daughter], and do not lodge in the doctor’s memory. Moreover, the names that are withheld screen the approach to all sorts of important connections. But one may perhaps allow names to be left on one side until the patient has become more familiar with the doctor and the procedure of analysis. It is very remarkable how the whole task becomes impossible if a reservation is allowed at any single place. But we have only to reflect what would happen if the right of asylum existed at any one point in a town; how long would it be before all the riff-raff of the town had collected there? I once treated a high official who was bound by his oath of office not to communicate certain things because they were state secrets, and the analysis came to grief as a consequence of this restriction. Psycho-analytic treatment must have no regard for any consideration, because the neurosis and its resistances are themselves without any such regard.

On Beginning The Treatment

2489

Patients who date their illness from a particular moment usually concentrate upon its precipitating cause. Others, who themselves recognize the connection between their neurosis and their childhood, often begin with an account of their whole life-history. A systematic narrative should never be expected and nothing should be done to encourage it. Every detail of the story will have to be told afresh later on, and it is only with these repetitions that additional material will appear which will supply the important connections that are unknown to the patient.

There are patients who from the very first hours carefully prepare what they are going to communicate, ostensibly so as to be sure of making better use of the time devoted to the treatment. What is thus disguising itself as eagerness is resistance. Any preparation of this sort should be disrecommended, for it is only employed to guard against unwelcome thoughts cropping up.¹ However genuinely the patient may believe in his excellent intentions, the resistance will play its part in this deliberate method of preparation and will see to it that the most valuable material escapes communication. One will soon find that the patient devises yet other means by which what is required may be withheld from the treatment. He may talk over the treatment every day with some intimate friend, and bring into this discussion all the thoughts which should come forward in the presence of the doctor. The treatment thus has a leak which lets through precisely what is most valuable. When this happens, the patient must, without much delay, be advised to treat his analysis as a matter between himself and his doctor and to exclude everyone else from sharing in the knowledge of it, no matter how close to him they may be, or how inquisitive. In later stages of the treatment the patient is usually not subjected to temptations of this sort.

Certain patients want their treatment to be kept secret, often because they have kept their neurosis secret; and I put no obstacle in their way. That in consequence the world hears nothing of some of the most successful cures is, of course, a consideration that cannot be taken into account. It is obvious that a patient’s decision in favour of secrecy already reveals a feature of his secret history.

¹ Exceptions may be made only for such data as family relationships, times and places of residence, operations, and so on.

On Beginning The Treatment

2490

In advising the patient at the beginning of the treatment to tell as few people as possible about it, we also protect him to some extent from the many hostile influences that will seem to entice him away from analysis. Such influences may be very mischievous at the outset of the treatment; later, they are usually immaterial, or even useful in bringing to the fore resistances which are trying to conceal themselves.

If during the course of the analysis the patient should temporarily need some other medical or specialist treatment, it is far wiser to call in a non-analytic colleague than to give this other treatment oneself. Combined treatments for neurotic disorders which have a powerful organic basis are nearly always impracticable. The patients withdraw their interest from analysis as soon as they are shown more than one path that promises to lead them to health. The best plan is to postpone the organic treatment until the psychical treatment is finished; if the former were tried first it would in most cases meet with no success.

To return to the beginning of the treatment. Patients are occasionally met with who start the treatment by assuring us that they cannot think of anything to say, although the whole field of their life-history and the story of their illness is open to them to choose from. Their request that we should tell them what to talk about must not be granted on this first occasion any more than on any later one. We must bear in mind what is involved here. A strong resistance has come to the front in order to defend the neurosis; we must take up the challenge then and there and come to grips with it. Energetic and repeated assurances to the patient that it is impossible for no ideas at all to occur to him at the beginning, and that what is in question is a resistance against the analysis, soon oblige him to make the expected admissions or to uncover a first piece of his complexes. It is a bad sign if he has to confess that while he was listening to the fundamental rule of analysis he made a mental reservation that he would nevertheless keep this or that to himself; it is not so serious if all he has to tell us is how mistrustful he is of analysis or the horrifying things he has heard about it. If he denies these and similar possibilities when they are put before him, he can be driven by our insistence to acknowledge that he has nevertheless overlooked certain thoughts which were occupying his mind. He had thought of the treatment itself, though nothing definite about it, or he had been occupied with the picture of the room in which he was, or he could not help thinking of the objects in the consulting room and of the fact that he was lying here on a sofa - all of which he has replaced by the word ‘nothing’. These indications are intelligible enough: everything connected with the present situation represents a transference to the doctor, which proves suitable to serve as a first resistance. We are thus obliged to begin by uncovering this transference; and a path from it will give rapid access to the patient’s pathogenic material. Women who are prepared by events in their past history to be subjected to sexual aggression and men with over-strong repressed homosexuality are the most apt thus to withhold the ideas that occur to them at the outset of their analysis.

The patient’s first symptoms or chance actions, like his first resistance, may possess a special interest and may betray a complex which governs his neurosis. A clever young philosopher with exquisite aesthetic sensibilities will hasten to put the creases of his trousers straight before lying down for his first hour; he is revealing himself as a former coprophilic of the highest refinement - which was to be expected from the later aesthete. A young girl will at the same juncture hurriedly pull the hem of her skirt over her exposed ankles; in doing this she is giving away the gist of what her analysis will uncover later: her narcissistic pride in her physical beauty and her inclinations to exhibitionism.

On Beginning The Treatment

2491

A particularly large number of patients object to being asked to lie down, while the doctor sits out of sight behind them. They ask to be allowed to go through the treatment in some other position, for the most part because they are anxious not to be deprived of a view of the doctor. Permission is regularly refused, but one cannot prevent them from contriving to say a few sentences before the beginning of the actual ‘session’ or after one has signified that it is finished and they have got up from the sofa. In this way they divide the treatment in their own view into an official portion, in which they mostly behave in a very inhibited manner, and an informal ‘friendly’ portion, in which they speak really freely and say all sorts of things which they themselves do not regard as being part of the treatment. The doctor does not accept this division for long. He takes note of what is said before or after the session and he brings it forward at the first opportunity, thus pulling down the partition which the patient has tried to erect. This partition, once again, will have been put together from the material of a transference-resistance.

So long as the patient’s communications and ideas run on without any obstruction, the theme of transference should be left untouched. One must wait until the transference, which is the most delicate of all procedures, has become a resistance.

The next question with which we are faced raises a matter of principle. It is this: When are we to begin making our communications to the patient? When is the moment for disclosing to him the hidden meaning of the ideas that occur to him, and for initiating him into the postulates and technical procedures of analysis?

The answer to this can only be: Not until an effective transference has been established in the patient, a proper rapport with him. It remains the first aim of the treatment to attach him to it and to the person of the doctor. To ensure this, nothing need be done but to give him time. If one exhibits a serious interest in him, carefully clears away the resistances that crop up at the beginning and avoids making certain mistakes, he will of himself form such an attachment and link the doctor up with one of the imagos of the people by whom he was accustomed to be treated with affection. It is certainly possible to forfeit this first success if from the start one takes up any standpoint other than one of sympathetic understanding, such as a moralizing one, or if one behaves like a representative or contending party - of the other member of a married couple, for instance.

On Beginning The Treatment

2492

This answer of course involves a condemnation of any line of behaviour which would lead us to give the patient a translation of his symptoms as soon as we have guessed it ourselves, or would even lead us to regard it as a special triumph to fling these ‘solutions’ in his face at the first interview. It is not difficult for a skilled analyst to read the patient’s secret wishes plainly between the lines of his complaints and the story of his illness; but what a measure of self-complacency and thoughtlessness must be possessed by anyone who can, on the shortest acquaintance, inform a stranger who is entirely ignorant of all the tenets of analysis that he is attached to his mother by incestuous ties, that he harbours wishes for the death of his wife whom he appears to love, that he conceals an intention of betraying his superior, and so on! I have heard that there are analysts who plume themselves upon these kinds of lightning diagnoses and ‘express’ treatments, but I must warn everyone against following such examples. Behaviour of this sort will completely discredit oneself and the treatment in the patient’s eyes and will arouse the most violent opposition in him, whether one’s guess has been true or not; indeed, the truer the guess the more violent will be the resistance. As a rule the therapeutic effect will be nil; but the deterring of the patient from analysis will be final. Even in the later stages of analysis one must be careful not to give a patient the solution of a symptom or the translation of a wish until he is already so close to it that he has only one short step more to make in order to get hold of the explanation for himself. In former years I often had occasion to find that the premature communication of a solution brought the treatment to an untimely end, on account not only of the resistances which it thus suddenly awakened but also of the relief which the solution brought with it.

But at this point an objection will be raised. Is it, then, our task to lengthen the treatment and not, rather, to bring it to an end as rapidly as possible? Are not the patient’s ailments due to his lack of knowledge and understanding and is it not a duty to enlighten him as soon as possible - that is, as soon as the doctor himself knows the explanations? The answer to this question calls for a short digression on the meaning of knowledge and the mechanism of cure in analysis.

On Beginning The Treatment

2493

It is true that in the earliest days of analytic technique we took an intellectualist view of the situation. We set a high value on the patient’s knowledge of what he had forgotten, and in this we made hardly any distinction between our knowledge of it and his. We thought it a special piece of good luck if we were able to obtain information about the forgotten childhood trauma from other sources - for instance, from parents or nurses or the seducer himself - as in some cases it was possible to do; and we hastened to convey the information and the proofs of its correctness to the patient, in the certain expectation of thus bringing the neurosis and the treatment to a rapid end. It was a severe disappointment when the expected success was not forthcoming. How could it be that the patient, who now knew about his traumatic experience, nevertheless still behaved as if he knew no more about it than before? Indeed, telling and describing his repressed trauma to him did not even result in any recollection of it coming into his mind.

In one particular case the mother of a hysterical girl had confided to me the homosexual experience which had greatly contributed to the fixation of the girl’s attacks. The mother had herself surprised the scene; but the patient had completely forgotten it, though it had occurred when she was already approaching puberty. I was now able to make a most instructive observation. Every time I repeated her mother’s story to the girl she reacted with a hysterical attack, and after this she forgot the story once more. There is no doubt that the patient was expressing a violent resistance against the knowledge that was being forced upon her. Finally she simulated feeble-mindedness and a complete loss of memory in order to protect herself against what I had told her. After this, there was no choice but to cease attributing to the fact of knowing, in itself, the importance that had previously been given to it and to place the emphasis on the resistances which had in the past brought about the state of not knowing and which were still ready to defend that state. Conscious knowledge, even if it was not subsequently driven out again, was powerless against those resistances.

On Beginning The Treatment

2494

The strange behaviour of patients, in being able to combine a conscious knowing with not knowing, remains inexplicable by what is called normal psychology. But to psycho-analysis, which recognizes the existence of the unconscious, it presents no difficulty. The phenomenon we have described, moreover, provides some of the best support for a view which approaches mental processes from the angle of topographical differentiation. The patients now know of the repressed experience in their conscious thought, but this thought lacks any connection with the place where the repressed recollection is in some way or other contained. No change is possible until the conscious thought-process has penetrated to that place and has overcome the resistances of repression there. It is just as though a decree were promulgated by the Ministry of Justice to the effect that juvenile delinquencies should be dealt with in a certain lenient manner. As long as this decree has not come to the knowledge of the local magistrates, or in the event of their not intending to obey it but preferring to administer justice by their own lights, no change can occur in the treatment of particular youthful delinquents. For the sake of complete accuracy, however, it should be added that the communication of repressed material to the patient’s consciousness is nevertheless not without effect. It does not produce the hoped-for result of putting an end to the symptoms; but it has other consequences. At first it arouses resistances, but then, when these have been overcome, it sets up a process of thought in the course of which the expected influencing of the unconscious recollection eventually takes place.

It is now time for us to take a survey of the play of forces which is set in motion by the treatment. The primary motive force in the therapy is the patient’s suffering and the wish to be cured that arises from it. The strength of this motive force is subtracted from by various factors - which are not discovered till the analysis is in progress - above all, by what we have called the ‘secondary gain from illness’; but it must be maintained till the end of the treatment. Every improvement effects a diminution of it. By itself, however, this motive force is not sufficient to get rid of the illness. Two things are lacking in it for this: it does not know what paths to follow to reach this end; and it does not possess the necessary quota of energy with which to oppose the resistances. The analytic treatment helps to remedy both these deficiencies. It supplies the amounts of energy that are needed for overcoming the resistances by making mobile the energies which lie ready for the transference; and, by giving the patient information at the right time, it shows him the paths along which he should direct those energies. Often enough the transference is able to remove the symptoms of the disease by itself, but only for a while - only for as long as it itself lasts. In this case the treatment is a treatment by suggestion, and not a psycho-analysis at all. It only deserves the latter name if the intensity of the transference has been utilized for the overcoming of resistances. Only then has being ill become impossible, even when the transference has once more been dissolved, which is its destined end.

On Beginning The Treatment

2495

In the course of the treatment yet another helpful factor is aroused. This is the patient’s intellectual interest and understanding. But this alone hardly comes into consideration in comparison with the other forces that are engaged in the struggle; for it is always in danger of losing its value, as a result of the clouding of judgement that arises from the resistances. Thus the new sources of strength for which the patient is indebted to his analyst are reducible to transference and instruction (through the communications made to him). The patient, however, only makes use of the instruction in so far as he is induced to do so by the transference; and it is for this reason that our first communication should be withheld until a strong transference has been established. And this, we may add, holds good of every subsequent communication. In each case we must wait until the disturbance of the transference by the successive emergence of transference-resistances has been removed.

2496

REMEMBERING, REPEATING AND WORKING-THROUGH

(FURTHER RECOMMENDATIONS ON THE TECHNIQUE OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS II)

(1914)

2497

Intentionally left blank

2498

REMEMBERING, REPEATING AND WORKING-THROUGH

(FURTHER RECOMMENDATIONS ON THE TECHNIQUE OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS II)

It seems to me not unnecessary to keep on reminding students of the far-reaching changes which psycho-analytic technique has undergone since its first beginnings. In its first phase - that of Breuer’s catharsis - it consisted in bringing directly into focus the moment at which the symptom was formed, and in persistently endeavouring to reproduce the mental processes involved in that situation, in order to direct their discharge along the path of conscious activity. Remembering and abreacting, with the help of the hypnotic state, were what was at that time aimed at. Next, where hypnosis had been given up, the task became one of discovering from the patient’s free associations what he failed to remember. The resistance was to be circumvented by the work of interpretation and by making its results known to the patient. The situations which had given rise to the formation of the symptom and the other situations which lay behind the moment at which the illness broke out retained their place as the focus of interest; but the element of abreaction receded into the background and seemed to be replaced by the expenditure of work which the patient had to make in being obliged to overcome his criticism of his free associations, in accordance with the fundamental rule of psycho-analysis. Finally, there was evolved the consistent technique used to-day, in which the analyst gives up the attempt to bring a particular moment or problem into focus. He contents himself with studying whatever is present for the time being on the surface of the patient’s mind, and he employs the art of interpretation mainly for the purpose of recognizing the resistances which appear there, and making them conscious to the patient. From this there results a new sort of division of labour: the doctor uncovers the resistances which are unknown to the patient; when these have been got the better of, the patient often relates the forgotten situations and connections without any difficulty. The aim of these different techniques has, of course, remained the same. Descriptively speaking, it is to fill in gaps in memory; dynamically speaking, it is to overcome resistances due to repression.

Remembering, Repeating And Working-Through

2499

We must still be grateful to the old hypnotic technique for having brought before us single psychical processes of analysis in an isolated or schematic form. Only this could have given us the courage ourselves to create more complicated situations in the analytic treatment and to keep them clear before us.

In these hypnotic treatments the process of remembering took a very simple form. The patient put himself back into an earlier situation, which he seemed never to confuse with the present one, and gave an account of the mental processes belonging to it, in so far as they had remained normal; he then added to this whatever was able to emerge as a result of transforming the processes that had at the time been unconscious into conscious ones.

At this point I will interpolate a few remarks which every analyst has found confirmed in his observations. Forgetting impressions, scenes or experiences nearly always reduces itself to shutting them off. When the patient talks about these ‘forgotten’ things he seldom fails to add: ‘As a matter of fact I’ve always known it; only I’ve never thought of it.’ He often expresses disappointment at the fact that not enough things come into his head that he can call ‘forgotten’ - that he has never thought of since they happened. Nevertheless, even this desire is fulfilled, especially in the case of conversion hysterias. ‘Forgetting’ becomes still further restricted when we assess at their true value the screen memories which are so generally present. In some cases I have had an impression that the familiar childhood amnesia, which is theoretically so important to us, is completely counterbalanced by screen memories. Not only some but all of what is essential from childhood has been retained in these memories. It is simply a question of knowing how to extract it out of them by analysis. They represent the forgotten years of childhood as adequately as the manifest content of a dream represents the dream-thoughts.

Remembering, Repeating And Working-Through

2500

The other group of psychical processes - phantasies, processes of reference, emotional impulses, thought-connections - which, as purely internal acts, can be contrasted with impressions and experiences, must, in their relation to forgetting and remembering, be considered separately. In these processes it particularly often happens that something is ‘remembered’ which could never have been ‘forgotten’ because it was never at any time noticed - was never conscious. As regards the course taken by psychical events it seems to make no difference whatever whether such a ‘thought-connection’ was conscious and then forgotten or whether it never managed to become conscious at all. The conviction which the patient obtains in the course of his analysis is quite independent of this kind of memory.

In the many different forms of obsessional neurosis in particular, forgetting is mostly restricted to dissolving thought-connections, failing to draw the right conclusions and isolating memories.

There is one special class of experiences of the utmost importance for which no memory can as a rule be recovered. These are experiences which occurred in very early childhood and were not understood at the time but which were subsequently understood and interpreted. One gains a knowledge of them through dreams and one is obliged to believe in them on the most compelling evidence provided by the fabric of the neurosis. Moreover, we can ascertain for ourselves that the patient, after his resistances have been overcome, no longer invokes the absence of any memory of them (any sense of familiarity with them) as a ground for refusing to accept them. This matter, however, calls for so much critical caution and introduces so much that is novel and startling that I shall reserve it for a separate discussion in connection with suitable material.

Remembering, Repeating And Working-Through

2501

Under the new technique very little, and often nothing, is left of this delightfully smooth course of events. There are some cases which behave like those under the hypnotic technique up to a point and only later cease to do so; but others behave differently from the beginning. If we confine ourselves to this second type in order to bring out the difference, we may say that the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it.

For instance, the patient does not say that he remembers that he used to be defiant and critical towards his parents’ authority; instead, he behaves in that way to the doctor. He does not remember how he came to a helpless and hopeless deadlock in his infantile sexual researches; but he produces a mass of confused dreams and associations, complains that he cannot succeed in anything and asserts that he is fated never to carry through what he undertakes. He does not remember having been intensely ashamed of certain sexual activities and afraid of their being found out; but he makes it clear that he is ashamed of the treatment on which he is now embarked and tries to keep it secret from everybody. And so on.

Above all, the patient will begin his treatment with a repetition of this kind. When one has announced the fundamental rule of psycho-analysis to a patient with an eventful life-history and a long story of illness and has then asked him to say what occurs to his mind, one expects him to pour out a flood of information; but often the first thing that happens is that he has nothing to say. He is silent and declares that nothing occurs to him. This, of course, is merely a repetition of a homosexual attitude which comes to the fore as a resistance against remembering anything. As long as the patient is in the treatment he cannot escape from this compulsion to repeat; and in the end we understand that this is his way of remembering.

Remembering, Repeating And Working-Through

2502

What interests us most of all is naturally the relation of this compulsion to repeat to the transference and to resistance. We soon perceive that the transference is itself only a piece of repetition, and that the repetition is a transference of the forgotten past not only on to the doctor but also on to all the other aspects of the current situation. We must be prepared to find, therefore, that the patient yields to the compulsion to repeat, which now replaces the impulsion to remember, not only in his personal attitude to his doctor but also in every other activity and relationship which may occupy his life at the time - if, for instance, he falls in love or undertakes a task or starts an enterprise during the treatment. The part played by resistance, too, is easily recognized. The greater the resistance, the more extensively will acting out (repetition) replace remembering. For the ideal remembering of what has been forgotten which occurs in hypnosis corresponds to a state in which resistance has been put completely on one side. If the patient starts his treatment under the auspices of a mild and unpronounced positive transference it makes it possible at first for him to unearth his memories just as he would under hypnosis, and during this time his pathological symptoms themselves are quiescent. But if, as the analysis proceeds, the transference becomes hostile or unduly intense and therefore in need of repression, remembering at once gives way to acting out. From then onwards the resistances determine the sequence of the material which is to be repeated. The patient brings out of the armoury of the past the weapons with which he defends himself against the progress of the treatment - weapons which we must wrest from him one by one.

We have learnt that the patient repeats instead of remembering, and repeats under the conditions of resistance. We may now ask what it is that he in fact repeats or acts out. The answer is that he repeats everything that has already made its way from the sources of the repressed into his manifest personality - his inhibitions and unserviceable attitudes and his pathological character-traits. He also repeats all his symptoms in the course of the treatment. And now we can see that in drawing attention to the compulsion to repeat we have acquired no new fact but only a more comprehensive view. We have only made it clear to ourselves that the patient’s state of being ill cannot cease with the beginning of his analysis, and that we must treat his illness, not as an event of the past, but as a present-day force. This state of illness is brought, piece by piece, within the field and range of operation of the treatment, and while the patient experiences it as something real and contemporary, we have to do our therapeutic work on it, which consists in a large measure in tracing it back to the past.

Remembering, Repeating And Working-Through

2503

Remembering, as it was induced in hypnosis, could not but give the impression of an experiment carried out in the laboratory. Repeating, as it is induced in analytic treatment according to the newer technique, on the other hand, implies conjuring up a piece of real life; and for that reason it cannot always be harmless and unobjectionable. This consideration opens up the whole problem of what is so often unavoidable - ‘deterioration during treatment’.

First and foremost, the initiation of the treatment in itself brings about a change in the patient’s conscious attitude to his illness. He has usually been content with lamenting it, despising it as nonsensical and under-estimating its importance; for the rest, he has extended to its manifestations the ostrich-like policy of repression which he adopted towards its origins. Thus it can happen that he does not properly know under what conditions his phobia breaks out or does not listen to the precise wording of his obsessional ideas or does not grasp the actual purpose of his obsessional impulse. The treatment, of course, is not helped by this. He must find the courage to direct his attention to the phenomena of his illness. His illness itself must no longer seem to him contemptible, but must become an enemy worthy of his mettle, a piece of his personality, which has solid ground for its existence and out of which things of value for his future life have to be derived. The way is thus paved from the beginning for a reconciliation with the repressed material which is coming to expression in his symptoms, while at the same time place is found for a certain tolerance for the state of being ill. If this new attitude towards the illness intensifies the conflicts and brings to the fore symptoms which till then had been indistinct, one can easily console the patient by pointing out that these are only necessary and temporary aggravations and that one cannot overcome an enemy who is absent or not within range. The resistance, however, may exploit the situation for its own ends and abuse the licence to be ill. It seems to say: ‘See what happens if I really give way to such things. Was I not right to consign them to repression?’ Young and childish people in particular are inclined to make the necessity imposed by the treatment for paying attention to their illness a welcome excuse for luxuriating in their symptoms.

Remembering, Repeating And Working-Through

2504

Further dangers arise from the fact that in the course of the treatment new and deeper-lying instinctual impulses, which have not hitherto made themselves felt, may come to be ‘repeated’. Finally, it is possible that the patient’s actions outside the transference may do him temporary harm in his ordinary life, or even have been so chosen as permanently to invalidate his prospects of recovery.

The tactics to be adopted by the physician in this situation are easily justified. For him, remembering in the old manner - reproduction in the psychical field - is the aim to which he adheres, even though he knows that such an aim cannot be achieved in the new technique. He is prepared for a perpetual struggle with his patient to keep in the psychical sphere all the impulses which the patient would like to direct into the motor sphere; and he celebrates it as a triumph for the treatment if he can bring it about that something that the patient wishes to discharge in action is disposed of through the work of remembering. If the attachment through transference has grown into something at all serviceable, the treatment is able to prevent the patient from executing any of the more important repetitive actions and to utilize his intention to do so in statu nascendi as material for the therapeutic work. One best protects the patient from injuries brought about through carrying out one of his impulses by making him promise not to take any important decisions affecting his life during the time of his treatment - for instance, not to choose any profession or definitive love-object - but to postpone all such plans until after his recovery.

At the same time one willingly leaves untouched as much of the patient’s personal freedom as is compatible with these restrictions, nor does one hinder him from carrying out unimportant intentions, even if they are foolish; one does not forget that it is in fact only through his own experience and mishaps that a person learns sense. There are also people whom one cannot restrain from plunging into some quite undesirable project during the treatment and who only afterwards become ready for, and accessible to, analysis. Occasionally, too, it is bound to happen that the untamed instincts assert themselves before there is time to put the reins of the transference on them, or that the bonds which attach the patient to the treatment are broken by him in a repetitive action. As an extreme example of this, I may cite the case of an elderly lady who had repeatedly fled from her house and her husband in a twilight state and gone no one knew where, without ever having become conscious of her motive for decamping in this way. She came to treatment with a marked affectionate transference which grew in intensity with uncanny rapidity in the first few days; by the end of the week she had decamped from me, too, before I had had time to say anything to her which might have prevented this repetition.

Remembering, Repeating And Working-Through

2505

The main instrument, however, for curbing the patient’s compulsion to repeat and for turning it into a motive for remembering lies in the handling of the transference. We render the compulsion harmless, and indeed useful, by giving it the right to assert itself in a definite field. We admit it into the transference as a playground in which it is allowed to expand in almost complete freedom and in which it is expected to display to us everything in the way of pathogenic instincts that is hidden in the patient’s mind. Provided only that the patient shows compliance enough to respect the necessary conditions of the analysis, we regularly succeed in giving all the symptoms of the illness a new transference meaning and in replacing his ordinary neurosis by a ‘transference-neurosis’ of which he can be cured by the therapeutic work. The transference thus creates an intermediate region between illness and real life through which the transition from the one to the other is made. The new condition has taken over all the features of the illness; but it represents an artificial illness which is at every point accessible to our intervention. It is a piece of real experience, but one which has been made possible by especially favourable conditions, and it is of a provisional nature. From the repetitive reactions which are exhibited in the transference we are led along the familiar paths to the awakening of the memories, which appear without difficulty, as it were, after the resistance has been overcome.

Remembering, Repeating And Working-Through

2506

I might break off at this point but for the title of this paper, which obliges me to discuss a further point in analytic technique. The first step in overcoming the resistances is made, as we know, by the analyst’s uncovering the resistance, which is never recognized by the patient, and acquainting him with it. Now it seems that beginners in analytic practice are inclined to look on this introductory step as constituting the whole of their work. I have often been asked to advise upon cases in which the doctor complained that he had pointed out his resistance to the patient and that nevertheless no change had set in; indeed, the resistance had become all the stronger, and the whole situation was more obscure than ever. The treatment seemed to make no headway. This gloomy foreboding always proved mistaken. The treatment was as a rule progressing most satisfactorily. The analyst had merely forgotten that giving the resistance a name could not result in its immediate cessation. One must allow the patient time to become more conversant with this resistance with which he has now become acquainted, to work through it, to overcome it, by continuing, in defiance of it, the analytic work according to the fundamental rule of analysis. Only where the resistance is at its height can the analyst, working in common with his patient, discover the repressed instinctual impulses which are feeding the resistance; and it is this kind of experience which convinces the patient of the existence and power of such impulses. The doctor has nothing else to do than to wait and let things take their course, a course which cannot be avoided nor always hastened. If he holds fast to this conviction he will often be spared the illusion of having failed when in fact he is conducting the treatment on the right lines.

This working-through of the resistances may in practice turn out to be an arduous task for the subject of the analysis and a trial of patience for the analyst. Nevertheless it is a part of the work which effects the greatest changes in the patient and which distinguishes analytic treatment from any kind of treatment by suggestion. From a theoretical point of view one may correlate it with the ‘abreacting’ of the quotas of affect strangulated by repression - an abreaction without which hypnotic treatment remained ineffective.

2507

OBSERVATIONS ON TRANSFERENCE-LOVE

(FURTHER RECOMMENDATIONS ON THE TECHNIQUE OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS III)

(1915)

2508

Intentionally left blank

2509

OBSERVATIONS ON TRANSFERENCE-LOVE

(FURTHER RECOMMENDATIONS ON THE TECHNIQUE OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS III)

Every beginner in psycho-analysis probably feels alarmed at first at the difficulties in store for him when he comes to interpret the patient’s associations and to deal with the reproduction of the repressed. When the time comes, however, he soon learns to look upon these difficulties as insignificant, and instead becomes convinced that the only really serious difficulties he has to meet lie in the management of the transference.

Among the situations which arise in this connection I shall select one which is very sharply circumscribed; and I shall select it, partly because it occurs so often and is so important in its real aspects and partly because of its theoretical interest. What I have in mind is the case in which a woman patient shows by unmistakable indications, or openly declares, that she has fallen in love, as any other mortal woman might, with the doctor who is analysing her. This situation has its distressing and comical aspects, as well as its serious ones. It is also determined by so many and such complicated factors, it is so unavoidable and so difficult to clear up, that a discussion of it to meet a vital need of analytic technique has long been overdue. But since we who laugh at other people’s failings are not always free from them ourselves, we have not so far been precisely in a hurry to fulfil this task. We are constantly coming up against the obligation to professional discretion - a discretion which cannot be dispensed with in real life, but which is of no service in our science. In so far as psycho-analytic publications are a part of real life, too, we have here an insoluble contradiction. I have recently disregarded this matter of discretion at one point,¹ and shown how this same transference situation held back the development of psycho-analytic therapy during its first decade.

¹ In the first section of my contribution to the history of the psycho-analytic movement (1914d)

Observations On Transference-Love

2510

To a well-educated layman (for that is what the ideal civilized person is in regard to psycho-analysis) things that have to do with love are incommensurable with everything else; they are, as it were, written on a special page on which no other writing is tolerated. If a woman patient has fallen in love with her doctor it seems to such a layman that only two outcomes are possible. One, which happens comparatively rarely, is that all the circumstances allow of a permanent legal union between them; the other, which is more frequent, is that the doctor and the patient part and give up the work they have begun which was to have led to her recovery, as though it had been interrupted by some elemental phenomenon. There is, to be sure, a third conceivable outcome, which even seems compatible with a continuation of the treatment. This is that they should enter into a love-relationship which is illicit and which is not intended to last for ever. But such a course is made impossible by conventional morality and professional standards. Nevertheless, our layman will beg the analyst to reassure him as unambiguously as possible that this third alternative is excluded.

It is clear that a psycho-analyst must look at things from a different point of view.

Let us take the case of the second outcome of the situation we are considering. After the patient has fallen in love with her doctor, they part; the treatment is given up. But soon the patient’s condition necessitates her making a second attempt at analysis, with another doctor. The next thing that happens is that she feels she has fallen in love with this second doctor too; and if she breaks off with him and begins yet again, the same thing will happen with the third doctor, and so on. This phenomenon, which occurs without fail and which is, as we know, one of the foundations of the psycho-analytic theory, may be evaluated from two points of view, that of the doctor who is carrying out the analysis and that of the patient who is in need of it.

For the doctor the phenomenon signifies a valuable piece of enlightenment and a useful warning against any tendency to a counter-transference which may be present in his own mind. He must recognize that the patient’s falling in love is induced by the analytic situation and is not to be attributed to the charms of his own person; so that he has no grounds whatever for being proud of such a ‘conquest’, as it would be called outside analysis. And it is always well to be reminded of this. For the patient, however, there are two alternatives: either she must relinquish psycho-analytic treatment or she must accept falling in love with her doctor as an inescapable fate.¹

¹ We know that the transference can manifest itself in other, less tender feelings, but I do not propose to go into that side of the matter here.

Observations On Transference-Love

2511

I have no doubt that the patient’s relatives and friends will decide as emphatically for the first of these two alternatives as the analyst will for the second. But I think that here is a case in which the decision cannot be left to the tender - or rather, the egoistic and jealous - concern of her relatives. The welfare of the patient alone should be the touchstone; her relatives’ love cannot cure her neurosis. The analyst need not push himself forward, but he may insist that he is indispensable for the achievement of certain ends. Any relative who adopts Tolstoy’s attitude to this problem can remain in undisturbed possession of his wife or daughter; but he will have to try to put up with the fact that she, for her part, retains her neurosis and the interference with her capacity for love which it involves. The situation, after all, is similar to that in a gynaecological treatment. Moreover, the jealous father or husband is greatly mistaken if he thinks that the patient will escape falling in love with her doctor if he hands her over to some kind of treatment other than analysis for combating her neurosis. The difference, on the contrary, will only be that a love of this kind, which is bound to remain unexpressed and unanalysed, can never make the contribution to the patient’s recovery which analysis would have extracted from it.

It has come to my knowledge that some doctors who practise analysis frequently prepare their patients for the emergence of the erotic transference or even urge them to ‘go ahead and fall in love with the doctor so that the treatment may make progress’. I can hardly imagine a more senseless proceeding. In doing so, an analyst robs the phenomenon of the element of spontaneity which is so convincing and lays up obstacles for himself in the future which are hard to overcome.

Observations On Transference-Love

2512

At a first glance it certainly does not look as if the patient’s falling in love in the transference could result in any advantage to the treatment. No matter how amenable she has been up till then, she suddenly loses all understanding of the treatment and all interest in it, and will not speak or hear about anything but her love, which she demands to have returned. She gives up her symptoms or pays no attention to them; indeed, she declares that she is well. There is a complete change of scene; it is as though some piece of make-believe had been stopped by the sudden irruption of reality - as when, for instance, a cry of fire is raised during a theatrical performance. No doctor who experiences this for the first time will find it easy to retain his grasp on the analytic situation and to keep clear of the illusion that the treatment is really at an end.

A little reflection enables one to find one’s bearings. First and foremost, one keeps in mind the suspicion that anything that interferes with the continuation of the treatment may be an expression of resistance. There can be no doubt that the outbreak of a passionate demand for love is largely the work of resistance. One will have long since noticed in the patient the signs of an affectionate transference, and one will have been able to feel certain that her docility, her acceptance of the analytic explanations, her remarkable comprehension and the high degree of intelligence she showed were to be attributed to this attitude towards her doctor. Now all this is swept away. She has become quite without insight and seems to be swallowed up in her love. Moreover, this change quite regularly occurs precisely at a point of time when one is having to try to bring her to admit or remember some particularly distressing and heavily repressed piece of her life-history. She has been in love, therefore, for a long time; but now the resistance is beginning to make use of her love in order to hinder the continuation of the treatment, to deflect all her interest from the work and to put the analyst in an awkward position.

Observations On Transference-Love

2513

If one looks into the situation more closely one recognizes the influence of motives which further complicate things - of which some are connected with being in love and others are particular expressions of resistance. Of the first kind are the patient’s endeavour to assure herself of her irresistibility, to destroy the doctor’s authority by bringing him down to the level of a lover and to gain all the other promised advantages incidental to the satisfaction of love. As regards the resistance, we may suspect that on occasion it makes use of a declaration of love on the patient’s part as a means of putting her analyst’s severity to the test, so that, if he should show signs of compliance, he may expect to be taken to task for it. But above all one gets an impression that the resistance is acting as an agent provocateur; it heightens the patient’s state of being in love and exaggerates her readiness for sexual surrender in order to justify the workings of repression all the more emphatically, by pointing to the dangers of such licentiousness. All these accessory motives, which in simpler cases may not be present, have, as we know, been regarded by Adler as the essential part of the whole process.

But how is the analyst to behave in order not to come to grief over this situation, supposing he is convinced that the treatment should be carried on in spite of this erotic transference and should take it in its stride?

It would be easy for me to lay stress on the universally accepted standards of morality and to insist that the analyst must never under any circumstances accept or return the tender feelings that are offered him: that, instead, he must consider that the time has come for him to put before the woman who is in love with him the demands of social morality and the necessity for renunciation, and to succeed in making her give up her desires, and, having surmounted the animal side of herself, go on with the work of analysis.

I shall not, however, fulfil these expectations - neither the first nor the second of them. Not the first, because I am writing not for patients but for doctors who have serious difficulties to contend with, and also because in this instance I am able to trace the moral prescription back to its source, namely to expediency. I am on this occasion in the happy position of being able to replace the moral embargo by considerations of analytic technique, without any alteration in the outcome.

Observations On Transference-Love

2514

Even more decidedly, however, do I decline to fulfil the second of the expectations I have mentioned. To urge the patient to suppress, renounce or sublimate her instincts the moment she has admitted her erotic transference would be, not an analytic way of dealing with them, but a senseless one. It would be just as though, after summoning up a spirit from the underworld by cunning spells, one were to send him down again without having asked him a single question. One would have brought the repressed into consciousness, only to repress it once more in a fright. Nor should we deceive ourselves about the success of any such proceeding. As we know, the passions are little affected by sublime speeches. The patient will feel only the humiliation, and she will not fail to take her revenge for it.

Just as little can I advocate a middle course, which would recommend itself to some people as being specially ingenious. This would consist in declaring that one returns the patient’s fond feelings but at the same time in avoiding any physical implementation of this fondness until one is able to guide the relationship into calmer channels and raise it to a highest level. My objection to this expedient is that psycho-analytic treatment is founded on truthfulness. In this fact lies a great part of its educative effect and its ethical value. It is dangerous to depart from this foundation. Anyone who has become saturated in the analytic technique will no longer be able to make use of the lies and pretences which a doctor normally finds unavoidable; and if, with the best intentions, he does attempt to do so, he is very likely to betray himself. Since we demand strict truthfulness from our patients, we jeopardize our whole authority if we let ourselves be caught out by them in a departure from the truth. Besides, the experiment of letting oneself go a little way in tender feelings for the patient is not altogether without danger. Our control over ourselves is not so complete that we may not suddenly one day go further than we had intended. In my opinion, therefore, we ought not to give up the neutrality towards the patient, which we have acquired through keeping the counter-transference in check.

Observations On Transference-Love

2515

I have already let it be understood that analytic technique requires of the physician that he should deny to the patient who is craving for love the satisfaction she demands. The treatment must be carried out in abstinence. By this I do not mean physical abstinence alone, nor yet the deprivation of everything that the patient desires, for perhaps no sick person could tolerate this. Instead, I shall state it as a fundamental principle that the patient’s need and longing should be allowed to persist in her, in order that they may serve as forces impelling her to do work and to make changes, and that we must beware of appeasing those forces by means of surrogates. And what we could offer would never be anything else than a surrogate, for the patient’s condition is such that, until her repressions are removed, she is incapable of getting real satisfaction.

Let us admit that this fundamental principle of the treatment being carried out in abstinence extends far beyond the single case we are considering here, and that it needs to be thoroughly discussed in order that we may define the limits of its possible application. We will not enter into this now, however, but will keep as close as possible to the situation from which we started out. What would happen if the doctor were to behave differently and, supposing both parties were free, if he were to avail himself of that freedom in order to return the patient’s love and to still her need for affection?

If he has been guided by the calculation that this compliance on his part will ensure his domination over his patient and thus enable him to influence her to perform the tasks required by the treatment, and in this way to liberate herself permanently from her neurosis - then experience would inevitably show him that his calculation was wrong. The patient would achieve her aim, but he would never achieve his. What would happen to the doctor and the patient would only be what happened, according to the amusing anecdote, to the pastor and the insurance agent. The insurance agent, a free-thinker, lay at the point of death and his relatives insisted on bringing in a man of God to convert him before he died. The interview lasted so long that those who were waiting outside began to have hopes. At last the door of the sick-chamber opened. The free-thinker had not been converted; but the pastor went away insured.

Observations On Transference-Love

2516

If the patient’s advances were returned it would be a great triumph for her, but a complete defeat for the treatment. She would have succeeded in what all patients strive for in analysis - she would have succeeded in acting out, in repeating in real life, what she ought only to have remembered, to have reproduced as psychical material and to have kept within the sphere of psychical events.¹ In the further course of the love-relationship she would bring out all the inhibitions and pathological reactions of her erotic life, without there being any possibility of correcting them; and the distressing episode would end in remorse and a great strengthening of her propensity to repression. The love-relationship in fact destroys the patient’s susceptibility to influence from analytic treatment. A combination of the two would be an impossibility.

It is, therefore, just as disastrous for the analysis if the patient’s craving for love is gratified as if it is suppressed. The course the analyst must pursue is neither of these; it is one for which there is no model in real life. He must take care not to steer away from the transference-love, or to repulse it or to make it distasteful to the patient; but he must just as resolutely withhold any response to it. He must keep firm hold of the transference-love, but treat it as something unreal, as a situation which has to be gone through in the treatment and traced back to its unconscious origins and which must assist in bringing all that is most deeply hidden in the patient’s erotic life into her consciousness and therefore under her control. The more plainly the analyst lets it be seen that he is proof against every temptation, the more readily will he be able to extract from the situation its analytic content. The patient, whose sexual repression is of course not yet removed but merely pushed into the background, will then feel safe enough to allow all her preconditions for loving, all the phantasies springing from her sexual desires, all the detailed characteristics of her state of being in love, to come to light; and from these she will herself open the way to the infantile roots of her love.

There is, it is true, one class of women with whom this attempt to preserve the erotic transference for the purposes of analytic work without satisfying it will not succeed. These are women of elemental passionateness who tolerate no surrogates. They are children of nature who refuse to accept the psychical in place of the material, who, in the poet’s words, are accessible only to ‘the logic of soup, with dumplings for arguments’. With such people one has the choice between returning their love or else bringing down upon oneself the full enmity of a woman scorned. In neither case can one safeguard the interests of the treatment. One has to withdraw, unsuccessful; and all one can do is to turn the problem over in one’s mind of how it is that a capacity for neurosis is joined with such an intractable need for love.

¹ See the preceding paper.

Observations On Transference-Love

2517

Many analysts will no doubt be agreed on the method by which other women, who are less violent in their love, can be gradually made to adopt the analytic attitude. What we do, above all, is to stress to the patient the unmistakable element of resistance in this ‘love’. Genuine love, we say, would make her docile and intensify her readiness to solve the problems of her case, simply because the man she was in love with expected it of her. In such a case she would gladly choose the road to completion of the treatment, in order to acquire value in the doctor’s eyes and to prepare herself for real life, where this feeling of love could find a proper place. Instead of this, we point out, she is showing a stubborn and rebellious spirit, she has thrown up all interest in her treatment, and clearly feels no respect for the doctor’s well-founded convictions. She is thus bringing out a resistance under the guise of being in love with him; and in addition to this she has no compunction in placing him in a cleft stick. For if he refuses her love, as his duty and his understanding compel him to do, she can play the part of a woman scorned, and then withdraw from his therapeutic efforts out of revenge and resentment, exactly as she is now doing out of her ostensible love.

As a second argument against the genuineness of this love we advance the fact that it exhibits not a single new feature arising from the present situation, but is entirely composed of repetitions and copies of earlier reactions, including infantile ones. We undertake to prove this by a detailed analysis of the patient’s behaviour in love.

If the necessary amount of patience is added to these arguments, it is usually possible to overcome the difficult situation and to continue the work with a love which has been moderated or transformed; the work then aims at uncovering the patient’s infantile object-choice and the phantasies woven round it.

Observations On Transference-Love

2518

I should now like, however, to examine these arguments with a critical eye and to raise the question whether, in putting them forward to the patient, we are really telling the truth, of whether we are not resorting in our desperation to concealments and misrepresentations. In other words: can we truly say that the state of being in love which becomes manifest in analytic treatment is not a real one?

I think we have told the patient the truth, but not the whole truth regardless of the consequences. Of our two arguments the first is the stronger. The part played by resistance in transference-love is unquestionable and very considerable. Nevertheless the resistance did not, after all, create this love; it finds it ready to hand, makes use of it and aggravates its manifestations. Nor is the genuineness of the phenomenon disproved by the resistance. The second argument is far weaker. It is true that the love consists of new editions of old traits and that it repeats infantile reactions. But this is the essential character of every state of being in love. There is no such state which does not reproduce infantile prototypes. It is precisely from this infantile determination that it receives its compulsive character, verging as it does on the pathological. Transference-love has perhaps a degree less of freedom than the love which appears in ordinary life and is called normal; it displays its dependence on the infantile pattern more clearly and is less adaptable and capable of modification; but that is all, and not what is essential.

By what other signs can the genuineness of a love be recognized? By its efficacy, its serviceability in achieving the aim of love? In this respect transference-love seems to be second to none; one has the impression that one could obtain anything from it.

Let us sum up, therefore. We have no right to dispute that the state of being in love which makes its appearance in the course of analytic treatment has the character of a ‘genuine’ love. If it seems so lacking in normality, this is sufficiently explained by the fact that being in love in ordinary life, outside analysis, is also more similar to abnormal than to normal mental phenomena. Nevertheless, transference-love is characterized by certain features which ensure it a special position. In the first place, it is provoked by the analytic situation; secondly, it is greatly intensified by the resistance, which dominates the situation; and thirdly, it is lacking to a high degree in a regard for reality, is less sensible, less concerned about consequences and more blind in its valuation of the loved person than we are prepared to admit in the case of normal love. We should not forget, however, that these departures from the norm constitute precisely what is essential about being in love.

Observations On Transference-Love

2519

As regards the analyst’s line of action, it is the first of these three features of transference-love which is the decisive factor. He has evoked this love by instituting analytic treatment in order to cure the neurosis. For him, it is an unavoidable consequence of a medical situation, like the exposure of a patient’s body or the imparting of a vital secret. It is therefore plain to him that he must not derive any personal advantage from it. The patient’s willingness makes no difference; it merely throws the whole responsibility on the analyst himself. Indeed, as he must know, the patient had been prepared for no other mechanism of cure. After all the difficulties have been successfully overcome, she will often confess to having had an anticipatory phantasy at the time when she entered the treatment, to the effect that if she behaved well she would be rewarded at the end by the doctor’s affection.

For the doctor, ethical motives unite with the technical ones to restrain him from giving the patient his love. The aim he has to keep in view is that this woman, whose capacity for love is impaired by infantile fixations, should gain free command over a function which is of such inestimable importance to her; that she should not, however, dissipate it in the treatment, but keep it ready for the time when, after her treatment, the demands of real life make themselves felt. He must not stage the scene of a dog-race in which the prize was to be a garland of sausages but which some humorist spoilt by throwing a single sausage on to the track. The result was, of course, that the dogs threw themselves upon it and forgot all about the race and about the garland that was luring them to victory in the far distance. I do not mean to say that it is always easy for the doctor to keep within the limits prescribed by ethics and technique. Those who are still youngish and not yet bound by strong ties may in particular find it a hard task. Sexual love is undoubtedly one of the chief things in life, and the union of mental and bodily satisfaction in the enjoyment of love is one of its culminating peaks. Apart from a few queer fanatics, all the world knows this and conducts its life accordingly; science alone is too delicate to admit it. Again, when a woman sues for love, to reject and refuse is a distressing part for a man to play; and, in spite of neurosis and resistance, there is an incomparable fascination in a woman of high principles who confesses her passion. It is not a patient’s crudely sensual desires which constitute the temptation. These are more likely to repel, and it will call for all the doctor’s tolerance if he is to regard them as natural phenomenon. It is rather, perhaps, a woman’s subtler and aim-inhibited wishes which bring with them the danger of making a man forget his technique and his medical task for the sake of a fine experience.

Observations On Transference-Love

2520

And yet it is quite out of the question for the analyst to give way. However highly he may prize love he must prize even more highly the opportunity for helping his patient over a decisive stage in her life. She has to learn from him to overcome the pleasure principle, to give up a satisfaction which lies to hand but is socially not acceptable, in favour of a more distant one, which is perhaps altogether uncertain, but which is both psychologically and socially unimpeachable. To achieve this overcoming, she has to be led through the primal period of her mental development and on that path she has to acquire the extra piece of mental freedom which distinguishes conscious mental activity - in the systematic sense - from unconscious.

The analytic psychotherapist thus has a threefold battle to wage - in his own mind against the forces which seek to drag him down from the analytic level; outside the analysis, against opponents who dispute the importance he attaches to the sexual instinctual forces and hinder him from making use of them in his scientific technique; and inside the analysis, against his patients, who at first behave like opponents but later on reveal the overvaluation of sexual life which dominates them, and who try to make him captive to their socially untamed passion.

The lay public, about whose attitude to psycho-analysis I spoke at the outset, will doubtless seize upon this discussion of transference-love as another opportunity for directing the attention of the world to the serious danger of this therapeutic method. The psycho-analyst knows that he is working with highly explosive forces and that he needs to proceed with as much caution and conscientiousness as a chemist. But when have chemists ever been forbidden, because of the danger, from handling explosive substances, which are indispensable, on account of their effects? It is remarkable that psycho-analysis has to win for itself afresh all the liberties which have long since been accorded to other medical activities. I am certainly not in favour of giving up the harmless methods of treatment. For many cases they are sufficient, and, when all is said, human society has no more use for the furor sanandi¹ than for any other fanaticism. But to believe that the psychoneuroses are to be conquered by operating with harmless little remedies is grossly to under-estimate those disorders both as to their origin and their practical importance. No; in medical practice there will always be room for the ‘ferrum’ and the ‘ignis’ side by side with the ‘medicina’; and in the same way we shall never be able to do without a strictly regular, undiluted psycho-analysis which is not afraid to handle the most dangerous mental impulses and to obtain mastery over them for the benefit of the patient.

¹ [’Passion for curing people.’]

2521

DREAMS IN FOLKLORE

(FREUD AND OPPENHEIM)

(1957 [1911])

2522

Intentionally left blank

2523

DREAMS IN FOLKLORE

By Sigm. Freud and Prof. Ernst Oppenheim (Vienna)

‘Celsi praetereunt austera poemata Ramnes.’¹

Persius, Satirae.

One of us (O.) in his studies of folklore has made two observations with regard to the dreams narrated there which seem to him worth communicating. Firstly, that the symbolism employed in these dreams coincides completely with that accepted by psycho-analysis, and secondly, that a number of these dreams are understood by the common people in the same way as they would be interpreted by psycho-analysis - that is, not as premonitions about a still unrevealed future, but as the fulfilment of wishes, the satisfaction of needs which arise during the state of sleep. Certain peculiarities of these, usually indecent, dreams, which are told as comic anecdotes, have encouraged the second of us (Fr.) to attempt an interpretation of them which has made them seem more serious and more deserving of attention.

I

PENIS-SYMBOLISM IN DREAMS OCCURRING IN FOLKLORE

The dream which we introduce first, although it contains no symbolic representations, sounds almost like ridicule of the prophetic and a plea in favour of the psychological interpretation of dreams.

A DREAM-INTERPRETATION²

A girl got up from her bed and told her mother that she had had a most strange dream.

‘Well, what did you dream, then?’ asked her mother.

‘How shall I tell you? I don’t know myself what it was - some sort of long and red and blunted thing.’

‘Long means a road,’ said her mother reflectively, ‘a long road; red means joy, but I don’t know what blunted can mean.’

The girl’s father, who was getting dressed meanwhile, and was listening to everything that the mother and daughter were saying, muttered at this, more or less to himself: ‘It sounds rather like my cock.’³

¹ [‘Haughty persons in authority disdain poems that are lacking in charm.’]

² ‘Sudslavische Volksüberlieferungen, die sich auf den Geschlechtsverkehr beziehen [Southern Slav Folk Traditions concerning Sexual Intercourse]’, collected and elucidated by F. S. Krauss, Anthropophyteia, 7, 450, No. 820.

³ [Addition by F. S. Krauss:] See Anthropophyteia, 1 , 4, No. 5. Cf. further the German Jewish proverb: ‘The goose dreams of maize and the betrothed girl of a prick.’

Dreams In Folklore

2524

It is very much more convenient to study dream-symbolism in folklore than in actual dreams. Dreams are obliged to conceal things and only surrender their secrets to interpretation; these comic anecdotes, however, which are disguised as dreams, are intended as communications, meant to give pleasure to the person who tells them as well as to the listener, and therefore the interpretation is added quite unashamedly to the symbol. These stories delight in stripping off the veiling symbols.

In the following quatrain the penis appears as a sceptre:

Last night I dreamt

I was King of the land,

And how jolly I was

With a prick in my hand.¹

Now compare with this the following examples in which the same symbolism is employed outside a dream.

I love a little lass

The prettiest I’ve seen,

I’ll put a sceptre in your hand

And you shall be a queen.²

‘Remember, my boy’, said Napoleon,

The Emperor of renown,

‘So long as the prick is the sceptre

The  will be the crown.’³

A different variant of this symbolic exaltation of the genitals is favoured in the imagination of artists. A fine etching by Félicien Rops,4 bearing the title ‘Tout est grand chez les rois’ [’Everything about kings is great’], shows the naked figure of a king with the features of the Roi Soleil, whose gigantic penis, which rises to arm level, itself wears a crown. The right hand balances a sceptre, while the left clasps a large orb, which by reason of a central cleft achieves an unmistakable resemblance to another part of the body which is the object of erotic desires.5 The index finger of the left hand is inserted into this groove.

¹ ‘Niederösterreichische Schnadahüpfeln’, collected by Dr. H. Rollett. Anthropophyteia, 5, 151, No. 2.

² From the Austrian Alps, Kryptadia, 4, 111, No. 160.

³ From Gaming in Lower Austria, Anthropophyteia, 3, 190, No. 85, 4.

4 Rops, 1905, Plate 20.

5 [Marginal Note by Oppenheim:] Like the orb in Rops’s picture, a Roman relief in the Amphitheatre at Nîmes shows an egg transformed into a symbol of the female sexual organs by means of a similar groove. Here, too, the male counterpart is not absent. It appears as a phallus strangely furbished up as a bird which sits on four eggs of the kind described - one might say brooding them.

Dreams In Folklore

2525

In the Silesian folksong that follows, the dream is only invented in order to hide a different occurrence. The penis appears here as a worm (‘fat earthworm’), which has crawled into the girl, and at the right time crawls out again as a little worm (baby).¹

SONG OF THE EARTHWORMS²

Asleep on the grass one day a young lass

Susanna of passion was dreaming;

A soft smile did play round her nose as she lay

While she thought of her swain and his scheming.

Then - dream full of fear! - it swift did appear

That her lover so handsome and charming

Had become as she slept a fat earthworm which crept

Right inside. What could be more alarming?

Full of dread in her heart she awoke with a start

And swift to the village she hied her

And tearfully told all the folk young and old

That an earthworm had crawled up inside her.

Her wailing and tears came at last to the ears

Of her mother who cursed and swore roundly;

With bodings of gloom she repaired to her room

And examined the maiden most soundly.

For the earthworm she sought, but alas! could find nought -

An unfortunate thing which dismayed her.

So she hurried away without further delay

To ask the wise woman to aid her.

With cunning she laid out the cards for the maid

And said: ‘We must wait a while longer.

‘I have questioned the Knave, but no answer he gave;

‘Perhaps the Red King will prove stronger.

‘'Tis the news that you fear which the Red King³ speaks clear:

‘The worm really crawled in the girlie;

‘But as everything bides its due times and its tides

‘To catch it 'tis yet much too early.’

When Susanna had heard the lugubrious word

She went to her chamber full sadly;

Till at last there appeared the dread hour that she feared

And out crept the little worm gladly.

So be warned, every lass: do not dream on the grass,

But let poor Susanna’s fate guide you,

Or - as you too may know, to your grief and your woe -

A fat earthworm will creep up inside you.4

The same symbolization of the penis by a worm is familiar from numerous obscene jokes.

¹ [‘Würmchen’ (‘little worm’) is a common German expression for ‘baby’.]

² ‘Schlesische Volkslieder [Silesian Folksongs]’, transcribed by Dr. von Waldheim, Anthropophyteia, 7, 369.

³ [’Röter Konig’ (‘Red King’) is an Austrian slang term for ‘menstruation’.]

4 [Footnote by F. S. Krauss:] Cf. p. 359 and the Southern Slav version in Krauss, ‘Die Zeugung in Sitte, Brauch und Glauben der Südslaven [Procreation in the Customs, Usages and Beliefs of the Southern Slavs]’, Kryptadia, 6, 259-269 and 375 f.

Dreams In Folklore

2526

The dream which now follows symbolizes the penis by a dagger: the woman who dreams it is pulling at a dagger in order to stab herself, when she is awakened by her husband and exhorted not to tear his member off.

A BAD DREAM

A woman dreamt that things had got to such a pitch that they had nothing to eat before the holiday and could not buy anything either. Her husband had drunk up all the money. There was only a lottery ticket left and even this they really ought to pawn. But the man was still keeping it back, for the draw was to be on the second of January. He said: ‘Wife, now tomorrow is the draw, let the ticket wait a while longer. If we don’t win, then we must sell the ticket or pawn it.’ - ‘Well, the devil take it, all you’ve bought is worry, and you’ve got about as much out of it as there is milk in a billy-goat.’ So the next day arrived. See, along came the newspaper man. He stopped him, took a copy and began to look down the list. He ran his eyes over the figures, he looked through every column, his number was not among them. He did not trust his eyes, looked through once again and this time sure enough he came upon the number of his ticket. The number was the same, but the number of the series did not fit. Once again he did not trust himself and thought to himself: ‘This must be a mistake. Wait a bit, I will go to the bank and make certain one way or the other.’ So he went there with his head hanging. On the way he met a second newspaper man. He bought another copy of a second paper, scanned the list and found the number of his ticket straight away. The number of the series, too, was the same as the one which included his ticket. The prize of 5,000 roubles fell to his lot. He burst into the bank, rushed up and asked them to pay out on the winning ticket at once. The banker said that they could not pay out yet, only in a week or two. He began to beg and pray: ‘Please be kind, give me one thousand at least, I can get the rest later!’ The banker refused, but advised him to apply to the private individual who had procured the winning lottery ticket for him. What was to be done now? Just then a little Jew appeared as though he had sprung up from the ground. He smelt a bargain and made him an offer to pay over the money at once, though instead of 5,000 only 4,000. The fifth thousand would be his own share. The man was delighted at this good fortune and decided to give the Jew the thousand, just so that he could get the money on the spot. He took the money from the Jew and handed over the ticket to him. Then he went home. On the way he went into an inn, swallowed a quick glass and from there went straight home. He walked along grinning and humming a little song. His wife saw him through the window and thought: ‘Now he’s certainly sold the lottery ticket; you can see he’s cheerful, he’s probably paid a visit to the inn and got himself drunk because he was feeling miserable.’ Then he came indoors, put the money on the kitchen table and went to his wife to bring her the good news that he had won and had got the money. While they were hugging and kissing one another to their heart’s content because they were so happy, their little three-year-old daughter grabbed the money and threw it into the stove. Then they came along to count the money and it was no longer there. The last bundle of notes was already on fire. In a rage the man seized hold of the little girl by the legs and dashed her against the stove. She dropped dead. Disaster stared him in the face, there was no escaping Siberia now. He seized his revolver and bang! he shot himself in the chest and dropped dead. Horrified by such a disaster, the woman snatched up a dagger and was going to stab herself. She tried to pull it out of the sheath but could not manage it however she tried. Then she heard a voice as though from Heaven: ‘Enough, let go! What are you doing?’ She woke up and saw that she was not pulling at a dagger but at her husband’s tool, and he was saying: ‘Enough, let go or you’ll tear it off!’

Dreams In Folklore

2527

The representation of the penis as a weapon, cutting knife,¹ dagger, etc., is familiar to us from the anxiety dreams of abstinent women in particular and also lies at the root of numerous phobias in neurotic people. The complicated disguise of this present dream, however, demands that we should make an attempt to clarify our understanding of it by a psycho-analytic interpretation based on interpretations already carried out. In doing so we are not overlooking the fact that we shall be going beyond the material presented in the folk tale itself and that consequently our conclusions will lose in certainty.

Since this dream ends in an act of sexual aggression carried out by the woman as a dream-action, this suggests that we should take the state of material need in the content of the dream as a substitute for a state of sexual need. Only the most extreme libidinal compulsion can at all justify such aggressiveness on the part of a woman. Other pieces of the dream-content point in a quite definite and different direction. The blame for the state of need is ascribed to the man. (He had drunk up all the money.)² The dream goes on to get rid of the man and the child and skilfully evades the sense of guilt attached to these wishes by causing the child to be killed by the man who then commits suicide out of remorse. Since this is the content of the dream we are led to conclude from many analogous instances that here is a woman who is not satisfied by her husband and who in her phantasies is longing for another marriage. It is all one for the interpretation whether we like to regard this dissatisfaction of the dreamer’s as a permanent state of want or merely as the expression of a temporary one. The lottery, which in the dream brought about a short-lived state of happiness, could perhaps be understood as a symbolic reference to marriage. This symbol has not yet been identified with certainty in psycho-analytic work, but people are in the habit of saying that marriage is a game of chance, that in marriage one either draws the winning lot or a blank.³ The numbers, which have been enormously magnified^4 by the dream-work, could well correspond in that case to the number of repetitions of the satisfying act that are wished for. We are thus made aware that the act of pulling the man’s member not only has the meaning of libidinal provocation but also the additional meaning of contemptuous criticism, as though the woman wanted to pull the member off - as the man correctly assumed - because it was no good, did not fulfil its obligations.

We should not have lingered over the interpretation of this dream and exploited it beyond its overt symbolism were it not that other dreams which likewise end in a dream-action demonstrate that the common people have recognized here a typical situation which, wherever it occurs, is susceptible to the same explanation. (Cf. below p. 2538.)

¹ [Footnote by Oppenheim:] A knife is habitually carried by a burglar [‘Einbrecher’, literally, ‘someone who breaks in’]. The kind of breaking-in intended is shown by a proverbial phrase from Solingen, reported in Anthropophyteia, 5, 182: ‘After marriage comes a burglary [breaking-in].’ Cf. the Berlin slang term ‘Brecheisen’ [‘jemmy’, literally, ‘breaking-iron’] for ‘a powerful penis’ (Anthropophyteia, 7, 3).

² [Marginal Note by Oppenheim:] Cf. further below our remarks on ‘marriage portion’ as a term for ‘penis’ and ‘purse’ for ‘testes’ and also in comparisons between virility and wealth and between the thirst for gold and libido.

³ Another dream about a lottery in this little collection confirms this suggestion.

4 Psycho-analytic experience shows that noughts appended to numbers in dreams can be ignored in interpretation.

Dreams In Folklore

2528

II

FAECES-SYMBOLISM AND RELATED DREAM-ACTIONS

Psycho-analysis has taught us that in the very earliest period of childhood faeces is a highly prized substance, in relation to which coprophilic instincts find satisfaction. With the repression of these instincts, which is accelerated as much as possible by up-bringing, this substance falls into contempt and then serves conscious purposes as a means of expressing disdain and scorn. Certain forms of mental activity such as joking are still able to make the obstructed source of pleasure accessible for a brief moment, and thus show how much of the esteem in which human beings once held their faeces still remains preserved in the unconscious. The most important residue of this former esteem is, however, that all the interest which the child has had in faeces is transferred in the adult on to another material which he learns in life to set above almost everything else - gold.¹ How old this connection between excrement and gold is can be seen from an observation by Jeremias:² gold, according to ancient oriental mythology, is the excrement of hell.³

In dreams in folklore gold is seen in the most unambiguous way to be a symbol of faeces. If the sleeper feels a need to defaecate, he dreams of gold, of treasure. The disguise in the dream, which is designed to mislead him into satisfying his need in bed, usually makes the pile of faeces serve as a sign to mark the place where the treasure is to be found; that is to say, the dream - as though by means of endopsychic perception - states outright, even if in a reversed form, that gold is a sign or a symbol for faeces.

A simple treasure- or defaecation-dream of this kind is the following one, related in the Facetiae of Poggio.

¹ Cf. ‘Character and Anal Erotism’ (1908b),

² Jeremias (1904, 115 n.).

³ [Marginal Note by Oppenheim:] Similarly in Mexico.

Dreams In Folklore

2529

DREAM-GOLD¹

A certain man related in company that he had dreamt he had found gold. Thereupon another man capped it with this story. (What follows is quoted verbatim.)

‘My neighbour once dreamt that the Devil had led him to a field to dig for gold; but he found none. Then the Devil said: "It is there for sure, only you cannot dig it up now; but take note of the place so that you may recognize it again by yourself."

‘When the man asked that the place should be made recognizable by some sign, the Devil suggested: "Just shit on it, then it will not occur to anybody that there is gold lying hidden here and you will be able to recognize the exact place." The man did so and then immediately awoke and felt that he had done a great heap in his bed.’

(We give the conclusion in summary.) As he was fleeing from the house, he put on a cap in which a cat had done its business during the same night. He had to wash his head and his hair. ‘Thus his dream-gold was turned to filth.’

Tarasevsky (1909, 194, No. 232) reports a similar dream from the Ukraine in which a peasant receives some treasure from the Devil, to whom he has lit a candle, and puts a pile of faeces to mark the place.²

We need not be surprised if the Devil appears in these two dreams as a bestower of treasure and a seducer, for the Devil - himself an angel expelled from Paradise - is certainly nothing else than the personification of the repressed unconscious instinctual life.³

The motives behind these simple comic anecdotes about dreams appear to be exhausted in a cynical delight in dirt and a malicious satisfaction over the dreamer’s embarrassment. But in other dreams about treasure the form taken by the dream is confused in all sorts of ways and includes various constituents the origin and significance of which we may well investigate. For we shall not regard even these dream-contents, which are intended to provide a rationalistic justification for obtaining the satisfaction, as entirely arbitrary and meaningless.

In the two next examples, the dream is not ascribed to a person sleeping alone but to one of two sleepers - two men - who share a bed. As a result of the dream, the dreamer dirties his bedfellow.

¹ Poggio (1905, No. 130).

² [Addition by Oppenheim:] Attention is there drawn to parallels in Anthropophyteia, 4, 342-345, Nos. 580-581.

³ ‘Character and Anal Erotism’ (1908b).

Dreams In Folklore

2530

A LIVELY DREAM¹

Two travelling journeymen arrived weary at an inn and asked for a night’s lodging. ‘Yes,’ said the host, ‘if you are not afraid, you can have a bedroom, but it’s a haunted one. If you want to stay, that’s all right, and the night will cost you nothing as far as sleeping goes.’ The lads asked one another: ‘Are you frightened?’ ‘No.’ Very well, so they seized another litre of wine and went to the room assigned to them.

They had hardly been lying down any time when the door opened and a white figure glided through the room. One fellow said to the other: ‘Didn’t you see something?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, why didn’t you say anything?’ ‘Just wait, it’s going to come through the room again.’ Sure enough, the figure glided in again. One of the lads jumped up swiftly, but swifter still the ghost glided out through the crack in the door. The lad, by no means slow, pulled open the door and saw the figure, a beautiful woman, already half way down the stairs. ‘What are you doing there?’ the lad shouted out. The figure stood still, turned round and spoke: ‘Now I am released. I have long had to wander. As a reward take the treasure which lies just at the spot where you are standing.’ The lad was as much frightened as delighted, and in order to mark the place he lifted up his shirt and planted a fine pile, for he thought that no one would wipe out that mark. But just as he was at his happiest, he felt someone suddenly seize hold of him. ‘You dirty swine,’ someone bellowed in his ear, ‘you’re shitting on my shirt.’ At these coarse words the happy dreamer awoke from his fairy-tale good fortune to find himself; roughly hurled out of bed.

HE SHAT ON THE GRAVE

Two gentlemen arrived at a hotel, ate their evening meal and drank and at last wanted to go to bed. They asked the host if he would show them to a room. As the rooms were all occupied the host gave up his own bed to them, which they were both to sleep in, and he would soon find a place for himself to sleep somewhere else. The two men lay down in the same bed. A spirit appeared to one of them in a dream, lit a candle and led him to the churchyard. The lychgate opened and the spirit with the candle in its hand and the man behind walked up to the grave of a maiden. When they had reached the grave, the candle suddenly went out. ‘What shall I do now? How shall I tell which is the maiden’s grave to-morrow, when it is day?’ he asked in the dream. Then an idea came to his rescue, he pulled down his drawers and shat on the grave. When he had finished shitting, his comrade, who was sleeping beside him, struck him first on one cheek and then on the other: ‘What! You’d shit right in my face?’

¹ F. Wernert, ‘Deutsche Bauernerzählungen gesammelt im Ober- und Unterelsass [German Peasant-Tales, Collected in Upper and Lower Alsace]’, Anthropophyteia, 3, 72, No. 15.

Dreams In Folklore

2531

In these two dreams, in place of the Devil other super, natural figures appear, namely ghosts - that is, spirits of dead people. ‘the spirit in the second dream actually leads the dreamer to the churchyard, where he is to mark a particular grave by defaecating on it. A part of this situation is very easy to understand. The sleeper knows that the bed is not the proper place for satisfying his need; hence in the dream he causes himself to be led away from it and procures a person who shows his hidden urge the right way to another place where he is permitted to satisfy his need, indeed is required by the circumstances to do so. The spirit in the second dream actually makes use of a candle when leading him, as a servant would do if he was conducting a stranger to the W.C. at night when it was dark. But why are these representatives of the demand for a change of scene, which the lazy sleeper wants to avoid at all costs, such uncanny individuals as ghosts and spirits of dead people? Why does the spirit in the second dream lead the way to a churchyard as if to desecrate a grave? After all, these: elements seem to have nothing to do with the urge to defaecate and the symbolization of faeces by gold. There is an indication; in them of an anxiety which could perhaps be traced back to an: effort to suppress the achievement of satisfaction in bed; but that anxiety would not explain the specific nature of the dream-content - its reference to death. We will refrain from making an interpretation at this point and will stress further, as being in need of explanation, the fact that in both these situations, where two men are sleeping together, the uncanny element of the ghostly guide is associated with a woman. The spirit in the first dream is early on revealed as a beautiful woman who feels she is now released, and the spirit in the second dream leads the way to the grave of a girl, on which the distinguishing mark is to be placed.

Dreams In Folklore

2532

Let us turn for further enlightenment to some other defaecation-dreams of this kind, in which the bedfellows are no longer two men but a man and a woman, a married couple. The satisfying action accomplished in sleep as a result of the dream seems here particularly repellent, but perhaps for that very reason conceals a special meaning.

First, however, we will introduce a dream (on account of its connection in content with those that follow) which does not strictly speaking fit in with the plan we have just put forward It is incomplete, inasmuch as the element of the dreamer’s dirtying his bedfellow, his wife, is absent. On the other hand, the connection between the urge to defaecate and the fear of death is extremely plain. The peasant, who is described as married, dreams that he is struck by lightning and that his soul flies up to Heaven. Up there he begs to be allowed to return once more to the earth in order to see his wife and children, obtains permission to transform himself into a spider and to let himself down on the thread spun by himself. The thread is too short and the effort to express still more thread out of his body results in defaecation.

DREAM AND REALITY¹

A peasant lay in bed and had a dream. He saw himself in the field with his oxen, ploughing. Then suddenly down came a flash of lightning and struck him dead. Then he felt quite clearly his soul floating upwards until at last it reached Heaven. Peter stood by the entrance gates and was going to send the peasant in without more ado. But he begged to be allowed down to earth once more, so that he could at least take leave of his wife and his children. But Peter said that would not do, and once a man was in Heaven he was not allowed to return to the world. At this the peasant wept and begged pitifully, until at last Peter gave way. Now there was only one possible way for the peasant to see his family again and that was for Peter to change him into an animal and send him down. So the peasant was turned into a spider and span a long thread on which he let himself down. When he had arrived just over his homestead, at about the level of the chimneys, and could already see his children playing in the meadow, he noticed to his horror that he could not spin any further. Naturally his fear was great, for of course he wanted to get right down to the earth. So he squeezed and he squeezed to make the thread longer. He squeezed with all his might and main - there was a loud noise - and the peasant awoke. Something very human had happened to him while he slept.

Here we encounter spun thread as a new symbol for evacuated faeces, although psycho-analysis furnishes us with no counterpart to this symbolization but on the contrary attributes another symbolic meaning to thread. This contradiction will be settled later on.

¹ Dr. von Waldheim, ‘Skatologische Erzählungen aus Preussisch-Schlesien [Scatologic Tales from Prussian Silesia]’, Anthropophyteia, 6, 431, No. 9.

Dreams In Folklore

2533

The next dream, richly elaborated and pungently told, might be described as a ‘sociable’ one; it ends with the wife’s being dirtied. Its points of agreement with the previous dream are, however, quite striking. The peasant is, it is true, not dead, but he finds himself in Heaven, wants to return to the earth and experiences the same difficulty over ‘spinning’ a sufficiently long thread to let himself down on. However, he does not make this thread for himself as a spider out of his own body, but in a less fantastic way out of everything that he can fasten together, and as the thread is still not long enough to reach, the little angels actually advise him to shit and to lengthen the rope with the turds.

THE PEASANT’S ASSUMPTION TO HEAVEN¹

A peasant had the following dream. He had heard that wheat in Heaven was standing at a high price. So he thought he would like to take his wheat there. He loaded his cart, harnessed the horse and set out. He journeyed a long way till he saw the road to Heaven and followed it. Thus he came to the gates of Heaven, and look! they stood open. He charged straight forward so as to drive right inside, but he had scarcely headed the cart towards them when - crash! the gates banged shut. Then he began to beg: ‘Let me in, please be kind!’ But the angels did not let him in and said he had come late. Then he saw that there was no business to be done here; there was just nothing for him, and so he turned round. But look! the road he had travelled on had vanished. What was he to do? He addressed himself to the angels again. ‘Little dears, please be kind and take me back to the earth, if it’s possible! give me a road so that I can get home with my horse and cart!’ But the angels said: ‘No, child of man, your horse and cart stay here and you can go down how you please.’ ‘But how shall I let myself down then, I haven’t any rope?’ ‘Just look for something to let yourself down with.’ So he took the reins, the bridle and the bit, fastened them all together and began to let himself down. He crawled and he crawled and he looked down - it was still a long way to the earth. He crawled back again and lengthened the rope he had joined together by adding the girth and the traces. Then he began to climb down again and it still did not reach the earth. So he fastened on the shafts and the body of the cart. It was still too short. What was he to do next? He racked his brains and then he thought: ‘Ah, I’ll lengthen it with my coat and my breeches and my shirt and then with my belt.’ And that is what he did, joined everything together and climbed on. When he had reached the end of the belt it was still a long way to the earth. Then he did not know what to do; he had nothing more to fasten on and it was dangerous to jump down: he might break his neck. He begged the angels again: ‘Be kind, take me down to the earth!’ The angels said: ‘Shit, and the muck will make a rope.’ So he shat and he shat almost half an hour until he had nothing left to shit with. It made a long rope and he climbed down it. He climbed and he climbed and reached the end of the rope, but it was still a long way to the earth. Then he began once more to beg the angels to take him down to the earth. But the angels said: ‘Now, child of man, piss and it will make a silken thread.’ The peasant pissed and he pissed, on and on, till he could do no more. He saw that it really had turned into a silken thread and he climbed on. He climbed and he climbed and he reached the end of it, and look, it did not reach to the earth, it still needed one and a half or two fathoms. He begged the angels again to take him down. But the angels said: ‘No, brother, there is no help for you now; just jump down!’ The peasant dangled undecided; he could not find the courage to jump down. But then he saw that there was no other was out left to him, and bump! instead of jumping down from Heaven he came flying down from the stove and only came to his senses in the middle of the room. Then he woke up and shouted: ‘ Wife, wife, where are you?’ His wife woke up, she heard the din and said: ‘The Devil take you, have you gone mad?’ She felt round about her and saw the mess: her husband had shat and pissed all over her. She began to rate and to scold him roundly. The peasant said: ‘What are you screaming about? There’s vexation enough anyway. The horse is lost, stayed behind in Heaven, and I was almost done for. God be thanked that I am alive at least!’ ‘What rubbish you’re talking. You’ve had much too much to drink. The horse is in the stable and you were on the stove, and dirtied me all over and then jumped down.’ Then the man collected himself. Only then did it dawn on him that he had merely dreamt it all; and then he told his wife the dream, how he had journeyed up to Heaven and how from there he came down to the earth again.

¹ Tarasevsky (1909, 196).

Dreams In Folklore

2534

At this point, however, psycho-analysis forces on our attention an interpretation which changes our whole view of this class of dreams. Extensible objects, so the experience of interpreting dreams tells us, are ordinarily symbols of erection.¹ In both these anecdotes of dreams the emphasis lies on the element of the thread’s refusing to get long enough, and the anxiety in the dream is also attached to this same element. Thread moreover, like all things analogous to it (cord, rope, twine etc.), is a symbol of semen.² The peasant, then, is striving to produce an erection and only when this is unsuccessful does he resort to defaecation. All at once a sexual need comes to view in these dreams behind the excremental one.

This sexual need is, however, much better adapted to explain the remaining constituents of the dream’s content. We are bound to admit, if we are ready to assume that these fictitious dreams are essentially correctly constructed, that the dream-action with which they end must have a meaning and must be one intended by the latent thoughts of the dreamer. If the dreamer defaecates over his wife at the end of it, then the whole dream must have this as its aim and provide the reason for this outcome. It can signify nothing else but an insult to the wife, or, strictly speaking, a rejection of her. It is then easy to establish a connection between this and the deeper significance of the anxiety expressed in the dream.

The situation from which this last dream grows can be construed according to these suggestions as follows. The sleeper is overcome by a strong erotic need which is indicated in fairly clear symbols at the beginning of the dream. (He had heard that wheat - probably equivalent to semen - was standing at a high price. He charged forward in order to drive with his horse and cart - genital symbols - through the open gates of Heaven.) But this libidinal impulse probably applies to an unattainable object. The gates close, he gives up his intention and wants to return to the earth. But his wife, who lies by him, does not attract him; he exerts himself in vain to get an erection for her. The wish to discard her in order to replace her by another and better woman is in the infantile sense a death-wish. When someone cherishes such wishes in his unconscious against a person who is nevertheless really loved, they are transformed for him into fear of death, fear for his own life. Hence the presence in these dreams of the state of being dead, the assumption to Heaven, the hypocritical longing to see wife and children again. But the disappointed sexual libido finds release along the path of regression in the excremental wishful impulse, which abuses and soils the unserviceable sexual object.

¹ [Marginal Note by Oppenheim:] In a story which comes from Picardy, pushing a ring down on a finger serves as a symbolic way of depicting an erection. The lower the ring goes, the longer the penis becomes - the analogy naturally has a magical force. (Kryptadia, 1, No. 32.)

² Cf. Stekel, 1911a.

Dreams In Folklore

2535

If this particular dream makes an interpretation of this kind plausible, then, in view of the peculiarities of the material which the dream-contains, we can only succeed in proving the interpretation by applying the same one to a whole succession of dreams with an allied content. With this aim in view, let us turn back to the dreams mentioned earlier, where we find the situation of a sleeper who has a man as his bedfellow. The connection in which the woman appears in these dreams now acquires an added significance in retrospect. The sleeper, overcome by a libidinal impulse, rejects the man; he wishes him far away and a woman in his place. A death-wish directed against the dreamer’s unwanted male bedfellow is naturally not so severely punished by the moral censorship as one directed against his wife, but the reaction is sufficiently far-reaching to turn the wish against himself or against the female object he desires. The dreamer himself is carried off by death; not the man, but the woman the dreamer longs for, is dead. In the end, however, the rejection of the male sexual object finds an outlet in defiling him, and this is felt and avenged by the other as an affront.

Our interpretation thus fits this group of dreams. If we now turn back to the dreams accompanied by defilement of the woman, we shall be prepared to find that elements missing or only hinted at in the dream we have taken as the type are expressed unmistakably in other similar dreams.

In the following defaecation-dream the dirtying of the woman is not emphasized, but we are told quite clearly, as far as can be in the realm of symbolism, that the libidinal impulse is directed towards another woman. The dreamer does not want to dirty his own field, but intends to defaecate on his neighbour’s land.

MUTTON-HEAD!¹

A peasant dreamt that he was at work in his clover field. He was overtaken by an urgent need and, since he did not want to foul his own clover, he hurried off to the tree standing in his neighhour’s field, pulled down his breeches and slapped down a pat of number two on to the ground. At last, when he had happily come to an end, he wanted to clean himself and began to tear up grass with a will. But what was that? Our little peasant woke up from his sleep with a jerk, and clutched at his painfully smarting cheek which someone had just slapped. ‘You deaf old mutton-head!’ - the peasant, coming to himself, heard his wife in bed beside him scolding. ‘So you’d go on pulling the hair right off my body would you!’

¹ F. Wernert, ‘Deutsche Bauernerzählungen gesammelt im Ober- und Unterelsass [German Peasant-Tales, Collected in Upper and Lower Alsace]’, Anthropophyteia, 4, 138, No. 173.

Dreams In Folklore

2536

Tearing out hair (grass), which here takes the place of defiling, is found mentioned alongside it in the next dream. Psycho-analytic experience shows that it originates from the group of symbols concerning masturbation (ausreissen, abreissen [to pull out, to pull off]).

The dreamer’s death-wish directed against his wife would seem to be what most requires confirming in our interpretation. But in the dream which follows next, the dreamer actually buries his wife (hypocritically designated as a treasure) by digging the vessel which contains the gold into the earth and, as is familiar to us in dreams about treasure, planting a heap of faeces on the top to mark the place. During the digging he is working his hands in his wife’s vagina.¹

THE DREAM OF THE TREASURE²

Once upon a time a peasant had a terrible dream. It seemed to him just like it was war-time and the whole district was being plundered by the enemy soldiers. But he had a treasure that he was so scared about that he didn’t rightly know what to do with it and where he should really hide it. At last he thought he would bury it in his garden, where he knew of a proper fine place. Now he dreams on further how he goes right out and comes to the place where he wants to dig up the earth so he can put the big pot in the hole. But when he looks for a tool to dig with he finds nix round about, and at last he has to take his hands to it. So he makes the hole with his bare hands, puts the crock with the money into it and covers the whole lot over again with earth. Now he wants to go, but he stops a while standing there and thinks to himself: ‘But when the soldiers have gone away again, how’ll I find my treasure then if I don’t put a sign there?’ And straight away he begins to hunt about; he hunts up and down and to and fro, wherever he can. No, in the end he finds nix nowhere that would show him again straight away where he has buried his money. But just then he feels a need. ‘Ah,’ he says to himself, ‘now that’ll be fine, I can shit on it.’ So of course he pulls his breeches down right away and does a fine heap on the place where he has put the crock in. Then he sees nearby a bit of grass and is going to pull it out, so he cam wipe himself with it. But that moment he gets such a fine clout that for a second he is quite silly and looks round all dazed. And straight after he hears his wife, who is quite beside herself with rage, yelling at him: ‘You cheeky bastard, you good-for-nothing! D’you think I’ve got to put up with everything from you? First you mess about with both hands in my cunt, then you shit on it and now you even want to pull all the hair off it!’

¹ [Marginal Note by Oppenheim:] Significance?

² A Riedl, ‘Schwänke und Schnurren niederösterreichischer Landleute [Comic and Curious Anecdotes from Lower-Austrian Country People]’, Anthropophyteia, 5, 10, No. 19.

Dreams In Folklore

2537

With this example of a dream we have returned to the treasure-dreams from which we started out, and we observe that those defaecation-dreams which are concerned with treasure contain little or no fear of death, whereas the others, in which the relation to death is expressed directly (dreams of an assumption to Heaven), disregard treasure and motivate the defaecation in other ways. It is almost as though the hypocritical transformation of the wife into a treasure had obviated punishment for the death-wish.¹

A death-wish directed against the woman is most clearly admitted to in another dream of an assumption to Heaven, which, however, ends not in defaecating on the woman’s body but in sexual activity involving her genitals, as already happened in the previous dream. The dreamer actually shortens his wife’s life in order to lengthen his own, by putting oil from her lamp of life into his own. As a kind of compensation for this undisguised hostility there appears at the end of the dream something like an attempt at a caress.

THE LIGHT OF LIFE²

Saint Peter appeared to a man when he was fast asleep and led him away to Paradise. The man agreed to go with all his heart and went with Saint Peter. They wandered about in Paradise for a long time and came to a copse, which was large and spacious but kept in beautiful order, and where hanging lamps were burning on every tree. The man asked Saint Peter what this could mean. Saint Peter answered that they were hanging lamps which only burned as long as a man lived. But as soon as the oil vanished and the lamp went out, the man had to die at once too. This interested the man very much and he asked Saint Peter if he would lead him to his own hanging lamp. Saint Peter granted his request and led him to his wife’s lamp, and just by it was the man’s own lamp. The man saw that his wife’s lamp still had a lot of oil in it, but there was very little in his own and this made him very sorry because he would have to die soon, and he asked Saint Peter if he would pour a little more oil into his lamp. Saint Peter said that God put the oil in at the moment when a man was born and determined for each the length of his life. This made the man very downcast and he wept and wailed beside his lamp. Saint Peter said to him: ‘You stay there, but I must go on - I have more to do.’ The man rejoiced at this and hardly was Saint Peter out of sight when he began to dip his finger in his wife’s hanging lamp and to drip the oil into his own. He did this several times and when Saint Peter approached he started up terrified, and awoke from his dream, and saw that he had been dipping his finger in his wife’s cunt and then dribbling it into his mouth and licking his finger.

Note. According to a version told by a journeyman in Sarajevo, the man awoke after getting a box on the ears from his wife, whom he had awakened by fumbling around in her pudenda. Here Saint Peter is missing and instead of hanging lamps there are glasses with oil burning in them. According to a third version, which I heard from a student in Mostar, a venerable greybeard shows the man various burning candles. His own is very thin, his wife’s enormously thick. In order to lengthen his life, the man then begins with burning zeal to lick the thick candle. But then he gets a tremendous clout. ‘I knew that you were an ox, but I honestly didn’t know that you were a swine as well,’ his wife said to him, for he was licking her cunt in his sleep.

The story is extraordinarily widespread in Europe.³

¹ [Marginal Note by Oppenheim:] What about the treasure in the dreams of one of two male bedfellows?

² Narrated by a Secondary School teacher in Belgrade, based on a version told by a peasant woman from the region of Kragujevac. Anthropophyteia, 4, 255, No. 10.

³ [Marginal Note by Oppenheim:] Cf. a very similar story from the Ukraine, Kryptadia, 5, 15.

Dreams In Folklore

2538

This is the moment to recall the ‘bad dream’ of the woman who ended by pulling at her husband’s organ as if she wanted to tear it out. The interpretation which we found; reason to make in that instance agrees completely with the interpretation of the defaecation-dreams dreamt by men which is expounded here. In the dream of the unsatisfied wife, she, as well, shamelessly gets rid of her husband (and the child) as obstacles in the way of satisfaction.

Another defaecation-dream, about whose interpretation we cannot perhaps be completely certain, suggests, however, that we should concede that there are certain differences in the purpose of these dreams, and throws new light on dreams like the ones we have just mentioned and on some that are still to follow, in which the dream-action consists in a manipulation of the woman’s genitals.

‘FROM FRIGHT’¹

The Pasha passed the night with the Bey. When the next day came, the Bey lay on in bed and did not want to get up. The Bey asked the Pasha: ‘What did you dream?’ ‘I dreamt that on the minaret there was another minaret.’ ‘Could that really be?’ wondered the Bey. ‘And what else did you dream?’ ‘I dreamt,’ he said, ‘that on the minaret there stood a copper jug, and there was water in the jug. The wind blew and the copper jug rocked. Now what would you have done if you had dreamt that?’ ‘I should have pissed myself and shat myself as well, from fright.’ ‘And, you see, I only pissed myself.’

This dream calls for a symbolic interpretation, because its manifest content is quite incomprehensible whereas the symbols are unmistakably clear. Why should the dreamer really feel frightened at the sight of a water-jug rocking on the tip of a minaret? But a minaret is excellently suited to be a symbol for the penis, and the rhythmically moving water-vessel seems a good symbol of the female genitals in the act of copulation The Pasha, then, has had a copulation-dream, and if his host suggests defaecation in connection with it this makes it likely that the interpretation is to be sought in the circumstance that both of them are old and impotent men, in whom old age has occasioned the same proverbial replacement of sexual by excremental pleasure which, as we have seen, came about in the other dreams owing to the lack of an appropriate sexual object. For a man who can no longer copulate, so say the common people with their crude love of truth, there still remains the pleasure of shitting; we can say of such a man there is a recurrence of anal erotism, which was there before genital erotism and

was repressed and replaced by this later impulse. Defaecation-dreams can thus also be impotence-dreams.

¹ F. S. Krauss, ‘Südslavische Volksüberlieferungen, die sich auf den Geschlechtsverkehr beziehen [Southern Slav Folk Traditions concerning Sexual Intercourse]’, Anthropophyteia, 5, 293, No. 697.

Dreams In Folklore

2539

The difference between the interpretations is not so pronounced as might appear at first sight. The defaecation-dreams too, in which the victim is a woman, deal with impotence - relative impotence, at least, towards the particular person who no longer has any attraction for the dreamer. A defaecation-dream thus becomes the dream of a man who can no longed satisfy a woman, as well as of a man whom a woman no longer satisfies.

The same interpretation (as an impotence-dream) can also be applied to a dream in the Facetiae of Poggio, which manifestly, it is true, poses as the dream of a jealous man - that is, in fact, of a man who does not think he can satisfy his wife.

THE RING OF FIDELITY¹

Franciscus Philelphus was jealous of his wife and became tormented by the greatest fear that she had to do with another man, and day and night he lay on the watch. Since what occupies us in waking is wont to return to us in dreams, there appeared to him during his sleep a demon, who said to him that if he would act according to his bidding his wife would always remain faithful to him. Franciscus said to him in the dream that he would be very indebted to him and promised him a reward.

‘Take this ring,’ replied the demon, ‘and wear it on your finger with care. As long as you wear it, your wife cannot lie with any other man without your knowledge.’

As he awoke, excited with joy, he felt that he was pushing his finger into the vulva of his wife.

The jealous have no better expedient; in this way their wives can never let themselves be taken by another man without the knowledge of their husbands.

¹ Poggio (1905, No. 133).

Dreams In Folklore

2540

This anecdote of Poggio is considered to be the source of a tale by Rabelais, which, in other respects very similar, is clearer inasmuch as it actually describes the husband bringing home a young wife in his old age, who then gives him grounds for jealous fears.¹

Hans Carvel was a learned, experienced, industrious man, a man of honour, of good understanding and judgement, benevolent, charitable to the poor and a cheerful philosopher. Withal a good companion, who was fond of a jest, somewhat corpulent and unsteady, but otherwise well set up in every way. In his old age he married the daughter of Concordat the bailiff, a young, comely, good, gay, lively and pleasing woman, merely perchance a little too friendly towards the gentlemen neighbours and menservants. So it befell that in the course of some weeks he became as jealous as a tiger and was suspicious that she might be getting her buttocks drummed upon elsewhere. To guard against this, he related to her a whole stock of pleasing histories of the punishments for adultery, often read aloud to her lovely legends of virtuous women, preached her the gospel of chastity, wrote her a small volume of songs of praise to matrimonial fidelity, inveighed in sharp and caustic words against the wantonness of undisciplined wives and in addition to all bestowed on her a magnificent necklace set round with oriental sapphires.

But regardless of this, he saw her going about with the neighbours in such a friendly and sociable fashion that his jealousy mounted yet higher. One night at that time, as he was lying with her in bed, in the midst of these painful thoughts, he dreamt he spoke with the Fiend Incarnate and bewailed his grief to him. But the Devil comforted him, put a ring on his finger and said: ‘Take this ring; as long as you carry it on your finger no other man can have carnal knowledge of your wife without your knowledge and against your will.’ ‘A thousand thanks, Sir Devil!’ said Hans Carvel, ‘I will deny Mahomet before ever I take this ring from my finger.’ The Devil disappeared. But Hans Carvel awoke with a joyful heart and found that he had his finger in his wife’s what-d’you-call-it.

I forgot to relate how the young woman, when she felt this, jerked her buttocks backwards as if to say: ‘Stop! No, no! That’s not what ought to be put in there!’ - which made Hans Carvel imagine that someone wanted to pull off his ring.

Is that not an infallible measure? Believe me! act after this example and take care at all times to have your wife’s ring on your finger!²

The Devil, who appears here as counsellor, as he does in the treasure-dreams, gives us a clue to something of the dreamer’s latent thoughts. Originally at least, he was supposed to ‘take’ the unfaithful wife who is hard to keep a watch on. He then shows in the manifest dream an infallible means of keeping her permanently. In this too we recognize an analogy with the wish to get rid of someone (death-wish) in the defaecation-dreams.

¹ Rabelais, Pantagruel, Chapter 28 of Le Tiers Livre.

² [Footnote by Freud:] Goethe is concerned with this symbolism of the ring and the finger in a Venetian Epigram (Paralipomena, No. 65, Sophienausgabe, Abt. II, Bd. 5, 381).

Costly rings I possess! Excellent stones, engraved

In lofty style and conception, held by the purest of gold;

Dearly men pay for these rings, adorned with fiery stones,

Oft have you seen them sparkle over the gaming-table.

But one little ring I know, whose virtue is not the same,

Which Hans Carvel once possessed, sadly, when he was old.

Foolish he pushed in the ring the smallest of all his ten fingers,

The eleventh, the biggest, alone is worthy and fit to be there.

Dreams In Folklore

2541

We will conclude this small collection of dreams by adding a lottery-dream, whose connection with the others is rather slight, but which serves to confirm the suggestion which we put forward earlier that a lottery symbolizes a marriage contract.

IT’S NO USE CRYING OVER SPILT MILK!¹

A merchant had a strange dream. He dreamt that he saw a woman’s arse with everything that belonged to it. On one half was a figure 1 and on the other a 3. Before this, the merchant had had the idea of buying a lottery ticket. It seemed to him that this picture in his dream was a lucky omen. Without waiting till the ninth hour, he ran to the bank first thing in the morning, in order to buy his ticket. He arrived there and without pausing to think he demanded ticket Number Thirteen, the same figures that he had seen in his dream. After he had bought his ticket, not a day passed on which he did not look in all the newspapers to see if his number had won. After a week, or at the most after ten days, the list of the draw came out. When he looked through, he saw that his number had not been drawn but the number 103, Series 8, and that number had won 200,000 roubles. The merchant nearly tore his hair out. ‘I must have made a mistake! there is something wrong!’ He was beside himself, he was almost inconsolable and could not conceive what his having had such a dream could mean. Then he resolved to discuss the matter with his friend to see if he could not account for his misfortune. He met his friend and told him everything in minute detail. Then his friend said: ‘Oh you simpleton! Didn’t you see the nought between the number 1 and the 3 on the arse?’ ‘A-a-ah, the Devil take it, it never occurred to me that the arse had a nought.’ ‘But it was there plain and clear, only you didn’t work out the lottery number right. And the number 8 belonging to the series - the cunt shows you that - it’s like a number 8.’ - It’s no use crying over spilt milk!

¹ Tarasevsky (1909, 40).

Dreams In Folklore

2542

Our intention in putting together this short paper was twofold. On the one hand we wanted to suggest that one should not be deterred by the often repulsively dirty and indecent nature of this popular material from seeking in it valuable confirmation of psycho-analytic views. Thus on this occasion we have been able to establish the fact that folklore interprets dream-symbols in the same way as psycho-analysis, and that, contrary to loudly proclaimed popular opinion, it derives a group of dreams from needs and wishes which have become immediate. On the other hand, we should like to express the view that it is doing the common people an injustice to assume that they employ this form of entertainment merely to satisfy the coarsest desires. It seems rather that behind these ugly façades are concealed mental reactions to impressions of life which are to be taken seriously, which even strike a sad note - reactions to which common people are ready to surrender, but only if they are accompanied by a yield of coarse pleasure.

2543

ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

(1913 [1911])

2544

Intentionally left blank

2545

ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

In response to a friendly request by the Secretary of your Section of Neurology and Psychiatry, I venture to draw the attention of this Congress to the subject of psycho-analysis, which is being extensively studied at the present time in Europe and America.

Psycho-analysis is a remarkable combination, for it comprises not only a method of research into the neuroses but also a method of treatment based on the aetiology thus discovered. I may begin by saying that psycho-analysis is not a child of speculation, but the outcome of experience; and for that reason, like every new product of science, is unfinished. It is open to anyone to convince himself by his own investigations of the correctness of the theses embodied in it, and to help in the further development of the study.

Psycho-analysis started with researches into hysteria, but in the course of years it has extended far beyond that field of work. The Studies on Hysteria by Breuer and myself, published in 1895, were the beginnings of psycho-analysis. They followed in the track of Charcot’s work on ‘traumatic’ hysteria, Liébeault’s and Bernheim’s investigations of the phenomena of hypnosis, and Janet’s studies of unconscious mental processes. Psycho-analysis soon found itself in sharp opposition to Janet’s views, because (a) it declined to trace back hysteria directly to congenital hereditary degeneracy, (b) it offered, instead of a mere description, a dynamic explanation based on the interplay of psychical forces and (c) it ascribed the origin of psychical dissociation (whose importance had been recognized by Janet as well) not to a failure of mental synthesis resulting from a congenital disability, but to a special psychical process known as ‘repression’ (‘Verdrängung’).

It was conclusively proved that hysterical symptoms are residues (reminiscences) of profoundly moving experiences, which have been withdrawn from everyday consciousness, and that their form is determined (in a manner that excludes deliberate action) by details of the traumatic effects of the experiences. On this view, the therapeutic prospects lie in the possibility of getting rid of this ‘repression’, so as to allow part of the unconscious psychical material to become conscious and thus to deprive it of its pathogenic power. This view is a dynamic one, in so far as it regards psychical processes as displacements of psychical energy which can be gauged by the amount of their effect on the affective elements. This is most significant in hysteria, where the process of ‘conversion’ creates the symptoms by transforming a quantity of mental impulses into somatic innervations.

On Psycho-Analysis

2546

The first psycho-analytic examinations and attempts at treatment were made with the help of hypnotism. Afterwards this was abandoned and the work was carried out by the method of ‘free association’, with the patient remaining in his normal state. This modification had the advantage of enabling the procedure to be applied to a far larger number of cases of hysteria, as well as to other neuroses and also to healthy people. The development of a special technique of interpretation became necessary, however, in order to draw conclusions from the expressed ideas of the person under investigation. These interpretations established with complete certainty the fact that psychical dissociations are maintained entirely by ‘internal resistances’. The conclusion seems justified, therefore, that the dissociations have originated owing to internal conflict, which has led to the ‘repression’ of the underlying impulse. To overcome this conflict and in that way to cure the neurosis, the guiding hand of a doctor trained in psycho-analysis is required.

Furthermore, it has been shown to be true quite generally that in all neuroses the pathological symptoms are really the end-products of such conflicts, which have led to ‘repression’ and ‘splitting’ of the mind. The symptoms are generated by different mechanisms: (a) either as formations in substitution for the repressed forces, or (b) as compromises between the repressing and repressed forces, or (c) as reaction-formations and safeguards against the repressed forces.

Researches were further extended to the conditions which determine whether or not psychical conflicts will lead to ‘repression’ (that is, to dissociation dynamically caused), since it goes without saying that a psychical conflict, per se, may also have a normal outcome. The conclusion arrived at by psycho-analysis was that such conflicts were always between the sexual instincts (using the word ‘sexual’ in the widest sense) and the wishes and trends of the remainder of the ego. In neuroses it is the sexual instincts that succumb to ‘repression’ and so constitute the most important basis for the genesis of symptoms, which may accordingly be regarded as substitutes for sexual satisfactions.

On Psycho-Analysis

2547

Our work on the question of the disposition to neurotic affections has added the ‘infantile’ factor to the somatic and hereditary ones hitherto recognized. Psycho-analysis was obliged to trace back patients’ mental life to their early infancy, and the conclusion was reached that inhibitions of mental development (‘infantilisms’) present a disposition to neurosis. In particular, we have learnt from our investigations of sexual life that there really is such a thing as ‘infantile sexuality’, that the sexual instinct is made up of many components and passes through a complicated course of development, the final outcome of which, after many restrictions and transformations, is the ‘normal’ sexuality of adults. The puzzling perversions of the sexual instinct which occur in adults appear to be either inhibitions of development, fixations or lop-sided growths. Thus neuroses are the negative of perversions.

The cultural development imposed on mankind is the factor which necessitates the restrictions and repressions of the sexual instinct, greater or lesser sacrifices being demanded according to the individual constitution. Development is hardly ever achieved smoothly, and disturbances may occur (whether on account of the individual constitution or of premature sexual incidents) leaving behind a disposition to future neuroses. Such dispositions may remain harmless if the adult’s life proceeds satisfactorily and quietly; but they become pathogenic if the conditions of mature life forbid satisfaction of the libido or make too high demands on its suppression.

Researches into the sexual activity of children have led to a further conception of the sexual instinct, based not on its purposes but on its sources. The sexual instinct possesses in a high degree the capacity for being diverted from direct sexual aims and for being directed towards higher aims which are no longer sexual (‘sublimation’). The instinct is thus enabled to make most important contributions to the social and artistic achievements of humanity.

On Psycho-Analysis

2548

Recognition of the simultaneous presence of the three factors of ‘infantilism’, ‘sexuality’ and ‘repression’ constitutes the main characteristic of the psycho-analytic theory, and marks its distinction from other views of pathological mental life. At the same time, psycho-analysis has demonstrated that there is no fundamental difference, but only one of degree, between the mental life of normal people, of neurotics and of psychotics. A normal person has to pass through the same repressions and has to struggle with the same substitutive structures; the only difference is that he deals with these events with less trouble and better success. The psycho-analytic method of investigation can accordingly be applied equally to the explanation of normal psychical phenomena, and has made it possible to discover the close relationship between pathological psychical products and normal structures such as dreams, the small blunders of everyday life, and such valuable phenomena as jokes, myths and imaginative works. The explanation of these has been carried furthest in the case of dreams, and has resulted here in the following general formula: ‘A dream is a disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish.’ The interpretation of dreams has as its object the removal of the disguise to which the dreamer’s thoughts have been subjected. It is, moreover, a highly valuable aid to psycho-analytic technique, for it constitutes the most convenient method of obtaining insight into unconscious psychical life.

There is often a tendency in medical and especially in psychiatric circles to contradict the theories of psycho-analysis without any real study or practical application of them. This is due not only to the striking novelty of these theories and the contrast they present to the views hitherto held by psychiatrists, but also to the fact that the premisses and technique of psycho-analysis are much more nearly related to the field of psychology than to that of medicine. It cannot be disputed, however, that purely medical and non-psychological teachings have hitherto done very little towards an understanding of mental life. The progress of psycho-analysis is further retarded by the dread felt by the average observer of seeing himself in his own mirror. Men of science tend to meet emotional resistances with arguments, and thus satisfy themselves to their own satisfaction! Whoever wishes not to ignore a truth will do well to distrust his antipathies, and, if he wishes to submit the theory of psycho-analysis to a critical examination, let him first analyse himself.

On Psycho-Analysis

2549

I cannot think that in these few sentences I have succeeded in painting a clear picture of the principles and purposes of psycho-analysis. But I will add a list of the chief publications on the subject, a study of which will give further enlightenment to any whom I may have interested.

1. Breuer and Freud, Studies on Hysteria, 1895. Fr. Deuticke, Vienna.

A portion of the above has been translated into English in ‘Selected Papers on Hysteria and other Psycho‑neuroses’, by Dr. A. A. Brill, New York, 1909.

2. Freud, Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, Vienna, 1905.

English translation by Dr. Brill, ‘Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory’, New York, 1910.

3. Freud, Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens, S. Karger, Berlin. 3rd edition, 1910.

4. Freud, Die Traumdeutung, Vienna, 1900. 3rd ed., 1911.

5. Freud, ‘The Origin and Development of Psycho-analysis’,

Amer. Jour. of Psychology, April, 1910. Also in German:

Ueber Psychoanalyse. Five Lectures given at the Clark University, Worcester, Mass, 1909.

6. Freud, Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten, Vienna, 1905.

7. Freud, Collection of minor papers on the Doctrine of Neuroses,

1893-1906. Vienna,1906.

8. Idem. A second collection. Vienna, 1909.

9. Hitschmann, Freud’s Neurosenlehre, Vienna, 1911.

10. C. G. Jung, Diagnostische Associationsstudien. Two volumes, 1906-1910.

11. C. G. Jung, Über die psychologie der Dementia Praecox, 1907.

12. Jahrbuch für psycho-analytische und psychopathologische Forschungen,

published by E. Bleuler and S. Freud, edited by Jung. Since 1909.

13. Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde. Fr. Deuticke, Vienna.

Since 1907. Eleven parts, by Freud, Jung, Abraham, Pfister, Rank, Jones, Riklin, Graf, Sadger.

14. Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse.

Edited by A. Adler and W Stekel. J. Bergmann, Wiesbaden. Since Sept., 1910.

2550

FORMULATIONS ON THE TWO PRINCIPLES OF MENTAL FUNCTIONING

(1911)

2551

Intentionally left blank

2552

FORMULATIONS ON THE TWO PRINCIPLES OF MENTAL FUNCTIONING

We have long observed that every neurosis has as its result, and probably therefore as its purpose, a forcing of the patient out of real life, an alienating of him from reality. Nor could a fact such as this escape the observation of Pierre Janet; he spoke: of a loss of ‘la fonction du réel’ [‘the function of reality’] as being a special characteristic of neurotics, but without discovering the connection of this disturbance with the fundamental determinants of neurosis.¹ By introducing the process of repression into the genesis of the neuroses we have been able to gain some insight into this connection. Neurotics turn away from reality because they find it unbearable - either the whole or parts of it. The most extreme type of this turning away from reality is shown by certain cases of hallucinatory psychosis which seek to deny the particular event that occasioned the outbreak of their insanity (Griesinger). But in fact every neurotic does the same with some fragment of reality.² And we are now confronted with the task of investigating the development of the relation of neurotics and of mankind in general to reality, and in this way of bringing the psychological significance of the real external world into the structure of our theories.

In the psychology which is founded on psycho-analysis we have become accustomed to taking as our starting-point the unconscious mental processes, with the peculiarities of which we have become acquainted through analysis. We consider these to be the older, primary processes, the residues of a phase of development in which they were the only kind of mental process. The governing purpose obeyed by these primary processes is easy to recognize; it is described as the pleasure-unpleasure [Lust-Unlust] principle, or more shortly the pleasure principle. These processes strive towards gaining pleasure; psychical activity draws back from any event which might arouse unpleasure. (Here we have repression.) Our dreams at night and our waking tendency to tear ourselves away from distressing impressions are remnants of the dominance of this principle and proofs of its power.

¹ Janet, 1909.

² Otto Rank (1910) has recently drawn attention to a remarkably clear prevision of this causation shown in Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea.

Formulations On The Two Principles Of Mental Functioning

2553

I shall be returning to lines of thought which I have developed elsewhere¹ when I suggest that the state of psychical rest was originally disturbed by the peremptory demands of internal needs. When this happened, whatever was thought of (wished for) was simply presented in a hallucinatory manner, just as still happens to-day with our dream-thoughts every night.² It was only the non-occurrence of the expected satisfaction, the disappointment experienced, that led to the abandonment of this attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination. Instead of it, the psychical apparatus had to decide to form a conception of the real circumstances in the external world and to endeavour to make a real alteration in them. A new principle of mental functioning was thus introduced; what was presented in the mind was no longer what was agreeable but what was real, even if it happened to be disagreeable.³ This setting-up of the reality principle proved to be a momentous step.

¹ In the General Section of The Interpretation of Dreams.

² The state of sleep is able to re-establish the likeness of mental life as it was before the recognition of reality, because a prerequisite of sleep is a deliberate rejection of reality (the wish to sleep).

³ I will try to simplify the above schematic account with some further details. It will rightly be objected that an organization which was a slave to the pleasure principle and neglected the reality of the external world could not maintain itself alive for the shortest time, so that it could not have come into existence at all. The employment of a fiction like this is, however, justified when one considers that the infant - provided one includes with it the care it receives from its mother - does almost realize a psychical system of this kind. It probably hallucinates the fulfilment of its internal needs; it betrays its unpleasure, when there is an increase of stimulus and an absence of satisfaction, by the motor discharge of screaming and beating about with its arms and legs, and it then experiences the satisfaction it has hallucinated. Later, as an older child, it learns to employ these manifestations of discharge intentionally as methods of expressing its feelings. Since the later care of children is modelled on the care of infants, the dominance of the pleasure principle can really come to an end only when a child has achieved complete psychical detachment from its parents. - A neat example of a psychical system shut off from the stimuli of the external world, and able to satisfy even its nutritional requirements autistically (to use Bleuler’s term), is afforded by a bird’s egg with its food supply enclosed in its shell; for it, the care provided by its mother is limited to the provision of warmth. - I shall not regard it as a correction, but as an amplification of the schematic picture under discussion, if it is insisted that a system living according to the pleasure principle must have devices to enable it to withdraw from the stimuli of reality. Such devices are merely the correlative of ‘repression’, which treats internal unpleasurable stimuli as if they were external - that is to say, pushes them into the external world.

Formulations On The Two Principles Of Mental Functioning

2554

(1) In the first place, the new demands made a succession of adaptations necessary in the psychical apparatus, which, owing to our insufficient or uncertain knowledge, we can only retail very cursorily.

The increased significance of external reality heightened the importance, too, of the sense-organs that are directed towards that external world, and of the consciousness attached to them. Consciousness now learned to comprehend sensory qualities in addition to the qualities of pleasure and unpleasure which hitherto had alone been of interest to it. A special function was instituted which had periodically to search the external world, in order that its data might be familiar already if an urgent internal need should arise - the function of attention. Its activity meets the sense-impressions half way, instead of awaiting their appearance. At the same time, probably, a system of notation was introduced, whose task it was to lay down the results of this periodical activity of consciousness - a part of what we call memory.

The place of repression, which excluded from cathexis as productive of unpleasure some of the emerging ideas, was taken by an impartial passing of judgement, which had to decide whether a given idea was true or false - that is, whether it was in agreement with reality or not - the decision being determined by making a comparison with the memory-traces of reality.

A new function was now allotted to motor discharge, which, under the dominance of the pleasure principle, had served as a means of unburdening the mental apparatus of accretions of stimuli, and which had carried out this task by sending innervations into the interior of the body (leading to expressive movements and the play of features and to manifestations of affect). Motor discharge was now employed in the appropriate alteration of reality; it was converted into action.

Restraint upon motor discharge (upon action), which then became necessary, was provided by means of the process of thinking, which was developed from the presentation of ideas. Thinking was endowed with characteristics which made it possible for the mental apparatus to tolerate an increased tension of stimulus while the process of discharge was postponed. It is essentially an experimental kind of acting, accompanied by displacement of relatively small quantities of cathexis together with less expenditure (discharge) of them. For this purpose the conversion of freely displaceable cathexes into ‘bound’ cathexes was necessary, and this was brought about by means of raising the level of the whole cathectic process. It is probable that thinking was originally unconscious, in so far as it went beyond mere ideational presentations and was directed to the relations between impressions of objects, and that it did not acquire further qualities, perceptible to consciousness, until it became connected with verbal residues.

Formulations On The Two Principles Of Mental Functioning

2555

(2) A general tendency of our mental apparatus, which can be traced back to the economic principle of saving expenditure, seems to find expression in the tenacity with which we hold on to the sources of pleasure at our disposal, and in the difficulty with which we renounce them. With the introduction of the reality principle one species of thought-activity was split off; it was kept free from reality-testing and remained subordinated to the pleasure principle alone.¹ This activity is phantasying, which begins already in children’s play, and later, continued as day-dreaming, abandons dependence on real objects.

(3) The supersession of the pleasure principle by the reality principle, with all the psychical consequences involved, which is here schematically condensed into a single sentence, is not in fact accomplished all at once; nor does it take place simultaneously all along the line. For while this development is going on in the ego-instincts, the sexual instincts become detached from them in a very significant way. The sexual instincts behave auto-erotically at first; they obtain their satisfaction in the subject’s own body and therefore do not find themselves in the situation of frustration which was what necessitated the institution of the reality principle; and when, later on, the process of finding an object begins, it is soon interrupted by the long period of latency, which delays sexual development until puberty. These two factors - auto-erotism and the latency period - have as their result that the sexual instinct is held up in its psychical development and remains far longer under the dominance of the pleasure principle, from which in many people it is never able to withdraw.

In consequence of these conditions, a closer connection arises, on the one hand, between the sexual instinct and phantasy and, on the other hand, between the ego-instincts and the activities of consciousness. Both in healthy and in neurotic people this connection strikes us as very intimate, although the considerations of genetic psychology which have just been put forward lead us to recognize it as a secondary one. The continuance of auto-erotism is what makes it possible to retain for so long the easier momentary and imaginary satisfaction in relation to the sexual object in place of real satisfaction, which calls for effort and postponement. In the realm of phantasy, repression remains all-powerful; it brings about the inhibition of ideas in statu nascendi before they can be noticed by consciousness, if their cathexis is likely to occasion a release of unpleasure. This is the weak spot in our psychical organization; and it can be employed to bring back under the dominance of the pleasure principle thought-processes which had already become rational. An essential part of the psychical disposition to neurosis thus lies in the delay in educating the sexual instincts to pay regard to reality and, as a corollary, in the conditions which make this delay possible.

¹ In the same way, a nation whose wealth rests on the exploitation of the produce of its soil will yet set aside certain areas for reservation in their original state and for protection from the changes brought about by civilization. (E.g. Yellowstone Park.)

Formulations On The Two Principles Of Mental Functioning

2556

(4) Just as the pleasure-ego can do nothing but wish, work for a yield of pleasure, and avoid unpleasure, so the reality-ego need do nothing but strive for what is useful and guard itself against damage.¹ Actually the substitution of the reality principle for the pleasure principle implies no deposing of the pleasure principle, but only a safeguarding of it. A momentary pleasure, uncertain in its results, is given up, but only in order to gain along the new path an assured pleasure at a later time. But the endopsychic impression made by this substitution has been so powerful that it is reflected in a special religious myth. The doctrine of reward in the after-life for the - voluntary or enforced - renunciation of earthly pleasures is nothing other than a mythical projection of this revolution in the mind. Following consistently along these lines, religions have been able to effect absolute renunciation of pleasure in this life by means of the promise of compensation in a future existence; but they have not by this means achieved a conquest of the pleasure principle. It is science which comes nearest to succeeding in that conquest; science too, however, offers intellectual pleasure during its work and promises practical gain in the end.

(5) Education can be described without more ado as an incitement to the conquest of the pleasure principle, and to its replacement by the reality principle; it seeks, that is, to lend its help to the developmental process which affects the ego. To this end it makes use of an offer of love as a reward from the educators; and it therefore fails if a spoilt child thinks that it possesses that love in any case and cannot lose it whatever happens.

(6) Art brings about a reconciliation between the two principles in a peculiar way. An artist is originally a man who turns away from reality because he cannot come to terms with the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction which it at first demands, and who allows his erotic and ambitious wishes full play in the life of phantasy. He finds the way back to reality, however, from this world of phantasy by making use of special gifts to mould his phantasies into truths of a new kind, which are valued by men as precious reflections of reality. Thus in a certain fashion he actually becomes the hero, the king, the creator, or the favourite he desired to be, without following the one roundabout path of making real alterations in the external world. But he can only achieve this because other men feel the same dissatisfaction as he does with the renunciation demanded by reality, and because that dissatisfaction, which results from the replacement of the pleasure principle by the reality principle, is itself a part of reality.²

(7) While the ego goes through its transformation from a pleasure-ego into a reality-ego, the sexual instincts undergo the changes that lead them from their original auto-erotism through various intermediate phases to object-love in the service of procreation. If we are right in thinking that each step in these two courses of development may become the site of a disposition to later neurotic illness, it is plausible to suppose that the form taken by the subsequent illness (the choice of neurosis) will depend on the particular phase of the development of the ego and of the libido in which the dispositional inhibition of development has occurred. Thus unexpected significance attaches to the chronological features of the two developments (which have not yet been studied), and to possible variations in their synchronization.

¹ The superiority of the reality-ego over the pleasure-ego has been aptly expressed by Bernard Shaw in these words: ‘To be able to choose the line of greatest advantage instead of yielding in the direction of least resistance.’ (Man and Superman.)

² Cf. the similar position taken by Otto Rank (1907).

Formulations On The Two Principles Of Mental Functioning

2557

(8) The strangest characteristic of unconscious (repressed) processes, to which no investigator can become accustomed without the exercise of great self-discipline, is due to their entire disregard of reality-testing; they equate reality of thought with external actuality, and wishes with their fulfilment - with the event - just as happens automatically under the dominance of the ancient pleasure principle. Hence also the difficulty of distinguishing unconscious phantasies from memories which have become unconscious. But one must never allow oneself to be misled into applying the standards of reality to repressed psychical structures, and on that account, perhaps, into undervaluing the importance of phantasies in the formation of symptoms on the ground that they are not actualities, or into tracing a neurotic sense of guilt back to some other source because there is no evidence that any actual crime has been committed. One is bound to employ the currency that is in use in the country one is exploring - in our case a neurotic currency. Suppose, for instance, that one is trying to solve a dream such as this. A man who had once nursed his father through a long and painful mortal illness, told me that in the months following his father’s death he had repeatedly dreamt that his father was alive once more and that he was talking to him in his usual way. But he felt it exceedingly painful that his father had really died, only without knowing it. The only way of understanding this apparently nonsensical dream is by adding ‘as the dreamer wished’ or ‘in consequence of his wish’ after the words ‘that his father had really died’, and by further adding ‘that he wished it’ to the last words. The dream-thought then runs: it was a painful memory for him that he had been obliged to wish for his father’s death (as a release) while he was still alive, and how terrible it would have been if his father had had any suspicion of it! What we have here is thus the familiar case of self-reproaches after the loss of someone loved, and in this instance the self-reproach went back to the infantile significance of death-wishes against the father.

The deficiencies of this short paper, which is preparatory rather than expository, will perhaps be excused only in small part if I plead that they are unavoidable. In these few remarks on the psychical consequences of adaptation to the reality principle I have been obliged to adumbrate views which I should have preferred for the present to withhold and whose justification will certainly require no small effort. But I hope it will not escape the notice of the benevolent reader how in these pages too the dominance of the reality principle is beginning.

2558

TYPES OF ONSET OF NEUROSIS

(1912)

2559

Intentionally left blank

2560

TYPES OF ONSET OF NEUROSIS

In the pages which follow, I shall describe, on the basis of impressions arrived at empirically, the changes which conditions must undergo in order to bring about the outbreak of a neurotic illness in a person with a disposition to it. I shall thus be dealing with the question of the precipitating factors of illnesses and shall have little to say about their forms. The present discussion of the precipitating causes will differ from others in that the changes to be enumerated will relate exclusively to the subject’s libido. For psycho-analysis has taught us that the vicissitudes of the libido are what decide in favour of nervous health or sickness. Nor are words to be wasted in this connection on the concept of disposition. It is precisely psycho-analytic research which has enabled us to show that neurotic disposition lies in the history of the development of the libido, and to trace back the operative factors in that development to innate varieties of sexual constitution and to influences of the external world experienced in early childhood.

(a) The most obvious, the most easily discoverable and the most intelligible precipitating cause of an onset of neurosis is to be seen in the external factor which may be described in general terms as frustration. The subject was healthy so long at his need for love was satisfied by a real object in the external world; he becomes neurotic as soon as this object is withdrawn from him without a substitute taking its place. Here happiness coincides with health and unhappiness with neurosis. It is easier for fate to bring about a cure than for the physician; for it can offer the patient a substitute for the possibility of satisfaction which he has lost.

Thus with this type, to which, no doubt, the majority of human beings on the whole belong, the possibility of falling ill arises only when there is abstinence. And it may be judged from this what an important part in the causation of neuroses may be played by the limitation imposed by civilization on the field of accessible satisfactions. Frustration has a pathogenic effect because it dams up libido, and so submits the subject to a test as to how long he can tolerate this increase in psychical tension and as to what methods he will adopt for dealing with it. There are only two possibilities for remaining healthy when there is a persistent frustration of satisfaction in the real world. The first is by transforming the psychical tension into active energy which remains directed towards the external world and eventually extorts a real satisfaction of the libido from it. The second is by renouncing libidinal satisfaction, sublimating the dammed-up libido and turning it to the attainment of aims which are no longer erotic and which escape frustration. That these two possibilities are realized in men’s lives proves that unhappiness does not coincide with neurosis and that frustration does not alone decide whether its victim remains healthy or falls ill. The immediate effect of frustration lies in its bringing into play the dispositional factors which have hitherto been inoperative.

Where these are present and sufficiently strongly developed, there is a risk of the libido becoming ‘introverted’.¹ It turns away from reality, which, owing to the obstinate frustration, has lost its value for the subject, and turns towards the life of phantasy, in which it creates new wishful structures and revives the traces of earlier, forgotten ones. In consequence of the intimate connection between the activity of phantasy and material present in everyone which is infantile and repressed and has become unconscious, and thanks to the exceptional position enjoyed by the life of phantasy in regard to reality-testing,² the libido may thenceforward move on a backward course; it may follow the path of regression along infantile lines, and strive after aims that correspond with them. If these strivings, which are incompatible with the subject’s present-day individuality, acquire enough intensity, a conflict must result between them and the other portion of his personality, which has maintained its relation to reality. This conflict is resolved by the formation of symptoms, and is followed by the onset of manifest illness. The fact that the whole process originated from frustration in the real world is reflected in the resulting event that the symptoms, in which the ground of reality is reached once more, represent substitutive satisfactions.

¹ To use a term introduced by C. G. Jung.

² See my ‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’ (1911b).

Types Of Onset Of Neurosis

2561

(b) The second type of precipitating cause of falling ill is by no means so obvious as the first; and it was in fact only possible to discover it through searching analytic investigations following on the Zurich school’s theory of complexes.¹ Here the subject does not fall ill as a result of a change in the external world which has replaced satisfaction by frustration, but as a result of an internal effort to obtain the satisfaction which is accessible to him in reality. He falls ill of his attempt to adapt himself to reality and to fulfil the demands of reality - an attempt in the course of which he comes up against insurmountable internal difficulties.

It is advisable to draw a sharp distinction between the two types of onset of illness - a sharper distinction than observation as a rule permits. In the first type what is prominent is a change in the external world; in the second type the accent falls on an internal change. In the first type the subject falls ill from an experience; in the second type it is from a developmental process. In the first case he is faced by the task of renouncing satisfaction, and he falls ill from his incapacity for resistance; in the second case his task is to exchange one kind of satisfaction for another, and he breaks down from his inflexibility. In the second case the conflict, which is between the subject’s effort to remain as he is and the effort to change himself in order to meet fresh purposes and fresh demands from reality, is present from the first. In the former case the conflict only arises after the dammed-up libido has chosen other, and incompatible, possibilities of satisfaction. The part played by the conflict and the previous fixation of the libido is incomparably more obvious in the second type than in the first, in which such unserviceable fixations may perhaps only emerge as a result of the external frustration.

¹ Cf. Jung (1909).

Types Of Onset Of Neurosis

2562

A young man who has hitherto satisfied his libido by means of phantasies ending in masturbation, and who now seeks to replace a régime approximating to auto-erotism by the choice of a real object - or a girl who has given her whole affection to her father or brother and who must now, for the sake of a man who is courting her, allow her hitherto unconscious incestuous libidinal wishes to become conscious - or a married woman who would like to renounce her polygamous inclinations and phantasies of prostitution so as to become a faithful consort to her husband and a perfect mother to her child - all of these fall ill from the most laudable efforts, if the earlier fixations of their libido are powerful enough to resist a displacement; and this point will be decided, once again, by the factors of disposition, constitution and infantile experience. All of them, it might be said, meet with the fate of the little tree in the Grimms’ fairy tale, which wished it had different leaves. From the hygienic point of view - which, to be sure, is not the only one to be taken into account - one could only wish for them that they had continued to be as undeveloped, as inferior and as useless as they were before they fell ill. The change which the patients strive after, but bring about only imperfectly or not at all, invariably has the value of a step forward from the point of view of real life. It is otherwise if we apply ethical standards: we see people falling ill just as often when they discard an ideal as when they seek to attain it.

In spite of the very clear differences between the two types of onset of illness that we have described, they nevertheless coincide in essentials and can without difficulty be brought together into a unity. Falling ill from frustration may also be regarded as incapacity for adaptation to reality - in the particular case, that is, in which reality frustrates satisfaction of libido. Falling ill under the conditions of the second type leads directly to a special case of frustration. It is true that reality does not here frustrate every kind of satisfaction; but it frustrates the one kind which the subject declares is the only possible one. Nor does the frustration come immediately from the external world, but primarily from certain trends in the subject’s ego. Nevertheless, frustration remains the common factor and the more inclusive one. In consequence of the conflict which immediately sets in in the second type, both kinds of satisfaction - the habitual one as well as the one aimed at - are equally inhibited; a damming-up of libido, with all its consequences, comes about just as it does in the first case. The psychical events leading to the formation of symptoms are if anything easier to follow in the second type than in the first; for in the second type the pathogenic fixations of the libido do not need to be freshly established, but have already been in force while the subject was healthy. A certain amount of introversion of libido is, as a rule, already present; and there is a saving of some part of the subject’s regression to the infantile stage, owing to the fact that his forward development has not yet completed its course.

Types Of Onset Of Neurosis

2563

(c) The next type, which I shall describe as falling ill from an inhibition in development, looks like an exaggeration of the second one - falling ill from the demands of reality. There is no theoretical reason for distinguishing it, but only a practical one; for those we are here concerned with are people who fall ill as soon as they get beyond the irresponsible age of childhood, and who have thus never reached a phase of health - a phase, that is, of capacity for achievement and enjoyment which is on the whole unrestricted. The essential feature of the dispositional process is in these cases quite plain. Their libido has never left its infantile fixations;  the demands of reality are not suddenly made upon a wholly or partly mature person, but arise from the very fact of growing older, since it is obvious that they constantly alter with the subject’s increasing age. Thus conflict falls into the background in comparison with insufficiency. But here, too, all our other experience leads us to postulate an effort at overcoming the fixations of childhood; for otherwise the outcome of the process could never be neurosis but only a stationary infantilism.

(d) Just as the third type has brought the dispositional determinant before us almost in isolation, so the fourth type, which now follows, draws our attention to another factor, which comes into consideration in every single case and might easily for that very reason be overlooked in a theoretical discussion. We see people fall ill who have hitherto been healthy, who have met with no fresh experience and whose relation to the external world has undergone no change, so that the onset of their illness inevitably gives an impression of spontaneity. A closer consideration of such cases, however, shows us that none the less a change has taken place in them whose importance we must rate very highly as a cause of illness. As a result of their having reached a particular period of life, and in conformity with regular biological processes, the quantity of libido in their mental economy has experienced an increase which is in itself enough to upset the equilibrium of their health and to set up the necessary conditions for a neurosis. It is well known that more or less sudden increases of libido of this kind are habitually associated with puberty and the menopause - with the attainment of a certain age in women; in some people they may in addition be manifested in periodicities that are still unknown. Here the damming-up of libido is the primary factor; it becomes pathogenic as a consequence of a relative frustration on the part of the external world, which would still have granted satisfaction to a smaller claim by the libido. The unsatisfied and dammed-up libido can once again open up paths to regression and kindle the same conflicts which we have demonstrated in the case of absolute external frustration. We are reminded in this way that the quantitative factor should not be left out of account in any consideration of the precipitating causes of illness. All the other factors - frustration, fixation, developmental inhibition - remain ineffective unless they affect a certain amount of libido and bring about a damming-up of libido of a certain height. It is true that we are unable to measure this amount of libido which seems to us indispensable for a pathogenic effect; we can only postulate it after the resulting illness has started. There is only one direction in which we can determine it more precisely. We may assume that it is not a question of an absolute quantity, but of the relation between the quota of libido in operation and the quantity of libido which the individual ego is able to deal with - that is, to hold under tension, to sublimate or to employ directly. For this reason a relative increase in the quantity of libido may have the same effects as an absolute one. An enfeeblement of the ego owing to organic illness or owing to some special demand upon its energy will be able to cause the emergence of neuroses which would otherwise have remained latent in spite of any disposition that might be present.

The importance in the causation of illness which must be ascribed to quantity of libido is in satisfactory agreement with two main theses of the theory of the neuroses to which psycho-analysis has led us: first, the thesis that the neuroses are derived from the conflict between the ego and the libido, and secondly, the discovery that there is no qualitative distinction between the determinants of health and those of neurosis, and that, on the contrary, healthy people have to contend with the same tasks of mastering their libido - they have simply succeeded better in them.

Types Of Onset Of Neurosis

2564

It remains to say a few words on the relation of these types to the facts of observation. If I survey the set of patients on whose analysis I am at the moment engaged, I must record that not one of them is a pure example of any of the four types of onset. In each of them, rather, I find a portion of frustration operating alongside of a portion of incapacity to adapt to the demands of reality; inhibition in development, which coincides, of course, with inflexibility of fixations, has to be reckoned with in all of them, and, as I have already said, the importance of quantity of libido must never be neglected. I find, indeed, that in several of these patients their illness has appeared in successive waves, between which there have been healthy intervals, and that each of these waves has been traceable to a different type of precipitating cause. Thus the erection of these four types cannot lay claim to any high theoretical value; they are merely different ways of establishing a particular pathogenic constellation in the mental economy - namely the damming-up of libido, which the ego cannot, with the means at its command, ward off without damage. But this situation itself only becomes pathogenic as a result of a quantitative factor; it does not come as a novelty to mental life and is not created by the impact of what is spoken of as a ‘cause of illness’.

A certain practical importance may readily be allowed to these types of onset. They are to be met with in their pure form, indeed, in individual cases; we should not have noticed the third and fourth types if they had not in some subjects constituted the sole precipitating causes of the illness. The first type keeps before our eyes the extraordinarily powerful influence of the external world, and the second the no less important influence - which opposes the former one - of the subject’s peculiar individuality. Pathology could not do justice to the problem of the precipitating factors in the neuroses so long as it was merely concerned with deciding whether those affections were of an ‘endogenous’ or ‘exogenous’ nature. It was bound to meet every observation which pointed to the importance of abstinence (in the widest sense of the word) as a precipitating cause with the objection that other people tolerate the same experiences without falling ill. If, however, it sought to lay stress on the peculiar individuality of the subject as being the essential factor decisive between illness and health, it was obliged to put up with the proviso that people possessing such a peculiarity can remain healthy indefinitely, just so long as they are able to retain that peculiarity. Psycho-analysis has warned us that we must give up the unfruitful contrast between external and internal factors, between experience and constitution, and has taught us that we shall invariably find the cause of the onset of neurotic illness in a particular psychical situation which can be brought about in a variety of ways.

2565

CONTRIBUTIONS TO A DISCUSSION ON MASTURBATION

(1912)

2566

Intentionally left blank

2567

CONTRIBUTIONS TO A DISCUSSION ON MASTURBATION

I

INTRODUCTION

It is never the aim of the discussions in the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society to remove diversities or to arrive at conclusions. The different speakers, who are held together by taking a similar fundamental view of the same facts, allow themselves to give the sharpest expression to the variety of their individual opinions without any regard to the probability of converting any of their audience who may think otherwise. There may be many points in these discussions which have been misstated and misunderstood, but the final outcome, nevertheless, is that every one has received the clearest impression of views differing from his own and has communicated his own differing views to other people.

The discussion on masturbation, of which actually only fragments are published here, lasted for several months and was conducted on the plan of each speaker in turn reading a paper, which was followed by an exhaustive debate. Only the actual papers are included in the present publication, and not the debates, which were highly stimulating and in which the differing opinions were expressed and defended. This pamphlet would otherwise have attained dimensions which would certainly have stood in the way of its being widely read and proving effective.

The choice of the topic calls for no apologies in these days when an attempt is at last being made to subject the problems of man’s sexual life to a scientific examination. Numerous repetitions of the same thoughts and assertions were unavoidable: they are, of course, the signs of agreement between the speakers. As regards the many divergences in their views, it can no more be an editor’s task to harmonize them than it is to attempt to hide them. It is to be hoped that the reader’s interest will be repelled neither by the repetitions nor by the contradictions.

It has been our purpose on this occasion to show the direction into which the study of the problem of masturbation has been forced by the emergence of the psycho-analytic method of approach. How far we have succeeded in that purpose will appear from our readers’ applause, or perhaps still more clearly from their disapproval.

VIENNA, Summer 1912

Contributions To A Discussion On Masturbation

2568

II

CONCLUDING REMARKS

GENTLEMEN, - The older members of this group will be able to recall that some years ago we made a previous attempt at a collective discussion of this kind - a ‘symposium’, as our American colleagues call it - on the subject of masturbation. At that time the opinions expressed showed such important divergences that we did not venture to lay our proceedings before the public. Since then the same group, together with some newcomers, having been uninterruptedly in touch with observed facts, and having had a constant interchange of ideas with one another, have so far clarified their views and arrived at common ground that the venture which we previously abandoned now no longer seems so rash. I really have an impression that the points on which we are agreed in connection with masturbation are now firmer and more deep-going than the disagreements - though these undeniably exist. Some of the apparent contradictions are only the result of the many different directions from which you have approached the subject, whereas in fact the opinions in question may quite well find a place alongside one another.

With your permission I will set before you a summary of the points on which we seem to be agreed or divided.

We are all agreed, I feel,

(a) on the importance of the phantasies which accompany or represent the act of masturbation,

(b) on the importance of the sense of guilt, whatever its source may be, which is attached to masturbation, and

(c) on the impossibility of assigning a qualitative determinant for the injurious effects of masturbation. (On this last point agreement is not unanimous.)

Unresolved differences of opinion have appeared

(a) in respect to a denial of a somatic factor in the effects of masturbation,

(b) in respect to a general denial of the injurious effects of masturbation,

(c) with regard to the origin of the sense of guilt, which some of you wish to attribute directly to lack of satisfaction, while others adduce social factors in addition, or the attitude of the subject’s personality at the moment, and

(d) with regard to the ubiquity of masturbation in children.

Lastly, significant uncertainties exist

(a) as to the mechanism of the injurious effects of masturbation, if there are any, and

(b) as to the aetiological relation of masturbation to the ‘actual neuroses’.

As regards the majority of the points of controversy among us, we have to thank the challenging criticisms of our colleague Wilhelm Stekel, based on his great and independent experience. There is no doubt that we have left very many points over to be established and clarified by some future band of observers and enquirers. But we may console ourselves with the knowledge that we have worked honestly and in no narrow spirit, and that in so doing we have opened up paths along which later research will be able to travel.

Contributions To A Discussion On Masturbation

2569

You must not expect much from my own contributions to the questions we are concerned with. You are aware of my preference for the fragmentary treatment of a subject, with emphasis on the points which seem to me best established. I have nothing new to offer - no solutions, only a few repetitions of things I have already maintained, a few words in defence of these old assertions against attacks made upon them by some of you, and in addition, a few comments which must inevitably force themselves on anyone listening to your papers.

I have, as you know, divided masturbation according to the subject’s age into (1) masturbation in infants, which includes all auto-erotic activities serving the purpose of sexual satisfaction, (2) masturbation in children, which arises directly out of the preceding kind and has already become fixed to certain erotogenic zones, and (3) masturbation at puberty, which is either continuous with childhood masturbation or is separated from it by the period of latency. In some of the accounts which I have heard you give, full justice has not quite been done to this temporal division. The ostensible unity of masturbation, which is fostered by the customary medical terminology, has given rise to some generalizations where a differentiation according to the three periods of life would have been better justified. It has been a matter for regret, too, that we have not been able to pay as much attention to female as to male masturbation; female masturbation, I believe, is deserving of a special study and in its case it is particularly true that a special emphasis lies on the modifications in it that arise in relation to the subject’s age.

I come now to the objections raised by Reitler to my teleological argument in favour of the ubiquity of masturbation in infancy. I admit that this argument must be abandoned. If one more edition of my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is called for, it will not contain the sentence under attack. I will renounce my attempt at guessing the purposes of Nature and will content myself with describing the facts.

Another remark of Reitler’s is, I think, significant and important. This was to the effect that certain arrangements in the genital apparatus which are peculiar to human beings seem to tend towards preventing sexual intercourse in childhood. Here, however, my doubts arise. The occlusion of the female sexual orifice and the absence of an os penis which would assure erection are, after all, directed only against actual coition, not against sexual excitations in general. Reitler seems to me to take too anthropomorphic a view of the way in which Nature pursues her aims - as though it were a question of her carrying through a single purpose, as is the case with human activity. But so far as we can see, in natural processes a whole number of aims are pursued alongside one another, without interfering with one another. If we are to speak of Nature in human terms, we shall have to say that she appears to us to be what, in the case of men, we should call inconsistent. For my part, I think Reitler should not attach so much weight to his own teleological arguments. The use of teleology as a heuristic hypothesis has its dubious side: in any particular instance one can never tell whether one has hit upon a ‘harmony’ or a ‘disharmony’. It is the same as when one drives a nail into the wall of a room: one cannot be certain whether one is going to come up against lath and plaster or brick-work.

Contributions To A Discussion On Masturbation

2570

On the question of the relation of masturbation and emissions to the causation of so-called ‘neurasthenia’, I find myself like many of you, in opposition to Stekel, and, subject to a limitation which I shall mention presently, I maintain, as against him, my former views. I see nothing that could oblige us to abandon the distinction between ‘actual neuroses’ and psychoneuroses, and I cannot regard the genesis of the symptoms in the case of the former as anything but toxic. Here Stekel really seems to me greatly to overstretch psychogenicity. My view is still what it was in the first instance, more than fifteen years ago: namely, that the two ‘actual neuroses’ - neurasthenia and anxiety neurosis (and perhaps we ought to add hypochondria proper as a third ‘actual neurosis’) - provide the psychoneuroses with the necessary ‘somatic compliance’; they provide the excitatory material, which is then psychically selected and given a ‘psychical coating’, so that, speaking generally, the nucleus of the psychoneurotic symptom - the grain of sand at the centre of the pearl - is formed of a somatic sexual manifestation. This is clearer, it is true, of anxiety neurosis and its relation to hysteria than it is of neurasthenia, into which no careful psycho-analytic investigations have yet been made. In anxiety neurosis, as you have often been able to convince yourselves, it is at bottom a small fragment of undischarged excitation connected with coition which emerges as an anxiety symptom or provides the nucleus for the formation of a hysterical symptom.

Stekel shares with many non-psycho-analytic writers an inclination to reject the morphological differentiations which we have made within the jumble of the neuroses and to lump them all together under one heading - under psychasthenia, perhaps. We have often contradicted him on this, and have held fast to our expectation that the morphologico-clinical differences will prove valuable as indications that have not yet been understood of essentially distinct processes. When he - justly - points out to us that he has regularly found the same complexes present in what are termed neurasthenics as in other neurotics, his argument fails to meet the point at issue. We have long known that the same complexes and conflicts are to be looked for, too, in all normal and healthy people. In fact, we have grown accustomed to attributing to every civilized human being a certain amount of repression of perverse impulses, a certain amount of anal erotism, of homosexuality and so on, as well as a piece of father-complex and mother-complex and of other complexes besides - just as in the chemical analysis of an organic substance we have every hope of finding certain elements: carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and a trace of sulphur. What distinguishes organic substances from one another is the relative amounts of these elements and the way in which the links between them are constituted. In the same way, in the case of normal and neurotic people what is in question is not whether these complexes and conflicts exist but whether they have become pathogenic and, if so, by means of what mechanisms they have become so.

Contributions To A Discussion On Masturbation

2571

The essence of the theories about the ‘actual neuroses’ which I have put forward in the past and am defending to-day lies in my assertion, based on experiment, that their symptoms, unlike psychoneurotic ones, cannot be analysed. That is to say, the constipation, headaches and fatigue of the so-called neurasthenic do not admit of being traced back historically or symbolically to operative experiences and cannot be understood as substitutes for sexual satisfaction or as compromises between opposing instinctual impulses, as is the case with psycho-neurotic symptoms (even though the latter may perhaps have the same appearance). I do not believe it will be possible to upset this assertion by the help of psycho-analysis. On the other hand I will grant to-day what I was unable to believe formerly - that an analytic treatment can have an indirect curative effect on ‘actual’ symptoms. It can do so either by enabling the current noxae to be better tolerated, or by enabling the sick person to escape from the current noxae by making a change in his sexual régime. These would be desirable prospects from the point of view of our therapeutic interest.

If in the end I am convicted of being in error over the theoretical problem of the ‘actual neuroses’, I shall be able to console myself with the advance in our knowledge, which must disregard the opinions of an individual. You may then ask why, since I have such a laudable appreciation of the limitations of my own infallibility, I do not at once give in to these new suggestions but prefer to re-enact the familiar comedy of an old man obstinately clinging to his opinions. My reply is that I do not yet see any evidence to induce me to give in. In early days I made a number of alterations in my views and did not conceal them from the public. I was reproached on account of these changes, just as to-day I am reproached for my conservativeness. Not that I should be intimidated by the one reproach or the other. But I know that I have a destiny to fulfil. I cannot escape it and I need not move towards it. I shall await it, and in the meantime I shall behave towards our science as earlier experience has taught me.

I am loth to take up a position on the question that has been dealt with by you so extensively of the injuriousness of masturbation, for it offers no proper approach to the problems which concern us. But we must all do so, no doubt: the world seems to feel no other interest in masturbation. You will recall that at our former series of discussions on the subject we had among us as a visitor a distinguished Viennese paediatrician. What was it that he repeatedly asked us to tell him? Simply, how far masturbation is injurious and why it injures some people but not others. So we must force our researches to make a pronouncement to meet this practical demand.

Contributions To A Discussion On Masturbation

2572

I must confess that here again I am unable to share Stekel’s point of view, in spite of the many courageous and correct comments that he has made to us on the question. As he sees it, the injuriousness of masturbation amounts to no more than a senseless prejudice which, purely as a result of personal limitations, we are unwilling to cast off with sufficient thoroughness. I believe, however, that if we fix our eyes on the problem sine ira et studio¹ - so far, of course, as we are able to, - we shall be obliged to declare, rather, that to take up such a position contradicts our fundamental views on the aetiology of the neuroses. Masturbation corresponds essentially to infantile sexual activity and to its subsequent retention at a more mature age. We derive the neuroses from a conflict between a person’s sexual urges and his other (ego) trends. Now someone might say: ‘In my view the pathogenic factor in this aetiological relation lies solely in the ego’s reaction to its sexuality.’ By this he would be asserting that anyone could keep free of neurosis if only he were willing to allow unrestricted satisfaction to his sexual urges. But it is clearly arbitrary, and evidently pointless as well, to come to such a decision, and not to allow the sexual urges themselves to have any share in the pathogenic process. But if you admit that the sexual urges can have a pathogenic effect, you should no longer deny a similar significance to masturbation, which after all only consists in carrying out such sexual instinctual impulses. In every case which seems to show that masturbation is pathogenic, you will, no doubt, be able to trace the operation further back - to the instincts which manifest themselves in the masturbation and to the resistances which are directed against those instincts. Masturbation is not anything ultimate - whether somatically or psychologically - it is not a real ‘agent’, but merely the name for certain activities. Yet, however much we may trace things further back, our judgement on the causation of the illness will nevertheless rightly remain attached to this activity. And do not forget that masturbation is not to be equated with sexual activity in general: it is sexual activity subjected to certain limiting conditions. Thus it also remains possible that it is precisely these peculiarities of masturbatory activity which are the vehicles of its pathogenic effects.

¹ [’Without bitterness or partiality.’]

Contributions To A Discussion On Masturbation

2573

We are therefore brought back once more from arguments to clinical observation, and we are warned by it not to strike out the heading ‘Injurious Effects of Masturbation’. We are at all events confronted in the neuroses with cases in which masturbation has done damage.

This damage seems to occur in three different ways:

(a) Organic injury may occur by some unknown mechanism. Here we must take into account the considerations of excess and of inadequate satisfaction, which have often been mentioned by you.

(b) The injury may occur through the laying down of a psychical pattern according to which there is no necessity for trying to alter the external world in order to satisfy a great need. Where, however, a far-reaching reaction against this pattern develops, the most valuable character-traits may be initiated.

(c) A fixation of infantile sexual aims may be made possible, and a persistence of psychical infantilism. Here we have the disposition for the occurrence of a neurosis. As psycho-analysts we cannot fail to be greatly interested in this result of masturbation - which in this case means, of course, masturbation occurring at puberty and continued afterwards. We must keep in mind the significance which masturbation acquires as a carrying into effect of phantasy - that half-way region interpolated between life in accordance with the pleasure principle and life in accordance with the reality principle; and we must remember how masturbation makes it possible to bring about sexual developments and sublimations in phantasy, which are nevertheless not advances but injurious compromises - though it is true, as an important remark of Stekel’s has pointed out, that this same compromise renders severe perverse inclinations harmless and averts the worst consequences of abstinence.

On the basis of my medical experience, I cannot rule out a permanent reduction in potency as one among the results of masturbation, though I will grant to Stekel that in a number of cases it may turn out to be only apparent. This particular result of masturbation, however, cannot be classed unhesitatingly among the injurious ones. Some diminution of male potency and of the brutal aggressiveness involved in it is much to the purpose from the point of view of civilization. It facilitates the practice by civilized men of the virtues of sexual moderation and trustworthiness that are incumbent on them. Virtue accompanied by full potency is usually felt as a hard task.

This may strike you as cynical, but you may rest assured that it is not cynically meant. It sets out to be no more than a piece of dry description, without regard to whether it may cause satisfaction or annoyance. For masturbation, like so many other things, has les défauts de ses vertus and on the other hand les vertus de ses défauts. If one is disentangling an involved and complex subject with a one-sided practical interest in its harmfulness and uses, one must put up with unwelcome discoveries.

Furthermore, I think we may with advantage distinguish what we may describe as the direct injuries caused by masturbation from those which arise indirectly from the ego’s resistance and indignation against that sexual activity. I have not entered into these latter consequences.

Contributions To A Discussion On Masturbation

2574

And now I am obliged to add a few words on the second of the two painful questions we have been asked. Assuming that masturbation can be injurious, under what conditions and in what people does it prove to be so?

Like the majority of you, I am inclined to refuse to give a general answer to the question. It partly coincides with another, more comprehensive question: when does sexual activity in general become pathogenic for particular people? If we put this consideration on one side, we are left with a question of detail relating to the characteristics of masturbation in so far as it represents a special manner and form of sexual satisfaction. Here it would be to the point to repeat what is already known to us and has been discussed in other connections - to assess the influence of the quantitative factor and of the combined operation of several pathogenic factors. Above all, however, we should have to leave a wide field for what are known as an individual’s constitutional dispositions. But it must be confessed that dealing with these is an awkward business. For we are in the habit of forming our opinion of individual dispositions ex post facto: we attribute this or that disposition to people after the event, when they have already fallen ill. We have no method of discovering it beforehand. We behave, in fact, like the Scottish King in one of Victor Hugo’s novels, who boasted of an infallible method of recognizing witchcraft. He had the accused woman stewed in boiling water and then tasted the broth. He then judged according to the taste: ‘Yes, that was a witch’, or ‘No, that was not one.’

There is another question that I might draw your attention to, which has been dealt with too little in our discussions: that of ‘unconscious’ masturbation. I mean masturbation during sleep, during abnormal states, or fits. You will recall the many hysterical fits in which masturbatory acts recur in a disguised or unrecognizable way, after the subject has renounced that form of satisfaction, and the many symptoms in obsessional neurosis which seek to replace and repeat this kind of sexual activity, which has formerly been forbidden. We may also speak of a therapeutic return of masturbation. A number of you will have found on occasion, as I have, that it represents a great advance if during the treatment the patient ventures to take up masturbation once more, though he may have no intention of making a permanent stop at that infantile halting-place. In this connection I may remind you that a considerable number of precisely the most severe sufferers from neurosis have avoided all recollection of masturbation during historic times, while psycho-analysis is able to prove that that species of sexual activity had by no means been strange to them during the forgotten earliest period of their lives.

But I think the time has come to break off. For we are all agreed on one thing - that the subject of masturbation is quite inexhaustible.

2575

A NOTE ON THE UNCONSCIOUS IN PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

(1912)

2576

Intentionally left blank

2577

A NOTE ON THE UNCONSCIOUS IN PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

I wish to expound in a few words and as plainly as possible what the term ‘unconscious’ has come to mean in Psycho-analysis and in Psycho-analysis alone.

A conception - or any other psychical element - which is now present to my consciousness may become absent the next moment, and may become present again, after an interval, unchanged, and, as we say, from memory, not as a result of a fresh perception by our senses. It is this fact which we are accustomed to account for by the supposition that during the interval the conception has been present in our mind, although latent in consciousness. In what shape it may have existed while present in the mind and latent in consciousness we have no means of guessing.

At this very point we may be prepared to meet with the philosophical objection that the latent conception did not exist as an object of psychology, but as a physical disposition for the recurrence of the same psychical phenomenon, i.e. of the said conception. But we may reply that this is a theory far overstepping the domain of psychology proper; that it simply begs the question by asserting ‘conscious’ to be an identical term with ‘psychical’, and that it is clearly at fault in denying psychology the right to account for its most common facts, such as memory, by its own means.

Now let us call ‘conscious’ the conception which is present to our consciousness and of which we are aware, and let this be the only meaning of the term ‘conscious’. As for latent conceptions, if we have any reason to suppose that they exist in the mind - as we had in the case of memory - let them be denoted by the term ‘unconscious’.

Thus an unconscious conception is one of which we are not aware, but the existence of which we are nevertheless ready to admit on account of other proofs or signs.

This might be considered an uninteresting piece of descriptive or classificatory work if no experience appealed to our judgement other than the facts of memory, or the cases of association by unconscious links. The well-known experiment, however, of the ‘post-hypnotic suggestion’ teaches us to insist upon the importance of the distinction between conscious and unconscious and seems to increase its value.

A Note On The Unconscious In Psycho-Analysis

2578

In this experiment, as performed by Bernheim, a person is put into a hypnotic state and is subsequently aroused. While he was in the hypnotic state, under the influence of the physician, he was ordered to execute a certain action at a certain fixed moment after his awakening, say half an hour later. He awakes, and seems fully conscious and in his ordinary condition; he has no recollection of his hypnotic state, and yet at the prearranged moment there rushes into his mind the impulse to do such and such a thing, and he does it consciously, though not knowing why. It seems impossible to give any other description of the phenomenon than to say that the order had been present in the mind of the person in a condition of latency, or had been present unconsciously, until the given moment came, and then had become conscious. But not the whole of it emerged into consciousness: only the conception of the act to be executed. All the other ideas associated with this conception - the order, the influence of the physician, the recollection of the hypnotic state, remained unconscious even then.

But we have more to learn from such an experiment. We are led from the purely descriptive to a dynamic view of the phenomenon. The idea of the action ordered in hypnosis not only became an object of consciousness at a certain moment, but the more striking aspect of the fact is that this idea grew active: it was translated into action as soon as consciousness became aware of its presence. The real stimulus to the action being the order of the physician, it is hard not to concede that the idea of the physician’s order became active too. Yet this last idea did not reveal itself to consciousness, as did its outcome, the idea of the action; it remained unconscious, and so it was active and unconscious at the same time.

A post-hypnotic suggestion is a laboratory production, an artificial fact. But if we adopt the theory of hysterical phenomena first put forward by P. Janet and elaborated by Breuer and myself, we shall not be at a loss for plenty of natural facts showing the psychological character of the post-hypnotic suggestion even more clearly and distinctly.

A Note On The Unconscious In Psycho-Analysis

2579

The mind of the hysterical patient is full of active yet unconscious ideas; all her symptoms proceed from such ideas. It is in fact the most striking character of the hysterical mind to be ruled by them. If the hysterical woman vomits, she may do so from the idea of being pregnant. She has, however, no knowledge of this idea, although it can easily be detected in her mind, and made conscious to her, by one of the technical procedures of psycho-analysis. If she is executing the jerks and movements constituting her ‘fit’, she does not even consciously represent to herself the intended actions, and she may perceive those actions with the detached feelings of an onlooker. Nevertheless analysis will show that she was acting her part in the dramatic reproduction of some incident in her life, the memory of which was unconsciously active during the attack. The same preponderance of active unconscious ideas is revealed by analysis as the essential fact in the psychology of all other forms of neurosis.

We learn therefore by the analysis of neurotic phenomena that a latent or unconscious idea is not necessarily a weak one, and that the presence of such an idea in the mind admits of indirect proofs of the most cogent kind, which are equivalent to the direct proof furnished by consciousness. We feel justified in making our classification agree with this addition to our knowledge by introducing a fundamental distinction between different kinds of latent or unconscious ideas. We were accustomed to think that every latent idea was so because it was weak and that it grew conscious as soon as it became strong. We have not gained the conviction that there are some latent ideas which do not penetrate into consciousness, however strong they may have become. Therefore we may call the latent ideas of the first type foreconscious,¹  while we reserve the term unconscious (proper) for the latter type which we came to study in the neuroses. The term unconscious, which was used in the purely descriptive sense before, now comes to imply something more. It designates not only latent ideas in general, but especially ideas with a certain dynamic character, ideas keeping apart from consciousness in spite of their intensity and activity.

¹ [In the 1925 English version, throughout the paper, ‘foreconscious’ was altered to ‘preconscious’, which has, of course, become the regular translation of the German ‘vorbewusst’.]

A Note On The Unconscious In Psycho-Analysis

2580

Before continuing my exposition I will refer to two objection which are likely to be raised at this point. The first of these may be stated thus: instead of subscribing to the hypothesis of unconscious ideas of which we know nothing, we had better assume that consciousness can be split up, so that certain ideas or other psychical acts may constitute a consciousness apart; which has become detached and estranged from the bulk of conscious psychical activity. Well-known pathological cases like that of Dr. Azam seem to go far to show that the splitting up of consciousness is no fanciful imagination.

I venture to urge against this theory that it is a gratuitous assumption, based on the abuse of the word ‘conscious’. We have no right to extend the meaning of this word so for as to make it include a consciousness of which its owner himself is not aware. If philosophers find difficulty in accepting the existence of unconscious ideas, the existence of an unconscious consciousness seems to me even more objectionable. The cases described as splitting of consciousness, like Dr. Azam’s, might better be denoted as shifting of consciousness, - that function - or whatever it be - oscillating between two different psychical complexes which become conscious and unconscious in alternation.

The other objection that may probably be raised would be that we apply to normal psychology conclusions which are drawn chiefly from the study of pathological conditions. We are enabled to answer it by another fact, the knowledge of which we owe to psycho-analysis. Certain deficiencies of function of most frequent occurrence among healthy people, e.g. lapsus linguae, errors in memory and speech, forgetting of names, etc., may easily be shown to depend on the action of strong unconscious ideas in the same way as neurotic symptoms. We shall meet with another still more convincing argument at a later stage of this discussion.

By the differentiation of foreconscious and unconscious ideas, we are led on to leave the field of classification and to form an opinion about functional and dynamical relations in psychical action. We have found a foreconscious activity passing into consciousness with no difficulty, and an unconscious activity which remains so and seems to be cut off from consciousness.

A Note On The Unconscious In Psycho-Analysis

2581

Now we do not know whether these two modes of psychical activity are identical or essentially divergent from their beginning, but we may ask why they should become different in the course of psychical action. To this last question psycho-analysis gives a clear and unhesitating answer. It is by no means impossible for the product of unconscious activity to pierce into consciousness, but a certain amount of exertion is needed for this task. When we try to do it in ourselves, we become aware of a distinct feeling of repulsion¹ which must be overcome, and when we produce it in a patient we get the most unquestionable signs of what we call his resistance to it. So we learn that the unconscious idea is excluded from consciousness by living forces which oppose themselves to its reception, while they do not object to other ideas, the foreconscious ones. Psycho-analysis leaves no room for doubt that the repulsion from unconscious ideas is only provoked by the tendencies embodied in their contents. The next and most probable theory which can be formulated at this stage of our knowledge is the following. Unconsciousness is a regular and inevitable phase in the processes constituting our psychical activity; every psychical act begins as an unconscious one, and it may either remain so or go on developing into consciousness, according as it meets with resistance or not. The distinction between foreconscious and unconscious activity is not a primary one, but comes to be established after repulsion has sprung up. Only then the difference between foreconscious ideas, which can appear in consciousness and reappear at any moment, and unconscious ideas which cannot do so gains a theoretical as well as a practical value. A rough but not inadequate analogy to this supposed relation of conscious to unconscious activity might be drawn from the field of ordinary photography. The first stage of the photograph is the ‘negative’; every photographic picture has to pass through the ‘negative process’, and some of these negatives which have held good in examination are admitted to the ‘positive process’ ending in the picture.

¹ [In the German translation the word ‘repulsion’, here and lower down, is rendered by ‘Abwehr’, of which the usual English version is ‘defence’ or ‘fending off ‘.]

A Note On The Unconscious In Psycho-Analysis

2582

But the distinction between foreconscious and unconscious activity, and the recognition of the barrier which keeps them asunder, is not the last or the most important result of the psycho-analytic investigation of psychical life. There is one psychical product to be met with in the most normal persons, which yet presents a very striking analogy to the wildest productions of insanity, and was no more intelligible to philosophers than insanity itself. I refer to dreams. Psycho-analysis is founded upon the analysis of dreams; the interpretation of dreams is the most complete piece of work the young science has done up to the present. One of the most common types of dream-formation may be described as follows: a train of thoughts has been aroused by the working of the mind in the daytime, and retained some of its activity, escaping from the general inhibition of interests which introduces sleep and constitutes the psychical preparation for sleeping. During the night this train of thoughts succeeds in finding connections with one of the unconscious tendencies present ever since his childhood in the mind of the dreamer, but ordinarily repressed and excluded from his conscious life. By the borrowed force of this unconscious help, the thoughts, the residue of the day’s work,¹ now become active again, and emerge into consciousness in the shape of the dream. Now three things have happened:

(1) The thoughts have undergone a change, a disguise and a distortion, which represents the part of the unconscious helpmate.

(2) The thoughts have occupied consciousness at a time when they ought not.

(3) Some part of the unconscious, which could not otherwise have done so, has emerged into consciousness.

We have learnt the art of finding out the ‘residual thoughts’, the latent thoughts of the dream, and, by comparing them with the apparent² dream, we are able to form a judgement on the changes they underwent and the manner in which these were brought about.

The latent thoughts of the dream differ in no respect from the products of our regular conscious activity; they deserve the name of foreconscious thoughts, and may indeed have been conscious at some moment of waking life. But by entering into connection with the unconscious tendencies during the night they have become assimilated to the latter, degraded as it were to the condition of unconscious thoughts, and subjected to the laws by which unconscious activity is governed. And here is the opportunity to learn what we could not have guessed from speculation, or from another source of empirical information - that the laws of unconscious activity differ widely from those of the conscious. We gather in detail what the peculiarities of the Unconscious are, and we may hope to learn still more about them by a profounder investigation of the processes of dream-formation.

¹ [In the 1925 English version the word ‘mental’ was inserted before ‘work’. In the German translation the whole phrase is rendered ‘Tagesreste’, for which the usual English equivalent is ‘day’s residues’.]

² [This word was altered to ‘manifest’ in the 1925 English version.]

A Note On The Unconscious In Psycho-Analysis

2583

This inquiry is not yet half finished, and an exposition of the results obtained hitherto is scarcely possible without entering into the most intricate problems of dream-analysis. But I would not break off this discussion without indicating the change and progress in our comprehension of the Unconscious which are due to our psycho-analytic study of dreams.

Unconsciousness seemed to us at first only an enigmatical characteristic of a definite psychical act. Now it means more for us. It is a sign that this act partakes of the nature of a certain psychical category known to us by other and more important characters¹ and that it belongs to a system of psychical activity which is deserving of our fullest attention. The index-value of the unconscious has far outgrown its importance as a property. The system revealed by the sign that the single acts forming parts of it are unconscious we designate by the name ‘The Unconscious’, for want of a better and less ambiguous term. In German, I propose to denote this system by the letters Ubw, an abbreviation of the German word ‘Unbewusst’.² And this is the third and most significant sense which the term ‘unconscious’ has acquired in psycho-analysis.

¹ [This was altered to ‘features’ in the 1925 English version.]

² [Equivalent English abbreviation: ‘Ucs.’.]

2584

AN EVIDENTIAL DREAM

(1913)

2585

Intentionally left blank

2586

AN EVIDENTIAL DREAM

A lady suffering from doubting mania and obsessive ceremonials insisted that her nurses should never let her out of their sight for a single moment: otherwise she would begin to brood about forbidden actions that she might have committed while she was not being watched. One evening, while she was resting on the sofa, she thought she saw that the nurse on duty had fallen asleep. She called out: ‘Did you see me?’ The nurse started up and replied: ‘Of course I did.’ This gave the patient grounds for a fresh doubt, and after a time she repeated her question, which the nurse met with renewed protestations; just at that moment another attendant came in bringing the patient’s supper.

This incident occurred one Friday evening. Next morning the nurse recounted a dream which had the effect of dispelling the patient’s doubts.

DREAM. - Someone had entrusted a child to her. Its mother had left home, and she had lost it. As she went along, she enquired from the people in the street whether they had seen the child. Then she came to a large expanse of water and crossed a narrow footbridge. (There was an addendum: Suddenly there appeared before her on the footbridge, like a ‘fata Morgana’, the figure of another nurse.) Then she found herself in a familiar place, where she met a woman whom she had known as a girl and who had in those days been a saleswoman in a provision shop and later had got married. She asked the woman, who was standing in front of her door: ‘Did you see the child?’ The woman paid no attention to the question but informed her that she was now divorced from her husband, adding that marriage is not always happy either. She woke up feeling reassured and thought that the child would turn up all right in a neighbour’s house.

ANALYSIS. - The patient assumed that this dream referred to the falling asleep which the nurse had denied. From additional information volunteered by the latter, she was able to interpret the dream in a fashion which, although incomplete in some respects, was sufficient for all practical purposes. I myself heard only the lady’s report and did not interview the nurse. I shall first quote the patient’s interpretation, and then supplement it with whatever our general understanding of the laws governing dream-formation allows us to add.

An Evidential Dream

2587

‘The nurse told me that the child in the dream reminded her of a case the nursing of which had given her the most lively satisfaction. It was that of a child who was unable to see on account of inflammation of the eyes (blennorrhoea). The mother, however, did not leave home: she helped to nurse the child. On the other hand I remember too that when my husband, who thinks highly of this nurse, went away, he left me in her care and she promised to look after me as she would after a child.’

Furthermore, we know from the patient’s analysis that by insisting on never being let out of sight she had put herself back in the position of being a child once more.

‘Her having lost the child’, continued the patient, ‘signified that she had not seen me; she had lost sight of me. This was her admission that she had actually gone to sleep for a time and had not told me the truth afterwards.’

She was in the dark about the meaning of the small piece of the dream in which the nurse enquired from the people in the street whether they had seen the child; on the other hand, she was able to elucidate the later details of the manifest dream.

‘The large expanse of water made the nurse think of the Rhine; she added, however, that it was much larger than the Rhine. Then she remembered that on the previous evening I had read her the story of Jonah and the whale, and had told her that I myself once saw a whale in the English Channel. I fancy that the large expanse of water was the sea and was an allusion to the story of Jonah.

‘I think, too, the narrow footbridge came from the same story, which was amusingly written in dialect. The anecdote related how a religious instructor described to his pupils the wonderful adventures of Jonah; whereupon a boy objected that it could not be true, since the teacher himself had told them before that whales could swallow only the smallest creatures owing to the narrowness of their gullets. The teacher got out of the difficulty by saying that Jonah was a Jew, and that Jews would squeeze in anywhere. My nurse is very pious but inclined to religious doubts, and I reproached myself in case what I had read to her might have stirred them up.

An Evidential Dream

2588

‘On this narrow footbridge she now saw the apparition of another nurse, whom she knew. She told me the story of this nurse: she had drowned herself in the Rhine because she had been discharged from a case owing to something she had been guilty of.¹ She herself had feared, therefore, that she would be discharged for having fallen asleep. Moreover, on the day following the incident and after relating the dream, the nurse cried bitterly, and when I asked her why, replied quite rudely: "You know why as well as I do; and now you won’t trust me any more!"‘

Since the apparition of the drowned nurse was an addendum and an especially distinct one, we would have advised the lady to begin her dream-interpretation at that point. According to the dreamer’s report, too, this first half of her dream was accompanied by acute anxiety; the second part paved the way for the feeling of reassurance with which she awoke.

‘I regard the next part of the dream’, said the lady, continuing her analysis, ‘as certain corroboration of my view that the dream had to do with what happened on Friday evening, for the person who had formerly been a saleswoman in a provision shop can only have referred to the attendant who brought in the supper on that occasion. I noticed, too, that the nurse had complained of nausea all day long. The question she put to this woman: "Did you see the child?" is obviously traceable to my question: "Did you see me!" which I had put to her for the second time just as the attendant came in with the dishes.’

¹ At this point I have been guilty of making a condensation of the material, which I have been able to put right after going through my draft with the lady who told me the story. The nurse who met the dreamer as an apparition on the footbridge had not been guilty of anything in her nursing. She was discharged because the child’s mother, who had to leave home at the time, wanted to leave her child in charge of an older attendant - thus in point of fact a more trustworthy one. This was followed by a second story about another nurse who had actually been discharged on account of neglect, but who did not on that account drown herself. The material necessary for the interpretation of the dream-element came, as is so often the way, from two sources. My memory carried out the synthesis that led to the interpretation. For the rest, this story of the drowned nurse contains the factor of the mother leaving home, which the lady connected with the departure of her husband. We thus have here an overdetermination which detracts somewhat from the elegance of the interpretation.

An Evidential Dream

2589

In the dream, too, enquiry after the child was made on two occasions. The fact that the woman did not reply - paid no attention - we may regard as a depreciation of this other attendant made in the dreamer’s favour: she represented herself in the dream as being superior to the other woman, precisely because she herself had to face reproaches on account of her own lack of attention.

‘The woman who appeared in the dream was not in actual fact divorced from her husband. The situation was taken from an incident in the life of the other attendant, who had been separated - "divorced" - from a man by her parents’ command. The remark that "marriage does not always run smoothly either" was probably a consolation used in the course of conversation between the two women. This consolation prefigured another, with which the dream ended: "The child will turn up all right."

‘I concluded from this dream that on the evening in question the nurse really did fall asleep and that she was afraid of being dismissed on that account. Because of this I no longer felt any doubt about the correctness of my observation. Incidentally, after relating the dream, she added that she was very sorry she had not got a dream-book with her. To my comment that such books were full of the most ignorant superstitions, she replied that, although she was not at all superstitious, still all the unpleasant happenings of her life had taken place on a Friday. I must add that at the present time her treatment of me is not at all satisfactory, and she is touchy and irritable and makes scenes about nothing.’

I think we must credit the lady with having correctly interpreted and evaluated her nurse’s dream. As so often happens with dream-interpretation during analysis, the translation of the dream does not depend solely on the products of association, but we have also to take into account the circumstances of its narration, the behaviour of the dreamer before and after the analysis of the dream, as well as every remark or disclosure made by the dreamer at about the same time - during the same analytic session. If we take into consideration the nurse’s touchiness, her attitude to unlucky Fridays, etc., we shall confirm the conclusion that the dream contained an admission that, in spite of her denial, she had actually dozed off, and was afraid she would be sent away from the ‘child’ in her care.¹

¹ A few days later, indeed, the nurse confessed to a third person that she had fallen asleep that evening, and thus confirmed the lady’s interpretation.

An Evidential Dream

2590

While, however, for the lady who reported it to me this dream had practical significance, for us it stimulates theoretical interest in two directions. It is true that it ended in a consolation, but in the main it represented an important admission in regard to the nurse’s relation to her patient. How does it come about that a dream, which is supposed, after all, to serve as the fulfilment of a wish, could take the place of an admission which was not even of any advantage to the dreamer? Must we really concede that in addition to wishful (and anxiety) dreams, there are also dreams of admission, as well as of warning, reflection, adaptation, and so on?

I must confess that I still do not quite understand why the stand I took against any such temptation in my Interpretation of Dreams has given rise to misgivings in the minds of so many psycho-analysts, among them some well-known ones. It seems to me that the differentiation between dreams of wishing, admission, warning, adaptation, and so on, has not much more sense than the differentiation, which is accepted perforce, of medical specialists into gynaecologists, paediatricians, and dentists. Let me recapitulate here as briefly as possible what I have said on this question in my Interpretation of Dreams.¹

The so-called ‘day’s residues’ can act as disturbers of sleep and constructors of dreams; they are affectively cathected thought-processes from the dream-day, which have resisted the general lowering through sleep. These day’s residues are uncovered by tracing back the manifest dream to the latent dream-thoughts; they constitute portions of the latter and are thus among the activities of waking life - whether conscious or unconscious - which have been able to persist into the period of sleep. In accordance with the multiplicity of thought-processes in the conscious and preconscious, these day’s residues have the most numerous and varied meanings: they may be wishes or fears that have not been disposed of, or intentions, reflections, warnings, attempts at adaptation to current tasks, and so on. To this extent the classification of dreams that is under consideration seems to be justified by the content which is uncovered by interpretation. These day’s residues, however, are not the dream itself: they lack the main essential of a dream. Of themselves they are not able to construct a dream. They are, strictly speaking, only the psychical material for the dream-work, just as sensory and somatic stimuli, whether accidental or produced under experimental conditions, constitute the somatic material for the dream-work. To attribute to them the main part in the construction of dreams is simply to repeat at a new point the pre-analytic error which explained dreams by referring them to bad digestion or to pressure on the skin. Scientific errors, indeed, are tenacious of life, and even when they have been refuted are ready to creep in again under new disguises.

¹ p. 992 ff.

An Evidential Dream

2591

The present state of our knowledge leads us to conclude that the essential factor in the construction of dreams is an unconscious wish - as a rule an infantile wish, now repressed - which can come to expression in this somatic or psychical material (in the day’s residues too, therefore) and can thus supply these with a force which enables them to press their way through to consciousness even during the suspension of thought at night. The dream is in every case a fulfilment of this unconscious wish, whatever else it may contain - warning, reflection, admission, or any other part of the rich content of preconscious waking life that has persisted undealt-with into the night. It is this unconscious wish that gives the dream-work its peculiar character as an unconscious revision of preconscious material. A psycho-analyst can characterize as dreams only the products of the dream-work: in spite of the fact that the latent dream-thoughts are only arrived at from the interpretation of the dream, he cannot reckon them as part of the dream, but only as part of preconscious reflection. (Secondary revision by the conscious agency is here reckoned as part of the dream-work. Even if one were to separate it, this would not involve any alteration in our conception. We should then have to say: dreams in the analytic sense comprise the dream-work proper together with the secondary revision of its products.) The conclusion to be drawn from these considerations is that one cannot put the wish-fulfilling character of dreams on a par with their character as warnings, admissions, attempts at solution, etc., without denying the concept of a psychical dimension of depth - that is to say, without denying the standpoint of psycho-analysis.

Let us now go back to the nurse’s dream, in order to demonstrate the quality of depth in the wish-fulfilment contained in it. We already know that the lady’s interpretation of the dream was by no means complete; there were portions of it to which she was unable to do justice. Moreover she suffered from an obsessional neurosis, a condition which, from what I have observed, makes it considerably harder to understand dream-symbols, just as dementia praecox makes it easier.

Nevertheless, our knowledge of dream-symbolism enables us to understand uninterpreted portions of this dream and to discover a deeper significance behind the interpretations already given. We cannot but notice that some of the material employed by the nurse came from the complex of giving birth, of having children. The expanse of water (the Rhine, the Channel where the whale was seen) was certainly the water out of which children come. And then, too, she came to the water in search of a child. The Jonah legend, which was a factor lying behind the determination of this water, the question how Jonah (the child) could get through such a narrow passage, belongs to the same complex. And the nurse who threw herself into the Rhine out of mortification found a sexual-symbolic consolation for her despair of life in the mode of her death - by going into water. The narrow footbridge on which the apparition met her was in all probability also a genital symbol, although I must admit that here we lack as yet more precise knowledge.

An Evidential Dream

2592

The wish ‘I want to have a child’ seems therefore to have been the dream-constructor from the unconscious; no other would have been better calculated to console the nurse for the distressing state of affairs in real life. ‘I shall be discharged: I shall lose the child in my care. What does it matter? I shall get a real child of my own instead.’ The uninterpreted portion of the dream in which she questioned everyone in the street about the child may perhaps belong here; the interpretation would then run: ‘And even if I have to offer myself on the streets I know how to get a child for myself.’ A strain of defiance in the dreamer, hitherto disguised, suddenly declares itself at this point. Her admission fits in here for the first time: ‘I have shut my eyes and compromised my professional reputation for conscientiousness; now I shall lose my place. Shall I be such a fool as to drown myself like Nurse X? Not I: I’ll give up nursing altogether and get married; I’ll be a woman and have a real child; nothing shall prevent me.’ This interpretation is justified by the consideration that ‘having children’ is really the infantile expression of a wish for sexual intercourse: indeed it can be chosen in consciousness as a euphemistic expression of this objectionable wish.

Thus the dreamer’s disadvantageous admission, to which she showed some inclination even in waking life, was made possible in the dream by being employed by a latent character-trait of hers for the purpose of bringing about the fulfilment of an infantile wish. We may surmise that this trait had a close connection - in regard both to time and to content - with the wish for a child and for sexual enjoyment.

Subsequent enquiry from the lady to whom I owe the first part of this interpretation afforded some unexpected information about the nurse’s previous life. Before she took up nursing she had wanted to marry a man who had been keenly interested in her; but she had abandoned the projected marriage on account of the opposition of an aunt, towards whom her relations were a curious mixture of dependence and defiance. This aunt who prevented the marriage was the Superior of a nursing Order. The dreamer always regarded her as her pattern. She had expectations of an inheritance from her and was tied to her for that reason. Nevertheless, she opposed her aunt by not entering the Order as that lady had planned. The defiance shown in the dream was therefore directed against the aunt. We have ascribed an anal-erotic origin to this character-trait, and may take into consideration that the interests which made her dependent on her aunt were of a financial nature; we are also reminded that children favour the anal theory of birth.

An Evidential Dream

2593

This factor of infantile defiance may perhaps allow us to assume a closer relation between the first and last scenes in the dream. The former saleswoman in a provision shop represents in the dream the attendant who brought the lady’s supper into the room just when she was asking the question ‘Did you see me?’ It appears, however, that she was cast for the role of hostile rival in general. The dreamer disparaged her capacities as a nurse by making her take not the slightest interest in the lost child, but deal only with her own private affairs in her answer. She had thus displaced on to this figure the indifference about the child in her care which she was beginning to feel. The unhappy marriage and divorce which she herself must have dreaded in her most secret wishes were attributed to the other woman. We know, however, that it was the aunt who had separated the dreamer from her fiancé. Hence the ‘provision saleswoman’ (a figure not necessarily without an infantile symbolic significance) may represent the aunt-Superior, who was in fact not much older than the dreamer and who had played the traditional part of mother-rival in her life. A satisfactory confirmation of this interpretation is to be found in the fact that the ‘familiar’ place where she came upon this person standing in front of her door was precisely the place where her aunt resided as a Superior.

Owing to the lack of contact between the analyst and the person under analysis, it is scarcely advisable to penetrate deeper into the structure of the dream. But we may perhaps say that so far as it was accessible to interpretation it has provided us with plenty of confirmations as well as with plenty of new problems.

2594

THE OCCURRENCE IN DREAMS OF MATERIAL FROM FAIRY TALES

(1913)

2595

Intentionally left blank

2596

THE OCCURRENCE IN DREAMS OF MATERIAL FROM FAIRY TALES

It is not surprising to find that psycho-analysis confirms our recognition of the important place which folk fairy tales have acquired in the mental life of our children. In a few people a recollection of their favourite fairy tales takes the place of memories of their own childhood; they have made the fairy tales into screen memories.

Elements and situations derived from fairy tales are also frequently to be found in dreams. In interpreting the passages in question the patient will produce the significant fairy tale as an association. In the present paper I shall give two instances of this very common occurrence. But it will not be possible to do more than hint at the relations between the fairy tales and the history of the dreamer’s childhood and his neurosis, though this limitation will involve the risk of breaking links which were of the utmost importance to the analyst.

I

Here is a dream of a young married woman who had had a visit from her husband a few days before: She was in a room that was entirely brown. A little door led to the top of a steep staircase, and up this staircase there came into the room a curious manikin - small, with white hair, a bald top to his head and a red nose. He danced round the room in front of her, carried on in the funniest way, and then went down the staircase again. He was dressed in a grey garment, through which every part of his figure was visible. (A correction was made subsequently: He was wearing a long black coat and grey trousers.)

The analysis was as follows. The description of the manikin’s personal appearance fitted the dreamer’s father-in-law without any alteration being necessary.¹ Immediately afterwards, however, she thought of the story of ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, who danced around in the same funny way as the man in the dream and in so doing betrayed his name to the queen; but by that he lost his claim to the queen’s first child, and in his fury tore himself in two.

¹ Except for the detail that the manikin had his hair cut short, whereas her father-in-law wore his long.

The Occurrence In Dreams Of Material From Fairy Tales

2597

On the day before she had the dream she herself had been just as furious with her husband and had exclaimed: ‘I could tear him in two.’

The brown room at first gave rise to difficulties. All that occurred to her was her parents’ dining-room, which was panelled in that colour - in brown wood. She then told some stories of beds which were so uncomfortable for two people to sleep in. A few days before, when the subject of conversation had been beds in other countries, she had said something very mal à propos - quite innocently, as she maintained - and everyone in the room had roared with laughter.

The dream was now already intelligible. The brown wood room¹ was in the first place a bed, and through the connection with the dining-room it was a marriage bed.² She was therefore in her marriage bed. Her visitor should have been her young husband, who, after an absence of several months, had visited her to play his part in the double bed. But to begin with it was her husband’s father, her father-in-law.

Behind this first interpretation we have a glimpse of deeper and purely sexual material. Here the room was the vagina. (The room was in her - this was reversed in the dream.) The little man who made grimaces and behaved so funnily was the penis. The narrow door and the steep stairs confirmed the view that the situation was a representation of intercourse. As a rule we are accustomed to find the penis symbolized by a child; but we shall find there was good reason for a father being introduced to represent the penis in this instance.

The solution of the remaining portion of the dream will entirely confirm us in this interpretation. The dreamer herself explained the transparent grey garment as a condom. We may gather that considerations of preventing conception and worries whether this visit of her husband’s might not have sown the seed of a second child were among the instigating causes of the dream.

¹ Wood, as is well known, is frequently a female or maternal symbol: e.g. materia, Madeira, etc.

² For bed and board stand for marriage.

The Occurrence In Dreams Of Material From Fairy Tales

2598

The black coat. Coats of that kind suited her husband admirably. She wanted to persuade him always to wear them, instead of his usual clothes. Dressed in the black coat, therefore, her husband was as she liked to see him. The black coat and grey trousers. At two different levels, one above the other, this had the same meaning: ‘I should like you to be dressed like that. I like you like that.’

Rumpelstiltskin was connected with the contemporary thoughts underlying the dream - the day’s residues - by a neat antithetic relation. In the fairy tale he comes in order to take away the queen’s first child. In the dream the little man comes in the shape of a father, because he had presumably brought a second child. But Rumpelstiltskin also gave access to the deeper, infantile stratum of the dream-thoughts. The droll little fellow, whose very name is unknown, whose secret is so eagerly canvassed, who can perform such extraordinary tricks - in the fairy tale he turns straw into gold - the fury against him, or rather against his possessor, who is envied for possessing him (the girl’s envy for the penis) - all of these were elements whose relation to the foundations of the patient’s neurosis can, as I have said, barely be touched upon in this paper. The short-cut hair of the manikin in the dream was no doubt also connected with the subject of castration.

If we carefully observe from clear instances the way in which dreamers use fairy tales and the point at which they bring them in, we may perhaps also succeed in picking up some hints which will help in interpreting remaining obscurities in the fairy tales themselves.

The Occurrence In Dreams Of Material From Fairy Tales

2599

II

A young man told me the following dream. He had a chronological basis for his early memories in the circumstance that his parents moved from one country estate to another just before he was five years old; the dream, which he said was his earliest one, occurred while he was still upon the first estate.

‘I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in my bed. (My bed stood with its foot towards the window: in front of the window there was a row of old walnut trees. I know it was winter when I had the dream, and night-time.) Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great horror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up. My nurse hurried to my bed, to see what had happened to me. It took quite a long while before I was convinced that it had only been a dream; I had had such a clear and life-like picture of the window opening and the wolves sitting on the tree. At last I grew quieter, felt as though I had escaped from some danger, and went to sleep again.

‘The only piece of action in the dream was the opening of the window; for the wolves sat quite still and without making any movement on the branches of the tree, to the right and left of the trunk, and looked at me. It seemed as though they had riveted their whole attention upon me. - I think this was my first anxiety-dream. I was three, four, or at most five years old at the time. From then until my eleventh or twelfth year I was always afraid of seeing something terrible in my dreams.’

He added a drawing of the tree with the wolves, which confirmed his description. The analysis of the dream brought the following material to light.

He had always connected this dream with the recollection that during these years of his childhood he was most tremendously afraid of the picture of a wolf in a book of fairy tales. His elder sister, who was very much his superior, used to tease him by holding up this particular picture in front of him on some excuse or other, so that he was terrified and began to scream. In this picture the wolf was standing upright, striding out with one foot, with its claws stretched out and its ears pricked. He thought this picture must have been an illustration to the story of ‘Little Red Riding-Hood’.

Why were the wolves white? This made him think of the sheep, large flocks of which were kept in the neighbourhood of the estate. His father occasionally took him with him to visit these flocks, and every time this happened he felt very proud and blissful. Later on - according to enquiries that were made it may easily have been shortly before the time of the dream - an epidemic broke out among the sheep. His father sent for a follower of Pasteur’s, who inoculated the animals, but after the inoculation even more of them died than before.

The Occurrence In Dreams Of Material From Fairy Tales

2600

How did the wolves come to be on the tree? This reminded him of a story that he had heard his grandfather tell. He could not remember whether it was before or after the dream, but its subject is a decisive argument in favour of the former view. The story ran as follows. A tailor was sitting at work in his room, when the window opened and a wolf leapt in. The tailor hit after him with his yard - no (he corrected himself), caught him by his tail and pulled it off, so that the wolf ran away in terror. Some time later the tailor went into the forest, and suddenly saw a pack of wolves coming towards him; so he climbed up a tree to escape from them. At first the wolves were in perplexity; but the maimed one, which was among them and wanted to revenge himself on the tailor, proposed that they should climb one upon another till the last one could reach him. He himself - he was a vigorous old fellow - would be the base of the pyramid. The wolves did as he suggested, but the tailor had recognized the visitor whom he had punished, and suddenly called out as he had before: ‘Catch the grey one by his tail!’ The tailless wolf, terrified by the recollection, ran away, and all the others tumbled down.

In this story the tree appears, upon which the wolves were sitting in the dream. But it also contains an unmistakable allusion to the castration complex. The old wolf was docked of his tail by the tailor. The fox-tails of the wolves in the dream were probably compensations for this taillessness.

Why were there six or seven wolves? There seemed to be no answer to this question, until I raised a doubt whether the picture that had frightened him could be connected with the story of ‘Little Red Riding-Hood’. This fairy tale only offers an opportunity for two illustrations - Little Red Riding-Hood’s meeting with the wolf in the wood, and the scene in which the wolf lies in bed in the grandmother’s night-cap. There must therefore be some other fairy tale behind his recollection of the picture. He soon discovered that it could only be the story of ‘The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats’ Here the number seven occurs, and also the number six, for the wolf only ate up six of the little goats, while the seventh hid itself in the clock-case. The white, too, comes into this story, for the wolf had his paw made white at the baker’s after the little goats had recognized him on his first visit by his grey paw. Moreover, the two fairy tales have much in common. In both there is the eating up, the cutting open of the belly, the taking out of the people who have been eaten and their replacement by heavy stones, and finally in both of them the wicked wolf perishes. Besides all this, in the story of the little goats the tree appears. The wolf lay down under a tree after his meal and snored.

The Occurrence In Dreams Of Material From Fairy Tales

2601

I shall have, for a special reason, to deal with this dream again elsewhere, and interpret it and consider its significance in greater detail. For it is the earliest anxiety-dream that the dreamer remembered from his childhood, and its content, taken in connection with other dreams that followed it soon afterwards and with certain events in his earliest years, is of quite peculiar interest. We must confine ourselves here to the relation of the dream to the two fairy tales which have so much in common with each other, ‘Little Red Riding-Hood’ and ‘The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats’. The effect produced by these stories was shown in the little dreamer by a regular animal phobia. This phobia was only distinguished from other similar cases by the fact that the anxiety-animal was not an object easily accessible to observation (such as a horse or a dog), but was known to him only from stories and picture-books.

I shall discuss on another occasion the explanation of these animal phobias and the significance attaching to them. I will only remark in anticipation that this explanation is in complete harmony with the principal characteristic shown by the neurosis from which the present dreamer suffered later in his life. His fear of his father was the strongest motive for his falling ill, and his ambivalent attitude towards every father-surrogate was the dominating feature of his life as well as of his behaviour during the treatment.

If in my patient’s case the wolf was merely a first father-surrogate, the question arises whether the hidden content in the fairy tales of the wolf that ate up the little goats and of ‘Little Red Riding-Hood’ may not simply be infantile fear of the father.¹ Moreover, my patient’s father had the characteristic, shown by so many people in relation to their children, of indulging in ‘affectionate abuse’; and it is possible that during the patient’s earlier years his father (though he grew severe later on) may more than once, as he caressed the little boy or played with him, have threatened in fun to ‘gobble him up’. One of my patients told me that her two children could never get to be fond of their grandfather, because in the course of his affectionate romping with them he used to frighten them by saying he would cut open their tummies.

¹ Compare the similarity between these two fairy tales and the myth of Kronos, which has been pointed out by Rank (1912).

2602

THE THEME OF THE THREE CASKETS

(1913)

2603

Intentionally left blank

2604

THE THEME OF THE THREE CASKETS

I

Two scenes from Shakespeare, one from a comedy and the other from a tragedy, have lately given me occasion for posing and solving a small problem.

The first of these scenes is the suitors’ choice between the three caskets in The Merchant of Venice. The fair and wise Portia is bound at her father’s bidding to take as her husband only that one of her suitors who chooses the right casket from among the three before him. The three caskets are of gold, silver and lead: the right casket is the one that contains her portrait. Two suitors have already departed unsuccessful: they have chosen gold and silver. Bassanio, the third, decides in favour of lead; thereby he wins the bride, whose affection was already his before the trial of fortune. Each of the suitors gives reasons for his choice in a speech in which he praises the metal he prefers and depreciates the other two. The most difficult task thus falls to the share of the fortunate third suitor; what he finds to say in glorification of lead as against gold and silver is little and has a forced ring. If in psycho-analytic practice we were confronted with such a speech, we should suspect that there were concealed motives behind the unsatisfying reasons produced.

Shakespeare did not himself invent this oracle of the choice of a casket; he took it from a tale in the Gesta Romanorum, in which a girl has to make the same choice to win the Emperor’s son.¹ Here too the third metal, lead, is the bringer of fortune. It is not hard to guess that we have here an ancient theme, which requires to be interpreted, accounted for and traced back to its origin. A first conjecture as to the meaning of this choice between gold, silver and lead is quickly confirmed by a statement of Stucken’s,² who has made a study of the same material over a wide field. He writes: ‘The identity of Portia’s three suitors is clear from their choice: the Prince of Morocco chooses the gold casket - he is the sun; the Prince of Arragon chooses the silver casket - he is the moon; Bassanio chooses the leaden casket - he is the star youth.’ In support of this explanation he cites an episode from the Estonian folk-epic ‘Kalewipoeg’, in which the three suitors appear undisguisedly as the sun, moon and star youths (the last being ‘the Pole-star’s eldest boy’) and once again the bride falls to the lot of the third.

¹ Brandes (1896).

² Stucken (1907, 655).

The Theme Of The Three Caskets

2605

Thus our little problem has led us to an astral myth! The only pity is that with this explanation we are not at the end of the matter. The question is not exhausted, for we do not share the belief of some investigators that myths were read in the heavens and brought down to earth; we are more inclined to judge with Otto Rank¹ that they were projected on to the heavens after having arisen elsewhere under purely human conditions. It is in this human content that our interest lies.

Let us look once more at our material. In the Estonian epic, just as in the tale from the Gesta Romanorum, the subject is a girl choosing between three suitors; in the scene from The Merchant of Venice the subject is apparently the same, but at the same time something appears in it that is in the nature of an inversion of the theme: a man chooses between three - caskets. If what we were concerned with were a dream, it would occur to us at once that caskets are also women, symbols of what is essential in woman, and therefore of a woman herself - like coffers, boxes, cases, baskets, and so on. If we boldly assume that there are symbolic substitutions of the same kind in myths as well, then the casket scene in The Merchant of Venice really becomes the inversion we suspected. With a wave of the wand, as though we were in a fairy tale, we have stripped the astral garment from our theme; and now we see that the theme is a human one, a man’s choice between three women.

This same content, however, is to be found in another scene of Shakespeare’s, in one of his most powerfully moving dramas; not the choice of a bride this time, yet linked by many hidden similarities to the choice of the casket in The Merchant of Venice. The old King Lear resolves to divide his kingdom while he is still alive among his three daughters, in proportion to the amount of love that each of them expresses for him. The two elder ones, Goneril and Regan, exhaust themselves in asseverations and laudations of their love for him; the third, Cordelia, refuses to do so. He should have recognized the unassuming, speechless love of his third daughter and rewarded it, but he does not recognize it. He disowns Cordelia, and divides the kingdom between the other two, to his own and the general ruin. Is not this once more the scene of a choice between three women, of whom the youngest is the best, the most excellent one?

¹ Rank (1909, 8 ff.).

The Theme Of The Three Caskets

2606

There will at once occur to us other scenes from myths, fairy tales and literature, with the same situation as their content. The shepherd Paris has to choose between three goddesses, of whom he declares the third to be the most beautiful. Cinderella, again, is a youngest daughter, who is preferred by the prince to her two elder sisters. Psyche, in Apuleius’s story, is the youngest and fairest of three sisters. Psyche is, on the one hand, revered as Aphrodite in human form; on the other, she is treated by that goddess as Cinderella was treated by her stepmother and is set the task of sorting a heap of mixed seeds, which she accomplishes with the help of small creatures (doves in the case of Cinderella, ants in the case of Psyche).¹ Anyone who cared to make a wider survey of the material would undoubtedly discover other versions of the same theme preserving the same essential features.

Let us be content with Cordelia, Aphrodite, Cinderella and Psyche. In all the stories the three women, of whom the third is the most excellent one, must surely be regarded as in some way alike if they are represented as sisters. (We must not be led astray by the fact that Lear’s choice is between three daughters; this may mean nothing more than that he has to be represented as an old man. An old man cannot very well choose between three women in any other way. Thus they become his daughters.)

But who are these three sisters and why must the choice fall on the third? If we could answer this question, we should be in possession of the interpretation we are seeking. We have once already made use of an application of psycho-analytic technique, when we explained the three caskets symbolically as three women. If we have the courage to proceed in the same way, we shall be setting foot on a path which will lead us first to something unexpected and incomprehensible, but which will perhaps, by a devious route, bring us to a goal.

¹ I have to thank Dr. Otto Rank for calling my attention to these similarities.

The Theme Of The Three Caskets

2607

It must strike us that this excellent third woman has in several instances certain peculiar qualities besides her beauty. They are qualities that seem to be tending towards some kind of unity; we must certainly not expect to find them equally well marked in every example. Cordelia makes herself unrecognizable, in conspicuous like lead, she remains dumb, she ‘loves and is silent’. Cinderella hides so that she cannot be found. We may perhaps be allowed to equate concealment and dumbness. These would of course be only two instances out of the five we have picked out. But there is an intimation of the same thing to be found, curiously enough, in two other cases. We have decided to compare Cordelia, with her obstinate refusal, to lead. In Bassanio’s short speech while he is choosing the casket, he says of lead (without in any way leading up to the remark):

‘Thy paleness¹moves me more than eloquence.’

That is to say: ‘Thy plainness moves me more than the blatant nature of the other two.’ Gold and silver are ‘loud’; lead is dumb - in fact like Cordelia, who ‘loves and is silent’.²

In the ancient Greek accounts of the Judgement of Paris, nothing is said of any such reticence on the part of Aphrodite. Each of the three goddesses speaks to the youth and tries to win him by promises. But, oddly enough, in a quite modern handling of the same scene this characteristic of the third one which has struck us makes its appearance again. In the libretto of Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène, Paris, after telling of the solicitations of the other two goddesses, describes Aphrodite’s behaviour in this competition for the beauty-prize:

La troisième, ah! la troisième . . .

La troisième ne dit rien.

Elle eut le prix tout de même . . .³

¹ ‘Plainness’ according to another reading.

² In Schlegel’s translation this allusion is quite lost; indeed, it is given the opposite meaning: ‘Dein schlichtes Wesen spricht beredt mich an.’ [‘Thy plainness speaks to me with eloquence.‘]

³ [Literally: ‘The third one, ah! the third one . . . the third one said nothing. She won the prize all the same.’]

The Theme Of The Three Caskets

2608

If we decide to regard the peculiarities of our ‘third one’ as concentrated in her ‘dumbness’, then psycho-analysis will tell us that in dreams dumbness is a common representation of death.¹

More than ten years ago a highly intelligent man told me a dream which he wanted to use as evidence of the telepathic nature of dreams. In it he saw an absent friend from whom he had received no news for a very long time, and reproached him energetically for his silence. The friend made no reply. It afterwards turned out that he had met his death by suicide at about the time of the dream. Let us leave the problem of telepathy on one side: there seems, however, not to be any doubt that here the dumbness in the dream represented death. Hiding and being unfindable - a thing which confronts the prince in the fairly tale of Cinderella three times, is another unmistakable symbol of death in dreams; so, too, is a marked pallor, of which the ‘paleness’ of the lead in one reading of Shakespeare’s text is a reminder.² It would be very much easier for us to transpose these interpretations from the language of dreams to the mode of expression used in the myth that is now under consideration if we could make it seem probable that dumbness must be interpreted as a sign of being dead in productions other than dreams.

At this point I will single out the ninth story in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which bears the title ‘The Twelve Brothers’. A king and a queen have twelve children, all boys. The king declares that if the thirteenth child is a girl, the boys will have to die. In expectation of her birth he has twelve coffins made. With their mother’s help the twelve sons take refuge in a hidden wood, and swear death to any girl they may meet. A girl is born, grows up, and learns one day from her mother that she has had twelve brothers. She decides to seek them out, and in the wood she finds the youngest; he recognizes her, but is anxious to hide her on account of the brothers’ oath. The sister says: ‘I will gladly die, if by so doing I can save my twelve brothers.’ The brothers welcome her affectionately, however, and she stays with them and looks after their house for them. In a little garden beside the house grow twelve lilies. The girl picks them and gives one to each brother. At that moment the brothers are changed into ravens, and disappear, together with the house and garden. (Ravens are spirit-birds; the killing of the twelve brothers by their sister is represented by the picking of the flowers, just as it is at the beginning of the story by the coffins and the disappearance of the brothers.) The girl, who is once more ready to save her brothers from death, is now told that as a condition she must be dumb for seven years, and not speak a single word. She submits to the test, which brings her herself into mortal danger. She herself, that is, dies for her brothers, as she promised to do before she met them. By remaining dumb she succeeds at last in setting the ravens free.

¹ In Stekel’s Sprache des Traumes, too, dumbness is mentioned among the ‘death’ symbols (1911a, 351).

² Stekel (1911a), loc. cit.

The Theme Of The Three Caskets

2609

In the story of ‘The Six Swans’ the brothers who are changed into birds are set free in exactly the same way - they are restored to life by their sister’s dumbness. The girl has made a firm resolve to free her brothers, ‘even if it should cost her her life’; and once again (being the wife of the king) she risks her own life because she refuses to give up her dumbness in order to defend herself against evil accusations.

It would certainly be possible to collect further evidence from fairy tales that dumbness is to be understood as representing death. These indications would lead us to conclude that the third one of the sisters between whom the choice is made is a dead woman. But she may be something else as well - namely, Death itself, the Goddess of Death. Thanks to a displacement that is far from infrequent, the qualities that a deity imparts to men are ascribed to the deity himself. Such a displacement will surprise us least of all in relation to the Goddess of Death, since in modern versions and representations, which these stories would thus be forestalling, Death itself is nothing other than a dead man.

If the third of the sisters is the Goddess of Death, the sisters are known to us. They are the Fates, the Moerae, the Parcae or the Norns, the third of whom is called Atropos, the inexorable.

The Theme Of The Three Caskets

2610

II

We will for the time being put aside the task of inserting the interpretation that we have found into our myth, and listen to what the mythologists have to teach us about the role and origin of the Fates.¹

The earliest Greek mythology (in Homer) only knew a single , personifying inevitable fate. The further development of this one Moera into a company of three (or less often two) sister-goddesses probably came about on the basis of other divine figures to which the Moerae were closely related - the Graces and the Horae [the Seasons].

The Horae were originally goddesses of the waters of the sky, dispensing rain and dew, and of the clouds from which rain falls; and, since the clouds were conceived of as something that has been spun, it came about that these goddesses were looked upon as spinners, an attribute that then became attached to the Moerae. In the sun-favoured Mediterranean lands it is the rain on which the fertility of the soil depends, and thus the Horae became vegetation goddesses. The beauty of flowers and the abundance of fruit was their doing, and they were accredited with a wealth of agreeable and charming traits. They became the divine representatives of the Seasons, and it is possibly owing to this connection that there were three of them, if the sacred nature of the number three is not a sufficient explanation. For the peoples of antiquity at first distinguished only three seasons: winter, spring and summer. Autumn was only added in late Graeco-Roman times, after which the Horae were often represented in art as four in number.

The Horae retained their relation to time. Later they presided over the times of day, as they did at first over the times of the year; and at last their name came to be merely a designation of the hours (heure, ora). The Norns of German mythology are akin to the Horae and the Moerae and exhibit this time signification in their names. It was inevitable, however, that a deeper view should come to be taken of the essential nature of these deities, and that their essence should be transposed on to the regularity with which the seasons change. The Horae thus became the guardians of natural law and of the divine Order which causes the same thing to recur in Nature in an unalterable sequence.

¹ What follows is taken from Roscher’s lexicon, under the relevant headings.

The Theme Of The Three Caskets

2611

This discovery of Nature reacted on the conception of human life. The nature-myth changed into a human myth: the weather-goddesses became goddesses of Fate. But this aspect of the Horae found expression only in the Moerae, who watch over the necessary ordering of human life as inexorably as do the Horae over the regular order of nature. The ineluctable severity of Law and its relation to death and dissolution, which had been avoided in the charming figures of the Horae, were now stamped upon the Moerae, as though men had only perceived the full seriousness of natural law when they had to submit their own selves to it.

The names of the three spinners, too, have been significantly explained by mythologists. Lachesis, the name of the second, seems to denote ‘the accidental that is included in the regularity of destiny’¹ - or, as we should say, ‘experience’; just as Atropos stands for ‘the ineluctable’ - Death. Clotho would then be left to mean the innate disposition with its fateful implications.

But now it is time to return to the theme which we are trying to interpret - the theme of the choice between three sisters. We shall be deeply disappointed to discover how unintelligible the situations under review become and what contradictions of their apparent content result, if we apply to them the interpretation that we have found. On our supposition the third of the sisters is the Goddess of Death, Death itself. But in the Judgement of Paris she is the Goddess of Love, in the tale of Apuleius she is someone comparable to the goddess for her beauty, in The Merchant of Venice she is the fairest and wisest of women, in King Lear she is the one loyal daughter. We may ask whether there can be a more complete contradiction. Perhaps, improbable though it may seem, there is a still more complete one lying close at hand. Indeed, there certainly is; since, whenever our theme occurs, the choice between the women is free, and yet it falls on death. For, after all, no one chooses death, and it is only by a fatality that one falls a victim to it.

¹ Roscher, quoting Preller, ed. Robert (1894).

The Theme Of The Three Caskets

2612

However, contradictions of a certain kind - replacements by the precise opposite - offer no serious difficulty to the work of analytic interpretation. We shall not appeal here to the fact that contraries are so often represented by one and the same element in the modes of expression used by the unconscious, as for instance in dreams. But we shall remember that there are motive forces in mental life which bring about replacement by the opposite in the form of what is known as reaction-formation; and it is precisely in the revelation of such hidden forces as these that we look for the reward of this enquiry. The Moerae were created as a result of a discovery that warned man that he too is a part of nature and therefore subject to the immutable law of death. Something in man was bound to struggle against this subjection, for it is only with extreme unwillingness that he gives up his claim to an exceptional position. Man, as we know, makes use of his imaginative activity in order to satisfy the wishes that reality does not satisfy. So his imagination rebelled against the recognition of the truth embodied in the myth of the Moerae, and constructed instead the myth derived from it, in which the Goddess of Death was replaced by the Goddess of Love and by what was equivalent to her in human shape. The third of the sisters was no longer Death; she was the fairest, best, most desirable and most lovable of women. Nor was this substitution in any way technically difficult: it was prepared for by an ancient ambivalence, it was carried out along a primaeval line of connection which could not long have been forgotten. The Goddess of Love herself, who now took the place of the Goddess of Death, had once been identical with her. Even the Greek Aphrodite had not wholly relinquished her connection with the underworld, although she had long surrendered he: chthonic role to other divine figures, to Persephone, or to the tri-form Artemis-Hecate. The great Mother-goddesses of the oriental peoples, however, all seem to have been both creators and destroyers - both goddesses of life and fertility and goddesses of death. Thus the replacement by a wishful opposite in our theme harks back to a primaeval identity.

The same consideration answers the question how the feature of a choice came into the myth of the three sisters. Here again there has been a wishful reversal. Choice stands in the place of necessity, of destiny. In this way man overcomes death, which he has recognized intellectually. No greater triumph of wish-fulfilment is conceivable. A choice is made where in reality there is obedience to a compulsion; and what is chosen is not a figure of terror, but the fairest and most desirable of women.

The Theme Of The Three Caskets

2613

On closer inspection we observe, to be sure, that the original myth is not so thoroughly distorted that traces of it do not show through and betray its presence. The free choice between the three sisters is, properly speaking, no free choice, for it must necessarily fall on the third if every kind of evil is not to come about, as it does in King Lear. The fairest and best of women, who has taken the place of the Death-goddess, has kept certain characteristics that border on the uncanny, so that from there we have been able to guess at what lies beneath.¹

So far we have been following out the myth and its transformation, and it is to be hoped that we have correctly indicated the hidden causes of the transformation. We may now turn our interest to the way in which the dramatist has made use of the theme. We get an impression that a reduction of the theme to the original myth is being carried out in his work, so that we once more have a sense of the moving significance which had been weakened by the distortion. It is by means of this reduction of the distortion, this partial return to the original, that the dramatist achieves his more profound effect upon us.

To avoid misunderstandings, I should like to say that it is not my purpose to deny that King Lear’s dramatic story is intended to inculcate two wise lessons: that one should not give up one’s possessions and rights during one’s lifetime, and that one must guard against accepting flattery at its face value. These and similar warnings are undoubtedly brought out by the play; but it seems to me quite impossible to explain the overpowering effect of King Lear from the impression that such a train of thought would produce, or to suppose that the dramatist’s personal motives did not go beyond the intention of teaching these lessons. It is suggested, too, that his purpose was to present the tragedy of ingratitude, the sting of which he may well have felt in his own heart, and that the effect of the play rests on the purely formal element of its artistic presentation; but this cannot, so it seems to me, take the place of the understanding brought to us by the explanation we have reached of the theme of the choice between the three sisters.

¹ The Psyche of Apuleius’s story has kept many traits that remind us of her relation with death. Her wedding is celebrated like a funeral, she has to descend into the underworld, and afterwards she sinks into a death-like sleep (Otto Rank). - On the significance of Psyche as goddess of the spring and as ‘Bride of Death’, cf. Zinzow (1881). - In another of Grimm’s Tales (‘The Goose-girl at the Fountain’, No. 179) there is, as in ‘Cinderella’, an alternation between the beautiful and the ugly aspect of the third sister, in which one may no doubt see an indication of her double nature - before and after the substitution. This third daughter is repudiated by her father, after a test which is almost the same as the one in King Lear. Like her sisters, she has to declare how fond she is of their father, but can find no expression for her love but a comparison with salt. (Kindly communicated by Dr. Hanns Sachs.)

The Theme Of The Three Caskets

2614

Lear is an old man. It is for this reason, as we have already said, that the three sisters appear as his daughters. The relationship of a father to his children, which might be a fruitful source of many dramatic situations, is not turned to further account in the play. But Lear is not only an old man: he is a dying man. In this way the extraordinary premiss of the division of his inheritance loses all its strangeness. But the doomed man is not willing to renounce the love of women; he insists on hearing how much he is loved. Let us now recall the moving final scene, one of the culminating points of tragedy in modern drama. Lear carries Cordelia’s dead body on to the stage. Cordelia is Death. If we reverse the situation it becomes intelligible and familiar to us. She is the Death-goddess who, like the Valkyrie in German mythology, carries away the dead hero from the battlefield. Eternal wisdom, clothed in the primaeval myth, bids the old man renounce love, choose death and make friends with the necessity of dying.

The dramatist brings us nearer to the ancient theme by representing the man who makes the choice between the three sisters as aged and dying. The regressive revision which he has thus applied to the myth, distorted as it was by wishful transformation, allows us enough glimpses of its original meaning to enable us perhaps to reach as well a superficial allegorical interpretation of the three female figures in the theme. We might argue that what is represented here are the three inevitable relations that a man has with a woman - the woman who bears him, the woman who is his mate and the woman who destroys him; or that they are the three forms taken by the figure of the mother in the course of a man’s life - the mother herself, the beloved one who is chosen after her pattern, and lastly the Mother Earth who receives him once more. But it is in vain that an old man yearns for the love of woman as he had it first from his mother; the third of the Fates alone, the silent Goddess of Death, will take him into her arms.

2615

TWO LIES TOLD BY CHILDREN

(1913)

2616

Intentionally left blank

2617

TWO LIES TOLD BY CHILDREN

We can understand children telling lies, when in doing so, they are imitating the lies told by grown-up people. But a number of lies told by well-brought-up children have a particular significance and should cause those in charge of them to reflect rather than be angry. These lies occur under the influence of excessive feelings of love, and become momentous when they lead to a misunderstanding between the child and the person it loves.

I

A girl of seven (in her second year at school) had asked her father for some money to buy colours for painting Easter eggs. Her father had refused, saying he had no money. Shortly afterwards the girl asked her father for some money for a contribution towards a wreath for the funeral of their reigning princess, who had recently died. Each of the schoolchildren was to bring fifty pfennigs. Her father gave her ten marks; she paid her contribution, put nine marks on her father’s writing-table, and with the remaining fifty pfennigs bought some paints, which she hid in her toy cupboard. At dinner her father asked suspiciously what she had done with the missing fifty pfennigs, and whether she had not bought paints with them after all. She denied it; but her brother, who was two years her elder and with whom she had planned to paint the eggs, betrayed her; the paints were found in the cupboard. The angry father handed the culprit over to her mother for punishment, and it was severely administered. Afterwards her mother was herself much shaken, when she saw how great the child’s despair was. She caressed the little girl after the punishment, and took her for a walk to console her. But the effects of the experience, which were described by the patient herself as the ‘turning-point in her life’, proved to be ineradicable. Up to then she had been a wild, self-confident child, afterwards she became shy and timid. When she was engaged to be married and her mother undertook the purchase of her furniture and her trousseau, she flew into a rage which was incomprehensible even to herself. She had a feeling that after all it was her money, and no one else ought to buy anything with it. As a young wife she was shy of asking her husband for any expenditure on her personal needs, and made an uncalled-for distinction between ‘her’ money and his. During the treatment it happened now and again that her husband’s remittances to her were delayed, so that she was left without resources in a foreign city. After she had told me this once, I made her promise that if it happened again she would borrow the small sum necessary from me. She promised to do so; but on the next occasion of financial embarrassment she did not keep her promise, but preferred to pawn her jewellery. She explained that she could not take money from me.

Two Lies Told By Children

2618

The appropriation of the fifty pfennigs in her childhood had had a significance which her father could not guess. Some time before she began going to school she had played a singular prank with money. A neighbour with whom they were friendly had sent the girl out with a small sum of money, in the company of her own little boy who was even younger, to buy something in a shop. Being the elder of the two, she was bringing the change back home. But, meeting the neighbour’s servant in the street, she threw the money down on the pavement. In the analysis of this action, which she herself found inexplicable, the thought of Judas occurred to her, who threw down the thirty pieces of silver which he had been given for betraying his Master. She said she was certainly acquainted with the story of the Passion before she went to school. But in what way could she identify herself with Judas?

When she was three and a half she had a nursemaid of whom she was extremely fond. This girl became involved in a love affair with a doctor whose surgery she visited with the child. It appears that at that time the child witnessed various sexual proceedings. It is not certain whether she saw the doctor give the girl money; but there is no doubt that, to make sure of the child’s keeping silence, the girl gave her some small coins, with which purchases were made (probably of sweets) on the way home. It is possible too that the doctor himself occasionally gave the child money. Nevertheless the child betrayed the girl to her mother out of jealousy. She played so ostentatiously with the coins she had brought home that her mother could not help asking: ‘Where did you get that money?’ The girl was dismissed.

To take money from anyone had thus early come to mean to her a physical surrender, an erotic relation. To take money from her father was equivalent to a declaration of love. The phantasy that her father was her lover was so seductive that with its help her childish wish for paints for the Easter eggs easily put itself into effect in spite of the prohibition. She could not admit, however, that she had appropriated the money; she was obliged to disavow it, because her motive for the deed, which was unconscious to herself, could not be admitted. Her father’s punishment was thus a rejection of the tenderness she was offering him - a humiliation - and so it broke her spirit. During the treatment a period of severe depression occurred (whose explanation led to her remembering the events described here) when on one occasion I was obliged to reproduce this humiliation by asking her not to bring me any more flowers.

For psycho-analysts I need hardly emphasize the fact that in this little experience of the child’s we have before us one of those extremely common cases in which early anal erotism persists into later erotic life. Even her desire to paint the eggs with colours derived from the same source.

Two Lies Told By Children

2619

II

A woman who is now seriously ill in consequence of a frustration in life was in her earlier years a particularly capable, truth-loving, serious and virtuous girl, and became an affectionate wife. But still earlier, in the first years of her life, she had been a wilful and discontented child, and, though she had changed fairly quickly into an excessively good and conscientious one, there were occurrences in her schooldays, which, when she fell ill, caused her deep self-reproaches, and were regarded by her as proofs of fundamental depravity. Her memory told her that in those days she had often bragged and lied. Once on the way to school a school-fellow had said boastfully: ‘Yesterday we had ice at dinner.’ She replied: ‘Oh we have ice every day.’ In reality she did not know what ice at dinner could mean; she only knew ice in the long blocks in which it is carted about, but she assumed that there must be something grand in having it for dinner, so she refused to be outdone by her school-fellow.

When she was ten years old, they were set the task in the drawing lesson of making a free-hand drawing of a circle. But she used a pair of compasses, thus easily producing a perfect circle, and showed her achievement in triumph to her neighbour in class. The mistress came up, heard her boasting, discovered the marks of the compasses in the circle, and questioned the girl. But she stubbornly denied what she had done, would not give way to any evidence, and took refuge in sullen silence. The mistress consulted with her father about it. They were both influenced by the girl’s usually good behaviour into deciding not to take any further steps about the matter.

Both the child’s lies were instigated by the same complex. As the eldest of five children, the little girl early developed an unusually strong attachment to her father, which was destined when she was grown up to wreck her happiness in life. But she could not long escape the discovery that her beloved father was not so great a personage as she was inclined to think him. He had to struggle against money difficulties; he was not so powerful or so distinguished as she had imagined. But she could not put up with this departure from her ideal. Since, as women do, she based all her ambition on the man she loved, she became too strongly dominated by the motive of supporting her father against the world. So she boasted to her school-fellows, in order not to have to belittle her father. When, later on, she learned to translate ice for dinner by ‘glace’, her self-reproaches about this reminiscence led her by an easy path into a pathological dread of pieces or splinters of glass.

Her father was an excellent draughtsman, and had often enough excited the delight and admiration of the children by exhibitions of his skill. It was as an identification of herself with her father that she had drawn the circle at school - which she could only do successfully by deceitful methods. It was as though she wanted to boast: ‘Look at what my father can do!’ The sense of guilt that was attached to her excessive fondness for her father found its expression in connection with her attempted deception; an admission was impossible for the same reason that was given in the first of these observations: it would inevitably have been an admission of her hidden incestuous love.

Two Lies Told By Children

2620

We should not think lightly of such episodes in the life of children. It would be a serious mistake to read into childish misdemeanours like these a prognosis of the development of a bad character. Nevertheless, they are intimately connected with the most powerful motive forces in children’s minds, and give notice of dispositions that will lead to later eventualities in their lives or to future neuroses.

2621

THE DISPOSITION TO OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS

A CONTRIBUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF CHOICE OF NEUROSIS

(1913)

2622

Intentionally left blank

2623

THE DISPOSITION TO OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS

A CONTRIBUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF CHOICE OF NEUROSIS

The problem of why and how a person may fall ill of a neurosis is certainly among those to which psycho-analysis should offer a solution. But it will probably be necessary to find a solution first to another and narrower problem - namely, why it is that this or that person must fall ill of a particular neurosis and of none other. This is the problem of ‘choice of neurosis’.

What do we know so far about this problem? Strictly speaking, only one single general proposition can be asserted on the subject with certainty. It will be recalled that we divide the pathogenic determinants concerned in the neuroses into those which a person brings along with him into his life and those which life brings to him - the constitutional and the accidental - by whose combined operation alone the pathogenic determinant is as a rule established. The general proposition, then, which I have alluded to above, lays it down that the grounds for determining the choice of neurosis are entirely of the former kind - that is, that they are in the nature of dispositions and are independent of experiences which operate pathogenically.

Where are we to look for the source of these dispositions? We have become aware that the psychical functions concerned - above all, the sexual function, but various important ego-functions too - have to undergo a long and complicated development before reaching the state characteristic of the normal adult. We can assume that these developments are not always so smoothly carried out that the total function passes through this regular progressive modification. Wherever a portion of it clings to a previous stage, what is known as a ‘point of fixation’ results, to which the function may regress if the subject falls ill through some external disturbance.

The Disposition To Obsessional Neurosis

2624

Thus our dispositions are inhibitions in development. We are confirmed in this view by the analogy of the facts of general pathology of other illnesses. But before the question as to what factors can bring about such disturbances of development the work of psycho-analysis comes to a stop: it leaves that problem to biological research.¹

Already a few years back we ventured, with the help of these hypotheses, to approach the problem of choice of neurosis. Our method of work, which aims at discovering normal conditions by studying their disturbances, led us to adopt a very singular and unexpected line of attack. The order in which the main forms of psychoneurosis are usually enumerated - Hysteria, Obsessional Neurosis, Paranoia, Dementia Praecox - corresponds (even though not quite exactly) to the order of the ages at which the onset of these disorders occurs. Hysterical forms of illness can be observed even in earliest childhood; obsessional neurosis usually shows its first symptoms in the second period of childhood (between the ages of six and eight); while the two other psychoneuroses, which I have brought together under the heading of ‘paraphrenia’, do not appear until after puberty and during adult life. It is these disorders - the last to emerge - which were the first to show themselves accessible to our enquiry into the dispositions that result in the choice of neurosis. The characteristics peculiar to both of them - megalomania, turning away from the world of objects, increased difficulty in transference - have obliged us to conclude that their dispositional fixation is to be looked for in a stage of libidinal development before object-choice has been established - that is in the phase of auto-erotism and of narcissism. Thus these forms of illness, which make their appearance so late, go back to very early inhibitions and fixations.

¹ Since Wilhelm Fliess’s writings have revealed the biological significance of certain periods of time it has become conceivable that disturbances of development may be traceable to temporal changes in the successive waves of development.

The Disposition To Obsessional Neurosis

2625

This would accordingly lead us to suppose that the disposition to hysteria and obsessional neurosis, the two transference neuroses proper, which produce their symptoms at an early age, lies in later phases of libidinal development. But at what point in them should we find a developmental inhibition? and, above all, what would be the difference in phases that would determine a disposition to obsessional neurosis as contrasted with hysteria? For a long time nothing was to be learned about this; and my earlier attempts at discovering these two dispositions - the notion, for instance, that hysteria might be determined by passivity and obsessional neurosis by activity in infantile experience - had soon to be abandoned as incorrect.

I shall now take my footing once more on the clinical observation of an individual case. Over a long period I studied a woman patient whose neurosis underwent an unusual change. It began, after a traumatic experience, as a straightforward anxiety hysteria and retained that character for a few years. One day, however, it suddenly changed into an obsessional neurosis of the severest type. A case of this kind could not fail to become significant in more than one direction. On the one hand, it might perhaps claim to be looked upon like a bilingual document and to show how an identical content could be expressed by the two neuroses in different languages. On the other hand, it threatened to contradict completely our theory that disposition arises from developmental inhibition, unless we were prepared to accept the supposition that a person could innately possess more than one weak spot in his libidinal development. I told myself that we had no right to dismiss this latter possibility; but I was greatly interested to arrive at an understanding of the case.

When in the course of the analysis this came about, I was forced to see that the situation was quite different from what I had imagined. The obsessional neurosis was not a further reaction to the same trauma which had first provoked the anxiety hysteria; it was a reaction to a second experience, which had completely wiped out the first. (Here, then, we have an exception - though, it is true, a not indisputable one - to our proposition affirming that choice of neurosis is independent of experience.)

The Disposition To Obsessional Neurosis

2626

Unfortunately I am unable, for familiar reasons, to enter into the history of the case as far as I should like, and I must restrict myself to the account which follows. Up to the time of her falling ill the patient had been a happy and almost completely satisfied wife. She wanted to have children, from motives based on an infantile fixation of her wishes, and she fell ill when she learned that it was impossible for her to have any by the husband who was the only object of her love. The anxiety hysteria with which she reacted to this frustration corresponded, as she herself soon learned to understand, to the repudiation of phantasies of seduction in which her firmly implanted wish for a child found expression. She now did all she could to prevent her husband from guessing that she had fallen ill owing to the frustration of which he was the cause. But I have had good reason for asserting that everyone possesses in his own unconscious an instrument with which he can interpret the utterances of the unconscious in other people. Her husband understood, without any admission or explanation on her part, what his wife’s anxiety meant; he felt hurt, without showing it, and in his turn reacted neurotically by - for the first time - failing in sexual intercourse with her. Immediately afterwards he started on a journey. His wife believed that he had become permanently impotent, and produced her first obsessional symptoms on the day before his expected return.

The content of her obsessional neurosis was a compulsion for scrupulous washing and cleanliness and extremely energetic protective measures against severe injuries which she thought other people had reason to fear from her - that is to say, reaction-formations against her own anal-erotic and sadistic impulses. Her sexual need was obliged to find expression in these shapes after her genital life had lost all its value owing to the impotence of the only man of whom there could be any question for her.

This is the starting-point of the small new fragment of theory which I have formulated. It is of course only in appearance that it is based on this one observation; actually it brings together a large number of earlier impressions, though an understanding of them was only made possible by this last experience. I told myself that my schematic picture of the development of the libidinal function called for an extra insertion in it. To begin with, I had only distinguished, first the phase of auto-erotism during which the subject’s component instincts, each on its own account, seek for the satisfaction of their desires in his own body, and then the combination of all the component instincts for the choice of an object, under the primacy of the genitals acting on behalf of reproduction. The analysis of the paraphrenias has, as we know, necessitated the insertion between them of a stage of narcissism, during which the choice of an object has already taken place but that object coincides with the subject’s own ego. And now we see the need for yet another stage to be inserted before the final shape is reached - a stage in which the component instincts have already come together for the choice of an object and that object is already something extraneous in contrast to the subject’s own self, but in which the primacy of the genital zones has not yet been established. On the contrary, the component instincts which dominate this pregenital organization of sexual life are the anal-erotic and sadistic ones.

The Disposition To Obsessional Neurosis

2627

I am aware that any such hypotheses sound strange at first. It is only by discovering their relations to our former knowledge that they become familiar to us; and in the end it is often their fate to be regarded as minor and long-foreseen innovations. Let us therefore turn with anticipations such as these to a discussion of the ‘pregenital sexual organization’.

(a) The extraordinary part played by impulses of hatred and anal erotism in the symptomatology of obsessional neurosis has already struck many observers and has recently been emphasized with particular clarity by Ernest Jones (1913). This follows directly from our hypothesis if we suppose that in that neurosis the component instincts in question have once more taken over the representation of the genital instincts, whose forerunners they were in the process of development.

At this point a portion of our case history fits in, which I have so far kept back. The patient’s sexual life began in her earliest childhood with beating-phantasies. After they were suppressed, an unusually long period of latency set in, during which the girl passed through a period of exalted moral growth, without any awakening of female sexual feelings. Her marriage, which took place at an early age, opened a time of normal sexual activity. This period, during which she was a happy wife, continued for a number of years, until her first great frustration brought on the hysterical neurosis. When this was followed by her genital life losing all its value, her sexual life, as I have said, returned to the infantile stage of sadism.

It is not difficult to determine the characteristic which distinguishes this case of obsessional neurosis from those more frequent ones which start at an early age and thereafter run a chronic course with exacerbations of a more or less striking kind. In these other cases, once the sexual organization which contains the disposition to obsessional neurosis is established it is never afterwards completely surmounted; in our case it was replaced to begin with by the higher stage of development, and was then re-activated by regression from the latter.

The Disposition To Obsessional Neurosis

2628

(b) If we wish to bring our hypothesis into contact with biological lines of thought, we must not forget that the antithesis between male and female, which is introduced by the reproductive function, cannot be present as yet at the stage of pregenital object-choice. We find in its place the antithesis between trends with an active and with a passive aim, an antithesis which later becomes firmly attached to that between the sexes. Activity is supplied by the common instinct of mastery, which we call sadism when we find it in the service of the sexual function; and even in fully developed normal sexual life it has important subsidiary services to perform. The passive trend is fed by anal erotism, whose erotogenic zone corresponds to the old, undifferentiated cloaca. A stressing of this anal erotism in the pregenital stage of organization leaves behind a significant predisposition to homosexuality in men when the next stage of the sexual function, the primacy of the genitals, is reached. The way in which this last phase is erected upon the preceding one and the accompanying remoulding of the libidinal cathexes present analytic research with the most interesting problems.

The view may be taken that all the difficulties and complications involved in this can be avoided by denying that there is any pregenital organization of sexual life and by holding that sexual life coincides with the genital and reproductive function and begins with it. It would then be asserted, having regard to the ummistakable findings of analytic research, that the neuroses are compelled by the process of sexual repression to give expression to sexual trends through other, non-sexual instincts, and thus to sexualize the latter by way of compensation. But this line of argument would place us outside psycho-analysis. It would place us where we were before psycho-analysis and would mean abandoning the understanding which psycho-analysis has given us of the relations between health, perversion and neurosis. Psycho-analysis stands or falls with the recognition of the sexual component instincts, of the erotogenic zones and of the extension thus made possible of the concept of a ‘sexual function’ in contrast to the narrower ‘genital function’. Moreover the observation of the normal development of children is in itself enough to make us reject any such temptation.

The Disposition To Obsessional Neurosis

2629

(c) In the field of the development of character we are bound to meet with the same instinctual forces which we have found at work in the neuroses. But a sharp theoretical distinction between the two is necessitated by the single fact that the failure of repression and the return of the repressed - which are peculiar to the mechanism of neurosis - are absent in the formation of character. In the latter, repression either does not come into action or smoothly achieves its aim of replacing the repressed by reaction-formations and sublimations. Hence the processes of the formation of character are more obscure and less accessible to analysis than neurotic ones.

But it is precisely in the field of character-development that we come across a good analogy with the case we have been describing - a confirmation, that is, of the occurrence of the pregenital sadistic anal-erotic sexual organization. It is a well-known fact, and one that has given much ground for complaint, that after women have lost their genital function their character often undergoes a peculiar alteration. They become quarrelsome, vexatious and overbearing, petty and stingy; that is to say, they exhibit typically sadistic and anal-erotic traits which they did not possess earlier, during their period of womanliness. Writers of comedy and satirists have in all ages directed their invectives against the ‘old dragon’ into which the charming girl, the loving wife and the tender mother have been transformed. We can see that this alteration of character corresponds to a regression of sexual life to the pregenital sadistic and anal-erotic stage, in which we have discovered the disposition to obsessional neurosis. It seems, then, to be not only the precursor of the genital phase but often enough its successor as well, its termination after the genitals have fulfilled their function.

A comparison between such a change of character and obsessional neurosis is very impressive. In both cases the work of regression is apparent. But whereas in the former we find complete regression following repression (or suppression) that has occurred smoothly, in the neurosis there are conflict, an effort to prevent regression from occurring, reaction-formations against it and symptom-formations produced by compromises between the two opposing sides, and a splitting of the psychical activities into some that are admissible to consciousness and others that are unconscious.

The Disposition To Obsessional Neurosis

2630

(d) Our hypothesis of a pregenital sexual organization is incomplete in two respects. In the first place, it takes no account of the behaviour of other component instincts, in regard to which there is plenty that would repay examination and discussion, and it is content with stressing the striking primacy of sadism and anal erotism. In particular we often gain an impression that the instinct for knowledge can actually take the place of sadism in the mechanism of obsessional neurosis. Indeed it is at bottom a sublimated off-shoot of the instinct of mastery exalted into something intellectual, and its repudiation in the form of doubt plays a large part in the picture of obsessional neurosis.

The second gap in our hypothesis is far more important. As we know, the developmental disposition to a neurosis is only complete if the phase of the development of the ego at which fixation occurs is taken into account as well as that of the libido. But our hypothesis has only related to the latter, and therefore does not include all the knowledge that we should demand. The stages of development of the ego-instincts are at present very little known to us; I know of only one attempt - the highly promising one made by Ferenczi (1913) - to approach these questions. I cannot tell if it may seem too rash if, on the basis of such indications as we possess, I suggest the possibility that a chronological outstripping of libidinal development by ego development should be included in the disposition to obsessional neurosis. A precocity of this kind would necessitate the choice of an object under the influence of the ego-instincts, at a time at which the sexual instincts had not yet assumed their final shape, and a fixation at the stage of the pregenital sexual organization would thus be left. If we consider that obsessional neurotics have to develop a super-morality in order to protect their object-love from the hostility lurking behind it, we shall be inclined to regard some degree of this precocity of ego development as typical of human nature and to derive the capacity for the origin of morality from the fact that in the order of development hate is the precursor of love. This is perhaps the meaning of an assertion by Stekel (1911a, 536), which at the time I found incomprehensible, to the effect that hate and not love is the primary emotional relation between men.

The Disposition To Obsessional Neurosis

2631

(e) It follows from what has been said that there remains for hysteria an intimate relation to the final phase of libidinal development, which is characterized by the primacy of the genitals and the introduction of the reproductive function. In hysterical neurosis this acquisition is subjected to repression, which does not involve regression to the pregenital stage. The gap in determining the disposition owing to our ignorance of ego development is even more obvious here than with obsessional neurosis.

On the other hand, it is not hard to show that another regression to an earlier level occurs in hysteria too. The sexuality of female children, is, as we know, dominated and directed by a masculine organ (the clitoris) and often behaves like the sexuality of boys. This masculine sexuality has to be got rid of by a last wave of development at puberty, and the vagina, an organ derived from the cloaca, has to be raised into the dominant erotogenic zone. Now, it is very common in hysterical neurosis for this repressed masculine sexuality to be re-activated and then for the defensive struggle on the part of the ego-syntonic instincts to be directed against it. But it seems to me too early to enter here into a discussion of the problems of the disposition to hysteria.

2632

INTRODUCTION TO PFISTER’S THE PSYCHO-ANALYTIC METHOD

(1913)

2633

Intentionally left blank

2634

INTRODUCTION TO PFISTER’S THE PSYCHO-ANALYTIC METHOD

Psycho-analysis had its origin on medical soil, as a therapeutic procedure for the treatment of certain nervous illnesses which were termed ‘functional’ and which were considered with increasing certainty to be consequences of disturbances in emotional life. It attains its end - of removing the manifestations of these disturbances, the symptoms - by assuming that they are not the only possible and final outcome of particular psychical processes. It therefore uncovers the history of the development of these symptoms in the patient’s memory, it revivifies the processes underlying them, and then conducts them, under the doctor’s guidance, to a more favourable outlet. Psycho-analysis has set itself the same therapeutic aims as treatment by hypnotism, which was introduced by Liébeault and Bernheim and after lengthy and severe struggles achieved a place in the technique of nerve specialists. But it goes far deeper into the structure of the mechanism of the mind, and seeks to bring about permanent results and viable changes in its subjects.

In its time, hypnotic treatment by suggestion very soon passed beyond the sphere of medical application and entered the service of the education¹ of young people. If we are to believe the reports, it proved to be an effective means forgetting rid of childish faults, of inconvenient physical habits and of character traits that were otherwise irreducible. No one at that time objected to, or was surprised at, this extension of its uses, which, incidentally, has only been made fully understandable by the researches of psycho-analysis. For we know to-day that pathological symptoms are often nothing but substitutes for bad (that is, unserviceable) inclinations, and that the determinants of these symptoms are laid down in the years of childhood and youth - during the same period in which human beings are the subject of education - whether the illnesses themselves already emerge in youth or only at a later time of life.

¹ [The German words ‘Erziehung’ and ‘Erzieher’, which are here translated throughout by ‘education’ and ‘educator’, have in fact a wider application and include the general notion of the ‘up-bringing’ of children.]

Introduction To Pfister's The Psycho-Analytic Method

2635

Education and therapeutics stand in an assignable relation to each other. Education seeks to ensure that certain of a child’s dispositions and inclinations shall not cause any damage either to the individual or to society. Therapeutics come into action if these same dispositions have already led to the unwished-for result of pathological symptoms. The alternative outcome - of the child’s unserviceable dispositions leading, not to substitutes in the form of symptoms, but to direct perversions of character - is almost inaccessible to therapeutics and as a rule beyond the influence of an educator. Education is a prophylaxis, which is intended to obviate both outcomes - neurosis and perversion alike; psychotherapy seeks, to undo the less stable of the two outcomes and to institute a kind of after-education.

In view of this position of affairs, the question automatically arises whether psycho-analysis should not be used for educative purposes just as hypnotic suggestion was in the past. The advantages would be obvious. The educator would, on the one hand, be prepared by his knowledge of the general human dispositions of childhood to judge which of those dispositions are threatening to lead to an undesirable outcome; and, if psycho-analysis can influence the course taken by such developments, he could bring it into use before the signs of an unfavourable development set in. Thus, with the help of analysis, he could have a prophylactic influence on the child while it was still healthy. On the other hand, he could detect the first indications of a development in the direction of neurosis and could guard the child against its further development at a time at which, for various reasons, a child is never taken to see a doctor. One cannot but think that a psycho-analytic activity such as this on the part of the educator - and of the similarly placed pastoral worker in protestant countries - would inevitably be of inestimable value and might often make the intervention of a doctor unnecessary.

The only question is whether the practice of psycho-analysis may not have as its prerequisite a medical training, from which the educator and the pastoral worker must remain debarred, or whether there may be other considerations which are opposed to the suggestion that the technique of psycho-analysis should be confided to any but a doctor’s hands. I confess that I can see no ground for any such reservations. The practice of psycho-analysis calls much less for medical training than for psychological instruction and a free human outlook. The majority of doctors are not equipped to practise psycho-analysis and have completely failed to grasp the value of that therapeutic procedure. The educator and the pastoral worker are bound by the standards of their profession to exercise the same consideration, care and restraint as are usually practised by the doctor, and apart from this their association with young people perhaps makes them better fitted to understand these young people’s mental life. But in both cases the only guarantee of the harmless application of the analytic procedure must depend on the personality of the analyst.

Introduction To Pfister's The Psycho-Analytic Method

2636

Where a case borders upon mental abnormality, the analytic educator will be bound to make himself familiar with the most necessary psychiatric knowledge, and furthermore to call a doctor into consultation when the diagnosis and prognosis of the disturbance appear doubtful. In a number of cases it will only be possible to achieve success if there is collaboration between the educator and the doctor.

In one single respect an educator’s responsibility may perhaps exceed that of a doctor. The doctor has as a rule to deal with psychical structures which have already become rigid and he will find in the patient’s established individuality a limit to his own achievement but at the same time a guarantee of the patient’s capacity to stand alone. The educator, however, works upon material which is plastic and open to every impression, and he must keep before himself an obligation not to mould the young mind in accordance with his own personal ideals but rather according to his subject’s dispositions and possibilities.

Let us hope that the application of psycho-analysis to the service of education will quickly fulfil the hopes which educators and doctors may rightly attach to it. A book such as this of Pfister’s, which seeks to acquaint educators with analysis, will then be able to count on the gratitude of later generations.

VIENNA, February 1913

2637

PREFACE TO BOURKE’S SCATALOGIC RITES OF ALL NATIONS

(1913)

2638

Intentionally left blank

2639

PREFACE TO BOURKE’S SCATALOGIC RITES OF ALL NATIONS

While I was living in Paris in 1885 as a pupil of Charcot, what chiefly attracted me, apart from the great man’s own lectures, were the demonstrations and addresses given by Brouardel. He used to show us from post-mortem material at the morgue how much there was which deserved to be known by doctors but of which science preferred to take no notice. On one occasion he was discussing the indications which enabled one to judge the social rank, character and origin of an unidentified body, and I heard him say: ‘Les genoux sales sont le signe d’une fille honnête.’ He was using a girl’s dirty knees as evidence of her virtue!

The lesson that bodily cleanliness is far more readily associated with vice than with virtue often occurred to me later on, when psycho-analytic work made me acquainted with the way in which civilized men to-day deal with the problem of their physical nature. They are clearly embarrassed by anything that reminds them too much of their animal origin. They are trying to emulate the ‘more perfected angels’ in the last scene of Faust, who complain:

Uns bleibt ein Erdenrest

zu tragen peinlich,

und wär’ er von Asbest,

er ist nicht reinlich.¹

Since, however, they must necessarily remain far removed from such perfection, men have chosen to evade the predicament by so far as possible denying the very existence of this inconvenient ‘trace of the Earth’, by concealing it from one another, and by withholding from it the attention and care which it might claim as an integrating component of their essential being. The wiser course would undoubtedly have been to admit its existence and to dignify it as much as its nature will allow.

¹ [Literally: ‘We still have a trace of the Earth, which is distressing to bear; and though it were of asbestos it is not cleanly.’]

Preface To Bourke's Scatalogic Rites Of All Nations

2640

It is far from being a simple matter to survey or describe the consequences involved in this way of treating the ‘distressing trace of the Earth’, of which the sexual and excretory functions may be considered the nucleus. It will be enough to mention a single one of these consequences, the one with which we are most concerned here: the fact that science is prohibited from dealing with these proscribed aspects of human life, so that anyone who studies such things is regarded as scarcely less ‘improper’ than someone who actually does improper things.

Nevertheless, psycho-analysis and folklore have not allowed themselves to be deterred from transgressing these prohibitions and have been able as a result to teach us all kinds of things that are indispensable for an understanding of human nature. If we limit ourselves here to what has been learnt about the excretory functions, it may be said that the chief finding from psycho-analytic research has been the fact that the human infant is obliged to recapitulate during the early part of his development the changes in the attitude of the human race towards excremental matters which probably had their start when homo sapiens first raised himself off Mother Earth. In the earliest years of infancy there is as yet no trace of shame about the excretory functions or of disgust at excreta. Small children show great interest in these, just as they do in others of their bodily secretions; they like occupying themselves with them and can derive many kinds of pleasure from doing so. Excreta, regarded as parts of a child’s own body and as products of his own organism, have a share in the esteem - the narcissistic esteem, as we should call it - with which he regards everything relating to his self. Children are, indeed, proud of their own excretions and make use of them to help in asserting themselves against adults. Under the influence of its upbringing, the child’s coprophilic instincts and inclinations gradually succumb to repression; it learns to keep them secret, to be ashamed of them and to feel disgust at their objects. Strictly speaking, however, the disgust never goes so far as to apply to a child’s own excretions, but is content with repudiating them when they are the products of other people. The interest which has hitherto been attached to excrement is carried over on to other objects - for instance, from faeces on to money, which is, of course, late in acquiring significance for children. Important constituents in the formation of character are developed, or strengthened, from the repression of coprophilic inclinations.

Preface To Bourke's Scatalogic Rites Of All Nations

2641

Psycho-analysis further shows that, to begin with, excremental and sexual instincts are not distinct from each other in children. The divorce between them only occurs later and it remains incomplete. Their original affinity, which is established by the anatomy of the human body, still makes itself felt in many ways in normal adults. Finally, it should not be forgotten that these developments can no more be expected to yield a perfect result than any others. Some portion of the old preferences persist, some part of the coprophilic inclinations continue to operate in later life and are expressed in the neuroses, perversions and bad habits of adults.

Folklore has adopted a quite different method of research, and yet it has reached the same results as psycho-analysis. It shows us how incompletely the repression of coprophilic inclinations has been carried out among various peoples at various times and how closely at other cultural levels the treatment of excretory substances approximates to that practised by children. It also demonstrates the persistent and indeed ineradicable nature of coprophilic interests, by displaying to our astonished gaze the multiplicity of applications - in magical ritual, in tribal customs, in observances of religious cults and in the art of healing - by which the old esteem for human excretions has found new expression. The connection, too, with sexual life seems to be fully preserved.

This expansion of our knowledge clearly involves no risk to our morality. The major part of what is known of the role played by excretions in human life has been brought together in J. G. Bourke’s Scatalogic Rites of All Nations. To make it accessible to German readers is therefore not only a courageous but also a meritorious undertaking.

2642

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SEQUENCES OF VOWELS

(1911)

Objections have no doubt often been raised to the assertion made by Stekel that in dreams and associations names which have to be concealed seem to be replaced by others that resemble them only in containing the same sequence of vowels. A striking analogy is, however, provided from the history of religion. Among the ancient Hebrews the name of God was taboo; it might neither be spoken aloud nor written down. (This is far from being an isolated example of the special significance of names in archaic civilizations.) This prohibition was so implicitly obeyed that to this very day the vocalization of the four consonants in God’s name () remains unknown. It was, however, pronounced ‘Jehovah’, being supplied with the vowels of the word ‘Adonai’ (‘Lord’), against which there was no such prohibition. (Reinach, 1905-12, 1, 1.)

2643

‘GREAT IS DIANA OF THE EPHESIANS’

(1911)

The ancient Greek city of Ephesus in Asia Minor, for the exploration of whose ruins, incidentally, our Austrian archaeology has to be thanked, was especially celebrated in antiquity for its splendid temple dedicated to Artemis (Diana). Ionic invaders - perhaps in the eighth century before Christ - conquered the city, which had long been inhabited by people of Asiatic race, and found in it the cult of an ancient mother goddess who possibly bore the name of Oupis, and identified her with Artemis, a deity of their home land. The evidence of excavations shows that in the course of centuries several temples were erected on the same site in honour of the goddess. It was the fourth of these temples that was destroyed by a fire started by the crazy Herostratus in the year 356, during the night in which Alexander the Great was born. It was rebuilt, more magnificent than ever. With its concourse of priests, magicians and pilgrims, and with its shops in which amulets, mementoes and oblations were offered for sale, the commercial metropolis of Ephesus might be compared to a modern Lourdes.

In about A.D. 54, the apostle Paul spent several years at Ephesus. He preached, performed miracles, and found a large following among the people. He was persecuted and accused by the Jews; and he separated from them and founded an independent Christian community. In consequence of the spread of his doctrine, there was a falling-off in the trade of the goldsmiths, who used to make mementoes of the holy place - small figures of Artemis and models of the temple - for the faithful and the pilgrims who came from all over the world.¹ Paul was much too strict a Jew to allow the old deity to survive under another name, to re-baptize her, as the Ionic conquerors had done with the goddess Oupis. So it was that the pious artisans and artists of the city became uneasy about their goddess as well as about their earnings. They revolted, and, with endlessly repeated cries of ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians’, streamed through the main street, called ‘Arcadian’, to the theatre, where their leader, Demetrius, delivered an incendiary speech against the Jews and against Paul. The authorities succeeded with difficulty in quelling the tumult by the assurance that the majesty of the goddess was unassailable and out of reach of any attack.²

¹ See also Goethe’s poem (Sophienausgabe, 2, 195).

² Acts, xix.

'Great Is Diana Of The Ephesians'

2644

The church founded by Paul at Ephesus did not long remain faithful to him. It came under the influence of a man named John, whose personality has set the critics some hard problems. He may have been the author of the Apocalypse, which teems with invectives against the apostle Paul. Tradition identifies him with the apostle John, to whom the fourth gospel is attributed. According to that gospel, when Jesus was on the cross he called out to his favourite disciple, pointing to Mary: ‘Behold thy mother!’ And from that moment John took Mary to him. So when John went to Ephesus, Mary accompanied him. Accordingly, alongside of the church of the apostle in Ephesus, there was built the first basilica in honour of the new mother-goddess of the Christians. Its existence is attested as early as in the fourth century. Now once again the city had its great goddess, and, apart from her name, there was little change. The goldsmiths, too, recovered their work of making models of the temple and images of the goddess for the new pilgrims. The function of Artemis expressed by the attribute of Κουροτρό fος,¹ however, was handed over to a St. Artemidorus, who took on the care of women in labour.

Then came the conquest of the city by Islam, and finally its ruin and abandonment owing to the river on which it stood becoming choked with sand. But even then the great goddess of Ephesus had not abandoned her claims. In our own days she appeared as a saintly virgin to a pious German girl, Katharina Emmerich, at Dülmen. She described to her her journey to Ephesus, the furnishings of the house in which she had lived there and in which she had died, the shape of her bed, and so on. And both the house and the bed were in fact found exactly as the virgin had described them, and they are once more the goal of the pilgrimages of the faithful.

¹ [‘Rearer of boys.’]

2645

PREFACE TO MAXIM STEINER’S

THE PSYCHICAL DISORDERS OF MALE POTENCY

(1913)

The author of this little monograph, which deals with the pathology and treatment of psychical impotence in males, is one of the small band of physicians who early recognized the importance of psycho-analysis for their special branch of medicine and who have never since ceased to perfect themselves in its theory and technique. We are aware that only a small part of neurotic ailments - which we have now come to know as the outcome of disturbances of the sexual function - are dealt with in neuropathology itself. The greater number of them find a place among the disorders of the particular organ which is the victim of a neurotic disturbance. It is therefore expedient and proper that the treatment of these symptoms or syndromes should also be the business of the specialist, who is alone capable of making a differential diagnosis between a neurotic and an organic illness, who can draw the line, in the case of mixed forms, between their organic and neurotic elements, and who can in general give us information on the way in which the two factors in the disease mutually reinforce each other. But if ‘nervous’ organic diseases are not to fall into neglect as being mere appendages of the material disorders of the same organ - a neglect which, from their frequency and practical importance, they are far from meriting - the specialist, whether he is concerned with the stomach, the heart or the urogenitary system, must, in addition to his general medical knowledge and his specialized attainments, also be able to make use, for his own field of work, of the lines of approach, the discoveries and the techniques of the nerve specialist.

A great therapeutic advance will have been made when specialists no longer dismiss a patient suffering from a nervous ailment in an organ with a pronouncement such as: ‘There’s nothing wrong with you; it’s simply nerves’, or with the not much better further advice: ‘Go to a nerve specialist; he’ll order you a light course of cold-water treatment.’ No doubt, too, we shall require the specialist in any organ to be capable of understanding and treating nervous disorders in his field, rather than expect the nerve-specialist to be trained into being a universal specialist in every organ in which neuroses produce symptoms. And it may accordingly be anticipated that only neuroses with mainly psychical symptoms will remain in the sphere of the nerve specialist.

We may hope, therefore, that the time is not far distant when it will be generally recognized that no sort of nervous disturbance can be understood and treated without the help of the line of approach and often of the technique of psycho-analysis. Such an assertion may sound to-day like a piece of presumptuous exaggeration; but I venture to prophesy that it is destined to become a platitude. It will, however, always be to the credit of the author of the present work that he has not waited for this to happen before admitting psycho-analysis as a treatment of the nervous ailments within his own specialized branch of medicine.

VIENNA, March 1913.

2646

TOTEM AND TABOO

Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics

(1913 [1912-13])

2647

Intentionally left blank

Totem And Taboo

2648

PREFACE

The four essays that follow were originally published (under a heading which serves as the present book’s sub-title) in the first two volumes of Imago, a periodical issued under my direction. They represent a first attempt on my part at applying the point of view and the findings of psycho-analysis to some unsolved problems of social psychology [Völkerpsychologie]. Thus they offer a methodological contrast on the one hand to Wilhelm Wundt’s extensive work, which applies the hypotheses and working methods of non-analytic psychology to the same purposes, and on the other hand to the writings of the Zurich school of psycho-analysis, which endeavour, on the contrary, to solve the problems of individual psychology with the help of material derived from social psychology. (Cf. Jung, 1912 and 1913.) I readily confess that it was from these two sources that I received the first stimulus for my own essays.

I am fully conscious of the deficiencies of these studies. I need not mention those which are necessarily characteristic of pioneering work; but others require a word of explanation. The four essays collected in these pages aim at arousing the interest of a fairly wide circle of educated readers, but they cannot in fact be understood and appreciated except by those few who are no longer strangers to the essential nature of psycho-analysis. They seek to bridge the gap between students of such subjects as social anthropology, philology and folklore on the one hand, and psycho-analysts on the other. Yet they cannot offer to either side what each lacks - to the former an adequate initiation into the new psychological technique or to the latter a sufficient grasp of the material that awaits treatment. They must therefore rest content with attracting the attention of the two parties and with encouraging a belief that occasional co-operation between them could not fail to be of benefit to research.

It will be found that the two principal themes from which the title of this little book is derived - totems and taboos - have not received the same treatment. The analysis of taboos is put forward as an assured and exhaustive attempt at the solution of the problem. The investigation of totemism does no more than declare that ‘here is what psycho-analysis can at the moment contribute towards elucidating the problem of the totem’. The difference is related to the fact that taboos still exist among us. Though expressed in a negative form and directed towards another subject-matter, they do not differ in their psychological nature from Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’, which operates in a compulsive fashion and rejects any conscious motives. Totemism, on the contrary, is something alien to our contemporary feelings - a religio-social institution which has been long abandoned as an actuality and replaced by newer forms. It has left only the slightest traces behind it in the religions, manners and customs of the civilized peoples of to-day and has been subject to far-reaching modifications even among the races over which it still holds sway. The social and technical advances in human history have affected taboos far less than the totem.

An attempt is made in this volume to deduce the original meaning of totemism from the vestiges remaining of it in childhood from the hints of it which emerge in the course of the growth of our own children. The close connection between totems and taboos carries us a step further along the path towards the hypothesis presented in these pages; and if in the end that hypothesis bears a highly improbable appearance, that need be no argument against the possibility of its approximating more or less closely to the reality which it is so hard to reconstruct.

ROME, September 1913

Totem And Taboo

2649

PREFACE TO THE HEBREW TRANSLATION

No reader of this book will find it easy to put himself in the emotional position of an author who is ignorant of the language of holy writ, who is completely estranged from the religion of his fathers - as well as from every other religion - and who cannot take a share in nationalist ideals, but who has yet never repudiated his people, who feels that he is in his essential nature a Jew and who has no desire to alter that nature. If the question were put to him: ‘Since you have abandoned all these common characteristics of your countrymen, what is there left to you that is Jewish?’ he would reply: ‘A very great deal, and probably its very essence.’ He could not now express that essence clearly in words; but some day, no doubt, it will become accessible to the scientific mind.

Thus it is an experience of a quite special kind for such an author when a book of his is translated into the Hebrew language and put into the hands of readers for whom that historic idiom is a living tongue: a book, moreover, which deals with the origin of religion and morality, though it adopts no Jewish standpoint and makes no exceptions in favour of Jewry. The author hopes, however, that he will be at one with his readers in the conviction that unprejudiced science cannot remain a stranger to the spirit of the new Jewry.

VIENNA, December 1930

2650

TOTEM AND TABOO

I

THE HORROR OF INCEST

Prehistoric man, in the various stages of his development, is known to us through the inanimate monuments and implements which he has left behind, through the information about his art, his religion and his attitude towards life which has come to us either directly or by way of tradition handed down in legends, myths and fairy tales, and through the relics of his mode of thought which survive in our own manners and customs. But apart from this, in a certain sense he is still our contemporary. There are men still living who, as we believe, stand very near to primitive man, far nearer than we do, and whom we therefore regard as his direct heirs and representatives. Such is our view of those whom we describe as savages or half-savages; and their mental life must have a peculiar interest for us if we are right in seeing in it a well-preserved picture of an early stage of our own development.

If that supposition is correct, a comparison between the psychology of primitive peoples, as it is taught by social anthropology, and the psychology of neurotics, as it has been revealed by psycho-analysis, will be bound to show numerous points of agreement and will throw new light upon familiar facts in both sciences.

For external as well as for internal reasons, I shall select as the basis of this comparison the tribes which have been described by anthropologists as the most backward and miserable of savages, the aborigines of Australia, the youngest continent, in whose fauna, too, we can still observe much that is archaic and that has perished elsewhere.

The Australian aborigines are regarded as a distinct race, showing neither physical nor linguistic relationship with their nearest neighbours, the Melanesian, Polynesian and Malayan peoples. They do not build houses or permanent shelters; they do not cultivate the soil; they keep no domesticated animals except the dog; they are not even acquainted with the art of making pottery. They live entirely upon the flesh of all kinds of animals which they hunt, and upon roots which they dig. Kings or chiefs are unknown among them; communal affairs are decided by a council of elders. It is highly doubtful whether any religion, in the shape of a worship of higher beings, can be attributed to them. The tribes in the interior of the continent, who have to struggle against the hardest conditions of existence as a result of the scarcity of water, appear to be more primitive in all respects than those living near the coast.

Totem And Taboo

2651

We should certainly not expect that the sexual life of these poor naked cannibals would be moral in our sense or that their sexual instincts would be subjected to any great degree of restriction. Yet we find that they set before themselves with the most scrupulous care and the most painful severity the aim of avoiding incestuous sexual relations. Indeed, their whole social organization seems to serve that purpose or to have been brought into relation with its attainment.

Among the Australians the place of all the religious and social institutions which they lack is taken by the system of ‘totemism’. Australian tribes fall into smaller divisions, or clans, each of which is named after its totem. What is a totem? It is as a rule an animal (whether edible and harmless or dangerous and feared) and more rarely a plant or a natural phenomenon (such as rain or water), which stands in a peculiar relation to the whole clan. In the first place, the totem is the common ancestor of the clan; at the same time it is their guardian spirit and helper, which sends them oracles and, if dangerous to others, recognizes and spares its own children. Conversely, the clansmen are under a sacred obligation (subject to automatic sanctions) not to kill of destroy their totem and to avoid eating its flesh (or deriving benefit from it in other ways). The totemic character is inherent, not in some individual animal or entity, but in all the individuals of a given class. From time to time festivals are celebrated at which the clansmen represent or imitate the motions and attributes of their totem in ceremonial dances.

Totem And Taboo

2652

The totem may be inherited either through the female or through the male line. It is possible that originally the former method of descent prevailed everywhere and was only subsequently replaced by the latter. An Australian’s relation to his totem is the basis of all his social obligations: it overrides on the one hand his tribal membership and on the other hand his blood relationships.¹

The totem is not attached to one particular place. The clansmen are distributed in different localities and live peacefully side by side with members of other totem clans.²

¹ ‘The Totem bond is stronger than the bond of blood or family in the modern sense.’ (Frazer, 1910, 1, 53.)

² This highly condensed summary of the totemic system must necessarily be subject to further comments and qualifications. The word ‘totem’ was first introduced in 1791 (in the form ‘totam’) from the North American Indians by an Englishman, J. Long. The subject itself has gradually attracted great scientific interest and has produced a copious literature, from which I may select as works of capital importance J. G. Frazer’s four-volume Totemism and Exogamy (1910) and the writings of Andrew Lang, e.g. The Secret of the Totem (1905). The merit of having been the first to recognize the importance of totemism for human prehistory lies with a Scotsman, John Ferguson McLennan (1869-70). Totemic institutions were, or still are, to be observed in operation, not only among the Australians, but also among the North American Indians, among the peoples of Oceania, in the East Indies and in a large part of Africa. It may also be inferred from certain vestigial remains, for which it is otherwise hard to account, that totemism existed at one time among the Aryan and Semitic aboriginal races of Europe and Asia. Many investigators are therefore inclined to regard it as a necessary phase of human development which has been passed through universally.

How did prehistoric men come to adopt totems? How, that is, did they come to make the fact of their being descended from one animal or another the basis of their social obligations and, as we shall see presently, of their sexual restrictions? There are numerous theories on the subject - of which Wundt (1906) has given an epitome for German readers - but no agreement. It is my intention to devote a special study before long to the problem of totemism, in which I shall attempt to solve it by the help of a psycho-analytic line of approach. (See the fourth essay in this work.)

Not only, however, is the theory of totemism a matter of dispute; the facts themselves are scarcely capable of being expressed in general terms as I have tried to do in the text above. There is scarcely a statement which does not call for exceptions or contradictions. But it must not be forgotten that even the most primitive and conservative races are in some sense ancient races and have a long past history behind them during which their original conditions of life have been subject to much development and distortion. So it comes about that in those races in which totemism exists to-day, we may find it in various stages of decay and disintegration or in the process of transition to other social and religious institutions, or again in a stationary condition which may differ greatly from the original one. The difficulty in this last case is to decide whether we should regard the present state of things as a true picture of the significant features of the past or as a secondary distortion of them.

Totem And Taboo

2653

And now we come at last to the characteristic of the totemic system which has attracted the interest of psycho-analysts. In almost every place where we find totems we also find a law against persons of the same totem having sexual relations with one another and consequently against their marrying. This, then, is ‘exogamy’, an institution related to totemism.

Strictly enforced as it is, this prohibition is a remarkable one. There is nothing in the concept or attributes of the totem which I have so far mentioned to lead us to anticipate it; so that it is hard to understand how it has become involved in the totemic system. We cannot, therefore, feel surprised that some investigators actually suppose that exogamy had originally - in the earliest times and in its true meaning - nothing to do with totemism, but became attached to it (without there being any underlying connection)  at some time when marriage restrictions became necessary. However this may be, the bond between totemism and exogamy exists and is clearly a very firm one.

Some further considerations will make the significance of this prohibition clearer:

(a) The violation of the prohibition is not left to what might be called the ‘automatic’ punishment of the guilty parties, as in the case of other totem prohibitions, such as that against killing the totem animal. It is avenged in the most energetic fashion by the whole clan, as though it were a question of averting some danger that threatened the whole community or some guilt that was pressing upon it. A few sentences from Frazer (1910, 1, 54) will show how severely such misdeeds are treated by savages who are otherwise far from being moral by our standards:

‘In Australia the regular penalty for sexual intercourse with a person of a forbidden clan is death. It matters not whether the woman be of the same local group or has been captured in war from another tribe; a man of the wrong clan who uses her as his wife is hunted down and killed by his clansmen, and so is the woman; though in some cases, if they succeed in eluding capture for a certain time, the offence may be condoned. In the Ta-ta-thi tribe, New South Wales, in the rare cases which occur, the man is killed but the woman is only beaten or speared, or both, till she is nearly dead; the reason given for not actually killing her being that she was probably coerced. Even in casual amours the clan prohibitions are strictly observed; any violations of these prohibitions "are regarded with the utmost abhorrence and are punished by death".’

(b) Since the same severe punishment is inflicted in the case of passing love-affairs which have not resulted in any children, it seems unlikely that the reasons for the prohibition are of a practical nature.

(c) Since totems are hereditary and not changed by marriage, it is easy to follow the consequences of the prohibition. Where, for instance, descent is through the female line, if a man of the Kangaroo totem marries a woman of the Emu totem, all the children, both boys and girls, belong to the Emu clan. The totem regulation will therefore make it impossible for a son of this marriage to have incestuous intercourse with his mother or sisters, who are Emus like himself.¹

¹ On the other hand, at all events so far as this prohibition is concerned, the father, who is a Kangaroo, is free to commit incest with his daughters, who are Emus. If the totem descended through the male line, however, the Kangaroo father would be prohibited from incest with his daughters (since all his children would be Kangaroos), whereas the son would be free to commit incest with his mother. These implications of totem prohibitions suggest that descent through the female line is older than that through the male, since there are grounds for thinking that totem prohibitions were principally directed against the incestuous desires of the son.

Totem And Taboo

2654

(d) But a little more reflection will show that exogamy linked with the totem effects more (and therefore aims at more) than the prevention of incest with a man’s mother and sisters. It makes sexual intercourse impossible for a man with all the women of his own clan (that is to say with a number of women who are not his blood-relatives) by treating them all as though they were his blood-relatives. It is difficult at first sight to see the psychological justification for this very extensive restriction, which goes far beyond anything comparable among civilized peoples. It may be gathered from this, however, that the part played by the totem as common ancestor is taken very seriously. All those who are descended from the same totem are blood relations. They form a single family, and within that family even the most distant degree of kinship is regarded as an absolute hindrance to sexual intercourse.

We see, then, that these savages have an unusually great horror of incest, or are sensitive on the subject to an unusual degree, and that they combine this with a peculiarity which remains obscure to us - of replacing real blood-relationship by totem kinship. This latter contrast must not, however, be too much exaggerated, and we must remember that the totem prohibitions include that against real incest as a special case.

The riddle of how it came about that the real family was replaced by the totem clan must perhaps remain unsolved till the nature of the totem itself can be explained. At the same time, it is to be observed that if there were a certain degree of freedom of sexual intercourse outside marriage, blood-relationship, and consequently the prevention of incest, would become so uncertain that the prohibition would stand in need of a wider basis. It is therefore worth remarking that Australian customs permit the occurrence, in certain social situations and during certain festivals, of breaches in a man’s exclusive conjugal rights over a woman.

Linguistic usage in these Australian tribes¹ exhibits a peculiarity which is no doubt relevant here. For the terms used by them to express the various degrees of kinship do not denote a relation between two individuals but between an individual and a group. This is what L. H. Morgan named the ‘classificatory’ system of relationship. Thus a man uses the term ‘father’ not only for his actual procreator but also for all the other men whom his mother might have married according to tribal law and who therefore might have procreated him; he uses the term ‘mother’ not only for the woman who actually bore him but also for all the other women who might have borne him without transgressing the tribal law; he uses the terms ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ not only for the children of his actual parents but also for the children of all those persons who stand in the relation of parents to him in the classificatory sense; and so on. Thus the kinship terms which two Australians apply to each other do not necessarily indicate any consanguinity, as ours would do: they represent social rather than physical relationships. Something approaching the classificatory system is to be found among us when, for instance, children are encouraged to refer to all their parents’ friends as ‘Uncle’ or ‘Aunt’, or when we speak in a metaphorical sense of ‘brothers in Apollo’ of ‘sisters in Christ’.

¹ As well as in most other totemic communities.

Totem And Taboo

2655

Though this use of words strikes us as so puzzling, it is easily explained if we look on it as a survival of the marriage institution which the Rev. L. Fison has called ‘group marriage’ and which consists in a certain number of men exercising conjugal rights over a certain number of women. The children of such a group marriage would then justly regard one another as brothers and sisters (though they were not all born of the same mother) and would regard all the men in the group as their fathers.

Though some authors, such as Westermarck (1901), have disputed the conclusions which others have drawn from the existence of the classificatory system of relationship, those who have the closest acquaintance with the Australian natives are agreed in regarding that system as a survival from the days of group marriage. Indeed, according to Spencer and Gillen (1899), a certain form of group marriage exists to this day in the Urabunna and Dieri tribes. Group marriage thus preceded individual marriage among these peoples, and after its disappearance left definite traces behind both in language and customs.

But when once we have put group marriage in the place of individual marriage, the apparently excessive degree of avoidance of incest which we have come across among the same peoples becomes intelligible. Totemic exogamy, the prohibition of sexual intercourse between members of the same clan, appears to have been the appropriate means for preventing group incest; it thus became established and persisted long after its raison d’être had ceased.

Totem And Taboo

2656

It may seem that we have thus discovered the motives the led the Australian natives to set up their marriage restrictions; but we have now to learn that the actual state of affairs reveals a far greater, and at first sight a bewildering, complexity. For there are few races in Australia in which the totem barrier is the sole prohibition. Most of them are organized in such a way as to fall into two divisions, known as marriage-classes or ‘phratries’. Each of these phratries is exogamous and comprises a number of totem clans. As a rule each phratry is further subdivided into two ‘sub-phratries’, the whole tribe being thus divided into four, with the sub-phratries intermediate between the phratries and the totem clans.

The following diagram represents the typical organization of an Australian tribe and corresponds to the actual situation in very large number of cases:

Here the twelve totem clans are divided into four sub-phratries and two phratries. All the divisions are exogamous.¹ Sub-phratries c and e form an exogamous unit; and so also do sub-phratries d and f. The result (and therefore the purpose) of these arrangements cannot be doubted: they bring about a still further restriction on the choice of marriage and on sexual liberty. Let us suppose that each clan contains an equal number of members. Then, if only the twelve totem clans existed, each member of a clan would have his choice among 11/12 of all the women in the tribe. The existence of the two phratries reduces his choice to 6/12 or 1/2, for then a man of totem α can only marry a woman of totems 1 to 6. With the introduction of the four sub-phratries his choice is still further reduced to 3/12 or 1/4, for in that case a man of totem αis restricted in his choice of a wife to a woman of totems 4, 5 or 6.

¹ The number of totems is chosen arbitrarily.

Totem And Taboo

2657

The historical relation between the marriage-classes (of which in some tribes there are as many as eight) and the totem clans is completely obscure. It is merely evident that these arrangements are directed towards the same aim as totemic exogamy and pursue it still further. While, however, totemic exogamy gives one the impression of being a sacred ordinance of unknown origin - in short, of being a custom - the complicated institution of the marriage-classes, with their subdivisions and the regulations attaching to them, look more like the result of deliberate legislation, which may perhaps have taken up the task of preventing incest afresh because the influence of the totem was waning. And, while the totemic system is, as we know, the basis of all the other social obligations and moral restrictions of the tribe, the significance of the phratries seems in general not to extend beyond the regulation of marriage choice which is its aim.

The system of marriage-classes in its furthest developments bears witness to an endeavour to go beyond the prevention of natural and group incest and to forbid marriage between still more distant groups of relatives. In this it resembles the Catholic Church, which extended the ancient prohibition against marriage between brothers and sisters to marriage between cousins and even to marriage between those who were merely spiritual relatives. (Cf. Lang, 1910-11.)

It would be little to our purpose if we were to follow in detail the extraordinarily involved and obscure discussions on the origin and significance of the marriage-classes and on their relation to the totem. For our purpose it is enough to draw attention to the great care which is devoted by the Australians, as well as by other savage peoples, to the prevention of incest.¹ It must be admitted that these savages are even more sensitive on the subject of incest than we are. They are probably liable to a greater temptation to it and for that reason stand in need of fuller protection.

¹ Storfer (1911) has quite recently insisted on this point.

Totem And Taboo

2658

But the horror of incest shown by these peoples is not satisfied by the erection of the institutions which I have described and which seem to be directed principally against group incest. We must add to them a number of ‘customs’ which regulate the dealings of individuals with their near relatives in our sense of the term, customs which are enforced literally with religious strictness and the purpose of which can scarcely be doubted. These customs or customary prohibitions have been termed ‘avoidances’. They extend far beyond the totemic races of Australia; but once again I must ask my readers to be content with a fragmentary extract from the copious material.

In Melanesia restrictive prohibitions of this sort govern a boy’s intercourse with his mother and sisters. Thus, for instance, in Lepers’ Island, one of the New Hebrides, when a boy has reached a certain age he no longer lives at home, but takes up his quarters in the ‘club-house’, where he now regularly eats and sleeps. It is true that he may still go to his father’s house to ask for food, but if his sister is at home he must go away before eating; if no sister is there he may sit down near the door and eat. If by chance a brother and sister meet in the open, she must run away or hide. If a boy knows that certain footprints in the road are his sister’s, he will not follow them, nor will she follow his. Indeed, he will not even utter her name, and will avoid the use of a common word if it forms part of her name. This avoidance begins with the puberty ceremonies and is maintained throughout life. The reserve between a son and his mother increases as the boy grows up and is much more on her side than on his. If his mother brings him food, she does not give it him but puts it down for him to take. In speaking to him she does not tutoyer him, but uses the more distant plural forms.¹

Similar customs prevail in New Caledonia. If a brother and sister happen to meet on a path, the sister will throw herself into the bushes and he will pass on without turning his head.

Among the natives of the Gazelle Peninsula in New Britain a sister, after her marriage, is not allowed to converse with her brother; she never utters his name, but designates him by another word.²

¹ Frazer (1910, 2, 77 f.), quoting Codrington (1891).

² Frazer (1910, 2, 124).

Totem And Taboo

2659

In New Mecklenburg cousins of one kind are subject to similar restrictions, as are brothers and sisters. They may not come near each other, may not shake hands and may not give each other presents; but they are allowed to speak to each other at a distance of some paces. The penalty for incest with a sister is death by hanging.¹

In Fiji these avoidance rules are particularly strict; they affect not only blood sisters but tribal sisters as well. It must strike us as all the more puzzling to hear that these same savages practise sacred orgies, in which precisely these forbidden degrees of kinship seek sexual intercourse - puzzling, that is, unless we prefer to regard the contrast as an explanation of the prohibition.²

Among the Battas of Sumatra the rules of avoidance apply to all near relations. ‘A Batta, for example, would think it shocking were a brother to escort his sister to an evening party. Even in the presence of others a Batta brother and sister feel embarrassed. If one of them comes into the house, the other will go away. Further, a father may never be alone in the house with his daughter, nor a mother with her son. . . . The Dutch missionary who reports these customs adds that he is sorry to say that from what he knows of the Battas he believes the maintenance of most of these rules to be very necessary.’ These people assume as a matter of course that a solitary meeting between a man and a woman will lead to an improper intimacy between them. And since they believe that intercourse between near relations will lead to punishments and calamities of all sorts, they are right to avoid any temptation to transgress these prohibitions.³

Curiously enough, among the Barongo of Delagoa Bay, in South Africa, the strictest rules affect a man’s relations with his sister-in-law, the wife of his wife’s brother. If he meets this formidable person anywhere, he carefully avoids her. He does not eat out of the same dish with her, he speaks to her with embarrassment, does not venture into her hut and greets her in a trembling voice.4

¹ Frazer (1910, 2, 130 f.), quoting Peckel (1908).

² Frazer (1910, 2, 146 ff.), quoting Fison.

³ Frazer (1910, 2, 189).

4 Frazer (1910, 2, 388), quoting Junod.

Totem And Taboo

2660

A rule of avoidance with which one would have expected to meet more frequently operates among the A-kamba (or Wa kamba) of British East Africa. A girl has to avoid her father between the age of puberty and the time of her marriage. If they meet in the road, she hides while he passes, and she may never go and sit near him. This holds good until the moment of her betrothal. After her marriage she does not avoid her father in any way.¹

By far the most widespread and strictest avoidance (and the most interesting from the point of view of civilized races) is that which restricts a man’s intercourse with his mother-in-law. It is quite general in Australia and also extends over Melanesia, Polynesia and the Negro races of Africa, wherever traces of totemism and the classificatory system of relationship are found and probably still further. In some of these places there are similar prohibitions against a woman having innocent intercourse with her father-in-law; but they are far less usual and severe. In a few isolated cases both parents-in-law are subject to avoidance. Since we are less concerned with the ethnographical extent of this avoidance than with its substance and purpose, I shall once again restrict myself to quoting a few examples.

Among the Melanesians of the Banks’ Islands ‘these rules of avoidance are very strict and minute. A man will not come near his wife’s mother and she will not come near him. If the two chance to meet in a path, the woman will step out of it and stand with her back turned till he has gone by, or perhaps, if it be more convenient, he will move out of the way. At Vanua Lava, in Port Patteson, a man would not even follow his mother-in-law along the beach until the rising tide had washed her foot prints from the sand. Yet a man and his mother-in-law may talk to each other at a distance; but a woman will on no account mention the name of her daughter’s husband, nor will he name hers.²

In the Solomon Islands, after his marriage a man may neither see nor converse with his mother-in-law. If he meets her, he may not recognize her, but must make off and hide himself as fast as he can.³

¹ Frazer (1910, 2, 424).

² Frazer (1910, 2, 76)

³ Frazer (1910, 2, 117), quoting Ribbe (1903).

Totem And Taboo

2661

Among the Eastern Bantu ‘custom requires that a man should "be ashamed of" his wife’s mother, that is to say, he must studiously shun her society. He may not enter the same hut with her, and if by chance they meet on a path, one or other turns aside, she perhaps hiding behind a bush, while he screens his face with a shield. If they cannot thus avoid each other, and the mother-in-law has nothing else to cover herself with, she will tie a wisp of grass round her head as a token of ceremonial avoidance. All correspondence between the two has to be carried on either through a third party or by shouting to each other at a distance with some barrier, such as the kraal fence, interposed between them. They may not even pronounce each other’s proper name.’ (Frazer, 1910, 2, 385.)

Among the Basoga, a Bantu people who live in the region of the sources of the Nile, a man may only speak to his mother-in-law when she is in another room and out of sight. Incidentally, these people have such a horror of incest that they punish it even when it occurs among their domestic animals. (Frazer, 1910, 2, 461.)

While there can be no doubt as to the purpose and significance of the other avoidances between near relations, and they are universally regarded as protective measures against incest, the prohibitions affecting a man’s intercourse with his mother-in law-have received another interpretation in some quarters. It was with justice regarded as incomprehensible that all these different peoples should feel such great fear of the temptation presented to a man by an elderly woman, who might have been, but in fact was not, his mother. (Crawley, 1902, 405.)

This objection was also raised against the view put forward by Fison. He pointed out that certain systems of marriage-classes had gaps in them, as a result of which marriage between a man and his mother-in-law was not theoretically impossible. For that reason, he suggested, a special guarantee against that possibility became necessary.

Sir John Lubbock (1870) traced back the attitude of a mother-in-law to her son-in-law to the institution of ‘marriage by capture’. ‘When the capture was a reality’, he writes, ‘the indignation of the parents would also be real; when it became a mere symbol, the parental anger would be symbolized also, and would be continued even after its origin was forgotten.’ Crawley has no difficulty in showing how insufficiently this attempted explanation covers the details of the observed facts.

Totem And Taboo

2662

Tylor believes that the treatment given to a son-in-law by his mother-in-law is merely a form of ‘cutting’ or non-recognition by the wife’s family: the man is regarded as an ‘outsider’ until the first child is born. In the first place, however, the prohibition is not always brought to an end when this occurs. But, apart from this, it may be objected that this explanation throws no light on the fact that the prohibition centres particularly on the mother-in-law - that the explanation overlooks the factor of sex. Moreover, it takes no account of the attitude of religious horror expressed in the prohibition. (Crawley, 1902, 407.)

A Zulu woman, questioned as to the basis of the prohibition, gave the sensitive reply: ‘It is not right that he should see the breasts which suckled his wife.’¹

As we know, the relation between son-in-law and mother-in-law is also one of the delicate points of family organization in civilized communities. That relation is no longer subject to rules of avoidance in the social system of the white peoples of Europe and America; but many disputes and much unpleasantness could often be eliminated if the avoidance still existed as a custom and did not have to be re-erected by individuals. It may be regarded by some Europeans as an act of high wisdom on the part of these savage races that by their rules of avoidance they entirely precluded any contact between two persons brought into this close relationship to each other. There is scarcely room for doubt that something in the psychological relation of a mother-in-law to a son-in-law breeds hostility between them and makes it hard for them to live together. But the fact that in civilized societies mothers-in-law are such a favourite subject for jokes seems to me to suggest that the emotional relation involved includes sharply contrasted components. I believe, that is, that this relation is in fact an ‘ambivalent’ one, composed of conflicting affectionate and hostile impulses.

¹ Crawley (1902, 401), quoting Leslie (1875).

Totem And Taboo

2663

Some of those impulses are obvious enough. On the side of the mother-in-law there is reluctance to give up the possession of her daughter, distrust of the stranger to whom she is to be handed over, an impulse to retain the dominating position which she has occupied in her own house. On the man’s side there is a determination not to submit any longer to someone else’s will, jealousy of anyone who possessed his wife’s affection before he did, and, last but not least, an unwillingness to allow anything to interfere with the illusory overvaluation bred of his sexual feelings. The figure of his mother-in-law usually causes such an interference, for she has many features which remind him of her daughter and yet lacks all the charms of youth, beauty and spiritual freshness which endear his wife to him.

But we are able to bring forward other motives than these, thanks to the knowledge of concealed mental impulses which we have acquired from the psycho-analytic examination of individual human beings. A woman whose psychosexual needs should find satisfaction in her marriage and her family life is often threatened with the danger of being left unsatisfied, because her marriage relation has come to a premature end and because of the uneventfulness of her emotional life. A mother, as she grows older, saves herself from this by putting herself in her children’s place, by identifying herself with them; and this she does by making their emotional experiences her own. Parents are said to stay young with their children, and that is indeed one of the most precious psychological gains that parents derive from their children. Where a marriage is childless, the wife has lost one of the things which might be of most help to her in tolerating the resignation that her own marriage demands from her. A mother’s sympathetic identification with her daughter can easily go so far that she herself falls in love with the man her daughter loves; and in glaring instances this may lead to severe forms of neurotic illness as a result of her violent mental struggles against this emotional situation. In any case, it very frequently happens that a mother-in-law is subject to an impulse to fall in love in this way, and this impulse itself or an opposing trend are added to the tumult of conflicting forces in her mind. And very often the unkind, sadistic components of her love are directed on to her son-in-law in order that the forbidden, affectionate ones may be the more severely suppressed.

Totem And Taboo

2664

A man’s relation to his mother-in-law is complicated by similar impulses, though they have another source. It is regularly found that he chose his mother as the object of his love, and perhaps his sister as well, before passing on to his final choice. Because of the barrier that exists against incest, his love is deflected from the two figures on whom his affection was centred in his childhood on to an outside object that is modelled upon them. The place of his own and his sister’s mother is taken by his mother-in-law. He has an impulse to fall back upon his original choice, though everything in him fights against it. His horror of incest insists that the genealogical history of his choice of an object for his love shall not be recalled. His repudiation of this impulse is also facilitated by the fact that his mother-in-law is only a contemporary figure; he has not known her all his life, so that there is no unchangeable picture of her preserved in his unconscious. A streak of irritability and malevolence that is apt to be present in the medley of his feelings leads us to suspect that she does in fact offer him a temptation to incest; and this is confirmed by the not uncommon event of a man openly falling in love with the woman who is later to be his mother-in-law before transferring his love to her daughter.

I can see nothing against the presumption that it is precisely this incestuous factor in the relation that provides savages with the motive for their rules of avoidance between son-in-law and mother-in-law. Thus the explanation which we should adopt for these strictly enforced avoidances among primitive peoples is that put forward by Fison, which regards them merely as a further protection against possible incest. The same explanation holds good of all other avoidances, between both blood and tribal relations. The only difference would be that in the case of blood relations the possibility of incest is an immediate one and the intention to prevent it may be conscious; in the other cases, including that of a man’s relation to his mother-in-law, the possibility of incest would seem to be a temptation in phantasy set in motion through the agency of unconscious connecting links.

Totem And Taboo

2665

There has been little opportunity in the preceding pages for showing how new light can be thrown upon the facts of social psychology by the adoption of a psycho-analytic method of approach: for the horror of incest displayed by savages has long been recognized as such and stands in need of no further interpretation. All that I have been able to add to our understanding of it is to emphasize the fact that it is essentially an infantile feature and that it reveals a striking agreement with the mental life of neurotic patients. Psycho-analysis has taught us that a boy’s earliest choice of objects for his love is incestuous and that those objects are forbidden ones - his mother and his sister. We have learnt, too, the manner in which, as he grows up, he liberates himself from this incestuous attraction. A neurotic, on the other hand, invariably exhibits some degree of psychical infantilism. He has either failed to get free from the psychosexual conditions that prevailed in his childhood or he has returned to them - two possibilities which may be summed up as developmental inhibition and regression. Thus incestuous fixations of libido continue to play (or begin once more to play) the principal part in his unconscious mental life. We have arrived at the point of regarding a child’s relation to his parents, dominated as it is by incestuous longings, as the nuclear complex of neurosis. This revelation of the importance of incest in neurosis is naturally received with universal scepticism by adults and normal people. Similar expressions of disbelief, for instance, inevitably greet the writings of Otto Rank, which have brought more and more evidence to show the extent to which the interest of creative writers centres round the theme of incest and how the same theme, in countless variations and distortions, provides the subject-matter of poetry. We are driven to believe that this rejection is principally a product of the distaste which human beings feel for their early incestuous wishes, now over taken by repression. It is therefore of no small importance that we are able to show that these same incestuous wishes, which are later destined to become unconscious, are still regarded by savage peoples as immediate perils against which the most severe measures of defence must be enforced.

Totem And Taboo

2666

II

TABOO AND EMOTIONAL AMBIVALENCE

(1)

‘Taboo’ is a Polynesian word. It is difficult for us to find a translation for it, since the concept connoted by it is one which we no longer possess. It was still current among the ancient Romans, whose ‘sacer’ was the same as the Polynesian ‘taboo’. So, too, the ‘άγος’ of the Greeks and the ‘kadesh’ of the Hebrews must have had the same meaning as is expressed in ‘taboo’ by the Polynesians and in analogous terms by many other races in America, Africa (Madagascar) and North and Central Asia.

The meaning of ‘taboo’, as we see it, diverges in two contrary directions. To us it means, on the one hand, ‘sacred’, ‘consecrated’, and on the other ‘uncanny’, ‘dangerous’, ‘forbidden’, ‘unclean’. The converse of ‘taboo’ in Polynesian is ‘noa’, which means ‘common’ or ‘generally accessible’. Thus ‘taboo’ has about it a sense of something unapproachable, and it is principally expressed in prohibitions and restrictions. Our collocation ‘holy dread’ would often coincide in meaning with ‘taboo’.

Taboo restrictions are distinct from religious or moral prohibitions. They are not based upon any divine ordinance, but may be said to impose themselves on their own account. They differ from moral prohibitions in that they fall into no system that declares quite generally that certain abstinences must be observed and gives reasons for that necessity. Taboo prohibitions have no grounds and are of unknown origin. Though they are unintelligible to us, to those who are dominated by them they are taken as a matter of course.

Wundt (1906, 308) describes taboo as the oldest human unwritten code of laws. It is generally supposed that taboo is older than gods and dates back to a period before any kind of religion existed.

Totem And Taboo

2667

Since we need an impartial account of taboo to submit to psycho-analytic examination, I shall now give some extracts and summaries of portions of the article ‘Taboo’ in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910-11),¹ the author of which was Northcote W. Thomas, the anthropologist.

‘Properly speaking taboo includes only (a) the sacred (or unclean) character of person or things, (b) the kind of prohibition which results from this character, and (c) the sanctity (or uncleanness) which results from a violation of the prohibition. The converse of taboo in Polynesia is noa and allied forms, which mean "general" or "common". . . .

‘Various classes of taboo in the wider sense may be distinguished: (i) natural or direct, the result of mana (mysterious power) inherent in a person or thing; (ii) communicated or indirect, equally the result of mana, but (a) acquired or (b) imposed by a priest, chief or other person; (iii) intermediate, where both factors are present, as in the appropriation of a wife to her husband. .. .’ The term is also applied to other ritual restrictions, but what is better described as a ‘religious interdiction’ should not be referred to as taboo.

‘The objects of taboo are many: (i) direct taboos aim at (a) the protection of important persons-chiefs, priests, etc. - and things against harm; (b) the safeguarding of the weak - women, children and common people generally - from the powerful manas (magical influence) of chiefs and priests; (c) the provision against the dangers incurred by handling or coming in contact with corpses, by eating certain foods, etc.; (d) the guarding the chief acts of life - birth, initiation, marriage and sexual functions, etc., against interference; (e) the securing of human beings against the wrath or power of gods and spirits;² (f) the securing of unborn infants and young children, who stand in a specially sympathetic relation with one or both parents, from the consequences of certain actions, and more especially from the communication of qualities supposed to be derived from certain foods. (ii) Taboos are imposed in order to secure against thieves the property of an individual, his fields, tools, etc. . . .’

¹ This includes a bibliography of the chief literature on the subject.

² In the present context this use of the term ‘taboo’ may be disregarded as not being a primary one.

Totem And Taboo

2668

The punishment for the violation of a taboo was no doubt originally left to an internal, automatic agency: the violated taboo itself took vengeance. When, at a later stage, ideas of gods and spirits arose, with whom taboo became associated, the penalty was expected to follow automatically from the divine power. In other cases, probably as a result of a further evolution of the concept, society itself took over the punishment of offenders, whose conduct had brought their fellows into danger. Thus the earliest human penal systems may be traced back to taboo.

‘The violation of a taboo makes the offender himself taboo. . . .’ Certain of the dangers brought into existence by the violation may be averted by acts of atonement and purification.

The source of taboo is attributed to a peculiar magical power which is inherent in persons and spirits and can be conveyed by them through the medium of inanimate objects. ‘Persons or things which are regarded as taboo may be compared to objects charged with electricity; they are the seat of a tremendous power which is transmissible by contact, and may be liberated with destructive effect if the organisms which provoke its discharge are too weak to resist it; the result of a violation of a taboo depends partly on the strength of the magical influence inherent in the taboo object or person, partly on the strength of the opposing mana of the violator of the taboo. Thus, kings and chiefs are possessed of great power, and it is death for their subjects to address them directly; but a minister or other person of greater mana than common can approach them unharmed, and can in turn be approached by their inferiors without risk. . . . So too indirect taboos depend for their strength on the mana of him who imposes them; if it is a chief or a priest, they are more powerful than those imposed by a common person. . . .’

It is no doubt the transmissibility of taboo which accounts for the attempts to throw it off by suitable purificatory ceremonies.

Taboos may be permanent or temporary. Among the former are those attaching to priests and chiefs, as well as to dead persons and anything belonging to them. Temporary taboos may be attached to certain particular states, such as menstruation and child-birth, to warriors before and after an expedition, or to special activities such as fishing and hunting. A general taboo may (like a Papal Interdict) be imposed upon a whole region and may then last for many years.

Totem And Taboo

2669

If I judge my readers’ feelings aright, I think it is safe to say that in spite of all that they have now heard about taboo they still have very little idea of the meaning of the term or of what place to give it in their thoughts. This is no doubt due to the insufficiency of the information I have given them and to my having omitted to discuss the relation between taboo and superstition, the belief in spirits, and religion. On the other hand, I am afraid a more detailed account of what is known about taboo would have been even more confusing, and I can assure them that in fact the whole subject is highly obscure.

What we are concerned with, then, is a number of prohibitions to which these primitive races are subjected. Every sort of thing is forbidden; but they have no idea why, and it does not occur to them to raise the question. On the contrary, they submit to the prohibitions as though they were a matter of course and feel convinced that any violation of them will be automatically met by the direst punishment. We have trustworthy stories of how any unwitting violation of one of these prohibitions is in fact automatically punished. An innocent wrong-doer, who may, for instance, have eaten a forbidden animal, falls into a deep depression, anticipates death and then dies in real earnest. These prohibitions are mainly directed against liberty of enjoyment and against freedom of movement and communication. In some cases they have an intelligible meaning and are clearly aimed at abstinences and renunciations. But in other cases their subject-matter is quite incomprehensible; they are concerned with trivial details and seem to be of a purely ceremonial nature.

Behind all these prohibitions there seems to be something in the nature of a theory that they are necessary because certain persons and things are charged with a dangerous power, which can be transferred through contact with them, almost like an infection. The quantity of this dangerous attribute also plays a part. Some people or things have more of it than others and the danger is actually proportional to the difference of potential of the charges. The strangest fact seems to be that anyone who has transgressed one of these prohibitions himself acquires the characteristic of being prohibited - as though the whole of the dangerous charge had been transferred over to him. This power is attached to all special individuals, such as kings, priests or new born babies, to all exceptional states, such as the physical states of menstruation, puberty or birth, and to all uncanny things, such as sickness and death and what is associated with them through their power of infection or contagion.

Totem And Taboo

2670

The word ‘taboo’ denotes everything, whether a person or a place or a thing or a transitory condition, which is the vehicle or source of this mysterious attribute. It also denotes the prohibitions arising from the same attribute. And, finally, it has a connotation which includes alike ‘sacred’ and ‘above the ordinary’, as well as ‘dangerous’, ‘unclean’ and ‘uncanny’.

This word and the system denoted by it give expression to a group of mental attitudes and ideas which seem remote indeed from our understanding. In particular, there would seem to be no possibility of our coming into closer contact with them without examining the belief in ghosts and spirits which is characteristic of these low levels of culture.

Why, it may be asked at this point, should we concern ourselves at all with this riddle of taboo? Not only, I think, because it is worth while trying to solve any psychological problem for its own sake, but for other reasons as well. It may begin to dawn on us that the taboos of the savage Polynesians are after all not so remote from us as we were inclined to think at first, that the moral and conventional prohibitions by which we ourselves are governed may have some essential relationship with these primitive taboos and that an explanation of taboo might throw a light upon the obscure origin of our own ‘categorical imperative’.

Accordingly, we shall be particularly interested to hear the views of so notable an investigator as Wilhelm Wundt on the subject of taboo, especially as he promises ‘to trace back the concept of taboo to its earliest roots’ (1906, 301).

Totem And Taboo

2671

Wundt writes of that concept that ‘it comprises all of the usages in which is expressed a dread of certain objects related to cult ideas or of actions connected with them’. (Ibid., 237.) And, in another passage: ‘If we understand by it, in accordance with the general meaning of the word, every prohibition (whether laid down in usage or custom or in explicitly formulated laws) against touching an object or making use of it for one’s own purposes or against using certain proscribed words . . .’ then, he goes on, there can be no race and no level of culture which has escaped the ill-effects of taboo.

Wundt next proceeds to explain why it seems to him advisable to study the nature of taboo in the primitive conditions of the Australian savages rather than in the higher culture of the Polynesian peoples. He divides the taboo prohibition is among the Australians into three classes, according as they affect animals, human beings or other objects. The taboos on animals, which consist essentially of prohibitions against killing and eating them, constitute the nucleus of Totemism.¹ The second class of taboos, those directed towards human beings, are of an entirely different kind. They are restricted in the first instance to circumstances in which the person on whom the taboo is imposed finds himself in an unusual situation. Thus young men are taboo at their initiation ceremonies, women are taboo during menstruation and immediately after giving birth; so too new-born babies, sick persons and, above all, the dead are taboo. A man’s property which is in his constant use is permanently taboo to all other men: his clothing, for instance, his tools and weapons. Included in a man’s most personal property, in Australia, is the new name which he received when he was a boy at his initiation. It is taboo and must be kept secret. The third class of taboos, which are imposed on trees, plants, houses and localities, are less stable. They appear to follow a rule that anything that is uncanny or provokes dread for any reason becomes subject to taboo.

The modifications shown by taboo in the richer culture of Polynesia and the Malay Archipelago are, as Wundt himself is obliged to admit, not very profound. The more marked social differences among these peoples find expression in the fact that chiefs, kings and priests exercise a specially effective taboo and are themselves subject to a taboo of the greatest force.

¹ Cf. the first and fourth essays in this work.

Totem And Taboo

2672

But, adds Wundt, the true sources of taboo lie deeper than in the interests of the privileged classes: ‘they have their origin in the source of the most primitive and at the same time most lasting of human instincts - in fear of "demonic" powers.’ (Ibid., 307.) ‘Taboo is originally nothing other than the objectified fear of the "demonic" power which is believed to lie hidden in a tabooed object. The taboo prohibits anything that may provoke that power and commands that, if it has been injured, whether wittingly or unwittingly, the demon’s vengeance must be averted.’

Little by little, we are told, taboo then grows into a force with a basis of its own, independent of the belief in demons. It develops into the rule of custom and tradition and finally of law. ‘But the unspoken command underlying all the prohibitions of taboo, with their numberless variations according to the time and place, is originally one and one only: "Beware of the wrath of demons!"‘

Wundt informs us, then, that taboo is an expression and derivative of the belief of primitive peoples in ‘demonic’ power. Later, he tells us, it freed itself from this root and remained a power simply because it was a power - from a kind of mental conservatism. And thereafter it itself became the root of our moral precepts and of our laws. Though the first of these assertions may provoke little contradiction, I believe I shall be expressing the thoughts of many readers when I say that Wundt’s explanation comes as something of a disappointment. This is surely not tracing back the concept of taboo to its sources or revealing its earliest roots. Neither fear nor demons can be regarded by psychology as ‘earliest’ things, impervious to any attempt at discovering their antecedents. It would be another matter if demons really existed. But we know that, like gods, they are creations of the human mind: they were made by something and out of something.

Wundt has important views on the double significance of taboo, though these are not very clearly expressed. According to him, the distinction between ‘sacred’ and ‘unclean’ did not exist in the primitive beginnings of taboo. For that very reason those concepts were at that stage without the peculiar significance which they could only acquire when they became opposed to each other. Animals, human beings or localities on which a taboo was imposed were ‘demonic’, not ‘sacred’, nor, therefore, in the sense which was later acquired, ‘unclean’. It is precisely this neutral and intermediate meaning - ‘demonic’ or ‘what may not be touched’ - that is appropriately expressed by the word ‘taboo’, since it stresses a characteristic which remains common for all time both to what is sacred and to what is unclean: the dread of contact with it. The persistence, however, of this important common characteristic is at the same time evidence that the ground covered by the two was originally one and that it was only as a result of further influences that it be came differentiated and eventually developed into opposites.

Totem And Taboo

2673

According to Wundt, this original characteristic of taboo - the belief in a ‘demonic’ power which lies hidden in an object and which, if the object is touched or used unlawfully, takes its vengeance by casting a spell over the wrong-doer - is still wholly and solely ‘objectified fear’. That fear has not yet split up into the two forms into which it later develops: veneration and horror.

But how did this split take place? Through the transplanting, so Wundt tells us, of the taboo ordinances from the sphere of demons into the sphere of belief in gods. The contrast between ‘sacred’ and ‘unclean’ coincides with a succession of two stages of mythology. The earlier of these stages did not completely disappear when the second one was reached but persisted in what was regarded as an inferior and eventually a contemptible form. It is, he says, a general law of mythology that a stage which has been passed, for the very reason that it has been overcome and driven under by a superior stage, persists in an inferior form alongside the later one, so that the objects of its veneration turn into objects of horror.

The remainder of Wundt’s discussion deals with the relation of the concept of taboo to purification and sacrifice.

Totem And Taboo

2674

(2)

Anyone approaching the problem of taboo from the angle of psycho-analysis, that is to say, of the investigation of the unconscious portion of the individual mind, will recognize, after a moment’s reflection, that these phenomena are far from unfamiliar to him. He has come across people who have created for themselves individual taboo prohibitions of this very kind and who obey them just as strictly as savages obey the communal taboos of their tribe or society. If he were not already accustomed to describing such people as ‘obsessional’ patients, he would find ‘taboo sickness’ a most appropriate name for their condition. Having learnt so much, however, about this obsessional sickness from psycho-analytic examination - its clinical aetiology and the essence of its psychical mechanism - he can scarcely refrain from applying the knowledge he has thus acquired to the parallel sociological phenomenon.

A warning must be uttered at this point. The similarity between taboo and obsessional sickness may be no more than a matter of externals; it may apply only to the forms in which they are manifested and not extend to their essential character. Nature delights in making use of the same forms in the most various biological connections: as it does, for instance, in the appearance of branch-like structures both in coral and in plants, and indeed in some forms of crystal and in certain chemical precipitates. It would obviously be hasty and unprofitable to infer the existence of any internal relationship from such points of agreement as these, which merely derive from the operation of the same mechanical causes. We shall bear this warning in mind, but we need not be deterred by it from proceeding with our comparison.

The most obvious and striking point of agreement between the obsessional prohibitions of neurotics and taboos is that these prohibitions are equally lacking in motive and equally puzzling in their origin. Having made their appearance at some unspecified moment, they are forcibly maintained by an irresistible fear. No external threat of punishment is required, for there is an internal certainty, a moral conviction, that any violation will lead to intolerable disaster. The most that an obsessional patient can say on this point is that he has an undefined feeling that some particular person in his environment will be injured as result of the violation. Nothing is known of the nature of the injury; and indeed even this wretchedly small amount of information is more often obtained in connection with the expiatory and defensive actions which we shall have to discuss later than with the prohibitions themselves.

Totem And Taboo

2675

As in the case of taboo, the principal prohibition, the nucleus of the neurosis, is against touching; and thence it is sometimes known as ‘touching phobia’ or ‘délire du toucher’. The prohibition does not merely apply to immediate physical contact but has an extent as wide as the metaphorical use of the phrase ‘to come in contact with’. Anything that directs the patient’s thoughts to the forbidden object, anything that brings him into intellectual contact with it, is just as much prohibited as direct physical contact. This same extension also occurs in the case of taboo.

The purpose of some of the prohibitions is immediately obvious. Others, on the contrary, strike us as incomprehensible, senseless and silly, and prohibitions of this latter sort are described as ‘ceremonial’. This distinction, too, is found in the observances of taboo.

Obsessional prohibitions are extremely liable to displacement. They extend from one object to another along whatever paths the context may provide, and this new object then becomes, to use the apt expression of one of my women patients, ‘impossible’ - till at last the whole world lies under an embargo of ‘impossibility’. Obsessional patients behave as though the ‘impossible’ persons and things were carriers of a dangerous infection liable to be spread by contact on to everything in their neighbourhood. I have already drawn attention to the same characteristic capacity for contagion and transference in my description of taboo. We know, too, that anyone who violates a taboo by coming into contact with something that is taboo becomes taboo himself and that then no one may come into contact with him.

I will now put side by side two instances of the transference (or, as it is better to say, the displacement) of a prohibition. One of these is taken from the life of the Maoris and the other from an observation of my own on a female obsessional patient.

Totem And Taboo

2676

‘A Maori chief would not blow a fire with his mouth; for his sacred breath would communicate its sanctity to the fire, which would pass it on to the pot on the fire, which would pass it on to the meat in the pot, which would pass it on to the man who ate the meat, which was in the pot, which stood on the fire, which was breathed on by the chief; so that the eater, infected by the chief’s breath conveyed through these intermediaries, would surely die.’¹

My patient’s husband purchased a household article of some kind and brought it home with him. She insisted that it should be removed or it would make the room she lived in ‘impossible’. For she had heard that the article had been bought in a shop situated in, let us say, ‘Smith’ Street.² ‘Smith’, however, was the married name of a woman friend of hers who lived in a distant town and whom she had known in her youth under her maiden name. This friend of hers was at the moment ‘impossible’ or taboo. Consequently the article that had been purchased here in Vienna was as taboo as the friend herself with whom she must not come into contact.

Obsessional prohibitions involve just as extensive renunciations and restrictions in the lives of those who are subject to them as do taboo prohibitions; but some of them can be lifted if certain actions are performed. Thereafter, these actions must be performed: they become compulsive or obsessive acts, and there can be no doubt that they are in the nature of expiation, penance, defensive measures and purification. The commonest of these obsessive acts is washing in water (‘washing mania’). Some taboo prohibitions can be replaced in just the same way; or rather their violation can be made good by a similar ‘ceremonial’; and here again lustration with water is the preferred method.

Let us now summarize the points in which agreement between taboo usages and obsessional symptoms is most clearly shown: (1) the fact that the prohibitions lack any assignable motive; (2) the fact that they are maintained by an internal necessity; (3) the fact that they are easily displaceable and that there is a risk of infection from the prohibited object; and (4) the fact that they give rise to injunctions for the performance of ceremonial acts.

¹ Frazer (1911b, 136).

² [’Hirschengasse’ and ‘Hirsch’ in the original.]

Totem And Taboo

2677

Now both the clinical history and the psychical mechanism of obsessional neurosis have become known to us through psycho-analysis. The clinical history of a typical case of ‘touching phobia’ is as follows. Right at the beginning, in very early childhood, the patient shows a strong desire to touch, the aim of which is of a far more specialized kind that one would have been inclined to expect. This desire is promptly met by an external prohibition against carrying out that particular kind of touching.¹ The prohibition is accepted, since it finds support from powerful internal forces,² and proves stronger than the instinct which is seeking to express itself in the touching. In consequence, however, of the child’s primitive psychical constitution, the prohibition does not succeed in abolishing the instinct. Its only result is to repress the instinct (the desire to touch) and banish it into the unconscious. Both the prohibition and the instinct persist: the instinct because it has only been repressed and not abolished, and the prohibition because, if it ceased, the instinct would force its way through into consciousness and into actual operation. A situation is created which remains undealt with - a psychical fixation - and everything else follows from the continuing conflict between the prohibition and the instinct.

The principal characteristic of the psychological constellation which becomes fixed in this way is what might be described as the subject’s ambivalent³ attitude towards a single object, or rather towards one act in connection with that object. He is constantly wishing to perform this act (the touching), and detests it as well. The conflict between these two currents cannot be promptly settled because - there is no other way of putting it - they are localized in the subject’s mind in such a manner that they cannot come up against each other. The prohibition is noisily conscious, while the persistent desire to touch is unconscious and the subject knows nothing of it. If it were not for this psychological factor, an ambivalence like this could neither last so long nor lead to such consequences.

¹ Both the desire and the prohibition relate to the child’s touching his own genitals.

² That is, from the child’s loving relation to the authors of the prohibition.

³ To borrow the apt term coined by Bleuler.

Totem And Taboo

2678

In our clinical history of a case we have insisted that the imposition of the prohibition in very early childhood is the determining point; a similar importance attaches in the subsequent developments to the mechanism of repression at the same early age. As a result of the repression which has been enforced and which involves a loss of memory - an amnesia - the motives for the prohibition (which is conscious) remain unknown; and all attempts at disposing of it by intellectual processes must fail, since they cannot find any base of attack. The prohibition owes its strength and its obsessive character precisely to its unconscious opponent, the concealed and undiminished desire - that is to say, to an internal necessity inaccessible to conscious inspection. The ease with which the prohibition can be transferred and extended reflects a process which falls in with the unconscious desire and is greatly facilitated by the psychological conditions that prevail in the unconscious. The instinctual desire is constantly shifting in order to escape from the impasse and endeavours to find substitutes - substitute objects and substitute acts - in place of the prohibited ones. In consequence of this, the prohibition itself shifts about as well, and extends to any new aims which the forbidden impulse may adopt. Any fresh advance made by the repressed libido is answered by a fresh sharpening of the prohibition. The mutual inhibition of the two conflicting forces produces a need for discharge, for reducing the prevailing tension; and to this may be attributed the reason for the performance of obsessive acts. In the case of a neurosis these are clearly compromise actions: from one point of view they are evidences of remorse, efforts at expiation, and so on, while on the other hand they are at the same time substitutive acts to compensate the instinct for what has been prohibited. It is a law of neurotic illness that these obsessive acts fall more and more under the sway of the instinct and approach nearer and nearer to the activity which was originally prohibited.

Totem And Taboo

2679

Let us now make the experiment of treating taboo as though it were of the same nature as an obsessional prohibition in one of our patients. We must make it clear beforehand, however, that many of the taboo prohibitions that come under our notice are of a secondary, displaced and distorted kind, and that we shall have to be satisfied if we can throw only a little light on the most fundamental and significant taboos. Moreover, the differences between the situation of a savage and of a neurotic are no doubt of sufficient importance to make any exact agreement impossible and to prevent our carrying the comparison to the point of identity in every detail.

In the first place, then, it must be said that there is no sense in asking savages to tell us the real reason for their prohibitions - the origin of taboo. It follows from our postulates that they cannot answer, since their real reason must be ‘unconscious’. We can, however, reconstruct the history of taboo as follows on the model of obsessional prohibitions. Taboos, we must suppose, are prohibitions of primaeval antiquity which were at some time externally imposed upon a generation of primitive men; they must, that is to say, no doubt have been impressed on them violently by the previous generation. These prohibitions must have concerned activities towards which there was a strong inclination. They must then have persisted from generation to generation, perhaps merely as a result of tradition transmitted through parental and social authority. Possibly, however, in later generations they may have become ‘organized’ as an inherited psychical endowment. Who can decide whether such things as ‘innate ideas’ exist, or whether in the present instance they have operated, either alone or in conjunction with education, to bring about the permanent fixing of taboos? But one thing would certainly follow from the persistence of the taboo, namely that the original desire to do the prohibited thing must also still persist among the tribes concerned. They must therefore have an ambivalent attitude towards their taboos. In their unconscious there is nothing they would like more than to violate them, but they are afraid to do so; they are afraid precisely because they would like to, and the fear is stronger than the desire. The desire is unconscious, however, in every individual member of the tribe just as it is in neurotics.

Totem And Taboo

2680

The most ancient and important taboo prohibitions are the two basic laws of totemism: not to kill the totem animal and to avoid sexual intercourse with members of the totem clan of the opposite sex.

These, then, must be the oldest and most powerful of human desires. We cannot hope to understand this or test our hypothesis on these two examples, so long as we are totally ignorant of the meaning and origin of the totemic system. But the wording of these two taboos and the fact of their concurrence will remind anyone acquainted with the findings of psycho-analytic investigations on individuals of something quite definite, which psycho-analysts regard as the centre-point of childhood wishes and as the nucleus of neuroses.¹

The multiplicity of the manifestations of taboo, which have led to the attempts at classification that I have already mentioned, are reduced to a single unity by our thesis: the basis of taboo is a prohibited action, for performing which a strong inclination exists in the unconscious.

We have heard, though without understanding it, that anyone who does what is forbidden, that is, who violates a taboo, becomes taboo himself. How is this to be brought into line with the fact that taboo attaches not only to a person who has done what is forbidden but also to persons in particular states, to the states themselves, as well as to impersonal objects? What can the dangerous attribute be which remains the same under all these different conditions? There is only one thing it can be: the quality of exciting men’s ambivalence and tempting them to transgress the prohibition.

Anyone who has violated a taboo becomes taboo himself because he possesses the dangerous quality of tempting others to follow his example: why should he be allowed to do what is forbidden to others? Thus he is truly contagious in that every example encourages imitation, and for that reason he himself must be shunned.

But a person who has not violated any taboo may yet be permanently or temporarily taboo because he is in a state which possesses the quality of arousing forbidden desires in others and of awakening a conflict of ambivalence in them. The majority of exceptional positions and exceptional states are of this kind and possess this dangerous power. The king or chief arouses envy on account of his privileges: everyone, perhaps, would like to be a king. Dead men, new-born babies and women menstruating or in labour stimulate desires by their special helplessness; a man who has just reached maturity stimulates them by the promise of new enjoyment. For that reason all of these persons and all of these states are taboo, since temptation must be resisted.

¹ Cf. my forthcoming study upon totemism, to which I have referred more than once in these pages (the fourth essay in this work).

Totem And Taboo

2681

Now, too, we can understand why the amounts of mana possessed by different persons can be subtracted from one another and can to some extent cancel one another out. A king’s taboo is too strong for one of his subjects because the social difference between them is too great. But a minister may without any harm serve as an intermediary between them. If we translate this from the language of taboo into that of normal psychology, it means something like this. A subject, who dreads the great temptation presented to him by contact with the king, can perhaps tolerate dealings with an official whom he does not need to envy so much and whose position may even seem attainable to him. A minister, again, can mitigate his envy of the king by reflecting on the power which he himself wields. So it comes about that smaller differences between the amounts of the tempting magical force possessed by two people are less to be feared than greater ones.

It is equally clear why it is that the violation of certain taboo prohibitions constitutes a social danger which must be punished or atoned for by all the members of the community if they are not all to suffer injury. If we replace the unconscious desires by conscious impulses we shall see that the danger is a real one. It lies in the risk of imitation, which would quickly lead to the dissolution of the community. If the violation were not avenged by the other members they would become aware that they wanted to act in the same way as the transgressor. We cannot be surprised at the fact that, in the restrictions of taboo, touching plays a part similar to the one which it plays in ‘touching phobias’, though the secret meaning of the prohibition cannot be of such a specialized nature in taboo as it is in the neurosis. Touching is the first step towards obtaining any sort of control over, or attempting to make use of, a person or object.

Totem And Taboo

2682

We have translated the contagious power inherent in taboo into the possession of some attribute likely to produce temptation or encourage imitation. This does not appear to tally with the fact that the contagious character of taboo is shown chiefly by its transmissibility on to material objects, which then themselves become carriers of taboo.

This transmissibility of taboo is a reflection of the tendency, on which we have already remarked, for the unconscious instinct in the neurosis to shift constantly along associative paths on to new objects. Our attention is thus directed to the fact that the dangerous magical force of mana corresponds to two powers of a more realistic sort: the power of reminding a man of his own prohibited wishes and the apparently more important one of inducing him to transgress the prohibition in obedience to those wishes. These two functions can be reduced to one, however, if we suppose that in a primitive mind the awakening of the memory of a forbidden action is naturally linked with the awakening of an impulse to put that action into effect. Thus recollection and temptation come together again. It must be admitted, too, that, in so far as the example of a man transgressing a prohibition tempts another man to do the same, disobedience to prohibitions spreads like a contagion, in just the same way as a taboo is transferred from a person to a material object and from one material object to another.

If the violation of a taboo can be made good by atonement or expiation, which involve the renunciation of some possession or some freedom, this proves that obedience to the taboo injunction meant in itself the renunciation of something desirable. Emancipation from one renunciation is made up for by the imposition of another one elsewhere. This leads us to conclude that atonement is a more fundamental factor than purification in the ceremonials of taboo.

I will now sum up the respects in which light has been thrown on the nature of taboo by comparing it with the obsessional prohibitions of neurotics. Taboo is a primaeval prohibition forcibly imposed (by some authority) from outside, and directed against the most powerful longings to which human beings are subject. The desire to violate it persists in their unconscious; those who obey the taboo have an ambivalent attitude to what the taboo prohibits. The magical power that is attributed to taboo is based on the capacity for arousing temptation; and it acts like a contagion because examples are contagious and because the prohibited desire in the unconscious shifts from one thing to another. The fact that the violation of a taboo can be atoned for by a renunciation shows that renunciation lies at the basis of obedience to taboo.

Totem And Taboo

2683

(3)

What we now want to discover is how much value is to be attributed to the parallel we have drawn between taboo and obsessional neurosis and to the view of taboo which we have based on that parallel. Their value must clearly depend on whether the view we have put forward has any advantages over others, and whether it gives us a clearer understanding of taboo than we could otherwise reach. We may be inclined to feel that we have given sufficient evidence of the applicability of our view in what has already been said; yet we must attempt to strengthen the evidence by entering into our explanation of taboo prohibitions and usages in greater detail.

There is also another path open to us. We can start an inquiry as to whether some of the hypotheses which we have carried over from neuroses to taboo or some of the results to which that procedure has led us may not be directly verifiable in the phenomena of taboo. But we must decide what we are to look for. Our assertion that taboo originated in a primaeval prohibition imposed at one time or other by some external authority is obviously incapable of demonstration. What we shall rather endeavour to confirm, therefore, are the psychological determinants of taboo, which we have learnt to know from obsessional neurosis. How did we arrive at our knowledge of these psychological factors in the case of the neurosis? Through the analytical study of its symptoms, and particularly of obsessional acts, defensive measures and obsessional commands. We found that they showed every sign of being derived from ambivalent impulses, either corresponding simultaneously to both a wish and a counter-wish or operating predominantly on behalf of one of the two opposing trends. If, now, we could succeed in demonstrating that ambivalence, that is, the dominance of opposing trends, is also to be found in the observances of taboo, or if we could point to some of them which, like obsessional acts, give simultaneous expression to both currents, we should have established the psychological agreement between taboo and obsessional neurosis in what is perhaps their most important feature.

Totem And Taboo

2684

The two fundamental prohibitions of taboo are, as I have already remarked, inaccessible to our analysis owing to their connection with totemism; while certain others of its injunctions are of a secondary nature and consequently useless for our purpose. For taboo has become the ordinary method of legislation in the communities affected by it and it has come to serve social purposes which are certainly more recent than taboo itself: such, for instance, are the taboos imposed by chiefs and priests for the protection of their own property and privileges. There nevertheless remain a large group of observances on which our investigation can be made. From these I shall select the taboos attaching (a) to enemies, (b) to chiefs and (c) to the dead; and I shall take the material for our examination from the excellent collection included by Frazer in Taboo and the Perils of the Soul (1911b), the second part of his great work The Golden Bough.

(a) The Treatment of Enemies

We may be inclined to suppose that savage and half-savage races are guilty of uninhibited and ruthless cruelty towards their enemies. We shall be greatly interested to learn, then, that even in their case the killing of a man is governed by a number of observances which are included among the usages of taboo. These observances fall easily into four groups. They demand (1) the appeasement of the slain enemy, (2) restrictions upon the slayer, (3) acts of expiation and purification by him and (4) certain ceremonial observances. Our incomplete information on the subject does not enable us to determine with certainty how general or the reverse these usages may be among the peoples concerned; but for our purposes this is a matter of indifference. It may safely be assumed, in any case, that what we have before us are not isolated peculiarities but widespread usages.

Totem And Taboo

2685

The rites of appeasement performed in the island of Timor, when a warlike expedition has returned in triumph bringing the heads of the vanquished foe, are particularly remarkable, since in addition to them the leader of the expedition is submitted to severe restrictions (see below, p. 2687). On the occasion of the expedition’s return, sacrifices are offered to appease the souls of the men whose heads have been taken. ‘The people think that some misfortune would befall the victor were such offerings omitted. Moreover, a part of the ceremony consists of a dance accompanied by a song, in which the death of the slain man is lamented and his forgiveness is entreated. "Be not angry", they say, "because your head is here with us; had we been less lucky, our heads might now have been exposed in your village. We have offered the sacrifice to appease you. Your spirit may now rest and leave us in peace. Why were you our enemy? Would it not have been better that we should remain friends? Then your blood would not have been spilt and your head would not have been cut off."’¹ The same is true of the people of Paloo, in Celebes. So, too, ‘the Gallas returning from war sacrifice to the jinn or guardian spirits of their slain foes before they will re-enter their own houses’.²

Other peoples have found a means for changing their former enemies after their death into guardians, friends and benefactors. This method lies in treating their severed heads with affection, as some of the savage races of Borneo boast of doing. When the Sea Dyaks of Sarawak bring home a head from a successful head-hunting expedition, for months after its arrival it is treated with the greatest consideration and addressed with all the names of endearment of which their language is capable. The most dainty morsels of food are thrust into its mouth, delicacies of all kinds and even cigars. The head is repeatedly implored to hate its former friends and to love its new hosts since it has now become one of them. It would be a great mistake to suppose that these observances, which strike us as so horrible, are performed with any intention of ridicule.³

In several of the savage tribes of North America observers have been struck by the mourning over enemies who have been killed and scalped. When a Choctaw had killed an enemy, he went into mourning for a month during which he was subjected to severe restrictions; and the Dacotas had similar practices. When the Osages, reports a witness, have mourned over their own dead, ‘they will mourn for the foe just as if he was a friend’.4

¹ Frazer (1911b, 166).

² Frazer (loc. cit.), quoting Paulitschke (1893-6).

³ Frazer (1914, 1, 295), quoting Low (1848).

4 Frazer (1911b, 181), quoting Dorsey (1884).

Totem And Taboo

2686

Before considering the remaining classes of taboo usages in connection with enemies, we must deal with an obvious objection. It will be argued against us, with Frazer and others, that the grounds for such rites of appeasement are simple enough and have nothing to do with any such thing as ‘ambivalence’. These peoples are dominated by a superstitious fear of the ghosts of the slain - a fear which was not unknown in classical antiquity and which was put upon the stage by the great English dramatist in the hallucinations of Macbeth and Richard III. All the rites of appeasement follow logically from this superstition, as well as the restrictions and acts of expiation which will be discussed presently. This view is also supported by the fourth group of these observances, which can only be explained as attempts at driving away the ghosts of the victims that are pursuing their murderers.¹ In addition to this, the savages openly admit their fear of the ghosts of dead enemies and themselves attribute to it the taboo usages which we are discussing.

This objection is indeed an obvious one, and if it covered the whole ground we could save ourselves the trouble of any further attempt at an explanation. I shall put off dealing with it until later, and for the moment I will merely state the alternative view which is derived from the hypothesis based upon our earlier discussions of taboo. The conclusion that we must draw from all these observances is that the impulses which they express towards an enemy are not solely hostile ones. They are also manifestations of remorse, of admiration for the enemy, and of a bad conscience for having killed him. It is difficult to resist the notion that, long before a table of laws was handed down by any god, these savages were in possession of a living commandment: ‘Thou shalt not kill’, a violation of which would not go unpunished.

Let us now return to the other three groups of taboo observances. Restrictions placed upon a victorious slayer are unusually frequent and as a rule severe. In Timor (cf. the rites of appeasement described above, on p. 2685) the leader of the expedition is forbidden ‘to return at once to his own house. A special hut is prepared for him, in which he has to reside for two months, undergoing bodily and spiritual purification. During this time he may not go to his wife nor feed himself; the food must be put into his mouth by another person.’² In some Dyak tribes men returning from a successful expedition are obliged to keep to themselves for several days and abstain from various kinds of food; they may not touch iron nor have any intercourse with women. In Logea, an island in the neighbourhood of New Guinea, ‘men who have killed or assisted in killing enemies shut themselves up for about a week in their houses. They must avoid all intercourse with their wives and friends, and they may not touch food with their hands. They may eat vegetable food only, which is brought to them cooked in special pots. The intention of these restrictions is to guard the men against the smell of the blood of the slain; for it is believed that if they smelt the blood they would fall ill and die. In the Toaripi or Motumotu tribe of south-eastern New Guinea a man who has killed another may not go near his wife, and may not touch food with his fingers. He is fed by others, and only with certain kinds of food. These observances last till the new moon.’ (Frazer, 1911b, 167.)

¹ Frazer (1911b, 169-74). These ceremonies consist of beating on shields, shouting and screaming, making noises with musical instruments, etc.

² Frazer (1911b, 166), quoting Müller (1857).

Totem And Taboo

2687

I shall not attempt to give a complete catalogue of the instances quoted by Frazer of restrictions imposed upon victorious manslayers. I will only remark upon a few more such cases in which their taboo character is particularly marked or in which the restrictions are accompanied by expiation, purification and other ceremonials.

‘Among the Monumbos of German New Guinea anyone who has slain a foe in war becomes thereby "unclean"’ - the same term being applied to women who are menstruating or in child-bed. He ‘must remain a long time in the men’s club-house, while the villagers gather round him and celebrate his victory with dance and song. He may touch nobody, not even his own wife and children; if he were to touch them it is believed that they would be covered with sores. He becomes clean again by washing and using other modes of purification.’

‘Among the Natchez of North America young braves who had taken their first scalps were obliged to observe certain rules of abstinence for six months. They might not sleep with their wives nor eat flesh; their only food was fish and hasty-pudding. . . . When a Choctaw had killed an enemy and taken his scalp, he went into mourning for a month, during which he might not comb his hair, and if his head itched he might not scratch it except with a little stick which he wore fastened to his wrist for the purpose.’

‘When a Pima Indian had killed an Apache, he had to go through severe ceremonies of purification and atonement. During a sixteen-day fast he might not touch meat nor salt, nor look on a blazing fire, nor speak to a human being. He lived alone in the woods, waited on by an old woman, who brought him his scanty dole of food. He bathed often in the river and (as a sign of mourning) kept his head covered with a plaster of mud. On the seventeenth day there was a public ceremony of solemn purification of the man and his weapons. Since the Pima Indians took the taboo on killing much more seriously than their enemies and did not, like them, postpone the expiation and purification till the end of the expedition, their warlike efficiency suffered greatly from their moral strictness, or piety, if that term is preferred. Despite their extreme courage, the Americans found them unsatisfactory allies in their operations against the Apaches.’

However much the details and variations of the ceremonies of expiation and purification after the slaying of enemies might be of interest for deeper research into the subject, I shall break off at this point, since for our present purpose they have nothing more to tell us. I may perhaps suggest that the temporary or permanent isolation of professional executioners, which has persisted to the present day, may belong in this connection. The position of the public hangman in mediaeval society offers a good picture of the workings of taboo among savages.¹

¹ Further examples of these practices will be found in Frazer (1911b, 165-90) in the section upon ‘Manslayers tabooed’.

Totem And Taboo

2688

In the accepted explanation of all these observances of appeasement, restriction, expiation and purification, two principles are combined: the extension of the taboo from the slain man on to everything that has come in contact with him, and the fear of the slain man’s ghost. How these two factors are to be combined with each other to explain the ceremonials, whether they are to be regarded as of equal weight, whether one is primary and the other secondary, and if so which - none of these questions receives an answer, and indeed it would be hard to find one. We, on the other hand, can lay stress on the unity of our view, which derives all of these observances from emotional ambivalence towards the enemy.

(b) The Taboo upon Rulers

The attitude of primitive peoples to their chiefs, kings and priests is governed by two basic principles which seem to be complementary rather than contradictory. A ruler ‘must not only be guarded, he must also be guarded against’. (Frazer, 1911b, 132.) Both of these ends are secured by innumerable taboo observances. We know already why it is that rulers must be guarded against. It is because they are vehicles of the mysterious and dangerous magical power which is transmitted by contact like an electric charge and which brings death and ruin to anyone who is not protected by a similar charge. Any immediate or indirect contact with this dangerous sacred entity is therefore avoided; and, if it cannot be avoided, some ceremonial is devised to avert the dreaded consequences. The Nubas of East Africa, for instance, ‘believe that they would die if they entered the house of their priestly king; however they can evade the penalty of their intrusion by baring the left shoulder and getting the king to lay his hand on it’. Here we are met by the remarkable fact that contact with the king is a remedy and protection against the dangers provoked by contact with the king. No doubt, however, there is a contrast to be drawn between the remedial power of a touch made deliberately by the king and the danger which arises if he is touched - a contrast between a passive and an active relation to the king.

Totem And Taboo

2689

For examples of the healing power of the royal touch there is no need to resort to savages. The kings of England, in times that are not yet remote, enjoyed the power of curing scrofula, which was known accordingly as ‘the King’s Evil’. Queen Elizabeth I exercised this royal prerogative no less than her successors. Charles I is said to have cured a hundred patients at a stroke in 1633. But it was after the Restoration of the monarchy under his dissolute son, Charles II, that the royal cures of scrofula reached their climax. In the course of his reign he is reputed to have touched close upon a hundred thousand persons. The crowd of those in search of cure used to be so great that on one occasion six or seven of those who came to be healed were trampled to death. The sceptical William of Orange, who be came King of England after the dismissal of the Stuarts, refused to lend himself to these magical practices. On the only occasion on which he was persuaded into laying his hands on a patient, he said to him: ‘God give you better health and more sense.’ (Frazer, 1911a, 1, 368-70.)

The stories which follow are evidence of the fearful effects of active contact made, even unintentionally, with a king or anything belonging to him. ‘It once happened that a New Zealand chief of high rank and great sanctity had left the remains of his dinner by the wayside. A slave, a stout, hungry fellow, coming up after the chief had gone, saw the unfinished dinner, and ate it up without asking questions. Hardly had he finished when he was informed by a horror-stricken spectator that the food of which he had eaten was the chief’s.’ He was a strong, courageous man, but ‘no sooner did he hear the fatal news than he was seized with the most extraordinary convulsions and cramp in the stomach, which never ceased till he died, about sundown the same day’.¹ ‘A Maori woman having eaten of some fruit, and being afterwards told that the fruit had been taken from a tabooed place, exclaimed that the spirit of the chief, whose sanctity had been thus profaned, would kill her. This was in the afternoon, and next day by twelve o’clock she was dead.’² ‘A Maori chief’s tinder-box was once the means of killing several persons; for, having been lost by him, and found by some men who used it to light their pipes, they died of fright on learning to whom it had belonged.³

¹ Frazer (1911b, 134-5), quoting a Pakeha Maori (1884).

² Frazer (loc. cit.), quoting Brown (1845).

³ Frazer (loc. cit.).

Totem And Taboo

2690

It is not to be wondered at that a need was felt for isolating such dangerous persons as chiefs and priests from the rest of the community - to build a barrier round them which would make them inaccessible. It may begin to dawn on us that this barrier, originally erected for the observance of taboo, exists to this day in the form of court ceremonial.

But perhaps the major part of this taboo upon rulers is not derived from the need for protection against them. The second reason for the special treatment of privileged persons - the need to provide protection for them against the threat of danger - has had an obvious part in creating taboos and so of giving rise to court etiquette.

The need to protect the king from every possible form of danger follows from his immense importance to his subjects, whether for weal or woe. It is his person which, strictly speaking, regulates the whole course of existence. ‘The people have to thank him for the rain and sunshine which foster the fruits of the earth, for the wind which brings ships to their coasts, and even for the solid ground beneath their feet.’ (Frazer, 1911b, 7.)

These rulers among savage peoples possess a degree of power and a capacity to confer benefits which are an attribute only of gods, and with which at later stages of civilization only the most servile of courtiers would pretend to credit them.

It must strike us as self-contradictory that persons of such unlimited power should need to be protected so carefully from the threat of danger; but that is not the only contradiction shown in the treatment of royal personages among savage peoples. For these peoples also think it necessary to keep a watch on their king to see that he makes a proper use of his powers; they feel by no means convinced of his good intentions or conscientiousness. Thus an element of distrust may be traced among the reasons for the taboo observances that surround the king. ‘The idea’, writes Frazer (1911b, 7 f.), ‘that early kingdoms are despotisms in which the people exist only for the sovereign, is wholly inapplicable to the monarchies we are considering. On the contrary, the sovereign in them exists only for his subjects; his life is only valuable so long as he discharges the duties of his position by ordering the course of nature for his people’s benefit. So soon as he fails to do so, the care, the devotion, the religious homage which they had hitherto lavished on him cease and are changed into hatred and contempt; he is dismissed ignominiously, and may be thankful if he escapes with his life. Worshipped as a god one day, he is killed as a criminal the next. But in this changed behaviour of the people there is nothing capricious or inconstant. On the contrary, their conduct is entirely of a piece. If their king is their god, he is or should be also their preserver; and if he will not preserve them, he must make room for another who will. So long, however, as he answers their expectations, there is no limit to the care which they take of him, and which they compel him to take of himself. A king of this sort lives hedged in by a ceremonious etiquette, a network of prohibitions and observances, of which the intention is not to contribute to his dignity, much less to his comfort, but to restrain him from conduct which, by disturbing the harmony of nature, might involve himself, his people, and the universe in one common catastrophe. Far from adding to his comfort, these observances, by trammelling his every act, annihilate his freedom and often render the very life, which it is their object to preserve, a burden and sorrow to him.’

Totem And Taboo

2691

One of the most glaring instances of a sacred ruler being fettered and paralysed in this way by taboo ceremonials is to be found in the mode of life of the Mikado of Japan in earlier centuries. An account written more than two hundred years age reports that the Mikado ‘thinks it would be very prejudicial to his dignity and holiness to touch the ground with his feet; for this reason, when he intends to go anywhere, he must be carried thither on men’s shoulders. Much less will they suffer that he should expose his sacred person to the open air, and the sun is not thought worthy to shine on his head. There is such a holiness ascribed to all parts of his body that he dares to cut off neither his hair, nor his beard, nor his nails. However, lest he should grow too dirty, they may clean him in the night when he is asleep; because, they say, that which is taken from his body at that time hath been stolen from him and that such a theft doth not prejudice his holiness or dignity. In ancient times he was obliged to sit on the throne for some hours every morning, with the imperial crown on his head, but to sit altogether like a statue, without stirring either hands or feet, head or eyes, nor indeed any part of his body, because, by this means, it was thought that he could preserve peace and tranquillity in his empire; for if, unfortunately, he turned himself on one side or the other, or if he looked a good while towards any part of his dominions, it was apprehended that war, famine, fire, or some other great misfortune was near at hand to desolate the country.’¹

Some of the taboos laid upon barbarian kings remind one vividly of the restrictions imposed upon murderers. Thus in West Africa, ‘at Shark Point near Cape Padron, in Lower Guinea, lives the priestly king Kukulu, alone in a wood. He may not touch a woman nor leave his house; indeed he may not even quit his chair, in which he is obliged to sleep sitting, for if he lay down no wind would arise and navigation would be stopped. He regulates storms, and in general maintains a wholesome and equable state of the atmosphere.’ The same writer says of Loango (in the same part of the world) that the more powerful a king is, the more taboos he is bound to observe.² The heir to the throne is also subject to them from infancy; their number increases as he advances in life, till at the moment that he ascends the throne he is positively suffocated by them.

Our space will not allow nor does our interest require us to enter further into a description of the taboos associated with the dignity of kings and priests. I will only add that the principal part is played in them by restrictions upon freedom of movement and upon diet. Two examples of taboo ceremonials occurring in civilized communities of a far higher level of culture will serve to show, however, what a conservative effect upon ancient usages is exercised by contact with these privileged personages.

¹ Kaempfer (1727), quoted by Frazer (1911b, 3 f.).

² Frazer (1911b, 5 and 8), quoting Bastian (1874-5).

Totem And Taboo

2692

The Flamen Dialis, the high priest of Jupiter in ancient Rome, was obliged to observe an extraordinary number of taboos. He ‘might not ride or even touch a horse, nor see an army under arms, nor wear a ring which was not broken, nor have a knot on any part of his garments; . .  . he might not touch wheaten flour or leavened bread; he might not touch or even name a goat, a dog, raw meat, beans, and ivy; . . . his hair could be cut only by a free man and with a bronze knife, and his hair and nails when cut had to be buried under a lucky tree; . . . he might not touch a dead body; . . . he might not be uncovered in the open air’, and so on. ‘His wife, the Flaminica, had to observe nearly the same rules, and others of her own besides. She might not ascend more than three steps of the kind of staircase called Greek; at a certain festival she might not comb her hair; the leather of her shoes might not be made from a beast that had died a natural death, but only from one that had been slain or sacrificed; if she heard thunder she was tabooed till she had offered an expiatory sacrifice.’ (Frazer, 1911b, 13 f.)

The ancient kings of Ireland were subject to a number of exceedingly strange restrictions. If these were obeyed, every kind of blessing would descend upon the country, but if they were violated, disasters of every kind would visit it. A complete list of these taboos is contained in the Book of Rights, the two oldest manuscript copies of which date from 1390 and 1418. The prohibitions are of the most detailed character, and refer to specific actions at specific places at specific times: the king, for instance, may not stay in a certain town on a particular day of the week; he may not cross a certain river at a particular hour of the day; he may not encamp for nine days on a certain plain, and so on. (Frazer, 1911b, 11 f.)

Totem And Taboo

2693

Among many savage peoples the severity of these taboo restrictions upon priestly kings has led to consequences which have been important historically and are of particular interest from our point of view. The dignity of their position ceased to be an enviable thing, and those who were offered it often took every possible means of escaping it. Thus in Cambodia, where there are kingships of Fire and Water, it is often necessary to force successors into accepting these distinctions. On Niue or Savage Island, a coral island in the South Pacific, the monarchy actually came to an end because no one could be induced to take over the responsible and dangerous office. ‘In some parts of West Africa, when the king dies, a family council is secretly held to determine his successor. He on whom the choice falls is suddenly seized, bound, and thrown into the fetish-house, where he is kept in durance till he consents to accept the crown. Sometimes the heir finds means of evading the honour which it is thought to thrust upon him; a ferocious chief has been known to go about constantly armed, resolute to resist by force any attempt to set him on the throne.’¹ Among the natives of Sierra Leone the objection to accepting the honour of kingship become so great that most tribes were obliged to choose foreigners as their kings.

Frazer (1911b, 17-25) attributes to these circumstances the fact that in the course of history there eventually came about a division of the original priestly kingship into a spiritual and a temporal power. Weighed down by the burden of their sacred office, kings became unable to exert their dominance in real affairs and these were left in the hands of inferior but practical persons, who were ready to renounce the honours of kingship. These, then, became the temporal rulers, while spiritual supremacy, deprived of any practical significance, was left to the former taboo kings. It is familiar knowledge how far this hypothesis finds confirmation in the history of old Japan.

¹ Frazer (1911b, 17 f.), quoting Bastian (1874-5).

Totem And Taboo

2694

If we take a general survey of the relations of primitive men to their rulers, we are left with an expectation that we shall have no great difficulty in advancing from a description of them to a psycho-analytic understanding of them. Those relations are of a complex kind and not free from contradictions. Rulers are allowed great privileges, which coincide exactly with the taboo prohibitions imposed on other people. They are privileged persons: they may do or enjoy precisely what other people are forbidden by taboo. As against this freedom, however, we find that they are restricted by other taboos from which common people are exempt. Here we have a first contrast - a contradiction, almost - the fact, that is, of the same individual being both more free and more restricted. Again, they are regarded as possessing extraordinary powers of magic, so that people are afraid of coming into contact with their persons or their property, while on the other hand the most beneficial consequences are expected from that same contact. Here there seems to be another, particularly glaring, contradiction; but, as we have already seen, it is only an apparent one. Contacts originating from the king himself are healing and protective; the dangerous contacts are those effected by common men upon the king or his belongings - probably because they may hint at aggressive impulses. Yet another contradiction, and one not so easily resolved, is to be found in the fact that the ruler is believed to exercise great authority over the forces of Nature, but that he has to be most carefully protected against the threat of danger - as though his own power, which can do so much, cannot do this. The situation is made still more difficult by the fact that the ruler cannot be trusted to make use of his immense powers in the right way, that is, for the benefit of his subjects and for his own protection. Thus people distrust his and feel justified in keeping a watch on him. The etiquette of taboos to which the king’s whole life is subjected serves all these protective purposes at once: his own protection from dangers and the protection of his subjects from the dangers with which he threatens them.

It seems plausible to explain the complicated and contradictory attitude of primitive peoples to their rulers in some such way as the following. For superstitious and other reasons, a variety of different impulses find expression in relation to kings; and each of these impulses is developed to an extreme point without regard to the others. This gives rise to contradictions - by which, incidentally, a savage intellect is as little disturbed as is a highly civilized one when it comes to such matters as religion or ‘loyalty’.

Totem And Taboo

2695

So far so good; but the technique of psycho-analysis allows us to go into the question further and to enter more into the details of these various impulses. If we submit the recorded facts to analysis, as though they formed part of the symptoms presented by a neurosis, our starting-point must be the excessive apprehensiveness and solicitude which is put forward as the reason for the taboo ceremonials. The occurrence of excessive solicitude of this kind is very common in neuroses, and especially in obsessional neuroses, with which our comparison is chiefly drawn. We have come to understand its origin quite clearly. It appears wherever, in addition to a predominant feeling of affection, there is also a contrary, but unconscious, current of hostility - a state of affairs which represents a typical instance of an ambivalent emotional attitude. The hostility is then shouted down, as it were, by an excessive intensification of the affection, which is expressed as solicitude and becomes compulsive, because it might otherwise be inadequate to perform its task of keeping the unconscious contrary current of feeling under repression. Every psycho-analyst knows from experience with what certainty this explanation of solicitous over-affection is found to apply even in the most unlikely circumstances - in cases, for instance, of attachments between a mother and child or between a devoted married couple. If we now apply this to the case of privileged persons, we shall realize that alongside the veneration, and indeed idolization, felt towards them, there is in the unconscious an opposing current of intense hostility; that, in fact, as we expected, we are faced by a situation of emotional ambivalence. The distrust which provides one of the unmistakable elements in kingly taboos would thus be another, more direct, expression of the same unconscious hostility. Indeed, owing to the variety of outcomes of a conflict of this kind which are reached among different peoples, we are not at a loss for examples in which the existence of this hostility is still more obviously shown. ‘The savage Timmes of Sierra Leone’, we learn from Frazer,¹ ‘who elect their king, reserve to themselves the right of beating him on the eve of his coronation; and they avail themselves of this constitutional privilege with such hearty goodwill that sometimes the unhappy monarch does not long survive his elevation to the throne. Hence when the leading chiefs have a spite at a man and wish to rid themselves of him, they elect him king.’ Even in glaring instances like this, however, the hostility is not admitted as such, but masquerades as a ceremonial.

¹ Frazer (1911b, 18), quoting Zweifel and Moustier (1880).

Totem And Taboo

2696

Another side of the attitude of primitive peoples towards their rulers recalls a procedure which is common in neuroses generally but comes into the open in what are known as delusions of persecution. The importance of one particular person is immensely exaggerated and his absolute power is magnified to the most improbable degree, in order that it may be easier to make him responsible for everything disagreeable that the patient may experience. Savages are really behaving in just the same way with their kings when they ascribe to them power over rain and sunshine, wind and weather, and then depose them or kill them because Nature disappoints their hopes of a successful hunt or a rich harvest. The model upon which paranoics base their delusions of persecution is the relation of a child to his father. A son’s picture of his father is habitually clothed with excessive powers of this kind, and it is found that distrust of the father is intimately linked with admiration for him. When a paranoic turns the figure of one of his associates into a ‘persecutor’, he is raising him to the rank of a father: he is putting him into a position in which he can blame him for all his misfortunes. Thus this second analogy between savages and neurotics gives us a glimpse of the truth that much of a savage’s attitude to his ruler is derived from a child’s infantile attitude to his father.

But the strongest support for our effort to equate taboo prohibitions with neurotic symptoms is to be found in the taboo ceremonials themselves, the effect of which upon the position of royalty has already been discussed. These ceremonials unmistakably reveal their double meaning and their derivation from ambivalent impulses, as soon as we are ready to allow that the results which they bring about were intended from the first. The taboo does not only pick out the king and exalt him above all common mortals, it also makes his existence a torment and an intolerable burden and reduces him to a bondage far worse than that of his subjects. Here, then, we have an exact counterpart of the obsessional act in the neurosis, in which the suppressed impulse and the impulse that suppresses it find simultaneous and common satisfaction. The obsessional act is ostensibly a protection against the prohibited act; but actually, in our view, it is a repetition of it. The ‘ostensibly’ applies to the conscious part of the mind, and the ‘actually’ to the unconscious part. In exactly the same way, the ceremonial taboo of kings is ostensibly the highest honour and protection for them, while actually it is a punishment for their exaltation, a revenge taken on them by their subjects. The experiences of Sancho Panza (as described by Cervantes) when he was Governor of his island convinced him that this view of court ceremonial was the only one that met the case. If we could hear the views of modern kings and rulers on the subject, we might find that there were many others who agreed with him.

Totem And Taboo

2697

The question of why the emotional attitude towards rulers includes such a powerful unconscious element of hostility raises a very interesting problem, but one that lies outside the limits of the present study. I have already hinted at the fact that the child’s complex of emotions towards his father - the father-complex - has a bearing on the subject, and I may add that more information on the early history of the kingship would throw a decisive light on it. Frazer (1911a) has put forward impressive reasons, though, as he himself admits, not wholly conclusive ones, for supposing that the earliest kings were foreigners who, after a brief reign, were sacrificed with solemn festivities as representatives of the deity. It is possible that the course taken by the evolution of kings may also have had an influence upon the myths of Christendom.

(c) The Taboo upon the Dead

We know that the dead are powerful rulers; but we may perhaps be surprised when we learn that they are treated as enemies.

The taboo upon the dead is - if I may revert to the simile of infection - especially virulent among most primitive peoples. It is manifested, in the first instance, in the consequences that follow contact with the dead and in the treatment of mourners.

Among the Maoris anyone who had handled a corpse or taken any part in its burial was in the highest degree unclean and was almost cut off from intercourse with his fellow-men, or, as we might put it, was boycotted. He could not enter any house, or come into contact with any person or thing without infecting them. He might not even touch food with his hands, which, owing to their uncleanness, had become quite useless. ‘Food would be set for him on the ground, and he would then sit or kneel down, and, with his hands carefully held behind his back, would gnaw at it as best he could. In some cases he would be fed by another person, who with outstretched arm contrived to do it without touching the tabooed man; but the feeder was himself subjected to many severe restrictions, little less onerous than those which were imposed upon the other. In almost every populous village there lived a degraded wretch, the lowest of the low, who earned a sorry pittance by thus waiting upon the defiled.’ He alone was allowed ‘to associate at arm’s length with one who had paid the last offices . . . to the dead. And when, the dismal term of his seclusion being over, the mourner was about to mix with his fellows once more, all the dishes he had used in his seclusion were diligently smashed, and all the garments he had worn were carefully thrown away.’

Totem And Taboo

2698

The taboo observances after bodily contact with the dead are the same over the whole of Polynesia, Melanesia and a part of Africa. Their most regular feature is the prohibition against those who have had such contact touching food themselves, and the consequent necessity for their being fed by other people. It is a remarkable fact that in Polynesia (though the report may perhaps refer only to Hawaii) priestly kings were subject to the same restriction while performing their sacred functions.¹ The case of the taboo upon the dead in Tonga offers a specially clear instance of the way in which the degree of prohibition varies according to the taboo power of the person upon whom the taboo is imposed. Thus anyone who touches a dead chief is unclean for ten months; but if he himself is a chief he is only tabooed for three, four, or five months according to the rank of the dead man; but if the dead man were the ‘great divine chief’, even the greatest chief would be tabooed for ten months. These savages believe firmly that anyone who violates the taboo ordinances is bound to fall ill and die; indeed they believe it so firmly that, in the opinion of an observer, ‘no native ever made an experiment to prove the contrary’.²

Essentially the same prohibitions (though from our point of view they are more interesting) apply to those who have been in contact with the dead only in a metaphorical sense: the dead person’s mourning relations, widowers and widows. The observances that we have so far mentioned may seem merely to give characteristic expression to the virulence of the taboo and its contagious power. But those which now follow give us a hint at the reasons for the taboo - both the ostensible ones and what we must regard as the deep-lying real ones.

‘Among the Shuswap of British Columbia widows and widowers in mourning are secluded and forbidden to touch their own head or body; the cups and cooking vessels which they use may be used by no one else. . . . No hunter would come near such mourners, for their presence is unlucky. If their shadow were to fall on anyone, he would be taken ill at once. They employ thorn-bushes for bed and pillow . . . and thorn-bushes are also laid all around their beds.’ This last measure is designed to keep the dead person’s ghost at a distance. The same purpose is shown still more clearly in the usage reported from another North American tribe which provides that, after her husband’s death, ‘a widow would wear a breech-cloth made of dry bunch-grass for several days to prevent her husband’s ghost having intercourse with her.’ This suggests that contact ‘in a metaphorical sense’ is after all understood as being bodily contact, for the dead man’s ghost does not leave his relations and does not cease to ‘hover’ round them during the time of mourning.

‘Among the Agutainos, who inhabit Palawan, one of the Philippine Islands, a widow may not leave her hut for seven or eight days after the death; and even then she may only go out at an hour when she is not likely to meet anybody, for whoever looks upon her dies a sudden death. To prevent this fatal catastrophe, the widow knocks with a wooden peg on the trees as she goes along, thus warning people of her dangerous proximity; and the very trees on which she knocks soon die.’ The nature of the danger feared from a widow such as this is made plain by another example. ‘In the Mekeo district of British New Guinea a widower loses all his civil rights and becomes a social outcast, an object of fear and horror, shunned by all. He may not cultivate a garden, nor show himself in public, nor walk on the roads and paths. Like a wild beast he must skulk in the long grass and the bushes; and if he sees or hears anyone coming, especially a woman, he must hide behind a tree or a thicket.’ This last hint makes it easy to trace the origin of the dangerous character of widowers or widows to the danger of temptation. A man who has lost his wife must resist a desire to find a substitute for her; a widow must fight against the same wish and is moreover liable, being without a lord and master, to arouse the desires of other men. Substitutive satisfactions of such a kind run counter to the sense of mourning and they would inevitably kindle the ghost’s wrath.³

¹ Frazer (loc. cit.).

² Frazer (1911b, 140), quoting Mariner (1818).

³ The patient whose ‘impossibilities’ I compared with taboos earlier in this paper (see page 2676) told me that whenever she met anyone dressed in mourning in the street she was filled with indignation: such people, she thought, should be forbidden to go out.

Totem And Taboo

2699

One of the most puzzling, but at the same time instructive usages in connection with mourning is the prohibition against uttering the name of the dead person. This custom is extremely widespread, it is expressed in a variety of ways and has had important consequences. It is found not only among the Australians and Polynesians (who usually show us taboo observances in the best state of preservation), but also among ‘peoples so widely separated from each other as the Samoyeds of Siberia and the Todas of southern India; the Mongols of Tartary and the Tuaregs of the Sahara; the Ainos of Japan and the Akamba and Nandi of central Africa; the Tinguianes of the Philippines and the inhabitants of the Nicobar Islands, of Borneo, of Madagascar, and of Tasmania.’ (Frazer, 1911b, 353.) In some of these cases the prohibition and its consequences last only during the period of mourning, in others they are permanent; but it seems invariably to diminish in strictness with the passage of time.

The avoidance of the name of a dead person is as a rule enforced with extreme severity. Thus in some South American tribes it is regarded as a deadly insult to the survivors to mention the name of a dead relative in their presence, and the punishment for it is not less than that laid down for murder. (Ibid., 352.) It is not easy at first to see why the mention of the name should be regarded with such horror; but the dangers involved have given rise to a whole number of methods of evasion which are interesting and important in various ways. Thus the Masai in East Africa resort to the device of changing the dead man’s name immediately after his death; he may then be mentioned freely under his new name while all the restrictions remain attached to the old one. This seems to presuppose that the dead man’s ghost does not know and will not get to know his new name. The Adelaide and Encounter Bay tribes of South Australia are so consistently careful that after a death everyone bearing the same name as the dead man’s, or a very similar one, changes it for another. In some instances, as for instance among certain tribes in Victoria and in North-West America, this is carried a step further, and after a death all the dead person’s relations change their names, irrespective of any similarity in their sound. Indeed, among the Guaycurus in Paraguay, when a death had taken place, the chief used to change the name of every member of the tribe; and ‘from that moment everybody remembered his new name just as if he had borne it all his life’.¹

Moreover, if the name of the dead man happens to be the same as that of an animal or common object, some tribes think it necessary to give these animals or objects new names, so that the use of the former names shall not recall the dead man to memory. This usage leads to a perpetual change of vocabulary, which causes much difficulty to the missionaries, especially when such changes are permanent. In the seven years which the missionary Dobrizhoffer spent among the Abipones of Paraguay, ‘the native word for jaguar was changed thrice, and the words for crocodile, thorn, and the slaughter of cattle underwent similar though less varied vicissitudes’.² The dread of uttering a dead person’s name extends, indeed, to an avoidance of the mention of anything in which the dead man played a part; and an important consequence of this process of suppression is that these peoples possess no tradition and no historical memory, so that any research into their early history is faced by the greatest difficulties. A number of these primitive races have, however, adopted compensatory usages which revive the names of dead persons after a long period of mourning by giving them to children, who are thus regarded as reincarnations of the dead.

¹ Frazer (1911b, 357), quoting an old Spanish observer.

² Frazer (1911b, 360), quoting Dobrizhoffer.

Totem And Taboo

2700

This taboo upon names will seem less puzzling if we bear in mind the fact that savages regard a name as an essential part of a man’s personality and as an important possession: they treat words in every sense as things. As I have pointed out elsewhere, our own children do the same. They are never ready to accept a similarity between two words as having no meaning; they consistently assume that if two things are called by similar-sounding names this must imply the existence of some deep-lying point of agreement between them. Even a civilized adult may be able to infer from certain peculiarities in his own behaviour that he is not so far removed as he may have thought from attributing importance to proper names, and that his own name has become to a very remarkable extent bound up with his personality. So, too, psycho-analytic practice comes upon frequent confirmations of this in the evidence it finds of the importance of names in unconscious mental activities.¹

As was only to be expected, obsessional neurotics behave exactly like savages in relation to names. Like other neurotics, they show a high degree of ‘complexive sensitiveness’ in regard to uttering or hearing particular words and names; and their attitude towards their own names imposes numerous, and often serious, inhibitions upon them. One of these taboo patients of my acquaintance had adopted a rule against writing her own name, for fear that it might fall into the hands of someone who would then be in possession of a portion of her personality. She was obliged to fight with convulsive loyalty against the temptations to which her imagination subjected her, and so forbade herself ‘to surrender any part of her person’. This included in the first place her name, and later extended to her handwriting, till finally she gave up writing altogether.

¹ Cf. Stekel and Abraham.

Totem And Taboo

2701

We shall no longer feel surprised, therefore, at savages regarding the name of a dead person as a portion of his personality and making it subject to the relevant taboo. So, too, uttering the name of a dead person is clearly a derivative of having contact with him. We may therefore turn to the wider problem of why such contact is submitted to so strict a taboo.

The most obvious explanation would point to horror roused by dead bodies and by the changes which quickly become visible in them. Some part must also be played in the matter by mourning for the dead person, since it must be a motive force in everything relating to him. But horror at the corpse clearly does not account for all the details of the taboo observances, and mourning cannot explain why the uttering of the dead man’s name is an insult to his survivors. Mourning, on the contrary, tends to be preoccupied with the dead man, to dwell upon his memory and to preserve it as long as possible. Something other than mourning must be held responsible for the peculiarities of the taboo usages, something which has very different purposes in view. It is precisely the taboo upon names that gives us the clue to this unknown motive; and if the usages alone did not tell us, we should learn it from what the mourning savages say to us themselves.

For they make no disguise of the fact that they are afraid of the presence or of the return of the dead person’s ghost; and they perform a great number of ceremonies to keep him at a distance or drive him off.¹ They feel that to utter his name is equivalent to invoking him and will quickly be followed by his presence.² And accordingly they do everything they can to avoid any such evocation. They disguise themselves so that the ghost shall not recognize them,³ or they change his name or their own; they are furious with reckless strangers who by uttering the ghost’s name incite him against the survivors. It is impossible to escape the conclusion that, in the words of Wundt (1906, 49), they are victims to a fear of ‘the dead man’s soul which has become a demon’. Here, then, we seem to have found a confirmation of Wundt’s view, which, as we have already seen (p. 2672), considers that the essence of taboo is a fear of demons.

¹ Frazer (1911b, 353) mentions the Tuaregs of the Sahara as an example of this explanation being given by the savages themselves.

² Subject, perhaps, to the condition that some of his bodily remains are still in existence. (Ibid., 372.)

³ In the Nicobar Islands. (Ibid., 358.)

Totem And Taboo

2702

This theory is based on a supposition so extraordinary that it seems at first sight incredible: the supposition, namely, that a dearly loved relative at the moment of his death changes into a demon, from whom his survivors can expect nothing but hostility and against whose evil desires they must protect themselves by every possible means. Nevertheless, almost all the authorities are at one in attributing these views to primitive peoples. Westermarck, who, in my opinion, takes far too little notice of taboo in his book on The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, actually writes in his chapter on ‘Regard for the Dead’: ‘Generally speaking, my collection of facts has led me to the conclusion that the dead are more commonly regarded as enemies than friends, and that Professor Jevons and Mr. Grant Allen are mistaken in their assertion that, according to early beliefs, the malevolence of the dead is for the most part directed against strangers only, whereas they exercise a fatherly care over the lives and fortunes of their descendants and fellow clansmen.’¹

¹ Westermarck (1906-8, 2, 532 ff.). In his footnotes and in the section of the text which follows, the author gives copious confirmatory evidence, often of an extremely pertinent sort. For instance: ‘Among the Maoris the nearest and most beloved relatives were supposed to have their natures changed by death, and to become malignant, even towards those they formerly loved. . . . Australian natives believed that a deceased person is malevolent for a long time after death, and the more nearly related the more he is feared. . . . According to ideas prevalent among the Central Eskimo, the dead are at first malevolent spirits who frequently roam around the villages, causing sickness and mischief and killing men by their touch; but subsequently they are supposed to attain rest and are no longer feared.’

Totem And Taboo

2703

In an interesting volume, Rudolf Kleinpaul (1898) has used the remnants among civilized races of the ancient belief in spirits to throw light on the relation between the living and the dead. He, too, reaches the final conclusion that the dead, filled with a lust for murder, sought to drag the living in their train. The dead slew; and the skeleton which we use to-day to picture the dead stands for the fact that they themselves were slayers. The living did not feel safe from the attacks of the dead till there was a sheet of water between them. That is why men liked to bury the dead on islands or on the farther side of rivers; and that, in turn, is the origin of such phrases as ‘Here and in the Beyond’. Later, the malignity of the dead diminished and was restricted to special categories which had a particular right to feel resentment - such as murdered men, for instance, who in the form of evil spirits went in pursuit of their murderers, or brides who had died with their desires unsatisfied. But originally, says Kleinpaul, all of the dead were vampires, all of them had a grudge against the living and sought to injure them and rob them of their lives. It was from corpses that the concept of evil spirits first arose.

The hypothesis that after their death those most beloved were transformed into demons clearly raises further questions. What was it that induced primitive men to attribute such a change of feeling to those who had been dear to them? Why did they make them into demons? Westermarck (1906-8, 2, 534 f.) is of the opinion that these questions can be answered easily. ‘Death is commonly regarded as the gravest of all misfortunes; hence the dead are believed to be exceedingly dissatisfied with their fate. According to primitive ideas a person only dies if he is killed - by magic if not by force - and such a death naturally tends to make the soul revengeful and ill-tempered. It is envious of the living and is longing for the company of its old friends; no wonder, then, that it sends them diseases to cause their death. . . . But the notion that the disembodied soul is on the whole a malicious being . . . is also, no doubt, intimately connected with the instinctive fear of the dead, which is in its turn the outcome of the fear of death.’

The study of psychoneurotic disorders suggests a more comprehensive explanation, which at the same time covers that put forward by Westermarck

Totem And Taboo

2704

When a wife has lost her husband or a daughter her mother, it not infrequently happens that the survivor is overwhelmed by tormenting doubts (to which we give the name of ‘obsessive self-reproaches’) as to whether she may not herself have been responsible for the death of this cherished being through some act of carelessness or neglect. No amount of recollection of the care she lavished on the sufferer, no amount of objective disproof of the accusation, serves to bring the torment to an end. It may be regarded as a pathological form of mourning, and with the passage of time it gradually dies away. The psycho-analytic investigation of such cases has revealed the secret motives of the disorder. We find that in a certain sense these obsessive self-reproaches are justified, and that this is why they are proof against contradictions and protests. It is not that the mourner was really responsible for the death or was really guilty of neglect, as the self-reproaches declare to be the case. None the less there was something in her - a wish that was unconscious to herself - which would not have been dissatisfied by the occurrence of death and which might actually have brought it about if it had had the power. And after death has occurred, it is against this unconscious wish that the reproaches are a reaction. In almost every case where there is an intense emotional attachment to a particular person we find that behind the tender love there is a concealed hostility in the unconscious. This is the classical example, the prototype, of the ambivalence of human emotions. This ambivalence is present to a greater or less amount in the innate disposition of everyone; normally, there is not so much of it as to produce the obsessive self-reproaches we are considering. Where, however, it is copiously present in the disposition, it will manifest itself precisely in the subject’s relation to those of whom he is most fond, in the place, in fact, where one would least expect to find it. It must be supposed that the presence of a particularly large amount of this original emotional ambivalence is characteristic of the disposition of obsessional neurotics - whom I have so often brought up for comparison in this discussion upon taboo.

Totem And Taboo

2705

We have now discovered a motive which can explain the idea that the souls of those who have just died are transformed into demons and the necessity felt by survivors to protect themselves by taboos against their hostility. Let us suppose that the emotional life of primitive peoples is characterized by an amount of ambivalence as great as that which we are led by the findings of psycho-analysis to attribute to obsessional patients. It then becomes easy to understand how after a painful bereavement savages should be obliged to produce a reaction against the hostility latent in their unconscious similar to that expressed as obsessive self-reproach in the case of neurotics. But this hostility, distressingly felt in the unconscious as satisfaction over the death, is differently dealt with among primitive peoples. The defence against it takes the form of displacing it on to the object of the hostility, on to the dead themselves. This defensive procedure, which is a common one both in normal and in pathological mental life, is known as a ‘projection’. The survivor thus denies that he has ever harboured any hostile feelings against the dead loved one; the soul of the dead harbours them instead and seeks to put them into action during the whole period of mourning. In spite of the successful defence which the survivor achieves by means of projection, his emotional reaction shows the characteristics of punishment and remorse, for he is the subject of fears and submits to renunciations and restrictions, though these are in part disguised as measures of protection against the hostile demon. Once again, therefore, we find that the taboo has grown up on the basis of an ambivalent emotional attitude. The taboo upon the dead arises, like the others, from the contrast between conscious pain and unconscious satisfaction over the death that has occurred. Since such is the origin of the ghost’s resentment, it follows naturally that the survivors who have the most to fear will be those who were formerly its nearest and dearest.

In this respect taboo observances, like neurotic symptoms, have a double sense. On the one hand, in their restrictive character, they are expressions of mourning; but on the other hand they clearly betray - what they seek to conceal - hostility against the dead disguised as self-defence. We have already learned that certain taboos arise out of fear of temptation. The fact that a dead man is helpless is bound to act as an encouragement to the survivor to give free rein to his hostile passions, and that temptation must be countered by a prohibition.

Totem And Taboo

2706

Westermarck is right in insisting that savages draw no distinction between violent and natural death. In the view of unconscious thinking, a man who has died a natural death is a murdered man: evil wishes have killed him.¹ Anyone who investigates the origin and significance of dreams of the death of loved relatives (of parents or brothers or sisters) will be able to convince himself that dreamers, children and savages are at one in their attitude towards the dead - an attitude based upon emotional ambivalence.

At the beginning of this essay disagreement was expressed with Wundt’s opinion that the essence of taboo was a fear of demons. Yet we have now assented to an explanation that derives the taboo upon the dead from a fear of the soul of the dead person transformed into a demon. The apparent contradiction can easily be resolved. It is true that we have accepted the presence of demons, but not as something ultimate and psychologically unanalysable. We have succeeded, as it were, in getting behind the demons, for we have explained them as projections of hostile feelings harboured by the survivors against the dead.

Both of the two sets of feelings (the affectionate and the hostile), which, as we have good reason to believe, exist towards the dead person, seek to take effect at the time of the bereavement, as mourning and as satisfaction. There is bound to be a conflict between these two contrary feelings; and, since one of the two, the hostility, is wholly or for the greater part unconscious, the outcome of the conflict cannot be to subtract, as it were, the feeling with the lesser intensity from that with the greater and to establish the remainder in consciousness - as occurs, for instance, when one forgives a slight that one has received from someone of whom one is fond. The process is dealt with instead by the special psychical mechanism known in psycho-analysis, as I have said, by the name of ‘projection’. The hostility, of which the survivors know nothing and moreover wish to know nothing, is ejected from internal perception into the external world, and thus detached from them and pushed on to someone else. It is ho longer true that they are rejoicing to be rid of the dead man; on the contrary, they are mourning for him; but, strange to say, he has turned into a wicked demon ready to gloat over their misfortunes and eager to kill them. It then becomes necessary for them, the survivors, to defend themselves against this evil enemy; they are relieved of pressure from within, but have only exchanged it for oppression from without.

¹ Cf. the next essay in this volume.

Totem And Taboo

2707

It cannot be disputed that this process of projection, which turns a dead man into a malignant enemy, is able to find support in any real acts of hostility on his part that may be recollected and felt as a grudge against him: his severity, his love of power, his unfairness, or whatever else may form the background of even the tenderest of human relationships. But it cannot be such a simple matter as that. This factor alone cannot explain the creation of demons by projection. The faults of the dead no doubt provide a part of the explanation of the survivors’ hostility; but they would not operate in this way unless the survivors had first developed hostility on their own account. The moment of death, moreover, would certainly seem to be a most inappropriate occasion for recalling any justifiable grounds of complaint that might exist. It is impossible to escape the fact that the true determining factor is invariably unconscious hostility. A hostile current of feeling such as this against a person’s nearest and dearest relatives may remain latent during their lifetime, that is, its existence may not be betrayed to consciousness either directly or through some substitute. But when they die this is no longer possible and the conflict becomes acute. The mourning which derives from an intensification of the affectionate feelings becomes on the one hand more impatient of the latent hostility and, on the other hand, will not allow it to give rise to any sense of satisfaction. Accordingly, there follow the repression of the unconscious hostility by the method of projection and the construction of the ceremonial which gives expression to the fear of being punished by the demons. When in course of time the mourning runs its course, the conflict grows less acute, so that the taboo upon the dead is able to diminish in severity or sink into oblivion.

Totem And Taboo

2708

(4)

Having thus explained the basis of the exceedingly instructive taboo upon the dead, we must not omit to add a few remarks that may help to increase our understanding of taboo in general.

The projection of unconscious hostility on to demons in the case of the taboo upon the dead is only a single instance of a number of processes to which the greatest influence must be attributed in the shaping of the primitive mind. In the case we have been dealing with, projection served the purpose of dealing with an emotional conflict; and it is employed in the same way in a large number of psychical situations that lead to neuroses. But projection was not created for the purpose of defence; it also occurs where there is no conflict. The projection outwards of internal perceptions is a primitive mechanism, to which, for instance, our sense perceptions are subject, and which therefore normally plays a very large part in determining the form taken by our external world. Under conditions whose nature has not yet been sufficiently established, internal perceptions of emotional and thought processes can be projected outwards in the same way as sense perceptions; they are thus employed for building up the external world, though they should by rights remain part of the internal world. This may have some genetic connection with the fact that the function of attention was originally directed not towards the internal world but towards the stimuli that stream in from the external world, and that that function’s only information upon endopsychic processes was received from feelings of pleasure and unpleasure. It was not until a language of abstract thought had been developed, that is to say, not until the sensory residues of verbal presentations had been linked to the internal processes, that the latter themselves gradually became capable of being perceived. Before that, owing to the projection outwards of internal perceptions, primitive men arrived at a picture of the external world which we, with our intensified conscious perception, have now to translate back into psychology.

Totem And Taboo

2709

The projection of their own evil impulses into demons is only one portion of a system which constituted the Weltanschauung of primitive peoples, and which we shall come to know as ‘animism’ in the following essay. There we shall have to investigate that system’s psychological characteristics, and we shall do so once again by reference to the similar systems which we find constructed by neurotics. For the moment I will only say that the prototype of all such systems is what we have termed the ‘secondary revision’ of the content of dreams. And we must not forget that, at and after the stage at which systems are constructed, two sets of reasons can be assigned for every psychical event that is consciously judged - one set belonging to the system and the other set real but unconscious.¹

Wundt (1906, 129) remarks that ‘among the activities attributed by myths all over the world to demons, the harmful predominate, so that in popular belief bad demons are clearly older than good ones’. It is quite possible that the whole concept of demons was derived from the important relation of the living to the dead. The ambivalence inherent in that relation was expressed in the subsequent course of human development by the fact that, from the same root, it gave rise to two completely opposed psychical structures: on the one hand fear of demons and ghosts and on the other hand veneration of ancestors.² The fact that demons are always regarded as the spirits of those who have died recently shows better than anything the influence of mourning on the origin of the belief in demons. Mourning has a quite specific psychical task to perform: its function is to detach the survivors’ memories and hopes from the dead. When this has been achieved, the pain grows less and with it the remorse and self-reproaches and consequently the fear of the demon as well. And the same spirits who to begin with were feared as demons may now expect to meet with friendlier treatment; they are revered as ancestors and appeals are made to them for help.

¹ The projected creations of primitive men resemble the personifications constructed by creative writers; for the latter externalize in the form of separate individuals the opposing instinctual impulses struggling within them.

² In the course of psycho-analyses of neurotics who suffer (or who suffered in their childhood) from fear of ghosts, it is often possible to show without much difficulty that the ghosts are disguises for the patient’s parents. Cf. in this connection a paper upon ‘Sexual Ghosts’ by Haeberlin (1912). Here the person concerned was not the subject’s parent (who was dead) but someone else of erotic significance to him.

Totem And Taboo

2710

If we follow the changing relations between survivors and the dead through the course of ages, it becomes obvious that there has been an extraordinary diminution in ambivalence. It is now quite easy to keep down the unconscious hostility to the dead (though its existence can still be traced) without any particular expenditure of psychical energy. Where, in earlier times, satisfied hatred and pained affection fought each other, we now find that a kind of scar has been formed in the shape of piety, which declares ‘de mortuis nil nisi bonum’. It is only neurotics whose mourning for the loss of those dear to them is still troubled by obsessive self-reproaches - the secret of which is revealed by psycho-analysis as the old emotional ambivalence. We need not discuss here how this alteration came about or how much share in it is due to a constitutional modification and how much to a real improvement in family relations. But this example suggests the probability that the psychical impulses of primitive peoples were characterized by a higher amount of ambivalence than is to be found in modern civilized man. It is to be supposed that as this ambivalence diminished, taboo (a symptom of the ambivalence and a compromise between two conflicting impulses) slowly disappeared Neurotics, who are obliged to reproduce the struggle and the taboo resulting from it, may be said to have inherited an archaic constitution as an atavistic vestige; the need to compensate for this at the behest of civilization is what drives them to their immense expenditure of mental energy.

And here we may recall the obscure and puzzling statement by Wundt on the double meaning of the word taboo: ‘sacred’ and ‘unclean’. (See above.) Originally, according to him, the word did not possess these two meanings, but described ‘what is demonic’, ‘what may not be touched’, thus stressing an important characteristic common to both the extreme concepts. The persistence, however (he added), of this common characteristic was evidence that the ground covered by the two - the sacred and the unclean - was originally one and did not become differentiated until later.

Totem And Taboo

2711

Our discussions, on the contrary, lead us to the simple conclusion that the word ‘taboo’ had a double meaning from the very first and that it was used to designate a particular kind of ambivalence and whatever arose from it. ‘Taboo’ is itself an ambivalent word; and one feels on looking back that the well-attested meaning of the word should alone have made it possible to infer - what has actually been arrived at as a result of extensive researches - that the prohibitions of taboo are to be understood as consequences of an emotional ambivalence. Study of the earliest languages has taught us that there were once many such words, which expressed contrary ideas and in a sense (though not in quite the same sense as the word ‘taboo’) were ambivalent.¹ Slight modifications in the pronunciation of the antithetical ‘primal word’ made it possible subsequently to give separate verbal expression to the two contrary ideas which were originally combined in it.

The word ‘taboo’ met with a different fate. As the importance of the ambivalence denoted by it diminished, the word itself, or rather the words analogous to it, fell out of use. I hope to be able, in a later connection, to make it probable that a definite historical chain of events is concealed behind the fate of this concept: that the word was at first attached to certain quite specific human relations which were characterized by great emotional ambivalence, and that its use then spread on to other analogous relations.

If I am not mistaken, the explanation of taboo also throws light on the nature and origin of conscience. It is possible, without any stretching of the sense of the terms, to speak of a taboo conscience or, after a taboo has been violated, of a taboo sense of guilt. Taboo conscience is probably the earliest form in which the phenomenon of conscience is met with.

For what is ‘conscience’? On the evidence of language it is related to that of which one is ‘most certainly conscious’. Indeed, in some languages the words for ‘conscience’ and ‘consciousness’ can scarcely be distinguished.

¹ Cf. my review of Abel’s ‘Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words’.

Totem And Taboo

2712

Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us. The stress, however, is upon the fact that this rejection has no need to appeal to anything else for support, that it is quite ‘certain of itself’. This is even clearer in the case of consciousness of guilt - the perception of the internal condemnation of an act by which we have carried out a particular wish. To put forward any reason for this would seem superfluous: anyone who has a conscience must feel within him the justification for the condemnation, must feel the self-reproach for the act that has been carried out. This same characteristic is to be seen in the savage’s attitude towards taboo. It is a command issued by conscience; any violation of it produces a fearful sense of guilt which follows as a matter of course and of which the origin is unknown.¹

Thus it seems probable that conscience too arose, on a basis of emotional ambivalence, from quite specific human relations to which this ambivalence was attached; and that it arose under the conditions which we have shown to apply in the case of taboo and of obsessional neurosis - namely, that one of the opposing feelings involved shall be unconscious and kept under repression by the compulsive domination of the other one. This conclusion is supported by several things we have learnt from the analysis of neuroses.

In the first place, we have found that a feature in the character of obsessional neurotics is a scrupulous conscientiousness which is a symptom reacting against the temptation lurking in their unconscious. If their illness becomes more acute, they develop a sense of guilt of the most intense degree. In fact, one may venture to say that if we cannot trace the origin of the sense of guilt in obsessional neurotics, there can be no hope of our ever tracing it. This task can be directly achieved in the case of individual neurotic patients, and we may rely upon reaching a similar solution by inference in the case of primitive peoples.

¹ The sense of guilt in the case of taboos is not in the least diminished if the violation occurs unwittingly. (Cf. the instances above.) An interesting parallel is found in Greek mythology: the guilt of Oedipus was not palliated by the fact that he incurred it without his knowledge and even against his intention.

Totem And Taboo

2713

In the second place, we cannot help being struck by the fact that a sense of guilt has about it much of the nature of anxiety: we could describe it without any misgivings as ‘dread of conscience’. But the anxiety points to unconscious sources. The psychology of the neuroses has taught us that, if wishful impulses are repressed, their libido is transformed into anxiety. And this reminds us that there is something unknown and unconscious in connection with the sense of guilt, namely the reasons for the act of repudiation. The character of anxiety that is inherent in the sense of guilt corresponds to this unknown factor.

Since taboos are mainly expressed in prohibitions, the underlying presence of a positive current of desire may occur to us as something quite obvious and calling for no lengthy proofs based on the analogy of the neuroses. For, after all, there is no need to prohibit something that no one desires to do, and a thing that is forbidden with the greatest emphasis must be a thing that is desired. If we were to apply this plausible thesis to our primitive peoples, we should be led to the conclusion that some of their strongest temptations were to kill their kings and priests, to commit incest, to maltreat the dead, and so on - which seems scarcely probable. And we should be met with the most positive contradiction if we were to apply the same thesis to instances in which we ourselves seem most clearly to hear the voice of conscience. We should maintain with the most absolute certainty that we feel not the slightest temptation to violate any of these prohibitions - the commandment to ‘do no murder’, for instance - and that we feel nothing but horror at the notion of violating them.

If, however, we were to admit the claims thus asserted by our conscience, it would follow, on the one hand, that these prohibitions would be superfluous - both taboo and our own moral prohibitions - and, on the other hand, the fact of conscience would remain unexplained and no place would be left for the relations between conscience, taboo and neurosis. In other words, we should be back in the state of knowledge we were in before we approached the problem from the psycho-analytic angle.

Totem And Taboo

2714

Suppose, on the other hand, that we were to take into account the finding arrived at by psycho-analysis from the dreams of normal people, to the effect that we ourselves are subject, more strongly and more often than we suspect, to a temptation to kill someone and that that temptation produces psychical effects even though it remains out of sight of our consciousness. Suppose, again, that we were to recognize the compulsive observances of certain neurotics as being guarantees against an intensified impulse to murder or as being self-punishments on account of it. In that case we should have to attach still greater importance to our thesis that where there is a prohibition there must be an underlying desire. We should have to suppose that the desire to murder is actually present in the unconscious and that neither taboos nor moral prohibitions are psychologically superfluous but that on the contrary they are explained and justified by the existence of an ambivalent attitude towards the impulse to murder.

One of the characteristics of this ambivalent relation which I have repeatedly stressed as fundamental - the fact that the positive current of desire is an unconscious one - opens the way to further considerations and to further possible explanations. Psychical processes in the unconscious are not in every respect identical with those with which our conscious mind is familiar; they enjoy some remarkable liberties that are forbidden to the latter. An unconscious impulse need not have arisen at the point where it makes its appearance; it may arise from some quite other region and have applied originally to quite other persons and connections; it may have reached the place at which it attracts our attention though the mechanism of ‘displacement’. Owing, moreover, to the indestructibility and insusceptibility to correction which are attributes of unconscious processes, it may have survived from very early times to which it was appropriate into later times and circumstances in which its manifestations are bound to seem strange. These are no more than hints, but if they were attentively developed their importance for our understanding of the growth of civilization would become apparent.

Totem And Taboo

2715

Before I conclude this discussion, a further point must not be overlooked which will pave the way for later inquiries. In maintaining the essential similarity between taboo prohibitions and moral prohibitions, I have not sought to dispute the fact that there must be a psychological difference between them. The only possible reason why the prohibitions no longer take the form of taboos must be some change in the circumstances governing the ambivalence underlying them.

In our analytical examination of the problems of taboo we have hitherto allowed ourselves to be led by the points of agreement that we have been able to show between it and obsessional neurosis. But after all taboo is not a neurosis but a social institution. We are therefore faced with the task of explaining what difference there is in principle between a neurosis and a cultural creation such as taboo.

Once again I will take a single fact as my starting-point. It is feared among primitive peoples that the violation of a taboo will be followed by a punishment, as a rule by some serious illness or by death. The punishment threatens to fall on whoever was responsible for violating the taboo. In obsessional neuroses the case is different. What the patient fears if he performs some forbidden action is that a punishment will fall not on himself but on someone else. This person’s identity is as a rule left unstated, but can usually be shown without difficulty by analysis to be one of those closest and most dear to the patient. Here, then, the neurotic seems to be behaving altruistically and the primitive man egoistically. Only if the violation of a taboo is not automatically avenged upon the wrong-doer does a collective feeling arise among savages that they are all threatened by the outrage; and they thereupon hasten to carry out the omitted punishment themselves. There is no difficulty in explaining the mechanism of this solidarity. What is in question is fear of an infectious example, of the temptation to imitate - that is, of the contagious character of taboo. If one person succeeds in gratifying the repressed desire, the same desire is bound to be kindled in all the other members of the community. In order to keep the temptation down, the envied transgressor must be deprived of the fruit of his enterprise; and the punishment will not infrequently give those who carry it out an opportunity of committing the same outrage under colour of an act of expiation. This is indeed one of the foundations of the human penal system and it is based, no doubt correctly, on the assumption that the prohibited impulses are present alike in the criminal and in the avenging community. In this, psycho-analysis is no more than confirming the habitual pronouncement of the pious: we are all miserable sinners.

Totem And Taboo

2716

How, then, are we to account for the unexpected nobility of mind of the neurotic, who fears nothing on his own account but everything for someone he loves? Analytical inquiry shows that this attitude is not primary. Originally, that is to say at the beginning of the illness, the threat of punishment applied, as in the case of savages, to the patient himself; he was invariably in fear for his own life; it was not until later that the mortal fear was displaced on to another and a loved person. The process is a little complicated, but we can follow it perfectly. At the root of the prohibition there is invariably a hostile impulse against someone the patient loves - a wish that that person should die. This impulse is repressed by a prohibition and the prohibition is attached to some particular act, which, by displacement, represents, it may be, a hostile act against the loved person. There is a threat of death if this act is performed. But the process goes further, and the original wish that the loved person may die is replaced by fear that he may die. So that when the neurosis appears to be so tenderly altruistic, it is merely compensating for an underlying contrary attitude of brutal egoism. We may describe as ‘social’ the emotions which are determined by showing consideration for another person without taking him as a sexual object. The receding into the background of these social factors may be stressed as a fundamental characteristic of the neurosis, though one which is later disguised by overcompensation.

I do not propose to linger over the origin of these social impulses and their relation to the other basic human instincts but shall proceed to illustrate the second main characteristic of the neurosis by means of another example. In the forms which it assumes, taboo very closely resembles the neurotic’s fear of touching, his ‘touching phobia’. Now, in the case of the neurosis the prohibition invariably relates to touching of a sexual kind, and psycho-analysis has shown that it is in general true that the instinctual forces that are diverted and displaced in neuroses have a sexual origin. In the case of taboo the prohibited touching is obviously not to be understood in an exclusively sexual sense but in the more general sense of attacking, of getting control, and of asserting oneself. If there is a prohibition against touching a chief or anything that has been in contact with him, this means that an inhibition is to be laid on the same impulse which expresses itself on other occasions in keeping a suspicious watch upon the chief or even in ill-treating him physically before his coronation. (See above.) Thus the fact which is characteristic of the neurosis is the preponderance of the sexual over the social instinctual elements. The social instincts, however, are themselves derived from a combination of egoistic and erotic components into wholes of a special kind.

Totem And Taboo

2717

This single comparison between taboo and obsessional neurosis is enough to enable us to gather the nature of the relation between the different forms of neurosis and cultural institutions, and to see how it is that the study of the psychology of the neuroses is important for an understanding of the growth of civilization.

The neuroses exhibit on the one hand striking and far-reaching points of agreement with those great social institutions, art, religion and philosophy. But on the other hand they seem like distortions of them. It might be maintained that a case of hysteria is a caricature of a work of art, that an obsessional neurosis is a caricature of a religion and that a paranoic delusion is a caricature of a philosophical system. The divergence resolves itself ultimately into the fact that the neuroses are asocial structures; they endeavour to achieve by private means what is effected in society by collective effort. If we analyse the instincts at work in the neuroses, we find that the determining influence in them is exercised by instinctual forces of sexual origin; the corresponding cultural formations, on the other hand, are based upon social instincts, originating from the combination of egoistic and erotic elements. Sexual needs are not capable of uniting men in the same way as are the demands of self-preservation. Sexual satisfaction is essentially the private affair of each individual.

The asocial nature of neuroses has its genetic origin in their most fundamental purpose, which is to take flight from an unsatisfying reality into a more pleasurable world of phantasy. The real world, which is avoided in this way by neurotics, is under the sway of human society and of the institutions collectively created by it. To turn away from reality is at the same time to withdraw from the community of man.

Totem And Taboo

2718

III

ANIMISM, MAGIC AND THE OMNIPOTENCE OF THOUGHTS

(1)

Writings that seek to apply the findings of psycho-analysis to topics in the field of the mental sciences have the inevitable defect of offering too little to readers of both classes. Such writings can only be in the nature of an instigation: they put before the specialist certain suggestions for him to take into account in his own work. This defect is bound to be extremely evident in an essay which will attempt to deal with the immense domain of what is known as ‘animism’.¹

Animism is, in its narrower sense, the doctrine of souls, and, in its wider sense, the doctrine of spiritual beings in general. The term ‘animatism’ has also been used to denote the theory of the living character of what appear to us to be inanimate objects, and the terms ‘animalism’ and ‘manism’ occur as well in this connection. The word ‘animism’, originally used to describe a particular philosophical system, seems to have been given its present meaning by Tylor.²

¹ The necessity for a concise treatment of the material involves the omission of any elaborate bibliography. Instead, I will merely refer to the standard works of Herbert Spencer, J. G. Frazer, Andrew Lang, E. B. Tylor and Wilhelm Wundt, from which all that I have to say about animism and magic is derived. My own contribution is visible only in my selection both of material and of opinions.

² Cf. Tylor (1891, 1, 425), Wundt (1906, 173)..

Totem And Taboo

2719

What led to the introduction of these terms was a realization of the highly remarkable view of nature and the universe adopted by the primitive races of whom we have knowledge, whether in past history or at the present time. They people the world with innumerable spiritual beings both benevolent and malignant; and these spirits and demons they regard as the causes of natural phenomena and they believe that not only animals and plants but all the inanimate objects in the world are animated by them. A third, and perhaps the most important, article of this primitive ‘philosophy of nature’ strikes us as less strange, since, while we have retained only a very limited belief in the existence of spirits and explain natural phenomena by the agency of impersonal physical forces, we ourselves are not very far removed from this third belief. For primitive peoples believe that human individuals are inhabited by similar spirits. These souls which live in human beings can leave their habitations and migrate into other human beings; they are the vehicle of mental activities and are to a certain extent independent of their bodies. Originally souls were pictured as very similar to persons and only in the course of a long development have they lost their material characteristics and become to a high degree ‘spiritualized’.¹

Most authorities incline to the view that these ideas of a soul are the original nucleus of the animistic system, that spirits are only souls that have made themselves independent, and that the souls of animals, plants and objects were constructed on the analogy of human souls.

How did primitive men arrive at the peculiar dualistic views on which the animistic system is based? It is supposed that they did so by observing the phenomena of sleep (including dreams) and of death which so much resembles it, and by attempting to explain those states, which are of such close concern to every one. The chief starting-point of this theorizing must have been the problem of death. What primitive man regarded as the natural thing was the indefinite prolongation of life - immortality. The idea of death was only accepted late, and with hesitancy. Even for us it is lacking in content and has no clear connotation. There have been very lively but inconclusive discussions upon the part that may have been played in the formation of the basic doctrines of animism by such other observed or experienced facts as dream-pictures, shadows, mirror images, and so on.²

¹ Wundt (1906), Chapter IV, ‘Die Seelenvorstellungen’.

² Cf. Wundt, Herbert Spencer, as well as the general articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910-11) on ‘Animism’, ‘Mythology’, etc.

Totem And Taboo

2720

It has been regarded as perfectly natural and not in the least puzzling that primitive man should have reacted to the phenomena which aroused his speculations by forming the idea of the soul and then of extending it to objects in the external world. In discussing the fact that the same animistic ideas have emerged among the most various races and at every period, Wundt (1906, 154) declares that ‘they are the necessary psychological product of a mythopoeic consciousness . . . and in this sense, therefore, primitive animism must be regarded as the spiritual expression of the natural state of man, so far as it is accessible to our observation’. The justification for attributing life to inanimate objects was already stated by Hume in his Natural History of Religion: ‘There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious.’¹

Animism is a system of thought. It does not merely give an explanation of a particular phenomenon, but allows us to grasp the whole universe as a single unity from a single point of view. The human race, if we are to follow the authorities, have in the course of ages developed three such systems of thought - three great pictures of the universe: animistic (or mythological), religious and scientific. Of these, animism, the first to be created, is perhaps the one which is most consistent and exhaustive and which gives a truly complete explanation of the nature of the universe. This first human Weltanschauung is a psychological theory. It would go beyond our present purpose to show how much of it still persists in modern life, either in the debased form of superstition or as the living basis of our speech, our beliefs and our philosophies.

With these three stages in mind, it may be said that animism itself is not yet a religion but contains the foundations on which religions are later built. It is obvious, too, that myths are based on animistic premises, though the details of the relation between myths and animism seem to be unexplained in some essential respects.

¹ Quoted by Tylor (1891, 1, 477).

Totem And Taboo

2721

(2)

Our psycho-analytic approach to the subject, however, is from another side. It is not to be supposed that men were inspired to create their first system of the universe by pure speculative curiosity. The practical need for controlling the world around them must have played its part. So we are not surprised to learn that, hand in hand with the animistic system, there went a body of instructions upon how to obtain mastery over men, beasts and things - or rather, over their spirits. These instructions go by the names of ‘sorcery [Zauberei]’ and ‘magic [Magie]’. Reinach (1905-12, 2, xv) describes them as the ‘strategy of animism’; I should prefer, following Hubert and Mauss (1904), to regard them as its technique.

Can the concepts of sorcery and magic be distinguished? Perhaps - if we are prepared to show a somewhat arbitrary disregard for the fluctuations of linguistic usage. Sorcery, then, is essentially the art of influencing spirits by treating them in the same way as one would treat men in like circumstances: appeasing them, making amends to them, propitiating them, intimidating them, robbing them of their power, subduing them to one’s will - by the same methods that have proved effective with living men. Magic, on the other hand, is something different: fundamentally, it disregards spirits and makes use of special procedures and not of everyday psychological methods. It is easy to guess that magic is the earlier and more important branch of animistic technique; for magical methods can, among others, be used in dealing with spirits,¹ and magic can be applied as well in cases where, as it seems to us, the process of spiritualizing Nature has not yet been carried out.

Magic has to serve the most varied purposes - it must subject natural phenomena to the will of man, it must protect the individual from his enemies and from dangers and it must give him power to injure his enemies. But the principle on the presumption of which magical action is based - or, more properly, the principle of magic - is so striking that none of the authorities has failed to recognize it. Tylor, if we leave on one side an accompanying moral judgement, states it in its most succinct form as mistaking an ideal connection for a real one. I will illustrate this feature from two groups of magical acts.

¹ If a spirit is scared away by making a noise and shouting, the action is one purely of sorcery; if compulsion is applied to it by getting hold of its name, magic has been used against it.

Totem And Taboo

2722

One of the most widespread magical procedures for injuring an enemy is by making an effigy of him from any convenient material. Whether the effigy resembles him is of little account: any object can be ‘made into’ an effigy of him. Whatever is then done to the effigy, the same thing happens to the detested original; whatever part of the former’s body is damaged, the same part of the latter’s becomes diseased. The same magical technique may be employed, not only for purposes of private enmity, but also for pious ends and for giving help to gods against malignant demons. I will quote from Frazer (1911a, 1, 67): ‘Every night when the sun-god Ra sank down to his home in the glowing west he was assailed by hosts of demons under the leadership of the arch-fiend Apepi. All night long he fought them, and sometimes by day the powers of darkness sent up clouds even into the blue Egyptian sky to obscure his light and weaken his power. To aid the sun-god in this daily struggle, a ceremony was daily performed in his temple at Thebes. A figure of his foe Apepi, represented as a crocodile with a hideous face or a serpent with many coils, was made of wax, and on it the demon’s name was written in green ink. Wrapt in a papyrus case, on which another likeness of Apepi had been drawn in green ink, the figure was then tied up with black hair, spat upon, hacked with a stone knife, and cast on the ground. There the priest trod on it with his left foot again and again, and then burnt it in a fire made of a certain plant or grass. When Apepi himself had thus been effectually disposed of, waxen effigies of each of his principal demons, and of their fathers, mothers and children, were made and burnt in the same way. The service, accompanied by the recitation of certain prescribed spells, was repeated not merely morning, noon and night, but whenever a storm was raging, or heavy rain had set in, or black clouds were stealing across the sky to hide the sun’s bright disc. The fiends of darkness, clouds, and rain felt the injuries inflicted on their images as if they had been done to themselves; they passed away, at least for a time, and the beneficent sun-god shone out triumphant once more.¹

¹ It seems probable that the biblical prohibition against making an image of any living thing originated, not from any objection to the plastic arts, but from a desire to deprive magic (which was abominated by the Hebrew religion) of one of its tools. Cf. Frazer (1911a, 1, 87 n.).

Totem And Taboo

2723

From the vast number of magical acts having a similar basis I will only draw attention to two more, which have played a large part among primitive peoples of every age and which persist to some degree in the myths and cults of higher stages of civilization - that is, rituals for producing rain and fertility. Rain is produced magically by imitating it or the clouds and storms which give rise to it, by ‘playing at rain’, one might almost say. In Japan, for instance, ‘a party of Ainos will scatter water by means of sieves, while others will take a porringer, fit it up with sails and oars as if it were a boat, and then push or draw it about the village and gardens’. In the same way, the fertility of the earth is magically promoted by a dramatic representation of human intercourse. Thus, to take one from a countless number of instances, ‘in some parts of Java, at the season when the bloom will soon be on the rice, the husbandman and his wife visit their fields by night and there engage in sexual intercourse’ to encourage the fertility of the rice by their example.¹ There is a dread, however, that prohibited, incestuous sexual relations may cause a failure of the crops and make the earth sterile.²

Certain negative observances, that is, magical precautions, must be included in this first group. ‘When a Dyak village has turned out to hunt wild pigs in the jungle, the people who stay at home may not touch oil or water with their hands during the absence of their friends; for if they did so, the hunters would all be "butter-fingered" and the prey would slip through their hands.’³ Or again, ‘while a Gilyak hunter is pursuing game in the forest, his children at home are forbidden to make drawings on wood or on sand; for they fear that if the children did so, the paths in the forest would become as perplexed as the lines in the drawings, so that the hunter might lose his way and never return.’4

¹ Frazer (1911a, 2, 98).

² An echo of this is to be found in the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles.

³ Frazer (1911a, 1, 120).

4 Frazer (1911a, 1, 122).

Totem And Taboo

2724

In these last, as in so many other instances of the workings of magic, the element of distance is disregarded; in other words, telepathy is taken for granted. We shall find no difficulty, therefore, in understanding this characteristic of magic.

There can be no doubt what is to be regarded as the operative factor in all these examples. It is the similarity between the act performed and the result expected. For this reason Frazer describes this sort of magic as ‘imitative’ or ‘homoeopathic’. If I wish it to rain, I have only to do something that looks like rain or is reminiscent of rain. At a later stage of civilization, instead of this rain-magic, processions will be made to a temple and prayers for rain will be addressed to the deity living in it. Finally, this religious technique will in its turn be given up and attempts will be made to produce effects in the atmosphere which will lead to rain.

In a second group of magical acts the principle of similarity plays no part, and its place is taken by another one, the nature of which will at once become clear from the following examples.

There is another procedure by which an enemy can be injured. One gets possession of some of his hair or nails or other waste products or even a piece of his clothing, and treats them in some hostile way. It is then exactly as though one had got possession of the man himself; and he himself experiences whatever it is that has been done to the objects that originated from him. In the view of primitive man, one of the most important parts of a person is his name. So that if one knows the name of a man or of a spirit, one has obtained a certain amount of power over the owner of the name. This is the origin of the remarkable precautions and restrictions in the use of names which we have already touched upon in the essay on taboo. (See p. 2699 ff.) In these examples the place of similarity is evidently taken by affinity.

Totem And Taboo

2725

The higher motives for cannibalism among primitive races have a similar origin. By incorporating parts of a person’s body through the act of eating, one at the same time acquires the qualities possessed by him. This leads in certain circumstances to precautions and restrictions in regard to diet. A woman who is with child will avoid eating the flesh of certain animals for fear that any undesirable qualities they may have (cowardice, for instance) might be passed over to the child that is nourished by her. The magical power is not affected even if the connection between the two objects has already been severed or even if the contact occurred only on a single important occasion. For instance, the belief that there is a magical bond between a wound and the weapon which caused it may be traced unaltered for thousands of years. If a Melanesian can obtain possession of the bow which caused his wound, he will keep it carefully in a cool place so as to reduce the inflammation of the wound. But if the bow was left in the enemy’s possession, it will undoubtedly be hung up close to the fire so that the wound may become thoroughly hot and inflamed. Pliny (in his Natural History, Book xxviii) tells us that ‘if you have wounded a man and are sorry for it, you have only to spit on the hand that gave the wound, and the pain of the sufferer will be instantly alleviated’. Francis Bacon (in his Sylva Sylvarum) mentions that ‘it is constantly received and avouched that the anointing of the weapon that maketh the wound will heal the wound itself’. English country people are said even to day to follow this prescription, and if they cut themselves with a scythe carefully keep the instrument clean, to prevent the wound from festering. ‘At Norwich in June 1902 a woman named Matilda Henry accidentally ran a nail into her foot. Without examining the wound, or even removing her stocking, she caused her daughter to grease the nail, saying that if this were done no harm would come of the hurt. A few days afterwards she died of lockjaw’ - as a result of this displaced antisepsis. (Frazer, ibid., 203.)

Totem And Taboo

2726

The last group of instances exemplify what Frazer distinguishes from ‘imitative’ magic under the name of ‘contagious’ magic. What is believed to be their effective principle is no longer similarity but spatial connection, contiguity, or at least imagined contiguity - the recollection of it. Since, however, similarity and contiguity are the two essential principles of processes of association, it appears that the true explanation of all the folly of magical observances is the domination of the association of ideas. The aptness of Tylor’s description of magic which I have already quoted now becomes evident: mistaking an ideal connection for a real one. Frazer (1911a, 1, 420) has put it almost in the same words: ‘Men mistook the order of their ideas for the order of nature, and hence imagined that the control which they have, or seem to have, over their thoughts, permitted them to exercise a corresponding control over things.’

We shall at first be surprised to learn that this illuminating explanation of magic has been rejected by some writers as unsatisfactory (e.g. Thomas, 1910-11a). On reflection, however, it will be seen that the criticism is justified. The associative theory of magic merely explains the paths along which magic proceeds; it does not explain its true essence, namely the misunderstanding which leads it to replace the laws of nature by psychological ones. Some dynamic factor is evidently missing. But whereas the critics of Frazer’s theory have gone astray in their search for it, it will be easy to arrive at a satisfactory explanation of magic merely by carrying the associative theory further and deeper.

Let us consider first the simpler and more important case of imitative magic. According to Frazer (1911a, 1, 54) it can be practised by itself, whereas contagious magic as a rule presupposes the other. It is easy to perceive the motives which lead men to practise magic: they are human wishes. All we need to suppose is that primitive man had an immense belief in the power of his wishes. The basic reason why what he sets about by magical means comes to pass is, after all, simply that he wills it. To begin with, therefore, the emphasis is only upon his wish.

Totem And Taboo

2727

Children are in an analogous psychical situation, though their motor efficiency is still undeveloped. I have elsewhere (1911b) put forward the hypothesis that, to begin with, they satisfy their wishes in a hallucinatory manner, that is, they create a satisfying situation by means of centrifugal excitations of their sense organs. An adult primitive man has an alternative method open to him. His wishes are accompanied by a motor impulse, the will, which is later destined to alter the whole face of the earth in order to satisfy his wishes. This motor impulse is at first employed to give a representation of the satisfying situation in such a way that it becomes possible to experience the satisfaction by means of what might be described as motor hallucinations. This kind of representation of a satisfied wish is quite comparable to children’s play, which succeeds their earlier purely sensory technique of satisfaction. If children and primitive men find play and imitative representation enough for them, that is not a sign of their being unassuming in our sense or of their resignedly accepting their actual impotence. It is the easily understandable result of the paramount virtue they ascribe to their wishes, of the will that is associated with those wishes and of the methods by which those wishes operate. As time goes on, the psychological accent shifts from the motives for the magical act on to the measures by which it is carried out - that is, on to the act itself. (It would perhaps be more correct to say that it is only these measures that reveal to the subject the excessive valuation which he attaches to his psychical acts.) It thus comes to appear as though it is the magical act itself which, owing to its similarity with the desired result, alone determines the occurrence of that result. There is no opportunity, at the stage of animistic thinking, for showing any objective evidence of the true state of affairs. But a possibility of doing so does arrive at a later time, when, though all of these procedures are still being carried out, the psychical phenomenon of doubt has begun to emerge as an expression of a tendency to repression. At that point, men will be ready to admit that conjuring up spirits has no result unless it is accompanied by faith, and that the magical power of prayer fails if there is no piety at work behind it.¹

¹ Cf. the King in Hamlet (III. 3):

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

Totem And Taboo

2728

The fact that it has been possible to construct a system of contagious magic on associations of contiguity shows that the importance attached to wishes and to the will has been extended from them on to all those psychical acts which are subject to the will. A general overvaluation has thus come about of all mental processes - an attitude towards the world, that is, which, in view of our knowledge of the relation between reality and thought, cannot fail to strike us as an overvaluation of the latter. Things become less important than ideas of things: whatever is done to the latter will inevitably also occur to the former. Relations which hold between the ideas of things are assumed to hold equally between the things themselves. Since distance is of no importance in thinking - since what lies furthest apart both in time and space can without difficulty be comprehended in a single act of consciousness - so, too, the world of magic has a telepathic disregard for spatial distance and treats past situations as though they were present. In the animistic epoch the reflection of the internal world is bound to blot out the other picture of the world - the one which we seem to perceive.

It is further to be noticed that the two principles of association - similarity and contiguity - are both included in the more comprehensive concept of ‘contact’. Association by contiguity is contact in the literal sense; association by similarity is contact in the metaphorical sense. The use of the same word for the two kinds of relation is no doubt accounted for by some identity in the psychical processes concerned which we have not yet grasped. We have here the same range of meaning of the idea of ‘contact’ as we found in our analysis of taboo. (Cf. p. 2675.)

By way of summary, then, it may be said that the principle governing magic, the technique of the animistic mode of thinking, is the principle of the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’.

(3)

I have adopted the term ‘omnipotence of thoughts’ from a highly intelligent man who suffered from obsessional ideas and who, after having been set right by psycho-analytic treatment, was able to give evidence of his efficiency and good sense. (Cf. Freud, 1909d.) He had coined the phrase as an explanation of all the strange and uncanny events by which he, like others afflicted with the same illness, seemed to be pursued. If he thought of someone, he would be sure to meet that very person immediately afterwards, as though by magic. If he suddenly asked after the health of an acquaintance whom he had not seen for a long time, he would hear that he had just died, so that it would look as though a telepathic message had arrived from him. If, without any really serious intention, he swore at some stranger, he might be sure that the man would die soon afterwards, so that he would feel responsible for his death. In the course of the treatment he himself was able to tell me how the deceptive appearance arose in most of these cases, and by what contrivances he himself had helped to strengthen his own superstitious beliefs. All obsessional neurotics are superstitious in this way, usually against their better judgement.¹

¹ We appear to attribute an ‘uncanny’ quality to impressions that seek to confirm the omnipotence of thoughts and the animistic mode of thinking in general, after we have reached a stage at which, in our judgement, we have abandoned such beliefs.

Totem And Taboo

2729

It is in obsessional neuroses that the survival of the omnipotence of thoughts is most clearly visible and that the consequences of this primitive mode of thinking come closest to consciousness. But we must not be misled into supposing that it is a distinguishing feature of this particular neurosis, for analytic investigation reveals the same thing in the other neuroses as well. In all of them what determines the formation of symptoms is the reality not of experience but of thought. Neurotics live in a world apart, where, as I have said elsewhere, only ‘neurotic currency’ is legal tender; that is to say, they are only affected by what is thought with intensity and pictured with emotion, whereas agreement with external reality is a matter of no importance. What hysterics repeat in their attacks and fix by means of their symptoms are experiences which have occurred in that form only in their imagination though it is true that in the last resort those imagined experiences go back to actual events or are based upon them. To attribute the neurotic sense of guilt to real misdeeds would show an equal misunderstanding. An obsessional neurotic may be weighed down by a sense of guilt that would be appropriate in a mass-murderer, while in fact, from his childhood onwards, he has behaved to his fellow-men as the most considerate and scrupulous member of society. Nevertheless, his sense of guilt has a justification: it is founded on the intense and frequent death wishes against his fellows which are unconsciously at work in him. It has a justification if what we take into account are unconscious thoughts and not intentional deeds. Thus the omnipotence of thoughts, the overvaluation of mental processes as compared with reality, is seen to have unrestricted play in the emotional life of neurotic patients and in everything that derives from it. If one of them undergoes psycho-analytic treatment, which makes what is unconscious in him conscious, he will be unable to believe that thoughts are free and will constantly be afraid of expressing evil wishes, as though their expression would lead inevitably to their fulfilment. This behaviour, as well as the superstitions which he practises in ordinary life, reveals his resemblance to the savages who believe they can alter the external world by mere thinking.

Totem And Taboo

2730

The primary obsessive acts of these neurotics are of an entirely magical character. If they are not charms, they are at all events counter-charms, designed to ward off the expectations of disaster with which the neurosis usually starts. Whenever I have succeeded in penetrating the mystery, I have found that the expected disaster was death. Schopenhauer has said that the problem of death stands at the outset of every philosophy; and we have already seen that the origin of the belief in souls and in demons, which is the essence of animism, goes back to the impression which is made upon men by death. It is difficult to judge whether the obsessive or protective acts performed by obsessional neurotics follow the law of similarity (or, as the case may be, of contrast); for as a rule, owing to the prevailing conditions of the neurosis, they have been distorted by being displaced on to something very small, some action in itself of the greatest triviality.¹ The protective formulas of obsessional neuroses, too, have their counterpart in the formulas of magic. It is possible, however, to describe the course of development of obsessive acts: we can show how they begin by being as remote as possible from anything sexual - magical defences against evil wishes - and how they end by being substitutes for the forbidden sexual act and the closest possible imitations of it.

¹ A further motive for such displacement on to a very small action will appear in what follows.

Totem And Taboo

2731

If we are prepared to accept the account given above of the evolution of human views of the universe - an animistic phase followed by a religious phase and this in turn by a scientific one - it will not be difficult to follow the vicissitudes of the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’ through these different phases. At the animistic stage men ascribe omnipotence to themselves. At the religious stage they transfer it to the gods but do not seriously abandon it themselves, for they reserve the power of influencing the gods in a variety of ways according to their wishes. The scientific view of the universe no longer affords any room for human omnipotence; men have acknowledged their smallness and submitted resignedly to death and to the other necessities of nature. None the less some of the primitive belief in omnipotence still survives in men’s faith in the power of the human mind, which grapples with the laws of reality.

If we trace back the development of libidinal trends as we find them in the individual from their adult forms to the first beginnings in childhood, an important distinction emerges, which I have described in my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d). Manifestations of the sexual instincts can be observed from the very first, but to begin with they are not yet directed towards any external object. The separate instinctual components of sexuality work independently of one another to obtain pleasure and find satisfaction in the subject’s own body. This stage is known as that of auto-erotism and it is succeeded by one in which an object is chosen.

Further study has shown that it is expedient and indeed indispensable to insert a third stage between these two, or, putting it in another way, to divide the first stage, that of auto-erotism, into two. At this intermediate stage, the importance of which is being made more and more evident by research, the hitherto isolated sexual instincts have already come together into a single whole and have also found an object. But this object is not an external one, extraneous to the subject, but it is his own ego, which has been constituted at about this same time. Bearing in mind pathological fixations of this new stage, which become observable later, we have given it the name of ‘narcissism’. The subject behaves as though he were in love with himself; his egoistic instincts and his libidinal wishes are not yet separable under our analysis.

Totem And Taboo

2732

Although we are not yet in a position to describe with sufficient accuracy the characteristics of this narcissistic stage, at which the hitherto dissociated sexual instincts come together into a single unity and cathect the ego as an object, we suspect already that this narcissistic organization is never wholly abandoned. A human being remains to some extent narcissistic even after he has found external objects for his libido. The cathexes of objects which he effects are as it were emanations of the libido that still remains in his ego and can be drawn back into it once more. The state of being in love, which is psychologically so remarkable and is the normal prototype of the psychoses, shows these emanations at their maximum compared to the level of self-love.

Primitive men and neurotics, as we have seen, attach a high valuation - in our eyes an over-valuation - to psychical acts. This attitude may plausibly be brought into relation with narcissism and regarded as an essential component of it. It may be said that in primitive men the process of thinking is still to a great extent sexualized. This is the origin of their belief in the omnipotence of thoughts, their unshakable confidence in the possibility of controlling the world and their inaccessibility to the experiences, so easily obtainable, which could teach them man’s true position in the universe. As regards neurotics, we find that on the one hand a considerable part of this primitive attitude has survived in their constitution, and on the other hand that the sexual repression that has occurred in them has brought about a further sexualization of their thinking processes. The psychological results must be the same in both cases, whether the libidinal hypercathexis of thinking is an original one or has been produced by regression: intellectual narcissism and the omnipotence of thoughts.¹

¹ ‘It is almost an axiom with writers on this subject, that a sort of Solipsism, or Berkleianism (as Professor Sully terms it as he finds it in the Child), operates in the savage to make him refuse to recognize death as a fact.’ (Marett, 1900, 178.)

Totem And Taboo

2733

If we may regard the existence among primitive races of the omnipotence of thoughts as evidence in favour of narcissism, we are encouraged to attempt a comparison between the phases in the development of men’s view of the universe and the stages of an individual’s libidinal development. The animistic phase would correspond to narcissism both chronologically and in its content; the religious phase would correspond to the stage of object-choice of which the characteristic is a child’s attachment to his parents; while the scientific phase would have an exact counterpart in the stage at which an individual has reached maturity, has renounced the pleasure principle, adjusted himself to reality and turned to the external world for the object of his desires.¹

In only a single field of our civilization has the omnipotence of thoughts been retained, and that is in the field of art. Only in art does it still happen that a man who is consumed by desires performs something resembling the accomplishment of those desires and that what he does in play produces emotional effects - thanks to artistic illusion - just as though it were something real. People speak with justice of the ‘magic of art’ and compare artists to magicians. But the comparison is perhaps more significant than it claims to be. There can be no doubt that art did not begin as art for art’s sake. It worked originally in the service of impulses which are for the most part extinct to-day. And among them we may suspect the presence of many magical purposes.²

¹ I will only briefly allude here to the fact that the original narcissism of children has a decisive influence upon our view of the development of their character and excludes the possibility of their having any primary sense of inferiority.

² Cf. Reinach, ‘L’art et la magie’ (1905-12, 1, 125-36). In Reinach’s opinion the primitive artists who left behind the carvings and paintings of animals in the French caves, did not desire to ‘please’ but to ‘evoke’ or conjure up. He thus explains why it is that these pictures are situated in the darkest and most inaccessible parts of the caves and that dangerous beasts of prey do not appear among them. ‘Les modernes parlent souvent, par hyperbole, de la magie du pinceau ou du ciseau d’un grand artiste et, en général, de la magie de l’art. Entendu au sens propre, qui est celui d’une contrainte mystique exercée par la volonté de l’homme sur d’autres volontés ou sur les choses, cette expression n’est plus admissible; mais nous avons vu qu’elle était autrefois rigoureusement vraie, du moins dans l’opinion des artistes.’ (Ibid., 136.) [‘In modern times people often speak metaphorically of the magic of a great artist’s brush or chisel, or more generally of the magic of art. This expression is no longer permissible in its proper sense of a mystical force brought to bear by the human will upon other wills or upon objects; but, as we have seen, there was a time when it was literally true - at least in the artists’ opinion.’]

Totem And Taboo

2734

(4)

Thus the first picture which man formed of the world - animism - was a psychological one. It needed no scientific basis as yet, since science only begins after it has been realized that the world is unknown and that means must therefore be sought for getting to know it. Animism came to primitive man naturally and as a matter of course. He knew what things were like in the world, namely just as he felt himself to be. We are thus prepared to find that primitive man transposed the structural conditions of his own mind¹ into the external world; and we may attempt to reverse the process and put back into the human mind what animism teaches as to the nature of things.

The technique of animism, magic, reveals in the clearest and most unmistakable way an intention to impose the laws governing mental life upon real things; in this, spirits need not as yet play any part, though spirits may be taken as objects of magical treatment. Thus the assumptions of magic are more fundamental and older than the doctrine of spirits, which forms the kernel of animism. Our psycho-analytic point of view coincides here with a theory put forward by R. R. Marett (1900), who postulates a pre-animistic stage before animism, the character of which is best indicated by the term ‘animatism’, the doctrine of the universality of life. Experience has little light to throw on pre-animism, since no race has yet been discovered which is without the concept of spirits. (Cf. Wundt, 1906, 171 ff.)

Whereas magic still reserves omnipotence solely for thoughts, animism hands some of it over to spirits and so prepares the way for the construction of a religion. What, we may ask, can have induced a primitive man to make this first act of renunciation? It can scarcely have been a recognition of the falseness of his premises, for he continued to practise the magical technique.

¹ Which he was aware of by what is known as endopsychic perception.

Totem And Taboo

2735

Spirits and demons, as I have shown in the last essay, are only projections of man’s own emotional impulses.¹ He turns his emotional cathexes into persons, he peoples the world with them and meets his internal mental processes again outside himself - in just the same way as that intelligent paranoic, Schreber, found a reflection of the attachments and detachments of his libido in the vicissitudes of his confabulated ‘rays of God’.²

I propose to avoid (as I have already done elsewhere³) entering into the general problem of the origin of the tendency to project mental processes into the outside. It is, however, safe to assume that that tendency will be intensified when projection promises to bring with it the advantage of mental relief. Such an advantage may be expected with certainty where a conflict has arisen between different impulses all of which are striving towards omnipotence - for they clearly cannot all become omnipotent. The pathological process in paranoia in fact makes use of the mechanism of projection in order to deal with mental conflicts of this kind. The typical case of such a conflict is one between the two members of a pair of opposites - the case of an ambivalent attitude, which we have examined in detail as it appears in someone mourning the death of a loved relative. This kind of case must seem particularly likely to provide a motive for the creation of projections. Here again we are in agreement with the writers who maintain that the first born spirits were evil spirits, and who derive the idea of a soul from the impression made by death upon the survivors. The only difference is that we do not lay stress on the intellectual problem with which death confronts the living; in our view the force which gives the impetus to research is rather to be attributed to the emotional conflict into which the survivors are plunged.

Thus man’s first theoretical achievement - the creation of spirits - seems to have arisen from the same source as the first moral restrictions to which he was subjected - the observances of taboo. The fact that they had the same origin need not imply, however, that they arose simultaneously. If the survivors’ position in relation to the dead was really what first caused primitive man to reflect, and compelled him to hand over some of his omnipotence to the spirits and to sacrifice some of his freedom of action, then these cultural products would constitute a first acknowledgement of ’Ανάγκη [Necessity], which opposes human narcissism. Primitive man would thus be submitting to the supremacy of death with the same gesture with which he seemed to be denying it.

¹ I assume that at this early narcissistic stage cathexes arising from libidinal and from other sources of excitation may still be indistinguishable from one another.

² Cf. Schreber (1903) and Freud (1911c).

³ In my paper on Schreber (Freud, 1911c).

Totem And Taboo

2736

If we may venture to exploit our hypothesis still further, we may inquire which essential part of our psychological structure is reflected and reproduced in the projective creation of souls and spirits. It could scarcely be disputed that the primitive conception of a soul, however much it may differ from the later, purely immaterial soul, is nevertheless intrinsically the same; that is to say, it assumes that both persons and things are of a double nature and that their known attributes and modifications are distributed between their two component portions. This original ‘duality’, to borrow an expression from Herbert Spencer (1893), is identical with the dualism proclaimed by our current distinction between soul and body and by such ineradicable linguistic expressions of it as the use of phrases like ‘beside himself’ or ‘coming to himself’ in relation to fits of rage or fainting (ibid., 144).

When we, no less than primitive man, project something into external reality, what is happening must surely be this: we are recognizing the existence of two states - one in which something is directly given to the senses and to consciousness (that is, is present to them), and alongside it another, in which the same thing is latent but capable of re-appearing. In short, we are recognizing the co-existence of perception and memory, or, putting it more generally, the existence of unconscious mental processes alongside the conscious ones.¹ It might be said that in the last analysis the ‘spirit’ of persons or things comes down to their capacity to be remembered and imagined after perception of them has ceased.

It is not, of course, to be expected that either the primitive or the present-day concept of a ‘soul’ will be separated from that of the other portion of the personality by the same line of demarcation which our modern science draws between conscious and unconscious mental activity. The animistic soul unites properties from both sides. Its volatile and mobile quality, its power of leaving the body and of taking possession, temporarily or permanently, of another body - these are characteristics which remind us unmistakably of the nature of consciousness. But the way in which it remains concealed behind the manifest personality is reminiscent of the unconscious; immutability and indestructibility are qualities which we no longer attribute to conscious but rather to unconscious processes, and we regard the latter as the true vehicle of mental activity.

¹ Cf. my short paper on the use of the concept ‘unconscious’ in psycho-analysis, first published in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research in 1912.

Totem And Taboo

2737

I have said that animism is a system of thought, the first complete theory of the universe, and I shall now go on to draw certain conclusions from the psycho-analytic view of such systems. Every day of our lives our experience is in a position to show us the principal characteristics of a ‘system’. We have dreams during the night and we have learnt how to interpret them during the day. Dreams may, without contradicting their nature, appear confused and disconnected. But they may, on the contrary, simulate the orderly impressions of a real experience, they may make one event follow from another and make one portion of their content refer to another. Such a result can be more or less successfully achieved; but it scarcely ever succeeds so completely as to leave no absurdity, no rift in its texture, visible. When we come to submit a dream to interpretation, we find that the erratic and irregular arrangement of its constituent parts is quite unimportant from the point of view of our understanding it. The essential elements in a dream are the dream-thoughts, and these have meaning, connection and order. But their order is quite other than that remembered by us as present in the manifest dream. In the latter the connection between the dream-thoughts has been abandoned and may either remain completely lost or be replaced by the new connection exhibited in the manifest content. The elements of the dream, apart from their being condensed, are almost invariably arranged in a new order more or less independent of their earlier arrangement. Finally, it must be added that whatever the original material of the dream-thoughts has been turned into by the dream-work is then subjected to a further influence. This is what is known as ‘secondary revision’, and its purpose is evidently to get rid of the disconnectedness and unintelligibility produced by the dream-work and replace it by a new ‘meaning’. But this new meaning, arrived at by secondary revision, is no longer the meaning of the dream-thoughts.

The secondary revision of the product of the dream-work is an admirable example of the nature and pretensions of a system. There is an intellectual function in us which demands unity, connection and intelligibility from any material, whether of perception or thought, that comes within its grasp; and if, as a result of special circumstances, it is unable to establish a true connection, it does not hesitate to fabricate a false one. Systems constructed in this way are known to us not only from dreams, but also from phobias, from obsessive thinking and from delusions. The construction of systems is seen most strikingly in delusional disorders (in paranoia), where it dominates the symptomatic picture; but its occurrence in other forms of neuro-psychosis must not be overlooked. In all these cases it can be shown that a rearrangement of the psychical material has been made with a fresh aim in view; and the rearrangement may often have to be a drastic one if the outcome is to be made to appear intelligible from the point of view of the system. Thus a system is best characterized by the fact that at least two reasons can be discovered for each of its products: a reason based upon the premises of the system (a reason, then, which may be delusional) and a concealed reason, which we must judge to be the truly operative and the real one.

Totem And Taboo

2738

This may be illustrated by an example from a neurosis. In my essay on taboo I mentioned a woman patient of mine whose obsessional prohibitions showed the most perfect agreement with a Maori taboo (p. 2676). This woman’s neurosis was aimed at her husband and culminated in her defence against an unconscious wish that he should die. Her manifest, systematic phobia, however, related to the mention of death in general, while her husband was entirely excluded from it and was never an object of her conscious solicitude. One day she heard her husband giving instructions that his razors, which had lost their edge, were to be taken to a particular shop to be re-set. Driven by a strange uneasiness, she herself set off for the shop. After reconnoitring the ground, she came back and insisted that her husband should get rid of the razors for good and all, since she had discovered that next door to the shop he had named there was an undertaker’s establishment: owing to the plan he had made, she said, the razors had become inextricably involved with thoughts of death. This, then, was the systematic reason for her prohibition. We may be quite sure that, even without her discovery of the next-door shop, the patient would have come home with a prohibition against the razors. It would have been enough if she had met a hearse on her way to the shop, or someone dressed in mourning or carrying a funeral wreath. The net of possible determinants for the prohibition was spread wide enough to catch the quarry in any event; it merely depended on her decision whether to draw it together or not. It could be shown that on other occasions she would not put the determinants into operation, and she would explain this by saying it had been ‘a better day’. The real cause of her prohibition upon the razors was, of course, as it was easy to discover, her repugnance to attaching any pleasurable feeling to the idea that her husband might cut his throat with the newly ground razors.

In just the same may, an inhibition upon movement (an abasia or an agoraphobia) will gradually become more complete and more detailed, when once that system has succeeded in installing itself as a representative of an unconscious wish and of the defence against the wish. Whatever other unconscious phantasies and operative reminiscences may be present in the patient force their way to expression as symptoms along this same path, once it has been opened, and group themselves into an appropriate new arrangement within the framework of the inhibition upon movement. Thus it would be a vain and indeed a foolish task to attempt to understand the complexities and details of the symptoms of (for example) an agoraphobia on the basis of its underlying premises; for the whole consistency and strictness of the combination are merely apparent. Just as with the façades of dreams, if we look more attentively we find the most blatant inconsistency and arbitrariness in the structure of symptoms. The real reason for the details of a systematic phobia of this kind lies in concealed determinants, which need have nothing to do with an inhibition upon movement; and that, too, is why these phobias take such various and contradictory shapes in different people.

Totem And Taboo

2739

Let us now return to the animistic system with which we are dealing. The insight we have gained into other psychological systems enables us to conclude that with primitive man, too, ‘superstition’ need not be the only or the real reason for some particular custom or observance and does not excuse us from the duty of searching for its hidden motives. Under the domination of an animistic system it is inevitable that every observance and every activity shall have a systematic basis, which nowadays we describe as ‘superstitious’. ‘Superstition’ - like ‘anxiety’, ‘dreams’ and ‘demons’ - is one of those provisional psychological concepts which have crumbled under the impact of psycho-analytic research. Once we have penetrated behind these constructions, which are like screens erected as defences against correct understanding, we begin to realize that the mental life and cultural level of savages have not hitherto had all the recognition they deserve.

If we take instinctual repression as a measure of the level of civilization that has been reached, we shall have to admit that even under the animistic system advances and developments took place which are unjustly despised on account of their superstitious basis. When we are told that the warriors in a savage tribe practise the greatest continence and cleanliness when they go on the war-path, the explanation is put forward that their motive is ‘a fear lest the enemy should obtain the refuse of their persons, and thus be enabled to work their destruction by magic’ (Frazer, 1911b, 157); and an analogous superstitious reason could be suggested for their continence. None the less the fact remains that they have made an instinctual renunciation; and we can understand the position better if we suppose that the savage warrior submits to these restrictions as a counter-measure because he is on the point of yielding completely to the satisfaction of cruel and hostile impulses which are as a rule prohibited to him. The same is true of the numerous cases of sexual restrictions being imposed on anyone who is engaged on difficult or responsible work (ibid., 200 f.). Though the grounds alleged for these prohibitions may belong to a magical context, yet the fundamental idea of gaining greater strength by renouncing some instinctual satisfaction remains unmistakable; and the hygienic root of the prohibition which lies alongside its magical rationalization must not be overlooked. When the men of a savage tribe go out on an expedition to hunt, to fish, to fight or to gather precious plants, their wives left at home are subjected to many oppressive restrictions, to which the savages themselves ascribe a favourable influence, operating at a distance upon the success of the expedition. But it requires very little penetration to see that this factor which operates at a distance is nothing other than the absent men’s longing thoughts of home, and that behind these disguises lies a sound piece of psychological insight that the men will only do their best if they feel completely secure about the women whom they have left behind them unguarded. Sometimes they will even themselves declare, without alleging any magical reasons, that a wife’s infidelity in marriage will bring to nothing the efforts of an absent husband engaged on some responsible work.

Totem And Taboo

2740

The countless taboo regulations to which the women in savage communities are subject during menstruation are said to be due to a superstitious horror of blood, and this is no doubt in fact one of their determinants. But it would be wrong to overlook the possibility that in this case the horror of blood also serves aesthetic and hygienic purposes, which are obliged in every case to cloak themselves behind magical motives.

I am under no illusion that in putting forward these attempted explanations I am laying myself open to the charge of endowing modern savages with a subtlety in their mental activities which exceeds all probability. It seems to me quite possible, however, that the same may be true of our attitude towards the psychology of those races that have remained at the animistic level as is true of our attitude towards the mental life of children, which we adults no longer understand and whose fullness and delicacy of feeling we have in consequence so greatly underestimated.

One further group of taboo observances, which have not hitherto been accounted for, deserve mention, since they admit of an explanation which is familiar to psycho-analysts. Among many savage peoples there is a prohibition against keeping sharp weapons or cutting instruments in a house. Frazer (1911b, 238) quotes a German superstition to the effect that a knife should not be left edge upwards, for fear that God and the angels might be injured on it. May we not recognize in this taboo a premonitory warning against possible ‘symptomatic acts’ in the execution of which a sharp weapon might be employed by unconscious evil impulses?

Totem And Taboo

2741

IV

THE RETURN OF TOTEMISM IN CHILDHOOD

There are no grounds for fearing that psycho-analysis, which first discovered that psychical acts and structures are invariably overdetermined, will be tempted to trace the origin of anything so complicated as religion to a single source. If psycho-analysis is compelled - and is, indeed, in duty bound - to lay all the emphasis upon one particular source, that does not mean it is claiming either that that source is the only one or that it occupies first place among the numerous contributory factors. Only when we can synthesize the findings in the different fields of research will it become possible to arrive at the relative importance of the part played in the genesis of religion by the mechanism discussed in these pages. Such a task lies beyond the means as well as beyond the purposes of a psycho-analyst.

(1)

In the first of this series of essays we became acquainted with the concept of totemism. We heard that totemism is a system which takes the place of a religion among certain primitive peoples of Australia, America and Africa, and provides the basis of their social organization. As we have heard, it was a Scotsman, McLennan, who in 1869 first drew general attention to the phenomena of totemism (which had hitherto been regarded as mere curiosities) by giving voice to a suspicion that a large number of customs and usages current in various societies ancient and modern were to be explained as remnants of a totemic age. Since that date science has fully accepted his estimate of totemism. Let me quote, as one of the most recent statements on the subject, a passage from Wundt’s Elemente der Völkerpsychologie (1912, 139): ‘In the light of all these facts, the conclusion appears highly probable that at some time totemic culture everywhere paved the way for a more advanced civilization, and, thus, that it represents a transitional stage between the age of primitive men and the era of heroes and gods.’

Totem And Taboo

2742

The purpose of the present essays obliges us to enter more deeply into the nature of totemism. For reasons which will presently become clear I will begin with an account given by Reinach, who, in 1900,¹ sketched out a ‘Code du totémisme’ in twelve Articles - a catechism, as it were, of the totemic religion:

(1) Certain animals may neither be killed nor eaten, but individual members of the species are reared by human beings and cared for by them.

(2) An animal which has died an accidental death is mourned over and buried with the same honours as a member of the clan.

(3) In some instances the eating prohibition extends only to one particular part of the animal’s body.

(4) When one of the animals which are usually spared has to be killed under the stress of necessity, apologies are offered to it and an attempt is made by means of various artifices and evasions to mitigate the violation of the taboo - that is to say, the murder.

(5) When the animal is made the victim of a ritual sacrifice, it is solemnly bewailed.

(6) On particular solemn occasions and at religious ceremonies the skins of certain animals are worn. Where totemism is still in force, they are the totem animals.

(7) Clans and individuals adopt the names of animals - viz. of the totem animals.

(8) Many clans make use of representations of animals on their standards and weapons; the men have pictures of animals painted or tattooed on their bodies.

(9) If the totem is a formidable or dangerous animal, it is supposed to spare members of the clan named after it.

(10) The totem animal protects and gives warning to members of its clan.

(11) The totem animal foretells the future to the loyal members of its clan and serves them as guide.

(12) The members of the totemic clan often believe that they are related to the totem animal by the bond of a common ancestry.

This catechism of the totemic religion can only be seen at its proper value if we take into account the fact that Reinach has included in it all the indications and traces from which the earlier existence of a totemic system can be inferred. The author’s peculiar attitude to the problem is shown by his partial neglect of the essential features of totemism. As we shall see, he has relegated one of the two principal articles of the totemic catechism to the background and entirely overlooked the other.

¹ Cf. Reinach (1905-12, 1, 17 ff.).

Totem And Taboo

2743

To obtain a correct picture of the nature of totemism we must turn to another author, who has devoted a four-volume work to the subject, which combines the fullest collection of the relevant observations with the most detailed discussion of the problems they raise. We shall remain indebted to J. G. Frazer, the author of Totemism and Exogamy (1910), both for enjoyment and instruction, even if psycho-analytic research may lead to conclusions which differ widely from his.¹

¹ It may be as well, however, to warn the reader, in advance, of the difficulties with which any statements on the subject have to contend.

In the first place, those who collect the observations are not the same as those who examine and discuss them. The former are travellers and missionaries while the latter are students who may never have set eyes on the objects of their researches. Again, communication with savages is not an easy matter. The observers are not always acquainted with the native language but may be obliged to rely on the help of interpreters or to conduct their inquiries through the medium of pidgin-English. Savages are not communicative on the subject of the most intimate details of their cultural life and they talk openly only to those foreigners who have lived among them for many years. They often give false or misleading information for a great variety of motives. (Cf. Frazer, 1910, 1, 150 f.) It should not be forgotten that primitive races are not young races but are in fact as old as civilized races. There is no reason to suppose that, for the benefit of our information, they have retained their original ideas and institutions undeveloped and undistorted. On the contrary, it is certain that there have been profound changes in every direction among primitive races, so that it is never possible to decide without hesitation how far their present-day conditions and opinions preserve the primaeval past in a petrified form and how far they are distortions and modifications of it. Hence arise the all-too-frequent disputes among the authorities as to which characteristics of a primitive civilization are to be regarded as primary and as to which are later and secondary developments. The determination of the original state of things thus invariably remains a matter of construction. Finally, it is not easy to feel one’s way into primitive modes of thinking. We misunderstand primitive men just as easily as we do children, and we are always apt to interpret their actions and feelings according to our own mental constellations.

Totem And Taboo

2744

‘A totem’, wrote Frazer in his first essay on the subject,¹ ‘is a class of material objects which a savage regards with superstitious respect, believing that there exists between him and every member of the class an intimate and altogether special relation . . . The connection between a man and his totem is mutually beneficent; the totem protects the man, and the man shows his respect for the totem in various ways, by not killing it if it be an animal, and not cutting or gathering it if it be a plant. As distinguished from a fetish, a totem is never an isolated individual, but always a class of objects, generally a species of animals or of plants, more rarely a class of inanimate natural objects, very rarely a class of artificial objects. . . .

‘Totems are of at least three kinds: (1) the clan totem, common to a whole clan, and passing by inheritance from generation to generation; (2) the sex totem, common either to all the males or to all the females of a tribe, to the exclusion in either case of the other sex; (3) the individual totem, belonging to a single individual and not passing to his descendants. . . .’

The last two kinds of totem do not compare in significance with the clan totem. Unless we are quite mistaken, they are late developments and of little importance for the essential nature of the totem.

‘The clan totem is reverenced by a body of men and women who call themselves by the name of the totem, believe themselves to be of one blood, descendants of a common ancestor, and are bound together by common obligations to each other and by a common faith in the totem. Totemism is thus both a religious and a social system. In its religious aspect it consists of the relations of mutual respect and protection between a man and his totem; in its social aspect it consists of the relations of the clansmen to each other and to men of other clans. In the later history of totemism these two sides, the religious and the social, tend to part company; the social system sometimes survives the religious; and, on the other hand, religion sometimes bears traces of totemism in countries where the social system based on totemism has disappeared. How in the origin of totemism these two sides were related to each other it is, in our ignorance of that origin, impossible to say with certainty. But on the whole the evidence points strongly to the conclusion that the two sides were originally inseparable; that, in other words, the farther we go back, the more we should find that the clansman regards himself and his totem as beings of the same species, and the less he distinguishes between conduct towards his totem and towards his fellow-clansmen.’

¹ Totemism, Edinburgh, 1887, reprinted in Frazer (1910, 1, 3 ff.).

Totem And Taboo

2745

In giving particulars of totemism as a religious system, Frazer begins by stating that the members of a totem clan call themselves by the name of their totem, and commonly believe themselves to be actually descended from it. It follows from this belief that they will not hunt the totem animal or kill or eat it and, if it is something other than an animal, they refrain from making use of it in other ways. The rules against killing or eating the totem are not the only taboos; sometimes they are forbidden to touch it, or even to look at it; in a number of cases the totem may not be spoken of by its proper name. Any violation of the taboos that protect the totem are automatically punished by severe illness or death.¹

Specimens of the totem animal are occasionally reared by the clan and cared for in captivity.² A totem animal that is found dead is mourned for and buried like a dead clansman. If it is necessary to kill a totem animal, this is done according to a prescribed ritual of apologies and ceremonies of expiation.

The clan expects to receive protection and care from its totem. If it is a dangerous animal (such as a beast of prey or a venomous snake) there is a presumption that it will do no harm to its clansmen; and if that expectation is not fulfilled the injured man is expelled from the clan. Oaths, in Frazer’s opinion, were originally ordeals; thus, many tests of descent and legitimacy were submitted for decision to the totem. The totem gives help in sickness and delivers omens and warnings to its clan. The appearance of the totem in or about a house is often regarded as an omen of death; the totem has come to fetch his kinsman.³

¹ Cf. my earlier essay on taboo.

² As is done to this day with the she-wolf in her cage beside the steps leading up to the Capitol in Rome and with the bears in their den at Berne.

³ Like the White Lady in certain aristocratic families.

Totem And Taboo

2746

In particular important circumstances the clansman seeks to emphasize his kinship with the totem by making himself resemble it externally, by dressing in the skin of the animal, by incising a picture of the totem upon his own body, and so on. This identification with the totem is carried into effect in actions and words on the ceremonial occasions of birth, initiation and burial. Various magical and religious purposes are served by dances in which all the clansmen disguise themselves as their totem and imitate its behaviour. Lastly, there are ceremonies in which the totem animal is ceremoniously killed.¹

The social aspect of totemism is principally expressed in a severely enforced injunction and a sweeping restriction.

The members of a totem clan are brothers and sisters and are bound to help and protect one another. If a member of a clan is killed by someone outside it, the whole clan of the aggressor is responsible for the deed and the whole clan of the murdered man is at one in demanding satisfaction for the blood that has been shed. The totem bond is stronger than that of the family in our sense. The two do not coincide, since the totem is as a rule inherited through the female line, and it is possible that paternal descent may originally have been left entirely out of account.

The corresponding taboo restriction prohibits members of the same totem clan from marrying or having sexual intercourse with each other. Here we have the notorious and mysterious correlate of totemism - exogamy. I have devoted the whole of the first essay in the present work to that subject, so that here I need only repeat that it originates from the intensification among savages of the horror of incest, that it would be fully explained as an assurance against incest under conditions of group marriage, and that it is primarily aimed at restraining the younger generation from incest and that only as a later development does it interfere with the older generation.

¹ Frazer (1910, 1, 45). See my discussion of sacrifice below.

Totem And Taboo

2747

To Frazer’s account of totemism - one of the earliest in the literature of the subject - I will add a few extracts from one of the most recent ones. In his Elemente der Völkerpsychologie, Wundt (1912, 116 ff.) writes as follows: ‘The totem animal is also usually regarded as the ancestral animal of the group in question. "Totem" is, on the one hand a group name, and, on the other, a name indicative of ancestry. In the latter connection it has also a mythological significance. These various ideas, however, interplay in numerous ways. Some of the meanings may recede, so that totems have frequently become a mere nomenclature of tribal divisions, while at other times the idea of ancestry, or, perhaps also, the cult significance, predominates. . . .’ The concept of the totem has a decisive influence upon tribal division and tribal organization, which are subject to certain norms of custom. ‘These norms, and their fixed place in the beliefs and feelings of the tribal members, are connected with the fact that originally, at all events, the totem animal was regarded, for the most part, as having not merely given its name to a group of tribal members but as having actually been its fore father. . . . Bound up with this is the further fact that these animal ancestors possessed a cult. . . . Aside from specific ceremonies and ceremonial festivals, this animal cult originally found expression primarily in the relations maintained towards the totem animal. It was not merely a particular animal that was to a certain extent held sacred, but every representative of the species. The totem members were forbidden to eat the flesh of the totem animal, or were allowed to do so only under specific conditions. A significant counter-phenomenon, not irreconcilable with this, is the fact that on certain occasions the eating of the totem flesh constituted a sort of ceremony. . . .’

‘. . . The most important social aspect of this totemic tribal organization, however, consists in the fact that it involved certain norms of custom regulating the intercourse of the separate groups with one another. Of these norms, those governing marriage relations were of first importance. The tribal organization of this period was bound up with an important institution, exogamy, which originated in the totemic age.’

Totem And Taboo

2748

If we seek to penetrate to the original nature of totemism, without regard to subsequent accretions or attenuations, we find that its essential characteristics are these: Originally, all totems were animals, and were regarded as the ancestors of the different clans. Totems were inherited only through the female line. There was a prohibition against killing the totem (or - which, under primitive conditions, is the same thing - against eating it). Members of a totem clan were forbidden to practise sexual intercourse with one another.¹

We shall now, perhaps, be struck by the fact that in Reinach’s Code du totémisme one of the two principal taboos, that of exogamy, is not mentioned at all, while the belief upon which the second one is founded, namely descent from the totem animal, is only referred to in passing. My reason, however, for selecting the account given by Reinach (a writer, incidentally, who has made very valuable contributions to the subject) was to prepare us for the differences of opinion between the authorities - differences into which we must now enter.

¹ The picture of totemism given by Frazer in his second work on it (‘The Origin of Totemism’, published in the Fortnightly Revue in 1899) agrees with what I have written above: ‘Thus, Totemism has commonly been treated as a primitive system both of religion and of society. As a system of religion it embraces the mystic union of the savage with his totem; as a system of society it comprises the relations in which men and women of the same totem stand to each other and to the members of other totemic groups. And corresponding to these two sides of the system are two rough and ready tests or canons of Totemism: first, the rule that a man may not kill or eat his totem animal or plant; and second, the rule that he may not marry or cohabit with a woman of the same totem.’ Frazer then proceeds (thus plunging us into the middle of the controversies on totemism): ‘Whether the two sides - the religious and the social - have always co-existed or are essentially independent, is a question which has been variously answered.’

Totem And Taboo

2749

(2)

The more incontestable became the conclusion that totemism constitutes a regular phase in all cultures, the more urgent became the need for arriving at an understanding of it and for throwing light upon the puzzle of its essential nature. Everything connected with totemism seems to be puzzling: the decisive problems concern the origin of the idea of descent from the totem and the reasons for exogamy (or rather for the taboo upon incest of which exogamy is the expression), as well as the relation between these two institutions, totemic organization and prohibition of incest. Any satisfactory explanation should be at once a historical and a psychological one. It should tell us under what conditions this peculiar institution developed and to what psychical needs in men it has given expression.

My readers will, I am sure, be astonished to hear of the variety of angles from which attempts have been made to answer these questions, and of the wide divergences of opinion upon them put forward by the experts. Almost any generalization that could be made on the subject of totemism and exogamy seems open to question. Even the account that I have just given, derived from the book published by Frazer in 1887, is open to the criticism that it expresses the present writer’s arbitrary preferences; and indeed it would be contested to-day by Frazer himself, who has repeatedly changed his opinions on the subject.¹

¹ He makes the following admirable comment upon such changes of opinion: ‘That my conclusions on these difficult questions are final, I am not so foolish as to pretend. I have changed my views repeatedly, and I am resolved to change them again with every change of the evidence, for like a chameleon the candid inquirer should shift his colours with the shifting colours of the ground he treads.’ (Frazer, 1910, 1, xiii.)

Totem And Taboo

2750

It is plausible to suppose that an understanding of the essential nature of totemism and exogamy would best be arrived at, if it were possible to come nearer to the origins of the two institutions. But in this connection we must bear in mind Andrew Lang’s warning that even primitive peoples have not retained the original forms of those institutions nor the conditions which gave rise to them; so that we have nothing whatever but hypotheses to fall back upon as a substitute for the observations which we are without.¹ Some of the attempted explanations seem, in the judgement of a psychologist, inadequate at the very outset: they are too rational and take no account of the emotional character of the matters to be explained. Others are based on assumptions which are unconfirmed by observation. Yet others rely upon material which would be better interpreted in another way. There is generally little difficulty in refuting the various views put forward: the authorities are as usual more effective in their criticisms of one another’s work than in their own productions. The conclusion upon most of the points raised must be a non liquet. It is not surprising, therefore, that in the most recent literature on the subject (which is for the most part passed over in the present work) an unmistakable tendency emerges to reject any general solution of totemic problems as impracticable. (See, for instance, Goldenweiser, 1910.) In the discussion of these conflicting hypotheses which follows, I have ventured to disregard their chronological sequence.

(a) THE ORIGIN OF TOTEMISM

The question of the origin of totemism may be put in another way: how did it come about that primitive men called themselves (and their clans) after animals, plants and inanimate objects?²

McLennan (1865 and 1869-70), the Scot who discovered totemism and exogamy for the world of science, refrained from publishing any opinion on the origin of totemism. According to Andrew Lang (1905, 34) he was at one time inclined to think that it originated from the custom of tattooing. I propose to divide the published theories on the origin of totemism into three groups - (α) the nominalist, (β) the sociological and (γ) the psychological.

¹ ‘By the nature of the case, as the origin of totemism lies far beyond our powers of historical examination or of experiment, we must have recourse as regards this matter to conjecture.’ (Lang, 1905, 27.) ‘Nowhere do we see absolutely primitive man, and a totemic system in the making.’ (Ibid., 29.)

² In the first instance probably after animals only.

Totem And Taboo

2751

(α) Nominalist Theories

My accounts of these theories will justify my having brought them together under the title I have adopted.

Garcilasso de la Vega, a descendant of the Peruvian Incas, who wrote a history of his people in the seventeenth century, seems already to have attributed the origin of what he knew of totemic phenomena to the need felt by clans to distinguish themselves from one another by the use of names. (Lang, 1905, 34.) Hundreds of years later the same idea was again proposed. Keane¹ regards totems as ‘heraldic badges’ by means of which individuals, families and clans sought to distinguish themselves from one another. The same idea is expressed once more by Max-Müller (1897):² ‘A totem is a clan mark, then a clan name, then the name of the ancestor of a clan, and lastly the name of something worshipped by a clan.’ Julius Pikler,³ writing later, declares: ‘Mankind required both for communities and for individuals a permanent name which could be fixed in writing. . . . Thus totemism did not arise from the religious needs of men but from their practical, everyday needs. The core of totemism, nomenclature, is a result of the primitive technique of writing. In its nature a totem is like an easily drawn pictograph. But when once savages bore the name of an animal, they went on to form the idea of kinship with it.’

In the same way, Herbert Spencer (1870 and 1893, 331-46) regards the giving of names as the decisive factor in the origin of totemism. The personal characteristics of particular individuals, he argues, prompted the idea of calling them after animals, and in that way they acquired laudatory names or nicknames which were handed on to their descendants. As a result of the vagueness and unintelligibility of primitive speech, later generations interpreted these names as evidence of descent from the actual animals. Totemism would thus be shown to be a misunderstood form of ancestor worship.

¹ Quoted by Lang.

² Quoted by Lang.

³ Pikler and Somló. These authors justly describe their attempted explanation of the origin of totemism as ‘a contribution to the materialist theory of history’.

Totem And Taboo

2752

Lord Avebury (better known under his earlier name of Sir John Lubbock) gives a very similar account of the origin of totemism, though without insisting upon the element of misunderstanding. If, he says, we wish to explain animal-worship, we must not forget how often human names are borrowed from animals. The children and followers of a man who was called ‘Bear’ or ‘Lion’ naturally turned his name into a clan-name. Thence it came about that the animal itself would come to be regarded ‘first with interest, then with respect and at length with a sort of awe’.

What would seem to be an incontrovertible objection to this derivation of totem names from the names of individuals was brought forward by Fison.¹ He showed from conditions in Australia that the totem is invariably ‘the badge of a group, not of an individual’. But even if this were not so, and the totem was originally the name of an individual, it could never - since totems are inherited through the female line - be transmitted to his children.

Moreover, the theories which I have so far discussed are obviously inadequate. They might perhaps explain the fact that primitive peoples adopt animal names for their clans, but they could never explain the importance that has become attached to this nomenclature - namely, the totemic system. The theory belonging to this group which most deserves attention is that proposed by Andrew Lang (1903 and 1905). He, too, regards the giving of names as the heart of the problem, but he introduces two interesting psychological factors and may thus claim to have led the way towards the final solution of the enigma of totemism.

Andrew Lang regards it as initially a matter of indifference how clans obtained their animal names. It is only necessary to assume that they awoke one day to the consciousness that they bore such names and could give no account of how this had come about. The origin of the names had been forgotten. They would then attempt to arrive at an explanation by speculating on the subject; and, in view of their belief in the importance of names, they were bound to reach all the ideas contained in the totemic system. Primitive races (as well as modern savages and even our own children²) do not, like us, regard names as something indifferent and conventional, but as significant and essential. A man’s name is a principal component of his personality, perhaps even a portion of his soul. The fact of a primitive man bearing the same name as an animal must lead him to assume the existence of a mysterious and significant bond between himself and that particular species of animal. What other bond could it be than one of blood relationship? Once the similarity of names had led to this conclusion, the blood taboo would immediately involve all the totemic ordinances, including exogamy. ‘No more than these three things - a group animal name of unknown origin; belief in a transcendental connection between all bearers, human and bestial, of the same name; and belief in the blood superstitions - was needed to give rise to all the totemic creeds and practices, including exogamy.’ (Lang, 1905, 125 f.)

¹ Fison and Howitt (1880, 165), quoted by Lang (1905).

² See the discussion of taboo above, p. 2699 ff.

Totem And Taboo

2753

Lang’s explanation falls into two parts. One part of it traces the totemic system as a matter of psychological necessity from the fact of the totems having animal names - always presupposing that the origin of these names had been forgotten. The second part of his theory goes on to try to explain how the names in fact originated; as we shall see, it is of a very different character from the first part.

This second part of Lang’s theory differs in no essential way from the other theories which I have called ‘nominalist’. The practical necessity for differentiation compelled the various clans to adopt names, and they therefore acquiesced in the names by which each clan was called by another clan. This ‘naming from without’ is the special feature of Lang’s construction. The fact that the names adopted in this way were borrowed from animals needs no special comment and there is no reason why they should have been regarded in primitive times as insulting or derisive. Moreover, Lang has adduced not a few instances from later historical times in which names that were originally given in derision by outsiders have been accepted and willingly adopted (e.g. ‘Les Gueux’, ‘Whigs’ and ‘Tories’). The hypothesis that in the course of time the origin of these names was forgotten connects this part of Lang’s theory with the other part which I have already discussed.

Totem And Taboo

2754

(β) Sociological Theories

Reinach, who has been successful in tracing survivals of the totemic system in the cults and usages of later periods but who has always attached small importance to the factor of descent from the totem, remarks confidently in one passage that in his opinion totemism is nothing more than ‘un hypertrophie de l’instinct social’. (Reinach, 1905-12, 1, 41.) A similar view seems to run through the recent book by Durkheim (1912). The totem, he argues, is the visible representative of social religion among the races concerned: it embodies the community, which is the true object of their worship.

Other writers have sought to find a more precise basis for the participation of the social instincts in the formation of totemic institutions. Thus Haddon (1902)¹ supposes that each primitive clan originally subsisted upon some one species of animal or plant and perhaps traded in that particular article of food and exchanged it with other clans. It would inevitably follow that this clan would be known to the others by the name of the animal which was of such importance to it. At the same time the clan would be bound to become especially familiar with the animal and develop a peculiar interest in it, though this would be founded on no psychical motive other than the most elementary and urgent of human needs, that is, on hunger.

Against this most ‘rational’ of all the theories of totemism it has been objected that feeding conditions of this kind are never found among primitive races and have probably never existed. Savages are omnivorous, and the more so the lower their condition. Nor is it easy to see how an exclusive diet such as this could have developed into an almost religious attitude to the totem, culminating in absolute abstention from the favourite food.

¹ Quoted by Frazer (1910, 4, 50).

Totem And Taboo

2755

The first of the three theories on the origin of totemism which Frazer himself has supported at different times was a psychological one, and I shall deal with it later. His second theory, with which we are here concerned, took form under the influence of a momentous publication by two men who had made researches among the natives of Central Australia.

Spencer and Gillen (1899) described a number of peculiar observances, usages and beliefs found in a group of tribes known as the Arunta nation; and Frazer agreed with their opinion that these peculiarities were to be regarded as features of a primitive condition of things and might throw light upon the original and true meaning of totemism.

The peculiarities found in the Arunta tribe (a portion of the Arunta nation) are as follows:

(1) The Arunta are divided into totem clans, but the totem is not hereditary but determined for each individual in a manner to be described presently.

(2) The totem clans are not exogamous; but the restrictions upon marriage are based upon a highly developed division into marriage-classes, which have no connection with the totem.

(3) The function of the totem clans lies in their performing a ceremony which has as its aim the multiplication of the edible totem object by a characteristically magical method. (This ceremony is known as intichiuma.)

(4) The Arunta have a peculiar theory of conception and reincarnation. They believe that there are places scattered over the country at each of which the spirits of the dead of some one totem await reincarnation and enter the body of any woman who passes by the spot. When a child is born, the mother reports at which of these places she thinks it was conceived, and the child’s totem is determined accordingly. It is further believed that the spirits (both of the dead and of the reborn) are intimately associated with certain peculiar stone amulets, known as churinga, which are found at these same centres.

Two factors seem to have led Frazer to suppose that the observances among the Arunta constitute the oldest form of totemism. First, there was the existence of certain myths which declared that the ancestors of the Arunta regularly ate their totem and always married women of their own totem. Secondly, there was the apparent disregard of the sexual act in their theory of conception. People who had not yet discovered that conception is the result of sexual intercourse might surely be regarded as the most backward and primitive of living men.

Totem And Taboo

2756

By focusing his judgement of totemism upon the intichiuma ceremony, Frazer came all at once to see the totemic system in an entirely new light: as a purely practical organization for meeting the most natural of human needs. (Cf. Haddon’s theory above.)¹ The system was simply an example upon a large scale of ‘co-operative magic’. Primitive men set up what might be described as a magical producers’ and consumers’ union. Each totem clan undertook the business of guaranteeing the plentiful supply of one particular article of food. Where non-edible totems were concerned (such as dangerous animals, or rain, wind, etc.) the duty of the totem clan lay in controlling the natural force in question and in counteracting its injurious possibilities. The achievements of each clan were to the advantage of all the rest. Since each clan might eat none, or only very little, of its own totem, it provided that valuable material for the other clans and was itself provided in exchange with what they produced as their social totemic duty. In the light of the insight which he thus obtained from the intichiuma ceremony, Frazer came to believe that the prohibition against eating one’s own totem had blinded people to the more important element in the situation, namely the injunction to produce as much as possible of an edible totem to meet the needs of other people.

Frazer accepted the Arunta tradition that each totem clan had originally eaten its own totem without restriction. But it was then difficult to understand the next stage in development, at which the clansmen became content with assuring a supply of the totem for others, while themselves renouncing its enjoyment almost completely. He supposed that this restriction had arisen, not from any kind of religious deference, but perhaps from observing that animals never fed upon their own kind: to do so might imply a breach in their identification with their totem and consequently reduce their power of controlling it. Or it might be that by sparing the creatures they hoped to conciliate them. Frazer, however, makes no disguise of the difficulties involved in these explanations (1910, 1, 121 ff.); nor does he venture to suggest by what means the custom described in the Arunta myths of marrying within the totem was transformed into exogamy.

¹ ‘There is nothing vague or mystical about it, nothing of that metaphysical haze which some writers love to conjure up over the humble beginnings of human speculation, but which is utterly foreign to the simple, sensuous and concrete modes of thought of the savage.’ (Frazer, 1910, 1, 117.)

Totem And Taboo

2757

The theory based by Frazer on the intichiuma ceremony stands or falls with the assertion of the primitive character of the Arunta institutions. But in face of the objections raised by Durkheim¹ and Lang (1903 and 1905), that assertion appears untenable. On the contrary, the Arunta seem to be the most highly developed of the Australian tribes and to represent a stage of totemism in dissolution rather than its beginnings. The myths which impressed Frazer so deeply because, in contrast to the conditions that rule to-day, they lay stress upon liberty to eat the totem and to marry within the totem - these myths are easily explicable as wishful phantasies which, like the myth of a Golden Age, have been projected back into the past.

(γ) Psychological Theories

Frazer’s first psychological theory, formed before he became acquainted with Spencer and Gillen’s observations, was based on the belief in an ‘external soul’.² The totem, according to this view, represented a safe place of refuge in which the soul could be deposited and so escape the dangers which threatened it. When a primitive man had deposited his soul in his totem he himself was invulnerable, and he naturally avoided doing any injury to the receptacle of his soul. Since, however, he did not know in which particular individual of the animal species concerned his own soul was lodged, it was reasonable for him to spare the whole species.

¹ In L’année socialogique (1898, 1902, 1905, etc.); see especially ‘Sur le totémisme’ (1902).

² See Frazer, The Golden Bough, First Edition (1890), 2, 332 ff.

Totem And Taboo

2758

Frazer himself subsequently abandoned this theory that totemism was derived from a belief in souls; and, after coming to know of Spencer and Gillen’s observations, adopted the sociological theory which I have already discussed. But he came to see himself that the motive from which that second theory derived totemism was too ‘rational’ and that it implied a social organization which was too complicated to be described as primitive.¹ The magical co-operative societies now seemed to him to be the fruit rather than the seed of totemism. He sought for some simpler factor, some primitive superstition behind these structures, to which the origin of totemism might be traced back. At last he found this original factor in the Arunta’s remarkable story of conception.

The Arunta, as I have already explained, eliminate the connection between the sexual act and conception. At the moment at which a woman feels she is a mother, a spirit, which has been awaiting reincarnation in the nearest totem centre where the spirits of the dead collect, has entered her body. She will bear this spirit as a child, and the child will have the same totem as all the spirits waiting at that particular centre. This theory of conception cannot explain totemism, since it presupposes the existence of totems. But let us go back a step further and suppose that originally the woman believed that the animal, plant, stone or other object, with which her imagination was occupied at the moment when she first felt she was a mother, actually made its way into her and was later born in human form. In that case the identity between a man and his totem would have a factual basis in his mother’s belief and all the remaining totem ordinances (with the exception of exogamy) would follow. A man would refuse to eat this animal or plant because to do so would amount to eating himself. He would, however, have a reason for occasionally partaking of his totem in a ceremonial manner, because in that way he might strengthen his identification with the totem, which is the essence of totemism. Some observations made by Rivers upon the natives of the Banks’ Islands² seemed to prove a direct identification of human beings with their totem on the basis of a similar theory of conception.

¹ ‘It is unlikely that a community of savages should deliberately parcel out the realm of nature into provinces, assign each province to a particular band of magicians, and bid all the bands to work their magic and weave their spells for the common good.’ (Frazer, 1910, 4, 57.)

² Quoted by Frazer (1910, 2, 89 ff. and 4, 59).

Totem And Taboo

2759

Accordingly, the ultimate source of totemism would be the savages’ ignorance of the process by which men and animals reproduce their kind; and, in particular, ignorance of the part played by the male in fertilization. This ignorance must have been facilitated by the long interval between the act of fertilization and the birth of the child (or the first perception of its movements). Thus totemism would be a creation of the feminine rather than of the masculine mind: its roots would lie in ‘the sick fancies of pregnant women’. ‘Anything indeed that struck a woman at that mysterious moment of her life when she first knows herself to be a mother might easily be identified by her with the child in her womb. Such maternal fancies, so natural and seemingly so universal, appear to be the root of totemism.’ (Frazer, 1910, 4, 63.)

The main objection to this third of Frazer’s theories is the same as has already been brought against the second or sociological one. The Arunta seem to be far removed from the beginnings of totemism. Their denial of paternity does not appear to rest upon primitive ignorance; in some respects they themselves make use of descent through the father. They seem to have sacrificed paternity for the sake of some sort of speculation designed to honour the souls of their ancestors.¹ They have enlarged the myth of the impregnation of a virgin by the spirit into a general theory of conception; but that is no reason why ignorance of the conditions governing fertilization should be imputed to them any more than to the peoples of antiquity at the time of the origin of the Christian myths.

Another psychological theory of the origin of totemism has been advanced by a Dutchman, G. A. Wilken. It connects totemism with the belief in the transmigration of souls. ‘The animal in which the souls of the dead are thought by preference to be incarnate becomes a kinsman, an ancestor, and as such is revered.’² It seems more likely, however, that the belief in transmigration was derived from totemism than vice versa.

¹ ‘That belief is a philosophy far from primitive.’ (Lang, 1905, 192.)

² Quoted by Frazer (1910, 4, 45 f.).

Totem And Taboo

2760

Yet another theory of totemism is held by some eminent American ethnologists, Franz Boas, C. Hill-Tout, and others. It is based upon observations on North American Indian totemic clans and maintains that the totem was originally the guardian spirit of an ancestor, who acquired it in a dream and transmitted it to his descendants. We have already heard the difficulties which stand in the way of the view that totems are inherited from single individuals; but apart from this, the Australian evidence lends no support to the theory that totems are derived from guardian spirits. (Frazer, 1910, 4, 48 ff.)

The last of the psychological theories, that put forward by Wundt (1912, 190), is based upon two facts. ‘In the first place, the original totem, and the one which continues to remain most common, is the animal; and, secondly, the earliest totem animals are identical with soul animals.’ Soul animals (such as birds, snakes, lizards and mice) are appropriate receptacles of souls which have left the body, on account of their rapid movements or flight through the air or of other qualities likely to produce surprise or alarm. Totem animals are derived from the transformations of the ‘breath-soul’ into animals. Thus, according to Wundt, totemism is directly connected with the belief in spirits, that is to say with animism.

Totem And Taboo

2761

(b) and (c) THE ORIGIN OF EXOGAMY AND ITS RELATION TO TOTEMISM

I have set out the different theories about totemism in some detail, though even so compression has been inevitable and I fear that my account may have suffered in consequence. In what follows, however, I shall venture, for my readers’ sake, to be still more condensed. The discussions on the exogamy practised by totemic peoples are, owing to the nature of the material with which they deal, particularly complicated and diffuse one might even say confused. The purposes of the present work make it possible for me to limit myself to tracing certain of the main lines of dispute, while referring those who wish to enter into the subject more deeply to the specialized writings from which I have so frequently quoted.

The attitude taken by an author on the problems of exogamy must naturally depend to some extent on the position he has adopted towards the various theories of totemism. Some of the explanations of totemism exclude any connection with exogamy, so that the two institutions fall completely apart. Thus we find two opposing views: one which seeks to maintain the original presumption that exogamy forms an inherent part of the totemic system, and the other which denies that there is any such connection and holds that the convergence between these two features of the oldest cultures is a chance one. This latter opinion has been adopted without qualification by Frazer in his later works: ‘I must request the reader to bear constantly in mind’, he writes, ‘that the two institutions of totemism and exogamy are fundamentally distinct in origin and nature, though they have accidentally crossed and blended in many tribes.’ (Frazer, 1910, 1, xii.) He gives an explicit warning that the opposite view must be a source of endless difficulties and misunderstandings.

Other writers have, on the contrary, found a means of regarding exogamy as an inevitable consequence of the basic principles of totemism. Durkheim (1898, 1902 and 1905) has put forward the view that the taboo attached to totems was bound to involve prohibition against practising sexual intercourse with a woman of the same totem. The totem is of the same blood as the man and consequently the ban upon shedding blood (in connection with defloration and menstruation) prohibits him from sexual relations with a woman belonging to his totem.¹ Andrew Lang (1905, 125), who agrees with Durkheim on this subject, believes that the prohibition against women of the same clan might operate even without any blood taboo. The general totem taboo (which, for instance, forbids a man to sit under his own totem tree) would, in Lang’s opinion, have been sufficient. Incidentally, he complicates this with another explanation of exogamy (see below) and omits to show how the two explanations are related to each other.

¹ See the criticisms of Durkheim’s views by Frazer (1910, 4, 100 ff.).

Totem And Taboo

2762

As regards the chronological relations between the two institutions, most of the authorities agree that totemism is the older of them and that exogamy arose later.¹

Of the theories which seek to show that exogamy is independent of totemism I shall only draw attention to a few which throw light on the attitude of the different authors to the problem of incest.

McLennan (1865) ingeniously inferred the existence of exogamy from the vestiges of customs which seemed to indicate the earlier practice of marriage by capture. He formed a hypothesis that in the earliest times it had been a general usage for men to obtain their wives from another group and that marriage with a woman of their own group gradually ‘came to be considered improper because it was unusual’. He accounted for the prevalence of exogamy by supposing that the practice of killing the majority of female children at birth had led to a scarcity of women in primitive societies. We are not here concerned with the question of how far these assumptions of McLennan’s are supported by the actual findings. What interests us far more is the fact that his hypotheses fail to explain why the male members of a group should refuse themselves access to the few remaining women of their own blood - the fact that he entirely overlooks the problem of incest. (Frazer, 1910, 4, 71-92.)

Other students of exogamy, on the contrary, and evidently with greater justice, have seen in exogamy an institution for the prevention of incest.² When one considers the gradually increasing complication of the Australian restrictions upon marriage, it is impossible not to accept the opinions of Morgan (1877), Frazer (1910, 4, 105 ff.), Howitt and Baldwin Spencer that those regulations bear (in Frazer’s words) ‘the impress of deliberate design’ and that they aimed at achieving the result they have in fact achieved. ‘In no other way does it seem possible to explain in all its details a system at once so complex and so regular.’ (Frazer, ibid., 106.)

It is interesting to observe that the first restrictions produced by the introduction of marriage-classes affected the sexual freedom of the younger generation (that is, incest between brothers and sisters and between sons and mothers) whereas incest between fathers and daughters was only prevented by a further extension of the regulations.

¹ See, for instance, Frazer (1910, 4, 75): ‘The totemic clan is a totally different social organism from the exogamous clan, and we have good grounds for thinking that it is far older.’

² Cf. the first essay in this work.

Totem And Taboo

2763

But the fact that exogamous sexual restrictions were imposed intentionally throws no light on the motive which led to their imposition. What is the ultimate source of the horror of incest which must be recognized as the root of exogamy? To explain it by the existence of an instinctive dislike of sexual intercourse with blood relatives - that is to say, by an appeal to the fact that there is a horror of incest - is clearly unsatisfactory; for social experience shows that, in spite of this supposed instinct, incest is no uncommon event even in our present-day society, and history tells us of cases in which incestuous marriage between privileged persons was actually the rule.

Westermarck (1906-8, 2, 368)¹ has explained the horror of incest on the ground that ‘there is an innate aversion to sexual intercourse between persons living very closely together from early youth, and that, as such persons are in most cases related by blood, this feeling would naturally display itself in custom and law as a horror of intercourse between near kin’. Havelock Ellis, though he disputed the instinctiveness of the aversion, subscribed to this explanation in the main: ‘The normal failure of the pairing instinct to manifest itself in the case of brothers and sisters, or of boys and girls brought up together from infancy, is a merely negative phenomenon due to the inevitable absence in those circumstances of the conditions which evoke the pairing instinct. . . . Between those who have been brought up together from childhood all the sensory stimuli of vision, hearing and touch have been dulled by use, trained to the calm level of affection, and deprived of their potency to arouse the erethistic excitement which produces sexual tumescence.’

¹ In the same chapter he replies to various objections which have been raised against his views.

Totem And Taboo

2764

It seems to me very remarkable that Westermarck should consider that this innate aversion to sexual intercourse with those with whom one has been intimate in childhood is also the equivalent in psychical terms of the biological fact that inbreeding is detrimental to the species. A biological instinct of the kind suggested would scarcely have gone so far astray in its psychological expression that, instead of applying to blood relatives (intercourse with whom might be injurious to reproduction), it affected persons who were totally innocuous in this respect, merely because they shared a common home. I cannot resist referring, too, to Frazer’s admirable criticism of Westermarck’s theory. Frazer finds it inexplicable that to-day there should be scarcely any sexual aversion to intercourse with house-mates, whereas the horror of incest, which on Westermarck’s theory is only a derivative of that aversion, should have increased so enormously. But some further comments of Frazer’s go deeper, and these I shall reproduce in full, since they are in essential agreement with the arguments which I put forward in my essay on taboo:

‘It is not easy to see why any deep human instinct should need to be reinforced by law. There is no law commanding men to eat and drink or forbidding them to put their hands in the fire. Men eat and drink and keep their hands out of the fire instinctively for fear of natural not legal penalties, which would be entailed by violence done to these instincts. The law only forbids men to do what their instincts incline them to do; what nature itself prohibits and punishes, it would be superfluous for the law to prohibit and punish. Accordingly we may always safely assume that crimes forbidden by law are crimes which many men have a natural propensity to commit. If there was no such propensity there would be no such crimes, and if no such crimes were committed what need to forbid them? Instead of assuming, therefore, from the legal prohibition of incest that there is a natural aversion to incest, we ought rather to assume that there is a natural instinct in favour of it, and that if the law represses it, as it represses other natural instincts, it does so because civilized men have come to the conclusion that the satisfaction of these natural instincts is detrimental to the general interests of society.’ (Frazer, 1910, 4, 97 f.)

I may add to these excellent arguments of Frazer’s that the findings of psycho-analysis make the hypothesis of an innate aversion to incestuous intercourse totally untenable. They have shown, on the contrary, that the earliest sexual excitations of youthful human beings are invariably of an incestuous character and that such impulses when repressed play a part that can scarcely be over-estimated as motive forces of neuroses in later life.

Totem And Taboo

2765

Thus the view which explains the horror of incest as an innate instinct must be abandoned. Nor can anything more favourable be said of another, widely held explanation of the law against incest, according to which primitive peoples noticed at an early date the dangers with which their race was threatened by inbreeding and for that reason deliberately adopted the prohibition. There are a host of objections to this theory. (Cf. Durkheim, 1898.) Not only must the prohibition against incest be older than any domestication of animals which might have enabled men to observe the effects of inbreeding upon racial characters, but even to-day the detrimental results of inbreeding are not established with certainty and cannot easily be demonstrated in man. Moreover, everything that we know of contemporary savages makes it highly improbable that their most remote ancestors were already concerned with the question of preserving their later progeny from injury. Indeed it is almost absurd to attribute to such improvident creatures motives of hygiene and eugenics to which consideration is scarcely paid in our own present-day civilization.¹

Lastly, account must be taken of the fact that a prohibition against inbreeding, based upon practical motives of hygiene, on the ground of its tending to racial enfeeblement, seems quite inadequate to explain the profound abhorrence shown towards incest in our society. As I have shown elsewhere,² this feeling seems to be even more active and intense among contemporary primitive peoples than among civilized ones.

It might have been expected that here again we should have before us a choice between sociological, biological and psychological explanations. (In this connection the psychological motives should perhaps be regarded as representing biological forces.) Nevertheless, at the end of our inquiry, we can only subscribe to Frazer’s resigned conclusion. We are ignorant of the origin of the horror of incest and cannot even tell in what direction to look for it. None of the solutions of the enigma that have been proposed seems satisfactory.³

¹ Darwin writes of savages that they ‘are not likely to reflect on distant evils to their progeny’.

² See the first essay in this work.

³ ‘Thus the ultimate origin of exogamy, and with it of the law of incest - since exogamy was devised to prevent incest - remains a problem nearly as dark as ever.’ (Frazer, 1910, 1, 165.)

Totem And Taboo

2766

I must, however, mention one other attempt at solving it. It is of a kind quite different from any that we have so far considered, and might be described as ‘historical’.

This attempt is based upon a hypothesis of Charles Darwin’s upon the social state of primitive men. Darwin deduced from the habits of the higher apes that men, too, originally lived in comparatively small groups or hordes within which the jealousy of the oldest and strongest male prevented sexual promiscuity. ‘We may indeed conclude from what we know of the jealousy of all male quadrupeds, armed, as many of them are, with special weapons for battling with their rivals, that promiscuous intercourse in a state of nature is extremely improbable. . . . Therefore, if we look far enough back in the stream of time, . . . judging from the social habits of man as he now exists . . . the most probable view is that primaeval man aboriginally lived in small communities, each with as many wives as he could support and obtain, whom he would have jealously guarded against all other men. Or he may have lived with several wives by himself, like the Gorilla; for all the natives "agree that but one adult male is seen in a band; when the young male grows up, a contest takes place for mastery, and the strongest, by killing and driving out the others, establishes himself as the head of the community". (Dr. Savage, in Boston Journal of Nat. Hist., vol. v, 1845-7, p. 423.) The younger males, being thus expelled and wandering about, would, when at last successful in finding a partner, prevent too close interbreeding within the limits of the same family.’ (Darwin, 1871, 2, 362 f.)

Atkinson (1903) seems to have been the first to realize that the practical consequence of the conditions obtaining in Darwin’s primal horde must be exogamy for the young males. Each of them might, after being driven out, establish a similar horde, in which the same prohibition upon sexual intercourse would rule owing to its leader’s jealousy. In course of time this would produce what grew into a conscious law: ‘No sexual relations between those who share a common home.’ After the establishment of totemism this regulation would assume another form and would run: ‘No sexual relations within the totem.’

Andrew Lang (1905, 114 and 143) accepted this explanation of exogamy. In the same volume, however, he supports the other theory (held by Durkheim), according to which exogamy was a resultant of the totemic laws. It is a little difficult to bring these two points of view into harmony: according to the first theory exogamy would have originated before totemism, while according to the second it would have been derived from it.¹

¹ ‘If it be granted that exogamy existed in practice, on the lines of Mr. Darwin’s theory, before the totem beliefs lent to the practice a sacred sanction, our task is relatively easy. The first practical rule would be that of the jealous Sire, "No males to touch the females in my camp", with expulsion of adolescent sons. In efflux of time that rule, become habitual, would be, "No marriage within the local group". Next, let the local groups receive names, such as Emus, Crows, Opossums, Snipes, and the rule becomes, "No marriage within the local group of animal name; no Snipe to marry Snipe". But, if the primal groups were not exogamous, they would become so, as soon as totemic myths and tabus were developed out of the animal, vegetable, and other names of local groups.’ (Lang, 1905, 143.) (The italics in the middle of this passage are mine.) In his last discussion of this subject, moreover, Lang (1911) states that he has ‘abandoned the idea that exogamy is a consequence of the general totemic taboo’.

Totem And Taboo

2767

(3)

Into this obscurity one single ray of light is thrown by psycho-analytic observation.

There is a great deal of resemblance between the relations of children and of primitive men towards animals. Children show no trace of the arrogance which urges adult civilized men to draw a hard-and-fast line between their own nature and that of all other animals. Children have no scruples over allowing animals to rank as their full equals. Uninhibited as they are in the avowal of their bodily needs, they no doubt feel themselves more akin to animals than to their elders, who may well be a puzzle to them.

Not infrequently, however, a strange rift occurs in the excellent relations between children and animals. A child will suddenly begin to be frightened of some particular species of animal and to avoid touching or seeing any individual of that species. The clinical picture of an animal phobia emerges - a very common, and perhaps the earliest, form of psychoneurotic illness occurring in childhood. As a rule the phobia is attached to animals in which the child has hitherto shown a specially lively interest and it has nothing to do with any particular individual animal. There is no large choice of animals that may become objects of a phobia in the case of children living in towns: horses, dogs, cats, less often birds, and with striking frequency very small creatures such as beetles and butterflies. The senseless and immoderate fear shown in these phobias is sometimes attached to animals only known to the child from picture books and fairy tales. On a few rare occasions it is possible to discover what has led to an unusual choice of this kind; and I have to thank Karl Abraham for telling me of a case in which the child himself explained that his fear of wasps was due to their colour and stripes reminding him of tigers, which from all accounts were beasts to be feared.

No detailed analytic examination has yet been made of children’s animal phobias, though they would greatly repay study. This neglect has no doubt been due to the difficulty of analysing children of such a tender age. It cannot therefore be claimed that we know the general meaning of these disorders and I myself am of the opinion that this may not turn out to be of a uniform nature. But a few cases of phobias of this kind directed towards the larger animals have proved accessible to analysis and have thus yielded their secret to the investigator. It was the same in every case: where the children concerned were boys, their fear related at bottom to their father and had merely been displaced on to the animal.

Totem And Taboo

2768

Everyone with psycho-analytic experience will no doubt have come across cases of the sort and have derived the same impression from them. Yet I can quote only a few detailed publications on the subject. This paucity of literature is an accidental circumstance and it must not be supposed that our conclusions are based on a few scattered observations. I may mention, for instance, a writer who has studied the neuroses of childhood with great understanding - Dr. M. Wulff, of Odessa. In the course of a case history of a nine-year-old boy he reports that at the age of four the patient had suffered from a dog-phobia. ‘When he saw a dog running past in the street, he would weep and call out: "Dear doggie, don’t bite me! I’II be good!" By "being good" he meant "not playing on the fiddle" - not masturbating. (Wulff, 1912, 15.) ‘The boy’s dog-phobia’, the author explains, ‘was in reality his fear of his father displaced on to dogs; for his curious exclamation "Doggie, I’II be good!" - that is, "I won’t masturbate" - was directed to his father, who had forbidden him to masturbate.’ Wulff adds a footnote which is in complete agreement with my views and at the same time bears witness to the frequent occurrence of such experiences: ‘Phobias of this type (phobias of horses, dogs, cats, fowls and other domestic animals) are, in my opinion, at least as common in childhood as pavor nocturnus; and in analysis they almost invariably turn out to be a displacement on to the animals of the child’s fear of one of his parents. I should not be prepared to maintain that the same mechanism applies to the widespread phobias of rats and mice.’

I recently published (1909b) an ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’, the material of which was supplied to me by the little patient’s father. The boy had a phobia of horses, and as a result he refused to go out in the street. He expressed a fear that the horse would come into the room and bite him; and it turned out that this must be the punishment for a wish that the horse might fall down (that is, die). After the boy’s fear of his father had been removed by reassurances, it became evident that he was struggling against wishes which had as their subject the idea of his father being absent (going away on a journey, dying). He regarded his father (as he made all too clear) as a competitor for the favours of his mother, towards whom the obscure foreshadowings of his budding sexual wishes were aimed. Thus he was situated in the typical attitude of a male child towards his parents to which we have given the name of the ‘Oedipus complex’ and which we regard in general as the nuclear complex of the neuroses. The new fact that we have learnt from the analysis of ‘little Hans’ - a fact with an important bearing upon totemism - is that in such circumstances children displace some of their feelings from their father on to an animal.

Totem And Taboo

2769

Analysis is able to trace the associative paths along which this displacement passes - both the fortuitous paths and those with a significant content. Analysis also enables us to discover the motives for the displacement. The hatred of his father that arises in a boy from rivalry for his mother is not able to achieve uninhibited sway over his mind; it has to contend against his old-established affection and admiration for the very same person. The child finds relief from the conflict arising out of this double-sided, this ambivalent emotional attitude towards his father by displacing his hostile and fearful feelings on to a substitute for his father. The displacement cannot, however, bring the conflict to an end, it cannot effect a clear-cut severance between the affectionate and the hostile feelings. On the contrary, the conflict is resumed in relation to the object on to which the displacement has been made: the ambivalence is extended to it. There could be no doubt that little Hans was not only frightened of horses; he also approached them with admiration and interest. As soon as his anxiety began to diminish, he identified himself with the dreaded creature: he began to jump about like a horse and in his turn bit his father.¹ At another stage in the resolution of his phobia he did not hesitate to identify his parents with some other large animals.²

¹ Freud (1909b).

² In his giraffe phantasy.

Totem And Taboo

2770

It may fairly be said that in these children’s phobias some of the features of totemism reappear, but reversed into their negative. We are, however, indebted to Ferenczi (1913a) for an interesting history of a single case which can only be described as an instance of positive totemism in a child. It is true that in the case of little Árpád (the subject of Ferenczi’s report) his totemic interests did not arise in direct relation with his Oedipus complex but on the basis of its narcissistic precondition, the fear of castration. But any attentive reader of the story of little Hans will find abundant evidence that he, too, admired his father as possessing a big penis and feared him as threatening his own. The same part is played by the father alike in the Oedipus and the castration complexes - the part of a dreaded enemy to the sexual interests of childhood. The punishment which he threatens is castration, or its substitute, blinding.¹

When little Árpád was two and a half years old, he had once, while he was on a summer holiday, tried to micturate into the fowl-house and a fowl had pecked, or pecked at his penis. A year later, when he was back in the same place, he himself turned into a fowl; his one interest was in the fowl-house and in what went on there and he abandoned human speech in favour of cackling and crowing. At the time at which the observation was made (when he was five years old) he had recovered his speech, but his interests and his talk were entirely concerned with chickens and other kinds of poultry. They were his only toys and he only sang songs that had some mention of fowls in them. His attitude towards his totem animal was superlatively ambivalent: he showed both hatred and love to an extravagant degree. His favourite game was playing slaughtering fowls. ‘The slaughtering of poultry was a regular festival for him. He would dance round the animals’ bodies for hours at a time in a state of intense excitement.’ But afterwards he would kiss and stroke the slaughtered animal or would clean and caress the toy fowls that he had himself ill-treated.

Little Árpád himself saw to it that the meaning of his strange behaviour should not remain hidden. From time to time he translated his wishes from the totemic language into that of everyday life. ‘My father’s the cock’, he said on one occasion, and another time: ‘Now I’m small, now I’m a chicken. When I get bigger I’lI be a fowl. When I’m bigger still I’II be a cock.’ On another occasion he suddenly said he would like to eat some ‘fricassee of mother’ (on the analogy of fricassee of chicken). He was very generous in threatening other people with castration, just as he himself had been threatened with it for his masturbatory activities.

¹ For the substitution of blinding for castration - a substitution that occurs, too, in the myth of Oedipus - see Reitler (1913), Ferenczi (1913b), Rank (1913) and Eder (1913).

Totem And Taboo

2771

There was no doubt, according to Ferenczi, as to the sources of Árpád’s interest in events in the poultry-yard: ‘the continual sexual activity between the cock and hens, the laying of eggs and the hatching out of the young brood’ gratified his sexual curiosity, the real object of which was human family-life. He showed that he had formed his own choice of sexual objects on the model of life in the hen-run, for he said one day to the neighbour’s wife: ‘I’II marry you and your sister and my three cousins and the cook; no, not the cook, I’II marry my mother instead.’

Later on we shall be able to assess the worth of this observation more completely. At the moment I will only emphasize two features in it which offer valuable points of agreement with totemism: the boy’s complete identification with his totem animal¹ and his ambivalent emotional attitude to it. These observations justify us, in my opinion, in substituting the father for the totem animal in the formula for totemism (in the case of males). It will be observed that there is nothing new or particularly daring in this step forward. Indeed, primitive men say the very same thing themselves, and, where the totemic system is still in force to-day, they describe the totem as their common ancestor and primal father. All we have done is to take at its literal value an expression used by these people, of which the anthropologists have been able to make very little and which they have therefore been glad to keep in the background. Psycho-analysis, on the contrary, leads us to put special stress upon this same point and to take it as the starting-point of our attempt at explaining totemism.²

¹ This, according to Frazer (1910, 4, 5), constitutes ‘the whole essence of totemism’: ‘totemism is an identification of a man with his totem.’

² I have to thank Otto Rank for bringing to my notice a dog-phobia in an intelligent young man. His explanation of the way in which he acquired his illness sounds markedly like the totemic theory of the Arunta which I mentioned on page 2755: he thought he had heard from his father that his mother had had a severe fright from a dog during her pregnancy.

Totem And Taboo

2772

The first consequence of our substitution is most remarkable. If the totem animal is the father, then the two principal ordinances of totemism, the two taboo prohibitions which constitute its core - not to kill the totem and not to have sexual relations with a woman of the same totem - coincide in their content with the two crimes of Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother, as well as with the two primal wishes of children, the insufficient repression or the re-awakening of which forms the nucleus of perhaps every psychoneurosis. If this equation is anything more than a misleading trick of chance, it must enable us to throw a light upon the origin of totemism in the inconceivably remote past. In other words, it would enable us to make it probable that the totemic system - like little Hans’s animal phobia and little Árpád’s poultry perversion - was a product of the conditions involved in the Oedipus complex. In order to pursue this possibility, we shall have, in the following pages, to study a feature of the totemic system (or, as we might say, of the totemic religion) which I have hitherto scarcely found an opportunity of mentioning.

(4)

William Robertson Smith, who died in 1894 - physicist, philologist, Bible critic and archaeologist - was a man of many-sided interests, clear-sighted and liberal-minded. In his book on the Religion of the Semites (first published in 1889) he put forward the hypothesis that a peculiar ceremony known as the ‘totem meal’ had from the very first formed an integral part of the totemic system. At that time he had only a single piece of evidence in support of his theory: an account of a procedure of the kind dating from the fifth century A.D. But by an analysis of the nature of sacrifice among the ancient Semites he was able to lend his hypothesis a high degree of probability. Since sacrifice implies a divinity, it was a question of arguing back from a comparatively high phase of religious ritual to the lowest one, that is, to totemism.

Totem And Taboo

2773

I will now attempt to extract from Robertson Smith’s admirable work those of his statements on the origin and meaning of the ritual of sacrifice which are of decisive interest for us. In so doing I must omit all the details, often so fascinating, and neglect all the later developments. It is quite impossible for an abstract such as this to give my readers any notion of the lucidity and convincing force of the original.

Robertson Smith explains that sacrifice at the altar was the essential feature in the ritual of ancient religions. It plays the same part in all religions, so that its origin must be traced back to very general causes, operating everywhere in the same manner. Sacrifice - the sacred act par excellence (sacrificium, ίερουργία) - originally had a somewhat different meaning, however, from its later one of making an offering to the deity in order to propitiate him or gain his favour. (The non-religious usage of the word followed from this subsidiary sense of ‘renunciation’.) It can be shown that, to begin with, sacrifice was nothing other than ‘an act of fellowship between the deity and his worshippers’.

The materials offered for sacrifice were things that can be eaten or drunk; men sacrificed to their deity the things on which they themselves lived: flesh, cereals, fruit, wine and oil. Only in the case of flesh were there limitations and exceptions. The god shared the animal sacrifices with his worshippers, the vegetable offerings were for him alone. There is no doubt that animal sacrifices were the older and were originally the only ones. Vegetable sacrifices arose from the offering of first-fruits and were in the nature of a tribute to the lord of the earth and of the land; but animal sacrifices are more ancient than agriculture.

Linguistic survivals make it certain that the portion of the sacrifice allotted to the god was originally regarded as being literally his food. As the nature of gods grew progressively less material, this conception became a stumbling-block. It was avoided by assigning to the deity only the liquid part of the meal. Later, the use of fire, which caused the flesh of the sacrifice upon the altar to rise in smoke, afforded a method of dealing with human food more appropriate to the divine nature. The drink-offering consisted originally of the blood of the animal victim. This was later replaced by wine. In ancient times wine was regarded as ‘the blood of the grape’, and it has been so described by modern poets.

Totem And Taboo

2774

The oldest form of sacrifice, then, older than the use of fire or the knowledge of agriculture, was the sacrifice of animals, whose flesh and blood were enjoyed in common by the god and his worshippers. It was essential that each one of the participants should have his share of the meal.

A sacrifice of this kind was a public ceremony, a festival celebrated by the whole clan. Religion in general was an affair of the community and religious duty was a part of social obligation. Everywhere a sacrifice involves a feast and a feast cannot be celebrated without a sacrifice. The sacrificial feast was an occasion on which individuals rose joyously above their own interests and stressed the mutual dependence existing between one another and their god.

The ethical force of the public sacrificial meal rested upon very ancient ideas of the significance of eating and drinking together. Eating and drinking with a man was a symbol and a confirmation of fellowship and mutual social obligations. What was directly expressed by the sacrificial meal was only the fact that the god and his worshippers were ‘commensals’, but every other point in their mutual relations was included in this. Customs still in force among the Arabs of the desert show that what is binding in a common meal is not a religious factor but the act of eating itself. Anyone who has eaten the smallest morsel of food with one of these Bedouin or has swallowed a mouthful of his milk need no longer fear him as an enemy but may feel secure in his protection and help. Not, however, for an unlimited time; strictly speaking, only so long as the food which has been eaten in common remains in the body. Such was the realistic view of the bond of union. It needed repetition in order to be confirmed and made permanent.

Totem And Taboo

2775

But why is this binding force attributed to eating and drinking together? In primitive societies there was only one kind of bond which was absolute and inviolable - that of kinship. The solidarity of such a fellowship was complete. ‘A kin was a group of persons whose lives were so bound up together, in what must be called a physical unity, that they could be treated as parts of one common life. . . . In a case of homicide Arabian tribesmen do not say, "The blood of M. or N. has been spilt", naming the man; they say, "Our blood has been spilt". In Hebrew the phrase by which one claims kinship is "I am your bone and your flesh".’ Thus kinship implies participation in a common substance. It is therefore natural that it is not merely based on the fact that a man is a part of his mother’s substance, having been born of her and having been nourished by her milk, but that it can be acquired and strengthened by food which a man eats later and with which his body is renewed. If a man shared a meal with his god he was expressing a conviction that they were of one substance; and he would never share a meal with one whom he regarded as a stranger.

The sacrificial meal, then, was originally a feast of kinsmen, in accordance with the law that only kinsmen eat together. In our own society the members of a family have their meals in common; but the sacrificial meal bears no relation to the family. Kinship is an older thing than family life, and in the most primitive societies known to us the family contained members of more than one kindred. The man married a woman of another clan and the children inherited their mother’s clan; so that there was no communion of kin between the man and the other members of the family. In a family of such a kind there was no common meal. To this day, savages eat apart and alone and the religious food prohibitions of totemism often make it impossible for them to eat in common with their wives and children.

Totem And Taboo

2776

Let us now turn to the sacrificial animal. As we have heard, there is no gathering of a clan without an animal sacrifice, nor - and this now becomes significant - any slaughter of an animal except upon these ceremonial occasions. While game and the milk of domestic animals might be consumed without any qualms, religious scruples made it impossible to kill a domestic animal for private purposes. There cannot be the slightest doubt, says Robertson Smith, that the slaughter of a victim was originally among the acts which ‘are illegal to an individual, and can only be justified when the whole clan shares the responsibility of the deed.’¹ So far as I know, there is only one class of actions recognized by early nations to which this description applies, viz. actions which involve an invasion of the sanctity of the tribal blood. In fact, a life which no single tribesman is allowed to invade, and which can be sacrificed only by the consent and common action of the kin, stands on the same footing with the life of the fellow-tribesman.’ The rule that every participant at the sacrificial meal must eat a share of the flesh of the victim has the same meaning as the provision that the execution of a guilty tribesman must be carried out by the tribe as a whole. In other words, the sacrificial animal was treated as a member of the tribe; the sacrificing community, the god and the sacrificial animal were of the same blood and members of one clan.

Robertson Smith brings forward copious evidence for identifying the sacrificial animal with the primitive totem animal. In later antiquity there were two classes of sacrifice: one in which the victims were domestic animals of the kinds habitually used for eating, and the other extraordinary sacrifices of animals which were unclean and whose consumption was forbidden. Investigation shows that these unclean animals were sacred animals, that they were offered as sacrifices to the gods to whom they were sacred, that originally they were identical with the gods themselves, and that by means of the sacrifice the worshippers in some way laid stress upon their blood kinship with the animal and the god. But in still earlier times this distinction between ordinary and ‘mystic’ sacrifices disappears. Originally all animals were sacred, their flesh was forbidden meat and might only be consumed on ceremonial occasions and with the participation of the whole clan. The slaughter of an animal was equivalent to a shedding of the tribal blood and could occur subject only to the same precautions and the same insurances against incurring reproach.

¹ [This sentence is italicized by Freud.]

Totem And Taboo

2777

The domestication of animals and the introduction of cattle-breeding seems everywhere to have brought to an end the strict and unadulterated totemism of primaeval days.¹ But such sacred character as remained to domestic animals under what had then become ‘pastoral’ religion is obvious enough to allow us to infer its original totemic nature. Even in late classical times ritual prescribed in many places that the sacrificial priest must take to flight after performing the sacrifice, as though to escape retribution. The idea that slaughtering oxen was a crime must at one time have prevailed generally in Greece. At the Athenian festival of Buphonia a regular trial was instituted after the sacrifice, and all the participants were called as witnesses. At the end of it, it was agreed that the responsibility for the murder should be placed upon the knife; and this was accordingly cast into the sea.

In spite of the ban protecting the lives of sacred animals in their quality of fellow-clansmen, a necessity arose for killing one of them from time to time in solemn communion and for dividing its flesh and blood among the members of the clan. The compelling motive for this deed reveals the deepest meaning of the nature of sacrifice. We have heard how in later times, whenever food is eaten in common, the participation in the same substance establishes a sacred bond between those who consume it when it has entered their bodies. In ancient times this result seems only to have been effected by participation in the substance of a sacrosanct victim. The holy mystery of sacrificial death ‘is justified by the consideration that only in this way can the sacred cement be procured which creates or keeps alive a living bond of union between the worshippers and their god’.²(Ibid., 313.)

This bond is nothing else than the life of the sacrificial animal, which resides in its flesh and in its blood and is distributed among all the participants in the sacrificial meal. A notion of this kind lies at the root of all the blood covenants by which men made compacts with each other even at a late period of history. This completely literal way of regarding blood-kinship as identity of substance makes it easy to understand the necessity for renewing it from time to time by the physical process of the sacrificial meal.

¹ ‘The inference is that the domestication to which totemism inevitably leads (when there are any animals capable of domestication) is fatal to totemism.’ (Jevons, 1902, 120.)

² [This sentence is italicized by Freud.]

Totem And Taboo

2778

At this point I will interrupt my survey of Robertson Smith’s line of thought and restate the gist of it in the most concise terms. With the establishment of the idea of private property sacrifice came to be looked upon as a gift to the deity, as a transference of property from men to the god. But this interpretation left unexplained all the peculiarities of the ritual of sacrifice. In the earliest times the sacrificial animal had itself been sacred and its life untouchable; it might only be killed if all the members of the clan participated in the deed and shared their guilt in the presence of the god, so that the sacred substance could be yielded up and consumed by the clansmen and thus ensure their identity with one another and with the deity. The sacrifice was a sacrament and the sacrificial animal was itself a member of the clan. It was in fact the ancient totem animal, the primitive god himself, by the killing and consuming of which the clans men renewed and assured their likeness to the god.

From this analysis of the nature of sacrifice Robertson Smith draws the conclusion that the periodic killing and eating of the totem in times before the worship of anthropomorphic deities had been an important element in totemic religion. The ceremonial of a totem meal of this kind is, he suggests, to be found in a description of a sacrifice of comparatively late date. St. Nilus records a sacrificial ritual current among the Bedouin of the Sinai Desert at the end of the fourth century A.D. The victim of the sacrifice, a camel, ‘is bound upon a rude altar of stones piled together, and when the leader of the band has thrice led the worshippers round the altar in a solemn procession accompanied with chants, he inflicts the first wound . . . and in all haste drinks of the blood that gushes forth. Forthwith the whole company fall on the victim with their swords, hacking off pieces of the quivering flesh and devouring them raw with such wild haste, that in the short interval between the rise of the day star¹ which marked the hour for the service to begin, and the disappearance of its rays before the rising sun, the entire camel, body and bones, skin, blood and entrails, is wholly devoured.’ All the evidence goes to show that this barbaric ritual, which bears every sign of extreme antiquity, was no isolated instance but was everywhere the original form taken by totemic sacrifice, though later toned down in many different directions.

¹ To which the sacrifice was offered.

Totem And Taboo

2779

Many authorities have refused to attach importance to the concept of the totem meal, because it was not supported by any direct observation at the level of totemism. Robertson Smith himself pointed to instances in which the sacramental significance of the sacrifice seemed to be assured: for instance, the human sacrifices of the Aztecs, and others which recall the circumstances of the totem meal - the sacrifice of bears by the Bear clan of the Ouataouak tribe in America and the bear feast of the Aino in Japan. These and similar cases have been reported in detail by Frazer in the Fifth Part of his great work (1912, 2). An American Indian tribe in California, which worship a large bird of prey (a buzzard), kill it once a year at a solemn festival, after which it is mourned and its skin and feathers are preserved. The Zuni Indians of New Mexico behave in a similar way to their sacred turtles.

A feature has been observed in the intichiuma ceremonies of the Central Australian tribes which agrees admirably with Robertson Smith’s conjectures. Each clan, when it is performing magic for the multiplication of its totem (which it itself is normally prohibited from consuming), is obliged during the ceremony to eat a small portion of its own totem before making it accessible to the other clans. According to Frazer (ibid., 2, 590) the clearest example of a sacramental consumption of an otherwise prohibited totem is to be found among the Bini of West Africa in connection with their funeral ceremonies.

Accordingly, I propose that we should adopt Robertson Smith’s hypothesis that the sacramental killing and communal eating of the totem animal, whose consumption was forbidden on all other occasions, was an important feature of totemic religion.¹

¹ I am not unaware of the objections to this theory of sacrifice which have been brought forward by various writers (such as Marillier, Hubert and Mauss, etc.); but they have not diminished to any important extent the impression produced by Robertson Smith’s hypothesis.

Totem And Taboo

2780

(5)

Let us call up the spectacle of a totem meal of the kind we have been discussing, amplified by a few probable features which we have not yet been able to consider. The clan is celebrating the ceremonial occasion by the cruel slaughter of its totem animal and is devouring it raw - blood, flesh and bones. The clansmen are there, dressed in the likeness of the totem and imitating it in sound and movement, as though they are seeking to stress their identity with it. Each man is conscious that he is performing an act forbidden to the individual and justifiable only through the participation of the whole clan; nor may any one absent himself from the killing and the meal. When the deed is done, the slaughtered animal is lamented and bewailed. The mourning is obligatory, imposed by dread of a threatened retribution. As Robertson Smith (1894, 412) remarks of an analogous occasion, its chief purpose is to disclaim responsibility for the killing.

But the mourning is followed by demonstrations of festive rejoicing: every instinct is unfettered and there is licence for every kind of gratification. Here we have easy access to an understanding of the nature of festivals in general. A festival is a permitted, or rather an obligatory, excess, a solemn breach of a prohibition. It is not that men commit the excesses because they are feeling happy as a result of some injunction they have received. It is rather that excess is of the essence of a festival; the festive feeling is produced by the liberty to do what is as a rule prohibited.

What are we to make, though, of the prelude to this festive joy - the mourning over the death of the animal? If the clansmen rejoice over the killing of the totem - a normally forbidden act - why do they mourn over it as well?

As we have seen, the clansmen acquire sanctity by consuming the totem: they reinforce their identification with it and with one another. Their festive feelings and all that follows from them might well be explained by the fact that they have taken into themselves the sacred life of which the substance of the totem is the vehicle.

Totem And Taboo

2781

Psycho-analysis has revealed that the totem animal is in reality a substitute for the father; and this tallies with the contradictory fact that, though the killing of the animal is as a rule forbidden, yet its killing is a festive occasion - with the fact that it is killed and yet mourned. The ambivalent emotional attitude, which to this day characterizes the father-complex in our children and which often persists into adult life, seems to extend to the totem animal in its capacity as substitute for the father.

If, now, we bring together the psycho-analytic translation of the totem with the fact of the totem meal and with Darwin’s theories of the earliest state of human society, the possibility of a deeper understanding emerges - a glimpse of a hypothesis which may seem fantastic but which offers the advantage of establishing an unsuspected correlation between groups of phenomena that have hitherto been disconnected.

There is, of course, no place for the beginnings of totemism in Darwin’s primal horde. All that we find there is a violent and jealous father who keeps all the females for himself and drives away his sons as they grow up. This earliest state of society has never been an object of observation. The most primitive kind of organization that we actually come across - and one that is in force to this day in certain tribes - consists of bands of males; these bands are composed of members with equal rights and are subject to the restrictions of the totemic system, including inheritance through the mother. Can this form of organization have developed out of the other one? and if so along what lines?

Totem And Taboo

2782

If we call the celebration of the totem meal to our help, we shall be able to find an answer. One day¹ the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde. United, they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible for them individually. (Some cultural advance, perhaps, command over some new weapon, had given them a sense of superior strength.) Cannibal savages as they were, it goes without saying that they devoured their victim as well as killing him. The violent primal father had doubtless been the feared and envied model of each one of the company of brothers: and in the act of devouring him they accomplished their identification with him, and each one of them acquired a portion of his strength. The totem meal, which is perhaps mankind’s earliest festival, would thus be a repetition and a commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed, which was the beginning of so many things - of social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion.¹

¹ To avoid possible misunderstanding, I must ask the reader to take into account the final sentences of the following footnote as a corrective to this description.

² This hypothesis, which has such a monstrous air, of the tyrannical father being overwhelmed and killed by a combination of his exiled sons, was also arrived at by Atkinson (1903, 220 f.) as a direct implication of the state of affairs in Darwin’s primal horde: ‘The patriarch had only one enemy whom he should dread . . . a youthful band of brothers living together in forced celibacy, or at most in polyandrous relation with some single female captive. A horde as yet weak in their impubescence they are, but they would, when strength was gained with time, inevitably wrench by combined attacks, renewed again and again, both wife and life from the paternal tyrant.’ Atkinson, who incidentally passed his whole life in New Caledonia and had unusual opportunities for studying the natives, also pointed out that the conditions which Darwin assumed to prevail in the primal horde may easily be observed in herds of wild oxen and horses and regularly lead to the killing of the father of the herd. He further supposed that, after the father had been disposed of, the horde would be disintegrated by a bitter struggle between the victorious sons. Thus any new organization of society would be precluded: there would be ‘an ever-recurring violent succession to the solitary paternal tyrant, by sons whose parricidal hands were so soon again clenched in fratricidal strife.’ (Ibid., 228.) Atkinson, who had no psycho-analytic hints to help him and who was ignorant of Robertson Smith’s studies, found a less violent transition from the primal horde to the next social stage, at which numbers of males live together in a peaceable community. He believed that through the intervention of maternal love the sons - to begin with only the youngest, but later others as well - were allowed to remain with the horde, and that in return for this toleration the sons acknowledged their father’s sexual privilege by renouncing all claim to their mother and sisters.

Such is the highly remarkable theory put forward by Atkinson. In its essential feature it is in agreement with my own; but its divergence results in its failing to effect a correlation with many other issues.

The lack of precision in what I have written in the text above, its abbreviation of the time factor and its compression of the whole subject matter, may be attributed to the reserve necessitated by the nature of the topic. It would be as foolish to aim at exactitude in such questions as it would be unfair to insist upon certainty.

Totem And Taboo

2783

In order that these latter consequences may seem plausible, leaving their premises on one side, we need only suppose that the tumultuous mob of brothers were filled with the same contradictory feelings which we can see at work in the ambivalent father-complexes of our children and of our neurotic patients. They hated their father, who presented such a formidable obstacle to their craving for power and their sexual desires; but they loved and admired him too. After they had got rid of him, had satisfied their hatred and had put into effect their wish to identify themselves with him, the affection which had all this time been pushed under was bound to make itself felt.¹ It did so in the form of remorse. A sense of guilt made its appearance, which in this instance coincided with the remorse felt by the whole group. The dead father became stronger than the living one had been - for events took the course we so often see them follow in human affairs to this day. What had up to then been prevented by his actual existence was thenceforward prohibited by the sons themselves, in accordance with the psychological procedure so familiar to us in psycho-analyses under the name of ‘deferred obedience’. They revoked their deed by forbidding the killing of the totem, the substitute for their father; and they renounced its fruits by resigning their claim to the women who had now been set free. They thus created out of their filial sense of guilt the two fundamental taboos of totemism, which for that very reason inevitably corresponded to the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex. Whoever contravened those taboos be came guilty of the only two crimes with which primitive society concerned itself.²

¹ This fresh emotional attitude must also have been assisted by the fact that the deed cannot have given complete satisfaction to those who did it. From one point of view it had been done in vain. Not one of the sons had in fact been able to put his original wish - of taking his father’s place - into effect. And, as we know, failure is far more propitious for a moral reaction than satisfaction.

² ‘Murder and incest, or offences of a like kind against the sacred laws of blood, are in primitive society the only crimes of which the community as such takes cognizance.’ (Smith, 1894, 419.)

Totem And Taboo

2784

The two taboos of totemism with which human morality has its beginning are not on a par psychologically. The first of them, the law protecting the totem animal, is founded wholly on emotional motives: the father had actually been eliminated, and in no real sense could the deed be undone. But the second rule, the prohibition of incest, has a powerful practical basis as well. Sexual desires do not unite men but divide them. Though the brothers had banded together in order to overcome their father, they were all one another’s rivals in regard to the women. Each of them would have wished, like his father, to have all the women to himself. The new organization would have collapsed in a struggle of all against all, for none of them was of such over-mastering strength as to be able to take on his father’s part with success. Thus the brothers had no alternative, if they were to live together, but - not, perhaps, until they had passed through many dangerous crises - to institute the law against incest, by which they all alike renounced the women whom they desired and who had been their chief motive for despatching their father. In this way they rescued the organization which had made them strong - and which may have been based on homosexual feelings and acts, originating perhaps during the period of their expulsion from the horde. Here, too, may perhaps have been the germ of the institution of matriarchy, described by Bachofen, which was in turn replaced by the patriarchal organization of the family.

On the other hand, the claim of totemism to be regarded as a first attempt at a religion is based on the first of these two taboos - that upon taking the life of the totem animal. The animal struck the sons as a natural and obvious substitute for their father; but the treatment of it which they found imposed on themselves expressed more than the need to exhibit their remorse. They could attempt, in their relation to this surrogate father, to allay their burning sense of guilt, to bring about a kind of reconciliation with their father. The totemic system was, as it were, a covenant with their father, in which he promised them everything that a childish imagination may expect from a father - protection, care and indulgence - while on their side they undertook to respect his life, that is to say, not to repeat the deed which had brought destruction on their real father. Totemism, moreover, contained an attempt at self-justification: ‘If our father had treated us in the way the totem does, we should never have felt tempted to kill him.’ In this fashion totemism helped to smooth things over and to make it possible to forget the event to which it owed its origin.

Totem And Taboo

2785

Features were thus brought into existence which continued thenceforward to have a determining influence on the nature of religion. Totemic religion arose from the filial sense of guilt, in an attempt to allay that feeling and to appease the father by deferred obedience to him. All later religions are seen to be attempts at solving the same problem. They vary according to the stage of civilization at which they arise and according to the methods which they adopt; but all have the same end in view and are reactions to the same great event with which civilization began and which, since it occurred, has not allowed mankind a moment’s rest.

There is another feature which was already present in totemism and which has been preserved unaltered in religion. The tension of ambivalence was evidently too great for any contrivance to be able to counteract it; or it is possible that psychological conditions in general are unfavourable to getting rid of these antithetical emotions. However that may be, we find that the ambivalence implicit in the father-complex persists in totemism and in religions generally. Totemic religion not only comprised expressions of remorse and attempts at atonement, it also served as a remembrance of the triumph over the father. Satisfaction over that triumph led to the institution of the memorial festival of the totem meal, in which the restrictions of deferred obedience no longer held. Thus it became a duty to repeat the crime of parricide again and again in the sacrifice of the totem animal, whenever, as a result of the changing conditions of life, the cherished fruit of the crime - appropriation of the paternal attributes - threatened to disappear. We shall not be surprised to find that the element of filial rebelliousness also emerges, in the later products of religion, often in the strangest disguises and transformations.

Totem And Taboo

2786

Hitherto we have followed the developments of the affectionate current of feeling towards the father, transformed into remorse, as we find them in religion and in moral ordinances (which are not sharply distinguished in totemism). But we must not overlook the fact that it was in the main with the impulses that led to parricide that the victory lay. For a long time afterwards, the social fraternal feelings, which were the basis of the whole transformation, continued to exercise a profound influence on the development of society. They found expression in the sanctification of the blood tie, in the emphasis upon the solidarity of all life within the same clan. In thus guaranteeing one another’s lives, the brothers were declaring that no one of them must be treated by another as their father was treated by them all jointly. They were precluding the possibility of a repetition of their father’s fate. To the religiously-based prohibition against killing the totem was now added the socially-based prohibition against fratricide. It was not until long afterwards that the prohibition ceased to be limited to members of the clan and assumed the simple form: ‘Thou shalt do no murder.’ The patriarchal horde was replaced in the first instance by the fraternal clan, whose existence was assured by the blood tie. Society was now based on complicity in the common crime; religion was based on the sense of guilt and the remorse attaching to it; while morality was based partly on the exigencies of this society and partly on the penance demanded by the sense of guilt.

Thus psycho-analysis, in contradiction to the more recent views of the totemic system but in agreement with the earlier ones, requires us to assume that totemism and exogamy were intimately connected and had a simultaneous origin.

Totem And Taboo

2787

(6)

A great number of powerful motives restrain me from any attempt at picturing the further development of religions from their origin in totemism to their condition to-day. I will only follow two threads whose course I can trace with especial clarity as they run through the pattern: the theme of the totemic sacrifice and the relation of son to father.¹

Robertson Smith has shown us that the ancient totem meal recurs in the original form of sacrifice. The meaning of the act is the same: sanctification through participation in a common meal. The sense of guilt, which can only be allayed by the solidarity of all the participants, also persists. What is new is the clan deity, in whose supposed presence the sacrifice is performed, who participates in the meal as though he were a clansman, and with whom those who consume the meal become identified. How does the god come to be in a situation to which he was originally a stranger?

The answer might be that in the meantime the concept of God had emerged - from some unknown source - and had taken control of the whole of religious life; and that, like everything else that was to survive, the totem meal had been obliged to find a point of contact with the new system. The psycho-analysis of individual human beings, however, teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father. As in the case of totemism, psycho-analysis recommends us to have faith in the believers who call God their father, just as the totem was called the tribal ancestor. If psycho-analysis deserves any attention, then - without prejudice to any other sources or meanings of the concept of God, upon which psycho-analysis can throw no light - the paternal element in that concept must be a most important one. But in that case the father is represented twice over in the situation of primitive sacrifice: once as God and once as the totemic animal victim. And, even granting the restricted number of explanations open to psycho-analysis, one must ask whether this is possible and what sense it can have.

We know that there are a multiplicity of relations between the god and the sacred animal (the totem or the sacrificial victim). (1) Each god usually has an animal (and quite often several animals) sacred to him. (2) In the case of certain specially sacred sacrifices - ‘mystic’ sacrifices - the victim was precisely the animal sacred to the god (Smith, 1894). (3) The god was often worshipped in the shape of an animal (or, to look at it in another way, animals were worshipped as gods) long after the age of totemism. (4) In myths the god often transforms himself into an animal, and frequently into the animal that is sacred to him.

¹ Cf. the discussion by C. G. Jung (1912), which is governed by views differing in certain respects from mine.

Totem And Taboo

2788

It therefore seems plausible to suppose that the god himself was the totem animal, and that he developed out of it at a later stage of religious feeling. But we are relieved from the necessity for further discussion by the consideration that the totem is nothing other than a surrogate of the father. Thus, while the totem may be the first form of father-surrogate, the god will be a later one, in which the father has regained his human shape. A new creation such as this, derived from what constitutes the root of every form of religion - a longing for the father - might occur if in the process of time some fundamental change had taken place in man’s relation to the father, and perhaps, too, in his relation to animals.

Signs of the occurrence of changes of this kind may easily be seen, even if we leave on one side the beginning of a mental estrangement from animals and the disrupting of totemism owing to domestication. (See above, p2777 f.) There was one factor in the state of affairs produced by the elimination of the father which was bound in the course of time to cause an enormous increase in the longing felt for him. Each single one of the brothers who had banded together for the purpose of killing their father was inspired by a wish to become like him and had given expression to it by incorporating parts of their father’s surrogate in the totem meal. But, in consequence of the pressure exercised upon each participant by the fraternal clan as a whole, that wish could not be fulfilled. For the future no one could or might ever again attain the father’s supreme power, even though that was what all of them had striven for. Thus after a long lapse of time their bitterness against their father, which had driven them to their deed, grew less, and their longing for him increased; and it became possible for an ideal to emerge which embodied the unlimited power of the primal father against whom they had once fought as well as their readiness to submit to him. As a result of decisive cultural changes, the original democratic equality that had prevailed among all the individual clansmen became untenable; and there developed at the same time an inclination, based on veneration felt for particular human individuals, to revive the ancient paternal ideal by creating gods. The notion of a man becoming a god or of a god dying strikes us to-day as shockingly presumptuous; but even in classical antiquity there was nothing revolting in it.¹ The elevation of the father who had once been murdered into a god from whom the clan claimed descent was a far more serious attempt at atonement than had been the ancient covenant with the totem.

¹ ‘To us moderns, for whom the breach which divides the human and the divine has deepened into an impassable gulf, such mimicry may appear impious, but it was otherwise with the ancients. To their thinking gods and men were akin, for many families traced their descent from a divinity, and the deification of a man probably seemed as little extraordinary to them as the canonization of a saint seems to a modern Catholic.’ (Frazer, 1911, 2, 177 f.)

Totem And Taboo

2789

I cannot suggest at what point in this process of development a place is to be found for the great mother-goddesses, who may perhaps in general have preceded the father-gods. It seems certain, however, that the change in attitude to the father was not restricted to the sphere of religion but that it extended in a consistent manner to that other side of human life which had been affected by the father’s removal - to social organization. With the introduction of father-deities a fatherless society gradually changed into one organized on a patriarchal basis. The family was a restoration of the former primal horde and it gave back to fathers a large portion of their former rights. There were once more fathers, but the social achievements of the fraternal clan had not been abandoned; and the gulf between the new fathers of a family and the unrestricted primal father of the horde was wide enough to guarantee the continuance of the religious craving, the persistence of an unappeased longing for the father.

We see, then, that in the scene of sacrifice before the god of the clan the father is in fact represented twice over - as the god and as the totemic animal victim. But in our attempts at understanding this situation we must beware of interpretations which seek to translate it in a two-dimensional fashion as though it were an allegory, and which in so doing forget its historical stratification. The two-fold presence of the father corresponds to the two chronologically successive meanings of the scene. The ambivalent attitude towards the father has found a plastic expression in it, and so, too, has the victory of the son’s affectionate emotions over his hostile ones. The scene of the father’s vanquishment, of his greatest defeat, has become the stuff for the representation of his supreme triumph. The importance which is everywhere, without exception, ascribed to sacrifice lies in the fact that it offers satisfaction to the father for the outrage inflicted on him in the same act in which that deed is commemorated.

Totem And Taboo

2790

As time went on, the animal lost its sacred character and the sacrifice lost its connection with the totem feast; it became a simple offering to the deity, an act of renunciation in favour of the god. God Himself had become so far exalted above mankind that He could only be approached through an intermediary the priest. At the same time divine kings made their appearance in the social structure and introduced the patriarchal system into the state. It must be confessed that the revenge taken by the deposed and restored father was a harsh one: the dominance of authority was at its climax. The subjugated sons made use of the new situation in order to unburden themselves still further of their sense of guilt. They were no longer in any way responsible for the sacrifice as it now was. It was God Himself who demanded it and regulated it. This is the phase in which we find myths showing the god himself killing the animal which is sacred to him and which is in fact himself. Here we have the most extreme denial of the great crime which was the beginning of society and of the sense of guilt. But there is a second meaning to this last picture of sacrifice which is unmistakable. It expresses satisfaction at the earlier father-surrogate having been abandoned in favour of the superior concept of God. At this point the psycho-analytic interpretation of the scene coincides approximately with the allegorical, surface translation of it, which represents the god as overcoming the animal side of his own nature.¹

¹ It is generally agreed that when, in mythologies, one generation of gods is overcome by another, what is denoted is the historical replacement of one religious system by a new one, whether as a result of foreign conquest or of psychological development. In the latter case myth approximates to what Silberer has described as ‘functional phenomena’. The view maintained by Jung (1912) that the god who kills the animal is a libidinal symbol implies a concept of libido other than that which has hitherto been employed and seems to me questionable from every point of view.

Totem And Taboo

2791

Nevertheless it would be a mistake to suppose that the hostile impulses inherent in the father-complex were completely silenced during this period of revived paternal authority. On the contrary, the first phases of the dominance of the two new father surrogates - gods and kings - show the most energetic signs of the ambivalence that remains a characteristic of religion.

In his great work, The Golden Bough, Frazer puts forward the view that the earliest kings of the Latin tribes were foreigners who played the part of a god and were solemnly executed at a particular festival. The annual sacrifice (or, as a variant, self-sacrifice) of a god seems to have been an essential element in the Semitic religions. The ceremonials of human sacrifice, performed in the most different parts of the inhabited globe, leave very little doubt that the victims met their end as representatives of the deity; and these sacrificial rites can be traced into late times, with an inanimate effigy or puppet taking the place of the living human being. The theanthropic sacrifice of the god, into which it is unfortunately impossible for me to enter here as fully as into animal sacrifice, throws a searching retrospective light upon the meaning of the older forms of sacrifice. It confesses, with a frankness that could hardly be excelled, to the fact that the object of the act of sacrifice has always been the same - namely what is now worshipped as God, that is to say, the father. The problem of the relation between animal and human sacrifice thus admits of a simple solution. The original animal sacrifice was already a substitute for a human sacrifice - for the ceremonial killing of the father; so that, when the father-surrogate once more resumed its human shape, the animal sacrifice too could be changed back into a human sacrifice.

The memory of the first great act of sacrifice thus proved indestructible, in spite of every effort to forget it; and at the very point at which men sought to be at the farthest distance from the motives that led to it, its undistorted reproduction emerged in the form of the sacrifice of the god. I need not enlarge here upon the developments of religious thought which, in the shape of rationalizations, made this recurrence possible. Robertson Smith, who had no thought of our derivation of sacrifice from the great event in human prehistory, states that the ceremonies at the festivals in which the ancient Semites celebrated the death of a deity ‘were currently interpreted as the commemoration of a mythical tragedy’. ‘The mourning’, he declares, ‘is not a spontaneous expression of sympathy with the divine tragedy, but obligatory and enforced by fear of supernatural anger. And a chief object of the mourners is to disclaim responsibility for the god’s death - a point which his already come before us in connection with theanthropic sacrifices, such as the "ox-murder at Athens".’ (Ibid., 412.) It seems most probable that these ‘current interpretations’ were correct and that the feelings of the celebrants were fully explained by the underlying situation.

Totem And Taboo

2792

Let us assume it to be a fact, then, that in the course of the later development of religions the two driving factors, the son’s sense of guilt and the son’s rebelliousness, never became extinct. Whatever attempt was made at solving the religious problem, whatever kind of reconciliation was effected between these two opposing mental forces, sooner or later broke down, under the combined influence, no doubt, of historical events, cultural changes and internal psychical modifications.

The son’s efforts to put himself in the place of the father-god became ever more obvious. The introduction of agriculture increased the son’s importance in the patriarchal family. He ventured upon new demonstrations of his incestuous libido, which found symbolic satisfaction in his cultivation of Mother Earth. Divine figures such as Attis, Adonis and Tammuz emerged, spirits of vegetation and at the same time youthful divinities enjoying the favours of mother goddesses and committing incest with their mother in defiance of their father. But the sense of guilt, which was not allayed by these creations, found expression in myths which granted only short lives to these youthful favourites of the mother-goddesses and decreed their punishment by emasculation or by the wrath of the father in the form of an animal. Adonis was killed by a wild boar, the sacred animal of Aphrodite; Attis, beloved of Cybele, perished by castration.¹ The mourning for these gods and the rejoicings over their resurrection passed over into the ritual of another son-deity who was destined to lasting success.

¹ Fear of castration plays an extremely large part, in the case of the youthful neurotics whom we come across, as an interference in their relations with their father. The illuminating instance reported by Ferenczi (1913a) has shown us how a little boy took as his totem the beast that had pecked at his little penis. When our children come to hear of ritual circumcision, they equate it with castration. The parallel in social psychology to this reaction by children has not yet been worked out, so far as I am aware. In primaeval times and in primitive races, where circumcision is so frequent, it is performed at the age of initiation into manhood and it is at that age that its significance is to be found; it was only as a secondary development that it was shifted back to the early years of life. It is of very great interest to find that among primitive peoples circumcision is combined with cutting the hair and knocking out teeth or is replaced by them, and that our children, who cannot possibly have any knowledge of this, in fact treat these two operations, in the anxiety with which they react to them, as equivalents of castration.

Totem And Taboo

2793

When Christianity first penetrated into the ancient world it met with competition from the religion of Mithras and for a time it was doubtful which of the two deities would gain the victory. In spite of the halo of light surrounding his form, the youthful Persian god remains obscure to us. We may perhaps infer from the sculptures of Mithras slaying a bull that he represented a son who was alone in sacrificing his father and thus redeemed his brothers from their burden of complicity in the deed. There was an alternative method of allaying their guilt and this was first adopted by Christ. He sacrificed his own life and so redeemed the company of brothers from original sin.

The doctrine of original sin was of Orphic origin. It formed a part of the mysteries, and spread from them to the schools of philosophy of ancient Greece. (Reinach, 1905-12, 2, 75 ff.) Mankind, it was said, were descended from the Titans, who had lulled the young Dionysus-Zagreus and had torn him to pieces. The burden of this crime weighed on them. A fragment of Anaximander relates how the unity of the world was broken by a primaeval sin,¹ and that whatever issued from it must bear the punishment. The tumultuous mobbing, the killing and the tearing in pieces by the Titans reminds us clearly enough of the totemic sacrifice described by St. Nilus - as, for the matter of that, do many other ancient myths, including, for instance, that of the death of Orpheus himself. Nevertheless, there is a disturbing difference in the fact of the murder having been committed on a youthful god.

¹ ‘Une sorte de péché proethnique’ (Reinach, 1905-12, 2, 76).

Totem And Taboo

2794

There can be no doubt that in the Christian myth the original sin was one against God the Father. If, however, Christ redeemed mankind from the burden of original sin by the sacrifice of his own life, we are driven to conclude that the sin was a murder. The law of talion, which is so deeply rooted in human feelings, lays it down that a murder can only be expiated by the sacrifice of another life: self-sacrifice points back to blood-guilt.¹ And if this sacrifice of a life brought about atonement with God the Father, the crime to be expiated can only have been the murder of the father.

In the Christian doctrine, therefore, men were acknowledging in the most undisguised manner the guilty primaeval deed, since they found the fullest atonement for it in the sacrifice of this one son. Atonement with the father was all the more complete since the sacrifice was accompanied by a total renunciation of the women on whose account the rebellion against the father was started. But at that point the inexorable psychological law of ambivalence stepped in. The very deed in which the son offered the greatest possible atonement to the father brought him at the same time to the attainment of his wishes against the father. He himself became God, beside, or, more correctly, in place of, the father. A son-religion displaced the father-religion. As a sign of this substitution the ancient totem meal was revived in the form of communion, in which the company of brothers consumed the flesh and blood of the son - no longer the father - obtained sanctity thereby and identified themselves with him. Thus we can trace through the ages the identity of the totem meal with animal sacrifice, with theanthropic human sacrifice and with the Christian Eucharist, and we can recognize in all these rituals the effect of the crime by which men were so deeply weighed down but of which they must none the less feel so proud. The Christian communion, however, is essentially a fresh elimination of the father, a repetition of the guilty deed. We can see the full justice of Frazer’s pronouncement that ‘the Christian communion has absorbed within itself a sacrament which is doubtless far older than Christianity’.²

¹ We find that impulses to suicide in a neurotic turn out regularly to be self-punishments for wishes for someone else’s death.

² Frazer (1912, 2, 51). No one familiar with the literature of the subject will imagine that the derivation of Christian communion from the totem meal is an idea originating from the author of the present essay.

Totem And Taboo

2795

(7)

An event such as the elimination of the primal father by the company of his sons must inevitably have left ineradicable traces in the history of humanity; and the less it itself was recollected, the more numerous must have been the substitutes to which it gave rise.¹ I shall resist the temptation of pointing out these traces in mythology, where they are not hard to find, and shall turn in another direction and take up a suggestion made by Salomon Reinach in a most instructive essay on the death of Orpheus.²

In the history of Greek art we come upon a situation which shows striking resemblances to the scene of the totem meal as identified by Robertson Smith, and not less profound differences from it. I have in mind the situation of the most ancient Greek tragedy. A company of individuals, named and dressed alike, surrounded a single figure, all hanging upon his words and deeds: they were the Chorus and the impersonator of the Hero. He was originally the only actor. Later, a second and third actor were added, to play as counterpart to the Hero and as characters split off from him; but the character of the Hero himself and his relation to the Chorus remained unaltered. The Hero of tragedy must suffer; to this day that remains the essence of a tragedy. He had to bear the burden of what was known as ‘tragic guilt’; the basis of that guilt is not always easy to find, for in the light of our everyday life it is often no guilt at all. As a rule it lay in rebellion against some divine or human authority; and the Chorus accompanied the Hero with feelings of sympathy, sought to hold him back, to warn him and to sober him, and mourned over him when he had met with what was felt as the merited punishment for his rash undertaking.

But why had the Hero of tragedy to suffer? and what was the meaning of his ‘tragic guilt’? I will cut the discussion short and give a quick reply. He had to suffer because he was the primal father, the Hero of the great primaeval tragedy which was being re-enacted with a tendentious twist; and the tragic guilt was the guilt which he had to take on himself in order to relieve the Chorus from theirs. The scene upon the stage was derived from the historical scene through a process of systematic distortion - one might even say, as the product of a refined hypocrisy. In the remote reality it had actually been the members of the Chorus who caused the Hero’s suffering; now, however, they exhausted themselves with sympathy and regret and it was the Hero himself who was responsible for his own sufferings. The crime which was thrown on to his shoulders, presumptuousness and rebelliousness against a great authority, was precisely the crime for which the members of the Chorus, the company of brothers, were responsible. Thus the tragic Hero became, though it might be against his will, the redeemer of the Chorus

In Greek tragedy the special subject-matter of the performance was the sufferings of the divine goat, Dionysus, and the lamentation of the goats who were his followers and who identified themselves with him. That being so, it is easy to understand how drama, which had become extinct, was kindled into fresh life in the Middle Ages around the Passion of Christ.

¹ In Ariel’s words from The Tempest:

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

² ‘La mort d’Orphée’, contained in the volume which I have so often quoted (1905-12, 2, 100 ff.).

Totem And Taboo

2796

At the conclusion, then, of this exceedingly condensed inquiry, I should like to insist that its outcome shows that the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art converge in the Oedipus complex. This is in complete agreement with the psycho-analytic finding that the same complex constitutes the nucleus of all neuroses, so far as our present knowledge goes. It seems to me a most surprising discovery that the problems of social psychology, too, should prove soluble on the basis of one single concrete point - man’s relation to his father. It is even possible that yet another psychological problem belongs in this same connection. I have often had occasion to point out that emotional ambivalence in the proper sense of the term - that is, the simultaneous existence of love and hate towards the same object - lies at the root of many important cultural institutions. We know nothing of the origin of this ambivalence. One possible assumption is that it is a fundamental phenomenon of our emotional life. But it seems to me quite worth considering another possibility, namely that originally it formed no part of our emotional life but was acquired by the human race in connection with their father-complex,¹ precisely where the psycho-analytic examination of modern individuals still finds it revealed at its strongest.²

Before I bring my remarks to a close, however, I must find room to point out that, though my arguments have led to a high degree of convergence upon a single comprehensive nexus of ideas, this fact cannot blind us to the uncertainties of my premises or the difficulties involved in my conclusions. I will only mention two of the latter which may have forced themselves on the notice of a number of my readers.

No one can have failed to observe, in the first place, that I have taken as the basis of my whole position the existence of a collective mind, in which mental processes occur just as they do in the mind of an individual. In particular, I have supposed that the sense of guilt for an action has persisted for many thousands of years and has remained operative in generations which can have had no knowledge of that action. I have supposed that an emotional process, such as might have developed in generations of sons who were ill-treated by their father, has extended to new generations which were exempt from such treatment for the very reason that their father had been eliminated. It must be admitted that these are grave difficulties; and any explanation that could avoid presumptions of such a kind would seem to be preferable.

¹ Or, more correctly, their parental complex.

² Since I am used to being misunderstood, I think it worth while to insist explicitly that the derivations which I have proposed in these pages do not in the least overlook the complexity of the phenomena under review. All that they claim is to have added a new factor to the sources, known or still unknown, of religion, morality and society - a factor based on a consideration of the implications of psycho-analysis. I must leave to others the task of synthesizing the explanation into a unity. It does, however, follow from the nature of the new contribution that it could not play any other than a central part in such a synthesis, even though powerful emotional resistance might have to be overcome before its great importance was recognized.

Totem And Taboo

2797

Further reflection, however, will show that I am not alone in the responsibility for this bold procedure. Without the assumption of a collective mind, which makes it possible to neglect the interruptions of mental acts caused by the extinction of the individual, social psychology in general cannot exist. Unless psychical processes were continued from one generation to another, if each generation were obliged to acquire its attitude to life anew, there would be no progress in this field and next to no development. This gives rise to two further questions: how much can we attribute to psychical continuity in the sequence of generations? and what are the ways and means employed by one generation in order to hand on its mental states to the next one? I shall not pretend that these problems are sufficiently explained or that direct communication and tradition - which are the first things that occur to one - are enough to account for the process. Social psychology shows very little interest, on the whole, in the manner in which the required continuity in the mental life of successive generations is established. A part of the problem seems to be met by the inheritance of psychical dispositions which, however, need to be given some sort of impetus in the life of the individual before they can be roused into actual operation. This may be the meaning of the poet’s words:

Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast,

Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen.¹

The problem would seem even more difficult if we had to admit that mental impulses could be so completely suppressed as to leave no trace whatever behind them. But that is not the case. Even the most ruthless suppression must leave room for distorted surrogate impulses and for reactions resulting from them. If so, however, we may safely assume that no generation is able to conceal any of its more important mental processes from its successor. For psycho-analysis has shown us that everyone possesses in his unconscious mental activity an apparatus which enables him to interpret other people’s reactions, that is, to undo the distortions which other people have imposed on the expression of their feelings. An unconscious understanding such as this of all the customs, ceremonies and dogmas left behind by the original relation to the father may have made it possible for later generations to take over their heritage of emotion.

¹ [‘What thou hast inherited from thy fathers, acquire it to make it thine.’]

Totem And Taboo

2798

Another difficulty might actually be brought forward from psycho-analytic quarters. The earliest moral precepts and restrictions in primitive society have been explained by us as reactions to a deed which gave those who performed it the concept of ‘crime’. They felt remorse for the deed and decided that it should never be repeated and that its performance should bring no advantage. This creative sense of guilt still persists among us. We find it operating in an asocial manner in neurotics, and producing new moral precepts and persistent restrictions, as an atonement for crimes that have been committed and as a precaution against the committing of new ones.¹ If, however, we inquire among these neurotics to discover what were the deeds which provoked these reactions, we shall be disappointed. We find no deeds, but only impulses and emotions, set upon evil ends but held back from their achievement. What lie behind the sense of guilt of neurotics are always psychical realities and never factual ones. What characterizes neurotics is that they prefer psychical to factual reality and react just as seriously to thoughts as normal people do to realities.

May not the same have been true of primitive men?  We are justified in believing that, as one of the phenomena of their narcissistic organization, they overvalued their psychical acts to an extraordinary degree.² Accordingly the mere hostile impulse against the father, the mere existence of a wishful phantasy of killing and devouring him, would have been enough to produce the moral reaction that created totemism and taboo. In this way we should avoid the necessity for deriving the origin of our cultural legacy, of which we justly feel so proud, from a hideous crime, revolting to all our feelings. No damage would thus be done to the causal chain stretching from the beginning to the present day, for psychical reality would be strong enough to bear the weight of these consequences. To this it may be objected that an alteration in the form of society from a patriarchal horde to a fraternal clan did actually take place. This is a powerful argument, but not a conclusive one. The alteration might have been effected in a less violent fashion and none the less have been capable of determining the appearance of the moral reaction. So long as the pressure exercised by the primal father could be felt, the hostile feelings towards him were justified, and remorse on their account would have to await a later day. And if it is further argued that everything derived from the ambivalent relation to the father - taboo and the sacrificial ordinance - is characterized by the deepest seriousness and the most complete reality, this further objection carries just as little weight. For the ceremonials and inhibitions of obsessional neurotics show these same characteristics and are nevertheless derived only from psychical reality - from intentions and not from their execution. We must avoid transplanting a contempt for what is merely thought or wished from our commonplace world, with its wealth of material values, into the world of primitive men and neurotics, of which the wealth lies only within themselves.

¹ Cf. the essay on taboo, the second in this work.

² Cf. the third essay in this work.

Totem And Taboo

2799

Here we are faced by a decision which is indeed no easy one. First, however, it must be confessed that the distinction, which may seem fundamental to other people, does not in our judgement affect the heart of the matter. If wishes and impulses have the full value of facts for primitive men, it is our business to give their attitude our understanding attention instead of correcting it in accordance with our own standards. Let us, then, examine more closely the case of neurosis - comparison with which led us into our present uncertainty. It is not accurate to say that obsessional neurotics, weighed down under the burden of an excessive morality, are defending themselves only against psychical reality and are punishing themselves for impulses which were merely felt. Historical reality has a share in the matter as well. In their childhood they had these evil impulses pure and simple, and turned them into acts so far as the impotence of childhood allowed. Each of these excessively virtuous individuals passed though an evil period in his infancy - a phase of perversion which was the forerunner and precondition of the later period of excessive morality. The analogy between primitive men and neurotics will therefore be far more fully established if we suppose that in the former instance, too, psychical reality - as to the form taken by which we are in no doubt - coincided at the beginning with factual reality: that primitive men actually did what all the evidence shows that they intended to do.

Nor must we let ourselves be influenced too far in our judgement of primitive men by the analogy of neurotics. There are distinctions, too, which must be borne in mind. It is no doubt true that the sharp contrast that we make between thinking and doing is absent in both of them. But neurotics are above all inhibited in their actions: with them the thought is a complete substitute for the deed. Primitive men, on the other hand, are uninhibited: thought passes directly into action. With them it is rather the deed that is a substitute for the thought. And that is why, without laying claim to any finality of judgement, I think that in the case before us it may safely be assumed that ‘in the beginning was the Deed’.

2800

THE CLAIMS OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS TO SCIENTIFIC INTEREST

(1913)

2801

Intentionally left blank

2802

THE CLAIMS OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS TO SCIENTIFIC INTEREST

PART I

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INTEREST OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

Psycho-analysis is a medical procedure which aims at the cure of certain forms of nervous disease (the neuroses) by a psychological technique. In a small volume published in 1910.¹ I described the evolution of psycho-analysis from Josef Breuer’s cathartic procedure and its relation to the theories of Charcot and Pierre Janet.

We may give as instances of disorders that are accessible to psycho-analytic treatment hysterical convulsions and paralyses as well as the various symptoms of obsessional neurosis (obsessive ideas and actions). All of these are conditions which are occasionally subject to spontaneous recovery and are dependent on the personal influence of the physician in a haphazard fashion which has not yet been explained. Psycho-analysis has no therapeutic effect on the severer forms of mental disorder properly so called. But - for the first time in the history of medicine - psycho-analysis has made it possible to get some insight into the origin and mechanism alike of the neuroses and psychoses.

This medical significance of psycho-analysis would not, however, justify me in bringing it to the notice of a circle of savants concerned in the synthesis of the sciences. And such a plan must seem particularly premature so long as a large number of psychiatrists and neurologists are opposed to the new therapeutic method and reject both its postulates and its findings. If, nevertheless, I regard the experiment as a legitimate one, it is because psycho-analysis can also claim to be of interest to others than psychiatrists, since it touches upon various other spheres of knowledge and reveals unexpected relations between them and the pathology of mental life.

Accordingly in my present paper I shall leave the medical interest of psycho-analysis on one side and illustrate what I have just asserted of the young science by a series of examples.

¹ Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis.

The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest

2803

There are a large number of phenomena related to facial and other expressive movements and to speech, as well as many processes of thought (both in normal and sick people), which have hitherto escaped the notice of psychology because they have been regarded as no more than the results of organic disorder or of some abnormal failure in function of the mental apparatus. What I have in mind are ‘parapraxes’ (slips of the tongue or pen, forgetfulness, etc.), haphazard actions and dreams in normal people, and convulsive attacks, deliria, visions, and obsessive ideas or acts in neurotic subjects. These phenomena (in so far as they were not entirely neglected, as was the case with the parapraxes) were relegated to pathology and an attempt was made to find ‘physiological’ explanations of them, though these were invariably unsatisfactory. Psycho-analysis, on the contrary, has been able to show that all these things can be explained by means of hypotheses of a purely psychological nature and can be fitted into the chain of psychical events already known to us. Thus on the one hand psycho-analysis has narrowed the region subject to the physiological point of view and on the other hand has brought a large section of pathology into the sphere of psychology. In this instance the normal phenomena provide the more convincing evidence. Psycho-analysis cannot be accused of having applied to normal cases findings arrived at from pathological material. The evidence in the latter and in the former was reached independently and shows that normal processes and what are described as pathological ones follow the same rules.

I shall now discuss in greater detail two of the normal phenomena with which we are here concerned (phenomena, that is, which can be observed in normal people) - namely, parapraxes and dreams.

The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest

2804

By parapraxes, then, I understand the occurrence in healthy and normal people of such events as forgetting words and names that are normally familiar to one, forgetting what one intends to do, making slips of the tongue and pen, misreading, mislaying things and being unable to find them, losing things, making mistakes against one’s better knowledge, and certain habitual gestures and movements. All of these have on the whole had little attention paid to them by psychology; they have been classed as instances of ‘absent-mindedness’ and have been attributed to fatigue, to distracted attention or to the contributory effects of certain slight illnesses. Analytic enquiry, however, shows with enough certainty to satisfy every requirement that these latter factors merely operate as facilitating factors and may be absent. Parapraxes are full-blown psychical phenomena and always have a meaning and an intention. They serve definite purposes which, owing to the prevailing psychological situation, cannot be expressed in any other way. These situations as a rule involve a psychical conflict which prevents the underlying intention from finding direct expression and diverts it along indirect paths. A person who is guilty of a parapraxis may notice it or overlook it; the suppressed intention underlying it may well be familiar to him; but he is usually unaware, without analysis, that that intention is responsible for the parapraxis in question. Analyses of parapraxes are often quite easily and quickly made. If a person’s attention is drawn to a blunder, the next thought that occurs to him provides its explanation.

Parapraxes are the most convenient material for anyone who wishes to convince himself of the trustworthiness of psycho-analytic explanations. In a small work, first published in book form in 1904, I presented a large number of examples of this kind, and since then I have been able to add to my collection many contributions from other observers.¹

The commonest motive for suppressing an intention, which has thereafter to be content with finding its expression in a parapraxis, turns out to be the avoidance of unpleasure. Thus, one obstinately forgets a proper name if one nourishes a secret grudge against its owner; one forgets to carry out an intention if one has in fact only formed it unwillingly - only, for instance, under the pressure of some convention; one loses an object, if one has quarrelled with someone of whom the object reminds one - with its original donor, for instance; one gets into the wrong train if one is making a journey unwillingly and would rather be somewhere else. This motive of avoiding unpleasure is seen most clearly where the forgetting of impressions and experiences is concerned - a fact which had already been observed by many writers before psycho-analysis existed. Memory shows its partiality by being ready to prevent the reproduction of impressions with a distressing affect, even though this purpose cannot be achieved in every case.

¹ The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Cf. also works on the subject by Maeder, Brill, Jones, Rank, etc.

The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest

2805

In other instances the analysis of a parapraxis is less simple and requires less obvious explanations, on account of the intrusion of a process which we describe as ‘displacement’. One may, for instance, forget the name of someone against whom one has no objection; analysis will show, however, that the name has stirred up the memory of someone else, who has the same or a similar-sounding name and whom one has good reason to dislike. This connection has led to the innocent person’s name being forgotten; the intention to forget has, as it were, been displaced along some line of association.

Nor is the intention to avoid unpleasure the only one which can find its outlet in parapraxes. In many cases analysis reveals other purposes which have been suppressed in the particular situation and which can only make themselves felt, so to say, as background disturbances. Thus a slip of the tongue will often serve to betray opinions which the speaker wishes to conceal from his interlocutor. Slips of the tongue have been understood in this sense by various great writers and employed for this purpose in their works. The loss of precious objects often turns out to be an act of sacrifice intended to avert some expected evil; and many other superstitions too survive in educated people in the form of parapraxes. The mislaying of objects means as a rule getting rid of them; damage is done to one’s possessions (ostensibly by accident) so as to make it necessary to acquire something better - and so on.

Nevertheless, in spite of the apparent triviality of these phenomena, the psycho-analytic explanation of parapraxes involves some slight modifications in our view of the world. We find that even normal people are far more frequently moved by contradictory motives than we should have expected. The number of occurrences that can be described as ‘accidental’ is considerably diminished. It is almost a consolation to be able to exclude the loss of objects from among the chance events of life; our blunders often turn out to be a cover for our secret intentions. But - what is more important - many serious accidents that we should otherwise have ascribed entirely to chance reveal under analysis the participation of the subject’s own volition, though without its being clearly admitted by him. The distinction between a chance accident and deliberate self-destruction, which in practice is so often hard to draw, becomes even more dubious when looked at from an analytic point of view.

The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest

2806

The explanation of parapraxes owes its theoretical value to the ease with which they can be solved and their frequency in normal people. But the success of psycho-analysis in explaining them is far surpassed in importance by a further achievement made by it, relating to another phenomenon of normal mental life. What I have in mind is the interpretation of dreams, which brought psycho-analysis for the first time into the conflict with official science which was to be its destiny. Medical research explains dreams as purely somatic phenomena, without meaning or significance, and regards them as the reaction of a mental organ sunk in a state of sleep to physical stimuli which partially awaken it. Psycho-analysis raises the status of dreams into that of psychical acts possessing meaning and purpose, and having a place in the subject’s mental life, and thus disregards their strangeness, incoherence and absurdity. On this view somatic stimuli merely play the part of material that is worked over in the course of the construction of the dream. There is no half-way house between these two views of dreams. What argues against the physiological hypothesis is its unfruitfulness, and what may be argued in favour of the psycho-analytic one is the fact that it has translated and given a meaning to thousands of dreams and has used them to throw light on the intimate details of the human mind.

I devoted a volume published in 1900 to the important subject of dream-interpretation and have had the satisfaction of seeing the theories put forward in it confirmed and amplified by contributions from almost every worker in the field of psycho-analysis.¹ It is generally agreed that dream-interpretation is the foundation stone of psycho-analytic work and that its findings constitute the most important contribution made by psycho-analysis to psychology.

¹ The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a). See also my shorter essay On Dreams (1901a), and other writings by Rank, Stekel, Jones, Silberer, Brill, Maeder, Abraham, Ferenczi, etc.

The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest

2807

I cannot enter here into the technique by which an interpretation of dreams is arrived at, nor can I give the grounds for the conclusions to which the psycho-analytic investigation of dreams has led. I must restrict myself to enunciating some new concepts, reporting my findings and stressing their importance for normal psychology.

Psycho-analysis, then, has demonstrated the following facts. All dreams have a meaning. Their strangeness is due to distortions that have been made in the expression of their meaning. Their absurdity is deliberate and expresses derision, ridicule and contradiction. Their incoherence is a matter of indifference for their interpretation. The dream as we remember it after waking is described by us as its ‘manifest content’. In the process of interpreting this, we are led to the ‘latent dream-thoughts’, which lie hidden behind the manifest content and which are represented by it. These latent dream-thoughts are no longer strange, incoherent or absurd; they are completely valid constituents of our waking thought. We give the name of ‘dream-work’ to the process which transforms the latent dream-thoughts into the manifest content of the dream; it is this dream-work that brings about the distortion which makes the dream-thoughts unrecognizable in the content of the dream.

The dream-work is a psychological process the like of which has hitherto been unknown to psychology. It has claims upon our interest in two main directions. In the first place, it brings to our notice novel processes such as ‘condensation’ (of ideas) and ‘displacement’ (of psychical emphasis from one idea to another), processes which we have never come across at all in our waking life, or only as the basis of what are known as ‘errors in thought’. In the second place, it enables us to detect the operation in the mind of a play of forces which was concealed from our conscious perception. We find that there is a ‘censorship’, a testing agency, at work in us, which decides whether an idea cropping up in the mind shall be allowed to reach consciousness, and which, so far as lies within its power, ruthlessly excludes anything that might produce or revive unpleasure. And it will be recalled at this point that in our analysis of parapraxes we found traces of this same intention to avoid unpleasure in remembering things and of similar conflicts between mental impulses.

The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest

2808

A study of the dream-work forces on us irresistibly a view of mental life which appears to decide the most controversial problems of psychology. The dream-work compels us to assume the existence of an unconscious psychical activity which is more comprehensive and more important than the familiar activity that is linked with consciousness. (I shall have some more to say on this point when I come to discuss the philosophical interest of psycho-analysis.) It enables us to dissect the psychical apparatus into a number of different agencies or systems, and shows us that in the system of unconscious mental activity processes operate which are of quite another kind from those perceived in consciousness.

The dream-work has only one function - namely to maintain sleep. ‘Dreams are the guardians of sleep.’ The dream-thoughts themselves may serve the purposes of the most various mental functions. The dream-work accomplishes its task by representing a wish that arises from the dream-thoughts as fulfilled in a hallucinatory fashion.

It may safely be said that the psycho-analytic study of dreams has given us our first insight into a ‘depth-psychology’ whose existence had not hitherto been suspected.¹ Fundamental changes will have to be introduced into normal psychology if it is to be brought into harmony with these new findings.

It is quite impossible to exhaust the psychological interest of dream-interpretation within the limits of my present paper. Let us bear in mind that what I have so far stressed is merely that dreams have a meaning and are objects for psychological study, and let us now proceed with our consideration of the new territory which has been annexed by psychology in the domain of pathology.

¹ Psycho-analysis does not at present postulate any relation between this psychical topography and anatomical stratification or histological layers.

The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest

2809

The psychological novelties inferred from dreams and parapraxes must be applicable as an explanation of other phenomena if we are to believe in the value of these novelties, or, indeed, in their existence. And we do in fact find that psycho-analysis has shown that the hypotheses of unconscious mental activity, of censorship and repression and of distortion and substitution, at which we have arrived from our study of these normal phenomena, also afford us a first understanding of a number of pathological phenomena and, as one might say, put into our hands the key to all the riddles of the psychology of the neuroses. Thus dreams are to be regarded as the normal prototypes of all psychopathological structures. Anyone who understands dreams can also grasp the psychical mechanism of the neuroses and psychoses.

Starting from dreams, the investigations of psycho-analysis have enabled it to construct a psychology of the neuroses which is being continuously built up piece by piece. But what we are here concerned with - the psychological interest of psycho-analysis - obliges us to enter more fully into only two sides of this far reaching subject: the evidence that many pathological phenomena which had hitherto been believed to require physiological explanations are in fact psychical acts, and the evidence that the processes which lead to abnormal consequences can be traced back to psychical motive forces.

I will illustrate the first of these theses by a few examples. Hysterical attacks have long been recognized as signs of increased emotional excitement and equated with outbreaks of affect. Charcot attempted to reduce the multiplicity of their modes of manifestation by means of descriptive formulas; Pierre Janet recognized the unconscious ideas operating behind such attacks; while psycho-analysis has shown that they are mimetic representations of scenes (whether actually experienced or only invented ) with which the patient’s imagination is occupied without his becoming conscious of them. The meaning of these pantomimes is concealed from the spectators by means of condensations and distortions of the acts which they represent. And this applies equally to what are described as the ‘chronic’ symptoms of hysterical patients. All of them are mimetic or hallucinatory representations of phantasies which unconsciously dominate the subject’s emotional life and which have the meaning of fulfilments of secret and repressed wishes. The tormenting character of these symptoms is due to the internal conflict into which these patients’ minds are driven by the need to combat such unconscious wishes.

The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest

2810

In another neurotic disorder, obsessional neurosis, the patients become the victims of distressing and apparently senseless ceremonials which take the form of the rhythmical repetition of the most trivial acts (such as washing or dressing) or of carrying out meaningless injunctions or of obeying mysterious prohibitions. It was nothing less than a triumph of psycho-analytic research when it succeeded in showing that all these obsessive acts, even the most insignificant and trivial of them, have a meaning, and that they are reflections, translated into indifferent terms, of conflicts in the patients’ lives, of the struggle between temptations and moral restraints - reflections of the proscribed wish itself and of the punishment and atonement which that wish incurs. In another form of the same disorder the victim suffers from tormenting ideas (obsessions) which force themselves upon him and are accompanied by affects whose character and intensity are often only quite inadequately accounted for by the terms of the obsessive ideas themselves. Analytic investigation has shown in their case that the affects are entirely justified, since they correspond to self-reproaches which are based on something that is at least psychically real. But the ideas to which these affects are attached are not the original ones, but have found their way into their present position by a process of displacement - by being substituted for something that has been repressed. If these displacements can be reversed, the way is open to the discovery of the repressed ideas, and the relation between affect and idea is found to be perfectly appropriate.

The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest

2811

In another neurotic disorder, dementia praecox (paraphrenia or schizophrenia), a condition which is in fact incurable, the patient is left, in the most severe cases, in a state of apparently complete apathy. Often his sole remaining actions are certain movements and gestures which are repeated monotonously and have been given the name of ‘stereotypies’. An analytic investigation of residues of this kind, made by Jung, has shown that they are the remains of perfectly significant mimetic actions, which at one time gave expression to the subject’s ruling wishes. The craziest speeches and the queerest poses and attitudes adopted by these patients become intelligible and can be given a place in the chain of their mental processes if they are approached on the basis of psycho-analytic hypotheses.

Similar considerations apply to the deliria and hallucinations, as well as to the delusional systems, exhibited by various psychotic patients. Where hitherto nothing but the most freakish capriciousness has seemed to prevail, psycho-analytic research has introduced law, order and connection, or has at least allowed us to suspect their presence where its work is still incomplete. The most heterogeneous forms of mental disorder are revealed as the results of processes which are at bottom identical and which can be understood and described by means of psychological concepts. What had already been discovered in the formation of dreams is operative everywhere - psychical conflict, the repression of certain instinctual impulses which have been pushed back into the unconscious by other mental forces, reaction formations set up by the repressing forces, and substitutes constructed by the instincts which have been repressed but have not been robbed of all their energy. The accompanying processes of condensation and displacement, so familiar to us in dreams, are also to be found everywhere. The multiplicity of clinical pictures observed by psychiatrists depends upon two other things: the multiplicity of the psychical mechanisms at the disposal of the repressive process and the multiplicity of developmental dispositions which give the repressed impulses an opportunity for breaking through into substitutive structures.

The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest

2812

Psycho-analysis points to psychology for the solution of a good half of the problems of psychiatry. It would nevertheless be a serious mistake to suppose that analysis favours or aims at a purely psychological view of mental disorders. It cannot overlook the fact that the other half of the problems of psychiatry are concerned with the influence of organic factors (whether mechanical, toxic or infective) on the mental apparatus. Even in the case of the mildest of these disorders, the neuroses, it makes no claim that their origin is purely psychogenic but traces their aetiology to the influence upon mental life of an unquestionably organic factor to which I shall refer later.

The number of detailed psycho-analytic findings which cannot fail to be of importance for general psychology is too great for me to enumerate them here. I will only mention two other points: psycho-analysis unhesitatingly ascribes the primacy in mental life to affective processes, and it reveals an unexpected amount of affective disturbance and blinding of the intellect in normal no less than in sick people.

The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest

2813

PART II

THE CLAIMS OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS TO THE INTEREST OF

THE NON-PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCES

(A) THE PHILOLOGICAL INTEREST OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

I shall no doubt be overstepping common linguistic usage in postulating an interest in psycho-analysis on the part of philologists, that is of experts in speech. For in what follows ‘speech’ must be understood not merely to mean the expression of thought in words but to include the speech of gesture and every other method, such, for instance, as writing, by which mental activity can be expressed. That being so, it may be pointed out that the interpretations made by psycho-analysis are first and foremost translations from an alien method of expression into the one which is familiar to us. When we interpret a dream we are simply translating a particular thought-content (the latent dream-thoughts) from the ‘language of dreams’ into our waking speech. In the course of doing so we learn the peculiarities of this dream language and it is borne in upon us that it forms part of a highly archaic system of expression. Thus, to take an instance, there is no special indication for the negative in the language of dreams. Contraries may stand for each other in the dream’s content and may be represented by the same element. Or we may put it like this: concepts are still ambivalent in dream-language, and unite within themselves contrary meanings - as is the case, according to the hypotheses of philologists, in the oldest roots of historical languages.¹ Another striking feature of our dream-language is its extremely frequent use of symbols, which make us able to some extent to translate the content of dreams without reference to the associations of the individual dreamer. Our researches have not yet sufficiently elucidated the essential nature of these symbols. They are in part substitutes and analogies based upon obvious similarities; but in some of these symbols the tertium comparationis which is presumably present escapes our conscious knowledge. It is precisely this latter class of symbols which must probably originate from the earliest phases of linguistic development and conceptual construction. In dreams it is above all the sexual organs and sexual activities which are represented symbolically instead of directly. A philologist, Hans Sperber, of Uppsala, has only recently (1912) attempted to prove that words which originally represented sexual activities have, on the basis of analogies of this kind, undergone an extraordinarily far-reaching change in their meaning.

¹ Cf. Abel on the antithetical meaning of primal words, and my review of his paper.

The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest

2814

If we reflect that the means of representation in dreams are principally visual images and not words, we shall see that it is even more appropriate to compare dreams with a system of writing than with a language. In fact the interpretation of dreams is completely analogous to the decipherment of an ancient pictographic script such as Egyptian hieroglyphs. In both cases there are certain elements which are not intended to be interpreted (or read, as the case may be) but are only designed to serve as ‘determinatives’, that is to establish the meaning of some other element. The ambiguity of various elements of dreams finds a parallel in these ancient systems of writing; and so too does the omission of various relations, which have in both cases to be supplied from the context. If this conception of the method of representation in dreams has not yet been followed up, this, as will be readily understood, must be ascribed to the fact that psycho-analysts are entirely ignorant of the attitude and knowledge with which a philologist would approach such a problem as that presented by dreams.

The language of dreams may be looked upon as the method by which unconscious mental activity expresses itself. But the unconscious speaks more than one dialect. According to the differing psychological conditions governing and distinguishing the various forms of neurosis, we find regular modifications in the way in which unconscious mental impulses are expressed. While the gesture-language of hysteria agrees on the whole with the picture-language of dreams and visions, etc., the thought-language of obsessional neurosis and of the paraphrenias (dementia praecox and paranoia) exhibits special idiomatic peculiarities which, in a number of instances, we have been able to understand and interrelate. For instance, what a hysteric expresses by vomiting an obsessional will express by painstaking protective measures against infection, while a paraphrenic will be led to complaints or suspicions that he is being poisoned. These are all of them different representations of the patient’s wish to become pregnant which have been repressed into the unconscious, or of his defensive reaction against that wish.

The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest

2815

(B) THE PHILOSOPHICAL INTEREST OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

Philosophy, in so far as it is built on psychology, will be unable to avoid taking the psycho-analytic contributions to psychology fully into account and reacting to this new enrichment of our knowledge just as it has to every considerable advance in the specialized sciences. In particular, the setting up of the hypothesis of unconscious mental activities must compel philosophy to decide one way or the other and, if it accepts the idea, to modify its own views on the relation of mind to body so that they may conform to the new knowledge. It is true that philosophy has repeatedly dealt with the problem of the unconscious, but, with few exceptions, philosophers have taken up one or other of the two following positions. Either their unconscious has been something mystical, something intangible and undemonstrable, whose relation to the mind has remained obscure, or they have identified the mental with the conscious and have proceeded to infer from this definition that what is unconscious cannot be mental or a subject for psychology. These opinions must be put down to the fact that philosophers have formed their judgement on the unconscious without being acquainted with the phenomena of unconscious mental activity, and therefore without any suspicion of how far unconscious phenomena resemble conscious ones or of the respects in which they differ from them. If anyone possessing that knowledge nevertheless holds to the conviction which equates the conscious and the psychical and consequently denies the unconscious the attribute of being psychical, no objection can, of course, be made except that such a distinction turns out to be highly unpractical. For it is easy to describe the unconscious and to follow its developments if it is approached from the direction of its relation to the conscious, with which it has so much in common. On the other hand, there still seems no possibility of approaching it from the direction of physical events. So that it is bound to remain a matter for psychological study.

There is yet another way in which philosophy can derive a stimulus from psycho-analysis, and that is by itself becoming a subject of psycho-analytic research. Philosophical theories and systems have been the work of a small number of men of striking individuality. In no other science does the personality of the scientific worker play anything like so large a part as in philosophy. And now for the first time psycho-analysis enables us to construct a ‘psychography’ of a personality. (See the sociological section below, p. 2824.) It teaches us to recognize the affective units - the complexes dependent on instincts - whose presence is to be presumed in each individual, and it introduces us to the study of the transformations and end-products arising from these instinctual forces. It reveals the relations of a person’s constitutional disposition and the events of his life to the achievements open to him owing to his peculiar gifts. It can conjecture with more or less certainty from an artist’s work the intimate personality that lies behind it. In the same way, psycho-analysis can indicate the subjective and individual motives behind philosophical theories which have ostensibly sprung from impartial logical work, and can draw a critic’s attention to the weak spots in the system. It is not the business of psycho-analysis, however, to undertake such criticism itself, for, as may be imagined, the fact that a theory is psychologically determined does not in the least invalidate its scientific truth.

The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest

2816

(C) THE BIOLOGICAL INTEREST OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

It has not been the fate of psycho-analysis to be greeted (like other young sciences) with the sympathetic encouragement of those who are interested in the advance of knowledge. For a long time it was disregarded, and when at last it could no longer be neglected it became, for emotional reasons, the object of the most violent attacks from people who had not taken the trouble to become acquainted with it. It owed this unfriendly reception to a single circumstance: for at an early stage of its researches psycho-analysis was driven to the conclusion that nervous illnesses are an expression of a disturbance of the sexual function and it was thus led to devote its attention to an investigation of that function - one which had been far too long neglected. But anyone who respects the rule that scientific judgement should not be influenced by emotional attitudes will assign a high degree of biological interest to psycho-analysis on account of these very investigations and will regard the resistances to it as actual evidence in favour of the correctness of its assertions.

Psycho-analysis has done justice to the sexual function in man by making a detailed examination of its importance in mental and practical life - an importance which has been emphasized by many creative writers and by some philosophers, but which has never been recognized by science. But in the first place it was necessary to enlarge the unduly restricted concept of sexuality, an enlargement that was justified by reference to the extensions of sexuality occurring in the so called perversions and to the behaviour of children. It turned out to be impossible to maintain any longer that childhood was asexual and was invaded for the first time by a sudden inrush of sexual impulses at the age of puberty. On the contrary, when once the blinkers of partiality and prejudice had been removed, observation had no difficulty in revealing that sexual interests and activities are present in the human child at almost every age and from the very first. The importance of this infantile sexuality is not impaired by the fact that we cannot everywhere draw a clear line between it and a child’s asexual activity. It differs, however, from what is described as the ‘normal’ sexuality of adults. It includes the germs of all those sexual activities which in later life are sharply contrasted with normal sexual life as being perversions, and as such bound to seem incomprehensible and vicious. The normal sexuality of adults emerges from infantile sexuality by a series of developments, combinations, divisions and suppressions, which are scarcely ever achieved with ideal perfection and consequently leave behind predispositions to a retrogression of the function in the form of illness.

The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest

2817

Infantile sexuality exhibits two other characteristics which are of importance from a biological point of view. It turns out to be put together from a number of component instincts which seem to be attached to certain regions of the body (‘erotogenic zones’) and some of which emerge from the beginning in pairs of opposites - instincts with an active and a passive aim. Just as in later life what is loved is not merely the object’s sexual organs but his whole body, so from the very first it is not merely the genitals but many other parts of the body which are the seat of sexual excitation and respond to appropriate stimuli with sexual pleasure. This fact is closely related to the second characteristic of infantile sexuality - namely that to start with it is attached to the functions of nutrition and excretion, and, in all probability, of muscular excitation and sensory activity.

If we examine sexuality in the adult with the help of psycho-analysis, and consider the life of children in the light of the knowledge thus gained, we perceive that sexuality is not merely a function serving the purposes of reproduction, on a par with digestion, respiration, etc. It is something far more independent, which stands in contrast to all the individual’s other activities and is only forced into an alliance with the individual’s economy after a complicated course of development involving the imposition of numerous restrictions. Cases, theoretically quite conceivable, in which the interests of these sexual impulses fail to coincide with the self-preservation of the individual seem actually to be presented by the group of neurotic illnesses. For the final formula which psycho-analysis has arrived at on the nature of the neuroses runs thus: The primal conflict which leads to neuroses is one between the sexual instincts and those which maintain the ego. The neuroses represent a more or less partial overpowering of the ego by sexuality after the ego’s attempts at suppressing sexuality have failed.

The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest

2818

We have found it necessary to hold aloof from biological considerations during our psycho-analytic work and to refrain from using them for heuristic purposes, so that we may not be misled in our impartial judgement of the psycho-analytic facts before us. But after we have completed our psycho-analytic work we shall have to find a point of contact with biology; and we may rightly feel glad if that contact is already assured at one important point or another. The contrast between the ego instincts and the sexual instinct, to which we have been obliged to trace back the origin of the neuroses, is carried into the sphere of biology in the contrast between the instincts which serve the preservation of the individual and those which serve the survival of the species. In biology we come upon the more comprehensive conception of an immortal germ-plasm to which the different transitory individuals are attached like organs that develop successively. It is only this conception which enables us rightly to understand the part played by the sexual instinctual forces in physiology and psychology.

In spite of all our efforts to prevent biological terminology and considerations from dominating psycho-analytic work, we cannot avoid using them even in our descriptions of the phenomena that we study. We cannot help regarding the term ‘instinct’ as a concept on the frontier between the spheres of psychology and biology. We speak, too, of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ mental attributes and impulses, although, strictly speaking, the differences between the sexes can lay claim to no special psychical characterization. What we speak of in ordinary life as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ reduces itself from the point of view of psychology to the qualities of ‘activity’ and ‘passivity’ - that is, to qualities determined not by the instincts themselves but by their aims. The regular association of these ‘active’ and ‘passive’ instincts in mental life reflects the bisexuality of individuals, which is among the clinical postulates of psycho-analysis.

I shall be satisfied if these few remarks have drawn attention to the many respects in which psycho-analysis acts as an intermediary between biology and psychology.

The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest

2819

(D) THE INTEREST OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS FROM A DEVELOPMENTAL POINT OF VIEW

Not every analysis of psychological phenomena deserves the name of psycho-analysis. The latter implies more than the mere analysis of composite phenomena into simpler ones. It consists in tracing back one psychical structure to another which preceded it in time and out of which it developed. Medical psycho-analytic procedure was not able to eliminate a symptom until it had traced that symptom’s origin and development. Thus from the very first psycho-analysis was directed towards tracing developmental processes. It began by discovering the genesis of neurotic symptoms, and was led, as time went on, to turn its attention to other psychical structures and to construct a genetic psychology which would apply to them too.

Psycho-analysis has been obliged to derive the mental life of adults from that of children, and has had to take seriously the old saying that the child is father to the man. It has traced the continuity between the infantile and adult mind, and has also noted the transformations and re-arrangements that occur in the process. In most of us there is a gap in our memories covering the first years of our childhood, of which only a few fragmentary recollections survive. Psycho-analysis may be said to have filled in this gap and to have abolished man’s infantile amnesia. (See the section on ‘Educational Interest’ below.)

Some notable discoveries have been made in the course of this investigation of the infantile mind. Thus it has been possible to confirm, what has often already been suspected, the extraordinarily important influence exerted by the impressions of childhood (and particularly by its earliest years) on the whole course of later development. This brings us up against a psychological paradox - which for psycho-analysts alone is no paradox - that it is precisely these most important of all impressions that are not remembered in later years. Psycho-analysis has been able to establish the decisive and indestructible character of these earliest experiences in the clearest possible way in the case of sexual life. ‘On revient toujours à ses premiers amours’ is sober truth. The many riddles in the sexual life of adults can only be solved if stress is laid on the infantile factors in love. Theoretical light is thrown on their influence by the consideration that an individual’s first experiences in childhood do not occur only by chance but also correspond to the first activities of his innate or constitutional instinctual dispositions.

The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest

2820

Another and far more surprising discovery has been that, in spite of all the later development that occurs in the adult, none of the infantile mental formations perish. All the wishes, instinctual impulses, modes of reaction and attitudes of childhood are still demonstrably present in maturity and in appropriate circumstances can emerge once more. They are not destroyed but merely overlaid - to use the spatial mode of description which psycho-analytic psychology has been obliged to adopt. Thus it is part of the nature of the mental past that, unlike the historic past, it is not absorbed by its derivatives; it persists (whether actually or only potentially) alongside what has proceeded from it. The proof of this assertion lies in the fact that the dreams of normal people revive their childhood characters every night and reduce their whole mental life to an infantile level. This same return to psychical infantilism (‘regression’) appears in the neuroses and psychoses, whose peculiarities may to a great extent be described as psychical archaisms. The strength in which the residues of infancy are still present in the mind shows us the amount of disposition to illness; that disposition may accordingly be regarded as an expression of an inhibition in development. The part of a person’s psychical material which has remained infantile and has been repressed as being unserviceable constitutes the core of his unconscious. And we believe we can follow in our patients’ life-histories the way in which this unconscious, held back as it is by the forces of repression, lies in wait for a chance to become active and makes use of its opportunities if the later and higher psychical structures fail to master the difficulties of real life.

In the last few years psycho-analytic writers¹ have become aware that the principle that ‘ontogeny is a repetition of phylogeny’ must be applicable to mental life; and this has led to a fresh extension of psycho-analytic interest.

¹ Abraham, Spielrein and Jung.

The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest

2821

(E) THE INTEREST OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS FROM THE POINT OF VIEW

OF THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION

The comparison between the childhood of individual men and the early history of societies has already proved its fruitfulness in several directions, even though the study has scarcely more than begun. In this connection the psycho-analytic mode of thought acts like a new instrument of research. The application of its hypotheses to social psychology enables us both to raise fresh problems and to see old ones in a fresh light and contribute towards their solution.

In the first place, it seems quite possible to apply the psycho-analytic views derived from dreams to products of ethnic imagination such as myths and fairy tales.¹ The need to interpret such productions has long been felt; some ‘secret meaning’ has been suspected to lie behind them and it has been presumed that that meaning is concealed by changes and transformations. The study made by psycho-analysis of dreams and neuroses has given it the necessary experience to enable it to guess the technical procedures that have governed these distortions. But in a number of instances it can also reveal the hidden motives which have led to this modification in the original meaning of myths. It cannot accept as the first impulse to the construction of myths a theoretical craving for finding an explanation of natural phenomena or for accounting for cult observances and usages which have become unintelligible. It looks for that impulse in the same psychical ‘complexes’, in the same emotional trends, which it has discovered at the base of dreams and symptoms.

A similar application of its points of view, its hypotheses and its findings has enabled psycho-analysis to throw light on the origins of our great cultural institutions - on religion, morality, justice and philosophy.² By examining the primitive psychological situations which were able to provide the motive for creations of this kind, it has been in a position to reject certain attempts at an explanation that were based on too superficial a psychology and to replace them by a more penetrating insight.

¹ Cf. Abraham, Rank and Jung.

² For some first attempts in this direction, see Jung (1912) and Freud (1912-13).

The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest

2822

Psycho-analysis has established an intimate connection between these psychical achievements of individuals on the one hand and societies on the other by postulating one and the same dynamic source for both of them. It starts out from the basic idea that the principal function of the mental mechanism is to relieve the individual from the tensions created in him by his needs. One part of this task can be achieved by extracting satisfaction from the external world; and for this purpose it is essential to have control over the real world. But the satisfaction of another part of these needs - among them certain affective impulses - is regularly frustrated by reality. This leads to the further task of finding some other means of dealing with the unsatisfied impulses. The whole course of the history of civilization is no more than an account of the various methods adopted by mankind for ‘binding’ their unsatisfied wishes, which, according to changing conditions (modified, moreover, by technological advances) have been met by reality sometimes with favour and sometimes with frustration.

An investigation of primitive peoples shows mankind caught up, to begin with, in a childish belief in its own omnipotence.¹ A whole number of mental structures can thus be understood as attempts to deny whatever might disturb this feeling of omnipotence and so to prevent emotional life from being affected by reality until the latter could be better controlled and used for purposes of satisfaction. The principle of avoiding unpleasure dominates human actions until it is replaced by the better one of adaptation to the external world. Pari passu with men’s progressive control over the world goes a development in their Weltanschauung, their view of the universe as a whole. They turn away more and more from their original belief in their own omnipotence, rising from an animistic phase through a religious to a scientific one. Myths, religion and morality find their place in this scheme as attempts to seek a compensation for the lack of satisfaction of human wishes.

Our knowledge of the neurotic illnesses of individuals has been of much assistance to our understanding of the great social institutions. For the neuroses themselves have turned out to be attempts to find individual solutions for the problems of compensating for unsatisfied wishes, while the institutions seek to provide social solutions for these same problems. The recession of the social factor and the predominance of the sexual one turns these neurotic solutions of the psychological problem into caricatures which are of no service except to help us in explaining such important questions.

¹ Cf. Ferenczi (1913c) and Freud (1912-13), Chapter III.

The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest

2823

(F) THE INTEREST OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS FROM THE POINT OF VIEW

OF THE SCIENCE OF AESTHETICS

Psycho-analysis throws a satisfactory light upon some of the problems concerning arts and artists; but others escape it entirely. In the exercising of an art it sees once again an activity intended to allay ungratified wishes - in the first place in the creative artist himself and subsequently in his audience or spectators. The motive forces of artists are the same conflicts which drive other people into neurosis and have encouraged society to construct its institutions. Whence it is that the artist derives his creative capacity is not a question for psychology. The artist’s first aim is to set himself free and, by communicating his work to other people suffering from the same arrested desires, he offers them the same liberation.¹ He represents his most personal wishful phantasies as fulfilled; but they only become a work of art when they have undergone a transformation which softens what is offensive in them, conceals their personal origin and, by obeying the laws of beauty, bribes other people with a bonus of pleasure. Psycho-analysis has no difficulty in pointing out, alongside the manifest part of artistic enjoyment, another that is latent though far more potent, derived from the hidden sources of instinctual liberation. The connection between the impressions of the artist’s childhood and his life-history on the one hand and his works, as reactions to those impressions, on the other is one of the most attractive subjects of analytic examination.²

For the rest, most of the problems of artistic creation and appreciation await further study, which will throw the light of analytic knowledge on them and assign them their place in the complex structure presented by the compensation for human wishes. Art is a conventionally accepted reality in which, thanks to artistic illusion, symbols and substitutes are able to provoke real emotions. Thus art constitutes a region half-way between a reality which frustrates wishes and the wish-fulfilling world of the imagination - a region in which, as it were, primitive man’s strivings for omnipotence are still in full force.

¹ Cf. Rank (1907).

² Cf. Rank (1912). See also, for the application of psycho-analysis to aesthetic problems, my book on jokes (Freud, 1905c).

The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest

2824

(G) THE SOCIOLOGICAL INTEREST OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

It is true that psycho-analysis has taken the individual mind as its subject, but in investigating the individual it could not avoid dealing with the emotional basis of the relation of the individual to society. It has found that the social feelings invariably contain an erotic element - an element which, if it is over-emphasized and then repressed, becomes one of the marks of a particular group of mental disorders. Psycho-analysis has recognized that in general the neuroses are asocial in their nature and that they always aim at driving the individual out of society and at replacing the safe monastic seclusion of earlier days by the isolation of illness. The intense feeling of guilt which dominates so many neuroses has been shown to be a social modification of neurotic anxiety.

On the other hand, psycho-analysis has fully demonstrated the part played by social conditions and requirements in the causation of neurosis. The forces which, operating from the ego, bring about the restriction and repression of instinct owe their origin essentially to compliance with the demands of civilization. A constitution and a set of childhood experiences which, in other cases, would inevitably lead to a neurosis will produce no such result where this compliance is absent or where these demands are not made by the social circle in which the particular individual is placed. The old assertion that the increase in nervous disorders is a product of civilization is at least a half-truth. Young people are brought into contact with the demands of civilization by upbringing and example; and if instinctual repression occurs independently of these two factors, it is a plausible hypothesis to suppose that a primaeval and prehistoric demand has at last become part of the organized and inherited endowment of mankind. A child who produces instinctual repressions spontaneously is thus merely repeating a part of the history of civilization. What is to-day an act of internal restraint was once an external one, imposed, perhaps, by the necessities of the moment; and, in the same way, what is now brought to bear upon every growing individual as an external demand of civilization may some day become an internal disposition to repression.

The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest

2825

(H) THE EDUCATIONAL INTEREST OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

The overmastering interest which must be felt in psycho-analysis by the theory of education is based upon a fact which has become evident. Only someone who can feel his way into the minds of children can be capable of educating them; and we grown-up people cannot understand children because we no longer understand our own childhood. Our infantile amnesia proves that we have grown estranged from our childhood. Psycho-analysis has brought to light the wishes, the thought structures and the developmental processes of childhood. All earlier attempts in this direction have been in the highest degree incomplete and misleading because they have entirely overlooked the inestimably important factor of sexuality in its physical and mental manifestations. The incredulous astonishment which meets the most certainly established findings of psycho-analysis on the subject of childhood - the Oedipus complex, self-love (or ‘narcissism’), the disposition to perversions, anal erotism, sexual curiosity - is a measure of the gulf which separates our mental life, our judgements of value and, indeed, our processes of thought from those of even normal children.

When educators have become familiar with the findings of psycho-analysis, it will be easier for them to reconcile themselves to certain phases of infantile development and they will, among other things, not be in danger of over-estimating the importance of the socially unserviceable or perverse instinctual impulses which emerge in children. On the contrary they will refrain from any attempt at forcibly suppressing such impulses, when they learn that efforts of this kind often produce no less undesirable results than the alternative, which is so much dreaded by educators, of giving free play to children’s naughtiness. The forcible suppression of strong instincts by external means never has the effect in a child of these instincts being extinguished or brought under control; it leads to repression, which establishes a predisposition to later nervous illness. Psycho-analysis has frequent opportunities of observing the part played by inopportune and undiscerning severity of upbringing in the production of neuroses, or the price, in loss of efficiency and of capacity for enjoyment, which has to be paid for the normality upon which the educator insists. And psycho-analysis can also show what precious contributions to the formation of character are made by these asocial and perverse instincts in the child, if they are not subjected to repression but are diverted from their original aims to more valuable ones by the process known as ‘sublimation’. Our highest virtues have grown up, as reaction formations and sublimations, out of our worst dispositions. Education should scrupulously refrain from burying these precious springs of action and should restrict itself to encouraging the processes by which these energies are led along safe paths. Whatever we can expect in the way of prophylaxis against neurosis in the individual lies in the hands of a psycho-analytically enlightened education.¹

¹ See the writings of the Zurich pastor, Dr. Oskar Pfister.

The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest

2826

It has not been my aim in my present paper to lay before a scientifically orientated public an account of the compass and content of psycho-analysis or of its hypotheses, problems and findings. My purpose will have been fulfilled if I have made clear the many spheres of knowledge in which psycho-analysis is of interest and the numerous links which it has begun to forge between them.

2827

OBSERVATIONS AND EXAMPLES FROM ANALYTIC PRACTICE

(1913)

2828

Intentionally left blank

2829

OBSERVATIONS AND EXAMPLES FROM ANALYTIC PRACTICE

The collection of short contributions, of which we here present a first instalment, calls for a few introductory words. The cases of illness which come under a psycho-analyst’s observation are of course of unequal value in adding to his knowledge. There are some on which he has to bring to bear all that he knows and from which he learns nothing; and there are others which show him what he already knows in a particularly clearly marked manner and in exceptionally revealing isolation, so that he is indebted to them not only for a confirmation but for an extension of his knowledge. We are justified in supposing that the psychical processes which we wish to study are no different in the first class of cases from what they are in the second, but we shall choose to describe them as they occur in the favourable and clear examples afforded by the latter. Similarly, the theory of evolution assumes that in the animal kingdom the segmentation of the egg proceeds in the same manner in those cases where a high degree of pigmentation is present and which are unfavourable for observation, as it does in those cases where the object of study is transparent and poorly pigmented and which are on that account selected for observation.

But the numerous apt examples, which, in the course of an analyst’s daily work, bring him a confirmation of what he already knows, are for the most part lost to view, since their collection into a larger whole often involves long delays. There is therefore some advantage in the provision of a framework within which observations and examples of this kind can be published and made generally known without waiting to be worked over from a more generalized point of view.

Observations And Examples From Analytic Practice

2830

Under the heading which is here introduced space will be offered for material of this kind. Communications should be kept as concise as possible. The different items are arranged in no particular order.

(1)

DREAM WITH AN UNRECOGNIZED PRECIPITATING CAUSE

A good sleeper awoke one morning at a summer resort in the Tyrol, knowing that he had had a dream that the Pope was dead. He could think of no explanation of it. During the morning of the same day his wife said to him: ‘Did you hear the dreadful noise the bells made early this morning?’ He had not heard it but had evidently dreamt about it. The interpretation which his dream gave of the bells was his revenge on the pious Tyrolese. According to the newspapers the Pope was slightly indisposed at that time.

(2)

THE TIME OF DAY IN DREAMS

This very often stands for the age of the dreamer at some particular period in his childhood. In one dream a quarter past five in the morning meant the age of five years and three months, which was significant, since that was the dreamer’s age at the time of the birth of his younger brother. - Many similar examples.

Observations And Examples From Analytic Practice

2831

(3)

REPRESENTATION OF AGES IN DREAMS

A woman dreamt that she was walking with two little girls whose ages differed by fifteen months. She was unable to recall any family of her acquaintance to whom this would apply. It occurred to her that both the children represented herself and that the dream was reminding her that the two traumatic events of her childhood were separated from each other by fifteen months (3½ and 4¾).

(4)

POSITION WHEN WAKING FROM A DREAM

A woman dreamt that she was lying on her back and pressing the soles of her feet against those of another woman. The analysis made it seem probable that she was thinking of scenes of romping which she had substituted for the memory of an observation of sexual intercourse. When she woke up she noticed that, on the contrary, she had been lying on her stomach with her arms crossed, and had thus been imitating the position of a man and his embrace.

(9)

TWO ROOMS AND ONE ROOM

He had a dream in which he saw two familiar rooms which had been made into one.

Nothing factual. The dream pointed to the female genitals and the anus, which, as a child, he had regarded as one area, the ‘bottom’ (in accordance with the infantile ‘cloaca theory’), while he now knows that there are two separate cavities and orifices. A reversed representation.

Observations And Examples From Analytic Practice

2832

(10)

OVERCOAT AS A SYMBOL

In women’s dreams an overcoat [German ‘Mantel’] is unquestionably shown to be a symbol for a man. Linguistic assonance may perhaps play some part in this.

(13)

DISGRACED FEET (SHOES)

After several days of resistance the patient reported that she had felt very much snubbed because a young man whom she met regularly near the doctor’s house, and who used as a rule to look at her admiringly, had on the last occasion looked contemptuously at her feet. In fact she had no reason to be ashamed of her feet. She produced the explanation herself after admitting that she had regarded the young man as the doctor’s son, who thus (by way of the transference) stood for her elder brother. There now followed a memory of having been in the habit of accompanying her brother to the lavatory when she was about five years old and of watching him micturate. She was overcome with envy at not being able to do it in the same way as he did and one day tried to copy him (envy for the penis). But in doing so she wetted her shoes and got very angry when her brother teased her about it. For a long time afterwards her anger recurred whenever her brother looked contemptuously at her shoes with the object of reminding her of her misfortune. She added that this experience had determined her later behaviour at school. If she was unsuccessful in anything at the first attempt she could never bring herself to try again, so that in many subjects she failed completely. This is a good example of the way in which sexual life acts as a model and influences character.

(15)

SELF-CRITICISM BY NEUROTICS

It is always a striking thing and deserves special notice when a neurotic is in the habit of speaking ill of himself, expressing a low opinion of himself, and so on. As in the case of self-reproaches, it is often possible to explain it by supposing that he is identifying himself with someone else. But in one patient the attendant circumstances during the session necessitated another explanation of behaviour of this kind. A young lady, who was never tired of declaring that she had very little intelligence, was without gifts, etc., was only trying to indicate by this that she had great physical beauty, and was concealing this boast behind her self-criticism. Nor was a reference to the harmful effects of masturbation - a reference which is to be expected in all such cases - absent in this one.

Observations And Examples From Analytic Practice

2833

(19)

CONSIDERATIONS OF REPRESENTABILITY

A man dreamt that he was pulling a woman out from behind a bed: i.e. he was giving her preference.¹ - He (an officer) was sitting at a table opposite the Emperor: i.e. he was putting himself in opposition to the Emperor (his father). In both these cases the dreamer himself gave the translation.

(20)

DREAMS ABOUT DEAD PEOPLE

If someone dreams of talking to dead people or associating with them, and so on, this often has the meaning of his own death. But if he remembers in his dream that the person in question is dead, the dreamer is repudiating the fact that it signifies his own death.

(21)

FRAGMENTARY DREAMS

These often contain only the symbols relating to the subject of the dream. For instance, here is a dream that occurred in a context of homosexual impulses: he was going for a walk somewhere with a friend . . . (indistinct) . . . balloons.

(22)

APPEARANCE IN THE DREAM OF THE SYMPTOMS OF THE ILLNESS

The symptoms of the illness (anxiety, etc.), when they appear in a dream, seem generally speaking to mean: ‘I fell ill because of this (i.e. in connection with the earlier elements of the dream).’ Such dreams, accordingly, correspond to a continuation of the analysis in the dream.

¹ [The point depends on a similarity between the German word for ‘pulling out’ (‘hervorziehen’) and ‘giving preference’ (‘vorziehen’).]

2834

FAUSSE RECONNAISSANCE (‘DÉJÀ RACONTÉ’)

IN PSYCHO-ANALYTIC TREATMENT

(1914)

2835

Intentionally left blank

2836

FAUSSE RECONNAISSANCE (‘DÉJÀ RACONTÉ’)

IN PSYCHO-ANALYTIC TREATMENT

It not infrequently happens in the course of an analytic treatment that the patient, after reporting some fact that he has remembered, will go on to say: ‘But I’ve told you that already’ - while the analyst himself feels sure that this is the first time he has heard the story. If the patient is contradicted upon the point, he will often protest with energy that he is perfectly certain he is right, that he is ready to swear to it, and so on; while the analyst’s own conviction that what he has heard is new to him will become correspondingly stronger. To try to decide the dispute by shouting the patient down or by outvying him in protestations would be a most unpsychological proceeding. It is familiar ground that a sense of conviction of the accuracy of one’s memory has no objective value; and, since one of the two persons concerned must necessarily be in the wrong, it may just as well be the physician as the patient who has fallen a victim to a paramnesia. The analyst will admit as much to the patient, will break off the argument, and will postpone a settlement of the point until some later occasion.

In a minority of cases the analyst himself will then recollect that he has already heard the piece of information under dispute, and will at the same time discover the subjective, and often far-fetched, reason which led to this temporary forgetfulness. But in the great majority of cases it is the patient who turns out to have been mistaken; and he can be brought to recognize the fact. The explanation of this frequent occurrence appears to be that the patient really had an intention of giving this information, that once or even several times he actually made some remark leading up to it, but that he was then prevented by resistance from carrying out his purpose, and afterwards confused a recollection of his intention with a recollection of its performance.

Fausse Reconnaissance ('Deja Raconte') In Psycho-Analytic Treatment

2837

Leaving on one side any cases in which there may still be some element of doubt, I will now bring forward a few others which are of special theoretical interest. With certain people it happens, and may even happen repeatedly, that they cling with particular obstinacy to the assertion that they have already told the analyst this or that, when the nature of the circumstances and of the information in question makes it quite impossible that they can be right. For what they claim to have told the analyst already and what they claim to recognize as something old, which must be familiar to the analyst as well, turn out to be memories of the greatest importance to the analysis - confirmatory facts for which the analyst has long been waiting, or solutions which wind up a whole section of the work and which he would certainly have made the basis of an exhaustive discussion. In the face of these considerations the patient himself soon admits that his recollection must have deceived him, though he is unable to account for its definite character.

The phenomenon presented by the patient in cases like this deserves to be called a ‘fausse reconnaissance’, and is completely analogous to what occurs in certain other cases and has been described as a ‘déjà vu’. In these other cases the subject has a spontaneous feeling such as ‘I’ve been in this situation before’, or ‘I’ve been through all this already’, without ever being in a position to confirm his conviction by discovering an actual recollection of the previous occasion. This latter phenomenon, as is well known, has provoked a large number of attempts at explanation, which can be divided roughly into two groups.¹ One class of explanation looks upon the feeling which constitutes the phenomenon as deserving of credence, and assumes that something really has been remembered - the only question being what. The second and far larger class of explanation includes those which maintain, on the contrary, that what we have to deal with is an illusory memory, and that the problem is to discover how this paramnesic error can have arisen. This latter group comprises many widely different hypotheses. There is, for instance, the ancient view, ascribed to Pythagoras, that the phenomenon of déjà vu is evidence of the subject having had a former life; again, there is the hypothesis based on anatomy (put forward by Wigan in 1860) to the effect that the phenomenon is based on an absence of simultaneity in the functioning of the two cerebral hemispheres; and finally there are the purely psychological theories, supported by the majority of more recent authorities, which regard the déjà vu as an indication of an apperceptive weakness, and assign the responsibility for its occurrence to such causes as fatigue, exhaustion and distraction.

¹ One of the most recent bibliographies of the subject is to be found in Havelock Ellis (1911).

Fausse Reconnaissance ('Deja Raconte') In Psycho-Analytic Treatment

2838

In 1904 Grasset put forward an explanation of the déjà vu which must be reckoned as one of the group which ‘believes’ in the phenomenon. He was of opinion that the phenomenon indicates that at some earlier time there has been an unconscious perception, which only now makes its way into consciousness under the influence of a new and similar impression. Several other authorities have agreed with this view, and have maintained that the basis of the phenomenon is the recollection of something that has been dreamed and then forgotten. In both cases it would be a question of the activation of an unconscious impression.

In 1907, in the second edition of my Psychopathology of Everyday Life, I proposed an exactly similar explanation for this form of apparent paramnesia without mentioning Grasset’s paper or knowing of its existence. By way of excuse I may remark that I arrived at my conclusion as the result of a psycho-analytic investigation which I was able to make of an example of déjà vu in a female patient; it was extremely clear, although it had taken place some 28 years earlier. I shall not reproduce the little analysis in this place. It showed that the situation in which the déjà vu occurred was really calculated to revive the memory of an earlier experience of the patient’s. The patient, who was at that time a twelve year-old child, was visiting a family in which there was a brother who was seriously ill and at the point of death; while her own brother had been in a similarly dangerous condition a few months earlier. But with the earlier of these two similar events there had been associated a phantasy that was incapable of entering consciousness - namely, a wish that her brother should die. Consequently, the analogy between the two cases could no become conscious. And the perception of it was replaced by the phenomenon of ‘having been through it all before’, the identity being displaced from the really common element on to the locality.

Fausse Reconnaissance ('Deja Raconte') In Psycho-Analytic Treatment

2839

The name ‘déjà vu’ is, as we know, applied to a whole class of analogous phenomena, such as the ‘déjà entendu’, the ‘déjà éprouve’ and the ‘déjà senti’. The case which I am now about to report, as a single instance out of many similar ones, consists of a ‘déjà raconte’; and it could be traced back to an unconscious resolution which was never carried out.

A patient said to me in the course of his associations: ‘When I was playing in the garden with a knife (that was when I was five years old) and cut through my little finger - oh, I only thought it was cut through - but I’ve told you about that already.’

I assured him that I had no recollection of anything of the kind. He insisted with increasing conviction that it was impossible he could be mistaken. I finally put an end to the argument in the manner I have described above and asked him in any case to repeat the story. Then we should see where we were.

‘When I was five years old, I was playing in the garden near my nurse, and was carving with my pocket-knife in the bark of one of the walnut-trees that come into my dream as well.¹ Suddenly, to my unspeakable terror, I noticed that I had cut through the little finger of my (right or left?) hand, so that it was only hanging on by its skin. I felt no pain, but great fear. I did not venture to say anything to my nurse, who was only a few paces distant, but I sank down on the nearest seat and sat there incapable of casting another glance at my finger. At last I calmed down, took a look at the finger, and saw that it was entirely uninjured.’

¹ Cf. ‘The Occurrence in Dreams of Material from Fairy Tales’. In telling the story again on a later occasion he made the following correction: ‘I don’t believe I was cutting the tree. That was a confusion with another recollection, which must also have been hallucinatorily falsified, of having made a cut in a tree with my knife and of blood having come out of the tree.’

Fausse Reconnaissance ('Deja Raconte') In Psycho-Analytic Treatment

2840

We soon agreed that, in spite of what he had thought, he could not have told me the story of this vision or hallucination before. He was very well aware that I could not have failed to exploit such evidence as this of his having had a fear of castration at the age of five. The episode broke down his resistance to assuming the existence of a castration complex; but he raised the question: ‘Why did I feel so certain of having told you this recollection before?’

It then occurred to both of us that repeatedly and in various connections he had brought out the following trivial recollection, and each time without our deriving my profit from it:

‘Once when my uncle went away on a journey he asked me and my sister what we should like him to bring us back. My sister asked for a book, and I asked for a pocket-knife.’ We now understood that this association which had emerged months before had in reality been a screen memory for the repressed recollection, and had been an attempt (rendered abortive by resistance) at telling the story of his imagined loss of his little finger - an unmistakable equivalent for his penis. The knife which his uncle did in fact bring him back was, as he clearly remembered, the same one that made its appearance in the episode which had been suppressed for so long.

It seems unnecessary to add anything in the way of an interpretation of this little occurrence, so far as it throws light upon the phenomenon of ‘fausse reconnaissance’. As regards the subject-matter of the patient’s vision, I may remark that, particularly in relation to the castration complex, similar hallucinatory falsifications are of not infrequent occurrence, and that they can just as easily serve the purpose of correcting unwelcome perceptions.

Fausse Reconnaissance ('Deja Raconte') In Psycho-Analytic Treatment

2841

In 1911 a man of university education, residing in a university town in Germany, with whom I am unacquainted and whose age is unknown to me, put the following notes upon his childhood at my disposal.

‘In the course of reading your study on Leonardo da Vinci, I was moved to internal dissent by the observations near the beginning of Chapter III. Your assertion that male children are dominated by an interest in their own genitals provoked me to make a counter-assertion to the effect that "if that is the general rule, I at all events am an exception to it". I then went on to read the passage that follows with the utmost amazement, such amazement as one feels when one comes across a fact of an entirely novel character. In the midst of my amazement a recollection occurred to me which showed me, to my own surprise, that the fact could not be by any means so novel as it had seemed. For, at the time at which I was passing through the period of "infantile sexual researches", a lucky chance gave me an opportunity of inspecting the female genitals in a little girl of my own age, and in doing so I quite clearly observed a penis of the same kind as my own. Soon afterwards I was plunged into fresh confusion by the sight of some female statues and nudes; and in order to get over this "scientific" discrepancy I devised the following experiment. By pressing my thighs together I succeeded in making my genitals disappear between them; and I was glad to find that in that way all differences between my own appearance and that of a female nude could be got rid of. Evidently, I thought to myself, the genitals have been made to disappear in a similar way in female nudes.

‘At this point another recollection occurred to me, which has always been of the greatest importance to me, in so far as it is one of the three recollections which constitute all that I can remember of my mother, who died when I was very young. I remember seeing my mother standing in front of the washing-stand and cleaning the glasses and washing-basin, while I was playing in the same room and committing some misdemeanour. As a punishment my hand was soundly slapped. Then to my very great terror I saw my little finger fall off; and in fact it fell into the pail. Knowing that my mother was angry, I did not venture to say anything; but my terror grew still more intense when I saw the pail carried off soon afterwards by the servant girl. For a long time I was convinced that I had lost a finger - up to the time, I believe, at which I learnt to count.

‘I have often tried to interpret this recollection, which, as I have already mentioned, has always been of the greatest importance to me on account of its connection with my mother; but none of my interpretations has satisfied me. It is only now, after reading your book, that I begin to have a suspicion of a simple and satisfying answer to the conundrum.’

Fausse Reconnaissance ('Deja Raconte') In Psycho-Analytic Treatment

2842

There is another kind of fausse reconnaissance which not infrequently makes its appearance at the close of a treatment, much to the physician’s satisfaction. After he has succeeded in forcing the repressed event (whether it was of a real or of a psychical nature) upon the patient’s acceptance in the teeth of all resistances, and has succeeded, as it were, in rehabilitating it - the patient may say: ‘Now I feel as though I had known it all the time.’ With this the work of the analysis has been completed.

2843

THE MOSES OF MICHELANGELO

(1914)

2844

Intentionally left blank

2845

THE MOSES OF MICHELANGELO

I may say at once that I am no connoisseur in art, but simply a layman. I have often observed that the subject-matter of works of art has a stronger attraction for me than their formal and technical qualities, though to the artist their value lies first and foremost in these latter. I am unable rightly to appreciate many of the methods used and the effects obtained in art. I state this so as to secure the reader’s indulgence for the attempt I propose to make here.

Nevertheless, works of art do exercise a powerful effect on me, especially those of literature and sculpture, less often of painting. This has occasioned me, when I have been contemplating such things, to spend a long time before them trying to apprehend them in my own way, i.e. to explain to myself what their effect is due to. Wherever I cannot do this, as for instance with music, I am almost incapable of obtaining any pleasure. Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me.

This has brought me to recognize the apparently paradoxical fact that precisely some of the grandest and most overwhelming creations of art are still unsolved riddles to our understanding. We admire them, we feel overawed by them, but we are unable to say what they represent to us. I am not sufficiently well-read to know whether this fact has already been remarked upon; possibly, indeed, some writer on aesthetics has discovered that this state of intellectual bewilderment is a necessary condition when a work of art is to achieve its greatest effects. It would be only with the greatest reluctance that I could bring myself to believe in any such necessity.

The Moses Of Michelangelo

2846

I do not mean that connoisseurs and lovers of art find no words with which to praise such objects to us. They are eloquent enough, it seems to me. But usually in the presence of a great work of art each says something different from the other; and none of them says anything that solves the problem for the unpretending admirer. In my opinion, what grips us so powerfully can only be the artist’s intention, in so far as he has succeeded in expressing it in his work and in getting us to understand it. I realize that this cannot be merely a matter of intellectual comprehension; what he aims at is to awaken in us the same, emotional attitude, the same mental constellation as that which in him produced the impetus to create. But why should the artist’s intention not be capable of being communicated and comprehended in words, like any other fact of mental life? Perhaps where great works of art are concerned this would never be possible without the application of psycho-analysis. The product itself after all must admit of such an analysis, if it really is an effective expression of the intentions and emotional activities of the artist. To discover his intention, though, I must first find out the meaning and content of what is represented in his work; I must, in other words, be able to interpret it. It is possible, therefore, that a work of art of this kind needs interpretation, and that until I have accomplished that interpretation I cannot come to know why I have been so powerfully affected. I even venture to hope that the effect of the work will undergo no diminution after we have succeeded in thus analysing it.

Let us consider Shakespeare’s masterpiece, Hamlet, a play, now over three centuries old.¹ I have followed the literature of psycho-analysis closely, and I accept its claim that it was not until the material of the tragedy had been traced back by psycho-analysis to the Oedipus theme that the mystery of its effect was at last explained. But before this was done, what a mass of differing and contradictory interpretative attempts, what a variety of opinions about the hero’s character and the dramatist’s intentions! Does Shakespeare claim our sympathies on behalf of a sick man, or of an ineffectual weakling, or of an idealist who is merely too good for the real world? And how many of these interpretations leave us cold! - so cold that they do nothing to explain the effect of the play and rather incline us to the view that its magical appeal rests solely upon the impressive thoughts in it and the splendour of its language. And yet, do not those very endeavours speak for the fact that we feel the need of discovering in it some source of power beyond them alone?

¹ Perhaps first performed in 1602.

The Moses Of Michelangelo

2847

Another of these inscrutable and wonderful works of art is the marble statue of Moses, by Michelangelo, in the Church of S. Pietro in Vincoli in Rome. As we know, it was only a fragment of the gigantic tomb which the artist was to have erected for the powerful Pope Julius II.¹ It always delights me to read an appreciative sentence about this statue, such as that it is ‘the crown of modern sculpture’ (Grimm). For no piece of statuary has ever made a stronger impression on me than this. How often have I mounted the steep steps from the unlovely Corso Cavour to the lonely piazza where the deserted church stands, and have essayed to support the angry scorn of the hero’s glance! Sometimes I have crept cautiously out of the half-gloom of the interior as though I myself belonged to the mob upon whom his eye is turned - the mob which can hold fast no conviction, which has neither faith nor patience, and which rejoices when it has regained its illusory idols.

But why do I call this statue inscrutable? There is not the slightest doubt that it represents Moses, the Law-giver of the Jews, holding the Tables of the Ten Commandments. That much is certain, but that is all. As recently as 1912 an art critic, Max Sauerlandt, has said, ‘No other work of art in the world has been judged so diversely as the Moses with the head of Pan. The mere interpretation of the figure has given rise to completely opposed views. . . .’ Basing myself on an essay published only five years ago,² I will first set out the doubts which are associated with this figure of Moses; and it will not be difficult to show that behind them lies concealed all that is most essential and valuable for the comprehension of this work of art.

¹ According to Henry Thode, the statue was made between the years 1512 and 1516.

² Thode (1908).

The Moses Of Michelangelo

2848

I

The Moses of Michelangelo is represented as seated; his body faces forward, his head with its mighty beard looks to the left, his right foot rests on the ground and his left leg is raised so that only the toes touch the ground. His right arm links the Tables of the Law with a portion of his beard; his left arm lies in his lap. Were I to give a more detailed description of his attitude, I should have to anticipate what I want to say later on. The descriptions of the figure given by various writers are, by the way, curiously inapt. What has not been understood has been inaccurately perceived or reproduced. Grimm says that the right hand, ‘under whose arm the Tables rest, grasps his beard’. So also Lübke: ‘Profoundly shaken, he rasps with his right hand his magnificent, flowing beard . . .‘; and Springer: ‘Moses presses one (the left) hand against his body, and thrusts the other, as though unconsciously, into the mighty locks of his beard.’ Justi thinks that the fingers of his (right) hand are playing with his beard, ‘as an agitated man nowadays might play with his watch-chain.’ Müntz, too, lays stress on this playing with the beard. Thode speaks of the ‘calm, firm posture of the right hand upon the Tables resting against his side’. He does not recognize any sign of excitement even in the right hand, as Justi and also Boito do. ‘The hand remains grasping his beard, in the position it was in before the Titan turned his head to one side.’ Jakob Burckhardt complains that ‘the celebrated left arm has no other function in reality than to press his beard to his body’.

If mere descriptions do not agree we shall not be surprised to find a divergence of view as to the meaning of various features of the statue. In my opinion we cannot better characterize the facial expression of Moses than in the words of Thode, who reads in it ‘a mixture of wrath, pain and contempt’, - ‘wrath in his threatening contracted brows, pain in his glance, and contempt in his protruded under-lip and in the down-drawn corners of his mouth’. But other admirers must have seen with other eyes. Thus Dupaty says, ‘His august brow seems to be but a transparent veil only half concealing his great mind’.¹ Lübke, on the other hand, declares that ‘one would look in vain in that head for an expression of higher intelligence; his down-drawn brow speaks of nothing but a capacity for infinite wrath and an all-compelling energy’. Guillaume (1876) differs still more widely in his interpretation of the expression of the face. He finds no emotion in it ‘only a proud simplicity, an inspired dignity, a living faith. The eye of Moses looks into the future, he foresees the lasting survival of his people, the immutability of his law.’ Similarly, to Müntz, ‘the eyes of Moses rove far beyond the race of men. They are turned towards those mysteries which he alone has descried.’ To Steinmann, indeed, this Moses is ‘no longer the stern Lawgiver, no longer the terrible enemy of sin, armed with the wrath of Jehovah, but the royal priest, whom age may not approach, beneficent and prophetic, with the reflection of eternity upon his brow, taking his last farewell of his people’.

¹ Quoted by Thode, ibid., 197.

The Moses Of Michelangelo

2849

There have even been some for whom the Moses of Michelangelo had nothing at all to say, and who are honest enough to admit it. Thus a critic in the Quarterly Revue of 1858: ‘There is an absence of meaning in the general conception, which precludes the idea of a self-sufficing whole. . . .’ And we are astonished to learn that there are yet others who find nothing to admire in the Moses, but who revolt against it and complain of the brutality of the figure and the animal cast of the head.

Has then the master-hand indeed traced such a vague or ambiguous script in the stone, that so many different readings of it are possible?

Another question, however, arises, which covers the first one. Did Michelangelo intend to create a ‘timeless study of character and mood’ in this Moses, or did he portray him at a particular moment of his life and, if so, at a highly significant one? The majority of judges have decided in the latter sense and are able to tell us what episode in his life it is which the artist has immortalized in stone. It is the descent from Mount Sinai, where Moses has received the Tables from God, and it is the moment when he perceives that the people have meanwhile made themselves a Golden Calf and are dancing around it and rejoicing. This is the scene upon which his eyes are turned, this is the spectacle which calls out the feelings depicted in his countenance - feelings which in the next instant will launch his great frame into violent action. Michelangelo has chosen this last moment of hesitation, of calm before the storm, for his representation. In the next instant Moses will spring to his feet - his left foot is already raised from the ground - dash the Tables to the earth, and let loose his rage upon his faithless people.

The Moses Of Michelangelo

2850

Once more many individual differences of opinion exist among those who support this interpretation.

Burckhardt writes: ‘Moses seems to be shown at that moment at which he catches sight of the worship of the Golden Calf, and is springing to his feet. His form is animated by the inception of a mighty movement and the physical strength with which he is endowed causes us to await it with fear and trembling.’

Lübke says: ‘It is as if at this moment his flashing eye were perceiving the sin of the worship of the Golden Calf and a mighty inward movement were running through his whole frame. Profoundly shaken, he grasps with his right hand his magnificent, flowing beard, as though to master his actions for one instant longer, only for the explosion of his wrath to burst out with more shattering force the next.’

Springer agrees with this view, but not without mentioning one misgiving, which will engage our attention later in this paper. He says, ‘Burning with energy and zeal, it is with difficulty that the hero subdues his inward emotion. . . . We are thus involuntarily reminded of a dramatic situation and are brought to believe that Moses is represented at the moment at which he sees the people of Israel worshipping the Golden Calf and is about to start up in wrath. Such an impression, it is true, is not easy to reconcile with the artist’s real intention, since the figure of Moses, like the other five seated figures on the upper part of the Papal tomb, is meant primarily to have a decorative effect. But it testifies very convincingly to the vitality and individuality portrayed in the figure of Moses.’

One or two writers, without actually accepting the Golden Calf theory, do nevertheless agree on its main point, namely, that Moses is just about to spring to his feet and take action.

According to Grimm, ‘The form’ (of Moses) ‘is filled with a majesty, a self-assurance, a feeling that all the thunders of heaven are at his command, and that yet he is holding himself in check before loosing them, waiting to see whether the foes whom he means to annihilate will dare to attack him. He sits there as if on the point of starting to his feet, his proud head carried high on his shoulders; the hand under whose arm the Tables rest grasps his beard, which falls in heavy waves over his breast, his nostrils distended and his lips shaped as though words were trembling upon them.’

Heath Wilson declares that Moses’ attention has been excited, and he is about to leap to his feet, but is still hesitating; and that his glance of mingled scorn and indignation is still capable of changing into one of compassion.

Wölfflin speaks of ‘inhibited movement’. The cause of this inhibition, he says, lies in the will of the man himself; it is the last moment of self-control before he lets himself go and leaps to his feet.

Justi has gone the furthest of all in his interpretation of the statue as Moses in the act of perceiving the Golden Calf, and he has pointed out details hitherto unobserved in it and worked them into his hypothesis. He directs our attention to the position of the two Tables - an unusual one, for they are about to slip down on to the stone seat. ‘He’ (Moses) ‘might therefore be looking in the direction from which the clamour was coming with an expression of evil foreboding, or it might be the actual sight of the abomination which has dealt him a stunning blow. Quivering with horror and pain he has sunk down.¹ He has sojourned on the mountain forty days and nights and he is weary. A horror, a great turn of fortune, a crime, even happiness itself, can be perceived in a single moment, but not grasped in its essence, its depths or its consequences. For an instant it seems to Moses that his work is destroyed and he despairs utterly of his people. In such moments the inner emotions betray themselves involuntarily in small movements. He lets the Tables slip from his right hand on to the stone seat; they have come to rest on their corner there and are pressed by his forearm against the side of his body. His hand, however, comes in contact with his breast and beard and thus, by the turning of the head to the spectator’s right, it draws the beard to the left and breaks the symmetry of that masculine adornment. It looks as though his fingers were playing with his beard as an agitated man nowadays might play with his watch-chain. His left hand is buried in his garment over the lower part of his body - in the Old Testament the viscera are the seat of the emotions - but the left leg is already drawn back and the right put forward; in the next instant he will leap up, his mental energy will be transposed from feeling into action, his right arm will move, the Tables will fall to the ground, and the shameful trespass will be expiated in torrents of blood. . . .’ ‘This is not yet the moment of tension of an act. Pain of mind still dominates him and almost paralyses him.’

¹ It should be remarked that the careful arrangement of the mantle over the knees of the sitting figure invalidates this first part of Justi’s view. On the contrary, this would lead us to suppose that Moses is represented as sitting there in calm repose until he is startled by some sudden perception.

The Moses Of Michelangelo

2851

Knapp takes the same view, except that he does not introduce the doubtful point at the beginning of the description, and carries the idea of the slipping Tables further. ‘He who just now was alone with his God is distracted by earthly sounds. He hears a noise; the noise of singing and dancing wakes him from his dream; he turns his eyes and his head in the direction of the clamour. In one instant fear, rage and unbridled passion traverse his huge frame. The Tables begin to slip down, and will fall to the ground and break when he leaps to his feet and hurls the angry thunder of his words into the midst of his backsliding people. . . . This is the moment of highest tension which is chosen. . . .’ Knapp, therefore, emphasizes the element of preparation for action, and disagrees with the view that what is being represented is an initial inhibition due to an overmastering agitation.

It cannot be denied that there is something extraordinarily attractive about attempts at an interpretation of the kind made by Justi and Knapp. This is because they do not stop short at the general effect of the figure, but are based on separate features in it; these we usually fail to notice, being overcome by the total impression of the statue and as it were paralysed by it. The marked turn of the head and eyes to the left, whereas the body faces forwards, supports the view that the resting Moses has suddenly seen something on that side to rivet his attention. His lifted foot can hardly mean anything else but that he is preparing to spring up;¹ and the very unusual way in which the Tables are held (for they are most sacred objects and are not to be brought into the composition like any ordinary accessory) is fully accounted for if we suppose they have slipped down as a result of the agitation of their bearer and will fall to the ground. According to this view we should believe that the statue represents a special and important moment in the life of Moses, and we should be left in no doubt of what that moment is.

But two remarks of Thode’s deprive us of the knowledge we thought to have gained. This critic says that to his eye the Tables are not slipping down but are ‘firmly lodged’. He notes the ‘calm, firm pose of the right hand upon the resting Tables’. If we look for ourselves we cannot but admit unreservedly that Thode is right. The Tables are firmly placed and in no danger of slipping. Moses’ right hand supports them or is supported by them. This does not explain the position in which they are held, it is true, but that position cannot be used in favour of the interpretation of Justi and others.

The second observation is still more final. Thode reminds us that ‘this statue was planned as one of six, and is intended to be seated. Both facts contradict the view that Michelangelo meant to record a particular historical moment. For, as regards the first consideration, the plan of representing a row of seated figures as types of human beings - as the vita activa and the vita contemplativa - excluded a representation of a particular historic episode. And, as regards the second, the representation of a seated posture - a posture necessitated by the artistic conception of the whole monument - contradicts the nature of that episode, namely, the descent of Moses from Mount Sinai into the camp.’

¹ Although the left foot of the reposeful seated figure of Giuliano in the Medici Chapel is similarly raised from the ground.

The Moses Of Michelangelo

2852

If we accept Thode’s objection we shall find that we can add to its weight. The figure of Moses was to have decorated the base of the tomb together with five other statues (or according to a later sketch, with three). Its immediate counterpart was to have been a figure of Paul. One other pair, representing the vita activa and the vita contemplativa in the shape of Leah and Rachel - standing, it is true - has been executed on the tomb as it still exists in its sadly aborted form. The Moses thus forms part of a whole and we cannot imagine that the figure was meant to arouse an expectation in the spectator that it was on the point of leaping up from its seat and rushing away to create a disturbance on its own account. If the other figures were not also represented as about to take violent action - and it seems very improbable that they were - then it would create a very bad impression for one of them to give us the illusion that it was going to leave its place and its companions, in fact to abandon its role in the general scheme. Such an intention would have a chaotic effect and we could not charge a great artist with it unless the facts drove us to it. A figure in the act of instant departure would be utterly at variance with the state of mind which the tomb is meant to induce in us.

The figure of Moses, therefore, cannot be supposed to be springing to his feet; he must be allowed to remain as he is in sublime repose like the other figures and like the proposed statue of the Pope (which was not, however, executed by Michelangelo himself). But then the statue we see before us cannot be that of a man filled with wrath, of Moses when he came down from Mount Sinai and found his people faithless and threw down the Holy Tables so that they were broken. And, indeed, I can recollect my own disillusionment when, during my, first visits to San Pietro in Vincoli, I used to sit down in front of the statue in the expectation that I should now see how it would start up on its raised foot, dash the Tables of the Law to the ground and let fly its wrath. Nothing of the kind happened. Instead, the stone image became more and more transfixed, an almost oppressively solemn calm emanated from it, and I was obliged to realize that something was represented here that could stay without change; that this Moses would remain sitting like this in his wrath for ever.

The Moses Of Michelangelo

2853

But if we have to abandon our interpretation of the statue as showing Moses just before his outburst of wrath at the sight of the Golden Calf, we have no alternative but to accept one of the hypotheses which regard it as a study of character. Thode’s view seems to be the least arbitrary and to have the closest reference to the meaning of its movements. He says, ‘Here, as always, he is concerned with representing a certain type of character. He creates the image of a passionate leader of mankind who, conscious of his divine mission as Lawgiver, meets the uncomprehending opposition of men. The only means of representing a man of action of this kind was to accentuate the power of his will, and this was done by a rendering of movement pervading the whole of his apparent quiet, as we see in the turn of his head, the tension of his muscles and the position of his left foot. These are the same distinguishing marks that we find again in the vir activus of the Medici Chapel in Florence. This general character of the figure is further heightened by laying stress on the conflict which is bound to arise between such a reforming genius and the rest of mankind. Emotions of anger, contempt and pain are typified in him. Without them it would not have been possible to portray the nature of a superman of this kind. Michelangelo has created, not a historical figure, but a character-type, embodying an inexhaustible inner force which tames the recalcitrant world; and he has given a form not only to the Biblical narrative of Moses, but to his own inner experiences, and to his impressions both of the individuality of Julius himself, and also, I believe, of the underlying springs of Savonarola’s perpetual conflicts.’

This view may be brought into connection with Knackfuss’s remark that the great secret of the effect produced by the Moses lies in the artistic contrast between the inward fire and the outward calm of his bearing.

For myself, I see nothing to object to in Thode’s explanation; but I feel the lack of something in it. Perhaps it is the need to discover a closer parallel between the state of mind of the hero as expressed in his attitude, and the contrast above-mentioned between his ‘outward’ calm and ‘inward’ emotion.

The Moses Of Michelangelo

2854

II

Long before I had any opportunity of hearing about psycho-analysis, I learnt that a Russian art-connoisseur, Ivan Lermolieff,¹ had caused a revolution in the art galleries of Europe by questioning the authorship of many pictures, showing how to distinguish copies from originals with certainty, and constructing hypothetical artists for those works whose former supposed authorship had been discredited. He achieved this by insisting that attention should be diverted from the general impression and main features of a picture, and by laying stress on the significance of minor details, of things like the drawing of the fingernails, of the lobe of an ear, of halos and such unconsidered trifles which the copyist neglects to imitate and yet which every artist executes in his own characteristic way. I was then greatly interested to learn that the Russian pseudonym concealed the identity of an Italian physician called Morelli, who died in 1891 with the rank of Senator of the Kingdom of Italy. It seems to me that his method of inquiry is closely related to the technique of psycho-analysis. It, too, is accustomed to divine secret and concealed things from despised or unnoticed features, from the rubbish-heap, as it were, of our observations.

Now in two places in the figure of Moses there are certain details which have hitherto not only escaped notice but, in fact, have not even been properly described. These are the attitude of his right hand and the position of the two Tables of the Law. We may say that this hand forms a very singular, unnatural link, and one which calls for explanation, between the Tables and the wrathful hero’s beard. He has been described as running his fingers through his beard and playing with its locks, while the outer edge of his hand rests on the Tables. But this is plainly not so. It is worth while examining more closely what those fingers of the right hand are doing, and describing more minutely the mighty beard with which they are in contact.²

¹ His first essays were published in German between 1874 and 1876.

² Cf. the illustration.

The Moses Of Michelangelo

2855

We now quite clearly perceive the following things: the thumb of the hand is concealed and the index finger alone is in effective contact with the beard. It is pressed so deeply against the soft masses of hair that they bulge out beyond it both above and below, that is, both towards the head and towards the abdomen. The other three fingers are propped upon the wall of his chest and are bent at the upper joints; they are barely touched by the extreme right-hand lock of the beard which falls past them. They have, as it were, withdrawn from the beard. It is therefore not correct to say that the right hand is playing with the beard or plunged in it; the simple truth is that the index finger is laid over a part of the beard and makes a deep trough in it. It cannot be denied that to press one’s beard with one finger is an extraordinary gesture and one not easy to understand.

The much-admired beard of Moses flows from his cheeks, chin and upper lip in a number of waving strands which are kept distinct from one another all the way down. One of the strands on his extreme right, growing from the cheek, falls down to the inward-pressing index finger, by which it is retained. We may assume that it resumes its course between that finger and the concealed thumb. The corresponding strand on his left side falls practically unimpeded far down over his breast. What has received the most unusual treatment is the thick mass of hair on the inside of this latter strand, the part between it and the middle line. It is not suffered to follow the turn of the head to the left; it is forced to roll over loosely and form part of a kind of scroll which lies across and over the strands on the inner right side of the beard. This is because it is held fast by the pressure of the right index finger, although it grows from the left side of the face and is, in fact, the main portion of the whole left side of the beard. Thus, the main mass of the beard is thrown to the right of the figure, whereas the head is sharply turned to the left. At the place where the right index finger is pressed in, a kind of whorl of hairs is formed; strands of hair coming from the left lie over strands coming from the right, both caught in by that despotic finger. It is only beyond this place that the masses of hair, deflected from their course, flow freely once more, and now they fall vertically until their ends are gathered up in Moses’ left hand as it lies open on his lap.

The Moses Of Michelangelo

2856

I have no illusions as to the clarity of my description, and venture no opinion whether the sculptor really does invite us to solve the riddle of that knot in the beard of his statue. But apart from this, the fact remains that the pressure of the right index finger affects mainly the strands of hair from the left side; and that this oblique hold prevents the beard from accompanying the turn of the head and eyes to the left. Now we may be allowed to ask what this arrangement means and to what motives it owes its existence. If it was indeed considerations of linear and spatial design which caused the sculptor to draw the downward-streaming wealth of hair across to the right of the figure which is looking to its left, how strangely unsuitable as a means does the pressure of a single finger appear to be! And what man who, for some reason or other, has drawn his beard over to the other side, would take it into his head to hold down the one half across the other by the pressure of one finger? Yet may not these minute particulars mean nothing in reality, and may we not be racking our brains about things which were of no moment to their creator?

But let us proceed on the assumption that even these details have significance. There is a solution which will remove our difficulties and afford a glimpse of a new meaning. If the left side of Moses’ beard lies under the pressure of his right finger, we may perhaps take this pose as the last stage of some connection between his right hand and the left half of his beard, a connection which was a much more intimate one at some moment before that chosen for representation. Perhaps his hand had seized his beard with far more energy, had reached across to its left edge, and, in returning to that position in which the statue shows it, had been followed by a part of his beard which now testifies to the movement which has just taken place. The loop of the beard would thus be an indication of the path taken by this hand.

The Moses Of Michelangelo

2857

Thus we shall have inferred that there had been a retreating motion of the right hand. This one assumption necessarily brings others with it. In imagination we complete the scene of which this movement, established by the evidence of the beard, is a part; and we are brought back quite naturally to the hypothesis according to which the resting Moses is startled by the clamour of the people and the spectacle of the Golden Calf. He was sitting there calmly, we will suppose, his head with its flowing beard facing forward, and his hand in all probability not near it at all. Suddenly the clamour strikes his ear; he turns his head and eyes in the direction from which the disturbance comes, sees the scene and takes it in. Now wrath and indignation lay hold of him; and he would fain leap up and punish the wrongdoers, annihilate them. His rage, distant as yet from its object, is meanwhile directed in a gesture against his own body. His impatient hand, ready to act, clutches at his beard which has moved with the turn of his head, and presses it between his thumb and palm in the iron grasp of his closing fingers. It is a gesture whose power and vehemence remind us of other creations of Michelangelo’s. But now an alteration takes place, as yet we do not know how or why. The hand that had been put forward and had sunk into his beard is hastily withdrawn and unclasped, and the fingers let go their hold; but so deeply have they been plunged in that in their withdrawal they drag a great piece of the left side of the beard across to the right, and this piece remains lodged over the hair of the right under the weight of one finger, the longest and uppermost one of the hand. And this new position, which can only be understood with reference to the former one, is now retained.

It is time now to pause and reflect. We have assumed that the right hand was, to begin with, away from the beard; that then it reached across to the left of the figure in a moment of great emotional tension and seized the beard; and that it was finally drawn back again, taking a part of the beard with it. We have disposed of this right hand as though we had the free use of it. But may we do this? Is the hand indeed so free? Must it not hold or support the Tables? Are not such mimetic evolutions as these prohibited by its important function? And furthermore, what could have occasioned its withdrawal if the motive which made it leave its original position was such a strong one?

Here are indeed fresh difficulties. It is undeniable that the right hand is responsible for the Tables; and also that we have no motive to account for the withdrawal we have ascribed to it. But what if both difficulties could be solved together, and if then and then only they presented a clear and connected sequence of events? What if it is precisely something which is happening to the Tables that explains the movements of the hand?

The Moses Of Michelangelo

2858

If we look at the drawing in Fig. 4 we shall see that the Tables present one or two notable features hitherto not deemed worthy of remark. It has been said that the right hand rests upon the Tables; or again that it supports them. And we can see at once that the two apposed, rectangular tablets stand on one corner. If we look closer we shall notice that the lower edge is a different shape from the upper one, which is obliquely inclined forward.

The upper edge is straight, whereas the lower one has a protuberance like a horn on the part nearest to us, and the Tables touch the stone seat precisely with this protuberance. What can be the meaning of this detail?¹ It can hardly be doubted that this projection is meant to mark the actual top side of the Tables, as regards the writing. It is only the top edge of rectangular tablets of this kind that is curved or notched. Thus we see that the Tables are upside-down. This is a singular way to treat such sacred objects. They are stood on their heads and practically balanced on one corner. What consideration of form could have led Michelangelo to put them in such a position? Or was this detail as well of no importance to the artist?

¹ Which, by the way, is quite incorrectly reproduced in a large plaster cast in the collection of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.

The Moses Of Michelangelo

2859

We begin to suspect that the Tables too have arrived at their present position as the result of a previous movement; that this movement was a consequence of the change of place of the right hand that we have postulated, and in its turn compelled that hand to make its subsequent retreat. The movements of the hand and of the Tables can be co-ordinated in this way: at first the figure of Moses, while it was still sitting quietly, carried the Tables perpendicularly under its right arm. Its right hand grasped their lower edge and found a hold in the projection on their front part. (The fact that this made them easier to carry sufficiently accounts for the upside-down position in which the Tables were held.) Then came the moment when Moses’ calm was broken by the disturbance. He turned his head in its direction, and when he saw the spectacle he lifted his foot preparatory to starting up, let go the Tables with his hand and plunged it to the left and upwards into his beard, as though to turn his violence against his own body. The Tables were now consigned to the pressure of his arm, which had to squeeze them against his side. But this support was not sufficient and the Tables began to slip in a forward and downward direction. The upper edge, which had been held horizontally, now began to face forwards and downwards; and the lower edge, deprived of its stay, was nearing the stone seat with its front corner. Another instant and the Tables would have pivoted upon this new point of support, have hit the ground with the upper edge foremost, and been shattered to pieces. It is to prevent this that the right hand retreated, let go the beard, a part of which was drawn back with it unintentionally, came against the upper edge of the Tables in time and held them near the hind corner, which had now come uppermost. Thus the singularly constrained air of the whole - beard, hand and tilted Tables - can be traced to that one passionate movement of the hand and its natural consequences. If we wish to reverse the effects of those stormy movements, we must raise the upper front corner of the Tables and push it back, thus lifting their lower front corner (the one with the protuberance) from the stone seat; and then lower the right hand and bring it under the now horizontal lower edge of the Tables.

The Moses Of Michelangelo

2860

I have procured from the hand of an artist three drawings to illustrate my meaning. Fig. 3 reproduces the statue as it actually is; Figs. 1 and 2 represent the preceding stages according to my hypothesis - the first that of calm, the second that of highest tension, in which the figure is preparing to spring up and has abandoned its hold of the Tables, so that these are beginning to slip down. Now it is remarkable how the two postures in the imaginary drawings vindicate the incorrect descriptions of earlier writers. Gondivi, a contemporary of Michelangelo’s, says: ‘Moses, the captain and leader of the Hebrews, is seated in the attitude of a contemplative sage, holding the Tables of the Law under his right arm, and leaning his chin on his left hand(!), as one who is weary and full of care.’ No such attitude is to be seen in Michelangelo’s statue, but it describes almost exactly the view on which the first drawing is based. Lübke writes, together with other critics: ‘Profoundly shaken, he grasps with his right hand his magnificent, flowing beard.’ This is incorrect if we look at the reproduction of the actual statue, but it is true of the second sketch (Fig. 2). Justi and Knapp have observed, as we have seen, that the Tables are about to slip down and are in danger of being broken. Thode set them right and showed that the Tables were securely held by the right hand; yet they would have been correct if they had been describing not the statue itself but the middle stage of our reconstructed action. It almost seems as if they had emancipated themselves from the visual image of the statue and had unconsciously begun an analysis of the motive forces behind it, and that that analysis had led them to make the same claim as we have done more consciously and more explicitly.

The Moses Of Michelangelo

2861

III

We may now, I believe, permit ourselves to reap the fruits of our endeavours. We have seen how many of those who have felt the influence of this statue have been impelled to interpret it as representing Moses agitated by the spectacle of his people fallen from grace and dancing round an idol. But this interpretation had to be given up, for it made us expect to see him spring up in the next moment, break the Tables and accomplish the work of vengeance. Such a conception, however, would fail to harmonize with the design of making this figure, together with three (or five) more seated figures, a part of the tomb of Julius II. We may now take up again the abandoned interpretation, for the Moses we have reconstructed will neither leap up nor cast the Tables from him. What we see before us is not the inception of a violent action but the remains of a movement that has already taken place. In his first transport of fury, Moses desired to act, to spring up and take vengeance and forget the Tables; but he has overcome the temptation, and he will now remain seated and still, in his frozen wrath and in his pain mingled with contempt. Nor will he throw away the Tables so that they will break on the stones, for it is on their especial account that he has controlled his anger; it was to preserve them that he kept his passion in check. In giving way to his rage and indignation, he had to neglect the Tables, and the hand which upheld them was withdrawn. They began to slide down and were in danger of being broken. This brought him to himself. He remembered his mission and for its sake renounced an indulgence of his feelings. His hand returned and saved the unsupported Tables before they had actually fallen to the ground. In this attitude he remained immobilized, and in this attitude Michelangelo has portrayed him as the guardian of the tomb.

As our eyes travel down it the figure exhibits three distinct emotional strata. The lines of the face reflect the feelings which have won the ascendancy; the middle of the figure shows the traces of suppressed movement; and the foot still retains the attitude of the projected action. It is as though the controlling influence had proceeded downwards from above. No mention has been made so far of the left arm, and it seems to claim a share in our interpretation. The hand is laid in the lap in a mild gesture and holds as though in a caress the end of the flowing beard. It seems as if it is meant to counteract the violence with which the other hand had misused the beard a few moments ago.

But here it will be objected that after all this is not the Moses of the Bible. For that Moses did actually fall into a fit of rage and did throw away the Tables and break them. This Moses must be a quite different man, a new Moses of the artist’s conception; so that Michelangelo must have had the presumption to emend the sacred text and to falsify the character of that holy man. Can we think him capable of a boldness which might almost be said to approach an act of blasphemy?

The Moses Of Michelangelo

2862

The passage in the Holy Scriptures which describes Moses’ action at the scene of the Golden Calf is as follows: (Exodus xxxii. 7) ‘And the Lord said unto Moses, Go, get thee down; for thy people, which thou broughtest out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves: (8) They have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them: they have made them a molten calf, and have worshipped it, and have sacrificed thereunto, and said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt. (9) And the Lord said unto Moses, I have seen this people, and, behold, it is a stiff-necked people: (10) Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them; and I will make of thee a great nation. (11) And Moses besought the Lord his God, and said, Lord, why doth thy wrath wax hot against thy people, which thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power, and with a mighty hand? . . .

‘(14) And the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people. (15) And Moses turned, and went down from the mount, and the two tables of the testimony were in his hand: the tables were written on both their sides; on the one side and on the other were they written. (16) And the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tables. (17) And when Joshua heard the noise of the people as they shouted, he said unto Moses, There is a noise of war in the camp. (18) And he said, It is not the voice of them that shout for mastery, neither is it the voice of them that cry for being overcome; but the noise of them that sing do I hear. (19) And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses’ anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount. (20) And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strawed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it. . . .

‘(30) And it came to pass on the morrow, that Moses said unto the people, Ye have sinned a great sin: and now I will go up unto the Lord; peradventure I shall make an atonement for your sin. (31) And Moses returned unto the Lord, and said, Oh! this people have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of gold! (32) Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin-; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written. (33) And the Lord said unto Moses, Whosoever hath sinned against me, him will I blot out of my book. (34) Therefore now go, lead the people unto the place of which I have spoken unto thee. Behold, mine Angel shall go before thee: nevertheless, in the day when I visit, I will visit their sin upon them. (35) And the Lord plagued the people, because they made the calf which Aaron made.’

The Moses Of Michelangelo

2863

It is impossible to read the above passage in the light of modern criticism of the Bible without finding evidence that it has been clumsily put together from various sources. In verse 8 the Lord Himself tells Moses that his people have fallen away and made themselves an idol; and Moses intercedes for the wrongdoers. And yet he speaks to Joshua as though he knew nothing of this (18), and is suddenly aroused to wrath as he sees the scene of the worshipping of the Golden Calf (19). In verse 14 he has already gained a pardon from God for his erring people, yet in verse 31 he returns into the mountains to implore this forgiveness, tells God about his people’s sin and is assured of the postponement of the punishment. Verse 35 speaks of a visitation of his people by the Lord about which nothing more is told us; whereas the verses 20-30 describe the punishment which Moses himself dealt out. It is well known that the historical parts of the Bible, dealing with the Exodus, are crowded with still more glaring incongruities and contradictions.

The age of the Renaissance had naturally no such critical attitude towards the text of the Bible, but had to accept it as a consistent whole, with the result that the passage in question was not a very good subject for representation. According to the Scriptures Moses was already instructed about the idolatry of his people and had ranged himself on the side of mildness and forgiveness; nevertheless, when he saw the Golden Calf and the dancing crowd, he was overcome by a sudden frenzy of rage. It would therefore not surprise us to find that the artist, in depicting the reaction of his hero to that painful surprise, had deviated from the text from inner motives. Moreover, such deviations from the scriptural text on a much slighter pretext were by no means unusual or disallowed to artists. A celebrated picture by Parmigiano possessed by his native town depicts Moses sitting on the top of a mountain and dashing the Tables to the ground, although the Bible expressly says that he broke them ‘beneath the mount’. Even the representation of a seated Moses finds no support in the text and seems rather to bear out those critics who maintain that Michelangelo’s statue is not meant to record any particular moment in the prophet’s life.

The Moses Of Michelangelo

2864

More important than his infidelity to the text of the Scriptures is the alteration which Michelangelo has, in our supposition, made in the character of Moses. The Moses of legend and tradition had a hasty temper and was subject to fits of passion. It was in a transport of divine wrath of this kind that he slew an Egyptian who was maltreating an Israelite, and had to flee out of the land into the wilderness; and it was in a similar passion that he broke the Tables of the Law, inscribed by God Himself. Tradition, in recording such a characteristic, is unbiased, and preserves the impression of a great personality who once lived. But Michelangelo has placed a different Moses on the tomb of the Pope, one superior to the historical or traditional Moses. He has modified the theme of the broken Tables; he does not let Moses break them in his wrath, but makes him be influenced by the danger that they will be broken and makes him calm that wrath, or at any rate prevent it from becoming an act. In this way he has added something new and more than human to the figure of Moses; so that the giant frame with its tremendous physical power becomes only a concrete expression of the highest mental achievement that is possible in a man, that of struggling successfully against an inward passion for the sake of a cause to which he has devoted himself.

We have now completed our interpretation of Michelangelo’s statue, though it can still be asked what motives prompted the sculptor to select the figure of Moses, and a so greatly altered Moses, as an adornment for the tomb of Julius II. In the opinion of many these motives are to be found in the character of the Pope and in Michelangelo’s relations with him. Julius II was akin to Michelangelo in this, that he attempted to realize great and mighty ends, and especially designs on a grand scale. He was a man of action and he had a definite purpose, which was to unite Italy under the Papal supremacy. He desired to bring about single-handed what was not to happen for several centuries, and then only through the conjunction of many alien forces; and he worked alone, with impatience, in the short span of sovereignty allowed him, and used violent means. He could appreciate Michelangelo as a man of his own kind, but he often made him smart under his sudden anger and his utter lack of consideration for others. The artist felt the same violent force of will in himself, and, as the more introspective thinker, may have had a premonition of the failure to which they were both doomed. And so he carved his Moses on the Pope’s tomb, not without a reproach against the dead pontiff, as a warning to himself, thus, in self-criticism, rising superior to his own nature.

The Moses Of Michelangelo

2865

IV

In 1863 an Englishman, Watkiss Lloyd, devoted a little book to the Moses of Michelangelo. I succeeded in getting hold of this short essay of forty-six pages, and read it with mixed feelings. I once more had an opportunity of experiencing in myself what unworthy and puerile motives enter into our thoughts and acts even in a serious cause. My first feeling was one of regret that the author should have anticipated so much of my thought, which seemed precious to me because it was the result of my own efforts; and it was only in the second instance that I was able to get pleasure from its unexpected confirmation of my opinion. Our views, however, diverge on one very important point.

Lloyd remarks in the first place that the usual descriptions of the figure are incorrect, and that Moses is not in the act of rising¹ - that the right hand is not grasping the beard, but that the index-finger alone is resting upon it.² Lloyd also recognizes, and this is much more important, that the attitude portrayed can only be explained by postulating a foregoing one, which is not represented, and that the drawing of the left lock of the beard across to the right signifies that the right hand and the left side of the beard have at a previous stage been in closer and more natural contact. But he suggests another way of reconstructing the earlier contact which must necessarily be assumed. According to him, it was not the hand which had been plunged into the beard, but the beard which had been where the hand now is. We must, he says, imagine that just before the sudden interruption the head of the statue was turned far round to its right over the hand which, then as now, was holding the Tables of the Law. The pressure (of the Tables) against the palm of the hand caused the fingers to open naturally beneath the flowing locks of the beard, and the sudden turn of the head to the other side resulted in a part of the beard being detained for an instant by the motionless hand and forming the loop of hair which is to be looked on as a mark of the course it has taken - its ‘wake’, to use Lloyd’s own word.

¹ ‘But he is not rising or preparing to rise; the bust is fully upright, not thrown forward for the alteration of balance preparatory for such a movement. . . .’ (LIoyd, 1863, 10).

² ‘Such a description is altogether erroneous; the fillets of the beard are detained by the right hand but they are not held, nor grasped, enclosed or taken hold of. They are even detained but momentarily - momentarily engaged, they are on the point of being free for disengagement’ (ibid., 11).

The Moses Of Michelangelo

2866

In rejecting the other possibility, that of the right hand having previously been in contact with the left side of the beard, Lloyd has allowed himself to be influenced by a consideration which shows how near he came to our interpretation. He says that it was not possible for the prophet, even in very great agitation, to have put out his hand to draw his beard across to the right. For in that case his fingers would have been in an entirely different position; and, moreover, such a movement would have allowed the Tables to slip down, since they are only supported by the pressure of the right arm - unless, in Moses’ endeavour to save them at the last moment, we think of them as being ‘clutched by a gesture so awkward that to imagine it is profanation’.

It is easy to see what the writer has overlooked. He has correctly interpreted the anomalies of the beard as indicating a preceding movement, but he has omitted to apply the same explanation to the no less unnatural details in the position of the Tables. He examines only the data connected with the beard and not those connected with the Tables, whose position he assumes to be the original one. In this way he closes the door to a conception like ours which, by examining certain insignificant details, has arrived at an unexpected interpretation of the meaning and aim of the figure as a whole.

But what if both of us have strayed on to a wrong path? What if we have taken too serious and profound a view of details which were nothing to the artist, details which he had introduced quite arbitrarily or for some purely formal reasons with no hidden intention behind? What if we have shared the fate of so many interpreters who have thought they saw quite clearly things which the artist did not intend either consciously or unconsciously? I cannot tell. I cannot say whether it is reasonable to credit Michelangelo - an artist in whose works there is so much thought striving for expression - with such an elementary want of precision, and especially whether this can be assumed in regard to the striking and singular features of the statue under discussion. And finally we may be allowed to point out, in all modesty, that the artist is no less responsible than his interpreters for the obscurity which surrounds his work. In his creations Michelangelo has often enough gone to the utmost limit of what is expressible in art; and perhaps in his statue of Moses he has not completely succeeded, if his purpose was to make the passage of a violent gust of passion visible in the signs left behind it in the ensuing calm.

The Moses Of Michelangelo

2867

The Moses Of Michelangelo

2868

POSTSCRIPT

(1927)

Several years after the publication of my paper on the Moses of Michelangelo, which appeared anonymously in Imago in 1914, Dr. Ernest Jones very kindly sent me a copy of the April number of the Burlington Magazine of 1921 (Vol. XXXVIII), which could not fail to turn my interest once more to the interpretation of the statue which I had originally suggested. This number contains (pp. 157-66) a short article by H. P. Mitchell on two bronzes of the twelfth century, now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, which are attributed to an outstanding artist of that day, Nicholas of Verdun. We possess other works by the same hand in Tournay, Arras and Klosterneuburg, near Vienna; his masterpiece is considered to be the Shrine of the Three Kings in Cologne.

One of the two statuettes described by Mitchell, which is just over 9 inches high, is identifiable beyond all doubt as a Moses, because of the two Tables of the Law which he holds in his hand. This Moses, too, is represented as seated, enveloped in a flowing robe. His face is expressive of strong passion, mixed, perhaps, with grief; and his hand grasps his long beard and presses its strands between palm and thumb as in a vice. He is, that is to say, making the very gesture which I postulated in Fig. 2 of my former paper as a preliminary stage of the attitude into which Michelangelo has cast him.

A glance at the accompanying illustration will show the main difference between the two compositions, which are separated from each other by an interval of more than three centuries. The Moses of the Lorraine artist is holding the Tables by their top edge with his left hand, resting them on his knee. If we were to transfer them to the other side of his body and put them under his right arm we should have established the preliminary posture of Michelangelo’s Moses. If my view of the thrusting of the hand into the beard is right, then the Moses of the year 1180 shows us an instant during his storm of feeling, whilst the statue in S. Pietro in Vincoli depicts the calm when the storm is over.

In my opinion this new piece of evidence increases the probability that the interpretation which I attempted in 1914 was a correct one. Perhaps some connoisseur of art will be able to bridge the gulf in time between the Moses of Nicholas of Verdun and the Moses of the Master of the Italian Renaissance by telling us where examples of representations of Moses belonging to the intervening period are to be found.

2869

SOME REFLECTIONS ON SCHOOLBOY PSYCHOLOGY

(1914)

2870

Intentionally left blank

2871

SOME REFLECTIONS ON SCHOOLBOY PSYCHOLOGY

It gives you a queer feeling if, late in life, you are ordered once again to write a school essay. But you obey automatically, like the old soldier who, at the word ‘Attention!’, cannot help dropping whatever he may have in his hands and who finds his little fingers pressed along the seams of his trousers. It is strange how readily you obey the orders, as though nothing in particular had happened in the last half-century. But in fact you have grown old in the interval, you are on the eve of your sixtieth birthday, and your physical feelings, as well as your mirror, show unmistakably how far your life’s candle is burnt down.

As little as ten years ago, perhaps, you may have had moments at which you suddenly felt quite young again. As you walked through the streets of Vienna - already a grey-beard, and weighed down by all the cares of family life - you might come unexpectedly on some well-preserved, elderly gentleman and would greet him humbly almost, because you had recognized him as one of your former schoolmasters. But afterwards you would stop and reflect: ‘Was that really he? or only some one deceptively like him? How youthful he looks! And how old you yourself have grown! How old can he be to-day? Can it be possible that the men who used to stand for us as types of adulthood were really so little older than we were?’

At such moments as these, I used to find, the present time seemed to sink into obscurity and the years between ten and eighteen would rise from the corners of my memory, with all their guesses and illusions, their painful distortions and heartening successes - my first glimpses of an extinct civilization (which in my case was to bring me as much consolation as anything else in the struggles of life), my first contacts with the sciences, among which it seemed open to me to choose to which of them I should dedicate what were no doubt my inestimable services. And I seem to remember that through the whole of this time there ran a premonition of a task ahead, till it found open expression in my school-leaving essay as a wish that I might during the course of my life contribute something to our human knowledge.

Some Reflections On Schoolboy Psychology

2872

Later I became a physician - or a psychologist, rather - and was able to create a new psychological discipline, something that is known as ‘psycho-analysis’, which is followed to-day with excited interest, and is greeted with praise and blame, by physicians and enquirers in neighbouring, and in distant, foreign lands - but least of all, of course, in our own country.

As a psycho-analyst I am bound to be concerned more with emotional than intellectual processes, with unconscious than with conscious mental life. My emotion at meeting my old schoolmaster warns me to make a first admission: it is hard to decide whether what affected us more and was of greater importance to us was our concern with the sciences that we were taught or with the personalities of our teachers. It is true, at least, that this second concern was a perpetual undercurrent in all of us, and that in many of us the path to the sciences led only through our teachers. Some of us stopped half-way along that path, and for a few - why not admit as much? - it was on that account blocked for good and all.

We courted them or turned our backs on them, we imagined sympathies and antipathies in them which probably had no existence, we studied their characters and on theirs we formed or misformed our own. They called up our fiercest opposition and forced us to complete submission; we peered into their little weaknesses, and took pride in their excellences, their knowledge and their justice. At bottom we felt a great affection for them if they gave us any ground for it, though I cannot tell how many of them were aware of this. But it cannot be denied that our position in regard to them was a quite remarkable one and one which may well have had its inconvenience for those concerned. We were from the very first equally inclined to love and to hate them, to criticize and respect them. Psycho-analysis has given the name of ‘ambivalence’ to this readiness to contradictory attitudes, and it has no difficulty in pointing to the source of ambivalent feelings of such a kind.

Some Reflections On Schoolboy Psychology

2873

For psycho-analysis has taught us that the individual’s emotional attitudes to other people, which are of such extreme importance to his later behaviour, are already established at an unexpectedly early age. The nature and quality of the human child’s relations to people of his own and the opposite sex have already been laid down in the first six years of his life. He may afterwards develop and transform them in certain directions but he can no longer get rid of them. The people to whom he is in this way fixed are his parents and his brothers and sisters. All those whom he gets to know later become substitute figures for these first objects of his feelings. (We should perhaps add to his parents any other people, such as nurses, who cared for him in his infancy.) These substitute figures can be classified from his point of view according as they are derived from what we call the ‘imagos’ of his father, his mother, his brothers and sisters, and so on. His later acquaintances are thus obliged to take over a kind of emotional heritage; they encounter sympathies and antipathies to the production of which they themselves have contributed little. All of his later choices of friendship and love follow upon the basis of the memory-traces left behind by these first prototypes.

Of all the imagos of a childhood which, as a rule, is no longer remembered, none is more important for a youth or a man than that of his father. Organic necessity introduces into a man’s relation to his father an emotional ambivalence which we have found most strikingly expressed in the Greek myth of King Oedipus. A little boy is bound to love and admire his father, who seems to him the most powerful, the kindest and the wisest creature in the world. God himself is after all only an exaltation of this picture of a father as he is represented in the mind of early childhood. But soon the other side of this emotional relationship emerges. One’s father is recognized as the paramount disturber of one’s instinctual life; he becomes a model not only to imitate but also to get rid of, in order to take his place. Thenceforward affectionate and hostile impulses towards him persist side by side, often to the end of one’s life, without either of them being able to do away with the other. It is in this existence of contrary feelings side by side that lies the essential character of what we call emotional ambivalence.

Some Reflections On Schoolboy Psychology

2874

In the second half of childhood a change sets in in the boy’s relation to his father - a change whose importance cannot be exaggerated. From his nursery the boy begins to cast his eyes upon the world outside. And he cannot fail now to make discoveries which undermine his original high opinion of his father and which expedite his detachment from his first ideal. He finds that his father is no longer the mightiest, wisest and richest of beings; he grows dissatisfied with him, he learns to criticize him and to estimate his place in society; and then, as a rule, he makes him pay heavily for the disappointment that has been caused by him. Everything that is hopeful, as well as everything that is unwelcome, in the new generation is determined by this detachment from the father.

It is in this phase of a youth’s development that he comes into contact with his teachers. So that we can now understand our relation to our schoolmasters. These men, not all of whom were in fact fathers themselves, became our substitute fathers. That was why, even though they were still quite young, they struck us as so mature and so unattainably adult. We transferred on to them the respect and expectations attaching to the omniscient father of our childhood, and we then began to treat them as we treated our fathers at home. We confronted them with the ambivalence that we had acquired in our own families and with its help we struggled with them as we had been in the habit of struggling with our fathers in the flesh. Unless we take into account our nurseries and our family homes, our behaviour to our schoolmasters would be not only incomprehensible but inexcusable.

As schoolboys we had other and scarcely less important experiences with the successors of our brothers and sisters - our schoolfellows - but these must be described elsewhere. In a commemoration of the jubilee of our school it is on the masters that our thoughts must rest.

2875

ON THE HISTORY OF THE PSYCHO-ANALYTIC MOVEMENT

(1914)

2876

Intentionally left blank

2877

ON THE HISTORY OF THE PSYCHO-ANALYTIC MOVEMENT

Fluctuat nec mergitur ¹

(On the coat of arms of the City of Paris)

I

No one need be surprised at the subjective character of the contribution I propose to make here to the history of the psycho-analytic movement, nor need anyone wonder at the part I play in it. For psycho-analysis is my creation; for ten years I was the only person who concerned himself with it, and all the dissatisfaction which the new phenomenon aroused in my contemporaries has been poured out in the form of criticisms on my head. Although it is a long time now since I was the only psycho-analyst, I consider myself justified in maintaining that even to-day no one can know better than I do what psycho-analysis is, how it differs from other ways of investigating the life of the mind, and precisely what should be called psycho-analysis and what would better be described by some other name. In thus repudiating what seems to me a cool act of usurpation, I am indirectly informing the readers of this Jahrbuch the events that have led to the changes in its editorship and format.

¹ [ ’It is tossed by the waves, but does not sink’.]

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2878

In 1909, in the lecture-room of an American university, I had my first opportunity of speaking in public about psycho-analysis.¹ The occasion was a momentous one for my work, and moved by this thought I then declared that it was not I who had brought psycho-analysis into existence: the credit for this was due to someone else, to Josef Breuer, whose work had been done at a time when I was still a student engaged in passing my examinations (1880-2). Since I gave those lectures, however, some well-disposed friends have suggested to me a doubt whether my gratitude was not expressed too extravagantly on that occasion. In their view I ought to have done as I had previously been accustomed to do: treated Breuer’s ‘cathartic procedure’ as a preliminary stage of psycho-analysis, and represented psycho-analysis itself as beginning with my discarding the hypnotic technique and introducing free associations. It is of no great importance in any case whether the history of psycho-analysis is reckoned as beginning with the cathartic method or with my modification of it; I refer to this uninteresting point merely because certain opponents of psycho-analysis have a habit of occasionally recollecting that after all the art of psycho-analysis was not invented by me, but by Breuer. This only happens, of course, if their views allow them to find something in it deserving attention; if they set no such limits to their rejection of it, psycho-analysis is always without question my work alone. I have never heard that Breuer’s great share in psycho-analysis has earned him a proportionate measure of criticism and abuse. As I have long recognized that to stir up contradiction and arouse bitterness is the inevitable fate of psycho-analysis, I have come to the conclusion that I must be the true originator of all that is particularly characteristic in it. I am happy to be able to add that none of the efforts to minimize my part in creating this much-abused analysis have ever come from Breuer himself or could claim any support from him.

Breuer’s discoveries have so often been described that I can dispense with discussing them in detail here. These were the fundamental fact that the symptoms of hysterical patients are founded upon scenes in their past lives which have made a great impression on them but have been forgotten (traumas); the therapy founded upon this, which consisted in causing them to remember and reproduce these experiences in a state of hypnosis (catharsis); and the fragment of theory inferred from it, which was that these symptoms represented an abnormal employment of amounts of excitation which had not been disposed of (conversion). Whenever Breuer, in his theoretical contribution to the Studies on Hysteria (1895), referred to this process of conversion, he always added my name in brackets after it, as though the priority for this first attempt at theoretical evaluation belonged to me. I believe that actually this distinction relates only to the name, and that the conception came to us simultaneously and together.

¹ In my ‘Five Lectures’ (1910a), delivered at Clark University.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2879

It is well known, too, that after Breuer made his first discovery of the cathartic method he let it rest for a number of years, and only took it up again at my instigation, on my return from my studies under Charcot. He had a large consulting practice in medicine which made great claims on him; I myself had only unwillingly taken up the profession of medicine, but I had at that time a strong motive for helping people suffering from nervous affections or at least for wishing to understand something about their states. I had embarked upon physical therapy, and had felt absolutely helpless after the disappointing results from my study of Erb’s Elektrotherapie, which put forward such a number of indications and recommendations. If I did not at the time arrive on my own account at the conclusion which Möbius established later, that the successes of electrical treatment in nervous patients are the effects of suggestion, there is no doubt that only the total absence of these promised successes was to blame. Treatment by suggestion during deep hypnosis, which I learned from Liébeault’s and Bernheim’s highly impressive demonstrations, then seemed to offer a satisfactory substitute for the failure of electrical treatment. But the practice of investigating patients in a state of hypnosis, with which Breuer made me acquainted - a practice which combined an automatic mode of operation with the satisfaction of scientific curiosity - was bound to be incomparably more attractive than the monotonous, forcible prohibitions used in treatment by suggestion, prohibitions which stood in the way of all research.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2880

We have recently received a piece of advice, purporting to represent one of the latest developments of psycho-analysis, to the effect that the current conflict and the exciting cause of illness are to be brought into the foreground in analysis. Now this is exactly what Breuer and I used to do at the beginning of our work with the cathartic method. We led the patient’s attention directly to the traumatic scene in which the symptom had arisen, and we endeavoured to discover the mental conflict in that scene and to release the suppressed affect in it. In the course of this we discovered the mental process, characteristic of the neuroses, which I later named ‘regression’. The patient’s associations moved back from the scene which we were trying to elucidate to earlier experiences, and compelled the analysis, which was supposed to correct the present, to occupy itself with the past. This regression led constantly further backwards; at first it seemed regularly to bring us to puberty; later on, failures and points which still eluded explanation drew the analytic work still further back into years of childhood which had hitherto been inaccessible to any kind of exploration. This regressive direction became an important characteristic of analysis. It appeared that psycho-analysis could explain nothing belonging to the present without referring back to something past; indeed, that every pathogenic experience implied a previous experience which, though not in itself pathogenic, had yet endowed the later one with its pathogenic quality. The temptation to confine one’s attention to the known present exciting cause was so strong, however, that even in later analyses I gave way to it. In the analysis of the patient I named ‘Dora’, carried out in 1899, I had knowledge of the scene which occasioned the outbreak of the current illness. I tried innumerable times to submit this experience to analysis, but even direct demands always failed to produce from her anything more than the same meagre and incomplete description of it. Not until a long détour, leading back over her earliest childhood, had been made, did a dream present itself which on analysis brought to her mind the hitherto forgotten details of this scene, so that a comprehension and a solution of the current conflict became possible.

This one example shows how very misleading is the advice referred to above, and what a degree of scientific regression is represented by the neglect of regression in analytic technique which is thus recommended to us.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2881

The first difference between Breuer and myself came to light on a question concerning the finer psychical mechanism of hysteria. He gave preference to a theory which was still to some extent physiological, as one might say; he tried to explain the mental splitting in hysterical patients by the absence of communication between various mental states (‘states of consciousness’, as we called them at that time), and he therefore constructed the theory of ‘hypnoid states’, the products of which were supposed to penetrate into ‘waking consciousness’ like unassimilated foreign bodies. I had taken the matter less scientifically; everywhere I seemed to discern motives and tendencies analogous to those of everyday life, and I looked upon psychical splitting itself as an effect of a process of repelling which at that time I called ‘defence’, and later, ‘repression’. I made a short-lived attempt to allow the two mechanisms a separate existence side by side, but as observation showed me always and only one thing, it was not long before my ‘defence’ theory took up its stand opposite his ‘hypnoid’ one.

I am quite sure, however, that this opposition between our views had nothing to do with the breach in our relations which followed shortly after. This had deeper causes, but it came about in such a way that at first I did not understand it; it was only later that I learnt from many clear indications how to interpret it. It will be remembered that Breuer said of his famous first patient that the element of sexuality was astonishingly undeveloped in her and had contributed nothing to the very rich clinical picture of the case. I have always wondered why the critics did not more often cite this assertion of Breuer’s as an argument against my contention of a sexual aetiology in the neuroses, and even to-day I do not know whether I ought to regard the omission as evidence of tact or of carelessness on their part. Anyone who reads the history of Breuer’s case now in the light of the knowledge gained in the last twenty years will at once perceive the symbolism in it - the snakes, the stiffening, the paralysis of the arm - and, on taking into account the situation at the bedside of the young woman’s sick father, will easily guess the real interpretation of her symptoms; his opinion of the part played by sexuality in her mental life will therefore be very different from that of her doctor. In his treatment of her case, Breuer was able to make use of a very intense suggestive rapport with the patient, which may serve us as a complete prototype of what we call ‘transference’ to-day. Now I have strong reasons for suspecting that after all her symptoms had been relieved Breuer must have discovered from further indications the sexual motivation of this transference, but that the universal nature of this unexpected phenomenon escaped him, with the result that, as though confronted by an ‘untoward event’,¹ he broke off all further investigation. He never said this to me in so many words, but he told me enough at different times to justify this reconstruction of what happened. When I later began more and more resolutely to put forward the significance of sexuality in the aetiology of neuroses, he was the first to show the reaction of distaste and repudiation which was later to become so familiar to me, but which at that time I had not yet learnt to recognize as my inevitable fate.

The fact of the emergence of the transference in its crudely sexual form, whether affectionate or hostile, in every treatment of a neurosis, although this is neither desired nor induced by either doctor or patient, has always seemed to me the most irrefragable proof that the source of the driving forces of neurosis lies in sexual life. This argument has never received anything approaching the degree of attention that it merits, for if it had, investigations in this field would leave no other conclusion open. As far as I am concerned, this argument has remained the decisive one, over and above the more specific findings of analytic work.

¹ [In English in the original.]

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2882

There was some consolation for the bad reception accorded to my contention of a sexual aetiology in the neuroses even by my more intimate circle of friends - for a vacuum rapidly formed itself about my person - in the thought that I was taking up the fight for a new and original idea. But, one day, certain memories gathered in my mind which disturbed this pleasing notion, but which gave me in exchange a valuable insight into the processes of human creative activity and the nature of human knowledge. The idea for which I was being made responsible had by no means originated with me. It had been imparted to me by three people whose opinion had commanded my deepest respect - by Breuer himself, by Charcot, and by Chrobak, the gynaecologist at the University, perhaps the most eminent of all our Vienna physicians. These three men had all communicated to me a piece of knowledge which, strictly speaking, they themselves did not possess. Two of them later denied having done so when I reminded them of the fact; the third (the great Charcot) would probably have done the same if it had been granted me to see him again. But these three identical opinions, which I had heard without understanding, had lain dormant in my mind for years, until one day they awoke in the form of an apparently original discovery.

One day, when I was a young house-physician, I was walking across the town with Breuer, when a man came up who evidently wanted to speak to him urgently. I fell behind. As soon as Breuer was free, he told me in his friendly, instructive way that this man was the husband of a patient of his and had brought him some news of her. The wife, he added, was behaving in such a peculiar way in society that she had been brought to him for treatment as a nervous case. He concluded: ‘These things are always secrets d’alcôve!’ I asked him in astonishment what he meant, and he answered by explaining the word alcôve (‘marriage-bed’) to me, for he failed to realize how extraordinary the matter of his statement seemed to me.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2883

Some years later, at one of Charcot’s evening receptions, I happened to be standing near the great teacher at a moment when he appeared to be telling Brouardel a very interesting story about something that had happened during his day’s work. I hardly heard the beginning, but gradually my attention was seized by what he was talking of: a young married couple from a distant country in the East - the woman a severe sufferer, the man either impotent or exceedingly awkward. ‘Tâchez donc,’ I heard Charcot repeating, ‘je vous assure, vous y arriverez.’¹ Brouardel, who spoke less loudly, must have expressed his astonishment that symptoms like the wife’s could have been produced by such circumstances. For Charcot suddenly broke out with great animation: ‘Mais, dans des cas pareils c’est toujours la chose génitale, toujours . . . toujours . . . toujours’;² and he crossed his arms over his stomach, hugging himself and jumping up and down on his toes several times in his own characteristically lively way. I know that for a moment I was almost paralysed with amazement and said to myself: ‘Well, but if he knows that, why does he never say so?’ But the impression was soon forgotten; brain anatomy and the experimental induction of hysterical paralyses absorbed all my interest.

A year later, I had begun my medical career in Vienna as a lecturer in nervous diseases, and in everything relating to the aetiology of the neuroses I was still as ignorant and innocent as one could expect of a promising student trained at a university. One day I had a friendly message from Chrobak, asking me to take a woman patient of his to whom he could not give enough time, owing to his new appointment as a University teacher. I arrived at the patient’s house before he did and found that she was suffering from attacks of meaningless anxiety, and could only be soothed by the most precise information about where her doctor was at every moment of the day. When Chrobak arrived he took me aside and told me that the patient’s anxiety was due to the fact that although she had been married for eighteen years she was still virgo intacta. The husband was absolutely impotent. In such cases, he said, there was nothing for a medical man to do but to shield this domestic misfortune with his own reputation, and put up with it if people shrugged their shoulders and said of him: ‘He’s no good if he can’t cure her after so many years.’ The sole prescription for such a malady, he added, is familiar enough to us, but we cannot order it. It runs:

‘Rx         Penis normalis

dosim

repetatur!’

I had never heard of such a prescription, and felt inclined to shake my head over my kind friend’s cynicism.

¹ [‘Go on trying! I promise you, you’ll succeed.’]

² [‘But in this sort of case it’s always a question of the genitals - always, always, always.’]

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2884

I have not of course disclosed the illustrious parentage of this scandalous idea in order to saddle other people with the responsibility for it. I am well aware that it is one thing to give utterance to an idea once or twice in the form of a passing aperçu, and quite another to mean it seriously - to take it literally and pursue it in the face of every contradictory detail, and to win it a place among accepted truths. It is the difference between a casual flirtation and a legal marriage with all its duties and difficulties. ‘Épouser les idées de . . .’¹ is no uncommon figure of speech, at any rate in French.

Among the other new factors which were added to the cathartic procedure as a result of my work and which transformed it into psycho-analysis, I may mention in particular the theory of repression and resistance, the recognition of infantile sexuality, and the interpreting and exploiting of dreams as a source of knowledge of the unconscious.

The theory of repression quite certainly came to me independently of any other source; I know of no outside impression which might have suggested it to me, and for a long time I imagined it to be entirely original, until Otto Rank (1911a) showed us a passage in Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Idea in which the philosopher seeks to give an explanation of insanity. What he says there about the struggle against accepting a distressing piece of reality coincides with my concept of repression so completely that once again I owe the chance of making a discovery to my not being well-read. Yet others have read the passage and passed it by without making this discovery, and perhaps the same would have happened to me if in my young days I had had more taste for reading philosophical works. In later years I have denied myself the very great pleasure of reading the works of Nietzsche, with the deliberate object of not being hampered in working out the impressions received in psycho-analysis by any sort of anticipatory ideas. I had therefore to be prepared - and I am so, gladly - to forgo all claims to priority in the many instances in which laborious psycho-analytic investigation can merely confirm the truths which the philosopher recognized by intuition.

¹ [‘To espouse an idea.’]

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2885

The theory of repression is the corner-stone on which the whole structure of psycho-analysis rests. It is the most essential part of it; and yet it is nothing but a theoretical formulation of a phenomenon which may be observed as often as one pleases if one undertakes an analysis of a neurotic without resorting to hypnosis. In such cases one comes across a resistance which opposes the work of analysis and in order to frustrate it pleads a failure of memory. The use of hypnosis was bound to hide this resistance; the history of psycho-analysis proper, therefore, only begins with the new technique that dispenses with hypnosis. The theoretical consideration of the fact that this resistance coincides with an amnesia leads inevitably to the view of unconscious mental activity which is peculiar to psycho-analysis and which, too, distinguishes it quite clearly from philosophical speculations about the unconscious. It may thus be said that the theory of psycho-analysis is an attempt to account for two striking and unexpected facts of observation which emerge whenever an attempt is made to trace the symptoms of a neurotic back to their sources in his past life: the facts of transference and of resistance. Any line of investigation which recognizes these two facts and takes them as the starting-point of its work has a right to call itself psycho-analysis, even though it arrives at results other than my own. But anyone who takes up other sides of the problem while avoiding these two hypotheses will hardly escape a charge of misappropriation of property by attempted impersonation, if he persists in calling himself a psycho-analyst.

If anyone sought to place the theory of repression and resistance among the premisses instead of the findings of psycho-analysis, I should oppose him most emphatically. Such premisses of a general psychological and biological nature do exist, and it would be useful to consider them on some other occasion; but the theory of repression is a product of psycho-analytic work, a theoretical inference legitimately drawn from innumerable observations.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2886

Another product of this sort was the hypothesis of infantile sexuality. This, however, was made at a much later date. In the early days of tentative investigation by analysis no such thing was thought of. At first it was merely observed that the effects of present-day experiences had to be traced back to something in the past. But enquirers often find more than they bargain for. One was drawn further and further back into the past; one hoped at last to be able to stop at puberty, the period in which the sexual impulses are traditionally supposed to awake. But in vain; the tracks led still further back into childhood and into its earlier years. On the way, a mistaken idea had to be overcome which might have been almost fatal to the young science. Influenced by Charcot’s view of the traumatic origin of hysteria, one was readily inclined to accept as true and aetiologically significant the statements made by patients in which they ascribed their symptoms to passive sexual experiences in the first years of childhood - to put it bluntly, to seduction. When this aetiology broke down under the weight of its own improbability and contradiction in definitely ascertainable circumstances, the result at first was helpless bewilderment. Analysis had led back to these infantile sexual traumas by the right path, and yet they were not true. The firm ground of reality was gone. At that time I would gladly have given up the whole work, just as my esteemed predecessor, Breuer, had done when he made his unwelcome discovery. Perhaps I persevered only because I no longer had any choice and could not then begin again at anything else. At last came the reflection that, after all, one had no right to despair because one has been deceived in one’s expectations; one must revise those expectations. If hysterical subjects trace back their symptoms to traumas that are fictitious, then the new fact which emerges is precisely that they create such scenes in phantasy, and this psychical reality requires to be taken into account alongside practical reality. This reflection was soon followed by the discovery that these phantasies were intended to cover up the auto-erotic activity of the first years of childhood, to embellish it and raise it to a higher plane. And now, from behind the phantasies, the whole range of a child’s sexual life came to light.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2887

With this sexual activity of the first years of childhood the inherited constitution of the individual also came into its own. Disposition and experience are here linked up in an indissoluble aetiological unity. For disposition exaggerates impressions which would otherwise have been completely commonplace and have had no effect, so that they become traumas giving rise to stimulations and fixations; while experiences awaken factors in the disposition which, without them, might have long remained dormant and perhaps never have developed. The last word on the subject of traumatic aetiology was spoken later by Abraham, when he pointed out that the sexual constitution which is peculiar to children is precisely calculated to provoke sexual experiences of a particular kind - namely traumas.

In the beginning, my statements about infantile sexuality were founded almost exclusively on the findings of analysis in adults which led back into the past. I had no opportunity of direct observations on children. It was therefore a very great triumph when it became possible years later to confirm almost all my inferences by direct observation and the analysis of very young children - a triumph that lost some of its magnitude as one gradually realized that the nature of the discovery was such that one should really be ashamed of having had to make it. The further one carried these observations on children, the more self-evident the facts became; but the more astonishing, too, did it become that one had taken so much trouble to overlook them.

Such a certain conviction of the existence and importance of infantile sexuality can, however, only be obtained by the method of analysis, by pursuing the symptoms and peculiarities of neurotics back to their ultimate sources, the discovery of which then explains whatever is explicable in them and enables whatever is modifiable to be changed. I can understand that one would arrive at different results if, as C. G. Jung has recently done, one first forms a theoretical conception of the nature of the sexual instinct and then seeks to explain the life of children on that basis. A conception of this kind is bound to be selected arbitrarily or in accordance with irrelevant considerations, and runs the risk of proving inadequate for the field to which one is seeking to apply it. It is true that the analytic method, too, leads to certain ultimate difficulties and obscurities in regard to sexuality and its relation to the total life of the individual. But these problems cannot be got rid of by speculation; they must await solution through other observations or through observations in other fields.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2888

I need say little about the interpretation of dreams. It came as the first fruits of the technical innovation I had adopted when, following a dim presentiment, I decided to replace hypnosis by free association. My desire for knowledge had not at the start been directed towards understanding dreams. I do not know of any outside influence which drew my interest to them or inspired me with any helpful expectations. Before Breuer and I ceased to meet I only just had time to tell him in a single sentence that I now understood how to translate dreams. Since this was how the discovery came about, it followed that the symbolism in the language of dreams was almost the last thing to become accessible to me, for the dreamer’s associations help very little towards understanding symbols. I have held fast to the habit of always studying things themselves before looking for information about them in books, and therefore I was able to establish the symbolism of dreams for myself before I was led to it by Scherner’s work on the subject. It was only later that I came to appreciate to its full extent this mode of expression of dreams. This was partly through the influence of the works of Stekel, who at first did such very creditable work but afterwards went totally astray. The close connection between psycho-analytic dream-interpretation and the art of interpreting dreams as practised and held in such high esteem in antiquity only became clear to me much later. Later on I found the essential characteristic and most important part of my dream theory - the derivation of dream-distortion from an internal conflict, a kind of inner dishonesty - in a writer who was ignorant, it is true, of medicine, though not of philosophy, the famous engineer J. Popper, who published his Phantasien eines Realisten under the name of Lynkeus.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2889

The interpretation of dreams became a solace and a support to me in those arduous first years of analysis, when I had to master the technique, clinical phenomena and therapy of the neuroses all at the same time. At that period I was completely isolated and in the network of problems and accumulation of difficulties I often dreaded losing my bearings and also my confidence. There were often patients with whom an unaccountably long time elapsed before my hypothesis, that a neurosis was bound to become intelligible through analysis, proved true; but these patients’ dreams, which might be regarded as analogues of their symptoms, almost always confirmed the hypothesis.

It was only my success in this direction that enabled me to persevere. The result is that I have acquired a habit of gauging the measure of a psychologist’s understanding by his attitude to dream-interpretation; and I have observed with satisfaction that most of the opponents of psycho-analysis avoid this field altogether or else display remarkable clumsiness if they attempt to deal with it. Moreover, I soon saw the necessity of carrying out a self-analysis, and this I did with the help of a series of my own dreams which led me back through all the events of my childhood; and I am still of the opinion to-day that this kind of analysis may suffice for anyone who is a good dreamer and not too abnormal.

I think that by thus unrolling the story of the development of psycho-analysis I have shown what it is, better than by a systematic description of it. I did not at first perceive the peculiar nature of what I had discovered. I unhesitatingly sacrificed my growing popularity as a doctor, and the increase in attendance during my consulting hours, by making a systematic enquiry into the sexual factors involved in the causation of my patients’ neuroses; and this brought me a great many new facts which finally confirmed my conviction of the practical importance of the sexual factor. I innocently addressed a meeting of the Vienna Society for Psychiatry and Neurology with Krafft-Ebing in the chair, expecting that the material losses I had willingly undergone would be made up for by the interest and recognition of my colleagues. I treated my discoveries as ordinary contributions to science and hoped they would be received in the same spirit. But the silence which my communications met with, the void which formed itself about me, the hints that were conveyed to me, gradually made me realize that assertions on the part played by sexuality in the aetiology of the neuroses cannot count upon meeting with the same kind of treatment as other communications. I understood that from now onwards I was one of those who have ‘disturbed the sleep of the world’, as Hebbel says, and that I could not reckon upon objectivity and tolerance. Since, however, my conviction of the general accuracy of my observations and conclusions grew even stronger, and since neither my confidence in my own judgement nor my moral courage were precisely small, the outcome of the situation could not be in doubt. I made up my mind to believe that it had been my fortune to discover some particularly important facts and connections, and I was prepared to accept the fate that sometimes accompanies such discoveries.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2890

I pictured the future as follows: - I should probably succeed in maintaining myself by means of the therapeutic success of the new procedure, but science would ignore me entirely during my lifetime; some decades later, someone else would infallibly come upon the same things - for which the time was not now ripe - would achieve recognition for them and bring me honour as a forerunner whose failure had been inevitable. Meanwhile, like Robinson Crusoe, I settled down as comfortably as possible on my desert island. When I look back to those lonely years, away from the pressures and confusions of to-day, it seems like a glorious heroic age. My ‘splendid isolation’¹ was not without its advantages and charms. I did not have to read any publications, nor listen to any ill-informed opponents; I was not subject to influence from any quarter; there was nothing to hustle me. I learnt to restrain speculative tendencies and to follow the unforgotten advice of my master, Charcot: to look at the same things again and again until they themselves begin to speak. My publications, which I was able to place with a little trouble, could always lag far behind my knowledge, and could be postponed as long as I pleased, since there was no doubtful ‘priority’ to be defended. The Interpretation of Dreams, for instance, was finished in all essentials at the beginning of 1896 but was not written out until the summer of 1899. The analysis of ‘Dora’ was over at the end of 1899; the case history was written in the next two weeks, but was not published until 1905. Meanwhile my writings were not reviewed in the medical journals, or, if as an exception they were reviewed, they were dismissed with expressions of scornful or pitying superiority. Occasionally a colleague would make some reference to me in one of his publications; it would be very short and not at all flattering - words such as ‘eccentric’, ‘extreme’, or ‘very peculiar’ would be used. It once happened that an assistant at the clinic in Vienna where I gave my University lectures asked me for permission to attend the course. He listened very attentively and said nothing; after the last lecture was over he offered to join me outside. As we walked away, he told me that with his chief’s knowledge he had written a book combating my views; he regretted very much, however, that he had not first learnt more about them from my lectures, for in that case he would have written much of it differently. He had indeed enquired at the clinic whether he had not better first read The Interpretation of Dreams, but had been advised against doing so - it was not worth the trouble. He then himself compared the structure of my theory, so far as he now understood it, with that of the Catholic Church as regards its internal solidity. In the interests of the salvation of his soul, I shall assume that this remark implied a certain amount of appreciation. But he concluded by saying that it was too late to alter anything in his book, since it was already in print. Nor did my colleague think it necessary later to make any public avowal of his change of views on the subject of psycho-analysis; but preferred, in his capacity as a regular reviewer for a medical journal, to follow its development with flippant comments.

¹ [In English in the original.]

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2891

Whatever personal sensitiveness I possessed became blunted during those years, to my advantage. I was saved from becoming embittered, however, by a circumstance which is not always present to help lonely discoverers. Such people are as a rule tormented by the need to account for the lack of sympathy or the aversion of their contemporaries, and feel this attitude as a distressing contradiction of the security of their own sense of conviction. There was no need for me to feel so; for psycho-analytic theory enabled me to understand this attitude in my contemporaries and to see it as a necessary consequence of fundamental analytic premisses. If it was true that the set of facts I had discovered were kept from the knowledge of patients themselves by internal resistances of an affective kind, then these resistances would be bound to appear in healthy people too, as soon as some external source confronted them with what was repressed. It was not surprising that they should be able to justify this rejection of my ideas on intellectual grounds though it was actually affective in origin. The same thing happened equally often with patients; the arguments they advanced were the same and were not precisely brilliant. In Falstaff’s words, reasons are ‘as plenty as blackberries’. The only difference was that with patients one was in a position to bring pressure to bear on them so as to induce them to get insight into their resistances and overcome them, whereas one had to do without this advantage in dealing with people who were ostensibly healthy. How to compel these healthy people to examine the matter in a cool and scientifically objective spirit was an unsolved problem which was best left to time to clear up. In the history of science one can clearly see that often the very proposition which has at first called out nothing but contradiction has later come to be accepted, although no new proofs in support of it have been brought forward.

It was hardly to be expected, however, that during the years when I alone represented psycho-analysis I should develop any particular respect for the world’s opinion or any bias towards intellectual appeasement.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2892

II

From the year 1902 onwards, a number of young doctors gathered round me with the express intention of learning, practising and spreading the knowledge of psycho-analysis. The stimulus came from a colleague who had himself experienced the beneficial effects of analytic therapy. Regular meetings took place on certain evenings at my house, discussions were held according to certain rules and the participants endeavoured to find their bearings in this new and strange field of research and to interest others in it. One day a young man who had passed through a technical training college introduced himself with a manuscript which showed very unusual comprehension. We persuaded him to go through the Gymnasium [Secondary School] and the University and to devote himself to the non-medical side of psycho-analysis. The little society acquired in him a zealous and dependable secretary and I gained in Otto Rank a most loyal helper and co-worker.¹

The small circle soon expanded, and in the course of the next few years often changed its composition. On the whole I could tell myself that it was hardly inferior, in wealth and variety of talent, to the staff of any clinical teacher one could think of. It included from the beginning the men who were later to play such a considerable, if not always a welcome, part in the history of the psycho-analytic movement. At that time, however, one could not yet guess at these developments. I had every reason to be satisfied, and I think I did everything possible to impart my own knowledge and experience to the others. There were only two inauspicious circumstances which at last estranged me inwardly from the group. I could not succeed in establishing among its members the friendly relations that ought to obtain between men who are all engaged upon the same difficult work; nor was I able to stifle the disputes about priority for which there were so many opportunities under these conditions of work in common. The difficulties in the way of giving instruction in the practice of psycho-analysis, which are quite particularly great and are responsible for much in the present dissensions, were evident already in this private Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society. I myself did not venture to put forward a still unfinished technique and a theory still in the making with an authority which would probably have enabled the others to avoid some wrong turnings and ultimate disasters. The self-reliance of intellectual workers, their early independence of their teacher, is always gratifying from a psychological point of view; but it is only of advantage to science if those workers fulfil certain personal conditions which are none too common. For psycho-analysis in particular a long and severe discipline and training in self-discipline would have been required. In view of the courage displayed by their devotion to a subject so much frowned upon and so poor in prospects, I was disposed to tolerate much among the members to which I should otherwise have made objection. Besides doctors, the circle included others - men of education who had recognized something important in psycho-analysis: writers, painters and so on. My Interpretation of Dreams and my book on jokes, among others, had shown from the beginning that the theories of psycho-analysis cannot be restricted to the medical field, but are capable of application to a variety of other mental sciences.

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] Now director of the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag [International Psycho-Analytical Publishing House] and editor of the Zeitschrift and Imago from their inception.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2893

In 1907 the situation changed all at once and contrary to all expectations. It appeared that psycho-analysis had unobtrusively awakened interest and gained friends, and that there were even some scientific workers who were ready to acknowledge it. A communication from Bleuler had informed me before this that my works had been studied and made use of in the Burghölzli. In January 1907, the first member of the Zurich clinic came to Vienna - Dr. Eitingon.¹ Other visits followed, which led to an animated exchange of ideas. Finally, on the invitation of C. G. Jung, at that time still assistant physician at the Burghölzli, a first meeting took place at Salzburg in the spring of 1908, which brought together friends of psycho-analysis from Vienna, Zurich and other places. One of the results of this first Psycho-Analytical Congress was the founding of a periodical called the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen, under the direction of Bleuler and Freud and edited by Jung, which first appeared in 1909. This publication gave expression to an intimate co-operation between Vienna and Zurich.

I have repeatedly acknowledged with gratitude the great services rendered by the Zurich School of Psychiatry in the spread of psycho-analysis, particularly by Bleuler and Jung, and I have no hesitation in doing so again, even in the greatly altered circumstances of the present. True, it was not the support of the Zurich School which first directed the attention of the scientific world to psycho-analysis at that time. What had happened was that the latency period had expired and everywhere psycho-analysis was becoming the object of ever-increasing interest. But in all other places this accession of interest at first produced nothing but a very emphatic repudiation, mostly a quite passionate one; whereas in Zurich, on the contrary, agreement on general lines was the dominant note. Moreover, nowhere else did such a compact little group of adherents exist, or could a public clinic be placed at the service of psycho-analytic researches, or was there a clinical teacher who included psycho-analytic theories as an integral part of his psychiatric course. The Zurich group thus became the nucleus of the small band who were fighting for the recognition of analysis. The only opportunity of learning the new art and working at it in practice lay there. Most of my followers and co-workers at the present time came to me by way of Zurich, even those who were geographically much nearer to Vienna than to Switzerland. In relation to Western Europe, which contains the great centres of our culture, the position of Vienna is an outlying one; and its prestige has for many years been affected by strong prejudices. Representatives of all the most important nations congregate in Switzerland, where intellectual activity is so lively; a focus of infection there was bound to be of great importance for the spread of the ‘psychical epidemic’, as Hoche of Freiburg has called it.

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] The subsequent founder of the ‘Psycho-Analytic Policlinic’ in Berlin.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2894

According to the evidence of a colleague who witnessed developments at the Burghölzli, it appears that psycho-analysis awakened interest there very early. In Jung’s work on occult phenomena, published in 1902, there was already an allusion to my book on dream-interpretation. From 1903 or 1904, says my informant, psycho-analysis was in the forefront of interest. After personal relations between Vienna and Zurich had been established, an informal society was also started, in the middle of 1907, in the Burghölzli, where the problems of psycho-analysis were discussed at regular meetings. In the alliance between the Vienna and Zurich schools the Swiss were by no means mere recipients. They had already produced very creditable scientific work, the results of which were of service to psycho-analysis. The association experiments started by the Wundt School had been interpreted by them in a psycho-analytic sense, and had proved applicable in unexpected ways. By this means it had become possible to arrive at rapid experimental confirmation of psycho-analytic observations and to demonstrate directly to students certain connections which an analyst would only have been able to tell them about. The first bridge linking up experimental psychology with psycho-analysis had been built.

In psycho-analytic treatment, association experiments enable a provisional, qualitative analysis of the case to be made, but they furnish no essential contribution to the technique and can be dispensed with in carrying out analyses. More important, however, was another achievement by the Zurich school, or its leaders, Bleuler and Jung. The former showed that light could be thrown on a large number of purely psychiatric cases by adducing the same processes as have been recognized through psycho-analysis to obtain in dreams and neuroses (Freudian mechanisms); and Jung successfully applied the analytic method of interpretation to the most alien and obscure phenomena of dementia praecox, so that their sources in the life-history and interests of the patient came clearly to light. After this it was impossible for psychiatrists to ignore psycho-analysis any longer. Bleuler’s great work on schizophrenia (1911), in which the psycho-analytic point of view was placed on an equal footing with the clinical systematic one, completed this success.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2895

I will not omit to point out a divergence which was already at that time noticeable in the direction taken by the work of the two schools. As early as in 1897 I had published the analysis of a case of schizophrenia, which however was of a paranoid character, so that the solution of it could not take away from the impression made by Jung’s analyses. But to me the important point had been, not so much the possibility of interpreting the symptoms, as the psychical mechanism of the disease, and above all the agreement of this mechanism with that of hysteria, which had already been discovered. At that time no light had yet been thrown on the differences between the two mechanisms. For I was then already aiming at a libido theory of the neuroses, which was to explain all neurotic and psychotic phenomena as proceeding from abnormal vicissitudes of the libido, that is, as diversions from its normal employment. This point of view was missed by the Swiss investigators. As far as I know, even to-day Bleuler maintains the view that the various forms of dementia praecox have an organic causation; and at the Salzburg Congress in 1908 Jung, whose book on this disease had appeared in 1907, supported the toxic theory of its causation, which takes no account of the libido theory, although it is true that it does not rule it out. Later on (1912) he came to grief on this same point, by making too much of the material which he had previously refused to employ.

There is a third contribution made by the Swiss School, probably to be ascribed entirely to Jung, which I do not value so highly as others do whose concern with these matters is more remote. I refer to the theory of ‘complexes’ which grew out of the Diagnostische Assoziationsstudien [Studies in Word-Association] (1906). It has neither itself produced a psychological theory, not has it proved capable of easy incorporation into the context of psycho-analytic theory. The word ‘complex’, on the other hand, had become naturalized, so to speak, in psycho-analytic language; it is a convenient and often indispensable term for summing up a psychological state descriptively. None of the other terms coined by psycho-analysis for its own needs has achieved such widespread popularity or been so misapplied to the detriment of the construction of clearer concepts. Analysts began to speak among themselves of a ‘return of a complex’ where they meant a ‘return of the repressed’, or fell into the habit of saying ‘I have a complex against him’, where the only correct expression would have been ‘a resistance against him’.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2896

In the years following 1907, when the schools of Vienna and Zurich were united, psycho-analysis made the extraordinary surge forward of which the momentum is felt even to-day; this is shown both by the spread of psycho-analytic literature and by the constant increase in the number of doctors who are practising or studying it, as well as by the frequency of the attacks made on it at Congresses and in learned societies. It has penetrated into the most distant lands and has everywhere not merely startled psychiatrists but commanded the attention of the educated public and of scientific workers in other fields. Havelock Ellis, who has followed its development with sympathy though without ever calling himself an adherent, wrote in 1911 in a report for the Australasian Medical Congress: ‘Freud’s psycho-analysis is now championed and carried out not only in Austria and in Switzerland, but in the United States, in England, in India, in Canada, and, I doubt not, in Australasia.’¹ A physician from Chile (probably a German) spoke at the International Congress at Buenos Aires in 1910 in support of the existence of infantile sexuality and commended highly the effects of psycho-analytic therapy on obsessional symptoms.² An English neurologist in Central India (Berkeley-Hill) informed me, through a distinguished colleague who was visiting Europe, that the analyses of Mohammedan Indians which he had carried out showed that the aetiology of their neuroses was no different from what we find in our European patients.

¹ Havelock Ellis, 1911.

² G. Greve, 1910.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2897

The introduction of psycho-analysis into North America was accompanied by very special marks of honour. In the autumn of 1909, Stanley Hall, the President of Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, invited Jung and myself to take part in the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the foundation of the University by giving a number of lectures in German. To our great surprise, we found the members of that small but highly esteemed University for the study of education and philosophy so unprejudiced that they were acquainted with all the literature of psycho-analysis and had given it a place in their lectures to students. In prudish America it was possible, in academic circles at least, to discuss freely and scientifically everything that in ordinary life is regarded as objectionable. The five lectures which I improvised in Worcester appeared in an English translation in the American Journal of Psychology, and were shortly afterwards published in German under the title Über Psychoanalyse. Jung read a paper on diagnostic association experiments and another on conflicts in the mind of the child. We were rewarded with the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. During that week of celebrations at Worcester, psycho-analysis was represented by five men: besides Jung and myself, there were Ferenczi, who had joined me for the journey, Ernest Jones, then at the University of Toronto (Canada) and now in London, and A. A. Brill, who was already practising psycho-analysis in New York.

The most important personal relationship which arose from the meeting at Worcester was that with James J. Putnam, Professor of Neuropathology at Harvard University. Some years before, he had expressed an unfavourable opinion of psycho-analysis, but now he rapidly became reconciled to it and recommended it to his countrymen and his colleagues in a series of lectures which were as rich in content as they were brilliant in form. The esteem he enjoyed throughout America on account of his high moral character and unflinching love of truth was of great service to psycho-analysis and protected it against the denunciations which in all probability would otherwise quickly have overwhelmed it. Later on, yielding too much to the strong ethical and philosophical bent of his nature, Putnam made what seems to me an impossible demand - he expected psycho-analysis to place itself at the service of a particular moral-philosophical conception of the Universe - but he remains the chief pillar of the psycho-analytic movement in his native land.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] See Putnam’s Addresses on Psycho-Analysis, 1921. Putnam died in 1918.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2898

For the further spread of this movement Brill and Jones deserve the greatest credit: in their writings they drew their countrymen’s attention with unremitting assiduity to the easily observable fundamental facts of everyday life, of dreams and neurosis. Brill has contributed still further to this effect by his medical practice and by his translations of my works, and Jones by his instructive lectures and by his skill in debate at congresses in America.¹ The absence of any deep-rooted scientific tradition in America and the much less stringent rule of official authority there have been of decided advantage to the impetus given by Stanley Hall. It was characteristic of that country that from the beginning professors and superintendents of mental hospitals showed as much interest in analysis as independent practitioners. But it is clear that precisely for this reason the ancient centres of culture, where the greatest resistance has been displayed, must be the scene of the decisive struggle over psycho-analysis.

Among European countries France has hitherto shown itself the least disposed to welcome psycho-analysis, although useful work in French by A. Maeder of Zurich has provided easy access to its theories. The first indications of sympathy came from the provinces: Morichau-Beauchant (Poitiers) was the first Frenchman to adhere publicly to psycho-analysis. Régis and Hesnard (Bordeaux) have recently attempted to disperse the prejudices of their countrymen against the new ideas by an exhaustive presentation, which, however, is not always understanding and takes special exception to symbolism. In Paris itself, a conviction still seems to reign (to which Janet himself gave eloquent expression at the Congress in London in 1913) that everything good in psycho-analysis is a repetition of Janet’s views with insignificant modifications, and that everything else in it is bad. At this Congress itself, indeed, Janet had to submit to a number of corrections by Ernest Jones, who was able to point out to him his insufficient knowledge of the subject. Even though we deny his claims, however, we cannot forget the value of his work on the psychology of the neuroses.

¹ The publications of both authors have appeared in collected volumes: Brill, 1912, and Ernest Jones, 1913.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2899

In Italy, after several promising starts, no real interest was forthcoming. To Holland analysis found early access through personal connections: Van Emden, Van Ophuijsen, Van Renterghem (Freud en zijn School) and the two Stärckes are actively occupied with it both in practice and theory.¹ In scientific circles in England interest in analysis has developed very slowly, but there is reason to expect that the sense for the practical and the passionate love of justice in the English will ensure it a brilliant future there.

In Sweden, P. Bjerre, who succeeded to Wetterstrand’s practice, gave up hypnotic suggestion, at least for the time, in favour of analytic treatment. R. Vogt (Christiania) had already shown an appreciation of psycho-analysis in his Psykiatriens grundtraek, published in 1907; so that the first text-book of psychiatry to refer to psycho-analysis was written in Norwegian. In Russia, psycho-analysis has become generally known and has spread widely; almost all my writings, as well as those of other adherents of analysis, have been translated into Russian. But a really penetrating comprehension of analytic theories has not yet been evinced in Russia; so that the contributions of Russian physicians are at present not very notable. The only trained analyst there is M. Wulff who practises in Odessa. It is principally due to L. Jekels that psycho-analysis has been introduced to Polish scientific and literary circles. Hungary, so near geographically to Austria, and so far from it scientifically, has produced only one collaborator, S. Ferenczi, but one that indeed outweighs a whole society.²

¹ The first official recognition of dream-interpretation and psycho-analysis in Europe was extended to them by the psychiatrist Jelgersma, Rector of the University of Leyden, in his rectorial address on February 9, 1914.

² (Footnote added 1923:) It is not my intention, of course, to bring this account, written in 1914, ‘up to date’ [in English in the original]. I will only add a few remarks to indicate how the picture has altered in the interval, which includes the World War. In Germany a gradual infiltration of analytic theories into clinical psychiatry is taking place, though this is not always admitted. The French translations of my works that have been appearing during the last few years have finally aroused a keen interest in psycho-analysis even in France, though for the moment this is more active in literary circles than in scientific ones. In Italy M. Levi Bianchini (of Nocera Superiore) and Edoardo Weiss (of Trieste) have come forward as translators and champions of psycho-analysis (cf. the Biblioteca Psicoanalitica Italiana). A collected edition of my works which is appearing in Madrid (translated by Lopez Ballesteros) is evidence of the lively interest taken in it in Spanish-speaking countries (Prof. H. Delgado in Lima). As regards England, the prophecy which I have made above seems to be in steady course of fulfilment; a special centre for the study of analysis has been formed at Calcutta in British India. In North America it is still true that the depth of understanding of analysis does not keep pace with its popularity. In Russia, since the Revolution, psycho-analytic work has begun afresh at several centres. In Poland the Polska Bibljoteka Psychoanalytyczna is now appearing. In Hungary a brilliant analytic school is flourishing under the leadership of Ferenczi. (Cf. the Festschrift issued in honour of his fiftieth birthday.) At the present time the Scandinavian countries are still the least receptive.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2900

As regards the position of psycho-analysis in Germany, it can only be said that it forms the centre-point of scientific discussions and provokes the most emphatic expressions of disagreement both among doctors and laymen; these are not yet at an end, but are constantly flaring up again, sometimes with greater intensity. No official educational bodies there have up to now recognized psycho-analysis. Successful practitioners who employ it are few; only a few institutions, such as Binswanger’s in Kreuzlingen (on Swiss soil) and Marcinowski’s in Holstein, have opened their doors to it. One of the most prominent representatives of analysis, Karl Abraham, at one time an assistant of Bleuler’s, maintains himself in the critical atmosphere of Berlin. One might wonder that this state of things should have continued unaltered for several years if one did not know that the account I have given only represents external appearances. Too much significance should not be attributed to rejection by the official representatives of science and heads of institutions, and by the followers dependent on them. It is natural that its opponents should give loud expression to their views, while its intimidated adherents keep silence. Some of the latter, whose first contributions to analysis raised favourable expectations, have later withdrawn from the movement under the pressure of circumstances. The movement itself advances surely though silently; it is constantly gaining new adherents among psychiatrists and laymen, it brings in a growing stream of new readers for psycho-analytic literature and for that very reason drives its opponents to ever more violent defensive efforts. At least a dozen times in recent years, in reports of the proceedings of certain congresses and scientific bodies or in reviews of certain publications, I have read that now psycho-analysis is dead, defeated and disposed of once and for all. The best answer to all this would be in the terms of Mark Twain’s telegram to the newspaper which had falsely published news of his death: ‘Report of my death greatly exaggerated.’ After each of these obituaries psycho-analysis regularly gained new adherents and co-workers or acquired new channels of publicity. After all, being declared dead was an advance on being buried in silence.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2901

Hand in hand with this expansion of psycho-analysis in space went an expansion in content; it extended from the field of the neuroses and psychiatry to other fields of knowledge. I shall not treat this aspect of the development of our discipline in much detail, since this has been done with great success by Rank and Sachs in a volume (one of Löwenfeld’s Grenzfragen) which deals exhaustively with precisely this side of analytic research. Moreover, this development is still in its infancy; it has been little worked at, consists mostly of tentative beginnings and in part of no more than plans. No reasonable person will see any grounds for reproach in this. An enormous mass of work confronts a small number of workers, most of whom have their main occupation elsewhere and can bring only the qualifications of an amateur to bear on the technical problems of these unfamiliar fields of science. These workers, who derive from psycho-analysis, make no secret of their amateurishness. Their aim is merely to act as sign-posts and stop-gaps for the specialists, and to put the analytic technique and principles at their disposal against a time when they in turn shall take up the work. That the results achieved are nevertheless not inconsiderable is due partly to the fruitfulness of the analytic method, and partly to the circumstance that there are already a few investigators who are not doctors, and have taken up the application of psycho-analysis to the mental sciences as their profession in life.

Most of these applications of analysis naturally go back to a hint in my earliest analytic writings. The analytic examination of neurotic people and the neurotic symptoms of normal people necessitated the assumption of psychological conditions which could not possibly be limited to the field in which they had been discovered. In this way analysis not only provided us with the explanation of pathological phenomena, but revealed their connection with normal mental life and disclosed unsuspected relationships between psychiatry and the most various other sciences dealing with activities of the mind. Certain typical dreams, for instance, yielded an explanation of some myths and fairy-tales. Riklin and Abraham followed this hint and initiated the researches into myths which have found their completion, in a manner complying with even expert standards, in Rank’s works on mythology. Further investigation into dream-symbolism led to the heart of the problems of mythology, folklore (Jones and Storfer) and the abstractions of religion. A deep impression was made on all hearers at one of the psycho-analytical Congresses when a follower of Jung’s demonstrated the correspondence between schizophrenic phantasies and the cosmogonies of primitive times and races. Mythological material later received further elaboration (which, though open to criticism, was none the less very interesting) at the hands of Jung, in works attempting to correlate the neuroses with religious and mythological phantasies.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2902

Another path led from the investigation of dreams to the analysis of works of imagination and ultimately to the analysis of their creators - writers and artists themselves. At an early stage it was discovered that dreams invented by writers will often yield to analysis in the same way as genuine ones. (Cf. ‘Gradiva’.) The conception of unconscious mental activity made it possible to form a preliminary idea of the nature of imaginative creative writing; and the realization, gained in the study of neurotics, of the part played by the instinctual impulses enabled us to perceive the sources of artistic production and confronted us with two problems: how the artist reacts to this instigation and what means he employs to disguise his reactions.¹ Most analysts with general interests have contributed something to the solution of these problems, which are the most fascinating among the applications of psycho-analysis. Naturally, opposition was not lacking in this direction either on the part of people who knew nothing of analysis; it took the same form as it did in the original field of psycho-analytic research - the same misconceptions and vehement rejections. It was only to be expected from the beginning that, whatever the regions into which psycho-analysis might penetrate, it would inevitably experience the same struggles with those already in possession of the field. These attempted invasions, however, have not yet stirred up the attention in some quarters which awaits them in the future. Among the strictly scientific applications of analysis to literature, Rank’s exhaustive work on the theme of incest easily takes the first place. Its subject is bound to arouse the greatest unpopularity. Up to the present, little work based on psycho-analysis has been done in the sciences of language and history. I myself ventured the first approach to the problems of the psychology of religion by drawing a parallel between religious ritual and the ceremonials of neurotics (1907b). Dr. Pfister, a pastor in Zurich, has traced back the origin of religious fanaticism to perverse eroticism in his book on the piety of Count von Zinzendorf, as well as in other contributions. In the latest works of the Zurich school, however, we find analysis permeated with religious ideas rather than the opposite outcome that had been in view.

¹ Cf. Rank’s Die Künstler [The Artist], analyses of imaginative writers by Sadger, Reik, and others, my own small work on a childhood memory of Leonardo da Vinci’s, and Abraham’s analysis of Segantini.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2903

In the four essays with the title Totem and Taboo I have made an attempt to deal with the problems of social anthropology in the light of analysis; this line of investigation leads direct to the origins of the most important institutions of our civilization, of the structure of the state, of morality and religion, and, moreover, of the prohibition against incest and of conscience. It is no doubt too early to decide how far the conclusions thus reached will be able to withstand criticism.

The first example of an application of the analytic mode of thought to the problems of aesthetics was contained in my book on jokes. Everything beyond this is still awaiting workers, who may expect a particularly rich harvest in this field. We are entirely without the co-operation of specialists in all these branches of knowledge, and in order to attract them Hanns Sachs, in 1912, founded the periodical Imago which is edited by him and Rank. A beginning has been made by Hitschmann and von Winterstein in throwing psycho-analytic light on philosophical systems and personalities, and here there is much need both of extended and of deeper investigation.

The revolutionary discoveries of psycho-analysis in regard to the mental life of children - the part played in it by sexual impulses (von Hug-Hellmuth), and the fate of those components of sexuality which become unserviceable in the function of reproduction - were bound early to direct attention to education and to stimulate an attempt to bring analytic points of view into the foreground in that field of work. Recognition is due to Dr. Pfister for having, with sincere enthusiasm, initiated the application of psycho-analysis in this direction and brought it to the notice of ministers of religion and those concerned with education. (Cf. The Psycho-Analytic Method, 1913.) He has succeeded in gaining the sympathy and participation of a number of Swiss teachers in this. Other members of his profession are said to share his views but to have preferred nevertheless to remain cautiously in the background. In their retreat from psycho-analysis, a section of Vienna analysts seem to have arrived at a kind of combination of medicine and education.¹

¹ Adler and Furtmüller, Heilen und Bilden [Healing and Educating], 1914.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2904

With this incomplete outline I have attempted to give some idea of the still incalculable wealth of connections which have come to light between medical psycho-analysis and other fields of science. There is material here for a generation of investigators to work at, and I do not doubt that the work will be carried out as soon as the resistances against psycho-analysis are overcome on its original ground.¹

To write the story of these resistances would, I think, be both fruitless and inopportune at the present time. The story is not very creditable to the scientific men of our day. But I must add at once that it has never occurred to me to pour contempt upon the opponents of psycho-analysis merely because they were opponents - apart from the few unworthy individuals, the adventurers and profiteers, who are always to be found on both sides in time of war. I knew very well how to account for the behaviour of these opponents and, moreover, I had learnt that psycho-analysis brings out the worst in everyone. But I made up my mind not to answer my opponents and, so far as my influence went, to restrain others from polemics. Under the peculiar conditions of the controversy over psycho-analysis it seemed to me very doubtful whether either public or written discussion would avail anything; it was certain which way the majority at congresses and meetings would go, and my faith in the reasonableness and good behaviour of the gentlemen who opposed me was not at any time great. Experience shows that only very few people are capable of remaining polite, to say nothing of objective, in a scientific dispute, and the impression made on me by scientific squabbles has always been odious. Perhaps this attitude on my part has been misunderstood; perhaps I have been thought so good-natured or so easily intimidated that no further notice need be taken of me. This was a mistake; I can be as abusive and enraged as anyone; but I have not the art of expressing the underlying emotions in a form suitable for publication and I therefore prefer to abstain completely.

¹ See my two articles in Scienta (1913j).

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2905

Perhaps in some respects it would have been better if I had given free rein to my own passions and to those of others round me. We have all heard of the interesting attempt to explain psycho-analysis as a product of the Vienna milieu. As recently as in 1913 Janet was not ashamed to use this argument, although he himself is no doubt proud of being a Parisian, and Paris can scarcely claim to be a city of stricter morals than Vienna. The suggestion is that psycho-analysis, and in particular its assertion that the neuroses are traceable to disturbances in sexual life, could only have originated in a town like Vienna - in an atmosphere of sensuality and immorality foreign to other cities - and that it is simply a reflection, a projection into theory, as it were, of these peculiar Viennese conditions. Now I am certainly no local patriot; but this theory about psycho-analysis always seems to me quite exceptionally senseless - so senseless, in fact, that I have sometimes been inclined to suppose that the reproach of being a citizen of Vienna is only a euphemistic substitute for another reproach which no one would care to put forward openly. If the premisses on which the argument rests were the opposite of what they are, then it might be worth giving it a hearing. If there were a town in which the inhabitants imposed exceptional restrictions on themselves as regards sexual satisfaction, and if at the same time they exhibited a marked tendency to severe neurotic disorders, that town might certainly give rise in an observer’s mind to the idea that the two circumstances had some connection with each other, and might suggest that one was contingent on the other. But neither of these assumptions is true of Vienna. The Viennese are no more abstinent and no more neurotic than the inhabitants of any other capital city. There is rather less embarrassment - less prudery - in regard to sexual relationships than in the cities of the West and North which are so proud of their chastity. These peculiar characteristics of Vienna would be more likely to mislead the observer on the causation of neurosis than to enlighten him on it.

Vienna has done everything possible, however, to deny her share in the origin of psycho-analysis. In no other place is the hostile indifference of the learned and educated section of the population so evident to the analyst as in Vienna.

It may be that my policy of avoiding wide publicity is to some extent responsible for this. If I had encouraged or allowed the medical societies of Vienna to occupy themselves with psycho-analysis in stormy debates which would have discharged all the passions and brought into the open all the reproaches and invectives that were on its opponents’ tongues or in their hearts - then, perhaps, the ban on psycho-analysis would have been overcome by now and it would no longer be a stranger in its native city. As it is, the poet may be right when he makes his Wallenstein say:

Doch das vergeben mir die Wiener nicht,

dass ich um ein Spektakel sie betrog.¹

¹ [Literally: ‘But what the Viennese will not forgive me is having cheated them out of a spectacle.’]

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2906

The task to which I was not equal - that of demonstrating to the opponents of psycho-analysis suaviter in modo their injustice and arbitrariness - was undertaken and carried out most creditably by Bleuler in a paper written in 1910, ‘Freud’s Psycho-Analysis: A Defence and Some Critical Remarks’. It would seem so natural for me to praise this work (which offers criticisms in both directions) that I will hasten to say what I take exception to in it. It seems to me still to display partiality, to be too lenient to the faults of the opponents of psycho-analysis and too severe on the shortcomings of its adherents. this trait in it may possibly explain why the opinion of a psychiatrist of such high repute, such undoubted ability and independence, failed to carry more weight with his colleagues. The author of Affectivity (1906) ought not to be surprised if the influence of a work is determined not by the strength of its arguments but by its affective tone. Another part of its influence - its influence on the followers of psycho-analysis - was destroyed later by Bleuler himself, when in 1913 he showed the reverse side of his attitude to psycho-analysis in his ‘Criticism of the Freudian Theory’. In that paper he subtracts so much from the structure of psycho-analytic theory that our opponents may well be glad of the help given them by this champion of psycho-analysis. These adverse judgements of Bleuler’s, however, are not based on new arguments or better observations. They rely simply on the state of his own knowledge, the inadequacy of which he no longer himself admits, as he did in his earlier works. It seemed therefore that an almost irreparable loss threatened psycho-analysis here. But in his last publication, ‘Criticisms of my Schizophrenia’ (1914), Bleuler rallies his forces in the face of the attacks made on him for having introduced psycho-analysis into his book on schizophrenia, and makes what he himself calls a ‘presumptuous claim’. ‘But now I will make a presumptuous claim: I consider that up to the present the various schools of psychology have contributed extremely little towards explaining the nature of psychogenic symptoms and diseases, but that depth-psychology offers something towards a psychology which still awaits creation and which physicians are in need of in order to understand their patients and to cure them rationally; and I even believe that in my Schizophrenia I have taken a very short step towards that understanding. The first two assertions are certainly correct; the last may be an error.’

Since by ‘depth-psychology’ he means nothing else but psycho-analysis, we may for the present be content with this acknowledgement.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2907

III

Mach es kurz!

Am Jüngsten Tag ist’s nur ein Furz!¹

GOETHE

Two years after the first private Congress of psycho-analysts the second took place, this time at Nuremberg, in March, 1910. In the interval between them, influenced partly by the favourable reception in America, by the increasing hostility in German-speaking countries, and by the unforeseen acquisition of support from Zurich, I had conceived a project which with the help of my friend Ferenczi I carried out at this second Congress. What I had in mind was to organize the psycho-analytic movement, to transfer its centre to Zurich and to give it a chief who would look after its future career. As this scheme has met with much opposition among the adherents of psycho-analysis, I will set out my reasons for it in some detail. I hope that these will justify me, even though it turns out that what I did was in fact not very wise.

I judged that the new movement’s association with Vienna was no recommendation but rather a handicap to it. A place in the heart of Europe like Zurich, where an academic teacher had opened the doors of his institution to psycho-analysis, seemed to me much more promising. I also took it that a second handicap lay in my own person, opinion about which was too much confused by the liking or hatred of the different sides: I was either compared to Columbus, Darwin and Kepler, or abused as a general paralytic. I wished, therefore, to withdraw into the background both myself and the city where psycho-analysis first saw the light. Moreover, I was no longer young; I saw that there was a long road ahead, and I felt oppressed by the thought that the duty of being a leader should fall to me so late in life. Yet I felt that there must be someone at the head. I knew only too well the pitfalls that lay in wait for anyone who became engaged in analysis, and hoped that many of them might be avoided if an authority could be set up who would be prepared to instruct and admonish. This position had at first been occupied by myself, owing to my fifteen years’ start in experience which nothing could counterbalance. I felt the need of transferring this authority to a younger man, who would then as a matter of course take my place after my death. This man could only be C. G. Jung, since Bleuler was my contemporary in age; in favour of Jung were his exceptional talents, the contributions he had already made to psycho-analysis, his independent position and the impression of assured energy which his personality conveyed. In addition to this, he seemed ready to enter into a friendly relationship with me and for my sake to give up certain racial prejudices which he had previously permitted himself. I had no inkling at that time that in spite of all these advantages the choice was a most unfortunate one, that I had lighted upon a person who was incapable of tolerating the authority of another, but who was still less capable of wielding it himself, and whose energies were relentlessly devoted to the furtherance of his own interests.

I considered it necessary to form an official association because I feared the abuses to which psycho-analysis would be subjected as soon as it became popular. There should be some headquarters whose business it would be to declare: ‘All this nonsense is nothing to do with analysis; this is not psycho-analysis.’ At the sessions of the local groups (which together would constitute the international association) instruction should be given as to how psycho-analysis was to be conducted and doctors should be trained, whose activities would then receive a kind of guarantee. Moreover, it seemed to me desirable, since official science had pronounced its solemn ban upon psycho-analysis and had declared a boycott against doctors and institutions practising it, that the adherents of psycho-analysis should come together for friendly communication with one another and mutual support.

¹ [Literally: ‘Cut it short! On the Day of Judgement it is no more than a fart.’]

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2908

This and nothing else was what I hoped to achieve by founding the ‘International Psycho-Analytical Association’. It was probably more than could be attained. Just as my opponents were to discover that it was not possible to stem the tide of the new movement, so I was to find that it would not proceed in the direction I wished to mark out for it. The proposals made by Ferenczi in Nuremburg were adopted, it is true; Jung was elected President and made Riklin his Secretary; the publication of a bulletin which should link the Central Executive with the local groups was resolved upon. The object of the Association was declared to be ‘to foster and further the science of psycho-analysis founded by Freud, both as pure psychology and in its application to medicine and the mental sciences; and to promote mutual support among its members in all endeavours to acquire and to spread psycho-analytic knowledge’. The scheme was strongly opposed only by the Vienna group. Adler, in great excitement, expressed the fear that ‘censorship and restrictions on scientific freedom’ were intended. Finally the Viennese gave in, after having secured that the seat of the Association should be not Zurich, but the place of residence of the President for the time being, who was to be elected for two years.

At this Congress three local groups were constituted: one in Berlin, under the chairmanship of Abraham; one in Zurich, whose head had become the President of the whole Association; and one in Vienna, the direction of which I made over to Adler. A fourth group, in Budapest, could not be formed until later. Bleuler had not attended the Congress on account of illness, and later he evinced hesitation about joining the Association on general grounds; he let himself be persuaded to do so, it is true, after a personal conversation with me, but resigned again shortly afterwards as a result of disagreements in Zurich. This severed the connection between the Zurich local group and the Burghölzli institution.

One outcome of the Nuremberg Congress was the founding of the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse [Central Journal for Psycho-analysis], for which purpose Adler and Stekel joined forces. It was obviously intended originally to represent the Opposition: it was meant to win back for Vienna the hegemony threatened by the election of Jung. But when the two founders of the journal, labouring under the difficulties of finding a publisher, assured me of their peaceful intentions and as a guarantee of their sincerity gave me a right of veto, I accepted the direction of it and worked energetically for the new organ; its first number appeared in September, 1910.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2909

I will now continue the story of the Psycho-Analytical Congresses. The third Congress took place in September, 1911, at Weimar, and was even more successful than the previous ones in its general atmosphere and scientific interest. J. J. Putnam, who was present on this occasion, declared afterwards in America how much pleasure it had given him and expressed his respect for ‘the mental attitude’ of those who attended it, quoting some words I was said to have used in reference to them: ‘They have learnt to tolerate a bit of truth.’ (Putnam 1912.) It is a fact that no one who had attended scientific congresses could have failed to carry away a favourable impression of the Psycho-Analytical Association. I myself had conducted the first two Congresses and I had allowed every speaker time for his paper, leaving discussions to take place in private afterwards among the members. Jung, as President, took over the direction at Weimar and re-introduced formal discussions after each paper, which, however, did not give rise to any difficulties as yet.

A very different picture was presented by the fourth Congress, held in Munich two years later, in September, 1913. It is still fresh in the memory of all who were present. It was conducted by Jung in a disagreeable and incorrect manner; the speakers were restricted in time and the discussions overwhelmed the papers. By a malicious stroke of chance it happened that that evil genius, Hoche, had settled in the very building in which the meetings were held. Hoche would have had no difficulty in convincing himself of the nonsense which the analysts made of his description of them as a fanatical sect blindly submissive to their leader. The fatiguing and unedifying proceedings ended in the re-election of Jung to the Presidency of the International Psycho-Analytical Association, which he accepted, although two-fifths of those present refused him their support. We dispersed without any desire to meet again.

At about the time of this Congress the strength of the International Psycho-Analytical Association was as follows. The local groups in Vienna, Berlin and Zurich had been formed at the Congress in Nuremberg as early as 1910. In May, 1911, a group at Munich under the chairmanship of Dr. L. Seif was added. In the same year the first American local group was formed under the chairmanship of A. A. Brill, with the name ‘The New York Psychoanalytic Society’. At the Weimar Congress the foundation of a second American group was authorized; it came into existence during the following year under the name of ‘The American Psychoanalytic Association’, and included members from Canada and the whole of America; Putnam was elected President and Ernest Jones Secretary. Shortly before the Congress in Munich in 1913, the Budapest local group was formed under the chairmanship of Ferenczi. Soon after this the first English group was formed by Ernest Jones, who had returned to London. The membership of these local groups, of which there were now eight, naturally affords no means of estimating the number of unorganized students and adherents of psycho-analysis.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2910

The development of the periodicals devoted to psycho-analysis also deserves a brief mention. The first of these was a series of monographs entitled Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde [‘Papers on Applied Mental Science’] which have appeared irregularly since 1907 and now number fifteen issues. (The publisher was to begin with Heller in Vienna and later F. Deuticke.) They comprise works by Freud (Nos. 1 and 7), Riklin, Jung, Abraham (Nos. 4 and 11), Rank (Nos. 5 and 13), Sadger, Pfister, Max Graf, Jones (Nos. 10 and 14), Storfer and von Hug-Hellmuth.¹ When the journal Imago (which will be referred to shortly) was founded, this form of publication ceased to have quite the same value. After the meeting at Salzburg in 1908, the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen [Yearbook for Psycho-Analytic and Psychopathological Researches] was founded, which appeared for two years under Jung’s editorship and has now re-emerged, under two new editors and with a slight change in its title, as the Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse [Yearbook of Psycho-Analysis.] It is no longer intended to be, as it has been in recent years, merely repository for the publication of self-contained works. Instead it will endeavour, through the activity of its editors, to fulfil the aim of recording all the work done and all the advances made in the sphere of psycho-analysis.²  The Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, which, as I have already said, was started by Adler and Stekel after the foundation of the International Psycho-Analytical Association in Nuremberg in 1910, has, during its short existence, had a stormy career. As early as in the tenth number of the first volume an announcement appeared on the front page that, on account of scientific differences of opinion with the director, Dr. Alfred Adler had decided to withdraw voluntarily from the editorship. After this Dr. Stekel remained the only editor (from the summer of 1911). At the Weimar Congress the Zentralblatt was raised to the position of official organ of the International Association and made available to all members in return for an increase in the annual subscription. From the third number of the second volume onwards (winter, 1912) Stekel became solely responsible for its contents. His behaviour, of which it is not easy to publish an account, had compelled me to resign the direction and hurriedly to establish a new organ for psycho-analysis - the Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse [International Journal for Medical Psycho-Analysis]. The combined efforts of almost all our workers and of Hugo Heller, the new publisher, resulted in the appearance of the first number in January, 1913, whereupon it took the place of the Zentralblatt as official organ of the International Psycho-Analytical Association.

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] Since then, further works have appeared, by Sadger (Nos. 16 and 18) and Kielholz (No. 17).

² [Footnote added 1924:] It ceased publication at the beginning of the War.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2911

Meanwhile, early in 1912, a new periodical, Imago (published by Heller), designed exclusively for the application of psycho-analysis to the mental sciences, was founded by Dr. Hanns Sachs and Dr. Otto Rank. Imago is now in the middle of its third volume and is read with interest by a continually increasing number of subscribers, some of whom have little connection with medical analysis.¹

Apart from these four periodical publications (Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde, Jahrbuch, Zeitschrift and Imago) other German and foreign journals publish works which may claim a place in the literature of psycho-analysis. The Journal of Abnormal Psychology, directed by Morton Prince, usually contains so many good analytic contributions that it must be regarded as the principal representative of analytic literature in America. In the winter of 1913, White and Jelliffe in New York started a new periodical (The Psychoanalytic Revue) which is devoted exclusively to psycho-analysis, no doubt bearing in mind the fact that most medical men in America who are interested in analysis find the German language a difficulty.²

I must now mention two secessions which have taken place among the adherents of psycho-analysis; the first occurred between the founding of the Association in 1910 and the Weimar Congress in 1911; the second took place after this and became manifest at Munich in 1913. The disappointment that they caused me might have been averted if I had paid more attention to the reactions of patients under analytic treatment. I knew very well of course that anyone may take to flight at his first approach to the unwelcome truths of analysis; I had always myself maintained that everyone’s understanding of it is limited by his own repressions (or rather, by the resistances which sustain them) so that he cannot go beyond a particular point in his relation to analysis. But I had not expected that anyone who had reached a certain depth in his understanding of analysis could renounce that understanding and lose it. And yet daily experience with patients had shown that total rejection of analytic knowledge may result whenever a specially strong resistance arises at any depth in the mind; one may have succeeded in laboriously bringing a patient to grasp some parts of analytic knowledge and to handle them like possessions of his own, and yet one may see him, under the domination of the very next resistance, throw all he has learnt to the winds and stand on the defensive as he did in the days when he was a carefree beginner. I had to learn that the very same thing can happen with psycho-analysts as with patients in analysis.

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] The publication of these two periodicals was transferred in 1919 to the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag [the International Psycho-Analytical Publishing House]. At the present time (1923) they are both in their ninth volume. (Actually, Internationale Zeitschrift is in the eleventh and Imago in the twelfth year of its existence, but, in consequence of events during the war, Volume IV of the Zeitschrift covered more than one year, i.e. the years 1916-18, and Volume V of Imago the years 1917-18.) With the beginning of Volume VI the word ‘ärztliche’ [‘medical’] was dropped from the title of the Internationale Zeitschrift.

² [Footnote added 1924:] In 1920 Ernest Jones undertook the founding of The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, intended for readers in England and America.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2912

It is no easy or enviable task to write the history of these two secessions, partly because I am without any strong personal motive for doing so - I had not expected gratitude nor am I revengeful to any effective degree - and partly because I know that by doing so I shall lay myself open to the invectives of my not too scrupulous opponents and offer the enemies of analysis the spectacle they so heartily desire - of ‘the psycho-analysts tearing one another limb from limb’. After exercising so much self-restraint in not coming to blows with opponents outside of analysis, I now see myself compelled to take up arms against its former followers or people who still like to call themselves its followers. I have no choice in the matter, however; only indolence or cowardice could lead one to keep silence, and silence would cause more harm than a frank revelation of the harms that already exist. Anyone who has followed the growth of other scientific movements will know that the same upheavals and dissensions commonly occur in them as well. It may be that elsewhere they are more carefully concealed; but psycho-analysis, which repudiates so many conventional ideals, is more honest in these matters too.

Another very severe drawback is that I cannot entirely avoid throwing some analytic light on these two opposition movements. Analysis is not suited, however, for polemical use; it presupposes the consent of the person who is being analysed and a situation in which there is a superior and a subordinate. Anyone, therefore, who undertakes an analysis for polemical purposes must expect the person analysed to use analysis against him in turn, so that the discussion will reach a state which entirely excludes the possibility of convincing any impartial third person. I shall therefore restrict to a minimum my use of analytic knowledge, and, with it, of indiscretion and aggressiveness towards my opponents; and I may also point out that I am not basing any scientific criticism on these grounds. I am not concerned with the truth that may be contained in the theories which I am rejecting, nor shall I attempt to refute them. I shall leave that task to other qualified workers in the field of psycho-analysis, and it has, indeed, already been partly accomplished. I wish merely to show that these theories controvert the fundamental principles of analysis (and on what points they controvert them) and that for this reason they should not be known by the name of analysis. So I shall avail myself of analysis only in order to explain how these divergences from it could arise among analysts. When I come to the points at which the divergences occurred, I shall have, it is true, to defend the just rights of psycho-analysis with some remarks of a purely critical nature.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2913

The first task confronting psycho-analysis was to explain the neuroses; it used the two facts of resistance and transference as starting-points, and, taking into consideration the third fact of amnesia, accounted for them with its theories of repression, of the sexual motive forces in neurosis and of the unconscious. Psycho-analysis has never claimed to provide a complete theory of human mentality in general, but only expected that what it offered should be applied to supplement and correct the knowledge acquired by other means. Adler’s theory, however, goes far beyond this point; it seeks at one stroke to explain the behaviour and character of human beings as well as their neurotic and psychotic illnesses. It is actually more suited to any other field than that of neurosis, although for reasons connected with the history of its development it still places this in the foreground. For many years I had opportunities of studying Dr. Adler and have never refused to recognize his unusual ability, combined with a particularly speculative disposition. As an instance of the ‘persecution’ to which he asserts he has been subjected by me, I can point to the fact that after the Association was founded I made over to him the leadership of the Vienna group. It was not until urgent demands were put forward by all the members of the society that I let myself be persuaded to take the chair again at its scientific meetings. When I perceived how little gift Adler had precisely for judging unconscious material, my view changed to an expectation that he would succeed in discovering the connections of psycho-analysis with psychology and with the biological foundations of instinctual processes - an expectation which was in some sense justified by the valuable work he had done on ‘organ-inferiority’. And he did in fact effect something of the kind; but his work conveys an impression ‘as if’ - to speak in his own ‘jargon’ - it was intended to prove that psycho-analysis was wrong in everything and that it had only attributed so much importance to sexual motive forces because of its credulity in accepting the assertions of neurotics. I may even speak publicly of the personal motive for his work, since he himself announced it in the presence of a small circle of members of the Vienna group: - ‘ Do you think it gives me such great pleasure to stand in your shadow my whole life long?’ To be sure, I see nothing reprehensible in a younger man freely admitting his ambition, which one would in any case guess was among the incentives for his work. But even though a man is dominated by a motive of this kind he should know how to avoid being what the English, with their fine social tact, call ‘unfair’ - which in German can only be expressed by a much cruder word. How little Adler has succeeded in this is shown by the profusion of petty outbursts of malice which disfigure his writings and by the indications they contain of an uncontrolled craving for priority. At the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society we once actually heard him claim priority for the conception of the ‘unity of the neuroses’ and for the ‘dynamic view’ of them. This came as a great surprise to me, for I had always believed that these two principles were stated by me before I ever made Adler’s acquaintance.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2914

This striving of Adler’s for a place in the sun has, however, had one result which is bound to be beneficial to psycho-analysis. When, after irreconcilable scientific disagreements had come to light, I was obliged to bring about Adler’s resignation from the editorship of the Zentralblatt, he left the Vienna society as well, and founded a new one, which at first adopted the tasteful name of ‘The Society for Free Psycho-Analysis’ [‘Verein für freie Psychoanalyse’]. But outsiders who are unconnected with analysis are evidently as unskilful in appreciating the differences between the views of two psycho-analysts as we Europeans are in detecting the differences between two Chinese faces. ‘Free’ psycho-analysis remained in the shadow of ‘official’, ‘orthodox’ psycho-analysis and was treated merely as an appendage to the latter. Then Adler took a step for which we are thankful; he severed all connection with psycho-analysis, and gave his theory the name of ‘Individual Psychology’. There is room enough on God’s earth, and anyone who can has a perfect right to potter about on it without being prevented; but it is not a desirable thing for people who have ceased to understand one another and have grown incompatible with one another to remain under the same roof. Adler’s ‘Individual Psychology’ is now one of the many schools of psychology which are adverse to psycho-analysis and its further development is no concern of ours.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2915

The Adlerian theory was from the very beginning a ‘system’ - which psycho-analysis was careful to avoid becoming. It is also a remarkably good example of ‘secondary revision’, such as occurs, for instance, in the process to which dream-material is submitted by the action of waking thought. In Adler’s case the place of dream-material is taken by the new material obtained through psycho-analytic studies; this is then viewed purely from the standpoint of the ego, reduced to the categories with which the ego is familiar, translated, twisted and - exactly as happens in dream-formation - is misunderstood. Moreover, the Adlerian theory is characterized less by what it asserts than by what it denies, so that it consists of three sorts of elements of quite dissimilar value: useful contributions to the psychology of the ego, superfluous but admissible translations of the analytic facts into the new ‘jargon’, and distortions and perversions of these facts when they do not comply with the requirements of the ego.

The elements of the first sort have never been ignored by psycho-analysis, although they did not deserve any special attention from it; it was more concerned to show that every ego-trend contains libidinal components. The Adlerian theory emphasises the counterpart to this, the egoistic constituent in libidinal instinctual impulses. This would have been an appreciable gain if Adler had not on every occasion used this observation in order to deny the libidinal impulses in favour of their egoistic instinctual components. His theory does what every patient does and what our conscious thought in general does - namely, makes use of a rationalization, as Jones has called it, in order to conceal the unconscious motive. Adler is so consistent in this that he positively considers that the strongest motive force in the sexual act is the man’s intention of showing himself master of the woman - of being ‘on top’. I do not know if he has expressed these monstrous notions in his writings.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2916

Psycho-analysis recognized early that every neurotic symptom owes its possibility of existence to a compromise. Every symptom must therefore in some way comply with the demands of the ego which manipulates the repression; it must offer some advantage, it must admit of some useful application, or it would meet with the same fate as the original instinctual impulse itself which has been fended off. The term ‘gain from illness’ has taken this into account; one is even justified in differentiating the ‘primary’ gain to the ego, which must be operative at the time of the generation of the symptom, from a ‘secondary’ part, which supervenes in attachment to other purposes of the ego, if the symptom is to persist. It has also long been known that the withdrawal of this gain from illness, or its disappearance in consequence of some change in real external circumstances, constitutes one of the mechanisms of a cure of the symptom. In the Adlerian doctrine the main emphasis falls on these easily verifiable and clearly intelligible connections, while the fact is altogether overlooked that on countless occasions the ego is merely making a virtue of necessity in submitting, because of its usefulness, to the very disagreeable symptom which is forced upon it - for instance, in accepting anxiety as a means to security. The ego is here playing the ludicrous part of the clown in a circus who by his gestures tries to convince the audience that every change in the circus ring is being carried out under his orders. But only the youngest of the spectators are deceived by him.

Psycho-analysis is obliged to give its backing to the second constituent of Adler’s theory as it would to something of its own. And in fact it is nothing else than psycho-analytic knowledge, which that author extracted from sources open to everyone during ten years of work in common and which he has now labelled as his own by a change in nomenclature. I myself consider ‘safeguarding [Sicherung]’, for instance, a better term than ‘protective measure [Schutzmassregel]’ which is the one I employ; but I cannot discover any difference in their meaning. Again, a host of familiar features come to light in Adler’s propositions when one restores the earlier ‘phantasied’ and ‘phantasy’ in place of ‘feigned [fingiert]’, ‘fictive’ and ‘fiction’. The identity of these terms would be insisted upon by psycho-analysis even if their author had not taken part in our common work over a period of many years.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2917

The third part of the Adlerian theory, the twisted interpretations and distortions of the disagreeable facts of analysis, are what definitely separate ‘Individual Psychology’, as it is now to be called, from psycho-analysis. As we know, the principle of Adler’s system is that the individual’s aim of self-assertion, his ‘will to power’, is what, in the form of a ‘masculine protest’, plays a dominating part in the conduct of life, in character-formation and in neurosis. This ‘masculine protest’, the Adlerian motive force, is nothing else, however, but repression detached from its psychological mechanism and, moreover, sexualized in addition - which ill accords with the vaunted ejection of sexuality from its place in mental life. The ‘masculine protest’ undoubtedly exists, but if it is made into the motive force of mental life the observed facts are being treated like a spring-board that is left behind after it has been used to jump off from. Let us consider one of the fundamental situations in which desire is felt in infancy: that of a child observing the sexual act between adults. Analysis shows, in the case of people with whose life-story the physician will later be concerned, that at such moments two impulses take possession of the immature spectator. In boys, one is the impulse to put himself in the place of the active man, and the other, the opposing current, is the impulse to identify himself with the passive woman. Between them these two impulses exhaust the pleasurable possibilities of the situation. The first alone can come under the head of the masculine protest, if that concept is to retain any meaning at all. The second, however, the further course of which Adler disregards or which he knows nothing about, is the one that will become the more important in the subsequent neurosis. Adler has so merged himself in the jealous narrowness of the ego that he takes account only of those instinctual impulses which are agreeable to the ego and are encouraged by it; the situation in neurosis, in which the impulses are opposed to the ego, is precisely the one that lies beyond his horizon.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2918

In connection with the attempt, which psycho-analysis has made necessary, to correlate the fundamental principle of its theory with the mental life of children, Adler exhibits the most serious departures from actual observation and the most fundamental confusion in his concepts. The biological, social and psychological meanings of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are here hopelessly mixed. It is impossible, and is disproved by observation, that a child, whether male or female, should found the plan of its life on an original depreciation of the female sex and take the wish to be a real man as its ‘guiding line’. Children have, to begin with, no idea of the significance of the distinction between the sexes; on the contrary, they start with the assumption that the same genital organ (the male one) is possessed by both sexes; they do not begin their sexual researches with the problem of the distinction between the sexes, while the social underestimation of women is completely foreign to them. There are women in whose neurosis the wish to be a man has played no part. Whatever in the nature of a masculine protest can be shown to exist is easily traceable to a disturbance in primary narcissism due to threats of castration or to the earliest interferences with sexual activities. All disputes about the psychogenesis of the neuroses must eventually be decided in the field of the neuroses of childhood. Careful dissection of a neurosis in early childhood puts an end to all misapprehensions about the aetiology of the neuroses and to all doubts about the part played by the sexual instincts in them. That is why, in his criticism of Jung’s paper ‘Conflicts in the Mind of the Child’, Adler was obliged to resort to the imputation that the facts of the case had been one-sidedly arranged, ‘no doubt by the father’.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2919

I will not dwell any longer on the biological aspect of the Adlerian theory nor discuss whether either actual ‘organ-inferiority’ or the subjective feeling of it - one does not know which - is really capable of serving as the foundation of Adler’s system. I will merely remark in passing that if it were so neurosis would appear as a by-product of every kind of physical decrepitude, whereas observation shows that an impressive majority of ugly, misshapen, crippled and miserable people fail to react to their defects by neurosis. Nor will I deal with the interesting assertion according to which inferiority is to be traced back to the feeling of being a child. It shows the disguise under which the factor of infantilism, which is so strongly emphasized by psycho-analysis, re-appears in ‘Individual Psychology’. On the other hand, I must point out how all the psychological acquisitions of psycho-analysis have been thrown to the winds by Adler. In his book Über den nervösen Charakter the unconscious is still mentioned as a psychological peculiarity, without, however, any relation to his system. Later, he has consistently declared that it is a matter of indifference to him whether an idea is conscious or unconscious. Adler has never from the first shown any understanding of repression. In an abstract of a paper read by him at the Vienna Society (February, 1911) he wrote that it must be pointed out that the evidence in a particular case showed that the patient had never repressed his libido, but had been continually ‘safeguarding’ himself against it. Soon afterwards, in a discussion at the Vienna Society, he said: ‘If you ask where repression comes from, you are told, "from civilization"; but if you go on to ask where civilization comes from, you are told "from repression". So you see it is all simply playing with words.’ A tithe of the acuteness and ingenuity with which Adler has unmasked the defensive devices of the ‘nervous character’ would have been enough to show him the way out of this pettifogging argument. What is meant is simply that civilization is based on the repressions effected by former generations, and that each fresh generation is required to maintain this civilization by effecting the same repressions. I once heard of a child who thought people were laughing at him, and began to cry, because when he asked where eggs come from he was told ‘from hens’, and when he went on to ask where hens come from he was told ‘from eggs’. But they were not playing with words; on the contrary, they were telling him the truth.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2920

Everything that Adler has to say about dreams, the shibboleth of psycho-analysis, is equally empty and unmeaning. At first he regarded dreams as a turning away from the feminine to the masculine line - which is simply a translation of the wish-fulfilment theory of dreams into the language of the ‘masculine protest’. Later he found that the essence of dreams lies in enabling men to accomplish unconsciously what they are denied consciously. Adler must also be credited with priority in confusing dreams with latent dream-thoughts - a confusion on which the discovery of his ‘prospective tendency’ rests. Maeder followed his lead in this later. Here the fact is readily overlooked that every interpretation of a dream which is incomprehensible in its manifest form is based on the very method of dream-interpretation whose premisses and conclusions are being disputed. In regard to resistance Adler informs us that it serves the purpose of putting into effect the patient’s opposition to the physician. This is certainly true; it is as much as to say that it serves the purpose of resistance. Where it comes from, however, or how it happens that its phenomena are at the disposal of the patient is not further enquired into, as being of no interest to the ego. The detailed mechanism of the symptoms and manifestations of diseases, the explanation of the manifold variety of those diseases and their forms of expression, are disregarded in toto; for everything alike is pressed into the service of the masculine protest, self-assertion and the aggrandizement of the personality. the system is complete; to produce it has cost an enormous amount of labour in the recasting of interpretations, while it has not furnished a single new observation. I fancy I have made it clear that it has nothing to do with psycho-analysis.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2921

The view of life which is reflected in the Adlerian system is founded exclusively on the aggressive instinct; there is no room in it for love. We might feel surprise that such a cheerless Weltanschauung should have met with any attention at all; but we must not forget that human beings, weighed down by the burden of their sexual needs, are ready to accept anything if only the ‘overcoming of sexuality’ is offered them as a bait.

Adler’s secession took place before the Weimar Congress in 1911; after that date the Swiss began theirs. The first signs of it, curiously enough, were a few remarks of Riklin’s in some popular articles appearing in Swiss publications, so that the general public learned earlier than those most intimately concerned in the subject that psycho-analysis had got the better of some regrettable errors which had previously discredited it. In 1912 Jung boasted, in a letter from America, that his modifications of psycho-analysis had overcome the resistances of many people who had hitherto refused to have anything to do with it. I replied that that was nothing to boast of, and that the more he sacrificed of the hard-won truths of psycho-analysis the more would he see resistances vanishing. This modification which the Swiss were so proud of introducing was again nothing else but a pushing into the background of the sexual factor in psycho-analytic theory. I confess that from the beginning I regarded this ‘advance’ as too far-reaching an adjustment to the demands of actuality.

These two retrograde movements away from psycho-analysis, which I must now compare with each other, show another point in common: for they both court a favourable opinion by putting forward certain lofty ideas, which view things, as it were, sub specie aeternitatis. With Adler, this part is played by the relativity of all knowledge and the right of the personality to put an artificial construction on the data of knowledge according to individual taste; with Jung, the appeal is made to the historic right of youth to throw off the fetters in which tyrannical age with its hidebound views seeks to bind it. A few words must be devoted to exposing the fallacy of these ideas.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2922

The relativity of our knowledge is a consideration which may be advanced against every other science just as well as against psycho-analysis. It is derived from familiar reactionary currents of present-day feeling which are hostile to science, and it lays claim to an appearance of superiority to which no one is entitled. None of us can guess what the ultimate judgement of mankind about our theoretical efforts will be. There are instances in which rejection by the first three generations has been corrected by the succeeding one and changed into recognition. After a man has listened carefully to the voice of criticism in himself and has paid some attention to the criticisms of his opponents, there is nothing for him to do but with all his strength to maintain his own convictions which are based of experience. One should be content to conduct one’s case honestly, and should not assume the office of judge, which is reserved for the remote future. The stress on arbitrary personal views in scientific matters is bad; it is clearly an attempt to dispute the right of psycho-analysis to be valued as a science - after that value, incidentally, has already been depreciated by what has been said before. Anyone who sets a high value on scientific thought will rather seek every possible means and method of circumscribing the factor of fanciful personal predilections as far as possible wherever it still plays too great a part. Moreover, it is opportune to recall that any zeal in defending ourselves is out of place. These arguments of Adler’s are not intended seriously. They are only meant for use against his opponents; they do not touch his own theories. Nor have they prevented his followers from hailing him as the Messiah, for whose appearance expectant humanity has been prepared by a number of forerunners. The Messiah is certainly no relative phenomenon.

Jung’s argument ad captandam benevolentiam¹ rests on the too optimistic assumption that the progress of the human race, of civilization and knowledge, has always pursued an unbroken one; as if there had been no periods of decadence, no reactions and restorations after every revolution, no generations who have taken a backward step and abandoned the gains of their predecessors. His approach to the standpoint of the masses, his abandonment of an innovation which proved unwelcome, make it a priori improbable that Jung’s corrected version of psycho-analysis can justly claim to be a youthful act of liberation. After all, it is not the age of the doer that decides this but the character of the deed.

¹ [‘For the purpose of gaining good-will.’]

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2923

Of the two movements under discussion Adler’s is indubitably the more important; while radically false, it is marked by consistency and coherence. It is, moreover, in spite of everything, founded upon a theory of the instincts. Jung’s modification, on the other hand, loosens the connection of the phenomena with instinctual life; and further, as its critics (e.g. Abraham, Ferenczi and Jones) have pointed out, it is so obscure, unintelligible and confused as to make it difficult to take up any position upon it. Wherever one lays hold of anything, one must be prepared to hear that one has misunderstood it, and one cannot see how to arrive at a correct understanding of it. It is put forward in a peculiarly vacillating manner, one moment as ‘quite a mild deviation, which does not justify the outcry that has been raised about it’ (Jung), and the next moment as a new message of salvation which is to begin a new epoch for psycho-analysis, and, indeed, a new Weltanschauung for everyone.

When one thinks of the inconsistencies displayed in the various public and private pronouncements made by the Jungian movement, one is bound to ask oneself how much of this is due to lack of clearness and how much to lack of sincerity. It must be admitted, however, that the exponents of the new theory find themselves in a difficult position. They are now disputing things which they themselves formerly upheld, and they are doing so, moreover, not on the ground of fresh observations which might have taught them something further, but in consequence of fresh interpretations which make the things they see look different to them now from what they did before. For this reason they are unwilling to give up their connection with psycho-analysis, as whose representatives they became known to the world, and prefer to give it out that psycho-analysis has changed. At the Munich Congress I found it necessary to clear up this confusion, and I did so by declaring that I did not recognize the innovations of the Swiss as legitimate continuations and further developments of the psycho-analysis that originated with me. Outside critics (like Furtmüller) had already seen how things were, and Abraham is right in saying that Jung is in full retreat from psycho-analysis. I am of course perfectly ready to allow that everyone has a right to think and to write what he pleases; but he has no right to put it forward as something other than what it really is.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2924

Just as Adler’s investigation brought something new to psycho-analysis - a contribution to the psychology of the ego - and then expected us to pay too high a price for this gift by throwing over all the fundamental theories of analysis, so in the same way Jung and his followers paved the way for their fight against psycho-analysis by presenting it with a new acquisition. They traced in detail (as Pfister did before them) the way in which the material of sexual ideas belonging to the family-complex and incestuous object-choice is made use of in representing the highest ethical and religious interests of man - that is, they have illuminated an important instance of the sublimation of the erotic instinctual forces and of their transformation into trends which can no longer be called erotic. This was in complete harmony with all the expectations of psycho-analysis, and would have agreed very well with the view that in dreams and neurosis a regressive dissolution of this sublimation, as of all others, becomes visible. But the world would have risen in indignation and protested that ethics and religion were being sexualized. Now I cannot refrain from thinking teleologically for once and concluding that these discoverers were not equal to meeting such a storm of indignation. Perhaps it even began to rage in their own bosoms. The theological prehistory of so many of the Swiss throws no less light on their attitude to psycho-analysis than does Adler’s socialist prehistory on the development of his psychology. One is reminded of Mark Twain’s famous story of all the things that happened to his watch and of his concluding words: ‘And he used to wonder what became of all the unsuccessful tinkers, and gunsmiths, and shoemakers, and blacksmiths; but nobody could ever tell him.’

Suppose - to make use of a simile - that in a particular social group there lives a parvenu, who boasts of being descended from a noble family living in another place. It is pointed out to him, however, that his parents live somewhere in the neighbourhood, and that they are quite humble people. There is only one way of escape from his difficulty and he seizes on it. He can no longer repudiate his parents, but he asserts that they themselves are of noble lineage and have merely come down in the world; and he procures a family-tree from some obliging official source. It seems to me that the Swiss have been obliged to behave in much the same way. If ethics and religion were not allowed to be sexualized but had to be something ‘higher’ from the start, and if nevertheless the ideas contained in them seemed undeniably to be descended from the Oedipus and family-complex, there could be only one way out: it must be that from the very first these complexes themselves do not mean what they seem to be expressing, but bear the higher ‘anagogic’ meaning (as Silberer calls it) which made it possible for them to be employed in the abstract trains of thought of ethics and religious mysticism.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2925

I am quite prepared to be told again that I have misunderstood the substance and purpose of the Neo-Zurich theory; but I must protest in advance against any contradictions to my view of it that may be found in the publications of that school being laid at my door instead of theirs. I can find no other way of making the whole range of Jung’s innovations intelligible to myself and of grasping all their implications. All the changes that Jung has proposed to make in psycho-analysis flow from his intention to eliminate what is objectionable in the family-complexes, so as not to find it again in religion and ethics. For sexual libido an abstract concept has been substituted, of which one may safely say that it remains mystifying and incomprehensible to wise men and fools alike. The Oedipus complex has a merely ‘symbolic’ meaning: the mother in it means the unattainable, which must be renounced in the interests of civilization; the father who is killed in the Oedipus myth is the ‘inner’ father, from whom one must set oneself free in order to become independent. Other parts of the material of sexual ideas will no doubt be subjected to similar re-interpretations in the course of time. In the place of a conflict between ego-dystonic erotic trends and the self-preservative ones a conflict appears between the ‘life-task’ and ‘psychical inertia’; the neurotic’s sense of guilt corresponds to his self-reproach for not properly fulfilling his ‘life-task’. In this way a new religio-ethical system has been created, which, just like the Adlerian system, was bound to re-interpret, distort or jettison the factual findings of analysis. The truth is that these people have picked out a few cultural overtones from the symphony of life and have once more failed to hear the mighty and primordial melody of the instincts.

In order to preserve this system intact it was necessary to turn entirely away from observation and from the technique of psycho-analysis. Occasionally enthusiasm for the cause even permitted a disregard of scientific logic - as when Jung finds that the Oedipus complex is not ‘specific’ enough for the aetiology of the neuroses, and proceeds to attribute this specific quality to inertia, the most universal characteristic of all matter, animate and inanimate! It is to be noted, by the way, that the ‘Oedipus complex’ represents only a topic with which the individual’s mental forces have to deal, and is not itself a force, like ‘psychical inertia’. The study of individual people had shown (and always will show) that the sexual complexes in their original sense are alive in them. On that account the investigation of individuals was pushed into the background and replaced by conclusions based on evidence derived from anthropological research. The greatest risk of coming up against the original, undisguised meaning of these re-interpreted complexes was to be met with in the early childhood of every individual; consequently in therapy the injunction was laid down that this past history should be dwelt on as little as possible and the main emphasis put on reverting to the current conflict, in which, moreover, the essential thing was on no account to be what was accidental and personal, but what was general - in fact, the non-fulfilment of the life-task. As we know, however, a neurotic’s current conflict becomes comprehensible and admits of solution only when it is traced back to his prehistory, when one goes back along the path that his libido took when he fell ill.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2926

The form taken by the Neo-Zurich therapy under these influences can be conveyed in the words of a patient who experienced it himself: ‘This time not a trace of attention was given to the past or to the transference. Wherever I thought I recognized the latter it was pronounced to be a pure libidinal symbol. The moral instruction was very fine and I followed it faithfully, but I did not advance a step. It was even more annoying for me than for him, but how could I help it? . . . Instead of freeing me by analysis, every day brought fresh tremendous demands on me, which had to be fulfilled if the neurosis was to be conquered - for instance, inward concentration by means of introversion, religious meditation, resuming life with my wife in loving devotion, etc. It was almost beyond one’s strength; it was aiming at a radical transformation of one’s whole inner nature. I left the analysis as a poor sinner with intense feelings of contrition and the best resolutions, but at the same time in utter discouragement. Any clergyman would have advised what he recommended, but where was I to find the strength?’ The patient, it is true, reported that he had heard that analysis of the past and of the transference must be gone through first; but he had been told that he had already had enough of it. Since this first kind of analysis had not helped him more, the conclusion seems to me justified that the patient had not had enough of it. Certainly the subsequent treatment, which no longer had any claim to be called psycho-analysis, did not improve matters. It is remarkable that the members of the Zurich school should have made the long journey round by way of Vienna in order to wind up at the nearby city of Berne, where Dubois cures neuroses by ethical encouragement in a more considerate manner.¹

The total incompatibility of this new movement with psycho-analysis shows itself too, of course, in Jung’s treatment of repression, which is hardly mentioned nowadays in his writings, in his misunderstanding of dreams, which, like Adler, in complete disregard of dream-psychology, he confuses with the latent dream-thoughts, and in his loss of all understanding of the unconscious - in short, in all the points which I should regard as the essence of psycho-analysis. When Jung tells us that the incest-complex is merely ‘symbolic’, that after all it has no ‘real’ existence, that after all a savage feels no desire towards an old hag but prefers a young and pretty woman, we are tempted to conclude that ‘symbolic’ and ‘without real existence’ simply mean something which, in virtue of its manifestations and pathogenic effects, is described by psycho-analysis as ‘existing unconsciously’ - a description that disposes of the apparent contradiction.

¹ I know the objections there are to making use of a patient’s reports, and I will therefore expressly state that my informant is a trustworthy person, very well capable of forming a judgement. He gave me this information quite spontaneously and I make use of his communication without asking his consent, since I cannot allow that a psycho-analytic technique has any right to claim the protection of medical discretion.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2927

If one bears in mind that dreams are something different from the latent dream-thoughts which they work over, there is nothing surprising in patients dreaming of things with which their minds have been filled during the treatment, whether it be the ‘life-task’, or ‘being on top’ or ‘underneath’. The dreams of people being analysed can undoubtedly be directed, in the same way as they are by stimuli produced for experimental purposes. One can determine a part of the material which appears in a dream; nothing in the essence or mechanism of dreams is altered by this. Nor do I believe that ‘biographical’ dreams, as they are called, occur outside analysis. If, on the other hand, one analyses dreams which occurred before treatment, or if one considers the dreamer’s own additions to what has been suggested to him in the treatment, or if one avoids setting him any such tasks, then one may convince oneself how far removed it is from the purpose of a dream to produce attempted solutions of the life-task. Dreams are only a form of thinking; one can never reach an understanding of this form by reference to the content of the thoughts; only an appreciation of the dream-work will lead to that understanding.

It is not difficult to find a factual refutation of Jung’s misconceptions of psycho-analysis and deviations from it. Every analysis conducted in a proper manner, and in particular every analysis of a child, strengthens the convictions upon which the theory of psycho-analysis is founded, and rebuts the re-interpretations made by both Jung’s and Adler’s systems. In the days before his illumination, Jung himself carried out and published an analysis of this kind of a child; it remains to be seen whether he will undertake a new interpretation of its results with the help of a different ‘one-sided arrangement of the facts’, to use the expression employed by Adler in this connection.

The view that the sexual representation of ‘higher’ thoughts in dreams and neurosis is nothing but an archaic mode of expression is of course irreconcilable with the fact that in neurosis these sexual complexes prove to be the bearers of the quantities of libido which have been withdrawn from utilization in real life. If it was merely a question of a sexual ‘jargon’, the economy of the libido could not have been altered in any way by it. Jung admits this himself in his Darstellung der psychoanalytischen Theorie and formulates the task of therapy as the detaching of libidinal cathexes from these complexes. This can never be achieved, however, by directing the patient away from them and urging him to sublimate, but only by exhaustive examination of them and by making them fully and completely conscious. The first piece of reality which the patient must deal with is his illness. Efforts to spare him that task point to the physician’s incapacity to help him to overcome his resistances, or else to the physician’s dread of the results of the work.

On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement

2928

It may be said lastly that by his ‘modification’ of psycho-analysis Jung has given us a counterpart to the famous Lichtenberg knife. He has changed the hilt, and he has put a new blade into it; yet because the same name is engraved on it we are expected to regard the instrument as the original one.

I think I have made clear, on the contrary, that the new teaching which aims at replacing psycho-analysis signifies an abandonment of analysis and a secession from it. Some people may be inclined to fear that this secession is bound to have more momentous consequences for analysis than would another, owing to its having been started by men who have played so great a part in the movement and have done so much to advance it. I do not share this apprehension.

Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea; they become powerless when they oppose it. Psycho-analysis will survive this loss and gain new adherents in place of these. In conclusion, I can only express a wish that fortune may grant an agreeable upward journey to all those who have found their stay in the underworld of psycho-analysis too uncomfortable for their taste. The rest of us, I hope, will be permitted without hindrance to carry through to their conclusion our labours in the depths.

February, 1914.

2929

ON NARCISSISM: AN INTRODUCTION

(1914)

2930

Intentionally left blank

2931

ON NARCISSISM: AN INTRODUCTION

I

The term narcissism is derived from clinical description and was chosen by Paul Näcke in 1899 to denote the attitude of a person who treats his own body in the same way in which the body of a sexual object is ordinarily treated - who looks at it, that is to say, strokes it and fondles it till he obtains complete satisfaction through these activities. Developed to this degree, narcissism has the significance of a perversion that has absorbed the whole of the subject’s sexual life, and it will consequently exhibit the characteristics which we expect to meet with in the study of all perversions.

Psycho-analytic observers were subsequently struck by the fact that individual features of the narcissistic attitude are found in many people who suffer from other disorders - for instance, as Sadger has pointed out, in homosexuals - and finally it seemed probable that an allocation of the libido such as deserved to be described as narcissism might be present far more extensively, and that it might claim a place in the regular course of human sexual development.¹ Difficulties in psycho-analytic work upon neurotics led to the same supposition, for it seemed as though this kind of narcissistic attitude in them constituted one of the limits to their susceptibility to influence. Narcissism in this sense would not be a perversion, but the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation, a measure of which may justifiably be attributed to every living creature.

¹ Otto Rank (1911c).

On Narcissism: An Introduction

2932

A pressing motive for occupying ourselves with the conception of a primary and normal narcissism arose when the attempt was made to subsume what we know of dementia praecox (Kraepelin) or schizophrenia (Bleuler) under the hypothesis of the libido theory. Patients of this kind, whom I have proposed to term paraphrenics, display two fundamental characteristics: megalomania and diversion of their interest from the external world - from people and things. In consequence of the latter change, they become inaccessible to the influence of psycho-analysis and cannot be cured by our efforts. But the paraphrenic’s turning away from the external world needs to be more precisely characterized. A patient suffering from hysteria or obsessional neurosis has also, as far as his illness extends, given up his relation to reality. But analysis shows that he has by no means broken off his erotic relations to people and things. He still retains them in phantasy; i.e. he has, on the one hand, substituted for real objects imaginary ones from his memory, or has mixed the latter with the former; and on the other hand, he has renounced the initiation of motor activities for the attainment of his aims in connection with those objects. Only to this condition of the libido may we legitimately apply the term ‘introversion’ of the libido which is used by Jung indiscriminately. It is otherwise with the paraphrenic. He seems really to have withdrawn his libido from people and things in the external world, without replacing them by others in phantasy. When he does so replace them, the process seems to be a secondary one and to be part of an attempt at recovery, designed to lead the libido back to objects.¹

The question arises: What happens to the libido which has been withdrawn from external objects in schizophrenia? The megalomania characteristic of these states points the way. This megalomania has no doubt come into being at the expense of object-libido. The libido that has been withdrawn from the external world has been directed to the ego and thus gives rise to an attitude which may be called narcissism. But the megalomania itself is no new creation; on the contrary, it is, as we know, a magnification and plainer manifestation of a condition which had already existed previously. This leads us to look upon the narcissism which arises through the drawing in of object-cathexes as a secondary one, superimposed upon a primary narcissism that is obscured by a number of different influences.

¹ In connection with this see my discussion of the ‘end of the world’ in the analysis of Senatspräsident Schreber; also Abraham, 1908.

On Narcissism: An Introduction

2933

Let me insist that I am not proposing here to explain or penetrate further into the problem of schizophrenia, but that I am merely putting together what has already been said elsewhere, in order to justify the introduction of the concept of narcissism.

This extension of the libido theory - in my opinion, a legitimate one - receives reinforcement from a third quarter, namely, from our observations and views on the mental life of children and primitive peoples. In the latter we find characteristics which, if they occurred singly, might be put down to megalomania: an over-estimation of the power of their wishes and mental acts, the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’, a belief in the thaumaturgic force of words, and a technique for dealing with the external world - ‘magic’ - which appears to be a logical application of these grandiose premisses.¹ In the children of to-day, whose development is much more obscure to us, we expect to find an exactly analogous attitude towards the external world.² Thus we form the idea of there being an original libidinal cathexis of the ego, from which some is later given off to objects, but which fundamentally persists and is related to the object-cathexes much as the body of an amoeba is related to the pseudopodia which it puts out. In our researches, taking, as they did, neurotic symptoms for their starting-point, this part of the allocation of libido necessarily remained hidden from us at the outset. All that we noticed were the emanations of this libido - the object-cathexes, which can be sent out and drawn back again. We see also, broadly speaking, an antithesis between ego-libido and object-libido. The more of the one is employed, the more the other becomes depleted. The highest phase of development of which object-libido is capable is seen in the state of being in love, when the subject seems to give up his own personality in favour of an object-cathexis; while we have the opposite condition in the paranoic’s phantasy (or self-perception) of the ‘end of the world’.³ Finally, as regards the differentiation of psychical energies, we are led to the conclusion that to begin with, during the state of narcissism, they exist together and that our analysis is too coarse to distinguish between them; not until there is object-cathexis is it possible to discriminate a sexual energy - the libido - from an energy of the ego-instincts.

¹ Cf. the passages in my Totem and Taboo (1912-13) which deal with this subject.

² Cf. Ferenczi (1913a).

³  There are two mechanisms of this ‘end of the world’ idea: in the one case, the whole libidinal cathexis flows off to the loved object; in the other, it all flows back into the ego.

On Narcissism: An Introduction

2934

Before going any further I must touch on two questions which lead us to the heart of the difficulties of our subject. In the first place, what is the relation of the narcissism of which we are now speaking to auto-erotism, which we have described as an early state of the libido? Secondly, if we grant the ego a primary cathexis of libido, why is there any necessity for further distinguishing a sexual libido from a non-sexual energy of the ego-instincts? Would not the postulation of a single kind of psychical energy save us all the difficulties of differentiating an energy of the ego-instincts from ego-libido, and ego-libido from object-libido?

As regards the first question, I may point out that we are bound to suppose that a unity comparable to the ego cannot exist in the individual from the start; the ego has to be developed. The auto-erotic instincts, however, are there from the very first; so there must be something added to auto-erotism - a new psychical action - in order to bring about narcissism.

To be asked to give a definite answer to the second question must occasion perceptible uneasiness in every psycho-analyst. One dislikes the thought of abandoning observation for barren theoretical controversy, but nevertheless one must not shirk an attempt at clarification. It is true that notions such as that of an ego-libido, an energy of the ego-instincts, and so on, are neither particularly easy to grasp, nor sufficiently rich in content; a speculative theory of the relations in question would begin by seeking to obtain a sharply defined concept as its basis. But I am of opinion that that is just the difference between a speculative theory and a science erected on empirical interpretation. The latter will not envy speculation its privilege of having a smooth, logically unassailable foundation, but will gladly content itself with nebulous, scarcely imaginable basic concepts, which it hopes to apprehend more clearly in the course of its development, or which it is even prepared to replace by others. For these ideas are not the foundation of science, upon which everything rests: that foundation is observation alone. They are not the bottom but the top of the whole structure, and they can be replaced and discarded without damaging it. The same thing is happening in our day in the science of physics, the basic notions of which as regards matter, centres of force, attraction, etc., are scarcely less debatable than the corresponding notions in psycho-analysis.

The value of the concepts ‘ego-libido’ and ‘object-libido’ lies in the fact that they are derived from the study of the intimate characteristics of neurotic and psychotic processes. A differentiation of libido into a kind which is proper to the ego and one which is attached to objects is an unavoidable corollary to an original hypothesis which distinguished between sexual instincts and ego-instincts. At any rate, analysis of the pure transference neuroses (hysteria and obsessional neurosis) compelled me to make this distinction and I only know that all attempts to account for these phenomena by other means have been completely unsuccessful.

On Narcissism: An Introduction

2935

In the total absence of any theory of the instincts which would help us to find our bearings, we may be permitted, or rather, it is incumbent upon us, to start off by working out some hypothesis to its logical conclusion, until it either breaks down or is confirmed. There are various points in favour of the hypothesis of there having been from the first a separation between sexual instincts and others, ego-instincts, besides the serviceability of such a hypothesis in the analysis of the transference neuroses. I admit that this latter consideration alone would not be unambiguous, for it might be a question of an indifferent psychical energy which only becomes libido through the act of cathecting an object. But, in the first place, the distinction made in this concept corresponds to the common, popular distinction between hunger and love. In the second place, there are biological considerations in its favour. The individual does actually carry on a twofold existence: one to serve his own purposes and the other as a link in a chain, which he serves against his will, or at least involuntarily. The individual himself regards sexuality as one of his own ends; whereas from another point of view he is an appendage to his germ plasm, at whose disposal he puts his energies in return for a bonus of pleasure. He is the mortal vehicle of a (possibly) immortal substance - like the inheritor of an entailed property, who is only the temporary holder of an estate which survives him. The separation of the sexual instincts from the ego-instincts would simply reflect this twofold function of the individual. Thirdly, we must recollect that all our provisional ideas in psychology will presumably some day be based on an organic substructure. This makes it probable that it is special substances and chemical processes which perform the operations of sexuality and provide for the extension of individual life into that of the species. We are taking this probability into account in replacing the special chemical substances by special psychical forces.

On Narcissism: An Introduction

2936

I try in general to keep psychology clear from everything that is different in nature from it, even biological lines of thought. For that very reason I should like at this point expressly to admit that the hypothesis of separate ego-instincts and sexual instincts (that is to say, the libido theory) rests scarcely at all upon a psychological basis, but derives its principal support from biology. But I shall be consistent enough to drop this hypothesis if psycho-analytic work should itself produce some other, more serviceable hypothesis about the instincts. So far, this has not happened. It may turn out that, most basically and on the longest view, sexual energy - libido - is only the product of a differentiation in the energy at work generally in the mind. But such an assertion has no relevance. It relates to matters which are so remote from the problems of our observation, and of which we have so little cognizance, that it is as idle to dispute it as to affirm it; this primal identity may well have as little to do with our analytic interests as the primal kinship of all the races of mankind has to do with the proof of kinship required in order to establish a legal right of inheritance. All these speculations take us nowhere. Since we cannot wait for another science to present us with the final conclusions on the theory of the instincts, it is far more to the purpose that we should try to see what light may be thrown upon this basic problem of biology by a synthesis of the psychological phenomena. Let us face the possibility of error; but do not let us be deterred from pursuing the logical implications of the hypothesis we first adopted of an antithesis between ego-instincts and sexual instincts (a hypothesis to which we were forcibly led by analysis of the transference neuroses), and from seeing whether it turns out to be without contradictions and fruitful, and whether it can be applied to other disorders as well, such as schizophrenia.

On Narcissism: An Introduction

2937

It would, of course, be a different matter if it were proved that the libido theory has already come to grief in the attempt to explain the latter disease. This has been asserted by C. G. Jung (1912) and it is on that account that I have been obliged to enter upon this last discussion, which I would gladly have been spared. I should have preferred to follow to its end the course embarked upon in the analysis of the Schreber case without any discussion of its premisses. But Jung’s assertion is, to say the least of it, premature. The grounds he gives for it are scanty. In the first place, he appeals to an admission of my own that I myself have been obliged, owing to the difficulties of the Schreber analysis, to extend the concept of libido (that is, to give up its sexual content) and to identify libido with psychical interest in general. Ferenczi (1913b), in an exhaustive criticism of Jung’s work, has already said all that is necessary in correction of this erroneous interpretation. I can only corroborate his criticism and repeat that I have never made any such retractation of the libido theory. Another argument of Jung’s, namely, that we cannot suppose that the withdrawal of the libido is in itself enough to bring about the loss of the normal function of reality, is no argument but a dictum. It ‘begs the question’,¹ and saves discussion; for whether and how this is possible was precisely the point that should have been under investigation. In his next major work, Jung (1913) just misses the solution I had long since indicated: ‘At the same time’, he writes, ‘there is this to be further taken into consideration (a point to which, incidentally, Freud refers in his work on the Schreber case) - that the introversion of the libido sexualis leads to a cathexis of the "ego", and that it may possibly be this that produces the result of a loss of reality. It is indeed a tempting possibility to explain the psychology of the loss of reality in this fashion.’ But Jung does not enter much further into a discussion of this possibility. A few lines later he dismisses it with the remark that this determinant ‘would result in the psychology of an ascetic anchorite, not in a dementia praecox’. How little this inapt analogy can help us to decide the question may be learnt from the consideration that an anchorite of this kind, who ‘tries to eradicate every trace of sexual interest’ (but only in the popular sense of the word ‘sexual’), does not even necessarily display any pathogenic allocation of the libido. He may have diverted his sexual interest from human beings entirely, and yet may have sublimated it into a heightened interest in the divine, in nature, or in the animal kingdom, without his libido having undergone an introversion on to his phantasies or a return to his ego. This analogy would seem to rule out in advance the possibility of differentiating between interest emanating from erotic sources and from others. Let us remember, further, that the researches of the Swiss school, however valuable, have elucidated only two features in the picture of dementia praecox - the presence in it of complexes known to us both in healthy and neurotic subjects, and the similarity of the phantasies that occur in it to popular myths - but that they have not been able to throw any further light on the mechanism of the disease. We may repudiate Jung’s assertion, then, that the libido theory has come to grief in the attempt to explain dementia praecox, and that it is therefore disposed of for the other neuroses as well.

¹ [In English in the original.]

On Narcissism: An Introduction

2938

II

Certain special difficulties seem to me to lie in the way of a direct study of narcissism. Our chief means of access to it will probably remain the analysis of the paraphrenias. Just as the transference neuroses have enabled us to trace the libidinal instinctual impulses, so dementia praecox and paranoia will give us an insight into the psychology of the ego. Once more, in order to arrive at an understanding of what seems so simple in normal phenomena, we shall have to turn to the field of pathology with its distortions and exaggerations. At the same time, other means of approach remain open to us, by which we may obtain a better knowledge of narcissism. These I shall now discuss in the following order: the study of organic disease, of hypochondria and of the erotic life of the sexes.

In estimating the influence of organic disease upon the distribution of libido, I follow a suggestion made to me orally by Sándor Ferenczi. It is universally known, and we take it as a matter of course, that a person who is tormented by organic pain and discomfort gives up his interest in the things of the external world, in so far as they do not concern his suffering. Closer observation teaches us that he also withdraws libidinal interest from his love-objects: so long as he suffers, he ceases to love. The commonplace nature of this fact is no reason why we should be deterred from translating it into terms of the libido theory. We should then say:(the sick man withdraws his libidinal cathexes back upon his own ego, and sends them out again when he recovers. ‘Concentrated is his soul’, says Wilhelm Busch of the poet suffering from toothache, ‘in his molar’s narrow hole.’ Here libido and ego-interest share the same fate and are once more indistinguishable from each other. The familiar egoism of the sick person covers both. We find it so natural because we are certain that in the same situation we should behave in just the same way. The way in which a lover’s feelings, however strong, are banished by bodily ailments, and suddenly replaced by complete indifference, is a theme which has been exploited by comic writers to an appropriate extent.

On Narcissism: An Introduction

2939

The condition of sleep, too, resembles illness in implying a narcissistic withdrawal of the positions of the libido on to the subject’s own self, or, more precisely, on to the single wish to sleep. The egoism of dreams fits very well into this context. In both states we have, if nothing else, examples of changes in the distribution of libido that are consequent upon an alteration of the ego.

Hypochondria, like organic disease, manifests itself in distressing and painful bodily sensations, and it has the same effect as organic disease on the distribution of libido. The hypochondriac withdraws both interest and libido - the latter specially markedly - from the objects of the external world and concentrates both of them upon the organ that is engaging his attention. A difference between hypochondria and organic disease now becomes evident: in the latter, the distressing sensations are based upon demonstrable changes; in the former, this is not so. But it would be entirely in keeping with our general conception of the processes of neurosis if we decided to say that hypochondria must be right: organic changes must be supposed to be present in it, too.

But what could these changes be? We will let ourselves be guided at this point by our experience, which shows that bodily sensations of an unpleasurable nature, comparable to those of hypochondria, occur in the other neuroses as well. I have said before that I am inclined to class hypochondria with neurasthenia and anxiety-neurosis as a third ‘actual’ neurosis. It would probably not be going too far to suppose that in the case of the other neuroses a small amount of hypochondria was regularly formed at the same time as well. We have the best example of this, I think, in anxiety neurosis with its superstructure of hysteria. Now the familiar prototype of an organ that is painfully tender, that is in some way changed and that is yet not diseased in the ordinary sense, is the genital organ in its states of excitation. In that condition it becomes congested with blood, swollen and humected, and is the seat of a multiplicity of sensations. Let us now, taking any part of the body, describe its activity of sending sexually exciting stimuli to the mind as its ‘erotogenicity’, and let us further reflect that the considerations on which our theory of sexuality was based have long accustomed us to the notion that certain other parts of the body - the ‘erotogenic’ zones - may act as substitutes for the genitals and behave analogously to them. We have then only one more step to take. We can decide to regard erotogenicity as a general characteristic of all organs and may then speak of an increase or decrease of it in a particular part of the body. For every such change in the erotogenicity of the organs there might then be a parallel change of libidinal cathexis in the ego. Such factors would constitute what we believe to underlie hypochondria and what may have the same effect upon the distribution of libido as is produced by a material illness of the organs.

On Narcissism: An Introduction

2940

We see that, if we follow up this line of thought, we come up against the problem not only of hypochondria, but of the other ‘actual’ neuroses - neurasthenia and anxiety neurosis. Let us therefore stop at this point. It is not within the scope of a purely psychological inquiry to penetrate so far behind the frontiers of physiological research. I will merely mention that from this point of view we may suspect that the relation of hypochondria to paraphrenia is similar to that of the other ‘actual’ neuroses to hysteria and obsessional neurosis: we may suspect, that is, that it is dependent on ego-libido just as the others are on object-libido, and that hypochondriacal anxiety is the counterpart, as coming from ego-libido, to neurotic anxiety. Further, since we are already familiar with the idea that the mechanism of falling ill and of the formation of symptoms in the transference neuroses - the path from introversion to regression - is to be linked to a damming-up of object-libido,¹ we may come to closer quarters with the idea of a damming-up of ego-libido as well and may bring this idea into relation with the phenomena of hypochondria and paraphrenia.

At this point, our curiosity will of course raise the question why this damming-up of libido in the ego should have to be experienced as unpleasurable. I shall content myself with the answer that unpleasure is always the expression of a higher degree of tension, and that therefore what is happening is that a quantity in the field of material events is being transformed here as elsewhere into the psychical quality of unpleasure. Nevertheless it may be that what is decisive for the generation of unpleasure is not the absolute magnitude of the material event, but rather some particular function of that absolute magnitude. Here we may even venture to touch on the question of what makes it necessary at all for our mental life to pass beyond the limits of narcissism and to attach the libido to objects. The answer which would follow from our line of thought would once more be that this necessity arises when the cathexis of the ego with libido exceeds a certain amount. A strong egoism is a protection against falling ill, but in the last resort we must begin to love in order not to fall ill, and we are bound to fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we are unable to love. This follows somewhat on the lines of Heine’s picture of the psychogenesis of the Creation:

Krankheit ist wohl der letzte Grund

Des ganzen Schöpferdrangs gewesen;

Erschaffend konnte ich genesen,

Erschaffend wurde ich gesund.²

We have recognized our mental apparatus as being first and foremost a device designed for mastering excitations which would otherwise be felt as distressing or would have pathogenic effects. Working them over in the mind helps remarkably towards an internal draining away of excitations which are incapable of direct discharge outwards, or for which such a discharge is for the moment undesirable. In the first instance, however, it is a matter of indifference whether this internal process of working-over is carried out upon real or imaginary objects. The difference does not appear till later - if the turning of the libido on to unreal objects (introversion) has led to its being dammed up. In paraphrenics, megalomania allows of a similar internal working-over of libido which has returned to the ego; perhaps it is only when the megalomania fails that the damming-up of libido in the ego becomes pathogenic and starts the process of recovery which gives us the impression of being a disease.

¹ Cf. ‘Types of Onset of Neurosis’ (1912c).

² [‘Illness was no doubt the final cause of the whole urge to create. By creating, I could recover; by creating, I became healthy.’]

On Narcissism: An Introduction

2941

I shall try here to penetrate a little further into the mechanism of paraphrenia and shall bring together those views which already seem to me to deserve consideration. The difference between paraphrenic affections and the transference neuroses appears to me to lie in the circumstance that, in the former, the libido that is liberated by frustration does not remain attached to objects in phantasy, but withdraws on to the ego. Megalomania would accordingly correspond to the psychical mastering of this latter amount of libido, and would thus be the counterpart of the introversion on to phantasies that is found in the transference neuroses; a failure of this psychical function gives rise to the hypochondria of paraphrenia and this is homologous to the anxiety of the transference neuroses. We know that this anxiety can be resolved by further psychical working over, i.e. by conversion, reaction-formation or the construction of protections (phobias). The corresponding process in paraphrenics is an attempt at restoration, to which the striking manifestations of the disease are due. Since paraphrenia frequently, if not usually, brings about only a partial detachment of the libido from objects, we can distinguish three groups of phenomena in the clinical picture: (1) those representing what remains of a normal state or of neurosis (residual phenomena); (2) those representing the morbid process (detachment of libido from its objects and, further, megalomania, hypochondria, affective disturbance and every kind of regression); (3) those representing restoration, in which the libido is once more attached to objects, after the manner of a hysteria (in dementia praecox or paraphrenia proper), or of an obsessional neurosis (in paranoia). This fresh libidinal cathexis differs from the primary one in that it starts from another level and under other conditions. The difference between the transference neuroses brought about in the case of this fresh kind of libidinal cathexis and the corresponding formations where the ego is normal should be able to afford us the deepest insight into the structure of our mental apparatus.

On Narcissism: An Introduction

2942

A third way in which we may approach the study of narcissism is by observing the erotic life of human beings, with its many kinds of differentiation in man and woman. Just as object-libido at first concealed ego-libido from our observation, so too in connection with the object-choice of infants (and of growing children) what we first noticed was that they derived their sexual objects from their experiences of satisfaction. The first auto-erotic sexual satisfactions are experienced in connection with vital functions which serve the purpose of self-preservation. The sexual instincts are at the outset attached to the satisfaction of the ego-instincts; only later do they become independent of these, and even then we have an indication of that original attachment in the fact that the persons who are concerned with a child’s feeding, care, and protection become his earliest sexual objects: that is to say, in the first instance his mother or a substitute for her. Side by side, however, with this type and source of object-choice, which may be called the ‘anaclitic’ or ‘attachment’ type, psycho-analytic research has revealed a second type, which we were not prepared for finding. We have discovered, especially clearly in people whose libidinal development has suffered some disturbance, such as perverts and homosexuals, that in their later choice of love-objects they have taken as a model not their mother but their own selves. They are plainly seeking themselves as a love-object, and are exhibiting a type of object-choice which must be termed ‘narcissistic’. In this observation we have the strongest of the reasons which have led us to adopt the hypothesis of narcissism.

On Narcissism: An Introduction

2943

We have, however, not concluded that human beings are divided into two sharply differentiated groups, according as their object-choice conforms to the anaclitic or to the narcissistic type; we assume rather that both kinds of object-choice are open to each individual, though he may show a preference for one or the other. We say that a human being has originally two sexual objects - himself and the woman who nurses him - and in doing so we are postulating a primary narcissism in everyone, which may in some cases manifest itself in a dominating fashion in his object-choice.

A comparison of the male and female sexes then shows that there are fundamental differences between them in respect of their type of object-choice, although these differences are of course not universal. Complete object-love of the attachment type is, properly speaking, characteristic of the male. It displays the marked sexual overvaluation which is doubtless derived from the child’s original narcissism and thus corresponds to a transference of that narcissism to the sexual object. This sexual overvaluation is the origin of the peculiar state of being in love, a state suggestive of a neurotic compulsion, which is thus traceable to an impoverishment of the ego as regards libido in favour of the love-object. A different course is followed in the type of female most frequently met with, which is probably the purest and truest one. With the onset of puberty the maturing of the female sexual organs, which up till then have been in a condition of latency, seems to bring about an intensification of the original narcissism, and this is unfavourable to the development of a true object-choice with its accompanying sexual overvaluation. Women, especially if they grow up with good looks, develop a certain self-contentment which compensates them for the social restrictions that are imposed upon them in their choice of object. Strictly speaking, it is only themselves that such women love with an intensity comparable to that of the man’s love for them. Nor does their need lie in the direction of loving, but of being loved; and the man who fulfils this condition is the one who finds favour with them. The importance of this type of woman for the erotic life of mankind is to be rated very high. Such women have the greatest fascination for men, not only for aesthetic reasons, since as a rule they are the most beautiful, but also because of a combination of interesting psychological factors. For it seems very evident that another person’s narcissism has a great attraction for those who have renounced part of their own narcissism and are in search of object-love. The charm of a child lies to a great extent in his narcissism, his self-contentment and inaccessibility, just as does the charm of certain animals which seem not to concern themselves about us, such as cats and the large beasts of prey. Indeed, even great criminals and humorists, as they are represented in literature, compel our interest by the narcissistic consistency with which they manage to keep away from their ego anything that would diminish it. It is as if we envied them for maintaining a blissful state of mind - an unassailable libidinal position which we ourselves have since abandoned. The great charm of narcissistic women has, however, its reverse side; a large part of the lover’s dissatisfaction, of his doubts of the woman’s love, of his complaints of her enigmatic nature, has its root in this incongruity between the types of object-choice.

On Narcissism: An Introduction

2944

Perhaps it is not out of place here to give an assurance that this description of the feminine form of erotic life is not due to my tendentious desire on my part to depreciate women. Apart from the fact that tendentiousness is quite alien to me, I know that these different lines of development correspond to the differentiation of functions in a highly complicated biological whole; further, I am ready to admit that there are quite a number of women who love according to the masculine type and who also develop the sexual overvaluation proper to that type.

Even for narcissistic women, whose attitude towards men remains cool, there is a road which leads to complete object-love. In the child which they bear, a part of their own body confronts them like an extraneous object, to which, starting out from their narcissism, they can then give complete object-love. There are other women, again, who do not have to wait for a child in order to take the step in development from (secondary) narcissism to object-love. Before puberty they feel masculine and develop some way along masculine lines; after this trend has been cut short on their reaching female maturity, they still retain the capacity of longing for a masculine ideal - an ideal which is in fact a survival of the boyish nature that they themselves once possessed.

What I have so far said by way of indication may be concluded by a short summary of the paths leading to the choice of an object.

A person may love:-

(1) According to the narcissistic type:

(a) what he himself is (i.e. himself),

(b) what he himself was,

(c) what he himself would like to be,

(d) someone who was once part of himself.

(2) According to the anaclitic (attachment) type:

(a) the woman who feeds him,

(b) the man who protects him,

and the succession of substitutes who take their place. The inclusion of case (c) of the first type cannot be justified till a later stage of this discussion.

The significance of narcissistic object-choice for homosexuality in men must be considered in another connection.

On Narcissism: An Introduction

2945

The primary narcissism of children which we have assumed and which forms one of the postulates of our theories of the libido, is less easy to grasp by direct observation than to confirm by inference from elsewhere. If we look at the attitude of affectionate parents towards their children, we have to recognize that it is a revival and reproduction of their own narcissism, which they have long since abandoned. The trustworthy pointer constituted by overvaluation, which we have already recognized as a narcissistic stigma in the case of object-choice, dominates, as we all know, their emotional attitude. Thus they are under a compulsion to ascribe every perfection to the child - which sober observation would find no occasion to do - and to conceal and forget all his shortcomings. (Incidentally, the denial of sexuality in children is connected with this.) Moreover, they are inclined to suspend in the child’s favour the operation of all the cultural acquisitions which their own narcissism has been forced to respect, and to renew on his behalf the claims to privileges which were long ago given up by themselves. The child shall have a better time than his parents; he shall not be subject to the necessities which they have recognized as paramount in life. Illness, death, renunciation of enjoyment, restrictions on his own will, shall not touch him; the laws of nature and of society shall be abrogated in his favour; he shall once more really be the centre and core of creation - ‘His Majesty the Baby’,¹ as we once fancied ourselves. The child shall fulfil those wishful dreams of the parents which they never carried out - the boy shall become a great man and a hero in his father’s place, and the girl shall marry a prince as a tardy compensation for her mother. At the most touchy point in the narcissistic system, the immortality of the ego, which is so hard pressed by reality, security is achieved by taking refuge in the child. Parental love, which is so moving and at bottom so childish, is nothing but the parents’ narcissism born again, which, transformed into object-love, unmistakably reveals its former nature.

¹ [In English in the original.]

On Narcissism: An Introduction

2946

III

The disturbances to which a child’s original narcissism is exposed, the reactions with which he seeks to protect himself from them and the paths into which he is forced in doing so - these are themes which I propose to leave on one side, as an important field of work which still awaits exploration. The most significant portion of it, however, can be singled out in the shape of the ‘castration complex’ (in boys, anxiety about the penis - in girls, envy for the penis) and treated in connection with the effect of early deterrence from sexual activity. Psycho-analytic research ordinarily enables us to trace the vicissitudes undergone by the libidinal instincts when these, isolated from the ego-instincts, are placed in opposition to them; but in the particular field of the castration complex, it allows us to infer the existence of an epoch and a psychical situation in which the two groups of instincts, still operating in unison and inseparably mingled, make their appearance as narcissistic interests. It is from this context that Adler has derived his concept of the ‘masculine protest’, which he has elevated almost to the position of the sole motive force in the formation of character and neurosis alike and which he bases not on a narcissistic, and therefore still a libidinal, trend, but on a social valuation. Psycho-analytic research has from the very beginning recognized the existence and importance of the ‘masculine protest’, but it has regarded it, in opposition to Adler, as narcissistic in nature and derived from the castration complex. The ‘masculine protest’ is concerned in the formation of character, into the genesis of which it enters along with many other factors, but it is completely unsuited for explaining the problems of the neuroses, with regard to which Adler takes account of nothing but the manner in which they serve the ego-instincts. I find it quite impossible to place the genesis of neurosis upon the narrow basis of the castration complex, however powerfully it may come to the fore in men among their resistances to the cure of a neurosis. Incidentally, I know of cases of neurosis in which the ‘masculine protest’, or, as we regard it, the castration complex, plays no pathogenic part, and even fails to appear at all.

On Narcissism: An Introduction

2947

Observation of normal adults shows that their former megalomania has been damped down and that the psychical characteristics from which we inferred their infantile narcissism have been effaced. What has become of their ego-Iibido? Are we to suppose that the whole amount of it has passed into object-cathexes? Such a possibility is plainly contrary to the whole trend of our argument; but we may find a hint at another answer to the question in the psychology of repression.

We have learnt that libidinal instinctual impulses undergo the vicissitude of pathogenic repression if they come into conflict with the subject’s cultural and ethical ideas. By this we never mean that the individual in question has a merely intellectual knowledge of the existence of such ideas; we always mean that he recognizes them as a standard for himself and submits to the claims they make on him. Repression, we have said, proceeds from the ego; we might say with greater precision that it proceeds from the self-respect of the ego. The same impressions, experiences, impulses and desires that one man indulges or at least works over consciously will be rejected with the utmost indignation by another, or even stifled before they enter consciousness. The difference between the two, which contains the conditioning factor of repression, can easily be expressed in terms which enable it to be explained by the libido theory. We can say that the one man has set up an ideal in himself by which he measures his actual ego, while the other has formed no such ideal. For the ego the formation of an ideal would be the conditioning factor of repression.

On Narcissism: An Introduction

2948

This ideal ego is now the target of the self-love which was enjoyed in childhood by the actual ego. The subject’s narcissism makes its appearance displaced on to this new ideal ego, which, like the infantile ego, finds itself possessed of every perfection that is of value. As always where the libido is concerned, man has here again shown himself incapable of giving up a satisfaction he had once enjoyed. He is not willing to forgo the narcissistic perfection of his childhood; and when, as he grows up, he is disturbed by the admonitions of others and by the awakening of his own critical judgement, so that he can no longer retain that perfection, he seeks to recover it in the new form of an ego ideal. What he projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal.

We are naturally led to examine the relation between this forming of an ideal and sublimation. Sublimation is a process that concerns object-libido and consists in the instinct’s directing itself towards an aim other than, and remote from, that of sexual satisfaction; in this process the accent falls upon deflection from sexuality. Idealization is a process that concerns the object; by it that object, without any alteration in its nature, is aggrandized and exalted in the subject’s mind. Idealization is possible in the sphere of ego-libido as well as in that of object-libido. For example, the sexual overvaluation of an object is an idealization of it. In so far as sublimation describes something that has to do with the instinct and idealization something to do with the object, the two concepts are to be distinguished from each other.

The formation of an ego ideal is often confused with the sublimation of instinct, to the detriment of our understanding of the facts. A man who has exchanged his narcissism for homage to a high ego ideal has not necessarily on that account succeeded in sublimating his libidinal instincts. It is true that the ego ideal demands such sublimation, but it cannot enforce it; sublimation remains a special process which may be prompted by the ideal but the execution of which is entirely independent of any such prompting. It is precisely in neurotics that we find the highest differences of potential between the development of their ego ideal and the amount of sublimation of their primitive libidinal instincts; and in general it is far harder to convince an idealist of the inexpedient location of his libido than a plain man whose pretensions have remained more moderate. Further, the formation of an ego ideal and sublimation are quite differently related to the causation of neurosis. As we have learnt, the formation of an ideal heightens the demands of the ego and is the most powerful factor favouring repression; sublimation is a way out, a way by which those demands can be met without involving repression.

On Narcissism: An Introduction

2949

It would not surprise us if we were to find a special psychical agency which performs the task of seeing that narcissistic satisfaction from the ego ideal is ensured and which, with this end in view, constantly watches the actual ego and measures it by that ideal. If such an agency does exist, we cannot possibly come upon it as a discovery - we can only recognize it; for we may reflect that what we call our ‘conscience’ has the required characteristics. Recognition of this agency enables us to understand the so-called ‘delusions of being noticed’ or more correctly, of being watched, which are such striking symptoms in the paranoid diseases and which may also occur as an isolated form of illness, or intercalated in a transference neurosis. Patients of this sort complain that all their thoughts are known and their actions watched and supervised; they are informed of the functioning of this agency by voices which characteristically speak to them in the third person (‘Now she’s thinking of that again’, ‘now he’s going out’). This complaint is justified; it describes the truth. A power of this kind, watching, discovering and criticizing all our intentions, does really exist. Indeed, it exists in every one of us in normal life.

Delusions of being watched present this power in a regressive form, thus revealing its genesis and the reason why the patient is in revolt against it. For what prompted the subject to form an ego ideal, on whose behalf his conscience acts as watchman, arose from the critical influence of his parents (conveyed to him by the medium of the voice), to whom were added, as time went on, those who trained and taught him and the innumerable and indefinable host of all the other people in his environment - his fellow-men - and public opinion.

In this way large amounts of libido of an essentially homosexual kind are drawn into the formation of the narcissistic ego ideal and find outlet and satisfaction in maintaining it. The institution of conscience was at bottom an embodiment, first of parental criticism, and subsequently of that of society - a process which is repeated in what takes place when a tendency towards repression develops out of a prohibition or obstacle that came in the first instance from without. The voices, as well as the undefined multitude, are brought into the foreground again by the disease, and so the evolution of conscience is reproduced regressively. But the revolt against this ‘censoring agency’ arises out of the subject’s desire (in accordance with the fundamental character of his illness) to liberate himself from all these influences, beginning with the parental one, and out of his withdrawal of homosexual libido from them. His conscience then confronts him in a regressive form as a hostile influence from without.

The complaints made by paranoics also show that at bottom the self-criticism of conscience coincides with the self-observation on which it is based. Thus the activity of the mind which has taken over the function of conscience has also placed itself at the service of internal research, which furnishes philosophy with the material for its intellectual operations. This may have some bearing on the characteristic tendency of paranoics to construct speculative systems.¹

¹ I should like to add to this, merely by way of suggestion, that the developing and strengthening of this observing agency might contain within it the subsequent genesis of (subjective) memory and the time-factor, the latter of which has no application to unconscious processes.

On Narcissism: An Introduction

2950

It will certainly be of importance to us if evidence of the activity of this critically observing agency - which becomes heightened into conscience and philosophic introspection - can be found in other fields as well. I will mention here what Herbert Silberer has called the ‘functional phenomenon’, one of the few indisputably valuable additions to the theory of dreams. Silberer, as we know, has shown that in states between sleeping and waking we can directly observe the translation of thoughts into visual images, but that in these circumstances we frequently have a representation, not of a thought-content, but of the actual state (willingness, fatigue, etc.) of the person who is struggling against sleep. Similarly, he has shown that the conclusions of some dreams or some divisions in their content merely signify the dreamer’s own perception of his sleeping and waking. Silberer has thus demonstrated the part played by observation - in the sense of the paranoic’s delusions of being watched - in the formation of dreams. This part is not a constant one. Probably the reason why I overlooked it is because it does not play any great part in my own dreams; in persons who are gifted philosophically and accustomed to introspection it may become very evident.

We may here recall that we have found that the formation of dreams takes place under the dominance of a censorship which compels distortion of the dream-thoughts. We did not, however, picture this censorship as a special power, but chose the term to designate one side of the repressive trends that govern the ego, namely the side which is turned towards the dream-thoughts. If we enter further into the structure of the ego, we may recognize in the ego ideal and in the dynamic utterances of conscience the dream-censor as well. If this censor is to some extent on the alert even during sleep, we can understand how it is that its suggested activity of self-observation and self-criticism - with such thoughts as, ‘now he is too sleepy to think’, ‘now he is waking up’ - makes a contribution to the content of the dream.¹

¹ I cannot here determine whether the differentiation of the censoring agency from the rest of the ego is capable of forming the basis of the philosophic distinction between consciousness and self-consciousness.

On Narcissism: An Introduction

2951

At this point we may attempt some discussion of the self-regarding attitude in normal people and in neurotics.

In the first place self-regard appears to us to be an expression of the size of the ego; what the various elements are which go to determine that size is irrelevant. Everything a person possesses or achieves, every remnant of the primitive feeling of omnipotence which his experience has confirmed, helps to increase his self-regard.

Applying our distinction between sexual and ego-instincts, we must recognize that self-regard has a specially intimate dependence on narcissistic libido. Here we are supported by two fundamental facts: that in paraphrenics self-regard is increased, while in the transference neuroses it is diminished; and that in love-relations not being loved lowers the self-regarding feelings, while being loved raises them. As we have indicated, the aim and the satisfaction in a narcissistic object-choice is to be loved.

Further, it is easy to observe that libidinal object-cathexis does not raise self-regard. The effect of dependence upon the loved object is to lower that feeling: a person in love is humble. A person who loves has, so to speak, forfeited a part of his narcissism, and it can only be replaced by his being loved. In all these respects self-regard seems to remain related to the narcissistic element in love.

The realization of impotence, of one’s own inability to love, in consequence of mental or physical disorder, has an exceedingly lowering effect upon self-regard. Here, in my judgement, we must look for one of the sources of the feelings of inferiority which are experienced by patients suffering from the transference neuroses and which they are so ready to report. The main source of these feelings is, however, the impoverishment of the ego, due to the extraordinarily large libidinal cathexes which have been withdrawn from it - due, that is to say, to the injury sustained by the ego through sexual trends which are no longer subject to control.

On Narcissism: An Introduction

2952

Adler is right in maintaining that when a person with an active mental life recognizes an inferiority in one of his organs, it acts as a spur and calls out a higher level of performance in him through overcompensation. But it would be altogether an exaggeration if, following Adler’s example, we sought to attribute every successful achievement to this factor of an original inferiority of an organ. Not all artists are handicapped with bad eyesight, nor were all orators originally stammerers. And there are plenty of instances of excellent achievements springing from superior organic endowment. In the aetiology of neuroses organic inferiority and imperfect development play an insignificant part - much the same as that played by currently active perceptual material in the formation of dreams. Neuroses make use of such inferiorities as a pretext, just as they do of every other suitable factor. We may be tempted to believe a neurotic woman patient when she tells us that it was inevitable she should fall ill, since she is ugly, deformed or lacking in charm, so that no one could love her; but the very next neurotic will teach us better - for she persists in her neurosis and in her aversion to sexuality, although she seems more desirable, and is more desired, than the average woman. The majority of hysterical women are among the attractive and even beautiful representatives of their sex, while, on the other hand, the frequency of ugliness, organic defects and infirmities in the lower classes of society does not increase the incidence of neurotic illness among them.

The relations of self-regard to erotism - that is, to libidinal object-cathexes - may be expressed concisely in the following way. Two cases must be distinguished, according to whether the erotic cathexes are ego-syntonic, or, on the contrary, have suffered repression. In the former case (where the use made of the libido is ego-syntonic), love is assessed like any other activity of the ego. Loving in itself, in so far as it involves longing and deprivation, lowers self-regard; whereas being loved, having one’s love returned, and possessing the loved object, raises it once more. When libido is repressed, the erotic cathexis is felt as a severe depletion of the ego, the satisfaction of love is impossible, and the re-enrichment of the ego can be effected only by a withdrawal of libido from its objects. The return of the object-libido to the ego and its transformation into narcissism represents, as it were, a happy love once more; and, on the other hand, it is also true that a real happy love corresponds to the primal condition in which object-libido and ego-libido cannot be distinguished.

On Narcissism: An Introduction

2953

The importance and extensiveness of the topic must be my justification for adding a few more remarks which are somewhat loosely strung together.

The development of the ego consists in a departure from primary narcissism and gives rise to a vigorous attempt to recover that state. This departure is brought about by means of the displacement of libido on to an ego ideal imposed from without; and satisfaction is brought about from fulfilling this ideal.

At the same time the ego has sent out the libidinal object-cathexes. It becomes impoverished in favour of these cathexes, just as it does in favour of the ego ideal, and it enriches itself once more from its satisfactions in respect of the object, just as it does by fulfilling its ideal.

One part of self-regard is primary - the residue of infantile narcissism; another part arises out of the omnipotence which is corroborated by experience (the fulfilment of the ego ideal), whilst a third part proceeds from the satisfaction of object-libido.

The ego ideal has imposed severe conditions upon the satisfaction of libido through objects; for it causes some of them to be rejected by means of its censor, as being incompatible. Where no such ideal has been formed, the sexual trend in question makes its appearance unchanged in the personality in the form of a perversion. To be their own ideal once more, in regard to sexual no less than other trends, as they were in childhood - this is what people strive to attain as their happiness.

Being in love consists in a flowing-over of ego-libido on to the object. It has the power to remove repressions and re-instate perversions. It exalts the sexual object into a sexual ideal. Since, with the object type (or attachment type), being in love occurs in virtue of the fulfilment of infantile conditions for loving, we may say that whatever fulfils that condition is idealized.

On Narcissism: An Introduction

2954

The sexual ideal may enter into an interesting auxiliary relation to the ego ideal. It may be used for substitutive satisfaction where narcissistic satisfaction encounters real hindrances. In that case a person will love in conformity with the narcissistic type of object-choice, will love what he once was and no longer is, or else what possesses the excellences which he never had at all (cf. (c)). The formula parallel to the one there stated runs thus: what possesses the excellence which the ego lacks for making it an ideal, is loved. This expedient is of special importance for the neurotic, who, on account of his excessive object-cathexes, is impoverished in his ego and is incapable of fulfilling his ego ideal. He then seeks a way back to narcissism from his prodigal expenditure of libido upon objects, by choosing a sexual ideal after the narcissistic type which possesses the excellences to which he cannot attain. This is the cure by love, which he generally prefers to cure by analysis. Indeed, he cannot believe in any other mechanism of cure; he usually brings expectations of this sort with him to the treatment and directs them towards the person of the physician. The patient’s incapacity for love, resulting from his extensive repressions, naturally stands in the way of a therapeutic plan of this kind. An unintended result is often met with when, by means of the treatment, he has been partially freed from his repressions: he withdraws from further treatment in order to choose a love-object, leaving his cure to be continued by a life with someone he loves. We might be satisfied with this result, if it did not bring with it all the dangers of a crippling dependence upon his helper in need.

The ego ideal opens up an important avenue for the understanding of group psychology. In addition to its individual side, this ideal has a social side; it is also the common ideal of a family, a class or a nation. It binds not only a person’s narcissistic libido, but also a considerable amount of his homosexual libido, which is in this way turned back into the ego. The want of satisfaction which arises from the non-fulfilment of this ideal liberates homosexual libido, and this is transformed into a sense of guilt (social anxiety). Originally this sense of guilt was a fear of punishment by the parents, or, more correctly, the fear of losing their love; later the parents are replaced by an indefinite number of fellow-men. The frequent causation of paranoia by an injury to the ego, by a frustration of satisfaction within the sphere of the ego ideal, is thus made more intelligible, as is the convergence of ideal-formation and sublimation in the ego ideal, as well as the involution of sublimations and the possible transformation of ideals in paraphrenic disorders.

2955

INSTINCTS AND THEIR VICISSITUDES

(1915)

2956

Intentionally left blank

2957

INSTINCTS AND THEIR VICISSITUDES

We have often heard it maintained that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basic concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them. Even at the stage of description it is not possible to avoid applying certain abstract ideas to the material in hand, ideas derived from somewhere or other but certainly not from the new observations alone. Such ideas which will later become the basic concepts of the science are still more indispensable as the material is further worked over. They must at first necessarily possess some degree of indefiniteness; there can be no question of any clear delimitation of their content. So long as they remain in this condition, we come to an understanding about their meaning by making repeated references to the material of observation from which they appear to have been derived, but upon which, in fact, they have been imposed. Thus, strictly speaking, they are in the nature of conventions - although everything depends on their not being arbitrarily chosen but determined by their having significant relations to the empirical material, relations that we seem to sense before we can clearly recognize and demonstrate them. It is only after more thorough investigation of the field of observation that we are able to formulate its basic scientific concepts with increased precision, and progressively so to modify them that they become serviceable and consistent over a wide area. Then, indeed, the time may have come to confine them in definitions. The advance of knowledge, however, does not tolerate any rigidity even in definitions. Physics furnishes an excellent illustration of the way in which even ‘basic concepts’ that have been established in the form of definitions are constantly being altered in their content.

A conventional basic concept of this kind, which at the moment is still somewhat obscure but which is indispensable to us in psychology, is that of an ‘instinct [Trieb]’ . Let us try to give a content to it by approaching it from different angles.

Instincts And Their Vicissitudes

2958

First, from the angle of physiology. This has given us the concept of a ‘stimulus’ and the pattern of the reflex arc, according to which a stimulus applied to living tissue (nervous substance) from the outside is discharged by action to the outside. This action is expedient in so far as it withdraws the stimulated substance from the influence of the stimulus, removes it out of its range of operation.

What is the relation of ‘instinct’ to ‘stimulus’? There is nothing to prevent our subsuming the concept of ‘instinct’ under that of ‘stimulus’ and saying that an instinct is a stimulus applied to the mind. But we are immediately set on our guard against equating instinct and mental stimulus. There are obviously other stimuli to the mind besides those of an instinctual kind, stimuli which behave far more like physiological ones. For example, when a strong light falls on the eye, it is not an instinctual stimulus; it is one, however, when a dryness of the mucous membrane of the pharynx or an irritation of the mucous membrane of the stomach makes itself felt.¹

We have now obtained the material necessary for distinguishing between instinctual stimuli and other (physiological) stimuli that operate on the mind. In the first place, an instinctual stimulus does not arise from the external world but from within the organism itself. For this reason it operates differently upon the mind and different actions are necessary in order to remove it. Further, all that is essential in a stimulus is covered if we assume that it operates with a single impact, so that it can be disposed of by a single expedient action. A typical instance of this is motor flight from the source of stimulation. These impacts may, of course, be repeated and summated, but that makes no difference to our notion of the process and to the conditions for the removal of the stimulus. An instinct, on the other hand, never operates as a force giving a momentary impact but always as a constant one. Moreover, since it impinges not from without but from within the organism, no flight can avail against it. A better term for an instinctual stimulus is a ‘need’. What does away with a need is ‘satisfaction’. This can be attained only by an appropriate (‘adequate’) alteration of the internal source of stimulation.

¹ Assuming, of course, that these internal processes are the organic basis of the respective needs of thirst and hunger.

Instincts And Their Vicissitudes

2959

Let us imagine ourselves in the situation of an almost entirely helpless living organism, as yet unorientated in the world, which is receiving stimuli in its nervous substance. This organism will very soon be in a position to make a first distinction and a first orientation. On the one hand, it will be aware of stimuli which can be avoided by muscular action (flight); these it ascribes to an external world. On the other hand, it will also be aware of stimuli against which such action is of no avail and whose character of constant pressure persists in spite of it; these stimuli are the signs of an internal world, the evidence of instinctual needs. The perceptual substance of the living organism will thus have found in the efficacy of its muscular activity a basis for distinguishing between an ‘outside’ and an ‘inside’.

We thus arrive at the essential nature of instincts in the first place by considering their main characteristics - their origin in sources of stimulation within the organism and their appearance as a constant force - and from this we deduce one of their further features, namely, that no actions of flight avail against them. In the course of this discussion, however, we cannot fail to be struck by something that obliges us to make a further admission. In order to guide us in dealing with the field of psychological phenomena, we do not merely apply certain conventions to our empirical material as basic concepts; we also make use of a number of complicated postulates. We have already alluded to the most important of these, and all we need now do is to state it expressly. This postulate is of a biological nature, and makes use of the concept of ‘purpose’ (or perhaps of expediency) and runs as follows: the nervous system is an apparatus which has the function of getting rid of the stimuli that reach it, or of reducing them to the lowest possible level; or which, if it were feasible, would maintain itself in an altogether unstimulated condition. Let us for the present not take exception to the indefiniteness of this idea and let us assign to the nervous system the task - speaking in general terms - of mastering stimuli. We then see how greatly the simple pattern of the physiological reflex is complicated by the introduction of instincts. External stimuli impose only the single task of withdrawing from them; this is accomplished by muscular movements, one of which eventually achieves that aim and thereafter, being the expedient movement, becomes a hereditary disposition. Instinctual stimuli, which originate from within the organism, cannot be dealt with by this mechanism. Thus they make far higher demands on the nervous system and cause it to undertake involved and interconnected activities by which the external world is so changed as to afford satisfaction to the internal source of stimulation. Above all, they oblige the nervous system to renounce its ideal intention of keeping off stimuli, for they maintain an incessant and unavoidable afflux of stimulation. We may therefore well conclude that instincts and not external stimuli are the true motive forces behind the advances that have led the nervous system, with its unlimited capacities, to its present high level of development. There is naturally nothing to prevent our supposing that the instincts themselves are, at least in part, precipitates of the effects of external stimulation, which in the course of phylogenesis have brought about modifications in the living substance.

Instincts And Their Vicissitudes

2960

When we further find that the activity of even the most highly developed mental apparatus is subject to the pleasure principle, i. e. is automatically regulated by feelings belonging to the pleasure-unpleasure series, we can hardly reject the further hypothesis that these feelings reflect the manner in which the process of mastering stimuli takes place - certainly in the sense that unpleasurable feelings are connected with an increase and pleasurable feelings with a decrease of stimulus. We will, however, carefully preserve this assumption in its present highly indefinite form, until we succeed, if that is possible, in discovering what sort of relation exists between pleasure and unpleasure, on the one hand, and fluctuations in the amounts of stimulus affecting mental life, on the other. It is certain that many very various relations of this kind, and not very simple ones, are possible.

If now we apply ourselves to considering mental life from a biological point of view, an ‘instinct’ appears to us as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body.

We are now in a position to discuss certain terms which are used in reference to the concept of an instinct - for example, its ‘pressure’, its ‘aim’, its ‘object’ and its ‘source’.

By the pressure [Drang] of an instinct we understand its motor factor, the amount of force or the measure of the demand for work which it represents. The characteristic of exercising pressure is common to all instincts; it is in fact their very essence. Every instinct is a piece of activity; if we speak loosely of passive instincts, we can only mean instincts whose aim is passive.

The aim [Ziel] of an instinct is in every instance satisfaction, which can only be obtained by removing the state of stimulation at the source of the instinct. But although the ultimate aim of each instinct remains unchangeable, there may yet be different paths leading to the same ultimate aim; so that an instinct may be found to have various nearer or intermediate aims, which are combined or interchanged with one another. Experience permits us also to speak of instincts which are ‘inhibited in their aim’, in the case of processes which are allowed to make some advance towards instinctual satisfaction but are then inhibited or deflected. We may suppose that even processes of this kind involve a partial satisfaction.

The object [Objekt] of an instinct is the thing in regard to which or through which the instinct is able to achieve its aim. It is what is most variable about an instinct and is not originally connected with it, but becomes assigned to it only in consequence of being peculiarly fitted to make satisfaction possible. The object is not necessarily something extraneous: it may equally well be a part of the subject’s own body. It may be changed any number of times in the course of the vicissitudes which the instinct undergoes during its existence; and highly important parts are played by this displacement of instinct. It may happen that the same object serves for the satisfaction of several instincts simultaneously, a phenomenon which Adler has called a ‘confluence’ of instincts [Triebverschränkung]’. A particularly close attachment of the instinct to its object is distinguished by the term ‘fixation’. This frequently occurs at very early periods of the development of an instinct and puts an end to its mobility through its intense opposition to detachment.

Instincts And Their Vicissitudes

2961

By the source [Quelle] of an instinct is meant the somatic process which occurs in an organ or part of the body and whose stimulus is represented in mental life by an instinct. We do not know whether this process is invariably of a chemical nature or whether it may also correspond to the release of other, e.g. mechanical, forces. The study of the sources of instincts lies outside the scope of psychology. Although instincts are wholly determined by their origin in a somatic source, in mental life we know them only by their aims. An exact knowledge of the sources of an instinct is not invariably necessary for purposes of psychological investigation; sometimes its source may be inferred from its aim.

Are we to suppose that the different instincts which originate in the body and operate on the mind are also distinguished by different qualities, and that that is why they behave in qualitatively different ways in mental life? This supposition does not seem to be justified; we are much more likely to find the simpler assumption sufficient - that the instincts are all qualitatively alike and owe the effect they make only to the amount of excitation they carry, or perhaps, in addition, to certain functions of that quantity. What distinguishes from one another the mental effects produced by the various instincts may be traced to the difference in their sources. In any event, it is only in a later connection that we shall be able to make plain what the problem of the quality of instincts signifies.

What instincts should we suppose there are, and how many? There is obviously a wide opportunity here for arbitrary choice. No objection can be made to anyone’s employing the concept of an instinct of play or of destruction or of gregariousness, when the subject-matter demands it and the limitations of psychological analysis allow of it. Nevertheless, we should not neglect to ask ourselves whether instinctual motives like these, which are so highly specialized on the one hand, do not admit of further dissection in accordance with the sources of the instinct, so that only primal instincts - those which cannot be further dissected - can lay claim to importance.

Instincts And Their Vicissitudes

2962

I have proposed that two groups of such primal instincts should be distinguished: the ego, or self-preservative, instincts and the sexual instincts. But this supposition has not the status of a necessary postulate, as has, for instance, our assumption about the biological purpose of the mental apparatus (p. 2960); it is merely a working hypothesis, to be retained only so long as it proves useful, and it will make little difference to the results of our work of description and classification if it is replaced by another. The occasion for this hypothesis arose in the course of the evolution of psycho-analysis, which was first employed upon the psychoneuroses, or, more precisely, upon the group described as ‘transference neuroses’ (hysteria and obsessional neurosis); these showed that at the root of all such affections there is to be found a conflict between the claims of sexuality and those of the ego. It is always possible that an exhaustive study of the other neurotic affections (especially of the narcissistic psychoneuroses, the schizophrenias) may oblige us to alter this formula and to make a different classification of the primal instincts. But for the present we do not know of any such formula, nor have we met with any argument unfavourable to drawing this contrast between sexual and ego-instincts.

I am altogether doubtful whether any decisive pointers for the differentiation and classification of the instincts can be arrived at on the basis of working over the psychological material. This working-over seems rather itself to call for the application to the material of definite assumptions concerning instinctual life, and it would be a desirable thing if those assumptions could be taken from some other branch of knowledge and carried over to psychology. The contribution which biology has to make here certainly does not run counter to the distinction between sexual and ego-instincts. Biology teaches that sexuality is not to be put on a par with other functions of the individual; for its purposes go beyond the individual and have as their content the production of new individuals - that is, the preservation of the species. It shows, further, that two views, seemingly equally well-founded, may be taken of the relation between the ego and sexuality. On the one view, the individual is the principal thing, sexuality is one of its activities and sexual satisfaction one of its needs; while on the other view the individual is a temporary and transient appendage to the quasi-immortal germ-plasm, which is entrusted to him by the process of generation. The hypothesis that the sexual function differs from other bodily processes in virtue of a special chemistry is, I understand, also a postulate of the Ehrlich school of biological research.

Instincts And Their Vicissitudes

2963

Since a study of instinctual life from the direction of consciousness presents almost insuperable difficulties, the principal source of our knowledge remains the psycho-analytic investigation of mental disturbances. Psycho-analysis, however, in consequence of the course taken by its development, has hitherto been able to give us information of a fairly satisfactory nature only about the sexual instincts; for it is precisely that group which alone can be observed in isolation, as it were, in the psychoneuroses. With the extension of psycho-analysis to the other neurotic affections, we shall no doubt find a basis for our knowledge of the ego-instincts as well, though it would be rash to expect equally favourable conditions for observation in this further field of research.

This much can be said by way of a general characterization of the sexual instincts. They are numerous, emanate from a great variety of organic sources, act in the first instance independently of one another and only achieve a more or less complete synthesis at a late stage. The aim which each of them strives for is the attainment of ‘organ-pleasure’; only when synthesis is achieved do they enter the service of the reproductive function and thereupon become generally recognizable as sexual instincts. At their first appearance they are attached to the instincts of self-preservation, from which they only gradually become separated; in their choice of object, too, they follow the paths that are indicated to them by the ego-instincts. A portion of them remains associated with the ego-instincts throughout life and furnishes them with libidinal components, which in normal functioning easily escape notice and are revealed clearly only by the onset of illness. They are distinguished by possessing the capacity to act vicariously for one another to a wide extent and by being able to change their objects readily. In consequence of the latter properties they are capable of functions which are far removed from their original purposive actions - capable, that is, of ‘sublimation’.

Instincts And Their Vicissitudes

2964

Our inquiry into the various vicissitudes which instincts undergo in the process of development and in the course of life must be confined to the sexual instincts, which are the more familiar to us. Observation shows us that an instinct may undergo the following vicissitudes:-

Reversal into its opposite.

Turning round upon the subject’s own self.

Repression.

Sublimation.

Since I do not intend to treat of sublimation here and since repression requires a special chapter to itself, it only remains for us to describe and discuss the two first points. Bearing in mind that there are motive forces which work against an instinct’s being carried through in an unmodified form, we may also regard these vicissitudes as modes of defence against the instincts.

Reversal of an instinct into its opposite resolves on closer examination into two different processes: a change from activity to passivity, and a reversal of its content. The two processes, being different in their nature, must be treated separately.

Examples of the first process are met with in the two pairs of opposites: sadism-masochism and scopophilia-exhibitionism. The reversal affects only the aims of the instincts. The active aim (to torture, to look at) is replaced by the passive aim (to be tortured, to be looked at). Reversal of content is found in the single instance of the transformation of love into hate.

The turning round of an instinct upon the subject’s own self is made plausible by the reflection that masochism is actually sadism turned round upon the subject’s own ego, and that exhibitionism includes looking at his own body. Analytic observation, indeed, leaves us in no doubt that the masochist shares in the enjoyment of the assault upon himself, and that the exhibitionist shares in the enjoyment of his exposure. The essence of the process is thus the change of the object, while the aim remains unchanged. We cannot fail to notice, however, that in these examples the turning round upon the subject’s self and the transformation from activity to passivity converge or coincide.

To elucidate the situation, a more thorough investigation is essential.

In the case of the pair of opposites sadism-masochism, the process may be represented as follows:

(a) Sadism consists in the exercise of violence or power upon some other person as object.

(b)  This object is given up and replaced by the subject’s self. With the turning round upon the self the change from an active to a passive instinctual aim is also effected.

(c) An extraneous person is once more sought as object; this person, in consequence of the alteration which has taken place in the instinctual aim, has to take over the role of the subject.

Instincts And Their Vicissitudes

2965

Case (c) is what is commonly termed masochism. Here, too, satisfaction follows along the path of the original sadism, the passive ego placing itself back in phantasy in its first role, which has now in fact been taken over by the extraneous subject. Whether there is, besides this, a more direct masochistic satisfaction is highly doubtful. A primary masochism, not derived from sadism in the manner I have described, seems not to be met with.¹ That it is not superfluous to assume the existence of stage (b) is to be seen from the behaviour of the sadistic instinct in obsessional neurosis. There there is a turning round upon the subject’s self without an attitude of passivity towards another person: the change has only got as far as stage (b). The desire to torture has turned into self-torture and self-punishment, not into masochism. The active voice is changed, not into the passive, but into the reflexive, middle voice.

Our view of sadism is further prejudiced by the circumstance that this instinct, side by side with its general aim (or perhaps, rather, within it), seems to strive towards the accomplishment of a quite special aim - not only to humiliate and master, but, in addition, to inflict pains. Psycho-analysis would appear to show that the infliction of pain plays no part among the original purposive actions of the instinct. A sadistic child takes no account of whether or not he inflicts pains, nor does he intend to do so. But when once the transformation into masochism has taken place, the pains are very well fitted to provide a passive masochistic aim; for we have every reason to believe that sensations of pain, like other unpleasurable sensations, trench upon sexual excitation and produce a pleasurable condition, for the sake of which the subject will even willingly experience the unpleasure of pain. When once feeling pains has become a masochistic aim, the sadistic aim of causing pains can arise also, retrogressively; for while these pains are being inflicted on other people, they are enjoyed masochistically by the subject through his identification of himself with the suffering object. In both cases, of course, it is not the pain itself which is enjoyed, but the accompanying sexual excitation - so that this can be done especially conveniently from the sadistic position. The enjoyment of pain would thus be an aim which was originally masochistic, but which can only become an instinctual aim in someone who was originally sadistic.

¹ (Footnote added 1924:) In later works (cf. ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’, 1924c) relating to problems of instinctual life I have expressed an opposite view.

Instincts And Their Vicissitudes

2966

For the sake of completeness I may add that feelings of pity cannot be described as a result of a transformation of instinct occurring in sadism, but necessitate the notion of a reaction-formation against that instinct. (For the difference, see later.)

Rather different and simpler findings are afforded by the investigation of another pair of opposites - the instincts whose respective aim is to look and to display oneself (scopophilia and exhibitionism, in the language of the perversions). Here again we may postulate the same stages as in the previous instance:- (a) Looking as an activity directed towards an extraneous object. (b) Giving up of the object and turning of the scopophilic instinct towards a part of the subject’s own body; with this, transformation to passivity and setting up of a new aim - that of being looked at. (c) Introduction of a new subject to whom one displays oneself in order to be looked at by him. Here, too, it can hardly be doubted that the active aim appears before the passive, that looking precedes being looked at. But there is an important divergence from what happens in the case of sadism, in that we can recognize in the case of the scopophilic instinct a yet earlier stage than that described as (a). For the beginning of its activity the scopophilic instinct is auto-erotic: it has indeed an object, but that object is part of the subject’s own body. It is only later that the instinct is led, by a process of comparison, to exchange this object for an analogous part of someone else’s body - stage (a ). This preliminary stage is interesting because it is the source of both the situations represented in the resulting pair of opposites, the one or the other according to which element in the original situation is changed. The following might serve as a diagrammatic picture of the scopophilic instinct:-

(á) Oneself looking at a           =       A sexual organ being looked

sexual organ                               at by oneself

|

(â) Oneself looking at an          (ã) An object which is oneself

extraneous object                      or part of oneself being looked

(active scopophilia)                   at by an extraneous person

(exhibitionism)

Instincts And Their Vicissitudes

2967

A preliminary stage of this kind is absent in sadism, which from the outset is directed upon an extraneous object, although it might not be altogether unreasonable to construct such a stage out of the child’s efforts to gain control over his own limbs.¹

With regard to both the instincts which we have just taken as examples, it should be remarked that their transformation by a reversal from activity to passivity and by a turning round upon the subject never in fact involves the whole quota of the instinctual impulse. The earlier active direction of the instinct persists to some degree side by side with its later passive direction, even when the process of its transformation has been very extensive. The only correct statement to make about the scopophilic instinct would be that all the stages of its development, its auto-erotic, preliminary stage as well as its final active or passive form, co-exist alongside one another; and the truth of this becomes obvious if we base our opinion, not on the actions to which the instinct leads, but on the mechanism of its satisfaction. Perhaps, however, it is permissible to look at the matter and represent it in yet another way. We can divide the life of each instinct into a series of separate successive waves, each of which is homogeneous during whatever period of time it may last, and whose relation to one another is comparable to that of successive eruptions of lava. We can then perhaps picture the first, original eruption of the instinct as proceeding in an unchanged form and undergoing no development at all. The next wave would be modified from the outset -(being turned, for instance, from active to passive - and would then, with this new characteristic, be added to the earlier wave, and so on. If we were then to take a survey of the instinctual impulse from its beginning up to a given point, the succession of waves which we have described would inevitably present the picture of a definite development of the instinct.

¹ (Footnote added 1924:) Cf.  p. 2965 n.

Instincts And Their Vicissitudes

2968

The fact that, at this later period of development of an instinctual impulse, its (passive) opposite may be observed alongside of it deserves to be marked by the very apt term introduced by Bleuler - ‘ambivalence’.

This reference to the developmental history of instincts and the permanence of their intermediate stages should make the development of instincts fairly intelligible to us. Experience shows that the amount of demonstrable ambivalence varies greatly between individuals, groups and races. Marked instinctual ambivalence in a human being living at the present day may be regarded as an archaic inheritance, for we have reason to suppose that the part played in instinctual life by the active impulses in their unmodified form was greater in primaeval times than it is on an average to-day.

We have become accustomed to call the early phase of the development of the ego, during which its sexual instincts find auto-erotic satisfaction, ‘narcissism’, without at once entering on any discussion of the relation between auto-erotism and narcissism. It follows that the preliminary stage of the scopophilic instinct, in which the subject’s own body is the object of the scopophilia, must be classed under narcissism, and that we must describe it as a narcissistic formation. The active scopophilic instinct develops from this, by leaving narcissism behind. The passive scopophilic instinct, on the contrary, holds fast to the narcissistic object. Similarly, the transformation of sadism into masochism implies a return to the narcissistic object. And in both these cases the narcissistic subject is, through identification, replaced by another, extraneous ego. If we take into account our constructed preliminary narcissistic stage of sadism, we shall be approaching a more general realization - namely, that the instinctual vicissitudes which consist in the instinct’s being turned round upon the subject’s own ego and undergoing reversal from activity to passivity are dependent on the narcissistic organization of the ego and bear the stamp of that phase. They perhaps correspond to the attempts at defence which at higher stages of the development of the ego are effected by other means.

At this point we may call to mind that so far we have considered only two pairs of opposite instincts: sadism-masochism and scopophilia-exhibitionism. These are the best known sexual instincts that appear in an ambivalent manner. The other components of the later sexual function are not yet sufficiently accessible to analysis for us to be able to discuss them in a similar way. In general we can assert of them that their activities are auto-erotic; that is to say, their object is negligible in comparison with the organ which is their source, and as a rule coincides with that organ. The object of the scopophilic instinct, however, though it too is in the first instance a part of the subject’s own body, is not the eye itself; and in sadism the organic source, which is probably the muscular apparatus with its capacity for action, points unequivocally at an object other than itself, even though that object is part of the subject’s own body. In the auto-erotic instincts, the part played by the organic source is so decisive that, according to a plausible suggestion of Federn (1913) and Jekels (1913), the form and function of the organ determine the activity or passivity of the instinctual aim.

Instincts And Their Vicissitudes

2969

The change of the content of an instinct into its opposite is observed in a single instance only - the transformation of love into hate. Since it is particularly common to find both these directed simultaneously towards the same object, their co-existence furnishes the most important example of ambivalence of feeling.

The case of love and hate acquires a special interest from the circumstance that it refuses to be fitted into our scheme of the instincts. It is impossible to doubt that there is the most intimate relation between these two opposite feelings and sexual life, but we are naturally unwilling to think of love as being some kind of special component instinct of sexuality in the same way as the others we have been discussing. We should prefer to regard loving as the expression of the whole sexual current of feeling; but this idea does not clear up our difficulties, and we cannot see what meaning to attach to an opposite content of this current.

Loving admits not merely of one, but of three opposites. In addition to the antithesis ‘loving-hating’, there is the other one of ‘loving-being loved’; and, in addition to these, loving and hating taken together are the opposite of the condition of unconcern or indifference. The second of these three antitheses, loving-being loved, corresponds exactly to the transformation from activity to passivity and may be traced to an underlying situation in the same way as in the case of the scopophilic instinct. This situation is that of loving oneself which we regard as the characteristic feature of narcissism. Then, according as the object or the subject is replaced by an extraneous one, what results is the active aim of loving or the passive one of being loved - the latter remaining near to narcissism.

Perhaps we shall come to a better understanding of the several opposites of loving if we reflect that our mental life as a whole is governed by three polarities, the antitheses

Subject (ego) - Object (external world),

Pleasure - Unpleasure, and

Active - Passive.

Instincts And Their Vicissitudes

2970

The antithesis ego - non-ego (external), i. e. subject-object, is, as we have already said, thrust upon the individual organism at an early stage, by the experience that it can silence external stimuli by means of muscular action but is defenceless against instinctual stimuli. This antithesis remains, above all, sovereign in our intellectual activity and creates for research the basic situation which no efforts can alter. The polarity of pleasure-unpleasure is attached to a scale of feelings, whose paramount importance in determining our actions (our will) has already been emphasized. The antithesis active-passive must not be confused with the antithesis ego-subject - external world-object. The relation of the ego to the external world is passive in so far as it receives stimuli from it and active when it reacts to these. It is forced by its instincts into a quite special degree of activity towards the external world, so that we might bring out the essential point if we say that the ego-subject is passive in respect of external stimuli but active through its own instincts. The antithesis active-passive coalesces later with the antithesis masculine-feminine, which, until this has taken place, has no psychological meaning. The coupling of activity with masculinity and of passivity with femininity meets us, indeed, as a biological fact; but it is by no means so invariably complete and exclusive as we are inclined to assume.

The three polarities of the mind are connected with one another in various highly significant ways. There is a primal psychical situation in which two of them coincide. Originally, at the very beginning of mental life, the ego is cathected with instincts and is to some extent capable of satisfying them on itself. We call this condition ‘narcissism’ and this way of obtaining satisfaction ‘auto-erotic’.¹ At this time the external world is not cathected with interest (in a general sense) and is indifferent for purposes of satisfaction. During this period, therefore, the ego-subject coincides with what is pleasurable and the external world with what is indifferent (or possibly unpleasurable, as being a source of stimulation). If for the moment we define loving as the relation of the ego to its sources of pleasure, the situation in which the ego loves itself only and is indifferent to the external world illustrates the first of the opposites which we found to ‘loving’.

¹ Some of the sexual instincts are, as we know, capable of this auto-erotic satisfaction, and so are adapted to being the vehicle for the development under the dominance of the pleasure principle which we are about to describe. Those sexual instincts which from the outset require an object, and the needs of the ego-instincts, which are never capable of auto-erotic satisfaction, naturally disturb this state and so pave the way for an advance from it. Indeed, the primal narcissistic state would not be able to follow the development if it were not for the fact that every individual passes through a period during which he is helpless and has to be looked after and during which his pressing needs are satisfied by an external agency and are thus prevented from becoming greater.

Instincts And Their Vicissitudes

2971

In so far as the ego is auto-erotic, it has no need of the external world, but, in consequence of experiences undergone by the instincts of self-preservation, it acquires objects from that world, and, in spite of everything, it cannot avoid feeling internal instinctual stimuli for a time as unpleasurable. Under the dominance of the pleasure principle a further development now takes place in the ego. In so far as the objects which are presented to it are sources of pleasure, it takes them into itself, ‘introjects’ them (to use Ferenczi’s term); and, on the other hand, it expels whatever within itself becomes a cause of unpleasure. (See below, the mechanism of projection.)

Thus the original ‘reality-ego’, which distinguished internal and external by means of a sound objective criterion, changes into a purified ‘pleasure-ego’, which places the characteristic of pleasure above all others. For the pleasure-ego the external world is divided into a part that is pleasurable, which it has incorporated into itself, and a remainder that is extraneous to it. It has separated off a part of its own self, which it projects into the external world and feels as hostile. After this new arrangement, the two polarities coincide once more: the ego-subject coincides with pleasure, and the external world with unpleasure (with what was earlier indifference).

When, during the stage of primary narcissism, the object makes its appearance, the second opposite to loving, namely hating, also attains its development.

As we have seen, the object is brought to the ego from the external world in the first instance by the instincts of self-preservation; and it cannot be denied that hating, too, originally characterized the relation of the ego to the alien external world with the stimuli it introduces. Indifference falls into place as a special case of hate or dislike, after having first appeared as their forerunner. At the very beginning, it seems, the external world, objects, and what is hated are identical. If later on an object turns out to be a source of pleasure, it is loved, but it is also incorporated into the ego; so that for the purified pleasure-ego once again objects coincide with what is extraneous and hated.

Now, however, we may note that just as the pair of opposites love-indifference reflects the polarity ego-external world, so the second antithesis love-hate reproduces the polarity pleasure-unpleasure, which is linked to the first polarity. When the purely narcissistic stage has given place to the object-stage, pleasure and unpleasure signify relations of the ego to the object. If the object becomes a source of pleasurable feelings, a motor urge is set up which seeks to bring the object closer to the ego and to incorporate it into the ego. We then speak of the ‘attraction’ exercised by the pleasure-giving object, and say that we ‘love’ that object. Conversely, if the object is a source of unpleasurable feelings, there is an urge which endeavours to increase the distance between the object and the ego and to repeat in relation to the object the original attempt at flight from the external world with its emission of stimuli. We feel the ‘repulsion’ of the object, and hate it; this hate can afterwards be intensified to the point of an aggressive inclination against the object - an intention to destroy it.

Instincts And Their Vicissitudes

2972

We might at a pinch say of an instinct that it ‘loves’ the objects towards which it strives for purposes of satisfaction; but to say that an instinct ‘hates’ an object strikes us as odd. Thus we become aware that the attitudes of love and hate cannot be made use of for the relations of instincts to their objects, but are reserved for the relations of the total ego to objects. But if we consider linguistic usage, which is certainly not without significance, we shall see that there is a further limitation to the meaning of love and hate. We do not say of objects which serve the interests of self-preservation that we love them; we emphasize the fact that we need them, and perhaps express an additional, different kind of relation to them by using words that denote a much reduced degree of love - such as, for example, ‘being fond of’, ‘liking’ or ‘finding agreeable’.

Thus the word ‘to love’ moves further and further into the sphere of the pure pleasure-relation of the ego to the object and finally becomes fixed to sexual objects in the narrower sense and to those which satisfy the needs of sublimated sexual instincts. The distinction between the ego-instincts and the sexual instincts which we have imposed upon our psychology is thus seen to be in conformity with the spirit of our language. The fact that we are not in the habit of saying of a single sexual instinct that it loves its object, but regard the relation of the ego to its sexual object as the most appropriate case in which to employ the word ‘love’ - this fact teaches us that the word can only begin to be applied in this relation after there has been a synthesis of all the component instincts of sexuality under the primacy of the genitals and in the service of the reproductive function.

Instincts And Their Vicissitudes

2973

It is noteworthy that in the use of the word ‘hate’ no such intimate connection with sexual pleasure and the sexual function appears. The relation of unpleasure seems to be the sole decisive one. The ego hates, abhors and pursues with intent to destroy all objects which are a source of unpleasurable feeling for it, without taking into account whether they mean a frustration of sexual satisfaction or of the satisfaction of self-preservative needs. Indeed, it may be asserted that the true prototypes of the relation of hate are derived not from sexual life, but from the ego’s struggle to preserve and maintain itself.

So we see that love and hate, which present themselves to us as complete opposites in their content, do not after all stand in any simple relation to each other. They did not arise from the cleavage of any originally common entity, but sprang from different sources, and had each its own development before the influence of the pleasure-unpleasure relation made them into opposites.

It now remains for us to put together what we know of the genesis of love and hate. Love is derived from the capacity of the ego to satisfy some of its instinctual impulses auto-erotically by obtaining organ-pleasure. It is originally narcissistic, then passes over on to objects, which have been incorporated into the extended ego, and expresses the motor efforts of the ego towards these objects as sources of pleasure. It becomes intimately linked with the activity of the later sexual instincts and, when these have been completely synthesized, coincides with the sexual impulsion as a whole. Preliminary stages of love emerge as provisional sexual aims while the sexual instincts are passing through their complicated development. As the first of these aims we recognize the phase of incorporating or devouring - a type of love which is consistent with abolishing the object’s separate existence and which may therefore be described as ambivalent. At the higher stage of the pregenital sadistic-anal organization, the striving for the object appears in the form of an urge for mastery, to which injury or annihilation of the object is a matter of indifference. Love in this form and at this preliminary stage is hardly to be distinguished from hate in its attitude towards the object. Not until the genital organization is established does love become the opposite of hate.

Instincts And Their Vicissitudes

2974

Hate, as a relation to objects, is older than love. It derives from the narcissistic ego’s primordial repudiation of the external world with its outpouring of stimuli. As an expression of the reaction of unpleasure evoked by objects, it always remains in an intimate relation with the self-preservative instincts; so that sexual and ego-instincts can readily develop an antithesis which repeats that of love and hate. When the ego-instincts dominate the sexual function, as is the case at the stage of the sadistic-anal organization, they impart the qualities of hate to the instinctual aim as well.

The history of the origins and relations of love makes us understand how it is that love so frequently manifests itself as ‘ambivalent’ - i.e. as accompanied by impulses of hate against the same object. The hate which is admixed with the love is in part derived from the preliminary stages of loving which have not been wholly surmounted; it is also in part based on reactions of repudiation by the ego-instincts, which, in view of the frequent conflicts between the interests of the ego and those of love, can find grounds in real and contemporary motives. In both cases, therefore, the admixed hate has as its source the self-preservative instincts. If a love-relation with a given object is broken off, hate not infrequently emerges in its place, so that we get the impression of a transformation of love into hate. This account of what happens leads on to the view that the hate, which has its real motives, is here reinforced by a regression of the love to the sadistic preliminary stage; so that the hate acquires an erotic character and the continuity of a love relation is ensured.

The third antithesis of loving, the transformation of loving into being loved, corresponds to the operation of the polarity of activity and passivity, and is to be judged in the same way as the cases of scopophilia and sadism.

We may sum up by saying that the essential feature in the vicissitudes undergone by instincts lies in the subjection of the instinctual impulses to the influences of the three great polarities that dominate mental life. Of these three polarities we might describe that of activity-passivity as the biological, that of ego-external world as the real, and finally that of pleasure-unpleasure as the economic polarity.

The instinctual vicissitude of repression will form the subject of an inquiry which follows.

2975

REPRESSION

(1915)

2976

Intentionally left blank

2977

REPRESSION

One of the vicissitudes an instinctual impulse may undergo is to meet with resistances which seek to make it inoperative. Under certain conditions, which we shall presently investigate more closely, the impulse then passes into the state of ‘repression’ [‘Verdrängung’]. If what was in question was the operation of an external stimulus, the appropriate method to adopt would obviously be flight; with an instinct, flight is of no avail, for the ego cannot escape from itself. At some later period, rejection based on judgement (condemnation) will be found to be a good method to adopt against an instinctual impulse. Repression is a preliminary stage of condemnation, something between flight and condemnation; it is a concept which could not have been formulated before the time of psycho-analytic studies.

It is not easy in theory to deduce the possibility of such a thing as repression. Why should an instinctual impulse undergo a vicissitude like this? A necessary condition of its happening must clearly be that the instinct’s attainment of its aim should produce unpleasure instead of pleasure. But we cannot well imagine such a contingency. There are no such instincts: satisfaction of an instinct is always pleasurable. We should have to assume certain peculiar circumstances, some sort of process by which the pleasure of satisfaction is changed into unpleasure.

In order the better to delimit repression, let us discuss some other instinctual situations. It may happen that an external stimulus becomes internalized - for example, by eating into and destroying some bodily organ - so that a new source of constant excitation and increase of tension arises. The stimulus thereby acquires a far-reaching similarity to an instinct. We know that a case of this sort is experienced by us as pain. The aim of this pseudo-instinct, however, is simply the cessation of the change in the organ and of the unpleasure accompanying it. There is no other direct pleasure to be attained by cessation of pain. Further, pain is imperative; the only things to which it can yield are removal by some toxic agent or the influence of mental distraction.

The case of pain is too obscure to give any help in our purpose. Let us take the case in which an instinctual stimulus such as hunger remains unsatisfied. It then becomes imperative and can be allayed by nothing but the action that satisfies it; it keeps up a constant tension of need. Nothing in the nature of a repression seems in this case to come remotely into question.

Repression

2978

Thus repression certainly does not arise in cases where the tension produced by lack of satisfaction of an instinctual impulse is raised to an unbearable degree. The methods of defence which are open to the organism against that situation must be discussed in another connection.

Let us rather confine ourselves to clinical experience, as we meet with it in psycho-analytic practice. We then learn that the satisfaction of an instinct which is under repression would be quite possible, and further, that in every instance such a satisfaction would be pleasurable in itself; but it would be irreconcilable with other claims and intentions. It would, therefore, cause pleasure in one place and unpleasure in another. It has consequently become a condition for repression that the motive force of unpleasure shall have acquired more strength than the pleasure obtained from satisfaction. Psycho-analytic observation of the transference neuroses, moreover, leads us to conclude that repression is not a defensive mechanism which is present from the very beginning, and that it cannot arise until a sharp cleavage has occurred between conscious and unconscious mental activity - that the essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious. This view of repression would be made more complete by assuming that, before the mental organization reaches this stage, the task of fending off instinctual impulses is dealt with by the other vicissitudes which instincts may undergo - e.g. reversal into the opposite or turning round upon the subject’s own self.

Repression

2979

It seems to us now that, in view of the very great extent to which repression and what is unconscious are correlated, we must defer probing more deeply into the nature of repression until we have learnt more about the structure of the succession of psychical agencies and about the differentiation between what is unconscious and conscious. Till then, all we can do is to put together in a purely descriptive fashion a few characteristics of repression that have been observed clinically, even though we run the risk of having to repeat unchanged much that has been said elsewhere.

We have reason to assume that there is a primal repression, a first phase of repression, which consists in the psychical (ideational) representative of the instinct being denied entrance into the conscious. With this fixation is established; the representative in question persists unaltered from then onwards and the instinct remains attached to it. This is due to the properties of unconscious processes of which we shall speak later.

The second stage of repression, repression proper, affects mental derivatives of the repressed representative, or such trains of thought as, originating elsewhere, have come into associative connection with it. On account of this association, these ideas experience the same fate as what was primally repressed. Repression proper, therefore, is actually an after-pressure [Nachdrängen]. Moreover, it is a mistake to emphasize only the repulsion which operates from the direction of the conscious upon what is to be repressed; quite as important is the attraction exercised by what was primally repressed upon everything with which it can establish a connection. Probably the trend towards repression would fail in its purpose if these two forces did not co-operate, if there were not something previously repressed ready to receive what is repelled by the conscious.

Repression

2980

Under the influence of the study of the psychoneuroses, which brings before us the important effects of repression, we are inclined to overvalue their psychological bearing and to forget too readily that repression does not hinder the instinctual representative from continuing to exist in the unconscious, from organizing itself further, putting out derivatives and establishing connections. Repression in fact interferes only with the relation of the instinctual representative to one psychical system, namely, to that of the conscious.

Psycho-analysis is able to show us other things as well which are important for understanding the effects of repression in the psychoneuroses. It shows us, for instance, that the instinctual representation develops with less interference and more profusely if it is withdrawn by repression from conscious influence. It proliferates in the dark, as it were, and takes on extreme forms of expression, which when they are translated and presented to the neurotic are not only bound to seem alien to him, but frighten him by giving him the picture of an extraordinary and dangerous strength of instinct. This deceptive strength of instinct is the result of an uninhibited development in phantasy and of the damming-up consequent on frustrated satisfaction. The fact that this last result is bound up with repression points the direction in which the true significance of repression has to be looked for.

Reverting once more, however, to the opposite aspect of repression, let us make it clear that it is not even correct to suppose that repression withholds from the conscious all the derivatives of what was primally repressed. If these derivatives have become sufficiently far removed from the repressed representative, whether owing to the adoption of distortions or by reason of the number of intermediate links inserted, they have free access to the conscious. It is as though the resistance of the conscious against them was a function of their distance from what was originally repressed. In carrying out the technique of psycho-analysis, we continually require the patient to produce such derivatives of the repressed as, in consequence either of their remoteness or of their distortion, can pass the censorship of the conscious. Indeed, the associations which we require him to give without being influenced by any conscious purposive idea and without any criticism, and from which we reconstitute a conscious translation of the repressed representative - these associations are nothing else than remote and distorted derivatives of this kind. During this process we observe that the patient can go on spinning a thread of such associations, till he is brought up against some thought, the relation of which to what is repressed becomes so obvious that he is compelled to repeat his attempt at repression. Neurotic symptoms, too, must have fulfilled this same condition, for they are derivatives of the repressed, which has, by their means, finally won the access to consciousness which was previously denied to it.

Repression

2981

We can lay down no general rule as to what degree of distortion and remoteness is necessary before the resistance on the part of the conscious is removed. A delicate balancing is here taking place, the play of which is hidden from us; its mode of operation, however, enables us to infer that it is a question of calling a halt when the cathexis of the unconscious reaches a certain intensity - an intensity beyond which the unconscious would break through to satisfaction. Repression acts, therefore, in a highly individual manner. Each single derivative of the repressed may have its own special vicissitude; a little more or a little less distortion alters the whole outcome. In this connection we can understand how it is that the objects to which men give most preference, their ideals, proceed from the same perceptions and experiences as the objects which they most abhor, and that they were originally only distinguished from one another through slight modifications. Indeed, as we found in tracing the origin of the fetish, it is possible for the original instinctual representative to be split in two, one part undergoing repression, while the remainder, precisely on account of this intimate connection, undergoes idealization.

The same result as follows from an increase or a decrease in the degree of distortion may also be achieved at the other end of the apparatus, so to speak, by a modification in the condition for the production of pleasure and unpleasure. Special techniques have been evolved, with the purpose of bringing about such changes in the play of mental forces that what would otherwise give rise to unpleasure may on this occasion result in pleasure; and, whenever a technical device of this sort comes into operation, the repression of an instinctual representative which would otherwise be repudiated is lifted. These techniques have till now only been studied in any detail in jokes. As a rule the repression is only temporarily lifted and is promptly re-instated.

Repression

2982

Observations like this, however, enable us to note some further characteristics of repression. Not only is it, as we have just shown, individual in its operation, but it is also exceedingly mobile. The process of repression is not to be regarded as an event which takes place once, the results of which are permanent, as when some living thing has been killed and from that time onward is dead; repression demands a persistent expenditure of force, and if this were to cease the success of the repression would be jeopardized, so that a fresh act of repression would be necessary. We may suppose that the repressed exercises a continuous pressure in the direction of the conscious, so that this pressure must be balanced by an unceasing counter-pressure. Thus the maintenance of a repression involves an uninterrupted expenditure of force, while its removal results in a saving from an economic point of view. The mobility of repression, incidentally, also finds expression in the psychical characteristics of the state of sleep, which alone renders possible the formation of dreams. With a return to waking life the repressive cathexes which have been drawn in are once more sent out.

Finally, we must not forget that after all we have said very little about an instinctual impulse when we have established that it is repressed. Without prejudice to its repression, such an impulse may be in widely different states. It may be inactive, i.e. only very slightly cathected with mental energy; or it may be cathected in varying degrees, and so enabled to be active. True, its activation will not result in a direct lifting of the repression, but it will set in motion all the processes which end in a penetration by the impulse into consciousness along circuitous paths. With unrepressed derivatives of the unconscious the fate of a particular idea is often decided by the degree of its activity or cathexis. It is an everyday occurrence that such a derivative remains unrepressed so long as it represents only a small amount of energy, although its content would be calculated to give rise to a conflict with what is dominant in consciousness. The quantitative factor proves decisive for this conflict: as soon as the basically obnoxious idea exceeds a certain degree of strength, the conflict becomes a real one, and it is precisely this activation that leads to repression. So that, where repression is concerned, an increase of energic cathexis operates in the same sense as an approach to the unconscious, while a decrease of that cathexis operates in the same sense as remoteness from the unconscious or distortion. We see that the repressive trends may find a substitute for repression in a weakening of what is distasteful.

Repression

2983

In our discussion so far we have dealt with the repression of an instinctual representative, and by the latter we have understood an idea or group of ideas which is cathected with a definite quota of psychical energy (libido or interest) coming from an instinct. Clinical observation now obliges us to divide up what we have hitherto regarded as a single entity; for it shows us that besides the idea, some other element representing the instinct has to be taken into account, and that this other element undergoes vicissitudes of repression which may be quite different from those undergone by the idea. For this other element of the psychical representative the term quota of affect has been generally adopted. It corresponds to the instinct in so far as the latter has become detached from the idea and finds expression, proportionate to its quantity, in processes which are sensed as affects. From this point on, in describing a case of repression, we shall have to follow up separately what, as the result of repression, becomes of the idea, and what becomes of the instinctual energy linked to it.

We should be glad to be able to say something general about the vicissitudes of both; and having taken our bearings a little we shall in fact be able to do so. The general vicissitude which overtakes the idea that represents the instinct can hardly be anything else than that it should vanish from the conscious if it was previously conscious, or that it should be held back from consciousness if it was about to become conscious. The difference is not important; it amounts to much the same thing as the difference between my ordering an undesirable guest out of my drawing-room (or out of my front hall), and my refusing, after recognizing him, to let him cross my threshhold at all.¹ The quantitative factor of the instinctual representative has three possible vicissitudes, as we can see from a cursory survey of the observations made by psycho-analysis: either the instinct is altogether suppressed, so that no trace of it is found, or it appears as an affect which is in some way or other qualitatively coloured, or it is changed into anxiety. The two latter possibilities set us the task of taking into account, as a further instinctual vicissitude, the transformation into affects, and especially into anxiety, of the psychical energies of instincts.

We recall the fact that the motive and purpose of repression has nothing else than the avoidance of unpleasure. It follows that the vicissitude of the quota of affect belonging to the representative is far more important than the vicissitude of the idea, and this fact is decisive for our assessment of the process of repression. If a repression does not succeed in preventing feelings of unpleasure or anxiety from arising, we may say that it has failed, even though it may have achieved its purpose as far as the ideational portion is concerned. Repressions that have failed will of course have more claim on our interest than any that may have been successful; for the latter will for the most part escape our examination.

¹ This simile, which is thus applicable to the process of repression, may also be extended to a characteristic of it which has been mentioned earlier: I have merely to add that I must set a permanent guard over the door which I have forbidden this guest to enter, since he would otherwise burst it open. (See above.)

Repression

2984

We must now try to obtain some insight into the mechanism of the process of repression. In particular we want to know whether there is a single mechanism only, or more than one, and whether perhaps each of the psychoneuroses is distinguished by a mechanism of repression peculiar to it. At the outset of this enquiry, however, we are met by complications. The mechanism of a repression becomes accessible to us only by our deducing that mechanism from the outcome of the repression. Confining our observations to the effect of repression on the ideational portion of the representative, we discover that as a rule it creates a substitutive formation. What is the mechanism by which such a substitute is formed?  Or should we distinguish several mechanisms here as well?  Further, we know that repression leaves symptoms behind it. May we then suppose that the forming of substitutes and the forming of symptoms coincide, and, if this is so on the whole, is the mechanism of forming symptoms the same as that of repression? The general probability would seem to be that the two are widely different, and that it is not the repression itself which produces substitutive formations and symptoms, but that these latter are indications of a return of the repressed and owe their existence to quite other processes. It would also seem advisable to examine the mechanisms by which substitutes and symptoms are formed before considering the mechanisms of repression.

Obviously this is no subject for further speculation. The place of speculation must be taken by a careful analysis of the results of repression observable in the different neuroses. I must, however, suggest that we should postpone this task, too, until we have formed reliable conceptions of the relation of the conscious to the unconscious. But, in order that the present discussion may not be entirely unfruitful, I will say in advance that (1) the mechanism of repression does not in fact coincide with the mechanism or mechanisms of forming substitutes, (2) there are a great many different mechanisms of forming substitutes and (3) the mechanisms of repression have at least this one thing in common: a withdrawal of the cathexis of energy (or of libido, where we are dealing with sexual instincts).

Repression

2985

Further, restricting myself to the three best-known forms of psychoneurosis, I will show by means of some examples how the concepts here introduced find application to the study of repression.

From the field of anxiety hysteria I will choose a well-analysed example of an animal phobia. The instinctual impulse subjected to repression here is a libidinal attitude towards the father, coupled with fear of him. After repression, this impulse vanishes out of consciousness: the father does not appear in it as an object of libido. As a substitute for him we find in a corresponding place some animal which is more or less fitted to be an object of anxiety. The formation of the substitute for the ideational portion has come about by displacement along a chain of connections which is determined in a particular way. The quantitative portion has not vanished, but has been transformed into anxiety. The result is fear of a wolf, instead of a demand for love from the father. The categories here employed are of course not enough to supply an adequate explanation of even the simplest case of psychoneurosis: there are always other considerations to be taken into account. A repression such as occurs in an animal phobia must be described as radically unsuccessful. All that it has done is to remove and replace the idea; it has failed altogether in sparing unpleasure. And for this reason, too, the work of the neurosis does not cease. It proceeds to a second phase, in order to attain its immediate and more important purpose. What follows is an attempt at flight - the formation of the phobia proper, of a number of avoidances which are intended to prevent a release of the anxiety. More specialized investigation enables us to understand the mechanism by which the phobia achieves its aim.

Repression

2986

We are obliged to take quite another view of the process of repression when we consider the picture of a true conversion hysteria. Here the salient point is that it is possible to bring about a total disappearance of the quota of affect. When this is so, the patient displays towards his symptoms what Charcot called ‘la belle indifférence hystériques’. In other cases this suppression is not so completely successful: some distressing sensations may attach to the symptoms themselves, or it may prove impossible to prevent some release of anxiety, which in turn sets to work the mechanism of forming a phobia. The ideational content of the instinctual representative is completely withdrawn from consciousness; as a substitute - and at the same time as a symptom - we have an over-strong innervation (in typical cases, a somatic one), sometimes of a sensory, sometimes of a motor character, either as an excitation or an inhibition. The over-innervated area proves on a closer view to be a part of the repressed instinctual representative itself - a part which, as though by a process of condensation, has drawn the whole cathexis on to itself. These remarks do not of course bring to light the whole mechanism of a conversion hysteria; in especial the factor of regression, which will be considered in another connection, has also to be taken into account. In so far as repression in hysteria is made possible only by the extensive formation of substitutes, it may be judged to be entirely unsuccessful; as regards dealing with the quota of affect, however, which is the true task of repression, it generally signifies a total success. In conversion hysteria the process of repression is completed with the formation of the symptom and does not, as in anxiety hysteria, need to continue to a second phase - or rather, strictly speaking, to continue endlessly.

Repression

2987

A totally different picture of repression is shown, once more, in the third disorder which we shall consider for the purposes of our illustration - in obsessional neurosis. Here we are at first in doubt what it is that we have to regard as the instinctual representative that is subjected to repression - whether it is a libidinal or a hostile trend. This uncertainty arises because obsessional neurosis has as its basis a regression owing to which a sadistic trend has been substituted for an affectionate one. It is this hostile impulsion against someone who is loved which is subjected to repression. The effect at an early stage of the work of repression is quite different from what it is at a later one. At first the repression is completely successful; the ideational content is rejected and the affect made to disappear. As a substitutive formation there arises an alteration in the ego in the shape of an increased conscientiousness, and this can hardly be called a symptom. Here, substitute and symptom do not coincide. From this we learn something, too, about the mechanism of repression. In this instance, as in all others, repression has brought about a withdrawal of libido; but here it has made use of reaction-formation for this purpose, by intensifying an opposite. Thus in this case the formation of a substitute has the same mechanism as repression and at bottom coincides with it, while chronologically, as well as conceptually, it is distinct from the formation of a symptom. It is very probable that the whole process is made possible by the ambivalent relationship into which the sadistic impulsion that has to be repressed has been introduced. But the repression, which was at first successful, does not hold firm; in the further course of things its failure becomes increasingly marked. The ambivalence which has enabled repression through reaction-formation to take place is also the point at which the repressed succeeds in returning. The vanished affect comes back in its transformed shape as social anxiety, moral anxiety and unlimited self-reproaches; the rejected idea is replaced by a substitute by displacement, often a displacement on to something very small or indifferent. A tendency to a complete re-establishment of the repressed idea is as a rule unmistakably present. The failure in the repression of the quantitative, affective factor brings into play the same mechanism of flight, by means of avoidance and prohibitions, as we have seen at work in the formation of hysterical phobias. The rejection of the idea from the conscious is, however, obstinately maintained, because it entails abstention from action, a motor fettering of the impulsion. Thus in obsessional neurosis the work of repression is prolonged in a sterile and interminable struggle.

Repression

2988

The short series of comparisons presented here may easily convince us that more comprehensive investigations are necessary before we can hope thoroughly to understand the processes connected with repression and the formation of neurotic symptoms. The extraordinary intricacy of all the factors to be taken into consideration leaves only one way of presenting them open to us. We must select first one and then another point of view, and follow it up through the material as long as the application of it seems to yield results. Each separate treatment of the subject will be incomplete in itself, and there cannot fail to be obscurities where it touches upon material that has not yet been treated; but we may hope that a final synthesis will lead to a proper understanding.

2989

THE UNCONSCIOUS

(1915)

2990

Intentionally left blank

2991

THE UNCONSCIOUS

We have learnt from psycho-analysis that the essence of the process of repression lies, not in putting an end to, in annihilating, the idea which represents an instinct, but in preventing it from becoming conscious. When this happens we say of the idea that it is in a state of being ‘unconscious’, and we can produce good evidence to show that even when it is unconscious it can produce effects, even including some which finally reach consciousness. Everything that is repressed must remain unconscious; but let us state at the very outset that the repressed does not cover everything that is unconscious. The unconscious has the wider compass: the repressed is a part of the unconscious.

How are we to arrive at a knowledge of the unconscious? It is of course only as something conscious that we know it, after it has undergone transformation or translation into something conscious. Psycho-analytic work shows us every day that translation of this kind is possible. In order that this should come about, the person under analysis must overcome certain resistances - the same resistances as those which, earlier, made the material concerned into something repressed by rejecting it from the conscious.

I.  JUSTIFICATION FOR THE CONCEPT OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

Our right to assume the existence of something mental that is unconscious and to employ that assumption for the purposes of scientific work is disputed in many quarters. To this we can reply that our assumption of the unconscious is necessary and legitimate, and that we possess numerous proofs of its existence.

It is necessary because the data of consciousness have a very large number of gaps in them; both in healthy and in sick people psychical acts often occur which can be explained only by presupposing other acts, of which, nevertheless, consciousness affords no evidence. These not only include parapraxes and dreams in healthy people, and everything described as a psychical symptom or an obsession in the sick; our most personal daily experience acquaints us with ideas that come into our head we do not know from where, and with intellectual conclusions arrived at we do not know how. All these conscious acts remain disconnected and unintelligible if we insist upon claiming that every mental act that occurs in us must also necessarily be experienced by us through consciousness; on the other hand, they fall into a demonstrable connection if we interpolate between them the unconscious acts which we have inferred. A gain in meaning is a perfectly justifiable ground for going beyond the limits of direct experience. When, in addition, it turns out that the assumption of there being an unconscious enables us to construct a successful procedure by which we can exert an effective influence upon the course of conscious processes, this success will have given us an incontrovertible proof of the existence of what we have assumed. This being so, we must adopt the position that to require that whatever goes on in the mind must also be known to consciousness is to make an untenable claim.

The Unconscious

2992

We can go further and argue, in support of there being an unconscious psychical state, that at any given moment consciousness includes only a small content, so that the greater part of what we call conscious knowledge must in any case be for very considerable periods of time in a state of latency, that is to say, of being psychically unconscious. When all our latent memories are taken into consideration it becomes totally incomprehensible how the existence of the unconscious can be denied. But here we encounter the objection that these latent recollections can no longer be described as psychical, but that they correspond to residues of somatic processes from which what is psychical can once more arise. The obvious answer to this is that a latent memory is, on the contrary, an unquestionable residuum of a psychical process. But it is more important to realize clearly that this objection is based on the equation - not, it is true, explicitly stated but taken as axiomatic - of what is conscious with what is mental. This equation is either a petitio principii which begs the question whether everything that in psychical is also necessarily conscious; or else it is a matter of convention, of nomenclature. In this latter case it is, of course, like any other convention, not open to refutation. The question remains, however, whether the convention is so expedient that we are bound to adopt it. To this we may reply that the conventional equation of the psychical with the conscious is totally inexpedient. It disrupts psychical continuities, plunges us into the insoluble difficulties of psycho-physical parallelism, is open to the reproach that for no obvious reason it over-estimates the part played by consciousness, and that it forces us prematurely to abandon the field of psychological research without being able to offer us any compensation from other fields.

It is clear in any case that this question - whether the latent states of mental life, whose existence is undeniable, are to be conceived of as conscious mental states or as physical ones - threatens to resolve itself into a verbal dispute. We shall therefore be better advised to focus our attention on what we know with certainty of the nature of these debatable states. As far as their physical characteristics are concerned, they are totally inaccessible to us: no physiological concept or chemical process can give us any notion of their nature. On the other hand, we know for certain that they have abundant points of contact with conscious mental processes; with the help of a certain amount of work they can be transformed into, or replaced by, conscious mental processes, and all the categories which we employ to describe conscious mental acts, such as ideas, purposes, resolutions and so on, can be applied to them. Indeed, we are obliged to say of some of these latent states that the only respect in which they differ from conscious ones is precisely in the absence of consciousness. Thus we shall not hesitate to treat them as objects of psychological research, and to deal with them in the most intimate connection with conscious mental acts.

The stubborn denial of a psychical character to latent mental acts is accounted for by the circumstance that most of the phenomena concerned have not been the subject of study outside psycho-analysis. Anyone who is ignorant of pathological facts, who regards the parapraxes of normal people as accidental, and who is content with the old saw that dreams are froth [‘Träume sind Schäume’] has only to ignore a few more problems of the psychology of consciousness in order to spare himself any need to assume an unconscious mental activity. Incidentally, even before the time of psycho-analysis, hypnotic experiments, and especially post-hypnotic suggestion, had tangibly demonstrated the existence and mode of operation of the mental unconscious.

The Unconscious

2993

The assumption of an unconscious is, moreover, a perfectly legitimate one, inasmuch as in postulating it we are not departing a single step from our customary and generally accepted mode of thinking. Consciousness makes each of us aware only of his own states of mind; that other people, too, possess a consciousness is an inference which we draw by analogy from their observable utterances and actions, in order to make this behaviour of theirs intelligible to us. (It would no doubt be psychologically more correct to put it in this way: that without any special reflection we attribute to everyone else our own constitution and therefore our consciousness as well, and that this identification is a sine qua non of our understanding.) This inference (or this identification) was formerly extended by the ego to other human beings, to animals, plants, inanimate objects and to the world at large, and proved serviceable so long as their similarity to the individual ego was overwhelmingly great; but it became more untrustworthy in proportion as the difference between the ego and these ‘others’ widened. To-day, our critical judgement is already in doubt on the question of consciousness in animals; we refuse to admit it in plants and we regard the assumption of its existence in inanimate matter as mysticism. But even where the original inclination to identification has withstood criticism - that is, when the ‘others’ are our fellow-men - the assumption of a consciousness in them rests upon an inference and cannot share the immediate certainty which we have of our own consciousness.

Psycho-analysis demands nothing more than that we should apply this process of inference to ourselves also - a proceeding to which, it is true, we are not constitutionally inclined. If we do this, we must say: all the acts and manifestations which I notice in myself and do not know how to link up with the rest of my mental life must be judged as if they belonged to someone else: they are to be explained by a mental life ascribed to this other person. Furthermore, experience shows that we understand very well how to interpret in other people (that is, how to fit into their chain of mental events) the same acts which we refuse to acknowledge as being mental in ourselves. Here some special hindrance evidently deflects our investigations from our own self and prevents our obtaining a true knowledge of it.

The Unconscious

2994

This process of inference, when applied to oneself in spite of internal opposition, does not, however, lead to the disclosure of an unconscious; it leads logically to the assumption of another, second consciousness which is united in one’s self with the consciousness one knows. But at this point, certain criticisms may fairly be made. In the first place, a consciousness of which its own possessor knows nothing is something very different from a consciousness belonging to another person, and it is questionable whether such a consciousness, lacking, as it does, its most important characteristic, deserves any discussion at all. Those who have resisted the assumption of an unconscious psychical are not likely to be ready to exchange it for an unconscious consciousness. the second place, analysis shows that the different latent mental processes inferred by us enjoy a high degree of mutual independence, as though they had no connection with one another, and knew nothing of one another. We must be prepared, if so, to assume the existence in us not only of a second consciousness, but of a third, fourth, perhaps of an unlimited number of states of consciousness, all unknown to us and to one another. In the third place - and this is the most weighty argument of all - we have to take into account the fact that analytic investigation reveals some of these latent processes as having characteristics and peculiarities which seem alien to us, or even incredible, and which run directly counter to the attributes of consciousness with which we are familiar. Thus we have grounds for modifying our inference about ourselves and saying that what is proved is not the existence of a second consciousness in us, but the existence of psychical acts which lack consciousness. We shall also be right in rejecting the term ‘subconsciousness’ as incorrect and misleading. The well-known cases of ‘double conscience’¹ (splitting of consciousness) prove nothing against our view. We may most aptly describe them as cases of a splitting of the mental activities into two groups, and say that the same consciousness turns to one or the other of these groups alternately.

¹ [The French term for ‘dual consciousness’.]

The Unconscious

2995

In psycho-analysis there is no choice for us but to assert that mental processes are in themselves unconscious, and to liken the perception of them by means of consciousness to the perception of the external world by means of the sense-organs. We can even hope to gain fresh knowledge from the comparison. The psycho-analytic assumption of unconscious mental activity appears to us, on the one hand, as a further expansion of the primitive animism which caused us to see copies of our own consciousness all around us, and, on the other hand, as an extension of the corrections undertaken by Kant of our views on external perception. Just as Kant warned us not to overlook the fact that our perceptions are subjectively conditioned and must not be regarded as identical with what is perceived though unknowable, so psycho-analysis warns us not to equate perceptions by means of consciousness with the unconscious mental processes which are their object. Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be. We shall be glad to learn, however, that the correction of internal perception will turn out not to offer such great difficulties as the correction of external perception - that internal objects are less unknowable than the external world.

The Unconscious

2996

II.  VARIOUS MEANINGS OF ‘THE UNCONSCIOUS’ -

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL POINT OF VIEW

Before going any further, let us state the important, though inconvenient, fact that the attribute of being unconscious is only one feature that is found in the psychical and is by no means sufficient fully to characterize it. There are psychical acts of very varying value which yet agree in possessing the characteristic of being unconscious. The unconscious comprises, on the one hand, acts which are merely latent, temporarily unconscious, but which differ in no other respect from conscious ones and, on the other hand, processes such as repressed ones, which if they were to become conscious would be bound to stand out in the crudest contrast to the rest of the conscious processes. It would put an end to all misunderstandings if, from now on, in describing the various kinds of psychical acts we were to disregard the question of whether they were conscious or unconscious, and were to classify and correlate them only according to their relation to instincts and aims, according to their composition and according to which of the hierarchy of psychical systems they belong to. This, however, is for various reasons impracticable, so that we cannot escape the ambiguity of using the words ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ sometimes in a descriptive and sometimes in a systematic sense, in which latter they signify inclusion in particular systems and possession of certain characteristics. We might attempt to avoid confusion by giving the psychical systems which we have distinguished certain arbitrarily chosen names which have no reference to the attribute of being conscious. Only we should first have to specify what the grounds are on which we distinguish the systems, and in doing this we should not be able to evade the attribute of being conscious, seeing that it forms the point of departure for all our investigations. Perhaps we may look for some assistance from the proposal to employ, at any rate in writing, the abbreviation Cs. for consciousness and Ucs. for what is unconscious, when we are using the two words in the systematic sense.

The Unconscious

2997

Proceeding now to an account of the positive findings of psycho-analysis, we may say that in general a psychical act goes through two phases as regards its state, between which is interposed a kind of testing (censorship). In the first phase the psychical act is unconscious and belongs to the system Ucs.; if, on testing, it is rejected by the censorship, it is not allowed to pass into the second phase; it is then said to be ‘repressed’ and must remain unconscious. If, however, it passes this testing, it enters the second phase and thenceforth belongs to the second system, which we will call the system Cs. But the fact that it belongs to that system does not yet unequivocally determine its relation to consciousness. It is not yet conscious, but it is certainly capable of becoming conscious (to use Breuer’s expression) - that is, it can now, given certain conditions, become an object of consciousness without any special resistance. In consideration of this capacity for becoming conscious we also call the system Cs. the ‘preconscious’. If it should turn out that a certain censorship also plays a part in determining whether the preconscious becomes conscious, we shall discriminate more sharply between the systems Pcs. and Cs. For the present let it suffice us to bear in mind that the system Pcs. shares the characteristics of the system Cs. and that the rigorous censorship exercises its office at the point of transition from the Ucs. to the Pcs. (or Cs.).

By accepting the existence of these two (or three) psychical systems, psycho-analysis has departed a step further from the descriptive ‘psychology of consciousness’ and has raised new problems and acquired a new content. Up till now, it has differed from that psychology mainly by reason of its dynamic view of mental processes; now in addition it seems to take account of psychical topography as well, and to indicate in respect of any given mental act within what system or between what systems it takes place. On account of this attempt, too, it has been given the name of ‘depth-psychology’. We shall hear that it can be further enriched by taking yet another point of view into account.

The Unconscious

2998

If we are to take the topography of mental acts seriously we must direct our interest to a doubt which arises at this point. When a psychical act (let us confine ourselves here to one which is in the nature of an idea) is transposed from the system Ucs. into the system Cs. (or Pcs.), are we to suppose that this transposition involves a fresh record - as it were, a second registration - of the idea in question, which may thus be situated as well in a fresh psychical locality, and alongside of which the original unconscious registration continues to exist? Or are we rather to believe that the transposition consists in a change in the state of the idea, a change involving the same material and occurring in the same locality? This question may appear abstruse, but it must be raised if we wish to form a more definite conception of psychical topography, of the dimension of depth in the mind. It is a difficult one because it goes beyond pure psychology and touches on the relations of the mental apparatus to anatomy. We know that in the very roughest sense such relations exist. Research has given irrefutable proof that mental activity is bound up with the function of the brain as it is with no other organ. We are taken a step further - we do not know how much - by the discovery of the unequal importance of the different parts of the brain and their special relations to particular parts of the body and to particular mental activities. But every attempt to go on from there to discover a localization of mental processes, every endeavour to think of ideas as stored up in nerve-cells and of excitations as travelling along nerve-fibres, has miscarried completely. The same fate would await any theory which attempted to recognize, let us say, the anatomical position of the system Cs. - conscious mental activity - as being in the cortex, and to localize the unconscious processes in the sub-cortical parts of the brain. There is a hiatus here which at present cannot be filled, nor is it one of the tasks of psychology to fill it. Our psychical topography has for the present nothing to do with anatomy; it has reference not to anatomical localities, but to regions in the mental apparatus, wherever they may be situated in the body.

The Unconscious

2999

In this respect, then, our work is untrammelled and may proceed according to its own requirements. It will, however, be useful to remind ourselves that as things stand our hypotheses set out to be no more than graphic illustrations. The first of the two possibilities which we considered - namely, that the Cs. phase of an idea implies a fresh registration of it, which is situated in another place - is doubtless the cruder but also the more convenient. The second hypothesis - that of a merely functional change of state - is a priori more probable, but it is less plastic, less easy to manipulate. With the first, or topographical, hypothesis is bound up that of a topographical separation of the systems Ucs. and Cs. and also the possibility that an idea may exist simultaneously in two places in the mental apparatus indeed, that if it is not inhibited by the censorship, it regularly advances from the one position to the other, possibly without losing its first location or registration.

This view may seem odd, but it can be supported by observations from psycho-analytic practice. If we communicate to a patient some idea which he has at one time repressed but which we have discovered in him, our telling him makes at first no change in his mental condition. Above all, it does not remove the repression nor undo its effects, as might perhaps be expected from the fact that the previously unconscious idea has now become conscious. On the contrary, all that we shall achieve at first will be a fresh rejection of the repressed idea. But now the patient has in actual fact the same idea in two forms indifferent places in his mental apparatus: first, he has the conscious memory of the auditory trace of the idea, conveyed in what we told him; and secondly, he also has - as we know for certain - the unconscious memory of his experience as it was in its earlier form. Actually there is no lifting of the repression until the conscious idea, after the resistances have been overcome, has entered into connection with the unconscious memory-trace. It is only through the making conscious of the latter itself that success is achieved. On superficial consideration this would seem to show that conscious and unconscious ideas are distinct registrations, topographically separated, of the same content. But a moment’s reflection shows that the identity of the information given to the patient with his repressed memory is only apparent. To have heard something and to have experienced something are in their psychological nature two quite different things, even though the content of both is the same.

So for the moment we are not in a position to decide between the two possibilities that we have discussed. Perhaps later on we shall come upon factors which may turn the balance in favour of one or the other. Perhaps we shall make the discovery that our question was inadequately framed and that the difference between an unconscious and a conscious idea has to be defined in quite another way.

The Unconscious

3000

III.  UNCONSCIOUS EMOTIONS

We have limited the foregoing discussion to ideas; we may now raise a new question, the answer to which is bound to contribute to the elucidation of our theoretical views. We have said that there are conscious and unconscious ideas; but are there also unconscious instinctual impulses, emotions and feelings, or is it in this instance meaningless to form combinations of the kind?

I am in fact of the opinion that the antithesis of conscious and unconscious is not applicable to instincts. An instinct can never become an object of consciousness - only the idea that represents the instinct can. Even in the unconscious, moreover, an instinct cannot be represented otherwise than by an idea. If the instinct did not attach itself to an idea or manifest itself as an affective state, we could know nothing about it. When we nevertheless speak of an unconscious instinctual impulse or of a repressed instinctual impulse, the looseness of phraseology is a harmless one. We can only mean an instinctual impulse the ideational representative of which is unconscious, for nothing else comes into consideration.

We should expect the answer to the question about unconscious feelings, emotions and affects to be just as easily given. It is surely of the essence of an emotion that we should be aware of it, i.e. that it should become known to consciousness. Thus the possibility of the attribute of unconsciousness would be completely excluded as far as emotions, feelings and affects are concerned. But in psycho-analytic practice we are accustomed to speak of unconscious love, hate, anger, etc., and find it impossible to avoid even the strange conjunction ‘unconscious consciousness of guilt’, or a paradoxical ‘unconscious anxiety’. Is there more meaning in the use of these terms than there is in speaking of ‘unconscious instincts’?

The Unconscious

3001

The two cases are in fact not on all fours. In the first place, it may happen that an affective or emotional impulse is perceived but misconstrued. Owing to the repression of its proper representative it has been forced to become connected with another idea, and is now regarded by consciousness as the manifestation of that idea. If we restore the true connection, we call the original affective impulse an ‘unconscious’ one. Yet its affect was never unconscious; all that had happened was that its idea had undergone repression. In general, the use of the terms ‘unconscious affect’ and ‘unconscious emotion’ has reference to the vicissitudes undergone, in consequence of repression, by the quantitative factor in the instinctual impulse. We know that three such vicissitudes are possible:¹ either the affect remains, wholly or in part, as it is; or it is transformed into a qualitatively different quota of affect, above all into anxiety; or it is suppressed, i.e. it is prevented from developing at all. (These possibilities may perhaps be studied even more easily in the dream-work than in neuroses.) We know, too, that to suppress the development of affect is the true aim of repression and that its work is incomplete if this aim is not achieved. In every instance where repression has succeeded in inhibiting the development of affects, we term those affects (which we restore when we undo the work of repression) ‘unconscious’. Thus it cannot be denied that the use of the terms in question is consistent; but in comparison with unconscious ideas there is the important difference that unconscious ideas continue to exist after repression as actual structures in the system Ucs., whereas all that corresponds in that system to unconscious affects is a potential beginning which is prevented from developing. Strictly speaking, then, and although no fault can be found with the linguistic usage, there are no unconscious affects as there are unconscious ideas. But there may very well be in the system Ucs. affective structures which, like others, become conscious. The whole difference arises from the fact that ideas are cathexes - basically of memory-traces - whilst affects and feelings correspond to processes of discharge, the final manifestations of which are perceived as feelings. In the present state of our knowledge of affects and feelings we cannot express this difference more clearly.

¹ Cf. the preceding paper on ‘Repression’.

The Unconscious

3002

It is of especial interest to us to have established the fact that repression can succeed in inhibiting an instinctual impulse from being turned into a manifestation of affect. This shows us that the system Cs. normally controls affectivity as well as access to motility; and it enhances the importance of repression, since it shows that repression results not only in withholding things from consciousness, but also in preventing the development of affect and the setting-off of muscular activity. Conversely, too, we may say that as long as the system Cs. controls affectivity and motility, the mental condition of the person in question is spoken of as normal. Nevertheless, there is an unmistakable difference in the relation of the controlling system to the two contiguous processes of discharge.¹  Whereas the control by the Cs. over voluntary motility is firmly rooted, regularly withstands the onslaught of neurosis and only breaks down in psychosis, control by the Cs. over the development of affects is less secure. Even within the limits of normal life we can recognize that a constant struggle for primacy over affectivity goes on between the two systems Cs. and Ucs., that certain spheres of influence are marked off from one another and that intermixtures between the operative forces occur.

The importance of the system Cs. (Pcs.) as regards access to the release of affect and to action enables us also to understand the part played by substitutive ideas in determining the form taken by illness. It is possible for the development of affect to proceed directly from the system Ucs.; in that case the affect always has the character of anxiety, for which all ‘repressed’ affects are exchanged. Often, however, the instinctual impulse has to wait until it has found a substitutive idea in the system Cs. The development of affect can then proceed from this conscious substitute, and the nature of that substitute determines the qualitative character of the affect. We have asserted that in repression a severance takes place between the affect and the idea to which it belongs, and that each then undergoes its separate vicissitudes. Descriptively, this is incontrovertible; in actuality, however, the affect does not as a rule arise till the break-through to a new representation in the system Cs. has been successfully achieved.

¹ Affectivity manifests itself essentially in motor (secretory and vasomotor) discharge resulting in an (internal) alteration of the subject’s own body without reference to the external world; motility, in actions designed to effect changes in the external world.

The Unconscious

3003

IV.  TOPOGRAPHY AND DYNAMICS OF REPRESSION

We have arrived at the conclusion that repression is essentially a process affecting ideas on the border between the systems Ucs. and Pcs. (Cs.), and we can now make a fresh attempt to describe the process in greater detail.

It must be a matter of a withdrawal of cathexis; but the question is, in which system does the withdrawal take place and to which system does the cathexis that is withdrawn belong? The repressed idea remains capable of action in the Ucs., and it must therefore have retained its cathexis. What has been withdrawn must be something else. Let us take the case of repression proper (‘after-pressure’), as it affects an idea which is preconscious or even actually conscious. Here repression can only consist in withdrawing from the idea the (preconscious cathexis which belongs to the system Pcs. The idea then either remains uncathected, or receives cathexis from the Ucs., or retains the Ucs. cathexis which it already had. Thus there is a withdrawal of the preconscious cathexis, retention of the unconscious cathexis, or replacement of the preconscious cathexis by an unconscious one. We notice, moreover, that we have based these reflections (as it were, without meaning to) on the assumption that the transition from the system Ucs. to the system next to it is not effected through the making of a new registration but through a change in its state, an alteration in its cathexis. The functional hypothesis has here easily defeated the topographical one.

But this process of withdrawal of libido is not adequate to make another characteristic of repression comprehensible to us. It is not clear why the idea which has remained cathected or has received cathexis from the Ucs. should not, in virtue of its cathexis, renew the attempt to penetrate into the system Pcs. If it could do so, the withdrawal of libido from it would have to be repeated, and the same performance would go on endlessly; but the outcome would not be repression. So, too, when it comes to describing primal repression, the mechanism just discussed of withdrawal of preconscious cathexis would fail to meet the case; for here we are dealing with an unconscious idea which has as yet received no cathexis from the Pcs. and therefore cannot have that cathexis withdrawn from it.

The Unconscious

3004

What we require, therefore, is another process which maintains the repression in the first case and, in the second, ensures its being established as well as continued. This other process can only be found in the assumption of an anticathexis, by means of which the system Pcs. protects itself from the pressure upon it of the unconscious idea. We shall see from clinical examples how such an anticathexis, operating in the system Pcs., manifests itself. It is this which represents the permanent expenditure of a primal repression, and which also guarantees the permanence of that repression. Anticathexis is the sole mechanism of primal repression; in the case of repression proper (‘after-pressure’) there is in addition withdrawal of the Pcs. cathexis. It is very possible that it is precisely the cathexis which is withdrawn from the idea that is used for anticathexis.

We see how we have gradually been led into adopting a third point of view in our account of psychical phenomena. Besides the dynamic and the topographical points of view, we have adopted the economic one. This endeavours to follow out the vicissitudes of amounts of excitation and to arrive at least at some relative estimate of their magnitude.

It will not be unreasonable to give a special name to this whole way of regarding our subject-matter, for it is the consummation of psycho-analytic research. I propose that when we have succeeded in describing a psychical process in its dynamic, topographical and economic aspects, we should speak of it as a metapsychological presentation. We must say at once that in the present state of our knowledge there are only a few points at which we shall succeed in this.

The Unconscious

3005

Let us make a tentative effort to give a metapsychological description of the process of repression in the three transference neuroses which are familiar to us. Here we may replace ‘cathexis’ by ‘libido’, because, as we know, it is the vicissitudes of sexual impulses with which we shall be dealing.

In anxiety hysteria a first phase of the process is frequently overlooked, and may perhaps be in fact missed out; on careful observation, however, it can be clearly discerned. It consists in anxiety appearing without the subject knowing what he is afraid of. We must suppose that there was present in the Ucs. some love-impulse demanding to be transposed into the system Pcs.; but the cathexis directed to it from the latter system has drawn back from the impulse (as though in an attempt at flight) and the unconscious libidinal cathexis of the rejected idea has been discharged in the form of anxiety.

On the occasion of a repetition (if there should be one) of this process, a first step is taken in the direction of mastering the unwelcome development of anxiety. The cathexis that has taken flight attaches itself to a substitutive idea which, on the one hand, is connected by association with the rejected idea, and, on the other, has escaped repression by reason of its remoteness from that idea. This substitutive idea - a ‘substitute by displacement’ - permits the still uninhibitable development of anxiety to be rationalized. It now plays the part of an anticathexis for the system Cs. (Pcs.), by securing it against an emergence in the Cs. of the repressed idea. On the other hand it is, or acts as if it were, the point of departure for the release of the anxiety-affect, which has now really become quite uninhibitable. Clinical observation shows, for instance, that a child suffering from an animal phobia experiences anxiety under two kinds of conditions: in the first place, when his repressed love-impulse becomes intensified, and, in the second, when he perceives the animal he is afraid of. The substitutive idea acts in the one instance as a point at which there is a passage across from the system Ucs. to the system Cs., and, in the other instance, as a self-sufficing source for the release of anxiety. The extending dominance of the system Cs. usually manifests itself in the fact that the first of these two modes of excitation of the substitutive idea gives place more and more to the second. The child may perhaps end by behaving as though he had no predilection whatever towards his father but had become quite free from him, and as though his fear of the animal was a real fear - except that this fear of the animal, fed as such a fear is from an unconscious instinctual source, proves obdurate and exaggerated in the face of all influences brought to bear from the system Cs., and thereby betrays its derivation from the system Ucs. - In the second phase of anxiety hysteria, therefore, the anticathexis from the system Cs. has led to substitute-formation.

The Unconscious

3006

Soon the same mechanism finds a fresh application. The process of repression, as we know, is not yet completed, and it finds a further aim in the task of inhibiting the development of the anxiety which arises from the substitute. This is achieved by the whole of the associated environment of the substitutive idea being cathected with special intensity, so that it can display a high degree of sensibility to excitation. Excitation of any point in this outer structure must inevitably, on account of its connection with the substitutive idea, give rise to a slight development of anxiety; and this is now used as a signal to inhibit, by means of a fresh flight on the part of the cathexis, the further progress of the development of anxiety. The further away the sensitive and vigilant anticathexes are situated from the feared substitute, the more precisely can the mechanism function which is designed to isolate the substitutive idea and to protect it from fresh excitations. These precautions naturally only guard against excitations which approach the substitutive idea from outside, through perception; they never guard against instinctual excitation, which reaches the substitutive idea from the direction of its link with the repressed idea. Thus the precautions do not begin to operate till the substitute has satisfactorily taken over representation of the repressed, and they can never operate with complete reliability. With each increase of instinctual excitation the protecting rampart round the substitutive idea must be shifted a little further outwards. The whole construction, which is set up in an analogous way in the other neuroses, is termed a phobia. The flight from a conscious cathexis of the substitutive idea is manifested in the avoidances, renunciations and prohibitions by which we recognize anxiety hysteria.

The Unconscious

3007

Surveying the whole process, we may say that the third phase repeats the work of the second on an ampler scale. The system Cs. now protects itself against the activation of the substitutive idea by an anticathexis of its environment, just as previously it had secured itself against the emergence of the repressed idea by a cathexis of the substitutive idea. In this way the formation of substitutes by displacement has been further continued. We must also add that the system Cs. had earlier only one small area at which the repressed instinctual impulse could break through, namely, the substitutive idea; but that ultimately this enclave of unconscious influence extends to the whole phobic outer structure. Further, we may lay stress on the interesting consideration that by means of the whole defensive mechanism thus set in action a projection outward of the instinctual danger has been achieved. The ego behaves as if the danger of a development of anxiety threatened it not from the direction of an instinctual impulse but from the direction of a perception, and it is thus enabled to react against this external danger with the attempts at flight represented by phobic avoidances. In this process repression is successful in one particular: the release of anxiety can to some extent be dammed up, but only at a heavy sacrifice of personal freedom. Attempts at flight from the demands of instinct are, however, in general useless, and, in spite of everything, the result of phobic flight remains unsatisfactory.

A great deal of what we have found in anxiety hysteria also holds good for the other two neuroses, so that we can confine our discussion to their points of difference and to the part played by anticathexis. In conversion hysteria the instinctual cathexis of the repressed idea is changed into the innervation of the symptom. How far and in what circumstances the unconscious idea is drained empty by this discharge into innervation, so that it can relinquish its pressure upon the system Cs. - these and similar questions had better be reserved for a special investigation of hysteria. In conversion hysteria the part played by the anticathexis proceeding from the system Cs. (Pcs.) is clear and becomes manifest in the formation of the symptom. It is the anticathexis that decides upon what portion of the instinctual representative the whole cathexis of the latter is able to be concentrated. The portion thus selected to be a symptom fulfils the condition of expressing the wishful aim of the instinctual impulse no less than the defensive or punitive efforts of the system Cs.; thus it becomes hypercathected, and it is maintained from both directions like the substitutive idea in anxiety hysteria. From this circumstance we may conclude without hesitation that the amount of energy expended by the system Cs. on repression need not be so great as the cathectic energy of the symptom; for the strength of the repression is measured by the amount of anticathexis expended, whereas the symptom is supported not only by this anticathexis but also by the instinctual cathexis from the system Ucs. which is condensed in the symptom.

The Unconscious

3008

As regards obsessional neurosis, we need only add to the observations brought forward in the preceding paper that it is here that the anticathexis from the system Cs. comes most noticeably into the foreground. It is this which, organized as a reaction-formation, brings about the first repression, and which is later the point at which the repressed idea breaks through. We may venture the supposition that it is because of the predominance of the anticathexis and the absence of discharge that the work of repression seems far less successful in anxiety hysteria and in obsessional neurosis than in conversion hysteria.

The Unconscious

3009

V.  THE SPECIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SYSTEM Ucs.

The distinction we have made between the two psychical systems receives fresh significance when we observe that processes in the one system, the Ucs., show characteristics which are not met with again in the system immediately above it.

The nucleus of the Ucs. consists of instinctual representatives which seek to discharge their cathexis; that is to say, it consists of wishful impulses. These instinctual impulses are co-ordinate with one another, exist side by side without being influenced by one another, and are exempt from mutual contradiction. When two wishful impulses whose aims must appear to us incompatible become simultaneously active, the two impulses do not diminish each other or cancel each other out, but combine to form an intermediate aim, a compromise.

There are in this system no negation, no doubt, no degrees of certainty: all this is only introduced by the work of the censorship between the Ucs. and the Pcs. Negation is a substitute, at a higher level, for repression. In the Ucs. there are only contents, cathected with greater or lesser strength.

The cathectic intensities are much more mobile. By the process of displacement one idea may surrender to another its whole quota of cathexis; by the process of condensation it may appropriate the whole cathexis of several other ideas. I have proposed to regard these two processes as distinguishing marks of the so-called primary psychical process. In the system Pcs. the secondary process¹ is dominant. When a primary process is allowed to take its course in connection with elements belonging to the system Pcs., it appears ‘comic’ and excites laughter.

¹ Cf. the discussion in Chapter VII of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), based on ideas developed by Breuer in Studies on Hysteria (Breuer and Freud, 1895).

The Unconscious

3010

The processes of the system Ucs. are timeless; i.e. they are not ordered temporally, are not altered by the passage of time; they have no reference to time at all. Reference to time is bound up, once again, with the work of the system Cs.

The Ucs. processes pay just as little regard to reality. They are subject to the pleasure principle; their fate depends only on how strong they are and on whether they fulfil the demands of the pleasure-unpleasure regulation.

To sum up: exemption from mutual contradiction, primary process (mobility of cathexes), timelessness, and replacement of external by psychical reality - these are the characteristics which we may expect to find in processes belonging to the system Ucs.¹

Unconscious processes only become cognizable by us under the conditions of dreaming and of neurosis - that is to say, when processes of the higher, Pcs., system are set back to an earlier stage by being lowered (by regression). In themselves they cannot be cognized, indeed are even incapable of carrying on their existence; for the system Ucs. is at a very early moment overlaid by the Pcs. which has taken over access to consciousness and to motility. Discharge from the system Ucs. passes into somatic innervation that leads to development of affect; but even this path of discharge is, as we have seen, contested by the Pcs. By itself, the system Ucs. would not in normal conditions be able to bring about any expedient muscular acts, with the exception of those already organized as reflexes.

¹ We are reserving for a different context the mention of another notable privilege of the Ucs.

The Unconscious

3011

The full significance of the characteristics of the system Ucs. described above could only be appreciated by us if we were to contrast and compare them with those of the system Pcs. But this would take us so far afield that I propose that we should once more call a halt and not undertake the comparison of the two till we can do so in connection with our discussion of the higher system. Only the most pressing points of all will be mentioned at this stage.

The processes of the system Pcs. display - no matter whether they are already conscious or only capable of becoming conscious - an inhibition of the tendency of cathected ideas towards discharge. When a process passes from one idea to another, the first idea retains a part of its cathexis and only a small portion undergoes displacement. Displacements and condensations such as happen in the primary process are excluded or very much restricted. This circumstance caused Breuer to assume the existence of two different states of cathectic energy in mental life: one in which the energy is tonically ‘bound’ and the other in which it is freely mobile and presses towards discharge. In my opinion this distinction represents the deepest insight we have gained up to the present into the nature of nervous energy, and I do not see how we can avoid making it. A metapsychological presentation would most urgently call for further discussion at this point, though perhaps that would be too daring an undertaking as yet.

Further, it devolves upon the system Pcs. to make communication possible between the different ideational contents so that they can influence one another, to give them an order in time, and to set up a censorship or several censorships; ‘reality testing’ too, and the reality-principle, are in its province. Conscious memory, moreover, seems to depend wholly on the Pcs. This should be clearly distinguished from the memory-traces in which the experiences of the Ucs. are fixed, and probably corresponds to a special registration such as we proposed (but later rejected) to account for the relation of conscious to unconscious ideas. In this connection, also, we shall find means for putting an end to our oscillations in regard to the naming of the higher system - which we have hitherto spoken of indifferently, sometimes as the Pcs. and sometimes as the Cs.

The Unconscious

3012

Nor will it be out of place here to utter a warning against any over-hasty generalization of what we have brought to light concerning the distribution of the various mental functions between the two systems. We are describing the state of affairs as it appears in the adult human being, in whom the system Ucs. operates, strictly speaking, only as a preliminary stage of the higher organization. The question of what the content and connections of that system are during the development of the individual, and of what significance it possesses in animals - these are points on which no conclusion can be deduced from our description: they must be investigated independently. Moreover, in human beings we must be prepared to find possible pathological conditions under which the two systems alter, or even exchange, both their content and their characteristics.

The Unconscious

3013

VI.  COMMUNICATION BETWEEN THE TWO SYSTEMS

It would nevertheless be wrong to imagine that the Ucs. remains at rest while the whole work of the mind is performed by the Pcs. - that the Ucs. is something finished with, a vestigial organ, a residuum from the process of development. It is wrong also to suppose that communication between the two systems is confined to the act of repression, with the Pcs. casting everything that seems disturbing to it into the abyss of the Ucs. On the contrary, the Ucs. is alive and capable of development and maintains a number of other relations with the Pcs., amongst them that of co-operation. In brief, it must be said that the Ucs. is continued into what are known as derivatives, that it is accessible to the impressions of life, that it constantly influences the Pcs., and is even, for its part, subjected to influences from the Pcs.

Study of the derivatives of the Ucs. will completely disappoint our expectations of a schematically clear-cut distinction between the two psychical systems. This will no doubt give rise to dissatisfaction with our results and will probably be used to cast doubts on the value of the way in which we have divided up the psychical processes. Our answer is, however, that we have no other aim but that of translating into theory the results of observation, and we deny that there is any obligation on us to achieve at our first attempt a well-rounded theory which will commend itself by its simplicity. We shall defend the complications of our theory so long as we find that they meet the results of observation, and we shall not abandon our expectations of being led in the end by those very complications to the discovery of a state of affairs which, while simple in itself, can account for all the complications of reality.

Among the derivatives of the Ucs. instinctual impulses, of the sort we have described, there are some which unite in themselves characters of an opposite kind. On the one hand, they are highly organized, free from self-contradiction, have made use of every acquisition of the system Cs. and would hardly be distinguished in our judgement from the formations of that system. On the other hand they are unconscious and are incapable of becoming conscious. Thus qualitatively they belong to the system Pcs., but factually to the Ucs. Their origin is what decides their fate. We may compare them with individuals of mixed race who, taken all round, resemble white men, but who betray their coloured descent by some striking feature or other, and on that account are excluded from society and enjoy none of the privileges of white people. Of such a nature are those phantasies of normal people as well as of neurotics which we have recognized as preliminary stages in the formation both of dreams and of symptoms and which, in spite of their high degree of organization, remain repressed and therefore cannot become conscious. They draw near to consciousness and remain undisturbed so long as they do not have an intense cathexis, but as soon as they exceed a certain height of cathexis they are thrust back. Substitutive formations, too, are highly organized derivatives of the Ucs. of this kind; but these succeed in breaking through into consciousness, when circumstances are favourable - for example, if they happen to join forces with an anticathexis from the Pcs.

The Unconscious

3014

When, elsewhere, we come to examine more closely the preconditions for becoming conscious, we shall be able to find a solution of some of the difficulties that arise at this juncture. Here it seems a good plan to look at things from the angle of consciousness, in contrast to our previous approach, which was upwards from the Ucs. To consciousness the whole sum of psychical processes presents itself as the realm of the preconscious. A very great part of this preconscious originates in the unconscious, has the character of its derivatives and is subjected to a censorship before it can become conscious. Another part of the Pcs. is capable of becoming conscious without any censorship. Here we come upon a contradiction of an earlier assumption. In discussing the subject of repression we were obliged to place the censorship which is decisive for becoming conscious between the systems Ucs. and Pcs.. Now it becomes probable that there is a censorship between the Pcs. and the Cs. Nevertheless we shall do well not to regard this complication as a difficulty, but to assume that to every transition from one system to that immediately above it (that is, every advance to a higher stage of psychical organization) there corresponds a new censorship. This, it may be remarked, does away with the assumption of a continuous laying down of new registrations.

The reason for all these difficulties is to be found in the circumstance that the attribute of being conscious, which is the only characteristic of psychical processes that is directly presented to us, is in no way suited to serve as a criterion for the differentiation of systems. Apart from the fact that the conscious is not always conscious but also at times latent, observation has shown that much that shares the characteristics of the system Pcs. does not become conscious; and we learn in addition that the act of becoming conscious is dependent on the attention of the Pcs. being turned in certain directions. Hence consciousness stands in no simple relation either to the different systems or to repression. The truth is that it is not only the psychically repressed that remains alien to consciousness, but also some of the impulses which dominate our ego - something, therefore, that forms the strongest functional antithesis to the repressed. The more we seek to win our way to a metapsychological view of mental life, the more we must learn to emancipate ourselves from the importance of the symptom of ‘being conscious’.

The Unconscious

3015

So long as we still cling to this belief we see our generalizations regularly broken through by exceptions. On the one hand we find that derivatives of the Ucs. become conscious as substitutive formations and symptoms - generally, it is true, after having undergone great distortion as compared with the unconscious, though often retaining many characteristics which call for repression. On the other hand, we find that many preconscious formations remain unconscious, though we should have expected that, from their nature, they might very well have become conscious. Probably in the latter case the stronger attraction of the Ucs. is asserting itself. We are led to look for the more important distinction as lying, not between the conscious and the preconscious, but between the preconscious and the unconscious. The Ucs. is turned back on the frontier of the Pcs. by the censorship, but derivatives of the Ucs. can circumvent this censorship, achieve a high degree of organization and reach a certain intensity of cathexis in the Pcs. When, however, this intensity is exceeded and they try to force themselves into consciousness, they are recognized as derivatives of the Ucs. and are repressed afresh at the new frontier of censorship, between the Pcs. and the Cs. Thus the first of these censorships is exercised against the Ucs. itself, and the second against its Pcs. derivatives. One might suppose that in the course of individual development the censorship had taken a step forward.

In psycho-analytic treatment the existence of the second censorship, located between the systems Pcs. and Cs., is proved beyond question. We require the patient to form numerous derivatives of the Ucs., we make him pledge himself to overcome the objections of the censorship to these preconscious formations becoming conscious, and by overthrowing this censorship, we open up the way to abrogating the repression accomplished by the earlier one. To this let us add that the existence of the censorship between the Pcs. and the Cs. teaches us that becoming conscious is no mere act of perception, but is probably also a hypercathexis, a further advance in the psychical organization.

The Unconscious

3016

Let us turn to the communications between the Ucs. and the other systems, less in order to establish anything new than in order to avoid omitting what is most prominent. At the roots of instinctual activity the systems communicate with one another most extensively. One portion of the processes which are there excited passes through the Ucs., as through a preparatory stage, and reaches the highest psychical development in the Cs.; another portion is retained as Ucs. But the Ucs. is also affected by experiences originating from external perception. Normally all the paths from perception to the Ucs. remain open, and only those leading on from the Ucs. are subject to blocking by repression.

It is a very remarkable thing that the Ucs. of one human being can react upon that of another, without passing through the Cs. This deserves closer investigation, especially with a view to finding out whether preconscious activity can be excluded as playing a part in it; but, descriptively speaking, the fact is incontestable.

The content of the system Pcs. (or Cs.) is derived partly from instinctual life (through the medium of the Ucs.), and partly from perception. It is doubtful how far the processes of this system can exert a direct influence on the Ucs.; examination of pathological cases often reveals an almost incredible independence and lack of susceptibility to influence on the part of the Ucs. A complete divergence of their trends, a total severance of the two systems, is what above all characterizes a condition of illness. Nevertheless, psycho-analytic treatment is based upon an influencing of the Ucs. from the direction of the Cs., and at any rate shows that this, though a laborious task, is not impossible. The derivatives of the Ucs. which act as intermediaries between the two systems open the way, as we have already said, towards accomplishing this. But we may safely assume that a spontaneously effected alteration in the Ucs. from the direction of the Cs. is a difficult and slow process.

The Unconscious

3017

Co-operation between a preconscious and an unconscious impulse, even when the latter is intensely repressed, may come about if there is a situation in which the unconscious impulse can act in the same sense as one of the dominant trends. The repression is removed in this instance, and the repressed activity is admitted as a reinforcement of the one intended by the ego. The unconscious becomes ego-syntonic in respect of this single conjunction without any change taking place in its repression apart from this. In this co-operation the influence of the Ucs. is unmistakable: the reinforced tendencies reveal themselves as being nevertheless different from the normal; they make specially perfect functioning possible, and they manifest a resistance in the face of opposition which is similar to that offered, for instance, by obsessional symptoms.

The content of the Ucs. may be compared with an aboriginal population in the mind. If inherited mental formations exist in the human being - something analogous to instinct¹ in animals - these constitute the nucleus of the Ucs. Later there is added to them what is discarded during childhood development as unserviceable; and this need not differ in its nature from what is inherited. A sharp and final division between the content of the two systems does not, as a rule, take place till puberty.

¹ [The German word here is ‘Instinkt’, not the usual ‘Trieb’.]

The Unconscious

3018

VII.  ASSESSMENT OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

What we have put together in the preceding discussions is probably as much as we can say about the Ucs. so long as we only draw upon our knowledge of dream-life and the transference neuroses. It is certainly not much, and at some points it gives an impression of obscurity and confusion; and above all it offers us no possibility of co-ordinating or subsuming the Ucs. into any context with which we are already familiar. It is only the analysis of one of the affections which we call narcissistic psychoneuroses that promises to furnish us with conceptions through which the enigmatic Ucs. will be brought more within our reach and, as it were, made tangible.

Since the publication of a work by Abraham (1908) - which that conscientious author has attributed to my instigation - we have tried to base our characterization of Kraepelin’s ‘dementia praecox’ (Bleuler’s ‘schizophrenia’) on its position with reference to the antithesis between ego and object. In the transference neuroses (anxiety hysteria, conversion hysteria and obsessional neurosis) there was nothing to give special prominence to this antithesis. We knew, indeed, that frustration in regard to the object brings on the outbreak of the neurosis and that the neurosis involves a renunciation of the real object; we knew too that the libido that is withdrawn from the real object reverts first to a phantasied object and then to one that had been repressed (introversion). But in these disorders object-cathexis in general is retained with great energy, and more detailed examination of the process of repression has obliged us to assume that object-cathexis persists in the system Ucs. in spite of - or rather in consequence of - repression. Indeed, the capacity for transference, of which we make use for therapeutic purposes in these affections, presupposes an unimpaired object-cathexis.

The Unconscious

3019

In the case of schizophrenia, on the other hand, we have been driven to the assumption that after the process of repression the libido that has been withdrawn does not seek a new object, but retreats into the ego; that is to say, that here the object-cathexes are given up and a primitive objectless condition of narcissism is re-established. The incapacity of these patients for transference (so far as the pathological process extends), their consequent inaccessibility to therapeutic efforts, their characteristic repudiation of the external world, the appearance of signs of a hypercathexis of their own ego, the final outcome in complete apathy - all these clinical features seem to agree excellently with the assumption that their object-cathexes have been given up. As regards the relation of the two psychical systems to each other, all observers have been struck by the fact that in schizophrenia a great deal is expressed as being conscious which in the transference neuroses can only be shown to be present in the Ucs. by psycho-analysis. But to begin with we were not able to establish any intelligible connection between the ego-object relation and the relationships of consciousness.

What we are seeking seems to present itself in the following unexpected way. In schizophrenics we observe - especially in the initial stages, which are so instructive - a number of changes in speech, some of which deserve to be regarded from a particular point of view. The patient often devotes peculiar care to his way of expressing himself, which becomes ‘stilted’ and ‘precious’. The construction of his sentences undergoes a peculiar disorganization, making them so incomprehensible to us that his remarks seem nonsensical. Some reference to bodily organs or innervations is often given prominence in the content of these remarks. To this may be added the fact that in such symptoms of schizophrenia as are comparable with the substitutive formations of hysteria or obsessional neurosis, the relation between the substitute and the repressed material nevertheless displays peculiarities which would surprise us in these two forms of neurosis.

Dr. Victor Tausk of Vienna has placed at my disposal some observations that he has made in the initial stages of schizophrenia in a female patient, which are particularly valuable in that the patient was ready to explain her utterances herself. I will take two of his examples to illustrate the view I wish to put forward, and I have no doubt that every observer could easily produce plenty of such material.

The Unconscious

3020

A patient of Tausk’s, a girl who was brought to the clinic after a quarrel with her lover, complained that her eyes were not right, they were twisted. This she herself explained by bringing forward a series of reproaches against her lover in coherent language. ‘She could not understand him at all, he looked different every time; he was a hypocrite, an eye-twister,¹ he had twisted her eyes; now she had twisted eyes; they were not her eyes any more; now she saw the world with different eyes.’

The patient’s comments on her unintelligible remark have the value of an analysis, for they contain the equivalent of the remark expressed in a generally comprehensible form. They throw light at the same time on the meaning and the genesis of schizophrenic word-formation. I agree with Tausk in stressing in this example the point that the patient’s relation to a bodily organ (the eye) has arrogated to itself the representation of the whole content. Here the schizophrenic utterance exhibits a hypochondriac trait: it has become ‘organ-speech’.

A second communication by the same patient was as follows: ‘She was standing in church. Suddenly she felt a jerk; she had to change her position, as though somebody was putting her into a position, as though she was being put in a certain position.’

Now came the analysis of this through a fresh series of reproaches against her lover. ‘He was common, he had made her common, too, though she was naturally refined. He had made her like himself by making her think that he was superior to her; now she had become like him, because she thought she would be better if she were like him. He had given a false impression of his position; now she was just like him’ (by identification), ‘he had put her in a false position’.

The physical movement of ‘changing her position’, Tausk remarks, depicted the words ‘putting her in a false position’ and her identification with her lover. I would call attention once more to the fact that the whole train of thought is dominated by the element which has for its content a bodily innervation (or, rather, the sensation of it). Furthermore, a hysterical woman would, in the first example, have in fact convulsively twisted her eyes, and, in the second, have given actual jerks, instead of having the impulse to do so or the sensation of doing so: and in neither example would she have any accompanying conscious thoughts, nor would she have been able to express any such thoughts afterwards.

¹ [The German ‘Augenverdreher’ has the figurative meaning of ‘deceiver’.]

The Unconscious

3021

These two observations, then, argue in favour of what we have called hypochondriacal speech or ‘organ-speech’. But, what seems to us more important, they also point to something else, of which we have innumerable instances (for example, in the cases collected in Bleuler’s monograph) and which may be reduced to a definite formula. In schizophrenia words are subjected to the same process as that which makes the dream images out of latent dream-thoughts - to what we have called the primary psychical process. They undergo condensation, and by means of displacement transfer their cathexes to one another in their entirety. The process may go so far that a single word, if it is specially suitable on account of its numerous connections, takes over the representation of a whole train of thought. The works of Bleuler, Jung and their pupils offer a quantity of material which particularly supports this assertion.¹

Before we draw any conclusion from impressions such as these, let us consider further the distinctions between the formation of substitutes in schizophrenia on the one hand, and in hysteria and obsessional neurosis on the other - subtle distinctions which nevertheless make a strange impression. A patient whom I have at present under observation has allowed himself to be withdrawn from all the interests of life on account of a bad condition of the skin of his face. He declares that he has black heads and deep holes in his face which everyone notices. Analysis shows that he is playing out his castration complex upon his skin. At first he worked at these blackheads remorselessly; and it gave him great satisfaction to squeeze them out, because, as he said, something spurted out when be did so. Then he began to think that a deep cavity appeared wherever he had got rid of a blackhead, and he reproached himself most vehemently with having ruined his skin for ever by ‘constantly fiddling about with his hand’. Pressing out the content of the blackheads is clearly to him a substitute for masturbation. The cavity which then appears owing to his fault is the female genital, i.e. the fulfilment of the threat of castration (or the phantasy representing that threat) provoked by his masturbating. This substitutive formation has, in spite of its hypochondriacal character, considerable resemblance to a hysterical conversion; and yet we have a feeling that something different must be going on here, that a substitutive formation such as this cannot be attributed to hysteria, even before we can say in what the difference consists. A tiny little cavity such as a pore of the skin would hardly be used by a hysteric as a symbol for the vagina, which he is otherwise ready to compare with every imaginable object that encloses a hollow space. Besides, we should expect the multiplicity of these little cavities to prevent him from using them as a substitute for the female genital. The same applies to the case of a young patient reported by Tausk some years ago to the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society. This patient behaved in other respects exactly as though he were suffering from an obsessional neurosis; he took hours to wash and dress, and so on. It was noticeable, however, that he was able to give the meaning of his inhibitions without any resistance. In putting on his stockings, for instance, he was disturbed by the idea that he must pull apart the stitches in the knitting, i.e. the holes, and to him every hole was a symbol of the female genital aperture. This again is a thing which we cannot attribute to an obsessional neurotic. Reitler observed a patient of the latter sort, who also suffered from having to take a long time over putting on his stockings; this man, after overcoming his resistances, found as the explanation that his foot symbolized a penis, that putting on the stocking stood for a masturbatory act, and that he had to keep on pulling the stocking on and off, partly in order to complete the picture of masturbation, and partly in order to undo that act.

¹ The dream-work, too, occasionally treats words like things, and so creates very similar ‘schizophrenic’ utterances or neologisms.

The Unconscious

3022

If we ask ourselves what it is that gives the character of strangeness to the substitutive formation and the symptom in schizophrenia, we eventually come to realize that it is the predominance of what has to do with words over what has to do with things. As far as the thing goes, there is only a very slight similarity between squeezing out a blackhead and an emission from the penis, and still less similarity between the innumerable shallow pores of the skin and the vagina; but in the former case there is, in both instances, a ‘spurting out’, while in the latter the cynical saying, ‘a hole is a hole’, is true verbally. What has dictated the substitution is not the resemblance between the things denoted but the sameness of the words used to express them. Where the two - word and thing - do not coincide, the formation of substitutes in schizophrenia deviates from that in the transference neuroses.

If now we put this finding alongside the hypothesis that in schizophrenia object-cathexes are given up, we shall be obliged to modify the hypothesis by adding that the cathexis of the word-presentations of objects is retained. What we have permissibly called the conscious presentation of the object can now be split up into the presentation of the word and the presentation of the thing; the latter consists in the cathexis, if not of the direct memory-images of the thing, at least of remoter memory-traces derived from these. We now seem to know all at once what the difference is between a conscious and an unconscious presentation. The two are not, as we supposed, different registrations of the same content in different psychical localities, nor yet different functional states of cathexis in the same locality; but the conscious presentation comprises the presentation of the thing plus the presentation of the word belonging to it, while the unconscious presentation is the presentation of the thing alone. The system Ucs.   contains the thing-cathexes of the objects, the first and true object-cathexes; the system Pcs. comes about by this thing-presentation being hypercathected through being linked with the word-presentations corresponding to it. It is these hypercathexes, we may suppose, that bring about a higher psychical organization and make it possible for the primary process to be succeeded by the secondary process which is dominant in the Pcs. Now, too, we are in a position to state precisely what it is that repression denies to the rejected presentation in the transference neuroses: what it denies to the presentation is translation into words which shall remain attached to the object. A presentation which is not put into words, or a psychical act which is not hypercathected, remains thereafter in the Ucs. in a state of repression.

The Unconscious

3023

I should like to point out at what an early date we already possessed the insight which to-day enables us to understand one of the most striking characteristics of schizophrenia. In the last few pages of The Interpretation of Dreams, which was published in 1900, the view was developed that thought-processes, i.e. those acts of cathexis which are comparatively remote from perception, are in themselves without quality and unconscious, and that they attain their capacity to become conscious only through being linked with the residues of perceptions of words. But word-presentations, for their part too, are derived from sense-perceptions, in the same way as thing-presentations are; the question might therefore be raised why presentations of objects cannot become conscious through the medium of their own perceptual residues. Probably, however, thought proceeds in systems so far remote from the original perceptual residues that they have no longer retained anything of the qualities of those residues, and, in order to become conscious, need to be reinforced by new qualities. Moreover, by being linked with words, cathexes can be provided with quality even when they represent only relations between presentations of objects and are thus unable to derive any quality from perceptions. Such relations, which become comprehensible only through words, form a major part of our thought-processes. As we can see, being linked with word-presentations is not yet the same thing as becoming conscious, but only makes it possible to become so; it is therefore characteristic of the system Pcs. and of that system alone. With these discussions, however, we have evidently departed from our subject proper and find ourselves plunged into problems concerning the preconscious and the conscious, which for good reasons we are reserving for separate treatment.

The Unconscious

3024

As regards schizophrenia, which we only touch on here so far as seems indispensable for a general understanding of the Ucs., a doubt must occur to us whether the process here termed repression has anything at all in common with the repression which takes place in the transference neuroses. The formula that repression is a process which occurs between the systems Ucs. and Pcs. (or Cs.), and results in keeping something at a distance from consciousness, must in any event be modified, in order that it may also be able to include the case of dementia praecox and other narcissistic affections. But the ego’s attempt at flight, which expresses itself in the withdrawal of the conscious cathexis, nevertheless remains a factor common [to the two classes of neurosis]. The most superficial reflection shows us how much more radically and profoundly this attempt at flight, this flight of the ego, is put into operation in the narcissistic neuroses.

If, in schizophrenia, this flight consists in withdrawal of instinctual cathexis from the points which represent the unconscious presentation of the object, it may seem strange that the part of the presentation of this object which belongs to the system Pcs. - namely, the word-presentations corresponding to it - should, on the contrary, receive a more intense cathexis. We might rather expect that the word-presentation, being the preconscious part, would have to sustain the first impact of repression and that it would be totally uncathectable after repression had proceeded as far as the unconscious thing-presentations. This, it is true, is difficult to understand. It turns out that the cathexis of the word-presentation is not part of the act of repression, but represents the first of the attempts at recovery or cure which so conspicuously dominate the clinical picture of schizophrenia. These endeavours are directed towards regaining the lost object, and it may well be that to achieve this purpose they set off on a path that leads to the object via the verbal part of it, but then find themselves obliged to be content with words instead of things. It is a general truth that our mental activity moves in two opposite directions: either it starts from the instincts and passes through the system Ucs. to conscious thought-activity; or, beginning with an instigation from outside, it passes through the system Cs. and Pcs. till it reaches the Ucs. cathexes of the ego and objects. This second path must, in spite of the repression which has taken place, remain traversable, and it lies open to some extent to the endeavours made by the neurosis to regain its objects. When we think in abstractions there is a danger that we may neglect the relations of words to unconscious thing-presentations, and it must be confessed that the expression and content of our philosophizing then begins to acquire an unwelcome resemblance to the mode of operation of schizophrenics. We may, on the other hand, attempt a characterization of the schizophrenic’s mode of thought by saying that he treats concrete things as though they were abstract.

If we have made a true assessment of the nature of the Ucs. and have correctly defined the difference between an unconscious and a preconscious presentation, then our researches will inevitably bring us back from many other points to this same piece of insight.

3025

A METAPSYCHOLOGICAL SUPPLEMENT TO THE THEORY OF DREAMS

(1917 [1915])

3026

Intentionally left blank

3027

A METAPSYCHOLOGICAL SUPPLEMENT TO THE THEORY OF DREAMS ¹

We shall discover in various connections how much our enquiries benefit if certain states and phenomena which may be regarded as normal prototypes of pathological affections are brought up for purposes of comparison. Among these we may include such affective states as grief and being in love, as well as the state of sleep and the phenomenon of dreaming.

We are not in the habit of devoting much thought to the fact that every night human beings lay aside the wrappings in which they have enveloped their skin, as well as anything which they may use as a supplement to their bodily organs (so far as they have succeeded in making good those organs’ deficiencies by substitutes), for instance, their spectacles, their false hair and teeth, and so on. We may add that when they go to sleep they carry out an entirely analogous undressing of their minds and lay aside most of their psychical acquisitions. Thus on both counts they approach remarkably close to the situation in which they began life. Somatically, sleep is a reactivation of intrauterine existence, fulfilling as it does the conditions of repose, warmth and exclusion of stimulus; indeed, in sleep many people resume the foetal posture. The psychical state of a sleeping person is characterized by an almost complete withdrawal from the surrounding world and a cessation of all interest in it.

In investigating psychoneurotic states, we find ourselves led to emphasize in each of them what are known as temporal regressions, i.e. the amount of developmental recession peculiar to it. We distinguish two such regressions - one affecting the development of the ego and the other that of the libido. In the state of sleep, the latter is carried to the point of restoring primitive narcissism, while the former goes back to the stage of hallucinatory satisfaction of wishes.

¹ This paper and the following one are derived from a collection which I originally intended to publish in book form under the title ‘Zur Vorbereitung einer Metapsychologie’ [‘Preliminaries to a Metapsychology’]. They follow on some papers which were printed in Volume III of the Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse (‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’, ‘Repression’ and ‘The Unconscious’). The intention of the series is to clarify and carry deeper the theoretical assumptions on which a psycho-analytic system could be founded.

A Metapsychological Supplement To The Theory Of Dreams

3028

It is, of course, the study of dreams which has taught us what we know of the psychical characteristics of the state of sleep. It is true that dreams only show us the dreamer in so far as he is not sleeping; nevertheless they are bound to reveal at the same time characteristics of sleep itself. We have come to know from observation some peculiarities of dreams which we could not at first understand, but which we can now fit into the picture without difficulty. Thus, we know that dreams are completely egoistic and that the person who plays the chief part in their scenes is always to be recognized as the dreamer. This is now easily to be accounted for by the narcissism of the state of sleep. Narcissism and egoism, indeed, coincide; the word ‘narcissism’ is only intended to emphasize the fact that egoism is a libidinal phenomenon as well; or, to put it in another way, narcissism may be described as the libidinal complement of egoism. The ‘diagnostic’ capacity of dreams - a phenomenon which is generally acknowledged, but regarded as puzzling - becomes equally comprehensible, too. In dreams, incipient physical disease is often detected earlier and more clearly than in waking life, and all the current bodily sensations assume gigantic proportions. This magnification is hypochondriacal in character; it is conditional upon the withdrawal of all psychical cathexes from the external world back on to the ego, and it makes possible early recognition of bodily changes which in waking life would still for a time have remained unobserved.

A dream tells us that something was going on which tended to interrupt sleep, and it enables us to understand in what way it has been possible to fend off this interruption. The final outcome is that the sleeper has dreamt and is able to go on sleeping; the internal demand which was striving to occupy him has been replaced by an external experience, whose demand has been disposed of. A dream is, therefore, among other things, a projection: an externalization of an internal process. We may recall that we have already met with projection elsewhere among the means adopted for defence. The mechanism of a hysterical phobia, too, culminates in the fact that the subject is able to protect himself by attempts at flight against an external danger which has taken the place of an internal instinctual claim. We will, however, defer the full treatment of projection till we come to analyse the narcissistic disorder in which this mechanism plays the most striking part.

A Metapsychological Supplement To The Theory Of Dreams

3029

In what way, however, can a case arise in which the intention to sleep meets with an interruption? The interruption may proceed from an internal excitation or from an external stimulus. Let us first consider the more obscure and more interesting case of interruption from within. Observation shows that dreams are instigated by residues from the previous day - thought-cathexes which have not submitted to the general withdrawal of cathexes, but have retained in spite of it a certain amount of libidinal or other interest. Thus the narcissism of sleep has from the outset had to admit an exception at this point, and it is here that the formation of dreams takes its start. In analysis we make the acquaintance of these ‘day’s residues’ in the shape of latent dream-thoughts; and, both by reason of their nature and of the whole situation, we must regard them as preconscious ideas, as belonging to the system Pcs.

We cannot proceed any further in explaining the formation of dreams till we have overcome certain difficulties. The narcissism of the state of sleep implies a withdrawal of cathexis from all ideas of objects, from both the unconscious and the preconscious portions of those ideas. If, then, certain day’s residues have retained their cathexis, we hesitate to suppose that they have acquired at night so much energy as to compel notice on the part of consciousness; we should be more inclined to suppose that the cathexis they have retained is far weaker than that which they possessed during the day. Here analysis saves us further speculation, for it shows that these day’s residues must receive a reinforcement which has its source in unconscious instinctual impulses if they are to figure as constructors of dreams. This hypothesis presents no immediate difficulties, for we have every reason to suppose that in sleep the censorship between the Pcs. and the Ucs. is greatly reduced, so that communication between the two systems is made easier.

A Metapsychological Supplement To The Theory Of Dreams

3030

But there is another doubt, which we must not pass over in silence. If the narcissistic state of sleep has resulted in a drawing in of all the cathexes of the systems Ucs. and Pcs., then there can no longer be any possibility of the preconscious day’s residues being reinforced by unconscious instinctual impulses, seeing that these themselves have surrendered their cathexes to the ego. Here the theory of dream-formation ends up in a contradiction, unless we can rescue it by introducing a modification into our assumption about the narcissism of sleep.

A restrictive modification of this kind is, as we shall discover later, necessary in the theory of dementia praecox as well. This must be to the effect that the repressed portion of the system Ucs. does not comply with the wish to sleep that comes from the ego, that it retains its cathexis in whole or in part, and that in general, in consequence of repression, it has acquired a certain measure of independence of the ego. Accordingly, too, some amount of the expenditure on repression (anticathexis) would have to be maintained throughout the night, in order to meet the instinctual danger - though the inaccessibility of all paths leading to a release of affect and to motility may considerably diminish the height of the anticathexis that is necessary. Thus we should picture the situation which leads to the formation of dreams as follows. The wish to sleep endeavours to draw in all the cathexes sent out by the ego and to establish an absolute narcissism. This can only partly succeed, for what is repressed in the system Ucs. does not obey the wish to sleep. A part of the anticathexes has therefore to be maintained, and the censorship between the Ucs. and the Pcs. must remain, even if not at its full strength. So far as the dominance of the ego extends, all the systems are emptied of cathexes. The stronger the Ucs. instinctual cathexes are, the more unstable is sleep. We are acquainted, too, with the extreme case where the ego gives up the wish to sleep, because it feels unable to inhibit the repressed impulses set free during sleep - in other words, where it renounces sleep because of its fear of its dreams.

A Metapsychological Supplement To The Theory Of Dreams

3031

Later on we shall learn to recognize the momentous nature of this hypothesis regarding the unruliness of repressed impulses. For the present let us follow out the situation which occurs in dream-formation.

The possibility mentioned above - that some of the preconscious thoughts of the day may also prove resistant and retain a part of their cathexis - must be recognized as a second breach in narcissism. At bottom, the two cases may be identical. The resistance of the day’s residues may originate in a link with unconscious impulses which is already in existence during waking life; or the process may be somewhat less simple, and the day’s residues which have not been wholly emptied of cathexis may establish a connection with the repressed material only after the state of sleep has set in, thanks to the easing of communication between the Pcs. and the Ucs. In both cases there follows the same decisive step in dream-formation: the preconscious dream-wish is formed, which gives expression to the unconscious impulse in the material of the preconscious day’s residues. This dream-wish must be sharply distinguished from the day’s residues; it need not have existed in waking life and it may already display the irrational character possessed by everything that is unconscious when we translate it into the conscious. Again, the dream-wish must not be confused with the wishful impulses which may have been present, though they certainly need not necessarily be present, amongst the preconscious (latent) dream-thoughts. If, however, there were any such preconscious wishes, the dream-wish associates itself with them, as a most effective reinforcement of them.

A Metapsychological Supplement To The Theory Of Dreams

3032

We have now to consider the further vicissitudes undergone by this wishful impulse, which in its essence represents an unconscious instinctual demand and which has been formed in the Pcs. as a dream-wish (a wish-fulfilling phantasy). Reflection tells us that this wishful impulse may be dealt with along three different paths. It may follow the path that would be normal in waking life, by pressing from the Pcs. to consciousness; or it may bypass the Cs. and find direct motor discharge; or it may take the unexpected path which observation enables us in fact to trace. In the first case, it would become a delusion having as content the fulfilment of the wish; but in the state of sleep this never happens. With our scanty knowledge of the metapsychological conditions of mental processes, we may perhaps take this fact as a hint that a complete emptying of a system renders it little susceptible to instigation. The second case, that of direct motor discharge, should be excluded by the same principle; for access to motility normally lies yet another step beyond the censorship of consciousness. But we do meet with exceptional instances in which this happens, in the form of somnambulism. We do not know what conditions make this possible, or why it does not happen more often. What actually happens in dream-formation is a very remarkable and quite unforeseen turn of events. The process, begun in the Pcs. and reinforced by the Ucs., pursues a backward course, through the Ucs.   to perception, which is pressing upon consciousness. This regression is the third phase of dream-formation. For the sake of clarity, we will repeat the two earlier ones: the reinforcement of the Pcs. by the Ucs., and the setting up of the dream-wish.

We call this kind of regression a topographical one, to distinguish it from the previously mentioned temporal or developmental regression. The two do not necessarily always coincide, but they do so in the particular example before us. The reversal of the course of the excitation from the Pcs. through the Ucs. to perception is at the same time a return to the early stage of hallucinatory wish-fulfilment.

A Metapsychological Supplement To The Theory Of Dreams

3033

We have already in The Interpretation of Dreams described the way in which the regression of the preconscious day’s residues takes place in dream-formation. In this process thoughts are transformed into images, mainly of a visual sort; that is to say, word-presentations are taken back to the thing-presentations which correspond to them, as if, in general, the process were dominated by considerations of representability. When regression has been completed, a number of cathexes are left over in the system Ucs. - cathexes of memories of things. The primary psychical process is brought to bear on these memories, till, by condensation of them and displacement between their respective cathexes, it has shaped the manifest dream-content. Only where the word-presentations occurring in the day’s residues are recent and current residues of perceptions, and not the expression of thoughts, are they themselves treated like thing-presentations, and subjected to the influence of condensation and displacement. Hence the rule laid down in The Interpretation of Dreams, and since confirmed beyond all doubt, that words and speeches in the dream-content are not freshly formed, but are modelled on speeches from the day preceding the dream (or on some other recent impressions, such as something that has been read). It is very noteworthy how little the dream-work keeps to the word-presentations; it is always ready to exchange one word for another till it finds the expression which is most handy for plastic representation.¹

¹ I also ascribe to considerations of representability the fact which is insisted on and perhaps over-estimated by Silberer that some dreams admit of two simultaneous, and yet essentially different interpretations, one of which he calls the ‘analytic’ and the other the ‘anagogic’. When this happens, we are invariably concerned with thoughts of a very abstract nature, which must have made their representation in the dream very difficult. We might compare it with the problem of representing in pictures a leading article from a political newspaper. In such cases, the dream-work must first replace the text that consists of abstract thoughts by one more concrete, connected with the former in some way - by comparison, symbolism, allegorical allusion, or best of all, genetically - so that the more concrete text then takes the place of the abstract one as material for the dream-work. The abstract thoughts yield the so-called anagogic interpretation, which, in our interpretative work, we discover more easily than the true analytic one. Otto Rank has justly remarked that certain dreams about their treatment, dreamt by patients in analysis, are the best models on which to form a view of these dreams which admit of more than one interpretation.

A Metapsychological Supplement To The Theory Of Dreams

3034

Now it is in this respect that the essential difference between the dream-work and schizophrenia becomes clear. In the latter, what becomes the subject of modification by the primary process are the words themselves in which the preconscious thought was expressed; in dreams, what are subject to this modification are not the words, but the thing-presentations to which the words have been taken back. In dreams there is a topographical regression; in schizophrenia there is not. In dreams there is free communication between (Pcs.) word-cathexes and (Ucs.) thing-cathexes, while it is characteristic of schizophrenia that this communication is cut off. The impression this difference makes on one is lessened precisely by the dream-interpretations we carry out in psycho-analytic practice. For, owing to the fact that dream-interpretation traces the course taken by the dream-work, follows the paths which lead from the latent thoughts to the dream-elements, reveals the way in which verbal ambiguities have been exploited, and points out the verbal bridges between different groups of material - owing to all this, we get an impression now of a joke, now of schizophrenia, and are apt to forget that for a dream all operations with words are no more than a preparation for a regression to things.

The completion of the dream-process consists in the thought-content - regressively transformed and worked over into a wishful phantasy - becoming conscious as a sense-perception; while this is happening it undergoes secondary revision, to which every perceptual concept is subject. The dream-wish, as we say, is hallucinated, and, as a hallucination, meets with belief in the reality of its fulfilment. It is precisely round this concluding piece in the formation of dreams that the gravest uncertainties centre, and it is in order to clear them up that we are proposing to compare dreams with pathological states akin to them.

The formation of the wishful phantasy and its regression to hallucination are the most essential parts of the dream-work, but they do not belong exclusively to dreams. They are also found in two morbid states: in acute hallucinatory confusion (Meynert’s ‘amentia’), and in the hallucinatory phase of schizophrenia. The hallucinatory delirium of amentia is a clearly recognizable wishful phantasy, often completely well ordered like a perfect day-dream. One might speak quite generally of a ‘hallucinatory wishful psychosis’, and attribute it equally to dreams and amentia. There are even dreams which consist of nothing but undistorted wishful phantasies with a very rich content. The hallucinatory phase of schizophrenia has been less thoroughly studied; it seems as a rule to be of a composite nature, but in its essence it might well correspond to a fresh attempt at restitution, designed to restore a libidinal cathexis to the ideas of objects.¹ I cannot extend the comparison to the other hallucinatory states in various pathological disorders, because in their case I have no experience of my own upon which to draw, and cannot utilize that of other observers.

¹ In the paper on ‘The Unconscious’ we recognized the hypercathexis of word-presentations as a first attempt of this kind.

A Metapsychological Supplement To The Theory Of Dreams

3035

Let us be clear that the hallucinatory wishful psychosis - in dreams or elsewhere - achieves two by no means identical results. It not only brings hidden or repressed wishes into consciousness; it also represents them, with the subject’s entire belief, as fulfilled. The concurrence of these two results calls for explanation. It is quite impossible to maintain that unconscious wishes must necessarily be taken for realities when once they have become conscious; for, as we know, our judgement is very well able to distinguish realities from ideas and wishes, however intense they may be. On the other hand, it seems justifiable to assume that belief in reality is bound up with perception through the senses. When once a thought has followed the path to regression as far back as to the unconscious memory-traces of objects and thence to perception, we accept the perception of it as real. So hallucination brings belief in reality with it. We now have to ask ourselves what determines the coming into being of a hallucination. The first answer would be regression, and this would replace the problem of the origin of hallucination by that of the mechanism of regression. As regards dreams, this latter problem need not remain long unanswered. Regression of Pcs. dream-thoughts to mnemic images of things is clearly the result of the attraction which the Ucs. instinctual representatives - e.g. repressed memories of experiences - exercise upon the thoughts which have been put into words. But we soon perceive that we are on a false scent. If the secret of hallucination is nothing else than that of regression, every regression of sufficient intensity would produce hallucination with belief in its reality. But we are quite familiar with situations in which a process of regressive reflection brings to consciousness very clear visual mnemic images, though we do not on that account for a single moment take them for real perceptions. Again, we could very well imagine the dream-work penetrating to mnemic images of this kind, making conscious to us that was previously unconscious, and holding up to us a wishful phantasy which rouses our longing, but which we should not regard as a real fulfilment of the wish. Hallucination must therefore be something more than the regressive revival of mnemic images that are in themselves Ucs.

A Metapsychological Supplement To The Theory Of Dreams

3036

Let us, furthermore, bear in mind the great practical importance of distinguishing perceptions from ideas, however intensely recalled. Our whole relation to the external world, to reality, depends on our ability to do so. We have put forward the fiction that we did not always possess this ability and that at the beginning of our mental life we did in fact hallucinate the satisfying object when we felt the need for it. But in such a situation satisfaction did not occur, and this failure must very soon have moved us to create some contrivance with the help of which it was possible to distinguish such wishful perceptions from a real fulfilment and to avoid them for the future. In other words, we gave up hallucinatory satisfaction of our wishes at a very early period and set up a kind of ‘reality-testing’. The question now arises in what this reality-testing consisted, and how the hallucinatory wishful psychosis of dreams and amentia and similar conditions succeeds in abolishing it and in re-establishing the old mode of satisfaction.

The answer can be given if we now proceed to define more precisely the third of our psychical systems, the system Cs., which hitherto we have not sharply distinguished from the Pcs. In The Interpretation of Dreams we were already led to a decision to regard conscious perception as the function of a special system, to which we ascribed certain curious properties, and to which we shall now have good grounds for attributing other characteristics as well. We may regard this system, which is there called the Pcpt., as coinciding with the system Cs., on whose activity becoming conscious usually depends. Nevertheless, even so, the fact of a thing’s becoming conscious still does not wholly coincide with its belonging to a system, for we have learnt that it is possible to be aware of sensory mnemic images to which we cannot possibly allow a psychical location in the systems Cs. or Pcpt.

We must, however, put off discussing this difficulty till we can focus our interest upon the system Cs. itself. In the present connection we may be allowed to assume that hallucination consists in a cathexis of the system Cs. (Pcpt.), which, however, is not effected - as normally - from without, but from within, and that a necessary condition for the occurrence of hallucination is that regression shall be carried far enough to reach this system itself and in so doing be able to pass over reality-testing.¹

In an earlier passage² we ascribed to the still helpless organism a capacity for making a first orientation in the world by means of its perceptions, distinguishing ‘external’ and ‘internal’ according to their relation to its muscular action. A perception which is made to disappear by an action is recognized as external, as reality; where such an action makes no difference, the perception originates within the subject’s own body - it is not real. It is of value to the individual to possess a means such as this of recognizing reality, which at the same time helps him to deal with it, and he would be glad to be equipped with a similar power against the often merciless claims of his instincts. That is why he takes such pains to transpose outwards what becomes troublesome to him from within - that is, to project it.

¹ I may add by way of supplement that any attempt to explain hallucination would have to start out from negative rather than positive hallucination.

² ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’.

A Metapsychological Supplement To The Theory Of Dreams

3037

This function of orientating the individual in the world by discrimination between what is internal and what is external must now, after detailed dissection of the mental apparatus, be ascribed to the system Cs. (Pcpt.) alone. The Cs. must have at its disposal a motor innervation which determines whether the perception can be made to disappear or whether it proves resistant. Reality-testing need be nothing more than this contrivance.¹ We can say nothing more precise on this point, for we know too little as yet of the nature and mode of operation of the system Cs. We shall place reality-testing among the major institutions of the ego, alongside the censorships which we have come to recognize between the psychical systems, and we shall expect that the analysis of the narcissistic disorders will help to bring other similar institutions to light.

On the other hand, we can already learn from pathology the way in which reality-testing may be done away with or put out of action. We shall see this more clearly in the wishful psychosis of amentia than in that of dreams. Amentia is the reaction to a loss which reality affirms, but which the ego has to deny, since it finds it insupportable. Thereupon the ego breaks off its relation to reality; it withdraws the cathexis from the system of perceptions, Cs. - or rather, perhaps, it withdraws a cathexis, the special nature of which may be the subject of further enquiry. With this turning away from reality, reality-testing is got rid of, the (unrepressed, completely conscious) wishful phantasies are able to press forward into the system, and they are there regarded as a better reality. Such a withdrawal may be put on a par with the processes of repression. Amentia presents the interesting spectacle of a breach between the ego and one of its organs - one which had perhaps been its most faithful servant and had been bound up with it the most intimately.²

¹ Cf. a later passage on the distinction between testing with regard to reality and testing with regard to immediacy. [‘Relitätsprüfung’ and ‘Aktualitätsprüfung’.]

² I may venture to suggest in this connection that the toxic hallucinoses, too, e.g. alcoholic delirium, are to be understood in an analogous fashion. Here the unbearable loss imposed by reality would be precisely the loss of alcohol. When the latter is supplied, the hallucinations cease.

A Metapsychological Supplement To The Theory Of Dreams

3038

What is performed in amentia by this ‘repression’ is performed in dreams by voluntary renunciation. The state of sleep does not wish to know anything of the external world; it takes no interest in reality, or only so far as abandoning the state of sleep - waking up - is concerned. Hence it withdraws cathexis from the system Cs. as well as from the other systems, the Pcs. and the Ucs., in so far as the cathexes in them obey the wish to sleep. With the system Cs. thus uncathected, the possibility of reality-testing is abandoned; and the excitations which, independently of the state of sleep, have entered on the path of regression will find that path clear as far as the system Cs. where they will count as undisputed reality.¹

As regards the hallucinatory psychosis of dementia praecox, we shall infer from our discussion that that psychosis cannot be among the initial symptoms of the affection. It becomes possible only when the patient’s ego is so far disintegrated that reality-testing no longer stands in the way of hallucination.

In what concerns the psychology of dream-processes we arrive at the result that all the essential characteristics of dreams are determined by the conditioning factor of sleep. Aristotle was entirely right, long ago, in his modest pronouncement that dreams are the mental activity of the sleeper. We might expand this and say: they are a residue of mental activity, made possible by the fact that the narcissistic state of sleep has not been able to be completely established. This does not sound very different from what psychologists and philosophers have said all along, but it is based on quite different views about the structure and function of the mental apparatus. These views have this advantage over the earlier ones, that they have given us an understanding, too, of all the detailed characteristics of dreams.

Finally, let us once more glance at the significant light which the topography of the process of repression throws for us on the mechanism of mental disturbances. In dreams the withdrawal of cathexis (libido or interest) affects all systems equally; in the transference neuroses, the Pcs. cathexis is withdrawn; in schizophrenia, the cathexis of the Ucs.; in amentia, that of the Cs.

¹ Here the principle of the insusceptibility to excitation of uncathected systems appears to be invalidated in the case of the system Cs. (Pcpt.). But it may be a question of only the partial removal of cathexis; and for the perceptual system in especial we must assume many conditions for excitation which are widely divergent from those of other systems. - We are not, of course, intending to disguise or gloss over the uncertain and tentative character of these metapsychological discussions. Only deeper investigation can lead to the achievement of a certain degree of probability.

3039

MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA

(1917 [1915])

3040

Intentionally left blank

3041

MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA

Dreams having served us as the prototype in normal life of narcissistic mental disorders, we will now try to throw some light on the nature of melancholia by comparing it with the normal affect of mourning. This time, however, we must begin by making an admission, as a warning against any over-estimation of the value of our conclusions. Melancholia, whose definition fluctuates even in descriptive psychiatry, takes on various clinical forms the grouping together of which into a single unity does not seem to be established with certainty; and some of these forms suggest somatic rather than psychogenic affections. Our material, apart from such impressions as are open to every observer, is limited to a small number of cases whose psychogenic nature was indisputable. We shall, therefore, from the outset drop all claim to general validity for our conclusions, and we shall console ourselves by reflecting that, with the means of investigation at our disposal to-day, we could hardly discover anything that was not typical, if not of a whole class of disorders, at least of a small group of them.

The correlation of melancholia and mourning seems justified by the general picture of the two conditions.¹ Moreover, the exciting causes due to environmental influences are, so far as we can discern them at all, the same for both conditions. Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on. In some people the same influences produce melancholia instead of mourning and we consequently suspect them of a pathological disposition. It is also well worth notice that, although mourning involves grave departures from the normal attitude to life, it never occurs to us to regard it as a pathological condition and to refer it to medical treatment. We rely on its being overcome after a certain lapse of time, and we look upon any interference with it as useless or even harmful.

¹  Abraham (1912), to whom we owe the most important of the few analytic studies on this subject, also took this comparison as his starting point.

Mourning And Melancholia

3042

The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment. This picture becomes a little more intelligible when we consider that, with one exception, the same traits are met with in mourning. The disturbance of self-regard is absent in mourning; but otherwise the features are the same. Profound mourning, the reaction to the loss of someone who is loved, contains the same painful frame of mind, the same loss of interest in the outside world - in so far as it does not recall him - the same loss of capacity to adopt any new object of love (which would mean replacing him) and the same turning away from any activity that is not connected with thoughts of him. It is easy to see that this inhibition and circumscription of the ego is the expression of an exclusive devotion to mourning which leaves nothing over for other purposes or other interests. It is really only because we know so well how to explain it that this attitude does not seem to us pathological.

We should regard it as an appropriate comparison, too, to call the mood of mourning a ‘painful’ one. We shall probably see the justification for this when we are in a position to give a characterization of the economics of pain.

In what, now, does the work which mourning performs consist? I do not think there is anything far-fetched in presenting it in the following way. Reality-testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object. This demand arouses understandable opposition - it is a matter of general observation that people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is already beckoning to them. This opposition can be so intense that a turning away from reality takes place and a clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis.¹ Normally, respect for reality gains the day. Nevertheless its orders cannot be obeyed at once. They are carried out bit by bit, at great expense of time and cathectic energy, and in the meantime the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged. Each single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hypercathected, and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it. Why this compromise by which the command of reality is carried out piecemeal should be so extraordinarily painful is not at all easy to explain in terms of economics. It is remarkable that this painful unpleasure is taken as a matter of course by us. The fact is, however, that when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again.

¹ Cf. the preceding paper.

Mourning And Melancholia

3043

Let us now apply to melancholia what we have learnt about mourning. In one set of cases it is evident that melancholia too may be the reaction to the loss of a loved object. Where the exciting causes are different one can recognize that there is a loss of a more ideal kind. The object has not perhaps actually died, but has been lost as an object of love (e.g. in the case of a betrothed girl who has been jilted). In yet other cases one feels justified in maintaining the belief that a loss of this kind has occurred, but one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either. This, indeed, might be so even if the patient is aware of the loss which has given rise to his melancholia, but only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him. This would suggest that melancholia is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious.

In mourning we found that the inhibition and loss of interest are fully accounted for by the work of mourning in which the ego is absorbed. In melancholia, the unknown loss will result in a similar internal work and will therefore be responsible for the melancholic inhibition. The difference is that the inhibition of the melancholic seems puzzling to us because we cannot see what it is that is absorbing him so entirely. The melancholic displays something else besides which is lacking in mourning - an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale. In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself. The patient represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable; he reproaches himself, vilifies himself and expects to be cast out and punished. He abases himself before everyone and commiserates with his own relatives for being connected with anyone so unworthy. He is not of the opinion that a change has taken place in him, but extends his self-criticism back over the past; he declares that he was never any better. This picture of a delusion of (mainly moral) inferiority is completed by sleeplessness and refusal to take nourishment, and - what is psychologically very remarkable - by an overcoming of the instinct which compels every living thing to cling to life.

Mourning And Melancholia

3044

It would be equally fruitless from a scientific and a therapeutic point of view to contradict a patient who brings these accusations against his ego. He must surely be right in some way and be describing something that is as it seems to him to be. Indeed, we must at once confirm some of his statements without reservation. He really is as lacking in interest and as incapable of love and achievement as he says. But that, as we know, is secondary; it is the effect of the internal work which is consuming his ego work which is unknown to us but which is comparable to the work of mourning. He also seems to us justified in certain other self-accusations; it is merely that he has a keener eye for the truth than other people who are not melancholic. When in his heightened self-criticism he describes himself as petty, egoistic, dishonest, lacking in independence, one whose sole aim has been to hide the weaknesses of his own nature, it may be, so far as we know, that he has come pretty near to understanding himself; we only wonder why a man has to be ill before he can be accessible to a truth of this kind. For there can be no doubt that if anyone holds and expresses to others an opinion of himself such as this (an opinion which Hamlet held both of himself and of everyone else ¹), he is ill, whether he is speaking the truth or whether he is being more or less unfair to himself. Nor is it difficult to see that there is no correspondence, so far as we can judge, between the degree of self-abasement and its real justification. A good, capable, conscientious woman will speak no better of herself after she develops melancholia than one who is in fact worthless; indeed, the former is perhaps more likely to fall ill of the disease than the latter, of whom we too should have nothing good to say. Finally, it must strike us that after all the melancholic does not behave in quite the same way as a person who is crushed by remorse and self-reproach in a normal fashion. Feelings of shame in front of other people, which would more than anything characterize this latter condition, are lacking in the melancholic, or at least they are not prominent in him. One might emphasize the presence in him of an almost opposite trait of insistent communicativeness which finds satisfaction in self-exposure.

¹ ‘Use every man after his desert, and who shall scape whipping?’ (Act II, Scene 2).

Mourning And Melancholia

3045

The essential thing, therefore, is not whether the melancholic’s distressing self-denigration is correct, in the sense that his self-criticism agrees with the opinion of other people. The point must rather be that he is giving a correct description of his psychological situation. He has lost his self-respect and he must have good reason for this. It is true that we are then faced with a contradiction that presents a problem which is hard to solve. The analogy with mourning led us to conclude that he had suffered a loss in regard to an object; what he tells us points to a loss in regard to his ego.

Before going into this contradiction, let us dwell for a moment on the view which the melancholic’s disorder affords of the constitution of the human ego. We see how in him one part of the ego sets itself over against the other, judges it critically, and, as it were, takes it as its object. Our suspicion that the critical agency which is here split off from the ego might also show its independence in other circumstances will be confirmed by every further observation. We shall really find grounds for distinguishing this agency from the rest of the ego. What we are here becoming acquainted with is the agency commonly called ‘conscience’; we shall count it, along with the censorship of consciousness and reality-testing, among the major institutions of the ego, and we shall come upon evidence to show that it can become diseased on its own account. In the clinical picture of melancholia, dissatisfaction with the ego on moral grounds is the most outstanding feature. The patient’s self-evaluation concerns itself much less frequently with bodily infirmity, ugliness or weakness, or with social inferiority; of this category, it is only his fears and asseverations of becoming poor that occupy a prominent position.

Mourning And Melancholia

3046

There is one observation, not at all difficult to make, which leads to the explanation of the contradiction mentioned above. If one listens patiently to a melancholic’s many and various self-accusations, one cannot in the end avoid the impression that often the most violent of them are hardly at all applicable to the patient himself, but that with insignificant modifications they do fit someone else, someone whom the patient loves or has loved or should love. Every time one examines the facts this conjecture is confirmed. So we find the key to the clinical picture: we perceive that the self-reproaches are reproaches against a loved object which have been shifted away from it on to the patient’s own ego.

The woman who loudly pities her husband for being tied to such an incapable wife as herself is really accusing her husband of being incapable, in whatever sense she may mean this. There is no need to be greatly surprised that a few genuine self-reproaches are scattered among those that have been transposed back. These are allowed to obtrude themselves, since they help to mask the others and make recognition of the true state of affairs impossible. Moreover, they derive from the pros and cons of the conflict of love that has led to the loss of love. The behaviour of the patients, too, now becomes much more intelligible. Their complaints are really ‘plaints’ in the old sense of the word. They are not ashamed and do not hide themselves, since everything derogatory that they say about themselves is at bottom said about someone else. Moreover, they are far from evincing towards those around them the attitude of humility and submissiveness that would alone befit such worthless people. On the contrary, they make the greatest nuisance of themselves, and always seem as though they felt slighted and had been treated with great injustice. All this is possible only because the reactions expressed in their behaviour still proceed from a mental constellation of revolt, which has then, by a certain process, passed over into the crushed state of melancholia.

Mourning And Melancholia

3047

There is no difficulty in reconstructing this process. An object choice, an attachment of the libido to a particular person, had at one time existed; then, owing to a real slight or disappointment coming from this loved person, the relationship was shattered. The result was not the normal one of a withdrawal of the libido from this object and a displacement of it on to a new one, but something different, for whose coming about various conditions seem to be necessary. The object-cathexis proved to have little power of resistance and was brought to an end. But the free libido was not displaced on to another object; it was withdrawn into the ego. There, however, it was not employed in any unspecified way, but served to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object. Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object. In this way an object-loss was transformed into an ego-loss and the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identification.

One or two things may be directly inferred with regard to the preconditions and effects of a process such as this. On the one hand, a strong fixation to the loved object must have been present; on the other hand, in contradiction to this, the object-cathexis must have had little power of resistance. As Otto Rank has aptly remarked, this contradiction seems to imply that the object-choice has been effected on a narcissistic basis, so that the object-cathexis, when obstacles come in its way, can regress to narcissism. The narcissistic identification with the object then becomes a substitute for the erotic cathexis, the result of which is that in spite of the conflict with the loved person the love-relation need not be given up. This substitution of identification for object-love is an important mechanism in the narcissistic affections; Karl Landauer (1914) has lately been able to point to it in the process of recovery in a case of schizophrenia. It represents, of course, a regression from one type of object-choice to original narcissism. We have elsewhere shown that identification is a preliminary stage of object-choice, that it is the first way - and one that is expressed in an ambivalent fashion - in which the ego picks out an object. The ego wants to incorporate this object into itself, and, in accordance with the oral or cannibalistic phase of libidinal development in which it is, it wants to do so by devouring it. Abraham is undoubtedly right in attributing to this connection the refusal of nourishment met with in severe forms of melancholia.

Mourning And Melancholia

3048

The conclusion which our theory would require - namely, that the disposition to fall ill of melancholia (or some part of that disposition) lies in the predominance of the narcissistic type of object-choice - has unfortunately not yet been confirmed by observation. In the opening remarks of this paper, I admitted that the empirical material upon which this study is founded is insufficient for our needs. If we could assume an agreement between the results of observation and what we have inferred, we should not hesitate to include this regression from object-cathexis to the still narcissistic oral phase of the libido in our characterization of melancholia. Identifications with the object are by no means rare in the transference neuroses either; indeed, they are a well-known mechanism of symptom-formation, especially in hysteria. The difference, however, between narcissistic and hysterical identification may be seen in this: that, whereas in the former the object-cathexis is abandoned, in the latter it persists and manifests its influence, though this is usually confined to certain isolated actions and innervations. In any case, in the transference neuroses, too, identification is the expression of there being something in common, which may signify love. Narcissistic identification is the older of the two and it paves the way to an understanding of hysterical identification, which has been less thoroughly studied.

Melancholia, therefore, borrows some of its features from mourning, and the others from the process of regression from narcissistic object-choice to narcissism. It is on the one hand, like mourning, a reaction to the real loss of a loved object; but over and above this, it is marked by a determinant which is absent in normal mourning or which, if it is present, transforms the latter into pathological mourning. The loss of a love-object is an excellent opportunity for the ambivalence in love-relationships to make itself effective and come into the open. Where there is a disposition to obsessional neurosis the conflict due to ambivalence gives a pathological cast to mourning and forces it to express itself in the form of self-reproaches to the effect that the mourner himself is to blame for the loss of the loved object, i.e. that he has willed it. These obsessional states of depression following upon the death of a loved person show us what the conflict due to ambivalence can achieve by itself when there is no regressive drawing-in of libido as well. In melancholia, the occasions which give rise to the illness extend for the most part beyond the clear case of a loss by death, and include all those situations of being slighted, neglected or disappointed, which can import opposed feelings of love and hate into the relationship or reinforce an already existing ambivalence. This conflict due to ambivalence, which sometimes arises more from real experiences, sometimes more from constitutional factors, must not be overlooked among the preconditions of melancholia. If the love for the object - a love which cannot be given up though the object itself is given up - takes refuge in narcissistic identification, then the hate comes into operation on this substitutive object, abusing it, debasing it, making it suffer and deriving sadistic satisfaction from its suffering. The self-tormenting in melancholia, which is without doubt enjoyable, signifies, just like the corresponding phenomenon in obsessional neurosis, a satisfaction of trends of sadism and hate ¹ which relate to an object, and which have been turned round upon the subject’s own self in the ways we have been discussing. In both disorders the patients usually still succeed, by the circuitous path of self-punishment, in taking revenge on the original object and in tormenting their loved one through their illness, having resorted to it in order to avoid the need to express their hostility to him openly. After all, the person who has occasioned the patient’s emotional disorder, and on whom his illness is centred, is usually to be found in his immediate environment. The melancholic’s erotic cathexis in regard to his object has thus undergone a double vicissitude: part of it has regressed to identification, but the other part, under the influence of the conflict due to ‘ambivalence, has been carried back to the stage of sadism which is nearer to that conflict.

¹ For the distinction between the two, see my paper on ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’.

Mourning And Melancholia

3049

It is this sadism alone that solves the riddle of the tendency to suicide which makes melancholia so interesting - and so dangerous. So immense is the ego’s self-love, which we have come to recognize as the primal state from which instinctual life proceeds, and so vast is the amount of narcissistic libido which we see liberated in the fear that emerges at a threat to life, that we cannot conceive how that ego can consent to its own destruction. We have long known, it is true, that no neurotic harbours thoughts of suicide which he has not turned back upon himself from murderous impulses against others, but we have never been able to explain what interplay of forces can carry such a purpose through to execution. The analysis of melancholia now shows that the ego can kill itself only if, owing to the return of the object-cathexis, it can treat itself as an object - if it is able to direct against itself the hostility which relates to an object and which represents the ego’s original reaction to objects in the external world.¹ Thus in regression from narcissistic object-choice the object has, it is true, been got rid of, but it has nevertheless proved more powerful than the ego itself. In the two opposed situations of being most intensely in love and of suicide the ego is overwhelmed by the object, though in totally different ways.

As regards one particular striking feature of melancholia that we have mentioned, the prominence of the fear of becoming poor, it seems plausible to suppose that it is derived from anal erotism which has been torn out of its context and altered in a regressive sense.

Melancholia confronts us with yet other problems, the answer to which in part eludes us. The fact that it passes off after a certain time has elapsed without leaving traces of any gross changes is a feature it shares with mourning. We found by way of explanation that in mourning time is needed for the command of reality-testing to be carried out in detail, and that when this work has been accomplished the ego will have succeeded in freeing its libido from the lost object. We may imagine that the ego is occupied with analogous work during the course of a melancholia; in neither case have we any insight into the economics of the course of events. The sleeplessness in melancholia testifies to the rigidity of the condition, the impossibility of effecting the general drawing-in of cathexes necessary for sleep. The complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic energies - which in the transference neuroses we have called ‘anticathexes’ - from all directions, and emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished. It can easily prove resistant to the ego’s wish to sleep.

What is probably a somatic factor, and one which cannot be explained psychogenically, makes itself visible in the regular amelioration in the condition that takes place towards evening. These considerations bring up the question whether a loss in the ego irrespectively of the object - a purely narcissistic blow to the ego - may not suffice to produce the picture of melancholia and whether an impoverishment of ego-libido directly due to toxins may not be able to produce certain forms of the disease.

¹ Cf. ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’.

Mourning And Melancholia

3050

The most remarkable characteristic of melancholia, and the one in most need of explanation, is its tendency to change round into mania - a state which is the opposite of it in its symptoms. As we know, this does not happen to every melancholia. Some cases run their course in periodic relapses, during the intervals between which signs of mania may be entirely absent or only very slight. Others show the regular alternation of melancholic and manic phases which has led to the hypothesis of a circular insanity. One would be tempted to regard these cases as non-psychogenic, if it were not for the fact that the psycho-analytic method has succeeded in arriving at a solution and effecting a therapeutic improvement in several cases precisely of this kind. It is not merely permissible, therefore, but incumbent upon us to extend an analytic explanation of melancholia to mania as well.

I cannot promise that this attempt will prove entirely satisfactory. It hardly carries us much beyond the possibility of taking one’s initial bearings. We have two things to go upon: the first is a psycho-analytic impression, and the second what we may perhaps call a matter of general economic experience. The impression which several psycho-analytic investigators have already put into words is that the content of mania is no different from that of melancholia, that both disorders are wrestling with the same ‘complex’, but that probably in melancholia the ego has succumbed to the complex whereas in mania it has mastered it or pushed it aside. Our second pointer is afforded by the observation that all states such as joy, exultation or triumph, which give us the normal model for mania, depend on the same economic conditions. What has happened here is that, as a result of some influence, a large expenditure of psychical energy, long maintained or habitually occurring, has at last become unnecessary, so that it is available for numerous applications and possibilities of discharge - when, for instance, some poor wretch, by winning a large sum of money, is suddenly relieved from chronic worry about his daily bread, or when a long and arduous struggle is finally crowned with success, or when a man finds himself in a position to throw off at a single blow some oppressive compulsion, some false position which he has long had to keep up, and so on. All such situations are characterized by high spirits, by the signs of discharge of joyful emotion and by increased readiness for all kinds of action - in just the same way as in mania, and in complete contrast to the depression and inhibition of melancholia. We may venture to assert that mania is nothing other than a triumph of this sort, only that here again what the ego has surmounted and what it is triumphing over remain hidden from it. Alcoholic intoxication, which belongs to the same class of states, may (in so far as it is an elated one) be explained in the same way; here there is probably a suspension, produced by toxins, of expenditures of energy in repression. The popular view likes to assume that a person in a manic state of this kind finds such delight in movement and action because he is so ‘cheerful’. This false connection must of course be put right. The fact is that the economic condition in the subject’s mind referred to above has been fulfilled, and this is the reason why he is in such high spirits on the one hand and so uninhibited in action on the other.

Mourning And Melancholia

3051

If we put these two indications together, what we find is this. In mania, the ego must have got over the loss of the object (or its mourning over the loss, or perhaps the object itself), and thereupon the whole quota of anticathexis which the painful suffering of melancholia had drawn to itself from the ego and ‘bound’ will have become available. Moreover, the manic subject plainly demonstrates his liberation from the object which was the cause of his suffering, by seeking like a ravenously hungry man for new object-cathexes.

This explanation certainly sounds plausible, but in the first place it is too indefinite, and, secondly, it gives rise to more new problems and doubts than we can answer. We will not evade a discussion of them, even though we cannot expect it to lead us to a clear understanding.

In the first place, normal mourning, too, overcomes the loss of the object, and it, too, while it lasts, absorbs all the energies of the ego. Why, then, after it has run its course, is there no hint in its case of the economic condition for a phase of triumph? I find it impossible to answer this objection straight away. It also draws our attention to the fact that we do not even know the economic means by which mourning carries out its task. Possibly, however, a conjecture will help us here. Each single one of the memories and situations of expectancy which demonstrate the libido’s attachment to the lost object is met by the verdict of reality that the object no longer exists; and the ego, confronted as it were with the question whether it shall share this fate, is persuaded by the sum of the narcissistic satisfactions it derives from being alive to sever its attachment to the object that has been abolished. We may perhaps suppose that this work of severance is so slow and gradual that by the time it has been finished the expenditure of energy necessary for it is also dissipated.¹

It is tempting to go on from this conjecture about the work of mourning and try to give an account of the work of melancholia. Here we are met at the outset by an uncertainty. So far we have hardly considered melancholia from the topographical point of view, nor asked ourselves in and between what psychical systems the work of melancholia goes on. What part of the mental processes of the disease still takes place in connection with the unconscious object-cathexes that have been given up, and what part in connection with their substitute, by identification, in the ego?

¹ The economic standpoint has hitherto received little attention in psycho-analytic writings. I would mention as an exception a paper by Victor Tausk (1913) on motives for repression devalued by recompenses.

Mourning And Melancholia

3052

The quick and easy answer is that ‘the unconscious (thing-) presentation of the object has been abandoned by the libido’. In reality, however, this presentation is made up of innumerable single impressions (or unconscious traces of them), and this withdrawal of libido is not a process that can be accomplished in a moment, but must certainly, as in mourning, be one in which progress is long-drawn-out and gradual. Whether it begins simultaneously at several points or follows some sort of fixed sequence is not easy to decide; in analyses it often becomes evident that first one and then another memory is activated, and that the laments which always sound the same and are wearisome in their monotony nevertheless take their rise each time in some different unconscious source. If the object does not possess this great significance for the ego - a significance reinforced by a thousand links - then, too, its loss will not be of a kind to cause either mourning or melancholia. This characteristic of detaching the libido bit by bit is therefore to be ascribed alike to mourning and to melancholia; it is probably supported by the same economic situation and serves the same purposes in both.

As we have seen, however, melancholia contains something more than normal mourning. In melancholia the relation to the object is no simple one; it is complicated by the conflict due to ambivalence. The ambivalence is either constitutional, i.e. is an element of every love-relation formed by this particular ego, or else it proceeds precisely from those experiences that involved the threat of losing the object. For this reason the exciting causes of melancholia have a much wider range than those of mourning, which is for the most part occasioned only by a real loss of the object, by its death. In melancholia, accordingly, countless separate struggles are carried on over the object, in which hate and love contend with each other; the one seeks to detach the libido from the object, the other to maintain this position of the libido against the assault. The location of these separate struggles cannot be assigned to any system but the Ucs., the region of the memory-traces of things (as contrasted with word-cathexes). In mourning, too, the efforts to detach the libido are made in this same system; but in it nothing hinders these processes from proceeding along the normal path through the Pcs. to consciousness. This path is blocked for the work of melancholia, owing perhaps to a number of causes or a combination of them. Constitutional ambivalence belongs by its nature to the repressed; traumatic experiences in connection with the object may have activated other repressed material. Thus everything to do with these struggles due to ambivalence remains withdrawn from consciousness, until the outcome characteristic of melancholia has set in. This, as we know, consists in the threatened libidinal cathexis at length abandoning the object, only, however, to draw back to the place in the ego from which it had proceeded. So by taking flight into the ego love escapes extinction. After this regression of the libido the process can become conscious, and it is represented to consciousness as a conflict between one part of the ego and the critical agency.

Mourning And Melancholia

3053

What consciousness is aware of in the work of melancholia is thus not the essential part of it, nor is it even the part which we may credit with an influence in bringing the ailment to an end. We see that the ego debases itself and rages against itself, and we understand as little as the patient what this can lead to and how it can change. We can more readily attribute such a function to the unconscious part of the work, because it is not difficult to perceive an essential analogy between the work of melancholia and of mourning. Just as mourning impels the ego to give up the object by declaring the object to be dead and offering the ego the inducement of continuing to live, so does each single struggle of ambivalence loosen the fixation of the libido to the object by disparaging it, denigrating it and even as it were killing it. It is possible for the process in the Ucs. to come to an end, either after the fury has spent itself or after the object has been abandoned as valueless. We cannot tell which of these two possibilities is the regular or more usual one in bringing melancholia to an end, nor what influence this termination has on the future course of the case. The ego may enjoy in this the satisfaction of knowing itself as the better of the two, as superior to the object.

Even if we accept this view of the work of melancholia, it still does not supply an explanation of the one point on which we were seeking light. It was our expectation that the economic condition for the emergence of mania after the melancholia has run its course is to be found in the ambivalence which dominates the latter affection; and in this we found support from analogies in various other fields. But there is one fact before which that expectation must bow. Of the three preconditions of melancholia - loss of the object, ambivalence, and regression of libido into the ego - the first two are also found in the obsessional self-reproaches arising after a death has occurred. In those cases it is unquestionably the ambivalence which is the motive force of the conflict, and observation shows that after the conflict has come to an end there is nothing left over in the nature of the triumph of a manic state of mind. We are thus led to the third factor as the only one responsible for the result. The accumulation of cathexis which is at first bound and then, after the work of melancholia is finished, becomes free and makes mania possible must be linked with regression of the libido to narcissism. The conflict within the ego, which melancholia substitutes for the struggle over the object, must act like a painful wound which calls for an extraordinarily high anticathexis. - But here once again, it will be well to call a halt and to postpone any further explanation of mania until we have gained some insight into the economic nature, first, of physical pain, and then of the mental pain which is analogous to it. As we already know, the interdependence of the complicated problems of the mind forces us to break off every enquiry before it is completed - till the outcome of some other enquiry can come to its assistance.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1925:] Cf. a continuation of this discussion of mania in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c).

3054

A CASE OF PARANOIA RUNNING COUNTER TO THE PSYCHO-ANALYTIC

THEORY OF THE DISEASE

(1915)

3055

Intentionally left blank

3056

A CASE OF PARANOIA RUNNING COUNTER TO THE PSYCHO-ANALYTIC

THEORY OF THE DISEASE

Some years ago a well-known lawyer consulted me about a case which had raised some doubts in his mind. A young woman had asked him to protect her from the molestations of a man who had drawn her into a love-affair. She declared that this man had abused her confidence by getting unseen witnesses to photograph them while they were making love, and that by exhibiting these pictures it was now in his power to bring disgrace on her and force her to resign the post she occupied. Her legal adviser was experienced enough to recognize the pathological stamp of this accusation; he remarked, however, that, as what appears to be incredible often actually happens, he would appreciate the opinion of a psychiatrist in the matter. He promised to call on me again, accompanied by the plaintiff.

(Before I continue the account, I must confess that I have altered the milieu of the case in order to preserve the incognito of the people concerned, but that I have altered nothing else. I consider it a wrong practice, however excellent the motive may be, to alter any detail in the presentation of a case. One can never tell what aspect of a case may be picked out by a reader of independent judgement, and one runs the risk of leading him astray.)

Shortly afterwards I met the patient in person She was thirty years old, a most attractive and handsome girl, who looked much younger than her age and was of a distinctly feminine type. She obviously resented the interference of a doctor and took no trouble to hide her distrust. It was clear that only the influence of her legal adviser, who was present, induced her to tell me the story which follows and which set me a problem that will be mentioned later. Neither in her manner nor by any kind of expression of emotion did she betray the slightest shame or shyness, such as one would have expected her to feel in the presence of a stranger. She was completely under the spell of the apprehension brought on by her experience.

A Case Of Paranoia Running Counter To The Psycho-Analytic Theory Of The Disease

3057

For many years she had been on the staff of a big business concern, in which she held a responsible post. Her work had given her satisfaction and had been appreciated by her superiors. She had never sought any love-affairs with men, but had lived quietly with her old mother, of whom she was the sole support. She had no brothers or sisters; her father had died many years before. Recently an employee in her office, a highly cultivated and attractive man, had paid her attentions and she in turn had been drawn towards him. For external reasons, marriage was out of the question, but the man would not hear of giving up their relationship on that account. He had pleaded that it was senseless to sacrifice to social convention all that they both longed for and had an indisputable right to enjoy, something that could enrich their life as nothing else could. As he had promised not to expose her to any risk, she had at last consented to visit him in his bachelor rooms in the daytime. There they kissed and embraced as they lay side by side, and he began to admire the charms which were now partly revealed. In the midst of this idyllic scene she was suddenly frightened by a noise, a kind of knock or click. It came from the direction of the writing-desk, which was standing across the window; the space between desk and window was partly taken up by a heavy curtain. She had at once asked her friend what this noise meant, and was told, so she said, that it probably came from the small clock on the writing-desk. I shall venture, however, to make a comment presently on this part of her narrative.

As she was leaving the house she had met two men on the staircase, who whispered something to each other when they saw her. One of the strangers was carrying something which was wrapped up and looked like a small box. She was much exercised over this meeting, and on her way home she had already put together the following notions: the box might easily have been a camera, and the man a photographer who had been hidden behind the curtain while she was in the room; the click had been the noise of the shutter; the photograph had been taken as soon as he saw her in a particularly compromising position which he wished to record. From that moment nothing could abate her suspicion of her lover. She pursued him with reproaches and pestered him for explanations and reassurances, not only when they met but also by letter. But it was in vain that he tried to convince her that his feelings were sincere and that her suspicions were entirely without foundation. At last she called on the lawyer, told him of her experience and handed over the letters which the suspect had written to her about the incident. Later I had an opportunity of seeing some of these letters. They made a very favourable impression on me, and consisted mainly in expressions of regret that such a beautiful and tender relationship should have been destroyed by this ‘unfortunate morbid idea’.

A Case Of Paranoia Running Counter To The Psycho-Analytic Theory Of The Disease

3058

I need hardly justify my agreement with this judgement. But the case had a special interest for me other than a merely diagnostic one. The view had already been put forward in psycho-analytic literature that patients suffering from paranoia are struggling against an intensification of their homosexual trends - a fact pointing back to a narcissistic object-choice. And a further interpretation had been made: that the persecutor is at bottom someone whom the patient loves or has loved in the past. A synthesis of the two propositions would lead us to the necessary conclusion that the persecutor must be of the same sex as the person persecuted. We did not maintain, it is true, as universally and without exception valid the thesis that paranoia is determined by homosexuality; but this was only because our observations were not sufficiently numerous; the thesis was one of those which in view of certain considerations become important only when universal application can be claimed for them. In psychiatric literature there is certainly no lack of cases in which the patient imagines himself persecuted by a person of the opposite sex. It is one thing, however, to read of such cases, and quite a different thing to come into personal contact with one of them. My own observations and analyses and those of my friends had so far confirmed the relation between paranoia and homosexuality without any difficulty. But the present case emphatically contradicted it. The girl seemed to be defending herself against love for a man by directly transforming the lover into a persecutor: there was no sign of the influence of a woman, no trace of a struggle against a homosexual attachment.

A Case Of Paranoia Running Counter To The Psycho-Analytic Theory Of The Disease

3059

In these circumstances the simplest thing would have been to abandon the theory that the delusion of persecution invariably depends on homosexuality, and at the same time to abandon everything that followed from that theory. Either the theory must be given up or else, in view of this departure from our expectations, we must side with the lawyer and assume that this was no paranoic combination but an actual experience which had been correctly interpreted. But I saw another way out, by which a final verdict could for the moment be postponed. I recollected how often wrong views have been taken about people who are ill psychically, simply because the physician has not studied them thoroughly enough and has thus not learnt enough about them. I therefore said that I could not form an immediate opinion, and asked the patient to call on me a second time, when she could relate her story again at greater length and add any subsidiary details that might have been omitted. Thanks to the lawyer’s influence I secured this promise from the reluctant patient; and he helped me in another way by saying that at our second meeting his presence would be unnecessary.

The story told me by the patient on this second occasion did not conflict with the previous one, but the additional details she supplied resolved all doubts and difficulties. To begin with, she had visited the young man in his rooms not once but twice. It was on the second occasion that the had been disturbed by the suspicious noise: in her original story she had suppressed, or omitted to mention, the first visit because it had no longer seemed of importance to her. Nothing noteworthy had happened during this first visit, but something did happen on the day after it. Her department in the business was under the direction of an elderly lady whom she described as follows: ‘She has white hair like my mother.’ This elderly superior had a great liking for her and treated her with affection, though some times she teased her; the girl regarded herself as her particular favourite. On the day after her first visit to the young man’s rooms he appeared in the office to discuss some business matter with this elderly lady. While they were talking in low voices the patient suddenly felt convinced that he was telling her about their adventure of the previous day - indeed, that the two of them had for some time been having a love-affair, which she had hitherto overlooked. The white-haired motherly old lady now knew everything, and her speech and conduct in the course of the day confirmed the patient’s suspicion. At the first opportunity she took her lover to task about his betrayal. He naturally protested vigorously against what he called a senseless accusation. For the time being, in fact, he succeeded in freeing her from her delusion, and she regained enough confidence to repeat her visit to his rooms a short time - I believe it was a few weeks - afterwards. The rest we know already from her first narrative.

A Case Of Paranoia Running Counter To The Psycho-Analytic Theory Of The Disease

3060

In the first place, this new information removes any doubts as to the pathological nature of her suspicion. It is easy to see that the white-haired elderly superior was a substitute for her mother, that in spite of his youth her lover had been put in the place of her father, and that it was the strength of her mother-complex which had driven the patient to suspect a love-relationship between these ill-matched partners, however unlikely such a relation might be. Moreover, this disposes of the apparent contradiction to the expectation, based on psycho-analytic theory, that the development of a delusion of persecution will turn out to be determined by an over-powerful homosexual attachment. The original persecutor - the agency whose influence the patient wishes to escape - is here again not a man but a woman. The superior knew about the girl’s love affairs, disapproved of them, and showed her disapproval by mysterious hints. The patient’s attachment to her own sex opposed her attempts to adopt a person of the other sex as a love-object. Her love for her mother had become the spokesman of all those tendencies which, playing the part of a ‘conscience’, seek to arrest a girl’s first step along the new road to normal sexual satisfaction - in many respects a dangerous one; and indeed it succeeded in disturbing her relation with men.

When a mother hinders or arrests a daughter’s sexual activity, she is fulfilling a normal function whose lines are laid down by events in childhood, which has powerful, unconscious motives, and has received the sanction of society. It is the daughter’s business to emancipate herself from this influence and to decide for herself on broad and rational grounds what her share of enjoyment or denial of sexual pleasure shall be. If in the attempt to emancipate herself she falls a victim to a neurosis it implies the presence of a mother-complex which is as a rule over-powerful, and is certainly unmastered. The conflict between this complex and the new direction taken by the libido is dealt with in the form of one neurosis or another, according to the subject’s disposition. The manifestation of the neurotic reaction will always be determined, however, not by her present-day relation to her actual mother but by her infantile relations to her earliest image of her mother.

A Case Of Paranoia Running Counter To The Psycho-Analytic Theory Of The Disease

3061

We know that our patient had been fatherless for many years: we may also assume that she would not have kept away from men up to the age of thirty if she had not been supported by a powerful emotional attachment to her mother. This support became a heavy yoke when her libido began to turn to a man in response to his insistent wooing. She tried to free herself, to throw off her homosexual attachment; and her disposition, which need not be discussed here, enabled this to occur in the form of a paranoic delusion. The mother thus became the hostile and malevolent watcher and persecutor. As such she could have been overcome, had it not been that the mother-complex retained power enough to carry out its purpose of keeping the patient at a distance from men. Thus, at the end of the first phase of the conflict the patient had become estranged from her mother without having definitely gone over to the man. Indeed, both of them were plotting against her. Then the man’s vigorous efforts succeeded in drawing her decisively to him. She conquered her mother’s opposition in her mind and was willing to grant her lover a second meeting. In the later developments the mother did not reappear, but we may safely insist that in this phase the lover had not become the persecutor directly but via the mother and in virtue of his relationship to the mother, who had played the leading part in the first delusion.

One would think that the resistance was now definitely overcome, that the girl who until now had been bound to her mother had succeeded in coming to love a man. But after the second visit a new delusion appeared, which, by making ingenious use of some accidental circumstances, destroyed this love and thus successfully carried through the purpose of the mother-complex. It still seems strange that a woman should protect herself against loving a man by means of a paranoic delusion; but before examining this state of things more closely, let us glance at the accidental circumstances that formed the basis of this second delusion, the one aimed exclusively against the man.

A Case Of Paranoia Running Counter To The Psycho-Analytic Theory Of The Disease

3062

Lying partly undressed on the sofa beside her lover, she heard a noise like a click or beat. She did not know its cause, but she arrived at an interpretation of it after meeting two men on the staircase, one of whom was carrying something that looked like a covered box. She became convinced that someone acting on instructions from her lover had watched and photographed her during their intimate tête à tête. I do not for a moment imagine, of course, that if the unlucky noise had not occurred the delusion would not have been formed; on the contrary, something inevitable is to be seen behind this accidental circumstance, something which was bound to assert itself compulsively in the patient, just as when she supposed that there was a liason between her lover and the elderly superior, her mother-substitute. Among the store of unconscious phantasies of all neurotics, and probably of all human beings, there is one which is seldom absent and which can be disclosed by analysis: this is the phantasy of watching sexual intercourse between the parents. I call such phantasies - of the observation of sexual intercourse between the parents, of seduction, of castration, and others - ‘primal phantasies’; and I shall discuss in detail elsewhere their origin and their relation to individual experience. The accidental noise was thus merely playing the part of a provoking factor which activated the typical phantasy of overhearing which is a component of the parental complex. Indeed, it is doubtful whether we can rightly call the noise ‘accidental’. As Otto Rank has remarked to me, such noises are on the contrary an indispensible part of the phantasy of listening, and they reproduce either the sounds which betray parental intercourse or those by which the listening child fears to betray itself. But now we know at once where we stand. The patient’s lover was still her father, but she herself had taken her mother’s place. The part of the listener had then to be allotted to a third person. We can see by what means the girl had freed herself from her homosexual dependence on her mother. It was by means of a small piece of regression: instead of choosing her mother as a love-object, she identified herself with her - she herself became her mother. The possibility of this regression points to the narcissistic origin of her homosexual object-choice and thus to the paranoic disposition in her. One might sketch a train of thought which would bring about the same result as this identification: ‘If my mother does it, I may do it too; I’ve just as good a right as she has.’

A Case Of Paranoia Running Counter To The Psycho-Analytic Theory Of The Disease

3063

One can go a step further in disproving the accidental nature of the noise. We do not, however, ask our readers to follow us, since the absence of any deeper analytic investigation makes it impossible in this case to go beyond a certain degree of probability. The patient mentioned in her first interview with me that she had immediately demanded an explanation of the noise, and had been told that it was probably the ticking of the small clock on the writing-desk. I venture, however, to explain what she told me as a mistaken memory. It seems to me much more likely that at first she did not react to the noise at all, and that it became significant only after she met the two men on the staircase. Her lover, who had probably not even heard the noise, may have tried, perhaps on some later occasion when she assailed him with her suspicions, to account for it in this way: ‘I don’t know what noise you can have heard. Perhaps it was the small clock; it sometimes ticks like that.’ This deferred use of impressions and this displacement of recollections often occur precisely in paranoia and are characteristic of it. But as I never met the man and could not continue the analysis of the woman, my hypothesis cannot be proved.

I might go still further in the analysis of this ostensibly real ‘accident’. I do not believe that the clock ever ticked or that there was any noise to be heard at all. The woman’s situation justified a sensation of a knock or beat in her clitoris. And it was this that she subsequently projected as a perception of an external object. Just the same sort of thing can occur in dreams. A hysterical woman patient of mine once related to me a short arousal dream to which she could bring no spontaneous associations. She dreamt simply that someone knocked and then she awoke. Nobody had knocked at the door, but during the previous nights she had been awakened by distressing sensations of pollutions: she thus had a motive for awakening as soon as she felt the first sign of genital excitation. There had been a ‘knock’ in her clitoris. In the case of our paranoic patient, I should substitute for the accidental noise a similar process of projection. I certainly cannot guarantee that in the course of our short acquaintance the patient, who was reluctantly yielding to compulsion, gave me a truthful account of all that had taken place during the two meetings of the lovers. But an isolated contraction of the clitoris would be in keeping with her statement that no contact of the genitals had taken place. In her subsequent rejection of the man, lack of satisfaction undoubtedly played a part as well as ‘conscience’.

A Case Of Paranoia Running Counter To The Psycho-Analytic Theory Of The Disease

3064

Let us consider again the outstanding fact that the patient protected herself against her love for a man by means of a paranoic delusion. The key to the understanding of this is to be found in the history of the development of the delusion. As we might have expected, the latter was at first aimed against the woman. But now, on this paranoic basis, the advance from a female to a male object was accomplished. Such an advance is unusual in paranoia; as a rule we find that the victim of persecution remains fixated to the same persons, and therefore to the same sex to which his love-objects belonged before the paranoic transformation took place. But neurotic disorder does not preclude an advance of this kind, and our observation may be typical of many others. There are many similar processes occurring outside paranoia which have not yet been looked at from this point of view, amongst them some which are very familiar. For instance, the so-called neurasthenic’s unconscious attachment to incestuous love-objects prevents him from choosing a strange woman as his object and restricts his sexual activity to phantasy. But within the limits of phantasy he achieves the progress which is denied him, and he succeeds in replacing mother and sister by extraneous objects. Since the veto of the censorship does not come into action with these objects, he can become conscious in his phantasies of his choice of these substitute-figures.

These then are phenomena of an attempted advance from the new ground which has as a rule been regressively acquired; and we may set alongside them the efforts made in some neuroses to regain a position of the libido which was once held and subsequently lost. Indeed we can hardly draw any conceptual distinction between these two classes of phenomena. We are too apt to think that the conflict underlying a neurosis is brought to an end when the symptom has been formed. In reality the struggle can go on in many ways after this. Fresh instinctual components arise on both sides, and these prolong it. The symptom itself becomes an object of this struggle; certain trends anxious to preserve it conflict with others which strive to remove it and to re-establish the status quo ante. Methods are often sought of rendering the symptom nugatory by trying to regain along other lines of approach what has been lost and is now withheld by the symptom. These facts throw much light on a statement made by C. G. Jung to the effect that a peculiar ‘psychical inertia’, which opposes change and progress, is the fundamental precondition of neurosis. This inertia is indeed most peculiar; it is not a general one, but is highly specialized; it is not even all-powerful within its own field, but fights against tendencies towards progress and recovery which remain active even after the formation of neurotic symptoms. If we search for the starting-point of this special inertia, we discover that it is the manifestation of very early linkages - linkages which it is hard to resolve - between instincts and impressions and the objects involved in those impressions. These linkages have the effect of bringing the development of the instincts concerned to a standstill. Or in other words, this specialized ‘psychical inertia’ is only a different term, though hardly a better one, for what in psycho-analysis we are accustomed to call a ‘fixation’.

3065

THOUGHTS FOR THE TIMES ON WAR AND DEATH

(1915)

3066

Intentionally left blank

3067

THOUGHTS FOR THE TIMES ON WAR AND DEATH

I

THE DISILLUSIONMENT OF THE WAR

In the confusion of wartime in which we are caught up, relying as we must on one-sided information, standing too close to the great changes that have already taken place or are beginning to, and without a glimmering of the future that is being shaped, we ourselves are at a loss as to the significance of the impressions which press in upon us and as to the value of the judgements which we form. We cannot but feel that no event has ever destroyed so much that is precious in the common possessions of humanity, confused so many of the clearest intelligences, or so thoroughly debased what is highest. Science herself has lost her passionless impartiality; her deeply embittered servants seek for weapons from her with which to contribute towards the struggle with the enemy. Anthropologists feel driven to declare him inferior and degenerate, psychiatrists issue a diagnosis of his disease of mind or spirit. Probably, however, our sense of these immediate evils is disproportionately strong, and we are not entitled to compare them with the evils of other times which we have not experienced.

The individual who is not himself a combatant - and so a cog in the gigantic machine of war - feels bewildered in his orientation, and inhibited in his powers and activities. I believe that he will welcome any indication, however slight, which will make it easier for him to find his bearings within himself at least. I propose to pick out two among the factors which are responsible for the mental distress felt by non-combatants, against which it is such a heavy task to struggle, and to treat of them here: the disillusionment which this war has evoked, and the altered attitude towards death which this - like every other war - forces upon us.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3068

When I speak of disillusionment, everyone will know at once what I mean. One need not be a sentimentalist; one may perceive the biological and psychological necessity for suffering in the economy of human life, and yet condemn war both in its means and ends and long for the cessation of all wars. We have told ourselves, no doubt, that wars can never cease so long as nations live under such widely differing conditions, so long as the value of individual life is so variously assessed among them, and so long as the animosities which divide them represent such powerful motive forces in the mind. We were prepared to find that wars between the primitive and the civilized peoples, between the races who are divided by the colour of their skin - wars, even, against and among the nationalities of Europe whose civilization is little developed or has been lost - would occupy mankind for some time to come. But we permitted ourselves to have other hopes. We had expected the great world-dominating nations of white race upon whom the leadership of the human species has fallen, who were known to have world-wide interests as their concern, to whose creative powers were due not only our technical advances towards the control of nature but the artistic and scientific standards of civilization - we had expected these peoples to succeed in discovering another way of settling misunderstandings and conflicts of interest. Within each of these nations high norms of moral conduct were laid down for the individual, to which his manner of life was bound to conform if he desired to take part in a civilized community. These ordinances, often too stringent, demanded a great deal of him - much self-restraint, much renunciation of instinctual satisfaction. He was above all forbidden to make use of the immense advantages to be gained by the practice of lying and deception in the competition with his fellow-men. The civilized states regarded these moral standards as the basis of their existence. They took serious steps if anyone ventured to tamper with them, and often declared it improper even to subject them to examination by a critical intelligence. It was to be assumed, therefore, that the state itself would respect them, and would not think of undertaking anything against them which would contradict the basis of its own existence. Observation showed, to be sure, that embedded in these civilized states there were remnants of certain other peoples, which were universally unpopular and had therefore been only reluctantly, and even so not fully, admitted to participation in the common work of civilization, for which they had shown themselves suitable enough. But the great nations themselves, it might have been supposed, would have acquired so much comprehension of what they had in common, and so much tolerance for their differences, that ‘foreigner’ and ‘enemy’ could no longer be merged, as they still were in classical antiquity, into a single concept.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3069

Relying on this unity among the civilized peoples, countless men and women have exchanged their native home for a foreign one, and made their existence dependent on the intercommunications between friendly nations. Moreover anyone who was not by stress of circumstance confined to one spot could create for himself out of all the advantages and attractions of these civilized countries a new and wider fatherland, in which he could move about without hindrance or suspicion. In this way he enjoyed the blue sea and the grey; the beauty of snow covered mountains and of green meadow lands; the magic of northern forests and the splendour of southern vegetation; the mood evoked by landscapes that recall great historical events, and the silence of untouched nature. This new fatherland was a museum for him, too, filled with all the treasures which the artists of civilized humanity had in the successive centuries created and left behind. As he wandered from one gallery to another in this museum, he could recognize with impartial appreciation what varied types of perfection a mixture of blood, the course of history, and the special quality of their mother earth had produced among his compatriots in this wider sense. Here he would find cool, inflexible energy developed to the highest point; there, the graceful art of beautifying existence; elsewhere, the feeling for orderliness and law, or others among the qualities which have made mankind the lords of the earth.

Nor must we forget that each of these citizens of the civilized world had created for himself a ‘Parnassus’ and a ‘School of Athens’ of his own. From among the great thinkers, writers and artists of all nations he had chosen those to whom he considered he owed the best of what he had been able to achieve in enjoyment and understanding of life, and he had venerated them along with the immortal ancients as well as with the familiar masters of his own tongue. None of these great men had seemed to him foreign because they spoke another language - neither the incomparable explorer of human passions, nor the intoxicated worshipper of beauty, nor the powerful and menacing prophet, nor the subtle satirist; and he never reproached himself on that account for being a renegade towards his own nation and his beloved mother-tongue.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3070

The enjoyment of this common civilization was disturbed from time to time by warning voices, which declared that old traditional differences made wars inevitable, even among the members of a community such as this. We refused to believe it; but if such a war were to happen, how did we picture it? We saw it as an opportunity for demonstrating the progress of comity among men since the era when the Greek Amphictyonic Council proclaimed that no city of the league might be destroyed, nor its olive-groves cut down, nor its water-supply stopped; we pictured it as a chivalrous passage of arms, which would limit itself to establishing the superiority of one side in the struggle, while as far as possible avoiding acute suffering that could contribute nothing to the decision, and granting complete immunity for the wounded who had to withdraw from the contest, as well as for the doctors and nurses who devoted themselves to their recovery. There would, of course, be the utmost consideration for the non-combatant classes of the population - for women who take no part in war-work, and for the children who, when they are grown up, should become on both sides one another’s friends and helpers. And again, all the international undertakings and institutions in which the common civilization of peace-time had been embodied would be maintained.

Even a war like this would have produced enough horror and suffering; but it would not have interrupted the development of ethical relations between the collective individuals of mankind the peoples and states.

Then the war in which we had refused to believe broke out, and it brought - disillusionment. Not only is it more bloody and more destructive than any war of other days, because of the enormously increased perfection of weapons of attack and defence; it is at least as cruel, as embittered, as implacable as any that has preceded it. It disregards all the restrictions known as International Law, which in peace-time the states had bound themselves to observe; it ignores the prerogatives of the wounded and the medical service, the distinction between civil and military sections of the population, the claims of private property. It tramples in blind fury on all that comes in its way, as though there were to be no future and no peace among men after it is over. It cuts all the common bonds between the contending peoples, and threatens to leave a legacy of embitterment that will make any renewal of those bonds impossible for a long time to come.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3071

Moreover, it has brought to light an almost incredible phenomenon: the civilized nations know and understand one another so little that one can turn against the other with hate and loathing. Indeed, one of the great civilized nations is so universally unpopular that the attempt can actually be made to exclude it from the civilized community as ‘barbaric’, although it has long proved its fitness by the magnificent contributions to that community which it has made. We live in hopes that the pages of an impartial history will prove that that nation, in whose language we write and for whose victory our dear ones are fighting, has been precisely the one which has least transgressed the laws of civilization. But at such a time who dares to set himself up as judge in his own cause?

Peoples are more or less represented by the states which they form, and these states by the governments which rule them. The individual citizen can with horror convince himself in this war of what would occasionally cross his mind in peace-time - that the state has forbidden to the individual the practice of wrong doing, not because it desires to abolish it, but because it desires to monopolize it, like salt and tobacco. A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual. It makes use against the enemy not only of the accepted ruses de guerre, but of deliberate lying and deception as well - and to a degree which seems to exceed the usage of former wars. The state exacts the utmost degree of obedience and sacrifice from its citizens, but at the same time it treats them like children by an excess of secrecy and a censorship upon news and expressions of opinion which leaves the spirits of those whose intellects it thus suppresses defenceless against every unfavourable turn of events and every sinister rumour. It absolves itself from the guarantees and treaties by which it was bound to other states, and confesses shamelessly to its own rapacity and lust for power, which the private individual has then to sanction in the name of patriotism.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3072

It should not be objected that the state cannot refrain from wrong-doing, since that would place it at a disadvantage. It is no less disadvantageous, as a general rule, for the individual man to conform to the standards of morality and refrain from brutal and arbitrary conduct; and the state seldom proves able to indemnify him for the sacrifices it exacts. Nor should it be a matter for surprise that this relaxation of all the moral ties between the collective individuals of mankind should have had repercussions on the morality of individuals; for our conscience is not the inflexible judge that ethical teachers declare it, but in its origin is ‘social anxiety’ and nothing else. When the community no longer raises objections, there is an end, too, to the suppression of evil passions, and men perpetrate deeds of cruelty, fraud, treachery and barbarity so incompatible with their level of civilization that one would have thought them impossible.

Well may the citizen of the civilized world of whom I have spoken stand helpless in a world that has grown strange to him - his great fatherland disintegrated, its common estates laid waste, his fellow-citizens divided and debased!

There is something to be said, however, in criticism of his disappointment. Strictly speaking it is not justified, for it consists in the destruction of an illusion. We welcome illusions because they spare us unpleasurable feelings, and enable us to enjoy satisfactions instead. We must not complain, then, if now and again they come into collision with some portion of reality, and are shattered against it.

Two things in this war have aroused our sense of disillusionment: the low morality shown externally by states which in their internal relations pose as the guardians of moral standards, and the brutality shown by individuals whom, as participants in the highest human civilization, one would not have thought capable of such behaviour.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3073

Let us begin with the second point and try to formulate, in a few brief words, the point of view that we wish to criticize. How, in point of fact, do we imagine the process by which an individual rises to a comparatively high plane of morality? The first answer will no doubt simply be that he is virtuous and noble from birth - from the very start. We shall not consider this view any further here. A second answer will suggest that we are concerned with a developmental process, and will probably assume that the development consists in eradicating his evil human tendencies and, under the influence of education and a civilized environment, replacing them by good ones. If so, it is nevertheless surprising that evil should re-emerge with such force in anyone who has been brought up in this way.

But this answer also contains the thesis which we propose to contradict. In reality, there is no such thing as ‘eradicating’ evil. Psychological - or, more strictly speaking, psycho-analytic - investigation shows instead that the deepest essence of human nature consists of instinctual impulses which are of an elementary nature, which are similar in all men and which aim at the satisfaction of certain primal needs. These impulses in themselves are neither good nor bad. We classify them and their expressions in that way, according to their relation to the needs and demands of the human community. It must be granted that all the impulses which society condemns as evil - let us take as representative the selfish and the cruel ones - are of this primitive kind.

These primitive impulses undergo a lengthy process of development before they are allowed to become active in the adult. They are inhibited, directed towards other aims and fields, become commingled, alter their objects, and are to some extent turned back upon their possessor. Reaction-formations against certain instincts take the deceptive form of a change in their content, as though egoism had changed into altruism, or cruelty into pity. These reaction-formations are facilitated by the circumstance that some instinctual impulses make their appearance almost from the first in pairs of opposites - a very remarkable phenomenon, and one strange to the lay public, which is termed ‘ambivalence of feeling’. The most easily observed and comprehensible instance of this is the fact that intense love and intense hatred are so often to be found together in the same person. Psycho-analysis adds that the two opposed feelings not infrequently have the same person for their object.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3074

It is not until all these ‘instinctual vicissitudes’ have been surmounted that what we call a person’s character is formed, and this, as we know, can only very inadequately be classified as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. A human being is seldom altogether good or bad; he is usually ‘good’ in one relation and ‘bad’ in another, or ‘good’ in certain external circumstances and in others decidedly ‘bad’. It is interesting to find that the pre-existence of strong ‘bad’ impulses in infancy is often the actual condition for an unmistakable inclination towards ‘good’ in the adult. Those who as children have been the most pronounced egoists may well become the most helpful and self-sacrificing members of the community; most of our sentimentalists, friends of humanity and protectors of animals have been evolved from little sadists and animal-tormentors.

The transformation of ‘bad’ instincts is brought about by two factors working in the same direction, an internal and an external one. The internal factor consists in the influence exercised on the bad (let us say, the egoistic) instincts by erotism - that is, by the human need for love, taken in its widest sense. By the admixture of erotic components the egoistic instincts are transformed into social ones. We learn to value being loved as an advantage for which we are willing to sacrifice other advantages. The external factor is the force exercised by upbringing, which represents the claims of our cultural environment, and this is continued later by the direct pressure of that environment. Civilization has been attained through the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction, and it demands the same renunciation from each newcomer in turn. Throughout an individual’s life there is a constant replacement of external by internal compulsion. The influences of civilization cause an ever-increasing transformation of egoistic trends into altruistic and social ones by an admixture of erotic elements. In the last resort it may be assumed that every internal compulsion which makes itself felt in the development of human beings was originally - that is, in the history of mankind - only an external one. Those who are born to-day bring with them as an inherited organization some degree of tendency (disposition) towards the transformation of egoistic into social instincts, and this disposition is easily stimulated into bringing about that result. A further portion of this instinctual transformation has to be accomplished during the life of the individual himself. So the human being is subject not only to the pressure of his immediate cultural environment, but also to the influence of the cultural history of his ancestors.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3075

If we give the name of ‘susceptibility to culture’ to a man’s personal capacity for the transformation of the egoistic impulses under the influence of erotism, we may further affirm that this susceptibility is made up of two parts, one innate and the other acquired in the course of life, and that the relation of the two to each other and to that portion of the instinctual life which remains untransformed is a very variable one.

Generally speaking, we are apt to attach too much importance to the innate part, and in addition to this we run the risk of over-estimating the total susceptibility to culture in comparison with the portion of instinctual life which has remained primitive - that is, we are misled into regarding men as ‘ better’ than they actually are. For there is yet another element which obscures our judgement and falsifies the issue in a favourable sense.

The instinctual impulses of other people are of course hidden from our observation. We infer them from their actions and behaviour, which we trace back to motives arising from their instinctual life. Such an inference is bound to be erroneous in many cases. This or that action which is ‘good’ from the cultural point of view may in one instance originate from a ‘noble’ motive, in another not. Ethical theorists class as ‘good’ actions only those which are the outcome of good impulses; to the others they refuse recognition. But society, which is practical in its aims, is not on the whole troubled by this distinction; it is content if a man regulates his behaviour and actions by the precepts of civilization, and is little concerned with his motives.

We have learned that the external compulsion exercised on a human being by his upbringing and environment produces a further transformation towards good in his instinctual life - a further turning from egoism towards altruism. But this is not the regular or necessary effect of the external compulsion. Upbringing and environment not only offer benefits in the way of love, but also employ other kinds of incentive, namely, rewards and punishments. In this way their effect may turn out to be that a person who is subjected to their influence will choose to behave well in the cultural sense of the phrase, although no ennoblement of instinct, no transformation of egoistic into altruistic inclinations, has taken place in him. The result will, roughly speaking, be the same; only a particular concatenation of circumstances will reveal that one man always acts in a good way because his instinctual inclinations compel him to, and the other is good only in so far and for so long as such cultural behaviour is advantageous for his own selfish purposes. But superficial acquaintance with an individual will not enable us to distinguish between the two cases, and we are certainly misled by our optimism into grossly exaggerating the number of human beings who have been transformed in a cultural sense.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3076

Civilized society, which demands good conduct and does not trouble itself about the instinctual basis of this conduct, has thus won over to obedience a great many people who are not in this following their own natures. Encouraged by this success, society has allowed itself to be misled into tightening the moral standard to the greatest possible degree, and it has thus forced its members into a yet greater estrangement from their instinctual disposition. They are consequently subject to an unceasing suppression of instinct, and the resulting tension betrays itself in the most remarkable phenomena of reaction and compensation. In the domain of sexuality, where such suppression is most difficult to carry out, the result is seen in the reactive phenomena of neurotic disorders. Elsewhere the pressure of civilization brings in its train no pathological results, it is true, but is shown in malformations of character, and in the perpetual readiness of the inhibited instincts to break through to satisfaction at any suitable opportunity. Anyone thus compelled to act continually in accordance with precepts which are not the expression of his instinctual inclinations, is living, psychologically speaking, beyond his means, and may objectively be described as a hypocrite, whether he is clearly aware of the incongruity or not. It is undeniable that our contemporary civilization favours the production of this form of hypocrisy to an extraordinary extent. One might venture to say that it is built up on such hypocrisy, and that it would have to submit to far-reaching modifications if people were to undertake to live in accordance with psychological truth. Thus there are very many more cultural hypocrites than truly civilized men - indeed, it is a debatable point whether a certain degree of cultural hypocrisy is not indispensable for the maintenance of civilization, because the susceptibility to culture which has hitherto been organized in the minds of present-day men would perhaps not prove sufficient for the task. On the other hand, the maintenance of civilization even on so dubious a basis offers the prospect of paving the way in each new generation for a more far-reaching transformation of instinct which shall be the vehicle of a better civilization.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3077

We may already derive one consolation from this discussion: our mortification and our painful disillusionment on account of the uncivilized behaviour of our fellow-citizens of the world during this war were unjustified. They were based on an illusion to which we had given way. In reality our fellow-citizens have not sunk so low as we feared, because they had never risen so high as we believed. The fact that the collective individuals of mankind, the peoples and states, mutually abrogated their moral restraints naturally prompted these individual citizens to withdraw for a while from the constant pressure of civilization and to grant a temporary satisfaction to the instincts which they had been holding in check. This probably involved no breach in their relative morality within their own nations.

We may, however, obtain a deeper insight than this into the change brought about by the war in our former compatriots, and at the same time receive a warning against doing them an injustice. For the development of the mind shows a peculiarity which is present in no other developmental process. When a village grows into a town or a child into a man, the village and the child become lost in the town and the man. Memory alone can trace the old features in the new picture; and in fact the old materials or forms have been got rid of and replaced by new ones. It is otherwise with the development of the mind. Here one can describe the state of affairs, which has nothing to compare with it, only by saying that in this case every earlier stage of development persists alongside the later stage which has arisen from it; here succession also involves co-existence, although it is to the same materials that the whole series of transformations has applied. The earlier mental state may not have manifested itself for years, but none the less it is so far present that it may at any time again become the mode of expression of the forces in the mind, and indeed the only one, as though all later developments had been annulled or undone. This extraordinary plasticity of mental developments is not unrestricted as regards direction; it may be described as a special capacity for involution - for regression - since it may well happen that a later and higher stage of development, once abandoned, cannot be reached again. But the primitive stages can always be re-established; the primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3078

What are called mental diseases inevitably produce an impression in the layman that intellectual and mental life have been destroyed. In reality, the destruction only applies to later acquisitions and developments. The essence of mental disease lies in a return to earlier states of affective life and of functioning. An excellent example of the plasticity of mental life is afforded by the state of sleep, which is our goal every night. Since we have learnt to interpret even absurd and confused dreams, we know that whenever we go to sleep we throw off our hard-won morality like a garment, and put it on again next morning. This stripping of ourselves is not, of course, dangerous, because we are paralysed, condemned to inactivity, by the state of sleep. It is only dreams that can tell us about the regression of our emotional life to one of the earliest stages of development. For instance, it is noteworthy that all our dreams are governed by purely egoistic motives. One of my English friends put forward this thesis at a scientific meeting in America, whereupon a lady who was present remarked that that might be the case in Austria, but she could assert as regards herself and her friends that they were altruistic even in their dreams. My friend, although himself of English race, was obliged to contradict the lady emphatically on the ground of his personal experience in dream-analysis, and to declare that in their dreams high-minded American ladies were quite as egoistic as the Austrians.

Thus the transformation of instinct, on which our susceptibility to culture is based, may also be permanently or temporarily undone by the impacts of life. The influences of war are undoubtedly among the forces that can bring about such involution; so we need not deny susceptibility to culture to all who are at the present time behaving in an uncivilized way, and we may anticipate that the ennoblement of their instincts will be restored in more peaceful times.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3079

There is, however, another symptom in our fellow-citizens of the world which has perhaps astonished and shocked us no less than the descent from their ethical heights which has given us so much pain. What I have in mind is the want of insight shown by the best intellects, their obduracy, their inaccessibility to the most forcible arguments and their uncritical credulity towards the most disputable assertions. This indeed presents a lamentable picture, and I wish to say emphatically that in this I am by no means a blind partisan who finds all the intellectual shortcomings on one side. But this phenomenon is much easier to account for and much less disquieting than the one we have just considered. Students of human nature and philosophers have long taught us that we are mistaken in regarding our intelligence as an independent force and in overlooking its dependence on emotional life. Our intellect, they teach us, can function reliably only when it is removed from the influences of strong emotional impulses; otherwise it behaves merely as an instrument of the will and delivers the inference which the will requires. Thus, in their view, logical arguments are impotent against affective interests, and that is why disputes backed by reasons, which in Falstaff’s phrase are ‘as plenty as blackberries’, are so unfruitful in the world of interests. Psycho-analytic experience has, if possible, further confirmed this statement. It can show every day that the shrewdest people will all of a sudden behave without insight, like imbeciles, as soon as the necessary insight is confronted by an emotional resistance, but that they will completely regain their understanding once that resistance has been overcome. The logical bedazzlement which this war has conjured up in our fellow-citizens, many of them the best of their kind, is therefore a secondary phenomenon, a consequence of emotional excitement, and is bound, we may hope, to disappear with it.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3080

Having in this way once more come to understand our fellow citizens who are now alienated from us, we shall much more easily endure the disappointment which the nations, the collective individuals of mankind, have caused us, for the demands we make upon these should be far more modest. Perhaps they are recapitulating the course of individual development, and to-day still represent very primitive phases in organization and in the formation of higher unities. It is in agreement with this that the educative factor of an external compulsion towards morality, which we found was so effective in individuals, is as yet barely discernible in them. We had hoped, certainly, that the extensive community of interests established by commerce and production would constitute the germ of such a compulsion, but it would seem that nations still obey their passions far more readily than their interests. Their interests serve them, at most, as rationalizations for their passions; they put forward their interests in order to be able to give reasons for satisfying their passions. It is, to be sure, a mystery why the collective individuals should in fact despise, hate and detest one another - every nation against every other - and even in times of peace. I cannot tell why that is so. It is just as though when it becomes a question of a number of people, not to say millions, all individual moral acquisitions are obliterated, and only the most primitive, the oldest, the crudest mental attitudes are left. It may be that only later stages in development will be able to make some change in this regrettable state of affairs. But a little more truthfulness and honesty on all sides - in the relations of men to one another and between them and their rulers - should also smooth the way for this transformation.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3081

II

OUR ATTITUDE TOWARDS DEATH

The second factor to which I attribute our present sense of estrangement in this once lovely and congenial world is the disturbance that has taken place in the attitude which we have hitherto adopted towards death.

That attitude was far from straightforward. To anyone who listened to us we were of course prepared to maintain that death was the necessary outcome of life, that everyone owes nature a death and must expect to pay the debt - in short, that death was natural, undeniable and unavoidable. In reality, however, we were accustomed to behave as if it were otherwise. We showed an unmistakable tendency to put death on one side, to eliminate it from life. We tried to hush it up; indeed we even have a saying [in German]: ‘to think of something as though it were death’. That is, as though it were our own death, of course. It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators. Hence the psycho-analytic school could venture on the assertion that at bottom no one believes in his own death, or, to put the same thing in another way, that in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3082

When it comes to someone else’s death, the civilized man will carefully avoid speaking of such a possibility in the hearing of the person under sentence. Children alone disregard this restriction; they unashamedly threaten one another with the possibility of dying, and even go so far as to do the same thing to someone whom they love, as, for instance: ‘Dear Mummy, when you’re dead I’II do this or that.’ The civilized adult can hardly even entertain the thought of another person’s death without seeming to himself hard-hearted or wicked; unless, of course, as a doctor or lawyer or something of the kind, he has to deal with death professionally. Least of all will he allow himself to think of the other person’s death if some gain to himself in freedom, property or position is bound up with it. This sensitiveness of ours does not, of course, prevent the occurrence of deaths; when one does happen, we are always deeply affected, and it is as though we were badly shaken in our expectations. Our habit is to lay stress on the fortuitous causation of the death - accident, disease, infection, advanced age; in this way we betray an effort to reduce death from a necessity to a chance event. A number of simultaneous deaths strikes us as something extremely terrible. Towards the actual person who has died we adopt a special attitude - something almost like admiration for someone who has accomplished a very difficult task. We suspend criticism of him, overlook his possible misdeeds, declare that ‘de mortuis nil nisi bonum’, and think it justifiable to set out all that is most favourable to his memory in the funeral oration and upon the tombstone. Consideration for the dead, who, after all, no longer need it, is more important to us than the truth, and certainly, for most of us, than consideration for the living.

The complement to this cultural and conventional attitude towards death is provided by our complete collapse when death has struck down someone whom we love - a parent or a partner in marriage, a brother or sister, a child or a close friend. Our hopes, our desires and our pleasures lie in the grave with him, we will not be consoled, we will not fill the lost one’s place. We behave as if we were a kind of Asra, who die when those they love die.

But this attitude of ours towards death has a powerful effect on our lives. Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, where the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an American flirtation, in which it is understood from the first that nothing is to happen, as contrasted with a Continental love-affair in which both partners must constantly bear its serious consequences in mind. Our emotional ties, the unbearable intensity of our grief, make us disinclined to court danger for ourselves and for those who belong to us. We dare not contemplate a great many undertakings which are dangerous but in fact indispensable, such as attempts at artificial flight, expeditions to distant countries or experiments with explosive substances. We are paralysed by the thought of who is to take the son’s place with his mother, the husband’s with his wife, the father’s with his children, if a disaster should occur. Thus the tendency to exclude death from our calculations in life brings in its train many other renunciations and exclusions. Yet the motto of the Hanseatic League ran: ‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’ (‘It is necessary to sail the seas, it is not necessary to live.’)

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3083

It is an inevitable result of all this that we should seek in the world of fiction, in literature and in the theatre compensation for what has been lost in life. There we still find people who know how to die - who, indeed, even manage to kill someone else. There alone too the condition can be fulfilled which makes it possible for us to reconcile ourselves with death: namely, that behind all the vicissitudes of life we should still be able to preserve a life intact. For it is really too sad that in life it should be as it is in chess, where one false move may force us to resign the game, but with the difference that we can start no second game, no return-match. In the realm of fiction we find the plurality of lives which we need. We die with the hero with whom we have identified ourselves; yet we survive him, and are ready to die again just as safely with another hero.

It is evident that war is bound to sweep away this conventional treatment of death. Death will no longer be denied; we are forced to believe in it. People really die; and no longer one by one, but many, often tens of thousands, in a single day. And death is no longer a chance event. To be sure, it still seems a matter of chance whether a bullet hits this man or that; but a second bullet may well hit the survivor; and the accumulation of deaths puts an end to the impression of chance. Life has, indeed, become interesting again; it has recovered its full content.

Here a distinction should be made between two groups - those who themselves risk their lives in battle, and those who have stayed at home and have only to wait for the loss of one of their dear ones by wounds, disease or infection. It would be most interesting, no doubt, to study the changes in the psychology of the combatants, but I know too little about it. We must restrict ourselves to the second group, to which we ourselves belong. I have said already that in my opinion the bewilderment and the paralysis of capacity, from which we suffer, are essentially determined among other things by the circumstance that we are unable to maintain our former attitude towards death, and have not yet found a new one. It may assist us to do this if we direct our psychological enquiry towards two other relations to death - the one which we may ascribe to primaeval, prehistoric men, and the one which still exists in every one of us, but which conceals itself, invisible to consciousness, in the deeper strata of our mental life.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3084

What the attitude of prehistoric man was towards death is, of course, only known to us by inferences and constructions, but I believe that these methods have furnished us with fairly trustworthy conclusions.

Primaeval man took up a very remarkable attitude towards death. It was far from consistent; it was indeed most contradictory. On the one hand, he took death seriously, recognized it as the termination of life and made use of it in that sense; on the other hand, he also denied death and reduced it to nothing. This contradiction arose from the fact that he took up radically different attitudes towards the death of other people, of strangers, of enemies, and towards his own. He had no objection to someone else’s death; it meant the annihilation of someone he hated, and primitive man had no scruples against bringing it about. He was no doubt a very passionate creature and more cruel and more malignant than other animals. He liked to kill, and killed as a matter of course. The instinct which is said to restrain other animals from killing and devouring their own species need not be attributed to him.

Hence the primaeval history of mankind is filled with murder. Even to-day, the history of the world which our children learn at school is essentially a series of murders of peoples. The obscure sense of guilt to which mankind has been subject since prehistoric times, and which in some religions has been condensed into the doctrine of primal guilt, of original sin, is probably the outcome of a blood-guilt incurred by prehistoric man. In my book Totem and Taboo (1912-13) I have, following clues given by Robertson Smith, Atkinson and Charles Darwin, tried to guess the nature of this primal guilt, and I believe, too, that the Christian doctrine of to-day enables us to deduce it. If the Son of God was obliged to sacrifice his life to redeem mankind from original sin, then by the law of talion, the requital of like by like, that sin must have been a killing, a murder. Nothing else could call for the sacrifice of a life for its expiation. And the original sin was an offence against God the Father, the primal crime of mankind must have been a parricide, the killing of the primal father of the primitive human horde, whose mnemic image was later transfigured into a deity.¹

¹ Cf. Totem and Taboo, Essay IV.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3085

His own death was certainly just as unimaginable and unreal for primaeval man as it is for any one of us to-day. But there was for him one case in which the two opposite attitudes towards death collided and came into conflict with each other; and this case became highly important and productive of far-reaching consequences. It occurred when primaeval man saw someone who belonged to him die - his wife, his child, his friend - whom he undoubtedly loved as we love ours, for love cannot be much younger than the lust to kill. Then, in his pain, he was forced to learn that one can die, too, oneself, and his whole being revolted against the admission; for each of these loved ones was, after all, a part of his own beloved ego. But, on the other hand, deaths such as these pleased him as well, since in each of the loved persons there was also something of the stranger. The law of ambivalence of feeling, which to this day governs our emotional relations with those whom we love most, certainly had a very much wider validity in primaeval times. Thus these beloved dead had also been enemies and strangers who had aroused in him some degree of hostile feeling.¹

Philosophers have declared that the intellectual enigma presented to primaeval man by the picture of death forced him to reflection, and thus became the starting-point of all speculation. I believe that here the philosophers are thinking too philosophically, and giving too little consideration to the motives that were primarily operative. I should like therefore to limit and correct their assertion. In my view, primaeval man must have triumphed beside the body of his slain enemy, without being led to rack his brains about the enigma of life and death. What released the spirit of enquiry in man was not the intellectual enigma, and not every death, but the conflict of feeling at the death of loved yet alien and hated persons. Of this conflict of feeling psychology was the first offspring. Man could no longer keep death at a distance, for he had tasted it in his pain about the dead; but he was nevertheless unwilling to acknowledge it, for he could not conceive of himself as dead. So he devised a compromise: he conceded the fact of his own death as well, but denied it the significance of annihilation - a significance which he had had no motive for denying where the death of his enemy was concerned. It was beside the dead body of someone he loved that he invented spirits, and his sense of guilt at the satisfaction mingled with his sorrow turned these new-born spirits into evil demons that had to be dreaded. The changes brought about by death suggested to him the division of the individual into a body and a soul - originally several souls. In this way his train of thought ran parallel with the process of disintegration which sets in with death. His persisting memory of the dead became the basis for assuming other forms of existence and gave him the conception of a life continuing after apparent death.

¹ Ibid., Essay II.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3086

These subsequent existences were at first no more than appendages to the existence which death had brought to a close - shadowy, empty of content, and valued at little until later times; they still bore the character of wretched makeshifts. We may recall the answer made to Odysseus by the soul of Achilles:

‘For of old, when thou wast alive, we Argives honoured thee even as the gods, and now that thou art here, thou rulest mightily over the dead. Wherefore grieve not at all that thou art dead, Achilles.’

So I spoke, and he straightway made answer and said: ‘Nay, seek not to speak soothingly to me of death, glorious Odysseus. I should choose, so I might live on earth, to serve as the hireling off another, of some portionless man whose livelihood was but small, rather than to be lord over all the dead that have perished.’¹

Or in Heine’s powerful and bitter parody:

Der kleinste lebendige Philister

Zu Stuckert am Neckar

Viel glücklicher ist er

Als ich, der Pelide, der tote Held,

Der Schattenfürst in der Unterwelt.²

¹ Odyssey, XI, 484-91.

² [Literally: ‘The smallest living Philistine at Stuckert-am-Neckar is far happier than I, the son of Peleus, the dead hero, the shadow-prince in the underworld.’]

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3087

It was only later that religions succeeded in representing this after-life as the more desirable, the truly valid one, and in reducing the life which is ended by death to a mere preparation. After this, it was no more than consistent to extend life backwards into the past, to form the notion of earlier existences, of the transmigration of souls and of reincarnation, all with the purpose of depriving death of its meaning as the termination of life. So early did the denial of death, which we have described as a ‘conventional and cultural attitude’, have its origin.

What came into existence beside the dead body of the loved one was not only the doctrine of the soul, the belief in immortality and a powerful source of man’s sense of guilt, but also the earliest ethical commandments. The first and most important prohibition made by the awakening conscience was: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ It was acquired in relation to dead people who were loved, as a reaction against the satisfaction of the hatred hidden behind the grief for them; and it was gradually extended to strangers who were not loved, and finally even to enemies.

This final extension of the commandment is no longer experienced by civilized man. When the furious struggle of the present war has been decided, each one of the victorious fighters will return home joyfully to his wife and children, unchecked and undisturbed by thoughts of the enemies he has killed whether at close quarters or at long range. It is worthy of note that the primitive races which still survive in the world, and are undoubtedly closer than we are to primaeval man, act differently in this respect, or did until they came under the influence of our civilization. Savages - Australians, Bushmen, Tierra del Fuegans - are far from being remorseless murderers; when they return victorious from the war-path they may not set foot in their villages or touch their wives till they have atoned for the murders they committed in war by penances which are often long and tedious. It is easy, of course, to attribute this to their superstition: the savage still goes in fear of the avenging spirits of the slain. But the spirits of his slain enemy are nothing but the expression of his bad conscience about his blood-guilt; behind this superstition there lies concealed a vein of ethical sensitiveness which has been lost by us civilized men.¹

¹ Cf. Totem and Taboo (1912-13).

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3088

Pious souls, no doubt, who would like to believe that our nature is remote from any contact with what is evil and base, will not fail to use the early appearance and the urgency of the prohibition against murder as the basis for gratifying conclusions as to the strength of the ethical impulses which must have been implanted in us. Unfortunately this argument proves even more for the opposite view. So powerful a prohibition can only be directed against an equally powerful impulse. What no human soul desires stands in no need of prohibition;¹ it is excluded automatically. The very emphasis laid on the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ makes it certain that we spring from an endless series of generations of murderers, who had the lust for killing in their blood, as, perhaps, we ourselves have to-day. Mankind’s ethical strivings, whose strength and significance we need not in the least depreciate, were acquired in the course of man’s history; since then they have become, though unfortunately only in a very variable amount, the inherited property of contemporary men.

Let us now leave primaeval man, and turn to the unconscious in our own mental life. Here we depend entirely upon the psycho-analytic method of investigation, the only one which reaches to such depths. What, we ask, is the attitude of our unconscious towards the problem of death? The answer must be: almost exactly the same as that of primaeval man. In this respect, as in many others, the man of prehistoric times survives unchanged in our unconscious. Our unconscious, then, does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if it were immortal. What we call our ‘unconscious’ - the deepest strata of our minds, made up of instinctual impulses - knows nothing that is negative, and no negation; in it contradictories coincide. For that reason it does not know its own death, for to that we can give only a negative content. Thus there is nothing instinctual in us which responds to a belief in death. This may even be the secret of heroism. The rational grounds for heroism rest on a judgement that the subject’s own life cannot be so precious as certain abstract and general goods. But more frequent, in my view, is the instinctive and impulsive heroism which knows no such reasons, and flouts danger in the spirit of Anzengruber’s Steinklopferhans: ‘Nothing can happen to me’. Or else those reasons only serve to clear away the hesitations which might hold back the heroic reaction that corresponds to the unconscious. The fear of death, which dominates us oftener than we know, is on the other hand something secondary, and is usually the outcome of a sense of guilt.

¹ Cf. Frazer’s brilliant argument quoted in Totem and Taboo.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3089

On the other hand, for strangers and for enemies we do acknowledge death, and consign them to it quite as readily and unhesitatingly as did primaeval man. There is, it is true, a distinction here which will be pronounced decisive so far as real life is concerned. Our unconscious does not carry out the killing; it merely thinks it and wishes it. But it would be wrong so completely to undervalue this psychical reality as compared with factual reality. It is significant and momentous enough. In our unconscious impulses we daily and hourly get rid of anyone who stands in our way, of anyone who has offended or injured us. The expression ‘Devil take him!’, which so often comes to people’s lips in joking anger and which really means ‘Death take him!’, is in our unconscious a serious and powerful death-wish. Indeed, our unconscious will murder even for trifles; like the ancient Athenian code of Draco, it knows no other punishment for crime than death. And this has a certain consistency, for every injury to our almighty and autocratic ego is at bottom a crime of lèse-majesté.

And so, if we are to be judged by our unconscious wishful impulses, we ourselves are, like primaeval man, a gang of murderers. It is fortunate that all these wishes do not possess the potency that was attributed to them in primaeval times;¹ in the cross-fire of mutual curses mankind would long since have perished, the best and wisest of men and the loveliest and fairest of women with the rest.

¹ See Totem and Taboo, Essay IV.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3090

Psycho-analysis finds as a rule no credence among laymen for assertions such as these. They reject them as calumnies which are confuted by conscious experience, and they adroitly overlook the faint indications by which even the unconscious is apt to betray itself to consciousness. It is therefore relevant to point out that many thinkers who could not have been influenced by psycho-analysis have quite definitely accused our unspoken thoughts of being ready, heedless of the prohibition against murder, to get rid of anything which stands in our way. From many examples of this I will choose one that has become famous:

In Le Père Goriot, Balzac alludes to a passage in the works of J. J. Rousseau where that author asks the reader what he would do if - without leaving Paris and of course without being discovered - he could kill, with great profit to himself, an old mandarin in Peking by a mere act of will. Rousseau implies that he would not give much for the life of that dignitary. ‘Tuer son mandarin’ has become a proverbial phrase for this secret readiness, present even in modern man.

There are also a whole number of cynical jokes and anecdotes which reveal the same tendency - such, for instance, as the words attributed to a husband: ‘If one of us two dies, I shall move to Paris.’ Such cynical jokes would not be possible unless they contained an unacknowledged truth which could not be admitted if it were expressed seriously and without disguise. In jest - it is well known - one may even tell the truth.

Just as for primaeval man, so also for our unconscious, there is one case in which the two opposing attitudes towards death, the one which acknowledges it as the annihilation of life and the other which denies it as unreal, collide and come into conflict. This case is the same as in primal ages: the death, or the risk of death, of someone we love, a parent or a partner in marriage, a brother or sister, a child or a dear friend. These loved ones are on the one hand an inner possession, components of our own ego; but on the other hand they are partly strangers, even enemies. With the exception of only a very few situations, there adheres to the tenderest and most intimate of our love-relations a small portion of hostility which can excite an unconscious death-wish. But this conflict due to ambivalence does not now, as it did then, lead to the doctrine of the soul and to ethics, but to neurosis, which affords us deep insight into normal mental life as well. How often have physicians who practise psycho-analysis had to deal with the symptom of an exaggerated worry over the well-being of relatives, or with entirely unfounded self-reproaches after the death of a loved person. The study of such phenomena has left them in no doubt about the extent and importance of unconscious death-wishes.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3091

The layman feels an extraordinary horror at the possibility of such feelings, and takes this aversion as a legitimate ground for disbelief in the assertions of psycho-analysis. Mistakenly, I think. No depreciation of feelings of love is intended, and there is in fact none. It is indeed foreign to our intelligence as well as to our feelings thus to couple love and hate; but Nature, by making use of this pair of opposites, contrives to keep love ever vigilant and fresh, so as to guard it against the hate which lurks behind it. It might be said that we owe the fairest flowerings of our love to the reaction against the hostile impulse which we sense within us.

To sum up: our unconscious is just as inaccessible to the idea of our own death, just as murderously inclined towards strangers, just as divided (that is, ambivalent) towards those we love, as was primaeval man. But how far we have moved from this primal state in our conventional and cultural attitude towards death!

It is easy to see how war impinges on this dichotomy. It strips us of the later accretions of civilization, and lays bare the primal man in each of us. It compels us once more to be heroes who cannot believe in their own death; it stamps strangers as enemies, whose death is to be brought about or desired; it tells us to disregard the death of those we love. But war cannot be abolished; so long as the conditions of existence among nations are so different and their mutual repulsion so violent, there are bound to be wars. The question then arises: Is it not we who should give in, who should adapt ourselves to war? Should we not confess that in our civilized attitude towards death we are once again living psychologically beyond our means, and should we not rather turn back and recognize the truth? Would it not be better to give death the place in reality and in our thoughts which is its due, and to give a little more prominence to the unconscious attitude towards death which we have hitherto so carefully suppressed? This hardly seems an advance to higher achievement, but rather in some respects a backward step - a regression; but it has the advantage of taking the truth more into account, and of making life more tolerable for us once again. To tolerate life remains, after all, the first duty of all living beings. Illusion becomes valueless if it makes this harder for us.

We recall the old saying: Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want to preserve peace, arm for war.

It would be in keeping with the times to alter it: Si vis vitam, para mortem. If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3092

APPENDIX

LETTER TO FREDERIK VAN EEDEN

Vienna, December 28, 1914.

Dear Dr. van Eeden,

I venture, under the impact of the war, to remind you of two theses which have been put forward by psycho-analysis and which have undoubtedly contributed to its unpopularity.

Psycho-analysis has inferred from the dreams and parapraxes of healthy people, as well as from the symptoms of neurotics, that the primitive, savage and evil impulses of mankind have not vanished in any of its individual members but persist, although in a repressed state, in the unconscious (to use our technical terms), and lie wait for opportunities of becoming active once more. It has further taught us that our intellect is a feeble and dependent thing, a plaything and tool of our instincts and affects, and that we are all compelled to behave cleverly or stupidly according to the commands of our attitudes and internal resistances.

If you will now observe what is happening in the war - the cruelties and injustices for which the most civilized nations are responsible, the different way in which they judge their own lies and wrong-doings and those of their enemies, and the general lack of insight which prevails - you will have to admit that psycho-analysis has been right in both its theses.

It may not have been entirely original in this; many thinkers and students of mankind have made similar assertions. But our science has worked out both of them in detail and has employed them to throw light on many psychological puzzles. I hope we shall meet again in happier times.

Yours very sincerely,

Sigm. Freud

¹ [Written by Freud at the end of 1914]

3093

ON TRANSIENCE

(1916)

3094

Intentionally left blank

3095

ON TRANSIENCE

Not long ago I went on a summer walk through a smiling countryside in the company of a taciturn friend and of a young but already famous poet. The poet admired the beauty of the scene around us but felt no joy in it. He was disturbed by the thought that all this beauty was fated to extinction, that it would vanish when winter came, like all human beauty and all the beauty and splendour that men have created or may create. All that he would otherwise have loved and admired seemed to him to be shorn of its worth by the transience which was its doom.

The proneness to decay of all that is beautiful and perfect can, as we know, give rise to two different impulses in the mind. The one leads to the aching despondency felt by the young poet, while the other leads to rebellion against the fact asserted. No! it is impossible that all this loveliness of Nature and Art, of the world of our sensations and of the world outside, will really fade away into nothing. It would be too senseless and too presumptuous to believe it. Somehow or other this loveliness must be able to persist and to escape all the powers of destruction.

But this demand for immortality is a product of our wishes too unmistakable to lay claim to reality: what is painful may none the less be true. I could not see my way to dispute the transience of all things, nor could I insist upon an exception in favour of what is beautiful and perfect. But I did dispute the pessimistic poet’s view that the transience of what is beautiful involves any loss in its worth.

On the contrary, an increase! Transience value is scarcity value in time. Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of the enjoyment. It was incomprehensible, I declared, that the thought of the transience of beauty should interfere with our joy in it. As regards the beauty of Nature, each time it is destroyed by winter it comes again next year, so that in relation to the length of our lives it can in fact be regarded as eternal. The beauty of the human form and face vanish for ever in the course of our own lives, but their evanescence only lends them a fresh charm. A flower that blossoms only for a single night does not seem to us on that account less lovely. Nor can I understand any better why the beauty and perfection of a work of art or of an intellectual achievement should lose its worth because of its temporal limitation. A time may indeed come when the pictures and statues which we admire to-day will crumble to dust, or a race of men may follow us who no longer understand the works of our poets and thinkers, or a geological epoch may even arrive when all animate life upon the earth ceases; but since the value of all this beauty and perfection is determined only by its significance for our own emotional lives, it has no need to survive us and is therefore independent of absolute duration.

On Transience

3096

These considerations appeared to me incontestable; but I noticed that I had made no impression either upon the poet or upon my friend. My failure led me to infer that some powerful emotional factor was at work which was disturbing their judgement, and I believed later that I had discovered what it was. What spoilt their enjoyment of beauty must have been a revolt in their minds against mourning. The idea that all this beauty was transient was giving these two sensitive minds a foretaste of mourning over its decease; and, since the mind instinctively recoils from anything that is painful, they felt their enjoyment of beauty interfered with by thoughts of its transience.

Mourning over the loss of something that we have loved or admired seems so natural to the layman that he regards it as self-evident. But to psychologists mourning is a great riddle, one of those phenomena which cannot themselves be explained but to which other obscurities can be traced back. We possess, as it seems, a certain amount of capacity for love - what we call libido - which in the earliest stages of development is directed towards our own ego. Later, though still at a very early time, this libido is diverted from the ego on to objects, which are thus in a sense taken into our ego. If the objects are destroyed or if they are lost to us, our capacity for love (our libido) is once more liberated; and it can then either take other objects instead or can temporarily return to the ego. But why it is that this detachment of libido from its objects should be such a painful process is a mystery to us and we have not hitherto been able to frame any hypothesis to account for it. We only see that libido clings to its objects and will not renounce those that are lost even when a substitute lies ready to hand. Such then is mourning.

On Transience

3097

My conversation with the poet took place in the summer before the war. A year later the war broke out and robbed the world of its beauties. It destroyed not only the beauty of the countrysides through which it passed and the works of art which it met with on its path but it also shattered our pride in the achievements of our civilization, our admiration for many philosophers and artists and our hopes of a final triumph over the differences between nations and races. It tarnished the lofty impartiality of our science, it revealed our instincts in all their nakedness and let loose the evil spirits within us which we thought had been tamed for ever by centuries of continuous education by the noblest minds. It made our country small again and made the rest of the world far remote. It robbed us of very much that we had loved, and showed us how ephemeral were many things that we had regarded as changeless.

We cannot be surprised that our libido, thus bereft of so many of its objects, has clung with all the greater intensity to what is left to us, that our love of our country, our affection for those nearest us and our pride in what is common to us have suddenly grown stronger. But have those other possessions, which we have now lost, really ceased to have any worth for us because they have proved so perishable and so unresistant? To many of us this seems to be so, but once more wrongly, in my view. I believe that those who think thus, and seem ready to make a permanent renunciation because what was precious has proved not to be lasting, are simply in a state of mourning for what is Lost. Mourning, as we know, however painful it may becomes to a spontaneous end. When it has renounced everything that has been lost, then it has consumed itself, and our libido is once more free (in so far as we are still young and active) to replace the lost objects by fresh ones equally or still more precious. It is to be hoped that the same will be true of the losses caused by this war. When once the mourning is over, it will be found that our high opinion of the riches of civilization has lost nothing from our discovery of their fragility. We shall build up again all that war has destroyed, and perhaps on firmer ground and more lastingly than before.

3098

SOME CHARACTER-TYPES MET WITH IN PSYCHO-ANALYTIC WORK

(1916)

3099

Intentionally left blank

3100

SOME CHARACTER-TYPES MET WITH IN PSYCHO-ANALYTIC WORK

When a doctor carries out the psycho-analytic treatment of a neurotic, his interest is by no means directed in the first instance to the patient’s character. He would much rather know what the symptoms mean, what instinctual impulses are concealed behind them and are satisfied by them, and what course was followed by the mysterious path that has led from the instinctual wishes to the symptoms. But the technique which he is obliged to follow soon compels him to direct his immediate curiosity towards other objectives. He observes that his investigation is threatened by resistances set up against him by the patient, and these resistances he may justly count as part of the latter’s character. This now acquires the first claim on his interest.

What opposes the doctor’s efforts is not always those traits of character which the patient recognizes in himself and which are attributed to him by people round him. Peculiarities in him which he had seemed to possess only to a modest degree are often brought to light in surprisingly increased intensity, or attitudes reveal themselves in him which had not been betrayed in other relations of life. The pages which follow will be devoted to describing and tracing back a few of these surprising traits of character.

I

THE ‘EXCEPTIONS’

Psycho-analytic work is continually confronted with the task of inducing the patient to renounce an immediate and directly attainable yield of pleasure. He is not asked to renounce all pleasure; that could not, perhaps, be expected of any human being, and even religion is obliged to support its demand that earthly pleasure shall be set aside by promising that it will provide instead an incomparably greater amount of superior pleasure in another world. No, the patient is only asked to renounce such satisfactions as will inevitably have detrimental consequences. His privation is only to be temporary; he has only to learn to exchange an immediate yield of pleasure for a better assured, even though a postponed one. Or, in other words, under the doctor’s guidance he is asked to make the advance from the pleasure principle to the reality principle by which the mature human being is distinguished from the child. In this educative process, the doctor’s clearer insight can hardly be said to play a decisive part; as a rule, he can only tell his patient what the latter’s own reason can tell him. But it is not the same to know a thing in one’s own mind and to hear it from someone outside. The doctor plays the part of this effective outsider; he makes use of the influence which one human being exercises over another. Or - recalling that it is the habit of psycho-analysis to replace what is derivative and etiolated by what is original and basic - let us say that the doctor, in his educative work, makes use of one of the components of love. In this work of after-education, he is probably doing no more than repeat the process which made education of any kind possible in the first instance. Side by side with the exigencies of life, love is the great educator; and it is by the love of those nearest him that the incomplete human being is induced to respect the decrees of necessity and to spare himself the punishment that follows any infringement of them.

Some Character-Types Met With In Psycho-Analytic Work

3101

When in this way one asks the patient to make a provisional renunciation of some pleasurable satisfaction, to make a sacrifice, to show his readiness to accept some temporary suffering for the sake of a better end, or even merely to make up his mind to submit to a necessity which applies to everyone, one comes upon individuals who resist such an appeal on a special ground. They say that they have renounced enough and suffered enough, and have a claim to be spared any further demands; they will submit no longer to any disagreeable necessity, for they are exceptions and, moreover, intend to remain so. In one such patient this claim was magnified into a conviction that a special providence watched over him, which would protect him from any painful sacrifices of the sort. The doctor’s arguments will achieve nothing against an inner confidence which expresses itself as strongly as this; even his influence, indeed, is powerless at first, and it becomes clear to him that he must discover the sources from which this damaging prepossession is being fed.

Now it is no doubt true that everyone would like to consider himself an ‘exception’ and claim privileges over others. But precisely because of this there must be a particular reason, and one not universally present, if someone actually proclaims himself an exception and behaves as such. This reason may be of more than one kind; in the cases I investigated I succeeded in discovering a common peculiarity in the earlier experiences of these patients’ lives. Their neuroses were connected with some experience or suffering to which they had been subjected in their earliest childhood, one in respect of which they knew themselves to be guiltless, and which they could look upon as an unjust disadvantage imposed upon them. The privileges that they claimed as a result of this injustice, and the rebelliousness it engendered, had contributed not a little to intensifying the conflicts leading to the outbreak of their neurosis. In one of these patients, a woman, the attitude towards life which I am discussing came to a head when she learnt that a painful organic trouble, which had hindered her from attaining her aims in life, was of congenital origin. So long as she looked upon this trouble as an accidental and late acquisition, she bore it patiently; as soon as she found that it was part of an innate inheritance, she became rebellious. The young man who believed that he was watched over by a special providence had in his infancy been the victim of an accidental infection from his wet-nurse, and had spent his whole later life making claims for compensation, an accident pension, as it were, without having any idea on what he based those claims. In his case the analysis, which constructed this event out of obscure mnemic residues and interpretations of the symptoms, was confirmed objectively by information from his family.

For reasons which will be easily understood I cannot communicate very much about these or other case histories. Nor do I propose to go into the obvious analogy between deformities of character resulting from protracted sickliness in childhood and the behaviour of whole nations whose past history has been full of suffering. Instead, however, I will take the opportunity of pointing to a figure created by the greatest of poets - a figure in whose character the claim to be an exception is closely bound up with and is motivated by the circumstance of congenital disadvantage.

Some Character-Types Met With In Psycho-Analytic Work

3102

In the opening soliloquy to Shakespeare’s Richard III, Gloucester, who subsequently becomes King, says:

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,

Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;

I that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty

To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;

I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,

Cheated of feature by dissembling Nature,

Deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time

Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,

And that so lamely and unfashionable,

That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;

*      *      *      *      *

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,

To entertain these fair well-spoken days,

I am determined to prove a villain,

And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

At a first glance this tirade may perhaps seem unrelated to our present theme. Richard seems to say nothing more than: ‘I find these idle times tedious, and I want to enjoy myself. As I cannot play the lover on account of my deformity, I will play the villain; I will intrigue, murder and do anything else I please.’ Such a frivolous motivation could not but stifle any stirring of sympathy in the audience, if it were not a screen for something much more serious. Otherwise the play would be psychologically impossible, for the writer must know how to furnish us with a secret background of sympathy for his hero, if we are to admire his boldness and adroitness without inward protest; and such sympathy can only be based on understanding or on a sense of a possible inner fellow-feeling for him.

I think, therefore, that Richard’s soliloquy does not say everything; it merely gives a hint, and leaves us to fill in what it hints at. When we do so, however, the appearance of frivolity vanishes, the bitterness and minuteness with which Richard has depicted his deformity make their full effect, and we clearly perceive the fellow-feeling which compels our sympathy even with a villain like him. What the soliloquy thus means is: ‘nature has done me a grievous wrong in denying me the beauty of form which wins human love. Life owes me reparation for this, and I will see that I get it. I have a right to be an exception, to disregard the scruples by which others let themselves be held back. I may do wrong myself, since wrong has been done to me.’ And now we feel that we ourselves might become like Richard, that on a small scale, indeed, we are already like him. Richard is an enormous magnification of something we find in ourselves as well. We all think we have reason to reproach Nature and our destiny for congenital and infantile disadvantages; we all demand reparation for early wounds to our narcissism, our self-love. Why did not Nature give us the golden curls of Balder or the strength of Siegfried or the lofty brow of genius or the noble profile of aristocracy? Why were we born in a middle-class home instead of in a royal palace? We could carry off beauty and distinction quite as well as any of those whom we are now obliged to envy for these qualities.

Some Character-Types Met With In Psycho-Analytic Work

3103

It is, however, a subtle economy of art in the poet that he does not permit his hero to give open and complete expression to all his secret motives. By this means he obliges us to supplement them; he engages our intellectual activity, diverts it from critical reflection and keeps us firmly identified with his hero. A bungler in his place would give conscious expression to all that he wishes to reveal to us, and would then find himself confronted by our cool, untrammelled intelligence, which would preclude any deepening of the illusion.

Before leaving the ‘exceptions’, however, we may point out that the claim of women to privileges and to exemption from so many of the importunities of life rests upon the same foundation. As we learn from psycho-analytic work, women regard themselves as having been damaged in infancy, as having been undeservedly cut short of something and unfairly treated; and the embitterment of so many daughters against their mother derives, ultimately, from the reproach against her of having brought them into the world as women instead of as men.

Some Character-Types Met With In Psycho-Analytic Work

3104

II

THOSE WRECKED BY SUCCESS

Psycho-analytic work has furnished us with the thesis that people fall ill of a neurosis as a result of frustration. What is meant is the frustration of the satisfaction of their libidinal wishes, and some digression is necessary in order to make the thesis intelligible. For a neurosis to be generated there must be a conflict between a person’s libidinal wishes and the part of his personality we call his ego, which is the expression of his instinct of self-preservation and which also includes his ideals of his personality. A pathogenic conflict of this kind takes place only when the libido tries to follow paths and aims which the ego has long since overcome and condemned and has therefore prohibited forever; and this the libido only does if it is deprived of the possibility of an ideal ego-syntonic satisfaction. Hence privation, frustration of a real satisfaction, is the first condition for the generation of a neurosis, although, indeed, it is far from being the only one.

So much the more surprising, and indeed bewildering, must it appear when as a doctor one makes the discovery that people occasionally fall ill precisely when a deeply-rooted and long-cherished wish has come to fulfilment. It seems then as though they were not able to tolerate their happiness; for there can be no question that there is a causal connection between their success and their falling ill.

I had an opportunity of obtaining an insight into a woman’s history, which I propose to describe as typical of these tragic occurrences. She was of good birth and well brought-up, but as quite a young girl she could not restrain her zest for life; she ran away from home and roved about the world in search of adventures, till she made the acquaintance of an artist who could appreciate her feminine charms but could also divine, in spite of what she had fallen to, the finer qualities she possessed. He took her to live with him, and she proved a faithful companion to him, and seemed only to need social rehabilitation to achieve complete happiness. After many years of life together, he succeeded in getting his family reconciled to her, and was then prepared to make her his legal wife. At that moment she began to go to pieces. She neglected the house of which she was now about to become the rightful mistress, imagined herself persecuted by his relatives, who wanted to take her into the family, debarred her lover, through her senseless jealousy, from all social intercourse, hindered him in his artistic work, and soon succumbed to an incurable mental illness.

Some Character-Types Met With In Psycho-Analytic Work

3105

On another occasion I came across the case of a most respectable man who, himself an academic teacher, had for many years cherished the natural wish to succeed the master who had initiated him into his own studies. When this older man retired, and his colleagues informed him that it was he who was chosen as successor, he began to hesitate, depreciated his merits, declared himself unworthy to fill the position designed for him, and fell into a melancholia which unfitted him for all activity for some years.

Different as these two cases are in other respects, they yet agree in this one point: the illness followed close upon the fulfilment of a wish and put an end to all enjoyment of it.

The contradiction between such experiences and the rule that what induces illness is frustration is not insoluble. It disappears if we make a distinction between an external and an internal frustration. If the object in which the libido can find its satisfaction is withheld in reality, this is an external frustration. In itself it is inoperative, not pathogenic, until an internal frustration is joined to it. This latter must proceed from the ego, and must dispute the access by the libido to other objects, which it now seeks to get hold of. Only then does a conflict arise, and the possibility of a neurotic illness, i.e. of a substitutive satisfaction reached circuitously by way of the repressed unconscious. Internal frustration is potentially present, therefore, in every case, only it does not come into operation until external, real frustration has prepared the ground for it. In those exceptional cases in which people are made ill by success, the internal frustration has operated by itself; indeed it has only made its appearance after an external frustration has been replaced by fulfilment of a wish. At first sight there is something strange about this; but on closer consideration we shall reflect that it is not at all unusual for the ego to tolerate a wish as harmless so long as it exists in phantasy alone and seems remote from fulfilment, whereas the ego will defend itself hotly against such a wish as soon as it approaches fulfilment and threatens to become a reality. The distinction between this and familiar situations in neurosis-formation is merely that ordinarily it is internal intensifications of the libidinal cathexis that turn the phantasy, which has hitherto been thought little of and tolerated, into a dreaded opponent; while in these cases of ours the signal for the outbreak of conflict is given by a real external change.

Some Character-Types Met With In Psycho-Analytic Work

3106

Analytic work has no difficulty in showing us that it is forces of conscience which forbid the subject to gain the long hoped for advantage from the fortunate change in reality. It is a difficult task, however, to discover the essence and origin of these judging and punishing trends, which so often surprise us by their existence where we do not expect to find them. For the usual reasons I shall not discuss what we know or conjecture on the point in relation to cases of clinical observation, but in relation to figures which great writers have created from the wealth of their knowledge of the mind.

We may take as an example of a person who collapses on reaching success, after striving for it with single-minded energy, the figure of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth. Beforehand there is no hesitation, no sign of any internal conflict in her, no endeavour but that of overcoming the scruples of her ambitious and yet tender-minded husband. She is ready to sacrifice even her womanliness to her murderous intention, without reflecting on the decisive part which this womanliness must play where the question afterwards arises of preserving the aim of her ambition, which has been attained through a crime.

Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here

. . . Come to my woman’s breasts,

And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers!

(Act I, Sc. 5.)

. . . I have given suck, and know

How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me:

I would, while it was smiling in my face,

Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,

And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you

Have done to this.

(Act I, Sc. 7.)

One solitary faint stirring of reluctance comes over her before the deed:

. . . Had he not resembled

My father as he slept, I had done it . . .

(Act I, Sc. 2.)

Then, when she has become Queen through the murder of Duncan, she betrays for a moment something like disappointment, something like disillusionment. We cannot tell why.

. . . Nought’s had, all’s spent,

Where our desire is got without content:

‘Tis safer to be that which we destroy,

Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.

(Act III, Sc. 2.)

Nevertheless, she holds out. In the banqueting scene which follows on these words, she alone keeps her head, cloaks her husband’s state of confusion and finds a pretext for dismissing the guests. And then she disappears from view. We next see her n the sleep-walking scene in the last Act, fixated to the impressions of the night of the murder. Once again, as then, she seeks to put heart into her husband:

‘Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who

knows it, when none can call our power to account?’

(Act V, Sc. 1.)

She hears the knocking at the door, which terrified her husband after the deed. But at the same time she strives to ‘undo the deed which cannot be undone’. She washes her hands, which are blood-stained and smell of blood, and is conscious of the futility of the attempt. She who had seemed so remorseless seems to have been borne down by remorse. When she dies, Macbeth, who meanwhile has become as inexorable as she had been in the beginning, can only find a brief epitaph for her:

She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word.

(Act V, Sc. 5.)

Some Character-Types Met With In Psycho-Analytic Work

3107

And now we ask ourselves what it was that broke this character which had seemed forged from the toughest metal? Is it only disillusionment - the different aspect shown by the accomplished deed - and are we to infer that even in Lady Macbeth an originally gentle and womanly nature had been worked up to a concentration and high tension which could not endure for long, or ought we to seek for signs of a deeper motivation which will make this collapse more humanly intelligible to us?

It seems to me impossible to come to any decision. Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a pièce d’occasion, written for the accession of James, who had hitherto been King of Scotland. The plot was ready-made, and had been handled by other contemporary writers, whose work Shakespeare probably made use of in his customary manner. It offered remarkable analogies to the actual situation. The ‘virginal’ Elizabeth, of whom it was rumoured that she had never been capable of child-bearing and who had once described herself as ‘a barren stock’,¹ in an anguished outcry at the news of James’s birth, was obliged by this very childlessness of hers to make the Scottish king her successor. And he was the son of the Mary Stuart whose execution she, even though reluctantly, had ordered, and who, in spite of the clouding of their relations by political concerns, was nevertheless of her blood and might be called her guest.

The accession of James I was like a demonstration of the curse of unfruitfulness and the blessings of continuous generation. And the action of Shakespeare’s Macbeth is based on this same contrast.

The Weird Sisters assured Macbeth that he himself should be king, but to Banquo they promised that his children should succeed to the crown. Macbeth is incensed by this decree of destiny. He is not content with the satisfaction of his own ambition. He wants to found a dynasty - not to have murdered for the benefit of strangers. This point is overlooked if Shakespeare’s play is regarded only as a tragedy of ambition. It is clear that Macbeth cannot live for ever, and thus there is but one way for him to invalidate the part of the prophecy which opposes him - namely, to have children himself who can succeed him. And he seems to expect them from his indomitable wife:

Bring forth men-children only!

For thy undaunted mettle should compose

Nothing but males . . .  .

(Act I, Sc. 7.)

¹ Cf. Macbeth, Act III, Sc. 1:

Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown,

And put a barren sceptre in my gripe,

Thence to be wrenched with an unlineal hand,

No son of mine succeeding . . .

Some Character-Types Met With In Psycho-Analytic Work

3108

And equally it is clear that if he is deceived in this expectation he must submit to destiny; otherwise his actions lose all purpose and are transformed into the blind fury of one doomed to destruction, who is resolved to destroy beforehand all that he can reach. We watch Macbeth pass through this development, and at the height of the tragedy we hear Macduff’s shattering cry, which has so often been recognized to be ambiguous and which may perhaps contain the key to the change in Macbeth:

He has no children!

(Act IV, Sc. 3.)

There is no doubt that this means: ‘Only because he is himself childless could he murder my children.’ But more may be implied in it, and above all it might lay bare the deepest motive which not only forces Macbeth to go far beyond his own nature, but also touches the hard character of his wife at its only weak point. If one surveys the whole play from the summit marked by these words of Macduff’s, one sees that it is sown with references to the father-children relation. The murder of the kindly Dun can is little else than parricide; in Banquo’s case, Macbeth kills the father while the son escapes him; and in Macduff’s, he kills the children because the father has fled from him. A bloody child, and then a crowned one, are shown him by the witches in the apparition scene; the armed head which is seen earlier is no doubt Macbeth himself. But in the background rises the sinister form of the avenger, Macduff, who is himself an exception to the laws of generation, since he was not born of his mother but ripp’d from her womb.

It would be a perfect example of poetic justice in the manner of the talion if the childlessness of Macbeth and the barrenness of his Lady were the punishment for their crimes against the sanctity of generation - if Macbeth could not become a father because he had robbed children of their father and a father of his children, and if Lady Macbeth suffered the unsexing she had demanded of the sprits of murder. I believe Lady Macbeth’s illness, the transformation of her callousness into penitence, could be explained directly as a reaction to her childlessness, by which she is convinced of her impotence against the decrees of nature, and at the same time reminded that it is through her own fault if her crime has been robbed of the better part of its fruits.

Some Character-Types Met With In Psycho-Analytic Work

3109

In Holinshed’s Chronicle (1577), from which Shakespeare took the plot of Macbeth, Lady Macbeth is only once mentioned as the ambitious wife who instigates her husband to murder in order that she may herself become queen. There is no mention of her subsequent fate and of the development of her character. On the other hand, it would seem that the change of Macbeth’s character into a bloodthirsty tyrant is ascribed to the same motives as we have suggested here. For in Holinshed ten years pass between the murder of Duncan, through which Macbeth becomes king, and his further misdeeds; and in these ten years he is shown as a stern but just ruler. It is not until after this lapse of time that the change begins in him, under the influence of the tormenting fear that the prophecy to Banquo may be fulfilled just as the prophecy of his own destiny has been. Only then does he contrive the murder of Banquo, and, as in Shakespeare, is driven from one crime to another. It is not expressly stated in Holinshed that it was his childlessness which urged him to these courses, but enough time and room is given for that plausible motive. Not so in Shakespeare. Events crowd upon us in the tragedy with breathless haste so that, to judge by the statements made by the characters in it, the course of its action covers about one week.¹ This acceleration takes the ground from under all our constructions of the motives for the change in the characters of Macbeth and his wife. There is no time for a long drawn-out disappointment of their hopes of offspring to break the woman down and drive the man to defiant rage; and the contradiction remains that though so many subtle interrelations in the plot, and between it and its occasion, point to a common origin of them in the theme of childlessness, nevertheless the economy of time in the tragedy expressly precludes a development of character from any motives but those inherent in the action itself.

¹ Darmesteter (1881, lxxv).

Some Character-Types Met With In Psycho-Analytic Work

3110

What, however, these motives can have been which in so short a space of time could turn the hesitating, ambitious man into an unbridled tyrant, and his steely-hearted instigator into a sick woman gnawed by remorse, it is, in my view, impossible to guess. We must, I think, give up any hope of penetrating the triple layer of obscurity into which the bad preservation of the text, the unknown intention of the dramatist, and the hidden purport of the legend have become condensed. But I should not subscribe to the objection that investigations like these are idle in face of the powerful effect which the tragedy has upon the spectator. The dramatist can indeed, during the representation, overwhelm us by his art and paralyse our powers of reflection; but he cannot prevent us from attempting subsequently, to grasp its effect by studying its psychological mechanism. Nor does the contention that a dramatist is at liberty to shorten at will the natural chronology of the events he brings before us, if by the sacrifice of common probability he can enhance the dramatic effect, seem to me relevant in this instance. For such a sacrifice is justified only when it merely interferes with probability,¹ and not when it breaks the causal connection; moreover, the dramatic effect would hardly have suffered if the passage of time had been left indeterminate, instead of being expressly limited to a few days.

One is so unwilling to dismiss a problem like that of Macbeth as insoluble that I will venture to bring up a fresh point, which may offer another way out of the difficulty. Ludwig Jekels, in a recent Shakespearean study, thinks he has discovered a particular technique of the poet’s, and this might apply to Macbeth. He believes that Shakespeare often splits a character up into two personages, which, taken separately, are not completely understandable and do not become so until they are brought together once more into a unity. This might be so with Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. In that case it would of course be pointless to regard her as an independent character and seek to discover the motives for her change, without considering the Macbeth who completes her. I shall not follow this clue any further, but I should, nevertheless, like to point out something which strikingly confirms this view: the germs of fear which break out in Macbeth on the night of the murder do not develop further in him but in her.² It is he who has the hallucination of the dagger before the crime; but it is she who afterwards falls ill of a mental disorder. It is he who after the murder hears the cry in the house: ‘Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep . . .’ and so ‘Macbeth shall sleep no more’; but we never hear that he slept no more, while the Queen, as we see, rises from her bed and, talking in her sleep, betrays her guilt. It is he who stands helpless with bloody hands, lamenting that ‘all great Neptune’s ocean’ will not wash them clean, while she comforts him: ‘A little water clears us of this deed’; but later it is she who washes her hands for a quarter of an hour and cannot get rid of the bloodstains: ‘All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.’ Thus what he feared in his pangs of conscience is fulfilled in her; she becomes all remorse and he all defiance. Together they exhaust the possibilities of reaction to the crime, like two disunited parts of a single psychical individuality, and it may be that they are both copied from a single prototype.

¹ As in Richard III’s wooing of Anne beside the bier of the King whom he has murdered.

² Cf. Darmesteter (1881, lxxv).

Some Character-Types Met With In Psycho-Analytic Work

3111

If we have been unable to give any answer to the question why Lady Macbeth should collapse after her success, we may perhaps have a better chance when we turn to the creation of another great dramatist, who loves to pursue problems of psychological responsibility with unrelenting rigour.

Rebecca Gamvik, the daughter of a midwife, has been brought up by her adopted father, Dr. West, to be a freethinker and to despise the restrictions which a morality founded on religious belief seeks to impose on the desires of life. After the doctor’s death she finds a position at Rosmersholm, the home for many generations of an ancient family whose members know nothing of laughter and have sacrificed joy to a rigid fulfilment of duty. Its occupants are Johannes Rosmer, a former pastor, and his invalid wife, the childless Beata. Overcome by ‘a wild, uncontrollable passion’ for the love of the high-born Rosmer, Rebecca resolves to remove the wife who stands in her way, and to this end makes use of her ‘fearless, free’ will, which is restrained by no scruples. She contrives that Beata shall read a medical book in which the aim of marriage is represented to by the begetting of offspring, so that the poor woman begins to doubt whether her own marriage is justifiable. Rebecca then hints that Rosmer, whose studies and ideas she shares, is about to abandon the old faith and join the ‘party of enlightenment’; and after she has thus shaken the wife’s confidence in her husband’s moral integrity, gives her finally to understand that she, Rebecca, will soon leave the house in order to conceal the consequences of her illicit intercourse with Rosmer. The criminal scheme succeeds. The poor wife, who has passed for depressed and irresponsible, throws herself from the path beside the mill into the mill-race, possessed by the sense of her own worthlessness and wishing no longer to stand between her beloved husband and his happiness.

Some Character-Types Met With In Psycho-Analytic Work

3112

For more than a year Rebecca and Rosmer have been living alone at Rosmersholm in a relationship which he wishes to regard as a purely intellectual and ideal friendship. But when this relationship begins to be darkened from outside by the first shadow of gossip, and at the same time tormenting doubts arise in Rosmer about the motives for which his wife put an end to herself, he begs Rebecca to become his second wife, so that they may counter the unhappy past with a new living reality (Act II). For an instant she exclaims with joy at his proposal, but immediately afterwards declares that it can never be, and that if he urges her further she will ‘go the way Beata went’. Rosmer cannot understand this rejection; and still less can we, who know more of Rebecca’s actions and designs. All we can be certain of is that her ‘no’ is meant in earnest.

How could it come about that the adventuress with the ‘fearless, free will’, who forged her way ruthlessly to her desired goal, should now refuse to pluck the fruit of success when it is offered to her? She herself gives us the explanation in the fourth Act: ‘This is the terrible part of it: that now, when all life’s happiness is within my grasp - my heart is changed and my own past cuts me off from it.’ That is to say, she has in the meantime become a different being; her conscience has awakened, she has acquired a sense of guilt which debars her from enjoyment.

And what has awakened her conscience? Let us listen to her herself, and then consider whether we can believe her entirely. ‘It is the Rosmer view of life - or your view of life at any rate - that has infected my will. . . . And made it sick. Enslaved it to laws that had no power over me before. You - life with you has ennobled my mind.’

Some Character-Types Met With In Psycho-Analytic Work

3113

This influence, we are further to understand, has only become effective since she has been able to live alone with Rosmer: ‘In quiet - in solitude - when you showed me all your thoughts without reserve - every tender and delicate feeling, just as it came to you - then the great change came over me.’

Shortly before this she has lamented the other aspect of the change: ‘Because Rosmersholm has sapped my strength. My old fearless will has had its wings clipped here. It is crippled! The time is past when I had courage for anything in the world. I have lost the power of action, Rosmer.’

Rebecca makes this declaration after she had revealed herself as a criminal in a voluntary confession to Rosmer and Rector Kroll, the brother of the woman she has got rid of. Ibsen has made it clear by small touches of masterly subtlety that Rebecca does not actually tell lies, but is never entirely straightforward. Just as, in spite of all her freedom from prejudices, she has understated her age by a year, so her confession to the two men is incomplete, and as a result of Kroll’s insistence it is supplemented on some important points. Hence it is open to us to suppose that her explanation of her renunciation exposes one motive only to conceal another.

Certainly, we have no reason to disbelieve her when she declares that the atmosphere of Rosmersholm and her association with the high-minded Rosmer have ennobled - and crippled - her. She is here expressing what she knows and has felt. But this is not necessarily all that has happened in her, nor need she have understood all that has happened. Rosmer’s influence may only have been a cloak, which concealed another influence that was operative, and a remarkable indication points in this other direction.

Even after her confession, Rosmer, in their last conversation which brings the play to an end, again beseeches her to be his wife. He forgives her the crime she has committed for love of him. And now she does not answer, as she should, that no forgiveness can rid her of the feeling of guilt she has incurred from her malignant deception of poor Beata; but she charges herself with another reproach which affects us as coming strangely from this freethinking woman, and is far from deserving the importance which Rebecca attaches to it: ‘Dear - never speak of this again! It is impossible! For you must know, Rosmer, I have a - a past behind me.’ She means, of course, that she has had sexual relations with another man; and we do not fail to observe that these relations, which occurred at a time when she was free and accountable to nobody, seem to her a greater hindrance to the union with Rosmer than her truly criminal behaviour to his wife.

Some Character-Types Met With In Psycho-Analytic Work

3114

Rosmer refuses to hear anything about this past. We can guess what it was, though everything that refers to it in the play is, so to speak, subterranean and has to be pieced together from hints. But nevertheless they are hints inserted with such art that it is impossible to misunderstand them.

Between Rebecca’s first refusal and her confession something occurs which has a decisive influence on her future destiny. Rector Kroll arrives one day at the house on purpose to humiliate Rebecca by telling her that he knows she is an illegitimate child, the daughter of the very Dr. West who adopted her after her mother’s death. Hate has sharpened his perceptions, yet he does not suppose that this is any news to her. ‘I really did not suppose you were ignorant of this, otherwise it would have been very odd that you should have let Dr. West adopt you . . .’ ‘And then he takes you into his house - as soon as your mother dies. He treats you harshly. And yet you stay with him. You know that he won’t leave you a halfpenny - as a matter of fact you got only a case of books - and yet you stay on; you bear with him; you nurse him to the last.’ . . .  ‘I attribute your care for him to the natural filial instinct of a daughter. Indeed, I believe your whole conduct is a natural result of your origin.’

But Kroll is mistaken. Rebecca had no idea at all that she could be Dr. West’s daughter. When Kroll began with dark hints at her past, she must have thought he was referring to something else. After she has gathered what he means, she can still retain her composure for a while, for she is able to suppose that her enemy is basing his calculations on her age, which she had given falsely on an earlier visit of his. But Kroll demolishes this objection by saying: ‘Well, so be it, but my calculation may be right, none the less; for Dr. West was up there on a short visit the year before he got the appointment.’ After this new information, she loses her self-possession. ‘It is not true!’ She walks about wringing her hands. ‘It is impossible. You want to cheat me into believing it. This can never, never be true. It cannot be true. Never in this world! - Her agitation is so extreme that Kroll cannot attribute it to his information alone.

Some Character-Types Met With In Psycho-Analytic Work

3115

‘KROLL: But, my dear Miss West - why in Heaven’s name are you so terribly excited? You quite frighten me. What am I to think - to believe--?

‘REBECCA: Nothing. You are to think and believe nothing.

‘KROLL: Then you must really tell me how you can take this affair - this possibility - so terribly to heart.

‘REBECCA (controlling herself): It is perfectly simple, Rector Kroll. I have no wish to be taken for an illegitimate child.’

The enigma of Rebecca’s behaviour is susceptible of only one solution. The news that Dr. West was her father is the heaviest blow that can befall her, for she was not only his adopted daughter, but had been his mistress. When Kroll began to speak, she thought that he was hinting at these relations, the truth of which she would probably have admitted and justified by her emancipated ideas. But this was far from the Rector’s intention; he knew nothing of the love-affair with Dr. West, just as she knew nothing of Dr. West’s being her father. She cannot have had anything else in her mind but this love-affair when she accounted for her final rejection of Rosmer on the ground that she had a past which made her unworthy to be his wife. And probably, if Rosmer had consented to hear of that past, she would have confessed half her secret only and have kept silence on the more serious part of it.

But now we understand, of course, that this past must seem to her the more serious obstacle to their union - the more serious crime.

After she has learnt that she has been the mistress of her own father, she surrenders herself wholly to her now overmastering sense of guilt. She makes the confession to Rosmer and Kroll which stamps her as a murderess; she rejects for ever the happiness to which she has paved the way by crime, and prepares for departure. But the true motive of her sense of guilt, which results in her being wrecked by success, remains a secret. As we have seen, it is something quite other than the atmosphere of Rosmersholm and the refining influence of Rosmer.

At this point no one who has followed us will fail to bring forward an objection which may justify some doubts. Rebecca’s first refusal of Rosmer occurs before Kroll’s second visit, and therefore before his exposure of her illegitimate origin and at a time when she as yet knows nothing of her incest - if we have rightly understood the dramatist. Yet this first refusal is energetic and seriously meant. The sense of guilt which bids her renounce the fruit of her actions is thus effective before she knows anything of her cardinal crime; and if we grant so much, we ought perhaps entirely to set aside her incest as a source of that sense of guilt.

Some Character-Types Met With In Psycho-Analytic Work

3116

So far we have treated Rebecca West as if she were a living person and not a creation of Ibsen’s imagination, which is always directed by the most critical intelligence. We may therefore attempt to maintain the same position in dealing with the objection that has been raised. The objection is valid: before the knowledge of her incest, conscience was already in part awakened in Rebecca; and there is nothing to prevent our making the influence which is acknowledged and blamed by Rebecca herself responsible for this change. But this does not exempt us from recognizing the second motive. Rebecca’s behaviour when she hears what Kroll has to tell her, the confession which is her immediate reaction, leave no doubt that then only does the stronger and decisive motive for renunciation begin to take effect. It is in fact a case of multiple motivation, in which a deeper motive comes into view behind the more superficial one. Laws of poetic economy necessitate this way of presenting the situation, for this deeper motive could not be explicitly enunciated. It had to remain concealed, kept from the easy perception of the spectator or the reader; otherwise serious resistances, based on the most distressing emotions, would have arisen, which might have imperilled the effect of the drama.

We have, however, a right to demand that the explicit motive shall not be without an internal connection with the concealed one, but shall appear as a mitigation of, and a derivation from, the latter. And if we may rely on the fact that the dramatist’s conscious creative combination arose logically from unconscious premisses, we may now make an attempt to show that he has fulfilled this demand. Rebecca’s feeling of guilt has its source in the reproach of incest, even before Kroll, with analytical perspicacity, has made her conscious of it. If we reconstruct her past, expanding and filling in the author’s hints, we may feel sure that she cannot have been without some inkling of the intimate relation between her mother and Dr. West. It must have made a great impression on her when she became her mother’s successor with this man. She stood under the domination of the Oedipus complex, even though she did not know that this universal phantasy had in her case become a reality. When she came to Rosmersholm, the inner force of this first experience drove her into bringing about, by vigorous action, the same situation which had been realized in the original instance through no doing of hers - into getting rid of the wife and mother, so that she might take her place with the husband and father. She describes with a convincing insistence how, against her will, she was obliged to proceed, step by step, to the removal of Beata.

Some Character-Types Met With In Psycho-Analytic Work

3117

‘You think then that I was cool and calculating and self-possessed all the time! I was not the same woman then that I am now, as I stand here telling it all. Besides, there are two sorts of will in us, I believe! I wanted Beata away, by one means or another; but I never really believed that it would come to pass. As I felt my way forward, at each step I ventured, I seemed to hear something within me cry out: No farther! Not a step farther! And yet I could not stop, I had to venture the least little bit farther. And only one hair’s-breadth more. And then one more - and always one more. And then it happened. - That is the way such things come about.’

That is not an embellishment, but an authentic description. Everything that happened to her at Rosmersholm, her falling in love with Rosmer and her hostility to his wife, was from the first a consequence of the Oedipus complex - an inevitable replica of her relations with her mother and Dr. West.

And so the sense of guilt which first causes her to reject Rosmer’s proposal is at bottom no different from the greater one which drives her to her confession after Kroll has opened her eyes. But just as under the influence of Dr. West she had become a freethinker and despiser of religious morality, so she is transformed by her love for Rosmer into a being of conscience and nobility. This much of the mental processes within her she herself understands, and so she is justified in describing Rosmer’s influence as the motive for her change - the motive that had become accessible to her.

The practising psycho-analytic physician knows how frequently, or how invariably, a girl who enters a household as servant, companion or governess, will consciously or unconsciously weave a day-dream, which derives from the Oedipus complex, of the mistress of the house disappearing and the master taking the newcomer as his wife in her place. Rosmersholm is the greatest work of art of the class that treats of this common phantasy in girls. What makes it into a tragic drama is the extra circumstance that the heroine’s day-dream had been preceded in her childhood by a precisely corresponding reality.¹

After this long digression into literature, let us return to clinical experience - but only to establish in a few words the complete agreement between them. Psycho-analytic work teaches that the forces of conscience which induce illness in consequence of success, instead of, as normally, in consequence of frustration, are closely connected with the Oedipus complex, the relation to father and mother - as perhaps, indeed, is our sense of guilt in general.

¹ The presence of the theme of incest in Rosmersholm has already been demonstrated by the same arguments as mine in Otto Rank’s extremely comprehensive Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage (1912).

Some Character-Types Met With In Psycho-Analytic Work

3118

III

CRIMINALS FROM A SENSE OF GUILT

In telling me about their early youth, particularly before puberty, people who have afterwards often become very respectable have informed me of forbidden actions which they committed at that time - such as thefts, frauds and even arson. I was in the habit of dismissing these statements with the comment that we are familiar with the weakness of moral inhibitions at that period of life, and I made no attempt to find a place for them in any more significant context. But eventually I was led to make a more thorough study of such incidents by some glaring and more accessible cases in which the misdeeds were committed while the patients were actually under my treatment, and were no longer so youthful. Analytic work then brought the surprising discovery that such deeds were done principally because they were forbidden, and because their execution was accompanied by mental relief for their doer. He was suffering from an oppressive feeling of guilt, of which he did not know the origin, and after he had committed a misdeed this oppression was mitigated. His sense of guilt was at least attached to something.

Paradoxical as it may sound, I must maintain that the sense of guilt was present before the misdeed, that it did not arise from it, but conversely - the misdeed arose from the sense of guilt. These people might justly be described as criminals from a sense of guilt. The pre-existence of the guilty feeling had of course been demonstrated by a whole set of other manifestations and effects.

But scientific work is not satisfied with the establishment of a curious fact. There are two further questions to answer: what is the origin of this obscure sense of guilt before the deed, and is it probable that this kind of causation plays any considerable part in human crime?

An examination of the first question held out the promise of bringing us information about the source of mankind’s sense of guilt in general. The invariable outcome of analytic work was to show that this obscure sense of guilt derived from the Oedipus complex and was a reaction to the two great criminal intentions of killing the father and having sexual relations with the mother. In comparison with these two, the crimes committed in order to fix the sense of guilt to something came as a relief to the sufferers. We must remember in this connection that parricide and incest with the mother are the two great human crimes, the only ones which, as such, are pursued and abhorred in primitive communities. And we must remember, too, how close other investigations have brought us to the hypothesis that the conscience of mankind, which now appears as an inherited mental force, was acquired in connection with the Oedipus complex.

Some Character-Types Met With In Psycho-Analytic Work

3119

In order to answer the second question we must go beyond the scope of psycho-analytic work. With children it is easy to observe that they are often ‘naughty’ on purpose to provoke punishment, and are quiet and contented after they have been punished. Later analytic investigation can often put us on the track of the guilty feeling which induced them to seek punishment. Among adult criminals we must no doubt except those who commit crimes without any sense of guilt, who have either developed no moral inhibitions or who, in their conflict with society, consider themselves justified in their action. But as regards the majority of other criminals, those for whom punitive measures are really designed, such a motivation for crime might very well be taken into consideration; it might throw light on some obscure points in the psychology of the criminal, and furnish punishment with a new psychological basis.

A friend has since called my attention to the fact that the ‘criminal from a sense of guilt’ was known to Nietzsche too. The pre-existence of the feeling of guilt, and the utilization of a deed in order to rationalize this feeling, glimmer before us in Zarathustra’s sayings ‘On the Pale Criminal’. Let us leave it to future research to decide how many criminals are to be reckoned among these ‘pale’ ones.

3120

A MYTHOLOGICAL PARALLEL TO A VISUAL OBSESSION

(1916)

In a patient of about twenty-one years of age the products of unconscious mental activity became conscious not only in obsessive thoughts but also in obsessive images. The two could accompany each other or appear independently. At one particular time, whenever he saw his father entering the room, there came into his mind in close connection an obsessive word and an obsessive image. The word was ‘Vaterarsch’ [‘father-arse’]; the accompanying image represented his father as the naked lower part of a body, provided with arms and legs, but without the head or upper part. The genitals were not indicated, and the facial features were painted on the abdomen.

It will help to explain this more than usually absurd symptom if I mention that the patient, who was a man of fully developed intellect and high moral ideals, manifested a very lively anal erotism in the most various ways until after his tenth year. After this had been got over, his sexual life was once again forced back to the preliminary anal stage by his later struggle against genital erotism. He loved and respected his father greatly, and also feared him not a little; judged by his own high standards in regard to asceticism and the suppression of the instincts, however, his father seemed to him a person who stood for debauchery and the pursuit of enjoyment in material things.

‘Father-arse’ was soon explained as a jocular Teutonizing of the honorific title of ‘patriarch’. The obsessive image is an obvious caricature. It recalls other representations which, with a derogatory end in view, replace a whole person by one of his organs, e.g. his genitals; it reminds us, too, of unconscious phantasies which lead to the identification of the genitals with the whole person, and also of joking figures of speech, such as ‘I am all ears’.

A Mythological Parallel To A Visual Obsession

3121

The placing of the facial features on the abdomen of the caricature struck me at first as very strange. But I soon remembered having seen the same thing in French caricatures.¹ Chance then brought to my notice an antique representation, which tallied exactly with my patient’s obsessive image.

According to the Greek legend, Demeter came to Eleusis in search of her daughter after she had been abducted, and was given lodging by Dysaules and his wife Baubo; but in her great sorrow she refused to touch food or drink. Thereupon her hostess Baubo made her laugh by suddenly lifting up her dress and exposing her body. A discussion of this anecdote, which was probably intended to explain a magic ceremonial which was no longer understood, is to be found in the fourth volume of Salomon Reinach’s work, Culte, Mythes, et Religions, 1912. In the same passage the author mentions that during the excavations at Priene in Asia Minor some terracottas were found which represented Baubo. They show the body of a woman without a head or chest and with a face drawn on the abdomen: the lifted dress frames this face like a crown of hair (ibid., 117).

¹ Cf. ‘L’impudique Albion’, a caricature of England drawn in 1901 by Jean Véber, reproduced in Fuchs, 1908.

3122

A CONNECTION BETWEEN A SYMBOL AND A SYMPTOM

(1916)

Experience in the analysis of dreams has sufficiently well established the hat as a symbol of the genital organ, most frequently of the male organ. It cannot be said, however, that the symbol is an intelligible one. In phantasies and in numerous symptoms the head too appears as a symbol of the male genitals, or, if one prefers to put it so, as something standing for them. It will sometimes have been noticed that patients suffering from obsessions express an amount of abhorrence of and indignation against punishment by beheading far greater than they do in the case of any other form of death; and in such cases the analyst may be led to explain to them that they are treating being beheaded as a substitute for being castrated. Instances have often been analysed and published of dreams dreamt by young people or reported as having occurred in youth, which concerned the subject of castration, and in which a round ball was mentioned which could only be interpreted as the head of the dreamer’s father. I was recently able to solve a ceremonial performed by a woman patient before going to sleep, in which she had to lay her small top pillow diamond-wise on the other ones and to rest her head exactly in the long diameter of the diamond-shape. The diamond had the meaning that is familiar to us from drawings on walls [graffiti]; the head was supposed to represent a male organ.

It may be that the symbolic meaning of the hat is derived from that of the head, in so far as a hat can be regarded as a prolonged, though detachable head. In this connection I am reminded of a symptom by means of which obsessional neurotics succeed in causing themselves continual torments. When they are in the street they are constantly on the look-out to see whether some acquaintance will greet them first by taking of his hat, or whether he seems to be waiting for their salutation; and they give up a number of their acquaintances after discovering that they no longer greet them or do not return their own salutation properly. There is no end to their difficulties in this connection; they find them everywhere as their mood and fancy dictate. It makes no difference to their behaviour when we tell them, what they all know already, that a salutation by taking off the hat has the meaning of an abasement before the person saluted - that a Spanish grandee, for example, enjoyed the privilege of remaining covered in the king’s presence - and that their own sensitiveness on the subject of greeting therefore means that they are unwilling to show themselves less important than the other person thinks he is. The resistance of their sensitiveness to explanations such as this suggests that a motive less familiar to consciousness is at work; and the source of this excess of feeling might easily be found in its relation to the castration complex.

3123

LETTER TO DR. HERMINE VON HUG-HELLMUTH

(1919 [1915])

The diary is a little gem. I really believe it has never before been possible to obtain such a clear and truthful view of the mental impulses that characterize the development of a girl in our social and cultural stratum during the years before puberty. We are shown how her feelings grow up out of a childish egoism till they reach social maturity; we learn what form is first assumed by her relations with her parents and with her brothers and sisters and how they gradually gain in seriousness and inward feeling; how friendships are made and broken; how her affection feels its way towards her first objects; and, above all, how the secret of sexual life begins to dawn on her indistinctly and then takes complete possession of the child’s mind; how, in the consciousness of her secret knowledge, she at first suffers hurt, but little by little overcomes it. All of this is so charmingly, so naturally, and so gravely expressed in these artless notes that they cannot fail to arouse the greatest interest in educators and psychologists . . . It is your duty, I think, to publish the diary. My readers will be grateful to you for it.

3124

INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

(1916-17)

3125

Intentionally left blank

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3126

PREFACE

What I am here offering the public as an ‘Introduction to Psycho-Analysis’ is not designed to compete in any way with such general accounts of this field of knowledge as are already in existence, e.g. those of Hitschmann (1913), Pfister (1913), Kaplan (1914), Régis and Hesnard (1914) and Meijer (1915). This volume is a faithful reproduction of the lectures which I delivered during the two Winter Terms 1915/16 and 1916/17 before an audience of doctors and laymen of both sexes.

Any peculiarities of this book which may strike its readers are accounted for by the conditions in which it originated. It was not possible in my presentation to preserve the unruffled calm of a scientific treatise. On the contrary, the lecturer had to make it his business to prevent his audience’s attention from lapsing during a session lasting for almost two hours. The necessities of the moment often made it impossible to avoid repetitions in treating some particular subject - it might emerge once, for instance, in connection with dream-interpretation and then again later on in connection with the problems of the neuroses. As a result, too, of the way in which the material was arranged, some important topics (the unconscious, for instance) could not be exhaustively treated at a single point, but had to be taken up repeatedly and then dropped again until a fresh opportunity arose for adding some further information about it.

Those who are familiar with psycho-analytic literature will find little in this ‘Introduction’ that could not have been known to them already from other much more detailed publications. Nevertheless, the need for rounding-off and summarizing the subject-matter has compelled the author at certain points (the aetiology of anxiety and hysterical phantasies) to bring forward material that he has hitherto held back.

FREUD

VIENNA, Spring 1917

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3127

PREFACE TO THE HEBREW TRANSLATION

These lectures were delivered in 1916 and 1917; they gave a fairly accurate account of the position of the young science at that period and they contained more than their title indicated. They provided not only an introduction to psycho-analysis but covered the greater part of its subject-matter. This is naturally no longer true. Advances have in the meantime taken place in its theory and important additions have been made to it, such as the division of the personality into an ego, a super-ego and an id, a radical alteration in the theory of the instincts, and discoveries concerning the origin of conscience and the sense of guilt. These lectures have thus become to a large extent incomplete; it is in fact only now that they have become truly ‘introductory’. But in another sense, even to-day they have not been superseded or become obsolete. What they contain is still believed and taught, apart from a few modifications, in psycho-analytic training schools.

Readers of Hebrew and especially young people eager for knowledge are presented in this volume with psycho-analysis clothed in the ancient language which has been awakened to a new life by the will of the Jewish people. The author can well picture the problem which this has set its translator. Nor need he suppress his doubt whether Moses and the Prophets would have found these Hebrew lectures intelligible. But he begs their descendants (among whom he himself is numbered), for whom this book is designed, not to react too quickly to their first impulses of criticism and dislike by rejecting it. Psycho-analysis brings forward so much that is new, and among it so much that contradicts traditional opinions and wounds deeply rooted feelings, that it is bound at first to provoke denial. A reader who suspends his judgement and allows psycho-analysis as a whole to make its impression on him will perhaps become open to a conviction that even this undesired novelty is worth knowing and is indispensable for anyone who wishes to understand the mind and human life.

VIENNA, December 1930

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3128

PART I

PARAPRAXES

(1916)

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3129

LECTURE I

INTRODUCTION

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - I cannot tell how much knowledge about psycho-analysis each one of you has already acquired from what you have read or from hearsay. But the wording of my prospectus - ‘Elementary Introduction to Psycho-Analysis’ - obliges me to treat you as though you knew nothing and stood in need of some preliminary information.

I can, however, assume this much - that you know that psycho-analysis is a procedure for the medical treatment of neurotic patients. And here I can at once give you an instance of how in this field a number of things take place in a different way - often, indeed, in an opposite way - from what they do elsewhere in medical practice. When elsewhere we introduce a patient to a medical technique which is new to him, we usually minimize its inconveniences and give him confident assurances of the success of the treatment. I think we are justified in this, since by doing so we are increasing the probability of success. But when we take a neurotic patient into psycho-analytic treatment, we act differently. We point out the difficulties of the method to him, its long duration, the efforts and sacrifices it calls for; and as regards its success, we tell him we cannot promise it with certainty, that it depends on his own conduct, his understanding, his adaptability and his perseverance. We have good reasons, of course, for such apparently wrong-headed behaviour, as you will perhaps come to appreciate later on.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3130

Do not be annoyed, then, if I begin by treating you in the same way as these neurotic patients. I seriously advise you not to join my audience a second time. To support this advice, I will explain to you how incomplete any instruction in psycho-analysis must necessarily be and what difficulties stand in the way of your forming a judgement of your own upon it. I will show you how the whole trend of your previous education and all your habits of thought are inevitably bound to make you into opponents of psycho-analysis, and how much you would have to overcome in yourselves in order to get the better of this instinctive opposition. I cannot, of course, foretell how much understanding of psycho-analysis you will obtain from the information I give you, but I can promise you this: that by listening to it you will not have learnt how to set about a psycho-analytic investigation or how to carry a treatment through. If, however, there should actually turn out to be one of you who did not feel satisfied by a fleeting acquaintance with psycho-analysis but was inclined to enter into a permanent relationship to it, I should not merely dissuade him from doing so but actively warn him against it. As things stand at present, such a choice of profession would ruin any chance he might have of success at a University, and, if he started in life as a practising physician, he would find himself in a society which did not understand his efforts, which regarded him with distrust and hostility, and unleashed upon him all the evil spirits lurking within it. And the phenomena accompanying the war that is now raging in Europe will perhaps give you some notion of what legions of these evil spirits there may be.

Nevertheless, there are quite a number of people for whom, in spite of these inconveniences, something that promises to bring them a fresh piece of knowledge still has its attraction. If a few of you should be of this sort and in spite of my warnings appear here again for my next lecture, you will be welcome. All of you, however, have a right to learn the nature of the difficulties of psycho-analysis to which I have alluded.

I will begin with those connected with instruction, with training in psycho-analysis. In medical training you are accustomed to see things. You see an anatomical preparation, the precipitate of a chemical reaction, the shortening of a muscle as a result of the stimulation of its nerves. Later on, patients are demonstrated before your senses - the symptoms of their illness, the products of the pathological process and even in many cases the agent of the disease in isolation. In the surgical departments you are witnesses of the active measures taken to bring help to patients, and you may yourselves attempt to put them into effect. Even in psychiatry the demonstration of patients with their altered facial expressions, their mode of speech and their behaviour, affords you plenty of observations which leave a deep impression on you. Thus a medical teacher plays in the main the part of a leader and interpreter who accompanies you through a museum, while you gain a direct contact with the objects exhibited and feel yourselves convinced of the existence of the new facts through your own perception.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3131

In psycho-analysis, alas, everything is different. Nothing takes place in a psycho-analytic treatment but an interchange of words between the patient and the analyst. The patient talks, tells of his past experiences and present impressions, complains, confesses to his wishes and his emotional impulses. The doctor listens, tries to direct the patient’s processes of thought, exhorts, forces his attention in certain directions, gives him explanations and observes the reactions of understanding or rejection which he in this way provokes in him. The uninstructed relatives of our patients, who are only impressed by visible and tangible things - preferably by actions of the sort that are to be witnessed at the cinema - never fail to express their doubts whether ‘anything can be done about the illness by mere talking’. That, of course, is both a short-sighted and an inconsistent line of thought. These are the same people who are so certain that patients are ‘simply imagining’ their symptoms. Words were originally magic and to this day words have retained much of their ancient magical power. By words one person can make another blissfully happy or drive him to despair, by words the teacher conveys his knowledge to his pupils, by words the orator carries his audience with him and determines their judgements and decisions. Words provoke affects and are in general the means of mutual influence among men. Thus we shall not depreciate the use of words in psychotherapy and we shall be pleased if we can listen to the words that pass between the analyst and his patient.

But we cannot do that either. The talk of which psycho-analytic treatment consists brooks no listener; it cannot be demonstrated. A neurasthenic or hysterical patient can of course, like any other, be introduced to students in a psychiatric lecture. He will give an account of his complaints and symptoms, but of nothing else. The information required by analysis will be given by him only on condition of his having a special emotional attachment to the doctor; he would become silent as soon as he observed a single witness to whom he felt indifferent. For this information concerns what is most intimate in his mental life, everything that, as a socially independent person, he must conceal from other people, and, beyond that, everything that, as a homogeneous personality, he will not admit to himself.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3132

Thus you cannot be present as an audience at a psycho-analytic treatment. You can only be told about it; and, in the strictest sense of the word, it is only by hearsay that you will get to know psycho-analysis. As a result of receiving your instruction at second hand, as it were, you find yourselves under quite unusual conditions for forming a judgement. That will obviously depend for the most part on how much credence you can give to your informant.

Let us assume for a moment that you were attending a lecture not on psychiatry but on history, and that the lecturer was telling you of the life and military deeds of Alexander the Great. What grounds would you have for believing in the truth of what he reported? At a first glance the position would seem to be even more unfavourable than in the case of psycho-analysis, for the Professor of History no more took part in Alexander’s campaigns than you did. The psycho-analyst does at least report things in which he himself played a part. But in due course we come to the things that confirm what the historian has told you. He could refer you to the reports given by ancient writers, who were either themselves contemporary with the events under question or, at any rate, were comparatively close to them - he could refer you, that is to say, to the works of Diodorus, Plutarch, Arrian, and so on. He could put reproductions before, you of coins and statues of the king which have survived and he could hand round to you a photograph of the Pompeian mosaic of the battle of Issus. Strictly speaking, however, all these documents only prove that earlier generations already believed in Alexander’s existence and in the reality of his deeds, and your criticism might start afresh at that point. You would then discover that not all that has been reported about Alexander deserves credence or can be confirmed in its details; but nevertheless I cannot think that you would leave the lecture-room in doubts of the reality of Alexander the Great. Your decision would be determined essentially by two considerations: first, that the lecturer had no conceivable motive for assuring you of the reality of something he himself did not think real, and secondly, that all the available history books describe the events in approximately similar terms. If you went on to examine the older sources, you would take the same factors into account the possible motives of the informants and the conformity of the witnesses to one another. The outcome of your examination would undoubtedly be reassuring in the case of Alexander, but would probably be different where figures such as Moses or Nimrod were concerned. Later opportunities will bring to light clearly enough what doubts you may feel about the credibility of your psycho-analytic informant.

But you will have a right to ask another question. If there is no objective verification of psycho-analysis, and no possibility of demonstrating it, how can one learn psycho-analysis at all, and convince oneself of the truth of its assertions? It is true that psycho-analysis cannot easily be learnt and there are not many people who have learnt it properly. But of course there is a practicable method none the less. One learns psycho-analysis on oneself, by studying one’s own personality. This is not quite the same thing as what is called self-observation, but it can, if necessary, be subsumed under it. There are a whole number of very common and generally familiar mental phenomena which, after a little instruction in technique, can be made the subject of analysis upon oneself. In that way one acquires the desired sense of conviction of the reality of the processes described by analysis and of the correctness of its views. Nevertheless, there are definite limits to progress by this method. One advances much further if one is analysed oneself by a practised analyst and experiences the effects of analysis on one’s own self, making use of the opportunity of picking up the subtler technique of the process from one’s analyst. This excellent method is, of course, applicable only to a single person and never to a whole lecture room of students together.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3133

Psycho-analysis is not to be blamed for a second difficulty in your relation to it; I must make you yourselves responsible for it, Ladies and Gentlemen, at least in so far as you have been students of medicine. Your earlier education has given a particular direction to your thinking, which leads far away from psycho-analysis. You have been trained to find an anatomical basis for the functions of the organism and their disorders, to explain them chemically and physically and to view them biologically. But no portion of your interest has been directed to psychical life, in which, after all, the achievement of this marvellously complex organism reaches its peak. For that reason psychological modes of thought have remained foreign to you. You have grown accustomed to regarding them with suspicion, to denying them the attribute of being scientific, and to handing them over to laymen, poets, natural philosophers and mystics. This limitation is without doubt detrimental to your medical activity, since, as is the rule in all human relationships, your patients will begin by presenting you with their mental façade, and I fear that you will be obliged as a punishment to leave a part of the therapeutic influence you are seeking to the lay practitioners, nature curers and mystics whom you so much despise.

I am not unaware of the excuse that we have to accept for this defect in your education. No philosophical auxiliary science exists which could be made of service for your medical purposes. Neither speculative philosophy, nor descriptive psychology, nor what is called experimental psychology (which is closely allied to the physiology of the sense-organs), as they are taught in the Universities, are in a position to tell you anything serviceable of the relation between body and mind or to provide you with the key to an understanding of possible disturbances of the mental functions. It is true that psychiatry, as a part of medicine, sets about describing the mental disorders it observes and collecting them into clinical entities; but at favourable moments the psychiatrists themselves have doubts of whether their purely descriptive hypotheses deserve the name of a science. Nothing is known of the origin, the mechanism or the mutual relations of the symptoms of which these clinical entities are composed; there are either no observable changes in the anatomical organ of the mind to correspond to them, or changes which throw no light upon them. These mental disorders are only accessible to therapeutic influence when they can be recognized as subsidiary effects of what is otherwise an organic illness.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3134

This is the gap which psycho-analysis seeks to fill. It tries to give psychiatry its missing psychological foundation. It hopes to discover the common ground on the basis of which the convergence of physical and mental disorder will become intelligible. With this aim in view, psycho-analysis must keep itself free from any hypothesis that is alien to it, whether of an anatomical, chemical or physiological kind, and must operate entirely with purely psychological auxiliary ideas; and for that very reason, I fear, it will seem strange to you to begin with.

I shall not hold you, your education or your attitude of mind responsible for the next difficulty. Two of the hypotheses of psycho-analysis are an insult to the entire world and have earned its dislike. One of them offends against an intellectual prejudice, the other against an aesthetic and moral one. We must not be too contemptuous of these prejudices; they are powerful things, precipitates of human developments that were useful and indeed essential. They are kept in existence by emotional forces and the struggle against them is hard.

The first of these unpopular assertions made by psycho-analysis declares that mental processes are in themselves unconscious and that of all mental life it is only certain individual acts and portions that are conscious. You know that on the contrary we are in the habit of identifying what is psychical with what is conscious. We look upon consciousness as nothing more nor less than the defining characteristic of the psychical, and psychology as the study of the contents of consciousness. Indeed it seems to us so much a matter of course to equate them in this way that any contradiction of the idea strikes us as obvious nonsense. Yet psycho-analysis cannot avoid raising this contradiction; it cannot accept the identity of the conscious and the mental. It defines what is mental as processes such as feeling, thinking and willing, and it is obliged to maintain that there is unconscious thinking and unapprehended willing. In saying this it has from the start frivolously forfeited the sympathy of every friend of sober scientific thought, and laid itself open to the suspicion of being a fantastic esoteric doctrine eager to make mysteries and fish in troubled waters. But you, Ladies and Gentlemen, naturally cannot understand as yet what right I have to describe as a prejudice a statement of so abstract a nature as ‘what is mental is conscious’. Nor can you guess what development can have led to a denial of the unconscious - should such a thing exist - and what advantage there may have been in that denial. The question whether we are to make the psychical coincide with the conscious or make it extend further sounds like an empty dispute about words; yet I can assure you that the hypothesis of there being unconscious mental processes paves the way to a decisive new orientation in the world and in science.

You cannot have any notion, either, of what an intimate connection there is between this first piece of audacity on the part of psycho-analysis and the second one, which I must now tell you of. This second thesis, which psycho-analysis puts forward as one of its findings, is an assertion that instinctual impulses which can only be described as sexual, both in the narrower and wider sense of the word, play an extremely large and never hitherto appreciated part in the causation of nervous and mental diseases. It asserts further that these same sexual impulses also make contributions that must not be underestimated to the highest cultural, artistic and social creations of the human spirit.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3135

In my experience antipathy to this outcome of psycho-analytic research is the most important source of resistance which it has met with. Would you like to hear how we explain that fact? We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts;(and we believe that civilization is to a large extent being constantly created anew, since each individual who makes a fresh entry into human society repeats this sacrifice of instinctual satisfaction for the benefit of the whole community. Among the instinctual forces which are put to this use the sexual impulses play an important part; in this process they are sublimated - that is to say, they are diverted from their sexual aims and directed to others that are socially higher and no longer sexual. But this arrangement is unstable; the sexual instincts are imperfectly tamed, and, in the case of every individual who is supposed to join in the work of civilization, there is a risk that his sexual instincts may refuse to be put to that use. Society believes that no greater threat to its civilization could arise than if the sexual instincts were to be liberated and returned to their original aims. For this reason society does not wish to be reminded of this precarious portion of its foundations. It has no interest in the recognition of the strength of the sexual instincts or in the demonstration of the importance of sexual life to the individual. On the contrary, with an educational aim in view, it has set about diverting attention from that whole field of ideas. That is why it will not tolerate this outcome of psycho-analytic research and far prefers to stamp it as something aesthetically repulsive and morally reprehensible, or as something dangerous. But objections of this sort are ineffective against what claims to be an objective outcome of a piece of scientific work; if the contradiction is to come into the open it must be restated in intellectual terms. Now it is inherent in human nature to have an inclination to consider a thing untrue if one does not like it, and after that it is easy to find arguments against it. Thus society makes what is disagreeable into what is untrue. It disputes the truths of psycho-analysis with logical and factual arguments; but these arise from emotional sources and it maintains these objections as prejudices, against every attempt to counter them.

We, however, Ladies and Gentlemen, can claim that in asserting this controversial thesis we have had no tendentious aim in view. We have merely wished to give expression to a matter of fact which we believe we have established by our painstaking labours. We claim, too, the right to reject without qualification any interference by practical considerations in scientific work, even before we have enquired whether the fear which seeks to impose these considerations on us is justified or not.

Such, then, are a few of the difficulties that stand in the way of your interest in psycho-analysis. They are perhaps more than enough for a start. But if you are able to overcome the impression they make on you, we will proceed.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3136

LECTURE II

PARAPRAXES

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - We will not start with postulates but with an investigation. Let us choose as its subject certain phenomena which are very common and very familiar but which have been very little examined, and which, since they can be observed in any healthy person, have nothing to do with illnesses. They are what are known as ‘parapraxes’, to which everyone is liable. It may happen, for instance, that a person who intends to say something may use another word instead (a slip of the tongue [Versprechen]), or he may do the same thing in writing, and may or may not notice what he has done. Or a person may read something, whether in print or manuscript, different from what is actually before his eyes (a misreading [Verlesen]), or he may hear wrongly something that has been said to him (a mishearing [Verhören]) - on the assumption, of course, that there is no organic disturbance of his powers of hearing. Another group of these phenomena has as its basis forgetting [Vergessen] - not, however, a permanent forgetting but only a temporary one. Thus a person may be unable to get hold of a name which he nevertheless knows and which he recognizes at once, or he may forget to carry out an intention, though he remembers it later and has thus only forgotten it at that particular moment. In a third group the temporary character is absent - for instance in the case of mislaying [Verlegen], when a person has put something somewhere and cannot find it again or in the precisely analogous case of losing [Verlieren]. Here we have a forgetting which we treat differently from other kinds of forgetting, one at which we are surprised or annoyed instead of finding it understandable. In addition to all this there are particular sorts of errors [Irrtümer], in which the temporary character is present once more; for in their instance we believe for a time that something is the case which both before and afterwards we know is not so. And there are a number of other similar phenomena known by various names.

All these are occurrences whose internal affinity with one another is expressed in the fact that [in German] they begin with the syllable ‘ver’. They are almost all of an unimportant kind, most of them are very transitory, and they are without much significance in human life. Only rarely does one of them, such as losing an object, attain some degree of practical importance. For that reason, too, they attract little attention, give rise to no more than feeble emotions, and so on.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3137

It is to these phenomena, then, that I now propose to draw your attention. But you will protest with some annoyance: ‘There are so many vast problems in the wide universe, as well as within the narrower confines of our minds, so many marvels in the field of mental disorders, which require and deserve to have light thrown upon them, that it does really seem gratuitous to waste labour and interest on such trivialities. If you could make us understand why a person with sound eyes and ears can see and hear in broad daylight things that are not there, why another person suddenly thinks he is being persecuted by the people of whom he has hitherto been most fond, or puts forward the cleverest arguments in support of delusional beliefs which any child could see were nonsensical, then we should have some opinion of psycho-analysis. But if it can do no more than ask us to consider why a speaker at a banquet uses one word instead of another or why a housewife has mislaid her keys, and similar futilities, then we shall know how to put our time and interest to better uses.’

I should reply: Patience, Ladies and Gentlemen! I think your criticism has gone astray. It is true that psycho-analysis cannot boast that it has never concerned itself with trivialities. On the contrary, the material for its observations is usually provided by the inconsiderable events which have been put aside by the other sciences as being too unimportant - the dregs, one might say, of the world of phenomena. But are you not making a confusion in your criticism between the vastness of the problems and the conspicuousness of what points to them? Are there not very important things which can only reveal themselves, under certain conditions and at certain times, by quite feeble indications? I should find no difficulty in giving you several examples of such situations. If you are a young man, for instance, will it not be from small pointers that you will conclude that you have won a girl’s favour? Would you wait for an express declaration of love or a passionate embrace? Or would not a glance, scarcely noticed by other people, be enough? a slight movement, the lengthening by a second of the pressure of a hand? And if you were a detective engaged in tracing a murder, would you expect to find that the murderer had left his photograph behind at the place of the crime, with his address attached? or would you not necessarily have to be satisfied with comparatively slight and obscure traces of the person you were in search of? So do not let us under-estimate small indications; by their help we may succeed in getting on the track of something bigger. Furthermore, I think like you that the great problems of the universe and of science have the first claim on our interest. But it is as a rule of very little use to form an express intention of devoting oneself to research into this or that great problem. One is then often at a loss to know the first step to take. It is more promising in scientific work to attack whatever is immediately before one and offers an opportunity for research. If one does so really thoroughly and without prejudice or preconception, and if one has luck, then, since everything is related to everything, including small things to great, one may gain access even from such unpretentious work to a study of the great problems. That is what I should say in order to retain your interest, when we deal with such apparent trivialities as the parapraxes of healthy people.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3138

Let us now call in someone who knows nothing of psycho-analysis, and ask him how he explains such occurrences. His first reply will certainly be: ‘Oh! that’s not worth explaining: they’re just small chance events.’ What does the fellow mean by this? Is he maintaining that there are occurrences, however small, which drop out of the universal concatenation of events - occurrences which might just as well not happen as happen? If anyone makes a breach of this kind in the determinism of natural events at a single point, it means that he has thrown overboard the whole Weltanschauung of science. Even the Weltanschauung of religion, we may remind him, behaves much more consistently, since it gives an explicit assurance that no sparrow falls from the roof without God’s special will. I think our friend will hesitate to draw the logical conclusion from his first reply; he will change his mind and say that after all when he comes to study these things he can find explanations of them. What is in question are small failures of functioning, imperfections in mental activity, whose determinants can be assigned. A man who can usually speak correctly may make a slip of the tongue (1) if he is slightly indisposed and tired, (2) if he is excited and (3) if he is too much occupied with other things. It is easy to confirm these statements. Slips of the tongue do really occur with particular frequency when one is tired, has a headache or is threatened with migraine. In the same circumstances proper names are easily forgotten. Some people are accustomed to recognize the approach of an attack of migraine when proper names escape them in this way. When we are excited, too, we often make mistakes over words - and over things as well, and a ‘bungled action’ follows. Intentions are forgotten and a quantity of other undesigned actions become noticeable if we are absent-minded - that is, properly speaking, if we are concentrated on something else. A familiar example of this absent-mindedness is the Professor in Fliegende Blätter who leaves his umbrella behind and takes the wrong hat because he is thinking about the problems he is going to deal with in his next book. All of us can recall from our own experience instances of how we can forget intentions we have formed and promises we have made because in the meantime we have had some absorbing experience.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3139

This sounds quite reasonable and seems safe from contradiction, though it may not be very interesting, perhaps, and not what we expected. Let us look at these explanations of parapraxes more closely. The alleged preconditions for the occurrence of these phenomena are not all of the same kind. Being ill and disturbances of the circulation provide a physiological reason for the impairment of normal functioning; excitement, fatigue and distraction are factors of another sort, which might be described as psycho-physiological. These last admit of easy translation into theory. Both fatigue and distraction, and perhaps also general excitement, bring about a division of attention which may result in insufficient attention being directed to the function in question. If so, the function can be disturbed with especial ease, or carried out inaccurately. Slight illness or changes in the blood-supply to the central nervous organ can have the same effect, by influencing the determining factor, the division of attention, in a similar manner. In all these cases, therefore, it would be a question of the effects of a disturbance of attention, whether from organic or psychical causes.

This does not appear to promise much for our psycho-analytic interest. We might feel tempted to drop the subject. If, however, we examine the observations more closely, what we find does not tally entirely with this attention theory of parapraxes, or at least does not follow from it naturally. We discover that parapraxes of this kind and forgetting of this kind occur in people who are not fatigued or absent-minded or excited, but who are in all respects in their normal state - unless we choose to ascribe ex post facto to the people concerned, purely on account of their parapraxis, an excitement which, however, they themselves do not admit to. Nor can it be simply the case that a function is ensured by an increase in the attention directed upon it and endangered if that attention is reduced. There are a large number of procedures that one carries out purely automatically, with very little attention, but nevertheless performs with complete security. A walker, who scarcely knows where he is going, keeps to the right path for all that, and stops at his destination without having gone astray [vergangen]. Or at all events this is so as a rule. An expert pianist strikes the right keys without thinking. He may, of course, make an occasional mistake; but if automatic playing increased the danger of bungling, that danger would be at its greatest for a virtuoso, whose playing, as a result of prolonged practice, has become entirely automatic. We know, on the contrary, that many procedures are carried out with quite particular certainty if they are not the object of a specially high degree of attention, and that the mishap of a parapraxis is liable to occur precisely if special importance is attached to correct functioning and there has therefore certainly been no distraction of the necessary attention. It could be argued that this is the result of ‘excitement’, but it is difficult to see why the excitement should not on the contrary increase the attention directed to what is so earnestly intended. If by a slip of the tongue someone says the opposite of what he intends in an important speech or oral communication, it can scarcely be explained by the psycho-physiological or attention theory.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3140

There are, moreover, a number of small subsidiary phenomena in the case of parapraxes, which we do not understand and on which the explanations so far given shed no light. For instance, if we have temporarily forgotten a name, we are annoyed about it, do all we can to remember it and cannot leave the business alone. Why in such cases do we so extremely seldom succeed in directing our attention, as we are after all anxious to do, to the word which (as we say) is ‘on the tip of our tongue’ and which we recognize at once when we are told it? Or again: there are cases in which the parapraxes multiply, form chains, and replace one another. On a first occasion one has missed an appointment. On the next occasion, when one has firmly decided not to forget this time, it turns out that one has made a note of the wrong hour. Or one tries to arrive at a forgotten word by roundabout ways and thereupon a second name escapes one which might have helped one to find the first. If one searches for this second name, a third disappears, and so on. As is well known, the same thing can happen with misprints, which are to be regarded as the parapraxes of the compositor. An obstinate misprint of this kind, so it is said, once slipped into a social-democrat newspaper. Its report of some ceremonial included the words: ‘Among those present was to be noticed His Highness the Kornprinz.’ Next day an attempt was made at a correction. The paper apologized and said: ‘We should of course have said "the Knorprinz".’¹ People speak in such cases of a ‘demon of misprints’ or a ‘type-setting fiend’ - terms which at least go beyond any psycho-physiological theory of misprints.

¹ [What was intended was the ‘Kronprinz (Crown Prince)'. ‘Korn’ means ‘corn’ and ‘Knorr’ ‘protuberance’.]

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3141

Perhaps you are familiar, too, with the fact that it is possible to provoke slips of the tongue, to produce them, as it were, by suggestion. An anecdote illustrates this. A stage neophyte had been cast for the important part in Die Jungfrau von Orleans of the messenger who announces to the King that ‘der Connétable schickt sein Schwert zurück [the Constable sends back his sword]’. A leading actor amused himself during the rehearsal by repeatedly inducing the nervous young man to say, instead of the words of the text: ‘der Komfortabel schickt sein Pferd zurück [the cab-driver sends back his horse].’ He achieved his aim: the wretched beginner actually made his debut at the performance with the corrupt version, in spite of having been warned against it, or perhaps because he had been warned.

No light is thrown on these small features of parapraxes by the theory of withdrawal of attention. The theory need not on that account be wrong, however; it may merely lack something, some addition, before it is entirely satisfying. But some of the parapraxes, too, can themselves be looked at from another point of view.

Let us take slips of the tongue as the most suitable sort of parapraxis for our purpose - though we might equally well have chosen slips of the pen or misreading. We must bear in mind that so far we have only asked when - under what conditions - people make slips of the tongue, and it is only to that question that we have had an answer. But we might direct our interest elsewhere and enquire why it is that the slip occurred in this particular way and no other; and we might take into account what it is that emerges in the slip itself. You will observe that, so long as this question is unanswered and no light thrown on the product of the slip, the phenomenon remains a chance event from the psychological point of view, even though it may have been given a physiological explanation. If I make a slip of the tongue, I might obviously do so in an infinite number of ways, the right word might be replaced by any of a thousand others, it might be distorted in countless different directions. Is there something, then, that compels me in the particular case to make the slip in one special way, or does it remain a matter of chance, of arbitrary choice, and is the question perhaps one to which no sensible answer at all can be given?

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3142

Two writers, Meringer and Mayer (a philologist and a psychiatrist), in fact made an attempt in 1895 to attack the problem of parapraxes from this angle. They collected examples and began by treating them in a purely descriptive way. This, of course, provides no explanation as yet, though it might pave the way to one. They distinguish the various kinds of distortions imposed by the slip on the intended speech as ‘transpositions’, pre-sonances’, ‘post-sonances’, ‘fusions (contaminations)' and ‘replacements (substitutions)'. I will give you some examples of these main groups proposed by the authors. An instance of transposition would be to say ‘the Milo of Venus’ instead of ‘the Venus of Milo’ (a transposition of the order of the words); an instance of a pre-sonance would be: ‘es war mir auf der Schwest . . . auf der Brust so schwer’;¹ and a post-sonance would be exemplified by the well-known toast that went wrong: ‘Ich fordere Sie auf, auf das Wohl unseres Chefs aufzustossen’ [instead of anzustossen].² These three forms of slip of the tongue are not exactly common. You will come on much more numerous examples in which the slip results from contraction or fusion. Thus, for instance, a gentleman addressed a lady in the street in the following words: ‘If you will permit me, madam, I should like to begleit-digen you.’ The composite word,³ in addition to the ‘begleiten [to accompany]’, evidently has concealed in it ‘beleidigen [to insult]’. (Incidentally, the young man was not likely to have much success with the lady.) As an example of a substitution Meringer and Mayer give the case of someone saying: ‘Ich gebe die Präparate in den Briefkasten’ instead of ‘Brütkasten’.4

¹ [The phrase intended was: ‘it lay on my breast so heavily.’ The meaningless ‘Schwest’ was a distortion of ‘Brust (breast)' owing to an anticipation of the ‘schw’ of ‘schwer (heavily)'.]

² [‘I call on you to hiccough’ (instead of ‘drink to’) ‘the health of our Chief.’]

³ [A meaningless one.]

4 [‘I put the preparation into the letter-box’ instead of ‘incubator’, literally, ‘hatching-box’.]

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3143

The attempted explanation which these authors base on their collection of instances is quite peculiarly inadequate. They believe that the sounds and syllables of a word have a particular ‘valency’ and that the innervation of an element of high valency may have a disturbing influence on one that is less valent. Here they are clearly basing themselves on the far from common cases of pre-sonance and post-sonance; these preferences of some sounds over others (if they in fact exist) can have no bearing at all on other effects of slips of the tongue. After all, the commonest slips of the tongue are when, instead of saying one word, we say another very much like it; and this similarity is for many people a sufficient explanation of such slips. For instance, a Professor declared in his inaugural lecture: ‘I am not ‘geneigt [inclined]’ (instead of ‘geeignet [qualified]’) to appreciate the services of my highly esteemed predecessor.’ Or another Professor remarked: ‘In the case of the female genitals, in spite of many Versuchungen [temptations] - I beg your pardon, Versuche [experiments]. . . .’

The most usual, and at the same time the most striking kind of slips of the tongue, however, are those in which one says the precise opposite of what one intended to say. Here, of course, we are very remote from relations between sounds and the effects of similarity; and instead we can appeal to the fact that contraries have a strong conceptual kinship with each other and stand in a particularly close psychological association with each other. There are historical examples of such occurrences. A President of the Lower House of our Parliament once opened the sitting with the words: ‘Gentlemen, I take notice that a full quorum of members is present and herewith declare the sitting closed.’)

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3144

Any other familiar association can act in the same insidious fashion as a contrary one, and can emerge in quite unsuitable circumstances. Thus, on the occasion of a celebration in honour of the marriage of a child of Hermann von Helmholtz to a child of Werner von Siemens, the well-known inventor and industrialist, it is said that the duty of proposing the young couple’s health fell to the famous physiologist Du Bois-Reymond. No doubt he made a brilliant speech, but he ended with the words: ‘So, long life to the new firm of Siemens and Halske!’ That was, of course, the name of the old firm. The juxtaposition of the two names must have been as familiar to a Berliner as Fortnum and Mason would be to a Londoner.¹

We must therefore include among the causes of parapraxes not only relations between sounds and verbal similarity, but the influence of word-associations as well. But that is not all. In a number of cases it seems impossible to explain a slip of the tongue unless we take into account something that had been said, or even merely thought, in an earlier sentence. Once again, then, we have here a case of perseveration, like those insisted upon by Meringer, but of more distant origin. - I must confess that I feel on the whole as though after all this we were further than ever from understanding slips of the tongue.

¹ [In the original: ‘as Riedel and Beutel would be to a Viennese’. This last was a well-known outfitter’s shop in Vienna. Siemens and Halske were, of course, the great electrical engineers.]

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3145

Nevertheless I hope I am not mistaken in saying that during this last enquiry we have all of us formed a fresh impression of these instances of slips of the tongue, and that it may be worth while to consider that impression further. We examined the conditions under which in general slips of the tongue occur, and afterwards the influences which determine the kind of distortion which the slip produces. But we have so far paid no attention whatever to the product of the slip considered by itself, without reference to its origin. If we decide to do so, we are bound in the end to find the courage to say that in a few examples what results from the slip of the tongue has a sense of its own. What do we mean by ‘has a sense’? That the product of the slip of the tongue may perhaps itself have a right to be regarded as a completely valid psychical act, pursuing an aim of its own, as a statement with a content and significance. So far we have always spoken of ‘parapraxes’, but it seems now as though sometimes the faulty act was itself quite a normal act, which merely took the place of the other act which was the one expected or intended.

The fact of the parapraxis having a sense of its own seems in certain cases evident and unmistakable. When the President of the Lower House with his first words closed the sitting instead of opening it, we feel inclined, in view of our knowledge of the circumstances in which the slip of the tongue occurred, to recognize that the parapraxis had a sense. The President expected nothing good of the sitting and would have been glad if he could have brought it to an immediate end. We have no difficulty in pointing to the sense of this slip of the tongue, or, in other words, in interpreting it. Or, let us suppose that one lady says to another in tones of apparent admiration: ‘That smart new hat - I suppose you aufgepatzt [a non-existent word instead of aufgeputzt (trimmed)] it yourself?’ Then no amount of scientific propriety will succeed in preventing our seeing behind this slip of the tongue the words: ‘This hat is a Patzerei [botched-up affair].’ Or, once more, we are told that a lady who was well-known for her energy remarked on one occasion: ‘My husband asked his doctor what diet he ought to follow; but the doctor told him he had no need to diet: he could eat and drink what I want.’ Here again the slip of the tongue has an unmistakable other side to it: it was giving expression to a consistently planned programme.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3146

If it turned out, Ladies and Gentlemen, that not only a few instances of slips of the tongue and of parapraxes in general have a sense, but a considerable number of them, the sense of parapraxes, of which we have so far heard nothing, would inevitably become their most interesting feature and would push every other consideration into the background. We should then be able to leave all physiological or psycho-physiological factors on one side and devote ourselves to purely psychological investigations into the sense - that is, the meaning or purpose - of parapraxes. We shall therefore make it our business to test this expectation on a considerable number of observations.

But before carrying out this intention I should like to invite you to follow me along another track. It has repeatedly happened that a creative writer has made use of a slip of the tongue or some other parapraxis as an instrument for producing an imaginative effect. This fact alone must prove to us that he regards the parapraxis - the slip of the tongue, for instance - as having a sense, since he has produced it deliberately. For what has happened is not that the author has made an accidental slip of the pen and has then allowed it to be used by one of his characters as a slip of the tongue; he intends to bring something to our notice by means of the slip of the tongue and we can enquire what that something is - whether perhaps he wants to suggest that the character in question is absent-minded and fatigued or is going to have an attack of migraine. If the author uses the slip as though it had a sense, we have no wish, of course, to exaggerate the importance of this. After all, a slip might in fact be without a sense, a chance psychical event, or it might have a sense in only quite rare cases, but the author would still retain his right to intellectualize it by furnishing it with a sense so as to employ it for his own purposes. Nor would it be surprising if we had more to learn about slips of the tongue from creative writers than from philologists and psychiatrists.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3147

An example of this kind is to be found in Wallenstein (Piccolomini, Act I, Scene 5). In the preceding scene Max Piccolomini has ardently espoused the Duke’s cause, and has been passionately describing the blessings of peace, of which he has become aware in the course of a journey while escorting Wallenstein’s daughter to the camp. As he leaves the stage, his father and Questenberg, the emissary from the Court, are plunged in consternation. Scene 5 continues:

QUESTENBERG       Alas, alas! and stands it so?

What, friend! and do we let him go away

In this delusion - let him go away?

Not call him back immediately, not open

His eyes upon the spot?

OCTAVIO (recovering himself out of a deep study) He now has open’d mine,

And I see more than pleases me.

QUEST.                                                                    What is it?

OCT.                        Curse on this journey!

QUEST.                                                    But why so? What is it?

OCT.                        Come, come along friend! I must follow up

The ominous track immediately. Mine eyes

Are open’d now, and I must use them. Come!

(Draws Q. on with him.)

QUEST.                    What now? Where go you then?

OCT.                                                                        To her  . . .

QUEST.                                                                                    To -

OCT. (correcting himself) To the Duke. Come let us go.

Octavio had meant to say ‘to him’, to the Duke. But he makes a slip of the tongue, and, by saying ‘to her’ he betrays to us at least that he has clearly recognized the influence that has made the young warrior into an enthusiast for peace.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3148

A still more impressive example has been discovered by Otto Rank in Shakespeare. It is from The Merchant of Venice, in the famous scene in which the fortunate lover chooses between the three caskets, and perhaps I cannot do better than read you Rank’s short account of it:

‘A slip of the tongue occurs in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (Act III, Scene 2), which is from the dramatic point of view extremely subtly motivated and which is put to brilliant technical use. Like the slip in Wallenstein to which Freud has drawn attention, it shows that dramatists have a clear understanding of the mechanism and meaning of this kind of parapraxis and assume that the same is true of their audience. Portia, who by her father’s will has been bound to the choice of a husband by lot, has so far escaped all her unwelcome suitors by a fortunate chance. Having at last found in Bassanio the suitor who is to her liking, she has cause to fear that he too will choose the wrong casket. She would very much like to tell him that even so he could rest assured of her love; but she is prevented by her vow. In this internal conflict the poet makes her say to the suitor she favours:

I pray you tarry; pause a day or two

Before you hazard: for, in choosing wrong,

I lose your company; therefore forbear a while:

There’s something tells me (but it is not love)

I would not lose you . . . .

. . . . I could teach you

How to choose right, but then I am forsworn;

So will I never be; so may you miss me;

But if you do you’ll make me wish a sin,

That I have been forsworn. Beshrew your eyes,

They have o’erlooked me, and divided me;

One half of me is yours, the other half is yours, -

Mine own, I would say; but if mine, then yours,

And so all yours.

The thing of which she wanted to give him only a very subtle hint, because she should have concealed it from him altogether, namely, that even before he made his choice she was wholly his and loved him - it is precisely this that the poet, with a wonderful psychological sensitivity, causes to break through openly in her slip of the tongue; and by this artistic device he succeeds in relieving both the lover’s unbearable uncertainty and the suspense of the sympathetic audience over the outcome of his choice.’

Observe, too, how skilfully Portia in the end reconciles the two statements contained in her slip of the tongue, how she solves the contradiction between them and yet finally shows that it was the slip that was in the right:

‘But if mine, then yours,

And so all yours.’

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3149

It has occasionally happened that a thinker whose field lies outside medicine has, by something he says, revealed the sense of a parapraxis and anticipated our efforts at explaining them. You all know of the witty satirist Lichtenberg (1742-99), of whom Goethe said: ‘Where he makes a jest a problem lies concealed.’ Sometimes the jest brings the solution of the problem to light as well. In Lichtenberg’s Witzige und Satirische Einfälle [Witty and Satirical Thoughts] we find this: ‘He had read so much Homer that he always read "Agamemnon" instead of "angenommen [supposed]".’ Here we have the whole theory of misreading.

We must see next time whether we can go along with these writers in their view of parapraxes.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3150

LECTURE III

PARAPRAXES (continued)

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - We arrived last time at the idea of considering parapraxes not in relation to the intended function which they disturbed but on their own account; and we formed an impression that in particular cases they seemed to be betraying a sense of their own. We then reflected that if confirmation could be obtained on a wider scale that parapraxes have a sense, their sense would soon become more interesting than the investigation of the circumstances in which they come about.

Let us once more reach an agreement upon what is to be understood by the ‘sense’ of a psychical process. We mean nothing other by it than the intention it serves and its position in a psychical continuity. In most of our researches we can replace ‘sense’ by ‘intention’ or ‘purpose’. Was it, then, merely a deceptive illusion or a poetic exaltation of parapraxes when we thought we recognized an intention in them?

We will continue to take slips of the tongue as our examples. If we now look through a considerable number of observations of that kind, we shall find whole categories of cases in which the intention, the sense, of the slip is plainly visible. Above all there are those in which what was intended is replaced by its contrary. The President of the Lower House said in his opening speech: ‘I declare the sitting closed.’ That is quite unambiguous. The sense and intention of his slip was that he wanted to close the sitting. ‘Er sagt es ja selbst’¹ we are tempted to quote: we need only take him at his word. Do not interrupt me at this point by objecting that that is impossible, that we know that he did not want to close the sitting but to open it, and that he himself, whom we have just recognized as the supreme court of appeal, could confirm the fact that he wanted to open it. You are forgetting that we have come to an agreement that we will begin by regarding parapraxes on their own account; their relation to the intention which they have disturbed is not to be discussed till later. Otherwise you will be guilty of a logical error by simply evading the problem that is under discussion - by what is called in English ‘begging the question’.

¹ [‘He says so himself.’]

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3151

In other cases, where the slip does not express the precise contrary, an opposite sense can nevertheless be brought out by it. ‘I am not geneigt [inclined] to appreciate the services of my predecessor’. Geneigt is not the contrary of geeignet [qualified], but it expresses openly something which contrasts sharply with the situation in which the speech was to be made,

In yet other cases the slip of the tongue merely adds a second sense to the one intended. The sentence then sounds like a contraction, abbreviation or condensation of several sentences. Thus, when the energetic lady said: ‘He can eat and drink what I want’, it was just as though she had said: ‘He can eat and drink what he wants; but what has he to do with wanting? I will want instead of him.’ A slip of the tongue often gives the impression of being an abbreviation of this sort. For instance, a Professor of Anatomy at the end of a lecture on the nasal cavities asked whether his audience had understood what he said and, after general assent, went on: ‘I can hardly believe that, since even in a city with millions of inhabitants, those who understand the nasal cavities can be counted on one finger. . . . I beg your pardon, on the fingers of one hand.’ The abbreviated phrase has a sense too - namely, that there is only one person who understands them.

In contrast to these groups of cases, in which the parapraxis itself brings its sense to light, there are others in which the parapraxis produces nothing that has any sense of its own, and which therefore sharply contradict our expectations. If someone twists a proper name about by a slip of the tongue or puts an abnormal series of sounds together, these very common events alone seem to give a negative reply to our question whether all parapraxes have some sort of sense. Closer examination of such instances, however, shows that these distortions are easily understood and that there is by no means so great a distinction between these more obscure cases and the earlier straightforward ones.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3152

A man who was asked about the health of his horse replied: ‘Well, it draut [a meaningless word] . . . it dauert [will last] another month perhaps.’ When he was asked what he had really meant to say, he explained that he had thought it was a ‘traurige [sad]’ story. The combination of ‘dauert’ and ‘traurig’ had produced ‘draut’.¹

Another man, speaking of some occurrences he disapproved of, went on: ‘But then facts came to Vorschwein [a non-existent word, instead of Vorschein (light)]. . . .’ In reply to enquiries he confirmed the fact that he had thought these occurrences ‘Schweinereien [‘disgusting’, literally ‘piggish’]. ‘Vorschein’ and ‘Schweinereien’ combined to produce the strange word ‘Vorschwein.²

You will recall the case of the young man who asked the unknown lady if he might ‘begleitigden’ her. We ventured to divide up this verbal form into ‘begleiten [accompany]’ and ‘beleidigen [insult]’, and we felt certain enough of this interpretation not to need any confirmation of it. You will see from these examples that even these obscurer cases of slips of the tongue can be explained by a convergence, a mutual ‘interference’, between two different intended speeches; the differences between these cases of slips arise merely from the fact that on some occasions one intention takes the place of the other completely (becomes a substitute for it), as in slips of the tongue that express the contrary, whereas on other occasions the one intention has to be satisfied with distorting or modifying the other, so that composite structures are produced, which make sense, to a greater or lesser degree, on their own account.

¹ Meringer and Mayer.

² Meringer and Mayer.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3153

We seem now to have grasped the secret of a large number of slips of the tongue. If we bear this discovery in mind, we shall be able to understand other groups as well which have puzzled us hitherto. In cases of distortion of names, for instance, we cannot suppose that it is always a matter of competition between two similar but different names. It is not difficult, however to guess the second intention. The distortion of a name occurs often enough apart from slips of the tongue; it seeks to give the name an offensive sound or to make it sound like something inferior, and it is a familiar practice (or malpractice) designed as an insult, which civilized people soon learn to abandon, but which they are reluctant to abandon. It is still often permitted as a ‘joke’, though a pretty poor one. As a blatant and ugly example of this way of distorting names, I may mention that in these days the name of the President of the French Republic, Poincaré, has been changed into ‘Schweinskarré.¹ It is therefore plausible to suppose that the same insulting intention is present in these slips of the tongue and is trying to find expression in the distortion of a name. Similar explanations suggest themselves along the same lines for certain instances of slips of the tongue with comic or absurd results. ‘I call on you to hiccough [aufzustossen] to the health of our Chief.’ Here a ceremonial atmosphere is unexpectedly disturbed by the intrusion of a word which calls up an unsavoury idea, and, on the model of certain insulting and offensive phrases, we can scarcely avoid a suspicion that a purpose was trying to find expression which was in violent contradiction to the ostensibly respectful words. What the slip seems to have been saying was something like: ‘Don’t you believe it! I don’t mean this seriously! I don’t care a rap for the fellow!’ Just the same thing applies to slips of the tongue which turn innocent words into indecent or obscene ones: thus, ‘Apopos’ for ‘à propos’ or ‘Eischeissweibschen’ for ‘Eiweissscheibchen’.²

Many people, as we know, derive some pleasure from a habit like this of deliberately distorting innocent words into obscene ones; such distortions are regarded as funny, and when we hear one we must in fact first enquire from the speaker whether he muttered it intentionally as a joke or whether it happened as a slip of the tongue.

¹ [The Viennese term for a pork chop.]

² Both from Meringer and Mayer. [In the first of these untranslatable examples ‘Apopos’ is a non-existent word; but ‘Popo’ is a nursery word for ‘bottom’. In the second example the nonsense word means literally ‘egg-shit-female’, while the intended word means ‘small slices of white of egg.’]

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3154

Well, it looks now as though we have solved the problem of parapraxes, and with very little trouble! They are not chance events but serious mental acts; they have a sense; they arise from the concurrent action - or perhaps rather, the mutually opposing action - of two different intentions. But now I see too that you are preparing to overwhelm me with a mass of questions and doubts which will have to be answered and dealt with before we can enjoy this first outcome of our work. I certainly have no desire to force hasty decisions upon you. Let us take them all in due order, one after the other, and give them cool consideration.

What is it you want to ask me? Do I think that this explanation applies to all parapraxes or only to a certain number? Can this same point of view be extended to the many other kinds of parapraxis, to misreading, slips of the pen, forgetting, bungled actions, mislaying, and so on? In view of the psychical nature of parapraxes, what significance remains for the factors of fatigue, excitement, absent-mindedness and interference with the attention? Further, it is clear that of the two competing purposes in a parapraxis one is always manifest, but the other not always. What do we do, then, in order to discover the latter? And, if we think we have discovered it, how do we prove that it is not merely a probable one but the only correct one? Is there anything else you want to ask? If not, I will go on myself. You will recall that we do not set much store by parapraxes themselves, and that all we want is to learn from studying them something that may be turned to account for psycho-analysis. I therefore put this question to you. What are these intentions or purposes which are able to disturb others in this way? And what are the relations between the disturbing purposes and the disturbed ones? Thus, no sooner is the problem solved than our work begins afresh.

First, then, is this the explanation of all cases of slips of the tongue? I am very much inclined to think so, and my reason is that every time one investigates an instance of a slip of the tongue an explanation of this kind is forthcoming. But it is also true that there is no way of proving that a slip of the tongue cannot occur without this mechanism. It may be so; but theoretically it is a matter of indifference to us, since the conclusions we want to draw for our introduction to psycho-analysis remain, even though - which is certainly not the case - our view holds good of only a minority of cases of slips of the tongue. The next question - whether we may extend our view to other sorts of parapraxis - I will answer in advance with a ‘yes’. You will be able to convince yourselves of this when we come to examining instances of slips of the pen, bungled actions, and so on. But for technical reasons I suggest that we should postpone this task till we have treated slips of the tongue themselves still more thoroughly.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3155

A more detailed reply is called for by the question of what significance remains for the factors put forward by the authorities - disturbances of the circulation, fatigue, excitement, absent-mindedness and the theory of disturbed attention - if we accept the psychical mechanism of slips of the tongue which we have described. Observe that we are not denying these factors. It is in general not such a common thing for psycho-analysis to deny something asserted by other people; as a rule it merely adds something new - though no doubt it occasionally happens that this thing that has hitherto been overlooked and is now brought up as a fresh addition is in fact the essence of the matter. The influence on the production of slips of the tongue by physiological dispositions brought about by slight illness, disturbances of the circulation or states of exhaustion, must be recognized at once; daily and personal experience will convince you of it. But how little they explain! Above all, they are not necessary preconditions of parapraxes. Slips of the tongue are just as possible in perfect health and in a normal state. These somatic factors only serve therefore, to facilitate and favour the peculiar mental mechanism of slips of the tongue. I once used an analogy to describe this relation, and I will repeat it here since I can think of none better to take its place. Suppose that one dark night I went to a lonely spot and was there attacked by a rough who took away my watch and purse. Since I did not see the robber’s face clearly, I laid my complaint at the nearest police station with the words: ‘Loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables.’ The police officer might then say to me: ‘In what you say you seem to be unjustifiably adopting an extreme mechanistic view. It would be better to represent the facts in this way: "Under the shield of darkness and favoured by loneliness, an unknown thief robbed you of your valuables." In your case the essential task seems to me to be that we should find the thief. Perhaps we shall then be able to recover the booty.’

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3156

Such psycho-physiological factors as excitement, absent-mindedness and disturbances of attention will clearly help us very little towards an explanation. They are only empty phrases, screens behind which we must not let ourselves be prevented from having a look. The question is rather what it is that has been brought about here by the excitement, the particular distracting of attention. And again, we must recognize the importance of the influence of sounds, the similarity of words and the familiar associations aroused by words. These facilitate slips of the tongue by pointing to the paths they can take. But if I have a path open to me, does that fact automatically decide that I shall take it? I need a motive in addition before I resolve in favour of it and furthermore a force to propel me along the path. So these relations of sounds and words are also, like the somatic dispositions, only things that favour slips of the tongue and cannot provide the true explanation of them. Only consider: in an immense majority of cases my speech is not disturbed by the circumstance that the words I am using recall others with a similar sound, that they are intimately linked with their contraries or that familiar associations branch off from them. Perhaps we might still find a way out by following the philosopher Wundt, when he says that slips of the tongue arise if, as a result of physical exhaustion, the inclination to associate gains the upper hand over what the speaker otherwise intends to say. That would be most convincing if it were not contradicted by experience, which shows that in one set of cases the somatic factors favouring slips of the tongue are absent and in another set of cases the associative factors favouring them are equally absent.

I am particularly interested, however, in your next question: how does one discover the two mutually interfering purposes? You do not realize, probably, what a momentous question this is. One of the two, the purpose that is disturbed, is of course unmistakable: the person who makes the slip of the tongue knows it and admits to it. It is only the other, the disturbing purpose, that can give rise to doubt and hesitation. Now, we have already seen, and no doubt you have not forgotten, that in a number of cases this other purpose is equally evident. It is indicated by the outcome of the slip, if only we have the courage to grant that outcome a validity of its own. Take the President of the Lower House, whose slip of the tongue said the contrary of what he intended. It is clear that he wanted to open the sitting, but it is equally clear that he also wanted to close it. That is so obvious that it leaves us nothing to interpret. But in the other cases, in which the disturbing purpose only distorts the original one without itself achieving complete expression, how do we arrive at the disturbing purpose from the distortion?

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3157

In a first group of cases this is done quite simply and securely - in the same way, in fact, as with the disturbed purpose. We get the speaker to give us the information directly. After his slip of the tongue he at once produces the wording which he originally intended: ‘It draut . . . no, it dauert [will last] another month perhaps.’ Well, in just the same way we get him to tell us the disturbing purpose. ‘Why’, we ask him, ‘did you say "draut?’ He replies: ‘I wanted to say "It’s a traurige [sad] story".’ Similarly, in the other case, where the slip of the tongue was ‘Vorschwein’, the speaker confirms the fact that he had wanted at first to say ‘It’s a Schweinerei [disgusting]’, but had controlled himself and gone off into another remark. Here then the distorting purpose is as securely established as the distorted one. My choice of these examples has not been unintentional, for their origin and solution come neither from me nor from any of my followers. And yet in both these cases active measures of a kind were necessary in order to bring about the solution. The speaker had to be asked why he had made the slip and what he could say about it. Otherwise he might perhaps have passed over his slip without wanting to explain it. But when he was asked he gave the explanation with the first thing that occurred to him. And now please observe that this small active step and its successful outcome are already a psycho-analysis and are a model for every psycho-analytic investigation which we shall embark upon later.

Am I too mistrustful, however, if I suspect that at the very moment at which psycho-analysis makes its appearance before you resistance to it simultaneously raises its head? Do you not feel inclined to object that the information given by the person of whom the question was asked - the person who made the slip of the tongue - is not completely conclusive? He was naturally anxious, you think, to fulfil the request to explain the slip, so he said the first thing that came into his head which seemed capable of providing such an explanation. But that is no proof that the slip did in fact take place in that way. It may have been so, but it may just as well have happened otherwise. And something else might have occurred to him which would have fitted in as well or perhaps even better.

It is strange how little respect you have at bottom for a psychical fact! Imagine that someone had undertaken the chemical analysis of a certain substance and had arrived at a particular weight for one component of it - so and so many milligrams. Certain inferences could be drawn from this weight. Now do you suppose that it would ever occur to a chemist to criticize those inferences on the ground that the isolated substance might equally have had some other weight? Everyone will bow before the fact that this was the weight and none other and will confidently draw his further inferences from it. But when you are faced with the psychical fact that a particular thing occurred to the mind of the person questioned, you will not allow the fact’s validity: something else might have occurred to him! You nourish the illusion of there being such a thing as psychical freedom, and you will not give it up. I am sorry to say I disagree with you categorically over this.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3158

You will break off at that, but only to take up your resistance again at another point. You proceed: ‘It is the special technique of psycho-analysis, as we understand, to get people under analysis themselves to produce the solution of their problems. Now let us take another example - the one in which a speaker proposing the toast of honour on a ceremonial occasion called on his audience to hiccough [aufzustossen] to the health of the Chief. You say that the disturbing intention in this case was an insulting one: that was what was opposing the speaker’s expression of respect. But this is pure interpretation on your part, based upon observations apart from the slip of the tongue. If in this instance you were to question the person responsible for the slip, he would not confirm your idea that he intended an insult; on the contrary, he would energetically repudiate it. Why, in view of this clear denial, do you not abandon your unprovable interpretation?’

Yes. You have lighted on a powerful argument this time. I can imagine the unknown proposer of the toast. He is probably a subordinate to the Chief of the Department who is being honoured - perhaps he himself is already an Assistant Lecturer, a young man with excellent prospects in life. I try to force him to admit that he may nevertheless have had a feeling that there was something in him opposing his toast in honour of the Chief. But this lands me in a nice mess. He gets impatient and suddenly breaks out: ‘Just you stop trying to cross-question me or I shall turn nasty. You’re going to ruin my whole career with your suspicions. I simply said "aufstossen [hiccough to]" instead of "anstossen [drink to]" because I’d said "auf" twice before in the same sentence. That’s what Meringer calls a perseveration and there’s nothing more to be interpreted about it. D’you understand? Basta!’ - H’m! That was a surprising reaction, a truly energetic denial. I see there’s nothing more to be done with the young man. But I also reflect that he shows a strong personal interest in insisting on his parapraxis not having a sense. You may also feel that there was something wrong in his being quite so rude about a purely theoretical enquiry. But, you will think, when all is said and done he must know what he wanted to say and what he didn’t.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3159

But must he? Perhaps that may still be the question.

Now, however, you think you have me at your mercy. ‘So that’s your technique’, I hear you say. ‘When a person who has made a slip of the tongue says something about it that suits you, you pronounce him to be the final decisive authority on the subject. "He says so himself!". But when what he says doesn’t suit your book, then all at once you say he’s of no importance - there’s no need to believe him.

That is quite true. But I can put a similar case to you in which the same monstrous event occurs. When someone charged with an offence confesses his deed to the judge, the judge believes his confession; but if he denies it, the judge does not believe him. If it were otherwise, there would be no administration of justice, and in spite of occasional errors we must allow that the system works.

‘Are you a judge, then? And is a person who has made a slip of the tongue brought up before you on a charge? So making a slip of the tongue is an offence, is it?’¹

Perhaps we need not reject the comparison. But I would ask you to observe what profound differences of opinion we have reached after a little investigation of what seemed such innocent problems concerning the parapraxes - differences which at the moment we see no possible way of smoothing over. I propose a provisional compromise on the basis of the analogy with the judge and the defendant. I suggest that you shall grant me that there can be no doubt of a parapraxis having a sense if the subject himself admits it. I will admit in return that we cannot arrive at a direct proof of the suspected sense if the subject refuses us information, and equally, of course, if he is not at hand to give us the information. Then, as in the case of the administration of justice, we are obliged to turn to circumstantial evidence, which may make a decision more probable in some instances and less so in others. In the law courts it may be necessary for practical purposes to find a defendant guilty on circumstantial evidence. We are under no such necessity; but neither are we obliged to disregard the circumstantial evidence. It would be a mistake to suppose that a science consists entirely of strictly proved theses, and it would be unjust to require this. Only a disposition with a passion for authority will raise such a demand, someone with a craving to replace his religious catechism by another, though it is a scientific one. Science has only a few apodeictic propositions in its catechism: the rest are assertions promoted by it to some particular degree of probability. It is actually a sign of a scientific mode of thought to find satisfaction in these approximations to certainty and to be able to pursue constructive work further in spite of the absence of final confirmation.

¹ [The German words are on the same pattern: ‘Versprechen’ and ‘Vergehen’.]

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3160

But if the subject does not himself give us the explanation of the sense of a parapraxis, where are we to find the starting-points for our interpretation - the circumstantial evidence? In various directions. In the first place from analogies with phenomena apart from parapraxes: when, for instance, we assert that distorting a name when it occurs as a slip of the tongue has the same insulting sense as a deliberate twisting of a name. Further, from the psychical situation in which the parapraxis occurs, the character of the person who makes the parapraxis, and the impressions which he has received before the parapraxis and to which the parapraxis is perhaps a reaction. What happens as a rule is that the interpretation is carried out according to general principles: to begin with there is only a suspicion, a suggestion for an interpretation, and we then find a confirmation by examining the psychical situation. Sometimes we have to wait for subsequent events as well (which have, as it were, announced themselves by the parapraxis) before our suspicion is confirmed.

I cannot easily give you illustrations of this if I limit myself to the field of slips of the tongue, though even there some good instances are to be found. The young man who wanted to ‘begleitdigen’ a lady was certainly a timid character. The lady whose husband could eat and drink what she wanted is known to me as one of those energetic women who wear the breeches in their home. Or let us take the following example: At the General Meeting of the ‘Concordia’ a young member made a speech of violent opposition, in the course of which he addressed the committee as ‘Vorschussmitglieder [lending members]’, a word which seems to be made up of ‘Vorstand [directors]’ and ‘Ausschuss [committee]’. We shall suspect that some disturbing purpose was at work in him, acting against his violent opposition, based on something connected with a loan. And in fact we learnt from our informant that the speaker was constantly in financial difficulties and just at that time had applied for a loan. The disturbing intention could therefore be replaced by the thought: ‘Moderate your opposition; these are the same people who will have to sanction your loan.’

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3161

But I can give you a large selection of circumstantial evidence of this kind if I pass over to the wide field of the other parapraxes.

If anyone forgets a proper name which is familiar to him normally or if, in spite of all his efforts, he finds it difficult to keep it in mind, it is plausible to suppose that he has something against the person who bears the name so that he prefers not to think of him. Consider, for instance, what we learn in the following cases about the psychical situation in which the parapraxis occurred.

‘A Herr Y. fell in love with a lady, but he met with no success, and shortly afterwards she married a Herr X. Thereafter, Herr Y., in spite of having known Herr X. for a long time and even having business dealings with him, forgot his name over and over again, so that several times he had to enquire what it was from other people when he wanted to correspond with Herr X.’ Herr Y. evidently wanted to know nothing of his more fortunate rival: ‘never thought of shall he be.’¹

Or: A lady enquired from her doctor for news of a common acquaintance, but called her by her maiden name. She had forgotten her friend’s married name. She admitted afterwards that she had been very unhappy about the marriage and disliked her friend’s husband.²

We shall have a good deal to say about forgetting names in other connections; for the moment we are principally interested in the psychical situation in which the forgetting occurs.

The forgetting of intentions can in general be traced to an opposing current of thought, which is unwilling to carry out the intention. But this view is not only held by us psycho-analysts; it is the general opinion, accepted by everyone in their daily lives and only denied when it comes to theory. A patron who gives his protégé the excuse of having forgotten his request fails to justify himself. The protégé immediately thinks: ‘It means nothing to him; it’s true he promised, but he doesn’t really want to do it.’ For that reason forgetting is banned in certain circumstances of ordinary life; the distinction between the popular and the psycho-analytic view of these parapraxes seems to have disappeared. Imagine the lady of the house receiving her guest with the words: ‘What? have you come to-day? I’d quite forgotten I invited you for to-day.’ Or imagine a young man confessing to his fiancée that he had forgotten to keep their last rendez-vous. He will certainly not confess it; he will prefer to invent on the spur of the moment the most improbable obstacles which prevented his appearing at the time and afterwards made it impossible for him to let her know. We all know too that in military affairs the excuse of having forgotten something is of no help and is no protection against punishment, and we must all feel that that is justified. Here all at once everyone is united in thinking that a particular parapraxis has a sense and in knowing what that sense is. Why are they not consistent enough to extend this knowledge to the other parapraxes and to admit them fully? There is of course an answer to this question too.

¹ From Jung.

² From Brill.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3162

Since laymen have so little doubt about the sense of this forgetting of intentions, you will be the less surprised to find writers employing this sort of parapraxis in the same sense. Any of you who have seen or read Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra will remember that in the last scene Caesar, as he is leaving Egypt, is haunted by the idea that there is something else he had intended to do but has forgotten. In the end it turns out what this was: he had forgotten to say good-bye to Cleopatra. The dramatist is seeking by this little contrivance to ascribe to the great Caesar a superiority which he did not in fact possess and which he never desired. For historical sources will tell you that Caesar made Cleopatra follow him to Rome, that she was living there with her little Caesarion when Caesar was murdered, and that she thereupon fled from the city.

Cases of forgetting an intention are in general so clear that they are not of much use for our purpose of obtaining circumstantial evidence of the sense of a parapraxis from the psychical situation. Let us therefore turn to a particularly ambiguous and obscure kind of parapraxis - to losing and mislaying. You will no doubt find it incredible that we ourselves can play an intentional part in what is so often the painful accident of losing something. But there are plenty of observations like the following one. A young man lost a pencil of his of which he had been very fond. The day before, he had received a letter from his brother-in-law which ended with these words: ‘I have neither the inclination nor the time at present to encourage you in your frivolity and laziness.’ The pencil had actually been given to him by this brother-in-law. Without this coincidence we could not, of course, have asserted that a part was played in the loss by an intention to get rid of the thing.¹ Similar cases are very common. We lose an object if we have quarrelled with the person who gave it to us and do not want to be reminded of him; or if we no longer like the object itself and want to have an excuse for getting another and better one instead. The same intention directed against an object can also play a part, of course, in cases of dropping, breaking or destroying things. Can we regard it as a matter of chance when a schoolchild immediately before his birthday loses, ruins or smashes some of his personal belongings, such as his satchel or his watch?

Nor will anyone who has sufficiently often experienced the torment of not being able to find something that he himself has put away feel inclined to believe that there is a purpose in mislaying things. Yet instances are far from rare in which the circumstances attendant on the mislaying point to an intention to get rid of the object temporarily or permanently.

¹ From Dattner.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3163

Here is the best example, perhaps, of such an occasion. A youngish man told me the following story: ‘Some years ago there were misunderstandings between me and my wife. I found her too cold, and although I willingly recognized her excellent qualities we lived together without any tender feelings. One day, returning from a walk, she gave me a book which she had bought because she thought it would interest me. I thanked her for this mark of "attention", promised to read the book and put it on one side. After that I could never find it again. Months passed by, in which I occasionally remembered the lost book and made vain attempts to find it. About six months later my dear mother, who was not living with us, fell ill. My wife left home to nurse her mother-in-law. The patient’s condition became serious and gave my wife an opportunity of showing the best side of herself. One evening I returned home full of enthusiasm and gratitude for what my wife had accomplished. I walked up to my desk, and without any definite intention but with a kind of somnambulistic certainty opened one of the drawers. On the very top I found the long-lost book I had mislaid. With the extinction of the motive the mislaying of the object ceased as well.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I could multiply this collection of examples indefinitely; but I will not do so here. You will in any case find a profusion of case material for the study of parapraxes in my Psychopathology of Everyday Life (first published in 1901).¹ All these examples lead to the same result: they make it probable that parapraxes have a sense, and they show you how that sense is discovered or confirmed by the attendant circumstances. I will be briefer to-day, because we have adopted the limited aim of using the study of these phenomena as a help towards a preparation for psycho-analysis. There are only two groups of observations into which I need enter more fully here: accumulated and combined parapraxes and the confirmation of our interpretations by subsequent events.

¹ See also similar collections by Maeder (in French), Brill (in English), Jones (in English) and J. Stärcke (in Dutch), etc.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3164

Accumulated and combined parapraxes are without doubt the finest flower of their kind. If we had only been concerned to prove that parapraxes have a sense we should have confined ourselves to them from the first, for in their case the sense is unmistakable even to the dull-witted and forces itself on the most critical judgement. An accumulation of these phenomena betrays an obstinacy that is scarcely ever a characteristic of chance events but fits in well with something intentional. Finally, the mutual interchangeability between different species of parapraxes demonstrates what it is in parapraxes that is important and characteristic: not their form or the method which they employ but the purpose which they serve and which can be achieved in the most various ways. For this reason I will give you an instance of repeated forgetting. Ernest Jones tells us that once, for reasons unknown to him, he left a letter lying on his desk for several days. At last he decided to send it off, but he had it returned to him by the Dead Letter Office¹ since he had forgotten to address it. After he had addressed it he took it to the post, but this time it had no stamp. And then at last he was obliged to admit his reluctance to sending the letter off at all.

In another case a bungled action is combined with an instance of mislaying. A lady travelled to Rome with her brother-in-law, who was a famous artist. The visitor was received with great honour by the German community in Rome, and among other presents he was given an antique gold medal. The lady was vexed that her brother-in-law did not appreciate the lovely object sufficiently. When she returned home (her place in Rome having been taken by her sister) she discovered while unpacking that she had brought the medal with her - how, she did not know. She at once sent a letter with the news to her brother-in-law, and announced that she would send the article she had walked off with back to Rome next day. But next day the medal had been so cleverly mislaid that it could not be found and sent of; and it was at this point, that the meaning of her ‘absent-mindedness’ dawned on the lady: she wanted to keep the object for herself.²

¹ [In English in the original.]

² Reported by R. Reitler.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3165

I have already given you an example of a combination of a forgetting with an error, the case of someone forgetting an appointment and on a second occasion, having firmly decided not to forget this time, turning up at the wrong hour. An exactly similar case was reported to me from his own experience by a friend with literary as well as scientific interests. ‘Some years ago’, he told me, ‘I allowed myself to be elected to the committee of a certain literary society, as I thought that the organization might one day be able to help me to have my play produced; and I took a regular part, though without being much interested, in the meetings which were held every Friday. Then, a few months ago, I was given the promise of a production at the theatre at F.; and since then I have regularly forgotten the meetings of the society. When I read your book on the subject I felt ashamed of my forgetfulness. I reproached myself with the thought that it was shabby behaviour on my part to stay away now that I no longer needed these people, and resolved on no account to forget the next Friday. I kept on reminding myself of this resolution until I carried it into effect and stood at the door of the room where the meetings were held. To my astonishment it was locked; the meeting was over. I had in fact made a mistake over the day; it was now Saturday!’

It would be agreeable to add further, similar examples. But I must proceed, and give you a glimpse of the cases in which our interpretation has to wait for the future for confirmation. The governing condition of these cases, it will be realized, is that the present psychical situation is unknown to us or inaccessible to our enquiries. Our interpretation is consequently no more than a suspicion to which we ourselves do not attach too much importance. Later, however, something happens which shows us how well-justified our interpretation had been. I was once the guest of a young married couple and heard the young woman laughingly describe her latest experience. The day after her return from the honeymoon she had called for her unmarried sister to go shopping with her as she used to do, while her husband went to his business. Suddenly she noticed a gentleman on the other side of the street, and nudging her sister had cried: ‘Look, there goes Herr L.’ She had forgotten that this gentleman had been her husband for some weeks. I shuddered as I heard the story, but I did not dare to draw the inference. The little incident only occurred to my mind some years later when the marriage had come to a most unhappy end.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3166

Maeder tells of a lady who, on the eve of her wedding had forgotten to try on her wedding-dress and, to her dressmaker’s despair, only remembered it late in the evening. He connects this forgetfulness with the fact that she was soon divorced from her husband. I know a lady now divorced from her husband, who in managing her money affairs frequently signed documents in her maiden name, many years before she in fact resumed it. - I know of other women who have lost their wedding-rings during the honeymoon, and I know too that the history of their marriages has given a sense to the accident. - And now here is one more glaring example, but with a happier ending. The story is told of a famous German chemist that his marriage did not take place, because he forgot the hour of his wedding and went to the laboratory instead of to the church. He was wise enough to be satisfied with a single attempt and died at a great age unmarried.

The idea may possibly have occurred to you that in these examples parapraxes have taken the place of the omens or auguries of the ancients. And indeed some omens were nothing else than parapraxes, as, for instance, when someone stumbled or fell down. Others of them, it is true, had the character of objective happenings and not of subjective acts. But you would hardly believe how difficult it sometimes is to decide whether a particular event belongs to the one group or to the other. An act so often understands how to disguise itself as a passive experience.

All those of us who can look back on a comparatively long experience of life will probably admit that we should have spared ourselves many disappointments and painful surprises if we had found the courage and determination to interpret small parapraxes experienced in our human contacts as auguries and to make use of them as indications of intentions that were still concealed. As a rule we dare not do so; it would make us feel as though, after a detour through science, we were becoming superstitious again. Nor do all auguries come true, and you will understand from our theories that they do not all need to come true.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3167

LECTURE IV

PARAPRAXES (concluded)

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - We may take it as the outcome of our efforts so far and the basis of our further investigations that parapraxes have a sense. Let me insist once again that I am not asserting - and for our purposes there is no need to do so - that every single parapraxis that occurs has a sense, even though I regard that as probably the case. It is enough for us if we can point to such a sense relatively often in the different forms of parapraxis. Moreover, in this respect these different forms behave differently. Cases of slips of the tongue and of the pen, etc., may occur on a purely physiological basis. I cannot believe that this is so in the types depending on forgetting (forgetting names or intentions, mislaying, etc.). It is very probable that there are cases of losing which can be regarded as unintended. It is in general true that only a certain proportion of the errors that occur in ordinary life can be looked at from our point of view. You should bear these limitations in mind when henceforward we start from the assumption that parapraxes are psychical acts and arise from mutual interference between two intentions.

This is the first product of psycho-analysis. Psychology has hitherto known nothing of the occurrence of such mutual interferences or of the possibility that they might result in such phenomena. We have made a quite considerable extension to the world of psychical phenomena and have won for psychology phenomena which were not reckoned earlier as belonging to it.

Let us pause a moment longer over the assertion that parapraxes are ‘psychical acts’. Does this imply more than what we have said already - that they have a sense? I think not. I think, rather, that the former assertion is more indefinite and more easily misunderstood. Anything that is observable in mental life may occasionally be described as a mental phenomenon. The question will then be whether the particular mental phenomenon has arisen immediately from somatic, organic and material influences - in which case its investigation will not be part of psychology - or whether it is derived in the first instance from other mental processes, somewhere behind which the series of organic influences begins. It is this latter situation that we have in view when we describe a phenomenon as a mental process, and for that reason it is more expedient to clothe our assertion in the form: ‘the phenomenon has a sense.’ By ‘sense’ we understand ‘meaning’, ‘intention,’ ‘purpose’ and ‘position in a continuous psychical context’.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3168

There are a number of other phenomena which are closely akin to parapraxes but to which that name is no longer appropriate. We call them chance and symptomatic actions. Like the others, they have the character of being without a motive, insignificant and unimportant; but they have in addition, more clearly, that of being unnecessary. They are distinguished from parapraxes by their lack of another intention with which they are in collision and which is disturbed by them. On the other hand, they merge insensibly into the gestures and movements which we regard as expressions of the emotions. These chance actions include all sorts of manipulations with our clothing, or parts of our body or objects within our reach, performed as though in play and apparently with no purpose, or, again, the omission of these manipulations; or, further, tunes that we hum to ourselves. I suggest that all these phenomena have a sense and can be interpreted in the same way as parapraxes, that they are small indications of more important mental processes and are fully valid psychical acts. But I do not propose to linger over this fresh extension of the field of mental phenomena; I shall return to the parapraxes, in connection with which problems important for psycho-analysis can be worked out with far greater clarity.

The most interesting questions which we have raised about parapraxes and not yet answered are perhaps these. We have said that parapraxes are the product of mutual interference between two different intentions, of which one may be called the disturbed intention and the other the disturbing one. The disturbed intentions give no occasion for further questions, but concerning the latter we should like to know, first, what sort of intentions emerge as a disturbance to others, and secondly what is the relation of the disturbing intentions to the disturbed ones?

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3169

If you will allow me, I will once more take slips of the tongue as representatives of the whole class and I will reply to the second question before the first.

In a slip of the tongue the disturbing intention may be related in its content to the disturbed one, in which case it will contradict it or correct it or supplement it. Or - the more obscure and more interesting case - the content of the disturbing intention may have nothing to do with that of the disturbed one.

We shall have no difficulty in finding evidence of the former relation in instances we already know and in similar ones. In almost every case in which a slip of the tongue reverses the sense, the disturbing intention expresses the contrary to the disturbed one and the parapraxis represents a conflict between two incompatible inclinations. ‘I declare the sitting opened, but I should prefer it to be already closed’ is the sense of the President’s slip of the tongue. A political periodical which had been accused of corruption defended itself in an article the climax of which should have been: ‘Our readers will bear witness to the fact that we have always acted in the most unself-seeking manner for the good of the community.’ But the editor entrusted with the preparation of the article wrote ‘in the most self-seeking manner’. That is to say, he was thinking: ‘This is what I am obliged to write; but I have different ideas.’ A member of parliament who was insisting that the truth should be told to the Emperor ‘rückhaltloss [unreservedly]’ evidently heard an inner voice that was shocked at his boldness and, by a slip of the tongue, changed the word into ‘rückgratloss [spinelessly]’.¹

In the instances already familiar to you which give an impression of being contractions or abbreviations, what we have before us are corrections, additions or continuations, by means of which a second purpose makes itself felt alongside of the first. ‘Facts came to Vorschein [light] - better to say it straight out - they were Schweinereien [disgusting]; well then, facts came to Vorschwein.’ ‘Those who understand this can be counted on the fingers of one hand - no, there’s really only one person who understands it, so: can be counted on one finger.’ Or: ‘My husband can eat and drink what he wants. But, as you know, I don’t put up with his wanting anything at all, so: he can eat and drink what I want.’ In all these cases, then, the slip of the tongue arises from the content of the disturbed intention itself or is connected with it.

¹ This was in the German Reichstag in November 1908.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3170

The other sort of relation between the two mutually interfering intentions seems puzzling. If the disturbing intention has nothing to do with the disturbed one, where can it have come from and why is it that it makes itself noticeable as a disturbance at this particular point? The observation which can alone give us the answer to this shows that the disturbance arises from a train of thought which has occupied the person concerned a short time before and, whether it has already been expressed in speech or not, produces this subsequent effect. It must in fact, therefore, be described as a perseveration, though not necessarily as the perseveration of spoken words. In this case too an associative link between the disturbing and the disturbed intentions is present; but it does not lie in their content but is artificially constructed, often along extremely forced associative paths.

Here is a simple example of this, derived from my own observation. I once met two Viennese ladies in the lovely Dolomites, who were dressed in walking clothes. I accompanied them part of the way, and we discussed the pleasures and also the trials of spending a holiday in that way. One of the ladies admitted that spending the day like that entailed a good deal of discomfort. ‘It is certainly not at all pleasant’, she said, ‘if one has been tramping all day in the sun and has perspired right through one’s blouse and chemise.’ In this sentence she had to overcome a slight hesitation at one point. Then she continued: ‘But then when one gets "nach Hose" and can change. . . .’ This slip of the tongue was not analysed but I expect you can understand it easily. The lady’s intention had obviously been to give a more complete list of her clothes: blouse, chemise and Hose [drawers]. Reasons of propriety led her to omit any mention of the ‘Hose’. But in the next sentence, with its quite independent content, the unspoken word emerged as a distortion of the similar-sounding ‘nach Hause [home]’.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3171

We can now turn, however, to the main question, which we have long postponed, of what sort of intentions these are, which find expression in this unusual fashion as disturbers of other intentions. Well, they are obviously of very different sorts, among which we must look for the common factor. If we examine a number of examples with this in view, they will soon fall into three groups. The first group contains those cases in which the disturbing purpose is known to the speaker and moreover had been noticed by him before he made the slip of the tongue. Thus, in the ‘Vorschwein’ slip the speaker admitted not only that he had formed the judgement ‘Schweinereien’ about the events in question, but also that he had had the intention, from which he afterwards drew back, of expressing his judgement in words. A second group is made up of other cases in which the disturbing purpose is equally recognized as his by the speaker, but in which he was unaware that it was active in him just before he made the slip. Thus, he accepts our interpretation of his slip, but nevertheless remains to some extent surprised at it. Instances of this kind of attitude can perhaps be found in other sorts of parapraxes more easily than in slips of the tongue. In a third group the interpretation of the disturbing intention is vigorously rejected by the speaker; he not only denies that it was active in him before he made the slip, but seeks to maintain that it is entirely foreign to him. You will recall the example of the ‘hiccough’ and the positively rude denial which I brought on myself from the speaker by uncovering his disturbing intention. As you know, we have not yet come to any agreement in our views on these cases. I should pay no attention to the denial put forward by the proposer of the toast and should persist in my interpretation unruffled, while you, I suppose, are still affected by his protest and raise the question of whether we ought not to give up interpreting parapraxes of this kind and regard them as purely physiological acts in the pre-analytic sense. I can well imagine what it is that deters you. My interpretation carries with it the hypothesis that intentions can find expression in a speaker of which he himself knows nothing but which I am able to infer from circumstantial evidence. You are brought up short in the face of such a novel and momentous hypothesis. I can understand that, and I see your point so far as that goes. But one thing is certain. If you want to apply consistently the view of parapraxes which has been confirmed by so many examples, you will have to make up your mind to accept the strange hypothesis I have mentioned. If you cannot do that, you will have once more to abandon the understanding of parapraxes which you have only just achieved.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3172

Let us consider for a moment what it is that unites the three groups, what it is that the three mechanisms of slips of the tongue have in common. It is fortunately unmistakable. In the first two groups the disturbing purpose is recognized by the speaker; furthermore, in the first group that purpose announce: itself immediately before the slip. But in both cases it is forced back. The speaker decides not to put it into words, and after that the slip of the tongue occurs; after that, that is to say, the purpose which has been forced back is put into words against the speaker’s will, either by altering the expression of the intention which he has permitted, or by mingling with it, or by actually taking its place. This, then, is the mechanism of a slip of the tongue.

On my view, I can bring what happens in the third group into complete harmony with the mechanism I have described. I have only to assume that what distinguishes these three groups from one another is the differing extent to which the intention is forced back. In the first group the intention is there and makes itself noticed before the speaker’s remark; only then is it rejected; and it takes its revenge in the slip of the tongue. In the second group the rejection goes further: the intention has already ceased to be noticeable before the remark is made. Strangely enough, this does not in the least prevent it from playing its part in causing the slip. But this behaviour makes it easier for us to explain what happens in the third group. I shall venture to assume that a purpose can also find expression in a parapraxis when it has been forced back and not noticed for a considerable time, for a very long time perhaps, and can for that reason be denied straight out by the speaker. But even if you leave the problem of the third group on one side, you are bound to conclude from the observations we have made in the other cases that the suppression of the speaker’s intention to say something is the indispensable condition for the occurrence of a slip of the tongue.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3173

We may now claim to have made further advances in our understanding of parapraxes. We know not only that they are mental acts, in which we can detect sense and intention, not only that they come about through mutual interference between two different intentions, but beyond this we know that one of these intentions must have been in some way forced back from being put into effect before it can manifest itself as a disturbance of the other intention. It must itself have been disturbed before it can become a disturber. This does not mean, of course, that we have yet achieved a complete explanation of the phenomena which we call parapraxes. We see further questions immediately cropping up, and we suspect in general that the further our understanding goes the more occasions there will be for raising fresh questions. We may ask, for instance, why things should not be much simpler. If the intention is to force back a particular purpose instead of carrying it into effect, the forcing back should be successful, so that the purpose does not manifest itself at all; or on the other hand the forcing back might fail, so that the purpose that was to have been forced back would manifest itself completely. But parapraxes are the outcome of a compromise: they constitute a half-success and a half-failure for each of the two intentions; the intention which is being challenged is neither completely suppressed nor, apart from special cases, carried through quite unscathed. We may conclude that special conditions must prevail in order that an interference or compromise of this kind shall come about, but we can form no conception of what they can be. Nor do I think that we could discover these unknown factors by going deeper into the study of parapraxes. It will be necessary, rather, to examine first yet other obscure regions of mental life: it is only from analogies which we shall meet with there that we shall find the courage to set up the hypotheses necessary for throwing a more penetrating light upon parapraxes. And one thing more. Working from small indications, as we are constantly in the habit of doing in the present field, brings its own dangers. There is a mental disease, ‘combinatory paranoia’, in which the exploitation of small indications like these is carried to unlimited lengths; and I will not of course claim that conclusions built on such foundations are invariably correct. We can only be guarded against these risks by the broad basis of our observations, the repetition of similar impressions from the most varied spheres of mental life.

At this point, therefore, we will leave the analysis of parapraxes. But there is one point more to which I would draw your attention. I would ask you to bear in mind as a model the manner in which we have treated these phenomena. From this example you can learn the aims of our psychology. We seek not merely to describe and to classify phenomena, but to understand them as signs of an interplay of forces in the mind, as a manifestation of purposeful intentions working concurrently or in mutual opposition. We are concerned with a dynamic view of mental phenomena. On our view the phenomena that are perceived must yield in importance to trends which are only hypothetical.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3174

We shall therefore not enter more deeply into parapraxes, but we may still undertake a cursory survey of the extent of this field, in the course of which we shall come once more upon things we already know but shall also discover some novelties. In this survey I shall keep to the division into three groups which I proposed to begin with: slips of the tongue together with their cognate forms (slips of the pen, misreading and mishearing); forgetting, subdivided according to the objects forgotten (proper names, foreign words, intentions or impressions); and bungled actions, mislaying and losing. Errors, in so far as they concern us, fall under the headings partly of forgetting and partly of bungled actions.

We have already treated slips of the tongue in great detail, but there are a few more points to be added. Slips of the tongue are accompanied by certain minor emotional phenomena which are not quite without interest. No one likes making slips of the tongue, and we often fail to hear our own slips, though never other people’s. Slips of the tongue are also in a certain sense contagious; it is not at all easy to talk about slips of the tongue without making slips of the tongue oneself. The most trivial forms of such slips, precisely those which have no special light to throw on hidden mental processes, have reasons which are nevertheless not hard to penetrate. For instance, if someone has pronounced a long vowel short on account of a disturbance affecting the word for some reason or other, he will soon afterwards pronounce a subsequent short vowel long, thus making a fresh slip of the tongue to compensate for the earlier one. In the same way, if he pronounces a diphthong incorrectly and carelessly (for instance pronouncing an ‘eu’ or ‘oi’ as ‘ei’) he will try to make up for it by changing a subsequent ‘ei’ into an ‘eu’ or ‘oi’. The decisive factor here seems to be consideration of the impression made on the audience, who are not to suppose that it is a matter of indifference to the speaker how he treats his mother-tongue. The second, compensating distortion actually has the purpose of directing the hearer’s attention to the first one and of assuring him that the speaker has noticed it too. The commonest, simplest and most trivial slips of the tongue are contractions and anticipations which occur in insignificant parts of speech. For instance, in a longish sentence one may make a slip of the tongue which anticipates the last word of what one intends to say. This gives an impression of impatience to be finished with the sentence, and is evidence in general of a certain antipathy against communicating the sentence or against the whole of one’s remarks. We thus arrive at marginal cases in which the distinctions between the psycho-analytic view of slips of the tongue and the ordinary physiological one melt into one another. It is to be assumed that a purpose of disturbing the intention of the speech is present in these cases but that it can only announce its presence and not what it itself has in view. The disturbance it produces then proceeds in accordance with certain phonetic influences or associative attractions and can be regarded as a distraction of the attention from the intention of the speech. But neither this disturbance of the attention nor the inclinations to associate which have become operative touch on the essence of the process. This remains, in spite of everything, the indication of the existence of an intention which is disturbing to the intention of the speech, though the nature of this disturbing intention cannot be guessed from its consequences, as is possible in all the better defined cases of slips of the tongue.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3175

Slips of the pen, to which I now pass, are so closely akin to slips of the tongue that we have nothing new to expect from them. Perhaps we may glean one little further point. The extremely common small slips of the pen, contractions and anticipations of later words (especially of final words) point, once again, to a general dislike of writing and impatience to be done with it. More marked products of miswriting enable one to recognize the nature and aim of the disturbing purpose. If one finds a slip of the pen in a letter, one knows in general that there was something the matter with its author, but one cannot always discover what was going on in him. A slip of the pen is just as often overlooked by the person responsible as is a slip of the tongue. The following is a noteworthy observation. There are, as we know, people who are in the habit of reading through every letter they write before sending it off. Others do not do this as a rule; but if, as an exception, they do so they always come across some conspicuous slip of the pen, which they can then correct. How is this to be explained? It looks as though these people knew that they had made a mistake in writing the letter. Are we really to believe this?

An interesting problem attaches to the practical importance of slips of the pen. You may perhaps remember the case of a murderer, H., who found the means of obtaining cultures of highly dangerous pathogenic organisms from scientific institutes by representing himself as a bacteriologist. He then used these cultures for the purpose of getting rid of his near connections by this most modern of methods. Now on one occasion this man complained to the Directors of one of these institutes that the cultures that had been sent to him were ineffective; but he made a slip of the pen, and instead of writing ‘in my experiments on mice or guinea-pigs’ he wrote quite clearly ‘in my experiments on men’¹. The doctors at the institute were struck by the slip, but, so far as I know, drew no conclusions from it. Well, what do you think? Should not the doctors, on the contrary, have taken the slip of the pen as a confession and started an investigation which would have put an early stop to the murderer’s activities? Was not ignorance of our view of parapraxes responsible in this case for an omission of practical significance? Well, I think a slip of the pen like this would certainly have seemed to me most suspicious; but something of great importance stands in the way of using it as a confession. The matter is not as simple as all that. The slip was certainly a piece of circumstantial evidence; but it was not enough in itself to start an investigation. It is true that the slip of the pen said that he was concerned with thoughts of infecting men, but it did not make it possible to decide whether these thoughts were to be taken as a clear intention to injure or as a phantasy of no practical importance. It is even possible that a man who had made a slip like this would have every subjective justification for denying the phantasy and would repudiate it as something entirely foreign to him. You will understand these possibilities still better when later on we come to consider the distinction between psychical and material reality. But this is another instance of a parapraxis acquiring importance from subsequent events.

¹ [‘Menschen’ instead of ‘Mäusen oder Meerschweinchen’.]

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3176

With misreading we come to a psychical situation which differs sensibly from that in slips of the tongue or pen. Here one of the two mutually competing purposes is replaced by a sensory stimulation and is perhaps on that account less resistant. What one is going to read is not a derivative of one’s own mental life like something one proposes to write. In a great majority of cases, therefore, a misreading consists in a complete substitution. One replaces the word that is to be read by another, without there necessarily being any connection of content between the text and the product of the misreading, which depends as a rule on verbal similarity. The best member of this group is Lichtenberg’s ‘Agamemnon’ for ‘angenommen’. If we want to discover the disturbing purpose which produced the misreading we must leave the text that has been misread entirely aside and we may begin the analytic investigation with the two questions: what is the first association to the product of the misreading? and in what situation did the misreading occur? Occasionally a knowledge of the latter is alone enough to explain the misreading. For instance, a man under the pressure of an imperious need was wandering about in a strange town when he saw the word ‘Closet-House’ on a large notice board on the first storey of a building. He had just enough time to feel surprised at the notice-board being placed so high up before discovering that, strictly speaking, what he should have read was ‘Corset-House’. In other cases a misreading precisely of the kind which is quite independent of the content of the text may call for a detailed analysis which cannot be carried through without practice in the technique of psycho-analysis and without reliance on it. As a rule, however, it is not so hard to find the explanation of a misreading: the word substituted immediately betrays, as in the Agamemnon example, the circle of ideas from which the disturbance has arisen. In this time of war, for instance, it is a very usual thing for the names of towns and generals and the military terms that are constantly buzzing around us to be read wherever a similar word meets our eyes. Whatever interests and concerns us puts itself in the place of what is strange and still uninteresting. After-images of thoughts trouble new perceptions.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3177

With misreading, too, there is no lack of cases of another sort, in which the text of what is read itself arouses the disturbing purpose, which thereupon, as a rule, turns it into its opposite. What we ought to read is something unwished-for, and analysis will convince us that an intense wish to reject what we have read must be held responsible for its alteration.

In the more frequent cases of misreading which we mentioned first, we miss two factors to which we have assigned an important role in the mechanism of parapraxes: a conflict between two purposes and a forcing-back of one of them which takes its revenge by producing a parapraxis. Not that anything contrary to this occurs in misreading. But the prominence of the thought that leads to the misreading is far more noticeable than the forcing-back which it may have experienced previously.

It is these two factors which we meet with most markedly in the different situations in which parapraxes of forgetting occur. The forgetting of intentions is quite unambiguous; as we have already seen, its interpretation is not disputed even by laymen. The purpose which disturbs the intention is in every instance a counter-intention, an unwillingness; and all that remains for us to learn about it is why it has not expressed itself in some other and less disguised manner. But the presence of this counter-will is unquestionable. Sometimes, too, we succeed in guessing something of the motives which compel this counter-will to conceal itself; acting surreptitiously by means of the parapraxis it always achieves its aim, whereas it would be sure of repudiation if it emerged as an open contradiction. If some important change in the psychical situation takes place between the forming of the intention and its carrying-out, as a result of which there is no longer any question of the intention being carried out, then the forgetting of the intention drops out of the category of parapraxes. It no longer seems strange to have forgotten it, and we realize that it would have been unnecessary to remember it: thereafter it becomes permanently or temporarily extinct. The forgetting of an intention can only be called a parapraxis if we cannot believe that the intention has been interrupted in this latter way.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3178

The instances of forgetting an intention are in general so uniform and so perspicuous that for that very reason they are of no interest for our investigation. Nevertheless there are two points at which we can learn something new from a study of these parapraxes. Forgetting - that is, failure to carry out an intention - points, as we have said, to a counter-will that is hostile to it. This is no doubt true; but our enquiries show that the counter-will can be of two kinds - direct or indirect. What I mean by the latter will best appear from one or two examples. If a patron forgets to put in a word with a third person on behalf of his protégé this may happen because he is not really very much interested in the protégé and therefore has no great desire to speak on his behalf. In any case, that is how the protégé will understand the patron’s forgetting. But things may be more complicated. The counter-will in the patron against carrying out the intention may come from another direction and may be aimed at quite a different point. It may have nothing to do with the protégé but may perhaps be directed against the third person to whom the recommendation was to have been made. So you see from this once more the doubts that stand in the way of a practical application of our interpretations. In spite of the correct interpretation of the forgetting, the protégé is in danger of being too distrustful and of doing his patron a grave injustice. Or, supposing someone forgets an appointment which he has promised someone else to keep, the most frequent reason for it will be, no doubt, a direct disinclination to meeting this person. But in such a case analysis might show that the disturbing purpose did not relate to him but was directed against the place at which the meeting was planned to happen and was avoided on account of a distressing memory attaching to it. Or, again, if someone forgets to post a letter, the counter-purpose may be based on the contents of the letter; but it is by no means out of the question that the letter may be harmless in itself and may only be subject to the counter-purpose because something about it recalls another letter which had been written on some earlier occasion and which offered the counter-will a direct point of attack. It can be said, therefore, that here the counter-will was transferred from the earlier letter, which justified it, to the present one, which it had in fact no grounds for concern about. You see, then, that we must practise restraint and foresight in applying our interpretations, justified as they are: things that are psychologically equivalent may in practice have a great variety of meanings.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3179

Phenomena such as these last may seem to you most unusual, and you will perhaps be inclined to suppose that an ‘indirect’ counter-will already indicates that the process is a pathological one. But I can assure you that it occurs as well within the limits of what is normal and healthy. Moreover you should not misunderstand me. I am far from admitting that our analytic interpretations are untrustworthy. The ambiguities in the forgetting of intentions which I have been mentioning exist only so long as we have not made an analysis of the case and are only making our interpretations on the basis of our general assumptions. If we carry out an analysis upon the person in question, we invariably learn with sufficient certainty whether the counter-will is a direct one or what other origin it may have.

The second point I have in mind is this. If in a large majority of instances we find confirmation of the fact that the forgetting of an intention goes back to a counter-will, we grow bold enough to extend the solution to another set of instances in which the person under analysis does not confirm but denies the counter-will we have inferred. Take as examples of this such extremely common events as forgetting to return books one has been lent or to pay bills or debts. We shall venture to insist to the person concerned that an intention exists in him to keep the books and not to pay the debts, while he will deny this intention but will not be able to produce any other explanation of his behaviour. Thereupon we shall go on to say that he has this intention but knows nothing about it, but that it is enough for us that it reveals its presence by producing the forgetting in him. He may repeat to us that he has in fact forgotten. You will now recognize the situation as one in which we found ourselves once before. If we want to pursue our interpretations of parapraxes, which have so frequently proved justified, to a consistent conclusion, we are forced to the inescapable hypothesis that there are purposes in people which can become operative without their knowing about them. But this brings us into opposition to all the views that dominate both ordinary life and psychology.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3180

The forgetting of proper names and foreign names, as well as of foreign words, can similarly be traced back to a counter-intention, which is aimed either directly or indirectly against the name concerned. I have already given you several instances of direct dislike. But indirect causation is particularly frequent in these cases and can usually only be established by careful analyses. For instance, during the present war, which has obliged us to give up so many of our former enjoyments, our power of remembering proper names has suffered greatly as the result of the strangest associations. A short time ago I found that I was unable to reproduce the name of the innocent Moravian town of Bisenz; and analysis showed that what was responsible for this was not any direct hostility to it but its resemblance in sound to the name of the Palazzo Bisenzi in Orvieto which I had repeatedly enjoyed visiting in the past. Here for the first time, in this reason for objecting to remembering a name, we come across a principle which will later on reveal its enormous importance for the causation of neurotic symptoms: the memory’s disinclination to remembering anything which is connected with feelings of unpleasure and the reproduction of which would renew the unpleasure. This intention to avoid unpleasure arising from a recollection or from other psychical acts, this psychical flight from unpleasure, may be recognized as the ultimate operative motive not only for the forgetting of names but for many other parapraxes, such as omissions, errors, and so on.

The forgetting of names, however, seems particularly facilitated psycho-physiologically, and for that reason cases occur in which interference by the unpleasure motive cannot be confirmed. If someone has a tendency to forget names, analytic investigation will show that names escape him not only because he does not like them themselves or because they remind him of something disagreeable, but also because in his case the same name belongs to another circle of associations with which he is more intimately related. The name is, as it were, anchored there and is kept from contact with the other associations which have been momentarily activated. If you recall the tricks of mnemotechnics, you will realize with some surprise that the same chains of association which are deliberately laid down in order to prevent names from being forgotten can also lead to our forgetting them. The most striking example of this is afforded by the proper names of persons, which naturally possess quite different psychical importance for different people. Let us, for instance, take a first name such as Theodore. To one of you it will have no special meaning, to another it will be the name of his father or brother or of a friend, or his own name. Analytic experience will then show you that the first of these people is in no danger of forgetting that a particular stranger bears this name, whereas the others will be constantly inclined to withhold from strangers a name which seems to them reserved for intimate connections. If you now bear in mind that this associative inhibition may coincide with the operation of the unpleasure principle and, besides that, with an indirect mechanism, you will be in a position to form an adequate idea of the complications in the causation of the temporary forgetting of a name. An appropriate analysis will however unravel every one of these tangles for you.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3181

The forgetting of impressions and experiences demonstrates much more clearly and exclusively than the forgetting of names the operation of the purpose of keeping disagreeable things out of memory. The whole field of this kind of forgetting does not, of course, fall within the class of parapraxes, but only such cases as, measured by the standard of our usual experience, seem to us striking and unjustified: for instance, when the forgetting affects impressions that are too fresh or important, or when the missing memory tears a gap in what is otherwise a well remembered chain of events. Why and in what way we are able to forget in general, and among other things experiences which have certainly left the deepest impression upon us, such as the events of our earliest childhood years, - that is quite another problem, in which fending off unpleasurable impulses plays a certain part but is far from being the whole explanation. It is an undoubted fact that disagreeable impressions are easily forgotten. Various psychologists have noticed it and the great Darwin was so much impressed by it that he made it ‘a golden rule’ to note down with especial care any observations which seemed unfavourable to his theory, since he had convinced himself that precisely they would not remain in his memory.

A person who hears for the first time of this principle of the fending off of unpleasurable memories by forgetting rarely fails to object that on the contrary it has been his experience that distressing things are particularly hard to forget but keep on returning to torment him against his will - memories, for instance, of insults and humiliations. This is also a true fact, but the objection is not to the point. It is important to begin in good time to reckon with the fact that mental life is the arena and battle-ground for mutually opposing purposes or, to put it non-dynamically, that it consists of contradictions and pairs of contraries. Proof of the existence of a particular purpose is no argument against the existence of an opposite one; there is room for both. It is only a question of the attitude of these contraries to each other, and of what effects are produced by the one and by the other.

Losing and mislaying are of particular interest to us owing to the many meanings they may have - owing, that is, to the multiplicity of the purposes which can be served by these parapraxes. All cases have in common the fact that there was a wish to lose something; they differ in the basis and aim of that wish. We lose a thing when it is worn out, when we intend to replace it by a better one, when we no longer like it, when it originates from someone with whom we are no longer on good terms or when we acquired it in circumstances we no longer want to recall. Dropping, damaging or breaking the object can serve the same purpose. In the sphere of social life experience is said to have shown that unwanted and illegitimate children are far more frail than those legitimately conceived. The crude technique of baby-farmers is not necessary for bringing about this result; a certain amount of neglect in looking after the children should be quite sufficient. The preserving of things may be subject to the same influences as that of children.

Things may, however, be condemned to be lost without their value having suffered any diminution - when, that is, there is an intention to sacrifice something to Fate in order to ward off some other dreaded loss. Analysis tells us that it is still quite a common thing among us to exorcize Fate in this way; and thus our losing is often a voluntary sacrifice. In the same way, losing may also serve the purpose of defiance or self-punishment. In short, the more remote reasons for the intention to get rid of a thing by losing it are beyond number.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3182

Bungled actions, like other errors, are often used to fulfil wishes which one ought to deny oneself. Here the intention disguises itself as a lucky accident. For instance, as happened to one of my friends, a man may be due, obviously against his will, to go by train to visit someone near the town where he lives, and then, at a junction where he has to change, may by mistake get into a train that takes him back to where he came from. Or someone on a journey may be anxious to make a stop at an intermediate station but may be forbidden from doing so by other obligations, and he may then overlook or miss some connection so that he is after all obliged to break his journey in the way he wished. Or what happened to one of my patients: I had forbidden him to telephone to the girl he was in love with, and then, when he meant to telephone to me, he asked for the wrong number ‘by mistake’ or ‘while he was thinking of something else’ and suddenly found himself connected to the girl’s number. A good example of an outright blunder, and one of practical importance, is provided by an observation made by an engineer in his account of what preceded a case of material damage:

‘Some time ago I worked with several students in the laboratory of the technical college on a series of complicated experiments in elasticity, a piece of work which we had undertaken voluntarily but which was beginning to take up more time than we had expected. One day as I returned to the laboratory with my friend F., he remarked how annoying it was to him to lose so much time on that particular day as he had so much else to do at home. I could not help agreeing with him and added half jokingly, referring to an incident the week before: "Let us hope that the machine will go wrong again so that we can stop work and go home early."

‘In arranging the work it happened that F. was given the regulation of the valve of the press; that is to say, he was, by cautiously opening the valve, to let the fluid under pressure flow slowly out of the accumulator into the cylinder of the hydraulic press. The man conducting the experiment stood by the manometer and when the right pressure was reached called out a loud "Stop!" At the word of command F. seized the valve and turned it with all his might - to the left! (All valves without exception are closed by being turned to the right.) This caused the full pressure of the accumulator to come suddenly on to the press, a strain for which the connecting-pipes are not designed, so that one of them immediately burst - quite a harmless accident to the machine, but enough to oblige us to suspend work for the day and go home.

‘It is characteristic, by the way, that when we were discussing the affair some time later my friend F. had no recollection whatever of my remark, which I recalled with certainty.’

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3183

This may lead you to suspect that it is not always just an innocent chance that turns the hands of your domestic servants into dangerous enemies of your household belongings. And you may also raise the question whether it is always a matter of chance when people injure themselves and risk their own safety. These are notions whose value you may care to test, if occasion arises, by analysing observations of your own.

This, Ladies and Gentlemen, is far from being all that might be said about parapraxes. Much remains that might be examined and discussed. But I am satisfied if our discussion of the subject so far has to some extent shaken your previous views and has made you a little prepared to accept new ones. I am content, for the rest, to leave you faced with an unclarified situation. We cannot establish all our doctrines from a study of parapraxes and we are not obliged to draw our evidence from that material alone. The great value of parapraxes for our purposes lies in their being very common phenomena which, moreover, can easily be observed in oneself, and which can occur without the slightest implication of illness. There is only one of your unanswered questions which I should like to put into words before I end. If, as we have found from many instances, people come so close to an understanding of parapraxes and so often behave as though they grasped their sense, how is it possible that they none the less set down these same phenomena as being in general chance events without sense or meaning, and that they can oppose the psycho-analytic elucidation of them with so much vigour?

You are right. This is a remarkable fact and it calls for an explanation. But I will not give you one. Instead, I will introduce you by degrees to fields of knowledge from which the explanation will force itself upon you without any contribution of mine.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3184

PART II

DREAMS

(1916)

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3185

LECTURE V

DIFFICULTIES AND FIRST APPROACHES

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - It was discovered one day that the pathological symptoms of certain neurotic patients have a sense.¹ On this discovery the psycho-analytic method of treatment was founded. It happened in the course of this treatment that patients, instead of bringing forward their symptoms, brought forward dreams. A suspicion thus arose that the dreams too had a sense.

We will not, however, follow this historical path, but will proceed in the opposite direction. We will demonstrate the sense of dreams by way of preparing for the study of the neuroses. This reversal is justified, since the study of dreams is not only the best preparation for the study of the neuroses, but dreams are themselves a neurotic symptom, which, moreover, offers us the priceless advantage of occurring in all healthy people. Indeed, supposing all human beings were healthy, so long as they dreamt we could arrive from their dreams at almost all the discoveries which the investigation of the neuroses has led to.

¹ By Josef Breuer in the years 1880-2. Cf. the lectures delivered by me in America in 1909 (Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis) and ‘On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement’.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3186

Dreams, then, have become a subject of psycho-analytic research: once again ordinary phenomena, with little value set on them, and apparently of no practical use - like parapraxes, with which indeed they have in common the fact of occurring in healthy people. But apart from this the conditions for our work are a good deal less favourable here. Parapraxes had merely been neglected by science, little attention had been paid to them; but at least there was no harm in concerning oneself with them. ‘No doubt’, people would say, ‘there are more important things. But something may possibly come of it.’ But to concern oneself with dreams is not merely unpractical and uncalled-for, it is positively disgraceful. It brings with it the odium of being unscientific and rouses the suspicion of a personal inclination to mysticism. Imagine a medical man going in for dreams when there are so many more serious things even in neuropathology and psychiatry - tumours as big as apples compressing the organ of the mind, haemorrhages, chronic inflammation, in all of which the changes in the tissues can be demonstrated under the microscope! No, dreams are much too trivial, and unworthy to be an object of research.

And there is something else which from its very nature frustrates the requirements of exact research. In investigating dreams one is not even certain about the object of one’s research. A delusion, for instance, meets one squarely and with definite outlines. ‘I am the Emperor of China’, says the patient straight out. But dreams? As a rule no account at all can be given of them. If anyone gives an account of a dream, has he any guarantee that his account has been correct, or that he may not, on the contrary, have altered his account in the course of giving it and have been obliged to invent some addition to it to make up for the indistinctness of his recollection? Most dreams cannot be remembered at all and are forgotten except for small fragments. And is the interpretation of material of this kind to serve as the basis of a scientific psychology or as a method for treating patients?

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3187

An excess of criticism may make us suspicious. These objections to dreams as an object of research are obviously carried too far. We have already dealt with the question of unimportance in connection with parapraxes. We have told ourselves that big things can show themselves by small indications. As regards their indistinctness - that is one of the characteristics of dreams, like any other: we cannot lay down for things what their characteristics are to be. And incidentally there are clear and distinct dreams as well. There are, more over, other objects of psychiatric research which suffer from the same characteristic of indistinctness - in many instances, for example, obsessions, and these have been dealt with, after all, by respected and esteemed psychiatrists. I recall the last such case that I came across in my medical practice. This was a woman patient who introduced herself with these words: ‘I have a sort of feeling as though I had injured or had wanted to injure some living creature - a child? - no, more like a dog - as though I may have thrown it off a bridge, or something else.’ We can help to overcome the defect of the uncertainty in remembering dreams if we decide that whatever the dreamer tells us must count as his dream, without regard to what he may have forgotten or have altered in recalling it. And finally it cannot even be maintained so sweepingly that dreams are unimportant things. We know from our own experience that the mood in which one wakes up from a dream may last for the whole day; doctors have observed cases in which a mental disease has started with a dream and in which a delusion originating in the dream has persisted; historical figures are reported to have embarked on momentous enterprises in response to dreams. We may therefore ask what may be the true source of the contempt in which dreams are held in scientific circles.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3188

It is, I believe, a reaction against the overvaluation of dreams in earlier days. The reconstruction of the past is, as we know, no easy matter, but we may assume with certainty, if I may put it as a joke, that our ancestors three thousand or more years ago already had dreams like ours. So far as we know, all the peoples of antiquity attached great significance to dreams and thought they could be used for practical purposes. They deduced signs for the future from them and searched in them for auguries. For the Greeks and other oriental nations, there may have been times when a campaign without dream-interpreters seemed as impossible as one without air-reconnaissance seems to-day. When Alexander the Great started on his conquests, his train included the most famous dream-interpreters. The city of Tyre, which at that time still stood on an island, offered the king such a stiff resistance that he considered the possibility of raising the siege. Then one night he had a dream of a satyr who seemed to be dancing in triumph, and when he reported it to his dream-interpreters they informed him that it foretold his conquest of the city. He ordered an assault and captured Tyre. Among the Etruscans and Romans other methods of foretelling the future were in use; but throughout the whole of the Hellenistic-Roman period the interpretation of dreams was practised and highly esteemed. Of the literature dealing with the subject the principal work at least has survived: the book by Artemidorus of Daldis, who probably lived during the reign of the Emperor Hadrian. How it came about after this that the art of interpreting dreams declined and that dreams fell into discredit I cannot tell you. The spread of enlightenment cannot have had much to do with it, for many things more absurd than the dream-interpretation of antiquity were faithfully preserved in the obscurity of the Middle Ages. The fact remains that interest in dreams gradually sank to the level of superstition and could survive only among the uneducated classes. The final abuse of dream-interpretation was reached in our days with attempts to discover from dreams the numbers fated to be drawn in the game of lotto. On the other hand the exact science of to-day has repeatedly concerned itself with dreams but always with the sole aim of applying its physiological theories to them. Medical men, of course, looked on dreams as non-psychical acts, as the expression in mental life of somatic stimuli. Binz (1878) pronounced that dreams are ‘somatic processes, which are in every case useless and in many cases positively pathological, to which the soul of the universe and immortality are as sublimely superior as the blue sky above some weed-grown, low-lying stretch of sand.’ Maury compares dreams to the disordered twitchings of St. Vitus’s dance as contrasted with the co-ordinated movements of a healthy man. According to an old analogy, the contents of a dream are like the sounds produced when ‘the ten fingers of a man who knows nothing of music wander over the keys of a piano’.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3189

Interpreting means finding a hidden sense in something; there can of course be no question of doing that if we adopt this last estimate of the function of dreams. Look at the description of dreams given by Wundt, Jodl, and other more recent philosophers. They content themselves with enumerating the respects in which dream-life differs from waking thought, always in a sense depreciatory to dreams - emphasizing the fact that associations are broken apart, that the critical faculty ceases to work, that all knowledge is eliminated, as well as other signs of diminished functioning. The only valuable contribution to the knowledge of dreams for which we have to thank exact science relates to the effect produced on the content of dreams by the impact of somatic stimuli during sleep. A recently deceased Norwegian author, J. Mourly Vold, published two stout volumes of experimental researches into dreams (German edition, 1910 and 1912), which are devoted almost exclusively to the consequences of alterations in the posture of the limbs. They have been recommended to us as models of exact research into dreams. Can you imagine what exact science would say if it learnt that we want to make an attempt to discover the sense of dreams? Perhaps it has already said it. But we will not let ourselves be frightened off. If it was possible for parapraxes to have a sense, dreams can have one too; and in a great many cases parapraxes have a sense, which has escaped exact science. So let us embrace the prejudice of the ancients and of the people and let us follow in the footsteps of the dream-interpreters of antiquity.

We must begin by finding our bearings in the task before us and taking a general survey of the field of dreams. What, then, is a dream? It is hard to answer in a single sentence. But we will not attempt a definition when it is enough to point to something familiar to everyone. We should, however, bring the essential feature of dreams into prominence. Where is that to be found, though? There are such immense differences within the frame that comprises our subject - differences in every direction. The essential feature will presumably be something that we can point to as common to all dreams.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3190

The first thing common to all dreams would seem to be, of course, that we are asleep during them. Dreaming is evidently mental life during sleep - something which has certain resemblances to waking mental life but which, on the other hand, is distinguished from it by large differences. This was, long ago, Aristotle’s definition. It may be that there are still closer connections between dreams and sleep. We can be woken by a dream; we very often have a dream when we wake up spontaneously or if we are forcibly aroused from sleep. Thus dreams seem to be an intermediate state between sleeping and waking. So our attention is turned to sleep. Well, then, what is sleep?

That is a physiological or biological problem about which much is still in dispute. On that we can come to no conclusion; but we ought, I think, to try to describe the psychological characteristics of sleep. Sleep is a state in which I want to know nothing of the external world, in which I have taken my interest away from it. I put myself to sleep by withdrawing from the external world and keeping its stimuli away from me. I also go to sleep when I am fatigued by it. So when I go to sleep I say to the external world: ‘Leave me in peace: I want to go to sleep.’ On the contrary, children say: ‘I’m not going to sleep yet; I’m not tired, and I want to have some more experiences.’ The biological purpose of sleep seems therefore to be rehabilitation, and its psychological characteristic suspense of interest in the world. Our relation to the world, into which we have come so unwillingly, seems to involve our not being able to tolerate it uninterruptedly. Thus from time to time we withdraw into the premundane state, into existence in the womb. At any rate, we arrange conditions for ourselves very like what they were then: warm, dark and free from stimuli. Some of us roll ourselves up into a tight package and, so as to sleep, take up a posture much as it was in the womb. The world, it seems, does not possess even those of us who are adults completely, but only up to two thirds; one third of us is still quite unborn. Every time we wake in the morning it is like a new birth. Indeed, in speaking of our state after sleep, we say that we feel as though we were newly born. (In saying this, incidentally, we are making what is probably a very false assumption about the general sensations of a new-born child, who seems likely, on the contrary, to be feeling very uncomfortable.) We speak, too, of being born as ‘first seeing the light of day’.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3191

If this is what sleep is, dreams cannot possibly form part of its programme, but seem on the contrary to be an unwelcome addition to it. In our opinion too, a dreamless sleep is the best, the only proper one. There ought to be no mental activity in sleep; if it begins to stir, we have not succeeded in establishing the foetal state of rest: we have not been able entirely to avoid residues of mental activity. Dreaming would consist in these residues. But if so, it would really seem that there is no need for dreams to have any sense. It was different with parapraxes; they, after all, were activities during waking life. But if I am asleep and have stopped mental activity completely and have merely failed to suppress some residues of it, then there is no need whatever for these residues to have any sense. I cannot even make use of any such sense, since the rest of my mental life is asleep. So it really can only be a matter of reactions, in the nature of ‘twitchings’, of mental phenomena such as result directly from a somatic stimulus. Dreams would accordingly be residues of waking mental activity which were disturbing sleep, and we might well decide to drop the subject at once, as not being suited to psycho-analysis.

Even if dreams are superfluous, however, they do exist, and we can try to account for their existence. Why does mental life fail to go to sleep? Probably because there is something that will not allow the mind any peace. Stimuli impinge upon it and it must react to them. A dream, then, is the manner in which the mind reacts to stimuli that impinge upon it in the state of sleep. And here we see a way of access to an understanding of dreams. We can take various dreams and try to discover what the stimulus was which was seeking to disturb sleep and to which the reaction was a dream. Our examination of the first thing common to all dreams seems to have taken us so far.

Is there anything else common to them? Yes, something unmistakable but much harder to grasp and to describe. Mental processes in sleep have a quite different character from those of waking life. We experience every sort of thing in dreams and believe in it, whereas nevertheless we experience nothing, except, perhaps, the single disturbing stimulus. We experience it predominantly in visual images; feelings may be present too, and thoughts interwoven in it as well; the other senses may also experience something, but nonetheless it is predominantly a question of images. Part of the difficulty of giving an account of dreams is due to our having to translate these images into words. ‘I could draw it’, a dreamer often says to us, ‘but I don’t know how to say it.’ This is not, however, a reduced mental activity, like that of a feeble-minded person as compared to that of a genius: it is qualitatively different, though it is hard to say where the difference lies. G. T. Fechner once voiced a suspicion that the scene of action of dreams (in the mind) is different from that of waking ideational life. Though we do not understand this and do not know what we are to make of it, it does in fact reproduce the impression of strangeness which most dreams make on us. The comparison between dream-activity and the effects of an unmusical hand on the piano does not help us here. The piano will after all respond with the same sounds, though not with tunes, to any chance pressure on its keys. Let us carefully bear this second thing common to all dreams in mind, even though we may not have understood it.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3192

Are there any other things common to them? I cannot discover any; I can see nothing anywhere but differences, and differences in all kinds of ways: in their apparent duration, as well as in their clarity, in the amount of affect accompanying them, in the possibility of retaining them, and so on. This variety is not in fact what we might expect to find in a mere defensive reaction to a stimulus, something mechanically imposed, an empty thing, like the twitchings of St. Vitus’s dance. As regards the dimensions of dreams, some are very short and comprise only a single image or a few, a single thought, or even a single word; others are uncommonly rich in their content, present whole novels and seem to last a long time. There are dreams which are as clear as experience, so clear that quite a time after waking we do not realize that they were dreams; and there are others which are indescribably dim, shadowy and blurred. Indeed in one and the same dream excessively definite portions may alternate with others of scarcely discernible vagueness. Dreams may be entirely sensible or at least coherent, witty even, or fantastically beautiful; others, again, are confused, feeble-minded as it were, absurd, often positively crazy. There are dreams that leave us quite cold and others in which affects of all kinds are manifest - pain to the point of tears, anxiety to the point of waking us up, astonishment, delight, and so on. Dreams are usually quickly forgotten after waking, or they may last through the day, remembered more and more dimly and incompletely till evening; others, again - for instance, childhood dreams - are so well preserved that after thirty years they remain in the memory like some fresh experience. Dreams may appear, like individuals, on a single occasion only and never again, or they may recur in the same person unchanged or with small divergences. In short, this fragment of mental activity during the night has an immense repertory at its disposal; it is capable, in fact, of all that the mind creates in daytime - yet it is never the same thing.

We might try to account for these many variations in dreams by supposing that they correspond to different intermediate stages between sleeping and waking, different degrees of in complete sleep. Yes, but if this were so, the value, content and clarity of a dream’s product - and the awareness, too, of its being a dream - would have to increase in dreams in which the mind was coming near to waking; and it would not be possible for a clear and rational fragment of dream to be immediately followed by one that was senseless and obscure and for this in turn to be followed by another good piece. The mind could certainly not alter the depth of its sleep so quickly as that. So this explanation is of no help: there can be no short cut out of the difficulty.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3193

We will for the moment leave on one side the ‘sense’ of dreams, and try to make our way to a better understanding of them from what we have found is common to them. We inferred from the relation of dreams to the state of sleep that dreams are the reaction to a stimulus which disturbs sleep. We have learnt that this too is the single point on which exact experimental psychology is able to come to our assistance: it brings us evidence that stimuli which impinge during sleep make their appearance in dreams. Many investigations of this kind have been made, most recently those by Mourly Vold which I have already mentioned; and each of us, no doubt, has been in a position to confirm this finding from personal observation. I will select a few of the earlier experiments. Maury had some experiments performed on himself. He was given some eau-de-cologne to smell in his sleep. He dreamt he was in Cairo, in Johann Maria Farina’s shop, and some further absurd adventures followed. Or, he was pinched lighdy on the neck; he dreamt of a mustard plaster being applied to him and of a doctor who had treated him as a child. Or again, a drop of water was dropped on his forehead; he was in Italy, was sweating violently and was drinking white Orvieto wine.

The striking thing about these experimentally produced dreams will perhaps be even more plainly visible in another series of stimulus-dreams. They are three dreams reported by an intelligent observer, Hildebrandt, all of them reactions to the ringing of an alarm-clock:

‘I dreamt, then, that one spring morning I was going for a walk and was strolling through the green fields till I came to a neighbouring village, where I saw the villagers in their best clothes, with hymn-books under their arms, flocking to the church. Of course! It was Sunday, and early morning service would soon be beginning. I decided I would attend it; but first, as I was rather hot from walking, I went into the church yard which surrounded the church, to cool down. While I was reading some of the tombstones, I heard the bell-ringer climbing up the church tower and at the top of it I now saw the little village bell which would presently give the signal for the beginning of devotions. For quite a while it hung there motionless, then it began to swing, and suddenly its peal began to ring out clear and piercing - so clear and piercing that it put an end to my sleep. But what was ringing was the alarm-clock.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3194

‘Here is another instance. It was a bright winter’s day and the streets were covered with deep snow. I had agreed to join a party for a sleigh-ride; but I had to wait a long time before news came that the sleigh was at the door. Now followed the preparations for getting in - the fur rug spread out, the foot muff put ready - and at last I was sitting in my seat. But even then the moment of departure was delayed till a pull at the reins gave the waiting horses the signal. Then off they started, and, with a violent shake, the sleigh bells broke into their familiar jingle - with such violence, in fact, that in a moment the cobweb of my dream was torn through. And once again it was only the shrill sound of the alarm-clock.

‘And now yet a third example. I saw a kitchenmaid, carrying several dozen plates piled on one another, walking along the passage to the dining-room. The column of china in her arms seemed to me in danger of losing its balance. "Take care," I exclaimed, "or you’ll drop the whole load." The inevitable rejoinder duly followed: she was quite accustomed to that kind of job, and so on. And meanwhile my anxious looks followed the advancing figure. Then - just as I expected - she stumbled at the threshold and the fragile crockery slipped and rattled and clattered in a hundred pieces on the floor. But the noise continued without ceasing, and soon it seemed no longer to be a clattering; it was turning into a ringing - and the ringing, as my waking self now became aware, was only the alarm-clock doing its duty.’

These are very nice dreams, entirely sensible and by no means as incoherent as dreams are usually apt to be. I am not objecting to them on that account. What they have in common is that in each case the situation ends in a noise, which, when the dreamer wakes up, is recognized as being made by the alarm-clock. So we see here how a dream is produced; but we learn something more than this. The dream does not recognize the alarm-clock - nor does it appear in the dream - but it replaces the noise of the alarm-clock by another; it interprets the stimulus which is bringing sleep to an end, but it interprets it differently each time. Why does it do that? There is no answer to this; it seems a matter of caprice. Understanding the dream would mean being able to say why this particular noise and none other was chosen for the interpretation of the stimulus from the alarm-clock. We may make an analogous objection to Maury’s experiments: we can see quite clearly that the impinging stimulus appears in the dream; but why it should take this particular form we are not told, and it does not seem by any means to follow from the nature of the stimulus that disturbed sleep. In Maury’s experiments, too, a quantity of other dream material usually appears in addition to the direct effect of the stimulus - for instance, the ‘absurd adventures’ in the eau-de-cologne dream -, which cannot be accounted for.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3195

And now consider that arousal dreams offer the best chance of establishing the influence of external sleep-disturbing stimuli. In most other cases it will become more difficult. We do not wake out of every dream, and if we remember a dream of the past night in the morning, how are we to discover a disturbing stimulus which may perhaps have made its impact on us during the night? I once succeeded in identifying a sound-stimulus of that kind retrospectively, but only, of course, owing to special circumstances. I woke up one morning in a mountain resort in the Tyrol, knowing I had had a dream that the Pope was dead. I could not explain the dream to myself; but later on my wife asked me if I had heard the fearful noise made by the pealing of bells towards morning which had broken out from all the churches and chapels. No, I had heard nothing, my sleep is more resistant than hers; but thanks to her information I understood my dream. How often may stimuli of this kind instigate dreams in a sleeper without his getting news of them afterwards? Perhaps very often, but perhaps not. If the stimulus can no longer be pointed to, we cannot be convinced of its existence. And in any case we have changed our view of the importance of external stimuli that disturb sleep since we learnt that they can explain only a small portion of the dream and not the whole dream-reaction.

There is no need to give up this theory entirely on that account. Moreover it is capable of extension. It is obviously a matter of indifference what it is that disturbs sleep or instigates the mind to dream. If it cannot invariably be a sensory stimulus coming from outside, there may instead be what is called a somatic stimulus, arising from the internal organs. This is a very plausible notion and agrees with the most popular view of the origin of dreams: ‘dreams come from indigestion’, people often say. Here too unluckily we must often suspect that there are cases when a somatic stimulus which has impinged on a sleeper during the night is no longer manifest after waking and can therefore not be proved to have occurred. But we shall not overlook the number of clear experiences which support the origin of dreams from somatic stimuli. In general, there can be no doubt that the condition of the internal organs can influence dreams. The relation of the content of some dreams to an over full bladder or to a state of excitation of the genital organs is too plain to be mistaken. These clear cases lead to others in which the content of the dreams give rise to a justifiable suspicion that there has been an impact from somatic stimuli because there is something in the content which can be regarded as a working over, a representation or an interpretation of such stimuli. Scherner (1861), who made researches into dreams, argued particularly strongly in favour of the derivation of dreams from organic stimuli and brought forward some good examples of it. For instance, in one dream he saw ‘two rows of pretty boys with fair hair and delicate complexions facing one another in pugnacious array, making an onset and attacking one another, and then drawing back and taking up their old position again, and then starting the whole business once more.’ His interpretation of these two rows of boys as teeth is plausible in itself and seems fully confirmed when we learn that after this scene the dreamer ‘pulled a long tooth out of his jaw.’ Similarly, the interpretation of ‘long, narrow, winding passages’ as derived from an intestinal stimulus seems valid, and confirms the assertion by Scherner that dreams seek above all to represent the organ that sends out the stimulus by objects resembling it.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3196

Thus we must be prepared to admit that internal stimuli can play the same part in dreams as external ones. Any estimate of their importance is unfortunately open to the same objections. In a large number of cases an interpretation pointing to a somatic stimulus is uncertain or unprovable. Not all dreams, but only a certain number of them give rise to a suspicion that internal organic stimuli had a share in their origin. And lastly, internal somatic stimuli are as little able as external sensory stimuli to explain more of a dream than what corresponds in it to a direct reaction to the stimulus. Where the rest of the dream comes from remains obscure.

Let us notice, however, one peculiarity of dream-life which comes to light in this study of the effects of stimuli. Dreams do not simply reproduce the stimulus; they work it over, they make allusions to it, they include it in some context, they replace it by something else. This is a side of the dream-work which is bound to interest us since it may perhaps bring us nearer to the essence of dreams. When a person constructs something as a result of a stimulus, the stimulus need not on that account exhaust the whole of the work. Shakespeare’s Macbeth, for instance, was a pièce d’occasion composed to celebrate the accession of the king who first united the crowns of the three kingdoms. But does this immediate historical occasion cover the content of the tragedy? Does it explain its greatnesses and its enigmas? It may be that the external and internal stimuli, too, impinging on the sleeper, are only the instigators of the dream and will accordingly betray nothing to us of its essence.

The second thing that is common to dreams, their psychical peculiarity, is on the one hand hard to grasp and on the other offers us no starting-point for further enquiry. We experience things in dreams as a rule in visual forms. Can the stimuli throw any light on this? Is what we experience in fact the stimulus? But, if so, why is the experience visual, while it is only in the rarest cases that optical stimulation has instigated the dream? Or if we dream spoken words, can it be shown that during sleep a conversation, or some noise resembling one made its way into our ears? I venture to dismiss that possibility decisively.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3197

If we can get no further with what is common to dreams, let us see whether their differences can help us. Dreams are, of course, often senseless, confused and absurd; but there are also sensible, matter-of-fact, and reasonable ones. Let us enquire whether the latter, the sensible ones, can throw any light on the senseless ones. Here is the latest reasonable dream that I have had reported to me. It was dreamt by a young man: ‘I went for a walk along the Kärntnerstrasse and met Herr X. there and joined him for a time. Then I went into a restaurant. Two ladies and a gentleman came and sat at my table. I was annoyed at this to begin with and wouldn’t look at them. Then I did look and found that they were quite nice.’ The dreamer commented on this that on the evening before the dream he had in fact walked along the Kärntnerstrasse, which is the way he usually goes, and had met Herr X. there. The other part of the dream was not a direct recollection, and only had some similarity to an experience a considerable time earlier. Or here is another matter-of-fact dream, this time a lady’s: ‘Her husband asked her: "Don’t you think we ought to have the piano tuned?" And she replied: "It’s not worth while; the hammers need reconditioning in any case."' This dream repeated, without much alteration, a conversation which had taken place between her and her husband the day before the dream. What do we learn from these two reasonable dreams? Nothing except that they contain repetitions from daily life or things connected with it. That would already be something, if it could be said of dreams generally. But there is no question of that; it applies only to a minority, and in most dreams there is no sign of a connection with the day before, and no light is thrown by this on the senseless and absurd dreams. It only shows that we have come upon a new task. We not only want to know what a dream says, but, if it speaks clearly, as it does in these examples of ours, we also want to know why and for what purpose this familiar material, only recently experienced, has been repeated in the dream.

I think that, like me, you must be tired of pursuing enquiries like those we have so far been making. All one’s interest in a problem is evidently insufficient unless one knows as well of a path of approach that will lead to its solution. We have not yet found such a path. Experimental psychology has brought us nothing but some very valuable information on the significance of stimuli as instigators to dreaming. We have nothing to expect from philosophy except that it will once again haughtily point out to us the intellectual inferiority of the object of our study. Nor have we any wish to borrow anything from the occult sciences. History and popular opinion tell us that dreams have a sense and a meaning: that they look into the future - which is hard to accept and certainly incapable of proof. So our first effort leaves us completely at a loss.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3198

Unexpectedly, a hint reaches us from a direction in which we have not so far looked. Linguistic usage, which is no chance thing, but the precipitate of old discoveries, though, to be sure, it must not be employed incautiously - our language, then, is acquainted with things that bear the strange name of ‘day dreams’. Day-dreams are phantasies (products of the imagination); they are very general phenomena, observable, once more, in healthy as well as in sick people, and are easily accessible to study in our own mind. The most remarkable thing about these imaginative structures is that they have been given the name of ‘day-dreams’, for there is no trace in them of the two things that are common to dreams. Their relation to sleep is already contradicted by their name; and, as regards the second thing common to dreams, we do not experience or hallucinate anything in them but imagine something, we know that we are having a phantasy, we do not see but think. These day-dreams appear in the prepubertal period, often in the later part of childhood even; they persist until maturity is reached and are then either given up or maintained till the end of life. The content of these phantasies is dominated by a very transparent motive. They are scenes and events in which the subject’s egoistic needs of ambition and power or his erotic wishes and satisfaction. In young men the ambitious phantasies are the most prominent, in women, whose ambition is directed to success in love, the erotic ones. But in men, too, erotic needs are often enough present in the background: all their heroic deeds and successes seem only to aim at courting the admiration and favour of women. In other respects these day-dreams are of many different kinds and pass through changing vicissitudes. They are either, each one of them, dropped after a short time and replaced by a fresh one, or they are retained, spun out into long stories and adapted to the changes in the circumstances of the subject’s life. They go along with the times, so to speak, and receive a ‘date stamp’ which bears witness to the influence of the new situation. They are the raw material of poetic production, for the creative writer uses his day-dreams, with certain remodellings, disguises and omissions, to construct the situations which he introduces into his short stories, his novels or his plays. The hero of the day dreams is always the subject himself, either directly or by an obvious identification with someone else.

It may be that day-dreams bear their name on account of having the same relation to reality - in order to indicate that their content is to be looked on as no less unreal than that of dreams. But perhaps they share this name because of some psychical characteristic of dreams which is still unknown to us, one which we are in search of. It is also possible that we are being quite wrong in trying to make use of this similarity of name as something significant. Only later will it be possible to clear this up.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3199

LECTURE VI

THE PREMISSES AND TECHNIQUE OF INTERPRETATION

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - What we need, then, is a new path, a method which will enable us to make a start in the investigation of dreams. I will put a suggestion to you which presents itself. Let us take it as a premiss from this point onwards that dreams are not somatic but psychical phenomena. You know what that means, but what justifies our making the assumption? Nothing: but there is nothing either to prevent our making it. Here is the position: if dreams are somatic phenomena they are no concern of ours, they can only interest us on the assumption that they are mental phenomena. We will therefore work on the assumption that they really are, to see what comes of it. The outcome of our work will decide whether we are to hold to this assumption and whether we may then go on to treat it in turn as a proved finding. But what is it actually that we want to arrive at? What is our work aiming at? We want something that is sought for in all scientific work - to understand the phenomena, to establish a correlation between them and, in the latter end, if it is possible, to enlarge our power over them.

We proceed with our work, accordingly, on the supposition that dreams are psychical phenomena. In that case they are products and utterances of the dreamer’s, but utterances which tell us nothing, which we do not understand. Well, what do you do if I make an unintelligible utterance to you? You question me, is that not so? Why should we not do the same thing to the dreamer - question him as to what his dream means?

As you will remember, we found ourselves in this situation once before. It was while we were investigating certain parapraxes - a case of a slip of the tongue. Someone had said: ‘Then facts came to Vorschwein’ and we thereupon asked him - no, it was luckily not we but some other people who had no connection at all with psycho-analysis - these other people, then, asked him what he meant by this unintelligible remark. And he replied at once that he had intended to say ‘these facts were Schweinereien [disgusting]’, but had forced this intention back in favour of the milder version ‘then facts came to Vorschein [light]’. I pointed out to you at the time that this piece of information was the model for every psycho-analytic investigation, and you will understand now that psycho-analysis follows the technique of getting the people under examination so far as possible themselves to produce the solution of their riddles. Thus, too, it is the dreamer himself who should tell us what his dream means.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3200

But, as we know, things are not so simple with dreams. With parapraxes it worked all right in a number of cases; but then others came along in which the person who was questioned would say nothing, and even indignantly rejected the answer we proposed to him. With dreams cases of the first sort are entirely lacking; the dreamer always says he knows nothing. He cannot reject our interpretation as we have none to offer him. Are we to give up our attempt then? Since he knows nothing and we know nothing and a third person could know even less, there seems to be no prospect of finding out. If you feel inclined, then, give up the attempt! But if you feel otherwise, you can accompany me further. For I can assure you that it is quite possible, and highly probable indeed, that the dreamer does know what his dream means: only that he does not know that he knows it and for that reason thinks that he does not know it.

You will point out to me that I am once more introducing an assumption, the second already in this short argument, and that in doing so I am enormously reducing my procedure’s claim to credibility: ‘Subject to the premiss that dreams are psychical phenomena, and subject to the further premiss that there are mental things in a man which he knows without knowing that he knows them.’ and so on. If so, one has only to consider the internal improbability of each of these two premisses, and one can quietly divert one’s interest from any conclusions that may be based on them.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3201

I have not brought you here, Ladies and Gentlemen, to delude you or to conceal things from you. In my prospectus, it is true, I announced a course of ‘Elementary Lectures to Serve as an Introduction to Psycho-Analysis’, but what I had in mind was nothing in the nature of a presentation in usum Delphini,¹ which would give you a smooth account with all the difficulties carefully concealed, with the gaps filled in and the doubts glossed over, so that you might believe with an easy mind that you had learnt something new. No, for the very reason of your being beginners. I wanted to show you our science as it is, with its unevennesses and roughnesses, its demands and hesitations. For I know that it is the same in all sciences and cannot possibly be otherwise, especially in their beginnings. I know also that ordinarily instruction is at pains to start out by concealing such difficulties and incompletenesses from the learner. But that will not do for psycho-analysis. So I have in fact laid down two premisses, one within the other; and if anyone finds the whole thing too laborious and too insecure, or if anyone is accustomed to higher certainties and more elegant deductions, he need go no further with us. I think, however, that he should leave psychological problems entirely alone, for it is to be feared that in this quarter he will find impassable the precise and secure paths which he is prepared to follow. And, for a science which has something to offer, there is no necessity to sue for a hearing and for followers. Its findings are bound to canvass on its behalf and it can wait until these have compelled attention to it.

But for those who would like to persist in the subject, I can point out that my two assumptions are not on a par. The first, that dreams are psychical phenomena, is the premiss which we seek to prove by the outcome of our work; the second one has already been proved in another field, and I am merely venturing to bring it over from there to our own problems.

Where, then, in what field, can it be that proof has been found that there is knowledge of which the person concerned nevertheless knows nothing, as we are proposing to assume of dreamers? After all, this would be a strange, surprising fact and one which would alter our view of mental life and which would have no need to hide itself: a fact, incidentally, which cancels itself in its very naming and which nevertheless claims to be something real - a contradiction in terms. Well, it does not hide itself. It is not its fault if people know nothing about it of do not pay enough attention to it. Any more than we are to blame because judgement is passed on all these psychological problems by people who have kept at a distance from all the observations and experiences which are decisive on the matter.

¹ [‘For the use of the Dauphin’ - an edition of the Classics prepared for his son by order of Louis XIV: ‘bowdlerized’.]

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3202

The proof was found in the field of hypnotic phenomena. When, in 1889, I took part in the extraordinarily impressive demonstrations by Liébeault and Bernheim at Nancy, I witnessed the following experiment among others. If a man was put into a state of somnambulism, was made to experience all kinds of things in a hallucinatory manner, and was then woken up, he appeared at first to know nothing of what had happened during his hypnotic sleep. Bernheim then asked him straight out to report what had happened to him under hypnosis. The man maintained that he could remember nothing. But Bernheim held out against this, brought urgent pressure to bear on him, insisted that he knew it and must remember it. And, lo and behold! the man grew uncertain, began to reflect, and recalled in a shadowy way one of the experiences that had been suggested to him, and then another piece, and the memory be came clearer and clearer and more and more complete, and finally came to light without a break. Since, however, he knew afterwards what had happened and had learnt nothing about it from anyone else in the interval, we are justified in concluding that he had known it earlier as well. It was merely inaccessible to him; he did not know that he knew it and thought he did not know it. That is to say, the position was exactly the same as what we suspected in our dreamer.

I hope you will be surprised that this fact has been established and will ask me: ‘Why did you omit to bring this proof forward earlier, in connection with the parapraxes, when we came to the point of attributing to a man who had made a slip of the tongue an intention to say things of which he knew nothing and which he denied? If a person thinks he knows nothing of experiences the memory of which he nevertheless has within him, it is no longer so improbable that he knows nothing of other mental processes within him. This argument would certainly have impressed us, and helped us to understand parapraxes.’ Of course I could have brought it forward then, but I reserved it for another place, where it was more needed. The parapraxes explained themselves in part, and in part left us with a suggestion that, in order to preserve the continuity of the phenomena concerned, it would be wise to assume the existence of mental processes of which the subject knows nothing. In the case of dreams we are compelled to bring in explanations from elsewhere and moreover I expect that in their case you will find it easier to accept my carrying over of the explanations from hypnosis. The state in which a parapraxis occurs is bound to strike you as being the normal one; it has no similarity with the hypnotic state. On the other hand there an obvious kinship between the hypnotic state and the state of sleep, which is a necessary condition of dreaming. Hypnosis, indeed, is described as an artificial sleep. We tell the person we are hypnotizing to sleep, and the suggestions we make are comparable to the dreams of natural sleep. The psychical situations in the two cases are really analogous. In natural sleep we withdraw our interest from the whole external world; and in hypnotic sleep we also withdraw it from the whole world, but with the single exception of the person who has hypnotized us and with whom we remain in rapport. Incidentally, the sleep of a nursing mother, who remains in rapport with her child and can be woken only by him, is a normal counterpart of hypnotic sleep. So it scarcely seems a very bold venture to transpose a situation from hypnosis to natural sleep. The assumption that in a dreamer too a knowledge about his dreams is present, though it is inaccessible to him so that he himself does not believe it, is not something entirely out of the blue. It should be noticed, moreover, that a third line of approach to the study of dreams is opened at this point: from the stimuli which disturb sleep, from day-dreams, and now in addition from the suggested dreams of the hypnotic state.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3203

We may now go back to our task with increased confidence perhaps. It is very probable, then, that the dreamer knows about his dream; the only question is how to make it possible for him to discover his knowledge and communicate it to us. We do not require him to tell us straight away the sense of his dream, but he will be able to find its origin, the circle of thoughts and interests from which it sprang. You will recall that in the case of the parapraxis the man was asked how he had arrived at the wrong word ‘Vorschwein’ and the first thing that occurred to him gave us the explanation. Our technique with dreams, then, is a very simple one, copied from this example. We shall once more ask the dreamer how he arrived at the dream, and once more his first remark is to be looked on as an explanation. Thus we disregard the distinction between his thinking or not thinking that he knows something, and we treat both cases as one and the same.

This technique is certainly very simple, but I fear it will rouse your liveliest opposition. You will say: ‘A fresh assumption! the third! And the most unlikely of all! If I ask the dreamer what occurs to him in connection with the dream, is precisely the first thing that occurs to him going to bring the explanation we are hoping for? But nothing at all may occur to him, or heaven knows what may occur to him. I cannot see what an expectation of that kind is based on. That is really showing too much trust in Providence at a point where rather more exercise of the critical faculty would be appropriate. Besides, a dream is not a single wrong word; it consists of a number of elements. So which association are we to take up?’

You are correct on all your minor points. A dream differs from a slip of the tongue, among other things, in the multiplicity of its elements. Our technique must take this into account. I therefore suggest to you that we should divide the dream-into its elements and start a separate enquiry into each element; if we do this, the analogy with a slip of the tongue is re-established. You are also right in thinking that when the dreamer is questioned about the separate elements of the dream he may reply that nothing occurs to him. There are some instances in which we let this reply pass, and you will later hear which these are; strangely enough, they are instances in which definite ideas may occur to us ourselves. But in general if the dreamer asserts that nothing occurs to him we contradict him; we bring urgent pressure to bear on him, we insist that something must occur to him - and we turn out to be right. He will produce an idea - some idea, it is a matter of indifference to us which. He will give us certain pieces of information, which may be described as ‘historical’, with particular ease. He may say: ‘That’s something that happened yesterday’ (as was the case in our two ‘matter-of-fact’ dreams), or: ‘That reminds me of something that happened a short time ago’ - and we shall discover in this way that dreams are connected with impressions of the last day or two much more often than we thought to begin with. And finally he will also recall, starting from the dream, events from further back and even perhaps from the far distant past.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3204

But on your main point you are wrong. If you think it is arbitrary to assume that the first thing that occurs to the dreamer is bound to bring what we are looking for or to lead us to it, if you think that what occurs to him might be anything in the world and might have no connection with what we are looking for, and that it is only exhibiting my trust in Providence if I expect something different - then you are making a great mistake. Once before I ventured to tell you that you nourish a deeply rooted faith in undetermined psychical events and in free will, but that this is quite unscientific and must yield to the demand of a determinism whose rule extends over mental life. I beg you to respect it as a fact that that is what occurred to the man when he was questioned and nothing else. But I am not opposing one faith with another. It can be proved that the idea produced by the man was not arbitrary nor indeterminable nor unconnected with what we were looking for. Indeed, not long ago I learnt - without, I may say, attaching too much importance to the fact - that experimental psychology too had brought up evidence to that effect.

In view of the importance of the matter, I will ask for your special attention. If I ask someone to tell me what occurs to him in response to a particular element of a dream, I am asking him to surrender himself to free association while keeping an idea in mind as a starting point. This calls for a special attitude of the attention which is quite different from reflection and which excludes reflection. Some people achieve this attitude with ease; others show an incredibly high degree of clumsiness when they attempt it. There is, however, a higher degree of freedom of association: that is to say, I may drop the insistence on keeping an initial idea in mind and only lay down the sort or kind of association I want - I may, for instance, require the experimenter to allow a proper name or a number to occur to him freely. What then occurs to him would presumably be even more arbitrary and more indeterminable than with our own technique. It can be shown, however, that it is always strictly determined by important internal attitudes of mind which are not known to us at the moment at which they operate - which are as little known to us as the disturbing purposes of parapraxes and the provoking ones of chance actions.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3205

I and many others after me have repeatedly made such experiments with names and numbers thought of at random, and a few of these have been published. Here the procedure is to produce a series of associations to the name which has emerged; these latter associations are accordingly no longer completely free but have a link, like the associations to the elements of dreams. One continues doing this until one finds the impulse exhausted. But by then light will have been thrown both on the motive and the meaning of the random choice of the name. These experiments always lead to the same result; reports on them often cover a wealth of material and call for extensive expositions. The associations to numbers chosen at random are perhaps the most convincing; they run off so quickly and proceed with such incredible certainty to a hidden goal that the effect is really staggering. I will give you only one example of an analysis like this of a name, since dealing with it calls for a conveniently small amount of material.

In the course of treating a young man I had occasion to discuss this topic, and mentioned the thesis that, in spite of an apparently arbitrary choice, it is impossible to think of a name at random which does not turn out to be closely determined by the immediate circumstances, the characteristics of the subject of the experiment and his situation at the moment. Since he was sceptical, I suggested that he should make an experiment of the kind himself on the spot. I knew that he carried on particularly numerous relationships of every kind with married women and girls, so I thought he would have a specially large choice open to him if it were to be a woman’s name that he was asked to choose. He agreed to this. To my astonishment, or rather, perhaps, to his, no avalanche of women’s names broke over me; he remained silent for a moment and then admitted that only a single name had come into his head and none other besides: ‘Albine’. - How curious! But what does that name mean to you? How many ‘Albines’ do you know? - Strange to say, he knew no one called ‘Albine’ and nothing further occurred to him in response to the name. So it might be thought that the analysis had failed. But not at all: it was already complete, and no further associations were needed. The man had an unusually fair complexion and in conversation during the treatment I had often jokingly called him an albino. We were engaged at the time in determining the feminine part of his constitution. So it was he himself who was this ‘Albine’, the woman who was the most interesting to him at the moment.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3206

In the same way tunes that come into one’s head without warning turn out to be determined by and to belong to a train of thought which has a right to occupy one’s mind though without one’s being aware of its activity. It is easy to show then that the relation to the tune is based on its text or its origin. But I must be careful not to extend this assertion to really musical people, of whom, as it happens, I have had no experience. It may be that for such people the musical content of the tune is what decides its emergence. The earlier case is certainly the commoner one. I know of a young man, for instance, who was positively persecuted for a time by the tune (incidentally a charming one) of Paris’s song in La belle Hélène, till his analysis drew his attention to a contemporary competition in his interest between an ‘Ida’ and a ‘Helen’.

If then things that occur to one quite freely are determined in this way and form parts of a connected whole, we shall no doubt be justified in concluding that things that occur to one with a single link - namely their link with the idea which serves as their starting-point - cannot be any less determined. Investigation shows, in fact, that, apart from the link we have given them with the initial idea, they are found to be dependent as well on groups of strongly emotional thoughts and interests, ‘complexes’, whose participation is not known at the moment - that is to say, is unconscious.

The occurrence of ideas with links of this kind has been the subject of very instructive experimental researches, which have played a notable part in the history of psycho-analysis. The school of Wundt had introduced what are known as association-experiments, in which a stimulus word is called out to the subject and he has the task of replying to it as quickly as possible with any reaction that occurs to him. It is then possible to study the interval that passes between the stimulus and the reaction, the nature of the answer given as a reaction, possible errors when the same experiment is repeated later, and so on. The Zurich school, led by Bleuler and Jung, found the explanation of the reactions that followed in the association-experiment by getting the subjects to throw light on their reactions by means of subsequent associations, if those reactions had shown striking features. It then turned out that these striking reactions were determined in the most definite fashion by the subject’s complexes. In this manner Bleuler and Jung built the first bridge from experimental psychology to psycho-analysis.

Having learnt thus much, you will be able to say: ‘We acknowledge now that thoughts that occur to one freely are determined and not arbitrary as we supposed. We admit that this is also true of thoughts occurring in response to the elements of dreams. But that is not what we are concerned with. You assert that what occurs to the dreamer in response to the dream-element will be determined by the psychical background (unknown to us) of that particular element. This does not seem to us to be proved. We quite expect that what occurs to the dreamer in response to the dream-element will turn out to be determined by one of the dreamer’s complexes, but what good does that do us? This does not lead us to an understanding of dreams but, like the association-experiment, to a knowledge of these so-called complexes. But what have they got to do with dreams?’

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3207

You are right, but you are overlooking one factor. Moreover it is precisely the factor on account of which I did not choose the association-experiment as the starting-point of this exposition. In that experiment the single determinant of the reaction - that is, the stimulus-word - is arbitrarily chosen by us. The reaction is in that case an intermediary between the stimulus-word and the complex which has been aroused in the subject. In dreams the stimulus-word is replaced by something that is itself derived from the dreamer’s mental life, from sources unknown to him, and may therefore very easily itself be a ‘derivative of a complex’. It is therefore not precisely fantastic to suppose that the further associations linked to the dream-elements will be determined by the same complex as that of the element itself and will lead to its discovery.

Let me show you from another instance that the facts are as we expect. The forgetting of proper names is actually an excellent model of what happens in dream-analysis; the difference is only that events that are shared between two people in dream-analysis are combined in a single person in the parapraxis. If I forget a name temporarily, I nevertheless feel in myself a certainty that I know it - a certainty which in the case of the dreamer we only arrived at by the round-about path of the Bernheim experiment. The name which I have forgotten but which I know is, however, not accessible to me. Experience soon teaches me that thinking about it, with however much effort, is of no help. But in place of the forgotten name I can always call up one or several substitute names. It is only after a substitute name of this kind has occurred to me spontaneously that the conformity of this situation with that of dream-interpretation becomes obvious. Like this substitute name, the dream-element is not the right thing, but only takes the place of something else - of the genuine thing which I do not know and which I am to discover by means of the dream-analysis. The difference is once more only that in the case of forgetting the name, I recognize the substitute unhesitatingly as something ungenuine, whereas we had to acquire this view laboriously in the case of the dream-element. Now in the case of forgetting a name there is also a method by which we can start from the substitute and arrive at the unconscious genuine thing, the forgotten name. If I direct my attention to the substitute names and allow further ideas in response to them to occur to me, I arrive by shorter or longer detours at the forgotten name, and I find when this happens that both the spontaneous substitute name and the ones that I have called up are connected with the forgotten one and were determined by it.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3208

I will describe an analysis of this kind to you. I noticed one day that I could not recall the name of the small country on the Riviera, of which Monte Carlo is the chief town. It was very tiresome, but so it was. I summoned up all that I knew about that country. I thought of Prince Albert of the House of Lusignan, of his marriages, of his devotion to deep-sea researches, and everything else I could bring together, but it was of no avail. So I gave up reflection and allowed substitute names to occur to me instead of the lost one. They came rapidly: Monte Carlo itself, then Piedmont, Albania, Montevideo, Colico. Of this series I was struck first by Albania, which was at once replaced by Montenegro, no doubt because of the contrast between white and black.¹ I then saw that four of these substitute names contained the same syllable ‘mon’, then suddenly I had the forgotten word and exclaimed aloud: ‘Monaco!’ So the substitute names had in fact arisen from the forgotten one: the first four came from its first syllable while the last reproduced its syllabic structure and its whole last syllable. Moreover I was able to discover quite easily what it was that had temporarily deprived me of the name. Monaco is also the Italian name for Munich; and it was that town which exerted the inhibitory influence.

No doubt this example is a good one, but it is too simple. In other cases it would have been necessary to call up a longer string of ideas in response to the first substitute name, and then the analogy with dream-analysis would have been clearer. I have had experiences of that sort too. On one occasion a stranger had invited me to drink some Italian wine with him, but when we were in the inn it turned out that he had forgotten the name of the wine which he intended to order because of his very agreeable recollections of it. From a quantity of substitute ideas of different kinds which came into his head in place of the forgotten name, I was able to infer that thoughts about someone called Hedwig had made him forget the name. And he not only confirmed the fact that he had first tasted this wine when he was with someone of that name, but with the help of this discovery he recalled the name of the wine. He was happily married at the present time and this Hedwig belonged to earlier days which he had no wish to remember.

But if it is possible in the case of forgetting a name, it must also be possible in interpreting dreams to proceed from the substitute along the chain of associations attached to it and so to obtain access to the genuine thing which is being held back. From the example of the forgotten name we may conclude that the associations to the dream-element will be determined both by the dream-element and also by the unconscious genuine thing behind it. In this way, then, we seem to have produced some justification of our technique.

¹ [‘Albus’ the Latin for ‘white’, and ‘negro’ the Spanish or Portuguese for ‘black’.]

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3209

LECTURE VII

THE MANIFEST CONTENT OF DREAMS AND THE LATENT DREAM-THOUGHTS

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - As you see, our study of parapraxes has not been unprofitable. Thanks to our labours over them we have, subject to the premisses I have explained to you, achieved two things: a conception of the nature of dream-elements and a technique for interpreting dreams. The conception of dream-elements tells us that they are ungenuine things, substitutes for something else that is unknown to the dreamer (like the purpose of a parapraxis), substitutes for something the knowledge of which is present in the dreamer but which is inaccessible to him. We are in hopes that it will be possible to carry over the same conception to whole dreams, which are made up of such elements. Our technique lies in employing free association to these elements in order to bring about the emergence of other substitutive structures, which will enable us to arrive at what is concealed from view.

I now propose that we should introduce a change into our nomenclature which will give us more freedom of movement. Instead of speaking of ‘concealed’, ‘inaccessible’, or ‘ungenuine’, let us adopt the correct description and say ‘inaccessible to the dreamer’s consciousness’ or ‘unconscious’. I mean nothing else by this than what may be suggested to you when you think of a word that has escaped you or the disturbing purpose in a parapraxis - that is to say, I mean nothing else than ‘unconscious at the moment’. In contrast to this, we can of course speak of the dream-elements themselves, and the substitutive ideas that have been newly arrived at from them by association, as ‘conscious’. This nomenclature so far involves no theoretical construction. No objection can be made to using the word ‘unconscious’ as an apt and easily understandable description.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3210

If we carry over our conception of the separate elements to the whole dream, it follows that the dream as a whole is a distorted substitute for something else, something unconscious, and that the task of interpreting a dream is to discover this unconscious material. From this, however, there at once follow three important rules, which we must obey during the work of interpreting dreams.

(1) We must not concern ourselves with what the dream appears to tell us, whether it is intelligible or absurd, clear or confused, since it cannot possibly be the unconscious material we are in search of. (An obvious limitation to this rule will force itself on our notice later.) (2) We must restrict our work to calling up the substitutive ideas for each element, we must not reflect about them, or consider whether they contain anything relevant, and we must not trouble ourselves with how far they diverge from the dream-element. (3) We must wait till the concealed unconscious material we are in search of emerges of its own accord, exactly as the forgotten word ‘Monaco’ did in the experiment I have described.

Now, too, we can understand to what extent it is a matter of indifference how much or how little the dream is remembered and, above all, how accurately or how uncertainly. For the remembered dream is not the genuine material but a distorted substitute for it, which should assist us, by calling up other substitutive images, to come nearer to the genuine material, to make what is unconscious in the dream conscious. If our memory has been inaccurate, therefore, it has merely made a further distortion of this substitute - a distortion, moreover, which cannot have been without a reason.

The work of interpreting can be performed on one’s own dreams just as on other people’s. In fact one learns more from one’s own: the process carries more conviction. If, then, we make the attempt, we notice that something is opposing our work. It is true that ideas occur to us, but we do not allow all of them to count; testing and selecting influences make themselves felt. In the case of one idea we may say to ourselves: ‘No, this is not relevant, it does not belong here’; in the case of another: ‘this is too senseless’ and of a third: ‘this is totally unimportant’. And we can further observe how with objections of this sort we may smother ideas and finally expel them altogether, even before they have become quite clear. Thus on the one hand we keep too close to the idea which was our starting point, the dream-element itself; and on the other hand we interfere with the outcome of the free associations by making a selection. If we are not by ourselves while interpreting the dream, if we get someone else to interpret it, we become very clearly aware of yet another motive which we employ in making this illicit selection, for sometimes we say to ourselves: ‘No, this idea is too disagreeable; I will not or cannot report it.’

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3211

These objections are obviously a threat to the success of our work. We must guard against them, and in our own case we do so by firmly resolving not to give way to them. If we are analysing someone else’s dream, we do so by laying it down as an inviolable rule that he must not hold back any idea from us, even if it gives rise to one of the four objections - of being too unimportant or too senseless or of being irrelevant or too distressing to be reported. The dreamer promises to obey the rule, and we may be annoyed afterwards to find how badly he keeps his promise when the occasion arises. We may explain this to ourselves to begin with by supposing that, in spite of our authoritative assurance, he has not yet realized the justification for free association, and we may perhaps have the notion of first convincing him theoretically by giving him books to read or by sending him to lectures which may convert him into a supporter of our views on free association. But we shall be held back from blunders like this when we consider that in the case of ourselves, as to the strength of whose convictions we can, after all, hardly be in doubt, the same objections arise to certain ideas and are only set aside subsequently - by a court of appeal, as it were.

Instead of being annoyed by the dreamer’s disobedience, we may take advantage of these experiences by learning something new from them - something which is all the more important the less we are expecting it. We perceive that the work of interpreting dreams is carried out in the face of a resistance, which opposes it and of which the critical objections are manifestations. This resistance is independent of the dreamer’s theoretical conviction. We learn still more, indeed. We discover that a critical objection of this kind never turns out to be justified. On the contrary, the ideas which people try to suppress in this way turn out invariably to be the most important ones and those which are decisive in our search for the unconscious material. It amounts, in fact, to a special distinguishing mark, if an idea is accompanied by an objection like this.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3212

This resistance is something entirely new: a phenomenon which we have come upon in connection with our premisses, but one which was not included among them. The appearance of this new factor in our reckoning comes to us as a not altogether pleasant surprise. We suspect at once that it is not going to make our work any easier. It might mislead us into abandoning our whole concern with dreams: something so unimportant as a dream and, on top of that, all these difficulties instead of a simple straightforward technique! But, on the other hand, the difficulties might act precisely as a stimulus and make us suspect that the work will be worth the trouble. We regularly come up against resistance when we try to make our way forward from the substitute which is the dream-element to the unconscious material hidden behind it. So we may conclude that there must be something of importance concealed behind the substitute. Otherwise, what is the point of the difficulties that are trying to keep the concealment going? If a child refuses to open his clenched fist to show what he has in it, we may feel sure that it is something wrong - something he ought not to have.

The moment we introduce the dynamic idea of a resistance into the facts of the case, we must simultaneously reflect that this factor is something variable in quantity. There may be greater and smaller resistances, and we are prepared to find these differences showing themselves during our work as well. We may perhaps be able to link with this another experience we also meet with during the work of interpreting dreams: sometimes it requires only a single response, or no more than a few, to lead us from a dream-element to the unconscious material behind it, while on other occasions long chains of associations and the overcoming of many critical objections are required for bringing this about. We shall conclude that these differences relate to the changing magnitude of the resistance, and we shall probably turn out to be right. If the resistance is small, the substitute cannot be far distant from the unconscious material; but a greater resistance means that the unconscious material will be greatly distorted and that the path will be a long one from the substitute back to the unconscious material.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3213

And now perhaps it is time to take a dream and try our technique upon it and see whether our expectations are confirmed. Yes, but what dream are we to choose for the purpose: You cannot imagine how hard I find it to decide; nor can I yet make the nature of my difficulties plain to you. There must obviously be dreams which have on the whole been subjected to only a little distortion, and the best plan would be to begin with them. But what dreams have been least distorted? The ones that are intelligible and not confused, two examples of which I have already put before you? That would be leading us quite astray. Investigation shows that such dreams have been subjected to an extraordinarily high degree of distortion. If, however, I were to disregard particular requirements and were to select a dream at haphazard, you would probably be greatly disappointed. We might have to notice or record such a profusion of ideas in response to the separate dream-elements that we should be unable to make head or tail of the work. If we write down a dream and then make a note of all the ideas that emerge in response to it, these may prove to be many times longer than the text of the dream. The best plan would therefore seem to be to choose out a number of short dreams for analysis, each of which will at least tell us something or confirm some point. So we will make up our minds to take that course, unless experience may perhaps show us where we can really find dreams that have been only slightly distorted.

I can however think of something else that will make things easier for us - something, moreover, which lies along our path. Instead of starting on the interpretation of whole dreams, we will restrict ourselves to a few dream-elements, and we will trace out in a number of examples how these can be explained by applying our technique to them.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3214

(a) A lady reported that she very often dreamt when she was a child that God wore a paper cocked-hat on his head. What can you make of that without the dreamer’s help? It sounds completely nonsensical. But it ceases to be nonsense when we hear from the lady that she used to have a hat of that sort put on her head at meals when she was a child, because she could never resist taking furtive glances at her brothers’ and sisters’ plates to see whether they had been given larger helpings than she had. So the hat was intended to act like a pair of blinkers. This, incidentally, was a piece of historical information and was given without any difficulty. The interpretation of this element and at the same time of the whole short dream was easily made with the help of a further idea that occurred to the dreamer: ‘As I had heard that God was omniscient and saw everything’, she said, ‘the dream can only mean that I knew everything and saw everything, even though they tried to prevent me.’ Perhaps this example is too simple.

(b) A sceptical woman patient had a longish dream in the course of which some people told her about my book on jokes and praised it highly. Something came in then about a ‘a ‘channel’, perhaps it was another book that mentioned a channel, or something else about a channel . . . she didn’t know . . . it was all so indistinct.

No doubt you will be inclined to expect that the element ‘channel’, since it was so indistinct, would be inaccessible to interpretation. You are right in suspecting a difficulty; but the difficulty did not arise from the indistinctness: both the difficulty and the indistinctness arose from another cause. Nothing occurred to the dreamer in connection with ‘channel’, and I could of course throw no light on it. A little later - it was the next day, in point of fact - she told me that she had thought of something that might have something to do with it. It was a joke, too, - a joke she had heard. On the steamer between Dover and Calais a well-known author fell into conversation with an Englishman. The latter had occasion to quote the phrase: ‘Du sublime au ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas. [It is only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous.]’ ‘Yes,’ replied the author, ‘le Pas de Calais’ - meaning that he thought France sublime and England ridiculous. But the Pas de Calais is a channel - the English Channel. You will ask whether I think this had anything to do with the dream. Certainly I think so; and it provides the solution of the puzzling element of the dream. Can you doubt that this joke was already present before the dream occurred, as the unconscious thought behind the element ‘channel’? Can you suppose that it was introduced as a subsequent invention? The association betrayed the scepticism which lay concealed behind the patient’s ostensible admiration; and her resistance against revealing this was no doubt the common cause both of her delay in producing the association and of the indistinctness of the dream-element concerned. Consider the relation of the dream-element to its unconscious background: it was, as it were, a fragment of the background, an allusion to it, but it was made quite incomprehensible by being isolated.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3215

(c) As part of a longish dream a patient dreamt that several members of his family were sitting round a table of peculiar shape, etc. It occurred to him in connection with the table that he had seen a piece of furniture of the kind when he was on a visit to a particular family. His thoughts then went on to say that there was a peculiar relationship between the father and son in this family; and he soon added that the same thing was true of the relationship between himself and his own father. So the table had been taken into the dream in order to point out this parallel.

This dreamer had been long familiar with the requirement of dream-interpretation. Another person might perhaps have taken objection to such a trivial detail as the shape of a table being made the subject of investigation. But in fact we regard nothing in a dream as accidental or indifferent, and we expect to obtain information precisely from the explanation of such trivial and pointless details. You may perhaps also feel surprised that the thought that ‘the same thing was true of us and of them’ should have been expressed by, in particular, the choice of a table [Tisch]. But this too becomes clear when you learn that the name of the family in question was Tischler [literally, ‘carpenter’]. By making his relations sit at this Tisch, he was saying that they too were Tischlers. Incidentally, you will notice how inevitably one is led into being indiscreet when one reports these dream-interpretations. And you will guess that this is one of the difficulties I have hinted at over the choice of examples. I could easily have taken another example in place of this one, but I should probably merely have avoided this indiscretion at the price of committing another.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3216

The moment seems to me to have arrived for introducing two terms, which we could have made use of long ago. We will describe what the dream actually tells us as the manifest dream-content, and the concealed material, which we hope to reach by pursuing the ideas that occur to the dreamer, as the latent dream-thoughts. Thus we are here considering the relations between the manifest content of the dream and the latent dream-thoughts as shown in these examples. These relations may be of very many different kinds. In examples (a) and (b) the manifest element is also a constituent of the latent thoughts, though only a small fragment of them. A small piece of the large and complicated psychical structure of unconscious dream-thoughts has made its way into the manifest dream as well - a fragment of them, or, in other cases, an allusion to them, a caption, as it were, or an abbreviation in telegraphic style. It is the business of the work of interpretation to complete these fragments or this allusion into a whole - which was achieved particularly nicely in the case of example (b). Thus one form of the distortion which constitutes the dream-work is replacement by a fragment or an allusion. In example (c) another kind of relation is to be observed in addition; and we shall find this expressed in a purer and clearer form in the examples which follow.

(d) The dreamer was pulling a lady (a particular one, of his acquaintance) out from behind a bed. He himself found the meaning of this dream-element from the first idea that occurred to him. It meant that he was giving this lady preference.¹

¹ [This example, like the next, depends on a purely verbal point: the resemblance between the German words for ‘pulling out’ (hervor ziehen) and ‘preferring’ (vorziehen).]

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3217

(e) Another man dreamt that his brother was in a box [Kasten]. In his first response ‘Kasten’ was replaced by ‘Schrank [cupboard]’, and the second gave the interpretation: his brother was restricting himself [‘schränkt sich ein’].

(f) The dreamer climbed to the top of a mountain, which commanded an unusually extensive view. This sounds quite rational and you might suppose that there is nothing to interpret in it and that all we have to do is to enquire what memory gave rise to the dream and the reason for its being stirred up. But you would be wrong. It turned out that this dream stood in need of interpreting just as much as any other, more confused one. For none of his own mountain climbs occurred to the dreamer, but he thought of the fact that an acquaintance of his was the editor of a ‘Survey’, dealing with our relations with the most remote parts of the earth. Thus the latent dream-thought was an identification of the dreamer with the ‘surveyor’,

Here we have a new type of relation between the manifest and latent dream-elements. The former is not so much a distortion of the latter as a representation of it, a plastic, concrete, portrayal of it, taking its start from the wording. But precisely on that account it is once more a distortion, for we have long since forgotten from what concrete image the word originated and consequently fail to recognize it when it is replaced by the image. When you consider that the manifest dream is made up predominantly of visual images and more rarely of thoughts and words, you can imagine what importance attaches to this kind of relation in the construction of dreams. You will see, too, that in this way it becomes possible in regard to a large number of abstract thoughts to create pictures to act as substitutes for them in the manifest dream while at the same time serving the purpose of concealment. This is the technique of the familiar picture-puzzles. Why it is that these representations have an appearance of being jokes is a special problem into which we need not enter here.

There is a fourth kind of relation between the manifest and latent elements, which I must continue to hold back from you until we come upon its key-word in considering technique. Even so I shall not have given you a full list; but it will serve our purpose.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3218

Do you feel bold enough now to venture upon the interpretation of a whole dream? Let us make the experiment, to see whether we are well enough equipped for the task. I shall of course not select one of the most obscure ones; nevertheless, it will be one that gives a well-marked picture of the attributes of a dream.

Very well then. A lady who, though she was still young, had been married for many years had the following dream: She was at the theatre with her husband. One side of the stalls was completely empty. Her husband had told her that Elisa L. and her fiancé had wanted to go too, but had only been able to get bad seats - three for 1 florin 50 kreuzers - and of course they could not take those. She thought it would not really have done any harm if they had.

The first thing the dreamer reported to us was that the precipitating cause of the dream was touched on in its manifest content. Her husband had in fact told her that Elise L., who was approximately her contemporary, had just become engaged. The dream was a reaction to this information. We know already that it is easy in the case of many dreams to point to a precipitating cause like this from the previous day, and that the dreamer is often able to trace this for us without any difficulty. The dreamer in the present case put similar information at our disposal for other elements of the manifest dream as well. - Where did the detail come from about one side of the stalls being empty? It was an allusion to a real event of the previous week. She had planned to go to a particular play and had therefore bought her tickets early - so early that she had had to pay a booking fee. When they got to the theatre it turned out that her anxiety was quite uncalled-for, since one side of the stalls was almost empty. It would have been early enough if she had bought the tickets on the actual day of the performance. Her husband had kept on teasing her for having been in too much of a hurry. - What was the origin of the 1 florin 50 kreuzers? It arose in quite another connection, which had nothing to do with the former one but also alluded to some information from the previous day. Her sister-in-law had been given a present of 150 florins by her husband and had been in a great hurry - the silly goose - to rush off to the jewellers’ and exchange the money for a piece of jewellery. - Where did the ‘three’ come from? She could think of nothing in connection with that, unless we counted the idea that her newly-engaged friend, Elise L., was only three months her junior, though she herself had been a married woman for nearly ten years. - And the absurd notion of taking three tickets for only two people? She had nothing to say to that, and refused to report any further ideas or information.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3219

But all the same, she had given us so much material in these few associations that it was possible to guess the latent dream-thoughts from them. We cannot help being struck by the fact that periods of time occur at several points in the information she gave us about the dream, and these provide a common factor between the different parts of the material. She took the theatre tickets too early, bought them over-hurriedly so that she had to pay more than was necessary; so too her sister-in-law had been in a hurry to take her money to the jewellers and buy some jewellery with it, as though otherwise she would miss it. If, in addition to the ‘too early’ and ‘in a hurry’ which we have stressed, we take into account the precipitating cause of the dream-the news that her friend, though only three months her junior, had nevertheless got an excellent husband - and the criticism of her sister-in-law expressed in the idea that it was absurd of her to be in such a hurry, then we find ourselves presented almost spontaneously with the following construction of the latent dream-thoughts, for which the manifest dream is a severely distorted substitute:

‘Really it was absurd of me to be in such a hurry to get married! I can see from Elise’s example that I could have got a husband later too.’ (Being in too great a hurry was represented by her own behaviour in buying the tickets and by her sister-in-laws in buying the jewellery. Going to the play appeared as a substitute forgetting married.) This would seem to be the main thought. We may perhaps proceed further, though with less certainty, since the analysis ought not to have been without the dreamer’s comments at these points: ‘And I could have got one a hundred times better with the money!’ (150 florins is a hundred times more than 1 florin 50.) If we were to put her dowry in place of the money, it would mean that her husband was bought with her dowry: the jewellery, and the bad tickets as well, would be substitutes for her husband. It would be still more satisfactory if the actual element ‘three tickets’ had something to do with a husband. But we have not got so far as that in our understanding of the dream. We have only discovered that the dream expresses the low value assigned by her to her own husband and her regret at having married so early.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3220

We shall, I fancy, be more surprised and confused than satisfied by the outcome of this first dream-interpretation. We have been given too much in one dose - more than we are yet able to cope with. We can already see that we shall not exhaust the lessons of this interpretation of a dream. Let us hasten to single out what we can recognize as established new discoveries.

In the first place, it is a remarkable thing that the main emphasis in the latent thoughts lies on the element of being in too great a hurry; nothing of the sort is to be found in the manifest dream. Without the analysis, we should have had no suspicion that that factor plays any part. It seems, therefore, to be possible for what is in fact the main thing, the centre of the unconscious thoughts, to be absent in the manifest dream. This means that the impression made by the whole dream must be fundamentally altered. In the second place, there is an absurd combination in the dream: three for 1 florin 50. We detected in the dream-thoughts the assertion that ‘it was absurd (to marry so early)'. Can it be doubted that this thought, ‘it was absurd’, is represented by the inclusion of an absurd element in the manifest dream? And in the third place, a glance of comparison shows us that the relation between the manifest and latent elements is no simple one; it is far from being the case that one manifest element always takes the place of one latent one. It is rather that there is a group-relation between the two layers, within which one manifest element can replace several latent ones or one latent element can be replaced by several manifest ones.

As regards the meaning of the dream and the dreamer’s attitude to it, we might point out much that is similarly surprising. She agreed to the interpretation indeed, but she was astonished at it. She was not aware that she assigned such a low value to her husband; nor did she know why she should set such a low value on him. So there is still much that is unintelligible about it. It really seems to me that we are not yet equipped for interpreting a dream and that we need first to be given some further instruction and preparation.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3221

LECTURE VIII

CHILDREN’S DREAMS

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - I am under the impression that we have advanced too quickly. Let us go back a little. Before we made our last attempt at overcoming the difficulty of distortion in dreams by the help of our technique, we were saying that our best plan would be to get round the difficulty by keeping to dreams in which there was no distortion or only a very little - if such dreams exist. This will once more mean a divergence from the historical development of our discoveries; for actually it was only after the technique of interpretation had been consistently applied and distorted dreams had been completely analysed that the existence of dreams that are free from distortion came to our notice.

The dreams we are in search of occur in children. They are short, clear, coherent, easy to understand and unambiguous; but they are nevertheless undoubtedly dreams. You must not suppose, however, that all children’s dreams are of this kind. Dream-distortion sets in very early in childhood, and dreams dreamt by children of between five and eight have been reported which bear all the characteristics of later ones. But if you limit yourselves to ages between the beginning of observable mental activity and the fourth or fifth year, you will come upon a number of dreams which possess the characteristics that can be described as ‘infantile’ and you will find a few of the same kind in later years of childhood. Indeed, under certain conditions even adults have dreams which are quite similar to the typically infantile ones.

From these children’s dreams we can draw conclusions with great ease and certainty on the essential nature of dreams in general, and we can hope that those conclusions will prove decisive and universally valid.

(1) No analysis, no application of any technique is necessary in order to understand these dreams. There is no need to question a child who tells us his dream. One has, however, to add a piece of information to it from the events of the child’s life. There is invariably some experience of the previous day which explains the dream to us. The dream is the reaction of the child’s mental life in his sleep to this experience of the previous day.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3222

We will take a few examples on which to base our further conclusions.

(a) A boy of 22 months was told to hand over a basket of cherries to someone as a birthday present. He was obviously very unwilling to do it, although he was promised that he should have a few of them for himself. Next morning he reported having dreamt: ‘Hermann eaten all the chewwies!’

(b) A girl of 3¼ years was taken across the lake for the first time. At the landing-stage she did not want to leave the boat and wept bitterly. The crossing had been too short for her. Next morning she announced: ‘Last night I went on the lake.’ We may safely add that this crossing had lasted longer.

(c) A boy of 5¼ years was taken on an excursion up the Echerntal near Hallstatt. He had been told that Hallstatt was at the foot of the Dachstein. He had shown great interest in this mountain. There was a fine view of it from where he was staying at Aussee, and the Simony Hut on it could be made out through a telescope. The child had often tried to see it through the telescope - with what success was not known. The excursion began in an atmosphere of cheerful expectation. Whenever a fresh mountain came into view the boy asked: ‘Is that the Dachstein?’ and he became more and more depressed the more often he was told it was not. Finally he fell completely silent and refused to go with the rest of the party up the short ascent to the waterfall, and it was thought that he must be overtired. But next morning he said with a radiant face: ‘Last night I dreamt we were at the Simony Hut.’ So that had been what he expected to do on the excursion. He gave no further details except something he had heard before: ‘You have to climb up steps for six hours.’

These three dreams will give us all the information we require.

(2) As we can see, these children’s dreams are not senseless. They are intelligible, completely valid mental acts. You will recall what I told you of the medical view of dreams and of the analogy with unmusical fingers wandering over the keys of a piano. You cannot fail to observe how sharply these children’s dreams contradict this view. It would really be too strange if children could perform complete mental functions in their sleep while adults were content under the same conditions with reactions which were no more than ‘twitchings’. Moreover, we have every reason to think that children’s sleep is sounder and deeper.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3223

(3) These dreams are without any dream-distortion, and therefore call for no interpretative activity. Here the manifest and the latent dream coincide. Thus dream-distortion is not part of the essential nature of dreams. I expect this will be a weight off your minds. But when we examine these dreams more closely, we shall recognize a small piece of dream-distortion even in them, a certain distinction between the manifest content of the dream and the latent dream-thoughts.

(4) A child’s dream is a reaction to an experience of the previous day, which has left behind it a regret, a longing, a wish that has not been dealt with. The dream produces a direct, undisguised fulfilment of that wish. Let us recall now our discussions on the part played by somatic stimuli from outside and from within as disturbers of sleep and instigators of dreams. In that connection we came to know some quite undoubted facts, but by their means we were only able to explain a small number of dreams. In these children’s dreams, however, there is nothing that points to the operation of somatic stimuli of that kind; we could not be mistaken in this, for the dreams are completely intelligible and easy to grasp. But this does not mean that we need abandon the stimulus aetiology of dreams. We can only ask how it has happened that from the first we have forgotten that besides somatic stimuli there are mental stimuli that disturb sleep. We know, after all, that it is excitations of this kind that are chiefly responsible for disturbing the sleep of an adult by preventing him from establishing the mood required for falling asleep - the withdrawing of interest from the world. He does not want to interrupt his life but would rather continue his work on the things he is concerned with, and for that reason he does not fall asleep. In the case of children, therefore, the stimulus that disturbs sleep is a mental one - the wish that has not been dealt with - and it is to this that they react with the dream.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3224

(5) This gives us the most direct approach to understanding the function of dreams. In so far as a dream is a reaction to a psychical stimulus, it must be equivalent to dealing with the stimulus in such a way that it is got rid of and that sleep can continue. We do not yet know how this dealing with the stimulus by the dream is made possible dynamically, but we see already that dreams are not disturbers of sleep, as they are abusively called, but guardians of sleep which get rid of disturbances of sleep. We think we should have slept more soundly if there had been no dream, but we are wrong; in fact, without the help of the dream we should not have slept at all. It is due to it that we have slept as soundly as we have. It could not avoid disturbing us a little, just as the night-watchman often cannot help making a little noise while he chases away the disturbers of the peace who seek to waken us with their noise.

(6) What instigates a dream is a wish, and the fulfilment of that wish is the content of the dream-this is one of the chief characteristics of dreams. The other, equally constant one, is that a dream does not simply give expression to a thought, but represents the wish-fulfilled as a hallucinatory experience. ‘I should like to go on the lake’ is the wish that instigates the dream. The content of the dream itself is: ‘I am going on the lake.’ Thus even in these simple children’s dreams a difference remains between the latent and the manifest dream, there is a distortion of the latent dream-thought: the transformation of a thought into an experience. In the process of interpreting a dream this alteration must first be undone. If this turns out to be the most universal characteristic of dreams, the fragment of dream which I reported to you earlier ‘I saw my brother in a box [Kasten]’ is not to be translated ‘my brother is restricting himself [schnärkt sich ein]’ but ‘I should like my brother to restrict himself: my brother must restrict himself.’ Of the two general characteristics of dreams which I have here brought forward, the second clearly has more prospect of being accepted without contradiction than the first. It is only by means of far-reaching investigations that we shall be able to establish the fact that what instigates dreams must always be a wish and cannot be a worry or an intention or a reproach; but this will not affect the other characteristic - that the dream does not simply reproduce this stimulus, but removes it, gets rid of it, deals with it, by means of a kind of experience.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3225

(7) On the basis of these characteristics of dreams, we can return once more to a comparison between a dream and a parapraxis. In the latter we distinguished between a disturbing purpose and a disturbed one, and the parapraxis was a compromise between them. A dream can be fitted into the same pattern. The disturbed purpose can only be that of sleeping. We may replace the disturbing one by the psychical stimulus, or let us say by the wish which presses to be dealt with, since we have not learnt so far of any other psychical stimulus that disturbs sleep. Here the dream, too, is the result of a compromise. One sleeps, but one nevertheless experiences the removing of a wish; one satisfies a wish, but at the same time one continues to sleep. Both purposes are partly achieved and partly abandoned.

(8) You will recall that at one point we hoped to approach an understanding of the problems of dreams from the fact that certain imaginative structures which are very transparent to us are known as ‘day-dreams’. Now these day-dreams are in fact wish-fulfilments, fulfilments of ambitions and erotic wishes which are well known to us; but they are thought, even though vividly imagined, and never experienced as hallucinations. Of the two chief characteristics of dreams, then, the less well assured is preserved here, while the other, since it depends on the state of sleep and cannot be realized in waking life, is entirely absent. Linguistic usage, therefore, has a suspicion of the fact that wish-fulfilment is a chief characteristic of dreams. Incidentally, if our experience in dreams is only a modified kind of imagining made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep - that is, a ‘nocturnal day-dreaming’ - we can already understand how the process of constructing a dream can dispose of the nocturnal stimulus and bring satisfaction, since day dreaming too is an activity bound up with satisfaction and is only practised, indeed, on that account.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3226

But other usages of language express the same sense. There are familiar proverbs such as ‘Pigs dream of acorns and geese dream of maize’ or ‘What do hens dream of? - Of millet.’ So proverbs go even lower than we do - below children to animals - and assert that the content of dreams is the satisfaction of a need. Numbers of figures of speech seem to point in the same direction: ‘lovely as a dream’, ‘I shouldn’t have dreamt of such a thing’, ‘I haven’t imagined it in my wildest dreams’. In this, linguistic usage is evidently taking sides. For there are anxiety’. dreams as well, and dreams with a distressing or indifferent content; but linguistic usage has been unmoved by them. It is true that it knows of ‘bad dreams’, but a dream pure and simple is only the sweet fulfilment of a wish. Nor is there any proverb which might tell us that pigs or geese dream of being slaughtered.

It is inconceivable, of course, that the wish-fulfilling characteristic of dreams should not have been noticed by writers on the subject. On the contrary, it has often been noticed; but it has not occurred to any of them to recognize this characteristic as a universal one and to make it into a corner-stone for the explanation of dreams. We can well imagine what it is that has held them back from it and we shall go into the matter later on.

But consider what a large amount of light has been thrown on things by our examination of children’s dreams, and with scarcely any effort: the functions of dreams as the guardians of sleep; their origin from two concurrent purposes, one of which, the desire for sleep, remains constant, while the other strives to satisfy a psychical stimulus; proof that dreams are psychical acts with a sense; their two chief characteristics - wish-fulfilment and hallucinatory experience. And in discovering all this we were al most able to forget that we were engaged on psycho-analysis. Apart from its connection with parapraxes, our work has carried no specific mark. Any psychologist, knowing nothing of the postulates of psycho-analysis, might have been able to give this explanation of children’s dreams. Why have they not done so?

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3227

If dreams of the infantile kind were the only ones, the problem would be solved and our task finished, and that without our questioning the dreamer or bringing in the unconscious or resorting to free association. This is evidently where a continuation of our task lies ahead. We have already found repeatedly that characteristics which were claimed as being of general validity have turned out to apply only to a particular sort and number of dreams. The question for us is therefore whether the general characteristics we inferred from children’s dreams have a firmer footing, whether they also hold good of dreams which are not transparently clear and whose manifest content gives no sign of being connected with a wish left over from the previous day. It is our view that these other dreams have undergone a far-reaching distortion and for that reason cannot be judged at a first glance. We suspect too that to explain this distortion we shall need the psycho-analytic technique which we have been able to do without in the understanding we have just gained of children’s dreams.

In any case, there is yet another class of dreams which are undistorted and, like children’s dreams, can easily be recognized as wish-fulfilments. These are the dreams which all through life are called up by imperative bodily needs - hunger, thirst, sexual need - that is, they are wish-fufilments as reactions to internal somatic stimuli. Thus I have a note of a dream dreamt by a little girl of nineteen months, which consisted of a menu, to which her own name was attached: ‘Anna F., stawbewwies, wild stawbewwies, omblet, pudden!’ This was a reaction to a day without food, owing to a digestive upset, which had actually been traced back to the fruit which appeared twice in the dream. The little girl’s grandmother - their combined ages came to seventy years - was simultaneously obliged to go without food for a whole day on account of a disturbance due to a floating kidney. She dreamt the same night that she had been ‘asked out’ and had been served with the most appetizing delicacies.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3228

Observations on prisoners who have been compelled to starve, and on people who have been subjected to privations on travels and explorations, teach us that under these conditions the satisfaction of their needs is regularly dreamt of. Thus Otto Nordenskjöld (1904, 1, 336 f.) writes as follows of the members of his expedition while they were wintering in the Antarctic: ‘The direction taken by our innermost thoughts was very clearly shown by our dreams, which were never more vivid or numerous than at this time. Even those of us who otherwise dreamt but rarely had long stories to tell in the morning when we exchanged our latest experiences in this world of the imagination. They were all concerned with the outside world which was now so remote from us, though they were often adapted to our actual circumstances. . . . Eating and drinking, however, were the pivot round which our dreams most often revolved. One of us, who had a special gift for attending large luncheon parties during the night, was proud if he was able to report in the morning that he had "got through a three-course dinner". Another of us dreamt of tobacco, of whole mountains of tobacco; while a third dreamt of a ship in full sail coming in across open water. Yet another dream is worth repeating. The postman brought round the mail and gave a long explanation of why we had had to wait so long for it: he had delivered it at the wrong address and had only succeeded in recovering it with great difficulty. We dreamt, of course, of still more impossible things. But there was a most striking lack of imaginativeness shown by almost all the dreams I dreamt myself or heard described. It would certainly be of great psychological interest if all these dreams could be recorded. And it will easily be understood how much we longed for sleep, since it could offer each one of us everything that he most eagerly desired.’ So too, according to Du Prel, ‘Mungo Park, when he was almost dying of thirst on one of his African journeys, dreamt unceasingly of the well-watered valleys and meadows of his home. Similarly, Baron Trenck, suffering torments of hunger while he was a prisoner in the fortress at Magdeburg, dreamt of being surrounded by sumptuous meals; and George Back, who took part in Franklin’s first expedition, when he was almost dying of starvation as a result of his fearful privations, dreamt constantly and regularly of copious meals.’

Anyone who has eaten some highly-spiced dish at dinner and develops a thirst during the night is very likely to dream that he is drinking. It is of course impossible to get rid of a fairly strong need for food or drink by means of a dream. One wakes up from a dream of this sort still feeling thirsty, and has to have a drink of real water. The effect produced by the dream is in this instance trivial from the practical point of view; but it is none the less clear that it was produced with the aim of protecting one’s sleep against a stimulus that was urging one to wake up and take action. When the need is of less intensity dreams of satisfaction often help one to get over it.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3229

In the same way, dreams create satisfactions under the influence of sexual stimuli, but these show peculiarities which deserve mention. Since it is characteristic of the sexual instinct to be a degree less dependent on its object than hunger and thirst, the satisfaction in dreams of emission can be a real one; and in consequence of certain difficulties (which I shall have to mention later) in its relation to its object, it happens with special frequency that the real satisfaction is nevertheless attached to a dream-content which is obscure or distorted. This characteristic of dreams of emission (as Otto Rank has pointed out) makes them particularly favourable subjects for the study of dream-distortion. Furthermore, all adult dreams arising from bodily needs usually contain, in addition to the satisfaction, other material which is derived from purely psychical sources of stimulation and requires interpretation before it can be understood.

Moreover I do not mean to assert that the wish-fulfilment dreams of adults which are constructed on infantile lines only appear as reactions to the imperative needs that I have mentioned. We are acquainted as well with short, clear dreams of this sort which, under the influence of some dominant situation, arise out of what are unquestionably psychical sources of stimulation. There are, for instance, dreams of impatience: if someone has made preparations for a journey, for a theatrical performance that is important to him, for going to a lecture or paying a visit, he may dream of a premature fulfilment of his expectation; he may, during the night before the event, see himself arrived at his destination, present at the theatre, in conversation with the person he is going to visit. Or there are what are justly known as dreams of convenience, in which a person who would like to sleep longer dreams that he is already up and is washing, or is already at school, whereas he is really still sleeping and would rather get up in a dream than in reality. The wish to sleep, which we have recognized as regularly playing a part in the construction of dreams, comes into the open in these dreams and reveals itself in them as the essential dream-constructor. There is good reason for ranking the need to sleep alongside of the other great bodily needs.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3230

Here is a reproduction of a picture by Schwind in the Schack Gallery in Munich, which shows how correctly the artist grasped the way in which dreams arise from the dominant situation. Its title is ‘The Prisoner’s Dream’, a dream whose content is bound to be his escape. It is a happy point that he is to escape through the window, for it is the stimulus of the light pouring in by the window that is putting an end to the prisoner’s sleep. The gnomes who are clambering up on one another no doubt represent the successive positions which he himself would have had to take as he climbed up to the level of the window; and, if I am not mistaken and am not attributing too much deliberation to the artist, the topmost of the gnomes, who is sawing through the bars - that is, who is doing what the prisoner would like to do - has the same features as himself.

THE PRISONERS DREAM

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3231

In all dreams other than children’s dreams and those of an infantile type our path is, as I have said, obstructed by dream distortion. We cannot tell, to begin with, whether these other dreams too are wish-fulfilments as we suspect, we cannot guess from their manifest content to what psychical stimulus they owe their origin, and we cannot prove that they too are endeavouring to get rid of that stimulus or in some way deal with it. They must be interpreted - that is, translated -, their distortion must be undone, and their manifest content replaced by their latent one, before we can form a judgement as to whether what we have found in infantile dreams can claim to be valid for all dreams.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3232

LECTURE IX

THE CENSORSHIP OF DREAMS

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - The study of the dreams of children has taught us the origin, the essential nature and the function of dreams. Dreams are things which get rid of (psychical) stimuli disturbing to sleep, by the method of hallucinatory satisfaction. We have, however, only been able to explain one group of the dreams of adults - those which we have described as dreams of an infantile type. What the facts are about the others we cannot yet say, but we do not understand them. We have arrived at a provisional finding, however, whose importance we must not under-estimate. Whenever a dream has been completely intelligible to us, it has turned out to be the hallucinated fulfilment of a wish. This coincidence cannot be a chance one nor a matter of indifference.

We have assumed of dreams of another sort, on the basis of various considerations and on the analogy of our views on parapraxes, that they are a distorted substitute for an unknown content, and that the first thing is to trace them back to it. Our immediate task, then, is an enquiry which will lead to an understanding of this distortion in dreams.

Dream-distortion is what makes a dream seem strange and unintelligible to us. We want to know a number of things about it: firstly, where it comes from - its dynamics -, secondly, what it does and, lastly, how it does it. We can also say that dream distortion is carried out by the dream-work; and we want to describe the dream-work and trace it back to the forces operating in it.

And now listen to this dream. It was recorded by a lady belonging to our group,¹ and, as she tells us, was derived from a highly-esteemed and cultivated elderly lady. No analysis was made of the dream; our informant remarks that for a psycho-analyst it needs no interpreting. Nor did the dreamer herself interpret it, but she judged it and condemned it as though she understood how to interpret it; for she said of it: ‘And disgusting, stupid stuff like this was dreamt by a woman of fifty, who has no other thoughts day and night but worry about her child!’

¹ Frau Dr. von Hug-Hellmuth.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3233

Here, then, is the dream - which deals with ‘love services’ in war-time.¹ ‘She went to Garrison Hospital No. I and informed the sentry at the gate that she must speak to the Chief Medical Officer (mentioning a name that was unknown to her) as she wanted to volunteer for service at the hospital. She pronounced the word "service" in such a way that the N.C.O. at once understood that she meant "love service". Since she was an elderly lady, after some hesitation he allowed her to pass. Instead of finding the Chief Medical Officer, however, she reached a large and gloomy apartment in which a number of officers and army doctors were standing and sitting round a long table. She approached a staff surgeon with her request, and he understood her meaning after she had said only a few words. The actual wording of her speech in the dream was: "I and many other women and girls in Vienna are ready to . . ." at this point in the dream her words turned into a mumble ". . . for the troops - officers and other ranks without distinction." She could tell from the expressions on the officers’ faces, partly embarrassed and partly sly, that everyone had understood her meaning correctly. The lady went on: "I’m aware that our decision must sound surprising, but we mean it in bitter earnest. No one asks a soldier in the field whether he wishes to die or not." There followed an awkward silence of some minutes. The staff surgeon then put his arm round her waist and said "Suppose, madam, it actually came to . . . (mumble)." She drew away from him, thinking to herself: "He’s like all the rest of them", and replied: "Good gracious, I’m an old woman and I might never come to that. Besides, there’s one condition that must be observed: age must be respected. It must never happen that an elderly woman . . . (mumble) . . . a mere boy. That would be terrible." "I understand perfectly," replied the staff surgeon. Some of the officers, and among them one who had been a suitor of hers in her youth, laughed out loud. The lady then asked to be taken to the Chief Medical Officer, with whom she was acquainted, so that the whole matter could be thrashed out; but she found, to her consternation, that she could not recall his name. Nevertheless, the staff surgeon, most politely and respectfully, showed her the way up to the second floor by a very narrow, iron, spiral staircase, which led directly from the room to the upper storeys of the building. As she went up she heard an officer say: "That’s a tremendous decision to make - no matter whether a woman’s young or old! Splendid of her!" Feeling simply that she was doing her duty, she walked up an interminable staircase.

‘The dream was repeated twice in the course of a few weeks, with, as the lady remarked, some quite unimportant and meaningless modifications.’

¹ [‘Liebesdienste’ means in the first instance ‘services performed for love’, i.e. ‘unremunerated services’; but it could bear another, less respectable, meaning.]

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3234

From its continuous nature, the dream resembles a daytime phantasy: there are few breaks in it, and some of the details of its content could have been explained if they had been enquired into, but that, as you know, was not done. But what is remarkable and interesting from our point of view is that the dream shows several gaps - gaps not in the dreamer’s memory of the dream but in the content of the dream itself. At three points the content was, as it were, extinguished; the speeches in which these gaps occurred were interrupted by a mumble. As no analysis was carried out, we have, strictly speaking, no right to say anything about the sense of the dream. Nevertheless there are hints on which conclusions can be based (for instance, in the phrase ‘love services’); but above all, the portions of the speeches immediately preceding the mumbles call for the gaps to be filled in, and in an unambiguous manner. If we make the insertions, the content of the phantasy turns out to be that the dreamer is prepared, by way of fulfilling a patriotic duty, to put herself at the disposal of the troops, both officers and other ranks, for the satisfaction of their erotic needs. This is, of course, highly objectionable, the model of a shameless libidinal phantasy - but it does not appear in the dream at all. Precisely at the points at which the context would call for this admission, the manifest dream-contains an indistinct mumble: something has been lost or suppressed.

You will, I hope, think it plausible to suppose that it was precisely the objectionable nature of these passages that was the motive for their suppression. Where shall we find a parallel to such an event? You need not look far in these days. Take up any political newspaper and you will find that here and there the, text is absent and in its place nothing except the white paper is to be seen. This, as you know, is the work of the press censorship. In these empty places there was something that displeased the higher censorship authorities and for that reason it was removed - a pity, you feel, since no doubt it was the most interesting thing in the paper - the ‘best bit’.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3235

On other occasions the censorship has not gone to work on a passage after it has already been completed. The author has seen in advance which passages might expect to give rise to objections from the censorship and has on that account toned them down in advance, modified them slightly, or has contented himself with approximations and allusions to what would genuinely have come from his pen. In that case there are no blank places in the paper, but circumlocutions and obscurities of expression appearing at certain points will enable you to guess where regard has been paid to the censorship in advance.

Well, we can keep close to this parallel. It is our view that the omitted pieces of the speeches in the dream which were concealed by a mumble have likewise been sacrificed to a censorship. We speak in so many words of a ‘dream-censorship’, to which some share in dream-distortion is to be attributed. Wherever there are gaps in the manifest dream the dream-censorship is responsible for them. We should go further, and regard it as a manifestation of the censorship wherever a dream-element is remembered especially faintly, indefinitely and doubtfully among other elements that are more clearly constructed. But it is only rarely that this censorship manifests itself so undisguisedly - so naïvely, one might say - as in this example of the dream of ‘love services’. The censorship takes effect much more frequently according to the second method, by producing softenings, approximations and allusions instead of the genuine thing.

I know of no parallel in the operations of the press-censorship to a third manner of working by the dream-censorship; but I am able to demonstrate it from precisely the one example of a dream which we have analysed so far. You will recall the dream of the ‘three bad theatre-tickets for 1 florin 50'. In the latent thoughts of that dream the element ‘over-hurriedly, too early’ stood in the foreground. Thus: it was absurd to marry so early - it was also absurd to take the theatre-tickets so early - it was ridiculous of the sister-in-law to part with her money in such a hurry to buy jewellery with it. Nothing of this central element of the dream-thoughts passed over into the manifest dream; in it the central position is taken by the ‘going to the theatre’ and ‘taking the tickets’. As a result of this displacement of accent, this fresh grouping of the elements of the content, the manifest dream has become so unlike the latent dream-thoughts that no-one would suspect the presence of the latter behind the former. This displacement of accent is one of the chief instruments of dream-distortion and it is what gives the dream the strangeness on account of which the dreamer himself is not inclined to recognize it as his own production.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3236

Omission, modification, fresh grouping of the material - these, then, are the activities of the dream-censorship and the instruments of dream-distortion. The dream-censorship itself is the originator, or one of the originators, of the dream-distortion which we are now engaged in examining. We are in the habit of combining the concepts of modification and re-arrangement under the term ‘displacement’.

After these remarks on the activities of the dream-censorship, we will now turn to its dynamics. I hope you do not take the term too anthropomorphically, and do not picture the ‘censor of dreams’ as a severe little manikin or a spirit living in a closet in the brain and there discharging his office; but I hope too that you do not take the term in too ‘localizing’ a sense, and do not think of a ‘brain-centre’, from which a censoring influence of this kind issues, an influence which would be brought to an end if the ‘centre’ were damaged or removed. For the time being it is nothing more than a serviceable term for describing a dynamic relation. The word does not prevent our asking by what purposes this influence is exercised and against what purposes it is directed. And we shall not be surprised to learn that we have come up against the dream-censorship once already, though perhaps without recognizing it.

For that is in fact the case. You will recall that when we began to make use of our technique of free association we made a surprising discovery. We became aware that our efforts at proceeding from the dream-element to the unconscious element for which it is a substitute were being met by a resistance. This resistance, we said, could be of different magnitudes, sometimes enormous and sometimes quite insignificant. In the latter case we need to pass through only a small number of intermediate links in our work of interpretation; but when the resistance is large we have to traverse long chains of associations from the dream-element, we are led far away from it and on our path we have to overcome all the difficulties which represent themselves as critical objections to the ideas that occur. What we met with as resistance in our work of interpretation must now be introduced into the dream-work in the form of the dream-censorship. The resistance to interpretation is only a putting into effect of the dream-censorship. It also proves to us that the force of the censorship is not exhausted in bringing about the distortion of dreams and thereafter extinguished, but that the censorship persists as a permanent institution which has as its aim the maintenance of the distortion. Moreover, just as the strength of the resistance varies in the interpretation of each element in a dream, so too the magnitude of the distortion introduced by the censorship varies for each element in the same dream. If we compare the manifest and the latent dream, we shall find that some particular latent elements have been completely eliminated, others modified to a greater or less extent, while yet others have been carried over into the manifest content of the dream unaltered or even perhaps strengthened.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3237

But we wanted to enquire what are the purposes which exercise the censorship and against what purposes it is directed. Now this question, which is fundamental for the understanding of dreams and perhaps, indeed, of human life, is easy to answer if we look through the series of dreams which have been interpreted. The purposes which exercise the censorship are those which are acknowledged by the dreamer’s waking judgement, those with which he feels himself at one. You may be sure that if you reject an interpretation of one of your own dreams which has been correctly carried out, you are doing so for the same motives for which the dream-censorship has been exercised, the dream-distortion brought about and the interpretation made necessary. Take the dream of our fifty-year-old lady. She thought her dream disgusting without having analysed it, and she would have been still more indignant if Dr. von Hug-Hellmuth had told her anything of its inevitable interpretation; it was precisely because of this condemnation by the dreamer that the objectionable passages in her dream were replaced by a mumble.

The purposes against which the dream-censorship is directed must be described in the first instance from the point of view of that agency itself. If so, one can only say that they are invariably of a reprehensible nature, repulsive from the ethical, aesthetic and social point of view - matters of which one does not venture to think at all or thinks only with disgust. These wishes, which are censored and given a distorted expression in dreams, are first and foremost manifestations of an unbridled and ruthless egoism. And, to be sure, the dreamer’s own ego appears in every dream and plays the chief part in it, even if it knows quite well how to hide itself so far as the manifest content goes. This ‘sacro egoisimo’ of dreams is certainly not unrelated to the attitude we adopt when we sleep, which consists in our withdrawing our interest from the whole external world.

The ego, freed from all ethical bonds, also finds itself at one with all the demands of sexual desire, even those which have long been condemned by our aesthetic upbringing and those which contradict all the requirements of moral restraint. The desire for pleasure - the ‘libido’, as we call it - chooses its objects without inhibition, and by preference, indeed, the forbidden ones: not only other men’s wives, but above all incestuous objects, objects sanctified by the common agreement of mankind, a man’s mother and sister, a woman’s father and brother. (The dream of our fifty-year-old lady, too, was incestuous; her libido was unmistakably directed to her son.) Lusts which we think of as remote from human nature show themselves strong enough to provoke dreams. Hatred, too, rages without restraint. Wishes for revenge and death directed against those who are nearest and dearest in waking life, against the dreamer’s parents, brothers and sisters, husband or wife, and his own children are nothing unusual. These censored wishes appear to rise up out of a positive Hell; after they have been interpreted when we are awake, no censorship of them seems to us too severe.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3238

But you must not blame the dream itself on account of its evil content. Do not forget that it performs the innocent and indeed useful function of preserving sleep from disturbance. This wickedness is not part of the essential nature of dreams. Indeed you know too that there are dreams which can be recognized as the satisfaction of justified wishes and of pressing bodily needs. These, it is true, have no dream-distortion; but they have no need of it, for they can fulfil their function without insulting the ethical and aesthetic purposes of the ego. Bear in mind, too, that dream-distortion is proportionate to two factors. On the one hand it becomes greater the worse the wish that has to be censored; but on the other hand it also becomes greater the more severe the demands of the censorship at the moment. Thus a strictly brought-up and prudish young girl, with a relentless censorship, will distort dream-impulses which we doctors, for instance, would have to regard as permissible, harmless, libidinal wishes, and on which in ten years’ time the dreamer herself will make the same judgement.

Furthermore, we have not got nearly far enough yet to be able to feel indignant at this result of our work of interpretation. We do not yet, I think, understand it properly; but our first duty is to defend it against certain aspersions. There is no difficulty in finding a weak point in it. Our dream-interpretations are made on the basis of the premisses which we have already accepted - that dreams in general have a sense, that it is legitimate to carry across from hypnotic to normal sleep the fact of the existence of mental processes which are at the time unconscious, and that everything that occurs to the mind is determined. If on the basis of these premisses we had arrived at plausible findings from dream-interpretation, we should have been justified in concluding that the premisses were valid. But how about it if these findings seem to be as I have pictured them? We should then be tempted to say: ‘These are impossible, senseless or at the least most improbable findings; so there was something wrong about the premisses. Either dreams are not psychical phenomena, or there is nothing unconscious in the normal state, or our technique has a flaw in it. Is it not simpler and more satisfactory to suppose this rather than accept all the abominations which we are supposed to have discovered on the basis of our premisses?’

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3239

Yes, indeed! Both simpler and more satisfactory - but not necessarily on that account more correct. Let us give ourselves time: the matter is not yet ripe for judgement. And first we can further strengthen the criticism of our dream-interpretations. The fact that the findings from them are so disagreeable and repellent need not, perhaps, carry very great weight. A stronger argument is that the dreamers to whom we are led to attribute such wishful purposes by the interpretation of their dreams reject them most emphatically and for good reasons. ‘What?’ says one of them, ‘you want to convince me from this dream that I regret the money I have spent on my sister’s dowry and my brother’s education? But that cannot be so. I work entirely for my brothers and sisters; I have no other interest in life but to fulfil my duties to them, which, as the eldest of the family, I promised our departed mother I would do.’ Or a woman dreamer would say: ‘You think I wish my husband was dead? That is a shocking piece of nonsense! It is not only that we are most happily married - you would probably not believe me if I said that - but his death would rob me of everything I possess in the world.’ Or another man would answer us: ‘You say that I have sensual desires for my sister? That is ridiculous! She means nothing at all to me. We are on bad terms with each other and I have not exchanged a word with her for years.’ We might still take it lightly, perhaps, if these dreamers neither confirmed nor denied the purposes we attribute to them; we might say that these were just things they did not know about themselves. But when they feel in themselves the precise contrary of the wish we have interpreted to them and when they are able to prove to us by the lives they lead that they are dominated by this contrary wish, it must surely take us aback. Has not the time come to throw aside the whole work we have done on dream-interpretation as something which its findings have reduced ad absurdum?

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3240

No, not even now. Even this stronger argument collapses if we examine it critically. Granted that there are unconscious purposes in mental life, nothing is proved by showing that purposes opposed to these are dominant in conscious life. Perhaps there is room in the mind for contrary purposes, for contradictions, to exist side by side. Possibly, indeed, the dominance of one impulse is precisely a necessary condition of its contrary being unconscious. We are after all left, then, with the first objections that were raised: the findings of dream-interpretation are not simple and they are very disagreeable. We may reply to the first that all your passion for what is simple will not be able to solve a single one of the problems of dreams. You must get accustomed here to assuming a complicated state of affairs. And we may reply to the second that you are plainly wrong to use a liking or disliking that you may feel as the ground for a scientific judgement. What difference does it make if the findings of dream-interpretation seem disagreeable to you or, indeed, embarrassing and repulsive. ‘Ça n’empêche pas d’exister’¹, as I heard my teacher Charcot say in a similar case when I was a young doctor. One must be humble and hold back one’s sympathies and antipathies if one wants to discover what is real in this world. If a physicist were able to prove to you that in a short period organic life on this earth would be brought to an end by freezing, would you venture to make the same reply to him: ‘That cannot be so, the prospect is too disagreeable’? You would, I think, be silent, until another physicist came and pointed out to the first one an error in his premisses or calculations. When you reject something that is disagreeable to you, what you are doing is repeating the mechanism of constructing dreams rather than understanding it and surmounting it.

¹ [‘It doesn’t prevent things from existing.’]

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3241

You will promise now, perhaps, to disregard the repellent character of the censored dream-wishes and will withdraw upon the argument that after all it is unlikely that such a large space should be given to the evil in the constitution of human beings. But do your own experiences justify your saying this? I will not discuss how you may appear to yourselves; but have you found so much benevolence among your superiors and competitors, so much chivalry among your enemies and so little envy in your social surroundings that you feel it your duty to protest against egoistic evil having a share in human nature? Are you not aware of how uncontrolled and untrustworthy the average person is in everything to do with sexual life? Or do you not know that all the transgressions and excesses of which we dream at night are daily committed in real life by waking men? what does psycho-analysis do here but confirm Plato’s old saying that the good are those who are content to dream of what the others, the bad, really do?

And now turn your eyes away from individuals and consider the Great War which is still laying Europe waste. Think of the vast amount of brutality, cruelty and lies which are able to spread over the civilized world. Do you really believe that a handful of ambitious and deluding men without conscience could have succeeded in unleashing all these evil spirits if their millions of followers did not share their guilt? Do you venture, in such circumstances, to break a lance on behalf of the exclusion of evil from the mental constitution of mankind?

You will represent to me that I am giving a one-sided judgement on the War: that it has also brought to light what is finest and noblest in men, their heroism, their self-sacrifice, their social sense. No doubt; but are you not now showing yourselves as accessories to the injustice that has so often been done to psycho-analysis in reproaching it with denying one thing because it has asserted another? It is not our intention to dispute the noble endeavours of human nature, nor have we ever done anything to detract from their value. On the contrary; I am exhibiting to you not only the evil dream-wishes which are censored but also the censorship, which suppresses them and makes them unrecognizable. We lay a stronger emphasis on what is evil in men only because other people disavow it and thereby make the human mind, not better, but incomprehensible. If now we give up this one-sided ethical valuation, we shall undoubtedly find a more correct formula for the relation between good and evil in human nature.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3242

There it is, then. We need not give up the findings of our work on the interpretation of dreams even though we cannot but regard them as strange. Perhaps we shall be able to approach an understanding of them later from another direction. For the time being let us hold fast to this: dream-distortion is a result of the censorship which is exercised by recognized purposes of the ego against wishful impulses in any way objectionable that stir within us at night-time during our sleep. Why this should happen particularly at night-time and where these reprehensible wishes come from - these are matters on which, no doubt, much still remains for questioning and research.

But it would be unfair if we neglected at this point to emphasize sufficiently another outcome of our investigations. The dream-wishes which seek to disturb us in our sleep are unknown to us and indeed we only learnt of them through dream-interpretation. They are thus to be described, in the sense we have discussed, as unconscious for the time being. But we must reflect that they are unconscious too for more than the time being. The dreamer also disavows them, as we have seen in so many instances, after he has come to know them through the interpretation of his dream. We are then faced once again with the position we first came across in the ‘hiccoughing’ slip of the tongue, where the proposer of the toast protested indignantly that neither then nor at any earlier time had he become conscious of any disrespectful impulse towards his Chief. Already at the time we felt some doubts about the weight of an assurance of this kind, and suggested instead the hypothesis that the speaker was permanently unaware of the presence of this impulse in him. This situation is repeated now with every interpretation of a strongly distorted dream and consequently gains an increased importance in its bearing on the view we have taken. We are now prepared to assume that there are in the mind processes and purposes of which one knows nothing at all has known nothing for a long time, and has even perhaps never known anything. With this the unconscious acquires a new sense for us; the characteristic of ‘for the time being’ or ‘temporary’ disappears from its essential nature. It can mean permanently unconscious and not merely ‘latent at the time’. We shall of course have to hear more about this on some other occasion.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3243

LECTURE X

SYMBOLISM IN DREAMS

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - We have found that the distortion in dreams, which interferes with our understanding of them, is the result of a censoring activity which is directed against unacceptable, unconscious wishful impulses. We have not, of course, maintained that the censorship is the sole factor responsible for the distortion in dreams, and in fact when we study them further we can discover that other factors play a part in producing this result. This amounts to our saying that even if the dream-censorship was out of action we should still not be in a position to understand dreams, the manifest dream would still not be identical with the latent dream-thoughts.

We come upon this other factor which prevents dreams from being lucid, this new contribution to dream-distortion, by noticing a gap in our technique. I have already admitted to you that it does sometimes really happen that nothing occurs to a person under analysis in response to particular elements of his dreams. It is true that this does not happen as often as he asserts; in a great many cases, with perseverance, an idea is extracted from him. But nevertheless there remain cases in which an association fails to emerge or, if it is extracted, does not give us what we expected from it. If this happens during a psycho-analytic treatment, it has a peculiar significance with which we are not here concerned. But it also happens in the interpretation of normal people’s dreams or in that of our own. If we convince ourselves that in such case no amount of pressure is of any use, we eventually discover that this unwished-for event regularly occurs in connection with particular dream-elements, and we begin to recognize that a fresh general principle is at work where we had begun by thinking we were only faced by an exceptional failure of technique.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3244

In this way we are tempted to interpret these ‘mute’ dream-elements ourselves, to set about translating them with our own resources. We are then forced to recognize that whenever we venture on making a replacement of this sort we arrive at a satisfactory sense for the dream, whereas it remains senseless and the chain of thought is interrupted so long as we refrain from intervening in this way. An accumulation of many similar cases eventually gives the necessary certainty to what began as a timid experiment.

I am putting all this in a rather schematic way; but that is permissible, after all, for didactic purposes, nor has it been falsified, but merely simplified.

In this way we obtain constant translations for a number of dream-elements - just as popular ‘dream-books’ provide them for everything that appears in dreams. You will not have forgotten, of course, that when we use our associative technique constant replacements of dream-elements never come to light.

You will object at once that this method of interpretation strikes you as far more insecure and open to attack than the earlier one by means of free association. There is, however, something further. For when, with experience, we have collected enough of these constant renderings, the time comes when we realize that we should in fact have been able to deal with these portions of dream-interpretation from our own knowledge, and that they could really be understood without the dreamer’s associations. How it is that we must necessarily have known their meaning will become clear in the second half of our present discussion.

A constant relation of this kind between a dream-element and its translation is described by us as a ‘symbolic’ one, and the dream-element itself as a ‘symbol’ of the unconscious dream-thought. You will recall that earlier, when we were investigating the relations between dream-elements and the ‘genuine’ thing behind them, I distinguished three such relations - those of a part to a whole, of allusion and of plastic portrayal. I warned you at the time that there was a fourth, but I did not name it. This fourth relation is the symbolic one which I am now introducing. It gives occasion for some most interesting discussions, and I will turn to them before laying before you the detailed results of our observations of symbolism.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3245

Symbolism is perhaps the most remarkable chapter of the theory of dreams. In the first place, since symbols are stable translations, they realize to some extent the ideal of the ancient as well as of the popular interpretation of dreams, from which, with our technique, we had departed widely. They allow us in certain circumstances to interpret a dream without questioning the dreamer, who indeed would in any case have nothing to tell, us about the symbol. If we are acquainted with the ordinary dream-symbols, and in addition with the dreamer’s personality, the circumstances in which he lives and the impressions which preceded the occurrence of the dream, we are often in a position to interpret a dream straightaway - to translate it at sight, as it were. A piece of virtuosity of this kind flatters the dream-interpreter and impresses the dreamer; it forms an agreeable contrast to the laborious work of questioning the dreamer. But do not allow yourselves to be led astray by this. It is not our business to perform acts of virtuosity. Interpretation based on a knowledge of symbols is not a technique which can replace or compete with the associative one. It forms a supplement to the latter and yields results which are only of use when introduced into it. And as regards acquaintance with the dreamer’s psychical situation, you must bear in mind that the dreams of people you know well are not the only ones you have to analyse, that you are not as a rule familiar with the events of the previous day, which were the instigators of the dream, but that the associations of the person you are analysing will provide you precisely with a knowledge of what we call the psychical situation.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3246

Moreover it is quite specially remarkable - having regard, too, to some considerations which we shall mention later - that the most violent resistances have been expressed once again to the existence of a symbolic relation between dreams and the unconscious. Even people of judgement and reputation, who, apart from this, have gone a long way in agreeing with psycho-analysis, have at this point withheld their support. This behaviour is all the stranger in view, first, of the fact that symbolism is not peculiar to dreams alone and is not characteristic of them, and, secondly, that symbolism in dreams is by no means a discovery of psycho-analysis, however many other surprising discoveries it has made. The philosopher K. A. Scherner (1861) must be described as the discoverer of dream-symbolism, if its beginning is to be placed in modern times at all. Psycho-analysis has confirmed Scherner’s findings, though it has made material modifications in them.

You will now want to hear something of the nature of dream symbolism and to be given some examples of it. I will gladly tell you what I know, though I must confess that our understanding of it does not go as far as we should like.

The essence of this symbolic relation is that it is a comparison, though not a comparison of any sort. Special limitations seem to be attached to the comparison, but it is hard to say what these are. Not everything with which we can compare an object or a process appears in dreams as a symbol for it. And on the other hand a dream does not symbolize every possible element of the latent dream-thoughts but only certain definite ones. So there are restrictions here in both directions. We must admit, too, that the concept of a symbol cannot at present be sharply delimited: it shades off into such notions as those of a replacement or representation, and even approaches that of an allusion. With a number of symbols the comparison which underlies them is obvious. But again there are other symbols in regard to which we must ask ourselves where we are to look for the common element, the tertium comparationis, of the supposed comparison. On further reflection we may afterwards discover it or it may definitely remain concealed. It is strange, moreover, that if a symbol is a comparison it should not be brought to light by an association, and that the dreamer should not be acquainted with it but should make use of it without knowing about it: more than that, indeed, that the dreamer feels no inclination to acknowledge the comparison even after it has been pointed out to him. You see, then, that a symbolic relation is a comparison of a quite special kind, of which we do not as yet clearly grasp the basis, though perhaps we may later arrive at some indication of it.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3247

The range of things which are given symbolic representation in dreams is not wide: the human body as a whole, parents, children, brothers and sisters, birth, death, nakedness - and something else besides. The one typical - that is regular - representation of the human figure as a whole is a house, as was recognized by Scherner, who even wanted to give this symbol a transcendant importance which it does not possess. It may happen in a dream that one finds oneself climbing down the façade of a house, enjoying it at one moment, frightened at another. The houses with smooth walls are men, the ones with projections and balconies that one can hold on to are women. One’s parents appear in dreams as the Emperor and Empress, the King and Queen or other honoured personages; so here dreams are displaying much filial piety. They treat children and brothers and sisters less tenderly: these are symbolized as small animals or vermin. Birth is almost invariably represented by something which has a connection with water: one either falls into the water or climbs out of it, one rescues someone from the water or is rescued by someone - that is to say, the relation is one of mother to child. Dying is replaced in dreams by departure, by a train journey, being dead by various obscure and, as it were, timid hints, nakedness by clothes and uniforms. You see how indistinct the boundaries are here between symbolic and allusive representation.

It is a striking fact that, compared with this scanty enumeration, there is another field in which the objects and topics are represented with an extraordinarily rich symbolism. This field is that of sexual life - the genitals, sexual processes, sexual intercourse. The very great majority of symbols in dreams are sexual symbols. And here a strange disproportion is revealed. The topics I have mentioned are few, but the symbols for them are extremely numerous, so that each of these things can be expressed by numbers of almost equivalent symbols. The out come, when they are interpreted, gives rise to general objection. For, in contrast to the multiplicity of the representations in the dream, the interpretations of the symbols are very monotonous, and this displeases everyone who hears of it; but what is there that we can do about it?

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3248

Since this is the first time I have spoken of the subject-matter of sexual life in one of these lectures, I owe you some account of the way in which I propose to treat the topic. Psycho-analysis finds no occasion for concealments and hints, it does not think it necessary to be ashamed of dealing with this important material, it believes it is right and proper to call everything by its correct name, and it hopes that this will be the best way of keeping irrelevant thoughts of a disturbing kind at a distance. The fact that these lectures are being given before a mixed audience of both sexes can make no difference to this. Just as there can be no science in usum Delphini, there can be none for schoolgirls; and the ladies among you have made it clear by their presence in this lecture-room that they wish to be treated on an equality with men.

The male genitals, then, are represented in dreams in a number of ways that must be called symbolic, where the common element in the comparison is mostly very obvious. To begin with, for the male genitals as a whole the sacred number 3 is of symbolic significance. The more striking and for both sexes the more interesting component of the genitals, the male organ, finds symbolic substitutes in the first instance in things that resemble it in shape - things, accordingly, that are long and up-standing, such as sticks, umbrellas, posts, trees and so on; further, in objects which share with the thing they represent the characteristic of penetrating into the body and injuring - thus, sharp weapons of every kind, knives, daggers, spears, sabres, but also fire-arms, rifles, pistols and revolvers (particularly suitable owing to their shape). In the anxiety dreams of girls, being followed by a man with a knife or a fire-arm plays a large part. This is perhaps the commonest instance of dream symbolism and you will now be able to translate it easily. Nor is there any difficulty in understanding how it is that the male organ can be replaced by objects from which water flows - water-taps, watering-cans, or fountains - or again by other objects which are capable of being lengthened, such as hanging-lamps, extensible pencils, etc. A no less obvious aspect of the organ explains the fact that pencils, pen-holders, nail-files, hammers, and other instruments are undoubted male sexual symbols.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3249

The remarkable characteristic of the male organ which enables it to rise up in defiance of the laws of gravity, one of the phenomena of erection, leads to its being represented symbolically by balloons, flying-machines and most recently by Zeppelin airships. But dreams can symbolize erection in yet another, far more expressive manner. They can treat the sexual organ as the essence of the dreamer’s whole person and make him himself fly. Do not take it to heart if dreams of flying, so familiar and often so delightful, have to be interpreted as dreams of general sexual excitement, as erection-dreams. Among students of psycho-analysis, Paul Federn has placed this interpretation beyond any doubt; but the same conclusion was reached from his investigations by Mourly Vold, who has been so much praised for his sobriety, who carried out the dream-experiments I have referred to with artificially arranged positions of the arms and legs and who was far removed from psycho-analysis and may have known nothing about it. And do not make an objection out of the fact that women can have the same flying dreams as men. Remember, rather, that our dreams aim at being the fulfilments of wishes and that the wish to be a man is found so frequently, consciously or unconsciously, in women. Nor will anyone with a knowledge of anatomy be bewildered by the fact that it is possible for women to realize this wish through the same sensations as men. Women possess as part of their genitals a small organ similar to the male one; and this small organ, the clitoris, actually plays the same part in childhood and during the years before sexual intercourse as the large organ in men.

Among the less easily understandable male sexual symbols are certain reptiles and fishes, and above all the famous symbol of the snake. It is certainly not easy to guess why hats and overcoats or cloaks are employed in the same way, but their symbolic significance is quite unquestionable. And finally we can ask ourselves whether the replacement of the male limb by another limb, the foot or the hand, should be described as symbolic. We are, I think, compelled to do so by the context and by counterparts in the case of women.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3250

The female genitals are symbolically represented by all such objects as share their characteristic of enclosing a hollow space which can take something into itself: by pits, cavities and hollows, for instance, by vessels and bottles, by receptacles, boxes, trunks, cases, chests, pockets, and so on. Ships, too, fall into this category. Some symbols have more connection with the uterus than with the female genitals: thus, cupboard, stoves and, more especially, rooms. Here room-symbolism touches on house-symbolism. Doors and gates, again, are symbols of the genital orifice. Materials, too, are symbols for women: wood, papery and objects made of them, like tables and books. Among animals, snails and mussels at least are undeniably female symbols; among parts of the body, the mouth (as a substitute for the genital orifice); among buildings, churches and chapels. Not every symbol, as you will observe, is equally intelligible.

The breasts must be reckoned with the genitals, and these, like the larger hemispheres of the female body, are represented by apples, peaches, and fruit in general. The pubic hair of both sexes is depicted in dreams as woods and bushes. The complicated topography of the female genital parts makes one understand how it is that they are often represented as landscapes, with rocks, woods and water, while the imposing mechanism of the male sexual apparatus explains why all kinds of complicated machinery which is hard to describe serve as symbols for it.

Another symbol of the female genitals which deserves mention is a jewel-case. Jewel and treasure are used in dreams as well as in waking life to describe someone who is loved. Sweets frequently represent sexual enjoyment. Satisfaction obtained from a person’s own genitals is indicated by all kinds of playing, including piano-playing. Symbolic representations par excellence of masturbation are gliding or sliding and pulling off a branch.(The falling out of a tooth or the pulling out of a tooth is a particularly notable dream-symbol. Its first meaning is undoubtedly castration as a punishment for masturbating. We come across special representations of sexual intercourse less often than might be expected from what has been said so far. Rhythmical activities such as dancing, riding and climbing must be mentioned here, as well as violent experiences such as being run over; so, too, certain manual crafts, and, of course, threatening with weapons.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3251

You must not picture the use or the translation of these symbols as something quite simple. In the course of them all kinds of things happen which are contrary to our expectations. It seems almost incredible, for instance, that in these symbolic representations the differences between the sexes are often not clearly observed. Some symbols signify genitals in general, irrespective of whether they are male or female: for instance, a small child, a small son or a small daughter. Or again, a predominantly male symbol may be used for the female genitals or vice versa. We cannot understand this till we have obtained some insight into the development of sexual ideas in human beings. In some instances the ambiguity of the symbols may only be an apparent one; and the most marked symbols, such as weapons, pockets and chests are excluded from this bisexual use.

I will now go on to make a survey, starting not from the thing represented but from the symbol, of the fields from which sexual symbols are mostly derived, and I will make a few additional remarks, with special reference to the symbols where the common element in the comparison is not understood. The hat is an obscure symbol of this kind - perhaps, too, head-coverings in general - with a male significance as a rule, but also capable of a female one. In the same way an overcoat or cloak means a man, perhaps not always with a genital reference; it is open to you to ask why. Neckties, which hang down and are not worn by women, are a definitely male symbol. Underclothing and linen in general are female. Clothes and uniforms, as we have already seen, are a substitute for nakedness or bodily shapes. Shoes and slippers are female genitals. Tables and wood have already been mentioned as puzzling but certainly female symbols. Ladders, steps, and staircases, or, more precisely, walking on them, are clear symbols of sexual intercourse. On reflection, it will occur to us that the common element here is the rhythm of walking up them - perhaps, too, the increasing excitement and breathlessness the higher one climbs.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3252

We have earlier referred to landscapes as representing the female genitals. Hills and rocks are symbols of the male organ. Gardens are common symbols of the female genitals. Fruit stands, not for children, but for the breasts. Wild animals mean people in an excited sensual state, and further, evil instincts or passions. Blossoms and flowers indicate women’s genitals, or, in particular, virginity. Do not forget that blossoms are actually the genitals of plants.

We are acquainted already with rooms as a symbol. The representation can be carried further, for windows, and doors in and out of rooms, take over the meaning of orifices in the body. And the question of the room being open or locked fits in with this symbolism, and the key that opens it is a decidedly male symbol.

Here, then, is material used for symbolism in dreams. It is not complete and could be carried deeper as well as further. But I fancy it will seem to you more than enough and may even have exasperated you. ‘Do I really live in the thick of sexual symbols?’ you may ask. ‘Are all the objects around me, all the clothes I put on, all the things I pick up, all of them sexual symbols and nothing else?’ There is really ground enough for raising astonished questions, and, as a first one, we may enquire how we in fact come to know the meaning of these dream symbols, upon which the dreamer himself gives us insufficient information or none at all.

My reply is that we learn it from very different sources from fairy tales and myths, from buffoonery and jokes, from folklore (that is, from knowledge about popular manners and customs, sayings and songs) and from poetic and colloquial linguistic usage. In all these directions we come upon the same symbolism, and in some of them we can understand it without further instruction. If we go into these sources in detail, we shall find so many parallels to dream-symbolism that we cannot fail to be convinced of our interpretations.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3253

According to Scherner, as we have said, the human body is often represented in dreams by the symbol of a house. Carrying this representation further, we found that windows, doors and gates stood for openings in the body and that façades of houses were either smooth or provided with balconies and projections to hold on to. But the same symbolism is found in our linguistic usage - when we greet an acquaintance familiarly as an ‘altes haus’ [‘old house’], when we speak of giving someone ‘eins aufs Dachl’ [a knock on the head, literally, ‘one on the roof’], or when we say of someone else that ‘he’s not quite right in the upper storey’. In anatomy the orifices of the body are in so many words termed ‘Leibespforten’ [literally, ‘portals of the body’].

It seems surprising at first to find one’s parents in dreams as an imperial or royal couple. But it has its parallel in fairy tales. It begins to dawn on us that the many fairy tales which begin ‘Once upon a time there were a King and Queen’ only mean to say that there were once a father and mother. In a family the children are jokingly called ‘princes’ and the eldest ‘crown prince’. The King himself calls himself the father of his country. We speak of small children jokingly as ‘Würmer’ [‘worms’] and speak sympathetically of a child as ‘der areme Wurm’ [‘the poor worm’].

Let us go back to house-symbolism. When in a dream we make use of the projections on houses for catching hold of, we may be reminded of a common vulgar expression for well developed breasts: ‘She’s got something to catch hold of.’ There is another popular expression in such cases: ‘She’s got plenty of wood in front of the house’, which seems to confirm our interpretation of wood as a female, maternal symbol.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3254

And, speaking of wood, it is hard to understand how that material came to represent what is maternal and female. But here comparative philology may come to our help. Our German word –‘Holz’ seems to come from the same root as the Greek ‘ύλη [hule]’, meaning ‘stuff ’ ‘raw material’. This seems to be an instance of the not uncommon event of the general name of a material eventually coming to be reserved for some particular material. Now there is an island in the Atlantic named ‘Madeira’. This name was given to it by the Portuguese when they discovered it, because at that time it was covered all over with woods. For in the Portuguese language ‘madeira’ means ‘wood’. You will notice, however, that ‘madeira’ is only a slightly modified form of the Latin word ‘materia’, which once more means ‘material’ in general. But ‘materia’ is derived from ‘mater’, ‘mother’: the material out of which anything is made is, as it were, a mother to it. This ancient view of the thing survives, therefore, in the symbolic use of wood for ‘woman’ or ‘mother’.

Birth is regularly expressed in dreams by some connection with water: one falls into the water or one comes out of the water - one gives birth or one is born. We must not forget that this symbol is able to appeal in two ways to evolutionary truth. Not only are all terrestrial mammals, including man’s ancestors, descended from aquatic creatures (this is the more remote of the two facts), but every individual mammal, every human being, spent the first phase of its existence in water - namely as an embryo in the amniotic fluid in its mother’s uterus, and came out of that water when it was born. I do not say that the dreamer knows this; on the other hand, I maintain that he need not know it. There is something else that the dreamer probably knows from having been told it in his childhood; and I even maintain of that too that his knowledge of it contributed nothing to the construction of the symbol. He was told in his nursery that the stork brings the babies. But where does it fetch them from? From the pond, or from the stream - once again, then, from the water. One of my patients after he had been given this information - he was a little Count at the time - disappeared for a whole afternoon. He was found at last lying by the edge of the castle pool, with his little face bending over the surface of the water eagerly peering down to try and see the babies at the bottom.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3255

In myths about the birth of heroes - to which Otto Rank has devoted a comparative study, the oldest being that of King Sargon of Agade (about 2800 B.C.) - a predominant part is played by exposure in the water and rescue from the water. Rank has perceived that these are representations of birth, analogous to those that are usual in dreams. If one rescues someone from the water in a dream, one is making one self into his mother, or simply into a mother. In myths a person who rescues a baby from the water is admitting that she is the baby’s true mother. There is a well-known comic anecdote according to which an intelligent Jewish boy was asked who the mother of Moses was. He replied without hesitation: ‘The Princess.’ ‘No’, he was told, ‘she only took him out of the water.’ ‘That’s what she says’, he replied, and so proved that he had found the correct interpretation of the myth.

Departure in dreams means dying. So, too, if a child asks where someone is who has died and whom he misses, it is common nursery usage to reply that he has gone on a journey. Once more I should like to contradict the belief that the dream symbol is derived from this evasion. The dramatist is using the same symbolic connection when he speaks of the after-life as ‘the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns’. Even in ordinary life it is common to speak of ‘the last journey’. Every one acquainted with ancient rituals is aware of how seriously (in the religion of Ancient Egypt, for instance) the idea is taken of a journey to the land of the dead. Many copies have survived of The Book of the Dead, which was supplied to the mummy like a Baedeker to take with him on the journey. Ever since burial-places have been separated from dwelling-places the dead person’s last journey has indeed become a reality.

It is just as little the case that genital symbolism is something that is found only in dreams. Every one of you has probably at one time or another spoken impolitely of a woman as an ‘alte Schachtel’ [‘old box’], perhaps without knowing that you were using a genital symbol. In the New Testament we find woman referred to as ‘the weaker vessel’. The Hebrew scriptures, written in a style that comes close to poetry, are full of sexually symbolic expressions, which have not always been correctly understood and whose exegesis (for instance, in the case of the Song of Solomon) has led to some misunderstandings. In later Hebrew literature it is very common to find a woman represented by a house, whose door stands for the sexual orifice. A man complains, for instance, in a case of lost virginity, that he has ‘found the door open’. So, too, the symbol of a table for a woman in these writings. Thus, a woman says of her husband: ‘I laid the table for him, but he turned it round.’ Lame children are said to come about through the man’s ‘turning the table round’. I take these examples from a paper by Dr. L. Levy of Brünn.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3256

The fact that ships, too, in dreams stand for women is made credible by the etymologists, who tell us that ‘Schiff [ship]’ was originally the name of an earthenware vessel and is the same word as ‘Schaff’ [a dialect word meaning ‘tub’]. That ovens represent women and the uterus is confirmed by the Greek legend of Periander of Corinth and his wife Melissa. The tyrant, according to Herodotus, conjured up the shade of his wife, whom he had loved passionately but had murdered out of jealousy, to obtain some information from her. The dead woman proved her identity by saying that he (Periander) had pushed his bread into a cold oven’, as a disguise for an event which no one else could know of. In the periodical Anthropophyteia, edited by F. S. Krauss, an invaluable source of knowledge of sexual anthropology, we learn that in a particular part of Germany they say of a woman who has given birth to a child that ‘her oven has come to pieces’. Kindling fire, and everything to do with it, is intimately interwoven with sexual symbolism. Flame is always a male genital, and the fireplace, the hearth is its female counterpart.

If you may have felt surprised at the frequency with which landscapes are used in dreams to represent the female genitals, you can learn from mythology the part played by Mother Earth in the concepts and cults of the peoples of antiquity and how their view of agriculture was determined by this symbolism. You will perhaps be inclined to trace the fact that in dreams a room represents a woman to the common usage in our language by which ‘Frau’ is replaced by ‘Frauenzimmer’¹ - the human being is replaced by the apartment allotted to her. Similarly we speak of the ‘Sublime Porte’, meaning the Sultan and his government. So too the title of the Ancient Egyptian ruler, ‘Pharaoh’, means simply ‘Great Courtyard’. (In the Ancient East the courts between the double gateways of a city were public meeting-places like the market-places of the classical world.) This derivation, however, appears to be too superficial. It seems to me more likely that a room became the symbol of a woman as being the space which encloses human beings. We have already found ‘house’ used in a similar sense; and mythology and poetical language enable us to add ‘city’, ‘citadel’, ‘castle’ and ‘fortress’ as further symbols for ‘woman’. The question could be easily settled from the dreams of people who do not speak or understand German. During the last few years I have mainly treated foreign-speaking patients, and I seem to remember that in their dreams too ‘Zimmer’ [‘room’] meant ‘Frauenzimmer’, though they had no similar usage in their languages. There are other indications that the symbolic relation can go beyond the limits of language - which, incidentally was asserted long ago by an old investigator of dreams, Schubert. However, none of my dreamers were completely ignorant of German, so the decision must be left to psycho-analysts who can collect data from unilingual people in other countries.

¹ [Literally ‘woman’s apartment’. The word is very often used in German as a slightly derogatory synonym for ‘woman’.]

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3257

There is scarcely one of the symbolic representations of the male genitals which does not recur in joking, vulgar or poetic usage, especially in the ancient classical dramatists. But here we meet not only the symbols which appear in dreams, but others besides - for instance tools employed in various operations, and particularly the plough. Moreover, the symbolic representation of masculinity leads us to a very extensive and much disputed region, which, on grounds of economy, we shall avoid. I should like, however, to devote a few words to one symbol, which, as it were, falls outside this class - the number 3. Whether this number owes its sacred character to this symbolic connection remains undecided. But what seems certain is that a number of tripartite things that occur in nature - the clover leaf, for instance - owe their use for coats of arms and emblems to this symbolic meaning. Similarly, the tripartite lily - the so-called fleur-de-lis - and the remarkable heraldic device of two islands so far apart as Sicily and the Isle of Man - the triskeles (three bent legs radiating from a centre) - seem to be stylized versions of the male genitals. Likenesses of the male organ were regarded in antiquity as the most powerful apotropaic (means of defence) against evil influences, and, in conformity with this, the lucky charms of our own day can all be easily recognized as genital or sexual symbols. Let us consider a collection of such things - as they are worn, for instance, in the form of small silver hanging trinkets: a four-leaved clover, a pig, a mushroom, a horse-shoe, a ladder, a chimney-sweep. The four-leaved clover has taken the place of the three-leaved one which is really suited to be a symbol. The pig is an ancient fertility symbol. The mushroom is an undoubted penis-symbol: there are mushrooms which owe their systematic name (Phallus impudicus) to their unmistakable resemblance to the male organ. The horseshoe copies the outline of the female genital orifice, while the chimney-sweep, who carries the ladder, appears in this company on account of his activities, with which sexual intercourse is vulgarly compared. (Cf. Anthropophyteia.) We have made the acquaintance of his ladder in dreams as a sexual symbol; here German linguistic usage comes to our help and shows us how the word ‘steigen’ [‘to climb’, or ‘to mount’] is used in what is par excellence a sexual sense. We say ‘den Frauen nachsteigen [‘to run’ (literally ‘climb’) ‘after women’], and ‘ein alter Steiger’ [‘an old rake’ (literally ‘climber’)]. In French, in which the word for steps on a staircase is ‘marches’, we find a precisely analogous term ‘un vieux marcheur’. The fact that in many large animals climbing or ‘mounting’ on the female is a necessary preliminary to sexual intercourse probably fits into this context.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3258

‘Pulling off a branch’ as a symbolic representation of masturbation is not merely in harmony with vulgar descriptions of the act but has far-reaching mythological parallels. But that masturbation, or rather the punishment for it - castration -, should be represented by the falling out or pulling out of teeth is especially remarkable, since there is a counterpart to it in anthropology which can be known to only a very small number of dreamers. There seems to me no doubt that the circumcision practised by so many peoples is an equivalent and substitute for castration. And we now learn that certain primitive tribes in Australia carry out circumcision as a puberty rite (at the festival to celebrate a boy’s attaining sexual maturity), while other tribes, their near neighbours, have replaced this act by the knocking out of a tooth.

Here I bring my account of these specimens to an end. They are only specimens. We know more on the subject; but you may imagine how much richer and more interesting a collection like this would be if it were brought together, not by amateurs like us, but by real professionals in mythology, anthropology, philology and folklore.

A few consequences force themselves on our notice; they cannot be exhaustive, but they offer us food for reflection.

In the first place we are faced by the fact that the dreamer has a symbolic mode of expression at his disposal which he does not know in waking life and does not recognize. This is as extraordinary as if you were to discover that your housemaid understood Sanskrit, though you know that she was born in a Bohemian village and never learnt it. It is not easy to account for this fact by the help of our psychological views. We can only say that the knowledge of symbolism is unconscious to the dreamer, that it belongs to his unconscious mental life. But even with this assumption we do not meet the point. Hitherto it has only been necessary for us to assume the existence of unconscious endeavours - endeavours, that is, of which, temporarily or permanently, we know nothing. Now, however, it is a question of more than this, of unconscious pieces of knowledge, of connections of thought, of comparisons between different objects which result in its being possible for one of them to be regularly put in place of the other. These comparisons are not freshly made on each occasion; they lie ready to hand and are complete, once and for all. This is implied by the fact of their agreeing in the case of different individuals - possibly, indeed, agreeing in spite of differences of language. What can be the origin of these symbolic relations? Linguistic usage covers only a small part of them. The multiplicity of parallels in other spheres of knowledge are mostly unknown to the dreamer; we ourselves have been obliged to collect them laboriously.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3259

Secondly, these symbolic relations are not something peculiar to dreamers or to the dream-work through which they come to expression. This same symbolism, as we have seen, is employed by myths and fairy tales, by the people in their sayings and songs, by colloquial linguistic usage and by the poetic imagination. The field of symbolism is immensely wide, and dream symbolism is only a small part of it: indeed, it serves no useful purpose to attack the whole problem from the direction of dreams. Many symbols which are commonly used elsewhere appear in dreams very seldom or not at all. Some dream symbols are not to be found in all other fields but only, as you have seen, here and there. One gets an impression that what we are faced with here is an ancient but extinct mode of expression, of which different pieces have survived indifferent fields, one piece only here, another only there, a third, perhaps, in slightly modified forms in several fields. And here I recall the phantasy of an interesting psychotic patient, who imagined a ‘basic language’ of which all these symbolic relations would be residues.

Thirdly, it must strike you that the symbolism in the other fields I have mentioned is by no means solely sexual symbolism, whereas in dreams symbols are used almost exclusively for the expression of sexual objects and relations. This is not easily explained either. Are we to suppose that symbols which originally had a sexual significance later acquired another application and that, furthermore, the toning-down of representation by symbols into other kinds of representation may be connected with this? These questions can evidently not be answered so long as we have considered dream-symbolism alone. We can only hold firmly to the suspicion that there is a specially intimate relation between true symbols and sexuality.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3260

In this connection we have been given an important hint during the last few years. A philologist, Hans Sperber, of Uppsala, who works independently of psycho-analysis, has put forward the argument that sexual needs have played the biggest part in the origin and development of speech. According to him, the original sounds of speech served for communication, and summoned the speaker’s sexual partner; the further development of linguistic roots accompanied the working activities of primal man. These activities, he goes on, were performed in common and were accompanied by rhythmically repeated utterances. In this way a sexual interest became attached to work. Primal man made work acceptable, as it were, by treating it as an equivalent and substitute for sexual activity. The words enunciated during work in common thus had two meanings; they denoted sexual acts as well as the working activity equated with them. As time went on, the words became detached from the sexual meaning and fixed to the work. In later generations the same thing happened with new words, which had a sexual meaning and were applied to new forms of work. In this way a number of verbal roots would have been formed, all of which were of sexual origin and had subsequently lost their sexual meaning. If the hypothesis I have here sketched out is correct, it would give us a possibility of understanding dream symbolism. We should understand why dreams, which preserve something of the earliest conditions, have such an extraordinarily large number of sexual symbols, and why, in general, weapons and tools always stand for what is male, while materials and things that are worked upon stand for what is female. The symbolic relation would be the residue of an ancient verbal identity; things which were once called by the same name as the genitals could now serve as symbols for them in dreams.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3261

The parallels we have found to dream-symbolism also allow us to form an estimate of the characteristic of psycho-analysis which enables it to attract general interest in a way in which neither psychology nor psychiatry has succeeded in doing. In the work of psycho-analysis links are formed with numbers of other mental sciences, the investigation of which promises results of the greatest value: links with mythology and philology, with folklore, with social psychology and the theory of religion. You will not be surprised to hear that a periodical has grown up on psycho-analytic soil whose sole aim is to foster these links. This periodical is known as Imago, founded in 1912 and edited by Hanns Sachs and Otto Rank. In all these links the share of psycho-analysis is in the first instance that of giver and only to a less extent that of receiver. It is true that this brings it an advantage in the fact that its strange findings become more familiar when they are met with again in other fields; but on the whole it is psycho-analysis which provides the technical methods and the points of view whose application in these other fields should prove fruitful. The mental life of human individuals, when subjected to psycho-analytic investigation, offers us the explanations with the help of which we are able to solve a number of riddles in the life of human communities or at least to set them in a true light.

Incidentally, I have said nothing at all to you yet as to the circumstances in which we can obtain our deepest insight into the hypothetical ‘primal language’ and as to the field in which most of it has survived. Until you know this you cannot form an opinion of its whole significance. For this field is that of the neuroses and its material is the symptoms and other manifestations of neurotic patients, for the explanation and treatment of which psycho-analysis was, indeed, created.

The fourth of my reflections takes us back to the beginning and directs us along our prescribed path. I have said that even if there were no dream-censorship dreams would still not be easily intelligible to us, for we should still be faced with the task of translating the symbolic language of dreams into that of our waking thought. Thus symbolism is a second and independent factor in the distortion of dreams, alongside of the dream-censorship. It is plausible to suppose, however, that the dream-censorship finds it convenient to make use of symbolism, since it leads towards the same end - the strangeness and incomprehensibility of dreams.

It will shortly become clear whether a further study of dreams may not bring us up against yet another factor that contributes to the distortion of dreams. But I should not like to leave the subject of dream-symbolism without once more touching on the problem of how it can meet with such violent resistance in educated people when the wide diffusion of symbolism in myths, religion, art and language is so unquestionable. May it not be that what is responsible is once again its connection with sexuality?

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3262

LECTURE XI

THE DREAM-WORK

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - When you have thoroughly grasped the dream-censorship and representation by symbols, you will not yet, it is true, have completely mastered the distortion in, dreams, but you will nevertheless be in a position to understand most dreams. In doing so you will make use of both of the two complementary techniques: calling up ideas that occur to the dreamer till you have penetrated from the substitute to the genuine thing and, on the ground of your own knowledge, replacing the symbols by what they mean. Later on we shall discuss some uncertainties that arise in this connection.

We can now take up once more a task that we tried to carry out previously with inadequate means, when we were studying the relations between the elements of dreams and the genuine things they stood for. We laid down four main relations of the kind: the relation of a part to a whole, approximation or allusion, the symbolic relation and the plastic representation of words. We now propose to undertake the same thing on a larger scale, by comparing the manifest content of a dream as a whole with the latent dream as it is revealed by interpretation.

I hope you will never again confuse these two things with each other. If you reach that point, you will probably have gone further in understanding dreams than most readers of my Interpretation of Dreams. And let me remind you once again that the work which transforms the latent dream-into the manifest one is called the dream-work. The work which proceeds in the contrary direction, which endeavours to arrive at the latent dream from the manifest one, is our work of interpretation. This work of interpretation seeks to undo the dream-work. The dreams of infantile type which we recognize as obvious fulfilments of wishes have nevertheless experienced some amount of dream-work - they have been transformed from a wish into an actual experience and also, as a rule, from thoughts into visual images. In their case there is no need for interpretation but only for undoing these two transformations. The additional dream-work that occurs in other dreams is called ‘dream-distortion’, and this has to be undone by our work of interpretation.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3263

Having compared the interpretations of numerous dreams, I am in a position to give you a summary description of what the dream-work does with the material of the latent dream-thoughts. I beg you, however, not to try to understand too much. of what I tell you. It will be a piece of description which should be listened to with quiet attention.

The first achievement of the dream-work is condensation. By that we understand the fact that the manifest dream has a smaller content than the latent one, and is thus an abbreviated translation of it. Condensation can on occasion be absent; as a rule it is present, and very often it is enormous. It is never changed into the reverse; that is to say, we never find that the manifest dream is greater in extent or content than the latent one. Condensation is brought about (1) by the total omission of certain latent elements, (2) by only a fragment of some complexes in the latent dream passing over into the manifest one and (3) by latent elements which have something in common being combined and fused into a single unity in the manifest dream.

If you prefer it, we can reserve the term ‘condensation’ for the last only of these processes. Its results are particularly easy to demonstrate. You will have no difficulty in recalling instances from your own dreams of different people being condensed into a single one. A composite figure of this kind may look like A perhaps, but may be dressed like B, may do something that we remember C doing, and at the same time we may know that he is D. This composite structure is of course emphasizing something that the four people have in common. It is possible, naturally, to make a composite structure out of things or places in the same way as out of people, provided that the various things and places have in common something which is emphasized by the latent dream. The process is like constructing a new and transitory concept which has this common element as its nucleus. The outcome of this superimposing of the separate elements that have been condensed together is as a rule a blurred and vague image, like what happens if you take several photographs on the same plate.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3264

The production of composite structures like these must be of great importance to the dream-work, since we can show that, where in the first instance the common elements necessary for them were missing, they are deliberately introduced - for instance, through the choice of the words by which a thought is expressed. We have already come across condensations and composite structures of this sort. They played a part in the production of some slips of the tongue. You will recall the young man who offered to ‘begleitdigen’ [‘begleiten (accompany)' + ‘beleidigen (insult)’] a lady. Moreover, there are jokes of which the technique is based on a condensation like this. But apart from these cases, it may be said that the process is something quite unusual and strange. It is true that counterparts to the construction of these composite figures are to be found in some creations of our imagination, which is ready to combine into a unity components of things that do not belong together in our experience - in the centaurs, for instance, and the fabulous beasts which appear in ancient mythology or in Böcklin’s pictures. The ‘creative’ imagination, indeed, is quite incapable of inventing anything; it can only combine components that are strange to one another. But the remarkable thing about the procedure of the dream-work lies in what follows. The material offered to the dream-work consists of thoughts - a few of which may be objectionable and unacceptable, but which are correctly constructed and expressed. The dream-work puts these thoughts into another form, and it is a strange and incomprehensible fact that in making this translation (this rendering, as it were, into another script or language) these methods of merging or combining are brought into use. After all, a translation normally endeavours to preserve the distinctions made in the text and particularly to keep things that are similar separate. The dream-work, quite the contrary, tries to condense two different thoughts by seeking out (like a joke) an ambiguous word in which the two thoughts may come together. We need not try to understand this feature all at once, but it may become important for our appreciation of the dream-work.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3265

But although condensation makes dreams obscure, it does not give one the impression of being an effect of the dream-censorship. It seems traceable rather to some mechanical or economic factor, but in any case the censorship profits by it.

The achievements of condensation can be quite extraordinary. It is sometimes possible by its help to combine two quite different latent trains of thought into one manifest dream, so that one can arrive at what appears to be a sufficient interpretation of a dream and yet in doing so can fail to notice a possible ‘over-interpretation’.

In regard to the connection between the latent and the manifest dream, condensation results also in no simple relation being left between the elements in the one and the other. A manifest element may correspond simultaneously to several latent ones, and, contrariwise, a latent element may play a part in several manifest ones - there is, as it were, a criss-cross relationship. In interpreting a dream, moreover, we find that the associations to a single manifest element need not emerge in succession: we must often wait till the whole dream has been interpreted.

Thus the dream-work carries out a very unusual kind of transcription of the dream-thoughts: it is not a word-for-word or a sign-for-sign translation; nor is it a selection made according to fixed rules - as though one were to reproduce only the consonants in a word and to leave out the vowels; nor is it what might be described as a representative selection - one element being invariably chosen to take the place of several; it is something different and far more complicated.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3266

The second achievement of the dream-work is displacement. Fortunately we have made some preliminary examination of this: for we know that it is entirely the work of the dream censorship. It manifests itself in two ways: in the first, a latent element is replaced not by a component part of itself but by something more remote - that is, by an allusion; and in the second, the psychical accent is shifted from an important element on to another which is unimportant, so that the dream appears differently centred and strange.

Replacing something by an allusion to it is a process familiar in our waking thought as well, but there is a difference. In waking thought the allusion must be easily intelligible, and the substitute must be related in its subject-matter to the genuine thing it stands for. Jokes, too, often make use of allusion. They drop the precondition of there being an association in subject matter, and replace it by unusual external associations such as similarity of sound, verbal ambiguity, and so on. But they retain the precondition of intelligibility: a joke would lose all its efficiency if the path back from the allusion to the genuine thing could not be followed easily. The allusions employed for displacement in dreams have set themselves free from both of these restrictions. They are connected with the element they replace by the most external and remote relations and are therefore unintelligible; and when they are undone, their interpretation gives the impression of being a bad joke or of an arbitrary and forced explanation dragged in by the hair of its head. For the dream-censorship only gains its end if it succeeds in making it impossible to find the path back from the allusion to the genuine thing.

Displacement of accent is unheard-of as a method of expressing thoughts. We sometimes make use of it in waking thought in order to produce a comic effect. I can perhaps call up the impression it produces of going astray if I recall an anecdote. There was a blacksmith in a village, who had committed a capital offence. The Court decided that the crime must be punished; but as the blacksmith was the only one in the village and was indispensable, and as on the other hand there were three tailors living there, one of them was hanged instead.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3267

The third achievement of the dream-work is psychologically the most interesting. It consists in transforming thoughts into visual images. Let us keep it clear that this transformation does not affect everything in the dream-thoughts; some of them retain their form and appear as thoughts or knowledge in the manifest dream as well; nor are visual images the only form into which thoughts are transformed. Nevertheless they comprise the essence of the formation of dreams; this part of the dream-work is, as we already know, the second most regular one, and we have already made the acquaintance of the ‘plastic’ representation of words in the case of individual dream-elements.

It is clear that this achievement is not an easy one. To form some idea of its difficulties, let us suppose that you have under taken the task of replacing a political leading article in a news paper by a series of illustrations. You will thus have been thrown back from alphabetic writing to picture writing. In so far as the article mentioned people and concrete objects you will replace them easily and perhaps even advantageously by pictures; but your difficulties will begin when you come to the representation of abstract words and of all those parts of speech which indicate relations between thoughts - such as particles, conjunctions and so on. In the case of abstract words you will be able to help yourselves out by means of a variety of devices. For instance, you will endeavour to give the text of the article a different wording, which may perhaps sound less usual but which will contain more components that are concrete and capable of being represented. You will then recall that most abstract words are ‘watered-down’ concrete ones, and you will for that reason hark back as often as possible to the original concrete meaning of such words. Thus you will be pleased to find that you can represent the ‘possession’ of an object by a real, physical sitting down on it.¹  And the dream-work does just the same thing. In such circumstances you will scarcely be able to expect very great accuracy from your representation: similarly, you will forgive the dream-work for replacing an element so hard to put into pictures as, for example, ‘adultery’ [‘Ehebruch’, literally, ‘breach of marriage’], by another breach - a broken leg [‘Beinbruch’].² And in this way you will succeed to some extent in compensating for the clumsiness of the picture writing that is supposed to take the place of the alphabetic script.

¹ [The German word ‘besitzen’ (‘to possess’) is more obviously connected with sitting than its English equivalent (‘sitzen’ = ‘to sit’).]

² While I am correcting the proofs of these pages chance has put into my hands a newspaper cutting which offers an unexpected confirmation of what I have written above:-

‘DIVINE PUNISHMENT

‘A Broken Arm for a Broken Marriage.

‘Frau Alta M., wife of a militiaman, sued Frau Klementine K. for adultery. According to the statement of claim, Frau K. had carried on an illicit relationship with Karl M., while her own husband was at the front and was actually making her an allowance of 70 Kronen a month. Frau K. had already received a considerable amount of money from the plaintiff’s husband, while she and her child had to live in hunger and poverty. Fellow-soldiers of her husband had informed her that Frau K. had visited taverns with M. and had sat there drinking till far into the night. On one occasion the defendant had asked the plaintiff’s husband in the presence of several other soldiers whether he would not get a divorce soon from "his old woman" and set up with her. Frau K.’s caretaker also reported that she had repeatedly seen the plaintiff’s husband in the house most incompletely dressed.

‘Before a court in the Leopoldstadt Frau K. yesterday denied knowing M., so that there could be no question of her having intimate relations with him.

‘A witness, Albertine M., stated, however, that she had surprised Frau K. kissing the plaintiff ‘s husband.

‘At a previous hearing, M., under examination as a witness, had denied having intimate relations with the defendant. Yesterday the Judge received a letter in which the witness withdrew the statements he had made on the earlier occasion and admitted that he had had a love-affair with Frau K. up till the previous June. He had only denied his relations with the defendant at the former hearing because she had come to him before the hearing and begged him on her knees to save her and say nothing. "Today", the witness wrote, "I feel compelled to make a full confession to the Court, for I have broken my left arm and this seems to me to be a divine punishment for my wrong-doing."

‘The Judge stated that the penal offence had lapsed under the statute of limitations. The plaintiff then withdrew her claim and the defendant was discharged.’

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3268

For representing the parts of speech which indicate relations between thoughts - ‘because’, ‘therefore’, ‘however’, etc. - you will have no similar aids at your disposal; those constituents of the text will be lost so far as translation into pictures goes. In the same way, the dream-work reduces the content of the dream-thoughts to its raw material of objects and activities. You will feel pleased if there is a possibility of in some way hinting, through the subtler details of the pictures, at certain relations not in themselves capable of being represented. And just so does the dream-work succeed in expressing some of the content of the latent dream-thoughts by peculiarities in the form of the manifest dream-by its clarity or obscurity, by its division into several pieces, and so on. The number of part dreams into which a dream is divided usually corresponds to the number of main topics or groups of thoughts in the latent dream. A short introductory dream will often stand in the relation of a prelude to a following, more detailed, main dream or may give the motive for it; a subordinate clause in the dream-thoughts will be replaced by the interpolation of a change of scene into the manifest dream, and so on. Thus the form of dreams is far from being without significance and itself calls for interpretation. When several dreams occur during the same night, they often have the same meaning and indicate that an attempt is being made to deal more and more efficiently with a stimulus of increasing insistence. In individual dreams a particularly difficult element may be represented by several symbols - by ‘doublets’.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3269

If we make a series of comparisons between the dream-thoughts and the manifest dreams which replace them, we shall come upon all kinds of things for which we are unprepared: for instance, that nonsense and absurdity in dreams have their meaning. At this point, indeed, the contrast between the medical and the psycho-analytic view of dreams reaches a pitch of acuteness not met with elsewhere. According to the former, dreams are senseless because mental activity in dreams has abandoned all its powers of criticism; according to our view, on the contrary, dreams become senseless when a piece of criticism included in the dream-thoughts - a judgement that ‘this is absurd’ - has to be represented. The dream you are familiar with of the visit to the theatre (‘three tickets for 1 florin 50') is a good example of this. The judgement it expressed was: ‘it was absurd to marry so early.’

Similarly, in the course of our work of interpretation we learn what it is that corresponds to the doubts and uncertainties which the dreamer so often expresses as to whether a particular element occurred in a dream, whether it was this or whether, on the contrary, it was something else. There is as a rule nothing in the latent dream-thoughts corresponding to these doubts and uncertainties; they are entirely due to the activity of the dream-censorship and are to be equated with an attempt at elimination which has not quite succeeded.

Among the most surprising findings is the way in which the dream-work treats contraries that occur in the latent dream. We know already that conformities in the latent material are replaced by condensations in the manifest dream. Well, contraries are treated in the same way as conformities, and there is a special preference for expressing them by the same manifest element. Thus an element in the manifest dream which is capable of having a contrary may equally well be expressing either itself or its contrary or both together: only the sense can decide which translation is to be chosen. This connects with the further fact that a representation of ‘no’ - or at any rate an unambiguous one - is not to be found in dreams.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3270

A welcome analogy to this strange behaviour of the dream-work is provided for us in the development of language. Some philologists have maintained that in the most ancient languages contraries such as ‘strong-weak’, ‘light-dark’, ‘big-small’ are expressed by the same verbal roots. (What we term ‘the antithetical meaning of primal words.’) Thus in Ancient Egyptian ‘ken’ originally meant ‘strong’ and ‘weak’. In speaking, misunderstanding from the use of such ambivalent words was avoided by differences of intonation and by the accompanying gesture, and in writing, by the addition of what is termed a ‘determinative’ - a picture which is not itself intended to be spoken. For instance, ‘ken’ meaning ‘strong’ was written with a picture of a little upright man after the alphabetic signs; when ‘ken’ stood for ‘weak’, what followed was the picture of a man squatting down limply. It was only later, by means of slight modifications of the original homologous word, that two distinct representations were arrived at of the contraries included in it. Thus from ‘ken’ ‘strong-weak’ were derived ‘ken’ ‘strong’ and ‘kan’ ‘weak’. The remains of this ancient antithetical meaning seem to have been preserved not only in the latest developments of the oldest languages but also in far younger ones and even in some that are still living. Here is some evidence of this, derived from K. Abel (1884).

In Latin, words that remained ambivalent in this way are ‘altus’ (‘high’ and ‘deep’) and ‘sacer’ (‘sacred’ and ‘accursed’).

As instances of modifications of the same root I may mention ‘clamare’ (‘to cry’), ‘clam’ (‘softly’, ‘quietly’, ‘secretly’); ‘siccus’ (‘dry’), ‘succus’ (‘juice’). And in German: ‘Stimme’ [‘voice’], ‘stumm’ [‘dumb’].

If we compare related languages, there are numerous examples. In English, ‘to lock’; in German, ‘Loch’ [‘hole’] and ‘Lücke [‘gap’]. In English, ‘to cleave’; in German, ‘kleben’ [‘to stick’].

The English word ‘without’ (which is really ‘with-without’) is used to-day for ‘without’ alone. ‘With’, in addition to its combining sense, originally had a removing one; this is still to be seen in the compounds ‘withdraw and ‘withhold’. Similarly with the German ‘wieder’ [‘together with’ and ‘wider’ ‘against’].

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3271

Another characteristic of the dream-work also has its counterpart in the development of language. In Ancient Egyptian, as well as in other, later languages, the order of the sounds in a word can be reversed, while keeping the same meaning. Examples of this in English and German are: ‘Topf’ [‘pot’]-’pot’; ‘boat’-’tub’; ‘hurry’-’Ruhe’ [‘rest’]; ‘Balken’ [‘beam’]-’Kloben’ [‘log’] and ‘club’; ‘wait’-’täuwen’ [‘tarry’]. Similarly in Latin and German: ‘capere’-’packen’ [‘to seize’]; ‘ren’-’Niere’ [’kidney’].

Reversals like this, which occur here with individual words, take place in various ways in the dream-work. We already know reversal of meaning, replacement of something by its opposite. Besides this we find in dreams reversals of situation, of the relation between two people - a ‘topsy-turvy’ world. Quite often in dreams it is the hare that shoots the sportsman. Or again we find a reversal in the order of events, so that what precedes an event causally comes after it in the dream - like a theatrical production by a third-rate touring company, in which the hero falls down dead and the shot that killed him is not fired in the wings till afterwards. Or there are dreams where the whole order of the elements is reversed, so that to make sense in interpreting it we must take the last one first and the first one last. You will remember too from our study of dream symbolism that going or falling into the water means the same as coming out of it - that is, giving birth or being born, and that climbing up a staircase or a ladder is the same thing as coming down it. It is not hard to see the advantage that dream-distortion can derive from this freedom of representation.

These features of the dream-work may be described as archaic. They are equally characteristic of ancient systems of expression by speech and writing and they involve the same difficulties, which we shall have to discuss again later in a critical sense.

And now a few more considerations. In the case of the dream-work it is clearly a matter of transforming the latent thoughts which are expressed in words into sensory images, mostly of a visual sort. Now our thoughts originally arose from sensory images of that kind: their first material and their preliminary stages were sense impressions, or, more properly, mnemic images of such impressions. Only later were words attached to them and the words in turn linked up into thoughts. The dream-work thus submits thoughts to a regressive treatment and undoes their development; and in the course of the regression everything has to be dropped that had been added as a new acquisition in the course of the development of the mnemic images into thoughts.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3272

Such then, it seems, is the dream-work. As compared with the processes we have come to know in it, interest in the manifest dream must pale into insignificance. But I will devote a few more remarks to the latter, since it is of it alone that we have immediate knowledge.

It is natural that we should lose some of our interest in the manifest dream. It is bound to be a matter of indifference to us whether it is well put together, or is broken up into a series of disconnected separate pictures. Even if it has an apparently sensible exterior, we know that this has only come about through dream-distortion and can have as little organic relation to the internal content of the dream as the façade of an Italian church has to its structure and plan. There are other occasions when this façade of the dream has its meaning, and reproduces an important component of the latent dream-thoughts with little or no distortion. But we cannot know this before we have submitted the dream to interpretation and have been able to form a judgement from it as to the amount of distortion that has taken place. A similar doubt arises when two elements in a dream appear to have been brought into a close relation to each other. This may give us a valuable hint that we may bring together what corresponds to these elements in the latent dream as well; but on other occasions we can convince ourselves that what belongs together in the dream-thoughts has been torn apart in the dream.

In general one must avoid seeking to explain one part of the manifest dream by another, as though the dream had been coherently conceived and was a logically arranged narrative. On the contrary, it is as a rule like a piece of breccia, composed of various fragments of rock held together by a binding medium, so that the designs that appear on it do not belong to the original rocks imbedded in it. And there is in fact one part of the dream-work, known as ‘secondary revision’, whose business it is to make something whole and more or less coherent out of the first products of the dream-work. In the course of this, the material is arranged in what is often a completely misleading sense and, where it seems necessary, interpolations are made in it.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3273

On the other hand, we must not over-estimate the dream-work and attribute too much to it. The achievements I have enumerated exhaust its activity; it can do no more than condense, displace, represent in plastic form and subject the whole to a secondary revision. What appear in the dream as expressions of judgement, of criticism, of astonishment or of inference - none of these are achievements of the dream-work and they are very rarely expressions of afterthoughts about the dream; they are for the most part portions of the latent dream-thoughts which have passed over into the manifest dream with a greater or less amount of modification and adaptation to the context. Nor can the dream-work compose speeches. With a few assignable exceptions, speeches in dreams are copies and combinations of speeches which one has heard or spoken one self on the day before the dream and which have been included in the latent thoughts either as material or as the instigator of the dream. The dream-work is equally unable to carry out calculations. Such of them as appear in the manifest dream are mostly combinations of numbers, sham calculations which are quite senseless quâ calculations and are once again only copies of calculations in the latent dream-thoughts. In these circumstances it is not to be wondered at that the interest which had turned to the dream-work soon tends to move away from it to the latent dream-thoughts, which are revealed, distorted to a greater or less degree, by the manifest dream. But there is no justification for carrying this shift of interest so far that, in looking at the matter theoretically, one replaces the dream entirely by the latent dream-thoughts and makes some assertion about the former which only applies to the latter. It is strange that the findings of psycho-analysis could be misused to bring about this confusion. One cannot give the name of ‘dream’ to anything other than the product of the dream-work - that is to say, the form into which the latent thoughts have been transmuted by the dream-work.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3274

The dream-work is a process of quite a singular kind, of which the like has not yet become known in mental life. Condensations, displacements, regressive transformations of thoughts into images - such things are novelties whose discovery has already richly rewarded the labours of psycho-analysis. And you can see once more, from the parallels to the dream-work, the connections which have been revealed between psycho-analytic studies and other fields - especially those concerned in the development of speech and thought. You will only be able to form an idea of the further significance of these discoveries when you learn that the mechanism of dream-construction is the model of the manner in which neurotic symptoms arise.

I am also aware that we are not yet able to make a survey of the whole of the new acquisitions which these studies have brought to psychology. I will only point out the fresh proofs they have provided of the existence of unconscious mental acts - for this is what the latent dream-thoughts are - and what an unimaginably broad access to a knowledge of unconscious mental life we are promised by the interpretation of dreams.

But now the time has no doubt come for me to demonstrate to you from a variety of small examples of dreams what I have been preparing you for in the course of these remarks.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3275

LECTURE XII

SOME ANALYSES OF SAMPLE DREAMS

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - You must not be disappointed if I once again put before you fragments of dream-interpretations instead of inviting you to take part in the interpretation of a nice big dream. You will argue that after so many preparations you have a right to it, and you will express your conviction that after so many thousands of dreams have been successfully interpreted, it should have been possible long since to have brought together a collection of excellent sample dreams on which all our assertions about the dream-work and the dream-thoughts could be demonstrated. Just so. But the difficulties that stand in the way of the fulfilment of your wish are too many.

In the first place I must admit that no one carries on the interpretation of dreams as his main occupation. How does it come about, then, that people do interpret them? Occasionally, with no particular end in view, one may interest oneself in the dreams of an acquaintance, or one may work through one’s own dreams for a time in order to train oneself in psycho-analytic work; but for the most part what one has to deal with are the dreams of neurotic patients who are under psycho-analytic treatment. These latter dreams are excellent material and are in no way inferior to those of healthy people; but the technique of the treatment necessitates our subordinating dream-interpretation to therapeutic aims, and we have to allow a whole number of dreams to drop after we have extracted something from them that is of service to the treatment. Some dreams that occur during treatment entirely escape any full analysis: since they have arisen out of the great mass of psychical material which is still unknown to us, it is impossible to understand them before the treatment is finished. If I were to report dreams of this kind, it would oblige me to uncover all the secrets of a neurosis as well; and that will not do for us, since it is precisely to prepare us for the study of the neuroses that we have attacked the problem of dreams.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3276

You, however, would be glad to dispense with this material and would prefer to be given an explanation of the dreams of healthy people or of your own dreams. But this cannot be done, on account of their content. It is impossible to submit either oneself or anyone else whose confidence one enjoys to the ruthless exposure that would be involved in a detailed analysis of his dreams, which, as you already know, are concerned with the most intimate part of one’s personality. But there is another difficulty in the way apart from that of providing the material. You are aware that dreams present an alien appearance to the dreamer himself, and much more so to anyone who is unacquainted with him personally. Our literature is not poor in good and detailed dream-analyses. I myself have published a few within the framework of case histories. Perhaps the best example of the interpretation of a dream is the one reported by Otto Rank consisting of two interrelated dreams dreamt by a young girl, which occupy about two pages of print: but their analysis extends to seventy-six pages. So I should need something like a whole term to conduct you through a piece of work of the sort. If one takes up any comparatively long and much distorted dream, one has to give so many explanations of it, to bring up so much material in the way of associations and memories, to follow up so many by-paths, that a lecture about it would be quite confusing and unsatisfactory. I must therefore ask you to be content with what can be had more easily - an account of small pieces of the dreams of neurotic patients, in which it is possible to recognize this or that point in isolation. What is easiest to demonstrate are dream-symbols and, after them, some characteristics of the regressive representation in dreams. In the case of each of the dreams that follow, I will indicate why it is that I think it worth reporting.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3277

(1) This dream consisted only of two short pictures: His uncle was smoking a cigarette although it was Saturday. - A woman was caressing and fondling him as though he were her child.

In regard to the first picture the dreamer (a Jew) remarked that his uncle was a pious man who never had done and never could do anything sinful like that. In regard to the woman in the second picture nothing occurred to him except his mother. These two pictures or thoughts must obviously be seen in connection with each other. But how? Since he expressly disputed the reality of his uncle’s action, it is plausible to insert an ‘if’: ‘If my uncle, that pious man, were to smoke a cigarette on a Saturday, then I might let myself, too, be cuddled by my mother.’ This clearly means that cuddling with his mother was something impermissible, like smoking on a Saturday to a pious Jew. - You will recall that I told you that in the course of the dream-work all the relations between the dream-thoughts drop out; these are resolved into their raw material and it is the task of the interpretation to re-insert the omitted relations.

(2) As a result of my publications on dreams I have in a sense become a public consultant on matters relating to them, and for many years I have been receiving communications from the most various sources in which dreams are reported to me or submitted to my judgement. I am of course grateful to anyone who adds enough material to the dream to make an interpretation possible or who gives an interpretation himself. The following dream, dreamt by a medical student in Munich and dating from the year 1910, falls into this category. I am bringing it up in order to show you how impossible it is in general to understand a dream till the dreamer has given us his information about it. For I suspect that at bottom you consider that the ideal method of dream-interpretation is by filling in the meaning of the symbols and that you would like to discard the technique of obtaining associations to the dream; and I am anxious to disabuse you of this damaging mistake.

‘July 13, 1910 - Towards morning I had this dream: I was bicycling down the street in Tübingen when a brown dachshund rushed up behind me and seized me by the heel. After a little I got off, sat down on a step, and began to hit at the beast, which had bitten firm hold of me. (I had no disagreeable feelings either from the bite or from the scene as a whole.) Some elderly ladies were sitting opposite me and grinning at me. Then I woke up and, as has often happened before, at the moment of transition to waking, the whole dream was clear to me.’

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3278

Symbols are of little help here. But the dreamer reported: ‘I have recently fallen in love with a girl, but only from seeing her in the street, and I have had no means of getting in contact with her. The dachshund might have been the pleasantest way of doing so, especially as I am a great animal-lover and I liked this same characteristic in the girl.’ He added that he had repeatedly intervened in furious dog-fights with great skill and often to the astonishment of the onlookers. We learn then that the girl he was attracted by was always to be seen in the company of this particular dog. As far as the manifest dream was concerned, however, the girl was omitted and only the dog associated with her was left. The elderly ladies who grinned at him may perhaps have taken the girl’s place. His further remarks threw no adequate light on this point. The fact that he was bicycling in the dream is a direct repetition of the remembered situation. He never met the girl with the dog except when he was on his bicycle.

(3) When anyone has lost someone near and dear to him, he produces dreams of a special sort for some time afterwards, in which knowledge of the death arrives at the strangest compromises with the need to bring the dead person to life again. In some of these dreams the person who has died is dead and at the same time still alive, because he does not know he is dead; only if he did know would he die completely. In others, he is half dead and half alive, and each of these states is indicated in a particular way. We must not describe these dreams as simply nonsensical; for being brought to life again is no more inconceivable in dreams than it is, for instance, in fairy tales, in which it occurs as a very usual event. So far as I have been able to analyse such dreams, it has turned out that they are capable of a reasonable solution, but that the pious wish to bring the dead person back to life has been able to operate by the strangest means. I will now put before you a dream of this kind which sounds sufficiently queer and senseless and the analysis of which will show you much for which our theoretical discussions will have prepared you. It is the dream of a man who had lost his father several years before:

His father was dead but had been exhumed and looked bad. He had been living since then and the dreamer was doing all he could to prevent him noticing it. (The dream then went on to other and apparently very remote matters.)

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3279

His father was dead; we know that. His having been exhumed did not correspond to reality; and there was no question of reality in anything that followed. But the dreamer reported that after he had come away from his father’s funeral, one of his teeth began to ache. He wanted to treat the tooth according to the precept of Jewish doctrine: ‘If thy tooth offend thee, pluck it out!’ And he went off to the dentist. But the dentist said: ‘One doesn’t pluck out a tooth. One must have patience with it. I’ll put something into it to kill it; come back in three days and I’ll take it out.’

‘That "take out",’ said the dreamer suddenly, ‘that’s the exhuming!’

Was the dreamer right about this? It only fits more or less, not completely; for the tooth was not taken out, but only something in it that had died. But inaccuracies of this kind can, on the evidence of other experiences, well be attributed to the dream-work. If so, the dreamer had condensed his dead father and the tooth that had been killed but retained; he had fused them into a unity. No wonder, then, that something senseless emerged in the manifest dream, for, after all, not everything that was said about the tooth could fit his father. Where could there possibly be a tertium comparationis between the tooth and his father, to make the condensation possible?

But no doubt he must have been right, for he went on to say that he knew that if one dreams of a tooth falling out it means that one is going to lose a member of one’s family.

This popular interpretation, as we know, is incorrect or at least is correct only in a scurrilous sense. We shall be all the more surprised to find the topic thus touched upon re-appearing behind other portions of the dream’s content.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3280

The dreamer now began, without any further encouragement, to talk about his father’s illness and death as well as about his own relations with him. His father was ill for a long time, and the nursing and treatment had cost him (the son) a lot of money. Yet it was never too much, he was never impatient, he never wished that after all it might soon come to an end. He was proud of his truly Jewish filial piety towards his father, of his strict obedience to Jewish Law. And here we are struck by a contradiction in the thoughts belonging to the dream. He had identified the tooth and his father. He wanted to proceed with the tooth in accordance with Jewish Law, which commanded him to pluck it out if it caused him pain or offence. He also wanted to proceed with his father, too, in accordance with the precepts of the Law, but in this case it commanded him to spare no expense or trouble, to take every burden on himself and to allow no hostile intention to emerge against the object that was causing him pain. Would not the two attitudes have agreed much more convincingly if he had really developed feelings towards his sick father similar to those towards his sick tooth - that is, if he had wished that an early death would put an end to his unnecessary, painful and costly existence?

I do not doubt that this was really his attitude towards his father during the tedious illness and that his boastful assurances of his filial piety were meant to distract him from these memories. Under such conditions the death-wish against a father is apt to become active and to hide itself under the mask of such sympathetic reflections as that ‘it would be a happy release for him’. But please observe that here we have passed a barrier in the latent dream-thoughts themselves. No doubt the first portion of them was unconscious only temporarily - that is, during the construction of the dream; but his hostile impulses against his father must have been permanently unconscious. They may have originated from scenes in his childhood and have occasionally slipped into consciousness, timidly and disguised, during his father’s illness. We can assert this with greater certainty of other latent thoughts which have made unmistakable contributions to the content of the dream. Nothing, indeed, is to be discovered in the dream of his hostile impulses towards his father. But if we look for the roots of such hostility to a father in childhood, we shall recall that fear of a father is set up because, in the very earliest years, he opposes a boy’s sexual activities, just as he is bound to do once more from social motives after the age of puberty. This relation to his father applies to our dreamer as well: his love for him included a fair admixture of awe and anxiety, which had their source in his having been early deterred by threats from sexual activity.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3281

The remaining phrases in the manifest dream can be explained now in relation to the masturbation complex. ‘He looked bad’ is indeed an allusion to another remark of the dentist’s to the effect that it looks bad if one has lost a tooth in that part of the mouth; but it relates at the same time to the ‘looking bad’ by which a young man at puberty betrays, or is afraid he betrays, his excessive sexual activity. It was not without relief to his own feelings that in the manifest content the dreamer displaced the ‘looking bad’ from himself on to his father - one of the kinds of reversal by the dream-work which is familiar to you. ‘He had been living since then’ coincides with the wish to bring back to life as well as with the dentist’s promise that the tooth would survive. The sentence ‘the dreamer was doing all he could to prevent him (his father) noticing it’ is very subtly devised to mislead us into thinking that it should be completed by the words ‘that he was dead’. The only completion, however, that makes sense comes once more from the masturbation complex; in that connection it is self-evident that the young man did all he could to conceal his sexual life from his father. And finally, remember that we must always interpret what are called ‘dreams with a dental stimulus’ as relating to masturbation and the dreaded punishment for it.

You can see now how this incomprehensible dream came about. It was done by producing a strange and misleading condensation, by disregarding all the thoughts that were in the centre of the latent thought-process and by creating ambiguous substitutes for the deepest and chronologically most remote of those thoughts.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3282

(4) We have already tried repeatedly to come to understand the matter-of-fact and commonplace dreams which have nothing senseless or strange about them but which raise the question of why one should dream about such indifferent stuff. I will therefore offer you another example of this kind - three interconnected dreams dreamt by a young lady in one night.

(a) She was walking across the hall of her house and struck her head against a low-hanging chandelier and drew blood.

No reminiscence, nothing that had really happened. The information she produced in response to it led in quite other directions. ‘You know how badly my hair’s falling out. "My child," my mother said to me yesterday, "if this goes any further you’ll have a head as smooth as a bottom."' So here the head stands for the other end of the body. We can understand the chandelier, without any help, as a symbol: all objects capable of being lengthened are symbols of the male organ. It was therefore a matter of bleeding at the lower end of the body, which had arisen from contact with a penis. This might still be ambiguous. Her further associations showed that what was in question concerned a belief that menstrual bleeding arises from sexual intercourse with a man - a piece of sexual theory which counts many faithful believers among immature girls.

(b) She saw a deep pit in the vineyard, which she knew had been caused by a tree being torn out. She added a remark that the tree was missing. She meant that she had not seen the tree in her dream; but the same wording served to express another thought which made the symbolic interpretation quite certain. The dream referred to another piece of infantile sexual theory - to the belief that girls originally had the same genitals as boys and that their later shape was the result of castration (the tearing out of a tree).

(c) She was standing in front of the drawer of her writing-table which she was so familiar with that she could tell at once if anyone had been into it. Like all drawers, chests and cases, the writing-table drawer stood for the female genitals. She knew that indications of sexual intercourse (and, as she thought, of touching) could be observed on the genitals and had long feared such a discovery. In all these three dreams, I think, the accent is to be placed on knowledge. She was recalling the period of her sexual researches when she was a child, of whose outcome she had been quite proud at the time.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3283

(5) Here is a little more symbolism. But this time I must start with a short preamble on the psychical situation. A gentleman who had passed a night in intercourse with a lady described her as one of those motherly characters in whom the wish for a child breaks irresistibly through in intercourse with a man. The circumstances of this meeting, however, called for a precaution which prevented the fertilizing semen from reaching the woman’s uterus. On waking up after this night the woman reported the following dream:

An officer in a red cap was running after her in the street. She fled from him, and ran up the stairs with him still after her. Breathless, she reached her flat, slammed the door behind her and locked it. He stayed outside, and when she looked through the peep-hole, he was sitting on a bench outside and weeping.

You will no doubt recognize the pursuit by the officer in the red cap and the breathless climbing upstairs as representing the sexual act. The fact that it was the dreamer who locked herself up against her pursuer will serve as an example of the reversals that are used so commonly in dreams, for it was the man who had avoided the consummation of the sexual act. In the same way, her grief was displaced on to the man, for it was he who wept in the dream - and this was simultaneously a representation of the emission of semen.

I feel sure that you have heard some time or other that it is asserted by psycho-analysis that every dream has a sexual meaning. Well, you yourselves are in a position to form a judgement of the incorrectness of this reproach. You have become acquainted with wishful dreams dealing with the satisfaction of the most obvious needs - hunger and thirst and the longing for freedom - with dreams of convenience and of impatience, and also with purely covetous and egoistic dreams. But at the same time you should bear in mind, as one of the results of psycho-analytic research, that greatly distorted dreams give expression mainly (though, again, not exclusively) to sexual wishes.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3284

(6) I have a particular reason for piling up instances of the use of symbols in dreams. At our first meeting I lamented the difficulty of providing demonstrations and so of carrying conviction in giving instruction in psycho-analysis. And I have no doubt that you have since come to agree with me. But the different theses of psycho-analysis are so intimately connected that conviction can easily be carried over from a single point to a larger part of the whole. It might be said of psycho-analysis that if anyone holds out a little finger to it it quickly grasps his whole hand. No one, even, who has accepted the explanation of parapraxes can logically withhold his belief in all the rest. A second, equally accessible position is offered by dream-symbolism. Here is the dream of an uneducated woman whose husband was a policeman and who had certainly never heard anything about dream-symbolism or psycho-analysis. Then judge for yourselves whether its explanation by the help of sexual symbols can be called arbitrary and forced:

‘. . . Then someone broke into the house and she was frightened and called out for a policeman. But he had gone into a church, to which a number of steps led up, accompanied amicably by two tramps. Behind the church there was a hill and above it a thick wood. The policeman was dressed in a helmet, gorget and cloak. He had a brown beard. The two tramps, who went along peaceably with the policeman, had sack-like aprons tied round their middles. In front of the church a path led up to the hill; on both sides of it there grew grass and brushwood, which became thicker and thicker and, at the top of the hill, turned into a regular wood.’

You will have no trouble in recognizing the symbols used. The male genitals are represented by a triad of figures, and the female ones by a landscape with a chapel, hill and wood. Once again you find steps as a symbol for the sexual act. What is called a hill in the dream is also called one in anatomy - the Mons Veneris.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3285

(7) And here is yet another dream that must be solved by the insertion of symbols. It is notable and convincing from the fact that the dreamer himself translated all the symbols, though he had no sort of previous theoretical knowledge of dream-interpretation. Such an attitude is quite unusual and its determinants are not precisely understood:

‘He was going for a walk with his father in a place which must certainly have been the Prater, since he saw the Rotunda, with a small annex in front of it to which a captive balloon was attached, though it looked rather limp. His father asked him what all this was for; he was surprised at his asking, but explained it to him. Then they came into a courtyard which had a large sheet of tin laid out in it. His father wanted to pull off a large piece of it, but first looked around to see if anyone was watching. He told him that he need only tell the foreman and he could take some without any bother. A staircase led down from this yard into a shaft, whose walls were cushioned in some soft material, rather like a leather armchair. At the end of the shaft was a longish platform and then another shaft started. . . .’

The dreamer himself interpreted: ‘The Rotunda was my genitals and the captive balloon in front of it was my penis, whose limpness I have reason to complain of.’ Going into greater detail, then, we may translate the Rotunda as the bottom (habitually regarded by children as part of the genitals) and the small annex in front of it as the scrotum. His father asked him in the dream what all this was - that is, what was the purpose and function of the genitals. It seemed plausible to reverse this situation and turn the dreamer into the questioner. Since he had in fact never questioned his father in this way, we had to look upon the dream-thought as a wish, or take it as a conditional clause, such as: ‘If I had asked my father for sexual enlightenment. . . .’ We shall presently find the continuation of this thought in another part of the dream.

The courtyard in which the sheet of tin was spread out is not to be taken symbolically in the first instance. It was derived from the business premises of the dreamer’s father. For reasons of discretion I have substituted ‘tin’ for another material in which his father actually dealt: but I have made no other change in the wording of the dream. The dreamer had entered his father’s business and had taken violent objection to the somewhat dubious practices on which the firm’s earnings in part depended. Consequently the dream-thought I have just interpreted may have continued in this way: ‘(If I had asked him), he would have deceived me just as he deceives his customers.’ As regards the ‘pulling off’ which served to represent his father’s dishonesty in business, the dreamer himself produced a second explanation - namely that it stood for masturbating. Not only have we long been familiar with this interpretation, but there was something to confirm it in the fact that the secret nature of masturbation was represented by its reverse: it might be done openly. Just as we should expect, the masturbatory activity was once again displaced on to the dreamer’s father, like the questioning in the first scene of the dream. He promptly interpreted the shaft as a vagina, having regard to the soft cushioning of its walls. I added on my own authority that climbing down, like climbing up in other cases, described sexual intercourse in the vagina.

The dreamer himself gave a biographical explanation of the further details - that the first shaft was followed by a longish platform and then by another shaft. He had practised intercourse for a time but had then given it up on account of inhibitions, and he now hoped to be able to resume it by the help of the treatment.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3286

(8) The two following dreams were dreamt by a foreigner of a highly polygamous disposition. I repeat them to you as evidence for my assertion that the dreamer’s own ego appears in every dream even if it is concealed in the manifest content. The trunks in the dreams were symbols of women:

(a) He was starting on a journey; his luggage was taken to the station on a carriage, a number of trunks piled up on it, and among them two big black ones, like boxes of samples. He said to someone consolingly: ‘Well, they’re only going with me as far as the station.’

He did in fact travel with a great deal of luggage; but he also brought a great many stories about women into the treatment. The two black trunks corresponded to two dark women who were at the time playing the main part in his life. One of them had wanted to follow him to Vienna; and on my advice he had telegraphed to put her off.

(b) A scene at the customs-house: Another traveller opened his box and, coolly smoking a cigarette, said: ‘There’s nothing in it.’ The customs officer seemed to believe him, but felt about once more inside it, and found something quite particularly prohibited. The traveller said in a resigned voice: ‘There’s nothing to be done about it.’

He himself was the traveller: I was the customs officer. As a rule he was very straightforward in making admissions; but he had intended to keep silent to me about a new connection he had formed with a lady, because he rightly supposed that she was not unknown to me. He displaced the distressing situation of being detected on to a stranger, so that he himself did not seem to appear in the dream.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3287

(9) Here is an example of a symbol which I have not yet mentioned:

He met his sister in the company of two women friends who were themselves sisters. He shook hands with both of them but not with his sister.

No connection with any real occurrence. But his thoughts took him back, rather, to a period in which his observations led him to reflect on how late girls’ breasts developed. So the two sisters were breasts; he would have liked to take hold of them with his hand - if only it were not his sister.

(10) Here is an example of death-symbolism in a dream:

He was walking with two people whose names he knew but had forgotten when he woke up, across a very high, steep iron bridge. Suddenly they had both gone, and he saw a ghost-like man in a cap and linen clothes. He asked him if he was the telegraph-boy. No. Was he the driver? No. Then he walked on further. . . . While he was still dreaming he felt acute anxiety, and after he had woken up he continued the dream with a phantasy that the iron bridge suddenly broke and he fell into the abyss.

People of whom one insists that they are unknown or that one has forgotten their names are mostly people very near to one. The dreamer had a brother and sister; and if he had wished that these two were dead, it would be only fair that in return he should be victimized by a fear of death. Of the telegraph boy he remarked that such people always bring bad news. By his uniform he might equally have been the lamp-lighter; but he puts out the lamps as well, just as the Spirit of Death puts out the torch. The driver made him think of Uhland’s poem about King Charles’s Voyage, and reminded him of a dangerous sea-voyage with two companions during which he had played the part of the King in the poem. The iron bridge made him think of a recent accident and of the foolish saying: ‘Life is a suspension bridge’.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3288

(11) The following dream may count as another representation of death:

An unknown gentleman left a black-edged visiting-card on him.

(12) You will be interested in the following dream in a number of ways, though a neurotic state in the dreamer was one of its preconditions:

He was travelling in a railway-train. The train came to a stop in open country. He thought there was going to be an accident and that he must think of getting away. He went through all the coaches in the train and killed everyone he met - the guard, the engine-driver, and so on.

In connection with this he thought of a story told him by a friend. A lunatic was being conveyed in a compartment on an Italian line, but through carelessness a traveller was allowed in with him. The madman killed the other traveller. Thus he was identifying himself with the madman, and based his right to do so on an obsession by which he was tormented from time to time that he must ‘get rid of all accessory witnesses’. But then he himself found a better reason, and this led to the precipitating cause of the dream. At the theatre the night before he had once more seen the girl whom he had wanted to marry but had withdrawn from because she had given him ground for being jealous. In view of the intensity reached by his jealousy he would, he thought, really be mad to want to marry her. This meant that he regarded her as so untrustworthy that, in his jealousy, he would have to kill everyone who came his way. We have already come across walking through a series of rooms (here, railway coaches) as a symbol of marriage (a reversal of ‘monogamy’).

In connection with the train coming to a stop in open country and his being afraid of an accident, he said that once when he was on a railway journey there had been a sudden stop of this kind when they were not in a station. A young lady who was travelling with him had said that there might be a collision and that the safest thing to do was to lift one’s legs up high. But this ‘lifting the legs high’ had also played a part in the many walks and excursions in the country which he had taken with the other girl in the happy early days of their love. This was a fresh argument for thinking he would be mad to marry her now. But my knowledge of the situation made me feel certain that he nevertheless wished he were mad enough to do it.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3289

LECTURE XIII

THE ARCHAIC FEATURES AND INFANTILISM OF DREAMS

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - Let us start out once more from the conclusion we arrived at that the dream-work, under the influence of the dream-censorship, transposes the latent dream-thoughts into a different mode of expression. The latent thoughts do not differ from our familiar conscious thoughts of waking life. The new mode of expression is incomprehensible to us owing to many of its features. We have said that it harks back to states of our intellectual development which have long since been superseded - to picture-language, to symbolic connections, to conditions, perhaps, which existed before our thought-language had developed. We have on that account described the mode of expression of the dream-work as archaic or regressive.

You may conclude from this that if we study the dream-work further we must succeed in gaining valuable light on the little known beginnings of our intellectual development. I hope it will be so; but this work has not so far been started upon. The prehistory into which the dream-work leads us back is of two kinds - on the one hand, into the individual’s prehistory, his childhood, and on the other, in so far as each individual some how recapitulates in an abbreviated form the entire development of the human race, into phylogenetic prehistory too. Shall we succeed in distinguishing which portion of the latent mental processes is derived from the individual prehistoric period and which portion from the phylogenetic one? It is not, I believe, impossible that we shall. It seems to me, for instance, that symbolic connections, which the individual has never acquired by learning, may justly claim to be regarded as a phylogenetic heritage.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3290

This, however, is not the only archaic characteristic of dreams. You are all familiar, of course, from your own experience, with the remarkable amnesia of childhood. I mean the fact that the earliest years of life, up to the age of five, six or eight, have not left behind them traces in our memory like later experiences. Here and there, it is true, we come upon people who can boast of a continuous memory from the first beginnings to the present day; but the other alternative, of gaps in the memory, is by far the more frequent. There has not, in my opinion, been enough astonishment over this fact. By the time a child is two he can speak well, and soon shows that he is at home in complicated mental situations; and he makes remarks which, if they are reported to him many years later, he himself will have forgotten. Moreover, the memory is more efficient at an early age, since it is less overburdened than it is later. Nor is there any reason for regarding the function of memory as a particularly high or difficult mental activity; on the contrary, we can find a good memory in people of very low intellectual standing.

A second remarkable fact to which I must draw your attention, and which comes on top of the first one, is that out of the void of memories that covers the earliest years of childhood there stand out a few well-preserved recollections, mostly perceived in plastic form, which cannot justify their survival. Our memory deals with the material of the impressions which impinge on us in later life by making a selection among them. It retains what is of any importance and drops what is unimportant. But this is not true of the childhood memories that have been retained. They do not necessarily correspond to the important experiences of childhood years, nor even to those which must have seemed important from the child’s point of view. They are often so commonplace and insignificant that we can only ask ourselves in astonishment why this particular detail has escaped oblivion. I attempted long ago, with the help of analysis, to attack the enigma of childhood amnesia and of the residual memories which interrupt it, and I arrived at the conclusion that even in the case of children it is true in spite of everything that only what is important remains in the memory. But through the processes, already familiar to you, of condensation and more especially of displacement, what is important is replaced in memory by something else which appears unimportant. For this reason I have called these childhood memories ‘screen memories’, and with a thorough analysis everything that has been forgotten can be extracted from them.

In psycho-analytic treatments we are invariably faced by the task of filling up these gaps in the memory of childhood; and in so far as the treatment is to any extent successful - that is to say, extremely frequently - we also succeed in bringing to light the content of these forgotten years of childhood. Those impressions had never been really forgotten, they were only inaccessible, latent, and had formed part of the unconscious. But it can come about that they emerge from the unconscious spontaneously, and this happens in connection with dreams. It appears that dream-life knows how to find access to these latent, infantile experiences. Excellent examples of this have been reported in the literature and I myself have been able to provide a contribution of the kind. I once dreamt in a certain connection of a person who must have done me a service and whom I saw clearly be fore me. He was a one-eyed man of small stature, stout, and with his head sunk deep in his shoulders. I concluded from the context that he was a doctor. Luckily I was able to enquire from my mother, who was still alive, what the doctor at my birth-place (which I had left when I was three) had looked like; and I learnt from her that he was one-eyed, short, stout and with his head sunk deep in his shoulders; and I also learnt what the accident was for which he had come to my help and which I myself had forgotten. This fact of dreams having at their disposal the forgotten material of the first years of childhood is thus a further archaic feature.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3291

This same piece of information can be further applied to another of the riddles we have come up against. You recall the amazement which was caused by our discovery that what instigates dreams are actively evil and extravagantly sexual wishes, which have made the censorship and distortion of dreams necessary. When we have interpreted a dream of this sort to the dreamer and if, to take the most favourable case, he does not actually attack the interpretation, he nevertheless regularly raises the question of where these wishes come from, since they feel alien to him and their opposite is what he is conscious of. We need have no hesitation in pointing out their origin. These evil wishful impulses arise from the past, and often from a past that is not very remote. It can be shown that there was a time when they were familiar and conscious, even if they are no longer so to-day. A woman, whose dream meant that she would like to see her only daughter, now seventeen years old, dead before her eyes, found under our guidance that she had indeed at one time harboured this death wish. The child was the fruit of an unhappy marriage which was soon dissolved. Once, while she still bore her daughter in her womb, in a fit of rage after a violent scene with her husband she had beaten with her fists on her body in order to kill the child inside it. How many mothers, who love their children tenderly, perhaps over-tenderly, to-day, conceived them unwillingly and wished at that time that the living thing within them might not develop further! They may even have expressed that wish in various, fortunately harmless, actions. Thus their death-wish against someone they love, which is later so mysterious, originates from the earliest days of their relationship to that person.

In the same way, a father had a dream which justified the interpretation that he wished for the death of his favourite eldest child. He too was led to remember that there had been a time when this wish was not strange to him. When the child was still an infant in arms, the father, discontented with his choice of a wife, often thought that if the little creature, who meant nothing to him, were to die, he would be free once more and would make better use of his freedom. The same origin can be shown in the case of a great number of similar impulses of hatred; they are recollections of something belonging to the past, which was once conscious and played its part in mental life. You will be inclined to conclude from this that such wishes and such dreams ought not to arise in cases where transformations of this kind in one’s relation to someone never occurred, where the relation was of the same kind from the first. I am prepared to admit this; but I must remind you that what you must take into consideration is not the wording of the dream but its sense after it has been interpreted. It is possible that a manifest dream of the death of someone loved has merely assumed a horrifying mask and may mean something quite different, or that the loved person is intended as a misleading substitute for someone else.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3292

But the same subject will suggest another and far more serious question. ‘Even if,’ you will say, ‘this death-wish was present at one time and is confirmed by recollection, that is still no explanation. After all, it was superseded long ago, and can only be present to-day in the unconscious as no more than an unemotional memory, not as a powerful impulse. Nothing speaks in favour of this last possibility. Why, then, was it recollected at all in the dream?’ This question may justly be raised. An attempt to answer it would lead us too far and would necessitate our taking up a position on one of the most important points in the theory of dreams. But I am obliged to keep within the framework of our discussions and to exercise restraint. So prepare yourselves for a provisional renunciation. Let us content ourselves with the factual evidence that this superseded wish can be shown to be the instigator of the dream, and let us pursue our enquiry whether other evil wishes can be similarly traced back to the past.

We will keep to wishes forgetting rid of someone, which may for the most part be attributed to the dreamer’s unrestricted egoism. A wish of this kind can very often be pointed to as the constructor of a dream. Whenever anyone in the course of one’s life gets in one’s way - and how often this must happen in view of the complication of one’s relationships in life! - a dream is promptly ready to kill that person, even if it be father or mother, brother or sister, husband or wife. This wickedness of human nature came as a great surprise to us and we were decidedly disinclined to accept this outcome of dream-interpretation without question. But as soon as we were led to look for the origin of these wishes in the past, we discovered the period of the individual’s past in which there was no longer anything strange in such egoism and such wishful impulses, directed even against his closest relatives. It is children, and precisely in those earliest years which are later veiled by amnesia, who often exhibit this egoism to an extremely marked degree and who invariably show clear rudiments or, more correctly speaking, residues of it. Children love themselves first, and it is only later that they learn to love others and to sacrifice something of their own ego to others. Even those people whom a child seems to love from the beginning are loved by him at first because he needs them and cannot do without them - once again from egoistic motives. Not until later does the impulse to love make itself independent of egoism. It is literally true that his egoism has taught him to love.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3293

In this connection it will be interesting to compare the child’s attitude to his brothers and sisters with that towards his parents. A small child does not necessarily love his brothers and sisters; often he obviously does not. There is no doubt that he hates them as his competitors, and it is a familiar fact that this attitude often persists for long years, till maturity is reached or even later, without interruption. Quite often, it is true, it is succeeded, or let us rather say overlaid, by a more affectionate attitude; but the hostile one seems very generally to be the earlier. This hostile attitude can be observed most easily in children between two and a half and four or five, when a new baby brother or sister appears. It usually meets with a very unfriendly reception. Such remarks as ‘I don’t like him; the stork can take him away again!’ are quite common. After this, every opportunity is taken of disparaging the new arrival and attempts to injure him and even murderous assaults are not unknown. If the difference in age is less, by the time the child’s mental activity has awakened to some degree of intensity he finds his competitor already there and adjusts himself to him. If the difference is greater, the new baby may from the first arouse a certain sympathy as an interesting object, a sort of live doll; and where the difference in age is of eight or more years, solicitous, maternal impulses may already come into play, especially in girls. But, honestly speaking, if one comes upon a wish for the death of a brother or sister behind a dream, there is seldom need to find it puzzling and one can trace its prototype without any trouble in early childhood and often enough in later years of companionship as well.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3294

There is probably no nursery without violent conflicts between its inmates. The motives for these are rivalry for parental love, for common possessions, for living space. The hostile impulses are directed against older as well as against younger members of the family. It was, I believe, Bernard Shaw who remarked: ‘As a rule there is only one person an English girl hates more than she hates her mother; and thats her eldest sister.’ But there is something in this remark that strikes us as strange. We might at a pinch find hatred and competition with brothers and sisters intelligible. But how can we suppose that feelings of hatred can make their way into the relation between daughter and mother, between parents and children?

This relation is undoubtedly a more favourable one, from the children’s point of view as well. That is what our expectations demand; we find an absence of love far more repellent between parents and children than between brothers and sisters. In the former case we have, as it were, made something sacred which in the latter we have left profane. Yet daily observation can show us how frequently the emotional relations between parents and their grown-up children fall behind the ideal set up by society, how much hostility is ready to hand and would be expressed if it were not held back by admixtures of filial piety and affectionate impulses. The motives for this hostility are generally known and their tendency is to divide those of the same sex - the daughter from the mother and the father from the son. The daughter finds in her mother the authority which restricts her will and which is entrusted with the task of imposing on her the renunciation of sexual freedom which society demands; in a few instances she even finds in her a competitor who struggles against being supplanted. The same thing is repeated between the son and his father still more glaringly. In the son’s eyes his father embodies every unwillingly tolerated social restraint; his father prevents him from exercising his will, from early sexual pleasure and, where there is common property in the family, from enjoying it. In the case of an heir to the throne this waiting for a father’s death reaches an almost tragic height. There seems less danger to the relation between father and daughter or mother and son. This last provides the purest examples of an unchangeable affection, unimpaired by any egoistic considerations.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3295

Why am I speaking of these things, which are after all commonplaces and universally known? Because there is an unmistakable inclination to disavow their importance in life and to make out that the ideal demanded by society is fulfilled far more often than it really is. It is better, however, that the truth should be told by psychologists rather than that the task should be left to cynics. And, incidentally, this disavowal applies only to real life. Narrative and dramatic works of the imagination may freely make play with the themes that arise from a disturbance of this ideal.

There is no need to feel surprised, therefore, if, in a large number of people, dreams disclose their wish to get rid of their parents and especially of the parent of their own sex. We may assume that this wish is also present in waking life and is even conscious sometimes, if it can be masked by some other motive, as was the case with our dreamer in Example 3, where it was replaced by pity for his father’s useless sufferings. It is rarely that the hostility alone dominates the relationship; far oftener it is in the background of more affectionate impulses by which it is suppressed, and it must wait until a dream isolates it, as it were. What seems to us of enormous size in a dream, on account of this isolation, shrinks up once more when our interpretation has given it its place in the context of real life (Hanns Sachs). But we come upon this dream-wish, too, where it has no relevance in real life, and where the adult need never confess to it in his waking life. The reason for this is that the deepest and most invariable motive for estrangement, especially between two people of the same sex, has already made itself felt in early childhood.

What I have in mind is rivalry in love, with a clear emphasis on the subject’s sex. While he is still a small child, a son will already begin to develop a special affection for his mother, whom he regards as belonging to him; he begins to feel his father as a rival who disputes his sole possession. And in the same way a little girl looks on her mother as a person who interferes with her affectionate relation to her father and who occupies a position which she herself could very well fill. Observation shows us to what early years these attitudes go back. We refer to them as the ‘Oedipus complex’, because the legend of Oedipus realizes, with only a slight softening, the two extreme wishes that arise from the son’s situation - to kill his father and take his mother to wife. I do not wish to assert that the Oedipus complex exhausts the relation of children to their parents: it can easily be far more complicated. The Oedipus complex can, moreover, be developed to a greater or less strength, it can even be reversed; but it is a regular and very important factor in a child’s mental life, and there is more danger of our under estimating rather than over-estimating its influence and that of the developments which proceed from it. Incidentally, children often react in their Oedipus attitude to a stimulus coming from their parents, who are frequently led in their preferences by difference of sex, so that the father will choose his daughter and the mother her son as a favourite, or, in case of a cooling-off in the marriage, as a substitute for a love-object that has lost its value.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3296

It cannot be said that the world has shown much gratitude to psycho-analytic research for its revelation of the Oedipus complex. On the contrary, the discovery has provoked the most violent opposition among adults; and those who had neglected to take part in the repudiation of this proscribed and tabooed emotional relationship made up for their fault later by depriving the complex of its value through twisted re-interpretations. It is my unaltered conviction that there is nothing in this to be disavowed or glossed over. We must reconcile ourselves to the fact which was recognized by the Greek legend itself as an inevitable fate. It is once again an interesting fact that the Oedipus complex, which has been rejected from real life, has been left to imaginative writing, has been placed freely, as it were, at its disposal. Otto Rank has shown in a careful study how the Oedipus complex has provided dramatic authors with a wealth of themes in endless modifications, softenings and disguises - in distortions, that is to say, of the kind which we are already familiar with as the work of a censorship. We may therefore also ascribe this Oedipus complex to dreamers who have been fortunate enough to escape conflicts with their parents in later life. And, intimately linked with it, we find what we call the ‘castration complex’, the reaction to the threats against the child aimed at putting a stop to his early sexual activities and attributed to his father.

What we have already learnt from our study of the mental life of children will lead us to expect to find a similar explanation of the other group of forbidden dream-wishes - the excessive sexual impulses. We are thus encouraged to make a study of the development of children’s sexual life and from many sources we arrive at what follows.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3297

First and foremost, it is an untenable error to deny that children have a sexual life and to suppose that sexuality only begins at puberty with the maturation of the genitals. On the contrary, from the very first children have a copious sexual life, which differs at many points from what is later regarded as normal. What in adult life is described as ‘perverse’ differs from the normal in these respects: first, by disregarding the barrier of species (the gulf between men and animals), secondly, by overstepping the barrier against disgust, thirdly that against incest (the prohibition against seeking sexual satisfaction from near blood-relations), fourthly that against members of one’s own sex and fifthly the transferring of the part played by the genitals to other organs and areas of the body. None of these barriers existed from the beginning; they were only gradually erected in the course of development and education. Small children are free from them. They recognize no frightful gulf between human beings and animals; the arrogance with which men separate themselves from animals does not emerge until later. To begin with, children exhibit no disgust at excreta but acquire this slowly under the pressure of education; they attach no special importance to the distinction between the sexes, but attribute the same conformation of the genitals to both; they direct their first sexual lusts and their curiosity to those who are nearest and for other reasons dearest to them - parents, brothers and sisters, or nurses; and finally, they show (what later on breaks through once again at the climax of a love-relation) that they expect to derive pleasure not only from their sexual organs, but that many other parts of the body lay claim to the same sensitivity, afford them analogous feelings of pleasure and can accordingly play the part of genitals. Children may thus be described as ‘polymorphously perverse’, and if these impulses only show traces of activity, that is because on the one hand they are of less intensity compared with those in later life and on the other hand all a child’s sexual manifestations are at once energetically suppressed by education. This suppression is, as it were, extended into theory; for adults endeavour to overlook one portion of the sexual manifestations of children and to disguise another portion by misinterpreting its sexual nature, so that they can then disavow the whole of them. It is often the very same people who in the nursery are furious with any sexual naughtinesses of children and afterwards at their writing-tables defend the sexual purity of the same children. when children are left to themselves, or under the influence of seduction, they often bring about quite considerable achievements in the was of perverse sexual activity. Adults are of course right not to take this too seriously and to regard it as ‘childishness’, or ‘playfulness’, for children are not to be condemned as fully capable or fully responsible either before the judgement-seat of morals or before the law; but nonetheless these things exist. They have their importance both as indications of a child’s innate constitution and as causes and encouragements of later developments in him; they give us information on the sexual life of children and so on human sexual life in general. If, therefore, we once more find all these perverse wishful impulses behind our distorted dreams, that only means that in this field too dreams have taken a step backwards into the state of infancy.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3298

Among these forbidden wishes special emphasis deserves to be further laid on the incestuous ones - that is, on those aiming at sexual intercourse with parents and brothers and sisters. You know what horror is felt, or at least professed, in human society at such intercourse, and what stress is laid on the prohibitions directed against it. Tremendous efforts have been made to ex plain this horror of incest. Some people have supposed that breeding considerations on the part of Nature have found psychical representation in this prohibition, since inbreeding would impair racial characters. Others have maintained that, as a result of living together from early childhood onwards, sexual desire has been diverted from the people in question. In both these cases, it may be remarked, an avoidance of incest would be secured automatically, and it would not be clear why such severe prohibitions were called for, which would point rather to the presence of a strong desire for it. Psycho-analytic researches have shown unmistakably that the choice of an incestuous love-object is, on the contrary, the first and invariable one, and that it is not until later that resistance to it sets in; it is no doubt impossible to trace back this resistance to individual psychology.

Let us now bring together what our researches into child psychology have contributed to our understanding of dreams. We have not only found that the material of the forgotten experiences of childhood is accessible to dreams, but we have also seen that the mental life of children with all its characteristics, its egoism, its incestuous choice of love-objects, and so on, still persists in dreams - that is, in the unconscious, and that dreams carry us back every night to this infantile level. The fact is thus confirmed that what is unconscious in mental life is also what is infantile. The strange impression of there being so much evil in people begins to diminish. This frightful evil is simply the initial, primitive, infantile part of mental life, which we can find in actual operation in children, but which, in part, we overlook in them on account of their small size, and which in part we do not take seriously since we do not expect any high ethical standard from children. Since dreams regress to this level, they give the appearance of having brought to light the evil in us. But this is a deceptive appearance, by which we have allowed ourselves to be scared. We are not so evil as we were inclined to suppose from the interpretation of dreams.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3299

If these evil impulses in dreams are merely infantile phenomena, a return to the beginnings of our ethical development (since dreams simply make us into children once more in our thoughts and feelings), we need not, if we are reasonable, be ashamed of these evil dreams. But what is reasonable is only a part of mental life, a number of other things take place in the mind which are not sensible; and so it happens that we are ashamed of these dreams in an unreasonable way. We subject them to the dream-censorship, we are ashamed and angry if, as an exception, one of these wishes succeeds in making its was into consciousness in such an undistorted form that we are obliged to recognize it; indeed we are occasionally as ashamed of a distorted dream as if we understood it. Only think of the indignant judgement which the excellent elderly lady passed on her uninterpreted dream of the ‘love services’. So the problem is not yet cleared up, and it is still possible that further consideration of the evil in dreams may lead us to form another judgement and arrive at another estimate of human nature.

As the outcome of our whole enquiry, let us grasp two discoveries, though they only signify the beginning of fresh enigmas and fresh doubts. First, the regression of the dream-work is not only a formal but also a material one. It not only translates our thoughts into a primitive form of expression; but it also revives the characteristics of our primitive mental life - the old dominance of the ego, the initial impulses of our sexual life, and even, indeed, our old intellectual endowment, if symbolic connections may be regarded as such. And secondly, all this, which is old and infantile and was once dominant and alone dominant, must to-day be ascribed to the unconscious, our ideas of which are now becoming altered and extended. ‘Unconscious’ is no longer the name of what is latent at the moment; the unconscious is a particular realm of the mind with its own wishful impulses, its own mode of expression and its peculiar mental mechanisms which are not in force elsewhere. But the latent dream-thoughts which we have discovered by interpreting dreams do not belong to this realm; they are on the contrary thoughts just as we might have thought them in waking life. Nevertheless, they are unconscious. How, then, is this contradiction to be solved? We begin to suspect that a distinction is to be drawn here. Something which is derived from our conscious life and shares its characteristics - we call it ‘the day’s residues’ - combines with something else coming from the realm of the unconscious in order to construct a dream. The dream-work is accomplished between these two components. The influence exercised upon the day’s residues by the addition of the unconscious is no doubt among the determinants of regression. This is the deepest insight that we can reach here into the essential nature of dreams - until we have investigated further regions of the mind. But the time will soon have come to provide another name for the unconscious character of the latent dream-thoughts in order to distinguish it from the unconscious which comes from the realm of the infantile.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3300

We can, of course, raise another question besides: ‘What is it that forces psychical activity during sleep to make this regression? Why does it not dispose of the mental stimuli that disturb sleep without doing this? And if, for the purposes of the dream censorship, it has to make use of disguise by means of the old and now unintelligible mode of expression, what is the point of reviving as well the old mental impulses, wishes and character traits, which are superseded to-day - of making use of material regression in addition to the formal kind?’ The only answer that could satisfy us would be that in this way alone can a dream be constructed, that it is not otherwise dynamically possible to get rid of the stimulus to the dream. But so far we have no right to give such an answer.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3301

LECTURE XIV

WISH-FULFILMENT

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - Shall I remind you once more of the ground we have covered so far? Of how, when we began applying our technique, we came up against the distortion in dreams, of how we thought we would begin by evading it and obtained our first decisive information on the essential nature of dreams from the dreams of children? Of how, after that, armed with what we had learnt from that enquiry, we made a direct assault on dream-distortion and, as I hope, overcame it step by step? We are bound to admit, however, that the things we have discovered by the one path and by the other do not entirely correspond. It will be our task to piece the two sets of findings together and reconcile them with each other.

We found from both sources that the dream-work consists essentially in the transformation of thoughts into a hallucinatory experience. How this can happen is sufficiently mysterious; but it is a problem of general psychology with which we are not properly concerned here. We learnt from children’s dreams that it is the intention of the dream-work to get rid of a mental stimulus, which is disturbing sleep, by means of the fulfilment of a wish. We were unable to say anything similar of distorted dreams till we found out how to interpret them. But it was from the first our expectation that we should be able to regard distorted dreams in the same light as those of children. The first confirmation of this expectation was brought to us by the discovery that in point of fact all dreams are children’s dreams, that they work with the same infantile material, with the mental impulses and mechanisms of childhood. Now that we believe we have overcome dream-distortion, we must go on to enquire whether the view of dreams as the fulfilment of wishes is also valid of distorted dreams.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3302

A short time ago we submitted a series of dreams to interpretation, but we left wish-fulfilment completely out of account. I feel sure that you must have repeatedly been driven to ask yourselves: ‘But where is the wish-fulfilment, which is supposed to be the aim of the dream-work?’ The question is an important one, for it has become the question raised by our lay critics. Human beings, as you know, have an instinctive tendency to fend off intellectual novelties. One of the ways in which this tendency is manifested is by immediately reducing the novelty to the smallest proportions, by compressing it if possible into a single catch-word. ‘Wish-fulfilment’ has become the catch word for the new theory of dreams. The layman asks: ‘Where is the wish-fulfilment?’ And instantly, having heard that dreams are supposed to be wish-fulfilments, and in the very act of asking the question, he answers it with a rejection. He immediately thinks of countless experiences of his own with dreams, in which the dream has been accompanied by feelings ranging from the unpleasurable to severe anxiety, so that the assertion made by the psycho-analytic theory of dreams seems to him most improbable. We have no difficulty in replying that in distorted dreams the wish-fulfilment cannot be obvious but must be looked for, so that it cannot be pointed out until the dream has been interpreted. We know too that the wishes in these distorted dreams are forbidden ones - rejected by the censorship - whose existence was precisely the cause of the dream’s distortion, the reason for the intervention of the dream censorship. But it is difficult to make the lay critic understand that before a dream has been interpreted one cannot enquire about the fulfilment of its wish. He will keep on forgetting this. His rejection of the theory of wish-fulfilment is actually nothing other than a consequence of the dream-censorship, a substitute for the rejection of the censored dream-wishes and an effluence from it.

We too, of course, feel the need to explain to ourselves why there are so many dreams with a distressing content and, especially why there are anxiety-dreams. Here for the first time we come upon the problem of affects in dreams; it would deserve a monograph of its own, but unfortunately we cannot enter into it. If dreams are the fulfilment of wishes, distressing feelings should be impossible in them: the lay critics would appear to be right there. But three kinds of complications must be taken into account which they have not thought of.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3303

Firstly, it may be that the dream-work has not completely succeeded in creating a wish-fulfilment; so that a portion of the distressing affect in the dream-thoughts has been left over in the manifest dream. In that case analysis would have to show that these dream-thoughts were far more distressing than the dream-constructed out of them. That much can always be proved. If so, we must admit that the dream-work has not achieved its aim any more than the dream of drinking, formed in response to the stimulus of thirst, succeeded in quenching the thirst. The dreamer remains thirsty and has to wake up in order to drink. Nevertheless it was a genuine dream, and had lost nothing of a dream’s essential nature. We can only say: ‘Ut desint vires, tamen est laudanda voluntas.’¹ The intention, at least, which can clearly be recognized, remains praiseworthy. Such instances of failure are no rare event. This is helped by that fact that it is so much harder for the dream-work to alter the sense of a dream’s affects than of its content; affects are some times highly resistant. What then happens is that the dream-work transforms the distressing content of the dream-thoughts into the fulfilment of a wish, while the distressing affect persists unaltered. In dreams of this kind the affect is quite inappropriate to the content, and our critics can say that dreams are so far from being wish-fulfilments that even one with a harmless content can be felt as distressing. We can answer this foolish remark by pointing out that it is precisely in dreams like this that the wish-fulfilling purpose of the dream-work appears most clearly, because in isolation. The error arises because those who are unfamiliar with the neuroses picture the link between content and affect as too intimate and therefore cannot imagine the content being altered without a simultaneous alteration of the expression of affect attached to it.

¹ [‘Though the strength is lacking, the will deserves to be praised.’]

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3304

A second factor, which is much more important and far reaching, but which is equally overlooked by laymen, is the following. No doubt a wish-fulfilment must bring pleasure; but the question then arises ‘To whom?’ To the person who has the wish, of course. But, as we know, a dreamer’s relation to his wishes is a quite peculiar one. He repudiates them and censors them - he has no liking for them, in short. So that their fulfilment will give him no pleasure, but just the opposite; and experience shows that this opposite appears in the form of anxiety, a fact which has still to be explained. Thus a dreamer in his relation to his dream-wishes can only be compared to an amalgamation of two separate people who are linked by some strong element in common. Instead of enlarging on this, I will remind you of a familiar fairy tale in which you will find the same situation repeated. A good fairy promised a poor married couple to grant them the fulfilment of their first three wishes. They were delighted, and made up their minds to choose their three wishes carefully. But a smell of sausages being fried in the cottage next door tempted the woman to wish for a couple of them. They were there in a flash; and this was the first wish-fulfilment. But the man was furious, and in his rage wished that the sausages were hanging on his wife’s nose. This happened too; and the sausages were not to be dislodged from their new position. This was the second wish-fulfilment; but the wish was the man’s, and its fulfilment was most disagreeable for his wife. You know the rest of the story. Since after all they were in fact one - man and wife - the third wish was bound to be that the sausages should come away from the woman’s nose. This fairy tale might be used in many other connections; but here it serves only to illustrate the possibility that if two people are not at one with each other the fulfilment of a wish of one of them may bring nothing but unpleasure to the other.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3305

It will not be difficult for us now to reach a still better understanding of anxiety-dreams. We will bring up one more observation and then make up our minds to adopt a hypothesis in favour of which there is much to be said. The observation is that anxiety-dreams often have a content entirely devoid of distortion, a content which has, so to speak, evaded the censorship. An anxiety-dream is often the undisguised fulfilment of a wish - not, of course, of an acceptable wish, but of a repudiated one. The generation of anxiety has taken the place of the censorship. Whereas we can say of an infantile dream that it is the open fulfilment of a permitted wish, and of an ordinary distorted dream that it is the disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish, the only formula which fits an anxiety-dream is that it is the open fulfilment of a repressed wish. The anxiety is a sign that the repressed wish has shown itself stronger than the censorship, that it has put through, or is on the point of putting through, its wish-fulfilment in spite of the censorship. We perceive that what is for it a wish-fulfilment can only be for us, who are on the side of the censorship, an occasion for distressing feelings and for fending the wish off. The anxiety that emerges in the dream is, if you like, anxiety at the strength of these wishes which are normally held down. Why this fending-off appears in the form of anxiety cannot be discovered from the study of dreams alone; anxiety must clearly be studied elsewhere.

We may suppose that what is true of undistorted anxiety dreams applies also to those which are partly distorted as well as to other unpleasurable dreams, in which the distressing feelings probably correspond to an approach to anxiety. Anxiety-dreams are as a rule also arousal dreams; we usually interrupt our sleep before the repressed wish in the dream has put its fulfilment through completely in spite of the censorship. In that case the function of the dream has failed, but its essential nature is not altered by this. We have compared dreams to the night-watchman or guardian of sleep, who tries to protect our sleep from disturbance. The night-watchman, too, may reach the point of waking the sleeper if he feels he is too weak alone to drive off the disturbance or the danger. Nevertheless we sometimes succeed in holding on to our sleep even when the dream begins to be precarious and to be turning into anxiety. We say to ourselves in our sleep ‘after all it’s only a dream’, and sleep on.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3306

When does it happen that a dream-wish is in a position to overpower the censorship? The condition necessary for this may be fulfilled equally well by the dream-wish or by the dream censorship. The wish may for an unknown reason be excessively strong on some occasion; but one gets an impression that it is more often the behaviour of the dream-censorship that is responsible for this displacement of their relative strengths. We have already seen that the censorship acts with varying intensity in each particular case, that it treats each element of a dream with a different degree of severity. We can now add a further hypothesis to the effect that it is in general very variable and does not always employ equal severity to the same objectionable element. If things turn out so that on some occasion it feels itself powerless against a dream-wish which threatens to take it by surprise, instead of distortion, it makes use of its last remaining expedient and abandons the state of sleep, at the same time generating anxiety.

In this connection it strikes us that we are still quite ignorant of why it is that these evil, repudiated wishes become active precisely at night and disturb us during our sleep. The answer is almost bound to lie in some hypothesis going back to the nature of the state of sleep. In day-time the heavy weight of censorship rests on them and as a rule makes it impossible for them to manifest themselves in any activity. At night this censorship, like all the other interests of mental life, is probably withdrawn, or at least greatly reduced, in favour of the single wish to sleep. It is this lowering of the censorship at night that the forbidden wishes have to thank for being able to become active once more. There are some neurotic patients who are unable to sleep and who admit to us that their insomnia was originally intentional. They did not dare to sleep because they were afraid of their dreams - afraid, that is, of the results of the weakening of the censorship. You will easily see, however, that in spite of this the withdrawal of the censorship implies no gross carelessness. The state of sleep paralyses our motive powers. If our evil intentions begin to stir, they can, after all, do nothing more than precisely cause a dream, which is harmless from the practical point of view. It is this soothing consideration that is the basis of the highly sensible remark made by the sleeper-made at night, it is true, but not forming part of dream-life: ‘After all it’s only a dream. So let us leave it to take its course, and let us sleep on.’

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3307

If, in the third place, you will recall our idea that the dreamer fighting against his own wishes is to be compared with a summation of two separate, though in some way intimately connected, people, you will understand another possibility. For there is a possibility that the fulfilment of a wish may bring about something very far from pleasant - namely, a punishment. Here we can once more use the fairy tale of the three wishes as an illustration. The fried sausages on a plate were the direct fulfilment of the wish of the first person, the woman, The sausages on her nose were the fulfilment of the wish of the second person, the man, but were at the same time a punishment for the woman’s foolish wish. (We shall discover in neuroses the motive for the third wish, the last remaining one in the fairy tale.) There are many such punitive trends in the mental life of human beings; they are very powerful, and we may hold them responsible for some of the distressing dreams. Perhaps you will now say that this leaves very little over of the famous wish-fulfilment. But if you look more closely you will admit that you are wrong. Compared with the multiplicity (which I shall mention later) of the things that dreams might be and according to many authorities actually are, our solution - wish-fulfilment, anxiety-fulfilment, punishment-fulfilment - is a very restricted one. We may add that the anxiety is the direct opposite of the wish, that opposites are especially close to one another in associations and that in the unconscious they coalesce; and further, that the punishment is also the fulfilment of a wish - of the wish of the other, censoring person.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3308

On the whole, therefore, I have made no concession to your objection to the theory of wish-fulfilment. It is our duty, however, to be able to indicate the wish-fulfilment in any distorted dream we may come across, and we shall certainly not evade the task. Let us go back to the dream we have already interpreted of the three bad theatre-tickets for 1 florin 50, from which we have already learnt so much. I hope you still recollect it. A lady, whose husband had told her during the day that her friend Elise, who was only three months her junior, had become engaged, dreamt that she was at the theatre with her husband. One side of the stalls was almost empty. Her husband said to her that Elise and her fiancé had wanted to go to the theatre too but had not been able to, since they had only got bad seats - three for 1 florin 50. She thought it would not really have done any harm if they had. We found that the dream-thoughts related to her anger at having married so early and to her dissatisfaction with her husband. We may be curious to discover how these gloomy thoughts were transformed into the fulfilment of a wish and where any trace of it is to be found in the manifest content of the dream. We already know that the element ‘too early, in a hurry’ was eliminated from the dream by the censorship. The empty stalls were an allusion to it. The mysterious ‘three for 1 florin 50' now becomes more intelligible to us with the help of the symbolism with which we have meanwhile become acquainted. The ‘3'¹ really means a man and the manifest element is easy to translate: buying a husband with her dowry. (‘I could have got one ten times better with my dowry.’) ‘Marrying’ is clearly replaced by ‘going to the theatre’. ‘Taking the theatre tickets too early’ is, indeed, an immediate substitute for ‘marrying too early’. This substitution is, however, the work of a wish-fulfilment. Our dreamer was not always so dissatisfied with her early marriage as she was on the day when she received the news of her friend’s engagement. She had been proud of it at one time and regarded herself as at an advantage over her friend. Simple-minded girls, after becoming engaged, are reputed often to express their joy that they will soon be able to go to the theatre, to all the plays which have hitherto been prohibited, and will be allowed to see everything. The pleasure in looking, or curiosity, which is revealed in this was no doubt originally a sexual desire to look, directed towards sexual happenings and especially on to the girls’ parents, and hence it became a powerful motive for urging them to an early marriage. In this way a visit to the theatre became an obvious substitute, by way of allusion, for being married. Thus the dreamer, in her present anger at her early marriage, harked back to the time at which early marriage was the fulfilment of a wish because it satisfied her scopophilia, and, under the lead of this old wishful impulse, she replaced marriage by going to the theatre.

¹ I have not mentioned another plausible interpretation of this ‘3' in a childless woman, since this analysis brought up no material in support of it.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3309

I cannot be accused of having specially chosen out the most convenient example as evidence of a concealed wish-fulfilment. The procedure would have had to be the same in the case of other distorted dreams. I cannot demonstrate this to you now, and I will only express my conviction that it could always be successfully accomplished. I will, however, dwell a little longer on this theoretical point. Experience has taught me that it is one of those most exposed to attack in the whole theory of dreams, and that many contradictions and misunderstandings arise from it. Apart from this, you may perhaps still be under the impression that I have already withdrawn part of my assertion in saying that a dream is a fulfilled wish or the opposite of one, or a realized anxiety or punishment; and you may think this is an opportunity of forcing further qualifications out of me. I have also been reproached for putting forward things that seem to me obvious in a manner that is too concise and consequently unconvincing.

When someone has accompanied us so far in the interpretation of dreams and has accepted everything that has been brought forward up to this point, it often happens that he comes to a halt at wish-fulfilment and says: ‘Granted that dreams always have a sense, and that that sense can be discovered by the technique of psycho-analysis, why must that sense, all evidence to the contrary, be invariably pushed into the formula of wish-fulfilment? Why should not the sense of this nightly thinking be of as many kinds as that of daytime thinking? Why, that is, should not a dream correspond sometimes to a fulfilled wish, sometimes, as you yourself say, to the opposite of that or to a realized fear, but sometimes express an intention, a warning, a reflection with its "pros" and "cons", or a reproach, a scruple of conscience, an attempt at preparing for a coming task, and so on? Why must it always be only a wish, or at most its opposite?’

It might be thought that a difference of opinion on this point is unimportant, if one is agreed on the rest. It is enough, it might be said, that we have discovered the sense of dreams and the way of recognizing it; it is of less importance if we seem to have defined that sense too narrowly. But that is not so. A misunderstanding on this point affects the essence of our discoveries about dreams and endangers their value for the understanding of the neuroses. Moreover, a compromise of this sort - what is highly thought of in commercial life as being ‘accommodating’ - is not in place, but detrimental rather, in scientific affairs.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3310

My first answer to the question why dreams should not have a variety of meanings in the sense indicated is as usual in such cases: ‘I don’t know why they shouldn’t. I should have no objection. As far as I’m concerned it could be so. There’s only one detail in the way of this broader and more convenient view of dreams - that it isn’t so in reality.’ My second answer would be that the hypothesis that dreams correspond to a variety of forms of thinking and intellectual operations is not unfamiliar to me myself. I once reported a dream in one of my case histories which appeared on three nights in succession and then no more, and I explained this behaviour by the fact that the dream corresponded to an intention, and did not need to be repeated after the intention had been carried out. Later on I published a dream which corresponded to an admission. How, then, can I contradict myself and assert that dreams are never anything but a fulfilled wish?

I do it because I will not allow a foolish misunderstanding to pass which may rob us of the fruit of our efforts with dreams - a misunderstanding which confuses the dream with the latent dream-thoughts, and asserts of the former something that applies solely to the latter. For it is quite correct to say that a dream can represent and be replaced by everything you have just enumerated - an intention, a warning, a reflection, a preparation, an attempt at solving a problem, and so on. But if you look properly, you will see that all this only applies to the latent dream-thoughts, which have been transformed into the dream. You learn from interpretations of dreams that people’s unconscious thinking is concerned with these intentions, preparations, reflections, and so on, out of which the dream-work then makes the dreams. If at the moment you are not interested in the dream-work, but are greatly interested in people’s unconscious thought-activity, you then eliminate the dream-work and say of the dream what is in practice quite correct that it corresponds to a warning, an intention, and so on. what often happens in psycho-analytic activity is that our efforts are chiefly directed only to doing away with the dream-form and inserting in the context instead of it the latent thoughts out of which the dream was made.

Thus, quite incidentally, we learn from our examination of the latent dream-thoughts that all these highly complicated mental acts that we have named can take place unconsciously - a discovery as imposing as it is perplexing!

But to go back, you are only correct so long as you are clearly aware that you have used an abbreviated form of expression and so long as you do not believe that the multiplicity you have been describing is to be related to the essential nature of dreams. When you speak of a ‘dream’, you must mean either the manifest dream - that is, the product of the dream-work or, at most, the dream-work itself as well - that is, the psychical process which forms the manifest dream out of the latent dream-thoughts. Any other use of the word is a confusion of ideas and can only lead to mischief. If you are making statements about the latent thoughts behind the dream, do so directly and do not obscure the problem of dreams by the loose manner in which you speak. The latent dream-thoughts are the material which the dream-work transforms into the manifest dream. Why should you want to confuse the material with the activity which forms it? If you do, what advantage have you over those who only knew the product of the activity and could not explain where it came from or how it was made?

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3311

The only essential thing about dreams is the dream-work that has influenced the thought-material. We have no right to ignore it in our theory, even though we may disregard it in certain practical situations. Analytic observation shows further that the dream-work never restricts itself to translating these thoughts into the archaic or regressive mode of expression that is familiar to you. In addition, it regularly takes possession of something else, which is not part of the latent thoughts of the previous day, but which is the true motive force for the construction of the dream. This indispensable addition is the equally unconscious wish for the fulfilment of which the content of the dream is given its new form. A dream may thus be any sort of thing in so far as you are only taking into account the thoughts it represents - a warning, an intention, a preparation, and so on; but it is always also the fulfilment of an unconscious wish and, if you are considering it as a product of the dream-work, it is only that. A dream is therefore never simply an intention, or a warning, but always an intention, etc., translated into the archaic mode of thought by the help of an unconscious wish and transformed to fulfil that wish. The one characteristic, the wish-fulfilment, is the invariable one; the other may vary. It may for its part once more be a wish, in which case the dream will, with the help of an unconscious wish, represent as fulfilled a latent wish of the previous day.

I can understand all this very clearly; but I cannot tell whether I have succeeded in making it intelligible to you as well. And I also have difficulty in proving it to you. That cannot be done without carefully analysing a great many dreams, and on the other hand this most critical and important point in our view of dreams cannot be convincingly represented without referring to what is coming later. It is impossible to suppose that, since everything is intimately interrelated, one can penetrate deeply into the nature of one thing without having concerned oneself with other things of a similar nature. Since we still know nothing of the dream’s nearest relatives, neurotic symptoms, we must once more rest content at this point with what we have achieved. I will only give you one more illustrative example and lay before you one fresh consideration.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3312

Let us once again take up the dream we have already so often returned to: the dream of the three theatre-tickets for 1 florin 50. (I can assure you that I originally chose out this example without any special purpose in view.) You know the latent dream thoughts: anger at having been in such a hurry to get married which arose when she heard the news that her friend had only just become engaged, putting a low value on her husband and the idea that she might have got a better one if only she had waited. We already know the wish which made a dream out of these thoughts: it was the desire to look, to be able to go to the theatre, most probably an offshoot of her old curiosity to discover at long last what really happens when one is married. This curiosity is, as we know, regularly directed by children towards their parents’ sexual life,: it is an infantile curiosity, and, so far as it still persists later, an instinctual impulse with roots reaching back into infancy. But the news the dreamer had received during the day gave no occasion for awakening this desire to look, but only for awakening anger and regret. This wishful impulse was not in the first instance connected with the latent dream-thoughts; and we were able to include the out come of the dream-interpretation in the analysis without taking any account of that impulse. But the anger in itself was not capable of creating a dream. A dream could not arise out of the thoughts that ‘it was absurd to marry so early’ until they had awakened the old wish to see at long last what happens in marriage. This wish then gave the dream-content its form by replacing marriage by going to the theatre, and the form was that of an earlier wish-fulfilment: ‘There! now I may go to the theatre and look at everything that’s forbidden, and you mayn’t! I’m married and you must wait!’ In this way the dreamer’s present situation was transformed into its opposite, an old triumph was put in the place of her recent defeat. And, incidentally, a satisfaction of her scopophilia was mixed with a satisfaction of her egoistic competitive sense. This satisfaction then determined the manifest content of the dream, in which the position actually was that she was sitting in the theatre while her friend could not gain admission to it. The portions of the content of the dream behind which the latent dream-thoughts still lay concealed were superimposed on this situation of satisfaction as a misplaced and unintelligible modification of it. The dream’s interpretation had to disregard everything that served to represent the wish-fulfilment and to re-establish the distressing latent dream-thoughts from these obscure remaining hints.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3313

The fresh consideration I wish to bring before you is to draw your attention to the latent dream-thoughts which have now been put in the foreground. I beg you not to forget that in the first place they are unconscious to the dreamer, and secondly that they are completely rational and coherent so that they can be understood as natural reactions to the precipitating cause of the dream, and thirdly that they can be the equivalent of any mental impulse or intellectual operation. I shall now describe these thoughts more strictly than before as the ‘day’s residues’, whether the dreamer confesses to them or not. I shall now distinguish between the day’s residues and the latent dream-thoughts, and, in conformity with our earlier usage, I shall designate as latent dream-thoughts everything we learn in interpreting the dream, whereas the day’s residues are only a portion of the latent dream-thoughts. Our view is then that something is added to the day’s residues, something that was also part of the unconscious, a powerful but repressed wishful impulse; and it is this alone that makes the construction of the dream possible. The influence of this wishful impulse on the day’s residues creates the further portion of the latent dream-thoughts - that which need no longer appear rational and intelligible as being derived from waking life.

I have made use of an analogy for the relation of the day’s residues to the unconscious wish, and I can only repeat it here. In every undertaking there must be a capitalist who covers the required outlay and an entrepreneur who has the idea and knows how to carry it out. In the construction of dreams, the part of the capitalist is always played by the unconscious wish alone; it provides the psychical energy for the construction of the dream. The entrepreneur is the day’s residues, which decide how this outlay is to be employed. It is possible, of course, for the capitalist himself to have the idea and the expert knowledge or for the entrepreneur himself to possess capital. This simplifies the practical situation but makes its theoretical understanding more difficult. In economics the same person is constantly divided into his two aspects of capitalist and entrepreneur and this restores the fundamental situation on which our analogy was based. In dream-construction the same variations occur and I will leave them for you to follow out.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3314

We cannot advance any further here, for you have probably long been disturbed by a doubt which deserves to be given a hearing. ‘Are the day’s residues,’ you will ask, ‘really unconscious in the same sense as the unconscious wish which must be added to them in order to make them capable of producing a dream?’ Your suspicion is correct. This is the salient point of the whole business. They are not unconscious in the same sense. The dream-wish belongs to a different unconscious - to the one which we have already recognized as being of infantile origin and equipped with peculiar mechanisms. It would be highly opportune to distinguish these two kinds of unconscious by different names. But we would prefer to wait till we have become familiar with the field of phenomena of the neuroses. People consider a single unconscious as something fantastic. What will they say when we confess that we cannot make shift without two of them?

Let us break off here. Once again you have only heard something incomplete. But is it not hopeful to reflect that this knowledge has a continuation, which either we ourselves or other people will bring to light? And have not we ourselves learnt enough that is new and surprising?

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3315

LECTURE XV

UNCERTAINTIES AND CRITICISMS

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - We will nevertheless not leave the field of dreams without dealing with the commonest doubts and uncertainties which our novelties and our theories have given rise to so far. Attentive listeners among you will themselves have collected some of the relevant material.

(1) You may have formed an impression that, even though the technique is correctly carried out, the findings of our interpretative work on dreams admit of so many uncertainties as to defeat any secure translation of the manifest dream-into the latent dream-thoughts. You will argue in support of this that in the first place one never knows whether a particular element of the dream is to be understood in its actual sense or as a symbol, since the things employed as symbols do not cease on that account to be themselves. If, however, one has no objective clue for deciding this, the interpretation must at that point be left to the arbitrary choice of the interpreter. Furthermore, as a result of the fact that in the dream-work contraries coalesce, it is always left undetermined whether a particular element is to be understood in a positive or negative sense - as itself or as its contrary. Here is a fresh opportunity for the interpreter to exercise an arbitrary choice. Thirdly, in consequence of the reversals of every kind of which dreams are so fond, it is open to the interpreter to carry out a reversal like this in connection with any passage in the dream he chooses. And lastly, you will mention having heard that one is never certain whether the interpretation one has found for a dream is the only possible one. We run the risk of overlooking a perfectly admissible ‘over-interpretation’ of the same dream. In these circumstances, you will conclude, so much room is left to the interpreter’s arbitrary decision as to be incompatible with objective certainty in the findings. Or alternatively you may suppose that the fault does not lie with dreams but that the inadequacies of our dream-interpretation are to be attributed to errors in our views and premisses.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3316

All your material is unimpeachable, but it does not, I think, justify your conclusions, and in two respects: namely that the interpretation of dreams is, as you insist, at the mercy of arbitrary choice and that the lack of results throws doubts on the correctness of our procedure. If instead of the interpreter’s arbitrary choice you would speak of his skill, his experience and his understanding, I should agree with you. We cannot, of course, do without a personal factor of that kind, especially in the more difficult problems of dream-interpretation. But the position is no different in other scientific occupations. There is no means of preventing one person from handling a particular technique worse than another, or one person from making better use of it than another. What in other ways gives an impression of arbitrariness - in, for instance, the interpretation of symbols - is done away with by the fact that as a rule the interconnection between the dream-thoughts, or the connection between the dream and the dreamer’s life, or the whole psychical situation in which the dream occurs, selects a single one from among the possible determinations presented and dismisses the rest as unserviceable. The conclusion that because of the imperfections of dream-interpretation our hypotheses are incorrect is invalidated by pointing out that on the contrary ambiguity or indefiniteness is a characteristic of dreams which was necessarily to be anticipated.

Let us recall that we have said that the dream-work makes a translation of the dream-thoughts into a primitive mode of expression similar to picture-writing. All such primitive systems of expression, however, are characterized by indefiniteness and ambiguity of this sort, without justifying us in casting doubts on their serviceability. The coalescence of contraries in the dream-work is, as you know, analogous to the so-called ‘antithetical meaning of primal words’ in the most ancient languages. Indeed, Abel (1884), the philologist to whom we owe this line of thought, implores us not to suppose that communications made by one person to another with the help of such ambivalent words were on that account ambiguous. On the contrary, intonation and gesture must have made it quite certain in the context of the speech which of the two contraries the speaker intended to convey. In writing, where gesture is absent, its place was taken by an additional pictograph which was not intended to be spoken - for instance by a picture of a little man, limply squatting or stiffly erect, according to whether the ambiguous hieroglyph ‘ken’ was to mean ‘weak’ or ‘strong’. In this way, in spite of the ambiguity of the sounds and signs, misunderstanding was avoided.

The old systems of expression - for instance, the scripts of the most ancient languages - betray vagueness in a variety of ways which we would not tolerate in our writing to-day. Thus in some Semitic scripts only the consonants in the words are indicated. The reader has to insert the omitted vowels according to his knowledge and the context. The hieroglyphic script behaves very similarly, though not precisely in the same way; and for that reason the pronunciation of Ancient Egyptian remains unknown to us. The sacred script of the Egyptians is indefinite in yet other ways. For instance, it is left to the arbitrary decision of the scribe whether he arranges the pictures from right to left or from left to right. In order to be able to read it one must obey the rule of reading towards the faces of the figures, birds, and so on. But the scribe might also arrange the pictographs in vertical columns, and in making inscriptions on comparatively small objects he allowed considerations of decorativeness and space to influence him in altering the sequence of the signs in yet other ways. The most disturbing thing about the hieroglyphic script is, no doubt, that it makes no separation between words. The pictures are placed across the page at equal distances apart; and in general it is impossible to tell whether a sign is still part of the preceding word or forms the beginning of a new word. In Persian cuneiform script, on the other hand, an oblique wedge serves to separate words.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3317

An extremely ancient language and script, which however is still used by four hundred million people, is the Chinese. You must not suppose that I at all understand it; I only obtained some information about it because I hoped to find analogies in it to the indefiniteness of dreams. Nor has my expectation been disappointed. The Chinese language is full of instances of indefiniteness which might fill us with alarm. As is well known, it consists of a number of syllabic sounds, which are spoken either singly or combined into pairs. One of the principal dialects has some four hundred such sounds. Since, however, the vocabulary of this dialect is reckoned at about four thousand words, it follows that each sound has on an average ten different meanings - some fewer but some correspondingly more. There are quite a number of methods of avoiding ambiguity, since one cannot infer from the context alone which of the ten meanings of the syllabic sound the speaker intends to evoke in the hearer. Among these methods are those of combining two sounds into a compound word and of using four different ‘tones’ in the pronunciation of the syllables. It is even more interesting from the point of view of our comparison to learn that this language has practically no grammar. It is impossible to tell of any of the monosyllabic words whether it is a noun or a verb or an adjective; and there are no verbal inflections by which one could recognize gender, number, termination, tense or mood. Thus the language consists, one might say, solely of the raw material, just as our thought-language is resolved by the dream-work into its raw material, and any expression of relations is omitted. In Chinese the decision in all cases of indefiniteness is left to the hearer’s understanding and this is guided by the context. I have made a note of an example of a Chinese proverb which, literally translated, runs:

‘Little what see much what wonderful.’

This is not hard to understand. It may mean: ‘The less someone has seen, the more he finds to wonder at’; or: ‘There is much to wonder at for him who has seen little.’ There is, of course, no question of distinguishing between these two translations, which only differ grammatically. In spite of this indefiniteness, we have been assured that the Chinese language is a quite excellent vehicle for the expression of thought. So indefiniteness need not necessarily lead to ambiguity.

It must, of course, be admitted that the system of expression by dreams occupies a far more unfavourable position than any of these ancient languages and scripts. For after all they are fundamentally intended for communication: that is to say, they are always, by whatever method and with whatever assistance, meant to be understood. But precisely this characteristic is absent in dreams. A dream does not want to say anything to anyone. It is not a vehicle for communication; on the contrary, it is meant to remain ununderstood. For that reason we must not be surprised or at a loss if it turns out that a number of ambiguities and obscurities in dreams remain undecided. The one certain gain we have derived from our comparison is the discovery that these points of uncertainty which people have tried to use as objections to the soundness of our dream-interpretations are on the contrary regular characteristics of all primitive systems of expression.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3318

The question of how far the intelligibility of dreams in fact extends can only be answered by practice and experience. Very far, I believe; and my view is confirmed if we compare the results produced by correctly trained analysts. The lay public, including the scientific lay public, are well known to enjoy making a parade of scepticism when faced by the difficulties and uncertainties of a scientific achievement. I think they are wrong in this. You are perhaps not all aware that a similar situation arose in the history of the deciphering of the Babylonian-Assyrian inscriptions. There was a time when public opinion was very much inclined to regard the decipherers of cuneiform as visionaries and the whole of their researches as a ‘swindle’. But in 1857 the Royal Asiatic Society made a decisive experiment. It requested four of the most highly respected experts in cuneiform, Rawlinson, Hincks, Fox Talbot and Oppert, to send it, in sealed envelopes, independent translations of a newly discovered inscription; and, after a comparison between the four productions, it was able to announce that the agreement between these experts went far enough to justify a belief in what had so far been achieved and confidence in further advances. The derision on the part of the learned lay world gradually diminished after this, and since then certainty in reading cuneiform documents has increased enormously.

(2) A second group of doubts is closely connected with the impression, which no doubt you yourselves have not escaped, that a number of the solutions to which we find ourselves driven in interpreting dreams seem to be forced, artificial, dragged in by the hair of their head - arbitrary, that is, or even comic and facetious. Remarks to this effect are so frequent that I will choose at random the last that has been reported to me. So listen to this. In free Switzerland the head of a training college was recently removed from his post on account of his interest in psycho-analysis. He entered a protest, and a Berne newspaper published the report of the school authorities on his appeal. I will select a few sentences dealing with psycho-analysis from this document: ‘Moreover we are surprised at the far-fetched and artificial character of many of the examples, which are also to be found in the volume by Dr. Pfister of Zurich which is quoted. . . . It is really surprising, therefore, that the head of a training-college should accept all these assertions and pretended proofs without criticism.’ These sentences are represented as a decision reached by someone ‘making a calm judgement’. It is rather this calmness, I think, which is ‘artificial’. Let us examine these remarks more closely, in the expectation that a little reflection and a little expert knowledge can be of no disadvantage even to a calm judgement.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3319

It is truly refreshing to see how swiftly and unerringly a person can arrive at a judgement on some delicate problem of depth-psychology after his first impression of it. The interpretations seem to him far-fetched and forced and he does not like them; so they are false and all this business of interpretation is worthless. Not even a fleeting thought is given to the other possibility - that there are good reasons why these interpretations are bound to have this appearance; after which the further question would follow of what these good reasons are.

The matter under consideration relates in essence to the results of displacement, which you have become acquainted with as the most powerful instrument of the dream-censorship. With the help of displacement the dream-censorship creates substitutive structures which we have described as allusions. But they are allusions which are not easily recognizable as such, from which the path back to the genuine thing is not easily traced, and which are connected with the genuine thing by the strangest, most unusual, external associations. In all these cases it is a question, however, of things which are meant to be hidden, which are condemned to concealment, for that is what the dream-censorship is aiming at. But we must not expect that a thing which has been hidden will be found in its own place, in its proper position. The frontier-control commissions which are operating to-day are more cunning in this respect than the Swiss school authorities. In their search for documents and plans they are not content with examining brief-cases and portfolios, but they consider the possibility that spies and smugglers may have these forbidden things in the most secret portions of their clothing where they decidedly do not belong - for instance, between the double soles of their boots. If the hidden things are there, it will certainly be possible to call them ‘far-fetched’, but it is also true that a great deal will have been found.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3320

If we recognize that the links between a latent dream-element and its manifest substitute can be of the most out-of-the-way and peculiar nature, sometimes appearing comic and sometimes resembling a joke, we are basing ourselves on copious experience of examples which, as a rule, we have not solved ourselves. It is often impossible to give such interpretations on our own account: no sensible person could guess at the connection. The dreamer gives us the translation either all at once by a direct association - he is able to, since it was he who produced the substitute - or else he brings up so much material that the solution no longer calls for any particular acumen, but presents itself, so to speak, as a matter of course. If the dreamer fails to assist in one or other of these two ways, the manifest element in question will for ever remain unintelligible to us. I will, if I may, give you an example which occurred to me recently. One of my women patients lost her father in the course of the treatment. Since then she has taken every opportunity of bringing him to life in her dreams. In one of these her father appeared (in a particular connection of no further relevance) and said: ‘It’s a quarter past eleven, it’s half-past eleven, it’s a quarter to twelve.’ By way of interpretation of this oddity all that occurred to her was that her father liked his grown-up children to appear punctually at the family meals. No doubt this was connected with the dream-element, but it threw no light on its origin. There was a suspicion, based on the immediate situation in the treatment, that a carefully suppressed critical revolt against her beloved and honoured father played some part in the dream. In the further course of her associations, apparently remote from the dream, she told how the day before there had been a lot of talk about psychology in her presence, and a relative of hers had remarked: ‘The Urmensch [primal man] survives in all of us.’ This seemed to provide us with the explanation. It had given her an excellent opportunity of bringing her dead father to life once again. She made him in the dream-into an ‘Uhrmensch’ [‘clock-man’] by making him announce the quarter hours at midday.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3321

You will not be able to escape the resemblance of this example to a joke; and it has in fact often happened that a joke of the dreamer’s has been regarded as a joke of the interpreter’s. There are other instances in which it has been far from easy to decide whether what we are dealing with is a joke or a dream. But you will recall that the same doubt arose in the case of some parapraxes - slips of the tongue. A man reported as a dream of his that his uncle had given him a kiss while they were sitting in his auto(mobile). He himself very quickly added the interpretation: it meant ‘auto-erotism’ (a term from the theory of the libido, indicating satisfaction obtained without any outside object). Had the man set out, then, to have some fun with us and was he passing off a joke that had occurred to him as a dream? I think not; I believe he really dreamt it. But what is the origin of this puzzling similarity? This question once led me temporarily aside from my path by compelling me to make jokes themselves the subject of a detailed investigation. It was there shown how jokes originate: a preconscious train of thought is abandoned for a moment to be worked over in the unconscious, and from this it emerges as a joke. Under the influence of the unconscious it is subjected to the effects of the mechanisms that hold sway there - condensation and displacement - the same processes that we have found concerned in the dream-work; and it is to this common feature that is to be ascribed the similarity, when it occurs, between jokes and dreams. But the unintended ‘dream-joke’ brings none of the yield of pleasure of a true joke. You can learn why if you go more deeply into the study of jokes. A ‘dream-joke’ strikes us as a bad joke; it does not make us laugh, it leaves us cold.

In this, however, we are treading in the footsteps of the dream-interpretation of antiquity, which, along with much that is unserviceable, has left us some good examples of dream-interpretation, which we ourselves could not better. I will re peat to you a dream which was of historic importance and which is reported of Alexander the Great, with slight variations, by Plutarch and Artemidorus of Daldis. When the king was laying siege to the obstinately defended city of Tyre (322 B.C.), he once dreamt that he saw a dancing satyr. Aristander, the dream-interpreter, who was present with the army, interpreted the dream by dividing the word ‘Satyros’ into σά Τύgος [sa Turos] (thine is Tyre), and therefore promised that he would triumph over the city. Alexander was led by this interpretation to continue the siege and eventually captured Tyre. The interpretation, which has a sufficiently artificial appearance, was undoubtedly the right one.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3322

(3) I can well imagine that you will be especially impressed when you hear that objections to our view of dreams have even been made by people who have themselves, as psycho-analysts, been engaged for a considerable time in interpreting dreams. It would have been too much to expect that such an abundant encouragement to fresh errors as this theory offers should have been neglected; and so, as a result of conceptual confusions and unjustified generalizations, assertions have been made which are not far behind the medical view of dreams in their incorrectness. You know one of them already. It tells us that dreams are concerned with attempts at adaptation to present conditions and with attempts at solving future problems - that they have a ‘prospective purpose’ (Maeder). We have already shown that this assertion is based on a confusion between the dream and the latent dream-thoughts and is therefore based on disregarding the dream-work. As a characterization of the unconscious intellectual activity of which the latent dream-thoughts form part, it is on the one hand no novelty and on the other not exhaustive, since unconscious intellectual activity is occupied with many other things besides preparing for the future. A far worse confusion seems to underlie the assurance that the idea of death will be found behind every dream. I am not clear exactly what is meant by this formula. But I suspect that it conceals a confusion between the dream and the dreamer’s whole personality.

An unjustifiable generalization, based on a few good examples, is involved in the statement that every dream allows of two interpretations - one which agrees with our account, a ‘psycho-analytic’ one, and another, an ‘anagogic’ one, which disregards the instinctual impulses and aims at representing the higher functions of the mind (Silberer). There are dreams of this kind, but you will try in vain to extend this view even to a majority of dreams. Again, after all that I have said to you, you will find quite incomprehensible an assertion that all dreams are to be interpreted bisexually, as a confluence of two currents described as a masculine and a feminine one (Adler). There are, of course, a few dreams of this kind too; and you may learn later that they are constructed like certain hysterical symptoms. The reason why I have mentioned all these discoveries of fresh universal characteristics of dreams is in order to warn you against them or at least to leave you in no doubt as to what I think of them.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3323

(4) One day the objective value of research into dreams seemed to be put in question by an observation that patients under analytic treatment arrange the content of their dreams in accordance with the favourite theories of their physicians some dreaming predominantly of sexual instinctual impulses, others of the struggle for power and yet others even of rebirth (Stekel). The weight of this observation was, however, diminished by the reflection that human beings had dreams before there was any psycho-analytic treatment which could give those dreams a direction, and that people who are now under treatment used also to dream during the period before the treatment started. What was true about this novelty could soon be seen to be self-evident and of no relevance to the theory of dreams. The day’s residues which instigate dreams are left over from powerful interests in waking life. When the remarks made by the physician and the hints he gives become of significance to the patient, they enter the circle of the day’s residues and can provide psychical stimuli for the construction of dreams like any other emotionally coloured interests of the previous day which have not been dealt with, and they then operate like somatic stimuli which impinge on the sleeper during his sleep. The trains of thought set going by the physician can, like these other instigators of dreams, appear in the manifest content of a dream or be discovered in its latent content. Indeed, we know that a dream can be experimentally produced, or, to put it more correctly, a part of the dream. material can be introduced into the dream. In producing these effects on his patients, an analyst is thus playing a part no different from an experimenter who, like Mourly Vold, gives particular postures to the limbs of the subjects of his experiments.

It is often possible to influence dreamers as to what they shall dream about, but never as to what they shall dream. The mechanism of the dream-work and the unconscious dream wish are exempt from any outside influence. In considering dreams with a somatic stimulus, we have already found that the characteristic nature and independence of dream-life are shown in the reaction with which dreams respond to the somatic or mental stimuli that are brought to bear. The thesis which we have been discussing, and which seeks to throw doubt on the objectivity of research into dreams, is thus once again based on a confusion - this time between the dream and the dream-material.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3324

This then, Ladies and Gentlemen, is what I wanted to tell you about the problems of dreams. As you will guess, there is much that I have had to pass over, and you will have been aware that on almost every point what I have said has necessarily been incomplete. That, however, is due to the connection between the phenomena of dreaming and those of the neuroses. We have studied dreams as an introduction to the theory of the neuroses, and this was certainly a more correct procedure than if we had done the opposite. But just as dreams prepare the way to an understanding of the neuroses, so, on the other hand, a true appreciation of dreams can only be achieved after a knowledge of neurotic phenomena.

I cannot tell what you will think of it, but I must assure you that I do not regret having claimed so much of your interest and of the time available to us for the problems of dreams. There is nothing else from which one can so quickly arrive at a conviction of the correctness of the theses by which psycho-analysis stands or falls. Exacting work over many months and even years is called for to show that the symptoms of a case of neurotic illness have a sense, serve a purpose and arise out of the patient’s experiences in life. On the other hand, only a few hours’ effort may be enough to prove that the same thing is true of a dream which is, to start with, confused to the point of being unintelligible, and thus to confirm all the premisses of psycho-analysis - the unconscious nature of mental processes, the peculiar mechanisms which they obey and the instinctual forces which are expressed in them. And when we bear in mind the sweeping analogy between the structure of dreams and that of neurotic symptoms and at the same time consider the rapidity of the transformation which makes a dreamer into a waking and reasonable man, we arrive at a certainty that neuroses too are based only on an alteration in the play of forces between the powers of mental life.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3325

PART III

GENERAL THEORY OF THE NEUROSES

(1917)

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3326

LECTURE XVI

PSYCHO-ANALYSIS AND PSYCHIATRY

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - I am delighted to see you again, at the beginning of a new academic year, for a resumption of our discussions. Last year I spoke to you of the way in which psycho-analysis deals with parapraxes and dreams. This year I should like to introduce you to an understanding of the phenomena of neurosis, which, as you will soon learn, have a great deal in common with both of the others. But I must warn you in advance that I shall not be able to offer you the same position in relation to me this year as I did last year. At that time I set great store on never taking a step without remaining in agreement with your judgement; I discussed a great deal with you and gave way to your objections - in fact I recognized you and your ‘common sense’ as a deciding factor. But this is no longer possible and for a simple reason. Parapraxes and dreams were not unfamiliar to you as phenomena; we might say that you had as much experience or could easily obtain as much experience of them as I had. The region of the phenomena of neurosis is, however, strange to you; in so far as you are not doctors yourselves, you have no other access to them than through what I have to tell you; and of what help is the best judgement if it is not accompanied by familiarity with the material that is to be judged?

But you must not take this warning of mine to mean that I propose to give you dogmatic lectures and to insist on your unqualified belief. Such a misunderstanding would do me a grave injustice. I do not wish to arouse conviction; I wish to stimulate thought and to upset prejudices. If as a result of lack of knowledge of the material you are not in a position to form a judgement, you should neither believe nor reject. You should listen and allow what I tell you to work on you. It is not so easy to arrive at convictions, or, if they are reached easily, they soon turn out to be worthless and incapable of resistance. The only person who has a right to a conviction is someone who, like me, has worked for many years at the same material and who, in doing so, has himself had the same new and surprising experiences. What is the good, then, in the sphere of the intellect, of these sudden convictions, these lightning-like conversions, these instantaneous rejections? Is it not clear that the ‘coup de foudre’, love at first sight, is derived from quite another sphere, from that of the emotions? We do not even require of our patients that they should bring a conviction of the truth of psycho-analysis into the treatment or be adherents of it. Such an attitude often raises our suspicions. The attitude that we find the most desirable in them is a benevolent scepticism. So you too should endeavour to allow the psycho-analytic view to grow up quietly in you alongside of the popular or psychiatric one, till opportunities arise for the two to influence each other, to compete with each other and to unite in leading to a conclusion.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3327

On the other hand, you should not for a moment suppose that what I put before you as the psycho-analytic view is a speculative system. It is on the contrary empirical - either a direct expression of observations or the outcome of a process of working them over. Whether this working-over has been carried out in an adequate and justifiable manner will appear in the course of the further advance of the science, and indeed I may assert without boasting, after a lapse of nearly twenty-five years, and having reached a fairly advanced age, that these observations are the result of particularly hard, concentrated and deep going work. I have often had an impression that our opponents were unwilling to take any account of this origin of our theses, as though they thought what was in question were merely subjectively determined notions to which someone else might oppose others of his own choice. This behaviour of our opponents is not entirely intelligible to me. It may perhaps be due to the fact that, as a doctor, one usually makes so little contact with neurotic patients and pays so little attention to what they say that one cannot imagine the possibility that anything valuable could be derived from their communications - the possibility, that is, of carrying out any thorough observations upon them. I take this opportunity of assuring you that in the course of these lectures I shall indulge in very little controversy, especially with individuals. I have never been able to convince myself of the truth of the maxim that strife is the father of all things. I believe it is derived from the Greek sophists and is at fault, like them, through overvaluing dialectics. It seems to me, on the contrary, that what is known as scientific controversy is on the whole quite unproductive, apart from the fact that it is almost always conducted on highly personal lines. Up to a few years ago I was able to boast that I had only once engaged in a regular scientific dispute - with one single worker (Löwenfeld of Munich). It ended in our becoming friends and we have remained so to this day. But I did not repeat the experiment for a long time, as I did not feel sure that the outcome would be the same.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3328

Now you will no doubt conclude that a rejection such as this of all written discussion argues a high degree of inaccessibility to objections, of obstinacy, or, to use the polite colloquial scientific term, of pig-headedness. I should like to say in reply that when once, after such hard work, one has arrived at a conviction, one has at the same time acquired a certain right to retain that conviction with some tenacity. I may also urge that in the course of my work I have modified my views on a few important points, changed them and replaced them by fresh ones - and in each case, of course, I have made this publicly known. And the outcome of this frankness? Some people have taken no notice whatever of myself - corrections and continue to this day to criticize me for hypotheses which have long ceased to have the same meaning for me. Others reproach me precisely for these changes and regard me as untrustworthy on their account. Of course! a person who has occasionally changed his opinions is deserving of no belief at all, since he has made it all too likely that his latest assertions may also be mistaken; but a person who has unflinchingly maintained what he once asserted, or who cannot be quickly enough persuaded to give it up, must naturally be pig-headed or stubborn! What can one do, in the face of these contradictory objections by the critics, but remain as one is and behave in accordance with one’s own judgement? I am resolved to do that, and I shall not be deterred from modifying or withdrawing any of my theories, as my advancing experience may require. In regard to fundamental discoveries I have hitherto found nothing to alter, and I hope this will remain true in the future.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3329

I am to put before you, then, the psycho-analytic view of the phenomena of neurosis. In doing so, the best plan would seem to be to make a start in connection with the phenomena we have already dealt with, for the sake both of analogy and contrast; and I will begin with a symptomatic action which I have seen many people perform during my consulting hours. We analysts cannot do much for the people who come to us in our consulting-room to lay before us in a quarter of an hour the miseries of a long lifetime. Our deeper knowledge makes it difficult for us to give the kind of opinion another doctor would - ‘There’s nothing wrong with you’ - with the added advice: ‘You should arrange for a mild hydropathic treatment.’ One of my colleagues who was asked what he did with his consultation patients shrugged his shoulders and replied: ‘I fine them so-and-so many Kronen for a frivolous waste of time.’ So you will not be surprised to hear that even in the case of busy psycho-analysts their consulting hours are not apt to be very lively. I have had the ordinary door between my waiting-room and my consulting- and treatment-room doubled and given a baize lining. There can be no doubt about the purpose of this arrangement. Now it constantly happens that a person whom I have brought in from the waiting-room omits to shut the door behind him and almost always he leaves both doors open. As soon as I notice this I insist in a rather unfriendly tone on his or her going back and making good the omission even if the person concerned is a well-dressed gentleman or a fashionable lady. This makes an impression of uncalled-for pedantry. Occasionally, too, I have put myself in a foolish position by making this request when it has turned out to be a person who cannot touch a door-handle himself and is glad if someone with him spares him the necessity. But in the majority of cases I have been right; for anyone who behaves like this and leaves the door open between a doctor’s waiting-room and consulting-room is ill-mannered and deserves an unfriendly reception. But do not take sides over this till you have heard the sequel. For this carelessness on the part of the patient only occurs when he has been alone in the waiting-room and has therefore left an empty room behind him; it never happens if other people, strangers to him, have been waiting with him. In this latter case he knows quite well that it is in his interest not to be overheard while he is talking to the doctor, and he never fails to shut both the doors carefully.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3330

Thus the patient’s omission is neither accidentally nor senselessly determined; and indeed it is not unimportant, for, as we shall see, it throws light on the newcomer’s attitude to the doctor. The patient is one of the great multitude who have a craving for mundane authority, who wish to be dazzled and intimidated. He may have enquired on the telephone as to the hour at which he could most easily get an appointment; he had formed a picture of a crowd of people seeking for help, like the crowd outside one of Julius Meinl’s branches. He now comes into an empty, and moreover extremely modestly furnished, waiting-room, and is shocked. He has to make the doctor pay for the superfluous respect which he had intended to offer him: so - he omits to shut the door between the waiting-room and the consulting-room. What he means to say to the doctor by his conduct is: ‘Ah, so there’s no one here and no one’s likely to come while I’m here.’ He would behave equally impolitely and disrespectfully during the consultation if his arrogance were not given a sharp reprimand at the very beginning.

The analysis of this small symptomatic action tells you no thing you did not know before: the thesis that it was not a matter of chance but had a motive, a sense and an intention, that it had a place in an assignable mental context and that it provided information, by a small indication, of a more important mental process. But, more than anything else, it tells you that the process thus indicated was unknown to the consciousness of the person who carried out the action, since none of the patients who left the two doors open would have been able to admit- that by this omission he wanted to give evidence of his contempt. Some of them would probably have been aware of a sense of disappointment when they entered the empty waiting room; but the connection between this impression and the symptomatic action which followed certainly remained unknown to their consciousness.

Beside this small analysis of a symptomatic action we will now place an observation on a patient. I choose this one because it is fresh in my memory, but also because it can be reported comparatively briefly A certain amount of detail is indispensable in any such account.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3331

A young officer, home on short leave, asked me to undertake the treatment of his mother-in-law, who, though in the happiest circumstances, was embittering her own life and the lives of her relatives through an absurd idea. In this way I made the acquaintance of a well-preserved lady of fifty-three, friendly and simple in her nature, who told me the following story without any reluctance. She lived in the country, most happily married, with her husband, who was at the head of a large factory. She could not give enough praise to her husband’s affectionate solicitude. It had been a love-match thirty years ago, and since then there had never been any trouble, discord or cause for jealousy. Her two children were happily married; her husband (and their father), out of a sense of duty, was not yet willing to retire. A year before, she had received an anonymous letter accusing her excellent husband of a love affair with a young girl; and the incredible - and to herself unintelligible - result was that she immediately believed it, and since then her happiness had been destroyed. The course of events, in greater detail, was something like this. She had a housemaid with whom she used, perhaps too often, to have intimate talks. This girl pursued another one with a positively malicious hostility because she had done so much better for herself in life, though she was of no higher origin. Instead of going into service, this other girl had managed to get a commercial training, had entered the factory and, as a result of shortness of personnel, owing to members of the staff being called up for military service, she was promoted to a good position. She now lived in the factory itself, had social relations with all the gentlemen and was actually addressed as ’Fräulein’. The girl who had made less of a success in life was of course ready to repeat all kinds of bad things of her former schoolmate. One day our lady had a conversation with the housemaid about a gentleman who had been staying with them, who was well known not to be living with his wife but to be having an affair with another woman. She did not know how it happened, but she suddenly said: ‘The most dreadful thing that could happen to me would be if I were to learn that my dear husband was having an affair too.’ The next day she received an anonymous letter by post which, as though by magic, gave her this very information, written in a disguised hand. She decided, probably rightly, that the letter was the work of the malicious housemaid, since it specified as her husband’s mistress the girl whom the servant pursued with her hatred. But although she at once saw through the intrigue and had seen enough instances where she lived of how little credence such cowardly denunciations deserved, what happened was that the letter instantly prostrated her. She became terribly excited, sent for her husband at once and reproached him violently. Her husband laughed the accusation off and did the best possible thing. He brought in the family doctor (who was also the factory doctor) who made efforts to soothe the unfortunate lady. The further conduct of both of them was also entirely sensible. The housemaid was dismissed, but the alleged rival was not. Since then the patient had repeatedly been pacified to the point of no longer believing the content of the anonymous letter, but never thoroughly and never for long. It was enough for her to hear the young lady’s name mentioned or to meet her in the street and a fresh attack of distrust, pain and reproaches would burst out in her.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3332

This, then, is the case history of this excellent woman. Not much psychiatric experience was needed to understand that, in contrast to other neurotics, she was giving too mild an account of her case - that she was, as we say, - dissimulating and that she had never really got over her belief in the accusation contained in the anonymous letter.

What attitude, then, will a psychiatrist adopt in a case of illness like this? We know already how he would behave to the symptomatic action of the patient who fails to shut the consulting-room door. He pronounces it to be a chance event of no psychological interest with which he has no further concern. But this procedure cannot be carried over to the illness of the jealous woman. The symptomatic action seems to be a matter of indifference; but the symptom forces itself on our attention as a matter of importance. It is accompanied by intense subjective suffering and, as an objective fact, it threatens the communal life of a family; it is thus an undeniable subject of psychiatric interest. The psychiatrist will start by endeavouring to characterize the symptom by some essential feature. The idea with which the woman torments herself cannot in itself be called absurd; it does, indeed, happen that elderly gentlemen have love affairs with young girls. But there is something else about it which is absurd and hard to understand. The patient had no other reason at all for believing that her affectionate and loyal husband belonged to this otherwise not so rare class of husbands except what was asserted in the anonymous letter. She knew that this document had no evidential value and she was able to give a satisfying explanation of its origin. She ought therefore to have been able to tell herself that she had no ground whatever for her jealousy, and she did tell herself so. But in spite of this she suffered as much as if she regarded this jealousy as completely justified. Ideas of this kind, which are inaccessible to logical arguments based on reality, are by general agreement described as delusions. The good lady, then, was suffering from delusions of jealousy. This is no doubt the essential feature of this case of illness.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3333

After this first point has been established our psychiatric interest will become even livelier. If a delusion is not to be got rid of by a reference to reality, no doubt it did not originate from reality either. Where else did it originate? There are delusions of the most varied content: why in our case is the content of the delusion jealousy in particular? In what kind of people do delusions, and especially delusions of jealousy, come about? We should like to hear what the psychiatrist has to say about this; but at this point he leaves us in the lurch. He enters into only a single one of our enquiries. He will investigate the woman’s family history and will perhaps give us this reply: ‘Delusions come about in people in whose families similar and other psychical disorders have repeatedly occurred.’ In other words, if this woman developed a delusion she was predisposed to it by hereditary transmission. No doubt that is something; but is it all we want to know? Was this the only thing that contributed to the causation of the illness? Must we be content to suppose that it is a matter of indifference or caprice or is inexplicable whether a delusion of jealousy arises rather than any other sort? And ought we to understand the assertion of the predominance of the hereditary influence in a negative sense as well - that no matter what experiences this woman’s mind encountered she was destined some time or other to produce a delusion? You will want to know why it is that scientific psychiatry will give us no further information. But my reply to you is: ‘he is a rogue who gives more than he has.’ The psychiatrist knows no way of throwing more light on a case like this one. He must content himself with a diagnosis and a prognosis - uncertain in spite of a wealth of experience - of its future course.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3334

But can psycho-analysis do more here? Yes, it actually can. I hope to be able to show you that, even in a case so hard of access as this, it can discover something which makes a first understanding possible. And to begin with I would draw your attention to the inconspicuous detail that the patient herself positively provoked the anonymous letter, which now gave support to her delusion, by informing the scheming housemaid on the previous day that it would cause her the greatest unhappiness if her husband had a love affair with a young girl. In this way she first put the notion of sending the anonymous Letter into the housemaid’s head. Thus the delusion acquires a certain independence of the letter; it had been present already in the patient as a fear - or was it as a wish? Let us now add to this the small further indications yielded by only two analytic sessions. The patient, indeed, behaved in a very unco-operative way when, after telling me her story, she was asked for her further thoughts, ideas and memories. She said that nothing occurred to her, that she had told me everything already, and after two sessions the experiment with me had in fact to be broken off because she announced that she already felt well and that she was sure the pathological idea would not come back. She only said this, of course, from resistance and from dread of the continuation of the analysis. Nevertheless, during these two sessions she let fall a few remarks which allowed of, and indeed necessitated, a particular interpretation; and this interpretation threw a clear light on the genesis of her delusion of jealousy. She herself was intensely in love with a young man, with the same son-in-law who had persuaded her to come to me as a patient. She herself knew nothing, or perhaps only a very little, of this love; in the family relationship that existed between them it was easy for this passionate liking to disguise itself as innocent affection. After all our experiences elsewhere, it is not hard for us to feel our way into the mental life of this upright wife and worthy mother, of the age of fifty-three. Being in love like this, a monstrous and impossible thing, could not become conscious; but it remained in existence and, even though it was unconscious, it exercised a severe pressure. Something had to become of it, some relief had to be looked for; and the easiest mitigation was offered, no doubt, by the mechanism of displacement which plays a part so regularly in the generating of delusional jealousy. If not only were she, the old woman, in love with a young man, but if also her old husband were having a love affair with a young girl, then her conscience would be relieved of the weight of her unfaithfulness. The phantasy of her husband’s unfaithfulness thus acted as a cooling compress on her burning wound. Her own love had not become conscious to her, but its mirror-reflection, which brought her such an advantage, now became conscious as an obsession and delusion. No arguments against it could, of course, have any effect, for they were only directed against the mirror-image and not against the original which gave the other its strength and which lay hidden, inviolable, in the unconscious.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3335

Let us now bring together what this effort at a psycho-analysis, short and impeded as it was, has brought to light for an understanding of this case - assuming, of course, that our enquiries were correctly carried out, which I cannot here submit to your judgement. Firstly, the delusion has ceased to be absurd or unintelligible; it had a sense, it had good motives and it fitted into the context of an emotional experience of the patient’s. Secondly, the delusion was necessary, as a reaction to an unconscious mental process which we have inferred from other indications, and it was precisely to this connection that it owed its delusional character and its resistance to every logical and realistic attack. It itself was something desired, a kind of consolation. Thirdly, the fact that the delusion turned out to be precisely a jealous one and not one of another kind was unambiguously determined by the experience that lay behind the illness. You recall of course that, the day before, she had told the scheming maid that the most dreadful thing that could happen to her would be her husband’s unfaithfulness. Nor will you have overlooked the two important analogies between this case and the symptomatic action which we analysed - the explanation of its sense or intention and its relation to something unconscious that was involved in the situation.

Naturally this does not answer all the questions that we might ask in connection with this case. On the contrary, the case bristles with further problems-some that have in general not yet become soluble and others which could not be solved owing to the particular circumstances being unfavourable. For instance, why did this lady who was happily married fall in love with her son-in-law? and why did the relief, which might have been possible in other ways, take the form of this mirror-image this projection of her state on to her husband? You must no: think it is otiose or frivolous to raise such questions. We already have some material at our disposal which might possibly serve to answer them. The lady was at a critical age, at which sexual needs in women suffer a sudden and undesired increase; that alone might account for the event. Or it may further have been that her excellent and faithful husband had for some years no longer enjoyed the sexual capacity which the well-preserved woman required for her satisfaction. Experience has shown us that it is precisely men in this position, whose faithfulness can consequently be taken for granted, who are distinguished by treating their wives with unusual tenderness, and by showing particular forbearance for their nervous troubles. Or, again, it may not be without significance that the object of this pathogenic love was precisely the young husband of one of her daughters. A powerful erotic tie with a daughter, which goes back in the last resort to the mother’s sexual constitution, often finds a way of persisting in a transformation of this sort. In this connection I may perhaps remind you that the relation between mother-in-law and son-in-law has been regarded from the earliest times of the human race as a particularly awkward one and that among primitive people it has given rise to very powerful taboo regulations and ‘avoidances’. The relation is frequently excessive by civilized standards both in a positive and negative direction. Which of these three factors became operative in our case, or whether two of them or perhaps all three came together, I cannot, it is true, tell you; but that is only because I was not permitted to continue the analysis of the case for more than two sessions.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3336

I notice now, Gentlemen, that I have been talking to you about a number of things which you are not yet prepared to understand. I did so in order to carry out the comparison between psychiatry and psycho-analysis. But there is one thing that I can ask you now. Have you observed any sign of a contradiction between them? Psychiatry does not employ the technical methods of psycho-analysis; it omits to make any inferences from the content of the delusion, and, in pointing to heredity, it gives us a very general and remote aetiology instead of indicating first the more special and proximate causes. But is there a contradiction, an opposition in this? Is it not rather a case of one supplementing the other? Does the hereditary factor contradict the importance of experience? Do not the two things rather combine in the most effective manner? You will grant that there is nothing in the nature of psychiatric work which could be opposed to psycho-analytic research. What is opposed to psycho-analysis is not psychiatry but psychiatrists. Psycho-analysis is related to psychiatry approximately as histology is to anatomy: the one studies the external forms of the organs, the other studies their construction out of tissues and cells. It is not easy to imagine a contradiction between these two species of study, of which one is a continuation of the other. To-day, as you know, anatomy is regarded by us as the foundation of scientific medicine. But there was a time when it was as much forbidden to dissect the human cadaver in order to discover the internal structure of the body as it now seems to be to practise psycho-analysis in order to learn about the internal mechanism of the mind. It is to be expected that in the not too distant future it will be realized that a scientifically based psychiatry is not possible without a sound knowledge of the deeper-lying unconscious processes in mental life.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3337

Perhaps, however, the much-abused psycho-analysis has friends among you who will be pleased if it can be justified from another direction - from the therapeutic side. As you know, our psychiatric therapy is not hitherto able to influence delusions. Is it possible, perhaps, that psycho-analysis can do so, thanks to its insight into the mechanism of these symptoms? No, Gentlemen, it cannot. It is as powerless (for the time being at least) against these ailments as any other form of therapy. We can understand, indeed, what has happened in the patient, but we have no means of making the patient himself understand it. You have heard how I was unable to pursue the analysis of this delusion beyond a first beginning. Will you be inclined to maintain on that account that an analysis of such cases is to be rejected because it is fruitless? I think not. We have a right, or rather a duty, to carry on our research without consideration of any immediate beneficial effect. In the end - we cannot tell where or when - every little fragment of knowledge will be transformed into power, and into therapeutic power as well. Even if psycho-analysis showed itself as unsuccessful in every other form of nervous and psychical disease as it does in delusions, it would still remain completely justified as an irreplaceable instrument of scientific research. It is true that in that case we should not be in a position to practise it. The human material on which we seek to learn, which lives, has its own will and needs its motives for co-operating in our work, would hold back from us. Let me therefore end my remarks to-day by informing you that there are extensive groups of nervous disorders in which the transformation of our better understanding into therapeutic power has actually taken place, and that in these illnesses, which are difficult of access by other means, we achieve, under favourable conditions, successes which are second to no others in the field of internal medicine.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3338

LECTURE XVII

THE SENSE OF SYMPTOMS

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - In the last lecture I explained to you that clinical psychiatry takes little notice of the outward form or content of individual symptoms, but that psycho-analysis takes matters up at precisely that point and has established in the first place the fact that symptoms have a sense and are related to the patient’s experiences. The sense of neurotic symptoms was first discovered by Josef Breuer from his study and successful cure (between 1880 and 1882) of a case of hysteria which has since become famous. It is true that Pierre Janet brought forward the same evidence independently; indeed, the French worker can claim priority of publication, for it was only a decade later (in 1893 and 1895), while he was collaborating with me, that Breuer published his observation. In any case it may seem a matter of some indifference who made the discovery, for, as you know, every discovery is made more than once and none is made all at once. And, apart from this, success does not always go along with merit: America is not named after Columbus. The great psychiatrist Leuret gave it as his opinion, before Breuer and Janet, that even the delusional ideas of the insane would certainly be found to have a sense if only we understood how to translate them. I must admit that for a long time I was prepared to give Janet very great credit for throwing light on neurotic symptoms, because he regarded them as expressions of idées inconscientes which dominated the patients. But since then he has expressed himself with exaggerated reserve, as if he wanted to admit that the unconscious had been nothing more to him than a form of words, a make shift, une façon de parler - that he had meant nothing real by it. Since then I have ceased to understand Janet’s writings; but I think he has unnecessarily forfeited much credit.

Thus neurotic symptoms have a sense, like parapraxes and dreams, and, like them, have a connection with the life of those who produce them. I should now like to make this important discovery plainer to you by a few examples. I can indeed only assert, I cannot prove, that it is always and in every instance so. Anyone who looks for experiences himself, will find convincing evidence. But for certain reasons I shall choose these examples from cases not of hysteria but of another, highly remarkable neurosis which is fundamentally very much akin to it and about which I have a few introductory remarks to make.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3339

This neurosis, known as ‘obsessional neurosis’, is not so popular as the universally familiar hysteria. It is not, if I may express myself thus, so obtrusively noisy, it behaves more like a private affair of the patient’s, it dispenses almost entirely with somatic phenomena, and creates all its symptoms in the mental sphere. Obsessional neurosis and hysteria are the forms of neurotic illness upon the study of which psycho-analysis was first built, and in the treatment of which, too, our therapy celebrates its triumphs. But obsessional neurosis, in which the puzzling leap from the mental to the physical plays no part, has actually, through the efforts of psycho-analysis, become more perspicuous and familiar to us than hysteria, and we have learnt that it displays certain extreme characteristics of the nature of neurosis far more glaringly.

Obsessional neurosis is shown in the patient’s being occupied with thoughts in which he is in fact not interested, in his being aware of impulses in himself which appear very strange to him and in his being led to actions the performance of which give him no enjoyment, but which it is quite impossible for him to omit. The thoughts (obsessions) may be senseless in themselves, or merely a matter of indifference to the subject; often they are completely silly, and invariably they are the starting-point of a strenuous mental activity, which exhausts the patient and to which he only surrenders himself most unwillingly. He is obliged against his will to brood and speculate as though it were a question of his most important vital problems. The impulses which the patient is aware of in himself may also make a childish and senseless impression; but as a rule they have a content of the most frightful kind, tempting him, for instance, to commit serious crimes, so that he not merely disavows them as alien to himself, but flies from them in horror and protects him. self from carrying them out by prohibitions, renunciations and restrictions upon his freedom. At the same time, these impulse never - literally never - force their way through to performance; the outcome lies always in victory for the flight and the precautions. What the patient actually carries out - his so called obsessional actions - are very harmless and certainly trivial things, for the most part repetitions or ceremonial elaborations of the activities of ordinary life. But these necessary activities (such as going to bed, washing, dressing or going for a walk) become extremely tedious and almost insoluble tasks. In different forms and cases of obsessional neurosis the pathological ideas, impulses and actions are not combined in equal proportions; it is the rule, rather, that one or other of these factors dominates the picture and gives its name to the illness, but the common element in all these forms is sufficiently unmistakable.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3340

Certainly this is a crazy illness. The most extravagant psychiatric imagination would not, I think, have succeeded in constructing anything like it; and if one did not see it before one every day one would never bring oneself to believe in it. Do not suppose, however, that you will help the patient in the least by calling on him to take a new line, to cease to occupy himself with such foolish thoughts and to do something sensible instead of his childish pranks. He would like to do so himself, for he is completely clear in his head, shares your opinion of his obsessional symptoms and even puts it forward to you spontaneously. Only he cannot help himself. What is carried into action in an obsessional neurosis is sustained by an energy to which we probably know nothing comparable in normal mental life. There is only one thing he can do: he can make displacements, and ex changes, he can replace one foolish idea by another somewhat milder, he can proceed from one precaution or prohibition to another, instead of one ceremonial he can perform another. He can displace the obsession but not remove it. The ability to displace any symptom into something far removed from its original conformation is a main characteristic of his illness. Moreover it is a striking fact that in his condition the contradictions (polarities) with which mental life is interlaced emerge especially sharply differentiated. Alongside of obsessions with a positive and negative content, doubt makes itself felt in the intellectual field and little by little it begins to gnaw even at what is usually most certain. The whole position ends up in an ever-increasing degree of indecision, loss of energy and restriction of freedom. At the same time, the obsessional neurotic starts off with a very energetic disposition, he is often extraordinarily self-willed and as a rule he has intellectual gifts above the average. He has usually reached a satisfactorily high level of ethical development; he exhibits over-conscientiousness, and is more than ordinarily correct in his behaviour. You can imagine that no small amount of work is needed before one can make one’s way any distance into this contradictory hotch-potch of character-traits and symptoms. And to begin with we aim at nothing whatever else than understanding a few of the symptoms and being able to interpret them.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3341

Perhaps you would like to know in advance, having in mind our earlier talks, what attitude contemporary psychiatry adopts towards the problems of obsessional neurosis. But it is a meagre chapter. Psychiatry gives names to the different obsessions but says nothing further about them. On the other hand it insists that those who suffer from these symptoms are ‘degenerates’. This gives small satisfaction; in fact it is a judgement of value a condemnation instead of an explanation. We are supposed to think that every possible sort of eccentricity may arise in de generates. Well, it is true that we must regard those who develop such symptoms as somewhat different in their nature from other people. But we may ask: are they more ‘degenerate’ than other neurotics-than hysterical patients, for instance, or those who fall ill of psychoses? Once again, the characterization is evidently too general. Indeed, we may doubt whether there is any justification for it at all, when we learn that such symptoms occur too in distinguished people of particularly high capacities, capacities important for the world at large. It is true that, thanks to their own discretion and to the untruthfulness of their biographers, we learn little that is intimate about the great men who are our models; but it may nevertheless happen that one of them, like Émile Zola, may be a fanatic for the truth, and we then learn from him of the many strange obsessional habits to which he was a life-long victim.¹

¹ E. Toulouse, Émile Zola, enquête médico-psychologique, Paris, 1896.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3342

Psychiatry has found a way out by speaking of ‘dégénérés supérieurs’. Very nice. But we have found from psycho-analysis that it is possible to get permanently rid of these strange obsessional symptoms, just as of other complaints and just as in people who are not degenerate. I myself have succeeded repeatedly in this.

I shall give you only two examples of the analysis of an obsessional symptom: one an old observation which I cannot find a better one to replace, and another recently met with. I limit myself to this small number, because it is impossible in such reports to avoid being very diffuse and entering into every detail.

A lady, nearly thirty years of age, who suffered from the most severe obsessional manifestations and whom I might perhaps have helped if a malicious chance had not brought my work to nothing - I may be able to tell you more about this later on performed (among others) the following remarkable obsessional action many times a day. She ran from her room into another neighbouring one, took up a particular position there beside a table that stood in the middle, rang the bell for her housemaid, sent her on some indifferent errand or let her go without one, and then ran back into her own room. This was certainly not a very distressing symptom, but was nevertheless calculated to excite curiosity. The explanation was reached in the most unequivocal and unobjectionable manner, free from any possible contribution on the doctor’s part. I cannot see how I could possibly have formed any suspicion of the sense of this obsessional action or could have offered any suggestion on how it was to be interpreted. Whenever I asked the patient ‘Why do you do that? What sense has it?’ she answered: ‘I don’t know.’ But one day, after I had succeeded in defeating a major, fundamental doubt of hers, she suddenly knew the answer and told me what it was that was connected with the obsessional action. More than ten years before, she had married a man very much older than herself, and on the wedding-night he was impotent. Many times during the night he had come running from his room into hers to try once more, but every time without success. Next morning he had said angrily: ‘I should feel ashamed in front of the housemaid when she makes the bed,’ took up a bottle of red ink that happened to be in the room and poured its contents over the sheet, but not on the exact place where a stain would have been appropriate. I could not understand at first what this recollection had to do with the obsessional action in question; the only resemblance I could find was in the repeated running from one room into the other, and perhaps also in the entrance of the housemaid. My patient then led me up to the table in the second room and showed me a big stain on the tablecloth. She further explained that she took up her position in relation to the table in such a way that the maid who had been sent for could not fail to see the stain. There could no longer be any doubt of the intimate connection between the scene on her wedding-night and her present obsessional action, though all kinds of other things remained to be learnt.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3343

It was clear, in the first place, that the patient was identifying herself with her husband; she was playing his part by imitating his running from one room into the other. Further, to carry on the analogy, we must agree that the bed and the sheet were re placed by the table and the tablecloth. This might seem arbitrary, but surely we have not studied dream-symbolism to no purpose. In dreams too we often find a table which has to be interpreted as a bed. Table and bed together stand for marriage, so that the one can easily take the place of the other.

It already seems proved that the obsessional action had a sense; it appears to have been a representation, a repetition, of the significant scene. But we are not obliged to come to a halt here. If we examine the relation between the two more closely, we shall probably obtain information about something that goes further - about the intention of the obsessional action. Its kernel was obviously the summoning of the housemaid, before whose eyes the patient displayed the stain, in contrast to her husband’s remark that he would feel ashamed in front of the maid. Thus he, whose part she was playing, did not feel ashamed in front of the maid; accordingly the stain was in the right place. We see, therefore, that she was not simply repeating the scene, she was continuing and at the same time correcting it; she was putting it right. But by this she was also correcting the other thing, which had been so distressing that night and had made the expedient with the red ink necessary - his impotence. So the obsessional action was saying: ‘No, it’s not true. He had no need to feel ashamed in front of the housemaid; he was not impotent.’ It represented this wish, in the manner of a dream, as fulfilled in a present-day action; it served the purpose of making her husband superior to his past mishap.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3344

Everything I could tell you about this woman fits in with this. Or, more correctly speaking, everything else we know about her points the way to this interpretation of what was in itself an unintelligible obsessional action. The woman had been living apart from her husband for years and was struggling with an intention to obtain a legal divorce. But there was no question of her being free of him; she was forced to remain faithful to him; she withdrew from the world so as not to be tempted; she exculpated and magnified his nature in her imagination. In deed, the deepest secret of her illness was that by means of it she protected her husband from malicious gossip, justified her separation from him and enabled him to lead a comfortable separate life. Thus the analysis of a harmless obsessional action led directly to the inmost core of an illness, but at the same time betrayed to us no small part of the secret of obsessional neurosis in general. I am glad to let you dwell a little on this example because it combines conditions which we could not fairly expect to find in every case. Here the interpretation of the symptom was discovered by the patient herself at a single blow, without any prompting or intervention on the analyst’s part; and it resulted from a connection with an event which did not (as is usually the case) belong to a forgotten period of childhood, but which had happened in the patient’s adult life and had remained undimmed in her memory. All the objections which criticism is normally in the habit of raising against our interpretation of symptoms fall to the ground in this particular case. We cannot hope always to have such good luck.

And one thing more. Were you not struck by the way in which this unobtrusive obsessional action has led us into the intimacies of the patient’s life? A woman cannot have anything much more intimate to tell than the story of her wedding-night. Is it a matter of chance and of no further significance that we have arrived precisely at the intimacies of sexual life? No doubt it might be the result of the choice I have made on this occasion. Do not let us be too hasty in forming our judgement, and let us turn to my second example, which is of quite a different kind - a sample of a very common species, a sleep-ceremonial.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3345

A nineteen-year-old girl, well developed and gifted, was the only child of parents to whom she was superior in education and intellectual liveliness. As a child she had been wild and high spirited, and in the course of the last few years had changed, without any visible cause, into a neurotic. She was very irritable, particularly towards her mother, always dissatisfied and depressed, and inclined to indecisiveness and doubt; finally she admitted that she was no longer able to walk by herself across squares or along comparatively wide streets. We will not concern ourselves much with her complicated illness, which called for at least two diagnoses - agoraphobia and obsessional neurosis - but will dwell only on the fact that she also developed a sleep-ceremonial, with which she tormented her parents. In a certain sense it may be said that every normal person has his sleep-ceremonial or that he has established certain necessary conditions the non-fulfilment of which interferes with his going to sleep; he has imposed certain forms on the transition from the waking to the sleeping state and repeats them in the same manner every evening. But everything that a healthy person requires as a necessary condition for sleep can be understood rationally, and if external circumstances call for a change he will comply easily and without waste of time. A pathological ceremonial, however, is unyielding and insists on being carried through, even at the cost of great sacrifices; it too is screened by having a rational basis and at a superficial glance seems to diverge from the normal only by a certain exaggerated meticulousness. On closer examination, nevertheless, we can see that the screen is insufficient, that the ceremonial comprises some stipulations which go far beyond its rational basis and others which positively run counter to it. Our present patient put forward as a pretext for her nightly precautions that she needed quiet in order to sleep and must exclude every source of noise. With that end in view she did two kinds of things. The big clock in her room was stopped, all the other clocks or watches in the room were removed, and her tiny wrist-watch was not allowed even to be inside her bedside table. Flower-pots and vases were collected on the writing-table so that they might not fall over in the night and break, and disturb her in her sleep. She was aware that these measures could find only an ostensible justification in the rule in favour of quiet: the ticking of the little watch would not have been audible even if it had been left lying on the top of the bedside table, and we have all had experience of the fact that the regular ticking of a pendulum-clock never disturbs sleep but acts, rather, as a soporific. She admitted too that her fear that flower-pots and vases, if they were left in their places, might fall over and break of their own accord lacked all plausibility. In the case of other stipulations made by the ceremonial the need for quiet was dropped as a basis. Indeed, the requirement that the door between her room and her parents’ bedroom should stay half-open - the fulfilment of which she ensured by placing various objects in the open doorway - seemed on the contrary to act as a source of disturbing noises. But the most important stipulations related to the bed itself. The pillow at the top end of the bed must not touch the wooden back of the bedstead. The small top pillow must lie on this large pillow in one specific way only - namely, so as to form a diamond shape. Her head had then to lie exactly along the long diameter of the diamond. The eiderdown (or ‘Duchent’ as we call it in Austria) had to be shaken before being laid on the bed so that its bottom end became very thick; afterwards, however, she never failed to even out this accumulation of feathers by pressing them apart.

With your leave I will pass over the remaining, often very trivial, details of the ceremonial; they would teach us nothing new, and would lead us too far afield from our aims. But you must not overlook the fact that all this was not carried out smoothly. There was always an apprehension that things might not have been done properly. Everything must be checked and repeated, doubts assailed first one and then another of the safety measures, and the result was that one or two hours were spent, during which the girl herself could not sleep and would not allow her intimidated parents to sleep either.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3346

The analysis of these torments did not proceed so simply as that of our earlier patient’s obsessional action. I was obliged to give the girl hints and propose interpretations, which were always rejected with a decided ‘no’ or accepted with contemptuous doubt. But after this first reaction of rejection there followed a time during which she occupied herself with the possibilities put before her, collected associations to them, produced recollections and made connections, until by her own work she had accepted all the interpretations. In proportion as this happened, she relaxed the performance of her obsessional measures, and even before the end of the treatment she had given up the whole ceremonial. You must understand, too, that the work of analysis as we carry it out to-day quite excludes the systematic treatment of any individual symptom till it has been entirely cleared up. We are, on the contrary, obliged to keep on leaving any particular topic, in the certain expectation of coming back to it again in other connections. The interpretation of her symptoms which I am about to give you is accordingly a synthesis of findings which were arrived at, interrupted by other work, over a period of weeks and months.

Our patient gradually came to learn that it was as symbols of the female genitals that clocks were banished from her equipment for the night. Clocks and watches - though elsewhere we have found other symbolic interpretations for them - have arrived at a genital role owing to their relation to periodic processes and equal intervals of time. A woman may boast that her menstruation behaves with the regularity of clockwork. Our patient’s anxiety, however, was directed in particular against being disturbed in her sleep by the ticking of a clock. The ticking of a clock may be compared with the knocking or throbbing in the clitoris during sexual excitement. She had in fact been repeatedly woken from her sleep by this sensation, which had now become distressing to her; and she gave expression to this fear of an erection in the rule that all clocks and watches that were going should be removed from her neighbourhood at night. Flower-pots and vases, like all vessels, are also female symbols. Taking precautions against their falling and being broken at night was thus not without its good sense. We know the widespread custom of breaking a vessel or plate at betrothal ceremonies. Each man present gets hold of a fragment, and we may regard this as a sign of his resigning the claims he had upon the bride in virtue of a marriage-regulation dating from before the establishment of monogamy. In connection with this part of her ceremonial the girl produced a recollection and several associations. Once when she was a child she had fallen down while she was carrying a glass or china vase and had cut her finger and bled profusely. When she grew up and came to know the facts about sexual intercourse she formed an anxious idea that on her wedding-night she would not bleed and would thus fail to show that she was a virgin. Her precautions against vases being broken thus meant a repudiation of the whole complex concerned with virginity and bleeding at the first intercourse - a repudiation equally of the fear of bleeding and of the contrary fear of not bleeding. These precautions, which she subsumed under her avoidance of noise, had only a remote connection with it.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3347

She found out the central meaning of her ceremonial one day when she suddenly understood the meaning of the rule that the pillow must not touch the back of the bedstead. The pillow, she said, had always been a woman to her and the upright wooden back a man. Thus she wanted - by magic, we must interpolate - to keep the man and woman apart - that is, to separate her parents from each other, not to allow them to have sexual intercourse. In earlier years, before she had established the ceremonial, she had tried to achieve the same aim in a more direct way. She had simulated fear (or had exploited a tendency to fear which was already present) in order that the connecting doors between her parents’ bedroom and the nursery should not be shut. This rule had, indeed, been retained in her present ceremonial. In that way she gave herself the opportunity of listening to her parents, but in making use of it she brought on an insomnia which lasted for months. Not satisfied with disturbing her parents by this means, she contrived to be allowed from time to time to sleep in her parents’ bed between them. The ‘pillow’ and the ‘wooden back’ were thus really unable to come together. Finally, when she was so big that it became physically uncomfortable for her to find room in the bed between her parents, she managed, by a conscious simulation of anxiety, to arrange for her mother to exchange places with her for the night and to leave her own place so that the patient could sleep beside her father. This situation no doubt became the starting-point of phantasies whose after-effect was to be seen in the ceremonial.

If a pillow was a woman, then the shaking of the eiderdown till all the feathers were at the bottom and caused a swelling there had a sense as well. It meant making a woman pregnant; but she never failed to smooth away the pregnancy again, for she had for years been afraid that her parents’ intercourse would result in another child and so present her with a competitor. On the other hand, if the big pillow was a woman, the mother, then the small top-pillow could only stand for the daughter. Why did this pillow have to be placed diamond-wise and her head precisely along its centre line? It was easy to re call to her that this diamond shape is the inscription scribbled on every wall to represent the open female genitals. If so, she herself was playing the man and replacing the male organ by her head. (Cf. the symbolism of beheading for castrating.)

Wild thoughts, you will say, to be running through an unmarried girl’s head. I admit that is so. But you must not forget that I did not make these things but only interpreted them. A sleep-ceremonial like this is a strange thing too, and you will not fail to see how the ceremonial corresponds to the phantasies which are revealed by the interpretation. But I attach more importance to your noticing that what was seen in the ceremonial was a precipitate not of a single phantasy but of a number of them, though they had a nodal point somewhere, and, further, that the rules laid down by the ceremonial reproduced the patient’s sexual wishes at one point positively and at another negatively - in part they represented them, but in part they served as a defence against them.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3348

More could be made, too, of the analysis of this ceremonial if it could be properly linked up with the patient’s other symptoms. But our path does not lead in that direction. You must be content with a hint that the girl was in the grip of an erotic attachment to her father whose beginnings went back to her childhood. Perhaps that was why she behaved in such an unfriendly way to her mother. Nor can we overlook the fact that the analysis of this symptom has once again taken us back to a patient’s sexual life. We shall perhaps be less surprised at this the more often we gain an insight into the sense and intention of neurotic symptoms.

I have shown you, then, on the basis of two chosen examples, that neurotic symptoms have a sense, like parapraxes and dreams, and that they have an intimate connection with the patient’s experiences. Can I expect you to believe this extremely important thesis on the evidence of two examples? No. But can you require me to go on giving you further examples till you declare yourselves convinced? No, once more. For, in view of the detailed fashion in which I deal with each single case, I should have to devote a five-hour course of lectures to settling this one point in the theory of the neuroses. So I must be content with having given you a trial proof of my assertion and, for the rest, I refer you to the reports given in the literature of the subject - to the classical interpretations of symptoms in Breuer’s first case (of hysteria), to the striking light thrown upon the most obscure symptoms of what is known as dementia praecox by C. G. Jung, at a time when he was merely a psycho-analyst and had not yet aspired to be a prophet, and all the other papers that have since than filled our periodicals. There has been no lack of investigations precisely on these lines. The analysis, interpretation and translation of neurotic symptoms proved so attractive to psycho-analysts that for a time they neglected the other problems of neurosis.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3349

If any of you undertakes exertions of this kind, he will certainly gain a powerful impression of the wealth of evidential material. But he will also come up against a difficulty. The sense of a symptom lies, as we have found, in some connection with the patient’s experience. The more individual is the form of the symptom the more reason we shall have for expecting to be able to establish this connection. The task is then simply to discover, in respect to a senseless idea and a pointless action, the past situation in which the idea was justified and the action served a purpose. The obsessional action of our patient who ran to the table and rang for the housemaid is a perfect model of this kind of symptom. But there are - and they are very frequent symptoms of quite another character. They must be described as ‘typical’ symptoms of an illness; they are approximately the same in all cases, individual distinctions disappear in them or at least shrink up to such an extent that it is difficult to bring them into connection with the patients’ individual experience and to relate them to particular situations they have experienced. Let us look once more at obsessional neurosis. the sleep-ceremonial of our second patient already has much that is typical about it, though at the same time it has enough individual traits to make what I might call a ‘historical’ interpretation possible. But all these obsessional patients have a tendency to repeat, to make their performances rhythmical and to keep them isolated from other actions. The majority of them wash too much. Patients who suffer from agoraphobia (topophobia or fear of spaces), which we no longer regard as obsessional neurosis but describe as ‘anxiety hysteria’, often repeat the same features in their symptoms with wearisome monotony: they are afraid of en closed spaces, of large open squares, of lengthy roads and streets. They feel protected if they are accompanied by an acquaintance or followed by a vehicle, and so on. On this similar background, however, different patients nevertheless display their individual requirements - whims, one is inclined to say - which in some cases contradict one another directly. One patient avoids only narrow streets and another only wide ones; one can go out only if there are few people in the street, another only if there are many. In the same way, hysteria, in spite of its wealth of individual traits, has a superfluity of common, typical symptoms, which seem to resist any easy historical derivation. And we must not forget that it is these typical symptoms, indeed, which give us our bearings when we make our diagnosis. Suppose, in a case of hysteria, we have really traced a typical symptom back to an experience or a chain of similar experiences - a case of hysterical vomiting, for instance, to a series of disgusting impressions - then we are at a loss when the analysis in a similar case of vomiting reveals a series of a quite different kind of ostensibly effective experiences. It looks, then, as though for unknown reasons hysterical patients are bound to produce vomiting and as though the historical precipitating causes revealed by analysis were only pretexts which, if they happen to be there, are exploited by this internal necessity.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3350

So we are now faced by the depressing discovery that, though we can give a satisfactory explanation of the individual neurotic symptoms by their connection with experiences, our skill leaves us in the lurch when we come to the far more frequent typical symptoms. Furthermore, I am far from having made you acquainted with all the difficulties that arise when consistently pursuing the historical interpretation of symptoms. Nor do I intend to do so; for, though it is my intention not to gloss things over to you or conceal them, I cannot throw you into perplexity and confusion at the very beginning of our common studies. It is true that we have only made a beginning with our efforts at understanding the significance of symptoms; but we will hold fast to what we have achieved and pursue our way step by step to a mastery of what we have not yet understood. I will try to console you, therefore, with the reflection that any fundamental distinction between one kind of symptom and the other is scarcely to be assumed. If the individual symptoms are so unmistakably dependent on the patient’s experience, it re mains possible that the typical symptoms may go back to an experience which is in itself typical - common to all human beings. Other features which recur regularly in neuroses may be general reactions which are imposed on the patients by the nature of their pathological change, like the repetitions or doubts in obsessional neurosis. In short, we have no grounds for premature despair; we shall see what remains to be seen.

A quite similar difficulty faces us in the theory of dreams. I could not deal with it in our earlier discussions on dreams. The manifest content of dreams is of the greatest diversity and individual variety, and we have shown in detail what one derives from this content by means of analysis. But alongside of these there are dreams which equally deserve to be called ‘typical’, which happen in everyone in the same way, dreams with a uniform content, which offer the same difficulties to interpretation. They are dreams of falling, flying, floating, swimming, of being inhibited, of being naked and certain other anxiety dreams - which lead, in different people, now to this and now to that interpretation, without any light being thrown on their monotony and typical occurrence. But in these dreams too we observe that this common background is enlivened by additions that vary individually; and it is probable that, with a widening of our knowledge, it will be possible, without constraint, to include these dreams too in the understanding of dream-life which we have acquired from other dreams.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3351

LECTURE XVIII

FIXATION TO TRAUMAS - THE UNCONSCIOUS

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - In my last lecture I expressed a desire that our work should go forward on the basis not of our doubts but of our discoveries. We have not yet had any discussion of two of the most interesting implications that follow from our two sample analyses.

To take the first of these. Both patients give us an impression of having been ‘fixated’ to a particular portion of their past, as though they could not manage to free themselves from it and were for that reason alienated from the present and the future. They then remained lodged in their illness in the sort of way in which in earlier days people retreated into a monastery in order to bear the burden there of their ill-fated lives. What had brought this fate upon our first patient was the marriage which she had in real life abandoned. By means of her symptoms she continued to carry on her dealings with her husband. We learnt to understand the voices that pleaded for him, that excused him, that put him on a pedestal and that lamented his loss. Although she was young and desirable to other men, she had taken every precaution, real and imaginary (magical), to remain faithful to him. She did not show herself to strangers and she neglected her personal appearance; furthermore, once she had sat down in a chair she was unable to get out of it quickly, she refused to sign her name, and she could not make any presents, on the ground that no one ought to receive anything from her.

The same effect was produced on the life of our second patient, the young girl, by an erotic attachment to her father which had started during the years before her puberty. The conclusion she herself drew was that she could not marry as long as she was so ill. We, however, may suspect that she had become so ill in order not to have to marry and in order to remain with her father.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3352

We cannot dismiss the question of why, in what way and for what motive a person can arrive at such a remarkable attitude to life and one that is so inexpedient - assuming that this attitude is a general characteristic of neuroses and not a special peculiarity of these two patients. And in fact it is a general feature, of great practical importance, in every neurosis. Breuer’s first hysterical patient was similarly fixated to the period when she was nursing her father in a serious illness. In spite of her recovery, in a certain respect she remained cut off from life; she remained healthy and efficient but avoided the normal course of a woman’s life. In every one of our patients, analysis shows us that they have been carried back to some particular period of their past by the symptoms of their illness or their consequences. In the majority of cases, indeed, a very early phase of life is chosen for the purpose - a period of their childhood or even, laughable as this may sound, of their existence as an infant at the breast.

The closest analogy to this behaviour of our neurotics is afforded by illnesses which are being produced with special frequency precisely at the present time by the war - what are described as traumatic neuroses. Similar cases, of course, appeared before the war as well, after railway collisions and other alarming accidents involving fatal risks. Traumatic neuroses are not in their essence the same thing as the spontaneous neuroses which we are in the habit of investigating and treating by analysis; nor have we yet succeeded in bringing them into harmony with our views, and I hope I shall be able at some time to explain to you the reason for this limitation. But in one respect we may insist that there is a complete agreement between them. The traumatic neuroses give a clear indication that a fixation to the moment of the traumatic accident lies at their root. These patients regularly repeat the traumatic situation in their dreams; where hysteriform attacks occur that admit of an analysis, we find that the attack corresponds to a complete transplanting of the patient into the traumatic situation. It is as though these patients had not finished with the traumatic situation, as though they were still faced by it as al immediate task which has not been dealt with; and we take this view quite seriously. It shows us the way to what we may call an economic view of mental processes. Indeed, the term ‘traumatic’ has no other sense than an economic one. We apply it to an experience which within a short period of time presents the mind with an increase of stimulus too powerful to be dealt with or worked off in the normal way, and this must result in permanent disturbances of the manner in which the energy operates.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3353

This analogy is bound to tempt us to describe as traumatic those experiences too to which our neurotic patients seem to be fixated. This would promise to offer us a simple determinant for the onset of neurosis. Neurosis could then be equated with a traumatic illness and would come about owing to inability to deal with an experience whose affective colouring was excessively powerful. And this indeed was actually the first formula in which (in 1893 and 1895) Breuer and I accounted theoretically for our new observations. A case like that of the first of the two patients in my last lecture - the young married woman separated from her husband - fits in very well with this view. She had not got over the failure of her marriage and remained attached to that trauma. But our second case - that of the girl with a fixation upon her father - shows us already that the formula is not sufficiently comprehensive. On the one hand, a little girl’s being in love like this with her father is something so common and so frequently surmounted that the term ‘traumatic’ applied to it would lose all its meaning; and, on the other hand, the patient’s history showed us that in the first instance her erotic fixation appeared to have passed off without doing any damage, and it was only several years later that it reappeared in the symptoms of the obsessional neurosis. Here, then, we foresee complications, a greater wealth of determinants for the onset of illness; but we may also suspect that there is no need to abandon the traumatic line of approach as being erroneous: it must be possible to fit it in and subsume it somewhere else.

Here once more, then, we must break off the course we have started on. For the moment it leads no further and we shall have to learn all kinds of other things before we can find its proper continuation. But on the subject of fixation to a particular phase in the past we may add that such behaviour is far more widespread than neurosis. Every neurosis includes a fixation of that kind, but not every fixation leads to a neurosis, coincides with a neurosis or arises owing to a neurosis. A perfect model of an affective fixation to something that is past is provided by mourning, which actually involves the most complete alienation from the present and the future. But even the judgement of a layman will distinguish sharply between mourning and neurosis. There are, on the other hand, neuroses which may be described as a pathological form of mourning.

It may happen, too, that a person is brought so completely to a stop by a traumatic event which shatters the foundations of his life that he abandons all interest in the present and future and remains permanently absorbed in mental concentration upon the past. But an unfortunate such as this need not on that account become a neurotic. We will not attach too much value to this one feature, therefore, in characterizing neurosis, however regularly present and however important it may usually be.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3354

Let us turn now to the second of the discoveries which follow from our analyses; in its case we need not fear having to make a subsequent qualification of our views. I have described to you how our first patient carried out a senseless obsessional action and how she reported an intimate memory from her past life as having some connection with it: and how afterwards I examined the connection between the two and discovered the intention of the obsessional action from its relation to the memory. But there is one factor which I have entirely neglected, though it deserves our fullest attention. However often the patient repeated her obsessional action, she knew nothing of its being derived from the experience she had had. The connection between the two was hidden from her; she could only quite truthfully reply that she did not know what it was that was making her carry out her action. Then suddenly one day, under the influence of the treatment, she succeeded in discovering the connection and reported it to me. But she still knew nothing of the intention with which she was performing the obsessional action - the intention of correcting a distressing portion of the past and of putting her beloved husband in a better light. It took a fairly long time and called for much labour before she understood and admitted to me that such a motive alone could have been the driving force of her obsessional action.

The link with the scene after her unhappy wedding-night and the patient’s affectionate motive constituted, taken together, what we have called the ‘sense’ of the obsessional action. But while she was carrying out the obsessional action this sense had been unknown to her in both directions - both its ‘whence’ and its ‘whither’. Mental processes had therefore been at work in her and the obsessional action was the effect of them; she had been aware of this effect in a normal mental fashion, but none of the mental predeterminants of this effect came to the knowledge of her consciousness. She behaved in precisely the same way as a hypnotized subject whom Bernheim had ordered to open an umbrella in the hospital ward five minutes after he woke up. The man carried out this instruction when he was awake, but he could produce no motive for his action. It is a state of affairs of this sort that we have before our eyes when we speak of the existence of unconscious mental processes. We can challenge anyone in the world to give a more correct scientific account of this state of affairs, and if he does we will gladly renounce our hypothesis of unconscious mental processes. Till that happens, however, we will hold fast to the hypothesis; and if someone objects that here the unconscious is nothing real in a scientific sense, is a makeshift, une façon de parler, we can only shrug our shoulders resignedly and dismiss what he says as unintelligible. Something not real, which produces effects of such tangible reality as an obsessional action!

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3355

And we meet with what is in essence the same thing in our second patient. She had made a rule that the pillow must not touch the back of the bedstead, and she had to obey this rule though she did not know where it came from, what it meant or to what motives it owed its power. Whether she herself regarded the rule as a matter of indifference, or whether she struggled against it or raged against it or decided to transgress it - none of this made any difference to her carrying it out. It had to be obeyed, and she asked herself vainly why. We must recognize, however, that these symptoms of obsessional neurosis, these ideas and impulses which emerge one knows not whence, which prove so resistant to every influence from an otherwise normal mind, which give the patient himself the impression of being all-powerful guests from an alien world, immortal beings intruding into the turmoil of mortal life - these symptoms offer the plainest indication of there being a special region of the mind, shut off from the rest. They lead, by a path that cannot be missed, to a conviction of the existence of the unconscious in the mind; and that is precisely why clinical psychiatry, which is acquainted only with a psychology of consciousness, can deal with these symptoms in no other way than by declaring them to be signs of a special sort of degeneracy. Obsessional ideas and obsessional impulses are not, of course, themselves unconscious, any more than the performance of obsessional actions escapes conscious perception. They would not have become symptoms if they had not forced their way into consciousness. But their psychical predeterminants which we infer by means of analysis, the connections into which we insert them by interpretation, are unconscious, at least until we have made them conscious to the patient by the work of analysis.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3356

If, now, you consider further that the state of affairs which we have established in our two cases is confirmed for every symptom of every neurotic illness - that always and everywhere the sense of the symptoms is unknown to the patient and that analysis regularly shows that these symptoms are derivatives of unconscious processes but can, subject to a variety of favourable circumstances, be made conscious - if you consider this, you will understand that in psycho-analysis we cannot do without what is at the same time unconscious and mental, and are accustomed to operate with it as though it were something palpable to the senses. But you will understand as well, perhaps, how incapable of forming a judgement on this question are all those other people, who are only acquainted with the unconscious as a concept, who have never carried out an analysis and have never interpreted dreams or found a sense and intention in neurotic symptoms. To say it for our ends once again: the possibility of giving a sense to neurotic symptoms by analytic interpretation is an unshakeable proof of the existence - or, if you prefer it, of the necessity for the hypothesis - of unconscious mental processes.

But that is not all. Thanks to a second discovery of Breuer’s, which seems to me even more significant than the other and which he shared with no one, we learn still more of the connection between neurotic symptoms and the unconscious. Not only is the sense of the symptoms regularly unconscious, but there is an inseparable relation between this fact of the symptoms being unconscious and the possibility of their existing. You will understand me in a moment. I follow Breuer in asserting that every time we come upon a symptom we can infer that there are certain definite unconscious processes in the patient which contain the sense of the symptom. But it is also necessary for that sense to be unconscious in order that the symptom can come about. Symptoms are never constructed from conscious processes; as soon as the unconscious processes concerned have become conscious, the symptom must disappear. Here you will at once perceive a means of approach to therapy, a way of making symptoms disappear. And in this way Breuer did in fact restore his hysterical patient - that is, freed her from her symptoms; he found a technique for bringing to her consciousness the unconscious processes which contained the sense of the symptoms, and the symptoms disappeared.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3357

This discovery of Breuer’s was not the result of speculation but of a fortunate observation made possible by the patient’s co-operation. Nor should you torment yourselves with attempts at understanding it by tracing it back to something already known; you should recognize in it a new fundamental fact, by whose help much else will become explicable. Allow me, therefore, to repeat the same thing to you in another way.

The construction of a symptom is a substitute for something else that did not happen. Some particular mental processes should normally have developed to a point at which consciousness received information of them. This, however, did not take place, and instead - out of the interrupted processes, which had been somehow disturbed and were obliged to remain unconscious - the symptom emerged. Thus something in the nature of an exchange has taken place; if this can be reversed the therapy of the neurotic symptoms will have achieved its task.

This discovery of Breuer’s is still the foundation of psycho-analytic therapy. The thesis that symptoms disappear when we have made their unconscious predeterminants conscious has been confirmed by all subsequent research, although we meet with the strangest and most unexpected complications when we attempt to carry it through in practice. Our therapy works by transforming what is unconscious into what is conscious, and it works only in so far as it is in a position to effect that transformation.

And now I must quickly make a short digression, to avoid the risk of your imagining that this therapeutic work is accomplished too easily. From what I have so far said a neurosis would seem to be the result of a kind of ignorance - a not knowing about mental events that one ought to know of. This would be a close approximation to some well-known Socratic doctrines, according to which even vices are based on ignorance. Now it would as a rule be very easy for a doctor experienced in analysis to guess what mental impulses had remained unconscious in a particular patient. So it ought not to be very difficult, either, for him to restore the patient by communicating his knowledge to him and so remedying his ignorance. One part at least of the symptom’s unconscious sense could be easily dealt with in this way, though it is true that the doctor cannot guess much about the other part - the connection between the symptoms and the patient’s experiences -, since he himself does not know those experiences but must wait till the patient remembers them and tells them to him. But even for this a substitute can in some instances be found. One can make enquiries about these experiences from the patient’s relatives and they will often be able to recognize which of them had a traumatic effect, and they can even sometimes report experiences of which the patient himself knows nothing because they occurred at a very early period of his life. Thus, by combining these two methods, we should have a prospect of relieving the patient of his pathogenic ignorance with little expense of time or trouble.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3358

If only that was how things happened! We came upon discoveries in this connection for which we were at first unprepared. Knowledge is not always the same as knowledge: there are different sorts of knowledge, which are far from equivalent psychologically. ‘Il y a fagots et fagots’, as Molière has said. The doctor’s knowledge is not the same as the patient’s and cannot produce the same effects. If the doctor transfers his knowledge to the patient as a piece of information, it has no result. No, it would be wrong to say that. It does not have the result of removing the symptoms, but it has another one - of setting the analysis in motion, of which the first signs are often expressions of denial. The patient knows after this what he did not know before - the sense of his symptom; yet he knows it just as little as he did. Thus we learn that there is more than one kind of ignorance. We shall need to have a somewhat deeper understanding of psychology to show us in what these differences consist. But our thesis that the symptoms vanish when their sense is known remains true in spite of this. All we have to add is that the knowledge must rest on an internal change in the patient such as can only be brought about by a piece of psychical work with a particular aim. We are faced here by problems which will presently be brought together into the dynamics of the construction of symptoms.

I must ask now, Gentlemen, whether what I am saying to you is not too obscure and complicated. Am I not confusing you by so often taking back what I have said or qualifying it by starting up trains of thought and then dropping them? I should be sorry if that were so. But I have a strong dislike of simplifying things at the expense of truthfulness. I have no objection to your receiving the full impact of the many-sidedness and complexity of our subject; and I think, too, that it does no harm if I tell you more on every point than you can at the moment make use of. I am aware, after all, that every listener or reader puts what is presented to him into shape in his mind, shortens it and simplifies it, and selects from it what he would like to retain. Up to a certain point it is no doubt true that the more there is at one’s disposal the more one is left with. Permit me to hope that, in spite of all the trimmings, you have clearly grasped the essential part of what I have told you - about the sense of symptoms, about the unconscious and about the relation between them. No doubt you have also understood that our further efforts will lead in two directions: first towards discovering how people fall ill and how they can come to adopt the neurotic attitude to life - which is a clinical problem; and secondly towards learning how the pathological symptoms develop from the determinants of the neurosis which remains a problem of mental dynamics. There must moreover be a point somewhere at which the two problems converge.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3359

I will not go into this any further to-day. But since we still have some time to spare, I should like to direct your attention to another characteristic of our two analyses, which, once again, it will only be possible to appreciate fully later on - to the gaps in the patients’ memories, their amnesias. As you have heard, the task of a psycho-analytic treatment can be expressed in this formula: its task is to make conscious everything that is pathogenically unconscious. You will perhaps be surprised to learn, then, that this formula can be replaced by another one: its task is to fill up all the gaps in the patient’s memory, to remove his amnesias. This would amount to the same thing. We are thus implying that the amnesias of neurotic patients have an important connection with the origin of their symptoms. If, however, you consider the case of our first analysis you will not find this view of amnesia justified. The patient had not forgotten the scene from which her obsessive action was derived; on the contrary, she had a vivid recollection of it; nor did anything else forgotten play a part in the origin of the symptom. The position with our second patient (the girl with the obsessional ceremonial), though less clear, was on the whole analogous. She had not really forgotten her behaviour in earlier years - the fact that she had insisted on the door between her parents’ bedroom and her own being left open and that she had driven her mother out of her place in her parents’ bed; she remembered this very plainly, even though with hesitation and unwillingly. The only thing we can consider striking is that the first patient, in carrying out her obsessional action on countless occasions, had never once noticed its resemblance to her experience on her wedding-night, and that the memory of it did not occur to her when she was directly asked to look for the motives of her obsessional action. And the same thing applies to the girl, whose ceremonial and its causes were moreover connected with a situation which was identically repeated every evening. In both these cases there was no true amnesia, no missing memory; but a connection had been broken which ought to have led to the reproduction or re-emergence of the memory.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3360

A disturbance of memory of this kind is enough for obsessional neurosis; but the case is different with hysteria. As a rule the latter neurosis is marked by amnesias on a really large scale. In analysing each separate hysterical symptom one is usually led to a whole chain of impressions of events, which, when they recur, are expressly described by the patient as having been till then forgotten. On the one hand, this chain reaches back to the earliest years of life, so that the hysterical amnesia can be recognized as an immediate continuation of the infantile amnesia which, for us normal people, conceals the beginnings of our mental life. On the other hand, we learn with astonishment that even the patient’s most recent experiences can be subject to forgetting, and that the occasions which precipitated the outbreak of the illness or led to its intensification are in particular encroached upon, if not completely swallowed up, by amnesia. It regularly happens that important details have disappeared from the total picture of a recent recollection of this sort or that they have been replaced by falsifications of memory. Indeed it happens with almost equal regularity that certain memories of recent experiences only emerge shortly before the end of an analysis memories which had been held back till that late moment and had left perceptible gaps in the continuity of the case.

Such restrictions upon the faculty of memory are, as I have said, characteristic of hysteria, in which, indeed, states also arise as symptoms - hysterical attacks - which need leave no trace behind them in the memory. If things are different in obsessional neurosis, you may conclude that what we are dealing with in these amnesias is a psychological characteristic of the change that occurs in hysteria and is not a universal feature of neuroses in general. The importance of this distinction is reduced by the following consideration. We have comprised two things as the ‘sense’ of a symptom: its ‘whence’ and its ‘whither’ or ‘what for’ - that is, the impressions and experiences from which it arose and the intentions which it serves. Thus the ‘whence’ of a symptom resolves itself into impressions which came from outside, which were necessarily once conscious and may have since become unconscious through forgetting. The ‘whither’ of a symptom, its purpose, is invariably, however, an endopsychic process, which may possibly have been conscious at first but may equally well never have been conscious and may have remained in the unconscious from the very start. Thus it is not of great importance whether the amnesia has laid hold on the ‘whence’ as well - the experiences on which the symptom is supported - as happens in hysteria; it is on the ‘whither’, the purpose of the symptom, which may have been unconscious from the beginning, that its dependence on the unconscious is founded - and no less firmly in obsessional neurosis than in hysteria.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3361

But in thus emphasizing the unconscious in mental life we have conjured up the most evil spirits of criticism against psycho-analysis. Do not be surprised at this, and do not suppose that the resistance to us rests only on the understandable difficulty of the unconscious or the- relative inaccessibility of the experiences which provide evidence of it. Its source, I think, lies deeper. In the course of centuries the naïve self-love of men has had to submit to two major blows at the hands of science. The first was when they learnt that our earth was not the centre of the universe but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system 0; scarcely imaginable vastness. This is associated in our mind: with the name of Copernicus, though something similar had already been asserted by Alexandrian science. The second blow fell when biological research destroyed man’s supposedly privileged place in creation and proved his descent from the animal kingdom and his ineradicable animal nature. This revaluation has been accomplished in our own days by Darwin, Wallace and their predecessors, though not without the most violent contemporary opposition. But human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from the psychological research of the present time which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind. We psycho-analysts were not the first and not the only ones to utter this call to introspection; but it seems to be our fate to give it its most forcible expression and to support it with empirical material which affects every individual. Hence arises the general revolt against our science, the disregard of all considerations of academic civility and the releasing of the opposition from every restraint of impartial logic. And beyond all this we have yet to disturb the peace of this world in still another way, as you will shortly hear.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3362

LECTURE XIX

RESISTANCE AND REPRESSION

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - Before we can make any further progress in our understanding of the neuroses, we stand in need of some fresh observations. Here we have two such, both of which are very remarkable and at the time when they were made were very surprising. Our discussions of last year will, it is true, have prepared you for both of them.

In the first place, then, when we undertake to restore a patient to health, to relieve him of the symptoms of his illness, he meets us with a violent and tenacious resistance, which persists throughout the whole length of the treatment. This is such a strange fact that we cannot expect it to find much credence. It is best to say nothing about it to the patient’s relatives, for they invariably regard it as an excuse on our part for the length or failure of our treatment. The patient, too, produces all the phenomena of this resistance without recognizing it as such, and if we can induce him to take our view of it and to reckon with its existence, that already counts as a great success. Only think of it! The patient, who is suffering so much from his symptoms and is causing those about him to share his sufferings, who is ready to undertake so many sacrifices in time, money, effort and self-discipline in order to be freed from those symptoms we are to believe that this same patient puts up a struggle in the interest of his illness against the person who is helping him. How improbable such an assertion must sound! Yet it is true; and when its improbability is pointed out to us, we need only reply that it is not without analogies. A man who has gone to the dentist because of an unbearable toothache will nevertheless try to hold the dentist back when he approaches the sick tooth with a pair of forceps.

The patient’s resistance is of very many sorts, extremely subtle and often hard to detect; and it exhibits protean changes in the forms in which it manifests itself. The doctor must be distrustful and remain on his guard against it.

In psycho-analytic therapy we make use of the same technique that is familiar to you from dream-interpretation. We instruct the patient to put himself into a state of quiet, unreflecting self-observation, and to report to us whatever internal perceptions he is able to make - feelings, thoughts, memories in the order in which they occur to him. At the same time we warn him expressly against giving way to any motive which would lead him to make a selection among these associations or to exclude any of them, whether on the ground that it is too disagreeable or too indiscreet to say, or that it is too unimportant or irrelevant, or that it is nonsensical and need not be said. We urge him always to follow only the surface of his consciousness and to leave aside any criticism of what he finds, whatever shape that criticism may take; and we assure him that the success of the treatment, and above all its duration, depends on the conscientiousness with which he obeys this fundamental technical rule of analysis. We already know from the technique of dream-interpretation that the associations giving rise to the doubts and objections I have just enumerated are precisely the ones that invariably contain the material which leads to the uncovering of the unconscious.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3363

The first thing we achieve by setting up this fundamental technical rule is that it becomes the target for the attacks of the resistance. The patient endeavours in every sort of way to extricate himself from its provisions. At one moment he declares that nothing occurs to him, at the next that so many things are crowding in on him that he cannot get hold of anything. Presently we observe with pained astonishment that he has given way first to one and then to another critical objection: he betrays this to us by the long pauses that he introduces into his remarks. He then admits that there is something he really cannot say - he would be ashamed to; and he allows this reason to prevail against his promise. Or he says that something has occurred to him, but it concerns another person and not himself and is therefore exempt from being reported. Or, what has now occurred to him is really too unimportant, too silly and senseless: I cannot possibly have meant him to enter into thoughts like that. So it goes on in innumerable variations, and one can only reply that ‘to say everything’ really does mean ‘to say everything’.

One hardly comes across a single patient who does not make an attempt at reserving some region or other for himself so as to prevent the treatment from having access to it. A man, whom I can only describe as of the highest intelligence, kept silence in this way for weeks on end about an intimate love-affair, and, when he was called to account for having broken the sacred rule, defended himself with the argument that he thought this particular story was his private business. Analytic treatment does not, of course, recognize any such right of asylum. Suppose that in a town like Vienna the experiment was made of treating a square such as the Hohe Markt, or a church like St. Stephen’s, as places where no arrests might be made, and suppose we then wanted to catch a particular criminal. We could be quite sure of finding him in the sanctuary. I once decided to allow a man, on whose efficiency much depended in the external world, the right to make an exception of this kind because he was bound under his oath of office not to make communications about certain things to another person. He, it is true, was satisfied with the outcome; but I was not. I determined not to repeat an attempt under such conditions.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3364

Obsessional neurotics understand perfectly how to make the technical rule almost useless by applying their over-conscientiousness and doubts to it. Patients suffering from anxiety hysteria occasionally succeed in carrying the rule ad absurdum by producing only associations which are so remote from what we are in search of that they contribute nothing to the analysis. But it is not my intention to induct you into the handling of these technical difficulties. It is enough to say that in the end, through resolution and perseverance, we succeed in extorting a certain amount of obedience to the fundamental technical rule from the resistance - which thereupon jumps over to another sphere.

It now appears as an intellectual resistance, it fights by means of arguments and exploits all the difficulties and improbabilities which normal but uninstructed thinking finds in the theories of analysis. It is now our fate to hear from this single voice all the criticisms and objections which assail our ears in a chorus in the scientific literature of the subject. And for this reason none of the shouts that reach us from outside sound unfamiliar. It is a regular storm in a tea-cup. But the patient is willing to be argued with; he is anxious to get us to instruct him, teach him, contradict him, introduce him to the literature, so that he can find further instruction. He is quite ready to become an adherent of psycho-analysis - on condition that analysis spares him personally. But we recognize this curiosity as a resistance, as a diversion from our particular tasks, and we repel it. In the case of an obsessional neurotic we have to expect special tactics of resistance. He will often allow the analysis to proceed on its way uninhibited, so that it is able to shed an ever-increasing light upon the riddle of his illness. We begin to wonder in the end, however, why this enlightenment is accompanied by no practical advance, no diminution of the symptoms. We are then able to realize that resistance has withdrawn on to the doubt belonging to the obsessional neurosis and from that position is successfully defying us. It is as though the patient were saying: ‘Yes, that’s all very nice and interesting, and I’II be very glad to go on with it further. It would change my illness a not if it were true. But I don’t in the least believe that it is true; and, so long as I don’t believe it, it makes no difference to my illness.’ Things can proceed like this for a long time, till finally one comes up against this uncommitted attitude itself, and the decisive struggle then breaks out.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3365

Intellectual resistances are not the worst; one always remains superior to them. But the patient also knows how to put up resistances, without going outside the framework of the analysis, the overcoming of which is among the most difficult of technical problems. Instead of remembering, he repeats attitudes and emotional impulses from his early life which can be used as a resistance against the doctor and the treatment by means of what is known as ‘transference’. If the patient is a man, he usually extracts this material from his relation to his father, into whose place he fits the doctor, and in that way he makes resistances out of his efforts to become independent in himself and in his judgements, out of his ambition, the first aim of which was to do things as well as his father or to get the better of him, or out of his unwillingness to burden himself for the second time in his life with a load of gratitude. Thus at times one has an impression that the patient has entirely replaced his better intention of making an end to his illness by the alternative one of putting the doctor in the wrong, of making him realize his impotence and of triumphing over him. Women have a masterly gift for exploiting an affectionate, erotically tinged transference to the doctor for the purposes of resistance. If this attachment reaches a certain height, all their interest in the immediate situation in the treatment and all the obligations they undertook at its commencement vanish; their jealousy, which is never absent, and their exasperation at their inevitable rejection, however considerately expressed, are bound to have a damaging effect on their personal understanding with the doctor and so to put out of operation one of the most powerful motive forces of the analysis.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3366

Resistances of this kind should not be one-sidedly condemned. They include so much of the most important material from the patient’s past and bring it back in so convincing a fashion that they become some of the best supports of the analysis if a skilful technique knows how to give them the right turn. Nevertheless, it remains a remarkable fact that this material is always in the service of the resistance to begin with and brings to the fore a façade that is hostile to the treatment. It may also be said that what is being mobilized for fighting against the alterations we are striving for are character-traits, attitudes of the ego. In this connection we discover that these character-traits were formed in relation to the determinants of the neurosis and in reaction against its demands, and we come upon traits which cannot normally emerge, or not to the same extent, and which may be described as latent. Nor must you get an impression that we regard the appearance of these resistances as an unforeseen risk to analytic influence. No, we are aware that these resistances are bound to come to light; in fact we are dissatisfied if we cannot provoke them clearly enough and are unable to demonstrate them to the patient. Indeed we come finally to understand that the overcoming of these resistances is the essential function of analysis and is the only part of our work which gives us an assurance that we have achieved something with the patient.

If you further consider that the patient makes all the chance events that occur during his analysis into interferences with it, that he uses as reasons for slackening his efforts every diversion outside the analysis, every comment by a person of authority in his environment who is hostile to analysis, any chance organic illness or any that complicates his neurosis and, even, indeed, every improvement in his condition - if you consider all this, you will have obtained an approximate, though still in complete, picture of the forms and methods of the resistance, the struggle against which accompanies every analysis.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3367

I have treated this point in such great detail because I must now inform you that this experience of ours with the resistance of neurotics to the removal of their symptoms became the basis of our dynamic view of the neuroses. Originally Breuer and I myself carried out psychotherapy by means of hypnosis; Breuer’s first patient was treated throughout under hypnotic influence, and to begin with I followed him in this. I admit that at that period the work proceeded more easily and pleasantly, and also in a much shorter time. But results were capricious and not lasting; and for that reason I finally dropped hypnosis. And I then understood that an insight into the dynamics of these illnesses had not been possible so long as hypnosis was employed. That state was precisely able to withhold the existence of the resistance from the doctor’s perception. It pushed the resistance back, making a certain area free for analytic work, and dammed it up at the frontiers of that area in such a way as to be impenetrable, just as doubt does in obsessional neurosis. For that reason I have been able to say that psycho-analysis proper began when I dispensed with the help of hypnosis.

If, however, the recognition of resistance has become so important, we should do well to find room for a cautious doubt whether we have not been too light-heartedly assuming resistances. Perhaps there really are cases of neurosis in which associations fail for other reasons, perhaps the arguments against our hypotheses really deserve to have their content examined, and perhaps we are doing patients an injustice in so conveniently setting aside their intellectual criticisms as resistance. But, Gentlemen, we did not arrive at this judgement lightly. We have had occasion to observe all these critical patients at the moment of the emergence of a resistance and after its disappearance. For resistance is constantly altering its intensity during the course of a treatment; it always increases when we are approaching a new topic, it is at its most intense while we are at the climax of dealing with that topic, and it dies away when the topic has been disposed of. Nor do we ever, unless we have been guilty of special clumsiness in our technique, have to meet the full amount of resistance of which a patient is capable. We have therefore been able to convince ourselves that on countless occasions in the course of his analysis the same man will abandon his critical attitude and then take it up again. If we are on the point of bringing a specially distressing piece of unconscious material to his consciousness, he is extremely critical; he may previously have understood and accepted a great deal, but now it is just as though those acquisitions have been swept away; in his efforts for opposition at any price, he may offer a complete picture of someone who is an emotional imbecile. But if we succeed in helping him to overcome this new resistance, he recovers his insight and understanding. Thus his critical faculty is not an independent function, to be respected as such, it is the tool of his emotional attitudes and is directed by his resistance. If there is something he does not like, he can put up a shrewd fight against it and appear highly critical; but if something suits his book, he can, on the contrary, show himself most credulous. Perhaps none of us are very different; a man who is being analysed only reveals this dependence of the intellect upon emotional life so clearly because in analysis we are putting such great pressure on him.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3368

How, then, do we account for our observation that the patient fights with such energy against the removal of his symptoms and the setting of his mental processes on a normal course? We tell ourselves that we have succeeded in discovering powerful forces here which oppose any alteration of the patient’s condition; they must be the same ones which in the past brought this condition about. During the construction of his symptoms something must have taken place which we can now reconstruct from our experiences during the resolution of his symptoms. We already know from Breuer’s observation that there is a precondition for the existence of a symptom: some mental process must not have been brought to an end normally - so that it could become conscious. The symptom is a substitute for what did not happen at that point. We now know the point at which we must locate the operation of the force which we have surmised. A violent opposition must have started against the entry into consciousness of the questionable mental process, and for that reason it remained unconscious. As being something unconscious, it had the power to construct a symptom. This same opposition, during psycho. analytic treatment, sets itself up once more against our effort to transform what is unconscious into what is conscious. This is what we perceive as resistance. We have proposed to give the pathogenic process which is demonstrated by the resistance the name of repression.

We must now form more definite ideas about this process of repression. It is the precondition for the construction of symptoms; but it is also something to which we know nothing similar. Let us take as our model an impulse, a mental process that endeavours to turn itself into an action. We know that it can be repelled by what we term a rejection or condemnation. When this happens, the energy at its disposal is withdrawn from it; it becomes powerless, though it can persist as a memory. The whole process of coming to a decision about it runs its course within the knowledge of the ego. It is a very different matter if we suppose that the same impulse is subjected to repression. In that case it would retain its energy and no memory of it would remain behind; moreover the process of repression would be accomplished unnoticed by the ego. This comparison, therefore, brings us no nearer to the essential nature of repression.

I will put before you the only theoretical ideas which have proved of service for giving a more definite shape to the concept of repression. It is above all essential for this purpose that we should proceed from the purely descriptive meaning of the word ‘unconscious’ to the systematic meaning of the same word. That is, we will decide to say that the fact of a psychical process being conscious or unconscious is only one of its attributes and not necessarily an unambiguous one. If a process of this kind has remained unconscious, its being kept away from consciousness may perhaps only be an indication of some vicissitude it has gone through, and not that vicissitude itself. In order to form a picture of this vicissitude, let us assume that every mental process - we must admit one exception, which we shall mention at a later stage exists to begin with in an unconscious stage or phase and that it is only from there that the process passes over into the conscious phase, just as a photographic picture begins as a negative and only becomes a picture after being turned into a positive. Not every negative, however, necessarily becomes a positive; nor is it necessary that every unconscious mental process should turn into a conscious one. This may be advantageously expressed by saying that an individual process belongs to begin with to the system of the unconscious and can then, in certain circumstances, pass over into the system of the conscious.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3369

The crudest idea of these systems is the most convenient for us - a spatial one. Let us therefore compare the system of the unconscious to a large entrance hall, in which the mental impulses jostle one another like separate individuals. Adjoining this entrance hall there is a second, narrower, room - a kind of drawing-room - in which consciousness, too, resides. But on the threshold between these two rooms a watchman performs his function: he examines the different mental impulses, acts as a censor, and will not admit them into the drawing-room if they displease him. You will see at once that it does not make much difference if the watchman turns away a particular impulse at the threshold itself or if he pushes it back across the threshold after it has entered the drawing-room. This is merely a question of the degree of his watchfulness and of how early he carries out his act of recognition. If we keep to this picture, we shall be able to extend our nomenclature further. The impulses in the entrance hall of the unconscious are out of sight of the conscious, which is in the other room; to begin with they must remain unconscious. If they have already pushed their way forward to the threshold and have been turned back by the watchman, then they are inadmissible to consciousness; we speak of them as repressed. But even the impulses which the watchman has allowed to cross the threshold are not on that account necessarily conscious as well; they can only become so if they succeed in catching the eye of consciousness. We are therefore justified in calling this second room the system of the preconscious. In that case becoming conscious retains its purely descriptive sense. For any particular impulse, however, the vicissitude of repression consists in its not being allowed by the watchman to pass from the system of the unconscious into that of the preconscious. It is the same watchman whom we get to know as resistance when we try to lift the repression by means of the analytic treatment.

Now I know you will say that these ideas are both crude and fantastic and quite impermissible in a scientific account. I know that they are crude: and, more than that, I know that they are incorrect, and, if I am not very much mistaken, I already have something better to take their place. Whether it will seem to you equally fantastic I cannot tell. They are preliminary working hypotheses, like Ampère’s manikin swimming in the electric current, and they are not to be despised in so far as they are of service in making our observations intelligible. I should like to assure you that these crude hypotheses of the two rooms, the watchman at the threshold between them and consciousness as a spectator at the end of the second room, must nevertheless be very far-reaching approximations to the real facts. And I should like to hear you admit that our terms, ‘unconscious’, ‘preconscious’ and ‘conscious’, prejudge things far less and are far easier to justify than others which have been proposed or are in use, such as ‘subconscious’, ‘paraconscious’, ‘intraconscious’ and the like.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3370

It will therefore be of greater importance to me if you warn me that an arrangement of the mental apparatus, such as I have here assumed in order to explain neurotic symptoms, must necessarily claim general validity and must give us information about normal functioning as well. You will, of course, be quite right in this. At the moment we cannot pursue this implication further; but our interest in the psychology of the forming of symptoms cannot but be increased to an extraordinary extent if there is a prospect, through the study of pathological conditions, of obtaining access to the normal mental events which are so well concealed.

Perhaps you recognize, moreover, what it is that supports our hypotheses of the two systems, and their relation to each other and to consciousness? After all, the watchman between the unconscious and the preconscious is nothing else than the censorship, to which, as we found, the form taken by the manifest dream is subject. The day’s residues, which we recognized as the instigators of the dream, were preconscious material which, at night-time and in the state of sleep, had been under the influence of unconscious and repressed wishful impulses; they had been able, in combination with those impulses and thanks to their energy, to construct the latent dream. Under the dominance of the unconscious system this material had been worked over (by condensation and displacement) in a manner which is unknown or only exceptionally permissible in normal mental life - that is, in the preconscious system. We came to regard this difference in their manner of operating as what characterizes the two systems; the relation which the preconscious has to consciousness was regarded by us merely as an indication of its belonging to one of the two systems. Dreams are not pathological phenomena; they can appear in any healthy person under the conditions of a state of sleep. Our hypothesis about the structure of the mental apparatus, which allows us to understand the formation alike of dreams and of neurotic symptoms, has an incontrovertible claim to being taken into account in regard to normal mental life as well.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3371

That much is what we have to say for the moment about repression. But it is only the precondition for the construction of symptoms. Symptoms, as we know, are a substitute for something that is held back by repression. It is a long step further, however, from repression to an understanding of this substitutive structure. On this other side of the problem, these questions arise out of our observation of repression: what kind of mental impulses are subject to repression? by what forces is it accomplished? and for what motives? So far we have only one piece of information on these points. In investigating resistance we have learnt that it emanates from forces of the ego, from known and latent character traits. It is these too, therefore, that are responsible for repression, or at any rate they have a share in it. We know nothing more at present.

At this point the second of the two observations which I mentioned to you earlier comes to our help. It is quite generally the case that analysis allows us to arrive at the intention of neurotic symptoms. This again will be nothing new to you. I have already demonstrated it to you in two cases of neurosis. But, after all, what do two cases amount to? You are right to insist on its being demonstrated to you in two hundred cases - in countless cases. The only trouble is that I cannot do that. Once again, your own experience must serve instead, or your belief, which on this point can appeal to the unanimous reports of all psycho-analysts.

You will recollect that, in the two cases whose symptoms we submitted to a detailed investigation, the analysis initiated us into these patients’ most intimate sexual life. In the first case we further recognized with particular clarity the intention or purpose of the symptom we were examining; in the second case this was perhaps somewhat concealed by a factor which will be mentioned later Well, every other case that we submit to analysis would show us the same thing that we have found in these two examples. In every instance we should be introduced by the analysis into the patient’s sexual experiences and wishes; and in every instance we should be bound to see that the symptoms served the same intention. We find that this intention is the satisfaction of sexual wishes; the symptoms serve for the patients’ sexual satisfaction; they are a substitute for satisfaction of this kind, which the patients are without in their lives.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3372

Think of our first patient’s obsessional action. The woman was without her husband, whom she loved intensely but with whom she could not share her life on account of his deficiencies and weaknesses. She had to remain faithful to him; she could not put anyone else in his place. Her obsessional symptom gave her what she longed for, set her husband on a pedestal, denied and corrected his weaknesses and above all his impotence. This symptom was fundamentally a wish-fulfilment, just like a dream-and moreover, what is not always true of a dream, an erotic wish-fulfilment. In the case of our second patient you could at least gather that her ceremonial sought to obstruct intercourse between her parents or prevent it from producing a new baby. You will also probably have guessed that it was at bottom endeavouring to put her herself in her mother’s place. Once again, therefore, a setting-aside of interferences with sexual satisfaction and a fulfilment of the patient’s own sexual wishes. I shall soon come to the complication I have hinted at.

I should like to anticipate, Gentlemen, the qualifications which I shall have to make later in the universal validity of these statements. I will therefore point out to you that all I have said here about repression and the formation and meaning of symptoms was derived from three forms of neurosis - anxiety hysteria, conversion hysteria and obsessional neurosis - and that in the first instance it is also valid only for these forms. These three disorders, which we are accustomed to group together as ‘transference neuroses’, also circumscribe the region in which psycho-analytic therapy can function. The other neuroses have been far less thoroughly studied by psycho-analysis; in one group of them the impossibility of therapeutic influence has been a reason for this neglect. Nor should you forget that psycho-analysis is still a very young science, that preparing for it costs much trouble and time, and that not at all long ago it was being practised single-handed. Nevertheless, we are every where on the point of penetrating to an understanding of these other disorders which are not transference neuroses. I hope later to be able to introduce you to the extensions of our hypotheses and findings which result from adaptation to this new material, and to show you that these further studies have not led to contradictions but to the establishment of higher unities. If, then, everything I am saying here applies to the transference neuroses, let me first increase the value of symptoms by a new piece of information. For a comparative study of the determining causes of falling ill leads to a result which can be expressed in a formula: these people fall ill in one way or another of frustration, when reality prevents them from satisfying their sexual wishes. You see how excellently these two findings tally with each other. It is only thus that symptoms can be properly viewed as substitutive satisfactions for what is missed in life.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3373

No doubt all kinds of objections can still be raised to the assertion that neurotic symptoms are substitutes for sexual satisfactions. I will mention two of them to-day. When you yourselves have carried out analytic examinations of a considerable number of neurotics, you will perhaps tell me, shaking your head, that in a lot of cases my assertion is simply not true; the symptoms seem rather to have the contrary purpose of excluding or of stopping sexual satisfaction. I will not dispute the correctness of your interpretation. The facts in psycho-analysis have a habit of being rather more complicated than we like. If they were as simple as all that, perhaps it might not have needed psycho-analysis to bring them to light. Indeed, some of the features of our second patient’s ceremonial show signs of this ascetic character with its hostility to sexual satisfaction: when, for instance, she got rid of the clocks and watches, which had the magical meaning of avoiding erections during the night, or when she tried to guard against flower-pots falling and breaking, which was equivalent to protecting her virginity. In some other cases of bed ceremonials, which I have been able to analyse, this negative character was far more outspoken; the ceremonial might consist exclusively of defensive measures against sexual memories and temptations. However, we have already found often enough that in psycho-analysis opposites imply no contradiction. We might extend our thesis and say that symptoms aim either at a sexual satisfaction or at fending it off, and that on the whole the positive, wish-fulfilling character prevails in hysteria and the negative, ascetic one in obsessional neurosis. If symptoms can serve the purpose both of sexual satisfaction and of its opposite, there is an excellent basis for this double-sidedness or polarity in a part of their mechanism which I have so far not been able to mention. For, as we shall hear, they are the products of a compromise and arise from the mutual interference between two opposing currents; they represent not only the repressed but also the repressing force which had a share in their origin. One side or the other may be more strongly represented; but it is rarely that one influence is entirely absent. In hysteria a convergence of both intentions in the same symptom is usually achieved. In obsessional neurosis the two portions are often separated; the symptom then becomes diphasic and consists in two actions, one after the other, which cancel each other out.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3374

We shall not be able to dismiss a second objection so easily. If you survey a fairly long series of interpretations of symptoms, you will probably start by judging that the concept of a substitutive sexual satisfaction has been stretched to its extreme limits in them. You will not fail to emphasize the fact that these symptoms offer nothing real in the way of satisfaction, that often enough they are restricted to the revival of a sensation or the representation of a phantasy derived from a sexual complex. And you will further point out that these supposed sexual satisfactions often take on a childish and discreditable form, approximate to an act of masturbation perhaps, or recall dirty kinds of naughtiness which are forbidden even to children - habits of which they have been broken. And, going on from this, you will also express surprise that we are representing as a sexual satisfaction what would rather have to be described as the satisfaction of lusts that are cruel or horrible or would even have to be called unnatural. We shall come to no agreement, Gentlemen, on this latter point till we have made a thorough investigation of the sexual life of human beings and till, in doing so, we have decided what it is that we are justified in calling ‘sexual’.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3375

LECTURE XX

THE SEXUAL LIFE OF HUMAN BEINGS

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - One would certainly have supposed that there could be no doubt as to what is to be understood by ‘sexual’. First and foremost, what is sexual is something improper, something one ought not to talk about. I have been told that the pupils of a celebrated psychiatrist made an attempt once to convince their teacher of how frequently the symptoms of hysterical patients represent sexual things. For this purpose they took him to the bedside of a female hysteric, whose attacks were an unmistakable imitation of the process of childbirth. But with a shake of his head he remarked: ‘Well, there’s nothing sexual about childbirth.’ Quite right. Childbirth need not in every case be something improper.

I see that you take offence at my joking about such serious things. But it is not altogether a joke. Seriously, it is not easy to decide what is covered by the concept ‘sexual’. Perhaps the only suitable definition would be ‘everything that is related to the distinction between the two sexes’. But you will regard that as colourless and too comprehensive. If you take the fact of the sexual act as the central point, you will perhaps define as sexual everything which, with a view to obtaining pleasure, is concerned with the body, and in particular with the sexual organs, of someone of the opposite sex, and which in the last resort aims at the union of the genitals and the performance of the sexual act. But if so you will really not be very far from the equation of what is sexual with what is improper, and childbirth will really not be anything sexual. If, on the other hand, you take the reproductive function as the nucleus of sexuality, you risk excluding a whole number of things which are not aimed at reproduction but which are certainly sexual, such as masturbation and perhaps even kissing. But we are already prepared to find that attempts at a definition always lead to difficulties; so let us renounce the idea of doing better in this particular case. We may suspect that in the course of the development of the concept ‘sexual’ something has happened which has resulted in what Silberer has aptly called an ‘error of superimposition’.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3376

On the whole, indeed, when we come to think of it, we are not quite at a loss in regard to what it is that people call sexual. Something which combines a reference to the contrast between the sexes, to the search for pleasure, to the reproductive function and to the characteristic of something that is improper and must be kept secret - some such combination will serve for all practical purposes in everyday life. But for science that is not enough. By means of careful investigations (only made possible, indeed, by disinterested self-discipline) we have come to know groups of individuals whose ‘sexual life’ deviates in the most striking way from the usual picture of the average. Some of these ‘perverse’ people have, we might say, struck the distinction between the sexes off their programme. Only members of their own sex can rouse their sexual wishes; those of the other sex, and especially their sexual parts, are not a sexual object for them at all, and in extreme cases are an object of disgust. This implies, of course, that they have abandoned any share in reproduction. We call such people homosexuals or inverts. They are men and women who are often, though not always, irreproachably fashioned in other respects, of high intellectual and ethical development, the victims only of this one fatal deviation. Through the mouth of their scientific spokesmen they represent themselves as a special variety of the human species - a ‘third sex’ which has a right to stand on an equal rooting beside the other two. We shall perhaps have an opportunity of examining their claims critically. Of course they are not, as they also like to assert, an ‘elite’ of mankind; there are at least as many inferior and useless individuals among them as there are among those of a different sexual kind.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3377

This class of perverts at any rate behave to their sexual objects in approximately the same way as normal people do to theirs. But we now come to a long series of abnormal people whose sexual activity diverges more and more widely from what seems desirable to a sensible person. In their multiplicity and strangeness they can only be compared to the grotesque monsters painted by Breughel for the temptation of St. Anthony or to the long procession of vanished gods and believers which Flaubert heads past, before the eyes of his pious penitent. Such a medley calls for some kind of arrangement if it is not to confuse our senses. We accordingly divide them into those in whom, like the homosexuals, the sexual object has been changed, and others in whom the sexual aim is what has primarily been altered. The first group includes those who have renounced the union of the two genitals and who replace the genitals of one of the couple engaged in the sexual act by some other part or region of the body; in this they disregard the lack of suitable organic arrangements as well as any impediment offered by feelings of disgust. (They replace the vulva, for instance, by the mouth or anus.) Others follow, who, it is true, still retain the genitals as an object - not, however, on account of their sexual function but of other functions in which the genital plays a part either for anatomical reasons or because of its propinquity. We find from them that the excretory functions, which have been put aside as improper during the upbringing of children, retain the ability to attract the whole of sexual interest. Then come others again, who have abandoned the genital as an object altogether, and have taken some other part of the body as the object they desire - a woman’s breast, a foot or a plait of hair. After them come others for whom parts of the body are of no importance but whose every wish is satisfied by a piece of clothing, a shoe, a piece of underclothing - the fetishists. Later in the procession come people who require the whole object indeed, but make quite definite demands of it - strange or horrible - even that it must have become a defenceless corpse, and who, using criminal violence, make it into one so that they may enjoy it. But enough of this kind of horror!

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3378

The second group is led by perverts who have made what is normally only an introductory or preparatory act into the aim of their sexual wishes. They are people whose desire it is to look at the other person or to feel him or to watch him in the performance of his intimate actions, or who expose parts of their own bodies which should be covered, in the obscure expectation that they may be rewarded by a corresponding action in return. Next come the sadists, puzzling people whose tender endeavours have no other aim than to cause pain and torment to their object, ranging from humiliation to severe physical injuries; and, as though to counterbalance them, their counterparts, the masochists, whose only pleasure it is to suffer humiliations and torments of every kind from their loved object either symbolically or in reality. There are still others in whom several of these abnormal preconditions are united and intertwined; and lastly, we must learn that each of these groups is to be found in two forms: alongside of those who seek their sexual satisfaction in reality are those who are content merely to imagine that satisfaction, who need no real object at all, but can replace it by their phantasies.

Now there cannot be the slightest doubt that all these crazy, eccentric and horrible things really constitute the sexual activity of these people. Not only do they themselves regard them as such and are aware that they are substitutes for each other, but we must admit that they play the same part in their lives as normal sexual satisfaction does in ours; they make the same, often excessive sacrifices for them, and we can trace both in the rough and in finer detail the points at which these abnormalities are based on what is normal and the points at which they diverge from it. Nor can you fail to notice that here once again you find the characteristic of being improper, which clings to sexual activity, though here it is for the most part intensified to the point of being abominable.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3379

Well, Ladies and Gentlemen, what attitude are we to adopt to these unusual kinds of sexual satisfaction? Indignation, an expression of our personal repugnance and an assurance that we ourselves do not share these lusts will obviously be of no help. Indeed, that is not what we have been asked for. When all is said and done, what we have here is a field of phenomena like any other. A denial in the form of an evasive suggestion that after all these are only rarities and curiosities would be easy to refute. On the contrary, we are dealing with quite common and widespread phenomena. If, however, it is argued that we need not allow our views of sexual life to be misled by them because they are one and all aberrations and deviations of the sexual instinct, a serious answer is called for. Unless we can understand these pathological forms of sexuality and can co-ordinate them with normal sexual life, we cannot understand normal sexuality either. In short, it remains an unavoidable task to give a complete theoretical account of how it is that these perversions can occur and of their connection with what is described as normal sexuality.

We shall be helped in this by a piece of information and two fresh observations. We owe the former to Iwan BIoch. It corrects the view that all these perversions are ‘signs of degeneracy’ by showing that aberrations of this kind from the sexual aim, loosenings like these of the tie with the sexual object, have occurred from time immemorial, in all periods known to us, among all peoples, the most primitive and the most civilized, and have occasionally obtained toleration and general recognition. The two observations were derived from the psycho-analytic investigation of neurotics; they are bound to have a decisive influence on our view of the sexual perversions.

I have said that neurotic symptoms are substitutes for sexual satisfaction, and I indicated to you that the confirmation of this assertion by the analysis of symptoms would come up against a number of difficulties. For it can only be justified if under ‘sexual satisfaction’ we include the satisfaction of what are called perverse sexual needs, since an interpretation of symptoms of that kind is forced upon us with surprising frequency. The claim made by homosexuals or inverts to being exceptions collapses at once when we learn that homosexual impulses are invariably discovered in every single neurotic, and that a fair number of symptoms give expression to this latent inversion. Those who call themselves homosexuals are only the conscious and manifest inverts, whose number is nothing compared to that of the latent homosexuals. We are compelled, however, to regard choice of an object of one’s own sex as a divergence in erotic life which is of positively habitual occurrence, and we are learning more and more to ascribe an especially high importance to it. No doubt this does not do away with the differences between manifest homosexuality and a normal attitude; their practical significance remains, but their theoretical value is greatly diminished. We have even found that a particular disease, paranoia, which is not to be counted among the transference neuroses, regularly arises from an attempt to fend off excessively strong homosexual impulses. You will perhaps recall that one of our patients (p. 3343) behaved in her obsessional action like a man, her own husband whom she had left; neurotic women very commonly produce symptoms in this way in the character of a man. Even if this is not actually to be regarded as homosexuality, it is closely related to its preconditions.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3380

As you probably know, the hysterical neurosis can produce its symptoms in any system of organs and so disturb any function. Analysis shows that in this way all the so-called perverse impulses which seek to replace the genital by some other organ manifest themselves: these organs are then behaving like substitutive genitals. The symptoms of hysteria have actually led us to the view that the bodily organs, besides the functional part they play, must be recognized as having a sexual (erotogenic) significance, and that the execution of the first of these tasks is disturbed if the second of them makes too many claims. Countless sensations and innervations which we come across as symptoms of hysteria in organs that have no apparent connection with sexuality are in this way revealed to us as being in the nature of fulfilments of perverse sexual impulses in relation to which other organs have acquired the significance of the sexual parts. We learn too to what a large extent the organs for the intake of nourishment and for excretion can in particular become the vehicles of sexual excitation. Here, then, we have the same thing that we were shown by the perversions; only in their case it was visible easily and unmistakably, whereas in hysteria we have to take a circuitous path by way of the interpretation of symptoms, and do not then ascribe the perverse sexual impulses concerned to the subject’s consciousness but locate them in his unconscious.

Of the many symptomatic pictures in which obsessional neurosis appears, the most important turn out to be those provoked by the pressure of excessively strong sadistic sexual impulses (perverse, therefore, in their aim). The symptoms, indeed, in accordance with the structure of an obsessional neurosis, serve predominantly as a defence against these wishes or give expression to the struggle between satisfaction and defence. But satisfaction does not come off too badly either; it succeeds in roundabout ways in putting itself into effect in the patients’ behaviour and is preferably directed against themselves and makes them into self-tormentors. Other forms of the neurosis, the brooding kinds, correspond to an excessive sexualization of actions which ordinarily have their place on the path to normal sexual satisfaction - an excessive sexualization of wanting to look or to touch or to explore. Here we have the explanation of the great importance of the fear of touching and of the obsession for washing. An unsuspectedly large proportion of obsessional actions may be traced back to masturbation, of which they are disguised repetitions and modifications; it is a familiar fact that masturbation, though a single and uniform action, accompanies the most various forms of sexual phantasying.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3381

I should not have much difficulty in giving you a far more intimate picture of the relations between perversion and neurosis; but I think what I have already said will serve our purpose. We must however guard against being misled by what I have told you of the meaning of symptoms into over-estimating the frequency and intensity of people’s perverse inclinations. It is possible, as you have heard, to fall ill of a neurosis as a result of a frustration of normal sexual satisfaction. But when a real frustration like this occurs, the need moves over on to abnormal methods of sexual excitation. You will later learn the way in which this happens. But in any case you will realize that as a result of this ‘collateral’ damming-back the perverse impulses must emerge more strongly than they would have if normal sexual satisfaction had met with no obstacle in the real world. More over a similar influence is to be recognized also as affecting the manifest perversions. In some cases they are provoked or made active if the normal satisfaction of the sexual instinct encounters too great difficulties for temporary reasons or because of permanent social regulations. In other cases, it is true, the inclination to perversions is quite independent of such favouring conditions; they are, we might say, the normal species of sexual life for those particular individuals.

For the moment, perhaps, you may have an impression that I have confused rather than explained the relation between normal and perverse sexuality. But you must bear the following consideration in mind. If it is true that increased difficulty in obtaining normal sexual satisfaction in real life, or deprivation of that satisfaction, brings out perverse inclinations in people who had not shown any previously, we must suppose that there was something in these people which came half-way to meet the perversions; or, if you prefer it, the perversions must have been present in them in a latent form.

And this brings us to the second novelty that I announced to you. For psycho-analytic research has had to concern itself, too, with the sexual life of children, and this is because the memories and associations arising during the analysis of symptoms regularly led back to the early years of childhood. What we inferred from these analyses was later confirmed point by point by direct observations of children. And it then turned out that all these inclinations to perversion had their roots in childhood, that children have a predisposition to all of them and carry them out to an extent corresponding to their immaturity - in short, that perverse sexuality is nothing else than a magnified infantile sexuality split up into its separate impulses.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3382

At all events you will now see the perversions in a new light and no longer fail to realize their connection with the sexual life of human beings: but at the price of what surprises and of what feelings of distress over these incongruities! No doubt you will feel inclined at first to deny the whole business: the fact that children have anything that can be described as sexual life, the correctness of our observations and the justification for finding any kinship between the behaviour of children and what is later condemned as perversion. So allow me to begin by explaining to you the motives for your opposition, and then to present you with the sum of our observations. To suppose that children have no sexual life - sexual excitations and needs and a kind of satisfaction - but suddenly acquire it between the ages of twelve and fourteen, would (quite apart from any observations) be as improbable, and indeed senseless, biologic ally as to suppose that they brought no genitals with them into the world and only grew them at the time of puberty. What does awaken in them at this time is the reproductive function, which makes use for its purposes of physical and mental material already present. You are committing the error of con fusing sexuality and reproduction and by doing so you are blocking your path to an understanding of sexuality, the perversions and the neuroses. This error is, however, a tendentious one. Strangely enough, it has its source in the fact that you yourselves were once children and, while you were children, came under the influence of education. For society must undertake as one of its most important educative tasks to tame and restrict the sexual instinct when it breaks out as an urge to reproduction, and to subject it to an individual will which is identical with the bidding of society. It is also concerned to postpone the full development of the instinct till the child shall have reached a certain degree of intellectual maturity, for, with the complete irruption of the sexual instinct, educability is for practical purposes at an end. Otherwise, the instinct would break down every dam and wash away the laboriously erected work of civilization. Nor is the task of taming it ever an easy one; its success is sometimes too small, sometimes too great. The motive of human society is in the last resort an economic one; since it does not possess enough provisions to keep its members alive unless they work, it must restrict the number of its members and divert their energies from sexual activity to work. It is faced, in short, by the eternal, primaeval exigencies of life, which are with us to this day.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3383

Experience must no doubt have taught the educators that the task of making the sexual will of the new generation tractable could only be carried out if they began to exercise their influence very early, if they did not wait for the storm of puberty but intervened already in the sexual life of children which is preparatory to it. For this reason almost all infantile sexual activities were forbidden to children and frowned upon; an ideal was set up of making the life of children asexual, and in course of time things came to the point at which people really believed they were asexual and thereafter science pronounced this as its doctrine. To avoid contradicting their belief and their intentions, people since then overlook the sexual activities of children (no mean achievement) or are content in science to take a different view of them. Children are pure and innocent, and anyone who describes them otherwise can be charged with being an infamous blasphemer against the tender and sacred feelings of mankind.

Children are alone in not falling in with these conventions. They assert their animal rights with complete naïveté and give constant evidence that they have still to travel the road to purity. Strangely enough, the people who deny the existence of sexuality in children do not on that account become milder in their educational efforts but pursue the manifestations of what they deny exists with the utmost severity - describing them as ‘childish naughtinesses’. It is also of the highest theoretical interest that the period of life which contradicts the prejudice of an asexual childhood most glaringly - the years of a child’s life up to the age of five or six - is afterwards covered in most people by the veil of amnesia which is only completely torn away by an analytic enquiry, though it has been permeable earlier for the construction of a few dreams.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3384

I will now set out before you what is most definitely known about the sexual life of children. Let me at the same time, for convenience sake, introduce the concept of ‘libido’. On the exact analogy of ‘hunger’, we use ‘libido’ as the name of the force (in this case that of the sexual instinct, as in the case of hunger that of the nutritive instinct) by which the instinct manifests itself. Other concepts, such as sexual ‘excitation’ and ‘satisfaction’, call for no explanation. You yourselves will easily perceive that the sexual activities of infants in arms are mostly a matter of interpretation, or you will probably use that as a ground of objection. These interpretations are arrived at on the basis of analytic examinations made by tracing from the symptoms backwards. In an infant the first impulses of sexuality make their appearance attached to other vital functions. His main interest is, as you know, directed to the intake of nourishment; when children fall asleep after being sated at the breast, they show an expression of blissful satisfaction which will be repeated later in life after the experience of a sexual orgasm. This would be too little on which to base an inference. But we observe how an infant will repeat the action of taking in nourishment without making a demand for further food; here, then, he is not actuated by hunger. We describe this as sensual sucking, and the fact that in doing this he falls asleep once more with a blissful expression shows us that the act of sensual sucking has in itself alone brought him satisfaction. Soon, as we know, things come to a point at which he cannot go to sleep without having sucked. A paediatrician in Budapest, Dr. Lindner, was the first to point out long ago the sexual nature of this activity. Those who are in charge of children, and who have no theoretical views on the subject, seem to form a similar judgement of sucking. They have no doubt of its only purpose being to obtain pleasure, class it as one of a child’s ‘naughtinesses’ and compel him to abandon it by causing him distress, if he will not give it up of his own accord. Thus we learn that infants perform actions which have no purpose other than obtaining pleasure. It is our belief that they first experience this pleasure in connection with taking nourishment but that they soon learn to separate it from that accompanying condition. We can only refer this pleasure to an excitation of the areas of the mouth and lips; we call those parts of the body ‘erotogenic zones’ and describe the pleasure derived from sucking as a sexual one. We shall no doubt have to discuss further whether this description is justifiable.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3385

If an infant could speak, he would no doubt pronounce the act of sucking at his mother’s breast by far the most important in his life. He is not far wrong in this, for in this single act he is satisfying at once the two great vital needs. We are therefore not surprised to learn from psycho-analysis how such psychical importance the act retains all through life. Sucking at the mother’s breast is the starting-point of the whole of sexual life, the unmatched prototype of every later sexual satisfaction, to which phantasy often enough recurs in times of need. This sucking involves making the mother’s breast the first object of the sexual instinct. I can give you no idea of the important bearing of this first object upon the choice of every later object, of the profound effects it has in its transformations and substitutions in even the remotest regions of our sexual life. But at first the infant, in his sucking activity, gives up this object and replaces it by a part of his own body. He begins to suck his thumbs or his own tongue. In this way he makes himself independent of the consent of the external world as regards gaining pleasure, and besides this he increases it by adding the excitation of a second area of his body. The erotogenic zones are not all equally generous in yielding pleasure; it is therefore an important experience when the infant, as Lindner reports, discovers, in the course of feeling around, the specially excitable regions afforded by his genitals and so finds his way from sucking to masturbation.

In forming this opinion of sensual sucking we have already become acquainted with two decisive characteristics of infantile sexuality. It makes its appearance attached to the satisfaction of the major organic needs, and it behaves auto-erotically - that is, it seeks and finds its objects in the infant’s own body. What has been shown most clearly in connection with the intake of nourishment is repeated in part with the excretions. We conclude that infants have feelings of pleasure in the process of evacuating urine and faeces and that they soon contrive to arrange those actions in such a way as to bring them the greatest possible yield of pleasure through the corresponding excitations of the erotogenic zones of the mucous membrane. It is here for the first time (as Lou Andreas-Salomé has subtly perceived) that they encounter the external world as an inhibiting power, hostile to their desire for pleasure, and have a glimpse of later conflicts both external and internal. An infant must not produce his excreta at whatever moment he chooses, but when other people decide that he shall. In order to induce him to forgo these sources of pleasure, he is told that everything that has to do with these functions is improper and must be kept secret. This is where he is first obliged to exchange pleasure for social respectability. To begin with, his attitude to his excreta themselves is quite different. He feels no disgust at his faeces, values them as a portion of his own body with which he will not readily part, and makes use of them as his first ‘gift’, to distinguish people whom he values especially highly. Even after education has succeeded in its aim of making these inclinations alien to him, he carries on his high valuation of faeces in his estimate of ‘gifts’ and ‘money’. On the other hand he seems to regard his achievements in urinating with peculiar pride.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3386

I know you have been wanting for a long time to interrupt me and exclaim: ‘Enough of these atrocities! You tell us that defaecating is a source of sexual satisfaction, and already exploited in infancy! that faeces is a valuable substance and that the anus is a kind of genital! We don’t believe all that but we do understand why paediatricians and educationists have given a wide berth to psycho-analysis and its findings.’ No, Gentlemen. You have merely forgotten that I have been trying to introduce the facts of infantile sexual life to you in connection with the facts of the sexual perversions. Why should you not be aware that for a large number of adults, homosexual and heterosexual alike, the anus does really take over the role of the vagina in sexual intercourse? And that there are many people who retain a voluptuous feeling in defaecating all through their lives and describe it as being far from small? As regards interest in the act of defaecation and enjoyment ill watching someone else defaecating, you can get children themselves to confirm the fact when they are a few years older and able to tell you about it. Of course, you must not have systematically intimidated them beforehand, or they will quite understand that they must be silent on the subject. And as to the other things that you are anxious not to believe, I will refer you to the findings of analysis and of the direct observation of children and will add that it calls for real ingenuity not to see all this or to see it differently. Nor do I complain if you find the kinship between infantile sexual activity and sexual perversions something very striking. But it is in fact self-evident: if a child has a sexual life at all it is bound to be of a perverse kind; for, except for a few obscure hints, children are without what makes sexuality into the reproductive function. On the other hand, the abandonment of the reproductive function is the common feature of all perversions. We actually describe a sexual activity as perverse if it has given up the aim of reproduction and pursues the attainment of pleasure as an aim independent of it. So, as you will see, the breach and turning-point in the development of sexual life lies in its becoming subordinate to the purposes of reproduction. Everything that happens before this turn of events and equally everything that disregards it and that aims solely at obtaining pleasure is given the uncomplimentary name of ‘perverse’ and as such is proscribed.

Allow me, therefore, to proceed with my brief account of infantile sexuality. What I have already reported of two systems of organs might be confirmed in reference to the others. A child’s sexual life is indeed made up entirely of the activities of a number of component instincts which seek, independently of one another, to obtain pleasure, in part from the subject’s own body and in part already from an external object. Among these organs the genitals come into prominence very soon. There are people in whom obtaining pleasure from their own genitals, without the assistance of any other genitals or of an object, continues uninterruptedly from infantile masturbation to the unavoidable masturbation of puberty and persists for an indefinite length of time afterwards. Incidentally, the topic of masturbation is not one that can be so easily disposed of: it is something that calls for examination from many angles.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3387

Though I am anxious to cut short this discussion still further, I must nevertheless tell you a little about the sexual researches of children: they are too characteristic of infantile sexuality and of too great significance for the symptomatology of the neuroses to be passed over. Infantile sexual researches begin very early, sometimes before the third year of life. They do not relate to the distinction between the sexes, for this means nothing to children, since they (or at any rate boys) attribute the same male genital to both sexes. If, afterwards, a boy makes the discovery of the vagina from seeing his little sister or a girl playmate, he tries, to begin with, to disavow the evidence of his senses, for he cannot imagine a human creature like himself who is without such a precious portion. Later on, he takes fright at the possibility thus presented to him; and any threats that may have been made to him earlier, because he took too intense an interest in his little organ, now produce a deferred effect. He comes under the sway of the castration complex, the form taken by which plays a great part in the construction of his character if he remains normal, in his neurosis if he falls ill, and in his resistances if he comes into analytic treatment. As regards little girls, we can say of them that they feel greatly at a disadvantage owing to their lack of a big, visible penis, that they envy boys for possessing one and that, in the main for this reason, they develop a wish to be a man - a wish that re-emerges later on, in any neurosis that may arise if they meet with a mishap in playing a feminine part. In her childhood, moreover, a girl’s clitoris takes on the role of a penis entirely: it is characterized by special excitability and is the area in which auto-erotic satisfaction is obtained. The process of a girl’s becoming a woman depends very much on the clitoris passing on this sensitivity to the vaginal orifice in good time and completely. In cases of what is known as sexual anaesthesia in women the clitoris has obstinately retained its sensitivity.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3388

The sexual interest of children begins by turning, rather, to the problem of where babies come from - the same problem which underlies the question put by the Theban Sphinx - and it is most often raised by egoistic fears on the arrival of a new baby. The reply which is ready to hand in the nursery, that babies are brought by the stork, comes up against disbelief on the part even of small children far oftener than we are aware. The sense of being defrauded of the truth by the grown-ups contributes much to making children feel lonely and to developing their independence. But a child is not in a position to solve this problem by his own means. His undeveloped sexual constitution sets definite limits to his power of perception. He begins by supposing that babies come from people taking in something special in their food, nor does he know that only women can have babies. Later he becomes aware of this limitation and ceases to regard eating as the origin of babies - though the theory persists in fairy tales. When the child has grown bigger, he soon notices that his father must play some part in getting babies, but he cannot guess what. If he happens to witness a sexual act, he regards it as an attempt at subjugation, a struggle, and this is the sadistic misunderstanding of coition. But at first he does not connect this act with the coming into being of a baby. So, too, if he finds traces of blood on his mother’s bed or on her underclothes, he takes it as a sign that she has been injured by his father. Still later in childhood, he no doubt suspects that the man’s sexual organ has an essential share in producing babies, but the only function he can attribute to that part of the body is micturition.

From the very first, children are at one in thinking that babies must be born through the bowel; they must make their appearance like lumps of faeces. This theory is not abandoned until all anal interests have been deprived of their value, and it is then replaced by the hypothesis that the navel comes open or that the area of the breast between the nipples is where birth takes place. In this way the child in the course of his researches comes nearer to the facts about sex, or, feeling at a loss owing to his ignorance, he passes them by till, usually in the years before puberty, he is given what is as a rule a depreciatory and incomplete explanation, which often produces traumatic effects.

You will no doubt have heard, Gentlemen, that in psycho-analysis the concept of what is sexual has been unduly extended in order to support the theses of the sexual causation of the neuroses and the sexual meaning of symptoms. You are now in a position to judge for yourselves whether this extension is unjustified. We have only extended the concept of sexuality far enough to be able to comprise the sexual life of perverts and of children. We have, that is to say, given it back its true compass. What is called sexuality outside psycho-analysis relates only to a restricted sexual life, which serves the purpose of reproduction and is described as normal.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3389

LECTURE XXI

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE LIBIDO AND THE SEXUAL ORGANIZATIONS

GENTLEMEN, - I am under the impression that I have not succeeded in bringing home to you quite convincingly the importance of the perversions for our view of sexuality, and I should therefore like so far as I can to improve and supplement what I have said.

It is not the case that the perversions alone would have obliged us to make the change in the concept of sexuality which has brought such violent contradictions down on us. The study of infantile sexuality had even more to do with it and it was the concurrence of the two which was decisive for us. But the manifestations of infantile sexuality, however unmistakable they may be in later childhood, seem to melt into indefiniteness towards their beginnings. Anyone who chooses to disregard the history of their development and their analytic context will deny that they are of a sexual character and will attribute some undifferentiated character to them instead. You must not forget that at the moment we are not in possession of any generally recognized criterion of the sexual nature of a process, apart, once again, from a connection with the reproductive function which we must reject as being too narrow-minded. The biological criteria, such as the periodicities of twenty-three and twenty-eight days postulated by Wilhelm Fliess, are still highly debatable; the chemical characteristics of the sexual process, which we may suspect, are still awaiting discovery. On the other hand, the sexual perversions of adults are something tangible and unambiguous. As is already shown by the name by which they are universally known, they are unquestionably sexual. Whether they are described as indications of degeneracy or in any other way, no one has yet had the courage to class them as anything but phenomena of sexual life. On their account alone we are justified in asserting that sexuality and reproduction do not coincide, for it is obvious that all of them disavow the aim of reproduction.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3390

I find a parallel here which is not uninteresting. Whereas for most people ‘conscious’ and ‘psychical’ are the same, we have been obliged to extend the concept of ‘psychical’ and to recognize something ‘psychical’ that is not ‘conscious’. And in just the same way, whereas other people declare that ‘sexual’ and ‘connected with reproduction’ (or, if you prefer to put it more shortly, ‘genital’) are identical, we cannot avoid postulating something ‘sexual’ that is not ‘genital’ - has nothing to do with reproduction. The similarity here is only a formal one, but it is not without a deeper foundation.

But if the existence of sexual perversions is such a decisive argument in this question, why has it not long since had its effect and settled the matter? I really cannot say. I think it is connected with the fact that these sexual perversions are subject to a quite special ban, which has even affected theory and has stood in the way of the scientific consideration of them. It is as though no one could forget that they are not only something disgusting but also something monstrous and dangerous - as though people felt them as seductive, and had at bottom to fight down a secret envy of those who were enjoying them. One is reminded of the admission made by the condemnatory Landgraf in the famous Tannhäuser parody:

‘ Im Venusberg vergass er Ehr und Pflicht!

- Merkwürdig, unser einem passiert

so etwas nicht.’¹

In reality perverts are poor wretches, rather, who have to pay extremely dear for their hard-won satisfaction.

What makes the activity of perverts so unmistakably sexual in spite of all the strangeness of its objects and aims is the fact that as a rule an act of perverse satisfaction nevertheless ends in complete orgasm and voidance of the genital products. This is of course only the result of the people concerned being adults. In children orgasm and genital excretion are scarcely possible; their place is taken by hints which are once more not recognized as being clearly sexual.

¹ [‘The Venusberg made him forget

Honour and Duty thus! -

Strange how these things don’t happen

To people such as us.’]

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3391

There is something else that I must add in order to complete our view of sexual perversions. However infamous they may be, however sharply they may be contrasted with normal sexual activity, quiet consideration will show that some perverse trait or other is seldom absent from the sexual life of normal people. Even a kiss can claim to be described as a perverse act, since it consists in the bringing together of two oral erotogenic zones instead of the two genitals. Yet no one rejects it as perverse; on the contrary, it is permitted in theatrical performances as a softened hint at the sexual act. But precisely kissing can easily turn into a complete perversion - if, that is to say, it becomes so intense that a genital discharge and orgasm follow upon it directly, an event that is far from rare. We can learn, too, that for one person feeling and looking at the object are indispensable preconditions of sexual enjoyment, that another person will pinch or bite at the climax of sexual excitation, that the highest pitch of excitement in lovers is not always provoked by the genitals but by some other region of the object’s body, and any number of similar things besides. There is no sense in excluding people with individual traits of this kind from the class of the normal and putting them among the perverts. On the contrary, we shall recognize more and more clearly that the essence of the perversions lies not in the extension of the sexual aim, not in the replacement of the genitals, not even always in the variant choice of the object, but solely in the exclusiveness with which these deviations are carried out and as a result of which the sexual act serving the purpose of reproduction is put on one side. In so far as the perverse actions are inserted in the performance of the normal sexual act as preparatory or intensifying contributions, they are in reality not perversions at all. The gulf between normal and perverse sexuality is of course very much narrowed by facts of this kind. It is an easy conclusion that normal sexuality has emerged out of something that was in existence before it, by weeding out certain features of that material as unserviceable and collecting together the rest in order to subordinate them to a new aim, that of reproduction.

Before we make use of our familiarity with the perversions to plunge once again into the study of infantile sexuality on the basis of clearer premisses, I must draw your attention to an important difference between them. Perverse sexuality is as a rule excellently centred: all its actions are directed to an aim - usually to a single one; one component instinct has gained the upper hand in it and is either the only one observable or has subjected the others to its purposes. In that respect there is no distinction between perverse and normal sexuality other than the fact that their dominating component instincts and consequently their sexual aims are different. In both of them, one might say, a well-organized tyranny has been established, but in each of the two a different family has seized the reins of power. Infantile sexuality, on the other hand, lacks, speaking generally, any such centring and organization; its separate component instincts have equal rights, each of them goes its own way to obtaining pleasure. Both the absence and the presence of centring harmonize well, of course, with the fact that both perverse and normal sexuality have arisen out of infantile sexuality. Incidentally, there are also cases of perverse sexuality which have a much greater resemblance to the infantile kind, since in them numerous component instincts have put through (or, more correctly, have persisted in) their aims independently of one another. It is better in such cases to speak of infantilism in sexual life rather than of a perversion.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3392

Thus forearmed we can proceed to the consideration of a suggestion which we shall certainly not be spared. ‘Why’, we shall be asked, ‘are you so obstinate in describing as being already sexuality what on your own evidence are indefinable manifestations in childhood out of which sexual life will later develop? Why should you not be content instead with giving them a physiological description and simply say that in an infant at the breast we already observe activities, such as sensual sucking or holding back the excreta, which show us that he is striving for "organ-pleasure"? In that way you would have avoided the hypothesis, so repugnant to every feeling, of the smallest babies having a sexual life.’ - Indeed, Gentlemen, I have no objection at all to organ-pleasure. I know that even the supreme pleasure of sexual union is only an organ-pleasure attached to the activity of the genitals. But can you tell me when this originally indifferent organ-pleasure acquires the sexual character which it undoubtedly possesses in the later phases of development? Do we know any more about ‘organ-pleasure’ than about sexuality? You will reply that it gains its sexual character precisely when the genitals begin to play their part; ‘sexual’ coincides with ‘genital’. You will even reject the objection raised by the perversions by pointing out to me that in the majority of perversions a genital orgasm is after all aimed at, even if it is arrived at by a method other than the union of the genitals. You are certainly taking up a much stronger position in determining the characteristics of what is sexual if you knock out of it the relation to reproduction which is made untenable by the perversions and put genital activity in its place. But, if so, we are no longer far apart: it is only a question of the genital organs versus the other organs. What are you going to do, however, about the numerous experiences which show you that the genitals can be represented as regards their yield of pleasure by other organs, as in the case of kissing or of the perverse practices of voluptuaries or of the symptoms of hysteria? In that neurosis it is quite usual for signs of stimulation, sensations and innervations, and even the processes of erection, which belong properly to the genitals, to be displaced on to other, remote regions of the body - as, for instance, by transposition upwards, to the head and face. Being thus convinced that you have nothing to catch hold of for your characterization of what is sexual, you will no doubt have to make up your minds to follow my example and extend the description of being ‘sexual’ to the activities of early childhood, too, which strive for organ-pleasure.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3393

And now, for my justification, there are two other considerations which I must ask you to take into account. As you know, we call the dubious and indefinable pleasurable activities of earliest childhood sexual because, in the course of analysis, we arrive at them from the symptoms after passing through indisputably sexual material. They need not necessarily themselves be sexual on that account - agreed! But take an analogous case. Suppose we had no means of observing the development from their seed of two dicotyledonous plants, the apple-tree and the bean, but that it was possible in both cases for us to trace their development backwards from the fully developed individual plant to the first seedling with two seed-leaves. The two seed leaves have a neutral appearance; they are just alike in both cases. Am I then to suppose that they are really alike, and that the specific difference between an apple-tree and a bean is only introduced into the plants later? Or is it biologically more correct to believe that this difference is already there in the seedling, although I cannot observe any distinction in the seed leaves? But we are doing the same thing when we call the pleasure in the activities of an infant-in-arms a sexual one. I cannot discuss here whether each and every organ-pleasure should be called a sexual one or whether, alongside of the sexual one, there is another which does not deserve to be so called. I know too little about organ-pleasure and its determinants; and, in view of the retrogressive character of analysis in general, I cannot feel surprised if at the very end I arrive at what are for the time being indefinable factors.

And one thing more! On the whole you will have gained very little for what you want to assert - the sexual purity of children - even if you succeed in convincing me that it would be better to regard the activities of infants-in-arms as non-sexual. For the sexual life of children is already free from all these doubts from the third year of life onwards: at about that time the genitals already begin to stir, a period of infantile masturbation - of genital satisfaction, therefore - sets in, regularly perhaps. The mental and social phenomena of sexual life need no longer be absent; the choice of an object, an affectionate preference for particular people, a decision, even, in favour of one of the two sexes, jealousy - all these have been established by impartial observations made independently of psycho-analysis and before its time, and they can be confirmed by any observer who cares to see them. You will object that you have never doubted the early awakening of affection; you have only doubted whether this affection bears a ‘sexual’ character. It is true that children have already learnt to conceal this between the ages of three and eight. But if you are attentive you will be able nevertheless to collect enough evidence of the ‘sensual’ aims of this affection, and whatever you still lack after that can easily be supplied in plenty by the investigations of analysis. The sexual aims at this period of life are intimately connected with the child’s contemporary sexual researches, of which I have given you some in stances. The perverse character of some of these aims is of course dependent on the child’s constitutional immaturity, for he has not yet discovered the aim that consists in the act of copulation.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3394

From about the sixth to the eighth year of life onwards, we can observe a halt and retrogression in sexual development, which, in cases where it is most propitious culturally, deserves to be called a period of latency. The latency period may also be absent: it need not bring with it any interruption of sexual activity and sexual interests along the whole line. The majority of experiences and mental impulses before the start of the latency period now fall victim to infantile amnesia - the forgetting (already discussed by us) which veils our earliest youth from us and makes us strangers to it. The task is set us in every psycho-analysis of bringing this forgotten period back into memory. It is impossible to avoid a suspicion that the beginnings of sexual life which are included in that period have provided the motive for its being forgotten - that this forgetting, in fact, is an outcome of repression.

From the third year of life a child’s sexual life shows much agreement with an adult’s. It differs from the latter, as we already know, in lacking a firm organization under the primacy of the genitals, in its inevitable traits of perversion and also, of course, in the far lesser intensity of the whole trend. But from the point of view of theory the most interesting phases of sexual, or, as we will say, of libidinal, development lie earlier than this point of time. This course of development takes place so rapidly that we should probably never have succeeded in getting a firm hold of its fleeting pictures by direct observation. It was only with the help of the psycho-analytic investigation of the neuroses that it became possible to discern the still earlier phases of the development of the libido. These are nothing but constructions, to be sure, but, if you carry out psycho-analyses in practice, you will find that they are necessary and useful constructions. You will soon learn how it comes about that pathology can here put us in possession of conditions which we should inevitably overlook in a normal subject.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3395

Accordingly, I can now describe to you the form taken by a child’s sexual life before the establishment of the primacy of the genitals, preparations for which are made in the first period of infancy preceding the latency period and which is permanently organized from puberty onwards. A kind of loose organization which may be called ‘pregenital’ exists during this early period. During this phase what stand in the forefront are not the genital component instincts but the sadistic and anal ones. The contrast between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ plays no part here as yet. Its place is taken by the contrast between ‘active’ and ‘passive’, which may be described as a precursor of the sexual polarity and which later on is soldered to that polarity, what appears to us as masculine in the activities of this phase, when we look at it from the point of view of the genital phase, turns out to be an expression of an instinct for mastery which easily passes over into cruelty. Trends with a passive aim are attached to the erotogenic zone of the anal orifice, which is very important at this period. The instincts for looking and for gaining knowledge are powerfully at work; the genitals actually play a part in sexual life only as organs for the excretion of urine. The component instincts of this phase are not without objects, but those objects do not necessarily converge into a single object. The sadistic anal organization is the immediate forerunner of the phase of genital primacy. Detailed study shows how much of it is retained in the later definitive shape of things and shows too the way in which its component instincts are compelled to take their place in the new genital organization. Behind the sadistic-anal phase of libidinal development we get a glimpse of a still earlier and more primitive stage of organization, in which the erotogenic zone of the mouth plays the chief part. As you will guess, the sexual activity of sensual sucking belongs to it. We must admire the understanding of the Ancient Egyptians who, in their art, represented children, including the God Horus, with a finger in their mouth. Only recently Abraham has given examples of the traces which this primitive oral phase leaves behind it in later sexual life.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3396

I can well suppose, Gentlemen, that this last account of the sexual organizations has obstructed rather than instructed you, and it may be that I have once more entered too much into details. But you must have patience. What you have just heard will derive increased value for you from its later application. For the present you should keep firmly in mind that sexual life (or, as we put it, the libidinal function) does not emerge as something ready-made and does not even develop further in its own likeness, but passes through a series of successive phases which do not resemble one another; its development is thus several times repeated - like that of a caterpillar into a butterfly. The turning-point of this development is the subordination of all the component sexual instincts under the primacy of the genitals and along with this the subjection of sexuality to the reproductive function. This is preceded by a sexual life that might be described as distracted - the independent activity of the different component instincts striving for organ-pleasure. This anarchy is mitigated by abortive beginnings of ‘pregenital’ organizations - a sadistic-anal phase preceded by an oral one, which is perhaps the most primitive. In addition, there are the various, still incompletely known, processes which lead one stage of organization over to the subsequent and next higher one. We shall learn later what an important light is thrown on the neuroses by the fact that the libido passes through such a long course of development and one which has so many breaks in it.

To-day we will follow yet another side of this development namely the relation of the component sexual instincts to their object. Or rather, we will make a hasty survey of this development and dwell somewhat longer on one of its rather late consequences. A few of the components of the sexual instinct, there, have an object from the first and hold fast to it - for instance, the instinct for mastery (sadism) and the scopophilic and epistemophilic instincts. Others, more definitely linked to particular erotogenic zones of the body, have one to begin with only, so long as they are still attached to the non-sexual functions, and give it up when they become separated from them. Thus the first object of the oral component of the sexual instinct is the mother’s breast which satisfies the infant’s need for nourishment. The erotic component, which is satisfied simultaneously during the sucking, makes itself independent with the act of sensual sucking [lutschen]; it gives up the outside object and replaces it by an area of the subject’s own body. The oral instinct becomes auto-erotic, as are the anal and other erotogenic instincts from the first. Further development, to put the matter as concisely as possible, has two aims: firstly, the abandonment of auto-erotism, the replacement of the subject’s own body once more by an outside object, and secondly, the unification of the various objects of the separate instincts and their replacement by a single object. This can, of course, only be achieved if the object is again a whole body, similar to the subject’s own. Nor can it be effected unless a number of the auto-erotic instinctual impulses are left behind as being unserviceable.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3397

The processes of finding an object are fairly complex and no comprehensive account has hitherto been given of them. For our purposes it may be specially pointed out that when, in the years of childhood before puberty, the process has in some respects reached a conclusion, the object that has been found turns out to be almost identical with the first object of the oral pleasure-instinct, which was reached by attachment. Though it is not actually the mother’s breast, at least it is the mother. We call the mother the first love-object. For we speak of love when we bring the mental side of the sexual trends into the foreground and want to force back the underlying physical or ‘sensual’ instinctual demands or to forget them for a moment. At the time at which the child’s mother becomes his love-object the psychical work of repression has already begun in him, which is withdrawing from his knowledge awareness of a part of his sexual aims. To his choice of his mother as a love-object everything becomes attached which, under the name of the ‘Oedipus complex’, has attained so much importance in the psycho-analytic explanation of the neuroses and has played no less a part, perhaps, in the resistance to psycho-analysis.

Listen to this episode which occurred in the course of the present war. One of the stout disciples of psycho-analysis was stationed as medical officer on the German front somewhere in Poland. He attracted his colleagues’ attention by the fact that he occasionally exercised an unexpected influence on a patient. When he was questioned, he acknowledged that he was employing the methods of psycho-analysis and declared his readiness to convey his knowledge to his colleagues. Every evening there after the medical officers of the corps, his colleagues and his superiors, came together in order to learn the secret doctrines of analysis. All went well for a while; but when he spoke to his audience about the Oedipus complex, one of his superiors rose, declared he did not believe it, that it was a vile act on the part of the lecturer to speak of such things to them, honest men who were fighting for their country and fathers of a family, and that he forbade the continuance of the lectures. That was the end of the matter. The analyst got himself transferred to another part of the front. It seems to me a bad thing, however, if a German victory requires that science shall be ‘organized’ in this way, and German science will not respond well to organization of such a kind.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3398

And now you will be eager to hear what this terrible Oedipus complex contains. Its name tells you. You all know the Greek legend of King Oedipus, who was destined by fate to kill his father and take his mother to wife, who did everything possible to escape the oracle’s decree and punished himself by blinding when he learned that he had none the less unwittingly committed both these crimes. I hope many of you may yourselves have felt the shattering effect of the tragedy in which Sophocles has treated the story. The work of the Athenian dramatist exhibits the way in which the long-past deed of Oedipus is gradually brought to light by an investigation ingeniously protracted and fanned into life by ever fresh relays of evidence. To this extent it has a certain resemblance to the progress of a psycho-analysis. In the course of the dialogue Jocasta, the deluded mother and wife, declares herself opposed to the continuance of the enquiry. She appeals to the fact that many people have dreamt of lying with their mothers, but that dreams should be despised. We do not despise dreams - least of all, typical dreams which occur to many people; and we do not doubt that the dream referred to by Jocasta has an intimate connection with the strange and terrifying content of the legend.

It is a surprising thing that the tragedy of Sophocles does not call up indignant repudiation in his audience - a reaction similar to that of our simple-minded army doctor but far better justified. For fundamentally it is an amoral work: it absolves men from moral responsibility, exhibits the gods as promoters of crime and shows the impotence of the moral impulses of men which struggle against crime. It might easily be supposed that the material of the legend had in view an indictment of the gods and of fate; and in the hands of Euripides, the critic and enemy of the gods, it would probably have become such an indictment. But with the devout Sophocles there is no question of an application of that kind. The difficulty is overcome by the pious sophistry that to bow to the will of the gods is the highest morality even when it promotes crime. I cannot think that this morality is a strong point of the play, but it has no influence on its effect. It is not to it that the auditor reacts but to the secret sense and content of the legend. He reacts as though by self analysis he had recognized the Oedipus complex in himself and had unveiled the will of the gods and the oracle as exalted disguises of his own unconscious. It is as though he was obliged to remember the two wishes - to do away with his father and in place of him to take his mother to wife - and to be horrified at them. And he understands the dramatist’s voice as though it were saying to him: ‘You are struggling in vain against your responsibility and are protesting in vain of what you have done in opposition to these criminal intentions. You are guilty, for you have not been able to destroy them; they still persist in you unconsciously.’ And there is psychological truth contained in this. Even if a man has repressed his evil impulses into the unconscious and would like to tell himself afterwards that he is not responsible for them, he is nevertheless bound to be aware of this responsibility as a sense of guilt whose basis is unknown to him.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3399

There can be no doubt that the Oedipus complex may be looked upon as one of the most important sources of the sense of guilt by which neurotics are so often tormented. But more than this: in a study of the beginnings of human religion and morality which I published in 1913 under the title of Totem and Taboo I put forward a suggestion that man kind as a whole may have acquired its sense of guilt, the ultimate source of religion and morality, at the beginning of its history, in connection with the Oedipus complex. I should be very glad to tell you more about this, but I had better leave it on one side. Once one has begun on that topic it is hard to break off; and we must go back to individual psychology.

What, then, can be gathered about the Oedipus complex from the direct observation of children at the time of their making their choice of an object before the latency period? Well, it is easy to see that the little man wants to have his mother all to himself, that he feels the presence of his father as a nuisance, that he is resentful if his father indulges in any signs of affection towards his mother and that he shows satisfaction when his father has gone on a journey or is absent. He will often express his feelings directly in words and promise his mother to marry her. It will be thought that this amounts to little compared to the deeds of Oedipus; but in fact it is enough, it is the same thing at root. Observation is often obscured by the circumstance that on other occasions the same child will simultaneously give evidence of great affection for his father. But contrary - or, as it is better to say, ‘ambivalent’ - emotional attitudes, which in adults would lead to a conflict, remain compatible with each other for a long time in children, just as later they find a permanent place beside each other in the unconscious. It will also be objected that the little boy’s conduct arises from egoistic motives and gives no grounds for postulating an erotic complex: the child’s mother attends to all his needs, so that he has an interest in preventing her from looking after anyone else. This also is true; but it will soon become clear that in this situation as in similar ones the egoistic interest is merely affording a point of support to which the erotic trend is attached. The little boy may show the most undisguised sexual curiosity about his mother, he may insist upon sleeping beside her at night, he may force his presence on her while she is dressing or may even make actual attempts at seducing her, as his mother will often notice and report with amusement - all of which puts beyond doubt the erotic nature of his tie with his mother. Nor must it be forgotten that the mother devotes the same attention to a little daughter without producing the same result and that the father often competes with her in looking after the boy and yet fails to gain the same significance as she does. In short, the factor of sexual preference cannot be eliminated from the situation by any criticism. From the standpoint of egoistic interest it would be simply foolish of the little man not to prefer to put up with having two people in his service rather than only one of them.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3400

As you see, I have only described the relation of a boy to his father and mother. Things happen in just the same way with little girls, with the necessary changes: an affectionate attachment to her father, a need to get rid of her mother as superfluous and to take her place, a coquetry which already employs the methods of later womanhood - these offer a charming picture, especially in small girls, which makes us forget the possibly grave consequences lying behind this infantile situation. We must not omit to add that the parents themselves often exercise a determining influence on the awakening of a child’s Oedipus attitude by themselves obeying the pull of sexual attraction, and that where there are several children the father will give the plainest evidence of his greater affection for his little daughter and the mother for her son. But the spontaneous nature of the Oedipus complex in children cannot be seriously shaken even by this factor.

When other children appear on the scene the Oedipus complex is enlarged into a family complex. This, with fresh support from the egoistic sense of injury, gives grounds for receiving the new brothers or sisters with repugnance and for unhesitatingly getting rid of them by a wish. It is even true that as a rule children are far readier to give verbal expression to these feelings of hate than to those arising from the parental complex. If a wish of this kind is fulfilled and the undesired addition to the family is removed again shortly afterwards by death, we can discover from a later analysis what an important experience this death has been to the child, even though it need not have remained fixed in his memory. A child who has been put into second place by the birth of a brother or sister, and who is now for the first time almost isolated from his mother, does not easily forgive her this loss of place; feelings which in an adult would be described as greatly embittered arise in him and are often the basis of a permanent estrangement. We have already mentioned that the child’s sexual researches, with all their consequences, usually follow from this vital experience of his. As these brothers and sisters grow up, the boy’s attitude to them undergoes very significant transformations. He may take his sister as a love-object by way of substitute for his faithless mother. Where there are several brothers, all of them courting a younger sister, situations of hostile rivalry, which are so important for later life, arise already in the nursery. A little girl may find in her elder brother a substitute for her father who no longer takes an affectionate interest in her as he did in her earliest years. Or she may take a younger sister as a substitute for the baby she has vainly wished for from her father.

This and very much else of a similar nature will be shown to you by the direct observation of children and by the consideration of clearly retained memories from childhood uninfluenced by analysis. From this you will conclude among other things that the position of a child in the family order is a factor of extreme importance in determining the shape of his later life and should deserve consideration in every life-history. But, what is more important, in view of this information which can be so easily obtained, you will not be able to recall without a smile the pronouncements of science in explanation of the prohibition of incest. There is no end to what has been invented on the subject. It has been said that sexual inclination is diverted from members of the same family who are of the opposite sex by the fact of having lived together from childhood; or, again, that a biological purpose of avoiding inbreeding is represented psychically by an innate horror of incest. In all this the fact is entirely overlooked that such an inexorable prohibition of it in law and custom would not be needed if there were any reliable natural barriers against the temptation to incest. The truth is just the opposite. A human being’s first choice of an object is regularly an incestuous one, aimed, in the case of the male, at his mother and sister; and it calls for the severest prohibitions to deter this persistent infantile tendency from realization. Among the primitive races still living to-day, among savages, the prohibitions against incest are even very much stricter than among ourselves, and Theodor Reik has only recently shown in a brilliant work that the puberty rites of savages, which represent a re-birth, have the sense of releasing the boy from his incestuous bond with his mother and of reconciling him with his father.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3401

Mythology will teach you that incest, which is supposed to be so much detested by humans, is unhesitatingly allowed to the gods. And you may learn from ancient history that incestuous sister marriage was a sanctified injunction upon the person of the Ruler (among the Egyptian Pharaohs and the Incas of Peru). What was in question was thus a privilege forbidden to the common herd.

Mother-incest was one of the crimes of Oedipus, parricide was the other. It may be remarked in passing that they are also the two great crimes proscribed by totemism, the first socio-religious institution of mankind.

But let us now turn from the direct observation of children to the analytic examination of adults who have become neurotic. What help does analysis give towards a further knowledge of the Oedipus complex? That can be answered in a word. Analysis confirms all that the legend describes. It shows that each of these neurotics has himself been an Oedipus or, what comes to the same thing, has, as a reaction to the complex, become a Hamlet. The analytic account of the Oedipus complex is, of course, a magnification and coarsening of the infantile sketch. The hatred of the father, the death-wishes against him, are no longer hinted at timidly, the affection for the mother admits that its aim is to possess her as a woman. Should we really attribute such blatant and extreme emotional impulses to the tender years of childhood, or is analysis deceiving us by an admixture of some new factor? It is not hard to find one. Whenever someone gives an account of a past event, even if he is a historian, we must take into account what he unintentionally puts back into the past from the present or from some intermediate time, thus falsifying his picture of it. In the case of a neurotic it is even a question whether this putting back is an entirely unintentional one; later on we shall have to discover reasons for this and have to do justice in general to the fact of ‘retrospective phantasying’. We can easily see, too, that hatred of the father is reinforced by a number of factors arising from later times and circumstances and that the sexual desires towards the mother are cast into forms which must have been alien as yet to a child. But it would be a vain effort to seek to explain the whole Oedipus complex by retrospective phantasying and to attach it to later times. Its infantile core and more or less of its accessories remain as they were confirmed by the direct observation of children.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3402

The clinical fact which meets us behind the form of the Oedipus complex as it is established by analysis is of the highest practical significance. We learn that at puberty, when the sexual instinct first makes its demands in full strength, the old familiar incestuous objects are taken up again and freshly cathected with libido. The infantile object-choice was only a feeble one, but it was a prelude, pointing the direction for the object-choice at puberty. At this point, then, very intense emotional processes come into play, following the direction of the Oedipus complex or reacting against it, processes which, however, since their premisses have become intolerable, must to a large extent remain apart from consciousness. From this time onwards, the human individual has to devote himself to the great task of detaching himself from his parents, and not until that task is achieved can he cease to be a child and become a member of the social community. For the son this task consists in detaching his libidinal wishes from his mother and employing them for the choice of a real outside love-object, and in reconciling himself with his father if he has remained in opposition to him, or in freeing himself from his pressure if, as a reaction to his infantile rebelliousness, he has become subservient to him. These tasks are set to everyone; and it is remarkable how seldom they are dealt with in an ideal manner - that is, in one which is correct both psychologically and socially. By neurotics, however, no solution at all is arrived at: the son remains all his life bowed beneath his father’s authority and he is unable to transfer his libido to an outside sexual object. With the relationship changed round, the same fate can await the daughter. In this sense the Oedipus complex may justly be regarded as the nucleus of the neuroses.

As you may imagine, Gentlemen, I have passed very cursorily over a great number of considerations of both practical and theoretical importance connected with the Oedipus complex. Nor shall I enter into its variations or its possible reversal. Among its remoter connections I will only give you a further hint that it has turned out to have a highly important effect on literary production. In a valuable work Otto Rank has shown that dramatists of every period have chosen their material in the main from the Oedipus and incest complex and its variations and disguises. Nor should it be allowed to pass unnoticed that the two criminal wishes of the Oedipus complex were recognized as the true representatives of the uninhibited life of the instincts long before the time of psycho-analysis. Among the writings of the Encyclopaedist Diderot you will find a celebrated dialogue, Le neveu Rameau, which was rendered into German by no less a person than Goethe. There you may read this remarkable sentence: ‘Si le petit sauvage était abandonné à lui-même, qu’il conservât toute son imbécillité, et qu’il réunît au peu de raison de l’enfant au berceau la violence des passions de l’homme de trente ans, il tordrait le col à son père et coucherait avec sa mère.’¹

But there is something else that I cannot pass by. The reminder of dreams given to us by the mother and wife of Oedipus must not be allowed to remain fruitless. Do you recall the out come of our dream-analyses - how the wishes that construct dreams are so often of a perverse or incestuous nature or reveal an unsuspected hostility to those who are nearest and dearest to the dreamer? At that time we gave no explanation of the origin of these evil impulses. Now you can find it for yourselves. They are allocations of the libido and object-cathexes which date from early infancy and have long since been abandoned as far as conscious life is concerned, but which prove still to be present at night-time and to be capable of functioning in a certain sense. Since, however, everyone, and not only neurotics, experiences these perverse, incestuous and murderous dreams, we may conclude that people who are normal to-day have passed along a path of development that has led through the perversions and object-cathexes of the Oedipus complex, that that is the path of normal development and that neurotics merely exhibit to us in a magnified and coarsened form what the analysis of dreams reveals to us in healthy people as well. And this is one of the reasons why I dealt with the study of dreams before that of neurotic symptoms.

¹ [’If the little savage were left to himself, preserving all his foolishness and adding to the small sense of a child in the cradle the violent passions of a man of thirty, he would strangle his father and lie with his mother.’]

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3403

LECTURE XXII

SOME THOUGHTS ON DEVELOPMENT AND REGRESSION - AETIOLOGY

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - You have heard that the libidinal function goes through a lengthy development before it can, in what is described as the normal manner, be enlisted in the service of reproduction. I should now like to bring to your attention the significance of this fact in the causation of the neuroses.

We are, I think, in agreement with the theories of general pathology in assuming that a development of this kind involves two dangers - first, of inhibition, and secondly, of regression. That is to say, in view of the general tendency of biological processes to variation, it is bound to be the case that not every preparatory phase will be passed through with equal success and completely superseded: portions of the function will be permanently held back at these early stages, and the total picture of development will be qualified by some amount of developmental inhibition.

Let us look for some analogies to these processes in other fields of knowledge. When, as often happened at early periods of human history, a whole people left their place of domicile and sought a new one, we may be certain that the whole of them did not arrive at the new location. Apart from other losses, it must regularly have happened that small groups or bands of the migrants halted on the way and settled at these stopping places while the main body went further. Or, as you know, to turn to a nearer comparison, in the highest mammals the male sex-glands, which are originally situated deep in the abdominal cavity, start upon a migration at a particular stage of intra-uterine life, which brings them almost directly under the skin of the pelvic extremity. As a consequence of this migration, we find in a number of male individuals that one of these paired organs has remained behind in the pelvic cavity, or that it has become permanently lodged in what is known as the inguinal canal, through which both organs must pass in the course of their migration, or at least that this canal has remained open, though it should normally close up after the sex-glands have completed their change of situation. Or again, when as a young student I was engaged under von Brücke’s direction on my first piece of scientific work, I was concerned with the origin of the posterior nerve-roots in the spinal cord of a small fish of very archaic structure; I found that the nerve-fibres of these roots have their origin in large cells in the posterior horn of the grey matter, which is no longer the case in other vertebrates. But I also discovered soon afterwards that nerve-cells of this kind are present outside the grey matter the whole way to what is known as the spinal ganglion of the posterior root; and from this I inferred that the cells of these masses of ganglia had migrated from the spinal cord along the roots of the nerves. This is also shown by their evolutionary history. But in this small fish the whole path of their migration was demonstrated by the cells that had remained behind.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3404

If you go into the matter more closely, you will have no difficulty in detecting the weak points in these comparisons. I will therefore declare without more ado that I regard it as possible in the case of every particular sexual trend that some portions of it have stayed behind at earlier stages of its development, even though other portions may have reached their final goal. You will recognize here that we are picturing every such trend as a current which has been continuous since the beginning of life but which we have divided up, to some extent artificially, into separate successive advances. Your impression that these ideas stand in need of greater clarification is justified; but to attempt it would take us too far afield. Let me further make it clear that we propose to describe the lagging behind of a part trend at an earlier stage as a fixation - a fixation, that is, of the instinct.

The second danger in a development by stages of this sort lies in the fact that the portions which have proceeded further may also easily return retrogressively to one of these earlier stages - what we describe as a regression. The trend will find itself led into a regression of this kind if the exercise of its function - that is, the attainment of its aim of satisfaction - is met, in its later or more highly developed form, by powerful external obstacles. It is plausible to suppose that fixation and regression are not independent of each other. The stronger the fixations on its path of development, the more readily will the function evade external difficulties by regressing to the fixations - the more incapable, therefore, does the developed function turn out to be of resisting external obstacles in its course. Consider that, if a people which is in movement has left strong detachments behind at the stopping-places on its migration, it is likely that the more advanced parties will be inclined to retreat to these stopping-places if they have been defeated or have come up against a superior enemy. But they will also be in the greater danger of being defeated the more of their number they have left behind on their migration.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3405

It is important for your understanding of the neuroses that you should not leave this relation between fixation and regression out of sight. This will give you a firmer footing in facing the question of how the neuroses are caused - the question of the aetiology of the neuroses which we shall shortly have to meet.

For the moment we will dwell a little longer on regression. After what you have learnt of the development of the libidinal function, you will be prepared to hear that there are regressions of two sorts: a return to the objects first cathected by the libido, which, as we know, are of an incestuous nature, and a return of the sexual organization as a whole to earlier stages. Both sorts are found in the transference neuroses and play a great part in their mechanism. In particular, a return to the first incestuous objects of the libido is a feature that is found in neurotics with positively fatiguing regularity. There is much more to be said about regressions of the libido itself when we take into account as well another group of neuroses, the narcissistic ones, which for the time being we do not intend to do. These disorders give us access to other developmental processes of the libidinal function which we have not yet mentioned, and show us correspondingly new sorts of regression as well. But above all I think I ought to warn you now not to confuse regression with repression and help you to form a clear idea of the relations between the two processes. Repression, as you will recall, is the process by which an act which is admissible to consciousness, one, therefore, which belongs to the system Pcs., is made unconscious - is pushed back, therefore, into the system Ucs. And we equally speak of repression if the unconscious mental act is altogether forbidden access to the neighbouring preconscious system and is turned back at the threshold by the censorship. Thus the concept of repression involves no relation to sexuality: I must ask you to take special note of that. It indicates a purely psychological process, which we can characterize still better if we call it a ‘topographical’ one. By this we intend to say that it is concerned with the psychical regions which we have assumed to exist, or, if we drop this clumsy working hypothesis, with the construction of the mental apparatus out of distinct psychical systems.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3406

The comparison we have proposed has drawn our attention for the first time to the fact that we have not hitherto been using the word ‘regression’ in its general sense but in a quite special one. If we give it its general sense - of a return from a higher to a lower stage of development - then repression too can be subsumed under the concept of regression, for it too can be described as a return to an earlier and deeper stage in the development of a psychical act. In the case of repression, however, this retrogressive movement does not concern us, since we also speak of repression, in the dynamic sense, when a psychical act is held back at the lower, unconscious, stage. The fact is that repression is a topographico-dynamic concept, while regression is a purely descriptive one. What we have hitherto spoken of as regression, however, and have related to fixation, has meant exclusively a return of the libido to earlier stopping places in its development - something, that is, entirely different in its nature from repression and entirely independent of it. Nor can we call regression of the libido a purely psychical process and we cannot tell where we should localize it in the mental apparatus. And though it is true that it exercises the most powerful influence on mental life, yet the most prominent factor in it is the organic one.

Discussions like this, Gentlemen, are bound to become some what arid. So let us turn to clinical material in order to find applications of it that will be a little more impressive. Hysteria and obsessional neurosis are, as you know, the two chief representatives of the group of transference neuroses. Now it is true that in hysteria there is a regression of the libido to the primary incestuous sexual objects and that this occurs quite regularly; but there is as good as no regression to an earlier stage of the sexual organization. To offset this, the chief part in the mechanism of hysteria is played by repression. If I might venture to complete what we already know for certain about this neurosis by making a construction, I might explain the position thus. The unification of the component instincts under the primacy of the genitals has been accomplished; but its results come up against the resistance of the preconscious system which is linked with consciousness. Thus the genital organization holds good for the unconscious, but not in the same way for the preconscious; and this rejection on the part of the preconscious brings about a picture which has certain resemblances to the state of things before genital primacy. But it is nevertheless something quite different.

Of the two kinds of regression of the libido, that to an earlier phase of the sexual organization is by far the more striking. Since this is absent in hysteria, and since our whole view of the neuroses is still far too much under the influence of the study of hysteria, which was chronologically the first, the significance of libidinal regression also became clear to us far later than that of repression. We must be prepared to find that our views will be subjected to still further extensions and revaluations when we are able to take into consideration not only hysteria and obsessional neurosis but also the other, narcissistic neuroses.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3407

In obsessional neurosis, on the contrary, it is the regression of the libido to the preliminary stage of the sadistic-anal organization that is the most striking fact and the one which is decisive for what is manifested in symptoms. The love-impulse is obliged, when this has happened, to disguise itself as a sadistic impulse. The obsessional idea ‘I should like to kill you’, when it has been freed from certain additions which are not a matter of chance but are indispensable, means at bottom nothing other than ‘I should like to enjoy you in love’. If you consider further that there has been a simultaneous regression in regard to the object, so that these impulses apply only to those who are nearest and dearest to the patient, you can form some idea of the horror which these obsessions arouse in him and at the same time of the alien appearance which they present to his conscious perception. But repression, too, plays a great part in the mechanism of these neuroses, though in a cursory introduction like ours this is not easily demonstrated. A regression of the libido without repression would never produce a neurosis but would lead to a perversion. From this you can see that repression is the process which is most peculiar to neuroses and is most characteristic of them. Perhaps I may have an opportunity later of telling you what we know of the mechanism of the perversions, and you will see that in their case too things are not so simple as we should be glad to make them out.

I think, Gentlemen, that you will best come to terms with what you have just been told about fixation and regression of the libido if you will regard it as a preparation for research into the aetiology of the neuroses. Hitherto I have only given you one piece of information about this: namely that people fall ill of a neurosis if they are deprived of the possibility of satisfying their libido - that they fall ill owing to ‘frustration’, as I put it - and that their symptoms are precisely a substitute for their frustrated satisfaction. This is not supposed to mean, of course, that every frustration of a libidinal satisfaction makes the person it affects neurotic, but merely that the factor of frustration could be discerned in every case of neurosis that has been examined. Thus the proposition is not convertible. No doubt, too, you will have understood that this assertion does not claim to reveal the whole secret of the aetiology of neuroses but is only bringing into prominence one important and indispensable determinant.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3408

In further pursuing the discussion of this thesis, are we to consider the nature of the frustration or the peculiar character of those who are affected by it? It is extremely seldom, after all, that frustration is universal and absolute. In order to operate pathogenically it must no doubt affect the mode of satisfaction which alone the subject desires, of which alone he is capable. There are in general very many ways of tolerating deprivation of libidinal satisfaction without falling ill as a result. In the first place, we know people who are able to put up with a deprivation of this kind without being injured: they are not happy, they suffer from longing, but they do not fall ill. Next, we must bear in mind that the sexual instinctual impulses in particular are extraordinarily plastic, if I may so express it. One of them can take the place of another, one of them can take over another’s intensity; if the satisfaction of one of them is frustrated by reality, the satisfaction of another can afford complete compensation. They are related to one another like a network of intercommunicating channels filled with a liquid; and this is so in spite of their being subject to the primacy of the genitals - a state of affairs that is not at all easily combined in a single picture. Further, the component instincts of sexuality, as well as the sexual current which is compounded from them, exhibit a large capacity for changing their object, for taking another in its place - and one, therefore, that is more easily attainable. This displaceability and readiness to accept a substitute must operate powerfully against the pathogenic effect of a frustration. Among these protective processes against falling ill owing to deprivation there is one which has gained special cultural significance. It consists in the sexual trend abandoning its aim of obtaining a component or a reproductive pleasure and taking on another which is related genetically to the abandoned one but is itself no longer sexual and must be described as social. We call this process ‘sublimation’, in accordance with the general estimate that places social aims higher than the sexual ones, which are at bottom self-interested. Sublimation is, incidentally, only a special case of the way in which sexual trends are attached to other, non-sexual ones. We shall have to discuss it again in another connection.

You may now have an impression that deprivation has been reduced to insignificance owing to all these methods of tolerating it. But no, it retains its pathogenic power. The counter-measures are on the whole insufficient. There is a limit to the amount of unsatisfied libido that human beings on the average can put up with. The plasticity or free mobility of the libido is by no means fully preserved in everyone, and sublimation is never able to deal with more than a certain fraction of libido, quite apart from the fact that many people are gifted with only a small amount of capacity to sublimate. The most important of these limitations is evidently that upon the mobility of the libido, since it makes a person’s satisfaction depend on the attainment of only a very small number of aims and objects. You have only to recall that an imperfect development of the libido leaves behind it very fertile and perhaps, too, very numerous libidinal fixations to early phases of the organization and of the finding of objects, which are for the most part incapable of real satisfaction, and you will recognize in libidinal fixation the second powerful factor which combines with frustration as the cause of illness. You can declare, as a schematic abbreviation, that libidinal fixation represents the predisposing, internal factor in the aetiology of the neuroses, while frustration represents the accidental, external one.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3409

I take the opportunity here of warning you against taking sides in a quite unnecessary dispute. In scientific matters people are very fond of selecting one portion of the truth, putting it in the place of the whole and of then disputing the rest, which is no less true, in favour of this one portion. In just this way a number of schools of opinion have already split off from the psycho-analytic movement, some of which recognize the egoistic instincts while disavowing the sexual ones, and others attribute importance to the influence of the real tasks of life while overlooking the individual’s past - and others besides. Now here we have a similar occasion for pointing a contrast and starting a controversy. Are neuroses exogenous or endogenous illnesses? Are they the inevitable result of a particular constitution or the product of certain detrimental (traumatic) experiences in life? More particularly, are they brought about by fixation of the libido (and the other features of the sexual constitution) or by the pressure of frustration? This dilemma seems to me no more sensible on the whole than another that I might put to you: does a baby come about through being begotten by its father or conceived by its mother? Both determinants are equally in dispensable, as you will justly reply. In the matter of the causation of the neuroses the relation, if not precisely the same, is very similar. As regards their causation, instances of neurotic illness fall into a series within which the two factors - sexual constitution and experience, or, if you prefer it, fixation of the libido and frustration - are represented in such a manner that if there is more of the one there is less of the other. At one end of the series are the extreme cases of which you could say with conviction: these people, in consequence of the singular development of their libido, would have fallen ill in any case, whatever they had experienced and however carefully their lives had been sheltered. At the other end there are the cases, as to which, on the contrary, you would have had to judge that they would certainly have escaped falling ill if their lives had not brought them into this or that situation. In the cases lying within the series a greater or lesser amount of predisposition in the sexual constitution is combined with a lesser or greater amount of detrimental experience in their lives. Their sexual constitution would not have led them into a neurosis if they had not had these experiences, and these experiences would not have had a traumatic effect on them if their libido had been otherwise disposed. In this series I can perhaps allow a certain preponderance in significance to the predisposing factors; but even that admission depends on how far you choose to extend the frontiers of neurotic illness.

I propose, Gentlemen, that we should name a series of this kind a ‘complemental series’, and I forewarn you that we shall have occasion to construct others of the same kind.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3410

The tenacity with which the libido adheres to particular trends and objects - what may be described as the ‘adhesiveness’ of the libido - makes its appearance as an independent factor, varying from individual to individual, whose determinants are quite unknown to us, but whose significance for the aetiology of the neuroses we shall certainly no longer underestimate. We should not, on the other hand, over-estimate the intimacy of this connection. For a similar ‘adhesiveness’ of the libido occurs (for unknown reasons) under numerous conditions in normal people, and it is found as a determining factor in people who are in one sense the contrary of neurotics - in perverts. It was known even before the days of psycho-analysis (cf. Binet) that in the anamnesis of perverts a very early impression of an abnormal instinctual trend or choice of object was quite often found, to which the subject’s libido remained attached all through his life. It is often impossible to say what it is that enabled this impression to exercise such an intense attraction on the libido. I will describe a case of this sort which I myself observed.

The subject was a man who is to-day quite indifferent to the genitals and other attractions of women, but who can be plunged into irresistible sexual excitement only by a foot of a particular form wearing a shoe. He can recall an event from his sixth year which was decisive for the fixation of his libido. He was sitting on a stool beside the governess who was to give him lessons in English. The governess, who was an elderly, dried-up, plain-looking spinster, with pale-blue eyes and a snub nose, had something wrong with her foot that day, and on that account kept it, wearing a velvet slipper, stretched out on a cushion. Her leg itself was most decently concealed. A thin, scraggy foot, like the one he had then seen belonging to his governess, thereupon became (after a timid attempt at normal sexual activity at puberty) his only sexual object; and the man was irresistibly attracted if a foot of this kind was associated with other features besides which recalled the type of the English governess. This fixation of his libido, however, made him, not into a neurotic, but into a pervert - what we call a foot-fetishist. You see, then, that although an excessive, and moreover premature, fixation of the libido is indispensable for the causation of neuroses, the area of its effects extends far beyond the field of the neuroses. This determinant, too, is as little decisive in itself as is the frustration which we have already talked about.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3411

Thus the problem of the causation of the neuroses seems to grow more complicated. In fact, psycho-analytic investigation makes us acquainted with a fresh factor, which is not taken into account in our aetiological series and which we can recognize easiest in cases in which what has hitherto been a healthy condition is suddenly disturbed by an onset of neurotic illness. In such people we regularly and indications of a contention between wishful impulses or, as we are in the habit of saying, a psychical conflict. One part of the personality champions certain wishes while another part opposes them and fends them off. Without such a conflict there is no neurosis. There would not seem to be anything peculiar in this. Our mental life is, as you know, perpetually agitated by conflicts which we have to settle. No doubt, therefore, special conditions must be fulfilled if such a conflict is to become pathogenic. We must ask what these conditions are, between what mental powers these pathogenic conflicts are played out, and what the relation is between the conflict and the other causative factors.

I hope to be able to give you adequate replies to these questions, even though the replies may be reduced to schematic dimensions. The conflict is conjured up by frustration, as a result of which the libido, deprived of satisfaction, is driven to look for other objects and paths. The necessary precondition of the conflict is that these other paths and objects arouse displeasure in one part of the personality, so that a veto is imposed which makes the new method of satisfaction impossible as it stands. From this point the construction of symptoms pursues its course, which we shall follow later. The repudiated libidinal trends nevertheless succeed in getting their way by certain roundabout paths, though not, it is true, without taking the objection into account by submitting to some distortions and mitigations. The roundabout paths are those taken by the construction of symptoms; the symptoms are the fresh or substitute satisfaction which has become necessary owing to the fact of frustration.

The meaning of psychical conflict can be adequately expressed in another way by saying that for an external frustration to become pathogenic an internal frustration must be added to it. In that case, of course, the external and internal frustration relate to different paths and objects. The external frustration removes one possibility of satisfaction and the internal frustration seeks to exclude another possibility, about which the conflict then breaks out. I prefer this way of representing the matter because it has a secret content. For it hints at the probability that the internal impediments arose from real external obstacles during the prehistoric periods of human development.

But what are the powers from which the objection to the libidinal trend arises? What is the other party to the pathogenic conflict? These powers, to put it quite generally, are the non sexual instinctual forces. We class them together as the ‘ego instincts’. The psycho-analysis of the transference-neuroses gives us no easy access to a further dissecting of them; at most we come to know them to some extent by the resistances which oppose analysis. The pathogenic conflict is thus one between the ego-instincts and the sexual instincts. In a whole number of cases, it looks as though there might also be a conflict between different purely sexual trends. But in essence that is the same thing; for, of the two sexual trends that are in conflict, one is always, as we might say, ‘ego-syntonic’, while the other provokes the ego’s defence. It therefore still remains a conflict between the ego and sexuality.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3412

Over and over again, Gentlemen, when psycho-analysis has claimed that some mental event is the product of the sexual instincts, it has been angrily pointed out to it by way of defence that human beings do not consist only of sexuality, that there are instincts and interests in mental life other than sexual ones, that it ought not to derive ‘everything’ from sexuality, and so on. Well, it is most gratifying for once in a way to find ourselves in agreement with our opponents. Psycho-analysis has never forgotten that there are instinctual forces as well which are not sexual. It was based on a sharp distinction between the sexual instincts and the ego-instincts, and, in spite of all objections, it has maintained not that the neuroses are derived from sexuality but that their origin is due to a conflict between the ego and sexuality. Nor has it any conceivable reason for disputing the existence or significance of the ego-instincts while it pursues the part played by the sexual instincts in illness and in ordinary life. It has simply been its fate to begin by concerning itself with the sexual instincts because the transference neuroses made them the most easily accessible to examination and because it was incumbent on it to study what other people had neglected.

Nor is it a fact that psycho-analysis has paid no attention whatever to the non-sexual part of the personality. It is precisely the distinction between the ego and sexuality which has enabled us to recognize with special clarity that the ego instincts pass through an important process of development a development which is neither completely independent of the libido nor without a counter-effect upon it. Nevertheless, we are far less well acquainted with the development of the ego than of the libido, since it is only the study of the narcissistic neuroses that promises to give us an insight into the structure of the ego. We already have before us, however, a notable attempt by Ferenczi to make a theoretical construction of the stages of development of the ego, and there are at least two points at which we have a solid basis for judging that development. It is not our belief that a person’s libidinal interests are from the first in opposition to his self-preservative interests; on the contrary, the ego endeavours at every stage to remain in harmony with its sexual organization as it is at the time and to fit itself into it. The succession of the different phases of libidinal development probably follows a prescribed programme. But the possibility cannot be rejected that this course of events can be influenced by the ego, and we may expect equally to find a certain parallelism, a certain correspondence, between the developmental phases of the ego and the libido; indeed a disturbance of that correspondence might provide a pathogenic factor. We are now faced by the important consideration of how the ego behaves if its libido leaves a strong fixation behind at some point in its (the libido’s) development. The ego may accept this and consequently become to that extent perverse or, what is the same thing, infantile. It may, however, adopt a non compliant attitude to the libido’s settling down in this position, in which case the ego experiences a repression where the libido has experienced a fixation.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3413

Thus we discover that the third factor in the aetiology of the neuroses, the tendency to conflict, is as much dependent on the development of the ego as on that of the libido. Our insight into the causation of the neuroses is thus made more complete. First there is the most general precondition - frustration; next, fixation of the libido which forces it into particular directions; and thirdly, the tendency to conflict, arising from the development of the ego, which rejects these libidinal impulses. The situation, then, is not so very confused and hard to penetrate as it probably seemed to you during the course of my remarks. It is true, however, that we shall find we have not yet finished with it. There is something new to be added and something already familiar to be further examined.

In order to demonstrate to you the influence which the development of the ego has upon the construction of conflicts and upon the causation of neuroses, I should like to put an example before you - one which, it is true, is a complete invention but which is nowhere divorced from probability. I shall describe it (on the basis of the title of one of Nestroy’s farces) as ‘In the Basement and on the First Floor’. The care taker of the house inhabits the basement and its landlord, a wealthy and respectable gentleman, the first floor. Both have children, and we may suppose that the landlord’s little daughter is allowed to play, without any supervision, with the proletarian girl. It might very easily happen, then, that the children’s games would take on a ‘naughty’ - that is to say, a sexual - character, that they would play at ‘father and mother’, that they would watch each other at their most private business and excite each other’s genitals. The caretaker’s girl, though only five or six years old, would have had an opportunity of observing a good deal of adult sexuality, and she might well play the part of seductress in all this. These experiences, even If they were not continued over a long period, would be enough to set certain sexual impulses to work in the two children; and, after their games together had ceased, these impulses would for several years- afterwards find expression in masturbation. So much for their experiences in common; the final outcome in the two children will be very different. The caretaker’s daughter will continue her masturbation, perhaps, till her menstrual periods begin and she will then give it up with no difficulty. A few years later she will find a lover and perhaps have a baby. She will take up some occupation or other, possibly become a popular figure on the stage and end up as an aristocrat. Her career is more likely to be less brilliant, but in any case she will go through her life undamaged by the early exercise of her sexuality and free from neurosis. With the landlord’s little girl things will be different. At an early stage and while she is still a child she will get an idea that she has done something wrong; after a short time, but perhaps only after a severe struggle, she will give up her masturbatory satisfaction, but she will nevertheless still have some sense of oppression about her. When in her later girlhood she is in a position to learn something of human sexual intercourse, she will turn away from it with unexplained disgust and prefer to remain in ignorance. And now she will probably be subject to a fresh emergence of an irresistible pressure to masturbate of which she will not dare to complain. During the years in which she should exercise a feminine attraction upon some man, a neurosis breaks out in her which cheats her of marriage and her hopes in life. If after this an analysis succeeds in gaining an insight into her neurosis, it will turn out that the well-brought-up, intelligent and high-minded girl has completely repressed her sexual impulses, but that these, unconscious to her, are still attached to her petty experiences with her childhood friend.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3414

The difference between the lives of these two, in spite of their having had the same experience, rests on the fact that the ego of one of them underwent a development with which the other never met. Sexual activity seemed to the caretaker’s daughter just as natural and harmless in later life as it had in childhood. The landlord’s daughter came under the influence of education and accepted its demands. From the suggestions offered to it, her ego constructed ideals of feminine purity and abstinence which are incompatible with sexual activity; her intellectual education reduced her interest in the feminine part which she was destined to play. Owing to this higher moral and intellectual development of her ego she came into conflict with the demands of her sexuality.

I will dwell for a little to-day on yet another point in ego development, partly because I have some remoter aims in view, but also because what follows is precisely calculated to justify the sharp separation between the ego-instincts and the sexual instincts which we favour but which is not self-evident. In forming our judgement of the two courses of development both of the ego and of the libido - we must lay emphasis on a consideration which has not often hitherto been taken into account. For both of them are at bottom heritages, abbreviated recapitulations of the development which all mankind has passed through from its primaeval days over long periods of time. In the case of the development of the libido, this phylogenetic origin is, I venture to think, immediately obvious. Consider how in one class of animals the genital apparatus is brought into the closest relation to the mouth, while in another it cannot be distinguished from the excretory apparatus, and in yet others it is linked to the motor organs - all of which you will find attractively set out in W. Bölsche’s valuable book. Among animals one can find, so to speak in petrified form, every species of perversion of the sexual organization. In the case of human beings, however, this phylogenetic point of view is partly veiled by the fact that what is at bottom inherited is nevertheless freshly acquired in the development of the individual, probably because the same conditions which originally necessitated its acquisition persist and continue to operate upon each individual. I should like to add that origin ally the operation of these conditions was creative but that it is now evocative. Besides this, there is no doubt that the prescribed course of development can be disturbed and altered in each individual by recent external influences. But we know the power which forced a development of this kind upon humanity and maintains its pressure in the same direction to-day. It is, once again, frustration by reality, or, if we are to give it its true, grand name, the pressure of vital needs - Necessity (Άνάγκη). She has been a strict educator and has made much out of us. The neurotics are among those of her children to whom her strictness has brought evil results; but that is a risk with all education. This appreciation of the necessities of life heed not, incidentally, weigh against the importance, of `internal developmental trends’, if such can be shown to be present.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3415

Now it is a very noteworthy fact that the sexual instincts and the self-preservative instincts do not behave in the same way towards real necessity. The self-preservative instincts, and everything to do with them, are much easier to educate: they learn early to comply with necessity and to arrange their developments in accordance with the instructions of reality. This is intelligible, since they could not obtain the objects they need in any other way; and without those objects the individual would inevitably perish. The sexual instincts are harder to educate, for at first they have no need of an object. Since they are attached like parasites, as it were, to the other bodily functions, and find their satisfaction auto-erotically on the subject’s own body, they are to begin with withdrawn from the educative influence of real necessity, and they retain this characteristic of being self-willed and inaccessible to influence (what we describe as being ‘unreasonable’) in most people in some respect all through their lives. Moreover, as a rule the educability of a youthful individual is at an end when his sexual needs arise in their full strength. Educators are aware of this and act accordingly; but the findings of psycho-analysis may perhaps also induce them to shift the main impact of education on to the earliest years of childhood, from infancy onwards. The little creature is often completed by the fourth or fifth year of life, and after that merely brings gradually to light what is already within him.

In order to appreciate the full significance of the difference which I have pointed out between the two groups of instincts, we shall have to go back a long way and introduce one of those considerations which deserve to be described as economic. This leads us to one of the most important, but unluckily also one of the most obscure, regions of psycho-analysis. We may ask whether in the operation of our mental apparatus a main purpose can be detected, and we may reply as a first approximation that that purpose is directed to obtaining pleasure. It seems as though our total mental activity is directed towards achieving pleasure and avoiding unpleasure - that it is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle. We should of all things like to know, then, what determines the generation of pleasure and unpleasure; but that is just what we are ignorant of. We can only venture to say this much: that pleasure is in some way connected with the diminution, reduction or extinction of the amounts of stimulus prevailing in the mental apparatus, and that similarly unpleasure is connected with their increase. An examination of the most intense pleasure which is accessible to human beings, the pleasure of accomplishing the sexual act, leaves little doubt on this point. Since in such processes related to pleasure it is a question of what happens to quantities of mental excitation or energy, we call considerations of this kind economic. It will be noticed that we can describe the tasks and achievements of the mental apparatus in another and more general way than by stressing the acquisition of pleasure. We can say that the mental apparatus serves the purpose of mastering and disposing of the amounts of stimulus and sums of excitation that impinge on it from outside and inside. It is immediately obvious that the sexual instincts, from beginning to end of their development, work towards obtaining pleasure; they retain their original function unaltered. The other instincts, the ego-instincts, have the same aim to start with. But under the influence of the instructress Necessity, they soon learn to replace the pleasure principle by a modification of it. For them the task of avoiding unpleasure turns out to be almost as important as that of obtaining pleasure. The ego discovers that it is inevitable for it to renounce immediate satisfaction, to postpone the obtaining of pleasure, to put up with a little unpleasure and to abandon certain sources of pleasure altogether. An ego thus educated has become ‘reasonable’; it no longer lets itself be governed by the pleasure principle, but obeys the reality principle, which also at bottom seeks to obtain pleasure, but pleasure which is assured through taking account of reality, even though it is pleasure postponed and diminished.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3416

The transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle is one of the most important steps forward in the ego’s development. We know already that it is only late and unwillingly that the sexual instincts join in this piece of development, and we shall hear later the consequences for human beings of the fact that their sexuality is content with such a loose connection with external reality. And now in conclusion one last remark on this subject. If man’s ego has its process of development like the libido, you will not be surprised to hear that there are also ‘regressions of the ego’, and you will be anxious to know too what part may be played in neurotic illnesses by this return of the ego to earlier phases of its development.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3417

LECTURE XXIII

THE PATHS TO THE FORMATION OF SYMPTOMS

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - For laymen the symptoms constitute the essence of a disease and its cure consists in the removal of the symptoms. Physicians attach importance to distinguishing the symptoms from the disease and declare that getting rid of the symptoms does not amount to curing the disease. But the only tangible thing left of the disease after the symptoms have been got rid of is the capacity to form new symptoms. For that reason we will for the moment adopt the layman’s position and assume that to unravel the symptoms means the same thing as to understand the disease.

Symptoms - and of course we are dealing now with psychical (or psychogenic) symptoms and psychical illness - are acts detrimental, or at least useless, to the subject’s life as a whole, often complained of by him as unwelcome and bringing unpleasure or suffering to him. The main damage they do resides in the mental expenditure which they themselves involve and in the further expenditure that becomes necessary for fighting against them. Where there is an extensive formation of symptoms, these two sorts of expenditure can result in an extraordinary impoverishment of the subject in regard to the mental energy available to him and so in paralysing him for all the important tasks of life. Since this outcome depends mainly on the quantity of the energy which is thus absorbed, you will easily see that ‘being ill’ is in its essence a practical concept. But if you take up a theoretical point of view and disregard this matter of quantity, you may quite well say that we are all ill - that is, neurotic - since the preconditions for the formation of symptoms can also be observed in normal people.

We already know that neurotic symptoms are the outcome of a conflict which arises over a new method of satisfying the libido. The two forces which have fallen out meet once again in the symptom and are reconciled, as it were, by the compromise of the symptom that has been constructed. It is for that reason, too, that the symptom is so resistant: it is supported from both sides. We also know that one of the two partners to the conflict is the unsatisfied libido which has been repulsed by reality and must now seek for other paths to its satisfaction. If reality remains relentless even though the libido is ready to take another object in place of the one that has been refused to it, then it will finally be compelled to take the path of regression and strive to find satisfaction either in one of the organizations which it has already outgrown or from one of the objects which it has earlier abandoned. The libido is lured into the path of regression by the fixation which it has left behind it at these points in its development.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3418

The path to perversion branches off sharply from that to neurosis. If these regressions rouse no objection from the ego, no neurosis will come about either; and the libido will arrive at some real, even though no longer normal, satisfaction. But if the ego, which has under its control not only consciousness but also the approaches to motor innervation and accordingly to the realization of mental desires, does not agree with these regressions, conflict will follow. The libido is, as it were, cut off and must try to escape in some direction where, in accordance with the requirements of the pleasure principle, it can find a discharge for its cathexis of energy. It must withdraw from the ego. An escape of this kind is offered it by the fixations on the path of its development which it has now entered on regressively - fixations from which the ego had protected itself in the past by repressions. By cathecting these repressed positions as it flows backward, the libido has withdrawn from the ego and its laws, and has at the same time renounced all the education it has acquired under the ego’s influence. It was docile so long as satisfaction beckoned to it; but under the double pressure of external and internal frustration it becomes refractory, and recalls earlier and better times. Such is the libido’s fundamentally unchangeable character. The ideas to which it now transfers its energy as a cathexis belong to the system of the unconscious and are subject to the processes which are possible there, particularly to condensation and displacement. In this way conditions are established which completely resemble those in dream-construction. The dream proper, which has been completed in the unconscious and is the fulfilment of an unconscious wishful phantasy, is brought up against a portion of (pre)conscious activity which exercises the office of censorship and which, when it has been indemnified, permits the formation of the manifest dream as a compromise. In the same way, what represents the libido in the unconscious has to reckon with the power of the preconscious ego. The opposition which had been raised against it in the ego pursues it as an ‘anticathexis’ and compels it to choose a form of expression which can at the same time become an expression of the opposition itself. Thus the symptom emerges as a many-times-distorted derivative of the unconscious libidinal wish-fulfilment, an ingeniously chosen piece of ambiguity with two meanings in complete mutual contradiction. In this last respect, however, there is a distinction between the construction of a dream and of a symptom. For in dream-formation the preconscious purpose is merely concerned to preserve sleep, to allow nothing that would disturb it to make its way into consciousness; it does not insist upon calling out sharply ‘No! on the contrary!’ to the unconscious wishful impulse. It can afford to be more tolerant because the situation of someone sleeping is less perilous. The state of sleep in itself bars any outlet into reality.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3419

You see, then, that the libido’s escape under conditions of conflict is made possible by the presence of fixations. The regressive cathexis of these fixations leads to the circumvention of the repression and to a discharge (or satisfaction) of the libido, subject to the conditions of a compromise being observed. By the roundabout path viâ the unconscious and the old fixations, the libido finally succeeds in forcing its way through to real satisfaction - though to one which is extremely restricted and scarcely recognizable as such. Let me add two comments to this conclusion. First, I should like you to notice how closely here the libido and the unconscious on one side and the ego, consciousness and reality on the other are shown to be interlinked, although to begin with they did not belong together at all. And secondly, I must ask you to bear in mind that everything I have said about this and what is still to follow relates only to the formation of symptoms in the neurosis of hysteria.

Where, then, does the libido find the fixations which it requires in order to break through the repressions? In the activities and experiences of infantile sexuality, in the abandoned component trends, in the objects of childhood which have been given up. It is to them, accordingly, that the libido returns. The significance of this period of childhood is twofold: on the one hand, during it the instinctual trends which the child has inherited with his innate disposition first become manifest, and secondly, others of his instincts are for the first time awakened and made active by external impressions and accidental experiences. There is no doubt, I think, that we are justified in making this twofold division. The manifestation of the innate disposition is indeed not open to any critical doubts, but analytic experience actually compels us to assume that purely chance experiences in childhood are able to leave fixations of the libido behind them. Nor do I see any theoretical difficulty in this. Constitutional dispositions are also undoubtedly after-effects of experiences by ancestors in the past; they too were once acquired. Without such acquisition there would be no heredity. And is it conceivable that acquisition such as this, leading to inheritance, would come to an end precisely with the generation we are considering? The significance of infantile experiences should not be totally neglected, as people like doing, in comparison with the experiences of the subject’s ancestors and of his own maturity; on the contrary, they call for particular consideration. They are all the more momentous because they occur in times of incomplete development and are for that very reason liable to have traumatic effects. The studies on developmental mechanics by Roux and others have shown that the prick of a needle into an embryonic germinal layer in the act of cell-division results in a severe disturbance of development. The same injury inflicted on a larval or fully grown animal would do no damage.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3420

Thus fixation of the libido in the adult, which we introduced into the aetiological equation of neurosis as representing the constitutional factor, now falls, for our purposes, into two further parts: the inherited constitution and the disposition acquired in early childhood. As we all know, a diagram is certain of a sympathetic reception from students. So I will summarize the position diagrammatically:

Causation of neurosis = Disposition due to Fixation of Libido + Accidental Experience (Traumatic)

Sexual Constitution                                          Infantile Experience

(Prehistoric Experience)

The hereditary sexual constitution presents us with a great variety of dispositions, according as one component instinct or another, alone or in combination with others, is inherited in particular strength. The sexual constitution forms once again, together with the factor of infantile experience, a ‘complemental series’ exactly similar to the one we first came to know between disposition and the accidental experience of the adult. In both of them we find the same extreme cases and the same relations between the two factors concerned. And here the question suggests itself of whether the most striking kinds of libidinal regressions - those to earlier stages of the sexual organization - may not be predominantly determined by the hereditary constitutional factor. But it is best to postpone answering this question till we have been able to take a wider range of forms of neurotic illness into account.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3421

Let us dwell now on the fact that analytic research shows the libido of neurotics tied to their infantile sexual experiences. It thus lends these the appearance of an enormous importance for the life and illness of human beings. They retain this importance undiminished so far as the work of therapeutics is concerned. But if we turn away from that task we can nevertheless easily see that there is a danger here of a misunderstanding which might mislead us into basing our view of life too one-sidedly on the neurotic situation. We must after all subtract from the importance of infantile experiences the fact that the libido has returned to them regressively, after being driven out of its later positions. In that case the contrary conclusion becomes very tempting - that these libidinal experiences had no importance at all at the time they occurred but only acquired it regressively. You will recall that we have already considered a similar alternative in our discussion of the Oedipus complex.

Once again we shall not find it hard to reach a decision. The assertion that the libidinal cathexis (and therefore the pathogenic significance) of the infantile experiences has been largely intensified by the regression of the libido is undoubtedly correct, but it would lead to error if we were to regard it alone as decisive. Other considerations must be allowed weight as well.

In the first place observation shows, in a manner that excludes all doubt, that the infantile experiences have an importance of their own and give evidence of it already in childhood. Children too have their neuroses, in which the factor of displacement backwards in time is necessarily very much reduced or is even completely absent, since the onset of the illness follows the traumatic experiences immediately. The study of these infantile neuroses protects us from more than one dangerous misunderstanding of the neuroses of adults, just as the dreams of children gave the key to an understanding of adult dreams. Children’s neuroses are very common, much commoner than is supposed. They are often overlooked, regarded as signs of a bad or naughty child, often, too, kept under by the nursery authorities; but they can always be easily recognized in retrospect. They usually appear in the form of anxiety hysteria. We shall learn on a later occasion what that means. If a neurosis breaks out in later life, analysis regularly reveals it as a direct continuation of the infantile illness which may have emerged as no more than a veiled hint. As I have said, however, there are cases in which these signs of neurosis in childhood proceed uninterruptedly into a lifelong illness. We have been able to analyse a few examples of these children’s neuroses in childhood itself - when they were actually present; but far more often we have had to be content with someone who has fallen ill in adult life enabling us to obtain a deferred insight into his childhood neurosis. In such cases we must not fail to make certain corrections and take certain precautions.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3422

In the second place, we must reflect that it would be inconceivable for the libido to regress so regularly to the period of childhood unless there were something there to exercise an attraction on it. The fixation which we have supposed to be present at particular points in the course of development can only have a meaning if we regard it as consisting in the retention of a certain quota of libidinal energy. And finally I may point out to you that between the intensity and pathogenic importance of infantile and of later experiences a complemental relationship exists similar to the series we have already discussed. There are cases in which the whole weight of causation falls on the sexual experiences of childhood, cases in which those impressions exert a definitely traumatic effect and call for no other support than can be afforded them by an average sexual constitution and the fact of its incomplete development. Alongside of these cases there are others in which the whole accent lies on the later conflicts and the emphasis we find in the analysis laid on the impressions of childhood appears entirely as the work of regression. Thus we have extremes of ‘developmental inhibition’ and ‘regression’ and between them every degree of co-operation between the two factors.

These facts have a certain interest from the point of view of education, which plans the prevention of neuroses by intervening at an early stage in children’s sexual development. So long as one focuses attention principally on infantile sexual experiences, one must suppose that one has done everything for the prophylaxis of nervous illnesses by taking care that the child’s development is delayed and that it is spared experiences of the sort. We already know, however, that the preconditions for the causation of neuroses are complex and cannot be influenced in general if we take account of only a single factor. Strict protection of the young loses value because it is powerless against the constitutional factor. Besides, it is more difficult to carry out than educationists imagine and it brings with it two fresh dangers which must not be underestimated: the fact that it may achieve too much - that it may encourage an excess of sexual repression, with damaging results, and the fact that it may send the child out into life without any defence against the onrush of sexual demands that is to be looked for at puberty. Thus it remains extremely doubtful how far prophylaxis in childhood can be carried with advantage and whether an altered attitude to the immediate situation may not offer a better angle of approach for the prevention of neuroses.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3423

Let us now go back to the symptoms. They create a substitute, then, for the frustrated satisfaction by means of a regression of the libido to earlier times, with which a return to earlier stages of object-choice or of the organization is inseparably bound up. We discovered some time ago that neurotics are anchored somewhere in their past; we know now that it is at a period of their past in which their libido did not lack satisfaction, in which they were happy. They search about in the history of their life till they find a period of that sort, even if they have to go back as far as the time when they were infants in arms - as they remember it or as they imagine it from later hints. In some way the symptom repeats this early infantile kind of satisfaction, distorted by the censorship arising from the conflict, turned as a rule to a feeling of suffering, and mingled with elements from the precipitating cause of the illness. The kind of satisfaction which the symptom brings has much that is strange about it.

We may disregard the fact that it is unrecognizable to the subject, who, on the contrary, feels the alleged satisfaction as suffering and complains of it. This transformation is a function of the psychical conflict under pressure of which the symptom had to be formed. What was once a satisfaction to the subject is, indeed, bound to arouse his resistance or his disgust to-day. We are familiar with a trivial but instructive model of this change of mind. The same child who once eagerly sucked the milk from his mother’s breast is likely a few years later to display a strong dislike to drinking milk, which his upbringing has difficulties in overcoming. This dislike increases to disgust if a skin forms on the milk or the drink containing it. We cannot exclude the possibility, perhaps, that the skin conjures up a memory of the mother’s breast, once so ardently desired. Between the two situations, however, there lies the experience of weaning, with its traumatic effects.

It is something else besides that makes symptoms seem strange to us and incomprehensible as a means of libidinal satisfaction. They do not remind us in the very least of anything from which we are in the habit of normally expecting satisfaction. Usually they disregard objects and in so doing abandon their relation to external reality. We can see that this is a consequence of turning away from the reality principle and of returning to the pleasure principle. But it is also a return to a kind of extended auto-erotism, of the sort that offered the sexual instinct its first satisfactions. In place of a change in the external world these substitute a change in the subject’s own body: they set an internal act in place of an external one, an adaptation in place of an action - once again, something that corresponds, phylogenetically, to a highly significant regression. We shall only understand this in connection with something new that we have still to learn from the analytic researches into the formation of symptoms. We must further remember that the same processes belonging to the unconscious play a part in the formation of symptoms as in the formation of dreams - namely, condensation and displacement. A symptom, like a dream, represents something as fulfilled: a satisfaction in the infantile manner. But by means of extreme condensation that satisfaction can be compressed into a single sensation or innervation, and by means of extreme displacement it can be restricted to one small detail of the entire libidinal complex. It is not to be wondered at if we, too, often have difficulty in recognizing in a symptom the libidinal satisfaction whose presence we suspect and which is invariably confirmed.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3424

I have warned you that we still have something new to learn; it is indeed something surprising and perplexing. By means of analysis, as you know, starting from the symptoms, we arrive at a knowledge of the infantile experiences to which the libido is fixated and out of which the symptoms are made. Well, the surprise lies in the fact that these scenes from infancy are not always true. Indeed, they are not true in the majority of cases, and in a few of them they are the direct opposite of the historical truth. As you will see, this discovery is calculated more than any other to discredit either analysis, which has led to this result, or the patients, on whose statements the analysis and our whole understanding of the neuroses are founded. But there is something else remarkably perplexing about it. If the infantile experiences brought to light by analysis were invariably real, we should feel that we were standing on firm ground; if they were regularly falsified and revealed as inventions, as phantasies of the patient, we should be obliged to abandon this shaky ground and look for salvation elsewhere. But neither of these things is the case: the position can be shown to be that the childhood experiences constructed or remembered in analysis are sometimes indisputably false and sometimes equally certainly correct, and in most cases compounded of truth and falsehood. Sometimes, then, symptoms represent events which really took place and to which we may attribute an influence on the fixation of the libido, and sometimes they represent phantasies of the patient’s which are not, of course, suited to playing an aetiological role. It is difficult to find one’s way about in this. We can make a first start, perhaps, with a similar discovery - namely, that the isolated childhood memories that people have possessed consciously from time immemorial and before there was any such thing as analysis may equally be falsified or at least may combine truth and falsehood in plenty. In their case there is seldom any difficulty in showing their incorrectness; so we at least have the reassurance of knowing that the responsibility for this unexpected disappointment lies, not with analysis, but in some way with the patients.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3425

After a little reflection we shall easily understand what it is about this state of things that perplexes us so much. It is the low valuation of reality, the neglect of the distinction between it and phantasy. We are tempted to feel offended at the patient’s having taken up our time with invented stories. Reality seems to us something worlds apart from invention, and we set a very different value on it. Moreover the patient, too, looks at things in this light in his normal thinking. When he brings up the material which leads from behind his symptoms to the wishful situations modelled on his infantile experiences, we are in doubt to begin with whether we are dealing with reality or phantasies. Later, we are enabled by certain indications to come to a decision and we are faced by the task of conveying it to the patient. This, however, invariably gives rise to difficulties. If we begin by telling him straight away that he is now engaged in bringing to light the phantasies with which he has disguised the history of his childhood just as every nation disguises its forgotten prehistory by constructing legends), we observe that his interest in pursuing the subject further suddenly diminishes in an undesirable fashion. He too wants to experience realities and despises everything that is merely ‘imaginary’. If; however, we leave him, till this piece of work is finished, in the belief that we are occupied in investigating the real events of his childhood, we run the risk of his later on accusing us of being mistaken and laughing at us for our apparent credulity. It will be a long time before he can take in our proposal that we should equate phantasy and reality and not bother to begin with whether the childhood experiences under examination are the one or the other. Yet this is clearly the only correct attitude to adopt towards these mental productions. They too possess a reality of a sort. It remains a fact that the patient has created these phantasies for himself, and this fact is of scarcely less importance for his neurosis than if he had really experienced what the phantasies contain. The phantasies possess psychical as contrasted with material reality, and we gradually learn to understand that in the world of the neuroses it is psychical reality which is the decisive kind.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3426

Among the occurrences which recur again and again in the youthful history of neurotics - which are scarcely ever absent - there are a few of particular importance, which also deserve, on that account, I think, to be brought into greater prominence than the rest. As specimens of this class I will enumerate these: observation of parental intercourse, seduction by an adult and threat of being castrated. It would be a mistake to suppose that they are never characterized by material reality; on the contrary, this is often established incontestably through enquiries from older members of the patient’s family. It is by no means a rare thing, for instance, for a little boy, who is beginning to play with his penis in a naughty way and is not yet aware that one must conceal such activities, to be threatened by a parent or nurse with having his penis or his sinful hand cut off. Parents will often admit this when they are asked, since they think they have done something useful in making such a threat; a number of people have a correct conscious memory of such a threat, especially if it was made at a somewhat later period. If the threat is delivered by the mother or some other female she usually shifts its performance on to the father or the doctor. In Struwwelpeter, the famous work of the Frankfurt paediatrician Hoffmann (which owes its popularity precisely to an understanding of the sexual and other complexes of childhood), you will find castration softened into a cutting-off of the thumbs as a punishment for obstinate sucking. But it is highly improbable that children are threatened with castration as often as it appears in the analyses of neurotics. We shall be satisfied by realizing that the child puts a threat of this kind together in his imagination on the basis of hints, helped out by a knowledge that auto-erotic satisfaction is forbidden and under the impression of his discovery of the female genitals. Nor is it only in proletarian families that it is perfectly possible for a child, while he is not yet credited with possessing an understanding or a memory, to be a witness of the sexual act between his parents or other grown-up people; and the possibility cannot be rejected that he will be able to understand and react to the impression in retrospect. If, however, the intercourse is described with the most minute details, which would be difficult to observe, or if, as happens most frequently, it turns out to have been intercourse from behind more ferarum [in the manner of animals], there can be no remaining doubt that the phantasy is based on an observation of intercourse between animals (such as dogs) and that its motive was the child’s unsatisfied scopophilia during puberty. The extreme achievement on these lines is a phantasy of observing parental intercourse while one is still an unborn baby in the womb. Phantasies of being seduced are of particular interest, because so often they are not phantasies but real memories. Fortunately, however, they are nevertheless not real as often as seemed at first to be shown by the findings of analysis. Seduction by an older child or by one of the same age is even more frequent than by an adult; and if in the case of girls who produce such an event in the story of their childhood their father figures fairly regularly as the seducer, there can be no doubt either of the imaginary nature of the accusation or of the motive that has led to it. A phantasy of being seduced when no seduction has occurred is usually employed by a child to screen the auto-erotic period of his sexual activity. He spares himself shame about masturbation by retrospectively phantasying a desired object into these earliest times. You must not suppose, however, that sexual abuse of a child by its nearest male relatives belongs entirely to the realm of phantasy. Most analysts will have treated cases in which such events were real and could be unimpeachably established; but even so they related to the later years of childhood and had been transposed into earlier times.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3427

The only impression we gain is that these events of childhood are somehow demanded as a necessity, that they are among the essential elements of a neurosis. If they have occurred in reality, so much to the good; but if they have been withheld by reality, they are put together from hints and supplemented by phantasy. The outcome is the same, and up to the present we have not succeeded in pointing to any difference in the consequences, whether phantasy or reality has had the greater share in these events of childhood. Here we simply have once again one of the complemental relations that I have so often mentioned; moreover it is the strangest of all we have met with. Whence comes the need for these phantasies and the material for them? There can be no doubt that their sources lie in the instincts; but it has still to be explained why the same phantasies with the same content are created on every occasion. I am prepared with an answer which I know will seem daring to you. I believe these primal phantasies, as I should like to call them, and no doubt a few others as well, are a phylogenetic endowment. In them the individual reaches beyond his own experience into primaeval experience at points where his own experience as been too rudimentary. It seems to me quite possible that all the things that are told to us to-day in analysis as phantasy - the seduction of children, the inflaming of sexual excitement by observing parental intercourse, the threat of castration (or rather castration itself) - were once real occurrences in the primaeval times of the human family, and that children in their phantasies are simply filling in the gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth. I have repeatedly been led to suspect that the psychology of the neuroses has stored up in it more of the antiquities of human development than any other source.

The things I have just been discussing, Gentlemen, compel me to enter more closely into the origin and significance of the mental activity which is described as ‘phantasy’. As you are aware, it enjoys a universally high reputation, without its position in mental life having become clear. I have the following remarks to make about it. The human ego is, as you know, slowly educated by the pressure of external necessity to appreciate reality and obey the reality principle; in the course of this process it is obliged to renounce, temporarily or permanently, a variety of the objects and aims at which its striving for pleasure, and not only for sexual pleasure, is directed. But men have always found it hard to renounce pleasure; they cannot bring themselves to do it without some kind of compensation. They have therefore retained a mental activity in which all these abandoned sources of pleasure and methods of achieving pleasure are granted a further existence - a form of existence in which they are left free from the claims of reality and of what we call ‘reality-testing’. Every desire takes before long the form of picturing its own fulfilment; there is no doubt that dwelling upon imaginary wish-fulfilments brings satisfaction with it, although it does not interfere with a knowledge that what is concerned is not real. Thus in the activity of phantasy human beings continue to enjoy the freedom from external compulsion which they have long since renounced in reality. They have contrived to alternate between remaining an animal of pleasure and being once more a creature of reason. Indeed, they cannot subsist on the scanty satisfaction which they can extort from reality. ‘We cannot do without auxiliary constructions’, as Theodor Fontane once said. The creation of the mental realm of phantasy finds a perfect parallel in the establishment of ‘reservations’ or ‘nature reserves’ in places where the requirements of agriculture, communications and industry threaten to bring about changes in the original face of the earth which will quickly make it unrecognizable. A nature reserve preserves its original state which everywhere else has to our regret been sacrificed to necessity. Everything, including what is useless and even what is noxious, can grow and proliferate there as it pleases. The mental realm of phantasy is just such a reservation withdrawn from the reality principle.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3428

The best-known productions of phantasy are the so-called ‘day-dreams’, which we have already come across, imagined satisfactions of ambitious, megalomanic, erotic wishes, which flourish all the more exuberantly the more reality counsels modesty and restraint. The essence of the happiness of phantasy - making the obtaining of pleasure free once more from the assent of reality - is shown in them unmistakably. We know that such day-dreams are the nucleus and prototype of night-dreams. A night-dream is at bottom nothing other than a day-dream that has been made utilizable owing the liberation of the instinctual impulses at night, and that has been distorted by the form assumed by mental activity at night. We have already become familiar with the idea that even a day-dream is not necessarily conscious - that there are unconscious day-dreams, as well. Such unconscious day-dreams are thus the source not only of night-dreams but also of neurotic symptoms.

The importance of the part played by phantasy in the formation of symptoms will be made clear to you by what I have to tell you. I have explained how in the case of frustration the libido cathects regressively the positions which it has given up but to which some quotas of it have remained adhering. I shall not withdraw this or correct it, but I have to insert a connecting link. How does the libido find its way to these points of fixation? All the objects and trends which the libido has given up have not yet been given up in every sense. They or their derivatives are still retained with a certain intensity in phantasies. Thus the libido need only withdraw on to phantasies in order to find the path open to every repressed fixation. These phantasies have enjoyed a certain amount of toleration: they have not come into conflict with the ego, however sharp the contrasts between them may have been, so long as a particular condition is observed. This condition is of a quantitative nature and it is now upset by the backward flow of libido on to the phantasies. As a result of this surplus, the energic cathexis of the phantasies is so much increased that they begin to raise claims, that they develop a pressure in the direction of becoming realized. But this makes a conflict between them and the ego inevitable. Whether they were previously preconscious or conscious, they are now subjected to repression from the direction of the ego and are at the mercy of attraction from the direction of the unconscious. From what are now unconscious phantasies the libido travels back to their origins in the unconscious - to its own points of fixation.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3429

The libido’s retreat to phantasy is an intermediate stage on the path to the formation of symptoms and it seem to call for a special name. C. G. Jung coined the very appropriate one of ‘introversion’, but then most inexpediently gave it another meaning as well. We will continue to take it that introversion denotes the turning away of the libido from the possibilities of real satisfaction and the hypercathexis of phantasies which have hitherto been tolerated as innocent. An introvert is not yet a neurotic, but he is in an unstable situation: he is sure to develop symptoms at the next shift of forces, unless he finds some other outlets for his dammed-up libido. The unreal character of neurotic satisfaction and the neglect of the distinction between phantasy and reality are on the other hand already determined by the fact of lingering at the stage of introversion.

You will no doubt have observed that in these last discussions I have introduced a fresh factor into the structure of the aetiological chain - namely the quantity, the magnitude, of the energies concerned. We have still to take this factor into account everywhere. A purely qualitative analysis of the aetiological determinants is not enough. Or, to put it another way, a merely dynamic view of these mental processes is insufficient; an economic line of approach is also needed. We must tell ourselves that the conflict between two trends does not break out till certain intensities of cathexis have been reached, even though the determinants for it have long been present so far as their subject-matter is concerned. In the same way, the pathogenic significance of the constitutional factors must be weighed according to how much more of one component instinct than of another is present in the inherited disposition. It may even be supposed that the disposition of all human beings is qualitatively alike and that they differ only owing to these quantitative conditions. The quantitative factor is no less decisive as regards capacity to resist neurotic illness. It is a matter of what quota of unemployed libido a person is able to hold in suspension and of how large a fraction of his libido he is able to divert from sexual to sublimated aims. The ultimate aim of mental activity, which may be described qualitatively as an endeavour to obtain pleasure and avoid unpleasure, emerges, looked at from the economic point of view, as the task of mastering the amounts of excitation (mass of stimuli) operating in the mental apparatus and of keeping down their accumulation which creates unpleasure.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3430

This, then, is what I wanted to tell you about the formation of symptoms in the neuroses. But I must not fail to lay emphasis expressly once again on the fact that everything I have said here applies only to the formation of symptoms in hysteria. Even in obsessional neurosis there is much - apart from fundamentals, which remain unaltered - that will be found different. The anticathexes opposing the demands of the instincts (which we have already spoken of in the case of hysteria as well) become prominent in obsessional neurosis and dominate the clinical picture in the form of what are known as ‘reaction formations’. We discover similar and even more far-reaching divergences in the other neuroses, where our researches into the mechanisms of symptom-formation are not yet concluded at any point.

Before I let you go to-day, however, I should like to direct your attention a little longer to a side of the life of phantasy which deserves the most general interest. For there is a path that leads back from phantasy to reality - the pat, that is, of art. An artist is once more in rudiments an introvert, not far removed from neurosis. He is oppressed by excessively powerful instinctual needs. He desires to win honour, power, wealth, fame and the love of women; but he lacks the means for achieving these satisfactions. Consequently, like any other unsatisfied man, he turns away from reality and transfers all his interest, and his libido too, to the wishful constructions of his life of phantasy, whence the path might lead to neurosis. There must be, no doubt, a convergence of all kinds of things if this is not to be the complete outcome of his development; it is well known, indeed, how often artists in particular suffer from a partial inhibition of their efficiency owing to neurosis. Their constitution probably includes a strong capacity for sublimation and a certain degree of laxity in the repressions which are decisive for a conflict. An artist, however, finds a path back to reality in the following manner. To be sure, he is not the only on who leads a life of phantasy. Access to the half-way region of phantasy is permitted by the universal assent of mankind, and everyone suffering from privation expects to derive alleviation and consolation from it. But for those who are not artists the yield of pleasure to be derived from the sources of phantasy is very limited. The ruthlessness of their repressions force them to be content with such meagre day-dreams as are allowed to become conscious. A man who is a true artist has more at his disposal. In the first place, he understands how to work over his day-dreams in such a way as to make them lose what is too personal about them and repels strangers, and to make it possible for others to share in the enjoyment of them. He understands, too, how to tone them down so that they do not easily betray their origin from proscribed sources. Furthermore, he possesses the mysterious power of shaping some particular material until it has become a faithful image of his phantasy; and he knows, moreover, how to link so large a yield of pleasure to this representation of his unconscious phantasy that, for the time being at least, repressions are outweighed and lifted by it. If he is able to accomplish all this, he makes it possible for other people once more to derive consolation and alleviation from their own sources of pleasure in their unconscious which have become inaccessible to them; he earns their gratitude an admiration and he has thus achieved through his phantasy what originally he had achieved only in his phantasy - honour, power and the love of women.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3431

LECTURE XXIV

THE COMMON NEUROTIC STATE

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - Now that we have disposed of such a difficult piece of work in our last discussions, I propose for a time to leave the subject and turn to you yourselves.

For I am aware that you are dissatisfied. You pictured an ‘Introduction to Psycho-Analysis’ very differently. What you expected to hear were lively examples, not the theory. On one occasion, you say, when I told you the parable of ‘In the Basement and on the First Floor’, you grasped something of the way in which neuroses are caused; the observations should have been real ones, however, and not made-up stories. Or when at the start I described two symptoms to you (not invented ones this time, let us hope) and described their solution and their relation to the patients’ lives, the ‘sense’ of symptoms dawned on you. You hoped I should go on along those lines. But instead I gave you long-winded theories, hard to grasp, which were never complete but were always having something fresh added to them; I worked with concepts which I had not yet explained to you; I went from a descriptive account of things to a dynamic one and from that to what I called an ‘economic’ one; I made it hard for you to understand how many of the technical terms I used meant the same thing and were merely being interchanged for reasons of euphony; I brought up such far-reaching conceptions as those of the pleasure and reality principles and of phylogenetically inherited endowments; and, far from introducing you to anything, I paraded something before your eyes which constantly grew more and more remote from you.

Why did I not begin my introduction to the theory of neuroses with what you yourselves know of the neurotic state and what has long aroused your interest - with the peculiar characteristics of neurotic people, their incomprehensible reactions to human intercourse and external influences, their irritability, their incalculable and inexpedient behaviour? Why did I not lead you step by step from an understanding of the simpler, everyday forms of the neurotic state to the problems of its enigmatic, extreme manifestations?

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3432

Indeed, Gentlemen, I cannot even disagree with you. I am not so enamoured of my skill in exposition that I can declare each of its artistic faults to be a peculiar charm. I think myself that it might have been more to your advantage if I had proceeded otherwise; and that was, indeed, my intention. But one cannot always carry out one’s reasonable intentions. There is often something in the material itself which takes charge of one and diverts one from one’s first intentions. Even such a trivial achievement as the arrangement of a familiar piece of material is not entirely subject to an author’s own choice; it takes what line it likes and all one can do is to ask oneself after the event why it has happened in this way and no other.

One reason is probably that the title ‘Introduction to Psycho-Analysis’ is no longer applicable to the present section, which is supposed to deal with the neuroses. An introduction to psycho-analysis is provided by the study of parapraxes and dreams; the theory of the neuroses is psycho-analysis itself. It would not, I believe have been possible to give you a knowledge of the subject-matter of the theory of the neuroses in so short a time except in this concentrated form. It was a question of presenting you with a connected account of the sense and significance of symptoms and of the external and internal determinants and mechanism of their formation. That is what I have tried to do; it is more or less the nucleus of what psycho-analysis has to teach to-day. It involved saying a great deal about the libido and its development and a little, too, about that of the ego. Our introduction had already prepared you in advance for the premisses of our technique and for the major considerations of the unconscious and of repression (of resistance). You will discover from one of the next lectures the points from which the work of psycho-analysis makes its further organic advance. For the time being I have made no secret of the fact that everything I have said is derived from the study of a single group of nervous disorders what are termed the ‘transference neuroses’. Indeed, I have traced the mechanism of symptom-formation in the case only of the hysterical neurosis. Even if you have acquired no thorough knowledge and have not retained every detail, yet I hope that you have formed some picture of the methods by which psycho-analysis works, of the problems which it attacks and of the results at which it has arrived.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3433

I have credited you with a wish that I might have started my description of the neuroses from the behaviour of neurotic people, from an account of the manner in which they suffer under their neurosis, of how they defend themselves against it and how they come to terms with it. No doubt that is an interesting topic, worth investigating; nor would it be very difficult to handle. But it would be of debatable wisdom to start with it. There would be a risk of not discovering the unconscious and at the same time of overlooking the great importance of the libido and of judging everything as it appears to the ego of the neurotic subject. It is obvious that this ego is not a trustworthy or impartial agency. The ego is indeed the power which disavows the unconscious and has degraded it into being repressed; so how can we trust it to be fair to the unconscious? The most prominent elements in what is thus repressed are the repudiated demands of sexuality, and it is quite self-evident that we should never be able to guess their extent and importance from the ego’s conceptions. From the moment the notion of repression dawns on us, we are warned against making one of the two contesting parties (and the victorious one, at that) into being judge in the dispute. We are prepared to find that the ego’s assertions will lead us astray. If we are to believe the ego, it was active at every point and itself willed and created its symptoms. But we know that it puts up with a good amount of passivity, which it afterwards tries to disguise and gloss over. It is true that it does not always venture on such am attempt; in the symptoms of obsessional neurosis it is obliged to admit that there is something alien which is confronting it and against which it can only defend itself with difficulty.

Anyone whom these warnings do not deter from taking the ego’s counterfeits as sterling coin will have an easy time of it and will avoid all the resistances which oppose the psycho-analytic emphasis upon the unconscious, sexuality and the passivity of the ego. He will be able to declare like Alfred Adler that the ‘neurotic character’ is the cause of neuroses instead of their consequence; but neither will he be in a position to explain a single detail of symptom-formation or a single dream.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3434

You will ask whether it may not be possible, however, to do justice to the part played by the ego in neurotic states and in the formation of symptoms without at the same time grossly neglecting the factors revealed by psycho-analysis. My reply is that that must certainly be possible and will sooner or later be done; but the road followed by the work of psycho-analysis does not admit of actually beginning with this. It is of course possible to foresee when psycho-analysis will be confronted by this task. There are neuroses in which the ego plays a far more intensive part than in those we have studied hitherto; we call them the ‘narcissistic’ neuroses. The investigation of these disorders will enable us to form an impartial and trustworthy judgement of the share taken by the ego in the onset of neuroses.

One of the ways in which the ego is related to its neuroses is, however, so obvious that it was possible to take it into account from the first. It seems never to be absent; but it is most clearly recognizable in a disorder which we are even to-day far from understanding - traumatic neurosis. For you must know that the same factors always come into operation in the causation and mechanism of every possible form of neurosis; but the chief importance in the construction of the symptoms falls now upon one and now upon another of these factors. The position is like that among the members of a theatrical company. Each of them is regularly cast for his own stock role - hero, confidant, villain, and so on; but each of them will choose a different piece for his benefit performance. In the same way phantasies which turn into symptoms are nowhere more obvious than in hysteria; the anticathexes or reaction-formations of the ego dominate the picture in obsessional neurosis; what in the case of dreams we have termed ‘secondary revision’ stands in the forefront in paranoia in the shape of delusions, and so on.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3435

Thus in traumatic neuroses, and particularly in those brought about by the horrors of war, we are unmistakably presented with a self-interested motive on the part of the ego, seeking for protection and advantage - a motive which cannot, perhaps, create the illness by itself but which assents to it and maintains it when once it has come about. This motive tries to preserve the ego from the dangers the threat of which was the precipitating cause of the illness and it will not allow recovery to occur until a repetition of these dangers seems no longer possible or until compensation has been received for the danger that has been endured.

The ego takes a similar interest, however, in the development and maintenance of the neurosis in every other case. I have already shown that symptoms are supported by the ego, too, because they have a side with which they offer satisfaction to the repressing purpose of the ego. Moreover, settling the conflict by constructing a symptom is the most convenient way out and the one most agreeable to the pleasure principle: it unquestionably spares the ego a large amount of internal work which is felt as distressing. Indeed there are cases in which even the physician must admit that for a conflict to end in neurosis is the most harmless and socially tolerable solution. You must not be surprised to hear that even the physician may occasionally take the side of the illness he is combating. It is not his business to restrict himself in every situation in life to being a fanatic in favour of health. He knows that there is not only neurotic misery in the world but real, irremovable suffering as well, that necessity may even require a person to sacrifice his health; and he learns that a sacrifice of this kind made by a single person can prevent immeasurable unhappiness for many others. If we may say, then, that whenever a neurotic is faced by a conflict he takes flight into illness, yet we must allow that in some cases that flight is fully justified, and a physician who has recognized how the situation lies will silently and solicitously withdraw.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3436

But let us disregard these exceptional cases and proceed with our discussion. In average circumstances we recognize that by escaping into a neurosis the ego obtains a certain internal ‘gain from illness’. In some circumstances of life this is further accompanied by an appreciable external advantage bearing a greater or less real value. Consider the commonest example of this sort. A woman who is roughly treated and ruthlessly exploited by her husband will fairly regularly find a way out in neurosis, if her constitution makes it possible, if she is too cowardly or too moral to console herself secretly with another man, if she is not strong enough to separate from her husband in the face of every external deterrent, if she has no prospect of supporting herself or obtaining a better husband and if in addition she is till attached to this brutal husband by her sexual feelings. Her illness now becomes a weapon in her battle with her dominating husband - a weapon which she can use for her defence and misuse for her revenge. To complain of her illness is allowable, though to lament her marriage was probably not. She find a helper in her doctor, she forces her usually inconsiderate husband to look after her, to spend money on her, to allow her at times to be away from home and so free from her married oppression. When an external or accidental gain from illness like this is really considerable and no real substitute for it is available, you must not reckon very high the chances of influencing the neurosis by your treatment.

You will now protest that what I have told you about the gain from illness argues entirely in favour of the view I have rejected - that the ego itself wills and creates he neurosis. Not too fast, Gentlemen! It may perhaps mean nothing more than that the ego puts up with the neurosis, which it cannot, after all, prevent, and that it makes the best of it, if anything can be made of it at all. That is only one side of the business, the pleasant side, it is true. So far as the neurosis has advantages the ego no doubt accepts it; but it does not only have advantages. As a rule it soon turns out that the ego has made a bad bargain by letting itself in for the neurosis. It has paid too dearly for an alleviation of the conflict, and the sufferings attached to the symptoms are perhaps an equivalent substitute for the torments of the conflict, but they probably involve an increase in unpleasure. The ego would like to free itself from this unpleasure of the symptoms without giving up the gain from illness, and this is just what it cannot achieve. This shows, then, that it was not so entirely active as it thought it was; and we shall bear this well in mind.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3437

In your contact as doctors with neurotics, Gentlemen, you will soon give up expecting that the ones who raise the most lamentations and complaints about their illness will be the most eager to co-operate and will offer you the least resistance. It is rather the opposite. But of course you will easily realize that everything that contributes to the gain from illness will intensify the resistance due to repression and will increase the therapeutic difficulties. But to the portion of gain from illness which is, so to say, born with the illness we have to add another portion which arises later. When a psychical organization like an illness has lasted for some time, it behaves eventually like an independent organism; it manifests something like a self-preservative instinct; it establishes a kind of modus vivendi between itself and other parts of the mind, even with those which are at bottom hostile to it; and there can scarcely fail to be occasions when it proves once again useful and expedient and acquires, as it were, a secondary function which strengthens its stability afresh. Instead of an example from pathology, let us take a glaring instance from daily life. A capable working-man, who earns his living, is crippled by an accident in the course of his occupation. The injured man can no longer work, but eventually he obtains a small disablement pension, and he learns how to exploit his mutilation by begging. His new, though worsened, means of livelihood is based precisely on the very thing that deprived him of his former means of livelihood. If you could put an end to his injury you would make him, to begin with, without means of subsistence; the question would arise of whether he was still capable of taking up his earlier work again. What corresponds in the case of neuroses to a secondary exploitation like this of an illness may be described as the secondary gain from illness in contrast to the primary one.

In general, however, I should like to recommend that, while not under-estimating the practical importance of the gain from illness, you should not let yourselves be impressed by it theoretically. After all, apart from the exceptions recognized earlier, it always calls to mind the examples of ‘animal intelligence’ illustrated by Oberländer in Fliegende Blätter. An Arab was riding his camel along a narrow path cut in the steep face of a mountain. At a turn in the path he suddenly found himself face to face with a lion, which prepared to make a spring. He saw no way out: on one side a perpendicular cliff and on the other a precipice; retreat and flight were impossible. He gave himself up for lost. But the animal thought otherwise. He took one leap with his rider into the abyss - and the lion was left in the lurch. The help provided by a neurosis has as a rule no better success with the patient. This may be because dealing with a conflict by forming symptoms is after all an automatic process which cannot prove adequate to meeting the demands of life, and in which the subject has abandoned the use of his best and highest powers. If there were a choice, it would be preferable to go down in an honourable struggle with fate.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3438

But I still owe you further enlightenment, Gentlemen, on my reasons for not starting my account of the theory of the neuroses with the common neurotic state. You may perhaps suppose that it was because in that case I should have had greater difficulty in proving the sexual causation of the neuroses. But you would be wrong there. In the case of the transference neuroses one must work one’s way through the interpretation of symptoms before one can arrive at that discovery. In the common forms of what are known as the ‘actual neuroses’ the aetiological significance of sexual life is a crude fact that springs to the observer’s eyes. I came upon it more than twenty years ago when one day I asked myself the question of why in the examination of neurotics their sexual activities were so regularly excluded from consideration. At that time I sacrificed my popularity with my patients for the sake of these enquiries; but after only a brief effort I was able to declare that ‘if the vita sexualis is normal, there can be no neurosis’ - and by this I meant no ‘actual neurosis’. No doubt this statement passes too lightly over people’s individual differences; it suffers, too, from the indefiniteness inseparable from the judgement of what is ‘normal’. But as a rough guide it retains its value to this day. I had by then reached the point of establishing specific relations between particular forms of neurosis and particular sexual noxae; and I have no doubt that I could repeat the same observations to-day if similar pathological material were still at my disposal. I found often enough that a man who indulged in a certain kind of incomplete sexual satisfaction (for instance, manual masturbation) had fallen ill of a particular form of ‘actual neurosis’, and that this neurosis promptly gave place to another if he replaced this sexual régime by another equally far from being irreproachable. I was then in a position to infer the change in a patient’s sexual mode of life from an alteration in his condition. I also learnt then to stand obstinately by my suspicions till I had overcome the patients’ disingenuousness and compelled them to confirm my views. It is true that thereafter they preferred to go to other doctors who did not make such keen enquiries about their sexual life.

Even at that time I could not fail to notice that the causation of the illness did not always point to sexual life. One person, it was true, fell ill directly from a sexual noxa; but another did so because he had lost his fortune or had been through an exhausting organic illness. The explanation of these varieties came later, when we gained an insight into the suspected interrelations between the ego and the libido, and the explanation became the more satisfactory the deeper that insight extended. A person only falls ill of a neurosis if his ego has lost the capacity to allocate his libido in some way. The stronger is his ego, the easier will it be for it to carry out that task. Any weakening of his ego from whatever cause must have the same effect as an excessive increase in the claims of the libido and will thus make it possible for him to fall ill of a neurosis. There are other and more intimate relations between the ego and the libido; but these have not yet come within our scope, so I will not bring them up as part of my present explanation. What remains essential and makes things clear to us is that, in every case and no matter how the illness is set going, the symptoms of the neurosis are sustained by the libido and are consequently evidence that it is being employed abnormally.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3439

Now, however, I must draw your attention to the decisive difference between the symptoms of the ‘actual’ neuroses and those of the psychoneuroses, the first group of which, the transference neuroses, have occupied us so much hitherto. In both cases the symptoms originate from the libido, and are thus abnormal employments of it, substitutive satisfactions. But the symptoms of the ‘actual’ neuroses - intracranial pressure, sensations of pain, a state of irritation in an organ, weakening or inhibition of a function - have no ‘sense’, no psychical meaning. They are not only manifested predominantly in the body (as are hysterical symptoms, for instance, as well), but they are also themselves entirely somatic processes, in the generating of which all the complicated mental mechanisms we have come to know are absent. Thus they really are what psychoneurotic symptoms were so long believed to be. But if so, how can they correspond to employments of the libido, which we have recognized as a force operating in the mind? Well, Gentlemen, that is a very simple matter. Let me remind you of one of the very first objections that were brought up against psycho-analysis. It was said then that it was occupied in finding a purely psychological theory of neurotic phenomena and this was quite hopeless, since psychological theories could never explain an illness. People had chosen to forget that the sexual function is not a purely psychical thing any more than it is a purely somatic one. It influences bodily and mental life alike. If in the symptoms of the psychoneuroses we have become acquainted with manifestations of disturbances in the psychical operation of the sexual function, we shall not be surprised to find in the ‘actual’ neuroses the direct somatic consequences of sexual disturbances.

Clinical medicine has given us a valuable pointer towards an interpretation of these disturbances, and one that has been taken into account by various enquirers. The ‘actual’ neuroses, in the details of their symptoms and also in their characteristic of influencing every organic system and every function, exhibit an unmistakable resemblance to the pathological states which arise from the chronic influence of external toxic substances and from a sudden withdrawal of them - to intoxications and conditions of abstinence. The two groups of disorders are brought together still more closely by intermediate conditions such as Grave’s disease which we have learnt to recognize as equally due to the operation of toxic substances, but of toxins which are not introduced into the body from outside but originate in the subject’s own metabolism. In view of these analogies, we cannot, I think, avoid regarding the neuroses as results of disturbances in the sexual metabolism, whether because more of these sexual toxins is produced than the subject can deal with, or whether because internal and even psychical conditions restrict the proper employment of these substances. The popular mind has from time immemorial paid homage to hypotheses of this kind on the nature of sexual desire, speaking of love as an ‘intoxication’ and believing that falling in love is brought about by love philtres - though here the operative agent is to some extent externalized. And for us this would be an occasion for recalling the erotogenic zones and our assertion that sexual excitation can be generated in the most various organs. But for the rest the phrase ‘sexual metabolism’ or ‘chemistry of sexuality’ is a term without content; we know nothing about it and cannot even decide whether we are to assume two sexual substances, which would then be named ‘male’ and ‘female’, or whether we could be satisfied with one sexual toxin which we should have to recognize as the vehicle of all the stimulant effects of the libido. The theoretical structure of psycho-analysis that we have created is in truth a superstructure, which will one day have to be set upon its organic foundation. But we are still ignorant of this.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3440

What characterizes psycho-analysis as a science is not the material which it handles but the technique with which it works. It can be applied to the history of civilization, to the science of religion and to mythology, no less than to the theory of the neuroses, without doing violence to its essential nature. What it aims at and achieves is nothing other than the uncovering of what is unconscious in mental life. The problems of the ‘actual’ neuroses, whose symptoms are probably generated by direct toxic damage, offer psycho-analysis no points of attack. It can do little towards throwing light on them and must leave the task to biologico-medical research.

And now perhaps you understand better why I did not choose to arrange my material differently. If I had promised you an ‘Introduction to the Theory of the Neuroses’ the correct path would certainly have led from the simple forms of the ‘actual’ neuroses to the more complicated psychical illnesses due to disturbance of the libido. As regards the former I should have had to collect from various sources what we have learnt or believe we know, and in connection with the psychoneuroses psycho-analysis would have come up for discussion as the most important technical aid in throwing light on those conditions. But what I intended to give and what I announced was an ‘Introduction to Psycho-Analysis’. It was more important for me that you should gain an idea of psycho-analysis than that you should obtain some pieces of knowledge about the neuroses; and for that reason the ‘actual’ neuroses, unproductive so far as psycho-analysis is concerned, could no longer have a place in the foreground. I believe, too, that I have made the better choice for you. For, on account of the profundity of its hypotheses and the comprehensiveness of its connections, psycho-analysis deserves a place in the interest of every educated person, while the theory of the neuroses is a chapter in medicine like any other.

Nevertheless you will rightly expect that we should devote some interest to the ‘actual’ neuroses as well. Their intimate clinical connection with the psychoneuroses would alone compel us to do so. I may inform you, then, that we distinguish three pure forms of ‘actual’ neuroses: neurasthenia, anxiety neurosis and hypochondria. Even this assertion is not uncontradicted. All the names are in use, it is true, but their content is indefinite and fluctuating. There are even doctors who oppose any dividing lines in the chaotic world of neurotic phenomena, any segregation of clinical entities or individual diseases, and who do not even recognize the distinction between the ‘actual’ neuroses and the psychoneuroses. I think they are going too far and have not chosen the path which leads to progress. The forms of neurosis which I have mentioned occur occasionally in their pure form; more often, however, they are intermixed with each other and with a psychoneurotic disorder. This need not lead us to abandon the distinction between them. Consider the difference between the study of minerals and of rocks in mineralogy. The minerals are described as individuals, no doubt on the basis of the fact that they often occur as crystals, sharply separated from their environment. Rocks consist of aggregations of minerals, which, we may be sure, have not come together by chance but as a result of what determined their origin. In the theory of the neuroses we still know too little of the course of their development to produce anything resembling petrology. But we are certainly doing the right thing if we start by isolating from the mass the individual clinical entities which we recognize and which are comparable to the minerals.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3441

A noteworthy relation between the symptoms of the ‘actual’ neuroses and of the psychoneuroses makes a further important contribution to our knowledge of the formation of symptoms in the latter. For a symptom of an ‘actual’ neurosis is often the nucleus and first stage of a psychoneurotic symptom. A relation of this kind can be most clearly observed between neurasthenia and the transference neurosis known as ‘conversion hysteria’, between anxiety neurosis and anxiety hysteria, but also between hypochondria and the forms of disorder which will be mentioned later under the name of paraphrenia (dementia praecox and paranoia). Let us take as an example a case of hysterical headache or lumbar pain. Analysis shows us that, by condensation and displacement, it has become a substitutive satisfaction for a whole number of libidinal phantasies or memories. But this pain was also at one time a real one and it was then a direct sexual-toxic symptom, the somatic expression of a libidinal excitation. We are far from asserting that all hysterical symptoms contain a nucleus of this kind. But it remains a fact that this is especially often the case and that whatever somatic influences (whether normal or pathological) are brought about by libidinal excitation are preferred for the construction of hysterical symptoms. In such cases they play the part of the grain of sand which a mollusc coats with layers of mother-of-pearl. In the same way, the passing indications of sexual excitement which accompany the sexual act are employed by the psychoneurosis as the most convenient and appropriate material for the construction of symptoms.

A similar course of events affords peculiar diagnostic and therapeutic interest. It not at all infrequently happens in the case of a person who is disposed to a neurosis without actually suffering from a manifest one, that a pathological somatic change (through inflammation or injury perhaps) sets the activity of symptom-formation going; so that this activity hastily turns the symptom which has been presented to it by reality into the representative of all the unconscious phantasies which have only been lying in wait to seize hold of some means of expression. In such a case the physician will adopt sometimes one and sometimes another line of treatment. He will either endeavour to remove the organic basis, without bothering about its noisy neurotic elaboration; or he will attack the neurosis which has taken this favourable opportunity for arising and will pay little attention to its organic precipitating cause. The outcome will prove the one or the other line of approach right or wrong; it is impossible to make general recommendations to meet such mixed cases.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3442

LECTURE XXV

ANXIETY

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - What I said to you in my last lecture about the general neurotic state will no doubt have struck you as the most incomplete and inadequate of all my pronouncements. I know that is true, and nothing will have surprised you more, I expect, than that there was nothing in it about anxiety, of which most neurotics complain, which they themselves describe as their worst suffering and which does in fact attain enormous intensity in them and may result in their adopting the craziest measures. But there at least I had no intention of giving you short measure. On the contrary, it was my intention to attack the problem of anxiety in neurotics particularly keenly and to discuss it at length with you.

I have no need to introduce anxiety itself to you. Every one of us has experienced that sensation, or, to speak more correctly, that affective state, at one time or other on our own account. But I think the question has never been seriously enough raised of why neurotics in particular suffer from anxiety so much more and so much more strongly than other people. Perhaps it has been regarded as something self-evident: the words ‘nervös’ and ‘ängstlich’ are commonly used interchangeably, as though they meant the same thing. But we have no right to do so: there are ‘ängstlich’ people who are otherwise not at all ‘nervös’ and, moreover, ‘nervös’ people who suffer from many symptoms, among which a tendency to ‘Angst’ is not included.

However that may be, there is no question that the problem of anxiety is a nodal point at which the most various and important questions converge, a riddle whose solution would be found to throw a flood of light on our whole mental existence. I will not assert that I can give you this complete solution; but you will certainly expect psycho-analysis to approach this subject too in quite a different way from academic medicine. Interest there seems mainly to be centred on tracing the anatomical paths along which the state of anxiety is brought about. We are told that the medulla oblongata is stimulated, and the patient learns that he is suffering from a neurosis of the vagus nerve. The medulla oblongata is a very serious and lovely object. I remember quite clearly how much time and trouble I devoted to its study many years ago. To-day, however, I must remark that I know nothing that could be of less interest to me for the psychological understanding of anxiety than knowledge of the path of the nerves along which its excitations pass.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3443

It is possible at the start to work upon the subject of anxiety for quite a time without thinking at all of neurotic states. You will understand me at once when I describe this kind of anxiety as ‘realistic’ anxiety in contrast to ‘neurotic’ anxiety. Realistic anxiety strikes us as something very rational and intelligible. We may say of it that it is a reaction to the perception of an external danger - that is, of an injury which is expected and foreseen. It is connected with the flight reflex and it may be regarded as a manifestation of the self-preservative instinct. On what occasions anxiety appears - that is to say, in the face of what objects and in what situations - will of course depend to a large extent on the state of a person’s knowledge and on his sense of power vis-à-vis the external world. We can quite understand how a savage is afraid of a cannon and frightened by an eclipse of the sun, while a white man, who knows how to handle the instrument and can foretell the eclipse, remains without anxiety in these circumstances. On other occasions it is actually superior knowledge that promotes anxiety, because it makes an early recognition of the danger possible. Thus the savage will be terrified at a trail in the jungle that tells an uninformed person nothing, because it warns him of the proximity of a wild animal; and an experienced sailor will look with terror at a small cloud in the sky that seems trivial to a passenger, because it tells him of an approaching hurricane.

On further consideration we must tell ourselves that our judgement that realistic anxiety is rational and expedient calls for drastic revision. For the only expedient behaviour when a danger threatens would be a cool estimate of one’s own strength in comparison with the magnitude of the threat and, on the basis of that, a decision as to whether flight or defence, or possibly even attack, offers the best prospect of a successful issue. But in this situation there is no place at all for anxiety; everything that happens would be achieved just as well and probably better if no anxiety were generated. And you can see, indeed, that if the anxiety is excessively great it proves in the highest degree inexpedient; it paralyses all action, including even flight. Usually the reaction to danger consists n a mixture of the affect of anxiety and defensive action. A terrified animal is afraid and flees; but the expedient part of this is the ‘flight’ and not the ‘being afraid’.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3444

Thus one feels tempted to assert that the generation of anxiety is never an expedient thing. It may perhaps help us to see more clearly if we dissect the situation of anxiety more carefully. The first thing about it is preparedness for the danger, which manifests itself in increased sensory attention and motor tension. This expectant preparedness can be unhesitatingly recognized as an advantage; indeed, its absence may be made responsible for serious consequences. From it there then proceeds on the one hand motor action - flight in the first instance and at a higher level active defence - and on the other hand what we feel as a state of anxiety. The more the generation of anxiety is limited to a mere abortive beginning - to a signal - the more will the preparedness for anxiety transform itself without disturbance into action and the more expedient will be the shape taken by the whole course of events. Accordingly, the preparedness for anxiety seems to me to be the expedient element in what we call anxiety, and the generation of anxiety the inexpedient one.

I shall avoid going more closely into the question of whether our linguistic usage means the same thing or something clearly different by ‘Angst [anxiety]’, ‘Furcht [fear]’ and ‘Schreck [fright]’. I will only say that I think ‘Angst’ relates to the state and disregards the object, while ‘Furcht’ draws attention precisely to the object. It seems that ‘Schreck’, on the other hand, does have a special sense; it lays emphasis, that is, on the effect produced by a danger which is not met by any preparedness for anxiety. We might say, therefore, that a person protects himself from fright by anxiety.

A certain ambiguity and indefiniteness in the use of the word ‘Angst’ will not have escaped you. By ‘anxiety’ we usually understand the subjective state into which we are put by perceiving the ‘generation of anxiety’ and we call this an affect. And what is an affect in the dynamic sense? It is in any case something highly composite. An affect includes in the first place particular motor innervations or discharges and secondly certain feelings; the latter are of two kinds - perceptions of the motor actions that have occurred and the direct feelings of pleasure and unpleasure which, as we say, give the affect its keynote. But I do not think that with this enumeration we have arrived at the essence of an affect. We seem to see deeper in the case of some affects and to recognize that the core which holds the combination we have described together is the repetition of some particular significant experience. This experience could only be a very early impression of a very general nature, placed in the prehistory not of the individual but of the species. To make myself more intelligible - an affective state would be constructed in the same way as a hysterical attack; and, like it, would be the precipitate of a reminiscence. A hysterical attack may thus be likened to a freshly constructed individual affect, and a normal affect to the expression of a general hysteria which has become a heritage.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3445

Do not suppose that the things I have said to you here about affects are the recognized stock-in-trade of normal psychology. They are on the contrary views that have grown up on the soil of psycho-analysis and are native only to it. What you may gather about affects from psychology - the James-Lange theory, for example - is quite beyond understanding or discussion to us psycho-analysts. But we do not regard our knowledge about affects as very assured either; it is a first attempt at finding our bearings in this obscure region. I will proceed, however. We believe that in the case of the affect of anxiety we know what the early impression is which it repeats. We believe that it is in the act of birth that there comes about the combination of unpleasurable feelings, impulses of discharge and bodily sensations which has become the prototype of the effects of a mortal danger and has ever since been repeated by us as the state of anxiety. The immense increase of stimulation owing to the interruption of the renovation of the blood (internal respiration) was at the time the cause of the experience of anxiety; the first anxiety was thus a toxic one. The name ‘Angst - ‘augustiae’, ‘Enge’¹ - emphasizes the characteristic of restriction in breathing which was then present as a consequence of the real situation and is now almost invariably reinstated in the affect. We shall also recognize it as highly relevant that this first state of anxiety arose out of separation from the mother. It is, of course, our conviction that the disposition to repeat the first state of anxiety has been so thoroughly incorporated into the organism through a countless series of generations that a single individual cannot escape the affect of anxiety even if, like the legendary Macduff, he ‘was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped’ and has therefore not himself experienced the act of birth. We cannot say what has become the prototype of the state of anxiety in the case of creatures other than mammals. And in the same way we do not know either what complex of feelings is in such creatures the equivalent to our anxiety.

It may perhaps interest you to learn how anyone could have formed such an idea as that the act of birth is the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety. Speculation had a very small share in it; what I did, rather, was to borrow from the naïve popular mind. Long years ago, while I was sitting with a number of other young hospital doctors at our mid-day meal in an inn, a house physician from the midwifery department told us of a comic thing that had happened at the last examination for midwives. A candidate was asked what it meant if meconium (excreta) made its appearance at birth in the water coming away, and she promptly replied: ‘it means the child’s frightened.’ She was laughed at and failed in the examination. But silently I took her side and began to suspect that this poor woman from the humbler classes had laid an unerring finger on an important correlation.

¹ [These Latin and German words, meaning ‘narrow place’, ’straits’, are from the same root as ‘angst’ (and ‘anxiety’).]

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3446

If we now pass over to consider neurotic anxiety, what fresh forms and situations are manifested by anxiety? There is much to be described here. In the first place we find a general apprehensiveness, a kind of freely floating anxiety which is ready to attach itself to any idea that is in any way suitable, which influences judgement, selects what is to be expected, and lies in wait for any opportunity that will allow it to justify itself. We call this state ‘expectant anxiety’ or ‘anxious expectation’. People who are tormented by this kind of anxiety always foresee the most frightful of all possibilities, interpret every chance event as a premonition of evil and exploit every uncertainty in a bad sense. A tendency to an expectation of evil of this sort is to be found as a character trait in many people whom one cannot otherwise regard as sick; one calls them over-anxious or pessimistic. A striking amount of expectant anxiety, however, forms a regular feature of a nervous disorder to which I have given the name of ‘anxiety neurosis’ and which I include among the ‘actual’ neuroses.

A second form of anxiety, in contrast to the ones I have just described, is bound psychically and attached particular objects or situations. This is the anxiety of the extremely multifarious and often very strange ‘phobias’. Stanley Hall, the respected American psychologist, has recently taken the trouble to present us with a whole series of these phobias in all the magnificence of Greek names. This sounds like a list of the ten Plagues of Egypt, though their number goes far beyond ten. Listen to all the things that can become the object or content of a phobia: darkness, open air, open spaces, cats, spiders, caterpillars, snakes, mice, thunderstorms, sharp points, blood, enclosed spaces, crowds, solitude, crossing bridges, sea voyages and railway journeys, etc., etc. A first attempt at finding one’s way about in this confusion suggests a division into three groups. Some of the dreaded objects and situations have something uncanny about them for normal people as well, some relation to danger; and such phobias, therefore, do not strike us as unintelligible, though their strength is greatly exaggerated. Thus most of us have a sense of repulsion if we meet with a snake. Snake phobia, we might say, is a universal human characteristic; and Darwin has described most impressively how he could not avoid feeling fear of a snake that struck at him, even though he knew that he was protected from it by a thick sheet of glass. We may refer to a second group the cases in which a relation to a danger is still present, though we are accustomed to minimize the danger and not to anticipate it. The majority of situation phobias belong to this group. We know that there is more chance of an accident when we are on a railway-journey than when we stay at home - the chance of a collision; we know, too, that a ship may go down, in which case there is a probability of being drowned; but we do not think about these dangers, and travel by rail and ship without anxiety. It cannot be disputed that we should fall into the river if the bridge collapsed at the moment we were crossing it; but that happens so exceedingly seldom that it does not arise as a danger. Solitude, too, has its dangers and in certain circumstances we avoid it; but there is no question of our not being able to tolerate it under any condition even for a moment. Much the same is true of crowds, of enclosed spaces, of thunderstorms and so on. What in general appears to us strange in these phobias of neurotics is not so much their content as their intensity. The anxiety of phobias is positively overwhelming. And sometimes we get an impression that what neurotics are afraid of are not at all the same things and situations which may in certain circumstances cause anxiety in us too and which they describe by the same names.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3447

We are left with a third group of phobias, which is quite beyond our comprehension. When a strong, grown-up man is unable owing to anxiety to walk along a street or cross a square in his own familiar home-town, when a healthy, well-developed woman is thrown into insensate anxiety because a cat has brushed against the edge of her dress or because a mouse has run across the room, how are we to relate these things to the danger which they obviously constitute for the phobic subject? In the case of such animal phobias there can be no question of an exaggeration of universal human antipathies, since, as though to demonstrate the contrary, there are numerous people who cannot pass by a cat without coaxing it and stroking it. The mouse that these women are so much afraid of is also [in German] one of the chief terms of affection; a girl who is delighted when her lover calls her one will often scream with terror when she sees the pretty creature which bears that name. In the case of the man with agoraphobia the only explanation that we can reach is that he is behaving like a small child. A child is actually taught as part of his education to avoid such situations as dangerous; and our agoraphobic will in fact be saved from his anxiety if we accompany him across the square.

The two forms of anxiety that I have just described - the freely floating expectant anxiety and the sort which is bound to phobias - are independent of each other. One is not a higher stage, as it were, of the other; and they only appear simultaneously in exceptional cases and, so to speak, accidentally. The most powerful general apprehensiveness need not be expressed in phobias; people whose whole existence is restricted by agoraphobia may be entirely free from pessimistic expectant anxiety. Some phobias - for instance, agoraphobia and railway phobia - are demonstrably acquired at a fairly mature age, while others - such as fear of darkness, thunderstorms and animals - seem to have been present from the first. Those of the former kind have the significance of severe illnesses; the latter make their appearance rather as eccentricities or whims. If a person exhibits one of these latter, one may suspect as a rule that he will have other similar ones. I must add that we class all these phobias as anxiety hysteria; that is to say, we regard them as a disorder closely related to the familiar conversion hysteria.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3448

The third of the forms of neurotic anxiety faces us with the puzzling fact that here the connection between anxiety and a threatening danger is completely lost to view. For instance, anxiety may appear in hysteria as an accompaniment to hysterical symptoms, or in some chance condition of excitement in which, it is true, we should expect some manifestation of affect but least of all one of anxiety; or it may make its appearance, divorced from any determinants and equally incomprehensible to us and to the patient, as an unrelated attack of anxiety. Here there is no sign whatever of any danger or of any cause that could be exaggerated into one. We next learn from these spontaneous attacks that the complex which we describe as a state of anxiety is capable of fragmentation. The total attack can be represented by a single, intensely developed symptom, by a tremor, a vertigo, by palpitation of the heart, or by dyspnoea; and the general feeling by which we recognize anxiety may be absent or have become indistinct. Yet these conditions, which we describe as ‘anxiety-equivalents’, have to be equated with anxiety in all clinical and aetiological respects.

Two questions now arise. Can we relate neurotic anxiety, in which danger plays little or no part, to realistic anxiety, which is invariably a reaction to danger? And how are we to understand neurotic anxiety? We shall certainly be inclined in the first instance to hold fast to our expectation that where there is anxiety there must be something that one is afraid of.

Clinical observation affords us a number of hints towards understanding neurotic anxiety, and I will give you their tenor:-

(a) It is not difficult to establish the fact that expectant anxiety or general apprehensiveness is closely dependent on certain happenings in sexual life, or, let us say, certain employments of the libido. The simplest and most instructive case of this sort occurs in people who expose themselves to what is known as unconsummated excitation - that is, people in whom violent sexual excitations meet with no sufficient discharge, cannot be brought to a satisfying conclusion - men for instance, while they are engaged to be married, and women whose husbands are insufficiently potent or, as a precaution, perform the sexual act in an incomplete or curtailed fashion. In such circumstances the libidinal excitation vanishes and anxiety appears in its place whether in the form of expectant anxiety or in attacks and anxiety-equivalents. Interruption of the sexual act as a precaution, if it is practised as a sexual régime, is such a regular cause of anxiety neurosis in men, but more particularly in women, that in medical practice it is advisable in such cases to begin by investigating this aetiology. It will then be found on countless occasions that the anxiety neurosis disappears when the sexual abuse is discontinued.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3449

The fact of there being a connection between sexual restraint and anxiety states is, so far as I know, no longer disputed even by physicians who have no contact with psycho-analysis. But I can well believe that an attempt is made to reverse the relation and to put forward the view that the people concerned are such as are already inclined to apprehensiveness and for that reason practise restraint in sexual matters as well. This, however, is decisively contradicted by the behaviour of women, whose sexual activity is essentially of a passive nature - is determined, that is to say, by their treatment by the man. The more passionate a woman is - the more inclined, therefore, to sexual intercourse and the more capable of being satisfied - the more certain she is to react with manifestations of anxiety to a man’s impotence or to coitus interruptus, whereas in the case of anaesthetic women or those without much libido such ill-treatment plays a far smaller part.

Of course, the sexual abstinence now so warmly recommended by doctors only has the same importance in generating anxiety states when the libido which is prevented from finding a satisfying discharge is correspondingly strong and has not been dealt with for the greater part by sublimation. Indeed, the decision on whether the outcome is to be illness or not always lies with quantitative factors. Even where what is in question is not illness but the form assumed by a person’s character, it is easy to recognize that sexual restriction goes hand in hand with some kind of anxiousness and hesitancy, while intrepidity and impudent daring bring along with them a free indulgence of sexual needs. However much these relations are altered and complicated by a variety of cultural influences, it nevertheless remains true of the average of mankind that anxiety has a close connection with sexual limitation.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3450

I am far from having told you of all the observations that speak in favour of the genetic relation I have asserted to exist between libido and anxiety. Among them, for instance, is the influence on anxiety disorders of certain phases of life to which, as in the case of puberty and the time of the menopause, a considerable increase in the production of libido may be attributed. In some states of excitement, too, it is possible to observe directly a mixture of libido and anxiety and the final replacement of libido by anxiety. The impression one gains from all these facts is twofold: first, that what is in question is an accumulation of libido which is kept away from its normal employment, and secondly, that here we are entirely in the sphere of somatic processes. How anxiety arises from libido is not at first discernible; we can only recognize that libido is absent and that anxiety is observed in its place.

(b) A second pointer is to be found in the analysis of the psychoneuroses, and especially of hysteria. We have seen that in this illness anxiety often appears in company with the symptoms, but that unbound anxiety appears, too, manifested as an attack or as a chronic condition. The patients cannot say what it is they are afraid of, and, by the help of an unmistakable secondary revision, link it to the first phobias that come to hand - such as dying, going mad, or having a stroke. If the situation out of which the anxiety (or the symptoms accompanied by anxiety) arose is subjected to analysis, we can as a rule discover what normal course of psychical events has failed to occur and has been replaced by phenomena of anxiety. To express it in another way: we construct the unconscious process as it would have been if it had not experienced any repression and had proceeded unhindered into consciousness. This process would have been accompanied by a particular affect, and we now learn to our surprise that this affect accompanying the normal course of events is invariably replaced by anxiety after repression has occurred, no matter what its own quality may be. Thus, when we have a hysterical anxiety-state before us, its unconscious correlate may be an impulse of a similar character - anxiety, shame, embarrassment - or, just as easily, a positive libidinal excitation or a hostile aggressive one, such as rage or anger. Anxiety is therefore the universally current coinage for which any affective impulse is or can be exchanged if the ideational content attached to it is subjected to repression.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3451

(c) We make a third discovery when we come to patients suffering from obsessional actions, who seem in a remarkable way exempt from anxiety. If we try to hinder their carrying out of their obsessional action - their washing or their ceremonial - or if they themselves venture upon an attempt to give up one of their compulsions, they are forced by the most terrible anxiety to yield to the compulsion. We can see that the anxiety was screened by the obsessional action, and that the latter was only performed in order to avoid the anxiety. In an obsessional neurosis, therefore, anxiety which would otherwise inevitably set in is replaced by the formation of a symptom, and if we turn to hysteria we find a similar relation: the result of the process of repression is either a generating of anxiety pure and simple, or anxiety accompanied by the formation of a symptom, or a more complete formation of a symptom without anxiety. It would thus seem not to be wrong in an abstract sense to assert that in general symptoms are only formed to escape an otherwise unavoidable generating of anxiety. If we adopt this view, anxiety is placed, as it were, in the very centre of our interest in the problems of neurosis.

Our observations on anxiety neurosis led us to conclude that the deflection of the libido from its normal employment, which causes the development of anxiety, takes place in the region of somatic processes. Analyses of hysteria an obsessional neurosis yield the additional conclusion that a similar deflection with the same outcome may also be the result of a refusal on the part of the psychical agencies. This much, therefore, we know about the origin of neurotic anxiety. It still sounds fairly indefinite; but for the moment I see no path that would lead us further. The second problem we set ourselves - of establishing a connection between neurotic anxiety, which is libido put to an abnormal employment, and realistic anxiety, which corresponds to a reaction to danger - seems even harder to solve. One might suppose that these were two quite disparate things; and yet we have no means of distinguishing in our feelings between realistic anxiety and neurotic anxiety.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3452

We finally arrive at the connection we are in search of, if we take as our starting-point the opposition we have so often asserted between the ego and the libido. As we know, the generation of anxiety is the ego’s reaction to danger and the signal for taking flight. If so, it seems plausible to suppose that in neurotic anxiety the ego is making a similar attempt at flight from the demand by its libido, that it is treating this internal danger as though it were an external one. This would therefore fulfil our expectation that where anxiety is shown there is something one is afraid of. But the analogy could be carried further. Just as the attempt at flight from an external danger is replaced by standing firm and the adoption of expedient measures of defence, so too the generation of neurotic anxiety gives place to the formation of symptoms, which results in the anxiety being bound.

The difficulty in understanding now lies else here. The anxiety which signifies a flight of the ego from its libido is after all supposed to be derived from that libido itself. This is obscure and it reminds us not to forget that after all a person’s libido is fundamentally something of his and cannot be contrasted with him as something external. It is the topographical dynamics of the generation of anxiety which are still obscure to us - the question of what mental energies are produced in what process and from what mental systems they derive. This is once more a question which I cannot promise to answer: but there are two other tracks which we must not fail to follow and in doing so we shall once more be making use of direct observation and analytic enquiry as a help to our speculations. We will turn to the genesis of anxiety in children and to the source of the neurotic anxiety which is attached to phobias.

Apprehensiveness in children is something very usual, and it seems most difficult to distinguish whether it is neurotic or realistic anxiety. Indeed the value of making the distinction is put in question by the behaviour of children. For on the one hand we are not surprised if a child is frightened of all strangers, or of new situations and things; and we account for this reaction very easily as being due to his weakness and ignorance. Thus we attribute to children a strong inclination to realistic anxiety and we should regard it as quite an expedient arrangement if this apprehensiveness were an innate heritage in them. Children would merely be repeating in this the behaviour of prehistoric men and of modern primitive peoples who as a result of their ignorance and helplessness are afraid of every novelty and of many familiar things which no longer cause us any anxiety to-day. And it would fit in perfectly with our expectation if children’s phobias, in part at least, were the same as those which we may attribute to the primaeval periods of human development.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3453

On the other hand we cannot overlook the fact that not all children are anxious to the same degree, and that precisely children who exhibit a special timidity towards objects and in situations of every kind turn out later to be neurotic. Thus the neurotic disposition betrays itself also by an outspoken tendency to realistic anxiety; apprehensiveness appears to be the primary thing and we reach the conclusion that the reason why children and, later, growing youths and girls are afraid of the height of their libido is because in fact they are afraid of everything. The genesis of anxiety from libido would in this way be denied; and if one examined into the determinants of realistic anxiety, consistency would lead one to the view that consciousness of one’s own weakness and helplessness - inferiority according to Adler’s terminology, - if it can be prolonged from childhood into adult life, is the final basis of neuroses.

This sounds so simple and seductive that it has a claim on our attention. It is true that it would involve a displacement of the riddle of the neurotic state. The continued existence of the sense of inferiority - and thus, of what determine anxiety and the formation of symptoms - seems so well assured that what calls for an explanation is rather how, as an exception, what we know as health can come about. But what is revealed by a careful examination of apprehensiveness in children? At the very beginning, what children are afraid of is strange people; situations only become important because they include people, and impersonal things do not come into account at all until later. But a child is not afraid of these strangers because he attributes evil intentions to them and compares his weakness with their strength, and accordingly assesses them as dangers to his existence, safety and freedom from pain. A child who is mistrustful in this way and terrified of the aggressive instinct which dominates the world is a theoretical construction that has quite miscarried. A child is frightened of a strange face because he is adjusted to the sight of a familiar and beloved figure - ultimately of his mother. It is his disappointment and longing that are transformed into anxiety - his libido, in fact, which has become unemployable, which cannot at that time be held in suspense and is discharged as anxiety. And it can scarcely be a matter of chance, either, that in this situation which is the prototype of the anxiety of children there is a repetition of the determinant of the first state of anxiety during the act of birth - namely, separation from the mother.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3454

In children the first phobias relating to situations are those of darkness and solitude. The former of these often persists throughout life; both are involved when a child feels the absence of some loved person who looks after it - its mother, that is to say. While I was in the next room, I heard a child who was afraid of the dark call out: ‘Do speak to me, Auntie! I’m frightened!’ ‘Why, what good would that do? You can’t see me.’ To this the child replied: ‘If someone speaks, it gets lighter.’ Thus a longing felt in the dark is transformed into a fear of the dark. Far from its being the case that neurotic anxiety is only secondary and a special case of realistic anxiety, we see on the contrary that in a small child something that behaves like realistic anxiety shares its essential feature - origin from unemployed libido - with neurotic anxiety. Innately, children seem to have little true realistic anxiety. In all the situations which can later become determinants of phobias (on heights, on narrow bridges over water, on railway journeys, on ships) children exhibit no anxiety; and, to be sure, the greater their ignorance the less their anxiety. It would have been a very good thing if they had inherited more of such life-preserving instincts, for that would have greatly facilitated the task of watching over them to prevent their running into one danger after another. The fact is that children, to begin with, over-estimate their strength and behave fearlessly because they are ignorant of dangers. They will run along the brink of the water, climb on to the window-sill, play with sharp objects and with fire - in short, do everything that is bound to damage them and to worry those in charge of them. When in the end realistic anxiety is awakened in them, that is wholly the result of education; for they cannot be allowed to make the instructive experiences themselves.

If, then, there are children who come some way to meet this education in anxiety, and who go on to find dangers themselves that they have not been warned against, this is sufficiently explained by the fact that they have a greater amount of innate libidinal need in their constitution or have been prematurely spoiled by libidinal satisfaction. It is not to be wondered at if such children include, too, the later neurotics: as we know, what most facilitates the development of a neurosis is an incapacity to tolerate a considerable damming-up of libido over any great length of time. You will observe that here once more the constitutional factor comes into its rights - and these, indeed, we have never sought to dispute. We are only on our guard against those who in its favour neglect all other claims, and who introduce the constitutional factor at points at which the combined results of observation and analysis show that it does not belong or must take the last place.

Let me sum up what we have learnt from our observations of the apprehensiveness of children. Infantile anxiety has very little to do with realistic anxiety, but, on the other hand, is closely related to the neurotic anxiety of adults. Like the latter, it is derived from unemployed libido and it replaces the missing love-object by an external object or by a situation.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3455

You will be glad to hear that the analysis of phobias has not much more that is new to teach us. For the same thing happens with them as with children’s anxiety: unemployable libido is being constantly transformed into an apparently realistic anxiety and thus a tiny external danger is introduced to represent the claims of the libido. There is nothing to be wondered at in this agreement, for the infantile phobias are not only the prototype of the later ones which we class as ‘anxiety hysteria’ but are actually their precondition and the prelude to them. Every hysterical phobia goes back to an infantile anxiety and is a continuation of it, even if it has a different content and must thus be given another name. The difference between the two disorders lies in their mechanism. In order that libido shall be changed into anxiety, it no longer suffices in the case of adults for the libido to have become momentarily unemployable in the form of a longing. Adults have long since learnt how to hold such libido in suspense or to employ it in some other way. If, however, the libido belongs to a psychical impulse which has been subjected to repression, then circumstances are re-established similar to those in the case of a child in whom there is still no distinction between conscious and unconscious; and by mean of regression to the infantile phobia a passage is opened, as it were, through which the transformation of libido into anxiety can be comfortably accomplished.

As you will recall, we have dealt with repression at great length, but in doing so we have always followed the vicissitudes only of the idea that is to be repressed - naturally, since this was easier to recognize and describe. We have always left on one side the question of what happens to the affect that was attached to the repressed idea; and it is only now that we learn that the immediate vicissitude of that affect is to be transformed into anxiety, whatever quality it may have exhibited apart from this in the normal course of events. This transformation of affect is, however, by far the most important part of the process of repression. It is not so easy to speak of this, since we cannot assert the existence of unconscious affects in the same sense as that of unconscious ideas. An idea remains the same, except for the one difference, whether it is conscious or unconscious; we can state what it is that corresponds to an unconscious idea. But an affect is a process of discharge and must be judged quite differently from an idea; what corresponds to it in the unconscious cannot be declared without deeper reflection and a clarification of our hypotheses about psychical processes. And that we cannot undertake here. We will, however, emphasize the impression we have now gained that the generation of anxiety is intimately linked to the system of the unconscious.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3456

I have said that transformation into anxiety - it would be better to say discharge in the form of anxiety - is the immediate vicissitude of libido which is subjected to repression. I must add that that vicissitude is not the only or the definitive one. In the neuroses processes are in action which endeavour to bind this generating of anxiety and which even succeed in doing so in various ways. In phobias, for instance, two phases of the neurotic process can be clearly distinguished. The first is concerned with repression and the changing of libido into anxiety, which is then bound to an external danger. The second consists in the erection of all the precautions and guarantees by means of which any contact can be avoided with this danger, treated as it is like an external thing. Repression corresponds to an attempt at flight by the ego from libido which is felt as a danger. A phobia may be compared to an entrenchment against an external danger which now represents the dreaded libido. The weakness of the defensive system in phobias lies, of course, in the fact that the fortress which has been so greatly strengthened towards the outside remains assailable from within. A projection outwards of the danger of libido can never succeed thoroughly. For that reason, in other neuroses other systems of defence are in use against the possible generation of anxiety. That is a most interesting part of the psychology of the neuroses; but unluckily it would lead us too far and it presupposes a deeper specialized knowledge. I will only add one thing more. I have already spoken to you of the ‘anticathexis’ which is employed by the ego in the process of repression and which must be permanently maintained in order that the repression may have stability. This anticathexis has the task of carrying through the various forms of defence against the generating of anxiety after repression.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3457

Let us return to the phobias. I can safely say that you now see how inadequate it is merely to seek to explain their content, to take no interest in anything but how it comes about that this or that object or some particular situation or other has been made into the object of the phobia. The content of a phobia has just about as much importance in relation to it as the manifest façade of a dream has in relation to the dream. It must be admitted, subject to the necessary qualifications, that among the contents of phobias there are a number which, as Stanley Hall insists, are adapted to serve as objects of anxiety owing to phylogenetic inheritance. It tallies with this, indeed, that many of these anxiety-objects can only establish their connection with danger by a symbolic tie.

We thus find ourselves convinced that the problem of anxiety occupies a place in the question of the psychology of the neuroses which may rightly be described as central. We have received a strong impression of the way in which the generation of anxiety is linked to the vicissitudes of the libido and the system of the unconscious. There is only a single point that we have found disconnected - a gap in our views: the single, yet scarcely disputable, fact that realistic anxiety must be regarded as a manifestation of the ego’s self-preservative instincts.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3458

LECTURE XXVI

THE LIBIDO THEORY AND NARCISSISM

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - We have repeatedly (and only recently once again) had to deal with the distinction between the ego-instincts and the sexual instincts. In the first place, repression showed us that the two can come into opposition to each other, that the sexual instincts are then ostensibly subdued and are obliged to find satisfaction for themselves along regressive and roundabout paths, and that in doing so they are able to find compensation for their defeat in their indomitability. We next learnt that the two kinds of instincts are from the first differently related to Necessity the educator, so that their course of development is not the same and they do not enter into the same connection with the reality principle. Lastly, we seem to have found that the sexual instincts are linked by much closer bonds than the ego-instincts to the affective state of anxiety - a conclusion which seems incomplete in only one important respect. In order to establish it more firmly, therefore, I will bring forward the further noteworthy fact that if hunger and thirst (the two most elementary self-preservative instincts) are unsatisfied, the result is never their transformation into anxiety, whereas the changing of unsatisfied libido into anxiety is, as we have seen, among the best known and most frequently observed of phenomena.

Our right to separate the ego-instincts from the sexual ones cannot, no doubt, be shaken: it is implied in the existence of sexual life as a distinct activity of the individual. The only question is what importance we attribute to this separation, how deep-going we wish to consider it. The answer to this question, however, will be guided by how far we are able to establish the extent to which the sexual instincts behave differently in their somatic and mental manifestations from the others which we are contrasting with them, and how important the consequences are which arise from those differences. Moreover, we have, of course, no motive for asserting an essential difference between the two groups of instincts which is not plainly appreciable. Both of them come before us merely as designations of sources of energy in the individual, and the discussion as to whether they are fundamentally one or essentially different and as to when, if they are one, they became separate from each other - this discussion cannot be conducted on the basis of the connotation of the terms but must keep to the biological facts lying behind them. At the moment we know too little about these, and even if we knew more it would have no relevance for our analytic task.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3459

It is obvious, too, that we shall profit very little if, following Jung’s example, we insist upon the original unity of all the instincts and give the name of ‘libido’ to the energy manifested in all of them. Since no device whatever will make it possible to eliminate the sexual function from mental life, we shall in that case find ourselves obliged to speak of sexual and asexual libido. But the name of libido is properly reserved for the instinctual forces of sexual life, as has hitherto been our practice.

In my opinion, therefore, the question of how we are to carry the undoubtedly justifiable separation between the sexual and self-preservative instincts is not of much importance for psycho-analysis. Nor is psycho-analysis competent answer the question. Biology, however, offers a number of suggestive possibilities which speak in favour of the distinction having some importance. Sexuality is, indeed, the single function of the living organism which extends beyond the individual and is concerned with his relation to the species. It is an unmistakable fact that it does not always, like the individual organism’s other functions, bring it advantages, but, in return for an unusually high degree of pleasure, brings dangers which threaten the individual’s life and often enough destroy it. It is probable, too, that quite special metabolic processes are necessary, differing from all others, in order to maintain a portion of the individual life as a disposition for its descendants. And finally, the individual organism, which regards itself as the main thing and its sexuality as a means, like any other, for its own satisfaction, is from the point of view of biology only an episode in a succession of generations, a short-lived appendage to a germ-plasm endowed with virtual immortality - like the temporary holder of an entail which will outlast him.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3460

The psycho-analytic explanation of the neuroses does not, however, call for such far-ranging considerations. The separate following-up of the sexual and ego-instincts has helped us to find the key to an understanding of the group of transference neuroses. We have been able to trace them back to the basic situation in which the sexual instincts have come into a dispute with the self-preservative instincts, or, to put it in biological (though less precise) terms, a situation in which one aspect of the ego, as an independent individual organism, comes into conflict with its other aspect, as a member of a succession of generations. A dissension of this kind may perhaps only occur in human beings, and on that account neurosis may, generally speaking, constitute their prerogative over the animals. The excessive development of their libido and - what is perhaps made possible precisely by that - their development of a richly articulated mental life seem to have created the determinants for the occurrence of such a conflict. It is at once obvious that these are also the determinants for the great advances that human beings have made beyond what they have in common with the animals; so that their susceptibility to neurosis would only be the reverse side of their other endowments. But these too are only speculations, which are diverting us from our immediate task.

Hitherto it has been a premiss of our work that we can distinguish the ego-instincts from the sexual ones by their manifestations. With the transference neuroses this could be done without difficulty. We termed the cathexes of energy which the ego directs towards the objects of its sexual desires ‘libido’; all the others, which are sent out by the self-preservative instincts, we termed ‘interest’. By tracing the course of the libidinal cathexes, their transformations and final vicissitudes, we were able to obtain a first insight into the machinery of the mental forces. For this purpose the transference neuroses offered us the most favourable material. But the ego, its composition out of various organizations and their construction and mode of functioning, remained hidden from us; and we were driven to suspect that only the analysis of other neurotic disorders would be able to bring us the necessary insight.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3461

We began at an early date to extend psycho-analytic observations to these other illnesses. Already in 1908 Karl Abraham, after an exchange of thoughts with me, pronounced the main characteristic of dementia praecox (which was reckoned among the psychoses) to be that in it the libidinal cathexis of objects was lacking. But the question then arose of what happened to the libido of dementia praecox patients which was turned away from objects. Abraham did not hesitate to give the answer: it is turned back on to the ego and this reflexive turning-back is the source of the megalomania in dementia praecox. Megalomania is in every way comparable to the familiar sexual overvaluation of the object in erotic life. In this way for the first time we learnt to understand a trait in a psychotic illness by relating it to normal erotic life.

I may tell you at once that these first explanations of Abraham’s have been accepted in psycho-analysis and have become the basis of our attitude to the psychoses. We thus slowly became familiar with the notion that the libido, which we find attached to objects and which is the expression of an effort to obtain satisfaction in connection with those objects, can also leave the objects and set the subject’s own ego in their place; and this notion was gradually built up more and more consistently. The name for this way of allocating the libido - ‘narcissism’ - was borrowed by us from a perversion described by Paul Näcke in which an adult treats his own body with all the caresses that are usually devoted to an outside sexual object.

Reflection will quickly suggest that if any such fixation of the libido to the subject’s own body and personality, instead of to an object does occur, it cannot be an exception or a trivial event. On the contrary it is probable that this narcissism is the universal and original state of things, from which object-love is only later developed, without the narcissism necessarily disappearing on that account. Indeed we had to recall from the history of the development of object-libido that many sexual instincts begin by finding satisfaction in the subject’s own body - auto-erotically, as we say - and that this capacity for auto-erotism is the basis of the lagging-behind of sexuality in the process of education in the reality principle. Auto-erotism would thus be the sexual activity of the narcissistic stage of allocation of the libido.

To put the matter shortly, we pictured the relation of ego libido to object-libido in a way which I can make plain to you by an analogy from zoology. Think of those simplest of living organisms which consist of a little-differentiated globule of protoplasmic substance. They put out protrusions, known as pseudopodia, into which they cause the substance of their body to flow over. They are able, however, to withdraw the protrusions once more and form themselves again into a globule. We compare the putting-out of these protrusions, then, to the emission of libido on to objects while the main mass of libido can remain in the ego; and we suppose that in normal circumstances ego-libido can be transformed unhindered into object-libido and that this can once more be taken back into the ego.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3462

With the help of these ideas we are now able to explain a whole number of mental states or, to express it more modestly, to describe them in terms of the libido theory - states which we must reckon as belonging to normal life, such as the psychical behaviour of a person in love, during an organic illness or when asleep. As regards the state of sleep, we assumed that it was based on turning-away from the external world and adopting a wish to sleep. The mental activity during the night which is manifested in dreams takes place, we found, in obedience to a wish to sleep and is moreover dominated by purely egoistic motives. We may now add, on the lines of the libido theory, that sleep is a state in which all object-cathexes, libidinal as well as egoistic, are given up and withdrawn into the ego. May not this throw a fresh light on the recuperating effect of sleep and on the nature of fatigue in general? The picture of the blissful isolation of intra-uterine life which a sleeper conjures up once more before us every night is in this way completed on its psychical side as well. In a sleeper the primal state of distribution of the libido is restored - total narcissism, in which libido and ego-interest, still united and indistinguishable, dwell in the self-sufficing ego.

This is the place for two remarks. First, how do we differentiate between the concepts of narcissism and egoism? Well, narcissism, I believe, is the libidinal complement to egoism. When we speak of egoism, we have in view only the individual’s advantage; when we talk of narcissism we are also taking his libidinal satisfaction into account. As practical motives the two can be traced separately for quite a distance. It is possible to be absolutely egoistic and yet maintain powerful object-cathexes, in so far as libidinal satisfaction in relation to the object forms part of the ego’s needs. In that case, egoism will see to it that striving for the object involves no damage to the ego. It is possible to be egoistic and at the same time to be excessively narcissistic - that is to say, to have very little need for an object, whether, once more, for the purpose of direct sexual satisfaction, or in connection with the higher aspirations, derived from sexual need, which we are occasionally in the habit of contrasting with ‘sensuality’ under the name of ‘love’. In all these connections egoism is what is self-evident and constant, while narcissism is the variable element. The opposite to egoism, altruism, does not, as a concept, coincide with libidinal object-cathexis, but is distinguished from it by the absence of longings for sexual satisfaction. When someone is completely in love, however, altruism converges with libidinal object cathexis. As a rule the sexual object attracts a portion of the ego’s narcissism to itself, and this becomes noticeable as what is known as the ‘sexual overvaluation’ of the object. If in addition there is an altruistic transposition of egoism on to the sexual object, the object becomes supremely powerful; it has, as it were, absorbed the ego.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3463

You will find it refreshing, I believe, if, after what is the essentially dry imagery of science, I present you with a poetic representation of the economic contrast between narcissism and being in love. Here is a quotation from Goethe’s Westöstlicher Diwan:

ZULEIKA

The slave, the lord of victories,

The crowd, when’er you ask, confess

In sense of personal being lies

A child of earth’s chief happiness.

There’s not a life we need refuse

If our true self we do not miss,

There’s not a thing we may not lose

If one remain the man one is.

HATEM

So it is held, so well may be;

But down a different track I come;

Of all the bliss earth holds for me

I in Zuleika find the sum.

Does she expend her being on me,

Myself grows to myself of cost;

Turns she away, then instantly

I to my very self am lost.

That day with Hatem all were over;

And yet I should but change my state;

Swift, should she grace some happy lover,

In him I were incorporate.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3464

My second remark is a supplement to the theory of dreams. We cannot explain the origin of dreams unless we adopt the hypothesis that the repressed unconscious has achieved some degree of independence of the ego, so that it does not acquiesce in the wish to sleep and retains its cathexes even when all the object-cathexes depending on the ego have been withdrawn in order to encourage sleep. Only if that is so can we understand how the unconscious can make use of the lifting or reduction of the censorship which occurs at night, and can succeed in obtaining control over the day’s residues so as to construct a forbidden dream-wish out of their material. On the other hand, it may be that these day’s residues have to thank an already existing connection with the repressed unconscious for some of their resistance to the withdrawal of libido commanded by the wish to sleep. We will, then, insert this dynamically important feature into our view of the formation of dreams by way of supplement.

Organic illness, painful stimulation or inflammation of an organ, creates a condition which clearly results in a detachment of the libido from its objects. The libido which is withdrawn is found in the ego once more, as an increased cathexis of the diseased part of the body. One may venture to assert, indeed, that the withdrawal of the libido from its objects in these circumstances is more striking than the diversion of egoistic interest from the external world. This seems to offer us a path to an understanding of hypochondria, in which an organ excites the ego’s attention in the same way, without being ill so far as we can perceive.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3465

But I shall resist the temptation of going further here or of discussing other situations which can be understood or pictured if we adopt the hypothesis that the object-libido may withdraw into the ego - for I am obliged to meet two objections which, as I know, are now attracting your attention. In the first place you want to call me to account because in talking of sleep, illness and similar situations I invariably try to separate libido from interest, sexual from ego-instincts, where observations can be fully satisfied by the hypothesis of a single and uniform energy which, being freely mobile, cathects now the object and now the ego, in obedience to one or the other instinct. And in the second place you want to know how I can venture to treat the detaching of the libido from the object as the source of a pathological state, when a transposition of this kind of object-libido into ego-libido (or, more generally, into ego-energy) is among the normal processes of mental dynamics which are repeated daily and every night.

Here is my reply. Your first objection sounds well enough. Consideration of the states of sleep, of illness and of being in love in themselves would probably never have led us to distinguish an ego-libido from an object-libido or libido from interest. But there you are neglecting the investigations from which we started and in the light of which we now look at the mental situations under discussion. The differentiation between libido and interest - that is to say, between the sexual and the self-preservative instincts - was forced upon us by our discovery of the conflict out of which the transference neuroses arise. Since then we cannot give it up. The hypothesis that object-libido can be transformed into ego-libido, that we must therefore take an ego-libido into account, seems to us the only one which is able to resolve the enigma of what are termed the narcissistic neuroses - dementia praecox, for instance - and to account for the resemblances and dissimilarities between them and hysteria or obsessions. We are now applying to illness, sleep and being in love what we have elsewhere found inescapably established. We should proceed further with applications of this kind and see where they will take us to. The only thesis which is not an immediate precipitate of our analytic experience is to the effect that libido remains libido, whether it is directed to objects or to one’s own ego, and never turns into egoistic interest, and the converse is also true. This thesis, however, is equivalent to the separation between the sexual and ego-instincts which we have already considered critically and to which we shall continue to hold for heuristic reasons until its possible collapse.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3466

Your second observation, too, raises a justifiable question, but it is aimed in the wrong direction. It is true that a withdrawal of the object-libido into the ego is not directly pathogenic; it takes place, indeed, as we know, every time before we go to sleep, only to be reversed when we wake up. The amoeba withdraws its protrusions only to send them out again at the first opportunity. But it is quite a different thing when a particular, very energetic process forces a withdrawal of libido from objects. Here the libido that has become narcissistic cannot find its way back to objects, and this interference with the libido’s mobility certainly becomes pathogenic. It seems that an accumulation of narcissistic libido beyond a certain amount is not tolerated. We may even imagine that it was for that very reason that object-cathexes originally came about, that the ego was obliged to send out its libido so as not to fall ill as a result of its being dammed up. If it lay within our plan to go more deeply into dementia praecox, I would show you that the process which detaches the libido from objects and cuts off its return to them is closely related to the process of repression and is to be looked at as its counterpart. But you would, first and foremost, find yourselves on familiar ground when you learnt that the determinants of this process are almost identical - so far as we know at present - with those of repression. The conflict seems to be the same and to be carried on between the same forces. If the outcome is so different from, for instance, that in hysteria, the reason can only depend on a difference in innate disposition. The weak spot in the libidinal development of these patients lies in a different phase; the determining fixation, which, as you will recollect, permits the irruption that leads to the formation of symptoms, lies elsewhere, probably in the stage of primitive narcissism to which dementia praecox returns in its final outcome. It is very remarkable that in the case of all the narcissistic neuroses we have to assume fixation points for the libido going back to far earlier phases of development than in hysteria or obsessional neurosis. As you heard, however, the concepts which we arrived at during our study of the transference neuroses are adequate in helping us to find our way about in the narcissistic neuroses which are so much more severe in practice. The conformities go very far; at bottom the field of phenomena is the same. And you can imagine how small a prospect anyone has of explaining these disorders (which belong within the sphere of psychiatry) who is not forearmed for his task with an analytic knowledge of the transference neuroses.

The clinical picture of dementia praecox (which, incidentally, is very changeable) is not determined exclusively by the symptoms arising from the forcing away of the libido on objects and its accumulation in the ego as narcissistic libido. A large part, rather, is played by other phenomena, which are derived from efforts of the libido to attain objects once more and which thus correspond to an attempt at restitution or recovery. These latter symptoms are indeed the more striking and noisy; they exhibit an undeniable resemblance to those of hysteria or, less frequently, of obsessional neurosis, but nevertheless differ from them in every respect. It seems as though in dementia praecox the libido, in its efforts once more to reach objects (that is, the presentations of objects), does in fact snatch hold something of them, but, as it were, only their shadows - I mean the word-presentations belonging to them. I cannot say more about this now, but I believe that this behaviour of the libido as it strives to find its way back has enabled us to obtain an insight into what really constitutes the difference between a conscious and an unconscious idea.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3467

I have now led you into the region in which the next advances in the work of analysis are to be expected. Since we have ventured to operate with the concept of ego-libido the narcissistic neuroses have become accessible to us; the task before us is to arrive at a dynamic elucidation of these disorders and at the same time to complete our knowledge of mental life by coming to understand the ego. The ego-psychology after which we are seeking must not be based on the data of our self-perceptions but (as in the case of the libido) on the analysis of disturbances and disruptions of the ego. It is likely that we shall have a low opinion of our present knowledge of the vicissitudes of the libido, which we have gained from a study of the transference neuroses, when we have achieved this greater task. But hitherto we have not made much progress with it. The narcissistic neuroses can scarcely be attacked with the technique that has served us with the transference neuroses. You will soon learn why. What always happens with them is that, after proceeding for a short distance, we come up against a wall which brings us to a stop. Even with the transference neuroses, as you know, we met with barriers of resistance, but we were able to demolish them bit by bit. In the narcissistic neuroses the resistance is unconquerable; at the most, we are able to cast an inquisitive glance over the top of the wall and spy out what is going on on the other side of it. Our technical methods must accordingly be replaced by others; and we do not know yet whether we shall succeed in finding substitute. Nevertheless, we have no lack of material with these patients either. They make a large number of remarks, even if they do not answer our questions, and for the time being it is our business to interpret these remarks with the help of the understanding we have gained from the symptoms of the transference neuroses. The agreement is great enough to guarantee us some initial advantage. It remains to be seen how far this technique will take us.

There are difficulties in addition which hold up our advance. The narcissistic disorders and the psychoses related to them can only be deciphered by observers who have been trained through the analytic study of the transference neuroses. But our psychiatrists are not students of psycho-analysis and we psycho-analysts see too few psychiatric cases. A race of psychiatrists must first grow up who have passed through the school of psycho-analysis as a preparatory science. A start in that direction is now being made in America, where very many leading psychiatrists lecture to students on the theories of psycho-analysis and where the proprietors of institutions and the directors of insane asylums endeavour to observe their patients in conformity with those theories. Nevertheless we too, over here, have succeeded sometimes in casting a glance over the narcissistic wall and in what follows I shall tell you a little of what we think we have detected.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3468

The form of disease known as paranoia, chronic systematic insanity, occupies an unsettled position in the attempts at classification made by present-day psychiatry. There is, however, no doubt of its close affinity to dementia praecox. I once ventured to suggest that paranoia and dementia praecox should be brought together under the common designation of ‘paraphrenia’. The forms of paranoia are described according to their content as megalomania, persecution mania, erotomania, delusions of jealousy, and so on. We shall not expect anything much in the way of an attempt at an explanation from psychiatry. Here is an example of one, though, it is true, one that is out of date and does not carry much weight - an attempt to derive one symptom from another by means of an intellectual rationalization: it is suggested that the patient, who, owing to a primary disposition, believes that he is being persecuted, infers from his persecution that he must be someone of quite particular importance and so develops megalomania. According to our analytic view the megalomania is the direct result of a magnification of the ego due to the drawing in of he libidinal object-cathexes - a secondary narcissism which is a return of the original early infantile one. We have, however, made a few observations of persecution mania which have induced us to follow a particular track. The first thing that struck us was that in the large majority of cases the persecutor was of the same sex as the persecuted patient. This was still open to an innocent explanation; but in a few cases that were thoroughly studied it was clear that the person of the same sex whom the patient loved most had, since his illness, been turned into his persecutor. This made a further development possible: namely, the replacement of the beloved person, along the line of familiar resemblances, by someone else - for instance, a father by a schoolmaster or by some superior. Experiences of this kind in ever increasing numbers led us to conclude that paranoia persecutoria is the form of the disease in which a person is defending himself against a homosexual impulse which has become too powerful. The change over from affection to hatred, which, it is well known, may become a serious threat to the life of the loved and hated object, corresponds in such cases to the transformation of libidinal impulses into anxiety which is a regular outcome of the process of repression. Listen, for instance, to what is, once again, the most recent instance of my observations in this connection.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3469

A young doctor had to be expelled from the town in which. he lived because he had threatened the life of the son of a university professor residing there, who had up till then been his greatest friend. He attributed really fiendish intentions and demonic power to this former friend, whom he regarded as responsible for all the misfortunes that had befallen his family in recent years, for every piece of ill-luck whether in his home or in his social life. But that was not all. He believed that this bad friend and the friend’s father, the Professor, had caused the war, too, and brought the Russians into the country. His friend had forfeited his life a thousand times, and our patient was convinced that the criminal’s death would put an end to every evil. Yet his affection for him was still so strong that it had paralysed his hand when, on one occasion, he had an opportunity of shooting down his enemy at close range. In the course of the short conversations I had with the patient, it came to light that their friendship went back far into their schooldays. Once at least it had overstepped the bounds of friendship: a night which they had spent together had been an occasion for complete sexual intercourse. Our patient had never acquired the emotional relation to women which would have corresponded to his age and his attractive personality. He had once been engaged to a beautiful young girl of good social position; but she had broken off the engagement because she found that her fiancé was without any affection. Years later, his illness broke out just at the moment when he had succeeded for the first time in satisfying a woman completely. When this woman embraced him in gratitude and devotion, he suddenly had a mysterious pain that went round the top of his head like a sharp cut. Later on he interpreted this sensation as though an incision were being made at an autopsy for exposing the brain. And as his friend had become a pathological anatomist, it slowly dawned on him that he alone could have sent this last woman to him to seduce him- From that point onwards his eyes were opened to the other persecutions to which he believed he had been made a victim by the machinations of his one-time friend.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3470

But what about the cases in which the persecutor is not of the same sex as the patient and which appear, therefore, to contradict our explanation of their being a defence against homosexual libido? A little time ago I had an opportunity of examining such a case and was able to derive a confirmation from the apparent contradiction. A girl, who believed she was being persecuted by a man with whom she had had affectionate assignations on two occasions, had in fact first had a delusion that was directed against a woman who could be looked on as a substitute for her mother. It was only after her second assignation that she took the step of detaching the delusion from the woman and transferring it to the man. To begin with, therefore, the precondition of the persecutor being of the same sex as the patient was fulfilled in this case too. In making a complaint to a lawyer and to a doctor, the patient made no mention of this preliminary stage of her delusion and thus gave rise to an appearance of there being a contradiction of our explanation of paranoia.

Homosexual object-choice originally lies closer to narcissism than does the heterosexual kind. When it is a question, therefore, of repelling an undesirably strong homosexual impulse, the path back to narcissism is made particularly easy. Hitherto I have had very little opportunity of talking to you about the foundations of erotic life so far as we have discovered them, and it is too late now to catch up on the omission. This much, however, I can emphasize to you. Object-choice, the step forward in the development of the libido which is made after the narcissistic stage, can take place according to two different types: either according to the narcissistic type, where the subject’s own ego is replaced by another one that is as similar as possible, or according to the attachment type, where people who have become precious through satisfying the other vital needs are chosen as objects by the libido as well. A strong libidinal fixation to the narcissistic type of object-choice is to be included in the predisposition to manifest homosexuality.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3471

You will recall that at our first meeting of the present academic year I described a case to you of a woman suffering from delusions of jealousy. Now that we are so near its end you would no doubt like to hear how delusions are explained by psycho-analysis. But I have less to tell you about that than you expect. The fact that a delusion cannot be shaken by logical arguments or real experiences is explained in the same way as in the case of an obsession - by its relation to the unconscious, which is represented and held down by the delusion or by the obsession. The difference between the two is based on the difference between the topography and dynamics of the two illnesses.

As with paranoia, so also with melancholia (of which, incidentally, many different clinical forms have been described) we have found a point at which it has become possible to obtain some insight into the internal structure of the disease. We have discovered that the self-reproaches, with which these melancholic patients torment themselves in the most merciless fashion, in fact apply to another person, the sexual object which they have lost or which has become valueless to them through its own fault. From this we can conclude that the melancholic has, it is true, withdrawn his libido from the object, but that, by a process which we must call ‘narcissistic identification’, the object has been set up in the ego itself, has been as it were, projected on to the ego. (Here I can only give you a pictorial description and not an ordered account on topographical and dynamic lines.) The subject’s own ego is then treated like the object that has been abandoned, and it is subjected to all the acts of aggression and expressions of vengefulness which have been aimed at the object. A melancholic’s propensity to suicide is also made more intelligible if we consider that the patient’s embitterment strikes with a single blow at his own ego and at the loved and hated object. In melancholia, as well as in other narcissistic disorders, a particular trait in the patient’s emotional life emerges with peculiar emphasis - what, since Bleuler, we have been accustomed to describe as ‘ambivalence’. By this we mean the direction towards the same person of contrary - affectionate and hostile - feelings. Unluckily I have been unable in the course of these lectures to tell you more about this emotional ambivalence.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3472

In addition to narcissistic identification, there is a hysterical kind, which has been familiar to us very much longer. I wish it were possible to illustrate for you the differences between the two forms by a few clear specifications. There is something I can tell you about the periodic and cyclical forms of melancholia which I am sure you will be glad to hear. For in favourable circumstances - I have experienced this twice - it is possible by analytic treatment in the lucid intervals to prevent the return of the condition in the same or the opposite emotional mood. We learn from such cases that in melancholia and mania we are concerned once more with a special method of dealing with a conflict whose underlying determinants agree precisely with those of the other neuroses. You can imagine how much more there is for psycho-analysis to learn in this field of knowledge.

I told you too that we hoped that the analysis of the narcissistic disorders would give us an insight into the way in which our ego is put together and built up out of different agencies. We have already made a start with this at one point. From the analysis of delusions of observation we have drawn the conclusion that there actually exists in the ego an agency which unceasingly observes, criticizes and compares, and in that way sets itself over against the other part of the ego. We believe, therefore, that the patient is betraying a truth to us which is not yet sufficiently appreciated when he complains that he is spied upon and observed at every step he takes and that every one of his thoughts is reported and criticized. His only mistake is in regarding this uncomfortable power as something alien to him and placing it outside himself. He senses an agency holding sway in his ego which measures his actual ego and each of its activities by an ideal ego that he has created for himself in the course of his development. We believe, too, that this creation was made with the intention of re-establishing the self-satisfaction which was attached to primary infantile narcissism but which since then has suffered so many disturbances and mortifications. We know the self-observing agency as the ego-censor, the conscience; it is this that exercises the dream-censorship during the night, from which the repressions of inadmissible wishful impulses proceed. When in delusions of observation it becomes split up, it reveals to us its origin from the influences of parents, educators and social environment - from an identification with some of these model figures.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3473

These are a few of the findings which have hitherto been reached from the application of psycho-analysis to the narcissistic disorders. No doubt there are not yet enough of them and they still lack the precision which can only be attained from established familiarity with a new field. We owe all of them to a use of the concept of ego-libido or narcissistic libido, by whose help we can extend to the narcissistic neuroses the views which have proved their value with the transference neuroses. Now, however, you will ask whether it is possible that we shall succeed in subsuming all the disturbances of the narcissistic illnesses and of the psychoses under the libido theory, whether we look upon the libidinal factor in mental life as universally guilty of the causation of illness, and need never attribute the responsibility for it to changes in the functioning of the self-preservative instinct. Well, Ladies and Gentlemen, this question seems to me to call for no urgent reply, and, above all, not to be ripe for judgement. We can confidently leave it over in expectation of the progress of our scientific work. I should not be surprised if it turned out that the power to produce pathogenic effects was in fact a prerogative of the libidinal instincts, so that the libido theory could celebrate its triumph all along the line from the simplest ‘actual’ neurosis to the most severe alienation of the personality. We after all know that it is a characteristic feature of the libido that it struggles against submitting to the reality of the universe - to Ananke. But I regard it as extremely probable that the ego-instincts are carried along secondarily by the pathogenic instigation of the libido and forced into functional disturbances. Nor can I think that it would be a disaster to the trend of our researches, if what lies before us is the discovery that in severe psychoses the ego-instincts themselves have gone astray as a primary fact. The future will give the answer - to you, at any rate.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3474

Let me once more, however, return for a moment to anxiety, to throw light on a last obscurity that we left there. I have said that there is something that does not tally with the relation (so thoroughly recognized apart from this) between anxiety and libido: the fact, namely, that realistic anxiety in face of a danger seems to be a manifestation of the self-preservative instinct - which, after all, can scarcely be disputed. How would it be, though, if what was responsible for the affect of anxiety was not the egoistic ego-instincts but the ego-libido? After all, the state of anxiety is in every instance inexpedient, and its inexpedience becomes obvious if it reaches a fairly high pitch. In such cases it interferes with action, whether flight or defence, which alone is expedient and alone serves the cause of self-preservation. If, therefore, we attribute the affective portion of realistic anxiety to ego-libido and the accompanying action to the self-preservative instinct, we shall have got rid of the theoretical difficulty. After all, you do not seriously believe that one runs away because one feels anxiety? No. One feels anxiety and one runs away for a common motive, which is roused by the perception of danger. People who have been through a great mortal danger tell us that they were not at all afraid but merely acted - for instance, that they aimed their rifle at the wild beast - and that is unquestionably what was most expedient.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3475

LECTURE XXVII

TRANSFERENCE

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - Since we are now drawing towards the end of our discussions, there is a particular expectation which will be in your minds and which should not be disappointed. You no doubt suppose that I would not have led you through thick and thin of the subject-matter of psycho-analysis only to dismiss you at the end without saying a word about therapy, on which, after all, the possibility of practising psycho-analysis at all is based. The subject, moreover, is one that I cannot withhold from you, since what you learn in connection with it will enable you to make the acquaintance of a new fact in whose absence your understanding of the illnesses investigated by us will remain most markedly incomplete.

You do not, I know, expect me to initiate you into the technique by which analysis for therapeutic ends should be carried out. You only want to know in the most general way the method by which psycho-analytic therapy operates and what, roughly, it accomplishes. And you have an indisputable right to learn this. I shall not, however, tell it you but shall insist on your discovering it for yourselves.

Think it over! You have learnt all that is essential about the determinants of falling ill as well as all the factors that come into effect after the patient has fallen ill. Where do these leave room for any therapeutic influence? In the first place there is hereditary disposition. We have not talked about it very often because it is emphatically stressed from other directions and we have nothing new to say about it. But do not suppose that we underestimate it; precisely as therapists we come to realize its power clearly enough. In any case we can do nothing to alter it; we too must take it as something given, which sets a limit to our efforts. Next there is the influence of early experiences in childhood, to which we are in the habit of giving prominence in analysis: they belong to the past and we cannot undo them. Then comes everything that we have summarized as ‘real frustration’ - the misfortunes of life from which arise deprivation of love, poverty, family quarrels, ill-judged choice of a partner in marriage, unfavourable social circumstances, and the strictness of the ethical standards to whose pressure the individual is subject. Here, to be sure, there would be handles enough for a very effective therapy, but it would have to be of the kind which Viennese folklore attributes to the Emperor Joseph - the benevolent interference of a powerful personage before whose will people bow and difficulties vanish. But who are we, that we should be able to adopt benevolence of this kind as an instrument of our therapy? Poor ourselves and socially powerless, and compelled to earn our livelihood from our medical activity, we are not even in a position to extend our efforts to people without means, as other doctors with other methods of treatment are after all able to do. Our therapy is too time-consuming and too laborious for that to be possible. Perhaps, however, you are clutching at one of the factors I have mentioned and believe that there you have found the point at which our influence can make its attack. If the ethical restrictions demanded by society play a part in the deprivation imposed on the patient, treatment can, after all, give him the courage, or perhaps a direct injunction, to disregard those barriers and achieve satisfaction and recovery while forgoing the fulfilment of an ideal that is exalted, but so often not adhered to, by society. The patient will thus become healthy by ‘living a full life’ sexually. This, it is true, casts a shadow on analytic treatment for not serving general morality. What it has given to the individual it will have taken from the community.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3476

But, Ladies and Gentlemen, who has so seriously misinformed you? A recommendation to the patient to ‘live a full life’ sexually could not possibly play a part in analytic therapy - if only because we ourselves have declared that an obstinate conflict is taking place in him between a libidinal impulse and sexual repression, between a sensual and an ascetic trend. This conflict would not be solved by our helping one of these trends to victory over its opponent. We see, indeed, that in neurotics asceticism has the upper hand; and the consequence of this is precisely that the suppressed sexual tendency finds a way out in symptoms. If, on the contrary, we were to secure victory for sensuality, then the sexual repression that had been put on one side would necessarily be replaced by symptom. Neither of these two alternative decisions could end the internal conflict; in either case one party to it would remain unsatisfied. There are only a few cases in which the conflict is so unstable that a factor such as the doctor’s taking sides could decide it; and such cases do not in fact stand in need of analytic treatment. Anyone on whom the doctor could have so much influence would have found the same way out without the doctor. You must be aware that if an abstinent young man decides in favour of illicit sexual intercourse or if an unsatisfied wife seeks relief with another man, they have not as a rule waited for permission from a doctor or even from their analyst.

In this connection people usually overlook the one essential point - that the pathogenic conflict in neurotics is not to be confused with a normal struggle between mental impulses both of which are on the same psychological footing. In the former case the dissension is between two powers, one of which has made its way to the stage of what is preconscious or conscious while the other has been held back at the stage of the unconscious. For that reason the conflict cannot be brought to an issue; the disputants can no more come to grips than, in the familiar simile, a polar bear and a whale. A true decision can only be reached when they both meet on the same ground. To make this possible is, I think, the sole task of our therapy.

Moreover, I can assure you that you are misinformed if you suppose that advice and guidance in the affairs of life play an integral part in analytic influence. On the contrary, so for as possible we avoid the role of a mentor such as this and there is nothing we would rather bring about than the patient should make his decisions for himself. With this purpose, too, we require him to postpone for the term of his treatment any vital decisions on choice of a profession, business undertakings, marriage or divorce, and only to put them in practice when the treatment is finished. You must admit that all this is different from what you pictured. Only in the case of some very youthful or quite helpless or unstable individuals are we unable to put the desired limitation of our role into effect. With them we have to combine the functions of a doctor and an educator; but when this is so we are quite conscious of our responsibility and behave with the necessary caution.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3477

But you must not conclude from my eagerness in defending myself against the charge that neurotics are encouraged in analytic treatment to live a full life - you must not conclude from this that we influence them in favour of conventional virtue. That is at least as far from being the case. It is true that we are not reformers but merely observers; nevertheless, we cannot help observing with a critical eye and we have found it impossible to side with conventional sexual morality or to form a very high opinion of the manner in which society attempts the practical regulation of the problems of sexual life. We can present society with a blunt calculation that what is described as its morality calls for a bigger sacrifice than it is worth and that its proceedings are not based on honesty and do not display wisdom. We do not keep such criticisms from our patients’ ears, we accustom them to giving unprejudiced consideration to sexual matters no less than to any others; and if, having grown independent after the completion of their treatment, they decide on their own judgement in favour of some midway position between living a full life and absolute asceticism, we feel our conscience clear whatever their choice. We tell ourselves that anyone who has succeeded in educating himself to truth about himself is permanently defended against the danger of immorality, even though his standard of morality may differ in some respect from that which is customary in society. Moreover, we must guard against over-estimating the importance of the part played by the question of abstinence in influencing neuroses. Only in a minority of cases can the pathogenic situation of frustration and the subsequent damming-up of libido be brought to an end by the sort of sexual intercourse that can be procured without much trouble.

Thus you cannot explain the therapeutic effect of psycho-analysis by its permitting a full sexual life. Look around, then, for something else. I fancy that, while I was rejecting this suggestion of yours, one remark of mine put you on the right track. What we make use of must no doubt be the replacing of what is unconscious by what is conscious, the translation of what is unconscious into what is conscious. Yes, that is it. By carrying what is unconscious on into what is conscious, we lift the repressions, we remove the preconditions for the formation of symptoms, we transform the pathogenic conflict to a normal one for which it must be possible somehow to find a solution. All that we bring about in a patient is this single psychical change: the length to which it is carried is the measure of the help we provide. Where no repressions (or analogous psychical processes) can be undone, our therapy nothing to expect.

We can express the aim of our efforts in a variety of formulas: making conscious what is unconscious, lifting repressions, filling gaps in the memory - all these amount to the same thing. But perhaps you will be dissatisfied by this admission. You had formed a different picture of the return to health of a neurotic patient - that, after submitting to the tedious hours of a psycho-analysis, he would become another man; but the total result, so it seems, is that he has rather less that is unconscious and rather more that is conscious in him than he had before. The fact is that you are probably under-estimating the importance of an internal change of this kind. The neurotic who is cured has really become another man, though a bottom, of course, he has remained the same; that is to say, he has become what he might have become at best under the most favourable conditions. But that is a very great deal. If you now hear all that has to be done and what efforts it needs to bring about this apparently trivial change in a man’s mental life, you will no doubt begin to realize the importance of this difference in psychical levels.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3478

I will digress for a moment to ask if you know what is meant by a causal therapy. That is how we describe procedure which does not take the symptoms of an illness as its point of attack but sets about removing its causes. Well, then, is our psycho-analytic method a causal therapy or not? The reply is not a simple one, but it may perhaps give us an opportunity of realizing the worthlessness of a question framed in this way. In so far as analytic therapy does not make it its first task to remove the symptoms, it is behaving like a causal therapy. In another respect, you may say, it is not. For we long ago traced the causal chain back through the repressions to the instinctual dispositions, their relative intensities in the constitution and the deviations in the course of their development. Supposing, now, that it was possible, by some chemical means, perhaps, to interfere in this mechanism, to increase or diminish the quantity of libido present at a given time or to strengthen one instinct at the cost of another - this then would be a causal therapy in the true sense of the word, for which our analysis would have carried out the indispensable preliminary work of reconnaissance. At present, as you know, there is no question of any such method of influencing libidinal processes; with our psychical therapy we attack at a different point in the combination - not exactly at what we know are the roots of the phenomena, but nevertheless far enough away from the symptoms, at a point which has been made accessible to us by some very remarkable circumstances.

What, then, must we do in order to replace what is unconscious in our patients by what is conscious? There was a time when we thought this was a very simple matter: all that was necessary was for us to discover this unconscious material and communicate it to the patient. But we know already that this was a short-sighted error. Our knowledge about the unconscious material is not equivalent to his knowledge; if we communicate our knowledge to him, he does not receive it instead of his unconscious material but beside it; and that makes very little change in it. We must rather picture this unconscious material topographically, we must look for it in his memory at the place where it became unconscious owing to a repression. The repression must be got rid of - after which the substitution of the conscious material for the unconscious can proceed smoothly. How, then, do we lift a repression of this kind? Here our task enters a second phase. First, the search for the repression and then the removal of the resistance which maintains the repression.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3479

How do we remove the resistance? In the same way: by discovering it and showing it to the patient. Indeed, the resistance too is derived from a repression - from the same one that we are endeavouring to resolve, or from one that took place earlier. It was set up by the anticathexis which arose in order to repress the objectionable impulse. Thus we now do the same thing that we tried to do to begin with: interpret, discover and communicate; but now we are doing it at the right place. The anticathexis or the resistance does not form part of the unconscious but of the ego, which is our collaborator, and is so even if it is not conscious. As we know, the word ‘unconscious’ is being used here in two senses: on the one hand as a phenomenon and on the other as a system. This sounds very difficult and obscure; but is it not only repeating what we have already said in earlier passages? We have long been prepared for it. We expect that this resistance will be given up and the anticathexis withdrawn when our interpretation has made it possible for the ego to recognize it. What are the motive forces that we work with in such a case? First with the patient’s desire for recovery, which has induced him to take part with us in our joint work, and secondly with the help of his intelligence, to which we give support by our interpretation. There is no doubt that it is easier for the patient’s intelligence to recognize the resistance and to find the translation corresponding to what is repressed if we have previously given him the appropriate anticipatory ideas. If I say to you: ‘Look up at the sky! There’s a balloon there!’ you will discover it much more easily than if I simply tell you to look up and see if you can see anything. In the same way, a student who is looking through a microscope for the first time is instructed by his teacher as to what he will see; otherwise he does not see it at all, though it is there and visible.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3480

And now for the fact! In a whole number of nervous diseases - in hysteria, anxiety states, obsessional neurosis - our expectation is fulfilled. By searching for the repression in this way, by uncovering the resistances, by pointing out what is repressed, we really succeed in accomplishing our task - that is, in overcoming the resistances, lifting the repression and transforming the unconscious material into conscious. In doing so we gain the clearest impression of the way in which a violent struggle takes place in the patient’s mind about the overcoming of each resistance - a normal mental struggle, on the same psychological ground, between the motives which seek to maintain the anticathexis and those which are prepared to give it up. The former are the old motives which in the past put the repression into effect; among the latter are the newly arrived ones which, we may hope, will decide the conflict in our favour. We have succeeded in reviving the old conflict which led to repression and in bringing up for revision the process that was then decided. The new material that we produce includes, first the reminder that the earlier decision led to illness and the promise that a different path will lead to recovery, and, second, the enormous change in all the circumstances that has take place since the time of the original rejection. Then the ego was feeble, infantile, and may perhaps have had grounds for banning the demands of the libido as a danger. To-day it has grown strong and experienced, and moreover has a helper at and in the shape of the doctor. Thus we may expect to lead the revived conflict to a better outcome than that which ended in repression, and, as I have said, in hysteria and in the anxiety and obsessional neuroses success proves us in general to be correct,

There are, however, other forms of illness in which, in spite of the conditions being the same, our therapeutic procedure is never successful. In them, too, it had been a question of an original conflict between the ego and the libido which led to repression - though this may call for a different topographical description; in them, too, it is possible to trace the points in the patient’s life at which the repressions occurred; we make use of the same procedure, are ready to make the same promises and give the same help by the offer of anticipatory ideas; and once again the lapse of time between the repressions and the present day favours a different outcome to the conflict. And yet we do not succeed in lifting a single resistance or getting rid of a single repression. These patients, paranoics, melancholics, sufferers from dementia praecox, remain on the whole unaffected and proof against psycho-analytic therapy. What can be the reason for this? Not any lack of intelligence. A certain amount of intellectual capacity is naturally required in our patients; but there is certainly no lack of it in, for instance, the extremely shrewd combinatory paranoics. Nor do any of the other motives seem to be absent. Thus the melancholics have a very high degree of consciousness, absent in paranoics, that they are ill and that that is why they suffer so much; but this does not make them more accessible. We are faced here by a fact which we do not understand and which therefore leads us to doubt whether we have really understood all the determinants of our possible success with the other neuroses.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3481

If we continue to concern ourselves only with our hysterics and obsessional neurotics, we are soon met by a second fact for which we were not in the least prepared. For after a while we cannot help noticing that these patients behave in a quite peculiar manner to us. We believed, to be sure, that we had reckoned with all the motives concerned in the treatment, that we had completely rationalized the situation between us and the patients so that it could be looked over at a lance like a sum in arithmetic; yet, in spite of all this, something seems to creep in which has not been taken into account in our sum. This unexpected novelty itself takes many shapes, and I will begin by describing to you the commoner and more easily understandable of the forms in which it appears.

We notice, then, that the patient, who ought to want nothing else but to find a way out of his distressing conflict, develops a special interest in the person of the doctor. Everything connected with the doctor seems to be more important to him than his own affairs and to be diverting him from his illness. For a time, accordingly, relations with him become very agreeable; he is particularly obliging, tries wherever possible to show his gratitude, reveals refinements and merits in his nature which we should not, perhaps, have expected to find in him. The doctor, too, thereupon forms a favourable opinion of the patient and appreciates the good fortune which has enabled him to give his assistance to such a particularly valuable personality. If the doctor has an opportunity of talking to the patient’s relatives, he learns to his satisfaction that the liking is a mutual one. The patient never tires in his home of praising the doctor and of extolling ever new qualities in him. ‘He’s enthusiastic about you,’ say his relatives, ‘he trusts you blindly; everything you say is like a revelation to him.’ Here and there someone in this chorus has sharper eyes and says: ‘It’s becoming a bore, the way he talks of nothing else but you and has your name on his lips all the time.’

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3482

Let us hope that the doctor is modest enough to attribute his patient’s high opinion of him to the hopes he can rouse in him and to the widening of his intellectual horizon by the surprising and liberating enlightenment that the treatment brings with it. Under these conditions the analysis makes fine progress too. The patient understands what is interpreted to him and becomes engrossed in the tasks set him by the treatment; the material of memories and associations floods in I upon him in plenty, the certainty and appositeness of his interpretations are a surprise to the doctor, and the latter can only take note with satisfaction that here is a patient who readily accepts all the psychological novelties which are apt to provoke the most bitter contradiction among healthy people in the outside world. Moreover the cordial relations that prevail during the work of analysis are accompanied by an objective improvement, which is recognized on all sides, in the patient’s illness.

But such fine weather cannot last for ever. One day it clouds over. Difficulties arise in the treatment; the patient declares that nothing more occurs to him. He gives the clearest impression of his interest being no longer in the work and of his cheerfully disregarding the instructions given him to say everything that comes into his head and not to give way to any critical obstacle to doing so. He behaves as though he were outside the treatment and as though he had not made this agreement with the doctor. He is evidently occupied with something, but intends to keep it to himself. This is a situation that is dangerous for the treatment. We are unmistakably confronted by a formidable resistance. But what has happened to account for it?

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3483

If we are able once more to clarify the position, we find that the cause of the disturbance is that the patient has transferred on to the doctor intense feelings of affection which are justified neither by the doctor’s behaviour nor by the situation that has developed during the treatment. The form in which this affection is expressed and what its aims are depend of course on the personal relation between the two people involved. If those concerned are a young girl and a youngish man, we shall get the impression of a normal case of falling in love; we shall find it understandable that a girl should fall in love with a man with whom she can be much alone and talk of intimate things and who has the advantage of having met her as a helpful superior; and we shall probably overlook the fact that what we should expect from a neurotic girl would rather be an impediment in her capacity for love. The further the personal relations between doctor and patient diverge from this supposed case, the more we shall be surprised to find nevertheless the same emotional relationship constantly recurring. It may still pass muster if a woman who is unhappy in her marriage appears to be seized with a serious passion for a doctor who is still unattached, if she is ready to seek a divorce in order to be his or if, where there are social obstacles, she even expresses no hesitation about entering into a secret liaison with him. Such things come about even outside psycho-analysis. But in these circumstances we are astonished to hear declarations by married women and girls which bear witness to a quite particular attitude to the therapeutic problem: they had always known, they say, that they could only be cured by love, and before the treatment began they had expected that through this relation they would at last be granted what life had hitherto withheld from them; it had only been in this hope that they had taken so much trouble over the treatment and overcome all the difficulties in communicating their thoughts - and we on our part can add: and had so easily understood what is otherwise so hard to believe. But an admission of this sort surprises us: it throws all our calculations to the winds. Can it be that we have left the most important item out of our account?

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3484

And indeed, the greater our experience the less we are able to resist making this correction, though having to do so puts our scientific pretensions to shame. On the first few occasions one might perhaps think that the analytic treatment had come up against a disturbance due to a chance event - an event, that is, not intended and not provoked by it. But when a similar affectionate attachment by the patient to the doctor is repeated regularly in every new case, when it comes to light again and again, under the most unfavourable conditions and where there are positively grotesque incongruities, even in elderly women and in relation to grey-bearded men, even where, in our judgement, there is nothing of any kind to entice - then we must abandon the idea of a chance disturbance and recognize that we are dealing with a phenomenon which is intimately bound up with the nature of the illness itself.

This new fact, which we thus recognize so unwillingly, is known by us as transference. We mean a transference of feelings on to the person of the doctor, since we do not believe that the situation in the treatment could justify the development of such feelings. We suspect, on the contrary, that the whole readiness for these feelings is derived from elsewhere, that they were already prepared in the patient and, upon the opportunity offered by the analytic treatment, are transferred on to the person of the doctor. Transference can appear as a passionate demand for love or in more moderate forms; in place of a wish to be loved, a wish can emerge between a girl and an old man to be received as a favourite daughter; the libidinal desire can be toned down into a proposal for an inseparable, but ideally non-sensual, friendship. Some women succeed in sublimating the transference and in moulding it till it achieves a kind of viability; others must express it in its crude, original, and for the most part, impossible form. But at bottom it is always the same, and never allows its origin from the same source to be mistaken.

Before we enquire where we are to find a place for this new fact, I will complete my description of it. What happens with male patients? There at least one might hope to escape the troublesome interference caused by difference of sex and by sexual attraction. Our answer, however, must be much the same as in the case of women. There is the same attachment to the doctor, the same overvaluation of his qualities, the same absorption in his interests, the same jealousy of everyone close to him in real life. The sublimated forms of transference are more frequent between one man and another and straightforward sexual demands are rarer, in proportion as manifest homosexuality is unusual as compared with the other ways in which these instinctual components are employed. With his male patients, again, more often than with women, the doctor comes across a form of expression of the transference which seems at first sight to contradict all our previous descriptions - a hostile or negative transference.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3485

I must begin by making it clear that a transference is present in the patient from the beginning of the treatment and for a while is the most powerful motive in its advance. We see no trace of it and need not bother about it so long as it operates in favour of the joint work of analysis. If it then changes into a resistance, we must turn our attention to it and we recognize that it alters its relation to the treatment under two different and contrary conditions: firstly, if as an affectionate trend it has become so powerful, and betrays signs of its origin in a sexual need so clearly, that it inevitably provokes an internal opposition to itself, and, secondly, if it consists of hostile instead of affectionate impulses. The hostile feelings make their appearance as a rule later than the affectionate ones and behind them; their simultaneous presence gives a good picture of the emotional ambivalence which is dominant in the majority of our intimate relations with other people. The hostile feelings are as much an indication of an emotional tie as the affectionate ones, in the same way as defiance signifies dependence as much as obedience does, though with a ‘minus’ instead of a ‘plus’ sign before it. We can be in no doubt that the hostile feelings towards the doctor deserve to be called a ‘transference’, since the situation in the treatment quite certainly offers no adequate grounds for their origin; this necessary view of the negative transference assures us, therefore, that we have not gone wrong in our judgement of the positive or affectionate one.

Where the transference arises, what difficulties it raises for us, how we overcome them and what advantages we eventually derive from it - these are questions to be dealt with in a technical guide to analysis, and I shall only touch on them lightly to-day. It is out of the question for us to yield to the patient’s demands deriving from the transference; it would be absurd for us to reject them in an unfriendly, still more in an indignant, manner. We overcome the transference by pointing out to the patient that his feelings do not arise from the present situation and do not apply to the person of the doctor, but that they are repeating something that happened to him earlier. In this way we oblige him to transform his repetition into a memory. By that means the transference, which, whether affectionate or hostile, seemed in every case to constitute the greatest threat to the treatment, becomes its best tool, by whose help the most secret compartments of mental life can be opened.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3486

But I should like to say a few words to you to relieve you of your surprise at the emergence of this unexpected phenomenon. We must not forget that the patient’s illness, which we have undertaken to analyse, is not something which has been rounded off and become rigid but that it is still growing and developing like a living organism. The beginning of the treatment does not put an end to this development; when, however, the treatment has obtained mastery over the patient, what happens is that the whole of his illness’s new production is concentrated upon a single point - his relation to the doctor. Thus the transference may be compared to the cambium layer in a tree between the wood and the bark, from which the new formation of tissue and the increase in the girth of the trunk derive. When the transference has risen to this significance, work upon the patient’s memories retreats far into the background. Thereafter it is not incorrect to say that we are no longer concerned with the patient’s earlier illness but with a newly created and transformed neurosis which has taken the former’s place. We have followed this new edition of the old disorder from its start, we have observed its origin and growth, and we are especially well able to find our way about in it since, as its object, we are situated at its very centre. All the patient’s symptoms have abandoned their original meaning and have take on a new sense which lies in a relation to the transference; or only such symptoms have persisted as are capable of undergoing such a transformation. But the mastering of this new, artificial neurosis coincides with getting rid of the illness which was originally brought to the treatment - with the accomplishment of our therapeutic task. A person who has become normal and free from the operation of repressed instinctual impulse in his relation to the doctor will remain so in his own life after the doctor has once more withdrawn from it.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3487

The transference possesses this extraordinary, and for the treatment, positively central, importance in hysteria, anxiety hysteria and obsessional neurosis, which are for that reason rightly classed together as ‘transference neuroses’. No one who has taken in a full impression of the fact of transference from his analytic work will any longer doubt the nature of the suppressed impulses that obtain expression in the symptoms of these neuroses, and will call for no more powerful evidence of their libidinal character. It may be said that our conviction of the significance of symptoms as substitutive satisfactions of the libido only received its final confirmation after the enlistment of the transference.

There is every reason now for us to improve our earlier dynamic account of the therapeutic process and to bring it into harmony with our new realization. If the patient is to fight his way through the normal conflict with the resistances which we have uncovered for him in the analysis, he is in need of a powerful stimulus which will influence the decision in the sense which we desire, leading to recovery. Otherwise it might happen that he would choose in favour of repeating the earlier outcome and would allow what had been brought up into consciousness to slip back again into repression. At this point what turns the scale in his struggle is not his intellectual insight which is neither strong enough nor free enough for such an achievement - but simply and solely his relation to the doctor. In so far as his transference bears a ‘plus’ sign, it clothes the doctor with authority and is transformed into belief in his communications and explanations. In the absence of such a transference, or if it is a negative one, the patient would never even give a hearing to the doctor and his arguments. In this his belief is repeating the story of its own development; it is a derivative of love and, to start with, needed no arguments. Only later did he allow them enough room to submit them to examination, provided they were brought forward by someone he loved. Without such supports arguments carried no weight, and in most people’s lives they never do. Thus in general a man is only accessible from the intellectual side too, in so far as he is capable of a libidinal cathexis of objects; and we have good reason to recognize and to dread in the amount of his narcissism a barrier against the possibility of being influenced by even the best analytic technique.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3488

A capacity for directing libidinal object-cathexes on to people must of course be attributed to every normal person. The tendency to transference of the neurotics I have spoken of is only an extraordinary increase of this universal characteristic. It would indeed be very strange if a human trait so widespread and so important had never been noticed or appreciated. And in fact it has been. Bernheim, with an unerring eye based his theory of hypnotic phenomena on the thesis that everyone is in some way ‘suggestible’. His suggestibility was nothing other than the tendency to transference, somewhat too narrowly conceived, so that it did not include negative transference. But Bernheim was never able to say what suggestion actually was and how it came about. For him it was a fundamental fact on whose origin he could throw no light. He did not know that his ‘suggestibilité' depended on sexuality, on the activity of the libido. And it must dawn on us that in our technique we have abandoned hypnosis only to rediscover suggestion in the shape of transference.

But here I will pause, and let you have a word; for I see an objection boiling up in you so fiercely that it would make you incapable of listening if it were not put into words: ‘Ah! so you’ve admitted it at last! You work with the help of suggestion, just like the hypnotists! That is what we’ve thought for a long time. But, if so, why the roundabout road by way of memories of the past, discovering the unconscious, interpreting and translating back distortions - this immense expenditure of labour, time and money - when the one effective thing is after all only suggestion? Why do you not make direct suggestion against the symptoms, as the others do - the honest hypnotists? Moreover, if you try to excuse yourself for your long detour on the ground that you have made a number of important psychological discoveries which are hidden by direct suggestion - what about the certainty of these discoveries now? Are not they a result of suggestion too, of unintentional suggestion? Is it not possible that you are forcing on the patient what you want and what seems to you correct, in this field as well?’

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3489

What you are throwing up at me in this is uncommonly interesting and must be answered. But I cannot do so to-day: we have not the time. Till our next meeting, then. I will answer you, you will see. But to-day I must finish what I have begun. I promised to make you understand by the help of the fact of transference why our therapeutic efforts have no success with the narcissistic neuroses.

I can do so in a few words, and you will see how simply the riddle can be solved and how well everything fits together. Observation shows that sufferers from narcissistic neuroses have no capacity for transference or only insufficient residues of it. They reject the doctor, not with hostility but with indifference. For that reason they cannot be influenced by him either; what he says leaves them cold, makes no impression on them; consequently the mechanism of cure which we carry through with other people - the revival of the pathogenic conflict and the overcoming of the resistance due to repression - cannot be operated with them. They remain as they are. Often they have already undertaken attempts at recovery on their own account which have led to pathological results. We cannot alter this in any way.

On the basis of our clinical impressions we maintained that these patients’ object-cathexes must have been given up and that their object-libido must have been transformed into ego-libido. Through this characteristic we distinguished them from the first group of neurotics (sufferers from hysteria, anxiety-hysteria and obsessional neurosis). This suspicion is now confirmed by their behaviour in our attempts at therapy. They manifest no transference and for that reason are inaccessible to our efforts and cannot be cured by us.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3490

LECTURE XXVIII

ANALYTIC THERAPY

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - You know what we are going to talk about to-day. You asked me why we do not make use of direct suggestion in psycho-analytic therapy, when we admit that our influence rests essentially on transference - that is, on suggestion; and you added a doubt whether, in view of this predominance of suggestion, we are still able to claim that our psychological discoveries are objective. I promised I would give you a detailed reply.

Direct suggestion is suggestion aimed against the manifestation of the symptoms; it is a struggle between your authority and the motives for the illness. In this you do not concern yourself with these motives; you merely request the patient to suppress their manifestation in symptoms. It makes no difference of principle whether you put the patient under hypnosis or not. Once again Bernheim, with his characteristic perspicacity, maintained that suggestion was the essential element in the phenomena of hypnotism, that hypnosis itself was already a result of suggestion, a suggested state; and he preferred to practise suggestion in a waking state, which can achieve the same effects as suggestion under hypnosis.

Which would you rather hear first on this question - what experience tells us or theoretical considerations?

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3491

Let us begin with the former. I was a pupil of Bernheim’s, whom I visited at Nancy in 1889 and whose book on suggestion I translated into German. I practised hypnotic treatment for many years, at first by prohibitory suggestion and later in combination with Breuer’s method of questioning the patient. I can therefore speak of the results of hypnotic or suggestive therapy on the basis of a wide experience. If, in the words of the old medical aphorism, an ideal therapy should be rapid, reliable and not disagreeable for the patient, Bernheim’s method fulfilled at least two of these requirements. It could be carried through much quicker - or, rather, infinitely quicker - than analytic treatment and it caused the patient neither trouble nor unpleasantness. For the doctor it became, in the long run, monotonous: in each case, in the same way, with the same ceremonial, forbidding the most variegated symptoms to exist, without being able to learn anything of their sense and meaning. It was hackwork and not a scientific activity, and it recalled magic, incantations and hocus-pocus. That could not weigh, however, against the patient’s interest. But the third quality was lacking: the procedure was not reliable in any respect. It could be used with one patient, but not with another; it achieved a great deal with one and very little with another, and one never knew why. Worse than the capriciousness of the procedure was the lack of permanence in its successes. If, after a short time, one had news of the patient once more, the old ailment was back again or its place had been taken by a new one. One might hypnotize him again. But in the background there was the warning given by experienced workers against robbing the patient of his self-reliance by frequently repeated hypnosis and so making him an addict to this kind of therapy as though it were a narcotic. Admittedly sometimes things went entirely as one would wish: after a few efforts, success was complete and permanent. But the conditions determining such a favourable outcome remained unknown. On one occasion a severe condition in a woman, which I had entirely got rid of by a short hypnotic treatment, returned unchanged after the patient had, through no action on my part, got annoyed with me; after a reconciliation, I removed the trouble again and far more thoroughly; yet it returned once more after she had fallen foul of me a second time. On another occasion a woman patient, whom I had repeatedly helped out of neurotic states by hypnosis, suddenly, during the treatment of a specially obstinate situation, threw her arms round my neck. After this one could scarcely avoid, whether one wanted to or not, investigating the question of the nature and origin of one’s authority in suggestive treatment.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3492

So much for experiences. They show us that in renouncing direct suggestion we are not giving up anything of irreplaceable value. Now let us add a few reflections to this. The practice of hypnotic therapy makes very small demands on either the patient or the doctor. It agrees most beautifully with the estimate in which neuroses are still held by the majority of doctors. The doctor says to the neurotic patient: ‘There’s nothing wrong with you, it’s only a question of nerves; so I can blow away your trouble in two or three minutes with just a few words.’ But our views on the laws of energy are offended by the notion of its being possible to move a great weight by a tiny application of force, attacking it directly, without the outside help of any appropriate appliances. In so far as the conditions are comparable, experience shows that this feat is not successfully accomplished in the case of the neuroses either. But I am aware that this argument is not unimpeachable. There is such a thing as a ‘trigger-action’.

In the light of the knowledge we have gained from psycho-analysis we can describe the difference between hypnotic and psycho-analytic suggestion as follows. Hypnotic treatment seeks to cover up and gloss over something in mental life; analytic treatment seeks to expose and get rid of something. The former acts like a cosmetic, the latter like surgery. The former makes use of suggestion in order to forbid the symptoms; it strengthens the repressions, but, apart from that, leaves all the processes that have led to the formation of the symptoms unaltered. Analytic treatment makes its impact further back towards the roots, where the conflicts are which gave rise to the symptoms, and uses suggestion in order to alter the outcome of those conflicts. Hypnotic treatment leaves the patient inert and unchanged, and for that reason, too, equally unable to resist any fresh occasion for falling ill. An analytic treatment demands from both doctor and patient the accomplishment of serious work, which is employed in lifting internal resistances. Through the overcoming of these resistances the patient’s mental life is permanently changed, is raised to a high level of development and remains protected against fresh possibilities of falling ill. This work of overcoming resistances is the essential function of analytic treatment; the patient has to accomplish it and the doctor makes this possible for him with the help of suggestion operating in an educative sense. For that reason psycho-analytic treatment has justly been described as a kind of after-education.

I hope I have now made it clear to you in what way our method of employing suggestion therapeutically differs from the only method possible in hypnotic treatment. You will understand too, from the fact that suggestion can be traced back to transference, the capriciousness which struck us in hypnotic therapy, while analytic treatment remains calculable within its limits. In using hypnosis we are dependent on the state of the patient’s capacity for transference without being able to influence it itself. The transference of a person who is to be hypnotized may be negative or, as most frequently, ambivalent, or he may have protected himself against his transference by adopting special attitudes; of that we learn nothing. In psycho-analysis we act upon the transference itself, resolve what opposes it, adjust the instrument with which we wish to make our impact. Thus it becomes possible for us to derive an entirely fresh advantage from the power of suggestion; we get it into our hands. The patient does not suggest to himself whatever he pleases: we guide his suggestion so far as he is in any way accessible to its influence.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3493

But you will now tell me that, no matter whether we call the motive force of our analysis transference or suggestion, there is a risk that the influencing of our patient may make the objective certainty of our findings doubtful. What is advantageous to our therapy is damaging to our researches. This is the objection that is most often raised against psycho-analysis, and it must be admitted that, though it is groundless, it cannot be rejected as unreasonable. If it were justified, psycho-analysis would be nothing more than a particularly well-disguised and particularly effective form of suggestive treatment and we should have to attach little weight to all that it tells us about what influences our lives, the dynamics of the mind or the unconscious. That is what our opponents believe; and in especial they think that we have ‘talked’ the patients into everything relating to the importance of sexual experiences - or even into those experiences themselves - after such notions have grown up in our own depraved imagination. These accusations are contradicted more easily by an appeal to experience than by the help of theory. Anyone who has himself carried out psycho-analyses will have been able to convince himself on countless occasions that it is impossible to make suggestions to a patient in that way. The doctor has no difficulty, of course, in making him a supporter of some particular theory and in thus making him share some possible error of his own. In this respect the patient is behaving like anyone else - like a pupil - but this only affects his intelligence, not his illness. After all, his conflicts will only be successfully solved and his resistances overcome if the anticipatory ideas he is given tally with what is real in him. Whatever in the doctor’s conjectures is inaccurate drops out in the course of the analysis; it has to be withdrawn and replaced by something more correct. We endeavour by a careful technique to avoid the occurrence of premature successes due to suggestion; but no harm is done even if they do occur, for we are not satisfied by a first success. We do not regard an analysis as at an end until all the obscurities of the case are cleared up, the gaps in the patient’s memory filled in, the precipitating causes of the repressions discovered. We look upon successes that set in too soon as obstacles rather than as a help to the work of analysis; and we put an end to such successes by constantly resolving the transference on which they are based. It is this last characteristic which is the fundamental distinction between analytic and purely suggestive therapy, and which frees the results of analysis from the suspicion of being successes due to suggestion. In every other kind of suggestive treatment the transference is carefully preserved and left untouched; in analysis it is itself subjected to treatment and is dissected in all the shapes in which it appears. At the end of an analytic treatment the transference must itself be cleared away; and if success is then obtained or continues, it rests, not on suggestion, but on the achievement by its means of an overcoming of internal resistances, on the internal change that has been brought about in the patient.

The acceptance of suggestions on individual points is no doubt discouraged by the fact that during the treatment we are struggling unceasingly against resistances which are able to transform themselves into negative (hostile) transferences. Nor must we fail to point out that a large number of the individual findings of analysis, which might otherwise be suspected to being products of suggestion, are confirmed from another and irreproachable source. Our guarantors in this case are the sufferers from dementia praecox and paranoia, who are of course far above any suspicion of being influenced by suggestion. The translations of symbols and the phantasies, which these patients produce for us and which in them have forced their way through into consciousness, coincide faithfully with the results of our investigations into the unconscious of transference neurotics and thus confirm the objective correctness of our interpretations, on which doubt is so often thrown. You will not, I think, be going astray if you trust analysis on these points.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3494

I will now complete my picture of the mechanism of cure by clothing it in the formulas of the libido theory. A neurotic is incapable of enjoyment and of efficiency - the former because his libido is not directed on to any real object and the latter because he is obliged to employ a great deal of this available energy on keeping his libido under repression and on warding off its assaults. He would become healthy if the conflict between his ego and his libido came to an end and if his ego had his libido again at its disposal. The therapeutic task consists, therefore, in freeing the libido from its present attachments, which are withdrawn from the ego, and in making it once more serviceable to the ego. Where, then, is the neurotic’s libido situated? It is easily found: it is attached to the symptoms, which yield it the only substitutive satisfaction possible at the time. We must therefore make ourselves masters of the symptoms and resolve them - which is precisely the same thing that the patient requires of us. In order to resolve the symptoms, we must go back as far as their origin, we must renew the conflict from which they arose, and, with the help of motive forces which were not at the patient’s disposal in the past, we must guide it to a different outcome. This revision of the process of repression can be accomplished only in part in connection with the memory traces of the processes which led to repression. The decisive part of the work is achieved by creating in the patient’s relation to the doctor - in the ‘transference’ - new editions of the old conflicts; in these the patient would like to behave in the same way as he did in the past, while we, by summoning up every available mental force, compel him to come to a fresh decision. Thus the transference becomes the battlefield on which all the mutually struggling forces should meet one another.

All the libido, as well as everything opposing it, is made to converge solely on the relation with the doctor. In this process the symptoms are inevitably divested of libido. In place of his patient’s true illness there appears the artificially constructed transference illness, in place of the various unreal objects of the libido there appears a single, and once more imaginary, object in the person of the doctor. But, by the help of he doctor’s suggestion, the new struggle around this object is lifted to the highest psychical level: it takes place as a normal mental conflict. Since a fresh repression is avoided, the alienation between ego and libido is brought to an end and the subject’s mental unity is restored. When the libido is released once more from its temporary object in the person of the doctor, it cannot return to its earlier objects, but is at the disposal of the ego. The forces against which we have been struggling during our work of therapy are, on the one hand, the ego’s antipathy to certain trends of the libido - an antipathy expressed in a tendency to repression - and, on the other hand, the tenacity or adhesiveness of the libido, which dislikes leaving objects that it has once cathected.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3495

Thus our therapeutic work falls into two phases. In the first, all the libido is forced from the symptoms into the transference and concentrated there; in the second, the struggle is waged around this new object and the libido is liberated from it. The change which is decisive for a favourable outcome is the elimination of repression in this renewed conflict so that the libido cannot withdraw once more from the ego by flight into the unconscious. This is made possible by the alteration of the ego which is accomplished under the influence of the doctor’s suggestion. By means of the work of interpretation, which transforms what is unconscious into what is conscious, the ego is enlarged at the cost of this unconscious; by means of instruction, it is made conciliatory towards the libido and inclined to grant it some satisfaction, and its repugnance to the claims of the libido is diminished by the possibility of disposing of a portion of it by sublimation. The more closely events in the treatment coincide with this ideal description, the greater will be the success of the psycho-analytic therapy. It finds its limits in the lack of mobility of the libido, which may refuse to leave its objects, and the rigidity of narcissism, which will not allow transference on to objects to increase beyond certain bounds. Further light may perhaps be thrown on the dynamics of the process of cure if I say that we get hold of the whole of the libido which has been withdrawn from the dominance of the ego by attracting a portion of it on to ourselves by means of the transference.

It will not be out of place to give a warning that we can draw no direct conclusion from the distribution of the libido during and resulting from the treatment as to how it was distributed during the illness. Suppose we succeeded in bringing a case to a favourable conclusion by setting up and then resolving a strong father-transference to the doctor. It would not be correct to conclude that the patient had suffered previously from a similar unconscious attachment of his libido to his father. His father-transference was merely the battlefield on which we gained control of his libido; the patient’s libido as directed to it from other positions. A battlefield need not necessarily coincide with one of the enemy’s key fortresses. The defence of a hostile capital need not take place just in front of its gates. Not until after the transference has once more been resolved can we reconstruct in our thoughts the distribution of the libido which had prevailed during the illness.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3496

From the standpoint of the libido theory, too, we may say a last word on dreams. A neurotic’s dreams help us, like his parapraxes and his free associations to them, to discover the sense of his symptoms and to reveal the way in which his libido is allocated. They show us, in the form of a wish-fulfilment, what wishful impulses have been subjected to repression and to what objects the libido withdrawn from the ego has become attached. For this reason the interpretation of dreams plays a large part in a psycho-analytic treatment, and in some cases it is over long periods the most important instrument of our work. We already know that the state of sleep in itself leads to a certain relaxation of the repressions. A repressed impulse, owing to this reduction in the pressure weighing down upon it, becomes able to express itself far more clearly in a dream than it can be allowed to be expressed by a symptom during the day. The study of dreams therefore becomes the most convenient means of access to a knowledge of the repressed unconscious, of which the libido withdrawn from the ego forms a part.

But the dreams of neurotics do not differ in any important respect from those of normal people; it is possible, indeed, that they cannot be distinguished from them at all. It would be absurd to give an account of the dreams of neurotics which could not also apply to the dreams of normal people. We must therefore say that the difference between neurosis and health holds only during the day; it is not prolonged into dream-life. We are obliged to carry over to healthy people a number of hypotheses which arise in connection with neurotics as a result of the link between the latter’s dreams and their symptoms. We cannot deny that healthy people as well possess in their mental life what alone makes possible the formation both of dreams and of symptoms, and we must conclude that they too have carried out repressions, that they expend a certain amount of energy in order to maintain them, that their unconscious system conceals repressed impulses which are still cathected with energy, and that a portion of their libido is withdrawn from their ego’s disposal. Thus a healthy person, too, is virtually a neurotic; but dreams appear to be the only symptoms which he is capable of forming. It is true that if one subjects his waking life to a closer examination one discovers something that contradicts this appearance - namely that this ostensibly healthy life is interspersed with a great number of trivial and in practice unimportant symptoms.

The distinction between nervous health and neurosis is thus reduced to a practical question and is decided by the outcome - by whether the subject is left with a sufficient amount of capacity for enjoyment and of efficiency. It probably goes back to the relative sizes of the quota of energy that remains free and of that which is bound by repression, and is of a quantitative not of a qualitative nature. I need not tell you that this discovery is the theoretical justification for our conviction that neuroses are in principle curable in spite of their being based on constitutional disposition.

The identity of the dreams of healthy and neurotic people enables us to infer thus much in regard to defining the characteristics of health. But in regard to dreams themselves we can make a further inference: we must not detach them from their connection with neurotic symptoms, we must not suppose that their essential nature is exhausted by the formula that describes them as a translation of thoughts into an archaic form of expression, but we must suppose that they exhibit to us allocations of the libido and object-cathexes that are really present.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3497

We shall soon have reached the end. You are perhaps disappointed that on the topic of the psycho-analytic method of therapy I have only spoken to you about theory and not about the conditions which determine whether a treatment is to be undertaken or about the results it produces. I shall discuss neither: the former because it is not my intention to give you practical instructions on how to carry out a psycho-analysis, and the latter because several reasons deter me from it. At the beginning of our talks, I emphasized the fact that under favourable conditions we achieve successes which are second to none of the finest in the field of internal medicine; and I can now add something further - namely that they could not have been achieved by any other procedure. If I were to say more than this I should be suspected of trying to drown the loudly raised voices of depreciation by self-advertisement. The threat has repeatedly been made against psycho-analysts by our medical ‘colleagues’ - even at public congresses - that a collection of the failures and damaging results of analysis would be published which would open the suffering public’s eyes to the worthlessness of this method of treatment. But, apart from the malicious, denunciatory character of such a measure, it would not even be calculated to make it possible to form a correct judgement of the therapeutic effectiveness of analysis. Analytic therapy, as you know, is in its youth; it has taken a long time to establish its technique, and that could only be done in the course of working and under the influence of increasing experience. In consequence of the difficulties in giving instruction, the doctor who is a beginner in psycho-analysis is thrown back to a greater extent than other specialists on his own capacity for further development, and the results of his first years will never make it possible to judge the efficacy of analytic therapy.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3498

Many attempts at treatment miscarried during the early period of analysis because they were undertaken in cases which were altogether unsuited to the procedure and which we should exclude to-day on the basis of our present view of the indications for treatment. But these indications, too, could only be arrived at by experiment. In those days we did not know a priori that paranoia and dementia praecox in strongly marked forms are inaccessible, and we had a right to make trial of the method on all kinds of disorders. But most of the failures of those early years were due not to the doctor’s fault or an unsuitable choice of patients but to unfavourable external conditions. Here we have only dealt with internal resistances, those of the patient, which are inevitable and can be overcome. The external resistances which arise from the patient’s circumstances, from his environment, are of small theoretical interest but of the greatest practical importance. Psycho-analytic treatment may be compared with a surgical operation and may similarly claim to be carried out under arrangements that will be the most favourable for its success. You know the precautionary measures adopted by a surgeon: a suitable room, good lighting, assistants, exclusion of the patient’s relatives, and so on. Ask yourselves now how many of these operations would turn out successfully if they had to take place in the presence of all the members of the patient’s family, who would stick their noses into the field of the operation and exclaim aloud at every incision. In psycho-analytic treatments the intervention of relatives is a positive danger and a danger one does not know how to meet. One is armed against the patient’s internal resistances which one knows are inevitable, but how can one ward off these external resistances? No kind of explanations make any impression on the patient’s relatives; they cannot be induced to keep at a distance from the whole business, and one cannot make common cause with them because of the risk of losing the confidence of the patient, who - quite rightly moreover - expects the person in whom he has put his trust to take his side. No one who has any experience of the rifts which so often divide a family will, if he is an analyst, be surprised to find that the patient’s closest relatives sometimes betray less interest in his recovering than in his remaining as he is. When, as so often, the neurosis is related to conflicts between members of a family, the healthy party will not hesitate long in choosing between his own interest and the sick party’s recovery. It is not to be wondered at, indeed, if a husband looks with disfavour on a treatment in which, as he may rightly suspect, the whole catalogue of his sins will be brought to light. Nor do we wonder at it; but we cannot in that case blame ourselves if our efforts remain unsuccessful and the treatment is broken off prematurely because the husband’s resistance is added to that of his sick wife. We had in fact undertaken something which in the prevailing circumstances was unrealizable.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3499

Instead of reporting a number of cases, I will tell you the story of a single one, in which, from considerations of medical discretion, I was condemned to play a long-suffering part. I undertook the analytic treatment - it was many years ago - of a girl who had for some time been unable, owing to anxiety, to go out in the street or to stay at home by herself. The patient slowly brought out an admission that her imagination had been seized by chance observations of the affectionate relations between her mother and a well-to-do friend of the family. But she was so clumsy - or so subtle - that she gave her mother a hint of what was being talked about in the analytic sessions. She brought this about by changing her behaviour towards her mother, by insisting on being protected by no one but her mother from her anxiety at being alone and by barring the door to her in her anxiety if she tried to leave the house. Her mother had herself been very neurotic in the past, but had been cured years before in a hydropathic establishment. Or rather, she had there made the acquaintance of the man with whom she was able to enter into a relation that was in every way satisfying to her. The girl’s passionate demands took her aback, and she suddenly understood the meaning of her daughter’s anxiety: the girl had made herself ill in order to keep her mother prisoner and to rob her of the freedom of movement that her relations with her lover required. The mother quickly made up her mind and brought the obnoxious treatment to an end. The girl was taken to a sanatorium for nervous diseases and was demonstrated for many years as ‘a poor victim of psycho-analysis’. All this time, too, I was pursued by the calumny of responsibility for the unhappy end of the treatment. I kept silence, for I thought I was bound by the duty of medical discretion. Long afterwards I learnt from one of my colleagues, who visited the sanatorium and had seen the agoraphobic girl there, that the liaison between her mother and the well-to-do friend of the family was common knowledge in the city and that it was probably connived at by the husband and father. Thus it was to this ‘secret’ that the treatment had been sacrificed.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3500

In the years before the war, when arrivals from many foreign countries made me independent of the favour or disfavour of my own city, I followed a rule of not taking on patient for treatment unless he was sui juris, not dependent on anyone else in the essential relations of his life. This is not possible, however, for every psycho-analyst. Perhaps you may conclude from my warning against relatives that patients designed for psycho-analysis should be removed from their families and that this kind of treatment should accordingly be restricted to inmates of hospitals for nervous diseases. I could not,, however, follow you in that. It is much more advantageous for patients, ( in so far as they are not in a phase of severe exhaustion) to remain during the treatment in the conditions in which they have to struggle with the tasks that face them. But the patients’ relatives ought not to cancel out this advantage by their conduct and should not offer any hostile opposition to the doctor’s efforts. But how do you propose to influence in that direction factors like these which are inaccessible to us? And you will guess, of course, how much the prospects of a treatment are determined by the patient’s social milieu and the cultural level of his family.

This presents a gloomy prospect for the effectiveness of psycho-analysis as a therapy - does it not? - even though we are able to explain the great majority of our failures by attributing them to interfering external factors. Friends of analysis have advised us to meet the threatened publication of our failures with statistics of our successes drawn up by ourselves. I did not agree to this. I pointed out that statistics are worthless if the items assembled in them are too heterogeneous; and the cases of neurotic illness which we had taken into treatment were in fact incomparable in a great variety of respects. Moreover, the period of time that could be covered was too short to make it possible to judge the durability of the cures. And it was altogether impossible to report on many of the cases: they concerned people who had kept both their illness and its treatment secret, and their recovery had equally to be kept secret. But the strongest reason for holding back lay in the realization that in matters of therapy people behave highly irrationally, so that one has no prospect of accomplishing anything with them by rational means. A therapeutic novelty is either received with delirious enthusiasm - as, for instance, when Koch introduced his first tuberculin against tuberculosis to the public - or it is treated with abysmal distrust - like Jenner’s vaccination, which was in fact a blessing and which even to-day has its irreconcilable opponents. There was obviously a prejudice against psycho-analysis. If one had cured a severe case, one might hear people say: ‘That proves nothing. He would have recovered on his own account by this time.’ And when a woman patient, who had already passed through four cycles of depression and mania, came to be treated by me during an interval after an attack of melancholia and three weeks later started on a phase of mania, all the members of her family and a high medical authority, too, who was called in for consultation - were convinced that the fresh attack could only be the result of my attempted analysis. Nothing can be done against prejudices. You can see it again to-day in the prejudices which each group of nations at war has developed against the other. The most sensible thing to do is to wait, and to leave such prejudices to the eroding effects of time. One day the same people begin to think about the same things in quite a different way from before; why they did not think so earlier remains a dark mystery.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3501

It is possible that the prejudice against analytic treatment is already diminishing. The constant spread of analytic teachings, the increasing number of doctors practising analysis in a number of countries seems to vouch for this. When I was a young doctor, I found myself in a similar storm of indignation on the doctors’ part against treatment by hypnotic suggestion, which is now held up in contrast to analysis by people of ‘moderate’ views. Hypnotism, however, has not fulfilled its original promise as a therapeutic agent. We psycho-analysts may claim to be its legitimate heirs and we do not forget how much encouragement and theoretical clarification we owe to it. The damaging results attributed to psycho-analysis are restricted essentially to passing manifestations of increased conflict if an analysis is clumsily carried out or if it is broken off in the middle. You have heard an account of what we do with our patients and can form your own judgement as to whether our efforts are calculated to lead to any lasting damage. Abuse of analysis is possible in various directions; in particular, the transference is a dangerous instrument in the hands of an unconscientious doctor. But no medical instrument or procedure is guaranteed against abuse; if a knife does not cut, it cannot be used for healing either.

I have finished, Ladies and Gentlemen. It is more than a conventional form of words if I admit that I myself am profoundly aware of the many defects in the lectures I have given you. I regret above all that I have so often promised to return later to a topic I have lightly touched on and have then found no opportunity of redeeming my promise. I undertook to give you an account of a subject which is still incomplete and in process of development, and my condensed summary has itself turned out to be an incomplete one. At some points I have set out the material on which to draw a conclusion and have then myself not drawn it. But I could not pretend to make you into experts; I have only tried to stimulate and enlighten you.

3502

FROM THE HISTORY OF AN INFANTILE NEUROSIS

(1918 [1914])

3503

Intentionally left blank

3504

FROM THE HISTORY OF AN INFANTILE NEUROSIS ¹

I

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

The case upon which I propose to report in the following pages (once again only in a fragmentary manner) is characterized by a number of peculiarities which require to be emphasized before I proceed to a description of the facts themselves. It is concerned with a young man whose health had broken down in his eighteenth year after a gonorrhoeal infection, and who was entirely incapacitated and completely dependent upon other people when he began his psycho-analytic treatment several years later. He had lived an approximately normal life during the ten years of his boyhood that preceded the date of his illness, and got through his studies at his secondary school without much trouble. But his earlier years were dominated by a severe neurotic disturbance, which began immediately before his fourth birthday as an anxiety-hysteria (in the shape of an animal phobia), then changed into an obsessional neurosis with a religious content, and lasted with its offshoots as far as into his tenth year.

¹ This case history was written down shortly after the termination of the treatment, in the winter of 1914‑15. At that time I was still freshly under the impression of the twisted re-interpretations which C. G. Jung and Alfred Adler were endeavouring to give to the findings of psycho-analysis. This paper is therefore connected with my essay ‘On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement’ which was published in the Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse in 1914. It supplements the polemic contained in that essay, which is in its essence of a personal character, by an objective estimation of the analytic material. It was originally intended for the next volume of the Jahrbuch, the appearance of which was, however, postponed indefinitely owing to the obstacles raised by the Great War. I therefore decided to add it to the present collection of papers which was being issued by a new publisher. Meanwhile I had been obliged to deal in my Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (which I delivered in 1916 and 1917) with many points which should have been raised for the first time in this paper. No alterations of any importance have been made in the text of the first draft; additions are indicated by means of square brackets.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3505

Only this infantile neurosis will be the subject of my communication. In spite of the patient’s direct request, I have abstained from writing a complete history of his illness, of his treatment, and of his recovery, because I recognized that such a task was technically impracticable and socially impermissible. This at the same time removes the possibility of demonstrating the connection between his illness in childhood and his later and permanent one. As regards the latter I can only say that on account of it the patient spent a long time in German sanatoria, and was at that period classified in the most authoritative quarters as a case of ‘manic-depressive insanity’. This diagnosis was certainly applicable to the patient’s father, whose life with its wealth of activity and interests, was disturbed by repeated attacks of severe depression. But in the son I was never able, during an observation which lasted several years, to detect any changes of mood which were disproportionate to the manifest psychological situation either in their intensity or in the circumstances of their appearance. I have formed the opinion that this case, like many others which clinical psychiatry has labelled with the most multifarious and shifting diagnoses, is to be regarded as a condition following on an obsessional neurosis which has come to an end spontaneously, but has left a defect behind it after recovery.

My description will therefore deal with an infantile neurosis which was analysed not while it actually existed, but only fifteen years after its termination. This state of things has its advantages as well as its disadvantages in comparison with the alternative. An analysis which is conducted upon a neurotic child itself must, as a matter of course, appear to be more trustworthy, but it cannot be very rich in material; too many words and thoughts have to be lent to the child, and even so the deepest strata may turn out to be impenetrable to consciousness. An analysis of a childhood disorder through the medium of recollection in an intellectually mature adult is free from these limitations; but it necessitates our taking into account the distortion and refurbishing to which a person’s own past is subjected when it is looked back upon from a later period. The first alternative perhaps gives the more convincing results; the second is by far the more instructive.

In any case it may be maintained that analysis of children’s neuroses can claim to possess a specially high theoretical interest They afford us, roughly speaking, as much help towards a proper understanding of the neuroses of adults as do children’s dreams in respect to the dreams of adults. Not, indeed, that they are more perspicuous or poorer in elements; in fact, the difficulty of feeling one’s way into the mental life of a child makes them set the physician a particularly difficult task. But nevertheless, so many of the later deposits are wanting in them that the essence of the neurosis springs to the eyes with unmistakable distinctness. In the present phase of the battle which is raging round psycho-analysis the resistance to its findings has, as we know, taken on a new form. People were content formerly to dispute the reality of the facts which are asserted by analysis; and for this purpose the best technique seemed to be to avoid examining them. That procedure appears to be slowly exhausting itself; and people are now adopting another plan of recognizing the facts, but of eliminating, by means of twisted interpretations, the consequences that follow from them, so that the critics can still ward off the objectionable novelties as efficiently as ever. The study of children’s neuroses exposes the complete inadequacy of these shallow or high-handed attempts at re-interpretation. It shows the predominant part that is played in the formation of neuroses by those libidinal motive forces which are so eagerly disavowed, and reveals the absence of any aspirations towards remote cultural aims, of which the child still knows nothing, and which cannot therefore be of any significance for him.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3506

Another characteristic which makes the present analysis noteworthy is connected with the severity of the illness and the duration of the treatment. Analyses which lead to a favourable conclusion in a short time are of value in ministering to the therapeutist’s self-esteem and substantiate the medical importance of psycho-analysis; but they remain for the most part insignificant as regards the advancement of scientific knowledge. Nothing new is learnt from them. In fact they only succeed so quickly because everything that was necessary for their accomplishment was already known. Something new can only be gained from analyses that present special difficulties, and to the overcoming of these a great deal of time has to be devoted. Only in such cases do we succeed in descending into the deepest and most primitive strata of mental development and in gaining from there solutions for the problems of the later formations. And we feel afterwards that, strictly speaking, only an analysis which has penetrated so far deserves the name. Naturally a single case does not give us all the information that we should like to have. Or, to put it more correctly, it might teach us everything, if we were only in a position to make everything out, and if we were not compelled by the inexperience of our own perception to content ourselves with a little.

As regards these fertile difficulties the case I am about to discuss left nothing to be desired. The first years of the treatment produced scarcely any change. Owing to a fortunate concatenation, all the external circumstances nevertheless combined to make it possible to proceed with the therapeutic experiment. I can easily believe that in less favourable circumstances the treatment would have been given up after a short time. Of the physician’s point of view I can only declare that in a case of this kind he must behave as ‘timelessly’ as the unconscious itself, if he wishes to learn anything or to achieve anything. And in the end he will succeed in doing so, if he has the strength to renounce any short-sighted therapeutic ambition. It is not to be expected that the amount of patience, adaptability, insight, and confidence demanded of the patient and his relatives will be forthcoming in many other cases. But the analyst has a right to feel that the results which he has attained from such lengthy work in one case will help substantially to reduce the length of the treatment in a subsequent case of equal severity, and that by submitting on a single occasion

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3507

The patient with whom I am here concerned remained for a long time unassailably entrenched behind an attitude of ‘obliging apathy’. He listened, understood, and remained unapproachable. His unimpeachable intelligence was, as it were, cut off from the instinctual forces which governed his behaviour in the few relations of life that remained to him. It required a long education to induce him to take an independent share in the work; and when as a result of this exertion he began for the first time to feel relief, he immediately gave up working in order to avoid any further changes, and in order to remain comfortably in the situation which had been thus established. His shrinking from a self-sufficient existence was so great as to outweigh all the vexations of his illness. Only one way was to be found of overcoming it. I was obliged to wait until his attachment to myself had become strong enough to counter-balance this shrinking, and then played off this one factor against the other. I determined - but not until trustworthy signs had led me to judge that the right moment had come that the treatment must be brought to an end at a particular fixed date, no matter how far it had advanced. I was resolved to keep to the date; and eventually the patient came to see that I was in earnest. Under the inexorable pressure of this fixed limit his resistance and his fixation to the illness gave may, and now in a disproportionately short time the analysis produced all the material which made it possible to clear up his inhibitions and remove his symptoms. All the information, too, which enabled me to understand his infantile neurosis is derived from this last period of the work, during which resistance temporarily disappeared and the patient gave an impression of lucidity which is usually attainable only in hypnosis.

Thus the course of this treatment illustrates a maxim whose truth has long been appreciated in the technique of analysis. The length of the road over which an analysis must travel with the patient, and the quantity of material which must be mastered on the way, are of no importance in comparison with the resistance which is met with in the course of the work, and are only of importance at all in so far as they are necessarily proportional to the resistance. The situation is the same as when to-day an enemy army needs weeks and months to make its way across a stretch of country which in times of peace was traversed by an express train in a few hours and which only a short time before had been passed over by the defending army in a few days.

A third peculiarity of the analysis which is to be described in these pages has only increased my difficulty in deciding to make a report upon it. On the whole its results have coincided in the most satisfactory manner with our previous knowledge, or have been easily embodied into it. Many details, however, seemed to me myself to be so extraordinary and incredible that I felt some hesitation in asking other people to believe them. I requested the patient to make the strictest criticism of his recollections, but he found nothing improbable in his statements and adhered closely to them. Readers may at all events rest assured that I myself am only reporting what I came upon as an independent experience, uninfluenced by my expectation. So that there was nothing left for me but to remember the wise saying that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. Anyone who could succeed in eliminating his pre-existing convictions even more thoroughly could no doubt discover even more such things.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3508

II

GENERAL SURVEY OF THE PATIENT’S ENVIRONMENT

AND OF THE HISTORY OF THE CASE

I am unable to give either a purely historical or a purely thematic account of my patient’s story; I can write a history neither of the treatment nor of the illness, but I shall find myself obliged to combine the two methods of presentation. It is well known that no means has been found of in any way introducing into the reproduction of an analysis the sense of conviction which results from the analysis itself. Exhaustive verbatim reports of the proceedings during the hours of analysis would certainly be of no help at all; and in any case the technique of the treatment makes it impossible to draw them up. So analyses such as this are not published in order to produce conviction in the minds of those whose attitude has hitherto been recusant and sceptical. The intention is only to bring forward some new facts for investigators who have already been convinced by their own clinical experiences.

I shall begin, then, by giving a picture of the child’s world, and by telling as much of the story of his childhood as could be learnt without any exertion; it was not, indeed, for several years that the story became any less incomplete and obscure.

His parents had been married young, and were still leading a happy married life, upon which their ill-health was soon to throw the first shadows. His mother began to suffer from abdominal disorders, and his father from his first attacks of depression, which led to his absence from home. Naturally the patient only came to understand his father’s illness very much later on, but he was aware of his mother’s weak health even in his early childhood. As a consequence of it she had relatively little to do with the children. One day, certainly before his fourth year, while his mother was seeing off the doctor to the station and he himself was walking beside her, holding her hand, he overheard her lamenting her condition. Her words made a deep impression upon him, and later on he applied them to himself. He was not the only child; he had a sister, about two years his elder, lively, gifted, and precociously naughty, who was to play an important part in his life.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3509

As far back as he could remember he was looked after by a nurse, an uneducated old woman of peasant birth, with an untiring affection for him. He served her as a substitute for a son of her own who had died young. The family lived on a country estate, from which they used to move to another for the summer. The two estates were not far from a large town. There was a break in his childhood when his parents sold the estates and moved into the town. Near relatives used often to pay them long visits upon one estate or the other - brothers of his father, sisters of his mother and their children, and his grandparents on his mother’s side. During the summer his parents used to be away for a few weeks. In a screen memory he saw himself with his nurse looking after the carriage which was driving off with his father, mother and sister, and then going peaceably back into the house. He must have been very small at that time.¹ Next summer his sister was left at home, and an English governess was engaged, who became responsible for the supervision of the children.

In his later years he was told many stories about his childhood.² He knew a great deal himself, but it was naturally disconnected both as regards date and subject-matter. One of these traditions, which was repeated over and over again in his presence on the occasion of his later illness, introduces us to the problem with whose solution we shall be occupied. He seems at first to have been a very good-natured, tractable, and even quiet child, so that they used to say of him that he ought to have been the girl and his elder sister the boy. But once, when his parents came back from their summer holiday, they found him transformed. He had become discontented, irritable and violent, took offence on every possible occasion, and then flew into a rage and screamed like a savage; so that, when this state of things continued, his parents expressed their misgivings as to whether it would be possible to send him to school later on. This happened during the summer while the English governess was with them. She turned out to be an eccentric and quarrelsome person, and, moreover, to be addicted to drink. The boy’s mother was therefore inclined to ascribe the alteration in his character to the influence of this Englishwoman, and assumed that she had irritated him by her treatment. His sharp-sighted grandmother, who had spent the summer with the children, was of opinion that the boy’s irritability had been provoked by the dissensions between the Englishwoman and the nurse. The Englishwoman had repeatedly called the nurse a witch, and had obliged her to leave the room; the little boy had openly taken the side of his beloved ‘Nanya’ and let the governess see his hatred. However it may have been, the Englishwoman was sent away soon after the parents’ return, without there being any consequent change in the child’s unbearable behaviour.

¹ Two and a half years old. It was possible later on to determine almost all the dates with certainty.

² Information of this kind may, as a rule, be employed as absolutely authentic material. So it may seem tempting to take the easy course of filling up the gaps in a patient’s memory by making enquiries from the older members of his family; but I cannot advise too strongly against such a technique. Any stories that may be told by relatives in reply to enquiries and requests are at the mercy of every critical misgiving that can come into play. One invariably regrets having made oneself dependent upon such information; at the same time confidence in the analysis is shaken and a court of appeal is set up over it. Whatever can be remembered at all will anyhow come to light in the further course of analysis.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3510

The patient had preserved his memory of this naughty period. According to his belief he made the first of his scenes one Christmas, when he was not given a double quantity of presents - which were his due, because Christmas Day was at the same time his birthday. He did not spare even his beloved Nanya with his importunity and touchiness, and even tormented her more remorselessly perhaps than anyone. But the phase which brought with it his change in character was inextricably connected in his memory with many other strange and pathological phenomena which he was unable to arrange in chronological sequence. He threw all the incidents that I am now about to relate (which cannot possibly have been contemporaneous, and which are full of internal contradictions) into one and the same period of time, to which he gave the name ‘still on the first estate’. He thought they must have left that estate by the time he was five years old. Thus he could recollect how he had suffered from a fear, which his sister exploited for the purpose of tormenting him. There was a particular picture-book, in which a wolf was represented, standing upright and striding along. Whenever he caught sight of this picture he began to scream like a lunatic that he was afraid of the wolf coming and eating him up. His sister, however, always succeeded in arranging so that he was obliged to see this picture, and was delighted at his terror. Meanwhile he was also frightened at other animals as well, big and little. Once he was running after a beautiful big butterfly, with striped yellow wings which ended in points, in the hope of catching it. (It was no doubt a ‘swallow-tail’) He was suddenly seized with a terrible fear of the creature, and, screaming, gave up the chase. He also felt fear and loathing of beetles and caterpillars. Yet he could also remember that at this very time he used to torment beetles and cut caterpillars to pieces. Horses, too, gave him an uncanny feeling. If a horse was beaten he began to scream, and he was once obliged to leave a circus on that account. On other occasions he himself enjoyed beating horses. Whether these contradictory sorts of attitudes towards animals were really in operation simultaneously, or whether they did not more probably replace one another, but if so in what order and when - to all these questions his memory could offer no decisive reply. He was also unable to say whether his naughty period was replaced by a phase of illness or whether it persisted right through the latter. But, in any case, the statements of his that follow justified the assumption that during these years of his childhood he went through an easily recognizable attack of obsessional neurosis. He related how during a long period he was very pious. Before he went to sleep he was obliged to pray for a long time and to make an endless series of signs of the cross. In the evening, too, he used to make the round of all the holy pictures that hung in the room, taking a chair with him, upon which he climbed, and used to kiss each one of them devoutly. It was utterly inconsistent with this pious ceremonial - or, on the other hand, perhaps it was quite consistent with it - that he should recollect some blasphemous thoughts which used to come into his head like an inspiration from the devil. He was obliged to think ‘God-swine’ or ‘God-shit’. Once while he was on a journey to a health resort in Germany he was tormented by the obsession of having to think of the Holy Trinity whenever he saw three heaps of horse-dung or other excrement lying in the road. At that time he used to carry out another peculiar ceremonial when he saw people that he felt sorry for, such as beggars, cripples, or very old men. He had to breathe out noisily, so as not to become like them; and under certain conditions he had to draw in his breath vigorously. I naturally assumed that these obvious symptoms of an obsessional neurosis belonged to a somewhat later time and stage of development than the signs of anxiety and the cruel treatment of animals.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3511

The patient’s maturer years were marked by a very unsatisfactory relation to his father, who, after repeated attacks of depression, was no longer able to conceal the pathological features of his character. In the earliest years of the patient’s childhood this relation had been a very affectionate one, and the recollection of it had remained in his memory. His father was very fond of him, and liked playing with him. From an early age he was proud of his father, and was always declaring that he would like to be a gentleman like him. His Nanya told him that his sister was his mother’s child, but that he was his father’s - which had very much pleased him. Towards the end of his childhood there was an estrangement between him and his father. His father had an unmistakable preference for his sister, and he felt very much slighted by this. Later on fear of his father became the dominating factor.

All of the phenomena which the patient associated with the phase of his life that began with his naughtiness disappeared in about his eighth year. They did not disappear at a single blow, and made occasional reappearances, but finally gave way, in the patient’s opinion, before the influence of the masters and tutors, who then took the place of the women who had hitherto looked after him. Here, then, in the briefest outline, are the riddles for which the analysis had to find a solution. What was the origin of the sudden change in the boy’s character? What was the significance of his phobia and of his perversities? How did he arrive at his obsessive piety? And how are all these phenomena interrelated? I will once more recall the fact that our therapeutic work was concerned with a subsequent and recent neurotic illness, and that light could only be thrown upon these earlier problems when the course of the analysis led away for a time from the present, and forced us to make a détour through the prehistoric period of childhood.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3512

III

THE SEDUCTION AND ITS IMMEDIATE CONSEQUENCES

It is easy to understand that the first suspicion fell upon the English governess, for the change in the boy made its appearance while she was there. Two screen memories had persisted, which were incomprehensible in themselves, and which related to her. On one occasion, as she was walking along in front of them, she said: ‘Do look at my little tail!’ Another time, when they were on a drive, her hat flew away, to the two children’s great satisfaction. This pointed to the castration complex, and might permit of a construction being made to the effect that a threat uttered by her against the boy had been largely responsible for originating his abnormal conduct. There is no danger at all in communicating constructions of this kind to the person under analysis; they never do any damage to the analysis if they are mistaken; but at the same time they are not put forward unless there is some prospect of reaching a nearer approximation to the truth by means of them. The first effect of this supposition was the appearance of some dreams, which it was not possible to interpret completely, but all of which seemed to centre around the same material. As far as they could be understood, they were concerned with aggressive actions on the boy’s part against his sister or against the governess and with energetic reproofs and punishments of account of them. It was as though . . . after her bath . . . he had tried . . . to undress his sister . . . to tear off her coverings . . . or veils - and so on. But it was not possible to get at any firm content from the interpretation; and since these dreams gave an impression of always working over the same material in various different ways, the correct reading of these ostensible reminiscences became assured: it could only be a question of phantasies, which the dreamer had made on the subject of his childhood at some time or other, probably at the age of puberty, and which had now come to the surface again in this unrecognizable form.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3513

The explanation came at a single blow, when the patient suddenly called to mind the fact that, when he was still very small, ‘on the first estate’, his sister had seduced him into sexual practices. First came a recollection that in the lavatory, which the children used frequently to visit together, she had made this proposal: ‘Let’s show our bottoms’, and had proceeded from words to deeds. Subsequently the more essential part of the seduction came to light, with full particulars as to time and place. It was in spring, at a time when his father was away; the children were in one room playing on the floor, while their mother was working in the next. His sister had taken hold of his penis and played with it, at the same time telling him incomprehensible stories about his Nanya, as though by way of explanation. His Nanya, she said, used to do the same thing with all kinds of people - for instance, with the gardener: she used to stand him on his head, and then take hold of his genitals.

Here, then, was the explanation of the phantasies whose existence we had already divined. They were meant to efface the memory of an event which later on seemed offensive to the patient’s masculine self-esteem, and they reached this end by putting an imaginary and desirable converse in the place of the historical truth. According to these phantasies it was not he who had played the passive part towards his sister; but, on the contrary, he had been aggressive, had tried to see his sister undressed, had been rejected and punished, and had for that reason got into the rage which the family tradition talked of so much. It was also appropriate to weave the governess into this imaginative composition, since the chief responsibility for his fits of rage had been ascribed to her by his mother and grandmother. These phantasies, therefore, corresponded exactly to the legends by means of which a nation that has become great and proud tries to conceal the insignificance and failure of its beginnings.

The governess can actually have had only a very remote share in the seduction and its consequences. The scenes with his sister took place in the early part of the same year in which, at the height of the summer, the Englishwoman arrived to take the place of his absent parents. The boy’s hostility to the governess came about, rather, in another way. By abusing the nurse and slandering her as a witch, she was in his eyes following in the footsteps of his sister, who had first told him such monstrous stories about the nurse; and in this way she enabled him to express openly against herself the aversion which, as we shall hear, he had developed against his sister as a result of his seduction.

But his seduction by his sister was certainly not a phantasy. Its credibility was increased by some information which had never been forgotten and which dated from a later part of his life, when he was grown up. A cousin who was more than ten years his elder told him in a conversation about his sister that he very well remembered what a forward and sensual little thing she had been: once, when she was a child of four or five, she had sat on his lap and opened his trousers to take hold of his penis.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3514

I should like at this point to break off the story of my patient’s childhood and say something of this sister, of her development and later fortunes, and of the influence she had on him. She was two years older than he was, and had always remained ahead of him. As a child she was boyish and unmanageable, but she then entered upon a brilliant intellectual development and distinguished herself by her acute and realistic powers of mind; she inclined in her studies to the natural sciences, but also produced imaginative writings of which her father had a high opinion. She was mentally far superior to her numerous early admirers, and used to make jokes at their expense. In her early twenties, however, she began to be depressed, complained that she was not good-looking enough, and withdrew from all society. She was sent to travel in the company of an acquaintance, an elderly lady, and after her return told a number of most improbable stories of how she had been ill-treated by her companion, but remained with her affections obviously fixed upon her alleged tormentor. While she was on a second journey, soon afterwards, she poisoned herself and died far away from her home. Her disorder is probably to be regarded as the beginning of a dementia praecox. She was one of the proofs of the conspicuously neuropathic heredity in her family, but by no means the only one. An uncle, her father’s brother, died after long years of life as an eccentric, with indications pointing to the presence of a severe obsessional neurosis; while a good number of collateral relatives were and are afflicted with less serious nervous complaints.

Independently of the question of seduction, our patient, while he was a child, found in his sister an inconvenient competitor for the good opinion of his parents, and he felt very much oppressed by her merciless display of superiority. Later on he especially envied her the respect which his father showed for her mental capacity and intellectual achievements, while he, intellectually inhibited as he was since his obsessional neurosis, had to be content with a lower estimation. From his fourteenth year onwards the relations between the brother and sister began to improve; a similar disposition of mind and a common opposition to their parents brought them so close together that they got on with each other like the best of friends. During the tempestuous sexual excitement of his puberty he ventured upon an attempt at an intimate physical approach. She rejected him with equal decision and dexterity, and he at once turned away from her to a little peasant girl who was a servant in the house and had the same name as his sister. In doing so he was taking a step which had a determinant influence on his heterosexual choice of object, for all the girls with whom he subsequently fell in love - often with the clearest indications of compulsion - were also servants, whose education and intelligence were necessarily far inferior to his own. If all of these objects of his love were substitutes for the figure of the sister whom he had to forgo, then it could not be denied that an intention of debasing his sister and of putting an end to her intellectual superiority, which he had formerly found so oppressive, had obtained the decisive control over his object-choice.

Human sexual conduct, as well as everything else, has been subordinated by Alfred Adler to motive forces of this kind, which spring from the will to power, from the individual’s self-assertive instinct. Without ever denying the importance of these motives of power and prerogative, I have never been convinced that they play the dominating and exclusive part that has been ascribed to them. If I had not pursued my patient’s analysis to the end, I should have been obliged, on account of my observation of this case, to correct my preconceived opinion in a direction favourable to Adler. The conclusion of the analysis unexpectedly brought up new material which, on the contrary, showed that these motives of power (in this case the intention to debase) had determined the object-choice only in the sense of serving as a contributory cause and as a rationalization, whereas the true underlying determination enabled me to maintain my former convictions.¹

¹ See below, p. 3575.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3515

When the news of his sister’s death arrived, so the patient told me, he felt hardly a trace of grief. He had to force himself to show signs of sorrow, and was able quite coolly to rejoice at having now become the sole heir to the property. He had already been suffering from his recent illness for several years when this occurred. But I must confess that this one piece of information made me for a long time uncertain in my diagnostic judgement of the case. It was to be assumed, no doubt, that his grief over the loss of the most dearly loved member of his family would meet with an inhibition in its expression, as a result of the continued operation of his jealousy of her and of the added presence of his incestuous love for her which had now become unconscious. But I could not do without some substitute for the missing outbursts of grief. And this was at last found in another expression of feeling which had remained inexplicable to the patient. A few months after his sister’s death he himself made a journey in the neighbourhood in which she had died. There he sought out the burial-place of a great poet, who was at that time his ideal, and shed bitter tears upon his grave. This reaction seemed strange to him himself, for he knew that more than two generations had passed by since the death of the poet he admired. He only understood it when he remembered that his father had been in the habit of comparing his dead sister’s works with the great poet’s. He gave me another indication of the correct way of interpreting the homage which he ostensibly paid to the poet, by a mistake in his story which I was able to detect at this point. He had repeatedly specified before that his sister had shot herself; but he was now obliged to make a correction and say that she had taken poison. The poet, however, had been shot in a duel.

I now return to the brother’s story, but from this point I must proceed for a little upon thematic lines. The boy’s age at the time at which his sister began her seductions turned out to be three and a quarter years. It happened, as has been mentioned, in the spring of the same year in whose summer the English governess arrived, and in whose autumn his parents, on their return, found him so fundamentally altered. It is very natural, then, to connect this transformation with the awakening of his sexual activity that had meanwhile taken place.

How did the boy react to the allurements of his elder sister? By a refusal, is the answer, but by a refusal which applied to the person and not to the thing. His sister was not agreeable to him as a sexual object, probably because his relation to her had already been determined in a hostile direction owing to their rivalry for their parents’ love. He held aloof from her, and, moreover, her solicitations soon ceased. But he tried to win, instead of her, another person of whom he was fonder; and the information which his sister herself had given him, and in which the had claimed his Nanya as a model, turned his choice in that direction. He therefore began to play with his penis in his Nanya’s presence, and this, like so many other instances in which children do not conceal their masturbation, must be regarded as an attempt at seduction. His Nanya disillusioned him; she made a serious face, and explained that that wasn’t good; children who did that, she added, got a ‘wound’ in the place.

The effect of this intelligence, which amounted to a threat, is to be traced in various directions. His dependence upon his Nanya was diminished in consequence. He might well have been angry with her; and later on, when his fits of rage set in, it became clear that he really was embittered against her. But it was characteristic of him that every position of the libido which he found himself obliged to abandon was at first obstinately defended by him against the new development. When the governess came upon the scene and abused his Nanya, drove her out of the room, and tried to destroy her authority, he, on the contrary, exaggerated his love for the victim of these attacks and assumed a brusque and defiant attitude towards the aggressive governess. Nevertheless, in secret he began to look about for another sexual object. His seduction had given him the passive sexual aim of being touched on the genitals; we shall presently hear in connection with whom it was that he tried to achieve this aim, and what paths led him to this choice.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3516

It agrees entirely with our anticipations when we learn that, after his first genital excitations, his sexual researches began, and that he soon came upon the problem of castration. At this time he succeeded in observing two girls - his sister and a friend of hers - while they were micturating. His acumen might well have enabled him to gather the true facts from this spectacle, but he behaved as we know other male children behave in these circumstances. He rejected the idea that he saw before him a confirmation of the wound with which his Nanya had threatened him, and he explained to himself that this was the girls’ ‘front bottom’. The theme of castration was not settled by this decision; he found new allusions to it in everything that he heard. Once when the children were given some coloured sugar-sticks, the governess, who was inclined to disordered fancies, pronounced that they were pieces of chopped-up snakes. He remembered afterwards that his father had once met a snake while he was walking along a footpath, and had beaten it to pieces with his stick. He heard the story (out of Reynard the Fox) read aloud, of how the wolf wanted to go fishing in the winter, and used his tail as a bait, and how in that way his tail was broken off in the ice. He learned the different names by which horses are distinguished, according to whether their sexual organs are intact or not. Thus he was occupied with thoughts about castration, but as yet he had no belief in it and no dread of it. Other sexual problems arose for him out of the fairy tales with which he became familiar at this time. In ‘Little Red Riding-Hood’ and ‘The Seven Little Goats’ the children were taken out of the wolf’s body. Was the wolf a female creature, then, or could men have children in their bodies as well? At this time the question was not yet settled. Moreover, at the time of these enquiries he had as yet no fear of wolves.

One of the patient’s pieces of information will make it easier for us to understand the alteration in his character which appeared during his parents’ absence as a somewhat indirect consequence of his seduction. He said that he gave up masturbating very soon after his Nanya’s refusal and threat. His sexual life, therefore, which was beginning to come under the sway of the genital zone, gave way before an external obstacle, and was thrown back by its influence into an earlier phase of pregenital organization. As a result of the suppression of his masturbation, the boy’s sexual life took on a sadistic-anal character. He became irritable and a tormentor, and gratified himself in this way at the expense of animals and humans. His principal object was his beloved Nanya, and he knew how to torment her till she burst into tears. In this way he revenged himself on her for the refusal he had met with, and at the same time gratified his sexual lust in the form which corresponded to his present regressive phase. He began to be cruel to small animals, to catch flies and pull off their wings, to crush beetles underfoot; in his imagination he liked beating large animals (horses) as well. All of these, then, were active and sadistic proceedings; we shall discuss his anal impulses at this period in a later connection.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3517

It is a most important fact that some contemporary phantasies of quite another kind came up as well in the patient’s memory. The content of these was of boys being chastised and beaten, and especially being beaten on the penis. And from other phantasies, which represented the heir to the throne being shut up in a narrow room and beaten, it was easy to guess for whom it was that the anonymous figures served as whipping-boys. The heir to the throne was evidently he himself; his sadism had therefore turned round in phantasy against himself, and had been converted into masochism. The detail of the sexual organ itself receiving the beating justified the conclusion that a sense of guilt, which related to his masturbation, was already concerned in this transformation.

No doubt was left in the analysis that these passive trends had made their appearance at the same time as the active-sadistic ones, or very soon after them.¹ This is in accordance with the unusually clear, intense, and constant ambivalence of the patient, which was shown here for the first time in the even development of both members of the pairs of contrary component instincts. Such behaviour was also characteristic of his later life, and so was this further trait: no position of the libido which had once been established was ever completely replaced by a later one. It was rather left in existence side by side with all the others, and this allowed him to maintain an incessant vacillation which proved to be incompatible with the acquisition of a stable character.

¹ By passive trends I mean trends that have a passive sexual aim; but in saying this I have in mind a transformation not of the instinct but only of its aim.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3518

The boy’s masochistic trends lead on to another point, which I have so far avoided mentioning, because it can only be confirmed by means of the analysis of the subsequent phase of his development. I have already mentioned that after his refusal by his Nanya his libidinal expectation detached itself from her and began to contemplate another person as a sexual object. This person was his father, at that time away from home. He was no doubt led to this choice by a number of convergent factors, including such fortuitous ones as the recollection of the snake being cut to pieces; but above all he was in this way able to renew his first and most primitive object-choice, which, in conformity with a small child’s narcissism, had taken place along the path of identification. We have heard already that his father had been his admired model, and that when he was asked what he wanted to be he used to reply: a gentleman like his father. This object of identification of his active current became the sexual object of a passive current in his present anal-sadistic phase. It looks as though his seduction by his sister had forced him into a passive role, and had given him a passive sexual aim. Under the persisting influence of this experience he pursued a path from his sister via his Nanya to his father - from a passive attitude towards women to the same attitude towards men - and had, nevertheless, by this means found a link with his earlier and spontaneous phase of development. His father was now his object once more; in conformity with his higher stage of development, identification was replaced by object-choice; while the transformation of his active attitude into a passive one was the consequence and the record of the seduction which had occurred meanwhile. It would naturally not have been so easy to achieve an active attitude in the sadistic phase towards his all-powerful father. When his father came home in the late summer or autumn the patient’s fits of rage and scenes of fury were put to a new use. They had served for active sadistic ends in relation to his Nanya; in relation to his father their purpose was masochistic. By bringing his naughtiness forward he was trying to force punishments and beatings out of his father, and in that way to obtain from him the masochistic sexual satisfaction that he desired. His screaming fits were therefore simply attempts at seduction. In accordance, moreover, with the motives which underlie masochism, this beating would also have satisfied his sense of guilt. He had preserved a memory of how, during one of these scenes of naughtiness, he had redoubled his screams as soon as his father came towards him. His father did not beat him, however, but tried to pacify him by playing ball in front of him with the pillows of his cot.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3519

I do not know how often parents and educators, faced with inexplicable naughtiness on the part of a child, might not have occasion to bear this typical state of affairs in mind. A child who behaves in this unmanageable way is making a confession and trying to provoke punishment. He hopes for a beating as a simultaneous means of setting his sense of guilt at rest and of satisfying his masochistic sexual trend.

We owe the further explanation of the case to a recollection which emerged with great distinctness. This was to the effect that the signs of an alteration in the patient’s character were not accompanied by any symptoms of anxiety until after the occurrence of a particular event. Previously, it seems, there was no anxiety, while directly after the event the anxiety expressed itself in the most tormenting shape. The date of this transformation can be stated with certainty; it was immediately before his fourth birthday. Taking this as a fixed point, we are able to divide the period of his childhood with which we are concerned into two phases: a first phase of naughtiness and perversity from his seduction at the age of three and a quarter up to his fourth birthday, and a longer subsequent phase in which the signs of neurosis predominated. But the event which makes this division possible was not an external trauma, but a dream, from which he awoke in a state of anxiety.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3520

IV

THE DREAM AND THE PRIMAL SCENE

I have already published this dream elsewhere,¹ on account of the quantity of material in it which is derived from fairy tales; and I will begin by repeating what I wrote on that occasion:

‘"I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in my bed. (My bed stood with its foot towards the window; in front of the window there was a row of old walnut trees. I know it was winter when I had the dream, and night-time.) Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up. My nurse hurried to my bed, to see what had happened to me. It took quite a long while before I was convinced that it had only been a dream; I had had such a clear and life-like picture of the window opening and the wolves sitting on the tree. At last I grew quieter, felt as though I had escaped from some danger, and went to sleep again.

‘"The only piece of action in the dream was the opening of the window; for the wolves sat quite still and without making any movement on the branches of the tree, to the right and left of the trunk, and looked at me. It seemed as though they had riveted their whole attention upon me. - I think this was my first anxiety-dream. I was three, four, or at most five years old at the time. From then until my eleventh or twelfth year I was always afraid of seeing something terrible in my dreams."

‘He added a drawing of the tree with the wolves, which confirmed his description (Fig. 1). The analysis of the dream brought the following material to light.

‘He had always connected this dream with the recollection that during these years of his childhood he was most tremendously afraid of the picture of a wolf in a book of fairy tales. His elder sister, who was very much his superior, used to tease him by holding up this particular picture in front of him on some excuse or other, so that he was terrified and began to scream. In this picture the wolf was standing upright, striding out with one foot, with its claws stretched out and its ears pricked. He thought this picture must have been an illustration to the story of "Little Red Riding-Hood".

¹ ‘The Occurrence in Dreams of Material from Fairy Tales’ (1913d).

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3521

Fig. 1

‘Why were the wolves white? This made him think of the sheep, large flocks of which were kept in the neighbourhood of the estate. His father occasionally took him with him to visit these flocks, and every time this happened he felt very proud and blissful. Later on - according to enquiries that were made it may easily have been shortly before the time of the dream - an epidemic broke out among the sheep. His father sent for a follower of Pasteur’s, who inoculated the animals, but after the inoculation even more of them died than before.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3522

‘How did the wolves come to be on the tree? This reminded him of a story that he had heard his grandfather tell. He could not remember whether it was before or after the dream, but its subject is a decisive argument in favour of the former view. The story ran as follows. A tailor was sitting at work in his room, when the window opened and a wolf leapt in. The tailor hit after him with his yard - no (he corrected himself), caught him by his tail and pulled it off, so that the wolf ran away in terror. Some time later the tailor went into the forest, and suddenly saw a pack of wolves coming towards him; so he climbed up a tree to escape from them. At first the wolves were in perplexity; but the maimed one, which was among them and wanted to revenge himself on the tailor, proposed that they should climb one upon another till the last one could reach him. He himself - he was a vigorous old fellow - would be the base of the pyramid. The wolves did as he suggested, but the tailor had recognized the visitor whom he had punished, and suddenly called out as he had before: "Catch the grey one by his tail!" The tailless wolf, terrified by the recollection, ran away, and all the others tumbled down.

‘In this story the tree appears, upon which the wolves were sitting in the dream. But it also contains an unmistakable allusion to the castration complex. The old wolf was docked of his tail by the tailor. The fox-tails of the wolves in the dream were probably compensations for this taillessness.

‘Why were there six or seven wolves? There seemed to be no answer to this question, until I raised a doubt whether the picture that had frightened him could be connected with the story of "Little Red Riding-Hood". This fairy tale only offers an opportunity for two illustrations - Little Red Riding-Hood’s meeting with the wolf in the wood, and the scene in which the wolf lies in bed in the grandmother’s night-cap. There must therefore be some other fairy tale behind his recollection of the picture. He soon discovered that it could only be the story of "The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats". Here the number seven occurs, and also the number six, for the wolf only ate up six of the little goats, while the seventh hid itself in the clock case. The white, too, comes into this story, for the wolf had his paw made white at the baker’s after the little goats had recognized him on his first visit by his grey paw. Moreover, the two fairy tales have much in common. In both there is the eating up, the cutting open of the belly, the taking out of the people who have been eaten and their replacement by heavy stones, and finally in both of them the wicked wolf perishes. Besides all this, in the story of the little goats the tree appears. The wolf lay down under a tree after his meal and snored.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3523

‘I shall have, for a special reason, to deal with this dream again elsewhere, and interpret it and consider its significance in greater detail. For it is the earliest anxiety-dream that the dreamer remembered from his childhood, and its content, taken in connection with other dreams that followed it soon afterwards and with certain events in his earliest years, is of quite peculiar interest. We must confine ourselves here to the relation of the dream to the two fairy tales which have so much in common with each other, "Little Red Riding-Hood" and "The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats". The effect produced by these stories was shown in the little dreamer by a regular animal phobia. This phobia was only distinguished from other similar cases by the fact that the anxiety-animal was not an object easily accessible to observation (such as a horse or a dog), but was known to him only from stories and picture-books.

‘I shall discuss on another occasion the explanation of these animal phobias and the significance attaching to them. I will only remark in anticipation that this explanation is in complete harmony with the principal characteristic shown by the neurosis from which the present dreamer suffered later in his life. His fear of his father was the strongest motive for his falling ill, and his ambivalent attitude towards every father-surrogate was the dominating feature of his life as well as of his behaviour during the treatment.

‘If in my patient’s case the wolf was merely a first father surrogate, the question arises whether the hidden content in the fairy tales of the wolf that ate up the little goats and of "Little Red Riding-Hood" may not simply be infantile fear of the father.¹ Moreover, my patient’s father had the characteristic, shown by so many people in relation to their children, of indulging in "affectionate abuse"; and it is possible that during the patient’s earlier years his father (though he grew severe later on) may more than once, as he caressed the little boy or played with him, have threatened in fun to "gobble him up". One of my patients told me that her two children could never get to be fond of their grandfather, because in the course of his affectionate romping with them he used to frighten them by saying he would cut open their tummies.’

¹ ‘Compare the similarity between these two fairy tales and the myth of Kronos, which has been pointed out by Rank (1912).’

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3524

Leaving on one side everything in this quotation that anticipates the dream’s remoter implications, let us return to its immediate interpretation. I may remark that this interpretation was a task that dragged on over several years. The patient related the dream at a very early stage of the analysis and very soon came to share my conviction that the causes of his infantile neurosis lay concealed behind it. In the course of the treatment we often came back to the dream, but it was only during the last months of the analysis that it became possible to understand it completely, and only then thanks to spontaneous work on the patient’s part. He had always emphasized the fact that two factors in the dream had made the greatest impression on him: first, the perfect stillness and immobility of the wolves, and secondly, the strained attention with which they all looked at him. The lasting sense of reality, too, which the dream left behind it, seemed to him to deserve notice.

Let us take this last remark as a starting-point. We know from our experience in interpreting dreams that this sense of reality carries a particular significance along with it. It assures us that some part of the latent material of the dream is claiming in the dreamer’s memory to possess the quality of reality, that is, that the dream relates to an occurrence that really took place and was not merely imagined. It can naturally only be a question of the reality of something unknown; for instance, the conviction that his grandfather really told him the story of the tailor and the wolf, or that the stories of ‘Little Red Riding-Hood’ and of ‘The Seven Little Goats’ were really read aloud to him, would not be of a nature to be replaced by this sense of reality that outlasted the dream. The dream seemed to point to an occurrence the reality of which was very strongly emphasized as being in marked contrast to the unreality of the fairy tales.

If it was to be assumed that behind the content of the dream there lay some such unknown scene - one, that is, which had already been forgotten at the time of the dream - then it must have taken place very early. The dreamer, it will be recalled, said: ‘I was three, four, or at most five years old at the time I had the dream.’ And we can add: ‘And I was reminded by the dream of something that must have belonged to an even earlier period.’

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3525

The parts of the manifest content of the dream which were emphasized by the dreamer, the factors of attentive looking and of motionlessness, must lead to the content of this scene. We must naturally expect to find that this material reproduces the unknown material of the scene in some distorted form, perhaps even distorted into its opposite.

There were several conclusions, too, to be drawn from the raw material which had been produced by the patient’s first analysis of the dream, and these had to be fitted into the collocation of which we were in search. Behind the mention of the sheep-breeding, evidence was to be expected of his sexual researches, his interest in which he was able to gratify during his visits with his father; but there must also have been allusions to a fear of death, since the greater part of the sheep had died of the epidemic. The most obtrusive thing in the dream, the wolves on the tree, led straight to his grandfather’s story; and what was fascinating about this story and capable of provoking the dream can scarcely have been anything but its connection with the theme of castration.

We also concluded from the first incomplete analysis of the dream that the wolf may have been a father-surrogate; so that, in that case, this first anxiety-dream would have brought to light the fear of his father which from that time forward was to dominate his life. This conclusion, indeed, was in itself not yet binding. But if we put together as the result of the provisional analysis what can be derived from the material produced by the dreamer, we then find before us for reconstruction some such fragments as these:

A real occurrence - dating from a very early period - looking - immobility - sexual problems - castration - his father - something terrible.

One day the patient began to continue with the interpretation of the dream. He thought that the part of the dream which said that ‘suddenly the window opened of its own accord’ was not completely explained by its connection with the window at which the tailor was sitting and through which the wolf came into the room. ‘It must mean: "My eyes suddenly opened." I was asleep, therefore, and suddenly woke up, and as I woke I saw something: the tree with the wolves.’ No objection could be made to this; but the point could be developed further. He had woken up and had seen something. The attentive looking, which in the dream was ascribed to the wolves, should rather be shifted on to him. At a decisive point, therefore, a transposition has taken place; and moreover this is indicated by another transposition in the manifest content of the dream. For the fact that the wolves were sitting on the tree was also a transposition, since in his grandfather’s story they were underneath, and were unable to climb on to the tree.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3526

What, then, if the other factor emphasized by the dreamer were also distorted by means of a transposition or reversal? In that case instead of immobility (the wolves sat there motionless; they looked at him, but did not move) the meaning would have to be: the most violent motion. That is to say, he suddenly woke up, and saw in front of him a scene of violent movement at which he looked with strained attention. In the one case the distortion would consist in an interchange of subject and object, of activity and passivity: being looked at instead of looking. In the other case it would consist in a transformation into the opposite; rest instead of motion.

On another occasion an association which suddenly occurred to him carried us another step forward in our understanding of the dream: ‘The tree was a Christmas-tree.’ He now knew that he had dreamt the dream shortly before Christmas and in expectation of it. Since Christmas Day was also his birthday, it now became possible to establish with certainty the date of the dream and of the change in him which proceeded from it. It was immediately before his fourth birthday. He had gone to sleep, then, in tense expectation of the day which ought to bring him a double quantity of presents. We know that in such circumstances a child may easily anticipate the fulfilment of his wishes. So it was already Christmas in his dream; the content of the dream showed him his Christmas box, the presents which were to be his were hanging on the tree. But instead of presents they had turned into - wolves, and the dream ended by his being overcome by fear of being eaten by the wolf (probably his father), and by his flying for refuge to his nurse. Our knowledge of his sexual development before the dream makes it possible for us to fill in the gaps in the dream and to explain the transformation of his satisfaction into anxiety. Of the wishes concerned in the formation of the dream the most powerful must have been the wish for the sexual satisfaction which he was at that time longing to obtain from his father. The strength of this wish made it possible to revive a long-forgotten trace in his memory of a scene which was able to show him what sexual satisfaction from his father was like; and the result was terror, horror of the fulfilment of the wish, the repression of the impulse which had manifested itself by means of the wish, and consequently a flight from his father to his less dangerous nurse.

The importance of this date of Christmas Day had been preserved in his supposed recollection of having had his first fit of rage because he was dissatisfied with his Christmas presents. The recollection combined elements of truth and of falsehood. It could not be entirely right, since according to the repeated declarations of his parents his naughtiness had already begun on their return in the autumn and it was not a fact that they had not come on till Christmas. But he had preserved the essential connection between his unsatisfied love, his rage, and Christmas.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3527

But what picture can the nightly workings of his sexual desire have conjured up that could frighten him away so violently from the fulfilment for which he longed? The material of the analysis shows that there is one condition which this picture must satisfy. It must have been calculated to create a conviction of the reality of the existence of castration. Fear of castration could then become the motive power for the transformation of the affect.

I have now reached the point at which I must abandon the support I have hitherto had from the course of the analysis. I am afraid it will also be the point at which the reader’s belief will abandon me.

What sprang into activity that night out of the chaos of the dreamer’s unconscious memory-traces was the picture of copulation between his parents, copulation in circumstances which were not entirely usual and were especially favourable for observation. It gradually became possible to find satisfactory answers to all the questions that arose in connection with this scene; for in the course of the treatment the first dream returned in innumerable variations and new editions, in connection with which the analysis produced the information that was required. Thus in the first place the child’s age at the date of the observation was established as being about one and a half years.¹ He was suffering at the time from malaria, an attack of which used to come on every day at a particular hour.² From his tenth year onwards he was from time to time subject to moods of depression, which used to come on in the afternoon and reached their height at about five o’clock. This symptom still existed at the time of the analytic treatment. The recurring fits of depression took the place of the earlier attacks of fever or languor; five o’clock was either the time of the highest fever or of the observation of the intercourse, unless the two times coincided.³ Probably for the very reason of this illness, he was in his parents’ bedroom. The illness, the occurrence of which is also corroborated by direct tradition, makes it reasonable to refer the event to the summer, and, since the child was born on Christmas Day, to assume that his age was n + 1½ years. He had been sleeping in his cot, then, in his parents’ bedroom, and woke up, perhaps because of his rising fever, in the afternoon, possibly at five o’clock, the hour which was later marked out by depression. It harmonizes with our assumption that it was a hot summer’s day, if we suppose that his parents had retired, half undressed,4 for an afternoon siesta. When he woke up, he witnessed a coitus a tergo [from behind], three times repeated;5 he was able to see his mother’s genitals as well as his father’s organ; and he understood the process as well as its significance.6 Lastly he interrupted his parents’ intercourse in a manner which will be discussed later.

¹ The age of six months came under consideration as a far less probable, and indeed scarcely tenable, alternative.

² Compare the subsequent metamorphoses of this factor during the obsessional neurosis. In the patient’s dreams during the treatment it was replaced by a violent wind. [Added 1924:] ‘Ayia’ equals ‘air’.

³ We may remark in this connection that the patient drew only five wolves in his illustration to the dream, although the text mentioned six or seven.

In white underclothes: the white wolves.

5 Why three times? He suddenly one day produced the statement that I had discovered this detail by interpretation. This was not the case. It was a spontaneous association, exempt from further criticism; in his usual way he passed it off on to me, and by this projection tried to make it seem more trustworthy.

6 I mean that he understood it at the time of the dream where he was four years old, not at the time of the observation. He received the impressions when he was one and a half; his understanding of them was deferred, but became possible at the time of the dream owing to his development, his sexual excitations, and his sexual researches.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3528

There is at bottom nothing extraordinary, nothing to give the impression of being the product of an extravagant imagination, in the fact that a young couple who had only been married a few years should have ended a siesta on a hot summer’s afternoon with a love-scene, and should have disregarded the presence of their little boy of one and a half, asleep in his cot. On the contrary, such an event would, I think, be something entirely commonplace and banal; and even the position in which we have inferred that the coitus took place cannot in the least alter this judgement - especially as the evidence does not require that the intercourse should have been performed from behind each time. A single time would have been enough to give the spectator an opportunity for making observations which would have been rendered difficult or impossible by any other attitude of the lovers. The content of the scene cannot therefore in itself be an argument against its credibility. Doubts as to its probability will turn upon three other points: whether a child at the tender age of one and a half could be in a position to take in the perceptions of such a complicated process and to preserve them so accurately in his unconscious; secondly, whether it is possible at the age of four for a deferred revision of the impressions so received to penetrate the understanding; and finally, whether any procedure could succeed in bringing into consciousness coherently and convincingly the details of a scene of this kind which had been experienced and understood in such circumstances.¹

¹ The first of these difficulties cannot be reduced by assuming that the child at the time of his observation was after all probably a year older, that is to say two and a half, an age at which he may perhaps have been perfectly capable of talking. All the minor details of my patient’s case almost excluded the possibility of shifting the date in this way. Moreover, the fact should be taken into account that these scenes of observing parental intercourse are by no means rarely brought to light in analysis. The condition of their occurrence, however, is precisely that it should be in the earliest period of childhood. The older the child is, the more carefully, with parents above a certain social level, will the child be deprived of the opportunity for this kind of observation.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3529

Later on I shall carefully examine these and other doubts; but I can assure the reader that I am no less critically inclined than he towards an acceptance of this observation of the child’s, and I will only ask him to join me in adopting a provisional belief in the reality of the scene. We will first proceed with the study of the relations between this ‘primal scene’ and the patient’s dream, his symptoms, and the history of his life; and we will trace separately the effects that followed from the essential content of the scene and from one of its visual impressions.

By the latter I mean the postures which he saw his parents adopt - the man upright, and the woman bent down like an animal. We have already heard that during his anxiety period his sister used to terrify him with a picture from the fairy-book, in which the wolf was shown standing upright, with one foot forward, with its claws stretched out and its ears pricked. He devoted himself with tireless perseverance during the treatment to the task of hunting in the second-hand book shops till he had found the illustrated fairy-book of his childhood, and had recognized his bogy in an illustration to the story of ‘The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats’. He thought that the posture of the wolf in this picture might have reminded him of that of his father during the constructed primal scene. At all events the picture became the point of departure for further manifestations of anxiety. Once when he was in his seventh or eighth year he was informed that next day a new tutor was coming for him. That night he dreamt of this tutor in the shape of a lion that came towards his bed roaring loudly and in the posture of the wolf in the picture; and once again he awoke in a state of anxiety. The wolf phobia had been overcome by that time, so he was free to choose himself a new anxiety-animal, and in this late dream he was recognizing the tutor as a father-surrogate. In the later years of his childhood each of his tutors and masters played the part of his father, and was endowed with his father’s influence both for good and for evil.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3530

While he was at his secondary school the Fates provided him with a remarkable opportunity of reviving his wolf phobia, and of using the relation which lay behind it as an occasion for severe inhibitions. The master who taught his form Latin was called Wolf. From the very first he felt cowed by him, and he was once taken severely to task by him for having made a stupid mistake in a piece of Latin translation. From that time on he could not get free from a paralysing fear of this master, and it was soon extended to other masters besides. But the occasion on which he made his blunder in the translation was also to the purpose. He had to translate the Latin word ‘filius’, and he did it with the French word ‘fils’ instead of with the corresponding word from his own language. The wolf, in fact, was still his father.¹

The first ‘transitory symptom’² which the patient produced during the treatment went back once more to the wolf phobia and to the fairy tale of ‘The Seven Little Goats’. In the room in which the first sessions were held there was a large grandfather clock opposite the patient, who lay on a sofa facing away from me. I was struck by the fact that from time to time he turned his face towards me, looked at me in a very friendly way as though to propitiate me, and then turned his look away from me to the clock. I thought at the time that he was in this way showing his eagerness for the end of the hour. A long time afterwards the patient reminded me of this piece of dumb show, and gave me an explanation of it; for he recalled that the youngest of the seven little goats hid himself in the case of the grandfather clock while his six brothers were eaten up by the wolf. So what he had meant was: ‘Be kind to me! Must I be frightened of you? Are you going to eat me up? Shall I hide myself from you in the clock-case like the youngest little goat?’

¹ After this reprimand from the schoolmaster-wolf he learnt that it was the general opinion of his companions that, to be pacified, the master expected money from him. We shall return to this point later. - I can see that it would greatly facilitate a rationalistic view of such a history of a child’s development as this if it could be supposed that his whole fear of the wolf had really originated from the Latin master of that name, that it had been projected back into his childhood, and, supported by the illustration to the fairy tale, had caused the phantasy of the primal scene. But this is untenable; the chronological priority of the wolf phobia and its reference to the period of his childhood spent upon the first estate is far too securely attested. And his dream at the age of four?

² Ferenczi (1912).

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3531

The wolf that he was afraid of was undoubtedly his father; but his fear of the wolf was conditional upon the creature being in an upright posture. His recollection asserted most definitely that he had not been terrified by pictures of wolves going on all fours or, as in the story of ‘Little Red Riding-Hood’, lying in bed. The posture which, according to our construction of the primal scene, he had seen the woman assume, was of no less significance; though in this case the significance was limited to the sexual sphere. The most striking phenomenon of his erotic life after maturity was his liability to compulsive attacks of falling physically in love which came on and disappeared again in the most puzzling succession. These attacks released a tremendous energy in him even at times when he was otherwise inhibited, and they were quite beyond his control. I must, for a specially important reason, postpone a full consideration of this compulsive love; but I may mention here that it was subject to a definite condition, which was concealed from his consciousness and was discovered only during the treatment. It was necessary that the woman should have assumed the posture which we have ascribed to his mother in the primal scene. From his puberty he had felt large and conspicuous buttocks as the most powerful attraction in a woman; to copulate except from behind gave him scarcely any enjoyment. At this point a criticism may justly be raised: it may be objected that a sexual preference of this kind for the hind parts of the body is a general characteristic of people who are inclined to an obsessional neurosis, and that its presence does not justify us in referring it back to a special impression in childhood. It is part of the fabric of the anal-erotic disposition and is one of the archaic traits which distinguish that constitution. Indeed, copulation from behind - more ferarum [in the fashion of animals] - may, after all, be regarded as phylogenetically the older form. We shall return to this point too in a later discussion, when we have brought forward the supplementary material which showed the basis of the unconscious condition upon which his falling in love depended.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3532

Let us now proceed with our discussion of the relations between his dream and the primal scene. We should so far have expected the dream to present the child (who was rejoicing at Christmas in the prospect of the fulfilment of his wishes) with this picture of sexual satisfaction afforded through his father’s agency, just as he had seen it in the primal scene, as a model of the satisfaction that he himself was longing to obtain from his father. Instead of this picture, however, there appeared the material of the story which he had been told by his grandfather shortly before: the tree, the wolves, and the taillessness (in the over-compensated form of the bushy tails of the putative wolves). At this point some connection is missing, some associative bridge to lead from the content of the primal scene to that of the wolf story. This connection is provided once again by the postures and only by them. In his grandfather’s story the tailless wolf asked the others to climb upon him. It was this detail that called up the recollection of the picture of the primal scene; and it was in this way that it became possible for the material of the primal scene to be represented by that of the wolf story, and at the same time for the two parents to be replaced, as was desirable, by several wolves. The content of the dream met with a further transformation, and the material of the wolf story was made to fit in with the content of the fairy tale of ‘The Seven Little Goats’, by borrowing from it the number seven.¹

The steps in the transformation of the material, ‘primal scene - wolf story - fairy tale of "The Seven Little Goats"’, are a reflection of the progress of the dreamer’s thoughts during the construction of the dream: ‘longing for sexual satisfaction from his father - realization that castration is a necessary condition of it - fear of his father’. It is only at this point, I think, that we can regard the anxiety-dream of this four-year-old boy as being exhaustively explained.²

¹ It says ‘six or seven’ in the dream. Six is the number of the children that were eaten; the seventh escaped into the clock-case. It is always a strict law of dream-interpretation that an explanation must be found for every detail.

² Now that we have succeeded in making a synthesis of the dream, I will try to give a comprehensive account of the relations between the manifest content of the dream and the latent dream-thoughts.

It was night, I was lying in my bed. The latter part of this is the beginning of the reproduction of the primal scene. ‘It was night’ is a distortion of I had been asleep’. The remark, ‘I know it was winter when I had the dream, and night-time’, refers to the patient’s recollection of the dream and is not part of its content. It is correct, for it was one of the nights before his birthday, that is, Christmas Day.

Suddenly the window opened of its own accord. That is to be translated: ‘Suddenly I woke up of my own accord’, a recollection of the primal scene. The influence of the wolf story, in which the wolf leapt in through the window, is making itself felt as a modifying factor, and transforms a direct expression into a plastic one. At the same time the introduction of the window serves the purpose of providing a contemporary reference for the subsequent content of the dream. On Christmas Eve the door opens suddenly and one sees before one the tree with the presents. Here therefore the influence of the actual expectation of Christmas (which comprises the wish for sexual satisfaction) is making itself felt.

The big walnut tree. The representative of the Christmas tree, and therefore belonging to the current situation. But also the tree out of the wolf story, on which the tailor took refuge from pursuit, and under which the wolves were on the watch. Moreover, as I have often been able to satisfy myself, a high tree is a symbol of observing, of scopophilia. A person sitting on a tree can see everything that is going on below him and cannot himself be seen. Compare Boccaccio’s well-known story, and similar facetiae.

The wolves. Their number: six or seven. In the wolf story there was a pack, and no number was given. The fixing of the number shows the influence of the fairy tale of ‘The Seven Little Goats’, six of whom were eaten up. The fact that the number two in the primal scene is replaced by a larger number, which would be absurd in the primal scene, is welcomed by the resistance as a means of distortion. In the illustration to the dream the dreamer brings forward the number five, which is probably meant to correct the statement ‘It was night’.

They were sitting on the tree. In the first place they replace the Christmas presents hanging on the tree. But they are also transposed on to the tree because that can mean that they are looking. In his grandfather’s story they were posted underneath the tree. Their relation to the tree has therefore been reversed in the dream; and from this it may be concluded that there are further reversals of the latent material to be found in the content of the dream.

They were looking at him with strained attention. This feature comes entirely from the primal scene, and has got into the dream at the price of being turned completely round.

They were quite white. This feature is unessential in itself, but is strongly emphasized in the dreamer’s narrative. It owes its intensity to a copious fusion of elements from all the strata of the material, and it combines unimportant details from the other sources of the dream with a fragment of the primal scene which is more significant. This last part of its determination goes back to the white of his parents’ bedclothes and underclothes, and to this is added the white of the flocks of sheep, and of the sheep-dogs, as an allusion to his sexual researches among animals, and the white in the fairy tale of ‘The Seven Little Goats’, in which the mother is recognized by the white of her hand. Later on we shall see that the white clothes are also an allusion to death.

They sat there motionless. This contradicts the most striking feature of the observed scene, namely, its agitated movement, which, in virtue of the postures to which it led, constitutes the connection between the primal scene and the wolf story.

They had tails like foxes. This must be the contradiction of a conclusion which was derived from the action of the primal scene on the wolf story, and which must be recognized as the most important result of the dreamer’s sexual researches: ‘So there really is such a thing as castration.’ The terror with which this conclusion was received finally broke out in the dream and brought it to an end.

The fear of being eaten up by the wolves. It seemed to the dreamer as though the motive force of this fear was not derived from the content of the dream. He said he need not have been afraid, for the wolves looked more like foxes or dogs, and they did not rush at him as though to bite him, but were very still and not at all terrible. We observe that the dream-work tries for some time to make the distressing content harmless by transforming it into its opposite. (‘They aren’t moving, and, only look, they have the loveliest tails!’) Until at last this expedient fails, and the fear breaks out. It expresses itself by the help of the fairy tale, in which the goat-children are eaten up by the wolf-father. This part of the fairy tale may perhaps have acted as a reminder of threats made by the child’s father in fun when he was playing with him; so that the fear of being eaten up by the wolf may be a reminiscence as well as a substitute by displacement.

The wishes which act as motive forces in this dream are obvious. First there are the superficial wishes of the day, that Christmas with its presents may already be here (a dream of impatience) and accompanying these is the deeper wish, now permanently present, for sexual satisfaction from the dreamer’s father. This is immediately replaced by the wish to see once more what was then so fascinating. The mental process then proceeds on its way. Starting from the fulfilment of this last wish with the conjuring up of the primal scene, it passes on to what has now become inevitable - the repudiation of that wish and its repression.

The diffuseness and elaboration of this commentary have been forced on me by the effort to present the reader with some sort of equivalent for the convincing power of an analysis carried through by oneself; perhaps they may also serve to discourage him from asking for the publication of analyses which have stretched over several years.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3533

After what has already been said I need only deal shortly with the pathogenic effect of the primal scene and the alteration which its revival produced in his sexual development. We will only trace that one of its effects to which the dream gave expression. Later on we shall have to make it clear that it was not only a single sexual current that started from the primal scene but a whole set of them, that his sexual life was positively splintered up by it. We shall further bear in mind that the activation of this scene (I purposely avoid the word ‘recollection’) had the same effect as though it were a recent experience. The effects of the scene were deferred, but meanwhile it had lost none of its freshness in the interval between the ages of one and a half and four years. We shall perhaps find in what follows reason to suppose that it produced certain effects even at the time of its perception, that is, from the age of one and a half onwards.

When the patient entered more deeply into the situation of the primal scene, he brought to light the following pieces of self-observation. He assumed to begin with, he said, that the event of which he was a witness was an act of violence, but the expression of enjoyment which he saw on his mother’s face did not fit in with this; he was obliged to recognize that the experience was one of gratification.¹ What was essentially new for him in his observation of his parents’ intercourse was the conviction of the reality of castration - a possibility with which his thoughts had already been occupied previously. (The sight of the two girls micturating, his Nanya’s threat, the governess’ interpretation of the sugar-sticks, the recollection of his father having beaten a snake to pieces.) For now he saw with his own eyes the wound of which his Nanya had spoken, and understood that its presence was a necessary condition of intercourse with his father. He could no longer confuse it with the bottom, as he had in his observation of the little girls.²

¹ We might perhaps best do justice to this statement of the patient’s by supposing that the object of his observation was in the first instance a coitus in the normal position, which cannot fail to produce the impression of being a sadistic act, and that only after this was the position altered, so that he had an opportunity for making other observations and judgements. This hypothesis, however, was not confirmed with certainty, and moreover does not seem to me indispensable. We must not forget the actual situation which lies behind the abbreviated description given in the text: the patient under analysis, at an age of over twenty-five years, was putting the impressions and impulses of his fourth year into words which he would never have found at that time. If we fail to notice this, it may easily seem comic and incredible that a child of four should be capable of such technical judgements and learned notions. This is simply another instance of deferred action. At the age of one and a half the child receives an impression to which he is unable to react adequately; he is only able to understand it and to be moved by it when the impression is revived in him at the age of four; and only twenty years later, during the analysis, is he able to grasp with his conscious mental processes what was then going on in him. The patient justifiably disregards the three periods of time, and puts his present ego into the situation which is so long past. And in this we follow him, since with correct self-observation and interpretation the effect must be the same as though the distance between the second and third periods of time could be neglected. Moreover, we have no other means of describing the events of the second period.

² We shall learn later on, when we come to trace out his anal erotism, how he further dealt with this portion of the problem.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3534

The dream ended in a state of anxiety, from which he did not recover until he had his Nanya with him. He fled, therefore, from his father to her. His anxiety was a repudiation of the wish for sexual satisfaction from his father - the trend which had put the dream into his head. The form taken by the anxiety, the fear of ‘being eaten by the wolf’, was only the (as we shall hear, regressive) transposition of the wish to be copulated with by his father, that is, to be given sexual satisfaction in the same way as his mother. His last sexual aim, the passive attitude towards his father, succumbed to repression, and fear of his father appeared in its place in the shape of the wolf phobia.

And the driving force of this repression? The circumstances of the case show that it can only have been his narcissistic genital libido which, in the form of concern for his male organ, was fighting against a satisfaction whose attainment seemed to involve the renunciation of that organ. And it was from his threatened narcissism that he derived the masculinity with which he defended himself against his passive attitude towards his father.

We now observe that at this point in our narrative we must make an alteration in our terminology. During the dream he had reached a new phase in his sexual organization. Up to then the sexual opposites had been for him active and passive. Since his seduction his sexual aim had been a passive one, of being touched on the genitals; it was then transformed, by regression to the earlier stage of the sadistic-anal organization, into the masochistic aim of being beaten or punished. It was a matter of indifference to him whether he reached this aim with a man or with a woman. He had travelled, without considering the difference of sex, from his Nanya to his father; he had longed to have his penis touched by his Nanya, and had tried to provoke a beating from his father. Here his genitals were left out of account; though the connection with them which had been concealed by the regression was still expressed in his phantasy of being beaten on the penis. The activation of the primal scene in the dream now brought him back to the genital organization. He discovered the vagina and the biological significance of masculine and feminine. He understood now that active was the same as masculine, while passive was the same as feminine. His passive sexual aim should now have been transformed into a feminine one, and have expressed itself as ‘being copulated with by his father’ instead of ‘being beaten by him on the genitals or on the bottom’. This feminine aim, however, underwent repression and was obliged to let itself be replaced by fear of the wolf.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3535

We must here break off the discussion of his sexual development until new light is thrown from the later stages of his history upon these earlier ones. For the proper appreciation of the wolf phobia we will only add that both his father and mother became wolves. His mother took the part of the castrated wolf, which let the others climb upon it; his father took the part of the wolf that climbed. But his fear, as we have heard him assure us, related only to the standing wolf, that is, to his father. It must further strike us that the fear with which the dream ended had a model in his grandfather’s story. For in this the castrated wolf, which had let the others climb upon it, was seized with fear as soon as it was reminded of the fact of its taillessness. It seems, therefore, as though he had identified himself with his castrated mother during the dream, and was now fighting against that fact. ‘If you want to be sexually satisfied by Father’, we may perhaps represent him as saying to himself, ‘you must allow yourself to be castrated like Mother; but I won’t have that.’ In short, a clear protest on the part of his masculinity! Let us, however, plainly understand that the sexual development of the case that we are now examining has a great disadvantage from the point of view of research, for it was by no means undisturbed. It was first decisively influenced by the seduction, and was then diverted by the scene of observation of the coitus, which in its deferred action operated like a second seduction.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3536

V

A FEW DISCUSSIONS

The whale and the polar bear, it has been said, cannot wage war on each other, for since each is confined to his own element they cannot meet. It is just as impossible for me to argue with workers in the field of psychology or of the neuroses who do not recognize the postulates of psycho-analysis and who look on its results as artefacts. But during the last few years there has grown up another kind of opposition as well, among people who, in their own opinion at all events, take their stand upon the ground of analysis, who do not dispute its technique or results, but who merely think themselves justified in drawing other conclusions from the same material and in submitting it to other interpretations.

As a rule, however, theoretical controversy is unfruitful. No sooner has one begun to depart from the material on which one ought to be relying, than one runs the risk of becoming intoxicated with one’s own assertions and, in the end, of supporting opinions which any observation would have contradicted. For this reason it seems to me to be incomparably more useful to combat dissentient interpretations by testing them upon particular cases and problems.

I have remarked above (see p. 3528) that it will certainly be considered improbable, firstly, that ‘a child at the tender age of one and a half could be in a position to take in the perceptions of such a complicated process and to preserve them so accurately in his unconscious; secondly, that it is possible at the age of four for a deferred revision of this material to penetrate the understanding; and finally, that any procedure could succeed in bringing into consciousness coherently and convincingly the details of a scene of this kind which had been experienced and understood in such circumstances’.

The last question is purely one of fact. Anyone who will take the trouble of pursuing an analysis into these depths by means of the prescribed technique will convince himself that it is decidedly possible. Anyone who neglects this, and breaks off the analysis in some higher stratum, has waived his right of forming a judgement on the matter. But the interpretation of what is arrived at in depth-analysis is not decided by this.

The two other doubts are based on a low estimate of the importance of early infantile impressions and an unwillingness to ascribe such enduring effects to them. The supporters of this view look for the causes of neuroses almost exclusively in the grave conflicts of later life; they assume that the importance of childhood is only held up before our eyes in analysis on account of the inclination of neurotics for expressing their present interests in reminiscences and symbols from the remote past. Such an estimate of the importance of the infantile factor would involve the disappearance of much that has formed part of the most intimate characteristics of analysis, though also, no doubt, of much that raises resistance to it and alienates the confidence of the outsider.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3537

The view, then, that we are putting up for discussion is as follows. It maintains that scenes from early infancy, such as are brought up by an exhaustive analysis of neuroses (as, for instance, in the present case), are not reproductions of real occurrences, to which it is possible to ascribe an influence over the course of the patient’s later life and over the formation of his symptoms. It considers them rather as products of the imagination, which find their instigation in mature life, which are intended to serve as some kind of symbolic representation of real wishes and interests, and which owe their origin to a regressive tendency, to a turning-away from the tasks of the present. If that is so, we can of course spare ourselves the necessity of attributing such a surprising amount to the mental life and intellectual capacity of children of the tenderest age.

Besides the desire which we all share for the rationalization and simplification of our difficult problem, there are all sorts of facts that speak in favour of this view. It is also possible to eliminate beforehand one objection to it which may arise, particularly in the mind of a practising analyst. It must be admitted that, if this view of these scenes from infancy were the right one, the carrying-out of analysis would not in the first instance be altered in any respect. If neurotics are endowed with the evil characteristic of diverting their interest from the present and of attaching it to these regressive substitutes, the products of their imagination, then there is absolutely nothing for it but to follow upon their tracks and bring these unconscious productions into consciousness; for, leaving on one side their lack of value from the point of view of reality, they are of the utmost value from our point of view, since they are for the moment the bearers and possessors of the interest which we want to set free so as to be able to direct it on to the tasks of the present. The analysis would have to run precisely the same course as one which had a naïf faith in the truth of the phantasies. The difference would only come at the end of the analysis, after the phantasies had been laid bare. We should then say to the patient: ‘Very well, then; your neurosis proceeded as though you had received these impressions and spun them out in your childhood. You will see, of course, that that is out of the question. They were products of your imagination which were intended to divert you from the real tasks that lay before you. Let us now enquire what these tasks were, and what lines of communication ran between them and your phantasies.’ After the infantile phantasies had been disposed of in this way, it would be possible to begin a second portion of the treatment, which would be concerned with the patient’s real life.

Any shortening of this course, any alteration, that is, in psycho-analytic treatment, as it has hitherto been practised, would be technically inadmissible. Unless these phantasies are made conscious to the patient to their fullest extent, he cannot obtain command of the interest which is attached to them. If his attention is diverted from them as soon as their existence and their general outlines are divined, support is simply being given to the work of repression, thanks to which they have been put beyond the patient’s reach in spite of all his pains. If he is given a premature sense of their unimportance, by being informed, for instance, that it will only be a question of phantasies, which, of course, have no real significance, his co-operation will never be secured for the task of bringing them into consciousness. A correct procedure, therefore, would make no alteration in the technique of analysis, whatever estimate might be formed of these scenes from infancy.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3538

I have already mentioned that there are a number of facts which can be brought up in support of the view of these scenes being regressive phantasies. And above all there is this one: so far as my experience hitherto goes, these scenes from infancy are not reproduced during the treatment as recollections, they are the products of construction. Many people will certainly think that this single admission decides the whole dispute.

I am anxious not to be misunderstood. Every analyst knows - and he has met with the experience on countless occasions - that in the course of a successful treatment the patient brings up a large number of spontaneous recollections from his childhood, for the appearance of which (a first appearance, perhaps) the physician feels himself entirely blameless, since he has not made any attempt at a construction which could have put any material of the sort into the patient’s head. It does not necessarily follow that these previously unconscious recollections are always true. They may be; but they are often distorted from the truth, and interspersed with imaginary elements, just like the so-called screen memories which are preserved spontaneously. All that I mean to say is this: scenes, like this one in my present patient’s case, which date from such an early period and exhibit a similar content, and which further lay claim to such an extraordinary significance for the history of the case, are as a rule not reproduced as recollections, but have to be divined - constructed - gradually and laboriously from an aggregate of indications. Moreover, it would be sufficient for the purposes of the argument if my admission that scenes of this kind do not become conscious in the shape of recollections applied only to cases of obsessional neurosis, or even if I were to limit my assertion to the case which we are studying here.

I am not of opinion, however, that such scenes must necessarily be phantasies because they do not reappear in the shape of recollections. It seems to me absolutely equivalent to a recollection, if the memories are replaced (as in the present case) by dreams the analysis of which invariably leads back to the same scene and which reproduce every portion of its content in an inexhaustible variety of new shapes. Indeed, dreaming is another kind of remembering, though one that is subject to the conditions that rule at night and to the laws of dream-formation. It is this recurrence in dreams that I regard as the explanation of the fact that the patients themselves gradually acquire a profound conviction of the reality of these primal scenes, a conviction which is in no respect inferior to one based on recollection.¹

¹ A passage in the first edition of my Interpretation of Dreams (1900a) will show at what an early stage I was occupied with this problem. On p. 670 of that work there is an analysis of a remark occurring in a dream: ‘That’s not obtainable any longer.’ It is explained that the phrase originated from myself. ‘A few days earlier I had explained to the patient that the earliest experiences of childhood were "not obtainable any longer as such" but were replaced in analysis by "transferences" and dreams.’

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3539

There is naturally no need for those who take the opposite view to abandon as hopeless their fight against such arguments. It is well known that dreams can be guided.¹ And the sense of conviction felt by the person analysed may be the result of suggestion, which is always having new parts assigned to it in the play of forces involved in analytic treatment. The old-fashioned psychotherapist, it might be maintained, used to suggest to his patient that he was cured, that he had overcome his inhibitions, and so on; while the psycho-analyst, on this view, suggests to him that when he was a child he had some experience or other, which he must now recollect in order to be cured. This would be the difference between the two.

Let it be clearly understood that this last attempt at an explanation on the part of those who take the view opposed to mine results in the scenes from infancy being disposed of far more fundamentally than was announced to begin with. What was argued at first was that they were not realities but phantasies. But what is argued now is evidently that they are phantasies not of the patient but of the analyst himself, who forces them upon the person under analysis on account of some complexes of his own. An analyst, indeed, who hears this reproach, will comfort himself by recalling how gradually the construction of this phantasy which he is supposed to have originated came about, and, when all is said and done, how independently of the physician’s incentive many points in its development proceeded; how, after a certain phase of the treatment, everything seemed to converge upon it, and how later, in the synthesis, the most various and remarkable results radiated out from it; how not only the large problems but the smallest peculiarities in the history of the case were cleared up by this single assumption. And he will disclaim the possession of the amount of ingenuity necessary for the concoction of an occurrence which can fulfil all these demands. But even this plea will be without an effect on an adversary who has not experienced the analysis himself. On the one side there will be a charge of subtle self-deception, and on the other of obtuseness of judgement; it will be impossible to arrive at a decision.

¹ The mechanism of dreaming cannot be influenced; but dream material is to some extent subject to orders.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3540

Let us turn to another factor which supports this opposing view of these constructed scenes from infancy. It is as follows: There can be no doubt of the real existence of all the processes which have been brought forward in order to explain these doubtful structures as phantasies, and their importance must be recognized. The diversion of interest from the tasks of real life,¹ the existence of phantasies in the capacity of substitutes for unperformed actions, the regressive tendency which is expressed in these productions - regressive in more than one sense, in so far as there is involved simultaneously a shrinking-back from life and a harking-back to the past - all these things hold good, and are regularly confirmed by analysis. One might think that they would also suffice to explain the supposed reminiscences from early infancy which are under discussion; and in accordance with the principle of economy in science such an explanation would have the advantage over one which is inadequate without the support of new and surprising assumptions.

I may here venture to point out that the antagonistic views which are to be found in the psycho-analytic literature of to-day are usually arrived at on the principle of pars pro toto. From a highly composite combination one part of the operative factors is singled out and proclaimed as the truth; and in its favour the other part, together with the whole combination, is then contradicted. If we look a little closer, to see which group of factors it is that has been given the preference, we shall find that it is the one that contains material already known from other sources or what can be most easily related to that material. Thus, Jung picks out actuality and regression, and Adler, egoistic motives. What is left over, however, and rejected as false, is precisely what is new in psycho-analysis and peculiar to it. This is the easiest method of repelling the revolutionary and inconvenient advances of psycho-analysis.

¹ I have good reasons for preferring to say ‘the diversion of libido from current conflicts’.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3541

It is worth while remarking that none of the factors which are adduced by the opposing view in order to explain these scenes from infancy had to wait for recognition until Jung brought them forward as novelties. The notion of a current conflict, of a turning away from reality, of a substitutive satisfaction obtained in phantasy, of a regression to material from the past - all of this (employed, moreover, in the same context, though perhaps with a slightly different terminology) had for years formed an integral part of my own theory. It was not the whole of it, however. It was only one part of the causes leading to the formation of neuroses - that part which, starting from reality, operates in a regressive direction. Side by side with this I left room for another influence which, starting from the impressions of childhood, operates in a forward direction, which points a path for the libido that is shrinking away from life, and which makes it possible to understand the otherwise inexplicable regression to childhood. Thus on my view the two factors co-operate in the formation of symptoms. But an earlier co-operation seems to me to be of equal importance. I am of opinion that the influence of childhood makes itself felt already in the situation at the beginning of the formation of a neurosis, since it plays a decisive part in determining whether and at what point the individual shall fail to master the real problems of life.

What is in dispute, therefore, is the significance of the infantile factor. The problem is to find a case which can establish that significance beyond any doubt. Such, however, is the case which is being dealt with so exhaustively in these pages and which is distinguished by the characteristic that the neurosis in later life was preceded by a neurosis in early childhood. It is for that very reason, indeed, that I have chosen it to report upon. Should any one feel inclined to reject it because the animal phobia strikes him as not sufficiently serious to be recognized as an independent neurosis, I may mention that the phobia was succeeded without any interval by an obsessional ceremonial, and by obsessional acts and thoughts, which will be discussed in the following sections of this paper.

The occurrence of a neurotic disorder in the fourth and fifth years of childhood proves, first and foremost, that infantile experiences are by themselves in a position to produce a neurosis, without there being any need for the addition of a flight from some task which has to be faced in real life. It may be objected that even a child is constantly being confronted with tasks which it would perhaps be glad to evade. That is so; but the life of a child under school age is easily observable, and we can examine it to see whether any ‘tasks’ are to be found in it capable of determining the causation of a neurosis. But we discover nothing but instinctual impulses which the child cannot satisfy and which it is not old enough to master, and the sources from which these impulses arise.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3542

As was to be expected, the enormous shortening of the interval between the outbreak of the neurosis and the date of the childhood experiences which are under discussion reduces to the narrowest limits the regressive part of the causation, while it brings into full view the portion of it which operates in a forward direction, the influence of earlier impressions. The present case history will, I hope, give a clear picture of this position of things. But there are other reasons why neuroses of childhood give a decisive answer to the question of the nature of primal scenes - the earliest experiences of childhood that are brought to light in analysis.

Let us assume as an uncontradicted premise that a primal scene of this kind has been correctly educed technically, that it is indispensable to a comprehensive solution of all the conundrums that are set us by the symptoms of the infantile disorder, that all the consequences radiate out from it, just as all the threads of the analysis have led up to it. Then, in view of its content, it is impossible that it can be anything else than the reproduction of a reality experienced by the child. For a child, like an adult, can produce phantasies only from material which has been acquired from some source or other; and with children, some of the means of acquiring it (by reading, for instance) are cut off, while the space of time at their disposal for acquiring it is short and can easily be searched with a view to the discovery of any such sources.

In the present case the content of the primal scene is a picture of sexual intercourse between the boy’s parents in a posture especially favourable for certain observations. Now it would be no evidence whatever of the reality of such a scene if we were to find it in a patient whose symptoms (the effects of the scene, that is) had appeared at some time or other in the later part of his life. A person such as this might have acquired the impressions, the ideas, and the knowledge on a great number of different occasions in the course of the long interval; he might then have transformed them into an imaginary picture, have projected them back into his childhood, and have attached them to his parents. If, however, the effects of a scene of this sort appear in the child’s fourth or fifth year, then he must have witnessed the scene at an age even earlier than that. But in that case we are still faced with all the disconcerting consequences which have arisen from the analysis of this infantile neurosis. The only way out would be to assume that the patient not only unconsciously imagined the primal scene, but also concocted the alteration in his character, his fear of the wolf, and his religious obsession; but such an expedient would be contradicted by his otherwise sober nature and by the direct tradition in his family. It must therefore be left at this (I can see no other possibility): either the analysis based on the neurosis in his childhood is all a piece of nonsense from start to finish, or everything took place just as I have described it above.

At an earlier stage in the discussion we were brought up against an ambiguity in regard to the patient’s predilection for female nates and for sexual intercourse in the posture in which they are especially prominent. It seemed necessary to trace this predilection back to the intercourse which he had observed between his parents, while at the same time a preference of this kind is a general characteristic of archaic constitutions which are predisposed to an obsessional neurosis. But the contradiction is easily resolved if we regard it as a case of overdetermination. The person who was the subject of his observation of this posture during intercourse was, after all, his father in the flesh, and it may also have been from him that he had inherited this constitutional predilection. Neither his father’s subsequent illness nor his family history contradicts this; as has been mentioned already, a brother of his father’s died in a condition which must be regarded as the outcome of a severe obsessional disorder.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3543

In this connection we may recall that, at the time of his seduction as a boy of three and a quarter, his sister had uttered a remarkable calumny against his good old nurse, to the effect that she stood all kinds of people on their heads and then took hold of them by their genitals. We cannot fail to be struck by the idea that perhaps the sister, at a similar tender age, also witnessed the same scene as was observed by her brother later on, and that it was this that had suggested to her her notion about ‘standing people on their heads’ during the sexual act. This hypothesis would also give us a hint of the reason for her own sexual precocity.

[Originally ¹ I had no intention of pursuing the discussion of the reality of ‘primal scenes’ any further in this place. Since, however, I have meanwhile had occasion in my Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis to treat the subject on more general lines and with no controversial aim in view, it would be misleading if I omitted to apply the considerations which determined my other discussion of the matter to the case that is now before us. I therefore proceed as follows by way of supplement and rectification. - There remains the possibility of taking yet another view of the primal scene underlying the dream - a view, moreover, which obviates to a large extent the conclusion that has been arrived at above and relieves us of many of our difficulties. But the theory which seeks to reduce scenes from infancy to the level of regressive symbols will gain nothing even by this modification; and indeed that theory seems to me to be finally disposed of by this (as it would be by any other) analysis of an infantile neurosis.

This other view which I have in mind is that the state of affairs can be explained in the following manner. It is true that we cannot dispense with the assumption that the child observed a copulation, the sight of which gave him a conviction that castration might be more than an empty threat. Moreover, the significance which he subsequently came to attach to the postures of men and women, in connection with the development of anxiety on the one hand, and as a condition upon which his falling in love depended on the other hand, leaves us no choice but to conclude that it must have been a coitus a tergo, more ferarum. But there is another factor which is not so irreplaceable and which may be dropped. Perhaps what the child observed was not copulation between his parents but copulation between animals, which he then displaced on to his parents, as though he had inferred that his parents did things in the same way.

¹ [Freud’s square brackets]

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3544

Colour is lent to this view above all by the fact that the wolves in the dream were actually sheep-dogs and, moreover, appear as such in the drawing. Shortly before the dream the boy was repeatedly taken to visit the flocks of sheep, and there he might see just such large white dogs and probably also observe them copulating. I should also like to bring into this connection the number three, which the dreamer introduced without adducing any further motive, and I would suggest that he had kept in his memory the fact that he had made three such observations with the sheep-dogs. What supervened during the expectant excitement of the night of his dream was the transference on to his parents of his recently acquired memory-picture, with all its details, and it was only thus that the powerful emotional effects which followed were made possible. He now arrived at a deferred understanding of the impressions which he may have received a few weeks or months earlier - a process such as all of us perhaps have been through in our own experiences. The transference from the copulating dogs on to his parents was accomplished not by means of his making an inference accompanied by words but by his searching out in his memory a real scene in which his parents had been together and which could be coalesced with the situation of the copulation. All the details of the scene which were established in the analysis of the dream may have been accurately reproduced. It was really on a summer’s afternoon while the child was suffering from malaria, the parents were both present, dressed in white, when the child woke up from his sleep, but - the scene was innocent. The rest had been added by the inquisitive child’s subsequent wish, based on his experiences with the dogs, to witness his parents too in their love-making; and the scene which was thus imagined now produced all the effects that we have catalogued, just as though it had been entirely real and not fused together out of two components, the one earlier and indifferent, the other later and profoundly impressive.

It is at once obvious how greatly the demands on our credulity are reduced. We need no longer suppose that the parents copulated in the presence of their child (a very young one, it is true) - which was a disagreeable idea for many of us. The period of time during which the effects were deferred is very greatly diminished; it now covers only a few months of the child’s fourth year and does not stretch back at all into the first dark years of childhood. There remains scarcely anything strange in the child’s conduct in making the transference from the dogs on to his parents and in being afraid of the wolf instead of his father. He was in that phase of the development of his attitude towards the world which I have described in Totem and Taboo as the return of totemism. The theory which endeavours to explain the primal scenes found in neuroses as retrospective phantasies of a later date seems to obtain powerful support from the present observation, in spite of our patient being of the tender age of four years. Young though he was, he was yet able to succeed in replacing an impression of his fourth year by an imaginary trauma at the age of one and a half. This regression, however, seems neither mysterious nor tendentious. The scene which was to be made up had to fulfil certain conditions which, in consequence of the circumstances of the dreamer’s life, could only be found in precisely this early period; such, for instance, was the condition that he should be in bed in his parents’ bedroom.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3545

But something that I am able to adduce from the analytic findings in other cases will seem to most readers to be the decisive factor in favour of the correctness of the view here proposed. Scenes of observing sexual intercourse between parents at a very early age (whether they be real memories or phantasies) are as a matter of fact by no means rarities in the analyses of neurotic mortals. Possibly they are no less frequent among those who are not neurotics. Possibly they are part of the regular store in the - conscious or unconscious - treasury of their memories. But as often as I have been able by means of analysis to bring out a scene of this sort, it has shown the same peculiarity which startled us with our present patient too: it has related to coitus a tergo, which alone offers the spectator a possibility of inspecting the genitals. There is surely no need any longer to doubt that what we are dealing with is only a phantasy, which is invariably aroused, perhaps, by an observation of the sexual intercourse of animals. And yet more: I have hinted that my description of the ‘primal scene’ has remained incomplete because I have reserved for a later moment my account of the way in which the child interrupted his parents’ intercourse. I must now add that this method of interruption is also the same in every case.

I can well believe that I have now laid myself open to grave aspersions on the part of the readers of this case history. If these arguments in favour of such a view of the ‘primal scene’ were at my disposal, how could I possibly have taken it on myself to begin by advocating one which seemed so absurd? Or have I made these new observations, which have obliged me to alter my original view, in the interval between the first draft of the case history and this addition, and am I for some reason or other unwilling to admit the fact? I will admit something else instead: I intend on this occasion to close the discussion of the reality of the primal scene with a non liquet. This case history is not yet at an end; in its further course a factor will emerge which will shake the certainty which we seem at present to enjoy. Nothing, I think, will then be left but to refer my readers to the passages in my Introductory Lectures in which I have treated the problem of primal phantasies or primal scenes.]

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3546

VI

THE OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS

Now for the third time the patient came under a new influence that gave a decisive turn to his development. When he was four and a half years old, and as his state of irritability and apprehensiveness had still not improved, his mother determined to make him acquainted with the Bible story in the hope of distracting and elevating him. Moreover, she succeeded; his initiation into religion brought the previous phase to an end, but at the same time it led to the anxiety symptoms being replaced by obsessional symptoms. Up to then he had not been able to get to sleep easily because he had been afraid of having bad dreams like the one he had had that night before Christmas; now he was obliged before he went to bed to kiss all the holy pictures in the room, to recite prayers, and to make innumerable signs of the cross upon himself and upon his bed.

His childhood now falls clearly into the following epochs: first, the earliest period up to the seduction when he was three and a quarter years old, during which the primal scene took place; secondly, the period of the alteration in his character up to the anxiety dream (four years old); thirdly, the period of the animal phobia up to his initiation into religion (four and a half years old); and from then onwards the period of the obsessional neurosis up to a time later than his tenth year. That there should be an instantaneous and clear-cut displacement of one phase by the next was not in the nature of things or of our patient; on the contrary, the preservation of all that had gone before and the co-existence of the most different sorts of currents were characteristic of him. His naughtiness did not disappear when the anxiety set in, and persisted with slowly diminishing force during the period of piety. But there was no longer any question of a wolf phobia during this last phase. The obsessional neurosis ran its course discontinuously; the first attack was the longest and most intense, and others came on when he was eight and ten, following each time upon exciting causes which stood in a clear relationship to the content of the neurosis.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3547

His mother told him the sacred story herself, and also made his Nanya read aloud to him about it out of a book adorned with illustrations. The chief emphasis in the narrative was naturally laid upon the story of the passion. His Nanya, who was very pious and superstitious, added her own commentary on it, but was also obliged to listen to all the little critic’s objections and doubts. If the battles which now began to convulse his mind finally ended in a victory for faith, his Nanya’s influence was not without its share in this result.

What he related to me as his recollection of his reactions to this initiation was met by me at first with complete disbelief. It was impossible, I thought, that these could have been the thoughts of a child of four and a half or five; he had probably referred back to this remote past the thoughts which had arisen from the reflections of a grown man of thirty.¹ But the patient would not hear of this correction; I could not succeed, as in so many other differences of opinion between us, in convincing him; and in the end the correspondence between the thoughts which he had recollected and the symptoms of which he gave particulars, as well as the way in which the thoughts fitted into his sexual development, compelled me on the contrary to come to believe him. And I then reflected that this very criticism of the doctrines of religion, which I was unwilling to ascribe to the child, was only achieved by an infinitesimal minority of adults.

I shall now bring forward the material of his recollections, and not until afterwards try to find some path that may lead to an explanation of them.

The impression which he received from the sacred story was, to begin with, as he reported, by no means an agreeable one. He set his face, in the first place, against the feature of suffering in the figure of Christ, and then against his story as a whole. He turned his critical dissatisfaction against God the Father. If he were almighty, then it was his fault that men were wicked and tormented others and were sent to Hell for it. He ought to have made them good; he was responsible himself for all wickedness and all torments. The patient took objection to the command that we should turn the other cheek if our right cheek is smitten, and to the fact that Christ had wished on the Cross that the cup might be taken away from him, as well as to the fact that no miracle had taken place to prove that he was the Son of God. Thus his acuteness was on the alert, and was able to search out with remorseless severity the weak points of the sacred narrative.

¹ I also repeatedly attempted to throw the patient’s whole story forward by one year at all events, and in that way to refer the seduction to an age of four and a quarter, the dream to his fifth birthday, etc. As regards the intervals between the events there was no possibility of gaining any time. But the patient remained obdurate on the point, though he did not succeed entirely in removing my doubts. A postponement like this for one year would obviously be of no importance as regards the impression made by his story and as regards the discussion and implications attached to it.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3548

But to this rationalistic criticism there were very soon added ruminations and doubts, which betray to us that hidden impulses were also at work. One of the first questions which he addressed to his Nanya was whether Christ had had a behind too. His Nanya informed him that he had been a god and also a man. As a man he had had and done all the same things as other men. This did not satisfy him at all, but he succeeded in finding consolation of his own by saying to himself that the behind is really only a continuation of the legs. But hardly had he pacified his dread of having to humiliate the sacred figure, when it flared up again as the further question arose whether Christ used to shit too. He did not venture to put this question to his pious Nanya, but he himself found a way out, and she could not have shown him a better. Since Christ had made wine out of nothing, he could also have made food into nothing and in this way have avoided defaecating.

We shall be in a better position to understand these ruminations if we return to a piece of his sexual development which we have already mentioned. We know that, after the rebuff from his Nanya and the consequent suppression of the beginnings of genital activity, his sexual life developed in the direction of sadism and masochism. He tormented and ill-treated small animals, imagined himself beating horses, and on the other hand imagined the heir to the throne being beaten.¹ In his sadism he maintained his ancient identification with his father; but in his masochism he chose him as a sexual object. He was deep in a phase of the pregenital organization which I regard as the predisposition to obsessional neurosis. The operation of the dream, which brought him under the influence of the primal scene, could have led him to make the advance to the genital organization, and to transform his masochism towards his father into a feminine attitude towards him - into homosexuality. But the dream did not bring about this advance; it ended in a state of anxiety. His relation to his father might have been expected to proceed from the sexual aim of being beaten by him to the next aim, namely, that of being copulated with by him like a woman; but in fact, owing to the opposition of his narcissistic masculinity, this relation was thrown back to an even more primitive stage. It was displaced on to a father-surrogate, and at the same time split off in the shape of a fear of being eaten by the wolf. But this by no means disposed of it. On the contrary, we can only do justice to the apparent complexity of the state of affairs by bearing firmly in mind the co-existence of the three sexual trends which were directed by the boy towards his father. From the time of the dream onwards, in his unconscious he was homosexual, and in his neurosis he was at the level of cannibalism; while the earlier masochistic attitude remained the dominant one. All three currents had passive sexual aims; there was the same object, and the same sexual impulse, but that impulse had become split up along three different levels.

¹ Especially on the penis (see p. 3517).

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3549

His knowledge of the sacred story now gave him a chance of sublimating his predominant masochistic attitude towards his father. He became Christ - which was made specially easy for him on account of their having the same birthday. Thus he became something great and also (a fact upon which enough stress was not laid for the moment) a man. We catch a glimpse of his repressed homosexual attitude in his doubting whether Christ could have a behind, for these ruminations can have had no other meaning but the question whether he himself could be used by his father like a woman - like his mother in the primal scene. When we come to the solution of the other obsessional ideas, we shall find this interpretation confirmed. His reflection that it was insulting to bring the sacred figure into relation with such insinuations corresponded to the repression of his passive homosexuality. It will be noticed that he was endeavouring to keep his new sublimation free from the admixture which it derived from sources in the repressed. But he was unsuccessful.

We do not as yet understand why he also rebelled against the passive character of Christ and against his ill-treatment by his Father, and in this way began also to renounce his previous masochistic ideal, even in its sublimation. We may assume that this second conflict was especially favourable to the emergence of the humiliating obsessional thoughts from the first conflict (between the dominant masochistic and the repressed homosexual currents), for it is only natural that in a mental conflict all the currents upon one side or the other should combine with one another, even though they have the most diverse origins. Some fresh information teaches us the motive of this rebelling and at the same time of the criticisms which he levelled at religion.

His sexual researches, too, gained something from what he was told about the sacred story. So far he had had no reason for supposing that children only came from women. On the contrary, his Nanya had given him to believe that he was his father’s child, while his sister was his mother’s; and this closer connection with his father had been very precious to him. He now heard that Mary was called the Mother of God. So all children came from women, and what his Nanya had said to him was no longer tenable. Moreover, as a result of what he was told, he was bewildered as to who Christ’s father really was. He was inclined to think it we Joseph, as he heard that he and Mary had always lived together, but his Nanya said that Joseph was only ‘like’ his father and that his real father was God. He could make nothing of that. He only understood this much: if the question was one that could be argued about at all, then the relation between father and son could not be such an intimate one as he had always imagined it to be.

The boy had some kind of inkling of the ambivalent feelings towards the father which are an underlying factor in all religions, and attacked his religion on account of the slackening which it implied in this relation between son and father. Naturally his opposition soon ceased to take the form of doubting the truth of the doctrine, and turned instead directly against the figure of God. God had treated his son harshly and cruelly, but he was no better towards men; he had sacrificed his own son and had ordered Abraham to do the same. He began to fear God.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3550

If he was Christ, then his father was God. But the God which religion forced upon him was not a true substitute for the father whom he had loved and whom he did not want to have stolen from him. His love for this father of his gave him his critical acuteness. He resisted God in order to be able to cling to his father; and in doing this he was really upholding the old father against the new. He was faced by a trying part of the process of detaching himself from his father.

His old love for his father, which had been manifest in his earliest period, was therefore the source of his energy in struggling against God and of his acuteness in criticizing religion. But on the other hand this hostility to the new God was not an original reaction either; it had its prototype in a hostile impulse against his father, which had come into existence under the influence of the anxiety-dream, and it was at bottom only a revival of that impulse. The two opposing currents of feeling, which were to rule the whole of his later life, met here in the ambivalent struggle over the question of religion. It followed, moreover, that what this struggle produced in the shape of symptoms (the blasphemous ideas, the compulsion which came over him of thinking ‘God-shit’, ‘God-swine’) were genuine compromise-products, as we shall see from the analysis of these ideas in connection with his anal erotism.

Some other obsessional symptoms of a less typical sort pointed with equal certainty to his father, while at the same time showing the connection between the obsessional neurosis and the earlier occurrences.

A part of the pious ritual by means of which he eventually atoned for his blasphemies was the command to breathe in a ceremonious manner under certain conditions. Each time he made the sign of the cross he was obliged to breathe in deeply or to exhale forcibly. In his native tongue ‘breath’ is the same word as ‘spirit’, so that here the Holy Ghost came in. He was obliged to breathe in the Holy Spirit, or to breathe out the evil spirits which he had heard and read about.¹ He ascribed too to these evil spirits the blasphemous thoughts for which he had to inflict such heavy penance upon himself. He was, however, also obliged to exhale when he saw beggars, or cripples, or ugly, old, or wretched-looking people; but he could think of no way of connecting this obsession with the spirits. The only account he could give to himself was that he did it so as not to become like such people.

Eventually, in connection with a dream, the analysis elicited the information that the breathing out at the sight of pitiable-looking people had begun only after his sixth year and was related to his father. He had not seen his father for many months, when one day his mother said she was going to take the children with her to the town and show them something that would very much please them. She then took them to a sanatorium, where they saw their father again; he looked ill, and the boy felt very sorry for him. His father was thus the prototype of all the cripples, beggars, and poor people in whose presence he was obliged to breathe out; just as a father is the prototype of the bogies that people see in anxiety states, and of the caricatures that are drawn to bring derision upon some one. We shall learn elsewhere that this attitude of compassion was derived from a particular detail of the primal scene, a detail which only became operative in the obsessional neurosis at this late moment.

Thus his determination not to become like cripples (which was the motive of his breathing out in their presence) was his old identification with his father transformed into the negative. But in so doing he was also copying his father in the positive sense, for the heavy breathing was an imitation of the noise which he had heard coming from his father during the intercourse.² He had derived the Holy Ghost from this manifestation of male sensual excitement. Repression had turned this breathing into an evil spirit, which had another genealogy as well: namely, the malaria from which he had been suffering at the time of the primal scene.

¹ This symptom, as we shall hear, had developed after his sixth year and when he could already read.

² Assuming the reality of the primal scene.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3551

His repudiation of these evil spirits corresponded to an unmistakable strain of asceticism in him which also found expression in other reactions. When he heard that Christ had once cast out some evil spirits into a herd of swine which then rushed down a precipice, he thought of how his sister in the earliest years of her childhood, before he could remember, had rolled down on to the beach from the cliff-path above the harbour. She too was an evil spirit and a swine. It was a short road from here to ‘God-swine’. His father himself had shown that he was no less of a slave to sensuality. When he was told the story of the first of mankind he was struck by the similarity of his lot to Adam’s. In conversation with his Nanya he professed hypocritical surprise that Adam should have allowed himself to be dragged into misfortune by a woman, and promised her that he would never marry. A hostility towards women, due to his seduction by his sister, found strong expression at this time. And it was destined to disturb him often enough in his later erotic life. His sister came to be the permanent embodiment for him of temptation and sin. After he had been to confession he seemed to himself pure and free from sin. But then it appeared to him as though his sister were lying in wait to drag him again into sin, and in a moment he had provoked a quarrel with her which made him sinful once more. Thus he was obliged to keep on reproducing the event of his seduction over and over again. Moreover, he had never given away his blasphemous thoughts at confession, in spite of their being such a weight on his mind.

We have been led unawares into a consideration of the symptoms of the later years of the obsessional neurosis; and we shall therefore pass over the occurrences of the intervening period and shall proceed to describe its termination. We already know that, apart from its permanent strength, it underwent occasional intensifications: once - though the episode must for the present remain obscure to us - at the time of the death of a boy living in the same street, with whom he was able to identify himself. When he was ten years old he had a German tutor, who very soon obtained a great influence over him. It is most instructive to observe that the whole of his strict piety dwindled away, never to be revived, after he had noticed and had learnt from enlightening conversations with his tutor that this father surrogate attached no importance to piety and set no store by the truth of religion. His piety sank away along with his dependence upon his father, who was now replaced by a new and more sociable father. This did not take place, however, without one last flicker of the obsessional neurosis; and from this he particularly remembered the obsession of having to think of the Holy Trinity whenever he saw three heaps of dung lying together in the road. In fact he never gave way to fresh ideas without making one last attempt at clinging to what had lost its values for him. When his tutor discouraged him from his cruelties to small animals he did indeed put an end to those misdeeds, but not until he had again cut up caterpillars for a last time to his thorough satisfaction. He still behaved in just the same way during the analytic treatment, for he showed a habit of producing transitory ‘negative reactions’; every time something had been conclusively cleared up, he attempted to contradict the effect for a short while by an aggravation of the symptom which had been cleared up. It is quite the rule, as we know, for children to treat prohibitions in the same kind of way. When they have been rebuked for something (for instance, because they are making an unbearable din), they repeat it once more after the prohibition before stopping it. In this way they gain the point of apparently stopping of their own accord and of disobeying the prohibition.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3552

Under the German tutor’s influence there arose a new and better sublimation of the patient’s sadism which, with the approach of puberty, had then gained the upper hand over his masochism. He developed an enthusiasm for military affairs, for uniforms, weapons and horses, and used them as food for continual day-dreams. Thus, under a man’s influence, he had got free from his passive attitudes, and found himself for the time being on fairly normal lines. It was as an after-effect of his affection for the tutor, who left him soon afterwards, that in his later life he preferred German things (as, for instance, physicians, sanatoria, women) to those belonging to his native country (representing his father) - a fact which was incidentally of great advantage to the transference during the treatment.

There was another dream, which belongs to the period before his emancipation by the tutor, and which I mention because it was forgotten until its appearance during the treatment. He saw himself riding on a horse and pursued by a gigantic caterpillar. He recognized in this dream an allusion to an earlier one from the period before the tutor, which we had interpreted long before. In this earlier dream he saw the Devil dressed in black and in the upright posture with which the wolf and the lion had terrified him so much in their day. He was pointing with his out-stretched finger at a gigantic snail. The patient had soon guessed that this Devil was the Demon out of a well-known poem, and that the dream itself was a version of a very popular picture representing the Demon in a love-scene with a girl. The snail was in the woman’s place, as being a perfect female sexual symbol. Guided by the Demon’s pointing gesture, we were soon able to give as the dream’s meaning that the patient was longing for some one who should give him the last pieces of information that were still missing upon the riddle of sexual intercourse, just as his father had given him the first in the primal scene long before.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3553

In connection with the later dream, in which the female symbol was replaced by the male one, he remembered a particular event which had occurred a short time before the dream. Riding on the estate one day, he passed a peasant who was lying asleep with his little boy beside him. The latter woke his father and said something to him, whereupon the father began to abuse the rider and to pursue him till he rode off hastily. There was also a second recollection, that on the same estate there were trees that were quite white, spun all over by caterpillars. We can see that he took flight from the realization of the phantasy of the son lying with his father, and that he brought in the white trees in order to make an allusion to the anxiety dream of the white wolves on the walnut tree. It was thus a direct outbreak of dread of the feminine attitude towards men against which he had at first protected himself by his religious sublimation and was soon to protect himself still more effectively by the military one.

It would, however, be a great mistake to suppose that after the removal of the obsessional symptoms no permanent effects of the obsessional neurosis remained behind. The process had led to a victory for the faith of piety over the rebelliousness of critical research, and had had the repression of the homosexual attitude as its necessary condition. Lasting disadvantages resulted from both these factors. His intellectual activity remained seriously impaired after this first great defeat. He developed no zeal for learning, he showed no more of the acuteness with which at the tender age of five he had criticized and dissected the doctrines of religion. The repression of his over-powerful homosexuality, which was accomplished during the anxiety-dream, reserved that important impulse for the unconscious, kept it directed towards its original aim, and withdrew it from all the sublimations to which it is susceptible in other circumstances. For this reason the patient was without all those social interests which give a content to life. It was only when, during the analytic treatment, it became possible to liberate his shackled homosexuality that this state of affairs showed any improvement; and it was a most remarkable experience to see how (without any direct advice from the physician) each piece of homosexual libido which was set free sought out some application in life and some attachment to the great common concerns of mankind.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3554

VII

ANAL EROTISM AND THE CASTRATION COMPLEX

I must beg the reader to bear in mind that I obtained this history of an infantile neurosis as a by-product, so to speak, during the analysis of an illness in mature years. I have therefore been obliged to put it together from even smaller fragments than are usually at one’s disposal for purposes of synthesis. This task, which is not difficult in other respects, finds a natural limit when it is a question of forcing a structure which is itself in many dimensions on to the two-dimensional descriptive plane. I must therefore content myself with bringing forward fragmentary portions, which the reader can then put together into a living whole. The obsessional neurosis that has been described grew up, as has been repeatedly emphasized, on the basis of a sadistic-anal constitution. But we have hitherto discussed only one of the two chief factors - the patient’s sadism and its transformations. Everything that concerns his anal erotism has intentionally been left on one side so that it might be brought together and discussed at this later stage.

Analysts have long been agreed that the multifarious instinctual impulses which are comprised under the name of anal erotism play an extraordinarily important part, which it would be quite impossible to over-estimate, in building up sexual life and mental activity in general. It is equally agreed that one of the most important manifestations of the transformed erotism derived from this source is to be found in the treatment of money, for in the course of life this precious material attracts on to itself the psychical interest which was originally proper to faeces, the product of the anal zone. We are accustomed to trace back interest in money, in so far as it is of a libidinal and not of a rational character, to excretory pleasure, and we expect normal people to keep their relations to money entirely free from libidinal influences and regulate them according to the demands of reality.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3555

In our patient, at the time of his later illness, these relations were disturbed to a particularly severe degree, and this fact was not the least considerable element in his lack of independence and his incapacity for dealing with life. He had become very rich through legacies from his father and uncle; it was obvious that he attached great importance to being taken for rich, and he was liable to feel very much hurt if he was undervalued in this respect. But he had no idea how much he possessed, what his expenditure was, or what balance was left over. It was hard to say whether he ought to be called a miser or a spendthrift. He behaved now in this way and now in that, but never in a way that seemed to show any consistent intention. Some striking traits, which I shall further discuss below, might have led one to regard him as a hardened plutocrat, who considered his wealth as his greatest personal advantage, and who would never for a moment allow emotional interests to weigh against pecuniary ones. Yet he did not value other people by their wealth, and, on the contrary, showed himself on many occasions unassuming, helpful, and charitable. Money, in fact, had been withdrawn from his conscious control, and meant for him something quite different.

I have already mentioned that I viewed with grave suspicion the way in which he consoled himself for the loss of his sister, who had become his closest companion during her latter years, with the reflection that now he would not have to share his parents’ inheritance with her. But what was perhaps even more striking was the calmness with which he was able to relate this, as though he had no comprehension of the coarseness of feeling to which he was thus confessing. It is true that analysis rehabilitated him by showing that his grief for his sister had merely undergone a displacement; but it then became quite inexplicable why he should have tried to find a substitute for his sister in an increase of wealth.

He himself was puzzled by his behaviour in another connection. After his father’s death the property that was left was divided between him and his mother. His mother administered it, and, as he himself admitted, met his pecuniary claims irreproachably and liberally. Yet every discussion of money matters that took place between them used to end with the most violent reproaches on his side, to the effect that she did not love him, that she was trying to economize at his expense, and that she would probably rather see him dead to as so have sole control over the money. His mother used then to protect her disinterestedness with tears, and he would thereupon grow ashamed of himself and declare with justice that he thought nothing of the sort of her. But he was sure to repeat the same scene at the first opportunity.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3556

Many incidents, of which I will relate two, show that, for a long time before the analysis, faeces had had this significance of money for him. At a time when his bowel as yet played no part in his complaint, he once paid a visit to a poor cousin of his in a large town. As he left him he reproached himself for not giving this relative financial support, and immediately afterwards had what was ‘perhaps the most urgent need for relieving his bowels that he had experienced in his life’. Two years later he did in fact settle an annuity upon this cousin. Here is the other case. At the age of eighteen, while he was preparing for his leaving-examination at school, he visited a friend and came to an agreement with him on a plan which seemed advisable on account of the dread which they shared of failing in the examination.¹ It had been decided to bribe the school servant, and the patient’s share of the sum to be provided was naturally the larger. On the way home he thought to himself that he should be glad to give even more if only he could succeed in getting through, if only he could be sure that nothing would happen to him in the examination - and an accident of another sort really did happen to him ² before he reached his own front door.

We shall be prepared to hear that during his later illness he suffered from disturbances of his intestinal function which were very obstinate, though various circumstances caused them to fluctuate in intensity. When he came under my treatment he had become accustomed to enemas, which were given him by an attendant; spontaneous evacuations did not occur for months at a time, unless a sudden excitement from some particular direction intervened, as a result of which normal activity of the bowels might set in for a few days. His principal subject of complaint was that for him the world was hidden in a veil, or that he was cut off from the world by a veil. This veil was torn only at one moment - when, after an enema, the contents of the bowel left the intestinal canal; and he then felt well and normal again.³

¹ The patient informed me that his native tongue has no parallel to the familiar German use of ‘Durchfall’ as a description for disturbance of the bowels.

² This expression has the same meaning in the patient’s native tongue as in German.

³ The effect was the same whether he had the enema given him by some one else or whether he managed it himself.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3557

The colleague to whom I referred the patient for a report upon his intestinal condition was perspicacious enough to explain it as being a functional one, or even psychically determined, and to abstain from any active medicinal treatment. Moreover, neither this nor dieting were of any use. During the years of analytic treatment there was no spontaneous motion apart from the sudden influences that I have mentioned. The patient allowed himself to be convinced that if the intractable organ received more intensive treatment things would only be made worse, and contented himself with bringing on an evacuation once or twice a week by means of an enema or a purgative.

In discussing these intestinal troubles I have given more space to the patient’s later illness than has been my plan elsewhere in this work, which is concerned with his infantile neurosis. I have done so for two reasons: first, because the intestinal symptoms were in point of fact carried forward from the infantile neurosis into the later one with little alteration, and secondly, because they played a principal part in the conclusion of the treatment.

We know how important doubt is to the physician who is analysing an obsessional neurosis. It is the patient’s strongest weapon, the favourite expedient of his resistance. This same doubt enabled our patient to lie entrenched behind a respectful indifference and to allow the efforts of the treatment to slip past him for years together. Nothing changed, and there was no way of convincing him. At last I recognized the importance of the intestinal trouble for my purposes; it represented the small trait of hysteria which is regularly to be found at the root of an obsessional neurosis. I promised the patient a complete recovery of his intestinal activity, and by means of this promise made his incredulity manifest. I then had the satisfaction of seeing his doubt dwindle away, as in the course of the work his bowel began, like a hysterically affected organ, to ‘join in the conversation’, and in a few week’s time recovered its normal functions after their long impairment.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3558

I now turn back to the patient’s childhood - to a time at which it was impossible that faeces could have had the significance of money for him.

Intestinal disorders set in very early with him, and especially in the form which is the most frequent and, among children, the most normal - namely, incontinence. We shall certainly be right, however, in rejecting a pathological explanation of these earliest occurrences, and in regarding them only as evidence of the patient’s intention not to let himself be disturbed or checked in the pleasure attached to the function of evacuation. He found a great deal of enjoyment (such as would tally with the natural coarseness of many classes of society, though not of his) in anal jokes and exhibitions, and this enjoyment had been retained by him until after the beginning of his later illness.

During the time of the English governess it repeatedly happened that he and his Nanya had to share that obnoxious lady’s bedroom. His Nanya noticed with comprehension the fact that precisely on those nights he made a mess in his bed, though otherwise this had ceased to happen a long time before. He was not in the least ashamed of it; it was an expression of defiance against the governess.

A year later (when he was four and a half), during the anxiety period, he happened to make a mess in his knickerbockers in the day-time. He was terribly ashamed of himself, and as he was being cleaned he moaned that he could not go on living like that. So that in the meantime something had changed; and by following up his lament we came upon the traces of this something. It turned out that the words ‘he could not go on living like that’ were repeated from some one else. His mother had once ¹ taken him with her when she was walking down to the station with the doctor who had come to visit her. During this walk she had lamented over her pains and haemorrhages and had broken out in the same words, ‘ I cannot go on living like this’, without imagining that the child whose hand she was holding would keep them in his memory. Thus his lament (which, moreover, he was to repeat on innumerable occasions during his later illness) had the significance of an identification with his mother.

¹ When this happened was not exactly fixed; but in any case before the anxiety-dream when he was four, and probably before his parents’ absence from home.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3559

There soon appeared in his recollection what was evidently, in respect both of its date and of its content, a missing intermediate link between these two events. It once happened at the beginning of his anxiety period that his apprehensive mother gave orders that precautions were to be taken to protect the children from dysentery, which had made its appearance in the neighbourhood of the estate. He made enquiries as to what that might be; and after hearing that when you have dysentery you find blood in your stool he became very nervous and declared that there was blood in his own stool; he was afraid he would die of dysentery, but allowed himself to be convinced by an examination that he had made a mistake and had no need to be frightened. We can see that in this dread he was trying to put into effect an identification with his mother, whose haemorrhages he had heard about in the conversation with her doctor. In his later attempt at identification (when he was four and a half) he had dropped any mention of the blood; he no longer understood himself, for he imagined that he was ashamed of himself and was not aware that he was being shaken by a dread of death, though this was unmistakably revealed in his lament.

At that time his mother, suffering as she was from an abdominal affection, was in general nervous, both about herself and the children; it is most probable that his own nervousness, besides its other motives, was based on an identification with his mother.

Now what can have been the meaning of this identification with his mother?

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3560

Between the impudent use he made of his incontinence when he was three and a half, and the horror with which he viewed it when he was four and a half, there lies the dream with which his anxiety period began - the dream which gave him a deferred comprehension of the scene he had experienced when he was one and a half (p. 3533), and an explanation of the part played by women in the sexual act. It is only another step to connect the change in his attitude towards defaecation with this same great revulsion. Dysentery was evidently his name for the illness which he had heard his mother lamenting about, and which it was impossible to go on living with; he did not regard his mother’s disease as being abdominal but as being intestinal. Under the influence of the primal scene he came to the conclusion that his mother had been made ill by what his father had done to her;¹ and his dread of having blood in his stool, of being as ill as his mother, was his repudiation of being identified with her in this sexual scene - the same repudiation with which he awoke from the dream. But the dread was also a proof that in his later elaboration of the primal scene he had put himself in his mother’s place and had envied her this relation with his father. The organ by which his identification with women, his passive homosexual attitude to men, was able to express itself was the anal zone. The disorders in the function of this zone had acquired the significance of feminine impulses of tenderness, and they retained it during the later illness as well.

At this point we must consider an objection, the discussion of which may contribute much to the elucidation of the apparent confusion of the circumstances. We have been driven to assume that during the process of the dream he understood that women are castrated, that instead of a male organ they have a wound which serves for sexual intercourse, and that castration is the necessary condition of femininity; we have been driven to assume that the threat of this loss induced him to repress his feminine attitude towards men, and that he awoke from his homosexual enthusiasm in anxiety. Now how can this comprehension of sexual intercourse, this recognition of the vagina, be brought into harmony with the selection of the bowel for the purpose of identification with women? Are not the intestinal symptoms based on what is probably an older notion, and one which in any case completely contradicts the dread of castration - the notion, namely, that sexual intercourse takes place at the anus?

To be sure, this contradiction is present; and the two views are entirely inconsistent with each other. The only question is whether they need be consistent. Our bewilderment arises only because we are always inclined to treat unconscious mental processes like conscious ones and to forget the profound differences between the two psychical systems.

¹ A conclusion which was probably not far from the truth.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3561

When his Christmas dream, with its excitement and expectancy, conjured up before him the picture of the sexual intercourse of his parents as it had once been observed (or construed) by him, there can be no doubt that the first view of it to come up was the old one, according to which the part of the female body which received the male organ was the anus. And, indeed, what else could he have supposed when at the age of one and a half he was a spectator of the scene?¹ But now came the new event that occurred when he was four years old. What he had learnt in the meantime, the allusions which he had heard to castration, awoke and cast a doubt on the ‘cloacal theory’; they brought to his notice the difference between the sexes and the sexual part played by women. In this contingency he behaved as children in general behave when they are given an unwished for piece of information - whether sexual or of any other kind. He rejected what was new (in our case from motives connected with his fear of castration) and clung fast to what was old. He decided in favour of the intestine and against the vagina, just as, for similar motives, he later on took his father’s side against God. He rejected the new information and clung to the old theory. The latter must have provided the material for his identification with women, which made its appearance later as a dread of death in connection with the bowels, and for his first religious scruples, about whether Christ had had a behind, and so on. It is not that his new insight remained without any effect; quite the reverse. It developed an extraordinarily powerful effect, for it became a motive for keeping the whole process of the dream under repression and for excluding it from being worked over later in consciousness. But with that its effect was exhausted; it had no influence in deciding the sexual problem. That it should have been possible from that time onwards for a fear of castration to exist side by side with an identification with women by means of the bowel admittedly involved a contradiction. But it was only a logical contradiction - which is not saying much. On the contrary, the whole process is characteristic of the way in which the unconscious works. A repression is something very different from a condemning judgement.

¹ Or so long as he did not grasp the sense of the copulation between the dogs.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3562

When we were studying the genesis of the wolf phobia, we followed the effect of his new insight into the sexual act; but now that we are investigating the disturbances of the intestinal function, we find ourselves working on the basis of the old cloacal theory. The two points of view remained separated from each other by a stage of repression. His feminine attitude towards men, which had been repudiated by the act of repression, drew back, as it were, into the intestinal symptoms, and expressed itself in the attacks of diarrhoea, constipation, and intestinal pain, which were so frequent during the patient’s childhood. His later sexual phantasies, which were based on a correct sexual knowledge, were thus able to express themselves regressively as intestinal troubles. But we cannot understand them until we have explained the modifications which take place in the significance of faeces from the first years of childhood onward.¹

I have already hinted at an earlier point in my story that one portion of the content of the primal scene has been kept back. I am now in a position to produce this missing portion. The child finally interrupted his parents’ intercourse by passing a stool, which gave him an excuse for screaming. All the considerations which I have raised above in discussing the rest of the content of the same scene apply equally to the criticism of this additional piece. The patient accepted this concluding act when I had constructed it, and appeared to confirm it by producing ‘transitory symptoms’. A further additional piece which I had proposed, to the effect that his father was annoyed at the interruption and gave vent to his ill-humour by scolding him, had to be dropped. The material of the analysis did not react to it.

The additional detail which I have now brought forward cannot of course be put on a level with the rest of the content of the scene. Here it is not a question of an impression from outside, which must be expected to re-emerge in a number of later indications, but of a reaction on the part of the child himself. It would make no difference to the story as a whole if this demonstration had not occurred, or if it had been taken from a later period and inserted into the course of the scene. But there can be no question of how we are to regard it. It is a sign of a state of excitement of the anal zone (in the widest sense). In other similar cases an observation like this of sexual intercourse has ended with a discharge of urine; a grown-up man in the same circumstances would feel an erection. The fact that our little boy passed a stool as a sign of his sexual excitement is to be regarded as a characteristic of his congenital sexual constitution. He at once assumed a passive attitude, and showed more inclination towards a subsequent identification with women than with men.

¹ Cf. ‘On Transformations of Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Erotism’ (1917c).

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3563

At the same time, like every other child, he was making use of the content of the intestines in one of its earliest and most primitive meanings. Faeces are the child’s first gift, the first sacrifice on behalf of his affection, a portion of his own body which he is ready to part with, but only for the sake of some one he loves.¹ To use faeces as an expression of defiance, as our patient did against the governess when he was three and a half, is merely to turn this earlier ‘gift’ meaning into the negative. The ‘grumus merdae’ [heap of faeces] left behind by criminals upon the scene of their misdeeds seems to have both these meanings: contumely, and a regressive expression of making amends. It is always possible, when a higher stage has been reached, for use still to be made of the lower one in its negative and debased sense. The contrariety is a manifestation of repression.²

¹ I believe these can be no difficulty in substantiating the statement that infants only soil with their excrement people whom they know and are fond of; they do not consider strangers worthy of this distinction. In my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d) I mentioned the very first purpose to which faeces are put - namely, the auto-erotic stimulation of the intestinal mucous membrane. We now reach a further stage, at which a decisive part in the process of defaecation is played by the child’s attitude to some object to whom he thus shows himself obedient or agreeable. This relation is one that persists; for even older children will only allow themselves to be assisted in defaecating and urinating by particular privileged persons, though in this connection the prospect of other forms of satisfaction is also involved.

² In the unconscious, as we are aware, ‘No’ does not exist, and there is no distinction between contraries. Negation is only introduced by the process of repression.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3564

At a later stage of sexual development faeces take on the meaning of a baby. For babies, like faeces, are born through the anus. The ‘gift’ meaning of faeces readily admits of this transformation. It is a common usage to speak of a baby as a ‘gift’. The more frequent expression is that the woman has ‘given’ the man a baby; but in the usage of the unconscious equal attention is justly paid to the other aspect of the relation, namely, to the woman having ‘received’ the baby as a gift from the man.

The meaning of faeces as money branches off from the ‘gift’ meaning in another direction.

The deeper significance of our patient’s early screen memory, to the effect that he had his first fit of rage because he was not given enough presents one Christmas, is now revealed to us. What he was feeling the want of was sexual satisfaction, which he had taken as being anal. His sexual researches came during the course of the dream to understand what they had been prepared for finding before the dream, namely, that the sexual act solved the problem of the origin of babies. Even before the dream he had disliked babies. Once, when he had come upon a small unfledged bird that had fallen out of its nest, he had taken it for a human baby and been horrified at it. The analysis showed that all small animals, such as caterpillars and insects, that he had been so enraged with, had had the meaning of babies to him.¹ His position in regard to his elder sister had given him every opportunity for reflecting upon the relation between elder and younger children. His Nanya had once told him that his mother was so fond of him because he was the youngest, and this gave him good grounds for wishing that no younger child might come after him. His dread of this youngest child was revived under the influence of the dream which brought up before him his parents’ intercourse.

To the sexual currents that are already known to us we must therefore add a further one, which, like the rest, started from the primal scene reproduced in the dream. In his identification with women (that is, with his mother) he was ready to give his father a baby, and was jealous of his mother, who had already done so and would perhaps do so again.

¹ Just as vermin often stands for babies in dreams and phobias.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3565

In a roundabout way, since both ‘money’ and ‘baby’ have the sense of ‘gift’, money can take over the meaning of baby and can thus become the means of expressing feminine (homosexual) satisfaction. This was what occurred with our patient when - he and his sister were staying at a German sanatorium at the time - he saw his father give his sister two large bank notes. In imagination he had always had suspicions of his father’s relations with his sister; and at this his jealousy awoke. He rushed at his sister as soon as they were alone, and demanded a share of the money with so much vehemence and such reproaches that his sister, in tears, threw him the whole of it. What had excited him was not merely the actual money, but rather the ‘baby’ - anal sexual satisfaction from his father. And he was able to console himself with this when, in his father’s lifetime, his sister died. The revolting thought which occurred to him when he heard the news of her death in fact meant no more than this: ‘Now I am the only child. Now Father will have to love me only.’ But though his reflection was in itself perfectly capable of becoming conscious, yet its homosexual background was so intolerable that it was possible for its disguise in the shape of the most sordid avarice to come as a great relief.

Similarly, too, when after his father’s death he reproached his mother so unjustifiably with wanting to cheat him out of the money and with being fonder of the money than of him. His old jealousy of her for having loved another child besides him, the possibility of her having wanted another child after him, drove him into making charges which he himself knew were unwarranted.

This analysis of the meaning of faeces makes it clear that the obsessive thoughts which obliged him to connect God with faeces had a further significance beyond the disparagement which he saw in them himself. They were in fact true compromise-products, in which a part was played no less by an affectionate current of devotion than by a hostile current of abuse. ‘God-shit’ was probably an abbreviation for an offering that one occasionally hears mentioned in its unabbreviated form. ‘Shitting on God’ [‘auf Gott scheissen’] or ‘shitting something for God’ [‘Gott etwas scheissen’] also means giving him a baby or getting him to give one a baby. The old ‘gift’ meaning in its negative and debased form and the ‘baby’ meaning that was later developed from it are combined with each other in the obsessional phrase. In the latter of these meanings a feminine tenderness finds expression: a readiness to give up one’s masculinity if in exchange for it one can be loved like a woman. Here, then, we have precisely the same impulse towards God which was expressed in unambiguous words in the delusional system of the paranoic Senatspräsident Schreber.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3566

When later on I come to describing the final clearing up of my patient’s symptoms, the way in which the intestinal disorder had put itself at the service of the homosexual current and had given expression to his feminine attitude towards his father will once again become evident. Meanwhile we shall mention a further meaning of faeces, which will lead us on to a discussion of the castration complex.

Since the column of faeces stimulates the erotogenic mucous membrane of the bowel, it plays the part of an active organ in regard to it; it behaves just as the penis does to the vaginal mucous membrane, and acts as it were as its forerunner during the cloacal epoch. The handing over of faeces for the sake of (out of love for) some one else becomes a prototype of castration; it is the first occasion upon which an individual parts with a piece of his own body ¹ in order to gain the favour of some other person whom he loves. So that a person’s love of his own penis, which is in other respects narcissistic, is not without an element of anal erotism. ‘Faeces’, ‘baby’ and ‘penis’ thus form a unity, an unconscious concept (sit venia verbo) - the concept, namely, of ‘a little one’ that can become separated from one’s body. Along these paths of association the libidinal cathexis may become displaced or intensified in ways which are pathologically important and which are revealed by analysis.

We are already acquainted with the attitude which our patient first adopted to the problem of castration. He rejected castration, and held to his theory of intercourse by the anus. When I speak of his having rejected it, the first meaning of the phrase is that he would have nothing to do with it, in the sense of having repressed it. This really involved no judgement upon the question of its existence, but it was the same as if it did not exist. Such an attitude, however, could not have been his final one, even at the time of his infantile neurosis. We find good subsequent evidence of his having recognized castration as a fact. In this connection, once again, he behaved in the manner which was so characteristic of him, but which makes it so difficult to give a clear account of his mental processes or to feel one’s way into them. First he resisted and then he yielded; but the second reaction did not do away with the first. In the end there were to be found in him two contrary currents side by side, of which one abominated the idea of castration, while the other was prepared to accept it and console itself with femininity as a compensation. But beyond any doubt a third current, the oldest and deepest, which did not as yet even raise the question of the reality of castration, was still capable of coming into activity. I have elsewhere ² reported a hallucination which this same patient had at the age of five and upon which I need only add a brief commentary here.

¹ It is as such that faeces are invariably treated by children.

² ‘Fausse Reconnaissance ("Déjà Raconté") in Psycho-Analytic Treatment’ (1914a).

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3567

‘"When I was five years old, I was playing in the garden near my nurse, and was carving with my pocket-knife in the bark of one of the walnut-trees that come into my dream as well.¹ Suddenly, to my unspeakable terror, I noticed that I had cut through the little finger of my (right or left?) hand, so that it was only hanging on by its skin. I felt no pain, but great fear. I did not venture to say anything to my nurse, who was only a few paces distant, but I sank down on the nearest seat and sat there incapable of casting another glance at my finger. At last I calmed down, took a look at the finger, and saw that it was entirely uninjured."’

After he had received his instruction in the Bible story at the age of four and a half he began, as we know, to make the intense effort of thought which ended in his obsessional piety. We may therefore assume that this hallucination belongs to the period in which he brought himself to recognize the reality of castration and it is perhaps to be regarded as actually marking this step. Even the small correction made by the patient is not without interest. If he had a hallucination of the same dreadful experience which Tasso, in his Gerusaleme Liberata, tells of his hero Tancred, we shall perhaps be justified in reaching the interpretation that the tree meant a woman to my little patient as well. Here, then, he was playing the part of his father, and was connecting his mother’s familiar haemorrhages with the castration of women, which he now recognized, - with the ‘wound’.

¹ ‘Cf. "The Occurrence in Dreams of Material from Fairy Tales". In telling the story again on a later occasion he made the following correction: "I don’t believe I was cutting the tree. That was a confusion with another recollection, which must also have been hallucinatorily falsified, of having made a cut in a tree with my knife and of blood having come out of the tree."’

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3568

His hallucination of the severed finger was instigated, as he reported later on, by the story that a female relation of his had been born with six toes and that the extra one had immediately afterwards been chopped off with an axe. Women, then, had no penis because it was taken away from them at birth. In this manner he came, at the period of the obsessional neurosis, to accept what he had already learned during the dream but had at the time rejected by repression. He must also have become acquainted, during the readings and discussions of the sacred story, with the ritual circumcision of Christ and of the Jews in general.

There is no doubt whatever that at this time his father was turning into the terrifying figure that threatened him with castration. The cruel God with whom he was then struggling - who made men sinful, only to punish them afterwards, who sacrificed his own son and the sons of men - this God threw back his character on to the patient’s father, though, on the other hand, the boy was at the same time trying to defend his father against the God. At this point the boy had to fit into a phylogenetic pattern, and he did so, although his personal experiences may not have agreed with it. Although the threats or hints of castration which had come his way had emanated from women, ¹ this could not hold up the final result for long. In spite of everything it was his father from whom in the end he came to fear castration. In this respect heredity triumphed over accidental experience; in man’s prehistory it was unquestionably the father who practised castration as a punishment and who later softened it down into circumcision. The further the patient went in repressing sensuality during the course of the development of the obsessional neurosis,² the more natural it must have become to him to attribute these evil intentions to his father, who was the true representative of sensual activity.

¹ We already know this as regards his Nanya; and we shall hear of it again in connection with another woman.

² For evidence of this see p. 3551.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3569

His identification of his father with the castrator ¹ became important as being the source of an intense unconscious hostility towards him (which reached the pitch of a death-wish) and of a sense of guilt which reacted against it. Up to this point, however, he was behaving normally - that is to say, like every neurotic who is possessed by a positive Oedipus complex. But the astonishing thing was that even against this there was a counter-current working in him, which, on the contrary, regarded his father as the one who had been castrated and as calling, therefore, for his sympathy.

When I analysed his ceremonial of breathing out whenever he saw cripples, beggars, and such people, I was able to show that that symptom could also be traced back to his father, whom he had felt sorry for when he visited him as a patient in the sanatorium. The analysis made it possible to follow this thread even further back. At a very early period, probably before his seduction (at the age of three and a quarter), there had been on the estate an old day-Iabourer whose business it was to carry the water into the house. He could not speak, ostensibly because his tongue had been cut out. (He was probably a deaf mute.) The little boy was very fond of him and pitied him deeply. When he died, he looked for him in the sky.² Here, then, was the first of the cripples for whom he had felt sympathy, and, as was shown by the context and the point at which the episode came out in the analysis, an undoubted father-surrogate.

¹ Among the most tormenting, though at the same time the most grotesque, symptoms of his later illness was his relation to every tailor from whom he ordered a suit of clothes: his deference and timidity in the presence of this high functionary, his attempts to get into his good books by giving him extravagant tips, and his despair over the results of the work however it might in fact have turned out.

² In this connection I may mention some dreams which he had, later than the anxiety-dream, but while he was still on the first estate. These dreams represented the scene of coition as an event taking place between heavenly bodies.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3570

In the analysis this man was associated with the recollection of other servants whom the patient had liked and about whom he emphasized the fact that they had been either sickly or Jews (which implied circumcision). The footman, too, who had helped to clean him after his accident at four and a half, had been a Jew and a consumptive and had been an object of his compassion. All of these figures belong to the period before his visit to his father at the sanatorium, that is, before the formation of the symptom; the latter must therefore rather have been intended to ward off (by means of the breathing out) any identification with the object of the patient’s pity. Then suddenly, in connection with a dream, the analysis plunged back into the prehistoric period, and led him to assert that during the copulation in the primal scene he had observed the penis disappear, that he had felt compassion for his father on that account, and had rejoiced at the reappearance of what he thought had been lost. So here was a fresh emotional impulse, starting once again from the primal scene. Moreover, the narcissistic origin of compassion (which is confirmed by the word itself) is here quite unmistakably revealed.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3571

VIII

FRESH MATERIAL FROM THE PRIMAL PERIOD - SOLUTION

It happens in many analyses that as one approaches their end new recollections emerge which have hitherto been kept carefully concealed. Or it may be that on one occasion some unpretentious remark is thrown out in an indifferent tone of voice as though it were superfluous; that then, on another occasion, something further is added, which begins to make the physician prick his ears; and that at last he comes to recognize this despised fragment of a memory as the key to the weightiest secrets that the patient’s neurosis has veiled.

Early in the analysis my patient had told me of a memory of the period in which his naughtiness had been in the habit of suddenly turning into anxiety. He was chasing a beautiful big butterfly with yellow stripes and large wings which ended in pointed projections - a swallow-tail, in fact. Suddenly, when the butterfly had settled on a flower, he was seized with a dreadful fear of the creature, and ran away screaming.

This memory recurred occasionally during the analysis, and called for an explanation; but for a long time none was to be found. Nevertheless it was to be assumed as a matter of course that a detail like this had not kept its place in his recollection on its own account, but that it was a screen-memory, representing something of more importance with which it was in some way connected. One day he told me that in his language a butterfly was called ‘babushka’, ‘granny’. He added that in general butterflies had seemed to him like women and girls, and beetles and caterpillars like boys. So there could be little doubt that in this anxiety scene a recollection of some female person had been aroused. I will not hide the fact that at that time I put forward the possibility that the yellow stripes on the butterfly had reminded him of similar stripes on a piece of clothing worn by some woman. I only mention this as an illustration to show how inadequate the physician’s constructive efforts usually are for clearing up questions that arise, and how unjust it is to attribute the results of analysis to the physician imagination and suggestion.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3572

Many months later, in quite another connection, the patient remarked that the opening and shutting of the butterfly’s wings while it was settled on the flower had given him an uncanny feeling. It had looked, so he said, like a woman opening her legs, and the legs then made the shape of a Roman V, which, as we know, was the hour at which, in his boyhood, and even up to the time of the treatment, he used to fall into a depressed state of mind.

This was an association which I could never have arrived at myself, and which gained importance from a consideration of the thoroughly infantile nature of the train of association which it revealed. The attention of children, as I have often noticed, is attracted far more readily by movements than by forms at rest; and they frequently base associations upon a similarity of movement which is overlooked or neglected by adults.

After this the little problem was once more left untouched for a long time; but I may mention the facile suspicion that the points or stick-like projections of the butterfly’s wings might have had the meaning of genital symbols.

One day there emerged, timidly and indistinctly, a kind of recollection that at a very early age, even before the time of the nurse, he must have had a nursery-maid who was very fond of him. Her name had been the same as his mother’s. He had no doubt returned her affection. It was, in fact, a first love that had faded into oblivion. But we agreed that something must have occurred at that time that became of importance later on.

Then on another occasion he emended this recollection. She could not have had the same name as his mother; that had been a mistake on his part, and it showed, of course, that in his memory she had become fused with his mother. Her real name, he went on, had occurred to him in a roundabout way. He had suddenly thought of a store-room, on the first estate, in which fruit was kept after it had been picked, and of a particular sort of pear with a most delicious taste - a big pear with yellow stripes on its skin. The word for ‘pear’ in his language was ‘grusha’, and that had also been the name of the nursery-maid.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3573

It thus became clear that behind the screen memory of the hunted butterfly the memory of the nursery-maid lay concealed. But the yellow stripes were not on her dress, but on the pear whose name was the same as hers. What, however, was the origin of the anxiety which had arisen when the memory of her had been activated? The obvious answer to this might have been the crude hypothesis that it had been this girl whom, when he was a small child, he had first seen making the movements with her legs which he had fixed in his mind with the Roman V - movements which allow access to the genitals. We spared ourselves such theorizing as this and waited for more material.

Very soon after this there came the recollection of a scene, incomplete, but, so far as it was preserved, definite. Grusha was kneeling on the floor, and beside her a pail and a short broom made of a bundle of twigs; he was also there, and she was teasing him or scolding him.

The missing elements could easily be supplied from other directions. During the first months of the treatment he had told me of how he had suddenly fallen in love in a compulsive manner with a peasant girl from whom, in his eighteenth year, he had contracted the precipitating cause of his later illness. When he told me this he had displayed a most extraordinary unwillingness to give me the girl’s name. It was an entirely isolated instance of resistance, for apart from it he obeyed the fundamental rule of analysis unreservedly. He asserted, however, that the reason for his being so much ashamed of mentioning the name was that it was a purely peasant name and that no girl of gentle birth could possibly be called by it. When eventually the name was produced, it turned out to be Matrona, which has a motherly ring about it. The shame was evidently displaced. He was not ashamed of the fact that these love-affairs were invariably concerned with girls of the humblest origin; he was ashamed only of the name. If it should turn out that the affair with Matrona had something in common with the Grusha scene, then the shame would have to be transferred back to that early episode.

He had told me another time that when he heard the story of John Huss he had been greatly moved, and that his attention had been held by the bundles of firewood that were dragged up when he was burnt at the stake. Now his sympathy for Huss created a perfectly definite suspicion in my mind, for I have often come upon this sympathy in youthful patients and I have always been able to explain it in the same way. One such patient even went so far as to produce a dramatized version of Huss’s career; he began to write his play on the day on which he lost the object with whom he was secretly in love. Huss perished by fire, and (like others who possess the same qualification) he becomes the hero of people who have at one time suffered from enuresis. My patient himself connected the bundles of firewood used for the execution of Huss with the nursery-maid’s broom or bundle of twigs.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3574

This material fitted together spontaneously and served to fill in the gaps in the patient’s memory of the scene with Grusha. When he saw the girl scrubbing the floor he had micturated in the room and she had rejoined, no doubt jokingly, with a threat of castration.¹

I do not know if my readers will have already guessed why it is that I have given such a detailed account of this episode from the patient’s early childhood.² It provides an important link between the primal scene and the later compulsive love which came to be of such decisive significance in his subsequent career, and it further shows us a condition upon which his falling in love depended and which elucidates that compulsion.

When he saw the girl on the floor engaged in scrubbing it, and kneeling down, with her buttocks projecting and her back horizontal, he was faced once again with the posture which his mother had assumed in the copulation scene. She became his mother to him; he was seized with sexual excitement owing to the activation of this picture;³ and, like his father (whose action he can only have regarded at the time as micturition), he behaved in a masculine way towards her. His micturition on the floor was in reality an attempt at a seduction, and the girl replied to it with a threat of castration, just as though she had understood what he meant.

¹ It is very remarkable that the reaction of shame should be so intimately connected with involuntary emptying of the bladder (whether in the day-time or at night) and not equally so, as one would have expected, with incontinence of the bowels. Experience leaves no room for doubt upon the point. The regular relation that is found to exist between incontinence of the bladder and fire also provides matter for reflection. It is possible that these reactions and relations represent precipitates from the history of human civilization derived from a lower stratum than anything that is preserved for us in the traces surviving in myths or folklore.

² It may be assigned to a time at which he was about two and a half: between his supposed observation of intercourse and his seduction.

³ This was before the dream.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3575

The compulsion which proceeded from the primal scene was transferred on to this scene with Grusha and was carried forward by it. But the condition upon which his falling in love depended underwent a change which showed the influence of the second scene: it was transferred from the woman’s posture to the occupation on which she was engaged while in that posture. This was clear, for instance, in the episode of Matrona. He was walking through the village which formed part of their (later) estate, when he saw a peasant girl kneeling by the pond and employed in washing clothes in it. He fell in love with the girl instantly and with irresistible violence, although he had not yet been able to get even a glimpse of her face. By her posture and occupation she had taken the place of Grusha for him. We can now see now it was that the shame which properly related to the content of the scene with Grusha could become attached to the name of Matrona.

Another attack of falling in love, dating from a few years earlier, shows even more clearly the compelling influence of the Grusha scene. A young peasant girl, who was a servant in the house, had long attracted him, but he succeeded in keeping himself from approaching her. One day, when he came upon her in a room by herself, he was overwhelmed by his love. He found her kneeling on the floor and engaged in scrubbing it, with a pail and a broom beside her - in fact, exactly as he had seen the girl in his childhood.

Even his final choice of object, which played such an important part in his life, is shown by its details (though they cannot be adduced here) to have been dependent upon the same condition and to have been an offshoot of the compulsion which, starting from the primal scene and going on to the scene with Grusha, had dominated his love-choice. I have remarked on an earlier page that I recognize in the patient an endeavour to debase his love-object. This is to be explained as a reaction against pressure from the sister who was so much his superior. But I promised at the same time (see p. 3515) to show that this self-assertive motive was not the only determinant, but that it concealed another and deeper one based on purely erotic motives. These were brought to light by the patient’s memory of the nursery-maid scrubbing the floor - physically debased too, by the by. All his later love-objects were surrogates for this one person, who through the accident of her attitude had herself become his first mother-surrogate. The patient’s first association in connection with the problem of his fear of the butterfly can now easily be explained retrospectively as a distant allusion to the primal scene (the hour of five). He confirmed the connection between the Grusha scene and the threat of castration by a particularly ingenious dream, which he himself succeeded in deciphering. ‘I had a dream,’ he said, ‘of a man tearing off the wings of an Espe.’ ‘Espe?’ I asked; ‘what do you mean by that?’ ‘You know; that insect with yellow stripes on its body, that stings.’ I could now put him right: ‘So what you mean is a Wespe [wasp].’ ‘Is it called a Wespe? I really thought it was called an Espe.’ (Like so many other people, he used his difficulties with a foreign language as a screen for symptomatic acts.) ‘But Espe, why, that’s myself: S. P.’ (which were his initials). The Espe was of course a mutilated Wespe. The dream said clearly that he was avenging himself on Grusha for her threat of castration.

The action of the two-and-a-half-year-old boy in the scene with Grusha is the earliest effect of the primal scene which has come to our knowledge. It represents him as copying his father, and shows us a tendency towards development in a direction which would later deserve the name of masculine. His seduction drove him into passivity - for which, in any case, the way was prepared by his behaviour when he was a witness of his parents’ intercourse.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3576

I must here turn for a moment to the history of the treatment. When once the Grusha scene had been assimilated - the first experience that he could really remember, and one which he had remembered without any conjectures or intervention on my part - the problem of the treatment had every appearance of having been solved. From that time forward there were no more resistances; all that remained to be done was to collect and to co-ordinate. The old trauma theory of the neuroses, which was after all built up upon impressions gained from psycho-analytic practice, had suddenly come to the front once more. Out of critical interest I made one more attempt to force upon the patient another view of his story, which might commend itself more to sober common sense. It was true that there could be no doubt about the scene with Grusha, but, I suggested, in itself that scene meant nothing; it had been emphasized ex post facto by a regression from the circumstances of his object choice, which, as a result of his intention to debase, had been diverted from his sister on to servant girls. On the other hand, his observation of intercourse, I argued, was a phantasy of his later years; its historical nucleus may perhaps have been an observation or an experience by the patient of the administration of an innocent enema. Some of my readers will possibly be inclined to think that with such hypotheses as these I was for the first time beginning to approach an understanding of the case; but the patient looked at me uncomprehendingly and a little contemptuously when I put this view before him, and he never reacted to it again. I have already stated my own arguments against any such rationalization at their proper point in the discussion.

[Thus ¹ the Grusha scene, by explaining the conditions governing the patient’s object-choice - conditions which were of decisive importance in his life - prevents our over-estimating the significance of his intention to debase women. But it does more than this. It affords me a justification for having refused on an earlier page (see p. 3545) to adopt unhesitatingly, as the only tenable explanation, the view that the primal scene was derived from an observation made upon animals shortly before the dream. The Grusha scene emerged in the patient’s memory spontaneously and through no effort of mine. His fear of the yellow-striped butterfly, which went back to that scene, proved that the scene had had a significant content, or that he had been able to attach this significance to its content subsequently. By means of the accompanying associations and the inferences that followed from them, it was possible with certainty to supply this significant element which was lacking in the patient’s memory. It then appeared that his fear of the butterfly was in every respect analogous to his fear of the wolf; in both cases it was a fear of castration, which was, to begin with, referred to the person who had first uttered the threat of castration, but was then transposed on to another person to whom it was bound to become attached in accordance with phylogenetic precedent. The scene with Grusha had occurred when the patient was two and a half, but the anxiety-episode with the yellow butterfly was certainly subsequent to the anxiety-dream. It was easy to understand how the patient’s later comprehension of the possibility of castration had retrospectively brought out the anxiety in the scene with Grusha. But that scene in itself contained nothing objectionable or improbable; on the contrary, it consisted entirely of commonplace details which gave no grounds for scepticism. There was nothing in it which could lead one to attribute its origin to the child’s imagination; such a supposition, indeed, seemed scarcely possible.

¹ [Freud’s square brackets.]

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3577

The question now arises whether we are justified in regarding the fact that the boy micturated, while he stood looking at the girl on her knees scrubbing the floor, as a proof of sexual excitement on his part. If so, the excitement would be evidence of the influence of an earlier impression, which might equally have been the actual occurrence of the primal scene or an observation made upon animals before the age of two and a half. Or are we to conclude that the situation as regards Grusha was entirely innocent, that the child’s emptying his bladder was purely accidental, and that it was not until later that the whole scene became sexualized in his memory, after he had come to recognize the importance of similar situations?

On these issues I can venture upon no decision. I must confess, however, that I regard it as greatly to the credit of psycho-analysis that it should even have reached the stage of raising such questions as these. Nevertheless, I cannot deny that the scene with Grusha, the part it played in the analysis, and the effects that followed from it in the patient’s life can be most naturally and completely explained if we consider that the primal scene, which may in other cases be a phantasy, was a reality in the present one. After all, there is nothing impossible about it; and the hypothesis of its reality is entirely compatible with the inciting action of the observations upon animals which are indicated by the sheep-dogs in the dream-picture.

I will now turn from this unsatisfactory conclusion to a consideration of the problem which I have attempted in my Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. I should myself be glad to know whether the primal scene in my present patient’s case was a phantasy or a real experience; but, taking other similar cases into account, I must admit that the answer to this question is not in fact a matter of very great importance. These scenes of observing parental intercourse, of being seduced in childhood, and of being threatened with castration are unquestionably an inherited endowment, a phylogenetic heritage, but they may just as easily be acquired by personal experience. With my patient, his seduction by his elder sister was an indisputable reality; why should not the same have been true of his observation of his parents’ intercourse?

All that we find in the prehistory of neuroses is that a child catches hold of this phylogenetic experience where his own experience fails him. He fills in the gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth; he replaces occurrences in his own life by occurrences in the life of his ancestors. I fully agree with Jung ¹ in recognizing the existence of this phylogenetic heritage; but I regard it as a methodological error to seize on a phylogenetic explanation before the ontogenetic possibilities have been exhausted. I cannot see any reason for obstinately disputing the importance of infantile prehistory while at the same time freely acknowledging the importance of ancestral prehistory. Nor can I overlook the fact that phylogenetic motives and productions themselves stand in need of elucidation, and that in quite a number of instances this is afforded by factors in the childhood of the individual. And, finally, I cannot feel surprised that what was originally produced by certain circumstances in prehistoric times and was then transmitted in the shape of a predisposition to its re-acquirement should, since the same circumstances persist, emerge once more as a concrete event in the experience of the individual.]

¹ Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prozesse, 1917. This was published too late for it to have influenced my Introductory Lectures.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3578

Room must also be found in the interval between the primal scene and the seduction (from the age of one and a half to the age of three and a quarter) for the dumb water-carrier. He served the patient as a father-surrogate just as Grusha served him as a mother-surrogate. I do not think there is any justification for regarding this as an example of the intention to debase, even though it is true that both parents have come to be represented by servants. A child pays no regard to social distinctions, which have little meaning for him as yet; and he classes people of inferior rank with his parents if such people love him as his parents do. Nor is the intention to debase any more responsible for the substitution of animals for a child’s parents, for children are very far indeed from taking a disparaging view of animals. Uncles and aunts are used as parent-surrogates without any regard to the question of debasing, and this was in fact done by our present patient, as many of his recollections showed.

There also belongs in this period a phase, which was obscurely remembered, in which he would not eat anything except sweet things, until alarm was felt on the score of his health. He was told about one of his uncles who had refused to eat in the same way and had wasted away to death while he was still young. He was also informed that when he himself was three months old he had been so seriously ill (with pneumonia?) that his winding-sheet had been got ready for him. In this way they succeeded in alarming him, so that he began eating again; and in the later years of his childhood he used actually to overdo this duty, as though to guard himself against the threat of death The fear of death, which was evoked at that time for his own protection, made its reappearance later when his mother warned him of the danger of dysentery. Later still, it brought on an attack of his obsessional neurosis (see p. 3551). We shall try below to go into its origins and meanings.

I am inclined to the opinion that this disturbance of appetite should be regarded as the very first of the patient’s neurotic illnesses. If so, the disturbance of appetite, the wolf phobia, and the obsessional piety would constitute the complete series of infantile disorders which laid down the predisposition for his neurotic break-down after he had passed the age of puberty. It will be objected that few children escape such disorders as a temporary loss of appetite or an animal phobia. But this argument is exactly what I should wish for. I am ready to assert that every neurosis in an adult is built upon a neurosis which has occurred in his childhood but has not invariably been severe enough to strike the eye and be recognized as such. This objection only serves to emphasize the theoretical importance of the part which infantile neuroses must play in our view of those later disorders which we treat as neuroses and endeavour to attribute entirely to the effects of adult life. If our present patient had not suffered from obsessional piety in addition to his disturbance of appetite and his animal phobia, his story would not have been noticeably different from that of other children, and we should have been the poorer by the loss of precious material which may guard us against certain plausible errors.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3579

The analysis would be unsatisfactory if it failed to explain the phrase used by the patient for summing up the troubles of which he complained. The world, he said, was hidden from him by a veil; and our psycho-analytic training forbids our assuming that these words can have been without significance or have been chosen at haphazard. The veil was torn, strange to say, in one situation only; and that was at the moment when, as a result of an enema, he passed a motion through his anus. He then felt well again, and for a very short while he saw the world clearly. The interpretation of this ‘veil’ progressed with as much difficulty as we met with in clearing up his fear of the butterfly. Nor did he keep to the veil. It became still more elusive, as a feeling of twilight, ‘ténèbres’, and of other impalpable things,

It was not until just before taking leave of the treatment that he remembered having been told that he was born with a caul. He had for that reason always looked on himself as a special child of fortune whom no ill could befall. He did not lose that conviction until he was forced to realize that his gonorrhoeal infection constituted a serious injury to his body. The blow to his narcissism was too much for him and he went to pieces. It may be said that in so doing he was repeating a mechanism that he had already brought into play once before. For his wolf phobia had broken out when he found himself faced by the fact that such a thing as castration was possible; and he clearly classed his gonorrhoea as castration.

Thus the caul was the veil which hid him from the world and hid the world from him. The complaint that he made was in reality a fulfilled wishful phantasy: it exhibited him as back once more in the womb, and was, in fact, a wishful phantasy of flight from the world. It can be translated as follows: ‘Life makes me so unhappy! I must get back into the womb!’

But what can have been the meaning of the fact that this veil, which was now symbolic but had once been real, was torn at the moment at which he evacuated his bowels after an enema, and that under this condition his illness left him? The context enables us to reply. If this birth-veil was torn, then he saw the world and was re-born. The stool was the child, as which he was born a second time, to a happier life. Here, then, we have the phantasy of re-birth, to which Jung has recently drawn attention and to which he has assigned such a dominating position in the imaginative life of neurotics.

This would be all very well, if it were the whole story. But certain details of the situation, and a due regard for the connection between it and this particular patient’s life-history, compel us to pursue the interpretation further. The necessary condition of his re-birth was that he should have an enema administered to him by a man. (It was not until later on that he was driven by necessity to take this man’s place himself.) This can, only have meant that he had identified himself with his mother, that the man was acting as his father, and that the enema was repeating the act of copulation, as the fruit of which the excrement-baby (which was once again himself) would be born. The phantasy of re-birth was therefore bound up closely with the necessary condition of sexual satisfaction from a man. So that the translation now runs to this effect: only on condition that he took the woman’s place and substituted himself for his mother, and thus let himself be sexually satisfied by his father and bore him a child - only on that condition would his illness leave him. Here, therefore, the phantasy of re-birth was simply a mutilated and censored version of the homosexual wishful phantasy.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3580

If we look into the matter more closely we cannot help remarking that in this condition which he laid down for his recovery the patient was simply repeating the state of affairs at the time of the ‘primal scene’. At that moment he had wanted to substitute himself for his mother; and, as we assumed long ago, it was he himself who, in the scene in question, had produced the excrement-baby. He still remained fixated, as though by a spell, to the scene which had such a decisive effect on his sexual life, and the return of which during the night of the dream brought the onset of his illness. The tearing of the veil was analogous to the opening of his eyes and to the opening of the window. The primal scene had become transformed into the necessary condition for his recovery.

It is easy to make a unified statement of what was expressed on the one hand by the complaint he made and on the other hand by the single exceptional condition under which the complaint no longer held good, and thus to make clear the whole meaning that underlay the two factors: he wished he could be back in the womb, not simply in order that he might then be re-born, but in order that he might be copulated with there by his father, might obtain sexual satisfaction from him, and might bear him a child.

The wish to be born of his father (as he had at first believed was the case), the wish to be sexually satisfied by him, the wish to present him with a child - and all of this at the price of his own masculinity, and expressed in the language of anal erotism - these wishes complete the circle of his fixation upon his father. In them homosexuality has found its furthest and most intimate expression.¹

This instance, I think, throws light on the meaning and origin of the womb-phantasy as well as that of re-birth. The former, the womb-phantasy, is frequently derived (as it was in the present case) from an attachment to the father. There is a wish to be inside the mother’s womb in order to replace her during intercourse - in order to take her place in regard to the father. The phantasy of re-birth, on the other hand, is in all probability regularly a softened substitute (a euphemism, one might say) for the phantasy of incestuous intercourse with the mother; to make use of Silberer’s expression, it is an anagogic abbreviation of it. There is a wish to be back in a situation in which one was in the mother’s genitals; and in this connection the man is identifying himself with his own penis and is using it to represent himself. Thus the two phantasies are revealed as each other’s counterparts: they give expression, according as the subject’s attitude is feminine or masculine, to his wish for sexual intercourse with his father or with his mother. We cannot dismiss the possibility that in the complaint made by our present patient and in the necessary condition laid down for his recovery the two phantasies, that is to say the two incestuous wishes, were united.

¹ A possible subsidiary explanation, namely that the veil represented the hymen which is torn at the moment of intercourse with a man, does not harmonize completely with the necessary condition for his recovery. Moreover it has no bearing on the life of the patient, for whom virginity carried no significance.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3581

I will make a final attempt at re-interpreting the last findings of this analysis in accordance with the scheme of my opponents. The patient lamented his flight from the world in a typical womb-phantasy and viewed his recovery as a typically conceived re-birth. In accordance with the predominant side of his disposition, he expressed the latter in anal symptoms. He next concocted, on the model of his anal phantasy of re-birth, a childhood scene which repeated his wishes in an archaic symbolic medium of expression. His symptoms were then strung together as though they had been derived from a primal scene of that kind. He was driven to embark on this long backward course either because he had come up against some task in life which he was too lazy to perform, or because he had every reason to be aware of his own inferiority and thought he could best protect himself from being slighted by elaborating such contrivances as these.

All this would be very nice, if only the unlucky wretch had not had a dream when he was no more than four years old, which signalized the beginning of his neurosis, which was instigated by his grandfather’s story of the tailor and the wolf, and the interpretation of which necessitates the assumption of this primal scene. All the alleviations which the theories of Jung and Adler seek to afford us come to grief, alas, upon such paltry but unimpeachable facts as these. As things stand, it seems to me more probable that the phantasy of re-birth was a derivative of the primal scene than that, conversely, the primal scene was a reflection of the phantasy of re-birth. And we may perhaps suppose, too, that the patient, at a time only four years after his birth, may after all have been too young to be already wishing to be born again. But no, I must take this last argument back; for my own observations show that we have rated the powers of children too low and that there is no knowing what they cannot be given credit for.¹

¹ I admit that this is the most delicate question in the whole domain of psycho-analysis. I did not require the contributions of Adler or Jung to induce me to consider the matter with a critical eye, and to bear in mind the possibility that what analysis puts forward as being forgotten experiences of childhood (and of an improbably early childhood) may on the contrary be based upon phantasies created on occasions occurring late in life. According to this view, wherever we seemed in analyses to see traces of the after-effects of an infantile impression of the kind in question, we should rather have to assume that we were faced by the manifestation of some constitutional factor or of some disposition that had been phylogenetically maintained. On the contrary, no doubt has troubled me more; no other uncertainty has been more decisive in holding me back from publishing my conclusions. I was the first - a point to which none of my opponents have referred - to recognize both the part played by phantasies in symptom-formation and also the ‘retrospective phantasying’ of late impressions into childhood and their sexualization after the event. (See my Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), First Edition, p. 559, and ‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’, (1909d).) If, in spite of this, I have held to the more difficult and more improbable view, it has been as a result of arguments such as are forced upon the investigator by the case described in these pages or by any other infantile neurosis - arguments which I once again lay before my readers for their decision.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3582

IX

RECAPITULATIONS AND PROBLEMS

I do not know if the reader of this report of an analysis will have succeeded in forming a clear picture of the origin and development of the patient’s illness. I fear that, on the contrary, this will not have been the case. But though on other occasions I have said very little on behalf of my powers in the art of exposition, I should like in the present instance to plead mitigating circumstances. The description of such early phases and of such deep strata of mental life has been a task which has never before been attacked; and it is better to perform that task badly than to take flight before it - a proceeding which would moreover (or so we are told) involve the coward in risks of a certain kind. I prefer, therefore, to put a bold face on it and show that I have not allowed myself to be held back by a sense of my own inferiority.

The case itself was not a particularly favourable one. The advantage of having a wealth of information about the patient’s childhood (an advantage which was made possible by the fact that the child could be studied through the medium of the adult) had to be purchased at the expense of the analysis being most terribly disjointed and of the exposition showing corresponding gaps. Personal peculiarities in the patient and a national character that was foreign to ours made the task of feeling one’s way into his mind a laborious one. The contrast between the patient’s agreeable and affable personality, his acute intelligence and his nice-mindedness on the one hand, and his completely unbridled instinctual life on the other, necessitated an excessively long process of preparatory education, and this made a general perspective more difficult. But the patient himself has no responsibility for that feature of the case which put the severest obstacles in the way of any description of it. In the psychology of adults we have fortunately reached the point of being able to divide mental processes into conscious and unconscious and of being able to give a clearly-worded description of both. With children this distinction leaves us almost completely in the lurch. It is often embarrassing to decide what one would choose to call conscious and what unconscious. Processes which have become the dominant ones, and which from their subsequent behaviour must be equated with conscious ones, have nevertheless not been conscious in the child. It is easy to understand why. In children the conscious has not yet acquired all its characteristics; it is still in process of development, and it does not as yet fully possess the capacity for transposing itself into verbal images. We are constantly guilty of making a confusion between the phenomenon of emergence as a perception in consciousness and the fact of belonging to a hypothetical psychical system to which we ought to assign some conventional name, but which we in fact also call ‘consciousness’ (the system Cs.). This confusion does no harm when we are giving a psychological description of an adult, but it is misleading when we are dealing with that of a young child. Nor should we be much assisted here if we introduced the ‘preconscious’; for a child’s preconscious may, in just the same way, fail to coincide with an adult’s. We must be content, therefore, with having clearly recognized the obscurity.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3583

It is obvious that a case such as that which is described in these pages might be made an excuse for dragging into the discussion every one of the findings and problems of psycho-analysis. But this would be an endless and unjustifiable labour. It must be recognized that everything cannot be learnt from a single case and that everything cannot be decided by it; we must content ourselves with exploiting whatever it may happen to show most clearly. There are in any case narrow limits to what a psycho-analysis is called upon to explain. For, while it is its business to explain the striking symptoms by revealing their genesis, it is not its business to explain but merely to describe the psychical mechanisms and instinctual processes to which one is led by that means. In order to derive fresh generalizations from what has thus been established with regard to the mechanisms and instincts, it would be essential to have at one’s disposal numerous cases as thoroughly and deeply analysed as the present one. But they are not easily to be had, and each one of them requires years of labour. So that advances in these spheres of knowledge must necessarily be slow. There is no doubt a great temptation to content oneself with ‘scratching’ the mental surface of a number of people and of replacing what is left undone by speculation - the latter being put under the patronage of some school or other of philosophy. Practical requirements may also be adduced in favour of this procedure; but no substitute can satisfy the requirements of science.

I shall now attempt to sketch out a synthetic survey of my patient’s sexual development, beginning from its earliest indications. The first that we hear of it is in the disturbance of his appetite; for, taking other observations into account, I am inclined, though with due reservations, to regard that as a result of some process in the sphere of sexuality. I have been driven to regard as the earliest recognizable sexual organization the so-called ‘cannibalistic’ or ‘oral’ phase, during which the original attachment of sexual excitation to the nutritional instinct still dominates the scene. It is not to be expected that we should come upon direct manifestations of this phase, but only upon indications of it where disturbances have been set up. Impairment of the nutritional instinct (though this can of course have other causes) draws our attention to a failure on the part of the organism to master its sexual excitation. In this phase the sexual aim could only be cannibalism - devouring; it makes its appearance with our present patient through regression from a higher stage, in the form of fear of ‘being eaten by the wolf’. We were, indeed, obliged to translate this into a fear of being copulated with by his father. It is well known that there is a neurosis in girls which occurs at a much later age, at the time of puberty or soon afterwards, and which expresses aversion to sexuality by means of anorexia. This neurosis will have to be brought into relation with the oral phase of sexual life. The erotic aim of the oral organization further makes its appearance at the height of a lover’s paroxysm (in such phrases as ‘I could eat you up with love’) and in affectionate relations with children, when the grown-up person is pretending to be a child himself. I have elsewhere given voice to a suspicion that the father of our present patient used himself to indulge in ‘affectionate abuse’, and may have played at wolf or dog with the little boy and have threatened as a joke to gobble him up (p. 3524). The patient confirmed this suspicion by his curious behaviour in the transference. Whenever he shrank back on to the transference from the difficulties of the treatment, he used to threaten me with eating me up and later with all kinds of other ill-treatment - all of which was merely an expression of affection.

Permanent marks have been left by this oral phase of sexuality upon the usages of language. People commonly speak for instance, of an ‘appetizing’ love-object, and describe persons they are fond of as ‘sweet’. It will be remembered, too, that our little patient would only eat sweet things. In dreams sweet things and sweetmeats stand regularly for caresses or sexual gratifications.

It appears, moreover, that there is an anxiety belonging to this phase (only, of course, where some disturbance has arisen) which manifests itself as a fear of death and may be attached to anything that is pointed out to the child as being suitable for the purpose. With our patient it was employed to induce him to overcome his loss of appetite and indeed to overcompensate for it. A possible origin of this disturbance of his appetite will be found, if we bear in mind (basing ourselves on the hypothesis that we have so often discussed) that his observation of copulation at the age of one and a half, which produced so many deferred effects, certainly occurred before the time of these difficulties in his eating. So we may perhaps suppose that it accelerated the processes of sexual maturing and consequently did in fact also produce immediate effects, though these were insignificant in appearance.

I am of course aware that it is possible to explain the symptoms of this period (the wolf anxiety and the disturbance of appetite) in another and simpler manner, without any reference to sexuality or to a pregenital stage of its organization. Those who like to neglect the indications of neurosis and the interconnections between events will prefer this other explanation, and I shall not be able to prevent their doing so. It is hard to discover any cogent evidence in regard to these beginnings of sexual life except by such roundabout paths as I have indicated.

In the scene with Grusha (at the age of two and a half) we see the little boy at the beginning of a development which, except perhaps for its prematureness, deserves to be considered normal; thus we find in it identification with his father, and urethral erotism representing masculinity. It was also completely under the sway of the primal scene. We have hitherto regarded his identification with his father as being narcissistic; but if we take the content of the primal scene into account we cannot deny that it had already reached the stage of genital organization. His male genital organ had begun to play its part and it continued to do so under the influence of his seduction by his sister.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3584

But his seduction gives the impression not merely of having encouraged his sexual development but of having, to an even greater extent, disturbed and diverted it. It offered him a passive sexual aim, which was ultimately incompatible with the action of his male genital organ. At the first external obstacle, the threat of castration from his Nanya, his genital organization, half-hearted as it still was, broke down (at the age of three and a half) and regressed to the stage which had preceded it, namely to that of the sadistic-anal organization, which he might otherwise have passed through, perhaps, with as slight indications as other children.

The sadistic-anal organization can easily be regarded as a continuation and development of the oral one. The violent muscular activity, directed upon the object, by which it is characterized, is to be explained as an action preparatory to eating. The eating then ceases to be a sexual aim, and the preparatory action becomes a sufficient aim in itself. The essential novelty, as compared with the previous stage, is that the receptive passive function becomes disengaged from the oral zone and attached to the anal zone. In this connection we can hardly fail to think of biological parallels or of the theory that the pregenital organizations in man should be regarded as vestiges of conditions which have been permanently retained in several classes of animals. The building up of the instinct for research out of its various components is another characteristic feature of this stage of development.

The boy’s anal erotism was not particularly noticeable. Under the influence of his sadism the affectionate significance of faeces gave place to an aggressive one. A part was played in the transformation of his sadism into masochism by a sense of guilt, the presence of which points to developmental processes in spheres other than the sexual one.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3585

His seduction continued to make its influence felt, by maintaining the passivity of his sexual aim. It transformed his sadism to a great extent into the masochism which was its passive counterpart. But it is questionable whether the seduction can be made entirely responsible for this characteristic of passivity, for the child’s reaction to his observation of intercourse at the age of one and a half was already preponderantly a passive one. His sympathetic sexual excitement expressed itself by his passing a stool, though it is true that in this behaviour an active element is also to be distinguished. Side by side with the masochism which dominated his sexual impulsions and also found expression in phantasies, his sadism, too, persisted and was directed against small animals. His sexual researches had set in from the time of the seduction and had been concerned, in essence, with two problems: the origin of children and the possibility of losing the genitals. These researches wove themselves into the manifestations of his instinctual impulses, and directed his sadistic propensities on to small animals as being representatives of small children.

We have now carried our account down to about the time of the boy’s fourth birthday, and it was at that point that the dream brought into deferred operation his observation of intercourse at the age of one and a half. It is not possible for us completely to grasp or adequately to describe what now ensued. The activation of the picture, which, thanks to the advance in his intellectual development, he was now able to understand, operated not only like a fresh event, but like a new trauma, like an interference from outside analogous to the seduction. The genital organization which had been broken off was re-established at a single blow; but the advance that was achieved in the dream could not be maintained. On the contrary, there came about, by means of a process that can only be equated with a repression, a repudiation of the new element and its replacement by a phobia.

Thus the sadistic-anal organization continued to exist during the phase of the animal phobia which now set in, only it suffered an admixture of anxiety-phenomena. The child persisted in his sadistic as well as in his masochistic activities, but he reacted with anxiety to a portion of them; the conversion of his sadism into its opposite probably made further progress.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3586

The analysis of the anxiety-dream shows us that the repression was connected with his recognition of the existence of castration. The new element was rejected because its acceptance would have cost him his penis. Closer consideration leads us to some such conclusion as the following. What was repressed was the homosexual attitude understood in the genital sense, an attitude which had been formed under the influence of this recognition of castration. But that attitude was retained as regards the unconscious and set up as a dissociated and deeper stratum. The motive force of the repression seems to have been the narcissistic masculinity which attached to the boy’s genitals, and which had come into a long-prepared conflict with the passivity of his homosexual sexual aim. The repression was thus a result of his masculinity.

One might be tempted at this point to introduce a slight alteration into psycho-analytic theory. It would seem palpably obvious that the repression and the formation of the neurosis must have originated out of the conflict between masculine and feminine tendencies, that is out of bisexuality. This view of the situation, however is incomplete. Of the two conflicting sexual impulses one was ego-syntonic, while the other offended the boy’s narcissistic interest; it was on that account that the latter underwent repression. So that in this case, too, it was the ego that put the repression into operation, for the benefit of one of the sexual tendencies. In other cases there is no such conflict between masculinity and femininity; there is only a single sexual tendency present, which seeks for acceptance, but offends against certain forces of the ego and is consequently repelled. Indeed, conflicts between sexuality and the moral ego trends are far more common than such as take place within the sphere of sexuality; but a moral conflict of this kind is lacking in our present case. To insist that bisexuality is the motive force leading to repression is to take too narrow a view; whereas if we assert the same of the conflict between the ego and the sexual tendencies (that is, the libido) we shall have covered all possible cases.

The theory of the ‘masculine protest’, as it has been developed by Adler, is faced by the difficulty that repression by no means always takes the side of masculinity against femininity; there are quite large classes of cases in which it is masculinity that has to submit to repression by the ego.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3587

Moreover, a juster appreciation of the process of repression in our present case would lead us to deny that narcissistic masculinity was the sole motive force. The homosexual attitude which came into being during the dream was of such overwhelming intensity that the little boy’s ego found itself unable to cope with it and so defended itself against it by the process of repression. The narcissistic masculinity which attached to his genitals, being opposed to the homosexual attitude, was drawn in, in order to assist the ego in carrying out the task. Merely to avoid misunderstandings, I will add that all narcissistic impulses operate from the ego and have their permanent seat in the ego, and that repressions are directed against libidinal object cathexes.

Let us now leave the process of repression, though we have perhaps not succeeded in dealing with it exhaustively, and let us turn to the boy’s state when he awoke from the dream. If it had really been his masculinity that had triumphed over his homosexuality (or femininity) during the dream-process, then we should necessarily find that the dominant trend was an active sexual trend of a character already explicitly masculine. But there is no question of this having happened. The essentials of the sexual organization had not been changed; the sadistic-anal phase persisted, and remained the dominant one. The triumph of his masculinity was shown only in this: that thenceforward he reacted with anxiety to the passive sexual aims of the dominant organization - aims which were masochistic but not feminine. We are not confronted by a triumphant masculine sexual trend, but only by a passive one and a struggle against it.

I can well imagine the difficulties that the reader must find in the sharp distinction (unfamiliar but essential) which I have drawn between ‘active’ and ‘masculine’ and between ‘passive’ and ‘feminine’. I shall therefore not hesitate to repeat myself. The state of affairs, then, after the dream, may be described as follows. The sexual trends had been split up; in the unconscious the stage of the genital organization had been reached, and a very intense homosexuality set up; on the top of this (virtually in the conscious) there persisted the earlier sadistic and predominantly masochistic sexual current; the ego had on the whole changed its attitude towards sexuality, for it now repudiated sexuality and rejected the dominant masochistic aims with anxiety, just as it had reacted to the deeper homosexual aims with the formation of a phobia. Thus the result of the dream was not so much the triumph of a masculine current, as a reaction against a feminine and passive one. It would be very forced to ascribe the quality of masculinity to this reaction. The truth is that the ego has no sexual currents, but only an interest in its own self-protection and in the preservation of its narcissism.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3588

Let us now consider the phobia. It came into existence on the level of the genital organization, and shows us the relatively simple mechanism of an anxiety-hysteria. The ego, by developing anxiety, was protecting itself against what it regarded as an overwhelming danger, namely, homosexual satisfaction. But the process of repression left behind it a trace which cannot be overlooked. The object to which the dangerous sexual aim had been attached had to have its place taken in consciousness by another one. What became conscious was fear not of the father but of the wolf. Nor did the process stop at the formation of a phobia with a single content. A considerable time afterwards the wolf was replaced by the lion. Simultaneously with sadistic impulses against small animals there was a phobia directed towards them, in their capacity of representatives of the boy’s rivals, the possible small children. The origin of the butterfly phobia is of especial interest. It was like a repetition of the mechanism that produced the wolf phobia in the dream. Owing to a chance stimulus an old experience, the scene with Grusha, was activated; her threat of castration thus produced deferred effects, though at the time it was uttered it had made no impression.¹

¹ The Grusha scene was, as I have said, a spontaneous product of the patient’s memory, and no construction or stimulation by the physician played any part in evoking it. The gaps in it were filled up by the analysis in a fashion which must be regarded as unexceptionable, if any value at all is attached to the analytic method of work. The only possible rationalistic explanation of the phobia would be the following. There is nothing extraordinary, it might be said, in a child that was inclined to be nervous having had an anxiety attack in connection with a yellow-striped butterfly, probably as a result of some inherited tendency to anxiety.(See Stanley Hall, ‘A Synthetic Genetic Study of Fear’, 1914.) In ignorance of the true causation of his fear, this explanation would proceed, the patient looked about for something in his childhood to which he could connect it; he made use of the chance similarity of names and the recurrence of the stripes as a ground for the construction of an imaginary adventure with the nursery-maid whom he still remembered. When, however, we observe that the trivial details of this went (which, according to this view, was in itself an innocent one) - the scrubbing, the pail and the broom - had enough power over the patient’s later life to determine his object-choice permanently and compulsively, then the butterfly phobia seems to have acquired an inexplicable importance. The state of things on this hypothesis is thus seen to be at least as remarkable as on mine, and any advantage that might be claimed for a rationalistic reading of the scene has melted away. The Grusha scene is of particular value to us, since in relation to it we can prepare our judgement upon the less certain primal scene.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3589

It may truly be said that the anxiety that was concerned in the formation of these phobias was a fear of castration. This statement involves no contradiction of the view that the anxiety originated from the repression of homosexual libido. Both modes of expression refer to the same process: namely, the withdrawal of libido by the ego from the homosexual wishful impulse, the libido having then become converted into free anxiety and subsequently bound in phobias. The first method of statement merely mentions in addition the motive by which the ego was actuated.

If we look into the matter more closely we shall see that our patient’s first illness (leaving the disturbance of appetite out of account) is not exhausted when we have extracted the phobia from it. It must be regarded as a true hysteria showing not merely anxiety-symptoms but also phenomena of conversion. A portion of the homosexual impulse was retained by the organ concerned in it; from that time forward, and equally during his adult life, his bowel behaved like a hysterically affected organ. The unconscious repressed homosexuality withdrew into his bowel. It was precisely this trait of hysteria which was of such great service in helping to clear up his later illness.

We must now summon up our courage to attack the still more complicated structure of the obsessional neurosis. Let up once more bear the situation in mind: a dominant masochistic sexual current and a repressed homosexual one, and an ego deep in hysterical repudiation of them. What processes transformed this condition into one of obsessional neurosis?

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3590

The transformation did not occur spontaneously, through internal development, but through an outside influence. Its visible effect was that the patient’s relation to his father, which stood in the foreground, and which had so far found expression in the wolf phobia, was now manifested in obsessional piety. I cannot refrain from pointing out that the course of events in this part of the

patient’s history affords an unmistakable confirmation of an assertion which I made in Totem and Taboo upon the relation of the totem animal to the deity.¹ I there decided in favour of the view that the idea of God was not a development from the totem, but replaced it after arising independently from a root common to both ideas. The totem, I maintained, was the first father-surrogate, and the god was a later one, in which the father had regained his human shape. And we find the same thing with our patient. In his wolf phobia he had gone through the stage of the totemic father-surrogate; but that stage was now broken off, and, as a result of new relations between him and his father, was replaced by a phase of religious piety.

The influence that provoked this transformation was the acquaintance which he obtained through his mother’s agency with the doctrines of religion and with the Bible story. This educational measure had the desired effect. The sadistic-masochistic sexual organization came slowly to an end, the wolf phobia quickly vanished, and, instead of sexuality being repudiated with anxiety, a higher method of suppressing it made its appearance. Piety became the dominant

force in the child’s life. These victories, however, were not won without struggles, of which his blasphemous thoughts were an indication, and of which the establishment of an obsessive exaggeration of religious ceremonial was the result.

Apart from these pathological phenomena, it may be said that in the present case religion achieved all the aims for the sake of which it is included in the education of the individual. It put a restraint on his sexual impulsions by affording them a sublimation and a safe mooring; it lowered the importance of his family relationships, and thus protected him from the threat of isolation by giving him access to the great community of mankind. The untamed and fear-ridden

child became social, well-behaved, and amenable to education.

¹ Totem and Taboo (1912-13), p. 2788.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3591

The chief motive force of the influence which religion had on him was his identification with the figure of Christ, which came particularly easily to him owing to the accident of the date of his birth. Along this path his extravagant love of his father, which had made the repression necessary, found its way at length to an ideal sublimation. As Christ, he could love his father, who was now called God, with a fervour which had sought in vain to discharge itself so long as his father had been a mortal. The means by which he could bear witness to this love were laid down by religion, and they were not haunted by that sense of guilt from which his individual feelings of love could not set themselves free. In this way it was still possible for him to drain off his deepest sexual current, which had already been precipitated in the form of unconscious homosexuality; and at the same time his more superficial masochistic impulsion found an incomparable sublimation, without much renunciation, in the story of the Passion of Christ, who, at the behest of his divine Father and in his honour, had let himself be ill-treated and sacrificed. So it was that religion did its work for the hard pressed child - by the combination which it afforded the believer of satisfaction, of sublimation, of diversion from sensual processes to purely spiritual ones, and of access to social relationships.

The opposition which he at first offered to religion had three different points of origin. To begin with, there was, in general, his characteristic (which we have seen exemplified already) of fending off all novelties. Any position of the libido which he had once taken up was obstinately defended by him from fear of what he would lose by giving it up and from distrust of the probability of a complete substitute being afforded by the new position that was in view. This is an important and fundamental psychological peculiarity, which I described in my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d) as a susceptibility to ‘fixation’. Under the name of psychical ‘inertia’ Jung has attempted to erect it into the principal cause of all the failures of neurotics. I think he is wrong in this; for this factor has a far more general application and plays an important part in the lives of the non-neurotic as well. Great mobility or sluggishness of libidinal cathexes (as well as of other kinds of energic cathexes) are special characteristics which attach to many normal people and by no means to all neurotics, and which have hitherto not been brought into relation with other qualities. They are, as it were, like prime numbers, not further divisible. We only know one thing about them, and that is that mobility of the mental cathexes is a quality which shows striking diminution with the advance of age. This has given us one of the indications of the limits within which psycho-analytic treatment is effective. There are some people, however, who retain this mental plasticity far beyond the usual age-limit, and others who lose it very prematurely. If the latter are neurotics, we make the unwelcome discovery that it is impossible to undo developments in them which, in apparently similar circumstances, have been easily dealt with in other people. So that in considering the conversion of psychical energy no less than of physical, we must make use of the concept of an entropy, which opposes the undoing of what has already occurred.

A second point of attack was afforded by the circumstance that religious doctrine is itself based upon a by no means unambiguous relation to God the Father, and in fact bears the stamp of the ambivalent attitude which presided over its origin. The patient’s own ambivalence, which he possessed in a high degree of development, helped him to detect the same feature in religion, and he brought to bear on that feature those acute powers of criticism whose presence could not fail to astonish us in a child of four and a half.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3592

But there was a third factor at work, which was certainly the most important of all, and to the operation of which we must ascribe the pathological products of his struggle against religion. The truth was that the mental current which impelled him to turn to men as sexual objects and which should have been sublimated by religion was no longer free; a portion of it was cut off by repression and so withdrawn from the possibility of sublimation and tied to its original sexual aim. In virtue of this state of things, the repressed portion kept making efforts to forge its way through to the sublimated portion or to drag down the latter to itself. The first ruminations which he wove round the figure of Christ already involved the question whether that sublime son could also fulfil the sexual relationship to his father which the patient had retained in his unconscious. The only result of his repudiation of these efforts was the production of apparently blasphemous obsessive thoughts, in which his physical affection for God asserted itself in the form of a debasement. A violent defensive struggle against these compromises then inevitably led to an obsessive exaggeration of all the activities which are prescribed for giving expression to piety and a pure love of God. Religion won in the end, but its instinctual foundations proved themselves to be incomparably stronger than the durability of the products of their sublimation. As soon as the course of events presented him with a new father-surrogate, who threw his weight into the scale against religion, it was dropped and replaced by something else. Let us further bear in mind, as an interesting complication, that his piety originated under the influence of women (his mother and his nurse), while it was a masculine influence that set him free from it.

The origin of this obsessional neurosis on the basis of the sadistic-anal organization confirms on the whole what I have said elsewhere on the predisposition to obsessional neurosis (1913i). The previous existence, however, of a severe hysteria in the present case makes it more obscure in this respect.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3593

I will conclude my survey of the patient’s sexual development by giving some brief glimpses of its later vicissitudes. During the years of puberty a markedly sensual, masculine current, with a sexual aim suitable to the genital organization, made its appearance in him; it must be regarded as normal, and its history occupied the period up to the time of his later illness. It was connected directly with the Grusha scene, from which it borrowed its characteristic feature - a compulsive falling in love that came on and passed off by sudden fits. This current had to struggle against the inhibitions that were derived from his infantile neurosis. There had been a violent revulsion in the direction of women, and he had thus won his way to complete masculinity. From that time forward he retained women as his sexual object; but he did not enjoy this possession, for a powerful, and now entirely unconscious, inclination towards men, in which were united all the forces of the earlier phases of his development, was constantly drawing him away from his female objects and compelling him in the intervals to exaggerate his dependence upon women. He kept complaining during the treatment that he could not bear having to do with women, and all our labours were directed towards disclosing to him his unconscious relation to men. The whole situation might be summarized in the shape of a formula. His childhood had been marked by a wavering between activity and passivity, his puberty by a struggle for masculinity, and the period after he had fallen ill by a fight for the object of his masculine desires. The precipitating cause of his neurosis was not one of the types of onset which I have been able to put together as special cases of ‘frustration,’¹ and it thus draws attention to a gap in that classification. He broke down after an organic affection of the genitals had revived his fear of castration, shattered his narcissism, and compelled him to abandon his hope of being personally favoured by destiny. He fell ill, therefore, as the result of a narcissistic ‘frustration’. This excessive strength of his narcissism was in complete harmony with the other indications of an inhibited sexual development: with the fact that so few of his psychical trends were concentrated in his heterosexual object choice, in spite of all its energy, and that his homosexual attitude, standing so much nearer to narcissism, persisted in him as an unconscious force with such very great tenacity. Naturally, where disturbances like these are present, psycho-analytic treatment cannot bring about any instantaneous revolution or put matters upon a level with a normal development: it can only get rid of the obstacles and clear the path, so that the influences of life may be able to further development along better lines.

¹ ‘Types of Onset of Neurosis’ (1912c).

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3594

I shall now bring together some peculiarities of the patient’s mentality which were revealed by the psycho-analytic treatment but were not further elucidated and were accordingly not susceptible to direct influence. Such were his tenacity of fixation, which has already been discussed, his extraordinary propensity to ambivalence, and (as a third trait in a constitution which deserves the name of archaic) his power of maintaining simultaneously the most various and contradictory libidinal cathexes, all of them capable of functioning side by side. His constant wavering between these (a characteristic which for a long time seemed to block the way to recovery and progress in the treatment) dominated the clinical picture during his adult illness, which I have scarcely been able to touch upon in these pages. This was undoubtedly a trait belonging to the general character of the unconscious, which in his case had persisted into processes that had become conscious. But it showed itself only in the products of affective impulses; in the region of pure logic he betrayed, on the contrary, a peculiar skill in unearthing contradictions and inconsistencies. So it was that his mental life impressed one in much the same way as the religion of Ancient Egypt, which is so unintelligible to us because it preserves the earlier stages of its development side by side with the end-products, retains the most ancient gods and their attributes along with the most modern ones, and thus, as it were, spreads out upon a two-dimensional surface what other instances of evolution show us in the solid.

I have now come to the end of what I had to say about this case. There remain two problems, of the many that it raises, which seem to me to deserve special emphasis. The first relates to the phylogenetically inherited schemata, which, like the categories of philosophy, are concerned with the business of ‘placing’ the impressions derived from actual experience. I am inclined to take the view that they are precipitates from the history of human civilization. The Oedipus complex, which comprises a child’s relation to his parents, is one of them - is, in fact, the best known member of the class. Wherever experiences fail to fit in with the hereditary schema, they become remodelled in the imagination - a process which might very profitably be followed out in detail. It is precisely such cases that are calculated to convince us of the independent existence of the schema. We are often able to see the schema triumphing over the experience of the individual; as when in our present case the boy’s father became the castrator and the menace of his infantile sexuality in spite of what was in other respects an inverted Oedipus complex. A similar process is at work where a nurse comes to play the mother’s part or where the two become fused together. The contradictions between experience and the schema seem to supply the conflicts of childhood with an abundance of material.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3595

The second problem is not far removed from the first, but it is incomparably more important. If one considers the behaviour of the four-year-old child towards the re-activated primal scene,¹ or even if one thinks of the far simpler reactions of the one-and-a-half-year-old child when the scene was actually experienced, it is hard to dismiss the view that some sort of hardly definable knowledge, something, as it were, preparatory to an understanding, was at work in the child at the time.² We can form no conception of what this may have consisted in; we have nothing at our disposal but the single analogy - and it is an excellent one - of the far-reaching instinctive knowledge of animals.

If human beings too possessed an instinctive endowment such as this, it would not be surprising that it should be very particularly concerned with the processes of sexual life, even though it could not be by any means confined to them. This instinctive factor would then be the nucleus of the unconscious, a primitive kind of mental activity, which would later be dethroned and overlaid by human reason, when that faculty came to be acquired, but which in some people, perhaps in every one, would retain the power of drawing down to it the higher mental processes. Repression would be the return to this instinctive stage, and man would thus be paying for his great new acquisition with his liability to neurosis, and would be bearing witness by the possibility of the neuroses to the existence of those earlier, instinct-like, preliminary stages. The significance of the traumas of early childhood would lie in their contributing material to this unconscious which would save it from being worn away by the subsequent course of development.

¹ I may disregard the fact that it was not possible to put this behaviour into words until twenty years afterwards; for all the effects that we traced back to the scene had already been manifested in the form of symptoms, obsessions, etc., in the patient’s childhood and long before the analysis. It is also a matter of indifference in this connection whether we choose to regard it as a primal scene or as a primal phantasy.

² I must once more emphasize the fact that these reflections would be vain if the dream and the neurosis had not themselves occurred in infancy.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3596

I am aware that expression has been given in many quarters to thoughts like these, which emphasize the hereditary, phylogenetically acquired factor in mental life. In fact, I am of opinion that people have been far too ready to find room for them and ascribe importance to them in psycho-analysis. I consider that they are only admissible when psycho-analysis strictly observes the correct order of precedence, and, after forcing its way through the strata of what has been acquired by the individual, comes at last upon traces of what has been inherited.¹

¹ (Footnote added 1923:) I will once more set out here the chronology of the events mentioned in this case history.

Born on Christmas Day.

1 ½ years old: Malaria. Observation of his parents copulating; or observation of them when they were together, into which he later introduced a phantasy of them copulating.

Just before 2 ½: Scene with Grusha.

2 ½: Screen memory of his parents’ departure with his sister. This showed him alone with his Nanya and so disowned Grusha and his sister.

Before 3 ¼: His mother’s laments to the doctor.

3 ¼: Beginning of his seduction by his sister. Soon afterwards the threat of castration from his Nanya.

3 ½: The English governess. Beginning of the change in his character.

4: The wolf dream. Origin of the phobia.

4 ½: Influence of the Bible story. Appearance of the obsessional symptoms.

Just before 5: Hallucination of the loss of his finger.

5: Departure from the first estate.

After 6: Visit to his sick father.

8 and 10: Final outbreaks of the obsessional neurosis.

It will have been easy to guess from my account that the patient was a Russian. I parted from him, regarding him as cured, a few weeks before the unexpected outbreak of the Great War; and I did not see him again until the shifting chances of the war had given the Central European Powers access to South Russia. He then came to Vienna and reported that immediately after the end of the treatment he had been seized with a longing to tear himself free from my influence. After a few months’ work, a piece of the transference which had not hitherto been overcome was successfully dealt with. Since then the patient has felt normal and has behaved unexceptionably, in spite of the war having robbed him of his home, his possessions, and all his family relationships. It may be that his very misery, by gratifying his sense of guilt, contributed to the consolidation of his recovery.

3597

ON TRANSFORMATIONS OF INSTINCT AS EXEMPLIFIED IN ANAL EROTISM

(1917)

3598

Intentionally left blank

3599

ON TRANSFORMATIONS OF INSTINCT AS EXEMPLIFIED IN ANAL EROTISM

Some years ago, observations made during psycho-analysis led me to suspect that the constant co-existence in any one of the three character-traits of orderliness, parsimony and obstinacy indicated an intensification of the anal-erotic components in his sexual constitution, and that these modes of reaction, which were favoured by his ego, had been established during the course of his development through the assimilation of his anal erotism.¹

In that publication my main object was to make known the fact of this established relation; I was little concerned about its theoretical significance. Since then there has been a general consensus of opinion that each one of the three qualities, avarice, pedantry and obstinacy, springs from anal-erotic sources - or, to express it more cautiously and more completely - draws powerful contributions from those sources. The cases in which these defects of character were combined and which in consequence bore a special stamp (the ‘anal character’) were merely extreme instances, which were bound to betray the particular connection that interests us here even to an unobservant eye.

As a result of numerous impressions, and in particular of one specially cogent analytical observation, I came to the conclusion a few years later that in the development of the libido in man the phase of genital primacy must be preceded by a ‘pregenital organization’ in which sadism and anal erotism play the leading parts.²

From that moment we had to face the problem of the later history of the anal-erotic instinctual impulses. What becomes of them when, owing to the establishment of a definitive genital organization, they have lost their importance in sexual life? Do they preserve their original nature, but in a state of repression? Are they sublimated or assimilated by transformation into character-traits? Or do they find a place within the new organization of sexuality characterized by genital primacy? Or, since none of these vicissitudes of anal erotism is likely to be the only one, to what extent and in what way does each of them share in deciding its fate? For the organic sources of anal erotism cannot of course be buried as a result of the emergence of the genital organization.

¹ ‘Character and Anal Erotism’ (1908b).

² ‘The Predisposition to Obsessional Neurosis’ (1913i).

On Transformations Of Instinct As Exemplified In Anal Erotism

3600

One would think that there could be no lack of material from which to provide an answer, since the processes of development and transformation in question must have taken place in everyone undergoing analysis. Yet the material is so obscure, the abundance of ever-recurring impressions so confusing, that even now I am unable to solve the problem fully and can do no more than make some contributions to its solution. In making them I need not refrain from mentioning, where the context allows it, other instinctual transformations besides anal-erotic ones. Finally, it scarcely requires to be emphasized that the developmental events here described - just as the others found in psycho-analysis - have been inferred from the regressions into which they had been forced by neurotic processes.

As a starting-point for this discussion we may take the fact that it appears as if in the products of the unconscious - spontaneous ideas, phantasies and symptoms - the concepts faeces (money, gift), baby and penis are ill-distinguished from one another and are easily interchangeable. We realize, of course, that to express oneself in this way is incorrectly to apply to the sphere of the unconscious terms which belong properly to other regions of mental life, and that we have been led astray by the advantages offered by an analogy. To put the matter in a form less open to objection, these elements in the unconscious are often treated as if they were equivalent and could replace one another freely.

This is most easily seen in the relation between ‘baby’ and ‘penis’. It cannot be without significance that in the symbolic language of dreams, as well as of everyday life, both may be replaced by the same symbol; both baby and penis are called a ‘little one’. It is a well-known fact that symbolic speech often ignores difference of sex. The ‘little one’, which originally meant the male genital organ, may thus have acquired a secondary application to the female genitals.

On Transformations Of Instinct As Exemplified In Anal Erotism

3601

If we penetrate deeply enough into the neurosis of a woman, we not infrequently meet with the repressed wish to possess a penis like a man. We call this wish ‘envy for a penis’ and include it in the castration complex. Chance mishaps in the life of such a woman, mishaps which are themselves frequently the result of a very masculine disposition, have re-activated this infantile wish and, through the backward flow of libido, made it the chief vehicle of her neurotic symptoms. In other women we find no evidence of this wish for a penis; it is replaced by the wish for a baby, the frustration of which in real life can lead to the outbreak of a neurosis. It looks as if such women had understood (although this could not possibly have acted as a motive) that nature has given babies to women as a substitute for the penis that has been denied them. With other women, again, we learn that both wishes were present in their childhood and that one replaced the other. At first they had wanted a penis like a man; then at a later, though still childish, stage there appeared instead the wish for a baby. The impression is forced upon us that this variety in our findings is caused by accidental factors during childhood (e.g. the presence or absence of brothers or the birth of a new baby at some favourable time of life), so that the wish for a penis and the wish for a baby would be fundamentally identical.

We can say what the ultimate outcome of the infantile wish for a penis is in women in whom the determinants of a neurosis in later life are absent: it changes into the wish for a man, and thus puts up with the man as an appendage to the penis. This transformation, therefore, turns an impulse which is hostile to the female sexual function into one which is favourable to it. Such women are in this way made capable of an erotic life based on the masculine type of object-love, which can exist alongside the feminine one proper, derived from narcissism. We already know that in other cases it is only a baby that makes the transition from narcissistic self-love to object-love possible. So that in this respect too a baby can be represented by the penis.

On Transformations Of Instinct As Exemplified In Anal Erotism

3602

I have had occasional opportunities of being told women’s dreams that had occurred after their first experience of intercourse. They revealed an unmistakable wish in the woman to keep for herself the penis which she had felt. Apart from their libidinal origin, then, these dreams indicated a temporary regression from man to penis as the object of her wish. One would certainly be inclined to trace back the wish for a man in a purely rationalistic way to the wish for a baby, since a woman is bound to understand sooner or later that there can be no baby without the co-operation of a man. It is, however, more likely that the wish for a man arises independently of the wish for a baby, and that when it arises - from understandable motives belonging entirely to ego-psychology - the original wish for a penis becomes attached to it as an unconscious libidinal reinforcement. The importance of the process described lies in the fact that a part of the young woman’s narcissistic masculinity is thus changed into femininity, and so can no longer operate in a way harmful to the female sexual function.

Along another path, a part of the erotism of the pregenital phase, too, becomes available for use in the phase of genital primacy. The baby is regarded as ‘lumf’ (cf. the analysis of ‘Little Hans’), as something which becomes detached from the body by passing through the bowel. A certain amount of libidinal cathexis which originally attached to the contents of the bowel can thus be extended to the baby born through it. Linguistic evidence of this identity of baby and faeces is contained in the expression ‘to give someone a baby’. For its faeces are the infant’s first gift, a part of his body which he will give up only on persuasion by someone he loves, to whom indeed, he will make a spontaneous gift of it as a token of affection; for, as a rule, infants do not dirty strangers. (There are similar if less intense reactions with urine.) Defaecation affords the first occasion on which the child must decide between a narcissistic and an object-loving attitude. He either parts obediently with his faeces, ‘sacrifices’ them to his love, or else retains them for purposes of auto-erotic satisfaction and later as a means of asserting his own will. If he makes the latter choice we are in the presence of defiance (obstinacy) which, accordingly, springs from a narcissistic clinging to anal erotism.

On Transformations Of Instinct As Exemplified In Anal Erotism

3603

It is probable that the first meaning which a child’s interest in faeces develops is that of ‘gift’ rather than ‘gold’ or ‘money’. The child knows no money apart from what is given him - no money acquired and none inherited of his own. Since his faeces are his first gift, the child easily transfers his interest from that substance to the new one which he comes across as the most valuable gift in life. Those who question this derivation of gifts should consider their experience of psycho-analytic treatment, study the gifts they receive as doctors from their patients, and watch the storms of transference which a gift from them can rouse in their patients.

Thus the interest in faeces is continued partly as interest in money, partly as a wish for a baby, in which latter an anal-erotic and a genital impulse (‘envy for a penis’) converge. But the penis has another anal-erotic significance apart from its relation to the interest in a baby. The relationship between the penis and the passage lined with mucous membrane which it fills and excites already has its prototype in the pregenital, anal-sadistic phase. The faecal mass, or as one patient called it, the faecal ‘stick’, represents as it were the first penis, and the stimulated mucous membrane of the rectum represents that of the vagina. There are people whose anal erotism remains vigorous and unmodified up to the age preceding puberty (ten to twelve years); we learn from them that during the pregenital phase they had already developed in phantasy and in perverse play an organization analogous to the genital one, in which penis and vagina were represented by the faecal stick and the rectum. In other people - obsessional neurotics - we can observe the result of a regressive debasement of the genital organization. This is expressed in the fact that every phantasy originally conceived on the genital level is transposed to the anal level - the penis being replaced by the faecal mass and the vagina by the rectum.

As the interest in faeces recedes in a normal way, the organic analogy we have described here has the effect of transferring the interest on to the penis. When, later, in the course of the child’s researches he discovers that babies are born from the bowel, they inherit the greater part of his anal erotism; they have, however, been preceded by the penis in this as well as in another sense.

On Transformations Of Instinct As Exemplified In Anal Erotism

3604

I feel sure that by this time the manifold interrelations of the series - faeces, penis, baby - have become totally unintelligible; so I will try to remedy the defect by presenting them diagramatically, and in considering the diagram we can review the same material in a different order. Unfortunately, this technical device is not sufficiently pliable for our purpose, or possibly we have not yet learned to use it with effect. In any case I hope the reader will not expect too much from it.

Fig. 2.

Anal erotism finds a narcissistic application in the production of defiance, which constitutes an important reaction on the part of the ego against demands made by other people. Interest in faeces is carried over first to interest in gifts, and then to interest in money. In girls, the discovery of the penis gives rise to envy for it, which later changes into the wish for a man as the possessor of a penis. Even before this the wish for a penis has changed into the wish for a baby, or the latter wish has taken the place of the former one. An organic analogy between penis and baby (dotted line) is expressed by the existence of a symbol (‘little one’) common to both. A rational wish (double line) then leads from the wish for a baby to the wish for a man: we have already appreciated the importance of this instinctual transformation.

On Transformations Of Instinct As Exemplified In Anal Erotism

3605

Another part of the nexus of relations can be observed much more clearly in the male. It arises when the boy’s sexual researches lead him to the discovery of the absence of a penis in women. He concludes that the penis must be a detachable part of the body, something analogous to faeces, the first piece of bodily substance the child had to part with. Thus the old anal defiance enters into the composition of the castration complex. The organic analogy which enabled the intestinal contents to be the forerunner of the penis during the pregenital phase cannot come into account as a motive; but the boy’s sexual researches lead him to a psychical substitute for it. When a baby appears on the scene he regards it as ‘lumf’, in accordance with those researches, and he cathects it with powerful anal-erotic interest. When social experiences teach that a baby is to be regarded as a love-token, a gift, the wish for a baby receives a second contribution from the same source. Faeces, penis and baby are all three solid bodies; they all three, by forcible entry or expulsion, stimulate a membranous passage, i.e. the rectum and the vagina, the latter being as it were ‘taken on lease’ from the rectum, as Lou Andreas-Salomé aptly remarks.¹ Infantile sexual researches can only lead to the conclusion that the baby follows the same route as the faecal mass. The function of the penis is not usually discovered by those researches. But it is interesting to note that after so many detours an organic correspondence reappears in the psychical sphere as an unconscious identity.

¹ In her paper ‘"Anal" und "Sexual"‘ (1916).

3606

A DIFFICULTY IN THE PATH OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

(1917)

3607

Intentionally left blank

3608

A DIFFICULTY IN THE PATH OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

I will say at once that it is not an intellectual difficulty I am thinking of, not anything that makes psycho-analysis hard for the hearer or reader to understand, but an affective one - something that alienates the feelings of those who come into contact with it, so that they become less inclined to believe in it or take an interest in it. As will be observed, the two kinds of difficulty amount to the same thing in the end. Where sympathy is lacking, understanding will not come very easily.

My present readers, I take it, have not so far had anything to do with the subject and I shall be obliged, therefore, to go back some distance. Out of a great number of individual observations and impressions something in the nature of a theory has at last shaped itself in psycho-analysis, and this is known by the name of the ‘libido theory’. As is well known, psycho-analysis is concerned with the elucidation and removal of what are called nervous disorders. A starting-point had to be found from which to approach this problem, and it was decided to look for it in the instinctual life of the mind. Hypotheses about the instincts in man came to form the basis, therefore, of our conception of nervous disease.

Psychology as it is taught academically gives us but very inadequate replies to questions concerning our mental life, but in no direction is its information so meagre as in this matter of the instincts.

It is open to us to make our first soundings as we please. The popular view distinguishes between hunger and love, as being the representatives of the instincts which aim respectively at the preservation of the individual and at the reproduction of the species. We accept this very evident distinction, so that in psycho-analysis too we make a distinction between the self-preservative or ego-instincts on the one hand and the sexual instincts on the other. The force by which the sexual instinct is represented in the mind we call ‘libido’ - sexual desire - and we regard it as something analogous to hunger, the will to power, and so on, where the ego-instincts are concerned.

A Difficulty In The Path Of Psycho-Analysis

3609

With this as a starting-point we go on to make our first important discovery. We learn that, when we try to understand neurotic disorders, by far the greater significance attaches to the sexual instincts; that in fact neuroses are the specific disorders, so to speak, of the sexual function; that in general whether or not a person develops a neurosis depends on the quantity of his libido, and on the possibility of satisfying it and of discharging it through satisfaction; that the form taken by the disease is determined by the way in which the individual passes through the course of development of his sexual function, or, as we put it, by the fixations his libido has undergone in the course of its development; and, further, that by a special, not very simple technique for influencing the mind we are able to throw light on the nature of some groups of neuroses and at the same time to do away with them. Our therapeutic efforts have their greatest success with a certain class of neuroses which proceed from a conflict between the ego-instincts and the sexual instincts. For in human beings it may happen that the demands of the sexual instincts, whose reach of course extends far beyond the individual, seem to the ego to constitute a danger which threatens its self-preservation or its self-esteem. The ego then assumes the defensive, denies the sexual instincts the satisfaction they desire and forces them into those by-paths of substitutive satisfaction which become manifest as nervous symptoms.

The psycho-analytic method of treatment is then able to subject this process of repression to revision and to bring about a better solution of the conflict - one that is compatible with health. Unintelligent opposition accuses us of one-sidedness in our estimate of the sexual instincts. ‘Human beings have other interests besides sexual ones,’ they say. We have not forgotten or denied this for a moment. Our one-sidedness is like that of the chemist, who traces all compounds back to the force of chemical attraction. He is not on that account denying the force of gravity; he leaves that to the physicist to deal with.

During the work of treatment we have to consider the distribution of the patient’s libido; we look for the object presentations to which it is bound and free it from them, so as to place it at the disposal of the ego. In the course of this, we have come to form a very curious picture of the original, primal distribution of libido in human beings. We have been driven to assume that at the beginning of the development of the individual all his libido (all his erotic tendencies, all his capacity for love) is tied to himself - that as we say, it cathects his own ego. It is only later that, being attached to the satisfaction of the major vital needs, the libido flows over from the ego on to external objects. Not till then are we able to recognize the libidinal instincts as such and distinguish them from the ego instincts. It is possible for the libido to become detached from these objects and withdrawn again into the ego.

A Difficulty In The Path Of Psycho-Analysis

3610

The condition in which the ego retains the libido is called by us ‘narcissism’, in reference to the Greek legend of the youth Narcissus who was in love with his own reflection.

Thus in our view the individual advances from narcissism to object-love. But we do not believe that the whole of the libido ever passes over from the ego to objects. A certain quantity of libido is always retained in the ego; even when object-love is highly developed, a certain amount of narcissism persists. The ego is a great reservoir from which the libido that is destined for objects flows out and into which it flows back from those objects. Object-libido was at first ego-libido and can be transformed back into ego-libido. For complete health it is essential that the libido should not lose this full mobility. As an illustration of this state of things we may think of an amoeba, whose viscous substance puts out pseudopodia, elongations into which the substance of the body extends but which can be retracted at any time so that the form of the protoplasmic mass is restored.

What I have been trying to describe in this outline is the libido theory of the neuroses, upon which are founded all our conceptions of the nature of these morbid states, together with our therapeutic measures for relieving them. We naturally regard the premises of the libido theory as valid for normal behaviour as well. We speak of the narcissism of small children, and it is to the excessive narcissism of primitive man that we ascribe his belief in the omnipotence of his thoughts and his consequent attempts to influence the course of events in the external world by the technique of magic.

After this introduction I propose to describe how the universal narcissism of men, their self-love, has up to the present suffered three severe blows from the researches of science.

A Difficulty In The Path Of Psycho-Analysis

3611

(a) In the early stages of his researches, man believed at first that his dwelling-place, the earth, was the stationary centre of the universe, with the sun, moon and planets circling round it. In this he was naïvely following the dictates of his sense perceptions, for he felt no movement of the earth, and wherever he had an unimpeded view he found himself in the centre of a circle that enclosed the external world. The central position of the earth, moreover, was a token to him of the dominating part played by it in the universe and appeared to fit in very well with his inclination to regard himself as lord of the world.

The destruction of this narcissistic illusion is associated in our minds with the name and work of Copernicus in the sixteenth century. But long before his day the Pythagoreans had already cast doubts on the privileged position of the earth, and in the third century B. C. Aristarchus of Samos had declared that the earth was much smaller than the sun and moved round that celestial body. Even the great discovery of Copernicus, therefore, had already been made before him. When this discovery achieved general recognition, the self-love of mankind suffered its first blow, the cosmological one.

(b) In the course of the development of civilization man acquired a dominating position over his fellow-creatures in the animal kingdom. Not content with this supremacy, however, he began to place a gulf between his nature and theirs. He denied the possession of reason to them, and to himself he attributed an immortal soul, and made claims to a divine descent which permitted him to break the bond of community between him and the animal kingdom. Curiously enough, this piece of arrogance is still foreign to children, just as it is to primitive and primaeval man. It is the result of a later, more pretentious stage of development. At the level of totemism primitive man had no repugnance to tracing his descent from an animal ancestor. In myths, which contain the precipitate of this ancient attitude of mind, the gods take animal shapes, and in the art of earliest times they are portrayed with animals’ heads. A child can see no difference between his own nature and that of animals. He is not astonished at animals thinking and talking in fairy-tales; he will transfer an emotion of fear which he feels for his human father onto a dog or a horse, without intending any derogation of his father by it. Not until he is grown up does he become so far estranged from animals as to use their names in vilification of human beings.

We all know that little more than half a century ago the researches of Charles Darwin and his collaborators and forerunners put an end to this presumption on the part of man. Man is not a being different from animals or superior to them; he himself is of animal descent, being more closely related to some species and more distantly to others. The acquisitions he has subsequently made have not succeeded in effacing the evidences, both in his physical structure and in his mental dispositions, of his parity with them. This was the second, the biological blow to human narcissism.

A Difficulty In The Path Of Psycho-Analysis

3612

(c) The third blow, which is psychological in nature, is probably the most wounding.

Although thus humbled in his external relations, man feels himself to be supreme within his own mind. Somewhere in the core of his ego he has developed an organ of observation to keep a watch on his impulses and actions and see whether they harmonize with its demands. If they do not, they are ruthlessly inhibited and withdrawn. His internal perception, consciousness, gives the ego news of all the important occurrences in the mind’s working, and the will, directed by these reports, carries out what the ego orders and modifies anything that seeks to accomplish itself spontaneously. For this mind is not a simple thing; on the contrary, it is a hierarchy of superordinated and subordinated agencies, a labyrinth of impulses striving independently of one another towards action, corresponding with the multiplicity of instincts and of relations with the external world, many of which are antagonistic to one another and incompatible. For proper functioning it is necessary that the highest of these agencies should have knowledge of all that is going forward and that its will should penetrate everywhere, so as to exert its influence. And in fact the ego feels secure both as to the completeness and trustworthiness of the reports it receives and as to the openness of the channels through which it enforces its commands.

In certain diseases - including the very neuroses of which we have made special study - things are different. The ego feels uneasy; it comes up against limits to its power in its own house, the mind. Thoughts emerge suddenly without one’s knowing where they come from, nor can one do anything to drive them away. These alien guests even seem to be more powerful than those which are at the ego’s command. They resist all the well-proved measures of enforcement used by the will, remain unmoved by logical refutation, and are unaffected by the contradictory assertions of reality. Or else impulses appear which seem like those of a stranger, so that the ego disowns them; yet it has to fear them and take precautions against them. The ego says to itself: ‘This is an illness, a foreign invasion.’ It increases its vigilance, but cannot understand why it feels so strangely paralysed.

A Difficulty In The Path Of Psycho-Analysis

3613

Psychiatry, it is true, denies that such things mean the intrusion into the mind of evil spirits from without; beyond this, however, it can only say with a shrug: ‘Degeneracy, hereditary disposition, constitutional inferiority!’ Psycho-analysis sets out to explain these uncanny disorders; it engages in careful and laborious investigations, devises hypotheses and scientific constructions, until at length it can speak thus to the ego:-

‘Nothing has entered into you from without; a part of the activity of your own mind has been withdrawn from your knowledge and from the command of your will. That, too, is why you are so weak in your defence; you are using one part of your force to fight the other part and you cannot concentrate the whole of your force as you would against an external enemy. And it is not even the worst or least important part of your mental forces that has thus become antagonistic to you and independent of you. The blame, I am bound to say, lies with yourself. You over-estimated your strength when you thought you could treat your sexual instincts as you liked and could utterly ignore their intentions. The result is that they have rebelled and have taken their own obscure paths to escape this suppression; they have established their rights in a manner you cannot approve. How they have achieved this, and the paths which they have taken, have not come to your knowledge. All you have learned is the outcome of their work - the symptom which you experience as suffering. Thus you do not recognize it as a derivative of your own rejected instincts and do not know that it is a substitutive satisfaction of them.

A Difficulty In The Path Of Psycho-Analysis

3614

‘The whole process, however, only becomes possible through the single circumstance that you are mistaken in another important point as well. You feel sure that you are informed of all that goes on in your mind if it is of any importance at all, because in that case, you believe, your consciousness gives you news of it. And if you have had no information of something in your mind you confidently assume that it does not exist there. Indeed, you go so far as to regard what is "mental" as identical with what is "conscious" - that is, with what is known to you in spite of the most obvious evidence that a great deal more must constantly be going on in your mind than can be known to your consciousness. Come, let yourself be taught something on this one point! What is in your mind does not coincide with what you are conscious of; whether something is going on in your mind and whether you hear of it, are two different things. In the ordinary way, I will admit, the intelligence which reaches your consciousness is enough for your needs; and you may cherish the illusion that you learn of all the more important things. But in some cases, as in that of an instinctual conflict such as I have described, your intelligence service breaks down and your will then extends no further than your knowledge. In every case, however, the news that reaches your consciousness is incomplete and often not to be relied on. Often enough, too, it happens that you get news of events only when they are over and when you can no longer do anything to change them. Even if you are not ill, who can tell all that is stirring in your mind of which you know nothing or are falsely informed? You behave like an absolute ruler who is content with the information supplied him by his highest officials and never goes among the people to hear their voice. Turn your eyes inward, look into your own depths, learn first to know yourself! Then you will understand why you were bound to fall ill; and perhaps, you will avoid falling ill in future.’

It is thus that psycho-analysis has sought to educate the ego. But these two discoveries - that the life of our sexual instincts cannot be wholly tamed, and that mental processes are in themselves unconscious and only reach the ego and come under its control through incomplete and untrustworthy perceptions - these two discoveries amount to a statement that the ego is not master in its own house. Together they represent the third blow to man’s self-love, what I may call the psychological one. No wonder, then, that the ego does not look favourably upon psycho-analysis and obstinately refuses to believe in it.

A Difficulty In The Path Of Psycho-Analysis

3615

Probably very few people can have realized the momentous significance for science and life of the recognition of unconscious mental processes. It was not psycho-analysis, however, let us hasten to add, which first took this step. There are famous philosophers who may be cited as forerunners - above all the great thinker Schopenhauer, whose unconscious ‘Will’ is equivalent to the mental instincts of psycho-analysis. It was this same thinker, moreover, who in words of unforgettable impressiveness admonished mankind of the importance, still so greatly under-estimated by it, of its sexual craving. Psycho-analysis has this advantage only, that it has not affirmed these two propositions which are so distressing to narcissism - the psychical importance of sexuality and the unconsciousness of mental life - on an abstract basis, but has demonstrated them in matters that touch every individual personally and force him to take up some attitude towards these problems. It is just for this reason, however, that it brings on itself the aversion and resistances which still hold back in awe before the great name of the philosopher.

3616

A CHILDHOOD RECOLLECTION FROM DICHTUNG UND WAHRHEIT

(1917)

3617

Intentionally left blank

3618

A CHILDHOOD RECOLLECTION FROM DICHTUNG UND WAHRHEIT

‘If we try to recollect what happened to us in the earliest years of childhood, we often find that we confuse what we have heard from others with what is really a possession of our own derived from what we ourselves have witnessed.’ This remark is found on one of the first pages of Goethe’s account of his life, which he began to write at the age of sixty. It is preceded only by some information about his birth, which ‘took place on August 28, 1749, at midday on the stroke of twelve’. The stars were in a favourable conjunction and may well have been the cause of his survival, for at his entry into the world he was ‘as though dead’, and it was only after great efforts that he was brought to life. There follows on this a short description of the house and of the place in it where the children - he and his younger sister - best liked to play. After this, however, Goethe relates in fact only one single event which can be assigned to the ‘earliest years of childhood’ (the years up to four?) and of which he seems to have preserved a recollection of his own.

The account of it runs as follows: ‘And three brothers (von Ochsenstein by name) who lived over the way became very fond of me; they were orphan sons of the late magistrate, and they took an interest in me and used to tease me in all sorts of ways.

‘My people used to like to tell of all kinds of pranks in which these men, otherwise of a serious and retiring disposition, used to encourage me. I will quote only one of these exploits. The crockery-fair was just over, and not only had the kitchen been fitted up from it with what would be needed for some time to come, but miniature utensils of the same sort had been bought for us children to play with. One fine afternoon, when all was quiet in the house, I was playing with my dishes and pots in the hall’ (a place which had already been described, opening on to the street) ‘and, since this seemed to lead to nothing, I threw a plate into the street, and was overjoyed to see it go to bits so merrily. The von Ochsensteins, who saw how delighted I was and how joyfully I clapped my little hands, called out "Do it again!" I did not hesitate to sling out a pot on to the paving-stones, and then, as they kept crying "Another!", one after another all my little dishes, cooking-pots and pans. My neighbours continued to show their approval and I was highly delighted to be amusing them. But my stock was all used up, and still they cried "Another!" So I ran off straight into the kitchen and fetched the earthenware plates, which made an even finer show as they smashed to bits. And thus I ran backwards and forwards, bringing one plate after another, as I could reach them in turn from the dresser; and, as they were not content with that, I hurled every piece of crockery I could set hold of to the same destruction. Only later did someone come and interfere and put a stop to it all. The damage was done, and to make up for so much broken earthenware there was at least an amusing story, which the rascals who had been its instigators enjoyed to the end of their lives.’

A Childhood Recollection From Dichtung Und Wahrheit

3619

In pre-analytic days it was possible to read this without finding occasion to pause and without feeling surprised, but later on the analytic conscience became active. We had formed definite opinions and expectations about the memories of earliest childhood, and would have liked to claim universal validity for them. It should not be a matter of indifference or entirely without meaning which detail of a child’s life had escaped the general oblivion. It might on the contrary be conjectured that what had remained in memory was the most significant element in that whole period of life, whether it had possessed such an importance at the time, or whether it had gained subsequent importance from the influence of later events.

The high value of such childish recollections was, it is true, obvious only in a few cases. Generally they seemed indifferent, worthless even, and it remained at first incomprehensible why just these memories should have resisted amnesia; nor could the person who had preserved them for long years as part of his own store of memories see more in them than any stranger to whom he might relate them. Before their significance could be appreciated, a certain work of interpretation was necessary. This interpretation either showed that their content required to be replaced by some other content, or revealed that they were related to some other unmistakably important experiences and had appeared in their place as what are known as ‘screen memories’.

In every psycho-analytic investigation of a life-history it is always possible to explain the meaning of the earliest childhood memories along these lines. Indeed, it usually happens that the very recollection to which the patient gives precedence, which he relates first, with which he introduces the story of his life, proves to be the most important, the very one that holds the key to the secret pages of his mind. But the little childish episode related in Dichtung und Wahrheit does not rise to our expectations. The ways and means that with our patients lead to interpretation are of course not available to us here; the episode does not seem in itself to admit of any traceable connection with important impressions at a later date. A mischievous trick with damaging effects on the household economy, carried out under the spur of outside encouragement, is certainly no fitting headpiece for all that Goethe has to tell us of his richly filled life. An impression of utter innocence and irrelevance clings to this childish memory, and it might be taken as a warning not to stretch the claims of psycho-analysis too far nor to apply it in unsuitable places.

The little problem, therefore, had long since slipped out of my mind, when one day chance brought me a patient in whom a similar childhood memory appeared in a clearer connection. He was a man of twenty-seven, highly educated and gifted, whose life at that time was entirely filled with a conflict with his mother that affected all his interests, and from the effects of which his capacity for love and his ability to lead an independent existence bad suffered greatly. This conflict went far back into his childhood; certainly to his fourth year. Before that he had been a very weakly child, always ailing, and yet that sickly period was glorified into a paradise in his memory; for then he had had exclusive, uninterrupted possession of his mother’s affection. When he was not yet four, a brother, who is still living, was born, and in his reaction to that disturbing event he became transformed into an obstinate, unmanageable boy, who perpetually provoked his mother’s severity. More over, he never regained the right path.

A Childhood Recollection From Dichtung Und Wahrheit

3620

When he came to me for treatment - by no means the least reason for his coming was that his mother, a religious bigot, had a horror of psycho-analysis - his jealousy of the younger brother (which had once actually been manifested as a murderous attack on the infant in its cradle) had long been forgotten. He now treated his brother with great consideration; but certain curious fortuitous actions of his (which involved sudden and severe injuries to favourite animals, like his sporting dog or birds which he had carefully reared,) were probably to be understood as echoes of these hostile impulses against the little brother.

Now this patient related that, at about the time of the attack on the baby he so much hated, he had thrown all the crockery he could lay hands on out of the window of their country house into the road-the very same thing that Goethe relates of his childhood in Dichtung und Wahrheit! I may remark that my patient was of foreign nationality and was not acquainted with German literature; he had never read Goethe’s autobiography.

This communication naturally suggested to me that an attempt might be made to explain Goethe’s childish memory on the lines forced upon us by my patient’s story. But could the necessary conditions for this explanation be shown to exist in the poet’s childhood? Goethe himself, it is true, makes the instigation of the von Ochsenstein brothers responsible for his childish prank. But from his own narrative it can be seen that these grown-up neighbours merely encouraged him to go on with what he was doing. The beginning was on his own initiative, and the reason he gives for this beginning - ‘since this (the game) seemed to lead to nothing’ - is surely, without any forcing of its meaning, a confession that at the time of writing it down and probably for many years previously he was not aware of any adequate motive for his behaviour.

It is well known that Johann Wolfgang and his sister Cornelia were the eldest survivors of a considerable family of very weakly children. Dr. Hanns Sachs has been so kind as to supply me with the following details concerning these brothers and sisters of Goethe’s, who died in childhood:

(a) Hermann Jakob, baptized Monday, November 27, 1752; reached the age of six years and six weeks; buried January 13, 1759.

(b) Katharina Elisabetha, baptized Monday, September 9, 1754; buried Thursday, December 22, 1755. (One year and four months old).

(c) Johanna Maria, baptized Tuesday, March 29, 1757, and buried Saturday, August 11, 1759. (Two years and four months old)- (This was doubtless the very pretty and attractive little girl celebrated by her brother.)

(d) Georg Adolph, baptized Sunday, June 15, 1760; buried, eight months old, Wednesday, February 18, 1761.

A Childhood Recollection From Dichtung Und Wahrheit

3621

Goethe’s next youngest sister, Cornelia Friederica Christiana, was born on December 7, 1750, when he was fifteen months old. This slight difference in age almost excludes the possibility of her having been an object of jealousy. It is known that, when their passions awake, children never develop such violent reactions against the brothers and sisters they find already in existence, but direct their hostility against the newcomers. Nor is the scene we are endeavouring to interpret reconcilable with Goethe’s tender age at the time of, or shortly after, Cornelia’s birth.

At the time of the birth of the first little brother, Hermann Jakob, Johann Wolfgang was three and a quarter years old. Nearly two years later, when he was about five years old, the second sister was born. Both ages come under consideration in dating the episode of the throwing out of the crockery. The earlier is perhaps to be preferred; and it would best agree with the case of my patient, who was about three and a quarter years old at the birth of his brother.

Moreover, Goethe’s brother Hermann Jakob, to whom we are thus led in our attempt at interpretation, did not make so brief a stay in the family nursery as the children born afterwards. One might feel some surprise that the autobiography does not contain a word of remembrance of him.¹ He was over six, and Johann Wolfgang was nearly ten, when he died. Dr. Hitschmann, who was kind enough to place his notes on this subject at my disposal, says:

‘Goethe, too, as a little boy saw a younger brother die without regret. At least, according to Bettina Brentano his mother gave the following account: "It struck her as very extraordinary that he shed no tears at the death of his younger brother Jakob who was his playfellow; he seemed on the contrary to feel annoyance at the grief of his parents and sisters. When, later on, his mother asked the young rebel if he had not been fond of his brother, he ran into his room and brought out from under the bed a heap of papers on which lessons and little stories were written, saying that he had done all this to teach his brother." So it seems all the same that the elder brother enjoyed playing father to the younger and showing him his superiority.’

¹ (Footnote added 1924:) I take this opportunity of withdrawing an incorrect statement which should not have been made. In a later passage in this first volume the younger brother is mentioned and described. It occurs in connection with memories of the serious illnesses of childhood, from which this brother also suffered ‘not a little’. ‘He was a delicate child, quiet and self-willed, and we never had much to do with each other. Besides, he hardly survived the years of infancy.’

A Childhood Recollection From Dichtung Und Wahrheit

3622

The opinion might thus be formed that the throwing of crockery out of the window was a symbolic action, or, to put it more correctly, a magic action, by which the child (Goethe as well as my patient) gave violent expression to his wish to get rid of a disturbing intruder. There is no need to dispute a child’s enjoyment of smashing things; if an action is pleasurable in itself, that is not a hindrance but rather an inducement to repeat it in obedience to other purposes as well. It is unlikely, however, that it could have been the pleasure in the crash and the breaking which ensured the childish prank a lasting place in adult memory. Nor is there any objection to complicating the motivation of the action by adding a further factor. A child who breaks crockery knows quite well that he is doing something naughty for which grown-ups will scold him, and if he is not restrained by that knowledge, he probably has a grudge against his parents that he wants to satisfy; he wants to show naughtiness.

The pleasure in breaking and in broken things would be satisfied, too, if the child simply threw the breakable object on the ground. The hurling them out of the window into the street would still remain unexplained. This ‘out!’ seems to be an essential part of the magic action and to arise directly from its hidden meaning. The new baby must be got rid of - through the window, perhaps because he came in through the window. The whole action would thus be equivalent to the verbal response, already familiar to us, of a child who was told that the stork had brought a little brother. ‘The stork can take him away again!’ was his verdict.

A Childhood Recollection From Dichtung Und Wahrheit

3623

All the same, we are not blind to the objections - apart from any internal uncertainties - against basing the interpretation of a childhood act on a single parallel. For this reason I had for years kept back my theory about the little scene in Dichtung und Wahrheit. Then one day I had a patient who began his analysis with the following remarks, which I set down word for word: ‘I am the eldest of a family of eight or nine children.¹ One of my earliest recollections is of my father sitting on the bed in his night-shirt, and telling me laughingly that I had a new brother. I was then three and three-quarters years old; that is the difference in age between me and my next younger brother. I know, too, that a short time after (or was it a year before?)²I threw a lot of things, brushes - or was it only one brush? - shoes and other things, out of the window into the street. I have a still earlier recollection. When I was two years old, I spent a night with my parents in a hotel bedroom at Linz on the way to the Salzkammergut. I was so restless in the night and made such a noise that my father had to beat me. ’

After hearing this statement I threw all doubts to the winds. When in analysis two things are brought out one immediately after the other, as though in one breath, we have to interpret this proximity as a connection of thought. It was, therefore, as if the patient had said, ‘Because I found that I had got a new brother, I shortly afterwards threw these things into the street.’ The act of flinging the brushes, shoes and so on, out of the window must be recognized as a reaction to the birth of the brother. Nor is it a matter for regret that in this instance the objects thrown out were not crockery but other things, probably, anything the child could reach at the moment. - The hurling out (through the window into the street) thus proves to be the essential thing in the act, while the pleasure in the smashing and the noise, and the class of object on which ‘execution is done’, are variable and unessential points.

Naturally, the principle of there being a connection of thought must be applied as well to the patient’s third childish recollection, which is the earliest, though it was put at the end of the short series. This can easily be done. Evidently the two-year-old child was so restless because he could not bear his parents being in bed together. On the journey it was no doubt impossible to avoid the child being a witness of this. The feelings which were aroused at that time in the jealous little boy left him with an embitterment against women which persisted and permanently interfered with the development of his capacity for love.

¹ A momentary error of a striking character. It was probably induced by the influence of the intention, which was already showing itself, to get rid of a brother. (Cf. Ferenczi, 1912, ‘On Transitory Symptoms during Analysis’.)

² This doubt, attaching to the essential point of the communication for purposes of resistance, was shortly afterwards withdrawn by the patient of his own accord.

A Childhood Recollection From Dichtung Und Wahrheit

3624

After making these two observations I expressed the opinion at a meeting of the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society that occurrences of the same kind might be not infrequent among young children; in response, Frau Dr. von Hug-Hellmuth placed two further observations at my disposal, which I append here.

I

‘At the age of about three and a half, little Erich quite suddenly acquired the habit of throwing everything he did not like out of the window. He also did it, however, with things that were not in his way and did not concern him. On his father’s birthday - he was three years and four and a half months old - he snatched a heavy rolling-pin from the kitchen, dragged it into the living-room and threw it out of the window of the third-floor flat into the street. Some days later he sent after it the kitchen-pestle, and then a pair of heavy mountaineering boots of his father’s, which he had first to take out of the cupboard.¹

‘At that time his mother had a miscarriage, in the seventh or eighth month of pregnancy, and after that the child was "sweet and quiet and so good that he seemed quite changed". In the fifth or sixth month he repeatedly said to his mother, "Mummy, I’II jump on your tummy" - or, "I’II push your tummy in." And shortly before the miscarriage, in October, he said, "If I must have a brother, at least I don’t want him till after Christmas."’

II

‘A young lady of nineteen told me spontaneously that her earliest recollection was as follows: "I see myself, frightfully naughty, sitting under the table in the dining-room, ready to creep out. My cup of coffee is standing on the table - I can still see the pattern on the china quite plainly - and Granny comes into the room just as I am going to throw it out of the window.

‘"For the fact was that no one had been bothering about me, and in the meantime a skin had formed on the coffee, which was always perfectly dreadful to me and still is.

‘"On that day my brother, who is two and a half years younger than I am, was born, and so no one had had any time to spare for me.

‘"They always tell me that I was insupportable on that day: at dinner I threw my father’s favourite glass on the floor, I dirtied my frock several times, and was in the worst temper from morning to night. In my rage I tore a bath-doll to pieces."’

¹ ‘He always chose heavy objects.’

A Childhood Recollection From Dichtung Und Wahrheit

3625

These two cases scarcely call for a commentary. They establish without further analytic effort that the bitterness children feel about the expected or actual appearance of a rival finds expression in throwing objects out of the window and in other acts of naughtiness and destructiveness. In the first case the ‘heavy objects’ probably symbolized the mother herself, against whom the child’s anger was directed so long as the new baby had not yet appeared. The three-and-a-half-year-old boy knew about his mother’s pregnancy and had no doubt that she had got the baby in her body. ‘Little Hans’¹ and his special dread of heavily loaded carts may be recalled here.² In the second case the very youthful age of the child, two and a half years, is noteworthy.

If we now return to Goethe’s childhood memory and put in the place it occupies in Dichtung und Wahrheit what we believe we have obtained through observations of other children, a perfectly valid train of thought emerges which we should not otherwise have discovered. It would run thus: ‘I was a child of fortune: destiny preserved my life, although I came into the world as though dead. Even more, destiny removed my brother, so that I did not have to share my mother’s love with him.’ The train of thought then goes on to someone else who died in those early days - the grandmother who lived like a quiet friendly spirit in another part of the house.

I have, however, already remarked elsewhere that if a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it. And Goethe might well have given some such heading to his autobiography as: ‘My strength has its roots in my relation to my mother.’

¹ Cf. ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’, (1909b)

² Further confirmation of this pregnancy-symbolism was given me some time ago by a lady of over fifty. She had often been told that as a little child, when she could hardly talk, she used to drag her father to the window in great agitation whenever a heavy furniture-van was passing along the street. In view of other recollections of the houses they had lived in, it became possible to establish that she was then younger than two and three quarter years. At about that time the brother next to her was born, and in consequence of this addition to the family a move was made. At about the same time, she often had an alarming feeling before going to sleep of something uncannily large, that came up to her, and ‘her hands got so thick’.

3626

LINES OF ADVANCE IN PSYCHO-ANALYTIC THERAPY

(1919)

3627

Intentionally left blank

3628

LINES OF ADVANCE IN PSYCHO-ANALYTIC THERAPY

GENTLEMEN, - As you know, we have never prided ourselves on the completeness and finality of our knowledge and capacity. We are just as ready now as we were earlier to admit the imperfections of our understanding, to learn new things and to alter our methods in any way that can improve them.

Now that we are met together once more after the long and difficult years of separation that we have lived through, I feel drawn to review the position of our therapeutic procedure - to which, indeed, we owe our place in human society - and to take a survey of the new directions in which it may develop.

We have formulated our task as physicians thus: to bring to the patient’s knowledge the unconscious, repressed impulses existing in him, and, for that purpose, to uncover the resistances that oppose this extension of his knowledge about himself. Does the uncovering of these resistances guarantee that they will also be overcome? Certainly not always; but our hope is to achieve this by exploiting the patient’s transference to the person of the physician, so as to induce him to adopt our conviction of the inexpediency of the repressive process established in childhood and of the impossibility of conducting life on the pleasure principle. I have set out elsewhere the dynamic conditions prevailing in the fresh conflict through which we lead the patient and which we substitute in him for his previous conflict - that of his illness. I have nothing at the moment to alter in that account.

Lines Of Advance In Psycho-Analytic Therapy

3629

The work by which we bring the repressed mental material into the patient’s consciousness has been called by us psycho-analysis. Why ‘analysis’ - which means breaking up or separating out, and suggests an analogy with the work carried out by chemists on substances which they find in nature and bring into their laboratories? Because in an important respect there really is an analogy between the two. The patient’s symptoms and pathological manifestations, like all his mental activities, are of a highly composite kind; the elements of this compound are at bottom motives, instinctual impulses. But the patient knows nothing of these elementary motives or not nearly enough. We teach him to understand the way in which these highly complicated mental formations are compounded; we trace the symptoms back to the instinctual impulses which motivate them; we point out to the patient these instinctual motives, which are present in his symptoms and of which he has hitherto been unaware, - just as a chemist isolates the fundamental substance, the chemical ‘element’, out of the salt in which it had been combined with other elements and in which it was unrecognizable. In the same way, as regards those of the patient’s mental manifestations that were not considered pathological, we show him that he was only to a certain extent conscious of their motivation - that other instinctual impulses of which he had remained in ignorance had co-operated in producing them.

Again, we have thrown light on the sexual impulsions in man by separating them into their component elements; and when we interpret a dream we proceed by ignoring the dream as a whole and starting associations from its single elements.

This well-founded comparison of medical psycho-analytic activity with a chemical procedure might suggest a new direction for our therapy. We have analysed the patient - that is, separated his mental processes into their elementary constituents and demonstrated these instinctual elements in him singly and in isolation; what could be more natural than to expect that we should also help him to make a new and a better combination of them? You know that this demand has actually been put forward. We have been told that after an analysis of a sick mind a synthesis of it must follow. And, close upon this, concern has been expressed that the patient might be given too much analysis and too little synthesis; and there has then followed a move to put all the weight on this synthesis as the main factor in the psychotherapeutic effect, to see in it a kind of restoration of something that had been destroyed - destroyed, as it were, by vivisection.

Lines Of Advance In Psycho-Analytic Therapy

3630

But I cannot think, Gentlemen, that any new task is set us by this psycho-synthesis. If I allowed myself to be frank and uncivil I should say it was nothing but an empty phrase. I will limit myself to remarking that it is merely pushing a comparison so far that it ceases to have any meaning, or, if you prefer, that it is an unjustifiable exploitation of a name. A name, however, is only a label applied to distinguish a thing from other similar things, not a syllabus, a description of its content or a definition. And the two objects compared need only coincide at a single point and may be entirely different from each other in everything else. What is psychical is something so unique and peculiar to itself that no one comparison can reflect its nature. The work of psycho-analysis suggests analogies with chemical analysis, but it does so just as much with the intervention of a surgeon or the manipulations of an orthopaedist or the influence of an educator. The comparison with chemical analysis has its limitation: for in mental life we have to deal with trends that are under a compulsion towards unification and combination. Whenever we succeed in analysing a symptom into its elements, in freeing an instinctual impulse from one nexus, it does not remain in isolation, but immediately enters into a new one.¹

In actual fact, indeed, the neurotic patient presents us with a torn mind, divided by resistances. As we analyse it and remove the resistances, it grows together; the great unity which we call his ego fits into itself all the instinctual impulses which before had been split off and held apart from it. The psycho-synthesis is thus achieved during analytic treatment without our intervention, automatically and inevitably. We have created the conditions for it by breaking up the symptoms into their elements and by removing the resistances. It is not true that something in the patient has been divided into its components and is now quietly waiting for us to put it somehow together again.

Developments in our therapy, therefore, will no doubt proceed along other lines; first and foremost, along the one which Ferenczi, in his paper ‘Technical Difficulties in an Analysis of Hysteria’ (1919), has lately termed ‘activity’ on the part of the analyst.

¹ After all, something very similar occurs in chemical analysis. Simultaneously with the isolation of the various elements induced by the chemist, syntheses which are no part of his intention come about, owing to the liberation of the elective affinities of the substances concerned.

Lines Of Advance In Psycho-Analytic Therapy

3631

Let us at once agree upon what we mean by this activity. We have defined our therapeutic task as consisting of two things: making conscious the repressed material and uncovering the resistances. In that we are active enough, to be sure. But are we to leave it to the patient to deal alone with the resistances we have pointed out to him? Can we give him no other help in this besides the stimulus he gets from the transference? Does it not seem natural that we should help him in another way as well, by putting him into the mental situation most favourable to the solution of the conflict which is our aim? After all, what he can achieve depends, too, on a combination of external circumstances. Should we hesitate to alter this combination by intervening in a suitable manner? I think activity of such a kind on the part of the analysing physician is unobjectionable and entirely justified.

You will observe that this opens up a new field of analytic technique the working over of which will require close application and which will lead to quite definite rules of procedure. I shall not attempt to-day to introduce you to this new technique, which is still in the course of being evolved, but will content myself with enunciating a fundamental principle which will probably dominate our work in this field. It runs as follows: Analytic treatment should be carried through, as far as is possible, under privation - in a state of abstinence.

How far it is possible to show that I am right in this must be left to a more detailed discussion. By abstinence, however, is not to be understood doing without any and every satisfaction - that would of course not be practicable; nor do we mean what it popularly connotes, refraining from sexual intercourse; it means something else which has far more to do with the dynamics of falling ill and recovering.

Lines Of Advance In Psycho-Analytic Therapy

3632

You will remember that it was a frustration that made the patient ill, and that his symptoms serve him as substitutive satisfactions. It is possible to observe during the treatment that every improvement in his condition reduces the rate at which he recovers and diminishes the instinctual force impelling him towards recovery. But this instinctual force is indispensible; reduction of it endangers our aim - the patient’s restoration to health. What, then, is the conclusion that forces itself inevitably upon us? Cruel though it may sound, we must see to it that the patient’s suffering, to a degree that is in some way or other effective, does not come to an end prematurely. If, owing to the symptoms having been taken apart and having lost their value, his suffering becomes mitigated, we must reinstate it elsewhere in the form of some appreciable privation; otherwise we run the danger of never achieving any improvements except quite insignificant and transitory ones.

As far as I can see, the danger threatens from two directions in especial. On the one hand, when the illness has been broken down by the analysis, the patient makes the most assiduous efforts to create for himself in place of his symptoms new substitutive satisfactions, which now lack the feature of suffering. He makes use of the enormous capacity for displacement possessed by the now partly liberated libido, in order to cathect with libido and promote to the position of substitutive satisfactions the most diverse kinds of activities, preferences and habits, not excluding some that have been his already. He continually finds new distractions of this kind, into which the energy necessary to carrying on the treatment escapes, and he knows how to keep them secret for a time. It is the analyst’s task to detect these divergent paths and to require him every time to abandon them, however harmless the activity which leads to satisfaction may be in itself. The half-recovered patient may also enter on less harmless paths - as when, for instance, if he is a man, he seeks prematurely to attach himself to a woman. It may be observed, incidentally, that unhappy marriage and physical infirmity are the two things that most often supersede a neurosis. They satisfy in particular the sense of guilt (need for punishment) which makes many patients cling so fast to their neuroses. By a foolish choice in marriage they punish themselves; they regard a long organic illness as a punishment by fate and thereafter often cease to keep up their neurosis.

Lines Of Advance In Psycho-Analytic Therapy

3633

In all such situations activity on the part of the physician must take the form of energetic opposition to premature substitutive satisfactions. It is easier for him, however, to prevent the second danger which jeopardizes the propelling force of the analysis, though it is not one to be under-estimated. The patient looks for his substitutive satisfactions above all in the treatment itself, in his transference-relationship with the physician; and he may even strive to compensate himself by this means for all the other privations laid upon him. Some concessions must of course be made to him, greater or less, according to the nature of the case and the patient’s individuality. But it is not good to let them become too great. Any analyst who out of the fullness of his heart, perhaps, and his readiness to help, extends to the patient all that one human being may hope to receive from another, commits the same economic error as that of which our non-analytic institutions for nervous patients are guilty. Their one aim is to make everything as pleasant as possible for the patient, so that he may feel well there and be glad to take refuge there again from the trials of life. In so doing they make no attempt to give him more strength for facing life and more capacity for carrying out his actual tasks in it. In analytic treatment all such spoiling must be avoided. As far as his relations with the physician are concerned, the patient must be left with unfulfilled wishes in abundance. It is expedient to deny him precisely those satisfactions which he desires most intensely and expresses most importunately.

I do not think I have exhausted the range of desirable activity on the part of the physician in saying that a condition of privation is to be kept up during the treatment. Activity in another direction during analytic treatment has already, as you will remember, been a point at issue between us and the Swiss school. We refused most emphatically to turn a patient who puts himself into our hands in search of help into our private property, to decide his fate for him, to force our own ideals upon him, and with the pride of a Creator to form him in our own image and see that it is good. I still adhere to this refusal, and I think that this is the proper place for the medical discretion which we have had to ignore in other connections. I have learnt by experience, too, that such a far-reaching activity towards patients is not in the least necessary for therapeutic purposes. For I have been able to help people with whom I had nothing in common - neither race, education, social position nor outlook upon life in general - without affecting their individuality. At the time of the controversy I have just spoken of, I had the impression, to be sure, that the objections of our spokesmen - I think it was Ernest Jones who took the chief part - were too harsh and uncompromising. We cannot avoid taking some patients for treatment who are so helpless and incapable of ordinary life that for them one has to combine analytic with educative influence; and even with the majority, occasions now and then arise in which the physician is bound to take up the position of teacher and mentor. But it must always be done with great caution, and the patient should be educated to liberate and fulfil his own nature, not to resemble ourselves.

Lines Of Advance In Psycho-Analytic Therapy

3634

Our honoured friend, J. J. Putnam, in the land of America which is now so hostile to us, must forgive us if we cannot accept his proposal either - namely that psycho-analysis should place itself in the service of a particular philosophical outlook on the world and should urge this upon the patient for the purpose of ennobling his mind. In my opinion, this is after all only to use violence, even though it is overlaid with the most honourable motives.

Lastly, another quite different kind of activity is necessitated by the gradually growing appreciation that the various forms of disease treated by us cannot all be dealt with by the same technique. It would be premature to discuss this in detail, but I can give two examples of the way in which a new kind of activity comes into question. Our technique grew up in the treatment of hysteria and is still directed principally to the cure of that affection. But the phobias have already made it necessary for us to go beyond our former limits. One can hardly master a phobia if one waits till the patient lets the analysis influence him to give it up. He will never in that case bring into the analysis the material indispensable for a convincing resolution of the phobia. One must proceed differently. Take the example of agoraphobia; there are two classes of it, one mild, the other severe. Patients belonging to the first class suffer from anxiety when they go into the street by themselves, but they have not yet given up going out alone on that account; the others protect themselves from the anxiety by altogether ceasing to go about alone. With these last one succeeds only when one can induce them by the influence of the analysis to behave like phobic patients of the first class - that is, to go into the street and to struggle with their anxiety while they make the attempt. One starts, therefore, by moderating the phobia so far; and it is only when that has been achieved at the physician’s demand that the associations and memories come into the patient’s mind which enable the phobia to be resolved.

In severe cases of obsessive acts a passive waiting attitude seems even less indicated. Indeed in general these cases incline to an ‘asymptotic’ process of recovery, an interminable protraction of the treatment. Their analysis is always in danger of bringing to light a great deal and changing nothing. I think there is little doubt that here the correct technique can only be to wait until the treatment itself has become a compulsion, and then with this counter-compulsion forcibly to suppress the compulsion of the disease. You will understand, however, that these two instances I have given you are only samples of the new developments towards which our therapy is tending.

Lines Of Advance In Psycho-Analytic Therapy

3635

And now in conclusion I will cast a glance at a situation which belongs to the future - one that will seem fantastic to many of you, but which I think, nevertheless, deserves that we should be prepared for it in our minds. You know that our therapeutic activities are not very far-reaching. There are only a handful of us, and even by working very hard each one can devote himself in a year to only a small number of patients. Compared to the vast amount of neurotic misery which there is in the world, and perhaps need not be, the quantity we can do away with is almost negligible. Besides this, the necessities of our existence limit our work to the well-to-do classes, who are accustomed to choose their own physicians and whose choice is diverted away from psycho-analysis by all kinds of prejudices. At present we can do nothing for the wider social strata, who suffer extremely seriously from neuroses.

Now let us assume that by some kind of organization we succeeded in increasing our numbers to an extent sufficient for treating a considerable mass of the population. On the other hand, it is possible to foresee that at some time or other the conscience of society will awake and remind it that the poor man should have just as much right to assistance for his mind as he now has to the life-saving help offered by surgery; and that the neuroses threaten public health no less than tuberculosis, and can be left as little as the latter to the impotent care of individual members of the community. When this happens, institutions or out-patient clinics will be started, to which analytically-trained physicians will be appointed, so that men who would otherwise give way to drink, women who have nearly succumbed under their burden of privations, children for whom there is no choice but between running wild or neurosis, may be made capable, by analysis, of resistance and of efficient work. Such treatments will be free. It may be a long time before the State comes to see these duties as urgent. Present conditions may delay its arrival even longer. Probably these institutions will first be started by private charity. Some time or other, however, it must come to this.

We shall then be faced by the task of adapting our technique to the new conditions. I have no doubt that the validity of our psychological assumptions will make its impression on the uneducated too, but we shall need to look for the simplest and most easily intelligible ways of expressing our theoretical doctrines. We shall probably discover that the poor are even less ready to part with their neuroses than the rich, because the hard life that awaits them if they recover offers them no attraction, and illness gives them one more claim to social help. Often, perhaps, we may only be able to achieve anything by combining mental assistance with some material support, in the manner of the Emperor Joseph. It is very probable, too, that the large-scale application of our therapy will compel us to alloy the pure gold of analysis freely with the copper of direct suggestion; and hypnotic influence, too, might find a place in it again, as it has in the treatment of war neuroses. But, whatever form this psychotherapy for the people may take, whatever the elements out of which it is compounded, its most effective and most important ingredients will assuredly remain those borrowed from strict and untendentious psycho-analysis.

3636

ON THE TEACHING OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS IN UNIVERSITIES

(1919)

3637

Intentionally left blank

3638

ON THE TEACHING OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS IN UNIVERSITIES

The question of the advisability of teaching psycho-analysis in Universities may be considered from two points of view: that of psycho-analysis and that of the University.

(1) The inclusion of psycho-analysis in the University curriculum would no doubt be regarded with satisfaction by every psycho-analyst. At the same time it is clear that the psycho-analyst can dispense entirely with the University without any loss to himself. For what he needs in the matter of theory can be obtained from the literature of the subject and, going more deeply, at the scientific meetings of the psycho-analytic societies as well as by personal contact with their more experienced members. As regards practical experience, apart from what he gains from his own personal analysis, he can acquire it by carrying out treatments, provided that he can get supervision and guidance from recognized psycho-analysts.

The fact that an organization of this kind exists is actually due to the exclusion of psycho-analysis from Universities. And it is therefore evident that these arrangements will continue to perform an effective function so long as this exclusion persists.

(2) So far as the Universities are concerned, the question depends on their deciding whether they are willing to attribute any value at all to psycho-analysis in the training of physicians and scientists. If so, the further problem remains of how it is to be incorporated into the regular educational framework.

The importance of psycho-analysis for the whole of medical and academic training is based on the following facts:

(a) This training has been quite rightly criticized during the last few decades for the one-sided way in which it directs the student into the fields of anatomy, physics and chemistry, while failing, on the other hand, to make plain to him the significance of mental factors in the different vital functions as well as in illnesses and their treatment. This short-coming in medical education makes itself felt later as a flagrant blind spot in the physician. This will not only show itself in his lack of interest in the most absorbing problems of human life, whether healthy or diseased, but will also render him unskilful in his treatment of patients, so that even quacks and ‘healers’ will have a greater effect on them than he does.

On The Teaching Of Psycho-Analysis In Universities

3639

This obvious deficiency led some time ago to the inclusion in the University curriculum of courses of lectures on medical psychology. But so long as these lectures were based on academic psychology or on experimental psychology (which deals only with questions of detail), they were unable to meet the requirements of the student’s training; nor could they bring him any nearer to the problems of life in general or to those of his profession. For these reasons the place occupied by this kind of medical psychology in the curriculum proved insecure.

A course of lectures on psycho-analysis, on the other hand, would certainly answer these requirements. Before coming to psycho-analysis proper, an introductory course would be needed, which would deal in detail with the relations between mental and physical life - the basis of all kinds of psychotherapy -, would describe the various kinds of suggestive procedures, and would finally show how psycho-analysis constitutes the outcome and culmination of all the earlier methods of mental treatment. Psycho-analysis, in fact, more than any other system, is fitted for teaching psychology to the medical student.

(b) Another of the functions of psycho-analysis should be to afford a preparation for the study of psychiatry. This, in its present shape, is exclusively descriptive in character; it merely teaches the student to recognize a series of pathological entities, enabling him to distinguish which are incurable and which are dangerous to the community. Its sole connection with the other branches of medical science lies in organic aetiology - that is, in its anatomical findings; but it offers not the slightest understanding of the facts observed. Such an understanding can be furnished only by a depth-psychology.

In America, according to the best of my information, it has already been recognized that psycho-analysts (the first attempt at a depth-psychology) has made successful inroads into this unexplored region of psychiatry. Many medical schools in that country, accordingly, have already organized courses of psycho-analysis as an introduction to psychiatry.

The teaching of psycho-analysis would have to proceed in two stages: an elementary course, designed for all medical students, and a course of specialized lectures for psychiatrists.

On The Teaching Of Psycho-Analysis In Universities

3640

(c) In the investigation of mental processes and intellectual functions, psycho-analysis pursues a specific method of its own. The application of this method is by no means confined to the field of psychological disorders, but extends also to the solution of problems in art, philosophy and religion. In this direction it has already yielded several new points of view and thrown valuable light on such subjects as the history of literature, on mythology, on the history of civilizations and on the philosophy of religion. Thus the general psycho-analytic course should be thrown open to the students of these branches of learning as well. The fertilizing effects of psycho-analytic thought on these other disciplines would certainly contribute greatly towards forging a closer link, in the sense of a universitas literarum, between medical science and the branches of learning which lie within the sphere of philosophy and the arts.

To sum up, it may be asserted that a University stands only to gain by the inclusion in its curriculum of the teaching of psycho-analysis. That teaching, it is true, can only be given in a dogmatic and critical manner, by means of theoretical lectures; for these lectures will allow only a very restricted opportunity for carrying out experiments or for practical demonstrations. For the purposes of research, it should be sufficient for teachers of psycho-analysis to have access to an out-patient department for the supply of the necessary material in the form of ‘neurotic’ patients. For psycho-analytic psychiatry, a mental in-patient department would also have to be available.

Consideration, lastly, must be given to the objection that, along these lines, the medical student will never learn psycho-analysis proper. This is indeed true, if we have in mind the actual practice of psycho-analysis. But for the purposes we have in view it will be enough if he learns something about psycho-analysis and something from it. After all, University training does not equip the medical student to be a skilled surgeon; and no one who chooses surgery as a profession can avoid further training in the form of several years of work in a surgical department of a hospital.

3641

‘A CHILD IS BEING BEATEN’

A CONTRIBUTION TO THE STUDY OF THE ORIGIN OF SEXUAL PERVERSIONS

(1919)

3642

Intentionally left blank

3643

‘A CHILD IS BEING BEATEN’

A CONTRIBUTION TO THE STUDY OF THE ORIGIN OF SEXUAL PERVERSIONS

I

It is surprising how often people who seek analytic treatment for hysteria or an obsessional neurosis confess to having indulged in the phantasy: ‘A child is being beaten.’ Very probably there are still more frequent instances of it among the far greater number of people who have not been obliged to come to analysis by manifest illness.

The phantasy has feelings of pleasure attached to it, and on their account the patient has reproduced it on innumerable occasions in the past or may even still be doing so. At the climax of the imaginary situation there is almost invariably a masturbatory satisfaction - carried out, that is to say, on the genitals. At first this takes place voluntarily, but later on it does so in spite of the patient’s efforts, and with the characteristics of an obsession.

It is only with hesitation that this phantasy is confessed to. Its first appearance is recollected with uncertainty. The analytic treatment of the topic is met by unmistakable resistance. Shame and a sense of guilt are perhaps more strongly excited in this connection than when similar accounts are given of memories of the beginning of sexual life. Eventually it becomes possible to establish that the first phantasies of the kind were entertained very early in life: certainly before school age, and not later than in the fifth or sixth year. When the child was at school and saw other children being beaten by the teacher, then, if the phantasies had become dormant, this experience called them up again, or, if they were still present, it reinforced them and noticeably modified their content. From that time forward it was ‘an indefinite number’ of children that were being beaten. The influence of the school was so clear that the patients concerned were at first tempted to trace back their beating-phantasies exclusively to these impressions of school life, which dated from later than their sixth year. But it was never possible for them to maintain that position; the phantasies had already been in existence before.

'A Child Is Being Beaten'

3644

Though in the higher forms at school the children were no longer beaten, the influence of such occasions was replaced and more than replaced by the effects of reading, of which the importance was soon to be felt. In my patients’ milieu it was almost always the same books whose contents gave a new stimulus to the beating-phantasies: those accessible to young people, such as what was known as the ‘Bibliothèque rose’, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, etc. The child began to compete with these works of fiction by producing his own phantasies and by constructing a wealth of situations and institutions, in which children were beaten, or were punished and disciplined in some other way, because of their naughtiness and bad behaviour.

This phantasy - ‘a child is being beaten’ - was invariably cathected with a high degree of pleasure and had its issue in an act of pleasurable auto-erotic satisfaction. It might therefore be expected that the sight of another child being beaten at school would also be a source of similar enjoyment. But as a matter of fact this was never so. The experience of real scenes of beating at school produced in the child who witnessed them a peculiarly excited feeling which was probably of a mixed character and in which repugnance had a large share. In a few cases the real experience of the scenes of beating was felt to be intolerable. Moreover, it was always a condition of the more sophisticated phantasies of later years that the punishment should do the children no serious injury.

The question was bound to arise of what relation there might be between the importance of the beating-phantasies and the part that real corporal punishment might have played in the child’s bringing up at home. It was impossible, on account of the one-sidedness of the material, to confirm the first suspicion that the relation was an inverse one. The individuals from whom the data for these analyses were derived were very seldom beaten in their childhood, or were at all events not brought up by the help of the rod. Naturally, however, each of these children was bound to have become aware at one time or another of the superior physical strength of its parents or educators; the fact that in every nursery the children themselves at times come to blows requires no special emphasis.

'A Child Is Being Beaten'

3645

As regards the early and simple phantasies which could not be obviously traced to the influence of school impressions or of scenes taken from books, further information would have been welcome. Who was the child that was being beaten? The one who was himself producing the phantasy or another? Was it always the same child or as often as not a different one? Who has it that was beating the child? A grown-up person? And if so, who? Or did the child imagine that he himself was beating another one? Nothing could be ascertained that threw any light upon all these questions - only the hesitant reply: ‘I know nothing more about it: a child is being beaten.’

Enquiries as to the sex of the child that was being beaten met with more success, but none the less brought no enlightenment. Sometimes the answer was: ‘Always boys’, or ‘Only girls’; more often it was: ‘I don’t know, or ‘It doesn’t matter which’. But the point to which the questions were directed, the discovery of some constant relation between the sex of the child producing the phantasy and that of the child that was being beaten, was never established. Now and again another characteristic detail of the content of the phantasy came to light: ‘A small child is being beaten on its naked bottom.’

In these circumstances it was impossible at first even to decide whether the pleasure attaching to the beating-phantasy was to be described as sadistic or masochistic.

II

A phantasy of this kind, arising, perhaps from accidental causes, in early childhood and retained for the purpose of auto-erotic satisfaction, can, in the light of our present knowledge, only be regarded as a primary trait of perversion. One of the components of the sexual function has, it seems, developed in advance of the rest, has made itself prematurely independent, has undergone fixation and in consequence been withdrawn from the later processes of development, and has in this way given evidence of a peculiar and abnormal constitution in the individual. We know that an infantile perversion of this sort need not persist for a whole lifetime; later on it can be subjected to repression, be replaced by a reaction-formation, or be transformed by sublimation. (It is possible that sublimation arises out of some special process which would be held back by repression.) But if these processes do not take place, then the perversion persists to maturity; and whenever we find a sexual aberration in adults - perversion, fetishism, inversion - we are justified in expecting that anamnestic investigation will reveal an event such as I have suggested, leading to a fixation in childhood. Indeed, long before the days of psycho-analysis, observers like Binet were able to trace the strange sexual aberrations of maturity back to similar impressions and to precisely the same period of childhood, namely, the fifth or sixth year. But at this point the enquiry was confronted with the limitations of our knowledge; for the impressions that brought about the fixation were without any traumatic force. They were for the most part commonplace and unexciting to other people. It was impossible to say why the sexual impulse had undergone fixation particularly upon them. It was possible, however, to look for their significance in the fact that they offered an occasion for fixation (even though it was an accidental one) to precisely that component which was prematurely developed and ready to press forward. We had in any case to be prepared to come to a provisional end somewhere or other in tracing back the train of causal connection; and the congenital constitution seemed exactly to correspond with what was required for a stopping-place of that kind.

'A Child Is Being Beaten'

3646

If the sexual component which has broken loose prematurely is the sadistic one, then we may expect, on the basis of knowledge derived from other sources, that its subsequent repression will result in a disposition to an obsessional neurosis. This expectation cannot be said to be contradicted by the results of enquiry. The present short paper is based on the exhaustive study of six cases (four female and two male). Of these, two were cases of obsessional neurosis; one extremely severe and incapacitating, the other of moderate severity and quite well accessible to influence. There was also a third case which at all events exhibited clearly marked individual traits of obsessional neurosis. The fourth case, it must be admitted, was one of straightforward hysteria, with pains and inhibitions; and the fifth patient, who had come to be analysed merely on account of indecisiveness in life, would not have been classified at all by coarse clinical diagnosis, or would have been dismissed as ‘psychasthenic’. There is no need for feeling disappointed over these statistics. In the first place, we know that not every disposition is necessarily developed into a disorder; in the second place, we ought to be content to explain the facts before us, and ought as a rule to avoid the additional task of making it clear why something has not taken place.

The present state of our knowledge would allow us to make our way so far and no further towards the comprehension of beating-phantasies. In the mind of the analytic physician, it is true, there remains an uneasy suspicion that this is not a final solution of the problem. He is obliged to admit to himself that to a great extent these phantasies subsist apart from the rest of the content of a neurosis, and find no proper place in its structure. But impressions of this kind, as I know from my own experience, are only too willingly put on one side.

III

Strictly considered - and why should this question not be considered with all possible strictness? - analytic work deserves to be recognized as genuine psycho-analysis only when it has succeeded in removing the amnesia which conceals from the adult his knowledge of his childhood from its beginning (that is, from about the second to the fifth year). This cannot be said among analysts too emphatically or repeated too often. The motives for disregarding this reminder are, indeed, intelligible. It would be desirable to obtain practical results in a shorter period and with less trouble. But at the present time theoretical knowledge is still far more important to all of us than therapeutic success, and anyone who neglects childhood analysis is bound to fall into the most disastrous errors. The emphasis which is laid here upon the importance of the earliest experiences does not imply any underestimation of the influence of later ones. But the later impressions of life speak loudly enough through the mouth of the patient, while it is the physician who has to raise his voice on behalf of the claims of childhood.

'A Child Is Being Beaten'

3647

It is in the years of childhood between the ages of two and four or five that the congenital libidinal factors are first awakened by actual experiences and become attached to certain complexes. The beating-phantasies which are now under discussion show themselves only towards the end of this period or after its termination. So it may quite well be that they have an earlier history, that they go through a process of development, that they represent an end-product and not an initial manifestation.

This suspicion is confirmed by analysis. A systematic application of it shows that beating-phantasies have a historical development which is by no means simple, and in the course of which they are changed in most respects more than once as regards their relation to the author of the phantasy, and as regards their object, their content and their significance.

In order to make it easier to follow these transformations in beating-phantasies I shall now venture to confine my descriptions to the female cases, which, since they are four as against two, in any case constitute the greater part of my material. Moreover, beating-phantasies in men are connected with another subject, which I shall leave on one side in this paper. In my description I shall be careful to avoid being more schematic than is inevitable for the presentation of an average case. If then on further observation a greater complexity of circumstances should come to light, I shall nevertheless be sure of having before us a typical occurrence, and one, moreover, that is not of an uncommon kind.

The first phase of beating-phantasies among girls, then, must belong to a very early period of childhood. Some features remain curiously indefinite, as though they were a matter of indifference. The scanty information given by the patients in their first statement, ‘a child is being beaten’, seems to be justified in respect to this phase. But another of their features can be established with certainty, and to the same effect in every case. The child being beaten is never the one producing the phantasy, but is invariably another child, most often a brother or a sister if there is any. Since this other child may be a boy or a girl, there is no constant relation between the sex of the child producing the phantasy and that of the child being beaten. The phantasy, then, is certainly not masochistic. It would be tempting to call it sadistic, but one cannot neglect the fact that the child producing the phantasy is never doing the beating herself. The actual identity of the person who does the beating remains obscure at first. Only this much can be established: it is not a child but an adult. Later on this indeterminate grown-up person becomes recognizable clearly and unambiguously as the (girl’s) father.

'A Child Is Being Beaten'

3648

This first phase of the beating-phantasy is therefore completely represented by the phrase: ‘My father is beating the child.’ I am betraying a great deal of what is to be brought forward later when instead of this I say: ‘ My father is beating the child whom I hate.’ Moreover, one may hesitate to say whether the characteristics of a ‘phantasy’ can yet be ascribed to this first step towards the later beating-phantasy. It is perhaps rather a question of recollections of events which have been witnessed, or of desires which have arisen on various occasions. But these doubts are of no importance.

Profound transformations have taken place between this first phase and the next. It is true that the person beating remains the same (that is, the father); but the child who is beaten has been changed into another one and is now invariably the child producing the phantasy. The phantasy is accompanied by a high degree of pleasure, and has now acquired a significant content, with the origin of which we shall be concerned later. Now, therefore, the wording runs: ‘I am being beaten by my father.’ It is of an unmistakably masochistic character.

This second phase is the most important and the most momentous of all. But we may say of it in a certain sense that it has never had a real existence. It is never remembered, it has never succeeded in becoming conscious. It is a construction of analysis, but it is no less a necessity on that account.

The third phase once more resembles the first. It has the wording which is familiar to us from the patient’s statement. The person beating is never the father, but is either left undetermined just as in the first phase, or turns in a characteristic way into a representative of the father, such as a teacher. The figure of the child who is producing the beating-phantasy no longer itself appears in it. In reply to pressing enquiries the patients only declare: ‘I am probably looking on.’ Instead of the one child that is being beaten, there are now a number of children present as a rule. Most frequently it is boys who are being beaten (in girls’ phantasies), but none of them is personally known to the subject. The situation of being beaten, which was originally simple and monotonous, may go through the most complicated alterations and elaborations; and punishments and humiliations of another kind may be substituted for the beating itself. But the essential characteristic which distinguishes even the simplest phantasies of this phase from those of the first, and which establishes the connection with the intermediate phase, is this: the phantasy now has strong and unambiguous sexual excitement attached to it, and so provides a means for masturbatory satisfaction. But this is precisely what is puzzling. By what path has the phantasy of strange and unknown boys being beaten (a phantasy which has by this time become sadistic) found its way into the permanent possession of the little girl’s libidinal trends?

Nor can we conceal from ourselves that the interrelations and sequence of the three phases of the beating-phantasy, as well as all its other peculiarities, have so far remained quite unintelligible.

'A Child Is Being Beaten'

3649

IV

If the analysis is carried through the early period to which the beating-phantasies are referred and from which they are recollected, it shows us the child involved in the agitations of its parental complex.

The affections of the little girl are fixed on her father, who has probably done all he could to win her love, and in this way has sown the seeds of an attitude of hatred and rivalry towards her mother. This attitude exists side by side with a current of affectionate dependence on her, and as years go on it may be destined to come into consciousness more and more clearly and forcibly, or else to give an impetus to an excessive reaction of devotion to her. But it is not with the girl’s relation to her mother that the beating-phantasy is connected. There are other children in the nursery, only a few years older or younger, who are disliked on all sorts of other grounds, but chiefly because the parents’ love has to be shared with them, and for this reason they are repelled with all the wild energy characteristic of the emotional life of those years. If the child in question is a younger brother or sister (as in three of my four cases) it is despised as well as hated; yet it attracts to itself the share of affection which the blinded parents are always ready to give the youngest child, and this is a spectacle the sight of which cannot be avoided. One soon learns that being beaten, even if it does not hurt very much, signifies a deprivation of love and a humiliation. And many children who believed themselves securely enthroned in the unshakable affection of their parents have by a single blow been cast down from all the heavens of their imaginary omnipotence. The idea of the father beating this hateful child is therefore an agreeable one, quite apart from whether he has actually been seen doing so. It means: ‘My father does not love this other child, he loves only me.’

This then is the content and meaning of the beating-phantasy in its first phase. The phantasy obviously gratifies the child’s jealousy and is dependent upon the erotic side of its life, but is also powerfully reinforced by the child’s egoistic interests. Doubt remains, therefore, whether the phantasy ought to be described as purely ‘sexual’, nor can one venture to call it ‘sadistic’.

As is well known, all the signs on which we are accustomed to base our distinctions tend to lose their clarity as we come nearer to the source. So perhaps we may say in terms recalling the prophecy made by the Three Witches to Banquo: ‘Not clearly sexual, not in itself sadistic, but yet the stuff from which both will later come.’ In any case, however, there is no ground for suspecting that in this first phase the phantasy is already at the service of an excitation which involves the genitals and finds its outlet in a masturbatory act.

'A Child Is Being Beaten'

3650

It is clear that the child’s sexual life has reached the stage of genital organization, now that its incestuous love has achieved this premature choice of an object. This can be demonstrated more easily in the case of boys, but is also indisputable in the case of girls. Something like a premonition of what are later to be the final and normal sexual aims governs the child’s libidinal trends. We may justly wonder why this should be so, but we may regard it as a proof of the fact that the genitals have already begun playing their part in the process of excitation. With boys the wish to beget a child from their mother is never absent, with girls the wish to have a child by their father is equally constant; and this in spite of their being completely incapable of forming any clear idea of the means for fulfilling these wishes. The child seems to be convinced that the genitals have something to do with the matter, even though in its constant brooding it may look for the essence of the presumed intimacy between its parents in relations of another sort, such as in their sleeping together, micturating in each other’s presence, etc.; and material of the latter kind can be more easily apprehended in verbal images than the mystery that is connected with the genitals.

But the time comes when this early blossoming is nipped by the frost. None of these incestuous loves can avoid the fate of repression. They may succumb to it on the occasion of some discoverable external event which leads to disillusionment - such as unexpected slights, the unwelcome birth of a new brother or sister (which is felt as faithlessness), etc.; or the same thing may happen owing to internal conditions apart from any such events, perhaps simply because their yearning remains unsatisfied too long. It is unquestionably true that such events are not the effective causes, but that these love-affairs are bound to come to grief sooner or later, though we cannot say on what particular stumbling block. Most probably they pass away because their time is over, because the children have entered upon a new phase of development in which they are compelled to recapitulate from the history of mankind the repression of an incestuous object-choice, just as at an earlier stage they were obliged to effect an object-choice of that very sort.¹ In the new phase no mental product of the incestuous love-impulses that is present unconsciously is taken over by consciousness; and anything that has already come into consciousness is expelled from it. At the same time as this process of repression takes place, a sense of guilt appears. This is also of unknown origin, but there is no doubt whatever that it is connected with the incestuous wishes, and that it is justified by the persistence of those wishes in the unconscious.²

¹ Compare the part played by Fate in the myth of Oedipus.

² [Footnote added 1924:] See the continuation of this line of thought in ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’ (1924d).

'A Child Is Being Beaten'

3651

The phantasy of the period of incestuous love had said: ‘He (my father) loves only me, and not the other child, for he is beating it.’ The sense of guilt can discover no punishment more severe than the reversal of this triumph: ‘No, he does not love you, for he is beating you.’ In this way the phantasy of the second phase, that of being beaten by her father, is a direct expression of the girl’s sense of guilt, to which her love for her father has now succumbed. The phantasy, therefore, has become masochistic. So far as I know, this is always so; a sense of guilt is invariably the factor that transforms sadism into masochism. But this is certainly not the whole content of masochism. The sense of guilt cannot have won the field alone; a share must also fall to the love-impulse. We must remember that we are dealing with children in whom the sadistic component was able for constitutional reasons to develop prematurely and in isolation. We need not abandon this point of view. It is precisely such children who find it particularly easy to hark back to the pregenital, sadistic-anal organization of their sexual life. If the genital organization, when it has scarcely been effected, is met by repression, the result is not only that every psychical representation of the incestuous love becomes unconscious, or remains so, but there is another result as well: a regressive debasement of the genital organization itself to a lower level. ‘My father loves me’ was meant in a genital sense; owing to the regression it is turned into ‘My father is beating me (I am being beaten by my father)’. This being beaten is now a convergence of the sense of guilt and sexual love. It is not only the punishment for the forbidden genital relation, but also the regressive substitute for that relation, and from this latter source it derives the libidinal excitation which is from this time forward attached to it, and which finds its outlet in masturbatory acts. Here for the first time we have the essence of masochism.

This second phase - the child’s phantasy of being itself beaten by its father - remains unconscious as a rule, probably in consequence of the intensity of the repression. I cannot explain why nevertheless in one of my six cases, that of a male, it was consciously remembered. This man, now grown up, had preserved the fact clearly in his memory that he used to employ the idea of being beaten by his mother for the purpose of masturbation, though to be sure he soon substituted for his own mother the mothers of his school-fellows or other women who in some way resembled her. It must not be forgotten that when a boy’s incestuous phantasy is transformed into the corresponding masochistic one, one more reversal has to take place than in the case of a girl, namely the substitution of passivity for activity; and this additional degree of distortion may save the phantasy from having to remain unconscious as a result of repression. In this way the sense of guilt would be satisfied by regression instead of by repression. In the female cases the sense of guilt, in itself perhaps more exacting, could be appeased only by a combination of the two.

'A Child Is Being Beaten'

3652

In two of my four female cases an elaborate superstructure of day-dreams, which was of great significance for the life of the person concerned, had grown up over the masochistic beating-phantasy. The function of this superstructure was to make possible a feeling of satisfied excitation, even though the masturbatory act was abstained from. In one of these cases the content - being beaten by the father - was allowed to venture again into consciousness, so long as the subject’s own ego was made unrecognizable by a thin disguise. The hero of these stories was invariably beaten (or later only punished, humiliated, etc.) by his father.

I repeat, however, that as a rule the phantasy remains unconscious, and can only be reconstructed in the course of the analysis. This fact perhaps vindicates patients who say they remember that with them masturbation made its appearance before the third phase of the beating-phantasy (shortly to be discussed), and that this phase was only a later addition, made perhaps under the impression of scenes at school. Every time I have given credit to these statements I have felt inclined to assume that the masturbation was at first under the dominance of unconscious phantasies and that conscious ones were substituted for them later.

I look upon the beating-phantasy in its familiar third phase, which is its final form, as a substitute of this sort. Here the child who produces the phantasy appears almost as a spectator, while the father persists in the shape of a teacher or some other person in authority. The phantasy, which now resembles that of the first phase, seems to have become sadistic once more. It appears as though in the phrase, ‘My father is beating the child, he loves only me’, the stress has been shifted back on to the first part after the second part has undergone repression. But only the form of this phantasy is sadistic; the satisfaction which is derived from it is masochistic. Its significance lies in the fact that it has taken over the libidinal cathexis of the repressed portion and at the same time the sense of guilt which is attached to the content of that portion. All of the many unspecified children who are being beaten by the teacher are, after all, nothing more than substitutes for the child itself.

We find here for the first time, too, something like a constancy of sex in the persons who play a part in the phantasy. The children who are being beaten are almost invariably boys, in the phantasies of boys just as much as in those of girls. This characteristic is naturally not to be explained by any rivalry between the sexes, as otherwise of course in the phantasies of boys it would be girls who would be being beaten; and it has nothing to do with the sex of the child who was hated in the first phase. But it points to a complication in the case of girls. When they turn away from their incestuous love for their father, with its genital significance, they easily abandon their feminine role. They spur their ‘masculinity complex’ (Van Ophuijsen, 1917) into activity, and from that time forward only want to be boys. For that reason the whipping-boys who represent them are boys too. In both the cases of day-dreaming - one of which almost rose to the level of a work of art - the heroes were always young men; indeed women used not to come into these creations at all, and only made their first appearance after many years, and then in minor parts.

'A Child Is Being Beaten'

3653

V

I hope I have brought forward my analytic observations in sufficient detail, and I should only like to add that the six cases I have mentioned so often do not exhaust my material. Like other analysts, I have at my disposal a far larger number of cases which have been investigated less thoroughly. These observations can be made use of along various lines: for elucidating the genesis of the perversions in general and of masochism in particular, and for estimating the part played by difference of sex in the dynamics of neurosis.

The most obvious result of such a discussion is its application to the origin of the perversions. The view which brought into the foreground in this connection the constitutional reinforcement or premature growth of a single sexual component is not shaken, indeed; but it is seen not to comprise the whole truth. The perversion is no longer an isolated fact in the child’s sexual life, but falls into its place among the typical, not to say normal, processes of development which are familiar to us. It is brought into relation with the child’s incestuous love-object, with its Oedipus complex. It first comes into prominence in the sphere of this complex, and after the complex has broken down it remains over, often quite by itself, the inheritor of the charge of libido from that complex and weighed down by the sense of guilt that was attached to it. The abnormal sexual constitution, finally, has shown its strength by forcing the Oedipus complex into a particular direction, and by compelling it to leave an unusual residue behind.

A perversion in childhood, as is well known, may become the basis for the construction of a perversion having a similar sense and persisting throughout life, one which consumes the subject’s whole sexual life. On the other hand the perversion may be broken off and remain in the background of a normal sexual development, from which, however, it continues to withdraw a certain amount of energy. The first of these alternatives was already known before the days of analysis. Analytic investigation, however, of such fully-developed cases almost bridges the gulf between the two. For we find often enough with these perverts that they too made an attempt at developing normal sexual activity, usually at the age of puberty; but their attempt had not enough force in it and was abandoned in the face of the first obstacles which inevitably arise, where upon they fell back upon their infantile fixation once and for all.

It would naturally be important to know whether the origin of infantile perversions from the Oedipus complex can be asserted as a general principle. While this cannot be decided without further investigation, it does not seem impossible. When we recall the anamneses which have been obtained in adult cases of perversion we cannot fail to notice that the decisive impression, the ‘first experience’, of all these perverts, fetishists, etc., is scarcely ever referred back to a time earlier than the sixth year. At this time, however, the dominance of the Oedipus complex is already over; the experience which is recalled, and which has been effective in such a puzzling way, may very well have represented the legacy of that complex. The connections between the experience and the complex which is by this time repressed are bound to remain obscure so long as analysis has not thrown any light on the time before the first ‘pathogenic’ impression. So it may be imagined how little value is to be attached, for instance, to an assertion that a case of homosexuality is congenital, when the ground given for this belief is that ever since his eighth or sixth year the person in question has felt inclinations only towards his own sex.

'A Child Is Being Beaten'

3654

If, however, the derivation of perversions from the Oedipus complex can be generally established, our estimate of its importance will have gained added strength. For in our opinion the Oedipus complex is the actual nucleus of neuroses, and the infantile sexuality which culminates in this complex is the true determinant of neuroses. What remains of the complex in the unconscious represents the disposition to the later development of neuroses in the adult. In this way the beating-phantasy and other analogous perverse fixations would also only be precipitates of the Oedipus complex, scars, so to say, left behind after the process has ended, just as the notorious ‘sense of inferiority’ corresponds to a narcissistic scar of the same sort. In taking this view of the matter I must express my unreserved agreement with Marcinowski (1918), who has recently put it forward most happily. As is well known, this neurotic delusion of inferiority is only a partial one, and is completely compatible with the existence of a self-overvaluation derived from other sources. The origin of the Oedipus complex itself, and the destiny which compels man, probably alone among all animals, to begin his sexual life twice over, first like all other creatures in his early childhood, and then after a long interruption once more at the age of puberty - all the problems that are connected with man’s ‘archaic heritage’ - have been discussed by me elsewhere, and I have no intention of going into them in this place.

Little light is thrown upon the genesis of masochism by our discussion of the beating-phantasy. To begin with, there seems to be a confirmation of the view that masochism is not the manifestation of a primary instinct, but originates from sadism which has been turned round upon the self - that is to say, by means of regression from an object to the ego.¹ Instincts with a passive aim must be taken for granted as existing, especially among women. But passivity is not the whole of masochism. The characteristic of unpleasure belongs to it as well, - a bewildering accompaniment to the satisfaction of an instinct. The transformation of sadism into masochism appears to be due to the influence of the sense of guilt which takes part in the act of repression. Thus repression is operative here in three ways: it renders the consequences of the genital organization unconscious, it compels that organization itself to regress to the earlier sadistic-anal stage, and it transforms the sadism of this stage into masochism, which is passive and again in a certain sense narcissistic. The second of these three effects is made possible by the weakness of the genital organization, which must be presupposed in these cases. The third becomes necessary because the sense of guilt takes as much objection to sadism as to incestuous object-choice genitally conceived. Again, the analyses do not tell us the origin of the sense of guilt itself. It seems to be brought along by the new phase upon which the child is entering, and, if it afterwards persists, it seems to correspond to a scar-like formation which is similar to the sense of inferiority. According to our present orientation in the structure of the ego, which is as yet uncertain, we should assign it to the agency in the mind which sets itself up as a critical conscience over against the rest of the ego, which produces Silberer’s functional phenomenon in dreams, and which cuts itself loose from the ego in delusions of being watched.

¹ Cf. Instincts and their Vicissitudes’ (1915c).

'A Child Is Being Beaten'

3655

We may note too in passing that the analysis of the infantile perversion dealt with here is also of help in solving an old riddle - one which, it is true, has always troubled those who have not accepted psycho-analysis more than analysts themselves. Yet quite recently even Bleuler regarded it as a remarkable and inexplicable fact that neurotics make masturbation the central point of their sense of guilt. We have long assumed that this sense of guilt relates to the masturbation of early childhood and not to that of puberty, and that in the main it is to be connected not with the act of masturbation but with the phantasy which, although unconscious, lies at its root - that is to say, with the Oedipus complex.

As regards the third and apparently sadistic phase of the beating-phantasy, I have already discussed the significance that it gains as the vehicle of the excitation impelling towards masturbation; and I have shown how it arouses activities of the imagination which on the one hand continue the phantasy along the same line, and on the other hand neutralize it through compensation. Nevertheless the second phase, the unconscious and masochistic one, in which the child itself is being beaten by its father, is incomparably the more important. This is not only because it continues to operate through the agency of the phase that takes its place; we can also detect effects upon the character, which are directly derived from its unconscious form. People who harbour phantasies of this kind develop a special sensitiveness and irritability towards anyone whom they can include in the class of fathers. They are easily offended by a person of this kind, and in that way (to their own sorrow and cost) bring about the realization of the imagined situation of being beaten by their father. I should not be surprised if it were one day possible to prove that the same phantasy is the basis of the delusional litigiousness of paranoia.

VI

It would have been quite impossible to give a clear survey of infantile beating-phantasies if I had not limited it, except in one or two connections, to the state of things in females. I will briefly recapitulate my conclusions. The little girl’s beating phantasy passes through three phases, of which the first and third are consciously remembered, the middle one remaining unconscious. The two conscious phases appear to be sadistic, whereas the middle and unconscious one is undoubtedly of a masochistic nature; its content consists in the child’s being beaten by her father, and it carries with it the libidinal charge and the sense of guilt. In the first and third phantasies the child who is being beaten is always someone other than the subject; in the middle phase it is always the child herself; in the third phase it is almost invariably only boys who are being beaten. The person who does the beating is from the first her father, replaced later on by a substitute taken from the class of fathers. The unconscious phantasy of the middle phase had primarily a genital significance and developed by means of repression and regression out of an incestuous wish to be loved by the father. Another fact, though its connection with the rest does not appear to be close, is that between the second and third phases the girls change their sex, for in the phantasies of the latter phase they turn into boys.

'A Child Is Being Beaten'

3656

I have not been able to get so far in my knowledge of beating-phantasies in boys, perhaps because my material was unfavourable. I naturally expected to find a complete analogy between the state of things in the case of boys and in that of girls, the mother taking the father’s place in the phantasy. This expectation seemed to be fulfilled; for the content of the boy’s phantasy which was taken to be the corresponding one was actually his being beaten by his mother (or later on by a substitute for her). But this phantasy, in which the boy’s own self was retained as the person who was being beaten, differed from the second phase in girls in that it was able to become conscious. If on this account, however, we attempt to draw a parallel between it and the third phase of the girl’s phantasy, a new difference is found, for the figure of the boy himself is not replaced by a number of unknown, and unspecified children, least of all by a number of girls. Therefore the expectation of there being a complete parallel was mistaken.

My male cases with an infantile beating-phantasy comprised only a few who did not exhibit some other gross injury to their sexual activities; again they included a fairly large number of persons who would have to be described as true masochists in the sense of being sexual perverts. They were either people who obtained their sexual satisfaction exclusively from masturbation accompanied by masochistic phantasies; or they were people who had succeeded in combining masochism with their genital activity in such a way that, along with masochistic performances and under similar conditions, they were able to bring about erection and emission or to carry out normal intercourse. In addition to this there was the rarer case in which a masochist is interfered with in his perverse activities by the appearance of obsessional ideas of unbearable intensity. Now perverts who can obtain satisfaction do not often have occasion to come for analysis. But as regards the three classes of masochists that have been mentioned there may be strong motives to induce them to go to an analyst. The masochist masturbator finds that he is absolutely impotent if after all he does attempt intercourse with a woman; and the man who has hitherto effected intercourse with the help of a masochistic idea or performance may suddenly make the discovery that the alliance which was so convenient for him has broken down, his genital organs no longer reacting to the masochistic stimulus. We are accustomed confidently to promise recovery to psychically impotent patients who come to us for treatment; but we ought to be more guarded in making this prognosis so long as the dynamics of the disturbance are unknown to us. It comes as a disagreeable surprise if the analysis reveals the cause of the ‘merely psychical’ impotence to be a typically masochistic attitude, perhaps deeply embedded since infancy.

'A Child Is Being Beaten'

3657

As regards these masochistic men, however, a discovery is made at this point which warns us not to pursue the analogy between their case and that of women any further at present, but to judge each independently. For the fact emerges that in their masochistic phantasies, as well as in the performances they go through for their realization, they invariably transfer themselves into the part of a woman; that is to say, their masochistic attitude coincides with a feminine one. This can easily be demonstrated from details of the phantasies; but many patients are even aware of it themselves, and give expression to it as a subjective conviction. It makes no difference if in a fanciful embellishment of the masochistic scene they keep up the fiction that a mischievous boy, or page, or apprentice is going to be punished. On the other hand the persons who administer chastisement are always women, both in the phantasies and the performances. This is confusing enough; and the further question must be asked whether this feminine attitude already forms the basis of the masochistic element in the infantile beating-phantasy.¹

Let us therefore leave aside consideration of the state of things in cases of adult masochism, which it is so hard to clear up, and turn to the infantile beating-phantasy in the male sex. Analysis of the earliest years of childhood once more allows us to make a surprising discovery in this field. The phantasy which has as its content being beaten by the mother, and which is conscious or can become so, is not a primary one. It possesses a preceding stage which is invariably unconscious and has as its content: ‘I am being beaten by my father.’ This preliminary stage, then, really corresponds to the second phase of the phantasy in the girl. The familiar and conscious phantasy: ‘I am being beaten by my mother’, takes the place of the third phase in the girl, in which, as has been mentioned already, unknown boys are the objects that are being beaten. I have not been able to demonstrate among boys a preliminary stage of a sadistic nature that could be set beside the first phase of the phantasy in girls, but I will not now express any final disbelief in its existence, for I can readily see the possibility of meeting with more complicated types.

In the male phantasy - as I shall call it briefly, and, I hope, without any risk of being misunderstood - the being beaten also stands for being loved (in a genital sense), though this has been debased to a lower level owing to regression. So the original form of the unconscious male phantasy was not the provisional one that we have hitherto given: ‘I am being beaten by my father’, but rather: ‘I am loved by my father’. The phantasy has been transformed by the processes with which we are familiar into the conscious phantasy: ‘I am being beaten by my mother’. The boy’s beating-phantasy is therefore passive from the very beginning, and is derived from a feminine attitude towards his father. It corresponds with the Oedipus complex just as the female one (that of the girl) does; only the parallel relation which we expected to find between the two must be given up in favour of a common character of another kind. In both cases the beating-phantasy has its origin in an incestuous attachment to the father.

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] Further remarks on this subject will be found in ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’ (1924c).

'A Child Is Being Beaten'

3658

It will help to make matters clearer if at this point I enumerate the other similarities and differences between beating phantasies in the two sexes. In the case of the girl the unconscious masochistic phantasy starts from the normal Oedipus attitude; in that of the boy it starts from the inverted attitude, in which the father is taken as the object of love. In the case of the girl the phantasy has a preliminary stage (the first phase), in which the beating bears no special significance and is performed upon a person who is viewed with jealous hatred. Both of these features are absent in the case of the boy, but this particular difference is one which might be removed by more fortunate observation. In her transition to the conscious phantasy which takes the place of the unconscious one, the girl retains the figure of her father, and in that way keeps unchanged the sex of the person beating; but she changes the figure and sex of the person being beaten, so that eventually a man is beating male children. The boy, on the contrary, changes the figure and sex of the person beating, by putting his mother in the place of his father; but he retains his own figure, with the result that the person beating and the person being beaten are of opposite sexes. In the case of the girl what was originally a masochistic (passive) situation is transformed into a sadistic one by means of repression, and its sexual quality is almost effaced. In the case of the boy the situation remains masochistic, and shows a greater resemblance to the original phantasy with its genital significance, since there is a difference of sex between the person beating and the person being beaten. The boy evades his homosexuality by repressing and remodelling his unconscious phantasy: and the remarkable thing about his later conscious phantasy is that it has for its content a feminine attitude without a homosexual object-choice. By the same process, on the other hand, the girl escapes from the demands of the erotic side of her life altogether. She turns herself in phantasy into a man, without herself becoming active in a masculine way, and is no longer anything but a spectator of the event which takes the place of a sexual act.

We are justified in assuming that no great change is effected by the repression of the original unconscious phantasy. Whatever is repressed from consciousness or replaced in it by something else remains intact and potentially operative in the unconscious. The effect of regression to an earlier stage of the sexual organization is quite another matter. As regards this we are led to believe that the state of things changes in the unconscious as well. Thus in both sexes the masochistic phantasy of being beaten by the father, though not the passive phantasy of being loved by him, lives on in the unconscious after repression has taken place. There are, besides, plenty of indications that the repression has only very incompletely attained its object. The boy, who has tried to escape from a homosexual object-choice, and who has not changed his sex, nevertheless feels like a woman in his conscious phantasies, and endows the women who are beating him with masculine attributes and characteristics. The girl, who has even renounced her sex, and who has on the whole accomplished a more thoroughgoing work of repression, nevertheless does not become freed from her father; she does not venture to do the beating herself; and since she has herself become a boy, it is principally boys whom she causes to be beaten.

'A Child Is Being Beaten'

3659

I am aware that the differences that I have here described between the two sexes in regard to the nature of the beating-phantasy have not been cleared up sufficiently. But I shall not attempt to unravel these complications by tracing out their dependence on other factors, as I do not consider that the material for observation is exhaustive. So far as it goes, however, I should like to make use of it as a test for two theories. These theories stand in opposition to each other, though both of them deal with the relation between repression and sexual character, and each, according to its own view, represents the relation as a very intimate one. I may say at once that I have always regarded both theories as incorrect and misleading.

The first of these theories is anonymous. It was brought to my notice many years ago by a colleague with whom I was at that time on friendly terms. The theory is so attractive on account of its bold simplicity that the only wonder is that it should not have found its way into the literature of the subject except in a few scattered allusions. It is based on the fact of the bisexual constitution of human beings, and asserts that the motive force of repression in each individual is a struggle between the two sexual characters. The dominant sex of the person, that which is the more strongly developed, has repressed the mental representation of the subordinated sex into the unconscious. Therefore the nucleus of the unconscious (that is to say, the repressed) is in each human being that side of him which belongs to the opposite sex. Such a theory as this can only have an intelligible meaning if we assume that a person’s sex is to be determined by the formation of his genitals; for otherwise it would not be certain which is a person’s stronger sex and we should run the risk of reaching from the results of our enquiry the very fact which has to serve as its point of departure. To put the theory briefly: with men, what is unconscious and repressed can be brought down to feminine instinctual impulses; and conversely with women.

'A Child Is Being Beaten'

3660

The second theory is of more recent origin. It is in agreement with the first one in so far as it too represents the struggle between the two sexes as being the decisive cause of repression. In other respects it comes into conflict with the former theory; moreover, it looks for support to sociological rather than biological sources. According to this theory of the ‘masculine protest’, formulated by Alfred Adler, every individual makes efforts not to remain on the inferior ‘feminine line’ and struggles towards the ‘masculine line’, from which satisfaction can alone be derived. Adler makes the masculine protest responsible for the whole formation both of character and of neuroses. Unfortunately he makes so little distinction between the two processes, which certainly have to be kept separate, and sets altogether so little store in general by the fact of repression, that to attempt to apply the doctrine of the masculine protest to repression brings with it the risk of misunderstanding. In my opinion such an attempt could only lead us to infer that the masculine protest, the desire to break away from the feminine line, was in every case the motive force of repression. The repressing agency, therefore, would always be a masculine instinctual impulse, and the repressed would be a feminine one. But symptoms would also be the result of a feminine impulse, for we cannot discard the characteristic feature of symptoms - that they are substitutes for the repressed, substitutes that have made their way out in spite of repression.

Now let us take these two theories, which may be said to have in common a sexualization of the process of repression, and test them by applying them to the example of the beating phantasies which we have been studying. The original phantasy, ‘I am being beaten by my father’, corresponds, in the case of the boy, to a feminine attitude, and is therefore an expression of that part of his disposition which belongs to the opposite sex. If this part of him undergoes repression, the first theory seems shown to be correct; for this theory set it up as a rule that what belongs to the opposite sex is identical with the repressed. It scarcely answers to our expectations, it is true, when we find that the conscious phantasy, which arises after repression has been accomplished, nevertheless exhibits the feminine attitude once more, though this time directed towards the mother. But we will not go into such doubtful points, when the whole question can be so quickly decided. There can be no doubt that the original phantasy in the case of the girl, ‘I am being beaten (i. e. I am loved) by my father’, represents a feminine attitude, and corresponds to her dominant and manifest sex; according to the theory, therefore, it ought to escape repression, and there would be no need for its becoming unconscious. But as a matter of fact it does become unconscious, and is replaced by a conscious phantasy which disavows the girl’s manifest sexual character. The theory is therefore useless as an explanation of beating-phantasies, and is contradicted by the facts. It might be objected that it is precisely in unmanly boys and unwomanly girls that these beating-phantasies appeared and went through these vicissitudes; or that it was a trait of femininity in the boy and of masculinity in the girl which must be made responsible for the production of a passive phantasy in the boy, and its repression in the girl. We should be inclined to agree with this view, but it would not be any the less impossible to defend the supposed relation between manifest sexual character and the choice of what is destined for repression. In the last resort we can only see that both in male and female individuals masculine as well as feminine instinctual impulses are found, and that each can equally well undergo repression and so become unconscious.

'A Child Is Being Beaten'

3661

The theory of the masculine protest seems to maintain its ground very much better on being tested in regard to the beating-phantasies. In the case of both boys and girls the beating phantasy corresponds with a feminine attitude - one, that is, in which the individual is lingering on the ‘feminine line’ - and both sexes hasten to get free from this attitude by repressing the phantasy. Nevertheless, it seems to be only with the girl that the masculine protest is attended with complete success, and in that instance, indeed, an ideal example is to be found of the operation of the masculine protest. With the boy the result is not entirely satisfactory; the feminine line is not given up, and the boy is certainly not ‘on top’ in his conscious masochistic phantasy. It would therefore agree with the expectations derived from the theory if we were to recognize that this phantasy was a symptom which had come into existence through the failure of the masculine protest. It is a disturbing fact, to be sure, that the girl’s phantasy, which owes its origin to the forces of repression, also has the value and meaning of a symptom. In this instance, where the masculine protest has completely achieved its object, surely the determining condition for the formation of a symptom must be absent.

Before we are led by this difficulty to a suspicion that the whole conception of the masculine protest is inadequate to meet the problem of neuroses and perversions, and that its application to them is unfruitful, we will for a moment leave the passive beating-phantasies and turn our attention to other instinctual manifestations of infantile sexual life - manifestations which have equally undergone repression. No one can doubt that there are also wishes and phantasies which keep to the masculine line from their very nature, and which are the expression of masculine instinctual impulses - sadistic tendencies, for instance, or a boy’s lustful feelings towards his mother arising out of the normal Oedipus complex. It is no less certain that these impulses, too, are overtaken by repression. If the masculine protest is to be taken as having satisfactorily explained the repression of passive phantasies (which later become masochistic), then it becomes for that very reason totally inapplicable to the opposite case of active phantasies. That is to say, the doctrine of the masculine protest is altogether incompatible with the fact of repression. Unless we are prepared to throw away all that has been acquired in psychology since Breuer’s first cathartic treatment and through its agency, we cannot expect that the principle of the masculine protest will acquire any significance in the elucidation of the neuroses and perversions.

'A Child Is Being Beaten'

3662

The theory of psycho-analysis (a theory based on observation) holds firmly to the view that the motive forces of repression must not be sexualized. Man’s archaic heritage forms the nucleus of the unconscious mind; and whatever part of that heritage has to be left behind in the advance to later phases of development, because it is unserviceable or incompatible with what is new and harmful to it, falls a victim to the process of repression. This selection is made more successfully with one group of instincts than with the other. In virtue of special circumstances which have often been pointed out already, the latter group, that of the sexual instincts, are able to defeat the intentions of repression, and to enforce their representation by substitutive formations of a disturbing kind. For this reason infantile sexuality, which is held under repression, acts as the chief motive force in the formation of symptoms; and the essential part of its content, the Oedipus complex, is the nuclear complex of neuroses. I hope that in this paper I have raised an expectation that the sexual aberrations of childhood, as well as those of mature life, are ramifications of the same complex.

3663

INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHO-ANALYSIS AND THE WAR NEUROSES

(1919)

3664

Intentionally left blank

3665

INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHO-ANALYSIS AND THE WAR NEUROSES

This small book on the war neuroses - the opening volume of our Internationale Psychoanalytische Bibliothek - deals with a subject which until recently enjoyed the advantage of being in the greatest degree topical. When it came up for discussion at the Fifth Psycho-Analytical Congress, which was held in Budapest in September, 1918, official representatives from the highest quarters of the Central European Powers were present as observers at the papers and other proceedings. The hopeful result of this first contact was that the establishment of psycho-analytic Centres was promised, at which analytically trained physicians would have leisure and opportunity for studying the nature of these puzzling disorders and the therapeutic effect exercised on them by psycho-analysis. Before these proposals could be put into effect, the war came to an end, the state organizations collapsed and interest in the war neuroses gave place to other concerns. It is, however, a significant fact that, when war conditions ceased to operate, the greater number of the neurotic disturbances brought about by the war simultaneously vanished. The opportunity for a thorough investigation of these affections was thus unluckily lost - though, we must add, the early recurrence of such an opportunity is not a thing to be desired.

But this episode, though it is now closed, was not without an important influence on the spread of psycho-analysis. Medical men who had hitherto held back from any approach to psycho-analytic theories were brought into closer contact with them when, in the course of their duties as army doctors, they were obliged to deal with war neuroses. The reader will be able to gather from Ferenczi’s paper with what hesitations and under what disguises these closer contacts were made. Some of the factors which psycho-analysis had recognized and described long before as being at work in peace-time neuroses - the psychogenic origin of the symptoms, the importance of unconscious instinctual impulses, the part played in dealing with mental conflicts by the primary gain from being ill (‘the flight into illness’) - were observed to be present equally in the war neuroses and were accepted almost universally. Simmel’s studies show, too, what successes could be achieved by treating war neurotics by the method of catharsis, which, as we know, was the first step towards the psycho-analytic technique.

Introduction To Psycho-Analysis And The War Neuroses

3666

There is, however, no need to consider that these approaches to psycho-analysis imply any reconciliation or any appeasement of opposition. Suppose someone has hitherto rejected the whole of a complex of interdependent propositions, but now suddenly finds himself in a position to convince himself of the truth of one portion of the whole. It might be thought that he will begin to hesitate about his opposition in general and permit himself some degree of deferent expectation that the other portion, about which he has had no personal experience and can consequently form no judgement of his own, may also turn out to be true. This other portion of psycho-analytic theory, with which the study of the war neuroses did not come into contact, is to the effect that the motive forces which are expressed in the formation of symptoms are sexual and that neuroses arise from a conflict between the ego and the sexual instincts which it repudiates. (‘Sexuality’ in this context is to be understood in the extended sense in which it is used in psycho-analysis and is not to be confused with the narrower concept of ‘genitality’.) Now it is quite true, as Ernest Jones remarks in his contribution to this volume, that this portion of the theory has not yet been proved to apply to the war neuroses. The work that might prove it has not yet been taken in hand. It may be that the war neuroses are altogether unsuitable material for the purpose. But the opponents of psycho-analysis, whose dislike of sexuality is evidently stronger than their logic, have been in a hurry to proclaim that the investigation of the war neuroses has finally disproved this portion of psycho-analytic theory. They have been guilty here of a slight confusion. If the investigation of the war neuroses (and a very superficial one at that) has not shown that the sexual theory of the neuroses is correct, that is something very different from its showing that that theory is incorrect. With the help of an impartial attitude and a little good will, it should not be hard to find the way to a further clarification of the subject.

Introduction To Psycho-Analysis And The War Neuroses

3667

The war neuroses, in so far as they are distinguished from the ordinary neuroses of peace-time by special characteristics, are to be regarded as traumatic neuroses whose occurrence has been made possible or has been promoted by a conflict in the ego. Abraham’s paper affords good evidence for this conflict, which has also been recognized by the English and American writers quoted by Jones. The conflict is between the soldier’s old peaceful ego and his new warlike one, and it becomes acute as soon as the peace-ego realizes what danger it runs of losing its life owing to the rashness of its newly formed, parasitic double. It would be equally true to say that the old ego is protecting itself from a mortal danger by taking flight into a traumatic neurosis or to say that it is defending itself against the new ego which it sees is threatening its life. Thus the precondition of the war neuroses, the soil that nourishes them, would seem to be a national army; there would be no possibility of their arising in an army of professional soldiers or mercenaries.

Apart from this, the war neuroses are only traumatic neuroses, which, as we know, occur in peace-time too after frightening experiences or severe accidents, without any reference to a conflict in the ego.

The theory of the sexual aetiology of the neuroses, or, as we prefer to say, the libido theory of the neuroses, was originally put forward only in relation to the transference neuroses of peace-time and is easy to demonstrate in their case by the use of the technique of analysis. But its application to the other disorders which we later grouped together as the narcissistic neuroses already met with difficulties. An ordinary dementia praecox, a paranoia or a melancholia are essentially quite unsuitable material for demonstrating the validity of the libido theory or for serving as a first introduction to an understanding of it; and it is for that reason that psychiatrists, who neglect the transference neuroses, are unable to come to terms with it. But the traumatic neuroses of peace-time have always been regarded as the most refractory material of all in this respect; so that the emergence of the war neuroses could not introduce any new factor into the situation that already existed.

It only became possible to extend the libido theory to the narcissistic neuroses after the concept of a ‘narcissistic libido’ had been put forward and applied - a concept, that is, of an amount of sexual energy attached to the ego itself and finding satisfaction in the ego just as satisfaction is usually found only in objects. This entirely legitimate development of the concept of sexuality promises to accomplish as much for the severer neuroses and for the psychoses as can be expected of a theory which is feeling its way forwards on an empirical basis. The traumatic neuroses of peace will also fit into the scheme as soon as a successful outcome has been reached of our investigations into the relations which undoubtedly exist between fright, anxiety and narcissistic libido.

Introduction To Psycho-Analysis And The War Neuroses

3668

The traumatic neuroses and war neuroses may proclaim too loudly the effects of mortal danger and may be silent or speak only in muted tones of the effects of frustration in love. But, on the other hand, the ordinary transference neuroses of peace-time set no aetiological store by the factor of mortal danger which, in the former class of neuroses, plays so mighty a part. It is even held that the peace-time neuroses are promoted by indulgence, good living and inactivity - which would afford an interesting contrast to the living-conditions under which the war neuroses develop. If they were to follow the example of their opponents, psycho-analysts, finding that their patients had fallen ill owing to frustration in love (owing to the claims of the libido being unsatisfied) would have to maintain that there can be no such things as danger-neuroses or that the disorders that appear after frightening experiences are not neuroses. They have, of course, no notion of maintaining any such thing. On the contrary, a convenient possibility occurs to them of bringing the two apparently divergent sets of facts together under a single hypothesis. In traumatic and war neuroses the human ego is defending itself from a danger which threatens it from without or which is embodied in a shape assumed by the ego itself. In the transference neuroses of peace the enemy from which the ego is defending itself is actually the libido, whose demands seem to it to be menacing. In both cases the ego is afraid of being damaged - in the latter case by the libido and in the former by external violence. It might, indeed, be said that in the case of the war neuroses, in contrast to the pure traumatic neuroses and in approximation to the transference neuroses, what is feared is nevertheless an internal enemy. The theoretical difficulties standing in the way of a unifying hypothesis of this kind do not seem insuperable: after all, we have a perfect right to describe repression, which lies at the basis of every neurosis, as a reaction to a trauma - as an elementary traumatic neurosis.

Introduction To Psycho-Analysis And The War Neuroses

3669

APPENDIX

MEMORANDUM ON THE ELECTRICAL TREATMENT OF WAR NEUROTICS

(1955 [1920])

There were plenty of patients even in peace-time who, after traumas (that is, after frightening and dangerous experiences such as railway accidents, etc.) exhibited severe disturbances in their mental life and in their nervous activity, without physicians having reached an agreed judgement on these states. Some supposed that with such patients it was a question of severe injuries to the nervous system, similar to the haemorrhages and inflammations occurring in non-traumatic illnesses. And when anatomical examination failed to establish such processes, they nevertheless maintained their belief that finer changes in the tissues were the cause of the symptoms observed. They therefore classed these traumatic cases among the organic diseases. Other physicians maintained from the first that these states could only be regarded as functional disturbances, and that the nervous system remained anatomically intact. But medical opinion had long found difficulty in explaining how such severe disturbances of function could occur without any gross injury to the organ.

The war that has recently ended produced and brought under observation an immense number of these traumatic cases. In the result, the controversy was decided in favour of the functional view. The great majority of physicians no longer believe that the so-called ‘war neurotics’ are ill as a result of tangible organic injuries to the nervous system, and the more clear-sighted among them have already decided, instead of using the indefinite description of a ‘functional change’, to introduce the unambiguous term ‘mental change’.

Although the war neuroses manifested themselves for the most part as motor disturbances - tremors and paralyses - and although it was plausible to suppose that such a gross impact as that produced by the concussion due to the explosion of a shell near by or to being buried by a fall of earth would lead to gross mechanical effects, observations were nevertheless made which left no doubt as to the psychical nature of the causation of these so-called war neuroses. How could this be disputed when the same symptoms appeared behind the Front as well, far from the horrors of war, or immediately after a return from leave? The physicians were therefore led to regard war neurotics in a similar light to the nervous subjects of peace-time.

What is known as the psycho-analytic school of psychiatry, which was brought into being by me, had taught for the last twenty-five years that the neuroses of peace could be traced back to disturbances of emotional life. This explanation was now applied quite generally to war neurotics. We had further asserted that neurotic patients suffered from mental conflicts and that the wishes and inclinations which were expressed in the symptoms were unknown to the patients themselves - were, that is to say, unconscious. It was therefore easy to infer that the immediate cause of all war neuroses was an unconscious inclination in the soldier to withdraw from the demands, dangerous or outrageous to his feelings, made upon him by active service. Fear of losing his own life, opposition to the command to kill other people, rebellion against the ruthless suppression of his own personality by his superiors - these were the most important affective sources on which the inclination to escape from war was nourished.

Introduction To Psycho-Analysis And The War Neuroses

3670

A soldier in whom these affective motives were very powerful and clearly conscious would, if he was a healthy man, have been obliged to desert or pretend to be ill. Only the smallest proportion of war neurotics, however, were malingerers; the emotional impulses which rebelled in them against active service and drove them into illness were operative in them without becoming conscious to them. They remained unconscious because other motives, such as ambition, self-esteem, patriotism, the habit of obedience and the example of others, were to start with more powerful until, on some appropriate occasion, they were overwhelmed by the other, unconsciously operating motives.

This insight into the causation of the war neuroses led to a method of treatment which seemed to be well-grounded and also proved highly effective in the first instance. It seemed expedient to treat the neurotic as a malingerer and to disregard the psychological distinction between conscious and unconscious intentions, although he was known not to be a malingerer. Since his illness served the purpose of withdrawing him from an intolerable situation, the roots of the illness would clearly be undermined if it was made even more intolerable to him than active service. Just as he had fled from the war into illness, means were now adopted which compelled him to flee back from illness into health, that is to say, into fitness for active service. For this purpose painful electrical treatment was employed, and with success. Physicians are glossing over the facts in retrospect when they assert that the strength of this electrical current was the same as had always been employed in functional disorders. This would only have been effective in the mildest cases; nor did it fit in with the underlying argument that a war neurotic’s illness had to be made painful so that the balance of his motives would be tipped in favour of recovery.

This painful form of treatment introduced in the German army for therapeutic purposes could no doubt also be employed in a more moderate fashion. If it was used in the Vienna Clinics, I am personally convinced that it was never intensified to a cruel pitch by the initiative of Professor Wagner-Jauregg. I cannot vouch for other physicians whom I did not know. The psychological education of medical men is in general decidedly deficient and more than one of them may have forgotten that the patient whom he was seeking to treat as a malingerer was, after all, not one.

Introduction To Psycho-Analysis And The War Neuroses

3671

This therapeutic procedure, however, bore a stigma from the very first. It did not aim at the patient’s recovery, or not in the first instance; it aimed, above all, at restoring his fitness for service. Here Medicine was serving purposes foreign to its essence. The physician himself was under military command and had his own personal dangers to fear - loss of seniority or a charge of neglecting his duty - if he allowed himself to be led by considerations other than those prescribed for him. The insoluble conflict between the claims of humanity, which normally carry decisive weight for a physician, and the demands of a national war was bound to confuse his activity.

Moreover, the successes of treatment by a strong electric current, which were brilliant to begin with, turned out afterwards not to be lasting. A patient who, having been restored to health by it, was sent back to the Front, could repeat the business afresh and have a relapse, by means of which he at least gained time and escaped the danger which was at the moment the immediate one. If he was once more under fire his fear of the electric current receded, just as during the treatment his fear of active service had faded. In the course of the war years, too, a rapidly increasing fatigue in the popular spirit made itself felt more and more, and a growing dislike of fighting, so that the treatment I have described began to fail in its effects. In these circumstances some of the army doctors gave way to the inclination, characteristic of Germans, to carry through their intentions regardless of all else - which should never have happened. The strength of the current, as well as the severity of the rest of the treatment, were increased to an unbearable point in order to deprive war neurotics of the advantage they gained from their illness. The fact has never been contradicted that in German hospitals there were deaths at that time during treatment and suicides as a result of it. I am quite unable to say, however, whether the Vienna Clinics, too, passed through this phase of therapy.

Introduction To Psycho-Analysis And The War Neuroses

3672

I am in a position to bring forward conclusive evidence of the final break-down of the electrical treatment of the war neuroses. In 1918 Dr. Ernst Simmel, head of a hospital for war neuroses at Posen, published a pamphlet in which he reported the extraordinarily favourable results achieved in severe cases of war neurosis by the psychotherapeutic method introduced by me. As a result of this publication, the next Psycho-Analytical Congress, held in Budapest in September 1918, was attended by official delegates of the German, Austrian and Hungarian Army Command, who promised that Centres should be set up for the purely psychological treatment of war neuroses. This promise was made although the delegates can have been left in no doubt that with this considerate, laborious and tedious kind of treatment it was impossible to count on the quickest restoration of these patients to fitness for service. Preparations for the establishment of Centres of this kind were actually under way, when the revolution broke out and put an end to the war and to the influence of the administrative offices which had hitherto been all-powerful. But with the end of the war the war neurotics, too, disappeared - a final but impressive proof of the psychical causation of their illnesses.

Vienna, 23. 2. 20.

3673

THE ‘UNCANNY’

(1919)

3674

Intentionally left blank

3675

THE ‘UNCANNY’

I

It is only rarely that a psycho-analyst feels impelled to investigate the subject of aesthetics, even when aesthetics is understood to mean not merely the theory of beauty but the theory of the qualities of feeling. He works in other strata of mental life and has little to do with the subdued emotional impulses which, inhibited in their aims and dependent on a host of concurrent factors, usually furnish the material for the study of aesthetics. But it does occasionally happen that he has to interest himself in some particular province of that subject; and this province usually proves to be a rather remote one, and one which has been neglected in the specialist literature of aesthetics.

The subject of the ‘uncanny’ is a province of this kind. It is undoubtedly related to what is frightening - to what arouses dread and horror; equally certainly, too, the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general. Yet we may expect that a special core of feeling is present which justifies the use of a special conceptual term. One is curious to know what this common core is which allows us to distinguish as ‘uncanny’ certain things which lie within the field of what is frightening.

As good as nothing is to be found upon this subject in comprehensive treatises on aesthetics, which in general prefer to concern themselves with what is beautiful, attractive and sublime - that is, with feelings of a positive nature - and with the circumstances and the objects that call them forth, rather than with the opposite feelings of repulsion and distress. I know of only one attempt in medico-psychological literature, a fertile but not exhaustive paper by Jentsch (1906). But I must confess that I have not made a very thorough examination of the literature, especially the foreign literature, relating to this present modest contribution of mine, for reasons which, as may easily be guessed, lie in the times in which we live; so that my paper is presented to the reader without any claim to priority.

The 'Uncanny'

3676

In his study of the ‘uncanny’ Jentsch quite rightly lays stress on the obstacle presented by the fact that people vary so very greatly in their sensitivity to this quality of feeling. The writer of the present contribution, indeed, must himself plead guilty to a special obtuseness in the matter, where extreme delicacy of perception would be more in place. It is long since he has experienced or heard of anything which has given him an uncanny impression, and he must start by translating himself into that state of feeling, by awakening in himself the possibility of experiencing it. Still, such difficulties make themselves powerfully felt in many other branches of aesthetics; we need not on that account despair of finding instances in which the quality in question will be unhesitatingly recognized by most people.

Two courses are open to us at the outset. Either we can find out what meaning has come to be attached to the word ‘uncanny’ in the course of its history; or we can collect all those properties of persons, things, sense-impressions, experiences and situations which arouse in us the feeling of uncanniness, and then infer the unknown nature of the uncanny from what all these examples have in common. I will say at once that both courses lead to the same result: the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar. How this is possible, in what circumstances the familiar can become uncanny and frightening, I shall show in what follows. Let me also add that my investigation was actually begun by collecting a number of individual cases, and was only later confirmed by an examination of linguistic usage. In this discussion, however, I shall follow the reverse course.

The German word ‘unheimlich’ is obviously the opposite of ‘heimlich’ [‘homely’], ‘heimisch’ [‘native’] - the opposite of what is familiar; and we are tempted to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar. Naturally not everything that is new and unfamiliar is frightening, however; the relation is not capable of inversion. We can only say that what is novel can easily become frightening and uncanny; some new things are frightening but not by any means all. Something has to be added to what is novel and unfamiliar in order to make it uncanny.

The 'Uncanny'

3677

On the whole, Jentsch did not get beyond this relation of the uncanny to the novel and unfamiliar. He ascribes the essential factor in the production of the feeling of uncanniness to intellectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always, as it were, be something one does not know one’s way about in. The better orientated in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it.

It is not difficult to see that this definition is incomplete, and we will therefore try to proceed beyond the equation ‘uncanny’ = ‘unfamiliar’. We will first turn to other languages. But the dictionaries that we consult tell us nothing new, perhaps only because we ourselves speak a language that is foreign. Indeed, we get an impression that many languages are without a word for this particular shade of what is frightening.

I should like to express my indebtedness to Dr. Theodor Reik for the following excerpts:-

LATIN: (K. E. Georges, Deutchlateinisches Wörterbuch, 1898). An uncanny place: locus suspectus; at an uncanny time of night: intempesta nocte.

GREEK: (Rost’s and Schenkl’s Lexikons). ξέυος (i. e. strange, foreign).

ENGLISH: (from the dictionaries of Lucas, Bellows, Flügel and Muret-Sanders). Uncomfortable, uneasy, gloomy, dismal, uncanny, ghastly; (of a house) haunted; (of a man) a repulsive fellow.

FRENCH: (Sachs-Villatte). Inquiétant, sinistre, lugubre, mal à son aise.

SPANISH: (Tollhausen, 1889). Sospechoso, de mal aguëro, lúgubre, siniestro.

The Italian and Portuguese languages seem to content themselves with words which we should describe as circumlocutions. In Arabic and Hebrew ‘uncanny’ means the same as ‘daemonic’, ‘gruesome’.

The 'Uncanny'

3678

Let us therefore return to the German language. In Daniel Sanders’s Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache (1860, 1, 729), the following entry, which I here reproduce in full, is to be found under the word ‘heimlich’. I have laid stress on one or two passages by italicizing them.

Heimlich, adj., subst. Heimlichkeit (pl. Heimlichkeiten): I. Also heimelich, heimelig, belonging to the house, not strange, familiar, tame, intimate, friendly, etc.

(a) (Obsolete) belonging to the house or the family, or regarded as so belonging (cf. Latin familiaris, familiar): Die Heimlichen, the members of the household; Der heimliche Rat (Gen. xli, 45; 2 Sam. xxiii. 23; 1 Chron. xii. 25; Wisd. viii. 4), now more usually Geheimer Rat [Privy Councillor].

(b) Of animals: tame, companionable to man. As opposed to wild, e. g. ‘Animals which are neither wild nor heimlich’, etc. ‘Wild animals . . . that are trained to be heimlich and accustomed to men.’ ‘If these young creatures are brought up from early days among men they become quite heimlich, friendly’ etc. - So also: ‘It (the lamb) is so heimlich and eats out of my hand.’ ‘Nevertheless, the stork is a beautiful, heimelich bird.’

(c) Intimate, friendlily comfortable; the enjoyment of quiet content, etc., arousing a sense of agreeable restfulness and security as in one within the four walls of his house. ‘Is it still heimlich to you in your country where strangers are felling your woods?’ ‘She did not feel too heimlich with him.’ ‘Along a high, heimlich, shady path . . ., beside a purling, gushing and babbling woodland brook.’ ‘To destroy the Heimlichkeit of the home,’ ‘I could not readily find another spot so intimate and heimlich as this.’ ‘We pictured it so comfortable, so nice, so cosy and heimlich.’ ‘In quiet Heimlichkeit, surrounded by close walls.’ ‘A careful housewife, who knows how to make a pleasing Heimlichkeit (Häuslichkeit) out of the smallest means.’ ‘The man who till recently had been so strange to him now seemed to him all the more heimlich.’ ‘The protestant land-owners do not feel . . . heimlich among their catholic inferiors.’ ‘When it grows heimlich and still, and the evening quiet alone watches over your cell.’ ‘Quiet, lovely and heimlich, no place more fitted for their rest.’ ‘He did not feel at all heimlich about it.’ - Also, ‘The place was so peaceful, so lonely, so shadily-heimlich.’ ‘The in- and outflowing waves of the current, dreamy and lullaby-heimlich.’ Cf. in especial Unheimlich. Among Swabian Swiss authors in especial, often as a trisyllable: ‘How heimelich it seemed to Ivo again of an evening, when he was at home.’ ‘It was so heimelig in the house.’ ‘The warm room and the heimelig afternoon.’ ‘When a man feels in his heart that he is so small and the Lord so great - that is what is truly heimelig.’ ‘Little by little they grew at ease and heimelig among themselves.’ ‘Friendly Heimeligkeit.’ ‘I shall be nowhere more heimelich than I am here.’ ‘That which comes from afar . . . assuredly does not live quite heimelig (heimatlich, freundnachbarlich) among the people.’ ‘The cottage where he had once sat so often among his own people, so heimelig, so happy.’ ‘The sentinel’s horn sounds so heimelig from the tower, and his voice invites so hospitably.’ ‘You go to sleep there so soft and warm, so wonderfully heim’lig.’ - This form of the word deserves to become general in order to protect this perfectly good sense of the word from becoming obsolete through an easy confusion with II. Cf.: ‘"The Zecks are all ‘heimlich’." (in sense II) "‘Heimlich’?  . . . What do you understand by ‘heimlich’?" "Well, . . . they are like a buried spring or a dried-up pond. One cannot walk over it without always having the feeling that water might come up there again." "Oh, we call it ‘unheimlich’; you call it ‘heimlich’. Well, what makes you think that there is something secret and untrustworthy about this family?"’(Gutzkow).

(d) Especially in Silesia: gay, cheerful; also of the weather.

II. Concealed, kept from sight, so that others do not get to know of or about it, withheld from others. To do something heimlich, i.e. behind someone’s back; to steal away heimlich; heimlich meetings and appointments; to look on with heimlich pleasure at someone’s discomfiture; to sigh or weep heimlich; to behave heimlich, as though there was something to conceal; heimlich love-affair, love, sin; heimlich places (which good manners oblige us to conceal) (1 Sam. v. 6). ‘The heimlich chamber’ (privy) (2 Kings x. 27.). Also, ‘the heimlich chair’. ‘To throw into pits or Heimlichkeiten’. - ‘Led the steeds heimlich before Laomedon.’ - ‘As secretive, heimlich, deceitful and malicious towards cruel masters . . . as frank, open, sympathetic and helpful towards a friend in misfortune.’ ‘You have still to learn what is heimlich holiest to me.’ ‘The heimlich art’ (magic). ‘Where public ventilation has to stop, there heimlich machinations begin.’ ‘Freedom is the whispered watchword of heimlich conspirators and the loud battle-cry of professed revolutionaries.’ ‘A holy, heimlich effect.’ ‘I have roots that are most heimlich. I am grown in the deep earth.’ ‘My heimlich pranks.’ ‘If he is not given it openly and scrupulously he may seize it heimlich and unscrupulously.’ ‘He had achromatic telescopes constructed heimlich and secretly.’ ‘Henceforth I desire that there should be nothing heimlich any longer between us.’ - To discover, disclose, betray someone’s Heimlichkeiten; ‘to concoct Heimlichkeiten behind my back’. ‘In my time we studied Heimlichkeit’ ‘The hand of understanding can alone undo the powerless spell of the Heimlichkeit (of hidden gold).’ ‘Say, where is the place of concealment . . . in what place of hidden Heimlichkeit?’ ‘Bees, who make the lock of Heimlichkeiten’ (i. e. sealing-wax). ‘Learned in strange Heimlichkeiten (magic arts).

For compounds see above, Ic. Note especially the negative ‘un-’: eerie, weird, arousing gruesome fear: ‘Seeming quite unheimlich and ghostly to him.’ ‘The unheimlich, fearful hours of night.’ ‘I had already long since felt an unheimlich, even gruesome feeling.’ ‘Now I am beginning to have an unheimlich feeling.’ . . . ‘Feels an unheimlich horror.’ ‘Unheimlich and motionless like a stone image.’ ‘The unheimlich mist called hill-fog.’ ‘These pale youths are unheimlich and are brewing heaven knows what mischief.’ ‘"Unheimlich" is the name for everything that ought to have remained . . . secret and hidden but has come to light’ (Schelling). - ‘To veil the divine, to surround it with a certain Unheimlichkeit.’ - Unheimlich is not often used as opposite to meaning II (above).

The 'Uncanny'

3679

What interests us most in this long extract is to find that among its different shades of meaning the word ‘heimlich’ exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, ‘unheimlich’. What is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich. (Cf. the quotation from Gutzkow: ‘We call it "unheimlich"; you call it "heimlich".’) In general we are reminded that the word ‘heimlich’ is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight. ‘Unheimlich’ is customarily used, we are told, as the contrary only of the first signification of heimlich’, and not of the second. Sanders tells us nothing concerning a possible genetic connection between these two meanings of heimlich. On the other hand, we notice that Schelling says something which throws quite a new light on the concept of the Unheimlich, for which we were certainly not prepared. According to him, everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.

Some of the doubts that have thus arisen are removed if we consult Grimm’s dictionary. (1877, 4, Part 2, 873 ff.)

We read:

Heimlich; adj. and adv. vernaculus, occultus; MHG. heimelîch, heimlîch.

(P. 874.) In a slightly different sense: ‘I feel heimlich, well, free from fear.’ . . .

(b) Heimlich is also used of a place free from ghostly influences . . . familiar, friendly, intimate.

(P. 875: β) Familiar, amicable, unreserved.

4. From the idea of ‘homelike’, ‘belonging to the house’, the further idea is developed of something withdrawn from the eyes of strangers, something concealed, secret; and this idea is expanded in many ways . . .

(P. 876.) ‘On the left bank of the lake there lies a meadow heimlich in the wood.’ (Schiller, Wilhelm Tell, I. 4.) . . . Poetic licence, rarely so used in modern speech . . . Heimlich is used in conjunction with a verb expressing the act of concealing: ‘In the secret of his tabernacle he shall hide me heimlich.’ (Ps. xxvii. 5.) . . . Heimlich parts of the human body, pudenda  . . . ‘the men that died not were smitten on their heimlich parts.’ (1 Samuel v. 12.) . . .

(c) Officials who give important advice which has to be kept secret in matters of state are called heimlich councillors; the adjective, according to modern usage, has been replaced by geheim [secret] . . . ‘Pharaoh called Joseph’s name "him to whom secrets are revealed"‘ (heimlich councillor). (Gen. xli. 45.)

(P. 878.) 6. Heimlich, as used of knowledge - mystic, allegorical: a heimlich meaning, mysticus, divinus, occultus, figuratus.

(P. 878.) Heimlich in a different sense, as withdrawn from knowledge, unconscious . . . Heimlich also has the meaning of that which is obscure, inaccessible to knowledge . . . ‘Do you not see? They do not trust us; they fear the heimlich face of the Duke of Friedland.’ (Schiller, Wallensteins Lager, Scene 2.)

9. The notion of something hidden and dangerous, which is expressed in the last paragraph, is still further developed, so that ‘heimlich’ comes to have the meaning usually ascribed to ‘unheimlich’. Thus: ‘At times I feel like a man who walks in the night and believes in ghosts; every corner is heimlich and full of terrors for him’. (Klinger, Theater, 3. 298.)

Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich. Let us bear this discovery in mind, though we cannot yet rightly understand it, alongside of Schelling’s definition of the Unheimlich. If we go on to examine individual instances of uncanniness, these hints will become intelligible to us.

The 'Uncanny'

3680

II

When we proceed to review the things, persons, impressions, events and situations which are able to arouse in us a feeling of the uncanny in a particularly forcible and definite form, the first requirement is obviously to select a suitable example to start on. Jentsch has taken as a very good instance ‘doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate’; and he refers in this connection to the impression made by wax-work figures, ingeniously constructed dolls and automata. To these he adds the uncanny effect of epileptic fits, and of manifestations of insanity, because these excite in the spectator the impression of automatic, mechanical processes at work behind the ordinary appearance of mental activity. Without entirely accepting this author’s view, we will take it as a starting-point for our own investigation because in what follows he reminds us of a writer who has succeeded in producing uncanny effects better than anyone else.

Jentsch writes: ‘In telling a story, one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton, and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately. That, as we have said, would quickly dissipate the peculiar emotional effect of the thing. E. T. A. Hoffmann has repeatedly employed this psychological artifice with success in his fantastic narratives.’

This observation, undoubtedly a correct one, refers primarily to the story of ‘The Sand-Man’ in Hoffmann’s Nachtstücken,¹ which contains the original of Olympia, the doll that appears in the first act of Offenbach’s opera, Tales of Hoffman. But I cannot think - and I hope most readers of the story will agree with me - that the theme of the doll Olympia, who is to all appearances a living being, is by any means the only, or indeed the most important, element that must be held responsible for the quite unparalleled atmosphere of uncanniness evoked by the story. Nor is this atmosphere heightened by the fact that the author himself treats the episode of Olympia with a faint touch of satire and uses it to poke fun at the young man’s idealization of his mistress. The main theme of the story is, on the contrary, something different, something which gives it its name, and which is always re-introduced at critical moments: it is the theme of the ‘Sand-Man’ who tears out children’s eyes.

This fantastic tale opens with the childhood recollections of the student Nathaniel. In spite of his present happiness, he cannot banish the memories associated with the mysterious and terrifying death of his beloved father. On certain evenings his mother used to send the children to bed early, warning them that ‘the Sand-Man was coming’; and, sure enough, Nathaniel would not fail to hear the heavy tread of a visitor, with whom his father would then be occupied for the evening. When questioned about the Sand-Man, his mother, it is true, denied that such a person existed except as a figure of speech; but his nurse could give him more definite information: ‘He’s a wicked man who comes when children won’t go to bed, and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes so that they jump out of their heads all bleeding. Then he puts the eyes in a sack and carries them off to the half-moon to feed his children. They sit up there in their nest, and their beaks are hooked like owls’ beaks, and they use them to peck up naughty boys’ and girls’ eyes with.’

¹ Hoffmann’s Sämtliche Werke, Grisebach Edition, 3.

The 'Uncanny'

3681

Although little Nathaniel was sensible and old enough not to credit the figure of the Sand-Man with such gruesome attributes, yet the dread of him became fixed in his heart. He determined to find out what the Sand-Man looked like; and one evening, when the Sand-Man was expected again, he hid in his father’s study. He recognized the visitor as the lawyer Coppelius, a repulsive person whom the children were frightened of when he occasionally came to a meal; and he now identified this Coppelius with the dreaded Sand-Man. As regards the rest of the scene, Hoffmann already leaves us in doubt whether what we are witnessing is the first delirium of the panic-stricken boy, or a succession of events which are to be regarded in the story as being real. His father and the guest are at work at a brazier with glowing flames. The little eavesdropper hears Coppelius call out: ‘Eyes here! Eyes here!’ and betrays himself by screaming aloud. Coppelius seizes him and is on the point of dropping bits of red-hot coal from the fire into his eyes, and then of throwing them into the brazier, but his father begs him off and saves his eyes. After this the boy falls into a deep swoon; and a long illness brings his experience to an end. Those who decide in favour of the rationalistic interpretation of the Sand-Man will not fail to recognize in the child’s phantasy the persisting influence of his nurse’s story. The bits of sand that are to be thrown into the child’s eyes turn into bits of red-hot coal from the flames; and in both cases they are intended to make his eyes jump out. In the course of another visit of the Sand-Man’s, a year later, his father is killed in his study by an explosion. The lawyer Coppelius disappears from the place without leaving a trace behind.

The 'Uncanny'

3682

Nathaniel, now a student, believes that he has recognized this phantom of horror from his childhood in an itinerant optician, an Italian called Giuseppe Coppola, who at his university town, offers him weather-glasses for sale. When Nathaniel refuses, the man goes on: ‘Not weather-glasses? not weather-glasses? also got fine eyes, fine eyes!’ The student’s terror is allayed when he finds that the proffered eyes are only harmless spectacles, and he buys a pocket spy-glass from Coppola. With its aid he looks across into Professor Spalanzani’s house opposite and there spies Spalanzani’s beautiful, but strangely silent and motionless daughter, Olympia. He soon falls in love with her so violently that, because of her, he quite forgets the clever and sensible girl to whom he is betrothed. But Olympia is an automaton whose clock-work has been made by Spalanzani, and whose eyes have been put in by Coppola, the Sand-Man. The student surprises the two Masters quarrelling over their handiwork. The optician carries off the wooden eyeless doll; and the mechanician, Spalanzani, picks up Olympia’s bleeding eyes from the ground and throws them at Nathaniel’s breast, saying that Coppola had stolen them from the student. Nathaniel succumbs to a fresh attack of madness, and in his delirium his recollection of his father’s death is mingled with this new experience. ‘Hurry up! hurry up! ring of fire!’ he cries. ‘Spin about, ring of fire - Hurrah! Hurry up, wooden doll! lovely wooden doll, spin about -.’ He then falls upon the professor, Olympia’s ‘father’, and tries to strangle him.

Rallying from a long and serious illness, Nathaniel seems at last to have recovered. He intends to marry his betrothed, with whom he bas become reconciled. One day he and she are walking through the city market-place, over which the high tower of the Town Hall throws its huge shadow. On the girl’s suggestion, they climb the tower, leaving her brother, who is walking with them, down below. From the top, Clara’s attention is drawn to a curious object moving along the street. Nathaniel looks at this thing through Coppola’s spy-glass, which he finds in his pocket, and falls into a new attack of madness. Shouting ‘Spin about, wooden doll!’ he tries to throw the girl into the gulf below. Her brother, brought to her side by her cries, rescues her and hastens down with her to safety. On the tower above, the madman rushes round, shrieking ‘Ring of fire, spin about!’ - and we know the origin of the words. Among the people who begin to gather below there comes forward the figure of the lawyer Coppelius, who has suddenly returned. We may suppose that it was his approach, seen through the spy-glass, which threw Nathaniel into his fit of madness. As the onlookers prepare to go up and overpower the madman, Coppelius laughs and says: ‘Wait a bit; he’ll come down of himself.’ Nathaniel suddenly stands still, catches sight of Coppelius, and with a wild shriek ‘Yes! "Fine eyes - fine eyes"!’ flings himself over the parapet. While he lies on the paving-stones with a shattered skull the Sand-Man vanishes in the throng.

The 'Uncanny'

3683

This short summary leaves no doubt, I think, that the feeling of something uncanny is directly attached to the figure of the Sand-Man, that is, to the idea of being robbed of one’s eyes, and that Jentsch’s point of an intellectual uncertainty has nothing to do with the effect. Uncertainty whether an object is living or inanimate, which admittedly applied to the doll Olympia, is quite irrelevant in connection with this other, more striking instance of uncanniness. It is true that the writer creates a kind of uncertainty in us in the beginning by not letting us know, no doubt purposely, whether he is taking us into the real world or into a purely fantastic one of his own creation. He has, of course, a right to do either; and if he chooses to stage his action in a world peopled with spirits, demons and ghosts, as Shakespeare does in Hamlet, in Macbeth and, in a different sense, in A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, we must bow to his decision and treat his setting as though it were real for as long as we put ourselves into his hands. But this uncertainty disappears in the course of Hoffmann’s story, and we perceive that he intends to make us, too, look through the demon optician’s spectacles or spy-glass - perhaps, indeed, that the author in his very own person once peered through such an instrument. For the conclusion of the story makes it quite clear that Coppola the optician really is the lawyer Coppelius ¹ and also, therefore, the Sand-Man.

There is no question therefore, of any intellectual uncertainty here: we know now that we are not supposed to be looking on at the products of a madman’s imagination, behind which we, with the superiority of rational minds, are able to detect the sober truth; and yet this knowledge does not lessen the impression of uncanniness in the least degree. The theory of intellectual uncertainty is thus incapable of explaining that impression.

¹ Frau Dr. Rank has pointed out the association of the name with ‘coppella’ = crucible, connecting it with the chemical operations that caused the father’s death; and also with ‘coppo’ = eye-socket.

The 'Uncanny'

3684

We know from psycho-analytic experience, however, that the fear of damaging or losing one’s eyes is a terrible one in children. Many adults retain their apprehensiveness in this respect, and no physical injury is so much dreaded by them as an injury to the eye. We are accustomed to say, too, that we will treasure a thing as the apple of our eye. A study of dreams, phantasies and myths has taught us that anxiety about one’s eyes, the fear of going blind, is often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated. The self-blinding of the mythical criminal, Oedipus, was simply a mitigated form of the punishment of castration - the only punishment that was adequate for hum by the lex talionis. We may try on rationalistic grounds to deny that fears about the eye are derived from the fear of castration, and may argue that it is very natural that so precious an organ as the eye should be guarded by a proportionate dread. Indeed, we might go further and say that the fear of castration itself contains no other significance and no deeper secret than a justifiable dread of this rational kind. But this view does not account adequately for the substitutive relation between the eye and the male organ which is seen to exist in dreams and myths and phantasies; nor can it dispel the impression that the threat of being castrated in especial excites a peculiarly violent and obscure emotion, and that this emotion is what first gives the idea of losing other organs its intense colouring. All further doubts are removed when we learn the details of their ‘castration complex’ from the analysis of neurotic patients, and realize its immense importance in their mental life

Moreover, I would not recommend any opponent of the psycho-analytic view to select this particular story of the Sand-Man with which to support his argument that anxiety about the eyes has nothing to do with the castration complex. For why does Hoffmann bring the anxiety about eyes into such intimate connection with the father’s death? And why does the Sand-Man always appear as a disturber of love? He separates the unfortunate Nathaniel from his betrothed and from her brother, his best friend; he destroys the second object of his love, Olympia, the lovely doll; and he drives him into suicide at the moment when he has won back his Clara and is about to be happily united to her. Elements in the story like these, and many others, seem arbitrary and meaningless so long as we deny all connection between fears about the eye and castration; but they become intelligible as soon as we replace the Sand-Man by the dreaded father at whose hands castration is expected.¹

¹ In fact, Hoffman’s imaginative treatment of his material has not made such wild confusion of its elements that we cannot reconstruct their original arrangement. In the story of Nathaniel’s childhood, the figures of his father and Coppelius represent the two opposites into which the father-imago is split by his ambivalence; whereas the one threatens to blind him - that is, to castrate him -, the other, the ‘good’ father, intercedes for his sight. The part of the complex which is most strongly repressed, the death-wish against the ‘bad’ father, finds expression in the death of the ‘good’ father, and Coppelius is made answerable for it. This pair of fathers is represented later, in his student days, by Professor Spalanzani and Coppola the optician. The Professor is in himself a member of the father-series, and Coppola is recognized as identical with Coppelius the lawyer. Just as they used before to work together over the secret brazier, so now they have jointly created the doll Olympia; the Professor is even called the father of Olympia. This double occurrence of activity in common betrays them as divisions of the father-imago: both the mechanician and the optician were the father of Nathaniel (and of Olympia as well). In the frightening scene in childhood, Coppelius, after sparing Nathaniel’s eyes, had screwed off his arms and legs as an experiment; that is, he had worked on him as a mechanician would on a doll. This singular feature, which seems quite outside the picture of the Sand-Man, introduces a new castration equivalent; but it also points to the inner identity of Coppelius with his later counterpart, Spalanzani the mechanician, and prepares us for the interpretation of Olympia. This automatic doll can be nothing else than a materialization of Nathaniel’s feminine attitude towards his father in his infancy. Her fathers, Spalanzani and Coppola, are, after all, nothing but new editions, reincarnations of Nathaniel’s pair of fathers. Spalanzani’s otherwise incomprehensible statement that the optician has stolen Nathaniel’s eyes (see above), so as to set them in the doll, now become significant as supplying evidence of the identity of Olympia and Nathaniel. OIympia is, as it were, a dissociated complex of Nathaniel’s which confronts him as a person, and Nathaniel’s enslavement to this complex is expressed in his senseless obsessive love for Olympia. We may with justice call love of this kind narcissistic, and we can understand why someone who has fallen victim to it should relinquish the real, external object of his love. The psychological truth of the situation in which the young man, fixated upon his father by his castration complex, becomes incapable of loving a woman, is amply proved by numerous analyses of patients whose story, though less fantastic, is hardly less tragic than that of the student Nathaniel.

Hoffmann was the child of an unhappy marriage. When he was three years old, his father left his small family, and was never united to them again. According to Grisebach, in his biographical introduction to Hoffmann’s works, the writer’s relation to his father was always a most sensitive subject with him.

The 'Uncanny'

3685

We shall venture, therefore, to refer the uncanny effect of the Sand-Man to the anxiety belonging to the castration complex of childhood. But having reached the idea that we can make an infantile factor such as this responsible for feelings of uncanniness, we are encouraged to see whether we can apply it to other instances of the uncanny. We find in the story of the Sand-Man the other theme on which Jentsch lays stress, of a doll which appears to be alive. Jentsch believes that a particularly favourable condition for awakening uncanny feelings is created when there is intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one. Now, dolls are of course rather closely connected with childhood life. We remember that in their early games children do not distinguish at all sharply between living and inanimate objects, and that they are especially fond of treating their dolls like live people. In fact, I have occasionally heard a woman patient declare that even at the age of eight she had still been convinced that her dolls would be certain to come to life of she were to look at them in a particular, extremely concentrated, way. So that here, too, it is not difficult to discover a factor from childhood. But, curiously enough, while the Sand-Man story deals with the arousing of an early childhood fear, the idea of a ‘living doll’ excites no fear at all; children have no fear of their dolls coming to life, they may even desire it. The source of uncanny feelings would not, therefore, be an infantile fear in this case, but rather an infantile wish or even merely an infantile belief. There seems to be a contradiction here; but perhaps it is only a complication, which may be helpful to us later on.

The 'Uncanny'

3686

Hoffmann is the unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature. His novel, Die Elixire des Teufels, contains a whole mass of themes to which one is tempted to ascribe the uncanny effect of the narrative; but it is too obscure and intricate a story for us to venture upon a summary of it. Towards the end of the book the reader is told the facts, hitherto concealed from him, from which the action springs; with the result, not that he is at last enlightened, but that he falls into a state of complete bewilderment. The author has piled up too much material of the same kind. In consequence one’s grasp of the story as a whole suffers, though not the impression it makes. We must content ourselves with selecting those themes of uncanniness which are most prominent, and with seeing whether they too can fairly be traced back to infantile sources. These themes are all concerned with the phenomenon of the ‘double’, which appears in every shape and in every degree of development. Thus we have characters who are to be considered identical because they look alike. This relation is accentuated by mental processes leaping from one of these characters to another - by what we should call telepathy -, so that the one possesses knowledge, feelings and experience in common with the other. Or it is marked by the fact that the subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own. In other words, there is a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self. And finally there is the constant recurrence of the same thing - the repetition of the same features or character-traits or vicissitudes, of the same crimes, or even the same names through several consecutive generations.

The 'Uncanny'

3687

The theme of the ‘double’ has been very thoroughly treated by Otto Rank (1914). He has gone into the connections which the ‘double’ has with reflections in mirrors, with shadows, with guardian spirits, with the belief in the soul and with the fear of death; but he also lets in a flood of light on the surprising evolution of the idea. For the ‘double’ was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an ‘energetic denial of the power of death’, as Rank says; and probably the ‘immortal’ soul was the first ‘double’ of the body. This invention of doubling as a preservation against extinction has its counterpart in the language of dreams, which is fond of representing castration by a doubling or multiplication of a genital symbol. The same desire led the Ancient Egyptians to develop the art of making images of the dead in lasting materials. Such ideas, however, have sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which dominates the mind of the child and of primitive man. But when this stage has been surmounted, the ‘double’ reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.

The idea of the ‘double’ does not necessarily disappear with the passing of primary narcissism, for it can receive fresh meaning from the later stages of the ego’s development. A special agency is slowly formed there, which is able to stand over against the rest of the ego, which has the function of observing and criticizing the self and of exercising a censorship within the mind, and which we become aware of as our ‘conscience’. In the pathological case of delusions of being watched, this mental agency becomes isolated, dissociated from the ego, and discernible to the physician’s eye. The fact that an agency of this kind exists, which is able to treat the rest of the ego like an object - the fact, that is, that man is capable of self-observation - renders it possible to invest the old idea of a ‘double’ with a new meaning and to ascribe a number of things to it - above all, those things which seem to self-criticism to belong to the old surmounted narcissism of earliest times.¹

¹ I believe that when poets complain that two souls dwell in the human breast, and when popular psychologists talk of the splitting of people’s egos, what they are thinking of is this division (in the sphere of ego-psychology) between the critical agency and the rest of the ego, and not the antithesis discovered by psycho-analysis between the ego and what is unconscious and repressed. It is true that the distinction between these two antitheses is to some extent effaced by the circumstance that foremost among the things that are rejected by the criticism of the ego are derivatives of the repressed.

The 'Uncanny'

3688

But it is not only this latter material, offensive as it is to the criticism of the ego, which may be incorporated in the idea of a double. There are also all the unfulfilled but possible futures to which we still like to cling in phantasy, all the strivings of the ego which adverse external circumstances have crushed, and all our suppressed acts of volition which nourish in us the illusion of Free Will.¹

But after having thus considered the manifest motivation of the figure of a ‘double’, we have to admit that none of this helps us to understand the extraordinarily strong feeling of something uncanny that pervades the conception; and our knowledge of pathological mental processes enables us to add that nothing in this more superficial material could account for the urge towards defence which has caused the ego to project that material outward as something foreign to itself. When all is said and done, the quality of uncanniness can only come from the fact of the ‘double’ being a creation dating back to a very early mental stage, long since surmounted - a stage, incidentally, at which it wore a more friendly aspect. The ‘double’ has become a thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons.²

The other forms of ego-disturbance exploited by Hoffmann can easily be estimated along the same lines as the theme of the ‘double’. They are a harking-back to particular phases in the evolution of the self-regarding feeling, a regression to a time when the ego had not yet marked itself off sharply from the external world and from other people. I believe that these factors are partly responsible for the impression of uncanniness, although it is not easy to isolate and determine exactly their share of it.

¹ In Ewers’s Der Student von Prag, which serves as the starting-point of Rank’s study on the ‘double’, the hero has promised his beloved not to kill his antagonist in a duel. But on his way to the duelling-ground he meets his ‘double’, who has already killed his rival.

² Heine, Die Götter im Exil.

The 'Uncanny'

3689

The factor of the repetition of the same thing will perhaps not appeal to everyone as a source of uncanny feeling. From what I have observed, this phenomenon does undoubtedly, subject to certain conditions and combined with certain circumstances, arouse an uncanny feeling, which, furthermore, recalls the sense of helplessness experienced in some dream states. As I was walking, one hot summer afternoon, through the deserted streets of a provincial town in Italy which was unknown to me, I found myself in a quarter of whose character I could not long remain in doubt. Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a time without enquiring my way, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried away once more, only to arrive by another détour at the same place yet a third time. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to find myself back at the piazza I had left a short while before, without any further voyages of discovery. Other situations which have in common with my adventure an unintended recurrence of the same situation, but which differ radically from it in other respects, also result in the same feeling of helplessness and of uncanniness. So, for instance, when, caught in a mist perhaps, one has lost one’s way in a mountain forest, every attempt to find the marked or familiar path may bring one back again and again to one and the same spot, which one can identify by some particular landmark. Or one may wander about in a dark, strange room, looking for the door or the electric switch, and collide time after time with the same piece of furniture - though it is true that Mark Twain succeeded by wild exaggeration in turning this latter situation into something irresistibly comic.

If we take another class of things, it is easy to see that there, too, it is only this factor of involuntary repetition which surrounds what would otherwise be innocent enough with an uncanny atmosphere, and forces upon us the idea of something fateful and inescapable when otherwise we should have spoken only of ‘chance’. For instance, we naturally attach no importance to the event when we hand in an overcoat and get a cloak room ticket with the number, let us say, 62; or when we find that our cabin on a ship bears that number. But the impression is altered if two such events, each in itself indifferent, happen close together - if we come across the number 62 several times in a single day, or if we begin to notice that everything which has a number - addresses, hotel rooms, compartments in railway trains - invariably has the same one, or at all events one which contains the same figures. We do feel this to be uncanny. And unless a man is utterly hardened and proof against the lure of superstition, he will be tempted to ascribe a secret meaning to this obstinate recurrence of a number; he will take it, perhaps, as an indication of the span of life allotted to him. Or suppose one is engaged in reading the works of the famous physiologist, Hering, and within the space of a few days receives two letters from two different countries, each from a person called Hering, though one has never before had any dealings with anyone of that name. Not long ago an ingenious scientist (Kammerer, 1919) attempted to reduce coincidences of this kind to certain laws, and so deprive them of their uncanny effect. I will not venture to decide whether he has succeeded or not.

The 'Uncanny'

3690

How exactly we can trace back to infantile psychology the uncanny effect of such similar recurrences is a question I can only lightly touch on in these pages; and I must refer the reader instead to another work, already completed, in which this has been gone into in detail, but in a different connection. For it is possible to recognize the dominance in the unconscious mind of a ‘compulsion to repeat’ proceeding from the instinctual impulses and probably inherent in the very nature of the instincts - a compulsion powerful enough to overrule the pleasure principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their daemonic character, and still very clearly expressed in the impulses of small children; a compulsion, too, which is responsible for a part of the course taken by the analyses of neurotic patients. All these considerations prepare us for the discovery that whatever reminds us of this inner ‘compulsion to repeat’ is perceived as uncanny.

Now, however, it is time to turn from these aspects of the matter, which are in any case difficult to judge, and look for some undeniable instances of the uncanny, in the hope that an analysis of them will decide whether our hypothesis is a valid one.

In the story of ‘The Ring of Polycrates’, the King of Egypt turns away in horror from his host, Polycrates, because he sees that his friend’s every wish is at once fulfilled, his every care promptly removed by kindly fate. His host has become ‘uncanny’ to him. His own explanation, that the too fortunate man has to fear the envy of the gods, seems obscure to us; its meaning is veiled in mythological language. We will therefore turn to another example in a less grandiose setting. In the case history of an obsessional neurotic,¹ I have described how the patient once stayed in a hydropathic establishment and benefited greatly by it. He had the good sense, however, to attribute his improvement not to the therapeutic properties of the water, but to the situation of his room, which immediately adjoined that of a very accommodating nurse. So on his second visit to the establishment he asked for the same room, but was told that it was already occupied by an old gentleman, whereupon he gave vent to his annoyance in the words: ‘I wish he may be struck dead for it.’ A fortnight later the old gentleman really did have a stroke. My patient thought this an ‘uncanny’ experience. The impression of uncanniness would have been stronger still if less time had elapsed between his words and the untoward event, or if he had been able to report innumerable similar coincidences. As a matter of fact, he had no difficulty in producing coincidences of this sort; but then not only he but every obsessional neurotic I have observed has been able to relate analogous experiences. They are never surprised at their invariably running up against someone they have just been thinking of, perhaps for the first time for a long while. If they say one day ‘I haven’t had any news of so-and-so for a long time’, they will be sure to get a letter from him the next morning, and an accident or a death will rarely take place without having passed through their mind a little while before. They are in the habit of referring to this state of affairs in the most modest manner, saying that they have ‘presentiments’ which ‘usually’ come true.

¹ ‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’ (1909d).

The 'Uncanny'

3691

One of the most uncanny and wide-spread forms of superstition is the dread of the evil eye, which has been exhaustively studied by the Hamburg oculist Seligmann (1910-11). There never seems to have been any doubt about the source of this dread. Whoever possesses something that is at once valuable and fragile is afraid of other people’s envy, in so far as he projects on to them the envy he would have felt in their place. A feeling like this betrays itself by a look even though it is not put into words; and when a man is prominent owing to noticeable, and particularly owing to unattractive, attributes, other people are ready to believe that his envy is rising to a more than usual degree of intensity and that this intensity will convert it into effective action. What is feared is thus a secret intention of doing harm, and certain signs are taken to mean that that intention has the necessary power at its command.

These last examples of the uncanny are to be referred to the principle which I have called ‘omnipotence of thoughts’, taking the name from an expression used by one of my patients. And now we find ourselves on familiar ground. Our analysis of instances of the uncanny has led us back to the old, animistic conception of the universe. This was characterized by the idea that the world was peopled with the spirits of human beings; by the subject’s narcissistic overvaluation of his own mental processes; by the belief in the omnipotence of thoughts and the technique of magic based on that belief; by the attribution to various outside persons and things of carefully graded magical powers, or ‘mana’; as well as by all the other creations with the help of which man, in the unrestricted narcissism of that stage of development, strove to fend off the manifest prohibitions of reality. It seems as if each one of us has been through a phase of individual development corresponding to this animistic stage in primitive men, that none of us has passed through it without preserving certain residues and traces of it which are still capable of manifesting themselves, and that everything which now strikes us as ‘uncanny’ fulfils the condition of touching those residues of animistic mental activity within us and bringing them to expression.¹

At this point I will put forward two considerations which, I think, contain the gist of this short study. In the first place, if psycho-analytic theory is correct in maintaining that every affect belonging to an emotional impulse, whatever its kind, is transformed, if it is repressed, into anxiety, then among instances of frightening things there must be one class in which the frightening element can be shown to be something repressed which recurs. This class of frightening things would then constitute the uncanny; and it must be a matter of indifference whether what is uncanny was itself originally frightening or whether it carried some other affect. In the second place, if this is indeed the secret nature of the uncanny, we can understand why linguistic usage has extended das Heimliche into its opposite, das Unheimliche (p. 3680); for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression. This reference to the factor of repression enables us, furthermore, to understand Schelling’s definition of the uncanny as something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.

¹ Cf. my book Totem and Taboo (1912-13), Essay III, ‘Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts’, where the following footnote will be found: ‘We appear to attribute an "uncanny" quality to impressions that seek to confirm the omnipotence of thoughts and the animistic mode of thinking in general, after we have reached a stage at which, in our judgement, we have abandoned such beliefs.’

The 'Uncanny'

3692

It only remains for us to test our new hypothesis on one or two more examples of the uncanny.

Many people experience the feeling in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts. As we have seen some languages in use to-day can only render the German expression ‘an unheimlich house’ by ‘a haunted house’. We might indeed have begun our investigation with this example, perhaps the most striking of all, of something uncanny, but we refrained from doing so because the uncanny in it is too much intermixed with what is purely gruesome and is in part overlaid by it. There is scarcely any other matter, however, upon which our thoughts and feelings have changed so little since the very earliest times, and in which discarded forms have been so completely preserved under a thin disguise, as our relation to death. Two things account for our conservatism: the strength of our original emotional reaction to death and the insufficiency of our scientific knowledge about it. Biology has not yet been able to decide whether death is the inevitable fate of every living being or whether it is only a regular but yet perhaps avoidable event in life. It is true that the statement ‘All men are mortal’ is paraded in text-books of logic as an example of a general proposition; but no human being really grasps it, and our unconscious has as little use now as it ever had for the idea of its own mortality. Religions continue to dispute the importance of the undeniable fact of individual death and to postulate a life after death; civil governments still believe that they cannot maintain moral order among the living if they do not uphold the prospect of a better life hereafter as a recompense for mundane existence. In our great cities, placards announce lectures that undertake to tell us how to get into touch with the souls of the departed; and it cannot be denied that not a few of the most able and penetrating minds among our men of science have come to the conclusion, especially towards the close of their own lives, that a contact of this kind is not impossible. Since almost all of us still think as savages do on this topic, it is no matter for surprise that the primitive fear of the dead is still so strong within us and always ready to come to the surface on any provocation. Most likely our fear still implies the old belief that the dead man becomes the enemy of his survivor and seeks to carry him off to share his new life with him. Considering our unchanged attitude towards death, we might rather enquire what has become of the repression, which is the necessary condition of a primitive feeling recurring in the shape of something uncanny. But repression is there, too. All supposedly educated people have ceased to believe officially that the dead can become visible as spirits, and have made any such appearances dependent on improbable and remote conditions; their emotional attitude towards their dead, moreover, once a highly ambiguous and ambivalent one, has been toned down in the higher strata of the mind into an unambiguous feeling of piety.¹

¹ Cf. Totem and Taboo.

The 'Uncanny'

3693

We have now only a few remarks to add - for animism, magic and sorcery, the omnipotence of thoughts, man’s attitude to death, involuntary repetition and the castration complex comprise practically all the factors which turn something frightening into something uncanny.

We can also speak of a living person as uncanny, and we do so when we ascribe evil intentions to him. But that is not all; in addition to this we must feel that his intentions to harm us are going to be carried out with the help of special powers. A good instance of this is the ‘Gettatore’, that uncanny figure of Romanic superstition which Schaeffer, with intuitive poetic feeling and profound psycho-analytic understanding, has transformed into a sympathetic character in his Josef Montfort. But the question of these secret powers brings us back again to the realm of animism. It was the pious Gretchen’s intuition that Mephistopheles possessed secret powers of this kind that made him so uncanny to her.

Sie fühlt dass ich ganz sicher ein Genie,

Vielleicht sogar der Teufel bin.¹

The uncanny effect of epilepsy and of madness has the same origin. The layman sees in them the working of forces hitherto unsuspected in his fellow-men, but at the same time he is dimly aware of them in remote corners of his own being. The Middle Ages quite consistently ascribed all such maladies to the influence of demons, and in this their psychology was almost correct. Indeed, I should not be surprised to hear that psycho-analysis, which is concerned with laying bare these hidden forces, has itself become uncanny to many people for that very reason. In one case, after I had succeeded - though none too rapidly - in effecting a cure in a girl who had been an invalid for many years, I myself heard this view expressed by the patient’s mother long after her recovery.

¹ [She feels that surely I’m a genius now, -

Perhaps the very Devil indeed!]

The 'Uncanny'

3694

Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist, as in a fairy tale of Hauff’s, feet which dance by themselves, as in the book by Schaeffer which I mentioned above - all these have something peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when, as in the last instance, they prove capable of independent activity in addition. As we already know, this kind of uncanniness springs from its proximity to the castration complex. To some people the idea of being buried alive by mistake is the most uncanny thing of all. And yet psycho-analysis has taught us that this terrifying phantasy is only a transformation of another phantasy which had originally nothing terrifying about it at all, but was qualified by a certain lasciviousness - the phantasy, I mean, of intra-uterine existence.

There is one more point of general application which I should like to add, though, strictly speaking, it has been included in what has already been said about animism and modes of working of the mental apparatus that have been surmounted; for I think it deserves special emphasis. This is that an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes, and so on. It is this factor which contributes not a little to the uncanny effect attaching to magical practices. The infantile element in this, which also dominates the minds of neurotics, is the over-accentuation of psychical reality in comparison with material reality - a feature closely allied to the belief in the omnipotence of thoughts. In the middle of the isolation of war-time a number of the English Strand Magazine fell into my hands; and, among other somewhat redundant matter, I read a story about a young married couple who move into a furnished house in which there is a curiously shaped table with carvings of crocodiles on it. Towards evening an intolerable and very specific smell begins to pervade the house; they stumble over something in the dark; they seem to see a vague form gliding over the stairs - in short, we are given to understand that the presence of the table causes ghostly crocodiles to haunt the place, or that the wooden monsters come to life in the dark, or something of the sort. It was a naïve enough story, but the uncanny feeling it produced was quite remarkable.

To conclude this collection of examples, which is certainly not complete, I will relate an instance taken from psycho-analytic experience; if it does not rest upon mere coincidence, it furnishes a beautiful confirmation of our theory of the uncanny. It often happens that neurotic men declare that they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs. This unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the former Heim of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning. There is a joking saying that ‘Love is home-sickness’; and whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, while he is still dreaming: ‘this place is familiar to me, I’ve been here before’, we may interpret the place as being his mother’s genitals or her body. In this case too, then, the unheimlich is what was once heimlich, familiar; the prefix ‘un’ is the token of repression.

The 'Uncanny'

3695

III

In the course of this discussion the reader will have felt certain doubts arising in his mind; and he must now have an opportunity of collecting them and bringing them forward.

It may be true that the uncanny is something which is secretly familiar, which has undergone repression and then returned from it, and that everything that is uncanny fulfils this condition. But the selection of material on this basis does not enable us to solve the problem of the uncanny. For our proposition is clearly not convertible. Not everything that fulfils this condition - not everything that recalls repressed desires and surmounted modes of thinking belonging to the prehistory of the individual and of the race - is on that account uncanny.

Nor shall we conceal the fact that for almost every example adduced in support of our hypothesis one may be found which rebuts it. The story of the severed hand in Hauff’s fairy tale certainly has an uncanny effect, and we have traced that effect back to the castration complex; but most readers will probably agree with me in judging that no trace of uncanniness is provoked by Herodotus’s story of the treasure of Rhampsinitus, in which the master-thief, whom the princess tries to hold fast by the hand, leaves his brother’s severed hand behind with her instead. Again, the prompt fulfilment of the wishes of Polycrates undoubtedly affects us in the same uncanny way as it did the king of Egypt; yet our own fairy stories are crammed with instantaneous wish-fulfilments which produce no uncanny effect whatever. In the story of ‘The Three Wishes’, the woman is tempted by the savoury smell of a sausage to wish that she might have one too, and in an instant it lies on a plate before her. In his annoyance at her hastiness her husband wishes it may hang on her nose. And there it is, dangling from her nose. All this is very striking but not in the least uncanny. Fairy tales quite frankly adopt the animistic standpoint of the omnipotence of thoughts and wishes, and yet I cannot think of any genuine fairy story which has anything uncanny about it. We have heard that it is in the highest degree uncanny when an inanimate object - a picture or a doll - comes to life; nevertheless in Hans Andersen’s stories the household utensils, furniture and tin soldiers are alive, yet nothing could well be more remote from the uncanny. And we should hardly call it uncanny when Pygmalion’s beautiful statue comes to life.

The 'Uncanny'

3696

Apparent death and the re-animation of the dead have been represented as most uncanny themes. But things of this sort too are very common in fairy stories. Who would be so bold as to call it uncanny, for instance, when Snow-White opens her eyes once more? And the resuscitation of the dead in accounts of miracles, as in the New Testament, elicits feelings quite unrelated to the uncanny. Then, too, the theme that achieves such an indubitably uncanny effect, the unintended recurrence of the same thing, serves other and quite different purposes in another class of cases. We have already come across one example in which it is employed to call up a feeling of the comic; and we could multiply instances of this kind. Or again, it works as a means of emphasis, and so on. And once more: what is the origin of the uncanny effect of silence, darkness and solitude? Do not these factors point to the part played by danger in the genesis of what is uncanny, notwithstanding that in children these same factors are the most frequent determinants of the expression of fear? And are we after all justified in entirely ignoring intellectual uncertainty as a factor, seeing that we have admitted its importance in relation to death?

It is evident therefore, that we must be prepared to admit that there are other elements besides those which we have so far laid down as determining the production of uncanny feelings. We might say that these preliminary results have satisfied psycho-analytic interest in the problem of the uncanny, and that what remains probably calls for an aesthetic enquiry. But that would be to open the door to doubts about what exactly is the value of our general contention that the uncanny proceeds from something familiar which has been repressed.

We have noticed one point which may help us to resolve these uncertainties: nearly all the instances that contradict our hypothesis are taken from the realm of fiction, of imaginative writing. This suggests that we should differentiate between the uncanny that we actually experience and the uncanny that we merely picture or read about.

What is experienced as uncanny is much more simply conditioned but comprises far fewer instances. We shall find, I think, that it fits in perfectly with our attempt at a solution, and can be traced back without exception to something familiar that has been repressed. But here, too, we must make a certain important and psychologically significant differentiation in our material, which is best illustrated by turning to suitable examples.

The 'Uncanny'

3697

Let us take the uncanny associated with the omnipotence of thoughts, with the prompt fulfilment of wishes, with secret injurious powers and with the return of the dead. The condition under which the feeling of uncanniness arises here is unmistakable. We - or our primitive forefathers - once believed that these possibilities were realities, and were convinced that they actually happened. Nowadays we no longer believe in them, we have surmounted these modes of thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation. As soon as something actually happens in our lives which seems to confirm the old, discarded beliefs we get a feeling of the uncanny; it is as though we were making a judgement something like this: ‘So, after all, it is true that one can kill a person by the mere wish!’ or, ‘So the dead do live on and appear on the scene of their former activities!’ and so on. Conversely, anyone who has completely and finally rid himself of animistic beliefs will be insensible to this type of the uncanny. The most remarkable coincidences of wish and fulfilment, the most mysterious repetition of similar experiences in a particular place or on a particular date, the most deceptive sights and suspicious noises - none of these things will disconcert him or raise the kind of fear which can be described as ‘a fear of something uncanny’. The whole thing is purely an affair of ‘reality-testing’, a question of the material reality of the phenomena.¹

¹ Since the uncanny effect of a ‘double’ also belongs to this same group it is interesting to observe what the effect is of meeting one’s own image unbidden and unexpected. Ernst Mach has related two such observations in his Analyse der Empfindungen (1900, 3). On the first occasion he was not a little startled when he realized that the face before him was his own. The second time he formed a very unfavourable opinion about the supposed stranger who entered the omnibus, and thought ‘What a shabby-looking school-master that man is who is getting in!’ - I can report a similar adventure. I was sitting alone in my wagon-lit compartment when a more than usually violent jolt of the train swung back the door of the adjoining washing-cabinet, and an elderly gentleman in a dressing-gown and a travelling cap came in. I assumed that in leaving the washing-cabinet, which lay between the two compartments, he had taken the wrong direction and come into my compartment by mistake. Jumping up with the intention of putting him right, I at once realized to my dismay that the intruder was nothing but my own reflection in the looking-glass on the open door. I can still recollect that I thoroughly disliked his appearance. Instead, therefore, of being frightened by our ‘doubles’, both Mach and I simply failed to recognize them as such. Is it not possible, though, that our dislike of them was a vestigial trace of the archaic reaction which feels the ‘double’ to be something uncanny?

The 'Uncanny'

3698

The state of affairs is different when the uncanny proceeds from repressed infantile complexes, from the castration complex, womb-phantasies, etc.; but experiences which arouse this kind of uncanny feeling are not of very frequent occurrence in real life. The uncanny which proceeds from actual experience belongs for the most part to the first group. Nevertheless the distinction between the two is theoretically very important. Where the uncanny comes from infantile complexes the question of material reality does not arise; its place is taken by psychical reality. What is involved is an actual repression of some content of thought and a return of this repressed content, not a cessation of belief in the reality of such a content. We might say that in the one case what had been repressed is a particular ideational content, and in the other the belief in its (material) reality. But this last phrase no doubt extends the term ‘repression’ beyond its legitimate meaning. It would be more correct to take into account a psychological distinction which can be detected here, and to say that the animistic beliefs of civilized people are in a state of having been (to a greater or lesser extent) surmounted. Our conclusion could then be stated thus: an uncanny experience occurs either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed. Finally, we must not let our predilection for smooth solutions and lucid exposition blind us to the fact that these two classes of uncanny experience are not always sharply distinguishable. When we consider that primitive beliefs are most intimately connected with infantile complexes, and are, in fact, based on them, we shall not be greatly astonished to find that the distinction is often a hazy one.

The uncanny as it is depicted in literature, in stories and imaginative productions, merits in truth a separate discussion. Above all, it is a much more fertile province than the uncanny in real life, for it contains the whole of the latter and something more besides, something that cannot be found in real life. The contrast between what has been repressed and what has been surmounted cannot be transposed on to the uncanny in fiction without profound modification; for the realm of phantasy depends for its effect on the fact that its content is not submitted to reality-testing. The somewhat paradoxical result is that in the first place a great deal that is not uncanny in fiction would be so if it happened in real life; and in the second place, that there are many more means of creating uncanny effects in fiction than there are in real life.

The 'Uncanny'

3699

The imaginative writer has this licence among many others, that he can select his world of representation so that it either coincides with the realities we are familiar with or departs from them in what particulars he pleases. We accept his ruling in every case. In fairy tales, for instance, the world of reality is left behind from the very start, and the animistic system of beliefs is frankly adopted. Wish-fulfilments, secret powers, omnipotence of thoughts, animation of inanimate objects, all the elements so common in fairy stories, can exert no uncanny influence here; for, as we have learnt, that feeling cannot arise unless there is a conflict of judgement as to whether things which have been ‘surmounted’ and are regarded as incredible may not, after all, be possible; and this problem is eliminated from the outset by the postulates of the world of fairy tales. Thus we see that fairy stories, which have furnished us with most of the contradictions to our hypothesis of the uncanny, confirm the first part of our proposition - that in the realm of fiction many things are not uncanny which would be so if they happened in real life. In the case of these stories there are other contributory factors, which we shall briefly touch upon later.

The creative writer can also choose a setting which though less imaginary than the world of fairy tales, does yet differ from the real world by admitting superior spiritual beings such as daemonic spirits or ghosts of the dead. So long as they remain within their setting of poetic reality, such figures lose any uncanniness which they might possess. The souls in Dante’s Inferno, or the supernatural apparitions in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth or Julius Caesar, may be gloomy and terrible enough, but they are no more really uncanny than Homer’s jovial world of gods. We adapt our judgement to the imaginary reality imposed on us by the writer, and regard souls, spirits and ghosts as though their existence had the same validity as our own has in material reality. In this case too we avoid all trace of the uncanny.

The situation is altered as soon as the writer pretends to move in the world of common reality. In this case he accepts as well all the conditions operating to produce uncanny feelings in real life; and everything that would have an uncanny effect in reality has it in his story. But in this case he can even increase his effect and multiply it far beyond what could happen in reality, by bringing about events which never or very rarely happen in fact. In doing this he is in a sense betraying us to the superstitiousness which we have ostensibly surmounted; he deceives us by promising to give us the sober truth, and then after all overstepping it. We react to his inventions as we would have reacted to real experiences; by the time we have seen through his trick it is already too late and the author has achieved his object. But it must be added that his success is not unalloyed. We retain a feeling of dissatisfaction, a kind of grudge against the attempted deceit. I have noticed this particularly after reading Schnitzler’s Die Weissagung and similar stories which flirt with the supernatural. However, the writer has one more means which he can use in order to avoid our recalcitrance and at the same time to improve his chances of success. He can keep us in the dark for a long time about the precise nature of the presuppositions on which the world he writes about is based, or he can cunningly and ingeniously avoid any definite information on the point to the last. Speaking generally, however, we find a confirmation of the second part of our proposition - that fiction presents more opportunities for creating uncanny feelings than are possible in real life.

The 'Uncanny'

3700

Strictly speaking, all these complications relate only to that class of the uncanny which proceeds from forms of thought that have been surmounted. The class which proceeds from repressed complexes is more resistant and remains as powerful in fiction as in real experience, subject to one exception. The uncanny belonging to the first class - that proceeding from forms of thought that have been surmounted retains its character not only in experience but in fiction as well, so long as the setting is one of material reality; but where it is given an arbitrary and artificial setting in fiction, it is apt to lose that character.

We have clearly not exhausted the possibilities of poetic licence and the privileges enjoyed by story-writers in evoking or in excluding an uncanny feeling. In the main we adopt an unvarying passive attitude towards real experience and are subject to the influence of our physical environment. But the story-teller has a peculiarly directive power over us; by means of the moods he can put us into, he is able to guide the current of our emotions, to dam it up in one direction and make it flow in another, and he often obtains a great variety of effects from the same material. All this is nothing new, and has doubtless long since been fully taken into account by students of aesthetics. We have drifted into this field of research half involuntarily, through the temptation to explain certain instances which contradicted our theory of the causes of the uncanny. Accordingly we will now return to the examination of a few of those instances.

We have already asked why it is that the severed hand in the story of the treasure of Rhampsinitus has no uncanny effect in the way that the severed hand has in Hauff’s story. The question seems to have gained in importance now that we have recognized that the class of the uncanny which proceeds from repressed complexes is the more resistant of the two. The answer is easy. In the Herodotus story our thoughts are concentrated much more on the superior cunning of the master-thief than on the feelings of the princess. The princess may very well have had an uncanny feeling, indeed she very probably fell into a swoon; but we have no such sensations, for we put ourselves in the thief’s place, not in hers. In Nestroy’s farce, Der Zerrissene, another means is used to avoid any impression of the uncanny in the scene in which the fleeing man, convinced that he is a murderer, lifts up one trap door after another and each time sees what he takes to be the ghost of his victim rising up out of it. He calls out in despair, ‘But I’ve only killed one man. Why this ghastly multiplication?’ We know what went before this scene and do not share his error, so what must be uncanny to him has an irresistibly comic effect on us. Even a ‘real’ ghost, as in Oscar Wilde’s Canterville Ghost, loses all power of at least arousing gruesome feelings in us as soon as the author begins to amuse himself by being ironical about it and allows liberties to be taken with it. Thus we see how independent emotional effects can be of the actual subject-matter in the world of fiction. In fairy stories feelings of fear - including therefore uncanny feelings - are ruled out altogether. We understand this, and that is why we ignore any opportunities we find in them for developing such feelings.

Concerning the factors of silence, solitude and darkness, we can only say that they are actually elements in the production of the infantile anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free. This problem has been discussed from a psycho-analytic point of view elsewhere.

3701

PREFACE TO REIK’S RITUAL: PSYCHO-ANALYTIC STUDIES

(1919)

3702

Intentionally left blank

3703

PREFACE TO REIK’S RITUAL: PSYCHO-ANALYTIC STUDIES

Psycho-analysis was born out of medical necessity. It sprang from the need for bringing help to neurotic patients, who had found no relief through rest-cures, through the arts of hydropathy or through electricity. A most remarkable observation made by Josef Breuer had excited a hope that the more one understood of the hitherto unexplored origin of their symptoms the more extensive would be the help one could afford them. Thus it came about that psycho-analysis, being originally a purely medical technique, was from the first directed towards research, towards the discovery of causal chains at once far-reaching and recondite.

Its further course led it away from the study of the somatic determinants of nervous disease to an extent that was bewildering to physicians. Instead, it was brought into contact with the mental substance of human lives - the lives not only of the sick, but of the healthy, the normal and the supernormal. It had to deal with emotions and passions, and most of all with those which the poets never tire of depicting and celebrating - the emotions of love. It learnt to recognize the power of memories, the unsuspected importance of the years of childhood in shaping the adult, and the strength of wishes, which falsify human judgements and lay down fixed lines for human endeavour.

For a time psycho-analysis seemed fated to merge into psychology without being able to show why the psychology of the sick differed from that of the normal. In the course of its advance, however, it came up against the problem of dreams, which are abnormal products of the mind created by normal men under regularly recurrent physiological conditions. When psycho-analysis had solved the problem of dreams, it had discovered in unconscious psychical processes the common ground in which the highest and the lowest of mental impulses have their roots and from which spring the most normal as well as the most morbid and erratic of mental productions. The new picture of the workings of the mind began to grow ever clearer and more complete. It was a picture of obscure instinctual forces organic in origin, striving towards inborn aims, and, above them, of an agency comprising more highly organized mental structures - acquisitions of human evolution made under the impact of human history -, an agency which has taken over portions of the instinctual impulses, has developed them further or has even directed them towards higher aims, but which in any case binds them firmly and manipulates their energy to suit its own purposes. This higher organization, however, which is known to us as the ego, has rejected another portion of these same elementary instinctual impulses as being unserviceable because they cannot be fitted into the organic unity of the individual or because they rebel against the individual’s cultural aims. The ego is not in a position to exterminate these unsubdued mental powers, but it turns its back on them, lets them remain at the lowest psychological level, defends itself from their demands by the energetic erection of protective and antithetical barriers or seeks to come to terms with them by means of substitutive satisfactions. These instincts which have fallen victim to repression - untamed and indestructible, yet inhibited from any kind of activity - together with their primitive mental representatives, constitute the mental underworld, the nucleus of the true unconscious, and are at every moment ready to assert their demands and, by hook or by crook, to force their way forward to satisfaction. To this is due the instability of the proud superstructure of the mind, the emergence at night of the proscribed and repressed material in the form of dreams, and the tendency to fall ill with neuroses and psychoses as soon as the balance of power between the ego and the repressed shifts to the disadvantage of the ego.

Preface To Reik's Ritual: Psycho-Analytic Studies

3704

A little reflection was bound to show that it would be impossible to restrict to the provinces of dreams and nervous disorders a view such as this of the life of the human mind. If that view has hit upon a truth, it must apply equally to normal mental events, and even the highest achievements of the human spirit must bear a demonstrable relation to the factors found in pathology - to repression, to the efforts at mastering the unconscious and to the possibilities of satisfying the primitive instincts. There was thus an irresistible temptation and, indeed, a scientific duty, to apply the research methods of psycho-analysis, in regions far remote from its native soil, to the various mental sciences. And indeed psycho-analytic work upon patients itself pointed persistently in the direction of this new task, for it was obvious that the forms assumed by the different neuroses echoed the most highly admired productions of our culture. Thus hysterics are undoubtedly imaginative artists, even if they express their phantasies mimetically in the main and without considering their intelligibility to other people; the ceremonials and prohibitions of obsessional neurotics drive us to suppose that they have created a private religion of their own; and the delusions of paranoics have an unpalatable external similarity and internal kinship to the systems of our philosophers. It is impossible to escape the conclusion that these patients are, in an asocial fashion, making the very attempts at solving their conflicts and appeasing their pressing needs which, when those attempts are carried out in a fashion that is acceptable to the majority, are known as poetry, religion and philosophy.

In 1913 Otto Rank and Hanns Sachs, in an extremely interesting work, brought together the results which had been achieved up to that time in the application of psycho-analysis to the mental sciences. The most easily accessible branches of those sciences seem to be mythology and the history of literature and religion. No final formula has yet been found enabling us to give an appropriate place to myths in this connection. Otto Rank, in a large volume on the incest complex (1912), has produced evidence of the surprising fact that the choice of subject matter, especially for dramatic works, is principally determined by the ambit of what psycho-analysis has termed the ‘Oedipus complex’. By working it over with the greatest variety of modifications, distortions and disguises, the dramatist seeks to deal with his own most personal relations to this emotional theme. It is in attempting to master the Oedipus complex - that is to say, a person’s emotional attitude towards his family, or in a narrower sense towards his father and mother - that individual neurotics come to grief, and for this reason that complex habitually forms the nucleus of their neuroses. It does not owe its importance to any unintelligible conjunction; the emphasis laid upon the relation of children to their parents is an expression of the biological facts that the young of the human race pass through a long period of dependence and are slow in reaching maturity, as well as that their capacity for love undergoes a complicated course of development. Consequently, the overcoming of the Oedipus complex coincides with the most efficient way of mastering the archaic, animal heritage of humanity. It is true that that heritage comprises all the forces that are required for the subsequent cultural development of the individual, but they must first be sorted out and worked over. This archaic heirloom is not fit to be used for the purposes of civilized social life in the form in which it is inherited by the individual.

Preface To Reik's Ritual: Psycho-Analytic Studies

3705

To find the starting-point for the psycho-analytic view of religious life we must go a step further. What is to-day the heritage of the individual was once a new acquisition and has been handed on from one to another of a long series of generations. Thus the Oedipus complex too may have had stages of development, and the study of prehistory may enable us to trace them out. Investigation suggests that life in the human family took a quite different form in those remote days from that with which we are now familiar. And this idea is supported by findings based on observations of contemporary primitive races. If the prehistoric and ethnological material on this subject is worked over psycho-analytically, we arrive at an unexpectedly precise result: namely that God the Father once walked upon earth in bodily form and exercised his sovereignty as chieftain of the primal human horde until his sons united to slay him. It emerges further that this crime of liberation and the reactions to it had as their result the appearance of the first social ties, the basic moral restrictions and the oldest form of religion, totemism. But the later religions too have the same content, and on the one hand they are concerned with obliterating the traces of that crime or with expiating it by bringing forward other solutions of the struggle between the father and sons, while on the other hand they cannot avoid repeating once more the elimination of the father. Incidentally, an echo of this monstrous event, which overshadowed the whole course of human development, is also to be found in myths.

This hypothesis, which is founded on the observations of Robertson Smith and was developed by me in Totem and Taboo, has been taken by Theodor Reik as the basis of his studies on the problems of the psychology of religion, of which this is the first volume. In accordance with psycho-analytic technique these studies start out from hitherto unexplained details of religious life, and by means of their elucidation gain access to the fundamental postulates and ultimate aims of religions; moreover they keep steadily in view the relation between prehistoric man and contemporary primitive societies as well as the connection between the products of civilization and the substitutive structures of neurotics. In conclusion, I would draw attention to the author’s own introduction and express my belief that his work will recommend itself to the notice of specialists in the branch of knowledge with which it deals.

3706

A NOTE ON PSYCHO-ANALYTIC PUBLICATIONS AND PRIZES

(1919)

In the Autumn of 1918 a member of the Budapest Psycho-Analytical Society informed me that a Fund had been set aside for cultural purposes from the profits made by industrial undertakings during the war. The decision as to its use lay jointly with himself and the Chief Burgermaster of the city of Budapest, Dr. Stephan Bárczy. They had agreed to devote the considerable sum of money concerned to the purposes of the psycho-analytic movement and to hand over its administration to me. I accepted this commission, and I now fulfil my duty of offering public thanks to the Chief Burgermaster (who soon afterwards received the Psycho-Analytical Congress in Budapest with so much honour) as well as to the anonymous member who has performed such a high service to the cause of psycho-analysis.

The Fund thus placed at my disposal, which was given my name, was allotted by me to the foundation of an international psycho-analytic publishing business. I considered that in the present circumstances this was our most important need.

Unlike many other scientific undertakings, our two periodical publications, the Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse and Imago, did not come to an end during the war. We succeeded in keeping them in existence, but in consequence of the increasing difficulties, closing of frontiers and rise in prices which accompanied the war, it became necessary to reduce them considerably in size and to allow undesirably long intervals to elapse between the publication of successive issues. Of the four editors of the two journals (Ferenczi, Jones, Rank and Sachs) one, being a subject of an enemy State, was cut off from us; two others had joined the forces and were fully engaged in their military duties; only Dr. Sachs was left at work, and he self-sacrificingly assumed the whole burden. A few of the local psycho-analytical societies found it necessary to suspend their meetings entirely; the number of contributors shrank, as did that of the subscribers. It was easy to foresee that the publisher’s natural dissatisfaction would soon put in question the continuance of the journals to which we attached so much importance. Yet numerous indications, which reached us even from the front-line trenches, pointed to the fact that contemporary interest in psycho-analysis had not diminished. I think I was justified in my intention to put an end to these difficulties and dangers by the foundation of an international psycho-analytic publishing business. This publishing house is already in existence to-day, as a limited liability company; it is under the direction of Dr. Otto Rank, who has been for so many years secretary of the Vienna Society and co-editor of the two psycho-analytic journals, and who has returned after many years’ absence on active service to his earlier work in the service of psycho-analysis.

A Note On Psycho-Analytic Publications And Prizes

3707

The new publishing house, supported by the funds of the Budapest endowment, has assumed the task of ensuring the regular appearance and reliable distribution of the two journals. As soon as the difficulties of external circumstances permit, it is intended that they shall be restored to their former dimensions, and that these dimensions may if necessary be increased, without any extra charge to the subscribers. But in addition to this, and without waiting for an improvement, the publishing house will proceed to print books and pamphlets dealing with the field of medical and applied psycho-analysis; and since it is not a profit-making concern, it will be able to pay better heed to the interests of authors than is usually done by commercial publishers.

Simultaneously with the establishment of the psycho-analytic publishing house it was decided to award annual prizes out of the interest on the Budapest endowment, to two outstanding pieces of work, one each in the field of medical and of applied psycho-analysis. These prizes - to the amount of 1,000 Austrian Kronen - are intended to be awarded, not to authors, but to individual works, so that there will be a possibility of the same author winning a prize repeatedly. The decision on the question of which among the writings published during a particular period are to receive prizes has not been transferred to a committee but will be kept in the hands of a single person, the Administrator of the fund for the time being; otherwise, if a committee of adjudicators were to be formed of the most experienced and discerning analysts, their own writings would have to be excluded from consideration, and the scheme might easily fail in its intention of distinguishing exemplary achievements in psycho-analytic literature. If the adjudicator finds himself hesitating between two works of almost equal value, he will be empowered to divide the prize between them, without the award of a half-prize implying any less appreciation of the work in question.

It is intended that these prizes shall in general be awarded every year and that the choice should lie between the whole of the psycho-analytically important literature published during that period, irrespectively of whether the author of the work in question is a Member of the International Psycho-Analytical Association.

The first prizes have already been awarded and relate to papers published during the period of the war, from 1914 to 1918. The prize for medical psycho-analysis has been divided between Karl Abraham’s paper ‘The First Pregenital Stage of the Libido’ (1916) and Ernst Simmel’s pamphlet Kriegsneurosen und psychisches Trauma (1918). The prize for applied psycho-analysis has been awarded to Theodor Reik’s paper ‘Die Pubertätsriten der Wilden’ (1915).

FREUD.

A Note On Psycho-Analytic Publications And Prizes

3708

[Two further announcements on the same subject appeared subsequently: ‘Preiszuteilungen’ (Int. Z. Psychoanal., 7, 381 [1921]), and ‘Preisausschreibung’ (ibid., 8, 527 [1922]).]

‘AWARD OF PRIZES

‘A recent gift made by Dr. Max Eitingon, the director of the Berlin Clinic, has made it possible for me to revive the award of prizes (first made in 1919) for psycho-analytic writings of peculiar merit. The prize for medical psycho-analysis has been awarded to A. Stärcke (of Den Dolder, Holland) for his two publications "Der Kastrationskomplex" and "Psychoanalyse und Psychiatrie" (both of them Congress papers), of which the first appeared in the current volume of this periodical and the second as a supplementary issue. The prize for applied psycho-analysis has gone to Dr. G. Róheim (of Budapest) for his paper "Das Selbst" and his Congress paper on Australian Totemism. The amount of each prize was one thousand marks.

FREUD.’

‘PRIZE OFFER

‘At the Seventh International Psycho-Analytical Congress, in Berlin, I laid down as the subject for a prize: "The Relation between Analytic Technique and Analytic Theory." The questions to be discussed are how far the technique has influenced the theory and how far they assist or hinder each other at the present time.

‘Works dealing with this subject should be sent to me at the address given below before May 1, 1923. They should be legibly typewritten. They should have a motto attached and should be accompanied by a sealed envelope enclosing the author’s name. They must be written either in German or English. In judging the works submitted I shall have the assistance of Dr. K. Abraham and Dr. M. Eitingon.

‘The prize amounts to 20,000 marks at the value current at the time of the Congress.

‘Berggasse 19, Vienna IX.

FREUD.’

3709

JAMES J. PUTNAM

(1919)

Among the first pieces of news to reach us after the raising of the barrier separating us from the Anglo-Saxon countries comes the painful report of the death of Putnam, the President of the great pan-American psycho-analytic group. He lived to be over seventy-two years old, remained intellectually active to the end, and died peacefully of heart-failure during his sleep in November 1918. Putnam, who was until a few years ago Professor of Neuropathology at Harvard University, was the great support of psycho-analysis in America. His numerous theoretical works (a few of which made their first appearance in the Internationale Zeitschrift) have, by their clarity and wealth of ideas, and by the decisively favourable line they took, contributed immensely towards creating the high esteem which psycho-analysis now enjoys in America both in psychiatric teaching and in public opinion. His example may have been no less effective. He was universally respected for his unimpeachable character, and it was recognized that he was influenced only by the highest ethical considerations. His closer personal acquaintances could not escape the conclusion that he was one of those happily compensated people of the obsessional type for whom what is noble is second nature and for whom any concession to unworthiness has become an impossibility.

J. J. Putnam’s personal appearance was made familiar to European analysts through the part he took in the Weimar Congress of 1911. The editor of the Zeitschrift hopes to include in its next issue a portrait of our honoured friend and a detailed appreciation of his scientific achievements.

[Freud also translated one of Putnam’s papers (1910) anonymously and added the following footnote to the translation (Zbl. Psychoan., 1 (1911), 137): ‘This lecture delivered by the Professor of Neurology at Boston University is offered to our readers as an offset to the many unjust and uncomprehending attacks that are levelled against psycho-analysis, in place of counter-criticisms which might easily lead to embittered feelings. J. Putnam is not only one of the most eminent neurologists in America but also a man everywhere greatly respected for his unimpeachable character and high moral standards. Although he has left his youth far behind him, he took his open stand last year in the front rank of the champions of psycho-analysis.’]

3710

VICTOR TAUSK

(1919)

Among the sacrifices, fortunately few in number, claimed by the war from the ranks of psycho-analysis, we must count Dr. Victor Tausk. This rarely-gifted man, a Vienna specialist in nervous diseases, took his own life before peace was signed.

Dr. Tausk, who was only in his forty-second year, had for more than ten years been one of the closer circle of Freud’s followers. Originally a lawyer by profession, he had for some considerable time been acting as a magistrate in Bosnia when, under the stress of severe personal troubles, he abandoned his career and turned to journalism, for which he was peculiarly suited by his wide general education. After working for some time as a journalist in Berlin, he came to Vienna in the same capacity. Here he became acquainted with psycho-analysis and soon decided to devote himself to it entirely. Although he was to longer a young man and was the father of a family, he was not deterred by the great difficulties and sacrifices involved in yet another change in profession, and one which must necessitate an interruption of several years before he could once more earn his living. For he embarked on the tedious study of medicine only as a means to enable him to carry on a psycho-analytic practice.

Shortly before the outbreak of the World War, Tausk had obtained his second doctor’s degree and set up in Vienna as a nerve-specialist. Here, after a relatively short time, he had begun building up a considerable practice and had achieved some excellent results. These activities promised the rising young doctor full satisfaction as well as a means of support; but he was all at once violently torn from them by the war. He was called up immediately for active service and soon promoted to senior rank. He carried out his medical duties with devotion in the various theatres of war in the North and in the Balkans (finally in Belgrade), and received official commendation. It is also greatly to his honour that during the war he threw himself wholeheartedly, and with complete disregard of the consequences, into exposing the numerous abuses which so many doctors unfortunately tolerated in silence or for which they even shared the responsibility.

Victor Tausk

3711

The stresses of many years’ service in the field could not fail to exercise a severely damaging psychological effect on so intensely conscientious a man. At the last Psycho-Analytical Congress, which we held in Budapest in September 1918 and which brought analysts together once more after many years of separation, Dr. Tausk, who had long been suffering from physical ill-health, was already showing signs of unusual nervous irritability. When, soon afterwards, in the late autumn of last year, he came to the end of his military service and returned to Vienna, he was faced for the third time, in his state of mental exhaustion, with the hard task of building up a new existence - this time under the most unfavourable internal and external conditions. In addition to this, Dr. Tausk, who has left two grown-up sons to whom he was a devoted father, was on the brink of contracting a new marriage. He was no longer able to cope with the many demands imposed on him in his ailing state by harsh reality. On the morning of July 3rd he put an end to his life.

Dr. Tausk had been a member of the Vienna Psycho Analytical Society since the autumn of 1909. He was well known to the readers of this journal from his numerous contributions, which were distinguished by sharp observation, sound judgement and a particular clearness of expression. These writings exhibit plainly the philosophical training which the author was able so happily to combine with the exact methods of science. His strong need to establish things on a philosophical foundation and to achieve epistemological clarity compelled him to formulate, and seek as well to master, the whole profundity and comprehensive meaning of the very difficult problems involved. Perhaps he sometimes went too far in this direction, in his impetuous urge for investigation. Perhaps the time was not yet ripe for laying such general foundations as these for the young science of psycho-analysis. The psycho-analytic consideration of philosophical problems, for which Tausk showed special aptitude, promises to become more and more fruitful. One of his last works, on the psycho-analysis of the function of judgement, which was delivered at the Budapest Congress and has not yet been published, gives evidence of this direction taken by his interest.

Victor Tausk

3712

In addition to his gift for philosophy and attraction towards it, Tausk possessed a quite exceptional medico-psychological capacity and produced some excellent work in that field too. His clinical activities, to which we owe valuable researches into various psychoses (e.g. melancholia and schizophrenia) justified the fairest hopes and gave him the prospective appointment to a University Lectureship for which he had applied.

Psycho-analysis was particularly indebted to Dr. Tausk, who was a brilliant speaker, for the courses of lectures which he gave over a period of many years to large audiences of both sexes and in which he introduced them to the principles and problems of psycho-analysis. His audiences were able to admire the clarity and didactic skill of his lectures no less than the profundity with which he handled individual topics.

All those who knew him well valued his straightforward character, his honesty towards himself and towards others and the superiority of a nature which was distinguished by a striving for nobility and perfection. His passionate temperament found expression in sharp, and sometimes too sharp, criticisms, which however were combined with a brilliant gift for exposition. These personal qualities exercised a great attraction on many people, and some, too, may have been repelled by them. No one, however, could escape the impression that here was a man of importance.

How much psycho-analysis meant for him, even up to his last moments, is shown by letters which he left behind, in which he expressed his unreserved belief in it and his hope that it will find recognition at a not too distant date. There is no doubt that this man, of whom our science and his friends in Vienna have been prematurely robbed, has contributed to that aim. He is sure of an honourable memory in the history of psycho-analysis and its earliest struggles.

3713

BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE

(1920)

3714

Intentionally left blank

3715

BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE

I

In the theory of psycho-analysis we have no hesitation in assuming that the course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle. We believe, that is to say, that the course of those events is invariably set in motion by an unpleasurable tension, and that it takes a direction such that its final outcome coincides with a lowering of that tension - that is, with an avoidance of unpleasure or a production of pleasure. In taking that course into account in our consideration of the mental processes which are the subject of our study, we are introducing an ‘economic’ point of view into our work; and if,in describing those processes, we try to estimate this ‘economic’ factor in addition to the ‘topographical’ and ‘dynamic’ ones, we shall, I think, be giving the most complete description of them of which we can at present conceive, and one which deserves to be distinguished by the term ‘metapsychological’.

It is of no concern to us in this connection to enquire how far, with this hypothesis of the pleasure principle, we have approached or adopted any particular, historically established, philosophical system. We have arrived at these speculative assumptions in an attempt to describe and to account for the facts of daily observation in our field of study. Priority and originality are not among the aims that psycho-analytic work sets itself; and the impressions that underlie the hypothesis of the pleasure principle are so obvious that they can scarcely be overlooked. On the other hand we would readily express our gratitude to any philosophical or psychological theory which was able to inform us of the meaning of the feelings of pleasure and unpleasure which act so imperatively upon us. But on this point we are, alas, offered nothing to our purpose. This is the most obscure and inaccessible region of the mind, and, since we cannot avoid contact with it, the least rigid hypothesis, it seems to me, will be the best. We have decided to relate pleasure and unpleasure to the quantity of excitation that is present in the mind but is not in any way ‘bound’; and to relate them in such a manner that unpleasure corresponds to an increase in the quantity of excitation and pleasure to a diminution. What we are implying by this is not a simple relation between the strength of the feelings of pleasure and unpleasure and the corresponding modifications in the quantity of excitation; least of all - in view of all we have been taught by psycho-physiology - are we suggesting any directly proportional ratio: the factor that determines the feeling is probably the amount of increase or diminution in the quantity of excitation in a given period of time. Experiment might possibly play a part here; but it is not advisable for us analysts to go into the problem further so long as our way is not pointed by quite definite observations

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3716

We cannot, however, remain indifferent to the discovery that an investigator of such penetration as G. T. Fechner held a view on the subject of pleasure and unpleasure which coincides in all essentials with the one that has been forced upon us by psycho-analytic work. Fechner’s statement is to be found contained in a small work, Einige Ideen zur Schöpfungs- und Entwicklungsgeschichte der Organismen, 1873 (Part XI, Supplement, 94), and reads as follows: ‘In so far as conscious impulses always have some relation to pleasure or unpleasure, pleasure and unpleasure too can be regarded as having a psycho-physical relation to conditions of stability and instability. This provides a basis for a hypothesis into which I propose to enter in greater detail elsewhere. According to this hypothesis, every psycho-physical motion rising above the threshold of consciousness is attended by pleasure in proportion as, beyond a certain limit, it approximates to complete stability, and is attended by unpleasure in proportion as, beyond a certain limit, it deviates from complete stability; while between the two limits, which may be described as qualitative thresholds of pleasure and unpleasure, there is a certain margin of aesthetic indifference. . . .’

The facts which have caused us to believe in the dominance of the pleasure principle in mental life also find expression in the hypothesis that the mental apparatus endeavours to keep the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible or at least to keep it constant. This latter hypothesis is only another way of stating the pleasure principle; for if the work of the mental apparatus is directed towards keeping the quantity of excitation low, then anything that is calculated to increase that quantity is bound to be felt as adverse to the functioning of the apparatus, that is as unpleasurable. The pleasure principle follows from the principle of constancy: actually the latter principle was inferred from the facts which forced us to adopt the pleasure principle. Moreover, a more detailed discussion will show that the tendency which we thus attribute to the mental apparatus is subsumed as a special case under Fechner’s principle of the ‘tendency towards stability’, to which he has brought the feelings of pleasure and unpleasure into relation.

It must be pointed out, however, that strictly speaking it is incorrect to talk of the dominance of the pleasure principle over the course of mental processes. If such a dominance existed, the immense majority of our mental processes would have to be accompanied by pleasure or to lead to pleasure, whereas universal experience completely contradicts any such conclusion. The most that can be said, therefore, is that there exists in the mind a strong tendency towards the pleasure principle, but that that tendency is opposed by certain other forces or circumstances, so that the final outcome cannot always be in harmony with the tendency towards pleasure. We may compare what Fechner (1873, 90) remarks on a similar point: ‘Since however a tendency towards an aim does not imply that the aim is attained, and since in general the aim is attainable only by approximations. . . .’

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3717

If we turn now to the question of what circumstances are able to prevent the pleasure principle from being carried into effect, we find ourselves once more on secure and well-trodden ground and, in framing our answer, we have at our disposal a rich fund of analytic experience.

The first example of the pleasure principle being inhibited in this way is a familiar one which occurs with regularity. We know that the pleasure principle is proper to a primary method of working on the part of the mental apparatus, but that, from the point of view of the self-preservation of the organism among the difficulties of the external world, it is from the very outset inefficient and even highly dangerous. Under the influence of the ego’s instincts of self-preservation, the pleasure principle is replaced by the reality principle. This latter principle does not abandon the intention of ultimately obtaining pleasure, but it nevertheless demands and carries into effect the postponement of satisfaction, the abandonment of a number of possibilities of gaining satisfaction and the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure. The pleasure principle long persists, however, as the method of working employed by the sexual instincts, which are so hard to ‘educate’, and, starting from those instincts, or in the ego itself, it often succeeds in overcoming the reality principle, to the detriment of the organism as a whole.

There can be no doubt, however, that the replacement of the pleasure principle by the reality principle can only be made responsible for a small number, and by no means the most intense, of unpleasurable experiences. Another occasion of the release of unpleasure, which occurs with no less regularity, is to be found in the conflicts and dissensions that take place in the mental apparatus while the ego is passing through its development into more highly composite organizations. Almost all the energy with which the apparatus is filled arises from its innate instinctual impulses. But these are not all allowed to reach the same phases of development. In the course of things it happens again and again that individual instincts or parts of instincts turn out to be incompatible in their aims or demands with the remaining ones, which are able to combine into the inclusive unity of the ego. The former are then split off from this unity by the process of repression, held back at lower levels of psychical development and cut off, to begin with, from the possibility of satisfaction. If they succeed subsequently, as can so easily happen with repressed sexual instincts, in struggling through, by roundabout paths, to a direct or to a substitutive satisfaction, that event, which would in other cases have been an opportunity for pleasure, is felt by the ego as unpleasure. As a consequence of the old conflict which ended in repression, a new breach has occurred in the pleasure principle at the very time when certain instincts were endeavouring, in accordance with the principle, to obtain fresh pleasure. The details of the process by which repression turns a possibility of pleasure into a source of unpleasure are not yet clearly understood or cannot be clearly represented; but there is no doubt that all neurotic unpleasure is of that kind-pleasure that cannot be felt as such.¹

The two sources of unpleasure which I have just indicated are very far from covering the majority of our unpleasurable experiences. But as regards the remainder it can be asserted with some show of justification that their presence does not contradict the dominance of the pleasure principle. Most of the unpleasure that we experience is perceptual unpleasure. It may be perception of pressure by unsatisfied instincts; or it may be external perception which is either distressing in itself or which excites unpleasurable expectations in the mental apparatus - that is, which is recognized by it as a ‘danger’. The reaction to these instinctual demands, a reaction which constitutes the proper activity of the mental apparatus, can then be directed in a correct manner by the pleasure principle or the reality principle by which the former is modified. This does not seem to necessitate any far-reaching limitation of the pleasure principle. Nevertheless the investigation of the mental reaction to external danger is precisely in a position to produce new material and raise fresh questions bearing upon our present problem.

¹ No doubt the essential point is that pleasure and unpleasure, being conscious feelings, are attached to the ego

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3718

II

A condition has long been known and described which occurs after severe mechanical concussions, railway disasters and other accidents involving a risk to life; it has been given the name of ‘traumatic neurosis’. The terrible war which has just ended gave rise to a great number of illnesses of this kind, but it at least put an end to the temptation to attribute the cause of the disorder to organic lesions of the nervous system brought about by mechanical force.¹ The symptomatic picture presented by traumatic neurosis approaches that of hysteria in the wealth of its similar motor symptoms, but surpasses it as a rule in its strongly marked signs of subjective ailment (in which it resembles hypochondria or melancholia) as well as in the evidence it gives of a far more comprehensive general enfeeblement and disturbance of the mental capacities. No complete explanation has yet been reached either of war neuroses or of the traumatic neuroses of peace. In the case of the war neuroses, the fact that the same symptoms sometimes came about without the intervention of any gross mechanical force seemed at once enlightening and bewildering. In the case of the ordinary traumatic neuroses two characteristics emerge prominently: first, that the chief weight in their causation seems to rest upon the factor of surprise, of fright; and secondly, that a wound or injury inflicted simultaneously works as a rule against the development of a neurosis. ‘Fright’, ‘fear’ and ‘anxiety’ are improperly used as synonymous expressions; they are in fact capable of clear distinction in their relation to danger. ‘Anxiety’ describes a particular state of expecting the danger or preparing for it, even though it may be an unknown one. ‘Fear’ requires a definite object of which to be afraid. ‘Fright’, however, is the name we give to the state a person gets into when he has run into danger without being prepared for it; it emphasizes the factor of surprise. I do not believe anxiety itself can produce a traumatic neurosis. There is something about anxiety that protects its subject against fright and so against fright-neuroses. We shall return to this point later.¹

¹ Cf. the discussion on the psycho-analysis of war neuroses by Freud, Ferenczi, Abraham, Simmel and Jones (1919).

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3719

The study of dreams may be considered the most trustworthy method of investigating deep mental processes. Now dreams occurring in traumatic neuroses have the characteristic of repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident, a situation from which he wakes up in another fright. This astonishes people far too little. They think the fact that the traumatic experience is constantly forcing itself upon the patient even in his sleep is a proof of the strength of that experience: the patient is, as one might say, fixated to his trauma. Fixations to the experience which started the illness have long been familiar to us in hysteria. Breuer and Freud declared in 1893 that ‘hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences’. In the war neuroses, too, observers like Ferenczi and Simmel have been able to explain certain motor symptoms by fixation to the moment at which the trauma occurred.

I am not aware, however, that patients suffering from traumatic neurosis are much occupied in their waking lives with memories of their accident. Perhaps they are more concerned with not thinking of it. Anyone who accepts it as something self-evident that their dreams should put them back at night into the situation that caused them to fall ill has misunderstood the nature of dreams. It would be more in harmony with their nature if they showed the patient pictures from his healthy past or of the cure for which he hopes. If we are not to be shaken in our belief in the wish-fulfilling tenor of dreams by the dreams of traumatic neurotics, we still have one resource open to us: we may argue that the function of dreaming, like so much else, is upset in this condition and diverted from its purposes, or we may be driven to reflect on the mysterious masochistic trends of the ego.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3720

At this point I propose to leave the dark and dismal subject of the traumatic neurosis and pass on to examine the method of working employed by the mental apparatus in one of its earliest normal activities - I mean in children’s play.

The different theories of children’s play have only recently been summarized and discussed from the psycho-analytic point of view by Pfeifer (1919), to whose paper I would refer my readers. These theories attempt to discover the motives which lead children to play, but they fail to bring into the foreground the economic motive, the consideration of the yield of pleasure involved. Without wishing to include the whole field covered by these phenomena, I have been able, through a chance opportunity which presented itself, to throw some light upon the first game played by a little boy of one and a half and invented by himself. It was more than a mere fleeting observation, for I lived under the same roof as the child and his parents for some weeks, and it was some time before I discovered the meaning of the puzzling activity which he constantly repeated

The child was not at all precocious in his intellectual development. At the age of one and a half he could say only a few comprehensible words; he could also make use of a number of sounds which expressed a meaning intelligible to those around him. He was, however, on good terms with his parents and their one servant-girl, and tributes were paid to his being a ‘good boy’. He did not disturb his parents at night, he conscientiously obeyed orders not to touch certain things or go into certain rooms, and above all he never cried when his mother left him for a few hours. At the same time, he was greatly attached to his mother, who had not only fed him herself but had also looked after him without any outside help. This good little boy, however, had an occasional disturbing habit of taking any small objects he could get hold of and throwing them away from him into a corner, under the bed, and so on, so that hunting for his toys and picking them up was often quite a business. As he did this he gave vent to a loud, long-drawn-out ‘o-o-o-o’, accompanied by an expression of interest and satisfaction. His mother and the writer of the present account were agreed in thinking that this was not a mere interjection but represented the German word ‘fort’. I eventually realized that it was a game and that the only use he made of any of his toys was to play ‘gone’ with them. One day I made an observation which confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied round it. It never occurred to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at its being a carriage. What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skilfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive ‘o-o-o-o’. He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful ‘da’. This, then, was the complete game - disappearance and return. As a rule one only witnessed its first act, which was repeated untiringly as a game in itself, though there is no doubt that the greater pleasure was attached to the second act.¹

¹ A further observation subsequently confirmed this interpretation fully. One day the child’s mother had been away for several hours and on her return was met with the words ‘Baby o-o-o-o!’ which was at first incomprehensible. It soon turned out, however, that during this long period of solitude the child had found a method of making himself disappear. He had discovered his reflection in a full-length mirror which did not quite reach to the ground, so that by crouching down he could make his mirror-image ‘gone’.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3721

The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It was related to the child’s great cultural achievement - the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which be had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated himself for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach. It is of course a matter of indifference from the point of view of judging the effective nature of the game whether the child invented it himself or took it over on some outside suggestion. Our interest is directed to another point. The child cannot possibly have felt his mother’s departure as something agreeable or even indifferent. How then does his repetition of this distressing experience as a game fit in with the pleasure principle? It may perhaps be said in reply that her departure had to be enacted as a necessary preliminary to her joyful return, and that it was in the latter that lay the true purpose of the game. But against this must be counted the observed fact that the first act, that of departure, was staged as a game in itself and far more frequently than the episode in its entirety, with its pleasurable ending.

No certain decision can be reached from the analysis of a single case like this. On an unprejudiced view one gets an impression that the child turned his experience into a game from another motive. At the outset he was in a passive situation - he was overpowered by the experience; but, by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took on an active part. These efforts might be put down to an instinct for mastery that was acting independently of whether the memory was in itself pleasurable or not. But still another interpretation may be attempted. Throwing away the object so that it was ‘gone’ might satisfy an impulse of the child’s, which was suppressed in his actual life, to revenge himself on his mother for going away from him. In that case it would have a defiant meaning: ‘All right, then, go away! I don’t need you. I’m sending you away myself.’ A year later, the same boy whom I had observed at his first game used to take a toy, if he was angry with it, and throw it on the floor, exclaiming: ‘Go to the fwont!’ He had heard at that time that his absent father was ‘at the front’, and was far from regretting his absence; on the contrary he made it quite clear that he had no desire to be disturbed in his sole possession of his mother.¹ We know of other children who liked to express similar hostile impulses by throwing away objects instead of persons.² We are therefore left in doubt as to whether the impulse to work over in the mind some overpowering experience so as to make oneself master of it can find expression as a primary event, and independently of the pleasure principle. For, in the case we have been discussing, the child may, after all, only have been able to repeat his unpleasant experience in play because the repetition carried along with it a yield of pleasure of another sort but none the less a direct one.

¹ When this child was five and three-quarters, his mother died. Now that she was really ‘gone’ (‘o-o-o’), the little boy showed no signs of grief. It is true that in the interval a second child had been born and had roused him to violent jealousy.

² Cf. my note on a childhood memory of Goethe’s (1917b).

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3722

Nor shall we be helped in our hesitation between these two views by further considering children’s play. It is clear that in their play children repeat everything that has made a great impression on them in real life, and that in doing so they abreact the strength of the impression and, as one might put it, make themselves master of the situation. But on the other hand it is obvious that all their play is influenced by a wish that dominates them the whole time - the wish to be grown-up and to be able to do what grown-up people do. It can also be observed that the unpleasurable nature of an experience does not always unsuit it for play. If the doctor looks down a child’s throat or carries out some small operation on him, we may be quite sure that these frightening experiences will be the subject of the next game; but we must not in that connection overlook the fact that there is a yield of pleasure from another source. As the child passes over from the passivity of the experience to the activity of the game, he hands on the disagreeable experience to one of his playmates and in this way revenges himself on a substitute.

Nevertheless, it emerges from this discussion that there is no need to assume the existence of a special imitative instinct in order to provide a motive for play. Finally, a reminder may be added that the artistic play and artistic imitation carried out by adults, which, unlike children’s, are aimed at an audience, do not spare the spectators (for instance, in tragedy) the most painful experiences and can yet be felt by them as highly enjoyable. This is convincing proof that, even under the dominance of the pleasure principle, there are ways and means enough of making what is in itself unpleasurable into a subject to be recollected and worked over in the mind. The consideration of these cases and situations, which have a yield of pleasure as their final outcome, should be undertaken by some system of aesthetics with an economic approach to its subject-matter. They are of no use for our purposes, since they presuppose the existence and dominance of the pleasure principle; they give no evidence of the operation of tendencies beyond the pleasure principle, that is, of tendencies more primitive than it and independent of it.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3723

III

Twenty five years of intense work have had as their result that the immediate aims of psycho-analytic technique are quite other to-day than they were at the outset. At first the analysing physician could do no more than discover the unconscious material that was concealed from the patient, put it together, and, at the right moment, communicate it to him. Psychoanalysis was then first and foremost an art of interpreting. Since this did not solve the therapeutic problem, a further aim quickly came in view: to oblige the patient to confirm the analyst’s construction from his own memory. In that endeavour the chief emphasis lay upon the patient’s resistances: the art consisted now in uncovering these as quickly as possible, in pointing them out to the patient and in inducing him by human influence - this was where suggestion operating as ‘transference’ played its part - to abandon his resistances.

But it became ever clearer that the aim which had been set up - the aim that what was unconscious should become conscious - is not completely attainable by that method. The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it. Thus he acquires no sense of conviction of the correctness of the construction that has been communicated to him. He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something belonging to the past.¹ These reproductions, which emerge with such unwished-for exactitude, always have as their subject some portion of infantile sexual life - of the Oedipus complex, that is, and its derivatives; and they are invariably acted out in the sphere of the transference, of the patient’s relation to the physician. When things have reached this stage, it may be said that the earlier neurosis has now been replaced by a fresh, ‘transference neurosis’. It has been the physician’s endeavour to keep this transference neurosis within the narrowest limits: to force as much as possible into the channel of memory and to allow as little as possible to emerge as repetition. The ratio between what is remembered and what is reproduced varies from case to case. The physician cannot as a rule spare his patient this phase of the treatment. He must get him to re-experience some portion of his forgotten life, but must see to it, on the other hand, that the patient retains some degree of aloofness, which will enable him, in spite of everything, to recognize that what appears to be reality is in fact only a reflection of a forgotten past. If this can be successfully achieved, the patient’s sense of conviction is won, together with the therapeutic success that is dependent on it.

¹ See my paper on ‘Recollecting, Repeating and Working Through‘ (1914g).

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3724

In order to make it easier to understand this ‘compulsion to repeat’, which emerges during the psycho-analytic treatment of neurotics, we must above all get rid of the mistaken notion that what we are dealing with in our struggle against resistances is resistance on the part of the unconscious. The unconscious - that is to say, the ‘repressed’ - offers no resistance whatever to the efforts of the treatment. Indeed, it itself has no other endeavour than to break through the pressure weighing down on it and force its way either to consciousness or to a discharge through some real action. Resistance during treatment arises from the same higher strata and systems of the mind which originally carried out repression. But the fact that, as we know from experience, the motives of the resistances, and indeed the resistances themselves, are unconscious at first during the treatment, is a hint to us that we should correct a shortcoming in our terminology. We shall avoid a lack of clarity if we make our contrast not between the conscious and the unconscious but between the coherent ego and the repressed. It is certain that much of the ego is itself unconscious, and notably what we may describe as its nucleus; only a small part of it is covered by the term ‘preconscious’. Having replaced a purely descriptive terminology by one which is systematic or dynamic, we can say that the patient’s resistance arises from his ego, and we then at once perceive that the compulsion to repeat must be ascribed to the unconscious repressed. It seems probable that the compulsion can only express itself after the work of treatment has gone half-way to meet it and has loosened the repression.¹

¹ I have argued elsewhere that what thus comes to the help of the compulsion to repeat is the factor of ‘suggestion’ in the treatment - that is, the patient’s submissiveness to the physician, which has its roots deep in his unconscious parental complex.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3725

There is no doubt that the resistance of the conscious and unconscious ego operates under the sway of the pleasure principle: it seeks to avoid the unpleasure which would be produced by the liberation of the repressed. Our efforts, on the other hand, are directed towards procuring the toleration of that unpleasure by an appeal to the reality principle. But how is the compulsion to repeat - the manifestation of the power of the repressed - related to the pleasure principle? It is clear that the greater part of what is re-experienced under the compulsion to repeat must cause the ego unpleasure, since it brings to light activities of repressed instinctual impulses. That, however, is unpleasure of a kind we have already considered and does not contradict the pleasure principle: unpleasure for one system and simultaneously satisfaction for the other. But we come now to a new and remarkable fact, namely that the compulsion to repeat also recalls from the past experiences which include no possibility of pleasure, and which can never, even long ago, have brought satisfaction even to instinctual impulses which have since been repressed.

The early efflorescence of infantile sexual life is doomed to extinction because its wishes are incompatible with reality and with the inadequate stage of development which the child has reached. That efflorescence comes to an end in the most distressing circumstances and to the accompaniment of the most painful feelings. Loss of love and failure leave behind them a permanent injury to self-regard in the form of a narcissistic scar, which in my opinion, as well as in Marcinowski’s (1918), contributes more than anything to the ‘sense of inferiority’ which is so common in neurotics. The child’s sexual researches, on which limits are imposed by his physical development, lead to no satisfactory conclusion; hence such later complaints as ‘I can’t accomplish anything; I can’t succeed in anything’. The tie of affection, which binds the child as a rule to the parent of the opposite sex, succumbs to disappointment, to a vain expectation of satisfaction or to jealousy over the birth of a new baby - unmistakable proof of the infidelity of the object of the child’s affections. His own attempt to make a baby himself, carried out with tragic seriousness, fails shamefully. The lessening amount of affection he receives, the increasing demands of education, hard words and an occasional punishment - these show him at last the full extent to which he has been scorned. These are a few typical and constantly recurring instances of the ways in which the love characteristic of the age of childhood is brought to a conclusion.

Patients repeat all of these unwanted situations and painful emotions in the transference and revive them with the greatest ingenuity. They seek to bring about the interruption of the treatment while it is still incomplete; they contrive once more to feel themselves scorned, to oblige the physician to speak severely to them and treat them coldly; they discover appropriate objects for their jealousy; instead of the passionately desired baby of their childhood, they produce a plan or a promise of some grand present - which turns out as a rule to be no less unreal. None of these things can have produced pleasure in the past, and it might be supposed that they would cause less unpleasure to-day if they emerged as memories or dreams instead of taking the form of fresh experiences. They are of course the activities of instincts intended to lead to satisfaction; but no lesson has been learnt from the old experience of these activities having led instead only to unpleasure. In spite of that, they are repeated, under pressure of a compulsion.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3726

What psycho-analysis reveals in the transference phenomena of neurotics can also be observed in the lives of some normal people. The impression they give is of being pursued by a malignant fate or possessed by some ‘daemonic’ power; but psycho-analysis has always taken the view that their fate is for the most part arranged by themselves and determined by early infantile influences. The compulsion which is here in evidence differs in no way from the compulsion to repeat which we have found in neurotics, even though the people we are now considering have never shown any signs of dealing with a neurotic conflict by producing symptoms. Thus we have come across people all of whose human relationships have the same outcome: such as the benefactor who is abandoned in anger after a time by each of his protégés, however much they may otherwise differ from one another, and who thus seems doomed to taste all the bitterness of ingratitude; or the man whose friendships all end in betrayal by his friend; or the man who time after time in the course of his life raises someone else into a position of great private or public authority and then, after a certain interval, himself upsets that authority and replaces him by a new one; or, again, the lover each of whose love affairs with a woman passes through the same phases and reaches the same conclusion. This ‘perpetual recurrence of the same thing’ causes us no astonishment when it relates to active behaviour on the part of the person concerned and when we can discern in him an essential character-trait which always remains the same and which is compelled to find expression in a repetition of the same experiences. We are much more impressed by cases where the subject appears to have a passive experience, over which he has no influence, but in which he meets with a repetition of the same fatality. There is the case, for instance, of the woman who married three successive husbands each of whom fell ill soon afterwards and had to be nursed by her on their death-beds.¹ The most moving poetic picture of a fate such as this is given by Tasso in his romantic epic Gerusalemme Liberata. Its hero, Tancred, unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel while she is disguised in the armour of an enemy knight. After her burial he makes his way into a strange magic forest which strikes the Crusaders’ army with terror. He slashes with his sword at a tall tree; but blood streams from the cut and the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in the tree, is heard complaining that he has wounded his beloved once again.

If we take into account observations such as these, based upon behaviour in the transference and upon the life-histories of men and women, we shall find courage to assume that there really does exist in the mind a compulsion to repeat which overrides the pleasure principle. Now too we shall be inclined to relate to this compulsion the dreams which occur in traumatic neuroses and the impulse which leads children to play.

¹ Cf. the apt remarks on this subject by C. G. Jung (1909).

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3727

But it is to be noted that only in rare instances can we observe the pure effects of the compulsion to repeat, unsupported by other motives. In the case of children’s play we have already laid stress on the other ways in which the emergence of the compulsion may be interpreted; the compulsion to repeat and instinctual satisfaction which is immediately pleasurable seem to converge here into an intimate partnership. The phenomena of transference are obviously exploited by the resistance which the ego maintains in its pertinacious insistence upon repression; the compulsion to repeat, which the treatment tries to bring into its service is, as it were, drawn over by the ego to its side (clinging as the ego does to the pleasure principle). A great deal of what might be described as the compulsion of destiny seems intelligible on a rational basis; so that we are under no necessity to call in a new and mysterious motive force to explain it.

The least dubious instance is perhaps that of traumatic dreams. But on maturer reflection we shall be forced to admit that even in the other instances the whole ground is not covered by the operation of the familiar motive forces. Enough is left unexplained to justify the hypothesis of a compulsion to repeat - something that seems more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure principle which it overrides. But if a compulsion to repeat does operate in the mind, we should be glad to know something about it, to learn what function it corresponds to, under what conditions it can emerge and what its relation is to the pleasure principle - to which, after all, we have hitherto ascribed dominance over the course of the processes of excitation in mental life.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3728

IV

What follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which the reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual predilection. It is further an attempt to follow out an idea consistently, out of curiosity to see where it will lead.

Psycho-analytic speculation takes as its point of departure the impression, derived from examining unconscious processes, that consciousness may be, not the most universal attribute of mental processes, but only a particular function of them. Speaking in metapsychological terms, it asserts that consciousness is a function of a particular system which it describes as Cs. What consciousness yields consists essentially of perceptions of excitations coming from the external world and of feelings of pleasure and unpleasure which can only arise from within the mental apparatus; it is therefore possible to assign to the system Pcpt.-Cs. a position in space. It must lie on the borderline between outside and inside; it must be turned towards the external world and must envelop the other psychical systems. It will be seen that there is nothing daringly new in these assumptions; we have merely adopted the views on localization held by cerebral anatomy, which locates the ‘seat’ of consciousness in the cerebral cortex - the outermost, enveloping layer of the central organ. Cerebral anatomy has no need to consider why, speaking anatomically, consciousness should be lodged on the surface of the brain instead of being safely housed somewhere in its inmost interior. Perhaps we shall be more successful in accounting for this situation in the case of our system Pcpt.-Cs.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3729

Consciousness is not the only distinctive character which we ascribe to the processes in that system. On the basis of impressions derived from our psycho-analytic experience, we assume that all excitatory processes that occur in the other systems leave permanent traces behind in them which form the foundation of memory. Such memory-traces, then, have nothing to do with the fact of becoming conscious; indeed they are often most powerful and most enduring when the process which left them behind was one which never entered consciousness. We find it hard to believe, however, that permanent traces of excitation such as these are also left in the system Pcpt.-Cs. If they remained constantly conscious, they would very soon set limits to the system’s aptitude for receiving fresh excitations.¹ If, on the other hand, they were unconscious, we should be faced with the problem of explaining the existence of unconscious processes in a system whose functioning was otherwise accompanied by the phenomenon of consciousness. We should, so to say, have altered nothing and gained nothing by our hypothesis relegating the process of becoming conscious to a special system. Though this consideration is not absolutely conclusive, it nevertheless leads us to suspect that becoming conscious and leaving behind a memory-trace are processes incompatible with each other within one and the same system. Thus we should be able to say that the excitatory process becomes conscious in the system Cs. but leaves no permanent trace behind there; but that the excitation is transmitted to the systems lying next within and that it is in them that its traces are left. I followed these same lines in the schematic picture which I included in the speculative section of my Interpretation of Dreams. It must be borne in mind that little enough is known from other sources of the origin of consciousness; when, therefore, we lay down the proposition that consciousness arises instead of a memory-trace, the assertion deserves consideration, at all events on the ground of its being framed in fairly precise terms.

If this is so, then, the system Cs. is characterized by the peculiarity that in it (in contrast to what happens in the other psychical systems) excitatory processes do not leave behind any permanent change in its elements but expire, as it were, in the phenomenon of becoming conscious. An exception of this sort to the general rule requires to be explained by some factor that applies exclusively to that one system. Such a factor, which is absent in the other systems, might well be the exposed situation of the system Cs., immediately abutting as it does on the external world.

¹ What follows is based throughout on Breuer’s views in Studies on Hysteria (Breuer and Freud, 1895).

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3730

Let us picture a living organism in its most simplified possible form as an undifferentiated vesicle of a substance that is susceptible to stimulation. Then the surface turned towards the external world will from its very situation be differentiated and will serve as an organ for receiving stimuli. Indeed embryology, in its capacity as a recapitulation of developmental history, actually shows us that the central nervous system originates from the ectoderm; the grey matter of the cortex remains a derivative of the primitive superficial layer of the organism and may have inherited some of its essential properties. It would be easy to suppose, then, that as a result of the ceaseless impact of external stimuli on the surface of the vesicle, its substance to a certain depth may have become permanently modified, so that excitatory processes run a different course in it from what they run in the deeper layers. A crust would thus be formed which would at last have been so thoroughly ‘baked through’ by stimulation that it would present the most favourable possible conditions for the reception of stimuli and become incapable of any further modification. In terms of the system Cs., this would mean that its elements could undergo no further permanent modification from the passage of excitation, because they had already been modified in the respect in question to the greatest possible extent: now, however, they would have become capable of giving rise to consciousness. Various ideas may be formed which cannot at present be verified as to the nature of this modification of the substance and of the excitatory process. It may be supposed that, in passing from one element to another, an excitation has to overcome a resistance, and that the diminution of resistance thus effected is what lays down a permanent trace of the excitation, that is, a facilitation. In the system Cs., then, resistance of this kind to passage from one element to another would no longer exist. This picture can be brought into relation with Breuer’s distinction between quiescent (or bound) and mobile cathectic energy in the elements of the psychical systems;¹ the elements of the system Cs. would carry no bound energy but only energy capable of free discharge. It seems best, however, to express oneself as cautiously as possible on these points. None the less, this speculation will have enabled us to bring the origin of consciousness into some sort of connection with the situation of the system Cs. and with the peculiarities that must be ascribed to the excitatory processes taking place in it.

¹ Breuer and Freud, 1895.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3731

But we have more to say of the living vesicle with its receptive cortical layer. This little fragment of living substance is suspended in the middle of an external world charged with the most powerful energies; and it would be killed by the stimulation emanating from these if it were not provided with a protective shield against stimuli. It acquires the shield in this way: its outermost surface ceases to have the structure proper to living matter, becomes to some degree inorganic and thenceforward functions as a special envelope or membrane resistant to stimuli. In consequence, the energies of the external world are able to pass into the next underlying layers, which have remained living, with only a fragment of their original intensity; and these layers can devote themselves, behind the protective shield, to the reception of the amounts of stimulus which have been allowed through it. By its death, the outer layer has saved all the deeper ones from a similar fate - unless, that is to say, stimuli reach it which are so strong that they break through the protective shield. Protection against stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism than reception of stimuli. The protective shield is supplied with its own store of energy and must above all endeavour to preserve the special modes of transformation of energy operating in it against the effects threatened by the enormous energies at work in the external world - effects which tend towards a levelling out of them and hence towards destruction. The main purpose of the reception of stimuli is to discover the direction and nature of the external stimuli; and for that it is enough to take small specimens of the external world, to sample it in small quantities. In highly developed organisms the receptive cortical layer of the former vesicle has long been withdrawn into the depths of the interior of the body, though portions of it have been left behind on the surface immediately beneath the general shield against stimuli. These are the sense organs, which consist essentially of apparatus for the reception of certain specific effects of stimulation, but which also include special arrangements for further protection against excessive amounts of stimulation and for excluding unsuitable kinds of stimuli. It is characteristic of them that they deal only with very small quantities of external stimulation and only take in samples of the external world. They may perhaps be compared with feelers which are all the time making tentative advances towards the external world and then drawing back from it.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3732

At this point I shall venture to touch for a moment upon a subject which would merit the most exhaustive treatment. As a result of certain psycho-analytic discoveries, we are to-day in a position to embark on a discussion of the Kantian theorem that time and space are ‘necessary forms of thought’. We have learnt that unconscious mental processes are in themselves ‘timeless’. This means in the first place that they are not ordered temporally, that time does not change them in any way and that the idea of time cannot be applied to them. These are negative characteristics which can only be clearly understood if a comparison is made with conscious mental processes. On the other hand, our abstract idea of time seems to be wholly derived from the method of working of the system Pcpt.-Cs. and to correspond to a perception on its own part of that method of working. This mode of functioning may perhaps constitute another way of providing a shield against stimuli. I know that these remarks must sound very obscure, but I must limit myself to these hints.

We have pointed out how the living vesicle is provided with a shield against stimuli from the external world; and we had previously shown that the cortical layer next to that shield must be differentiated as an organ for receiving stimuli from without. This sensitive cortex, however, which is later to become the system Cs., also receives excitations from within. The situation of the system between the outside and the inside and the difference between the conditions governing the reception of excitations in the two cases have a decisive effect on the functioning of the system and of the whole mental apparatus. Towards the outside it is shielded against stimuli, and the amounts of excitation impinging on it have only a reduced effect. Towards the inside there can be no such shield; the excitations in the deeper layers extend into the system directly and in undiminished amount, in so far as certain of their characteristics give rise to feelings in the pleasure-unpleasure series. The excitations coming from within are, however, in their intensity and in other, qualitative, respects - in their amplitude, perhaps - more commensurate with the system’s method of working than the stimuli which stream in from the external world. This state of things produces two definite results. First, the feelings of pleasure and unpleasure (which are an index to what is happening in the interior of the apparatus) predominate over all external stimuli. And secondly, a particular way is adopted of dealing with any internal excitations which produce too great an increase of unpleasure: there is a tendency to treat them as though they were acting, not from the inside, but from the outside, so that it may be possible to bring the shield against stimuli into operation as a means of defence against them. This is the origin of projection, which is destined to play such a large part in the causation of pathological processes.

I have an impression that these last considerations have brought us to a better understanding of the dominance of the pleasure principle; but no light has yet been thrown on the cases that contradict that dominance. Let us therefore go a step further. We describe as ‘traumatic’ any excitations from outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield. It seems to me that the concept of trauma necessarily implies a connection of this kind with a breach in an otherwise efficacious barrier against stimuli. Such an event as an external trauma is bound to provoke a disturbance on a large scale in the functioning of the organism’s energy and to set in motion every possible defensive measure. At the same time, the pleasure principle is for the moment put out of action. There is no longer any possibility of preventing the mental apparatus from being flooded with large amounts of stimulus, and another problem arises instead - the problem of mastering the amounts of stimulus which have broken in and of binding them, in the psychical sense, so that they can then be disposed of.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3733

The specific unpleasure of physical pain is probably the result of the protective shield having been broken through in a limited area. There is then a continuous stream of excitations from the part of the periphery concerned to the central apparatus of the mind, such as could normally arise only from within the apparatus. And how shall we expect the mind to react to this invasion? Cathectic energy is summoned from all sides to provide sufficiently high cathexes of energy in the environs of the breach. An ‘anticathexis’ on a grand scale is set up, for whose benefit all the other psychical systems are impoverished, so that the remaining psychical functions are extensively paralysed or reduced. We must endeavour to draw a lesson from examples such as this and use them as a basis for our metapsychological speculations. From the present case, then, we infer that a system which is itself highly cathected is capable of taking up an additional stream of fresh inflowing energy and of converting it into quiescent cathexis, that is of binding it psychically. The higher the system’s own quiescent cathexis, the greater seems to be its binding force; conversely, therefore, the lower its cathexis, the less capacity will it have for taking up inflowing energy and the more violent must be the consequences of such a breach in the protective shield against stimuli. To this view it cannot be justly objected that the increase of cathexis round the breach can be explained far more simply as the direct result of the inflowing masses of excitation. If that were so, the mental apparatus would merely receive an increase in its cathexes of energy, and the paralysing character of pain and the impoverishment of all the other systems would remain unexplained. Nor do the very violent phenomena of discharge to which pain gives rise affect our explanation, for they occur in a reflex manner - that is, they follow without the intervention of the mental apparatus. The indefiniteness of all our discussions on what we describe as metapsychology is of course due to the fact that we know nothing of the nature of the excitatory process that takes place in the elements of the psychical systems, and that we do not feel justified in framing any hypothesis on the subject. We are consequently operating all the time with a large unknown factor, which we are obliged to carry over into every new formula. It may be reasonably supposed that this excitatory process can be carried out with energies that vary quantitatively; it may also seem probable that it has more than one quality (in the nature of amplitude, for instance). As a new factor we have taken into consideration Breuer’s hypothesis that charges of energy occur in two forms; so that we have to distinguish between two kinds of cathexis of the psychical systems or their elements - a freely flowing cathexis that presses on towards discharge and a quiescent cathexis. We may perhaps suspect that the binding of the energy that streams into the mental apparatus consists in its change from a freely flowing into a quiescent state.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3734

We may, I think, tentatively venture to regard the common traumatic neurosis as a consequence of an extensive breach being made in the protective shield against stimuli. This would seem to reinstate the old, naïve theory of shock, in apparent contrast to the later and psychologically more ambitious theory which attributes aetiological importance not to the effects of mechanical violence but to fright and the threat to life. These opposing views are not, however, irreconcilable; nor is the psycho-analytic view of the traumatic neurosis identical with the shock theory in its crudest form. The latter regards the essence of the shock as being the direct damage to the molecular structure or even to the histological structure of the elements of the nervous system; whereas what we seek to understand are the effects produced on the organ of the mind by the breach in the shield against stimuli and by the problems that follow in its train. And we still attribute importance to the element of fright. It is caused by lack of any preparedness for anxiety, including lack of hypercathexis of the systems that would be the first to receive the stimulus. Owing to their low cathexis those systems are not in a good position for binding the inflowing amounts of excitation and the consequences of the breach in the protective shield follow all the more easily. It will be seen, then, that preparedness for anxiety and the hypercathexis of the receptive systems constitute the last line of defence of the shield against stimuli. In the case of quite a number of traumas, the difference between systems that are unprepared and systems that are well prepared through being hypercathected may be a decisive factor in determining the outcome; though where the strength of a trauma exceeds a certain limit this factor will no doubt cease to carry weight. The fulfilment of wishes is, as we know, brought about in a hallucinatory manner by dreams, and under the dominance of the pleasure principle this has become their function. But it is not in the service of that principle that the dreams of patients suffering from traumatic neuroses lead them back with such regularity to the situation in which the trauma occurred. We may assume, rather, that dreams are here helping to carry out another task, which must be accomplished before the dominance of the pleasure principle can ever begin. These dreams are endeavouring to master the stimulus retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis. They thus afford us a view of a function of the mental apparatus which, though it does not contradict the pleasure principle, is nevertheless independent of it and seems to be more primitive than the purpose of gaining pleasure and avoiding unpleasure.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3735

This would seem to be the place, then, at which to admit for the first time an exception to the proposition that dreams are fulfilments of wishes. Anxiety dreams, as I have shown repeatedly and in detail, offer no such exception. Nor do ‘punishment dreams’, for they merely replace the forbidden wish-fulfilment by the appropriate punishment for it; that is to say, they fulfil the wish of the sense of guilt which is the reaction to the repudiated impulse. But it is impossible to classify as wish-fulfilments the dreams we have been discussing which occur in traumatic neuroses, or the dreams during psycho-analyses which bring to memory the psychical traumas of childhood. They arise, rather, in obedience to the compulsion to repeat, though it is true that in analysis that compulsion is supported by the wish (which is encouraged by ‘suggestion’) to conjure up what has been forgotten and repressed. Thus it would seem that the function of dreams, which consists in setting aside any motives that might interrupt sleep, by fulfilling the wishes of the disturbing impulses, is not their original function. It would not be possible for them to perform that function until the whole of mental life had accepted the dominance of the pleasure principle. If there is a ‘beyond the pleasure principle’, it is only consistent to grant that there was also a time before the purpose of dreams was the fulfilment of wishes. This would imply no denial of their later function. But if once this general rule has been broken, a further question arises. May not dreams which, with a view to the psychical binding of traumatic impressions, obey the compulsion to repeat - may not such dreams occur outside analysis as well? And the reply can only be a decided affirmative.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3736

I have argued elsewhere¹ that ‘war neuroses’ (in so far as that term implies something more than a reference to the circumstances of the illness’s onset) may very well be traumatic neuroses which have been facilitated by a conflict in the ego. The fact to which I have referred in the first paragraph of Chapter II, that a gross physical injury caused simultaneously by the trauma diminishes the chances that a neurosis will develop, becomes intelligible if one bears in mind two facts which have been stressed by psycho-analytic research: firstly, that mechanical agitation must be recognized as one of the sources of sexual excitation,² and secondly, that painful and feverish illnesses exercise a powerful effect, so long as they last, on the distribution of libido. Thus, on the one hand, the mechanical violence of the trauma would liberate a quantity of sexual excitation which, owing to the lack of preparation for anxiety, would have a traumatic effect; but, on the other hand, the simultaneous physical injury, by calling for a narcissistic hypercathexis of the injured organ,³ would bind the excess of excitation. It is also well known, though the libido theory has not yet made sufficient use of the fact, that such severe disorders in the distribution of libido as melancholia are temporarily brought to an end by intercurrent organic illness, and indeed that even a fully developed condition of dementia praecox is capable of a temporary remission in these same circumstances.

¹ See my introduction (1919d) to Psycho-analysis and the War Neuroses.

² Cf. my remarks elsewhere (Three Essays) on the effect of swinging and railway-travel

³ See my paper on narcissism (1914c).

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3737

V

The fact that the cortical layer which receives stimuli is without any protective shield against excitations from within must have as its result that these latter transmissions of stimulus have a preponderance in economic importance and often occasion economic disturbances comparable with traumatic neuroses. The most abundant sources of this internal excitation are what are described as the organism’s ‘instincts’ - the representatives of all the forces originating in the interior of the body and transmitted to the mental apparatus - at once the most important and the most obscure element of psychological research.

It will perhaps not be thought too rash to suppose that the impulses arising from the instincts do not belong to the type of bound nervous processes but of freely mobile processes which press towards discharge. The best part of what we know of these processes is derived from our study of the dream-work. We there discovered that the processes in the unconscious systems were fundamentally different from those in the preconscious (or conscious) systems. In the unconscious, cathexes can easily be completely transferred, displaced and condensed. Such treatment, however, could produce only invalid results if it were applied to preconscious material; and this accounts for the familiar peculiarities exhibited by manifest dreams after the preconscious residues of the preceding day have been worked over in accordance with the laws operating in the unconscious. I described the type of process found in the unconscious as the ‘primary’ psychical process, in contradistinction to the ‘secondary’ process which is the one obtaining in our normal waking life. Since all instinctual impulses have the unconscious systems as their point of impact, it is hardly an innovation to say that they obey the primary process. Again, it is easy to identify the primary psychical process with Breuer’s freely mobile cathexis and the secondary process with changes in his bound or tonic cathexis.¹ If so, it would be the task of the higher strata of the mental apparatus to bind the instinctual excitation reaching the primary process. A failure to effect this binding would provoke a disturbance analogous to a traumatic neurosis; and only after the binding has been accomplished would it be possible for the dominance of the pleasure principle (and of its modification, the reality principle) to proceed unhindered. Till then the other task of the mental apparatus, the task of mastering or binding excitations, would have precedence - not, indeed, in opposition to the pleasure principle, but independently of it and to some extent in disregard of it.

¹ Cf. my Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter VII.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3738

The manifestations of a compulsion to repeat (which we have described as occurring in the early activities of infantile mental life as well as among the events of psycho-analytic treatment) exhibit to a high degree an instinctual character and, when they act in opposition to the pleasure principle, give the appearance of some ‘daemonic’ force at work. In the case of children’s play we seemed to see that children repeat unpleasurable experiences for the additional reason that they can master a powerful impression far more thoroughly by being active than they could by merely experiencing it passively. Each fresh repetition seems to strengthen the mastery they are in search of. Nor can children have their pleasurable experiences repeated often enough, and they are inexorable in their insistence that the repetition shall be an identical one. This character trait disappears later on. If a joke is heard for a second time it produces almost no effect; a theatrical production never creates so great an impression the second time as the first; indeed, it is hardly possible to persuade an adult who has very much enjoyed reading a book to re-read it immediately. Novelty is always the condition of enjoyment. But children will never tire of asking an adult to repeat a game that he has shown them or played with them, till he is too exhausted to go on. And if a child has been told a nice story, he will insist on hearing it over and over again rather than a new one; and he will remorselessly stipulate that the repetition shall be an identical one and will correct any alterations of which the narrator may be guilty - though they may actually have been made in the hope of gaining fresh approval. None of this contradicts the pleasure principle; repetition, the re-experiencing of something identical, is clearly in itself a source of pleasure. In the case of a person in analysis, on the contrary, the compulsion to repeat the events of his childhood in the transference evidently disregards the pleasure principle in every way. The patient behaves in a purely infantile fashion and thus shows us that the repressed memory-traces of his primaeval experiences are not present in him in a bound state and are indeed in a sense incapable of obeying the secondary process. It is to this fact of not being bound, moreover, that they owe their capacity for forming, in conjunction with the residues of the previous day, a wishful phantasy that emerges in a dream. This same compulsion to repeat frequently meets us as an obstacle to our treatment when at the end of an analysis we try to induce the patient to detach himself completely from his physician. It may be presumed, too, that when people unfamiliar with analysis feel an obscure fear - a dread of rousing something that, so they feel, is better left sleeping - what they are afraid of at bottom is the emergence of this compulsion with its hint of possession by some ‘daemonic’ power.

But how is the predicate of being ‘instinctual’ related to the compulsion to repeat? At this point we cannot escape a suspicion that we may have come upon the track of a universal attribute of instincts and perhaps of organic life in general which has not hitherto been clearly recognized or at least not explicitly stressed. It seems, then, that an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces; that is, it is a kind of organic elasticity, or, to put it another way, the expression of the inertia inherent in organic life.¹

¹ I have no doubt that similar notions as to the nature of ‘instincts’ have already been put forward repeatedly.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3739

This view of instincts strikes us as strange because we have become used to see in them a factor impelling towards change and development, whereas we are now asked to recognize in them the precise contrary - an expression of the conservative nature of living substance. On the other hand we soon call to mind examples from animal life which seem to confirm the view that instincts are historically determined. Certain fishes, for instance, undertake laborious migrations at spawning-time in order to deposit their spawn in particular waters far removed from their customary haunts. In the opinion of many biologists what they are doing is merely to seek out the localities in which their species formerly resided but which in the course of time they have exchanged for others. The same explanation is believed to apply to the migratory flights of birds of passage - but we are quickly relieved of the necessity for seeking for further examples by the reflection that the most impressive proofs of there being an organic compulsion to repeat lie in the phenomena of heredity and the facts of embryology. We see how the germ of a living animal is obliged in the course of its development to recapitulate (even if only in a transient and abbreviated fashion) the structures of all the forms from which it is sprung, instead of proceeding quickly by the shortest path to its final shape. This behaviour is only to a very slight degree attributable to mechanical causes, and the historical explanation cannot accordingly be neglected. So too the power of regenerating a lost organ by growing afresh a precisely similar one extends far up into the animal kingdom.

We shall be met by the plausible objection that it may very well be that, in addition to the conservative instincts which impel towards repetition, there may be others which push forward towards progress and the production of new forms. This argument must certainly not be overlooked, and it will be taken into account at a later stage. But for the moment it is tempting to pursue to its logical conclusion the hypothesis that all instincts tend towards the restoration of an earlier state of things. The outcome may give an impression of mysticism or of sham profundity; but we can feel quite innocent of having had any such purpose in view. We seek only for the sober results of research or of reflection based on it; and we have no wish to find in those results any quality other than certainty.¹

¹ The reader should not overlook the fact that what follows is the development of an extreme line of thought. Later on, when account is taken of the sexual instincts, it will be found that the necessary limitations and corrections are applied to it.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3740

Let us suppose, then, that all the organic instincts are conservative, are acquired historically and tend towards the restoration of an earlier state of things. It follows that the phenomena of organic development must be attributed to external disturbing and diverting influences. The elementary living entity would from its very beginning have had no wish to change; if conditions remained the same, it would do no more than constantly repeat the same course of life. In the last resort, what has left its mark on the development of organisms must be the history of the earth we live in and of its relation to the sun. Every modification which is thus imposed upon the course of the organism’s life is accepted by the conservative organic instincts and stored up for further repetition. Those instincts are therefore bound to give a deceptive appearance of being forces tending towards change and progress, whilst in fact they are merely seeking to reach an ancient goal by paths alike old and new. Moreover it is possible to specify this final goal of all organic striving. It would be in contradiction to the conservative nature of the instincts if the goal of life were a state of things which had never yet been attained. On the contrary, it must be an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or other departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads. If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons - becomes inorganic once again - then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of life is death’ and, looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones’.

The attributes of life were at some time evoked in inanimate matter by the action of a force of whose nature we can form no conception. It may perhaps have been a process similar in type to that which later caused the development of consciousness in a particular stratum of living matter. The tension which then arose in what had hitherto been an inanimate substance endeavoured to cancel itself out. In this way the first instinct came into being: the instinct to return to the inanimate state. It was still an easy matter at that time for a living substance to die; the course of its life was probably only a brief one, whose direction was determined by the chemical structure of the young life. For a long time, perhaps, living substance was thus being constantly created afresh and easily dying, till decisive external influences altered in such a way as to oblige the still surviving substance to diverge ever more widely from its original course of life and to make ever more complicated détours before reaching its aim of death. These circuitous paths to death, faithfully kept to by the conservative instincts, would thus present us to-day with the picture of the phenomena of life. If we firmly maintain the exclusively conservative nature of instincts, we cannot arrive at any other notions as to the origin and aim of life.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3741

The implications in regard to the great groups of instincts which, as we believe, lie behind the phenomena of life in organisms must appear no less bewildering. The hypothesis of self-preservative instincts, such as we attribute to all living beings, stands in marked opposition to the idea that instinctual life as a whole serves to bring about death. Seen in this light, the theoretical importance of the instincts of self-preservation, of self-assertion and of mastery greatly diminishes. They are component instincts whose function it is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death, and to ward off any possible ways of returning to inorganic existence other than those which are immanent in the organism itself. We have no longer to reckon with the organism’s puzzling determination (so hard to fit into any context) to maintain its own existence in the face of every obstacle. What we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion. Thus these guardians of life, too, were originally the myrmidons of death. Hence arises the paradoxical situation that the living organism struggles most energetically against events (dangers, in fact) which might help it to attain its life’s aim rapidly - by a kind of short-circuit. Such behaviour is, however, precisely what characterizes purely instinctual as contrasted with intelligent efforts.

But let us pause for a moment and reflect. It cannot be so. The sexual instincts, to which the theory of the neuroses gives a quite special place, appear under a very different aspect.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3742

The external pressure which provokes a constantly increasing extent of development has not imposed itself upon every organism. Many have succeeded in remaining up to the present time at their lowly level. Many, though not all, such creatures, which must resemble the earliest stages of the higher animals and plants, are, indeed, living to-day. In the same way, the whole path of development to natural death is not trodden by all the elementary entities which compose the complicated body of one of the higher organisms. Some of them, the germ-cells, probably retain the original structure of living matter and, after a certain time, with their full complement of inherited and freshly acquired instinctual dispositions, separate themselves from the organism as a whole. These two characteristics may be precisely what enables them to have an independent existence. Under favourable conditions, they begin to develop - that is, to repeat the performance to which they owe their existence; and in the end once again one portion of their substance pursues its development to a finish, while another portion harks back once again as a fresh residual germ to the beginning of the process of development. These germ-cells, therefore, work against the death of the living substance and succeed in winning for it what we can only regard as potential immortality, though that may mean no more than a lengthening of the road to death. We must regard as in the highest degree significant the fact that this function of the germ-cell is reinforced, or only made possible, if it coalesces with another cell similar to itself and yet differing from it.

The instincts which watch over the destinies of these elementary organisms that survive the whole individual, which provide them with a safe shelter while they are defenceless against the stimuli of the external world, which bring about their meeting with other germ-cells, and so on - these constitute the group of the sexual instincts. They are conservative in the same sense as the other instincts in that they bring back earlier states of living substance; but they are conservative to a higher degree in that they are peculiarly resistant to external influences; and they are conservative too in another sense in that they preserve life itself for a comparatively long period.¹ They are the true life instincts. They operate against the purpose of the other instincts, which leads, by reason of their function, to death; and this fact indicates that there is an opposition between them and the other instincts, an opposition whose importance was long ago recognized by the theory of the neuroses. It is as though the life of the organism moved with a vacillating rhythm. One group of instincts rushes forward so as to reach the final aim of life as swiftly as possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has been reached, the other group jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start and so prolong the journey. And even though it is certain that sexuality and the distinction between the sexes did not exist when life began, the possibility remains that the instincts which were later to be described as sexual may have been in operation from the very first, and it may not be true that it was only at a later time that they started upon their work of opposing the activities of the ‘ego-instincts’.²

¹ Yet it is to them alone that we can attribute an internal impulse towards ‘progress’ and towards higher development! (See below)

² It should be understood from the context that the term ‘ego-instincts’ is used here as a provisional description and derives from the earliest psycho-analytical terminology.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3743

Let us now hark back for a moment ourselves and consider whether there is any basis at all for these speculations. Is it really the case that, apart from the sexual instincts, there are no instincts that do not seek to restore an earlier state of things? that there are none that aim at a state of things which has never yet been attained? I know of no certain example from the organic world that would contradict the characterization I have thus proposed. There is unquestionably no universal instinct towards higher development observable in the animal or plant world, even though it is undeniable that development does in fact occur in that direction. But on the one hand it is often merely a matter of opinion when we declare that one stage of development is higher than another, and on the other hand biology teaches us that higher development in one respect is very frequently balanced or outweighed by involution in another. Moreover there are plenty of animal forms from whose early stages we can infer that their development has, on the contrary, assumed a retrograde character. Both higher development and involution might well be the consequences of adaptation to the pressure of external forces; and in both cases the part played by instincts might be limited to the retention (in the form of an internal source of pleasure) of an obligatory modification.¹

¹ Ferenczi (1913, 137) has reached the same conclusion along different lines: ‘If this thought is pursued to its logical conclusion, one must make oneself familiar with the idea of a tendency to perseveration or regression dominating organic life as well, while the tendency to further development, to adaptation, etc., would become active only as a result of external stimuli.’

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3744

It may be difficult, too, for many of us, to abandon the belief that there is an instinct towards perfection at work in human beings, which has brought them to their present high level of intellectual achievement and ethical sublimation and which may be expected to watch over their development into supermen. I have no faith, however, in the existence of any such internal instinct and I cannot see how this benevolent illusion is to be preserved. The present development of human beings requires, as it seems to me, no different explanation from that of animals. What appears in a minority of human individuals as an untiring impulsion towards further perfection can easily be understood as a result of the instinctual repression upon which is based all that is most precious in human civilization. The repressed instinct never ceases to strive for complete satisfaction, which would consist in the repetition of a primary experience of satisfaction. No substitutive or reactive formations and no sublimations will suffice to remove the repressed instinct’s persisting tension; and it is the difference in amount between the pleasure of satisfaction which is demanded and that which is actually achieved that provides the driving factor which will permit of no halting at any position attained, but, in the poet’s words, ‘ungebändigt immer vorwärts dringt’.¹ The backward path that leads to complete satisfaction is as a rule obstructed by the resistances which maintain the repressions. So there is no alternative but to advance in the direction in which growth is still free - though with no prospect of bringing the process to a conclusion or of being able to reach the goal. The processes involved in the formation of a neurotic phobia, which is nothing else than an attempt at flight from the satisfaction of an instinct, present us with a model of the manner of origin of this supposititious ‘instinct towards perfection’ - an instinct which cannot possibly be attributed to every human being. The dynamic conditions for its development are, indeed, universally present; but it is only in rare cases that the economic situation appears to favour the production of the phenomenon.

I will add only a word to suggest that the efforts of Eros to combine organic substances into ever larger unities probably provide a substitute for this ‘instinct towards perfection’ whose existence we cannot admit. The phenomena that are attributed to it seem capable of explanation by these efforts of Eros taken in conjunction with the results of repression.

¹ Mephistopheles in Faust, Part I.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3745

VI

The upshot of our enquiry so far has been the drawing of a sharp distinction between the ‘ego-instincts’ and the sexual instincts, and the view that the former exercise pressure towards death and the latter towards a prolongation of life. But this conclusion is bound to be unsatisfactory in many respects even to ourselves. Moreover, it is actually only of the former group of instincts that we can predicate a conservative, or rather retrograde, character corresponding to a compulsion to repeat. For on our hypothesis the ego-instincts arise from the coming to life of inanimate matter and seek to restore the inanimate state; whereas as regards the sexual instincts, though it is true that they reproduce primitive states of the organism, what they are clearly aiming at by every possible means is the coalescence of two germ-cells which are differentiated in a particular way. If this union is not effected, the germ-cell dies along with all the other elements of the multicellular organism. It is only on this condition that the sexual function can prolong the cell’s life and lend it the appearance of immortality. But what is the important event in the development of living substance which is being repeated in sexual reproduction, or in its fore-runner, the conjugation of two protista? We cannot say; and we should consequently feel relieved if the whole structure of our argument turned out to be mistaken. The opposition between the ego or death instincts and the sexual or life instincts would then cease to hold and the compulsion to repeat would no longer possess the importance we have ascribed to it.

Let us turn back, then, to one of the assumptions that we have already made, with the expectation that we shall be able to give it a categorical denial. We have drawn far-reaching conclusions from the hypothesis that all living substance is bound to die from internal causes. We made this assumption thus carelessly because it does not seem to us to be an assumption. We are accustomed to think that such is the fact, and we are strengthened in our thought by the writings of our poets. Perhaps we have adopted the belief because there is some comfort in it. If we are to die ourselves, and first to lose in death those who are dearest to us, it is easier to submit to a remorseless law of nature, to the sublime ‘Anagch, than to a chance which might perhaps have been escaped. It may be, however, that this belief in the internal necessity of dying is only another of those illusions which we have created ‘um die Schwere des Daseins zu ertragen’. It is certainly not a primaeval belief. The notion of ‘natural death’ is quite foreign to primitive races; they attribute every death that occurs among them to the influence of an enemy or of an evil spirit. We must therefore turn to biology in order to test the validity of the belief.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3746

If we do so, we may be astonished to find how little agreement there is among biologists on the subject of natural death and in fact that the whole concept of death melts away under their hands. The fact that there is a fixed average duration of life at least among the higher animals naturally argues in favour of there being such a thing as death from natural causes. But this impression is countered when we consider that certain large animals and certain gigantic arboreal growths reach a very advanced age and one which cannot at present be computed. According to the large conception of Wilhelm Fliess, all the phenomena of life exhibited by organisms - and also, no doubt, their death - are linked with the completion of fixed periods, which express the dependence of two kinds of living substance (one male and the other female) upon the solar year. When we see, however, how easily and how extensively the influence of external forces is able to modify the date of the appearance of vital phenomena (especially in the plant world) - to precipitate them or hold them back - doubts must be cast upon the rigidity of Fliess’s formulas or at least upon whether the laws laid down by him are the sole determining factors.

The greatest interest attaches from our point of view to the treatment given to the subject of the duration of life and the death of organisms in the writings of Weismann (1882, 1884, 1892, etc.) It was he who introduced the division of living substance into mortal and immortal parts. The mortal part is the body in the narrower sense - the ‘soma’ - which alone is subject to natural death. The germ-cells, on the other hand, are potentially immortal, in so far as they are able, under certain favourable conditions, to develop into a new individual, or, in other words, to surround themselves with a new soma. (Weismann, 1884.)

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3747

What strikes us in this is the unexpected analogy with our own view, which was arrived at along such a different path. Weismann, regarding living substance morphologically, sees in it one portion which is destined to die - the soma, the body apart from the substance concerned with sex and inheritance - and an immortal portion - the germ-plasm, which is concerned with the survival of the species, with reproduction. We, on the other hand, dealing not with the living substance but with the forces operating in it, have been led to distinguish two kinds of instincts: those which seek to lead what is living to death, and others, the sexual instincts, which are perpetually attempting and achieving a renewal of life. This sounds like a dynamic corollary to Weismann’s morphological theory.

But the appearance of a significant correspondence is dissipated as soon as we discover Weismann’s views on the problem of death. For he only relates the distinction between the mortal soma and the immortal germ-plasm to multicellular organisms; in unicellular organisms the individual and the reproductive cell are still one and the same (Weismann, 1882, 38). Thus he considers that unicellular organisms are potentially immortal, and that death only makes its appearance with the multicellular metazoa. It is true that this death of the higher organisms is a natural one, a death from internal causes; but it is not founded on any primal characteristic of living substance (Weismann, 1884, 84) and cannot be regarded as an absolute necessity with its basis in the very nature of life (Weismann, 1882, 33). Death is rather a matter of expediency, a manifestation of adaptation to the external conditions of life; for, when once the cells of the body have been divided into soma and germ-plasm, an unlimited duration of individual life would become a quite pointless luxury. When this differentiation had been made in the multicellular organisms, death became possible and expedient. Since then, the soma of the higher organisms has died at fixed periods for internal reasons, while the protista have remained immortal. It is not the case, on the other hand, that reproduction was only introduced at the same time as death. On the contrary, it is a primal characteristic of living matter, like growth (from which it originated), and life has been continuous from its first beginning upon earth. (Weismann, 1884, 84 f.)

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3748

It will be seen at once that to concede in this way that higher organisms have a natural death is of very little help to us. For if death is a late acquisition of organisms, then there can be no question of there having been death instincts from the very beginning of life on this earth. Multicellular organisms may die for internal reasons, owing to defective differentiation or to imperfections in their metabolism, but the matter is of no interest from the point of view of our problem. An account of the origin of death such as this is moreover far less at variance with our habitual modes of thought than the strange assumption of ‘death instincts’.

The discussion which followed upon Weismann’s suggestions led, so far as I can see, to no conclusive results in any direction.¹ Some writers returned to the views of Goette (1883), who regarded death as a direct result of reproduction. Hartmann (1906, 29) does not regard the appearance of a ‘dead body’ - a dead portion of the living substance - as the criterion of death, but defines death as ‘the termination of individual development’. In this sense protozoa too are mortal; in their case death always coincides with reproduction, but is to some extent obscured by it, since the whole substance of the parent animal may be transmitted directly into the young offspring.

Soon afterwards research was directed to the experimental testing on unicellular organisms of the alleged immortality of living substance. An American biologist, Woodruff, experimenting with a ciliate infusorian, the ‘slipper-animalcule’, which reproduces by fission into two individuals, persisted until the 3029th generation (at which point he broke off the experiment), isolating one of the part-products on each occasion and placing it in fresh water. This remote descendent of the first slipper-animalcule was just as lively as its ancestor and showed no signs of ageing or degeneration. Thus, in so far as figures of this kind prove anything, the immortality of the protista seemed to be experimentally demonstrable.²

¹ Cf. Hartmann (1906), Lipschütz (1914) and Doflein (1919).

² For this and what follows see Lipschütz (1914, 26 and 52 ff.).

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3749

Other experimenters arrived at different results. Maupas, Calkins and others, in contrast to Woodruff, found that after a certain number of divisions these infusoria become weaker, diminish in size, suffer the loss of some part of their organization and eventually die, unless certain recuperative measures are applied to them. If this is so, protozoa would appear to die after a phase of senescence exactly like the higher animals - thus completely contradicting Weismann’s assertion that death is a late acquisition of living organisms.

From the aggregate of these experiments two facts emerge which seem to offer us a firm footing.

First: If two of the animalculae, at the moment before they show signs of senescence, are able to coalesce with each other, that is to ‘conjugate’ (soon after which they once more separate), they are saved from growing old and become ‘rejuvenated’. Conjugation is no doubt the fore-runner of the sexual reproduction of higher creatures; it is as yet unconnected with propagation and is limited to the mixing of the substances of the two individuals. (Weismann’s ‘amphimixis’.) The recuperative effects of conjugation can, however, be replaced by certain stimulating agents, by alterations in the composition of the fluid which provides their nourishment, by raising their temperature or by shaking them. We are reminded of the celebrated experiment made by J. Loeb, in which, by means of certain chemical stimuli, he induced segmentation in sea-urchins’ eggs - a process which can normally occur only after fertilization.

Secondly: It is probable nevertheless that infusoria die a natural death as a result of their own vital processes. For the contradiction between Woodruff’s findings and the others is due to his having provided each generation with fresh nutrient fluid. If he omitted to do so, he observed the same signs of senescence as the other experimenters. He concluded that the animalculae were injured by the products of metabolism which they extruded into the surrounding fluid. He was then able to prove conclusively that it was only the products of its own metabolism which had fatal results for the particular kind of animalcule. For the same animalculae which inevitably perished if they were crowded together in their own nutrient fluid flourished in a solution which was over-saturated with the waste products of a distantly related species. An infusorian, therefore, if it is left to itself, dies a natural death owing to its incomplete voidance of the products of its own metabolism. (It may be that the same incapacity is the ultimate cause of the death of all higher animals as well.)

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3750

At this point the question may well arise in our minds whether any object whatever is served by trying to solve the problem of natural death from a study of the protozoa. The primitive organization of these creatures may conceal from our eyes important conditions which, though in fact present in them too, only become visible in higher animals where they are able to find morphological expression. And if we abandon the morphological point of view and adopt the dynamic one, it becomes a matter of complete indifference to us whether natural death can be shown to occur in protozoa or not. The substance which is later recognized as being immortal has not yet become separated in them from the mortal one. The instinctual forces which seek to conduct life into death may also be operating in protozoa from the first, and yet their effects may be so completely concealed by the life-preserving forces that it may be very hard to find any direct evidence of their presence. We have seen, moreover, that the observations made by biologists allow us to assume that internal processes of this kind leading to death do occur also in protista. But even if protista turned out to be immortal in Weismann’s sense, his assertion that death is a late acquisition would apply only to its manifest phenomena and would not make impossible the assumption of processes tending towards it.

Thus our expectation that biology would flatly contradict the recognition of death instincts has not been fulfilled. We are at liberty to continue concerning ourselves with their possibility, if we have other reasons for doing so. The striking similarity between Weismann’s distinction of soma and germ-plasm and our separation of the death instincts from the life instincts persists and retains its significance.

We may pause for a moment over this pre-eminently dualistic view of instinctual life. According to E. Hering’s theory, two kinds of processes are constantly at work in living substance, operating in contrary directions, one constructive or assimilatory and the other destructive or dissimilatory. May we venture to recognize in these two directions taken by the vital processes the activity of our two instinctual impulses, the life instincts and the death instincts? There is something else, at any rate, that we cannot remain blind to. We have unwittingly steered our course into the harbour of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. For him death is the ‘true result and to that extent the purpose of life’,¹ while the sexual instinct is the embodiment of the will to live.

¹ Schopenhauer (1851; Sämtliche Werke, ed. Hübscher, 1938, 5, 236).

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3751

Let us make a bold attempt at another step forward. It is generally considered that the union of a number of cells into a vital association - the multicellular character of organisms - has become a means of prolonging their life. One cell helps to preserve the life of another, and the community of cells can survive even if individual cells have to die. We have already heard that conjugation, too, the temporary coalescence of two unicellular organisms, has a life-preserving and rejuvenating effect on both of them. Accordingly, we might attempt to apply the libido theory which has been arrived at in psycho-analysis to the mutual relationship of cells. We might suppose that the life instincts or sexual instincts which are active in each cell take the other cells as their object, that they partly neutralize the death instincts (that is, the processes set up by them) in those cells and thus preserve their life; while the other cells do the same for them, and still others sacrifice themselves in the performance of this libidinal function. The germ-cells themselves would behave in a completely ‘narcissistic’ fashion - to use the phrase that we are accustomed to use in the theory of the neuroses to describe a whole individual who retains his libido in his ego and pays none of it out in object-cathexes. The germ-cells require their libido, the activity of their life instincts, for themselves, as a reserve against their later momentous constructive activity. (The cells of the malignant neoplasms which destroy the organism should also perhaps be described as narcissistic in this same sense: pathology is prepared to regard their germs as innate and to ascribe embryonic attributes to them.) In this way the libido of our sexual instincts would coincide with the Eros of the poets and philosophers which holds all living things together.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3752

Here then is an opportunity for looking back over the slow development of our libido theory. In the first instance the analysis of the transference neuroses forced upon our notice the opposition between the ‘sexual instincts’, which are directed towards an object, and certain other instincts, with which we were very insufficiently acquainted and which we described provisionally as the ‘ego-instincts’. A foremost place among these was necessarily given to the instincts serving the self-preservation of the individual. It was impossible to say what other distinctions were to be drawn among them. No knowledge would have been more valuable as a foundation for true psychological science than an approximate grasp of the common characteristics and possible distinctive features of the instincts. But in no region of psychology were we groping more in the dark. Everyone assumed the existence of as many instincts or ‘basic instincts’ as he chose, and juggled with them like the ancient Greek natural philosophers with their four elements - earth, air, fire and water. Psycho-analysis, which could not escape making some assumption about the instincts, kept at first to the popular division of instincts typified in the phrase ‘hunger and love’. At least there was nothing arbitrary in this; and by its help the analysis of the psychoneuroses was carried forward quite a distance. The concept of ‘sexuality’, and at the same time of the sexual instinct, had, it is true, to be extended so as to cover many things which could not be classed under the reproductive function; and this caused no little hubbub in an austere, respectable or merely hypocritical world.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3753

The next step was taken when psycho-analysis felt its way closer towards the psychological ego, which it had first come to know only as a repressive, censoring agency, capable of erecting protective structures and reactive formations. Critical and far-seeing minds had, it is true, long since objected to the concept of libido being restricted to the energy of the sexual instincts directed towards an object. But they failed to explain how they had arrived at their better knowledge or to derive from it anything of which analysis could make use. Advancing more cautiously, psycho-analysis observed the regularity with which libido is withdrawn from the object and directed on to the ego (the process of introversion); and, by studying the libidinal development of children in its earliest phases, came to the conclusion that the ego is the true and original reservoir of libido, and that it is only from that reservoir that libido is extended on to objects. The ego now found its position among sexual objects and was at once given the foremost place among them. Libido which was in this way lodged in the ego was described as ‘narcissistic’.¹ This narcissistic libido was of course also a manifestation of the force of the sexual instinct in the analytical sense of those words, and it had necessarily to be identified with the ‘self-preservative instincts’ whose existence had been recognized from the first. Thus the original opposition between the ego-instincts and the sexual instincts proved to be inadequate. A portion of the ego-instincts was seen to be libidinal; sexual instincts - probably alongside others - operated in the ego. Nevertheless we are justified in saying that the old formula which lays it down that psychoneuroses are based on a conflict between ego-instincts and sexual instincts contains nothing that we need reject to-day. It is merely that the distinction between the two kinds of instinct, which was originally regarded as in some sort of way qualitative, must now be characterized differently - namely as being topographical. And in particular it is still true that the transference neuroses, the essential subject of psycho-analytic study, are the result of a conflict between the ego and the libidinal cathexis of objects.

But it is all the more necessary for us to lay stress upon the libidinal character of the self-preservative instincts now that we are venturing upon the further step of recognizing the sexual instinct as Eros, the preserver of all things, and of deriving the narcissistic libido of the ego from the stores of libido by means of which the cells of the soma are attached to one another. But we now find ourselves suddenly faced by another question. If the self-preservative instincts too are of a libidinal nature, are there perhaps no other instincts whatever but the libidinal ones? At all events there are none other visible. But in that case we shall after all be driven to agree with the critics who suspected from the first that psycho-analysis explains everything by sexuality, or with innovators like Jung who, making a hasty judgement, have used the word ‘libido’ to mean instinctual force in general. Must not this be so?

¹See my paper on narcissism (1914c).

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3754

It was not our intention at all events to produce such a result. Our argument had as its point of departure a sharp distinction between ego-instincts, which we equated with death instincts, and sexual instincts, which we equated with life instincts. (We were prepared at one stage to include the so-called self-preservative instincts of the ego among the death instincts; but we subsequently corrected ourselves on this point and withdrew it.) Our views have from the very first been dualistic, and to-day they are even more definitely dualistic than before - now that we describe the opposition as being, not between ego-instincts and sexual instincts but between life instincts and death instincts. Jung’s libido theory is on the contrary monistic; the fact that he has called his one instinctual force ‘libido’ is bound to cause confusion, but need not affect us otherwise. We suspect that instincts other than those of self-preservation operate in the ego, and it ought to be possible for us to point to them. Unfortunately, however, the analysis of the ego has made so little headway that it is very difficult for us to do so. It is possible, indeed, that the libidinal instincts in the ego may be linked in a peculiar manner with these other ego-instincts which are still strange to us. Even before we had any clear understanding of narcissism, psycho-analysts had a suspicion that the ‘ego-instincts’ had libidinal components attached to them. But these are very uncertain possibilities, to which our opponents will pay very little attention. The difficulty remains that psycho-analysis has not enabled us hitherto to point to any instincts other than the libidinal ones. That, however, is no reason for our falling in with the conclusion that no others in fact exist.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3755

In the obscurity that reigns at present in the theory of the instincts, it would be unwise to reject any idea that promises to throw light on it. We started out from the great opposition between the life and death instincts. Now object-love itself presents us with a second example of a similar polarity - that between love (or other affection) and hate (or aggressiveness). If only we could succeed in relating these two polarities to each other and in deriving one from the other! From the very first we recognized the presence of a sadistic component in the sexual instinct.¹ As we know, it can make itself independent and can, in the form of a perversion, dominate an individual’s entire sexual activity. It also emerges as a predominant component instinct in one of the ‘pregenital organizations’, as I have named them. But how can the sadistic instinct, whose aim it is to injure the object, be derived from Eros, the preserver of life? Is it not plausible to suppose that this sadism is in fact a death instinct which, under the influence of the narcissistic libido, has been forced away from the ego and has consequently only emerged in relation to the object? It now enters the service of the sexual function. During the oral stage of organization of the libido, the act of obtaining erotic mastery over an object coincides with that object’s destruction; later, the sadistic instinct separates off, and finally, at the stage of genital primacy, it takes on, for the purposes of reproduction, the function of overpowering the sexual object to the extent necessary for carrying out the sexual act. It might indeed be said that the sadism which has been forced out of the ego has pointed the way for the libidinal components of the sexual instinct, and that these follow after it to the object. Wherever the original sadism has undergone no mitigation or intermixture, we find the familiar ambivalence of love and hate in erotic life.

If such an assumption as this is permissible, then we have met the demand that we should produce an example of a death instinct - though, it is true, a displaced one. But this way of looking at things is very far from being easy to grasp and creates a positively mystical impression. It looks suspiciously as though we were trying to find a way out of a highly embarrassing situation at any price. We may recall, however, that there is nothing new in an assumption of this kind. We put one forward on an earlier occasion, before there was any question of an embarrassing situation. Clinical observations led us at that time to the view that masochism, the component instinct which is complementary to sadism, must be regarded as sadism that has been turned round upon the subject’s own ego.² But there is no difference in principle between an instinct turning from an object to the ego and its turning from the ego to an object - which is the new point now under discussion. Masochism, the turning round of the instinct upon the subject’s own ego, would in that case be a return to an earlier phase of the instinct’s history, a regression. The account that was formerly given of masochism requires emendation as being too sweeping in one respect: there might be such a thing as primary masochism - a possibility which I had contested at that time.³

¹ This was already so in the first edition of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905.

² See my Three Essays (1905d) and ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’ (1915c).

³ A considerable portion of these speculations have been anticipated by Sabina Spielrein (1912) in an instructive and interesting paper which, however, is unfortunately not entirely clear to me. She there describes the sadistic components of the sexual instinct as ‘destructive’. A. Stärke (1914), again, has attempted to identify the concept of libido itself with the biological concept (assumed on theoretical grounds) of an impetus towards death. See also Rank (1907). All these discussions, like that in the text, give evidence of the demand for a clarification of the theory of the instincts such as has not yet been achieved.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3756

Let us, however, return to the self-preservative sexual instincts. The experiments upon protista have already shown us that conjugation - that is, the coalescence of two individuals which separate soon afterwards without any subsequent cell-division occurring - has a strengthening and rejuvenating effect upon both of them.1 In later generations they show no signs of degenerating and seem able to put up a longer resistance to the injurious effects of their own metabolism. This single observation may, I think, be taken as typical of the effect produced by sexual union as well. But how is it that the coalescence of two only slightly different cells can bring about this renewal of life? The experiment which replaces the conjugation of protozoa by the application of chemical or even of mechanical stimuli (cf. Lipschütz, 1914) enables us to give what is no doubt a conclusive reply to this question. The result is brought about by the influx of fresh amounts of stimulus. This tallies well with the hypothesis that the life process of the individual leads for internal reasons to an abolition of chemical tensions, that is to say, to death, whereas union with the living substance of a different individual increases those tensions, introducing what may be described as fresh ‘vital differences’ which must then be lived off. As regards this dissimilarity there must of course be one or more optima. The dominating tendency of mental life, and perhaps of nervous life in general, is the effort to reduce, to keep constant or to remove internal tension due to stimuli (the ‘Nirvana principle’, to borrow a term from Barbara Low) - a tendency which finds expression in the pleasure principle; and our recognition of that fact is one of our strongest reasons for believing in the existence of death instincts.

¹ See the account quoted above p. 3748 from Lipschütz (1914).

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3757

But we still feel our line of thought appreciably hampered by the fact that we cannot ascribe to the sexual instinct the characteristic of a compulsion to repeat which first put us on the track of the death instincts. The sphere of embryonic developmental processes is no doubt extremely rich in such phenomena of repetition; the two germ-cells that are involved in sexual reproduction and their life history are themselves only repetitions of the beginnings of organic life. But the essence of the processes to which sexual life is directed is the coalescence of two cell-bodies. That alone is what guarantees the immortality of the living substance in the higher organisms.

In other words, we need more information on the origin of sexual reproduction and of the sexual instincts in general. This is a problem which is calculated to daunt an outsider and which the specialists themselves have not yet been able to solve. We shall therefore give only the briefest summary of whatever seems relevant to our line of thought from among the many discordant assertions and opinions.

One of these views deprives the problem of reproduction of its mysterious fascination by representing it as a part manifestation of growth. (Cf. multiplication by fission, sprouting or gemmation.) The origin of reproduction by sexually differentiated germ-cells might be pictured along sober Darwinian lines by supposing that the advantage of amphimixis, arrived at on some occasion by the chance conjugation of two protista, was retained and further exploited in later development.¹ On this view ‘sex’ would not be anything very ancient; and the extra ordinarily violent instincts whose aim it is to bring about sexual union would be repeating something that had once occurred by chance and had since become established as being advantageous.

The question arises here, as in the case of death, whether we do right in ascribing to protista those characteristics alone which they actually exhibit, and whether it is correct to assume that forces and processes which become visible only in the higher organisms originated in those organisms for the first time. The view of sexuality we have just mentioned is of little help for our purposes. The objection may be raised against it that it postulates the existence of life instincts already operating in the simplest organisms; for otherwise conjugation, which works counter to the course of life and makes the task of ceasing to live more difficult, would not be retained and elaborated but would be avoided. If, therefore, we are not to abandon the hypothesis of death instincts, we must suppose them to be associated from the very first with life instincts. But it must be admitted that in that case we shall be working upon an equation with two unknown quantities.

¹ Though Weismann (1892) denies this advantage as well: ‘In no case does fertilization correspond to a rejuvenescence or renewal of life, nor is its occurrence necessary in order that life may endure: it is merely an arrangement which renders possible the intermingling of two different hereditary tendencies.’ He nevertheless believes that an intermingling of this kind leads to an increase in the variability of the organism concerned.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3758

Apart from this, science has so little to tell us about the origin of sexuality that we can liken the problem to a darkness into which not so much as a ray of a hypothesis has penetrated. In quite a different region, it is true, we do meet with such a hypothesis; but it is of so fantastic a kind - a myth rather than a scientific explanation - that I should not venture to produce it here, were it not that it fulfils precisely the one condition whose fulfilment we desire. For it traces the origin of an instinct to a need to restore an earlier state of things.

What I have in mind is, of course, the theory which Plato put into the mouth of Aristophanes in the Symposium, and which deals not only with the origin of the sexual instinct but also with the most important of its variations in relation to its object. ‘The original human nature was not like the present, but different. In the first place, the sexes were originally three in number, not two as they are now; there was man, woman, and the union of the two. . . .’ Everything about these primaeval men was double: they had four hands and four feet, two faces, two privy parts, and so on. Eventually Zeus decided to cut these men in two, ‘like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling’. After the division had been made, ‘the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and threw their arms about one another eager to grow into one’.¹

¹I have to thank Professor Heinrich Gomperz, of Vienna, for the following discussion on the origin of the Platonic myth, which I give partly in his own words. It is to be remarked that what is essentially the same theory is already to be found in the Upanishads. For we find the following passage in the Brihadâranyaka-upanishad, 1, 4, 3, where the origin of the world from the Atman (the Self or Ego) is described: ‘But he felt no delight. Therefore a man who is lonely feels no delight. He wished for a second. He was so large as man and wife together. He then made this his Self to fall in two, and then arose husband and wife Therefore Yagnavalkya said: "We two are thus (each of us) like half a shell." Therefore the void which was there, is filled by the wife.’

The Brihadâranyaka-upanishad is the most ancient of all the Upanishads and no competent authority dates it later than about the year 800 B.C. In contradiction to the prevailing opinion, I should hesitate to give an unqualified denial to the possibility of Plato’s myth being derived, even if it were only indirectly, from the Indian source, since a similar possibility cannot be excluded in the case of the doctrine of transmigration. But even if a derivation of this kind (through the Pythagoreans in the first instance) were established, the significance of the coincidence between the two trains of thought would scarcely be diminished. For Plato would not have adopted a story of this kind which had somehow reached him through some oriental tradition - to say nothing of giving it so important a place - unless it had struck him as containing an element of truth.

In a paper devoted to a systematic examination of this line of thought before the time of Plato, Ziegler (1913) traces it back to Babylonian origins.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3759

Shall we follow the hint given us by the poet-philosopher, and venture upon the hypothesis that living substance at the time of its coming to life was torn apart into small particles, which have ever since endeavoured to reunite through the sexual instincts? that these instincts, in which the chemical affinity of inanimate matter persisted, gradually succeeded, as they developed through the kingdom of the protista, in overcoming the difficulties put in the way of that endeavour by an environment charged with dangerous stimuli - stimuli which compelled them to form a protective cortical layer? that these splintered fragments of living substance in this way attained a multicellular condition and finally transferred the instinct for reuniting, in the most highly concentrated form, to the germ-cells? - But here, I think, the moment has come for breaking off.

Not, however, without the addition of a few words of critical reflection. It may be asked whether and how far I am myself convinced of the truth of the hypotheses that have been set out in these pages. My answer would be that I am not convinced myself and that I do not seek to persuade other people to believe in them. Or, more precisely, that I do not know how far I believe in them. There is no reason, as it seems to me, why the emotional factor of conviction should enter into this question at all. It is surely possible to throw oneself into a line of thought and to follow it wherever it leads out of simple scientific curiosity, or, if the reader prefers, as an advocatus diaboli, who is not on that account himself sold to the devil. I do not dispute the fact that the third step in the theory of the instincts, which I have taken here, cannot lay claim to the same degree of certainty as the two earlier ones - the extension of the concept of sexuality and the hypothesis of narcissism. These two innovations were a direct translation of observation into theory and were no more open to sources of error than is inevitable in all such cases. It is true that my assertion of the regressive character of instincts also rests upon observed material - namely on the facts of the compulsion to repeat. It may be, however, that I have overestimated their significance. And in any case it is impossible to pursue an idea of this kind except by repeatedly combining factual material with what is purely speculative and thus diverging widely from empirical observation. The more frequently this is done in the course of constructing a theory, the more untrustworthy, as we know, must be the final result. But the degree of uncertainty is not assignable. One may have made a lucky hit or one may have gone shamefully astray. I do not think a large part is played by what is called ‘intuition’ in work of this kind. From what I have seen of intuition, it seems to me to be the product of a kind of intellectual impartiality. Unfortunately, however, people are seldom impartial where ultimate things, the great problems of science and life, are concerned. Each of us is governed in such cases by deep-rooted internal prejudices, into whose hands our speculation unwittingly plays. Since we have such good grounds for being distrustful, our attitude towards the results of our own deliberations cannot well be other than one of cool benevolence. I hasten to add, however, that self-criticism such as this is far from binding one to any special tolerance towards dissentient opinions. It is perfectly legitimate to reject remorselessly theories which are contradicted by the very first steps in the analysis of observed facts, while yet being aware at the same time that the validity of one’s own theory is only a provisional one.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3760

We need not feel greatly disturbed in judging our speculation upon the life and death instincts by the fact that so many bewildering and obscure processes occur in it - such as one instinct being driven out by another or an instinct turning from the ego to an object, and so on. This is merely due to our being obliged to operate with the scientific terms, that is to say with the figurative language, peculiar to psychology (or, more precisely, to depth psychology). We could not otherwise describe the processes in question at all, and indeed we could not have become aware of them. The deficiencies in our description would probably vanish if we were already in a position to replace the psychological terms by physiological or chemical ones. It is true that they too are only part of a figurative language; but it is one with which we have long been familiar and which is perhaps a simpler one as well.

On the other hand it should be made quite clear that the uncertainty of our speculation has been greatly increased by the necessity for borrowing from the science of biology. Biology is truly a land of unlimited possibilities. We may expect it to give us the most surprising information and we cannot guess what answers it will return in a few dozen years to the questions we have put to it. They may be of a kind which will blow away the whole of our artificial structure of hypotheses. If so, it may be asked why I have embarked upon such a line of thought as the present one, and in particular why I have decided to make it public. Well - I cannot deny that some of the analogies, correlations and connections which it contains seemed to me to deserve consideration.¹

¹I will add a few words to clarify our terminology, which has undergone some development in the course of the present work. We came to know what the ‘sexual instincts’ were from their relation to the sexes and to the reproductive function. We retained this name after we had been obliged by the findings of psycho-analysis to connect them less closely with reproduction. With the hypothesis of narcissistic libido and the extension of the concept of libido to the individual cells, the sexual instinct was transformed for us into Eros, which seeks to force together and hold together the portions of living substance. What are commonly called the sexual instincts are looked upon by us as the part of Eros which is directed towards objects. Our speculations have suggested that Eros operates from the beginning of life and appears as a ‘life instinct’ in opposition to the ‘death instinct’ which was brought into being by the coming to life of inorganic substance. These speculations seek to solve the riddle of life by supposing that these two instincts were struggling with each other from the very first. It is not so easy, perhaps, to follow the transformations though which the concept of the ‘ego-instincts’ has passed. To begin with we applied that name to all the instinctual trends (of which we had no closer knowledge) which could be distinguished from the sexual instincts directed towards an object; and we opposed the ego-instincts to the sexual instincts of which the libido is the manifestation. Subsequently we came to closer grips with the analysis of the ego and recognized that a portion of the ‘ego-instincts’ is also of a libidinal character and has taken the subject’s own ego as its object. These narcissistic self-preservative instincts had thenceforward to be counted among the libidinal sexual instincts. The opposition between the ego-instincts and the sexual instincts was transformed into one between the ego-instincts and the object-instincts, both of a libidinal nature. But in its place a fresh opposition appeared between the libidinal (ego- and object-) instincts and others, which must be presumed to be present in the ego and which may perhaps actually be observed in the destructive instincts. Our speculations have transformed this opposition into one between the life instincts (Eros) and the death instincts.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3761

VII

If it is really the case that seeking to restore an earlier state of things is such a universal characteristic of instincts, we need not be surprised that so many processes take place in mental life independently of the pleasure principle. This characteristic would be shared by all the component instincts and in their case would aim at returning once more to a particular stage in the course of development. These are matters over which the pleasure principle has as yet no control; but it does not follow that any of them are necessarily opposed to it, and we have still to solve the problem of the relation of the instinctual processes of repetition to the dominance of the pleasure principle.

We have found that one of the earliest and most important functions of the mental apparatus is to bind the instinctual impulses which impinge on it, to replace the primary process prevailing in them by the secondary process and convert their freely mobile cathectic energy into a mainly quiescent (tonic) cathexis. While this transformation is taking place no attention can be paid to the development of unpleasure; but this does not imply the suspension of the pleasure principle. On the contrary, the transformation occurs on behalf of the pleasure principle; the binding is a preparatory act which introduces and assures the dominance of the pleasure principle.

Let us make a sharper distinction than we have hitherto made between function and tendency. The pleasure principle, then, is a tendency operating in the service of a function whose business it is to free the mental apparatus entirely from excitation or to keep the amount of excitation in it constant or to keep it as low as possible. We cannot yet decide with certainty in favour of any of these ways of putting it; but it is clear that the function thus described would be concerned with the most universal endeavour of all living substance - namely to return to the quiescence of the inorganic world. We have all experienced how the greatest pleasure attainable by us, that of the sexual act, is associated with a momentary extinction of a highly intensified excitation. The binding of an instinctual impulse would be a preliminary function designed to prepare the excitation for its final elimination in the pleasure of discharge.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3762

This raises the question of whether feelings of pleasure and unpleasure can be produced equally from bound and from unbound excitatory processes. And there seems to be no doubt whatever that the unbound or primary processes give rise to far more intense feelings in both directions than the bound or secondary ones. Moreover the primary processes are the earlier in time; at the beginning of mental life there are no others, and we may infer that if the pleasure principle had not already been operative in them it could never have been established for the later ones. We thus reach what is at bottom no very simple conclusion, namely that at the beginning of mental life the struggle for pleasure was far more intense than later but not so unrestricted: it had to submit to frequent interruptions. In later times the dominance of the pleasure principle is very much more secure, but it itself has no more escaped the process of taming than the other instincts in general. In any case, whatever it is that causes the appearance of feelings of pleasure and unpleasure in processes of excitation must be present in the secondary process just as it is in the primary one.

Here might be the starting-point for fresh investigations. Our consciousness communicates to us feelings from within not only of pleasure and unpleasure but also of a peculiar tension which in its turn can be either pleasurable or unpleasurable. Should the difference between these feelings enable us to distinguish between bound and unbound processes of energy? or is the feeling of tension to be related to the absolute magnitude, or perhaps to the level, of the cathexis, while the pleasure and unpleasure series indicates a change in magnitude of the cathexis within a given unit of time? Another striking fact is that the life instincts have so much more contact with our internal perception - emerging as breakers of the peace and constantly producing tensions whose release is felt as pleasure - while the death instincts seem to do their work unobtrusively. The pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instincts. It is true that it keeps watch upon stimuli from without, which are regarded as dangers by both kinds of instincts; but it is more especially on guard against increases of stimulation from within, which would make the task of living more difficult. This in turn raises a host of other questions to which we can at present find no answer. We must be patient and await fresh methods and occasions of research. We must be ready, too, to abandon a path that we have followed for a time, if it seems to be leading to no good end. Only believers, who demand that science shall be a substitute for the catechism they have given up, will blame an investigator for developing or even transforming his views. We may take comfort, too, for the slow advances of our scientific knowledge in the words of the poet:

Was man nicht erfliegen kann, muss man erhinken.

.  .  .  .  .

Die Schrift sagt, es ist keine Sünde zu hinken.

3763

GROUP PSYCHOLOGY AND THE ANALYSIS OF THE EGO

(1921)

3764

Intentionally left blank

3765

GROUP PSYCHOLOGY AND THE ANALYSIS OF THE EGO

I

INTRODUCTION

The contrast between individual psychology and social or group psychology, which at a first glance may seem to be full of significance, loses a great deal of its sharpness when it is examined more closely. It is true that individual psychology is concerned with the individual man and explores the paths by which he seeks to find satisfaction for his instinctual impulses; but only rarely and under certain exceptional conditions is individual psychology in a position to disregard the relations of this individual to others. In the individual’s mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first individual psychology, in is extended but entirely justifiable sense of the words, is at the same time social psychology as well.

The relations of an individual to his parents and to his brothers and sisters, to the object of his love, and to his physician - in fact all the relations which have hitherto been the chief subject of psycho-analytic research - may claim to be considered as social phenomena; and in this respect they may be contrasted with certain other processes, described by us as ‘narcissistic’, in which the satisfaction of the instincts is partially or totally withdrawn from the influence of other people. The contrast between social and narcissistic - Bleuler would perhaps call them ‘autistic’ - mental acts therefore falls wholly within the domain of individual psychology, and is not well calculated to differentiate it from a social or group psychology.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3766

The individual in the relations which have already been mentioned - to his parents and to his brothers and sisters, to the person he is in love with, to his friend, and to his physician - comes under the influence of only a single person, or of a very small number of persons, each one of whom has become enormously important to him. Now in speaking of social or group psychology it has become usual to leave these relations on one side and to isolate as the subject of inquiry the influencing of an individual by a large number of people simultaneously, people with whom he is connected by something, though otherwise they may in many respects be strangers to him. Group psychology is therefore concerned with the individual man as a member of a race, of a nation, of a caste, of a profession, of an institution, or as a component part of a crowd of people who have been organized into a group at some particular time for some definite purpose. When once natural continuity has been severed in this way, if a breach is thus made between things which are by nature interconnected, it is easy to regard the phenomena that appear under these special conditions as being expressions of a special instinct that is not further reducible - the social instinct (‘herd instinct’, ‘group mind’), which does not come to light in any other situations. But we may perhaps venture to object that it seems difficult to attribute to the factor of number a significance so great as to make it capable by itself of arousing in our mental life a new instinct that is otherwise not brought into play. Our expectation is therefore directed towards two other possibilities: that the social instinct may not be a primitive one and insusceptible of dissection, and that it may be possible to discover the beginnings of its development in a narrower circle, such as that of the family.

Although group psychology is only in its infancy, it embraces an immense number of separate issues and offers to investigators countless problems which have hitherto not even been properly distinguished from one another. The mere classification of the different forms of group formation and the description of the mental phenomena produced by them require a great expenditure of observation and exposition, and have already given rise to a copious literature. Anyone who compares the narrow dimensions of this little book with the wide extent of group psychology will at once be able to guess that only a few points chosen from the whole material are to be dealt with here. And they will in fact only be a few questions with which the depth-psychology of psycho-analysis is specially concerned.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3767

II

LE BON’S DESCRIPTION OF THE GROUP MIND

Instead of starting from a definition, it seems more useful to begin with some indication of the range of the phenomena under review, and to select from among them a few specially striking and characteristic facts to which our enquiry can be attached. We can achieve both of these aims by means of quotation from Le Bon’s deservedly famous work Psychologie des foules.

Let us make the matter clear once again. If a psychology, concerned with exploring the predispositions, the instinctual impulses, the motives and the aims of an individual man down to his actions and his relations with those who are nearest to him, had completely achieved its task, and had cleared up the whole of these matters with their interconnections, it would then suddenly find itself confronted by a new task which would lie before it unachieved. It would be obliged to explain the surprising fact that under a certain condition this individual, whom it had come to understand, thought, felt and acted in quite a different way from what would have been expected. And this condition is his insertion into a collection of people which has acquired the characteristic of a ‘psychological group’. What, then, is a ‘group’? How does it acquire the capacity for exercising such a decisive influence over the mental life of the individual? And what is the nature of the mental change which it forces upon the individual?

It is the task of a theoretical group psychology to answer these three questions. The best way of approaching them is evidently to start with the third. Observation of the changes in the individual’s reactions is what provides group psychology with its material; for every attempt at an explanation must be preceded by a description of the thing that is to be explained.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3768

I will now let Le Bon speak for himself. He says: ‘The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological group is the following. Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a group puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation. There are certain ideas and feelings which do not come into being, or do not transform themselves into acts except in the case of individuals forming a group. The psychological group is a provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements, which for a moment are combined, exactly as the cells which constitute a living body form by their reunion a new being which displays characteristics very different from those possessed by each of the cells singly.’ (Trans. 1920, 29.)

We shall take the liberty of interrupting Le Bon’s exposition with glosses of our own, and shall accordingly insert an observation at this point. If the individuals in the group are combined into a unity, there must surely be something to unite them, and this bond might be precisely the thing that is characteristic of a group. But Le Bon does not answer this question; he goes on to consider the alteration which the individual undergoes when in a group and describes it in terms which harmonize well with the fundamental postulates of our own depth-psychology.

‘It is easy to prove how much the individual forming part of a group differs from the isolated individual, but it is less easy to discover the causes of this difference.

‘To obtain at any rate a glimpse of them it is necessary in the first place to call to mind the truth established by modern psychology, that unconscious phenomena play an altogether preponderating part not only in organic life, but also in the operations of the intelligence. The conscious life of the mind is of small importance in comparison with its unconscious life. The most subtle analyst, the most acute observer, is scarcely successful in discovering more than a very small number of the conscious motives that determine his conduct. Our conscious acts are the outcome of an unconscious substratum created in the mind mainly by hereditary influences. This substratum consists of the innumerable common characteristics handed down from generation to generation, which constitute the genius of a race. Behind the avowed causes of our acts there undoubtedly lie secret causes that we do not avow, but behind these secret causes there are many others more secret still, of which we ourselves are ignorant. The greater part of our daily actions are the result of hidden motives which escape our observation.’ (Ibid., 30.)

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3769

Le Bon thinks that the particular acquirements of individuals become obliterated in a group, and that in this way their distinctiveness vanishes. The racial unconscious emerges; what is heterogeneous is submerged in what is homogeneous. As we should say, the mental superstructure, the development of which in individuals shows such dissimilarities, is removed, and the unconscious foundations, which are similar in everyone, stand exposed to view.

In this way individuals in a group would come to show an average character. But Le Bon believes that they also display new characteristics which they have not previously possessed, and he seeks the reason for this in three different factors.

‘The first is that the individual forming part of a group acquires, solely from numerical considerations, a sentiment of invincible power which allows him to yield to instincts which, had he been alone, he would perforce have kept under restraint. He will be the less disposed to check himself, from the consideration that, a group being anonymous and in consequence irresponsible, the sentiment of responsibility which always controls individuals disappears entirely.’ (Ibid., 33.)

From our point of view we need not attribute so much importance to the appearance of new characteristics. For us it would be enough to say that in a group the individual is brought under conditions which allow him to throw off the repressions of his unconscious instinctual impulses. The apparently new characteristics which he then displays are in fact the manifestations of this unconscious, in which all that is evil in the human mind is contained as a predisposition. We can find no difficulty in understanding the disappearance of conscience or of a sense of responsibility in these circumstances. It has long been our contention that ‘social anxiety’ is the essence of what is called conscience.¹

¹ There is some difference between Le Bon’s view and ours owing to his concept of the unconscious not quite coinciding with the one adopted by psycho-analysis. Le Bon’s unconscious more especially contains the most deeply buried features of the racial mind, which as a matter of fact lies outside the scope of psycho-analysis. We do not fail to recognize, indeed, that the ego’s nucleus, which comprises the ‘archaic heritage’ of the human mind, is unconscious; but in addition to this we distinguish the ‘unconscious repressed’, which arose from a portion of that heritage. This concept of the repressed is not to be found in Le Bon.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3770

‘The second cause, which is contagion, also intervenes to determine the manifestation in groups of their special characteristics, and at the same time the trend they are to take. Contagion is a phenomenon of which it is easy to establish the presence, but which it is not easy to explain. It must be classed among those phenomena of a hypnotic order, which we shall shortly study. In a group every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest. This is an aptitude very contrary to his nature, and of which a man is scarcely capable, except when he makes part of a group.’ (Ibid., 33.)

We shall later on base an important conjecture upon this last statement.

‘A third cause, and by far the most important, determines in the individuals of a group special characteristics which are quite contrary at times to those presented by the isolated individual. I allude to that suggestibility of which, moreover, the contagion mentioned above is only an effect.

‘To understand this phenomenon it is necessary to bear in mind certain recent physiological discoveries. We know to-day that by various processes an individual may be brought into such a condition that, having entirely lost his conscious personality, he obeys all the suggestions of the operator who has deprived him of it, and commits acts in utter contradiction with his character and habits. The most careful investigations seem to prove that an individual immersed for some length of time in a group in action soon finds himself - either in consequence of the magnetic influence given out by the group, or from some other cause of which we are ignorant - in a special state, which much resembles the state of "fascination" in which the hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer. . . . The conscious personality has entirely vanished; will and discernment are lost. All feelings and thoughts are bent in the direction determined by the hypnotizer.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3771

‘Such also is approximately the state of the individual forming part of a psychological group. He is no longer conscious of his acts. In his case, as in the case of the hypnotized subject, at the same time that certain faculties are destroyed, others may be brought to a high degree of exaltation. Under the influence of a suggestion, he will undertake the accomplishment of certain acts with irresistible impetuosity. This impetuosity is the more irresistible in the case of groups than in that of the hypnotized subject, from the fact that, the suggestion being the same for all the individuals in the group, it gains in strength by reciprocity.’ (Ibid., 34.)

‘We see, then, that the disappearance of the conscious personality, the predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning by means of suggestion and contagion of feelings and ideas in an identical direction, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into acts; these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the individual forming part of a group. He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will.’ (Ibid., 35.)

I have quoted this passage so fully in order to make it quite clear that Le Bon explains the condition of an individual in a group as being actually hypnotic, and does not merely make a comparison between the two states. We have no intention of raising any objection at this point, but wish only to emphasize the fact that the two last causes of an individual becoming altered in a group (the contagion and the heightened suggestibility) are evidently not on a par, since the contagion seems actually to be a manifestation of the suggestibility. Moreover the effects of the two factors do not seem to be sharply differentiated in the text of Le Bon’s remarks. We may perhaps best interpret his statement if we connect the contagion with the effects of the individual members of the group on one another, while we point to another source for those manifestations of suggestion in the group which he regards as similar to the phenomena of hypnotic influence. But to what source? We cannot avoid being struck with a sense of deficiency when we notice that one of the chief elements of the comparison, namely the person who is to replace the hypnotist in the case of the group, is not mentioned in Le Bon’s exposition. But he nevertheless distinguishes between this influence of ‘fascination’ which remains plunged in obscurity and the contagious effect which the individuals exercise upon one another and by which the original suggestion is strengthened.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3772

Here is yet another important consideration for helping us to understand the individual in a group: ‘Moreover, by the mere fact that he forms part of an organized group, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian - that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings.’ (Ibid., 36.) Le Bon then dwells especially upon the lowering in intellectual ability which an individual experiences when he becomes merged in a group.¹

Let us now leave the individual, and turn to the group mind, as it has been outlined by Le Bon. It shows not a single feature which a psycho-analyst would find any difficulty in placing or in deriving from its source. Le Bon himself shows us the way by pointing to its similarity with the mental life of primitive people and of children (ibid., 40).

A group is impulsive, changeable and irritable. It is led almost exclusively by the unconscious.² The impulses which a group obeys may according to circumstances be generous or cruel, heroic or cowardly, but they are always so imperious that no personal interest, not even that of self-preservation, can make itself felt (ibid., 41). Nothing about it is premeditated. Though it may desire things passionately, yet this is never so for long, for it is incapable of perseverance. It cannot tolerate any delay between its desire and the fulfilment of what it desires. It has a sense of omnipotence; the notion of impossibility disappears for the individual in a group.³

¹ Compare Schiller’s couplet:

Jeder, sieht man ihn einzeln, ist leidlich klug und verständig;

Sind sie in corpore, gleich wird euch ein Dummkopf daraus.

² ‘Unconscious’ is used here correctly by Le Bon in the descriptive sense, where it does not mean only the ‘repressed’.

³ Compare the third essay in my Totem and Taboo (1912-13).

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3773

A group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence, it has no critical faculty, and the improbable does not exist for it. It thinks in images, which call one another up by association (just as they arise with individuals in states of free imagination), and whose agreement with reality is never checked by any reasonable agency. The feelings of a group are always very simple and very exaggerated. So that a group knows neither doubt nor uncertainty.¹

It goes directly to extremes; if a suspicion is expressed, it is instantly changed into an incontrovertible certainty; a trace of antipathy is turned into furious hatred (ibid., 56).²

Inclined as it itself is to all extremes, a group can only be excited by an excessive stimulus. Anyone who wishes to produce an effect upon it needs no logical adjustment in his arguments; he must paint in the most forcible colours, he must exaggerate, and he must repeat the same thing again and again.

Since a group is in no doubt as to what constitutes truth or error, and is conscious, moreover, of its own great strength, it is as intolerant as it is obedient to authority. It respects force and can only be slightly influenced by kindness, which it regards merely as a form of weakness. What it demands of its heroes is strength, or even violence. It wants to be ruled and oppressed and to fear its masters. Fundamentally it is entirely conservative and it has a deep aversion to all innovations and advances and an unbounded respect for tradition (ibid., 62).

¹ In the interpretation of dreams, to which, indeed, we owe our best knowledge of unconscious mental life, we follow a technical rule of disregarding doubt and uncertainty in the narrative of the dream, and of treating every element of the manifest dream as being quite certain. We attribute doubt and uncertainty to the influence of the censorship to which the dream-work is subjected, and we assume that the primary dream-thoughts are not acquainted with doubt and uncertainty as critical processes. They may of course be present, like anything else, as part of the content of the day’s residues which lead to the dream.

² The same extreme and unmeasured intensification of every emotion is also a feature of the affective life of children, and it is present as well in dream life. Thanks to the isolation of the single emotions in the unconscious, a slight annoyance during the day will express itself in a dream as a wish for the offending person’s death, or a breath of temptation may give the impetus to the portrayal in the dream of a criminal action. Hanns Sachs has made an appropriate remark on this point: ‘If we look in our consciousness at something that has been told us by a dream about a contemporary (real) situation, we ought not to be surprised to find that the monster which we saw under the magnifying glass of analysis turns out to be a tiny infusorian.’

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3774

In order to make a correct judgement upon the morals of groups, one must take into consideration the fact that when individuals come together in a group all their individual inhibitions fall away and all the cruel, brutal and destructive instincts, which lie dormant in individuals as relics of a primitive epoch, are stirred up to find free gratification. But under the influence of suggestion groups are also capable of high achievements in the shape of abnegation, unselfishness, and devotion to an ideal. While with isolated individuals personal interest is almost the only motive force, with groups it is very rarely prominent. It is possible to speak of an individual having his moral standards raised by a group (ibid., 65). Whereas the intellectual capacity of a group is always far below that of an individual, its ethical conduct may rise as high above his as it may sink deep below it.

Some other features in Le Bon’s description show in a clear light how well justified is the identification of the group mind with the mind of primitive people. In groups the most contradictory ideas can exist side by side and tolerate each other, without any conflict arising from the logical contradiction between them. But this is also the case in the unconscious mental life of individuals, of children and of neurotics, as psycho-analysis has long pointed out.¹

¹ In young children, for instance, ambivalent emotional attitudes towards those who are nearest to them exist side by side for a long time, without either of them interfering with the expression of the other and opposite one. If eventually a conflict breaks out between the two, it is often settled by the child making a change of object and displacing one of the ambivalent emotions on to a substitute. The history of the development of a neurosis in an adult will also show that a suppressed emotion may frequently persist for a long time in unconscious or even in conscious phantasies, the content of which naturally runs directly counter to some predominant tendency, and yet that this opposition does not result in any proceedings on the part of the ego against what it has repudiated. The phantasy is tolerated for quite a long time, until suddenly one day, usually as a result of an increase in the affective cathexis of the phantasy, a conflict breaks out between it and the ego with all the usual consequences. In the process of a child’s development into a mature adult there is a more and more extensive integration of his personality, a co-ordination of the separate instinctual impulses and purposive trends which have grown up in him independently of one another. The analogous process in the domain of sexual life has long been known to us as the co-ordination of all the sexual instincts into a definitive genital organization. (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905d.) Moreover, that the unification of the ego is liable to the same interferences as that of the libido is shown by numerous familiar instances, such as that of men of science who have preserved their faith in the Bible, and other similar cases. - The various possible ways in which the ego can later disintegrate form a special chapter in psychopathology.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3775

A group, further, is subject to the truly magical power of words; they can evoke the most formidable tempests in the group mind, and are also capable of stilling them (ibid., 117). ‘Reason and arguments are incapable of combating certain words and formulas. They are uttered with solemnity in the presence of groups, and as soon as they have been pronounced an expression of respect is visible on every countenance, and all heads are bowed. By many they are considered as natural forces or as supernatural powers.’ (Ibid., 117). It is only necessary in this connection to remember the taboo upon names among primitive people and the magical powers which they ascribe to names and words.¹

And, finally, groups have never thirsted after truth. They demand illusions, and cannot do without them. They constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real; they are almost as strongly influenced by what is untrue as by what is true. They have an evident tendency not to distinguish between the two (ibid., 77).

We have pointed out that this predominance of the life of phantasy and of the illusion born of an unfulfilled wish is the ruling factor in the psychology of neuroses. We have found that what neurotics are guided by is not ordinary objective reality but psychological reality. A hysterical symptom is based upon phantasy instead of upon the repetition of real experience, and the sense of guilt in an obsessional neurosis is based upon the fact of an evil intention which was never carried out. Indeed, just as in dreams and in hypnosis, in the mental operations of a group the function for testing the reality of things falls into the background in comparison with the strength of wishful impulses with their affective cathexis.

¹ See Totem and Taboo (1912-13).

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3776

What Le Bon says on the subject of leaders of groups is less exhaustive, and does not enable us to make out an underlying principle so clearly. He thinks that as soon as living beings are gathered together in certain numbers, no matter whether they are a herd of animals or a collection of human beings, they place themselves instinctively under the authority of a chief (ibid., 134). A group is an obedient herd, which could never live without a master. It has such a thirst for obedience that it submits instinctively to anyone who appoints himself its master.

Although in this way the needs of a group carry it half-way to meet the leader, yet he too must fit in with it in his personal qualities. He must himself be held in fascination by a strong faith (in an idea) in order to awaken the group’s faith; he must possess a strong and imposing will, which the group, which has no will of its own, can accept from him. Le Bon then discusses the different kinds of leaders, and the means by which they work upon the group. On the whole he believes that the leaders make themselves felt by means of the ideas in which they themselves are fanatical believers.

Moreover, he ascribes both to the ideas and to the leaders a mysterious and irresistible power, which he calls ‘prestige’. Prestige is a sort of domination exercised over us by an individual, a work or an idea. It entirely paralyses our critical faculty, and fills us with wonderment and respect. It would seem to arouse a feeling like that of ‘fascination’ in hypnosis (ibid., 148). He distinguishes between acquired or artificial and personal prestige. The former is attached to persons in virtue of their name, fortune and reputation, and to opinions, works of art, etc., in virtue of tradition. Since in every case it harks back to the past, it cannot be of much help to us in understanding this puzzling influence. Personal prestige is attached to a few people, who become leaders by means of it, and it has the effect of making everyone obey them as though by the operation of some magnetic magic. All prestige, however, is also dependent upon success, and is lost in the event of failure (ibid., 159).

Le Bon does not give the impression of having succeeded in bringing the function of the leader and the importance of prestige completely into harmony with his brilliantly executed picture of the group mind.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3777

III

OTHER ACCOUNTS OF COLLECTIVE MENTAL LIFE

We have made use of Le Bon’s description by way of introduction, because it fits in so well with our own psychology in the emphasis which it lays upon unconscious mental life. But we must now add that as a matter of fact none of that author’s statements bring forward anything new. Everything that he says to the detriment and depreciation of the manifestations of the group mind had already been said by others before him with equal distinctness and equal hostility, and has been repeated in unison by thinkers, statesmen and writers since the earliest periods of literature.¹ The two theses which comprise the most important of Le Bon’s opinions, those touching upon the collective inhibition of intellectual functioning and the heightening of affectivity in groups, had been formulated shortly before by Sighele.² At bottom, all that is left over as being peculiar to Le Bon are the two notions of the unconscious and of the comparison with the mental life of primitive people, and even these had naturally often been alluded to before him.

But, what is more, the description and estimate of the group mind as they have been given by Le Bon and the rest have not by any means been left undisputed. There is no doubt that all the phenomena of the group mind which have just been mentioned have been correctly observed, but it is also possible to distinguish other manifestations of group formation, which operate in a precisely opposite sense, and from which a much higher opinion of the group mind must necessarily follow.

Le Bon himself was prepared to admit that in certain circumstances the morals of a group can be higher than those of the individuals that compose it, and that only collectivities are capable of a high degree of unselfishness and devotion. ‘While with isolated individuals personal interest is almost the only motive force, with groups it is very rarely prominent.’ (Le Bon, trans. 1920, 65.) Other writers adduce the fact that it is only society which prescribes any ethical standards at all for the individual, while he as a rule fails in one way or another to come up to its high demands. Or they point out that in exceptional circumstances there may arise in communities the phenomenon of enthusiasm, which has made the most splendid group achievements possible.

¹ See Kraskovic (1915), particularly the bibliography.

² See Moede (1915).

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3778

As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual working in solitude. But even the group mind is capable of creative genius in the field of intelligence, as is shown above all by language itself, as well as by folk-song, folklore and the like. It remains an open question, moreover, how much the individual thinker or writer owes to the stimulation of the group in which he lives, and whether he does more than perfect a mental work in which the others have had a simultaneous share.

In face of these completely contradictory accounts, it looks as though the work of group psychology were bound to come to an ineffectual end. But it is easy to find a more hopeful escape from the dilemma. A number of very different structures have probably been merged under the term ‘group’ and may require to be distinguished. The assertions of Sighele, Le Bon and the rest relate to groups of a short-lived character, which some passing interest has hastily agglomerated out of various sorts of individuals. The characteristics of revolutionary groups, and especially those of the great French Revolution, have unmistakably influenced their descriptions. The opposite opinions owe their origin to the consideration of those stable groups or associations in which mankind pass their lives, and which are embodied in the institutions of society. Groups of the first kind stand in the same sort of relation to those of the second as a high but choppy sea to a ground swell.

McDougall, in his book on The Group Mind (1920a), starts out from the same contradiction that has just been mentioned, and finds a solution for it in the factor of organization. In the simplest case, he says, the ‘group’ possesses no organization at all or one scarcely deserving the name. He describes a group of this kind as a ‘crowd’. But he admits that a crowd of human beings can hardly come together without possessing at all events the rudiments of an organization, and that precisely in these simple groups some fundamental facts of collective psychology can be observed with special ease (McDougall, 1920a, 22). Before the members of a random crowd of people can constitute something like a group in the psychological sense, a condition has to be fulfilled: these individuals must have something in common with one another, a common interest in an object, a similar emotional bias in some situation or other, and (‘consequently’, I should like to interpolate) ‘some degree of reciprocal influence’ (ibid., 23). The higher the degree of ‘this mental homogeneity’, the more readily do the individuals form a psychological group, and the more striking are the manifestations of a group mind.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3779

The most remarkable and also the most important result of the formation of a group is the ‘exaltation or intensification of emotion’ produced in every member of it (ibid., 24). In McDougall’s opinion men’s emotions are stirred in a group to a pitch that they seldom or never attain under other conditions; and it is a pleasurable experience for those who are concerned, to surrender themselves so unreservedly to their passions and thus to become merged in the group and to lose the sense of the limits of their individuality. The manner in which individuals are thus carried away by a common impulse is explained by McDougall by means of what he calls the ‘principle of direct induction of emotion by way of the primitive sympathetic response’ (ibid., 25), that is, by means of the emotional contagion with which we are already familiar. The fact is that the perception of the signs of an affective state is calculated automatically to arouse the same affect in the person who perceives them. The greater the number of people in whom the same affect can be simultaneously observed, the stronger does this automatic compulsion grow. The individual loses his power of criticism, and lets himself slip into the same affect. But in so doing he increases the excitement of the other people, who had produced this result in him, and thus the affective charge of the individuals becomes intensified by mutual interaction. Something is unmistakably at work in the nature of a compulsion to do the same as the others, to remain in harmony with the many. The cruder and simpler emotional impulses are the more apt to spread through a group in this way (ibid., 39).

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3780

This mechanism for the intensification of affect is favoured by some other influences which emanate from groups. A group impresses the individual as being an unlimited power and an insurmountable peril. For the moment it replaces the whole of human society, which is the wielder of authority, whose punishments the individual fears, and for whose sake he has submitted to so many inhibitions. It is clearly perilous for him to put himself in opposition to it, and it will be safer to follow the example of those around him and perhaps even ‘hunt with the pack’. In obedience to the new authority he may put his former ‘conscience’ out of action, and so surrender to the attraction of the increased pleasure that is certainly obtained from the removal of inhibitions. On the whole, therefore, it is not so remarkable that we should see an individual in a group doing or approving things which he would have avoided in the normal conditions of life; and in this way we may even hope to clear up a little of the obscurity which is so often covered by the enigmatic word ‘suggestion’.

McDougall does not dispute the thesis as to the collective inhibition of intelligence in groups (ibid., 41). He says that the minds of lower intelligence bring down those of a higher order to their own level. The latter are obstructed in their activity, because in general an intensification of affect creates unfavourable conditions for sound intellectual work, and further because the individuals are intimidated by the group and their mental activity is not free, and because there is a lowering in each individual of his sense of responsibility for his own performances.

The judgement with which McDougall sums up the psychological behaviour of a simple ‘unorganized’ group is no more friendly than that of Le Bon. Such a group ‘is excessively emotional, impulsive, violent, fickle, inconsistent, irresolute and extreme in action, displaying only the coarser emotions and the less refined sentiments; extremely suggestible, careless in deliberation, hasty in judgement, incapable of any but the simpler and imperfect forms of reasoning; easily swayed and led, lacking in self-consciousness, devoid of self-respect and of sense of responsibility, and apt to be carried away by the consciousness of its own force, so that it tends to produce all the manifestations we have learnt to expect of any irresponsible and absolute power. Hence its behaviour is like that of an unruly child or an untutored passionate savage in a strange situation, rather than like that of its average member; and in the worst cases it is like that of a wild beast, rather than like that of human beings.’ (ibid., 45.)

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3781

Since McDougall contrasts the behaviour of a highly organized group with what has just been described, we shall be particularly interested to learn in what this organization consists, and by what factors it is produced. The author enumerates five ‘principal conditions’ for raising collective mental life to a higher level.

The first and fundamental condition is that there should be some degree of continuity of existence in the group. This may be either material or formal: material, if the same individuals persist in the group for some time; and formal, if there is developed within the group a system of fixed positions which are occupied by a succession of individuals.

The second condition is that in the individual member of the group some definite idea should be formed of the nature, composition, functions and capacities of the group, so that from this he may develop an emotional relation to the group as a whole.

The third is that the group should be brought into interaction (perhaps in the form of rivalry) with other groups similar to it but differing from it in many respects.

The fourth is that the group should possess traditions, customs and habits, and especially such as determine the relations of its members to one another.

The fifth is that the group should have a definite structure, expressed in the specialization and differentiation of the functions of its constituents.

According to McDougall, if these conditions are fulfilled, the psychological disadvantages of group formations are removed. The collective lowering of intellectual ability is avoided by withdrawing the performance of intellectual tasks from the group and reserving them for individual members of it.

It seems to us that the condition which McDougall designates as the ‘organization’ of a group can with more justification be described in another way. The problem consists in how to procure for the group precisely those features which were characteristic of the individual and which are extinguished in him by the formation of the group. For the individual, outside the primitive group, possessed his own continuity, his self-consciousness, his traditions and customs, his own particular functions and position, and he kept apart from his rivals. Owing to his entry into an ‘unorganized’ group he had lost this distinctiveness for a time. If we thus recognize that the aim is to equip the group with the attributes of the individual, we shall be reminded of a valuable remark of Trotter’s,¹ to the effect that the tendency towards the formation of groups is biologically a continuation of the multicellular character of all the higher organisms.²

¹ Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1916)

² I differ from what is in other respects an understanding and shrewd criticism by Hans Kelsen (1922) when he says that to provide the ‘group mind’ with an organization of this kind signifies a hypostasis of it - that is to say, implies an attribution to it of independence of the mental processes in the individual.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3782

IV

SUGGESTION AND LIBIDO

We started from the fundamental fact that an individual in a group is subjected through its influence to what is often a profound alteration in his mental activity. His liability to affect becomes extraordinarily intensified, while his intellectual ability is markedly reduced, both processes being evidently in the direction of an approximation to the other individuals in the group; and this result can only be reached by the removal of those inhibitions upon his instincts which are peculiar to each individual, and by his resigning those expressions of his inclinations which are especially his own. We have heard that these often unwelcome consequences are to some extent at least prevented by a higher ‘organization’ of the group; but this does not contradict the fundamental fact of group psychology - the two theses as to the intensification of the affects and the inhibition of the intellect in primitive groups. Our interest is now directed to discovering the psychological explanation of this mental change which is experienced by the individual in a group.

It is clear that rational factors (such as the intimidation of the individual which has already been mentioned, that is, the action of his instinct of self-preservation) do not cover the observable phenomena. Beyond this what we are offered as an explanation by authorities on sociology and group psychology is always the same, even though it is given various names, and that is the magic word ‘suggestion’. Tarde calls it ‘imitation’; but we cannot help agreeing with a writer who protests that imitation comes under the concept of suggestion, and is in fact one of its results (Brugeilles, 1913). Le Bon traces back all the puzzling features of social phenomena to two factors: the mutual suggestion of individuals and the prestige of leaders. But prestige, again, is only recognizable by its capacity for evoking suggestion. McDougall for a moment gives us an impression that his principle of ‘primitive induction of emotion’ might enable us to do without the assumption of suggestion. But on further consideration we are forced to perceive that this principle makes no more than the familiar assertions about ‘imitation’ or ‘contagion’, except for a decided stress upon the emotional factor. There is no doubt that something exists in us which, when we become aware of signs of an emotion in someone else, tends to make us fall into the same emotion; but how often do we not successfully oppose it, resist the emotion, and react in quite an opposite way? Why, therefore, do we invariably give way to this contagion when we are in a group? Once more we should have to say that what compels us to obey this tendency is imitation, and what induces the emotion in us is the group’s suggestive influence. Moreover, quite apart from this, McDougall does not enable us to evade suggestion; we hear from him as well as from other writers that groups are distinguished by their special suggestibility.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3783

We shall therefore be prepared for the statement that suggestion (or more correctly suggestibility) is actually an irreducible, primitive phenomenon, a fundamental fact in the mental life of man. Such, too, was the opinion of Bernheim, of whose astonishing arts I was a witness in the year 1889. But I can remember even then feeling a muffled hostility to this tyranny of suggestion. When a patient who showed himself unamenable was met with the shout: ‘What are you doing? Vous vous contre-suggestionnez!’, I said to myself that this was an evident injustice and an act of violence. For the man certainly had a right to counter-suggestions if people were trying to subdue him with suggestions. Later on my resistance took the direction of protesting against the view that suggestion, which explained everything, was itself to be exempt from explanation. Thinking of it, I repeated the old conundrum:¹

Christoph trug Christum,

Christus trug die ganze Welt,

Sag’ wo hat Christoph

Damals hin den Fuss gestellt?

Christophorus Christum, sed Christus sustulit orbem:

Constiterit pedibus dic ubi Christophorus?

¹ Konrad Richter, ‘Der deutsche S. Christoph.’

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3784

Now that I once more approach the riddle of suggestion after having kept away from it for some thirty years, I find there is no change in the situation. (There is one exception to be made to this statement, and one which bears witness precisely to the influence of psycho-analysis.) I notice that particular efforts are being made to formulate the concept of suggestion correctly, that is, to fix the conventional use of the name (e.g. McDougall, 1920b). And this is by no means superfluous, for the word is acquiring a more and more extended use and a looser and looser meaning, and will soon come to designate any sort of influence whatever, just as it does in English, where ‘to suggest’ and ‘suggestion’ correspond to our nahelegen and Anregung. But there has been no explanation of the nature of suggestion, that is, of the conditions under which influence without adequate logical foundation takes place. I should not avoid the task of supporting this statement by an analysis of the literature of the last thirty years, if I were not aware that an exhaustive enquiry is being undertaken close at hand which has in view the fulfilment of this very task.¹

Instead of this I shall make an attempt at using the concept of libido for the purpose of throwing light upon group psychology, a concept which has done us such good service in the study of psychoneuroses.

Libido is an expression taken from the theory of the emotions. We call by that name the energy, regarded as a quantitative magnitude (though not at present actually measurable), of those instincts which have to do with all that may be comprised under the word ‘love’. The nucleus of what we mean by love naturally consists (and this is what is commonly called love, and what the poets sing of) in sexual love with sexual union as its aim. But we do not separate from this - what in any case has a share in the name ‘love’ - on the one hand, self-love, and on the other, love for parents and children, friendship and love for humanity in general, and also devotion to concrete objects and to abstract ideas. Our justification lies in the fact that psycho-analytic research has taught us that all these tendencies are an expression of the same instinctual impulses; in relations between the sexes these impulses force their way towards sexual union, but in other circumstances they are diverted from this aim or are prevented from reaching it, though always preserving enough of their original nature to keep their identity recognizable (as in such features as the longing for proximity, and self-sacrifice).

¹ This work has unfortunately not materialized.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3785

We are of opinion, then, that language has carried out an entirely justifiable piece of unification in creating the word ‘love’ with its numerous uses, and that we cannot do better than take it as the basis of our scientific discussions and expositions as well. By coming to this decision, psycho-analysis has let loose a storm of indignation, as though it had been guilty of an act of outrageous innovation. Yet it has done nothing original in taking love in this ‘wider’ sense. In its origin, function, and relation to sexual love, the ‘Eros’ of the philosopher Plato coincides exactly with the love-force, the libido of psycho-analysis, as has been shown in detail by Nachansohn (1915) and Pfister (1921); and when the apostle Paul, in his famous epistle to the Corinthians, praises love above all else, he certainly understands it in the same ‘wider’ sense.¹ But this only shows that men do not always take their great thinkers seriously, even when they profess most to admire them.

Psycho-analysis, then, gives these love instincts the name of sexual instincts, a potiori and by reason of their origin. The majority of ‘educated’ people have regarded this nomenclature as an insult, and have taken their revenge by retorting upon psycho-analysis with the reproach of ‘pan-sexualism’. Anyone who considers sex as something mortifying and humiliating to human nature is at liberty to make use of the more genteel expressions ‘Eros’ and ‘erotic’. I might have done so myself from the first and thus have spared myself much opposition. But I did not want to, for I like to avoid concessions to faintheartedness. One can never tell where that road may lead one; one gives way first in words, and then little by little in substance too. I cannot see any merit in being ashamed of sex; the Greek word ‘Eros’, which is to soften the affront, is in the end nothing more than a translation of our German word Liebe; and finally, he who knows how to wait need make no concessions.

¹ ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.’

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3786

We will try our fortune, then, with the supposition that love relationships (or, to use a more neutral expression, emotional ties) also constitute the essence of the group mind. Let us remember that the authorities make no mention of any such relations. What would correspond to them is evidently concealed behind the shelter, the screen, of suggestion. Our hypothesis finds support in the first instance from two passing thoughts. First, that a group is clearly held together by a power of some kind: and to what power could this feat be better ascribed than to Eros, which holds together everything in the world? Secondly, that if an individual gives up his distinctiveness in a group and lets its other members influence him by suggestion, it gives one the impression that he does it because he feels the need of being in harmony with them rather than in opposition to them - so that perhaps after all he does it ‘ihnen zu Liebe’.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3787

V

TWO ARTIFICIAL GROUPS: THE CHURCH AND THE ARMY

We may recall from what we know of the morphology of groups that it is possible to distinguish very different kinds of groups and opposing lines in their development. There are very fleeting groups and extremely lasting ones; homogeneous ones, made up of the same sorts of individuals, and unhomogeneous ones; natural groups, and artificial ones, requiring an external force to keep them together; primitive groups, and highly organized ones with a definite structure. But for reasons which remain to be explained we should like to lay particular stress upon a distinction to which writers on the subject have been inclined to give too little attention; I refer to that between leaderless groups and those with leaders. And, in complete opposition to the usual practice, we shall not choose a relatively simple group formation as our point of departure, but shall begin with highly organized, lasting and artificial groups. The most interesting example of such structures are Churches - communities of believers - and armies.

A Church and an army are artificial groups - that is, a certain external force is employed to prevent them from disintegrating¹ and to check alterations in their structure. As a rule a person is not consulted, or is given no choice, as to whether he wants to enter such a group; any attempt at leaving it is usually met with persecution or with severe punishment, or has quite definite conditions attached to it. It is quite outside our present interest to enquire why these associations need such special safeguards. We are only attracted by one circumstance, namely that certain facts, which are far more concealed in other cases, can be observed very clearly in those highly organized groups which are protected from dissolution in the manner that has been mentioned.

¹ In groups, the attributes ‘stable’ and ‘artificial’ seem to coincide or at least to be intimately connected.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3788

In a Church (and we may with advantage take the Catholic Church as a type) as well as in an army, however different the two may be in other respects, the same illusion holds good of there being a head - in the Catholic Church Christ, in an army its Commander-in-Chief - who loves all the individuals in the group with an equal love. Everything depends upon this illusion; if it were to be dropped, then both Church and army would dissolve, so far as the external force permitted them to. This equal love was expressly enunciated by Christ: ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.’ He stands to the individual members of the group of believers in the relation of a kind elder brother; he is their substitute father. All the demands that are made upon the individual are derived from this love of Christ’s. A democratic strain runs through the Church, for the very reason that before Christ everyone is equal, and that everyone has an equal share in his love. It is not without a deep reason that the similarity between the Christian community and a family is invoked, and that believers call themselves brothers in Christ, that is, brothers through the love which Christ has for them. There is no doubt that the tie which unites each individual with Christ is also the cause of the tie which unites them with one another. The like holds good of an army. The Commander-in-Chief is a father who loves all soldiers equally, and for that reason they are comrades among themselves. The army differs structurally from the Church in being built up of a series of such groups. Every captain is, as it were, the Commander-in-Chief and the father of his company, and so is every non-commissioned officer of his section. It is true that a similar hierarchy has been constructed in the Church, but it does not play the same part in it economically; for more knowledge and care about individuals may be attributed to Christ than to a human Commander-in-Chief.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3789

An objection will justly be raised against this conception of the libidinal structure of an army on the ground that no place has been found in it for such ideas as those of one’s country, of national glory, etc., which are of such importance in holding an army together. The answer is that that is a different instance of a group tie, and no longer such a simple one; for the examples of great generals, like Caesar, Wallenstein, or Napoleon, show that such ideas are not indispensable to the existence of an army. We shall presently touch upon the possibility of a leading idea being substituted for a leader and upon the relations between the two. The neglect of this libidinal factor in an army, even when it is not the only factor operative, seems to be not merely a theoretical omission but also a practical danger. Prussian militarism, which was just as unpsychological as German science, may have had to suffer the consequences of this in the World War. We know that the war neuroses which ravaged the German army have been recognized as being a protest of the individual against the part he was expected to play in the army; and according to the communication of Simmel (1918), the hard treatment of the men by their superiors may be considered as foremost among the motive forces of the disease. If the importance of the libido’s claims on this score had been better appreciated, the fantastic promises of the American President’s Fourteen Points would probably not have been believed so easily, and the splendid instrument would not have broken in the hands of the German leaders.

It is to be noticed that in these two artificial groups each individual is bound by libidinal ties on the one hand to the leader (Christ, the Commander-in-Chief) and on the other hand to the other members of the group. How these two ties are related to each other, whether they are of the same kind and the same value, and how they are to be described psychologically - these questions must be reserved for subsequent enquiry. But we shall venture even now upon a mild reproach against earlier writers for not having sufficiently appreciated the importance of the leader in the psychology of the group, while our own choice of this as a first subject for investigation has brought us into a more favourable position. It would appear as though we were on the right road towards an explanation of the principal phenomenon of group psychology - the individual’s lack of freedom in a group. If each individual is bound in two directions by such an intense emotional tie, we shall find no difficulty in attributing to that circumstance the alteration and limitation which have been observed in his personality.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3790

A hint to the same effect, that the essence of a group lies in the libidinal ties existing in it, is also to be found in the phenomenon of panic, which is best studied in military groups. A panic arises if a group of that kind becomes disintegrated. Its characteristics are that none of the orders given by superiors are any longer listened to, and that each individual is only solicitous on his own account, and without any consideration for the rest. The mutual ties have ceased to exist, and a gigantic and senseless fear is set free. At this point, again, the objection will naturally be made that it is rather the other way round; and that the fear has grown so great as to be able to disregard all ties and all feelings of consideration for others. McDougall (1920a, 24) has even made use of panic (though not of military panic) as a typical instance of that intensification of emotion by contagion (‘primary induction’) on which he lays so much emphasis. But nevertheless this rational method of explanation is here quite inadequate. The very question that needs explanation is why the fear has become so gigantic. The greatness of the danger cannot be responsible, for the same army which now falls a victim to panic may previously have faced equally great or greater danger with complete success; it is of the very essence of panic that it bears no relation to the danger that threatens, and often breaks out on the most trivial occasions. If an individual in panic fear begins to be solicitous only on his own account, he bears witness in so doing to the fact that the emotional ties, which have hitherto made the danger seem small to him, have ceased to exist. Now that he is by himself in facing the danger, he may surely think it greater. The fact is, therefore, that panic fear presupposes a relaxation in the libidinal structure of the group and reacts to that relaxation in a justifiable manner, and the contrary view - that the libidinal ties of the group are destroyed owing to fear in the face of the danger - can be refuted.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3791

The contention that fear in a group is increased to enormous proportions through induction (contagion) is not in the least contradicted by these remarks. McDougall’s view meets the case entirely when the danger is a really great one and when the group has no strong emotional ties - conditions which are fulfilled, for instance, when a fire breaks out in a theatre or a place of amusement. But the truly instructive case and the one which can be best employed for our purposes is that mentioned above, in which a body of troops breaks into a panic although the danger has not increased beyond a degree that is usual and has often been previously faced. It is not to be expected that the usage of the word ‘panic’ should be clearly and unambiguously determined. Sometimes it is used to describe any collective fear, sometimes even fear in an individual when it exceeds all bounds, and often the name seems to be reserved for cases in which the outbreak of fear is not warranted by the occasion. If we take the word ‘panic’ in the sense of collective fear, we can establish a far-reaching analogy. Fear in an individual is provoked either by the greatness of a danger or by the cessation of emotional ties (libidinal cathexes); the latter is the case of neurotic fear or anxiety.¹ In just the same way panic arises either owing to an increase of the common danger or owing to the disappearance of the emotional ties which hold the group together; and the latter case is analogous to that of neurotic anxiety.²

Anyone who, like McDougall (1920a), describes a panic as one of the plainest functions of the ‘group mind’, arrives at the paradoxical position that this group mind does away with itself in one of its most striking manifestations. It is impossible to doubt that panic means the disintegration of a group; it involves the cessation of all the feelings of consideration which the members of the group otherwise show one another.

The typical occasion of the outbreak of a panic is very much as it is represented in Nestroy’s parody of Hebbel’s play about Judith and Holofernes. A soldier cries out: ‘The general has lost his head!’ and thereupon all the Assyrians take to flight. The loss of the leader in some sense or other, the birth of misgivings about him, brings on the outbreak of panic, though the danger remains the same; the mutual ties between the members of the group disappear, as a rule, at the same time as the tie with their leader. The group vanishes in dust, like a Prince Rupert’s drop when its tail is broken off.

¹ See Lecture XXV of my Introductory Lectures (1916-17)

² Compare Béla von Felszeghy’s interesting though somewhat over-imaginative paper ‘Panik und Pankomplex’ (1920).

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3792

The dissolution of a religious group is not so easy to observe. A short time ago there came into my hands an English novel of Catholic origin, recommended by the Bishop of London, with the title When It Was Dark. It gave a clever and, as it seems to me, a convincing picture of such a possibility and its consequences. The novel, which is supposed to relate to the present day, tells how a conspiracy of enemies of the person of Christ and of the Christian faith succeed in arranging for a sepulchre to be discovered in Jerusalem. In this sepulchre is an inscription, in which Joseph of Arimathaea confesses that for reasons of piety he secretly removed the body of Christ from its grave on the third day after its entombment and buried it in this spot. The resurrection of Christ and his divine nature are by this means disproved, and the result of this archaeological discovery is a convulsion in European civilization and an extraordinary increase in all crimes and acts of violence, which only ceases when the forgers’ plot has been revealed.

The phenomenon which accompanies the dissolution that is here supposed to overtake a religious group is not fear, for which the occasion is wanting. Instead of it ruthless and hostile impulses towards other people make their appearance, which, owing to the equal love of Christ, they had previously been unable to do.¹  But even during the kingdom of Christ those people who do not belong to the community of believers, who do not love him, and whom he does not love, stand outside this tie. Therefore a religion, even if it calls itself the religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it. Fundamentally indeed every religion is in this same way a religion of love for all those whom it embraces; while cruelty and intolerance towards those who do not belong to it are natural to every religion. However difficult we may find it personally, we ought not to reproach believers too severely on this account; people who are unbelieving or indifferent are much better off psychologically in this matter. If to-day that intolerance no longer shows itself so violent and cruel as in former centuries, we can scarcely conclude that there has been a softening in human manners. The cause is rather to be found in the undeniable weakening of religious feelings and the libidinal ties which depend upon them. If another group tie takes the place of the religious one - and the socialistic tie seems to be succeeding in doing so - then there will be the same intolerance towards outsiders as in the age of the Wars of Religion; and if differences between scientific opinions could ever attain a similar significance for groups, the same result would again be repeated with this new motivation.

¹ Compare the explanation of similar phenomena after the abolition of the paternal authority of the sovereign given in Federn’s Die vaterlose Gesellschaft (1919).

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3793

VI

FURTHER PROBLEMS AND LINES OF WORK

We have hitherto considered two artificial groups and have found that both are dominated by emotional ties of two kinds. One of these, the tie with the leader, seems (at all events for these cases) to be more of a ruling factor than the other, which holds between the members of the group.

Now much else remains to be examined and described in the morphology of groups. We should have to start from the ascertained fact that a mere collection of people is not a group, so long as these ties have not been established in it; but we should have to admit that in any collection of people the tendency to form a psychological group may very easily come to the fore. We should have to give our attention to the different kinds of groups, more or less stable, that arise spontaneously, and to study the conditions of their origin and of their dissolution. We should above all be concerned with the distinction between groups which have a leader and leaderless groups. We should consider whether groups with leaders may not be the more primitive and complete, whether in the others an idea, an abstraction, may not take the place of the leader (a state of things to which religious groups, with their invisible head, form a transitional stage), and whether a common tendency, a wish in which a number of people can have a share, may not in the same way serve as a substitute. This abstraction, again, might be more or less completely embodied in the figure of what we might call a secondary leader, and interesting varieties would arise from the relation between the idea and the leader. The leader or the leading idea might also, so to speak, be negative; hatred against a particular person or institution might operate in just the same unifying way, and might call up the same kind of emotional ties as positive attachment. Then the question would also arise whether a leader is really indispensable to the essence of a groups - and other questions besides.

But all these questions, which may, moreover, have been dealt with in part in the literature of group psychology, will not succeed in diverting our interest from the fundamental psychological problems that confront us in the structure of a group. And our attention will first be attracted by a consideration which promises to bring us in the most direct way to a proof that libidinal ties are what characterize a group.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3794

Let us keep before our eyes the nature of the emotional relations which hold between men in general. According to Schopenhauer’s famous simile of the freezing porcupines no one can tolerate a too intimate approach to his neighbour.¹

The evidence of psycho-analysis shows that almost every intimate emotional relation between two people which lasts for some time - marriage, friendship, the relations between parents and children² - contains a sediment of feelings of aversion and hostility, which only escapes perception as a result of repression. This is less disguised in the common wrangles between business partners or in the grumbles of a subordinate at his superior. The same thing happens when men come together in larger units. Every time two families become connected by a marriage, each of them thinks itself superior to or of better birth than the other. Of two neighbouring towns each is the other’s most jealous rival; every little canton looks down upon the others with contempt. Closely related races keep one another at arm’s length; the South German cannot endure the North German, the Englishman casts every kind of aspersion upon the Scot, the Spaniard despises the Portuguese. We are no longer astonished that greater differences should lead to an almost insuperable repugnance, such as the Gallic people feel for the German, the Aryan for the Semite, and the white races for the coloured.

¹ ‘A company of porcupines crowded themselves very close together one cold winter’s day so as to profit by one another’s warmth and so save themselves from being frozen to death. But soon they felt one another’s quills, which induced them to separate again. And now, when the need for warmth brought them nearer together again, the second evil arose once more. So that they were driven backwards and forwards from one trouble to the other, until they had discovered a mean distance at which they could most tolerably exist.’ (Parerga und Paralipomena, Part II, 31, ‘Gleichnisse und Parabeln’.)

² Perhaps with the solitary exception of the relation of a mother to her son, which is based on narcissism, is not disturbed by subsequent rivalry, and is reinforced by a rudimentary attempt at sexual object-choice.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3795

When this hostility is directed against people who are otherwise loved we describe it as ambivalence of feeling; and we explain the fact, in what is probably far too rational a manner, by means of the numerous occasions for conflicts of interest which arise precisely in such intimate relations. In the undisguised antipathies and aversions which people feel towards strangers with whom they have to do we may recognize the expression of self-love - of narcissism. This self-love works for the preservation of the individual, and behaves as though the occurrence of any divergence from his own particular lines of development involved a criticism of them and a demand for their alteration. We do not know why such sensitiveness should have been directed to just these details of differentiation; but it is unmistakable that in this whole connection men give evidence of a readiness for hatred, an aggressiveness, the source of which is unknown, and to which one is tempted to ascribe an elementary character.¹

But when a group is formed the whole of this intolerance vanishes, temporarily or permanently, within the group. So long as a group formation persists or so far as it extends, individuals in the group behave as though they were uniform, tolerate the peculiarities of its other members, equate themselves with them, and have no feeling of aversion towards them. Such a limitation of narcissism can, according to our theoretical views, only be produced by one factor, a libidinal tie with other people. Love for oneself knows only one barrier - love for others, love for objects.² The question will at once be raised whether community of interest in itself, without any addition of libido, must not necessarily lead to the toleration of other people and to considerateness for them. This objection may be met by the reply that nevertheless no lasting limitation of narcissism is effected in this way, since this tolerance does not persist longer than the immediate advantage gained from the other people’s collaboration. But the practical importance of this discussion is less than might be supposed, for experience has shown that in cases of collaboration libidinal ties are regularly formed between the fellow-workers which prolong and solidify the relation between them to a point beyond what is merely profitable. The same thing occurs in men’s social relations as has become familiar to psycho-analytic research in the course of the development of the individual libido. The libido attaches itself to the satisfaction of the great vital needs, and chooses as its first objects the people who have a share in that process. And in the development of mankind as a whole, just as in individuals, love alone acts as the civilizing factor in the sense that it brings a change from egoism to altruism. And this is true both of sexual love for women, with all the obligations which it involves of not harming the things that are dear to women, and also of desexualized, sublimated homosexual love for other men, which springs from work in common.

¹ In a recently published study, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, I have attempted to connect the polarity of love and hatred with a hypothetical opposition between instincts of life and death, and to establish the sexual instincts as the purest examples of the former, the instincts of life.

² See my paper on narcissism (1914c).

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3796

If therefore in groups narcissistic self-love is subject to limitations which do not operate outside them, that is cogent evidence that the essence of a group formation consists in new kinds of libidinal ties among the members of the group.

Our interest now leads us on to the pressing question as to what may be the nature of these ties which exist in groups. In the psycho-analytic study of neuroses we have hitherto been occupied almost exclusively with ties with objects made by love instincts which still pursue directly sexual aims. In groups there can evidently be no question of sexual aims of that kind. We are concerned here with love instincts which have been diverted from their original aims, though they do not operate with less energy on that account. Now, within the range of the usual sexual object-cathexis, we have already observed phenomena which represent a diversion of the instinct from its sexual aim. We have described them as degrees of being in love, and have recognized that they involve a certain encroachment upon the ego. We shall now turn our attention more closely to these phenomena of being in love, in the firm expectation of finding in them conditions which can be transferred to the ties that exist in groups. But we should also like to know whether this kind of object-cathexis, as we know it in sexual life, represents the only manner of emotional tie with other people, or whether we must take other mechanisms of the sort into account. As a matter of fact we learn from psycho-analysis that there do exist other mechanisms for emotional ties, the so-called identifications, insufficiently-known processes and hard to describe, the investigation of which will for some time keep us away from the subject of group psychology.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3797

VII

IDENTIFICATION

Identification is known to psycho-analysis as the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person. It plays a part in the early history of the Oedipus complex. A little boy will exhibit a special interest in his father; he would like to grow like him and be like him, and take his place everywhere. We may say simply that he takes his father as his ideal. This behaviour has nothing to do with a passive or feminine attitude towards his father (and towards males in general); it is on the contrary typically masculine. It fits in very well with the Oedipus complex, for which it helps to prepare the way.

At the same time as this identification with his father, or a little later, the boy has begun to develop a true object-cathexis towards his mother according to the attachment type. He then exhibits, therefore, two psychologically distinct ties: a straightforward sexual object-cathexis towards his mother and an identification with his father which takes him as his model. The two subsist side by side for a time without any mutual influence or interference. In consequence of the irresistible advance towards a unification of mental life, they come together at last; and the normal Oedipus complex originates from their confluence. The little boy notices that his father stands in his way with his mother. His identification with his father then takes on a hostile colouring and becomes identical with the wish to replace his father in regard to his mother as well. Identification, in fact, is ambivalent from the very first; it can turn into an expression of tenderness as easily as into a wish for someone’s removal. It behaves like a derivative of the first, oral phase of the organization of the libido, in which the object that we long for and prize is assimilated by eating and is in that way annihilated as such. The cannibal, as we know, has remained at this standpoint; he has a devouring affection for his enemies and only devours people of whom he is fond.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3798

The subsequent history of this identification with the father may easily be lost sight of. It may happen that the Oedipus complex becomes inverted, and that the father is taken as the object of a feminine attitude, an object from which the directly sexual instincts look for satisfaction; in that event the identification with the father has become the precursor of an object-tie with the father. The same holds good, with the necessary substitutions, of the baby daughter as well.

It is easy to state in a formula the distinction between an identification with the father and the choice of the father as an object. In the first case one’s father is what one would like to be and in the second he is what one would like to have. The distinction, that is, depends upon whether the tie attaches to the subject or to the object of the ego. The former kind of tie is therefore already possible before any sexual object-choice has been made. It is much more difficult to give a clear metapsychological representation of the distinction. We can only see that identification endeavours to mould a person’s own ego after the fashion of the one that has been taken as a model.

Let us disentangle identification as it occurs in the structure of a neurotic symptom from its rather complicated connections. Supposing that a little girl (and we will keep to her for the present) develops the same painful symptom as her mother - for instance, the same tormenting cough. This may come about in various ways. The identification may come from the Oedipus complex; in that case it signifies a hostile desire on the girl’s part to take her mother’s place, and the symptom expresses her object-love towards her father, and brings about a realization, under the influence of a sense of guilt, of her desire to take her mother’s place: ‘You wanted to be your mother, and now you are - anyhow so far as your sufferings are concerned.’ This is the complete mechanism of the structure of a hysterical symptom. Or, on the other hand, the symptom may be the same as that of the person who is loved; so, for instance, Dora¹ imitated her father’s cough. In that case we can only describe the state of things by saying that identification has appeared instead of object-choice, and that object-choice has regressed to identification. We have heard that identification is the earliest and original form of emotional tie; it often happens that under the conditions in which symptoms are constructed, that is, where there is repression and where the mechanisms of the unconscious are dominant, object-choice is turned back into identification - the ego assumes the characteristics of the object. It is noticeable that in these identifications the ego sometimes copies the person who is not loved and sometimes the one who is loved. It must also strike us that in both cases the identification is a partial and extremely limited one and only borrows a single trait from the person who is its object.

¹ In my ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (1905e).

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3799

There is a third particularly frequent and important case of symptom formation, in which the identification leaves entirely out of account any object-relation to the person who is being copied. Supposing, for instance, that one of the girls in a boarding school has had a letter from someone with whom she is secretly in love which arouses her jealousy, and that she reacts to it with a fit of hysterics; then some of her friends who know about it will catch the fit, as we say, by mental infection. The mechanism is that of identification based upon the possibility or desire of putting oneself in the same situation. The other girls would like to have a secret love affair too, and under the influence of a sense of guilt they also accept the suffering involved in it. It would be wrong to suppose that they take on the symptom out of sympathy. On the contrary, the sympathy only arises out of the identification, and this is proved by the fact that infection or imitation of this kind takes place in circumstances where even less pre-existing sympathy is to be assumed than usually exists between friends in a girls’ school. One ego has perceived a significant analogy with another upon one point - in our example upon openness to a similar emotion; an identification is thereupon constructed on this point, and, under the influence of the pathogenic situation, is displaced on to the symptom which the one ego has produced. The identification by means of the symptom has thus become the mark of a point of coincidence between the two egos which has to be kept repressed.

What we have learned from these three sources may be summarized as follows. First, identification is the original form of emotional tie with an object; secondly, in a regressive way it becomes a substitute for a libidinal object-tie, as it were by means of introjection of the object into the ego; and thirdly, it may arise with any new perception of a common quality shared with some other person who is not an object of the sexual instinct. The more important this common quality is, the more successful may this partial identification become, and it may thus represent the beginning of a new tie.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3800

We already begin to divine that the mutual tie between members of a group is in the nature of an identification of this kind, based upon an important emotional common quality; and we may suspect that this common quality lies in the nature of the tie with the leader. Another suspicion may tell us that we are far from having exhausted the problem of identification, and that we are faced by the process which psychology calls ‘empathy’ and which plays the largest part in our understanding of what is inherently foreign to our ego in other people. But we shall here limit ourselves to the immediate emotional effects of identification, and shall leave on one side its significance for our intellectual life.

Psycho-analytic research, which has already occasionally attacked the more difficult problems of the psychoses, has also been able to exhibit identification to us in some other cases which are not immediately comprehensible. I shall treat two of these cases in detail as material for our further consideration.

The genesis of male homosexuality in a large class of cases is as follows. A young man has been unusually long and intensely fixated upon his mother in the sense of the Oedipus complex. But at last, after the end of puberty, the time comes for exchanging his mother for some other sexual object. Things take a sudden turn: the young man does not abandon his mother, but identifies himself with her; he transforms himself into her, and now looks about for objects which can replace his ego for him, and on which he can bestow such love and care as he has experienced from his mother. This is a frequent process, which can be confirmed as often as one likes, and which is naturally quite independent of any hypothesis that may be made as to the organic driving force and the motives of the sudden transformation. A striking thing about this identification is its ample scale; it remoulds the ego in one of its important features - in its sexual character - upon the model of what has hitherto been the object. In this process the object itself is renounced - whether entirely or in the sense of being preserved only in the unconscious is a question outside the present discussion. Identification with an object that is renounced or lost, as a substitute for that object - introjection of it into the ego - is indeed no longer a novelty to us. A process of the kind may sometimes be directly observed in small children. A short time ago an observation of this sort was published in the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse. A child who was unhappy over the loss of a kitten declared straight out that now he himself was the kitten, and accordingly crawled about on all fours, would not eat at table, etc.¹

¹ Marcuszewicz (1920).

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3801

Another such instance of introjection of the object has been provided by the analysis of melancholia, an affection which counts among the most notable of its exciting causes the real or emotional loss of a loved object. A leading characteristic of these cases is a cruel self-depreciation of the ego combined with relentless self-criticism and bitter self-reproaches. Analyses have shown that this disparagement and these reproaches apply at bottom to the object and represent the ego’s revenge upon it. The shadow of the object has fallen upon the ego, as I have said elsewhere.¹ The introjection of the object is here unmistakably clear.

But these melancholias also show us something else, which may be of importance for our later discussions. They show us the ego divided, fallen apart into two pieces, one of which rages against the second. This second piece is the one which has been altered by introjection and which contains the lost object. But the piece which behaves so cruelly is not unknown to us either. It comprises the conscience, a critical agency within the ego, which even in normal times takes up a critical attitude towards the ego, though never so relentlessly and so unjustifiably. On previous occasions² we have been driven to the hypothesis that some such agency develops in our ego which may cut itself off from the rest of the ego and come into conflict with it. We have called it the ‘ego ideal’, and by way of functions we have ascribed to it self-observation, the moral conscience, the censorship of dreams, and the chief influence in repression. We have said that it is the heir to the original narcissism in which the childish ego enjoyed self-sufficiency; it gradually gathers up from the influences of the environment the demands which that environment makes upon the ego and which the ego cannot always rise to; so that a man, when he cannot be satisfied with his ego itself, may nevertheless be able to find satisfaction in the ego ideal which has been differentiated out of the ego. In delusions of observation, as we have further shown, the disintegration of this agency has become patent, and has thus revealed its origin in the influence of superior powers, and above all of parents.³ But we have not forgotten to add that the amount of distance between this ego ideal and the real ego is very variable from one individual to another, and that with many people this differentiation within the ego does not go further than with children.

¹ See ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917e).

² In my paper on narcissism (1914c).

³ Section III of my paper on narcissism.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3802

But before we can employ this material for understanding the libidinal organization of groups, we must take into account some other examples of the mutual relations between the object and the ego.¹

¹ We are very well aware that we have not exhausted the nature of identification with these examples taken from pathology, and that we have consequently left part of the riddle of group formations untouched. A far more fundamental and comprehensive psychological analysis would have to intervene at this point. A path leads from identification by way of imitation to empathy, that is, to the comprehension of the mechanism by means of which we are enabled to take up any attitude at all towards another mental life. Moreover there is still much to be explained in the manifestations of existing identifications. These result among other things in a person limiting his aggressiveness towards those with whom he has identified himself, and in his sparing them and giving them help. The study of such identifications, like those, for instance which lie at the root of clan feeling, led Robertson Smith (Kinship and Marriage, 1885) to the surprising discovery that they rest upon the acknowledgement of the possession of a common substance, and may even therefore be created by a meal eaten in common. This feature makes it possible to connect this kind of identification with the early history of the human family which I constructed in Totem and Taboo.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3803

VIII

BEING IN LOVE AND HYPNOSIS

Even in its caprices the usage of language remains true to some kind of reality. Thus it gives the name of ‘love’ to a great many kinds of emotional relationship which we too group together theoretically as love; but then again it feels a doubt whether this love is real, true, actual love, and so hints at a whole scale of possibilities within the range of the phenomena of love. We shall have no difficulty in making the same discovery from our own observations.

In one class of cases being in love is nothing more than object cathexis on the part of the sexual instincts with a view to directly sexual satisfaction, a cathexis which expires, moreover, when this aim has been reached; this is what is called common, sensual love. But, as we know, the libidinal situation rarely remains so simple. It was possible to calculate with certainty upon the revival of the need which had just expired; and this must no doubt have been the first motive for directing a lasting cathexis upon the sexual object and for ‘loving’ it in the passionless intervals as well.

To this must be added another factor derived from the very remarkable course of development which is pursued by the erotic life of man. In its first phase, which has usually come to an end by the time a child is five years old, he has found the first object for his love in one or other of his parents, and all of his sexual instincts with their demand for satisfaction have been united upon this object. The repression which then sets in compels him to renounce the greater number of these infantile sexual aims, and leaves behind a profound modification in his relation to his parents. The child still remains tied to his parents, but by instincts which must be described as being ‘inhibited in their aim’. The emotions which he feels henceforward towards these objects of his love are characterized as ‘affectionate’. It is well known that the earlier ‘sensual’ tendencies remain more of less strongly preserved in the unconscious, so that in a certain sense the whole of the original current continues to exist.¹

¹ See my Three Essays (1905d).

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3804

At puberty, as we know, there set in new and very strong impulsions towards directly sexual aims. In unfavourable cases they remain separate, in the form of a sensual current, from the ‘affectionate’ trends of feeling which persist. We then have before us a picture whose two aspects are typified with such delight by certain schools of literature. A man will show a sentimental enthusiasm for women whom he deeply respects but who do not excite him to sexual activities, and he will only be potent with other women whom he does not ‘love’ and thinks little of or even despises.¹ More often, however, the adolescent succeeds in bringing about a certain degree of synthesis between the unsensual, heavenly love and the sensual, earthly love, and his relation to his sexual object is characterized by the interaction of uninhibited instincts and of instincts inhibited in their aim. The depth to which anyone is in love, as contrasted with his purely sensual desire, may be measured by the size of the share taken by the aim-inhibited instincts of affection.

In connection with this question of being in love we have always been struck by the phenomenon of sexual overvaluation - the fact that the loved object enjoys a certain amount of freedom from criticism, and that all its characteristics are valued more highly than those of people who are not loved, or than its own were at a time when it itself was not loved. If the sensual impulsions are more or less effectively repressed or set aside, the illusion is produced that the object has come to be sensually loved on account of its spiritual merits, whereas on the contrary these merits may really only have been lent to it by its sensual charm.

The tendency which falsifies judgement in this respect is that of idealization. But now it is easier for us to find our bearings. We see that the object is being treated in the same way as our own ego, so that when we are in love a considerable amount of narcissistic libido overflows on to the object. It is even obvious, in many forms of love-choice, that the object serves as a substitute for some unattained ego ideal of our own. We love it on account of the perfections which we have striven to reach for our own ego, and which we should now like to procure in this roundabout way as a means of satisfying our narcissism.

¹ ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love’ (1912d).

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3805

If the sexual overvaluation and the being in love increase even further, then the interpretation of the picture becomes still more unmistakable. The impulsions whose trend is towards directly sexual satisfaction may now be pushed into the background entirely, as regularly happens, for instance, with a young man’s sentimental passion; the ego becomes more and more unassuming and modest, and the object more and more sublime and precious, until at last it gets possession of the entire self-love of the ego, whose self-sacrifice thus follows as a natural consequence. The object has, so to speak, consumed the ego. Traits of humility, of the limitation of narcissism, and of self-injury occur in every case of being in love; in the extreme case they are merely intensified, and as a result of the withdrawal of the sensual claims they remain in solitary supremacy.

This happens especially easily with love that is unhappy and cannot be satisfied; for in spite of everything each sexual satisfaction always involves a reduction in sexual overvaluation. Contemporaneously with this ‘devotion’ of the ego to the object, which is no longer to be distinguished from a sublimated devotion to an abstract idea, the functions allotted to the ego ideal entirely cease to operate. The criticism exercised by that agency is silent; everything that the object does and asks for is right and blameless. Conscience has no application to anything that is done for the sake of the object; in the blindness of love remorselessness is carried to the pitch of crime. The whole situation can be completely summarized in a formula: The object has been put in the place of the ego ideal.

It is now easy to define the difference between identification and such extreme developments of being in love as may be described as ‘fascination’ or ‘bondage’. In the former case the ego has enriched itself with the properties of the object, it has ‘introjected’ the object into itself, as Ferenczi expresses it. In the second case it is impoverished, it has surrendered itself to the object, it has substituted the object for its own most important constituent. Closer consideration soon makes it plain, however, that this kind of account creates an illusion of contradistinctions that have no real existence. Economically there is no question of impoverishment or enrichment; it is even possible to describe an extreme case of being in love as a state in which the ego has introjected the object into itself. Another distinction is perhaps better calculated to meet the essence of the matter. In the case of identification the object has been lost or given up; it is then set up again inside the ego, and the ego makes a partial alteration in itself after the model of the lost object. In the other case the object is retained, and there is a hypercathexis of it by the ego and at the ego’s expense. But here again a difficulty presents itself. Is it quite certain that identification presupposes that object-cathexis has been given up? Can there be no identification while the object is retained? And before we embark upon a discussion of this delicate question, the perception may already be beginning to dawn on us that yet another alternative embraces the real essence of the matter, namely, whether the object is put in the place of the ego or of the ego ideal.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3806

From being in love to hypnosis is evidently only a short step. The respects in which the two agree are obvious. There is the same humble subjection, the same compliance, the same absence of criticism, towards the hypnotist as towards the loved object. There is the same sapping of the subject’s own initiative; no one can doubt that the hypnotist has stepped into the place of the ego ideal. It is only that everything is even clearer and more intense in hypnosis, so that it would be more to the point to explain being in love by means of hypnosis than the other way round. The hypnotist is the sole object, and no attention is paid to any but him. The fact that the ego experiences in a dreamlike way whatever he may request or assert reminds us that we omitted to mention among the functions of the ego ideal the business of testing the reality of things.¹ No wonder that the ego takes a perception for real if its reality is vouched for by the mental agency which ordinarily discharges the duty of testing the reality of things. The complete absence of impulsions which are uninhibited in their sexual aims contributes further towards the extreme purity of the phenomena. The hypnotic relation is the unlimited devotion of someone in love, but with sexual satisfaction excluded; whereas in the actual case of being in love this kind of satisfaction is only temporarily kept back, and remains in the background as a possible aim at some later time.

¹ Cf. Freud (1917d). - There seems, however, to be some doubt whether the attribution of this function to the ego ideal is justified. The point requires thorough discussion.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3807

But on the other hand we may also say that the hypnotic relation is (if the expression is permissible) a group formation with two members. Hypnosis is not a good object for comparison with a group formation, because it is truer to say that it is identical with it. Out of the complicated fabric of the group it isolates one element for us - the behaviour of the individual to the leader. Hypnosis is distinguished from a group formation by this limitation of number, just as it is distinguished from being in love by the absence of directly sexual trends. In this respect it occupies a middle position between the two.

It is interesting to see that it is precisely those sexual impulsions that are inhibited in their aims which achieve such lasting ties between people. But this can easily be understood from the fact that they are not capable of complete satisfaction, while sexual impulsions which are uninhibited in their aims suffer an extraordinary reduction through the discharge of energy every time the sexual aim is attained. It is the fate of sensual love to become extinguished when it is satisfied; for it to be able to last, it must from the beginning be mixed with purely affectionate components - with such, that is, as are inhibited in their aims - or it must itself undergo a transformation of this kind.

Hypnosis would solve the riddle of the libidinal constitution of groups for us straight away, if it were not that it itself exhibits some features which are not met by the rational explanation we have hitherto given of it as a state of being in love with the directly sexual trends excluded. There is still a great deal in it which we must recognize as unexplained and mysterious. It contains an additional element of paralysis derived from the relation between someone with superior power and someone who is without power and helpless - which may afford a transition to the hypnosis of fright which occurs in animals. The manner in which it is produced and its relationship to sleep are not clear; and the puzzling way in which some people are subject to it, while others resist it completely, points to some factor still unknown which is realized in it and which perhaps alone makes possible the purity of the attitudes of the libido which it exhibits. It is noticeable that, even when there is complete suggestive compliance in other respects, the moral conscience of the person hypnotized may show resistance. But this may be due to the fact that in hypnosis as it is usually practised some knowledge may be retained that what is happening is only a game, an untrue reproduction of another situation of far more importance to life.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3808

But after the preceding discussions we are quite in a position to give the formula for the libidinal constitution of groups, or at least of such groups as we have hitherto considered - namely, those that have a leader and have not been able by means of too much ‘organization’ to acquire secondarily the characteristics of an individual. A primary group of this kind is a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in the place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego. This condition admits of graphic representation:

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3809

IX

THE HERD INSTINCT

We cannot for long enjoy the illusion that we have solved the riddle of the group with this formula. It is impossible to escape the immediate and disturbing recollection that all we have really done has been to shift the question on to the riddle of hypnosis, about which so many points have yet to be cleared up. And now another objection shows us our further path.

It might be said that the intense emotional ties which we observe in groups are quite sufficient to explain one of their characteristics - the lack of independence and initiative in their members, the similarity in the reactions of all of them, their reduction, so to speak, to the level of group individuals. But if we look at it as a whole, a group shows us more than this. Some of its features - the weakness of intellectual ability, the lack of emotional restraint, the incapacity for moderation and delay, the inclination to exceed every limit in the expression of emotion and to work it off completely in the form of action - these and similar features, which we find so impressively described in Le Bon, show an unmistakable picture of a regression of mental activity to an earlier stage such as we are not surprised to find among savages or children. A regression of this sort is in particular an essential characteristic of common groups, while, as we have heard, in organized and artificial groups it can to a large extent be checked.

We thus have an impression of a state in which an individual’s private emotional impulses and intellectual acts are too weak to come to anything by themselves and are entirely dependent for this on being reinforced by being repeated in a similar way in the other members of the group. We are reminded of how many of these phenomena of dependence are part of the normal constitution of human society, of how little originality and personal courage are to be found in it, of how much every individual is ruled by those attitudes of the group mind which exhibit themselves in such forms as racial characteristics, class prejudices, public opinion, etc. The influence of suggestion becomes a greater riddle for us when we admit that it is not exercised only by the leader, but by every individual upon every other individual; and we must reproach ourselves with having unfairly emphasized the relation to the leader and with having kept the other factor of mutual suggestion too much in the background.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3810

After this encouragement to modesty, we shall be inclined to listen to another voice, which promises us an explanation based upon simpler grounds. Such a one is to be found in Trotter’s thoughtful book on the herd instinct (1916), concerning which my only regret is that it does not entirely escape the antipathies that were set loose by the recent great war.

Trotter derives the mental phenomena that are described as occurring in groups from a herd instinct (‘gregariousness’), which is innate in human beings just as in other species of animals. Biologically, he says, this gregariousness is an analogy to multicellularity and as it were a continuation of it. (In terms of the libido theory it is a further manifestation of the tendency which proceeds from the libido and which is felt by all living beings of the same kind, to combine in more and more comprehensive units.¹) The individual feels incomplete if he is alone. The fear shown by small children would seem already to be an expression of this herd instinct. Opposition to the herd is as good as separation from it, and is therefore anxiously avoided. But the herd turns away from anything that is new or unusual. The herd instinct would appear to be something primary, something which cannot be split up.

Trotter gives as the list of instincts which he considers as primary those of self-preservation, of nutrition, of sex, and of the herd. The last often comes into opposition with the others. The feelings of guilt and of duty are the peculiar possessions of a gregarious animal. Trotter also derives from the herd instinct the repressive forces which psycho-analysis has shown to exist in the ego, and from the same source accordingly the resistances which the physician comes up against in psycho-analytic treatment. Speech owes its importance to its aptitude for mutual understanding in the herd, and upon it the identification of the individuals with one another largely rests.

¹ See Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3811

While Le Bon is principally concerned with typical transient group formations, and McDougall with stable associations, Trotter has chosen as the centre of his interest the most generalized form of assemblage in which man, that xvon politicsn, passes his life, and he gives us its psychological basis. But Trotter is under no necessity of tracing back the herd instinct, for he characterizes it as primary and not further reducible. Boris Sidis’s attempt, to which he refers, at tracing the herd instinct back to suggestibility is fortunately superfluous as far as he is concerned; it is an explanation of a familiar and unsatisfactory type, and the converse proposition - that suggestibility is a derivative of the herd instinct - would seem to me to throw far more light on the subject.

But Trotter’s exposition is open, with even more justice than the others, to the objection that it takes too little account of the leader’s part in a group, while we incline rather to the opposite judgement, that it is impossible to grasp the nature of a group if the leader is disregarded. The herd instinct leaves no room at all for the leader; he is merely thrown in along with the herd, almost by chance; it follows, too, that no path leads from this instinct to the need for a God; the herd is without a herdsman. But besides this, Trotter’s exposition can be undermined psychologically; that is to say, it can be made at all events probable that the herd instinct is not irreducible, that it is not primary in the same sense as the instinct of self-preservation and the sexual instinct.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3812

It is naturally no easy matter to trace the ontogenesis of the herd instinct. The fear which is shown by small children when they are left alone, and which Trotter claims as being already a manifestation of the instinct, nevertheless suggests more readily another interpretation. The fear relates to the child’s mother, and later to other familiar people, and it is the expression of an unfulfilled desire, which the child does not yet know how to deal with in any way except by turning it into anxiety.¹ Nor is the child’s fear when it is alone pacified by the sight of any haphazard ‘member of the herd’, but on the contrary it is brought into existence by the approach of a ‘stranger’ of this sort. Then for a long time nothing in the nature of herd instinct or group feeling is to be observed in children. Something like it first grows up, in a nursery containing many children, out of the children’s relation to their parents, and it does so as a reaction to the initial envy with which the elder child receives the younger one. The elder child would certainly like to put his successor jealously aside, to keep it away from the parents, and to rob it of all its privileges; but in the face of the fact that this younger child (like all that come later) is loved by the parents as much as he himself is, and in consequence of the impossibility of his maintaining his hostile attitude without damaging himself, he is forced into identifying himself with the other children. So there grows up in the troop of children a communal or group feeling, which is then further developed at school. The first demand made by this reaction-formation is for justice, for equal treatment for all. We all know how loudly and implacably this claim is put forward at school. If one cannot be the favourite oneself, at all events nobody else shall be the favourite. This transformation - the replacing of jealousy by a group feeling in the nursery and classroom - might be considered improbable, if the same process could not later on be observed again in other circumstances. We have only to think of the troop of women and girls, all of them in love in an enthusiastically sentimental way, who crowd round a singer or pianist after his performance. It would certainly be easy for each of them to be jealous of the rest; but, in the face of their numbers and the consequent impossibility of their reaching the aim of their love, they renounce it, and, instead of pulling out one another’s hair, they act as a united group, do homage to the hero of the occasion with their common actions, and would probably be glad to have a share of his flowing locks. Originally rivals, they have succeeded in identifying themselves with one another by means of a similar love for the same object. When, as is usual, an instinctual situation is capable of various outcomes, we shall not be surprised that the actual outcome is one which brings with it the possibility of a certain amount of satisfaction, whereas some other outcome, in itself more obvious, is passed over because the circumstances of life prevent its leading to any such satisfaction.

¹ See the remarks upon anxiety in my Introductory Lectures (1916-17), Lecture XXV.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3813

What appears later on in society in the shape of Gemeingeist, esprit de corps, ‘group spirit’, etc., does not belie its derivation from what was originally envy. No one must want to put himself forward, every one must be the same and have the same. Social justice means that we deny ourselves many things so that others may have to do without them as well, or, what is the same thing, may not be able to ask for them. This demand for equality is the root of social conscience and the sense of duty. It reveals itself unexpectedly in the syphilitic’s dread of infecting other people, which psycho-analysis has taught us to understand. The dread exhibited by these poor wretches corresponds to their violent struggles against the unconscious wish to spread their infection on to other people; for why should they alone be infected and cut off from so much? why not other people as well? And the same germ is to be found in the apt story of the judgement of Solomon. If one woman’s child is dead, the other shall not have a live one either. The bereaved woman is recognized by this wish.

Thus social feeling is based upon the reversal of what was first a hostile feeling into a positively-toned tie in the nature of an identification. So far as we have hitherto been able to follow the course of events, this reversal seems to occur under the influence of a common affectionate tie with a person outside the group. We do not ourselves regard our analysis of identification as exhaustive, but it is enough for our present purpose that we should revert to this one feature - its demand that equalization shall be consistently carried through. We have already heard in the discussion of the two artificial groups, Church and army, that their necessary precondition is that all their members should be loved in the same way by one person, the leader. Do not let us forget, however, that the demand for equality in a group applies only to its members and not to the leader. All the members must be equal to one another, but they all want to be ruled by one person. Many equals, who can identify themselves with one another, and a single person superior to them all - that is the situation that we find realized in groups which are capable of subsisting. Let us venture, then, to correct Trotter’s pronouncement that man is a herd animal and assert that he is rather a horde animal, an individual creature in a horde led by a chief.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3814

X

THE GROUP AND THE PRIMAL HORDE

In 1912 I took up a conjecture of Darwin’s to the effect that the primitive form of human society was that of a horde ruled over despotically by a powerful male. I attempted to show that the fortunes of this horde have left indestructible traces upon the history of human descent; and, especially, that the development of totemism, which comprises in itself the beginnings of religion, morality, and social organization, is connected with the killing of the chief by violence and the transformation of the paternal horde into a community of brothers.¹ To be sure, this is only a hypothesis, like so many others with which archaeologists endeavour to lighten the darkness of prehistoric times - a ‘Just-So Story’, as it was amusingly called by a not unkind English critic; but I think it is creditable to such a hypothesis if it proves able to bring coherence and understanding into more and more new regions.

Human groups exhibit once again the familiar picture of an individual of superior strength among a troop of equal companions, a picture which is also contained in our idea of the primal horde. The psychology of such a group, as we know it from the descriptions to which we have so often referred - the dwindling of the conscious individual personality, the focusing of thoughts and feelings into a common direction, the predominance of the affective side of the mind and of unconscious psychical life, the tendency to the immediate carrying out of intentions as they emerge - all this corresponds to a state of regression to a primitive mental activity, of just such a sort as we should be inclined to ascribe to the primal horde.²

¹ Totem and Taboo (1912-13)

² What we have just described in our general characterization of mankind must apply especially to the primal horde. The will of the individual was too weak; he did not venture upon action. No impulses whatever came into existence except collective ones; there was only a common will, there were no single ones. An idea did not dare to turn itself into an act of will unless it felt itself reinforced by a perception of its general diffusion. This weakness of the idea is to be explained by the strength of the emotional tie which is shared by all the members of the horde; but the similarity in the circumstances of their life and the absence of any private property assist in determining the uniformity of their individual mental acts. As we may observe with children and soldiers, common activity is not excluded even in the excretory functions. The one great exception is provided by the sexual act, in which a third person is at best superfluous and in the extreme case is condemned to a state of painful expectancy. As to the reaction of the sexual need (for genital satisfaction) towards gregariousness, see below.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3815

Thus the group appears to us as a revival of the primal horde. Just as primitive man survives potentially in every individual, so the primal horde may arise once more out of any random collection; in so far men are habitually under the sway of group formation we recognize in it the survival of the primal horde. We must conclude that the psychology of groups is the oldest human psychology; what we have isolated as individual psychology, by neglecting all traces of the group, has only since come into prominence out of the old group psychology, by a gradual process which may still, perhaps, be described as incomplete. We shall later venture upon an attempt at specifying the point of departure of this development.

Further reflection will show us in what respect this statement requires correction. Individual psychology must, on the contrary, be just as old as group psychology, for from the first there were two kinds of psychologies, that of the individual members of the group and that of the father, chief, or leader. The members of the group were subject to ties just as we see them to-day, but the father of the primal horde was free. His intellectual acts were strong and independent even in isolation, and his will needed no reinforcement from others. Consistency leads us to assume that his ego had few libidinal ties; he loved no one but himself, or other people only in so far as they served his needs. To objects his ego gave away no more than was barely necessary.

He, at the very beginning of the history of mankind, was the ‘superman’ whom Nietzsche only expected from the future. Even to-day the members of a group stand in need of the illusion that they are equally and justly loved by their leader; but the leader himself need love no one else, he may be of a masterful nature, absolutely narcissistic, self-confident and independent. We know that love puts a check upon narcissism, and it would be possible to show how, by operating in this way, it became a factor of civilization.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3816

The primal father of the horde was not yet immortal, as he later became by deification. If he died, he had to be replaced; his place was probably taken by a youngest son, who had up to then been a member of the group like any other. There must therefore be a possibility of transforming group psychology into individual psychology; a condition must be discovered under which such a transformation is easily accomplished, just as it is possible for bees in case of necessity to turn a larva into a queen instead of into a worker. One can imagine only one possibility: the primal father had prevented his sons from satisfying their directly sexual impulsions; he forced them into abstinence and consequently into the emotional ties with him and with one another which could arise out of those of their impulsions that were inhibited in their sexual aim. He forced them, so to speak, into group psychology. His sexual jealousy and intolerance became in the last resort the causes of group psychology.1

Whoever became his successor was also given the possibility of sexual satisfaction, and was by that means offered a way out of the conditions of group psychology. The fixation of the libido to woman and the possibility of satisfaction without any need for delay or accumulation made an end of the importance of those of his sexual impulsions that were inhibited in their aim, and allowed his narcissism always to rise to its full height. We shall return in a postscript to this connection between love and character formation.

We may further emphasize, as being specially instructive, the relation that holds between the contrivance by means of which an artificial group is held together and the constitution of the primal horde. We have seen that with an army and a Church this contrivance is the illusion that the leader loves all of the individuals equally and justly. But this is simply an idealistic remodelling of the state of affairs in the primal horde, where all of the sons knew that they were equally persecuted by the primal father, and feared him equally. This same recasting upon which all social duties are built up is already presupposed by the next form of human society, the totemic clan. The indestructible strength of the family as a natural group formation rests upon the fact that this necessary presupposition of the father’s equal love can have a real application in the family.

¹ It may perhaps also be assumed that the sons, when they were driven out and separated from their father, advanced from identification with one another to homosexual object-love, and in this way won freedom to kill their father.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3817

But we expect even more of this derivation of the group from the primal horde. It ought also to help us to understand what is still incomprehensible and mysterious in group formations - all that lies hidden behind the enigmatic words ‘hypnosis’ and ‘suggestion’. And I think it can succeed in this too. Let us recall that hypnosis has something positively uncanny about it; but the characteristic of uncanniness suggests something old and familiar that has undergone repression.¹ Let us consider how hypnosis is induced. The hypnotist asserts that he is in possession of a mysterious power that robs the subject of his own will; or, which is the same thing, the subject believe it of him. This mysterious power (which is even now often described popularly as ‘animal magnetism’) must be the same power that is looked upon by primitive people as the source of taboo, the same that emanates from kings and chieftains and makes it dangerous to approach them (mana). The hypnotist, then, is supposed to be in possession of this power; and how does he manifest it? By telling the subject to look him in the eyes; his most typical method of hypnotizing is by his look. But it is precisely the sight of the chieftain that is dangerous and unbearable for primitive people, just as later that of the Godhead is for mortals. Even Moses had to act as an intermediary between his people and Jehovah, since the people could not support the sight of God; and when he returned from the presence of God his face shone - some of the mana had been transferred on to him, just as happens with the intermediary among primitive people.²

¹ Cf. ‘The "Uncanny”’ (1919h).

² See Totem and Taboo and the sources there quoted.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3818

It is true that hypnosis can also be evoked in other ways, for instance by fixing the eyes upon a bright object or by listening to a monotonous sound. This is misleading and has given occasion to inadequate physiological theories. In point of fact these procedures merely serve to divert conscious attention and to hold it riveted. The situation is the same as if the hypnotist had said to the subject: ‘Now concern yourself exclusively with my person; the rest of the world is quite uninteresting.’ It would of course be technically inexpedient for a hypnotist to make such a speech; it would tear the subject away from his unconscious attitude and stimulate him to conscious opposition. The hypnotist avoids directing the subject’s conscious thoughts towards his own intentions, and makes the person upon whom he is experimenting sink into an activity in which the world is bound to seem uninteresting to him; but at the same time the subject is in reality unconsciously concentrating his whole attention upon the hypnotist, and is getting into an attitude of rapport, of transference on to him. Thus the indirect methods of hypnotizing, like many of the technical procedures used in making jokes, have the effect of checking certain distributions of mental energy which would interfere with the course of events in the unconscious, and they lead eventually to the same result as the direct methods of influence by means of staring or stroking.¹

¹ This situation, in which the subject’s attitude is unconsciously directed towards the hypnotist, while he is consciously occupied with monotonous and uninteresting perceptions, finds a parallel among the events of psycho-analytic treatment, which deserves to be mentioned here. At least once in the course of every analysis a moment comes when the patient obstinately maintains that just now positively nothing whatever occurs to his mind. His free associations come to a stop and the usual incentives for putting them in motion fail in their effect. If the analyst insists, the patient is at last induced to admit that he is thinking of the view from the consulting-room window, of the wall-paper that he sees before him, or of the gas-lamp hanging from the ceiling. Then one knows at once that he has gone off into the transference and that he is engaged upon what are still unconscious thoughts relating to the physician; and one sees the stoppage in the patient’s associations disappear, as soon as he has been given this explanation.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3819

Ferenczi has made the true discovery that when a hypnotist gives the command to sleep, which is often done at the beginning of hypnosis, he is putting himself in the place of the subject’s parents. He thinks that two sorts of hypnotism are to be distinguished: one coaxing and soothing, which he considers is modelled on the mother, and another threatening, which is derived from the father. Now the command to sleep in hypnosis means nothing more nor less than an order to with draw all interest from the world and to concentrate it on the person of the hypnotist. And it is so understood by the subject; for in this withdrawal of interest from the external world lies the psychological characteristic of sleep, and the kinship between sleep and the state of hypnosis is based on it.

By the measures that he takes, then, the hypnotist awakens in the subject a portion of his archaic heritage which had also made him compliant towards his parents and which had experienced an individual re-animation in his relation to his father; what is thus awakened is the idea of a paramount and dangerous personality, towards whom only a passive-masochistic attitude is possible, to whom one’s will has to be surrendered, - while to be alone with him, ‘to look him in the face’, appears a hazardous enterprise. It is only in some such way as this that we can picture the relation of the individual member of the primal horde to the primal father. As we know from other reactions, individuals have preserved a variable degree of personal aptitude for reviving old situations of this kind. Some knowledge that in spite of everything hypnosis is only a game, a deceptive renewal of these old impressions, may, however, remain behind and take care that there is a resistance against any too serious consequences of the suspension of the will in hypnosis.

The uncanny and coercive characteristics of group formations, which are shown in the phenomena of suggestion that accompany them, may therefore with justice be traced back to the fact of their origin from the primal horde. The leader of the group is still the dreaded primal father; the group still wishes to be governed by unrestricted force; it has an extreme passion for authority; in Le Bon’s phrase, it has a thirst for obedience. The primal father is the group ideal, which governs the ego in the place of the ego ideal. Hypnosis has a good claim to being described as a group of two. There remains as a definition for suggestion: a conviction which is not based upon perception and reasoning but upon an erotic tie.¹

¹ It seems to me worth emphasizing the fact that the discussions in this section have induced us to give up Bernheim’s conception of hypnosis and go back to the naïf earlier one. According to Bernheim all hypnotic phenomena are to be traced to the factor of suggestion, which is not itself capable of further explanation. We have come to the conclusion that suggestion is a partial manifestation of the state of hypnosis, and that hypnosis is solidly founded upon a predisposition which has survived in the unconscious from the early history of the human family.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3820

XI

A DIFFERENTIATING GRADE IN THE EGO

If we survey the life of an individual man of to-day, bearing in mind the mutually complementary accounts of group psychology given by the authorities, we may lose the courage, in face of the complications that are revealed, to attempt a comprehensive exposition. Each individual is a component part of numerous groups, he is bound by ties of identification in many directions, and he has built up his ego ideal upon the most various models. Each individual therefore has a share in numerous group minds - those of his race, of his class, of his creed, of his nationality, etc. - and he can also raise himself above them to the extent of having a scrap of independence and originality. Such stable and lasting group formations, with their uniform and constant effects, are less striking to an observer than the rapidly formed and transient groups from which Le Bon has made his brilliant psychological character sketch of the group mind. And it is just in these noisy ephemeral groups, which are as it were superimposed upon the others, that we are met by the prodigy of the complete, even though only temporary, disappearance of exactly what we have recognized as individual acquirements.

We have interpreted this prodigy as meaning that the individual gives up his ego ideal and substitutes for it the group ideal as embodied in the leader. And we must add by way of correction that the prodigy is not equally great in every case. In many individuals the separation between the ego and the ego ideal is not very far advanced; the two still coincide readily; the ego has often preserved its earlier narcissistic self-complacency. The selection of the leader is very much facilitated by this circumstance. He need often only possess the typical qualities of the individuals concerned in a particularly clearly marked and pure form, and need only give an impression of greater force and of more freedom of libido; and in that case the need for a strong chief will often meet him half-way and invest him with a predominance to which he would otherwise perhaps have had no claim. The other members of the group, whose ego ideal would not, apart from this, have become embodied in his person without some correction, are then carried away with the rest by ‘suggestion’, that is to say, by means of identification.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3821

We are aware that what we have been able to contribute towards the explanation of the libidinal structure of groups leads back to the distinction between the ego and the ego ideal and to the double kind of tie which this makes possible - identification, and putting the object in the place of the ego ideal. The assumption of this kind of differentiating grade in the ego as a first step in an analysis of the ego must gradually establish its justification in the most various regions of psychology. In my paper on narcissism I have put together all the pathological material that could at the moment be used in support of this differentiation. But it may be expected that when we penetrate deeper into the psychology of the psychoses its significance will be discovered to be far greater. Let us reflect that the ego now enters into the relation of an object to the ego ideal which has been developed out of it, and that all the interplay between an external object and the ego as a whole, with which our study of the neuroses has made us acquainted, may possibly be repeated upon this new scene of action within the ego.

In this place I shall only follow up one of the consequences which seem possible from this point of view, thus resuming the discussion of a problem which I was obliged to leave unsolved elsewhere.¹ Each of the mental differentiations that we have become acquainted with represents a fresh aggravation of the difficulties of mental functioning, increases its instability, and may become the starting-point for its breakdown, that is, for the onset of a disease. Thus, by being born we have made the step from an absolutely self-sufficient narcissism to the perception of a changing external world and the beginnings of the discovery of objects. And with this is associated the fact that we cannot endure the new state of things for long, that we periodically revert from it, in our sleep, to our former condition of absence of stimulation and avoidance of objects. It is true, however, that in this we are following a hint from the external world, which, by means of the periodical change of day and night, temporarily withdraws the greater part of the stimuli that affect us. The second example of such a step, pathologically more important, is subject to no such qualification. In the course of development we have effected a separation of our mental existence into a coherent ego and into an unconscious and repressed portion which is left outside it; and we know that the stability of this new acquisition is exposed to constant shocks. In dreams and in neuroses what is thus excluded knocks for admission at the gates, guarded though they are by resistances; and in our waking health we make use of special artifices for allowing what is repressed to circumvent the resistances and for receiving it temporarily into our ego to the increase of our pleasure. Jokes and humour, and to some extent the comic in general, may be regarded in this light. Everyone acquainted with the psychology of the neuroses will think of similar examples of less importance; but I hasten on to the application I have in view.

¹ ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917e).

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3822

It is quite conceivable that the separation of the ego ideal from the ego cannot be borne for long either, and has to be temporarily undone. In all renunciations and limitations imposed upon the ego a periodical infringement of the prohibition is the rule; this indeed is shown by the institution of festivals, which in origin are nothing less nor more than excesses provided by law and which owe their cheerful character to the release which they bring.¹ The Saturnalia of the Romans and our modern carnival agree in this essential feature with the festivals of primitive people, which usually end in debaucheries of every kind and the transgression of what are at other times the most sacred commandments. But the ego ideal comprises the sum of all the limitations in which the ego has to acquiesce, and for that reason the abrogation of the ideal would necessarily be a magnificent festival for the ego, which might then once again feel satisfied with itself.²

There is always a feeling of triumph when something in the ego coincides with the ego ideal. And the sense of guilt (as well as the sense of inferiority) can also be understood as an expression of tension between the ego and the ego ideal.

¹ Totem and Taboo.

² Trotter traces repression back to the herd instinct. It is a translation of this into another form of expression rather than a contradiction when I say in my paper on narcissism that ‘for the ego the formation of an ideal would be the conditioning factor of repression’.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3823

It is well known that there are people the general colour of whose mood oscillates periodically from an excessive depression through some kind of intermediate state to an exalted sense of well-being. These oscillations appear in very different degrees of amplitude, from what is just noticeable to those extreme instances which, in the shape of melancholia and mania, make the most tormenting or disturbing inroads upon the life of the person concerned. In typical cases of this cyclical depression external precipitating causes do not seem to play any decisive part; as regards internal motives, nothing more, or nothing else is to be found in these patients than in all others. It has consequently become the custom to consider these cases as not being psychogenic. We shall refer presently to those other exactly similar cases of cyclical depression which can easily be traced back to mental traumas.

Thus the foundation of these spontaneous oscillations of mood is unknown; we are without insight into the mechanism of the displacement of a melancholia by a mania. So we are free to suppose that these patients are people in whom our conjecture might find an actual application - their ego ideal might be temporarily resolved into their ego after having previously ruled it with especial strictness.

Let us keep to what is clear: On the basis of our analysis of the ego it cannot be doubted that in cases of mania the ego and the ego ideal have fused together, so that the person, in a mood of triumph and self-satisfaction, disturbed by no self-criticism, can enjoy the abolition of his inhibitions, his feelings of consideration for others, and his self-reproaches. It is not so obvious, but nevertheless very probable, that the misery of the melancholic is the expression of a sharp conflict between the two agencies of his ego, a conflict in which the ideal, in an excess of sensitiveness, relentlessly exhibits its condemnation of the ego in delusions of inferiority and in self-depreciation. The only question is whether we are to look for the causes of these altered relations between the ego and the ego ideal in the periodic rebellions, which we have postulated above, against the new institution, or whether we are to make other circumstances responsible for them.

A change into mania is not an indispensable feature of the symptomatology of melancholic depression. There are simple melancholias, some in single and some in recurrent attacks, which never show this development.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3824

On the other hand there are melancholias in which the precipitating cause clearly plays an aetiological part. They are those which occur after the loss of a loved object, whether by death or as the result of circumstances which have necessitated the withdrawal of the libido from the object. A psychogenic melancholia of this sort can end in mania, and this cycle can be repeated several times, just as easily as in a case which appears to be spontaneous. Thus the state of things is somewhat obscure, especially as only a few forms and cases of melancholia have been submitted to psycho-analytic investigation.¹ So far we only understand those cases in which the object is given up because it has shown itself unworthy of love. It is then set up again inside the ego, by means of identification, and severely condemned by the ego ideal. The reproaches and attacks directed towards the object come to light in the shape of melancholic self-reproaches.²

A melancholia of this kind, too, may end in a change into mania; so that the possibility of this happening represents a feature which is independent of the other characteristics of the clinical picture.

Nevertheless I see no difficulty in assigning to the factor of the periodic rebellion of the ego against the ego ideal a share in both kinds of melancholia, the psychogenic as well as the spontaneous. In the spontaneous kind it may be supposed that the ego ideal is inclined to display a peculiar strictness, which then results automatically in its temporary suspension. In the psychogenic kind the ego would be incited to rebellion by ill-treatment on the part of its ideal - an ill-treatment which it encounters when there has been identification with a rejected object.

¹ Cf. Abraham (1912).

² To speak more accurately, they conceal themselves behind the reproaches directed towards the subject’s own ego, and lend them the fixity, tenacity, and imperativeness which characterize the self-reproaches of a melancholic.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3825

XII

POSTSCRIPT

In the course of the enquiry which has just been brought to a provisional end we came across a number of side-paths which we avoided pursuing in the first instance but in which there was much that offered us promises of insight. We propose now to take up a few of the points that have been left on one side in this way.

A. The distinction between identification of the ego with an object and replacement of the ego ideal by an object finds an interesting illustration in the two great artificial groups which we began by studying, the army and the Christian Church.

It is obvious that a soldier takes his superior, that is, in fact, the leader of the army, as his ideal, while he identifies himself with his equals, and derives from this community of their egos the obligations for giving mutual help and for sharing possessions which comradeship implies. But he becomes ridiculous if he tries to identify himself with the general. The soldier in Wallensteins Lager laughs at the sergeant for this very reason:

Wie er räuspert und wie er spuckt,

Das habt ihr ihm glücklich abgeguckt!

It is otherwise in the Catholic Church. Every Christian loves Christ as his ideal and feels himself united with all other Christians by the tie of identification. But the Church requires more of him. He has also to identify himself with Christ and love all other Christians as Christ loved them. At both points, therefore, the Church requires that the position of the libido which is given by group formation should be supplemented. Identification has to be added where object-choice has taken place, and object-love where there is identification. This addition evidently goes beyond the constitution of the group. One can be a good Christian and yet be far from the idea of putting oneself in Christ’s place and of having like him an all-embracing love for mankind. One need not think oneself capable, weak mortal that one is, of the Saviour’s largeness of soul and strength of love. But this further development in the distribution of libido in the group is probably the factor upon which Christianity bases its claim to have reached a higher ethical level.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3826

B. We have said that it would be possible to specify the point in the mental development of mankind at which the advance from group psychology to individual psychology was achieved also by the individual members of the group.¹

For this purpose we must return for a moment to the scientific myth of the father of the primal horde. He was later on exalted into the creator of the world, and with justice, for he had produced all the sons who composed the first group. He was the ideal of each one of them, at once feared and honoured, a fact which led later to the idea of taboo. These many individuals eventually banded themselves together, killed him and cut him in pieces. None of the group of victors could take his place, or, if one of them did, the battles began afresh, until they understood that they must all renounce their father’s heritage. They then formed the totemic community of brothers, all with equal rights and united by the totem prohibitions which were to preserve and to expiate the memory of the murder. But the dissatisfaction with what had been achieved still remained, and it became the source of new developments. The persons who were united in this group of brothers gradually came towards a revival of the old state of things at a new level. The male became once more the chief of a family, and broke down the prerogatives of the gynaecocracy which had become established during the fatherless period. As a compensation for this he may at that time have acknowledged the mother deities, whose priests were castrated for the mother’s protection, after the example that had been given by the father of the primal horde. And yet the new family was only a shadow of the old one; there were numbers of fathers and each one was limited by the rights of the others.

¹ What follows at this point was written under the influence of an exchange of ideas with Otto Rank. See also Rank (1922).

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3827

It was then, perhaps, that some individual, in the exigency of his longing, may have been moved to free himself from the group and take over the father’s part. He who did this was the first epic poet; and the advance was achieved in his imagination. This poet disguised the truth with lies in accordance with his longing. He invented the heroic myth. The hero was a man who by himself had slain the father - the father who still appeared in the myth as a totemic monster. Just as the father had been the boy’s first ideal, so in the hero who aspires to the father’s place the poet now created the first ego ideal. The transition to the hero was probably afforded by the youngest son, the mother’s favourite, whom she had protected from paternal jealousy, and who, in the era of the primal horde, had been the father’s successor. In the lying poetic fancies of prehistoric times the woman, who had been the prize of battle and the temptation to murder, was probably turned into the active seducer and instigator to the crime.

The hero claims to have acted alone in accomplishing the deed, which certainly only the horde as a whole would have ventured upon. But, as Rank has observed, fairy tales have preserved clear traces of the facts which were disavowed. For we often find in them that the hero who has to carry out some difficult task (usually the youngest son, and not infrequently one who has represented himself to the father-substitute as being stupid, that is to say, harmless) - we often find, then, that this hero can carry out his task only by the help of a crowd of small animals, such as bees or ants. These would be the brothers in the primal horde, just as in the same way in dream symbolism insects or vermin signify brothers and sisters (contemptuously, considered as babies). Moreover every one of the tasks in myths and fairy tales is easily recognizable as a substitute for the heroic deed.

The myth, then, is the step by which the individual emerges from group psychology. The first myth was certainly the psychological, the hero myth; the explanatory nature myth must have followed much later. The poet who had taken this step and had in this way set himself free from the group in his imagination, is nevertheless able (as Rank has further observed) to find his way back to it in reality. For he goes and relates to the group his hero’s deeds which he has invented. At bottom this hero is no one but himself. Thus he lowers himself to the level of reality, and raises his hearers to the level of imagination. But his hearers understand the poet, and, in virtue of their having the same relation of longing towards the primal father, they can identify themselves with the hero.¹

The lie of the heroic myth culminates in the deification of the hero. Perhaps the deified hero may have been earlier than the Father God and may have been a precursor to the return of the primal father as a deity. The series of gods, then, would run chronologically: Mother Goddess-Hero-Father God. But it is only with the elevation of the never-forgotten primal father that the deity acquires the features that we still recognize in him to-day.²

¹ Cf. Hanns Sachs (1920).

² In this brief exposition I have made no attempt to bring forward any of the material existing in legends, myths, fairy tales, the history of manners, etc., in support of the construction.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3828

C. A great deal has been said in this paper about directly sexual instincts and those that are inhibited in their aims, and it may be hoped that this distinction will not meet with too much resistance. But a detailed discussion of the question will not be out of place, even if it only repeats what has to a great extent already been said before.

The development of the libido in children has made us acquainted with the first but also the best example of sexual instincts which are inhibited in their aims. All the feelings which a child has towards its parents and those who look after it pass by an easy transition into the wishes which give expression to the child’s sexual impulsions. The child claims from these objects of its love all the signs of affection which it knows of; it wants to kiss them, touch them, and look at them; it is curious to see their genitals, and to be with them when they perform their intimate excretory functions; it promises to marry its mother or nurse - whatever it may understand by marriage; it proposes to itself to bear its father a child, etc. Direct observation, as well as the subsequent analytic investigation of the residues of childhood, leave no doubt as to the complete fusion of tender and jealous feelings and of sexual intentions, and show us in what a fundamental way the child makes the person it loves into the object of all its still not properly centred sexual trends.¹

¹ Cf. my Three Essays (1905d).

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3829

This first configuration of the child’s love, which in typical cases takes the shape of the Oedipus complex, succumbs, as we know, from the beginning of the period of latency onwards to a wave of repression. Such of it as is left over shows itself as a purely affectionate emotional tie, relating to the same people, but no longer to be described as ‘sexual’. Psycho-analysis, which illuminates the depths of mental life, has no difficulty in showing that the sexual ties of the earliest years of childhood also persist, though repressed and unconscious. It gives us courage to assert that wherever we come across an affectionate feeling it is successor to a completely ‘sensual’ object-tie with the person in question or rather with that person’s prototype (or imago). It cannot indeed disclose to us without a special investigation whether in a given case this former complete sexual current still exists under repression or whether it has already been exhausted. To speak still more precisely: it is quite certain that this current is still there as a form and possibility, and can always be cathected and put into activity again by means of regression; the only question is (and it cannot always be answered) what degree of cathexis and operative force it still has at the present moment. Equal care must be taken in this connection to avoid two sources of error - the Scylla of underestimating the importance of the repressed unconscious, and the Charybdis of judging the normal entirely by the standards of the pathological.

A psychology which will not or cannot penetrate the depths of what is repressed regards affectionate emotional ties as being invariably the expression of impulsions which have no sexual aim, even though they are derived from impulsions which have such an aim.¹

¹ Hostile feelings are doubtless a little more complicated in their construction.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3830

We are justified in saying that they have been diverted from these sexual aims, even though there is some difficulty in giving a description of such a diversion of aim which will conform to the requirements of metapsychology. Moreover, those instincts which are inhibited in their aims always preserve some few of their original sexual aims; even an affectionate devotee, even a friend or an admirer, desires the physical proximity and the sight of the person who is now loved only in the ‘Pauline’ sense. If we choose, we may recognize in this diversion of aim a beginning of the sublimation of the sexual instincts, or on the other hand we may fix the limits of sublimation at some more distant point. Those sexual instincts which are inhibited in their aims have a great functional advantage over those which are uninhibited. Since they are not capable of really complete satisfaction, they are especially adapted to create permanent ties; while those instincts which are directly sexual incur a loss of energy each time they are satisfied, and must wait to be renewed by a fresh accumulation of sexual libido, so that meanwhile the object may have been changed. The inhibited instincts are capable of any degree of admixture with the uninhibited; they can be transformed back into them, just as they arose out of them. It is well known how easily erotic wishes develop out of emotional relations of a friendly character, based upon appreciation and admiration (compare Molière’s ‘Kiss me for the love of Greek’), between a master and a pupil, between a performer and a delighted listener, and especially in the case of women. In fact the growth of emotional ties of this kind, with their purposeless beginnings, provides a much frequented pathway to sexual object-choice. Pfister, in his Frömmigkeit des Grafen von Zinzendorf (1910), has given an extremely clear and certainly not an isolated example of how easily even an intense religious tie can revert to ardent sexual excitement. On the other hand it is also very usual for directly sexual impulsions, short-lived in themselves, to be transformed into a lasting and purely affectionate tie; and the consolidation of a passionate love marriage rests to a large extent upon this process.

We shall naturally not be surprised to hear that the sexual impulsions that are inhibited in their aims arise out of the directly sexual ones when internal or external obstacles make the sexual aims unattainable. The repression during the period of latency is an internal obstacle of this kind - or rather one which has become internal. We have assumed that the father of the primal horde owing to his sexual intolerance compelled all his sons to be abstinent, and thus forced them into ties that were inhibited in their aims, while he reserved for himself freedom of sexual enjoyment and in this way remained without ties. All the ties upon which a group depends are of the character of instincts that are inhibited in their aims. But here we have approached the discussion of a new subject, which deals with the relation between directly sexual instincts and the formation of groups.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3831

D. The last two remarks will have prepared us for finding that directly sexual impulsions are unfavourable to the formation of groups. In the history of the development of the family there have also, it is true, been group relations of sexual love (group marriages); but the more important sexual love became for the ego, and the more it developed the characteristics of being in love, the more urgently it required to be limited to two people - una cum uno - as is prescribed by the nature of the genital aim. Polygamous inclinations had to be content to find satisfaction in a succession of changing objects.

Two people coming together for the purpose of sexual satisfaction, in so far as they seek for solitude, are making a demonstration against the herd instinct, the group feeling. The more they are in love, the more completely they suffice for each other. Their rejection of the group’s influence is expressed in the shape of a sense of shame. Feelings of jealousy of the most extreme violence are summoned up in order to protect the choice of a sexual object from being encroached upon by a group tie. It is only when the affectionate, that is, personal, factor of a love relation gives place entirely to the sensual one, that it is possible for two people to have sexual intercourse in the presence of others or for there to be simultaneous sexual acts in a group, as occurs at an orgy. But at that point a regression has taken place to an early stage in sexual relations, at which being in love as yet played no part, and all sexual objects were judged to be of equal value, somewhat in the sense of Bernard Shaw’s malicious aphorism to the effect that being in love means greatly exaggerating the difference between one woman and another.

There are abundant indications that being in love only made its appearance late on in the sexual relations between men and women; so that the opposition between sexual love and group ties is also a late development. Now it may seem as though this assumption were incompatible with our myth of the primal family. For it was after all by their love for their mothers and sisters that the mob of brothers was, as we have supposed, driven to parricide; and it is difficult to imagine this love as being anything but undivided and primitive - that is, as an intimate union of the affectionate and sensual. But further consideration resolves this objection to our theory into a confirmation of it. One of the reactions to the parricide was after all the institution of totemic exogamy, the prohibition of any sexual relation with those women of the family who had been tenderly loved since childhood. In this way a wedge was driven in between a man’s affectionate and sensual feelings, one still firmly fixed in his erotic life to-day.¹ As a result of this exogamy the sensual needs of men had to be satisfied with strange and unloved women.

¹ See Freud, (1912d).

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3832

In the great artificial groups, the Church and the army, there is no room for woman as a sexual object. The love relation between men and women remains outside these organizations. Even where groups are formed which are composed of both men and women the distinction between the sexes plays no part. There is scarcely any sense in asking whether the libido which keeps groups together is of a homosexual or of a heterosexual nature, for it is not differentiated according to the sexes, and particularly shows a complete disregard for the aims of the genital organization of the libido.

Even in a person who has in other respects become absorbed in a group, the directly sexual impulsions preserve a little of his individual activity. If they become too strong they disintegrate every group formation. The Catholic Church had the best of motives for recommending its followers to remain unmarried and for imposing celibacy upon its priests; but falling in love has often driven even priests to leave the Church. In the same way love for women breaks through the group ties of race, of national divisions, and of the social class system, and it thus produces important effects as a factor in civilization. It seems certain that homosexual love is far more compatible with group ties, even when it takes the shape of uninhibited sexual impulsions - a remarkable fact, the explanation of which might carry us far.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3833

The psycho-analytic investigation of the psychoneuroses has taught us that their symptoms are to be traced back to directly sexual impulsions which are repressed but still remain active. We can complete this formula by adding - ‘or, to aim-inhibited impulsions, whose inhibition has not been entirely successful or has made room for a return to the repressed sexual aim’. It is in accordance with this that a neurosis should make its victim asocial and should remove him from the usual group formations. It may be said that a neurosis has the same disintegrating effect upon a group as being in love. On the other hand it appears that where a powerful impetus has been given to group formation neuroses may diminish and, at all events temporarily, disappear. Justifiable attempts have also been made to turn this antagonism between neuroses and group formation to therapeutic account. Even those who do not regret the disappearance of religious illusions from the civilized world of to-day will admit that so long as they were in force they offered those who were bound by them the most powerful protection against the danger of neurosis. Nor is it hard to discern that all the ties that bind people to mystico-religious or philosophico-religious sects and communities are expressions of crooked cures of all kinds of neuroses. All of this is correlated with the contrast between directly sexual impulsions and those which are inhibited in their aims.

If he is left to himself, a neurotic is obliged to replace by his own symptom formations the great group formations from which he is excluded. He creates his own world of imagination for himself, his own religion, his own system of delusions, and thus recapitulates the institutions of humanity in a distorted way which is clear evidence of the dominating part played by the directly sexual impulsions.¹

¹ See Totem and Taboo, towards the end of the second essay.

Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego

3834

E. In conclusion, we will add a comparative estimate, from the standpoint of the libido theory, of the states with which we have been concerned, of being in love, of hypnosis, of group formation, and of neurosis.

Being in love is based on the simultaneous presence of directly sexual impulsions and of sexual impulsions that are inhibited in their aims, while the object draws a part of the subject’s narcissistic ego-libido to itself. It is a condition in which there is only room for the ego and the object.

Hypnosis resembles being in love in being limited to these two persons, but it is based entirely on sexual impulsions that are inhibited in their aims and puts the object in the place of the ego ideal.

The group multiplies this process; it agrees with hypnosis in the nature of the instincts which hold it together, and in the replacement of the ego ideal by the object; but to this it adds identification with other individuals, which was perhaps originally made possible by their having the same relation to the object.

Both states, hypnosis and group formation, are an inherited deposit from the phylogenesis of the human libido - hypnosis in the form of a predisposition, and the group, besides this, as a direct survival. The replacement of the directly sexual impulsions by those that are inhibited in their aims promotes in both states a separation between the ego and the ego ideal, a separation with which a beginning has already been made in the state of being in love.

Neurosis stands outside this series. It also is based upon a peculiarity in the development of the human libido - the twice repeated start made by the directly sexual function, with an intervening period of latency.¹ To this extent it resembles hypnosis and group formation in having the character of a regression, which is absent from being in love. It makes its appearance wherever the advance from directly sexual instincts to those that are inhibited in their aims has not been wholly successful; and it represents a conflict between those portions of the instincts which have been received into the ego after having passed through this development and those portions of them which, springing from the repressed unconscious, strive - as do other, completely repressed, instinctual impulses - to attain direct satisfaction. Neuroses are extraordinarily rich in content, for they embrace all possible relations between the ego and the object - both those in which the object is retained and others in which it is abandoned or erected inside the ego itself - and also the conflicting relations between the ego and its ego ideal.

¹ See my Three Essays (1905d).

3835

THE PSYCHOGENESIS OF A CASE OF HOMOSEXUALITY IN A WOMAN

(1920)

3836

Intentionally left blank

3837

THE PSYCHOGENESIS OF A CASE OF HOMOSEXUALITY IN A WOMAN

I

Homosexuality in women, which is certainly not less common than in men, although much less glaring, has not only been ignored by the law, but has also been neglected by psycho-analytic research. The narration of a single case, not too pronounced in type, in which it was possible to trace its origin and development in the mind with complete certainty and almost without a gap may, therefore, have a certain claim to attention. If this presentation of it furnishes only the most general outlines of the various events concerned and of the conclusions reached from a study of the case, while suppressing all the characteristic details on which the interpretation is founded, this limitation is easily to be explained by the medical discretion necessary in discussing a recent case.

A beautiful and clever girl of eighteen, belonging to a family of good standing, had aroused displeasure and concern in her parents by the devoted adoration with which she pursued a certain ‘society lady’ who was about ten years older than herself. The parents asserted that, in spite of her distinguished name, this lady was nothing but a cocotte. It was well known, they said, that she lived with a friend, a married woman, and had intimate relations with her, while at the same time she carried on promiscuous affairs with a number of men. The girl did not contradict these evil reports, but neither did she allow them to interfere with her worship of the lady, although she herself was by no means lacking in a sense of decency and propriety. No prohibitions and no supervision hindered the girl from seizing every one of her rare opportunities of being together with her beloved, of ascertaining all her habits, of waiting for her for hours outside her door or at a tram-halt, of sending her gifts of flowers, and so on. It was evident that this one interest had swallowed up all others in the girl’s mind. She did not trouble herself any further with educational studies, thought nothing of social functions or girlish pleasures, and kept up relations only with a few girl friends who could help her in the matter or serve as confidantes. The parents could not say to what lengths their daughter had gone in her relations with the questionable lady, whether the limits of devoted admiration had already been exceeded or not. They had never remarked in their daughter any interest in young men, nor pleasure in their attentions, while, on the other hand, they were sure that her present attachment to a woman was only a continuation, in a more marked degree, of a feeling she had displayed of recent years for other members of her own sex which had already aroused her father’s suspicion and anger.

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman

3838

There were two details of her behaviour, in apparent contrast with each other, that most especially vexed her parents. On the one hand, she did not scruple to appear in the most frequented streets in the company of her undesirable friend, being thus quite neglectful of her own reputation; while, on the other hand, she disdained no means of deception, no excuses and no lies that would make meetings with her possible and cover them. She thus showed herself too open in one respect and full of deceitfulness in the other. One day it happened, indeed, as was sooner or later inevitable in the circumstances, that the father met his daughter in the company of the lady, about whom he had come to know. He passed them by with an angry glance which boded no good. Immediately afterwards the girl rushed off and flung herself over a wall down the side of a cutting on to the suburban railway line which ran close by. She paid for this undoubtedly serious attempt at suicide with a considerable time on her back in bed, though fortunately little permanent damage was done. After her recovery she found it easier to get her own way than before. The parents did not dare to oppose her with so much determination, and the lady, who up till then had received her advances coldly, was moved by such an unmistakable proof of serious passion and began to treat her in a more friendly manner.

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman

3839

About six months after this episode the parents sought medical advice and entrusted the physician with the task of bringing their daughter back to a normal state of mind. The girl’s attempted suicide had evidently shown them that strong disciplinary measures at home were powerless to overcome her disorder. Before going further, however, it will be desirable to deal separately with the attitudes of her father and of her mother to the matter. The father was an earnest, worthy man, at bottom very tender-hearted, but he had to some extent estranged his children by the sternness he had adopted towards them. His treatment of his only daughter was too much influenced by consideration for his wife. When he first came to know of his daughter’s homosexual tendencies he flew into a rage and tried to suppress them by threats. At that time perhaps he hesitated between different, though equally distressing, views - regarding her either as vicious, as degenerate, or as mentally afflicted. Even after the attempted suicide he did not achieve the lofty resignation shown by one of our medical colleagues who remarked of a similar irregularity in his own family: ‘Well, it’s just a misfortune like any other.’ There was something about his daughter’s homosexuality that aroused the deepest bitterness in him, and he was determined to combat it with all the means in his power. The low estimation in which psycho-analysis is so generally held in Vienna did not prevent him from turning to it for help. If this way failed he still had in reserve his strongest counter-measure: a speedy marriage was to awaken the natural instincts of the girl and stifle her unnatural tendencies.

The mother’s attitude towards the girl was not so easy to grasp. She was still a youngish woman, who was evidently unwilling to give up her own claims to attractiveness. All that was clear was that she did not take her daughter’s infatuation so tragically as did the father, nor was she so incensed at it. She had even for some time enjoyed her daughter’s confidence concerning her passion. Her opposition to it seemed to have been aroused mainly by the harmful publicity with which the girl displayed her feelings. She had herself suffered for some years from neurotic troubles and enjoyed a great deal of consideration from her husband; she treated her children in quite different ways, being decidedly harsh towards her daughter and over-indulgent to her three sons, the youngest of whom had been born after a long interval and was then not yet three years old. It was not easy to ascertain anything more definite about her character, for, owing to motives that will only later become intelligible, the patient was always reserved in what she said about her mother, whereas in regard to her father there was no question of this.

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman

3840

To a physician who was to undertake psycho-analytic treatment of the girl there were many grounds for misgiving. The situation he had to deal with was not the one that analysis demands, in which alone it can demonstrate its effectiveness. As is well known, the ideal situation for analysis is when someone who is otherwise his own master is suffering from an inner conflict which he is unable to resolve alone, so that he brings his trouble to the analyst and begs for his help. The physician then works hand in hand with one portion of the pathologically divided personality, against the other party in the conflict. Any situation which differs from this is to a greater or lesser degree unfavourable for psycho-analysis and adds fresh difficulties to the internal ones already present. Situations like that of a prospective house-owner who orders an architect to build him a villa to his own tastes and requirements, or of a pious donor who commissions an artist to paint a sacred picture in the corner of which is to be a portrait of himself in adoration, are at bottom incompatible with the conditions necessary for psycho-analysis. Thus, it constantly happens that a husband instructs the physician as follows: ‘My wife suffers from nerves, and for that reason gets on badly with me; please cure her, so that we may lead a happy married life again.’ But often enough it turns out that such a request is impossible to fulfil - that is to say, the physician cannot bring about the result for which the husband sought the treatment. As soon as the wife is freed from her neurotic inhibitions she sets about getting a separation, for her neurosis was the sole condition under which the marriage could be maintained. Or else parents expect one to cure their nervous and unruly child. By a healthy child they mean one who never causes his parents trouble, and gives them nothing but pleasure. The physician may succeed in curing the child, but after that it goes its own way all the more decidedly, and the parents are now far more dissatisfied than before. In short, it is not a matter of indifference whether someone comes to analysis of his own accord or because he is brought to it - whether it is he himself who desires to be changed, or only his relatives, who love him (or who might be expected to love him).

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman

3841

Further unfavourable features in the present case were the facts that the girl was not in any way ill (she did not suffer from anything in herself, nor did she complain of her condition) and that the task to be carried out did not consist in resolving a neurotic conflict but in converting one variety of the genital organization of sexuality into the other. Such an achievement - the removal of genital inversion or homosexuality - is in my experience never an easy matter. On the contrary, I have found success possible only in specially favourable circumstances, and even then the success essentially consisted in making access to the opposite sex (which had hitherto been barred) possible to a person restricted to homosexuality, thus restoring his full bisexual functions. After that it lay with him to choose whether he wished to abandon the path that is banned by society, and in some cases he has done so. One must remember that normal sexuality too depends upon a restriction in the choice of object. In general, to undertake to convert a fully developed homosexual into a heterosexual does not offer much more prospect of success than the reverse, except that for good practical reasons the latter is never attempted.

The number of successes achieved by psycho-analytic treatment of the various forms of homosexuality, which incidentally are manifold, is indeed not very striking. As a rule the homosexual is not able to give up the object which provides him with pleasure, and one cannot convince him that if he made the change he would rediscover in the other object the pleasure that he has renounced, and such components of the instinct of self-preservation prove themselves too weak in the struggle against the sexual impulsions. One then soon discovers his secret plan, namely, to obtain from the striking failure of his attempt a feeling of satisfaction that he has done everything possible against his abnormality, to which he can now resign himself with an easy conscience. The case is somewhat different when consideration for beloved parents and relatives has been the motive for his attempt to be cured. Here there really are libidinal impulsions present which may put forth energies opposed themselves to the homosexual choice of object; but their strength is rarely sufficient. It is only where the homosexual fixation has not yet become strong enough, or where there are considerable rudiments and vestiges of a heterosexual choice of object, i.e. in a still oscillating or in a definitely bisexual organization, that one may make a more favourable prognosis for psycho-analytic therapy.

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman

3842

For these reasons I refrained altogether from holding out to the parents any prospect of their wish being fulfilled. I merely said I was prepared to study the girl carefully for a few weeks or months, so as then to be able to pronounce how far a continuation of the analysis would be likely to influence her. In quite a number of cases, indeed, an analysis falls into two clearly distinguishable phases. In the first, the physician procures from the patient the necessary information, makes him familiar with the premises and postulates of psycho-analysis, and unfolds to him the reconstruction of the genesis of his disorder as deduced from the material brought up in the analysis. In the second phase the patient himself gets hold of the material put before him; he works on it, recollects what he can of the apparently repressed memories, and tries to repeat the rest as if he were in some way living it over again. In this way he can confirm, supplement, and correct the inferences made by the physician. It is only during this work that he experiences, through overcoming resistances, the inner change aimed at, and acquires for himself the convictions that make him independent of the physician’s authority. These two phases in the course of the analytic treatment are not always sharply divided from each other; this can only happen when the resistance obeys certain conditions. But when this is so, one may bring up as an analogy the two stages of a journey. The first comprises all the necessary preparations, to-day so complicated and hard to effect, before, ticket in hand, one can at last go on to the platform and secure a seat in the train. One then has the right, and the possibility, of travelling into a distant country; but after all these preliminary exertions one is not yet there - indeed, one is not a single mile nearer to one’s goal. For this to happen one has to make the journey itself from one station to the other, and this part of the performance may well be compared with the second phase of the analysis.

The course of the present patient’s analysis followed this two-phased pattern, but it was not continued beyond the beginning of the second phase. A special constellation of the resistance made it possible, nevertheless, to gain full confirmation of my constructions, and to obtain an adequate insight on broad lines into the way in which her inversion had developed. But before relating the findings of the analysis I must deal with a few points which have either been touched upon already by myself or which will have roused special interest in the reader.

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman

3843

I had made the prognosis partly dependent on how far the girl had succeeded in satisfying her passion. The information I obtained during the analysis seemed favourable in this respect. With none of the objects of her adoration had the patient enjoyed anything beyond a few kisses and embraces; her genital chastity, if one may use such a phrase, had remained intact. As for the demi-mondaine who had roused her most recent and by far her strongest emotions, she had always been treated coldly by her and never been allowed any greater favour than to kiss her hand. She was probably making a virtue of necessity when she kept insisting on the purity of her love and her physical repulsion against the idea of any sexual intercourse. But perhaps she was not altogether wrong when she boasted of her wonderful beloved that, being of good birth as she was, and forced into her present position only by adverse family circumstances, she had preserved, in spite of her situation, much nobility of character. For the lady used to recommend the girl every time they met to withdraw her affection from herself and from women in general, and she had persistently rejected the girl’s advances up to the time of the attempted suicide.

A second point, which I at once tried to investigate, concerned any possible motives in the girl herself which might serve as a support for psycho-analytic treatment. She did not try to deceive me by saying that she felt any urgent need to be freed from her homosexuality. On the contrary, she said she could not conceive of any other way of being in love, but she added that for her parents’ sake she would honestly help in the therapeutic attempt, for it pained her very much to be the cause of so much grief to them. To begin with, I could not but take this, too, as a propitious sign; for I could not guess the unconscious affective attitude that lay concealed behind it. What came to light later in this connection decisively influenced the course taken by the analysis and determined its premature conclusion.

Readers unversed in psycho-analysis will long have been awaiting an answer to two other questions. Did this homosexual girl show physical characteristics plainly belonging to the opposite sex, and did the case prove to be one of congenital or acquired (later-developed) homosexuality?

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman

3844

I am aware of the importance attaching to the first of these questions. But one should not exaggerate it and allow it to overshadow the fact that sporadic secondary characteristics of the opposite sex are very often present in normal individuals, and that well-marked physical characteristics of the opposite sex may be found in persons whose choice of object has undergone no change in the direction of inversion; in other words, that in both sexes the degree of physical hermaphroditism is to a great extent independent of psychical hermaphroditism. In modification of these statements it must be added that this independence is more evident in men than women, where bodily and mental traits belonging to the opposite sex are apt to coincide. Still I am not in a position to give a satisfactory answer to the first of our questions about my patient. The psycho-analyst customarily forgoes a thorough physical examination of his patients in certain cases. Certainly there was no obvious deviation from the feminine physical type, nor any menstrual disturbance. The beautiful and well-made girl had, it is true, her father’s tall figure, and her facial features were sharp rather than soft and girlish, traits which might be regarded as indicating a physical masculinity. Some of her intellectual attributes also could be connected with masculinity: for instance, her acuteness of comprehension and her lucid objectivity, in so far as she was not dominated by her passion. But these distinctions are conventional rather than scientific. What is certainly of greater importance is that in her behaviour towards her love-object she had throughout assumed the masculine part: that is to say, she displayed the humility and the sublime overvaluation of the sexual object so characteristic of the male lover, the renunciation of all narcissistic satisfaction, and the preference for being the lover rather than the beloved. She had thus not only chosen a feminine love-object, but had also developed a masculine attitude towards that object.

The second question, whether this was a case of congenital or acquired homosexuality, will be answered by the whole history of the patient’s abnormality and its development. The study of this will show how far this question is a fruitless and inapposite one.

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman

3845

II

After this highly discursive introduction I am only able to present a very concise summary of the sexual history of the case under consideration. In childhood the girl had passed through the normal attitude characteristic of the feminine Oedipus complex¹ in a way that was not at all remarkable, and had later also begun to substitute for her father a brother slightly older than herself. She did not remember any sexual traumas in early life, nor were any discovered by the analysis. Comparison of her brother’s genital organs and her own, which took place about the beginning of the latency period (at five years old or perhaps a little earlier), left a strong impression on her and had far-reaching after-effects. There were very few signs pointing to infantile masturbation, or else the analysis did not go far enough to throw light on this point. The birth of a second brother when she was between five and six years old exercised no special influence upon her development. During the pre-pubertal years at school she gradually became acquainted with the facts of sex, and she received this knowledge with mixed feelings of lasciviousness and frightened aversion, in a way which may be called normal and was not exaggerated in degree. This amount of information about her seems meagre enough, nor can I guarantee that it is complete. It may be that the history of her youth was much richer in experiences; I do not know. As I have already said, the analysis was broken off after a short time, and therefore yielded an anamnesis not much more reliable than the other anamneses of homosexuals, which there is good cause to question. Further, the girl had never been neurotic, and came to the analysis without even one hysterical symptom, so that opportunities for investigating the history of her childhood did not present themselves so readily as usual.

At the age of thirteen to fourteen she displayed a tender and, according to general opinion, exaggeratedly strong affection for a small boy, not quite three years old, whom she used to see regularly in a children’s playground. She took to the child so warmly that in consequence a lasting friendship grew up between herself and his parents. One may infer from this episode that at that time she was possessed of a strong desire to be a mother herself and to have a child. However, after a short time she grew indifferent to the boy, and began to take an interest in mature, but still youthful, women. The manifestations of this interest soon brought upon her a severe chastisement at the hands of her father.

¹ I do not see any advance or gain in the introduction of the term ‘Electra complex’, and do not advocate its use.

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman

3846

It was established beyond all doubt that this change occurred simultaneously with a certain event in the family, and one may therefore look to this for some explanation of the change. Before it happened, her libido was concentrated on a maternal attitude, while afterwards she became a homosexual attracted to mature women, and remained so ever since. The event which is so significant for our understanding of the case was a new pregnancy of her mother’s, and the birth of a third brother when she was about sixteen.

The position of affairs which I shall now proceed to lay bare is not a product of my inventive powers; it is based on such trustworthy analytic evidence that I can claim objective validity for it. It was in particular a series of dreams, interrelated and easy to interpret, that decided me in favour of its reality.

The analysis revealed beyond all shadow of doubt that the lady-love was a substitute for - her mother. It is true that the lady herself was not a mother, but then she was not the girl’s first love. The first objects of her affection after the birth of her youngest brother were really mothers, women between thirty and thirty-five whom she had met with their children during summer holidays or in the family circle of acquaintances in town. Motherhood as a sine qua non in her love-object was later on given up, because that precondition was difficult to combine in real life with another one, which grew more and more important. The specially intense bond with her latest love had still another basis which the girl discovered quite easily one day. Her lady’s slender figure, severe beauty, and downright manner reminded her of the brother who was a little older than herself. Her latest choice corresponded, therefore, not only to her feminine but also to her masculine ideal; it combined satisfaction of the homosexual tendency with that of the heterosexual one. It is well known that analysis of male homosexuals has in numerous cases revealed the same combination, which should warn us not to form too simple a conception of the nature and genesis of inversion, and to keep in mind the universal bisexuality of human beings.¹

¹ Cf. Sadger (1914).

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman

3847

But how are we to understand the fact that it was precisely the birth of a child who came late in the family (at a time when the girl herself was already mature and had strong wishes of her own) that moved her to bestow her passionate tenderness upon the woman who gave birth to this child, i. e. her own mother, and to express that feeling towards a substitute for her mother? From all that we know we should have expected just the opposite. In such circumstances mothers with daughters of nearly a marriageable age usually feel embarrassed in regard to them, while the daughters are apt to feel for their mothers a mixture of compassion, contempt and envy which does nothing to increase their tenderness for them. The girl we are considering had in any case altogether little cause to feel affection for her mother. The latter, still youthful herself, saw in her rapidly developing daughter an inconvenient competitor; she favoured the sons at her expense, limited her independence as much as possible, and kept an especially strict watch against any close relation between the girl and her father. A yearning from the beginning for a kinder mother would, therefore, have been quite intelligible, but why it should have flared up just then, and in the form of a consuming passion, is hard to understand.

The explanation is as follows. It was just when the girl was experiencing the revival of her infantile Oedipus complex at puberty that she suffered her great disappointment. She became keenly conscious of the wish to have a child, and a male one; that what she desired was her father’s child and an image of him, her consciousness was not allowed to know. And what happened next? It was not she who bore the child, but her unconsciously hated rival, her mother. Furiously resentful and embittered, she turned away from her father and from men altogether. After this first great reverse she forswore her womanhood and sought another goal for her libido.

In doing so she behaved just as many men do who after a first distressing experience turn their backs forever upon the faithless female sex and become woman-haters. It is related of one of the most attractive and unfortunate princely figures of our time that he became a homosexual because the lady he was engaged to marry betrayed him with another man. I do not know whether this is true historically, but an element of psychological truth lies behind the rumour. In all of us, throughout life, the libido normally oscillates between male and female objects; the bachelor gives up his men friends when he marries, and returns to club-life when married life has lost its savour. Naturally, when the swing-over is fundamental and final, we suspect the presence of some special factor which definitely favours one side or the other, and which perhaps has only waited for the appropriate moment in order to turn the choice of object in its direction.

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman

3848

After her disappointment, therefore, this girl had entirely repudiated her wish for a child, her love of men, and the feminine role in general. It is evident that at this point a number of very different things might have happened. What actually happened was the most extreme case. She changed into a man and took her mother in place of her father as the object of her love.¹  Her relation to her mother had certainly been ambivalent from the beginning, and it proved easy to revive her earlier love for her mother and with its help to bring about an overcompensation for her current hostility towards her. Since there was little to be done with the real mother, there arose from this transformation of feeling the search for a substitute mother to whom she could become passionately attached.²

¹ It is by no means rare for a love-relation to be broken off through a process of identification on the part of the lover with the loved object, a process equivalent to a kind of regression to narcissism. After this has been accomplished, it is easy in making a fresh choice of object to direct the libido to a member of the sex opposite to that of the earlier choice.

² The displacements of the libido here described are doubtless familiar to every analyst from investigation of the anamneses of neurotics. With the latter, however, they occur in early childhood, at the time of the early efflorescence of erotic life; with our patient, who was in no way neurotic, they took place in the first years following puberty, though, incidentally, they were just as completely unconscious. Perhaps one day this temporal factor may turn out to be of great importance.

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman

3849

There was, in addition, a practical motive for this change, derived from her real relations with her mother, which served as a gain from her illness. The mother herself still attached great value to the attentions and the admiration of men. If, then, the girl became homosexual and left men to her mother (in other words, ‘retired in favour of’ her mother), she would remove something which had hitherto been partly responsible for her mother’s dislike.¹

This libidinal position of the girl’s, thus arrived at, was greatly reinforced as soon as she perceived how much it displeased her father. After she had been punished for her over-affectionate attitude to a woman she realized how she could wound her father and take revenge on him. Henceforth she remained homosexual out of defiance against her father. Nor did she scruple to lie to him and to deceive him in every way. Towards her mother, indeed, she was only so far deceitful as was necessary to prevent her father from knowing things. I had the impression that her behaviour followed the principle of the talion: ‘Since you have betrayed me, you must put up with my betraying you.’ Nor can I come to any other conclusion about the striking lack of caution displayed by this otherwise exceedingly shrewd girl. She wanted her father to know occasionally of her relations with the lady, otherwise she would be deprived of the satisfaction of her keenest desire - namely, revenge. So she saw to this by showing herself openly in the company of her adored one, by walking with her in the streets near her father’s place of business, and the like. This maladroitness, moreover, was by no means unintentional. It was remarkable, too, that both parents behaved as if they understood their daughter’s secret psychology. The mother was tolerant, as though she appreciated her daughter’s ‘retirement’ as a favour to her; the father was furious, as though he realized the deliberate revenge directed against himself.

The girl’s inversion, however, received its final reinforcement when she found in her ‘lady’ an object which promised to satisfy not only her homosexual trends, but also that part of her heterosexual libido which was still attached to her brother.

¹ As ‘retiring in favour of someone else’ has not previously been mentioned among the causes of homosexuality, or in the mechanism of libidinal fixation in general, I will adduce here another analytic observation of the same kind which has a special feature of interest. I once knew two twin brothers, both of whom were endowed with strong libidinal impulses. One of them was very successful with women, and had innumerable affairs with women and girls. The other went the same way at first, but it became unpleasant for him to be trespassing on his brother’s preserves, and, owing to the likeness between them, to be mistaken for him on intimate occasions; so he got out of the difficulty by becoming homosexual. He left the women to his brother, and thus retired in his favour. Another time I treated a youngish man, an artist, unmistakably bisexual in disposition, in whom the homosexual trend had come to the fore simultaneously with a disturbance in his work. He fled from both women and work together. The analysis, which was able to bring him back to both, showed that fear of his father was the most powerful psychical motive for both the disturbances, which were really renunciations. In his imagination all women belonged to his father, and he sought refuge in men out of submission, so as to retire from the conflict with his father. Such a motivation of the homosexual object-choice must be by no means uncommon; in the primaeval ages of the human race all women presumably belonged to the father and head of the primal horde.

Among brothers and sisters who are not twins this ‘retiring’ plays a great part in other spheres as well as in that of erotic choice. For example, an elder brother studies music and is admired for it; the younger, far more gifted musically, soon gives up his own musical studies, in spite of his fondness for it, and cannot be persuaded to touch an instrument again. This is only one example of a very frequent occurrence, and investigation of the motives leading to this ‘retirement’ rather than to open rivalry discloses very complicated conditions in the mind.

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman

3850

III

Linear presentation is not a very adequate means of describing complicated mental processes going on in different layers of the mind. I am therefore obliged to pause in the discussion of the case and treat more fully and deeply some of the points brought forward above.

I mentioned the fact that in her behaviour to her adored lady the girl had adopted the characteristic masculine type of love. Her humility and her tender lack of pretensions, ‘che poco spera e nulla chiede’, her bliss when she was allowed to accompany the lady a little way and to kiss her hand on parting, her joy when she heard her praised as beautiful (while any recognition of her own beauty by another person meant nothing at all to her), her pilgrimages to places once visited by the loved one, the silence of all more sensual wishes - all these little traits in her resembled the first passionate adoration of a youth for a celebrated actress whom he regards as far above him, to whom he scarcely dares lift his bashful eyes. The correspondence with ‘a special type of choice of object made by men’ that I have described elsewhere (1910h), whose special features I traced to attachment to the mother, held good even to the smallest details. It may seem remarkable that she was not in the least repelled by the bad reputation of her beloved, although her own observations sufficiently confirmed the truth of such rumours. She was after all a well-brought-up and modest girl, who had avoided sexual adventures for herself, and who regarded coarsely sensual satisfactions as unaesthetic. But already her first passions had been for women who were not celebrated for specially strict propriety. The first protest her father made against her love-choice had been evoked by the pertinacity with which she sought the company of a film actress at a summer resort. Moreover, in all these affairs it had never been a question of women who had any reputation for homosexuality, and who might, therefore, have offered her some prospect of homosexual satisfaction; on the contrary, she illogically courted women who were coquettes in the ordinary sense of the word, and she rejected without hesitation the willing advances made by a homosexual friend of her own age. For her, the bad reputation of her ‘lady’, however, was positively a ‘necessary condition for love’. All that is enigmatic in this attitude vanishes when we remember that in the case too of the masculine type of object-choice derived from the mother it is a necessary condition that the loved object should be in some way or other ‘of bad repute’ sexually - someone who really may be called a cocotte. When the girl learnt later how far her adored lady deserved this description and that she lived simply by giving her bodily favours, her reaction took the form of great compassion and of phantasies and plans for ‘rescuing’ her beloved from these ignoble circumstances. We were struck by the same urge to ‘rescue’ in the men of the type referred to above, and in my description of it I have tried to give the analytic derivation of this urge.

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman

3851

We are led into quite another realm of explanation by the analysis of the attempt at suicide, which I must regard as seriously intended, and which, incidentally, considerably improved her position both with her parents and with the lady she loved. She went for a walk with her one day in a part of the town and at an hour at which she was not unlikely to meet her father on his way from his office. So it turned out. Her father passed them in the street and cast a furious look at her and her companion, about whom he had by that time come to know. A few moments later she flung herself into the railway cutting. The explanation she gave of the immediate reasons determining her decision sounded quite plausible. She had confessed to the lady that the man who had given them such an irate glance was her father, and that he had absolutely forbidden their friendship. The lady became incensed at this and ordered the girl to leave her then and there, and never again to wait for her or to address her - the affair must now come to an end. In her despair at having thus lost her loved one for ever, she wanted to put an end to herself. The analysis, however, was able to disclose another and deeper interpretation behind the one she gave, which was confirmed by the evidence of her own dreams. The attempted suicide was, as might have been expected, determined by two other motives besides the one she gave: it was the fulfilment of a punishment (self-punishment), and the fulfilment of a wish. As the latter it meant the attainment of the very wish which, when frustrated, had driven her into homosexuality - namely, the wish to have a child by her father, for now she ‘fell’ through her father’s fault.¹ The fact that at that moment the lady had spoken in just the same terms as her father, and had uttered the same prohibition, forms the connecting link between this deep interpretation and the superficial one of which the girl herself was conscious. From the point of view of self-punishment the girl’s action shows us that she had developed in her unconscious strong death-wishes against one or other of her parents - perhaps against her father, out of revenge for impeding her love, but more probably against her mother too, when she was pregnant with the little brother. For analysis has explained the enigma of suicide in the following way: probably no one finds the mental energy required to kill himself unless, in the first place, in doing so he is at the same time killing an object with whom he has identified himself, and, in the second place, is turning against himself a death-wish which had been directed against someone else. Nor need the regular discovery of these unconscious death-wishes in those who have attempted suicide surprise us (any more than it ought to make us think that it confirms our deductions), since the unconscious of all human beings is full enough of such death-wishes, even against those they love.² Since the girl identified herself with her mother, who should have died at the birth of the child denied to herself, this punishment-fulfilment itself was once again a wish-fulfilment. Finally, the discovery that several quite different motives, all of great strength, must have co-operated to make such a deed possible is only in accordance with what we should expect.

¹ That the various methods of suicide can represent sexual wish-fulfilments has long been known to all analysts. (To poison oneself = to become pregnant; to drown - to bear a child; to throw oneself from a height = to be delivered of a child.)

² Cf. ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’ (1915b).

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman

3852

In the girl’s account of her conscious motives the father did not figure at all; there was not even any mention of fear of his anger. In the motives laid bare by the analysis, on the other hand, he played the principal part. Her relation to her father had the same decisive importance for the course and outcome of the analytic treatment, or rather, analytic exploration. Behind her pretended consideration for her parents, for whose sake she had been willing to make the attempt to be transformed, lay concealed her attitude of defiance and revenge against her father which held her fast to her homosexuality. Secure under this cover, the resistance set a considerable region free to analytic investigation. The analysis went forward almost without any signs of resistance, the patient participating actively with her intellect, though absolutely tranquil emotionally. Once when I expounded to her a specially important part of the theory, one touching her nearly, she replied in an inimitable tone, ‘How very interesting’, as though she were a grande dame being taken over a museum and glancing through her lorgnon at objects to which she was completely indifferent. The impression one had of her analysis was not unlike that of a hypnotic treatment, where the resistance has in the same way withdrawn to a certain boundary line, beyond which it proves to be unconquerable. The resistance very often pursues similar tactics - Russian tactics, as they might be called - in cases of obsessional neurosis. For a time, consequently, these cases yield the clearest results and permit a deep insight into the causation of the symptoms. But presently one begins to wonder how it is that such marked progress in analytic understanding can be unaccompanied by even the slightest change in the patient’s compulsions and inhibitions, until at last one perceives that everything that has been accomplished is subject to a mental reservation of doubt, and that behind this protective barrier the neurosis can feel secure. ‘It would be all very fine’, thinks the patient, often quite consciously, ‘if I were obliged to believe what the man says, but there is no question of that, and so long as this is so I need change nothing.’ Then, when one comes to close quarters with the motives for this doubt, the fight with the resistances breaks out in earnest.

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman

3853

In the case of our patient, it was not doubt but the affective factor of revenge against her father that made her cool reserve possible, that divided the analysis into two distinct phases, and rendered the results of the first phase so complete and perspicuous. It seemed, further, as though nothing resembling a transference to the physician had been effected. That, however, is of course absurd, or, at least, is a loose way of expressing things. For some kind of relation to the analyst must come into being, and this relation is almost always transferred from an infantile one. In reality she transferred to me the sweeping repudiation of men which had dominated her ever since the disappointment she had suffered from her father. Bitterness against men is as a rule easy to gratify upon the physician; it need not evoke any violent emotional manifestations, it simply expresses itself by rendering futile all his endeavours and - by clinging to the illness. I know from experience how difficult it is to make a patient understand just precisely this mute kind of symptomatic behaviour and to make him aware of this latent, and often exceedingly strong, hostility without endangering the treatment. As soon, therefore, as I recognized the girl’s attitude to her father, I broke off the treatment and advised her parents that if they set store by the therapeutic procedure it should be continued by a woman doctor. The girl had in the meanwhile promised her father that at any rate she would give up seeing the ‘lady’, and I do not know whether my advice, the reasons for which are obvious, will be followed.

There was a single piece of material in the course of this analysis which I could regard as a positive transference, as a greatly weakened revival of the girl’s original passionate love for her father. Even this manifestation was not quite free from other motives, but I mention it because it brings up, in another direction, an interesting problem of analytic technique. At a certain period, not long after the treatment had begun, the girl brought a series of dreams which, distorted according to rule and couched in the usual dream-language, could nevertheless be easily translated with certainty. Their content, when interpreted, was, however, remarkable. They anticipated the cure of the inversion through the treatment, expressed her joy over the prospects in life that would then be opened before her, confessed her longing for a man’s love and for children, and so might have been welcomed as a gratifying preparation for the desired change. The contradiction between them and the girl’s utterances in waking life at the time was very great. She did not conceal from me that she meant to marry, but only in order to escape from her father’s tyranny and to follow her true inclinations undisturbed. As for the husband, she remarked rather contemptuously, she would easily deal with him, and besides, one could have sexual relations with a man and a woman at one and the same time, as the example of the adored lady showed. Warned through some slight impression or other, I told her one day that I did not believe these dreams, that I regarded them as false or hypocritical, and that she intended to deceive me just as she habitually deceived her father. I was right; after I had made this clear, this kind of dream ceased. But I still believe that, beside the intention to mislead me, the dreams partly expressed the wish to win my favour; they were also an attempt to gain my interest and my good opinion - perhaps in order to disappoint me all the more thoroughly later on.

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman

3854

I can imagine that to point out the existence of lying dreams of this kind, ‘obliging’ dreams, will arouse a positive storm of helpless indignation in some readers who call themselves analysts. ‘What!’ they will exclaim, ‘the unconscious, the real centre of our mental life, the part of us that is so much nearer the divine than our poor consciousness - it too can lie! Then how can we still build on the interpretations of analysis and the accuracy of our findings?’ To which one must reply that the recognition of these lying dreams does not constitute any shattering novelty. I know, indeed, that the craving of mankind for mysticism is ineradicable, and that it makes ceaseless efforts to win back for mysticism the territory it has been deprived of by The Interpretation of Dreams, but surely in the case under consideration everything is simple enough. A dream is not the ‘unconscious’; it is the form into which a thought left over from preconscious, or even from conscious, waking life, can, thanks to the favouring state of sleep, be recast. In the state of sleep this thought has been reinforced by unconscious wishful impulses and has thus experienced distortion through the dream-work, which is determined by the mechanisms prevailing in the unconscious. With our dreamer, the intention to mislead me, just as she did her father, certainly emanated from the preconscious, and may indeed have been conscious; it could come to expression by entering into connection with the unconscious wishful impulse to please her father (or father-substitute), and in this way it created a lying dream. The two intentions, to betray and to please her father, originated in the same complex; the former resulted from the repression of the latter, and the later one was brought back by the dream-work to the earlier one. There can therefore be no question of any devaluation of the unconscious, nor of a shattering of our confidence in the results of analysis.

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman

3855

I cannot neglect this opportunity of expressing for once my astonishment that human beings can go through such great and important moments of their erotic life without noticing them much, sometimes even, indeed, without having the faintest suspicion of their existence, or else, having become aware of those moments, deceive themselves so thoroughly in their judgement of them. This happens not only under neurotic conditions, where we are familiar with the phenomenon, but seems also to be common enough in ordinary life. In the present case, for example, a girl develops a sentimental adoration for women, which her parents at first find merely vexatious and hardly take seriously; she herself knows quite well that she is very much occupied with these relationships, but still she experiences few of the sensations of intense love until a particular frustration is followed by a quite excessive reaction, which shows everyone concerned that they have to do with a consuming passion of elemental strength. Nor had the girl ever perceived anything of the state of affairs which was a necessary preliminary to the outbreak of this mental storm. In other cases, too, we come across girls or women in a state of severe depression, who on being asked for a possible cause of their condition tell us that they have, it is true, had a slight feeling for a certain person, but that it was nothing deep and that they soon got over it when they had to give it up. And yet it was this renunciation, apparently so easily borne, that became the cause of serious mental disturbance. Again, we come across men who have passed through casual love-affairs and realize only from the subsequent effects that they had been passionately in love with the person whom they had apparently regarded lightly. One is also amazed at the unexpected results that may follow an artificial abortion, the killing of an unborn child, which had been decided upon without remorse and without hesitation. It must be admitted that poets are right in liking to portray people who are in love without knowing it, or uncertain whether they do love, or who think that they hate when in reality they love. It would seem that the information received by our consciousness about our erotic life is especially liable to be incomplete, full of gaps, or falsified. Needless to say, in this discussion I have not omitted to allow for the part played by subsequent forgetting.

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman

3856

IV

I now come back, after this digression, to the consideration of my patient’s case. We have made a survey of the forces which led the girl’s libido from the normal Oedipus attitude into that of homosexuality, and of the psychical paths traversed by it in the process. Most important in this respect was the impression made by the birth of her little brother, and we might from this be inclined to classify the case as one of late-acquired inversion.

But at this point we become aware of a state of things which also confronts us in many other instances in which light has been thrown by psycho-analysis on a mental process. So long as we trace the development from its final outcome backwards, the chain of events appears continuous, and we feel we have gained an insight which is completely satisfactory or even exhaustive. But if we proceed the reverse way, if we start from the premises inferred from the analysis and try to follow these up to the final result, then we no longer get the impression of an inevitable sequence of events which could not have been otherwise determined. We notice at once that there might have been another result, and that we might have been just as well able to understand and explain the latter. The synthesis is thus not so satisfactory as the analysis; in other words, from a knowledge of the premises we could not have foretold the nature of the result.

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman

3857

It is very easy to account for this disturbing state of affairs. Even supposing that we have a complete knowledge of the aetiological factors that decide a given result, nevertheless what we know about them is only their quality, and not their relative strength. Some of them are suppressed by others because they are too weak, and they therefore do not affect the final result. But we never know beforehand which of the determining factors will prove the weaker or the stronger. We only say at the end that those which succeeded must have been the stronger. Hence the chain of causation can always be recognized with certainty if we follow the line of analysis, whereas to predict it along the line of synthesis is impossible.

We do not, therefore, mean to maintain that every girl who experiences a disappointment such as this of the longing for love that springs from the Oedipus attitude at puberty will necessarily on that account fall a victim to homosexuality. On the contrary, other kinds of reaction to this trauma are undoubtedly commoner. If so, however, there must have been present in this girl special factors that turned the scale, factors outside the trauma, probably of an internal nature. Nor is there any difficulty in pointing them out.

It is well known that even in a normal person it takes a certain time before the decision in regard to the sex of the love object is finally made. Homosexual enthusiasms, exaggeratedly strong friendships tinged with sensuality, are common enough in both sexes during the first years after puberty. This was also so with our patient, but in her these tendencies undoubtedly showed themselves to be stronger, and lasted longer, than with others. In addition, these presages of later homosexuality had always occupied her conscious life, while the attitude arising from the Oedipus complex had remained unconscious and had appeared only in such signs as her tender behaviour to the little boy. As a school-girl she had been for a long time in love with a strict and unapproachable mistress, obviously a substitute mother. She had taken a specially lively interest in a number of young mothers long before her brother’s birth and therefore all the more certainly long before the first reprimand from her father. From very early years, therefore, her libido had flowed in two currents, the one on the surface being one that we may unhesitatingly designate as homosexual. This latter was probably a direct and unchanged continuation of an infantile fixation on her mother. Possibly the analysis described here actually revealed nothing more than the process by which, on an appropriate occasion, the deeper heterosexual current of libido, too, was deflected into the manifest homosexual one.

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman

3858

The analysis showed, further, that the girl had brought along with her from her childhood a strongly marked ‘masculinity complex’. A spirited girl, always ready for romping and fighting, she was not at all prepared to be second to her slightly older brother; after inspecting his genital organs she had developed a pronounced envy for the penis, and the thoughts derived from this envy still continued to fill her mind. She was in fact a feminist; she felt it to be unjust that girls should not enjoy the same freedom as boys, and rebelled against the lot of woman in general. At the time of the analysis the idea of pregnancy and child-birth was disagreeable to her, partly, I surmise, on account of the bodily disfigurement connected with them. Her girlish narcissism had fallen back on this defence,¹ and ceased to express itself as pride in her good looks. Various clues indicated that she must formerly have had strong exhibitionist and scopophilic tendencies. Anyone who is anxious that the claims of acquired as opposed to hereditary factors should not be under-estimated in aetiology will call attention to the fact that the girl’s behaviour, as described above, was exactly what would follow from the combined effect in a person with a strong mother-fixation of the two influences of her mother’s neglect and her comparison of her genital organs with her brother’s. It is possible here to attribute to the impress of the operation of external influence in early life something which one would have liked to regard as a constitutional peculiarity. On the other hand, a part even of this acquired disposition (if it was really acquired) has to be ascribed to inborn constitution. So we see in practice a continual mingling and blending of what in theory we should try to separate into a pair of opposites - namely, inherited and acquired characters.

If the analysis had come to an earlier, still more premature end, it might have led to the view that this was a case of late acquired homosexuality, but as it is, a consideration of the material impels us to conclude that it is rather a case of congenital homosexuality which, as usual, became fixed and unmistakably manifest only in the period following puberty. Each of these classifications does justice only to one part of the state of affairs ascertainable by observation, but neglects the other. It would be best not to attach too much value to this way of stating the problem.

¹ Cf. Kriemhilde’s admission in the Nibelungenlied.

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman

3859

The literature of homosexuality usually fails to distinguish clearly enough between the questions of the choice of object on the one hand, and of the sexual characteristics and sexual attitude of the subject on the other, as though the answer to the former necessarily involved the answers to the latter. Experience, however, proves the contrary: a man with predominantly male characteristics and also masculine in his erotic life may still be inverted in respect to his object, loving only men instead of women. A man in whose character feminine attributes obviously predominate, who may, indeed, behave in love like a woman, might be expected, from this feminine attitude, to choose a man for his love-object; but he may nevertheless be heterosexual, and show no more inversion in respect to his object than an average normal man. The same is true of women; here also mental sexual character and object-choice do not necessarily coincide. The mystery of homosexuality is therefore by no means so simple as it is commonly depicted in popular expositions - ‘a feminine mind, bound therefore to love a man, but unhappily attached to a masculine body; a masculine mind, irresistibly attracted by women, but, alas! imprisoned in a feminine body’. It is instead a question of three sets of characteristics, namely -

Physical sexual characters

(physical hermaphroditism)

Mental sexual characters

(masculine or feminine attitude)

Kind of object-choice

which, up to a certain point, vary independently of one another, and are met with in different individuals in manifold permutations. Tendentious literature has obscured our view of this interrelationship by putting into the foreground, for practical reasons, the third feature (the kind of object-choice), which is the only one that strikes the layman, and in addition by exaggerating the closeness of the association between this and the first feature. Moreover, it blocks the way to a deeper insight into all that is uniformly designated as homosexuality, by rejecting two fundamental facts which have been revealed by psycho-analytic investigation. The first of these is that homosexual men have experienced a specially strong fixation on their mother; the second, that, in addition to their manifest heterosexuality, a very considerable measure of latent or unconscious homosexuality can be detected in all normal people. If these findings are taken into account, then, clearly, the supposition that nature in a freakish mood created a ‘third sex’ falls to the ground.

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman

3860

It is not for psycho-analysis to solve the problem of homosexuality. It must rest content with disclosing the psychical mechanisms that resulted in determining the object-choice, and with tracing back the paths from them to the instinctual dispositions. There its work ends, and it leaves the rest to biological research, which has recently brought to light, through Steinach’s¹ experiments, such very important results concerning the influence exerted by the first set of characteristics mentioned above upon the second and third. Psycho-analysis has a common basis with biology, in that it presupposes an original bisexuality in human beings (as in animals). But psycho-analysis cannot elucidate the intrinsic nature of what in conventional or in biological phraseology is termed ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’: it simply takes over the two concepts and makes them the foundation of its work. When we attempt to reduce them further, we find masculinity vanishing into activity and femininity into passivity, and that does not tell us enough. I have already tried to explain how far we may reasonably expect, or how far experience has already proved, that the work of elucidation which is part of the task of analysis furnishes us with the means of effecting a modification of inversion. When one compares the extent to which we can influence it with the remarkable transformations that Steinach has effected in some cases by his operations, it does not make a very imposing impression. But it would be premature, or a harmful exaggeration, if at this stage we were to indulge in hopes of a ‘therapy’ of inversion that could be generally applied. The cases of male homosexuality in which Steinach has been successful fulfilled the condition, which is not always present, of a very patent physical ‘hermaphroditism’. Any analogous treatment of female homosexuality is at present quite obscure. If it were to consist in removing what are probably hermaphroditic ovaries, and in grafting others, which are hoped to be of a single sex, there would be little prospect of its being applied in practice. A woman who has felt herself to be a man, and has loved in masculine fashion, will hardly let herself be forced into playing the part of a woman, when she must pay for this transformation, which is not in every way advantageous, by renouncing all hope of motherhood.

¹ Cf. Lipschütz (1919).

3861

PSYCHO-ANALYSIS AND TELEPATHY

(1941 [1921])

3862

Intentionally left blank

3863

PSYCHO-ANALYSIS AND TELEPATHY

INTRODUCTORY

We are not destined, so it seems, to devote ourselves quietly to the extension of our science. Scarcely have we triumphantly repulsed two attacks - one of which sought to deny once more what we had brought to light and only offered us in exchange the theme of disavowal, while the other tried to persuade us that we had mistaken the nature of what we had found and might with advantage take something else in its place - scarcely, then, do we feel ourselves safe from these enemies, when another peril has arisen. And this time it is something tremendous, something elemental, which threatens not us alone but our enemies, perhaps, still more.

It no longer seems possible to keep away from the study of what are known as ‘occult’ phenomena - of facts, that is, that profess to speak in favour of the real existence of psychical forces other than the human and animal minds with which we are familiar, or that seem to reveal the possession by those minds of faculties hitherto unrecognized. The impetus towards such an investigation seems irresistibly strong. During this last brief vacation I have three times had occasion to refuse to associate myself with newly founded periodicals concerned with these studies. Nor is there much doubt as to the origin of this trend. It is a part expression of the loss of value by which everything has been affected since the world catastrophe of the Great War, a part of the tentative approach to the great revolution towards which we are heading and of whose extent we can form no estimate; but no doubt it is also an attempt at compensation, at making up in another, a supermundane, sphere for the attractions which have been lost by life on this earth. Some, indeed, of the proceedings of the exact sciences themselves may have contributed to this development. The discovery of radium has confused no less than it has advanced the possibilities of explaining the physical world; and the knowledge that has been so very recently acquired of what is called the theory of relativity has had the effect upon many of those who admire without comprehending it of diminishing their belief in the objective trustworthiness of science. You will remember that not long ago Einstein himself took occasion to protest against such misunderstanding.

Psycho-Analysis And Telepathy

3864

It does not follow as a matter of course that an intensified interest in occultism must involve a danger to psycho-analysis. We should, on the contrary, be prepared to find reciprocal sympathy between them. They have both experienced the same contemptuous and arrogant treatment by official science. To this day psycho-analysis is regarded as savouring of mysticism, and its unconscious is looked upon as one of the things between heaven and earth which philosophy refuses to dream of. The numerous suggestions made to us by occultists that we should co-operate with them show that they would like to treat us as half belonging to them and that they count on our support against the pressure of exact authority. Nor, on the other hand, has psycho-analysis any interest in going out of its way to defend that authority, for it itself stands in opposition to everything that is conventionally restricted, well-established and generally accepted. Not for the first time would it be offering its help to the obscure but indestructible surmises of the common people against the obscurantism of educated opinion. Alliance and co-operation between analysts and occultists might thus appear both plausible and promising.

But if we look closer, difficulties begin to emerge. The immense majority of occultists are not driven by a desire for knowledge or by a sense of shame that science has so long refused to take cognizance of what are indisputable problems or by a desire to conquer this new sphere of phenomena. They are, on the contrary, convinced believers who are looking for confirmation and for something that will justify them in openly confessing their faith. But the faith which they first adopt themselves and then seek to impose on other people is either the old religious faith which has been pushed into the background by science in the course of human development, or another one even closer to the superseded convictions of primitive peoples. Analysts, on the other hand, cannot repudiate their descent from exact science and their community with its representatives. Moved by an extreme distrust of the power of human wishes and of the temptations of the pleasure principle, they are ready, for the sake of attaining some fragment of objective certainty, to sacrifice everything - the dazzling brilliance of a flawless theory, the exalted consciousness of having achieved a comprehensive view of the universe, and the mental calm brought about by the possession of extensive grounds for expedient and ethical action. In place of all these, they are content with fragmentary pieces of knowledge and with basic hypotheses lacking preciseness and ever open to revision. Instead of waiting for the moment when they will be able to escape from the constraint of the familiar laws of physics and chemistry, they hope for the emergence of more extensive and deeper-reaching natural laws, to which they are ready to submit. Analysts are at bottom incorrigible mechanists and materialists, even though they seek to avoid robbing the mind and spirit of their still unrecognized characteristics. So, too, they embark on the investigation of occult phenomena only because they expect in that way finally to exclude the wishes of mankind from material reality.

Psycho-Analysis And Telepathy

3865

In view of this difference between their mental attitudes co-operation between analysts and occultists offers small prospect of gain. The analyst has his own province of work, which he must not abandon: the unconscious element of mental life. If in the course of his work he were to be on the watch for occult phenomena, he would be in danger of overlooking everything that more nearly concerned him. He would be surrendering the impartiality, the lack of prejudices and prepossessions, which have formed an essential part of his analytic armour and equipment. If occult phenomena force themselves on him in the same way in which others do, he will evade them no more than he evades the others. This would appear to be the only plan of behaviour consistent with the activity of an analyst.

By self-discipline the analyst can defend himself against one danger - the subjective one of allowing his interest to be drawn away on to occult phenomena. As regards the objective danger, the situation is different. There is little doubt that if attention is directed to occult phenomena the outcome will very soon be that the occurrence of a number of them will be confirmed; and it will probably be a very long time before an acceptable theory covering these new facts can be arrived at. But the eagerly attentive onlookers will not wait so long. At the very first confirmation the occultists will proclaim the triumph of their views. They will carry over an acceptance of one phenomenon on to all the rest and will extend belief in the phenomena to belief in whatever explanations are easiest and most to their taste. They will be ready to employ the methods of scientific enquiry only as a ladder to raise them over the head of science. Heaven help us if they climb to such a height! There will be no scepticism from the surrounding spectators to make them hesitate, there will be no popular outcry to bring them to a halt. They will be hailed as liberators from the burden of intellectual bondage, they will be joyfully acclaimed by all the credulity lying ready to hand since the infancy of the human race and the childhood of the individual. There may follow a fearful collapse of critical thought, of determinist standards and of mechanistic science. Will it be possible for scientific method, by a ruthless insistence on the magnitude of the forces, the masses and qualities of the material concerned, to prevent this collapse?

It is a vain hope to suppose that analytic work, precisely because it relates to the mysterious unconscious, will be able to escape such a collapse in values as this. If spiritual beings who are the intimate friends of human enquirers can supply ultimate explanations of everything, no interest can be left over for the laborious approaches to unknown mental forces made by analytic research. So, too, the methods of analytic technique will be abandoned if there is a hope of getting into direct touch with the operative spirits by means of occult procedures, just as habits of patient humdrum work are abandoned if there is a hope of growing rich at a single blow by means of a successful speculation. We have heard during the war of people who stood half-way between two hostile nations, belonging to one by birth and to the other by choice and domicile; it was their fate to be treated as enemies first by one side and then, if they were lucky enough to escape, by the other. Such might equally be the fate of psycho-analysis. However, one must put up with one’s fate whatever it may be; and psycho-analysis will somehow or other come to terms with hers.

Psycho-Analysis And Telepathy

3866

Let us return to the present situation, to our immediate task. In the course of the last few years I have made a few observations which I shall not hold back - at all events from the circle that is closest to me. A dislike of falling in with what is to-day a prevailing current, a dread of distracting interest from psycho-analysis and the total absence of any veil of discretion over what I have to say - all these combine as motives for withholding my remarks from a wider public. My material can lay claim to two advantages which are rarely present. In the first place it is exempt from the uncertainties and doubts to which most of the observations of the occultists are prone; and in the second place it only develops its convincing force after it has been worked over analytically. It consists, I should mention, of only two cases of a similar character; a third case, of another kind and open to a different assessment, is only added by way of appendix. The first two cases, which I shall now report at length, are concerned with events of the same sort - namely, with prophecies made by professional fortune-tellers which did not come true. In spite of this, these prophecies made an extraordinary impression on the people to whom they were announced, so that their relation to the future cannot be their essential point. Anything that may contribute to their explanation, as well as anything that throws doubt on their evidential force, will be extremely welcome to me. My personal attitude to the material remains unenthusiastic and ambivalent.

I

A few years before the war, a young man from Germany came to me to be analysed. He complained of being unable to work, of having forgotten his past life and of having lost all interest. He was a student of philosophy at Munich and was preparing for his final examination. Incidentally, he was a highly educated, rather sly young man, rascally in a childish way, and the son of a financier, who, as emerged later, had successfully remoulded a colossal amount of anal erotism. When I asked him whether there was really nothing he could remember about his life or his sphere of interest, he recalled the plot of a novel he had sketched out, which was laid in Egypt during the reign of Amenophis IV and in which an important part was played by a particular ring. We took this novel as a starting-point; the ring turned out to be a symbol of marriage, and from there we succeeded in reviving all his memories and interests. We found that his break-down had been the result of a great act of mental self-discipline on his part. He had an only sister a few years his junior, to whom he was wholeheartedly and quite undisguisedly devoted. ‘Why is it we can’t get married?’ they had often asked each other. But their affection had never gone beyond the point permissible between brothers and sisters.

Psycho-Analysis And Telepathy

3867

A young engineer had fallen in love with the sister. His love was reciprocated by her but did not meet with the approval of her strict parents. In their trouble the two young lovers turned to the brother for help. He gave their cause his support, made it possible for them to correspond, arranged for them to meet while he was at home on vacation, and eventually persuaded the parents to give their consent to an engagement and marriage. During the time of the engagement there was a highly suspicious occurrence. The brother took his future brother-in-law to climb the Zugspitze and himself acted as guide. They lost their way on the mountain, ran into trouble and only with difficulty avoided a fall. The patient offered little objection to my interpretation of this adventure as an attempted murder and suicide. It was a few months after his sister’s marriage that the young man started analysis.

After some six or nine months he had completely regained his ability to work, and broke off the analysis in order to take his examination and write his dissertation. A year or more later he returned - now a Ph. D.- to resume his analysis, because, as he said, psycho-analysis had an interest for him as a philosopher which extended beyond therapeutic success. I know it was in October that he started again, and it was a few weeks later that, in some connection or other, he told me the following story.

There lived in Munich a fortune-teller who enjoyed a great reputation. The Bavarian princes used to visit her when they had any undertaking in mind. All that she required was to be supplied with a date. (I omitted to enquire whether this had to include the date of the year.) It was understood that the date was that of the birth of some particular person, but she did not ask whose. Having been given this date, she would consult her astrological books, make long calculations and finally utter a prophecy about the person concerned. In the previous March my patient resolved to visit the fortune-teller. He presented her with the date of his brother-in-law’s birth, without, of course, mentioning his name or betraying the fact that he had him in mind. The oracle pronounced as follows: ‘The person in question will die next July or August of crayfish- or oyster-poisoning.’ After telling me this, my patient exclaimed: ‘It was marvellous!’

Psycho-Analysis And Telepathy

3868

I could not understand this and contradicted him vigorously: ‘What do you see in it that’s marvellous? You’ve been working with me now for several weeks, and if your brother-in-law had really died you would have told me long ago. So he must be alive. The prophecy was made in March and was to be fulfilled during the height of the summer. It’s November now, so it has not been fulfilled. What do you find so wonderful in that?

‘No doubt it has not come true,’ he replied. ‘But the remarkable thing about it is this. My brother-in-law is passionately fond of crayfish and oysters and so on, and last August he really did have an attack of crayfish-poisoning and almost died of it.’ The matter was not further discussed.

Let us now consider this case.

I believe in the narrator’s truthfulness. He is entirely trustworthy and is at present lecturer in philosophy at K----. I can think of no motive which could have induced him to bamboozle me. The story was an incidental one and served no ulterior purpose; nothing further emerged from it and no conclusions were drawn from it. He had no intention of persuading me of the existence of occult mental phenomena; and indeed I had an impression that he was not at all clear about the significance of his experience. I myself was so much struck - to tell the truth, so disagreeably affected - that I omitted to make any analytic use of his tale.

And the observation seems to me equally unobjectionable from another point of view. It is certain that the fortune-teller was not acquainted with the man who put the question. But consider what a degree of intimacy with an acquaintance would be necessary before one could recognize the date of his brother in-law’s birthday. On the other hand, you will no doubt all agree with me in offering the most obstinate resistance to the possibility that so detailed an event as falling ill of crayfish poisoning could be inferred from the date of the subject’s birth by the help of any tables or formulae whatever. Do not forget how many people are born on the same day. Is it credible that the similarity of the futures of people born on the same day can be carried down to such details as this? I therefore venture to exclude the astrological calculations entirely from the discussion; I believe the fortune-teller might have adopted some other procedure without affecting the outcome of the interrogation. Accordingly, we can also, so it seems to me, leave the fortune-teller (or, as we may say straight out, the ‘medium’) quite out of account as a possible source of deception.

Psycho-Analysis And Telepathy

3869

If you grant the genuineness and truth of this observation, its explanation will be near. And we at once find - and this is the case with the majority of these phenomena - that its explanation on an occult basis is remarkably adequate and covers what has to be explained completely, except that it is so unsatisfying in itself. It is impossible that the knowledge that this man - born on the day in question - had had an attack of crayfish-poisoning could have been present in the fortune-teller’s mind; nor can she have arrived at that knowledge from her tables and calculations. It was, however, present in the mind of her questioner. The event becomes completely explicable if we are ready to assume that the knowledge was transferred from him to the supposed prophetess - by some unknown method which excluded the means of communication familiar to us. That is to say, we must draw the inference that there is such a thing as thought-transference. The fortune-teller’s astrological activities would in that case have performed the function of diverting her own psychical forces and occupying them in a harmless way, so that she could become receptive and accessible to the effects upon her of her client’s thoughts - so that she could become a true ‘medium’. We have found similar distracting contrivances employed (for instance, in the case of jokes) where there is a question of securing a more automatic discharge for some mental process.

The application of analysis to this case does more than this, however; it further increases its significance. It teaches us that what has been communicated by this means of induction from one person to another is not merely a chance piece of indifferent knowledge. It shows that an extraordinarily powerful wish harboured by one person and standing in a special relation to his consciousness has succeeded, with the help of a second person, in finding conscious expression in a slightly disguised form - just as the invisible end of the spectrum reveals itself to the senses on a light-sensitive plate as a coloured extension. It seems possible to reconstruct the young man’s train of thought after the illness and recovery of the brother-in-law who was his hated rival: ‘Well, he’s got over it this time; but he won’t give up his dangerous taste on that account, and let’s hope that next time it will be the end of him.’ It was this ‘let’s hope’ that was changed into the prophecy. I could quote a parallel to this from a dream (dreamt by another person), in which a prophecy was part of the subject-matter. The analysis of the dream showed that the content of the prophecy coincided with the fulfilment of a wish.

I cannot simplify my statement by describing my patient’s death-wish against his brother-in-law as an unconscious, repressed one. For it had been made conscious during the treatment the year before and the consequences which had followed from its repression had yielded to the treatment. But it still persisted, and, though it was no longer pathogenic, it was sufficiently intense. It might be described as a ‘suppressed’ wish.

Psycho-Analysis And Telepathy

3870

II

In the city of F--- a child grew up who was the eldest of a family of five, all girls. The youngest was ten years younger than herself; she once dropped this child out of her arms when it was a baby; later she called it ‘her child’. Her mother was older than her father and not an agreeable person. Her father - and it was not in years only that he was the younger - saw a lot of the little girls and impressed them by his many dexterities. Unfortunately he was not impressive in any other way: he was incompetent at business and was unable to support the family without help from relatives. The eldest girl became at an early age the repository of all the worries that arose from his lack of earning power.

Once she had left behind the rigid and passionate character of her childhood, she grew up into a regular mirror of all the virtues. Her high moral feelings were accompanied by a narrowly limited intelligence. She became a teacher in an elementary school and was much respected. The timid homage paid to her by a young relation who was a music teacher left her unmoved. No other man had hitherto attracted her notice.

One day a relative of her mother’s appeared on the scene, considerably older than she was, but still (for she was only nineteen) a youngish man. He was a foreigner who lived in Russia as the head of a large commercial undertaking and had grown very rich. It took nothing less than a world war and the overthrow of a great despotism to impoverish him. He fell in love with his young and severe cousin and asked her to be his wife. Her parents put no pressure on her, but she understood their wishes. Behind all her moral ideals she felt the attraction of the fulfilment of a wishful phantasy of helping her father and rescuing him from his necessitous state. She calculated that her cousin would give her father financial support so long as he carried on his business and pension him when he finally gave it up, and that he would provide her sisters with dowries and trousseaux so that they could get married. And she fell in love with him, married him soon afterwards and followed him to Russia.

Except for a few occurrences which were not entirely understandable at first sight and whose significance only became evident in retrospect, everything went very well in the marriage. She grew into an affectionate wife, sexually satisfied, and a providential support to her family. Only one thing was wanting: she was childless. She was now 27 years old and in the eighth year of her marriage. She lived in Germany, and after overcoming every kind of hesitation she went for a consultation to a German gynaecologist. With the usual thoughtlessness of a specialist, he assured her of recovery if she underwent a small operation. She agreed, and on the eve of the operation discussed the matter with her husband. It was the hour of twilight and she was about to turn on the lights when her husband asked her not to: he had something to say to her and he would prefer to be in darkness. He told her to countermand the operation, as the blame for their childlessness was his. During a medical congress two years earlier he had learnt that certain illnesses can deprive a man of the capacity to procreate children. An examination had shown that such was the case with him. After this revelation the operation was abandoned. She herself suffered from a temporary collapse, which she vainly sought to disguise. She had only been able to love him as a substitute father, and she had now learnt that he never could be a father. Three paths were open to her, all equally impassable: unfaithfulness, renunciation of her wish for a child, or separation from her husband. The last of them was excluded for the best practical reasons and the middle one for the strongest unconscious ones, which you can easily guess: her whole childhood had been dominated by the thrice disappointed wish to get a child from her father. There remained one other way out, which is what interests us in her case. She fell seriously ill of a neurosis. For a time she put up a defence against various temptations with the help of an anxiety neurosis, but later her symptoms changed into severe obsessional acts. She spent some time in institutions and eventually, after her illness had lasted for ten years, came to me. Her most striking symptom was that when she was in bed she used to fasten [anstecken = bring into contact] her sheets to the blankets with safety-pins. In this way she was revealing the secret of her husband’s contagion [Ansteckung], to which her childlessness was due.

On one occasion, when she was perhaps 40 years old, the patient told me an episode dating back to the time when her depression was beginning, before the outbreak of her obsessional neurosis. To divert her mind, her husband had taken her with him on a business trip to Paris. The couple were sitting with a business friend of her husband’s in the hall of their hotel when they became aware of some kind of stir and movement. She asked one of the hotel servants what was happening and was told that Monsieur le Professeur had arrived for consultations in his little room near the hotel entrance. Monsieur le Professeur, it appeared, was a famous fortune-teller; he asked no questions, but got his clients to press down a hand into a dish full of sand and foretold the future by studying the imprint. My patient declared that she would go in and have her fortune told. Her husband dissuaded her, saying it was nonsense. But after he had gone off with his business friend she took off her wedding-ring and slipped into the fortune-teller’s cabinet. He made a long study of the imprint of her hand and then spoke as follows: ‘In the near future you will have to go through some severe struggles, but all will turn out well. You will get married and have two children by the time you are 32.’ In telling this story she gave every sign of being greatly impressed by it without understanding it. My comment that it was nevertheless unfortunate that the date laid down by the prophecy had already gone by some eight years made no impression on her. I reflected that perhaps she was admiring the confident boldness of the prophecy - like the faithful disciple of the long-sighted Rabbi.

Psycho-Analysis And Telepathy

3871

Unluckily my memory, which is usually so trustworthy, is not certain whether the first part of the prophecy ran: ‘All will turn out well. You will get married.’ Or whether it was: ‘You will become happy.’ My attention was focused too completely on my sharp impression of the final phrase with its striking details. But actually the first remarks, about struggles that will have a happy ending, are among the vague expressions that figure in all prophecies - even in those that can be purchased ready-made. The contrast afforded by the two numbers specified in the final phrase is all the more remarkable. Nevertheless, it would certainly have been of interest to know whether the Professor really spoke of her marriage. It is true that she had taken off her wedding-ring and, at the age of 27, had looked very youthful and might easily have been taken for an unmarried girl. But, on the other hand, it would not have needed any great refinement of observation to discover the trace of the ring on her finger.

Let us restrict ourselves to the problem contained in the last phrase, which promised her two children at the age of 32. These details seem quite arbitrary and inexplicable. Even the most credulous person would scarcely undertake to deduce them from an interpretation of the lines on a hand. They would have received an indisputable justification if the future had confirmed them. But this was not the case. She was now forty years old and had no children. What, then, were the source and meaning of these numbers? The patient herself had no notion. The obvious thing would be to dismiss the question entirely and to consign it to the rubbish heap among so many other meaningless and ostensibly occult messages. That would be delightful: the simplest solution and a greatly desirable relief. But unluckily I must add that it was possible - and precisely by the help of analysis - to find an explanation of the two numbers and one which, once again, was completely satisfactory and arose, almost as a matter of course, out of the actual situation.

Psycho-Analysis And Telepathy

3872

For the two numbers fitted in perfectly with the life-story of - our patient’s mother. She had not married till she was thirty and it was in her thirty-second year that (unlike most women and to make up, as it were, for her dilatoriness) she gave birth to two children. So it is easy to translate the prophecy: ‘There’s no need to worry about your present childlessness. There’s nothing in that. You can still follow the example of your mother, who was not even married at your age and nevertheless had two children by the time she was thirty-two.’ The prophecy promised her the fulfilment of the identification with her mother which had been the secret of her childhood, and it was spoken through the mouth of a fortune-teller who was in ignorance of all her personal affairs and was busy examining an imprint in the sand. And we may add, as the precondition of this wish-fulfilment (unconscious as it was in every sense): ‘You will be set free from your useless husband by his death, or you will find strength to separate from him.’ The first alternative would fit in better with the nature of an obsessional neurosis, while the second is suggested by the struggles which, according to the prophecy, she was successfully to overcome.

As you will observe, the part played by analytic interpretation is even more important in this example than in the last one. Analysis may actually be said to have created the occult fact. Accordingly, this example, too, would seem to offer positively conclusive evidence of its being possible to transfer an unconscious wish and the thoughts and knowledge relating to it. I can see only one way of evading the conclusiveness of this last case and you may be sure that I shall not conceal it. It is possible that in the course of the twelve or thirteen years that elapsed between the prophecy and the account of it given during the treatment the patient may have formed a paramnesia: the Professor may have uttered some general and colourless consolation - which would be nothing to wonder at - and the patient may have gradually inserted the significant numbers out of her unconscious. If so, we should have avoided the fact which threatened us with such momentous consequences. We will gladly identify ourselves with the sceptics who will only attach value to a report of this kind if it is made immediately after the event - and even then, perhaps, not without hesitation. I remember that after I was appointed to a professorship I had an audience with the Minister to express my thanks. As I was on my way home from this audience I caught myself in the act of trying to falsify the words that had passed between us and I was never able to recapture correctly the actual conversation. I must leave it to you to decide whether the explanation I have suggested is tenable. I can neither prove nor disprove it. Thus, this second observation, though in itself more impressive than the first, is not equally free from doubt.

Psycho-Analysis And Telepathy

3873

The two cases that I have reported to you are both concerned with unfulfilled prophecies. Observations of this kind, in my opinion, can provide the best material on the question of thought-transference, and I should like to encourage you to collect similar ones. I had also intended to bring you an example based on material of another kind - a case in which a patient of a special sort talked during one session of things which touched in the most remarkable way on an experience which I had had myself immediately before. But I can now give you visible proof of the fact that I discuss the subject of occultism under the pressure of the greatest resistance. When, while I was at Gastein, I looked out the notes which I had put together and brought with me for the purpose of this paper, the sheet on which I had noted down this last observation was not there, but in its place I found another sheet of indifferent memoranda on quite another topic, which I had brought with me by mistake. Nothing can be done against such a clear resistance. I must ask you to excuse me for omitting this case, for I cannot make the loss good from memory.

I will instead add a few remarks about someone who is very well known in Vienna, a graphologist, Rafael Schermann, who has a reputation for the most astonishing performances. He is said to be able not merely to read a person’s character from a specimen of his handwriting, but also to describe his appearance and to add predictions about him which later come true. Incidentally, many of these remarkable achievements are based on his own stories. A friend of mine once, without my previous knowledge, made the experiment of getting him to allow his imagination to play over a specimen of my writing. All that he produced was that the writing was that of an old gentleman (which it was easy to guess), with whom it was hard to live since he was an intolerable tyrant in his home. Those who share my house would hardly confirm this. But, as we know, the field of the occult is subject to the convenient principle that negative cases prove nothing. I have made no direct observations on Schermann, but through a patient of mine I have been in contact with him without his knowing it. I will tell you about it.

Psycho-Analysis And Telepathy

3874

A few years ago a young man came to me who made a particularly sympathetic impression on me, so that I gave him preference over a number of others. It appeared that he was involved with one of the best known demi-mondaines and that he wanted to get free from her, because the relationship deprived him of all independence of action, but was unable to do so. I succeeded in setting him free and at the same time I obtained full insight into his compulsion. Not many months ago he contracted a normal and respectable marriage. The analysis soon showed that the compulsion against which he was struggling was not a tie with the demi-mondaine but with a married lady in his own circle with whom he had had a liason from his earliest youth. The demi-mondaine served merely as a whipping-boy on whom he could satisfy all the feelings of revenge and jealousy which really applied to the other lady. On a model that is familiar to us, he had made use of displacement onto a fresh object in order to escape the inhibition brought about by his ambivalence.

It was his habit to inflict the most refined torment on the demi-mondaine, who had fallen in love with him in an almost unselfish fashion. But when she could no longer conceal her sufferings, he in turn passed over on to her the affection he had felt for the woman he had loved since his youth; he made her presents and propitiated her, and the cycle started on its course once more. When finally, under the influence of the treatment, he broke with her, it became clear what it was that he was trying to achieve by his behaviour to this substitute for his early love: revenge for an attempt at suicide of his own when his love had rejected his advances. After the attempted suicide he had at last succeeded in overcoming her reluctance. During this period of the treatment he used to visit the celebrated Schermann. And the latter, on the basis of specimens of the demi-mondaine’s handwriting, repeatedly told him by way of interpretation that she was at her last gasp, was at the point of suicide and would quite certainly kill herself. This, however, she did not do, but shook off her human weakness, and recalled the principles of her profession and her duties to her official friend. I saw clearly that the miracle-man had merely revealed to my patient his own intimate wish.

Psycho-Analysis And Telepathy

3875

After disposing of this spurious figure, my patient set about seriously the task of freeing himself from his real bond. I detected from his dreams a plan that he was forming by means of which he would be able to escape from his relation with his early love without causing her too much mortification or material damage. She had a daughter, who was very fond of the young friend of the family and ostensibly knew nothing of the secret part he played. He now proposed to marry this girl. Soon afterwards the scheme became conscious, and the man took the first steps towards putting it into effect. I supported his intentions, since it offered what was a possible way out of his difficult situation even though an irregular one. But presently there came a dream which showed hostility to the girl; and now once more he consulted Schermann, who reported that the girl was childish and neurotic and should not be married. This time the great observer of human nature was right. The girl, who was by now regarded as the man’s fiancée, behaved in a more and more contradictory manner, and it was decided that she should be analysed. As a result of the analysis the scheme for the marriage was abandoned. The girl had a complete unconscious knowledge of the relations between her mother and her fiancé, and was only attached to him on account of her Oedipus complex.

At about this time our analysis broke off. The patient was free and capable of going his own way in the future. He chose as his wife a respectable girl outside his family circle - a girl on whom Schermann has passed a favourable judgement. Let us hope that this time he will be right once more.

You will have grasped the sense in which I am inclined to interpret these experiences of mine with Schermann. You will see that all my material touches only on the single point of thought-transference. I have nothing to say about all the other miracles that are claimed by occultism. My own life, as I have already openly admitted, has been particularly poor in an occult sense. Perhaps the problem of thought-transference may seem very trivial to you in comparison with the great magical world of the occult. But consider what a momentous step beyond what we have hitherto believed would be involved in this hypothesis alone. What the custodian of Saint-Denis used to add to his account of the saint’s martyrdom remains true. Saint-Denis is said, after his head was cut off, to have picked it up and to have walked quite a distance with it under his arm. But the custodian used to remark: ‘Dans des cas pareils, ce n’est que le premier pas qui coûte.’ The rest is easy.

3876

DREAMS AND TELEPATHY

(1922)

3877

Intentionally left blank

3878

DREAMS AND TELEPATHY

At the present time, when such great interest is felt in what are called ‘occult’ phenomena, very definite anticipations will doubtless be aroused by the announcement of a paper with this title. I will therefore hasten to explain that there is no ground for any such anticipations. You will learn nothing from this paper of mine about the enigma of telepathy; indeed, you will not even gather whether I believe in the existence of ‘telepathy’ or not. On this occasion I have set myself the very modest task of examining the relation of the telepathic occurrences in question, whatever their origin may be, to dreams, or more exactly, to our theory of dreams. You will know that the connection between dreams and telepathy is commonly held to be a very intimate one; I shall put forward the view that the two have little to do with each other, and that if the existence of telepathic dreams were to be established there would be no need to alter our conception of dreams in any way.

The material on which the present communication is based is very slight. In the first place, I must express my regret that I could make no use of my own dreams, as I did when I wrote my Interpretation of Dreams (1900a). But I have never had a ‘telepathic’ dream. Not that I have been without dreams of the kind that convey an impression that a certain definite event is happening at some distant place, leaving it to the dreamer to decide whether the event is happening at that moment or will do so at some later time. In waking life, too, I have often become aware of presentiments of distant events. But these hints, foretellings and premonitions have none of them ‘come true’, as we say; there proved to be no external reality corresponding to them, and they had therefore to be regarded as purely subjective anticipations.

For example, I once dreamt during the war that one of my sons then serving at the front had been killed. This was not directly stated in the dream, but was expressed in an unmistakable manner, by means of the well-known death-symbolism of which an account was first given by Stekel. (We must not omit to fulfil the duty, often felt to be inconvenient, of making literary acknowledgements.)  I saw the young soldier standing on a landing-stage, between land and water, as it were; he looked to me very pale. I spoke to him but he did not answer. There were other unmistakable indications. He was not wearing military uniform, but a ski-ing costume that he had worn when a serious ski-ing accident had happened to him several years before the war. He stood on something like a footstool with a cupboard in front of him; a situation always closely associated in my mind with the idea of ‘falling’, through a memory of my own childhood. As a child of little more than two years old I had myself climbed on a footstool like this to get something off the top of a cupboard - probably something good to eat - and I fell down and gave myself an injury, of which I can even now show the scar. My son, however, whom the dream pronounced to be dead, came home from the war unscathed.

Dreams And Telepathy

3879

Only a short time ago, I had another dream bearing ill-tidings; it was, I think, just before I decided to put together these few remarks. This time there was not much attempt at disguise. I saw my two nieces who live in England. They were dressed in black and said to me, ‘We buried her on Thursday.’ I knew the reference was to the death of their mother, now eighty-seven years of age, the widow of my eldest brother.

A time of disagreeable anticipation followed; there would of course be nothing surprising in such an old lady suddenly passing away, yet it would be very unpleasant for the dream to coincide exactly with the occurrence. The next letter from England, however, dissipated this fear. For the benefit of those who are concerned for the wish-fulfilment theory of dreams I may interpolate a reassurance by saying that there was no difficulty in detecting by analysis the unconscious motives that might be presumed to exist in these death-dreams just as in others.

I hope you will not object that what I have just related is valueless because negative experiences prove as little here as they do in less occult matters. I am well aware of that and have not adduced these instances with any intention whatever of proving anything or of surreptitiously influencing you in any particular direction. My sole purpose was to explain the paucity of my material.

Dreams And Telepathy

3880

Another fact certainly seems to me of more significance, namely, that during some twenty-seven years of work as an analyst I have never been in a position to observe a truly telepathic dream in any of my patients. And yet those patients made up a fair collection of severely neuropathic and ‘highly sensitive’ natures. Many of them have related to me most remarkable incidents in their earlier life on which they based a belief in mysterious occult influences. Events such as accidents or illnesses of near relatives, in particular the death of a parent, have often enough happened during the treatment and interrupted it; but not on one single occasion did these occurrences, eminently suitable as they were in character, afford me the opportunity of registering a single telepathic dream, although treatment extended over several months or even years. Anyone who cares to may look for an explanation of this fact, which still further restricts the material at my disposal. In any case it will be seen that such an explanation would not affect the subject of this paper.

Nor does it embarrass me to be asked why I have made no use of the abundant store of telepathic dreams that have appeared in the literature of the subject. I should not have had far to seek, since the publications of the English as well as of the American Society for Psychical Research are accessible to me as a member of both societies. In none of these communications is any attempt ever made to subject such dreams to analytic investigation, which would be our first interest in such cases.¹ Moreover, you will soon perceive that for the purposes of this paper one single dream will serve well enough.

My material thus consists simply and solely of two communications which have reached me from correspondents in Germany. The writers are not personally known to me, but they give their names and addresses: I have not the least ground for presuming any intention to mislead on their part.

¹ In two publications by W. Stekel, the author mentioned above (Der telepathische Traum, no date, and Die Sprache des Traumes, Second Edition, 1922), there are at least attempts to apply the analytic technique to alleged telepathic dreams. The author expresses his belief in the reality of telepathy.

Dreams And Telepathy

3881

I

With the first of the two I had already been in correspondence; he had been good enough to send me, as many of my readers do, observations of everyday occurrences and the like. He is obviously an educated and highly intelligent man; this time he expressly places his material at my disposal if I care to turn it ‘to literary account’.

His letter runs as follows:

‘I consider the following dream of sufficient interest for me to hand it on to you as material for your researches.

‘I must first state the following facts. My daughter, who is married and lives in Berlin, was expecting her first confinement in the middle of December of this year. I intended to go to Berlin about that time with my (second) wife, my daughter’s stepmother. During the night of November 16-17 I dreamt, with a vividness and clearness I have never before experienced, that my wife, had given birth to twins. I saw the two healthy infants quite plainly with their chubby faces lying in their cot side by side. I did not observe their sex; one with fair hair had distinctly my features and something of my wife’s, the other with chestnut-brown hair clearly resembled her with a look of me. I said to my wife, who has red-gold hair, "Probably ‘your’ child’s chestnut hair will also go red later on." My wife gave them the breast. In the dream she had also made some jam in a wash-basin and the two children crawled about on all fours in the basin and licked up the contents.

‘So much for the dream. Four or five times I had half woken from it, asked myself if it were true that we had twins, but did not come to the conclusion with any certainty that it was only a dream. The dream lasted till I woke, and after that it was some little time before I felt quite clear about the true state of affairs. At breakfast I told my wife the dream, which much amused her. She said, "Surely Ilse (my daughter) won’t have twins?" I answered, "I should hardly think so, as twins are not the usual thing either in my family or in G.’s" (her husband). On November 18, at ten o’clock in the morning, I received a telegram from my son-in-law, handed in the afternoon before, telling me of the birth of twins, a boy and a girl. The birth thus took place at the time when I was dreaming that my wife had twins. The confinement occurred four weeks earlier than any of us had expected on the basis of my daughter and son in-law’s calculations.

Dreams And Telepathy

3882

‘But there is a further circumstance: the next night I dreamt that my deceased wife, my daughter’s own mother, had undertaken the care of forty-eight new-born infants. When the first dozen were being brought in, I protested. At that point the dream ended.

‘My late wife was very fond of children. She often talked about it, saying she would like a whole troop round her, the more the better, and that she would do very well if she had charge of a Kindergarten and would be quite happy so. The noise children make was music to her. From time to time she would invite in a whole troop of children from the streets and regale them with chocolate and cakes in the courtyard of our villa. My daughter must have thought at once of her mother after her confinement, especially because of the surprise of its coming on prematurely, the arrival of twins, and their difference in sex. She knew her mother would have greeted the event with the liveliest joy and sympathy. "Only think what mother would say, if she were with me now!" This thought must undoubtedly have gone through her mind. And then I dream of my dead wife, of whom I very seldom dream, and had neither spoken of nor thought of after the first dream.

‘Do you think that the coincidence between dream and event was accidental in both cases? My daughter is much attached to me and was most certainly thinking of me during her labour, particularly because we had often exchanged letters about her mode of living during her pregnancy and I had constantly given her advice.’

It is easy to guess what my answer to this letter was. I was sorry to find that my correspondent’s interest in analysis had been so completely killed by his interest in telepathy. I therefore avoided his direct question, and, remarking that the dream contained a good deal besides its connection with the birth of the twins, I asked him to give me any information or ideas that occurred to him which could give me a clue to the meaning of the dream.

Thereupon I received the following second letter which, it must be admitted, did not give me quite all I wanted:

‘I have not been able to answer your kind letter of the 24th until to-day. I shall be only too pleased to tell you "without omission or reserve" all the associations that occur to me. Unfortunately there is not much; more would come out in talking.

Dreams And Telepathy

3883

‘Well then - my wife and I do not wish for any more children. We almost never have sexual intercourse; at any rate at the time of the dream there was certainly no "danger". My daughter’s confinement, which was expected about the middle of December, was naturally a frequent subject of conversation between us. My daughter had been examined and X-rayed in the summer, and the doctor making the examination was certain that the child would be a boy. My wife said at the time, "I should laugh if it was a girl after all." At the time she also remarked that it would be better if it were an H. rather than a G. (my son-in-law’s family name); my daughter is handsomer and has a better figure than my son-in-law, although he has been a naval officer. I have made some study of the question of heredity and am in the habit of looking at babies to see whom they resemble. One more thing. We have a small dog which sits with us at table in the evening to have his food and licks the plates and dishes. All this material appears in the dream.

‘I am fond of small children and have often said that I should like to have the bringing up of a child once more, now that I should have so much more understanding, interest and time to devote to it; but with my wife I should not wish it, as she does not possess the necessary qualities for rearing a child judiciously. The dream makes me a present of two children - I did not observe their sex. I see them even at this moment lying in the bed and I recognize the features, the one more "me", the other more my wife, but each with minor traits from the other side. My wife has red-gold hair, but the one child had chestnut (reddish) brown hair. I said, "Oh well, it will go red, too, later on." Both the children crawl round a large wash basin in which my wife has been stirring jam and lick its bottom and sides (dream). The origin of this detail is easily explicable, just as is the dream as a whole. The dream would not be difficult to understand or interpret if it had not coincided with the unexpectedly early arrival of my grandchildren (three weeks too soon), a coincidence of time almost to the hour. (I cannot exactly say when the dream began; my grandchildren were born at nine p. m. and a quarter past; I went to bed at about eleven and had my dream during the course of the night.) Our knowledge too that the child would be a boy adds to the difficulty, though possibly the doubt whether this had been fully established might account for the appearance of twins in the dream. All the same, there remains the coincidence of the dream with the unexpected and premature appearance of my daughter’s twins.

Dreams And Telepathy

3884

‘It is not the first time that distant events have become known to me before I received the actual news. To give one instance among many. In October I had a visit from my three brothers. We had not all been together for thirty years, except for quite a short time, once at my father’s funeral and once at my mother’s. Both deaths were expected, and I had had no ‘presentiments’ in either case. But about twenty-five years ago my youngest brother died quite suddenly and unexpectedly when he was ten. As the postman handed me the postcard with the news of his death, before I had glanced at it, the thought came to me at once, "It is to say that your brother is dead." He was the only one left at home, a strong healthy lad, while we four elder brothers were already fully fledged and had left our parents’ house. At the time of my brothers’ visit the talk by chance came round to this experience of mine, and, as if at the word of command, all three brothers came out with the declaration that exactly the same thing had happened to them. Whether it happened in exactly the same manner I cannot say; at all events each one said that he had felt perfectly certain of the death just before the quite unexpected news had arrived. We are all from the mother’s side of a sensitive disposition, though tall, strong men, but not one of us is in the least inclined towards spiritualism or occultism; on the contrary, we disclaim adherence to either. My brothers are all three University men, two are schoolmasters, one a surveyor, all rather pedants than visionaries. - That is all I can tell you in regard to the dream. If you can turn it to literary account, I am delighted to place it at your disposal.’

Dreams And Telepathy

3885

I am afraid that you may behave like the writer of these two letters. You, too, will be primarily interested in the question whether this dream can really be regarded as a telepathic notification of the unexpected birth of the twin children, and you will not be disposed to submit this dream to analysis like any other. I foresee that it will always be so when psycho-analysis and occultism encounter each other. The former has, so to speak, all our mental instincts against it; the latter is met half-way by powerful and mysterious sympathies. I am not, however, going to take up the position that I am nothing but a psycho-analyst, that the problems of occultism do not concern me: you would rightly judge that to be only an evasion of a problem. On the contrary, I may say that it would be a great satisfaction to me if I could convince myself and others on unimpeachable evidence of the existence of telepathic processes, but I also consider that the information provided about this dream is altogether inadequate to justify any such pronouncement. You will observe that it does not once occur to this intelligent man, deeply interested as he is in the problem of his dream, to tell us when he had last seen his daughter or what news he had lately had from her. He writes in the first letter that the birth was a month too soon; in the second, however, the month has become three weeks only, and in neither are we told whether the birth was really premature, or whether, as so often happens, those concerned were out in their reckoning. But we should have to consider these and other details of the occurrence if we are to weigh the probability of the dreamer having made unconscious estimates and guesses. I felt too that it would be of no use even if I succeeded in getting answers to such questions. In the course of arriving at the information new doubts would constantly arise, which could only be set at rest if one had the man in front of one and could revive all the relevant memories which he had perhaps dismissed as unessential. He is certainly right in what he says at the beginning of his second letter that more would have come out in talking.

Consider another and similar case, in which the disturbing interest of occultism has no part. You must often have been in a position to compare the anamnesis and the information about the illness given during the first session by any neurotic with what you have gained from him after some months of psycho-analysis. Apart from inevitable abbreviations, how many essentials were left out or suppressed, how many connections were displaced - in fact, how much that was incorrect or untrue was told you on that first occasion! You will not call me hyper-critical if I refuse in the circumstances to make any pronouncement whether the dream in question is a telepathic event or a particularly subtle achievement on the part of the dreamer’s unconscious or whether it is simply to be taken as a striking coincidence. Our curiosity must be satisfied with the hope of some later occasion on which it may be possible to make a detailed oral examination of the dreamer. But you cannot say that this outcome of our investigation has disappointed you, for I prepared you for it; I said you would hear nothing which would throw any light on the problem of telepathy.

Dreams And Telepathy

3886

If we now pass on to the analytic treatment of this dream, we are obliged once more to express dissatisfaction. The thoughts that the dreamer associates with the manifest content of the dream are again insufficient; they do not enable us to make any analysis of the dream. For instance, the dream goes into great detail over the likeness of the children to the parents, discusses the colour of their hair and the probable change of colour at a later age, and as an explanation of these elaborate details we only have the dry piece of information from the dreamer that he has always been interested in questions of likeness and heredity. We are accustomed to expect rather more material than this! But at one point the dream does admit of an analytic interpretation, and precisely at this point analysis, which has otherwise no connection with occultism, comes to the aid of telepathy in a remarkable way. It is only on account of this single point that I am asking for your attention to this dream at all.

Correctly speaking, this dream has no right whatever to be called ‘telepathic’. It did not inform the dreamer of anything which (outside his normal knowledge) was taking place elsewhere. What the dream did relate was something quite different from the event reported in the telegram received on the second day after the night of the dream. The dream and the actual occurrence diverge at a particularly important point; but they agree, apart from the coincidence of time, in another very interesting element. In the dream the dreamer’s wife had twins. The occurrence, however, was that his daughter had given birth to twins in her distant home. The dreamer did not overlook this difference; he did not seem to know any way of getting over it and, as according to his own account he had no leaning towards the occult, he only asked quite tentatively whether the coincidence between dream and occurrence on the point of the twin-birth could be more than an accident. The psycho-analytic interpretation of dreams, however, does away with this difference between the dream and the event, and gives both the same content. If we consult the associative material to this dream, it shows, in spite of its sparseness, that an intimate bond of feeling existed between the father and daughter, a bond of feeling which is so usual and so natural that we ought to cease to be ashamed of it, one that in daily life merely finds expression as a tender interest and is only pushed to its logical conclusion in dreams. The father knew that his daughter clung to him, he was convinced that she often thought of him during her labour. In his heart I think he grudged her to his son-in-law, to whom in one letter he makes a few disparaging references. On the occasion of her confinement (whether expected or communicated by telepathy) the unconscious wish became active in the repressed part of his mind: ‘she ought to be my (second) wife instead’; it was this wish that had distorted the dream-thoughts and was the cause of the difference between the manifest content of the dream and the event. We are entitled to replace the second wife in the dream by the daughter. If we possessed more associations to the dream, we could undoubtedly verify and deepen this interpretation.

And now I have reached the point I wish to put before you. We have endeavoured to maintain the strictest impartiality and have allowed two conceptions of the dream to rank as equally probable and equally unproved. According to the first the dream is a reaction to a telepathic message: ‘your daughter has just brought twins into the world.’ According to the second an unconscious process of thought underlies the dream, which may be reproduced somewhat as follows: ‘To-day is the day the confinement should take place if the young people in Berlin are really out in their reckoning by a month, as I suspect. And if my (first) wife were still alive, she certainly would not be content with one grandchild. To please her there would have to be at least twins!’ If this second view is right, no new problems arise. It is simply a dream like any other. The (preconscious) dream-thoughts as outlined above are reinforced by the (unconscious) wish that no other than the daughter should be the dreamer’s second wife, and thus the manifest dream as described to us arises.

Dreams And Telepathy

3887

If you prefer to assume that a telepathic message about the daughter’s confinement reached the sleeper, further questions arise of the relation of a message such as this to a dream and of its influence on the formation of dreams. The answer is not far to seek and is quite unambiguous. A telepathic message will be treated as a portion of the material that goes to the formation of a dream, like any other external or internal stimulus, like a disturbing noise in the street or an insistent organic sensation in the sleeper’s own body. In our example it is evident how the message, with the help of a lurking repressed wish, became remodelled into a wish-fulfilment; it is unfortunately less easy to show that it combined with other material that had become active at the same time and was blended into a dream. Telepathic messages - if we are justified in recognizing their existence - can thus make no alteration in the process of forming a dream; telepathy has nothing to do with the nature of dreams. And in order to avoid the impression that I am trying to conceal a vague notion behind abstract and fine-sounding words, I am willing to repeat: the essential nature of dreams consists in the peculiar process of ‘dream-work’ which, with the help of an unconscious wish, carries the preconscious thoughts (day’s residues) over into the manifest content of the dream. The problem of telepathy concerns dreams as little as does the problem of anxiety.

I am hoping that you will grant this, but that you will raise the objection that there are, nevertheless, other telepathic dreams in which there is no difference between the event and the dream, and in which there is nothing else to be found but an undistorted reproduction of the event. I have no knowledge of such dreams from my own experience, but I know they have often been reported. If we assume that we have such an undisguised and unadulterated telepathic dream to deal with, another question arises. Ought we to call such a telepathic experience a ‘dream’ at all? You will certainly do so as long as you keep to popular usage, in which everything that takes place in mental life during sleep is called a dream. You, too, perhaps say, ‘I tossed about in my dream’, and still less are you conscious of anything incorrect when you say, ‘I shed tears in my dream’ or ‘I felt apprehensive in my dream’. But you will no doubt notice that in all these cases you are using ‘dream’ and ‘sleep’ and ‘state of being asleep’ interchangeably, as if there were no distinction between them. I think it would be in the interests of scientific accuracy to keep ‘dream’ and ‘state of sleep’ more distinctly separate. Why should we provide a counterpart to the confusion evoked by Maeder who, by refusing to distinguish between the dream-work and the latent dream-thoughts, has discovered a new function for dreams? Supposing, then, that we are brought face to face with a pure telepathic ‘dream’, let us rather call it instead a telepathic experience in a state of sleep. A dream without condensation, distortion, dramatization, above all, without wish-fulfilment, surely does not deserve the name. You will remind me that, if so, there are other mental products in sleep to which the right to be called ‘dreams’ would have to be refused. Actual experiences of the day are sometimes simply repeated in sleep; reproductions of traumatic scenes in ‘dreams’ have led us only lately to revise the theory of dreams. There are dreams which are to be distinguished from the usual type by certain special qualities, which are, properly speaking, nothing but night-phantasies, not having undergone additions or alterations of any kind and being in all other ways similar to the familiar day-dreams. It would be awkward, no doubt, to exclude these structures from the domain of ‘dreams’. But still they all come from within, are products of our mental life, whereas the very conception of the purely ‘telepathic dream’ lies in its being a perception of something external, in relation to which the mind remains passive and receptive.

Dreams And Telepathy

3888

II

The second case which I shall bring before your notice in fact follows along other lines. This is not a telepathic dream, but a dream that has recurred from childhood onwards, in a person who has had many telepathic experiences. Her letter, which I reproduce here, contains some remarkable things, about which we cannot form any judgement. A part of it is of interest in connection with the problem of the relation of telepathy to dreams.

(1) ‘. . . My doctor, Herr Dr. N., advises me to give you an account of a dream that has pursued me for some thirty or thirty-two years. I am following his advice, and perhaps the dream may possess interest for you in some scientific respect. Since, in your opinion, such dreams are to be traced to an experience of a sexual nature in the first years of my childhood, I relate some reminiscences of childhood. They are experiences whose impression on me still persists and which were of so marked a character as to have determined my religion for me.

‘May I beg of you to send me word in what way you explain this dream and whether it is not possible to banish it from my life, for it haunts me like a ghost, and the circumstances that always accompany it - I always fall out of bed, and have inflicted on myself not inconsiderable injuries - make it particularly disagreeable and distressing.’

(2)  ‘I am thirty-seven years old, very strong and in good physical health, but in childhood I had, besides measles and scarlet fever, an attack of nephritis. Furthermore, in my fifth year I had a very severe inflammation of the eyes, which left double vision. The images are at an angle to each other and their outline is blurred, as the scars from the ulcers affect clearness of vision. In the specialist’s opinion there is nothing more to be done to the eyes and no chance of improvement. The left side of my face is drawn up from having screwed up my left eye to see better. By dint of practice and determination I can do the finest needlework; and, similarly, when a six-year old child, I broke myself of squinting by practising in front of a looking-glass, so that now there is no external sign of the defect in vision.

‘From my very earliest years I was always solitary. I kept apart from other children, and had visions (clairvoyance and clairaudience). I was not able to distinguish these from reality, and in consequence often found myself in conflict with other people in embarrassing positions, with the result that I have become a very reserved and shy person. Since as a quite small child I already knew far more than I could have learnt, I simply did not understand children of my own age. I am myself the eldest of a family of twelve.

Dreams And Telepathy

3889

‘From six to ten years old I attended the parish school and up to sixteen the high-school of the Ursuline Nuns in B--. At ten I had taken in as much French in four weeks, in eight lessons, as other children learn in two years. I had only to say it over. It was just as if I had already learnt it and only forgotten it. I have never had any need to learn French, in contradistinction to English, which gave me no trouble, certainly, but which was not known to me beforehand. The same thing happened to me with Latin as with French and I have never properly learnt it, only knowing it from Church Latin, which is, however, quite familiar to me. If I read a French book to-day, then I immediately begin thinking in French, whereas this never happens to me with English, although I have more command of English. My parents are peasant people (who for generations have never spoken any languages except German and Polish.

‘Visions. - Sometimes reality vanishes for some moments and I see something quite different. In my house, for example, I often see an old married couple and a child; and the house is then differently furnished. In the sanatorium a friend once came into my room at about four in the morning; I was awake, had the lamp burning, and was sitting at my table reading, as I suffer much from sleeplessness. This apparition of her always means a trying time for me - as it did on this occasion.

‘In 1914 my brother was on active service; I was not with my parents in B-- but in Ch--. It was ten a. m. on August 22 when I heard my brother’s voice calling, "Mother! Mother!" It came again ten minutes later, but I saw nothing. On August 24 I came home, found my mother greatly depressed, and in answer to my questions she said that she had had a message from the boy on August 22. She had been in the garden in the morning, when she had heard him call, "Mother! Mother!" I comforted her and said nothing about myself. Three weeks after there came a card from my brother, written on August 22 between nine and ten in the morning; shortly after that he died.

‘On September 27, 1921, while in the sanatorium, I received a message of some kind. There were violent knockings two or three times repeated on the bed of the patient who shared my room. We were both awake; I asked if she had knocked; she had not even heard anything. Eight weeks later I heard that one of my friends had died in the night of September 26-7.

Dreams And Telepathy

3890

‘Now something which is regarded as a hallucination - a matter of opinion! I have a friend who married a widower with five children; I got to know the husband only through my friend. Nearly every time that I have been to see her, I have seen a lady going in and out of the house. It was natural to suppose that this was the husband’s first wife. I asked at some convenient opportunity for a portrait of her, but could not identify the apparition with the photograph. Seven years later I saw a picture with the features of the lady, belonging to one of the children. It was the first wife after all. In the picture she looked in much better health: she had just been through a feeding-up treatment and that alters the appearance of a consumptive patient. These are only a few examples out of many.

‘The dream. - I saw a tongue of land surrounded by water. The waves were being driven forward and then back by the breakers. On this piece of land stood a palm-tree, bent somewhat towards the water. A woman had her arm wound round the stem of the palm and was bending low towards the water, where a man was trying to reach the shore. At last she lay down on the ground, held tightly to the palm-tree with her left hand and stretched out her right hand as far as she could towards the man in the water, but without reaching him. At that point I would fall out of bed and wake. I was about fifteen or sixteen years old when I realized that this woman was myself, and from that time I not only experienced all the woman’s apprehensions on behalf of the man but sometimes stood there as a third person looking on at the scene without taking part in it. I dreamed this dream too in separate scenes. As an interest in men awoke in me (at eighteen to twenty years old), I tried to see the man’s face; but this was never possible. The foam hid everything but his neck and the back of his head. I have twice been engaged to be married, but judging by his head and build he was neither of the two men I was engaged to. - Once, when I was lying in the sanatorium under the influence of paraldehyde, I saw the man’s face, which I now always see in this dream. It was that of the doctor under whose care I was. I liked him as a doctor, but I was not drawn to him in any other way.

‘Memories. Six to nine months old. - I was in a perambulator. On my right were two horses; one, a brown, was looking at me very intently and expressively. This was my most vivid experience; I had the feeling that it was a human being.

Dreams And Telepathy

3891

‘One year old. - Father and I in the town-park, where a park-keeper was putting a little bird into my hand. Its eyes looked back into mine. I felt "That is a creature like yourself".

‘Animals being slaughtered. - When I heard the pigs squealing I always called for help and cried out "You are killing a person" (four years old). I always refused to eat meat. Pork always makes me vomit. It was not till the war that I came to eat meat, and only unwillingly; now I am learning to do without it again.

‘Five years old. - My mother was confined and I heard her cry out. I had the feeling, "There is a human being or an animal in the greatest distress", just as I had over the pig-killing.

‘I was quite indifferent as a child to sexual matters; at ten years old I had as yet no conception of offences against chastity. Menstruation came on at the age of twelve. The woman first awakened in me at six-and-twenty, after I had given life to a child; up to that time (six months) I constantly had violent vomiting after intercourse. This also came on whenever I was at all oppressed in mood.

‘I have extraordinarily keen powers of observation, and quite exceptionally sharp hearing, also a very keen sense of smell. With my eyes bandaged I can pick out by smell people I know from among a number of others.

‘I do not regard my abnormal powers of sight and hearing as pathological, but ascribe them to finer perceptions and greater quickness of thought; but I have only spoken of it to my pastor and to Dr.-- (very unwillingly to the latter, as I was afraid he would tell me that what I regarded as plus-qualities were minus-qualities, and also because from being misunderstood in childhood I am very reserved and shy).’

Dreams And Telepathy

3892

The dream which the writer of the letter asks us to interpret is not hard to understand. It is a dream of rescuing from water, a typical birth-dream. The language of symbolism, as you are aware, knows no grammar; it is an extreme case of a language of infinitives, and even the active and passive are represented by one and the same image. If in a dream a woman pulls (or tries to pull) a man out of the water, that may mean that she wants to be his mother (takes him for her son as Pharaoh’s daughter did with Moses). Or it may mean that she wants him to make her into a mother: she wants to have a son by him, who, as a likeness of him, can be his equivalent. The tree-trunk to which the woman was clinging is easily recognized as a phallic symbol, even though it is not standing straight up, but inclined towards the surface of the water - in the dream the word is ‘bent’. The onrush and recoil of the breakers brought to the mind of another dreamer who was relating a similar dream a comparison with the intermittent pains of labour; and when, knowing that she had not yet borne a child, I asked her how she knew of this characteristic of labour, she said that she imagined labour as a kind of colic - a quite unimpeachable description physiologically. She gave the association ‘The Waves of the Sea and of Love’. How our present dreamer at so early as age can have arrived at the finer details of symbolism - tongue of land, palm-tree - I am naturally unable to say. We must not, moreover, overlook the fact that, when people assert that they have for years been pursued by the same dream, it often turns out that the manifest content is not quite the same. Only the kernel of the dream has recurred each time; the details of the content are changed or additions are made to them.

At the end of this dream, which is clearly charged with anxiety, the dreamer falls out of bed. This is a fresh representation of childbirth. Analytic investigation of the fear of heights, of the dread of an impulse to throw oneself out of the window, has doubtless led you all to the same conclusion.

Who then is the man, by whom the dreamer wishes to have a child, or of whose likeness she would like to be the mother?  She often tried to see his face, but the dream never allowed her to; the man had to remain incognito. We know from countless analyses what this concealment means, and the conclusion we should base on analogy is verified by another statement of the dreamer’s. Under the influence of paraldehyde she once recognized the face of the man in the dream as that of the hospital physician who was treating her, and who meant nothing more to her conscious emotional life. The original thus never divulged its identity, but this impression of it in ‘transference’ establishes the conclusion that earlier it must always have been her father. Ferenczi is perfectly right in pointing out that these ‘dreams of the unsuspecting’ are valuable sources of information, as confirming the conjectures of analysis. Our dreamer was the eldest of twelve children; how often must she have suffered the pangs of jealousy and disappointment when it was not she but her mother who obtained from her father the child she longed for!

Dreams And Telepathy

3893

Our dreamer quite correctly supposed that her first memories of childhood would be of value in the interpretation of her early and recurrent dream. In the first scene, before she was one year old, as she was sitting in her perambulator she saw two horses beside her, one looking at her. This she described as her most vivid experience; she had the feeling that it was a human being. This was a feeling which we can understand only if we assume that the two horses represented, in this case as so often, a married couple, father and mother. It was, as it were, a flash of infantile totemism. If we could, we should ask the writer whether the brown horse who looked at her so humanly could not be recognized by its colouring as her father. The second recollection was associatively connected with the first through the same ‘understanding’ gaze. Taking the little bird in her hand, however, reminds the analyst, who has prejudices of his own, of a feature in the dream in which the woman’s hand was in contact with another phallic symbol.

The next two memories belong together; they make still slighter demands on the interpreter. The mother crying out during her confinement reminded the daughter directly of the pigs squealing when they were being killed and put her into the same frenzy of pity. But we may also conjecture that this was a violent reaction against an angry death-wish directed at the mother.

With these indications of tenderness for her father, of contact with his genitals, and of death-wishes against her mother, the outline of the female Oedipus complex is sketched in. Her long retention of her ignorance of sexual matters, and her frigidity at a later period bear out these suppositions. The writer of the letter became potentially - and at times no doubt actually - a hysterical neurotic. The forces of life have, for her own happiness, carried her along with them. They have awakened in her the sexual feelings of a woman and brought her the joys of motherhood, and the capacity to work. But a portion of her libido still clings to its points of fixation in childhood; she still dreams the dream that throws her out of bed and punishes her for her incestuous object-choice by ‘not inconsiderable injuries’.

And now an explanation, given in writing by a doctor who was a stranger to her, was expected to effect what all the most important experiences of her later life had failed to do!  Probably a regular analysis continued for a considerable time would have succeeded in this. As things were, I was obliged to content myself with writing to her that I was convinced she was suffering from the after-effects of a strong emotional tie binding her to her father and from a corresponding identification with her mother, but that I did not myself expect that this explanation would help her. Spontaneous cures of neurosis usually leave scars behind, and these become painful again from time to time. We are very proud of our art if we achieve a cure through psycho-analysis, yet here too we cannot always prevent the formation of a painful scar as an outcome.

Dreams And Telepathy

3894

The little series of reminiscences must engage our attention for a while longer. I have stated elsewhere that such scenes of childhood are  ‘screen memories’ selected at a later period, put together, and not infrequently falsified in the process. This subsequent remodelling serves a purpose that is sometimes easy to guess. In our case one can almost hear the writer’s ego glorifying or soothing itself by means of this series of recollections. ‘I was from infancy a particularly noble and compassionate creature. I learnt quite early that animals have souls as we have, and could not endure cruelty to animals. The sins of the flesh were far from me and I preserved my chastity till late in life.’ With declarations such as these she was loudly contradicting the inferences that we have to make about her early childhood on the basis of our analytical experience, namely, that she had an abundance of premature sexual impulses and violent feelings of hatred for her mother and her younger brothers and sisters. (Besides the genital significance I have just assigned to it, the little bird may also be a symbol of a child, like all small animals; her recollection thus accentuated very insistently the fact that this small creature had the same right to exist as she herself.) Hence the short series of recollections furnishes a very nice example of a mental structure with a twofold aspect. Viewed superficially, we may find in it the expression of an abstract idea, here, as usually, with an ethical reference. In Silberer’s nomenclature the structure has an anagogic content. On deeper investigation it reveals itself as a chain of phenomena belonging to the region of the repressed life of the instincts - it displays its psycho-analytic content. As you know, Silberer, who was among the first to issue a warning to us not to lose sight of the nobler side of the human soul, has put forward the view that all or nearly all dreams permit such a twofold interpretation, a purer, anagogic one beside the ignoble, psycho-analytic one. This is, however, unfortunately not so. On the contrary, an over-interpretation of this kind is rarely possible. To my knowledge no valid example of such a dream-analysis with a double meaning has been published up to the present time. But observations of this kind can often be made upon the series of associations that our patients produce during analytic treatment. On the one hand the successive ideas are linked by a line of association which is plain to the eye, while on the other hand you become aware of an underlying theme which is kept secret but which at the same time plays a part in all these ideas. The contrast between the two themes that dominate the same series of ideas is not always one between the lofty anagogic and the low psycho-analytic, but one rather between offensive and respectable or indifferent ideas - a fact that easily explains why such a chain of associations with a twofold determination arises. In our present example it is of course not accidental that the anagogic and the psycho-analytic interpretations stood in such a sharp contrast to each other; both related to the same material, and the later trend was no other than that of the reaction-formations which had been erected against the disowned instinctual impulses.

But why do we look for a psycho-analytic interpretation at all instead of contenting ourselves with the more accessible anagogic one? The answer to this is linked up with many other problems - with the existence in general of neurosis and the explanations it inevitably demands - with the fact that virtue does not reward a man with as much joy and strength in life as one would expect, as though it brought with it too much of its origin (our dreamer, too, had not been well rewarded for her virtue), and with other things which I need not discuss before this audience.

Dreams And Telepathy

3895

So far, however, we have completely neglected the question of telepathy, the other point of interest for us in this case; it is time to return to it. In a sense we have here an easier task than in the case of Herr H. With a person who so easily and so early in life lost touch with reality and replaced it by the world of phantasy, the temptation is irresistible to connect her telepathic experiences and ‘visions’ with her neurosis and to derive them from it, although here too we should not allow ourselves to be deceived as to the cogency of our own arguments. We shall merely be replacing what is unknown and unintelligible by possibilities that are at least comprehensible.

On August 22, 1914, at ten o’clock in the morning, our correspondent experienced a telepathic impression that her brother, who was at the time on active service, was calling, ’Mother! Mother!’; the phenomenon was purely acoustic, it was repeated shortly after, but nothing was seen. Two days later she saw her mother and found her much depressed because the boy had announced himself to her with a repeated call of ’Mother! Mother!’ She immediately remembered the same telepathic message, which she had experienced at the same time, and as a matter of fact some weeks later it was established that the young soldier had died on that day at the hour in question.

It cannot be proved, but also cannot be disproved, that instead of this, what happened was the following. Her mother told her one day that her son had sent a telepathic message; whereupon the conviction at once arose in her mind that she had had the same experience at the same time. Such illusions of memory arise in the mind with a compelling force which they draw from real sources; but they turn psychical reality into material reality. The strength of the illusion lies in its being an excellent way of expressing the sister’s proneness to identify herself with her mother. ‘You are anxious about the boy, but I am really his mother, and his cry was meant for me; I had this telepathic message.’ The sister would naturally firmly reject our attempt at explanation and would hold to her belief in the authenticity of her experience. But she could not do otherwise. She would be bound to believe in the reality of the pathological effect so long as the reality of its unconscious premises were unknown to her. Every such delusion derives its strength and its unassailable character from having a source in unconscious psychical reality. I note in passing that it is not incumbent on us here to explain the mother’s experience or to investigate its authenticity.

Dreams And Telepathy

3896

The dead brother, however, was not only our correspondent’s imaginary child; he also represented a rival whom she had regarded with hatred from the time of his birth. By far the greater number of all telepathic intimations relate to death or the possibility of death; when patients under analysis keep telling us of the frequency and infallibility of their gloomy forebodings, we can with equal regularity show them that they are fostering particularly strong death-wishes in their unconscious against their nearest relations and have long been thus suppressing them. The patient whose history I related in 1909¹ was an example to the point; he was called a ‘carrion crow’ by his relations. But when this kindly and highly intelligent man - who has since himself perished in the war - began to make progress towards recovery, he himself gave me considerable assistance in clearing up his own psychological conjuring tricks. In the same way, the account given in our first correspondent’s letter, of how he and his three brothers had received the news of their youngest brother’s death as a thing they had long been inwardly aware of, appears to need no other explanation. The elder brothers would all have been equally convinced of the superfluousness of the youngest arrival.

Here is another of our dreamer’s ‘visions’ which will probably become more intelligible in the light of analytic knowledge. Women friends obviously had a great significance in her emotional life. Only recently the death of one of them was conveyed to her by a knocking at night on the bed of a room-mate in the sanatorium. Another friend had many years before married a widower with several (five) children. On the occasion of her visits to their house she regularly saw the apparition of a lady, who she could not help supposing was the husband’s first wife; this did not at first permit of confirmation, and only became a matter of certainty with her seven years later, on the discovery of a fresh photograph of the dead woman. This achievement in the way of a vision on the part of our correspondent had the same intimate dependence on the family complexes familiar to us as had her presentiment of her brother’s death. By identifying herself with her friend she could in the person of the latter find the fulfilment of her own wishes; for every eldest daughter of a numerous family builds up in her unconscious the phantasy of becoming her father’s second wife by the death of her mother. If the mother is ill or dies, the eldest daughter takes her place as a matter of course in relation to her younger brothers and sisters, and may even take over some part of the functions of the wife in respect to the father. The unconscious wish fills in the other part.

¹ ‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’

Dreams And Telepathy

3897

I am now almost at the end of what I wish to say. I might, however, add the observation that the instances of telepathic messages or productions which have been discussed here are clearly connected with emotions belonging to the sphere of the Oedipus complex. This may sound startling; I do not intend to give it out as a great discovery, however. I would rather revert to the result we arrived at through investigating the dream I considered first. Telepathy has no relation to the essential nature of dreams; it cannot deepen in any way what we already understand of them through analysis. On the other hand, psycho-analysis may do something to advance the study of telepathy, in so far as, by the help of its interpretations, many of the puzzling characteristics of telepathic phenomena may be rendered more intelligible to us; or other, still doubtful, phenomena may for the first time definitely be ascertained to be of a telepathic nature.

There remains one element of the apparently intimate connection between telepathy and dreams which is not affected by any of these considerations: namely, the incontestable fact that sleep creates favourable conditions for telepathy. Sleep is not, it is true, indispensable to the occurrence of telepathic processes - whether they originate in messages or in unconscious activity. If you are not already aware of this, you will learn it from the instance given by our second correspondent, of the young man’s message which came between nine and ten in the morning. We must add, however, that no one has a right to take exception to telepathic occurrences if the event and the intimation (or message) do not exactly coincide in astronomical time. It is perfectly conceivable that a telepathic message might arrive contemporaneously with the event and yet only penetrate to consciousness the following night during sleep (or even in waking life only after a while, during some pause in the activity of the mind). We are, as you know, of opinion that dream-formation itself does not necessarily wait for the onset of sleep before it begins. Often the latent dream-thoughts may have been being got ready during the whole day, till at night they find the contact with the unconscious wish that shapes them into a dream. But if the phenomenon of telepathy is only an activity of the unconscious mind, then, of course, no fresh problem lies before us. The laws of unconscious mental life may then be taken for granted as applying to telepathy.

Have I given you the impression that I am secretly inclined to support the reality of telepathy in the occult sense? If so, I should very much regret that it is so difficult to avoid giving such an impression. For in reality I have been anxious to be strictly impartial. I have every reason to be so, since I have no opinion on the matter and know nothing about it.

3898

SOME NEUROTIC MECHANISMS IN JEALOUSY, PARANOIA AND HOMOSEXUALITY

(1922)

3899

Intentionally left blank

3900

SOME NEUROTIC MECHANISMS IN JEALOUSY, PARANOIA AND HOMOSEXUALITY

A

Jealousy is one of those affective states, like grief, that may be described as normal. If anyone appears to be without it, the inference is justified that it has undergone severe repression and consequently plays all the greater part in his unconscious mental life. The instances of abnormally intense jealousy met with in analytic work reveal themselves as constructed of three layers. The three layers or grades of jealousy may be described as (1) competitive or normal, (2) projected, and (3) delusional jealousy.

There is not much to be said from the analytic point of view. It is easy to see that essentially it is compounded of grief, the pain caused by the thought of losing the loved object, and of the narcissistic wound, in so far as this is distinguishable from the other wound; further, of feelings of enmity against the successful rival, and of a greater or lesser amount of self-criticism which tries to hold the subject’s own ego accountable for his loss. Although we may call it normal, this jealousy is by no means completely rational, that is, derived from the actual situation, proportionate to the real circumstances and under the complete control of the conscious ego; for it is rooted deep in the unconscious, it is a continuation of the earliest stirrings of the child’s affective life, and it originates in the Oedipus or brother-and-sister complex of the first sexual period. Moreover, it is noteworthy that in some people it is experienced bisexually. That is to say, a man will not only feel pain about the woman he loves and hatred of the man who is his rival, but also grief about the man, whom he loves unconsciously, and hatred of the woman as his rival; and this latter set of feelings will add to the intensity of his jealousy. I even know of a man who suffered exceedingly during his attacks of jealousy and who, according to his own account, went through unendurable torments by consciously imagining himself in the position of the faithless woman. The sensation of helplessness which then came over him and the images he used to describe his condition - exposed to the vulture’s beak like Prometheus, or thrown bound into a nest of serpents - were referred by him to impressions received during several homosexual acts of aggression to which he had been subjected as a boy.

Some Neurotic Mechanisms In Jealousy, Paranoia And Homosexuality

3901

The jealousy of the second layer, projected jealousy, is derived in both men and women either from their own actual unfaithfulness in real life or from impulses towards it which have succumbed to repression. It is a matter of everyday experience that fidelity, especially that degree of it required in marriage, is only maintained in the face of continual temptations. Anyone who denies these temptations in himself will nevertheless feel their pressure so strongly that he will be glad enough to make use of an unconscious mechanism to alleviate his situation. He can obtain this alleviation - and, indeed, acquittal by his conscience - if he projects his own impulses to faithlessness on to the partner to whom he owes faith. This strong motive can then make use of the perceptual material which betrays unconscious impulses of the same kind in the partner, and the subject can justify himself with the reflection that the other is probably not much better than he is himself.¹

Social conventions have wisely taken this universal state of things into account, by granting a certain amount of latitude to the married woman’s craving to attract and the married man’s thirst to make conquests, in the expectation that this inevitable tendency to unfaithfulness will thus find a safety valve and be rendered innocuous. Convention has laid down that neither partner is to hold the other accountable for these little excursions in the direction of unfaithfulness, and they usually result in the desire that has been awakened by the new object finding satisfaction in some kind of return to faithfulness to the original object. A jealous person, however, does not recognize this convention of tolerance; he does not believe in any such thing as a halt or a turning-back once the path has been trodden, nor that a flirtation may be a safeguard against actual infidelity. In the treatment of a jealous person like this, one must refrain from disputing with him the material on which he bases his suspicions; one can only aim at bringing him to regard the matter in a different light.

¹ Cf. Desdemona’s song:

I called my love false love; but what said he then?

If I court moe women, you’ll couch with moe men.

Some Neurotic Mechanisms In Jealousy, Paranoia And Homosexuality

3902

The jealousy that arises from such a projection has, it is true, an almost delusional character; it is, however, amenable to the analytic work of exposing the unconscious phantasies of the subject’s own infidelity. The position is worse as regards jealousy belonging to the third layer, the true delusional type. It too has its origin in repressed impulses towards unfaithfulness; but the object in these cases is of the same sex as the subject. Delusional jealousy is what is left of a homosexuality that has run its course, and it rightly takes its position among the classical forms of paranoia. As an attempt at defence against an unduly strong homosexual impulse it may, in a man, be described in the formula: ‘I do not love him, she loves him!’ ¹  In a delusional case one will be prepared to find jealousy belonging to all three layers, never to the third alone.

B

Paranoia - Cases of paranoia are for well-known reasons not usually amenable to analytic investigation. I have recently been able, nevertheless, by an intensive study of two paranoics, to discover something new to me.

The first case was that of a youngish man with a fully developed paranoia of jealousy, the object of which was his impeccably faithful wife. A stormy period in which the delusion had possessed him uninterruptedly already lay behind him. When I saw him he was only subject to clearly separated attacks, which lasted for several days and which, curiously enough, regularly appeared on the day after he had had sexual intercourse with his wife, which was, incidentally, satisfying to both of them. The inference is justified that after every satiation of the heterosexual libido the homosexual component, likewise stimulated by the act, forced an outlet for itself in the attack of jealousy.

These attacks drew their material from his observation of minute indications, by which his wife’s quite unconscious coquetry, unnoticeable to any one else, had betrayed itself to him. She had unintentionally touched the man sitting next her with her hand; she had turned too much towards him, or she had smiled more pleasantly than when alone with her husband. He was extraordinarily observant of all these manifestations of her unconscious, and always knew how to interpret them correctly, so that he really was always in the right about it, and could furthermore call in analysis to justify his jealousy. His abnormality really reduced itself to this, that he watched his wife’s unconscious mind much more closely and then regarded it as far more important than anyone else would have thought of doing.

¹ See the Schreber analysis (1911c).

Some Neurotic Mechanisms In Jealousy, Paranoia And Homosexuality

3903

We are reminded that sufferers from persecutory paranoia act in just the same way. They, too, cannot regard anything in other people as indifferent, and they, too, take up minute indications with which these other, unknown, people present them, and use them in their delusions of reference. The meaning of their delusion of reference is that they expect from all strangers something like love. But these people show them nothing of the kind; they laugh to themselves, flourish their sticks, even spit on the ground as they go by - and one really does not do such things while a person in whom one takes a friendly interest is near. One does them only when one feels quite indifferent to the passer-by, when one can treat him like air; and, considering, too, the fundamental kinship of the concepts of ‘stranger’ and ‘enemy’, the paranoic is not so far wrong in regarding this indifference as hate, in contrast to his claim for love.

We begin to see that we describe the behaviour of both jealous and persecutory paranoics very inadequately by saying that they project outwards on to others what they do not wish to recognize in themselves. Certainly they do this; but they do not project it into the blue, so to speak, where there is nothing of the sort already. They let themselves be guided by their knowledge of the unconscious, and displace to the unconscious minds of others the attention which they have withdrawn from their own. Our jealous husband perceived his wife’s unfaithfulness instead of his own; by becoming conscious of hers and magnifying it enormously he succeeded in keeping his own unconscious. If we accept his example as typical, we may infer that the enmity which the persecuted paranoic sees in others is the reflection of his own hostile impulses against them. Since we know that with the paranoic it is precisely the most loved person of his own sex that becomes his persecutor, the question arises where this reversal of affect takes its origin; the answer is not far to seek - the ever-present ambivalence of feeling provides its source and the non-fulfilment of his claim for love strengthens it. This ambivalence thus serves the same purpose for the persecuted paranoic as jealousy served for my patient - that of a defence against homosexuality.

Some Neurotic Mechanisms In Jealousy, Paranoia And Homosexuality

3904

The dreams of my jealous patient presented me with a great surprise. They were not simultaneous with the outbreaks of the attacks, it is true, but they occurred within the period which was under the dominance of the delusion; yet they were completely free from delusion and they revealed the underlying homosexual impulses with no more than the usual degree of disguise. Since I had had little experience of the dreams of paranoics, it seemed plausible at the time to suppose that it was true in general that paranoia does not penetrate into dreams.

This patient’s homosexual position was easily surveyed. He had made no friendships and developed no social interests; one had the impression that only the delusion had carried forward the development of his relations with men, as if it had taken over some of the arrears that had been neglected. The fact that his father was of no great importance in the family, combined with a humiliating homosexual trauma in early boyhood, had forced his homosexuality into repression and barred the way to its sublimation. The whole of his youth was governed by a strong attachment to his mother. Of all her many sons he was her declared favourite, and he developed marked jealousy of the normal type in regard to her. When later he made his choice of a wife - mainly prompted by an impulse to enrich his mother - his longing for a virgin mother expressed itself in obsessive doubts about his fiancée’s virginity. The first years of his marriage were free from jealousy. Then he became unfaithful to his wife and entered upon an intimate relationship with another woman that lasted for a considerable time. Frightened by a certain suspicion, he at length made an end of this love affair, and not until then did jealousy of the second, projected type break out, by means of which he was able to assuage his self-reproaches about his own unfaithfulness. It was soon complicated by an accession of homosexual impulses, of which his father-in-law was the object, and became a fully formed jealous paranoia.

Some Neurotic Mechanisms In Jealousy, Paranoia And Homosexuality

3905

My second case would probably not have been classified as persecutory paranoia, apart from analysis; but I had to recognize the young man as a candidate for a terminal illness of that kind. In his attitude to his father there existed an ambivalence which in its range was quite extraordinary. On the one hand, he was the most pronounced rebel imaginable, and had developed manifestly in every direction in opposition to his father’s wishes and ideals; on the other hand, at a deeper level he was still the most submissive of sons, who after his father’s death denied himself all enjoyment of women out of a tender sense of guilt. His actual relations with men were clearly dominated by suspiciousness; his keen intellect easily rationalized this attitude; and he knew how to bring it about that both friends and acquaintances deceived and exploited him. The new thing I learned from studying him was that classical persecutory ideas may be present without finding belief or acceptance. They flashed up occasionally during the analysis, but he regarded them as unimportant and invariably scoffed at them. This may occur in many cases of paranoia; it may be that the delusions which we regard as new formations when the disease breaks out have already long been in existence.

It seems to me that we have here an important discovery - namely, that the qualitative factor, the presence of certain neurotic formations, has less practical significance than the quantitative factor, the degree of attention or, more correctly, the amount of cathexis that these structures are able to attract to themselves. Our consideration of the first case, the jealous paranoia, led to a similar estimate of the importance of the quantitative factor, by showing that there also the abnormality essentially consisted in the hypercathexis of the interpretations of someone else’s unconscious. We have long known of an analogous fact in the analysis of hysteria. The pathogenic phantasies, derivatives of repressed instinctual impulses, are for a long time tolerated alongside the normal life of the mind, and have no pathogenic effect until by a revolution in the libidinal economy they receive a hypercathexis; not till then does the conflict which leads to the formation of symptoms break out. Thus as our knowledge grows we are increasingly impelled to bring the economic point of view into the foreground. I should also like to throw out the question whether this quantitative factor that I am now dwelling on does not suffice to cover the phenomena which Bleuler and others have lately proposed to name ‘switching’. One need only assume that an increase in resistance in the course taken by the psychical current in one direction results in a hypercathexis of another path and thus causes the flow to be switched into that path.

Some Neurotic Mechanisms In Jealousy, Paranoia And Homosexuality

3906

My two cases of paranoia showed an instructive contrast in the behaviour of their dreams. Whereas those of the first case were free from delusion, as has already been said, the other patient produced great numbers of persecutory dreams, which may be regarded as forerunners of or substitutes for the delusional ideas. The pursuer, whom he only managed to escape with great fear, was usually a powerful bull or some other male symbol which even in the dream itself he sometimes recognized as representing his father. One day he produced a very characteristic paranoic transference-dream. He saw me shaving in front of him, and from the scent he realized that I was using the same soap as his father had used. I was doing this in order to oblige him to make a father-transference on to me. The choice of this incident for his dream quite unmistakably betrays the patient’s depreciatory attitude to his paranoic phantasies and his disbelief in them; for his own eyes could tell him every day that I was never in a position to make use of shaving-soap and that therefore there was in this respect nothing to which a father-transference could attach itself.

A comparison of the dreams of the two patients shows, however, that the question whether or not paranoia (or any other psychoneurosis) can penetrate into dreams is based on a false conception of dreams. Dreams are distinguished from waking thought by the fact that they can include material (belonging to the region of the repressed) which must not emerge in waking thought. Apart from this, dreams are merely a form of thinking, a transformation of preconscious material of thought by the dream-work and its conditions. Our terminology of the neuroses is not applicable to repressed material; this cannot be called hysterical, nor obsessional, nor paranoic. As against this, the other part of the material which is subjected to the process of dream-formation - the preconscious thoughts - may be normal or may bear the character of any neurosis; they may be the products of any of the pathogenic processes in which the essence of a neurosis lies There seems to be no reason why any such pathological idea should not be transformed into a dream. A dream may therefore quite simply represent a hysterical phantasy, an obsessional idea, or a delusion - that is, may reveal one or other of these upon interpretation. Observation of the two paranoics shows that the dreams of the one were quite normal while he was subject to his delusion, and that those of the other were paranoic in content while he was treating his delusional ideas with contempt. In both cases, therefore, the dream took up the material that was at the time forced into the background in waking life. This too, however, need not necessarily be an invariable rule.

Some Neurotic Mechanisms In Jealousy, Paranoia And Homosexuality

3907

C

Homosexuality. - Recognition of the organic factor in homosexuality does not relieve us of the obligation of studying the psychical processes connected with its origin. The typical process, already established in innumerable cases, is that a few years after the termination of puberty a young man, who until this time has been strongly fixated to his mother, changes his attitude; he identifies himself with his mother, and looks about for love-objects in whom he can re-discover himself, and whom he might then love as his mother loved him. The characteristic mark of this process is that for several years one of the necessary conditions for his love is usually that the male object shall be of the same age as he himself was when the change took place. We have come to know of various factors contributing to this result, probably in different degrees. First there is the fixation on the mother, which makes it difficult to pass on to another woman. Identification with the mother is an outcome of this attachment, and at the same time in a certain sense it enables the son to keep true to her, his first object. Then there is the inclination towards a narcissistic object-choice, which in general lies readier to hand and is easier to put into effect than a move towards the other sex. Behind this latter factor there lies concealed another of quite exceptional strength, or perhaps it coincides with it: the high value set upon the male organ and the inability to tolerate its absence in a love-object. Depreciation of women, and aversion to them, even horror of them, are generally derived from the early discovery that women have no penis. We subsequently discovered, as another powerful motive urging towards homosexual object-choice, regard for the father or fear of him; for the renunciation of women means that all rivalry with him (or with all men who may take his place) is avoided. The two last motives - the clinging to the condition of a penis in the object, as well as the retiring in favour of the father - may be ascribed to the castration complex. Attachment to the mother, narcissism, fear of castration - these are the factors (which incidentally have nothing specific about them)  that we have hitherto found in the psychical aetiology of homosexuality; and with these must be reckoned the effect of seduction, which is responsible for a premature fixation of the libido, as well as the influence of the organic factor which favours the passive role in love.

Some Neurotic Mechanisms In Jealousy, Paranoia And Homosexuality

3908

We have, however, never regarded this analysis of the origin of homosexuality as complete. I can now point to a new mechanism leading to homosexual object-choice, although I cannot say how large a part it plays in the formation of the extreme, manifest and exclusive type of homosexuality. Observation has directed my attention to several cases in which during early childhood impulses of jealousy, derived from the mother-complex and of very great intensity, arose against rivals, usually older brothers. This jealousy led to an exceedingly hostile and aggressive attitude towards these brothers which might sometimes reach the pitch of actual death-wishes, but which could not maintain themselves in the face of the subject’s further development. Under the influences of upbringing - and certainly not uninfluenced also by their own continuing powerlessness - these impulses yielded to repression and underwent a transformation, so that the rivals of the earlier period became the first homosexual love-objects. Such an outcome of the attachment to the mother shows various interesting relations with other processes known to us. First of all it is a complete contrast to the development of persecutory paranoia, in which the person who has before been loved becomes the hated persecutor, whereas here the hated rivals are transformed into love objects. It represents, too, an exaggeration of the process which, according to my view, leads to the birth of social instincts in the individual.¹ In both processes there is first the presence of jealous and hostile impulses which cannot achieve satisfaction; and both the affectionate and the social feelings of identification arise as reactive formations against the repressed aggressive impulses.

¹ Cf. my Group psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c).

Some Neurotic Mechanisms In Jealousy, Paranoia And Homosexuality

3909

This new mechanism of homosexual object-choice - its origin in rivalry which has been overcome and in aggressive impulses which have become repressed - is sometimes combined with the typical conditions already familiar to us. In the history of homosexuals one often hears that the change in them took place after the mother had praised another boy and set him up as a model. The tendency to a narcissistic object-choice was thus stimulated, and after a short phase of keen jealousy the rival became a love-object. As a rule, however, the new mechanism is distinguished by the change taking place at a much earlier period, and the identification with the mother receding into the background. Moreover, in the cases I have observed, it led only to homosexual attitudes which did not exclude heterosexuality and did not involve a horror feminae.

It is well known that a good number of homosexuals are characterized by a special development of their social instinctual impulses and by their devotion to the interests of the community. It would be tempting, as a theoretical explanation of this, to say that the behaviour towards men in general of a man who sees in other men potential love-objects must be different from that of a man who looks upon other men in the first instance as rivals in regard to women. The only objection to this is that jealousy and rivalry play their part in homosexual love as well, and that the community of men also includes these potential rivals. Apart from this speculative explanation, however, the fact that homosexual object-choice not infrequently proceeds from an early overcoming of rivalry with men cannot be without a bearing on the connection between homosexuality and social feeling.

In the light of psycho-analysis we are accustomed to regard social feeling as a sublimation of homosexual attitudes towards objects. In the homosexuals with marked social interests, it would seem that the detachment of social feeling from object choice has not been fully carried through.

3910

TWO ENCYCLOPAEDIA ARTICLES

(1923)

3911

Intentionally left blank

3912

TWO ENCYCLOPAEDIA ARTICLES

(A) PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

Psycho-analysis is the name (1) of a procedure for the investigation of mental processes which are almost inaccessible in any other way, (2) of a method (based upon that investigation) for the treatment of neurotic disorders and (3) of a collection of psychological information obtained along those lines, which is gradually being accumulated into a new scientific discipline.

History - The best way of understanding psycho-analysis is still by tracing its origin and development. In 1880 and 1881 Dr. Josef Breuer of Vienna, a well-known physician and experimental physiologist, was occupied in the treatment of a girl who had fallen ill of a severe hysteria while she was nursing her sick father. The clinical picture was made up of motor paralyses, inhibitions, and disturbances of consciousness. Following a hint given him by the patient herself, who was a person of great intelligence, he put her into a state of hypnosis and contrived that, by describing to him the moods and thoughts that were uppermost in her mind, she returned on each particular occasion to a normal mental condition. By consistently repeating the same laborious process, he succeeded in freeing her from all her inhibitions and paralyses, so that in the end he found his trouble rewarded by a great therapeutic success as well as by an unexpected insight into the nature of the puzzling neurosis. Nevertheless, Breuer refrained from following up his discovery or from publishing anything about the case until some ten years later, when the personal influence of the present writer (Freud, who had returned to Vienna in 1886 after studying in the school of Charcot) prevailed on him to take up the subject afresh and embark upon a joint study of it. These two, Breuer and Freud, published a preliminary paper ‘On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena’ in 1893, and in 1895 a volume entitled Studies on Hysteria (which reached its fourth edition in 1922), in which they described their therapeutic procedure as ‘cathartic’.

Two Encyclopaedia Articles

3913

Catharsis. - The investigations which lay at the root of Breuer and Freud’s studies led to two chief results, and these have not been shaken by subsequent experience: first, that hysterical symptoms have sense and meaning, being substitutes for normal mental acts; and secondly, that the uncovering of this unknown meaning is accompanied by the removal of the symptoms - so that in this case scientific research and therapeutic effort coincide. The observations were carried out upon a series of patients who were treated in the same manner as Breuer’s first patient, that is to say, put into a state of deep hypnosis; and the results seemed brilliant, until later their weak side became evident. The theoretical ideas put forward at that time by Breuer and Freud were influenced by Charcot’s theories on traumatic hysteria and could find support in the findings of his pupil Pierre Janet, which, though they were published earlier than the Studies, were in fact subsequent to Breuer’s first case. From the very beginning the factor of affect was brought into the foreground: hysterical symptoms, the authors maintained, came into existence when a mental process with a heavy charge of affect was in any way prevented from being levelled out along the normal path leading to consciousness and movement (i. e. was prevented from being ‘abreacted’); as a result of this the affect, which was in a sense ‘strangulated’, was diverted along wrong paths and flowed off into the somatic innervation (a process named ‘conversion’). The occasions upon which ‘pathogenic ideas’ of this kind arose were described by Breuer and Freud as ‘psychical traumas’, and, since these often dated back to the very remote past, it was possible for the authors to say that hysterics suffered mainly from reminiscences (which had not been dealt with). Under the treatment, therefore, ‘catharsis’ came about when the path to consciousness was opened and there was a normal discharge of affect. It will be seen that an essential part of this theory was the assumption of the existence of unconscious mental processes. Janet too had made use of unconscious acts in mental life; but, as he insisted in his later polemics against psycho-analysis, to him the phrase was no more than a make-shift expression, a ‘manière de parler’, and he intended to suggest no new point of view by it.

In a theoretical section of the Studies Breuer brought forward some speculative ideas about the processes of excitation in the mind. These ideas determined the direction of future lines of thought and even to-day have not received sufficient appreciation. But they brought his contributions to this branch of science to an end, and soon afterwards he withdrew from the common work.

Two Encyclopaedia Articles

3914

Transition to Psycho-analysis. - Contrasts between the views of the two authors had been visible even in the Studies. Breuer supposed that the pathogenic ideas produced their traumatic effect because they arose during ‘hypnoid states’, in which mental functioning was subject to special limitations. The present writer rejected this explanation and inclined to the belief that an idea became pathogenic if its content was in opposition to the predominant trend of the subject’s mental life so that it provoked him into ’defence’.(Janet had attributed to hysterical patients a constitutional incapacity for holding together the contents of their minds; and it was at this point that his path diverged from that of Breuer and Freud.) Moreover, the two innovations which led the present writer to move away from the cathartic method had already been mentioned in the Studies. After Breuer’s withdrawal they became the starting-point of fresh developments.

Abandonment of Hypnosis. - The first of these innovations was based on practical experience and led to a change in technique. The second consisted in an advance in the clinical understanding of neuroses. It soon appeared that the therapeutic hopes which had been placed upon cathartic treatment in hypnosis were to some extent unfulfilled. It was true that the disappearance of the symptoms went hand-in-hand with the catharsis, but total success turned out to be entirely dependent upon the patient’s relation to the physician and thus resembled the effect of ‘suggestion’. If that relation was disturbed, all the symptoms reappeared, just as though they had never been cleared up. In addition to this, the small number of people who could be put into a deep state of hypnosis involved a very considerable limitation, from the medical standpoint, of the applicability of the cathartic procedure. For these reasons the present writer decided to give up the use of hypnosis. But at the same time the impressions he had derived from hypnosis afforded him the means of replacing it.

Two Encyclopaedia Articles

3915

Free Association. - The effect of the hypnotic condition upon the patient had been so greatly to increase his ability to make associations that he was able straight away to find the path - inaccessible to his conscious reflection - which led from the symptom to the thoughts and memories connected with it. The abandonment of hypnosis seemed to make the situation hopeless, until the writer recalled a remark of Bernheim’s to the effect that things that had been experienced in a state of somnambulism were only apparently forgotten and that they could be brought into recollection at any time if the physician insisted forcibly enough that the patient knew them. The writer therefore endeavoured to insist on his unhypnotized patients giving him their associations, so that from the material thus provided he might find the path leading to what had been forgotten or fended off. He noticed later that the insistence was unnecessary and that copious ideas almost always arose in the patient’s mind, but that they were held back from being communicated and even from becoming conscious by certain objections put by the patient in his own way. It was to be expected - though this was still unproved and not until later confirmed by wide experience - that everything that occurred to a patient setting out from a particular starting-point must also stand in an internal connection with that starting-point; hence arose the technique of educating the patient to give up the whole of his critical attitude and of making use of the material which was thus brought to light for the purpose of uncovering the connections that were being sought. A strong belief in the strict determination of mental events certainly played a part in the choice of this technique as a substitute for hypnosis.

The ‘Fundamental Technical Rule’ of this procedure of ‘free association’ has from that time on been maintained in psycho-analytic work. The treatment is begun by the patient being required to put himself in the position of an attentive and dispassionate self-observer, merely to read off all the time the surface of his consciousness, and on the one hand to make a duty of the most complete honesty while on the other not to hold back any idea from communication, even if (1) he feels that it is too disagreeable or if (2) he judges that it is nonsensical or (3) too unimportant or (4) irrelevant to what is being looked for. It is uniformly found that precisely those ideas which provoke these last-mentioned reactions are of particular value in discovering the forgotten material.

Two Encyclopaedia Articles

3916

Psycho-analysis as an Interpretive Art. - The new technique altered the picture of the treatment so greatly, brought the physician into such a new relation to the patient and produced so many surprising results that it seemed justifiable to distinguish the procedure from the cathartic method by giving it a new name. The present writer gave this method of treatment, which could now be extended to many other forms of neurotic disorder, the name of psycho-analysis. Now, in the first resort, this psycho-analysis was an art of interpretation and it set itself the task of carrying deeper the first of Breuer’s great discoveries - namely, that neurotic symptoms are significant substitutes for other mental acts which have been omitted. It was now a question of regarding the material produced by the patients’ associations as though it hinted at a hidden meaning and of discovering that meaning from it. Experience soon showed that the attitude which the analytic physician could most advantageously adopt was to surrender himself to his own unconscious mental activity, in a state of evenly suspended attention, to avoid so far as possible reflection and the construction of conscious expectations, not to try to fix anything that he heard particularly in his memory, and by these means to catch the drift of the patient’s unconscious with his own unconscious. It was then found that, except under conditions that were too unfavourable, the patient’s associations emerged like allusions, as it were, to one particular theme and that it was only necessary for the physician to go a step further in order to guess the material which was concealed from the patient himself and to be able to communicate it to him. It is true that this work of interpretation was not to be brought under strict rules and left a great deal of play to the physician’s tact and skill; but, with impartiality and practice, it was usually possible to obtain trustworthy results - that is to say, results which were confirmed by being repeated in similar cases. At a time when so little was as yet known of the unconscious, the structure of the neuroses and the pathological processes underlying them, it was a matter for satisfaction that a technique of this kind should be available, even if it had no better theoretical basis. Moreover it is still employed in analyses at the present day in the same manner, though with a sense of greater assurance and with a better understanding of its limitations.

Two Encyclopaedia Articles

3917

The Interpretation of Parapraxes and Haphazard Acts. - It was a triumph for the interpretative art of psycho-analysis when it succeeded in demonstrating that certain common mental acts of normal people, for which no one had hitherto attempted to put forward a psychological explanation, were to be regarded in the same light as the symptoms of neurotics: that is to say, they had a meaning, which was unknown to the subject but which could easily be discovered by analytic means. The phenomena in question were such events as the temporary forgetting of familiar words and names, forgetting to carry out prescribed tasks, everyday slips of the tongue and of the pen, misreadings, losses and mislayings of objects, certain errors, instances of apparently accidental self-injury, and finally habitual movements carried out seemingly without intention or in play, tunes hummed ‘thoughtlessly’, and so on. All of these were shorn of their physiological explanation, if any such had ever been attempted, were shown to be strictly determined and were revealed as an expression of the subject’s suppressed intentions or as a result of a clash between two intentions one of which was permanently or temporarily unconscious. The importance of this contribution to psychology was of many kinds. The range of mental determinism was extended by it in an unforeseen manner; the supposed gulf between normal and pathological mental events was narrowed; in many cases a useful insight was afforded into the play of mental forces that must be suspected to lie behind the phenomena. Finally, a class of material was brought to light which is calculated better than any other to stimulate a belief in the existence of unconscious mental acts even in people to whom the hypothesis of something at once mental and unconscious seems strange and even absurd. The study of one’s own parapraxes and haphazard acts, for which most people have ample opportunities, is even to-day the best preparation for an approach to psycho-analysis. In analytic treatment, the interpretation of parapraxes retains a place as a means of uncovering the unconscious, alongside the immeasurably more important interpretation of associations.

The Interpretation of Dreams. - A new approach to the depths of mental life was opened when the technique of free association was applied to dreams, whether one’s own or those of patients in analysis. In fact, the greater and better part of what we know of the processes in the unconscious levels of the mind is derived from the interpretation of dreams. Psycho-analysis has restored to dreams the importance which was generally ascribed to them in ancient times, but it treats them differently. It does not rely upon the cleverness of the dream-interpreter but for the most part hands the task over to the dreamer himself by asking him for his associations to the separate elements of the dream. By pursuing these associations further we obtain knowledge of thoughts which coincide entirely with the dream but which can be recognized - up to a certain point - as genuine and completely intelligible portions of waking mental activity. Thus the recollected dream emerges as the manifest dream content, in contrast to the latent dream-thoughts discovered by interpretation. The process which has transformed the latter into the former, that is to say into ‘the dream’, and which is undone by the work of interpretation, may be called the ‘dream-work’.

Two Encyclopaedia Articles

3918

We also describe the latent dream-thoughts, on account of their connection with waking life, as ’residues of the day’. By the operation of the dream-work (to which it would be quite incorrect to ascribe any ‘creative’ character ) the latent dream thoughts are condensed in a remarkable way, are distorted by the displacement of psychical intensities and are arranged with a view to being represented in visual pictures; and, besides all this, before the manifest dream is arrived at, they are submitted to a process of secondary revision which seeks to give the new product something in the nature of sense and coherence. Strictly speaking, this last process does not form a part of the dream-work.

The Dynamic Theory of Dream-Formation. The motive power for the formation of dreams is not provided by the latent dream-thoughts or day’s residues, but by an unconscious impulse, repressed during the day, with which the day’s residues have been able to establish contact and which contrives to make a wish-fulfilment for itself out of the material of the latent thoughts. Thus every dream is on the one hand the fulfilment of a wish on the part of the unconscious and on the other hand (in so far as it succeeds in guarding the state of sleep against being disturbed) the fulfilment of the normal wish to sleep which set the sleep going. If we disregard the unconscious contribution to the formation of the dream and limit the dream to its latent thoughts, it can represent anything with which waking life has been concerned - a reflection, a warning, an intention, a preparation for the immediate future or, once again, the satisfaction of an unfulfilled wish. The unrecognizability, strangeness and absurdity of the manifest dream are partly the result of the translation of the thoughts into a different, so to say archaic, method of expression, but partly the effect of a restrictive, critically disapproving agency in the mind which does not entirely cease to function during sleep. It is plausible to suppose that the ‘dream-censorship’, which we regard as being responsible in the first instance for the distortion of the dream-thoughts into the manifest dream, is an expression of the same mental forces which during the day-time had held back or repressed the unconscious wishful impulse.

Two Encyclopaedia Articles

3919

It has been worth while to enter in some detail into the explanation of dreams, since analytic work has shown that the dynamics of the formation of dreams are the same as those of the formation of symptoms. In both cases we find a struggle between two trends, of which one is unconscious and ordinarily repressed and strives towards satisfaction - that is, wish-fulfilment - while the other, belonging probably to the conscious ego, is disapproving and repressive. The outcome of this conflict is a compromise-formation (the dream or the symptom) in which both trends have found an incomplete expression. The theoretical importance of this conformity between dreams and symptoms is illuminating. Since dreams are not pathological phenomena, the fact shows that the mental mechanisms which produce the symptoms of illness are equally present in normal mental life, that the same uniform law embraces both the normal and the abnormal and that the findings of research into neurotics or psychotics cannot be without significance for our understanding of the healthy mind.

Symbolism. - In the course of investigating the form of expression brought about by the dream-work, the surprising fact emerged that certain objects, arrangements and relations are represented, in a sense indirectly, by ‘symbols’, which are used by the dreamer without his understanding them and to which as a rule he offers no associations. Their translation has to be provided by the analyst, who can himself only discover it empirically by experimentally fitting it into the context. It was later found that linguistic usage, mythology and folklore afford the most ample analogies to dream-symbols. Symbols, which raise the most interesting and hitherto unsolved problems, seem to be a fragment of extremely ancient inherited mental equipment. The use of a common symbolism extends far beyond the use of a common language.

Two Encyclopaedia Articles

3920

The Aetiological Significance of Sexual Life. - The second novelty which emerged after the hypnotic technique had been replaced by free associations was of a clinical nature. It was discovered in the course of the prolonged search for the traumatic experiences from which hysterical symptoms appeared to be derived.The more carefully the search was pursued the more extensive seemed to be the network of aetiologically significant impressions involved, but the further back, too, did they reach into the patient’s puberty or childhood. At the same time they assumed a uniform character and eventually it became inevitable to bow before the evidence and recognize that at the root of the formation of every symptom there were to be found traumatic experiences from early sexual life. Thus a sexual trauma stepped into the place of an ordinary trauma and the latter was seen to owe its aetiological significance to an associative or symbolic connection with the former, which had preceded it. An investigation of cases of common nervousness (falling into the two classes of neurasthenia and anxiety neurosis) which was simultaneously undertaken led to the conclusion that these disorders could be traced to contemporary abuses in the patients’ sexual life and could be removed if these were brought to an end. It was thus easy to infer that neuroses in general are an expression of disturbances in sexual life, the so-called actual-neuroses being the consequences (by chemical agency) of contemporary injuries and the psycho-neuroses the consequences (by psychical modification) of bygone injuries to a biological function which had hitherto been gravely neglected by science. None of the theses of psycho-analysis has met with such tenacious scepticism or such embittered resistance as this assertion of the preponderating aetiological significance of sexual life in the neuroses. It should, however, be expressly remarked that, in its development up to the present day, psycho-analysis has found no reason to retreat from this opinion.

Infantile Sexuality. - As a result of its aetiological researches, psycho-analysis found itself in the position of dealing with a subject the very existence of which had scarcely been suspected previously. Science had become accustomed to consider sexual life as beginning with puberty and regarded manifestations of sexuality in children as rare signs of abnormal precocity and degeneracy. But now psycho-analysis revealed a wealth of phenomena, remarkable, yet of regular occurrence, which made it necessary to date back the beginning of the sexual function in children almost to the commencement of extra-uterine existence; and it was asked with astonishment how all this could have come to be overlooked.The first glimpses of sexuality in children had indeed been obtained through the analytic examination of adults and were consequently saddled with all the doubts and sources of error that could be attributed to such a belated retrospect; but subsequently (from 1908 onwards) a beginning was made with the analysis of children themselves and with the unembarrassed observation of their behaviour, and in this way direct confirmation was reached for the whole factual basis of the new view.

Two Encyclopaedia Articles

3921

Sexuality in children showed a different picture in many respects from that in adults, and, surprisingly enough, it exhibited numerous traces of what, in adults, were condemned as ‘perversions’. It became necessary to enlarge the concept of what was sexual, till it covered more than the impulsion towards the union of the two sexes in the sexual act or towards provoking particular pleasurable sensations in the genitals. But this enlargement was rewarded by the new possibility of grasping infantile, normal and perverse sexual life as a single whole.

The analytic researches carried out by the writer fell, to begin with, into the error of greatly overestimating the importance of seduction as a source of sexual manifestations in children and as a root for the formation of neurotic symptoms. This misapprehension was corrected when it became possible to appreciate the extraordinarily large part played in the mental life of neurotics by the activities of phantasy, which clearly carried more weight in neurosis than did external reality. Behind these phantasies there came to light the material which allows us to draw the picture which follows of the development of the sexual function.

The Development of the Libido. - The sexual instinct, the dynamic manifestation of which in mental life we shall call ‘libido’, is made up of component instincts into which it may once more break up and which are only gradually united into well-defined organizations. The sources of these component instincts are the organs of the body and in particular certain specially marked erotogenic zones; but contributions are made to libido from every important functional process in the body. At first the individual component instincts strive for satisfaction independently of one another, but in the course of development they become more and more convergent and concentrated. The first (pregenital) stage of organization to be discerned is the oral one, in which - in conformity with the suckling’s predominant interest - the oral zone plays the leading part. This is followed by the sadistic-anal organization, in which the anal zone and the component instinct of sadism are particularly prominent; at this stage the difference between the sexes is represented by the contrast between active and passive. The third and final stage of organization is that in which the majority of the component instincts converge under the primacy of the genital zones. As a rule this development is passed through swiftly and unobtrusively; but some individual portions of the instincts remain behind at the prodromal stages of the process and thus give rise to fixations of libido, which are important as constituting predispositions for subsequent irruptions of repressed impulses and which stand in a definite relation to the later development of neuroses and perversions. (See the article on ‘The Libido Theory’.)

Two Encyclopaedia Articles

3922

The Process of Finding an Object, and the Oedipus Complex. - In the first instance the oral component instinct finds satisfaction by attaching itself to the sating of the desire for nourishment; and its object is the mother’s breast. It then detaches itself, becomes independent and at the same time auto-erotic, that is, it finds an object in the child’s own body. Others of the component instincts also start by being auto-erotic and are not until later diverted on to an external object. It is a particularly important fact that the component instincts belonging to the genital zone habitually pass through a period of intense auto-erotic satisfaction. The component instincts are not all equally serviceable in the final genital organization of libido; some of them (for instance, the anal components) are consequently left aside and suppressed, or undergo complicated transformations.

In the very earliest years of childhood (approximately between the ages of two and five) a convergence of the sexual impulses occurs of which, in the case of boys, the object is the mother. This choice of an object, in conjunction with a corresponding attitude of rivalry and hostility towards the father, provides the content of what is known as the Oedipus complex, which in every human being is of the greatest importance in determining the final shape of his erotic life. It has been found to be characteristic of a normal individual that he learns to master his Oedipus complex, whereas the neurotic subject remains involved in it.

Two Encyclopaedia Articles

3923

The Diphasic Onset of Sexual Development. - Towards the end of the fifth year this early period of sexual life normally comes to an end. It is succeeded by a period of more or less complete latency, during which ethical restraints are built up, to act as defences against the desires of the Oedipus complex. In the subsequent period of puberty, the Oedipus complex is revivified in the unconscious and embarks upon further modifications. It is only at puberty that the sexual instincts develop to their full intensity; but the direction of that development, as well as all the predispositions for it, have already been determined by the early efflorescence of sexuality during childhood which preceded it. This diphasic development of the sexual function - in two stages, interrupted by the latency period - appears to be a biological peculiarity of the human species and to contain the determining factor for the origin of neuroses.

The Theory of Repression. - These theoretical considerations, taken together with the immediate impressions derived from analytic work, lead to a view of the neuroses which may be described in the roughest outline as follows. The neuroses are the expression of conflicts between the ego and such of the sexual impulses as seem to the ego incompatible with its integrity or with its ethical standards. Since these impulses are not ego-syntonic, the ego has repressed them: that is to say, it has withdrawn its interest from them and has shut them off from becoming conscious as well as from obtaining satisfaction by motor discharge. If in the course of analytic work one attempts to make these repressed impulses conscious, one becomes aware of the repressive forces in the form of resistance. But the achievement of repression fails particularly readily in the case of the sexual instincts. Their dammed-up libido finds other ways out from the unconscious: for it regresses to earlier phases of development and earlier attitudes towards objects, and, at weak points in the libidinal development where there are infantile fixations, it breaks through into consciousness and obtains discharge. What results is a symptom and consequently in its essence a substitutive sexual satisfaction. Nevertheless the symptom cannot entirely escape from the repressive forces of the ego and must therefore submit to modifications and displacements exactly as happens with dreams - by means of which its characteristic of being a sexual satisfaction becomes unrecognizable. Consequently symptoms are in the nature of compromises between the repressed sexual instincts and the repressing ego-instincts; they represent a wish-fulfilment for both partners to the conflict simultaneously, but one which is incomplete for each of them. This is quite strictly true of the symptoms of hysteria, while in the symptoms of obsessional neurosis there is often a stronger emphasis upon the side of the repressing function owing to the erection of reaction-formations, which are assurances against sexual satisfaction.

Two Encyclopaedia Articles

3924

Transference. - If further proof were needed of the truth that the motive forces behind the formation of neurotic symptoms are of a sexual nature, it would be found in the fact that in the course of analytic treatment a special emotional relation is regularly formed between the patient and the physician. This goes far beyond rational limits. It varies between the most affectionate devotion and the most obstinate enmity and derives all of its characteristics from earlier erotic attitudes of the patient’s which have become unconscious. This transference alike in its positive and in its negative form is used as a weapon by the resistance; but in the hands of the physician it becomes the most powerful therapeutic instrument and it plays a part scarcely to be over-estimated in the dynamics of the process of cure.

The Corner-Stones of Psycho-Analytic Theory. - The assumption that there are unconscious mental processes, the recognition of the theory of resistance and repression, the appreciation of the importance of sexuality and of the Oedipus complex - these constitute the principal subject-matter of psycho-analysis and the foundations of its theory. No one who cannot accept them all should count himself a psycho-analyst.

Later History of Psycho-Analysis. - Psycho-analysis was carried approximately thus far by the work of the writer of this article, who for more than ten years was its sole representative. In 1906 the Swiss psychiatrists Bleuler and C. G. Jung began to play a lively part in analysis; in 1907 a first conference of its supporters took place at Salzburg; and the young science soon found itself the centre of interest both among psychiatrists and laymen. Its reception in Germany, with her morbid craving for authority, was not precisely to the credit of German science and moved even so cool a partisan as Bleuler to an energetic protest. Yet no condemnation or dismissal at official congresses served to hold up the internal growth or external expansion of psycho-analysis. In the course of the next ten years it extended far beyond the frontiers of Europe and became especially popular in the United States of America, and this was due in no small degree to the advocacy and collaboration of Putnam (Boston), Ernest Jones (Toronto; later London), Flournoy (Geneva), Ferenczi (Budapest), Abraham (Berlin), and many others besides. The anathema which was imposed upon psycho-analysis led its supporters to combine in an international organization which in the present year (1922) is holding its eighth private Congress in Berlin and now includes local groups in Vienna, Budapest, Berlin, Holland, Zurich, London, New York, Calcutta and Moscow. This development was not interrupted even by the World War. In 1918-19 Dr. Anton von Freund of Budapest founded the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, which publishes journals and books concerned with psycho analysis, and in 1920 Dr. M. Eitingon opened in Berlin the first psycho-analytic clinic for the treatment of neurotics without private means. Translations of the writer’s principal works, which are now in preparation, into French, Italian and Spanish, testify to a growing interest in psycho-analysis in the Latin world as well.

Between 1911 and 1913 two movements of divergence from psycho-analysis took place, evidently with the object of mitigating its repellent features. One of these (sponsored by C. G. Jung), in an endeavour to conform to ethical standards, divested the Oedipus complex of its real significance by giving it only a symbolic value, and in practice neglected the uncovering of the forgotten and, as we may call it, ‘prehistoric’ period of childhood. The other (originated by Alfred Adler in Vienna) reproduced many factors from psycho-analysis under other names - repression, for instance, appeared in a sexualized version as the ‘masculine protest’. But in other respects it turned away from the unconscious and the sexual instincts, and endeavoured to trace back the development of character and of the neuroses to the ‘will to power’, which by means of overcompensation strives to check the dangers arising from ‘organ inferiority’. Neither of these movements, with their systematic structures, had any permanent influence on psycho-analysis. In the case of Adler’s theories it soon became clear that they had very little in common with psycho-analysis, which they were designed to replace.

Two Encyclopaedia Articles

3925

More Recent Advances in Psycho-Analysis. - Since psycho-analysis has become the field of work for such a large number of observers it has made advances, both in extent and depth; but unfortunately these can receive only the briefest mention in the present article.

Narcissism. - The most important theoretical advance has certainly been the application of the libido theory to the repressing ego. The ego itself came to be regarded as a reservoir of what was described as narcissistic libido, from which the libidinal cathexes of objects flowed out and into which they could be once more withdrawn. By the help of this conception it became possible to embark upon the analysis of the ego and to make a clinical distinction of the psychoneuroses into transference neuroses and narcissistic disorders. In the former (hysteria and obsessional neurosis) the subject has at his disposal a quantity of libido striving to be transferred on to extraneous objects, and use is made of this in carrying out analytic treatment; on the other hand, the narcissistic disorders (dementia praecox, paranoia, melancholia) are characterized by a withdrawal of the libido from objects and they are therefore scarcely accessible to analytic therapy. But their therapeutic inaccessibility has not prevented analysis from making the most fruitful beginnings in the deeper study of these illnesses, which are counted among the psychoses.

Development of Technique. - After the analyst’s curiosity had, as it were, been gratified by the elaboration of the technique of interpretation, it was inevitable that interest should turn to the problem of discovering the most effective way of influencing the patient. It soon became evident that the physician’s immediate task was to assist the patient in getting to know, and afterwards in overcoming, the resistances which emerged in him during treatment and of which, to begin with, he himself was unaware. And it was found at the same time that the essential part of the process of cure lay in the overcoming of these resistances and that unless this was achieved no permanent mental change could be brought about in the patient. Since the analyst’s efforts have in this way been directed upon the patient’s resistance, analytic technique has attained a certainty and delicacy rivalling that of surgery. Consequently, everyone is strongly advised against undertaking psycho-analytic treatments without a strict training, and a physician who ventures upon them on the strength of his medical qualification is in no respect better than a layman.

Two Encyclopaedia Articles

3926

Psycho-Analysis as a Therapeutic Procedure. - Psycho-analysis has never set itself up as a panacea and has never claimed to perform miracles. In one of the most difficult spheres of medical activity it is the only possible method of treatment for certain illnesses and for others it is the method which yields the best or the most permanent results - though never without a corresponding expenditure of time and trouble. A physician who is not wholly absorbed in the work of giving help will find his labours amply repaid by obtaining an unhoped-for insight into the complications of mental life and the interrelations between the mental and the physical. Where at present it cannot offer help but only theoretical understanding, it may perhaps be preparing the way for some later, more direct means of influencing neurotic disorders. Its province is above all the two transference neuroses, hysteria and obsessional neurosis, in which it has contributed to the discovery of their internal structure and operative mechanisms; and, beyond them, all kinds of phobias, inhibitions, deformities of character, sexual perversions and difficulties in erotic life. Some analysts (Jelliffe, Groddeck, Felix Deutsch) have reported too that the analytic treatment of gross organic diseases is not unpromising, since a mental factor not infrequently contributes to the origin and continuance of such illnesses. Since psycho-analysis demands a certain amount of psychical plasticity from its patients, some kind of age-limit must be laid down in their selection; and since it necessitates the devotion of long and intense attention to the individual patient, it would be uneconomical to squander such expenditure upon completely worthless persons who happen to be neurotic. Experience upon material in clinics can alone show what modifications may be necessary in order to make psycho-analytic treatment accessible to wider strata of the population or to adapt it to weaker intelligences.

Two Encyclopaedia Articles

3927

Comparison between Psycho-Analysis and Hypnotic and Suggestive Methods. - Psycho-analytic procedure differs from all methods making use of suggestion, persuasion, etc., in that it does not seek to suppress by means of authority any mental phenomenon that may occur in the patient. It endeavours to trace the causation of the phenomenon and to remove it by bringing about a permanent modification in the conditions that led to it. In psycho-analysis the suggestive influence which is inevitably exercised by the physician is diverted on to the task assigned to the patient of overcoming his resistances, that is, of carrying forward the curative process. Any danger of falsifying the products of a patient’s memory by suggestion can be avoided by prudent handling of the technique; but in general the arousing of resistances is a guarantee against the misleading effects of suggestive influence. It may be laid down that the aim of the treatment is to remove the patient’s resistances and to pass his repressions in review and thus to bring about the most far-reaching unification and strengthening of his ego, to enable him to save the mental energy which he is expending upon internal conflicts, to make the best of him that his inherited capacities will allow and so to make him as efficient and as capable of enjoyment as is possible. The removal of the symptoms of the illness is not specifically aimed at, but is achieved, as it were, as a by-product if the analysis is properly carried through. The analyst respects the patient’s individuality and does not seek to remould him in accordance with his own - that is, according to the physician’s - personal ideals; he is glad to avoid giving advice and instead to arouse the patient’s power of initiative.

Its Relation to Psychiatry. - Psychiatry is at present essentially a descriptive and classificatory science whose orientation is still towards the somatic rather than the psychological and which is without the possibility of giving explanations of the phenomena which it observes. Psycho-analysis does not, however, stand in opposition to it, as the almost unanimous behaviour of the psychiatrists might lead one to believe. On the contrary, as a depth-psychology, a psychology of those processes in mental life which are withdrawn from consciousness, it is called upon to provide psychiatry with an indispensable groundwork and to free it from its present limitations. We can foresee that the future will give birth to a scientific psychiatry, to which psycho-analysis has served as an introduction.

Two Encyclopaedia Articles

3928

Criticisms and Misunderstandings of Psycho-Analysis. - Most of what is brought up against psycho-analysis, even in scientific works, is based upon insufficient information which in its turn seems to be determined by emotional resistances. Thus it is a mistake to accuse psycho-analysis of ‘pan-sexualism’ and to allege that it derives all mental occurrences from sexuality and traces them all back to it. On the contrary, psycho-analysis has from the very first distinguished the sexual instincts from others which it has provisionally termed ‘ego instincts’. It has never dreamt of trying to explain ‘everything’, and even the neuroses it has traced back not to sexuality alone but to the conflict between the sexual impulses and the ego. In psycho-analysis (unlike the works of C. G. Jung) the term ‘libido’ does not mean psychical energy in general but the motive force of the sexual instincts. Some assertions, such as that every dream is the fulfilment of a sexual wish, have never been maintained by it at all. The charge of one-sidedness made against psycho-analysis, which, as the science of the unconscious mind, has its own definite and restricted field of work, is as inapplicable as it would be if it were made against chemistry. To believe that psycho-analysis seeks a cure for neurotic disorders by giving a free rein to sexuality is a serious misunderstanding which can only be excused by ignorance. The making conscious of repressed sexual desires in analysis makes it possible, on the contrary, to obtain a mastery over them which the previous repression had been unable to achieve. It can more truly be said that analysis sets the neurotic free from the chains of his sexuality. Moreover, it is quite unscientific to judge analysis by whether it is calculated to undermine religion, authority and morals; for, like all sciences, it is entirely non-tendentious and has only a single aim - namely to arrive at a consistent view of one portion of reality. Finally, one can only characterize as simple-minded the fear which is sometimes expressed that all the highest goods of humanity, as they are called - research, art, love, ethical and social sense - will lose their value or their dignity because psycho-analysis is in a position to demonstrate their origin in elementary and animal instinctual impulses.

Two Encyclopaedia Articles

3929

The Non-Medical Applications and Correlations of Psycho-analysis. - Any estimate of psycho-analysis would be incomplete if it failed to make clear that, alone among the medical disciplines, it has the most extensive relations with the mental sciences, and that it is in a position to play a part of the same importance in the studies of religious and cultural history and in the sciences of mythology and literature as it is in psychiatry. This may seem strange when we reflect that originally its only object was the understanding and improvement of neurotic symptoms. But it is easy to indicate the starting-point of the bridge that leads over to the mental sciences. The analysis of dreams gave us an insight into the unconscious processes of the mind and showed us that the mechanisms which produce pathological symptoms are also operative in the normal mind. Thus psychoanalysis became a depth-psychology and capable as such of being applied to the mental sciences, and it was able to answer a good number of questions with which the academic psychology of consciousness was helpless to deal. At quite an early stage problems of human phyllogenesis arose. It became clear that pathological function was often nothing more than a regression to an earlier stage in the development of normal function. C. G. Jung was the first to draw explicit attention to the striking similarity between the disordered phantasies of sufferers from dementia praecox and the myths of primitive peoples; while the present writer pointed out that the two wishes which combine to form the Oedipus complex coincide precisely with the two principal prohibitions imposed by totemism (not to kill the tribal ancestor and not to marry any woman belonging to one’s own clan) and drew far-reaching conclusions from this fact. The significance of the Oedipus complex began to grow to gigantic proportions and it looked as though social order, morals, justice and religion had arisen together in the primaeval ages of mankind as reaction-formations against the Oedipus complex. Otto Rank threw a brilliant light upon mythology and the history of literature by the application of psycho-analytic views, as did Theodor Reik upon the history of morals and religions, while Dr. Pfister, of Zurich, aroused the interest of religious and secular teachers and demonstrated the importance of the psycho-analytic standpoint for education. Further discussion of these applications of psycho-analysis would be out of place here, and it is enough to say that the limits of their influence are not yet in sight.

Two Encyclopaedia Articles

3930

Psycho-analysis an Empirical Science. - Psycho-analysis is not, like philosophies, a system starting out from a few sharply defined basic concepts, seeking to grasp the whole universe with the help of these and, once it is completed, having no room for fresh discoveries or better understanding. On the contrary, it keeps close to the facts in its field of study, seeks to solve the immediate problems of observation, gropes its way forward by the help of experience, is always incomplete and always ready to correct or modify its theories. There is no incongruity (any more than in the case of physics or chemistry) if its most general concepts lack clarity and if its postulates are provisional; it leaves their more precise definition to the results of future work.

Two Encyclopaedia Articles

3931

(B) THE LIBIDO THEORY

Libido is a term used in the theory of the instincts for describing the dynamic manifestation of sexuality. It was already used in this sense by Moll (1898) and was introduced into psycho-analysis by the present writer. What follows is limited to a description of the developments which the theory of the instincts has passed through in psycho-analysis - developments which are still proceeding.

Contrast between Sexual and Ego Instincts. - Psycho-analysis early became aware that all mental occurrences must be regarded as built on the basis of an interplay of the forces of the elementary instincts. This, however, led to a difficult predicament, since psychology included no theory of the instincts. No one could say what an instinct really was, the question was left entirely to individual caprice, and every psychologist was in the habit of postulating any instincts in any number that he chose. The first sphere of phenomena to be studied by psycho-analysis comprised what are known as the transference neuroses (hysteria and obsessional neurosis). It was found that their symptoms came about by sexual instinctual impulses being rejected (repressed) by the subject’s personality (his ego) and then finding expression by circuitous paths through the unconscious. These facts could be met by drawing a contrast between the sexual instincts and ego instincts (instincts of self-preservation ), which was in line with the popular saying that hunger and love are what make the world go round: libido was the manifestation of the force of love in the same sense as was hunger of the self-preservative instinct. The nature of the ego instincts remained for the time being undefined and, like all the other characteristics of the ego, inaccessible to analysis. There was no means of deciding whether, and if so what, qualitative differences were to be assumed to exist between the two classes of instincts.

Two Encyclopaedia Articles

3932

Primal Libido. - C. G. Jung attempted to resolve this obscurity along speculative lines by assuming that there was only a single primal libido which could be either sexualized or desexualized and which therefore coincided in its essence with mental energy in general. This innovation was methodologically disputable, caused a great deal of confusion, reduced the term ‘libido’ to the level of a superfluous synonym and was still in practice confronted with the necessity for distinguishing between sexual and asexual libido. The difference between the sexual instincts and instincts with other aims was not to be got rid of by means of a new definition.

Sublimation. - An attentive examination of the sexual trends, which alone were accessible to psycho-analysis, had meanwhile led to some remarkable detailed findings. What is described as the sexual instinct turns out to be of a highly composite nature and is liable to disintegrate once more into its component instincts. Each component instinct is unalterably characterized by its source, that is, by the region or zone of the body from which its excitation is derived. Each has furthermore as distinguishable features an object and an aim. The aim is always discharge accompanied by satisfaction, but it is capable of being changed from activity to passivity. The object is less closely attached to the instinct than was at first supposed; it is easily exchanged for another one, and, moreover, an instinct which had an external object can be turned round upon the subject’s own self. The separate instincts can either remain independent of one another or - in what is still an inexplicable manner - can be combined and merged into one another to perform work in common. They are also able to replace one another and to transfer their libidinal cathexis to one another, so that the satisfaction of one instinct can take the place of the satisfaction of others. The most important vicissitude which an instinct can undergo seems to be sublimation; here both object and aim are changed, so that what was originally a sexual instinct finds satisfaction in some achievement which is no longer sexual but has a higher social or ethical valuation. These different features do not as yet combine to form an integral picture.

Two Encyclopaedia Articles

3933

Narcissism. - A decisive advance was made when the analysis of dementia praecox and other psychotic disorders was ventured upon and thus the examination was begun of the ego itself, which had so far been known only as the agency of repression and opposition. It was found that the pathogenic process in dementia praecox is the withdrawal of the libido from objects and its introduction into the ego, while the clamorous symptoms of the disease arise from the vain struggles of the libido to find a pathway back to objects. It thus turned out to be possible for object-libido to change into cathexis of the ego and vice versa. Further reflection showed that this process must be presumed to occur on the largest scale and that the ego is to be regarded as a great reservoir of libido from which libido is sent out to objects and which is always ready to absorb libido flowing back from objects. Thus the instincts of self-preservation were also of a libidinal nature: they were sexual instincts which, instead of external objects, had taken the subject’s own ego as an object. Clinical experience had made us familiar with people who behaved in a striking fashion as though they were in love with themselves and this perversion had been given the name of narcissism. The libido of the self-preservative instincts was now described as narcissistic libido and it was recognized that a high degree of this self-love constituted the primary and normal state of things. The earlier formula laid down for the transference neuroses consequently required to be modified, though not corrected. It was better, instead of speaking of a conflict between sexual instincts and ego instincts, to speak of a conflict between object-libido and ego-libido, or, since the nature of these instincts was the same, between the object-cathexes and the ego.

Apparent Approach to Jung’s Views. - It thus seemed on the face of it as though the slow process of psycho-analytic research was following in the steps of Jung’s speculation about a primal libido, especially because the transformation of object-libido into narcissism necessarily carried along with it a certain degree of desexualization, or abandonment of the specifically sexual aims. Nevertheless, it has to be borne in mind that the fact that the self-preservative instincts of the ego are recognized as libidinal does not necessarily prove that there are no other instincts operating in the ego.

The Herd Instinct. - It has been maintained in many quarters that there is a special innate and not further analysable ‘herd instinct’, which determines the social behaviour of human beings and impels individuals to come together into larger communities. Psycho-analysis finds itself in contradiction to this view. Even if the social instinct is innate, it may without any difficulty be traced back to what were originally libidinal object-cathexes and may have developed in the childhood of the individual as a reaction-formation against hostile attitudes of rivalry. It is based on a peculiar kind of identification with other people.

Two Encyclopaedia Articles

3934

Aim-inhibited Sexual Impulses. - The social instincts belong to a class of instinctual impulses which need not be described as sublimated, though they are closely related to these. They have not abandoned their directly sexual aims, but they are held back by internal resistances from attaining them; they rest content with certain approximations to satisfaction and for that very reason lead to especially firm and permanent attachments between human beings. To this class belong in particular the affectionate relations between parents and children, which were originally fully sexual, feelings of friendship, and the emotional ties in marriage which had their origin in sexual attraction.

Recognition of Two Classes of Instincts in Mental Life. - Though psycho-analysis endeavours as a rule to develop its theories as independently as possible from those of other sciences, it is nevertheless obliged to seek a basis for the theory of the instincts in biology. On the ground of a far-reaching consideration of the processes which go to make up life and which lead to death, it becomes probable that we should recognize the existence of two classes of instincts, corresponding to the contrary processes of construction and dissolution in the organism. On this view, the one set of instincts, which work essentially in silence, would be those which follow the aim of leading the living creature to death and therefore deserve to be called the ‘death instincts’; these would be directed outwards as the result of the combination of numbers of unicellular elementary organisms, and would manifest themselves as destructiveness or aggressive impulses. The other set of instincts would be those which are better known to us in analysis - the libidinal, sexual or life instincts, which are best comprised under the name of Eros; their purpose would be to form living substance into ever greater unities, so that life may be prolonged and brought to higher development. The erotic instincts and the death instincts would be present in living beings in regular mixtures or fusions; but ‘defusions’ would also be liable to occur. Life would consist in the manifestations of the conflict or interaction between the two classes of instincts; death would mean for the individual the victory of the destructive instincts, but reproduction would mean for him the victory of Eros.

The Nature of the Instincts. - This view would enable us to characterize instincts as tendencies inherent in living substance towards restoring an earlier state of things: that is to say, they would be historically determined and of a conservative nature and, as it were, the expression of an inertia or elasticity present in what is organic. Both classes of instincts, Eros as well as the death instinct, would, on this view, have been in operation and working against each other from the first origin of life.

3935

A NOTE ON THE PREHISTORY OF THE TECHNIQUE OF ANALYSIS

(1920)

A recent book by Havelock Ellis (so justly admired for his researches into sexual science, and an eminent critic of psycho-analysis), which bears the title of The Philosophy of Conflict (1919), includes an essay on ‘Psycho-Analysis in Relation to Sex.’ The aim of this essay is to show that the writings of the creator of analysis should be judged not as a piece of scientific work but as an artistic production. We cannot but regard this view as a fresh turn taken by resistance and as a repudiation of analysis, even though it is disguised in a friendly, indeed in too flattering a manner. We are inclined to meet it with a most decided contradiction.

It is not, however, with a view to contradicting him on this point that we are now concerned with Havelock Ellis’s essay, but for another reason. His wide reading has enabled him to bring forward an author who practised and recommended free association as a technique, though for purposes other than ours, and thus has a claim to be regarded as a forerunner of psycho-analysis.

‘In 1857, Dr. J. J. Garth Wilkinson, more noted as a Swedenborgian mystic and poet than as a physician, published a volume of mystic doggerel verse written by what he considered "a new method", the method of "Impression". "A theme is chosen or written down," he stated; "as soon as this is done the first impression upon the mind which succeeds the act of writing the title is the beginning of the evolution of that theme, no matter how strange or alien the word or phrase may seem." "The first mental movement, the first word that comes" is "the response to the mind’s desire for the unfolding of the subject." It is continued by the same method, and Garth Wilkinson adds: "I have always found it lead by an infallible instinct into the subject." The method was, as Garth Wilkinson viewed it, a kind of exalted laissez-faire, a command to the deepest unconscious instincts to express themselves. Reason and will, he pointed out, are left aside; you trust to "an influx", and the faculties of the mind are "directed to ends they know not of". Garth Wilkinson, it must be clearly understood, although he was a physician, used this method for religious and literary, and never for scientific or medical ends; but it is easy to see that essentially it is the method of psycho-analysis applied to oneself, and it is further evidence how much Freud’s method is an artist’s method.’

A Note On The Prehistory Of The Technique Of Analysis

3936

Those who are familiar with psycho-analytic literature will recall at this point the interesting passage in Schiller’s correspondence with Körner¹ in which (1788) the great poet and thinker recommends anyone who desires to be productive to adopt the method of free association. It is to be suspected that what is alleged to be Garth Wilkinson’s new technique had already occurred to the minds of many others and that its systematic application in psycho-analysis is not evidence so much of Freud’s artistic nature as of his conviction, amounting almost to a prejudice, that all mental events are completely determined. It followed from this view that the first and most likely possibility was that a free association would be related to the subject designated; and this was confirmed by experience in analysis except in so far as too great resistances made the suspected connection unrecognizable.

Meanwhile it is safe to assume that neither Schiller nor Garth Wilkinson had in fact any influence on the choice of psycho-analytic technique. It is from another direction that there are indications of a personal influence at work.

¹ Pointed out by Otto Rank and quoted in my Interpretation of Dreams (1900a)

A Note On The Prehistory Of The Technique Of Analysis

3937

A short time ago in Budapest Dr. Hugo Dubowitz drew Dr. Ferenczi’s attention to a short essay covering only four and a half pages, by Ludwig Börne. This was written in 1823 and was reprinted in the first volume of the 1862 edition of his collected works. It is entitled ‘The Art of Becoming an Original Writer in Three Days’, and shows the familiar stylistic features of Jean Paul, of whom Börne was at that time a great admirer. He ends the essay with the following sentences:

‘And here follows the practical application that was promised. Take a few sheets of paper and for three days on end write down, without fabrication or hypocrisy, everything that comes into your head. Write down what you think of yourself, of your wife, of the Turkish War, of Goethe, of Fonk’s trial, of the Last Judgement, of your superiors - and when three days have passed you will be quite out of your senses with astonishment at the new and unheard-of thoughts you have had. This is the art of becoming an original writer in three days.’

When Professor Freud came to read this essay of Börne’s, he brought forward a number of facts that may have an important bearing on the question that is under discussion here as to the prehistory of the psycho-analytic use of free associations. He said that when he was fourteen he had been given Börne’s works as a present, that he still possessed the book now, fifty years later, and that it was the only one that had survived from his boyhood. Börne, he said, had been the first author into whose writings he had penetrated deeply. He could not remember the essay in question, but some of the others that were contained in the same volume - such as ‘A Tribute to the Memory of Jean Paul,’ ‘The Artist in Eating’, and ‘The Fool at the White Swan Inn’ - kept on recurring to his mind for no obvious reason over a long period of years. He was particularly astonished to find expressed in the advice to the original writer some opinions which he himself had always cherished and vindicated. For instance: ‘A disgraceful cowardliness in regard to thinking holds us all back. The censorship of governments is less oppressive than the censorship exercised by public opinion over our intellectual productions.’ (Moreover there is a reference here to a ‘censorship’, which reappears in psycho-analysis as the dream-censorship.) ‘It is not lack of intellect but lack of character that prevents most writers from being better than they are. . . . Sincerity is the source of all genius, and men would be cleverer if they were more moral. . . .’

Thus it seems not impossible that this hint may have brought to light the fragment of cryptomnesia which in so many cases may be suspected to lie behind apparent originality.

3938

ASSOCIATIONS OF A FOUR-YEAR-OLD CHILD

(1920)

Here is part of a letter from an American mother: ‘I must tell you what my little girl said yesterday. I have not yet recovered from my astonishment. Cousin Emily was talking of how she was going to take an apartment. Whereupon the child said: "If Emily gets married, she’ll have a baby." I was very much surprised and asked her: "Why, how do you know that?" And she replied: "Well, when anyone gets married, a baby always comes." I repeated: "But how can you tell that?" And the little girl answered: "Oh, I know a lot besides. I know that trees grow in the ground." What a strange association! That is precisely what I intend to say to her one day by way of enlightening her. Then she went on: "And I know that God makes the world." When she talks like this I can scarcely believe that she is not yet four years old.’

The mother herself seems to have understood the transition from the child’s first remark to her second one. What she was trying to say was: ‘I know that babies grow inside their mother.’ She was not expressing this knowledge directly, but symbolically, by replacing the mother by Mother Earth. We have already learnt from numerous incontestable observations the early age at which children know how to make use of symbols. But the little girl’s third remark carries on the same context. We can only suppose that she was trying to convey a further piece of her knowledge about the origin of babies: ‘I know that it’s all the work of the father.’ But this time she was replacing the direct thought by the appropriate sublimation - that God makes the world.

3939

DR. ANTON VON FREUND

(1920)

DR. ANTON VON FREUND, who has been General Secretary of the International Psycho-Analytical Association since the Budapest Congress in September 1918, died on January 20, 1920, in a Vienna sanatorium, a few days after completing his fortieth year. He was the most powerful promoter of our science and one of its brightest hopes. Born in Budapest in 1880, he obtained a doctorate in philosophy. He intended to become a teacher, but was persuaded to enter his father’s industrial undertaking. But the great successes he attained as a manufacturer and organizer failed to satisfy the two needs which were active in the depths of his nature - for social benefaction and scientific activity. Seeking nothing for himself, and possessing every gift which can charm and captivate, he used his material powers to assist others and to soften the hardness of their destiny as well as to sharpen in all directions the sense of social justice. In this way he acquired a wide circle of friends, who will deeply mourn his loss.

When, during his last years, he came to know psycho-analysis, it seemed to him to promise the fulfilment of his two great wishes. He set himself the task of helping the masses by psycho-analysis and of making use of the therapeutic effects of that medical technique, which had hitherto only been at the service of the rich, in order to mitigate the neurotic suffering of the poor. Since the State took no heed of the neuroses of the common people, since hospital clinics for the most part rejected psycho-analytic therapy without being able to offer any substitute for it, and since the few psycho-analytic physicians, tied by the necessity for maintaining themselves, were unequal to such a gigantic task, Anton von Freund sought, by his private initiative, to open a path for every one towards the fulfilment of this important social duty. During the years of the war he had collected what was then the very considerable sum of one and a half million kronen for humanitarian purposes in the city of Budapest. With the concurrence of Dr Stephan von Bárczy, the then Burgomaster, he assigned this sum for the foundation of a psycho-analytic Institute in Budapest, in which analysis was to be practised, taught and made accessible to the people. It was intended to train a considerable number of physicians in this Institute who would then receive an honorarium from it for the treatment of poor neurotics in an out-patient clinic. The Institute, furthermore, was to be a centre for further scientific research in analysis. Dr. Ferenczi was to be the scientific head of the Institute; von Freund himself was to undertake its organization and finances. The founder handed over a relatively smaller sum to Professor Freud for the foundation of an international psycho-analytic publishing house. But,

Was sind Hoffnungen, was sind Entwürfe,

die der Mensch, der vergängliche, baut?

Von Freund’s premature death has put an end to these philanthropic schemes, with all their scientific hopes. Though the fund which he collected is still in existence, the attitude of those who are now in power in the Hungarian capital gives no promise that his intentions will be fulfilled. Only the psycho-analytical publishing house has come to birth in Vienna.

None the less, the example which von Freund sought to set has already had its effect. A few weeks after his death, thanks to the energy and liberality of Dr. Max Eitingon, the first psycho-analytical out-patients’ clinic has been opened in Berlin. Thus von Freund’s work is carried on, though he himself can never be replaced or forgotten.

3940

PREFACE TO J. J. PUTNAM’S ADDRESSES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

(1921)

The editor of this series must feel a special satisfaction in being able to issue as its opening volume this collection of the psycho-analytical writings of Professor James J. Putnam, the distinguished neurologist of Harvard University. Professor Putnam, who died in 1918 at the age of seventy-two, was not only the first American to interest himself in psycho-analysis, but soon became its most decided supporter and its most influential representative in America. In consequence of the established reputation which he had gained through his activities as a teacher, as well as through his important work in the domain of organic nervous disease, and thanks to the universal respect which his personality enjoyed, he was able to do perhaps more than anyone for the spread of psycho-analysis in his own country, and was able to protect it from aspersions which, on the other side of the Atlantic no less than this, would inevitably have been cast upon it. But all such reproaches were bound to be silenced when a man of Putnam’s lofty ethical standards and moral rectitude had ranged himself among the supporters of the new science and of the therapeutics based upon it.

The papers here collected into a single volume, which were written by Putnam between 1909 and the end of his life, give a good picture of his relations to psycho-analysis. They show how he was at first occupied in correcting a provisional judgement which was based on insufficient knowledge; how he then accepted the essence of analysis, recognized its capacity for throwing a clear light upon the origin of human imperfections and failings, and how he was struck by the prospect of contributing towards the improvement of humanity along analytical lines; how he then became convinced by his own activities as a physician as to the truth of most of the psycho-analytical conclusions and postulates, and then in his turn bore witness to the fact that the physician who makes use of analysis understands far more about the sufferings of his patients and can do far more for them than was possible with the earlier methods of treatment; and finally how he began to extend beyond the limits of analysis, demanding that as a science it should be linked on to a particular philosophical system, and that its practice should be openly associated with a particular set of ethical doctrines.

Preface To J. J. Putnam's Addresses On Psycho-Analysis

3941

So it is not to be wondered at that a mind with such pre-eminently ethical and philosophical tendencies as Putnam’s should have desired, after he had plunged deep into psycho-analysis, to establish the closest relation between it and the aims which lay nearest his heart. But his enthusiasm, so admirable in a man of his advanced age, did not succeed in carrying others along with him. Younger people remained cooler. It was especially Ferenczi who expressed the opposite view. The decisive reason for the rejection of Putnam’s proposals was the doubt as to which of the countless philosophical systems should be accepted, since they all seemed to rest on an equally insecure basis, and since everything had up till then been sacrificed for the sake of the relative certainty of the results of psycho-analysis. It seemed more prudent to wait, and to discover whether a particular attitude towards life might be forced upon us with all the weight of necessity by analytical investigation itself.

It is our duty to express our thanks to the author’s widow, Mrs. Putnam, for her assistance with the manuscripts, with the copyrights, and with financial support, without all of which the publication of this volume would have been impossible. No English manuscripts were forthcoming in the case of the papers numbered VI, VII, and X. They have been translated into English by Dr. Katherine Jones from the German text which originated from Putnam himself.

This volume will keep fresh in analytical circles the memory of the friend whose loss we so profoundly deplore. May it be the first of a series of publications which shall serve the end of furthering the understanding and application of psycho-analysis among those who speak the English tongue - an end to which James J. Putnam dedicated the last ten years of his fruitful life.

January 1921

3942

INTRODUCTION TO J. VARENDONCK’S THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS

(1921)

This present volume of Dr. Varendonck’s contains a significant novelty, and will justly arouse the interest of all philosophers, psychologists and psycho-analysts. After an effort lasting for some years the author has succeeded in getting hold of the mode of thought-activity to which one abandons oneself during the state of distraction into which we readily pass before sleep or upon incomplete awakening. He has brought to the consciousness the chains of thought originating in these conditions without the interference of the will; he has written them down, studied their peculiarities and differences with directed conscious thinking, and has made thereby a series of important discoveries which lead to still vaster problems and give rise to the formulation of still more far-reaching questions. Many a point in the psychology of the dream and the defective act finds, thanks to the observations of Dr. Varendonck, a trustworthy settlement.

It is not my intention to give a review of the author’s results. I will content myself with pointing to the significance of his work and will permit myself only a remark concerning the terminology which he has adopted. He includes the sort of thought-activity which he has observed in Bleuler’s autistic thinking, but calls it, as a rule, fore-conscious thinking, according to the custom prevailing in psycho-analysis. However, the autistic thinking of Bleuler does not by any means correspond with the extension and the contents of the fore-conscious, neither can I admit that the name used by Bleuler has been happily chosen. The designation ‘fore-conscious’ thinking itself as a characteristic appears to me misleading and unsatisfactory. The point in question is that the sort of thought-activity of which the well-known day-dream is an example - complete by itself, developing a situation or an act that is being brought to a close - constitutes the best and until now the only studied example. This day-dreaming does not owe its peculiarities to the circumstances that it proceeds mostly fore-consciously, nor are the forms changed when it is accomplished consciously. From another point of view we know also that even strictly directed reflection may be achieved without the co-operation of consciousness, that is to say, fore-consciously. For that reason I think it is advisable, when establishing a distinction between the different modes of thought-activity, not to utilize the relation to consciousness in the first instance, and to designate the day-dream, as well as the chains of thought studied by Varendonck, as freely wandering or phantastic thinking, in opposition to intentionally directed reflection. At the same time it should be taken into consideration that even phantastic thinking is not invariably in want of an aim and end-representations.

3943

MEDUSA’S HEAD

(1940 [1922])

We have not often attempted to interpret individual mythological themes, but an interpretation suggests itself easily in the case of the horrifying decapitated head of Medusa.

To decapitate = to castrate. The terror of Medusa is thus a terror of castration that is linked to the sight of something. Numerous analyses have made us familiar with the occasion for this: it occurs when a boy, who has hitherto been unwilling to believe the threat of castration, catches sight of the female genitals, probably those of an adult, surrounded by hair, and essentially those of his mother.

The hair upon Medusa’s head is frequently represented in works of art in the form of snakes, and these once again are derived from the castration complex. It is a remarkable fact that, however frightening they may be in themselves, they nevertheless serve actually as a mitigation of the horror, for they replace the penis, the absence of which is the cause of the horror. This is a confirmation of the technical rule according to which a multiplication of penis symbols signifies castration.

The sight of Medusa’s head makes the spectator stiff with terror, turns him to stone. Observe that we have here once again the same origin from the castration complex and the same transformation of affect! For becoming stiff means an erection. Thus in the original situation it offers consolation to the spectator: he is still in possession of a penis, and the stiffening reassures him of the fact.

This symbol of horror is worn upon her dress by the virgin goddess Athene. And rightly so, for thus she becomes a woman who is unapproachable and repels all sexual desires - since she displays the terrifying genitals of the Mother. Since the Greeks were in the main strongly homosexual, it was inevitable that we should find among them a representation of woman as a being who frightens and repels because she is castrated.

If Medusa’s head takes the place of a representation of the female genitals, or rather if it isolates their horrifying effects from their pleasure-giving ones, it may be recalled that displaying the genitals is familiar in other connections as an apotropaic act. What arouses horror in oneself will produce the same effect upon the enemy against whom one is seeking to defend oneself. We read in Rabelais of how the Devil took to flight when the woman showed him her vulva.

The erect male organ also has an apotropaic effect, but thanks to another mechanism. To display the penis (or any of its surrogates) is to say: ‘I am not afraid of you. I defy you. I have a penis.’ Here, then, is another way of intimidating the Evil Spirit.

In order seriously to substantiate this interpretation it would be necessary to investigate the origin of this isolated symbol of horror in Greek mythology as well as parallels to it in other mythologies.

3944

THE EGO AND THE ID

(1923)

3945

Intentionally left blank

3946

THE EGO AND THE ID

The present discussions are a further development of some trains of thought which I opened up in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g), and to which, as I remarked there, my attitude was one of a kind of benevolent curiosity. In the following pages these thoughts are linked to various facts of analytic observation and an attempt is made to arrive at new conclusions from this conjunction; in the present work, however, there are no fresh borrowings from biology, and on that account it stands closer to psycho-analysis than does Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It is more in the nature of a synthesis than of a speculation and seems to have had an ambitious aim in view. I am conscious, however, that it does not go beyond the roughest outline and with that limitation I am perfectly content.

In these pages things are touched on which have not yet been the subject of psycho-analytic consideration, and it has not been possible to avoid trenching upon some theories which have been put forward by non-analysts or by former analysts on their retreat from analysis. I have elsewhere always been ready to acknowledge what I owe to other workers; but in this instance I feel burdened by no such debt of gratitude. If psycho-analysis has not hitherto shown its appreciation of certain things, this has never been because it overlooked their achievement or sought to deny their importance, but because it followed a particular path, which had not yet led so far. And finally, when it has reached them, things have a different look to it from what they have to others.

The Ego And The Id

3947

I

CONSCIOUSNESS AND WHAT IS UNCONSCIOUS

In this introductory chapter there is nothing new to be said and it will not be possible to avoid repeating what has often been said before.

The division of the psychical into what is conscious and what is unconscious is the fundamental premiss of psycho-analysis; and it alone makes it possible for psycho-analysis to understand the pathological processes in mental life, which are as common as they are important, and to find a place for them in the framework of science. To put it once more, in a different way: psycho-analysis cannot situate the essence of the psychical in consciousness, but is obliged to regard consciousness as a quality of the psychical, which may be present in addition to other qualities or may be absent.

If I could suppose that everyone interested in psychology would read this book, I should also be prepared to find that at this point some of my readers would already stop short and would go no further; for here we have the first shibboleth of psycho-analysis. To most people who have been educated in philosophy the idea of anything psychical which is not also conscious is so inconceivable that it seems to them absurd and refutable simply by logic. I believe this is only because they have never studied the relevant phenomena of hypnosis and dreams, which - quite apart from pathological manifestations -necessitate this view. Their psychology of consciousness is incapable of solving the problems of dreams and hypnosis.

The Ego And The Id

3948

‘Being conscious’ is in the first place a purely descriptive term, resting on perception of the most immediate and certain character. Experience goes on to show that a psychical element (for instance, an idea) is not as a rule conscious for a protracted length of time. On the contrary, a state of consciousness is characteristically very transitory; an idea that is conscious now is no longer so a moment later, although it can become so again under certain conditions that are easily brought about. In the interval the idea was - we do not know what. We can say that it was latent, and by this we mean that it was capable of becoming conscious at any time. Or, if we say that is was unconscious, we shall also be giving a correct description of it. Here ‘unconscious’ coincides with ‘latent and capable of becoming conscious’. The philosophers would no doubt object: ‘No, the term "unconscious" is not applicable here; so long as the idea was in a state of latency it was not anything psychical at all.’ To contradict them at this point would lead to nothing more profitable than a verbal dispute.

But we have arrived at the term or concept of the unconscious along another path, by considering certain experiences in which mental dynamics play a part. We have found - that is, we have been obliged to assume - that very powerful mental processes or ideas exist (and here a quantitative or economic factor comes into question for the first time) which can produce all the effects in mental life that ordinary ideas do (including effects that can in their turn become conscious as ideas), though they themselves do not become conscious. It is unnecessary to repeat in detail here what has been explained so often before. It is enough to say that at this point psycho-analytic theory steps in and asserts that the reason why such ideas cannot become conscious is that a certain force opposes them, that otherwise they could become conscious, and that it would then be apparent how little they differ from other elements which are admittedly psychical. The fact that in the technique of psycho-analysis a means has been found by which the opposing force can be removed and the ideas in question made conscious renders this theory irrefutable. The state in which the ideas existed before being made conscious is called by us repression, and we assert that the force which instituted the repression and maintains it is perceived as resistance during the work of analysis

The Ego And The Id

3949

Thus we obtain our concept of the unconscious from the theory of repression. The repressed is the prototype of the unconscious for us. We see, however, that we have two kinds of unconscious - the one which is latent but capable of becoming conscious, and the one which is repressed and which is not, in itself and without more ado, capable of becoming conscious. This piece of insight into psychical dynamics cannot fail to affect terminology and description. The latent, which is unconscious only descriptively, not in the dynamic sense, we call preconscious; we restrict the term unconscious to the dynamically unconscious repressed; so that now we have three terms, conscious (Cs.), preconscious (Pcs.), and unconscious (Ucs.), whose sense is no longer purely descriptive. The Pcs. is presumably a great deal closer to the Cs. than is the Ucs., and since we have called the Ucs. psychical we shall with even less hesitation call the latent Pcs. psychical. But why do we not rather, instead of this, remain in agreement with the philosophers and, in a consistent way, distinguish the Pcs. as well as the Ucs. from the conscious psychical? The philosophers would then propose that the Pcs. and the Ucs. should be described as two species or stages of the ‘psychoid’, and harmony would be established. But end less difficulties in exposition would follow; and the one important fact, that these two kinds of ‘psychoid’ coincide in almost every other respect with what is admittedly psychical, would be forced into the background in the interests of a prejudice dating from a period in which these psychoids, or the most important part of them, were still unknown.

The Ego And The Id

3950

We can now play about comfortably with our three terms, Cs., Pcs., and Ucs., so long as we do not forget that in the descriptive sense there are two kinds of unconscious, but in the dynamic sense only one. For purposes of exposition this distinction can in some cases be ignored, but in others it is of course indispensable. At the same time, we have become more or less accustomed to this ambiguity of the unconscious and have managed pretty well with it. As far as I can see, it is impossible to avoid this ambiguity; the distinction between conscious and unconscious is in the last resort a question of perception, which must be answered ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and the act of perception itself tells us nothing of the reason why a thing is or is not perceived. No one has a right to complain because the actual phenomenon expresses the dynamic factor ambiguously.¹

¹ This may be compared so far with my ‘Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis’ (1912g). A new turn taken by criticisms of the unconscious deserves consideration at this point. Some investigators, who do not refuse to recognize the facts of psycho-analysis but who are unwilling to accept the unconscious, find a way out of the difficulty in the fact, which no one contests, that in consciousness (regarded as a phenomenon) it is possible to distinguish a great variety of gradations in intensity or clarity. Just as there are processes which are very vividly, glaringly, and tangibly conscious, so we also experience others which are only faintly, hardly even noticeably conscious; those that are most faintly conscious are, it is argued, the ones to which psycho-analysis wishes to apply the unsuitable name ‘unconscious’. These too, however (the argument proceeds), are conscious or ‘in consciousness’, and can be made fully and intensely conscious if sufficient attention is paid to them.

In so far as it is possible to influence by arguments the decision of a question of this kind which depends either on convention or on emotional factors, we may make the following comments. The reference to gradations of clarity in consciousness is in no way conclusive and has no more evidential value than such analogous statements as: ‘There are so very many gradations in illumination - from the most glaring and dazzling light to the dimmest glimmer - therefore there is no such thing as darkness at all’; or, ‘There are varying degrees of vitality, therefore there is no such thing as death.’ Such statements may in a certain way have a meaning, but for practical purposes they are worthless. This will be seen if one tries to draw particular conclusions from them, such as, ‘there is therefore no need to strike a light’, or, ‘therefore all organisms are immortal’. Further, to include ‘what is unnoticeable’ under the concept of ‘what is conscious’ is simply to play havoc with the one and only piece of direct and certain knowledge that we have about the mind. And after all, a consciousness of which one knows nothing seems to me a good deal more absurd than something mental that is unconscious. Finally, this attempt to equate what is unnoticed with what is unconscious is obviously made without taking into account the dynamic conditions involved, which were the decisive factors in forming the psycho-analytic view. For it ignores two facts: first, that it is exceedingly difficult and requires very great effort to concentrate enough attention on something unnoticed of this kind; and secondly, that when this has been achieved the thought which was previously unnoticed is not recognized by consciousness, but often seems entirely alien and opposed to it and is promptly disavowed by it. Thus, seeking refuge from the unconscious in what is scarcely noticed or unnoticed is after all only a derivative of the preconceived belief which regards the identity of the psychical and the conscious as settled once and for all.

The Ego And The Id

3951

In the further course of psycho-analytic work, however, even these distinctions have proved to be inadequate and, for practical purposes, insufficient. This has become clear in more ways than one; but the decisive instance is as follows. We have formed the idea that in each individual there is a coherent organization of mental processes; and we call this his ego. It is to this ego that consciousness is attached; the ego controls the approaches to motility - that is, to the discharge of excitations into the external world; it is the mental agency which supervises all its own constituent processes, and which goes to sleep at night, though even then it exercises the censorship on dreams. From this ego proceed the repressions, too, by means of which it is sought to exclude certain trends in the mind not merely from consciousness but also from other forms of effectiveness and activity. In analysis these trends which have been shut out stand in opposition to the ego, and the analysis is faced with the task of removing the resistances which the ego displays against concerning itself with the repressed. Now we find during analysis that, when we put certain tasks before the patient, he gets into difficulties; his associations fail when they should be coming near the repressed. We then tell him that he is dominated by a resistance; but he is quite unaware of the fact, and, even if he guesses from his unpleasurable feelings that a resistance is now at work in him, he does not know what it is or how to describe it. Since, however, there can be no question but that this resistance emanates from his ego and belongs to it, we find ourselves in an unforeseen situation. We have come upon something in the ego itself which is also unconscious, which behaves exactly like the repressed - that is, which produces powerful effects without itself being conscious and which requires special work before it can be made conscious. From the point of view of analytic practice, the consequence of this discovery is that we land in endless obscurities and difficulties if we keep to our habitual forms of expression and try, for instance, to derive neuroses from a conflict between the conscious and the unconscious. We shall have to substitute for this antithesis another, taken from our insight into the structural conditions of the mind - the antithesis between the coherent ego and the repressed which is split off from it.¹

¹ Cf. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g).

The Ego And The Id

3952

For our conception of the unconscious, however, the consequences of our discovery are even more important. Dynamic considerations caused us to make our first correction; our insight into the structure of the mind leads to the second. We recognize that the Ucs. does not coincide with the repressed; it is still true that all that is repressed is Ucs., but not all that is Ucs. is repressed. A part of the ego, too - and Heaven knows how important a part - may be Ucs., undoubtedly is Ucs. And this Ucs. belonging to the ego is not latent like the Pcs.; for if it were, it could not be activated without becoming Cs., and the process of making it conscious would not encounter such great difficulties. When we find ourselves thus confronted by the necessity of postulating a third Ucs., which is not repressed, we must admit that the characteristic of being unconscious begins to lose significance for us. It becomes a quality which can have many meanings, a quality which we are unable to make, as we should have hoped to do, the basis of far-reaching and inevitable conclusions. Nevertheless we must beware of ignoring this characteristic, for the property of being conscious or not is in the last resort our one beacon-light in the darkness of depth-psychology.

The Ego And The Id

3953

II

THE EGO AND THE ID

Pathological research has directed our interest too exclusively to the repressed. We should like to learn more about the ego, now that we know that it, too, can be unconscious in the proper sense of the word. Hitherto the only guide we have had during our investigations has been the distinguishing mark of being conscious or unconscious; we have finally come to see how ambiguous this can be.

Now all our knowledge is invariably bound up with consciousness. We can come to know even the Ucs, only by making it conscious. But stop, how is that possible? What does it mean when we say ‘making something conscious’? How can that come about?

We already know the point from which we have to start in this connection. We have said that consciousness is the surface of the mental apparatus; that is, we have ascribed it as a function to a system which is spatially the first one reached from the external world - and spatially not only in the functional sense but, on this occasion, also in the sense of anatomical dissection.¹ Our investigations too must take this perceiving surface as a starting-point.

All perceptions which are received from without (sense-perceptions) and from within - what we call sensations and feelings - are Cs. from the start. But what about those internal processes which we may - roughly and inexactly - sum up under the name of thought-processes? They represent displacements of mental energy which are effected somewhere in the interior of the apparatus as this energy proceeds on its way towards action. Do they advance to the surface, which causes consciousness to be generated? Or does consciousness make its way to them? This is clearly one of the difficulties that arise when one begins to take the spatial or ‘topographical’ idea of mental life seriously. Both these possibilities are equally unimaginable, there must be a third alternative.

¹ Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

The Ego And The Id

3954

I have already, in another place,¹ suggested that the real difference between a Ucs. and a Pcs. idea (thought) consists in this: that the former is carried out on some material which remains unknown, whereas the latter (the Pcs.) is in addition brought into connection with word-presentations. This is the first attempt to indicate distinguishing marks for the two systems, the Pcs. and the Ucs., other than their relation to consciousness. The question, ‘How does a thing become conscious?’ would thus be more advantageously stated: ‘How does a thing become preconscious?’ And the answer would be: ‘Through becoming connected with the word-presentations corresponding to it.’

These word-presentations are residues of memories; they were at one time perceptions, and like all mnemic residues they can become conscious again. Before we concern ourselves further with their nature, it dawns upon us like a new discovery that only something which has once been a Cs. perception can become conscious, and that anything arising from within (apart from feelings) that seeks to become conscious must try to transform itself into external perceptions: this becomes possible by means of memory-traces.

We think of the mnemic residues as being contained in systems which are directly adjacent to the system Pcpt.-Cs., so that the cathexes of those residues can readily extend from within on to the elements of the latter system. We immediately think here of hallucinations, and of the fact that the most vivid memory is always distinguishable both from a hallucination and from an external perception; but it will also occur to us at once that when a memory is revived the cathexis remains in the mnemic system, whereas a hallucination, which is not distinguishable from a perception, can arise when the cathexis does not merely spread over from the memory-trace on to the Pcpt. element, but passes over to it entirely.

¹ ‘The Unconscious’.

The Ego And The Id

3955

Verbal residues are derived primarily from auditory perceptions, so that the system Pcs. has, as it were, a special sensory source. The visual components of word-presentations are secondary, acquired through reading, and may to begin with be left on one side; so may the motor images of words, which, except with deaf-mutes, play the part of auxiliary indications. In essence a word is after all the mnemic residue of a word that has been heard.

We must not be led, in the interests of simplification perhaps, to forget the importance of optical mnemic residues, when they are of things, or to deny that it is possible for thought-processes to become conscious through a reversion to visual residues, and that in many people this seems to be the favoured method. The study of dreams and of preconscious phantasies as shown in Varendonck’s observations can give us an idea of the special character of this visual thinking. We learn that what becomes conscious in it is as a rule only the concrete subject-matter of the thought, and that the relations between the various elements of this subject-matter, which is what specially characterizes thoughts, cannot be given visual expression. Thinking in pictures is, therefore, only a very incomplete form of becoming conscious. In some way, too, it stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and it is unquestionably older than the latter both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.

To return to our argument: if, therefore, this is the way in which something that is in itself unconscious becomes preconscious, the question how we make something that is repressed (pre)conscious would be answered as follows. It is done by supplying Pcs. intermediate links through the work of analysis. Consciousness remains where it is, therefore; but, on the other hand, the Ucs. does not rise into the Cs.

Whereas the relation of external perceptions to the ego is quite perspicuous, that of internal perceptions to the ego requires special investigation. It gives rise once more to a doubt whether we are really right in referring the whole of consciousness to the single superficial system Pcpt-Cs.

The Ego And The Id

3956

Internal perceptions yield sensations of processes arising in the most diverse and certainly also in the deepest strata of the mental apparatus. Very little is known about these sensations and feelings; those belonging to the pleasure-unpleasure series may still be regarded as the best examples of them. They are more primordial, more elementary, than perceptions arising externally and they can come about even when consciousness is clouded. I have elsewhere expressed my views about their greater economic significance and the metapsychological reasons for this. These sensations are multilocular, like external perceptions; they may come from different places simultaneously and may thus have different or even opposite qualities.

Sensations of a pleasurable nature have not anything inherently impelling about them, whereas unpleasurable ones have it in the highest degree. The latter impel towards change, towards discharge, and that is why we interpret unpleasure as implying a heightening and pleasure a lowering of energic cathexis. Let us call what becomes conscious as pleasure and unpleasure a quantitative and qualitative ‘something’ in the course of mental events; the question then is whether this ‘something’ can become conscious in the place where it is, or whether it must first be transmitted to the system Pcpt.

Clinical experience decides for the latter. It shows us that this ‘something’ behaves like a repressed impulse. It can exert driving force without the ego noticing the compulsion. Not until there is resistance to the compulsion, a hold-up in the discharge-reaction, does the ‘something’ at once become conscious as unpleasure. In the same way that tensions arising from physical needs can remain unconscious, so also can pain - a thing intermediate between external and internal perception, which behaves like an internal perception even when its source is in the external world. It remains true, therefore, that sensations and feelings, too, only become conscious through reaching the system Pcpt.; if the way forward is barred, they do not come into being as sensations, although the ‘something’ that corresponds to them in the course of excitation is the same as if they did. We then come to speak, in a condensed and not entirely correct manner, of ‘unconscious feelings’, keeping up an analogy with unconscious ideas which is not altogether justifiable. Actually the difference is that, whereas with Ucs ideas connecting links must be created before they can be brought into the Cs., with feelings, which are themselves transmitted directly, this does not occur. In other words: the distinction between Cs. and Pcs, has no meaning where feelings are concerned; the Pcs. here drops out - and feelings are either conscious or unconscious. Even when they are attached to word-presentations, their becoming conscious is not due to that circumstance, but they become so directly.

The Ego And The Id

3957

The part played by word-presentations now becomes perfectly clear. By their interposition internal thought-processes are made into perceptions. It is like a demonstration of the theorem that all knowledge has its origin in external perception. When a hypercathexis of the process of thinking takes place, thoughts are actually perceived - as if they came from without and are consequently held to be true.

After this clarifying of the relations between external and internal perception and the superficial system Pcpt.-Cs., we can go on to work out our idea of the ego. It starts out, as we see, from the system Pcpt., which is its nucleus, and begins by embracing the Pcs., which is adjacent to the mnemic residues. But, as we have learnt, the ego is also unconscious.

Now I think we shall gain a great deal by following the suggestion of a writer who, from personal motives, vainly asserts that he has nothing to do with the rigours of pure science. I am speaking of Georg Groddeck, who is never tired of insisting that what we call our ego behaves essentially passively in life, and that, as he expresses it, we are ‘lived’ by unknown and uncontrollable forces.¹ We have all had impressions of the same kind, even though they may not have overwhelmed us to the exclusion of all others, and we need feel no hesitation in finding a place for Groddeck’s discovery in the structure of science. I propose to take it into account by calling the entity which starts out from the system Pcpt. and begins by being Pcs. the ‘ego’, and by following Groddeck in calling the other part of the mind, into which this entity extends and which behaves as though it were Ucs., the ‘id’.²

¹ Groddeck (1923)

² Groddeck himself no doubt followed the example of Nietzsche, who habitually used this grammatical term for whatever in our nature is impersonal and, so to speak, subject to natural law.

The Ego And The Id

3958

We shall soon see whether we can derive any advantage from this view for purposes either of description or of understanding. We shall now look upon an individual as a psychical id, unknown and unconscious, upon whose surface rests the ego, developed from its nucleus the Pcpt. system. If we make an effort to represent this pictorially, we may add that the ego does not completely envelop the id, but only does so to the extent to which the system Pcpt. forms its surface, more or less as the germinal disc rests upon the ovum. The ego is not sharply separated from the id; its lower portion merges into it.

But the repressed merges into the id as well, and is merely a part of it. The repressed is only cut off sharply from the ego by the resistances of repression; it can communicate with the ego through the id. We at once realize that almost all the lines of demarcation we have drawn at the instigation of pathology relate only to the superficial strata of the mental apparatus - the only ones known to us. The state of things which we have been describing can be represented diagrammatically (Fig. 1); though it must be remarked that the form chosen has no pre tensions to any special applicability, but is merely intended to serve for purposes of exposition.

Fig. 1.

The Ego And The Id

3959

We might add, perhaps, that the ego wears a ‘cap of hearing’ - on one side only, as we learn from cerebral anatomy. It might be said to wear it awry.

It is easy to see that the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world through the medium of the Pcpt.-Cs.; in a sense it is an extension of the surface-differentiation. Moreover, the ego seems to bring the influence of the external world to bear upon the id and its tendencies, and endeavours to substitute the reality principle for the pleasure principle which reigns unrestrictedly in the id. For the ego, perception plays the part which in the id falls to instinct. The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions. All this falls into line with popular distinctions which we are all familiar with; at the same time, however, it is only to be regarded as holding good on the average or ‘ideally’.

The functional importance of the ego is manifested in the fact that normally control over the approaches to motility devolves upon it. Thus in its relation to the id it is like a man on horse back, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength while the ego uses borrowed forces. The analogy may be carried a little further. Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id’s will into action as if it were its own.

Another factor, besides the influence of the system Pcpt., seems to have played a part in bringing about the formation of the ego and its differentiation from the id. A person’s own body, and above all its surface, is a place from which both external and internal perceptions may spring. It is seen like any other object, but to the touch it yields two kinds of sensations, one of which may be equivalent to an internal perception. Psycho-physiology has fully discussed the manner in which a person’s own body attains its special position among other objects in the world of perception. Pain, too, seems to play a part in the process, and the way in which we gain new knowledge of our organs during painful illnesses is perhaps a model of the way by which in general we arrive at the idea of our body.

The Ego And The Id

3960

The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface. If we wish to find an anatomical analogy for it we can best identify it with the ‘cortical homunculus’ of the anatomists, which stands on its head in the cortex, sticks up its heels, faces backwards and, as we know, has its speech-area on the left-hand side.

The relation of the ego to consciousness has been entered into repeatedly; yet there are some important facts in this connection which remain to be described here. Accustomed as we are to taking our social or ethical scale of values along with us wherever we go, we feel no surprise at hearing that the scene of the activities of the lower passions is in the unconscious; we expect, moreover, that the higher any mental function ranks in our scale of values the more easily it will find access to consciousness assured to it. Here, however, psycho-analytic experience disappoints us. On the one hand, we have evidence that even subtle and difficult intellectual operations which ordinarily require strenuous reflection can equally be carried out preconsciously and without coming into consciousness. Instances of this are quite incontestable; they may occur, for example, during the state of sleep, as is shown when someone finds, immediately after waking, that he knows the solution to a difficult mathematical or other problem with which he had been wrestling in vain the day before.¹

¹ I was quite recently told an instance of this which was, in fact, brought up as an objection against my description of the ‘dream-work’.

The Ego And The Id

3961

There is another phenomenon, however, which is far stranger. In our analyses we discover that there are people in whom the faculties of self-criticism and conscience - mental activities, that is, that rank as extremely high ones - are unconscious and unconsciously produce effects of the greatest importance; the example of resistance remaining unconscious during analysis is therefore by no means unique. But this new discovery, which compels us, in spite of our better critical judgement, to speak of an ‘unconscious sense of guilt’, bewilders us far more than the other and sets us fresh problems, especially when we gradually come to see that in a great number of neuroses an unconscious sense of guilt of this kind plays a decisive economic part and puts the most powerful obstacles in the way of recovery. If we come back once more to our scale of values, we shall have to say that not only what is lowest but also what is highest in the ego can be unconscious. It is as if we were thus supplied with a proof of what we have just asserted of the conscious ego: that it is first and foremost a body-ego.

The Ego And The Id

3962

III

THE EGO AND THE SUPER-EGO (EGO IDEAL)

If the ego were merely the part of the id modified by the influence of the perceptual system, the representative in the mind of the real external world, we should have a simple state of things to deal with. But there is a further complication.

The considerations that led us to assume the existence of a grade in the ego, a differentiation within the ego, which may be called the ‘ego ideal’ or ‘super-ego’, have been stated elsewhere.¹They still hold good.² The fact that this part of the ego is less firmly connected with consciousness is the novelty which calls for explanation.

At this point we must widen our range a little. We succeeded in explaining the painful disorder of melancholia by supposing that an object which was lost has been set up again inside the ego - that is, that an object-cathexis has been replaced by an identification.³ At that time, however, we did not appreciate the full significance of this process and did not know how common and how typical it is. Since then we have come to understand that this kind of substitution has a great share in determining the form taken by the ego and that it makes an essential contribution towards building up what is called its ‘character’.

¹ Cf. ‘On Narcissism: an Introduction’ (1914c), and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c).

² Except that I seem to have been mistaken in ascribing the function of ‘reality-testing’ to this super-ego - a point which needs correction. It would fit in perfectly with the relations of the ego to the world of perception if reality-testing remained a task of the ego itself. Some earlier suggestions about a ‘nucleus of the ego’, never very definitely formulated, also require to be put right, since the system Pcpt.-Cs. alone can be regarded as the nucleus of the ego.

³ Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917e).

The Ego And The Id

3963

At the very beginning, in the individual’s primitive oral phase, object-cathexis and identification are no doubt indistinguishable from each other. We can only suppose that later on object-cathexes proceed from the id, which feels erotic trends as needs. The ego, which to begin with is still feeble, becomes aware of the object-cathexes, and either acquiesces in them or tries to fend them off by the process of repression.¹

When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can only be described as a setting up of the object inside the ego, as it occurs in melancholia; the exact nature of this substitution is as yet unknown to us. It may be that by this introjection, which is a kind of regression to the mechanism of the oral phase, the ego makes it easier for the object to be given up or renders that process possible. It may be that this identification is the sole condition under which the id can give up its objects. At any rate the process, especially in the early phases of development, is a very frequent one, and it makes it possible to suppose that the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and that it contains the history of those object-choices. It must, of course, be admitted from the outset that there are varying degrees of capacity for resistance, which decide the extent to which a person’s character fends off or accepts the influences of the history of his erotic object-choices. In women who have had many experiences in love there seems to be no difficulty in finding vestiges of their object-cathexes in the traits of their character. We must also take into consideration cases of simultaneous object-cathexis and identification - cases, that is, in which the alteration in character occurs before the object has been given up. In such cases the alteration in character has been able to survive the object-relation and in a certain sense to conserve it.

¹ An interesting parallel to the replacement of object-choice by identification is to be found in the belief of primitive peoples, and in the prohibitions based upon it, that the attributes of animals which are incorporated as nourishment persist as part of the character of those who eat them. As is well known, this belief is one of the roots of cannibalism and its effects have continued through the series of usages of the totem meal down to Holy Communion. The consequences ascribed by this belief to oral mastery of the object do in fact follow in the case of the later sexual object-choice.

The Ego And The Id

3964

From another point of view it may be said that this transformation of an erotic object-choice into an alteration of the ego is also a method by which the ego can obtain control over the id and deepen its relations with it - at the cost, it is true, of acquiescing to a large extent in the id’s experiences. When the ego assumes the features of the object, it is forcing itself, so to speak, upon the id as a love-object and is trying to make good the id’s loss by saying: ‘Look, you can love me too - I am so like the object.’

The transformation of object-libido into narcissistic libido which thus takes place obviously implies an abandonment of sexual aims, a desexualization - a kind of sublimation, therefore. Indeed, the question arises, and deserves careful consideration, whether this is not the universal road to sublimation, whether all sublimation does not take place though the mediation of the ego, which begins by changing sexual object-libido into narcissistic libido and then, perhaps, goes on to give it another aim.¹ We shall later on have to consider whether other instinctual vicissitudes may not also result from this transformation, whether, for instance, it may not bring about a defusion of the various instincts that are fused together.

Although it is a digression from our aim, we cannot avoid giving our attention for a moment longer to the ego’s object-identifications. If they obtain the upper hand and become too numerous, unduly powerful and incompatible with one another, a pathological outcome will not be far off. It may come to a disruption of the ego in consequence of the different identifications becoming cut off from one another by resistances; perhaps the secret of the cases of what is described as ‘multiple personality’ is that the different identifications seize hold of consciousness in turn. Even when things do not go so far as this, there remains the question of conflicts between the various identifications into which the ego comes apart, conflicts which cannot after all be described as entirely pathological.

¹ Now that we have distinguished between the ego and the id, we must recognize the id as the great reservoir of libido indicated in my paper on narcissism (1914c). The libido which flows into the ego owing to the identifications described above brings about its ‘secondary narcissism’.

The Ego And The Id

3965

But, whatever the character’s later capacity for resisting the influences of abandoned object-cathexes may turn out to be, the effects of the first identifications made in earliest childhood will be general and lasting. This leads us back to the origin of the ego ideal; for behind it there lies hidden an individual’s first and most important identification, his identification with the father in his own personal prehistory.¹ This is apparently not in the first instance the consequence or outcome of an object-cathexis; it is a direct and immediate identification and takes place earlier than any object-cathexis. But the object-choices belonging to the first sexual period and relating to the father and mother seem normally to find their outcome in an identification of this kind, and would thus reinforce the primary one.

The whole subject, however, is so complicated that it will be necessary to go into it in greater detail. The intricacy of the problem is due to two factors: the triangular character of the Oedipus situation and the constitutional bisexuality of each individual.

In its simplified form the case of a male child may be described as follows. At a very early age the little boy develops an object-cathexis for his mother, which originally related to the mother’s breast and is the prototype of an object-choice on the anaclitic model; the boy deals with his father by identifying himself with him. For a time these two relationships proceed side by side, until the boy’s sexual wishes in regard to his mother become more intense and his father is perceived as an obstacle to them; from this the Oedipus complex originates.² His identification with his father then takes on a hostile colouring and changes into a wish to get rid of his father in order to take his place with his mother. Henceforward his relation to his father is ambivalent; it seems as if the ambivalence inherent in the identification from the beginning had become manifest. An ambivalent attitude to his father and an object-relation of a solely affectionate kind to his mother make up the content of the simple positive Oedipus complex in a boy.

¹ Perhaps it would be safer to say ‘with the parents’; for before a child has arrived at definite knowledge of the difference between the sexes, the lack of a penis, it does not distinguish in value between its father and its mother. I recently came across the instance of a young married woman whose story showed that, after noticing the lack of a penis in herself, she had supposed it to be absent not in all women, but only in those whom she regarded as inferior, and had still supposed that her mother possessed one. In order to simplify my presentation I shall discuss only identification with the father.

² Cf. Group Psychology (1921c), loc. cit.

The Ego And The Id

3966

Along with the demolition of the Oedipus complex, the boy’s object-cathexis of his mother must be given up. Its place may be filled by one of two things: either an identification with his mother or an intensification of his identification with his father. We are accustomed to regard the latter outcome as the more normal; it permits the affectionate relation to the mother to be in a measure retained. In this way the dissolution of the Oedipus complex would consolidate the masculinity in a boy’s character. In a precisely analogous way, the outcome of the Oedipus attitude in a little girl may be an intensification of her identification with her mother (or the setting up of such an identification for the first time) - a result which will fix the child’s feminine character.

These identifications are not what we should have expected, since they do not introduce the abandoned object into the ego; but this alternative outcome may also occur, and is easier to observe in girls than in boys. Analysis very often shows that a little girl, after she has had to relinquish her father as a love-object, will bring her masculinity into prominence and identify herself with her father (that is, with the object which has been lost), instead of with her mother. This will clearly depend on whether the masculinity in her disposition - whatever that may consist in - is strong enough.

The Ego And The Id

3967

It would appear, therefore, that in both sexes the relative strength of the masculine and feminine sexual dispositions is what determines whether the outcome of the Oedipus situation shall be an identification with the father or with the mother. This is one of the ways in which bisexuality takes a hand in the subsequent vicissitudes of the Oedipus complex. The other way is even more important. For one gets an impression that the simple Oedipus complex is by no means its commonest form, but rather represents a simplification or schematization which, to be sure, is often enough justified for practical purposes. Closer study usually discloses the more complete Oedipus complex, which is twofold, positive and negative, and is due to the bisexuality originally present in children: that is to say, a boy has not merely an ambivalent attitude towards his father and an affectionate object-choice towards his mother, but at the same time he also behaves like a girl and displays an affectionate feminine attitude to his father and a corresponding jealousy and hostility towards his mother. It is this complicating element introduced by bisexuality that makes it so difficult to obtain a clear view of the facts in connection with the earliest object-choices and identifications, and still more difficult to describe them intelligibly. It may even be that the ambivalence displayed in the relations to the parents should be attributed entirely to bisexuality and that it is not, as I have represented above, developed out of identification in consequence of rivalry.

In my opinion it is advisable in general, and quite especially where neurotics are concerned, to assume the existence of the complete Oedipus complex. Analytic experience then shows that in a number of cases one or the other constituent disappears, except for barely distinguishable traces; so that the result is a series with the normal positive Oedipus complex at one end and the inverted negative one at the other, while its intermediate members exhibit the complete form with one or other of its two components preponderating. At the dissolution of the Oedipus complex the four trends of which it consists will group themselves in such a way as to produce a father-identification and a mother-identification. The father-identification will preserve the object-relation to the mother which belonged to the positive complex and will at the same time replace the object-relation to the father which belonged to the inverted complex: and the same will be true, mutatis mutandis, of the mother-identification. The relative intensity of the two identifications in any individual will reflect the preponderance in him of one or other of the two sexual dispositions.

The Ego And The Id

3968

The broad general outcome of the sexual phase dominated by the Oedipus complex may, therefore, be taken to be the forming of a precipitate in the ego, consisting of these two identifications in some way united with each other. This modification of the ego retains its special position; it confronts the other contents of the ego as an ego ideal or super-ego.

The super-ego is, however, not simply a residue of the earliest object-choices of the id; it also represents an energetic reaction-formation against those choices. Its relation to the ego is not exhausted by the precept: ‘You ought to be like this (like your father).’ It also comprises the prohibition: ‘You may not be like this (like your father) - that is, you may not do all that he does; some things are his prerogative.’ This double aspect of the ego ideal derives from the fact that the ego ideal had the task of repressing the Oedipus complex; indeed, it is to that revolutionary event that it owes its existence. Clearly the repression of the Oedipus complex was no easy task. The child’s parents, and especially his father, were perceived as the obstacle to a realization of his Oedipus wishes; so his infantile ego fortified itself for the carrying out of the repression by erecting this same obstacle within itself. It borrowed strength to do this, so to speak, from the father, and this loan was an extraordinarily momentous act. The super-ego retains the character of the father, while the more powerful the Oedipus complex was and the more rapidly it succumbed to repression (under the influence of authority, religious teaching, schooling and reading), the stricter will be the domination of the super-ego over the ego later on - in the form of conscience or perhaps of an unconscious sense of guilt. I shall presently bring forward a suggestion about the source of its power to dominate in this way - the source, that is, of its compulsive character which manifests itself in the form of a categorical imperative.

The Ego And The Id

3969

If we consider once more the origin of the super-ego as we have described it, we shall recognize that it is the outcome of two highly important factors, one of a biological and the other of a historical nature: namely, the lengthy duration in man of his childhood helplessness and dependence, and the fact of his Oedipus complex, the repression of which we have shown to be connected with the interruption of libidinal development by the latency period and so with the diphasic onset of man’s sexual life. According to one psycho-analytic hypothesis, the last-mentioned phenomenon, which seems to be peculiar to man, is a heritage of the cultural development necessitated by the glacial epoch. We see, then, that the differentiation of the super-ego from the ego is no matter of chance; it represents the most important characteristics of the development both of the individual and of the species; indeed, by giving permanent expression to the influence of the parents it perpetuates the existence of the factors to which it owes its origin.

Psycho-analysis has been reproached time after time with ignoring the higher, moral, supra-personal side of human nature. The reproach is doubly unjust, both historically and methodologically. For, in the first place, we have from the very beginning attributed the function of instigating repression to the moral and aesthetic trends in the ego, and secondly, there has been a general refusal to recognize that psycho-analytic research could not, like a philosophical system, produce a complete and ready-made theoretical structure, but had to find its way step by step along the path towards understanding the intricacies of the mind by making an analytic dissection of both normal and abnormal phenomena. So long as we had to concern ourselves with the study of what is repressed in mental life, there was no need for us to share in any agitated apprehensions as to the whereabouts of the higher side of man. But now that we have embarked upon the analysis of the ego we can give an answer to all those whose moral sense has been shocked and who have complained that there must surely be a higher nature in man: ‘Very true,’ we can say, ‘and here we have that higher nature, in this ego ideal or super-ego, the representative of our relation to our parents. When we were little children we knew these higher natures, we admired them and feared them; and later we took them into ourselves.’

The Ego And The Id

3970

The ego ideal is therefore the heir of the Oedipus complex, and thus it is also the expression of the most powerful impulses and most important libidinal vicissitudes of the id. By setting up this ego ideal, the ego has mastered the Oedipus complex and at the same time placed itself in subjection to the id. Whereas the ego is essentially the representative of the external world, of reality, the super-ego stands in contrast to it as the representative of the internal world, of the id. Conflicts between the ego and the ideal will, as we are now prepared to find, ultimately reflect the contrast between what is real and what is psychical, between the external world and the internal world.

Through the forming of the ideal, what biology and the vicissitudes of the human species have created in the id and left behind in it is taken over by the ego and re-experienced in relation to itself as an individual. Owing to the way in which the ego ideal is formed, it has the most abundant links with the phylogenetic acquisition of each individual - his archaic heritage. What has belonged to the lowest part of the mental life of each of us is changed, through the formation of the ideal, into what is highest in the human mind by our scale of values. It would be vain, however, to attempt to localize the ego ideal, even in the sense in which we have localized the ego, or to work it into any of the analogies with the help of which we have tried to picture the relation between the ego and the id.

The Ego And The Id

3971

It is easy to show that the ego ideal answers to everything that is expected of the higher nature of man. As a substitute for a longing for the father, it contains the germ from which all religions have evolved. The self-judgement which declares that the ego falls short of its ideal produces the religious sense of humility to which the believer appeals in his longing. As a child grows up, the role of father is carried on by teachers and others in authority; their injunctions and prohibitions remain powerful in the ego ideal and continue, in the form of conscience, to exercise the moral censorship. The tension between the demands of conscience and the actual performances of the ego is experienced as a sense of guilt. Social feelings rest on identifications with other people, on the basis of having the same ego ideal.

Religion, morality, and a social sense - the chief elements in the higher side of man¹ - were originally one and the same thing. According to the hypothesis which I put forward in Totem and Taboo they were acquired phylogenetically out of the father-complex: religion and moral restraint through the process of mastering the Oedipus complex itself, and social feeling through the necessity for overcoming the rivalry that then remained between the members of the younger generation. The male sex seems to have taken the lead in all these moral acquisitions; and they seem to have then been transmitted to women by cross-inheritance. Even to-day the social feelings arise in the individual as a superstructure built upon impulses of jealous rivalry against his brothers and sisters. Since the hostility cannot be satisfied, an identification with the former rival develops. The study of mild cases of homosexuality confirms the suspicion that in this instance, too, the identification is a substitute for an affectionate object-choice which has taken the place of the aggressive, hostile attitude.²

¹ I am at the moment putting science and art on one side.

² Cf. Group Psychology (1921c) and ‘Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality’ (1922b).

The Ego And The Id

3972

With the mention of phylogenesis, however, fresh problems arise, from which one is tempted to draw cautiously back. But there is no help for it, the attempt must be made - in spite of a fear that it will lay bare the inadequacy of our whole effort. The question is: which was it, the ego of primitive man or his id, that acquired religion and morality in those early days out of the father-complex? If it was his ego, why do we not speak simply of these things being inherited by the ego? If it was the id, how does that agree with the character of the id? Or are we wrong in carrying the differentiation between ego, super-ego, and id back into such early times? Or should we not honestly confess that our whole conception of the processes in the ego is of no help in understanding phylogenesis and cannot be applied to it?

Let us answer first what is easiest to answer. The differentiation between ego and id must be attributed not only to primitive man but even to much simpler organisms, for it is the inevitable expression of the influence of the external world. The super-ego, according to our hypothesis, actually originated from the experiences that led to totemism. The question whether it was the ego or the id that experienced and acquired these things soon comes to nothing. Reflection at once shows us that no external vicissitudes can be experienced or undergone by the id, except by way of the ego, which is the representative of the external world to the id. Nevertheless it is not possible to speak of direct inheritance in the ego. It is here that the gulf between an actual individual and the concept of a species becomes evident. Moreover, one must not take the difference between ego and id in too hard-and-fast a sense, nor forget that the ego is a specially differentiated part of the id. The experiences of the ego seem at first to be lost for inheritance; but, when they have been repeated often enough and with sufficient strength in many individuals in successive generations, they transform themselves, so to say, into experiences of the id, the impressions of which are preserved by heredity. Thus in the id, which is capable of being inherited, are harboured residues of the existences of countless egos; and, when the ego forms its super-ego out of the id, it may perhaps only be reviving shapes of former egos and be bringing them to resurrection.

The Ego And The Id

3973

The way in which the super-ego came into being explains how it is that the early conflicts of the ego with the object-cathexes of the id can be continued in conflicts with their heir, the super-ego. If the ego has not succeeded in properly mastering the Oedipus complex, the energic cathexis of the latter, springing from the id, will come into operation once more in the reaction-formation of the ego ideal. The abundant communication between the ideal and these Ucs. instinctual impulses solves the puzzle of how it is that the ideal itself can to a great extent remain unconscious and inaccessible to the ego. The struggle which once raged in the deepest strata of the mind, and was not brought to an end by rapid sublimation and identification, is now continued in a higher region, like the Battle of the Huns in Kaulbach’s painting.

The Ego And The Id

3974

IV

THE TWO CLASSES OF INSTINCTS

We have already said that, if the differentiation we have made of the mind into an id, an ego, and a super-ego represents any advance in our knowledge, it ought to enable us to understand more thoroughly the dynamic relations within the mind and to describe them more clearly. We have also already concluded that the ego is especially under the influence of perception, and that, speaking broadly, perceptions may be said to have the same significance for the ego as instincts have for the id. At the same time the ego is subject to the influence of the instincts, too, like the id, of which it is, as we know, only a specially modified part.

I have lately developed a view of the instincts¹ which I shall here hold to and take as the basis of my further discussions. According to this view we have to distinguish two classes of instincts, one of which, the sexual instincts or Eros, is by far the more conspicuous and accessible to study. It comprises not merely the uninhibited sexual instinct proper and the instinctual impulses of an aim-inhibited or sublimated nature derived from it, but also the self-preservative instinct, which must be assigned to the ego and which at the beginning of our analytic work we had good reason for contrasting with the sexual object-instincts. The second class of instincts was not so easy to point to; in the end we came to recognize sadism as its representative. On the basis of theoretical considerations, supported by biology, we put forward the hypothesis of a death instinct, the task of which is to lead organic life back into the inanimate state; on the other hand, we supposed that Eros, by bringing about a more and more far-reaching combination of the particles into which living substance is dispersed, aims at complicating life and at the same time, of course, at preserving it. Acting in this way, both the instincts would be conservative in the strictest sense of the word, since both would be endeavouring to re-establish a state of things that was disturbed by the emergence of life. The emergence of life would thus be the cause of the continuance of life and also at the same time of the striving towards death; and life itself would be a conflict and compromise between these two trends. The problem of the origin of life would remain a cosmological one; and the problem of the goal and purpose of life would be answered dualistically.

¹ Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

The Ego And The Id

3975

On this view, a special physiological process (of anabolism of catabolism) would be associated with each of the two classes of instincts; both kinds of instinct would be active in every particle of living substance, though in unequal proportions, so that some one substance might be the principal representative of Eros.

This hypothesis throws no light whatever upon the manner in which the two classes of instincts are fused, blended, and alloyed with each other; but that this takes place regularly and very extensively is an assumption indispensable to our conception. It appears that, as a result of the combination of unicellular organisms into multicellular forms of life, the death instinct of the single cell can successfully be neutralized and the destructive impulses be diverted on to the external world through the instrumentality of a special organ. This special organ would seem to be the muscular apparatus; and the death instinct would thus seem to express itself - though probably only in part - as an instinct of destruction directed against the external world and other organisms.

Once we have admitted the idea of a fusion of the two classes of instincts with each other, the possibility of a - more or less complete - ‘defusion’ of them forces itself upon us. The sadistic component of the sexual instinct would be a classical example of a serviceable instinctual fusion; and the sadism which has made itself independent as a perversion would be typical of a defusion, though not of one carried to extremes. From this point we obtain a view of a great domain of facts which has not before been considered in this light. We perceive that for purposes of discharge the instinct of destruction is habitually brought into the service of Eros; we suspect that the epileptic fit is a product and indication of an instinctual defusion; and we come to understand that instinctual defusion and the marked emergence of the death instinct call for particular consideration among the effects of some severe neuroses - for instance, the obsessional neuroses. Making a swift generalization, we might conjecture that the essence of a regression of libido (e. g. from the genital to the sadistic-anal phase) lies in a defusion of instincts, just as, conversely, the advance from the earlier phase to the definitive genital one would be conditioned by an accession of erotic components. The question also arises whether ordinary ambivalence, which is so often unusually strong in the constitutional disposition to neurosis, should not be regarded as the product of a defusion; ambivalence, however, is such a fundamental phenomenon that it more probably represents an instinctual fusion that has not been completed.

The Ego And The Id

3976

It is natural that we should turn with interest to enquire whether there may not be instructive connections to be traced between the structures we have assumed to exist - the ego, the super-ego and the id - on the one hand and the two classes of instincts on the other; and, further, whether the pleasure principle which dominates mental processes can be shown to have any constant relation both to the two classes of instincts and to these differentiations which we have drawn in the mind. But before we discuss this, we must clear away a doubt which arises concerning the terms in which the problem itself is stated. There is, it is true, no doubt about the pleasure principle, and the differentiation within the ego has good clinical justification; but the distinction between the two classes of instincts does not seem sufficiently assured and it is possible that facts of clinical analysis may be found which will do away with its pretension.

One such fact there appears to be. For the opposition between the two classes of instincts we may put the polarity of love and hate. There is no difficulty in finding a representative of Eros; but we must be grateful that we can find a representative of the elusive death instinct in the instinct of destruction, to which hate points the way. Now, clinical observation shows not only that love is with unexpected regularity accompanied by hate (ambivalence), and not only that in human relationships hate is frequently a forerunner of love, but also that in a number of circumstances hate changes into love and love into hate. If this change is more than a mere succession in time - if, that is, one of them actually turns into the other - then clearly the ground is cut away from under a distinction so fundamental as that between erotic instincts and death instincts, one which presupposes physiological processes running in opposite directions.

The Ego And The Id

3977

Now the case in which someone first loves and then hates the same person (or the reverse) because that person has given him cause for doing so, has obviously nothing to do with our problem. Nor has the other case, in which feelings of love that have not yet become manifest express themselves to begin with by hostility and aggressive tendencies; for it may be that here the destructive component in the object-cathexis has hurried on ahead and is only later on joined by the erotic one. But we know of several instances in the psychology of the neuroses in which it is more plausible to suppose that a transformation does take place. In persecutory paranoia the patient fends off an excessively strong homosexual attachment to some particular person in a special way; and as a result this person whom he loved most becomes a persecutor, against whom the patient directs an often dangerous aggressiveness. Here we have a right to interpolate a previous phase which has transformed the love into hate. In the case of the origin of homosexuality, and of desexualized social feelings as well, analytic investigation has only recently taught us to recognize that violent feelings of rivalry are present which lead to aggressive inclinations, and that it is only after these have been surmounted that the formerly hated object becomes the loved one or gives rise to an identification. The question arises whether in these instances we are to assume a direct transformation of hate into love. It is clear that here the changes are purely internal and an alteration in the behaviour of the object plays no part in them.

There is another possible mechanism, however, which we have come to know of by analytic investigation of the processes concerned in the change in paranoia. An ambivalent attitude is present from the outset and the transformation is effected by means of a reactive displacement of cathexis, energy being withdrawn from the erotic impulse and added to the hostile one.

The Ego And The Id

3978

Not quite the same thing but something like it happens when the hostile rivalry leading to homosexuality is overcome. The hostile attitude has no prospect of satisfaction; consequently - for economic reasons, that is - it is replaced by a loving attitude for which there is more prospect of satisfaction - that is, possibility of discharge. So we see that we are not obliged in any of these cases to assume a direct transformation of hate into love, which would be incompatible with the qualitative distinction between the two classes of instincts.

It will be noticed, however, that by introducing this other mechanism of changing love into hate, we have tacitly made another assumption which deserves to be stated explicitly. We have reckoned as though there existed in the mind - whether in the ego or in the id - a displaceable energy, which, neutral in itself, can be added to a qualitatively differentiated erotic or destructive impulse, and augment its total cathexis. Without assuming the existence of a displaceable energy of this kind we can make no headway. The only question is where it comes from, what it belongs to, and what it signifies.

The problem of the quality of instinctual impulses and of its persistence throughout their various vicissitudes is still very obscure and has hardly been attacked up to the present. In the sexual component instincts, which are especially accessible to observation, it is possible to perceive a few processes which are in the same category as what we are discussing. We see, for instance, that some degree of communication exists between the component instincts, that an instinct deriving from one particular erotogenic source can make over its intensity to reinforce another component instinct originating from another source, that the satisfaction of one instinct can take the place of the satisfaction of another, and more facts of the same nature - which must encourage us to venture upon certain hypotheses.

The Ego And The Id

3979

In the present discussion, moreover, I am only putting forward a hypothesis; I have no proof to offer. It seems a plausible view that this displaceable and neutral energy, which is no doubt active in both in the ego and in the id, proceeds from the narcissistic store of libido - that it is desexualized Eros. (The erotic instincts appear to be altogether more plastic, more readily diverted and displaced than the destructive instincts.) From this we can easily go on to assume that this displaceable libido is employed in the service of the pleasure principle to obviate blockages and to facilitate discharge. In this connection it is easy to observe a certain indifference as to the path along which the discharge takes place, so long as it takes place somehow. We know this trait; it is characteristic of the cathectic processes in the id. It is found in erotic cathexes, where a peculiar indifference in regard to the object displays itself; and it is especially evident in the transferences arising in analysis, which develop inevitably, irrespective of the persons who are their object. Not long ago Rank published some good examples of the way in which neurotic acts of revenge can be directed against the wrong people. Such behaviour on the part of the unconscious reminds one of the comic story of the three village tailors, one of whom had to be hanged because the only village blacksmith had committed a capital offence. Punishment must be exacted even if it does not fall upon the guilty. It was in studying the dream-work that we first came upon this kind of looseness in the displacements brought about by the primary process. In that case it was the objects that were thus relegated to a position of no more than secondary importance, just as in the case we are now discussing it is the paths of discharge. It would be characteristic of the ego to be more particular about the choice both of an object and of a path of discharge.

If this displaceable energy is desexualized libido, it may also be described as sublimated energy; for it would still retain the main purpose of Eros - that of uniting and binding - in so far as it helps towards establishing the unity, or tendency to unity, which is particularly characteristic of the ego. If thought processes in the wider sense are to be included among these displacements, then the activity of thinking is also supplied from the sublimation of erotic motive forces.

Here we arrive again at the possibility which has already been discussed that sublimation may take place regularly, through the mediation of the ego. The other case will be recollected, in which the ego deals with the first object-cathexes of the id (and certainly with later ones too) by taking over the libido from them into itself and binding it to the alteration of the ego produced by means of identification. The transformation into ego-libido of course involves an abandonment of sexual aims, a desexualization. In any case this throws light upon an important function of the ego in its relation to Eros. By thus getting hold of the libido from the object-cathexes, setting itself up as sole love-object, and desexualizing or sublimating the libido of the id, the ego is working in opposition to the purposes of Eros and placing itself at the service of the opposing instinctual impulses. It has to acquiesce in some of the other object-cathexes of the id; it has, so to speak, to participate in them. We shall come back later to another possible consequence of this activity of the ego.

The Ego And The Id

3980

This would seem to imply an important amplification of the theory of narcissism. At the very beginning, all the libido is accumulated in the id, while the ego is still in process of formation or is still feeble. The id sends part of this libido out into erotic object-cathexes, whereupon the ego, now grown stronger, tries to get hold of this object-libido and to force itself on the id as a love-object. The narcissism of the ego is thus a secondary one, which has been withdrawn from objects.

Over and over again we find, when we are able to trace instinctual impulses back, that they reveal themselves as derivatives of Eros. If it were not for the considerations put forward in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and ultimately for the sadistic constituents which have attached themselves to Eros, we should have difficulty in holding to our fundamental dualistic point of view. But since we cannot escape that view, we are driven to conclude that the death instincts are by their nature mute and that the clamour of life proceeds for the most part from Eros.¹

¹ In fact, on our view it is through the agency of Eros that the destructive instincts that are directed towards the external world have been diverted from the self.

The Ego And The Id

3981

And from the struggle against Eros! It can hardly be doubted that the pleasure principle serves the id as a compass in its struggle against the libido - the force that introduces disturbances into the process of life. If it is true that Fechner’s principle of constancy governs life, which thus consists of a continuous descent towards death, it is the claims of Eros, of the sexual instincts, which, in the form of instinctual needs, hold up the falling level and introduce fresh tensions. The id, guided by the pleasure principle - that is, by the perception of unpleasure - fends off these tensions in various ways. It does so in the first place by complying as swiftly as possible with the demands of the non-desexualized libido - by striving for the satisfaction of the directly sexual trends. But it does so in a far more comprehensive fashion in relation to one particular form of satisfaction in which all component demands converge - by discharge of the sexual substances, which are saturated vehicles, so to speak, of the erotic tensions. The ejection of the sexual substances in the sexual act corresponds in a sense to the separation of soma and germ-plasm. This accounts for the likeness of the condition that follows complete sexual satisfaction to dying, and for the fact that death coincides with the act of copulation in some of the lower animals. These creatures die in the act of reproduction because, after Eros has been eliminated through the process of satisfaction, the death instinct has a free hand for accomplishing its purposes. Finally, as we have seen, the ego, by sublimating some of the libido for itself and its purposes, assists the id in its work of mastering the tensions.

The Ego And The Id

3982

V

THE DEPENDENT RELATIONSHIPS OF THE EGO

The complexity of our subject-matter must be an excuse for the fact that none of the chapter-headings of this book quite correspond to their contents, and that in turning to new aspects of the topic we are constantly harking back to matters that have already been dealt with.

Thus we have said repeatedly that the ego is formed to a great extent out of identifications which take the place of abandoned cathexes by the id; that the first of these identifications always behave as a special agency in the ego and stand apart from the ego in the form of a super-ego, while later on, as it grows stronger, the ego may become more resistant to the influences of such identifications. The super-ego owes its special position in the ego, or in relation to the ego, to a factor which must be considered from two sides: on the one hand it was the first identification and one which took place while the ego was still feeble, and on the other hand it is the heir to the Oedipus complex and has thus introduced the most momentous objects into the ego. The super-ego’s relation to the later alterations of the ego is roughly similar to that of the primary sexual phase of childhood to later sexual life after puberty. Although it is accessible to all later influences, it nevertheless preserves throughout life the character given to it by its derivation from the father-complex - namely, the capacity to stand apart from the ego and to master it. It is a memorial of the former weakness and dependence of the ego, and the mature ego remains subject to its domination. As the child was once under a compulsion to obey its parents, so the ego submits to the categorical imperative of its super-ego.

But the derivation of the super-ego from the first object-cathexes of the id, from the Oedipus complex, signifies even more for it. This derivation, as we have already shown, brings it into relation with the phylogenetic acquisitions of the id and makes it a reincarnation of former ego-structures which have left their precipitates behind in the id. Thus the super-ego is always close to the id and can act as its representative vis-à-vis the ego. It reaches deep down into the id and for that reason is farther from consciousness than the ego is.¹

¹ It may be said that the psycho-analytic or metapsychological ego stands on its head no less than the anatomical ego - the ‘cortical homunculus’.

The Ego And The Id

3983

We shall best appreciate these relations by turning to certain clinical facts, which have long since lost their novelty but which still await theoretical discussion.

There are certain people who behave in a quite peculiar fashion during the work of analysis. When one speaks hopefully to them or expresses satisfaction with the progress of the treatment, they show signs of discontent and their condition invariably becomes worse. One begins by regarding this as defiance and as an attempt to prove their superiority to the physician, but later one comes to take a deeper and juster view. One becomes convinced, not only that such people cannot endure any praise or appreciation, but that they react inversely to the progress of the treatment. Every partial solution that ought to result, and in other people does result, in an improvement or a temporary suspension of symptoms produces in them for the time being an exacerbation of their illness; they get worse during the treatment instead of getting better. They exhibit what is known as a ‘negative therapeutic reaction’.

There is no doubt that there is something in these people that sets itself against their recovery, and its approach is dreaded as though it were a danger. We are accustomed to say that the need for illness has got the upper hand in them over the desire for recovery. If we analyse this resistance in the usual way then, even after allowance has been made for an attitude of defiance towards the physician and for fixation to the various forms of gain from illness, the greater part of it is still left over; and this reveals itself as the most powerful of all obstacles to recovery, more powerful than the familiar ones of narcissistic inaccessibility, a negative attitude towards the physician and clinging to the gain from illness.

The Ego And The Id

3984

In the end we come to see that we are dealing with what may be called a ‘moral’ factor, a sense of guilt, which is finding its satisfaction in the illness and refuses to give up the punishment of suffering. We shall be right in regarding this disheartening explanation as final. But as far as the patient is concerned this sense of guilt is dumb; it does not tell him he is guilty; he does not feel guilty, he feels ill. This sense of guilt expresses itself only as a resistance to recovery which it is extremely difficult to overcome. It is also particularly difficult to convince the patient that this motive lies behind his continuing to be ill; he holds fast to the more obvious explanation that treatment by analysis is not the right remedy for his case.¹

The description we have given applies to the most extreme instances of this state of affairs, but in a lesser measure this factor has to be reckoned with in very many cases, perhaps in all comparatively severe cases of neurosis. In fact it may be precisely this element in the situation, the attitude of the ego ideal, that determines the severity of a neurotic illness. We shall not hesitate, therefore, to discuss rather more fully the way in which the sense of guilt expresses itself under different conditions.

¹ The battle with the obstacle of an unconscious sense of guilt is not made easy for the analyst. Nothing can be done against it directly, and nothing indirectly but the slow procedure of unmasking its unconscious repressed roots, and of thus gradually changing it into a conscious sense of guilt. One has a special opportunity for influencing it when this Ucs. sense of guilt is a ‘borrowed’ one - when it is the product of an identification with some other person who was once the object of an erotic cathexis. A sense of guilt that has been adopted in this way is often the sole remaining trace of the abandoned love-relation and not at all easy to recognize as such. (The likeness between this process and what happens in melancholia is unmistakable.) If one can unmask this former object-cathexis behind the Ucs. sense of guilt, the therapeutic success is often brilliant, but otherwise the outcome of one’s efforts is by no means certain. It depends principally on the intensity of the sense of guilt; there is often no counteracting force of a similar order of strength which the treatment can oppose to it. Perhaps it may depend, too, on whether the personality of the analyst allows of the patient’s putting him in the place of his ego ideal, and this involves a temptation for the analyst to play the part of prophet, saviour and redeemer to the patient. Since the rules of analysis are diametrically opposed to the physician’s making use of his personality in any such manner, it must be honestly confessed that here we have another limitation to the effectiveness of analysis; after all, analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient’s ego freedom to decide one way or the other.

The Ego And The Id

3985

An interpretation of the normal, conscious sense of guilt (conscience) presents no difficulties; it is based on the tension between the ego and the ego ideal and is the expression of a condemnation of the ego by its critical agency. The feelings of inferiority so well known in neurotics are presumably not far removed from it. In two very familiar maladies the sense of guilt is over-strongly conscious; in them the ego ideal displays particular severity and often rages against the ego in a cruel fashion. The attitude of the ego ideal in these two conditions, obsessional neurosis and melancholia, presents, alongside of this similarity, differences that are no less significant.

In certain forms of obsessional neurosis the sense of guilt is over-noisy but cannot justify itself to the ego. Consequently the patient’s ego rebels against the imputation of guilt and seeks the physician’s support in repudiating it. It would be folly to acquiesce in this, for to do so would have no effect. Analysis eventually shows that the super-ego is being influenced by processes that have remained unknown to the ego. It is possible to discover the repressed impulses which are really at the bottom of the sense of guilt. Thus in this case the super-ego knew more than the ego about the unconscious id.

In melancholia the impression that the super-ego has obtained a hold upon consciousness is even stronger. But here the ego ventures no objection; it admits its guilt and submits to the punishment. We understand the difference. In obsessional neurosis what were in question were objectionable impulses which remained outside the ego, while in melancholic the object to which the super-ego’s wrath applies has been taken into the ego through identification.

It is certainly not clear why the sense of guilt reaches such an extraordinary strength in these two neurotic disorders; but the main problem presented in this state of affairs lies in another direction. We shall postpone discussion of it until we have dealt with the other cases in which the sense of guilt remains unconscious.

It is essentially in hysteria and in states of a hysterical type that this is found. Here the mechanism by which the sense of guilt remains unconscious is easy to discover. The hysterical ego fends off a distressing perception with which the criticisms of its super-ego threaten it, in the same way in which it is in the habit of fending off an unendurable object-cathexis - by an act of repression. It is the ego, therefore, that is responsible for the sense of guilt remaining unconscious. We know that as a rule the ego carries out repressions in the service and at the behest of its super-ego; but this is a case in which it has turned the same weapon against its harsh taskmaster. In obsessional neurosis, as we know, the phenomena of reaction-formation predominate; but here the ego succeeds only in keeping at a distance the material to which the sense of guilt refers.

The Ego And The Id

3986

One may go further and venture the hypothesis that a great part of the sense of guilt must normally remain unconscious, because the origin of conscience is intimately connected with the Oedipus complex, which belongs to the unconscious. If anyone were inclined to put forward the paradoxical proposition that the normal man is not only far more immoral than he believes but also far more moral than he knows, psycho-analysis, on whose findings the first half of the assertion rests, would have no objection to raise against the second half.¹

It was a surprise to find that an increase in this Ucs. sense of guilt can turn people into criminals. But it is undoubtedly a fact. In many criminals, especially youthful ones, it is possible to detect a very powerful sense of guilt which existed before the crime, and is therefore not its result but its motive. It is as if it was a relief to be able to fasten this unconscious sense of guilt on to something real and immediate.

In all these situations the super-ego displays its independence of the conscious ego and its intimate relations with the unconscious id. Having regard, now, to the importance we have ascribed to preconscious verbal residues in the ego, the question arises whether it can be the case that the super-ego, in so far as it is Ucs., consists in such word-presentations and, if it does not, what else it consists in. Our tentative answer will be that it is as impossible for the super-ego as for the ego to disclaim its origin from things heard; for it is a part of the ego and remains accessible to consciousness by way of these word-presentations (concepts, abstractions). But the cathectic energy does not reach these contents of the super-ego from auditory perception (instruction or reading) but from sources in the id.

¹ This proposition is only apparently a paradox; it simply states that human nature has a far greater extent, both for good and for evil, than it thinks it has - i. e. than its ego is aware of through conscious perception.

The Ego And The Id

3987

The question which we put off answering runs as follows: How is it that the super-ego manifests itself essentially as a sense of guilt (or rather, as criticism - for the sense of guilt is the perception in the ego answering to this criticism) and moreover develops such extraordinary harshness and severity towards the ego? If we turn to melancholia first, we find that the excessively strong super-ego which has obtained a hold upon consciousness rages against the ego with merciless violence, as if it had taken possession of the whole of the sadism available in the person concerned. Following our view of sadism, we should say that the destructive component had entrenched itself in the super-ego and turned against the ego. What is now holding sway in the super-ego is, as it were, a pure culture of the death instinct, and in fact it often enough succeeds in driving the ego into death, if the latter does not fend off its tyrant in time by the change round into mania.

The reproaches of conscience in certain forms of obsessional neurosis are as distressing and tormenting, but here the situation is less perspicuous. It is noteworthy that the obsessional neurotic, in contrast to the melancholic, never in fact takes the step of self-destruction; it is as though he were immune against the danger of suicide, and he is far better protected from it than the hysteric. We can see that what guarantees the safety of the ego is the fact that the object has been retained. In obsessional neurosis it has become possible, through a regression to the pregenital organization, for the love-impulses to transform themselves into impulses of aggression against the object. Here again the instinct of destruction has been set free and it seeks to destroy the object, or at least it appears to have that intention. These purposes have not been adopted by the ego and it struggles against them with reaction-formations and precautionary measures; they remain in the id. The super-ego, however, behaves as if the ego were responsible for them and shows at the same time by the seriousness with which it chastises these destructive intentions that they are no mere semblance evoked by regression but an actual substitution of hate for love. Helpless in both directions, the ego defends itself vainly, alike against the instigations of the murderous id and against the reproaches of the punishing conscience. It succeeds in holding in check at least the most brutal actions of both sides; the first outcome is interminable self-torment, and eventually there follows a systematic torturing of the object, in so far as it is within reach.

The Ego And The Id

3988

The dangerous death instincts are dealt with in the individual in various ways: in part they are rendered harmless by being fused with erotic components, in part they are diverted towards the external world in the form of aggression, while to a large extent they undoubtedly continue their internal work unhindered. How is it then that in melancholia the super-ego can become a kind of gathering-place for the death instincts?

From the point of view of instinctual control, of morality, it may be said of the id that it is totally non-moral, of the ego that it strives to be moral, and of the super-ego that it can be super-moral and then become as cruel as only the id can be. It is remarkable that the more a man checks his aggressiveness towards the exterior the more severe - that is aggressive - he becomes in his ego ideal. The ordinary view sees the situation the other way round: the standard set up by the ego ideal seems to be the motive for the suppression of aggressiveness. The fact remains, however, as we have stated it: the more a man controls his aggressiveness, the more intense becomes his ideal’s inclination to aggressiveness against his ego. It is like a displacement, a turning round upon his own ego. But even ordinary normal morality has a harshly restraining, cruelly prohibiting quality. It is from this, indeed, that the conception arises of a higher being who deals out punishment inexorably.

I cannot go further in my consideration of these questions without introducing a fresh hypothesis. The super-ego arises, as we know, from an identification with the father taken as a model. Every such identification is in the nature of a desexualization or even of a sublimation. It now seems as though when a transformation of this kind takes place, an instinctual defusion occurs at the same time. After sublimation the erotic component no longer has the power to bind the whole of the destructiveness that was combined with it, and this is released in the form of an inclination to aggression and destruction. This defusion would be the source of the general character of harshness and cruelty exhibited by the ideal - its dictatorial ‘Thou shalt’.

The Ego And The Id

3989

Let us again consider obsessional neurosis for a moment. The state of affairs is different here. The defusion of love into aggressiveness has not been effected by the work of the ego, but is the result of a regression which has come about in the id. But this process has extended beyond the id to the super-ego, which now increases its severity towards the innocent ego. It would seem, however, that in this case, no less than in that of melancholia, the ego, having gained control over the libido by means of identification, is punished for doing so by the super-ego through the instrumentality of the aggressiveness which was mixed with the libido.

Our ideas about the ego are beginning to clear, and its various relationships are gaining distinctness. We now see the ego in its strength and in its weaknesses. It is entrusted with important functions. By virtue of its relation to the perceptual system it gives mental processes an order in time and submits them to ‘reality-testing’. By interposing the processes of thinking, it secures a postponement of motor discharges and controls the access to motility. This last power is, to be sure, a question more of form than of fact; in the matter of action the ego’s position is like that of a constitutional monarch, without whose sanction no law can be passed but who hesitates long before imposing his veto on any measure put forward by Parliament. All the experiences of life that originate from without enrich the ego; the id, however, is its second external world, which it strives to bring into subjection to itself. It withdraws libido from the id and transforms the object-cathexes of the id into ego-structures. With the aid of the super-ego, in a manner that is still obscure to us, it draws upon the experiences of past ages stored in the id.

There are two paths by which the contents of the id can penetrate into the ego. The one is direct, the other leads by way of the ego ideal; which of these two paths they take may, for some mental activities, be of decisive importance. The ego develops from perceiving instincts to controlling them, from obeying instincts to inhibiting them. In this achievement a large share is taken by the ego ideal, which indeed is partly a reaction-formation against the instinctual processes of the id. Psycho-analysis is an instrument to enable the ego to achieve a progressive conquest of the id.

The Ego And The Id

3990

From the other point of view, however, we see this same ego as a poor creature owing service to three masters and consequently menaced by three dangers: from the external world, from the libido of the id, and from the severity of the super-ego. Three kinds of anxiety correspond to these three dangers, since anxiety is the expression of a retreat from danger. As a frontier creature, the ego tries to mediate between the world and the id, to make the id pliable to the world and, by means of its muscular activity, to make the world fall in with the wishes of the id. In point of fact it behaves like the physician during an analytic treatment: it offers itself, with the attention it pays to the real world, as a libidinal object to the id, and aims at attaching the id’s libido to itself. It is not only a helper to the id; it is also a submissive slave who courts his master’s love. Whenever possible, it tries to remain on good terms with the id; it clothes the id’s Ucs. commands with its Pcs. rationalizations; it pretends that the id is showing obedience to the admonitions of reality, even when in fact it is remaining obstinate and unyielding; it disguises the id’s conflicts with reality and, if possible, its conflicts with the super-ego too. In its position midway between the id and reality, it only too often yields to the temptation to become sycophantic, opportunist and lying, like a politician who sees the truth but wants to keep his place in popular favour.

Towards the two classes of instincts the ego’s attitude is not impartial. Through its work of identification and sublimation it gives the death instincts in the id assistance in gaining control over the libido, but in so doing it runs the risk of becoming the object of the death instincts and of itself perishing. In order to be able to help in this way it has had itself to become filled with libido; it thus itself becomes the representative of Eros and henceforward desires to live and to be loved.

But since the ego’s work of sublimation results in a defusion of the instincts and a liberation of the aggressive instincts in the super-ego, its struggle against the libido exposes it to the danger of maltreatment and death. In suffering under the attacks of the super-ego or perhaps even succumbing to them, the ego is meeting with a fate like that of the protista which are destroyed by the products of decomposition that they themselves have created. From the economic point of view the morality that functions in the super-ego seems to be a similar product of decomposition.

The Ego And The Id

3991

Among the dependent relationships in which the ego stands, that to the super-ego is perhaps the most interesting.

The ego is the actual seat of anxiety. Threatened by dangers from three directions, it develops the flight-reflex by withdrawing its own cathexis from the menacing perception or from the similarly regarded process in the id, and emitting it as anxiety. This primitive reaction is later replaced by the carrying-out of protective cathexes (the mechanism of the phobias). What it is that the ego fears from the external and from the libidinal danger cannot be specified; we know that the fear is of being overwhelmed or annihilated, but it cannot be grasped analytically. The ego is simply obeying the warning of the pleasure principle. On the other hand, we can tell what is hidden behind the ego’s dread of the super-ego, the fear of conscience. The superior being, which turned into the ego ideal, once threatened castration, and this dread of castration is probably the nucleus round which the subsequent fear of conscience has gathered; it is this dread that persists as the fear of conscience.

The high-sounding phrase, ‘every fear is ultimately the fear of death’, has hardly any meaning, and at any rate cannot be justified. It seems to me, on the contrary, perfectly correct to distinguish the fear of death from dread of an object (realistic anxiety) and from neurotic libidinal anxiety. It presents a difficult problem to psycho-analysis, for death is an abstract concept with a negative content for which no unconscious correlative can be found. It would seem that the mechanism of the fear of death can only be that the ego relinquishes its narcissistic libidinal cathexis in a very large measure - that is, that it gives up itself, just as it gives up some external object in other cases in which it feels anxiety. I believe that the fear of death is something that occurs between the ego and the super-ego.

The Ego And The Id

3992

We know that the fear of death makes its appearance under two conditions (which, moreover, are entirely analogous to situations in which other kinds of anxiety develop), namely, as a reaction to an external danger and as an internal process, as for instance in melancholia. Once again a neurotic manifestation may help us to understand a normal one.

The fear of death in melancholia only admits of one explanation: that the ego gives itself up because it feels itself hated and persecuted by the super-ego, instead of loved. To the ego, therefore, living means the same as being loved - being loved by the super-ego, which here again appears as the representative of the id. The super-ego fulfils the same function of protecting and saving that was fulfilled in earlier days by the father and later by Providence or Destiny. But, when the ego finds itself in an excessive real danger which it believes itself unable to overcome by its own strength, it is bound to draw the same conclusion. It sees itself deserted by all protecting forces and lets itself die. Here, moreover, is once again the same situation as that which underlay the first great anxiety-state of birth and the infantile anxiety of longing - the anxiety due to separation from the protecting mother.

These considerations make it possible to regard the fear of death, like the fear of conscience, as a development of the fear of castration. The great significance which the sense of guilt has in the neuroses makes it conceivable that common neurotic anxiety is reinforced in severe cases by the generating of anxiety between the ego and the super-ego (fear of castration, of conscience, of death).

The id, to which we finally come back, has no means of showing the ego either love or hate. It cannot say what it wants; it has achieved no unified will. Eros and the death instinct struggle within it; we have seen with what weapons the one group of instincts defends itself against the other. It would be possible to picture the id as under the domination of the mute but powerful death instincts, which desire to be at peace and (prompted by the pleasure principle) to put Eros, the mischief maker, to rest; but perhaps that might be to undervalue the part played by Eros.

3993

A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY DEMONOLOGICAL NEUROSIS

(1923)

3994

3995

Intentionally left blank

3996

A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY DEMONOLOGICAL NEUROSIS

The neuroses of childhood have taught us that a number of things can easily be seen in them with the naked eye which at a later age are only to be discovered after a thorough investigation. We may expect that the same will turn out to be true of neurotic illnesses in earlier centuries, provided that we are prepared to recognize them under names other than those of our present-day neuroses. We need not be surprised to find that, whereas the neuroses of our unpsychological modern days take on a hypochondriacal aspect and appear disguised as organic illnesses, the neuroses of those early times emerge in demonological trappings. Several authors, foremost among them Charcot, have, as we know, identified the manifestations of hysteria in the portrayals of possession and ecstasy that have been preserved for us in the productions of art. If more attention had been paid to the histories of such cases at the time, it would not have been difficult to retrace in them the subject-matter of a neurosis.

The demonological theory of those dark times has won in the end against all the somatic views of the period of ‘exact’ science. The states of possession correspond to our neuroses, for the explanation of which we once more have recourse to psychical powers. In our eyes, the demons are bad and reprehensible wishes, derivatives of instinctual impulses that have been repudiated and repressed. We merely eliminate the projection of these mental entities into the external world which the middle ages carried out; instead, we regard them as having arisen in the patient’s internal life, where they have their abode.

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

3997

I

THE STORY OF CHRISTOPH HAIZMANN

THE PAINTER

I am indebted to the friendly interest of Hofrat Dr. Payer-Thurn, director of the former Imperial Fideikommissbibliothek of Vienna, for the opportunity of studying a seventeenth century demonological neurosis of this kind. Payer-Thurn had discovered a manuscript in this library which originated from the shrine of Mariazell and in which there was a detailed account of a miraculous redemption from a pact with the Devil through the grace of the Blessed Virgin Mary. His interest was aroused by the resemblance of this story to the legend of Faust, and has led him to undertake the exhaustive publication and editing of the material. Finding, however, that the person whose redemption was described had been subject to convulsive seizures and visions he approached me for a medical opinion on the case. We came to an agreement to publish our investigations independently and separately. I should like to take this opportunity of thanking him for his original suggestion and for the many ways in which he has assisted me in the study of the manuscript.

This demonological case history leads to really valuable findings which can be brought to light without much interpretation - much as a vein of pure metal may sometimes be struck which must elsewhere be laboriously smelted from the ore.

The manuscript, an exact copy of which lies before me, falls into two quite distinct sections. One is a report, written in Latin, by a monastic scribe or compiler; the other is a fragment from the patient’s diary, written in German. The first succession contains a preface and a description of the actual miraculous cure. The second can scarcely have been of any significance for the reverend Fathers but so much the more is it of value for us. It serves in large part to confirm our judgement of the case, which might otherwise have been hesitant, and we have good cause to be grateful to the clergy for having preserved the document although it added nothing to support the tenor of their views and, indeed, may rather have weakened it.

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

3998

But before going further into the composition of this little manuscript brochure, which bears the title Trophaeum Mariano-Cellense, I must relate a part of its contents, which I take from the preface.

On September 5, 1677, the painter Christoph Haizmann, a Bavarian, was brought to Mariazell, with a letter of introduction from the village priest of Pottenbrunn (in lower Austria) not far away.¹ The letter states that the man had been staying in Pottenbrunn for some months, pursuing his occupation of painting. On August 29, while in the church there, he had been seized with frightful convulsions. As these convulsions recurred during the following days, he had been examined by the Praefectus Dominii Pottenbrunnensis with a view to discovering what it was that was oppressing him and whether perhaps he had entered into illicit traffic with the Evil Spirit.² Upon this, the man had admitted that nine years before, when he was in a state of despondency about his art and doubtful whether he could support himself, he had yielded to the Devil, who had tempted him nine times, and that he had given him his bond in writing to belong to him in body and soul after a period of nine years. This period would expire on the twenty-fourth day of the current month.³ The letter went on to say that the unfortunate man had repented and was convinced that only the grace of the Mother of God at Mariazell could save him, by compelling the Evil One to deliver up the bond, which had been written in blood. For this reason the village priest ventured to recommend miserum hunc hominem omni auxilio destitutum to the benevolence of the Fathers of Mariazell.

So far the narrative of Leopoldus Braun, the village priest of Pottenbrunn, dated September 1, 1677.

¹ No mention is anywhere made of the painter’s age. The context suggests that he was a man of between thirty and forty, probably nearer the lower figure. He died, as we shall see, in 1700.

² We will merely note in passing the possibility that this interrogation inspired in the sufferer - ‘suggested’ to him - the phantasy of his pact with the Devil.

³ Quorum et finis 24 mensis hujus futurus appropinquat.

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

3999

We can now proceed with the analysis of the manuscript. It consists of three parts:

(1) A coloured title-page representing the scene of the signing of the pact and the scene of the redemption in the chapel of Mariazell. On the next sheet are eight pictures, also coloured, representing the subsequent appearances of the Devil, with a short legend in German attached to each. These pictures are not the originals; they are copies - faithful copies, we are solemnly assured - of the original paintings by Christoph Haizmann.

(2) The actual Trophaeum Mariano-Cellense (in Latin), the work of a clerical compiler who signs himself at the foot ‘P.A.E.’ and appends to these initials four lines of verse containing his biography. The Trophaeum ends with a deposition by the Abbot Kilian of St. Lambert, dated September 12, 1729, which is in a different handwriting from that of the compiler. It testifies to the exact correspondence of the manuscript and the pictures with the originals preserved in the archives. There is no mention of the year in which the Trophaeum was compiled. We are free to assume that it was done in the same year in which the Abbot Kilian made his deposition - that is, in 1729; or, since the last date mentioned in the text is 1714 -, we may put the compiler’s work somewhere between the years 1714 and 1729. The miracle which was to be preserved from oblivion by this manuscript occurred in 1677 - that is to say, between thirty-seven and fifty-two years earlier.

(3) The painter’s diary, written in German and covering the period from his redemption in the chapel till January 13 of the following year, 1678. It is inserted in the text of the Trophaeum near the end.

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

4000

The core of the actual Trophaeum consists of two pieces of writing: the letter of introduction, mentioned above, from the village priest, Leopold Braun of Pottenbrunn, dated September 1, 1677, and the report by the Abbot Franciscus of Mariazell and St. Lambert, describing the miraculous cure. This is dated September 12, 1677, that is to say, only a few days later. The activity of the editor or compiler, P.A.E., has provided a preface which as it were fuses the contents of these two documents; he has also added some connecting passages of little importance, and, at the end, an account of the subsequent vicissitudes of the painter, based on enquiries made in the year 1714.¹

The painter’s previous history is thus told three times over in the Trophaeum: (1) in the village priest of Pottenbrunn’s letter of introduction, (2) in the formal report by the Abbot Franciscus and (3) in the editor’s preface. A comparison of these three sources discloses certain discrepancies which it will be not unimportant for us to follow up.

I can now continue with the painter’s story. After he had undergone a prolonged period of penance and prayer at Mariazell, the Devil appeared to him in the sacred Chapel at midnight, on September 8, the Nativity of the Virgin, in the form of a winged dragon, and gave him back the pact, which was written in blood. We shall learn later, to our surprise, that two bonds with the Devil appear in Christoph Haizmann’s story - an earlier one, written in black ink, and a later one, written in blood. The one referred to in the description of the scene of exorcism, as can also he seen from the picture on the title-page, is the one written in blood - that is, the later one.

¹ This would seem to suggest that the Trophaeum, too, dates from 1714.

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

4001

At this point a doubt as to the credibility of the clerical reporters may well arise in our minds and warn us not to waste our labours on a product of monastic superstition. We are told that several clerics, mentioned by name, assisted at the exorcism and were present in the Chapel when the Devil appeared. If it had been asserted that they, too, saw the Devil appear in the form of a dragon and offer the painter the paper written in red (Schedam sibi porrigentem conspexisset), we should be faced by several unpleasant possibilities, among which that of a collective hallucination would be the mildest. But the Abbot Franciscus’s testimony dispels this doubt. Far from asserting that the assisting clerics saw the Devil too, he only states in straightforward and sober words that the painter suddenly tore himself away from the Fathers who were holding him, rushed into the corner of the Chapel where he saw the apparition, and then returned with the paper in his hand.¹

The miracle was great, and the victory of the Holy Mother over Satan without question; but unfortunately the cure was not a lasting one. It is once more to the credit of the clergy that they have not concealed this. After a short time the painter left Mariazell in the best of health and went to Vienna, where he lived with a married sister. On October 11 fresh attacks began, some of them very severe, and these are reported in the diary until January 13. They consisted in visions and ‘absences’, in which he saw and experienced every kind of thing, in convulsive seizures accompanied by the most painful sensations, on one occasion in paralysis of the legs, and so on. This time, however, it was not the Devil who tormented him; it was by sacred figures that he was vexed - by Christ and by the Blessed Virgin herself. It is remarkable that he suffered no less through these heavenly manifestations and the punishments they inflicted on him than he had formerly through his traffic with the Devil. In his diary, indeed, he included these fresh experiences too as manifestations of the Devil; and when, in May, 1678, he returned to Mariazell, he complained of maligini Spiritûs manifestationes.

¹ . . . ipsumque Daemonem ad Aram Sac. Cellae per fenestrellam in cornu Epistolae, Schedam sibi porrigentem conspexisset, eo advolans e Religiosorum manibus, qui eum tenebant, ipsam Schedam ad manum obtinuit. . . .’

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

4002

He told the reverend Fathers that his reason for returning was that he had to require the Devil to give him back another, earlier bond, which had been written in ink.¹ This time once more the Blessed Virgin and the pious Fathers helped him to obtain the fulfilment of his request. As to how this came about, however, the report is silent. It merely states shortly: quâ iuxta votum redditâ - he prayed once again and received the pact back. After this he felt quite free and entered the Order of the Brothers Hospitallers.

We have occasion yet again to acknowledge that in spite of the obvious purpose of his efforts, the compiler has not been tempted into departing from the veracity required of a case history. For he does not conceal the outcome of the enquiry that was made in 1714 from the Superior of the Monastery of the Brothers Hospitallers concerning the painter’s later history. The Reverend Pater Provincialis reported that Brother Chrysostomus had again been repeatedly tempted by the Evil Spirit, who tried to seduce him into making a fresh pact (though this only happened ‘when he had drunk somewhat too much wine’). But by the grace of God, it had always been possible to repel these attempts. Brother Chrysostomus had died of a hectic fever ‘peacefully and of good comfort’ in the year 1700 in the Monastery of the Order, at Neustatt on the Moldau.

¹ This bond had been signed in September, 1668, and by May, 1678, nine and a half years later, it would long since have fallen due.

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

4003

II

THE MOTIVE FOR THE PACT WITH THE DEVIL

If we look at this bond with the Devil as if it were the case history of a neurotic, our interest will turn in the first instance to the question of its motivation, which is, of course, intimately connected with its exciting cause. Why does anyone sign a bond with the Devil? Faust, it is true, asked contemptuously: ‘Was willst du armer Teufel geben?’ But he was wrong. In return for an immortal soul, the Devil has many things to offer which are highly prized by men: wealth, security from danger, power over mankind and the forces of nature, even magical arts, and, above all else, enjoyment - the enjoyment of beautiful women. These services performed or undertakings made by the Devil are usually mentioned specifically in the agreement made with him.¹ What, then, was the motive which induced Christoph Haizmann to make his pact?

Curiously enough, it was none of these very natural wishes. To put the matter beyond doubt, one has only to read the short remarks attached by the painter to his illustrations of the apparitions of the Devil. For example, the caption to the third vision runs: ‘On the third occasion within a year and a half, he appeared to me in this loathsome shape, with a book in his hand which was full of magic and black arts . . .’ But from the legend attached to a later apparition we learn that the Devil reproached him violently for having ‘burnt his beforementioned book’, and threatened to tear him to pieces if he did not give it back.

¹  Cf. Faust, Part I, Scene 4:

Ich will mich hier zu deinem Dienst verbinden,

Auf deinem Wink nicht rasten und nicht ruhn;

Wenn wir uns drüuben wieder finden,

So sollst du mir das Gleiche thun.

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

4004

At his fourth appearance the Devil showed him a large yellow money-bag and a great ducat and promised him to give him as many of these as he wanted at any time. But the painter is able to boast that he ‘had taken nothing whatever of the kind’.

Another time the Devil asked him to turn to enjoyment and entertainment, and the painter remarks that ‘this indeed came to pass at his desire; but I did not continue for more than three days and it was then brought to an end’.

Since he rejected magical arts, money and pleasures when they were offered him by the Devil, and still less made them conditions of the pact, it becomes really imperative to know what the painter in fact wanted from the Devil when he signed a bond with him. Some motive he must have had for his dealings with the Devil.

On this point, too, the Trophaeum provides us with reliable information. He had become low-spirited, was unable or unwilling to work properly and was worried about making a livelihood; that is to say, he was suffering from melancholic depression, with an inhibition in his work and (justified) fears about his future. We can see that what we are dealing with really is a case history. We learn, too, the exciting cause of the illness, which the painter himself, in the caption to one of his pictures of the Devil, actually calls a melancholia (‘that I should seek diversion and banish melancholy’). The first of our three sources of information, the village priest’s letter of introduction, speaks, it is true, only of the state of depression (‘dum artis suae progressum emolumentumque secuturum pusillanimis perpenderet’), but the second source, the Abbot Franciscus’s report, tells us the cause of this despondency or depression as well. He says: ‘acceptâ aliquâ pusillanimitate ex morte parentis’; and in the compiler’s preface the same words are used, though in a reversed order: (‘ex morte parentis acceptâ aliquâ pusillanimitate’). His father, then, had died and he had in consequence fallen into a state of melancholia; whereupon the Devil had approached him and asked him why he was so downcast and sad, and had promised ‘to help him in every way and to give him support’. ¹

¹ The first picture on the title-page and its caption represent the Devil in the form of an ‘honest citizen’.

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

4005

Here was a person, therefore, who signed a bond with the Devil in order to be freed from a state of depression. Undoubtedly an excellent motive, as anyone will agree who can have an understanding sense of the torments of such a state and who knows as well how little medicine can do to alleviate this ailment. Yet no one who has followed the story so far as this would be able to guess what the wording of this bond (or rather, of these two bonds)¹ with the Devil actually was.

These bonds bring us two great surprises. In the first place, they mention no undertaking given by the Devil in return for whose fulfilment the painter pledges his eternal bliss, but only a demand made by the Devil which the painter must satisfy. It strikes us as quite illogical and absurd that this man should give up his soul, not for something he is to get from the Devil but for something he is to do for him. But the undertaking given by the painter seems even stranger.

The first ‘syngrapha’, written in ink, runs as follows: ‘Ich Christoph Haizmann undterschreibe mich disen Herrn sein leibeigener Sohn auff 9. Jahr. 1669 Jahr.’ The second, written in blood, runs:-

‘Anno 1669.

‘Christoph Haizmann. Ich verschreibe mich disen Satan ich sein leibeigner Sohn zu sein, und in 9. Jahr ihm mein Leib und Seel zuzugeheren.’

¹ Since there were two of them - the first written in ink, and the second written about a year later in blood - both said still to be in the treasury of Mariazell and to be transcribed in the Trophaeum.

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

4006

All our astonishment vanishes, however, if we read the text of the bonds in the sense that what is represented in them as a demand made by the Devil is, on the contrary, a service performed by him - that is to say, it is a demand made by the painter. The incomprehensible pact would in that case have a straightforward meaning and could be paraphrased thus. The Devil undertakes to replace the painter’s lost father for nine years. At the end of that time the painter becomes the property, body and soul, of the Devil, as was the usual custom in such bargains. The train of thought which motivated the painter in making the pact seems to have been this: his father’s death had made him lose his spirits and his capacity to work; if he could only obtain a father-substitute he might hope to regain what he had lost.

A man who has fallen into a melancholia on account of his father’s death must really have been fond of him. But, if so, it is very strange that such a man should have hit upon the idea of taking the Devil as a substitute for the father whom he loved.

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

4007

III

THE DEVIL AS A FATHER-SUBSTITUTE

I fear that sober critics will not be prepared to admit that this fresh interpretation has made the meaning of this pact with the Devil clear. They will have two objections to make to it.

In the first place they will say that it is not necessary to regard the bond as a contract in which the undertakings of both parties have been set out. On the contrary, they will argue, it contains only the painter’s undertaking; the Devil’s is omitted from the text, and is, as it were, sousentendu: the painter gives two undertakings - firstly to be the Devil’s son for nine years, and secondly to belong to him entirely after death. In this way one of the premisses on which our conclusion is built would be disposed of.

The second objection will be that we are not justified in attaching any special importance to the expression ‘the Devil’s bounden son’; that this is no more than a common figure of speech, which anyone could interpret in the same way as the reverend Fathers may have done. For in their Latin translation they did not mention the relationship of son promised in the bonds, but merely say that the painter ‘mancipavit’ himself - made himself a bondslave - to the Evil One and had undertaken to lead a sinful life and to deny God and the Holy Trinity. Why depart from this obvious and natural view of the matter?¹ The position would simply be that a man, in the torment and perplexity of a melancholic depression, signs a bond with the Devil, to whom he ascribes the greatest therapeutic power. That the depression was occasioned by his father’s death would then be irrelevant; the occasion might quite as well have been something else.

¹ In point of fact, when we come to consider later at what time and for whom these bonds were drawn up, we shall realize that their text had to be expressed in unobtrusive and generally comprehensible terms. It is enough for us, however, that it contains an ambiguity which we can take as the starting-point of our discussion.

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

4008

All this sounds convincing and reasonable. Psycho-analysis has once more to meet the reproach that it makes hair-splitting complications in the simplest things and sees mysteries and problems where none exist, and that it does this by laying undue stress on insignificant and irrelevant details, such as occur every where, and making them the basis of the most far-reaching and strangest conclusions. It would be useless for us to point out that this rejection of our interpretation would do away with many striking analogies and break a number of subtle connections which we are able to demonstrate in this case. Our opponents will say that those analogies and connections do not in fact exist, but have been imported into the case by us with quite uncalled-for ingenuity.

I will not preface my reply with the words, ‘to be honest’ or ‘to be candid’, for one must always be able to be these things without any special preliminaries. I will instead say quite simply that I know very well that no reader who does not already believe in the justifiability of the psycho-analytic mode of thought will acquire that belief from the case of the seventeenth-century painter, Christoph Haizmann. Nor is it my intention to make use of this case as evidence of the validity of psycho-analysis. On the contrary, I presuppose its validity and am employing it to throw light on the painter’s demonological illness. My justification for doing so lies in the success of our investigations into the nature of the neuroses in general. We may say in all modesty that to-day even the more obtuse among our colleagues and contemporaries are beginning to realize that no understanding of neurotic states can be reached without the help of psycho-analysis.

‘These shafts can conquer Troy, these shafts alone’

as Odysseus confesses in the Philoctetes of Sophocles.

If we are right in regarding our painter’s bond with the Devil as a neurotic phantasy, there is no need for any further apology for considering it psycho-analytically. Even small indications have a meaning and importance, and quite specially when they are related to the conditions under which a neurosis originates. To be sure, it is as possible to overvalue as to undervalue them, and it is a matter of judgement how far one should go in exploiting them. But anyone who does not believe in psycho-analysis - or, for the matter of that, even in the Devil - must be left to make what he can of the painter’s case, whether he is able to furnish an explanation of his own or whether he sees nothing in it that needs explaining.

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

4009

We therefore come back to our hypothesis that the Devil with whom the painter signed the bond was a direct substitute for his father. And this is borne out by the shape in which the Devil first appeared to him - as an honest elderly citizen with a brown beard, dressed in a red cloak and leaning with his right hand on a stick, with a black dog beside him¹ (cf. the first picture). Later on his appearance grows more and more terrifying - more mythological, one might say. He is equipped with horns, eagle’s claws and bat’s wings. Finally he appears in the chapel as a flying dragon. We shall have to come back later to a particular detail of his bodily shape.

It does indeed sound strange that the Devil should be chosen as a substitute for a loved father. But this is only so at first sight, for we know a good many things which lessen our surprise. To begin with, we know that God is a father-substitute; or, more correctly, that he is an exalted father; or, yet again, that he is a copy of a father as he is seen and experienced in childhood - by individuals in their own childhood and by mankind in its prehistory as the father of the primitive and primal horde. Later on in life the individual sees his father as something different and lesser. But the ideational image belonging to his childhood is preserved and becomes merged with the inherited memory-traces of the primal father to form the individual’s idea of God. We also know, from the secret life of the individual which analysis uncovers, that his relation to his father was perhaps ambivalent from the outset, or, at any rate, soon became so. That is to say, it contained two sets of emotional impulses that were opposed to each other: it contained not only impulses of an affectionate and submissive nature, but also hostile and defiant ones. It is our view that the same ambivalence governs the relations of mankind to its Deity. The unresolved conflict between, on the one hand, a longing for the father and, on the other, a fear of him and a son’s defiance of him, has furnished us with an explanation of important characteristics of religion and decisive vicissitudes in it.²

¹ In Goethe, a black dog like this turns into the Devil himself.

² Cf. Totem and Taboo (1912-13) and Reik (1919).

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

4010

Concerning the Evil Demon, we know that he is regarded as the antithesis of God and yet is very close to him in his nature. His history has not been so well studied as that of God; not all religions have adopted the Evil Spirit, the opponent of God, and his prototype in the life of the individual has so far remained obscure. One thing, however, is certain: gods can turn into evil demons when new gods oust them. When one people has been conquered by another, their fallen gods not seldom turn into demons in the eyes of the conquerors. The evil demon of the Christian faith - the Devil of the Middle Ages - was, according to Christian mythology, himself a fallen angel and of a godlike nature. It does not need much analytic perspicacity to guess that God and the Devil were originally identical - were a single figure which was later split into two figures with opposite attributes.¹ In the earliest ages of religion God himself still possessed all the terrifying features which were afterwards combined to form a counterpart of him.

We have here an example of the process, with which we are familiar, by which an idea that has a contradictory - an ambivalent - content becomes divided into two sharply contrasted opposites. The contradictions in the original nature of God are, however, a reflection of the ambivalence which governs the relation of the individual to his personal father. If the benevolent and righteous God is a substitute for his father, it is not to be wondered at that his hostile attitude to his father, too, which is one of hating and fearing him and of making complaints against him, should have come to expression in the creation of Satan. Thus the father, it seems, is the individual prototype of both God and the Devil. But we should expect religions to bear ineffaceable marks of the fact that the primitive primal father was a being of unlimited evil - a being less like God than the Devil.

¹ Cf. Reik, 1923, Chapter VII.

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

4011

It is true that it is by no means easy to demonstrate the traces of this satanic view of the father in the mental life of the individual. When a boy draws grotesque faces and caricatures, we may no doubt be able to show that he is jeering at his father in them; and when a person of either sex is afraid of robbers and burglars at night, it is not hard to recognize these as split off portions of the father.¹ The animals, too, which appear in children’s animal phobias are most often father-substitutes, as were the totem animals of primaeval times. But that the Devil is a duplicate of the father and can act as a substitute for him has not been shown so clearly elsewhere as in the demonological neurosis of this seventeenth-century painter. That is why, at the beginning of this paper, I foretold that a demonological case history of this kind would yield in the form of pure metal material which, in the neuroses of a later epoch (no longer superstitious but hypochondriacal instead) has to be laboriously extracted by analytic work from the ore of free associations and symptoms.² A deeper penetration into the analysis of our painter’s illness will probably bring stronger conviction. It is no unusual thing for a man to acquire a melancholic depression and an inhibition in his work as a result of his father’s death. When this happens, we conclude that the man had been attached to his father with an especially strong love, and we remember how often a severe melancholia appears as a neurotic form of mourning.

¹ In the familiar fairy tale of ‘The Seven Little Goats’, the Father Wolf appears as a burglar.

² The fact that in our analyses we so seldom succeed in finding the Devil as a father-substitute may be an indication that for those who come to us for analysis this figure from mediaeval mythology has long since played out its part. For the pious Christian of earlier centuries belief in the Devil was no less a duty than belief in God. In point of fact, he needed the Devil in order to be able to keep hold of God. The later decrease in faith has, for various reasons, first and foremost affected the figure of the Devil.

If we are bold enough to apply this idea of the Devil as a father substitute to cultural history, we may also be able to see the witch-trials of the Middle Ages in a new light.

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

4012

In this we are undoubtedly right. But we are not right if we conclude further that this relation has been merely one of love. On the contrary, his mourning over the loss of his father is the more likely to turn into melancholia, the more his attitude to him bore the stamp of ambivalence. This emphasis on ambivalence, however, prepares us for the possibility of the father being subjected to a debasement, as we see happening in the painter’s demonological neurosis. If we were able to learn as much about Christoph Haizmann as about a patient undergoing an analysis with us, it would be an easy matter to elicit this ambivalence, to get him to remember when and under what provocations he was given cause to fear and hate his father; and, above all, to discover what were the accidental factors that were added to the typical motives for a hatred of the father which are necessarily inherent in the natural relationship of son to father. Perhaps we might then find a special explanation for the painter’s inhibition in work. It is possible that his father had opposed his wish to become a painter. If that was so, his inability to practise his art after his father’s death would on the one hand be an expression of the familiar phenomenon of ‘deferred obedience’; and, on the other hand, by making him incapable of earning a livelihood, it would be bound to increase his longing for his father as a protector from the cares of life. In its aspect as deferred obedience it would also be an expression of remorse and a successful self-punishment.

Since, however, we cannot carry out an analysis of this sort with Christoph Haizmann, who died in the year 1700, we must content ourselves with bringing out those features of his case history which may point to the typical exciting causes of a negative attitude to the father. There are only a few such features, nor are they very striking, but they are of great interest.

Let us first consider the part played by the number nine. The pact with the Evil One was for nine years. On this point the unquestionably trustworthy report by the village priest of Pottenbrunn is quite clear: pro novem annis Syngraphen scriptam tradidit. This letter of introduction, dated September 1, 1677, is also able to inform us that the appointed time was about to expire in a few days: quorum et finis 24 mensis hujus futurus appropinquat. The pact would therefore have been signed on September 24, 1668.¹ In the same report, indeed, yet another use is made of the number nine. The painter claims to have withstood the temptations of the Evil One nine times - ‘nonies’ - before he yielded to him. This detail is no longer mentioned in the later reports. In the Abbot’s deposition the phrase ‘pos annos novem’ is used, and the compiler repeats ‘ad novem annos’ in his summary - a proof that this number was not regarded as indifferent.

¹ The contradictory fact that both the pacts as transcribed bear the date 1669 will be considered later.

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

4013

The number nine is well known to us from neurotic phantasies. It is the number of the months of pregnancy, and wherever it appears it directs our attention to a phantasy of pregnancy. In our painter’s case, to be sure, the number refers to years, not months; and it will be objected that nine is a significant number in other ways as well. But who knows whether it may not in general owe a good deal of its sanctity to the part it plays in pregnancy? Nor need we be disconcerted by the change from nine months to nine years. We know from dreams what liberties ‘unconscious mental activity’ takes with numbers. If, for instance, the number five occurs in a dream, this can invariably be traced back to a five that is important in waking life; but whereas in waking life the five was a five years’ difference in age or a company of five people, it appeared in the dream as five bank-notes or five fruits. That is to say, the number is kept, but its denominator is changed according to the requirements of condensation and displacement. Nine years in a dream could thus easily correspond to nine months in real life. The dream-work plays about with the numbers of waking life in another way, too, for it shows a sovereign disregard for noughts and does not treat them as numbers at all. Five dollars in a dream can stand for fifty or five hundred or five thousand dollars in reality.

Another detail in the painter’s relations to the Devil has once more a sexual reference. On the first occasion, as I have mentioned, he saw the Evil One in the shape of an honest citizen. But already on the second occasion the Devil was naked and misshapen, and had two pairs of female breasts. In none of his subsequent apparitions are the breasts absent, either as a single or a double pair. Only in one of them does the Devil exhibit, in addition to the breasts, a large penis ending in a snake. This stressing of the female sexual character by introducing large pendulous breasts (there is never any indication of the female genitals) is bound to appear to us as a striking contradiction of our hypothesis that the Devil had the meaning of a father-substitute for the painter. And, indeed, such a way of representing the Devil is in itself unusual. Where ‘devil’ is thought of in a generic sense, and devils appear in numbers, there is nothing strange about depicting female devils; but that the Devil, who is a great individuality, the Lord of Hell and the Adversary of God, should be represented otherwise than as a male, and, indeed, as a super-male, with horns, tail and a big penis-snake - this, I believe, is never found.

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

4014

These two slight indications give us an idea of what the typical factor is which determines the negative side of the painter’s relation to his father. What he is rebelling against is his feminine attitude to him which culminates in a phantasy of bearing him a child (the nine years). We have an accurate knowledge of this resistance from our analyses, where it takes on very strange forms in the transference and gives us a great deal of trouble. With the painter’s mourning for his lost father, and the heightening of his longing for him, there also comes about in him a re-activation of his long-since repressed phantasy of pregnancy, and he is obliged to defend himself against it by a neurosis and by debasing his father.

But why should his father, after being reduced to the status of a Devil, bear this physical mark of a woman? The feature seems at first hard to interpret; but soon we find two explanations which compete with each other without being mutually exclusive. A boy’s feminine attitude to his father undergoes repression as soon as he understands that his rivalry with a woman for his father’s love has as a precondition the loss of his own male genitals - in other words, castration. Repudiation of the feminine attitude is thus the result of a revolt against castration. It regularly finds its strongest expression in the converse phantasy of castrating the father, of turning him into a woman. Thus the Devil’s breasts would correspond to a projection of the subject’s own femininity on to the father-substitute. The second explanation of these female additions to the Devil’s body no longer has a hostile meaning but an affectionate one. It sees in the adoption of this shape an indication that the child’s tender feelings towards his mother have been displaced on to his father; and this suggests that there has previously been a strong fixation on the mother, which, in its turn, is responsible for part of the child’s hostility towards his father. Large breasts are the positive sexual characteristics of the mother even at a time when the negative characteristic of the female - her lack of a penis - is as yet unknown to the child. ¹

¹ Cf. Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood (1910c).

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

4015

If our painter’s repugnance to accepting castration made it impossible for him to appease his longing for his father, it is perfectly understandable that he should have turned for help and salvation to the image of his mother. This is why he declared that only the Holy Mother of God of Mariazell could release him from his pact with the Devil and why he obtained his freedom once more on the day of the Mother’s Nativity (September 8). Whether the day on which the pact was made - September 24 - was not also determined in some similar way, we shall of course never know.

Among the observations made by psycho-analysis of the mental life of children there is scarcely one which sounds so repugnant and unbelievable to a normal adult as that of a boy’s feminine attitude to his father and the phantasy of pregnancy that arises from it. It is only since Senatspräsident Daniel Paul Schreber, a judge presiding over a division of the Appeal Court of Saxony, published the history of his psychotic illness and his extensive recovery from it,¹  that we can discuss the subject without trepidation or apology. We learn from this invaluable book that, somewhere about the age of fifty, the Senatspräsident became firmly convinced that God - who, incidentally, exhibited distinct traits of his father, the worthy physician, Dr. Schreber - had decided to emasculate him, to use him as a woman, and to beget from him ‘a new race of men born from the spirit of Schreber’. (His own marriage was childless.) In his revolt against this intention of God’s, which seemed to him highly unjust and ‘contrary to the Order of Things’, he fell ill with symptoms of paranoia, which, however, underwent a process of involution in the course of years, leaving only a small residue behind. The gifted author of his own case history could not have guessed that in it he had uncovered a typical pathogenic factor.

¹ Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken, 1903. See my analysis of his case (1911c).

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

4016

This revolt against castration or a feminine attitude has been torn out of its organic context by Alfred Adler. He has linked it superficially or falsely with the longing for power, and has postulated it as an independent ‘masculine protest’. Since a neurosis can only arise from a conflict between two trends, it is as justifiable to see the cause of ‘every’ neurosis in the masculine protest as it is to see it in the feminine attitude against which the protest is being made. It is quite true that this masculine protest plays a regular part in the formation of character - in some types of people a very large part - and that we meet it in the analysis of neurotic men as a vigorous resistance. Psycho-analysis has attached due importance to the masculine protest in connection with the castration complex, without being able to accept its omnipotence or its omnipresence in neuroses. The most marked case of a masculine protest with all its manifest reactions and character-traits that I have met with in analysis was that of a patient who came to me for treatment on account of an obsessional neurosis in whose symptoms the unresolved conflict between a masculine and a feminine attitude (fear of castration and desire for castration) found clear expression. In addition, the patient had developed masochistic phantasies which were wholly derived from a wish to accept castration; and he had even gone beyond these phantasies to real satisfaction in perverse situations. The whole of his state rested - like Adler’s theory itself - on the repression and denial of early infantile fixations of love.

Senatspräsident Schreber found the way to recovery when he decided to give up his resistance to castration and to accommodate himself to the feminine role cast for him by God. After this, he became lucid and calm, was able to put through his own discharge from the asylum and led a normal life - with the one exception that he devoted some hours every day to the cultivation of his femaleness, of whose gradual advance towards the goal determined by God he remained convinced.

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

4017

IV

THE TWO BONDS

A remarkable detail in our painter’s story is the statement that he signed two different bonds with the Devil. The first, written in black ink, ran as follows:

‘I, Chr. H., subscribe myself to this Lord as his bounden son till the ninth year.’

The second, written in blood, ran:

‘Chr. H. I sign a bond with this Satan, to be his bounden son, and in the ninth year to belong to him body and soul.’

The originals of both are said to have been in the archives at Mariazell when the Trophaeum was compiled, and both bear the same date - 1669.

I have already made a number of references to the two bonds; and I now propose to deal with them in greater detail, although it is precisely here that the danger of overvaluing trifles seems especially great.

It is unusual for anyone to sign a bond with the Devil twice, in such a way that the first document is replaced by the second, but without losing its own validity. Perhaps this occurrence is less surprising to other people, who are more at home with demonological material. For my part, I could only look on it as a special peculiarity of our case, and my suspicions were aroused when I found that the reports were at variance precisely on this point. Examination of these discrepancies will afford us, unexpectedly, a deeper understanding of the case history.

The village priest of Pottenbrunn’s letter of introduction describes a very simple and clear situation. In it mention is only made of one bond, which was written in blood by the painter nine years before and which was due to expire in a few days’ time - on September 24. It must therefore have been drawn up on September 24, 1668; unfortunately this date, although it can be inferred with certainty, is not explicitly stated.

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

4018

The Abbot Franciscus’s deposition, which was dated, as we know, a few days later (September 12, 1677), already describes a more complicated state of affairs. It is plausible to assume that the painter had given more precise information in the interval. The deposition relates that the painter had signed two bonds: one in the year 1668 (a date which should also be the correct one according to the letter of introduction), written in black ink, and the other ‘sequenti anno 1669’, written in blood. The bond that he received back on the day of the Nativity of the Virgin was the one written in blood - viz. the later bond, which had been signed in 1669. This does not emerge from the Abbot’s deposition, for there it merely says later ‘schedam redderet’ and ‘schedam sibi porrigentem conspexisset’ as if there could only be a single document in question. But it does follow from the subsequent course of the story, and also from the coloured title-page of the Tropheaum, where what is clearly a red script can be seen on the paper which the demon dragon is holding. The further course of the story is, as I have already related, that the painter returned to Mariazell in May, 1678, after he had experienced further temptations from the Evil One in Vienna; and that he begged that, through a further act of Grace on the part of the Holy Mother, the first document, written in ink, might also be given back to him. In what way this came about is not so fully described as on the first occasion. We are merely told: ‘quâ juxta votum redditâ’; and in another passage the compiler says that this particular bond was thrown to the painter by the Devil ‘crumpled up and torn into four pieces’ on May 9, 1678, at about nine o’clock in the evening.

Both bonds, however, bear the date of the same year - 1669.

This incompatibility is either of no significance or may put us on the following track.

If we take as a starting-point the Abbot’s account, as being the more detailed one, we are confronted with a number of difficulties. When Christoph Haizmann confessed to the village priest of Pottenbrunn that he was hard pressed by the Devil and that the time-limit would soon run out, he could only (in 1677) have been thinking of the bond which he had signed in 1668 - namely, the first one, written in black (which is referred to in the letter of introduction as the only one, but is described there being written in blood). But a few days later, at Mariazell, he was only concerned to get back the later bond, in blood, which was not nearly due to expire then (1669-77), and allowed the first one to become overdue. This latter was not reclaimed till 1678 - that is, when it had run into its tenth year. Furthermore, why are both the bonds dated in the same year (1669), when one of them is explicitly attributed to the following year (‘anno subsequenti’)?

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

4019

The compiler must have noticed these difficulties, for he made an attempt to remove them. In his preface he adopted the Abbot’s version, but he modified it in one particular. The painter, he says, signed a bond with the Devil in 1669 in ink, but afterwards (‘deinde vero’) in blood. He thus overrode the express statement of both reports that one bond was signed in 1668, and he ignored the Abbot’s remark in his deposition to the effect that there was a difference in the year-number between the two bonds. This he did in order to keep in harmony with the dating of the two documents that were given back by the Devil.

In the Abbot’s deposition a passage appears in brackets after the words ‘sequenti vero anno 1669’. It runs: ‘sumitur hic alter annus pro nondum completo, uti saepe in loquendo fieri solet, nam eundem annum indicant syngraphae, quarum atramento scripta ante praesentem attestationem nondum habita fuit.’ This passage is clearly an interpolation by the compiler; for the Abbot, who had only seen one bond, could not have stated that both bore the same date. The placing of the passage in brackets, moreover, must have been intended to show that it was an addition to the text of the deposition. It represents another attempt on the compiler’s part to reconcile the incompatible evidence. He agrees that the first bond was signed in 1668; but he thinks that, since the year was already far advanced (it was September), the painter had post-dated it by a year so that both bonds were able to show the same year. His invoking the fact that people often do the same sort of thing in conversation seems to me to stamp his whole attempt at an explanation as no more than a feeble evasion.

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

4020

I cannot tell whether my presentation of the case has made any impression on the reader and whether it has put him in a position to take an interest in these minute details. I myself have found it impossible to arrive with any certainty at the true state of affairs; but, in studying this confused business, I hit upon a notion which has the advantage of giving the most natural picture of the course of events, even though once more the written evidence does not entirely fit in with it.

My view is that when the painter first came to Mariazell he spoke only of one bond, written in the regular way in blood, which was about to fall due and which had therefore been signed in September, 1668 - all exactly as described in the village priest’s letter of introduction. In Mariazell, too, he presented this bond in blood as the one which the Demon had given back to him under compulsion from the Holy Mother. We know what happened subsequently. The painter left the shrine soon afterwards and went to Vienna, where he felt free till the middle of October. Then, however, he began once more to be subjected to sufferings and apparitions, in which he saw the work of the Evil Spirit. He again felt in need of redemption, but was faced with the difficulty of explaining why the exorcism in the holy Chapel had not brought him a lasting deliverance. He would certainly not have been welcome at Mariazell if he had returned there uncured and relapsed. In this quandary, he invented an earlier, first bond, which, however, was to be written in ink, so that its supersession in favour of a later bond, written in blood, should seem more plausible. Having returned to Mariazell, he had this alleged first bond given back to him too. After this he was left in peace by the Evil One; but at the same time he did something else, which will show us what lay in the background of his neurosis.

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

4021

The drawings he made were undoubtedly executed during his second stay at Mariazell: the title-page, which is a single composition, contains a representation of both the bond scenes. The attempt to make his new story tally with his earlier one may well have caused him embarrassment. It was unfortunate for him that his additional invention could only be of an earlier bond and not of a later one. Thus he could not avoid the awkward result that he had redeemed one - the blood bond - too soon (in the eighth year), and the other - the black bond - too late (in the tenth year). And he betrayed the double editing of the story by making a mistake in the dating of the bonds and attributing the earlier one as well as the later to the year 1669. This mistake has the significance of a piece of unintentional honesty: it enables us to guess that the supposedly earlier bond was fabricated at the later date. The compiler, who certainly did not begin revising the material before 1714, and perhaps not till 1729, had to do his best to resolve its not inconsiderable contradictions. Finding that both the bonds before him were dated 1669, he had recourse to the evasion which he interpolated in the Abbot’s deposition.

It is easy to see where the weak spot lies in this otherwise attractive reconstruction. Reference is already made to the existence of two bonds, one in black and one in blood, in the Abbot’s deposition. I therefore have the choice between accusing the compiler of having also made an alteration in the deposition, an alteration closely related to his interpolation, or confessing that I am unable to unravel the tangle.¹

¹ The compiler, it seems to me, was between two fires. On the one hand, he found, in the village priest’s letter of introduction as well as in the Abbot’s deposition, the statement that the bond (or at any rate the first bond) had been signed in 1668; on the other hand, both bonds, which had been preserved in the archives, bore the date 1669. As he had two bonds before him, it seemed certain to him that two bonds had been signed. If, as I believe, the Abbot’s deposition mentioned only one bond, he was obliged to insert in the deposition a reference to the other and then remove the contradiction by the hypothesis of the post-dating. The textual alteration which he made occurs immediately before the interpolation, which can only have been written by him. He was obliged to link the interpolation to the alteration with the words ‘sequenti vero anno 1669’, since the painter had expressly written in his (very much damaged) caption to the title-page:

‘A year after He

... terrible threatenings in

... shape No. 2, was forced

... to sign a bond in blood.’

The painter’s blunder in writing his Syngraphae - a blunder which I have been obliged to assume in my attempted explanation - appears to me to be no less interesting than are the actual bonds.

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

4022

The reader will long ago have judged this whole discussion superfluous and the details concerned in it too unimportant. But the matter gains a new interest if it is pursued in a certain direction.

I have just expressed the view that, when the painter was disagreeably surprised by the course taken by his illness, he invented an earlier bond (the one in ink) in order to be able to maintain his position with the reverend Fathers at Mariazell. Now I am writing for readers who, although they believe in psycho-analysis, do not believe in the Devil; and they might object that it was absurd for me to bring such an accusation against the poor wretch - hunc miserum, as he is called in the letter of introduction. For, they will say, the bond in blood was just as much a product of his phantasy as the allegedly earlier one in ink. In reality, no Devil appeared to him at all, and the whole business of pacts with the Devil only existed in his imagination. I quite realize this: the poor man cannot be denied the right to supplement his original phantasy with a new one, if altered circumstances seem to require it.

But here, too, the matter goes further. After all, the two bonds were not phantasies like the visions of the Devil. They were documents, preserved, according to the assurances of the copyist and the deposition of the later Abbot Kilian, in the archives of Mariazell, for all to see and touch. We are therefore in a dilemma. Either we must assume that both the papers which were supposed to have been given back to the painter through divine Grace were written by him at the time when he needed them; or else, despite all the solemn assurances, the confirmatory evidence of witnesses, signed and sealed, and so on, we shall be obliged to deny the credibility of the reverend Fathers of Mariazell and St. Lambert. I must admit that I am unwilling to cast doubts on the Fathers. I am inclined to think, it is true, that the compiler, in the interests of consistency, has falsified some things in the deposition made by the first Abbot; but a ‘secondary revision’ such as this does not go much beyond what is carried out even by modern lay historians, and at all events it was done in good faith. In another respect, the reverend Fathers have established a good claim to our confidence. As I have said already there was nothing to prevent them from suppressing the accounts of the incompleteness of the cure and the continuance of the temptations. And even the description of the scene of exorcism in the Chapel, which one might have viewed with some apprehension, is soberly written and inspires belief. So there is nothing for it but to lay the blame on the painter. No doubt he had the red bond with him when he went to penitential prayer in the Chapel, and he produced it afterwards as he came back to his spiritual assistants from his meeting with the Demon. Nor need it have been the same paper which was later preserved in the archives, and, according to our construction, it may have borne the date 1668 (nine years before the exorcism).

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

4023

V

THE FURTHER COURSE OF THE NEUROSIS

But if this is so, we should be dealing not with a neurosis but with a deception, and the painter would be a malingerer and forger instead of a sick man suffering from possession. But the transitional stages between neurosis and malingering are, as we know, very fluid. Nor do I see any difficulty in supposing that the painter wrote this paper and the later one, and took them with him, in a peculiar state, similar to the one in which he had his visions. Indeed there was no other course open to him if he wished to carry into effect his phantasy of his pact with the Devil and of his redemption.

On the other hand, the diary written in Vienna, which he gave to the clerics on his second visit to Mariazell, bears the stamp of veracity. It undoubtedly affords us a deep insight into the motivation - or let us rather say, the exploitation - of the neurosis.

The entries extend from the time of the successful exorcism till January 13 of the following year, 1678.

Until October 11 he felt very well in Vienna, where he lived with a married sister; but after that he had fresh attacks, with visions, convulsions, loss of consciousness and painful sensations, and these finally led to his return to Mariazell in May, 1678.

The story of his fresh illness falls into three phases. First, temptation appeared in the form of a finely dressed cavalier, who tried to persuade him to throw away the document attesting his admission to the Brotherhood of the Holy Rosary. He resisted this temptation, whereupon the same thing happened next day; only this time the scene was laid in a magnificently decorated hall in which grand gentlemen were dancing with beautiful ladies. The same cavalier who had tempted him before made a proposal to him connected with painting¹ and promised to give him a handsome sum of money in return. After he had made this vision disappear by prayer, it was repeated once more a few days later, in a still more pressing form. This time the cavalier sent one of the most beautiful of the ladies who sat at the banqueting table to him to persuade him to join their company, and he had difficulty in defending himself from the temptress. Most terrifying of all, moreover, was the vision which occurred soon after this. He saw a still more magnificent hall, in which there was a ‘throne built up of gold pieces’. Cavaliers were standing about awaiting the arrival of their King. The same person who had so often made proposals to him now approached him and summoned him to ascend the throne, for they ‘wanted to have him for their King and to honour him for ever’. This extravagant phantasy concluded the first, perfectly transparent, phase of the story of his temptation.

¹ This passage is unintelligible to me.

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

4024

There was bound to be a revulsion against this. An ascetic reaction reared its head. On October 20 a great light appeared, and a voice came from it, making itself known as Christ, and commanded him to forswear this wicked world and serve God in the wilderness for six years. The painter clearly suffered more from these holy apparitions than from the earlier demoniacal ones; it was only after two and a half hours that he awoke from this attack. In the next attack the holy figure surrounded by light was much more unfriendly. He issued threats against him for not having obeyed the divine behest and led him down into Hell so that he might be terrified by the fate of the damned. Evidently, however, this failed in its effect, for the apparitions of the figure surrounded by light, which purported to be Christ, were repeated several more times. Each time the painter underwent an absence and an ecstasy lasting for hours. In the grandest of these ecstasies the figure surrounded by light took him first into a town in whose streets people were perpetrating all the acts of darkness; and then, in contrast, took him to a lovely meadow in which anchorites were leading a godly life and were receiving tangible evidence of God’s grace and care. There then appeared, instead of Christ, the Holy Mother herself, who, reminding him of what she had already done on his behalf, called on him to obey the command of her dear Son. ‘Since he could not truly resolve so to do’, Christ appeared to him again the next day and upbraided him soundly with threats and promises. At last he gave way and made up his mind to leave the world and to do what was required of him. With this decision, the second phase ended. The painter states that from this time onwards he had no more visions and no more temptations.

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

4025

Nevertheless, his resolution cannot have been firm enough or he must have delayed its execution too long; for while he was in the midst of his devotions, on December 26, in St. Stephen’s, catching sight of a strapping young woman accompanied by a smartly dressed gentleman, he could not fend off the thought that he might himself be in this gentleman’s place. This called for punishment, and that very evening it over took him like a thunderbolt. He saw himself in bright flames and sank down in a swoon. Attempts were made to rouse him but he rolled about in the room till blood flowed from his mouth and nose. He felt that he was surrounded by heat and noisome smells, and he heard a voice say that he had been condemned to this state as a punishment for his vain and idle thoughts. Later he was scourged with ropes by Evil Spirits, and was told that he would be tormented like this every day until he had decided to enter the Order of Anchorites. These experiences continued up to the last entry in his diary (January 13).

We see how our unfortunate painter’s phantasies of temptation were succeeded by ascetic ones and finally by phantasies of punishment. The end of his tale of suffering we know already. In May he went to Mariazell, told his story of an earlier bond written in black ink, to which he explicitly attributed his continued torment by the Devil, received this bond back, too, and was cured.

During his second stay there he painted the pictures which are copied in the Trophaeum. Then he took a step which was in keeping with the demands of the ascetic phase of his diary. He did not, it is true, go into the wilderness to become an anchorite, but he joined the Order of the Brothers Hospitallers: religiosus factus est.

Reading the diary, we gain insight into another part of the story. It will be remembered that the painter signed a bond with the Devil because after his father’s death, feeling depressed and unable to work, he was worried about making a livelihood. These factors of depression, inhibition in his work and mourning for his father are somehow connected with one another, whether in a simple or a complicated way. Perhaps the reason why the apparitions of the Devil were so over-generously furnished with breasts was that the Evil One was meant to become his foster father. This hope was not fulfilled, and the painter continued to be in a bad state. He could not work properly, or he was out of luck and could not find enough employment. The village priest’s letter of introduction speaks of him as ‘hunc miserum omni auxilio destitutum’. He was thus not only in moral straits but was suffering material want. In the account of his later visions, we find remarks here and there indicating - as do the contents of the scenes described - that even after the successful first exorcism, nothing had been changed in his situation. We come to know him as a man who fails in everything and who is therefore trusted by no one. In his first vision the cavalier asked him ‘what he is going to do, since he has no one to stand by him’. The first series of visions in Vienna tallied completely with the wishful phantasies of a poor man, who had come down in the world and who hungered for enjoyment: magnificent halls, high living, a silver dinner-service and beautiful women. Here we find what was missing in his relations with the Devil made good. At that time he had been in a melancholia which made him unable to enjoy anything and obliged him to reject the most attractive offers. After the exorcism the melancholia seems to have been overcome and all his worldly-minded desires had once more become active.

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

4026

In one of the ascetic visions he complained to his guide (Christ) that nobody had any faith in him, so that he was unable to carry out the commands laid upon him. The reply he was given is, unfortunately, obscure to us: ‘Although they will not believe me, yet I know well what has happened, but I am not able to declare it.’ Especially illuminating, however, are the experiences which his heavenly Guide made him have among the anchorites. He came to a cave in which an old man had been sitting for the last sixty years, and in answer to a question he learnt that this old man had been fed every day by God’s angels. And then he saw for himself how an angel brought the old man food: ‘Three dishes with food, a loaf, a dumpling and some drink.’ After the anchorite had eaten, the angel collected everything and carried it away. We can see what the temptation was which the pious visions offered the painter: they were meant to induce him to adopt a mode of existence in which he need no longer worry about sustenance. The utterances of Christ in the last vision are also worthy of note. After threatening that, if he did not prove amenable, something would happen which would oblige him and the people to believe [in it], Christ gave him a direct warning that ‘I should not heed the people; even if they were to persecute me or give me no help, God would not abandon me’.

Christoph Haizmann was enough of an artist and a child of the world to find it difficult to renounce this sinful world. Nevertheless, in view of his helpless position, he did so in the end. He entered a Holy Order. With this, both his internal struggle and his material need came to an end. In his neurosis, this outcome was reflected in the fact of his seizures and visions being brought to an end by the return of an alleged first bond. Actually, both portions of his demonological illness had the same meaning. He wanted all along simply to make his life secure. He tried first to achieve this with the help of the Devil at the cost of his salvation; and when this failed and had to be given up, he tried to achieve it with the help of the clergy at the cost of his freedom and most of the possibilities of enjoyment in life. Perhaps he himself was only a poor devil who simply had no luck; perhaps he was too ineffective or too untalented to make a living, and was one of those types of people who are known as ‘eternal sucklings’ - who cannot tear themselves away from the blissful situation at the mother’s breast, and who, all through their lives, persist in a demand to be nourished by someone else. - And so it was that, in this history of his illness, he followed the path which led from his father, by way of the Devil as a father substitute, to the pious Fathers of the Church.

To superficial observation Haizmann’s neurosis appears to be a masquerade which overlays a part of the serious, if commonplace, struggle for existence. This is not always the case, but it is not infrequently so. Analysts often discover how unprofitable it is to treat a business man who ‘though otherwise in good health, has for some time shown signs of a neurosis’. The business catastrophe with which he feels himself threatened throws up the neurosis as a by-product; and this gives him the advantage of being able to conceal his worries about his real life behind his symptoms. But apart from this the neurosis serves no useful purpose whatever, since it uses up forces which would have been more profitably employed in dealing rationally with the dangerous situation.

A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis

4027

In a far greater number of cases the neurosis is more autonomous and more independent of the interests of self-preservation and self-maintenance. In the conflict which creates the neurosis, what are at stake are either solely libidinal interests or libidinal interests in intimate connections with self-preservative ones. In all three instances the dynamics of the neurosis are the same. A dammed-up libido which cannot be satisfied in reality succeeds, with the help of a regression to old fixations, in finding discharge through the repressed unconscious. The sick man’s ego, in so far as it can extract a ‘gain from illness’ out of this process, countenances the neurosis, although there can be no doubt of its injuriousness in its economic aspect.

Nor would our painter’s wretched situation in life have provoked a demonological neurosis in him if his material need had not intensified his longing for his father. After his melancholia and the Devil had been disposed of, however, he still had to face a struggle between his libidinal enjoyment of life and his realization that the interests of self-preservation called imperatively for renunciation and asceticism. It is interesting to see that the painter was very well aware of the unity of the two portions of his illness, for he attributed both to the bonds which he had signed with the Devil. On the other hand, he made no sharp distinction between the operations of the Evil Spirit and those of the Divine Powers. He had only one description for both: they were manifestations of the Devil.

4028

REMARKS ON THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF DREAM-INTERPRETATION

(1923)

4029

Intentionally left blank

4030

REMARKS ON THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF DREAM-INTERPRETATION

The accidental circumstance that the last editions of my Interpretation of Dreams (1900a) have been printed from stereotype plates has led me to issue the following remarks in an independent form, instead of introducing them into the text as modifications or additions.

I

In interpreting a dream during an analysis a choice lies open to one between several technical procedures.

One can (a) proceed chronologically and get the dreamer to bring up his associations to the elements of the dream in the order in which those elements occurred in his account of the dream. This is the original, classical method, which I still regard as the best if one is analysing one’s own dreams.

Or one can (b) start the work of interpretation from some one particular element of the dream which one picks out from the middle of it. For instance, one can choose the most striking piece of it, or the piece which shows the greatest clarity or sensory intensity; or, again, one can start off from some spoken words in the dream, in the expectation that they will lead to the recollection of some spoken words in waking life.

Or one can (c) begin by entirely disregarding the manifest content and instead ask the dreamer what events of the previous day are associated in his mind with the dream he has just described.

Finally, one can (d), if the dreamer is already familiar with the technique of interpretation, avoid giving him any instructions and leave it to him to decide with which associations to the dream he shall begin.

I cannot lay it down that one or the other of these techniques is preferable or in general yields better results.

Remarks On The Theory And Practice Of Dream-Interpretation

4031

II

What is of far greater importance is the question of whether the work of interpretation proceeds under a pressure of resistance which is high or low - a point on which the analyst never remains long in doubt. If the pressure is high, one may perhaps succeed in discovering what the things are with which the dream is concerned, but one cannot make out what it says about these things. It is as though one were trying to listen to a conversation taking place at a distance or in a very low voice. In that case, one can feel confident that there is not much prospect of collaborating with the dreamer, one decides not to bother too much about it and not to give him much help, and one is content to put before him a few translations of symbols that seem probable.

The majority of dreams in a difficult analysis are of this kind; so that one cannot learn much from them about the nature and mechanism of dream-formation. Least of all can one learn anything from them upon the recurring question of where the dream’s wish-fulfilment may lie hidden. When the pressure of resistance is quite extremely high, one meets with the phenomenon of the dreamer’s associations broadening instead of deepening. In place of the desired associations to the dream that has already been narrated, there appear a constant succession of new fragments of dream, which in their turn remain without associations.

It is only when the resistance is kept within moderate limits that the familiar picture of the work of interpretation comes into view: the dreamer’s associations begin by diverging widely from the manifest elements, so that a great number of subjects and ranges of ideas are touched on, after which, a second series of associations quickly converge from these on to the dream-thoughts that are being looked for. When this is so, collaboration between the analyst and the dreamer becomes possible; whereas under a high pressure of resistance it would not even be of any advantage.

A number of dreams which occur during analyses are untranslatable even though they do not actually make much show of the resistance that is there. They represent free renderings of the latent dream-thoughts behind them and are comparable to successful creative writings which have been artistically worked over and in which the basic themes are still recognizable though they have been subjected to any amount of re-arrangement and transformation. Dreams of this kind serve in the treatment as an introduction to thoughts and memories of the dreamer without their own actual content coming into account.

Remarks On The Theory And Practice Of Dream-Interpretation

4032

III

It is possible to distinguish between dreams from above and dreams from below, provided the distinction is not made too sharply. Dreams from below are those which are provoked by the strength of an unconscious (repressed) wish which has found a means of being represented in some of the day’s residues. They may be regarded as inroads of the repressed into waking life. Dreams from above correspond to thoughts or intentions of the day before which have contrived during the night to obtain reinforcement from repressed material that is debarred from the ego. When this is so, analysis as a rule disregards this unconscious ally and succeeds in inserting the latent dream-thoughts into the texture of waking thought. This distinction calls for no modification in the theory of dreams.

IV

In some analyses, or in some periods of an analysis, a divorce may become apparent between dream-life and waking life, like the divorce between the activity of phantasy and waking life which is found in the ‘continued story’ (a novel in day-dreams). In that case one dream leads off from another, taking as its central point some element which was lightly touched upon in its predecessor, and so on. But we find far more frequently that dreams are not attached to one another but are interpolated into a successive series of portions of waking thought.

Remarks On The Theory And Practice Of Dream-Interpretation

4033

V

The interpretation of a dream falls into two phases: the phase in which it is translated and the phase in which it is judged or has its value assessed. During the first phase one must not allow oneself to be influenced by any consideration whatever for the second phase. It is as though one had before one a chapter from some work in a foreign language - by Livy, for instance. The first thing one wants to know is what Livy says in the chapter; and it is only after this that the discussion arises of whether what one has read is a historical narrative or a legend or a digression on the part of the author.

What conclusions can one draw from a correctly translated dream? I have an impression that analytic practice has not always avoided errors and over-estimations on this point, partly owing to an exaggerated respect for the ‘mysterious unconscious’. It is only too easy to forget that a dream is as a rule merely a thought like any other, made possible by a relaxation of the censorship and by unconscious reinforcement, and distorted by the operation of the censorship and by unconscious revision.

Let us take as an example the so-called dreams of recovery. If a patient has had a dream of this kind, in which he seems to abandon the restrictions of his neurosis - if, for instance, he overcomes some phobia or gives up some emotional attachment - we are inclined to think that he has made a great step forward, that he is ready to take his place in a new state of life, that he has begun to reckon on his recovery, etc. This may often be true, but quite as often such dreams of recovery only have the value of dreams of convenience: they signify a wish to be well at last, in order to avoid another portion of the work of analysis which is felt to lie ahead. In this sense, dreams of recovery very frequently occur, for instance, when the patient is about to enter upon a new and disagreeable phase of the transference. He is behaving in this just like some neurotics who after a few hours of analysis declare they have been cured - because they want to escape all the unpleasantness that is bound to come up for discussion in the analysis. Sufferers from war neuroses, too, who gave up their symptoms because the therapy adopted by the army doctors succeeded in making being ill even more uncomfortable than serving at the front - these sufferers, too, were following the same economic laws and in both cases alike the cures have proved to be only temporary.

Remarks On The Theory And Practice Of Dream-Interpretation

4034

VI

It is by no means easy to arrive at general conclusions upon the value of correctly translated dreams. If a conflict due to ambivalence is taking place in a patient, then the emergence in him of a hostile thought certainly does not imply a permanent overcoming of his affectionate impulse - that is to say, a resolution of the conflict: neither does any such implication follow from a dream with a similarly hostile content. During a conflict such as this arising from ambivalence, there are often two dreams every night, each of them representing an opposite attitude. In that case the progress lies in the fact that a complete isolation of the two contrasted impulses has been achieved and that each of them, with the help of its unconscious reinforcements, can be followed and understood to its extreme limits. And if it sometimes happens that one of the two ambivalent dreams has been forgotten, one must not be deceived into assuming that a decision has been made in favour of the one side. The fact that one of the dreams has been forgotten shows, it is true, that for the moment one tendency is in the ascendant, but that is true only of the one day, and may be changed. The next night may perhaps bring the opposite expression into the foreground. The true state of the conflict can only be determined by taking into account all the other indications, including those of waking life.

Remarks On The Theory And Practice Of Dream-Interpretation

4035

VII

The question of the value to be assigned to dreams is intimately related to the other question of their susceptibility to influence from ‘suggestion’ by the physician. Analysts may at first be alarmed at the mention of this possibility. But on further reflection this alarm will give place to the realization that the influencing of the patient’s dreams is no more a blunder on the part of the analyst or disgrace to him than the guiding of the patient’s conscious thoughts.

The fact that the manifest content of dreams is influenced by the analytic treatment stands in no need of proof. It follows from our knowledge that dreams take their start from waking life and work over material derived from it. Occurrences during analytic treatment are of course among the impressions of waking life and soon become some of the most powerful of these. So it is not to be wondered at that patients should dream of things which the analyst has discussed with them and of which he has aroused expectations in them. At least it is no more to be wondered at than what is implied in the familiar fact of ‘experimental’ dreams.

But from here our interest proceeds to the question whether the latent dream-thoughts that have to be arrived at by interpretation can also be influenced or suggested by the analyst. And to this the answer must once more be that they obviously can be. For a portion of these latent dream-thoughts correspond to preconscious thought-formations, perfectly capable of being conscious, with which the dreamer might quite well have reacted to the physician’s remarks in his waking state too - whether the patient’s reactions were in harmony with those remarks or in opposition to them. In fact, if we replace the dream by the dream-thoughts which it contains, the question of how far one can suggest dreams coincides with the more general question of how far a patient in analysis is accessible to suggestion.

On the mechanism of dream-formation itself, on the dream-work in the strict sense of the word, one never exercises any influence: of that one may be quite sure.

Besides that portion of the dream which we have already discussed - the preconscious dream-thoughts - every true dream contains indications of the repressed wishful impulses to which it owes the possibility of its formation. The doubter will reply that they appear in the dream because the dreamer knows that he ought to produce them - that they are expected by the analyst. The analyst himself will rightly think otherwise.

Remarks On The Theory And Practice Of Dream-Interpretation

4036

If a dream brings up situations that can be interpreted as referring to scenes from the dreamer’s past, it seems especially important to ask whether the physician’s influence can also play a part in such contents of the dream as these. And this question is most urgent of all in the case of what are called ‘corroborative’ dreams, dreams which, as it were, ‘tag along behind’ the analysis. With some patients these are the only dreams that one obtains. Such patients reproduce the forgotten experiences of their childhood only after one has constructed them from their symptoms, associations and other signs and has propounded these constructions to them. Then follow the corroborative dreams, concerning which, however, the doubt arises whether they may not be entirely without evidential value, since they may have been imagined in compliance with the physician’s words instead of having been brought to light from the dreamer’s unconscious. This ambiguous position cannot be escaped in the analysis, since with these patients unless one interprets, constructs and propounds, one never obtains access to what is repressed in them.

The situation takes a favourable turn if the analysis of a corroborative dream of this sort, which ‘tags along behind’, is immediately followed by feelings of remembering what has hitherto been forgotten. But even then the sceptic can fall back upon an assertion that the recollections are illusory. Moreover, such feelings are for the most part absent. The repressed material is only allowed through bit by bit; and every lack of completeness inhibits or delays the forming of a sense of conviction. Furthermore, what we are dealing with may not be the reproduction of a real and forgotten event but the bringing forward of an unconscious phantasy, about which no feeling of memory is ever to be expected, though the possibility may sometimes remain of a sense of subjective conviction.

Remarks On The Theory And Practice Of Dream-Interpretation

4037

Is it possible, then, that corroborative dreams are really the result of suggestion, that they are ‘obliging’ dreams? The patients who produce only corroborative dreams are the same patients in whom doubt plays the principal part in resistance. One makes no attempt at shouting down this doubt by means of one’s authority or at reducing it by arguments. It must persist until it is brought to an end in the further course of the analysis. The analyst, too, may himself retain a doubt of the same kind in some particular instances. What makes him certain in the end is precisely the complication of the problem before him, which is like the solution of a jig-saw puzzle. A coloured picture, pasted upon a thin sheet of wood and fitting exactly into a wooden frame, is cut into a large number of pieces of the most irregular and crooked shapes. If one succeeds in arranging the confused heap of fragments, each of which bears upon it an unintelligible piece of drawing, so that the picture acquires a meaning, so that there is no gap anywhere in the design and so that the whole fits into the frame - if all these conditions are fulfilled, then one knows that one has solved the puzzle and that there is no alternative solution.

An analogy of this kind can of course have no meaning for a patient while the work of analysis is still uncompleted. At this point I recall a discussion which I was led into with a patient whose exceptionally ambivalent attitude was expressed in the most intense compulsive doubt. He did not dispute my interpretations of his dreams and was very much struck by their agreement with the hypotheses which I put forward. But he asked whether these corroborative dreams might not be an expression of his compliance towards me. I pointed out that the dreams had also brought up a quantity of details of which I could have had no suspicion and that his behaviour in the treatment apart from this had not been precisely characterized by compliance. Whereupon he switched over to another theory and asked whether his narcissistic wish to be cured might not have caused him to produce these dreams, since, after all, I had held out to him a prospect of recovery if he were able to accept my constructions. I could only reply that I had not yet come across any such mechanism of dream-formation. But a decision was reached by another road. He recollected some dreams which he had had before starting analysis and indeed before he had known anything about it; and the analysis of these dreams, which were free from all suspicion of suggestion, led to the same interpretations as the later ones. It is true that his obsession for contradiction once more found a way out in the idea that the earlier dreams had been less clear than those that occurred during the treatment; but I was satisfied with their similarity. I think that in general it is a good plan occasionally to bear in mind the fact that people were in the habit of dreaming before there was such a thing as psycho-analysis.

Remarks On The Theory And Practice Of Dream-Interpretation

4038

VIII

It may well be that dreams during psycho-analysis succeed in bringing to light what is repressed to a greater extent than dreams outside that situation. But it cannot be proved, since the two situations are not comparable; the employment of dreams in analysis is something very remote from their original purpose. On the other hand, it cannot be doubted that within an analysis far more of the repressed is brought to light in connection with dreams than by any other method. In order to account for this, there must be some motive power, some unconscious force, which is better able to lend support to the purposes of analysis during the state of sleep than at other times. What is here in question cannot well be any factor other than the patient’s compliance towards the analyst which is derived from his parental complex - in other words, the positive portion of what we call the transference; and in fact, in many dreams which recall what has been forgotten and repressed, it is impossible to discover any other unconscious wish to which the motive force for the formation of the dream can be attributed. So that if anyone wishes to maintain that most of the dreams that can be made use of in analysis are obliging dreams and owe their origin to suggestion, nothing can be said against that opinion from the point of view of analytic theory. In that case I need only add a reference to what I have said in my Introductory Lectures, where I have dealt with the relation between transference and suggestion and shown how little the trustworthiness of our results is affected by a recognition of the operation of suggestion in our sense.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g) I have dealt with the economic problem of how what are in every respect distressing experiences of the early infantile sexual period can succeed in forcing their way through to some kind of reproduction. I was obliged to ascribe to them an extraordinarily strong upward drive in the shape of the ‘compulsion to repeat’ - a force able to overcome the repression which, in obedience to the pleasure principle, weighs down upon them - though not until ‘the work of treatment has gone half-way to meet it and has loosened the repression’. Here we may add that it is the positive transference that gives this assistance to the compulsion to repeat. Thus an alliance has been made between the treatment and the compulsion to repeat, an alliance which is directed in the first instance against the pleasure principle but of which the ultimate purpose is the establishment of the dominion of the reality principle. As I have shown in the passage to which I am referring, it happens only too often that the compulsion to repeat throws over its obligations under this alliance and is not content with the return of the repressed merely in the form of dream-pictures.

Remarks On The Theory And Practice Of Dream-Interpretation

4039

IX

So far as I can at present see, dreams that occur in a traumatic neurosis are the only genuine exceptions, and punishment dreams are the only apparent exceptions, to the rule that dreams are directed towards wish-fulfilment. In the latter class of dreams we are met by the remarkable fact that actually nothing belonging to the latent dream-thoughts is taken up into the manifest content of the dream. Something quite different appears instead, which must be described as a reaction-formation against the dream-thoughts, a rejection and complete contradiction of them. Such offensive action as this against the dream can only be ascribed to the critical agency of the ego and it must therefore be assumed that the latter, provoked by the unconscious wish-fulfilment, has been temporarily re-established even during the sleeping state. It might have reacted to the undesirable content of the dream by waking up; but it has found a means, by the construction of the punishment dream, of avoiding an interruption of sleep.

For instance, in the case of the well-known dreams of the poet Rosegger which I discussed in The Interpretation of Dreams, we must suspect the existence of a suppressed version with an arrogant and boastful text, whereas the actual dream said to him: ‘You are an incompetent journeyman tailor.’ It would, of course, be useless to look for a repressed wishful impulse as the motive power for a manifest dream such as this; one must be content with the fulfilment of the wish for self-criticism.

Remarks On The Theory And Practice Of Dream-Interpretation

4040

A dream-structure of this kind will excite less astonishment if one considers how frequently dream-distortion, acting in the service of the censorship, replaces a particular element by something that is in some sense or other its opposite or contrary. It is only a short step from there to the replacement of a characteristic portion of the content of the dream by a defensive contradiction, and one further step will lead to the whole objectionable dream-content being replaced by the punishment dream. I should like to give a couple of characteristic examples of the intermediate phase in the falsification of the manifest content.

Here is an extract from the dream of a girl with a strong fixation to her father, who had difficulty in talking during the analysis. She was sitting in a room with a girl friend, and dressed only in a kimono. A gentleman came in and she felt embarrassed. But the gentleman said: ‘Why, this is the girl we saw once before dressed so nicely!’ - The gentleman stood for me, and, further back, for her father. But we can make nothing of the dream unless we make up our mind to replace the most important element in the gentleman’s speech by its contrary: ‘This is the girl I saw once before undressed and who looked so nice then!’ When she was a child of three or four she had for some time slept in the same room as her father and everything goes to suggest that she used then to throw back her clothes in her sleep to please her father. The subsequent repression of her pleasure in exhibiting herself was the motive for her secretiveness in the treatment, her dislike of showing herself openly.

And here is another scene from the same dream. She was reading her own case history, which she had before her in print. In it was a statement that ‘a young man murdered his fiancée - cocoa - that comes under anal erotism.’ This last phrase was a thought that she had in the dream at the mention of cocoa. - The interpretation of this piece of the dream was even more difficult than the former one. It emerged at last that before going to sleep she had been reading my ‘History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (1918b), the central point of which is the real or imagined observation by a patient of his parents copulating. She had already once before related this case history to her own, and this was not the only indication that in her case as well there was a question of an observation of the same kind. The young man murdering his fiancée was a clear reference to a sadistic view of the scene of copulation. But the next element, the cocoa, was very remote from it. Her only association to cocoa was that her mother used to say that cocoa gave one a headache, and she maintained that she had heard the same thing from other women. Moreover, she had at one time identified herself with her mother by means of headaches like hers. Now I could find no link between the two elements of the dream except by supposing that she wanted to make a diversion from the consequences of the observation of coitus. No, she was saying, coitus had nothing to do with the procreation of children; children came from something one ate (as they do in fairy tales); and the mention of anal erotism, which looks like an attempt in the dream at interpretation, supplemented the infantile theory which she had called to her help, by adding anal birth to it.

Remarks On The Theory And Practice Of Dream-Interpretation

4041

X

Astonishment is sometimes expressed at the fact that the dreamer’s ego can appear two or more times in the manifest dream, once as himself and again disguised behind the figures of other people. During the course of the construction of the dream, the secondary revision has evidently sought to obliterate this multiplicity of the ego, which cannot fit in with any possible scenic situation; but it is re-established by the work of interpretation. In itself this multiplicity is no more remarkable than the multiple appearance of the ego in a waking thought, especially when the ego divides itself into subject and object, puts one part of itself as an observing and critical agency in contrast to the other, or compares its present nature with its recollected past, which was also ego once; for instance, in such sentences as ‘When I think what I’ve done to this man’ or ‘When I think that I too was a child once’. But I should reject as a meaningless and unjustifiable piece of speculation the notion that all figures that appear in a dream are to be regarded as fragmentations and representatives of the dreamer’s own ego. It is enough that we should keep firmly to the fact that the separation of the ego from an observing, critical, punishing agency (an ego ideal) must be taken into account in the interpretation of dreams as well.

4042

SOME ADDITIONAL NOTES ON DREAM-INTERPRETATION AS A WHOLE

(1925)

4043

Intentionally left blank

4044

SOME ADDITIONAL NOTES ON DREAM-INTERPRETATION AS A WHOLE

(A) THE LIMITS TO THE POSSIBILITY OF INTERPRETATION

It may be asked whether it is possible to give a complete and assured translation into the language of waking life (that is, an interpretation) of every product of dream-life. This question will not be treated here in the abstract but with reference to the conditions under which one works at interpreting dreams.

Our mental activities pursue either a useful aim or an immediate yield of pleasure. In the former case what we are dealing with are intellectual judgements, preparations for action or the conveyance of information to other people. In the latter case we describe these activities as play or phantasy. What is useful is itself (as is well known) only a circuitous path to pleasurable satisfaction. Now, dreaming is an activity of the second kind, which is indeed, from the point of view of evolution, the earlier one. It is misleading to say that dreams are concerned with the tasks of life before us or seek to find a solution for the problems of our daily work. That is the business of preconscious thought. Useful work of this kind is as remote from dreams as is any intention of conveying information to another person. When a dream deals with a problem of actual life, it solves it in the manner of an irrational wish and not in the manner of a reasonable reflection. There is only one useful task, only one function, that can be ascribed to a dream, and that is the guarding of sleep from interruption. A dream may be described as a piece of phantasy working on behalf of the maintenance of sleep.

Some Additional Notes On Dream-Interpretation As A Whole

4045

It follows from this that it is on the whole a matter of indifference to the sleeping ego what may be dreamt during the night so long as the dream performs its task, and that those dreams best fulfil their function about which one knows nothing after waking. If it so often happens otherwise, if we remember dreams - even after years and decades - it always means that there has been an irruption of the repressed unconscious into the normal ego. Without this concession to it the repressed would not have consented to lend its help to the removal of the threat of disturbance to sleep. We know that it is the fact of this irruption that gives dreams their importance for psychopathology. If we can uncover a dream’s motivating force, we shall obtain unsuspected information about the repressed impulses in the unconscious; and on the other hand, if we can undo its distortions, we shall overhear preconscious thought taking place in states of internal reflection which would not have attracted consciousness to themselves during the day-time.

No one can practise the interpretation of dreams as an isolated activity: it remains a part of the work of analysis. In analysis we direct our interest according to necessity, now to the preconscious content of the dream and now to the unconscious contribution to its formation; and we often neglect the one element in favour of the other. Nor would it be of any avail for anyone to endeavour to interpret dreams outside analysis. He would not succeed in escaping the conditions of the analytic situation; and if he worked at his own dreams, he would be undertaking a self-analysis. This comment would not apply to someone who did without the dreamer’s collaboration and sought to interpret dreams by intuitive insight. But dream-interpretation of such a kind, without reference to the dreamer’s associations, would in the most favourable case remain a piece of unscientific virtuosity of very doubtful value.

If one practises dream-interpretation according to the sole justifiable technical procedure, one soon notices that success depends entirely upon the tension of resistance between the awakened ego and the repressed unconscious. Work under a ‘high pressure of resistance’ demands (as I have explained elsewhere) a different attitude on the part of the analyst from work under a low pressure. In analysis one has for long periods at a time to deal with strong resistances which are still unknown to one and which it will in any case be impossible to overcome so long as they remain unknown. It is therefore not to he wondered at that only a certain portion of a patient’s dream-products can be translated and made use of, and, even at that, most often incompletely. Even if, owing to one’s own experience, one is in a position to understand many dreams to the interpretation of which the dreamer has contributed little, one must always remember that the certainty of such interpretations remains in doubt and one hesitates to press one’s conjectures upon the patient.

Some Additional Notes On Dream-Interpretation As A Whole

4046

Critical voices will now be raised. It will be objected that, since it is not possible to interpret every dream that is dealt with, one should cease asserting more than one can establish and should be content to say that some dreams can be shown by interpretation to have a meaning but that as to the rest we are in ignorance. But the very fact that success in interpretation depends upon the resistance absolves the analyst from the necessity for such modesty. He may have the experience of a dream that was at first unintelligible becoming clear during the very same hour after some fortunate remark has got rid of one of the dreamer’s resistances. A portion of the dream which the patient had hitherto forgotten may suddenly occur to him and may bring the key to the interpretation; or a new association may emerge which may throw light upon the darkness. It sometimes happens, too, that, after months or years of analytic labour, one returns to a dream which at the beginning of the treatment seemed meaningless and incomprehensible but which is now, in the light of knowledge obtained in the meantime, completely elucidated. And if one further takes into consideration the argument from the theory of dreams that the model dream-products of children invariably have a clear meaning and are easy to interpret, then it will be justifiable to assert that dreams are quite generally mental structures that are capable of interpretation, though the situation may not always allow of an interpretation being reached.

Some Additional Notes On Dream-Interpretation As A Whole

4047

When the interpretation of a dream has been discovered, it is not always easy to decide whether it is a ‘complete’ one - that is, whether further preconscious thoughts may not also have found expression in the same dream. In that case we must consider the meaning proved which is based on the dreamer’s associations and our estimate of the situation, without on that account feeling bound to reject the other meaning. It remains possible, though unproven; one must become accustomed to a dream being thus capable of having many meanings. Moreover, the blame for this is not always to be laid upon incompleteness of the work of interpretation; it may just as well be inherent in the latent dream-thoughts themselves. Indeed it may happen in waking life, quite apart from the situation of dream-interpretation, that one is uncertain whether some remark that one has heard or some piece of information that one has received is open to construction this way or that, or whether it is hinting at something else beyond its obvious meaning.

One interesting occurrence which has been insufficiently investigated is to be seen where the same manifest dream-content gives simultaneous expression to a set of concrete ideas and to an abstract line of thought based upon them. It is of course difficult for the dream-work to find a means for representing abstract thoughts.

Some Additional Notes On Dream-Interpretation As A Whole

4048

(B) MORAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE CONTENT OF DREAMS

In the introductory chapter of this book (which discusses ‘The Scientific Literature Dealing with the Problem of Dreams’) I have shown the way in which writers have reacted to what is felt as the distressing fact that the unbridled content of dreams is so often at odds with the moral sense of the dreamer. (I deliberately avoid speaking of ‘criminal’ dreams, as such a description, which would overstep the limits of psychological interest, seems to me quite uncalled-for.) The immoral character of dreams has naturally provided a fresh motive for denying them any psychical value: if dreams are the meaningless product of disordered mental activity, then there can be no ground for assuming responsibility for their apparent content.

The problem of responsibility for the manifest content of dreams has been fundamentally shifted and indeed disposed of by the explanations given in my Interpretation of Dreams.

We know now that the manifest content is a deception, a façade. It is not worth while to submit it to an ethical examination or to take its breaches of morality any more seriously than its breaches of logic or mathematics. When the ‘content’ of the dream is spoken of, what must be referred to can only be the content of the preconscious thoughts and of the repressed wishful impulse which are revealed behind the façade of the dream by the work of interpretation. Nevertheless, this immoral façade has a question to put to us. We have heard that the latent dream-thoughts have to submit to a severe censorship before they are allowed access to the manifest content. How can it happen, then, that this censorship, which makes difficulties over more trivial things, breaks down so completely over these manifestly immoral dreams?

Some Additional Notes On Dream-Interpretation As A Whole

4049

The answer is not easy to come by and may perhaps not seem completely satisfying. If, in the first place, one submits these dreams to interpretation, one finds that some of them have given no offence to the censorship because au fond the have no bad meaning. They are innocent boastings or identifications that put up a mask of pretence; they have not been censored because they do not tell the truth. But others of them - and, it must be admitted, the majority - really mean what they say and have undergone no distortion from the censorship. They are an expression of immoral, incestuous and perverse impulses or of murderous and sadistic lusts. The dreamer reacts to many of these dreams by waking up in a fright, in which case the situation is no longer obscure to us. The censorship has neglected its task, this has been noticed too late, and the generation of anxiety is a substitute for the distortion that has been omitted. In still other instances of such dreams, even that expression of affect is absent. The objectionable matter is carried along by the height of the sexual excitement that has been reached during sleep, or it is viewed with the same tolerance with which even a waking person can regard a fit of rage, an angry mood or the indulgence in cruel phantasies.

But our interest in the genesis of these manifestly immoral dreams is greatly reduced when we find from analysis that the majority of dreams - innocent dreams, dreams without affect and anxiety-dreams - are revealed, when the distortions of the censorship have been undone, as the fulfilments of immoral - egoistic, sadistic, perverse or incestuous - wishful impulses. As in the world of waking life, these masked criminals are far commoner than those with their vizors raised. The straightforward dream of sexual relations with one’s mother, which Jocasta alludes to in the Oedipus Rex, is a rarity in comparison with all the multiplicity of dreams which psycho-analysis must interpret in the same sense.

Some Additional Notes On Dream-Interpretation As A Whole

4050

I have dealt so exhaustively in these pages with this characteristic of dreams, which indeed provides the motive for their distortion, that I can pass at once from this topic to the problem that lies before us: Must one assume responsibility for the content of one’s dreams? For the sake of completeness, it should, however, be added that dreams do not always offer immoral wish-fulfilments, but often energetic reactions against them in the form of ‘punishment dreams’. In other words, the dream-censorship cannot only express itself in distortions and the generation of anxiety, but can go so far as to blot out the immoral subject-matter completely and replace it by something else that serves as an atonement, though it allows one to see what lies behind. But the problem of responsibility for the immoral content of dreams no longer exists for us as it formerly did for writers who knew nothing of latent dream-thoughts and the repressed part of our mental life. Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one’s dreams. What else is one to do with them? Unless the content of the dream (rightly understood) is inspired by alien spirits, it is a part of my own being. If I seek to classify the impulses that are present in me according to social standards into good and bad, I must assume responsibility for both sorts; and if, in defence, I say that what is unknown, unconscious and repressed in me is not my ‘ego’, then I shall not be basing my position upon psycho-analysis, I shall not have accepted its conclusions - and I shall perhaps be taught better by the criticisms of my fellow-men, by the disturbances in my actions and the confusion of my feelings. I shall perhaps learn that what I am disavowing not only ‘is’ in me but sometimes ‘acts’ from out of me as well.

It is true that in the metapsychological sense this bad repressed content does not belong to my ‘ego’ - that is, assuming that I am a morally blameless individual - but to an ‘id’ upon which my ego is seated. But this ego developed out of the id, it forms with it a single biological unit, it is only a specially modified peripheral portion of it, and it is subject to the influences and obeys the suggestions that arise from the id. For any vital purpose, a separation of the ego from the id would be a hopeless undertaking.

Moreover, if I were to give way to my moral pride and tried to decree that for purposes of moral valuation I might disregard the evil in the id and need not make my ego responsible for it, what use would that be to me? Experience shows me that I nevertheless do take that responsibility, that I am somehow compelled to do so. Psycho-analysis has made us familiar with a pathological condition, obsessional neurosis, in which the poor ego feels itself responsible for all sorts of evil impulses of which it knows nothing, impulses which are brought up against it in consciousness but which it is unable to acknowledge. Something of this is present in every normal person. It is a remarkable fact that the more moral he is the more sensitive is his ‘conscience’. It is just as though we could say that the healthier a man is, the more liable he is to contagions and to the effects of injuries. This is no doubt because conscience is itself a reaction-formation against the evil that is perceived in the id. The more strongly the latter is suppressed, the more active is the conscience.

Some Additional Notes On Dream-Interpretation As A Whole

4051

The ethical narcissism of humanity should rest content with the knowledge that the fact of distortion in dreams, as well as the existence of anxiety-dreams and punishment-dreams, afford just as clear evidence of his moral nature as dream-interpretation gives of the existence and strength of his evil nature. If anyone is dissatisfied with this and would like to be ‘better’ than he was created, let him see whether he can attain anything more in life than hypocrisy or inhibition.

The physician will leave it to the jurist to construct for social purposes a responsibility that is artificially limited to the metapsychological ego. It is notorious that the greatest difficulties are encountered by the attempts to derive from such a construction practical consequences which are not in contradiction to human feelings.

Some Additional Notes On Dream-Interpretation As A Whole

4052

(C) THE OCCULT SIGNIFICANCE OF DREAMS

There seems to be no end to the problems of dream-life. But this can only be surprising if we forget that all the problems of mental life recur in dreams with the addition of a few new ones arising from the special nature of dreams. Many of the things that we study in dreams, because we meet with them there, have nevertheless little or nothing to do with the psychological peculiarity of dreams. Thus, for instance, symbolism is not a dream-problem, but a topic connected with our archaic thinking - our ‘basic language’, as it was aptly called by the paranoic Schreber. It dominates myths and religious ritual no less than dreams, and dream-symbolism can scarcely even claim that it is peculiar in that it conceals more particularly things that are important sexually. Again, it is not to be expected that the explanation of anxiety-dreams will be found in the theory of dreams. Anxiety is a problem rather of neurosis, and all that remains to be discussed is how it comes about that anxiety can arise under dream-conditions.

The position is just the same, I think, in the matter of the relation of dreams to the alleged facts of the occult world. But, since dreams themselves have always been mysterious things, they have been brought into intimate connection with the other unknown mysteries. No doubt, too, they have a historic claim to that position, since in primaeval ages, when our mythology was being formed, dream-images may have played a part in the origin of ideas about spirits.

There would seem to be two categories of dreams with a claim to being reckoned as occult phenomena: prophetic dreams and telepathic ones. A countless multitude of witnesses speak in favour of both of them, while against both of them there is the obstinate aversion, or maybe prejudice, of science.

Some Additional Notes On Dream-Interpretation As A Whole

4053

There can, indeed, be no doubt that there are such things as prophetic dreams, in the sense that their content gives some sort of picture of the future; the only question is whether these predictions coincide to any noticeable extent with what really happens subsequently. I must confess that upon this point my resolution in favour of impartiality deserts me. The notion that there is any mental power, apart from acute calculation, which can foresee future events in detail is on the one hand too much in contradiction to all the expectations and presumptions of science and on the other hand corresponds too closely to certain ancient and familiar human desires which criticism must reject as unjustifiable pretensions. I am therefore of opinion that after one has taken into account the untrustworthiness, credulity and unconvincingness of most of these reports, together with the possibility of falsifications of memory facilitated by emotional causes and the inevitability of a few lucky shots, it may be anticipated that the spectre of veridical prophetic dreams will disappear into nothing. Personally, I have never experienced anything or learnt of anything that could encourage a more favourable presumption.

It is otherwise with telepathic dreams. But at this point it must be made quite clear that no one has yet maintained that telepathic phenomena - the reception of a mental process by one person from another by means other than sensory perception - are exclusively related to dreams. Thus once again telepathy is not a dream-problem: our judgement upon whether it exists or not need not be based on a study of telepathic dreams.

If reports of telepathic occurrences (or, to speak less exactly, of thought-transference) are submitted to the same criticism as stories of other occult events, there remains a considerable amount of material which cannot be so easily neglected. Further, it is much more possible to collect observations and experiences of one’s own in this field which justify a favourable attitude to the problem of telepathy, even though they may not be enough to carry an assured conviction. One arrives at a provisional opinion that it may well be that telepathy really exists and that it provides the kernel of truth in many other hypotheses that would otherwise be incredible.

Some Additional Notes On Dream-Interpretation As A Whole

4054

It is certainly right in what concerns telepathy to adhere obstinately to the same sceptical position and only to yield grudgingly to the force of evidence. I believe I have found a class of material which is exempt from the doubts which are otherwise justified - namely, unfulfilled prophecies made by professional fortune-tellers. Unluckily, I have but few such observations at my disposal; but two among these have made a powerful impression on me. I am not in a position to describe them in such detail as would produce a similar effect upon other people, and I must restrict myself to bringing out a few essential points.

A prediction had been made, then, to the enquirers (at a strange place and by a strange fortune-teller, who was at the same time carrying out some, presumably irrelevant, ritual) that something would happen to them at a particular time, which in fact did not come true. The date at which the prophecy should have been fulfilled was long past. It was striking that those concerned reported their experience not with derision or disappointment but with obvious satisfaction. Included among what had been told them there were certain quite definite details which seemed capricious and unintelligible and would only have been justified if they had hit the mark. Thus, for instance, the palmist told a woman who was twenty-seven (though she looked much younger) and who had taken off her wedding-ring, that she would be married and have two children before she was thirty-two. The woman was forty-three when, now seriously ill, she told me the story in her analysis: she had remained childless. If one knew her private history (of which the ‘Professor’ in the lounge of the Paris hotel was certainly ignorant) one could understand the two numbers included in the prophecy. The girl had married after an unusually intense attachment to her father and had then had a passionate longing for children, so as to be able to put her husband in the place of her father. After years of disappointment, when she was on the brink of a neurosis, she obtained the prophecy, which promised her - the lot of her mother. For it was a fact that the latter had had two children by the time she was thirty-two. Thus it was only by the help of psycho-analysis that it was possible to give a significant interpretation of the peculiarities of this pretended message from without. But there was then no better explanation of the whole, unequivocally determined chain of events than to suppose that a strong wish on the part of the questioner - the strongest unconscious wish, in fact, of her whole emotional life and the motive force of her impending neurosis - had made itself manifest to the fortune-teller by being directly transferred to him while his attention was being distracted by the performances he was going through.

Some Additional Notes On Dream-Interpretation As A Whole

4055

I have often had an impression, in the course of experiments in my private circle, that strongly emotionally coloured recollections can be successfully transferred without much difficulty. If one has the courage to subject to an analytic examination the associations of the person to whom the thoughts are supposed to be transferred, correspondences often come to light which would otherwise have remained undiscovered. On the basis of a number of experiences I am inclined to draw the conclusion that thought-transference of this kind comes about particularly easily at the moment at which an idea emerges from the unconscious, or, in theoretical terms, as it passes over from the ‘primary process’ to the ‘secondary process’.

In spite of the caution which is prescribed by the importance, novelty and obscurity of the subject, I feel that I should not be justified in holding back any longer these considerations upon the problem of telepathy. All of this has only this much to do with dreams: if there are such things as telepathic messages, the possibility cannot be dismissed of their reaching someone during sleep and coming to his knowledge in a dream. Indeed, on the analogy of other perceptual and intellectual material, the further possibility arises that telepathic messages received in the course of the day may only be dealt with during a dream of the following night. There would then be nothing contradictory in the material that has been telepathically communicated being modified and transformed in the dream like any other material. It would be satisfactory if with the help of psycho-analysis we could obtain further and better authenticated knowledge of telepathy.

4056

THE INFANTILE GENITAL ORGANIZATION

(AN INTERPOLATION INTO THE THEORY OF SEXUALITY)

(1923)

4057

Intentionally left blank

4058

THE INFANTILE GENITAL ORGANIZATION

(AN INTERPOLATION INTO THE THEORY OF SEXUALITY)

The difficulty of the work of research in psycho-analysis is clearly shown by the fact of its being possible, in spite of whole decades of unremitting observation, to overlook features that are of general occurrence and situations that are characteristic, until at last they confront one in an unmistakable form. The remarks that follow are intended to make good a neglect of this sort in the field of infantile sexual development.

Readers of my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d) will be aware that I have never undertaken any thorough remodelling of that work in its later editions, but have retained the original arrangement and have kept abreast of the advances made in our knowledge by means of interpolations and alterations in the text. In doing this, it may often have happened that what was old and what was more recent did not admit of being merged into an entirely uncontradictory whole. Originally, as we know, the accent was on a portrayal of the fundamental difference between the sexual life of children and of adults; later, the pregenital organizations of the libido made their way into the foreground, and also the remarkable and momentous fact of the diphasic onset of sexual development. Finally, our interest was engaged by the sexual researches of children; and from this we were able to recognize the far-reaching approximation of the final outcome of sexuality in childhood (in about the fifth year) to the definitive form taken by it in the adult. This is the point at which I left things in the last (1922) edition of my Three Essays.

In that volume (p. 1400) I wrote that ‘the choice of an object, such as we have shown to be characteristic of the pubertal phase of development, has already frequently or habitually been effected during the years of childhood: that is to say, the whole of the sexual currents have become directed towards a single person in relation to whom they seek to achieve their aims. This then is the closest approximation possible in childhood to the final form taken by sexual life after puberty. The only difference lies in the fact that in childhood the combination of the component instincts and their subordination under the primacy of the genitals have been effected only very incompletely or not at all. Thus the establishment of that primacy in the service of reproduction is the last phase through which the organization of sexuality passes.’

The Infantile Genital Organization

4059

To-day I should no longer be satisfied with the statement that in the early period of childhood the primacy of the genitals has been effected only very incompletely or not at all. The approximation of the child’s sexual life to that of the adult goes much further and is not limited solely to the coming into being of the choice of an object. Even if a proper combination of the component instincts under the primacy of the genitals is not effected, nevertheless, at the height of the course of development of infantile sexuality, interest in the genitals and in their activity acquires a dominating significance which falls little short of that reached in maturity. At the same time, the main characteristic of this ‘infantile genital organization’ is its difference from the final genital organization of the adult. This consists in the fact that, for both sexes, only one genital, namely the male one, comes into account. What is present, therefore, is not a primacy of the genitals, but a primacy of the phallus.

Unfortunately we can describe this state of things only as it affects the male child; the corresponding processes in the little girl are not known to us. The small boy undoubtedly perceives the distinction between men and women, but to begin with he has no occasion to connect it with a difference in their genitals. It is natural for him to assume that all other living beings, humans and animals, possess a genital like his own; indeed, we know that he looks for an organ analogous to his own in inanimate things as well.¹ This part of the body, which is easily excitable, prone to changes and so rich in sensations, occupies the boy’s interest to a high degree and is constantly setting new tasks to his instinct for research. He wants to see it in other people as well, so as to compare it with his own; and he behaves as though he had a vague idea that this organ could and should be bigger. The driving force which this male portion of the body will develop later at puberty expresses itself at this period of life mainly as an urge to investigate, as sexual curiosity. Many of the acts of exhibitionism and aggression which children commit, and which in later years would be judged without hesitation to be expressions of lust, prove in analysis to be experiments undertaken in the service of sexual research.

¹ It is, incidentally, remarkable what a small degree of attention the other part of the male genitals, the little sac with its contents, attracts in children. From all one hears in analyses, one would not guess that the male genitals consisted of anything more than the penis.

The Infantile Genital Organization

4060

In the course of these researches the child arrives at the discovery that the penis is not a possession which is common to all creatures that are like himself. An accidental sight of the genitals of a little sister or playmate provides the occasion for this discovery. In unusually intelligent children, the observation of girls urinating will even earlier have aroused a suspicion that there is something different here. For they will have seen a different posture and heard a different sound, and will have made attempts to repeat their observations so as to obtain enlightenment. We know how children react to their first impressions of the absence of a penis. They disavow the fact and believe that they do see a penis, all the same. They gloss over the contradiction between observation and preconception by telling themselves that the penis is still small and will grow bigger presently; and they then slowly come to the emotionally significant conclusion that after all the penis had at least been there before and been taken away afterwards. The lack of a penis is regarded as a result of castration, and so now the child is faced with the task of coming to terms with castration in relation to himself. The further developments are too well known generally to make it necessary to recapitulate them here. But it seems to me that the significance of the castration complex can only be rightly appreciated if its origin in the phase of phallic primacy is also taken into account.¹

¹ It has been quite correctly pointed out that a child gets the idea of a narcissistic injury through a bodily loss from the experience of losing his mother’s breast after sucking, from the daily surrender of his faeces and, indeed, even from his separation from the womb at birth. Nevertheless, one ought not to speak of a castration complex until this idea of a loss has become connected with the male genitals.

The Infantile Genital Organization

4061

We know, too, to what a degree depreciation of women, horror of women, and a disposition to homosexuality are derived from the final conviction that women have no penis. Ferenczi (1923) has recently, with complete justice, traced back the mythological symbol of horror - Medusa’s head - to the impression of the female genitals devoid of a penis.¹

It should not be supposed, however, that the child quickly and readily makes a generalization from his observation that some women have no penis. He is in any case debarred from doing so by his assumption that the lack of a penis is the result of having been castrated as a punishment. On the contrary, the child believes that it is only unworthy female persons that have lost their genitals - females who, in all probability, were guilty of inadmissible impulses similar to his own. Women whom he respects, like his mother, retain a penis for a long time. For him, being a woman is not yet synonymous with being without a penis.² It is not till later, when the child takes up the problems of the origin and birth of babies, and when he guesses that only women can give birth to them - it is only then that the mother, too, loses her penis. And, along with this, quite complicated theories are built up to explain the exchange of the penis for a baby. In all this, the female genitals never seem to be discovered. The baby, we know, is supposed to live inside the mother’s body (in her bowel) and to be born through the intestinal outlet. These last theories carry us beyond the stretch of time covered by the infantile sexual period.

¹ I should like to add that what is indicated in the myth is the mother’s genitals. Athene, who carries Medusa’s head on her armour, becomes in consequence the unapproachable woman, the sight of whom extinguishes all thought of a sexual approach.

² I learnt from the analysis of a young married woman who had no father but several aunts that she clung, until quite far on in the latency period, to the belief that her mother and her aunts had a penis. One of her aunts, however, was feeble-minded; and she regarded this aunt as castrated, as she felt herself to be.

The Infantile Genital Organization

4062

It is not unimportant to bear in mind what transformations are undergone, during the sexual development of childhood, by the polarity of sex with which we are familiar. A first antithesis is introduced with the choice of object, which, of course, presupposes a subject and an object. At the stage of the pregenital sadistic-anal organization, there is as yet no question of male and female; the antithesis between active and passive is the dominant one.¹ At the following stage of infantile genital organization, which we now know about, maleness exists, but not femaleness. The antithesis here is between having a male genital and being castrated. It is not until development has reached its completion at puberty that the sexual polarity coincides with male and female. Maleness combines subject, activity and possession of the penis; femaleness takes over object and passivity. The vagina is now valued as a place of shelter for the penis; it enters into the heritage of the womb.

¹ Cf. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d).

4063

NEUROSIS AND PSYCHOSIS

(1924)

4064

Intentionally left blank

4065

NEUROSIS AND PSYCHOSIS

In my recently published work, The Ego and the Id (1923b), I have proposed a differentiation of the mental apparatus, on the basis of which a number of relationships can be represented in a simple and perspicuous manner. As regards other points - for instance, in what concerns the origin and role of the super-ego - enough remains obscure and unelucidated. Now one may reasonably expect that a hypothesis of this kind should prove useful and helpful in other directions as well, if only to enable us to see what we already know from another angle, to group it differently and to describe it more convincingly. Such an application of the hypothesis might also bring with it a profitable return from grey theory to the perpetual green of experience.

In the work I have mentioned I described the numerous dependent relationships of the ego, its intermediate position between the external world and the id and its efforts to humour all its masters at once. In connection with a train of thought raised in other quarters, which was concerned with the origin and prevention of the psychoses, a simple formula has now occurred to me which deals with what is perhaps the most important genetic difference between a neurosis and a psychosis: neurosis is the result of a conflict between the ego and its id, whereas psychosis in the analogous outcome of a similar disturbance in the relations between the ego and the external world.

Neurosis And Psychosis

4066

There are certainly good grounds for being suspicious of such simple solutions of a problem. Moreover, the most that we may expect is that this formula will turn out to be correct in the roughest outline. But even that would be something. One recalls at once, too, a whole number of discoveries and findings which seem to support our thesis. All our analyses go to show that the transference neuroses originate from the ego’s refusing to accept a powerful instinctual impulse in the id or to help it to find a motor outlet, or from the ego’s forbidding that impulse the object at which it is aiming. In such a case the ego defends itself against the instinctual impulse by the mechanism of repression. The repressed material struggles against this fate. It creates for itself, along paths over which the ego has no power, a substitutive representation (which forces itself upon the ego by way of a compromise) - the symptom. The ego finds its unity threatened and impaired by this intruder, and it continues to struggle against the symptom, just as it fended off the original instinctual impulse. All this produces the picture of a neurosis. It is no contradiction to this that, in undertaking the repression, the ego is at bottom following the commands of its super-ego - commands which, in their turn, originate from influences in the external world that have found representation in the super-ego. The fact remains that the ego has taken sides with those powers, that in it their demands have more strength than the instinctual demands of the id, and that the ego is the power which sets the repression in motion against the portion of the id concerned and which fortifies the repression by means of the anticathexis of resistance. The ego has come into conflict with the id in the service of the super-ego and of reality; and this is the state of affairs in every transference neurosis.

On the other side, it is equally easy, from the knowledge we have so far gained of the mechanism of the psychoses, to adduce examples which point to a disturbance in the relationship between the ego and the external world. In Meynert’s amentia - an acute hallucinatory confusion which is perhaps the most extreme and striking form of psychosis - either the external world is not perceived at all, or the perception of it has no effect whatever. Normally, the external world governs the ego in two ways: firstly, by current, present perceptions which are always renewable, and secondly, by the store of memories of earlier perceptions which, in the shape of an ‘internal world’, form a possession of the ego and a constituent part of it. In amentia, not only is the acceptance of new perceptions refused, but the internal world, too, which, as a copy of the external world, has up till now represented it, loses its significance (its cathexis) - The ego creates, autocratically, a new external and internal world; and there can be no doubt of two facts - that this new world is constructed in accordance with the id’s wishful impulses, and that the motive of this dissociation from the external world is some very serious frustration by reality of a wish - a frustration which seems intolerable. The close affinity of this psychosis to normal dreams is unmistakable. A precondition of dreaming, moreover, is a state of sleep, and one of the features of sleep is a complete turning away from perception and the external world.

Neurosis And Psychosis

4067

We know that other forms of psychosis, the schizophrenias, are inclined to end in affective hebetude - that is, in a loss of all participation in the external world. In regard to the genesis of delusions, a fair number of analyses have taught us that the delusion is found applied like a patch over the place where originally a rent had appeared in the ego’s relation to the external world. If this precondition of a conflict with the external world is not much more noticeable to us than it now is, that is because, in the clinical picture of the psychosis, the manifestations of the pathogenic process are often overlaid by manifestations of an attempt at a cure or a reconstruction.

The aetiology common to the onset of a psychoneurosis and of a psychosis always remains the same. It consists in a frustration, a non-fulfilment of one of those childhood wishes which are for ever undefeated and which are so deeply rooted in our phylogenetically determined organization. This frustration is in the last resort always an external one; but in the individual case it may proceed from the internal agency (in the super-ego) which has taken over the representation of the demands of reality. The pathogenic effect depends on whether, in a conflictual tension of this kind, the ego remains true to its dependence on the external world and attempts to silence the id, or whether it lets itself be overcome by the id and thus torn away from reality. A complication is introduced into this apparently simple situation, however, by the existence of the super-ego, which, through a link that is not yet clear to us, unites in itself influences coming from the id as well as from the external world, and is to some extent an ideal model of what the whole endeavour of the ego is aiming at - a reconciliation between its various dependent relationships. The attitude of the super-ego should be taken into account - which has not hitherto been done - in every form of psychical illness. We may provisionally assume that there must also be illnesses which are based on a conflict between the ego and the super-ego. Analysis gives us a right to suppose that melancholia is a typical example of this group; and we would set aside the name of ‘narcissistic psychoneuroses’ for disorders of that kind. Nor will it clash with our impressions if we find reasons for separating states like melancholia from the other psychoses. We now see that we have been able to make our simple genetic formula more complete, without dropping it. Transference neuroses correspond to a conflict between the ego and the id; narcissistic neuroses, to a conflict between the ego and the super-ego; and psychoses, to one between the ego and the external world. It is true that we cannot tell at once whether we have really gained any new knowledge by this, or have only enriched our store of formulas; but I think that this possible application of the proposed differentiation of the mental apparatus into an ego, a super-ego and an id cannot fail to give us courage to keep that hypothesis steadily in view.

Neurosis And Psychosis

4068

The thesis that neuroses and psychoses originate in the ego’s conflicts with its various ruling agencies - that is, therefore, that they reflect a failure in the functioning of the ego, which is at pains to reconcile all the various demands made on it - this thesis needs to be supplemented in one further point. One would like to know in what circumstances and by what means the ego can succeed in emerging from such conflicts, which are certainly always present, without falling ill. This is a new field of research, in which no doubt the most varied factors will come up for examination. Two of them, however, can be stressed at once. In the first place, the outcome of all such situations will undoubtedly depend on economic considerations - on the relative magnitudes of the trends which are struggling with one another. In the second place, it will be possible for the ego to avoid a rupture in any direction by deforming itself, by submitting to encroachments on its own unity and even perhaps by effecting a cleavage or division of itself. In this way the inconsistencies, eccentricities and follies of men would appear in a similar light to their sexual perversions, though the acceptance of which they spare themselves repressions.

In conclusion, there remains to be considered the question of what the mechanism, analogous to repression, can be by means of which the ego detaches itself from the external world. This cannot, I think, be answered without fresh investigations; but such a mechanism, it would seem, must, like repression, comprise a withdrawal of the cathexis sent out by the ego.

4069

THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM OF MASOCHISM

(1924)

4070

Intentionally left blank

4071

THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM OF MASOCHISM

The existence of a masochistic trend in the instinctual life of human beings may justly be described as mysterious from the economic point of view. For if mental processes are governed by the pleasure principle in such a way that their first aim is the avoidance of unpleasure and the obtaining of pleasure, masochism is incomprehensible. If pain and unpleasure can be not simply warnings but actually aims, the pleasure principle is paralysed - it is as though the watchman over our mental life were put out of action by a drug.

Thus masochism appears to us in the light of a great danger, which is in no way true of its counterpart, sadism. We are tempted to call the pleasure principle the watchman over our life rather than merely over our mental life. But in that case we are faced with the task of investigating the relationship of the pleasure principle to the two classes of instincts which we have distinguished - the death instincts and the erotic (libidinal) life instincts; and we cannot proceed further in our consideration of the problem of masochism till we have accomplished that task.

It will be remembered that we have taken the view that the principle which governs all mental processes is a special case of Fechner’s ‘tendency towards stability’,¹ and have accordingly attributed to the mental apparatus the purpose of reducing to nothing, or at least of keeping as low as possible, the sums of excitation which flow in upon it. Barbara Low has suggested the name of ‘Nirvana principle’ for this supposed tendency, and we have accepted the term. But we have unhesitatingly identified the pleasure-unpleasure principle with this Nirvana principle. Every unpleasure ought thus to coincide with a heightening, and every pleasure with a lowering, of mental tension due to stimulus; the Nirvana principle (and the pleasure principle which is supposedly identical with it) would be entirely in the service of the death instincts, whose aim is to conduct the restlessness of life into the stability of the inorganic state, and it would have the function of giving warnings against the demands of the life instincts - the libido - which try to disturb the intended course of life. But such a view cannot be correct. It seems that in the series of feelings of tension we have a direct sense of the increase and decrease of amounts of stimulus, and it cannot be doubted that there are pleasurable tensions and unpleasurable relaxations of tension. The state of sexual excitation is the most striking example of a pleasurable increase of stimulus of this sort, but it is certainly not the only one.

¹ Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g).

The Economic Problem Of Masochism

4072

Pleasure and unpleasure, therefore, cannot be referred to an increase or decrease of a quantity (which we describe as ‘tension due to stimulus’), although they obviously have a great deal to do with that factor. It appears that they depend, not on this quantitative factor, but on some characteristic of it which we can only describe as a qualitative one. If we were able to say what this qualitative characteristic is, we should be much further advanced in psychology. Perhaps it is the rhythm, the temporal sequence of changes, rises and falls in the quantity of stimulus. We do not know.

However this may be, we must perceive that the Nirvana principle, belonging as it does to the death instinct, has undergone a modification in living organisms through which it has become the pleasure principle; and we shall henceforward avoid regarding the two principles as one. It is not difficult, if we care to follow up this line of thought, to guess what power was the source of the modification. It can only be the life instinct, the libido, which has thus, alongside of the death instinct, seized upon a share in the regulation of the processes of life. In this way we obtain a small but interesting set of connections. The Nirvana principle expresses the trend of the death instinct; the pleasure principle represents the demands of the libido; and the modification of the latter principle, the reality principle, represents the influence of the external world.

The Economic Problem Of Masochism

4073

None of these three principles is actually put out of action by another. As a rule they are able to tolerate one another, although conflicts are bound to arise occasionally from the fact of the differing aims that are set for each - in one case a quantitative reduction of the load of the stimulus, in another a qualitative characteristic of the stimulus, and, lastly, a postponement of the discharge of the stimulus and a temporary acquiescence in the unpleasure due to tension.

The conclusion to be drawn from these considerations is that the description of the pleasure principle as the watchman over our life cannot be rejected.

To return to masochism. Masochism comes under our observation in three forms: as a condition imposed on sexual excitation, as an expression of the feminine nature, and as a norm of behaviour. We may, accordingly, distinguish an erotogenic, a feminine and a moral masochism. The first, the erotogenic, masochism - pleasure in pain - lies at the bottom of the other two forms as well. Its basis must be sought along biological and constitutional lines and it remains incomprehensible unless one decides to make certain assumptions about matters that are extremely obscure. The third, and in some respects the most important, form assumed by masochism has only recently been recognized by psycho-analysis as a sense of guilt which is mostly unconscious; but it can already be completely explained and fitted into the rest of our knowledge. Feminine masochism, on the other hand, is the one that is most accessible to our observation and least problematical, and it can be surveyed in all its relations. We will begin our discussion with it.

The Economic Problem Of Masochism

4074

We have sufficient acquaintance with this kind of masochism in men (to whom, owing to the material at my command, I shall restrict my remarks), derived from masochistic - and therefore often impotent - subjects whose phantasies either terminate in an act of masturbation or represent a sexual satisfaction in themselves. The real-life performances of masochistic perverts tally completely with these phantasies, whether the performances are carried out as an end in themselves or serve to induce potency and to lead to the sexual act. In both cases - for the performances are, after all, only a carrying-out of the phantasies in play - the manifest content is of being gagged, bound, painfully beaten, whipped, in some way maltreated, forced into unconditional obedience, dirtied and debased. It is far more rare for mutilations to be included in the content, and then only subject to strict limitations. The obvious interpretation, and one easily arrived at, is that the masochist wants to be treated like a small and helpless child, but, particularly, like a naughty child. It is unnecessary to quote cases to illustrate this; for the material is very uniform and is accessible to any observer, even to non-analysts. But if one has an opportunity of studying cases in which the masochistic phantasies have been especially richly elaborated, one quickly discovers that they place the subject in a characteristically female situation; they signify, that is, being castrated, or copulated with, or giving birth to a baby. For this reason I have called this form of masochism, a potiori as it were, the feminine form, although so many of its features point to infantile life. This superimposed stratification of the infantile and the feminine will find a simple explanation later on. Being castrated - or being blinded, which stands for it - often leaves a negative trace of itself in phantasies, in the condition that no injury is to occur precisely to the genitals or the eyes. (Masochistic tortures, incidentally, rarely make such a serious impression as the cruelties of sadism, whether imagined or performed.) A sense of guilt, too, finds expression in the manifest content of masochistic phantasies; the subject assumes that he has committed some crime (the nature of which is left indefinite) which is to be expiated by all these painful and tormenting procedures. This looks like a superficial rationalization of the masochistic subject-matter, but behind it there lies a connection with infantile masturbation. On the other hand, this factor of guilt provides a transition to the third, moral, form of masochism.

This feminine masochism which we have been describing is entirely based on the primary, erotogenic masochism, on pleasure in pain. This cannot be explained without taking our discussion very far back.

The Economic Problem Of Masochism

4075

In my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in the section on the sources of infantile sexuality, I put forward the proposition that ‘in the case of a great number of internal processes sexual excitation arises as a concomitant effect, as soon as the intensity of those processes passes beyond certain quantitative limits’. Indeed, ‘it may well be that nothing of considerable importance can occur in the organism without contributing some component to the excitation of the sexual instinct’. In accordance with this, the excitation of pain and unpleasure would be bound to have the same result, too. The occurrence of such a libidinal sympathetic excitation when there is tension due to pain and unpleasure would be an infantile physiological mechanism which ceases to operate later on. It would attain a varying degree of development in different sexual constitutions; but in any case it would provide the physiological foundation on which the psychical structure of erotogenic masochism would afterwards be erected.

The inadequacy of this explanation is seen, however, in the fact that it throws no light on the regular and close connections of masochism with its counterpart in instinctual life, sadism. If we go back a little further, to our hypothesis of the two classes of instincts which we regard as operative in the living organism, we arrive at another derivation of masochism, which, however, is not in contradiction with the former one. In (multicellular) organisms the libido meets the instinct of death, or destruction, which is dominant in them and which seeks to disintegrate the cellular organism and to conduct each separate unicellular organism into a state of inorganic stability (relative though this may be). The libido has the task of making the destroying instinct innocuous, and it fulfils the task by diverting that instinct to a great extent outwards - soon with the help of a special organic system, the muscular apparatus - towards objects in the external world. The instinct is then called the destructive instinct, the instinct for mastery, or the will to power. A portion of the instinct is placed directly in the service of the sexual function, where it has an important part to play. This is sadism proper. Another portion does not share in this transposition outwards; it remains inside the organism and, with the help of the accompanying sexual excitation described above, becomes libidinally bound there. It is in this portion that we have to recognize the original, erotogenic masochism.

The Economic Problem Of Masochism

4076

We are without any physiological understanding of the ways and means by which this taming of the death instinct by the libido may be effected. So far as the psycho-analytic field of ideas is concerned, we can only assume that a very extensive fusion and amalgamation, in varying proportions, of the two classes of instincts takes place, so that we never have to deal with pure life instincts or pure death instincts but only with mixtures of them in different amounts. Corresponding to a fusion of instincts of this kind, there may, as a result of certain influences, be a defusion of them. How large the portions of the death instincts are which refuse to be tamed in this way by being bound to admixtures of libido we cannot at present guess.

If one is prepared to overlook a little inexactitude, it may be said that the death instinct which is operative in the organism - primal sadism - is identical with masochism. After the main portion of it has been transposed outwards on to objects, there remains inside, as a residuum of it, the erotogenic masochism proper, which on the one hand has become a component of the libido and, on the other, still has the self as its object. This masochism would thus be evidence of, and a remainder from, the phase of development in which the coalescence, which is so important for life, between the death instinct and Eros took place. We shall not be surprised to hear that in certain circumstances the sadism, or instinct of destruction, which has been directed outwards, projected, can be once more introjected, turned inwards, and in this way regress to its earlier situation. If this happens, a secondary masochism is produced, which is added to the original masochism.

The Economic Problem Of Masochism

4077

Erotogenic masochism accompanies the libido through all its developmental phases and derives from them its changing psychical coatings. The fear of being eaten up by the totem animal (the father) originates from the primitive oral organization; the wish to be beaten by the father comes from the sadistic-anal phase which follows it; castration, although it is later disavowed, enters into the content of masochistic phantasies as a precipitate of the phallic stage or organization;¹ and from the final genital organization there arise, of course, the situations of being copulated with and of giving birth, which are characteristic of femaleness. The part played in masochism by the nates, too, is easily understandable, apart from its obvious basis in reality. The nates are the part of the body which is given erotogenic preference in the sadistic-anal phase, like the breast in the oral phase and the penis in the genital phase.

The third form of masochism, moral masochism, is chiefly remarkable for having loosened its connection with what we recognize as sexuality. All other masochistic sufferings carry with them the condition that they shall emanate from the loved person and shall be endured at his command. This restriction has been dropped in moral masochism. The suffering itself is what matters; whether it is decreed by someone who is loved or by someone who is indifferent is of no importance. It may even be caused by impersonal powers or by circumstances; the true masochist always turns his cheek whenever he has a chance of receiving a blow. It is very tempting, in explaining this attitude, to leave the libido out of account and to confine oneself to assuming that in this case the destructive instinct has been turned inwards again and is now raging against the self; yet there must be some meaning in the fact that linguistic usage has not given up the connection between this norm of behaviour and erotism and calls these self-injurers masochists too.

¹ See ‘The Infantile Genital Organization’ (1923e).

The Economic Problem Of Masochism

4078

Let us keep to a habit of our technique and consider first the extreme and unmistakably pathological form of this masochism. I have described elsewhere¹ how in analytic treatment we come across patients to whom, owing to their behaviour towards its therapeutic influence, we are obliged to ascribe an ‘unconscious’ sense of guilt. I pointed out the sign by which such people can be recognized (a ‘negative therapeutic reaction’) and I did not conceal the fact that the strength of such an impulse constitutes one of the most serious resistances and the greatest danger to the success of our medical or educative aims. The satisfaction of this unconscious sense of guilt is perhaps the most powerful bastion in the subject’s (usually composite) gain from illness - in the sum of forces which struggle against his recovery and refuse to surrender his state of illness. The suffering entailed by neuroses is precisely the factor that makes them valuable to the masochistic trend. It is instructive, too, to find, contrary to all theory and expectation, that a neurosis which has defied every therapeutic effort may vanish if the subject becomes involved in the misery of an unhappy marriage, or loses all his money, or develops a dangerous organic disease. In such instances one form of suffering has been replaced by another; and we see that all that mattered was that it should be possible to maintain a certain amount of suffering.

Patients do not easily believe us when we tell them about the unconscious sense of guilt. They know only too well by what torments - the pangs of conscience - a conscious sense of guilt, a consciousness of guilt, expresses itself, and they therefore cannot admit that they could harbour exactly analogous impulses in themselves without being in the least aware of them. We may, I think, to some extent meet their objection if we give up the term ‘unconscious sense of guilt’, which is in any case psychologically incorrect, and speak instead of a ‘need for punishment’, which covers the observed state of affairs just as aptly. We cannot, however, restrain ourselves from judging and localizing this unconscious sense of guilt in the same way as we do the conscious kind.

¹ The Ego and the Id (1923b).

The Economic Problem Of Masochism

4079

We have attributed the function of conscience to the super-ego and we have recognized the consciousness of guilt as an expression of a tension between the ego and the super-ego. The ego reacts with feelings of anxiety (conscience anxiety) to the perception that it has not come up to the demands made by its ideal, the super-ego. What we want to know is how the super-ego has come to play this demanding role and why the ego, in the case of a difference with its ideal, should have to be afraid.

We have said that the function of the ego is to unite and to reconcile the claims of the three agencies which it serves; and we may add that in doing so it also possesses in the super-ego a model which it can strive to follow. For this super-ego is as much a representative of the id as of the external world. It came into being through the introjection into the ego of the first objects of the id’s libidinal impulses - namely, the two parents. In this process the relation to those objects was desexualized; it was diverted from its direct sexual aims. Only in this way was it possible for the Oedipus complex to be surmounted. The super-ego retained essential features of the introjected persons - their strength, their severity, their inclination to supervise and to punish. As I have said elsewhere,¹ it is easily conceivable that, thanks to the defusion of instinct which occurs along with this introduction into the ego, the severity was increased. The super-ego - the conscience at work in the ego - may then become harsh, cruel and inexorable against the ego which is in its charge. Kant’s Categorical Imperative is thus the direct heir of the Oedipus complex.

But the same figures who continue to operate in the super-ego as the agency we know as conscience after they have ceased to be objects of the libidinal impulses of the id - these same figures also belong to the real external world. It is from there that they were drawn; their power, behind which lie hidden all the influences of the past and of tradition, was one of the most strongly-felt manifestations of reality. In virtue of this concurrence, the super-ego, the substitute for the Oedipus complex, becomes a representative of the real external world as well and thus also becomes a model for the endeavours of the ego.

¹ The Ego and the Id.

The Economic Problem Of Masochism

4080

In this way the Oedipus complex proves to be - as has already been conjectured in a historical sense¹ - the source of our individual ethical sense, our morality. The course of childhood development leads to an ever-increasing detachment from parents, and their personal significance for the super-ego recedes into the background. To the imagos they leave behind there are then linked the influences of teachers and authorities, self-chosen models and publicly recognized heroes, whose figures need no longer be introjected by an ego which has become more resistant. The last figure in the series that began with the parents is the dark power of Destiny which only the fewest of us are able to look upon as impersonal. There is little to be said against the Dutch writer Multatuli² when he replaces the Μοία[Destiny] of the Greeks by the divine pair ‘Λόγος χαί’ Αυάγχη‚[Reason and necessity]; but all who transfer the guidance of the world to Providence, to God, or to God and Nature, arouse a suspicion that they still look upon these ultimate and remotest powers as a parental couple, in a mythological sense, and believe themselves linked to them by libidinal ties. In The Ego and the Id I made an attempt to derive mankind’s realistic fear of death, too, from the same parental view of fate. It seems very hard to free oneself from it.

¹ In Essay IV of Totem and Taboo (1912-13).

² E. D. Dekker (1820-87).

The Economic Problem Of Masochism

4081

After these preliminaries we can return to our consideration of moral masochism. We have said that, by their behaviour during treatment and in life, the individuals in question give an impression of being morally inhibited to an excessive degree, of being under the domination of an especially sensitive conscience, although they are not conscious of any of this ultra-morality. On closer inspection, we can see the difference there is between an unconscious extension of morality of this kind and moral masochism. In the former, the accent falls on the heightened sadism of the super-ego to which the ego submits; in the latter, it falls on the ego’s own masochism which seeks punishment, whether from the super-ego or from the parental powers outside. We may be forgiven for having confused the two to begin with; for in both cases it is a question of a relationship between the ego and the super-ego (or powers that are equivalent to it), and in both cases what is involved is a need which is satisfied by punishment and suffering. It can hardly be an insignificant detail, then, that the sadism of the super-ego becomes for the most part glaringly conscious, whereas the masochistic trend of the ego remains as a rule concealed from the subject and has to be inferred from his behaviour.

The fact that moral masochism is unconscious leads us to an obvious clue. We were able to translate the expression ‘unconscious sense of guilt’ as meaning a need for punishment at the hands of a parental power. We now know that the wish, which so frequently appears in phantasies, to be beaten by the father stands very close to the other wish, to have a passive (feminine) sexual relation to him and is only a regressive distortion of it. If we insert this explanation into the content of moral masochism, its hidden meaning becomes clear to us. Conscience and morality have arisen through the overcoming, the desexualization, of the Oedipus complex; but through moral masochism morality becomes sexualized once more, the Oedipus complex is revived and the way is opened for a regression from morality to the Oedipus complex. This is to the advantage neither of morality nor of the person concerned. An individual may, it is true, have preserved the whole or some measure of ethical sense alongside of his masochism; but, alternatively, a large part of his conscience may have vanished into his masochism. Again, masochism creates a temptation to perform ‘sinful’ actions, which must then be expiated by the reproaches of the sadistic conscience (as is exemplified in so many Russian character-types) or by chastisement from the great parental power of Destiny. In order to provoke punishment from this last representative of the parents, the masochist must do what is inexpedient, must act against his own interests, must ruin the prospects which open out to him in the real world and must, perhaps, destroy his own real existence.

The Economic Problem Of Masochism

4082

The turning back of sadism against the self regularly occurs where a cultural suppression of the instincts holds back a large part of the subject’s destructive instinctual components from being exercised in life. We may suppose that this portion of the destructive instinct which has retreated appears in the ego as an intensification of masochism. The phenomena of conscience, however, lead us to infer that the destructiveness which returns from the external world is also taken up by the super-ego, without any such transformation, and increases its sadism against the ego. The sadism of the super-ego and the masochism of the ego supplement each other and unite to produce the same effects. It is only in this way, I think, that we can understand how the suppression of an instinct can - frequently or quite generally - result in a sense of guilt and how a person’s conscience becomes more severe and more sensitive the more he refrains from aggression against others. One might expect that if a man knows that he is in the habit of avoiding the commission of acts of aggression that are undesirable from a cultural standpoint he will for that reason have a good conscience and will watch over his ego less suspiciously. The situation is usually presented as though ethical requirements were the primary thing and the renunciation of instinct followed from them. This leaves the origin of the ethical sense unexplained. Actually, it seems to be the other way about. The first instinctual renunciation is enforced by external powers, and it is only this which creates the ethical sense, which expresses itself in conscience and demands a further renunciation of instinct.

Thus moral masochism becomes a classical piece of evidence for the existence of fusion of instinct. Its danger lies in the fact that it originates from the death instinct and corresponds to the part of that instinct which has escaped being turned outwards as an instinct of destruction. But since, on the other hand, it has the significance of an erotic component, even the subject’s destruction of himself cannot take place without libidinal satisfaction.

4083

THE DISSOLUTION OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX

(1924)

4084

Intentionally left blank

4085

THE DISSOLUTION OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX

To an ever-increasing extent the Oedipus complex reveals its importance as the central phenomenon of the sexual period of early childhood. After that, its dissolution takes place; it succumbs to repression, as we say, and is followed by the latency period. It has not yet become clear, however, what it is that brings about its destruction. Analyses seem to show that it is the experience of painful disappointments. The little girl likes to regard herself as what her father loves above all else; but the time comes when she has to endure a harsh punishment from him and she is cast out of her fool’s paradise. The boy regards his mother as his own property; but he finds one day that she has transferred her love and solicitude to a new arrival. Reflection must deepen our sense of the importance of those influences, for it will emphasize the fact that distressing experiences of this sort, which act in opposition to the content of the complex, are inevitable. Even when no special events occur, like those we have mentioned as examples, the absence of the satisfaction hoped for, the continued denial of the desired baby, must in the end lead the small lover to turn away from his hopeless longing. In this way the Oedipus complex would go to its destruction from its lack of success, from the effects of its internal impossibility.

Another view is that the Oedipus complex must collapse because the time has come for its disintegration, just as the milk-teeth fall out when the permanent ones begin to grow. Although the majority of human beings go through the Oedipus complex as an individual experience, it is nevertheless a phenomenon which is determined and laid down by heredity and which is bound to pass away according to programme when the next pre-ordained phase of development sets in. This being so, it is of no great importance what the occasions are which allow this to happen, or, indeed, whether any such occasions can be discovered at all.

The Dissolution Of The Oedipus Complex

4086

The justice of both these views cannot be disputed. Moreover, they are compatible. There is room for the ontogenetic view side by side with the more far-reaching phylogenetic one. It is also true that even at birth the whole individual is destined to die, and perhaps his organic disposition may already contain the indication of what he is to die from. Nevertheless, it remains of interest to follow out how this innate programme is carried out and in what way accidental noxae exploit his disposition.

We have lately been made more clearly aware than before that a child’s sexual development advances to a certain phase at which the genital organ has already taken over the leading role. But this genital is the male one only, or, more correctly, the penis; the female genital has remained undiscovered. This phallic phase, which is contemporaneous with the Oedipus complex, does not develop further to the definitive genital organization, but is submerged, and is succeeded by the latency period. Its termination, however, takes place in a typical manner and in conjunction with events that are of regular recurrence.

When the (male) child’s interest turns to his genitals he betrays the fact by manipulating them frequently; and he then finds that the adults do not approve of this behaviour. More or less plainly, more or less brutally, a threat is pronounced that this part of him which he values so highly will be taken away from him. Usually it is from women that the threat emanates; very often they seek to strengthen their authority by a reference to the father or the doctor, who, so they say, will carry out the punishment. In a number of cases the women will themselves mitigate the threat in a symbolic manner by telling the child that what is to be removed is not his genital, which actually plays a passive part, but his hand, which is the active culprit. It happens particularly often that the little boy is threatened with castration, not because he plays with his penis with his hand, but because he wets his bed every night and cannot be got to be clean. Those in charge of him behave as if this nocturnal incontinence was the result and the proof of his being unduly concerned with his penis, and they are probably right. In any case, long-continued bed-wetting is to be equated with the emissions of adults. It is an expression of the same excitation of the genitals which has impelled the child to masturbate at this period.

The Dissolution Of The Oedipus Complex

4087

Now it is my view that what brings about the destruction of the child’s phallic genital organization is this threat of castration. Not immediately, it is true, and not without other influences being brought to bear as well. For to begin with the boy does not believe in the threat or obey it in the least. Psycho-analysis has recently attached importance to two experiences which all children go through and which, it is suggested, prepare them for the loss of highly valued parts of the body. These experiences are the withdrawal of the mother’s breast - at first intermittently and later for good - and the daily demand on them to give up the contents of the bowel. But there is no evidence to show that, when the threat of castration takes place, those experiences have any effect. It is not until a fresh experience comes his way that the child begins to reckon with the possibility of being castrated, and then only hesitatingly and unwillingly, and not without making efforts to depreciate the significance of something he has himself observed.

The observation which finally breaks down his unbelief is the sight of the female genitals. Sooner or later the child, who is so proud of his possession of a penis, has a view of the genital region of a little girl, and cannot help being convinced of the absence of a penis in a creature who is so like himself. With this, the loss of his own penis becomes imaginable, and the threat of castration takes its deferred effect.

The Dissolution Of The Oedipus Complex

4088

We should not be as short-sighted as the person in charge of the child who threatens him with castration, and we must not overlook the fact that at this time masturbation by no means represents the whole of his sexual life. As can be clearly shown, he stands in the Oedipus attitude to his parents; his masturbation is only a genital discharge of the sexual excitation belonging to the complex, and throughout his later years will owe its importance to that relationship. The Oedipus complex offered the child two possibilities of satisfaction, an active and a passive one. He could put himself in his father’s place in a masculine fashion and have intercourse with his mother as his father did, in which case he would soon have felt the latter as a hindrance; or he might want to take the place of his mother and be loved by his father, in which case his mother would become superfluous. The child may have had only very vague notions as to what constitutes a satisfying erotic intercourse; but certainly the penis must play a part in it, for the sensations in his own organ were evidence of that. So far he had had no occasion to doubt that women possessed a penis. But now his acceptance of the possibility of castration, his recognition that women were castrated, made an end of both possible ways of obtaining satisfaction from the Oedipus complex. For both of them entailed the loss of his penis - the masculine one as a resulting punishment and the feminine one as a precondition. If the satisfaction of love in the field of the Oedipus complex is to cost the child his penis, a conflict is bound to arise between his narcissistic interest in that part of his body and the libidinal cathexis of his parental objects. In this conflict the first of these forces normally triumphs: the child’s ego turns away from the Oedipus complex.

I have described elsewhere how this turning away takes place. The object-cathexes are given up and replaced by identifications. The authority of the father or the parents is introjected into the ego, and there it forms the nucleus of the super-ego, which takes over the severity of the father and perpetuates his prohibition against incest, and so secures the ego from the return of the libidinal object-cathexis. The libidinal trends belonging to the Oedipus complex are in part desexualized and sublimated (a thing which probably happens with every transformation into an identification) and in part inhibited in their aim and changed into impulses of affection. The whole process has, on the one hand, preserved the genital organ - has averted the danger of its loss - and, on the other, has paralysed it - has removed its function. This process ushers in the latency period, which now interrupts the child’s sexual development.

The Dissolution Of The Oedipus Complex

4089

I see no reason for denying the name of a ‘repression’ to the ego’s turning away from the Oedipus complex, although later repressions come about for the most part with the participation of the super-ego, which in this case is only just being formed. But the process we have described is more than a repression. It is equivalent, if it is ideally carried out, to a destruction and an abolition of the complex. We may plausibly assume that we have here come upon the borderline - never a very sharply drawn one - between the normal and the pathological. If the ego has in fact not achieved much more than a repression of the complex, the latter persists in an unconscious state in the id and will later manifest its pathogenic effect.

Analytic observation enables us to recognize or guess these connections between the phallic organization, the Oedipus complex, the threat of castration, the formation of the super-ego and the latency period. These connections justify the statement that the destruction of the Oedipus complex is brought about by the threat of castration. But this does not dispose of the problem; there is room for a theoretical speculation which may upset the results we have come to or put them in a new light. Before we start along this new path, however, we must turn to a question which has arisen in the course of this discussion and has so far been left on one side. The process which has been described refers, as has been expressly said, to male children only. How does the corresponding development take place in little girls?

The Dissolution Of The Oedipus Complex

4090

At this point our material - for some incomprehensible reason - becomes far more obscure and full of gaps. The female sex, too, develops an Oedipus complex, a super-ego and a latency period. May we also attribute a phallic organization and a castration complex to it? The answer is in the affirmative; but these things cannot be the same as they are in boys. Here the feminist demand for equal rights for the sexes does not take us far, for the morphological distinction is bound to find expression in differences of psychical development. ‘Anatomy is Destiny’, to vary a saying of Napoleon’s. The little girl’s clitoris behaves just like a penis to begin with; but, when she makes a comparison with a playfellow of the other sex, she perceives that she has ‘come off badly’ and she feels this as a wrong done to her and as a ground for inferiority. For a while still she consoles herself with the expectation that later on, when she grows older, she will acquire just as big an appendage as the boy’s. Here the masculinity complex of women branches off. A female child, however, does not understand her lack of a penis as being a sex character; she explains it by assuming that at some earlier date she had possessed an equally large organ and had then lost it by castration. She seems not to extend this inference from herself to other, adult females, but, entirely on the lines of the phallic phase, to regard them as possessing large and complete - that is to say, male - genitals. The essential difference thus comes about that the girl accepts castration as an accomplished fact, whereas the boy fears the possibility of its occurrence.

The fear of castration being thus excluded in the little girl, a powerful motive also drops out for the setting-up of a super-ego and for the breaking-off of the infantile genital organization. In her, far more than in the boy, these changes seem to be the result of upbringing and of intimidation from outside which threatens her with a loss of love. The girl’s Oedipus complex is much simpler than that of the small bearer of the penis; in my experience, it seldom goes beyond the taking of her mother’s place and the adopting of a feminine attitude towards her father. Renunciation of the penis is not tolerated by the girl without some attempt at compensation. She slips - along the line of a symbolic equation, one might say - from the penis to a baby. Her Oedipus complex culminates in a desire, which is long retained, to receive a baby from her father as a gift - to bear him a child. One has an impression that the Oedipus complex is then gradually given up because this wish is never fulfilled. The two wishes - to possess a penis and a child - remain strongly cathected in the unconscious and help to prepare the female creature for her later sexual role. The comparatively lesser strength of the sadistic contribution to her sexual instinct, which we may no doubt connect with the stunted growth of her penis, makes it easier in her case for the direct sexual trends to be transformed into aim-inhibited trends of an affectionate kind. It must be admitted, however, that in general our insight into these developmental processes in girls is unsatisfactory, incomplete and vague.

The Dissolution Of The Oedipus Complex

4091

I have no doubt that the chronological and causal relations described here between the Oedipus complex, sexual intimidation (the threat of castration), the formation of the super-ego and the beginning of the latency period are of a typical kind; but I do not wish to assert that this type is the only possible one. Variations in the chronological order and in the linking-up of these events are bound to have a very important bearing on the development of the individual.

Since the publication of Otto Rank’s interesting study, The Trauma of Birth, even the conclusion arrived at by this modest investigation, to the effect that the boy’s Oedipus complex is destroyed by the fear of castration, cannot be accepted without further discussion. Nevertheless, it seems to me premature to enter into such a discussion at the present time, and perhaps inadvisable to begin a criticism or an appreciation of Rank’s view at this juncture.

4092

THE LOSS OF REALITY IN NEUROSIS AND PSYCHOSIS

(1924)

4093

Intentionally left blank

4094

THE LOSS OF REALITY IN NEUROSIS AND PSYCHOSIS

I have recently¹ indicated as one of the features which differentiate a neurosis from a psychosis the fact that in a neurosis the ego, in its dependence on reality, suppresses a piece of the id (of instinctual life), whereas in a psychosis, this same ego, in the service of the id, withdraws from a piece of reality. Thus for a neurosis the decisive factor would be the predominance of the influence of reality, whereas for a psychosis it would be the predominance of the id. In a psychosis, a loss of reality would necessarily be present, whereas in a neurosis, it would seem, this loss would be avoided.

But this does not at all agree with the observation which all of us can make that every neurosis disturbs the patient’s relation to reality in some way, that it serves him as a means of withdrawing from reality, and that, in its severe forms, it actually signifies a flight from real life. This contradiction seems a serious one; but it is easily resolved, and the explanation of it will in fact help us to understand neuroses.

For the contradiction exists only as long as we keep our eyes fixed on the situation at the beginning of the neurosis, in which the ego, in the service of reality, sets about the repression of an instinctual impulse. This, however, is not yet the neurosis itself. The neurosis consists rather in the processes which provide a compensation for the portion of the id that has been damaged - that is to say, in the reaction against the repression and in the failure of the repression. The loosening of the relation to reality is a consequence of this second step in the formation of a neurosis, and it ought not to surprise us if a detailed examination shows that the loss of reality affects precisely that piece of reality as a result of whose demands the instinctual repression ensued.

There is nothing new in our characterization of neurosis as the result of a repression that has failed. We have said this all along, and it is only because of the new context in which we are viewing the subject that it has been necessary to repeat it.

¹ ‘Neurosis and Psychosis’ (1924b)

The Loss Of Reality In Neurosis And Psychosis

4095

Incidentally, the same objection arises in a specially marked manner when we are dealing with a neurosis in which the exciting cause (the ‘traumatic scene’) is known, and in which one can see how the person concerned turns away from the experience and consigns it to amnesia. Let me go back by way of example to a case analysed a great many years ago,¹ in which the patient, a young woman, was in love with her brother-in-law. Standing beside her sister’s death-bed, she was horrified at having the thought: ‘Now he is free and can marry me.’ This scene was instantly forgotten, and thus the process of regression, which led to her hysterical pains, was set in motion. It is instructive precisely in this case, moreover, to learn along what path the neurosis attempted to solve the conflict. It took away from the value of the change that had occurred in reality, by repressing the instinctual demand which had emerged - that is, her love for her brother-in-law. The psychotic reaction would have been a disavowal of the fact of her sister’s death.

We might expect that when a psychosis comes into being, something analogous to the process in a neurosis occurs, though, of course, between different agencies of the mind; thus we might expect that in a psychosis, too, two steps could be discerned, of which the first would drag the ego away, this time from reality, while the second would try to make good the damage done and re-establish the subject’s relations to reality at the expense of the id. And, in fact, some analogy of the sort can be observed in a psychosis. Here, too, there are two steps, the second of which has the character of a reparation. But beyond that the analogy gives way to a far more extensive similarity between the two processes. The second step of the psychosis is indeed intended to make good the loss of reality, not, however, at the expense of a restriction of the id - as happens in neurosis at the expense of the relation to reality - but in another, more autocratic manner, by the creation of a new reality which no longer raises the same objections as the old one that has been given up. The second step, therefore, both in neurosis and psychosis, is supported by the same trends. In both cases it serves the desire for power of the id, which will not allow itself to be dictated to by reality. Both neurosis and psychosis are thus the expression of a rebellion on the part of the id against the external world, of its unwillingness - or, if one prefers, its incapacity - to adapt itself to the exigencies of reality, to Αυάγχη [Necessity]. Neurosis and psychosis differ from each other far more in their first, introductory, reaction than in the attempt at reparation which follows it.

¹ In Studies on Hysteria (1895d).

The Loss Of Reality In Neurosis And Psychosis

4096

Accordingly, the initial difference is expressed thus in the final outcome: in neurosis a piece of reality is avoided by a sort of flight, whereas in psychosis it is remodelled. Or we might say: in psychosis, the initial flight is succeeded by an active phase of remodelling; in neurosis, the initial obedience is succeeded by a deferred attempt at flight. Or again, expressed in yet another way: neurosis does not disavow the reality, it only ignores it; psychosis disavows it and tries to replace it. We call behaviour ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’, if it combines certain features of both reactions - if it disavows the reality as little as does a neurosis, but if it then exerts itself, as does a psychosis, to effect an alteration of that reality. Of course, this expedient, normal, behaviour leads to work being carried out on the external world; it does not stop, as in psychosis, at effecting internal changes. It is no longer autoplastic but alloplastic.

In a psychosis, the transforming of reality is carried out upon the psychical precipitates of former relations to it - that is, upon the memory-traces, ideas and judgements which have been previously derived from reality and by which reality was represented in the mind. But this relation was never a closed one; it was continually being enriched and altered by fresh perceptions. Thus the psychosis is also faced with the task of procuring for itself perceptions of a kind which shall correspond to the new reality; and this is most radically effected by means of hallucination. The fact that, in so many forms and cases of psychosis, the paramnesias, the delusions and the hallucinations that occur are of a most distressing character and are bound up with a generation of anxiety - this fact is without doubt a sign that the whole process of remodelling is carried through against forces which oppose it violently. We may construct the process on the model of a neurosis, with which we are more familiar. There we see that a reaction of anxiety sets in whenever the repressed instinct makes a thrust forward, and that the outcome of the conflict is only a compromise and does not provide complete satisfaction. Probably in a psychosis the rejected piece of reality constantly forces itself upon the mind, just as the repressed instinct does in a neurosis, and that is why in both cases the consequences too are the same. The elucidation of the various mechanisms which are designed, in the psychoses, to turn the subject away from reality and to reconstruct reality - this is a task for specialized psychiatric study which has not yet been taken in hand.

The Loss Of Reality In Neurosis And Psychosis

4097

There is, therefore, a further analogy between a neurosis and a psychosis, in that in both of them the task which is undertaken in the second step is partly unsuccessful. For the repressed instinct is unable to procure a full substitute (in neurosis); and the representation of reality cannot be remoulded into satisfying forms (not, at least, in every species of mental illness). But the emphasis is different in the two cases. In a psychosis it falls entirely on the first step, which is pathological in itself and cannot but lead to illness. In a neurosis, on the other hand, it falls on the second step, on the failure of the repression, whereas the first step may succeed, and does succeed in innumerable instances without overstepping the bounds of health - even though it does so at a certain price and not without leaving behind traces of the psychical expenditure it has called for. These distinctions, and perhaps many others as well, are a result of the topographical difference in the initial situation of the pathogenic conflict - namely whether in it the ego yielded to its allegiance to the real world or to its dependence on the id.

A neurosis usually contents itself with avoiding the piece of reality in question and protecting itself against coming into contact with it. The sharp distinction between neurosis and psychosis, however, is weakened by the circumstance that in neurosis, too, there is no lack of attempts to replace a disagreeable reality by one which is more in keeping with the subject’s wishes. This is made possible by the existence of a world of phantasy, of a domain which became separated from the real external world at the time of the introduction of the reality principle. This domain has since been kept free from the demands of the exigencies of life, like a kind of ‘reservation’; it is not inaccessible to the ego, but is only loosely attached to it. It is from this world of phantasy that the neurosis draws the material for its new wishful constructions, and it usually finds that material along the path of regression to a more satisfying real past.

The Loss Of Reality In Neurosis And Psychosis

4098

It can hardly be doubted that the world of phantasy plays the same part in psychosis and that there, too, it is the storehouse from which the materials or the pattern for building the new reality are derived. But whereas the new, imaginary external world of a psychosis attempts to put itself in the place of external reality, that of a neurosis, on the contrary, is apt, like the play of children, to attach itself to a piece of reality - a different piece from the one against which it has to defend itself - and to lend that piece a special importance and a secret meaning which we (not always quite appropriately) call a symbolic one. Thus we see that both in neurosis and psychosis there comes into consideration the question not only of a loss of reality but also of a substitute for reality.

4099

A SHORT ACCOUNT OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

(1924)

4100

Intentionally left blank

4101

A SHORT ACCOUNT OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

I

Psycho-analysis may be said to have been born with the twentieth century; for the publication in which it emerged before the world as something new - my Interpretation of Dreams - bears the date ‘1900’. But, as may well be supposed, it did not drop from the skies ready-made. It had its starting-point in older ideas, which it developed further; it sprang from earlier suggestions, which it elaborated. Any history of it must therefore begin with an account of the influences which determined its origin and should not overlook the times and circumstances that preceded its creation.

Psycho-analysis grew up in a narrowly-restricted field. At the outset, it had only a single aim - that of understanding something of the nature of what were known as the ‘functional’ nervous diseases, with a view to overcoming the impotence which had so far characterized their medical treatment. The neurologists of that period had been brought up to have a high respect for chemico-physical and pathologico-anatomical facts; and they were latterly under the influence of the findings of Hitzig and Fritsch, of Ferrier, Goltz and others, who seemed to have established an intimate and possibly exclusive connection between certain functions and particular parts of the brain. They did not know what to make of the psychical factor and could not understand it. They left it to the philosophers, the mystics and - the quacks; and they considered it unscientific to have anything to do with it. Accordingly they could find no approach to the secrets of the neuroses, and in particular of the enigmatic ‘hysteria’, which was, indeed, the prototype of the whole species. As late as in 1885, when I was studying at the Salpêtrière, I found that people were content to account for hysterical paralyses by a formula which asserted that they were founded on slight functional disturbances of the same parts of the brain which, when they were severely damaged, led to the corresponding organic paralyses.

A Short Account Of Psycho-Analysis

4102

Of course this lack of understanding affected the treatment of these pathological conditions badly as well. In general this consisted in measures designed to ‘harden’ the patient - in the prescription of medicines and in attempts, mostly very ill-contrived and executed in an unfriendly manner, at bringing mental influences to bear on him by threats, jeers and warnings and by exhorting him to make up his mind to ‘pull himself together’. Electrical treatment was given out as being a specific cure for nervous conditions; but anyone who has endeavoured to carry out Erb’s detailed instructions must marvel at the space that phantasy can occupy even in what professes to be an exact science. The decisive turn was taken in the eighties, when the phenomena of hypnotism made one more attempt to find admission to medical science - this time with more success than so often before, thanks to the work of Liébeault, Bernheim, Heidenhain and Forel. The essential thing was that the genuineness of these phenomena was recognized. Once this had been admitted, two fundamental and unforgettable lessons could not fail to be drawn from hypnotism. First, one was given convincing proof that striking somatic changes could after all be brought about solely by mental influences, which in this case one had oneself set in motion. Secondly, one received the clearest impression - especially from the behaviour of subjects after hypnosis - of the existence of mental processes that one could only describe as ‘unconscious’. The ‘unconscious’ had, it is true, long been under discussion among philosophers as a theoretical concept; but now for the first time, in the phenomena of hypnotism, it became something actual, tangible and subject to experiment. Apart from all this, hypnotic phenomena showed an unmistakable similarity to the manifestations of some neuroses.

It is not easy to over-estimate the importance of the part played by hypnotism in the history of the origin of psycho-analysis. From a theoretical as well as from a therapeutic point of view, psycho-analysis has at its command a legacy which it has inherited from hypnotism.

Hypnosis also proved a valuable aid in the study of the neuroses - once again, first and foremost, of hysteria. Charcot’s experiments created a great impression. He suspected that certain paralyses which appeared after a trauma (an accident) were of a hysterical nature, and he showed that, by suggesting a trauma under hypnosis, he was able to provoke paralyses of the same sort artificially. The expectation was thus raised that traumatic influences might in all cases play a part in the production of hysterical symptoms. Charcot himself made no further efforts towards a psychological understanding of hysteria; but his pupil, Pierre Janet, took up the question and was able to show, with the help of hypnosis, that the symptoms of hysteria were firmly dependent on certain unconscious thoughts (idées fixes). Janet attributed to hysteria a supposed constitutional incapacity for holding mental processes together - an incapacity which led to a disintegration (dissociation) of mental life.

A Short Account Of Psycho-Analysis

4103

Psycho-analysis, however, was not in any way based on these researches of Janet’s. The decisive factor in its case was the experience of a Viennese physician, Dr. Josef Breuer. In 1881, independently of any outside influence, he was able with the help of hypnosis to study and restore to health a highly-gifted girl who suffered from hysteria. Breuer’s findings were not given to the public until fifteen years later, after he had taken the present writer (Freud) into collaboration. This case of Breuer’s retains its unique significance for our understanding of the neuroses to this day; so that we cannot avoid dwelling on it a little longer. It is essential to realize clearly in what its peculiarity consisted. The girl had fallen ill while she was nursing her father, to whom she was tenderly attached. Breuer was able to establish that all her symptoms were related to this period of nursing and could be explained by it. Thus it had for the first time become possible to obtain a complete view of a case of this puzzling neurosis, and all its symptoms had turned out to have a meaning. Further, it was a universal feature of the symptoms that they had arisen in situations involving an impulse to an action which, however, had not been carried out but had for other reasons been suppressed. The symptoms had, in fact, appeared in place of the actions that were not performed. Thus, to explain the aetiology of hysterical symptoms, we were led to the subject’s emotional life (to affectivity) and to the interplay of mental forces (to dynamics); and since then these two lines of approach have never been dropped.

A Short Account Of Psycho-Analysis

4104

The precipitating causes of the symptoms were compared by Breuer to Charcot’s traumas. Now it was a remarkable fact that all these traumatic precipitating causes, and all the mental impulses starting from them, were lost to the patient’s memory, as though they had never happened; while their products - the symptoms - persisted unaltered, as though, so far as they were concerned, there was no such thing as the effacing effect of time. Here, therefore, we had a fresh proof of the existence of mental processes which were unconscious but for that very reason especially powerful - processes which we had first come to know in post-hypnotic suggestion. The therapeutic procedure adopted by Breuer was to induce the patient, under hypnosis, to remember the forgotten traumas and to react to them with powerful expressions of affect. When this had been done, the symptom, which had till then taken the place of these expressions of emotion, disappeared. Thus one and the same procedure served simultaneously the purposes of investigating and of getting rid of the ailment; and this unusual conjunction was later retained in psycho-analysis.

After the present writer had, during the early nineties, confirmed Breuer’s results in a considerable number of patients, the two, Breuer and Freud, together decided on a publication, Studies on Hysteria (1895d), which contained their findings and an attempt at a theory based on them. This asserted that hysterical symptoms arose when the affect of a mental process cathected with a strong affect was forcibly prevented from being worked over consciously in the normal way and was thus diverted into a wrong path. In cases of hysteria, according to this theory, the affect passed over into an unusual somatic innervation (‘conversion’), but could be given another direction and got rid of (‘abreacted’), if the experience were revived under hypnosis. The authors gave this procedure the name of ‘catharsis’ (purging, setting free of a strangulated affect).

The cathartic method was the immediate precursor of psycho-analysis; and, in spite of every extension of experience and of every modification of theory, is still contained within it as its nucleus. But it was no more than a new medical procedure for influencing certain nervous diseases, and nothing suggested that it might become a subject for the most general interest and for the most violent contradiction.

A Short Account Of Psycho-Analysis

4105

II

Soon after the publication of Studies on Hysteria the partnership between Breuer and Freud came to an end. Breuer, who was in reality a consultant in internal medicine, gave up treating nervous patients, and Freud devoted himself to the further perfection of the instrument left over to him by his elder collaborator. The technical novelties which he introduced and the discoveries which he made changed the cathartic method into psycho-analysis. The most momentous step, no doubt, was his determination to do without the assistance of hypnosis in his technical procedure. He did so for two reasons: first, because, in spite of a course of instruction with Bernheim at Nancy, he did not succeed in inducing hypnosis in a sufficient number of cases, and secondly, because he was dissatisfied with the therapeutic results of catharsis based on hypnosis. It is true that these results were striking and appeared after a treatment of short duration, but they turned out not to be permanent and to depend too much on the patient’s personal relations with the physician. The abandonment of hypnosis made a breach in the course of development of the procedure up to then, and it meant a fresh start.

Hypnosis had, however, performed the service of restoring to the patient’s memory what he had forgotten. It was necessary to find some other technique to replace it; and the idea occurred to Freud of substituting for it the method of ‘free association’. That is to say, he pledged his patients to refrain from any conscious reflection and to abandon themselves, in a state of quiet concentration, to following the ideas which occurred to them spontaneously (involuntarily) - ‘to skim off the surface of their consciousness’. They were to communicate these ideas to the physician even if they felt objections to doing so, if, for instance, the thoughts seemed too disagreeable, too senseless, too unimportant or irrelevant. The choice of free association as a means of investigating the forgotten unconscious material seems so strange that a word in justification of it will not be out of place. Freud was led to it by an expectation that the so-called ‘free’ association would prove in fact to be unfree, since, when all conscious intellectual purposes had been suppressed, the ideas that emerged would be seen to be determined by the unconscious material. This expectation was justified by experience. When the ‘fundamental rule of psycho-analysis’ which has just been stated was obeyed, the course of free association produced a plentiful store of ideas which could put one on the track of what the patient had forgotten. To be sure, this material did not bring up what had actually been forgotten, but it brought up such plain and numerous hints at it that, with the help of a certain amount of supplementing and interpreting, the doctor was able to guess (to reconstruct) the forgotten material from it. Thus free association together with the art of interpretation performed the same function as had previously been performed by hypnotism.

A Short Account Of Psycho-Analysis

4106

It looked as though our work had been made much more difficult and complicated; but the inestimable gain was that an insight was now obtained into an interplay of forces which had been concealed from the observer by the hypnotic state. It became evident that the work of uncovering what had been pathogenically forgotten had to struggle against a constant and very intense resistance. The critical objections which the patient raised in order to avoid communicating the ideas which occurred to him, and against which the fundamental rule of psycho-analysis was directed, had themselves already been manifestations of this resistance. A consideration of the phenomena of resistance led to one of the corner-stones of the psycho-analytic theory of the neuroses - the theory of repression. It was plausible to suppose that the same forces which were now struggling against the pathogenic material being made conscious had at an earlier time made the same efforts with success. A gap in the aetiology of neurotic symptoms was thus filled. The impressions and mental impulses, for which the symptoms were now serving as substitutes, had not been forgotten without reason or on account of a constitutional in capacity for synthesis (as Janet supposed); they had, though the influence of other mental forces, met with a repression the success and evidence of which was precisely their being debarred from consciousness and excluded from memory. It was only in consequence of this repression that they had become pathogenic - that is, had succeeded in manifesting themselves along unusual paths as symptoms.

A conflict between two groups of mental trends had to be looked on as the ground for repression and accordingly as the cause of every neurotic illness. And here experience taught us a new and surprising fact about the nature of the forces that were struggling against each other. Repression invariably proceeded from the sick person’s conscious personality (his ego) and took its stand on aesthetic and ethical motives; the impulses that were subjected to repression were those of selfishness and cruelty, which can be summed up in general as evil, but above all sexual wishful impulses, often of the crudest and most forbidden kind. Thus the symptoms were a substitute for forbidden satisfactions and the illness seemed to correspond to an incomplete subjugation of the immoral side of human beings.

A Short Account Of Psycho-Analysis

4107

Advance in knowledge made ever clearer the enormous part played in mental life by sexual wishful impulses, and led to a detailed study of the nature and development of the sexual instinct.¹ But we also came upon another purely empirical finding, in the discovery that the experiences and conflicts of the first years of childhood play an unsuspectedly important part in the individual’s development and leave behind them ineffaceable dispositions bearing upon the period of maturity. This led to the revelation of something that had hitherto been fundamentally overlooked by science - infantile sexuality, which, from the tenderest age onwards, is manifested both in physical reactions and in mental attitudes. In order to bring together this sexuality of children with what is described as the normal sexuality of adults and the abnormal sexual life of perverts, the concept of what was sexual had itself to be corrected and widened in a manner which could be justified by the evolution of the sexual instinct.

After hypnosis was replaced by the technique of free association, Breuer’s cathartic procedure turned into psycho-analysis, which for more than a decade was developed by the author (Freud) alone. During that time psycho-analysis gradually acquired a theory which appeared to give a satisfactory account of the origin, meaning and purpose of neurotic symptoms and provided a rational basis for medical attempts at curing the complaint. I will once again enumerate the factors that go to make up this theory. They are: emphasis on instinctual life (affectivity), on mental dynamics, on the fact that even the apparently most obscure and arbitrary mental phenomena invariably have a meaning and a causation, the theory of psychical conflict and of the pathogenic nature of repression, the view that symptoms are substitutive satisfactions, the recognition of the aetiological importance of sexual life, and in particular of the beginnings of infantile sexuality. From a philosophical standpoint this theory was bound to adopt the view that the mental does not coincide with the conscious, that mental processes are in themselves unconscious and are only made conscious by the functioning of special organs (agencies or systems). By way of completing this list, I will add that among the affective attitudes of childhood the complicated emotional relation of children to their parents - what is known as the Oedipus complex - came into prominence. It became ever clearer that this was the nucleus of every case of neurosis, and in the patient’s behaviour towards his analyst certain phenomena of his emotional transference emerged which came to be of great importance for theory and technique alike.

¹ Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d)

A Short Account Of Psycho-Analysis

4108

In the form which it thus assumed, the psycho-analytic theory of the neuroses already contained a number of things which ran counter to accepted opinions and inclinations and which were calculated to provoke astonishment, repugnance and scepticism in outsiders: for instance, the attitude of psycho-analysis to the problem of the unconscious, its recognition of an infantile sexuality and the stress it laid on the sexual factor in mental life generally. But more was to follow.

III

In order to reach even half way to an understanding of how, in a hysterical girl, a forbidden sexual wish can change into a painful symptom, it had been necessary to make far-reaching and complicated hypotheses about the structure and functioning of the mental apparatus. There was an evident contradiction here between expenditure of effort and result. If the conditions postulated by psycho-analysis really existed, they were of a fundamental nature and must be able to find expression in other phenomena besides hysterical ones. But if this inference were correct, psycho-analysis would have ceased to be of interest only to neurologists; it could claim the attention of everyone to whom psychological research was of any importance. Its findings would not only have to be taken into account in the field of pathological mental life but could not be overlooked either in coming to an understanding of normal functioning.

A Short Account Of Psycho-Analysis

4109

Evidence of its being of use for throwing light on other than pathological mental activity was early forthcoming in connection with two kinds of phenomena: with the very frequent parapraxes that occur in everyday life - such as forgetting things, slips of the tongue, and mislaying objects - and with the dreams dreamt by healthy and psychically normal people. Small failures of functioning, like the temporary forgetting of normally familiar proper names, slips of the tongue and of the pen, and so on, had hitherto not been considered worthy of any explanation at all or were supposed to be accounted for by conditions of fatigue, by distraction of the attention, etc. The present writer then showed from many examples, in his book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b), that events of this kind have a meaning, and arise owing to a conscious intention being interfered with by another, suppressed or actually unconscious one. As a rule, quick reflection or a short analysis is enough to reveal the interfering influence. Owing to the frequency of such parapraxes as slips of the tongue, it became easy for anyone to convince himself from his own experience of the existence of mental processes which are not conscious, but which are nevertheless operative and which at least find expression as inhibitions and modifications of other, intended acts.

The analysis of dreams led further: it was brought to public notice by the present writer as early as in 1900 in The Interpretation of Dreams. This showed that dreams are constructed in just the same way as neurotic symptoms. Like them, they may appear strange and senseless; but, if we examine them by a technique which differs little from the free association used in psycho-analysis, we are led from their manifest content to a secret meaning, to the latent dream-thoughts. This latent meaning is always a wishful impulse which is represented as fulfilled at the moment of the dream. But, except in young children and under the pressure of imperative physical needs, this secret wish can never be expressed recognizably. It has first to submit to a distortion, which is the work of restrictive, censoring forces in the dreamer’s ego. In this way the manifest dream, as it is remembered in waking life, comes about. It is distorted, to the pitch of being unrecognizable, by concessions made to the dream-censorship; but it can be revealed once more by analysis as an expression of a situation of satisfaction or as the fulfilment of a wish. It is a compromise between two conflicting groups of mental trends, just as we have found to be the case with hysterical symptoms. The formula which, at bottom, best meets the essence of the dream is this: a dream is a (disguised) fulfilment of a (repressed) wish. The study of the process which transforms the latent dream-wish into the manifest content of the dream -a process known as the ‘dream-work’ - has taught us the best part of what we know of unconscious mental life.

A Short Account Of Psycho-Analysis

4110

Now a dream is not a morbid symptom but a product of the normal mind. The wishes which it represents as fulfilled are the same as those which are repressed in neuroses. Dreams owe the possibility of their genesis merely to the favourable circumstance that during the state of sleep, which paralyses man’s power of movement, repression is mitigated into the dream-censorship. If, however, the process of dream-formation oversteps certain limits, the dreamer brings it to a stop and wakes up in a fright. Thus it is proved that the same forces and the same processes taking place between them operate in normal as in pathological mental life. From the date of The Interpretation of Dreams psycho-analysis had a twofold significance. It was not only a new method of treating the neuroses but it was also a new psychology; it claimed the attention not only of nerve-specialists but also of all those who were students of a mental science.

The reception given it in the scientific world was, however, no friendly one. For some ten years no one took any notice of Freud’s works. About the year 1907 attention was drawn to psycho-analysis by a group of Swiss psychiatrists (Bleuler and Jung, in Zurich), and a storm of indignation, which was not precisely fastidious in its methods and arguments, thereupon broke out, particularly in Germany. In this, psycho-analysis was sharing the fate of many novelties which, after a certain lapse of time, have found general recognition. Nevertheless it lay in its nature that it should inevitably arouse particularly violent opposition. It wounded the prejudices of civilized humanity at some specially sensitive spots. It subjected every individual, as it were, to the analytic reaction, by uncovering what had by universal agreement been repressed into the unconscious; and in this way it forced its contemporaries to behave like patients who, under analytic treatment, above all else bring their resistances to the fore. It must also be admitted that it was no easy thing to become convinced of the correctness of the psycho-analytic theories, nor to obtain instruction in the practice of analysis.

A Short Account Of Psycho-Analysis

4111

The general hostility, however, did not succeed in preventing psycho-analysis from continuous expansion during the next decade in two directions: on the map, for interest in it was constantly cropping up in new countries, and in the field of the mental sciences, for it was constantly finding applications in new branches of knowledge. In 1909 President G. Stanley Hall invited Freud and Jung to give a series of lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., of which he was the head and where they were given a friendly reception. Since then psycho-analysis has remained popular in America, although precisely in that country its name has been coupled with much superficiality and some abuses. As early as in 1911, Havelock Ellis was able to report that analysis was studied and practised, not only in Austria and Switzerland, but also in the United States, in England, India, Canada, and, no doubt, in Australia too.

It was in this period of struggle and of first blossoming, moreover, that the periodicals devoted exclusively to psycho-analysis were inaugurated. These were the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen (1909-1914), directed by Bleuler and Freud and edited by Jung, which ceased publication at the outbreak of the World War, the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse (1911), edited by Adler and Stekel, which was soon replaced by the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalse (1913, to-day in its tenth volume); further, since 1912, Imago, founded by Rank and Sachs, a periodical for the application of psycho-analysis to the mental sciences. The great interest taken in the subject by Anglo-American doctors was shown in 1913 by the founding of the still active Psycho-Analytic Revue by White and Jelliffe. Later, in 1920, The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, intended specially for readers in England, made its appearance under the editorship of Ernest Jones. The Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag and the corresponding English undertaking, The International Psycho-Analytical Press, brought out a continuous series of analytic publications under the name of the Internationale Psychoanalytische Bibliothek (International Psycho-Analytical Library). The literature of psycho-analysis is, of course, not to be found only in these periodicals, which are for the most part supported by psycho-analytic societies; it appears far and wide in a great number of places, in scientific and in literary publications. Among the periodicals of the Latin world which pay special attention to psycho-analysis the Rivista de Psiquiatria, edited by H. Delgado in Lima (Peru), may be specially mentioned.

A Short Account Of Psycho-Analysis

4112

An essential difference between this second decade of psycho-analysis and the first lay in the fact that the present writer was no longer its sole representative. A constantly growing circle of pupils and followers had collected around him, who devoted themselves first to the diffusion of the theories of psycho-analysis and then extended them, supplemented them and carried them deeper. In the course of years, several of these supporters, as was inevitable, seceded, took their own paths, or turned themselves into an opposition which seemed to threaten the continuity of the development of psycho-analysis. Between 1911 and 1913 C. G. Jung in Zurich and Alfred Adler in Vienna produced some stir by their attempts at giving new interpretations to the facts of analysis and their efforts at a diversion from the analytic standpoint. But it soon appeared that these secessions had effected no lasting damage. What temporary success they achieved was easily accounted for by the readiness of the mass of people to have themselves set free from the pressure of the demands of psycho-analysis by whatever path might be opened to them. The great majority of co-workers remained firm and continued their work along the lines indicated to them. We shall come on their names repeatedly in the short account below of the findings of psycho-analysis in the many and various fields of its application.

IV

The noisy rejection of psycho-analysis by the medical world could not deter its supporters from developing it, to begin with, along its original lines into a specialized pathology and treatment of the neuroses - a task which has not been completely accomplished even to-day. Its undeniable therapeutic success, which far exceeded any that had previously been achieved, constantly spurred them on to fresh efforts; while the difficulties which came to light as the material was examined more deeply led to profound alterations in the technique of analysis and to important corrections in its theoretical hypotheses and postulates.

A Short Account Of Psycho-Analysis

4113

In the course of this development, the technique of psycho-analysis has become as definite and as delicate as that of any other specialized branch of medicine. A failure to understand this fact has led to many abuses (particularly in England and America) because people who have acquired only a literary knowledge of psycho-analysis from reading consider themselves capable of undertaking analytic treatments without having received any special training. The consequences of such behaviour are damaging both to the science and to the patients and have brought much discredit upon psycho-analysis. The foundation of a first psycho-analytic out-patient clinic (by Max Eitingon in Berlin in 1920) has therefore become a step of high practical importance. This institute seeks on the one hand to make analytic treatment accessible to wide circles of the population and on the other hand undertakes the education of doctors to be practical analysts by a course of training which includes as a condition that the learner shall agree to be analysed himself.

Among the hypothetical concepts which enable the doctor to deal with the analytic material, the first to be mentioned is that of ‘libido’. Libido means in psycho-analysis in the first instance the force (thought of as quantitatively variable and measurable) of the sexual instincts directed towards an object - ‘sexual’ in the extended sense required by analytic theory. Further study showed that it was necessary to set alongside this ‘object-libido’ a ‘narcissistic’ or ‘ego-libido’, directed to the subject’s own ego; and the interaction of these two forces has enabled us to account for a great number of normal and abnormal processes in mental life. A rough distinction was soon made between what are known as the ‘transference neuroses’ and the narcissistic disorders. The former (hysteria and obsessional neurosis) are the objects proper of psycho-analytic treatment, while the others, the narcissistic neuroses, though they can, it is true, be examined by the help of analysis, offer fundamental difficulties to therapeutic influence. It is true that the libido theory of psycho-analysis is by no means complete and that its relation to a general theory of the instincts is not yet clear, for psycho-analysis is a young science, quite unfinished and in a stage of rapid development. Here, however, it should be emphatically pointed out how erroneous the charge of pan-sexualism is which is so often levelled at psycho-analysis. It seeks to show that psycho-analytic theory knows of no mental motive forces other than purely sexual ones and in doing so exploits popular prejudices by using the word ‘sexual’ not in its analytic but in its vulgar sense.

A Short Account Of Psycho-Analysis

4114

The psycho-analytic view would also have to include in narcissistic disorders all the ailments described in psychiatry as ‘functional psychoses’. It could not be doubted that neuroses and psychoses are not separated by a hard and fast line, any more than health and neurosis; and it was plausible to explain the mysterious psychotic phenomena by the discoveries achieved on the neuroses, which had hitherto been equally incomprehensible. The present writer had himself, during the period of his isolation, made a case of paranoid illness partly intelligible by an analytic investigation and had pointed out in this unquestionable psychosis the same contents (complexes) and a similar interplay of forces as in the simple neuroses. Bleuler followed out the indications of what he called ‘Freudian mechanisms’ in a whole number of psychoses, and Jung won high opinions as an analyst at a single blow when, in 1907, he explained the most eccentric symptoms in the end-stages of dementia praecox from the individual life-histories of the patients. The comprehensive study of schizophrenia by Bleuler (1911) probably demonstrated once and for all the justification of a psycho-analytic angle of approach for the understanding of these psychoses.

In this way psychiatry became the first field to which psycho-analysis was applied and it has remained so ever since. The same research workers who have done most to deepen analytic knowledge of the neuroses, such as Karl Abraham in Berlin and Sándor Ferenczi in Budapest (to name only the most prominent), have also played a leading part in throwing analytic light on the psychoses. The conviction of the unity and intimate connection of all the disorders that present themselves as neurotic and psychotic phenomena is becoming more and more firmly established despite all the efforts of the psychiatrists. People are beginning to understand - best of all, perhaps, in America - that the psycho-analytic study of the neuroses is the only preparation for an understanding of the psychoses, and that psycho-analysis is destined to make possible a scientific psychiatry of the future which will not need to content itself with describing curious clinical pictures and unintelligible sequences of events and with tracing the influence of gross anatomical and toxic traumas upon a mental apparatus which is inaccessible to our knowledge.

A Short Account Of Psycho-Analysis

4115

V

But the importance of psycho-analysis for psychiatry would never have drawn the attention of the intellectual world to it or won it a place in The History of our Times. This result was brought about by the relation of psycho-analysis to normal, not to pathological, mental life. Originally, analytic research had indeed no other aim than to establish the determinants of the onset (the genesis) of a few morbid mental states. In the course of its efforts, however, it succeeded in bringing to light facts of fundamental importance, in actually creating a new psychology, so that it became obvious that the validity of such findings could not possibly be restricted to the sphere of pathology. We have seen already when it was that the decisive proof was produced of the correctness of this conclusion. It was when dreams were successfully interpreted by analytic technique - dreams, which are a part of the mental life of normal people and which yet may in fact be regarded as pathological products that can regularly appear under healthy conditions.

If the psychological discoveries gained from the study of dreams were firmly kept in view, only one further step was needed before psycho-analysis could be proclaimed as the theory of the deeper mental processes not directly accessible to consciousness - as a ‘depth-psychology’ - and before it could be applied to almost all the mental sciences. This step lay in the transition from the mental activity of individual men to the psychical functions of human communities and peoples - that is, from individual to group psychology; and many surprising analogies forced this transition upon us. It had been found, for instance, that in the deep strata of unconscious mental activity contraries are not distinguished from each other but are expressed by the same element. But already in 1884 Karl Abel the philologist had put forward the view (in his ‘Über den Gegensinn der Urworte’) that the oldest languages known to us treat contraries in the same way. Thus Ancient Egyptian, for example, had in the first instance only one word for ‘strong’ and ‘weak’, and not till later were the two sides of the antithesis distinguished by slight modifications. Even in the most modern languages clear relics of such antithetical meanings are to be found. So in German ‘Boden’ means the highest as well as the lowest thing in the house; similarly in Latin ‘altus’ means ‘high’ and ‘deep’. Thus the equivalence of contraries in dreams is a universal archaic trait in human thinking.

A Short Account Of Psycho-Analysis

4116

To take an instance from another field. It is impossible to escape the impression of the perfect correspondence which can be discovered between the obsessive actions of certain obsessional patients and the religious observances of believers all over the world. Some cases of obsessional neurosis actually behave like a caricature of a private religion, so that it is tempting to liken the official religions to an obsessional neurosis that has been mitigated by becoming universalized. This comparison, which is no doubt highly objectionable to all believers, has nevertheless proved most fruitful psychologically. For psycho-analysis soon discovered in the case of obsessional neurosis what the forces are that struggle with one another in it till their conflicts find a remarkable expression in the ceremonial of obsessive actions. Nothing similar was suspected in the case of religious ceremonial until, by tracing back religious feeling to the relation with the father as its deepest root, it became possible to point to an analogous dynamic situation in that case too. This instance, moreover, may warn the reader that even in its application to non-medical fields psycho-analysis cannot avoid wounding cherished prejudices, touching upon deeply-rooted sensibilities and thus provoking enmities which have an essentially emotional basis.

If we may assume that the most general features of unconscious mental life (conflicts between instinctual impulses, repressions and substitutive satisfactions) are present everywhere, and if there is a depth-psychology which leads to a knowledge of those features, then we may reasonably expect that the application of psycho-analysis to the most varied spheres of human mental activity will everywhere bring to light important and hitherto unattainable results. In an exceedingly valuable study, Otto Rank and Hanns Sachs (1913) have tried to bring together what the work of psycho-analysts had been able to achieve up to that time towards fulfilling these expectations. Lack of space prevents me from attempting to complete their enumeration here. I can only select for mention the most important findings with the addition of a few details.

If we leave little-known internal urges out of account, we may say that the main motive force towards the cultural development of man has been real external exigency, which has withheld from him the easy satisfaction of his natural needs and exposed him to immense dangers. This external frustration drove him into a struggle with reality, which ended partly in adaptation to it and partly in control over it; but it also drove him into working and living in common with those of his kind, and this already involved a renunciation of a number of instinctual impulses which could not be satisfied socially. With the further advances of civilization the demands of repression also grew. Civilization is after all built entirely on renunciation of instinct, and every individual on his journey from childhood to maturity has in his own person to recapitulate this development of humanity to a state of judicious resignation. Psycho-analysis has shown that it is predominantly, though not exclusively, sexual instinctual impulses that have succumbed to this cultural suppression. One portion of them, however, exhibit the valuable characteristic of allowing themselves to be diverted from their immediate aims and of thus placing their energy at the disposal of cultural development in the form of ‘sublimated’ trends. But another portion persist in the unconscious as unsatisfied wishes and press for some, even if it is distorted, satisfaction.

A Short Account Of Psycho-Analysis

4117

We have seen that one part of human mental activity is directed towards obtaining control over the real external world. Psycho-analysis now tells us further that another, particularly highly-prized, part of creative mental work serves for the fulfilment of wishes - for the substitutive satisfaction of the repressed wishes which, from the days of childhood, live in the spirit of each of us, unsatisfied. Among these creations, whose connection with an incomprehensible unconscious was always suspected, are myths and works of imaginative writing and of art, and the researches of psycho-analysts have in fact thrown a flood of light on the fields of mythology, the science of literature, and the psychology of artists. It is enough to mention Otto Rank’s work as an example. We have shown that myths and fairy tales can be interpreted like dreams, we have traced the convoluted paths that lead from the urge of the unconscious wish to its realization in a work of art, we have learnt to understand the emotional effect of a work of art on the observer, and in the case of the artist himself we have made clear his internal kinship with the neurotic as well as his distinction from him, and we have pointed out the connection between his innate disposition, his chance experiences and his achievements. The aesthetic appreciation of works of art and the elucidation of the artistic gift are, it is true, not among the tasks set to psycho-analysis. But it seems that psycho-analysis is in a position to speak the decisive word in all questions that touch upon the imaginative life of man.

And now, as a third point, psycho-analysis has shown us, to our growing astonishment, the enormously important part played by what is known as the ‘Oedipus complex’ - that is, the emotional relation of a child to its two parents - in the mental life of human beings. Our astonishment diminishes when we realize that the Oedipus complex is the psychical correlate of two fundamental biological facts: the long period of the human child’s dependence, and the remarkable way in which its sexual life reaches a first climax in the third to fifth years of life, and then, after a period of inhibition, sets in again at puberty. And here, the discovery was made that a third and extremely serious part of human intellectual activity, the part which has created the great institutions of religion, law, ethics, and all forms of civic life, has as its fundamental aim the enabling of the individual to master his Oedipus complex and to divert his libido from its infantile attachments into the social ones that are ultimately desired. The applications of psycho-analysis to the science of religion and sociology (e. g. by the present writer, Theodor Reik and Oskar Pfister), which have led to these findings, are still young and insufficiently appreciated; but it cannot be doubted that further studies will only confirm the certainty of these important conclusions.

A Short Account Of Psycho-Analysis

4118

By way, as it were, of postscript, I must also mention that educationists, too, cannot avoid making use of the hints which they have received from the analytic exploration of the mental life of children; and further that voices have been raised among therapists (e.g. Groddeck and Jelliffe), maintaining that the psycho-analytic treatment of serious organic complaints shows promising results, since in many of these affections some part is played by a psychical factor on which it is possible to bring influence to bear.

Thus we may express our expectation that psycho-analysis, whose development and achievements hitherto have been briefly and inadequately related in these pages, will enter into the cultural development of the next decades as a significant ferment, and will help to deepen our understanding of the world and to fight against some things in life which are recognized as injurious. It must not be forgotten, however, that psycho-analysis alone cannot offer a complete picture of the world. If we accept the distinction which I have recently proposed of dividing the mental apparatus into an ego, turned towards the external world and equipped with consciousness, and an unconscious id, dominated by its instinctual needs, then psycho-analysis is to be described as a psychology of the id (and of its effects upon the ego). In each field of knowledge, therefore, it can make only contributions, which require to be completed from the psychology of the ego. If these contributions often contain the essence of the facts, this only corresponds to the important part which, it may be claimed, is played in our lives by the mental unconscious that has so long remained unknown.

4119

THE RESISTANCES TO PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

(1925)

4120

Intentionally left blank

4121

THE RESISTANCES TO PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

A child in his nurse’s arms will turn away screaming at the sight of a strange face; a pious man will begin the new season with a prayer and he will also greet the first fruits of the year with a blessing; a peasant will refuse to buy a scythe unless it bears the trade-mark that was familiar to his parents. The distinction between these situations is obvious and would seem to justify one in looking for a different motive in each of them.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to overlook what they have in common. In each case we are dealing with unpleasure of the same kind. The child expresses it in an elementary fashion, the pious man lulls it by an artifice, while the peasant uses it as the motive for a decision. The source of this unpleasure is the demand made upon the mind by anything that is new, the psychical expenditure that it requires, the uncertainty, mounting up to anxious expectancy, which it bring along with it. It would be interesting to devote a whole study to mental reactions to novelty; for under certain, no longer primary, conditions we can observe behaviour of the contrary kind - a thirst for stimulation which flings itself upon anything that is new merely because it is new.

In scientific affairs there should be no place for recoiling from novelty. Science, in her perpetual incompleteness and insufficiency, is driven to hope for her salvation in new discoveries and new ways of regarding things. She does well, in order not to be deceived, to arm herself with scepticism and to accept nothing new unless it has withstood the strictest examination. Sometimes, however, this scepticism shows two unexpected features; it may be sharply directed against what is new while it spares what is familiar and accepted, and it may be content to reject things before it has examined them. But in behaving thus it reveals itself as a prolongation of the primitive reaction against what is new and as a cloak for the retention of that reaction. It is a matter of common knowledge how often in the history of scientific research it has happened that innovations have met with intense and stubborn resistance, while subsequent events have shown that the resistance was unjustified and that the novelty was valuable and important. What provoked the resistance was, as a rule, certain factors in the subject-matter of the novelty, while, on the other side, several factors must have combined to make the irruption of the primitive reaction possible.

The Resistances To Psycho-Analysis

4122

A particularly bad reception was accorded to psycho-analysis, which the present writer began to develop nearly thirty years ago from the discoveries of Josef Breuer (of Vienna) on the origin of neurotic symptoms. It cannot be disputed that it possessed the quality of novelty, even though it made use of plenty of material which was well known from other sources (quite apart from Breuer’s discoveries), such as the lessons from the teachings of Charcot, the great neuropathologist, and impressions derived from the sphere of hypnotic phenomena. Its original significance was purely therapeutic: it aimed at creating a new and efficient method for treating neurotic illnesses. But connections which could not be foreseen in the beginning caused psycho-analysis to reach out far beyond its original aim. It ended by claiming to have set our whole view of mental life upon a new basis and therefore to be of importance for every field of knowledge that is founded on psychology. After a decade of complete neglect it suddenly became a subject of general interest - and set loose a storm of indignant opposition.

The forms in which the resistance to psycho-analysis found expression need not now be considered. It is enough to say that the struggle over this innovation is by no means at an end, though it is already possible to see what direction it will take. Its opponents have not succeeded in suppressing the movement. Psycho-analysis, of which twenty years ago I was the only spokesman, has since attracted the support of numerous valuable and active workers, medical and non-medical, who make use of it as a procedure for the treatment of nervous diseases, as a method of psychological research and as an auxiliary instrument for scientific work in the most various departments of intellectual life. In the following pages our interest will be directed only to the motives of the resistance to psycho-analysis, with particular stress upon the composite character of that resistance and upon the differing amount of weight carried by its components.

The Resistances To Psycho-Analysis

4123

From a clinical standpoint the neuroses must necessarily be put alongside the intoxications and such disorders as Graves’ disease. These are conditions arising from an excess or a relative lack of certain highly active substances, whether produced inside the body or introduced into it from outside - in short, they are disturbances of the chemistry of the body, toxic conditions. If someone succeeded in isolating and demonstrating the hypothetical substance or substances concerned in neuroses, he would have no need to worry about opposition from the medical profession. For the present, however, no such avenue of approach to the problem is open. At the moment we can only start from the symptoms presented by a neurosis - symptoms which in the case of hysteria, for instance, consist of a combination of somatic and mental disturbances. Now Charcot’s experiments as well as Breuer’s clinical observations taught us that the somatic symptoms of hysteria are psychogenic too - that is, that they are precipitates of mental processes that have run their course. By putting a subject into a state of hypnosis it was possible at will to produce the somatic symptoms of hysteria artificially.

Psycho-analysis took hold of this new realization and began to consider the problem of the nature of the psychical processes which led to these unusual consequences. But the direction taken by this enquiry was not to the liking of the contemporary generation of physicians. They had been brought up to respect only anatomical, physical and chemical factors. They were not prepared for taking psychical ones into account and therefore met them with indifference or antipathy. They obviously had doubts whether psychical events allowed of any exact scientific treatment whatever. As an excessive reaction against an earlier phase during which medicine had been dominated by what was known as the ‘philosophy of Nature’, they regarded such abstractions as those with which psychology is obliged to work as nebulous, fantastic and mystical; while they simply refused to believe in remarkable phenomena which might have been the starting-point of research. The symptoms of hysterical neuroses were looked upon as shamming and the phenomena of hypnotism as a hoax. Even the psychiatrists, upon whose attention the most unusual and astonishing mental phenomena were constantly being forced, showed no inclination to examine their details or enquire into their connections. They were content to classify the variegated array of symptoms and trace them back, so far as they could manage, to somatic, anatomical or chemical aetiological disturbances. During this materialistic or, rather, mechanistic period, medicine made tremendous advances, but it also showed a short-sighted misunderstanding of the most important and most difficult among the problems of life.

The Resistances To Psycho-Analysis

4124

It is easy to understand why doctors, with an attitude of this kind towards the mind, should have had no liking for psycho-analysis and should have demurred to its demand for learning many things afresh and for seeing many things in a different light. But as a compensation it might be supposed that the new theory would be all the more likely to meet with applause from philosophers. For philosophers were accustomed to putting abstract concepts (or, as unkind tongues would say, hazy words) in the forefront of their explanations of the universe, and it would be impossible that they should object to the extension of the sphere of psychology for which psycho-analysis had paved the way. But here another obstacle arose. The philosophers’ idea of what is mental was not that of psycho-analysis. The overwhelming majority of philosophers regard as mental only the phenomena of consciousness. For them the world of consciousness coincides with the sphere of what is mental. Everything else that may take place in the ‘mind’ - an entity so hard to grasp - is relegated by them to the organic determinants of mental processes or to processes parallel to mental ones. Or, more strictly speaking, the mind has no contents other than the phenomena of consciousness, and consequently psychology, the science of the mind, has no other subject-matter. And on this point the layman’s view is the same.

What, then, can a philosopher say to a theory which, like psycho-analysis, asserts that on the contrary what is mental is in itself unconscious and that being conscious is only a quality, which may or may not accrue to a particular mental act and the withholding of which may perhaps alter that act in no other respect? He will naturally say that anything both unconscious and mental would be an impossibility, a contradictio in adjecto, and he will fail to observe that in making this judgement he is merely repeating his own definition of what is mental, a definition which may perhaps be too narrow. It is easy for philosophers to feel this certainty, since they have no acquaintance with the material whose investigation has compelled analysts to believe in unconscious mental acts. Philosophers have never taken account of hypnosis, they have not concerned themselves with the interpreting of dreams - on the contrary, like doctors, they regard dreams as the meaningless products of reduced mental activity during sleep - they are scarcely aware that there are such things as obsessions and delusions and they would find themselves in a most embarrassing situation if they were asked to explain them on the basis of their own psychological premisses. Analysts, too, refuse to say what the unconscious is, but they can indicate the domain of phenomena whose observation has obliged them to assume its existence. Philosophers, who know no kind of observation other than self-observation, cannot follow them into that domain.

The Resistances To Psycho-Analysis

4125

So it comes about that psycho-analysis derives nothing but disadvantages from its middle position between medicine and philosophy. Doctors regard it as a speculative system and refuse to believe that, like every other natural science, it is based on a patient and tireless elaboration of facts from the world of perception; philosophers, measuring it by the standard of their own artificially constructed systems, find that it starts from impossible premisses and reproach it because its most general concepts (which are only now in process of evolution) lack clarity and precision.

This state of affairs is enough to account for the reluctant and hesitant reception of analysis in scientific quarters. But it does not explain the outbursts of indignation, derision and scorn which, in disregard of every standard of logic and good taste, have characterized the controversial methods of its opponents. A reaction of such a kind suggests that resistances other than purely intellectual ones were stirred up and that powerful emotional forces were aroused. And there are indeed plenty of things to be found in the theory of psycho-analysis calculated to produce such an effect as this upon the passions of men of every kind and not of scientists alone. Above all there is the very important place in the mental life of human beings which psycho-analysis assigns to what are known as the sexual instincts. Psycho-analytic theory maintained that the symptoms of neuroses are distorted substitutive satisfactions of sexual instinctual forces, the direct satisfaction of which has been frustrated by internal resistances. Later on, when analysis had extended beyond its original field of work and began to be applied to normal mental life, it sought to show that these same sexual components, which could be diverted from their immediate aims and directed to other things, made the most important contributions to the cultural achievements of the individual and of society. These views were not entirely new. The incomparable significance of sexual life had been proclaimed by the philosopher Schopenhauer in an intensely impressive passage. Moreover, what psycho-analysis called sexuality was by no means identical with the impulsion towards a union of the two sexes or towards producing a pleasurable sensation in the genitals; it had far more resemblance to the all-inclusive and all-preserving Eros of Plato’s Symposium.

The Resistances To Psycho-Analysis

4126

But the opponents of psycho-analysis forgot its illustrious forerunners; they fell upon it as though it had made an assault upon the dignity of the human race. They accused it of ‘pan-sexualism’, though the psycho-analytic theory of the instincts had always been strictly dualistic and had at no time failed to recognize, alongside the sexual instincts, others to which it actually ascribed force enough to suppress the sexual instincts. (These mutually opposing forces were described to begin with as the sexual instincts and the ego instincts. A later theoretical development changed them into Eros and the instinct of death or destruction.) The suggestion that art, religion and social order originated in part in a contribution from the sexual instincts was represented by the opponents of analysis as a degradation of the highest cultural values. They emphatically declared that men have other interests besides this eternal one of sex, overlooking in their zeal the fact that animals too have other interests - indeed they are subject to sexuality, not permanently like men, but only in bouts occurring at specific periods - overlooking, too, the fact that the existence of these other interests in men had never been disputed and that nothing can be altered in the value of a cultural achievement by its being shown to have been derived from elementary animal instinctual sources.

The Resistances To Psycho-Analysis

4127

Such a display of unfairness and lack of logic cries out for an explanation. Its origin is not hard to find. Human civilization rests upon two pillars, of which one is the control of natural forces and the other the restriction of our instincts. The ruler’s throne rests upon fettered slaves. Among the instinctual components which are thus brought into service, the sexual instincts, in the narrower sense of the word, are conspicuous for their strength and savagery. Woe, if they should be set loose! The throne would be overturned and the ruler trampled under foot. Society is aware of this - and will not allow the topic to be mentioned.

But why not? What harm could the discussion do? Psycho-analysis has never said a word in favour of unfettering instincts that would injure our community; on the contrary it has issued a warning and an exhortation to us to mend our ways. But society refuses to consent to the ventilation of the question, because it has a bad conscience in more than one respect. In the first place it has set up a high ideal of morality - morality being restriction of the instincts - and insists that all its members shall fulfil that ideal without troubling itself with the possibility that obedience may bear heavily upon the individual. Nor is it sufficiently wealthy or well-organized to be able to compensate the individual for the amount of his instinctual renunciation. It is consequently left to the individual to decide how he can obtain, for the sacrifice he has made, enough compensation to enable him to preserve his mental balance. On the whole, however, he is obliged to live psychologically beyond his means, while the unsatisfied claims of his instincts make him feel the demands of civilization as a constant pressure upon him. Thus society maintains a condition of cultural hypocrisy which is bound to be accompanied by a sense of insecurity and a necessity for guarding what is an undeniably precarious situation by forbidding criticism and discussion. This line of thought holds good for all the instinctual impulses, including, therefore, the egoistic ones. The question whether it applies to all possible forms of civilization, and not merely to those which have evolved hitherto, cannot be discussed here. As regards the sexual instincts in the narrower sense, there is the further point that in most people they are tamed insufficiently and in a manner which is psychologically wrong and are therefore readier than the rest to break loose.

The Resistances To Psycho-Analysis

4128

Psycho-analysis has revealed the weaknesses of this system and has recommended that it should be altered. It proposes that there should be a reduction in the strictness with which instincts are repressed and that correspondingly more play should be given to truthfulness. Certain instinctual impulses, with whose suppression society has gone too far, should be permitted a greater amount of satisfaction; in the case of certain others the inefficient method of suppressing them by means of repression should be replaced by a better and securer procedure. As a result of these criticisms psycho-analysis is regarded as ‘inimical to culture’ and has been put under a ban as a ‘social danger’. This resistance cannot last for ever. No human institution can in the long run escape the influence of fair criticism; but men’s attitude to psycho-analysis is still dominated by this fear, which gives rein to their passions and diminishes their power of logical argument.

By its theory of the instincts psycho-analysis offended the feelings of individuals in so far as they regarded themselves as members of the social community; another branch of its theory was calculated to hurt every single person at the tenderest point of his own psychical development. Psycho-analysis disposed once and for all of the fairy tale of an asexual childhood. It demonstrated the fact that sexual interests and activities occur in small children from the beginning of their lives. It showed what transformations those activities pass through, how at about the age of five they succumb to inhibition and how from puberty onwards they enter the service of the reproductive function. It recognized that early infantile sexual life reaches its peak in what is known as the Oedipus complex (an emotional attachment of the child to the parent of the opposite sex accompanied by an attitude of rivalry to the parent of the same sex) and that at that period of life this impulsion extends uninhibited into a straightforward sexual desire. This can be confirmed so easily that only the greatest efforts could make it possible to overlook it. Every individual has in fact gone through this phase but has afterwards energetically repressed its purport and succeeded in forgetting it. A horror of incest and an enormous sense of guilt are left over from this prehistoric epoch of the individual’s existence. It may be that something quite similar occurred in the prehistoric epoch of the human species as a whole and that the beginnings of morality, religion and social order were intimately connected with the surmounting of that primaeval era. To adults their prehistory seems so inglorious that they refuse to allow themselves to be reminded of it: they were infuriated when psycho-analysis tried to lift the veil of amnesia from their years of childhood. There was only one way out: what psycho-analysis asserted must be false and what posed as a new science must be a tissue of fancies and distortions.

The Resistances To Psycho-Analysis

4129

Thus the strongest resistances to psycho-analysis were not of an intellectual kind but arose from emotional sources. This explained their passionate character as well as their poverty in logic. The situation obeyed a simple formula: men in the mass behaved to psycho-analysis in precisely the same way as individual neurotics under treatment for their disorders. It is possible, however, by patient work to convince these latter individuals that everything happened as we maintained it did: we had not invented it ourselves but had arrived at it from a study of other neurotics covering a period of twenty or thirty years. The position was at once alarming and consoling: alarming because it was no small thing to have the whole human race as one’s patient, and consoling because after all everything was taking place as the hypotheses of psycho-analysis declared that it was bound to.

If we cast our eyes once again over the various resistances to psycho-analysis that have been enumerated, it is evident that only a minority of them are of the kind which habitually arise against most scientific innovations of any considerable importance. The majority of them are due to the fact that powerful human feelings are hurt by the subject-matter of the theory. Darwin’s theory of descent met with the same fate, since it tore down the barrier that had been arrogantly set up between men and beasts. I drew attention to this analogy in an earlier paper,¹ in which I showed how the psycho-analytic view of the relation of the conscious ego to an overpowering unconscious was a severe blow to human self-love. I described this as the psychological blow to men’s narcissism, and compared it with the biological blow delivered by the theory of descent and the earlier cosmological blow aimed at it by the discovery of Copernicus.

¹ ‘A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis’ (1917a).

The Resistances To Psycho-Analysis

4130

Purely external difficulties have also contributed to strengthen the resistance to psycho-analysis. It is not easy to arrive at an independent judgement upon matters to do with analysis without having experienced it oneself or practised it on someone else. Nor can one do the latter without having acquired a specific and decidedly delicate technique, while until recently there was no easily accessible means of learning psycho-analysis and its technique. This position has now been improved by the foundation (in 1920) of the Berlin Psycho-Analytic Clinic and Training Institute, and soon afterwards (in 1922) of an exactly similar institute in Vienna.

Finally, with all reserve, the question may be raised whether the personality of the present writer as a Jew who has never sought to disguise the fact that he is a Jew may not have had a share in provoking the antipathy of his environment to psycho-analysis. An argument of this kind is not often uttered aloud. But we have unfortunately grown so suspicious that we cannot avoid thinking that this factor may not have been quite without its effect. Nor is it perhaps entirely a matter of chance that the first advocate of psycho-analysis was a Jew. To profess belief in this new theory called for a certain degree of readiness to accept a situation of solitary opposition - a situation with which no one is more familiar than a Jew.

4131

A NOTE UPON THE ‘MYSTIC WRITING-PAD’

(1925)

4132

Intentionally left blank

4133

A NOTE UPON THE ‘MYSTIC WRITING-PAD’

If I distrust my memory - neurotics, as we know, do so to a remarkable extent, but normal people have every reason for doing so as well - I am able to supplement and guarantee its working by making a note in writing. In that case the surface upon which this note is preserved, the pocket-book or sheet of paper, is as it were a materialized portion of my mnemic apparatus, which I otherwise carry about with me invisible. I have only to bear in mind the place where this ‘memory’ has been deposited and I can then ‘reproduce’ it at any time I like, with the certainty that it will have remained unaltered and so have escaped the possible distortions to which it might have been subjected in my actual memory.

If I want to make full use of this technique for improving my mnemic function, I find that there are two different procedures open to me. On the one hand, I can choose a writing-surface which will preserve intact any note made upon it for an indefinite length of time - for instance, a sheet of paper which I can write upon in ink. I am then in possession of a ‘permanent memory-trace’. The disadvantage of this procedure is that the receptive capacity of the writing-surface is soon exhausted. The sheet is filled with writing, there is no room on it for any more notes, and I find myself obliged to bring another sheet into use, that has not been written on. Moreover, the advantage of this procedure, the fact that it provides a ‘permanent trace’, may lose its value for me if after a time the note ceases to interest me and I no longer want to ‘retain it in my memory’. The alternative procedure avoids both of these disadvantages. If, for instance, I write with a piece of chalk on a slate, I have a receptive surface which retains its receptive capacity for an unlimited time and the notes upon which can be destroyed as soon as they cease to interest me, without any need for throwing away the writing-surface itself. Here the disadvantage is that I cannot preserve a permanent trace. If I want to put some fresh notes on the slate, I must first wipe out the ones which cover it. Thus an unlimited receptive capacity and a retention of permanent traces seem to be mutually exclusive properties in the apparatus which we use as substitutes for our memory: either the receptive surface must be renewed or the note must be destroyed.

A Note Upon The 'Mystic Writing-Pad'

4134

All the forms of auxiliary apparatus which we have invented for the improvement or intensification of our sensory functions are built on the same model as the sense organs themselves or portions of them: for instance, spectacles, photographic cameras, ear-trumpets. Measured by this standard, devices to aid our memory seem particularly imperfect, since our mental apparatus accomplishes precisely what they cannot: it has an unlimited receptive capacity for new perceptions and nevertheless lays down permanent - even though not unalterable - memory-traces of them. As long ago as in 1900 I gave expression in The Interpretation of Dreams to a suspicion that this unusual capacity was to be divided between two different systems (or organs of the mental apparatus). According to this view, we possess a system Pcpt.-Cs., which receives perceptions but retains no permanent trace of them, so that it can react like a clean sheet to every new perception; while the permanent traces of the excitations which have been received are preserved in ‘mnemic systems’ lying behind the perceptual system. Later, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g), I added a remark to the effect that the inexplicable phenomenon of consciousness arises in the perceptual system instead of the permanent traces.

Now some time ago there came upon the market, under the name of the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’, a small contrivance that promises to perform more than the sheet of paper or the slate. It claims to be nothing more than a writing-tablet from which notes can be erased by an easy movement of the hand. But if it is examined more closely it will be found that its construction shows a remarkable agreement with my hypothetical structure of our perceptual apparatus and that it can in fact provide both an ever-ready receptive surface and permanent traces of the notes that have been made upon it.

A Note Upon The 'Mystic Writing-Pad'

4135

The Mystic Pad is a slab of dark brown resin or wax with a paper edging; over the slab is laid a thin transparent sheet, the top end of which is firmly secured to the slab while its bottom end rests on it without being fixed to it. This transparent sheet is the more interesting part of the little device. It itself consists of two layers, which can be detached from each other except at their two ends. The upper layer is a transparent piece of celluloid; the lower layer is made of thin translucent waxed paper. When the apparatus is not in use, the lower surface of the waxed paper adheres lightly to the upper surface of the wax slab.

To make use of the Mystic Pad, one writes upon the celluloid portion of the covering-sheet which rests on the wax slab. For this purpose no pencil or chalk is necessary, since the writing does not depend on material being deposited on the receptive surface. It is a return to the ancient method of writing on tablets of clay or wax: a pointed stilus scratches the surface, the depressions upon which constitute the ‘writing’. In the case of the Mystic Pad this scratching is not effected directly, but through the medium of the covering-sheet. At the points which the stilus touches, it presses the lower surface of the waxed paper on to the wax slab, and the grooves are visible as dark writing upon the otherwise smooth whitish-grey surface of the celluloid. If one wishes to destroy what has been written, all that is necessary is to raise the double covering-sheet from the wax slab by a light pull, starting from the free lower end. The close contact between the waxed paper and the wax slab at the places which have been scratched (upon which the visibility of the writing depended) is thus brought to an end and it does not recur when the two surfaces come together once more. The Mystic Pad is now clear of writing and ready to receive fresh notes.

The small imperfections of the contrivance have, of course, no importance for us, since we are only concerned with its approximation to the structure of the perceptual apparatus of the mind.

A Note Upon The 'Mystic Writing-Pad'

4136

If, while the Mystic Pad has writing on it, we cautiously raise the celluloid from the waxed paper, we can see the writing just as clearly on the surface of the latter, and the question may arise why there should be any necessity for the celluloid portion of the cover. Experiment will then show that the thin paper would be very easily crumpled or torn if one were to write directly upon it with the stilus. The layer of celluloid thus acts as a protective sheath for the waxed paper, to keep off injurious effects from without. The celluloid is a ‘protective shield against stimuli’; the layer which actually receives the stimuli is the paper. I may at this point recall that in Beyond the Pleasure Principle I showed that the perceptual apparatus of our mind consists of two layers, of an external protective shield against stimuli whose task it is to diminish the strength of excitations coming in, and of a surface behind it which receives the stimuli, namely the system Pcpt.-Cs.

The analogy would not be of much value if it could not be pursued further than this. If we lift the entire covering-sheet - both the celluloid and the waxed paper - off the wax slab, the writing vanishes and, as I have already remarked, does not re-appear again. The surface of the Mystic Pad is clear of writing and once more capable of receiving impressions. But it is easy to discover that the permanent trace of what was written is retained upon the wax slab itself and is legible in suitable lights. Thus the Pad provides not only a receptive surface that can be used over and over again, like a slate, but also permanent traces of what has been written, like an ordinary paper pad: it solves the problem of combining the two functions by dividing them between two separate but interrelated component parts or systems. But this is precisely the way in which, according to the hypothesis which I mentioned just now, our mental apparatus performs its perceptual function. The layer which receives the stimuli - the system Pcpt.-Cs. - forms no permanent traces; the foundations of memory come about in other, adjoining, systems.

We need not be disturbed by the fact that in the Mystic Pad no use is made of the permanent traces of the notes that have been received; it is enough that they are present. There must come a point at which the analogy between an auxiliary apparatus of this kind and the organ which is its prototype will cease to apply. It is true, too, that once the writing has been erased, the Mystic Pad cannot ‘reproduce’ it from within; it would be a mystic pad indeed if, like our memory, it could accomplish that. None the less, I do not think it is too far-fetched to compare the celluloid and waxed paper cover with the system Pcpt.-Cs. and its protective shield, the wax slab with the unconscious behind them, and the appearance and disappearance of the writing with the flickering-up and passing-away of consciousness in the process of perception.

A Note Upon The 'Mystic Writing-Pad'

4137

But I must admit that I am inclined to press the comparison still further. On the Mystic Pad the writing vanishes every time the close contact is broken between the paper which receives the stimulus and the wax slab which preserves the impression. This agrees with a notion which I have long had about the method by which the perceptual apparatus of our mind functions, but which I have hitherto kept to myself. My theory was that cathectic innervations are sent out and withdrawn in rapid periodic impulses from within into the completely pervious system Pcpt.-Cs. So long as that system is cathected in this manner, it receives perceptions (which are accompanied by consciousness) and passes the excitation on to the unconscious mnemic systems; but as soon as the cathexis is withdrawn, consciousness is extinguished and the functioning of the system comes to a standstill. It is as though the unconscious stretches out feelers, through the medium of the system Pcpt.-Cs., towards the external world and hastily withdraws them as soon as they have sampled the excitations coming from it. Thus the interruptions, which in the case of the Mystic Pad have an external origin, were attributed by my hypothesis to the discontinuity in the current of innervation; and the actual breaking of contact which occurs in the Mystic Pad was replaced in my theory by the periodic non-excitability of the perceptual system. I further had a suspicion that this discontinuous method of functioning of the system Pcpt.-Cs. lies at the bottom of the origin of the concept of time.

If we imagine one hand writing upon the surface of the Mystic Writing-Pad while another periodically raises its covering-sheet from the wax slab, we shall have a concrete representation of the way in which I tried to picture the functioning of the perceptual apparatus of our mind.

4138

NEGATION

(1925)

4139

Intentionally left blank

4140

NEGATION

The manner in which our patients bring forward their associations during the work of analysis gives us an opportunity for making some interesting observations. ‘Now you’ll think I mean to say something insulting, but really I’ve no such intention.’ we realize that this is a rejection, by projection, of an idea that has just come up. Or: ‘You ask who this person in the dream can be. It’s not my mother.’ We emend this to: ‘So it is his mother.’ In our interpretation, we take the liberty of disregarding the negation and of picking out the subject-matter alone of the association. It is as though the patient had said: ‘It’s true that my mother came into my mind as I thought of this person, but I don’t feel inclined to let the association count.’

There is a very convenient method by which we can sometimes obtain a piece of information we want about unconscious repressed material. ‘What’, we ask, ‘would you consider the most unlikely imaginable thing in that situation? What do you think was furthest from your mind at that time?’ If the patient falls into the trap and says what he thinks is most incredible, he almost always makes the right admission. A neat counterpart to this experiment is often met with in an obsessional neurotic who has already been initiated into the meaning of his symptoms. ‘I’ve got a new obsessive idea,’ he says, ‘and it occurred to me at once that it might mean so and so. But no; that can’t be true, or it couldn’t have occurred to me.’ What he is repudiating, on grounds picked up from his treatment, is, of course, the correct meaning of the obsessive idea.

Negation

4141

Thus the content of a repressed image or idea can make its way into consciousness, on condition that it is negated. Negation is a way of taking cognizance of what is repressed; indeed it is already a lifting of the repression, though not, of course, an acceptance of what is repressed. We can see how in this the intellectual function is separated from the affective process. With the help of negation only one consequence of the process of repression is undone - the fact, namely, of the ideational content of what is repressed not reaching consciousness. The outcome of this is a kind of intellectual acceptance of the repressed, while at the same time what is essential to the repression persists.¹ In the course of analytic work we often produce a further, very important and somewhat strange variant of this situation. We succeed in conquering the negation as well, and in bringing about a full intellectual acceptance of the repressed; but the repressive process itself is not yet removed by this.

Since to affirm or negate the content of thoughts is the task of the function of intellectual judgement, what we have just been saying has led us to the psychological origin of that function. To negate something in a judgement is, at bottom, to say: ‘This is something which I should prefer to repress.’ A negative judgement is the intellectual substitute for repression; its ‘no’ is the hall-mark of repression, a certificate of origin like, let us say, ‘Made in Germany’. With the help of the symbol of negation, thinking frees itself from the restrictions of repression and enriches itself with material that is indispensable for its proper functioning.

The function of judgement is concerned in the main with two sorts of decisions. It affirms or disaffirms the possession by a thing of a particular attribute; and it asserts or disputes that a presentation has an existence in reality. The attribute to be decided about may originally have been good or bad, useful or harmful. Expressed in the language of the oldest - the oral - instinctual impulses, the judgement is: ‘I should like to eat this’, or ‘I should like to spit it out’; and, put more generally: ‘I should like to take this into myself and to keep that out.’ That is to say: ‘It shall be inside me’ or ‘it shall be outside me’. As I have shown elsewhere, the original pleasure-ego wants to introject into itself everything that is good and to eject from itself everything that is bad. What is bad, what is alien to the ego and what is external are, to begin with, identical.²

¹ The same process is at the root of the familiar superstition that boasting is dangerous. ‘How nice not to have had one of my headaches for so long.’ But this is in fact the first announcement of an attack, of whose approach the subject is already sensible, although he is as yet unwilling to believe it.

² See the discussion in ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’ (1915c).

Negation

4142

The other sort of decision made by the function of judgement - as to the real existence of something of which there is a presentation (reality-testing) - is a concern of the definitive reality-ego, which develops out of the initial pleasure-ego. It is now no longer a question of whether what has been perceived (a thing) shall be taken into the ego or not, but of whether something which is in the ego as a presentation can be rediscovered in perception (reality) as well. It is, we see, once more a question of external and internal. What is unreal, merely a presentation and subjective, is only internal; what is real is also there outside. In this stage of development regard for the pleasure principle has been set aside. Experience has shown the subject that it is not only important whether a thing (an object of satisfaction for him) possesses the ‘good’ attribute and so deserves to be taken into his ego, but also whether it is there in the external world, so that he can get hold of it whenever he needs it. In order to understand this step forward we must recollect that all presentations originate from perceptions and are repetitions of them. Thus originally the mere existence of a presentation was a guarantee of the reality of what was presented. The antithesis between subjective and objective does not exist from the first. It only comes into being from the fact that thinking possesses the capacity to bring before the mind once more something that has once been perceived, by reproducing it as a presentation without the external object having still to be there. The first and immediate aim, therefore, of reality-testing is, not to find an object in real perception which corresponds to the one presented, but to refind such an object, to convince oneself that it is still there. Another capacity of the power of thinking offers a further contribution to the differentiation between what is subjective and what is objective. The reproduction of a perception as a presentation is not always a faithful one; it may be modified by omissions, or changed by the merging of various elements. In that case, reality-testing has to ascertain how far such distortions go. But it is evident that a precondition for the setting up of reality-testing is that objects shall have been lost which once brought real satisfaction.

Negation

4143

Judging is the intellectual action which decides the choice of motor action, which puts an end to the postponement due to thought and which leads over from thinking to acting. This postponement due to thought has also been discussed by me elsewhere. It is to be regarded as an experimental action, a motor palpating, with small expenditure of discharge. Let us consider where the ego has used a similar kind of palpating before, at what place it learnt the technique which it now applies in its processes of thought. It happened at the sensory end of the mental apparatus, in connection with sense perceptions. For, on our hypothesis, perception is not a purely passive process. The ego periodically sends out small amounts of cathexis into the perceptual system, by means of which it samples the external stimuli, and then after every such tentative advance it draws back again.

The study of judgement affords us, perhaps for the first time, an insight into the origin of an intellectual function from the interplay of the primary instinctual impulses. Judging is a continuation, along lines of expediency, of the original process by which the ego took things into itself or expelled them from itself, according to the pleasure principle. The polarity of judgement appears to correspond to the opposition of the two groups of instincts which we have supposed to exist. Affirmation - as a substitute for uniting - belongs to Eros; negation - the successor to expulsion - belongs to the instinct of destruction. The general wish to negate, the negativism which is displayed by some psychotics, is probably to be regarded as a sign of a defusion of instincts that has taken place through a withdrawal of the libidinal components. But the performance of the function of judgement is not made possible until the creation of the symbol of negation has endowed thinking with a first measure of freedom from the consequences of repression and, with it, from the compulsion of the pleasure principle.

This view of negation fits in very well with the fact that in analysis we never discover a ‘no’ in the unconscious and that recognition of the unconscious on the part of the ego is expressed in a negative formula. There is no stronger evidence that we have been successful in our effort to uncover the unconscious than when the patient reacts to it with the words ‘I didn’t think that’, or ‘I didn’t (ever) think of that’.

4144

SOME PSYCHICAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE ANATOMICAL DISTINCTION

BETWEEN THE SEXES

(1925)

4145

Intentionally left blank

4146

SOME PSYCHICAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE ANATOMICAL DISTINCTION

BETWEEN THE SEXES

In my own writings and in those of my followers more and more stress is laid on the necessity that the analyses of neurotics shall deal thoroughly with the remotest period of their childhood, the time of the early efflorescence of sexual life. It is only by examining the first manifestations of the patient’s innate instinctual constitution and the effects of his earliest experiences that we can accurately gauge the motive forces that have led to his neurosis and can be secure against the errors into which we might be tempted by the degree to which things have become remodelled and overlaid in adult life. This requirement is not only of theoretical but also of practical importance, for it distinguishes our efforts from the work of those physicians whose interests are focused exclusively on therapeutic results and who employ analytic methods, but only up to a certain point. An analysis of early childhood such as we are considering is tedious and laborious and makes demands both upon the physician and upon the patient which cannot always be met. Moreover, it leads us into dark regions where there are as yet no sign posts. Indeed, analysts may feel reassured, I think, that there is no risk of their work becoming mechanical, and so of losing its interest, during the next few decades.

In the following pages I bring forward some findings of analytic research which would be of great importance if they could be proved to apply universally. Why do I not postpone publication of them until further experience has given me the necessary proof, if such proof is obtainable? Because the conditions under which I work have undergone a change, with implications which I cannot disguise. Formerly, I was not one of those who are unable to hold back what seems to be a new discovery until it has been either confirmed or corrected. My Interpretation of Dreams (1900a) and my ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (1905e) (the case of Dora) were suppressed by me - if not for the nine years enjoined by Horace - at all events for four or five years before I allowed them to be published. But in those days I had unlimited time before me - ‘oceans of time’ as an amiable author puts it - and material poured in upon me in such quantities that fresh experiences were hardly to be escaped. Moreover, I was the only worker in a new field, so that my reticence involved no danger to myself and no loss to others.

Some Psychical Consequences Of The Anatomical Distinction Between The Sexes

4147

But now everything has changed. The time before me is limited. The whole of it is no longer spent in working, so that my opportunities for making fresh observations are not so numerous. If I think I see something new, I am uncertain whether I can wait for it to be confirmed. And further, everything that is to be seen upon the surface has already been exhausted; what remains has to be slowly and laboriously dragged up from the depths. Finally, I am no longer alone. An eager crowd of fellow-workers is ready to make use of what is unfinished or doubtful, and I can leave to them that part of the work which I should otherwise have done myself. On this occasion, therefore, I feel justified in publishing something which stands in urgent need of confirmation before its value or lack of value can be decided.

In examining the earliest mental shapes assumed by the sexual life of children we have been in the habit of taking as the subject of our investigations the male child, the little boy. With little girls, so we have supposed, things must be similar, though in some way or other they must nevertheless be different. The point in development at which this difference lay could not be clearly determined.

In boys the situation of the Oedipus complex is the first stage that can be recognized with certainty. It is easy to understand, because at that stage a child retains the same object which he previously cathected with his libido - not as yet a genital one - during the preceding period while he was being suckled and nursed. The fact, too, that in this situation he regards his father as a disturbing rival and would like to get rid of him and take his place is a straightforward consequence of the actual state of affairs. I have shown elsewhere¹ how the Oedipus attitude in little boys belongs to the phallic phase, and how its destruction is brought about by the fear of castration - that is, by narcissistic interest in their genitals. The matter is made more difficult to grasp by the complicating circumstance that even in boys the Oedipus complex has a double orientation, active and passive, in accordance with their bisexual constitution; a boy also wants to take his mother’s place as the love-object of his father - a fact which we describe as the feminine attitude.

¹ ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’ (1924d).

Some Psychical Consequences Of The Anatomical Distinction Between The Sexes

4148

As regards the prehistory of the Oedipus complex in boys we are far from complete clarity. We know that that period includes an identification of an affectionate sort with the boy’s father, an identification which is still free from any sense of rivalry in regard to his mother. Another element of that stage is invariably, I believe, a masturbatory activity in connection with the genitals, the masturbation of early childhood, the more or less violent suppression of which by those in charge of the child sets the castration complex in action. It is to be assumed that this masturbation is attached to the Oedipus complex and serves as a discharge for the sexual excitation belonging to it. It is, however, uncertain whether the masturbation has this character from the first, or whether on the contrary it makes its first appearance spontaneously as an activity of a bodily organ and is only brought into relation with the Oedipus complex at some later date; this second possibility is by far the more probable. Another doubtful question is the part played by bed-wetting and by the breaking of that habit through the intervention of training measures. We are inclined to make the simple connection that continued bed-wetting is a result of masturbation and that its suppression is regarded by boys as an inhibition of their genital activity - that is, as having the meaning of a threat of castration; but whether we are always right in supposing this remains to be seen. Finally, analysis shows us in a shadowy way how the fact of a child at a very early age listening to his parents copulating may set up his first sexual excitation, and how that event may, owing to its after-effects, act as a starting-point for the child’s whole sexual development. Masturbation, as well as the two attitudes in the Oedipus complex, later on become attached to this early experience, the child having subsequently interpreted its meaning. It is impossible, however, to suppose that these observations of coitus are of universal occurrence, so that at this point we are faced with the problem of ‘primal phantasies’. Thus the prehistory of the Oedipus complex, even in boys, raises all of these questions for sifting and explanation; and there is the further problem of whether we are to suppose that the process invariably follows the same course, or whether a great variety of different preliminary stages may not converge upon the same terminal situation.

Some Psychical Consequences Of The Anatomical Distinction Between The Sexes

4149

In little girls the Oedipus complex raises one problem more than in boys. In both cases the mother is the original object; and there is no cause for surprise that boys retain that object in the Oedipus complex. But how does it happen that girls abandon it and instead take their father as an object? In pursuing this question I have been able to reach some conclusions which may throw light precisely on the prehistory of the Oedipus relation in girls.

Every analyst has come across certain women who cling with especial intensity and tenacity to the bond with their father and to the wish in which it culminates of having a child by him. We have good reason to suppose that the same wishful phantasy was also the motive force of their infantile masturbation, and it is easy to form an impression that at this point we have been brought up against an elementary and unanalysable fact of infantile sexual life. But a thorough analysis of these very cases brings something different to light - namely, that here the Oedipus complex has a long prehistory and is in some respects a secondary formation.

The old paediatrician Lindner once remarked that a child discovers the genital zones (the penis or the clitoris) as a source of pleasure while indulging in sensual sucking (thumb sucking).¹ I shall leave it an open question whether it is really true that the child takes the newly found source of pleasure in exchange for the recent loss of the mother’s nipple - a possibility to which later phantasies (fellatio) seem to point. Be that as it may, the genital zone is discovered at some time or other, and there seems no justification for attributing any psychical content to the first activities in connection with it. But the first step in the phallic phase which begins in this way is not the linking-up of the masturbation with the object-cathexes of the Oedipus complex, but a momentous discovery which little girls are destined to make. They notice the penis of a brother or playmate, strikingly visible and of large proportions, at once recognize it as the superior counterpart of their own small and inconspicuous organ, and from that time forward fall a victim to envy for the penis.

¹ Cf. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d).

Some Psychical Consequences Of The Anatomical Distinction Between The Sexes

4150

There is an interesting contrast between the behaviour of the two sexes. In the analogous situation, when a little boy first catches sight of a girl’s genital region, he begins by showing irresolution and lack of interest; he sees nothing or disavows what he has seen, he softens it down or looks about for expedients for bringing it into line with his expectations. It is not until later, when some threat of castration has obtained a hold upon him, that the observation becomes important to him: if he then recollects or repeats it, it arouses a terrible storm of emotion in him and forces him to believe in the reality of the threat which he has hitherto laughed at. This combination of circumstances leads to two reactions, which may become fixed and will in that case, whether separately or together or in conjunction with other factors, permanently determine the boy’s relations to women: horror of the mutilated creature or triumph and contempt for her. These developments, however, belong to the future, though not to a very remote one.

A little girl behaves differently. She makes her judgement and her decision in a flash. She has seen it and knows that she is without it and wants to have it.¹

¹ This is an opportunity for correcting a statement which I made many years ago. I believed that the sexual interest of children, unlike that of pubescents, was aroused, not by the difference between the sexes, but by the problem of where babies come from. We now see that, at all events with girls, this is certainly not the case. With boys it may no doubt happen sometimes one way and sometimes the other; or with both sexes chance experiences may determine the event.

Some Psychical Consequences Of The Anatomical Distinction Between The Sexes

4151

Here what has been named the masculinity complex of women branches off. It may put great difficulties in the way of their regular development towards femininity, if it cannot be got over soon enough. The hope of some day obtaining a penis in spite of everything and so of becoming like a man may persist to an incredibly late age and may become a motive for strange and otherwise unaccountable actions. Or again, a process may set in which I should like to call a ‘disavowal’, a process which in the mental life of children seems neither uncommon nor very dangerous but which in an adult would mean the beginning of a psychosis. Thus a girl may refuse to accept the fact of being castrated, may harden herself in the conviction that she does possess a penis, and may subsequently be compelled to behave as though she were a man.

The psychical consequences of envy for the penis, in so far as it does not become absorbed in the reaction-formation of the masculinity complex, are various and far-reaching. After a woman has become aware of the wound to her narcissism, she develops, like a scar, a sense of inferiority. When she has passed beyond her first attempt at explaining her lack of a penis as being a punishment personal to herself and has realized that that sexual character is a universal one, she begins to share the contempt felt by men for a sex which is the lesser in so important a respect, and, at least in holding that opinion, insists on being like a man.¹

¹ In my first critical account of the ‘History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement’ (1914d), I recognized that this fact represents the core of truth contained in Adler’s theory. That theory has no hesitation in explaining the whole world by this single point (‘organ inferiority’, the ‘masculine protest’, ‘breaking away from the feminine line’) and prides itself upon having in this way robbed sexuality of its importance and put the desire for power in its place! Thus the only organ which could claim to be called ‘inferior’ without any ambiguity would be the clitoris. On the other hand, one hears of analysts who boast that, though they have worked for dozens of years, they have never found a sign of the existence of a castration complex. We must bow our heads in recognition of the greatness of this achievement, even though it is only a negative one, a piece of virtuosity in the art of overlooking and mistaking. The two theories form an interesting pair of opposites: in the latter not a trace of a castration complex, in the former nothing else than its consequences.

Some Psychical Consequences Of The Anatomical Distinction Between The Sexes

4152

Even after penis-envy has abandoned its true object, it continues to exist: by an easy displacement it persists in the character-trait of jealousy. Of course, jealousy is not limited to one sex and has a wider foundation than this, but I am of opinion that it plays a far larger part in the mental life of women than of men and that that is because it is enormously reinforced from the direction of displaced penis-envy. While I was still unaware of this source of jealousy and was considering the phantasy ‘a child is being beaten’, which occurs so commonly in girls, I constructed a first phase for it in which its meaning was that another child, a rival of whom the subject was jealous, was to be beaten.¹ This phantasy seems to be a relic of the phallic period in girls. The peculiar rigidity which struck me so much in the monotonous formula ‘a child is being beaten’ can probably be interpreted in a special way. The child which is being beaten (or caressed) may ultimately be nothing more nor less than the clitoris itself, so that at its very lowest level the statement will contain a confession of masturbation, which has remained attached to the content of the formula from its beginning in the phallic phase till later life.

A third consequence of penis-envy seems to be a loosening of the girl’s relation with her mother as a love-object. The situation as a whole is not very clear, but it can be seen that in the end the girl’s mother, who sent her into the world so insufficiently equipped, is almost always held responsible for her lack of a penis. The way in which this comes about historically is often that soon after the girl has discovered that her genitals are unsatisfactory she begins to show jealousy of another child on the ground that her mother is fonder of it than of her, which serves as a reason for her giving up her affectionate relation to her mother. It will fit in with this if the child which has been preferred by her mother is made into the first object of the beating-phantasy which ends in masturbation.

¹ ‘"A child is Being Beaten"’ (1919e).

Some Psychical Consequences Of The Anatomical Distinction Between The Sexes

4153

There is yet another surprising effect of penis-envy, or of the discovery of the inferiority of the clitoris, which is undoubtedly the most important of all. In the past I had often formed an impression that in general women tolerate masturbation worse than men, that they more frequently fight against it and that they are unable to make use of it in circumstances in which a man would seize upon it as a way of escape without any hesitation. Experience would no doubt elicit innumerable exceptions to this statement, if we attempted to turn it into a rule. The reactions of human individuals of both sexes are of course made up of masculine and feminine traits. But it appeared to me nevertheless as though masturbation were further removed from the nature of women than of men, and the solution of the problem could be assisted by the reflection that masturbation, at all events of the clitoris, is a masculine activity and that the elimination of clitoridal sexuality is a necessary precondition for the development of femininity. Analyses of the remote phallic period have now taught me that in girls, soon after the first signs of penis-envy, an intense current of feeling against masturbation makes its appearance, which cannot be attributed exclusively to the educational influence of those in charge of the child. This impulse is clearly a forerunner of the wave of repression which at puberty will do away with a large amount of the girl’s masculine sexuality in order to make room for the development of her femininity. It may happen that this first opposition to auto-erotic activity fails to attain its end. And this was in fact the case in the instances which I analysed. The conflict continued, and both then and later the girl did everything she could to free herself from the compulsion to masturbate. Many of the later manifestations of sexual life in women remain unintelligible unless this powerful motive is recognized.

I cannot explain the opposition which is raised in this way by little girls to phallic masturbation except by supposing that there is some concurrent factor which turns her violently against that pleasurable activity. Such a factor lies close at hand. It cannot be anything else than her narcissistic sense of humiliation which is bound up with penis-envy, the reminder that after all this is a point on which she cannot compete with boys and that it would therefore be best for her to give up the idea of doing so. Thus the little girl’s recognition of the anatomical distinction between the sexes forces her away from masculinity and masculine masturbation on to new lines which lead to the development of femininity.

Some Psychical Consequences Of The Anatomical Distinction Between The Sexes

4154

So far there has been no question of the Oedipus complex, nor has it up to this point played any part. But now the girl’s libido slips into a new position along the line - there is no other way of putting it - of the equation ‘penis-child’. She gives up her wish for a penis and puts in place of it a wish for a child: and with that purpose in view she takes her father as a love object. Her mother becomes the object of her jealousy. The girl has turned into a little woman. If I am to credit a single analytic instance, this new situation can give rise to physical sensations which would have to be regarded as a premature awakening of the female genital apparatus. When the girl’s attachment to her father comes to grief later on and has to be abandoned, it may give place to an identification with him and the girl may thus return to her masculinity complex and perhaps remain fixated in it.

I have now said the essence of what I had to say: I will stop, therefore, and cast an eye over our findings. We have gained some insight into the prehistory of the Oedipus complex in girls. The corresponding period in boys is more or less unknown. In girls the Oedipus complex is a secondary formation. The operations of the castration complex precede it and prepare for it. As regards the relation between the Oedipus and castration complexes there is a fundamental contrast between the two sexes. Whereas in boys the Oedipus complex is destroyed by the castration complex, in girls it is made possible and led up to by the castration complex. This contradiction is cleared up if we reflect that the castration complex always operates in the sense implied in its subject-matter: it inhibits and limits masculinity and encourages femininity. The difference between the sexual development of males and females at the stage we have been considering is an intelligible consequence of the anatomical distinction between their genitals and of the psychical situation involved in it; it corresponds to the difference between a castration that has been carried out and one that has merely been threatened. In their essentials, therefore, our findings are self-evident and it should have been possible to foresee them.

Some Psychical Consequences Of The Anatomical Distinction Between The Sexes

4155

The Oedipus complex, however, is such an important thing that the manner in which one enters and leaves it cannot be without its effects. In boys (as I have shown at length in the paper to which I have just referred and to which all of my present remarks are closely related) the complex is not simply repressed, it is literally smashed to pieces by the shock of threatened castration. Its libidinal cathexes are abandoned, desexualized and in part sublimated; its objects are incorporated into the ego, where they form the nucleus of the super-ego and give that new structure its characteristic qualities. In normal, or, it is better to say, in ideal cases, the Oedipus complex exists no longer, even in the unconscious; the super-ego has become its heir. Since the penis (to follow Ferenczi) owes its extraordinarily high narcissistic cathexis to its organic significance for the propagation of the species, the catastrophe to the Oedipus complex (the abandonment of incest and the institution of conscience and morality) may be regarded as a victory of the race over the individual. This is an interesting point of view when one considers that neurosis is based upon a struggle of the ego against the demands of the sexual function. But to leave the standpoint of individual psychology is not of any immediate help in clarifying this complicated situation.

In girls the motive for the demolition of the Oedipus complex is lacking. Castration has already had its effect, which was to force the child into the situation of the Oedipus complex. Thus the Oedipus complex escapes the fate which it meets with in boys: it may be slowly abandoned or dealt with by repression, or its effects may persist far into women’s normal mental life. I cannot evade the notion (though I hesitate to give it expression) that for women the level of what is ethically normal is different from what it is in men. Their super-ego is never so inexorable, so impersonal, so independent of its emotional origins as we require it to be in men. Character-traits which critics of every epoch have brought up against women - that they show less sense of justice than men, that they are less ready to submit to the great exigencies of life, that they are more often influenced in their judgements by feelings of affection or hostility - all these would be amply accounted for by the modification in the formation of their super-ego which we have inferred above. We must not allow ourselves to be deflected from such conclusions by the denials of the feminists, who are anxious to force us to regard the two sexes as completely equal in position and worth; but we shall, of course, willingly agree that the majority of men are also far behind the masculine ideal and that all human individuals, as a result of their bisexual disposition and of cross-inheritance, combine in themselves both masculine and feminine characteristics, so that pure masculinity and femininity remain theoretical constructions of uncertain content.

Some Psychical Consequences Of The Anatomical Distinction Between The Sexes

4156

I am inclined to set some value on the considerations I have brought forward upon the psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes. I am aware, however, that this opinion can only be maintained if my findings, which are based on a handful of cases, turn out to have general validity and to be typical. If not, they would remain no more than a contribution to our knowledge of the different paths along which sexual life develops.

In the valuable and comprehensive studies on the masculinity and castration complexes in women by Abraham (1921), Horney (1923) and Helene Deutsch (1925) there is much that touches closely on what I have written but nothing that coincides with it completely, so that here again I feel justified in publishing this paper.

4157

JOSEF POPPER-LYNKEUS AND THE THEORY OF DREAMS

(1923)

4158

Intentionally left blank

4159

JOSEF POPPER-LYNKEUS AND THE THEORY OF DREAMS

There is much of interest to be said on the subject of apparent scientific originality. When some new idea comes up in science, which is hailed at first as a discovery and is also as a rule disputed as such, objective research soon afterwards reveals that after all it was in fact no novelty. Usually the discovery has already been made repeatedly and has afterwards been forgotten, often at very long intervals of time. Or at least it has had forerunners, had been obscurely surmised or incompletely enunciated. This is too well known to call for further discussion.

But the subjective side of originality also deserves consideration. A scientific worker may sometimes ask himself what was the source of the ideas peculiar to himself which he has applied to his material. As regards some of them he will discover without much reflection the hints from which they were derived, the statements made by other people which he has picked out and modified and whose implications he has elaborated. But as regards others of his ideas he can make no such acknowledgements; he can only suppose that these thoughts and lines of approach were generated - he cannot tell how - in his own mental activity, and it is on them that he bases his claim to originality.

Careful psychological investigation, however, diminishes this claim still further. It reveals hidden and long-forgotten sources which gave the stimulus to the apparently original ideas, and it replaces the ostensible new creation by a revival of something forgotten applied to fresh material. There is nothing to regret in this; we had no right to expect that what was ‘original’ could be untraceable and undetermined.

In my case, too, the originality of many of the new ideas employed by me in the interpretation of dreams and in psycho-analysis has evaporated in this way. I am ignorant of the source of only one of these ideas. It was no less than the key to my view of dreams and helped me to solve their riddles, so far as it has been possible to solve them hitherto. I started out from the strange, confused and senseless character of so many dreams, and hit upon the notion that dreams were bound to become like that because something was struggling for expression in them which was opposed by a resistance from other mental forces. In dreams hidden impulses were stirring which stood in contradiction to what might be called the dreamer’s official ethical and aesthetic creed; the dreamer was thus ashamed of these impulses, turned away from them and refused to acknowledge them in day-time, and if during the night he could not withhold expression of some kind from them, he submitted them to a ‘dream-distortion’ which made the content of the dream appear confused and senseless. To the mental force in human beings which keeps watch on this internal contradiction and distorts the dream’s primitive instinctual impulses in favour of conventional or of higher moral standards, I gave the name of ‘dream-censorship’.

Josef Popper-Lynkeus And The Theory Of Dreams

4160

Precisely this essential part of my theory of dreams was, however, discovered by Popper-Lynkeus independently. I will ask the reader to compare the following quotation from a story called ‘Träumen wie Wachen’ in his Phantasien eines Realisten which was certainly written in ignorance of the theory of dreams which I published in 1900, just as I myself was then in ignorance of Lynkeus’s Phantasien:

‘About a man who has the remarkable attribute of never dreaming nonsense.

‘"This splendid gift of yours, for dreaming as though you were waking, is a consequence of your virtues, of your kindness, your sense of justice, and your love of truth; it is the moral serenity of your nature which makes me understand all about you."

‘"But when I think the matter over properly", replied the other, "I almost believe that everyone is made like me, and that no one at all ever dreams nonsense. Any dream which one can remember clearly enough to describe it afterwards - any dream, that is to say, which is not a fever-dream - must always make sense, and it cannot possibly be otherwise. For things that were mutually contradictory could not group themselves into a single whole. The fact that time and space are often thrown into confusion does not affect the true content of the dream, since no doubt neither of them are of significance for its real essence. We often do the same thing in waking life. Only think of fairy tales and of the many daring products of the imagination, which are full of meaning and of which only a man without intelligence could say: ‘This is nonsense, for it is impossible.’"

‘"If only one always knew how to interpret dreams in the right way, as you have just done with mine!" said his friend.

‘"That is certainly no easy task; but with a little attention on the part of the dreamer himself it should no doubt always succeed. - You ask why it is that for the most part it does not succeed? In you other people there seems always to be something that lies concealed in your dreams, something unchaste in a special and higher sense, a certain secret quality in your being which it is hard to follow. And that is why your dreams so often seem to be without meaning or even to be nonsense. But in the deepest sense this is not in the least so; indeed, it cannot be so at all - for it is always the same man, whether he is awake or dreaming."’

I believe that what enabled me to discover the cause of dream-distortion was my moral courage. In the case of Popper it was the purity, love of truth and moral serenity of his nature.

4161

DR. SÁNDOR FERENCZI

(ON HIS 5Oth BIRTHDAY)

(1923)

4162

Intentionally left blank

4163

DR. SÁNDOR FERENCZI

(ON HIS 50th BIRTHDAY)

Not many years after its publication (in 1900), The Interpretation of Dreams fell into the hands of a young Budapest physician, who, although he was a neurologist, psychiatrist and expert in forensic medicine, was eagerly in search of new scientific knowledge. He did not get far in reading the book; very soon he had thrown it aside - whether out of boredom or disgust is not known. Soon afterwards, however, the call for fresh possibilities of work and discovery took him to Zurich, and thence he was led to Vienna to meet the author of the book that he had once contemptuously cast aside. This first visit was succeeded by a long, intimate and hitherto untroubled friendship, in the course of which he too made the journey to America in 1909 to lecture at Clark University at Worcester, Mass.

Such were the beginnings of Ferenczi, who has since himself become a master and teacher of psycho-analysis and who in the present year, 1923, completes alike the fiftieth anniversary of his birth and the first decade of his leadership of the Budapest Psycho-Analytical Society.

Ferenczi has repeatedly played a part, too, in the external affairs of psycho-analysis. His appearance at the Second Analytical Congress, at Nuremberg in 1910, will be remembered, where he proposed and helped to bring about the foundation of an International Psycho-Analytical Association as a means of defence against the contempt with which analysis was treated by official Medicine. At the Fifth Analytical Congress, at Budapest, in September, 1918, he was elected President of the Association. He appointed Anton von Freund as Secretary; and there is no doubt that the combined energy of the two men, together with Freund’s generous schemes of endowment, would have made Budapest the analytic capital of Europe, had not political catastrophes and personal tragedy put a merciless end to these fair hopes. Freund fell ill and died in January, 1920. In view of Hungary’s isolation from contact with the rest of the world, Ferenczi had resigned his position in October, 1919, and had transferred the Presidency of the International Association to Ernest Jones in London. For the duration of the Soviet Republic in Hungary Ferenczi had been allotted the functions of a University teacher, and his lectures had attracted crowded audiences. The Branch Society, which he had founded in 1913,¹ survived every storm and, under his guidance, became a centre of intense and productive work and was distinguished by an accumulation of abilities such as were exhibited in combination by no other Branch Society. Ferenczi, who, as a middle child in a large family, had to struggle with a powerful brother complex, had, under the influence of analysis, become an irreproachable elder brother, a kindly teacher and promoter of young talent.

¹ Its Inaugural General Meeting was held on May 19, 1913, with Ferenczi as President, Dr. Radó as Secretary, and Drs. Hollós, Ignotus and Lévy as members.

Dr. Sandor Ferenczi (On His 50th Birthday)

4164

Ferenczi’s analytic writings have become universally known and appreciated. It was not until 1922 that his Popular Lectures on Psycho-Analysis were published by our Verlag as Volume XIII of the ‘Internationale Psychoanalytische Bibliothek’. These lectures, clear and formally perfect, sometimes most fascinatingly written, offer what is in fact the best ‘Introduction to Psycho-Analysis’ for those who are unfamiliar with it. There is still no collection of his purely technical medical writings, a number of which have been translated into English by Ernest Jones. The Verlag will fulfil this task as soon as more favourable times make it possible. Those of his books and papers which have appeared in Hungarian have passed through many editions and have made analysis familiar to educated circles in Hungary.

Ferenczi’s scientific achievement is impressive above all from its many-sidedness. Besides well-chosen case histories and acutely observed clinical communications (‘A Little Chanticleer’, ‘Transitory Symptom-Constructions during the Analysis’, and shorter clinical works) we find exemplary critical writings such as those upon Jung’s Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, upon Régis and Hesnard’s views on psycho-analysis, as well as effective polemical writings such as those against Bleuler on alcohol and against Putnam on the relation between psycho-analysis and philosophy, moderate and dignified in spite of their decisiveness. But besides all these there are the papers upon which Ferenczi’s fame principally rests, in which his originality, his wealth of ideas and his command over a well-directed scientific imagination find such happy expression, and with which he has enlarged important sections of psycho-analytic theory and has promoted the discovery of fundamental situations in mental life: ‘Introjection and Transference’, including a discussion of the theory of hypnosis, ‘Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality’ and his discussion of symbolism. Finally there are the works of these last few years - ‘The Psycho-Analysis of the War Neuroses’, Hysterie und Pathoneurosen and, in collaboration with Hollós, Psycho-Analysis and the Psychic Disorder of General Paresis (in which the medical interest advances from the psychological conditions to the somatic determinants), and his approaches to an ‘active’ therapy.

However incomplete this enumeration may seem to be, his friends know that Ferenczi has held back even more than he has been able to make up his mind to communicate. On his fiftieth birthday they are united in wishing that he may be granted strength, leisure and a frame of mind to bring his scientific plans to realization in fresh achievements.

4165

PREFACE TO AICHHORN’S WAYWARD YOUTH

(1925)

4166

Intentionally left blank

4167

PREFACE TO AICHHORN’S WAYWARD YOUTH

None of the applications of psycho-analysis has excited so much interest and aroused so many hopes, and none, consequently, has attracted so many capable workers, as its use in the theory and practice of education. It is easy to understand why; for children have become the main subject of psycho-analytic research and have thus replaced in importance the neurotics on whom its studies began. Analysis has shown how the child lives on, almost unchanged, in the sick man as well as in the dreamer and the artist; it has thrown light on the motive forces and trends which set its characteristic stamp upon the childish nature; and it has traced the stages through which a child grows to maturity. No wonder, therefore, if an expectation has arisen that psycho-analytic concern with children will benefit the work of education, whose aim it is to guide and assist children on their forward path and to shield them from going astray.

My personal share in this application of psycho-analysis been very slight. At an early stage I had accepted the from bon mot which lays it down that there are three impossible professions - educating, healing and governing - and I was already fully occupied with the second of them. But this does not mean that I overlook the high social value of the work done by those of my friends who are engaged in education.

The present volume by August Aichhorn is concerned with one department of the great problem - with the educational influencing of juvenile delinquents. The author had worked for many years in an official capacity as a director of municipal institutions for delinquents before he became acquainted with psycho-analysis. His attitude to his charges sprang from a warm sympathy with the fate of those unfortunates and was correctly guided by an intuitive perception of their mental needs. Psycho-analysis could teach him little that was new of a practical kind, but it brought him a clear theoretical insight into the justification of his way of acting and put him in a position to explain its basis to other people.

It must not be assumed that this gift of intuitive understanding will be found in everyone concerned with the bringing-up of children. Two lessons may be derived, it seems to me, from the experience and the success of August Aichhorn. One is that every such person should receive a psycho-analytic training, since without it children, the object of his endeavours, must remain an inaccessible problem to him. A training of this kind is best carried out if such a person himself undergoes an analysis and experiences it on himself: theoretical instruction in analysis fails to penetrate deep enough and carries no conviction.

Preface To Aichhorn's Wayward Youth

4168

The second lesson has a somewhat conservative ring. It is to the effect that the work of education is something sui generis: it is not to be confused with psycho-analytic influence and cannot be replaced by it. Psycho-analysis can be called in by education as an auxiliary means of dealing with a child; but it is not a suitable substitute for education. Not only is such a substitution impossible on practical grounds but it is also to be disrecommended for theoretical reasons. The relation between education and psycho-analytic treatment will probably before long be the subject of a detailed investigation. Here I will only give a few hints. One should not be misled by the statement - incidentally a perfectly true one - that the psycho-analysis of an adult neurotic is equivalent to an after-education. A child, even a wayward and delinquent child, is still not a neurotic; and after-education is something quite different from the education of the immature. The possibility of analytic influence rests on quite definite preconditions which can be summed up under the term ‘analytic situation’; it requires the development of certain psychical structures and a particular attitude to the analyst. Where these are lacking - as in the case of children, of juvenile delinquents, and, as a rule, of impulsive criminals - something other than analysis must be employed, though something which will be at one with analysis in its purpose. The theoretical chapters of the present volume will give the reader a preliminary grasp of the multiplicity of the decisions involved.

I will end with a further inference, and this time one which is important not for the theory of education but for the status of those who are engaged in education. If one of these has learnt analysis by experiencing it on his own person and is in a position of being able to employ it in borderline and mixed cases to assist him in his work, he should obviously be given the right to practise analysis, and narrow-minded motives should not be allowed to try to put obstacles in his way.

4169

JOSEF BREUER

(1925)

4170

Intentionally left blank

4171

JOSEF BREUER

On June 20, 1925, there died in Vienna, in his eighty-fourth year, Josef Breuer, the creator of the cathartic method, whose name is for that reason indissolubly linked with the beginnings of psycho-analysis.

Breuer was a physician, a pupil of the clinician Oppolzer. In his youth he had worked at the physiology of respiration under Ewald Hering, and later, in the scanty hours of leisure allowed by an extensive medical practice, he occupied himself successfully with experiments on the function of the vestibular apparatus in animals. Nothing in his education could lead one to expect that he would gain the first decisive insight into the age-old riddle of the hysterical neurosis and would make a contribution of imperishable value to our knowledge of the human mind. But he was a man of rich and universal gifts, and his interests extended in many directions far beyond his professional activities.

It was in 1880 that chance brought into his hands an unusual patient, a girl of more than ordinary intelligence who had fallen ill of severe hysteria while she was nursing her sick father. It was only some fourteen years later, in our joint publication, Studies on Hysteria (1895d) - and even then unluckily only in a much abbreviated form, censored, too, from considerations of medical discretion - that the world learnt the nature of his treatment of this celebrated ‘first case’, with what immense care and patience he carried out the technique when once he had discovered it, till the patient was freed from all the incomprehensible symptoms of her illness, and what insight he obtained in the course of the work into the mental mechanisms of the neurosis.

We psycho-analysts, who have long been familiar with the idea of devoting hundreds of sessions to a single patient, can form no conception of how novel such a procedure must have seemed forty-five years ago. It must have called for a large amount of personal interest and, if the phrase can be allowed, of medical libido, but also for a considerable degree of freedom of thought and certainty of judgement. At the date of the publication of our Studies we were able to appeal to Charcot’s writings and to Pierre Janet’s investigations, which had by that time deprived Breuer’s discoveries of some of their priority. But when Breuer was treating his first case (in 1881-2) none of this was as yet available. Janet’s Automatisme psychologique appeared in 1889 and his second work, L’état mental des hystériques, not until 1892. It seems that Breuer’s researches were wholly original, and were directed only by the hints offered to him by the material of his case.

Josef Breuer

4172

I have repeatedly attempted - most recently in my Autobiographical Study (1925d), in Grote’s series, Die Medizin der Gegenwart - to define my share in the Studies which we published jointly. My merit lay chiefly in reviving in Breuer an interest which seemed to have become extinct, and in then urging him on to publication. A kind of reserve which was characteristic of him, an inner modesty, surprising in a man of such a brilliant personality, had led him to keep his astonishing discovery secret for so long that not all of it was any longer new. I found reason later to suppose that a purely emotional factor, too, had given him an aversion to further work on the elucidation of the neuroses. He had come up against something that is never absent - his patient’s transference on to her physician, and he had not grasped the impersonal nature of the process. At the time when he submitted to my influence and was preparing the Studies for publication, his judgement of their significance seemed to be confirmed. ‘I believe’, he told me, ‘that this is the most important thing we two have to give the world.’

Besides the case history of his first patient Breuer contributed a theoretical paper to the Studies. It is very far from being out of date; on the contrary, it conceals thoughts and suggestions which have even now not been turned to sufficient account. Anyone immersing himself in this speculative essay will form a true impression of the mental build of this man, whose scientific interests were, alas, turned in the direction of our psychopathology during only one short episode of his long life.

4173

PREFACE TO RAYMOND DE SAUSSURE’S THE PSYCHO-ANALYTIC METHOD

(1922)

It is with great pleasure that I am able to assure the public that the present work by Dr. de Saussure is a book of value and merit. It is especially well calculated to give French readers a correct idea of what psycho-analysis is and what it contains.

Dr. de Saussure has not only conscientiously studied my writings, but in addition he has made the sacrifice of coming to me to undergo an analysis lasting several months. This has put him in a position to form his own judgement on the majority of those questions in psycho-analysis which are still undecided, and to avoid the many distortions and errors which one is accustomed to finding in French as well as in German expositions of psycho-analysis. Nor has he failed to contradict certain false or negligent statements which commentators pass on from one to another: such as, for instance, that all dreams have a sexual meaning or that, according to me, the only motive force in our mental life is that of sexual libido.

Since Dr. de Saussure has said in his preface that I have corrected his work, I must add a qualification; my influence has only made itself felt in a few corrections and comments and I have in no way sought to encroach upon the author’s independence. In the first, theoretical part of this work, I should have expounded a number of things differently from him: for instance, the difficult topic of the preconscious and the unconscious. And above all, I should have treated the Oedipus complex far more exhaustively.

Preface To Raymond De Saussure's The Psycho-Analytic Method

4174

The excellent dream which Dr. Odier has put at the author’s disposal may give even the uninitiated an idea of the wealth of dream-associations and of the relation between the manifest dream-image and the latent thoughts concealed behind it. It demonstrates too the significance that the analysis of a dream can have in the treatment of a patient.

Finally, the remarks which the author makes in conclusion on the technique of psycho-analysis are quite excellent. They are entirely correct and, in spite of their conciseness, leave aside nothing essential. They are convincing evidence of the author’s subtle understanding. The reader should not, of course, conclude that knowledge of these rules of technique alone will make him capable of undertaking an analysis.

To-day psycho-analysis is beginning to arouse in a larger measure the interest of professional men and of the lay public in France as well; it will certainly not find any fewer resistances there than it has encountered previously in other countries. Let us hope that Dr. de Saussure’s book will make an important contribution to the clarification of the discussions that lie ahead.

FREUD

VIENNA, February 1922

4175

PREFACE TO MAX EITINGON’S

REPORT ON THE BERLIN PSYCHO-ANALYTIC POLICLINIC

(MARCH 1920 TO JUNE 1922)

(1923)

My friend Max Eitingon, who created the Berlin Psycho-Analytical Policlinic and has hitherto supported it out of his own resources, has in the following pages made public his reasons for founding it and has also given an account of the Institute’s organization and functions. I can only add to what he has written my wish that individuals or societies may be found elsewhere to follow Eitingon’s example and bring similar institutions into existence. If psycho-analysis, alongside of its scientific significance, has a value as a therapeutic procedure, if it is capable of giving help to sufferers in their struggle to fulfil the demands of civilization, this help should be accessible as well to the great multitude who are too poor themselves to repay an analyst for his laborious work. This seems to be a social necessity particularly in our times, when the intellectual strata of the population, which are especially prone to neurosis, are sinking irresistibly into poverty. Institutes such as the Berlin Policlinic are also alone in a position to overcome the difficulties which otherwise stand in the way of thorough instruction in psycho-analysis. They make possible the education of a considerable number of trained analysts, whose activity must be regarded as the sole possible protection against injury to patients by ignorant and unqualified persons, whether they are laymen or doctors.

4176

LETTER TO FRITZ WITTELS

(1924)

You have given me a Christmas present which is very largely occupied with my own personality. The failure to send a word of thanks for such a gift would be an act of rudeness only to be accounted for by very peculiar motives. Fortunately no such motives exist in this case. Your book is by no means hostile; it is not unduly indiscreet; and it manifests the serious interest in the topic which was to be anticipated in so able a writer as yourself.

I need hardly say that I neither expected nor desired the publication of such a book. It seems to me that the public has no concern with my personality, and can learn nothing from an account of it, so long as my case (for manifold reasons) cannot be expounded without any reserves whatever. But you have thought otherwise. Your own detachment from me, which you consider an advantage, entails serious drawbacks none the less. You know too little of the object of study, and you have not been able to avoid the danger of straining the facts a little in your analytic endeavours. Moreover, I am inclined to think that your adoption of Stekel’s standpoint, and the fact that you contemplate the object of study from his outlook, cannot but have impaired the accuracy of your discernment.

Letter To Fritz Wittels

4177

In some respects, I think there are positive distortions, and I believe these to be the outcome of a preconceived notion of yours. You think that a great man must have such and such merits and defects, and must display certain extreme characteristics; and you hold that I belong to the category of great men. That is why you ascribe to me all sorts of qualities many of which are mutually conflicting. Much of general interest might be said on this matter, but unfortunately your relationship to Stekel precludes further attempts on my part to clear up the misunderstanding.

On the other hand, I am glad to acknowledge that your shrewdness has enabled you to detect some things which are well known to myself. For instance, you are right in inferring that I have often been compelled to make détours when following my own path. You are right, too, in thinking that I have no use for other people’s ideas when they are presented to me at an inopportune moment. (Still, as regards the latter point, I think you might have defended me from the accusation that I am repudiating ideas when I am merely unable for the time being to pass judgement on them or to elaborate them.) But I am delighted to find that you do me full justice in the matter of my relations with Adler....

I realize that you may have occasion to revise your text in view of a second edition. With an eye to this possibility, I enclose a list of suggested emendations. These are based on trustworthy data, and are quite independent of my own prepossessions. Some of them relate to matters of trifling importance, but some of them will perhaps lead you to reverse or modify certain inferences. The fact that I send you these corrections is a token that I value your work though I cannot wholly approve it.

4178

LETTER TO SEÑOR LUIS LOPEZ-BALLESTEROS Y DE TORRES

(1923)

When I was a young student, the desire to read the immortal Don Quixote in the original of Cervantes led me to learn, untaught, the lovely Castilian tongue. Thanks to this youthful enthusiasm, I am able to-day - at an advanced age - to test the accuracy of your Spanish version of my works, the reading of which invariably provokes in me a lively appreciation of your very correct interpretation of my thoughts and of the elegance of your style. I am above all astonished that one who, like you, is neither a doctor nor a psychiatrist by profession should have been able to obtain so absolute and precise a mastery over material which is intricate and at times obscure.

4179

LETTER TO LE DISQUE VERT

(1924)

Of the many lessons lavished upon me in the past (1885-6) by the great Charcot at the Salpêtrière, two left me with a deep impression: that one should never tire of considering the same phenomena again and again (or of submitting to their effects), and that one should not mind meeting with contradiction on every side provided one has worked sincerely.

FREUD

4180

LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF THE JEWISH PRESS CENTRE IN ZURICH

(1925)

. . .I can say that I stand as far apart from the Jewish religion as from all other religions: that is to say, they are of great significance to me as a subject of scientific interest, but I have no part in them emotionally. On the other hand I have always had a strong feeling of solidarity with my fellow-people, and have always encouraged it in my children as well. We have all remained in the Jewish denomination.

In the time of my youth our free-thinking religious instructors set no store by their pupils’ acquiring a knowledge of the Hebrew language and literature. My education in this field was therefore extremely behindhand, as I have since often regretted.

4181

ON THE OCCASION OF THE OPENING OF THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY

(1925)

Historians have told us that our small nation withstood the destruction of its independence as a State only because it began to transfer in its estimation of values the highest rank to its spiritual possessions, to its religion and its literature.

We are now living in a time when this people has a prospect of again winning the land of its fathers with the help of a Power that dominates the world, and it celebrates the occasion by the foundation of a University in its ancient capital city.

A University is a place in which knowledge is taught above all differences of religions and of nations, where investigation is carried on, which is to show mankind how far they understand the world around them and how far they can control it.

Such an undertaking is a noble witness to the development to which our people has forced its way in two thousand years of unhappy fortune.

I find it painful that my ill-health prevents me from being present at the opening festivities of the Jewish University in Jerusalem.

4182

EDITORIAL CHANGES IN THE ZEITSCHRIFT

(1924)

Dr. Otto Rank has acted as editor of this journal ever since its foundation in 1913, even though it is only since 1920 that he has been named on its title-page as sole editor. During his period of military service in the War, his place was taken by Dr. Hanns Sachs, who was at that time in Vienna. Since the beginning of the current volume Dr. S. Ferenczi has also had a share in the editing.

At Easter, 1924, Dr. Rank accepted an invitation which took him to New York. On his return home he announced that he had decided to transfer his activity as a teaching and practising analyst to America - at least for a part of the year. Thus it became necessary to place the editorship of the Zeitschrift in other hands. It is not within the rights of the Director to give public expression to his opinion of the level and achievements of this journal. No one who is inclined to appreciate them should overlook or forget how much of its success is due to the tireless devotion and exemplary work of the retiring editor.

Dr. Rank’s place will now be taken by Dr. S. Radó of Berlin. He will be supported as advisers and collaborators by Dr. M. Eitingon (Berlin) and Dr. S. Ferenczi (Budapest). All communications and contributions for the editor should be addressed to Dr. Sándor Radó, Berlin-Schöneberg, Am Park, 20. The business side of the Zeitschrift will be conducted as before at the offices of the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag in Vienna (Manager: A. J. Storfer).

4183

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL STUDY

(1925)

4184

Intentionally left blank

4185

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL STUDY

Several of the contributors to this series of ‘Autobiographical Studies’ have begun by expressing their misgivings at the unusual difficulties of the task they have undertaken. The difficulties in my case are, I think, even greater; for I have already more than once published papers upon the same line as the present one, papers which, from the nature of the subject have dealt more with personal considerations than is usual or than would otherwise have been necessary.

I gave my first account of the development and subject matter of psycho-analysis in five lectures which I delivered in 1909 before Clark University at Worcester, Mass., where I had been invited to attend the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the foundation of that body.¹ Only recently I gave way to the temptation of making a contribution of a similar kind to an American collective publication dealing with the opening years of the twentieth century, since its editors had shown their recognition of the importance of psycho-analysis by allotting a special chapter to it.² Between these two dates appeared a paper, ‘On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement’, which, in fact, contains the essence of all that I can say on the present occasion. Since I must not contradict myself and since I have no wish to repeat myself exactly, I must endeavour to construct a narrative in which subjective and objective attitudes, biographical and historical interests, are combined in a new proportion.

¹ The lectures were first published (in English) in the American Journal of Psychology (1910); the original German was issued under the title of Über Psychoanalyse.

² These Eventful Years (New York, 1924). My essay, translated by Dr. A. A. Brill, forms chapter lxxiii. of the second volume.

An Autobiographical Study

4186

I was born on May 6th, 1856, at Freiberg in Moravia, a small town in what is now Czechoslovakia. My parents were Jews, and I have remained a Jew myself. I have reason to believe that my father’s family were settled for a long time on the Rhine (at Cologne), that, as a result of a persecution of the Jews during the fourteenth or fifteenth century, they fled eastwards, and that, in the course of the nineteenth century, they migrated back from Lithuania through Galicia into German Austria. When I was a child of four I came to Vienna, and I went through the whole of my education there. At the ‘Gymnasium’ I was at the top of my class for seven years; I enjoyed special privileges there, and had scarcely ever to be examined in class. Although we lived in very limited circumstances, my father insisted that, in my choice of a profession, I should follow my own inclinations alone. Neither at that time, nor indeed in my later life, did I feel any particular predilection for the career of a doctor. I was moved, rather, by a sort of curiosity, which was, however, directed more towards human concerns than towards natural objects; nor had I grasped the importance of observation as one of the best means of gratifying it. My deep engrossment in the Bible story (almost as soon as I had learnt the art of reading) had, as I recognized much later, an enduring effect upon the direction of my interest. Under the powerful influence of a school friendship with a boy rather my senior who grew up to be a well-known politician, I developed a wish to study law like him and to engage in social activities. At the same time, the theories of Darwin, which were then of topical interest, strongly attracted me, for they held out hopes of an extraordinary advance in our understanding of the world; and it was hearing Goethe’s beautiful essay on Nature read aloud at a popular lecture by Professor Carl Brühl just before I left school that decided me to become a medical student.

An Autobiographical Study

4187

When, in 1873, I first joined the University, I experienced some appreciable disappointments. Above all, I found that I was expected to feel myself inferior and an alien because I was a Jew. I refused absolutely to do the first of these things. I have never been able to see why I should feel ashamed of my descent or, as people were beginning to say, of my ‘race’. I put up, without much regret, with my non-acceptance into the community; for it seemed to me that in spite of this exclusion an active fellow-worker could not fail to find some nook or cranny in the framework of humanity. These first impressions at the University, however, had one consequence which was afterwards to prove important; for at an early age I was made familiar with the fate of being in the Opposition and of being put under the ban of the ‘compact majority’. The foundations were thus laid for a certain degree of independence of judgement.

I was compelled, moreover, during my first years at the University, to make the discovery that the peculiarities and limitations of my gifts denied me all success in many of the departments of science into which my youthful eagerness had plunged me. Thus I learned the truth of Mephistopheles’ warning:

Vergebens, dass ihr ringsum wissenschaftlich schweift,

Ein jeder lernt nur, was er lernen kann.

At length, in Ernst Brücke’s physiological laboratory, I found rest and full satisfaction - and men, too, whom I could respect and take as my models: the great Brücke himself, and his assistants, Sigmund Exner and Ernst Fleischl von Marxow. With the last of these, a brilliant man, I was privileged to be upon terms of friendship. Brücke gave me a problem to work out in the histology of the nervous system; I succeeded in solving it to his satisfaction and in carrying the work further on my own account. I worked at this Institute, with short interruptions, from 1876 to 1882, and it was generally thought that I was marked out to fill the next post of Assistant that might fall vacant there. The various branches of medicine proper, apart from psychiatry, had no attraction for me. I was decidedly negligent in pursuing my medical studies, and it was not until 1881 that I took my somewhat belated degree as a Doctor of Medicine.

An Autobiographical Study

4188

The turning-point came in 1882, when my teacher, for whom I felt the highest possible esteem, corrected my father’s generous improvidence by strongly advising me, in view of my bad financial position, to abandon my theoretical career. I followed his advice, left the physiological laboratory and entered the General Hospital as an Aspirant. I was soon afterwards promoted to being a Sekundararzt, and worked in various departments of the hospital, among others for more than six months under Meynert, by whose work and personality I had been greatly struck while I was still a student.

In a certain sense I nevertheless remained faithful to the line of work upon which I had originally started. The subject which Brücke had proposed for my investigations had been the spinal cord of one of the lowest of the fishes (Ammocoetes Petromyzon); and I now passed on to the human central nervous system. Just at this time Flechsig’s discoveries of the non-simultaneity of the formation of the medullary sheaths were throwing a revealing light upon the intricate course of its tracts. The fact that I began by choosing the medulla oblongata as the one and only subject of my work was another sign of the continuity of my development. In complete contrast to the diffuse character of my studies during my earlier years at the University, I was now developing an inclination to concentrate my work exclusively upon a single subject or problem. This inclination has persisted and has since led to my being accused of one-sidedness.

An Autobiographical Study

4189

I now became as active a worker in the Institute of Cerebral Anatomy as I had previously been in the physiological one. Some short papers upon the course of the tracts and the nuclear origins in the medulla oblongata date from these hospital years, and some notice was taken of my findings by Edinger. One day Meynert, who had given me access to the laboratory even during the times when I was not actually working under him, proposed that I should definitely devote myself to the anatomy of the brain, and promised to hand over his lecturing work to me, as he felt he was too old to manage the newer methods. This I declined, in alarm at the magnitude of the task; it is possible, too, that I had guessed already that this great man was by no means kindly disposed towards me.

From the material point of view, brain anatomy was certainly no better than physiology, and, with an eye to pecuniary considerations, I began to study nervous diseases. There were, at that time, few specialists in that branch of medicine in Vienna, the material for its study was distributed over a number of different departments of the hospital, there was no satisfactory opportunity of learning the subject, and one was forced to be one’s own teacher. Even Nothnagel, who had been appointed a short time before, on account of his book upon cerebral localization, did not single out neuropathology from among the other subdivisions of medicine. In the distance shone the great name of Charcot; so I formed a plan of first obtaining an appointment as University Lecturer on Nervous Diseases in Vienna and of then going to Paris to continue my studies.

An Autobiographical Study

4190

In the course of the following years, while I continued to work as a junior physician, I published a number of clinical observations on organic diseases of the nervous system. I gradually became familiar with the ground; I was able to localize the site of a lesion in the medulla oblongata so accurately that the pathological anatomist had no further information to add; I was the first person in Vienna to send a case for autopsy with a diagnosis of polyneuritis acuta.

The fame of my diagnoses and of their post-mortem confirmation brought me an influx of American physicians, to whom I lectured upon the patients in my department in a sort of pidgin English. About the neuroses I understood nothing. On one occasion I introduced to my audience a neurotic suffering from a persistent headache as a case of chronic localized meningitis; they all quite rightly rose in revolt and deserted me, and my premature activities as a teacher came to an end. By way of excuse I may add that this happened at a time when greater authorities than myself in Vienna were in the habit of diagnosing neurasthenia as cerebral tumour.

In the spring of 1885 I was appointed Lecturer in Neuropathology on the ground of my histological and clinical publications. Soon afterwards, as the result of a warm testimonial from Brücke, I was awarded a Travelling Bursary of considerable value. In the autumn of the same year I made the journey to Paris.

I became a student at the Salpêtrière, but, as one of the crowd of foreign visitors, I had little attention paid me to begin with. One day in my hearing Charcot expressed his regret that since the war he had heard nothing from the German translator of his lectures; he went on to say that he would be glad if someone would undertake to translate the new volume of his lectures into German. I wrote to him and offered to do so; I can still remember a phrase in the letter, to the effect that I suffered only from ‘l’aphasie motrice’ and not from ‘l’aphasie sensorielle du français’. Charcot accepted the offer, I was admitted to the circle of his personal acquaintances, and from that time forward I took a full part in all that went on at the Clinic.

An Autobiographical Study

4191

As I write these lines, a number of papers and newspaper articles have reached me from France, which give evidence of a violent objection to the acceptance of psycho-analysis, and which often make the most inaccurate assertions in regard to my relations with the French school. I read, for instance, that I made use of my visit to Paris to familiarize myself with the theories of Pierre Janet and then made off with my booty. I should therefore like to say explicitly that during the whole of my visit to the Salpêtrière Janet’s name was never so much as mentioned.

What impressed me most of all while I was with Charcot were his latest investigations upon hysteria, some of which were carried out under my own eyes. He had proved, for instance, the genuineness of hysterical phenomena and their conformity to laws (‘introite et hic dii sunt’), the frequent occurrence of hysteria in men, the production of hysterical paralyses and contractures by hypnotic suggestion and the fact that such artificial products showed, down to their smallest details, the same features as spontaneous attacks, which were often brought on traumatically. Many of Charcot’s demonstrations began by provoking in me and in other visitors a sense of astonishment and an inclination to scepticism, which we tried to justify by an appeal to one of the theories of the day. He was always friendly and patient in dealing with such doubts, but he was also most decided; it was in one of these discussions that (speaking of theory) he remarked, ‘Ca n’empêche pas d’exister’, a mot which left an indelible mark upon my mind.

No doubt not the whole of what Charcot taught us at that time holds good to-day: some of it has become doubtful, some has definitely failed to withstand the test of time. But enough is left over that has found a permanent place in the storehouse of science. Before leaving Paris I discussed with the great man a plan for a comparative study of hysterical and organic paralyses. I wished to establish the thesis that in hysteria paralyses and anaesthesias of the various parts of the body are demarcated according to the popular idea of their limits and not according to anatomical facts. He agreed with this view, but it was easy to see that in reality he took no special interest in penetrating more deeply into the psychology of the neuroses. When all is said and done, it was from pathological anatomy that his work had started.

An Autobiographical Study

4192

Before I returned to Vienna I stopped for a few weeks in Berlin, in order to gain a little knowledge of the general disorders of childhood. Kassowitz, who was at the head of a public institute in Vienna for the treatment of children’s diseases, had promised to put me in charge of a department for the nervous diseases of children. In Berlin I was given assistance and a friendly reception by Baginsky. In the course of the next few years I published, from the Kassowitz Institute, several monographs of considerable size on unilateral and bilateral cerebral palsies in children. And for that reason, at a later date (in 1897), Nothnagel made me responsible for dealing with the same subject in his great Handbuch der allgemeinen und speziellen Therapie.

In the autumn of 1886 I settled down in Vienna as a physician, and married the girl who had been waiting for me in a distant city for more than four years. I may here go back a little and explain how it was the fault of my fiancée that I was not already famous at that youthful age. A side interest, though it was a deep one, had led me in 1884 to obtain from Merck some of what was then the little-known alkaloid cocaine and to study its physiological action. While I was in the middle of this work, an opportunity arose for making a journey to visit my fiancée, from whom I had been parted for two years. I hastily wound up my investigation of cocaine and contented myself in my monograph on the subject with prophesying that further uses for it would soon be found. I suggested, however, to my friend Königstein, the ophthalmologist, that he should investigate the question of how far the anaesthetizing properties of cocaine were applicable in diseases of the eye. When I returned from my holiday I found that not he, but another of my friends, Carl Koller (now in New York), whom I had also spoken to about cocaine, had made the decisive experiments upon animals’ eyes and had demonstrated them at the Ophthalmological Congress at Heidelberg. Koller is therefore rightly regarded as the discoverer of local anaesthesia by cocaine, which has become so important in minor surgery; but I bore my fiancée no grudge for the interruption.

An Autobiographical Study

4193

I will now return to the year 1886, the time of my settling down in Vienna as a specialist in nervous diseases. The duty devolved upon me of giving a report before the ‘Gesellschaft der Aerzte’ upon what I had seen and learnt with Charcot. But I met with a bad reception. Persons of authority, such as the chairman (Bamberger, the physician), declared that what I said was incredible. Meynert challenged me to find some cases in Vienna similar to those which I had described and to present them before the Society. I tried to do so; but the senior physicians in whose departments I found any such cases refused to allow me to observe them or to work at them. One of them, an old surgeon, actually broke out with the exclamation: ‘But, my dear sir, how can you talk such nonsense? Hysteron (sic) means the uterus. So how can a man be hysterical?’ I objected in vain that what I wanted was not to have my diagnosis approved, but to have the case put at my disposal. At length, outside the hospital, I came upon a case of classical hysterical hemi-anaesthesia in a man, and demonstrated it before the ‘Gesellschaft der Aerzte’. This time I was applauded, but no further interest was taken in me. The impression that the high authorities had rejected my innovations remained unshaken; and, with my hysteria in men and my production of hysterical paralyses by suggestion, I found myself forced into the Opposition. As I was soon afterwards excluded from the laboratory of cerebral anatomy and for terms on end had nowhere to deliver my lectures, I withdrew from academic life and ceased to attend the learned societies. It is a whole generation since I have visited the ‘Gesellschaft der Aerzte’.

An Autobiographical Study

4194

Anyone who wants to make a living from the treatment of nervous patients must clearly be able to do something to help them. My therapeutic arsenal contained only two weapons, electrotherapy and hypnotism, for prescribing a visit to a hydropathic establishment after a single consultation was an inadequate source of income. My knowledge of electrotherapy was derived from W. Erb’s text-book, which provided detailed instructions for the treatment of all the symptoms of nervous diseases. Unluckily I was soon driven to see that following these instructions was of no help whatever and that what I had taken for an epitome of exact observations was merely the construction of phantasy. The realization that the work of the greatest name in German neuropathology had no more relation to reality than some ‘Egyptian’ dream-book, such as is sold in cheap book-shops, was painful, but it helped to rid me of another shred of the innocent faith in authority from which I was not yet free. So I put my electrical apparatus aside, even before Moebius had saved the situation by explaining that the successes of electric treatment in nervous disorders (in so far as there were any) were the effect of suggestion on the part of the physician.

With hypnotism the case was better. While I was still a student I had attended a public exhibition given by Hansen the ‘magnetist’, and had noticed that one of the subjects experimented upon had become deathly pale at the onset of cataleptic rigidity and had remained so as long as that condition lasted. This firmly convinced me of the genuineness of the phenomena of hypnosis. Scientific support was soon afterwards given to this view by Heidenhain; but that did not restrain the professors of psychiatry from declaring for a long time to come that hypnotism was not only fraudulent but dangerous and from regarding hypnotists with contempt. In Paris I had seen hypnotism used freely as a method for producing symptoms in patients and then removing them again. And now the news reached us that a school had arisen at Nancy which made an extensive and remarkably successful use of suggestion, with or without hypnosis, for therapeutic purposes. It thus came about, as a matter of course, that in the first years of my activity as a physician my principal instrument of work, apart from haphazard and unsystematic psychotherapeutic methods, was hypnotic suggestion.

An Autobiographical Study

4195

This implied, of course, that I abandoned the treatment of organic nervous diseases; but that was of little importance. For on the one hand the prospects in the treatment of such disorders were in any case never promising, while, on the other hand, in the private practice of a physician working in a large town, the quantity of such patients was nothing compared to the crowds of neurotics, whose number seemed further multiplied by the way in which they hurried, with their troubles unsolved, from one physician to another. And, apart from this, there was something positively seductive in working with hypnotism. For the first time there was a sense of having overcome one’s helplessness; and it was highly flattering to enjoy the reputation of being a miracle-worker. It was not until later that I was to discover the drawbacks of the procedure. At the moment there were only two points to complain of: first, that I could not succeed in hypnotizing every patient, and secondly, that I was unable to put individual patients into as deep a state of hypnosis as I should have wished. With the idea of perfecting my hypnotic technique, I made a journey to Nancy in the summer of 1889 and spent several weeks there. I witnessed the moving spectacle of old Liébeault working among the poor women and children of the labouring classes. I was a spectator of Bernheim’s astonishing experiments upon his hospital patients, and I received the profoundest impression of the possibility that there could be powerful mental processes which nevertheless remained hidden from the consciousness of men. Thinking it would be instructive, I had persuaded one of my patients to follow me to Nancy. This patient was a very highly gifted hysteric, a woman of good birth, who had been handed over to me because no one knew what to do with her. By hypnotic influence I had made it possible for her to lead a tolerable existence and I was always able to take her out of the misery of her condition. But she always relapsed again after a short time, and in my ignorance I attributed this to the fact that her hypnosis had never reached the stage of somnambulism with amnesia. Bernheim now attempted several times to bring this about, but he too failed. He frankly admitted to me that his great therapeutic successes by means of suggestion were only achieved in his hospital practice and not with his private patients. I had many stimulating conversations with him, and undertook to translate into German his two works upon suggestion and its therapeutic effects.

An Autobiographical Study

4196

During the period from 1886 to 1891 I did little scientific work, and published scarcely anything. I was occupied with establishing myself in my new profession and with assuring my own material existence as well as that of a rapidly increasing family. In 1891 there appeared the first of my studies on the cerebral palsies of children, which was written in collaboration with my friend and assistant, Dr. Oskar Rie. An invitation which I received in the same year to contribute to an encyclopaedia of medicine led me to investigate the theory of aphasia. This was at the time dominated by the views of Wernicke and Lichtheim, which laid stress exclusively upon localization. The fruit of this enquiry was a small critical and speculative book, Zur Auffassung der Aphasien

But I must now show how it happened that scientific research once more became the chief interest of my life.

An Autobiographical Study

4197

II

I must supplement what I have just said by explaining that from the very first I made use of hypnosis in another manner, apart from hypnotic suggestion. I used it for questioning the patient upon the origin of his symptom, which in his waking state he could often describe only very imperfectly or not at all. Not only did this method seem more effective than mere suggestive commands or prohibitions, but it also satisfied the curiosity of the physician, who, after all, had a right to learn something of the origin of the phenomenon which he was striving to remove by the monotonous procedure of suggestion.

The manner in which I arrived at this other procedure was as follows. While I was still working in Brücke’s laboratory I had made the acquaintance of Dr. Josef Breuer, who was one of the most respected family physicians in Vienna, but who also had a scientific past, since he had produced several works of permanent value upon the physiology of respiration and upon the organ of equilibrium. He was a man of striking intelligence and fourteen years older than myself. Our relations soon became more intimate and he became my friend and helper in my difficult circumstances. We grew accustomed to share all our scientific interests with each other. In this relationship the gain was naturally mine. The development of psycho-analysis afterwards cost me his friendship. It was not easy for me to pay such a price, but I could not escape it.

Even before I went to Paris, Breuer had told me about a case of hysteria which, between 1880 and 1882, he had treated in a peculiar manner which had allowed him to penetrate deeply into the causation and significance of hysterical symptoms. This was at a time, therefore, when Janet’s works still belonged to the future. He repeatedly read me pieces of the case history, and I had an impression that it accomplished more towards an understanding of neuroses than any previous observation. I determined to inform Charcot of these discoveries when I reached Paris, and I actually did so. But the great man showed no interest in my first outline of the subject, so that I never returned to it and allowed it to pass from my mind.

An Autobiographical Study

4198

When I was back in Vienna I turned once more to Breuer’s observation and made him tell me more about it. The patient had been a young girl of unusual education and gifts, who had fallen ill while she was nursing her father, of whom she was devotedly fond. When Breuer took over her case it presented a variegated picture of paralyses with contractures, inhibitions and states of mental confusion. A chance observation showed her physician that she could be relieved of these clouded states of consciousness if she was induced to express in words the affective phantasy by which she was at the moment dominated. From this discovery, Breuer arrived at a new method of treatment. He put her into deep hypnosis and made her tell him each time what it was that was oppressing her mind. After the attacks of depressive confusion had been overcome in this way, he employed the same procedure for removing her inhibitions and physical disorders. In her waking state the girl could no more describe than other patients how her symptoms had arisen, and she could discover no link between them and any experiences of her life. In hypnosis she immediately discovered the missing connection. It turned out that all her symptoms went back to moving events which she had experienced while nursing her father; that is to say, her symptoms had a meaning and were residues or reminiscences of those emotional situations. It was found in most instances that there had been some thought or impulse which she had had to suppress while she was by her father’s sick-bed, and that, in place of it, as a substitute for it, the symptom had afterwards appeared. But as a rule the symptom was not the precipitate of a single such ‘traumatic’ scene, but the result of a summation of a number of similar situations. When the patient recalled a situation of this kind in a hallucinatory way under hypnosis and carried through to its conclusion, with a free expression of emotion, the mental act which she had originally suppressed, the symptom was abolished and did not return. By this procedure Breuer succeeded, after long and painful efforts, in relieving his patient of all her symptoms.

An Autobiographical Study

4199

The patient had recovered and had remained well and, in fact, had become capable of doing serious work. But over the final stage of this hypnotic treatment there rested a veil of obscurity, which Breuer never raised for me; and I could not understand why he had so long kept secret what seemed to me an invaluable discovery instead of making science the richer by it. The immediate question, however, was whether it was possible to generalize from what he had found in a single case. The state of things which he had discovered seemed to me to be of so fundamental a nature that I could not believe it could fail to be present in any case of hysteria if it had been proved to occur in a single one. But the question could only be decided by experience. I therefore began to repeat Breuer’s investigations with my own patients and eventually, especially after my visit to Bernheim in 1889 had taught me the limitations of hypnotic suggestion, I worked at nothing else. After observing for several years that his findings were invariably confirmed in every case of hysteria that was accessible to such treatment, and after having accumulated a considerable amount of material in the shape of observations analogous to his, I proposed to him that we should issue a joint publication. At first he objected vehemently, but in the end he gave way, especially, since, in the meantime, Janet’s works had anticipated some of his results, such as the tracing back of hysterical symptoms to events in the patient’s life, and their removal by means of hypnotic reproduction in statu nascendi. In 1893 we issued a preliminary communication, ‘On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena’, and in 1895 there followed our book, Studies on Hysteria.

An Autobiographical Study

4200

If the account I have so far given has led the reader to expect that the Studies on Hysteria must, in all essentials of their material content, be the product of Breuer’s mind, that is precisely what I myself have always maintained and what it has been my aim to repeat here. As regards the theory put forward in the book, I was partly responsible, but to an extent which it is to-day no longer possible to determine. That theory was in any case unpretentious and hardly went beyond the direct description of the observations. It did not seek to establish the nature of hysteria but merely to throw light upon the origin of its symptoms. Thus it laid stress upon the significance of the life of the emotions and upon the importance of distinguishing between mental acts which are unconscious and those which are conscious (or rather capable of being conscious); it introduced a dynamic factor, by supposing that a symptom arises through the damming-up of an affect, and an economic factor, by regarding that same symptom as the product of the transformation of an amount of energy which would otherwise have been employed in some other way. (This latter process was described as conversion.) Breuer spoke of our method as cathartic; its therapeutic aim was explained as being to provide that the quota of affect used for maintaining the symptom, which had got on to the wrong lines and had, as it were, become strangulated there, should be directed on to the normal path along which it could obtain discharge (or abreaction). The practical results of the cathartic procedure were excellent. Its defects, which became evident later, were those of all forms of hypnotic treatment. There are still a number of psychotherapists who have not gone beyond catharsis as Breuer understood it and who still speak in its favour. Its value as an abridged method of treatment was shown afresh by Simmel in his treatment of war neuroses in the German army during the Great War. The theory of catharsis had not much to say on the subject of sexuality. In the case histories which I contributed to the Studies sexual factors played a certain part, but scarcely more attention was paid to them than to other emotional excitations. Breuer wrote of the girl, who has since become famous as his first patient, that her sexual side was extraordinarily undeveloped. It would have been difficult to guess from the Studies on Hysteria what an importance sexuality has in the aetiology of the neuroses.

An Autobiographical Study

4201

The stage of development which now followed, the transition from catharsis to psycho-analysis proper, has been described by me several times already in such detail that I shall find it difficult to bring forward any new facts. The event which formed the opening of this period was Breuer’s retirement from our common work, so that I became the sole administrator of his legacy. There had been differences of opinion between us at quite an early stage, but they had not been a ground for our separating. In answering the question of when it is that a mental process becomes pathogenic - that is, when it is that it becomes impossible for it to be dealt with normally - Breuer preferred what might be called a physiological theory: he thought that the processes which could not find a normal outcome were such as had originated during unusual, ‘hypnoid’, mental states. This opened the further question of the origin of these hypnoid states. I, on the other hand, was inclined to suspect the existence of an interplay of forces and the operation of intentions and purposes such as are to be observed in normal life. Thus it was a case of ‘hypnoid hysteria’ versus ‘neuroses of defence’. But such differences as this would scarcely have alienated him from the subject if there had not been other factors at work. One of these was undoubtedly that his work as a physician and family doctor took up much of his time, and that he could not, like me, devote his whole strength to the work of catharsis. Again, he was affected by the reception which our book had received both in Vienna and in Germany. His self-confidence and powers of resistance were not developed so fully as the rest of his mental organization. When, for instance, the Studies met with a severe rebuff from Strümpell, I was able to laugh at the lack of comprehension which his criticism showed, but Breuer felt hurt and grew discouraged. But what contributed chiefly to his decision was that my own further work led in a direction to which he found it impossible to reconcile himself.

An Autobiographical Study

4202

The theory which we had attempted to construct in the Studies remained, as I have said, very incomplete; and in particular we had scarcely touched on the problem of aetiology, on the question of the ground in which the pathogenic process takes root. I now learned from my rapidly increasing experience that it was not any kind of emotional excitation that was in action behind the phenomena of neurosis but habitually one of a sexual nature, whether it was a current sexual conflict or the effect of earlier sexual experiences. I was not prepared for this conclusion and my expectations played no part in it, for I had begun my investigation of neurotics quite unsuspectingly. While I was writing my ‘History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement’ in 1914, there recurred to my mind some remarks that had been made to me by Breuer, Charcot, and Chrobak, which might have led me to this discovery earlier. But at the time I heard them I did not understand what these authorities meant; indeed they had told me more than they knew themselves or were prepared to defend. What I heard from them lay dormant and inactive within me, until the chance of my cathartic experiments brought it out as an apparently original discovery. Nor was I then aware that in deriving hysteria from sexuality I was going back to the very beginnings of medicine and following up a thought of Plato’s. It was not until later that I learnt this from an essay by Havelock Ellis.

Under the influence of my surprising discovery, I now took a momentous step. I went beyond the domain of hysteria and began to investigate the sexual life of the so-called neurasthenics who used to visit me in numbers during my consultation hours. This experiment cost me, it is true, my popularity as a doctor, but it brought me convictions which to-day, almost thirty years later, have lost none of their force. There was a great deal of equivocation and mystery-making to be overcome, but, once that had been done, it turned out that in all of these patients grave abuses of the sexual function were present. Considering how extremely widespread are these abuses on the one hand and neurasthenia on the other, a frequent coincidence between the two would not have proved much; but there was more in it than that one bald fact. Closer observation suggested to me that it was possible to pick out from the confused jumble of clinical pictures covered by the name of neurasthenia two fundamentally different types, which might appear in any degree of mixture but which were nevertheless to be observed in their pure forms. In the one type the central phenomenon was the anxiety attack with its equivalents, rudimentary forms and chronic substitutive symptoms; I consequently gave it the name of anxiety neurosis, and limited the term neurasthenia to the other type. Now it was easy to establish the fact that each of these types had a different abnormality of sexual life as its corresponding aetiological factor: in the former, coitus interruptus, unconsummated excitation and sexual abstinence, and in the latter, excessive masturbation and too numerous nocturnal emissions. In a few specially instructive cases, which had shown a surprising alteration in the clinical picture from one type to the other, it could be proved that there had been a corresponding change in the underlying sexual régime. If it was possible to put an end to the abuse and allow its place to be taken by normal sexual activity, a striking improvement in the condition was the reward.

An Autobiographical Study

4203

I was thus led into regarding the neuroses as being without exception disturbances of the sexual function, the so-called ‘actual neuroses’ being the direct toxic expression of such disturbances and the psychoneuroses their mental expression. My medical conscience felt pleased at my having arrived at this conclusion. I hoped that I had filled up a gap in medical science, which, in dealing with a function of such great biological importance, had failed to take into account any injuries beyond those caused by infection or by gross anatomical lesions. The medical aspect of the matter was, moreover, supported by the fact that sexuality was not something purely mental. It had a somatic side as well, and it was possible to assign special chemical processes to it and to attribute sexual excitation to the presence of some particular, though at present unknown, substances. There must also have been some good reason why the true spontaneous neuroses resembled no group of diseases more closely than the phenomena of intoxication and abstinence, which are produced by the administration or privation of certain toxic substances, or than exophthalmic goitre, which is known to depend upon the product of the thyroid gland.

Since that time I have had no opportunity of returning to the investigation of the ‘actual neuroses’; nor has this part of my work been continued by anyone else. If I look back to-day at my early findings, they strike me as being the first rough outlines of what is probably a far more complicated subject. But on the whole they seem to me still to hold good. I should have been very glad if I had been able, later on, to make a psycho-analytic examination of some more cases of simple juvenile neurasthenia, but unluckily the occasion did not arise. To avoid misconceptions, I should like to make it clear that I am far from denying the existence of mental conflicts and of neurotic complexes in neurasthenia. All that I am asserting is that the symptoms of these patients are not mentally determined or removable by analysis, but that they must be regarded as direct toxic consequences of disturbed sexual chemical processes.

During the years that followed the publication of the Studies, having reached these conclusions upon the part played by sexuality in the aetiology of the neuroses, I read some papers on the subject before various medical societies, but was only met with incredulity and contradiction. Breuer did what he could for some time longer to throw the great weight of his personal influence into the scales in my favour, but he effected nothing and it was easy to see that he too shrank from recognizing the sexual aetiology of the neuroses. He might have crushed me or at least disconcerted me by pointing to his own first patient, in whose case sexual factors had ostensibly played no part whatever. But he never did so, and I could not understand why this was, until I came to interpret the case correctly and to reconstruct, from some remarks which he had made, the conclusion of his treatment of it. After the work of catharsis had seemed to be completed, the girl had suddenly developed a condition of ‘transference love’; he had not connected this with her illness, and had therefore retired in dismay. It was obviously painful to him to be reminded of this apparent contretemps. His attitude towards me oscillated for some time between appreciation and sharp criticism; then accidental difficulties arose, as they never fail to do in a strained situation, and we parted.

An Autobiographical Study

4204

Another result of my taking up the study of nervous disorders in general was that I altered the technique of catharsis. I abandoned hypnotism and sought to replace it by some other method, because I was anxious not to be restricted to treating hysteriform conditions. Increasing experience had also given rise to two grave doubts in my mind as to the use of hypnotism even as a means to catharsis. The first was that even the most brilliant results were liable to be suddenly wiped away if my personal relation with the patient became disturbed. It was true that they would be re-established if a reconciliation could be effected; but such an occurrence proved that the personal emotional relation between doctor and patient was after all stronger than the whole cathartic process, and it was precisely that factor which escaped every effort at control. And one day I had an experience which showed me in the crudest light what I had long suspected. It related to one of my most acquiescent patients, with whom hypnotism had enabled me to bring about the most marvellous results, and whom I was engaged in relieving of her suffering by tracing back her attacks of pain to their origins. As she woke up on one occasion, she threw her arms round my neck. The unexpected entrance of a servant relieved us from a painful discussion, but from that time onwards there was a tacit understanding between us that the hypnotic treatment should be discontinued. I was modest enough not to attribute the event to my own irresistible personal attraction, and I felt that I had now grasped the nature of the mysterious element that was at work behind hypnotism. In order to exclude it, or at all events to isolate it, it was necessary to abandon hypnotism.

An Autobiographical Study

4205

But hypnotism had been of immense help in the cathartic treatment, by widening the field of the patient’s consciousness and putting within his reach knowledge which he did not possess in his waking life. It seemed no easy task to find a substitute for it. While I was in this perplexity there came to my help the recollection of an experiment which I had often witnessed while I was with Bernheim. When the subject awoke from the state of somnambulism, he seemed to have lost all memory of what had happened while he was in that state. But Bernheim maintained that the memory was present all the same; and if he insisted on the subject remembering, if he asseverated that the subject knew it all and had only to say it, and if at the same time he laid his hand on the subject’s forehead, then the forgotten memories used in fact to return, hesitatingly at first, but eventually in a flood and with complete clarity. I determined that I would act in the same way. My patients, I reflected, must in fact ‘know’ all the things which had hitherto only been made accessible to them in hypnosis; and assurances and encouragement on my part, assisted perhaps by the touch of my hand, would, I thought, have the power of forcing the forgotten facts and connections into consciousness. No doubt this seemed a more laborious process than putting the patients into hypnosis, but it might prove highly instructive. So I abandoned hypnotism, only retaining my practice of requiring the patient to lie upon a sofa while I sat behind him, seeing him, but not seen myself.

An Autobiographical Study

4206

III

My expectations were fulfilled; I was set free from hypnotism. But along with the change in technique the work of catharsis took on a new complexion. Hypnosis had screened from view an interplay of forces which now came in sight and the understanding of which gave a solid foundation to my theory.

How had it come about that the patients had forgotten so many of the facts of their external and internal lives but could nevertheless recollect them if a particular technique was applied? Observation supplied an exhaustive answer to these questions. Everything that had been forgotten had in some way or other been distressing; it had been either alarming or painful or shameful by the standards of the subject’s personality. It was impossible not to conclude that that was precisely why it had been forgotten - that is, why it had not remained conscious. In order to make it conscious again in spite of this, it was necessary to overcome something that fought against one in the patient; it was necessary to make efforts on one’s own part so as to urge and compel him to remember. The amount of effort required of the physician varied in different cases; it increased in direct proportion to the difficulty of what had to be remembered. The expenditure of force on the part of the physician was evidently the measure of a resistance on the part of the patient. It was only necessary to translate into words what I myself had observed, and I was in possession of the theory of repression.

It was now easy to reconstruct the pathogenic process. Let us keep to a simple example, in which a particular impulsion had arisen in the subject’s mind but was opposed by other powerful impulsions. We should have expected the mental conflict which now arose to take the following course. The two dynamic quantities - for our present purposes let us call them ‘the instinct’ and ‘the resistance’ - would struggle with each other for some time in the fullest light of consciousness, until the instinct was repudiated and the cathexis of energy withdrawn from its impulsion. This would have been the normal solution. In a neurosis, however (for reasons which were still unknown), the conflict found a different outcome. The ego drew back, as it were, on its first collision with the objectionable instinctual impulse; it debarred the impulse from access to consciousness and to direct motor discharge, but at the same time the impulse retained its full cathexis of energy. I named this process repression; it was a novelty, and nothing like it had ever before been recognized in mental life. It was obviously a primary mechanism of defence, comparable to an attempt at flight, and was only a forerunner of the later-developed normal condemning judgement. The first act of repression involved further consequences. In the first place the ego was obliged to protect itself against the constant threat of a renewed advance on the part of the repressed impulse by making a permanent expenditure of energy, an anticathexis, and it thus impoverished itself. On the other hand, the repressed impulse, which was now unconscious, was able to find means of discharge and of substitutive satisfaction by circuitous routes and thus to bring the whole purpose of the repression to nothing. In the case of conversion hysteria the circuitous route led to the somatic innervation; the repressed impulse broke its way through at some point or other and produced symptoms. The symptoms were thus results of a compromise, for although they were substitutive satisfactions they were nevertheless distorted and deflected from their aim owing to the resistance of the ego.

An Autobiographical Study

4207

The theory of repression became the corner-stone of our understanding of the neuroses. A different view had now to be taken of the task of therapy. Its aim was no longer to ‘abreact’ an affect which had got on to the wrong lines but to uncover repressions and replace them by acts of judgement which might result either in the accepting or in the condemning of what had formerly been repudiated. I showed my recognition of the new situation by no longer calling my method of investigation and treatment catharsis but psycho-analysis.

It is possible to take repression as a centre and to bring all the elements of psycho-analytic theory into relation with it. But before doing so I have a further comment of a polemical nature to make. According to Janet’s view a hysterical woman was a wretched creature who, on account of a constitutional weakness, was unable to hold her mental acts together, and it was for that reason that she fell a victim to a splitting of her mind and to a restriction of the field of her consciousness. The outcome of psycho-analytic investigations, on the other hand, showed that these phenomena were the result of dynamic factors - of mental conflict and of repression. This distinction seems to me to be far-reaching enough to put an end to the glib repetition of the view that whatever is of value in psycho-analysis is merely borrowed from the ideas of Janet. The reader will have learned from my account that historically psycho-analysis is completely independent of Janet’s discoveries, just as in its content it diverges from them and goes far beyond them. Janet’s works would never have had the implications which have made psycho-analysis of such importance to the mental sciences and have made it attract such universal interest. I always treated Janet himself with respect, since his discoveries coincided to a considerable extent with those of Breuer, which had been made earlier but were published later than his. But when in the course of time psycho-analysis became a subject of discussion in France, Janet behaved ill, showed ignorance of the facts and used ugly arguments. And finally he revealed himself to my eyes and destroyed the value of his own work by declaring that when he had spoken of ‘unconscious’ mental acts he had meant nothing by the phrase - it had been no more than a façon de parler.

An Autobiographical Study

4208

But the study of pathogenic repressions and of other phenomena which have still to be mentioned compelled psycho-analysis to take the concept of the ‘unconscious’ seriously. Psycho-analysis regarded everything mental as being in the first instance unconscious; the further quality of ‘consciousness’ might also be present, or again it might be absent. This of course provoked a denial from the philosophers, for whom ‘conscious’ and ‘mental’ were identical, and who protested that they could not conceive of such an absurdity as the ‘unconscious mental’. There was no help for it, however, and this idiosyncrasy of the philosophers could only be disregarded with a shrug. Experience (gained from pathological material, of which the philosophers were ignorant) of the frequency and power of impulses of which one knew nothing directly, and whose existence had to be inferred like some fact in the external world, left no alternative open. It could be pointed out, incidentally, that this was only treating one’s own mental life as one had always treated other people’s. One did not hesitate to ascribe mental processes to other people, although one had no immediate consciousness of them and could only infer them from their words and actions. But what held good for other people must be applicable to oneself. Anyone who tried to push the argument further and to conclude from it that one’s own hidden processes belonged actually to a second consciousness would be faced with the concept of a consciousness of which one knew nothing, of an ‘unconscious consciousness’ - and this would scarcely be preferable to the assumption of an ‘unconscious mental’. If on the other hand one declared, like some other philosophers, that one was prepared to take pathological phenomena into account, but that the processes underlying them ought not to be described as mental but as ‘psychoid’, the difference of opinion would degenerate into an unfruitful dispute about words, though even so expediency would decide in favour of keeping the expression ‘unconscious mental’. The further question as to the ultimate nature of this unconscious is no more sensible or profitable than the older one as to the nature of the conscious.

It would be more difficult to explain concisely how it came about that psycho-analysis made a further distinction in the unconscious, and separated it into a preconscious and an unconscious proper. It will be sufficient to say that it appeared a legitimate course to supplement the theories that were a direct expression of experience with hypotheses that were designed to facilitate the handling of the material and related to matters which could not be a subject of immediate observation. The very same procedure is adopted by the older sciences. The subdivision of the unconscious is part of an attempt to picture the apparatus of the mind as being built up of a number of agencies or systems whose relations to one another are expressed in spatial terms, without, however, implying any connection with the actual anatomy of the brain. (I have described this as the topographical method of approach.) Such ideas as these are part of a speculative superstructure of psycho-analysis, any portion of which can be abandoned or changed without loss or regret the moment its inadequacy has been proved. But there is still plenty to be described that lies closer to actual experience.

An Autobiographical Study

4209

I have already mentioned that my investigation of the precipitating and underlying causes of the neuroses led me more and more frequently to conflicts between the subject’s sexual impulses and his resistances to sexuality. In my search for the pathogenic situations in which the repressions of sexuality had set in and in which the symptoms, as substitutes for what was repressed, had had their origin, I was carried further and further back into the patient’s life and ended by reaching the first years of his childhood. What poets and students of human nature had always asserted turned out to be true: the impressions of that early period of life, though they were for the most part buried in amnesia, left ineradicable traces upon the individual’s growth and in particular laid down the disposition to any nervous disorder that was to follow. But since these experiences of childhood were always concerned with sexual excitations and the reaction against them, I found myself faced by the fact of infantile sexuality - once again a novelty and a contradiction of one of the strongest of human prejudices. Childhood was looked upon as ‘innocent’ and free from the lusts of sex, and the fight with the demon of ‘sensuality’ was not thought to begin until the troubled age of puberty. Such occasional sexual activities as it had been impossible to overlook in children were put down as signs of degeneracy or premature depravity or as a curious freak of nature. Few of the findings of psycho-analysis have met with such universal contradiction or have aroused such an outburst of indignation as the assertion that the sexual function starts at the beginning of life and reveals its presence by important signs even in childhood. And yet no other finding of analysis can be demonstrated so easily and so completely.

An Autobiographical Study

4210

Before going further into the question of infantile sexuality I must mention an error into which I fell for a while and which might well have had fatal consequences for the whole of my work. Under the influence of the technical procedure which I used at that time, the majority of my patients reproduced from their childhood scenes in which they were sexually seduced by some grown-up person. With female patients the part of seducer was almost always assigned to their father. I believed these stories, and consequently supposed that I had discovered the roots of the subsequent neurosis in these experiences of sexual seduction in childhood. My confidence was strengthened by a few cases in which relations of this kind with a father, uncle, or elder brother had continued up to an age at which memory was to be trusted. If the reader feels inclined to shake his head at my credulity, I cannot altogether blame him; though I may plead that this was at a time when I was intentionally keeping my critical faculty in abeyance so as to preserve an unprejudiced and receptive attitude towards the many novelties which were coming to my notice every day. When, however, I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only phantasies which my patients had made up or which I myself had perhaps forced on them, I was for some time completely at a loss. My confidence alike in my technique and in its results suffered a severe blow; it could not be disputed that I had arrived at these scenes by a technical method which I considered correct, and their subject-matter was unquestionably related to the symptoms from which my investigation had started. When I had pulled myself together, I was able to draw the right conclusions from my discovery: namely, that the neurotic symptoms were not related directly to actual events but to wishful phantasies, and that as far as the neurosis was concerned psychical reality was of more importance than material reality. I do not believe even now that I forced the seduction-phantasies on my patients, that I ‘suggested’ them. I had in fact stumbled for the first time upon the Oedipus complex, which was later to assume such an overwhelming importance, but which I did not recognize as yet in its disguise of phantasy. Moreover, seduction during childhood retained a certain share, though a humbler one, in the aetiology of neuroses. But the seducers turned out as a rule to have been older children.

An Autobiographical Study

4211

It will be seen, then, that my mistake was of the same kind as would be made by someone who believed that the legendary story of the early kings of Rome (as told by Livy) was historical truth instead of what it is in fact - a reaction against the memory of times and circumstances that were insignificant and occasionally, perhaps, inglorious. When the mistake had been cleared up, the path to the study of the sexual life of children lay open. It thus became possible to apply psycho-analysis to another field of science and to use its data as a means of discovering a new piece of biological knowledge.

The sexual function, as I found, is in existence from the very beginning of the individual’s life, though at first it is attached to the other vital functions and does not become independent of them until later; it has to pass through a long and complicated process of development before it becomes what we are familiar with as the normal sexual life of the adult. It begins by manifesting itself in the activity of a whole number of component instincts. These are dependent upon erotogenic zones in the body; some of them make their appearance in pairs of opposite impulses (such as sadism and masochism or the impulses to look and to be looked at); they operate independently of one another in a search for pleasure, and they find their object for the most part in the subject’s own body. Thus at first the sexual function is non-centralized and predominantly auto-erotic. Later, syntheses begin to appear in it; a first stage of organization is reached under the dominance of the oral components, an anal-sadistic stage follows, and it is only after the third stage has at last been reached that the primacy of the genitals is established and that the sexual function begins to serve the ends of reproduction. In the course of this process of development a number of elements of the various component instincts turn out to be unserviceable for this last end and are therefore left on one side or turned to other uses, while others are diverted from their aims and carried over into the genital organization. I gave the name of libido to the energy of the sexual instincts and to that form of energy alone. I was next driven to suppose that the libido does not always pass through its prescribed course of development smoothly. As a result either of the excessive strength of certain of the components or of experiences involving premature satisfaction, fixations of the libido may occur at various points in the course of its development. If subsequently a repression takes place, the libido flows back to these points (a process described as regression), and it is from them that the energy breaks through in the form of a symptom. Later on it further became clear that the localization of the point of fixation is what determines the choice of neurosis, that is, the form in which the subsequent illness makes its appearance.

An Autobiographical Study

4212

The process of arriving at an object, which plays such an important part in mental life, takes place alongside of the organization of the libido. After the stage of auto-erotism, the first love-object in the case of both sexes is the mother; and it seems probable that to begin with a child does not distinguish its mother’s organ of nutrition from its own body. Later, but still in the first years of infancy, the relation known as the Oedipus complex becomes established: boys concentrate their sexual wishes upon their mother and develop hostile impulses against their father as being a rival, while girls adopt an analogous attitude.¹ All of the different variations and consequences of the Oedipus complex are important; and the innately bisexual constitution of human beings makes itself felt and increases the number of simultaneously active tendencies. Children do not become clear for quite a long time about the differences between the sexes; and during this period of sexual researches they produce typical sexual theories which, being circumscribed by the incompleteness of their authors’ own physical development, are a mixture of truth and error and fail to solve the problems of sexual life (the riddle of the Sphinx - that is, the question of where babies come from). We see, then, that a child’s first object-choice is an incestuous one. The whole course of development that I have described is run through rapidly. For the most remarkable feature of the sexual life of man is its diphasic onset, its onset in two waves, with an interval between them. It reaches a first climax in the fourth or fifth year of a child’s life. But thereafter this early efflorescence of sexuality passes off; the sexual impulses which have shown such liveliness are overcome by repression, and a period of latency follows, which lasts until puberty and during which the reaction-formations of morality, shame, and disgust are built up.² Of all living creatures man alone seems to show this diphasic onset of sexual growth, and it may perhaps be the biological determinant of his predisposition to neuroses. At puberty the impulses and object-relations of a child’s early years become re-animated, and amongst them the emotional ties of its Oedipus complex. In the sexual life of puberty there is a struggle between the urges of early years and the inhibitions of the latency period. Before this, and while the child is at the highest point of its infantile sexual development, a genital organization of a sort is established; but only the male genitals play a part in it, and the female ones remain undiscovered. (I have described this as the period of phallic primacy.) At this stage the contrast between the sexes is not stated in terms of ‘male’ or ‘female’ but of ‘possessing a penis’ or ‘castrated’. The castration complex which arises in this connection is of the profoundest importance in the formation alike of character and of neuroses.

¹ (Footnote added 1935:) The information about infantile sexuality was obtained from the study of men and the theory deduced from it was concerned with male children. It was natural enough to expect to find a complete parallel between the two sexes; but this turned out not to hold. Further investigations and reflections revealed profound differences between the sexual development of men and women. The first sexual object of a baby girl (just as of a baby boy) is her mother; and before a woman can reach the end of her normal development she has to change not only her sexual object but also her leading genital zone. From this circumstance difficulties arise and possibilities of inhibition which are not present in the case of men.

²(Footnote added 1935:) The period of latency is a physiological phenomenon. It can, however, only give rise to a complete interruption of sexual life in cultural organizations which have made the suppression of infantile sexuality a part of their system. This is not the case with the majority of primitive peoples.

An Autobiographical Study

4213

In order to make this condensed account of my discoveries upon the sexual life of man more intelligible, I have brought together conclusions which I reached at different dates and incorporated by way of supplement or correction in the successive editions of my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d). I hope it will have been easy to gather the nature of my extension (on which so much stress has been laid and which has excited so much opposition) of the concept of sexuality. That extension is of a twofold kind. In the first place sexuality is divorced from its too close connection with the genitals and is regarded as a more comprehensive bodily function, having pleasure as its goal and only secondarily coming to serve the ends of reproduction. In the second place the sexual impulses are regarded as including all of those merely affectionate and friendly impulses to which usage applies the exceedingly ambiguous word ‘love’. I do not, however, consider that these extensions are innovations but rather restorations: they signify the removal of inexpedient limitations of the concept into which we had allowed ourselves to be led.

The detaching of sexuality from the genitals has the advantage of allowing us to bring the sexual activities of children and of perverts into the same scope as those of normal adults. The sexual activities of children have hitherto been entirely neglected and though those of perverts have been recognized it has been with moral indignation and without understanding. Looked at from the psycho-analytic standpoint, even the most eccentric and repellent perversions are explicable as manifestations of component instincts of sexuality which have freed themselves from the primacy of the genitals and are now in pursuit of pleasure on their own account as they were in the very early days of the libido’s development. The most important of these perversions, homosexuality, scarcely deserves the name. It can be traced back to the constitutional bisexuality of all human beings and to the after-effects of the phallic primacy. Psycho-analysis enables us to point to some trace or other of a homosexual object-choice in everyone. If I have described children as ‘polymorphously perverse’, I was only using a terminology that was generally current; no moral judgement was implied by the phrase. Psycho-analysis has no concern whatever with such judgements of value.

An Autobiographical Study

4214

The second of my alleged extensions of the concept of sexuality finds its justification in the fact revealed by psycho-analytic investigation that all of these affectionate impulses were originally of a completely sexual nature but have become inhibited in their aim or sublimated. The manner in which the sexual instincts can thus be influenced and diverted enables them to be employed for cultural activities of every kind, to which indeed they bring the most important contributions.

My surprising discoveries as to the sexuality of children were made in the first instance through the analysis of adults. But later (from about 1908 onwards) it became possible to confirm them fully and in every detail by direct observations upon children. Indeed, it is so easy to convince oneself of the regular sexual activities of children that one cannot help asking in astonishment how the human race can have succeeded in overlooking the facts and in maintaining for so long the wishful legend of the asexuality of childhood. This surprising circumstance must be connected with the amnesia which, with the majority of adults, hides their own infancy.

An Autobiographical Study

4215

IV

The theories of resistance and of repression, of the unconscious, of the aetiological significance of sexual life and of the importance of infantile experiences - these form the principal constituents of the theoretical structure of psycho-analysis. In these pages, unfortunately, I have been able to describe only the separate elements and not their interconnections and their bearing upon one another. But I am obliged now to turn to the alterations which gradually took place in the technique of the analytic method.

The means which I first adopted for overcoming the patient’s resistance, by insistence and encouragement, had been indispensable for the purpose of giving me a first general survey of what was to be expected. But in the long run it proved to be too much of a strain on both sides, and further, it seemed open to certain obvious criticisms. It therefore gave place to another method which was in one sense its opposite. Instead of urging the patient to say something upon some particular subject, I now asked him to abandon himself to a process of free association - that is, to say whatever came into his head, while ceasing to give any conscious direction to his thoughts. It was essential, however, that he should bind himself to report literally everything that occurred to his self-perception and not to give way to critical objections which sought to put certain associations on one side on the ground that they were not sufficiently important or that they were irrelevant or that they were altogether meaningless. There was no necessity to repeat explicitly the demand for candour on the patient’s part in reporting his thoughts, for it was the precondition of the whole analytic treatment.

An Autobiographical Study

4216

It may seem surprising that this method of free association, carried out subject to the observation of the fundamental rule of psycho-analysis, should have achieved what was expected of it, namely the bringing into consciousness of the repressed material which was held back by resistances. We must, however, bear in mind that free association is not really free. The patient remains under the influence of the analytic situation even though he is not directing his mental activities on to a particular subject. We shall be justified in assuming that nothing will occur to him that has not some reference to that situation. His resistance against reproducing the repressed material will now be expressed in two ways. Firstly it will be shown by critical objections; and it was to deal with these that the fundamental rule of psycho-analysis was invented. But if the patient observes that rule and so overcomes his reticences, the resistance will find another means of expression. It will so arrange it that the repressed material itself will never occur to the patient but only something which approximates to it in an allusive way; and the greater the resistance, the more remote from the actual idea that the analyst is in search of will be the substitutive association which the patient has to report. The analyst, who listens composedly but without any constrained effort to the stream of associations and who, from his experience, has a general notion of what to expect, can make use of the material brought to light by the patient according to two possibilities. If the resistance is slight he will be able from the patient’s allusions to infer the unconscious material itself; or if the resistance is stronger he will be able to recognize its character from the associations, as they seem to become more remote from the topic in hand, and will explain it to the patient. Uncovering the resistance, however, is the first step towards overcoming it. Thus the work of analysis involves an art of interpretation, the successful handling of which may require tact and practice but which is not hard to acquire. But it is not only in the saving of labour that the method of free association has an advantage over the earlier method. It exposes the patient to the least possible amount of compulsion, it never allows of contact being lost with the actual current situation, it guarantees to a great extent that no factor in the structure of the neurosis will be overlooked and that nothing will be introduced into it by the expectations of the analyst. It is left to the patient in all essentials to determine the course of the analysis and the arrangement of the material; any systematic handling of particular symptoms or complexes thus becomes impossible. In complete contrast to what happened with hypnotism and with the urging method, interrelated material makes its appearance at different times and at different points in the treatment. To a spectator, therefore - though in fact there must be none - an analytic treatment would seem completely obscure.

An Autobiographical Study

4217

Another advantage of the method is that it need never break down. It must theoretically always be possible to have an association, provided that no conditions are made as to its character. Yet there is one case in which in fact a breakdown occurs with absolute regularity; from its very uniqueness, however, this case too can be interpreted.

I now come to the description of a factor which adds an essential feature to my picture of analysis and which can claim, alike technically and theoretically, to be regarded as of the first importance. In every analytic treatment there arises, without the physician’s agency, an intense emotional relationship between the patient and the analyst which is not to be accounted for by the actual situation. It can be of a positive or of a negative character and can vary between the extremes of a passionate, completely sensual love and the unbridled expression of an embittered defiance and hatred. This transference - to give it its short name - soon replaces in the patient’s mind the desire to be cured, and, so long as it is affectionate and moderate, becomes the agent of the physician’s influence and neither more nor less than the mainspring of the joint work of analysis. Later on, when it has become passionate or has been converted into hostility, it becomes the principal tool of the resistance. It may then happen that it will paralyse the patient’s powers of associating and endanger the success of the treatment. Yet it would be senseless to try to evade it; for an analysis without transference is an impossibility. It must not be supposed, however, that transference is created by analysis and does not occur apart from it. Transference is merely uncovered and isolated by analysis. It is a universal phenomenon of the human mind, it decides the success of all medical influence, and in fact dominates the whole of each person’s relations to his human environment. We can easily recognize it as the same dynamic factor which the hypnotists have named ‘suggestibility’, which is the agent of hypnotic rapport and whose incalculable behaviour led to difficulties with the cathartic method as well. When there is no inclination to a transference of emotion such as this, or when it has become entirely negative, as happens in dementia praecox or paranoia, then there is also no possibility of influencing the patient by psychological means.

An Autobiographical Study

4218

It is perfectly true that psycho-analysis, like other psychotherapeutic methods, employs the instrument of suggestion (or transference). But the difference is this: that in analysis it is not allowed to play the decisive part in determining the therapeutic results. It is used instead to induce the patient to perform a piece of psychical work - the overcoming of his transference resistances - which involves a permanent alteration in his mental economy. The transference is made conscious to the patient by the analyst, and it is resolved by convincing him that in his transference-attitude he is re-experiencing emotional relations which had their origin in his earliest object-attachments during the repressed period of his childhood. In this way the transference is changed from the strongest weapon of the resistance into the best instrument of the analytic treatment. Nevertheless its handling remains the most difficult as well as the most important part of the technique of analysis.

With the help of the method of free association and of the related art of interpretation, psycho-analysis succeeded in achieving one thing which appeared to be of no practical importance but which in fact necessarily led to a totally fresh attitude and a fresh scale of values in scientific thought. It became possible to prove that dreams have a meaning, and to discover it. In classical antiquity great importance was attached to dreams as foretelling the future; but modern science would have nothing to do with them, it handed them over to superstition, declaring them to be purely ‘somatic’ processes - a kind of twitching of a mind that is otherwise asleep. It seemed quite inconceivable that anyone who had done serious scientific work could make his appearance as an ‘interpreter of dreams’. But by disregarding the excommunication pronounced upon dreams, by treating them as unexplained neurotic symptoms, as delusional or obsessional ideas, by neglecting their apparent content and by making their separate component images into subjects for free association, psycho-analysis arrived at a different conclusion. The numerous associations produced by the dreamer led to the discovery of a thought-structure which could no longer be described as absurd or confused, which ranked as a completely valid psychical product, and of which the manifest dream was no more than a distorted, abbreviated, and misunderstood translation, and for the most part a translation into visual images. These latent dream-thoughts contained the meaning of the dream, while its manifest content was simply a make-believe, a façade, which could serve as a starting-point for the associations but not for the interpretation.

An Autobiographical Study

4219

There were now a whole series of questions to be answered, among the most important of them being whether the formation of dreams had a motive, under what conditions it took place, by what methods the dream-thoughts (which are invariably full of sense) become converted into the dream (which is often senseless), and others besides. I attempted to solve all of these problems in The Interpretation of Dreams, which I published in the year 1900. I can only find space here for the briefest abstract of my investigation. When the latent dream-thoughts that are revealed by the analysis of a dream are examined, one of them is found to stand out from among the rest, which are intelligible and well known to the dreamer. These latter thoughts are residues of waking life (the day’s residues, as they are called technically); but the isolated thought is found to be a wishful impulse, often of a very repellent kind, which is foreign to the waking life of the dreamer and is consequently disavowed by him with surprise or indignation. This impulse is the actual constructor of the dream: it provides the energy for its production and makes use of the day’s residues as material. The dream which thus originates represents a situation of satisfaction for the impulse, it is the fulfilment of its wish. It would not be possible for this process to take place without being favoured by the presence of something in the nature of a state of sleep. The necessary mental precondition of sleep is the concentration of the ego upon the wish to sleep and the withdrawal of psychical energy from all the interests of life. Since at the same time all the paths of approach to motility are blocked, the ego is also able to reduce the expenditure by which at other times it maintains the repressions. The unconscious impulse makes use of this nocturnal relaxation of repression in order to push its way into consciousness with the dream. But the repressive resistance of the ego is not abolished in sleep but merely reduced. Some of it remains in the shape of a censorship of dreams and forbids the unconscious impulse to express itself in the forms which it would properly assume. In consequence of the severity of the censorship of dreams, the latent dream-thoughts are obliged to submit to being altered and softened so as to make the forbidden meaning of the dream unrecognizable. This is the explanation of dream-distortion, which accounts for the most striking characteristics of the manifest dream. We are therefore justified in asserting that a dream is the (disguised) fulfilment of a (repressed) wish. It will now be seen that dreams are constructed like a neurotic symptom: they are compromises between the demands of a repressed impulse and the resistance of a censoring force in the ego. Since they have a similar origin they are equally unintelligible and stand in equal need of interpretation.

An Autobiographical Study

4220

There is no difficulty in discovering the general function of dreaming. It serves the purpose of fending off, by a kind of soothing action, external or internal stimuli which would tend to arouse the sleeper, and thus of securing sleep against interruption. External stimuli are fended off by being given a new interpretation and by being woven into some harmless situation; internal stimuli, caused by instinctual demands, are given free play by the sleeper and allowed to find satisfaction in the formation of dreams, so long as the latent dream-thoughts submit to the control of the censorship. But if they threaten to break free and the meaning of the dream becomes too plain, the sleeper cuts short the dream and wakes in a fright. (Dreams of this class are known as anxiety-dreams.) A similar failure in the function of dreaming occurs if an external stimulus becomes too strong to be fended off. (This is the class of arousal-dreams.) I have given the name of dream-work to the process which, with the co-operation of the censorship, converts the latent thoughts into the manifest content of the dream. It consists of a peculiar way of treating the preconscious material of thought, so that its component parts become condensed, its psychical emphasis becomes displaced, and the whole of it is translated into visual images or dramatized, and completed by a deceptive secondary revision. The dream-work is an excellent example of the processes occurring in the deeper, unconscious layers of the mind, which differ considerably from the familiar normal processes of thought. It also displays a number of archaic characteristics, such as the use of a symbolism (in this case of a predominantly sexual kind) which it has since also been possible to discover in other spheres of mental activity.

An Autobiographical Study

4221

We have explained that the unconscious instinctual impulse of the dream connects itself with a residue of the day, with some interest of waking life which has not been disposed of; it thus gives the dream which it constructs a double value for the work of analysis. For on the one hand a dream that has been analysed reveals itself as the fulfilment of a repressed wish; but on the other hand it may be a continuation of some preconscious activity of the day before and may contain every kind of subject-matter and give expression to an intention, a warning, a reflection, or once more to the fulfilment of a wish. Analysis exploits the dream in both directions, as a means of obtaining knowledge alike of the patient’s conscious and of his unconscious processes. It also profits from the fact that dreams have access to the forgotten material of childhood, and so it happens that infantile amnesia is for the most part overcome in connection with the interpretation of dreams. In this respect dreams achieve a part of what was previously the task of hypnotism. On the other hand, I have never maintained the assertion which has so often been ascribed to me that dream-interpretation shows that all dreams have a sexual content or are derived from sexual motive forces. It is easy to see that hunger, thirst, or the need to excrete, can produce dreams of satisfaction just as well as any repressed sexual or egoistic impulse. The case of young children affords us a convenient test of the validity of our theory of dreams. In them the various psychical systems are not yet sharply divided and the repressions have not yet grown deep, so that we often come upon dreams which are nothing more than undisguised fulfilments of wishful impulses left over from waking life. Under the influence of imperative needs, adults may also produce dreams of this infantile type.¹

¹ (Footnote added 1935:) When it is considered how frequently the function of dreaming miscarries, the dream may aptly be characterized as an attempt at the fulfilment of a wish. Aristotle’s old definition of the dream as mental life during sleep still holds good. There was a reason for my choosing as the title of my book not The Dream but The Interpretation of Dreams.

An Autobiographical Study

4222

In the same way that psycho-analysis makes use of dream-interpretation, it also profits by the study of the numerous little slips and mistakes which people make - symptomatic actions, as they are called. I investigated this subject in a series of papers which were published for the first time in book form in 1904 under the title of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. In this widely circulated work I have pointed out that these phenomena are not accidental, that they require more than physiological explanations, that they have a meaning and can be interpreted, and that one is justified in inferring from them the presence of restrained or repressed impulses and intentions. But what constitutes the enormous importance of dream-interpretation, as well as of this latter study, is not the assistance they give to the work of analysis but another of their attributes. Previously psycho-analysis had only been concerned with solving pathological phenomena and in order to explain them it had often been driven into making assumptions whose comprehensiveness was out of all proportion to the importance of the actual material under consideration. But when it came to dreams, it was no longer dealing with a pathological symptom, but with a phenomenon of normal mental life which might occur in any healthy person. If dreams turned out to be constructed like symptoms, if their explanation required the same assumptions - the repression of impulses, substitutive formation, compromise-formation, the dividing of the conscious and the unconscious into various psychical systems - then psycho-analysis was no longer an auxiliary science in the field of psychopathology, it was rather the starting-point of a new and deeper science of the mind which would be equally indispensable for the understanding of the normal. Its postulates and findings could be carried over to other regions of mental happening; a path lay open to it that led far afield, into spheres of universal interest.

An Autobiographical Study

4223

V

I must interrupt my account of the internal growth of psycho-analysis and turn to its external history. What I have so far described of its discoveries has related for the most part to the results of my own work; but I have also filled in my story with material from later dates and have not distinguished between my own contributions and those of my pupils and followers.

For more than ten years after my separation from Breuer I had no followers. I was completely isolated. In Vienna I was shunned; abroad no notice was taken of me. My Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, was scarcely reviewed in the technical journals. In my paper ‘On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement’ I mentioned as an instance of the attitude adopted by psychiatric circles in Vienna a conversation with an assistant at the clinic, who had written a book against my theories but had never read my Interpretation of Dreams. He had been told at the clinic that it was not worth while. The man in question, who has since become a professor, has gone so far as to repudiate my report of the conversation and to throw doubts in general upon the accuracy of my recollection. I can only say that I stand by every word of the account I then gave.

As soon as I realized the inevitable nature of what I had come up against, my sensitiveness greatly diminished. Moreover my isolation gradually came to an end. To begin with, a small circle of pupils gathered round me in Vienna; and then, after 1906, came the news that the psychiatrists at Zurich, E. Bleuler, his assistant C. G. Jung, and others, were taking a lively interest in psycho-analysis. We got into personal touch with one another, and at Easter 1908 the friends of the young science met at Salzburg, agreed upon the regular repetition of similar informal congresses and arranged for the publication of a journal which was edited by Jung and was given the title of Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen. It was brought out under the direction of Bleuler and myself and ceased publication at the beginning of the World War. At the same time that the Swiss psychiatrists joined the movement, interest in psycho-analysis began to be aroused all over Germany as well; it became the subject of a large number of written comments and of lively discussions at scientific congresses. But its reception was nowhere friendly or even benevolently non-committal. After the briefest acquaintance with psycho-analysis German science was united in rejecting it.

An Autobiographical Study

4224

Even to-day it is of course impossible for me to foresee the final judgment of posterity upon the value of psycho-analysis for psychiatry, psychology, and the mental sciences in general. But I fancy that, when the history of the phase we have lived through comes to be written, German science will not have cause to be proud of those who represented it. I am not thinking of the fact that they rejected psycho-analysis or of the decisive way in which they did so; both of these things were easily intelligible, they were only to be expected and at any rate they threw no discredit on the character of the opponents of analysis. But for the degree of arrogance which they displayed, for their conscienceless contempt of logic, and for the coarseness and bad taste of their attacks there could be no excuse. It may be said that it is childish of me to give free rein to such feelings as these now, after fifteen years have passed; nor would I do so unless I had something more to add. Years later, during the World War, when a chorus of enemies were bringing against the German nation the charge of barbarism, a charge which sums up all that I have written above, it none the less hurt deeply to feel that my own experience would not allow me to contradict it.

One of my opponents boasted of silencing his patients as soon as they began to talk of anything sexual and evidently thought that this technique gave him a right to judge the part played by sexuality in the aetiology of the neuroses. Apart from emotional resistances, which were so easily explicable by the psycho-analytic theory that it was impossible to be misled by them, it seemed to me that the main obstacle to agreement lay in the fact that my opponents regarded psycho-analysis as a product of my speculative imagination and were unwilling to believe in the long, patient and unbiased work which had gone to its making. Since in their opinion analysis had nothing to do with observation or experience, they believed that they themselves were justified in rejecting it without experience. Others again, who did not feel so strongly convinced of this, repeated in their resistance the classical manoeuvre of not looking through the microscope so as to avoid seeing what they had denied. It is remarkable, indeed, how incorrectly most people act when they are obliged to form a judgement of their own on some new subject. For years I have been told by ‘benevolent’ critics - and I hear the same thing even to-day - that psycho-analysis is right up to such-and-such a point but that there it begins to exaggerate and to generalize without justification. And I know that, though nothing is more difficult than to decide where such a point lies, these critics had been completely ignorant of the whole subject only a few weeks or days earlier.

An Autobiographical Study

4225

The result of the official anathema against psycho-analysis was that the analysts began to come closer together. At the second Congress, held at Nuremberg in 1910, they formed themselves, on the proposal of Ferenczi, into an ‘International Psycho-Analytical Association’ divided into a number of local societies but under a common President. The Association survived the Great War and still exists, consisting to-day of branch societies in Austria, Germany, Hungary, Switzerland, Great Britain, Holland, Russia, and India, as well as two in the United States. I arranged that C. G. Jung should be appointed as the first President, which turned out later to have been a most unfortunate step. At the same time a second journal devoted to psycho-analysis was started, the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, edited by Adler and Stekel, and a little later a third, Imago, edited by two non-medical analysts, H. Sachs and O. Rank, and intended to deal with the application of analysis to the mental sciences. Soon afterwards Bleuler published a paper in defence of psycho-analysis. Though it was a relief to find honesty and straightforward logic for once taking part in the dispute, yet I could not feel completely satisfied by Bleuler’s essay. He strove too eagerly after an appearance of impartiality; nor is it a matter of chance that it is to him that our science owes the valuable concept of ambivalence. In later papers Bleuler adopted such a critical attitude towards the theoretical structure of analysis and rejected or threw doubts upon such essential parts of it that I could not help asking myself in astonishment what could be left of it for him to admire. Yet not only has he subsequently uttered the strongest pleas in favour of ‘depth psychology’ but he based his comprehensive study of schizophrenia upon it. Nevertheless Bleuler did not for long remain a member of the International Psycho-Analytical Association; he resigned from it as a result of misunderstandings with Jung, and the Burghölzli was lost to analysis.

An Autobiographical Study

4226

Official disapproval could not hinder the spread of psycho-analysis either in Germany or in other countries. I have elsewhere followed the stages of its growth and given the names of those who were its first representatives. In 1909 G. Stanley Hall invited Jung and me to America to go to Clark University, Worcester, Mass., of which he was President, and to spend a week giving lectures (in German) at the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of that body’s foundation. Hall was justly esteemed as a psychologist and educationalist, and had introduced psycho-analysis into his courses several years earlier; there was a touch of the ‘king-maker’ about him, a pleasure in setting up authorities and in then deposing them. We also met James J. Putnam there, the Harvard neurologist, who in spite of his age was an enthusiastic supporter of psycho-analysis and threw the whole weight of a personality that was universally respected into the defence of the cultural value of analysis and the purity of its aims. He was an estimable man, in whom, as a reaction against a predisposition to obsessional neurosis, an ethical bias predominated; and the only thing in him that was disquieting was his inclination to attach psycho-analysis to a particular philosophical system and to make it the servant of moral aims. Another event of this time which made a lasting impression on me was a meeting with William James the philosopher. I shall never forget one little scene that occurred as we were on a walk together. He stopped suddenly, handed me a bag he was carrying and asked me to walk on, saying that he would catch me up as soon as he had got through an attack of angina pectoris which was just coming on. He died of that disease a year later; and I have always wished that I might be as fearless as he was in the face of approaching death.

An Autobiographical Study

4227

At that time I was only fifty-three. I felt young and healthy, and my short visit to the new world encouraged my self-respect in every way. In Europe I felt as though I were despised; but over there I found myself received by the foremost men as an equal. As I stepped on to the platform at Worcester to deliver my Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis it seemed like the realization of some incredible day-dream: psycho-analysis was no longer a product of delusion, it had become a valuable part of reality. It has not lost ground in America since our visit; it is extremely popular among the lay public and is recognized by a number of official psychiatrists as an important element in medical training. Unfortunately, however, it has suffered a great deal from being watered down. Moreover, many abuses which have no relation to it find a cover under its name, and there are few opportunities for any thorough training in technique or theory. In America, too, it has come in conflict with Behaviourism, a theory which is naïve enough to boast that it has put the whole problem of psychology completely out of court.

In Europe during the years 1911-13 two secessionist movements from psycho-analysis took place, led by men who had previously played a considerable part in the young science, Alfred Adler and C. G. Jung. Both movements seemed most threatening and quickly obtained a large following. But their strength lay, not in their own content, but in the temptation which they offered of being freed from what were felt as the repellent findings of psycho-analysis even though its actual material was no longer rejected. Jung attempted to give to the facts of analysis a fresh interpretation of an abstract, impersonal and non-historical character, and thus hoped to escape the need for recognizing the importance of infantile sexuality and of the Oedipus complex as well as the necessity for any analysis of childhood. Adler seemed to depart still further from psycho-analysis; he entirely repudiated the importance of sexuality, traced back the formation both of character and of the neuroses solely to men’s desire for power and to their need to compensate for their constitutional inferiorities, and threw all the psychological discoveries of psycho-analysis to the winds. But what he had rejected forced its way back into his closed system under other names; his ‘masculine protest’ is nothing else than repression unjustifiably sexualized. The criticism with which the two heretics were met was a mild one; I only insisted that both Adler and Jung should cease to describe their theories as ‘psycho-analysis’. After a lapse of ten years it can be asserted that both of these attempts against psycho-analysis have blown over without doing any harm.

An Autobiographical Study

4228

If a community is based on agreement upon a few cardinal points, it is obvious that people who have abandoned that common ground will cease to belong to it. Yet the secession of former pupils has often been brought up against me as a sign of my intolerance or has been regarded as evidence of some special fatality that hangs over me. It is a sufficient answer to point out that in contrast to those who have left me, like Jung, Adler, Stekel, and a few besides, there are a great number of men, like Abraham, Eitingon, Ferenczi, Rank, Jones, Brill, Sachs, Pfister, van Emden, Reik, and others, who have worked with me for some fifteen years in loyal collaboration and for the most part in uninterrupted friendship. I have only mentioned the oldest of my pupils, who have already made a distinguished name for themselves in the literature of psycho-analysis; if I have passed over others, that is not to be taken as a slight, and indeed among those who are young and have joined me lately talents are to be found on which great hopes may be set. But I think I can say in my defence that an intolerant man, dominated by an arrogant belief in his own infallibility, would never have been able to maintain his hold upon so large a number of intellectually eminent people, especially if he had at his command as few practical attractions as I had.

An Autobiographical Study

4229

The World War, which broke up so many other organizations, could do nothing against our ‘International’. The first meeting after the war took place in 1920, at The Hague, on neutral ground. It was moving to see how hospitably the Dutch welcomed the starving and impoverished subjects of the Central European states; and I believe this was the first occasion in a ruined world on which Englishmen and Germans sat at the same table for the friendly discussion of scientific interests. Both in Germany and in the countries of Western Europe the war had actually stimulated interest in psycho-analysis. The observation of war neuroses had at last opened the eyes of the medical profession to the importance of psychogenesis in neurotic disturbances, and some of our psychological conceptions, such as the ‘gain from illness’ and the ‘flight into illness’, quickly became popular. The last Congress before the German collapse, which was held at Budapest in 1918, was attended by official representatives of the allied governments of the Central European powers, and they agreed to the establishment of psycho-analytic Centres for the treatment of war neuroses. But this point was never reached. Similarly too the comprehensive plans made by one of our leading members, Dr. Anton von Freund, for establishing in Budapest a centre for analytic study and treatment came to grief as a result of the political upheavals that followed soon afterwards and of the premature death of their irreplaceable author. At a later date some of his ideas were put into execution by Max Eitingon, who in 1920 founded a psycho-analytical clinic in Berlin. During the brief period of Bolshevik rule in Hungary, Ferenczi was still able to carry on a successful course of instruction as the official representative of psycho-analysis at the University of Budapest. After the war our opponents were pleased to announce that events had produced a conclusive argument against the validity of the theses of analysis. The war neuroses, they said, had proved that sexual factors were unnecessary to the aetiology of neurotic disorders. But their triumph was frivolous and premature. For on the one hand no one had been able to carry out a thorough analysis of a case of war neurosis, so that in fact nothing whatever was known for certain as to their motivation and no conclusions could be drawn from this uncertainty; while on the other hand psycho-analysis had long before arrived at the concept of narcissism and of narcissistic neuroses, in which the subject’s libido is attached to his own ego instead of to an object. Though on other occasions, therefore, the charge was brought against psycho-analysis of having made an unjustifiable extension of the concept of sexuality, yet, when it became convenient for controversial ends, this crime was forgotten and we were once more held down to the narrowest meaning of the word.

An Autobiographical Study

4230

If the preliminary cathartic period is left on one side, the history of psycho-analysis falls from my point of view into two phases. In the first of these I stood alone and had to do all the work myself: this was from 1895-6 until 1906 or 1907. In the second phase, lasting from then until the present time, the contributions of my pupils and collaborators have been growing more and more in importance, so that to-day, when a grave illness warns me of the approaching end, I can think with a quiet mind of the cessation of my own labours. For that very reason, however, it is impossible for me in this Autobiographical Study to deal as fully with the progress of psycho-analysis during the second phase as I did with its gradual rise during the first phase, which was concerned with my own activity alone. I feel that I should only be justified in mentioning here those new discoveries in which I still played a prominent part, in particular, therefore, those made in the sphere of narcissism, of the theory of the instincts, and of the application of psycho-analysis to the psychoses.

I must begin by adding that increasing experience showed more and more plainly that the Oedipus complex was the nucleus of the neurosis. It was at once the climax of infantile sexual life and the point of junction from which all of its later developments proceeded. But if so, it was no longer possible to expect analysis to discover a factor that was specific in the aetiology of the neuroses. It must be true, as Jung expressed it so well in the early days when he was still an analyst, that neuroses have no peculiar content which belongs exclusively to them but that neurotics break down at the same difficulties that are successfully overcome by normal people. This discovery was very far from being a disappointment. It was in complete harmony with another one: that the depth-psychology revealed by psycho-analysis was in fact the psychology of the normal mind. Our path had been like that of chemistry: the great qualitative differences between substances were traced back to quantitative variations in the proportions in which the same elements were combined.

An Autobiographical Study

4231

In the Oedipus complex the libido was seen to be attached to the image of the parental figures. But earlier there was a period in which there were no such objects. There followed from this fact the concept (of fundamental importance for the libido theory) of a state in which the subject’s libido filled his own ego and had that for its object. This state could be called narcissism or self-love. A moment’s reflection showed that this state never completely ceases. All through the subject’s life his ego remains the great reservoir of his libido, from which object-cathexes are sent out and into which the libido can stream back again from the objects. Thus narcissistic libido is constantly being transformed into object-libido, and vice versa. An excellent instance of the length to which this transformation can go is afforded by the state of being in love, whether in a sexual or sublimated manner, which goes so far as involving a sacrifice of the self. Whereas hitherto in considering the process of repression attention had only been paid to what was repressed, these ideas made it possible to form a correct estimate of the repressing forces too. It had been said that repression was set in action by the instincts of self-preservation operating in the ego (the ‘ego-instincts’) and that it was brought to bear upon the libidinal instincts. But since the instincts of self-preservation were now recognized as also being of a libidinal nature, as being narcissistic libido, the process of repression was seen to be a process occurring within the libido itself; narcissistic libido was opposed to object-libido, the interest of self-preservation was defending itself against the demands of object-love, and therefore against the demands of sexuality in the narrower sense as well.

An Autobiographical Study

4232

There is no more urgent need in psychology than for a securely founded theory of the instincts on which it might then be possible to build further. Nothing of the sort exists, however, and psycho-analysis is driven to making tentative efforts towards some such theory. It began by drawing a contrast between the ego-instincts (the instinct of self-preservation, hunger) and the libidinal instincts (love), but later replaced it by a new contrast between narcissistic and object-libido. This was clearly not the last word on the subject; biological considerations seemed to make it impossible to remain content with assuming the existence of only a single class of instincts.

In the works of my later years (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, and The Ego and the Id, I have given free rein to the inclination, which I kept down for so long, to speculation, and I have also contemplated a new solution of the problem of the instincts. I have combined the instincts for self-preservation and for the preservation of the species under the concept of Eros and have contrasted with it an instinct of death or destruction which works in silence. Instinct in general is regarded as a kind of elasticity of living things, an impulsion towards the restoration of a situation which once existed but was brought to an end by some external disturbance. This essentially conservative character of instincts is exemplified by the phenomena of the compulsion to repeat. The picture which life presents to us is the result of the concurrent and mutually opposing action of Eros and the death instinct.

An Autobiographical Study

4233

It remains to be seen whether this construction will turn out to be serviceable. Although it arose from a desire to fix some of the most important theoretical ideas of psycho-analysis, it goes far beyond psycho-analysis. I have repeatedly heard it said contemptuously that it is impossible to take a science seriously whose most general concepts are as lacking in precision as those of libido and of instinct in psycho-analysis. But this reproach rests on a complete misconception of the facts. Clear basic concepts and sharply drawn definitions are only possible in the mental sciences in so far as the latter seek to fit a region of facts into the frame of a logical system. In the natural sciences, of which psychology is one, such clear-cut general concepts are superfluous and indeed impossible. Zoology and Botany did not start from correct and adequate definitions of an animal and a plant; to this very day biology has been unable to give any certain meaning to the concept of life. Physics itself, indeed, would never have made any advance if it had had to wait until its concepts of matter, force, gravitation, and so on, had reached the desirable degree of clarity and precision. The basic ideas or most general concepts in any of the disciplines of science are always left indeterminate at first and are only explained to begin with by reference to the realm of phenomena from which they were derived; it is only by means of a progressive analysis of the material of observation that they can be made clear and can find a significant and consistent meaning. I have always felt it as a gross injustice that people have refused to treat psycho-analysis like any other science. This refusal found an expression in the raising of the most obstinate objections. Psycho-analysis was constantly reproached for its incompleteness and insufficiencies; though it is plain that a science based upon observation has no alternative but to work out its findings piecemeal and to solve its problems step by step. Again, when I endeavoured to obtain for the sexual function the recognition which had so long been withheld from it, psycho-analytic theory was branded as ‘pan-sexualism’. And when I laid stress on the hitherto neglected importance of the part played by the accidental impressions of early youth, I was told that psycho-analysis was denying constitutional and hereditary factors - a thing which I had never dreamt of doing. It was a case of contradiction at any price and by any methods.

An Autobiographical Study

4234

I had already made attempts at earlier stages of my work to arrive at some more general points of view on the basis of psycho-analytic observation. In a short essay, ‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’, I drew attention (and there was, of course, nothing original in this) to the domination of the pleasure-unpleasure principle in mental life and to its displacement by what is called the reality principle. Later on I made an attempt to produce a ‘Metapsychology’. By this I meant a method of approach according to which every mental process is considered in relation to three co-ordinates, which I described as dynamic, topographical, and economic respectively; and this seemed to me to represent the furthest goal that psychology could attain. The attempt remained no more than a torso; after writing two or three papers - ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’, ‘Repression’, ‘The Unconscious’, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, etc. - I broke off, wisely perhaps, since the time for theoretical predications of this kind had not yet come. In my latest speculative works I have set about the task of dissecting our mental apparatus on the basis of the analytic view of pathological facts and have divided it into an ego, an id, and a super-ego.¹ The super-ego is the heir of the Oedipus complex and represents the ethical standards of mankind.

I should not like to create an impression that during this last period of my work I have turned my back upon patient observation and have abandoned myself entirely to speculation. I have on the contrary always remained in the closest touch with the analytic material and have never ceased working at detailed points of clinical or technical importance. Even when I have moved away from observation, I have carefully avoided any contact with philosophy proper. This avoidance has been greatly facilitated by constitutional incapacity. I was always open to the ideas of G. T. Fechner and have followed that thinker upon many important points. The large extent to which psycho-analysis coincides with the philosophy of Schopenhauer - not only did he assert the dominance of the emotions and the supreme importance of sexuality but he was even aware of the mechanism of repression - is not to be traced to my acquaintance with his teaching. I read Schopenhauer very late in my life. Nietzsche, another philosopher whose guesses and intuitions often agree in the most astonishing way with the laborious findings of psycho-analysis, was for a long time avoided by me on that very account; I was less concerned with the question of priority than with keeping my mind unembarrassed.

¹ The Ego and the Id.

An Autobiographical Study

4235

The neuroses were the first subject of analysis, and for a long time they were the only one. No analyst could doubt that medical practice was wrong in separating those disorders from the psychoses and in attaching them to the organic nervous diseases. The theory of the neuroses belongs to psychiatry and is indispensable as an introduction to it. It would seem, however, that the analytic study of the psychoses is impracticable owing to its lack of therapeutic results. Mental patients are as a rule without the capacity for forming a positive transference, so that the principal instrument of analytic technique is inapplicable to them. There are nevertheless a number of methods of approach to be found. Transference is often not so completely absent but that it can be used to a certain extent; and analysis has achieved undoubted successes with cyclical depressions, light paranoic modifications, and partial schizophrenias. It has at least been a benefit to science that in many cases the diagnosis can oscillate for quite a long time between assuming the presence of a psychoneurosis or of a dementia praecox; for therapeutic attempts initiated in such cases have resulted in valuable discoveries before they have had to be broken off. But the chief consideration in this connection is that so many things that in the neuroses have to be laboriously fetched up from the depths are found in the psychoses on the surface, visible to every eye. For that reason the best subjects for the demonstration of many of the assertions of analysis are provided by the psychiatric clinic. It was thus bound to happen before long that analysis would find its way to the objects of psychiatric observation. I was able very early (1896) to establish in a case of paranoid dementia the presence of the same aetiological factors and the same emotional complexes as in the neuroses. Jung explained some most puzzling stereotypies in dements by bringing them into relation with the patients’ life-histories; Bleuler demonstrated the existence in various psychoses of mechanisms like those which analysis had discovered in neurotics. Since then analysts have never relaxed their efforts to come to an understanding of the psychoses. Especially since it has been possible to work with the concept of narcissism, they have managed, now in this place and now in that, to get a glimpse beyond the wall. Most of all, no doubt, was achieved by Abraham in his elucidation of the melancholias. It is true that in this sphere all our knowledge is not yet converted into therapeutic power; but the mere theoretical gain is not to be despised, and we may be content to wait for its practical application. In the long run even the psychiatrists cannot resist the convincing force of their own clinical material. At the present time German psychiatry is undergoing a kind of ‘peaceful penetration’ by analytic views. While they continually declare that they will never be psycho-analysts, that they do not belong to the ‘orthodox’ school or agree with its exaggerations, and in particular that they do not believe in the predominance of the sexual factor, nevertheless the majority of the younger workers take over one piece or another of analytic theory and apply it in their own fashion to the material. All the signs point to the proximity of further developments in the same direction.

An Autobiographical Study

4236

V

I now watch from a distance the symptomatic reactions that are accompanying the introduction of psycho-analysis into the France which was for so long refractory. It seems like a reproduction of something I have lived through before, and yet it has peculiarities of its own. Objections of incredible simplicity are raised, such as that French sensitiveness is offended by the pedantry and crudity of psycho-analytic terminology. (One cannot help being reminded of Lessing’s immortal Chevalier Riccaut de la Marlinière.) Another comment has a more serious ring (a Professor of Psychology at the Sorbonne did not think it beneath him): the whole mode of thought of psycho-analysis, so he declared, is inconsistent with the génie latin. Here the Anglo-Saxon allies of France, who count as supporters of analysis, are explicitly thrown over. Anyone hearing the remark would suppose that psycho-analysis had been the favourite child of the génie teutonique and had been clasped to its heart from the moment of birth.

In France the interest in psycho-analysis began among the men of letters. To understand this, it must be borne in mind that from the time of the writing of The Interpretation of Dreams psycho-analysis ceased to be a purely medical subject. Between its appearance in Germany and in France lies the history of its numerous applications to departments of literature and of aesthetics, to the history of religions and to prehistory, to mythology, to folklore, to education, and so on. None of these things have much to do with medicine; in fact it is only through psycho-analysis that they are connected with it. I have no business, therefore, to go into them in detail in these pages. I cannot pass them over completely in silence, however, for on the one hand they are essential to a correct appreciation of the nature and value of psycho-analysis, and on the other hand I have, after all, undertaken to give an account of my life-work. The beginnings of the majority of these applications of psycho-analysis will be found in my works. Here and there I have gone a little way along the path in order to gratify my non-medical interests. Later on, others (not only doctors, but specialists in the various fields as well) have followed in my tracks and penetrated far into the different subjects. But since my programme limits me to a mention of my own share in these applications of psycho-analysis, I can only give a quite inadequate picture of their extent and importance.

An Autobiographical Study

4237

A number of suggestions came to me out of the Oedipus complex, the ubiquity of which gradually dawned on me. The poet’s choice, or his invention, of such a terrible subject seemed puzzling; and so too did the overwhelming effect of its dramatic treatment, and the general nature of such tragedies of destiny. But all of this became intelligible when one realized that a universal law of mental life had here been captured in all its emotional significance. Fate and the oracle were no more than materializations of an internal necessity; and the fact of the hero’s sinning without his knowledge and against his intentions was evidently a right expression of the unconscious nature of his criminal tendencies. From understanding this tragedy of destiny it was only a step further to understanding a tragedy of character - Hamlet, which had been admired for three hundred years without its meaning being discovered or its author’s motives guessed. It could scarcely be a chance that this neurotic creation of the poet should have come to grief, like his numberless fellows in the real world, over the Oedipus complex. For Hamlet was faced with the task of taking vengeance on another for the two deeds which are the subject of the Oedipus desires; and before that task his arm was paralysed by his own obscure sense of guilt. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet very soon after his father’s death.¹ The suggestions made by me for the analysis of this tragedy were fully worked out later on by Ernest Jones. And the same example was afterwards used by Otto Rank as the starting-point for his investigation of the choice of material made by dramatists. In his large volume on the incest theme (Rank, 1912) he was able to show how often imaginative writers have taken as their subject the themes of the Oedipus situation, and traced in the different literatures of the world the way in which the material has been transformed, modified, and softened.

¹ (Footnote added 1935:) This is a construction which I should like explicitly to withdraw. I no longer believe that William Shakespeare the actor from Stratford was the author of the works which have so long been attributed to him. Since the publication of J. T. Looney’s volume ‘Shakespeare’ Identified, I am almost convinced that in fact Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, is concealed behind this pseudonym.

An Autobiographical Study

4238

It was tempting to go on from there to an attempt at an analysis of poetic and artistic creation in general. The realm of imagination was seen to be a ‘reservation’ made during the painful transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle in order to provide a substitute for instinctual satisfactions which had to be given up in real life. The artist, like the neurotic, had withdrawn from an unsatisfying reality into this world of imagination; but, unlike the neurotic, he knew how to find a way back from it and once more to get a firm foothold in reality. His creations, works of art, were the imaginary satisfactions of unconscious wishes, just as dreams are; and like them they were in the nature of compromises, since they too were forced to avoid any open conflict with the forces of repression. But they differed from the asocial, narcissistic products of dreaming in that they were calculated to arouse sympathetic interest in other people and were able to evoke and to satisfy the same unconscious wishful impulses in them too. Besides this, they made use of the perceptual pleasure of formal beauty as what I have called an ‘incentive bonus’. What psycho-analysis was able to do was to take the interrelations between the impressions of the artist’s life, his chance experiences, and his works, and from them to construct his constitution and the instinctual impulses at work in it - that is to say, that part of him which he shared with all men. With this aim in view, for instance, I made Leonardo da Vinci the subject of a study, which is based on a single memory of childhood related by him and which aims chiefly at explaining his picture of ‘The Madonna and Child with St. Anne’. Since then my friends and pupils have undertaken numerous analyses of artists and their works. It does not appear that the enjoyment of a work of art is spoiled by the knowledge gained from such an analysis. The layman may perhaps expect too much from analysis in this respect, for it must be admitted that it throws no light on the two problems which probably interest him the most. It can do nothing towards elucidating the nature of the artistic gift, nor can it explain the means by which the artist works - artistic technique.

An Autobiographical Study

4239

I was able to show from a short story by W. Jensen called Gradiva, which has no particular merit in itself, that invented dreams can be interpreted in the same way as real ones and that the unconscious mechanisms familiar to us in the ‘dream-work’ are thus also operative in the processes of imaginative writing. My book on Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious was a side-issue directly derived from The Interpretation of Dreams. The only friend of mine who was at that time interested in my work remarked to me that my interpretations of dreams often impressed him as being like jokes. In order to throw some light on this impression, I began to investigate jokes and found that their essence lay in the technical methods employed in them, and that these were the same as the means used in the ‘dream-work’ - that is to say, condensation, displacement, the representation of a thing by its opposite or by something very small, and so on. This led to an economic enquiry into the origin of the high degree of pleasure obtained from hearing a joke. And to this the answer was that it was due to the momentary suspension of the expenditure of energy upon maintaining repression, owing to the attraction exercised by the offer of a bonus of pleasure (fore-pleasure).

I myself set a higher value on my contributions to the psychology of religion, which began with the establishment of a remarkable similarity between obsessive actions and religious practices or ritual (1907b). Without as yet understanding the deeper connections, I described the obsessional neurosis as a distorted private religion and religion as a kind of universal obsessional neurosis. Later on, in 1912, Jung’s forcible indication of the far-reaching analogies between the mental products of neurotics and of primitive peoples led me to turn my attention to that subject. In four essays, which were collected into a book with the title of Totem and Taboo, I showed that the horror of incest was even more marked among primitive than among civilized races and had given rise to very special measures of defence against it. I examined the relations between taboo-prohibitions (the earliest form in which moral restrictions make their appearance) and emotional ambivalence; and I discovered under the primitive scheme of the universe known as ‘animism’ the principle of the over-estimation of the importance of psychical reality - the belief in ‘the omnipotence of thoughts’ - which lies at the root of magic as well. I developed the comparison with the obsessional neurosis at every point, and showed how many of the postulates of primitive mental life are still in force in that remarkable illness. Above all, however, I was attracted by totemism, the first system of organization in primitive tribes, a system in which the beginnings of social order are united with a rudimentary religion and the implacable domination of a small number of taboo-prohibitions. The being that is revered is ultimately always an animal, from which the clan also claims to be descended. Many indications pointed to the conclusion that every race, even the most highly developed, had once passed through the stage of totemism.

An Autobiographical Study

4240

The chief literary sources of my studies in this field were the well-known works of J. G. Frazer (Totemism and Exogamy and The Golden Bough), a mine of valuable facts and opinions. But Frazer effected little towards elucidating the problems of totemism; he had several times fundamentally altered his views on the subject, and the other ethnologists and prehistorians seemed in equal uncertainty and disagreement. My starting-point was the striking correspondence between the two taboo-ordinances of totemism (not to kill the totem and not to have sexual relations with any woman of the same totem-clan) and the two elements of the Oedipus complex (getting rid of the father and taking the mother to wife). I was therefore tempted to equate the totem-animal with the father; and in fact primitive peoples themselves do this explicitly, by honouring it as the forefather of the clan. There next came to my help two facts from psycho-analysis, a lucky observation of a child made by Ferenczi, which enabled me to speak of an ‘infantile return of totemism’, and the analysis of early animal-phobias in children, which so often showed that the animal was a substitute for the father, a substitute on to which the fear of the father derived from the Oedipus complex had been displaced. Not much was lacking to enable me to recognize the killing of the father as the nucleus of totemism and the starting-point in the formation of religion.

This missing element was supplied when I became acquainted with W. Robertson Smith’s work, The Religion of the Semites. Its author (a man of genius who was both a physicist and an expert in biblical researches) introduced the so-called ‘totem meal’ as an essential part of the totemic religion. Once a year the totem animal, which was at other times regarded as sacred, was solemnly killed in the presence of all the members of the clan, was devoured and was then mourned over. The mourning was followed by a great festival. When I further took into account Darwin’s conjecture that men originally lived in hordes, each under the domination of a single powerful, violent and jealous male, there rose before me out of all these components the following hypothesis, or, I would rather say, vision. The father of the primal horde, since he was an unlimited despot, had seized all the women for himself; his sons, being dangerous to him as rivals, had been killed or driven away. One day, however, the sons came together and united to overwhelm, kill, and devour their father, who had been their enemy but also their ideal. After the deed they were unable to take over their heritage since they stood in one another’s way. Under the influence of failure and remorse they learned to come to an agreement among themselves; they banded themselves into a clan of brothers by the help of the ordinances of totemism, which aimed at preventing a repetition of such a deed, and they jointly undertook to forgo the possession of the women on whose account they had killed their father. They were then driven to finding strange women, and this was the origin of the exogamy which is so closely bound up with totemism. The totem meal was the festival commemorating the fearful deed from which sprang man’s sense of guilt (or ‘original sin’) and which was the beginning at once of social organization, of religion and of ethical restrictions.

An Autobiographical Study

4241

Now whether we suppose that such a possibility was a historical event or not, it brings the formation of religion within the circle of the father-complex and bases it upon the ambivalence which dominates that complex. After the totem animal had ceased to serve as a substitute for him, the primal father, at once feared and hated, revered and envied, became the prototype of God himself. The son’s rebelliousness and his affection for his father struggled against each other through a constant succession of compromises, which sought on the one hand to atone for the act of parricide and on the other to consolidate the advantages it had brought. This view of religion throws a particularly clear light upon the psychological basis of Christianity, in which, as we know, the ceremony of the totem meal still survives with but little distortion, in the form of Communion. I should like explicitly to mention that this last observation was not made by me but is to be found in the works of Robertson Smith and Frazer.

Theodor Reik and G. Róheim, the ethnologist, have taken up the line of thought which I developed in Totem and Taboo and, in a series of important works, have extended it, deepened it, or corrected it. I myself have since returned to it more than once, in the course of my investigations into the ‘unconscious sense of guilt’ (which also plays such an important part among the motives of neurotic suffering) and in my attempts at forming a closer connection between social psychology and the psychology of the individual.¹ I have moreover made use of the idea of an archaic heritage from the ‘primal horde’ epoch of mankind’s development in explaining susceptibility to hypnosis.

¹ The Ego and the Id and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.

An Autobiographical Study

4242

I have taken but little direct part in certain other applications of psycho-analysis, though they are none the less of general interest. It is only a step from the phantasies of individual neurotics to the imaginative creations of groups and peoples as we find them in myths, legends, and fairy tales. Mythology became the special province of Otto Rank; the interpretation of myths, the tracing of them back to the familiar unconscious complexes of early childhood, the replacing of astral explanations by a discovery of human motives, all of this is to a large extent due to his analytic efforts. The subject of symbolism, too, has found many students among my followers. Symbolism has brought psycho-analysis many enemies; many enquirers with unduly prosaic minds have never been able to forgive it the recognition of symbolism, which followed from the interpretation of dreams. But analysis is guiltless of the discovery of symbolism, for it had long been known in other regions of thought (such as folklore, legends, and myths) and plays an even larger part in them than in the ‘language of dreams’.

I myself have contributed nothing to the application of analysis to education. It was natural, however, that the analytic discoveries about the sexual life and mental development of children should attract the attention of educators and make them see their problems in a new light. Dr. Oskar Pfister, a protestant pastor at Zurich, led the way as a tireless pioneer along these lines, nor did he find the practice of analysis incompatible with the retention of his religion, though it is true that this was of a sublimated kind. Among the many others who worked alongside of him I may mention Frau Dr. Hug-Hellmuth and Dr. S. Bernfeld, both of Vienna.¹ The application of analysis to the prophylactic upbringing of healthy children and to the correcting of those who, though not actually neurotic, have deviated from the normal course of development has led to one consequence which is of practical importance. It is no longer possible to restrict the practice of psycho-analysis to doctors and to exclude laymen from it. In fact, a doctor who has not been through a special training is, in spite of his diploma, a layman in analysis, and a non-doctor who has been suitably trained can, with occasional reference to a doctor, carry out the analytic treatment not only of children but also of neurotics.

¹ (Footnote added 1935:) Since these words were written child analysis in particular has gained a powerful momentum owing to the work of Mrs. Melanie Klein and of my daughter, Anna Freud.

An Autobiographical Study

4243

By a process of development against which it would have been useless to struggle, the word ‘psycho-analysis’ has itself become ambiguous. While it was originally the name of a particular therapeutic method, it has now also become the name of a science - the science of unconscious mental processes. By itself this science is seldom able to deal with a problem completely, but it seems destined to give valuable contributory help in the most varied regions of knowledge. The sphere of application of psycho-analysis extends as far as that of psychology, to which it forms a complement of the greatest moment.

Looking back, then, over the patchwork of my life’s labours, I can say that I have made many beginnings and thrown out many suggestions. Something will come of them in the future, though I cannot myself tell whether it will be much or little. I can, however, express a hope that I have opened up a pathway for an important advance in our knowledge.

An Autobiographical Study

4244

POSTSCRIPT

(1935)

The editor of this series of autobiographical studies did not, so far as I know, consider the possibility that after a certain lapse of time a sequel might be written to any of them; and it may be that such an event has occurred only in the present instance. I am undertaking the task since my American publisher desires to issue the little work in a new edition. It first appeared in America in 1927 (published by Brentano) under the title of An Autobiographical Study, but it was injudiciously brought out in the same volume as another essay of mine which gave its title, The Problem of Lay-Analyses, to the whole book and so obscured the present work.

Two themes run through these pages: the story of my life and the history of psycho-analysis. They are intimately interwoven. This Autobiographical Study shows how psycho-analysis came to be the whole content of my life and rightly assumes that no personal experiences of mine are of any interest in comparison to my relations with that science.

Shortly before I wrote this study it seemed as though my life would soon be brought to an end by the recurrence of a malignant disease; but surgical skill saved me in 1923 and I was able to continue my life and my work, though no longer in freedom from pain. In the period of more than ten years that has passed since then, I have never ceased my analytic work nor my writing - as is proved by the completion of the twelfth volume of the German edition of my collected works. But I myself find that a significant change has come about. Threads which in the course of my development had become intertangled have now begun to separate; interests which I had acquired in the later part of my life have receded, while the older and original ones become prominent once more. It is true that in this last decade I have carried out some important pieces of analytic work, such as the revision of the problem of anxiety in my book Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926d) or the simple explanation of sexual ‘fetishism’ which I was able to make a year later (1927e). Nevertheless it would be true to say that, since I put forward my hypothesis of the existence of two classes of instinct (Eros and the death instinct) and since I proposed a division of the mental personality into an ego, a super-ego, and an id (1923b), I have made no further decisive contributions to psycho-analysis: what I have written on the subject since then has been either unessential or would soon have been supplied by someone else. This circumstance is connected with an alteration in myself, with what might be described as a phase of regressive development. My interest, after making a lifelong détour through the natural sciences, medicine and psychotherapy, returned to the cultural problems which had fascinated me long before, when I was a youth scarcely old enough for thinking. At the very climax of my psycho-analytic work, in 1912, I had already attempted in Totem and Taboo to make use of the newly discovered findings of analysis in order to investigate the origins of religion and morality. I now carried this work a stage further in two later essays, The Future of an Illusion (1927c) and Civilization and its Discontents (1930a). I perceived ever more clearly that the events of human history, the interactions between human nature, cultural development and the precipitates of primaeval experiences (the most prominent example of which is religion) are no more than a reflection of the dynamic conflicts between the ego, the id and the super-ego, which psycho-analysis studies in the individual - are the very same processes repeated upon a wider stage. In The Future of an Illusion I expressed an essentially negative valuation of religion. Later, I found a formula which did better justice to it: while granting that its power lies in the truth which it contains, I showed that that truth was not a material but a historical truth.

An Autobiographical Study

4245

These studies, which, though they originate in psycho-analysis, stretch far beyond it, have perhaps awakened more public sympathy than psycho-analysis itself. They may have played a part in creating the short-lived illusion that I was among the writers to whom a great nation like Germany was ready to listen. It was in 1929 that, with words no less pregnant than friendly, Thomas Mann, one of the acknowledged spokesmen of the German people, found a place for me in the history of modern thought. A little later my daughter Anna, acting as my proxy, was given a civic reception in the Rathaus at Frankfort-on-Main on the occasion of my being awarded the Goethe Prize for 1930. This was the climax of my life as a citizen. Soon afterwards the boundaries of our country narrowed and the nation would know no more of us.

And here I may be allowed to break off these autobiographical notes. The public has no claim to learn any more of my personal affairs - of my struggles, my disappointments, and my successes. I have in any case been more open and frank in some of my writings (such as The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life) than people usually are who describe their lives for their contemporaries or for posterity. I have had small thanks for it, and from my experience I cannot recommend anyone to follow my example.

I must add a few more words on the history of psycho-analysis during the last decade. There can no longer be any doubt that it will continue; it has proved its capacity to survive and to develop both as a branch of knowledge and as a therapeutic method. The number of its supporters (organized into the International Psycho-Analytical Association) has considerably increased. In addition to the older local groups (in Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, London, Holland, Switzerland, and Russia), societies have since been formed in Paris and Calcutta, two in Japan, several in the United States, and quite recently one each in Jerusalem and South Africa and two in Scandinavia. Out of their own funds these local societies support (or are in process of forming) training institutes, in which instruction in the practice of psycho-analysis is given according to a uniform plan, and out-patient clinics in which experienced analysts as well as students give free treatment to patients of limited means. Every other year the members of the International Psycho-Analytical Association hold a Congress at which scientific papers are read and questions of organization decided. The thirteenth of these congresses (which I myself can no longer attend) took place at Lucerne in 1934. From a core of interests that are common to all members of the Association, their work radiates in many different directions. Some lay most stress upon clarifying and deepening our knowledge of psychology, while others are concerned with keeping in contact with medicine and psychiatry. From the practical point of view, some analysts have set themselves the task of bringing about the recognition of psycho-analysis at the universities and its inclusion in the medical curriculum, whereas others are content to remain outside these institutions and will not allow that psycho-analysis is less important in the field of education than in that of medicine. It happens from time to time that an analytic worker may find himself isolated in an attempt to emphasize some single one of the findings or views of psycho-analysis at the expense of all the rest. Nevertheless, the whole impression is a satisfactory one - of serious scientific work carried on at a high level.

4246

INHIBITIONS, SYMPTOMS AND ANXIETY

(1926)

4247

Intentionally left blank

4248

INHIBITIONS, SYMPTOMS AND ANXIETY

I

In the description of pathological phenomena, linguistic usage enables us to distinguish symptoms from inhibitions, without, however, attaching much importance to the distinction. Indeed, we might hardly think it worth while to differentiate exactly between the two, were it not for the fact that we meet with illnesses in which we observe the presence of inhibitions but not of symptoms and are curious to know the reason for this.

The two concepts are not upon the same plane. Inhibition has a special relation to function. It does not necessarily have a pathological implication. One can quite well call a normal restriction of a function an inhibition of it. A symptom, on the other hand, actually denotes the presence of some pathological process. Thus, an inhibition may be a symptom as well. Linguistic usage, then, employs the word inhibition when there is a simple lowering of function, and symptom when a function has undergone some unusual change or when a new phenomenon has arisen out of it. Very often it seems to be quite an arbitrary matter whether we emphasize the positive side of a pathological process and call its outcome a symptom, or its negative side and call its outcome an inhibition. But all this is really of little interest; and the problem as we have stated it does not carry us very far.

Since the concept of inhibition is so intimately associated with that of function, it might be helpful to examine the various functions of the ego with a view to discovering the forms which any disturbance of those functions assumes in each of the different neurotic affections. Let us pick out for a comparative study of this kind the sexual function and those of eating, of locomotion and of professional work.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4249

(a) The sexual function is liable to a great number of disturbances, most of which exhibit the characteristics of simple inhibitions. These are classed together as psychical impotence. The normal performance of the sexual function can only come about as the result of a very complicated process, and disturbances may appear at any point in it. In men the chief stages at which inhibition occurs are shown by: a turning away of the libido at the very beginning of the process (psychical unpleasure); an absence of the physical preparation for it (lack of erection); an abridgement of the sexual act (ejaculatio praecox), an occurrence which might equally well be regarded as a symptom; an arrest of the act before it has reached its natural conclusion (absence of ejaculation); or a non-appearance of the psychical outcome (lack of the feeling of pleasure in orgasm). Other disturbances arise from the sexual function becoming dependent on special conditions of a perverse or fetishist nature.

That there is a relationship between inhibition and anxiety is pretty evident. Some inhibitions obviously represent a relinquishment of a function because its exercise would produce anxiety. Many women are openly afraid of the sexual function. We class this anxiety under hysteria, just as we do the defensive symptom of disgust which, arising originally as a deferred reaction to the experiencing of a passive sexual act, appears later whenever the idea of such an act is presented. Furthermore, many obsessional acts turn out to be measures of precaution and security against sexual experiences and are thus of a phobic character.

This is not very illuminating. We can only note that disturbances of the sexual function are brought about by a great variety of means. (1) The libido may simply be turned away (this seems most readily to produce what we regard as an inhibition pure and simple); (2) the function may be less well carried out; (3) it may be hampered by having conditions attached to it, or modified by being diverted to other aims; (4) it may be prevented by security measures; (5) if it cannot be prevented from starting, it may be immediately interrupted by the appearance of anxiety; and (6), if it is nevertheless carried out, there may be a subsequent reaction of protest against it and an attempt to undo what has been done.

(b) The function of nutrition is most frequently disturbed by a disinclination to eat, brought about by a withdrawal of libido. An increase in the desire to eat is also a not uncommon thing. The compulsion to eat is attributed to a fear of starving; but this is a subject which has been but little studied. The symptom of vomiting is known to us as a hysterical defence against eating. Refusal to eat owing to anxiety is a concomitant of psychotic states (delusions of being poisoned).

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4250

(c) In some neurotic conditions locomotion is inhibited by a disinclination to walk or a weakness in walking. In hysteria there will be a paralysis of the motor apparatus, or this one special function of the apparatus will be abolished (abasia). Especially characteristic are the increased difficulties that appear in locomotion owing to the introduction of certain stipulations whose non-observance results in anxiety (phobia).

(d) In inhibition in work - a thing which we so often have to deal with as an isolated symptom in our therapeutic work - the subject feels a decrease in his pleasure in it or becomes less able to do it well; or he has certain reactions to it, like fatigue, giddiness or sickness, if he is obliged to go on with it. If he is a hysteric he will have to give up his work owing to the appearance of organic and functional paralyses which make it impossible for him to carry it on. If he is an obsessional neurotic he will be perpetually being distracted from his work or losing time over it through the introduction of delays and repetitions.

Our survey might be extended to other functions as well; but there would be nothing more to be learnt by doing so. For we should not penetrate below the surface of the phenomena presented to us. Let us then proceed to describe inhibition in such a way as to leave very little doubt about what is meant by it, and say that inhibition is the expression of a restriction of an ego-function. A restriction of this kind can itself have very different causes. Some of the mechanisms involved in this renunciation of function are well known to us, as is a certain general purpose which governs it.

This purpose is more easily recognizable in the specific inhibitions. Analysis shows that when activities like playing the piano, writing or even walking are subjected to neurotic inhibitions it is because the physical organs brought into play - the fingers or the legs - have become too strongly erotized. It has been discovered as a general fact that the ego-function of an organ is impaired if its erotogenicity - its sexual significance - is increased. It behaves, if I may be allowed a rather absurd analogy, like a maid-servant who refuses to go on cooking because her master has started a love-affair with her. As soon as writing, which entails making a liquid flow out of a tube on to a piece of white paper, assumes the significance of copulation, or as soon as walking becomes a symbolic substitute for treading upon the body of mother earth, both writing and walking are stopped because they represent the performance of a forbidden sexual act. The ego renounces these functions, which are within its sphere, in order not to have to undertake fresh measures of repression - in order to avoid a conflict with the id.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4251

There are clearly also inhibitions which serve the purpose of self-punishment. This is often the case in inhibitions of professional activities. The ego is not allowed to carry on those activities, because they would bring success and gain, and these are things which the severe super-ego has forbidden. So the ego gives them up too, in order to avoid coming into conflict with the super-ego.

The more generalized inhibitions of the ego obey a different mechanism of a simple kind. When the ego is involved in a particularly difficult psychical task, as occurs in mourning, or when there is some tremendous suppression of affect or when a continual flood of sexual phantasies has to be kept down, it loses so much of the energy at its disposal that it has to cut down the expenditure of it at many points at once. It is in the position of a speculator whose money has become tied up in his various enterprises. I came across an instructive example of this kind of intense, though short-lived, general inhibition. The patient, an obsessional neurotic, used to be overcome by a paralysing fatigue which lasted for one or more days whenever something occurred which should obviously have thrown him into a rage. We have here a point from which it should be possible to reach an understanding of the condition of general inhibition which characterizes states of depression, including the gravest form of them, melancholia.

As regards inhibitions, then, we may say in conclusion that they are restrictions of the functions of the ego which have been either imposed as a measure of precaution or brought about as a result of an impoverishment of energy; and we can see without difficulty in what respect an inhibition differs from a symptom: for a symptom cannot any longer be described as a process that takes place within, or acts upon, the ego.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4252

II

The main characteristics of the formation of symptoms have long since been studied and, I hope, established beyond dispute. A symptom is a sign of, and a substitute for, an instinctual satisfaction which has remained in abeyance; it is a consequence of the process of repression. Repression proceeds from the ego when the latter - it may be at the behest of the super-ego - refuses to associate itself with an instinctual cathexis which has been aroused in the id. The ego is able by means of repression to keep the idea which is the vehicle of the reprehensible impulse from becoming conscious. Analysis shows that the idea often persists as an unconscious formation.

So far everything seems clear; but we soon come upon difficulties which have not as yet been solved. Up till now our account of what occurs in repression has laid great stress on this point of exclusion from consciousness. But it has left other points open to uncertainty. One question that arose was, what happened to the instinctual impulse which had been activated in the id and which sought satisfaction? The answer was an indirect one. It was that owing to the process of repression the pleasure that would have been expected from satisfaction had been transformed into unpleasure. But we were then faced with the problem of how the satisfaction of an instinct could produce unpleasure. The whole matter can be clarified, I think, if we commit ourselves to the definite statement that as a result of repression the intended course of the excitatory process in the id does not occur at all; the ego succeeds in inhibiting or deflecting it. If this is so the problem of ‘transformation of affect’ under repression disappears. At the same time this view implies a concession to the ego that it can exert a very extensive influence over processes in the id, and we shall have to find out in what way it is able to develop such surprising powers.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4253

It seems to me that the ego obtains this influence in virtue of its intimate connections with the perceptual system - connections which, as we know, constitute its essence and provide the basis of its differentiation from the id. The function of this system, which we have called Pcpt.-Cs., is bound up with the phenomenon of consciousness. It receives excitations not only from outside but from within, and endeavours, by means of the sensations of pleasure and unpleasure which reach it from these quarters, to direct the course of mental events in accordance with the pleasure principle. We are very apt to think of the ego as powerless against the id; but when it is opposed to an instinctual process in the id it has only to give a ‘signal of unpleasure’ in order to attain its object with the aid of that almost omnipotent institution, the pleasure principle. To take this situation by itself for a moment, we can illustrate it by an example from another field. Let us imagine a country in which a certain small faction objects to a proposed measure the passage of which would have the support of the masses. This minority obtains command of the press and by its help manipulates the supreme arbiter, ‘public opinion’, and so succeeds in preventing the measure from being passed.

But this explanation opens up fresh problems. Where does the energy come from which is employed for giving the signal of unpleasure? Here we may be assisted by the idea that a defence against an unwelcome internal process will be modelled upon the defence adopted against an external stimulus, that the ego wards off internal and external dangers alike along identical lines. In the case of external danger the organism has recourse to attempts at flight. The first thing it does is to withdraw cathexis from the perception of the dangerous object; later on it discovers that it is a better plan to perform muscular movements of such a sort as will render perception of the dangerous object impossible even in the absence of any refusal to perceive it - that it is a better plan, that is, to remove itself from the sphere of danger. Repression is an equivalent of this attempt at flight. The ego withdraws its (preconscious) cathexis from the instinctual representative that is to be repressed and uses that cathexis for the purpose of releasing unpleasure (anxiety). The problem of how anxiety arises in connection with repression may be no simple one; but we may legitimately hold firmly to the idea that the ego is the actual seat of anxiety and give up our earlier view that the cathectic energy of the repressed impulse is automatically turned into anxiety. If I expressed myself earlier in the latter sense, I was giving a phenomenological description and not a metapsychological account of what was occurring.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4254

This brings us to a further question: how is it possible, from an economic point of view, for a mere process of withdrawal and discharge, like the withdrawing of a preconscious ego-cathexis, to produce unpleasure or anxiety, seeing that, according to our assumptions, unpleasure and anxiety can only arise as a result of an increase in cathexis? The reply is that this causal sequence should not be explained from an economic point of view. Anxiety is not newly created in repression; it is reproduced as an affective state in accordance with an already existing mnemic image. If we go further and enquire into the origin of that anxiety - and of affects in general - we shall be leaving the realm of pure psychology and entering the borderland of physiology. Affective states have become incorporated in the mind as precipitates of primaeval traumatic experiences, and when a similar situation occurs they are revived like mnemic symbols. I do not think I have been wrong in likening them to the more recent and individually acquired hysterical attack and in regarding them as its normal prototypes. In man and the higher animals it would seem that the act of birth, as the individual’s first experience of anxiety, has given the affect of anxiety certain characteristic forms of expression. But, while acknowledging this connection, we must not lay undue stress on it nor overlook the fact that biological necessity demands that a situation of danger should have an affective symbol, so that a symbol of this kind would have to be created in any case. Moreover, I do not think that we are justified in assuming that whenever there is an outbreak of anxiety something like a reproduction of the situation of birth goes on in the mind. It is not even certain whether hysterical attacks, though they were originally traumatic reproductions of this sort, retain that character permanently.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4255

As I have shown elsewhere, most of the repressions with which we have to deal in our therapeutic work are cases of after-pressure. They presuppose the operation of earlier, primal repressions which exert an attraction on the more recent situation. Far too little is known as yet about the background and preliminary stages of repression. There is a danger of over-estimating the part played in repression by the super-ego. We cannot at present say whether it is perhaps the emergence of the super-ego which provides the line of demarcation between primal repression and after-pressure. At any rate, the earliest outbreaks of anxiety, which are of a very intense kind, occur before the super-ego has become differentiated. It is highly probable that the immediate precipitating causes of primal repressions are quantitative factors such as an excessive degree of excitation and the breaking through of the protective shield against stimuli.

This mention of the protective shield sounds a note which recalls to us the fact that repression occurs in two different situations - namely, when an undesirable instinctual impulse is aroused by some external perception, and when it arises internally without any such provocation. We shall return to this difference later. But the protective shield exists only in regard to external stimuli, not in regard to internal instinctual demands.

So long as we direct our attention to the ego’s attempt at flight we shall get no nearer to the subject of symptom-formation. A symptom arises from an instinctual impulse which has been detrimentally affected by repression. If the ego, by making use of the signal of unpleasure, attains its object of completely suppressing the instinctual impulse, we learn nothing of how this has happened. We can only find out about it from those cases in which repression must be described as having to a greater or less extent failed. In this event the position, generally speaking, is that the instinctual impulse has found a substitute in spite of repression, but a substitute which is very much reduced, displaced and inhibited and which is no longer recognizable as a satisfaction. And when the substitutive impulse is carried out there is no sensation of pleasure; its carrying out has, instead, the quality of a compulsion.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4256

In thus degrading a process of satisfaction to a symptom, repression displays its power in a further respect. The substitutive process is prevented, if possible, from finding discharge though motility; and even if this cannot be done, the process is forced to expend itself in making alterations in the subject’s own body and is not permitted to impinge upon the external world. It must not be transformed into action. For, as we know, in repression the ego is operating under the influence of external reality and therefore it debars the substitutive process from having any effect upon that reality.

Just as the ego controls the path to action in regard to the external world, so it controls access to consciousness. In repression it exercises its power in both directions, acting in the one manner upon the instinctual impulse itself and in the other upon the representative of that impulse. At this point it is relevant to ask how I can reconcile this acknowledgement of the might of the ego with the description of its position which I gave in The Ego and the Id. In that book I drew a picture of its dependent relationship to the id and to the super-ego and revealed how powerless and apprehensive it was in regard to both and with what an effort it maintained its show of superiority over them. This view has been widely echoed in psycho-analytic literature. Many writers have laid much stress on the weakness of the ego in relation to the id and of our rational elements in the face of the daemonic forces within us; and they display a strong tendency to make what I have said into a corner-stone of a psycho-analytic Weltanschauung. Yet surely the psycho-analyst, with his knowledge of the way in which repression works, should, of all people, be restrained from adopting such an extreme and one-sided view.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4257

I must confess that I am not at all partial to the fabrication of Weltanschauungen. Such activities may be left to philosophers, who avowedly find it impossible to make their journey through life without a Baedeker of that kind to give them information on every subject. Let us humbly accept the contempt with which they look down on us from the vantage-ground of their superior needs. But since we cannot forgo our narcissistic pride either, we will draw comfort from the reflection that such ‘Handbooks to Life’ soon grow out of date and that it is precisely our short-sighted, narrow and finicky work which obliges them to appear in new editions, and that even the most up-to-date of them are nothing but attempts to find a substitute for the ancient, useful and all-sufficient Church Catechism. We know well enough how little light science has so far been able to throw on the problems that surround us. But however much ado the philosophers may make, they cannot alter the situation. Only patient, persevering research, in which everything is subordinated to the one requirement of certainty, can gradually bring about a change. The benighted traveller may sing aloud in the dark to deny his own fears; but, for all that, he will not see an inch further beyond his nose.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4258

III

To return to the problem of the ego. The apparent contradiction is due to our having taken abstractions too rigidly and attended exclusively now to the one side and now to the other of what is in fact a complicated state of affairs. We were justified, I think, in dividing the ego from the id, for there are certain considerations which necessitate that step. On the other hand the ego is identical with the id, and is merely a specially differentiated part of it. If we think of this part by itself in contradistinction to the whole, or if a real split has occurred between the two, the weakness of the ego becomes apparent. But if the ego remains bound up with the id and indistinguishable from it, then it displays its strength. The same is true of the relation between the ego and the super-ego. In many situations the two are merged; and as a rule we can only distinguish one from the other when there is a tension or conflict between them. In repression the decisive fact is that the ego is an organization and the id is not. The ego is, indeed, the organized portion of the id. We should be quite wrong if we pictured the ego and the id as two opposing camps and if we supposed that, when the ego tries to suppress a part of the id by means of repression, the remainder of the id comes to the rescue of the endangered part and measures its strength with the ego. This may often be what happens, but it is certainly not the initial situation in repression. As a rule the instinctual impulse which is to be repressed remains isolated. Although the act of repression demonstrates the strength of the ego, in one particular it reveals the ego’s powerlessness and how impervious to influence are the separate instinctual impulses of the id. For the mental process which has been turned into a symptom owing to repression now maintains its existence outside the organization of the ego and independently of it. Indeed, it is not that process alone but all its derivatives which enjoy, as it were, this same privilege of extra-territoriality; and whenever they come into associative contact with a part of the ego-organization, it is not at all certain that they will not draw that part over to themselves and thus enlarge themselves at the expense of the ego. An analogy with which we have long been familiar compared a symptom to a foreign body which was keeping up a constant succession of stimuli and reactions in the tissue in which it was embedded. It does sometimes happen that the defensive struggle against an unwelcome instinctual impulse is brought to an end with the formation of a symptom. As far as can be seen, this is most often possible in hysterical conversion. But usually the outcome is different. The initial act of repression is followed by a tedious or interminable sequel in which the struggle against the instinctual impulse is prolonged into a struggle against the symptom.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4259

In this secondary defensive struggle the ego presents two faces with contradictory expressions. The one line of behaviour it adopts springs from the fact that its very nature obliges it to make what must be regarded as an attempt at restoration or reconciliation. The ego is an organization. It is based on the maintenance of free intercourse and of the possibility of reciprocal influence between all its parts. Its desexualized energy still shows traces of its origin in its impulsion to bind together and unify, and this necessity to synthesize grows stronger in proportion as the strength of the ego increases. It is therefore only natural that the ego should try to prevent symptoms from remaining isolated and alien by using every possible method to bind them to itself in one way or another, and to incorporate them into its organization by means of those bonds. As we know, a tendency of this kind is already operative in the very act of forming a symptom. A classical instance of this are those hysterical symptoms which have been shown to be a compromise between the need for satisfaction and the need for punishment. Such symptoms participate in the ego from the very beginning, since they fulfil a requirement of the super-ego, while on the other hand they represent positions occupied by the repressed and points at which an irruption has been made by it into the ego-organization. They are a kind of frontier-station with a mixed garrison. (Whether all primary hysterical symptoms are constructed on these lines would be worth enquiring into very carefully.) The ego now proceeds to behave as though it recognized that the symptom had come to stay and that the only thing to do was to accept the situation in good part and draw as much advantage from it as possible. It makes an adaptation to the symptom - to this piece of the internal world which is alien to it - just as it normally does to the real external world. It can always find plenty of opportunities for doing so. The presence of a symptom may entail a certain impairment of capacity, and this can be exploited to appease some demand on the part of the super-ego or to refuse some claim from the external world. In this way the symptom gradually comes to be the representative of important interests; it is found to be useful in asserting the position of the self and becomes more and more closely merged with the ego and more and more indispensable to it. It is only very rarely that the physical process of ‘healing’ round a foreign body follows such a course as this. There is a danger, too, of exaggerating the importance of a secondary adaptation of this kind to a symptom, and of saying that the ego has created the symptom merely in order to enjoy its advantages. It would be equally true to say that a man who had lost his leg in the war had got it shot away so that he might thenceforward live on his pension without having to do any more work.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4260

In obse4160ssional neurosis and paranoia the forms which the symptoms assume become very valuable to the ego because they obtain for it, not certain advantages, but a narcissistic satisfaction which it would otherwise be without. The systems which the obsessional neurotic constructs flatter his self-love by making him feel that he is better than other people because he is specially cleanly or specially conscientious. The delusional constructions of the paranoic offer to his acute perceptive and imaginative powers a field of activity which he could not easily find elsewhere.

All of this results in what is familiar to us as the ‘(secondary) gain from illness’ which follows a neurosis. This gain comes to the assistance of the ego in its endeavour to incorporate the symptom and increases the symptom’s fixation. When the analyst tries subsequently to help the ego in its struggle against the symptom, he finds that these conciliatory bonds between ego and symptom operate on the side of the resistances and that they are not easy to loosen.

The two lines of behaviour which the ego adopts towards the symptom are in fact directly opposed to each other. For the other line is less friendly in character, since it continues in the direction of repression. Nevertheless the ego, it appears, cannot be accused of inconsistency. Being of a peaceable disposition it would like to incorporate the symptom and make it part of itself. It is from the symptom itself that the trouble comes. For the symptom, being the true substitute for and derivative of the repressed impulse, carries on the role of the latter; it continually renews its demands for satisfaction and thus obliges the ego in its turn to give the signal of unpleasure and put itself in a posture of defence.

The secondary defensive struggle against the symptom takes many shapes. It is fought out on different fields and makes use of a variety of methods. We shall not be able to say much about it until we have made an enquiry into the various different instances of symptom-formation. In doing this we shall have an opportunity of going into the problem of anxiety - a problem which has long been looming in the background. The wisest plan will be to start from the symptoms produced by the hysterical neurosis; for we are not as yet in a position to consider the conditions in which the symptoms of obsessional neurosis, paranoia and other neuroses are formed.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4261

IV

Let us start with an infantile hysterical phobia of animals - for instance, the case of ‘Little Hans’, whose phobia of horses was undoubtedly typical in all its main features. The first thing that becomes apparent is that in a concrete case of neurotic illness the state of affairs is much more complex than one would suppose so long as one was dealing with abstractions. It takes a little time to find one’s bearings and to decide which the repressed impulse is, what substitutive symptom it has found and where the motive for repression lies.

‘Little Hans’ refused to go out into the street because he was afraid of horses. This was the raw material of the case. Which part of it constituted the symptom? Was it his having the fear? Was it his choice of an object for his fear? Was it his giving up of his freedom of movement? Or was it more than one of these combined? What was the satisfaction which he renounced? And why did he have to renounce it?

At a first glance one is tempted to reply that the case is not so very obscure. ‘Little Hans’s’ unaccountable fear of horses was the symptom and his inability to go out into the streets was an inhibition, a restriction which his ego had imposed on itself so as not to arouse the anxiety-symptom. The second point is clearly correct; and in the discussion which follows I shall not concern myself any further with this inhibition. But as regards the alleged symptom, a superficial acquaintance with the case does not even disclose its true formulation. For further investigation shows that what he was suffering from was not a vague fear of horses but a quite definite apprehension that a horse was going to bite him. This idea, indeed, was endeavouring to withdraw from consciousness and get itself replaced by an undefined phobia in which only the anxiety and its object still appeared. Was it perhaps this idea that was the nucleus of his symptom?

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4262

We shall not make any headway until we have reviewed the little boy’s psychical situation as a whole as it came to light in the course of the analytic treatment. He was at the time in the jealous and hostile Oedipus attitude towards his father, whom nevertheless - except in so far as his mother was the cause of estrangement - he dearly loved. Here, then, we have a conflict due to ambivalence: a well-grounded love and a no less justifiable hatred directed towards one and the same person. ‘Little Hans’s’ phobia must have been an attempt to solve this conflict. Conflicts of this kind due to ambivalence are very frequent and they can have another typical outcome, in which one of the two conflicting feelings (usually that of affection) becomes enormously intensified and the other vanishes. The exaggerated degree and compulsive character of the affection alone betray the fact that it is not the only one present but is continually on the alert to keep the opposite feeling under suppression, and enable us to postulate the operation of a process which we call repression by means of reaction-formation (in the ego). Cases like ‘Little Hans’s’ show no traces of a reaction-formation of this kind. There are clearly different ways of egress from a conflict due to ambivalence.

Meanwhile we have been able to establish another point with certainty. The instinctual impulse which underwent repression in ‘Little Hans’ was a hostile one against his father. Proof of this was obtained in his analysis while the idea of the biting horse was being followed up. He had seen a horse fall down and he had also seen a playmate, with whom he was playing at horses, fall down and hurt himself. Analysis justified the inference that he had a wishful impulse that his father should fall down and hurt himself as his playmate and the horse had done. Moreover, his attitude towards someone’s departure on a certain occasion makes it probable that his wish that his father should be out of the way also found less hesitating expression. But a wish of this sort is tantamount to an intention of putting one’s father out of the way oneself - is tantamount, that is, to the murderous impulse of the Oedipus complex.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4263

So far there seem to be no connecting links between ‘Little Hans’s’ repressed instinctual impulse and the substitute for it which we suspect is to be seen in his phobia of horses. Let us simplify his psychical situation by setting on one side the infantile factor and the ambivalence. Let us imagine that he is a young servant who is in love with the mistress of the house and has received some tokens of her favour. He hates his master, who is more powerful than he is, and he would like to have him out of the way. It would then be eminently natural for him to dread his master’s vengeance and to develop a fear of him - just as ‘Little Hans’ developed a phobia of horses. We cannot, therefore, describe the fear belonging to this phobia as a symptom. If ‘Little Hans’, being in love with his mother, had shown fear of his father, we should have no right to say that he had a neurosis or a phobia. His emotional reaction would have been entirely comprehensible. What made it a neurosis was one thing alone: the replacement of his father by a horse. It is this displacement, then, which has a claim to be called a symptom, and which, incidentally, constitutes the alternative mechanism which enables a conflict due to ambivalence to be resolved without the aid of a reaction-formation. Such a displacement is made possible or facilitated at ‘Little Hans’s’ early age because the inborn traces of totemic thought can still be easily revived. Children do not as yet recognize or, at any rate, lay such exaggerated stress upon the gulf that separates human beings from the animal world. In their eyes the grown man, the object of their fear and admiration, still belongs to the same category as the big animal who has so many enviable attributes but against whom they have been warned because he may become dangerous. As we see, the conflict due to ambivalence is not dealt with in relation to one and the same person: it is circumvented, as it were, by one of the pair of conflicting impulses being directed to another person as a substitutive object.

So far everything is clear. But the analysis of ‘Hans’s’ phobia has been a complete disappointment in one respect. The distortion which constituted the symptom-formation was not applied to the representative (the ideational content) of the instinctual impulse that was to be repressed; it was applied to a quite different representative and one which only corresponded to a reaction to the disagreeable instinct. It would be more in accordance with our expectations if ‘Little Hans’ had developed, instead of a fear of horses, as inclination to ill-treat them and to beat them or if he had expressed in plain terms a wish to see them fall down or be hurt or even die in convulsions (‘make a row with their feet’). Something of the sort did in fact emerge in his analysis, but it was not by any means in the forefront of his neurosis. And, curiously enough, if he really had produced a hostility of this sort not against his father but against horses as his main symptom, we should not have said that he was suffering from a neurosis. There must be something wrong either with our view of repression or with our definition of a symptom. One thing, of course, strikes us at once: if ‘Little Hans’ had really behaved like that to horses, it would mean that repression had in no way altered the character of his objectionable and aggressive instinctual impulse itself but only the object towards which it was directed.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4264

Undoubtedly there are cases in which this is all that repression does. But more than this happened in the development of ‘Little Hans’s’ phobia - how much more can be guessed from a part of another analysis.

As we know, ‘Little Hans’ alleged that what he was afraid of was that a horse would bite him. Now some time later I was able to learn something about the origin of another animal phobia. In this instance the dreaded animal was a wolf; it, too, had the significance of a father-substitute. As a boy the patient in question - a Russian whom I did not analyse till he was in his twenties - had had a dream (whose meaning was revealed in analysis) and, immediately after it, had developed a fear of bring devoured by a wolf, like the seven little goats in the fairy tale. 1 In the case of ‘Little Hans’ the ascertained fact that his father used to play at horses with him doubtless determined his choice of a horse as his anxiety-animal. In the same way it appeared at least highly probable that the father of my Russian patient used, when playing with him, to pretend to be a wolf and jokingly threaten to gobble him up. Since then I have come across a third instance. The patient was a young American who came to me for analysis. He did not, it is true, develop an animal phobia, but it is precisely because of this omission that his case helps to throw light upon the other two. As a child he had been sexually excited by a fantastic children’s story which had been read aloud to him about an Arab chief who pursued a ‘ginger-bread man’ so as to eat him up. He identified himself with this edible person, and the Arab chief was easily recognizable as a father-substitute. This phantasy formed the earliest substratum of his auto-erotic phantasies.

¹  ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (1918b).

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4265

The idea of being devoured by the father is typical age-old childhood material. It has familiar parallels in mythology (e.g. the myth of Kronos) and in the animal kingdom. Yet in spite of this confirmation the idea is so strange to us that we can hardly credit its existence in a child. Nor do we know whether it really means what it seems to say, and we cannot understand how it can have become the subject of a phobia. Analytic observation supplies the requisite information. It shows that the idea of being devoured by the father gives expression, in a form that has undergone regressive degradation, to a passive, tender impulse to be loved by him in a genital-erotic sense. Further investigation of the case history leaves no doubt of the correctness of this explanation. The genital impulse, it is true, betrays no sign of its tender purpose when it is expressed in the language belonging to the superseded transitional phase between the oral and sadistic organizations of the libido. Is it, moreover, a question merely of the replacement of the representative by a regressive form of expression or is it a question of a genuine regressive degradation of the genitally-directed impulse in the id? It is not at all easy to make certain. The case history of the Russian ‘Wolf Man’ gives very definite support to the second, more serious, view; for, from the time of the decisive dream onward, the boy became naughty, tormenting and sadistic, and soon afterwards developed a regular obsessional neurosis. At any rate, we can see that repression is not the only means which the ego can employ for the purpose of defence against an unwelcome instinctual impulse. If it succeeds in making an instinct regress, it will actually have done it more injury than it could have by repressing it. Sometimes, indeed, after forcing an instinct to regress in this way, it goes on to repress it.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4266

The case of the ‘Wolf Man’ and the somewhat less complicated one of ‘Little Hans’ raise a number of further considerations. But we have already made two unexpected discoveries. There can be no doubt that the instinctual impulse which was repressed in both phobias was a hostile one against the father. One might say that that impulse had been repressed by the process of being transformed into its opposite. Instead of aggressiveness on the part of the subject towards his father, there appeared aggressiveness (in the shape of revenge) on the part of his father towards the subject. Since this aggressiveness is in any case rooted in the sadistic phase of the libido, only a certain amount of degradation is needed to reduce it to the oral stage. This stage, while only hinted at in ‘Little Hans’s’ fear of being bitten, was blatantly exhibited in the ‘Wolf Man’s’ terror of being devoured. But, besides this, the analysis has demonstrated, beyond a shadow of doubt, the presence of another instinctual impulse of an opposite nature which had succumbed to repression. This was a tender, passive impulse directed towards the father, which had already reached the genital (phallic) level of libidinal organization. As regards the final outcome of the process of repression, this impulse seems, indeed, to have been the more important of the two; it underwent a more far-reaching regression and had a decisive influence upon the content of the phobia. In following up a single instinctual repression we have thus had to recognize a convergence of two such processes. The two instinctual impulses that have been overtaken by repression - sadistic aggressiveness towards the father and a tender passive attitude to him - form a pair of opposites. Furthermore, a full appreciation of ‘Little Hans’s’ case shows that the formation of his phobia had had the effect of abolishing his affectionate object-cathexis of his mother as well, though the actual content of his phobia betrayed no sign of this. The process of repression had attacked almost all the components of his Oedipus complex - both his hostile and his tender impulses towards his father and his tender impulses towards his mother. In my Russian patient this state of affairs was much less obvious.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4267

These are unwelcome complications, considering that we only set out to study simple cases of symptom-formation due to repression, and with that intention selected the earliest and to all appearances, most transparent neuroses of childhood. Instead of a single repression we have found a collection of them and have become involved with regression into the bargain. Perhaps we have added to the confusion by treating the two cases of animal phobia at our disposal - ‘ Little Hans’ and the ‘Wolf Man’ - as though they were cast in the same mould. As a matter of fact, certain differences between them stand out. It is only with regard to ‘Little Hans’ that we can say with certainty that what his phobia disposed of were the two main impulses of the Oedipus complex - his aggressiveness towards his father and his over-fondness for his mother. A tender feeling for his father was undoubtedly there too and played a part in repressing the opposite feeling; but we can prove neither that it was strong enough to draw repression upon itself nor that it disappeared afterwards. ‘Hans’ seems, in fact, to have been a normal boy with what is called a ‘positive’ Oedipus complex. It is possible that the factors which we do not find were actually at work in him, but we cannot demonstrate their existence. Even the most exhaustive analysis has gaps in its data and is insufficiently documented. In the case of the Russian the deficiency lies elsewhere. His attitude to female objects had been disturbed by an early seduction and his passive, feminine side was strongly developed. The analysis of his wolf-dream revealed very little intentional aggressiveness towards his father, but it brought forward unmistakable proof that what repression overtook was his passive tender attitude to his father. In his case, too, the other factors may have been operative as well; but they were not in evidence. How is it that, in spite of these differences in the two cases, almost amounting to an antithesis, the final outcome - a phobia - was approximately the same? The answer must be sought in another quarter. I think it will be found in the second fact which emerges from our brief comparative examination. It seems to me that in both cases we can detect what the motive force of the repression was and can substantiate our view of its nature from the line of development which the two children subsequently pursued. This motive force was the same in both of them. It was the fear of impending castration. ‘Little Hans’ gave up his aggressiveness towards his father from fear of being castrated. His fear that a horse would bite him can, without any forcing, be given the full sense of a fear that a horse would bite off his genitals, would castrate him. But it was from fear of being castrated, too, that the little Russian relinquished his wish to be loved by his father, for he thought that a relation of that sort presupposed a sacrifice of his genitals - of the organ which distinguished him from a female. As we see, both forms of the Oedipus complex, the normal, active form and the inverted one, came to grief through the castration complex. The Russian boy’s anxiety-idea of being devoured by a wolf contained, it is true, no suggestion of castration, for the oral regression it had undergone had removed it too far from the phallic stage. But the analysis of his dream rendered further proof superfluous. It was a triumph of repression that the form in which his phobia was expressed should no longer have contained any allusion to castration.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4268

Here, then, is our unexpected finding: in both patients the motive force of the repression was fear of castration. The ideas contained in their anxiety - being bitten by a horse and being devoured by a wolf - were substitutes by distortion for the idea of being castrated by their father. This was the idea which had undergone repression. In the Russian boy the idea was an expression of a wish which was not able to subsist in the face of his masculine revolt; in ‘Little Hans’ it was the expression of a reaction in him which had turned his aggressiveness into its opposite. But the affect of anxiety, which was the essence of the phobia, came, not from the process of repression, not from the libidinal cathexes of the repressed impulses, but from the repressing agency itself. The anxiety belonging to the animal phobias was an untransformed fear of castration. It was therefore a realistic fear, a fear of a danger which was actually impending or was judged to be a real one. It was anxiety which produced repression and not, as I formerly believed, repression which produced anxiety.

It is no use denying the fact, though it is not pleasant to recall it, that I have on many occasions asserted that in repression the instinctual representative is distorted, displaced and so on, while the libido belonging to the instinctual impulse is transformed into anxiety. But now an examination of phobias, which should be best able to provide confirmatory evidence, fails to bear out my assertion; it seems, rather, to contradict it directly. The anxiety felt in animal phobias is the ego’s fear of castration; while the anxiety felt in agoraphobia (a subject that has been less thoroughly studied) seems to be its fear of sexual temptation - a fear which, after all, must be connected in its origins with the fear of castration. As far as can be seen at present, the majority of phobias go back to an anxiety of this kind felt by the ego in regard to the demands of the libido. It is always the ego’s attitude of anxiety which is the primary thing and which sets repression going. Anxiety never arises from repressed libido. If I had contented myself earlier with saying that after the occurrence of repression a certain amount of anxiety appeared in place of the manifestation of libido that was to be expected, I should have nothing to retract to-day. The description would be correct; and there does undoubtedly exist a correspondence of the kind asserted between the strength of the impulse that has to be repressed and the intensity of the resultant anxiety. But I must admit that I thought I was giving more than a mere description. I believed I had put my finger on a metapsychological process of direct transformation of libido into anxiety. I can now no longer maintain this view. And, indeed, I found it impossible at the time to explain how a transformation of that kind was carried out.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4269

It may be asked how I arrived at this idea of transformation in the first instance. It was while I was studying the ‘actual neuroses’, at a time when analysis was still a very long way from distinguishing between processes in the ego and processes in the id. I found that outbreaks of anxiety and a general state of preparedness for anxiety were produced by certain sexual practices such as coitus interruptus, undischarged sexual excitation or enforced abstinence - that is, whenever sexual excitation was inhibited, arrested or deflected in its progress towards satisfaction. Since sexual excitation was an expression of libidinal instinctual impulses it did not seem too rash to assume that the libido was turned into anxiety through the agency of these disturbances. The observations which I made at the time still hold good. Moreover, it cannot be denied that the libido belonging to the id-processes is subjected to disturbance at the instigation of repression. It might still be true, therefore, that in repression anxiety is produced from the libidinal cathexis of the instinctual impulses. But how can we reconcile this conclusion with our other conclusion that the anxiety felt in phobias is an ego anxiety and arises in the ego, and that it does not proceed out of repression but, on the contrary, sets repression in motion? There seems to be a contradiction here which it is not at all a simple matter to solve. It will not be easy to reduce the two sources of anxiety to a single one. We might attempt to do so by supposing that, when coitus is disturbed or sexual excitation interrupted or abstinence enforced, the ego scents certain dangers to which it reacts with anxiety. But this takes us nowhere. On the other hand, our analysis of the phobias seems to admit of no correction. Non liquet.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4270

V

We set out to study the formation of symptoms and the secondary struggle waged by the ego against symptoms. But in picking on the phobias for this purpose we have clearly made an unlucky choice. The anxiety which predominates in the picture of these disorders is now seen as a complication which obscures the situation. There are plenty of neuroses which exhibit no anxiety whatever. True conversion hysteria is one of these. Even in its most severe symptoms no admixture of anxiety is found. This fact alone ought to warn us against making too close a connection between anxiety and symptom-formation. The phobias are so closely akin to conversion hysteria in every other respect that I have felt justified in classing them alongside of it under the name of ‘anxiety hysteria’. But no one has as yet been able to say what it is that determines whether any given case shall take the form of a conversion hysteria or a phobia - has been able, that is to say, to establish what determines the generating of anxiety in hysteria.

The commonest symptoms of conversion hysteria - motor paralyses, contractures, involuntary actions or discharges, pains and hallucinations - are cathectic processes which are either permanently maintained or intermittent. But this puts fresh difficulties in the way. Not much is actually known about these symptoms. Analysis can show what the disturbed excitatory process is which the symptoms replace. It usually turns out that they themselves have a share in that process. It is as though the whole energy of the process had been concentrated in this one part of it. For instance, it will be found that the pains from which a patient suffers were present in the situation in which the repression occurred; or that his hallucination was, at that time, a perception; or that his motor paralysis is a defence against an action which should have been performed in that situation but was inhibited; or that his contracture is usually a displacement of an intended innervation of the muscles in some other part of his body; or that his convulsions are the expression of an outburst of affect which has been withdrawn from the normal control of the ego. The sensation of unpleasure which accompanies the appearance of the symptoms varies in a striking degree. In chronic symptoms which have been displaced on to motility, like paralyses and contractures, it is almost always entirely absent; the ego behaves towards the symptoms as though it had nothing to do with them. In intermittent symptoms and in those concerned with the sensory sphere, sensations of unpleasure are as a rule distinctly felt; and in symptoms of pain these may reach an extreme degree. The picture presented is so manifold that it is difficult to discover the factor which permits of all these variations and yet allows a uniform explanation of them. There is, moreover, little to be seen in conversion hysteria of the ego’s struggle against the symptom after it has been formed. It is only when sensitivity to pain in some part of the body constitutes the symptom that that symptom is in a position to play a dual role. The symptom of pain will appear no less regularly whenever the part of the body concerned is touched from outside than when the pathogenic situation which it represents is associatively activated from within; and the ego will take precautions to prevent the symptom from being aroused through external perceptions. Why the formation of symptoms in conversion hysteria should be such a peculiarly obscure thing I cannot tell; but the fact affords us a good reason for quitting such an unproductive field of enquiry without delay.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4271

Let us turn to the obsessional neuroses in the hope of learning more about the formation of symptoms. The symptoms belonging to this neurosis fall, in general, into two groups, each having an opposite trend. They are either prohibitions, precautions and expiations - that is, negative in character - or they are, on the contrary, substitutive satisfactions which often appear in symbolic disguise. The negative, defensive group of symptoms is the older of the two; but as illness is prolonged, the satisfactions, which scoff at all defensive measures, gain the upper hand. The symptom-formation scores a triumph if it succeeds in combining the prohibition with satisfaction so that what was originally a defensive command or prohibition acquires the significance of a satisfaction as well; and in order to achieve this end it will often make use of the most ingenious associative paths. Such an achievement demonstrates the tendency of the ego to synthesize, which we have already observed. In extreme cases the patient manages to make most of his symptoms acquire, in addition to their original meaning, a directly contrary one. This is a tribute to the power of ambivalence, which, for some unknown reason, plays such a large part in obsessional neuroses. In the crudest instance the symptom is diphasic: an action which carries out a certain injunction is immediately succeeded by another action which stops or undoes the first one even if it does not go quite so far as to carry out its opposite.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4272

Two impressions at once emerge from this brief survey of obsessional symptoms. The first is that a ceaseless struggle is being waged against the repressed, in which the repressing forces steadily lose ground; the second is that the ego and the super-ego have a specially large share in the formation of the symptoms.

Obsessional neurosis is unquestionably the most interesting and repaying subject of analytic research. But as a problem it has not yet been mastered. It must be confessed that, if we endeavour to penetrate more deeply into its nature, we still have to rely upon doubtful assumptions and unconfirmed suppositions. Obsessional neurosis originates, no doubt, in the same situation as hysteria, namely, the necessity of fending off the libidinal demands of the Oedipus complex. Indeed, every obsessional neurosis seems to have a substratum of hysterical symptoms that have been formed at a very early stage. But it is subsequently shaped along quite different lines owing to a constitutional factor. The genital organization of the libido turns out to be feeble and insufficiently resistant, so that when the ego begins its defensive efforts the first thing it succeeds in doing is to throw back the genital organization (of the phallic phase), in whole or in part, to the earlier sadistic-anal level. This fact of regression is decisive for all that follows.

Another possibility has to be considered. Perhaps regression is the result no t of a constitutional factor but of a time-factor. It may be that regression is rendered possible not because the genital organization of the libido is too feeble but because the opposition of the ego begins too early, while the sadistic phase is at its height. I am not prepared to express a definite opinion on this point, but I may say that analytic observation does not speak in favour of such an assumption. It shows rather that, by the time an obsessional neurosis is entered upon, the phallic stage has already been reached. Moreover, the onset of this neurosis belongs to a later time of life than that of hysteria - to the second period of childhood, after the latency period has set in. In a woman patient whose case I was able to study and who was overtaken by this disorder at a very late date, it became clear that the determining cause of her regression and of the emergence of her obsessional neurosis was a real occurrence through which her genital life, which had up till then been intact, lost all its value.¹

¹ See my paper on ‘The Disposition to Obsessional Neurosis’ (1913I).

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4273

As regards the metapsychological explanation of regression, I am inclined to find it in a ‘defusion of instinct’, in a detachment of the erotic components which, with the onset of the genital stage, had joined the destructive cathexes belonging to the sadistic phase.

In enforcing regression, the ego scores its first success in its defensive struggle against the demands of the libido. (In this connection it is of advantage to distinguish the more general notion of ‘defence’ from ‘repression’. Repression is only one of the mechanisms which defence makes use of.) It is perhaps in obsessional cases more than in normal or hysterical ones that we can most clearly recognize that the motive force of defence is the castration complex and that what is being fended off are the trends of the Oedipus complex. We are at present dealing with the beginning of the latency period, a period which is characterized by the dissolution of the Oedipus complex, the creation or consolidation of the super-ego and the erection of ethical and aesthetic barriers in the ego. In obsessional neuroses these processes are carried further than is normal. In addition to the destruction of the Oedipus complex a regressive degradation of the libido takes place, the super-ego becomes exceptionally severe and unkind, and the ego, in obedience to the super-ego, produces strong reaction-formations in the shape of conscientiousness, pity and cleanliness. Implacable, though not always on that account successful, severity is shown in condemning the temptation to continue early infantile masturbation, which now attaches itself to regressive (sadistic-anal) ideas but which nevertheless represents the unsubjugated part of the phallic organization. There is an inherent contradiction about this state of affairs, in which, precisely in the interests of masculinity (that is to say, from fear of castration), every activity belonging to masculinity is stopped. But here, too, obsessional neurosis is only overdoing the normal method of getting rid of the Oedipus complex. We once more find here an illustration of the truth that every exaggeration contains the seed of its own undoing. For, under the guise of obsessional acts, the masturbation that has been suppressed approaches ever more closely to satisfaction.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4274

The reaction-formations in the ego of the obsessional neurotic, which we recognize as exaggerations of normal character-formation, should be regarded, I think, as yet another mechanism of defence and placed alongside of regression and repression. They seem to be absent or very much weaker in hysteria. Looking back, we can now get an idea of what is peculiar to the defensive process in hysteria. It seems that in it the process is limited to repression alone. The ego turns away from the disagreeable instinctual impulse, leaves it to pursue its course in the unconscious, and takes no further part in its fortunes. This view cannot be absolutely correct, for we are acquainted with the case in which a hysterical symptom is at the same time a fulfilment of a penalty imposed by the super-ego; but it may describe a general characteristic of the behaviour of the ego in hysteria.

We can either simply accept it as a fact that in obsessional neurosis a super-ego of this severe kind emerges, or we can take the regression of the libido as the fundamental characteristic of the affection and attempt to relate the severity of the super-ego to it. And indeed the super-ego, originating as it does from the id, cannot dissociate itself from the regression and defusion of instinct which have taken place there. We cannot be surprised if it becomes harsher, unkinder and more tormenting than where development has been normal.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4275

The chief task during the latency period seems to be the fending-off of the temptation to masturbate. This struggle produces a series of symptoms which appear in a typical fashion in the most different individuals and which in general have the character of a ceremonial. It is a great pity that no one has as yet collected them and systematically analysed them. Being the earliest products of the neurosis they should best be able to shed light on the mechanisms employed in its symptom-formation. They already exhibit the features which will emerge so disastrously if a serious illness follows. They tend to become attached to activities (which would later be carried out almost automatically) such as going to sleep, washing, dressing and walking about; and they tend also to repetition and waste of time. Why this should be so is at present not at all clear; but the sublimation of anal-erotic components plays an unmistakable part in it.

The advent of puberty opens a decisive chapter in the history of an obsessional neurosis. The genital organization which has been broken off in childhood starts again with great vigour. But, as we know, the sexual development in childhood determines what direction this new start at puberty will take. Not only will the early aggressive impulses be re-awakened; but a greater or lesser proportion of the new libidinal impulses - in bad cases the whole of them - will have to follow the course prescribed for them by regression and will emerge as aggressive and destructive tendencies. In consequence of the erotic trends being disguised in this way and owing to the powerful reaction-formations in the ego, the struggle against sexuality will henceforward be carried on under the banner of ethical principles. The ego will recoil with astonishment from promptings to cruelty and violence which enter consciousness from the id, and it has no notion that in them it is combating erotic wishes, including some to which it would not otherwise have taken exception. The overstrict super-ego insists all the more strongly on the suppression of sexuality, since this has assumed such repellent forms. Thus in obsessional neurosis the conflict is aggravated in two directions: the defensive forces become more intolerant and the forces that are to be fended off become more intolerable. Both effects are due to a single factor, namely, regression of the libido.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4276

A good deal of what has been said may be objected to on the ground that the unpleasant obsessive ideas are themselves quite conscious. But there is no doubt that before becoming conscious they have been though the process of repression. In most of them the actual wording of the aggressive instinctual impulse is altogether unknown to the ego, and it requires a good deal of analytic work to make it conscious. What does penetrate into consciousness is usually only a distorted substitute which is either of a vague, dream-like and indeterminate nature or so travestied as to be unrecognizable. Even where repression has not encroached upon the content of the aggressive impulse it has certainly got rid of its accompanying affective character. As a result, the aggressiveness appears to the ego not to be an impulsion but, as the patients themselves say, merely a ‘thought’ which awakens no feeling. But the remarkable thing is that this is not the case. What happens is that the affect left out when the obsessional idea is perceived appears in a different place. The super-ego behaves as though repression had not occurred and as though it knew the real wording and full affective character of the aggressive impulse, and it treats the ego accordingly. The ego which, on the one hand, knows that it is innocent is obliged, on the other hand, to be aware of a sense of guilt and to carry a responsibility which it cannot account for. This state of affairs is, however, not so puzzling as it would seem at first sight. The behaviour of the super-ego is perfectly intelligible, and the contradiction in the ego merely shows that it has shut out the id by means of repression while remaining fully accessible to the influence of the super-ego. 1 If it is asked why the ego does not also attempt to withdraw from the tormenting criticism of the super-ego, the answer is that it does manage to do so in a great number of instances. There are obsessional neuroses in which no sense of guilt whatever is present. In them, as far as can be seen, the ego has avoided becoming aware of it by instituting a fresh set of symptoms, penances or restrictions of a self-punishing kind. These symptoms, however, represent at the same time a satisfaction of masochistic impulses which, in their turn, have been reinforced by regression.

¹ Cf. Theodor Reik, 1925, 51.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4277

Obsessional neurosis presents such a vast multiplicity of phenomena that no efforts have yet succeeded in making a coherent synthesis of all its variations. All we can do is to pick out certain typical correlations; but there is always the risk that we may have overlooked other uniformities of a no less important kind.

I have already described the general tendency of symptom-formation in obsessional neurosis. It is to give ever greater room to substitutive satisfaction at the expense of frustration. Symptoms which once stood for a restriction of the ego come later on to represent satisfactions as well, thanks to the ego’s inclination to synthesis, and it is quite clear that this second meaning gradually becomes the more important of the two. The result of this process, which approximates more and more to a complete failure of the original purpose of defence, is an extremely restricted ego which is reduced to seeking satisfaction in the symptoms. The displacement of the distribution of forces in favour of satisfaction may have the dreaded final outcome of paralysing the will of the ego, which in every decision it has to make is almost as strongly impelled from the one side as from the other. The over-acute conflict between id and super-ego which has dominated the illness from the very beginning may assume such extensive proportions that the ego, unable to carry out its office of mediator, can undertake nothing which is not drawn into the sphere of that conflict.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4278

VI

In the course of these struggles we come across two activities of the ego which form symptoms and which deserve special attention because they are obviously surrogates of repression and therefore well calculated to illustrate its purpose and technique. The fact that such auxiliary and substitutive techniques emerge may argue that true repression has met with difficulties in its functioning. If one considers how much more the ego is the scene of action of symptom-formation in obsessional neurosis than it is in hysteria and with what tenacity the ego clings to its relations to reality and to consciousness, employing all its intellectual faculties to that end - and indeed how the very process of thinking becomes hypercathected and erotized - then one may perhaps come to a better understanding of these variations of repression.

The two techniques I refer to are undoing what has been done and isolating. The first of these has a wide range of application and goes back very far. It is, as it were, negative magic, and endeavours, by means of motor symbolism, to ‘blow away’ not merely the consequences of some event (or experience or impression) but the event itself. I choose the term ‘blow away’ advisedly, so as to remind the reader of the part played by this technique not only in neuroses but in magical acts, popular customs and religious ceremonies as well. In obsessional neurosis the technique of undoing what has been done is first met with in the ‘diphasic’ symptoms, in which one action is cancelled out by a second, so that it is as though neither action had taken place, whereas, in reality, both have. This aim of undoing is the second underlying motive of obsessional ceremonials, the first being to take precautions in order to prevent the occurrence or recurrence of some particular event. The difference between the two is easily seen: the precautionary measures are rational, while trying to get rid of something by ‘making it not to have happened’ is irrational and in the nature of magic. It is of course to be suspected that the latter is the earlier motive of the two and proceeds from the animistic attitude towards the environment. This endeavour to undo shades off into normal behaviour in the case in which a person decides to regard an event as not having happened. But whereas he will take no direct steps against the event, and will simply pay no further attention to it or its consequences, the neurotic person will try to make the past itself non-existent. He will try to repress it by motor means. The same purpose may perhaps account for the obsession for repeating which is so frequently met with in this neurosis and the carrying out of which serves a number of contradictory intentions at once. When anything has not happened in the desired way it is undone by being repeated in a different way; and thereupon all the motives that exist for lingering over such repetitions come into play as well. As the neurosis proceeds, we often find that the endeavour to undo a traumatic experience is a motive of first-rate importance in the formation of symptoms. We thus unexpectedly discover a new, motor technique of defence, or (as we may say in this case with less inaccuracy) of repression.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4279

The second of these techniques which we are setting out to describe for the first time, that of isolation, is peculiar to obsessional neurosis. It, too, takes place in the motor sphere. When something unpleasant has happened to the subject or when he himself has done something which has a significance for his neurosis, he interpolates an interval during which nothing further must happen - during which he must perceive nothing and do nothing. This behaviour, which seems strange at first sight, is soon seen to have a relation to repression. We know that in hysteria it is possible to cause a traumatic experience to be overtaken by amnesia. In obsessional neurosis this can often not be achieved: the experience is not forgotten, but, instead, it is deprived of its affect, and its associative connections are suppressed or interrupted so that it remains as though isolated and is not reproduced in the ordinary processes of thought. The effect of this isolation is the same as the effect of repression with amnesia. This technique, then, is reproduced in the isolations of obsessional neurosis; and it is at the same time given motor reinforcement for magical purposes. The elements that are held apart in this way are precisely those which belong together associatively. The motor isolation is meant to ensure an interruption of the connection in thought. The normal phenomenon of concentration provides a pretext for this kind of neurotic procedure: what seems to us important in the way of an impression or a piece of work must not be interfered with by the simultaneous claims of any other mental processes or activities. But even a normal person uses concentration to keep away not only what is irrelevant or unimportant, but, above all, what is unsuitable because it is contradictory. He is most disturbed by those elements which once belonged together but which have been torn apart in the course of his development - as, for instance, by manifestations of the ambivalence of his father-complex in his relation to God, or by impulses attached to his excretory organs in his emotions of love. Thus, in the normal course of things, the ego has a great deal of isolating work to do in its function of directing the current of thought. And, as we know, we are obliged, in carrying out our analytic technique, to train it to relinquish that function for the time being, eminently justified as it usually is.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4280

We have all found by experience that it is especially difficult for an obsessional neurotic to carry out the fundamental rule of psycho-analysis. His ego is more watchful and makes sharper isolations, probably because of the high degree of tension due to conflict that exists between his super-ego and his id. While he is engaged in thinking, his ego has to keep off too much - the intrusion of unconscious phantasies and the manifestation of ambivalent trends. It must not relax, but is constantly prepared for a struggle. It fortifies this compulsion to concentrate and to isolate by the help of the magical acts of isolation which, in the form of symptoms, grow to be so noticeable and to have so much practical importance for the patient, but which are, of course, useless in themselves and are in the nature of ceremonials.

But in thus endeavouring to prevent associations and connections of thought, the ego is obeying one of the oldest and most fundamental commands of obsessional neurosis, the taboo on touching. If we ask ourselves why the avoidance of touching, contact or contagion should play such a large part in this neurosis and should become the subject-matter of complicated systems, the answer is that touching and physical contact are the immediate aim of the aggressive as well as the loving object- cathexes. Eros desires contact because it strives to make the ego and the loved object one, to abolish all spatial barriers between them. But destructiveness, too, which (before the invention of long-range weapons) could only take effect at close quarters, must presuppose physical contact, a coming to grips. To ‘touch’ a woman has become a euphemism for using her as a sexual object. Not to ‘touch’ one’s genitals is the phrase employed for forbidding auto-erotic satisfaction. Since obsessional neurosis begins by persecuting erotic touching and then, after regression has taken place, goes on to persecute touching in the guise of aggressiveness, it follows that nothing is so strongly proscribed in that illness as touching nor so well suited to become the central point of a system of prohibitions. But isolating is removing the possibility of contact; it is a method of withdrawing a thing from being touched in any way. And when a neurotic isolates an impression or an activity by interpolating an interval, he is letting it be understood symbolically that he will not allow his thoughts about that impression or activity to come into associative contact with other thoughts.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4281

This is as far as our investigations into the formation of symptoms take us. It is hardly worth while summing them up, for the results they have yielded are scanty and incomplete and tell us scarcely anything that we do not already know. It would be fruitless to turn our attention to symptom-formation in other disorders besides phobias, conversion hysteria and obsessional neurosis, for too little is known about them. But in reviewing those three neuroses together we are brought up against a very serious problem the consideration of which can no longer be put off. All three have as their outcome the destruction of the Oedipus complex; and in all three the motive force of the ego’s opposition is, we believe, the fear of castration. Yet it is only in the phobias that this fear comes to the surface and is acknowledged. What has become of it in the other two neuroses? How has the ego spared itself this fear? The problem becomes accentuated when we recall the possibility, already referred to, that anxiety arises directly, by a kind of fermentation, from a libidinal cathexis whose processes have been disturbed. Furthermore, is it absolutely certain that fear of castration is the only motive force of repression (or defence)? If we think of neuroses in women we are bound to doubt it. For though we can with certainty establish in them the presence of a castration complex, we can hardly speak with propriety of castration anxiety where castration has already taken place.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4282

VII

Let us go back again to infantile phobias of animals; for, when all is said and done, we understand them better than any other cases. In animal phobias, then, the ego has to oppose a libidinal object-cathexis coming from the id - a cathexis that belongs either to the positive or the negative Oedipus complex - because it believes that to give way to it would entail the danger of castration. This question has already been discussed, but there still remains a doubtful point to clear up. In ‘Little Hans’s’ case - that is, in the case of a positive Oedipus complex - was it his fondness for his mother or was it his aggressiveness towards his father which called out the defence by the ego? In practice it seems to make no difference, especially as each set of feelings implies the other; but the question has a theoretical interest, since it is only the feeling of affection for the mother which can count as a purely erotic one. The aggressive impulse flows mainly from the destructive instinct; and we have always believed that in a neurosis it is against the demands of the libido and not against those of any other instinct that the ego is defending itself. In point of fact we know that after ‘Hans’s’ phobia had been formed, his tender attachment to his mother seemed to disappear, having been completely disposed of by repression, while the formation of the symptom (the substitutive formation) took place in relation to his aggressive impulses. In the ‘Wolf Man’ the situation was simpler. The impulse that was repressed - his feminine attitude towards his father - was a genuinely erotic one; and it was in relation to that impulse that the formation of his symptoms took place.

It is almost humiliating that, after working so long, we should still be having difficulty in understanding the most fundamental facts. But we have made up our minds to simplify nothing and to hide nothing. If we cannot see things clearly we will at least see clearly what the obscurities are. What is hampering us here is evidently some hitch in the development of our theory of the instincts. We began by tracing the organization of the libido through its successive stages - from the oral through the sadistic-anal to the genital - and in doing so placed all the components of the sexual instinct on the same footing. Later it appeared that sadism was the representative of another instinct, which was opposed to Eros. This new view, that the instincts fall into two groups, seems to explode the earlier construction of the successive stages of libidinal organization. But we do not have to break fresh ground in order to find a way out of the difficulty. The solution has been at hand for a long time and lies in the fact that what we are concerned with are scarcely ever pure instinctual impulses but mixtures in various proportions of the two groups of instincts. If this is so, there is no need to revise our view of the organizations of the libido. A sadistic cathexis of an object may also legitimately claim to be treated as a libidinal one; and an aggressive impulse against the father can just as well be subjected to repression as a tender impulse towards the mother. Nevertheless we shall bear in mind for future consideration the possibility that repression is a process which has a special relation to the genital organization of the libido and that the ego resorts to other methods of defence when it has to secure itself against the libido on other levels of organization. To continue: a case like ‘Little Hans’s’ does not enable us to come to any clear conclusion. It is true that in him an aggressive impulse was disposed of by repression, but this happened after the genital organization had been reached.

This time we will not lose sight of the part played by anxiety. We have said that as soon as the ego recognizes the danger of castration it gives the signal of anxiety and inhibits through the pleasure-unpleasure agency (in a way which we cannot as yet understand) the impending cathectic process in the id. At the same time the phobia is formed. And now the castration anxiety is directed to a different object and expressed in a distorted form, so that the patient is afraid, not of being castrated by his father, but of being bitten by a horse or devoured by a wolf. This substitutive formation has two obvious advantages. In the first place it avoids a conflict due to ambivalence (for the father was a loved object, too), and in the second place it enables the ego to cease generating anxiety. For the anxiety belonging to a phobia is conditional; it only emerges when the object of it is perceived - and rightly so, since it is only then that the danger-situation is present. There is no need to be afraid of being castrated by a father who is not there. On the other hand one cannot get rid of a father; he can appear whenever he chooses. But if he is replaced by an animal, all one has to do is to avoid the sight of it - that is, its presence - in order to be free from danger and anxiety. ‘Little Hans’, therefore, imposed a restriction upon his ego. He produced the inhibition of not leaving the house, so as not to come across any horses. The young Russian had an even easier time of it, for it was hardly a privation for him not to look at a particular picture-book any more. If his naughty sister had not kept on showing him the book with the picture of the wolf standing upright in it, he would have been able to feel safe from his fear.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4283

On a previous occasion I have stated that phobias have the character of a projection in that they replace an internal, instinctual danger by an external, perceptual one. The advantage of this is that the subject can protect himself against an external danger by fleeing from it and avoiding the perception of it, whereas it is useless to flee from dangers that arise from within. This statement of mine was not incorrect, but it did not go below the surface of things. For an instinctual demand is, after all, not dangerous in itself; it only becomes so inasmuch as it entails a real external danger, the danger of castration. Thus what happens in a phobia in the last resort is merely that one external danger is replaced by another. The view that in a phobia the ego is able to escape anxiety by means of avoidance or of inhibitory symptoms fits in very well with the theory that that anxiety is only an affective signal and that no alteration has taken place in the economic situation.

The anxiety felt in animal phobias is, therefore, an affective reaction on the part of the ego to danger; and the danger which is being signalled in this way is the danger of castration. This anxiety differs in no respect from the realistic anxiety which the ego normally feels in situations of danger, except that its content remains unconscious and only becomes conscious in the form of a distortion.

The same will prove true, I think, of the phobias of adults, although the material which their neuroses work over is much more abundant and there are some additional factors in the formation of the symptoms. Fundamentally the position is identical. The agoraphobic patient imposes a restriction on his ego so as to escape a certain instinctual danger - namely, the danger of giving way to his erotic desires. For if he did so the danger of being castrated, or some similar danger, would once more be conjured up as it was in his childhood. I may cite as an instance the case of a young man who became agoraphobic because he was afraid of yielding to the solicitations of prostitutes and of contracting a syphilitic infection from them as a punishment.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4284

I am well aware that a number of cases exhibit a more complicated structure and that many other repressed instinctual impulses can enter into a phobia. But they are only tributary streams which have for the most part joined the main current of the neurosis at a later stage. The symptomatology of agoraphobia is complicated by the fact that the ego does not confine itself to making a renunciation. In order to rob the situation of danger it does more: it usually effects a temporal regression to infancy (in extreme cases, to a time when the subject was in his mother’s womb and protected against the dangers which threaten him in the present). Such a regression now becomes a condition whose fulfilment exempts the ego from making its renunciation. For instance, an agoraphobic patient may be able to walk in the street provided he is accompanied, like a small child, by someone he knows and trusts; or, for the same reason, he may be able to go out alone provided he remains within a certain distance of his own house and does not go to places which are not familiar to him or where people do not know him. What these stipulations are will depend in each case on the infantile factors which dominate him through his neurosis. The phobia of being alone is unambiguous in its meaning, irrespective of any infantile regression: it is, ultimately, an endeavour to avoid the temptation to indulge in solitary masturbation. Infantile regression can, of course, only take place when the subject is no longer a child.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4285

A phobia generally sets in after a first anxiety attack has been experienced in specific circumstances, such as in the street or in a train or in solitude. Thereafter the anxiety is held in ban by the phobia, but it re-emerges whenever the protective condition cannot be fulfilled. The mechanism of phobia does good service as a means of defence and tends to be very stable. A continuation of the defensive struggle, in the shape of a struggle against the symptom, occurs frequently but not invariably.

What we have learnt about anxiety in phobias is applicable to obsessional neuroses as well. In this respect it is not difficult for us to put obsessional neuroses on all fours with phobias. In the former, the mainspring of all later symptom-formation is clearly the ego’s fear of its super-ego. The danger-situation from which the ego must get away is the hostility of the super-ego. There is no trace of projection here; the danger is completely internalized. But if we ask ourselves what it is that the ego fears from the super-ego, we cannot but think that the punishment threatened by the latter must be an extension of the punishment of castration. Just as the father has become depersonalized in the shape of the super-ego, so has the fear of castration at his hands become transformed into an undefined social or moral anxiety. But this anxiety is concealed. The ego escapes it by obediently carrying out the commands, precautions and penances that have been enjoined on it. If it is impeded in doing so, it is at once overtaken by an extremely distressing feeling of discomfort which may be regarded as an equivalent of anxiety and which the patients themselves liken to anxiety.

The conclusion we have come to, then, is this. Anxiety is a reaction to a situation of danger. It is obviated by the ego’s doing something to avoid that situation or to withdraw from it. It might be said that symptoms are created so as to avoid the generating of anxiety. But this does not go deep enough. It would be truer to say that symptoms are created so as to avoid a danger-situation whose presence has been signalled by the generation of anxiety. In the cases that we have discussed, the danger concerned was the danger of castration or of something traceable back to castration.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4286

If anxiety is a reaction of the ego to danger, we shall be tempted to regard the traumatic neuroses, which so often follow upon a narrow escape from death, as a direct result of a fear of death (or fear for life) and to dismiss from our minds the question of castration and the dependent relationships of the ego. Most of those who observed the traumatic neuroses that occurred during the last war took this line, and triumphantly announced that proof was now forthcoming that a threat to the instinct of self-preservation could by itself produce a neurosis without any admixture of sexual factors and without requiring any of the complicated hypotheses of psycho-analysis. It is in fact greatly to be regretted that not a single analysis of a traumatic neurosis of any value is extant. And it is to be regretted, not because such an analysis would contradict the aetiological importance of sexuality - for any such contradiction has long since been disposed of by the introduction of the concept of narcissism, which brings the libidinal cathexis of the ego into line with the cathexes of objects and emphasizes the libidinal character of the instinct of self-preservation - but because, in the absence of any analyses of this kind, we have lost a most precious opportunity of drawing decisive conclusions about the relations between anxiety and the formation of symptoms. In view of all that we know about the structure of the comparatively simple neuroses of everyday life, it would seem highly improbable that a neurosis could come into being merely because of the objective presence of danger, without any participation of the deeper levels of the mental apparatus. But the unconscious seems to contain nothing that could give any content to our concept of the annihilation of life. Castration can be pictured on the basis of the daily experience of the faeces being separated from the body or on the basis of losing the mother’s breast at weaning. But nothing resembling death can ever have been experienced; or if it has, as in fainting, it has left no observable traces behind. I am therefore inclined to adhere to the view that the fear of death should be regarded as analogous to the fear of castration and that the situation to which the ego is reacting is one of being abandoned by the protecting super-ego - the powers of destiny - so that it has no longer any safeguard against all the dangers that surround it. In addition, it must be remembered that in the experiences which lead to a traumatic neurosis the protective shield against external stimuli is broken through and excessive amounts of excitation impinge upon the mental apparatus; so that we have here a second possibility - that anxiety is not only being signalled as an affect but is also being freshly created out of the economic conditions of the situation.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4287

The statement I have just made, to the effect that the ego has been prepared to expect castration by having undergone constantly repeated object-losses, places the question of anxiety in a new light. We have hitherto regarded it as an affective signal of danger; but now, since the danger is so often one of castration, it appears to us as a reaction to a loss, a separation. Even though a number of considerations immediately arise which make against this view, we cannot but be struck by one very remarkable correlation. The first experience of anxiety which an individual goes through (in the case of human beings, at all events) is birth, and, objectively speaking, birth is a separation from the mother. It could be compared to a castration of the mother (by equating the child with a penis). Now it would be very satisfactory if anxiety, as a symbol of a separation, were to be repeated on every subsequent occasion on which a separation took place. But unfortunately we are prevented from making use of this correlation by the fact that birth is not experienced subjectively as a separation from the mother, since the foetus, being a completely narcissistic creature, is totally unaware of her existence as an object. Another adverse argument is that we know what the affective reactions to a separation are: they are pain and mourning, not anxiety. Incidentally, it may be remembered that in discussing the question of mourning we also failed to discover why it should be such a painful thing.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4288

VIII

The time has come to pause and consider. What we clearly want is to find something that will tell us what anxiety really is, some criterion that will enable us to distinguish true statements about it from false ones. But this is not easy to get. Anxiety is not so simple a matter. Up till now we have arrived at nothing but contradictory views about it, none of which can, to the unprejudiced eye, be given preference over the others. I therefore propose to adopt a different procedure. I propose to assemble, quite impartially, all the facts that we know about anxiety without expecting to arrive at a fresh synthesis.

Anxiety, then, is in the first place something that is felt. We call it an affective state, although we are also ignorant of what an affect is. As a feeling, anxiety has a very marked character of unpleasure. But that is not the whole of its quality. Not every unpleasure can be called anxiety, for there are other feelings, such as tension, pain or mourning, which have the character of unpleasure. Thus anxiety must have other distinctive features besides this quality of unpleasure. Can we succeed in understanding the differences between these various unpleasurable affects?

We can at any rate note one or two things about the feeling of anxiety. Its unpleasurable character seems to have a note of its own - something not very obvious, whose presence is difficult to prove yet which is in all likelihood there. But besides having this special feature which is difficult to isolate, we notice that anxiety is accompanied by fairly definite physical sensations which can be referred to particular organs of the body. As we are not concerned here with the physiology of anxiety, we shall content ourselves with mentioning a few representatives of these sensations. The clearest and most frequent ones are those connected with the respiratory organs and with the heart. They provide evidence that motor innervations - that is, processes of discharge - play a part in the general phenomenon of anxiety.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4289

Analysis of anxiety-states therefore reveals the existence of (1) a specific character of unpleasure, (2) acts of discharge and (3) perceptions of those acts. The two last points indicate at once a difference between states of anxiety and other similar states, like those of mourning and pain. The latter do not have any motor manifestation; or if they have, the manifestation is not an integral part of the whole state but is distinct from it as being a result of it or a reaction to it. Anxiety, then, is a special state of unpleasure with acts of discharge along particular paths. In accordance with our general views we should be inclined to think that anxiety is based upon an increase of excitation which on the one hand produces the character of unpleasure and on the other finds relief through the acts of discharge already mentioned. But a purely physiological account of this sort will scarcely satisfy us. We are tempted to assume the presence of a historical factor which binds the sensations of anxiety and its innervations firmly together. We assume, in other words, that an anxiety-state is the reproduction of some experience which contained the necessary conditions for such an increase of excitation and a discharge along particular paths, and that from this circumstance the unpleasure of anxiety receives its specific character. In man, birth provides a prototypic experience of this kind, and we are therefore inclined to regard anxiety-states as a reproduction of the trauma of birth.

This does not imply that anxiety occupies an exceptional position among the affective states. In my opinion the other affects are also reproductions of very early, perhaps even pre-individual, experiences of vital importance; and I should be inclined to regard them as universal, typical and innate hysterical attacks, as compared to the recently and individually acquired attacks which occur in hysterical neuroses and whose origin and significance as mnemic symbols have been revealed by analysis. It would be very desirable, of course, to be able to demonstrate the truth of this view in a number of such affects - a thing which is still very far from being the case.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4290

The view that anxiety goes back to the event of birth raises immediate objections which have to be met. It may be argued that anxiety is a reaction which, in all probability, is common to every organism, certainly every organism of a higher order, whereas birth is only experienced by the mammals; and it is doubtful whether in all of them, even, birth has the significance of a trauma. Therefore there can be anxiety without the prototype of birth. But this objection takes us beyond the barrier that divides psychology from biology. It may be that, precisely because anxiety has an indispensable biological function to fulfil as a reaction to a state of danger, it is differently contrived in different organisms. We do not know, besides, whether anxiety involves the same sensations and innervations in organisms far removed from man as it does in man himself. Thus there is no good argument here against the view that, in man, anxiety is modelled upon the process of birth.

If the structure and origin of anxiety are as described, the next question is: what is the function of anxiety and on what occasions is it reproduced? The answer seems to be obvious and convincing: anxiety arose originally as a reaction to a state of danger and it is reproduced whenever a state of that kind recurs.

This answer, however, raises further considerations. The innervations involved in the original state of anxiety probably had a meaning and purpose, in just the same way as the muscular movements which accompany a first hysterical attack. In order to understand a hysterical attack, all one has to do is to look for the situation in which the movements in question formed part of an appropriate and expedient action. Thus at birth it is probable that the innervation, in being directed to the respiratory organs, is preparing the way for the activity of the lungs, and, in accelerating the heartbeat, is helping to keep the blood free from toxic substances. Naturally, when the anxiety-state is reproduced later as an affect it will be lacking in any such expediency, just as are the repetitions of a hysterical attack. When the individual is placed in a new situation of danger it may well be quite inexpedient for him to respond with an anxiety-state (which is a reaction to an earlier danger) instead of initiating a reaction appropriate to the current danger. But his behaviour may become expedient once more if the danger-situation is recognized as it approaches and is signalled by an outbreak of anxiety. In that case he can at once get rid of his anxiety by having recourse to more suitable measures. Thus we see that there are two ways in which anxiety can emerge: in an inexpedient way, when a new situation of danger has occurred, or in an expedient way in order to give a signal and prevent such a situation from occurring.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4291

But what is a ‘danger’? In the act of birth there is a real danger to life. We know what this means objectively; but in a psychological sense it says nothing at all to us. The danger of birth has as yet no psychical content. We cannot possibly suppose that the foetus has any sort of knowledge that there is a possibility of its life being destroyed. It can only be aware of some vast disturbance in the economy of its narcissistic libido. Large sums of excitation crowd in upon it, giving rise to new kinds of feelings of unpleasure, and some organs acquire an increased cathexis, thus foreshadowing the object-cathexis which will soon set in. What elements in all this will be made use of as the sign of a ‘danger-situation’?

Unfortunately far too little is known about the mental make-up of a new-born baby to make a direct answer possible. I cannot even vouch for the validity of the description I have just given. It is easy to say that the baby will repeat its affect of anxiety in every situation which recalls the event of birth. The important thing to know is what recalls the event and what it is that is recalled.

All we can do is to examine the occasions on which infants in arms or somewhat older children show readiness to produce anxiety. In his book on the trauma of birth, Rank (1924) has made a determined attempt to establish a relationship between the earliest phobias of children and the impressions made on them by the event of birth. But I do not think he has been successful. His theory is open to two objections. In the first place, he assumes that the infant has received certain sensory impressions, in particular of a visual kind, at the time of birth, the renewal of which can recall to its memory the trauma of birth and thus evoke a reaction of anxiety. This assumption is quite unfounded and extremely improbable. It is not credible that a child should retain any but tactile and general sensations relating to the process of birth. If, later on, children show fear of small animals that disappear into holes or emerge from them, this reaction, according to Rank, is due to their perceiving an analogy. But it is an analogy of which they cannot be aware. In the second place, in considering these later anxiety-situations Rank dwells, as suits him best, now on the child’s recollection of its happy intra-uterine existence, now on its recollection of the traumatic disturbance which interrupted that existence which leaves the door wide open for arbitrary interpretation. There are, moreover, certain examples of childhood anxiety which directly traverse his theory. When, for instance, a child is left alone in the dark one would expect it, according to his view, to welcome the re-establishment of the intra-uterine situation; yet it is precisely on such occasions that the child reacts with anxiety. And if this is explained by saying that the child is being reminded of the interruption which the event of birth made in its intra-uterine happiness, it becomes impossible to shut one’s eyes any longer to the far-fetched character of such explanations.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4292

I am driven to the conclusion that the earliest phobias of infancy cannot be directly traced back to impressions of the act of birth and that so far they have not been explained. A certain preparedness for anxiety is undoubtedly present in the infant in arms. But this preparedness for anxiety, instead of being at its maximum immediately after birth and then slowly decreasing, does not emerge till later, as mental development proceeds, and lasts over a certain period of childhood. If these early phobias persist beyond that period one is inclined to suspect the presence of a neurotic disturbance, although it is not at all clear what their relation is to the undoubted neuroses that appear later on in childhood.

Only a few of the manifestations of anxiety in children are comprehensible to us, and we must confine our attention to them. They occur, for instance, when a child is alone, or in the dark, or when it finds itself with an unknown person instead of one to whom it is used - such as its mother. These three instances can be reduced to a single condition - namely, that of missing someone who is loved and longed for. But here, I think, we have the key to an understanding of anxiety and to a reconciliation of the contradictions that seem to beset it.

The child’s mnemic image of the person longed for is no doubt intensely cathected, probably in a hallucinatory way at first. But this has no effect; and now it seems as though the longing turns into anxiety. This anxiety has all the appearance of being an expression of the child’s feeling at its wits’ end, as though in its still very undeveloped state it did not know how better to cope with its cathexis of longing. Here anxiety appears as a reaction to the felt loss of the object; and we are at once reminded of the fact that castration anxiety, too, is a fear of being separated from a highly valued object, and that the earliest anxiety of all - the ‘primal anxiety’ of birth - is brought about on the occasion of a separation from the mother.

But a moment’s reflection takes us beyond this question of loss of object. The reason why the infant in arms wants to perceive the presence of its mother is only because it already knows by experience that she satisfies all its needs without delay. The situation, then, which it regards as a ‘danger’ and against which it wants to be safeguarded is that of non-satisfaction, of a growing tension due to need, against which it is helpless. I think that if we adopt this view all the facts fall into place. The situation of non-satisfaction in which the amounts of stimulation rise to an unpleasurable height without its being possible for them to be mastered psychically or discharged must for the infant be analogous to the experience of being born - must be a repetition of the situation of danger. What both situations have in common is the economic disturbance caused by an accumulation of amounts of stimulation which require to be disposed of. It is this factor, then, which is the real essence of the ‘danger’. In both cases the reaction of anxiety sets in. (This reaction is still an expedient one in the infant in arms, for the discharge, being directed into the respiratory and vocal muscular apparatus, now calls its mother to it, just as it activated the lungs of the new-born baby to get rid of the internal stimuli.) It is unnecessary to suppose that the child carries anything more with it from the time of its birth than this way of indicating the presence of danger.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4293

When the infant has found out by experience that an external, perceptible object can put an end to the dangerous situation which is reminiscent of birth, the content of the danger it fears is displaced from the economic situation on to the condition which determined that situation, viz., the loss of object. It is the absence of the mother that is now the danger; and as soon as that danger arises the infant gives the signal of anxiety, before the dreaded economic situation has set in. This change constitutes a first great step forward in the provision made by the infant for its self-preservation, and at the same time represents a transition from the automatic and involuntary fresh appearance of anxiety to the intentional reproduction of anxiety as a signal of danger.

In these two aspects, as an automatic phenomenon and as a rescuing signal, anxiety is seen to be a product of the infant’s mental helplessness which is a natural counterpart of its biological helplessness. The striking coincidence by which the anxiety of the new-born baby and the anxiety of the infant in arms are both conditioned by separation from the mother does not need to be explained on psychological lines. It can be accounted for simply enough biologically; for, just as the mother originally satisfied all the needs of the foetus through the apparatus of her own body, so now, after its birth, she continues to do so, though partly by other means. There is much more continuity between intra-uterine life and earliest infancy than the impressive caesura of the act of birth would have us believe. What happens is that the child’s biological situation as a foetus is replaced for it by a psychical object-relation to its mother. But we must not forget that during its intra-uterine life the mother was not an object for the foetus, and that at that time there were no objects at all. It is obvious that in this scheme of things there is no place for the abreaction of the birth trauma. We cannot find that anxiety has any function other than that of being a signal for the avoidance of a danger situation.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4294

The significance of the loss of object as a determinant of anxiety extends considerably further. For the next transformation of anxiety, viz. the castration anxiety belonging to the phallic phase, is also a fear of separation and is thus attached to the same determinant. In this case the danger is of being separated from one’s genitals. Ferenczi has traced, quite correctly, I think, a clear line of connection between this fear and the fears contained in the earlier situations of danger. The high degree of narcissistic value which the penis possesses can appeal to the fact that that organ is a guarantee to its owner that he can be once more united to his mother - i.e. to a substitute for her - in the act of copulation. Being deprived of it amounts to a renewed separation from her, and this in its turn means being helplessly exposed to an unpleasurable tension due to instinctual need, as was the case at birth. But the need whose increase is feared is now a specific one belonging to the genital libido and is no longer an indeterminate one, as it was in the period of infancy. It may be added that for a man who is impotent (that is, who is inhibited by the threat of castration) the substitute for copulation is a phantasy of returning into his mother’s womb. Following Ferenczi’s line of thought, we might say that the man in question, having tried to bring about his return into his mother’s womb by using his genital organ to represent him, is now replacing that organ regressively by his whole person.

The progress which the child makes in its development - its growing independence, the sharper division of its mental apparatus into several agencies, the advent of new needs - cannot fail to exert an influence upon the content of the danger situation. We have already traced the change of that content from loss of the mother as an object to castration. The next change is caused by the power of the super-ego. With the depersonalization of the parental agency from which castration was feared, the danger becomes less defined. Castration anxiety develops into moral anxiety - social anxiety - and it is not so easy now to know what the anxiety is about. The formula, ‘separation and expulsion from the horde’, only applies to that later portion of the super-ego which has been formed on the basis of social prototypes, not to the nucleus of the super-ego, which corresponds to the introjected parental agency. Putting it more generally, what the ego regards as the danger and responds to with an anxiety-signal is that the super-ego should be angry with it or punish it or cease to love it. The final transformation which the fear of the super-ego undergoes is, it seems to me, the fear of death (or fear for life) which is a fear of the super-ego projected on to the powers of destiny.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4295

At one time I attached some importance to the view that what was used as a discharge of anxiety was the cathexis which had been withdrawn in the process of repression. To-day this seems to me of scarcely any interest. The reason for this is that whereas I formerly believed that anxiety invariably arose automatically by an economic process, my present conception of anxiety as a signal given by the ego in order to affect the pleasure-unpleasure agency does away with the necessity of considering the economic factor. Of course there is nothing to be said against the idea that it is precisely the energy that has been liberated by being withdrawn through repression which is used by the ego to arouse the affect; but it is no longer of any importance which portion of energy is employed for this purpose.

This new view of things calls for an examination of another assertion of mine - namely, that the ego is the actual seat of anxiety. I think this proposition still holds good. There is no reason to assign any manifestation of anxiety to the super-ego; while the expression ‘anxiety of the id’ would stand in need of correction, though rather as to its form than its substance. Anxiety is an affective state and as such can, of course, only be felt by the ego. The id cannot have anxiety as the ego can; for it is not an organization and cannot make a judgement about situations of danger. On the other hand it very often happens that processes take place or begin to take place in the id which cause the ego to produce anxiety. Indeed, it is probable that the earliest repressions as well as most of the later ones are motivated by an ego-anxiety of this sort in regard to particular processes in the id. Here again we are rightly distinguishing between two cases: the case in which something occurs in the id which activates one of the danger-situations for the ego and induces the latter to give the anxiety-signal for inhibition to take place, and the case in which a situation analogous to the trauma of birth is established in the id and an automatic reaction of anxiety ensues. The two cases may be brought closer together if it is pointed out that the second case corresponds to the earliest and original danger-situation, while the first case corresponds to any one of the later determinants of anxiety that have been derived from it; or, as applied to the disorders which we in fact come across, that the second case is operative in the aetiology of the ‘actual’ neuroses, while the first remains typical for that of the psychoneuroses.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4296

We see, then, that it is not so much a question of taking back our earlier findings as of bringing them into line with more recent discoveries. It is still an undeniable fact that in sexual abstinence, in improper interference with the course of sexual excitation or if the latter is diverted from being worked over psychically, anxiety arises directly out of libido; in other words, that the ego is reduced to a state of helplessness in the face of an excessive tension due to need, as it was in the situation of birth, and that anxiety is then generated. Here once more, though the matter is of little importance, it is very possible that what finds discharge in the generating of anxiety is precisely the surplus of unutilized libido. As we know, a psychoneurosis is especially liable to develop on the basis of an ‘actual’ neurosis. This looks as though the ego were attempting to save itself from anxiety, which it has learned to keep in suspension for a while, and to bind it by the formation of symptoms. Analysis of the traumatic war neuroses - a term which, incidentally, covers a great variety of disorders - would probably have shown that a number of them possess some characteristics of the ‘actual’ neuroses.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4297

In describing the evolution of the various danger-situations from their prototype, the act of birth, I have had no intention of asserting that every later determinant of anxiety completely invalidates the preceding one. It is true that, as the development of the ego goes on, the earlier danger-situations tend to lose their force and to be set aside, so that we might say that each period of the individual’s life has its appropriate determinant of anxiety. Thus the danger of psychical helplessness is appropriate to the period of life when his ego is immature; the danger of loss of object, to early childhood when he is still dependent on others; the danger of castration, to the phallic phase; and the fear of his super-ego, to the latency period. Nevertheless, all these danger-situations and determinants of anxiety can persist side by side and cause the ego to react to them with anxiety at a period later than the appropriate one; or, again, several of them can come into operation at the same time. It is possible, moreover, that there is a fairly close relationship between the danger-situation that is operative and the form taken by the ensuing neurosis.¹

¹ Since the differentiation of the ego and the id, our interest in the problems of repression, too, was bound to receive a fresh impetus. Up till then we had been content to confine our interest to those aspects of repression which concerned the ego - the keeping away from consciousness and from motility, and the formation of substitutes (symptoms). With regard to the repressed instinctual impulses themselves, we assumed that they remained unaltered in the unconscious for an indefinite length of time. But now our interest is turned to the vicissitudes of the repressed and we begin to suspect that it is not self-evident, perhaps not even usual, that those impulses should remain unaltered and unalterable in this way. There is no doubt that the original impulses have been inhibited and deflected from their aim through repression. But has the portion of them in the unconscious maintained itself and been proof against the influences of life that tend to alter and depreciate them? In other words, do the old wishes, about whose former existence analysis tells us, still exist? The answer seems ready to hand and certain. It is that the old, repressed wishes must still be present in the unconscious since we still find their derivatives, the symptoms, in operation. But this answer is not sufficient. It does not enable us to decide between two possibilities: either that the old wish is now operating only through its derivatives, having transferred the whole of its cathectic energy to them, or that it is itself still in existence too. If its fate has been to exhaust itself in cathecting its derivatives, there is yet a third possibility. In the course of the neurosis it may have become re-animated by regression, anachronistic though it may now be. These are no idle speculations. There are many things about mental life, both normal and pathological, which seem to call for the raising of such questions. In my paper, ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’ (1924d), I had occasion to notice the difference between the mere repression and the real removal of an old wishful impulse.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4298

When, in an earlier part of this discussion, we found that the danger of castration was of importance in more than one neurotic illness, we put ourselves on guard against overestimating that factor, since it could not be a decisive one for the female sex, who are undoubtedly more subject to neuroses than men. We now see that there is no danger of our regarding castration anxiety as the sole motive force of the defensive processes which lead to neurosis. I have shown elsewhere how little girls, in the course of their development, are led into making a tender object-cathexis by their castration complex. It is precisely in women that the danger situation of loss of object seems to have remained the most effective. All we need to do is to make a slight modification in our description of their determinant of anxiety, in the sense that it is no longer a matter of feeling the want of, or actually losing the object itself, but of losing the object’s love. Since there is no doubt that hysteria has a strong affinity with femininity, just as obsessional neurosis has with masculinity, it appears probable that, as a determinant of anxiety, loss of love plays much the same part in hysteria as the threat of castration does in phobias and fear of the super-ego in obsessional neurosis.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4299

IX

What is now left for us is to consider the relationship between the formation of symptoms and the generating of anxiety.

There seem to be two very widely held opinions on this subject. One is that anxiety is itself a symptom of neurosis. The other is that there is a much more intimate relation between the two. According to the second opinion, symptoms are only formed in order to avoid anxiety: they bind the psychical energy which would otherwise be discharged as anxiety. Thus anxiety would be the fundamental phenomenon and main problem of neurosis.

That this latter opinion is at least in part true is shown by some striking examples. If an agoraphobic patient who has been accompanied into the street is left alone there, he will produce an anxiety attack. Or if an obsessional neurotic is prevented from washing his hands after having touched something, he will become a prey to almost unbearable anxiety. It is plain, then, that the purpose and the result of the imposed condition of being accompanied in the street and the obsessional act of washing the hands were to obviate outbreaks of anxiety of this kind. In this sense every inhibition which the ego imposes on itself can be called a symptom.

Since we have traced back the generating of anxiety to a situation of danger, we shall prefer to say that symptoms are created in order to remove the ego from a situation of danger. If the symptoms are prevented from being formed, the danger does in fact materialize; that is, a situation analogous to birth is established in which the ego is helpless in the face of a constantly increasing instinctual demand - the earliest and original determinant of anxiety. Thus in our view the relation between anxiety and symptom is less close than was supposed, for we have inserted the factor of the danger-situation between them. We can also add that the generating of anxiety sets symptom formation going and is, indeed, a necessary prerequisite of it. For if the ego did not arouse the pleasure-unpleasure agency by generating anxiety, it would not obtain the power to arrest the process which is preparing in the id and which threatens danger. There is in all this an evident inclination to limit to a minimum the amount of anxiety generated and to employ it only as a signal; for to do otherwise would only result in feeling in another place the unpleasure which the instinctual process was threatening to produce, and that would not be a success from the standpoint of the pleasure principle, although it is one that occurs often enough in the neuroses.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4300

Symptom-formation, then, does in fact put an end to the danger-situation. It has two aspects: one, hidden from view, brings about the alteration in the id in virtue of which the ego is removed from danger; the other, presented openly, shows what has been created in place of the instinctual process that has been affected - namely, the substitutive formation.

It would, however, be more correct to ascribe to the defensive process what we have just said about symptom-formation and to use the latter term as synonymous with substitute-formation. It will then be clear that the defensive process is analogous to the flight by means of which the ego removes itself from a danger that threatens it from outside. The defensive process is an attempt at flight from an instinctual danger. An examination of the weak points in this comparison will make things clearer.

One objection to it is that loss of an object (or loss of love on the part of the object) and the threat of castration are just as much dangers coming from outside as, let us say, a ferocious animal would be; they are not instinctual dangers. Nevertheless, the two cases are not the same. A wolf would probably attack us irrespectively of our behaviour towards it; but the loved person would not cease to love us nor should we be threatened with castration if we did not entertain certain feelings and intentions within us. Thus such instinctual impulses are determinants of external dangers and so become dangerous in themselves; and we can now proceed against the external danger by taking measures against the internal ones. In phobias of animals the danger seems to be still felt entirely as an external one, just as it has undergone an external displacement in the symptom. In obsessional neuroses the danger is much more internalized. That portion of anxiety in regard to the super-ego which constitutes social anxiety still represents an internal substitute for an external danger, while the other portion- moral anxiety - is already completely endopsychic.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4301

Another objection is that in an attempt at flight from an impending external danger all that the subject is doing is to increase the distance between himself and what is threatening him. He is not preparing to defend himself against it or attempting to alter anything about it, as would be the case if he attacked the wolf with a stick or shot at it with a gun. But the defensive process seems to do something more than would correspond to an attempt at flight. It joins issue with the threatening instinctual process and somehow suppresses it or deflects it from its aims and thus renders it innocuous. This objection seems unimpeachable and must be given due weight. I think it is probable that there are some defensive processes which can truly be likened to an attempt at flight, while in others the ego takes a much more active line of self-protection and initiates vigorous counter-measures. But perhaps the whole analogy between defence and flight is invalidated by the fact that both the ego and the instinct in the id are parts of the same organization, not separate entities like the wolf and the child, so that any kind of behaviour on the part of the ego will result in an alteration in the instinctual process as well.

This study of the determinants of anxiety has, as it were, shown the defensive behaviour of the ego transfigured in a rational light. Each situation of danger corresponds to a particular period of life or a particular developmental phase of the mental apparatus and appears to be justifiable for it. In early infancy the individual is really not equipped to master psychically the large sums of excitation that reach him whether from without or from within. Again, at a certain period of life his most important interest really is that the people he is dependent on should not withdraw their loving care of him. Later on in his boyhood, when he feels that his father is a powerful rival in regard to his mother and becomes aware of his own aggressive inclinations towards him and of his sexual intentions towards his mother, he really is justified in being afraid of his father; and his fear of being punished by him can find expression through phylogenetic reinforcement in the fear of being castrated. Finally, as he enters into social relationships, it really is necessary for him to be afraid of his super-ego, to have a conscience; and the absence of that factor would give rise to severe conflicts, dangers and so on.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4302

But this last point raises a fresh problem. Instead of the affect of anxiety let us take, for a moment, another affect - that of pain, for instance. It seems quite normal that at four years of age a girl should weep painfully if her doll is broken; or at six, if her governess reproves her; or at sixteen, if she is slighted by her young man; or at twenty-five, perhaps, if a child of her own dies. Each of these determinants of pain has its own time and each passes away when that time is over. Only the final and definitive determinants remain throughout life. We should think it strange if this same girl, after she had grown to be a wife and mother, were to cry over some worthless trinket that had been damaged. Yet that is how the neurotic behaves. Although all the agencies for mastering stimuli have long ago been developed within wide limits in his mental apparatus, and although he is sufficiently grown up to satisfy most of his needs for himself and has long ago learnt that castration is no longer practised as a punishment, he nevertheless behaves as though the old danger-situations still existed, and keeps hold of all the earlier determinants of anxiety.

Why this should be so calls for a rather long reply. First of all, we must sift the facts. In a great number of cases the old determinants of anxiety do really lapse, after having produced neurotic reactions. The phobias of very young children, fears of being alone or in the dark or with strangers - phobias which can almost be called normal - usually pass off later on; the child ‘grows out of them’, as we say about some other disturbances of childhood. Animal phobias, which are of such frequent occurrence, undergo the same fate and many conversion hysterias of early years find no continuation in later life. Ceremonial actions appear extremely often in the latency period, but only a very small percentage of them develop later into a full obsessional neurosis. In general, so far as we can tell from our observations of town children belonging to the white races and living according to fairly high cultural standards, the neuroses of childhood are in the nature of regular episodes in a child’s development, although too little attention is still being paid to them. Signs of childhood neuroses can be detected in all adult neurotics without exception; but by no means all children who show those signs become neurotic in later life. It must be, therefore, that certain determinants of anxiety are relinquished and certain danger-situations lose their significance as the individual becomes more mature. Moreover, some of these danger-situations manage to survive into later times by modifying their determinants of anxiety so as to bring them up to date. Thus, for instance, a man may retain his fear of castration in the guise of a syphilidophobia, after he has come to know that it is no longer customary to castrate people for indulging their sexual lusts, but that, on the other hand, severe diseases may overtake anyone who thus gives way to his instincts. Other determinants of anxiety, such as fear of the super-ego, are destined not to disappear at all but to accompany people throughout their lives. In that case the neurotic will differ from the normal person in that his reactions to the dangers in question will he unduly strong. Finally, being grown-up affords no absolute protection against a return of the original traumatic anxiety-situation. Each individual has in all probability a limit beyond which his mental apparatus fails in its function of mastering the quantities of excitation which require to be disposed of.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4303

These minor rectifications cannot in any way alter the fact which is here under discussion, that a great many people remain infantile in their behaviour in regard to danger and do not overcome determinants of anxiety which have grown out of date. To deny this would be to deny the existence of neurosis, for it is precisely such people whom we call neurotics. But how is this possible? Why are not all neuroses episodes in the development of the individual which come to a close when the next phase is reached? Whence comes the element of persistence in these reactions to danger? Why does the affect of anxiety alone seem to enjoy the advantage over all other affects of evoking reactions which are distinguished from the rest in being abnormal and which, through their inexpediency, run counter to the movement of life? In other words, we have once more come unawares upon the riddle which has so often confronted us: whence does neurosis come - what is its ultimate, its own peculiar raison d’être? After tens of years of psycho-analytic labours, we are as much in the dark about this problem as we were at the start.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4304

X

Anxiety is the reaction to danger. One cannot, after all, help suspecting that the reason why the affect of anxiety occupies a unique position in the economy of the mind has something to do with the essential nature of danger. Yet dangers are the common lot of humanity; they are the same for everyone. What we need and cannot lay our finger on is some factor which will explain why some people are able to subject the affect of anxiety, in spite of its peculiar quality, to the normal workings of the mind, or which decides who is doomed to come to grief over that task. Two attempts to find a factor of this kind have been made; and it is natural that such efforts should meet with a sympathetic reception, since they promise help to meet a tormenting need. The two attempts in question are mutually complementary; they approach the problem at opposite ends. The first was made by Alfred Adler more than ten years ago. His contention, reduced to its essence, was that the people who came to grief over the task set them by danger were those who were too greatly impeded by some organic inferiority. If it were true that simplex sigillum veri, we should welcome such a solution as a deliverance. But on the contrary, our critical studies of the last ten years have effectively demonstrated the total inadequacy of such an explanation - an explanation, moreover, which sets aside the whole wealth of material that has been discovered by psycho-analysis.

The second attempt was made by Otto Rank in 1923 in his book, The Trauma of Birth. It would be unjust to put his attempt on the same level as Adler’s except in this single point which concerns us here, for it remains on psycho-analytic ground and pursues a psycho-analytic line of thought, so that it may be accepted as a legitimate endeavour to solve the problems of analysis. In this matter of the relation of the individual to danger Rank moves away from the question of organic defect in the individual and concentrates on the variable degree of intensity of the danger. The process of birth is the first situation of danger, and the economic upheaval which it produces becomes the prototype of the reaction of anxiety. We have already traced the line of development which connects this first danger-situation and determinant of anxiety with all the later ones, and we have seen that they all retain a common quality in so far as they signify in a certain sense a separation from the mother - at first only in a biological sense, next as a direct loss of object and later as a loss of object incurred indirectly. The discovery of this extensive concatenation is an undoubted merit of Rank’s construction. Now the trauma of birth overtakes each individual with a different degree of intensity, and the violence of his anxiety-reaction varies with the strength of the trauma; and it is the initial amount of anxiety generated in him which, according to Rank, decides whether he will ever learn to control it - whether he will become neurotic or normal.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4305

It is not our business to criticize Rank’s hypothesis in detail here. We have only to consider whether it helps to solve our particular problem. His formula - that those people become neurotic in whom the trauma of birth was so strong that they have never been able completely to abreact it - is highly disputable from a theoretical point of view. We do not rightly know what is meant by abreacting the trauma. Taken literally, it implies that the more frequently and the more intensely a neurotic person reproduces the affect of anxiety the more closely will he approach to mental health - an untenable conclusion. It was because it did not tally with the facts that I gave up the theory of abreaction which had played such a large part in the cathartic method. To lay so much stress, too, on the variability in the strength of the birth trauma is to leave no room for the legitimate claims of hereditary constitution as an aetiological factor. For this variability is an organic factor which operates in an accidental fashion in relation to the constitution and is itself dependent on many influences which might be called accidental - as, for instance, on timely assistance in child-birth. Rank’s theory completely ignores constitutional factors as well as phylogenetic ones. If, however, we were to try to find a place for the constitutional factor by qualifying his statement with the proviso, let us say, that what is really important is the extent to which the individual reacts to the variable intensity of the trauma of birth, we should be depriving his theory of its significance and should be relegating the new factor introduced by him to a position of minor importance: the factor which decided whether a neurosis should supervene or not would lie in a different, and once more in an unknown, field.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4306

Moreover, the fact that while man shares the process of birth with the other mammals he alone has the privilege over them of possessing a special disposition to neurosis is hardly favourable to Rank’s theory. But the main objection to it is that it floats in the air instead of being based upon ascertained observations. No body of evidence has been collected to show that difficult and protracted birth does in fact coincide with the development of a neurosis, or even that children so born exhibit the phenomena of early infantile apprehensiveness more strongly and over a longer period than other children. It might be rejoined that induced labour and births that are easy for the mother may possibly involve a severe trauma for the child. But we can still point out that births which lead to asphyxia would be bound to give clear evidence of the results which are supposed to follow. It should be one of the advantages of Rank’s aetiological theory that it postulates a factor whose existence can be verified by observation. And so long as no such attempt at verification has been made it is impossible to assess the theory’s value.

On the other hand I cannot identify myself with the view that Rank’s theory contradicts the aetiological importance of the sexual instincts as hitherto recognized by psycho-analysis. For his theory only has reference to the individual’s relation to the danger-situation, so that it leaves it perfectly open to us to assume that if a person has not been able to master his first dangers he is bound to come to grief as well in later situations involving sexual danger and thus be driven into a neurosis.

I do not believe, therefore, that Rank’s attempt has solved the problem of the causation of neurosis; nor do I believe that we can say as yet how much it may nevertheless have contributed to such a solution. If an investigation into the effects of difficult birth on the disposition to neurosis should yield negative results, we shall rate the value of his contribution low. It is to be feared that our need to find a single, tangible ‘ultimate cause’ of neurotic illness will remain unsatisfied. The ideal solution, which medical men no doubt still yearn for, would be to discover some bacillus which could be isolated and bred in a pure culture and which, when injected into anyone, would invariably produce the same illness; or, to put it rather less extravagantly, to demonstrate the existence of certain chemical substances the administration of which would bring about or cure particular neuroses. But the probability of a solution of this kind seems slight.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4307

Psycho-analysis leads to less simple and satisfactory conclusions. What I have to say in this connection has long been familiar and I have nothing new to add. If the ego succeeds in protecting itself from a dangerous instinctual impulse, through, for instance, the process of repression, it has certainly inhibited and damaged the particular part of the id concerned; but it has at the same time given it some independence and has renounced some of its own sovereignty. This is inevitable from the nature of repression, which is, fundamentally, an attempt at flight. The repressed is now, as it were, an outlaw; it is excluded from the great organization of the ego and is subject only to the laws which govern the realm of the unconscious. If, now, the danger-situation changes so that the ego has no reason for fending off a new instinctual impulse analogous to the repressed one, the consequence of the restriction of the ego which has taken place will become manifest. The new impulse will run its course under an automatic influence - or, as I should prefer to say, under the influence of the compulsion to repeat. It will follow the same path as the earlier, repressed impulse, as though the danger-situation that had been overcome still existed. The fixating factor in repression, then, is the unconscious id’s compulsion to repeat - a compulsion which in normal circumstances is only done away with by the freely mobile function of the ego. The ego may occasionally manage to break down the barriers of repression which it has itself put up and to recover its influence over the instinctual impulse and direct the course of the new impulse in accordance with the changed danger-situation. But in point of fact the ego very seldom succeeds in doing this: it cannot undo its repressions. It is possible that the way the struggle will go depends upon quantitative relations. In some cases one has the impression that the outcome is an enforced one: the regressive attraction exerted by the repressed impulse and the strength of the repression are so great that the new impulse has no choice but to obey the compulsion to repeat. In other cases we perceive a contribution from another play of forces: the attraction exerted by the repressed prototype is reinforced by a repulsion coming from the direction of difficulties in real life which stand in the way of any different course that might be taken by the new instinctual impulse.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4308

That this is a correct account of fixation upon repression and of the retention of danger-situations that are no longer present-day ones is confirmed by the fact of analytic therapy - a fact which is modest enough in itself but which can hardly be overrated from a theoretical point of view. When, in analysis, we have given the ego assistance which is able to put it in a position to lift its repressions, it recovers its power over the repressed id and can allow the instinctual impulses to run their course as though the old situations of danger no longer existed. What we can do in this way tallies with what can be achieved in other fields of medicine; for as a rule our therapy must be content with bringing about more quickly, more reliably and with less expenditure of energy than would otherwise be the case the good result which in favourable circumstances would have occurred of itself.

We see from what has been said that quantitative– relations - relations which are not directly observable but which can only be inferred - are what determine whether or not old situations of danger shall be preserved, repressions on the part of the ego maintained and childhood neuroses find a continuation. Among the factors that play a part in the causation of neuroses and that have created the conditions under which the forces of the mind are pitted against one another, three emerge into prominence: a biological, a phylogenetic and a purely psychological factor.

The biological factor is the long period of time during which the young of the human species is in a condition of helplessness and dependence. Its intra-uterine existence seems to be short in comparison with that of most animals, and it is sent into the world in a less finished state. As a result, the influence of the real external world upon it is intensified and an early differentiation between the ego and the id is promoted. Moreover, the dangers of the external world have a greater importance for it, so that the value of the object which can alone protect it against them and take the place of its former intra-uterine life is enormously enhanced. The biological factor, then, establishes the earliest situations of danger and creates the need to be loved which will accompany the child through the rest of its life.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4309

The existence of the second, phylogenetic, factor, is based only upon inference. We have been led to assume its existence by a remarkable feature in the development of the libido. We have found that the sexual life of man, unlike that of most of the animals nearly related to him, does not make a steady advance from birth to maturity, but that, after an early efflorescence up till the fifth year, it undergoes a very decided interruption; and that it then starts on its course once more at puberty, taking up again the beginnings broken off in early childhood. This has led us to suppose that something momentous must have occurred in the vicissitudes of the human species which has left behind this interruption in the sexual development of the individual as a historical precipitate. This factor owes its pathogenic significance to the fact that the majority of the instinctual demands of this infantile sexuality are treated by the ego as dangers and fended off as such, so that the later sexual impulses of puberty, which in the natural course of things would be ego-syntonic, run the risk of succumbing to the attraction of their infantile prototypes and following them into repression. It is here that we come upon the most direct aetiology of the neuroses. It is a curious thing that early contact with the demands of sexuality should have a similar effect on the ego to that produced by premature contact with the external world.

The third, psychological, factor resides in a defect of our mental apparatus which has to do precisely with its differentiation into an id and an ego, and which is therefore also attributable ultimately to the influence of the external world. In view of the dangers of reality, the ego is obliged to guard against certain instinctual impulses in the id and to treat them as dangers. But it cannot protect itself from internal instinctual dangers as effectively as it can from some piece of reality that is not part of itself. Intimately bound up with the id as it is, it can only fend off an instinctual danger by restricting its own organization and by acquiescing in the formation of symptoms in exchange for having impaired the instinct. If the rejected instinct renews its attack, the ego is overtaken by all those difficulties which are known to us as neurotic ailments.

Further than this, I believe, our knowledge of the nature and causes of neurosis has not as yet been able to go.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4310

XI

ADDENDA

In the course of this discussion various themes have had to be put aside before they had been fully dealt with. I have brought them together in this chapter so that they may receive the attention they deserve.

A

MODIFICATIONS OF EARLIER VIEWS

(a) Resistance and Anticathexis

An important element in the theory of repression is the view that repression is not an event that occurs once but that it requires a permanent expenditure. If this expenditure were to cease, the repressed impulse, which is being fed all the time from its sources, would on the next occasion flow along the channels from which it had been forced away, and the repression would either fail in its purpose or would have to be repeated an indefinite number of times. Thus it is because instincts are continuous in their nature that the ego has to make its defensive action secure by a permanent expenditure. This action undertaken to protect repression is observable in analytic treatment as resistance. Resistance presupposes the existence of what I have called anticathexis. An anticathexis of this kind is clearly seen in obsessional neurosis. It appears there in the form of an alteration of the ego, as a reaction-formation in the ego, and is effected by the reinforcement of the attitude which is the opposite of the instinctual trend that has to be repressed - as, for instance, in pity, conscientiousness and cleanliness. These reaction-formations of obsessional neurosis are essentially exaggerations of the normal traits of character which develop during the latency period. The presence of an anticathexis in hysteria is much more difficult to detect, though theoretically it is equally indispensable. In hysteria, too, a certain amount of alteration of the ego through reaction-formation is unmistakable and in some circumstances becomes so marked that it forces itself on our attention as the principal symptom. The conflict due to ambivalence, for instance, is resolved in hysteria by this means. The subject’s hatred of a person whom he loves is kept down by an exaggerated amount of tenderness for him and apprehensiveness about him. But the difference between reaction-formations in obsessional neurosis and in hysteria is that in the latter they do not have the universality of a character-trait but are confined to particular relationships. A hysterical woman, for instance, may be specially affectionate with her own children whom at bottom she hates; but she will not on that account be more loving in general than other women or even more affectionate to other children. The reaction-formation of hysteria clings tenaciously to a particular object and never spreads over into a general disposition of the ego, whereas what is characteristic of obsessional neurosis is precisely a spreading-over of this kind - a loosening of relations to the object and a facilitation of displacement in the choice of object.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4311

There is another kind of anticathexis, however, which seems more suited to the peculiar character of hysteria. A repressed instinctual impulse can be activated (newly cathected) from two directions: from within, through reinforcement from its internal sources of excitation, and from without, through the perception of an object that it desires. The hysterical anticathexis is mainly directed outwards, against dangerous perceptions. It takes the form of a special kind of vigilance which, by means of restrictions of the ego, causes situations to be avoided that would entail such perceptions, or, if they do occur, manages to withdraw the subject’s attention from them. Some French analysts, in particular Laforgue, have recently given this action of hysteria the special name of ‘scotomization’. This technique of anticathexis is still more noticeable in the phobias, whose interest is concentrated on removing the subject ever further from the possibility of the occurrence of the feared perception. The fact that anticathexis has an opposite direction in hysteria and the phobias from what it has in obsessional neurosis - though the distinction is not an absolute one - seems to be significant. It suggests that there is an intimate connection between repression and external anticathexis on the one hand and between regression and internal anticathexis (i.e. alteration in the ego through reaction-formation) on the other. The task of defence against a dangerous perception is, incidentally, common to all neuroses. Various commands and prohibitions in obsessional neurosis have the same end in view.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4312

We showed on an earlier occasion that the resistance that has to be overcome in analysis proceeds from the ego, which clings to its anticathexes. It is hard for the ego to direct its attention to perceptions and ideas which it has up till now made a rule of avoiding, or to acknowledge as belonging to itself impulses that are the complete opposite of those which it knows as its own. Our fight against resistance in analysis is based upon this view of the facts. If the resistance is itself unconscious, as so often happens owing to its connection with the repressed material, we make it conscious. If it is conscious, or when it has become conscious, we bring forward logical arguments against it; we promise the ego rewards and advantages if it will give up its resistance. There can be no doubt or mistake about the existence of this resistance on the part of the ego. But we have to ask ourselves whether it covers the whole state of affairs in analysis. For we find that even after the ego has decided to relinquish its resistances it still has difficulty in undoing the repressions; and we have called the period of strenuous effort which follows after its praiseworthy decision, the phase of ‘working-through’. The dynamic factor which makes a working-through of this kind necessary and comprehensible is not far to seek. It must be that after the ego’s resistance has been removed the power of the compulsion to repeat - the attraction exerted by the unconscious prototype upon the repressed instinctual process - has still to be overcome. There is nothing to be said against describing this factor as the resistance of the unconscious. There is no need to be discouraged by these emendations. They are to be welcomed if they add something to our knowledge, and they are no disgrace to us so long as they enrich rather than invalidate our earlier views - by limiting some statement, perhaps, that was too general or by enlarging some idea that was too narrowly formulated.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4313

It must not be supposed that these emendations provide us with a complete survey of all the kinds of resistance that are met with in analysis. Further investigation of the subject shows that the analyst has to combat no less than five kinds of resistance, emanating from three directions - the ego, the id and the super-ego. The ego is the source of three of these, each differing in its dynamic nature. The first of these three ego-resistances is the repression resistance, which we have already discussed above and about which there is least new to be added. Next there is the transference resistance, which is of the same nature but which has different and much clearer effects in analysis, since it succeeds in establishing a relation to the analytic situation or the analyst himself and thus re-animating a repression which should only have been recollected. The third resistance, though also an ego-resistance, is of quite a different nature. It proceeds from the gain from illness and is based upon an assimilation of the symptom into the ego. It represents an unwillingness to renounce any satisfaction or relief that has been obtained. The fourth variety, arising from the id, is the resistance which, as we have just seen, necessitates ‘working-through’. The fifth, coming from the super-ego and the last to be discovered, is also the most obscure though not always the least powerful one. It seems to originate from the sense of guilt or the need for punishment; and it opposes every move towards success, including, therefore, the patient’s own recovery through analysis.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4314

(b) Anxiety from Transformation of Libido

The view of anxiety which I have put forward in these pages diverges somewhat from the one I have hitherto thought correct. Formerly I regarded anxiety as a general reaction of the ego under conditions of unpleasure. I always sought to justify its appearance on economic grounds and I assumed, on the strength of my investigations into the ‘actual’ neuroses, that libido (sexual excitation) which was rejected or not utilized by the ego found direct discharge in the form of anxiety. It cannot be denied that these various assertions did not go very well together, or at any rate did not necessarily follow from one another. Moreover, they gave the impression of there being a specially intimate connection between anxiety and libido and this did not accord with the general character of anxiety as a reaction to unpleasure.

The objection to this view arose from our coming to regard the ego as the sole seat of anxiety. It was one of the results of the attempt at a structural division of the mental apparatus which I made in The Ego and the Id. Whereas the old view made it natural to suppose that anxiety arose from the libido belonging to the repressed instinctual impulses, the new one, on the contrary, made the ego the source of anxiety. Thus it is a question of instinctual (id-) anxiety or ego-anxiety. Since the energy which the ego employs is desexualized, the new view also tended to weaken the close connection between anxiety and libido. I hope I have at least succeeded in making the contradiction plain and in giving a clear idea of the point in doubt.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4315

Rank’s contention - which was originally my own -, that the affect of anxiety is a consequence of the event of birth and a repetition of the situation then experienced, obliged me to review the problem of anxiety once more. But I could make no headway with his idea that birth is a trauma, states of anxiety a reaction of discharge to it and all subsequent affects of anxiety an attempt to ‘abreact’ it more and more completely. I was obliged to go back from the anxiety reaction to the situation of danger that lay behind it. The introduction of this element opened up new aspects of the question. Birth was seen to be the prototype of all later situations of danger which overtook the individual under the new conditions arising from a changed mode of life and a growing mental development. On the other hand its own significance was reduced to this prototypic relationship to danger. The anxiety felt at birth became the prototype of an affective state which had to undergo the same vicissitudes as the other affects. Either the state of anxiety reproduced itself automatically in situations analogous to the original situation and was thus an inexpedient form of reaction instead of an expedient one as it had been in the first situation of danger; or the ego acquired power over this affect, reproduced it on its own initiative, and employed it as a warning of danger and as a means of setting the pleasure-unpleasure mechanism in motion. We thus gave the biological aspect of the anxiety affect its due importance by recognizing anxiety as the general reaction to situations of danger; while we endorsed the part played by the ego as the seat of anxiety by allocating to it the function of producing the anxiety affect according to its needs. Thus we attributed two modes of origin to anxiety in later life. One was involuntary, automatic and always justified on economic grounds, and arose whenever a danger situation analogous to birth had established itself. The other was produced by the ego as soon as a situation of this kind merely threatened to occur, in order to call for its avoidance. In the second case the ego subjects itself to anxiety as a sort of inoculation, submitting to a slight attack of the illness in order to escape its full strength. It vividly imagines the danger situation, as it were, with the unmistakable purpose of restricting that distressing experience to a mere indication, a signal. We have already seen in detail how the various situations of danger arise one after the other, retaining at the same time a genetic connection.

We shall perhaps be able to proceed a little further in our understanding of anxiety when we turn to the problem of the relation between neurotic anxiety and realistic anxiety.

Our former hypothesis of a direct transformation of libido into anxiety possesses less interest for us now than it did. But if we do nevertheless consider it, we shall have to distinguish different cases. As regards anxiety evoked by the ego as a signal, it does not come into consideration; nor does it, therefore, in any of those danger-situations which move the ego to bring on repression. The libidinal cathexis of the repressed instinctual impulse is employed otherwise than in being transformed into anxiety and discharged as such - as is most clearly seen in conversion hysteria. On the other hand, further enquiry into the question of the danger-situation will bring to our notice an instance of the production of anxiety which will, I think, have to be accounted for in a different way.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4316

(c) Repression and Defence

In the course of discussing the problem of anxiety I have revived a concept or, to put it more modestly, a term, of which I made exclusive use thirty years ago when I first began to study the subject but which I later abandoned. I refer to the term ‘defensive process’.¹ I afterwards replaced it by the word ‘repression’, but the relation between the two remained uncertain. It will be an undoubted advantage, I think, to revert to the old concept of ‘defence’, provided we employ it explicitly as a general designation for all the techniques which the ego makes use of in conflicts which may lead to a neurosis, while we retain the word ‘repression’ for the special method of defence which the line of approach taken by our investigations made us better acquainted with in the first instance.

Even a purely terminological innovation ought to justify its adoption; it ought to reflect some new point of view or some extension of knowledge. The revival of the concept of defence and the restriction of that of repression takes into account a fact which has long since been known but which has received added importance owing to some new discoveries. Our first observations of repression and of the formation of symptoms were made in connection with hysteria. We found that the perceptual content of exciting experiences and the ideational content of pathogenic structures of thought were forgotten and debarred from being reproduced in memory, and we therefore concluded that the keeping away from consciousness was a main characteristic of hysterical repression. Later on, when we came to study the obsessional neuroses, we found that in that illness pathogenic occurrences are not forgotten. They remain conscious but they are ‘isolated’ in some way that we cannot as yet grasp, so that much the same result is obtained as in hysterical amnesia. Nevertheless the difference is great enough to justify the belief that the process by which instinctual demands are set aside in obsessional neurosis cannot be the same as in hysteria. Further investigations have shown that in obsessional neurosis a regression of the instinctual impulses to an earlier libidinal stage is brought about through the opposition of the ego, and that this regression, although it does not make repression unnecessary, clearly works in the same sense as repression. We have seen, too, that in obsessional neurosis anticathexis, which is also presumably present in hysteria, plays a specially large part in protecting the ego by effecting a reactive alteration in it. Our attention has, moreover, been drawn to a process of ‘isolation’ (whose technique cannot as yet be elucidated) which finds direct symptomatic manifestation, and to a procedure, that may be called magical, of ‘undoing’ what has been done - a procedure about whose defensive purpose there can be no doubt, but which has no longer any resemblance to the process of ‘repression’. These observations provide good enough grounds for re-introducing the old concept of defence, which can cover all these processes that have the same purpose - namely, the protection of the ego against instinctual demands - and for subsuming repression under it as a special case. The importance of this nomenclature is heightened if we consider the possibility that further investigations may show that there is an intimate connection between special forms of defence and particular illnesses, as, for instance, between repression and hysteria. In addition we may look forward to the possible discovery of yet another important correlation. It may well be that before its sharp cleavage into an ego and an id, and before the formation of a super-ego, the mental apparatus makes use of different methods of defence from those which it employs after it has reached these stages of organization.

¹ Cf. ‘The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’ (1894a).

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4317

B

SUPPLEMENTARY REMARKS ON ANXIETY

The affect of anxiety exhibits one or two features the study of which promises to throw further light on the subject. Anxiety has an unmistakable relation to expectation: it is anxiety about something. It has a quality of indefiniteness and lack of object. In precise speech we use the word ‘fear’ rather than ‘anxiety’ if it has found an object. Moreover, in addition to its relation to danger, anxiety has a relation to neurosis which we have long been trying to elucidate. The question arises: why are not all reactions of anxiety neurotic - why do we accept so many of them as normal? And finally the problem of the difference between realistic anxiety and neurotic anxiety awaits a thorough examination.

To begin with the last problem. The advance we have made is that we have gone behind reactions of anxiety to situations of danger. If we do the same thing with realistic anxiety we shall have no difficulty in solving the question. Real danger is a danger that is known, and realistic anxiety is anxiety about a known danger of this sort. Neurotic anxiety is anxiety about an unknown danger. Neurotic danger is thus a danger that has still to be discovered. Analysis has shown that it is an instinctual danger. By bringing this danger which is not known to the ego into consciousness, the analyst makes neurotic anxiety no different from realistic anxiety, so that it can be dealt with in the same way.

There are two reactions to real danger. One is an affective reaction, an outbreak of anxiety. The other is a protective action. The same will presumably be true of instinctual danger. We know how the two reactions can co-operate in an expedient way, the one giving the signal for the other to appear. But we also know that they can behave in an inexpedient way: paralysis from anxiety may set in, and the one reaction spread at the cost of the other.

In some cases the characteristics of realistic anxiety and neurotic anxiety are mingled. The danger is known and real but the anxiety in regard to it is over-great, greater than seems proper to us. It is this surplus of anxiety which betrays the presence of a neurotic element. Such cases, however, introduce no new principle; for analysis shows that to the known real danger an unknown instinctual one is attached.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4318

We can find out still more about this if, not content with tracing anxiety back to danger, we go on to enquire what the essence and meaning of a danger-situation is. Clearly, it consists in the subject’s estimation of his own strength compared to the magnitude of the danger and in his admission of helplessness in the face of it - physical helplessness if the danger is real and psychical helplessness if it is instinctual. In doing this he will be guided by the actual experiences he has had. (Whether he is wrong in his estimation or not is immaterial for the outcome.) Let us call a situation of helplessness of this kind that has been actually experienced a traumatic situation. We shall then have good grounds for distinguishing a traumatic situation from a danger-situation.

The individual will have made an important advance in his capacity for self-preservation if he can foresee and expect a traumatic situation of this kind which entails helplessness, instead of simply waiting for it to happen. Let us call a situation which contains the determinant for such an expectation a danger-situation. It is in this situation that the signal of anxiety is given. The signal announces: ‘I am expecting a situation of helplessness to set in’, or: ‘The present situation reminds me of one of the traumatic experiences I have had before. Therefore I will anticipate the trauma and behave as though it had already come, while there is yet time to turn it aside.’ Anxiety is therefore on the one hand an expectation of a trauma, and on the other a repetition of it in a mitigated form. Thus the two features of anxiety which we have noted have a different origin. Its connection with expectation belongs to the danger-situation, whereas its indefiniteness and lack of object belong to the traumatic situation of helplessness - the situation which is anticipated in the danger-situation.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4319

Taking this sequence, anxiety - danger - helplessness (trauma), we can now summarize what has been said. A danger-situation is a recognized, remembered, expected situation of helplessness. Anxiety is the original reaction to helplessness in the trauma and is reproduced later on in the danger-situation as a signal for help. The ego, which experienced the trauma passively, now repeats it actively in a weakened version, in the hope of being able itself to direct its course. It is certain that children behave in this fashion towards every distressing impression they receive, by reproducing it in their play. In thus changing from passivity to activity they attempt to master their experiences psychically. If this is what is meant by ‘abreacting a trauma’ we can no longer have anything to urge against the phrase. But what is of decisive importance is the first displacement of the anxiety-reaction from its origin in the situation of helplessness to an expectation of that situation - that is, to the danger-situation. After that come the later displacements, from the danger to the determinant of the danger - loss of the object and the modifications of that loss with which we are already acquainted.

The undesirable result of ‘spoiling’ a small child is to magnify the importance of the danger of losing the object (the object being a protection against every situation of helplessness) in comparison with every other danger. It therefore encourages the individual to remain in the state of childhood, the period of life which is characterized by motor and psychical helplessness.

So far we have had no occasion to regard realistic anxiety in any different light from neurotic anxiety. We know what the distinction is. A real danger is a danger which threatens a person from an external object, and a neurotic danger is one which threatens him from an instinctual demand. In so far as the instinctual demand is something real, his neurotic anxiety, too, can be admitted to have a realistic basis. We have seen that the reason why there seems to be a specially close connection between anxiety and neurosis is that the ego defends itself against an instinctual danger with the help of the anxiety reaction just as it does against an external real danger, but that this line of defensive activity eventuates in a neurosis owing to an imperfection of the mental apparatus. We have also come to the conclusion that an instinctual demand often only becomes an (internal) danger because its satisfaction would bring on an external danger - that is, because the internal danger represents an external one.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4320

On the other hand, the external (real) danger must also have managed to become internalized if it is to be significant for the ego. It must have been recognized as related to some situation of helplessness that has been experienced.¹ Man seems not to have been endowed, or to have been endowed to only a very small degree, with an instinctive recognition of the dangers that threaten him from without. Small children are constantly doing things which endanger their lives, and that is precisely why they cannot afford to be without a protecting object. In relation to the traumatic situation, in which the subject is helpless, external and internal dangers, real dangers and instinctual demands converge. Whether the ego is suffering from a pain which will not stop or experiencing an accumulation of instinctual needs which cannot obtain satisfaction, the economic situation is the same, and the motor helplessness of the ego finds expression in psychical helplessness.

In this connection the puzzling phobias of early childhood deserve to be mentioned once again. We have been able to explain some of them, such as the fear of being alone or in the dark or with strangers, as reactions to the danger of losing the object. Others, like the fear of small animals, thunder storms, etc., might perhaps be accounted for as vestigial traces of the congenital preparedness to meet real dangers which is so strongly developed in other animals. In man, only that part of this archaic heritage is appropriate which has reference to the loss of the object. If childhood phobias become fixated and grow stronger and persist into later years, analysis shows that their content has become associated with instinctual demands and has come to stand for internal dangers as well.

¹ It may quite often happen that although a danger-situation is correctly estimated in itself, a certain amount of instinctual anxiety is added to the realistic anxiety. In that case the instinctual demand before whose satisfaction the ego recoils is a masochistic one: the instinct of destruction directed against the subject himself. Perhaps an addition of this kind explains cases in which reactions of anxiety are exaggerated, inexpedient or paralysing. Phobias of heights (windows, towers, precipices and so on) may have some such origin. Their hidden feminine significance is closely connected with masochism.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4321

C

ANXIETY, PAIN AND MOURNING

So little is known about the psychology of emotional processes that the tentative remarks I am about to make on the subject may claim a very lenient judgement. The problem before us arises out of the conclusion we have reached that anxiety comes to be a reaction to the danger of a loss of an object. Now we already know one reaction to the loss of an object, and that is mourning. The question therefore is, when does that loss lead to anxiety and when to mourning? In discussing the subject of mourning on a previous occasion I found that there was one feature about it which remained quite unexplained. This was its peculiar painfulness.¹ And yet it seems self-evident that separation from an object should be painful. Thus the problem becomes more complicated: when does separation from an object produce anxiety, when does it produce mourning and when does it produce, it may be, only pain?

Let me say at once that there is no prospect in sight of answering these questions. We must content ourselves with drawing certain distinctions and adumbrating certain possibilities.

Our starting-point will again be the one situation which we believe we understand - the situation of the infant when it is presented with a stranger instead of its mother. It will exhibit the anxiety which we have attributed to the danger of loss of object. But its anxiety is undoubtedly more complicated than this and merits a more thorough discussion. That it does have anxiety there can be no doubt; but the expression of its face and its reaction of crying indicate that it is feeling pain as well. Certain things seem to be joined together in it which will later on be separated out. It cannot as yet distinguish between temporary absence and permanent loss. As soon as it loses sight of its mother it behaves as if it were never going to see her again; and repeated consoling experiences to the contrary are necessary before it learns that her disappearance is usually followed by her re-appearance. Its mother encourages this piece of knowledge which is so vital to it by playing the familiar game of hiding her face from it with her hands and then, to its joy, uncovering it again. In these circumstances it can, as it were, feel longing unaccompanied by despair.

¹ ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917e).

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4322

In consequence of the infant’s misunderstanding of the facts, the situation of missing its mother is not a danger-situation but a traumatic one. Or, to put it more correctly, it is a traumatic situation if the infant happens at the time to be feeling a need which its mother should be the one to satisfy. It turns into a danger-situation if this need is not present at the moment. Thus, the first determinant of anxiety, which the ego itself introduces, is loss of perception of the object (which is equated with loss of the object itself). There is as yet no question of loss of love. Later on, experience teaches the child that the object can be present but angry with it; and then loss of love from the object becomes a new and much more enduring danger and determinant of anxiety.

The traumatic situation of missing the mother differs in one important respect from the traumatic situation of birth. At birth no object existed and so no object could be missed. Anxiety was the only reaction that occurred. Since then repeated situations of satisfaction have created an object out of the mother; and this object, whenever the infant feels a need, receives an intense cathexis which might be described as a ‘longing’ one. It is to this new aspect of things that the reaction of pain is referable. Pain is thus the actual reaction to loss of object, while anxiety is the reaction to the danger which that loss entails and, by a further displacement, a reaction to the danger of the loss of object itself.

We know very little about pain either. The only fact we are certain of is that pain occurs in the first instance and as a regular thing whenever a stimulus which impinges on the periphery breaks through the devices of the protective shield against stimuli and proceeds to act like a continuous instinctual stimulus, against which muscular action, which is as a rule effective because it withdraws the place that is being stimulated from the stimulus, is powerless. If the pain proceeds not from a part of the skin but from an internal organ, the situation is still the same. All that has happened is that a portion of the inner periphery has taken the place of the outer periphery. The child obviously has occasion to undergo experiences of pain of this sort, which are independent of its experiences of need. This determinant of the generating of pain seems, however, to have very little similarity with the loss of an object. And besides, the element which is essential to pain, peripheral stimulation, is entirely absent in the child’s situation of longing. Yet it cannot be for nothing that the common usage of speech should have created the notion of internal, mental pain and have treated the feeling of loss of object as equivalent to physical pain.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4323

When there is physical pain, a high degree of what may be termed narcissistic cathexis of the painful place occurs. This cathexis continues to increase and tends, as it were, to empty the ego. It is well known that when internal organs are giving us pain we receive spatial and other presentations of parts of the body which are ordinarily not represented at all in conscious ideation. Again, the remarkable fact that, when there is a psychical diversion brought about by some other interest, even the most intense physical pains fail to arise (I must not say ‘remain unconscious’ in this case) can be accounted for by there being a concentration of cathexis on the psychical representative of the part of the body which is giving pain. I think it is here that we shall find the point of analogy which has made it possible to carry sensations of pain over to the mental sphere. For the intense cathexis of longing which is concentrated on the missed or lost object (a cathexis which steadily mounts up because it cannot be appeased) creates the same economic conditions as are created by the cathexis of pain which is concentrated on the injured part of the body. Thus the fact of the peripheral causation of physical pain can be left out of account. The transition from physical pain to mental pain corresponds to a change from narcissistic cathexis to object-cathexis. An object-presentation which is highly cathected by instinctual need plays the same role as a part of the body which is cathected by an increase of stimulus. The continuous nature of the cathectic process and the impossibility of inhibiting it produce the same state of mental helplessness. If the feeling of unpleasure which then arises has the specific character of pain (a character which cannot be more exactly described) instead of manifesting itself in the reactive form of anxiety, we may plausibly attribute this to a factor which we have not sufficiently made use of in our explanations - the high level of cathexis and ‘binding’ that prevails while these processes which lead to a feeling of unpleasure take place.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4324

We know of yet another emotional reaction to the loss of an object, and that is mourning. But we have no longer any difficulty in accounting for it. Mourning occurs under the influence of reality-testing; for the latter function demands categorically from the bereaved person that he should separate himself from the object, since it no longer exists. Mourning is entrusted with the task of carrying out this retreat from the object in all those situations in which it was the recipient of a high degree of cathexis. That this separation should be painful fits in with what we have just said, in view of the high and unsatisfiable cathexis of longing which is concentrated on the object by the bereaved person during the reproduction of the situations in which he must undo the ties that bind him to it.

4325

THE QUESTION OF LAY ANALYSIS

Conversations with an Impartial Person

(1926)

4326

Intentionally left blank

4327

THE QUESTION OF LAY ANALYSIS

CONVERSATIONS WITH AN IMPARTIAL PERSON

INTRODUCTION

The title of this small work is not immediately intelligible. I will therefore explain it. ‘Layman’ = ‘Non-doctor’; and the question is whether non-doctors as well as doctors are to be allowed to practise analysis. This question has its limitations both in time and place. In time, because up to now no one has been concerned as to who practises analysis. Indeed, people have been much too little concerned about it - the one thing they were agreed on was a wish that no one should practise it. Various reasons were given for this, but they were based on the same underlying distaste. Thus the demand that only doctors should analyse corresponds to a new and apparently more friendly attitude to analysis - if, that is, it can escape the suspicion of being after all only a slightly modified derivative of the earlier attitude. It is conceded that in some circumstances an analytic treatment shall be undertaken; but, if so, only doctors are to undertake it. The reason for this restriction then becomes a matter for enquiry.

The question is limited in place because it does not arise in all countries with equal significance. In Germany and America it would be no more than an academic discussion; for in those countries every patient can have himself treated how and by whom he chooses, and anyone who chooses can, as a ‘quack’, handle any patients, provided only that he undertakes the responsibility for his actions. The law does not intervene until it is called in to expiate some injury done to the patient. But in Austria, in which and for which I am writing, there is a preventive law, which forbids non-doctors from undertaking the treatment of patients, without waiting for its outcome.¹ So here the question whether laymen (= non-doctors) may treat patients by psycho-analysis has a practical sense. As soon as it is raised, however, it appears to be settled by the wording of the law. Neurotics are patients, laymen are non-doctors, psycho-analysis is a procedure for curing or improving nervous disorders, and all such treatments are reserved to doctors. It follows that laymen are not permitted to practise analysis on neurotics, and are punishable if they nevertheless do so. The position being so simple, one hardly ventures to take up the question of lay analysis. All the same, there are some complications, which the law does not trouble about, but which nevertheless call for consideration. It may perhaps turn out that in this instance the patients are not like other patients, that the laymen are not really laymen, and that the doctors have not exactly the qualities which one has a right to expect of doctors and on which their claims should be based. If this can be proved, there will be justifiable grounds for demanding that the law shall not be applied without modification to the instance before us.

¹ The same holds good in France.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4328

I

Whether this happens will depend on people who are not obliged to be familiar with the peculiarities of an analytic treatment. It is our task to give information on the subject to these impartial persons, whom we shall assume to be, at the moment, still in ignorance. It is to be regretted that we cannot let them be present as an audience at a treatment of this kind. But the ‘analytic situation’ allows of the presence of no third person. Moreover the different sessions are of very unequal value. An unauthorized listener who hit upon a chance one of them would as a rule form no useful impression; he would be in danger of not understanding what was passing between the analyst and the patient, or he would be bored. For good or ill, therefore, he must be content with our information, which we shall try to make as trustworthy as possible.

A patient, then, may be suffering from fluctuations in his moods which he cannot control, or from a sense of despondency by which his energy feels paralysed because he thinks he is incapable of doing anything properly, or from a nervous embarrassment among strangers. He may perceive, without understanding the reason for it, that he has difficulties in carrying out his professional work, or indeed any comparatively important decision or any undertaking. He may one day have suffered from a distressing attack - unknown in its origin - of feelings of anxiety, and since then have been unable, without a struggle, to walk along the street alone, or to travel by train; he may perhaps have had to give up both entirely. Or, a very remarkable thing, his thoughts may go their own way and refuse to be directed by his will. They pursue problems that are quite indifferent to him, but from which he cannot get free. Quite ludicrous tasks, too, are imposed on him, such as counting up the windows on the fronts of houses. And when he has performed simple actions such as posting a letter or turning off a gas-jet, he finds himself a moment later doubting whether he has really done so. This may be no more than an annoyance and a nuisance. But his state becomes intolerable if he suddenly finds he is unable to fend off the idea that he has pushed a child under the wheels of a car or has thrown a stranger off the bridge into the water, or if he has to ask himself whether he is not the murderer whom the police are looking for in connection with a crime that was discovered that day. It is obvious nonsense, as he himself knows; he has never done any harm to anyone; but if he were really the murderer who is being looked for, his feeling - his sense of guilt - could not be stronger.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4329

Or again our patient - and this time let us make her a woman - may suffer in another way and in a different field. She is a pianist, but her fingers are overcome by cramp and refuse to serve her. Or when she thinks of going to a party she promptly becomes aware of a call of nature the satisfaction of which would be incompatible with a social gathering. She has therefore given up going to parties, dances, theatres or concerts. She is overcome by violent headaches or other painful sensations at times when they are most inconvenient. She may even be unable to keep down any meal she eats which can become dangerous in the long run. And, finally, it is a lamentable fact that she cannot tolerate any agitations, which after all are inevitable in life. On such occasions she falls in a faint, often accompanied by muscular spasms that recall sinister pathological states.

Other patients, again, suffer from disturbances in a particular field in which emotional life converges with demands of a bodily sort. If they are men, they find they are incapable of giving physical expression to their tenderest feelings towards the opposite sex, while towards less loved objects they may perhaps have every reaction at their command. Or their sensual feelings attach them to people whom they despise and from whom they would like to get free; or those same feelings impose requirements on them whose fulfilment they themselves find repulsive. If they are women, they feel prevented by anxiety or disgust or by unknown obstructions from meeting the demands of sexual life; or, if they have surrendered to love, they find themselves cheated of the enjoyment which nature has provided as a reward for such compliance.

All these people recognize that they are ill and go to doctors, by whom people expect nervous disorders like these to be removed. The doctors, too, lay down the categories into which these complaints are divided. They diagnose them, each according to his own standpoint, under different names: neurasthenia, psychasthenia, phobias, obsessional neurosis, hysteria. They examine the organs which produce the symptoms, the heart, the stomach, the bowels, the genitals, and find them healthy. They recommend interruptions in the patient’s accustomed mode of life, holidays, strengthening exercises, tonics, and by these means bring about temporary improvements - or no result at all. Eventually the patients hear that there are people who are concerned quite specially with the treatment of such complaints and start an analysis with them.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4330

During this disquisition on the symptoms of neurotics, the Impartial Person, whom I imagine as being present, has been showing signs of impatience. At this point, however, he becomes attentive and interested. ‘So now’, he says, ‘we shall learn what the analyst does with the patient whom the doctor has not been able to help.’

Nothing takes place between them except that they talk to each other. The analyst makes use of no instruments not even for examining the patient - nor does he prescribe any medicines. If it is at all possible, he even leaves the patient in his environment and in his usual mode of life during the treatment. This is not a necessary condition, of course, and may not always be practicable. The analyst agrees upon a fixed regular hour with the patient, gets him to talk, listens to him, talks to him in his turn and gets him to listen.

The Impartial Person’s features now show signs of unmistakable relief and relaxation, but they also clearly betray some contempt. It is as though he were thinking: ‘Nothing more than that? Words, words, words, as Prince Hamlet says.’ And no doubt he is thinking too of Mephistopheles’ mocking speech on how comfortably one can get along with words - lines that no German will ever forget.

‘So it is a kind of magic,’ he comments: ‘you talk, and blow away his ailments.’

Quite true. It would be magic if it worked rather quicker. An essential attribute of a magician is speed - one might say suddenness - of success. But analytic treatments take months and even years: magic that is so slow loses its miraculous character. And incidentally do not let us despise the word. After all it is a powerful instrument; it is the means by which we convey our feelings to one another, our method of influencing other people. Words can do unspeakable good and cause terrible wounds. No doubt ‘in the beginning was the deed’ and the word came later; in some circumstances it meant an advance in civilization when deeds were softened into words. But originally the word was magic - a magical act; and it has retained much of its ancient power.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4331

The Impartial Person proceeds: ‘Let us suppose that the patient is no better prepared to understand analytic treatment than I am; then how are you going to make him believe in the magic of the word or of the speech that is to free him from his sufferings?’

Some preparation must of course be given to him; and there is a simple way of doing it. We call on him to be completely straightforward with his analyst, to keep nothing back intentionally that comes into his head, and then to put aside every reservation that might prevent his reporting certain thoughts or memories. Everyone is aware that there are some things in himself that he would be very unwilling to tell other people or that he considers it altogether out of the question to tell. These are his ‘intimacies’. He has a notion too - and this represents a great advance in psychological self-knowledge - that there are other things that one would not care to admit to oneself: things that one likes to conceal from oneself and which for that reason one breaks off short and drives out of one’s thoughts if, in spite of everything, they turn up. Perhaps he may himself notice that a very remarkable psychological problem begins to appear in this situation - of a thought of his own being kept secret from his own self. It looks as though his own self were no longer the unity which he had always considered it to be, as though there were something else as well in him that could confront that self. He may become obscurely aware of a contrast between a self and a mental life in the wider sense. If now he accepts the demand made by analysis that he shall say everything, he will easily become accessible to an expectation that to have relations and exchanges of thought with someone under such unusual conditions might also lead to peculiar results.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4332

‘I understand,’ says our Impartial Person. ‘You assume that every neurotic has something oppressing him, some secret. And by getting him to tell you about it you relieve his oppression and do him good. That, of course, is the principle of Confession, which the Catholic Church has used from time immemorial in order to make secure its dominance over people’s minds.’

We must reply: ‘Yes and no!’ Confession no doubt plays a part in analysis - as an introduction to it, we might say. But it is very far from constituting the essence of analysis or from explaining its effects. In Confession the sinner tells what he knows; in analysis the neurotic has to tell more. Nor have we heard that Confession has ever developed enough power to get rid of actual pathological symptoms.

‘Then, after all, I do not understand,’ comes the rejoinder. ‘What can you possibly mean by "telling more than he knows"? But I can well believe that as an analyst you gain a stronger influence over your patients than a Father Confessor over his penitents, since your contacts with him are so much longer, more intensive and also more individual, and since you use this increased influence to divert him from his sick thoughts, to talk him out of his fears, and so on. It would certainly be strange if it were possible by such means to control purely physical phenomena as well, such as vomiting, diarrhoea, convulsions; but I know that influence like that is in fact quite possible if a person is put into a state of hypnosis. By the trouble you take with the patient you probably succeed in bringing about a hypnotic relation of that sort with him - a suggestive attachment to yourself - even though you may not intend to; and in that case the miraculous results of your treatment are the effect of hypnotic suggestion. But, so far as I know, hypnotic treatment works much faster than your analysis, which, as you tell me, lasts for months and years.’

Our Impartial Person cannot be either so ignorant or so perplexed as we thought to begin with. There are unmistakable signs that he is trying to understand psycho-analysis with the help of his previous knowledge, that he is trying to link it up with something he already knows. The difficult task now lies ahead of us of making it clear to him that he will not succeed in this: that analysis is a procedure sui generis, something novel and special, which can only be understood with the help of new insights - or hypotheses, if that sounds better. But he is still waiting for our answer to his last remarks.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4333

What you say about the special personal influence of the analyst certainly deserves great attention. An influence of the kind exists and plays a large part in analysis - but not the same part as in hypnotism. It ought to be possible to convince you that the situations in the two cases are quite different. It may be enough to point out that we do not use this personal influence, the factor of ‘suggestion’, to suppress the symptoms of the illness, as happens with hypnotic suggestion. Further, it would be a mistake to believe that this factor is the vehicle and promoter of the treatment throughout its length. At its beginning, no doubt. But later on it opposes our analytic intentions and forces us to adopt the most far-reaching counter-measures. And I should like to show by an example how far diverting a patient’s thoughts and talking him out of things are from the technique of analysis. If a patient of ours is suffering from a sense of guilt, as though he had committed a serious crime, we do not recommend him to disregard his qualms of conscience and do not emphasize his undoubted innocence; he himself has often tried to do so without success. What we do is to remind him that such a strong and persistent feeling must after all be based on something real, which it may perhaps be possible to discover.

‘It would surprise me’, comments the Impartial Person, ‘if you were able to soothe your patients by agreeing with their sense of guilt in that way. But what are your analytic intentions? and what

do you do with your patients?’

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4334

II

If I am to say anything intelligible to you, I shall no doubt have to tell you something of a psychological theory which is not known or not appreciated outside analytic circles. It will be easy to deduce from this theory what we want from our patients and how we obtain it. I shall expound it to you dogmatically, as though it were a complete theoretical structure. But do not suppose that it came into being as such a structure, like a philosophical system. We have developed it very slowly, we have wrestled over every small detail of it, we have unceasingly modified it, keeping a continuous contact with observation, till it has finally taken a shape in which it seems to suffice for our purposes. Only a few years ago I should have had to clothe this theory in other terms. Nor, of course, can I guarantee to you that the form in which it is expressed to-day will remain the final one. Science, as you know, is not a revelation; long after its beginnings it still lacks the attributes of definiteness, immutability and infallibility for which human thought so deeply longs. But such as it is, it is all that we can have. If you will further bear in mind that our science is very young, scarcely as old as the century, and that it is concerned with what is perhaps the most difficult material that can be the subject of human research, you will easily be able to adopt the correct attitude towards my exposition. But interrupt me whenever you feel inclined, if you cannot follow me or if you want further explanations.

‘I will interrupt you before you have even begun. You say that you intend to expound a new psychology to me; but I should have thought that psychology was no new science. There have been psychologies and psychologists enough; and I heard of great achievements in that field while I was at college.’

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4335

I should not dream of disputing them. But if you look into the matter more closely you will have to class these great achievements as belonging rather to the physiology of the sense organs. The theory of mental life could not be developed, because it was inhibited by a single essential misunderstanding. What does it comprise to-day, as it is taught at college? Apart from those valuable discoveries in the physiology of the senses, a number of classifications and definitions of our mental processes which, thanks to linguistic usage, have become the common property of every educated person. That is clearly not enough to give a view of our mental life. Have you not noticed that every philosopher, every imaginative writer, every historian and every biographer makes up his own psychology for himself, brings forward his own particular hypotheses concerning the interconnections and aims of mental acts - all more or less plausible and all equally untrustworthy? There is an evident lack of any common foundation. And it is for that reason too that in the field of psychology there is, so to speak, no respect and no authority. In that field everyone can ‘run wild’ as he chooses. If you raise a question in physics or chemistry, anyone who knows he possesses no ‘technical knowledge’ will hold his tongue. But if you venture upon a psychological assertion, you must be prepared to meet judgements and contradictions from every quarter. In this field, apparently, there is no ‘technical knowledge’. Everyone has a mental life, so everyone regards himself as a psychologist. But that strikes me as an inadequate legal title. The story is told of how someone who applied for a post as a children’s nurse was asked if she knew how to look after babies. ‘Of course,’ she replied, ‘why, after all, I was a baby once myself.’

‘And you claim that you have discovered this "common foundation" of mental life, which has been overlooked by every psychologist, from observations on sick people?’

The source of our findings does not seem it me to deprive them of their value. Embryology, to take an example, would not deserve to be trusted if it could not give a plain explanation of the origin of innate malformations. I have told you of people whose thoughts go their own way, so that they are obliged to worry over problems to which they are perfectly indifferent. Do you think that academic psychology could ever make the smallest contribution towards explaining an abnormality such as that? And, after all, we all of us have the experience at night-time of our thoughts going their own way and creating things which we do not understand, which puzzle us, and which are suspiciously reminiscent of pathological products. Our dreams, I mean. The common people have always firmly believed that dreams have a sense and a value - that they mean something. Academic psychology has never been able to inform us what this meaning is. It could make nothing of dreams. If it attempted to produce explanations, they were non-psychological - such as tracing them to sensory stimuli, or to an unequal depth of sleep in different portions of the brain, and so on. But it is fair to say that a psychology which cannot explain dreams is also useless for an understanding of normal mental life, that it has no claim to be called a science.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4336

‘You are becoming aggressive; so you have evidently got on to a sensitive spot. I have heard, it is true, that in analysis great value is attached to dreams, that they are interpreted, and that memories of real events are looked for behind them, and so on. But I have heard as well that the interpretation of dreams is left to the caprice of analysts, and that they themselves have never ceased disputing over the way of interpreting dreams and the justification for drawing conclusions from them. If that is so, you ought not to underline so heavily the advantage that analysis has won over academic psychology.’

There is really a great deal of truth in what you say. It is true that the interpretation of dreams has come to have unequalled importance both for the theory and the practice of analysis. If I seem to be aggressive, that is only a way of defending myself. And when I think of all the mischief some analysts have done with the interpretation of dreams I might lose heart and echo the pessimistic pronouncement of our great satirist Nestroy when he says that every step forward is only half as big as it looks at first. But have you ever found that men do anything but confuse and distort what they get hold of? By the help of a little foresight and self-discipline most of the dangers of dream-interpretation can be avoided with certainty. But you will agree that I shall never come to my exposition if we let ourselves be led aside like this.

‘Yes. If I understood rightly, you wanted to tell me about the fundamental postulate of the new psychology.’

That was not what I wanted to begin with. My purpose is to let you hear what pictures we have formed of the structure of the mental apparatus in the course of our analytic studies.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4337

‘What do you mean by the "mental apparatus"? and what, may I ask, is it constructed of?’

It will soon be clear what the mental apparatus is; but I must beg you not to ask what material it is constructed of. That is not a subject of psychological interest. Psychology can be as indifferent to it as, for instance, optics can be to the question of whether the walls of a telescope are made of metal or cardboard. We shall leave entirely on one side the material line of approach, but not so the spatial one. For we picture the unknown apparatus which serves the activities of the mind as being really like an instrument constructed of several parts (which we speak of as ‘agencies’), each of which performs a particular function and which have a fixed spatial relation to one another: it being understood that by spatial relation - ‘in front of’ and ‘behind’, ‘superficial’ and ‘deep’- we merely mean in the first instance a representation of the regular succession of the functions. Have I made myself clear?

‘Scarcely. Perhaps I shall understand it later. But, in any case, here is a strange anatomy of the soul - a thing which, after all, no longer exists at all for the scientists.’

What do you expect? It is a hypothesis like so many others in the sciences: the very earliest ones have always been rather rough. ‘Open to revision’ we can say in such cases. It seems to me unnecessary for me to appeal here to the ‘as if’ which has become so popular. The value of a ‘fiction’ of this kind (as the philosopher Vaihinger would call it) depends on how much one can achieve with its help.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4338

But to proceed. Putting ourselves on the footing of everyday knowledge, we recognize in human beings a mental organization which is interpolated between their sensory stimuli and the perception of their somatic needs on the one hand and their motor acts on the other, and which mediates between them for a particular purpose. We call this organization their ‘Ich’. Now there is nothing new in this. Each one of us makes this assumption without being a philosopher, and some people even in spite of being philosophers. But this does not, in our opinion, exhaust the description of the mental apparatus. Besides this ‘I’, we recognize another mental region, more extensive, more imposing and more obscure than the ‘I’, and this we call the ‘Es’. The relation between the two must be our immediate concern.

You will probably protest at our having chosen simple pronouns to describe our two agencies or provinces instead of giving them orotund Greek names. In psycho-analysis, however, we like to keep in contact with the popular mode of thinking and prefer to make its concepts scientifically serviceable rather than to reject them. There is no merit in this; we are obliged to take this line; for our theories must be understood by our patients, who are often very intelligent, but not always learned. The impersonal ‘it’ is immediately connected with certain forms of expression used by normal people. ‘It shot through me,’ people say; ‘there was something in me at that moment that was stronger than me.’ ‘C’était plus fort que moi.’

In psychology we can only describe things by the help of analogies. There is nothing peculiar in this; it is the case elsewhere as well. But we have constantly to keep changing these analogies, for none of them lasts us long enough. Accordingly, in trying to make the relation between the ego and the id clear, I must ask you to picture the ego as a kind of façade of the id, as a frontage, like an external, cortical, layer of it. We can hold on to this last analogy. We know that cortical layers owe their peculiar characteristics to the modifying influence of the external medium on which they abut. Thus we suppose that the ego is the layer of the mental apparatus (of the id) which has been modified by the influence of the external world (of reality). This will show you how in psycho-analysis we take spatial ways of looking at things seriously. For us the ego is really something superficial and the id something deeper - looked at from outside, of course. The ego lies between reality and the id, which is what is truly mental.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4339

‘I will not ask any questions yet as to how all this can be known. But tell me first what you gain from this distinction between an ego and an id? What leads you to make it?’

Your question shows me the right way to proceed. For the important and valuable thing is to know that the ego and the id differ greatly from each other in several respects. The rules governing the course of mental acts are different in the ego and the id; the ego pursues different purposes and by other methods. A great deal could be said about this; but perhaps you will be content with a fresh analogy and an example. Think of the difference between ‘the front’ and ‘behind the lines’, as things were during the war. We were not surprised then that some things were different at the front from what they were behind the lines, and that many things were permitted behind the lines which had to be forbidden at the front. The determining influence was, of course, the proximity of the enemy; in the case of mental life it is the proximity of the external world. There was a time when ‘outside’, ‘strange’ and ‘hostile’ were identical concepts. And now we come to the example. In the id there are no conflicts; contradictions and antitheses persist side by side in it unconcernedly, and are often adjusted by the formation of compromises. In similar circumstances the ego feels a conflict which must be decided; and the decision lies in one urge being abandoned in favour of the other. The ego is an organization characterized by a very remarkable trend towards unification, towards synthesis. This characteristic is lacking in the id; it is, as we might say, ‘all to pieces’; its different urges pursue their own purposes independently and regardless of one another.

‘And if such an important mental region "behind the lines" exists, how can you explain its having been overlooked till the time of analysis?’

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4340

That brings us back to one of your earlier questions. Psychology had barred its own access to the region of the id by insisting on a postulate which is plausible enough but untenable: namely, that all mental acts are conscious to us - that being conscious is the criterion of what is mental, and that, if there are processes in our brain which are not conscious, they do not deserve to be called mental acts and are no concern of psychology.

‘But I should have thought that was obvious.’

Yes, and that is what psychologists think. Nevertheless it can easily be shown to be false - that is, to be a quite inexpedient distinction. The idlest self-observation shows that ideas may occur to us which cannot have come about without preparation. But you experience nothing of these preliminaries of your thought, though they too must certainly have been of a mental nature; all that enters your consciousness is the ready-made result. Occasionally you can make these preparatory thought-structures conscious in retrospect, as though in a reconstruction.

‘Probably one’s attention was distracted, so that one failed to notice the preparations.’

Evasions! You cannot in that way get around the fact that acts of a mental nature, and often very complicated ones, can take place in you, of which your consciousness learns nothing and of which you know nothing. Or are you prepared to suppose that a greater or smaller amount of your ‘attention’ is enough to transform a non-mental act into a mental one? But what is the use of disputing? There are hypnotic experiments in which the existence of such non-conscious thoughts are irrefutably demonstrated to anyone who cares to learn.

‘I shall not retract; but I believe I understand you at last. What you call "ego" is consciousness; and your "id" is the so-called subconscious that people talk about so much nowadays. But why the masquerading with the new names?’

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4341

It is not masquerading. The other names are of no use. And do not try to give me literature instead of science. If someone talks of subconsciousness, I cannot tell whether he means the term topographically - to indicate something lying in the mind beneath consciousness - or qualitatively - to indicate another consciousness, a subterranean one, as it were. He is probably not clear about any of it. The only trustworthy antithesis is between conscious and unconscious. But it would be a serious mistake to think that this antithesis coincides with the distinction between ego and id. Of course it would be delightful if it were as simple as that: our theory would have a smooth passage. But things are not so simple. All that is true is that everything that happens in the id is and remains unconscious, and that processes in the ego, and they alone, can become conscious. But not all of them are, nor always, nor necessarily; and large portions of the ego can remain permanently unconscious.

The becoming conscious of a mental process is a complicated affair. I cannot resist telling you - once again, dogmatically - our hypotheses about it. The ego, as you will remember, is the external, peripheral layer of the id. Now, we believe that on the outermost surface of this ego there is a special agency directed immediately to the external world, a system, an organ, through the excitation of which alone the phenomenon that we call consciousness comes about. This organ can be equally well excited from outside - thus receiving (with the help of the sense-organs) the stimuli from the external world - and from inside - thus becoming aware, first, of the sensations in the id, and then also of the processes in the ego.

‘This is getting worse and worse and I can understand it less and less. After all, what you invited me to was a discussion of the question whether laymen (= non-doctors) ought to undertake analytic treatments. What is the point, then, of all these disquisitions on daring and obscure theories which you cannot convince me are justified?’

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4342

I know I cannot convince you. That is beyond any possibility and for that reason beyond my purpose. When we give our pupils theoretical instruction in psycho-analysis, we can see how little impression we are making on them to begin with. They take in the theories of analysis as coolly as other abstractions with which they are nourished. A few of them may perhaps wish to be convinced, but there is not a trace of their being so. But we also require that everyone who wants to practise analysis on other people shall first himself submit to an analysis. It is only in the course of this ‘self-analysis’ (as it is misleadingly termed), when they actually experience as affecting their own person - or rather, their own mind - the processes asserted by analysis, that they acquire the convictions by which they are later guided as analysts. How then could I expect to convince you, the Impartial Person, of the correctness of our theories, when I can only put before you an abbreviated and therefore unintelligible account of them, without confirming them from your own experiences?

I am acting with a different purpose. The question at issue between us is not in the least whether analysis is sensible or nonsensical, whether it is right in its hypotheses or has fallen into gross errors. I am unrolling our theories before you since that is the best way of making clear to you what the range of ideas is that analysis embraces, on the basis of what hypotheses it approaches a patient and what it does with him. In this way a quite definite light will be thrown on the question of lay analysis. And do not be alarmed. If you have followed me so far you have got over the worst. Everything that follows will be easier for you. - But now, with your leave, I will pause to take breath.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4343

III

‘I expect you will want to tell me how, on the basis of the theories of psycho-analysis, the origin of a neurotic illness can be pictured.’

I will try to. But for that purpose we must study our ego and our id from a fresh angle, from the dynamic one - that is to say, having regard to the forces at work in them and between them. Hitherto we have been content with a description of the mental apparatus.

‘My only fear is that it may become unintelligible again!’

I hope not. You will soon find your way about in it. Well then, we assume that the forces which drive the mental apparatus into activity are produced in the bodily organs as an expression of the major somatic needs. You will recollect the words of our poet-philosopher: ‘Hunger and love.’ Incidentally, quite a formidable pair of forces! We give these bodily needs, in so far as they represent an instigation to mental activity, the name of ‘Triebe’, a word for which we are envied by many modern languages. Well, these instincts fill the id: all the energy in the id, as we may put it briefly, originates from them. Nor have the forces in the ego any other origin; they are derived from those in the id. What, then, do these instincts want? Satisfaction - that is, the establishment of situations in which the bodily needs can be extinguished. A lowering of the tension of need is felt by our organ of consciousness as pleasurable; an increase of it is soon felt as unpleasure. From these oscillations arises the series of feelings of pleasure-unpleasure, in accordance with which the whole mental apparatus regulates its activity. In this connection we speak of a ‘dominance of the pleasure principle’.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4344

If the id’s instinctual demands meet with no satisfaction, intolerable conditions arise. Experience soon shows that these situations of satisfaction can only be established with the help of the external world. At that point the portion of the id which is directed towards the external world - the ego - begins to function. If all the driving force that sets the vehicle in motion is derived from the id, the ego, as it were, undertakes the steering, without which no goal can be reached. The instincts in the id press for immediate satisfaction at all costs, and in that way they achieve nothing or even bring about appreciable damage. It is the task of the ego to guard against such mishaps, to mediate between the claims of the id and the objections of the external world. It carries on its activity in two directions. On the one hand, it observes the external world with the help of its sense-organ, the system of consciousness, so as to catch the favourable moment for harmless satisfaction; and on the other hand it influences the id, bridles its ‘passions’, induces its instincts to postpone their satisfaction, and indeed, if the necessity is recognized, to modify its aims, or, in return for some compensation, to give them up. In so far as it tames the id’s impulses in this way, it replaces the pleasure principle, which was formerly alone decisive, by what is known as the ‘reality principle’, which, though it pursues the same ultimate aims, takes into account the conditions imposed by the real external world. Later, the ego learns that there is yet another way of securing satisfaction besides the adaption to the external world which I have described. It is also possible to intervene in the external world by changing it, and to establish in it intentionally the conditions which make satisfaction possible. This activity then becomes the ego’s highest function; decisions as to when it is more expedient to control one’s passions and bow before reality, and when it is more expedient to side with them and to take arms against the external world - such decisions make up the whole essence of worldly wisdom.

‘And does the id put up with being dominated like this by the ego, in spite of being, if I understand you aright, the stronger party?’

Yes, all will be well if the ego is in possession of its whole organization and efficiency, if it has access to all parts of the id and can exercise its influence on them. For there is no natural opposition between ego and id; they belong together, and under healthy conditions cannot in practice be distinguished from each other.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4345

‘That sounds very pretty; but I cannot see how in such an ideal relation there can be the smallest room for a pathological disturbance.’

You are right. So long as the ego and its relations to the id fulfil these ideal conditions, there will be no neurotic disturbance. The point at which the illness makes its breach is an unexpected one, though no one acquainted with general pathology will be surprised to find a confirmation of the principle that it is precisely the most important developments and differentiations that carry in them the seeds of illness, of failure of function.

‘You are becoming too learned. I cannot follow you.’

I must go back a little bit further. A small living organism is a truly miserable, powerless thing, is it not? compared with the immensely powerful external world, full as it is of destructive influences. A primitive organism, which has not developed any adequate ego-organization, is at the mercy of all these ‘traumas’. It lives by the ‘blind’ satisfaction of its instinctual wishes and often perishes in consequence. The differentiation of an ego is above all a step towards self-preservation. Nothing, it is true, can be learnt from being destroyed; but if one has luckily survived a trauma one takes notice of the approach of similar situations and signalizes the danger by an abbreviated repetition of the impressions one has experienced in connection with the trauma - by an affect of anxiety. This reaction to the perception of the danger now introduces an attempt at flight, which can have a life-saving effect till one has grown strong enough to meet the dangers of the external world in a more active fashion - even aggressively, perhaps.

‘All this is very far away from what you promised to tell me.’

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4346

You have no notion how close I am to fulfilling my promise. Even in organisms which later develop an efficient ego-organization, their ego is feeble and little differentiated from their id to begin with, during their first years of childhood. Imagine now what will happen if this powerless ego experiences an instinctual demand from the id which it would already like to resist (because it senses that to satisfy it is dangerous and would conjure up a traumatic situation, a collision with the external world) but which it cannot control, because it does not yet possess enough strength to do so. In such a case the ego treats the instinctual danger as if it was an external one; it makes an attempt at flight, draws back from this portion of the id and leaves it to its fate, after withholding from it all the contributions which it usually makes to instinctual impulses. The ego, as we put it, institutes a repression of these instinctual impulses. For the moment this has the effect of fending off the danger; but one cannot confuse the inside and the outside with impunity. One cannot run away from oneself. In repression the ego is following the pleasure principle, which it is usually in the habit of correcting; and it is bound to suffer damage in revenge. This lies in the ego’s having permanently narrowed its sphere of influence. The repressed instinctual impulse is now isolated, left to itself, inaccessible, but also uninfluenceable. It goes its own way. Even later, as a rule, when the ego has grown stronger, it still cannot lift the repression; its synthesis is impaired, a part of the id remains forbidden ground to the ego. Nor does the isolated instinctual impulse remain idle; it understands how to make up for being denied normal satisfaction; it produces psychical derivatives which take its place; it links itself to other processes which by its influence it likewise tears away from the ego; and finally it breaks through into the ego and into consciousness in the form of an unrecognizably distorted substitute, and creates what we call a symptom. All at once the nature of a neurotic disorder becomes clear to us: on the one hand an ego which is inhibited in its synthesis, which has no influence on parts of the id, which must renounce some of its activities in order to avoid a fresh collision with what has been repressed, and which exhausts itself in what are for the most part vain acts of defence against the symptoms, the derivatives of the repressed impulses; and on the other hand an id in which individual instincts have made themselves independent, pursue their aims regardless of the interests of the person as a whole and henceforth obey the laws only of the primitive psychology that rules in the depths of the id. If we survey the whole situation we arrive at a simple formula for the origin of a neurosis: the ego has made an attempt to suppress certain portions of the id in an inappropriate manner, this attempt has failed and the id has taken its revenge. A neurosis is thus the result of a conflict between the ego and the id, upon which the ego has embarked because, as careful investigation shows, it wishes at all costs to retain its adaptability in relation to the real external world. The disagreement is between the external world and the id; and it is because the ego, loyal to its inmost nature, takes sides with the external world that it becomes involved in a conflict with its id. But please observe that what creates the determinant for the illness is not the fact of this conflict - for disagreements of this kind between reality and the id are unavoidable and it is one of the ego’s standing tasks to mediate in them - but the circumstance that the ego has made use of the inefficient instrument of repression for dealing with the conflict. But this in turn is due to the fact that the ego, at the time at which it was set the task, was undeveloped and powerless. The decisive repressions all take place in early childhood.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4347

‘What a remarkable business! I shall follow your advice and not make criticisms, since you only want to show me what psycho-analysis believes about the origin of neurosis so that you can go on to say how it sets about combating it. I should have various questions to ask and later on I shall raise some of them. But at the moment I myself feel tempted for once to carry your train of thought further and to venture upon a theory of my own. You have expounded the relation between external world, ego and id, and you have laid it down as the determinant of a neurosis that the ego in its dependence on the external world struggles against the id. Is not the opposite case conceivable of the ego in a conflict of this kind allowing itself to be dragged away by the id and disavowing its regard for the external world? What happens in a case like that? From my lay notions of the nature of insanity I should say that such a decision on the part of the ego might be the determinant of insanity. After all, a turning-away of that kind from reality seems to be the essence of insanity.’

Yes. I myself have thought of that possibility, and indeed I believe it meets the facts - though to prove the suspicion true would call for a discussion of some highly complicated considerations. Neuroses and psychoses are evidently intimately related, but they must nevertheless differ in some decisive respect. That might well be the side taken by the ego in a conflict of this kind. In both cases the id would retain its characteristic of blind inflexibility.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4348

‘Well, go on! What hints on the treatment of neurotic illnesses does your theory give?’

It is easy now to describe our therapeutic aim. We try to restore the ego, to free it from its restrictions, and to give it back the command over the id which it has lost owing to its early repressions. It is for this one purpose that we carry out analysis, our whole technique is directed to this aim. We have to seek out the repressions which have been set up and to urge the ego to correct them with our help and to deal with conflicts better than by an attempt at flight. Since these repressions belong to the very early years of childhood, the work of analysis leads us, too, back to that period. Our path to these situations of conflict, which have for the most part been forgotten and which we try to revive in the patient’s memory, is pointed out to us by his symptoms, dreams and free associations. These must, however, first be interpreted - translated - for, under the influence of the psychology of the id, they have assumed forms of expression that are strange to our comprehension. We may assume that whatever associations, thoughts and memories the patient is unable to communicate to us without internal struggles are in some way connected with the repressed material or are its derivatives. By encouraging the patient to disregard his resistances to telling us these things, we are educating his ego to overcome its inclination towards attempts at flight and to tolerate an approach to what is repressed. In the end, if the situation of the repression can be successfully reproduced in his memory, his compliance will be brilliantly rewarded. The whole difference between his age then and now works in his favour; and the thing from which his childish ego fled in terror will often seem to his adult and strengthened ego no more than child’s play.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4349

IV

‘Everything you have told me so far has been psychology. It has often sounded strange, difficult, or obscure; but it has always been - if I may put it so - "pure". I have known very little hitherto, no doubt, about your psycho-analysis; but the rumour has nevertheless reached my ears that you are principally occupied with things that have no claim to that predicate. The fact that you have not yet touched on anything of the kind makes me feel that you are deliberately keeping something back. And there is another doubt that I cannot suppress. After all, as you yourself say, neuroses are disturbances of mental life. Is it possible, then, that such important things as our ethics, our conscience, our ideals, play no part at all in these profound disturbances?’

So you feel that a consideration both of what is lowest and of what is highest has been missing from our discussions up till now? The reason for that is that we have not yet considered the contents of mental life at all. But allow me now for once myself to play the part of an interrupter who holds up the progress of the conversation. I have talked so much psychology to you because I wanted you to get the impression that the work of analysis is a part of applied psychology - and, moreover, of a psychology that is unknown outside analysis. An analyst must therefore first and foremost have learnt this psychology, this depth-psychology or psychology of the unconscious, or as much of it at least as is known to-day. We shall need this as a basis for our later conclusions. But now, what was it you meant by your allusion to ‘purity’?

‘Well, it is generally reported that in analyses the most intimate - and the nastiest - events in sexual life come up for discussion in every detail. If that is so - I have not been able to gather from your psychological discussions that it is necessarily so - it would be a strong argument in favour of restricting these treatments to doctors. How could one dream of allowing such dangerous liberties to people of whose discretion one was not sure and of whose character one had no guarantee?’

It is true that doctors enjoy certain privileges in the sphere of sex: they are even allowed to inspect people’s genitals - though they were not allowed to in the East and though some idealistic reformers (you know whom I have in mind) have disputed this privilege. But you want to know in the first place whether it is so in analysis and why it must be so. - Yes, it is so.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4350

And it must be so, firstly, because analysis is entirely founded on complete candour. Financial circumstances, for instance, are discussed with equal detail and openness: things are said that are kept back from every fellow-citizen, even if he is not a competitor or a tax-collector. I will not dispute - indeed, I will myself insist with energy - that this obligation to candour puts a grave moral responsibility on the analyst as well. And it must be so, secondly, because factors from sexual life play an extremely important, a dominating, perhaps even a specific part among the causes and precipitating factors of neurotic illnesses. What else can analysis do but keep close to its subject-matter, to the material brought up by the patient? The analyst never entices his patient on to the ground of sex. He does not say to him in advance: ‘We shall be dealing with the intimacies of your sexual life!’ He allows him to begin what he has to say whenever he pleases, and quietly waits until the patient himself touches on sexual things. I used always to warn my pupils: ‘Our opponents have told us that we shall come upon cases in which the factor of sex plays no part. Let us be careful not to introduce it into our analyses and so spoil our chance of finding such a case.’ But so far none of us has had that good fortune.

I am aware, of course, that our recognition of sexuality has become - whether admittedly or not - the strongest motive for other people’s hostility to analysis. Can that shake our confidence? It merely shows us how neurotic our whole civilized life is, since ostensibly normal people do not behave very differently from neurotics. At a time when psycho-analysis was solemnly put on its trial before the learned societies of Germany - to-day things have grown altogether quieter - one of the speakers claimed to possess peculiar authority because, so he said, he even allowed his patients to talk: for diagnostic purposes, clearly, and to test the assertions of analysts. ‘But’, he added, ‘if they begin to talk about sexual matters I shut their mouths.’ What do you think of that as a method of demonstration? The learned society applauded the speaker to the echo instead of feeling suitably ashamed on his account. Only the triumphant certainty afforded by the consciousness of prejudices held in common can explain this speaker’s want of logical thought. Years later a few of those who had at that time been my followers gave in to the need to free human society from the yoke of sexuality which psycho-analysis was seeking to impose on it. One of them explained that what is sexual does not mean sexuality at all, but something else, something abstract and mystical. And another actually declared that sexual life is merely one of the spheres in which human beings seek to put in action their driving need for power and domination. They have met with much applause, for the moment at least.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4351

‘I shall venture, for once in a way, to take sides on that point. It strikes me as extremely bold to assert that sexuality is not a natural, primitive need of living organisms, but an expression of something else. One need only take the example of animals.’

That makes no difference. There is no mixture, however absurd, that society will not willingly swallow down if it is advertised as an antidote to the dreaded predominance of sexuality.

I confess, moreover, that the dislike that you yourself have betrayed of assigning to the factor of sexuality so great a part in the causation of neurosis - I confess that this scarcely seems to me consistent with your task as an Impartial Person. Are you not afraid that this antipathy may interfere with your passing a just judgement?

‘I am sorry to hear you say that. Your reliance on me seems to be shaken. But in that case why not have chosen someone else as your Impartial Person?’

Because that someone else would not have thought any differently from you. But if he had been prepared from the first to recognize the importance of sexual life, everyone would have exclaimed: ‘Why, that is no Impartial Person, he is one of your supporters!’ No, I am far from abandoning the expectation of being able to influence your opinions. I must admit, however, that from my point of view this situation is different from the one we dealt with earlier. As regards our psychological discussions it is a matter of indifference to me whether you believe me or not, provided only that you get an impression that what we are concerned with are purely psychological problems. But here, as regards the question of sexuality, I should nevertheless be glad if you were accessible to the realization that your strongest motive for contradiction is precisely the ingrained hostility which you share with so many other people.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4352

‘But after all I am without the experience that has given you your unshakeable certainty.’

Very well. I can now proceed with my exposition. Sexual life is not simply something spicy; it is also a serious scientific problem. There was much that was novel to be learnt about it, many strange things to be explained. I told you just now that analysis has to go back into the early years of the patient’s childhood, because the decisive repressions have taken place then, while his ego was feeble. But surely in childhood there is no sexual life? surely it only starts at puberty? On the contrary. We have to learn that sexual instinctual impulses accompany life from birth onwards, and that it is precisely in order to fend off those instincts that the infantile ego institutes repressions. A remarkable coincidence, is it not? that small children should already be struggling against the power of sexuality, just as the speaker in the learned society was to do later, and later still my followers who have set up their own theories. How does that come about? The most general explanation would be that our civilization is built up entirely at the expense of sexuality; but there is much more to be said on the subject.

The discovery of infantile sexuality is one of those of which we have reason to feel ashamed. A few paediatricians have, it seems, always known about it, and a few children’s nurses. Clever men, who call themselves child psychologists, have thereupon spoken in tones of reproach of a ‘desecration of the innocence of childhood’. Once again, sentiment instead of argument! Events of that kind are of daily occurrence in political bodies. A member of the Opposition rises and denounces some piece of maladministration in the Civil Service, in the Army, in the Judiciary and so on. Upon this another member, preferably one of the Government, declares that such statements are an affront to the sense of honour of the body politic, of the army, of the dynasty, or even of the nation. So they are as good as untrue. Feelings such as these can tolerate no affronts.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4353

The sexual life of children is of course different from that of adults. The sexual function, from its beginnings to the definitive form in which it is so familiar to us, undergoes a complicated process of development. It grows together from numerous component instincts with different aims and passes through several phases of organization till at last it comes into the service of reproduction. Not all the component instincts are equally serviceable for the final outcome; they must be diverted, remodelled and in part suppressed. Such a far-reaching course of development is not always passed through without a flaw; inhibitions in development take place, partial fixations at early stages of development. If obstacles arise later on to the exercise of the sexual function, the sexual urge - the libido, as we call it - is apt to hark back to these earlier points of fixation. The study of the sexuality of children and its transformations up to maturity has also given us the key to an understanding of what are known as the sexual perversions, which people used always to describe with all the requisite indications of disgust but whose origin they were never able to explain. The whole topic is of uncommon interest, but for the purposes of our conversation there is not much sense in telling you more about it. To find one’s way about in it one of course needs anatomical and physiological knowledge, all of which is unfortunately not to be acquired in medical schools. But a familiarity with the history of civilization and with mythology is equally indispensable.

‘After all that, I still cannot form any picture of the sexual life of children.’

Then I will pursue the subject further; in any case it is not easy for me to get away from it. I will tell you, then, that the most remarkable thing about the sexual life of children seems to me that it passes through the whole of its very far-reaching development in the first five years of life. From then onwards until puberty there stretches what is known as the period of latency. During it sexuality normally advances no further; on the contrary, the sexual urges diminish in strength and many things are given up and forgotten which the child did and knew. During that period of life, after the early efflorescence of sexuality has withered, such attitudes of the ego as shame, disgust and morality arise, which are destined to stand up against the later tempest of puberty and to lay down the path of the freshly awakening sexual desires. This ‘diphasic onset’, as it is named, of sexual life has a great deal to do with the genesis of neurotic illnesses. It seems to occur only in human beings, and it is perhaps one of the determinants of the human privilege of becoming neurotic. The prehistory of sexual life was just as much overlooked before psycho-analysis as, in another department, the background to conscious mental life. You will rightly suspect that the two are intimately connected.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4354

There is much to be told, for which our expectations have not prepared us, about the contents, manifestations and achievements of this early period of sexuality. For instance, you will no doubt be surprised to hear how often little boys are afraid of being eaten up by their father. (And you may also be surprised at my including this fear among the phenomena of sexual life.) But I may remind you of the mythological tale which you may still recall from your schooldays of how the god Kronos swallowed his children. How strange this must have sounded to you when you first heard it! But I suppose none of us thought about it at the time. To-day we can also call to mind a number of fairy tales in which some ravenous animal like a wolf appears, and we shall recognize it as a disguise of the father. And this is an opportunity of assuring you that it was only through the knowledge of infantile sexuality that it became possible to understand mythology and the world of fairy tales. Here then something has been gained as a by-product of analytic studies.

You will be no less surprised to hear that male children suffer from a fear of being robbed of their sexual organ by their father, so that this fear of being castrated has a most powerful influence on the development of their character and in deciding the direction to be followed by their sexuality. And here again mythology may give you the courage to believe psycho-analysis. The same Kronos who swallowed his children also emasculated his father Uranus, and was afterwards himself emasculated in revenge by his son Zeus, who had been rescued though his mother’s cunning. If you have felt inclined to suppose that all that psycho-analysis reports about the early sexuality of children is derived from the disordered imagination of the analysts, you must at least admit that their imagination has created the same product as the imaginative activities of primitive man, of which myths and fairy tales are the precipitate. The alternative friendlier, and probably also the more pertinent view would be that in the mental life of children to-day we can still detect the same archaic factors which were once dominant generally in the primaeval days of human civilization. In his mental development the child would be repeating the history of his race in an abbreviated form, just as embryology long since recognized was the case with somatic development.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4355

Another characteristic of early infantile sexuality is that the female sexual organ proper as yet plays no part in it: the child has not yet discovered it. Stress falls entirely on the male organ, all the child’s interest is directed towards the question of whether it is present or not. We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a ‘dark continent’ for psychology. But we have learnt that girls feel deeply their lack of a sexual organ that is equal in value to the male one; they regard themselves on that account as inferior, and this ‘envy for the penis’ is the origin of a whole number of characteristic feminine reactions.

It is also characteristic of children that their two excretory needs are cathected with sexual interest. Later on, education draws a sharp distinction here, which is once more obliterated in the practice of joking. It may seem to us an unsavoury fact, but it takes quite a long time for children to develop feelings of disgust. This is not disputed even by people who insist otherwise on the seraphic purity of the child’s mind.

Nothing, however, deserves more notice than the fact that children regularly direct their sexual wishes towards their nearest relatives - in the first place, therefore, towards their father and mother, and afterwards towards their brothers and sisters. The first object of a boy’s love is his mother, and of a girl’s her father (except in so far as an innate bisexual disposition favours the simultaneous presence of the contrary attitude). The other parent is felt as a disturbing rival and not infrequently viewed with strong hostility. You must understand me aright. What I mean to say is not that the child wants to be treated by its favourite parent merely with the kind of affection which we adults like to regard as the essence of the parent-child relation. No, analysis leaves us in no doubt that the child’s wishes extend beyond such affection to all that we understand by sensual satisfaction - so far, that is, as the child’s powers of imagination allow. It is easy to see that the child never guesses the actual facts of sexual intercourse; he replaces them by other notions derived from his own experience and feelings. As a rule his wishes culminate in the intention to bear, or in some in definable way, to procreate a baby. Boys, too, in their ignorance, do not exclude themselves from the wish to bear a baby. We give the whole of this mental structure the name of ‘Oedipus complex’, after the familiar Greek legend. With the end of the early sexual period it should normally be given up, should radically disintegrate and become transformed; and the results of this transformation are destined for important functions in later mental life. But as a rule this is not effected radically enough, in which case puberty brings about a revival of the complex, which may have serious consequences.

I am surprised that you are still silent. That can scarcely mean consent. - In asserting that a child’s first choice of an object is, to use the technical term, an incestuous one, analysis no doubt once more hurt the most sacred feelings of humanity, and might well be prepared for a corresponding amount of disbelief, contradiction and attack. And these it has received in abundance. Nothing has damaged it more in the good opinion of its contemporaries than its hypothesis of the Oedipus complex as a structure universally bound to human destiny. The Greek myth, incidentally, must have had the same meaning; but the majority of men to-day, learned and unlearned alike, prefer to believe that Nature has laid down an innate abhorrence in us as a guard against the possibility of incest.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4356

But let us first summon history to our aid. When Caius Julius Caesar landed in Egypt, he found the young Queen Cleopatra (who was soon to become so important to him) married to her still younger brother Ptolemy. In an Egyptian dynasty there was nothing peculiar in this; the Ptolemies, who were of Greek origin, had merely carried on the custom which had been practised by their predecessors, the ancient Pharaohs, for a few thousand years. This, however, was merely brother-and-sister incest, which even at the present time is not judged so harshly. So let us turn to our chief witness in matters concerning primaeval times - mythology. It informs us that the myths of every people, and not only of the Greeks, are filled with examples of love-affairs between fathers and daughters and even between mothers and sons. Cosmology, no less than the genealogy of royal races, is founded upon incest. For what purpose do you suppose these legends were created? To brand gods and kings as criminals? to fasten on them the abhorrence of the human race? Rather, surely, because incestuous wishes are a primordial human heritage and have never been fully overcome, so that their fulfilment was still granted to gods and their descendants when the majority of common humans were already obliged to renounce them. It is in complete harmony with these lessons of history and mythology that we find incestuous wishes still present and operative in the childhood of the individual.

‘I might take it amiss that you tried to keep back all this about infantile sexuality from me. It seems to me most interesting, particularly on account of its connection with human prehistory.’

I was afraid it might take us too far from our purpose. But perhaps after all it will be of use.

‘Now tell me, though, what certainty can you offer for your analytic findings on the sexual life of children? Is your conviction based solely on points of agreement with mythology and history?’

Oh, by no means. It is based on direct observation. What happened was this. We had begun by inferring the content of sexual childhood from the analysis of adults - that is to say, some twenty to forty years later. Afterwards, we undertook analyses on children themselves, and it was no small triumph when we were thus able to confirm in them everything that we had been able to divine, in spite of the amount to which it had been overlaid and distorted in the interval.

‘What? You have had small children in analysis? children of less than six years? Can that be done? And is it not most risky for the children?’

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4357

It can be done very well. It is hardly to be believed what goes on in a child of four or five years old. Children are very active-minded at that age; their early sexual period is also a period of intellectual flowering. I have an impression that with the onset of the latency period they become mentally inhibited as well, stupider. From that time on, too, many children lose their physical charm. And, as regards the damage done by early analysis, I may inform you that the first child on whom the experiment was ventured, nearly twenty years ago, has since then grown into a healthy and capable young man, who has passed through his puberty irreproachably, in spite of some severe psychical traumas. It may be hoped that things will turn out no worse for the other ‘victims’ of early analysis. Much that is of interest attaches to these child analyses; it is possible that in the future they will become still more important. From the point of view of theory, their value is beyond question. They give unambiguous information on problems which remain unsolved in the analyses of adults; and they thus protect the analyst from errors that might have momentous consequences for him. One surprises the factors that lead to the formation of a neurosis while they are actually at work and one cannot then mistake them. In the child’s interest, it is true, analytic influence must be combined with educational measures. The technique has still to receive its shaping. But practical interest is aroused by the observation that a very large number of our children pass through a plainly neurotic phase in the course of their development. Since we have learnt how to look more sharply, we are tempted to say that neurosis in children is not the exception but the rule, as though it could scarcely be avoided on the path from the innate disposition of infancy to civilized society. In most cases this neurotic phase in childhood is overcome spontaneously. But may it not also regularly leave its traces in the average healthy adult? On the other hand in those who are neurotics in later life we never fail to find links with the illness in childhood, though at the time it need not have been very noticeable. In a precisely analogous way physicians to-day, I believe, hold the view that each one of us has gone through an attack of tuberculosis in his childhood. It is true that in the case of the neuroses the factor of immunization does not operate, but only the factor of predisposition.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4358

Let me return to your question about certainty. We have become quite generally convinced from the direct analytic examination of children that we were right in our interpretation of what adults told us about their childhood. In a number of cases, however, another sort of confirmation has become possible. The material of the analysis of some patients has enabled us to reconstruct certain external happenings, certain impressive events of their childhood years, of which they have preserved no conscious memory. Lucky accidents, information from parents or nurses, have afterwards provided irrefutable evidence that these occurrences which we had inferred really did take place. This, of course, has not happened often, but when it has it has made an overwhelming impression. The correct reconstruction, you must know, of such forgotten experiences of childhood always has a great therapeutic effect, whether they permit of objective confirmation or not. These events owe their importance, of course, to their having occurred at such an early age, at a time when they could still produce a traumatic effect on the feeble ego.

‘And what sort of events can these be, that have to be discovered by analysis?’

Various sorts. In the first place, impressions capable of permanently influencing the child’s budding sexual life - such as observations of sexual activities between adults, or sexual experiences of his own with an adult or another child (no rare events); or, again, overhearing conversations, understood either at the time or retrospectively, from which the child thought it could draw conclusions about mysterious or uncanny matters; or again, remarks or actions by the child himself which give evidence of significant attitudes of affection or enmity towards other people. It is of special importance in an analysis to induce a memory of the patient’s own forgotten sexual activity as a child and also of the intervention by the adults which brought it to an end.

‘That gives me an opportunity of bringing up a question that I have long wanted to ask. What, then, is the nature of this "sexual activity" of children at an early age, which, as you say, was overlooked before the days of analysis?’

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4359

It is an odd thing that the regular and essential part of this sexual activity was not overlooked. Or rather, it is by no means odd; for it was impossible to overlook it. Children’s sexual impulses find their main expressions in self-gratification by friction of their own genitals, or, more precisely, of the male portion of them. The extraordinarily wide distribution of this form of childish ‘naughtiness’ was always known to adults, and it was regarded as a grave sin and severely punished. But please do not ask me how people could reconcile these observations of the immoral inclinations of children - for children do it, as they themselves say, because it gives them pleasure - with the theory of their innate purity and non-sensuality. You must get our opponents to solve this riddle. We have a more important problem before us. What attitude should we adopt towards the sexual activity of early childhood? We know the responsibility we are incurring if we suppress it; but we do not venture to let it take its course without restriction. Among races at a low level of civilization, and among the lower strata of civilized races, the sexuality of children seems to be given free rein. This probably provides a powerful protection against the subsequent development of neuroses in the individual. But does it not at the same time involve an extraordinary loss of the aptitude for cultural achievements? There is a good deal to suggest that here we are faced by a new Scylla and Charybdis.

But whether the interests which are stimulated by the study of the sexual life of neurotics create an atmosphere favourable to the encouragement of lasciviousness - that is a question which I venture to leave to your own judgement.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4360

V

‘I believe I understand your purpose. You want to show me what kind of knowledge is needed in order to practise analysis, so that I may be able to judge whether only doctors should have a right to do so. Well, so far very little to do with medicine has turned up: a great deal of psychology and a little biology or sexual science. But perhaps we have not got to the end?’

Decidedly not. There are still gaps to be filled. May I make a request? Will you describe how you now picture an analytic treatment? - just as though you had to undertake one yourself.

‘A fine idea, to be sure! No, I have not the least intention of settling our controversy by an experiment of that sort. But just to oblige, I will do what you ask - the responsibility will be yours. Very well. I will suppose that the patient comes to me and complains of his troubles. I promise him recovery or improvement if he will follow my directions. I call on him to tell me with perfect candour everything that he knows and that occurs to him, and not to be deterred from that intention even if some things are disagreeable to say. Have I taken in the rule properly?’

Yes. You should add: ‘even if what occurs to him seems unimportant or senseless.’

‘I will add that. Thereupon he begins to talk and I listen. And what then? I infer from what he tells me the kind of impressions, experiences and wishes which he has repressed because he came across them at a time when his ego was still feeble and was afraid of them instead of dealing with them. When he has learnt this from me, he puts himself back in the old situations and with my help he manages better. The limitations to which his ego was tied then disappear, and he is cured. Is that right?’

Bravo! bravo! I see that once again people will be able to accuse me of having made an analyst of someone who is not a doctor. You have mastered it all admirably.

‘I have done no more than repeat what I have heard from you - as though it was something I had learnt by heart. All the same, I cannot form any picture of how I should do it, and I am quite at a loss to understand why a job like that should take an hour a day for so many months. After all, an ordinary person has not as a rule experienced such a lot, and what was repressed in childhood is probably in every case the same.’

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4361

When one really practises analysis one learns all kinds of things besides. For instance: you would not find it at all such a simple matter to deduce from what the patient tells you the experiences he has forgotten and the instinctual impulses he has repressed. He says something to you which at first means as little to you as it does to him. You will have to make up your mind to look at the material which he delivers to you in obedience to the rule in a quite special way: as though it were ore, perhaps, from which its content of precious metal has to be extracted by a particular process. You will be prepared, too, to work over many tons of ore which may contain but little of the valuable material you are in search of. Here we should have a first reason for the prolonged character of the treatment.

‘But how does one work over this raw material - to keep to your simile?’

By assuming that the patient’s remarks and associations are only distortions of what you are looking for - allusions, as it were, from which you have to guess what is hidden behind them. In a word, this material, whether it consists of memories, associations or dreams, has first to be interpreted. You will do this, of course, with an eye to the expectations you have formed as you listened, thanks to your special knowledge.

‘"Interpret!" A nasty word! I dislike the sound of it; it robs me of all certainty. If everything depends on my interpretation who can guarantee that I interpret right? So after all everything is left to my caprice.’

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4362

Just a moment! Things are not quite as bad as that. Why do you choose to except your own mental processes from the rule of law which you recognize in other people’s? When you have attained some degree of self-discipline and have certain knowledge at your disposal, your interpretations will be independent of your personal characteristics and will hit the mark. I am not saying that the analyst’s personality is a matter of indifference for this portion of his task. A kind of sharpness of hearing for what is unconscious and repressed, which is not possessed equally by everyone, has a part to play. And here, above all, we are brought to the analyst’s obligation to make himself capable, by a deep-going analysis of his own, of the unprejudiced reception of the analytic material. Something, it is true, still remains over: something comparable to the ‘personal equation’ in astronomical observations. This individual factor will always play a larger part in psycho-analysis than elsewhere. An abnormal person can become an accurate physicist; as an analyst he will be hampered by his own abnormality from seeing the pictures of mental life undistorted. Since it is impossible to demonstrate to anyone his own abnormality, general agreement in matters of depth-psychology will be particularly hard to reach. Some psychologists, indeed, think it is quite impossible and that every fool has an equal right to give out his folly as wisdom. I confess that I am more of an optimist about this. After all, our experiences show that fairly satisfactory agreements can be reached even in psychology. Every field of research has its particular difficulty which we must try to eliminate. And, moreover, even in the interpretative art of analysis there is much that can be learnt like any other material of study: for instance, in connection with the peculiar method of indirect representation through symbols.

‘Well, I no longer have any desire to undertake an analytic treatment even in my imagination. Who can say what other surprises I might meet with?’

You are quite right to give up the notion. You see how much more training and practice would be needed. When you have found the right interpretation, another task lies ahead. You must wait for the right moment at which you can communicate your interpretation to the patient with some prospect of success.

‘How can one always tell the right moment?’

That is a question of tact, which can become more refined with experience. You will be making a bad mistake if, in an effort, perhaps, at shortening the analysis, you throw your interpretations at the patient’s head as soon as you have found them. In that way you will draw expressions of resistance, rejection and indignation from him; but you will not enable his ego to master his repressed material. The formula is: to wait till he has come so near to the repressed material that he has only a few more steps to take under the lead of the interpretation you propose.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4363

‘I believe I should never learn to do that. And if I carry out these precautions in making my interpretation, what next?’

It will then be your fate to make a discovery for which you were not prepared.

‘And what may that be?’

That you have been deceived in your patient; that you cannot count in the slightest on his collaboration and compliance; that he is ready to place every possible difficulty in the way of your common work - in a word, that he has no wish whatever to be cured.

‘Well! that is the craziest thing you have told me yet. And I do not believe it either. The patient who is suffering so much, who complains so movingly about his troubles, who is making so great a sacrifice for the treatment - you say he has no wish to be cured! But of course you do not mean what you say.’

Calm yourself! I do mean it. What I said was the truth - not the whole truth, no doubt, but a very noteworthy part of it. The patient wants to be cured - but he also wants not to be. His ego has lost its unity, and for that reason his will has no unity either. If that were not so, he would be no neurotic.

‘"Were I sagacious, I should not be Tell!"’

The derivatives of what is repressed have broken into his ego and established themselves there; and the ego has as little control over trends from that source as it has over what is actually repressed, and as a rule it knows nothing about them. These patients, indeed, are of a peculiar nature and raise difficulties with which we are not accustomed to reckon. All our social institutions are framed for people with a united and normal ego, which one can classify as good or bad, which either fulfils its function or is altogether eliminated by an overpowering influence. Hence the juridical alternative: responsible or irresponsible. None of these distinctions apply to neurotics. It must be admitted that there is difficulty in adapting social demands to their psychological condition. This was experienced on a large scale during the last war. Were the neurotics who evaded service malingerers or not? They were both. If they were treated as malingerers and if their illness was made highly uncomfortable, they recovered; if after being ostensibly restored they were sent back into service, they promptly took flight once more into illness. Nothing could be done with them. And the same is true of neurotics in civil life. They complain of their illness but exploit it with all their strength; and if someone tries to take it away from them they defend it like the proverbial lioness with her young. Yet there would be no sense in reproaching them for this contradiction.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4364

‘But would not the best plan be not to give these difficult people any treatment at all, but to leave them to themselves! I cannot think it is worth while to expend such great efforts over each of them as you lead me to suppose that you make.’

I cannot approve of your suggestion. It is undoubtedly a more proper line to accept the complications of life rather than struggle against them. It may be true that not every neurotic whom we treat is worth the expenditure of an analysis; but there are some very valuable individuals among them as well. We must set ourselves the goal of bringing it about that as few human beings as possible enter civilized life with such a defective mental equipment. And for that purpose we must collect much experience and learn to understand many things. Every analysis can be instructive and bring us a yield of new understanding quite apart from the personal value of the individual patient.

‘But if a volitional impulse has been formed in the patient’s ego which wishes to retain the illness, it too must have its reasons and motives and be able in some way to justify itself. But it is impossible to see why anyone should want to be ill or what he can get out of it.’

Oh, that is not so hard to understand. Think of the war neurotics, who do not have to serve, precisely because they are ill. In civil life illness can be used as a screen to gloss over incompetence in one’s profession or in competition with other people; while in the family it can serve as a means for sacrificing the other members and extorting proofs of their love or for imposing one’s will upon them. All of this lies fairly near the surface; we sum it up in the term ‘gain from illness’. It is curious, however, that the patient - that is, his ego - nevertheless knows nothing of the whole concatenation of these motives and the actions which they involve. One combats the influence of these trends by compelling the ego to take cognizance of them. But there are other motives, that lie still deeper, for holding on to being ill, which are not so easily dealt with. But these cannot be understood without a fresh journey into psychological theory.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4365

‘Please go on. A little more theory will make no odds now.’

When I described the relation between the ego and the id to you, I suppressed an important part of the theory of the mental apparatus. For we have been obliged to assume that within the ego itself a particular agency has become differentiated, which we name the super-ego. This super-ego occupies a special position between the ego and the id. It belongs to the ego and shares its high degree of psychological organization; but it has a particularly intimate connection with the id. It is in fact a precipitate of the first object-cathexes of the id and is the heir to the Oedipus complex after its demise. This super-ego can confront the ego and treat it like an object; and it often treats it very harshly. It is as important for the ego to remain on good terms with the super-ego as with the id. Estrangements between the ego and the super-ego are of great significance in mental life. You will already have guessed that the super-ego is the vehicle of the phenomenon that we call conscience. Mental health very much depends on the super-ego’s being normally developed - that is, on its having become sufficiently impersonal. And that is precisely what it is not in neurotics, whose Oedipus complex has not passed through the correct process of transformation. Their super-ego still confronts their ego as a strict father confronts a child; and their morality operates in a primitive fashion in that the ego gets itself punished by the super-ego. Illness is employed as an instrument for this ‘self-punishment’, and neurotics have to behave as though they were governed by a sense of guilt which, in order to be satisfied, needs to be punished by illness.

‘That really sounds most mysterious. The strangest thing about it is that apparently even this mighty force of the patient’s conscience does not reach his consciousness.’

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4366

Yes, we are only beginning to appreciate the significance of all these important circumstances. That is why my description was bound to turn out so obscure. But now I can proceed. We describe all the forces that oppose the work of recovery as the patient’s ‘resistances’. The gain from illness is one such resistance. The ‘unconscious sense of guilt’ represents the super-ego’s resistance; it is the most powerful factor, and the one most dreaded by us. We meet with still other resistances during the treatment. If the ego during the early period has set up a repression out of fear, then the fear still persists and manifests itself as a resistance if the ego approaches the repressed material. And finally, as you can imagine, there are likely to be difficulties if an instinctual process which has been going along a particular path for whole decades is suddenly expected to take a new path that has just been made open for it. That might be called the id’s resistance. The struggle against all these resistances is our main work during an analytic treatment; the task of making interpretations is nothing compared to it. But as a result of this struggle and of the overcoming of the resistances, the patient’s ego is so much altered and strengthened that we can look forward calmly to his future behaviour when the treatment is over. On the other hand, you can understand now why we need such long treatments. The length of the path of development and the wealth of the material are not the decisive factors. It is more a question of whether the path is clear. An army can be held up for weeks on a stretch of country which in peace time an express train crosses in a couple of hours - if the army has to overcome the enemy’s resistance there. Such battles call for time in mental life too. I am unfortunately obliged to tell you that every effort to hasten analytic treatment appreciably has hitherto failed. The best way of shortening it seems to be to carry it out according to the rules.

‘If I ever felt any desire to poach on your preserves and try my hand at analysing someone else, what you tell me about the resistances would have cured me of it. But how about the special personal influence that you yourself have after all admitted? Does not that come into action against the resistances?’

It is a good thing you have asked me about that. This personal influence is our most powerful dynamic weapon. It is the new element which we introduce into the situation and by means of which we make it fluid. The intellectual content of our explanations cannot do it, for the patient, who shares all the prejudices of the world around him, need believe us as little as our scientific critics do. The neurotic sets to work because he has faith in the analyst, and he believes him because he acquires a special emotional attitude towards the figure of the analyst. Children, too, only believe people they are attached to. I have already told you what use we make of this particularly large ‘suggestive’ influence. Not for suppressing the symptoms - this distinguishes the analytic method from other psychotherapeutic procedures - but as a motive force to induce the patient to overcome his resistances.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4367

‘Well, and if that succeeds, does not everything then go smoothly?’

Yes, it ought to. But there turns out to be an unexpected complication. It was perhaps the greatest of the analyst’s surprises to find that the emotional relation which the patient adopts towards him is of a quite peculiar nature. The very first doctor who attempted an analysis - it was not myself - came up against this phenomenon and did not know what to make of it. For this emotional relation is, to put it plainly, in the nature of falling in love. Strange, is it not? Especially when you take into account that the analyst does nothing to provoke it but on the contrary rather keeps at a distance from the patient, speaking humanly, and surrounds himself with some degree of reserve - when you learn besides that this odd love-relationship disregards anything else that is really propitious and every variation in personal attraction, age, sex or class. This love is of a positively compulsive kind. Not that that characteristic need be absent from spontaneous falling in love. As you know, the contrary is often the case. But in the analytic situation it makes its appearance with complete regularity without there being any rational explanation for it. One would have thought that the patient’s relation to the analyst called for no more than a certain amount of respect, trust, gratitude and human sympathy. Instead, there is this falling in love, which itself gives the impression of being a pathological phenomenon.

‘I should have thought all the same that it would be favourable for your analytic purposes. If someone is in love, he is amenable, and he will do anything in the world for the sake of the other person.’

Yes. It is favourable to start with. But when this falling in love has grown deeper, its whole nature comes to light, much of which is incompatible with the task of analysis. The patient’s love is not satisfied with being obedient; it grows exacting, calls for affectionate and sensual satisfactions, it demands exclusiveness, it develops jealousy, and it shows more and more clearly its reverse side, its readiness to become hostile and revengeful if it cannot obtain its ends. At the same time, like all falling in love, it drives away all other mental material; it extinguishes interest in the treatment and in recovery - in short, there can be no doubt that it has taken the place of the neurosis and that our work has had the result of driving out one form of illness with another.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4368

‘That does sound hopeless! What can be done about it? The analysis would have to be given up. But if, as you say, the same thing happens in every case, it would be impossible to carry through any analyses at all.’

We will begin by using the situation in order to learn something from it. What we learn may then perhaps help us to master it. Is it not an extremely noteworthy fact that we succeed in transforming every neurosis, whatever its content, into a condition of pathological love?

Our conviction that a portion of erotic life that has been abnormally employed lies at the basis of neuroses must be unshakeably strengthened by this experience. With this discovery we are once more on a firm footing and can venture to make this love itself the object of analysis. And we can make another observation. Analytic love is not manifested in every case as clearly and blatantly as I have tried to depict it. Why not? We can soon see. In proportion as the purely sensual and the hostile sides of his love try to show themselves, the patient’s opposition to them is aroused. He struggles against them and tries to repress them before our very eyes. And now we understand what is happening. The patient is repeating in the form of falling in love with the analyst mental experiences which he has already been through once before; he has transferred on to the analyst mental attitudes that were lying ready in him and were intimately connected with his neurosis. He is also repeating before our eyes his old defensive actions; he would like best to repeat in his relation to the analyst all the history of that forgotten period of his life. So what he is showing us is the kernel of his intimate life history: he is reproducing it tangibly, as though it were actually happening, instead of remembering it. In this way the riddle of the transference-love is solved and the analysis can proceed on its way - with the help of the new situation which had seemed such a menace to it.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4369

‘That is very cunning. And is the patient so easy to convince that he is not in love but only obliged to stage a revival of an old piece!’

Everything now depends on that. And the whole skill in handling the ‘transference’ is devoted to bringing it about. As you see, the requirements of analytic technique reach their maximum at this point. Here the gravest mistakes can be made or the greatest successes be registered. It would be folly to attempt to evade the difficulties by suppressing or neglecting the transference; whatever else had been done in the treatment, it would not deserve the name of an analysis. To send the patient away as soon as the inconveniences of his transference neurosis make their appearance would be no more sensible, and would moreover be cowardly. It would be as though one had conjured up spirits and run away from them as soon as they appeared. Sometimes, it is true, nothing else is possible. There are cases in which one cannot master the unleashed transference and the analysis has to be broken of; but one must at least have struggled with the evil spirits to the best of one’s strength. To yield to the demands of the transference, to fulfil the patient’s wishes for affectionate and sensual satisfaction, is not only justly forbidden by moral considerations but is also completely ineffective as a technical method for attaining the purpose of the analysis. A neurotic cannot be cured by being enabled to reproduce uncorrected an unconscious stereotype plate that is ready to hand in him. If one engages in compromises with him by offering him partial satisfactions in exchange for his further collaboration in the analysis, one must beware of falling into the ridiculous situation of the cleric who was supposed to convert a sick insurance agent. The sick man remained unconverted but the cleric took his leave insured. The only possible way out of the transference situation is to trace it back to the patient’s past, as he really experienced it or as he pictured it through the wish-fulfilling activity of his imagination. And this demands from the analyst much skill, patience, calm and self-abnegation.

‘And where do you suppose the neurotic experienced the prototype of his transference-love?’

In his childhood: as a rule in his relation with one of his parents. You will remember what importance we had to attribute to these earliest emotional ties. So here the circle closes.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4370

‘Have you finished at last? I am feeling just a little bewildered with all I have heard from you. Only tell me one thing more: how and where can one learn what is necessary for practising analysis?’

There are at the moment two Institutes at which instruction in psycho-analysis is given. The first has been founded in Berlin by Dr. Max Eitingon, who is a member of the Society there. The second is maintained by the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society at its own expense and at considerable sacrifice. The part played by the authorities is at present limited to the many difficulties which they put in the way of the young undertaking. A third training Institute is at this moment being opened in London by the Society there, under the direction of Dr. Ernest Jones. At these Institutes the candidates themselves are taken into analysis, receive theoretical instruction by lectures on all the subjects that are important for them, and enjoy the supervision of older and more experienced analysts when they are allowed to make their first trials with comparatively slight cases. A period of some two years is calculated for this training. Even after this period, of course, the candidate is only a beginner and not yet a master. What is still needed must be acquired by practice and by an exchange of ideas in the psycho-analytical societies in which young and old members meet together. Preparation for analytic activity is by no means so easy and simple. The work is hard, the responsibility great. But anyone who has passed through such a course of instruction, who has been analysed himself, who has mastered what can be taught to-day of the psychology of the unconscious, who is at home in the science of sexual life, who has learnt the delicate technique of psycho-analysis, the art of interpretation, of fighting resistances and of handling the transference - anyone who has accomplished all this is no longer a layman in the field of psycho-analysis. He is capable of undertaking the treatment of neurotic disorders, and will be able in time to achieve in that field whatever can be required from this form of therapy.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4371

VI

‘You have expended a great deal of effort on showing me what psycho-analysis is and what sort of knowledge is needed in order to practise it with some prospect of success. Very well. Listening to you can have done me no harm. But I do not know what influence on my judgement you expect your explanations to have. I see before me a case which has nothing unusual about it. The neuroses are a particular kind of illness and analysis is a particular method of treating them - a specialized branch of medicine. It is the rule in other cases as well for a doctor who has chosen a special branch of medicine not to be satisfied with the education that is confirmed by his diploma: particularly if he intends to set up in a fairly large town, such as can alone offer a livelihood to specialists. Anyone who wants to be a surgeon tries to work for a few years at a surgical clinic, and similarly with oculists, laryngologists and so on - to say nothing of psychiatrists, who are perhaps never able to get away from a state institution or a sanatorium. And the same will happen in the case of psycho-analysts: anyone who decides in favour of this new specialized branch of medicine will, when his studies are completed, take on the two years’ training you spoke of in a training institute, if it really requires so much time. He will realize afterwards, too, that it is to his advantage to keep up his contact with his colleagues in a psycho-analytical society, and everything will go along swimmingly. I cannot see where there is a place in this for the question of lay analysis.’

A doctor who does what you have promised on his behalf will be welcome to all of us. Four-fifths of those whom I recognize as my pupils are in any case doctors. But allow me to point out to you how the relations of doctors to analysis have really developed and how they will probably continue to develop. Doctors have no historical claim to the sole possession of analysis. On the contrary, until recently they have met it with everything possible that could damage it, from the shallowest ridicule to the gravest calumny. You will justly reply that that belongs to the past and need not affect the future. I agree, but I fear the future will be different from what you have foretold.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4372

Permit me to give the word ‘quack’ the meaning it ought to have instead of the legal one. According to the law a quack is anyone who treats patients without possessing a state diploma to prove he is a doctor. I should prefer another definition: a quack is anyone who undertakes a treatment without possessing the knowledge and capacities necessary for it. Taking my stand on this definition, I venture to assert that - not only in European countries - doctors form a preponderating contingent of quacks in analysis. They very frequently practise analytic treatment without having learnt it and without understanding it.

It is no use your objecting that that is unconscientious and that you cannot believe doctors capable of it; that after all a doctor knows that a medical diploma is not a letter of marque and that a patient is not an outlaw; and that one must always grant to a doctor that he is acting in good faith even if he may perhaps be in error.

The facts remain; we will hope that they can be accounted for as you think. I will try to explain to you how it becomes possible for a doctor to act in connection with psycho-analysis in a manner which he would carefully avoid in every other field.

The first consideration is that in his medical school a doctor receives a training which is more or less the opposite of what he would need as a preparation for psycho-analysis. His attention has been directed to objectively ascertainable facts of anatomy, physics and chemistry, on the correct appreciation and suitable influencing of which the success of medical treatment depends. The problem of life is brought into his field of vision so far as it has hitherto been explained to us by the play of forces which can also be observed in inanimate nature. His interest is not aroused in the mental side of vital phenomena; medicine is not concerned with the study of the higher intellectual functions, which lies in the sphere of another faculty. Only psychiatry is supposed to deal with the disturbances of mental functions; but we know in what manner and with what aims it does so. It looks for the somatic determinants of mental disorders and treats them like other causes of illness.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4373

Psychiatry is right to do so and medical education is clearly excellent. If it is described as one-sided, one must first discover the standpoint from which one is making that characteristic into a reproach. In itself every science is one-sided. It must be so, since it restricts itself to particular subjects, points of view and methods. It is a piece of nonsense in which I would take no part to play off one science against another. After all, physics does not diminish the value of chemistry; it cannot take its place but on the other hand cannot be replaced by it. Psycho-analysis is certainly quite particularly one-sided, as being the science of the mental unconscious. We must not therefore dispute to the medical sciences their right to be one-sided.

We shall only find the standpoint we are in search of if we turn from scientific medicine to practical therapeutics. A sick person is a complicated organism. He may remind us that even the mental phenomena which are so hard to grasp should not be effaced from the picture of life. Neurotics, indeed, are an undesired complication, an embarrassment as much to therapeutics as to jurisprudencc and to military service. But they exist and are a particular concern of medicine. Medical education, however, does nothing, literally nothing, towards their understanding and treatment. In view of the intimate connection between the things that we distinguish as physical and mental, we may look forward to a day when paths of knowledge and, let us hope, of influence will be opened up, leading from organic biology and chemistry to the field of neurotic phenomena. That day still seems a distant one, and for the present these illnesses are inaccessible to us from the direction of medicine.

It would be tolerable if medical education merely failed to give doctors any orientation in the field of the neuroses. But it does more: it gives them a false and detrimental attitude. Doctors whose interest has not been aroused in the psychical factors of life are all too ready to form a low estimate of them and to ridicule them as unscientific. For that reason they are unable to take anything really seriously which has to do with them and do not recognize the obligations which derive from them. They therefore fall into the layman’s lack of respect for psychological research and make their own task easy for themselves. - No doubt neurotics have to be treated, since they are sick people and come to the doctor; and one must always be ready to experiment with something new. But why burden oneself with a tedious preparation? We shall manage all right; who can tell if what they teach in the analytic institutes is any good? - The less such doctors understand about the matter, the more venturesome they become. Only a man who really knows is modest, for he knows how insufficient his knowledge is.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4374

The comparison which you brought up to pacify me, between specialization in analysis and in other branches of medicine, is thus not applicable. For surgery, ophthalmology, and so on, the medical school itself offers an opportunity for further education. The analytic training institutes are few in number, young in years, and without authority. The medical schools have not recognized them and take no notice of them. The young doctor, who has had to take so much on trust from his teachers that he has had little occasion for educating his judgement, will gladly seize an occasion for playing the part of a critic for once in a field in which there is as yet no recognized authority.

There are other things too that favour his appearing as an analytic quack. If he tried to undertake eye-operations without sufficient preparation, the failure of his cataract extractions and iridectomies and the absence of patients would soon bring his hazardous enterprise to an end. The practice of analysis is comparatively safe for him. The public is spoilt by the average successful outcome of eye-operations and expects cure from the surgeon. But if a ‘nerve-specialist’ fails to restore his patients no one is surprised. People have not been spoilt by successes in the therapy of the neuroses; the nerve-specialist has at least ‘taken a lot of trouble with them’. Indeed, there is not much that can be done; nature must help, or time. With women there is first menstruation, then marriage, and later on the menopause. Finally death is a real help. Moreover, what the medical analyst has done with his neurotic patient is so inconspicuous that no reproach can attach to it. He has made use of no instruments or medicines; he has merely conversed with him and tried to talk him into or out of something. Surely that can do no harm, especially if he avoids touching on distressing or agitating subjects. The medical analyst, who has avoided any strict teaching, will, no doubt, not have omitted an attempt to improve analysis, to pull out its poison fangs and make it pleasant for the patient. And it will be wise for him to stop there; for if he really ventures to call up resistances and then does not know how to meet them, he may in true earnest make himself unpopular.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4375

Honesty compels me to admit that the activity of an untrained analyst does less harm to his patients than that of an unskilled surgeon. The possible damage is limited to the patient having been led into useless expenditure and having his chances of recovery removed or diminished. Furthermore, the reputation of analytic therapy has been lowered. All this is most undesirable, but it bears no comparison with the dangers that threaten from the knife of a surgical quack. In my judgement, severe or permanent aggravations of a pathological condition are not to be feared even with an unskilled use of analysis. The unwelcome reactions cease after a while. Compared with the traumas of life which have provoked the illness, a little mishandling by the doctor is of no account. It is simply that the unsuitable attempt at a cure has done the patient no good.

‘I have listened to your account of the medical quack in analysis without interrupting you, though I formed an impression that you are dominated by a hostility against the medical profession to the historical explanation of which you yourself have pointed the way. But I will grant you one thing: if analyses are to be carried out, it should be by people who have been thoroughly trained for it. And do you not think that with time the doctors who turn to analysis will do everything to obtain that training?’

I fear not. So long as the attitude of the medical school to the analytic training institute remains unaltered, doctors will find the temptation to make things easier for themselves too great.

‘But you seem to be consistently evading any direct pronouncement on the question of lay analysis. What I guess now is that, because it is impossible to keep a check on doctors who want to analyse, you are proposing, out of revenge, as it were, to punish them by depriving them of their monopoly in analysis and by throwing open this medical activity to laymen as well.’

I cannot say whether you have guessed my motives correctly. Perhaps I shall be able later on to put evidence before you of a less partial attitude. But I lay stress on the demand that no one should practise analysis who has not acquired the right to do so by a particular training. Whether such a person is a doctor or not seems to me immaterial.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4376

‘Then what definite proposals have you to make?’

I have not got so far as that yet; and I cannot tell whether I shall get there at all. I should like to discuss another question with you, and first of all to touch on one special point. It is said that the authorities, at the instigation of the medical profession, want to forbid the practice of analysis by laymen altogether. Such a prohibition would also affect the non-medical members of the Psycho-Analytical Society, who have enjoyed an excellent training and have perfected themselves greatly by practice. If the prohibition were enacted, we should find ourselves in a position in which a number of people are prevented from carrying out an activity which one can safely feel convinced they can perform very well, while the same activity is opened to other people for whom there is no question of a similar guarantee. That is not precisely the sort of result to which legislation should lead. However, this special problem is neither very important nor difficult to solve. Only a handful of people are concerned, who cannot be seriously damaged. They will probably emigrate to Germany where no legislation will prevent them from finding recognition for their proficiency. If it is desired to spare them this and to mitigate the law’s severity, that can easily be done on the basis of some well-known precedents. Under the Austrian Monarchy it repeatedly happened that permission was given to notorious quacks, ad personam, to carry out medical activities in certain fields, because people were convinced of their real ability. Those concerned were for the most part peasant healers, and their recommendation seems regularly to have been made by one of the Archduchesses who were once so numerous; but it ought to be possible for it also to be done in the case of town-dwellers and on the basis of a different and merely expert guarantee. Such a prohibition would have more important effects on the Vienna analytic training institute, which would thenceforward be unable to accept any candidates for training from non-medical circles. Thus once again in our country a line of intellectual activity would be suppressed which is allowed to develop freely elsewhere. I am the last person to claim any competence in judging laws and regulations. But this much I can see: that to lay emphasis on our quackery law does not lead in the direction of the approach to conditions in Germany which is so much aimed at to-day, and that the application of that law to the case of psycho-analysis has something of an anachronism about it, since at the time of its enactment there was as yet no such thing as analysis and the peculiar nature of neurotic illnesses was not yet recognized.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4377

I come now to a question the discussion of which seems to me more important. Is the practice of psycho-analysis a matter which should in general be subject to official interference, or would it be more expedient to leave it to follow its natural development? I shall certainly not come to any decision on this point here and now, but I shall take the liberty of putting the problem before you for your consideration. In our country from of old a positive furor prohibendi has been the rule, a tendency to keep people under tutelage, to interfere and to forbid, which, as we all know, has not borne particularly good fruit. In our new republican Austria, it seems, things have not yet changed very much. I fancy you will have an important word to say in deciding the case of psycho-analysis which we are now considering; I do not know whether you have the wish or the influence with which to oppose these bureaucratic tendencies. At all events, I shall not spare you my unauthoritative thoughts on the subject. In my opinion a superabundance of regulations and prohibitions injures the authority of the law. It can be observed that where only a few prohibitions exist they are carefully observed, but where one is accompanied by prohibitions at every step, one feels definitely tempted to disregard them. Moreover, it does not mean one is quite an anarchist if one is prepared to realize that laws and regulations cannot from their origin claim to possess the attribute of being sacred and untransgressable, that they are often inadequately framed and offend our sense of justice, or will do so after a time, and that, in view of the sluggishness of the authorities, there is often no other means of correcting such inexpedient laws than by boldly violating them. Furthermore, if one desires to maintain respect for laws and regulations it is advisable not to enact any where a watch cannot easily be kept on whether they are obeyed or transgressed. Much of what I have quoted above on the practice of analysis by doctors could be repeated here in regard to genuine analysis by laymen which the law is seeking to suppress. The course of an analysis is most inconspicuous, it employs neither medicines nor instruments and consists only in talking and an exchange of information; it will not be easy to prove that a layman is practising ‘analysis’, if he asserts that he is merely giving encouragement and explanations and trying to establish a healthy human influence on people who are in search of mental assistance. It would surely not be possible to forbid that merely because doctors sometimes do the same thing. In English-speaking countries the practices of Christian Science have become very widespread: a kind of dialectical denial of the evils in life, based on an appeal to the doctrines of the Christian religion. I do not hesitate to assert that that procedure represents a regrettable aberration of the human spirit; but who in America or England would dream of forbidding it and making it punishable? Are the authorities so certain of the right path to salvation that they venture to prevent each man from trying ‘to be saved after his own fashion’. And granted that many people if they are left to themselves run into danger and come to grief, would not the authorities do better carefully to mark the limits of the regions which are to be regarded as not to be trespassed upon, and for the rest, so far as possible, to allow human beings to be educated by experience and mutual influence? Psycho-analysis is something so new in the world, the mass of mankind is so little instructed about it, the attitude of official science to it is still so vacillating, that it seems to me over-hasty to intervene in its development with legislative regulations. Let us allow patients themselves to discover that it is damaging to them to look for mental assistance to people who have not learnt how to give it. If we explain this to them and warn them against it, we shall have spared ourselves the need to forbid it. On the main roads of Italy the pylons that carry high-tension cables bear the brief and impressive inscription: ‘Chi tocca, muore.’ This is perfectly calculated to regulate the behaviour of passers-by to any wires that may be hanging down. The corresponding German notices exhibit an unnecessary and offensive verbosity: ‘Das Berühren der Leitungsdrähte ist, weil lebensgefährlich, stregstens verboten.’ Why the prohibition? Anyone who holds his life dear will make the prohibition for himself; and anyone who wants to kill himself in that way will not ask for permission.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4378

‘But there are instances that can be quoted as legal precedents against allowing lay analysis; I mean the prohibition against laymen practising hypnotism and the recently enacted prohibition against holding spiritualist seances or founding spiritualist societies.’

I cannot say that I am an admirer of these measures. The second one is a quite undisguised encroachment of police supervision to the detriment of intellectual freedom. I am beyond suspicion of having much belief in what are known as ‘occult phenomena’ or of feeling any desire that they should be recognized. But prohibitions like these will not stifle people’s interest in that supposedly mysterious world. They may on the contrary have done much harm and have closed the door to an impartial curiosity which might have arrived at a judgement that would have set us free from these harassing possibilities. But once again this only applies to Austria. In other countries ‘para-psychical’ researches are not met by any legal obstacles. The case of hypnotism is somewhat different from that of analysis. Hypnotism is the evoking of an abnormal mental state and is used by laymen to-day only for the purpose of public shows. If hypnotic therapy had maintained its very promising beginnings, a position would have been arrived at similar to that of analysis. And incidentally the history of hypnotism provides a precedent for that of analysis in another direction. When I was a young lecturer in neuropathology, the doctors inveighed passionately against hypnotism, declared that it was a swindle, a deception of the Devil’s and a highly dangerous procedure. To-day they have monopolized this same hypnotism and they make use of it unhesitatingly as a method of examination; for some nerve specialists it is still their chief therapeutic instrument.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4379

But I have already told you that I have no intention of making proposals which are based on the decision as to whether legal control or letting things go is to be preferred in the matter of analysis. I know this is a question of principle on the reply to which the inclinations of persons in authority will probably have more influence than arguments. I have already set out what seems to me to speak in favour of a policy of laissez faire. If the other decision is taken - for a policy of active intervention - then it seems to me that in any case a lame and unjust measure of ruthlessly forbidding analysis by non-doctors will be an insufficient outcome. More will have to be considered in that case: the conditions will have to be laid down under which the practice of analysis shall be permitted to all those who seek to make use of it, an authority will have to be set up from whom one can learn what analysis is and what sort of preparation is needed for it, and the possibilities for instruction in analysis will have to be encouraged. We must therefore either leave things alone or establish order and clarity; we must not rush into a complicated situation with a single isolated prohibition derived mechanically from a regulation that has become inadequate.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4380

VII

‘Yes, but the doctors! the doctors! I cannot induce you to go into the real subject of our conversations. You still keep on evading me. It is a question of whether we should not give doctors the exclusive right of practising analysis - for all I care, after they have fulfilled certain conditions. The majority of doctors are certainly not quacks in analysis as you have represented them. You say yourself that the great majority of your pupils and followers are doctors. It has come to my ears that they are far from sharing your point of view on the question of lay analysis. I may no doubt assume that your pupils agree with your demands for sufficient preparation and so on; and yet these pupils think it consistent to close the practice of analysis to laymen. Is that so? and if so, how do you explain it?’

I see you are well informed. Yes, it is so. Not all, it is true, but a good proportion of my medical colleagues do not agree with me over this, and are in favour of doctors having an exclusive right to the analytic treatment of neurotics. This will show you that differences of opinion are allowed even in our camp. The side I take is well known and the contradiction on the subject of lay analysis does not interfere with our good understanding. How can I explain the attitude of these pupils of mine to you? I do not know for certain; I think it must be the power of professional feeling. The course of their development has been different from mine, they still feel uncomfortable in their isolation from their colleagues, they would like to be accepted by the ‘profession’ as having plenary rights, and are prepared, in exchange for that tolerance, to make a sacrifice at a point whose vital importance is not obvious to them. Perhaps it may be otherwise; to impute motives of competition to them would be not only to accuse them of base sentiments but also to attribute a strange shortsightedness to them. They are always ready to introduce other doctors into analysis, and from a material point of view it must be a matter of indifference to them whether they have to share the available patients with medical colleagues or with laymen. But something different probably plays a part. These pupils of mine may be influenced by certain factors which guarantee a doctor an undoubted advantage over a layman in analytic practice.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4381

‘Guarantee him an advantage? There we have it. So you are admitting the advantage at last? This should settle the question.’

The admission is not hard for me to make. It may show you that I am not so passionately prejudiced as you suppose. I have put off mentioning these things because their discussion will once again make theoretical considerations necessary.

‘What are you thinking of now?’

First there is the question of diagnosis. When one takes into analysis a patient suffering from what are described as nervous disorders, one wishes beforehand to be certain - so far, of course, as certainty can be attained - that he is suited for this kind of treatment, that one can help him, that is to say, by this method. That, however, is only the case if he really has a neurosis.

‘I should have thought that would be recognizable from the phenomena, the symptoms, of which he complains.’

This is where a fresh complication arises. It cannot always be recognized with complete certainty. The patient may exhibit the external picture of a neurosis, and yet it may be something else - the beginning of an incurable mental disease or the preliminary of a destructive process in the brain. The distinction - the differential diagnosis - is not always easy and cannot be made immediately in every phase. The responsibility for such a decision can of course only be undertaken by a doctor. As I have said, it is not always easy for him. The illness may have an innocent appearance for a considerable time, till in the end it after all displays its evil character. Indeed, it is one of the regular fears of neurotics that they may become insane. However, if a doctor has been mistaken for a time over a case of this sort or has been in uncertainty about it, no harm has been caused and nothing unnecessary has been done. Nor indeed would the analytic treatment of this case have done any harm, though it would have been exposed as an unnecessary waste. And moreover there would certainly be enough people who would blame the analysis for the unfortunate outcome. Unjustly, no doubt, but such occasions ought to be avoided.

‘But that sounds hopeless. It strikes at the roots of everything you have told me about the nature and origin of a neurosis.’

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4382

Not at all. It merely confirms once again the fact that neurotics are a nuisance and an embarrassment for all concerned - including the analysts. But perhaps I shall clear up your confusion if I state my new information in more correct terms. It would probably be more correct to say of the cases we are now dealing with that they have readily developed a neurosis, but that it is not psychogenic but somatogenic - that its causes are not mental but physical. Do you understand?

‘Oh, yes, I understand. But I cannot bring it into harmony with the other side, the psychological one.’

That can be managed, though, if one bears in mind the complexities of living substance. In what did we find the essence of a neurosis? In the fact that the ego, the higher organization of the mental apparatus (elevated through the influence of the external world), is not able to fulfil its function of mediating between the id and reality, that in its feebleness it draws back from some instinctual portions of the id and, to make up for this, has to put up with the consequences of its renunciation in the form of restrictions, symptoms and unsuccessful reaction-formations.

A feebleness of the ego of this sort is to be found in all of us in childhood; and that is why the experiences of the earliest years of childhood are of such great importance for later life. Under the extraordinary burden of this period of childhood we have in a few years to cover the enormous developmental distance between stone-age primitive men and the participants in contemporary civilization, and, at the same time and in particular, we have to fend off the instinctual impulses of the early sexual period - under this burden, then, our ego takes refuge in repression and lays itself open to a childhood neurosis, the precipitate of which it carries with it into maturity as a disposition to a later nervous illness. Everything now depends on how the growing organism is treated by fate. If life becomes too hard, if the gulf between instinctual claims and the demands of reality becomes too great, the ego may fail in its efforts to reconcile the two, and the more readily, the more it is inhibited by the disposition carried over by it from infancy. The process of repression is then repeated, the instincts tear themselves away from the ego’s domination, find their substitutive satisfactions along the paths of regression, and the poor ego has become helplessly neurotic.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4383

Only let us hold fast to this: the nodal point and pivot of the whole situation is the relative strength of the ego organization. We shall then find it easy to complete our aetiological survey. As what may be called the normal causes of neurotic illness we already know the feebleness of the childhood ego, the task of dealing with the early sexual impulses and the effects of the more or less chance experiences of childhood. Is it not possible, however, that yet other factors play a part, derived from the time before the beginning of the child’s life? For instance, an innate strength and unruliness of the instinctual life in the id, which from the outset sets the ego tasks too hard for it? Or a special developmental feebleness of the ego due to unknown reasons? Such factors must of course acquire an aetiological importance, in some cases a transcendent one. We have invariably to reckon with the instinctual strength of the id; if it has developed to excess, the prospects of our therapy are poor. We still know too little of the causes of a developmental inhibition of the ego. These then would be the cases of neurosis with an essentially constitutional basis. Without some such constitutional, congenital favouring factors a neurosis can, no doubt, scarcely come about.

But if the relative feebleness of the ego is the decisive factor for the genesis of a neurosis, it must also be possible for a later physical illness to produce a neurosis, provided that it can bring about an enfeeblement of the ego. And that, once again, is very frequently found. A physical disorder of this kind can affect the instinctual life in the id and increase the strength of the instincts beyond the limit up to which the ego is capable of coping with them. The normal model of such processes is perhaps the alteration in women caused by the disturbances of menstruation and the menopause. Or again, a general somatic illness, indeed an organic disease of the nervous central organ, may attack the nutritional conditions of the mental apparatus and compel it to reduce its functioning and to bring to a halt its more delicate workings, one of which is the maintenance of the ego organization. In all these cases approximately the same picture of neurosis emerges; neurosis always has the same psychological mechanism, but, as we see, a most varied and often very complex aetiology.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4384

‘You please me better now. You have begun talking like a doctor at last. And now I expect you to admit that such a complicated medical affair as a neurosis can only be handled by a doctor.’

I fear you are overshooting the mark. What we have been discussing was a piece of pathology, what we are concerned with in analysis is a therapeutic procedure. I allow - no, I insist - that in every case which is under consideration for analysis the diagnosis shall be established first by a doctor. Far the greater number of neuroses which occupy us are fortunately of a psychogenic nature and give no grounds for pathological suspicions. Once the doctor has established this, he can confidently hand over the treatment to a lay analyst. In our analytical societies matters have always been arranged in that way. Thanks to the intimate contact between medical and non-medical members, mistakes such as might be feared have been as good as completely avoided. There is a further contingency, again, in which the analyst has to ask the doctor’s help. In the course of an analytic treatment, symptoms - most often physical symptoms - may appear about which one is doubtful whether they should be regarded as belonging to the neurosis or whether they should be related to an independent organic illness that has intervened. The decision on this point must once again be left to a doctor.

‘So that even during the course of an analysis a lay analyst cannot do without a doctor. A fresh argument against their fitness.’

No. No argument against lay analysts can be manufactured out of this possibility, for in such circumstances a medical analyst would not act differently.

‘I do not understand that.’

There is a technical rule that an analyst, if dubious symptoms like this emerge during the treatment, shall not submit them to his own judgement but shall get them reported upon by a doctor who is not connected with analysis - a consultant physician, perhaps - even if the analyst himself is a doctor and still well versed in his medical knowledge.

‘And why should a rule be made that seems to me so uncalled-for?’

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4385

It is not uncalled-for; in fact there are several reasons for it. In the first place it is not a good plan for a combination of organic and psychical treatment to be carried out by one and the same person. Secondly the relation in the transference may make it inadvisable for the analyst to examine the patient physically. And thirdly the analyst has every reason for doubting whether he is unprejudiced, since his interests are directed so intensely to the psychical factors.

‘I now understand your attitude to lay analysis quite clearly. You are determined that there must be lay analysts. And since you cannot dispute their inadequacy for their task, you are scraping together everything you can to excuse them and make their existence easier. But I cannot in the least see why there should be lay analysts, who, after all, can only be therapists of the second class. I am ready, so far as I am concerned, to make an exception in the case of the few laymen who have already been trained as analysts; but no fresh ones should be created and the training institutes should be put under an obligation to take no more laymen into training.’

I am at one with you, if it can be shown that all the interests involved will be served by this restriction. You will agree that these interests are of three sorts: that of the patients, that of the doctors and - last not least - that of science, which indeed comprises the interests of all future patients. Shall we examine these three points together?

For the patient, then, it is a matter of indifference whether the analyst is a doctor or not, provided only that the danger of his condition being misunderstood is excluded by the necessary medical report before the treatment begins and on some possible occasions during the course of it. For him it is incomparably more important that the analyst should possess personal qualities that make him trustworthy, and that he should have acquired the knowledge and understanding as well as the experience which alone can make it possible for him to fulfil his task. It might be thought that it would damage an analyst’s authority if the patient knows that he is not a doctor and cannot in some situations do without a doctor’s support. We have, of course, never omitted to inform patients of their analyst’s qualification, and we have been able to convince ourselves that professional prejudices find no echo in them and that they are ready to accept a cure from whatever direction it is offered them - which, incidentally, the medical profession discovered long ago to its deep mortification. Nor are the lay analysts who practise analysis to-day any chance collection of riff-raff, but people of academic education, doctors of philosophy, educationalists, together with a few women of great experience in life and outstanding personality. The analysis, to which all the candidates in an analytic training institute have to submit, is at the same time the best means of forming an opinion of their personal aptitude for carrying out their exacting occupation.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4386

Now as to the interest of the doctors. I cannot think that it would gain by the incorporation of psycho-analysis into medicine. The medical curriculum already lasts for five years and the final examinations extend well into a sixth year. Every few years fresh demands are made on the student, without the fulfilment of which his equipment for the future would have to be declared insufficient. Access to the medical profession is very difficult and its practice neither very satisfying nor very remunerative. If one supports what is certainly a fully justified demand that doctors should also be familiar with the mental side of illness, and if on that account one extends medical education to include some preparation for analysis, that implies a further increase in the curriculum and a corresponding prolongation of the period of study. I do not know whether the doctors will be pleased by this consequence of their claim upon analysis. But it can scarcely be escaped. And this at a period in which the conditions of material existence have so greatly deteriorated for the classes from which doctors are recruited, a period in which the younger generation sees itself compelled to make itself self-supporting as early in life as possible.

But perhaps you will choose not to burden medical studies with the preparation for analytic practice but think it more expedient for future analysts to take up their necessary training only after the end of their medical studies. You may say the loss of time involved in this is of no practical account, since after all a young man of less than thirty will never enjoy his patients’ confidence, which is a sine qua non of giving mental assistance. It might no doubt be said in reply that a newly-fledged physician for physical illnesses cannot count upon being treated by his patients with very great respect either, and that a young analyst might very well fill in his time by working in a psycho-analytic out-patient clinic under the supervision of experienced practitioners.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4387

But what seems to me more important is that with this proposal of yours you are giving support to a waste of energy for which, in these difficult times, I can really find no economic justification. Analytic training, it is true, cuts across the field of medical education, but neither includes the other. If - which may sound fantastic to-day - one had to found a college of psycho-analysis, much would have to be taught in it which is also taught by the medical faculty: alongside of depth-psychology, which would always remain the principal subject, there would be an introduction to biology, as much as possible of the science of sexual life, and familiarity with the symptomatology of psychiatry. On the other hand, analytic instruction would include branches of knowledge which are remote from medicine and which the doctor does not come across in his practice: the history of civilization, mythology, the psychology of religion and the science of literature. Unless he is well at home in these subjects, an analyst can make nothing of a large amount of his material. By way of compensation, the great mass of what is taught in medical schools is of no use to him for his purposes. A knowledge of the anatomy of the tarsal bones, of the constitution of the carbohydrates, of the course of the cranial nerves, a grasp of all that medicine has brought to light on bacillary exciting causes of disease and the means of combating them, on serum reactions and on neoplasms - all of this knowledge, which is undoubtedly of the highest value in itself, is nevertheless of no consequence to him; it does not concern him; it neither helps him directly to understand a neurosis and to cure it nor does it contribute to a sharpening of those intellectual capacities on which his occupation makes the greatest demands. It cannot be objected that the case is much the same when a doctor takes up some other special branch of medicine - dentistry, for instance: in that case, too, he may not need some of what he has to pass examinations in, and he will have to learn much in addition, for which his schooling has not prepared him. But the two cases cannot be put on a par. In dentistry the great principles of pathology - the theories of inflammation, suppuration, necrosis, and of the metabolism of the bodily organs - still retain their importance. But the experience of an analyst lies in another world, with other phenomena and other laws. However much philosophy may ignore the gulf between the physical and the mental, it still exists for our immediate experience and still more for our practical endeavours.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4388

It is unjust and inexpedient to try to compel a person who wants to set someone else free from the torment of a phobia or an obsession to take the roundabout road of the medical curriculum. Nor will such an endeavour have any success, unless it results in suppressing analysis entirely. Imagine a landscape in which two paths lead to a hilltop with a view - one short and straight, the other long, winding and circuitous. You try to stop up the short path by a prohibitory notice, perhaps because it passes by some flower-beds that you want to protect. The only chance you have of your prohibition being respected is if the short path is steep and difficult while the longer one leads gently up. If, however, that is not so, and the roundabout path is on the contrary the harder, you may imagine the use of your prohibition and the fate of your flower-beds! I fear you will succeed in compelling the laymen to study medicine just as little as I shall be able to induce doctors to learn analysis. For you know human nature as well as I do.

‘If you are right, that analytic treatment cannot be carried out without special training, but that the medical curriculum cannot bear the further burden of a preparation for it, and that medical knowledge is to a great extent unnecessary for an analyst, how shall we achieve the ideal physician who shall be equal to all the tasks of his calling?’

I cannot foresee the way out of these difficulties, nor is it my business to point it out. I see only two things, first that analysis is an embarrassment to you and that the best thing would be for it not to exist - though neurotics, no doubt, are an embarrassment too; and secondly, that the interests of everyone concerned would for the time being be met if the doctors could make up their minds to tolerate a class of therapists which would relieve them of the tedium of treating the enormously common psychogenic neuroses while remaining in constant touch with them to the benefit of the patients.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4389

‘Is that your last word on the subject? or have you something more to say?’

Yes indeed. I wanted to bring up a third interest - the interest of science. What I have to say about that will concern you little; but, by comparison, it is of all the more importance to me.

For we do not consider it at all desirable for psycho-analysis to be swallowed up by medicine and to find its last resting-place in a text-book of psychiatry under the heading ‘Methods of Treatment’, alongside of procedures such as hypnotic suggestion, autosuggestion, and persuasion, which, born from our ignorance, have to thank the laziness and cowardice of mankind for their short-lived effects. It deserves a better fate and, it may be hoped, will meet with one. As a ‘depth-psychology’, a theory of the mental unconscious, it can become indispensable to all the sciences which are concerned with the evolution of human civilization and its major institutions such as art, religion and the social order. It has already, in my opinion, afforded these sciences considerable help in solving their problems. But these are only small contributions compared with what might be achieved if historians of civilization, psychologists of religion, philologists and so on would agree themselves to handle the new instrument of research which is at their service. The use of analysis for the treatment of the neuroses is only one of its applications; the future will perhaps show that it is not the most important one. In any case it would be wrong to sacrifice all the other applications to this single one, just because it touches on the circle of medical interests.

For here a further prospect stretches ahead, which cannot be encroached upon with impunity. If the representatives of the various mental sciences are to study psycho-analysis so as to be able to apply its methods and angles of approach to their own material, it will not be enough for them to stop short at the findings which are laid down in analytic literature. They must learn to understand analysis in the only way that is possible - by themselves undergoing an analysis. The neurotics who need analysis would thus be joined by a second class of persons, who accept analysis from intellectual motives, but who will no doubt also welcome the increase in their capacities which they will incidentally achieve. To carry out these analyses a number of analysts will be needed, for whom any medical knowledge will have particularly little importance. But these ‘teaching analysts’ - let us call them - will require to have had a particularly careful education. If this is not to be stunted, they must be given an opportunity of collecting experience from instructive and informative cases; and since healthy people who also lack the motive of curiosity do not present themselves for analysis, it is once more only upon neurotics that it will be possible for the teaching analysts - under careful supervision - to be educated for their subsequent non-medical activity. All this, however, requires a certain amount of freedom of movement, and is not compatible with petty restrictions.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4390

Perhaps you do not believe in these purely theoretical interests of psycho-analysis or cannot allow them to affect the practical question of lay analysis. Then let me advise you that psycho-analysis has yet another sphere of application, which is outside the scope of the quackery law and to which the doctors will scarcely lay claim. Its application, I mean, to the bringing-up of children. If a child begins to show signs of an undesirable development, if it grows moody, refractory and inattentive, the paediatrician and even the school doctor can do nothing for it, even if the child produces clear neurotic symptoms, such as nervousness, loss of appetite, vomiting or insomnia. A treatment that combines analytic influence with educational measures, carried out by people who are not ashamed to concern themselves with the affairs in a child’s world, and who understand how to find their way into a child’s mental life, can bring about two things at once: the removal of the neurotic symptoms and the reversal of the change in character which had begun. Our recognition of the importance of these inconspicuous neuroses of children as laying down the disposition for serious illnesses in later life points to these child analyses as an excellent method of prophylaxis. Analysis undeniably still has its enemies. I do not know whether they have means at their command for stopping the activities of these educational analysts or analytic educationalists. I do not think it very likely; but one can never feel too secure.

Moreover, to return to our question of the analytic treatment of adult neurotics, even there we have not yet exhausted every line of approach. Our civilization imposes an almost intolerable pressure on us and it calls for a corrective. Is it too fantastic to expect that psycho-analysis in spite of its difficulties may be destined to the task of preparing mankind for such a corrective? Perhaps once more an American may hit on the idea of spending a little money to get the ‘social workers’ of his country trained analytically and to turn them into a band of helpers for combating the neuroses of civilization.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4391

‘Aha! a new kind of Salvation Army!’

Why not? Our imagination always follows patterns. The stream of eager learners who will then flow to Europe will be obliged to pass Vienna by, for here the development of analysis may have succumbed to a premature trauma of prohibition. You smile? I am not saying this as a bribe for your support. Not in the least. I know you do not believe me; nor can I guarantee that it will happen. But one thing I do know. It is by no means so important what decision you give on the question of lay analysis. It may have a local effect. But the things that really matter - the possibilities in psycho-analysis for internal development - can never be affected by regulations and prohibitions.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4392

POSTSCRIPT

(1927)

The immediate occasion of my writing the small volume which was the starting-point of the present discussion was a charge of quackery brought against a non-medical member of our Society, Dr. Theodor Reik, in the Vienna Courts. It is generally known, I think, that after all the preliminary proceedings had been completed and a number of expert opinions had been received, the charge was dropped. I do not believe that this was a result of my book. No doubt the prosecution’s case was too weak, and the person who brought the charge as an aggrieved party proved an untrustworthy witness. So that the quashing of the proceedings against Dr. Reik is probably not to be regarded as a considered judgement of the Vienna Courts on the general question of lay analysis. When I drew the figure of the ‘Impartial Person’ who was my interlocutor in my tract, I had before my mind one of our high officials. This was a man with a friendly attitude and a mind of unusual integrity, to whom I had myself talked about Reik’s case and for whom I had, at his request, written a confidential opinion on the subject. I knew I had not succeeded in converting him to my views, and that was why I made my dialogue with the Impartial Person end without agreement too.

Nor did I expect that I should succeed in bringing about unanimity in the attitude of analysts themselves towards the problem of lay analysis. Anyone who compares the views expressed by the Hungarian Society in this discussion with those of the New York group will perhaps conclude that my book has produced no effect whatever and that everyone persists in his former opinion. But I do not believe this either. I think that many of my colleagues have modified their extreme parti pris and that the majority have accepted my view that the problem of lay analysis ought not to be decided along the lines of traditional usage but that it arises from a novel situation and therefore demands a fresh judgement.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4393

Again, the turn which I gave to the whole discussion seems to have met with approval. My main thesis was that the important question is not whether an analyst possesses a medical diploma but whether he has had the special training necessary for the practice of analysis. This served as the starting-point for a discussion, which was eagerly embarked upon, as to what is the training most suitable for an analyst. My own view was and still remains that it is not the training prescribed by the University for future doctors. What is known as medical education appears to me to be an arduous and circuitous way of approaching the profession of analysis. No doubt it offers an analyst much that is indispensable to him. But it burdens him with too much else of which he can never make use, and there is a danger of its diverting his interest and his whole mode of thought from the understanding of psychical phenomena. A scheme of training for analysts has still to be created. It must include elements from the mental sciences, from psychology, the history of civilization and sociology, as well as from anatomy, biology and the study of evolution. There is so much to be taught in all this that it is justifiable to omit from the curriculum anything which has no direct bearing on the practice of analysis and only serves indirectly (like any other study) as a training for the intellect and for the powers of observation. It is easy to meet this suggestion by objecting that analytic colleges of this kind do not exist and that I am merely setting up an ideal. An ideal, no doubt. But an ideal which can and must be realized. And in our training institutes, in spite of all their youthful insufficiencies, that realization has already begun.

It will not have escaped my readers that in what I have said I have assumed as axiomatic something that is still violently disputed in the discussion. I have assumed, that is to say, that psycho-analysis is not a specialized branch of medicine. I cannot see how it is possible to dispute this. Psycho-analysis is a part of psychology; not of medical psychology in the old sense, not of the psychology of morbid processes, but simply of psychology. It is certainly not the whole of psychology, but its sub-structure and perhaps even its entire foundation. The possibility of its application to medical purposes must not lead us astray. Electricity and radiology also have their medical application, but the science to which they both belong is none the less physics. Nor can their situation be affected by historical arguments. The whole theory of electricity had its origin in an observation of a nerve-muscle preparation; yet no one would dream to-day of regarding it as a part of physiology. It is argued that psycho-analysis was after all discovered by a physician in the course of his efforts to assist his patients. But that is clearly neither here nor there. Moreover, the historical argument is double-edged. We might pursue the story and recall the unfriendliness and indeed the animosity with which the medical profession treated analysis from the very first. That would seem to imply that it can have no claims over analysis to-day. And though I do not accept that implication, I still feel some doubts as to whether the present wooing of psycho-analysis by the doctors is based, from the point of view of the libido theory, upon the first or upon the second of Abraham’s sub-stages - whether they wish to take possession of their object for the purpose of destroying or of preserving it.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4394

I should like to consider the historical argument a moment longer. Since it is with me personally that we are concerned, I can throw a little light, for anyone who may be interested, on my own motives. After forty-one years of medical activity, my self-knowledge tells me that I have never really been a doctor in the proper sense. I became a doctor through being compelled to deviate from my original purpose; and the triumph of my life lies in my having, after a long and roundabout journey, found my way back to my earliest path. I have no knowledge of having had any craving in my early childhood to help suffering humanity. My innate sadistic disposition was not a very strong one, so that I had no need to develop this one of its derivatives. Nor did I ever play the ‘doctor game’; my infantile curiosity evidently chose other paths. In my youth I felt an overpowering need to understand something of the riddles of the world in which we live and perhaps even to contribute something to their solution. The most hopeful means of achieving this end seemed to be to enrol myself in the medical faculty; but even after that I experimented - unsuccessfully - with zoology and chemistry, till at last, under the influence of Brücke, who carried more weight with me than any one else in my whole life, I settled down to physiology, though in those days it was too narrowly restricted to histology. By that time I had already passed all my medical examinations; but I took no interest in anything to do with medicine till the teacher whom I so deeply respected warned me that in view of my impoverished material circumstances I could not possibly take up a theoretical career. Thus I passed from the histology of the nervous system to neuropathology and then, prompted by fresh influences, I began to be concerned with the neuroses. I scarcely think, however, that my lack of a genuine medical temperament has done much damage to my patients. For it is not greatly to the advantage of patients if their doctor’s therapeutic interest has too marked an emotional emphasis. They are best helped if he carries out his task coolly and keeping as closely as possible to the rules.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4395

No doubt what I have just said throws little light on the problem of lay analysis; it was only intended to exhibit my personal credentials as being myself a supporter of the inherent value of psycho-analysis and of its independence of its application to medicine. But it will be objected at this point that whether psycho-analysis, regarded as a science, is a subdivision of medicine or of psychology is a purely academic question and of no practical interest. The real point at issue, it will be said, is a different one, namely the application of analysis to the treatment of patients; in so far as it claims to do this it must be content, the argument will run, to be accepted as a specialized branch of medicine, like radiology, for instance, and to submit to the rules laid down for all therapeutic methods. I recognize that that is so; I admit it. I only want to feel assured that the therapy will not destroy the science. Unluckily analogies never carry one more than a certain distance; a point is soon reached at which the subjects of the comparison take divergent paths. The case of analysis differs from that of radiology. A physicist does not require to have a patient in order to study the laws that govern X-rays. But the only subject-matter of psycho-analysis is the mental processes of human beings and it is only in human beings that it can be studied. For reasons which can easily be understood, neurotic human beings offer far more instructive and accessible material than normal ones, and to withhold that material from anyone who wishes to study and apply analysis is to dock him of a good half of his training possibilities. I have, of course, no intention of asking that the interests of neurotic patients should be sacrificed to those of instruction and scientific research. The aim of my small volume on the question of lay analysis was precisely to show that, if certain precautions are observed, the two interests can quite easily be brought into harmony and that the interests of medicine, as rightly understood, will not be the last to profit by such a solution.

I myself brought forward all the necessary precautions and I can safely say that the discussion added nothing on this point. But I should like to remark that the emphasis was often placed in a manner which did not do justice to the facts. What was said about the difficulties of differential diagnosis and the uncertainty in many cases in deciding about somatic symptoms - situations, that is, in which medical knowledge and medical intervention are necessary - this is all of it perfectly true. Nevertheless, the number of cases in which doubts of this kind never arise at all and in which a doctor is not required is surely incomparably greater. These cases may be quite uninteresting scientifically, but they play an important enough part in life to justify the activity of lay analysts, who are perfectly competent to deal with them. Some time ago I analysed a colleague who gave evidence of a particularly strong dislike of the idea of anyone being allowed to engage in a medical activity who was not himself a medical man. I was in a position to say to him: ‘We have now been working for more than three months. At what point in our analysis have I had occasion to make use of my medical knowledge?’ He admitted that I had had no such occasion.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4396

Again, I attach no great importance to the argument that a lay analyst, because he must be prepared to consult a doctor, will have no authority in the eyes of his patients and will be treated with no more respect than such people as bone-setters or masseurs. Once again, the analogy is an imperfect one - quite apart from the fact that what governs patients in their recognition of authority is usually their emotional transference and that the possession of a medical diploma does not impress them nearly so much as doctors believe. A professional lay analyst will have no difficulty in winning as much respect as is due to a secular pastoral worker. Indeed, the words, ‘secular pastoral worker’, might well serve as a general formula for describing the function which the analyst, whether he is a doctor or a layman, has to perform in his relation to the public. Our friends among the protestant clergy, and more recently among the catholic clergy as well, are often able to relieve their parishioners of the inhibitions of their daily life by confirming their faith - after having first offered them a little analytic information about the nature of their conflicts. Our opponents, the Adlerian ‘individual psychologists’, endeavour to produce a similar result in people who have become unstable and inefficient by arousing their interest in the social community after having first thrown some light upon a single corner of their mental life and shown them the part played in their illness by their egoistic and distrustful impulses. Both of these procedures, which derive their power from being based on analysis, have their place in psychotherapy. We who are analysts set before us as our aim the most complete and profoundest possible analysis of whoever may be our patient. We do not seek to bring him relief by receiving him into the catholic, protestant or socialist community. We seek rather to enrich him from his own internal sources, by putting at the disposal of his ego those energies which, owing to repression, are inaccessibly confined in his unconscious, as well as those which his ego is obliged to squander in the fruitless task of maintaining these repressions. Such activity as this is pastoral work in the best sense of the words. Have we set ourselves too high an aim? Are the majority of our patients worth the pains that this work requires of us? Would it not be more economical to prop up their weaknesses from without rather than to rebuild them from within? I cannot say; but there is something else that I do know. In psycho-analysis there has existed from the very first an inseparable bond between cure and research. Knowledge brought therapeutic success. It was impossible to treat a patient without learning something new; it was impossible to gain fresh insight without perceiving its beneficent results. Our analytic procedure is the only one in which this precious conjunction is assured. It is only by carrying on our analytic pastoral work that we can deepen our dawning comprehension of the human mind. This prospect of scientific gain has been the proudest and happiest feature of analytic work. Are we to sacrifice it for the sake of any considerations of a practical sort?

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4397

Some remarks that have been made in the course of this discussion have led me to suspect that, in spite of everything, my book on lay analysis has been misunderstood in one respect. The doctors have been defended against me, as though I had declared that they were in general incompetent to practise analysis and as though I had given it out as a password that medical reinforcements were to be rejected. That was not my intention. The idea probably arose from my having been led to declare in the course of my observations (which had a controversial end in view) that untrained medical analysts were even more dangerous than laymen. I might make my true opinion on this question clear by echoing a cynical remark about women that once appeared in Simplicissimus. One man was complaining to another about the weaknesses and troublesome nature of the fair sex. ‘All the same,’ replied his companion, ‘women are the best thing we have of the kind.’ I am bound to admit that, so long as schools such as we desire for the training of analysts are not yet in existence, people who have had a preliminary education in medicine are the best material for future analysts. We have a right to demand, however, that they should not mistake their preliminary education for a complete training, that they should overcome the one-sidedness that is fostered by instruction in medical schools and that they should resist the temptation to flirt with endocrinology and the autonomic nervous system, when what is needed is an apprehension of psychological facts with the help of a framework of psychological concepts. I also share the view that all those problems which relate to the connection between psychical phenomena and their organic, anatomical and chemical foundations can be approached only by those who have studied both, that is, by medical analysts. It should not be forgotten, however, that this is not the whole of psycho-analysis, and that for its other aspect we can never do without the co-operation of people who have had a preliminary education in the mental sciences. For practical reasons we have been in the habit - and this is true, incidentally, of our publications as well - of distinguishing between medical and applied analysis. But that is not a logical distinction. The true line of division is between scientific analysis and its applications alike in medical and in non-medical fields.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4398

In these discussions the bluntest rejection of lay analysis has been expressed by our American colleagues. A few words to them in reply will, I think, not be out of place. I can scarcely be accused of making a misuse of analysis for controversial purposes if I express an opinion that their resistance is derived wholly from practical factors. They see how in their own country lay analysts put analysis to all kinds of mischievous and illegitimate purposes and in consequence cause injury both to their patients and to the good name of analysis. It is therefore not to be wondered at if in their indignation they give the widest possible berth to such unscrupulous mischief-makers and try to prevent any laymen from having a share in analysis. But these facts are already enough to diminish the significance of the American position; for the question of lay analysis must not be decided on practical considerations alone, and local conditions in America cannot be the sole determining influence on our views.

The resolution passed by our American colleagues against lay analysts, based as it essentially is upon practical reasons, appears to me nevertheless to be unpractical; for it cannot affect any of the factors which govern the situation. It is more or less equivalent to an attempt at repression. If it is impossible to prevent the lay analysts from pursuing their activities and if the public does not support the campaign against them, would it not be more expedient to recognize the fact of their existence by offering them opportunities for training? Might it not be possible in this way to gain some influence over them? And, if they were offered as an inducement the possibility of receiving the approval of the medical profession and of being invited to co-operate, might they not have some interest in raising their own ethical and intellectual level?

VIENNA, June 1927

4399

PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

(1926)

4400

Intentionally left blank

4401

PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

Since psycho-analysis was not mentioned in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, it is impossible to restrict this account to its advances since 1910. The more important and the more interesting portion of its history lies in the period before that date.

PREHISTORY

In the years 1880-2 a Viennese physician, Dr. Josef Breuer (1842-1925), discovered a new procedure by means of which he relieved a girl, who was suffering from severe hysteria, of her many and various symptoms. The idea occurred to him that the symptoms were connected with impressions which she had received during a period of agitation while she was nursing her sick father. He therefore induced her, while she was in a state of hypnotic somnambulism, to search for these connections in her memory and to live through the ‘pathogenic’ scenes once again without inhibiting the affects that arose in the process. He found that when she had done this the symptom in question disappeared for good.

This was at a date before the investigations of Charcot and Pierre Janet into the origin of hysterical symptoms, and Breuer’s discovery was thus entirely uninfluenced by them. But he did not pursue the matter any further at the time, and it was not until some ten years later that he took it up again in collaboration with Sigmund Freud. In 1895 they published a book, Studies on Hysteria, in which Breuer’s discoveries were described and an attempt was made to explain them by the theory of ‘catharsis’. According to that hypothesis, hysterical symptoms originate through the energy of a mental process being withheld from conscious influence and being diverted into bodily innervation (‘conversion’). A hysterical symptom would thus be a substitute for an omitted mental act and a reminiscence of the occasion which should have given rise to that act. And, on this view, recovery would be a result of the liberation of the affect that had gone astray and of its discharge along a normal path (‘abreaction’). Cathartic treatment gave excellent therapeutic results, but it was found that they were not permanent and that they were not independent of the personal relation between the patient and the physician. Freud, who later proceeded with these investigations by himself, made an alteration in their technique, by replacing hypnosis by the method of free association. He invented the term ‘psycho-analysis’, which in the course of time came to have two meanings: (1) a particular method of treating nervous disorders and (2) the science of unconscious mental processes, which has also been appropriately described as ‘depth-psychology’.

Psycho-Analysis

4402

SUBJECT-MATTER OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

Psycho-analysis finds a constantly increasing amount of support as a therapeutic procedure, owing to the fact that it can do more for its patients than any other method of treatment. The principle field of its application is in the milder neuroses - hysteria, phobias and obsessional states; and in malformations of character and sexual inhibitions or abnormalities it can also bring about marked improvements or even recoveries. Its influence upon dementia praecox and paranoia is doubtful; on the other hand, in favourable circumstances it can cope with depressive states, even if they are of a severe type.

In every instance the treatment makes heavy claims upon both the physician and the patient: the former requires a special training and must devote a long period of time to exploring the mind of each patient, while the latter must make considerable sacrifices, both material and mental. Nevertheless, all the trouble involved is as a rule rewarded by the results. Psycho-analysis does not act as a convenient panacea (‘cito, tute, jucunde’) for psychological disorders. On the contrary, its application has been instrumental in making clear for the first time the difficulties and limitations in the treatment of such affections. For the moment it is only in Berlin and Vienna that there are voluntary institutions which make psycho-analytic treatment accessible to the wage-earning classes.

Psycho-Analysis

4403

The therapeutic influence of psycho-analysis depends on the replacement of unconscious mental acts by conscious ones and is effective within the limits of that factor. The replacement is effected by overcoming internal resistances in the patient’s mind. The future will probably attribute far greater importance to psycho-analysis as the science of the unconscious than as a therapeutic procedure.

Psycho-analysis, in its character of depth-psychology, considers mental life from three points of view: the dynamic, the economic and the topographical.

From the first of these standpoints, the dynamic one, psycho-analysis derives all mental processes (apart from the reception of external stimuli) from the interplay of forces, which assist or inhibit one another, combine with one another, enter into compromises with one another, etc. All of these forces are originally in the nature of instincts; thus they have an organic origin. They are characterized by possessing an immense (somatic) store of power (‘the compulsion to repeat’); and they are represented mentally as images or ideas with an affective charge. In psycho-analysis, no less than in other sciences, the theory of the instincts is an obscure subject. An empirical analysis leads to the formulation of two groups of instincts: the so-called ‘ego-instincts’, which are directed towards self-preservation, and the ‘object-instincts’, which are concerned with relations to an external object. The social instincts are not regarded as elementary or irreducible. Theoretical speculation leads to the suspicion that there are two fundamental instincts which lie concealed behind the manifest ego-instincts and object-instincts: namely (a) Eros, the instinct which strives for ever closer union, and (b) the instinct of destruction, which leads towards the dissolution of what is living. In psycho-analysis the manifestation of the force of Eros is given the name ‘libido’.

Psycho-Analysis

4404

From the economic standpoint psycho-analysis supposes that the mental representatives of the instincts have a charge (cathexis) of definite quantities of energy, and that it is the purpose of the mental apparatus to hinder any damming-up of these energies and to keep as low as possible the total amount of the excitations with which it is loaded. The course of mental processes is automatically regulated by the ‘pleasure-unpleasure principle’; and unpleasure is thus in some way related to an increase of excitation and pleasure to a decrease. In the course of development the original pleasure principle undergoes a modification with reference to the external world, giving place to the ‘reality principle’, in accordance with which the mental apparatus learns to postpone the pleasure of satisfaction and to tolerate temporarily feelings of unpleasure.

Topographically, psycho-analysis regards the mental apparatus as a compound instrument, and endeavours to determine at what points in it the various mental processes take place. According to the most recent psycho-analytic views, the mental apparatus is composed of an ‘id’, which is the repository of the instinctual impulses, of an ‘ego’, which is the most superficial portion of the id and one which has been modified by the influence of the external world, and of a ‘super-ego’, which develops out of the id, dominates the ego and represents the inhibitions of instinct that are characteristic of man. The quality of consciousness, too, has a topographical reference; for processes in the id are entirely unconscious, while consciousness is the function of the ego’s outermost layer, which is concerned with the perception of the external world.

At this point two observations may be in place. It must not be supposed that these very general ideas are presuppositions upon which the work of psycho-analysis depends. On the contrary, they are its latest conclusions and are ‘open to revision’. Psycho-analysis is founded securely upon the observation of the facts of mental life; and for that very reason its theoretical superstructure is still incomplete and subject to constant alteration. Secondly, there is no reason for surprise that psycho-analysis, which was originally no more than an attempt at explaining pathological mental phenomena, should have developed into a psychology of normal mental life. The justification for this arose with the discovery that the dreams and mistakes of normal men have the same mechanism as neurotic symptoms.

Psycho-Analysis

4405

The first task of psycho-analysis was the elucidation of nervous disorders. The analytic theory of the neuroses is based on three corner-stones: the recognition of (1) ‘repression’, of (2) the importance of the sexual instinct and of (3) ‘transference’.

(1) There is a force in the mind which exercises the functions of a censorship, and which excludes from consciousness and from any influence upon action all tendencies which displease it. Such tendencies are described as ‘repressed’. They remain unconscious; and if one attempts to bring them into the patient’s consciousness one provokes a ‘resistance’. These repressed instinctual impulses, however, have not always become powerless. In many cases they succeed in making their influence felt in the mind by circuitous paths, and the indirect or substitutive satisfactions of repressed impulses thus achieved are what constitute neurotic symptoms.

(2) For cultural reasons the most intense repression falls upon the sexual instincts; but it is precisely in connection with them that repression most easily miscarries, so that neurotic symptoms are found to be substitutive satisfactions of repressed sexuality. The belief that in man sexual life begins only at puberty is incorrect. On the contrary, signs of it can be detected from the beginning of extra-uterine existence; it reaches a first culminating point at or before the fifth year (‘early period’), after which it is inhibited or interrupted (‘latency period’) until the age of puberty, which is the second climax of its development. This diphasic onset of sexual development seems to be distinctive of the genus Homo. All experiences during the first period of childhood are of the greatest importance to the individual, and in combination with his inherited sexual constitution form the dispositions for the subsequent development of character and disease. It is wrong to make sexuality coincide with ‘genitality’. The sexual instincts pass through a complicated course of development, and it is only at the end of it that the ‘primacy of the genital zones’ is attained. Before this there are a number of ‘pregenital’ organizations of the libido - points at which it may become ‘fixated’ and to which, in the event of subsequent repression, it will return (‘regression’). The infantile fixations of the libido are what determine the form of any later neurosis. Thus the neuroses are to be regarded as inhibitions in the development of the libido. There are no specific causes of nervous disorders; the question whether a conflict finds a healthy solution or leads to a neurotic inhibition of function depends upon quantitative considerations.

Psycho-Analysis

4406

The most important conflict with which a small child is faced is his relation to his parents, the ‘Oedipus complex’; it is in attempting to grapple with this problem that those destined to suffer from a neurosis habitually come to grief. The reactions against the instinctual demands of the Oedipus complex are the source of the most precious and socially important achievements of the human mind; and this holds true not only in the life of individuals but probably also in the history of the human species as a whole. The super-ego, too, the moral agency which dominates the ego, has its origin in the process of overcoming the Oedipus complex.

(3) By ‘transference’ is meant a striking peculiarity of neurotics. They develop towards their physician emotional relations, both of an affectionate and hostile character, which are not based upon the actual situation but are derived from their relations to their parents (the Oedipus complex). Transference is a proof of the fact that adults have not overcome their former childish dependence; it coincides with the force which has been named ‘suggestion’; and it is only by learning to make use of it that the physician is enabled to induce the patient to overcome his internal resistances and do away with his repressions. Thus psycho-analytic treatment acts as a second education of the adult, as a corrective to his education as a child.

Within this narrow compass it has been impossible to mention many matters of the greatest interest, such as the ‘sublimation’ of instincts, the part played by symbolism, the problem of ‘ambivalence’, etc. Nor has there been space to allude to the applications of psycho-analysis, which originated, as we have seen, in the sphere of medicine, to other departments of knowledge (such as Social Anthropology, the Study of Religion, Literary History and Education) where its influence is constantly increasing. It is enough to say that psycho-analysis, in its character of the psychology of the deepest, unconscious mental acts, promises to become the link between psychiatry and all of these other branches of mental science.

Psycho-Analysis

4407

THE EXTERNAL HISTORY OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

The beginnings of psycho-analysis may be marked by two dates: 1895, which saw the publication of Breuer and Freud’s Studies on Hysteria, and 1900, which saw that of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. At first the new discoveries aroused no interest either in the medical profession or among the general public. In 1907 the Swiss psychiatrists, under the leadership of E. Bleuler and C. G. Jung, began to concern themselves in the subject; and in 1908 there took place at Salzburg a first meeting of adherents from a number of different countries. In 1909 Freud and Jung were invited to America by G. Stanley Hall to deliver a series of lectures on psycho-analysis at Clark University, Worcester, Mass. From that time forward interest grew rapidly in Europe; it expressed itself, however, in a very forcible rejection of the new teachings - a rejection which often showed an unscientific colouring.

The reasons for this hostility were to be found, from the medical point of view, in the fact that psycho-analysis lays stress upon psychical factors, and from the philosophical point of view, in its assuming as an underlying postulate the concept of unconscious mental activity; but the strongest reason was undoubtedly the general disinclination of mankind to concede to the factor of sexuality the importance that is assigned to it by psycho-analysis. In spite of this widespread opposition, however, the movement in favour of psycho-analysis was not to be checked. Its adherents formed themselves into an International Association, which passed successfully through the ordeal of the World War, and at the present time (1925) comprises local groups in Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, London, Switzerland, Holland, Moscow and Calcutta, as well as two in the United States. There are three periodicals representing the views of these societies: the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, Imago (which is concerned with the application of psycho-analysis to non-medical fields of knowledge), and the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis.

During the years 1911-13 two former adherents, Alfred Adler, of Vienna, and C. G. Jung, of Zurich, seceded from the psycho-analytic movement and founded schools of thought of their own, which, in view of the general hostility to psycho-analysis, could be certain of a favourable reception, but which remained scientifically sterile. In 1921 Dr. M. Eitingon founded in Berlin the first public psycho-analytic clinic and training-school, and this was soon followed by a second in Vienna.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Breuer and Freud, Studies on Hysteria (1895d); Freud, Traumdeutung (1900); Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens (1904); Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (1905); Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse (1916). Freud’s complete works have been published in German (Gesammelte Schriften) (1925), and in Spanish (Obras completas) (1923); the greater part of them has been translated into English and other languages. Short accounts of the subject-matter and history of psycho-analysis will be found in: Freud, Über Psychoanalyse (the lectures delivered at Worcester, U.S.A.) (1909); Zur Geschichte der psychoanalytischen Bewegung (1914); Selbstdarstellung (in Grote’s collection Die Medizin der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen) (1925). Particularly accessible to English readers are: Ernest Jones, Papers on Psycho-Analysis, and A. A. Brill, Psychoanalysis.

4408

ADDRESS TO THE SOCIETY OF B’NAI B’RITH

(1941 [1926])

4409

Intentionally left blank

4410

ADDRESS TO THE SOCIETY OF B’NAI B’RITH

Most honourable Grand President, honourable Presidents, dear Brethren,-

I thank you for the honours you have paid me to-day. You know why it is that you cannot hear the sound of my own voice. You have heard one of my friends and pupils speak of my scientific work; but a judgement on such things is hard to form and for a long while yet it may not be reached with any certainty. Allow me to add something to what has been said by one who is both my friend and the physician who cares for me. I should like to tell you shortly how I became a B.B. and what I have looked for from you.

It happened that in the years from 1895 onwards I was subjected to two powerful impressions which combined to produce the same effect on me. On the one hand, I had gained my first insight into the depths of the life of the human instincts; I had seen some things that were sobering and even, at first, frightening. On the other hand, the announcement of my unpleasing discoveries had as its result the severance of the greater part of my human contacts; I felt as though I were despised and universally shunned. In my loneliness I was seized with a longing to find a circle of picked men of high character who would receive me in a friendly spirit in spite of my temerity. Your society was pointed out to me as the place where such men were to be found.

That you were Jews could only be agreeable to me; for I was myself a Jew, and it had always seemed to me not only unworthy but positively senseless to deny the fact. What bound me to Jewry was (I am ashamed to admit) neither faith nor national pride, for I have always been an unbeliever and was brought up without any religion though not without a respect for what are called the ‘ethical’ standards of human civilization. Whenever I felt an inclination to national enthusiasm I strove to suppress it as being harmful and wrong, alarmed by the warning examples of the peoples among whom we Jews live. But plenty of other things remained over to make the attraction of Jewry and Jews irresistible - many obscure emotional forces, which were the more powerful the less they could be expressed in words, as well as a clear consciousness of inner identity, the safe privacy of a common mental construction. And beyond this there was a perception that it was to my Jewish nature alone that I owed two characteristics that had become indispensable to me in the difficult course of my life. Because I was a Jew I found myself free from many prejudices which restricted others in the use of their intellect; and as a Jew I was prepared to join the Opposition and to do without agreement with the ‘compact majority’.

Address To The Society Of B'nai B'rith

4411

So it was that I became one of you, took my share in your humanitarian and national interests, gained friends among you and persuaded my own few remaining friends to join our society. There was no question whatever of my convincing you of my new theories; but at a time when no one in Europe listened to me and I still had no disciples even in Vienna, you gave me your kindly attention. You were my first audience.

For some two thirds of the long period that has elapsed since my entry I persisted with you conscientiously, and found refreshment and stimulation in my relations with you. You have been kind enough to-day not to hold it up against me that during the last third of the time I have kept away from you. I was overwhelmed with work, and demands connected with it forced themselves on me; the day ceased to be long enough for me to attend your meetings, and soon my body began to rebel against a late evening meal. Finally came the years of my illness, which prevents me from being with you even to-day.

I cannot tell whether I have been a genuine B.B. in your sense. I am almost inclined to doubt it; so many exceptional circumstances have arisen in my case. But of this I can assure you - that you meant much to me and did much for me during the years in which I belonged to you. I ask you therefore to accept my warmest thanks both for those years and for to-day.

Yours in W. B. & E

Sigm. Freud

4412

KARL ABRAHAM

(1926)

Dr. Karl Abraham, President of the Berlin group, of which he was the founder, and President at the time of the International Psycho-Analytical Association, died in Berlin on December 25. He had not reached the age of fifty when he succumbed to an internal complaint against which his powerful physique had had to contend ever since the spring. At the Homburg Congress he had seemed, to the great joy of us all, to have recovered; but a relapse brought us painful disappointment.

We bury with him - integer vitae scerisque purus - one of the firmest hopes of our science, young as it is and still so bitterly assailed, and a part of its future that is now, perhaps, unrealizable. Among all those who followed me along the dark paths of psycho-analytic research, he won so pre-eminent a place that only one other name could be set beside his. It is likely that the boundless trust of his colleagues and pupils would have called him to the leadership; and he would without doubt have been a model leader in the pursuit of truth, led astray neither by the praise or blame of the many nor by the seductive illusion of his own phantasies.

I write these lines for friends and fellow-workers who knew and valued Abraham as I did. They will find it easy to understand what the loss of this friend, so much younger than I am, means to me; and they will forgive me if I make no further attempt to express what it is so hard to put into words. An account of Abraham’s scientific personality and an appreciation of his work will be undertaken for our journal by another hand.

4413

TO ROMAIN ROLLAND

(1926)

Unforgettable one! By what troubles and sufferings must you have fought your way up to such a height of humanity as yours!

Long years before I saw you, I had honoured you as an artist and as an apostle of the love of mankind. I was myself a disciple of the love of mankind, not from sentimental motives or in pursuit of an ideal, but for sober, economic reasons, because, our inborn instincts and the world around us being what they are, I could not but regard that love as no less essential for the survival of the human race than such things as technology.

And when at last I came to know you personally, I was surprised to find that you can value strength and energy so highly and that you yourself embody such force of will.

May the next decade bring you nothing but fulfilments!

Most cordially yours

Sigm. Freud, aetat. 70.

4414

PREFATORY NOTE TO A PAPER BY E. PICKWORTH FARROW

(1926)

The author of this paper is known to me as a man of strong and independent intelligence. Probably through being somewhat self-willed he failed to get on to good terms with two analysts with whom he made the attempt. He thereupon proceeded to make a systematic application of the procedure of self-analysis which I myself employed in the past for the analysis of my own dreams. His findings deserve attention precisely on account of the peculiar character of his personality and of his technique.

4415

THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION

(1927)

4416

Intentionally left blank

4417

THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION

I

When one has lived for quite a long time in a particular civilization and has often tried to discover what its origins were and along what path it has developed, one sometimes also feels tempted to take a glance in the other direction and to ask what further fate lies before it and what transformations it is destined to undergo. But one soon finds that the value of such an enquiry is diminished from the outset by several factors. Above all, because there are only a few people who can survey human activity in its full compass. Most people have been obliged to restrict themselves to a single, or a few, fields of it. But the less a man knows about the past and the present the more insecure must prove to be his judgement of the future. And there is the further difficulty that precisely in a judgement of this kind the subjective expectations of the individual play a part which it is difficult to assess; and these turn out to be dependent on purely personal factors in his own experience, on the greater or lesser optimism of his attitude to life, as it has been dictated for him by his temperament or by his success or failure. Finally, the curious fact makes itself felt that in general people experience their present naïvely, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it - the present, that is to say, must have become the past - before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future.

Thus anyone who gives way to the temptation to deliver an opinion on the probable future of our civilization will do well to remind himself of the difficulties I have just pointed out, as well as of the uncertainty that attaches quite generally to any prophecy. It follows from this, so far as I am concerned, that I shall make a hasty retreat before a task that is too great, and shall promptly seek out the small tract of territory which has claimed my attention hitherto, as soon as I have determined its position in the general scheme of things.

The Future Of An Illusion

4418

Human civilization, by which I mean all those respects in which human life has raised itself above its animal status and differs from the life of beasts - and I scorn to distinguish between culture and civilization -, presents, as we know, two aspects to the observer. It includes on the one hand all the knowledge and capacity that men have acquired in order to control the forces of nature and extract its wealth for the satisfaction of human needs, and, on the other hand, all the regulations necessary in order to adjust the relations of men to one another and especially the distribution of the available wealth. The two trends of civilization are not independent of each other: firstly, because the mutual relations of men are profoundly influenced by the amount of instinctual satisfaction which the existing wealth makes possible; secondly, because an individual man can himself come to function as wealth in relation to another one, in so far as the other person makes use of his capacity for work, or chooses him as a sexual object; and thirdly, moreover, because every individual is virtually an enemy of civilization, though civilization is supposed to be an object of universal human interest. It is remarkable that, little as men are able to exist in isolation, they should nevertheless feel as a heavy burden the sacrifices which civilization expects of them in order to make a communal life possible. Thus civilization has to be defended against the individual, and its regulations, institutions and commands are directed to that task. They aim not only at effecting a certain distribution of wealth but at maintaining that distribution; indeed, they have to protect everything that contributes to the conquest of nature and the production of wealth against men’s hostile impulses. Human creations are easily destroyed, and science and technology, which have built them up, can also be used for their annihilation.

The Future Of An Illusion

4419

One thus gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. It is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature of civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed. And in fact it is not difficult to indicate those defects. While mankind has made continual advances in its control over nature and may expect to make still greater ones, it is not possible to establish with certainty that a similar advance has been made in the management of human affairs; and probably at all periods, just as now once again, many people have asked themselves whether what little civilization has thus acquired is indeed worth defending at all. One would think that a re-ordering of human relations should be possible, which would remove the sources of dissatisfaction with civilization by renouncing coercion and the suppression of the instincts, so that, undisturbed by internal discord, men might devote themselves to the acquisition of wealth and its enjoyment. That would be the golden age, but it is questionable if such a state of affairs can be realized. It seems rather that every civilization must be built up on coercion and renunciation of instinct; it does not even seem certain that if coercion were to cease the majority of human beings would be prepared to undertake to perform the work necessary for acquiring new wealth. One has, I think, to reckon with the fact that there are present in all men destructive, and therefore anti-social and anti-cultural, trends and that in a great number of people these are strong enough to determine their behaviour in human society.

This psychological fact has a decisive importance for our judgement of human civilization. Whereas we might at first think that its essence lies in controlling nature for the purpose of acquiring wealth and that the dangers which threaten it could be eliminated through a suitable distribution of that wealth among men, it now seems that the emphasis has moved over from the material to the mental. The decisive question is whether and to what extent it is possible to lessen the burden of the instinctual sacrifices imposed on men, to reconcile men to those which must necessarily remain and to provide a compensation for them. It is just as impossible to do without control of the mass by a minority as it is to dispense with coercion in the work of civilization. For masses are lazy and unintelligent; they have no love for instinctual renunciation, and they are not to be convinced by argument of its inevitability; and the individuals composing them support one another in giving free rein to their indiscipline. It is only through the influence of individuals who can set an example and whom masses recognize as their leaders that they can be induced to perform the work and undergo the renunciations on which the existence of civilization depends. All is well if these leaders are persons who possess superior insight into the necessities of life and who have risen to the height of mastering their own instinctual wishes. But there is a danger that in order not to lose their influence they may give way to the mass more than it gives way to them, and it therefore seems necessary that they shall be independent of the mass by having means to power at their disposal. To put it briefly, there are two widespread human characteristics which are responsible for the fact that the regulations of civilization can only be maintained by a certain degree of coercion - namely, that men are not spontaneously fond of work and that arguments are of no avail against their passions.

The Future Of An Illusion

4420

I know the objections which will be raised against these assertions. It will be said that the characteristic of human masses depicted here, which is supposed to prove that coercion cannot be dispensed with in the work of civilization, is itself only the result of defects in the cultural regulations, owing to which men have become embittered, revengeful and inaccessible. New generations, who have been brought up in kindness and taught to have a high opinion of reason, and who have experienced the benefits of civilization at an early age, will have a different attitude to it. They will feel it as a possession of their very own and will be ready for its sake to make the sacrifices as regards work and instinctual satisfaction that are necessary for its preservation. They will be able to do without coercion and will differ little from their leaders. If no culture has so far produced human masses of such a quality, it is because no culture has yet devised regulations which will influence men in this way, and in particular from childhood onwards.

It may be doubted whether it is possible at all, or at any rate as yet, at the present stage of our control over nature, to set up cultural regulations of this kind. It may be asked where the number of superior, unswerving and disinterested leaders are to come from who are to act as educators of the future generations, and it may be alarming to think of the enormous amount of coercion that will inevitably be required before these intentions can be carried out. The grandeur of the plan and its importance for the future of human civilization cannot be disputed. It is securely based on the psychological discovery that man is equipped with the most varied instinctual dispositions, whose ultimate course is determined by the experiences of early childhood. But for the same reason the limitations of man’s capacity for education set bounds to the effectiveness of such a transformation in his culture. One may question whether, and in what degree, it would be possible for a different cultural environment to do away with the two characteristics of human masses which make the guidance of human affairs so difficult. The experiment has not yet been made. Probably a certain percentage of mankind (owing to a pathological disposition or an excess of instinctual strength) will always remain asocial; but if it were feasible merely to reduce the majority that is hostile towards civilization to-day into a minority, a great deal would have been accomplished - perhaps all that can be accomplished.

The Future Of An Illusion

4421

I should not like to give the impression that I have strayed a long way from the line laid down for my enquiry. Let me therefore give an express assurance that I have not the least intention of making judgements on the great experiment in civilization that is now in progress in the vast country that stretches between Europe and Asia. I have neither the special knowledge nor the capacity to decide on its practicability, to test the expediency of the methods employed or to measure the width of the inevitable gap between intention and execution. What is in preparation there is unfinished and therefore eludes an investigation for which our own long-consolidated civilization affords us material.

The Future Of An Illusion

4422

II

We have slipped unawares out of the economic field into the field of psychology. At first we were tempted to look for the assets of civilization in the available wealth and in the regulations for its distribution. But with the recognition that every civilization rests on a compulsion to work and a renunciation of instinct and therefore inevitably provokes opposition from those affected by these demands, it has become clear that civilization cannot consist principally or solely in wealth itself and the means of acquiring it and the arrangements for its distribution; for these things are threatened by the rebelliousness and destructive mania of the participants in civilization. Alongside of wealth we now come upon the means by which civilization can be defended - measures of coercion and other measures that are intended to reconcile men to it and to recompense them for their sacrifices. These latter may be described as the mental assets of civilization.

For the sake of a uniform terminology we will describe the fact that an instinct cannot be satisfied as a ‘frustration’, the regulation by which this frustration is established as a ‘prohibition’ and the condition which is produced by the prohibition as a ‘privation’. The first step is to distinguish between privations which affect everyone and privations which do not affect everyone but only groups, classes or even single individuals. The former are the earliest; with the prohibitions that established them, civilization - who knows how many thousands of years ago? - began to detach man from his primordial animal condition. We have found to our surprise that these privations are still operative and still form the kernel of hostility to civilization. The instinctual wishes that suffer under them are born afresh with every child; there is a class of people, the neurotics, who already react to these frustrations with asocial behaviour. Among these instinctual wishes are those of incest, cannibalism and lust for killing. It sounds strange to place alongside one another wishes which everyone seems united in repudiating and others about which there is so much lively dispute in our civilization as to whether they shall be permitted or frustrated; but psychologically it is justifiable to do so. Nor is the attitude of civilization to these oldest instinctual wishes by any means uniform. Cannibalism alone seems to be universally proscribed and - to the non-psycho-analytic view - to have been completely surmounted. The strength of the incestuous wishes can still be detected behind the prohibition against them; and under certain conditions killing is still practised, and indeed commanded, by our civilization. It is possible that cultural developments lie ahead of us in which the satisfaction of yet other wishes, which are entirely permissible to-day, will appear just as unacceptable as cannibalism does now.

The Future Of An Illusion

4423

These earliest instinctual renunciations already involve a psychological factor which remains important for all further instinctual renunciations as well. It is not true that the human mind has undergone no development since the earliest times and that, in contrast to the advances of science and technology, it is the same to-day as it was at the beginning of history. We can point out one of these mental advances at once. It is in keeping with the course of human development that external coercion gradually becomes internalized; for a special mental agency, man’s super-ego, takes it over and includes it among its commandments. Every child presents this process of transformation to us; only by that means does it become a moral and social being. Such a strengthening of the super-ego is a most precious cultural asset in the psychological field. Those in whom it has taken place are turned from being opponents of civilization into being its vehicles. The greater their number is in a cultural unit the more secure is its culture and the more it can dispense with external measures of coercion. Now the degree of this internalization differs greatly between the various instinctual prohibitions. As regards the earliest cultural demands, which I have mentioned, the internalization seems to have been very extensively achieved, if we leave out of account the unwelcome exception of the neurotics. But the case is altered when we turn to the other instinctual claims. Here we observe with surprise and concern that a majority of people obey the cultural prohibitions on these points only under the pressure of external coercion - that is, only where that coercion can make itself effective and so long as it is to be feared. This is also true of what are known as the moral demands of civilization, which likewise apply to everyone. Most of one’s experiences of man’s moral untrustworthiness fall into this category. There are countless civilized people who would shrink from murder or incest but who do not deny themselves the satisfaction of their avarice, their aggressive urges or their sexual lusts, and who do not hesitate to injure other people by lies, fraud and calumny, so long as they can remain unpunished for it; and this, no doubt, has always been so though many ages of civilization.

The Future Of An Illusion

4424

If we turn to those restrictions that apply only to certain classes of society, we meet with a state of things which is flagrant and which has always been recognized. It is to be expected that these underprivileged classes will envy the favoured ones their privileges and will do all they can to free themselves from their own surplus of privation. Where this is not possible, a permanent measure of discontent will persist within the culture concerned and this can lead to dangerous revolts. If, however, a culture has not got beyond a point at which the satisfaction of one portion of its participants depends upon the suppression of another, and perhaps larger, portion - and this is the case in all present day cultures - it is understandable that the suppressed people should develop an intense hostility towards a culture whose existence they make possible by their work, but in whose wealth they have too small a share. In such conditions an internalization of the cultural prohibitions among the suppressed people is not to be expected. On the contrary, they are not prepared to acknowledge the prohibitions, they are intent on destroying the culture itself, and possibly even on doing away with the postulates on which it is based. The hostility of these classes to civilization is so obvious that it has caused the more latent hostility of the social strata that are better provided for to be overlooked. It goes without saying that a civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.

The extent to which a civilization’s precepts have been internalized - to express it popularly and unpsychologically: the moral level of its participants - is not the only form of mental wealth that comes into consideration in estimating a civilization’s value. There are in addition its assets in the shape of ideals and artistic creations - that is, the satisfactions that can be derived from those sources.

The Future Of An Illusion

4425

People will be only too readily inclined to include among the psychical assets of a culture its ideals - its estimates of what achievements are the highest and the most to be striven after. It will seem at first as though these ideals would determine the achievements of the cultural unit; but the actual course of events would appear to be that the ideals are based on the first achievements which have been made possible by a combination of the culture’s internal gifts and external circumstances, and that these first achievements are then held on to by the ideal as something to be carried further. The satisfaction which the ideal offers to the participants in the culture is thus of a narcissistic nature; it rests on their pride in what has already been successfully achieved. To make this satisfaction complete calls for a comparison with other cultures which have aimed at different achievements and have developed different ideals. On the strength of these differences every culture claims the right to look down on the rest. In this way cultural ideals become a source of discord and enmity between different cultural units, as can be seen most clearly in the case of nations.

The narcissistic satisfaction provided by the cultural ideal is also among the forces which are successful in combating the hostility to culture within the cultural unit. This satisfaction can be shared in not only by the favoured classes, which enjoy the benefits of the culture, but also by the suppressed ones, since the right to despise the people outside it compensates them for the wrongs they suffer within their own unit. No doubt one is a wretched plebeian, harassed by debts and military service; but, to make up for it, one is a Roman citizen, one has one’s share in the task of ruling other nations and dictating their laws. This identification of the suppressed classes with the class who rules and exploits them is, however, only part of a larger whole. For, on the other hand, the suppressed classes can be emotionally attached to their masters; in spite of their hostility to them they may see in them their ideals; unless such relations of a fundamentally satisfying kind subsisted, it would be impossible to understand how a number of civilizations have survived so long in spite of the justifiable hostility of large human masses.

The Future Of An Illusion

4426

A different kind of satisfaction is afforded by art to the participants in a cultural unit, though as a rule it remains inaccessible to the masses, who are engaged in exhausting work and have not enjoyed any personal education. As we discovered long since, art offers substitutive satisfactions for the oldest and still most deeply felt cultural renunciations, and for that reason it serves as nothing else does to reconcile a man to the sacrifices he has made on behalf of civilization. On the other hand, the creations of art heighten his feelings of identification, of which every cultural unit stands in so much need, by providing an occasion for sharing highly valued emotional experiences. And when those creations picture the achievements of his particular culture and bring to his mind its ideals in an impressive manner, they also minister to his narcissistic satisfaction.

No mention has yet been made of what is perhaps the most important item in the psychical inventory of a civilization. This consists in its religious ideas in the widest sense - in other words (which will be justified later) in its illusions.

The Future Of An Illusion

4427

III

In what does the peculiar value of religious ideas lie?

We have spoken of the hostility to civilization which is produced by the pressure that civilization exercises, the renunciations of instinct which it demands. If one imagines its prohibitions lifted - if, then, one may take any woman one pleases as a sexual object, if one may without hesitation kill one’s rival for her love or anyone else who stands in one’s way, if, too, one can carry off any of the other man’s belongings without asking leave - how splendid, what a string of satisfactions one’s life would be! True, one soon comes across the first difficulty: everyone else has exactly the same wishes as I have and will treat me with no more consideration than I treat him. And so in reality only one person could be made unrestrictedly happy by such a removal of the restrictions of civilization, and he would be a tyrant, a dictator, who had seized all the means to power. And even he would have every reason to wish that the others would observe at least one cultural commandment: ‘thou shalt not kill’.

But how ungrateful, how short-sighted after all, to strive for the abolition of civilization! What would then remain would be a state of nature, and that would be far harder to bear. It is true that nature would not demand any restrictions of instinct from us, she would let us do as we liked; but she has her own particularly effective method of restricting us. She destroys us coldly, cruelly, relentlessly, as it seems to us, and possibly through the very things that occasioned our satisfaction. It was precisely because of these dangers with which nature threatens us that we came together and created civilization, which is also, among other things, intended to make our communal life possible. For the principal task of civilization, its actual raison d’être, is to defend us against nature.

We all know that in many ways civilization does this fairly well already, and clearly as time goes on it will do it much better. But no one is under the illusion that nature has already been vanquished; and few dare hope that she will ever be entirely subjected to man. There are the elements, which seem to mock at all human control: the earth, which quakes and is torn apart and buries all human life and its works; water, which deluges and drowns everything in a turmoil; storms, which blow everything before them; there are diseases, which we have only recently recognized as attacks by other organisms; and finally there is the painful riddle of death, against which no medicine has yet been found, nor probably will be. With these forces nature rises up against us, majestic, cruel and inexorable; she brings to our mind once more our weakness and helplessness, which we thought to escape through the work of civilization. One of the few gratifying and exalting impressions which mankind can offer is when, in the face of an elemental catastrophe, it forgets the discordancies of its civilization and all its internal difficulties and animosities, and recalls the great common task of preserving itself against the superior power of nature.

The Future Of An Illusion

4428

For the individual, too, life is hard to bear, just as it is for mankind in general. The civilization in which he participates imposes some amount of privation on him, and other men bring him a measure of suffering, either in spite of the precepts of his civilization or because of its imperfections. To this are added the injuries which untamed nature - he calls it Fate - inflicts on him. One might suppose that this condition of things would result in a permanent state of anxious expectation in him and a severe injury to his natural narcissism. We know already how the individual reacts to the injuries which civilization and other men inflict on him: he develops a corresponding degree of resistance to the regulations of civilization and of hostility to it. But how does he defend himself against the superior powers of nature, of Fate, which threaten him as they threaten all the rest?

Civilization relieves him of this task; it performs it in the same way for all alike; and it is noteworthy that in this almost all civilizations act alike. Civilization does not call a halt in the task of defending man against nature, it merely pursues it by other means. The task is a manifold one. Man’s self-regard, seriously menaced, calls for consolation; life and the universe must be robbed of their terrors; moreover his curiosity, moved, it is true, by the strongest practical interest, demands an answer.

A great deal is already gained with the first step: the humanization of nature. Impersonal forces and destinies cannot be approached; they remain eternally remote. But if the elements have passions that rage as they do in our own souls, if death itself is not something spontaneous but the violent act of an evil Will, if everywhere in nature there are Beings around us of a kind that we know in our own society, then we can breathe freely, can feel at home in the uncanny and can deal by psychical means with our senseless anxiety. We are still defenceless, perhaps, but we are no longer helplessly paralysed; we can at least react. Perhaps, indeed, we are not even defenceless. We can apply the same methods against these violent supermen outside that we employ in our own society; we can try to adjure them, to appease them, to bribe them, and, by so influencing them, we may rob them of a part of their power. A replacement like this of natural science by psychology not only provides immediate relief, but also points the way to a further mastering of the situation.

The Future Of An Illusion

4429

For this situation is nothing new. It has an infantile prototype, of which it is in fact only the continuation. For once before one has found oneself in a similar state of helplessness: as a small child, in relation to one’s parents. One had reason to fear them, and especially one’s father; and yet one was sure of his protection against the dangers one knew. Thus it was natural to assimilate the two situations. Here, too, wishing played its part, as it does in dream-life. The sleeper may be seized with a presentiment of death, which threatens to place him in the grave. But the dream-work knows how to select a condition that will turn even that dreaded event into a wish-fulfilment: the dreamer sees himself in an ancient Etruscan grave which he has climbed down into, happy to find his archaeological interests satisfied. In the same way, a man makes the forces of nature not simply into persons with whom he can associate as he would with his equals - that would not do justice to the overpowering impression which those forces make on him - but he gives them the character of a father. He turns them into gods, following in this, as I have tried to show, not only an infantile prototype but a phylogenetic one.

In the course of time the first observations were made of regularity and conformity to law in natural phenomena, and with this the forces of nature lost their human traits. But man’s helplessness remains and along with it his longing for his father, and the gods. The gods retain their threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.

The Future Of An Illusion

4430

But within these functions there is a gradual displacement of accent. It was observed that the phenomena of nature developed automatically according to internal necessities. Without doubt the gods were the lords of nature; they had arranged it to be as it was and now they could leave it to itself. Only occasionally, in what are known as miracles, did they intervene in its course, as though to make it plain that they had relinquished nothing of their original sphere of power. As regards the apportioning of destinies, an unpleasant suspicion persisted that the perplexity and helplessness of the human race could not be remedied. It was here that the gods were most apt to fail. If they themselves created Fate, then their counsels must be deemed inscrutable. The notion dawned on the most gifted people of antiquity that Moira stood above the gods and that the gods themselves had their own destinies. And the more autonomous nature became and the more the gods withdrew from it, the more earnestly were all expectations directed to the third function of the gods - the more did morality become their true domain. It now became the task of the gods to even out the defects and evils of civilization, to attend to the sufferings which men inflict on one another in their life together and to watch over the fulfilment of the precepts of civilization, which men obey so imperfectly. Those precepts themselves were credited with a divine origin; they were elevated beyond human society and were extended to nature and the universe.

The Future Of An Illusion

4431

And thus a store of ideas is created, born from man’s need to make his helplessness tolerable and built up from the material of memories of the helplessness of his own childhood and the childhood of the human race. It can clearly be seen that the possession of these ideas protects him in two directions - against the dangers of nature and Fate, and against the injuries that threaten him from human society itself. Here is the gist of the matter. Life in this world serves a higher purpose; no doubt it is not easy to guess what that purpose is, but it certainly signifies a perfecting of man’s nature. It is probably the spiritual part of man, the soul, which in the course of time has so slowly and unwillingly detached itself from the body, that is the object of this elevation and exaltation. Everything that happens in this world is an expression of the intentions of an intelligence superior to us, which in the end, though its ways and byways are difficult to follow, orders everything for the best - that is, to make it enjoyable for us. Over each one of us there watches a benevolent Providence which is only seemingly stern and which will not suffer us to become a plaything of the overmighty and pitiless forces of nature. Death itself is not extinction, is not a return to inorganic lifelessness, but the beginning of a new kind of existence which lies on the path of development to something higher. And, looking in the other direction, this view announces that the same moral laws which our civilizations have set up govern the whole universe as well, except that they are maintained by a supreme court of justice with incomparably more power and consistency. In the end all good is rewarded and all evil punished, if not actually in this form of life then in the later existences that begin after death. In this way all the terrors, the sufferings and the hardships of life are destined to be obliterated. Life after death, which continues life on earth just as the invisible part of the spectrum joins on to the visible part, brings us all the perfection that we may perhaps have missed here. And the superior wisdom which directs this course of things, the infinite goodness that expresses itself in it, the justice that achieves its aim in it - these are the attributes of the divine beings who also created us and the world as a whole, or rather, of the one divine being into which, in our civilization, all the gods of antiquity have been condensed. The people which first succeeded in thus concentrating the divine attributes was not a little proud of the advance. It had laid open to view the father who had all along been hidden behind every divine figure as its nucleus. Fundamentally this was a return to the historical beginnings of the idea of God. Now that God was a single person, man’s relations to him could recover the intimacy and intensity of the child’s relation to his father. But if one had done so much for one’s father, one wanted to have a reward, or at least to be his only beloved child, his Chosen People. Very much later, pious America laid claim to being ‘God’s own Country’; and, as regards one of the shapes in which men worship the deity, the claim is undoubtedly valid.

The Future Of An Illusion

4432

The religious ideas that have been summarized above have of course passed through a long process of development and have been adhered to in various phases by various civilizations. I have singled out one such phase, which roughly corresponds to the final form taken by our present-day white Christian civilization. It is easy to see that not all the parts of this picture tally equally well with one another, that not all the questions that press for an answer receive one, and that it is difficult to dismiss the contradiction of daily experience. Nevertheless, such as they are, those ideas - ideas which are religious in the widest sense - are prized as the most precious possession of civilization, as the most precious thing it has to offer its participants. It is far more highly prized than all the devices for winning treasures from the earth or providing men with sustenance or preventing their illnesses, and so forth. People feel that life would not be tolerable if they did not attach to these ideas the value that is claimed for them. And now the question arises: what are these ideas in the light of psychology? Whence do they derive the esteem in which they are held? And, to take a further timid step, what is their real worth?

The Future Of An Illusion

4433

IV

An enquiry which proceeds like a monologue, without interruption, is not altogether free from danger. One is too easily tempted into pushing aside thoughts which threaten to break into it, and in exchange one is left with a feeling of uncertainty which in the end one tries to keep down by over-decisiveness. I shall therefore imagine that I have an opponent who follows my arguments with mistrust, and here and there I shall allow him to interject some remarks.

I hear him say: ‘You have repeatedly used the expressions "civilization creates these religious ideas", "civilization places them at the disposal of its participants". There is something about this that sounds strange to me. I cannot myself say why, but it does not sound so natural as it does to say that civilization has made rules about distributing the products of labour or about rights concerning women and children.’

I think, all the same, that I am justified in expressing myself in this way. I have tried to show that religious ideas have arisen from the same need as have all the other achievements of civilization: from the necessity of defending oneself against the crushingly superior force of nature. To this a second motive was added - the urge to rectify the shortcomings of civilization which made themselves painfully felt. Moreover, it is especially apposite to say that civilization gives the individual these ideas, for he finds them there already; they are presented to him ready-made, and he would not be able to discover them for himself. What he is entering into is the heritage of many generations, and he takes it over as he does the multiplication table, geometry, and similar things. There is indeed a difference in this, but that difference lies elsewhere and I cannot examine it yet. The feeling of strangeness that you mention may be partly due to the fact that this body of religious ideas is usually put forward as a divine revelation. But this presentation of it is itself a part of the religious system, and it entirely ignores the known historical development of these ideas and their differences in different epochs and civilizations.

The Future Of An Illusion

4434

‘Here is another point, which seems to me to be more important. You argue that the humanization of nature is derived from the need to put an end to man’s perplexity and helplessness in the face of its dreaded forces, to get into a relation with them and finally to influence them. But a motive of this kind seems superfluous. Primitive man has no choice, he has no other way of thinking. It is natural to him, something innate, as it were, to project his existence outwards into the world and to regard every event which he observes as the manifestation of beings who at bottom are like himself. It is his only method of comprehension. And it is by no means self-evident, on the contrary it is a remarkable coincidence, if by thus indulging his natural disposition he succeeds in satisfying one of his greatest needs.’

I do not find that so striking. Do you suppose that human thought has no practical motives, that it is simply the expression of a disinterested curiosity? That is surely very improbable. I believe rather that when man personifies the forces of nature he is again following an infantile model. He has learnt from the persons in his earliest environment that the way to influence them is to establish a relation with them; and so, later on, with the same end in view, he treats everything else that he comes across in the same way as he treated those persons. Thus I do not contradict your descriptive observation; it is in fact natural to man to personify everything that he wants to understand in order later to control it (psychical mastering as a preparation for physical mastering); but I provide in addition a motive and a genesis for this peculiarity of human thinking.

‘And now here is yet a third point. You have dealt with the origin of religion once before, in your book Totem and Taboo. But there it appeared in a different light. Everything was the son-father relationship. God was the exalted father, and the longing for the father was the root of the need for religion. Since then, it seems, you have discovered the factor of human weakness and helplessness, to which indeed the chief role in the formation of religion is generally assigned, and now you transpose everything that was once the father complex into terms of helplessness. May I ask you to explain this transformation?’

The Future Of An Illusion

4435

With pleasure. I was only waiting for this invitation. But is it really a transformation? In Totem and Taboo it was not my purpose to explain the origin of religions but only of totemism. Can you, from any of the views known to you, explain the fact that the first shape in which the protecting deity revealed itself to men should have been that of an animal, that there was a prohibition against killing and eating this animal and that nevertheless the solemn custom was to kill and eat it communally once a year? This is precisely what happens in totemism. And it is hardly to the purpose to argue about whether totemism ought to be called a religion. It has intimate connections with the later god-religions. The totem animals become the sacred animals of the gods; and the earliest, but most fundamental moral restrictions - the prohibitions against murder and incest - originate in totemism. Whether or not you accept the conclusions of Totem and Taboo, I hope you will admit that a number of very remarkable, disconnected facts are brought together in it into a consistent whole.

The question of why in the long run the animal god did not suffice, and was replaced by a human one, was hardly touched on in Totem and Taboo, and other problems concerning the formation of religion were not mentioned in the book at all. Do you regard a limitation of that kind as the same thing as a denial? My work is a good example of the strict isolation of the particular contribution which psycho-analytic discussion can make to the solution of the problem of religion. If I am now trying to add the other, less deeply concealed part, you should not accuse me of contradicting myself, just as before you accused me of being one-sided. It is, of course, my duty to point out the connecting links between what I said earlier and what I put forward now, between the deeper and the manifest motives, between the father-complex and man’s helplessness and need for protection.

These connections are not hard to find. They consist in the relation of the child’s helplessness to the helplessness of the adult which continues it. So that, as was to be expected, the motives for the formation of religion which psycho-analysis revealed now turn out to be the same as the infantile contribution to the manifest motives. Let us transport ourselves into the mental life of a child. You remember the choice of object according to the anaclitic type, which psycho-analysis talks of? The libido there follows the paths of narcissistic needs and attaches itself to the objects which ensure the satisfaction of those needs. In this way the mother, who satisfies the child’s hunger, becomes its first love-object and certainly also its first protection against all the undefined dangers which threaten it in the external world - its first protection against anxiety, we may say.

The Future Of An Illusion

4436

In this function the mother is soon replaced by the stronger father, who retains that position for the rest of childhood. But the child’s attitude to its father is coloured by a peculiar ambivalence. The father himself constitutes a danger for the child, perhaps because of its earlier relation to its mother. Thus it fears him no less than it longs for him and admires him. The indications of this ambivalence in the attitude to the father are deeply imprinted in every religion, as was shown in Totem and Taboo. When the growing individual finds that he is destined to remain a child for ever, that he can never do without protection against strange superior powers, he lends those powers the features belonging to the figure of his father; he creates for himself the gods whom he dreads, whom he seeks to propitiate, and whom he nevertheless entrusts with his own protection. Thus his longing for a father is a motive identical with his need for protection against the consequences of his human weakness. The defence against childish helplessness is what lends its characteristic features to the adult’s reaction to the helplessness which he has to acknowledge - a reaction which is precisely the formation of religion. But it is not my intention to enquire any further into the development of the idea of God; what we are concerned with here is the finished body of religious ideas as it is transmitted by civilization to the individual.

The Future Of An Illusion

4437

V

Let us now take up the thread of our enquiry. What, then, is the psychological significance of religious ideas and under what heading are we to classify them? The question is not at all easy to answer immediately. After rejecting a number of formulations, we will take our stand on the following one. Religious ideas are teachings and assertions about facts and conditions of external (or internal) reality which tell one something one has not discovered for oneself and which lay claim to one’s belief. Since they give us information about what is most important and interesting to us in life, they are particularly highly prized. Anyone who knows nothing of them is very ignorant; and anyone who has added them to his knowledge may consider himself much the richer.

There are, of course, many such teachings about the most various things in the world. Every school lesson is full of them. Let us take geography. We are told that the town of Constance lies on the Bodensee. A student song adds: ‘if you don’t believe it, go and see.’ I happen to have been there and can confirm the fact that that lovely town lies on the shore of a wide stretch of water which all those who live round it call the Bodensee; and I am now completely convinced of the correctness of this geographical assertion. In this connection I am reminded of another, very remarkable, experience. I was already a man of mature years when I stood for the first time on the hill of the Acropolis in Athens, between the temple ruins, looking out over the blue sea. A feeling of astonishment mingled with my joy. It seemed to say: ‘So it really is true, just as we learnt at school!’ How shallow and weak must have been the belief I then acquired in the real truth of what I heard, if I could be so astonished now! But I will not lay too much stress on the significance of this experience; for my astonishment could have had another explanation, which did not occur to me at the time and which is of a wholly subjective nature and has to do with the special character of the place.

The Future Of An Illusion

4438

All teachings like these, then, demand belief in their contents, but not without producing grounds for their claim. They are put forward as the epitomized result of a longer process of thought based on observation and certainly also on inferences. If anyone wants to go through this process himself instead of accepting its result, they show him how to set about it. Moreover, we are always in addition given the source of the knowledge conveyed by them, where that source is not self-evident, as it is in the case of geographical assertions. For instance, the earth is shaped like a sphere; the proofs adduced for this are Foucault’s pendulum experiment, the behaviour of the horizon and the possibility of circumnavigating the earth. Since it is impracticable, as everyone concerned realizes, to send every schoolchild on a voyage round the world, we are satisfied with letting what is taught at school be taken on trust; but we know that the path to acquiring a personal conviction remains open.

Let us try to apply the same test to the teachings of religion. When we ask on what their claim to be believed is founded, we are met with three answers, which harmonize remarkably badly with one another. Firstly, these teachings deserve to be believed because they were already believed by our primal ancestors; secondly, we possess proofs which have been handed down to us from those same primaeval times; and thirdly, it is forbidden to raise the question of their authentication at all. In former days anything so presumptuous was visited with the severest penalties, and even to-day society looks askance at any attempt to raise the question again.

This third point is bound to rouse our strongest suspicions. After all, a prohibition like this can only be for one reason - that society is very well aware of the insecurity of the claim it makes on behalf of its religious doctrines. Otherwise it would certainly be very ready to put the necessary data at the disposal of anyone who wanted to arrive at conviction. This being so, it is with a feeling of mistrust which it is hard to allay that we pass on to an examination of the other two grounds of proof. We ought to believe because our forefathers believed. But these ancestors of ours were far more ignorant than we are. They believed in things we could not possibly accept to-day; and the possibility occurs to us that the doctrines of religion may belong to that class too. The proofs they have left us are set down in writings which themselves bear every mark of untrustworthiness. They are full of contradictions, revisions and falsifications, and where they speak of factual confirmations they are themselves unconfirmed. It does not help much to have it asserted that their wording, or even their content only, originates from divine revelation; for this assertion is itself one of the doctrines whose authenticity is under examination, and no proposition can be a proof of itself.

The Future Of An Illusion

4439

Thus we arrive at the singular conclusion that of all the information provided by our cultural assets it is precisely the elements which might be of the greatest importance to us and which have the task of solving the riddles of the universe and of reconciling us to the sufferings of life - it is precisely those elements that are the least well authenticated of any. We should not be able to bring ourselves to accept anything of so little concern to us as the fact that whales bear young instead of laying eggs, if it were not capable of better proof than this.

This state of affairs is in itself a very remarkable psychological problem. And let no one suppose that what I have said about the impossibility of proving the truth of religious doctrines contains anything new. It has been felt at all times - undoubtedly, too, by the ancestors who bequeathed us this legacy. Many of them probably nourished the same doubts as ours, but the pressure imposed on them was too strong for them to have dared to utter them. And since then countless people have been tormented by similar doubts, and have striven to suppress them, because they thought it was their duty to believe; many brilliant intellects have broken down over this conflict, and many characters have been impaired by the compromises with which they have tried to find a way out of it.

If all the evidence put forward for the authenticity of religious teachings originates in the past, it is natural to look round and see whether the present, about which it is easier to form judgements, may not also be able to furnish evidence of the sort. If by this means we could succeed in clearing even a single portion of the religious system from doubt, the whole of it would gain enormously in credibility. The proceedings of the spiritualists meet us at this point; they are convinced of the survival of the individual soul and they seek to demonstrate to us beyond doubt the truth of this one religious doctrine. Unfortunately they cannot succeed in refuting the fact that the appearance and utterances of their spirits are merely the products of their own mental activity. They have called up the spirits of the greatest men and of the most eminent thinkers, but all the pronouncements and information which they have received from them have been so foolish and so wretchedly meaningless that one can find nothing credible in them but the capacity of the spirits to adapt themselves to the circle of people who have conjured them up.

The Future Of An Illusion

4440

I must now mention two attempts that have been made - both of which convey the impression of being desperate efforts - to evade the problem. One, of a violent nature, is ancient; the other is subtle and modern. The first is the ‘Credo quia absurdum’ of the early Father of the Church. It maintains that religious doctrines are outside the jurisdiction of reason - are above reason. Their truth must be felt inwardly, and they need not be comprehended. But this Credo is only of interest as a self-confession. As an authoritative statement it has no binding force. Am I to be obliged to believe every absurdity? And if not, why this one in particular? There is no appeal to a court above that of reason. If the truth of religious doctrines is dependent on an inner experience which bears witness to that truth, what is one to do about the many people who do not have this rare experience? One may require every man to use the gift of reason which he possesses, but one cannot erect, on the basis of a motive that exists only for a very few, an obligation that shall apply to everyone. If one man has gained an unshakable conviction of the true reality of religious doctrines from a state of ecstasy which has deeply moved him, of what significance is that to others?

The second attempt is the one made by the philosophy of ‘As if’. This asserts that our thought-activity includes a great number of hypotheses whose groundlessness and even absurdity we fully realize. They are called ‘fictions’, but for a variety of practical reasons we have to behave ‘as if’ we believed in these fictions. This is the case with religious doctrines because of their incomparable importance for the maintenance of human society.¹ This line of argument is not far removed from the ‘Credo quia absurdum’. But I think the demand made by the ‘As if’ argument is one that only a philosopher could put forward. A man whose thinking is not influenced by the artifices of philosophy will never be able to accept it; in such a man’s view, the admission that something is absurd or contrary to reason leaves no more to be said. It cannot be expected of him that precisely in treating his most important interests he shall forgo the guarantees he requires for all his ordinary activities. I am reminded of one of my children who was distinguished at an early age by a peculiarly marked matter-of-factness. When the children were being told a fairy story and were listening to it with rapt attention, he would come up and ask: ‘Is that a true story?’ When he was told it was not, he would turn away with a look of disdain. We may expect that people will soon behave in the same way towards the fairy tales of religion, in spite of the advocacy of ‘As if’.

But at present they still behave quite differently; and in past times religious ideas, in spite of their incontrovertible lack of authentication, have exercised the strongest possible influence on mankind. This is a fresh psychological problem. We must ask where the inner force of those doctrines lies and to what it is that they owe their efficacy, independent as it is of recognition by reason.

¹ I hope I am not doing him an injustice if I take the philosopher of ‘As if’ as the representative of a view which is not foreign to other thinkers: ‘We include as fictions not merely indifferent theoretical operations but ideational constructs emanating from the noblest minds, to which the noblest part of mankind cling and of which they will not allow themselves to be deprived. Nor is it our object so to deprive them - for as practical fictions we leave them all intact; they perish only as theoretical truths.’ (Hans Vaihinger, 1922, 68.)

The Future Of An Illusion

4441

VI

I think we have prepared the way sufficiently for an answer to both these questions. It will be found if we turn our attention to the psychical origin of religious ideas. These, which are given out as teachings, are not precipitates of experience or end-results of thinking: they are illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes. As we already know, the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood arouses the need for protection - for protection through love which was provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life made it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one. Thus the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fear of the dangers of life; the establishment of a moral world-order ensures the fulfilment of the demands of justice, which have so often remained unfulfilled in human civilization; and the prolongation of earthly existence in a future life provides the local and temporal framework in which these wish-fulfilments shall take place. Answers to the riddles that tempt the curiosity of man, such as how the universe began or what the relation is between body and mind, are developed in conformity with the underlying assumptions of this system. It is an enormous relief to the individual psyche if the conflicts of its childhood arising from the father-complex - conflicts which it has never wholly overcome - are removed from it and brought to a solution which is universally accepted.

When I say that these things are all illusions, I must define the meaning of the word. An illusion is not the same thing as an error; nor is it necessarily an error. Aristotle’s belief that vermin are developed out of dung (a belief to which ignorant people still cling) was an error; so was the belief of a former generation of doctors that tabes dorsalis is the result of sexual excess. It would be incorrect to call these errors illusions. On the other hand, it was an illusion of Columbus’s that he had discovered a new sea-route to the Indies. The part played by his wish in this error is very clear. One may describe as an illusion the assertion made by certain nationalists that the Indo-Germanic race is the only one capable of civilization; or the belief, which was only destroyed by psycho-analysis, that children are creatures without sexuality. What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes. In this respect they come near to psychiatric delusions. But they differ from them, too, apart from the more complicated structure of delusions. In the case of delusions, we emphasize as essential their being in contradiction with reality. Illusions need not necessarily be false - that is to say, unrealizable or in contradiction to reality. For instance, a middle-class girl may have the illusion that a prince will come and marry her. This is possible; and a few such cases have occurred. That the Messiah will come and found a golden age is much less likely. Whether one classifies this belief as an illusion or as something analogous to a delusion will depend on one’s personal attitude. Examples of illusions which have proved true are not easy to find, but the illusion of the alchemists that all metals can be turned into gold might be one of them. The wish to have a great deal of gold, as much gold as possible, has, it is true, been a good deal damped by our present-day knowledge of the determinants of wealth, but chemistry no longer regards the transmutation of metals into gold as impossible. Thus we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we disregard its relations to reality, just as the illusion itself sets no store by verification.

The Future Of An Illusion

4442

Having thus taken our bearings, let us return once more to the question of religious doctrines. We can now repeat that all of them are illusions and insusceptible of proof. No one can be compelled to think them true, to believe in them. Some of them are so improbable, so incompatible with everything we have laboriously discovered about the reality of the world, that we may compare them - if we pay proper regard to the psychological differences - to delusions. Of the reality value of most of them we cannot judge; just as they cannot be proved, so they cannot be refuted. We still know too little to make a critical approach to them. The riddles of the universe reveal themselves only slowly to our investigation; there are many questions to which science to-day can give no answer. But scientific work is the only road which can lead us to a knowledge of reality outside ourselves. It is once again merely an illusion to expect anything from intuition and introspection; they can give us nothing but particulars about our own mental life, which are hard to interpret, never any information about the questions which religious doctrine finds it so easy to answer. It would be insolent to let one’s own arbitrary will step into the breach and, according to one’s personal estimate, declare this or that part of the religious system to be less or more acceptable. Such questions are too momentous for that; they might be called too sacred.

At this point one must expect to meet with an objection. ‘Well then, if even obdurate sceptics admit that the assertions of religion cannot be refuted by reason, why should I not believe in them, since they have so much on their side - tradition, the agreement of mankind, and all the consolations they offer?’ Why not, indeed? Just as no one can be forced to believe, so no one can be forced to disbelieve. But do not let us be satisfied with deceiving ourselves that arguments like these take us along the road of correct thinking. If ever there was a case of a lame excuse we have it here. Ignorance is ignorance; no right to believe anything can be derived from it. In other matters no sensible person will behave so irresponsibly or rest content with such feeble grounds for his opinions and for the one he takes. It is only in the highest and most sacred things that he allows himself to do so. In reality these are only attempts at pretending to oneself or to other people that one is still firmly attached to religion, when one has long since cut oneself loose from it. Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanour. Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense. They give the name of ‘God’ to some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves; having done so they can pose before all the world as deists, as believers in God, and they can even boast that they have recognized a higher, purer concept of God, notwithstanding that their God is now nothing more than an insubstantial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrines. Critics persist in describing as ‘deeply religious’ anyone who admits to a sense of man’s insignificance or impotence in the face of the universe, although what constitutes the essence of the religious attitude is not this feeling but only the next step after it, the reaction to it which seeks a remedy for it. The man who goes no further, but humbly acquiesces in the small part which human beings play in the great world - such a man is, on the contrary, irreligious in the truest sense of the word.

To assess the truth-value of religious doctrines does not lie within the scope of the present enquiry. It is enough for us that we have recognized them as being, in their psychological nature, illusions. But we do not have to conceal the fact that this discovery also strongly influences our attitude to the question which must appear to many to be the most important of all. We know approximately at what periods and by what kind of men religious doctrines were created. If in addition we discover the motives which led to this, our attitude to the problem of religion will undergo a marked displacement. We shall tell ourselves that it would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be. And it would be more remarkable still if our wretched, ignorant and downtrodden ancestors had succeeded in solving all these difficult riddles of the universe.

The Future Of An Illusion

4443

VII

Having recognized religious doctrines as illusions, we are at once faced by a further question: may not other cultural assets of which we hold a high opinion and by which we let our lives be ruled be of a similar nature? Must not the assumptions that determine our political regulations be called illusions as well? and is it not the case that in our civilization the relations between the sexes are disturbed by an erotic illusion or a number of such illusions? And once our suspicion has been aroused, we shall not shrink from asking too whether our conviction that we can learn something about external reality through the use of observation and reasoning in scientific work - whether this conviction has any better foundation. Nothing ought to keep us from directing our observation to our own selves or from applying our thought to criticism of itself. In this field a number of investigations open out before us, whose results could not but be decisive for the construction of a ‘Weltanschauung’. We surmise, moreover, that such an effort would not be wasted and that it would at least in part justify our suspicion. But the author does not dispose of the means for undertaking so comprehensive a task; he needs must confine his work to following out one only of these illusions - that, namely, of religion.

But now the loud voice of our opponent brings us to a halt. We are called to account for our wrong-doing:

‘Archaeological interests are no doubt most praiseworthy, but no one undertakes an excavation if by doing so he is going to undermine the habitations of the living so that they collapse and bury people under their ruins. The doctrines of religion are not a subject one can quibble about like any other. Our civilization is built up on them, and the maintenance of human society is based on the majority of men’s believing in the truth of those doctrines. If men are taught that there is no almighty and all-just God, no divine world-order and no future life, they will feel exempt from all obligation to obey the precepts of civilization. Everyone will, without inhibition or fear, follow his asocial, egoistic instincts and seek to exercise his power; Chaos, which we have banished through many thousands of years of the work of civilization, will come again. Even if we knew, and could prove, that religion was not in possession of the truth, we ought to conceal the fact and behave in the way prescribed by the philosophy of "As if" - and this in the interest of the preservation of us all. And apart from the danger of the undertaking, it would be a purposeless cruelty. Countless people find their one consolation in religious doctrines, and can only bear life with their help. You would rob them of their support, without having anything better to give them in exchange. It is admitted that so far science has not achieved much, but even if it had advanced much further it would not suffice for man. Man has imperative needs of another sort, which can never be satisfied by cold science; and it is very strange - indeed, it is the height of inconsistency - that a psychologist who has always insisted on what a minor part is played in human affairs by the intelligence as compared with the life of the instincts - that such a psychologist should now try to rob mankind of a precious wish-fulfilment and should propose to compensate them for it with intellectual nourishment.’

The Future Of An Illusion

4444

What a lot of accusations all at once! Nevertheless I am ready with rebuttals for them all; and, what is more, I shall assert the view that civilization runs a greater risk if we maintain our present attitude to religion than if we give it up.

But I hardly know where to begin my reply. Perhaps with the assurance that I myself regard my undertaking as completely harmless and free of risk. It is not I who am overvaluing the intellect this time. If people are as my opponents describe them - and I should not like to contradict them - then there is no danger of a devout believer’s being overcome by my arguments and deprived of his faith. Besides, I have said nothing which other and better men have not said before me in a much more complete, forcible and impressive manner. Their names are well known, and I shall not cite them, for I should not like to give an impression that I am seeking to rank myself as one of them. All I have done - and this is the only thing that is new in my exposition - is to add some psychological foundation to the criticisms of my great predecessors. It is hardly to be expected that precisely this addition will produce the effect which was denied to those earlier efforts. No doubt I might be asked here what is the point of writing these things if I am certain that they will be ineffective. But I shall come back to that later.

The Future Of An Illusion

4445

The one person this publication may injure is myself. I shall have to listen to the most disagreeable reproaches for my shallowness, narrow-mindedness and lack of idealism or of understanding for the highest interests of mankind. But on the one hand, such remonstrances are not new to me; and on the other, if a man has already learnt in his youth to rise superior to the disapproval of his contemporaries, what can it matter to him in his old age when he is certain soon to be beyond the reach of all favour or disfavour? In former times it was different. Then utterances such as mine brought with them a sure curtailment of one’s earthly existence and an effective speeding-up of the opportunity for gaining a personal experience of the after-life. But, I repeat, those times are past and to-day writings such as this bring no more danger to their author than to their readers. The most that can happen is that the translation and distribution of his book will be forbidden in one country or another - and precisely, of course, in a country that is convinced of the high standard of its culture. But if one puts in any plea at all for the renunciation of wishes and for acquiescence in Fate, one must be able to tolerate this kind of injury too.

The further question occurred to me whether the publication of this work might not after all do harm. Not to a person, however, but to a cause - the cause of psycho-analysis. For it cannot be denied that psycho-analysis is my creation, and it has met with plenty of mistrust and ill-will. If I now come forward with such displeasing pronouncements, people will be only too ready to make a displacement from my person to psycho-analysis. ‘Now we see,’ they will say, ‘where psycho-analysis leads to. The mask has fallen; it leads to a denial of God and of a moral ideal, as we always suspected. To keep us from this discovery we have been deluded into thinking that psycho-analysis has no Weltanschauung and never can construct one.’

An outcry of this kind will really be disagreeable to me on account of my many fellow-workers, some of whom do not by any means share my attitude to the problems of religion. But psycho-analysis has already weathered many storms and now it must brave this fresh one. In point of fact psycho-analysis is a method of research, an impartial instrument, like the infinitesimal calculus, as it were. If a physicist were to discover with the latter’s help that after a certain time the earth would be destroyed, we would nevertheless hesitate to attribute destructive tendencies to the calculus itself and therefore to proscribe it. Nothing that I have said here against the truth-value of religions needed the support of psycho-analysis; it had been said by others long before analysis came into existence. If the application of the psycho-analytic method makes it possible to find a new argument against the truths of religion, tant pis for religion; but defenders of religion will by the same right make use of psycho-analysis in order to give full value to the affective significance of religious doctrines.

The Future Of An Illusion

4446

And now to proceed with our defence. Religion has clearly performed great services for human civilization. It has contributed much towards the taming of the asocial instincts. But not enough. It has ruled human society for many thousands of years and has had time to show what it can achieve. If it had succeeded in making the majority of mankind happy, in comforting them, in reconciling them to life and in making them into vehicles of civilization, no one would dream of attempting to alter the existing conditions. But what do we see instead? We see that an appallingly large number of people are dissatisfied with civilization and unhappy in it, and feel it as a yoke which must be shaken of; and that these people either do everything in their power to change that civilization, or else go so far in their hostility to it that they will have nothing to do with civilization or with a restriction of instinct. At this point it will be objected against us that this state of affairs is due to the very fact that religion has lost a part of its influence over human masses precisely because of the deplorable effect of the advances of science. We will note this admission and the reason given for it, and we shall make use of it later for our own purposes; but the objection itself has no force.

It is doubtful whether men were in general happier at a time when religious doctrines held unrestricted sway; more moral they certainly were not. They have always known how to externalize the precepts of religion and thus to nullify their intentions. The priests, whose duty it was to ensure obedience to religion, met them half-way in this. God’s kindness must lay a restraining hand on His justice. One sinned, and then one made a sacrifice or did penance and then one was free to sin once more. Russian introspectiveness has reached the pitch of concluding that sin is indispensable for the enjoyment of all the blessings of divine grace, so that, at bottom, sin is pleasing to God. It is no secret that the priests could only keep the masses submissive to religion by making such large concessions as these to the instinctual nature of man. Thus it was agreed: God alone is strong and good, man is weak and sinful. In every age immorality has found no less support in religion than morality has. If the achievements of religion in respect to man’s happiness, susceptibility to culture and moral control are no better than this, the question cannot but arise whether we are not overrating its necessity for mankind, and whether we do wisely in basing our cultural demands upon it.

The Future Of An Illusion

4447

Let us consider the unmistakable situation as it is to-day. We have heard the admission that religion no longer has the same influence on people that it used to. (We are here concerned with European Christian civilization.) And this is not because its promises have grown less but because people find them less credible. Let us admit that the reason - though perhaps not the only reason - for this change is the increase of the scientific spirit in the higher strata of human society. Criticism has whittled away the evidential value of religious documents, natural science has shown up the errors in them, and comparative research has been struck by the fatal resemblance between the religious ideas which we revere and the mental products of primitive peoples and times.

The scientific spirit brings about a particular attitude towards worldly matters; before religious matters it pauses for a little, hesitates, and finally there too crosses the threshold. In this process there is no stopping; the greater the number of men to whom the treasures of knowledge become accessible, the more widespread is the falling-away from religious belief - at first only from its obsolete and objectionable trappings, but later from its fundamental postulates as well. The Americans who instituted the ‘monkey trial’ at Dayton have alone shown themselves consistent. Elsewhere the inevitable transition is accomplished by way of half-measures and insincerities.

The Future Of An Illusion

4448

Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers. In them the replacement of religious motives for civilized behaviour by other, secular motives would proceed unobtrusively; moreover, such people are to a large extent themselves vehicles of civilization. But it is another matter with the great mass of the uneducated and oppressed, who have every reason for being enemies of civilization. So long as they do not discover that people no longer believe in God, all is well. But they will discover it, infallibly, even if this piece of writing of mine is not published. And they are ready to accept the results of scientific thinking, but without the change having taken place in them which scientific thinking brings about in people. Is there not a danger here that the hostility of these masses to civilization will throw itself against the weak spot that they have found in their task-mistress? If the sole reason why you must not kill your neighbour is because God has forbidden it and will severely punish you for it in this or the next life then, when you learn that there is no God and that you need not fear His punishment, you will certainly kill your neighbour without hesitation, and you can only be prevented from doing so by mundane force. Thus either these dangerous masses must be held down most severely and kept most carefully away from any chance of intellectual awakening, or else the relationship between civilization and religion must undergo a fundamental revision.

The Future Of An Illusion

4449

VIII

One might think that there would be no special difficulties in the way of carrying out this latter proposal. It is true that it would involve a certain amount of renunciation, but more would perhaps be gained than lost, and a great danger would be avoided. Everyone is frightened of it, however, as though it would expose civilization to a still greater danger. When St. Boniface cut down the tree that was venerated as sacred by the Saxons the bystanders expected some fearful event to follow upon the sacrilege. But nothing happened, and the Saxons accepted baptism.

When civilization laid down the commandment that a man shall not kill the neighbour whom he hates or who is in his way or whose property he covets, this was clearly done in the interest of man’s communal existence, which would not otherwise be practicable. For the murderer would draw down on himself the vengeance of the murdered man’s kinsmen and the secret envy of others, who within themselves feel as much inclined as he does for such acts of violence. Thus he would not enjoy his revenge or his robbery for long, but would have every prospect of soon being killed himself. Even if he protected himself against his single foes by extraordinary strength and caution, he would be bound to succumb to a combination of weaker men. If a combination of this sort did not take place, the murdering would continue endlessly and the final outcome would be that men would exterminate one another. We should arrive at the same state of affairs between individuals as still persists in Corsica between families, though elsewhere only between nations. Insecurity of life, which is an equal danger for everyone, now unites men into a society which prohibits the individual from killing and reserves to itself the right to communal killing of anyone who violates the prohibition. Here, then, we have justice and punishment.

The Future Of An Illusion

4450

But we do not publish this rational explanation of the prohibition against murder. We assert that the prohibition has been issued by God. Thus we take it upon ourselves to guess His intentions, and we find that He, too, is unwilling for men to exterminate one another. In behaving in this way we are investing the cultural prohibition with a quite special solemnity, but at the same time we risk making its observance dependent on belief in God. If we retrace this step - if we no longer attribute to God what is our own will and if we content ourselves with giving the social reason - then, it is true, we have renounced the transfiguration of the cultural prohibition, but we have also avoided the risk to it. But we gain something else as well. Through some kind of diffusion or infection, the character of sanctity and inviolability - of belonging to another world, one might say - has spread from a few major prohibitions on to every other cultural regulation, law and ordinance. But on these the halo often looks far from becoming: not only do they invalidate one another by giving contrary decisions at different times and places, but apart from this they show every sign of human inadequacy. It is easy to recognize in them things that can only be the product of short-sighted apprehensiveness or an expression of selfishly narrow interests or a conclusion based on insufficient premisses. The criticism which we cannot fail to level at them also diminishes to an unwelcome extent our respect for other, more justifiable cultural demands. Since it is an awkward task to separate what God Himself has demanded from what can be traced to the authority of an all-powerful parliament or a high judiciary, it would be an undoubted advantage if we were to leave God out altogether and honestly admit the purely human origin of all the regulations and precepts of civilization. Along with their pretended sanctity, these commandments and laws would lose their rigidity and unchangeableness as well. People could understand that they are made, not so much to rule them as, on the contrary, to serve their interests; and they would adopt a more friendly attitude to them, and instead of aiming at their abolition, would aim only at their improvement. This would be an important advance along the road which leads to becoming reconciled to the burden of civilization.

The Future Of An Illusion

4451

But here our plea for ascribing purely rational reasons to the precepts of civilization - that is to say, for deriving them from social necessity - is interrupted by a sudden doubt. We have chosen as our example the origin of the prohibition against murder. But does our account of it tally with historical truth? We fear not; it appears to be nothing but a rationalistic construction. With the help of psycho-analysis, we have made a study of precisely this piece of the cultural history of mankind, and, basing ourselves on it, we are bound to say that in reality things happened otherwise. Even in present-day man purely reasonable motives can effect little against passionate impulsions. How much weaker then must they have been in the human animal of primaeval times! Perhaps his descendants would even now kill one another without inhibition, if it were not that among those murderous acts there was one - the killing of the primitive father - which evoked an irresistible emotional reaction with momentous consequences. From it arose the commandment: Thou shalt not kill. Under totemism this commandment was restricted to the father-substitute; but it was later extended to other people, though even to-day it is not universally obeyed.

But, as was shown by arguments which I need not repeat here, the primal father was the original image of God, the model on which later generations have shaped the figure of God. Hence the religious explanation is right, God actually played a part in the genesis of that prohibition; it was His influence, not any insight into social necessity, which created it. And the displacement of man’s will on to God is fully justified. For men knew that they had disposed of their father by violence, and in their reaction to that impious deed, they determined to respect his will thenceforward. Thus religious doctrine tells us the historical truth - though subject, it is true, to some modification and disguise - whereas our rational account disavows it.

The Future Of An Illusion

4452

We now observe that the store of religious ideas includes not only wish-fulfilments but important historical recollections. This concurrent influence of past and present must give religion a truly incomparable wealth of power. But perhaps with the help of an analogy yet another discovery may begin to dawn on us. Though it is not a good plan to transplant ideas far from the soil in which they grew up, yet here is a conformity which we cannot avoid pointing out. We know that a human child cannot successfully complete its development to the civilized stage without passing through a phase of neurosis sometimes of greater and sometimes of less distinctness. This is because so many instinctual demands which will later be unserviceable cannot be suppressed by the rational operation of the child’s intellect but have to be tamed by acts of repression, behind which, as a rule, lies the motive of anxiety. Most of these infantile neuroses are overcome spontaneously in the course of growing up, and this is especially true of the obsessional neuroses of childhood. The remainder can be cleared up later still by psycho-analytic treatment. In just the same way, one might assume, humanity as a whole, in its development through the ages, fell into states analogous to the neuroses, and for the same reasons - namely because in the times of its ignorance and intellectual weakness the instinctual renunciations indispensable for man’s communal existence had only been achieved by it by means of purely affective forces. The precipitates of these processes resembling repression which took place in prehistoric times still remained attached to civilization for long periods. Religion would thus be the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity; like the obsessional neurosis of children, it arose out of the Oedipus complex, out of the relation to the father. If this view is right, it is to be supposed that a turning-away from religion is bound to occur with the fatal inevitability of a process of growth, and that we find ourselves at this very juncture in the middle of that phase of development. Our behaviour should therefore be modelled on that of a sensible teacher who does not oppose an impending new development but seeks to ease its path and mitigate the violence of its irruption. Our analogy does not, to be sure, exhaust the essential nature of religion. If, on the one hand, religion brings with it obsessional restrictions, exactly as an individual obsessional neurosis does, on the other hand it comprises a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find in an isolated form nowhere else but in amentia, in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. But these are only analogies, by the help of which we endeavour to understand a social phenomenon; the pathology of the individual does not supply us with a fully valid counterpart.

The Future Of An Illusion

4453

It has been repeatedly pointed out (by myself and in particular by Theodor Reik) in how great detail the analogy between religion and obsessional neurosis can be followed out, and how many of the peculiarities and vicissitudes in the formation of religion can be understood in that light. And it tallies well with this that devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.

Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect. We may foresee, but hardly regret, that such a process of remoulding will not stop at renouncing the solemn transfiguration of cultural precepts, but that a general revision of them will result in many of them being done away with. In this way our appointed task of reconciling men to civilization will to a great extent be achieved. We need not deplore the renunciation of historical truth when we put forward rational grounds for the precepts of civilization. The truths contained in religious doctrines are after all so distorted and systematically disguised that the mass of humanity cannot recognize them as truth. The case is similar to what happens when we tell a child that new-born babies are brought by the stork. Here, too, we are telling the truth in symbolic clothing, for we know what the large bird signifies. But the child does not know it. He hears only the distorted part of what we say, and feels that he has been deceived; and we know how often his distrust of the grown-ups and his refractoriness actually take their start from this impression. We have become convinced that it is better to avoid such symbolic disguisings of the truth in what we tell children and not to withhold from them a knowledge of the true state of affairs commensurate with their intellectual level.

The Future Of An Illusion

4454

IX

‘You permit yourself contradictions which are hard to reconcile with one another. You begin by saying that a piece of writing like yours is quite harmless: no one will let himself be robbed of his faith by considerations of the sort put forward in it. But since it is nevertheless your intention, as becomes evident later on, to upset that faith, we may ask why in fact you are publishing your work? In another passage, moreover, you admit that it may be dangerous, indeed very dangerous, for someone to discover that people no longer believe in God. Hitherto he has been docile, but now he throws off his obedience to the precepts of civilization. Yet your whole contention that basing the commandments of civilization on religious grounds constitutes a danger for civilization rests on the assumption that the believer can be turned into an unbeliever. Surely that is a complete contradiction.

‘And here is another. On the one hand you admit that men cannot be guided through their intelligence, they are ruled by their passions and their instinctual demands. But on the other hand you propose to replace the affective basis of their obedience to civilization by a rational one. Let who can understand this. To me it seems that it must be either one thing or the other.

‘Besides, have you learned nothing from history? Once before an attempt of this kind was made to substitute reason for religion, officially and in the grand manner. Surely you remember the French Revolution and Robespierre? And you must also remember how short-lived and miserably ineffectual the experiment was? The same experiment is being repeated in Russia at the present time, and we need not feel curious as to its outcome. Do you not think we may take it for granted that men cannot do without religion?

‘You have said yourself that religion is more than an obsessional neurosis. But you have not dealt with this other side of it. You are content to work out the analogy with a neurosis. Men, you say, must be freed from a neurosis. What else may be lost in the process is of no concern to you.’

The Future Of An Illusion

4455

The appearance of contradiction has probably come about because I have dealt with complicated matters too hurriedly. But we can remedy this to some extent. I still maintain that what I have written is quite harmless in one respect. No believer will let himself be led astray from his faith by these or any similar arguments. A believer is bound to the teachings of religion by certain ties of affection. But there are undoubtedly countless other people who are not in the same sense believers. They obey the precepts of civilization because they let themselves be intimidated by the threats of religion, and they are afraid of religion so long as they have to consider it as a part of the reality which hems them in. They are the people who break away as soon as they are allowed to give up their belief in the reality-value of religion. But they too are unaffected by arguments. They cease to fear religion when they observe that others do not fear it; and it was of them that I asserted that they would get to know about the decline of religious influence even if I did not publish my work.

But I think you yourself attach more weight to the other contradiction which you charge me with. Since men are so little accessible to reasonable arguments and are so entirely governed by their instinctual wishes, why should one set out to deprive them of an instinctual satisfaction and replace it by reasonable arguments? It is true that men are like this; but have you asked yourself whether they must be like this, whether their innermost nature necessitates it? Can an anthropologist give the cranial index of a people whose custom it is to deform their children’s heads by bandaging them round from their earliest years? Think of the depressing contrast between the radiant intelligence of a healthy child and the feeble intellectual powers of the average adult. Can we be quite certain that it is not precisely religious education which bears a large share of the blame for this relative atrophy? I think it would be a very long time before a child who was not influenced began to trouble himself about God and things in another world. Perhaps his thoughts on these matters would then take the same paths as they did with his forefathers. But we do not wait for such a development; we introduce him to the doctrines of religion at an age when he is neither interested in them nor capable of grasping their import. Is it not true that the two main points in the programme for the education of children to-day are retardation of sexual development and premature religious influence? Thus by the time the child’s intellect awakens, the doctrines of religion have already become unassailable. But are you of opinion that it is very conducive to the strengthening of the intellectual function that so important a field should be closed against it by the threat of Hell-fire? When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly surprised at the weakness of his intellect. But we have no other means of controlling our instinctual nature but our intelligence. How can we expect people who are under the dominance of prohibitions of thought to attain the psychological ideal, the primacy of the intelligence? You know, too, that women in general are said to suffer from ‘physiological feeble-mindedness’ - that is, from a lesser intelligence than men. The fact itself is disputable and its interpretation doubtful, but one argument in favour of this intellectual atrophy being of a secondary nature is that women labour under the harshness of an early prohibition against turning their thoughts to what would most have interested them - namely, the problems of sexual life. So long as a person’s early years are influenced not only by a sexual inhibition of thought but also by a religious inhibition and by a loyal inhibition derived from this, we cannot really tell what in fact he is like.

The Future Of An Illusion

4456

But I will moderate my zeal and admit the possibility that I, too, am chasing an illusion. Perhaps the effect of the religious prohibition of thought may not be so bad as I suppose; perhaps it will turn out that human nature remains the same even if education is not abused in order to subject people to religion. I do not know and you cannot know either. It is not only the great problems of this life that seem insoluble at the present time; many lesser questions too are difficult to answer. But you must admit that here we are justified in having a hope for the future - that perhaps there is a treasure to be dug up capable of enriching civilization and that it is worth making the experiment of an irreligious education. Should the experiment prove unsatisfactory I am ready to give up the reform and to return to my earlier, purely descriptive judgement that man is a creature of weak intelligence who is ruled by his instinctual wishes.

On another point I agree with you unreservedly. It is certainly senseless to begin by trying to do away with religion by force and at a single blow. Above all, because it would be hopeless. The believer will not let his belief be torn from him, either by arguments or by prohibitions. And even if this did succeed with some it would be cruelty. A man who has been taking sleeping draughts for tens of years is naturally unable to sleep if his sleeping draught is taken away from him. That the effect of religious consolations may be likened to that of a narcotic is well illustrated by what is happening in America. There they are now trying - obviously under the influence of petticoat government - to deprive people of all stimulants, intoxicants, and other pleasure-producing substances, and instead, by way of compensation, are surfeiting them with piety. This is another experiment as to whose outcome we need not feel curious.

Thus I must contradict you when you go on to argue that men are completely unable to do without the consolation of the religious illusion, that without it they could not bear the troubles of life and the cruelties of reality. That is true, certainly, of the men into whom you have instilled the sweet - or bitter-sweet - poison from childhood onwards. But what of the other men, who have been sensibly brought up? Perhaps those who do not suffer from the neurosis will need no intoxicant to deaden it. They will, it is true, find themselves in a difficult situation. They will have to admit to themselves the full extent of their helplessness and their insignificance in the machinery of the universe; they can no longer be the centre of creation, no longer the object of tender care on the part of a beneficent Providence. They will be in the same position as a child who has left the parental house where he was so warm and comfortable. But surely infantilism is destined to be surmounted. Men cannot remain children for ever; they must in the end go out into ‘hostile life’. We may call this ‘education to reality’. Need I confess to you that the sole purpose of my book is to point out the necessity for this forward step?

The Future Of An Illusion

4457

You are afraid, probably, that they will not stand up to the hard test? Well, let us at least hope they will. It is something, at any rate, to know that one is thrown upon one’s own resources. One learns then to make a proper use of them. And men are not entirely without assistance. Their scientific knowledge has taught them much since the days of the Deluge, and it will increase their power still further. And, as for the great necessities of Fate, against which there is no help, they will learn to endure them with resignation. Of what use to them is the mirage of wide acres in the moon, whose harvest no one has ever yet seen? As honest smallholders on this earth they will know how to cultivate their plot in such a way that it supports them. By withdrawing their expectations from the other world and concentrating all their liberated energies into their life on earth, they will probably succeed in achieving a state of things in which life will become tolerable for everyone and civilization no longer oppressive to anyone. Then, with one of our fellow-unbelievers, they will be able to say without regret:

Den Himmel überlassen wir

Den Engeln und den Spatzen.

The Future Of An Illusion

4458

X

That sounds splendid! A race of men who have renounced all illusions and have thus become capable of making their existence on earth tolerable! I, however, cannot share your expectations. And that is not because I am the obstinate reactionary you perhaps take me for. No, it is because I am sensible. We seem now to have exchanged roles: you emerge as an enthusiast who allows himself to be carried away by illusions, and I stand for the claims of reason, the rights of scepticism. What you have been expounding seems to me to be built upon errors which, following your example, I may call illusions, because they betray clearly enough the influence of your wishes. You pin your hope on the possibility that generations which have not experienced the influence of religious doctrines in early childhood will easily attain the desired primacy of the intelligence over the life of the instincts. This is surely an illusion: in this decisive respect human nature is hardly likely to change. If I am not mistaken - one knows so little about other civilizations - there are even to-day peoples which do not grow up under the pressure of a religious system, and yet they approach no nearer to your ideal than the rest. If you want to expel religion from our European civilization, you can only do it by means of another system of doctrines; and such a system would from the outset take over all the psychological characteristics of religion - the same sanctity, rigidity and intolerance, the same prohibition of thought - for its own defence. You have to have something of the kind in order to meet the requirements of education. And you cannot do without education. The path from the infant at the breast to the civilized man is a long one; too many human young would go astray on it and fail to reach their life-tasks at the proper time if they were left without guidance to their own development. The doctrines which had been applied in their upbringing would always set limits to the thinking of their riper years - which is exactly what you reproach religion with doing to-day. Do you not observe that it is an ineradicable and innate defect of our and every other civilization, that it imposes on children, who are driven by instinct and weak in intellect, the making of decisions which only the mature intelligence of adults can vindicate? But civilization cannot do otherwise, because of the fact that mankind’s age-long development is compressed into a few years of childhood; and it is only by emotional forces that the child can be induced to master the task set before it. Such, then, are the prospects for your "primacy of the intellect".

The Future Of An Illusion

4459

‘And now you must not be surprised if I plead on behalf of retaining the religious doctrinal system as the basis of education and of man’s communal life. This is a practical problem, not a question of reality-value. Since, for the sake of preserving our civilization, we cannot postpone influencing the individual until he has become ripe for civilization (and many would never become so in any case), since we are obliged to impose on the growing child some doctrinal system which shall operate in him as an axiom that admits of no criticism, it seems to me that the religious system is by far the most suitable for the purpose. And it is so, of course, precisely on account of its wish-fulfilling and consolatory power, by which you claim to recognize it as an "illusion". In view of the difficulty of discovering anything about reality - indeed, of the doubt whether it is possible for us to do so at all - we must not overlook the fact that human needs, too, are a piece of reality, and, in fact, an important piece and one that concerns us especially closely.

‘Another advantage of religious doctrine resides, to my mind, in one of its characteristics to which you seem to take particular exception. For it allows of a refinement and sublimation of ideas, which make it possible for it to be divested of most of the traces which it bears of primitive and infantile thinking. What then remains is a body of ideas which science no longer contradicts and is unable to disprove. These modifications of religious doctrine, which you have condemned as half-measures and compromises, make it possible to avoid the cleft between the uneducated masses and the philosophic thinker, and to preserve the common bond between them which is so important for the safeguarding of civilization. With this, there would be no need to fear that the men of the people would discover that the upper strata of society "no longer believe in God". I think I have now shown that your endeavours come down to an attempt to replace a proved and emotionally valuable illusion by another one, which is unproved and without emotional value.’

You will not find me inaccessible to your criticism. I know how difficult it is to avoid illusions; perhaps the hopes I have confessed to are of an illusory nature, too. But I hold fast to one distinction. Apart from the fact that no penalty is imposed for not sharing them, my illusions are not, like religious ones, incapable of correction. They have not the character of a delusion. If experience should show - not to me, but to others after me, who think as I do - that we have been mistaken, we will give up our expectations. Take my attempt for what it is. A psychologist who does not deceive himself about the difficulty of finding one’s bearings in this world, makes an endeavour to assess the development of man, in the light of the small portion of knowledge he has gained through a study of the mental processes of individuals during their development from child to adult. In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis. These discoveries derived from individual psychology may be insufficient, their application to the human race unjustified, and his optimism unfounded. I grant you all these uncertainties. But often one cannot refrain from saying what one thinks, and one excuses oneself on the ground that one is not giving it out for more than it is worth.

The Future Of An Illusion

4460

And there are two points that I must dwell on a little longer. Firstly, the weakness of my position does not imply any strengthening of yours. I think you are defending a lost cause. We may insist as often as we like that man’s intellect is powerless in comparison with his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about this weakness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points on which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind, but it is in itself a point of no small importance. And from it one can derive yet other hopes. The primacy of the intellect lies, it is true, in a distant, distant future, but probably not in an infinitely distant one. It will presumably set itself the same aims as those whose realization you expect from your God (of course within human limits - so far as external reality, Anagch, allows it), namely the love of man and the decrease of suffering. This being so, we may tell ourselves that our antagonism is only a temporary one and not irreconcilable. We desire the same things, but you are more impatient, more exacting, and - why should I not say it? - more self-seeking than I and those on my side. You would have the state of bliss begin directly after death; you expect the impossible from it and you will not surrender the claims of the individual. Our God, Lsgox,¹ will fulfil whichever of these wishes nature outside us allows, but he will do it very gradually, only in the unforeseeable future, and for a new generation of men. He promises no compensation for us, who suffer grievously from life. On the way to this distant goal your religious doctrines will have to be discarded, no matter whether the first attempts fail, or whether the first substitutes prove to be untenable. You know why: in the long run nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction which religion offers to both is all too palpable. Even purified religious ideas cannot escape this fate, so long as they try to preserve anything of the consolation of religion. No doubt if they confine themselves to a belief in a higher spiritual being, whose qualities are indefinable and whose purposes cannot be discerned, they will be proof against the challenge of science; but then they will also lose their hold on human interest.

And secondly: observe the difference between your attitude to illusions and mine. You have to defend the religious illusion with all your might. If it becomes discredited - and indeed the threat to it is great enough - then your world collapses. There is nothing left for you but to despair of everything, of civilization and the future of mankind. From that bondage I am, we are, free. Since we are prepared to renounce a good part of our infantile wishes, we can bear it if a few of our expectations turn out to be illusions.

¹ The twin gods Lsgox andAnagch of the Dutch writer Multatuli.

The Future Of An Illusion

4461

Education freed from the burden of religious doctrines will not, it may be, effect much change in men’s psychological nature. Our god Lsgox is perhaps not a very almighty one, and he may only be able to fulfil a small part of what his predecessors have promised. If we have to acknowledge this we shall accept it with resignation. We shall not on that account lose our interest in the world and in life, for we have one sure support which you lack. We believe that it is possible for scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the world, by means of which we can increase our power and in accordance with which we can arrange our life. If this belief is an illusion, then we are in the same position as you. But science has given us evidence by its numerous and important successes that it is no illusion. Science has many open enemies, and many more secret ones, among those who cannot forgive her for having weakened religious faith and for threatening to overthrow it. She is reproached for the smallness of the amount she has taught us and for the incomparably greater field she has left in obscurity. But, in this, people forget how young she is, how difficult her beginnings were and how infinitesimally small is the period of time since the human intellect has been strong enough for the tasks she sets. Are we not all at fault, in basing our judgements on periods of time that are too short? We should make the geologists our pattern. People complain of the unreliability of science - how she announces as a law to-day what the next generation recognizes as an error and replaces by a new law whose accepted validity lasts no longer. But this is unjust and in part untrue. The transformations of scientific opinion are developments, advances, not revolutions. A law which was held at first to be universally valid proves to be a special case of a more comprehensive uniformity, or is limited by another law, not discovered till later; a rough approximation to the truth is replaced by a more carefully adapted one, which in turn awaits further perfectioning. There are various fields where we have not yet surmounted a phase of research in which we make trial with hypotheses that soon have to be rejected as inadequate; but in other fields we already possess an assured and almost unalterable core of knowledge. Finally, an attempt has been made to discredit scientific endeavour in a radical way, on the ground that, being bound to the conditions of our own organization, it can yield nothing else than subjective results, whilst the real nature of things outside ourselves remains inaccessible. But this is to disregard several factors which are of decisive importance for the understanding of scientific work. In the first place, our organization - that is, our mental apparatus - has been developed precisely in the attempt to explore the external world, and it must therefore have realized in its structure some degree of expediency; in the second place, it is itself a constituent part of the world which we set out to investigate, and it readily admits of such an investigation; thirdly, the task of science is fully covered if we limit it to showing how the world must appear to us in consequence of the particular character of our organization; fourthly, the ultimate findings of science, precisely because of the way in which they are acquired, are determined not only by our organization but by the things which have affected that organization; finally, the problem of the nature of the world without regard to our percipient mental apparatus is an empty abstraction, devoid of practical interest.

No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.

4462

CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

(1930)

4463

Intentionally left blank

4464

CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

I

It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement - that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life. And yet, in making any general judgement of this sort, we are in danger of forgetting how variegated the human world and its mental life are. There are a few men from whom their contemporaries do not withhold admiration, although their greatness rests on attributes and achievements which are completely foreign to the aims and ideals of the multitude. One might easily be inclined to suppose that it is after all only a minority which appreciates these great men, while the large majority cares nothing for them. But things are probably not as simple as that, thanks to the discrepancies between people’s thoughts and their actions, and to the diversity of their wishful impulses.

One of these exceptional few calls himself my friend in his letters to me. I had sent him my small book that treats religion as an illusion, and he answered that he entirely agreed with my judgement upon religion, but that he was sorry I had not properly appreciated the true source of religious sentiments. This, he says, consists in a peculiar feeling, which he himself is never without, which he finds confirmed by many others, and which he may suppose is present in millions of people. It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded - as it were, ‘oceanic’. This feeling, he adds, is a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; it brings with it no assurance of personal immortality, but it is the source of the religious energy which is seized upon by the various Churches and religious systems, directed by them into particular channels, and doubtless also exhausted by them. One may, he thinks, rightly call oneself religious on the ground of this oceanic feeling alone, even if one rejects every belief and every illusion.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4465

The views expressed by the friend whom I so much honour, and who himself once praised the magic of illusion in a poem,¹ caused me no small difficulty. I cannot discover this ‘oceanic’ feeling in myself. It is not easy to deal scientifically with feelings. One can attempt to describe their physiological signs. Where this is not possible - and I am afraid that the oceanic feeling too will defy this kind of characterization - nothing remains but to fall back on the ideational content which is most readily associated with the feeling. If I have understood my friend rightly, he means the same thing by it as the consolation offered by an original and somewhat eccentric dramatist to his hero who is facing a self-inflicted death. ‘We cannot fall out of this world.’² That is to say, it is a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole. I may remark that to me this seems something rather in the nature of an intellectual perception, which is not, it is true, without an accompanying feeling-tone, but only such as would be present with any other act of thought of equal range. From my own experience I could not convince myself of the primary nature of such a feeling. But this gives me no right to deny that it does in fact occur in other people. The only question is whether it is being correctly interpreted and whether it ought to be regarded as the fons et origo of the whole need for religion.

¹ Liluli. Since the publication of his two books La vie de Ramakrishna and La vie de Vivekananda, I need no longer hide the fact that the friend spoken of in the text is Romain Rolland.

² Christian Dietrich Grabbe, Hannibal: ‘Ja, aus der Welt werden wir nicht fallen. Wir sind einmal darin.’

Civilization And Its Discontents

4466

I have nothing to suggest which could have a decisive influence on the solution of this problem. The idea of men’s receiving an intimation of their connection with the world around them through an immediate feeling which is from the outset directed to that purpose sounds so strange and fits in so badly with the fabric of our psychology that one is justified in attempting to discover a psycho-analytic - that is, a genetic - explanation of such a feeling. The following line of thought suggests itself. Normally, there is nothing of which we are more certain than the feeling of our self, of our own ego. This ego appears to us as something autonomous and unitary, marked off distinctly from everything else. That such an appearance is deceptive, and that on the contrary the ego is continued inwards, without any sharp delimitation, into an unconscious mental entity which we designate as the id and for which it serves as a kind of façade - this was a discovery first made by psycho-analytic research, which should still have much more to tell us about the relation of the ego to the id. But towards the outside, at any rate, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation. There is only one state - admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological - in which it does not do this. At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that ‘I’ and ‘you’ are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact. What can be temporarily done away with by a physiological function must also, of course, be liable to be disturbed by pathological processes. Pathology has made us acquainted with a great number of states in which the boundary lines between the ego and the external world become uncertain or in which they are actually drawn incorrectly. There are cases in which parts of a person’s own body, even portions of his own mental life - his perceptions, thoughts and feelings -, appear alien to him and as not belonging to his ego; there are other cases in which he ascribes to the external world things that clearly originate in his own ego and that ought to be acknowledged by it. Thus even the feeling of our own ego is subject to disturbances and the boundaries of the ego are not constant.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4467

Further reflection tells us that the adult’s ego-feeling cannot have been the same from the beginning. It must have gone through a process of development, which cannot, of course, be demonstrated but which admits of being constructed with a fair degree of probability.¹ An infant at the breast does not as yet distinguish his ego from the external world as the source of the sensations flowing in upon him. He gradually learns to do so, in response to various promptings. He must be very strongly impressed by the fact that some sources of excitation, which he will later recognize as his own bodily organs, can provide him with sensations at any moment, whereas other sources evade him from time to time - among them what he desires most of all, his mother’s breast - and only reappear as a result of his screaming for help. In this way there is for the first time set over against the ego an ‘object’, in the form of something which exists ‘outside’ and which is only forced to appear by a special action. A further incentive to a disengagement of the ego from the general mass of sensations - that is, to the recognition of an ‘outside’, an external world - is provided by the frequent, manifold and unavoidable sensations of pain and unpleasure the removal and avoidance of which is enjoined by the pleasure principle, in the exercise of its unrestricted domination. A tendency arises to separate from the ego everything that can become a source of such unpleasure, to throw it outside and to create a pure pleasure-ego which is confronted by a strange and threatening ‘outside’. The boundaries of this primitive pleasure-ego cannot escape rectification through experience. Some of the things that one is unwilling to give up, because they give pleasure, are nevertheless not ego but object; and some sufferings that one seeks to expel turn out to be inseparable from the ego in virtue of their internal origin. One comes to learn a procedure by which, through a deliberate direction of one’s sensory activities and through suitable muscular action, one can differentiate between what is internal - what belongs to the ego - and what is external - what emanates from the outer world. In this way one makes the first step towards the introduction of the reality principle which is to dominate future development. This differentiation, of course, serves the practical purpose of enabling one to defend oneself against sensations of unpleasure which one actually feels or with which one is threatened. In order to fend off certain unpleasurable excitations arising from within, the ego can use no other methods than those which it uses against unpleasure coming from without, and this is the starting-point of important pathological disturbances.

¹ Cf. the many writings on the topic of ego-development and ego-feeling, dating from Ferenczi’s paper on ‘Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality’ (1913) to Federn’s contributions of 1926, 1927 and later.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4468

In this way, then, the ego detaches itself from the external world. Or, to put it more correctly, originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive - indeed, an all-embracing - feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it. If we may assume that there are many people in whose mental life this primary ego-feeling has persisted to a greater or less degree, it would exist in them side by side with the narrower and more sharply demarcated ego-feeling of maturity, like a kind of counterpart to it. In that case, the ideational contents appropriate to it would be precisely those of limitlessness and of a bond with the universe - the same ideas with which my friend elucidated the ‘oceanic’ feeling.

But have we a right to assume the survival of something that was originally there, alongside of what was later derived from it? Undoubtedly. There is nothing strange in such a phenomenon, whether in the mental field or elsewhere. In the animal kingdom we hold to the view that the most highly developed species have proceeded from the lowest; and yet we find all the simple forms still in existence to-day. The race of the great saurians is extinct and has made way for the mammals; but a true representative of it, the crocodile, still lives among us. This analogy may be too remote, and it is also weakened by the circumstance that the lower species which survive are for the most part not the true ancestors of the present-day more highly developed species. As a rule the intermediate links have died out and are known to us only through reconstruction. In the realm of the mind, on the other hand, what is primitive is so commonly preserved alongside of the transformed version which has arisen from it that it is unnecessary to give instances as evidence. When this happens it is usually in consequence of a divergence in development: one portion (in the quantitative sense) of an attitude or instinctual impulse has remained unaltered, while another portion has undergone further development.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4469

This brings us to the more general problem of preservation in the sphere of the mind. The subject has hardly been studied yet; but it is so attractive and important that we may be allowed to turn our attention to it for a little, even though our excuse is insufficient. Since we overcame the error of supposing that the forgetting we are familiar with signified a destruction of the memory-trace - that is, its annihilation - we have been inclined to take the opposite view, that in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish - that everything is somehow preserved and that in suitable circumstances (when, for instance, regression goes back far enough) it can once more be brought to light. Let us try to grasp what this assumption involves by taking an analogy from another field. We will choose as an example the history of the Eternal City.¹ Historians tell us that the oldest Rome was the Roma Quadrata, a fenced settlement on the Palatine. Then followed the phase of the Septimontium, a federation of the settlements on the different hills; after that came the city bounded by the Servian wall; and later still, after all the transformations during the periods of the republic and the early Caesars, the city which the Emperor Aurelian surrounded with his walls. We will not follow the changes which the city went through any further, but we will ask ourselves how much a visitor, whom we will suppose to be equipped with the most complete historical and topographical knowledge, may still find left of these early stages in the Rome of to-day. Except for a few gaps, he will see the wall of Aurelian almost unchanged. In some places he will be able to find sections of the Servian wall where they have been excavated and brought to light. If he knows enough - more than present-day archaeology does - he may perhaps be able to trace out in the plan of the city the whole course of that wall and the outline of the Roma Quadrata. Of the buildings which once occupied this ancient area he will find nothing, or only scanty remains, for they exist no longer. The best information about Rome in the republican era would only enable him at the most to point out the sites where the temples and public buildings of that period stood. Their place is now taken by ruins, but not by ruins of themselves but of later restorations made after fires or destruction. It is hardly necessary to remark that all these remains of ancient Rome are found dovetailed into the jumble of a great metropolis which has grown up in the last few centuries since the Renaissance. There is certainly not a little that is ancient still buried in the soil of the city or beneath its modern buildings. This is the manner in which the past is preserved in historical sites like Rome.

¹ Based on The Cambridge Ancient History, 7 (1928): ‘The Founding of Rome’ by Hugh Last.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4470

Now let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past - an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one. This would mean that in Rome the palaces of the Caesars and the Septizonium of Septimius Severus would still be rising to their old height on the Palatine and that the castle of S. Angelo would still be carrying on its battlements the beautiful statues which graced it until the siege by the Goths, and so on. But more than this. In the place occupied by the Palazzo Caffarelli would once more stand - without the Palazzo having to be removed - the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; and this not only in its latest shape, as the Romans of the Empire saw it, but also in its earliest one, when it still showed Etruscan forms and was ornamented with terracotta antefixes. Where the Coliseum now stands we could at the same time admire Nero’s vanished Golden House. On the Piazza of the Pantheon we should find not only the Pantheon of to-day, as it was bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but, on the same site, the original edifice erected by Agrippa; indeed, the same piece of ground would be supporting the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the ancient temple over which it was built. And the observer would perhaps only have to change the direction of his glance or his position in order to call up the one view or the other.

There is clearly no point in spinning our phantasy any further, for it leads to things that are unimaginable and even absurd. If we want to represent historical sequence in spatial terms we can only do it by juxtaposition in space: the same space cannot have two different contents. Our attempt seems to be an idle game. It has only one justification. It shows us how far we are from mastering the characteristics of mental life by representing them in pictorial terms.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4471

There is one further objection which has to be considered. The question may be raised why we chose precisely the past of a city to compare with the past of the mind. The assumption that everything past is preserved holds good even in mental life only on condition that the organ of the mind has remained intact and that its tissues have not been damaged by trauma or inflammation. But destructive influences which can be compared to causes of illness like these are never lacking in the history of a city, even if it has had a less chequered past than Rome, and even if, like London, it has hardly ever suffered from the visitations of an enemy. Demolitions and replacement of buildings occur in the course of the most peaceful development of a city. A city is thus a priori unsuited for a comparison of this sort with a mental organism.

We bow to this objection; and, abandoning our attempt to draw a striking contrast, we will turn instead to what is after all a more closely related object of comparison - the body of an animal or a human being. But here, too, we find the same thing. The earlier phases of development are in no sense still preserved; they have been absorbed into the later phases for which they have supplied the material. The embryo cannot be discovered in the adult. The thymus gland of childhood is replaced after puberty by connective tissue, but is no longer present itself; in the marrow-bones of the grown man I can, it is true, trace the outline of the child’s bone, but it itself has disappeared, having lengthened and thickened until it has attained its definitive form. The fact remains that only in the mind is such a preservation of all the earlier stages alongside of the final form possible, and that we are not in a position to represent this phenomenon in pictorial terms.

Perhaps we are going too far in this. Perhaps we ought to content ourselves with asserting that what is past in mental life may be preserved and is not necessarily destroyed. It is always possible that even in the mind some of what is old is effaced or absorbed - whether in the normal course of things or as an exception - to such an extent that it cannot be restored or revivified by any means; or that preservation in general is dependent on certain favourable conditions. It is possible, but we know nothing about it. We can only hold fast to the fact that it is rather the rule than the exception for the past to be preserved in mental life.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4472

Thus we are perfectly willing to acknowledge that the ‘oceanic’ feeling exists in many people, and we are inclined to trace it back to an early phase of ego-feeling. The further question then arises, what claim this feeling has to be regarded as the source of religious needs.

To me the claim does not seem compelling. After all, a feeling can only be a source of energy if it is itself the expression of a strong need. The derivation of religious needs from the infant’s helplessness and the longing for the father aroused by it seems to me incontrovertible, especially since the feeling is not simply prolonged from childhood days, but is permanently sustained by fear of the superior power of Fate. I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection. Thus the part played by the oceanic feeling, which might seek something like the restoration of limitless narcissism, is ousted from a place in the foreground. The origin of the religious attitude can be traced back in clear outlines as far as the feeling of infantile helplessness. There may be something further behind that, but for the present it is wrapped in obscurity.

I can imagine that the oceanic feeling became connected with religion later on. The ‘oneness with the universe’ which constitutes its ideational content sounds like a first attempt at a religious consolation, as though it were another way of disclaiming the danger which the ego recognizes as threatening it from the external world. Let me admit once more that it is very difficult for me to work with these almost intangible quantities. Another friend of mine, whose insatiable craving for knowledge has led him to make the most unusual experiments and has ended by giving him encyclopaedic knowledge, has assured me that through the practices of Yoga, by withdrawing from the world, by fixing the attention on bodily functions and by peculiar methods of breathing, one can in fact evoke new sensations and coenaesthesias in oneself, which he regards as regressions to primordial states of mind which have long ago been overlaid. He sees in them a physiological basis, as it were, of much of the wisdom of mysticism. It would not be hard to find connections here with a number of obscure modifications of mental life, such as trances and ecstasies. But I am moved to exclaim in the words of Schiller’s diver:-

‘. . . Es freue sich.

Wer da atmet im rosigten Licht.’

Civilization And Its Discontents

4473

II

In my Future of an Illusion I was concerned much less with the deepest sources of the religious feeling than with what the common man understands by his religion - with the system of doctrines and promises which on the one hand explains to him the riddles of this world with enviable completeness, and, on the otter, assures him that a careful Providence will watch over his life and will compensate him in a future existence for any frustrations he suffers here. The common man cannot imagine this Providence otherwise than in the figure of an enormously exalted father. Only such a being can understand the needs of the children of men and be softened by their prayers and placated by the signs of their remorse. The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. It is still more humiliating to discover how large a number of people living to-day, who cannot but see that this religion is not tenable, nevertheless try to defend it piece by piece in a series of pitiful rearguard actions. One would like to mix among the ranks of the believers in order to meet these philosophers, who think they can rescue the God of religion by replacing him by an impersonal, shadowy and abstract principle, and to address them with the warning words: ‘Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in Vain!’ And if some of the great men of the past acted in the same way, no appeal can be made to their example: we know why they were obliged to.

Let us return to the common man and to his religion - the only religion which ought to bear that name. The first thing that we think of is the well-known saying of one of our great poets and thinkers concerning the relation of religion to art and science:

Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst besitzt, hat auch Religion;

Wer jene beide nicht besitzt, der habe Religion!

Civilization And Its Discontents

4474

This saying on the one hand draws an antithesis between religion and the two highest achievements of man, and on the other, asserts that, as regards their value in life, those achievements and religion can represent or replace each other. If we also set out to deprive the common man of his religion, we shall clearly not have the poet’s authority on our side. We will choose a particular path to bring us nearer an appreciation of his words. Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures. ‘We cannot do without auxiliary constructions’, as Theodor Fontane tells us. There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensitive to it. Something of the kind is indispensable.¹ Voltaire has deflections in mind when he ends Candide with the advice to cultivate one’s garden; and scientific activity is a deflection of this kind, too. The substitutive satisfactions, as offered by art, are illusions in contrast with reality, but they are none the less psychically effective, thanks to the role which phantasy has assumed in mental life. The intoxicating substances influence our body and alter its chemistry. It is no simple matter to see where religion has its place in this series. We must look further afield.

The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times; it has never yet received a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one. Some of those who have asked it have added that if it should turn out that life has no purpose, it would lose all value for them. But this threat alters nothing. It looks, on the contrary, as though one had a right to dismiss the question, for it seems to derive from the human presumptuousness, many other manifestations of which are already familiar to us. Nobody talks about the purpose of the life of animals, unless, perhaps, it may be supposed to lie in being of service to man. But this view is not tenable either, for there are many animals of which man can make nothing, except to describe, classify and study them; and innumerable species of animals have escaped even this use, since they existed and became extinct before man set eyes on them. Once again, only religion can answer the question of the purpose of life. One can hardly be wrong in concluding that the idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system.

¹ In Die Fromme Helene Wilhelm Busch has said the same thing on a lower plane: ‘Wer Sorgen hat, hat auch Likör.’

Civilization And Its Discontents

4475

We will therefore turn to the less ambitious question of what men themselves show by their behaviour to be the purpose and intention of their lives. What do they demand of life and wish to achieve in it? The answer to this can hardly be in doubt. They strive after happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so. This endeavour has two sides, a positive and a negative aim. It aims, on the one hand, at an absence of pain and unpleasure, and, on the other, at the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure. In its narrower sense the word ‘happiness’ only relates to the last. In conformity with this dichotomy in his aims, man’s activity develops in two directions, according as it seeks to realize - in the main, or even exclusively - the one or the other of these aims.

As we see, what decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle. This principle dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start. There can be no doubt about its efficacy, and yet its programme is at loggerheads with the whole world, with the macrocosm as much as with the microcosm. There is no possibility at all of its being carried through; all the regulations of the universe run counter to it. One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be ‘happy’ is not included in the plan of ‘Creation’. What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree, and it is from its nature only possible as an episodic phenomenon. When any situation that is desired by the pleasure principle is prolonged, it only produces a feeling of mild contentment. We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.¹ Thus our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other. We tend to regard it as a kind of gratuitous addition, although it cannot be any less fatefully inevitable than the suffering which comes from elsewhere.

¹ Goethe, indeed, warns us that ‘nothing is harder to bear than a succession of fair days.’ But this may be an exaggeration.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4476

It is no wonder if, under the pressure of these possibilities of suffering, men are accustomed to moderate their claims to happiness - just as the pleasure principle itself, indeed, under the influence of the external world, changed into the more modest reality principle -, if a man thinks himself happy merely to have escaped unhappiness or to have survived his suffering, and if in general the task of avoiding suffering pushes that of obtaining pleasure into the background. Reflection shows that the accomplishment of this task can be attempted along very different paths; and all these paths have been recommended by the various schools of worldly wisdom and put into practice by men. An unrestricted satisfaction of every need presents itself as the most enticing method of conducting one’s life, but it means putting enjoyment before caution, and soon brings its own punishment. The other methods, in which avoidance of unpleasure is the main purpose, are differentiated according to the source of unpleasure to which their attention is chiefly turned. Some of these methods are extreme and some moderate; some are one-sided and some attack the problem simultaneously at several points. Against the suffering which may come upon one from human relationships the readiest safeguard is voluntary isolation, keeping oneself aloof from other people. The happiness which can be achieved along this path is, as we see, the happiness of quietness. Against the dreaded external world one can only defend oneself by some kind of turning away from it, if one intends to solve the task by oneself. There is, indeed, another and better path: that of becoming a member of the human community, and, with the help of a technique guided by science, going over to the attack against nature and subjecting her to the human will. Then one is working with all for the good of all. But the most interesting methods of averting suffering are those which seem to influence our own organism. In the last analysis, all suffering is nothing else than sensation; it only exists in so far as we feel it, and we only feel it in consequence of certain ways in which our organism is regulated.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4477

The crudest, but also the most effective among these methods of influence is the chemical one - intoxication. I do not think that anyone completely understands its mechanism, but it is a fact that there are foreign substances which, when present in the blood or tissues, directly cause us pleasurable sensations; and they also so alter the conditions governing our sensibility that we become incapable of receiving unpleasurable impulses. The two effects not only occur simultaneously, but seem to be intimately bound up with each other. But there must be substances in the chemistry of our own bodies which have similar effects, for we know at least one pathological state, mania, in which a condition similar to intoxication arises without the administration of any intoxicating drug. Besides this, our normal mental life exhibits oscillations between a comparatively easy liberation of pleasure and a comparatively difficult one, parallel with which there goes a diminished or an increased receptivity to unpleasure. It is greatly to be regretted that this toxic side of mental processes has so far escaped scientific examination. The service rendered by intoxicating media in the struggle for happiness and in keeping misery at a distance is so highly prized as a benefit that individuals and peoples alike have given them an established place in the economics of their libido. We owe to such media not merely the immediate yield of pleasure, but also a greatly desired degree of independence from the external world. For one knows that, with the help of this ‘drowner of cares’ one can at any time withdraw from the pressure of reality and find refuge in a world of one’s own with better conditions of sensibility. As is well known, it is precisely this property of intoxicants which also determines their danger and their injuriousness. They are responsible, in certain circumstances, for the useless waste of a large quota of energy which might have been employed for the improvement of the human lot.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4478

The complicated structure of our mental apparatus admits, however, of a whole number of other influences. Just as a satisfaction of instinct spells happiness for us, so severe suffering is caused us if the external world lets us starve, if it refuses to sate our needs. One may therefore hope to be freed from a part of one’s sufferings by influencing the instinctual impulses. This type of defence against suffering is no longer brought to bear on the sensory apparatus; it seeks to master the internal sources of our needs. The extreme form of this is brought about by killing off the instincts, as is prescribed by the worldly wisdom of the East and practised by Yoga. If it succeeds, then the subject has, it is true, given up all other activities as well - he has sacrificed his life; and, by another path, he has once more only achieved the happiness of quietness. We follow the same path when our aims are less extreme and we merely attempt to control our instinctual life. In that case, the controlling elements are the higher psychical agencies, which have subjected themselves to the reality principle. Here the aim of satisfaction is not by any means relinquished; but a certain amount of protection against suffering is secured, in that non-satisfaction is not so painfully felt in the case of instincts kept in dependence as in the case of uninhibited ones. As against this, there is an undeniable diminution in the potentialities of enjoyment. The feeling of happiness derived from the satisfaction of a wild instinctual impulse untamed by the ego is incomparably more intense than that derived from sating an instinct that has been tamed. The irresistibility of perverse instincts, and perhaps the attraction in general of forbidden things, finds an economic explanation here.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4479

Another technique for fending off suffering is the employment of the displacements of libido which our mental apparatus permits of and through which its function gains so much in flexibility. The task here is that of shifting the instinctual aims in such a way that they cannot come up against frustration from the external world. In this, sublimation of the instincts lends its assistance. One gains the most if one can sufficiently heighten the yield of pleasure from the sources of psychical and intellectual work. When that is so, fate can do little against one. A satisfaction of this kind, such as an artist’s joy in creating, in giving his phantasies body, or a scientist’s in solving problems or discovering truths, has a special quality which we shall certainly one day be able to characterize in metapsychological terms. At present we can only say figuratively that such satisfactions seem ‘finer and higher’. But their intensity is mild as compared with that derived from the sating of crude and primary instinctual impulses; it does not convulse our physical being. And the weak point of this method is that it is not applicable generally: it is accessible to only a few people. It presupposes the possession of special dispositions and gifts which are far from being common to any practical degree. And even to the few who do possess them, this method cannot give complete protection from suffering. It creates no impenetrable armour against the arrows of fortune, and it habitually fails when the source of suffering is a person’s own body.¹

¹ When there is no special disposition in a person which imperatively prescribes what direction his interests in life shall take, the ordinary professional work that is open to everyone can play the part assigned to it by Voltaire’s wise advice. It is not possible, within the limits of a short survey, to discuss adequately the significance of work for the economics of the libido. No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community. The possibility it offers of displacing a large amount of libidinal components, whether narcissistic, aggressive or even erotic, on to professional work and on to the human relations connected with it lends it a value by no means second to what it enjoys as something indispensible to the preservation and justification of existence in society. Professional activity is a source of special satisfaction if it is a freely chosen one - if, that is to say, by means of sublimation, it makes possible the use of existing inclinations, of persisting or constitutionally reinforced instinctual impulses. And yet, as a path to happiness, work is not highly prized by men. They do not strive after it as they do after other possibilities of satisfaction. The great majority of people only work under the stress of necessity, and this natural human aversion to work raises most difficult social problems.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4480

While this procedure already clearly shows an intention of making oneself independent of the external world by seeking satisfaction in internal, psychical processes, the next procedure brings out those features yet more strongly. In it, the connection with reality is still further loosened; satisfaction is obtained from illusions, which are recognized as such without the discrepancy between them and reality being allowed to interfere with enjoyment. The region from which these illusions arise is the life of the imagination; at the time when the development of the sense of reality took place, this region was expressly exempted from the demands of reality-testing and was set apart for the purpose of fulfilling wishes which were difficult to carry out. At the head of these satisfactions through phantasy stands the enjoyment of works of art - an enjoyment which, by the agency of the artist, is made accessible even to those who are not themselves creative.¹ People who are receptive to the influence of art cannot set too high a value on it as a source of pleasure and consolation in life. Nevertheless the mild narcosis induced in us by art can do no more than bring about a transient withdrawal from the pressure of vital needs, and it is not strong enough to make us forget real misery.

Another procedure operates more energetically and more thoroughly. It regards reality as the sole enemy and as the source of all suffering, with which it is impossible to live, so that one must break off all relations with it if one is to be in any way happy. The hermit turns his back on the world and will have no truck with it. But one can do more than that; one can try to re-create the world, to build up in its stead another world in which its most unbearable features are eliminated and replaced by others that are in conformity with one’s own wishes. But whoever, in desperate defiance, sets out upon this path to happiness will as a rule attain nothing. Reality is too strong for him. He becomes a madman, who for the most part finds no one to help him in carrying through his delusion. It is asserted, however, that each one of us behaves in some one respect like a paranoic, corrects some aspect of the world which is unbearable to him by the construction of a wish and introduces this delusion into reality. A special importance attaches to the case in which this attempt to procure a certainty of happiness and a protection against suffering through a delusional remoulding of reality is made by a considerable number of people in common. The religions of mankind must be classed among the mass delusions of this kind. No one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such.

¹ Cf. ‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’ (1911b), and Lecture XXIII of my Introductory Lectures (1916-17).

Civilization And Its Discontents

4481

I do not think that I have made a complete enumeration of the methods by which men strive to gain happiness and keep suffering away and I know, too, that the material might have been differently arranged. One procedure I have not yet mentioned - not because I have forgotten it but because it will concern us later in another connection. And how could one possibly forget, of all others, this technique in the art of living? It is conspicuous for a most remarkable combination of characteristic features. It, too, aims of course at making the subject independent of Fate (as it is best to call it), and to that end it locates satisfaction in internal mental processes, making use, in so doing, of the displaceability of the libido of which we have already spoken. But it does not turn away from the external world; on the contrary, it clings to the objects belonging to that world and obtains happiness from an emotional relationship to them. Nor is it content to aim at an avoidance of unpleasure - a goal, as we might call it, of weary resignation; it passes this by without heed and holds fast to the original, passionate striving for a positive fulfilment of happiness. And perhaps it does in fact come nearer to this goal than any other method. I am, of course, speaking of the way of life which makes love the centre of everything, which looks for all satisfaction in loving and being loved. A psychical attitude of this sort comes naturally enough to all of us; one of the forms in which love manifests itself - sexual love - has given us our most intense experience of an overwhelming sensation of pleasure and has thus furnished us with a pattern for our search for happiness. What is more natural than that we should persist in looking for happiness along the path on which we first encountered it? The weak side of this technique of living is easy to see; otherwise no human being would have thought of abandoning this path to happiness for any other. It is that we are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love. But this does not dispose of the technique of living based on the value of love as a means to happiness. There is much more to be said about it.

We may go on from here to consider the interesting case in which happiness in life is predominantly sought in the enjoyment of beauty, wherever beauty presents itself to our senses and our judgement - the beauty of human forms and gestures, of natural objects and landscapes and of artistic and even scientific creations. This aesthetic attitude to the goal of life offers little protection against the threat of suffering, but it can compensate for a great deal. The enjoyment of beauty has a peculiar, mildly intoxicating quality of feeling. Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it. The science of aesthetics investigates the conditions under which things are felt as beautiful, but it has been unable to give any explanation of the nature and origin of beauty, and, as usually happens, lack of success is concealed beneath a flood of resounding and empty words. Psycho-analysis, unfortunately, has scarcely anything to say about beauty either. All that seems certain is its derivation from the field of sexual feeling. The love of beauty seems a perfect example of an impulse inhibited in its aim. ‘Beauty’ and ‘attraction’ are originally attributes of the sexual object. It is worth remarking that the genitals themselves, the sight of which is always exciting, are nevertheless hardly ever judged to be beautiful; the quality of beauty seems, instead, to attach to certain secondary sexual characters.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4482

In spite of the incompleteness, I will venture on a few remarks as a conclusion to our enquiry. The programme of becoming happy, which the pleasure principle imposes on us, cannot be fulfilled; yet we must not - indeed, we cannot - give up our efforts to bring it nearer to fulfilment by some means or other. Very different paths may be taken in that direction, and we may give priority either to the positive aspect of the aim, that of gaining pleasure, or to its negative one, that of avoiding unpleasure. By none of these paths can we attain all that we desire. Happiness, in the reduced sense in which we recognize it as possible, is a problem of the economics of the individual’s libido. There is no golden rule which applies to everyone: every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved. All kinds of different factors will operate to direct his choice. It is a question of how much real satisfaction he can expect to get from the external world, how far he is led to make himself independent of it, and, finally, how much strength he feels he has for altering the world to suit his wishes. In this, his psychical constitution will play a decisive part, irrespectively of the external circumstances. The man who is predominantly erotic will give first preference to his emotional relationships to other people; the narcissistic man, who inclines to be self-sufficient, will seek his main satisfactions in his internal mental processes; the man of action will never give up the external world on which he can try out his strength. As regards the second of these types, the nature of his talents and the amount of instinctual sublimation open to him will decide where he shall locate his interests. Any choice that is pushed to an extreme will be penalized by exposing the individual to the dangers which arise if a technique of living that has been chosen as an exclusive one should prove inadequate. Just as a cautious business-man avoids tying up all his capital in one concern, so, perhaps, worldly wisdom will advise us not to look for the whole of our satisfaction from a single aspiration. Its success is never certain, for that depends on the convergence of many factors, perhaps on none more than on the capacity of the psychical constitution to adapt its function to the environment and then to exploit that environment for a yield of pleasure. A person who is born with a specially unfavourable instinctual constitution, and who has not properly undergone the transformation and rearrangement of his libidinal components which is indispensable for later achievements, will find it hard to obtain happiness from his external situation, especially if he is faced with tasks of some difficulty. As a last technique of living, which will at least bring him substitutive satisfactions, he is offered that of a flight into neurotic illness - a flight which he usually accomplishes when he is still young. The man who sees his pursuit of happiness come to nothing in later years can still find consolation in the yield of pleasure of chronic intoxication; or he can embark on the desperate attempt at rebellion seen in a psychosis.¹

¹ I feel impelled to point out one at least of the gaps that have been left in the account given above. No discussion of the possibilities of human happiness should omit to take into consideration the relation between narcissism and object libido. We require to know what being essentially self-dependent signifies for the economics of the libido.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4483

Religion restricts this play of choice and adaptation, since it imposes equally on everyone its own path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner - which presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence. At this price, by forcibly fixing them in a state of psychical infantilism and by drawing them into a mass-delusion, religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis. But hardly anything more. There are, as we have said, many paths which may lead to such happiness as is attainable by men, but there is none which does so for certain. Even religion cannot keep its promise. If the believer finally sees himself obliged to speak of God’s ‘inscrutable decrees’, he is admitting that all that is left to him as a last possible consolation and source of pleasure in his suffering is an unconditional submission. And if he is prepared for that, he could probably have spared himself the détour he has made.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4484

III

Our enquiry concerning happiness has not so far taught us much that is not already common knowledge. And even if we proceed from it to the problem of why it is so hard for men to be happy, there seems no greater prospect of learning anything new. We have given the answer already by pointing to the three sources from which our suffering comes: the superior power of nature, the feebleness of our own bodies and the inadequacy of the regulations which adjust the mutual relation ships of human beings in the family, the state and society. In regard to the first two sources, our judgement cannot hesitate long. It forces us to acknowledge those sources of suffering and to submit to the inevitable. We shall never completely master nature; and our bodily organism, itself a part of that nature, will always remain a transient structure with a limited capacity for adaptation and achievement. This recognition does not have a paralysing effect. On the contrary, it points the direction for our activity. If we cannot remove all suffering, we can remove some, and we can mitigate some: the experience of many thousands of years has convinced us of that. As regards the third source, the social source of suffering, our attitude is a different one. We do not admit it at all; we cannot see why the regulations made by ourselves should not, on the contrary, be a protection and a benefit for every one of us. And yet, when we consider how unsuccessful we have been in precisely this field of prevention of suffering, a suspicion dawns on us that here, too, a piece of unconquerable nature may lie behind it - this time a piece of our own psychical constitution.

When we start considering this possibility, we come upon a contention which is so astonishing that we must dwell upon it. This contention holds that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions. I call this contention astonishing because, in whatever way we may define the concept of civilization, it is a certain fact that all the things with which we seek to protect ourselves against the threats that emanate from the sources of suffering are part of that very civilization.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4485

How has it happened that so many people have come to take up this strange attitude of hostility to civilization? I believe that the basis of it was a deep and long-standing dissatisfaction with the then existing state of civilization and that on that basis a condemnation of it was built up, occasioned by certain specific historical events. I think I know what the last and the last but one of those occasions were. I am not learned enough to trace the chain of them far back enough in the history of the human species; but a factor of this kind hostile to civilization must already have been at work in the victory of Christendom over the heathen religions. For it was very closely related to the low estimation put upon earthly life by the Christian doctrine. The last but one of these occasions was when the progress of voyages of discovery led to contact with primitive peoples and races. In consequence of insufficient observation and a mistaken view of their manners and customs, they appeared to Europeans to be leading a simple, happy life with few wants, a life such as was unattainable by their visitors with their superior civilization. Later experience has corrected some of those judgements. In many cases the observers had wrongly attributed to the absence of complicated cultural demands what was in fact due to the bounty of nature and the ease with which the major human needs were satisfied. The last occasion is especially familiar to us. It arose when people came to know about the mechanism of the neuroses, which threaten to undermine the modicum of happiness enjoyed by civilized men. It was discovered that a person becomes neurotic because he cannot tolerate the amount of frustration which society imposes on him in the service of its cultural ideals, and it was inferred from this that the abolition or reduction of those demands would result in a return to possibilities of happiness.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4486

There is also an added factor of disappointment. During the last few generations mankind has made an extraordinary advance in the natural sciences and in their technical application and has established his control over nature in a way never before imagined. The single steps of this advance are common knowledge and it is unnecessary to enumerate them. Men are proud of those achievements, and have a right to be. But they seem to have observed that this newly-won power over space and time, this subjugation of the forces of nature, which is the fulfilment of a longing that goes back thousands of years, has not increased the amount of pleasurable satisfaction which they may expect from life and has not made them feel happier. From the recognition of this fact we ought to be content to conclude that power over nature is not the only precondition of human happiness, just as it is not the only goal of cultural endeavour; we ought not to infer from it that technical progress is without value for the economics of our happiness. One would like to ask: is there, then, no positive gain in pleasure, no unequivocal increase in my feeling of happiness, if I can, as often as I please, hear the voice of a child of mine who is living hundreds of miles away or if I can learn in the shortest possible time after a friend has reached his destination that he has come through the long and difficult voyage unharmed? Does it mean nothing that medicine has succeeded in enormously reducing infant mortality and the danger of infection for women in childbirth, and, indeed, in considerably lengthening the average life of a civilized man? And there is a long list that might be Added to benefits of this kind which we owe to the much-despised era of scientific and technical advances. But here the voice of pessimistic criticism makes itself heard and warns us that most of these satisfactions follow the model of the ‘cheap enjoyment’ extolled in the anecdote - the enjoyment obtained by putting a bare leg from under the bedclothes on a cold winter night and drawing it in again. If there had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would never have left his native town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice; if travelling across the ocean by ship had not been introduced, my friend would not have embarked on his sea-voyage and I should not need a cable to relieve my anxiety about him. What is the use of reducing infantile mortality when it is precisely that reduction which imposes the greatest restraint on us in the begetting of children, so that, taken all round, we nevertheless rear no more children than in the days before the reign of hygiene, while at the same time we have created difficult conditions for our sexual life in marriage, and have probably worked against the beneficial effects of natural selection? And, finally, what good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?

Civilization And Its Discontents

4487

It seems certain that we do not feel comfortable in our present-day civilization, but it is very difficult to form an opinion whether and in what degree men of an earlier age felt happier and what part their cultural conditions played in the matter. We shall always tend to consider people’s distress objectively - that is, to place ourselves, with our own wants and sensibilities, in their conditions, and then to examine what occasions we should find in them for experiencing happiness or unhappiness. This method of looking at things, which seems objective because it ignores the variations in subjective sensibility, is, of course, the most subjective possible, since it puts one’s own mental states in the place of any others, unknown though they may be. Happiness, however, is something essentially subjective. No matter how much we may shrink with horror from certain situations - of a galley-slave in antiquity, of a peasant during the Thirty Years’ War, of a victim of the Holy Inquisition, of a Jew awaiting a pogrom - it is nevertheless impossible for us to feel our way into such people - to divine the changes which original obtuseness of mind, a gradual stupefying process, the cessation of expectations, and cruder or more refined methods of narcotization have produced upon their receptivity to sensations of pleasure and unpleasure. Moreover, in the case of the most extreme possibility of suffering, special mental protective devices are brought into operation. It seems to me unprofitable to pursue this aspect of the problem any further.

It is time for us to turn our attention to the nature of this civilization on whose value as a means to happiness doubts have been thrown. We shall not look for a formula in which to express that nature in a few words, until we have learned something by examining it. We shall therefore content ourselves with saying once more that the word ‘civilization’ describes the whole sum of the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors and which serve two purposes - namely to protect men against nature and to adjust their mutual relations.¹ In order to learn more, we will bring together the various features of civilization individually, as they are exhibited in human communities. In doing so, we shall have no hesitation in letting ourselves be guided by linguistic usage or, as it is also called, linguistic feeling, in the conviction that we shall thus be doing justice to inner discernments which still defy expression in abstract terms.

¹ See The Future of an Illusion (1927c).

Civilization And Its Discontents

4488

The first stage is easy. We recognize as cultural all activities and resources which are useful to men for making the earth serviceable to them, for protecting them against the violence of the forces of nature, and so on. As regards this side of civilization, there can be scarcely any doubt. If we go back far enough, we find that the first acts of civilization were the use of tools, the gaining of control over fire and the construction of dwellings. Among these, the control over fire stands out as a quite extraordinary and unexampled achievement,¹ while the others opened up paths which man has followed ever since, and the stimulus to which is easily guessed. With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning. Motor power places gigantic forces at his disposal, which, like his muscles, he can employ in any direction; thanks to ships and aircraft neither water nor air can hinder his movements; by means of spectacles he corrects defects in the lens of his own eye; by means of the telescope he sees into the far distance; and by means of the microscope he overcomes the limits of visibility set by the structure of his retina. In the photographic camera he has created an instrument which retains the fleeting visual impressions, just as a gramophone disc retains the equally fleeting auditory ones; both are at bottom materializations of the power he possesses of recollection, his memory. With the help of the telephone he can hear at distances which would be respected as unattainable even in a fairy tale. Writing was in its origin the voice of an absent person; and the dwelling-house was a substitute for the mother’s womb, the first lodging, for which in all likelihood man still longs, and in which he was safe and felt at ease.

¹ Psycho-analytic material, incomplete as it is and not susceptible to clear interpretation, nevertheless admits of a conjecture - a fantastic sounding one - about the origin of this human feat. It is as though primal man had the habit, when he came in contact with fire, or satisfying an infantile desire connected with it, by putting it out with a stream of his urine. The legends that we possess leave no doubt about the originally phallic view taken of tongues of flame as they shoot upwards. Putting out fire by micturating - a theme to which modern giants, Gulliver in Lilliput and Rabelais’ Gargantua, still hark back - was therefore a kind of sexual act with a male, an enjoyment of sexual potency in a homosexual competition. The first person to renounce this desire and spare the fire was able to carry it off with him and subdue it to his own use. By damping down the fire of his own sexual excitation, he had tamed the natural force of fire. This great cultural conquest was thus the reward for his renunciation of instinct. Further, it is as though woman had been appointed guardian of the fire which was held captive on the domestic hearth, because her anatomy made it impossible for her to yield to the temptation of this desire. It is remarkable, too, how regularly analytic experience testifies to the connection between ambition, fire and urethral erotism.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4489

These things that, by his science and technology, man has brought about on this earth, on which he first appeared as a feeble animal organism and on which each individual of his species must once more make its entry (‘oh inch of nature!’) as a helpless suckling - these things do not only sound like a fairy tale, they are an actual fulfilment of every - or of almost every - fairy-tale wish. All these assets he may lay claim to as his cultural acquisition. Long ago he formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. To these gods he attributed everything that seemed unattainable to his wishes, or that was forbidden to him. One may say, therefore, that these gods were cultural ideals. To-day he has come very close to the attainment of this ideal, he has almost become a god himself. Only, it is true, in the fashion in which ideals are usually attained according to the general judgement of humanity. Not completely; in some respects not at all, in others only half way. Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times. Nevertheless, he is entitled to console himself with the thought that this development will not come to an end precisely with the year 1930 A.D. Future ages will bring with them new and probably unimaginably great advances in this field of civilization and will increase man’s likeness to God still more. But in the interests of our investigations, we will not forget that present-day man does not feel happy in his Godlike character.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4490

We recognize, then, that countries have attained a high level of civilization if we find that in them everything which can assist in the exploitation of the earth by man and in his protection against the forces of nature - everything, in short, which is of use to him - is attended to and effectively carried out. In such countries rivers which threaten to flood the land are regulated in their flow, and their water is directed through canals to places where there is a shortage of it. The soil is carefully cultivated and planted with the vegetation which it is suited to support; and the mineral wealth below ground is assiduously brought to the surface and fashioned into the required implements and utensils. The means of communication are ample, rapid and reliable. Wild and dangerous animals have been exterminated, and the breeding of domesticated animals flourishes. But we demand other things from civilization besides these, and it is a noticeable fact that we hope to find them realized in these same countries. As though we were seeking to repudiate the first demand we made, we welcome it as a sign of civilization as well if we see people directing their care too to what has no practical value whatever, to what is useless - if, for instance, the green spaces necessary in a town as playgrounds and as reservoirs of fresh air are also laid out with flower-beds, or if the windows of the houses are decorated with pots of flowers. We soon observe that this useless thing which we expect civilization to value is beauty. We require civilized man to reverence beauty wherever he sees it in nature and to create it in the objects of his handiwork so far as he is able. But this is far from exhausting our demands on civilization. We expect besides to see the signs of cleanliness and order. We do not think highly of the cultural level of an English country town in Shakespeare’s time when we read that there was a big dung heap in front of his father’s house in Stratford; we are indignant and call it ‘barbarous’ (which is the opposite of civilized) when we find the paths in the Wiener Wald littered with paper. Dirtiness of any kind seems to us incompatible with civilization. We extend our demand for cleanliness to the human body too. We are astonished to learn of the objectionable smell which emanated from the Roi Soleil; and we shake our heads on the Isola Bella when we are shown the tiny wash-basin in which Napoleon made his morning toilet. Indeed, we are not surprised by the idea of setting up the use of soap as an actual yardstick of civilization. The same is true of order. It, like cleanliness, applies solely to the works of man. But whereas cleanliness is not to be expected in nature, order, on the contrary, has been imitated from her. Man’s observation of the great astronomical regularities not only furnished him with a model for introducing order into his life, but gave him the first points of departure for doing so. Order is a kind of compulsion to repeat which, when a regulation has been laid down once and for all, decides when, where and how a thing shall be done, so that in every similar circumstance one is spared hesitation and indecision. The benefits of order are incontestable. It enables men to use space and time to the best advantage, while conserving their psychical forces. We should have a right to expect that order would have taken its place in human activities from the start and without difficulty; and we may well wonder that this has not happened - that, on the contrary, human beings exhibit an inborn tendency to carelessness, irregularity and unreliability in their work, and that a laborious training is needed before they learn to follow the example of their celestial models.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4491

Beauty, cleanliness and order obviously occupy a special position among the requirements of civilization. No one will maintain that they are as important for life as control over the forces of nature or as some other factors with which we shall become acquainted. And yet no one would care to put them in the background as trivialities. That civilization is not exclusively taken up with what is useful is already shown by the example of beauty, which we decline to omit from among the interests of civilization. The usefulness of order is quite evident. With regard to cleanliness, we must bear in mind that it is demanded of us by hygiene as well, and we may suspect that even before the days of scientific prophylaxis the connection between the two was not altogether strange to man. Yet utility does not entirely explain these efforts; something else must be at work besides.

No feature, however, seems better to characterize civilization than its esteem and encouragement of man’s higher mental activities - his intellectual, scientific and artistic achievements and the leading role that it assigns to ideas in human life. Foremost among those ideas are the religious systems, on whose complicated structure I have endeavoured to throw light elsewhere. Next come the speculations of philosophy; and finally what might be called man’s ‘ideals’ - his ideas of a possible perfection of individuals, or of peoples or of the whole of humanity, and the demands he sets up on the basis of such ideas. The fact that these creations of his are not independent of one another, but are on the contrary closely interwoven, increases the difficulty not only of describing them but of tracing their psychological derivation. If we assume quite generally that the motive force of all human activities is a striving towards the two confluent goals of utility and a yield of pleasure, we must suppose that this is also true of the manifestations of civilization which we have been discussing here, although this is easily visible only in scientific and aesthetic activities. But it cannot be doubted that the other activities, too, correspond to strong needs in men - perhaps to needs which are only developed in a minority. Nor must we allow ourselves to be misled by judgements of value concerning any particular religion, or philosophic system, or ideal. Whether we think to find in them the highest achievements of the human spirit, or whether we deplore them as aberrations, we cannot but recognize that where they are present, and, in especial, where they are dominant, a high level of civilization is implied.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4492

The last, but certainly not the least important, of the characteristic features of civilization remains to be assessed: the manner in which the relationships of men to one another, their social relationships, are regulated - relationships which affect a person as a neighbour, as a source of help, as another person’s sexual object, as a member of a family and of a State. Here it is especially difficult to keep clear of particular ideal demands and to see what is civilized in general. Perhaps we may begin by explaining that the element of civilization enters on the scene with the first attempt to regulate these social relationships. If the attempt were not made, the relationships would be subject to the arbitrary will of the individual: that is to say, the physically stronger man would decide them in the sense of his own interests and instinctual impulses. Nothing would be changed in this if this stronger man should in his turn meet someone even stronger than he. Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as ‘right’ in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as ‘brute force’. This replacement of the power of the individual by the power of a community constitutes the decisive step of civilization. The essence of it lies in the fact that the members of the community restrict themselves in their possibilities of satisfaction, whereas the individual knew no such restrictions. The first requisite of civilization, therefore, is that of justice - that is, the assurance that a law once made will not be broken in favour of an individual. This implies nothing as to the ethical value of such a law. The further course of cultural development seems to tend towards making the law no longer an expression of the will of a small community - a caste or a stratum of the population or a racial group - which, in its turn, behaves like a violent individual towards other, and perhaps more numerous, collections of people. The final outcome should be a rule of law to which all - except those who are not capable of entering a community - have contributed by a sacrifice of their instincts, and which leaves no one - again with the same exception - at the mercy of brute force.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4493

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization, though then, it is true, it had for the most part no value, since the individual was scarcely in a position to defend it. The development of civilization imposes restrictions on it, and justice demands that no one shall escape those restrictions. What makes itself felt in a human community as a desire for freedom may be their revolt against some existing injustice, and so may prove favourable to a further development of civilization; it may remain compatible with civilization. But it may also spring from the remains of their original personality, which is still untamed by civilization and may thus become the basis in them of hostility to civilization. The urge for freedom, therefore, is directed against particular forms and demands of civilization or against civilization altogether. It does not seem as though any influence could induce a man to change his nature into a termite’s. No doubt he will always defend his claim to individual liberty against the will of the group. A good part of the struggles of mankind centre round the single task of finding an expedient accommodation - one, that is, that will bring happiness - between this claim of the individual and the cultural claims of the group; and one of the problems that touches the fate of humanity is whether such an accommodation can be reached by means of some particular form of civilization or whether this conflict is irreconcilable.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4494

By allowing common feeling to be our guide in deciding what features of human life are to be regarded as civilized, we have obtained a clear impression of the general picture of civilization; but it is true that so far we have discovered nothing that is not universally known. At the same time we have been careful not to fall in with the prejudice that civilization is synonymous with perfecting, that it is the road to perfection pre-ordained for men. But now a point of view presents itself which may lead in a different direction. The development of civilization appears to us as a peculiar process which mankind undergoes, and in which several things strike us as familiar. We may characterize this process with reference to the changes which it brings about in the familiar instinctual dispositions of human beings, to satisfy which is, after all, the economic task of our lives. A few of these instincts are used up in such a manner that something appears in their place which, in an individual, we describe as a character-trait. The most remarkable example of such a process is found in the anal erotism of young human beings. Their original interest in the excretory function, its organs and products, is changed in the course of their growth into a group of traits which are familiar to us as parsimony, a sense of order and cleanliness - qualities which, though valuable and welcome in themselves, may be intensified till they become markedly dominant and produce what is called the anal character. How this happens we do not know, but there is no doubt about the correctness of the finding.¹ Now we have seen that order and cleanliness are important requirements of civilization, although their vital necessity is not very apparent, any more than their suitability as sources of enjoyment. At this point we cannot fail to be struck by the similarity between the process of civilization and the libidinal development of the individual. Other instincts are induced to displace the conditions for their satisfaction, to lead them into other paths. In most cases this process coincides with that of the sublimation (of instinctual aims) with which we are familiar, but in some it can be differentiated from it. Sublimation of instinct is an especially conspicuous feature of cultural development; it is what makes it possible for higher psychical activities, scientific, artistic or ideological, to play such an important part in civilized life. If one were to yield to a first impression, one would say that sublimation is a vicissitude which has been forced upon the instincts entirely by civilization. But it would be wiser to reflect upon this a little longer. In the third place, finally, and this seems the most important of all, it is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression, repression or some other means?) of powerful instincts. This ‘cultural frustration’ dominates the large field of social relationships between human beings. As we already know, it is the cause of the hostility against which all civilizations have to struggle. It will also make severe demands on our scientific work, and we shall have much to explain here. It is not easy to understand how it can become possible to deprive an instinct of satisfaction. Nor is doing so without danger. If the loss is not compensated for economically, one can be certain that serious disorders will ensue.

But if we want to know what value can be attributed to our view that the development of civilization is a special process, comparable to the normal maturation of the individual, we must clearly attack another problem. We must ask ourselves to what influences the development of civilization owes its origin, how it arose, and by what its course has been determined.

¹ Cf. my ‘Character and Anal Erotism’ (1908b), and numerous further contributions, by Ernest Jones and others.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4495

IV

The task seems an immense one, and it is natural to feel diffidence in the face of it. But here are such conjectures as I have been able to make.

After primal man had discovered that it lay in his own hands, literally, to improve his lot on earth by working, it cannot have been a matter of indifference to him whether another man worked with or against him. The other man acquired the value for him of a fellow-worker, with whom it was useful to live together. Even earlier, in his ape-like prehistory, man had adopted the habit of forming families, and the members of his family were probably his first helpers. One may suppose that the founding of families was connected with the fact that a moment came when the need for genital satisfaction no longer made its appearance like a guest who drops in suddenly, and, after his departure, is heard of no more for a long time, but instead took up its quarters as a permanent lodger. When this happened, the male acquired a motive for keeping the female, or, speaking more generally, his sexual objects, near him; while the female, who did not want to be separated from her helpless young, was obliged, in their interests, to remain with the stronger male.¹ In this primitive family one essential feature of civilization is still lacking. The arbitrary will of its head, the father, was unrestricted. In Totem and Taboo I have tried to show how the way led from this family to the succeeding stage of communal life in the form of bands of brothers. In overpowering their father, the sons had made the discovery that a combination can be stronger than a single individual. The totemic culture is based on the restrictions which the sons had to impose on one another in order to keep this new state of affairs in being. The taboo-observances were the first ‘right’ or ‘law. The communal life of human beings had, therefore, a two-fold foundation: the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity, and the power of love, which made the man unwilling to be deprived of his sexual object - the woman -, and made the woman unwilling to be deprived of the part of herself which had been separated off from her - her child. Eros and Ananke have become the parents of human civilization too. The first result of civilization was that even a fairly large number of people were now able to live together in a community. And since these two great powers were co-operating in this, one might expect that the further development of civilization would proceed smoothly towards an even better control over the external world and towards a further extension of the number of people included in the community. Nor is it easy to understand how this civilization could act upon its participants otherwise than to make them happy.

¹ The organic periodicity of the sexual process has persisted, it is true, but its effect on psychical sexual excitation has rather been reversed. This change seems most likely to be connected with the diminution of the olfactory stimuli by means of which the menstrual process produced an effect on the male psyche. Their role was taken over by visual excitations, which, in contrast to the intermittent olfactory stimuli, were able to maintain a permanent effect. The taboo on menstruation is derived from this ‘organic repression’, as a defence against a phase of development that has been surmounted. All other motives are probably of a secondary nature. (Cf. C. D. Daly, 1927.) This process is repeated on another level when the gods of a superseded period of civilization turn into demons. The diminution of the olfactory stimuli seems itself to be a consequence of man’s raising himself from the ground, of his assumption of an upright gait; this made his genitals, which were previously concealed, visible and in need of protection, and so provoked feelings of shame in him.

The fateful process of civilization would thus have set in with man’s adoption of an erect posture. From that point the chain of events would have proceeded through the devaluation of olfactory stimuli and the isolation of the menstrual period to the time when visual stimuli were paramount and the genitals became visible, and thence to the continuity of sexual excitation, the founding of the family and so to the threshold of human civilization. This is only a theoretical speculation, but it is important enough to deserve careful checking with reference to the conditions of life which obtain among animals closely related to man.

A social factor is also unmistakably present in the cultural trend towards cleanliness, which has received ex post facto justification in hygienic considerations but which manifested itself before their discovery. The incitement to cleanliness originates in an urge to get rid of the excreta, which have become disagreeable to the sense perceptions. We know that in the nursery things are different. The excreta arouse no disgust in children. They seem valuable to them as being a part of their own body which has come away from it. Here upbringing insists with special energy on hastening the course of development which lies ahead, and which should make the excreta worthless, disgusting, abhorrent and abominable. Such a reversal of values would scarcely be possible if the substances that are expelled from the body were not doomed by their strong smells to share the fate which overtook olfactory stimuli after man adopted the erect posture. Anal erotism, therefore, succumbs in the first instance to the ‘organic repression’ which paved the way to civilization. The existence of the social factor which is responsible for the further transformation of anal erotism is attested by the circumstance that, in spite of all man’s developmental advances, he scarcely finds the smell of his own excreta repulsive, but only that of other people’s. Thus a person who is not clean - who does not hide his excreta - is offending other people; he is showing no consideration for them. And this is confirmed by our strongest and commonest terms of abuse. It would be incomprehensible, too, that man should use the name of his most faithful friend in the animal world - the dog - as a term of abuse if that creature had not incurred his contempt through two characteristics: that it is an animal whose dominant sense is that of smell and one which has no horror of excrement, and that it is not ashamed of its sexual functions.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4496

Before we go on to enquire from what quarter an interference might arise, this recognition of love as one of the foundations of civilization may serve as an excuse for a digression which will enable us to fill in a gap which we left in an earlier discussion. We said there that man’s discovery that sexual (genital) love afforded him the strongest experiences of satisfaction, and in fact provided him with the prototype of all happiness, must have suggested to him that he should continue to seek the satisfaction of happiness in his life along the path of sexual relations and that he should make genital erotism the central point of his life. We went on to say that in doing so he made himself dependent in a most dangerous way on a portion of the external world, namely, his chosen love-object, and exposed himself to extreme suffering if he should be rejected by that object or should lose it through unfaithfulness or death. For that reason the wise men of every age have warned us most emphatically against this way of life; but in spite of this it has not lost its attraction for a great number of people.

A small minority are enabled by their constitution to find happiness, in spite of everything, along the path of love. But far-reaching mental changes in the function of love are necessary before this can happen. These people make themselves independent of their object’s acquiescence by displacing what they mainly value from being loved on to loving; they protect themselves against the loss of the object by directing their love, not to single objects but to all men alike; and they avoid the uncertainties and disappointments of genital love by turning away from its sexual aims and transforming the instinct into an impulse with an inhibited aim. What they bring about in themselves in this way is a state of evenly suspended, steadfast, affectionate feeling, which has little external resemblance any more to the stormy agitations of genital love, from which it is nevertheless derived. Perhaps St. Francis of Assisi went furthest in thus exploiting love for the benefit of an inner feeling of happiness. Moreover, what we have recognized as one of the techniques for fulfilling the pleasure principle has often been brought into connection with religion; this connection may lie in the remote regions where the distinction between the ego and objects or between objects themselves is neglected. According to one ethical view, whose deeper motivation will become clear to us presently, this readiness for a universal love of mankind and the world represents the highest standpoint which man can reach. Even at this early stage of the discussion I should like to bring forward my two main objections to this view. A love that does not discriminate seems to me to forfeit a part of its own value, by doing an injustice to its object; and secondly, not all men are worthy of love.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4497

The love which founded the family continues to operate in civilization both in its original form, in which it does not renounce direct sexual satisfaction, and in its modified form as aim-inhibited affection. In each, it continues to carry on its function of binding together considerable numbers of people, and it does so in a more intensive fashion than can be effected through the interest of work in common. The careless way in which language uses the word ‘love’ has its genetic justification. People give the name ‘love’ to the relation between a man and a woman whose genital needs have led them to found a family; but they also give the name ‘love’ to the positive feelings between parents and children, and between the brothers and sisters of a family, although we are obliged to describe this as ‘aim-inhibited love’ or ‘affection’. Love with an inhibited aim was in fact originally fully sensual love, and it is so still in man’s unconscious. Both - fully sensual love and aim-inhibited love - extend outside the family and create new bonds with people who before were strangers. Genital love leads to the formation of new families, and aim-inhibited love to ‘friendships’ which become valuable from a cultural standpoint because they escape some of the limitations of genital love, as, for instance, its exclusiveness. But in the course of development the relation of love to civilization loses its unambiguity. On the one hand love comes into opposition to the interests of civilization; on the other, civilization threatens love with substantial restrictions.

This rift between them seems unavoidable. The reason for it is not immediately recognizable. It expresses itself at first as a conflict between the family and the larger community to which the individual belongs. We have already perceived that one of the main endeavours of civilization is to bring people together into large unities. But the family will not give the individual up. The more closely the members of a family are attached to one another, the more often do they tend to cut themselves off from others, and the more difficult is it for them to enter into the wider circle of life. The mode of life in common which is phylogenetically the older, and which is the only one that exists in childhood, will not let itself be superseded by the cultural mode of life which has been acquired later. Detaching himself from his family becomes a task that faces every young person, and society often helps him in the solution of it by means of puberty and initiation rites. We get the impression that these are difficulties which are inherent in all psychical - and, indeed, at bottom, in all organic - development.

Furthermore, women soon come into opposition to civilization and display their retarding and restraining influence - those very women who, in the beginning, laid the foundations of civilization by the claims of their love. Women represent the interests of the family and of sexual life. The work of civilization has become increasingly the business of men, it confronts them with ever more difficult tasks and compels them to carry out instinctual sublimations of which women are little capable. Since a man does not have unlimited quantities of psychical energy at his disposal, he has to accomplish his tasks by making an expedient distribution of his libido. What he employs for cultural aims he to a great extent withdraws from women and sexual life. His constant association with men, and his dependence on his relations with them, even estrange him from his duties as a husband and father. Thus the woman finds herself forced into the background by the claims of civilization and she adopts a hostile attitude towards it.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4498

The tendency on the part of civilization to restrict sexual life is no less clear than its other tendency to expand the cultural unit. Its first, totemic, phase already brings with it the prohibition against an incestuous choice of object, and this is perhaps the most drastic mutilation which man’s erotic life has in all time experienced. Taboos, laws and customs impose further restrictions, which affect both men and women. Not all civilizations go equally far in this; and the economic structure of the society also influences the amount of sexual freedom that remains. Here, as we already know, civilization is obeying the laws of economic necessity, since a large amount of the psychical energy which it uses for its own purposes has to be withdrawn from sexuality. In this respect civilization behaves towards sexuality as a people or a stratum of its population does which has subjected another one to its exploitation. Fear of a revolt by the suppressed elements drives it to stricter precautionary measures. A high-water mark in such a development has been reached in our Western European civilization. A cultural community is perfectly justified, psychologically, in starting by proscribing manifestations of the sexual life of children, for there would be no prospect of curbing the sexual lusts of adults if the ground had not been prepared for it in childhood. But such a community cannot in any way be justified in going to the length of actually disavowing such easily demonstrable, and, indeed, striking phenomena. As regards the sexually mature individual, the choice of an object is restricted to the opposite sex, and most extra-genital satisfactions are forbidden as perversions. The requirement, demonstrated in these prohibitions, that there shall be a single kind of sexual life for everyone, disregards the dissimilarities, whether innate or acquired, in the sexual constitution of human beings; it cuts off a fair number of them from sexual enjoyment, and so becomes the source of serious injustice. The result of such restrictive measures might be that in people who are normal - who are not prevented by their constitution - the whole of their sexual interests would flow without loss into the channels that are left open. But heterosexual genital love, which has remained exempt from outlawry, is itself restricted by further limitations, in the shape of insistence upon legitimacy and monogamy. Present-day civilization makes it plain that it will only permit sexual relationships on the basis of a solitary, indissoluble bond between one man and one woman, and that it does not like sexuality as a source of pleasure in its own right and is only prepared to tolerate it because there is so far no substitute for it as a means of propagating the human race.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4499

This, of course, is an extreme picture. Everybody knows that it has proved impossible to put it into execution, even for quite short periods. Only the weaklings have submitted to such an extensive encroachment upon their sexual freedom, and stronger natures have only done so subject to a compensatory condition, which will be mentioned later. Civilized society has found itself obliged to pass over in silence many transgressions which, according to its own prescripts, it ought to have punished. But we must not err on the other side and assume that, because it does not achieve all its aims, such an attitude on the part of society is entirely innocuous. The sexual life of civilized man is notwithstanding severely impaired; it sometimes gives the impression of being in process of involution as a function, just as our teeth and hair seem to be as organs. One is probably justified in assuming that its importance as a source of feelings of happiness, and therefore in the fulfilment of our aim in life, has sensibly diminished.¹ Sometimes one seems to perceive that it is not only the pressure of civilization but something in the nature of the function itself which denies us full satisfaction and urges us along other paths. This may be wrong; it is hard to decide.²

¹ Among the works of that sensitive English writer, John Galsworthy, who enjoys general recognition to-day, there is a short story of which I early formed a high opinion. It is called ‘The Apple-Tree’, and it brings home to us how the life of present-day civilized people leaves no room for the simple natural love of two human beings.

² The view expressed above is supported by the following considerations. Man is an animal organism with (like others) an unmistakably bisexual disposition. The individual corresponds to a fusion of two symmetrical halves, of which, according to some investigators, one is purely male and the other female. It is equally possible that each half was originally hermaphrodite. Sex is a biological fact which, although it is of extraordinary importance in mental life, is hard to grasp psychologically. We are accustomed to say that every human being displays both male and female instinctual impulses, needs and attributes; but though anatomy, it is true, can point out the characteristic of maleness and femaleness, psychology cannot. For psychology the contrast between the sexes fades away into one between activity and passivity, in which we far too readily identify activity with maleness and passivity with femaleness, a view which is by no means universally confirmed in the animal kingdom. The theory of bisexuality is still surrounded by many obscurities and we cannot but feel it as a serious impediment in psycho-analysis that it has not yet found any link with the theory of the instincts. However this may be, if we assume it as a fact that each individual seeks to satisfy both male and female wishes in his sexual life, we are prepared for the possibility that those demands are not fulfilled by the same object, and that they interfere with each other unless they can be kept apart and each impulse guided into a particular channel that is suited to it. Another difficulty arises from the circumstance that there is so often associated with the erotic relationship, over and above its own sadistic components, a quota of plain inclination to aggression. The love-object will not always view these complications with the degree of understanding and tolerance shown by the peasant woman who complained that her husband did not love her any more, since he had not beaten her for a week.

The conjecture which goes deepest, however, is the one which takes its start from what I have said above (p. 4495) in my footnote. It is to the effect that, with the assumption of an erect posture by man and with the depreciation of his sense of smell, it was not only his anal erotism which threatened to fall a victim to organic repression, but the whole of his sexuality; so that since this, the sexual function has been accompanied by a repugnance which cannot further be accounted for, and which prevents its complete satisfaction and forces it away from the sexual aim into sublimations and libidinal displacements. I know that Bleuler (1913) once pointed to the existence of a primary repelling attitude like this towards sexual life. All neurotics, and many others besides, take exception to the fact that ‘inter urinas et faeces nascimur’. The genitals, too, give rise to strong sensations of smell which many people cannot tolerate and which spoil sexual intercourse for them. Thus we should find that the deepest root of the sexual repression which advances along with civilization is the organic defence of the new form of life achieved with man’s erect gait against his earlier animal existence. This result of scientific research coincides in a remarkable way with commonplace prejudices that have often made themselves heard. Nevertheless, these things are at present no more than unconfirmed possibilities which have not been substantiated by science. Nor should we forget that, in spite of the undeniable depreciation of olfactory stimuli, there exist even in Europe people among whom the strong genital odours which are so repellent to us are highly prized as sexual stimulants and who refuse to give them up. (Cf. the collections of folklore obtained from Iwan Bloch’s questionnaire on the sense of smell in sexual life published in different volumes of Friedrich S. Krauss’s Anthropophyteia.)

Civilization And Its Discontents

4500

V

Psycho-analytic work has shown us that it is precisely these frustrations of sexual life which people known as neurotics cannot tolerate. The neurotic creates substitutive satisfactions for himself in his symptoms, and these either cause him suffering in themselves or become sources of suffering for him by raising difficulties in his relations with his environment and the society he belongs to. The latter fact is easy to understand; the former presents us with a new problem. But civilization demands other sacrifices besides that of sexual satisfaction.

We have treated the difficulty of cultural development as a general difficulty of development by tracing it to the inertia of the libido, to its disinclination to give up an old position for a new one. We are saying much the same thing when we derive the antithesis between civilization and sexuality from the circumstance that sexual love is a relationship between two individuals in which a third can only be superfluous or disturbing, whereas civilization depends on relationships between a considerable number of individuals. When a love-relationship is at its height there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves, and do not even need the child they have in common to make them happy. In no other case does Eros so clearly betray the core of his being, his purpose of making one out of more than one; but when he has achieved this in the proverbial way through the love of two human beings, he refuses to go further.

So far, we can quite well imagine a cultural community consisting of double individuals like this, who, libidinally satisfied in themselves, are connected with one another through the bonds of common work and common interests. If this were so, civilization would not have to withdraw any energy from sexuality. But this desirable state of things does not, and never did, exist. Reality shows us that civilization is not content with the ties we have so far allowed it. It aims at binding the members of the community together in a libidinal way as well and employs every means to that end. It favours every path by which strong identifications can be established between the members of the community, and it summons up aim-inhibited libido on the largest scale so as to strengthen the communal bond by relations of friendship. In order for these aims to be fulfilled, a restriction upon sexual life is unavoidable. But we are unable to understand what the necessity is which forces civilization along this path and which causes its antagonism to sexuality. There must be some disturbing factor which we have not yet discovered.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4501

The clue may be supplied by one of the ideal demands, as we have called them, of civilized society. It runs: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’ It is known throughout the world and is undoubtedly older than Christianity, which puts it forward as its proudest claim. Yet it is certainly not very old; even in historical times it was still strange to mankind. Let us adopt a naïve attitude towards it, as though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall be unable then to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment. Why should we do it? What good will it do us? But, above all, how shall we achieve it? How can it be possible? My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection. It imposes duties on me for whose fulfilment I must be ready to make sacrifices. If I love someone, he must deserve it in some way. (I leave out of account the use he may be to me, and also his possible significance for me as a sexual object, for neither of these two kinds of relationship comes into question where the precept to love my neighbour is concerned.) He deserves it if he is so like me in important ways that I can love myself in him; and he deserves it if he is so much more perfect than myself that I can love my ideal of my own self in him. Again, I have to love him if he is my friend’s son, since the pain my friend would feel if any harm came to him would be my pain too - I should have to share it. But if he is a stranger to me and if he cannot attract me by any worth of his own or any significance that he may already have acquired for my emotional life, it will be hard for me to love him. Indeed, I should be wrong to do so, for my love is valued by all my own people as a sign of my preferring them, and it is an injustice to them if I put a stranger on a par with them. But if I am to love him (with this universal love) merely because he, too, is an inhabitant of this earth, like an insect, an earth-worm or a grass-snake, then I fear that only a small modicum of my love will fall to his share - not by any possibility as much as, by the judgement of my reason, I am entitled to retain for myself. What is the point of a precept enunciated with so much solemnity if its fulfilment cannot be recommended as reasonable?

Civilization And Its Discontents

4502

On closer inspection, I find still further difficulties. Not merely is this stranger in general unworthy of my love; I must honestly confess that he has more claim to my hostility and even my hatred. He seems not to have the least trace of love for me and shows me not the slightest consideration. If it will do him any good he has no hesitation in injuring me, nor does he ask himself whether the amount of advantage he gains bears any proportion to the extent of the harm he does to me. Indeed, he need not even obtain an advantage; if he can satisfy any sort of desire by it, he thinks nothing of jeering at me, insulting me, slandering me and showing his superior power; and the more secure he feels and the more helpless I am, the more certainly I can expect him to behave like this to me. If he behaves differently, if he shows me consideration and forbearance as a stranger, I am ready to treat him in the same way, in any case and quite apart from any precept. Indeed, if this grandiose commandment had run ‘Love thy neighbour as thy neighbour loves thee’, I should not take exception to it. And there is a second commandment, which seems to me even more incomprehensible and arouses still stronger opposition in me. It is ‘Love thine enemies’. If I think it over, however, I see that I am wrong in treating it as a greater imposition. At bottom it is the same thing.¹

¹ A great imaginative writer may permit himself to give expression - jokingly, at all events - to psychological truths that are severely proscribed. Thus Heine confesses: ‘Mine is a most peaceable disposition. My wishes are: a humble cottage with a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, the freshest milk and butter, flowers before my window, and a few fine trees before my door; and if God wants to make my happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees. Before their death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did me in their lifetime. One must, it is true, forgive one’s enemies - but not before they have been hanged.’ (Gedanken und Einfälle.)

Civilization And Its Discontents

4503

I think I can now hear a dignified voice admonishing me: ‘It is precisely because your neighbour is not worthy of love, and is on the contrary your enemy, that you should love him as yourself.’ I then understand that the case is one like that of Credo quia absurdum.

Now it is very probable that my neighbour, when he is enjoined to love me as himself, will answer exactly as I have done and will repel me for the same reasons. I hope he will not have the same objective grounds for doing so, but he will have the same idea as I have. Even so, the behaviour of human beings shows differences, which ethics, disregarding the fact that such differences are determined, classifies as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. So long as these undeniable differences have not been removed, obedience to high ethical demands entails damage to the aims of civilization, for it puts a positive premium on being bad. One is irresistibly reminded of an incident in the French Chamber when capital punishment was being debated. A member had been passionately supporting its abolition and his speech was being received with tumultuous applause, when a voice from the hall called out: ‘Que messieurs les assassins commencent!’

The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbour is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion? As a rule this cruel aggressiveness waits for some provocation or puts itself at the service of some other purpose, whose goal might also have been reached by milder measures. In circumstances that are favourable to it, when the mental counter-forces which ordinarily inhibit it are out of action, it also manifests itself spontaneously and reveals man as a savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien. Anyone who calls to mind the atrocities committed during the racial migrations or the invasions of the Huns, or by the people known as Mongols under Jenghiz Khan and Tamerlane, or at the capture of Jerusalem by the pious Crusaders, or even, indeed, the horrors of the recent World War - anyone who calls these things to mind will have to bow humbly before the truth of this view.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4504

The existence of this inclination to aggression, which we can detect in ourselves and justly assume to be present in others, is the factor which disturbs our relations with our neighbour and which forces civilization into such a high expenditure. In consequence of this primary mutual hostility of human beings, civilized society is perpetually threatened with disintegration. The interest of work in common would not hold it together; instinctual passions are stronger than reasonable interests. Civilization has to use its utmost efforts in order to set limits to man’s aggressive instincts and to hold the manifestations of them in check by psychical reaction-formations. Hence, therefore, the use of methods intended to incite people into identifications and aim-inhibited relationships of love, hence the restriction upon sexual life, and hence too the ideal’s commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself - a commandment which is really justified by the fact that nothing else runs so strongly counter to the original nature of man. In spite of every effort, these endeavours of civilization have not so far achieved very much. It hopes to prevent the crudest excesses of brutal violence by itself assuming the right to use violence against criminals, but the law is not able to lay hold of the more cautious and refined manifestations of human aggressiveness The time comes when each one of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will. At the same time, it would be unfair to reproach civilization with trying to eliminate strife and competition from human activity. These things are undoubtedly indispensable. But opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4505

The communists believe that they have found the path to deliverance from our evils. According to them, man is wholly good and is well-disposed to his neighbour; but the institution of private property has corrupted his nature. The ownership of private wealth gives the individual power, and with it the temptation to ill-treat his neighbour; while the man who is excluded from possession is bound to rebel in hostility against his oppressor. If private property were abolished, all wealth held in common, and everyone allowed to share in the enjoyment of it, ill-will and hostility would disappear among men. Since everyone’s needs would be satisfied, no one would have any reason to regard another as his enemy; all would willingly undertake the work that was necessary. I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous.¹ But I am able to recognize that the psychological premisses on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, certainly a strong one, though certainly not the strongest; but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its nature. Aggressiveness was not created by property. It reigned almost without limit in primitive times, when property was still very scanty, and it already shows itself in the nursery almost before property has given up its primal, anal form; it forms the basis of every relation of affection and love among people (with the single exception, perhaps, of the mother’s relation to her male child). If we do away with personal rights over material wealth, there still remains prerogative in the field of sexual relationships, which is bound to become the source of the strongest dislike and the most violent hostility among men who in other respects are on an equal footing. If we were to remove this factor, too, by allowing complete freedom of sexual life and thus abolishing the family, the germ-cell of civilization, we cannot, it is true, easily foresee what new paths the development of civilization could take; but one thing we can expect, and that is that this indestructible feature of human nature will follow it there.

¹ Anyone who has tasted the miseries of poverty in his own youth and has experienced the indifference and arrogance of the well-to-do, should be safe from the suspicion of having no understanding or good will towards endeavours to fight against the inequality of wealth among men and all that it leads to. To be sure, if an attempt is made to base this fight upon an abstract demand, in the name of justice, for equality for all men, there is a very obvious objection to be made - that nature, by endowing individuals with extremely unequal physical attributes and mental capacities, has introduced injustices against which there is no remedy.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4506

It is clearly not easy for men to give up the satisfaction of this inclination to aggression. They do not feel comfortable without it. The advantage which a comparatively small cultural group offers of allowing this instinct an outlet in the form of hostility against intruders is not to be despised. It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness. I once discussed the phenomenon that it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other - like the Spaniards and Portuguese, for instance, the North Germans and South Germans, the English and Scotch, and so on. I gave this phenomenon the name of ‘the narcissism of minor differences’, a name which does not do much to explain it. We can now see that it is a convenient and relatively harmless satisfaction of the inclination to aggression, by means of which cohesion between the members of the community is made easier. In this respect the Jewish people, scattered everywhere, have rendered most useful services to the civilizations of the countries that have been their hosts; but unfortunately all the massacres of the Jews in the Middle Ages did not suffice to make that period more peaceful and secure for their Christian fellows. When once the Apostle Paul had posited universal love between men as the foundation of his Christian community, extreme intolerance on the part of Christendom towards those who remained outside it became the inevitable consequence. To the Romans, who had not founded their communal life as a State upon love, religious intolerance was something foreign, although with them religion was a concern of the State and the State was permeated by religion. Neither was it an unaccountable chance that the dream of a Germanic world-dominion called for anti-Semitism as its complement; and it is intelligible that the attempt to establish a new, communist civilization in Russia should find its psychological support in the persecution of the bourgeois. One only wonders, with concern, what the Soviets will do after they have wiped out their bourgeois.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4507

If civilization imposes such great sacrifices not only on man’s sexuality but on his aggressivity, we can understand better why it is hard for him to be happy in that civilization. In fact, primitive man was better off in knowing no restrictions of instinct. To counterbalance this, his prospects of enjoying this happiness for any length of time were very slender. Civilized man has exchanged a portion of his possibilities of happiness for a portion of security. We must not forget, however, that in the primal family only the head of it enjoyed this instinctual freedom; the rest lived in slavish suppression. In that primal period of civilization, the contrast between a minority who enjoyed the advantages of civilization and a majority who were robbed of those advantages was, therefore, carried to extremes. As regards the primitive peoples who exist to-day, careful researches have shown that their instinctual life is by no means to be envied for its freedom. It is subject to restrictions of a different kind but perhaps of greater severity than those attaching to modern civilized man.

When we justly find fault with the present state of our civilization for so inadequately fulfilling our demands for a plan of life that shall make us happy, and for allowing the existence of so much suffering which could probably be avoided - when, with unsparing criticism, we try to uncover the roots of its imperfection, we are undoubtedly exercising a proper right and are not showing ourselves enemies of civilization. We may expect gradually to carry though such alterations in our civilization as will better satisfy our needs and will escape our criticisms. But perhaps we may also familiarize ourselves with the idea that there are difficulties attaching to the nature of civilization which will not yield to any attempt at reform. Over and above the tasks of restricting the instincts, which we are prepared for, there forces itself on our notice the danger of a state of things which might be termed ‘the psychological poverty of groups’. This danger is most threatening where the bonds of a society are chiefly constituted by the identification of its members with one another, while individuals of the leader type do not acquire the importance that should fall to them in the formation of a group.¹ The present cultural state of America would give us a good opportunity for studying the damage to civilization which is thus to be feared. But I shall avoid the temptation of entering upon a critique of American civilization; I do not wish to give an impression of wanting myself to employ American methods.

¹ See Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c).

Civilization And Its Discontents

4508

VI

In none of my previous writings have I had so strong a feeling as now that what I am describing is common knowledge and that I am using up paper and ink and, in due course, the compositor’s and printer’s work and material in order to expound things which are, in fact, self-evident. For that reason I should be glad to seize the point if it were to appear that the recognition of a special, independent aggressive instinct means an alteration of the psycho-analytic theory of the instincts.

We shall see, however, that this is not so and that it is merely a matter of bringing into sharper focus a turn of thought arrived at long ago and of following out its consequences. Of all the slowly developed parts of analytic theory, the theory of the instincts is the one that has felt its way the most painfully forward. And yet that theory was so indispensable to the whole structure that something had to be put in its place. In what was at first my utter perplexity, I took as my starting-point a saying of the poet-philosopher, Schiller, that ‘hunger and love are what moves the world’. Hunger could be taken to represent the instincts which aim at preserving the individual; while love strives after objects, and its chief function, favoured in every way by nature, is the preservation of the species. Thus, to begin with, ego-instincts and object-instincts confronted each other. It was to denote the energy of the latter and only the latter instinct that I introduced the term ‘libido’. Thus the antithesis was between the ego-instincts and the ‘libidinal’ instincts of love (in its widest sense) which were directed to an object. One of these object-instincts, the sadistic instinct, stood out from the rest, it is true, in that its aim was so very far from being loving. Moreover it was obviously in some respects attached to the ego-instincts: it could not hide its close affinity with instincts of mastery which have no libidinal purpose. But these discrepancies were got over; after all, sadism was clearly a part of sexual life, in the activities of which affection could be replaced by cruelty. Neurosis was regarded as the outcome of a struggle between the interest of self-preservation and the demands of the libido, a struggle in which the ego had been victorious but at the price of severe sufferings and renunciations.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4509

Every analyst will admit that even to-day this view has not the sound of a long-discarded error. Nevertheless, alterations in it became essential, as our enquiries advanced from the repressed to the repressing forces, from the object-instincts to the ego. The decisive step forward was the introduction of the concept of narcissism - that is to say, the discovery that the ego itself is cathected with libido, that the ego, indeed, is the libido’s original home, and remains to some extent its headquarters. This narcissistic libido turns towards objects, and thus becomes object-libido; and it can change back into narcissistic libido once more. The concept of narcissism made it possible to obtain an analytic understanding of the traumatic neuroses and of many of the affections bordering on the psychoses, as well as of the latter themselves. It was not necessary to give up our interpretation of the transference neuroses as attempts made by the ego to defend itself against sexuality; but the concept of libido was endangered. Since the ego-instincts, too, were libidinal, it seemed for a time inevitable that we should make libido coincide with instinctual energy in general, as C. G. Jung had already advocated earlier. Nevertheless, there still remained in me a kind of conviction, for which I was not as yet able to find reasons, that the instincts could not all be of the same kind. My next step was taken in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g), when the compulsion to repeat and the conservative character of instinctual life first attracted my attention. Starting from speculations on the beginning of life and from biological parallels, I drew the conclusion that, besides the instinct to preserve living substance and to join it into ever larger units,¹ there must exist another, contrary instinct seeking to dissolve those units and to bring them back to their primaeval, inorganic state. That is to say, as well as Eros there was an instinct of death. The phenomena of life could be explained from the concurrent or mutually opposing action of these two instincts. It was not easy, however, to demonstrate the activities of this supposed death instinct. The manifestations of Eros were conspicuous and noisy enough. It might be assumed that the death instinct operated silently within the organism towards its dissolution, but that, of course, was no proof. A more fruitful idea was that a portion of the instinct is diverted towards the external world and comes to light as an instinct of aggressiveness and destructiveness. In this way the instinct itself could be pressed into the service of Eros, in that the organism was destroying some other thing, whether animate or inanimate, instead of destroying its own self. Conversely, any restriction of this aggressiveness directed outwards would be bound to increase the self-destruction, which is in any case proceeding. At the same time one can suspect from this example that the two kinds of instinct seldom - perhaps never - appear in isolation from each other, but are alloyed with each other in varying and very different proportions and so become unrecognizable to our judgement. In sadism, long since known to us as a component instinct of sexuality, we should have before us a particularly strong alloy of this kind between trends of love and the destructive instinct; while its counterpart, masochism, would be a union between destructiveness directed inwards and sexuality - a union which makes what is otherwise an imperceptible trend into a conspicuous and tangible one.

¹ The opposition which thus emerges between the ceaseless trend by Eros towards extension and the general conservative nature of the instincts is striking, and it may become the starting-point for the study of further problems.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4510

The assumption of the existence of an instinct of death or destruction has met with resistance even in analytic circles; I am aware that there is a frequent inclination rather to ascribe whatever is dangerous and hostile in love to an original bipolarity in its own nature. To begin with it was only tentatively that I put forward the views I have developed here, but in the course of time they have gained such a hold upon me that I can no longer think in any other way. To my mind, they are far more serviceable from a theoretical standpoint than any other possible ones; they provide that simplification, without either ignoring or doing violence to the facts, for which we strive in scientific work. I know that in sadism and masochism we have always seen before us manifestations of the destructive instinct (directed outwards and inwards), strongly alloyed with erotism; but I can no longer understand how we can have overlooked the ubiquity of non-erotic aggressivity and destructiveness and can have failed to give it its due place in our interpretation of life. (The desire for destruction when it is directed inwards mostly eludes our perception, of course, unless it is tinged with erotism.) I remember my own defensive attitude when the idea of an instinct of destruction first emerged in psycho-analytic literature, and how long it took before I became receptive to it. That others should have shown, and still show, the same attitude of rejection surprises me less. For ‘little children do not like it’ when there is talk of the inborn human inclination to ‘badness’, to aggressiveness and destructiveness, and so to cruelty as well. God has made them in the image of His own perfection; nobody wants to be reminded how hard it is to reconcile the undeniable existence of evil - despite the protestations of Christian Science - with His all-powerfulness or His all-goodness. The Devil would be the best way out as an excuse for God; in that way he would be playing the same part as an agent of economic discharge as the Jew does in the world of the Aryan ideal. But even so, one can hold God responsible for the existence of the Devil just as well as for the existence of the wickedness which the Devil embodies. In view of these difficulties, each of us will be well advised, on some suitable occasion, to make a low bow to the deeply moral nature of mankind; it will help us to be generally popular and much will be forgiven us for it.¹

¹ In Goethe’s Mephistopheles we have a quite exceptionally convincing identification of the principle of evil with the destructive instinct:

Denn alles, was entsteht,

Ist wert, dass es zu Grunde geht . . .

So ist dann alles, was Ihr Sünde,

Zerstörung, kurz das Böse nennt,

Mein eigentliches Element.

The Devil himself names as his adversary, not what is holy and good, but Nature’s power to create, to multiply life - that is, Eros:

Der Luft, dem Wasser, wie der Erden

Entwinden tausend Keime sich,

Im Trocknen, Feuchten, Warmen, Kalten!

Hätt’ ich mir nicht die Flamme vorbehalten,

Ich hätte nichts Aparts für mich.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4511

The name ‘libido’ can once more be used to denote the manifestations of the power of Eros in order to distinguish them from the energy of the death instinct.¹ It must be confessed that we have much greater difficulty in grasping that instinct; we can only suspect it, as it were, as something in the background behind Eros, and it escapes detection unless its presence is betrayed by its being alloyed with Eros. It is in sadism, where the death instinct twists the erotic aim in its own sense and yet at the same time fully satisfies the erotic urge, that we succeed in obtaining the clearest insight into its nature and its relation to Eros. But even where it emerges without any sexual purpose, in the blindest fury of destructiveness, we cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction of the instinct is accompanied by an extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its presenting the ego with a fulfilment of the latter’s old wishes for omnipotence. The instinct of destruction, moderated and tamed, and, as it were, inhibited in its aim, must, when it is directed towards objects, provide the ego with the satisfaction of its vital needs and with control over nature. Since the assumption of the existence of the instinct is mainly based on theoretical grounds, we must also admit that it is not entirely proof against theoretical objections. But this is how things appear to us now, in the present state of our knowledge; future research and reflection will no doubt bring further light which will decide the matter.

¹ Our present point of view can be roughly expressed in the statement that libido has a share in every instinctual manifestation, but that not everything in that manifestation is libido.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4512

In all that follows I adopt the standpoint, therefore, that the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man, and I return to my view that it constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization. At one point in the course of this enquiry I was led to the idea that civilization was a special process which mankind undergoes, and I am still under the influence of that idea. I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this. 1 These collections of men are to be libidinally bound to one another. Necessity alone, the advantages of work in common, will not hold them together. But man’s natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all against each, opposes this programme of civilization. This aggressive instinct is the derivative and the main representative of the death instinct which we have found alongside of Eros and which shares world-dominion with it. And now, I think, the meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us. It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of, and the evolution of civilization may therefore be simply described as the struggle for life of the human species.¹ And it is this battle of the giants that our nurse-maids try to appease with their lullaby about Heaven.

¹ And we may probably add more precisely, a struggle for life in the shape it was bound to assume after a certain event which still remains to be discovered.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4513

VII

Why do our relatives, the animals, not exhibit any such cultural struggle? We do not know. Very probably some of them - the bees, the ants, the termites - strove for thousands of years before they arrived at the State institutions, the distribution of functions and the restrictions on the individual, for which we admire them to-day. It is a mark of our present condition that we know from our own feelings that we should not think ourselves happy in any of these animal States or in any of the roles assigned in them to the individual. In the case of other animal species it may be that a temporary balance has been reached between the influences of their environment and the mutually contending instincts within them, and that thus a cessation of development has come about. It may be that in primitive man a fresh access of libido kindled a renewed burst of activity on the part of the destructive instinct. There are a great many questions here to which as yet there is no answer.

Another question concerns us more nearly. What means does civilization employ in order to inhibit the aggressiveness which opposes it, to make it harmless, to get rid of it, perhaps? We have already become acquainted with a few of these methods, but not yet with the one that appears to be the most important. This we can study in the history of the development of the individual. What happens in him to render his desire for aggression innocuous? Something very remarkable, which we should never have guessed and which is nevertheless quite obvious. His aggressiveness is introjected, internalized; it is, in point of fact, sent back to where it came from - that is, it is directed towards his own ego. There it is taken over by a portion of the ego, which sets itself over against the rest of the ego as super-ego, and which now, in the form of ‘conscience’, is ready to put into action against the ego the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy upon other, extraneous individuals. The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it, is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment. Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4514

As to the origin of the sense of guilt, the analyst has different views from other psychologists; but even he does not find it easy to give an account of it. To begin with, if we ask how a person comes to have a sense of guilt, we arrive at an answer which cannot be disputed: a person feels guilty (devout people would say ‘sinful’) when he has done something which he knows to be ‘bad’. But then we notice how little this answer tells us. Perhaps, after some hesitation, we shall add that even when a person has not actually done the bad thing but has only recognized in himself an intention to do it, he may regard himself as guilty; and the question then arises of why the intention is regarded as equal to the deed. Both cases, however, presuppose that one had already recognized that what is bad is reprehensible, is something that must not be carried out. How is this judgement arrived at? We may reject the existence of an original, as it were natural, capacity to distinguish good from bad. What is bad is often not at all what is injurious or dangerous to the ego; on the contrary, it may be something which is desirable and enjoyable to the ego. Here, therefore, there is an extraneous influence at work, and it is this that decides what is to be called good or bad. Since a person’s own feelings would not have led him along this path, he must have had a motive for submitting to this extraneous influence. Such a motive is easily discovered in his helplessness and his dependence on other people, and it can best be designated as fear of loss of love. If he loses the love of another person upon whom he is dependent, he also ceases to be protected from a variety of dangers. Above all, he is exposed to the danger that this stronger person will show his superiority in the form of punishment. At the beginning, therefore, what is bad is whatever causes one to be threatened with loss of love. For fear of that loss, one must avoid it. This, too, is the reason why it makes little difference whether one has already done the bad thing or only intends to do it. In either case the danger only sets in if and when the authority discovers it, and in either case the authority would behave in the same way.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4515

This state of mind is called a ‘bad conscience’; but actually it does not deserve this name, for at this stage the sense of guilt is clearly only a fear of loss of love, ‘social’ anxiety. In small children it can never be anything else, but in many adults, too, it has only changed to the extent that the place of the father or the two parents is taken by the larger human community. Consequently, such people habitually allow themselves to do any bad thing which promises them enjoyment, so long as they are sure that the authority will not know anything about it or cannot blame them for it; they are afraid only of being found out.¹ Present-day society has to reckon in general with this state of mind.

A great change takes place only when the authority is internalized through the establishment of a super-ego. The phenomena of conscience then reach a higher stage. Actually, it is not until now that we should speak of conscience or a sense of guilt.² At this point, too, the fear of being found out comes to an end; the distinction, moreover, between doing something bad and wishing to do it disappears entirely, since nothing can be hidden from the super-ego, not even thoughts. It is true that the seriousness of the situation from a real point of view has passed away, for the new authority, the super-ego, has no motive that we know of for ill-treating the ego, with which it is intimately bound up; but genetic influence, which leads to the survival of what is past and has been surmounted, makes itself felt in the fact that fundamentally things remain as they were at the beginning. The super-ego torments the sinful ego with the same feeling of anxiety and is on the watch for opportunities of getting it punished by the external world.

¹ This reminds one of Rousseau’s famous mandarin.

² Everyone of discernment will understand and take into account the fact that in this summary description we have sharply delimited events which in reality occur by gradual transitions, and that it is not merely a question of the existence of a super-ego but of its relative strength and sphere of influence. All that has been said above about conscience and guilt is, moreover, common knowledge and almost undisputed.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4516

At this second stage of development, the conscience exhibits a peculiarity which was absent from the first stage and which is no longer easy to account for. For the more virtuous a man is, the more severe and distrustful is its behaviour, so that ultimately it is precisely those people who have carried saintliness furthest who reproach themselves with the worst sinfulness. This means that virtue forfeits some part of its promised reward; the docile and continent ego does not enjoy the trust of its mentor, and strives in vain, it would seem, to acquire it. The objection will at once be made that these difficulties are artificial ones, and it will be said that a stricter and more vigilant conscience is precisely the hallmark of a moral man. Moreover, when saints call themselves sinners, they are not so wrong, considering the temptations to instinctual satisfaction to which they are exposed in a specially high degree - since, as is well known, temptations are merely increased by constant frustration, whereas an occasional satisfaction of them causes them to diminish, at least for the time being. The field of ethics, which is so full of problems, presents us with another fact: namely that ill-luck - that is, external frustration - so greatly enhances the power of the conscience in the super-ego. As long as things to well with a man, his conscience is lenient and lets the ego do all sorts of things; but when misfortune befalls him, he searches his soul, acknowledges his sinfulness, heightens the demands of his conscience, imposes abstinences on himself and punishes himself with penances.¹ Whole peoples have behaved in this may, and still do. This, however, is easily explained by the original infantile stage of conscience, which, as we see, is not given up after the introjection into the super-ego, but persists alongside of it and behind it. Fate is regarded as a substitute for the parental agency. If a man is unfortunate it means that he is no longer loved by this highest power; and, threatened by such a loss of love, he once more bows to the parental representative in his super-ego - a representative whom, in his days of good fortune, he was ready to neglect. This becomes especially clear where Fate is looked upon in the strictly religious sense of being nothing else than an expression of the Divine Will. The people of Israel had believed themselves to be the favourite child of God, and when the great Father caused misfortune after misfortune to rain down upon this people of his, they were never shaken in their belief in his relationship to them or questioned his power or righteousness. Instead, they produced the prophets, who held up their sinfulness before them; and out of their sense of guilt they created the over-strict commandments of their priestly religion. It is remarkable how differently a primitive man behaves. If he has met with a misfortune, he does not throw the blame on himself but on his fetish, which has obviously not done its duty, and he gives it a thrashing instead of punishing himself.

¹ This enhancing of morality as a consequence of ill-luck has been illustrated by Mark Twain in a delightful little story, The First Melon I ever Stole. This first melon happened to be unripe. I heard Mark Twain tell the story himself in one of his public readings. After he had given out the title, he stopped and asked himself as though he was in doubt: ‘Was it the first?’ With this, everything had been said. The first melon was evidently not the only one.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4517

Thus we know of two origins of the sense of guilt: one arising from fear of an authority, and the other, later on, arising from fear of the super-ego. The first insists upon a renunciation of instinctual satisfactions; the second, as well as doing this, presses for punishment, since the continuance of the forbidden wishes cannot be concealed from the super-ego. We have also learned how the severity of the super-ego - the demands of conscience - is to be understood. It is simply a continuation of the severity of the external authority, to which it has succeeded and which it has in part replaced. We now see in what relationship the renunciation of instinct stands to the sense of guilt. Originally, renunciation of instinct was the result of fear of an external authority: one renounced one’s satisfactions in order not to lose its love. If one has carried out this renunciation, one is, as it were, quits with the authority and no sense of guilt should remain. But with fear of the super-ego the case is different. Here, instinctual renunciation is not enough, for the wish persists and cannot be concealed from the super-ego. Thus, in spite of the renunciation that has been made, a sense of guilt comes about. This constitutes a great economic disadvantage in the erection of a super-ego, or, as we may put it, in the formation of a conscience. Instinctual renunciation now no longer has a completely liberating effect; virtuous continence is no longer rewarded with the assurance of love. A threatened external unhappiness - loss of love and punishment on the part of the external authority - has been exchanged for a permanent internal unhappiness, for the tension of the sense of guilt.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4518

These interrelations are so complicated and at the same time so important that, at the risk of repeating myself, I shall approach them from yet another angle. The chronological sequence, then, would be as follows. First comes renunciation of instinct owing to fear of aggression by the external authority. (This is, of course, what fear of the loss of love amounts to, for love is a protection against this punitive aggression.) After that comes the erection of an internal authority, and renunciation of instinct owing to fear of it - owing to fear of conscience. In this second situation bad intentions are equated with bad actions, and hence come a sense of guilt and a need for punishment. The aggressiveness of conscience keeps up the aggressiveness of the authority. So far things have no doubt been made clear; but where does this leave room for the reinforcing influence of misfortune (of renunciation imposed from without), and for the extraordinary severity of conscience in the best and most tractable people? We have already explained both these peculiarities of conscience, but we probably still have an impression that those explanations do not go to the bottom of the matter, and leave a residue still unexplained. And here at last an idea comes in which belongs entirely to psycho-analysis and which is foreign to people’s ordinary way of thinking. This idea is of a sort which enables us to understand why the subject-matter was bound to seem so confused and obscure to us. For it tells us that conscience (or more correctly, the anxiety which later becomes conscience) is indeed the cause of instinctual renunciation to begin with, but that later the relationship is reversed. Every renunciation of instinct now becomes a dynamic source of conscience and every fresh renunciation increases the latter’s severity and intolerance. If we could only bring it better into harmony with what we already know about the history of the origin of conscience, we should be tempted to defend the paradoxical statement that conscience is the result of instinctual renunciation, or that instinctual renunciation (imposed on us from without) creates conscience, which then demands further instinctual renunciation.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4519

The contradiction between this statement and what we have previously said about the genesis of conscience is in point of fact not so very great, and we see a way of further reducing it. In order to make our exposition easier, let us take as our example the aggressive instinct, and let us assume that the renunciation in question is always a renunciation of aggression. (This, of course, is only to be taken as a temporary assumption.) The effect of instinctual renunciation on the conscience then is that every piece of aggression whose satisfaction the subject gives up is taken over by the super-ego and increases the latter’s aggressiveness (against the ego). This does not harmonize well with the view that the original aggressiveness of conscience is a continuance of the severity of the external authority and therefore has nothing to do with renunciation. But the discrepancy is removed if we postulate a different derivation for this first instalment of the super-ego’s aggressivity. A considerable amount of aggressiveness must be developed in the child against the authority which prevents him from having his first, but none the less his most important, satisfactions, whatever the kind of instinctual deprivation that is demanded of him may be; but he is obliged to renounce the satisfaction of this revengeful aggressiveness. He finds his way out of this economically difficult situation with the help of familiar mechanisms. By means of identification he takes the unattackable authority into himself. The authority now turns into his super-ego and enters into possession of all the aggressiveness which a child would have liked to exercise against it. The child’s ego has to content itself with the unhappy role of the authority - the father - who has been thus degraded. Here, as so often, the situation is reversed: ‘If I were the father and you were the child, I should treat you badly.’ The relationship between the super-ego and the ego is a return, distorted by a wish, of the real relationships between the ego, as yet undivided, and an external object. That is typical, too. But the essential difference is that the original severity of the super-ego does not - or does not so much - represent the severity which one has experienced from it, or which one attributes to it; it represents rather one’s own aggressiveness towards it. If this is correct, we may assert truly that in the beginning conscience arises through the suppression of an aggressive impulse, and that it is subsequently reinforced by fresh suppressions of the same kind.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4520

Which of these two views is correct? The earlier one, which genetically seemed so unassailable, or the newer one, which rounds off the theory in such a welcome fashion? Clearly, and by the evidence, too, of direct observations, both are justified. They do not contradict each other, and they even coincide at one point, for the child’s revengeful aggressiveness will be in part determined by the amount of punitive aggression which he expects from his father. Experience shows, however, that the severity of the super-ego which a child develops in no way corresponds to the severity of treatment which he has himself met with.¹ The severity of the former seems to be independent of that of the latter. A child who has been very leniently brought up can acquire a very strict conscience. But it would also be wrong to exaggerate this independence; it is not difficult to convince oneself that severity of upbringing does also exert a strong influence on the formation of the child’s super-ego. What it amounts to is that in the formation of the super-ego and the emergence of a conscience innate constitutional factors and influences from the real environment act in combination. This is not at all surprising; on the contrary, it is a universal aetiological condition for all such processes.²

¹ As has rightly been emphasized by Melanie Klein and by other English writers.

² The two main types of pathogenic methods of upbringing - over-strictness and spoiling - have been accurately assessed by Franz Alexander in his book The Psychoanalysis of the Total Personality (1927) in connection with Aichhorn’s study of delinquency. The ‘unduly lenient and indulgent father’ is the cause of children’s forming an over-severe super-ego, because, under the impression of the love that they receive, they have no other outlet for their aggressiveness but turning it inwards. In delinquent children, who have been brought up without love, the tension between ego and super-ego is lacking, and the whole of their aggressiveness can be directed outwards. Apart from a constitutional factor which may be supposed to be present, it can be said, therefore, that a severe conscience arises from the joint operation of two factors: the frustration of instinct, which unleashes aggressiveness, and the experience of being loved, which turns the aggressiveness inwards and hands it over to the super-ego.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4521

It can also be asserted that when a child reacts to his first great instinctual frustrations with excessively strong aggressiveness and with a correspondingly severe super-ego, he is following a phylogenetic model and is going beyond the response that would be currently justified; for the father of prehistoric times was undoubtedly terrible, and an extreme amount of aggressiveness may be attributed to him. Thus, if one shifts over from individual to phylogenetic development, the differences between the two theories of the genesis of conscience are still further diminished. On the other hand, a new and important difference makes its appearance between these two developmental processes. We cannot get away from the assumption that man’s sense of guilt springs from the Oedipus complex and was acquired at the killing of the father by the brothers banded together. On that occasion an act of aggression was not suppressed but carried out; but it was the same act of aggression whose suppression in the child is supposed to be the source of his sense of guilt. At this point I should not be surprised if the reader were to exclaim angrily: ‘So it makes no difference whether one kills one’s father or not - one gets a feeling of guilt in either case! We may take leave to raise a few doubts here. Either it is not true that the sense of guilt comes from suppressed aggressiveness, or else the whole story of the killing of the father is a fiction and the children of primaeval man did not kill their fathers any more often than children do nowadays. Besides, if it is not fiction but a plausible piece of history, it would be a case of something happening which everyone expects to happen - namely, of a person feeling guilty because he really has done something which cannot be justified. And of this event, which is after all an everyday occurrence, psycho-analysis has not yet given any explanation.’

That is true, and we must make good the omission. Nor is there any great secret about the matter. When one has a sense of guilt after having committed a misdeed, and because of it, the feeling should more properly be called remorse. It relates only to a deed that has been done, and, of course, it presupposes that a conscience - the readiness to feel guilty - was already in existence before the deed took place. Remorse of this sort can, therefore, never help us to discover the origin of conscience and of the sense of guilt in general. What happens in these everyday cases is usually this: an instinctual need acquires the strength to achieve satisfaction in spite of the conscience, which is, after all, limited in its strength; and with the natural weakening of the need owing to its having been satisfied, the former balance of power is restored. Psycho-analysis is thus justified in excluding from the present discussion the case of a sense of guilt due to remorse, however frequently such cases occur and however great their practical importance.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4522

But if the human sense of guilt goes back to the killing of the primal father, that was after all a case of ‘remorse’. Are we to assume that a conscience and a sense of guilt were not, as we have presupposed, in existence before the deed? If not, where, in this case, did the remorse come from? There is no doubt that this case should explain the secret of the sense of guilt to us and put an end to our difficulties. And I believe it does. This remorse was the result of the primordial ambivalence of feeling towards the father. His sons hated him, but they loved him, too. After their hatred had been satisfied by their act of aggression, their love came to the fore in their remorse for the deed. It set up the super-ego by identification with the father; it gave that agency the father’s power, as though as a punishment for the deed of aggression they had carried out against him, and it created the restrictions which were intended to prevent a repetition of the deed. And since the inclination to aggressiveness against the father was repeated in the following generations, the sense of guilt, too, persisted, and it was reinforced once more by every piece of aggressiveness that was suppressed and carried over to the super-ego. Now, I think, we can at last grasp two things perfectly clearly: the part played by love in the origin of conscience and the fatal inevitability of the sense of guilt. Whether one has killed one’s father or has abstained from doing so is not really the decisive thing. One is bound to feel guilty in either case, for the sense of guilt is an expression of the conflict due to ambivalence, of the eternal struggle between Eros and the instinct of destruction or death. This conflict is set going as soon as men are faced with the task of living together. So long as the community assumes no other form than that of the family, the conflict is bound to express itself in the Oedipus complex, to establish the conscience and to create the first sense of guilt. When an attempt is made to widen the community, the same conflict is continued in forms which are dependent on the past; and it is strengthened and results in a further intensification of the sense of guilt. Since civilization obeys an internal erotic impulsion which causes human beings to unite in a closely-knit group, it can only achieve this aim through an ever-increasing reinforcement of the sense of guilt. What began in relation to the father is completed in relation to the group. If civilization is a necessary course of development from the family to humanity as a whole, then - as a result of the inborn conflict arising from ambivalence, of the eternal struggle between the trends of love and death - there is inextricably bound up with it an increase of the sense of guilt, which will perhaps reach heights that the individual finds hard to tolerate. One is reminded of the great poet’s moving arraignment of the ‘Heavenly Powers’:-

Ihr führt in’s Leben uns hinein.

Ihr lasst den Armen schuldig werden,

Dann überlasst Ihr ihn den Pein,

Denn iede Schuld rächt sich auf Erden.¹

And we may well heave a sigh of relief at the thought that it is nevertheless vouchsafed to a few to salvage without effort from the whirlpool of their own feelings the deepest truths, towards which the rest of us have to find our way through tormenting uncertainty and with restless groping.

¹ One of the Harp-player’s songs in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4523

VIII

Having reached the end of his journey, the author must ask his readers’ forgiveness for not having been a more skilful guide and for not having spared them empty stretches of road and troublesome détours. There is no doubt that it could have been done better. I will attempt, late in the day, to make some amends.

In the first place, I suspect that the reader has the impression that our discussions on the sense of guilt disrupt the framework of this essay: that they take up too much space, so that the rest of its subject-matter, with which they are not always closely connected, is pushed to one side. This may have spoilt the structure of my paper; but it corresponds faithfully to my intention to represent the sense of guilt as the most important problem in the development of civilization and to show that the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.¹ Anything that still sounds strange about this statement, which is the final conclusion of our investigation, can probably be traced to the quite peculiar relationship - as yet completely unexplained - which the sense of guilt has to our consciousness. In the common case of remorse, which we regard as normal, this feeling makes itself clearly enough perceptible to consciousness. Indeed, we are accustomed to speak of a ‘consciousness of guilt’ instead of a ‘sense of guilt’. Our study of the neuroses, to which, after all we owe the most valuable pointers to an understanding of normal conditions, brings us up against some contradictions. In one of those affections, obsessional neurosis, the sense of guilt makes itself noisily heard in consciousness; it dominates the clinical picture and the patient’s life as well, and it hardly allows anything else to appear alongside of it. But in most other cases and forms of neurosis it remains completely unconscious, without on that account producing any less important effects. Our patients do not believe us when we attribute an ‘unconscious sense of guilt’ to them. In order to make ourselves at all intelligible to them, we tell them of an unconscious need for punishment, in which the sense of guilt finds expression. But its connection with a particular form of neurosis must not be over-estimated. Even in obsessional neurosis there are types of patients who are not aware of their sense of guilt, or who only feel it as a tormenting uneasiness, a kind of anxiety, if they are prevented from carrying out certain actions. It ought to be possible eventually to understand these things; but as yet we cannot. Here perhaps we may be glad to have it pointed out that the sense of guilt is at bottom nothing else but a topographical variety of anxiety; in its later phases it coincides completely with fear of the super-ego. And the relations of anxiety to consciousness exhibit the same extraordinary variations. Anxiety is always present somewhere or other behind every symptom; but at one time it takes noisy possession of the whole of consciousness, while at another it conceals itself so completely that we are obliged to speak of unconscious anxiety or, if we want to have a clearer psychological conscience, since anxiety is in the first instance simply a feeling, of possibilities of anxiety. Consequently it is very conceivable that the sense of guilt produced by civilization is not perceived as such either, and remains to a large extent unconscious, or appears as a sort of malaise, a dissatisfaction, for which people seek other motivations. Religions, at any rate, have never overlooked the part played in civilization by a sense of guilt. Furthermore - a point which I failed to appreciate elsewhere² - they claim to redeem mankind from this sense of guilt, which they call sin. From the manner in which, in Christianity, this redemption is achieved - by the sacrificial death of a single person, who in this manner takes upon himself a guilt that is common to everyone - we have been able to infer what the first occasion may have been on which this primal guilt, which was also the beginning of civilization, was acquired.³

¹ ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all . . .’

That the education of young people at the present day conceals from them the part which sexuality will play in their lives is not the only reproach which we are obliged to make against it. Its other sin is that it does not prepare them for the aggressiveness of which they are destined to become the objects. In sending the young out into life with such a false psychological orientation, education is behaving as though one were to equip people starting on a Polar expedition with summer clothing and maps of the Italian Lakes. In this it becomes evident that a certain misuse is being made of ethical demands. The strictness of those demands would not do so much harm if education were to say: ‘This is how men ought to be, in order to be happy and to make others happy; but you have to reckon on their not being like that.’ Instead of this the young are made to believe that everyone else fulfils those ethical demands - that is, that everyone else is virtuous. It is on this that the demand is based that the young, too, shall become virtuous.

² In The Future of an Illusion (1927c)

³ Totem and Taboo (1912-13).

Civilization And Its Discontents

4524

Though it cannot be of great importance, it may not be superfluous to elucidate the meaning of a few words such as ‘super-ego’, ‘conscience’, ‘sense of guilt’, ‘need for punishment’ and ‘remorse’, which we have often, perhaps, used too loosely and interchangeably. They all relate to the same state of affairs, but denote different aspects of it. The super-ego is an agency which has been inferred by us, and conscience is a function which we ascribe, among other functions, to that agency. This function consists in keeping a watch over the actions and intentions of the ego and judging them, in exercising a censorship. The sense of guilt, the harshness of the super-ego, is thus the same thing as the severity of the conscience. It is the perception which the ego has of being watched over in this way, the assessment of the tension between its own strivings and the demands of the super-ego. The fear of this critical agency (a fear which is at the bottom of the whole relationship), the need for punishment, is an instinctual manifestation on the part of the ego, which has become masochistic under the influence of a sadistic super-ego; it is a portion, that is to say, of the instinct towards internal destruction present in the ego, employed for forming an erotic attachment to the super-ego. We ought not to speak of a conscience until a super-ego is demonstrably present. As to a sense of guilt, we must admit that it is in existence before the super-ego, and therefore before conscience, too. At that time it is the immediate expression of fear of the external authority, a recognition of the tension between the ego and that authority. It is the direct derivative of the conflict between the need for the authority’s love and the urge towards instinctual satisfaction, whose inhibition produces the inclination to aggression. The superimposition of these two strata of the sense of guilt - one coming from fear of the external authority, the other from fear of the internal authority - has hampered our insight into the position of conscience in a number of ways. Remorse is a general term for the ego’s reaction in a case of sense of guilt. It contains, in little altered form, the sensory material of the anxiety which is operating behind the sense of guilt; it is itself a punishment and can include the need for punishment. Thus remorse, too, can be older than conscience.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4525

Nor will it do any harm if we once more review the contradictions which have for a while perplexed us during our enquiry. Thus, at one point the sense of guilt was the consequence of acts of aggression that had been abstained from; but at another point - and precisely at its historical beginning, the killing of the father - it was the consequence of an act of aggression that had been carried out. But a way out of this difficulty was found. For the institution of the internal authority, the super-ego, altered the situation radically. Before this, the sense of guilt coincided with remorse. (We may remark, incidentally, that the term ‘remorse’ should be reserved for the reaction after an act of aggression has actually been carried out.) After this, owing to the omniscience of the super-ego, the difference between an aggression intended and an aggression carried out lost its force. Henceforward a sense of guilt could be produced not only by an act of violence that is actually carried out (as all the world knows), but also by one that is merely intended (as psycho-analysis has discovered). Irrespectively of this alteration in the psychological situation, the conflict arising from ambivalence - the conflict between the two primal instincts - leaves the same result behind. We are tempted to look here for the solution of the problem of the varying relation in which the sense of guilt stands to consciousness. It might be thought that a sense of guilt arising from remorse for an evil deed must always be conscious, whereas a sense of guilt arising from the perception of an evil impulse may remain unconscious. But the answer is not so simple as that. Obsessional neurosis speaks energetically against it.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4526

The second contradiction concerned the aggressive energy with which we suppose the super-ego to be endowed. According to one view, that energy merely carries on the punitive energy of the external authority and keeps it alive in the mind; while, according to another view, it consists, on the contrary, of one’s own aggressive energy which has not been used and which one now directs against that inhibiting authority. The first view seemed to fit in better with the history, and the second with the theory, of the sense of guilt. Closer reflection has resolved this apparently irreconcilable contradiction almost too completely; what remained as the essential and common factor was that in each case we were dealing with an aggressiveness which had been displaced inwards. Clinical observation, moreover, allows us in fact to distinguish two sources for the aggressiveness which we attribute to the super-ego; one or the other of them exercises the stronger effect in any given case, but as a general rule they operate in unison.

This is, I think, the place at which to put forward for serious consideration a view which I have earlier recommended for provisional acceptance. In the most recent analytic literature a predilection is shown for the idea that any kind of frustration, any thwarted instinctual satisfaction, results, or may result, in a heightening of the sense of guilt.¹ A great theoretical simplification will, I think, be achieved if we regard this as applying only to the aggressive instincts, and little will be found to contradict this assumption. For how are we to account, on dynamic and economic grounds, for an increase in the sense of guilt appearing in place of an unfulfilled erotic demand? This only seems possible in a round-about way - if we suppose, that is, that the prevention of an erotic satisfaction calls up a piece of aggressiveness against the person who has interfered with the satisfaction, and that this aggressiveness has itself to be suppressed in turn. But if this is so, it is after all only the aggressiveness which is transformed into a sense of guilt, by being suppressed and made over to the super-ego. I am convinced that many processes will admit of a simpler and clearer exposition if the findings of psycho-analysis with regard to the derivation of the sense of guilt are restricted to the aggressive instincts. Examination of the clinical material gives us no unequivocal answer here, because, as our hypothesis tells us, the two classes of instinct hardly ever appear in a pure form, isolated from each other; but an investigation of extreme cases would probably point in the direction I anticipate.

¹ This view is taken in particular by Ernest Jones, Susan Isaacs and Melanie Klein; and also, I understand, by Reik and Alexander.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4527

I am tempted to extract a first advantage from this more restricted view of the case by applying it to the process of repression. As we have learned, neurotic symptoms are, in their essence, substitutive satisfactions for unfulfilled sexual wishes. In the course of our analytic work we have discovered to our surprise that perhaps every neurosis conceals a quota of unconscious sense of guilt, which in its turn fortifies the symptoms by making use of them as a punishment. It now seems plausible to formulate the following proposition. When an instinctual trend undergoes repression, its libidinal elements are turned into symptoms, and its aggressive components into a sense of guilt. Even if this proposition is only an average approximation to the truth, it is worthy of our interest.

Some readers of this work may further have an impression that they have heard the formula of the struggle between Eros and the death instinct too often. It was alleged to characterize the process of civilization which mankind undergoes but it was also brought into connection with the development of the individual, and, in addition, it was said to have revealed the secret of organic life in general. We cannot, I think, avoid going into the relations of these three processes to one another. The repetition of the same formula is justified by the consideration that both the process of human civilization and of the development of the individual are also vital processes - which is to say that they must share in the most general characteristic of life. On the other hand, evidence of the presence of this general characteristic fails, for the very reason of its general nature, to help us to arrive at any differentiation, so long as it is not narrowed down by special qualifications. We can only be satisfied, therefore, if we assert that the process of civilization is a modification which the vital process experiences under the influence of a task that is set it by Eros and instigated by Ananke - by the exigencies of reality; and that this task is one of uniting separate individuals into a community bound together by libidinal ties. When, however, we look at the relation between the process of human civilization and the developmental or educative process of individual human beings, we shall conclude without much hesitation that the two are very similar in nature, if not the very same process applied to different kinds of object. The process of the civilization of the human species is, of course, an abstraction of a higher order than is the development of the individual and it is therefore harder to apprehend in concrete terms, nor should we pursue analogies to an obsessional extreme; but in view of the similarity between the aims of the two processes - in the one case the integration of a separate individual into a human group, and in the other case the creation of a unified group out of many individuals - we cannot be surprised at the similarity between the means employed and the resultant phenomena.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4528

In view of its exceptional importance, we must not long postpone the mention of one feature which distinguishes between the two processes. In the developmental process of the individual, the programme of the pleasure principle, which consists in finding the satisfaction of happiness, is retained as the main aim. Integration in, or adaptation to, a human community appears as a scarcely avoidable condition which must be fulfilled before this aim of happiness can be achieved. If it could be done without that condition, it would perhaps be preferable. To put it in other words, the development of the individual seems to us to be a product of the interaction between two urges, the urge towards happiness, which we usually call ‘egoistic’, and the urge towards union with others in the community, which we call ‘altruistic’. Neither of these descriptions goes much below the surface. In the process of individual development, as we have said, the main accent falls mostly on the egoistic urge (or the urge towards happiness); while the other urge, which may be described as a ‘cultural’ one, is usually content with the role of imposing restrictions. But in the process of civilization things are different. Here by far the most important thing is the aim of creating a unity out of the individual human beings. It is true that the aim of happiness is still there, but it is pushed into the background. It almost seems as if the creation of a great human community would be most successful if no attention had to be paid to the happiness of the individual. The developmental process of the individual can thus be expected to have special features of its own which are not reproduced in the process of human civilization. It is only in so far as the first of these processes has union with the community as its aim that it need coincide with the second process.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4529

Just as a planet revolves around a central body as well as rotating on its own axis, so the human individual takes part in the course of development of mankind at the same time as he pursues his own path in life. But to our dull eyes the play of forces in the heavens seems fixed in a never-changing order; in the field of organic life we can still see how the forces contend with one another, and how the effects of the conflict are continually changing. So, also, the two urges, the one towards personal happiness and the other towards union with other human beings, must struggle with each other in every individual; and so, also, the two processes of individual and of cultural development must stand in hostile opposition to each other and mutually dispute the ground. But this struggle between the individual and society is not a derivative of the contradiction - probably an irreconcilable one - between the primal instincts of Eros and death. It is a dispute within the economics of the libido, comparable to the contest concerning the distribution of libido between ego and objects; and it does admit of an eventual accommodation in the individual, as, it may be hoped, it will also do in the future of civilization, however much that civilization may oppress the life of the individual to-day.

The analogy between the process of civilization and the path of individual development may be extended in an important respect. It can be asserted that the community, too, evolves a super-ego under whose influence cultural development proceeds. It would be a tempting task for anyone who has a knowledge of human civilizations to follow out this analogy in detail. I will confine myself to bringing forward a few striking points. The super-ego of an epoch of civilization has an origin similar to that of an individual. It is based on the impression left behind by the personalities of great leaders - men of overwhelming force of mind or men in whom one of the human impulsions has found its strongest and purest, and therefore often its most one-sided, expression. In many instances the analogy goes still further, in that during their lifetime these figures were - often enough, even if not always - mocked and maltreated by others and even despatched in a cruel fashion. In the same way, indeed, the primal father did not attain divinity until long after he had met his death by violence. The most arresting example of this fateful conjunction is to be seen in the figure of Jesus Christ - if, indeed, that figure is not a part of mythology, which called it into being from an obscure memory of that primal event. Another point of agreement between the cultural and the individual super-ego is that the former, just like the latter, sets up strict ideal demands, disobedience to which is visited with ‘fear of conscience’. Here, indeed, we come across the remarkable circumstance that the mental processes concerned are actually more familiar to us and more accessible to consciousness as they are seen in the group than they can be in the individual man. In him, when tension arises, it is only the aggressiveness of the super-ego which, in the form of reproaches, makes itself noisily heard; its actual demands often remain unconscious in the background. If we bring them to conscious knowledge, we find that they coincide with the precepts of the prevailing cultural super-ego. At this point the two processes, that of the cultural development of the group and that of the cultural development of the individual, are, as it were, always interlocked. For that reason some of the manifestations and properties of the super-ego can be more easily detected in its behaviour in the cultural community than in the separate individual.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4530

The cultural super-ego has developed its ideals and set up its demands. Among the latter, those which deal with the relations of human beings to one another are comprised under the heading of ethics. People have at all times set the greatest value on ethics, as though they expected that it in particular would produce especially important results. And it does in fact deal with a subject which can easily be recognized as the sorest spot in every civilization. Ethics is thus to be regarded as a therapeutic attempt - as an endeavour to achieve, by means of a command of the super-ego, something which has so far not been achieved by means of any other cultural activities. As we already know, the problem before us is how to get rid of the greatest hindrance to civilization - namely, the constitutional inclination of human beings to be aggressive towards one another; and for that very reason we are especially interested in what is probably the most recent of the cultural commands of the super-ego, the commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself. In our research into, and therapy of, a neurosis, we are led to make two reproaches against the super-ego of the individual. In the severity of its commands and prohibitions it troubles itself too little about the happiness of the ego, in that it takes insufficient account of the resistances against obeying them - of the instinctual strength of the id, and of the difficulties presented by the real external environment. Consequently we are very often obliged, for therapeutic purposes, to oppose the super-ego, and we endeavour to lower its demands. Exactly the same objections can be made against the ethical demands of the cultural super-ego. It, too, does not trouble itself enough about the facts of the mental constitution of human beings. It issues a command and does not ask whether it is possible for people to obey it. On the contrary, it assumes that a man’s ego is psychologically capable of anything that is required of it, that his ego has unlimited mastery over his id. This is a mistake; and even in what are known as normal people the id cannot be controlled beyond certain limits. If more is demanded of a man, a revolt will be produced in him or a neurosis, or he will be made unhappy. The commandment, ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’, is the strongest defence against human aggressiveness and an excellent example of the unpsychological proceedings of the cultural super-ego. The commandment is impossible to fulfil; such an enormous inflation of love can only lower its value, not get rid of the difficulty. Civilization pays no attention to all this; it merely admonishes us that the harder it is to obey the precept the more meritorious it is to do so. But anyone who follows such a precept in present-day civilization only puts himself at a disadvantage vis-à-vis the person who disregards it. What a potent obstacle to civilization aggressiveness must be, if the defence against it can cause as much unhappiness as aggressiveness itself! ‘Natural’ ethics, as it is called, has nothing to offer here except the narcissistic satisfaction of being able to think oneself better than others. At this point the ethics based on religion introduces its promises of a better after-life. But so long as virtue is not rewarded here on earth, ethics will, I fancy, preach in vain. I too think it quite certain that a real change in the relations of human beings to possessions would be of more help in this direction than any ethical commands; but the recognition of this fact among socialists has been obscured and made useless for practical purposes by a fresh idealistic misconception of human nature.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4531

I believe the line of thought which seeks to trace in the phenomena of cultural development the part played by a super-ego promises still further discoveries. I hasten to come to a close. But there is one question which I can hardly evade. If the development of civilization has such a far-reaching similarity to the development of the individual and if it employs the same methods, may we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization - possibly the whole of mankind - have become ‘neurotic’? An analytic dissection of such neuroses might lead to therapeutic recommendations which could lay claim to great practical interest. I would not say that an attempt of this kind to carry psycho-analysis over to the cultural community was absurd or doomed to be fruitless. But we should have to be very cautious and not forget that, after all, we are only dealing with analogies and that it is dangerous, not only with men but also with concepts, to tear them from the sphere in which they have originated and been evolved. Moreover, the diagnosis of communal neuroses is faced with a special difficulty. In an individual neurosis we take as our starting-point the contrast that distinguishes the patient from his environment, which is assumed to be ‘normal’. For a group all of whose members are affected by one and the same disorder no such background could exist; it would have to be found elsewhere. And as regards the therapeutic application of our knowledge, what would be the use of the most correct analysis of social neuroses, since no one possesses authority to impose such a therapy upon the group? But in spite of all these difficulties, we may expect that one day someone will venture to embark upon a pathology of cultural communities.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4532

For a wide variety of reasons, it is very far from my intention to express an opinion upon the value of human civilization. I have endeavoured to guard myself against the enthusiastic prejudice which holds that our civilization is the most precious thing that we possess or could acquire and that its path will necessarily lead to heights of unimagined perfection. I can at least listen without indignation to the critic who is of the opinion that when one surveys the aims of cultural endeavour and the means it employs, one is bound to come to the conclusion that the whole effort is not worth the trouble, and that the outcome of it can only be a state of affairs which the individual will be unable to tolerate. My impartiality is made all the easier to me by my knowing very little about all these things. One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man’s judgements of value follow directly his wishes for happiness - that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments. I should find it very understandable if someone were to point out the obligatory nature of the course of human civilization and were to say, for instance, that the tendencies to a restriction of sexual life or to the institution of a humanitarian ideal at the expense of natural selection were developmental trends which cannot be averted or turned aside and to which it is best for us to yield as though they were necessities of nature. I know, too, the objection that can be made against this, to the effect that in the history of mankind, trends such as these, which were considered unsurmountable, have often been thrown aside and replaced by other trends. Thus I have not the courage to rise up before my fellow-men as a prophet, and I bow to their reproach that I can offer them no consolation: for at bottom that is what they are all demanding - the wildest revolutionaries no less passionately than the most virtuous believers.

The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. It may be that in this respect precisely the present time deserves a special interest. Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety. And now it is to be expected that the other of the two ‘Heavenly Powers’, eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary. But who can foresee with what success and with what result?

4533

FETISHISM

(1927)

4534

Intentionally left blank

4535

FETISHISM

In the last few years I have had an opportunity of studying analytically a number of men whose object-choice was dominated by a fetish. There is no need to expect that these people came to analysis on account of their fetish. For though no doubt a fetish is recognized by its adherents as an abnormality, it is seldom felt by them as the symptom of an ailment accompanied by suffering. Usually they are quite satisfied with it, or even praise the way in which it eases their erotic life. As a rule, therefore, the fetish made its appearance in analysis as a subsidiary finding.

For obvious reasons the details of these cases must be withheld from publication; I cannot, therefore, show in what way accidental circumstances have contributed to the choice of a fetish. The most extraordinary case seemed to me to be one in which a young man had exalted a certain sort of ‘shine on the nose’ into a fetishistic precondition. The surprising explanation of this was that the patient had been brought up in an English nursery but had later come to Germany, where he forgot his mother-tongue almost completely. The fetish, which originated from his earliest childhood, had to be understood in English, not German. The ‘shine on the nose’ - was in reality a ‘glance at the nose’. The nose was thus the fetish, which, incidentally, he endowed at will with the luminous shine which was not perceptible to others.

In every instance, the meaning and the purpose of the fetish turned out, in analysis, to be the same. It revealed itself so naturally and seemed to me so compelling that I am prepared to expect the same solution in all cases of fetishism. When now I announce that the fetish is a substitute for the penis, I shall certainly create disappointment; so I hasten to add that it is not a substitute for any chance penis, but for a particular and quite special penis that had been extremely important in early childhood but had later been lost. That is to say, it should normally have been given up, but the fetish is precisely designed to preserve it from extinction. To put it more plainly: the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and - for reasons familiar to us - does not want to give up.¹

¹ This interpretation was made as early as 1910, in my study on Leonardo da Vinci, without any reasons being given for it.

Fetishism

4536

What happened, therefore, was that the boy refused to take cognizance of the fact of his having perceived that a woman does not possess a penis. No, that could not be true: for if a woman had been castrated, then his own possession of a penis was in danger; and against that there rose in rebellion the portion of his narcissism which Nature has, as a precaution, attached to that particular organ. In later life a grown man may perhaps experience a similar panic when the cry goes up that Throne and Altar are in danger, and similar illogical consequences will ensue. If I am not mistaken, Laforgue would say in this case that the boy ‘scotomizes’ his perception of the woman’s lack of a penis.¹ A new technical term is justified when it describes a new fact or emphasizes it. This is not so here. The oldest word in our psycho-analytic terminology, ‘repression’, already relates to this pathological process. If we wanted to differentiate more sharply between the vicissitude of the idea as distinct from that of the affect, and reserve the word ‘Verdrängung’ [‘repression’] for the affect, then the correct German word for the vicissitude of the idea would be ‘Verleugnung’ [’disavowal’]. ‘Scotomization’ seems to me particularly unsuitable, for it suggests that the perception is entirely wiped out, so that the result is the same as when a visual impression falls on the blind spot in the retina. In the situation we are considering, on the contrary, we see that the perception has persisted, and that a very energetic action has been undertaken to maintain the disavowal. It is not true that, after the child has made his observation of the woman, he has preserved unaltered his belief that women have a phallus. He has retained that belief, but he has also given it up. In the conflict between the weight of the unwelcome perception and the force of his counter-wish, a compromise has been reached, as is only possible under the dominance of the unconscious laws of thought - the primary processes. Yes, in his mind the woman has got a penis, in spite of everything; but this penis is no longer the same as it was before. Something else has taken its place, has been appointed its substitute, as it were, and now inherits the interest which was formerly directed to its predecessor. But this interest suffers an extraordinary increase as well, because the horror of castration has set up a memorial to itself in the creation of this substitute. Furthermore, an aversion, which is never absent in any fetishist, to the real female genitals remains a stigma indelebile of the repression that has taken place. We can now see what the fetish achieves and what it is that maintains it. It remains a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it. It also saves the fetishist from becoming a homosexual, by endowing women with the characteristic which makes them tolerable as sexual objects. In later life, the fetishist feels that he enjoys yet another advantage from his substitute for a genital. The meaning of the fetish is not known to other people, so the fetish is not withheld from him: it is easily accessible and he can readily obtain the sexual satisfaction attached to it. What other men have to woo and make exertions for can be had by the fetishist with no trouble at all.

¹ I correct myself, however, by adding that I have the best reasons for supposing that Laforgue would not say anything of the sort. It is clear from his own remarks that ‘scotomization’ is a term which derives from descriptions of dementia praecox, which does not arise from a carrying-over of psycho-analytic concepts to the psychoses and which has no application to developmental processes or to the formation of neuroses. In his exposition in the text of his paper, the author has been at pains to make this incompatibility clear.

Fetishism

4537

Probably no male human being is spared the fright of castration at the sight of a female genital. Why some people become homosexual as a consequence of that impression, while others fend it off by creating a fetish, and the great majority surmount it, we are frankly not able to explain. It is possible that, among all the factors at work, we do not yet know those which are decisive for the rare pathological results. We must be content if we can explain what has happened, and may for the present leave on one side the task of explaining why something has not happened.

One would expect that the organs or objects chosen as substitutes for the absent female phallus would be such as appear as symbols of the penis in other connections as well. This may happen often enough, but is certainly not a deciding factor. It seems rather that when the fetish is instituted some process occurs which reminds one of the stopping of memory in traumatic amnesia. As in this latter case, the subject’s interest comes to a halt half-way, as it were; it is as though the last impression before the uncanny and traumatic one is retained as a fetish. Thus the foot or shoe owes its preference as a fetish - or a part of it - to the circumstance that the inquisitive boy peered at the woman’s genitals from below, from her legs up; fur and velvet - as has long been suspected - are a fixation of the sight of the pubic hair, which should have been followed by the longed-for sight of the female member; pieces of underclothing, which are so often chosen as a fetish, crystallize the moment of undressing, the last moment in which the woman could still be regarded as phallic. But I do not maintain that it is invariably possible to discover with certainty how the fetish was determined.

An investigation of fetishism is strongly recommended to any one who still doubts the existence of the castration complex or who can still believe that fright at the sight of the female genital has some other ground - for instance, that it is derived from a supposed recollection of the trauma of birth.

For me, the explanation of fetishism had another point of theoretical interest as well. Recently, along quite speculative lines, I arrived at the proposition that the essential difference between neurosis and psychosis was that in the former the ego, in the service of reality, suppresses a piece of the id, whereas in a psychosis it lets itself be induced by the id to detach itself from a piece of reality. I returned to this theme once again later on.¹ But soon after this I had reason to regret that I had ventured so far. In the analysis of two young men I learned that each - one when he was two years old and the other when he was ten - had failed to take cognizance of the death of his beloved father - had ‘scotomized’ it - and yet neither of them had developed a psychosis. Thus a piece of reality which was undoubtedly important had been disavowed by the ego, just as the unwelcome fact of women’s castration is disavowed in fetishists. I also began to suspect that similar occurrences in childhood are by no means rare, and I believed that I had been guilty of an error in my characterization of neurosis and psychosis. It is true that there was one way out of the difficulty. My formula needed only to hold good where there was a higher degree of differentiation in the psychical apparatus; things might be permissible to a child which would entail severe injury to an adult.

¹ ‘Neurosis and Psychosis’ (1924b) and ‘The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis’ (1924e).

Fetishism

4538

But further research led to another solution of the contradiction. It turned out that the two young men had no more ‘scotomized’ their father’s death than a fetishist does the castration of women. It was only one current in their mental life that had not recognized their father’s death; there was another current which took full account of that fact. The attitude which fitted in with the wish and the attitude which fitted in with reality existed side by side. In one of my two cases this split had formed the basis of a moderately severe obsessional neurosis. The patient oscillated in every situation in life between two assumptions: the one, that his father was still alive and was hindering his activities; the other, opposite one, that he was entitled to regard himself as his father’s successor. I may thus keep to the expectation that in a psychosis the one current - that which fitted in with reality - would have in fact been absent.

Returning to my description of fetishism, I may say that there are many and weighty additional proofs of the divided attitude of fetishists to the question of the castration of women. In very subtle instances both the disavowal and the affirmation of the castration have found their way into the construction of the fetish itself. This was so in the case of a man whose fetish was an athletic support-belt which could also be worn as bathing drawers. This piece of clothing covered up the genitals entirely and concealed the distinction between them. Analysis showed that it signified that women were castrated and that they were not castrated; and it also allowed of the hypothesis that men were castrated, for all these possibilities could equally well be concealed under the belt - the earliest rudiment of which in his childhood had been the fig-leaf on a statue. A fetish of this sort, doubly derived from contrary ideas, is of course especially durable. In other instances the divided attitude shows itself in what the fetishist does with his fetish, whether in reality or in his imagination. To point out that he reveres his fetish is not the whole story; in many cases he treats it in a way which is obviously equivalent to a representation of castration. This happens particularly if he has developed a strong identification with his father and plays the part of the latter; for it is to him that as a child he ascribed the woman’s castration. Affection and hostility in the treatment of the fetish - which run parallel with the disavowal and the acknowledgement of castration - are mixed in unequal proportions in different cases, so that the one or the other is more clearly recognizable. We seem here to approach an understanding, even if a distant one, of the behaviour of the ‘coupeur de nattes’. In him the need to carry out the castration which he disavows has come to the front. His action contains in itself the two mutually incompatible assertions: ‘the woman has still got a penis’ and ‘my father has castrated the woman’. Another variant, which is also a parallel to fetishism in social psychology, might be seen in the Chinese custom of mutilating the female foot and then revering it like a fetish after it has been mutilated. It seems as though the Chinese male wants to thank the woman for having submitted to being castrated.

In conclusion we may say that the normal prototype of fetishes is a man’s penis, just as the normal prototype of inferior organs is a woman’s real small penis, the clitoris.

4539

HUMOUR

(1927)

4540

Intentionally left blank

4541

HUMOUR

In my volume on Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905c), I in fact considered humour only from the economic point of view. My object was to discover the source of the pleasure obtained from humour, and I think I was able to show that the yield of humorous pleasure arises from an economy in expenditure upon feeling.

There are two ways in which the humorous process can take place. It may take place in regard to a single person, who himself adopts the humorous attitude, while a second person plays the part of the spectator who derives enjoyment from it; or it may take place between two persons, of whom one takes no part at all in the humorous process, but is made the object of humorous contemplation by the other. When, to take the crudest example, a criminal who was being led out to the gallows on a Monday remarked: ‘Well, the week’s beginning nicely’, he was producing the humour himself; the humorous process is completed in his own person and obviously affords him a certain sense of satisfaction. I, the non-participating listener, am affected as it were at long-range by this humorous production of the criminal’s; I feel, like him, perhaps, the yield of humorous pleasure.

We have an instance of the second way in which humour arises when a writer or a narrator describes the behaviour of real or imaginary people in a humorous manner. There is no need for those people to display any humour themselves; the humorous attitude is solely the business of the person who is taking them as his object; and, as in the former instance, the reader or hearer shares in the enjoyment of the humour. To sum up, then, we can say that the humorous attitude - whatever it may consist in - can be directed either towards the subject’s own self or towards other people; it is to be assumed that it brings a yield of pleasure to the person who adopts it, and a similar yield of pleasure falls to the share of the non-participating onlooker.

We shall best understand the genesis of the yield of humorous pleasure if we consider the process in the listener before whom someone else produces humour. He sees this other person in a situation which leads the listener to expect that the other will produce the signs of an affect - that he will get angry, complain, express pain, be frightened or horrified or perhaps even in despair; and the onlooker or listener is prepared to follow his lead and to call up the same emotional impulses in himself. But this emotional expectancy is disappointed; the other person expresses no affect, but makes a jest. The expenditure on feeling that is economized turns into humorous pleasure in the listener.

Humour

4542

It is easy to get so far. But we soon tell ourselves that it is the process which takes place in the other person - the ‘humorist’ - that merits the greater attention. There is no doubt that the essence of humour is that one spares oneself the affects to which the situation would naturally give rise and dismisses the possibility of such expressions of emotion with a jest. As far as this goes, the process in the humorist must tally with the process in the hearer - or, to put it more correctly, the process in the hearer must have copied the one in the humorist. But how does the latter bring about the mental attitude which makes a release of affect superfluous? What are the dynamics of his adoption of the ‘humorous attitude’? Clearly, the solution of the problem is to be sought in the humorist; in the hearer we must assume that there is only an echo, a copy, of this unknown process.

It is now time to acquaint ourselves with a few of the characteristics of humour. Like jokes and the comic, humour has something liberating about it; but it also has something of grandeur and elevation, which is lacking in the other two ways of obtaining pleasure from intellectual activity. The grandeur in it clearly lies in the triumph of narcissism, the victorious assertion of the ego’s invulnerability. The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure. This last feature is a quite essential element of humour. Let us suppose that the criminal who was being led to execution on Monday had said: ‘It doesn’t worry me. What does it matter, after all, if a fellow like me is hanged? The world won’t come to an end because of it.’ We should have to admit that such a speech does in fact display the same magnificent superiority over the real situation. It is wise and true; but it does not betray a trace of humour. Indeed, it is based on an appraisal of reality which runs directly counter to the appraisal made by humour. Humour is not resigned; it is rebellious. It signifies not only the triumph of the ego but also of the pleasure principle, which is able here to assert itself against the unkindness of the real circumstances.

Humour

4543

These last two features - the rejection of the claims of reality and the putting though of the pleasure principle - bring humour near to the regressive or reactionary processes which engage our attention so extensively in psychopathology. Its fending off of the possibility of suffering places it among the great series of methods which the human mind has constructed in order to evade the compulsion to suffer - a series which begins with neurosis and culminates in madness and which includes intoxication, self-absorption and ecstasy. Thanks to this connection, humour possesses a dignity which is wholly lacking, for instance, in jokes, for jokes either serve simply to obtain a yield of pleasure or place the yield of pleasure that has been obtained in the service of aggression. In what, then, does the humorous attitude consist, an attitude by means of which a person refuses to suffer, emphasizes the invincibility of his ego by the real world, victoriously maintains the pleasure principle - and all this, in contrast to other methods having the same purposes, without overstepping the bounds of mental health? The two achievements seem incompatible.

If we turn to the situation in which one person adopts a humorous attitude towards others, a view which I have already put forward tentatively in my book on jokes will at once suggest itself. This is that the subject is behaving towards them as an adult does towards a child when he recognizes and smiles at the triviality of interests and sufferings which seem so great to it. Thus the humorist would acquire his superiority by assuming the role of the grown-up and identifying himself to some extent with his father, and reducing the other people to being children. This view probably covers the facts, but it hardly seems a conclusive one. One asks oneself what it is that makes the humorist arrogate this role to himself.

Humour

4544

But we must recall the other, probably more primary and important, situation of humour, in which a person adopts a humorous attitude towards himself in order to ward off possible suffering. Is there any sense in saying that someone is treating himself like a child and is at the same time playing the part of a superior adult towards that child?

This not very plausible idea receives strong support, I think, if we consider what we have learned from pathological observations on the structure of the ego. This ego is not a simple entity. It harbours within it, as its nucleus, a special agency the super-ego. Sometimes it is merged with the super-ego so that we cannot distinguish between them, whereas in other circumstances it is sharply differentiated from it. Genetically the super-ego is the heir to the parental agency. It often keeps the ego in strict dependence and still really treats it as the parents, or the father, once treated the child, in its early years. We obtain a dynamic explanation of the humorous attitude, therefore, if we assume that it consists in the humorist’s having withdrawn the psychical accent from his ego and having transposed it on to his super-ego. To the super-ego, thus inflated, the ego can appear tiny and all its interests trivial; and, with this new distribution of energy, it may become an easy matter for the super-ego to suppress the ego’s possibilities of reacting.

In order to remain faithful to our customary phraseology, we shall have to speak, not of transposing the psychical accent, but of displacing large amounts of cathexis. The question then is whether we are entitled to picture extensive displacements like this from one agency of the mental apparatus to another. It looks like a new hypothesis constructed ad hoc. Yet we may remind ourselves that we have repeatedly (even though not sufficiently often) taken a factor of this kind into account in our attempts at a metapsychological picture of mental events. Thus, for instance, we supposed that the difference between an ordinary erotic object-cathexis and the state of being in love is that in the latter incomparably more cathexis passes over to the object and that the ego empties itself as it were in favour of the object. In studying some cases of paranoia I was able to establish the fact that ideas of persecution are formed early and exist for a long time without any perceptible effect, until, as the result of some particular precipitating event, they receive sufficient amounts of cathexis to cause them to become dominant. The cure, too, of such paranoic attacks would lie not so much in a resolution and correction of the delusional ideas as in a withdrawal from them of the cathexis which has been lent to them. The alternations between melancholia and mania, between a cruel suppression of the ego by the super-ego and a liberation of the ego after that pressure, suggests a shift of cathexis of this kind; such a shift, moreover, would have to be brought in to explain a whole number of phenomena belonging to normal mental life. If this has been done hitherto only to a very limited extent, that is on account of our usual caution - something which deserves only praise. The region in which we feel secure is that of the pathology of mental life; it is here that we make our observations and acquire our convictions. For the present we venture to form a judgement on the normal mind only in so far as we can discern what is normal in the isolations and distortions of the pathological material. When once we have overcome this hesitancy we shall recognize what a large contribution is made to the understanding of mental processes by the static conditions as well as by the dynamic changes in the quantity of energic cathexis.

Humour

4545

I think, therefore, that the possibility I have suggested here, that in a particular situation the subject suddenly hypercathects his super-ego and then, proceeding from it, alters the reactions of the ego, is one which deserves to be retained. Moreover, what I have suggested about humour finds a remarkable analogy in the kindred field of jokes. As regards the origin of jokes I was led to assume that a preconscious thought is given over for a moment to unconscious revision. A joke is thus the contribution made to the comic by the unconscious. In just the same way, humour would be the contribution made to the comic through the agency of the super-ego.

In other connections we knew the super-ego as a severe master. It will be said that it accords ill with such a character that the super-ego should condescend to enabling the ego to obtain a small yield of pleasure. It is true that humorous pleasure never reaches the intensity of the pleasure in the comic or in jokes, that it never finds vent in hearty laughter. It is also true that, in bringing about the humorous attitude, the super-ego is actually repudiating reality and serving an illusion. But (without rightly knowing why) we regard this less intense pleasure as having a character of very high value; we feel it to be especially liberating and elevating. Moreover, the jest made by humour is not the essential thing. It has only the value of a preliminary. The main thing is the intention which humour carries out, whether it is acting in relation to the self or other people. It means: ‘Look! here is the world, which seems so dangerous! It is nothing but a game for children - just worth making a jest about!’

If it is really the super-ego which, in humour, speaks such kindly words of comfort to the intimidated ego, this will teach us that we have still a great deal to learn about the nature of the super-ego. Furthermore, not everyone is capable of the humorous attitude. It is a rare and precious gift, and many people are even without the capacity to enjoy humorous pleasure that is presented to them. And finally, if the super-ego tries, by means of humour, to console the ego and protect it from suffering, this does not contradict its origin in the parental agency.

4546

A RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

(1928)

4547

Intentionally left blank

4548

A RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

In the autumn of 1927, G. S. Viereck, a German-American journalist who had paid me a welcome visit, published an account of a conversation with me, in the course of which he mentioned my lack of religious faith and my indifference on the subject of survival after death. This ‘interview, as it was called, was widely read and brought me, among others, the following letter from an American physician:

‘. . . What struck me most was your answer to the question whether you believe in a survival of personality after death. You are reported as having said: "I give no thought to the matter."

‘I am writing now to tell you of an experience that I had in the year I graduated at the University of X. One afternoon while I was passing through the dissecting-room my attention was attracted to a sweet-faced dear old woman who was being carried to a dissecting-table. This sweet-faced woman made such an impression on me that a thought flashed up in my mind: "There is no God: if there were a God he would not have allowed this dear old woman to be brought into the dissecting room."

‘When I got home that afternoon the feeling I had had at the sight in the dissecting-room had determined me to discontinue going to church. The doctrines of Christianity had before this been the subject of doubts in my mind.

‘While I was meditating on this matter a voice spoke to my soul that "I should consider the step I was about to take". My spirit replied to this inner voice by saying, "If I knew of a certainty that Christianity was truth and the Bible was the Word of God, then I would accept it."

‘In the course of the next few days God made it clear to my soul that the Bible was His Word, that the teachings about Jesus Christ were true, and that Jesus was our only hope. After such a clear revelation I accepted the Bible as God’s Word and Jesus Christ as my personal Saviour. Since then God has revealed Himself to me by many infallible proofs.

‘I beg you as a brother physician to give thought to this most important matter, and I can assure you, if you look into this subject with an open mind, God will reveal the truth to your soul, the same as he did to me and to multitudes of others. . . .’

A Religious Experience

4549

I sent a polite answer, saying that I was glad to hear that this experience had enabled him to retain his faith. As for myself, God had not done so much for me. He had never allowed me to hear an inner voice; and if, in view of my age, he did not make haste, it would not be my fault if I remained to the end of my life what I now was - ‘an infidel Jew’.

In the course of a friendly reply, my colleague gave me an assurance that being a Jew was not an obstacle in the pathway to true faith and proved this by several instances. His letter culminated in the information that prayers were being earnestly addressed to God that he might grant me ‘faith to believe’.

I am still awaiting the outcome of this intercession. In the meantime, my colleague’s religious experience provides food for thought. It seems to me to demand some attempt at an interpretation based upon emotional motives; for his experience is puzzling in itself and is based on particularly bad logic. God, as we know, allows horrors to take place of a kind very different from the removal to a dissecting-room of the dead body of a pleasant-looking old woman. This has been true at all times, and it must have been so while my American colleague was pursuing his studies. Nor, as a medical student, can he have been so sheltered from the world as to have known nothing of such evils. Why was it, then, that his indignation against God broke out precisely when he received this particular impression in the dissecting-room?

For anyone who is accustomed to regard men’s internal experiences and actions analytically the explanation is very obvious - so obvious that it actually crept into my recollections of the facts themselves. Once, when I was referring to my pious colleague’s letter in the course of a discussion, I spoke of his having written that the dead woman’s face had reminded him of his own mother. In fact these words were not in his letter, and a moment’s reflection will show that they could not possibly have been. But that is the explanation irresistibly forced on us by his affectionately phrased description of the ‘sweet-faced dear old woman’. Thus the weakness of judgement displayed by the young doctor is to be accounted for by the emotion roused in him by the memory of his mother. It is difficult to escape from the bad psycho-analytic habit of bringing forward as evidence details which also allow of more superficial explanations - and I am tempted to recall the fact that my colleague addressed me later as a ‘brother physician’.

A Religious Experience

4550

We may suppose, therefore, that this was the way in which things happened. The sight of a woman’s dead body, naked or on the point of being stripped, reminded the young man of his mother. It roused in him a longing for his mother which sprang from his Oedipus complex, and this was immediately completed by a feeling of indignation against his father. His ideas of ‘father’ and ‘God’ had not yet become widely separated; so that his desire to destroy his father could become conscious as doubt in the existence of God and could seek to justify itself in the eyes of reason as indignation about the ill-treatment of a mother object. It is of course typical for a child to regard what his father does to his mother in sexual intercourse as ill-treatment. The new impulse, which was displaced into the sphere of religion, was only a repetition of the Oedipus situation and consequently soon met with a similar fate. It succumbed to a powerful opposing current. During the actual conflict the level of displacement was not maintained: there is no mention of arguments in justification of God, nor are we told what the infallible signs were by which God proved his existence to the doubter. The conflict seems to have been unfolded in the form of a hallucinatory psychosis: inner voices were heard which uttered warnings against resistance to God. But the outcome of the struggle was displayed once again in the sphere of religion and it was of a kind predetermined by the fate of the Oedipus complex: complete submission to the will of God the Father. The young man became a believer and accepted everything he had been taught since his childhood about God and Jesus Christ. He had had a religious experience and had undergone a conversion.

All of this is so simple and straightforward that we cannot but ask ourselves whether by understanding this case we have thrown any light at all on the psychology of conversion in general. I may refer the reader to an admirable volume on the subject by Sante de Sanctis (1924), which incidentally takes all the findings of psycho-analysis into account. Study of this work confirms our expectation that by no means every case of conversion can be understood so easily as this one. In no respect, however, does our case contradict the views arrived at on the subject by modern research. The point which our present observation throws into relief is the manner in which the conversion was attached to a particular determining event, which caused the subject’s scepticism to flare up for a last time before being finally extinguished.

4551

DOSTOEVSKY AND PARRICIDE

(1928)

4552

Intentionally left blank

4553

DOSTOEVSKY AND PARRICIDE

Four facets may be distinguished in the rich personality of Dostoevsky: the creative artist, the neurotic, the moralist and the sinner. How is one to find one’s way in this bewildering complexity?

The creative artist is the least doubtful: Dostoevsky’s place is not far behind Shakespeare. The Brothers Kamarazov is the most magnificent novel ever written; the episode of the Grand Inquisitor, one of the peaks in the literature of the world, can hardly be valued too highly. Before the problem of the creative artist analysis must, alas, lay down its arms.

The moralist in Dostoevsky is the most readily assailable. If we seek to rank him high as a moralist on the plea that only a man who has gone through the depths of sin can reach the highest summit of morality, we are neglecting a doubt that arises. A moral man is one who reacts to temptation as soon as he feels it in his heart, without yielding to it. A man who alternately sins and then in his remorse erects high moral standards lays himself open to the reproach that he has made things too easy for himself. He has not achieved the essence of morality, renunciation, for the moral conduct of life is a practical human interest. He reminds one of the barbarians of the great migrations, who murdered and did penance for it, till penance became an actual technique for enabling murder to be done. Ivan the Terrible behaved in exactly this way; indeed this compromise with morality is a characteristic Russian trait. Nor was the final outcome of Dostoevsky’s moral strivings anything very glorious. After the most violent struggles to reconcile the instinctual demands of the individual with the claims of the community, he landed in the retrograde position of submission both to temporal and spiritual authority, of veneration both for the Tsar and for the God of the Christians, and of a narrow Russian nationalism - a position which lesser minds have reached with smaller effort. This is the weak point in that great personality. Dostoevsky threw away the chance of becoming a teacher and liberator of humanity and made himself one with their gaolers. The future of human civilization will have little to thank him for. It seems probable that he was condemned to this failure by his neurosis. The greatness of his intelligence and the strength of his love for humanity might have opened to him another, an apostolic, way of life.

Dostoevsky And Parricide

4554

To consider Dostoevsky as a sinner or a criminal rouses violent opposition, which need not be based upon a philistine assessment of criminals. The real motive for this opposition soon becomes apparent. Two traits are essential in a criminal: boundless egoism and a strong destructive urge. Common to both of these, and a necessary condition for their expression, is absence of love, lack of an emotional appreciation of (human) objects. One at once recalls the contrast to this presented by Dostoevsky - his great need of love and his enormous capacity for love, which is to be seen in manifestations of exaggerated kindness and caused him to love and to help where he had a right to hate and to be revengeful, as, for example, in his relations with his first wife and her lover. That being so, it must be asked why there is any temptation to reckon Dostoevsky among the criminals. The answer is that it comes from his choice of material, which singles out from all others violent, murderous and egoistic characters, thus pointing to the existence of similar tendencies within himself, and also from certain facts in his life, like his passion for gambling and his possible confession to a sexual assault upon a young girl.¹ The contradiction is resolved by the realization that Dostoevsky’s very strong destructive instinct, which might easily have made him a criminal, was in his actual life directed mainly against his own person (inward instead of outward) and thus found expression as masochism and a sense of guilt. Nevertheless, his personality retained sadistic traits in plenty, which show themselves in his irritability, his love of tormenting and his intolerance even towards people he loved, and which appear also in the way in which, as an author, he treats his readers. Thus in little things he was a sadist towards others, and in bigger things a sadist towards himself, in fact a masochist - that is to say the mildest, kindliest, most helpful person possible.

¹ See the discussion of this in Fülöp-Miller and Eckstein (1926). Stefan Zweig (1920) writes: ‘He was not halted by the barriers of bourgeois morality; and no one can say exactly how far he transgressed the bounds of law in his own life or how much of the criminal instincts of his heroes was realized in himself.’ For the intimate connection between Dostoevsky’s characters and his own experiences, see René Fülöp Miller’s remarks in the introductory section of Fülöp-Miller and Eckstein (1925), which are based upon N. Strakhov.

Dostoevsky And Parricide

4555

We have selected three factors from Dostoevsky’s complex personality, one quantitative and two qualitative: the extraordinary intensity of his emotional life, his perverse innate instinctual disposition, which inevitably marked him out to be a sado-masochist or a criminal, and his unanalysable artistic gift. This combination might very well exist without neurosis; there are people who are complete masochists without being neurotic. Nevertheless, the balance of forces between his instinctual demands and the inhibitions opposing them (plus the available methods of sublimation) would even so make it necessary to classify Dostoevsky as what is known as an ‘instinctual character’. But the position is obscured by the simultaneous presence of neurosis, which, as we have said, was not in the circumstances inevitable, but which comes into being the more readily, the richer the complication which has to be mastered by the ego. For neurosis is after all only a sign that the ego has not succeeded in making a synthesis, that in attempting to do so it has forfeited its unity.

How then, strictly speaking, does his neurosis show itself? Dostoevsky called himself an epileptic, and was regarded as such by other people, on account of his severe attacks, which were accompanied by loss of consciousness, muscular convulsions and subsequent depression. Now it is highly probable that this so-called epilepsy was only a symptom of his neurosis and must accordingly be classified as hystero-epilepsy - that is, as severe hysteria. We cannot be completely certain on this point for two reasons - firstly, because the anamnestic data on Dostoevsky’s alleged epilepsy are defective and untrustworthy, and secondly, because our understanding of pathological states combined with epileptiform attacks is imperfect.

Dostoevsky And Parricide

4556

To take the second point first. It is unnecessary here to reproduce the whole pathology of epilepsy, for it would throw no decisive light on the problem. But this may be said. The old morbus sacer is still in evidence as an ostensible clinical entity, the uncanny disease with its incalculable, apparently unprovoked convulsive attacks, its changing of the character into irritability and aggressiveness, and its progressive lowering of all the mental faculties. But the outlines of this picture are quite lacking in precision. The attacks, so savage in their onset, accompanied by biting of the tongue and incontinence of urine and working up to the dangerous status epilepticus with its risk of severe self-injuries, may, nevertheless, be reduced to brief periods of absence, or rapidly passing fits of vertigo or may be replaced by short spaces of time during which the patient does something out of character, as though he were under the control of his unconscious. These attacks, though as a rule determined, in a way we do not understand, by purely physical causes, may nevertheless owe their first appearance to some purely mental cause (a fright, for instance) or may react in other respects to mental excitations. However characteristic intellectual impairment may be in the overwhelming majority of cases, at least one case is known to us (that of Helmholtz) in which the affliction did not interfere with the highest intellectual achievement. (Other cases of which the same assertion has been made are either disputable or open to the same doubts as the case of Dostoevsky himself.) People who are victims of epilepsy may give an impression of dullness and arrested development just as the disease often accompanies the most palpable idiocy and the grossest cerebral defects, even though not as a necessary component of the clinical picture. But these attacks, with all their variations, also occur in other people who display complete mental development and, if anything, an excessive and as a rule insufficiently controlled emotional life. It is no wonder in these circumstances that it has been found impossible to maintain that ‘epilepsy’ is a single clinical entity. The similarity that we find in the manifest symptoms seems to call for a functional view of them. It is as though a mechanism for abnormal instinctual discharge had been laid down organically, which could be made use of in quite different circumstances - both in the case of disturbances of cerebral activity due to severe histolytic or toxic affections, and also in the case of inadequate control over the mental economy and at times when the activity of the energy operating in the mind reaches crisis-pitch. Behind this dichotomy we have a glimpse of the identity of the underlying mechanism of instinctual discharge. Nor can that mechanism stand remote from the sexual processes, which are fundamentally of toxic origin: the earliest physicians described coition as a minor epilepsy, and thus recognized in the sexual act a mitigation and adaptation of the epileptic method of discharging stimuli.

Dostoevsky And Parricide

4557

The ‘epileptic reaction’, as this common element may be called, is also undoubtedly at the disposal of the neurosis whose essence it is to get rid by somatic means of amounts of excitation which it cannot deal with psychically. Thus the epileptic attack becomes a symptom of hysteria and is adapted and modified by it just as it is by the normal sexual process of discharge. It is therefore quite right to distinguish between an organic and an ‘affective’ epilepsy. The practical significance of this is that a person who suffers from the first kind has a disease of the brain, while a person who suffers from the second kind is a neurotic. In the first case his mental life is subjected to an alien disturbance from without, in the second case the disturbance is an expression of his mental life itself.

It is extremely probable that Dostoevsky’s epilepsy was of the second kind. This cannot, strictly speaking, be proved. To do so we should have to be in a position to insert the first appearance of the attacks and their subsequent fluctuations into the thread of his mental life; and for that we know too little. The descriptions of the attacks themselves teach us nothing and our information about the relations between them and Dostoevsky’s experiences is defective and often contradictory. The most probable assumption is that the attacks went back far into his childhood, that their place was taken to begin with by milder symptoms and that they did not assume an epileptic form until after the shattering experience of his eighteenth year - the murder of his father.¹ It would be very much to the point if it could be established that they ceased completely during his exile in Siberia, but other accounts contradict this.²

¹ See René Fülöp-Miller (1924). Of especial interest is the information that in the novelist’s childhood ‘something terrible, unforgettable and agonizing’ happened, to which the first signs of his illness were to be traced (from an article by Suvorin in the newspaper Novoe Vremya, 1881, quoted in the introduction to Fülöp-Miller and Eckstein, 1925, xlv). See also Orest Miller (1921, 140): ‘There is, however, another special piece of evidence about Fyodor Mikhailovich’s illness, which relates to his earliest youth and brings the illness into connection with a tragic event in the family life of his parents. But, although this piece of evidence was given to me orally by one who was a close friend of Fyodor Mlkhailovich, I cannot bring myself to reproduce it fully and precisely since I have had no confirmation of this rumour from any other quarter.’ Biographers and scientific research workers cannot feel grateful for this discretion.

² Most of the accounts, including Dostoevsky’s own, assert on the contrary that the illness only assumed its final, epileptic character during the Siberian exile. Unfortunately there is reason to distrust the autobiographical statements of neurotics. Experience shows that their memories introduce falsifications which are designed to interrupt disagreeable causal connections. Nevertheless, it appears certain that Dostoevsky’s detention in the Siberian prison markedly altered his pathological condition. Cf. Fülöp-Miller (1924, 1186).

Dostoevsky And Parricide

4558

The unmistakable connection between the murder of the father in The Brothers Kamarazov and the fate of Dostoevsky’s own father has struck more than one of his biographers, and has led them to refer to ‘a certain modern school of psychology’. From the standpoint of psycho-analysis (for that is what is meant), we are tempted to see in that event the severest trauma and to regard Dostoevsky’s reaction to it as the turning-point of his neurosis. But if I undertake to substantiate this view psycho-analytically, I shall have to risk the danger of being unintelligible to all those readers who are unfamiliar with the language and theories of psycho-analysis.

We have one certain starting-point. We know the meaning of the first attacks from which Dostoevsky suffered in his early years, long before the incidence of the ‘epilepsy’. These attacks had the significance of death: they were heralded by a fear of death and consisted of lethargic, somnolent states. The illness first came over him while he was still a boy, in the form of a sudden, groundless melancholy, a feeling, as he later told his friend Soloviev, as though he were going to die on the spot. And there in fact followed a state exactly similar to real death. His brother Andrey tells us that even when he was quite young Fyodor used to leave little notes about before he went to sleep, saying that he was afraid he might fall into this death-like sleep during the night and therefore begged that his burial should be postponed for five days. (Fülöp-Miller and Eckstein, 1925, lx.)

Dostoevsky And Parricide

4559

We know the meaning and intention of such deathlike attacks. They signify an identification with a dead person, either with someone who is really dead or with someone who is still alive and whom the subject wishes dead. The latter case is the more significant. The attack then has the value of a punishment. One has wished another person dead, and now one is this other person and is dead oneself. At this point psycho-analytical theory brings in the assertion that for a boy this other person is usually his father and that the attack (which is termed hysterical) is thus a self-punishment for a death-wish against a hated father.

Parricide, according to a well-known view, is the principal and primal crime of humanity as well as of the individual. (See my Totem and Taboo 1912-13.) It is in any case the main source of the sense of guilt, though we do not know if it is the only one: researches have not yet been able to establish with certainty the mental origin of guilt and the need for expiation. But it is not necessary for it to be the only one. The psychological situation is complicated and requires elucidation. The relation of a boy to his father is, as we say, an ‘ambivalent’ one. In addition to the hate which seeks to get rid of the father as a rival, a measure of tenderness for him is also habitually present. The two attitudes of mind combine to produce identification with the father; the boy wants to be in his father’s place because he admires him and wants to be like him, and also because he wants to put him out of the way. This whole development now comes up against a powerful obstacle. At a certain moment the child comes to understand that an attempt to remove his father as a rival would be punished by him with castration. So from fear of castration - that is, in the interests of preserving his masculinity - he gives up his wish to possess his mother and get rid of his father. In so far as this wish remains in the unconscious it forms the basis of the sense of guilt. We believe that what we have here been describing are normal processes, the normal fate of the so-called ‘Oedipus complex’; nevertheless it requires an important amplification.

A further complication arises when the constitutional factor we call bisexuality is comparatively strongly developed in a child. For then, under the threat to the boy’s masculinity by castration, his inclination becomes strengthened to diverge in the direction of femininity, to put himself instead in his mother’s place and take over her role as object of his father’s love. But the fear of castration makes this solution impossible as well. The boy understands that he must also submit to castration if he wants to be loved by his father as a woman. Thus both impulses, hatred of the father and being in love with the father, undergo repression. There is a certain psychological distinction in the fact that the hatred of the father is given up on account of fear of an external danger (castration), while the being in love with the father is treated as an internal instinctual danger, though fundamentally it goes back to the same external danger.

Dostoevsky And Parricide

4560

What makes hatred of the father unacceptable is fear of the father; castration is terrible, whether as a punishment or as the price of love. Of the two factors which repress hatred of the father, the first, the direct fear of punishment and castration, may be called the normal one; its pathogenic intensification seems to come only with the addition of the second factor, the fear of the feminine attitude. Thus a strong innate bisexual disposition becomes one of the preconditions or reinforcements of neurosis. Such a disposition must certainly be assumed in Dostoevsky, and it shows itself in a viable form (as latent homosexuality) in the important part played by male friendships in his life, in his strangely tender attitude towards rivals in love and in his remarkable understanding of situations which are explicable only by repressed homosexuality, as many examples from his novels show.

I am sorry, though I cannot alter the facts, if this exposition of the attitudes of hatred and love towards the father and their transformations under the influence of the threat of castration seems to readers unfamiliar with psycho-analysis unsavoury and incredible. I should myself expect that it is precisely the castration complex that would be bound to arouse the most general repudiation. But I can only insist that psycho-analytic experience has put these matters in particular beyond the reach of doubt and has taught us to recognize in them the key to every neurosis. This key, then, we must apply to our author’s so-called epilepsy. So alien to our consciousness are the things by which our unconscious mental life is governed!

Dostoevsky And Parricide

4561

But what has been said so far does not exhaust the consequences of the repression of the hatred of the father in the Oedipus complex. There is something fresh to be added: namely that in spite of everything the identification with the father finally makes a permanent place for itself in the ego. It is received into the ego, but establishes itself there as a separate agency in contrast to the rest of the content of the ego. We then give it the name of super-ego and ascribe to it, the inheritor of the parental influence, the most important functions. If the father was hard, violent and cruel, the super-ego takes over those attributes from him and, in the relations between the ego and it, the passivity which was supposed to have been repressed is re-established. The super-ego has become sadistic, and the ego becomes masochistic - that is to say, at bottom passive in a feminine way. A great need for punishment develops in the ego, which in part offers itself as a victim to Fate, and in part finds satisfaction in ill-treatment by the super-ego (that is, in the sense of guilt). For every punishment is ultimately castration and, as such, a fulfilment of the old passive attitude towards the father. Even Fate is, in the last resort, only a later projection of the father.

The normal processes in the formation of conscience must be similar to the abnormal ones described here. We have not yet succeeded in fixing the boundary line between them. It will be observed that here the largest share in the outcome is ascribed to the passive component of repressed femininity. In addition, it must be of importance as an accidental factor whether the father, who is feared in any case, is also especially violent in reality. This was true in Dostoevsky’s case, and we can trace back the fact of his extraordinary sense of guilt and of his masochistic conduct of life to a specially strong feminine component. Thus the formula for Dostoevsky is as follows: a person with a specially strong innate bisexual disposition, who can defend himself with special intensity against dependence on a specially severe father. This characteristic of bisexuality comes as an addition to the components of his nature that we have already recognized. His early symptoms of death-like attacks can thus be understood as a father-identification on the part of his ego, which is permitted by his super-ego as a punishment. ‘You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father’ - the regular mechanism of hysterical symptoms. And further: ‘Now your father is killing you.’ For the ego the death symptom is a satisfaction in phantasy of the masculine wish and at the same time a masochistic satisfaction; for the super-ego it is a punitive satisfaction - that is, a sadistic satisfaction. Both of them, the ego and the super-ego, carry on the role of father.

Dostoevsky And Parricide

4562

To sum up, the relation between the subject and his father-object, while retaining its content, has been transformed into a relation between the ego and the super-ego - a new setting on a fresh stage. Infantile reactions from the Oedipus complex such as these may disappear if reality gives them no further nourishment. But the father’s character remained the same, or rather, it deteriorated with the years, and thus Dostoevsky’s hatred for his rather and his death-wish against that wicked father were maintained. Now it is a dangerous thing if reality fulfils such repressed wishes. The phantasy has become reality and all defensive measures are thereupon reinforced. Dostoevsky’s attacks now assumed an epileptic character; they still undoubtedly signified an identification with his father as a punishment, but they had become terrible, like his father’s frightful death itself. What further content they had absorbed, particularly what sexual content, escapes conjecture.

One thing is remarkable: in the aura of the epileptic attack, one moment of supreme bliss is experienced. This may very well be a record of the triumph and sense of liberation felt on hearing the news of the death, to be followed immediately by an all the more cruel punishment. We have divined just such a sequence of triumph and mourning, of festive joy and mourning, in the brothers of the primal horde who murdered their father, and we find it repeated in the ceremony of the totem meal.¹ If it proved to be the case that Dostoevsky was free from his attacks in Siberia, that would merely substantiate the view that they were his punishment. He did not need them any longer when he was being punished in another way. But that cannot be proved. Rather does this necessity for punishment on the part of Dostoevsky’s mental economy explain the fact that he passed unbroken through these years of misery and humiliation. Dostoevsky’s condemnation as a political prisoner was unjust and he must have known it, but he accepted the undeserved punishment at the hands of the Little Father, the Tsar, as a substitute for the punishment he deserved for his sin against his real father. Instead of punishing himself, he got himself punished by his father’s deputy. Here we have a glimpse of the psychological justification of the punishments inflicted by society. It is a fact that large groups of criminals want to be punished. Their super-ego demands it and so saves itself the necessity for inflicting the punishment itself.

¹ See Totem and Taboo.

Dostoevsky And Parricide

4563

Everyone who is familiar with the complicated transformation of meaning undergone by hysterical symptoms will understand that no attempt can be made here to follow out the meaning of Dostoevsky’s attacks beyond this beginning.¹ It is enough that we may assume that their original meaning remained unchanged behind all later accretions. We can safely say that Dostoevsky never got free from the feelings of guilt arising from his intention of murdering his father. They also determined his attitude in the two other spheres in which the father-relation is the decisive factor, his attitude towards the authority of the State and towards belief in God. In the first of these he ended up with complete submission to his Little Father, the Tsar, who had once performed with him in reality the comedy of killing which his attacks had so often represented in play. Here penitence gained the upper hand. In the religious sphere he retained more freedom: according to apparently trustworthy reports he wavered, up to the last moment of his life, between faith and atheism. His great intellect made it impossible for him to overlook any of the intellectual difficulties to which faith leads. By an individual recapitulation of a development in world-history he hoped to find a way out and a liberation from guilt in the Christ ideal, and even to make use of his sufferings as a claim to be playing a Christ-like role. If on the whole he did not achieve freedom and became a reactionary, that was because the filial guilt, which is present in human beings generally and on which religious feeling is built, had in him attained a super-individual intensity and remained insurmountable even to his great intelligence. In writing this we are laying ourselves open to the charge of having abandoned the impartiality of analysis and of subjecting Dostoevsky to judgements that can only be justified from the partisan standpoint of a particular Weltanschauung. A conservative would take the side of the Grand Inquisitor and would judge Dostoevsky differently. The objection is just; and one can only say in extenuation that Dostoevsky’s decision has every appearance of having been determined by an intellectual inhibition due to his neurosis.

¹ The best account of the meaning and content given by Dostoevsky himself, when he told his friend Strakhov that his irritability and depression after an epileptic attack were due to the fact that he seemed to himself a criminal and could not get rid of the feeling that he had a burden of unknown guilt upon him, that he had committed some great misdeed, which oppressed him. (Fülöp-Miller, 1924, 1188.) In self-accusations like these psycho-analysis sees signs of a recognition of ‘psychical reality’, and it endeavours to make the unknown guilt known to consciousness.

Dostoevsky And Parricide

4564

It can scarcely be owing to chance that three of the masterpieces of the literature of all time - the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Kamarazov - should all deal with the same subject, parricide. In all three, moreover, the motive for the deed, sexual rivalry for a woman, is laid bare.

The most straightforward is certainly the representation in the drama derived from the Greek legend. In this it is still the hero himself who commits the crime. But poetic treatment is impossible without softening and disguise. The naked admission of an intention to commit parricide, as we arrive at it in analysis, seems intolerable without analytic preparation. The Greek drama, while retaining the crime, introduces the indispensable toning-down in a masterly fashion by projecting the hero’s unconscious motive into reality in the form of a compulsion by a destiny which is alien to him. The hero commits the deed unintentionally and apparently uninfluenced by the woman; this latter element is however taken into account in the circumstance that the hero can only obtain possession of the queen mother after he has repeated his deed upon the monster who symbolizes the father. After his guilt has been revealed and made conscious, the hero makes no attempt to exculpate himself by appealing to the artificial expedient of the compulsion of destiny. His crime is acknowledged and punished as though it were a full and conscious one - which is bound to appear unjust to our reason, but which psychologically is perfectly correct.

In the English play the presentation is more indirect; the hero does not commit the crime himself; it is carried out by someone else, for whom it is not parricide. The forbidden motive of sexual rivalry for the woman does not need, therefore, to be disguised. Moreover, we see the hero’s Oedipus complex, as it were, in a reflected light, by learning the effect upon him of the other’s crime. He ought to avenge the crime, but finds himself, strangely enough, incapable of doing so. We know that it is his sense of guilt that is paralysing him; but, in a manner entirely in keeping with neurotic processes, the sense of guilt is displaced on to the perception of his inadequacy for fulfilling his task. There are signs that the hero feels this guilt as a super-individual one. He despises others no less than himself: ‘Use every man after his desert, and who should ‘scape whipping?’

Dostoevsky And Parricide

4565

The Russian novel goes a step further in the same direction. There also the murder is committed by someone else. This other person, however, stands to the murdered man in the same filial relation as the hero, Dmitri; in this other person’s case the motive of sexual rivalry is openly admitted; he is a brother of the hero’s, and it is a remarkable fact that Dostoevsky has attributed to him his own illness, the alleged epilepsy, as though he were seeking to confess that the epileptic, the neurotic, in himself was a parricide. Then, again, in the speech for the defence at the trial, there is the famous mockery of psychology - it is a ‘knife that cuts both ways’: a splendid piece of disguise, for we have only to reverse it in order to discover the deepest meaning of Dostoevsky’s view of things. It is not psychology that deserves the mockery, but the procedure of judicial enquiry. It is a matter of indifference who actually committed the crime; psychology is only concerned to know who desired it emotionally and who welcomed it when it was done. And for that reason all of the brothers, except the contrasted figure of Alyosha, are equally guilty - the impulsive sensualist, the sceptical cynic and the epileptic criminal. In The Brothers Karamazov there is one particularly revealing scene. In the course of his talk with Dmitri, Father Zossima recognizes that Dmitri is prepared to commit parricide, and he bows down at his feet. It is impossible that this can be meant as an expression of admiration; it must mean that the holy man is rejecting the temptation to despise or detest the murderer and for that reason humbles himself before him. Dostoevsky’s sympathy for the criminal is, in fact, boundless; it goes far beyond the pity which the unhappy wretch has a right to, and reminds us of the ‘holy awe’ with which epileptics and lunatics were regarded in the past. A criminal is to him almost a Redeemer, who has taken on himself the guilt which must else have been borne by others. There is no longer any need for one to murder, since he has already murdered; and one must be grateful to him, for, except for him, one would have been obliged oneself to murder. That is not kindly pity alone, it is identification on the basis of similar murderous impulses - in fact, a slightly displaced narcissism. (In saying this, we are not disputing the ethical value of this kindliness.) This may perhaps be quite generally the mechanism of kindly sympathy with other people, a mechanism which one can discern with especial ease in this extreme case of a guilt-ridden novelist. There is no doubt that this sympathy by identification was a decisive factor in determining Dostoevsky’s choice of material. He dealt first with the common criminal (whose motives are egotistical) and the political and religious criminal; and not until the end of his life did he come back to the primal criminal, the parricide, and use him, in a work of art, for making his confession.

Dostoevsky And Parricide

4566

The publication of Dostoevsky’s posthumous papers and of his wife’s diaries has thrown a glaring light on one episode in his life, namely the period in Germany when he was obsessed with a mania for gambling (cf. Fülöp-Miller and Eckstein, 1925), which no one could regard as anything but an unmistakable fit of pathological passion. There was no lack of rationalizations for this remarkable and unworthy behaviour. As often happens with neurotics, Dostoevsky’s sense of guilt had taken a tangible shape as a burden of debt, and he was able to take refuge behind the pretext that he was trying by his winnings at the tables to make it possible for him to return to Russia without being arrested by his creditors. But this was no more than a pretext and Dostoevsky was acute enough to recognize the fact and honest enough to admit it. He knew that the chief thing was gambling for its own sake - le jeu pour le jeu.¹ All the details of his impulsively irrational conduct show this and something more besides. He never rested until he had lost everything. For him gambling was a method of self-punishment as well. Time after time he gave his young wife his promise or his word of honour not to play any more or not to play any more on that particular day; and, as she says, he almost always broke it. When his losses had reduced himself and her to the direst need, he derived a second pathological satisfaction from that. He could then scold and humiliate himself before her, invite her to despise him and to feel sorry that she had married such an old sinner; and when he had thus unburdened his conscience, the whole business would begin again next day. His young wife accustomed herself to this cycle, for she had noticed that the one thing which offered any real hope of salvation - his literary production - never went better than when they had lost everything and pawned their last possessions. Naturally she did not understand the connection. When his sense of guilt was satisfied by the punishments he had inflicted on himself, the inhibition upon his work became less severe and he allowed himself to take a few steps along the road to success.²

¹ ‘The main thing is the play itself,’ he writes in one of his letters. ‘I swear that greed for money has nothing to do with it, although Heaven knows I am sorely in need of money.’

² ‘He always remained at the gaming tables till he had lost everything and was totally ruined. It was only when the damage was quite complete that the demon at last retired from his soul and made way for the creative genius.’ (Fülöp-Miller and Eckstein, 1925, lxxxvi.)

Dostoevsky And Parricide

4567

What part of a gambler’s long-buried childhood is it that forces its way to repetition in his obsession for play? The answer may be divined without difficulty from a story by one of our younger writers. Stefan Zweig, who has incidentally devoted a study to Dostoevsky himself (1920), has included in his collection of three stories Die Verwirrung der Gefühle (1927) one which he calls ‘Vierundzwanzig Stunden aus dem Leben einer Frau’. This little masterpiece ostensibly sets out only to show what an irresponsible creature woman is, and to what excesses, surprising even to herself, an unexpected experience may drive her. But the story tells far more than this. If it is subjected to an analytical interpretation, it will be found to represent (without any apologetic intent) something quite different, something universally human, or rather something masculine. And such an interpretation is so extremely obvious that it cannot be resisted. It is characteristic of the nature of artistic creation that the author, who is a personal friend of mine, was able to assure me, when I asked him, that the interpretation which I put to him had been completely strange to his knowledge and intention, although some of the details woven into the narrative seemed expressly designed to give a clue to the hidden secret.

In this story, an elderly lady of distinction tells the author about an experience she has had more than twenty years earlier. She has been left a widow when still young and is the mother of two sons, who no longer need her. In her forty-second year, expecting nothing further of life, she happens, on one of her aimless journeyings, to visit the Rooms at Monte Carlo. There, among all the remarkable impressions which the place produces, she is soon fascinated by the sight of a pair of hands which seem to betray all the feelings of the unlucky gambler with terrifying sincerity and intensity. These hands belong to a handsome young man - the author, as though unintentionally, makes him of the same age as the narrator’s elder son - who, after losing everything, leaves the Rooms in the depth of despair, with the evident intention of ending his hopeless life in the Casino gardens. An inexplicable feeling of sympathy compels her to follow him and make every effort to save him. He takes her for one of the importunate women so common there and tries to shake her off; but she stays with him and finds herself obliged, in the most natural way possible, to join him in his apartment at the hotel, and finally to share his bed. After this improvised light of love, she exacts a most solemn vow from the young man, who has now apparently calmed down, that he will never play again, provides him with money for his journey home and promises to meet him at the station before the departure of his train. Now, however, she begins to feel a great tenderness for him, is ready to sacrifice all she has in order to keep him and makes up her mind to go with him instead of saying goodbye. Various mischances delay her, so that she misses the train. In her longing for the lost one she returns once more to the Rooms and there, to her horror, sees once more the hands which had first excited her sympathy: the faithless youth had gone back to his play. She reminds him of his promise, but, obsessed by his passion, he calls her a spoil-sport, tells her to go, and flings back the money with which she has tried to rescue him. She hurries away in deep mortification and learns later that she has not succeeded in saving him from suicide.

Dostoevsky And Parricide

4568

The brilliantly told, faultlessly motivated story is of course complete in itself and is certain to make a deep effect upon the reader. But analysis shows us that its invention is based fundamentally upon a wishful phantasy belonging to the period of puberty, which a number of people actually remember consciously. The phantasy embodies a boy’s wish that his mother should herself initiate him into sexual life in order to save him from the dreaded injuries caused by masturbation. (The numerous creative works that deal with the theme of redemption have the same origin.) The ‘vice’ of masturbation is replaced by the addiction to gambling; and the emphasis laid upon the passionate activity of the hands betrays this derivation. Indeed, the passion for play is an equivalent of the old compulsion to masturbate; ‘playing’ is the actual word used in the nursery to describe the activity of the hands upon the genitals. The irresistible nature of the temptation, the solemn resolutions, which are nevertheless invariably broken, never to do it again, the stupefying pleasure and the bad conscience which tells the subject that he is ruining himself (committing suicide) - all these elements remain unaltered in the process of substitution. It is true that Zweig’s story is told by the mother, not by the son. It must flatter the son to think: ‘if my mother only knew what dangers masturbation involves me in, she would certainly save me from them by allowing me to lavish all my tenderness on her own body’. The equation of the mother with a prostitute, which is made by the young man in the story, is linked up with the same phantasy. It brings the unattainable woman within easy reach. The bad conscience which accompanies the phantasy brings about the unhappy ending of the story. It is also interesting to notice how the façade given to the story by its author seeks to disguise its analytic meaning. For it is extremely questionable whether the erotic life of women is dominated by sudden and mysterious impulses. On the contrary, analysis reveals an adequate motivation for the surprising behaviour of this woman who had hitherto turned away from love. Faithful to the memory of her dead husband, she had armed herself against all similar attractions; but - and here the son’s phantasy is right - she did not, as a mother, escape her quite unconscious transference of love on to her son, and Fate was able to catch her at this undefended spot.

If the addiction to gambling, with the unsuccessful struggles to break the habit and the opportunities it affords for self-punishment, is a repetition of the compulsion to masturbate, we shall not be surprised to find that it occupied such a large space in Dostoevsky’s life. After all, we find no cases of severe neurosis in which the auto-erotic satisfaction of early childhood and of puberty has not played a part; and the relation between efforts to suppress it and fear of the father are too well known to need more than a mention.¹

¹ Most of the views which are here expressed are also contained in an excellent book by Jolan Neufeld (1923)

Dostoevsky And Parricide

4569

APPENDIX

A LETTER FROM FREUD TO THEODOR REIK

April 14, 1929

. . . I have read your critical review of my Dostoevsky study with great pleasure. All your objections deserve consideration and must be recognized as in a sense apt. I can bring forward a little in my defence. But of course it will not be a question of who is right or who is wrong.

I think you are applying too high a standard to this triviality. It was written as a favour to someone and written reluctantly. I always write reluctantly nowadays. No doubt you noticed this about it. This is not meant, of course, to excuse hasty or false judgements, but merely the careless architecture of the essay as a whole. I cannot dispute the unharmonious effect produced by the addition of the Zweig analysis; but deeper examination will perhaps show some justification for it. If I had not been hampered by considerations of the place where my essay was to appear, I should certainly have written: ‘We may expect that in the history of a neurosis accompanied by such a severe sense of guilt a special part will be played by the struggle against masturbation. This expectation is completely fulfilled by Dostoevsky’s pathological addiction to gambling. For, as we can see from a short story of Zweig’s . . . etc.’ That is to say, the amount of space given to the short story corresponds not to the relation: Zweig-Dostoevsky, but to the other one: masturbation-neurosis. All the same, the outcome was clumsy.

Dostoevsky And Parricide

4570

I hold firmly to a scientifically objective social assessment of ethics, and for that reason I should not wish to deny the excellent Philistine a certificate of good ethical conduct, even though it has cost him little self-discipline. But alongside of this I grant the validity of the subjective psychological view of ethics which you support. Though I agree with your judgement of the world and mankind as they are to-day, I cannot, as you know, regard your pessimistic dismissal of a better future as justified.

As you suggest, I included Dostoevsky the psychologist under the creative artist. Another objection I might have raised against him was that his insight was so much restricted to abnormal mental life. Consider his astonishing helplessness in face of the phenomena of love. All he really knew were crude, instinctual desire, masochistic subjection and loving out of pity. You are right, too, in suspecting that, in spite of all my admiration for Dostoevsky’s intensity and pre-eminence, I do not really like him. That is because my patience with pathological natures is exhausted in analysis. In art and life I am intolerant of them. Those are character traits personal to me and not binding on others.

Where are you going to publish your essay? I rate it very highly. It is only scientific research that must be without presumptions. In every other kind of thinking the choice of a point of view cannot be avoided; and there are, of course, several of these . . .

4571

SOME DREAMS OF DESCARTES’

A LETTER TO MAXIME LEROY

(1929)

4572

Intentionally left blank

4573

SOME DREAMS OF DESCARTES’

A LETTER TO MAXIME LEROY

On considering your letter asking me to examine some dreams of Descartes’, my first feeling was an impression of dismay, since working on dreams without being able to obtain from the dreamer himself any indications on the relations which might link them to one another or attach them to the external world - and this is clearly the case when it is a question of the dreams of a historical figure - gives, as a general rule, only a meagre result. In the event my task turned out to be easier than I had anticipated; nevertheless, the fruit of my investigations will no doubt seem to you much less important than you had a right to expect.

Our philosopher’s dreams are what are known as ‘dreams from above’ (‘Träume von oben’). That is to say, they are formulations of ideas which could have been created just as well in a waking state as during the state of sleep, and which have derived their content only in certain parts from mental states at a comparatively deep level. That is why these dreams offer for the most part a content which has an abstract, poetic or symbolic form.

The analysis of dreams of this kind usually leads us to the following position: we cannot understand the dream, but the dreamer - or the patient - can translate it immediately and without difficulty, given that the content of the dream is very close to his conscious thoughts. There then remain certain parts of the dream about which the dreamer does not know what to say: and these are precisely the parts which belong to the unconscious and which are in many respects the most interesting.

In the most favourable cases we explain this unconscious with the help of the ideas which the dreamer has added to it.

This way of judging ‘dreams from above’ - and this term must be understood in a psychological, not in a mystical, sense - is the one to be followed in the case of Descartes’ dreams.

Some Dreams Of Descartes'

4574

The philosopher interprets them himself and, in accordance with all the rules for the interpretation of dreams, we must accept his explanation, but it should be added that we have no path open to us which will take us any further.

In confirmation of his explanation we can say that the hindrances which prevented him from moving freely are perfectly well known to us: they are a representation by the dream of an internal conflict. The left side represents evil and sin, and the wind the ‘evil genius’ (animus).

The different figures who appear in the dream cannot of course be identified by us, although Descartes, if he were questioned, would not have failed to identify them. The bizarre elements, of which, incidentally, there are few, and which are almost absurd - such as ‘the melon from a foreign land’, and the little portraits - remain unexplained.

As regards the melon, the dreamer has had the - original - idea of seeing in it ‘the charms of solitude, but presented by purely human inducements’. This is certainly not correct, but it might provide an association of ideas which would lead to a correct explanation. If it is correlated with his state of sin, this association might stand for a sexual picture which occupied the lonely young man’s imagination.

On the question of the portraits Descartes throws no light.

4575

THE GOETHE PRIZE

(1930)

4576

Intentionally left blank

The Goethe Prize

4577

LETTER TO DR. ALFONS PAQUET

Grundlsee, 3.8.1930

My dear Dr. Paquet,

I have not been spoilt by public marks of honour and I have so adapted myself to this state of things that I have been able to do without them. I should not like to deny, however, that the award of the Goethe Prize of the City of Frankfurt has given me great pleasure. There is something about it that especially fires the imagination and one of its stipulations dispels the feeling of humiliation which in other cases is a concomitant of such distinctions.

I must particularly thank you for your letter; it moved and astonished me. Apart from your sympathetic penetration into the nature of my work, I have never before found the secret, personal intentions behind it recognized with such clarity as by you, and I should very much like to ask you how you come by such knowledge.

I am sorry to learn from your letter to my daughter that I am not to see you in the near future, and postponement is always a chancy affair at my time of life. Of course I shall be most ready to receive the gentleman (Dr. Michel) whose visit you announce.

Unfortunately I shall not be able to attend the ceremony in Frankfurt; I am too frail for such an undertaking. The company there will lose nothing by that: my daughter Anna is certainly pleasanter to look at and to listen to than I am. We propose that she shall read out a few sentences of mine which deal with Goethe’s connections with psycho-analysis and defend the analysts themselves against the reproach of having offended against the respect due to the great man by the analytic attempts they have made on him. I hope it will be acceptable if I thus adapt the theme that has been proposed to me - my ‘inner relations as a man and a scientist to Goethe’ - or else that you will be kind enough to let me know.

Yours very sincerely,

Freud

The Goethe Prize

4578

ADDRESS DELIVERED IN THE GOETHE HOUSE AT FRANKFURT

My life’s work has been directed to a single aim. I have observed the more subtle disturbances of mental function in healthy and sick people and have sought to infer - or, if you prefer it, to guess - from signs of this kind how the apparatus which serves these functions is constructed and what concurrent and mutually opposing forces are at work in it. What we - I, my friends and collaborators - have managed to learn in following this path has seemed to us of importance for the construction of a mental science which makes it possible to understand both normal and pathological processes as parts of the same natural course of events.

I was recalled from such narrow considerations by the astonishing honour which you do me. By evoking the figure of the great universal personality who was born in this house and who spent his childhood in these rooms, your distinction prompts one as it were to justify oneself before him and raises the question of how he would have reacted if his glance, attentive to every innovation in science, had fallen on psycho-analysis. Goethe can be compared in versatility to Leonardo da Vinci, the Renaissance master, who like him was both artist and scientific investigator. But human images can never be repeated, and profound differences between the two great men are not lacking. In Leonardo’s nature the scientist did not harmonize with the artist, he interfered with him and perhaps in the end stifled him. In Goethe’s life both personalities found room side by side: at different times each allowed the other to predominate. In Leonardo it is plausible to associate his disturbance with that inhibition in his development which withdrew everything erotic, and hence psychology too, from his sphere of interest. In this respect Goethe’s character was able to develop more freely.

The Goethe Prize

4579

I think that Goethe would not have rejected psycho-analysis in an unfriendly spirit, as so many of our contemporaries have done. He himself approached it at a number of points, recognized much through his own insight that we have since been able to confirm, and some views, which have brought criticism and mockery down upon us, were expounded by him as self-evident. Thus he was familiar with the incomparable strength of the first affective ties of human creatures. He celebrated them in the Dedication to his Faust poem, in words which we could repeat for each of our analyses:

Ihr naht euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten,

Die früh sich einst dem trüben Blick gezeigt,

Versuch’ ich wohl, euch diesmal festzuhalten?

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

Gleich einer alten, halbverklungenen Sage

Kommt erste Lieb’ und Freundschaft mit herauf

He explained to himself the strongest impulse of love that he experienced as a mature man by apostrophizing his beloved: ‘Ach, du warst in abgelebten Zeiten meine Schwester oder meine Frau.’

Thus he does not deny that these perennial first inclinations take figures from one’s own family circle as their object.

Goethe paraphrases the content of dream-life in the evocative words:

Was von Menschen nicht gewusst

Oder nicht bedacht,

Durch das Labyrinth der Brust

Wandelt in der Nacht.

Behind this magic we recognize the ancient, venerable and incontestably correct pronouncement of Aristotle - that dreaming is the continuation of our mental activity into the state of sleep - combined with the recognition of the unconscious which psycho-analysis first added to it. Only the riddle of dream-distortion finds no solution here.

The Goethe Prize

4580

In what is perhaps his most sublime poetical creation, Iphigenie, Goethe shows us a striking instance of expiation, of the freeing of a suffering mind from the burden of guilt, and he makes this catharsis come about through a passionate outburst of feeling under the beneficent influence of loving sympathy. Indeed, he himself repeatedly made attempts at giving psychological help - as for example to the unfortunate man who is named as Kraft in the Letters, and to Professor Plessing, of whom he tells in the Campagne in Frankreich; and the procedure which he applied goes beyond the method of the Catholic Confessional and approximates in some remarkable details to the technique of our psycho-analysis. There is an example of psychotherapeutic influence which is described by Goethe as a jest, but which I should like to quote in full since it may not be well known and yet is very characteristic. It is from a letter to Frau von Stein (No. 1444, of September 5, 1785):

‘Yesterday evening I performed a psychological feat. Frau Herder was still in a state of tension of the most hypochondriacal kind over all the unpleasant things that had happened to her at Carlsbad. Particularly through the woman who was her companion in the house. I made her tell and confess everything to me, other people’s misdeeds and her own faults with their most minute circumstances and consequences, and at the end I absolved her and made it clear to her, jestingly, in this formula, that these things were now done with and cast into the depths of the sea. She herself made fun of it all and is really cured.’

Goethe always rated Eros high, never tried to belittle its power, followed its primitive and even wanton expressions with no less attentiveness than its highly sublimated ones and has, as it seems to me, expounded its essential unity throughout all its manifestations no less decisively than Plato did in the remote past. Indeed, it is perhaps more than a chance coincidence when in Die Wahlverwandtschaften he applies to love an idea taken from the sphere of chemistry - a connection to which the name of psycho-analysis itself bears witness.

I am prepared for the reproach that we analysts have forfeited the right to place ourselves under the patronage of Goethe because we have offended against the respect due to him by trying to apply analysis to him himself: we have degraded the great man to the position of an object of analytic investigation. But I would dispute at once that any degradation is intended or implied by this.

The Goethe Prize

4581

We all, who revere Goethe, put up, without too much protest, with the efforts of his biographers, who try to recreate his life from existing accounts and indications. But what can these biographies achieve for us? Even the best and fullest of them could not answer the two questions which alone seem worth knowing about. It would not throw any light on the riddle of the miraculous gift that makes an artist, and it could not help us to comprehend any better the value and the effect of his works. And yet there is no doubt that such a biography does satisfy a powerful need in us. We feel this very distinctly if the legacy of history unkindly refuses the satisfaction of this need - for example in the case of Shakespeare. It is undeniably painful to all of us that even now we do not know who was the author of the Comedies, Tragedies and Sonnets of Shakespeare; whether it was in fact the untutored son of the provincial citizen of Stratford, who attained a modest position as an actor in London, or whether it was, rather, the nobly-born and highly cultivated, passionately wayward, to some extent déclassé aristocrat, Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain of England. But how can we justify a need of this kind to obtain knowledge of the circumstances of a man’s life when his works have become so full of importance to us? People generally say that it is our desire to bring ourselves nearer to such a man in a human way as well. Let us grant this; it is, then, the need to acquire affective relations with such men, to add them to the fathers, teachers, exemplars whom we have known or whose influence we have already experienced, in the expectation that their personalities will be just as fine and admirable as those works of art of theirs which we possess.

The Goethe Prize

4582

All the same, we may admit that there is still another motive force at work. The biographer’s justification also contains a confession. It is true that the biographer does not want to depose his hero, but he does want to bring him nearer to us. That means, however, reducing the distance that separates him from us: it still tends in effect towards degradation. And it is unavoidable that if we learn more about a great man’s life we shall also hear of occasions on which he has in fact done no better than we, has in fact come near to us as a human being. Nevertheless, I think we may declare the efforts of biography to be legitimate. Our attitude to fathers and teachers is, after all, an ambivalent one since our reverence for them regularly conceals a component of hostile rebellion. That is a psychological fatality; it cannot be altered without forcible suppression of the truth and is bound to extend to our relations with the great men whose life histories we wish to investigate.

When psycho-analysis puts itself at the service of biography, it naturally has the right to be treated no more harshly than the latter itself. Psycho-analysis can supply some information which cannot be arrived at by other means, and can thus demonstrate new connecting threads in the ‘weaver’s masterpiece’ spread between the instinctual endowments, the experiences and the works of an artist. Since it is one of the principal functions of our thinking to master the material of the external world psychically, it seems to me that thanks are due to psycho-analysis if, when it is applied to a great man, it contributes to the understanding of his great achievement. But, I admit, in the case of Goethe we have not yet succeeded very far. This is because Goethe was not only, as a poet, a great self-revealer, but also, in spite of the abundance of autobiographical records, a careful concealer. We cannot help thinking here of the words of Mephistopheles:

Das Beste, was du wissen kannst,

Darfst du den Buben doch nicht sagen.

4583

LIBIDINAL TYPES

(1931)

4584

Intentionally left blank

4585

LIBIDINAL TYPES

Observation teaches us that individual human beings realize the general picture of humanity in an almost infinite variety of ways. If we yield to the legitimate need to distinguish particular types in this multiplicity, we shall at the start have the choice as to what characteristics and what points of view we shall take as the basis of our differentiation. For that purpose physical qualities will doubtless serve no less well than mental ones; the most valuable distinctions will be those which promise to present a regular combination of physical and mental characteristics.

It is doubtful whether we are as yet in a position to discover types to fulfil this requirement - as we shall no doubt be able to do later, on some basis of which we are still ignorant. If we confine our effort to setting up purely psychological types, the libidinal situation will have a first claim to serve as a basis for our classification. It may fairly be demanded that this classification should not merely be deduced from our knowledge or our hypotheses about the libido, but that it should be easily confirmed in actual experience and that it should contribute to the clarification of the mass of our observations and help us to grasp them. It may at once be admitted that these libidinal types need not be the only possible ones even in the psychical field, and that, if we proceeded from other qualities, we might perhaps establish a whole set of other psychological types. But it must be required of all such types that they shall not coincide with clinical pictures. On the contrary, they must comprehend all the variations which according to our practical judgement fall within the limits of the normal. In their extreme developments, however, they may well approximate to clinical pictures and in that way help to bridge the gulf that is supposed to lie between the normal and the pathological.

According, then, as the libido is predominantly allocated to the provinces of the mental apparatus, we can distinguish three main libidinal types. To give names to these types is not particularly easy; following the lines of our depth-psychology, I should like to call them the erotic, the narcissistic and the obsessional types.

Libidinal Types

4586

The erotic type is easily characterized. Erotics are those whose main interest - the relatively largest part of whose libido - is turned towards love. Loving, but above all being loved, is the most important thing for them. They are dominated by the fear of loss of love and are therefore especially dependent on others who may withhold their love from them. Even in its pure form this type is a very common one. Variants of it occur according as it is blended with another type and in proportion to the amount of aggressiveness present in it. From the social and cultural standpoint this type represents the elementary instinctual demands of the id, to which the other psychical agencies have become compliant.

The second type is what I have termed the obsessional type - a name which may at first seem strange. It is distinguished by the predominance of the super-ego, which is separated from the ego under great tension. People of this type are dominated by fear of their conscience instead of fear of losing love. They exhibit, as it were, an internal instead of an external dependence. They develop a high degree of self-reliance; and, from the social standpoint, they are the true, pre-eminently conservative vehicles of civilization.

The third type, justly called the narcissistic type, is mainly to be described in negative terms. There is no tension between ego and super-ego (indeed, on the strength of this type one would scarcely have arrived at the hypothesis of a super-ego), and there is no preponderance of erotic needs. The subject’s main interest is directed to self-preservation; he is independent and not open to intimidation. His ego has a large amount of aggressiveness at its disposal, which also manifests itself in readiness for activity. In his erotic life loving is preferred above being loved. People belonging to this type impress others as being ‘personalities’; they are especially suited to act as a support for others, to take on the role of leaders and to give a fresh stimulus to cultural development or to damage the established state of affairs.

Libidinal Types

4587

These pure types will hardly escape the suspicion of having been deduced from the theory of the libido. But we feel ourselves on the firm ground of experience when we turn to the mixed types, which are to be observed so much more frequently than the unmixed ones. These new types - the erotic-obsessional, the erotic-narcissistic and the narcissistic-obsessional - seem in fact to afford a good classification of the individual psychical structures which we have come to know though analysis. If we study these mixed types we find in them pictures of characters with which we have long been familiar. In the erotic-obsessional type it appears that the preponderance of instinctual life is restricted by the influence of the super-ego. In this type, dependence at once on contemporary human objects and on the residues of parents, educators and exemplars, is carried to its highest pitch. The erotic-narcissistic type is perhaps the one we must regard as the commonest of all. It unites opposites, which are able to moderate one another in it. One may learn from this type, as compared with the two other erotic ones, that aggressiveness and activity go along with a predominance of narcissism. Finally, the narcissistic-obsessional type produces the variation which is most valuable from a cultural standpoint; for it adds to independence of the external world and a regard for the demands of conscience a capacity for vigorous action, and it strengthens the ego against the super-ego.

One might think one was making a jest if one asked why no mention has been made here of another mixed type which is theoretically possible - namely, the erotic-obsessional-narcissistic type. But the answer to this jest is serious. Such a type would no longer be a type at all: it would be the absolute norm, the ideal harmony. We thus realize that the phenomenon of types arises precisely from the fact that, of the three main ways of employing the libido in the economy of the mind, one or two have been favoured at the expense of the others.

The question may also be raised of what the relation is of these libidinal types to pathology - whether some of them have a special disposition to pass over into neurosis, and if so, which types lead to which forms of neurosis. The answer is that the setting-up of these libidinal types throws no new light on the genesis of the neuroses. Experience shows that all these types can exist without any neurosis. The pure types, marked by the undisputed preponderance of a single mental agency, seem to have a better chance of manifesting themselves as pure characterological pictures, while we might expect that mixed types would provide a more favourable soil for conditions leading to a neurosis. But I think we should not make up our minds on these matters till they have been submitted to a careful and specially directed examination.

It seems easy to infer that when people of the erotic type fall ill they will develop hysteria, just as those of the obsessional the will develop obsessional neurosis; but these inferences, too, share the uncertainty which I have just stressed. People of the narcissistic type who are exposed to a frustration from the external world, though otherwise independent, are peculiarly disposed to psychosis; and they also present essential preconditions for criminality.

It is a familiar fact that the aetiological preconditions of neurosis are not yet known with certainty. The precipitating causes of it are frustrations and internal conflicts: conflicts between the three major psychical agencies, conflicts arising within the libidinal economy in consequence of our bisexual disposition and conflicts between the erotic and the aggressive instinctual components. It is the endeavour of the psychology of the neuroses to discover what makes these processes, which belong to the normal course of mental life, become pathogenic.

4588

FEMALE SEXUALITY

(1931)

4589

Intentionally left blank

4590

FEMALE SEXUALITY

I

During the phase of the normal Oedipus complex we find the child tenderly attached to the parent of the opposite sex, while its relation to the parent of its own sex is predominantly hostile. In the case of a boy there is no difficulty in explaining this. His first love-object was his mother. She remains so; and, with the strengthening of his erotic desires and his deeper insight into the relations between his father and mother, the former is bound to become his rival. With the small girl it is different. Her first object, too, was her mother. How does she find her way to her father? How, when and why does she detach herself from her mother? We have long understood that the development of female sexuality is complicated by the fact that the girl has the task of giving up what was originally her leading genital zone the clitoris - in favour of a new zone - the vagina. But it now seems to us that there is a second change of the same sort which is no less characteristic and important for the development of the female: the exchange of her original object - her mother - for her father. The way in which the two tasks are connected with each other is not yet clear to us.

It is well known that there are many women who have a strong attachment to their father; nor need they be in any way neurotic. It is upon such women that I have made the observations which I propose to report here and which have led me to adopt a particular view of female sexuality. I was struck, above all, by two facts. The first was that where the woman’s attachment to her father was particularly intense, analysis showed that it had been preceded by a phase of exclusive attachment to her mother which had been equally intense and passionate. Except for the change of her love-object, the second phase had scarcely added any new feature to her erotic life. Her primary relation to her mother had been built up in a very rich and many-sided manner. The second fact taught me that the duration of this attachment had also been greatly under-estimated. In several cases it lasted until well into the fourth year - in one case into the fifth year - so that it covered by far the longer part of the period of early sexual efflorescence. Indeed, we had to reckon with the possibility that a number of women remain arrested in their original attachment to their mother and never achieve a true change-over towards men. This being so, the pre-Oedipus phase in women gains an importance which we have not attributed to it hitherto.

Female Sexuality

4591

Since this phase allows room for all the fixations and repressions from which we trace the origin of the neuroses, it would seem as though we must retract the universality of the thesis that the Oedipus complex is the nucleus of the neuroses. But if anyone feels reluctant about making this correction, there is no need for him to do so. On the one hand, we can extend the content of the Oedipus complex to include all the child’s relations to both parents; or, on the other, we can take due account of our new findings by saying that the female only reaches the normal positive Oedipus situation after she has surmounted a period before it that is governed by the negative complex. And indeed during that phase a little girl’s father is not much else for her than a troublesome rival, although her hostility towards him never reaches the pitch which is characteristic of boys. We have, after all, long given up any expectation of a neat parallelism between male and female sexual development.

Our insight into this early, pre-Oedipus, phase in girls comes to us as a surprise, like the discovery, in another field, of the Minoan-Mycenean civilization behind the civilization of Greece.

Everything in the sphere of this first attachment to the mother seemed to me so difficult to grasp in analysis - so grey with age and shadowy and almost impossible to revivify - that it was as if it had succumbed to an especially inexorable repression. But perhaps I gained this impression because the women who were in analysis with me were able to cling to the very attachment to the father in which they had taken refuge from the early phase that was in question. It does indeed appear that women analysts - as, for instance, Jeanne Lampl-de Groot and Helene Deutsch - have been able to perceive these facts more easily and clearly because they were helped in dealing with those under their treatment by the transference to a suitable mother-substitute. Nor have I succeeded in seeing my way though any case completely, and I shall therefore confine myself to reporting the most general findings and shall give only a few examples of the new ideas which I have arrived at. Among these is a suspicion that this phase of attachment to the mother is especially intimately related to the aetiology of hysteria, which is not surprising when we reflect that both the phase and the neurosis are characteristically feminine, and further, that in this dependence on the mother we have the germ of later paranoia in women.¹ For this germ appears to be the surprising, yet regular, fear of being killed (? devoured) by the mother. It is plausible to assume that this fear corresponds to a hostility which develops in the child towards her mother in consequence of the manifold restrictions imposed by the latter in the course of training and bodily care and that the mechanism of projection is favoured by the early age of the child’s psychical organization.

¹ In the well-known case of delusional jealousy reported by Ruth Mack Brunswick (1928), the direct source of the disorder was the patient’s pre-Oedipus fixation (to her sister).

Female Sexuality

4592

II

I began by stating the two facts which have struck me as new: that a woman’s strong dependence on her father merely takes over the heritage of an equally strong attachment to her mother, and that this earlier phase has lasted for an unexpectedly long period of time. I shall now go back a little in order to insert these new findings into the picture of female sexual development with which we are familiar. In doing this, a certain amount of repetition will be inevitable. It will help our exposition if, as we go along, we compare the state of things in women with that in men.

First of all, there can be no doubt that the bisexuality, which is present, as we believe, in the innate disposition of human beings, comes to the fore much more clearly in women than in men. A man, after all, has only one leading sexual zone, one sexual organ, whereas a woman has two: the vagina - the female organ proper - and the clitoris, which is analogous to the male organ. We believe we are justified in assuming that for many years the vagina is virtually non-existent and possibly does not produce sensations until puberty. It is true that recently an increasing number of observers report that vaginal impulses are present even in these early years. In women, therefore, the main genital occurrences of childhood must take place in relation to the clitoris. Their sexual life is regularly divided into two phases, of which the first has a masculine character, while only the second is specifically feminine. Thus in female development there is a process of transition from the one phase to the other, to which there is nothing analogous in the male. A further complication arises from the fact that the clitoris, with its virile character, continues to function in later female sexual life in a manner which is very variable and which is certainly not yet satisfactorily understood. We do not, of course, know the biological basis of these peculiarities in women; and still less are we able to assign them any teleological purpose.

Parallel with this first great difference there is the other, concerned with the finding of the object. In the case of a male, his mother becomes his first love-object as a result of her feeding him and looking after him, and she remains so until she is replaced by someone who resembles her or is derived from her. A female’s first object, too, must be her mother: the primary conditions for a choice of object are, of course, the same for all children. But at the end of her development, her father - a man - should have become her new love-object. In other words, to the change in her own sex there must correspond a change in the sex of her object. The new problems that now require investigating are in what way this change takes place, how radically or how incompletely it is carried out, and what the different possibilities are which present themselves in the course of this development.

Female Sexuality

4593

We have already learned, too, that there is yet another difference between the sexes, which relates to the Oedipus complex. We have an impression here that what we have said about the Oedipus complex applies with complete strictness to the male child only and that we are right in rejecting the term ‘Electra complex’ which seeks to emphasize the analogy between the attitude of the two sexes. It is only in the male child that we find the fateful combination of love for the one parent and simultaneous hatred for the other as a rival. In his case it is the discovery of the possibility of castration, as proved by the sight of the female genitals, which forces on him the transformation of his Oedipus complex, and which leads to the creation of his super-ego and thus initiates all the processes that are designed to make the individual find a place in the cultural community. After the paternal agency has been internalized and become a super-ego, the next task is to detach the latter from the figures of whom it was originally the psychical representative. In this remarkable course of development it is precisely the boy’s narcissistic interest in his genitals - his interest in preserving his penis - which is turned round into a curtailing of his infantile sexuality.

One thing that is left over in men from the influence of the Oedipus complex is a certain amount of disparagement in their attitude towards women, whom they regard as being castrated. In extreme cases this gives rise to an inhibition in their choice of object, and, if it is supported by organic factors, to exclusive homosexuality.

Female Sexuality

4594

Quite different are the effects of the castration complex in the female. She acknowledges the fact of her castration, and with it, too, the superiority of the male and her own inferiority; but she rebels against this unwelcome state of affairs. From this divided attitude three lines of development open up. The first leads to a general revulsion from sexuality. The little girl, frightened by the comparison with boys, grows dissatisfied with her clitoris, and gives up her phallic activity and with it her sexuality in general as well as a good part of her masculinity in other fields. The second line leads her to cling with defiant self-assertiveness to her threatened masculinity. To an incredibly late age she clings to the hope of getting a penis some time. That hope becomes her life’s aim; and the phantasy of being a man in spite of everything often persists as a formative factor over long periods. This ‘masculinity complex’ in women can also result in a manifest homosexual choice of object. Only if her development follows the third, very circuitous, path does she reach the final normal female attitude, in which she takes her father as her object and so finds her way to the feminine form of the Oedipus complex. Thus in women the Oedipus complex is the end-result of a fairly lengthy development. It is not destroyed, but created, by the influence of castration; it escapes the strongly hostile influences which, in the male, have a destructive effect on it, and indeed it is all too often not surmounted by the female at all. For this reason, too, the cultural consequences of its break-up are smaller and of less importance in her. We should probably not be wrong in saying that it is this difference in the reciprocal relation between the Oedipus and the castration complex which gives its special stamp to the character of females as social beings.¹

¹ It is to be anticipated that men analysts with feminist views, as well as our women analysts, will disagree with what I have said here. They will hardly fail to object that such notions spring from the ‘masculinity complex’ of the male and are designed to justify on theoretical grounds his innate inclination to disparage and suppress women. But this sort of psycho-analytic argumentation reminds us here, as it so often does, of Dostoevsky’s famous ‘knife that cuts both ways’. The opponents of those who argue in this way will on their side think it quite natural that the female sex should refuse to accept a view which appears to contradict their eagerly coveted equality with men. The use of analysis as a weapon of controversy can clearly lead to no decision.

Female Sexuality

4595

We see, then, that the phase of exclusive attachment to the mother, which may be called the pre-Oedipus phase, possesses a far greater importance in women than it can have in men. Many phenomena of female sexual life which were not properly understood before can be fully explained by reference to this phase. Long ago, for instance, we noticed that many women who have chosen their husband on the model of their father, or have put him in their father’s place, nevertheless repeat towards him, in their married life, their bad relations with their mother. The husband of such a woman was meant to be the inheritor of her relation to her father, but in reality he became the inheritor of her relation to her mother. This is easily explained as an obvious case of regression. Her relation to her mother was the original one, and her attachment to her father was built up on it, and now, in marriage, the original relation emerges from repression. For the main content of her development to womanhood lay in the carrying over of her affective object attachments from her mother to her father.

With many women we have the impression that their years of maturity are occupied by a struggle with their husband, just as their youth was spent in a struggle with their mother. In the light of the previous discussions we shall conclude that their hostile attitude to their mother is not a consequence of the rivalry implicit in the Oedipus complex, but originates from the preceding phase and has merely been reinforced and exploited in the Oedipus situation. And actual analytic examination confirms this view. Our interest must be directed to the mechanisms that are at work in her turning away from the mother who was an object so intensely and exclusively loved. We are prepared to find, not a single factor, but a whole number of them operating together towards the same end,

Among these factors are some which are determined by the circumstances of infantile sexuality in general, and so hold good equally for the erotic life of boys. First and foremost we may mention jealousy of other people - of brothers and sisters, rivals, among whom the father too has a place. Childhood love is boundless; it demands exclusive possession, it is not content with less than all. But it has a second characteristic: it has, in point of fact, no aim and is incapable of obtaining complete satisfaction; and principally for that reason it is doomed to end in disappointment and to give place to a hostile attitude. Later on in life the lack of an ultimate satisfaction may favour a different result. This very factor may ensure the uninterrupted continuance of the libidinal cathexis, as happens with love-relations that are inhibited in their aim. But in the stress of the processes of development it regularly happens that the libido abandons its unsatisfying position in order to find a new one.

Female Sexuality

4596

Another, much more specific motive for turning away from the mother arises from the effect of the castration complex on the creature who is without a penis. At some time or other the little girl makes the discovery of her organic inferiority - earlier and more easily, of course, if there are brothers or other boys about. We have already taken note of the three paths which diverge from this point: (a) the one which leads to a cessation of her whole sexual life, (b) the one which leads to a defiant over-emphasis of her masculinity, and (c) the first steps towards definitive femininity. It is not easy to determine the exact timing here or the typical course of events. Even the point of time when the discovery of castration is made varies, and a number of other factors seem to be inconstant and to depend on chance. The state of the girl’s own phallic activity plays a part; and so too does the question whether this activity was found out or not, and how much interference with it she experienced afterwards.

Little girls usually discover for themselves their characteristic phallic activity - masturbation of the clitoris; and to begin with this is no doubt unaccompanied by phantasy. The part played in starting it by nursery hygiene is reflected in the very common phantasy which makes the mother or nurse into a seducer. Whether little girls masturbate less frequently and from the first less energetically than little boys is not certain; quite possibly it is so. Actual seduction, too, is common enough; it is initiated either by other children or by someone in charge of the child who wants to soothe it, or send it to sleep or make it dependent on them. Where seduction intervenes it invariably disturbs the natural course of the developmental processes, and it often leaves behind extensive and lasting consequences.

A prohibition of masturbation, as we have seen, becomes an incentive for giving it up; but it also becomes a motive for rebelling against the person who prohibits it - that is to say, the mother, or the mother-substitute who later regularly merges with her. A defiant persistence in masturbation appears to open the way to masculinity. Even where the girl has not succeeded in suppressing her masturbation, the effect of the apparently vain prohibition is seen in her later efforts to free herself at all costs from a satisfaction which has been spoilt for her. When she reaches maturity her object-choice may still be influenced by this persisting purpose. Her resentment at being prevented from free sexual activity plays a big part in her detachment from her mother. The same motive comes into operation again after puberty, when her mother takes up her duty of guarding her daughter’s chastity. We shall, of course, not forget that the mother is similarly opposed to a boy’s masturbating and thus provides him, too, with a strong motive for rebellion.

Female Sexuality

4597

When the little girl discovers her own deficiency, from seeing a male genital, it is only with hesitation and reluctance that she accepts the unwelcome knowledge. As we have seen, she clings obstinately to the expectation of one day having a genital of the same kind too, and her wish for it survives long after her hope has expired. The child invariably regards castration in the first instance as a misfortune peculiar to herself; only later does she realize that it extends to certain other children and lastly to certain grown-ups. When she comes to understand the general nature of this characteristic, it follows that femaleness - and with it, of course, her mother - suffers a great depreciation in her eyes.

This account of how girls respond to the impression of castration and the prohibition against masturbation will very probably strike the reader as confused and contradictory. This is not entirely the author’s fault. In truth, it is hardly possible to give a description which has general validity. We find the most different reactions in different individuals, and in the same individual the contrary attitudes exist side by side. With the first intervention of the prohibition, the conflict is there, and from now on it will accompany the development of the sexual function. Insight into what takes place is made particularly difficult by the fact of its being so hard to distinguish the mental processes of this first phase from later ones by which they are overlaid and are distorted in memory. Thus, for instance, a girl may later construe the fact of castration as a punishment for her masturbatory activity, and she will attribute the carrying out of this punishment to her father, but neither of these ideas can have been a primary one. Similarly, boys regularly fear castration from their father, although in their case, too, the threat most usually comes from their mother.

Female Sexuality

4598

However this may be, at the end of this first phase of attachment to the mother, there emerges, as the girl’s strongest motive for turning away from her, the reproach that her mother did not give her a proper penis - that is to say, brought her into the world as a female. A second reproach, which does not reach quite so far back, is rather a surprising one. It is that her mother did not give her enough milk, did not suckle her long enough. Under the conditions of modern civilization this may be true often enough, but certainly not so often as is asserted in analyses. It would seem rather that this accusation gives expression to the general dissatisfaction of children, who, in our monogamous civilization, are weaned from the breast after six or nine months, whereas the primitive mother devotes herself exclusively to her child for two or three years. It is as though our children had remained for ever unsated, as though they had never sucked long enough at their mother’s breast. But I am not sure whether, if one analysed children who had been suckled as long as the children of primitive peoples, one would not come upon the same complaint. Such is the greed of a child’s libido!

When we survey the whole range of motives for turning away from the mother which analysis brings to light - that she failed to provide the little girl with the only proper genital, that she did not feed her sufficiently, that she compelled her to share her mother’s love with others, that she never fulfilled all the girl’s expectations of love, and, finally, that she first aroused her sexual activity and then forbade it - all these motives seem nevertheless insufficient to justify the girl’s final hostility. Some of them follow inevitably from the nature of infantile sexuality; others appear like rationalizations devised later to account for the uncomprehended change in feeling. Perhaps the real fact is that the attachment to the mother is bound to perish, precisely because it was the first and was so intense; just as one can often see happen in the first marriages of young women which they have entered into when they were most passionately in love. In both situations the attitude of love probably comes to grief from the disappointments that are unavoidable and from the accumulation of occasions for aggression. As a rule, second marriages turn out much better.

Female Sexuality

4599

We cannot go so far as to assert that the ambivalence of emotional cathexes is a universally valid law, and that it is absolutely impossible to feel great love for a person without its being accompanied by a hatred that is perhaps equally great, or vice versa. Normal adults do undoubtedly succeed in separating those two attitudes from each other, and do not find themselves obliged to hate their love-objects and to love their enemy as well as hate him. But this seems to be the result of later developments. In the first phases of erotic life, ambivalence is evidently the rule. Many people retain this archaic trait all through their lives. It is characteristic of obsessional neurotics that in their object-relationships love and hate counterbalance each other. In primitive races, too, we may say that ambivalence predominates. We shall conclude, then, that the little girl’s intense attachment to her mother is strongly ambivalent, and that it is in consequence precisely of this ambivalence that (with the assistance of the other factors we have adduced) her attachment is forced away from her mother - once again, that is to say, in consequence of a general characteristic of infantile sexuality.

The explanation I have attempted to give is at once met by a question: ‘How is it, then, that boys are able to keep intact their attachment to their mother, which is certainly no less strong than that of girls?’ The answer comes equally promptly: ‘Because boys are able to deal with their ambivalent feelings towards their mother by directing all their hostility on to their father.’ But, in the first place, we ought not to make this reply until we have made a close study of the pre-Oedipus phase in boys, and, in the second place, it is probably more prudent in general to admit that we have as yet no clear understanding of these processes, with which we have only just become acquainted.

Female Sexuality

4600

III

A further question arises: ‘What does the little girl require of her mother? What is the nature of her sexual aims during the time of exclusive attachment to her mother?’ The answer we obtain from the analytic material is just what we should expect. The girl’s sexual aims in regard to her mother are active as well as passive and are determined by the libidinal phases though which the child passes. Here the relation of activity to passivity is especially interesting. It can easily be observed that in every field of mental experience, not merely that of sexuality, when a child receives a passive impression it has a tendency to produce an active reaction. It tries to do itself what has just been done to it. This is part of the work imposed on it of mastering the external world and can even lead to its endeavouring to repeat an impression which it would have reason to avoid on account of its distressing content. Children’s play, too, is made to serve this purpose of supplementing a passive experience with an active piece of behaviour and of thus, as it were, annulling it. When a doctor has opened a child’s mouth, in spite of his resistance, to look down his throat, the same child, after the doctor has gone, will play at being the doctor himself, and will repeat the assault upon some small brother or sister who is as helpless in his hands as he was in the doctor’s. Here we have an unmistakable revolt against passivity and a preference for the active role. This swing-over from passivity to activity does not take place with the same regularity or vigour in all children; in some it may not occur at all. A child’s behaviour in this respect may enable us to draw conclusions as to the relative strength of the masculinity and femininity that it will exhibit in its sexuality.

The first sexual and sexually coloured experiences which a child has in relation to its mother are naturally of a passive character. It is suckled, fed, cleaned, and dressed by her, and taught to perform all its functions. A part of its libido goes on clinging to those experiences and enjoys the satisfactions bound up with them; but another part strives to turn them into activity. In the first place, being suckled at the breast gives place to active sucking. As regards the other experiences the child contents itself either with becoming self-sufficient - that is, with itself successfully carrying out what had hitherto been done for it - or with repeating its passive experiences in an active form in play; or else it actually makes its mother into the object and behaves as the active subject towards her. For a long time I was unable to credit this last behaviour, which takes place in the field of real action, until my observations removed all doubts on the matter.

Female Sexuality

4601

We seldom hear of a little girl’s wanting to wash or dress her mother, or tell her to perform her excretory functions. Sometimes, it is true, she says: ‘Now let’s play that I’m the mother and you’re the child’; but generally she fulfils these active wishes in an indirect way, in her play with her doll, in which she represents the mother and the doll the child. The fondness girls have for playing with dolls, in contrast to boys, is commonly regarded as a sign of early awakened femininity. Not unjustly so; but we must not overlook the fact that what finds expression here is the active side of femininity, and that the little girl’s preference for dolls is probably evidence of the exclusiveness of her attachment to her mother, with complete neglect of her father-object.

The very surprising sexual activity of little girls in relation to their mother is manifested chronologically in oral, sadistic, and finally even in phallic trends directed towards her. It is difficult to give a detailed account of these because they are often obscure instinctual impulses which it was impossible for the child to grasp psychically at the time of their occurrence, which were therefore only interpreted by her later, and which then appear in the analysis in forms of expression that were certainly not the original ones. Sometimes we come across them as transferences on to the later, father-object, where they do not belong and where they seriously interfere with our understanding of the situation. We find the little girl’s aggressive oral and sadistic wishes in a form forced on them by early repression, as a fear of being killed by her mother - a fear which, in turn, justifies her death-wish against her mother, if that becomes conscious. It is impossible to say how often this fear of the mother is supported by an unconscious hostility on the mother’s part which is sensed by the girl. (Hitherto, it is only in men that I have found the fear of being eaten up. This fear is referred to the father, but it is probably the product of a transformation of oral aggressivity directed to the mother. The child wants to eat up its mother from whom it has had its nourishment; in the case of the father there is no such obvious determinant for the wish.)

Female Sexuality

4602

The women patients showing a strong attachment to their mother in whom I have been able to study the pre-Oedipus phase have all told me that when their mother gave them enemas or rectal douches they used to offer the greatest resistance and react with fear and screams of rage. This behaviour may be very frequent or even the habitual thing in children. I only came to understand the reason for such a specially violent opposition from a remark made by Ruth Mack Brunswick, who was studying these problems at the same time as I was, to the effect that she was inclined to compare the outbreak of anger after an enema to the orgasm following genital excitation. The accompanying anxiety should, she thought, be construed as a transformation of the desire for aggression which had been stirred up. I believe that this is really so and that, at the sadistic-anal level, the intense passive stimulation of the intestinal zone is responded to by an outbreak of desire for aggression which is manifested either directly as rage, or, in consequence of its suppression, as anxiety. In later years this reaction seems to die away.

In regard to the passive impulses of the phallic phase, it is noteworthy that girls regularly accuse their mother of seducing them. This is because they necessarily received their first, or at any rate their strongest, genital sensations when they were being cleaned and having their toilet attended to by their mother (or by someone such as a nurse who took her place). Mothers have often told me, as a matter of observation, that their little daughters of two and three years old enjoy these sensations and try to get their mothers to make them more intense by repeated touching and rubbing. The fact that the mother thus unavoidably initiates the child into the phallic phase is, I think, the reason why, in phantasies of later years, the father so regularly appears as the sexual seducer. When the girl turns away from her mother, she also makes over to her father her introduction into sexual life.

Female Sexuality

4603

Lastly, intense active wishful impulses directed towards the mother also arise during the phallic phase. The sexual activity of this period culminates in clitoridal masturbation. This is probably accompanied by ideas of the mother, but whether the child attaches a sexual aim to the idea, and what that aim is, I have not been able to discover from my observations. It is only when all her interests have received a fresh impetus through the arrival of a baby brother or sister that we can clearly recognize such an aim. The little girl wants to believe that she has given her mother the new baby, just as the boy wants to; and her reaction to this event and her behaviour to the baby is exactly the same as his. No doubt this sounds quite absurd, but perhaps that is only because it sounds so unfamiliar.

The turning-away from her mother is an extremely important step in the course of a little girl’s development. It is more than a mere change of object. We have already described what takes place in it and the many motives put forward for it; we may now add that hand in hand with it there is to be observed a marked lowering of the active sexual impulses and a rise of the passive ones. It is true that the active trends have been affected by frustration more strongly; they have proved totally unrealizable and are therefore abandoned by the libido more readily. But the passive trends have not escaped disappointment either. With the turning-away from the mother clitoridal masturbation frequently ceases as well; and often enough when the small girl represses her previous masculinity a considerable portion of her sexual trends in general is permanently injured too. The transition to the father-object is accomplished with the help of the passive trends in so far as they have escaped the catastrophe. The path to the development of femininity now lies open to the girl, to the extent to which it is not restricted by the remains of the pre-Oedipus attachment to her mother which she has surmounted.

Female Sexuality

4604

If we now survey the stage of sexual development in the female which I have been describing, we cannot resist coming to a definite conclusion about female sexuality as a whole. We have found the same libidinal forces at work in it as in the male child and we have been able to convince ourselves that for a period of time these forces follow the same course and have the same outcome in each.

Biological factors subsequently deflect those libidinal forces from their original aims and conduct even active and in every sense masculine trends into feminine channels. Since we cannot dismiss the notion that sexual excitation is derived from the operation of certain chemical substances, it seems plausible at first to expect that biochemistry will one day disclose a substance to us whose presence produces a male sexual excitation and another substance which produces a female one. But this hope seems no less naïve than the other one - happily obsolete to-day - that it may be possible under the microscope to isolate the different exciting factors of hysteria, obsessional neurosis, melancholia, and so on.

Even in sexual chemistry things must be rather more complicated. For psychology, however, it is a matter of indifference whether there is a single sexually exciting substance in the body or two or countless numbers of them. Psycho-analysis teaches us to manage with a single libido, which, it is true, has both active and passive aims (that is, modes of satisfaction). This antithesis and, above all, the existence of libidinal trends with passive aims, contains within itself the remainder of our problem.

Female Sexuality

4605

IV

An examination of the analytic literature on the subject shows that everything that has been said by me here is already to be found in it. It would have been superfluous to publish this paper if it were not that in a field of research which is so difficult of access every account of first-hand experiences or personal views may be of value. Moreover, there are a number of points which I have defined more sharply and isolated more carefully. In some of the other papers on the subject the description is obscured because they deal at the same time with the problems of the super-ego and the sense of guilt. This I have avoided doing. Also, in describing the various outcomes of this phase of development, I have refrained from discussing the complications which arise when a child, as a result of disappointment from her father, returns to the attachment to her mother which she had abandoned, or when, in the course of her life, she repeatedly changes over from one position to the other. But precisely because my paper is only one contribution among others, I may be spared an exhaustive survey of the literature, and I can confine myself to bringing out the more important points on which I agree or disagree with these other writings.

Abraham’s (1921) description of the manifestations of the castration complex in the female is still unsurpassed; but one would be glad if it had included the factor of the girl’s original exclusive attachment to her mother. I am in agreement with the principal points in Jeanne Lampl-de Groot’s¹ (1927) important paper. In this the complete identity of the pre-Oedipus phase in boys and girls is recognized, and the girl’s sexual (phallic) activity towards her mother is affirmed and substantiated by observations. The turning-away from the mother is traced to the influence of the girl’s recognition of castration, which obliges her to give up her sexual object, and often masturbation along with it. The whole development is summed up in the formula that the girl goes through a phase of the ‘negative’ Oedipus complex before she can enter the positive one. A point on which I find the writer’s account inadequate is that it represents the turning-away from the mother as being merely a change of object and does not discuss the fact that it is accompanied by the plainest manifestations of hostility. To this hostility full justice is done in Helene Deutsch’s latest paper, on feminine masochism and its relation to frigidity (1930), in which she also recognizes the girl’s phallic activity and the intensity of her attachment to her mother. Helene Deutsch states further that the girl’s turning towards her father takes place viâ her passive trends (which have already been awakened in relation to her mother). In her earlier book (1925) the author had not yet set herself free from the endeavour to apply the Oedipus pattern to the pre-Oedipus phase, and she therefore interpreted the little girl’s phallic activity as an identification with her father.

¹ The author’s name was given when it appeared in the Zeitschrift as ‘A. Lampl-de Groot’, and I correct it here at her request.

Female Sexuality

4606

Fenichel (1930) rightly emphasizes the difficulty of recognizing in the material produced in analysis what parts of it represent the unchanged content of the pre-Oedipus phase and what parts have been distorted by regression (or in other ways). He does not accept Jeanne Lampl-de Groot’s assertion of the little girl’s active attitude in the phallic phase. He also rejects the ‘displacement backwards’ of the Oedipus complex proposed by Melanie Klein (1928), who places its beginnings as early as the commencement of the second year of life. This dating of it, which would also necessarily imply a modification of our view of all the rest of the child’s development, does not in fact correspond to what we learn from the analyses of adults, and it is especially incompatible with my findings as to the long duration of the girl’s pre-Oedipus attachment to her mother. A means of softening this contradiction is afforded by the reflection that we are not as yet able to distinguish in this field between what is rigidly fixed by biological laws and what is open to movement and change under the influence of accidental experience. The effect of seduction has long been familiar to us and in just the same way other factors - such as the date at which the child’s brothers and sisters are born or the time when it discovers the difference between the sexes, or again its direct observations of sexual intercourse or its parents’ behaviour in encouraging or repelling it - may hasten the child’s sexual development and bring it to maturity.

Female Sexuality

4607

Some writers are inclined to reduce the importance of the child’s first and most original libidinal impulses in favour of later developmental processes, so that - to put this view in its most extreme form - the only role left to the former is merely to indicate certain paths, while the intensities which flow along those paths are supplied by later regressions and reaction-formations. Thus, for instance, Karin Horney (1926) is of the opinion that we greatly over-estimate the girl’s primary penis-envy and that the strength of the masculine trend which she develops later is to be attributed to a secondary penis-envy which is used to fend off her feminine impulses and, in particular, her feminine attachment to her father. This does not tally with my impressions. Certain as is the occurrence of later reinforcements through regression and reaction-formation, and difficult as it is to estimate the relative strength of the confluent libidinal components, I nevertheless think that we should not overlook the fact that the first libidinal impulses have an intensity of their own which is superior to any that come later and which may indeed be termed incommensurable. It is undoubtedly true that there is an antithesis between the attachment to the father and the masculinity complex; it is the general antithesis that exists between activity and passivity, masculinity and femininity. But this gives us no right to assume that only one of them is primary and that the other owes its strength merely to the force of defence. And if the defence against femininity is so energetic, from what other source can it draw its strength than from the masculine trend which found its first expression in the child’s penis-envy and therefore deserves to be named after it?

A similar objection applies to Ernest Jones’s view (1927) that the phallic phase in girls is a secondary, protective reaction rather than a genuine developmental stage. This does not correspond either to the dynamic or the chronological position of things.

4608

DR. REIK AND THE PROBLEM OF QUACKERY

A LETTER TO THE NEUE FREIE PRESSE

(1926)

Dear Sir,

In an article in your issue of July 15 dealing with the case of my pupil, Dr. Theodor Reik, or, more precisely, in a section of it headed ‘Information from Psycho-Analytic Circles’, there is a passage on which I should like to make a few remarks by way of correction.

The passage runs: ‘. . . during the last few years he has become convinced that Dr. Reik, who has gained a wide reputation from his philosophical and psychological writings, possesses a far greater gift for psycho-analysis than the physicians attached to the Freudian school; and he has entrusted the most difficult cases only to him and to his daughter Anna, who has proved quite specially adept in the difficult technique of psycho-analysis.’

Dr. Reik himself would, I think, be the first to reject any such account of the basis of our relations. It is true, however, that I have availed myself of his skill in particularly difficult cases, but this has only been where the symptoms lay in a sphere far removed from the physical one. And I have never failed to inform a patient that he is not a physician but a psychologist.

My daughter Anna has devoted herself to the pedagogic analysis of children and adolescents. I have never yet referred to her a case of severe neurotic illness in an adult. Incidentally the only case with moderately severe symptoms verging on the psychiatric which she has hitherto treated repaid the physician who referred it to her by its complete success.

I take the opportunity of informing you that I have just sent to press a small work on The Question of Lay Analysis. In it I have tried to show what a psycho-analysis is and what demands it makes on the analyst. I have considered the far from simple relations between psycho-analysis and medicine, and have drawn the conclusion that any mechanical application to trained analysts of the section against quackery is open to grave doubts.

Since I have given up my Vienna practice and have cut down my activity to the treatment of a very few foreigners, I trust that this announcement will not involve me too in a prosecution for unprofessional advertisement.

Yours &c.,

Professor Freud

4609

DR. ERNEST JONES

(ON HIS 50th BIRTHDAY)

(1929)

The first piece of work that it fell to psycho-analysis to perform was the discovery of the instincts that are common to all men living to-day - and not only to those living to-day but to those of ancient and of prehistoric times. It called for no great effort, therefore, for psycho-analysis to ignore the differences that arise among the inhabitants of the earth owing to the multiplicity of races, languages and countries. From the start it was international, and it is well known that its followers overcame the dividing effects of the Great War sooner than any others.

Among the men who met at Salzburg in the spring of 1908 for the first psycho-analytical congress, a young English physician was prominent, who delivered a short paper on ‘Rationalization in Everyday Life’. The contents of this first-fruit hold good to this day: our young science was enriched by an important concept and an indispensable term.

From that time on Ernest Jones has never rested. First in his post as a professor in Toronto, then as a physician in London, as the founder and teacher of a Branch Society, as director of a Press, as editor of a Journal, and as head of a Training Institute, he has worked tirelessly for psycho-analysis, making its current findings generally known by means of lectures, defending it against the attacks and misunderstandings of its opponents by means of brilliant, severe but fair criticisms, maintaining its difficult position in England against the demands of the ‘profession’ with tact and moderation, and, alongside of all these externally directed activities, accomplishing, in loyal co-operation with the development of psycho-analysis on the Continent, the scientific achievement to which, among other works, his Papers on Psycho-Analysis and Essays in Applied Psycho-Analysis bear witness. Now, in the prime of life, he is not only indisputably the leading figure among English-speaking analysts, but is also recognized as one of the foremost representatives of psycho-analysis as a whole - a mainstay for his friends and, as much as ever, a hope for the future of our science.

Now that the Director of this journal has broken the silence to which he is condemned - or to which he has a right - owing to his age, in order to greet his friend, he may be permitted to conclude - not with a wish, for we do not believe in the omnipotence of thoughts - but with the admission that he cannot think of Ernest Jones, even after his fiftieth birthday, as other than before: zealous and energetic, combative and devoted to the cause.

4610

THE EXPERT OPINION IN THE HALSMANN CASE

(1931)

The Oedipus complex, as far as we know, is present in childhood in all human beings, undergoes great alterations during the years of development and in many individuals is found in varying degrees of strength even at a mature age. Its essential characteristics, its universality, its content and its fate were recognized, long before the days of psycho-analysis, by that acute thinker Diderot, as is shown by a passage in his famous dialogue, Le neveu de Rameua: ‘Si le petit sauvage était abandonne à lui-même, qu’il conservât tout son imbécillité, et qu’il réunit au peu de raison de l’enfant au berceau la violence des passions de l’homme de trente ans, il tordrait le cou à son pere, et coucherait avec sa mère.’

If it had been objectively demonstrated that Philipp Halsmann murdered his father, there would at all events be some grounds for introducing the Oedipus complex to provide a motive for an otherwise unexplained deed. Since no such proof has been adduced, mention of the Oedipus complex has a misleading effect; it is at the least idle. Such disagreements as have been uncovered by the investigation in the Halsmann family between the father and son are altogether inadequate to provide a foundation for assuming in the son a bad relationship towards his father. Even if it were otherwise, we should be obliged to say that it is a far cry from there to the causation of such a deed. Precisely because it is always present, the Oedipus complex is not suited to provide a decision on the question of guilt. The situation envisaged in a well-known anecdote might easily be brought about. There was a burglary. A man who had a jemmy in his possession was found guilty of the crime. After the verdict had been given and he had been asked if he had anything to say, he begged to be sentenced for adultery at the same time - since he was carrying the tool for that on him as well.

In Dostoevsky’s great novel, The Brothers Karamazov, the Oedipus situation stands at the focal point of interest. Old Karamazov has made himself detested by his sons through heartless oppression; in the eyes of one of them he is, in addition, a powerful rival for the woman he desires. This son, Dmitri, makes no secret of his intention to avenge himself on his father by force. It is therefore natural that after his father has been murdered and robbed he should be accused as his murderer and, despite all protestations of his innocence, condemned. And yet Dmitri is innocent; another of the brothers has done the deed. A dictum that has become famous occurs during the trial scene in this novel: ‘Psychology is a knife that cuts both ways.’

The Expert Opinion In The Halsmann Case

4611

The Opinion of the Innsbruck Faculty of Medicine seems inclined to attribute an ‘effective’ Oedipus complex to Philipp Halsmann, but refrains from defining the measure of this effectiveness, since under the pressure of the accusation the necessary conditions for ‘an unreserved disclosure’ on Philipp Halsmann’s part were not fulfilled. When the Faculty go on to refuse even ‘on the supposition of the accused being guilty to look for the root of the deed in an Oedipus complex’, they are carrying their denial too far without any necessity.

In the same Opinion, we come up against a contradiction which is by no means without significance. The possible influence of emotional shock on the disturbance of memory with regard to impressions before and during the critical time is minimized to the extreme, in my opinion unjustly. The assumptions of an exceptional state of mind or of mental illness are decisively rejected, but the explanation of a ‘repression’ having taken place in Philipp Halsmann after the deed is readily allowed. I must say, however, that a repression of this kind, occurring out of the blue in an adult who gives no indication of a severe neurosis - the repression of an action which would certainly be more important than any debatable details of distance and the passage of time and which takes place in a normal state or one altered only by physical fatigue - would be a rarity of the first order.

4612

INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL PSYCHOPATHOLOGY NUMBER OF

THE MEDICAL REVIEW OF REVIEWS

(1930)

Dr. Feigenbaum has asked me to write a few words for the Review of which he is in charge, and I take the opportunity of wishing the best success to his undertaking.

I often hear that psycho-analysis is very popular in the United States and that it does not come up against the same stubborn resistance there as it does in Europe. My satisfaction over this is, however, clouded by several circumstances. It seems to me that the popularity of the name of psycho-analysis in America signifies neither a friendly attitude to the thing itself nor any specially wide or deep knowledge of it. As evidence of the former fact I may point out that, although financial support is to be had easily and in plenty for every kind of scientific and pseudo-scientific enterprise, we have never succeeded in obtaining a backing for our psycho-analytic institutions. Nor is it hard to find evidence for my second assertion. Although America possesses several excellent analysts and, in Dr. A. A. Brill, at least one authority, the contributions to our science from that vast country are exiguous and provide little that is new. Psychiatrists and neurologists make frequent use of psycho-analysis as a therapeutic method, but as a rule they show little interest in its scientific problems and its cultural significance. Quite particularly often we find in American physicians and writers a very insufficient familiarity with psycho-analysis, so that they know only its terms and a few catch-words - though this does not shake them in the certainty of their judgement. And these same men lump psycho-analysis with other systems of thought, which may have developed out of it but are incompatible with it to-day. Or they make a hotch-potch out of psycho-analysis and other elements and quote this procedure as evidence of their broad-mindedness, whereas it only proves their lack of judgement.

Many of these evils which I have mentioned with regret no doubt arise from the fact that there is a general tendency in America to shorten study and preparation and to proceed as fast as possible to practical application. There is a preference, too, for studying a subject like psycho-analysis not from the original sources but from second-hand and often inferior accounts. Thoroughness is bound to suffer from this.

It is to be hoped that works of the kind that Dr. Feigenbaum intends to publish in his Review will be a powerful encouragement to the interest in psycho-analysis in America.

4613

INTRODUCTION TO EDOARDO WEISS’S ELEMENTS OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

(1931)

The author of these lectures, my friend and pupil Dr. Edoardo Weiss, has expressed a wish that I should send his work on its way with a few words of recommendation. In doing so I am fully aware that such a recommendation is superfluous. The work speaks for itself. All who know how to appreciate the seriousness of a scientific endeavour, how to value the honesty of an investigator who does not seek to belittle or deny the difficulties, and how to take pleasure in the skill of a teacher who brings light into darkness and order into chaos by his exposition, must form a high estimate of this book and share my hope that it will awaken among cultivated and learned circles in Italy a lasting interest in the young science of psycho-analysis.

Sigm. Freud

4614

PREFACE TO TEN YEARS OF THE BERLIN PSYCHO-ANALYTIC INSTITUTE

(1930)

The following pages describe the founding and achievements of the Berlin Psycho-Analytic Institute, to which are allotted three important functions within the psycho-analytic movement. First, it endeavours to make our therapy accessible to the great multitude who suffer under their neuroses no less than the wealthy, but who are not in a position to meet the cost of their treatment. Secondly, it seeks to provide a centre at which analysis can be taught theoretically and at which the experience of older analysts can be handed on to pupils who are anxious to learn. And lastly, it aims at perfecting our knowledge of neurotic illnesses and our therapeutic technique by applying them and testing them under fresh conditions.

An Institute of this kind was indispensable; but we should have waited in vain for assistance from the State or interest from the University in its foundation. Here the energy and self-sacrifice of an individual analyst took the initiative. Ten years ago, Dr. Max Eitingon, now President of the International Psycho-Analytical Association, created an Institute such as this from his own resources, and has since then maintained and directed it by his own efforts. This Report on the first decade of the Berlin Institute is a tribute to its creator and director - an attempt to render him public thanks. Everyone who, in whatever sense, has a share in psycho-analysis will unite in thus thanking him.

4615

PREFACE TO HERMANN NUNBERG’S

GENERAL THEORY OF THE NEUROSES ON A PSYCHO-ANALYTIC BASIS

(1932)

This volume by Hermann Nunberg contains the most complete and conscientious presentation of a psycho-analytic theory of neurotic processes which we at present possess. Anyone who is anxious to have the relevant problems simplified and smoothed away will scarcely find satisfaction in this work. But anyone who prefers scientific thinking and can appreciate it as a merit when speculation never abandons the guiding-line of experience and anyone who can enjoy the beautiful diversity of mental happenings - he will value this work and study it assiduously.

VIENNA, October 1931.

4616

LETTER TO THE BURGOMASTER OF PRÍBOR

(1931)

I offer my thanks to the Burgomaster of the town of Príbor-Freiberg, to the organizers of this celebration and to all those who are attending it, for the honour they have done me in marking the house of my birth with this commemorative tablet from an artist’s hand - and this during my lifetime and while the world around us is not yet agreed in its estimate of my work.

I left Freiberg at the age of three and visited it when I was sixteen, during my school holidays, as a guest of the Fluss family, and I have never returned to it again. Since that time much has befallen me; my labours have been many, I have experienced some suffering and happiness as well, and I have had a share of success - the common medley of human life. At seventy-five it is not easy for me to put myself back into those early times; of their rich experiences but few relics remain in my memory. But of one thing I can feel sure: deeply buried within me there still lives the happy child of Freiberg, the first-born son of a youthful mother, who received his first indelible impressions from this air, from this soil. Thus I may be allowed to end my words of thanks with a heartfelt wish for the happiness of this place and of those who live in it.

4617

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

(1933)

4618

Intentionally left blank

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4619

PREFACE

My Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis were delivered during the two Winter Terms of 1915-16 and 1916-17 in a lecture room of the Vienna Psychiatric Clinic before an audience gathered from all the Faculties of the University. The first half of the lectures were improvised, and written out immediately afterwards; drafts of the second half were made during the intervening summer vacation at Salzburg, and delivered word for word in the following winter. At that time I still possessed the gift of a phonographic memory.

These new lectures, unlike the former ones, have never been delivered. My age had in the meantime absolved me from the obligation of giving expression to my membership of the University (which was in any case a peripheral one) by delivering lectures; and a surgical operation had made speaking in public impossible for me. If, therefore, I once more take my place in the lecture room during the remarks that follow, it is only by an artifice of the imagination; it may help me not to forget to bear the reader in mind as I enter more deeply into my subject.

The new lectures are by no means intended to take the place of the earlier ones. They do not in any sense form an independent entity with an expectation of finding a circle of readers of its own; they are continuations and supplements, which, in relation to the former series, fall into three groups. A first group contains fresh treatments of subjects which were already dealt with fifteen years ago but which, as a result of a deepening of our knowledge and an alteration in our views, call for a different exposition to-day - that is to say, critical revisions. The two other groups contain what are true extensions, for they deal with things which either did not exist in psycho-analysis at the time of the first lectures or which were too little in evidence to justify a special chapter-heading. It is inevitable, but not to be regretted, if some of the new lectures unite the characteristics of more than one of these groups.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4620

I have also given expression to the dependence of these new lectures on the Introductory Lectures by giving them a numbering continuous with theirs. The first lecture in this volume is accordingly called No. XXIX. Like their predecessors, they offer the professional analyst little that is new; they are addressed to the multitude of educated people to whom we may perhaps attribute a benevolent, even though cautious, interest in the characteristics and discoveries of the young science. This time once again it has been my chief aim to make no sacrifice to an appearance of being simple, complete or rounded-off, not to disguise problems and not to deny the existence of gaps and uncertainties. In no other field of scientific work would it be necessary to boast of such modest intentions. They are universally regarded as self-evident; the public expects nothing else. No reader of an account of astronomy will feel disappointed and contemptuous of the science if he is shown the frontiers at which our knowledge of the universe melts into haziness. Only in psychology is it otherwise. There mankind’s constitutional unfitness for scientific research comes fully into the open. What people seem to demand of psychology is not progress in knowledge, but satisfactions of some other sort; every unsolved problem, every admitted uncertainty is made into a reproach against it.

Whoever cares for the science of mental life must accept these injustices along with it.

FREUD

VIENNA, Summer 1932

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4621

LECTURE XXIX

REVISION OF THE THEORY OF DREAMS

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - If, after an interval of more than fifteen years, I have brought you together again to discuss with you what novelties, and what improvements it may be, the intervening time has introduced into psycho-analysis, it is right and fitting from more than one point of view that we should turn our attention first to the position of the theory of dreams. It occupies a special place in the history of psycho-analysis and marks a turning-point; it was with it that analysis took the step from being a psychotherapeutic procedure to being a depth-psychology. Since then, too, the theory of dreams has remained what is most characteristic and peculiar about the young science, something to which there is no counterpart in the rest of our knowledge, a stretch of new country, which has been reclaimed from popular beliefs and mysticism. The strangeness of the assertions it was obliged to put forward has made it play the part of a shibboleth, the use of which decided who could become a follower of psycho-analysis and to whom it remained forever incomprehensible. I myself found it a sheet-anchor during those difficult times when the unrecognized facts of the neuroses used to confuse my inexperienced judgement. Whenever I began to have doubts of the correctness of my wavering conclusions, the successful transformation of a senseless and muddled dream into a logical and intelligible mental process in the dreamer would renew my confidence of being on the right track.

It is therefore of special interest to us, in the particular instance of the theory of dreams, on the one hand to follow the vicissitudes through which psycho-analysis has passed during this interval, and on the other hand to learn what advances it has made in being understood and appreciated by the contemporary world. I may tell you at once that you will be disappointed in both these directions.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4622

Let us look through the volumes of the Internationale Zeitschrift für (ärztliche) Psychoanalyse, in which, since 1913, the authoritative writings in our field of work have been brought together. In the earlier volumes you will find a recurrent sectional heading ‘On Dream-Interpretation’, containing numerous contributions on various points in the theory of dreams. But the further you go the rarer do these contributions become, and finally the sectional heading disappears completely. The analysts behave as though they had no more to say about dreams, as though there was nothing more to be added to the theory of dreams. But if you ask how much of dream-interpretation has been accepted by outsiders - by the many psychiatrists and psychotherapists who warm their pot of soup at our fire (incidentally without being very grateful for our hospitality), by what are described as educated people, who are in the habit of assimilating the more striking findings of science, by the literary men and by the public at large - the reply gives little cause for satisfaction. A few formulas have become generally familiar, among them some that we have never put forward - such as the thesis that all dreams are of a sexual nature - but really important things like the fundamental distinction between the manifest content of dreams and the latent dream-thoughts, the realization that the wish-fulfilling function of dreams is not contradicted by anxiety-dreams, the impossibility of interpreting a dream unless one has the dreamer’s associations to it at one’s disposal, and, above all, the discovery that what is essential in dreams is the process of the dream-work - all this still seems about as foreign to general awareness as it was thirty years ago. I am in a position to say this, since in the course of that period I have received innumerable letters whose writers present their dreams for interpretation or ask for information about the nature of dreams and who declare that they have read my Interpretation of Dreams, though in every sentence they betray their lack of understanding of our theory of dreams. But all this shall not deter us from once more giving a connected account of what we know about dreams. You will recall that last time we devoted a whole number of lectures to showing how we came to understand this hitherto unexplained mental phenomenon.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4623

Let us suppose, then, that someone - a patient in analysis, for instance - tells us one of his dreams. We shall assume that in this way he is making us one of the communications to which he has pledged himself by the fact of having started an analytic treatment. It is, to be sure, a communication made by inappropriate means, for dreams are not in themselves social utterances, not a means of giving information. Nor, indeed, do we understand what the dreamer was trying to say to us, and he himself is equally in the dark. And now we have to make a quick decision. On the one hand, the dream may be, as non-analytic doctors assure us, a sign that the dreamer has slept badly, that not every part of his brain has come to rest equally, that some areas of it, under the influence of unknown stimuli, endeavoured to go on working but were only able to do so in a very incomplete fashion. If that is the case, we shall be right to concern ourselves no further with the product of a nocturnal disturbance which has no psychical value: for what could we expect to derive from investigating it that would be of use for our purposes? Or on the other hand - but it is plain that we have from the first decided otherwise. We have - quite arbitrarily, it must be admitted - made the assumption, adopted as a postulate, that even this unintelligible dream must be a fully valid psychical act, with sense and worth, which we can use in analysis like any other communication. Only the outcome of our experiment can show whether we are right. If we succeed in turning the dream into an utterance of value of that kind, we shall evidently have a prospect of learning something new and of receiving communications of a sort which would otherwise be inaccessible to us.

Now, however, the difficulties of our task and the enigmas of our subject rise before our eyes. How do we propose to transform the dream into a normal communication and how do we explain the fact that some of the patient’s utterances have assumed a form that is unintelligible both to him and to us?

As you see, Ladies and Gentlemen, this time I am taking the path not of a genetic but of a dogmatic exposition. Our first step is to establish our new attitude to the problem of dreams by introducing two new concepts and names. What has been called the dream we shall describe as the text of the dream or the manifest dream, and what we are looking for, what we suspect, so to say, of lying behind the dream, we shall describe as the latent dream-thoughts. Having done this, we can express our two tasks as follows. We have to transform the manifest dream into the latent one, and to explain how, in the dreamer’s mind, the latter has become the former. The first portion is a practical task, for which dream-interpretation is responsible; it calls for a technique. The second portion is a theoretical task, whose business it is to explain the hypothetical dream-work; and it can only be a theory. Both of them, the technique of dream-interpretation and the theory of the dream-work, have to be newly created.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4624

With which of the two, then, shall we start? With the technique of dream-interpretation, I think; it will present a more concrete appearance and make a more vivid impression on you.

Well then, the patient has told us a dream, which we are to interpret. We have listened passively, without putting our powers of reflection into action. What do we do next? We decide to concern ourselves as little as possible with what we have heard, with the manifest dream. Of course this manifest dream exhibits all sorts of characteristics which are not entirely a matter of indifference to us. It may be coherent, smoothly constructed like a literary composition, or it may be confused to the point of unintelligibility, almost like a delirium; it may contain absurd elements or jokes and apparently witty conclusions; it may seem to the dreamer clear and sharp or obscure and hazy; its pictures may exhibit the complete sensory strength of perceptions or may be shadowy like an indistinct mist; the most diverse characteristics may be present in the same dream, distributed over various portions of it; the dream, finally, may show an indifferent emotional tone or be accompanied by feelings of the strongest joy or distress. You must not suppose that we think nothing of this endless diversity in manifest dreams. We shall come back to it later and we shall find a great deal in it that we can make use of in our interpretations. But for the moment we will disregard it and follow the main road that leads to the interpretation of dreams. That is to say, we ask the dreamer, too, to free himself from the impression of the manifest dream, to divert his attention from the dream as a whole on to the separate portions of its content and to report to us in succession everything that occurs to him in relation to each of these portions - what associations present themselves to him if he focuses on each of them separately.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4625

That is a curious technique, is it not? - not the usual way of dealing with a communication or utterance. And no doubt you guess that behind this procedure there are assumptions which have not yet been expressly stated. But let us proceed. In what order are we to get the patient to take up the portions of his dream? There are various possibilities open to us. We can simply follow the chronological order in which they appeared in the account of the dream. That is what may be called the strictest, classical method. Or we can direct the dreamer to begin by looking out for the ‘day’s residues’ in the dream; for experience has taught us that almost every dream includes the remains of a memory or an allusion to some event (or often to several events) of the day before the dream, and, if we follow these connections, we often arrive with one blow at the transition from the apparently far remote dream-world to the real life of the patient. Or, again, we may tell him to start with those elements of the dream’s content which strike him by their special clarity and sensory strength; for we know that he will find it particularly easy to get associations to these. It makes no difference by which of these methods we approach the associations we are in search of.

And next, we obtain these associations. What they bring us is of the most various kinds: memories from the day before, the ‘dream-day’, and from times long past, reflections, discussions, with arguments for and against, confessions and enquiries. Some of them the patient pours out; when he comes to others he is held up for a time. Most of them show a clear connection to some element of the dream; no wonder, since those elements were their starting-point. But it also sometimes happens that the patient introduces them with these words: ‘This seems to me to have nothing at all to do with the dream, but I tell it you because it occurs to me.’

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4626

If one listens to these copious associations, one soon notices that they have more in common with the content of the dream than their starting-points alone. They throw a surprising light on all the different parts of the dream, fill in gaps between them, and make their strange juxtapositions intelligible. In the end one is bound to become clear about the relation between them and the dream’s content. The dream is seen to be an abbreviated selection from the associations, a selection made, it is true, according to rules that we have not yet understood: the elements of the dream are like representatives chosen by election from a mass of people. There can be no doubt that by our technique we have got hold of something for which the dream is a substitute and in which lies the dream’s psychical value, but which no longer exhibits its puzzling peculiarities, its strangeness and its confusion.

Let there be no misunderstanding, however. The associations to the dream are not yet the latent dream-thoughts. The latter are contained in the associations like an alkali in the mother liquor, but yet not quite completely contained in them. On the one hand, the associations give us far more than we need for formulating the latent dream-thoughts - namely all the explanations, transitions, and connections which the patient’s intellect is bound to produce in the course of his approach to the dream-thoughts. On the other hand, an association often comes to a stop precisely before the genuine dream-thought: it has only come near to it and has only had contact with it through allusions. At that point we intervene on our own; we fill in the hints, draw undeniable conclusions, and give explicit utterance to what the patient has only touched on in his associations. This sounds as though we allowed our ingenuity and caprice to play with the material put at our disposal by the dreamer and as though we misused it in order to interpret into his utterances what cannot be interpreted from them. Nor is it easy to show the legitimacy of our procedure in an abstract description of it. But you have only to carry out a dream-analysis yourselves or study a good account of one in our literature and you will be convinced of the cogent manner in which interpretative work like this proceeds.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4627

If in general and primarily we are dependent, in interpreting dreams, on the dreamer’s associations, yet in relation to certain elements of the dream’s content we adopt a quite independent attitude, chiefly because we have to, because as a rule associations fail to materialize in their case. We noticed at an early stage that it is always in connection with the same elements that this happens; they are not very numerous, and repeated experience has taught us that they are to be regarded and interpreted as symbols of something else. As contrasted with the other dream-elements, a fixed meaning may be attributed to them, which, however, need not be unambiguous and whose range is determined by special rules with which we are unfamiliar. Since we know how to translate these symbols and the dreamer does not, in spite of having used them himself, it may happen that the sense of a dream may at once become clear to us as soon as we have heard the text of the dream, even before we have made any efforts at interpreting it, while it still remains an enigma to the dreamer himself. But I have said so much to you in my earlier lectures about symbolism, our knowledge of it and the problems it poses us, that I need not repeat it to-day.

That, then, is our method of interpreting dreams. The first and justifiable question is: ‘Can we interpret all dreams by its help?’ And the answer is: ‘No, not all; but so many that we feel confident in the serviceability and correctness of the procedure.’ ‘But why not all?’ The answer to this has something important to teach us, which at once introduces us into the psychical determinants of the formation of dreams: ‘Because the work of interpreting dreams is carried out against a resistance, which varies between trivial dimensions and invincibility (at least so far as the strength of our present methods reaches).’ It is impossible during our work to overlook the manifestations of this resistance. At some points the associations are given without hesitation and the first or second idea that occurs to the patient brings an explanation. At other points there is a stoppage and the patient hesitates before bringing out an association, and, if so, we often have to listen to a long chain of ideas before receiving anything that helps us to understand the dream. We are certainly right in thinking that the longer and more roundabout the chain of associations the stronger the resistance. We can detect the same influence at work in the forgetting of dreams. It happens often enough that a patient, despite all his efforts, cannot remember one of his dreams. But after we have been able in the course of a piece of analytic work to get rid of a difficulty which had been disturbing his relation to the analysis, the forgotten dream suddenly re-emerges. Two other observations are also in place here. It very frequently comes about that, to begin with, a portion of a dream is omitted and added afterwards as an addendum. This is to be regarded as an attempt to forget that portion. Experience shows that it is that particular piece which is the most important; there was a greater resistance, we suppose, in the path of communicating it than the other parts of the dream. Furthermore, we often find that a dreamer endeavours to prevent himself from forgetting his dreams by fixing them in writing immediately after waking up. We can tell him that that is no use. For the resistance from which he has extorted the preservation of the text of the dream will then be displaced on to its associations and will make the manifest dream inaccessible to interpretation. In view of these facts we need not feel surprised if a further increase in the resistance suppresses the associations altogether and thus brings the interpretation of the dream to nothing.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4628

From all this we infer that the resistance which we come across in the work of interpreting dreams must also have had a share in their origin. We can actually distinguish between dreams that arose under a slight and under a high pressure of resistance. But this pressure varies as well from place to place within one and the same dream; it is responsible for the gaps, obscurities and confusions which may interrupt the continuity of even the finest of dreams.

But what is creating the resistance and against what is it aimed? Well, the resistance is the surest sign to us of a conflict. There must be a force here which is seeking to express something and another which is striving to prevent its expression. What comes about in consequence as a manifest dream may combine all the decisions into which this struggle between two trends has been condensed. At one point one of these forces may have succeeded in putting through what it wanted to say, while at another point it is the opposing agency which has managed to blot out the intended communication completely or to replace it by something that reveals not a trace of it. The commonest and most characteristic cases of dream-construction are those in which the conflict has ended in a compromise, so that the communicating agency has, it is true, been able to say what it wanted but not in the way it wanted - only in a softened down, distorted and unrecognized form. If, then, dreams do not give a faithful picture of the dream-thoughts and if the work of interpretation is required in order to bridge the gap between them, that is the outcome of the opposing, inhibiting and restricting agency which we have inferred from our perception of the resistance while we interpret dreams. So long as we studied dreams as isolated phenomena independent of the psychical structures akin to them, we named this agency the censor of dreams.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4629

You have long been aware that this censorship is not an institution peculiar to dream-life. You know that the conflict between the two psychical agencies, which we - inaccurately - describe as the ‘unconscious repressed’ and the ‘conscious’, dominates our whole mental life and that the resistance against the interpretation of dreams, the sign of the dream-censorship, is nothing other than the resistance due to repression by which the two agencies are separated. You know too that the conflict between these two agencies may under certain conditions produce other psychical structures which, like dreams, are the outcome of compromises; and you will not expect me to repeat to you here everything that was contained in my introduction to the theory of the neuroses in order to demonstrate to you what we know of the determinants of the formation of such compromises. You have realized that the dream is a pathological product, the first member of the class which includes hysterical symptoms, obsessions and delusions, but that it is distinguished from the others by its transitoriness and by its occurrence under conditions which are part of normal life. For let us bear firmly in mind that, as was already pointed out by Aristotle, dream life is the way in which our mind works during the state of sleep. The state of sleep involves a turning-away from the real external world, and there we have the necessary condition for the development of a psychosis. The most careful study of the severe psychoses will not reveal to us a single feature that is more characteristic of those pathological conditions. In psychoses, however, the turning-away from reality is brought about in two kinds of way: either by the unconscious repressed becoming excessively strong so that it overwhelms the conscious, which is attached to reality, or because reality has become so intolerably distressing that the threatened ego throws itself into the arms of the unconscious instinctual forces in a desperate revolt. The harmless dream-psychosis is the result of a withdrawal from the external world which is consciously willed and only temporary, and it disappears when relations to the external world are resumed. During the isolation of the sleeping individual an alteration in the distribution of his psychical energy also sets in; a part of the expenditure on repression, which is normally required in order to hold the unconscious down, can be saved, for if the unconscious makes use of its relative liberation for active purposes, it finds its path to motility closed and the only path open to it is the harmless one leading to hallucinatory satisfaction. Now, therefore, a dream can be formed; but the fact of the dream-censorship shows that even during sleep enough of the resistance due to repression is retained.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4630

Here we are presented with a means of answering the question of whether dreams have a function too, whether they are entrusted with any useful achievement. The condition of rest free from stimulus, which the state of sleep wishes to establish, is threatened from three directions: in a relatively accidental manner by external stimuli during sleep, and by interests of the previous day which cannot be broken off, and in an unavoidable manner by unsated repressed instinctual impulses which are on the watch for an opportunity of finding expression. In consequence of the diminishing of repressions at night there would be a risk that the rest afforded by sleep would be interrupted whenever an instigation from outside or from inside succeeded in linking up with an unconscious instinctual source. The process of dreaming allows the product of a collaboration of this kind to find an outlet in a harmless hallucinatory experience and in that way assures a continuation of sleep. The fact that a dream occasionally awakens the sleeper, to the accompaniment of a generation of anxiety, is no contradiction of this function but rather, perhaps, a signal that the watchman regards the situation as too dangerous and no longer feels able to control it. And very often then, while we are still asleep, a consolation occurs to us which seeks to prevent our waking up: ‘But after all it’s only a dream!’

This was what I wanted to say to you, Ladies and Gentlemen, about dream-interpretation, whose task it is to lead the way from the manifest dream to the latent dream-thoughts. When this has been achieved, interest in a dream, so far as practical analysis is concerned, is for the most part at an end. We add the communication we have received in the form of a dream to the rest of the patient’s communications and proceed with the analysis. We, however, have an interest in dwelling a little longer on the dream. We are tempted to study the process by which the latent dream-thoughts were transformed into the manifest dream. We call this the ‘dream-work’. As you will recall, I described it in such detail in my earlier lectures that I can restrict my present survey to the most concise summary.

The process of the dream-work, then, is something entirely new and strange, nothing resembling which was known before. It has given us our first glimpse of the processes which take place in the unconscious system and has shown us that they are quite other than what we know from our conscious thinking and are bound to appear to the latter preposterous and incorrect. The importance of this finding was then increased by the discovery that in the construction of neurotic symptoms the same mechanisms (we do not venture to say ‘processes of thought’) are operative as those which have transformed the latent dream-thoughts into the manifest dream.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4631

In what follows I shall not be able to avoid a schematic method of exposition. Let us assume that in a particular case we have before us all the latent thoughts, charged with a greater or less amount of affect, by which the manifest dream has been replaced after its interpretation has been completed. We shall then be struck by one difference among these latent thoughts, and that difference will take us a long way. Almost all these dream-thoughts are recognized by the dreamer or acknowledged by him; he admits that he has thought this, now or at some other time, or that he might have thought it. There is only one single thought that he refuses to accept; it is strange to him or even perhaps repellent; he may possibly reject it with passionate feeling. It now becomes evident to us that the other thoughts are portions of a conscious, or, more accurately, a preconscious train of thinking. They might have been thought in waking life too, and indeed they were probably formed during the previous day. This one repudiated thought, however, or, properly speaking, this one impulse, is a child of night; it belongs to the dreamer’s unconscious and on that account it is repudiated and rejected by him. It had to wait for the nightly relaxation of repression in order to arrive at any kind of expression. And in any case this expression is a weakened, distorted and disguised one; without our work of dream-interpretation we should not have found it. This unconscious impulse has to thank its link with the other, unobjectionable, dream-thoughts for the opportunity of slipping past the barrier of the censorship in an inconspicuous disguise. On the other hand, the preconscious dream-thoughts have to thank this same link for the power to occupy mental life during sleep as well. For there is no doubt about it: this unconscious impulse is the true creator of the dream; it is what produces the psychical energy for the dream’s construction. Like any other instinctual impulse, it cannot strive for anything other than its own satisfaction; and our experience in interpreting dreams shows us too that that is the sense of all dreaming. In every dream an instinctual wish has to be represented as fulfilled. The shutting-off of mental life from reality at night and the regression to primitive mechanisms which this makes possible enable this wished-for instinctual satisfaction to be experienced in a hallucinatory manner as occurring in the present. As a result of this same regression, ideas are transformed in the dream into visual pictures: the latent dream-thoughts, that is to say, are dramatized and illustrated.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4632

This piece of the dream-work gives us information about some of the most striking and peculiar features of dreams. I will repeat the course of events in dream-formation. As an introduction: the wish to sleep and intentional turning away from the external world. Next, two consequences of this for the mental apparatus: first, the possibility for older and more primitive methods of working to emerge in it - regression; secondly, the lowering of the resistance due to repression which weighs down upon the unconscious. As a result of this last factor the possibility arises for the formation of a dream and this is taken advantage of by the precipitating causes, the internal and external stimuli which have become active. The dream which originates in this way is already a compromise-structure. It has a double function; on the one hand it is ego-syntonic, since, by getting rid of the stimuli which are interfering with sleep, it serves the wish to sleep; on the other hand it allows a repressed instinctual impulse to obtain the satisfaction that is possible in these circumstances, in the form of the hallucinated fulfilment of a wish. The whole process of forming a dream which is permitted by the sleeping ego is, however, subject to the condition of the censorship, which is exercised by the residue of the repression still in operation. I cannot present the process more simply: it is not more simple. But I can proceed now with my description of the dream-work.

Let us go back once more to the latent dream-thoughts. Their most powerful element is the repressed instinctual impulse which has created in them an expression for itself on the basis of the presence of chance stimuli and by transference on to the day’s residues - though an expression that is toned down and disguised. Like every instinctual impulse, it too presses for satisfaction by action; but its path to motility is blocked by the physiological regulations implied in the state of sleep; it is compelled to take the backwards course in the direction of perception and to be content with a hallucinated satisfaction. The latent dream-thoughts are thus transformed into a collection of sensory images and visual scenes. It is as they travel on this course that what seems to us so novel and so strange occurs to them. All the linguistic instruments by which we express the subtler relations of thought - the conjunctions and prepositions, the changes in declension and conjugation - are dropped, because there are no means of representing them; just as in a primitive language without any grammar, only the raw material of thought is expressed and abstract terms are taken back to the concrete ones that are at their basis. What is left over after this may well appear disconnected. The copious employment of symbols, which have become alien to conscious thinking, for representing certain objects and processes is in harmony alike with the archaic regression in the mental apparatus and with the demands of the censorship.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4633

But other changes made in the elements of the dream-thoughts go far beyond this. Such of those elements as allow any point of contact to be found between them are condensed into new unities. In the process of transforming the thoughts into pictures, preference is unmistakably given to such as permit of this putting-together, this condensation; it is as though a force were at work which was subjecting the material to compression and concentration. As a result of condensation, one element in the manifest dream may correspond to numerous elements in the latent dream-thoughts; but, conversely too, one element in the dream-thoughts may be represented by several images in the dream.

Still more remarkable is the other process - displacement or shifting of accent - which in conscious thinking we come across only as faulty reasoning or as means for a joke. The different ideas in the dream-thoughts are, indeed, not all of equal value; they are cathected with quotas of affect of varying magnitude and are correspondingly judged to be important and deserving of interest to a greater or less degree. In the dream-work these ideas are separated from the affects attaching to them. The affects are dealt with independently; they may be displaced on to something else, they may be retained, they may undergo alterations, or they may not appear in the dream at all. The importance of the ideas that have been stripped of their affect returns in the dream as sensory strength in the dream-pictures; but we observe that this accent has passed over from important elements to indifferent ones. Thus something that played only a minor part in the dream-thoughts seems to be pushed into the foreground in the dream as the main thing, while, on the contrary, what was the essence of the dream-thoughts finds only passing and indistinct representation in the dream. No other part of the dream-work is so much responsible for making the dream strange and incomprehensible to the dreamer. Displacement is the principal means used in the dream-distortion to which the dream-thoughts must submit under the influence of the censorship.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4634

After these influences have been brought to bear upon the dream-thoughts the dream is almost complete. A further, somewhat variable, factor also comes into play - known as ‘secondary revision’ - after the dream has been presented before consciousness as an object of perception. At that point we treat it as we are in general accustomed to treat the contents of our perception: we fill in gaps and introduce connections, and in doing so are often guilty of gross misunderstandings. But this activity, which might be described as a rationalizing one and which at best provides the dream with a smooth façade that cannot fit its true content, may also be omitted or only be expressed to a very modest degree - in which case the dream will display all its rents and cracks openly. It must not be forgotten, on the other hand, that the dream-work does not always operate with equal energy either; it often restricts itself to certain portions of the dream-thoughts only and others of them are allowed to appear in the dream unaltered. In such cases an impression is given of the dream having carried out the most delicate and complex intellectual operations, of its having speculated, made jokes, arrived at decisions and solved problems, whereas all this is a product of our normal mental activity, may have been performed equally well during the day before the dream as during the night, has nothing to do with the dream-work and brings nothing to light that is characteristic of dreams. Nor is it superfluous to insist once more on the contrast within the dream-thoughts themselves between the unconscious instinctual impulse and the day’s residues. While the latter exhibit all the multiplicity of our mental acts, the former, which becomes the motive force proper of the forming of the dream, finds its outlet invariably in the fulfilment of a wish.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4635

I could have told you all this fifteen years ago, and indeed I believe I did in fact tell it you then. And now let me bring together such changes and new discoveries as may have been made during the interval. I have said already that I am afraid you will find that it amounts to very little, and you will fail to understand why I obliged you to listen to the same thing twice over, and obliged myself to say it. But fifteen years have passed meanwhile and I hope that this will be my easiest way of re-establishing contact with you. Moreover, these are such fundamental things, of such decisive importance for understanding psycho-analysis, that one may be glad to hear them a second time, and it is in itself worth knowing that they have remained so much the same for fifteen years.

In the literature of this period you will of course find a large quantity of confirmatory material and of presentation of details, of which I intend only to give you samples. I shall also, incidentally, be able to tell you a few things that were in fact already known earlier. What is in question is principally the symbolism in dreams and the other methods of representation in them. Now listen to this. Only quite a short while ago the medical faculty in an American University refused to allow psycho-analysis the status of a science, on the ground that it did not admit of any experimental proof. They might have raised the same objection to astronomy; indeed, experimentation with the heavenly bodies is particularly difficult. There one has to fall back on observation. Nevertheless, some Viennese investigators have actually made a beginning with experimental confirmation of our dream symbolism. As long ago as in 1912 a Dr. Schrötter found that if instructions to dream of sexual matters are given to deeply hypnotized subjects, then in the dream that is thus provoked the sexual material emerges with its place taken by the symbols that are familiar to us. For instance, a woman was told to dream of sexual intercourse with a female friend. In her dream this friend appeared with a travelling-bag on which was pasted the label ‘Ladies Only’. Still more impressive experiments were carried out by Betlheim and Hartmann in 1924. They worked with patients suffering from what is known as the Korsakoff confusional psychosis. They told these patients stories of a grossly sexual kind and observed the distortions which appeared when the patients were instructed to reproduce what they had been told. Once more there emerged the symbols for sexual organs and sexual intercourse that are familiar to us - among them the symbol of the staircase which, as the writers justly remark, could never have been reached by a conscious wish to distort.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4636

In a very interesting series of experiments, Herbert Silberer has shown that one can catch the dream-work red-handed, as it were, in the act of turning abstract thoughts into visual pictures. If he tried to force himself to do intellectual work while he was in a state of fatigue and drowsiness, the thought would often vanish and be replaced by a vision, which was obviously a substitute for it.

Here is a simple example. ‘I thought’, says Silberer, ‘of having to revise an uneven passage in an essay.’ The vision: ‘I saw myself planing a piece of wood.’ It often happened during these experiments that the content of the vision was not the thought that was being dealt with but his own subjective state while he was making the effort - the state instead of the object. This is described by Silberer as a ‘functional phenomenon’. An example will show you at once what is meant. The author was endeavouring to compare the opinions of two philosophers on a particular question. But in his sleepy condition one of these opinions kept on escaping him and finally he had a vision that he was asking for information from a disobliging secretary who was bent over his writing-table and who began by disregarding him and then gave him a disagreeable and uncomplying look. The conditions under which the experiments were made probably themselves explain why the vision that was induced represented so often an event of self-observation.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4637

We have not yet finished with symbols. There are some which we believed we recognized but which nevertheless worried us because we could not explain how this particular symbol had come to have that particular meaning. In such cases confirmations from elsewhere - from philology, folklore, mythology or ritual - were bound to be especially welcome. An instance of this sort is the symbol of an overcoat or cloak. We have said that in a woman’s dreams this stands for a man. I hope it will impress you when you hear that Theodor Reik (1920) gives us this information: ‘During the extremely ancient bridal ceremonial of the Bedouins, the bridegroom covers the bride with a special cloak known as "Aba" and speaks the following ritual words: "Henceforth none save I shall cover thee!" (Quoted from Robert Eisler). We have also found several fresh symbols, at least two of which I will tell you of. According to Abraham (1922) a spider in dreams is a symbol of the mother, but of the phallic mother, of whom we are afraid; so that the fear of spiders expresses dread of mother-incest and horror of the female genitals. You know, perhaps, that the mythological creation, Medusa’s head, can be traced back to the same motif of fright at castration. The other symbol I want to talk to you about is that of the bridge, which has been explained by Ferenczi (1921 and 1922). First it means the male organ, which unites the two parents in sexual intercourse; but afterwards it develops further meanings which are derived from this first one. In so far as it is thanks to the male organ that we are able to come into the world at all, out of the amniotic fluid, a bridge becomes the crossing from the other world (the unborn state, the womb) to this world (life); and, since men also picture death as a return to the womb (to the water), a bridge also acquires the meaning of something that leads to death, and finally, at a further remove from its original sense, it stands for transitions or changes in condition generally. It tallies with this, accordingly, if a woman who has not overcome her wish to be a man has frequent dreams of bridges that are too short to reach the further shore.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4638

In the manifest content of dreams we very often find pictures and situations recalling familiar themes in fairy tales, legends and myths. The interpretation of such dreams thus throws a light on the original interests which created these themes, though we must at the same time not forget, of course, the change in meaning by which this material has been affected in the course of time. Our work of interpretation uncovers, so to say, the raw material, which must often enough be described as sexual in the widest sense, but has found the most varied application in later adaptations. Derivations of this kind are apt to bring down on us the wrath of all non-analytically schooled workers, as though we were seeking to deny or undervalue everything that was later erected on the original basis. Nevertheless, such discoveries are instructive and interesting. The same is true of tracing back the origin of particular themes in plastic art, as, for instance, when M. J. Eisler (1919), following indications in his patients’ dreams, gave an analytic interpretation of the youth playing with a little boy represented in the Hermes of Praxiteles. And lastly I cannot resist pointing out how often light is thrown by the interpretation of dreams on mythological themes in particular. Thus, for instance, the legend of the Labyrinth can be recognized as a representation of anal birth: the twisting paths are the bowels and Ariadne’s thread is the umbilical cord.

The methods of representation employed by the dream-work - fascinating material, scarcely capable of exhaustion - have been made more and more familiar to us by closer study. I will give you a few examples of them. Thus, for instance, dreams represent the relation of frequency by a multiplication of similar things. Here is a young girl’s remarkable dream. She dreamt she came into a great hall and found some one in it sitting on a chair; this was repeated six or eight times or more, but each time it was her father. This is easy to understand when we discover, from accessory details in the interpretation, that this room stood for the womb. The dream then becomes equivalent to the phantasy, familiarly found in girls, of having met their rather already during their intra-uterine life when he visited the womb while their mother was pregnant. You should not be confused by the fact that something is reversed in the dream - that her father’s ‘coming-in’ is displaced on to herself; incidentally, this has a special meaning of its own as well. The multiplication of the figure of the father can only express the fact that the event in question occurred repeatedly. After all, it must be allowed that the dream is not taking very much on itself in expressing frequency by multiplicity. It has only needed to go back to the original significance of the former word; to-day it means to us a repetition in time, but it is derived from an accumulation in space. In general, indeed, where it is possible, the dream-work changes temporal relations into spatial ones and represents them as such. In a dream, for instance, one may see a scene between two people who look very small and a long way off, as though one were seeing them through the wrong end of a pair of opera-glasses. Here, both the smallness and the remoteness in space have the same significance: what is meant is remoteness in time and we are to understand that the scene is from the remote past.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4639

Again, you may remember that in my earlier lectures I already told you (and illustrated the fact by examples) that we had learnt to make use for our interpretations even of the purely formal features of the manifest dream - that is, to transform them into material coming from the latent dream-thoughts. As you already know, all dreams that are dreamt in a single night belong in a single context. But it is not a matter of indifference whether these dreams appear to the dreamer as a continuum or whether he divides them into several parts and into how many. The number of such parts often corresponds to an equal number of separate focal points in the structural formation of the latent dream-thoughts or to contending trends in the dreamer’s mental life, each of which finds a dominant, even though never an exclusive, expression in one particular part of the dream. A short introductory dream and a longer main dream following it often stand in the relation of protasis and apodosis, of which a very clear instance will be found in the old lectures. A dream which is described by the dreamer as ‘somehow interpolated’ will actually correspond to a dependent clause in the dream-thoughts. Franz Alexander (1925) has shown in a study on pairs of dreams that it not infrequently happens that two dreams in one night share the carrying-out of the dream’s task by producing a wish-fulfilment in two stages if they are taken together, though each dream separately would not effect that result. Suppose, for instance, that the dream-wish had as its content some illicit action in regard to a particular person. Then in the first dream the person will appear undisguised, but the action will be only timidly hinted at. The second dream will behave differently. The action will be named without disguise, but the person will either be made unrecognizable or replaced by someone indifferent. This, you will admit, gives one an impression of actual cunning. Another and similar relation between the two members of a pair of dreams is found where one represents a punishment and the other the sinful wish-fulfilment. It amounts to this: ‘if one accepts the punishment for it, one can go on to allow oneself the forbidden thing.’

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4640

I cannot detain you any longer over such minor discoveries or over the discussions relating to the employment of dream-interpretation in the work of analysis. I feel sure you are impatient to hear what changes have been made in our fundamental views on the nature and significance of dreams. I have already warned you that precisely on this there is little to report to you. The most disputed point in the whole theory was no doubt the assertion that all dreams are the fulfilments of wishes. The inevitable and ever recurring objection raised by the layman that there are nevertheless so many anxiety-dreams was, I think I may say, completely disposed of in my earlier lectures. With the division into wishful dreams, anxiety-dreams and punishment dreams, we have kept our theory intact.

Punishment-dreams, too, are fulfilments of wishes, though not of wishes of the instinctual impulses but of those of the critical, censoring and punishing agency in the mind. If we have a pure punishment-dream before us, an easy mental operation will enable us to restore the wishful dream to which the punishment-dream was the correct rejoinder and which, owing to this repudiation, was replaced as the manifest dream. As you know, Ladies and Gentlemen, the study of dreams was what first helped us to understand the neuroses, and you will find it natural that our knowledge of the neuroses was later able to influence our view of dreams. As you will hear, we have been obliged to postulate the existence in the mind of a special critical and prohibiting agency which we have named the ‘super-ego’. Since recognizing that the censorship of dreams is also a function of this agency, we have been led to examine the part played by the super-ego in the construction of dreams more carefully.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4641

Only two serious difficulties have arisen against the wish-fulfilment theory of dreams. A discussion of them leads far afield and has not yet, indeed, brought us to any wholly satisfying conclusion.

The first of these difficulties is presented in the fact that people who have experienced a shock, a severe psychical trauma - such as happened so often during the war and such as affords the basis for traumatic hysteria - are regularly taken back in their dreams into the traumatic situation. According to our hypotheses about the function of dreams this should not occur. What wishful impulse could be satisfied by harking back in this way to this exceedingly distressing traumatic experience? It is hard to guess.

We meet with the second of these facts almost every day in the course of our analytic work; and it does not imply such an important objection as the other does. One of the tasks of psycho-analysis, as you know, is to lift the veil of amnesia which hides the earliest years of childhood and to bring to conscious memory the manifestations of early infantile sexual life which are contained in them. Now these first sexual experiences of a child are linked to painful impressions of anxiety, prohibition, disappointment and punishment. We can understand their having been repressed; but, that being so, we cannot understand how it is that they have such free access to dream-life, that they provide the pattern for so many dream-phantasies and that dreams are filled with reproductions of these scenes from childhood and with allusions to them. It must be admitted that their unpleasurable character and the dream-work’s wish-fulfilling purpose seem far from mutually compatible. But it may be that in this case we are magnifying the difficulty. After all, these same infantile experiences have attached to them all the imperishable, unfulfilled instinctual wishes which throughout life provide the energy for the construction of dreams, and to which we may no doubt credit the possibility, in their mighty uprush, of forcing to the surface, along with the rest, the material of distressing events. And on the other hand the manner and form in which this material is reproduced shows unmistakably the efforts of the dream-work directed to denying the unpleasure by means of distortion and to transforming disappointment into attainment.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4642

With the traumatic neuroses things are different. In their case the dreams regularly end in the generation of anxiety. We should not, I think, be afraid to admit that here the function of the dream has failed. I will not invoke the saying that the exception proves the rule: its wisdom seems to me most questionable. But no doubt the exception does not overturn the rule. If, for the sake of studying it, we isolate one particular psychical function, such as dreaming, from the psychical machinery as a whole, we make it possible to discover the laws that are peculiar to it; but when we insert it once more into the general context we must be prepared to discover that these findings are obscured or impaired by collision with other forces. We say that a dream is the fulfilment of a wish; but if you want to take these latter objections into account, you can say nevertheless that a dream is an attempt at the fulfilment of a wish. No one who can properly appreciate the dynamics of the mind will suppose that you have said anything different by this. In certain circumstances a dream is only able to put its intention into effect very incompletely, or must abandon it entirely. Unconscious fixation to a trauma seems to be foremost among these obstacles to the function of dreaming. While the sleeper is obliged to dream, because the relaxation of repression at night allows the upward pressure of the traumatic fixation to become active, there is a failure in the functioning of his dream-work, which would like to transform the memory-traces of the traumatic event into the fulfilment of a wish. In these circumstances it will happen that one cannot sleep, that one gives up sleep from dread of the failure of the function of dreaming. Traumatic neuroses are here offering us an extreme case; but we must admit that childhood experiences, too, are of a traumatic nature, and we need not be surprised if comparatively trivial interferences with the function of dreams may arise under other conditions as well.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4643

LECTURE XXX

DREAMS AND OCCULTISM

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - To-day we will proceed along a narrow path, but one which may lead us to a wide prospect.

You will scarcely be surprised by the news that I am going to speak to you on the relation of dreams to occultism. Dreams have, indeed, often been regarded as the gateway into the world of mysticism, and even to-day are themselves looked on by many people as an occult phenomenon. Even we, who have made them into a subject for scientific study, do not dispute that one or more threads link them to those obscure matters. Mysticism, occultism - what is meant by these words? You must not expect me to make any attempt at embracing this ill-circumscribed region with definitions. We all know in a general and indefinite manner what the words imply to us. They refer to some sort of ‘other world’, lying beyond the bright world governed by relentless laws which has been constructed for us by science.

Occultism asserts that there are in fact ‘more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy’. Well, we need not feel bound by the narrow-mindedness of academic philosophy; we are ready to believe what is shown to us to deserve belief.

We propose to proceed with these things as we do with any other scientific material: first of all to establish whether such events can really be shown to occur, and then and only then, when their factual nature cannot be doubted, to concern ourselves with their explanation. It cannot be denied, however, that even the putting of this decision into action is made hard for us by intellectual, psychological and historical factors. The case is not the same as when we approach other investigations.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4644

First, the intellectual difficulty. Let me give you a crude and obvious explanation of what I have in mind. Let us suppose that the question at issue is the constitution of the interior of the earth. We have, as you are aware, no certain knowledge about it. We suspect that it consists of heavy metals in an incandescent state. Then let us imagine that someone puts forward an assertion that the interior of the earth consists of water saturated with carbonic acid - that is to say, with a kind of soda-water. We shall no doubt say that this is most improbable, that it contradicts all our expectations and pays no attention to the known facts which have led us to adopt the metal hypothesis. Nevertheless it is not inconceivable; if someone were to show us a way of testing the soda-water hypothesis we should follow it without objecting. But suppose now that someone else comes along and seriously asserts that the core of the earth consists of jam. Our reaction to this will be quite different. We shall tell ourselves that jam does not occur in nature, that it is a product of human cooking, that, moreover, the existence of this material presupposes the presence of fruit-trees and their fruit, and that we cannot see how we can locate vegetation and human cookery in the interior of the earth. The result of these intellectual objections will be a switching of our interest: instead of starting upon an investigation of whether the core of the earth really consists of jam, we shall ask ourselves what sort of person this must be who can arrive at such a notion, or at most we shall ask him where he got it from. The unlucky inventor of the jam theory will be very much insulted and will complain that we are refusing to make an objective investigation of his assertion on the ground of a pretendedly scientific prejudice. But this will be of no help to him. We perceive that prejudices are not always to be reprobated, but that they are sometimes justified and expedient because they save us useless labour. In fact they are only conclusions based on an analogy with other well-founded judgements.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4645

A whole number of occultist assertions have the same sort of effect on us as the jam hypothesis; so that we consider ourselves justified in rejecting them at sight, without further investigation. But all the same, the position is not so simple. A comparison like the one I have chosen proves nothing, or proves as little as comparisons in general. It remains doubtful whether it fits the case, and it is clear that its choice was already determined by our attitude of contemptuous rejection. Prejudices are sometimes expedient and justified; but sometimes they are erroneous and detrimental, and one can never tell when they are the one and when the other. The history of science itself abounds in instances which are a warning against premature condemnation. For a long time it was regarded as a senseless hypothesis to suppose that the stones, which we now call meteorites, could have reached the earth from outer space or that the rocks forming mountains, in which the remains of shells are imbedded, could have once formed the bed of the sea. Incidentally, much the same thing happened to our psycho-analysis when it brought forward its inference of there being an unconscious. Thus we analysts have special reason to be careful in using intellectual considerations for rejecting new hypotheses and must admit that they do not relieve us from feelings of antipathy, doubt and uncertainty.

I have spoken of the second factor as the psychological one. By that I mean the general tendency of mankind to credulity and a belief in the miraculous. From the very beginning, when life takes us under its strict discipline, a resistance stirs within us against the relentlessness and monotony of the laws of thought and against the demands of reality-testing. Reason becomes the enemy which withholds from us so many possibilities of pleasure. We discover how much pleasure it gives us to withdraw from it, temporarily at least, and to surrender to the allurements of nonsense. Schoolboys delight in the twisting of words; when a scientific congress is over, the specialists make fun of their own activities; even earnest-minded men enjoy a joke. More serious hostility to ‘Reason and Science, the highest strength possessed by man’, awaits its opportunity; it hastens to prefer the miracle-doctor or the practitioner of nature-cures to the ‘qualified’ physician; it is favourable to the assertions of occultism so long as those alleged facts can be taken as breaches of laws and rules; it lulls criticism to sleep, falsifies perceptions and enforces confirmations and agreements which cannot be justified. If this human tendency is taken into account, there is every reason to discount much of the information put forward in occultist literature.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4646

I have called the third doubt the historical one; and by it I mean to point out that there is in fact nothing new in the world of occultism. There emerge in it once more all the signs, miracles, prophecies and apparitions which have been reported to us from ancient times and in ancient books and which we thought had long since been disposed of as the offspring of unbridled imagination or of tendentious fraud, as the product of an age in which man’s ignorance was very great and the scientific spirit was still in its cradle. If we accept the truth of what, according to the occultists’ information, still occurs to-day, we must also believe in the authenticity of the reports which have come down to us from ancient times. And we must then reflect that the tradition and sacred books of all peoples are brimful of similar marvellous tales and that the religions base their claim to credibility on precisely such miraculous events and find proof in them of the operation of superhuman powers. That being so, it will be hard for us to avoid a suspicion that the interest in occultism is in fact a religious one and that one of the secret motives of the occultist movement is to come to the help of religion, threatened as it is by the advance of scientific thought. And with the discovery of this motive our distrust must increase and our disinclination to embark on the examination of these supposedly occult phenomena.

Sooner or later, however, this disinclination must be overcome. We are faced by a question of fact: is what the occultists tell us true or not? It must, after all, be possible to decide this by observation. At bottom we have cause for gratitude to the occultists. The miraculous stories from ancient times are beyond the reach of our testing. If in our opinion they cannot be substantiated, we must admit that they cannot, strictly speaking, be disproved. But about contemporary happenings, at which we are able to be present, it must be possible for us to reach a definite judgement. If we arrive at a conviction that such miracles do not occur to-day, we need not fear the counter-argument that they may nevertheless have taken place in ancient times: in that case other explanations will be much more plausible. Thus we have settled our doubts and are ready to take part in an investigation of occult phenomena.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4647

But here unluckily we are met by circumstances which are exceedingly unfavourable to our honest intentions. The observations on which our judgement is supposed to depend take place under conditions which make our sensory perceptions uncertain and which blunt our power of attention; they occur in darkness or in dimmed light after long periods of blank expectation. We are told that in fact our unbelieving - that is to say, critical - attitude may prevent the expected phenomena from happening. The situation thus brought about is nothing less than a caricature of the circumstances in which we are usually accustomed to carry out scientific enquiries. The observations are made upon what are called ‘mediums’ - individuals to whom peculiarly ‘sensitive’ faculties are ascribed, but who are by no means distinguished by outstanding qualities of intellect or character and who are not, like the miracle-workers of the past, inspired by any great idea or serious purpose. On the contrary, they are looked upon, even by those who believe in their secret powers, as particularly untrustworthy; most of them have already been detected as cheats and we may reasonably expect that the same fate awaits the remainder. Their performances give one the impression of children’s mischievous pranks or of conjuring tricks. Never has anything of importance yet emerged from séances with these mediums - the revelation of a new source of power, for instance. We do not, it is true, expect to receive hints on pigeon-breeding from the conjurer who produces pigeons by magic from his empty top-hat. I can easily put myself in the place of a person who tries to fulfil the demands of an objective attitude and so takes part in occult séances, but who grows tired after a while and turns away in disgust from what is expected of him and goes back unenlightened to his former prejudices. The reproach may be made against such a person that this is not the right way of behaving: that one ought not to lay down in advance what the phenomena one is seeking to study shall be like and in what circumstances they shall appear. One should, on the contrary, persevere, and give weight to the precautionary and supervisory measures by which efforts have recently been made to provide against the untrustworthiness of mediums. Unfortunately this modern protective technique makes an end of the easy accessibility of occult observations. The study of occultism becomes a specialized and difficult profession - an activity one cannot pursue alongside of one’s other interests. And until those concerned in these investigations have reached their conclusions, we are left to our doubts and our own conjectures.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4648

Of these conjectures no doubt the most probable is that there is a real core of yet unrecognized facts in occultism round which cheating and phantasy have spun a veil which it is hard to pierce. But how can we even approach this core? at what point can we attack the problem? It is here, I think, that dreams come to our help, by giving us a hint that from out of this chaos we should pick the subject of telepathy.

What we call ‘telepathy’ is, as you know, the alleged fact that an event which occurs at a particular time comes at about the same moment to the consciousness of someone distant in space, without the paths of communication that are familiar to us coming into question. It is implicitly presupposed that this event concerns a person in whom the other one (the receiver of the intelligence) has a strong emotional interest. For instance, Person A may be the victim of an accident or may die, and Person B, someone nearly attached to him - his mother or daughter or fiancée - learns the fact at about the same time through a visual or auditory perception. In this latter case, then, it is as if she had been informed by telephone, though such was not the case; it is a kind of psychical counterpart to wireless telegraphy. I need not insist to you on the improbability of such events, and there is good reason for dismissing the majority of such reports. A few are left over which cannot be so easily disposed of in this way. Permit me now, for the purpose of what I have to tell you, to omit the cautious little word ‘alleged’ and to proceed as though I believed in the objective reality of the phenomenon of telepathy. But bear firmly in mind that that is not the case and that I have committed myself to no conviction.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4649

Actually I have little to tell you - only a modest fact. I will also at once reduce your expectations still further by saying that at bottom dreams have little to do with telepathy. Telepathy does not throw any fresh light on the nature of dreams nor do dreams give any direct evidence of the reality of telepathy. Moreover the phenomenon of telepathy is by no means bound up with dreams; it can occur as well during the waking state. The only reason for discussing the relation between dreams and telepathy is that the state of sleep seems particularly suited for receiving telepathic messages. In such cases one has what is called a telepathic dream and, when it is analysed, one forms a conviction that the telepathic news has played the same part as any other portion of the day’s residues and that it has been changed in the same way by the dream-work and made to serve its purpose.

During the analysis of one such telepathic dream, something occurred which seems to me of sufficient interest in spite of its triviality to serve as the starting-point of this lecture. When in 1922 I gave my first account of this matter I had only a single observation at my disposal. Since then I have made a number of similar ones, but I will keep to the first example, because it is easiest to describe, and I will take you straight away in medias res.

An obviously intelligent man, who from his own account was not in the least ‘inclined towards occultism’, wrote to me about a dream he had had which seemed to him remarkable. He began by informing me that his married daughter, who lived at a distance from him, was expecting her first confinement in the middle of December. This daughter meant a great deal to him and he knew too that she was very much attached to him. During the night of November 16-17, then, he dreamt that his wife had given birth to twins. A number of details followed, which I may here pass over, and all of which were never in fact explained. The wife who in the dream had become the mother of twins was his second wife, his daughter’s stepmother. He did not wish to have a child by his present wife who, he said, had no aptitude for bringing up children sensibly; moreover, at the time of the dream he had long ceased to have sexual relations with her. What led him to write to me was not doubt about the theory of dreams, though the manifest content of his dream would have justified it, for why did the dream, in complete contradiction to his wishes, make his wife give birth to children? Nor, according to him, was there any reason to fear that this unwished-for event might occur. What induced him to report this dream to me was the circumstance that on the morning of November 18 he received a telegram announcing that his daughter had given birth to twins. The telegram had been handed in the day before and the birth had taken place during the night of November 16-17, at about the same time at which he had had the dream of his wife’s twin birth. The dreamer asked me whether I thought the coincidence between dream and event was accidental. He did not venture to call the dream a telepathic one, since the difference between its content and the event affected precisely what seemed to him essential in it - the identity of the person who gave birth to the children. But one of his comments shows that he would not have been astonished at an actual telepathic dream: he believed his daughter would have thought particularly of him during her labour.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4650

I feel sure, Ladies and Gentlemen, that you have been able to explain this dream already and understand too why I have told it you. Here was a man who was dissatisfied with his second wife and who would prefer his wife to be like the daughter of his first marriage. This ‘like’ dropped out, of course, so far as the unconscious was concerned. And now the telepathic message arrived during the night to say that his daughter had given birth to twins. The dream-work took control of the news, allowed the unconscious wish to operate on it - the wish that he could put his daughter in the place of his second wife - and thus arose the puzzling manifest dream, which disguised the wish and distorted the message. We must admit that it is only the interpretation of the dream that has shown us that it was a telepathic one: psycho-analysis has revealed a telepathic event which we should not otherwise have discovered.

But pray do not let yourselves be misled! In spite of all this, dream-interpretation has told us nothing about the objective reality of the telepathic event. It may equally be an illusion which can be explained in another way. The man’s latent dream-thoughts may have run: ‘To-day is the day the confinement should take place if my daughter is really out in her reckoning by a month, as I suspect. And when I saw her last she looked just as though she was going to have twins. How my dead wife who has so fond of children would have rejoiced over twins!’ (I base this last factor on some associations of the dreamer’s which I have not mentioned.) In that case the instigation to the dream would have been well-grounded suspicions on the dreamer’s part and not a telepathic message; but the outcome would remain the same. You see then that even the interpretation of this dream has told us nothing on the question of whether we are to allow objective reality to telepathy. That could only be decided by a thorough-going investigation of all the circumstances of the case - which was unfortunately no more possible in this instance than in any of the others in my experience. Granted that the telepathy hypothesis offers by far the simplest explanation, yet that does not help us much. The simplest explanation is not always the correct one; the truth is often no simple matter, and before deciding in favour of such a far-reaching hypothesis we should like to have taken every precaution.

We may now leave the subject of dreams and telepathy: I have nothing more to say to you on it. But kindly observe that what seemed to us to teach us something about telepathy was not the dream but the interpretation of the dream, its psycho-analytic working-over. Accordingly, in what follows we may leave dreams entirely on one side and may follow an expectation that the employment of psycho-analysis may throw a little light on other events described as occult. There is, for instance, the phenomenon of thought-transference, which is so close to telepathy and can indeed without much violence be regarded as the same thing. It claims that mental processes in one person - ideas, emotional states, conative impulses - can be transferred to another person through empty space without employing the familiar methods of communication by means of words and signs. You will realize how remarkable, and perhaps even of what great practical importance, it would be if something of the kind really happened. It may be noted, incidentally, that strangely enough precisely this phenomenon is referred to least frequently in the miraculous stories of the past.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4651

I have formed an impression in the course of the psycho-analytic treatment of patients that the activities of professional fortune-tellers conceal an opportunity for making particularly unobjectionable observations on thought-transference. These are insignificant and even inferior people, who immerse themselves in some sort of performance - lay out cards, study writing or lines upon the palm of the hand, or make astrological calculations - and at the same time, after having shown themselves familiar with portions of their visitor’s past or present circumstances, go on to prophesy their future. As a rule their clients exhibit great satisfaction over these achievements and feel no resentment if later on these prophecies are not fulfilled. I have come across several such cases and have been able to study them analytically, and in a moment I will tell you the most remarkable of these instances. Their convincingness is unfortunately impaired by the numerous reticences to which I am compelled by the obligation of medical discretion. I have, however, of set purpose avoided distortions. So listen now to the story of one of my women patients, who had an experience of this kind with a fortune-teller.

She had been the eldest of a numerous family and had grown up with an extremely strong attachment to her father. She had married young and had found entire satisfaction in her marriage. Only one thing was wanting to her happiness: she had remained childless, so she could not bring her beloved husband completely into the place of her father. When, after long years of disappointment, she decided to undergo a gynaecological operation, her husband revealed to her that the blame was his: an illness before their marriage had made him incapable of procreating children. She took the disappointment badly, became neurotic and clearly suffered from fears of being tempted. To cheer her up, he took her with him on a business trip to Paris. They were sitting there one day in the hall of their hotel when she noticed a stir among the hotel servants. She asked what was going on and was told that Monsieur le Professeur had arrived and was giving consultations in a little room over there. She expressed a wish to have a try. Her husband rejected the idea, but while he was not watching she slipped into the consulting-room and faced the fortune-teller. She was 27 years old, but looked much younger and had taken off her wedding-ring. Monsieur le Professeur made her lay her hand on a tray filled with ashes and carefully studied the imprint; he then told her all kinds of things about hard struggles that lay before her, and ended with the comforting assurance that all the same she would still get married and would have two children by the time she was 32. When she told me this story she was 43 years old, seriously ill and without any prospect of ever having a child. Thus the prophecy had not come true; yet she spoke of it without any sort of bitterness but with an unmistakable expression of satisfaction, as though she were recalling a cheerful event. It was easy to establish that she had not the slightest notion of what the two numbers in the prophecy might mean or whether they meant anything at all.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4652

You will say that this is a stupid and incomprehensible story and ask why I have told it you. I should be entirely of your opinion if - and this is the salient point - analysis had not made it possible to arrive at an interpretation of the prophecy which is convincing precisely from the explanation it affords of the details. For the two numbers find their place in the life of my patient’s mother. She had married late - not till she was over thirty, and in the family they had often dwelt on the fact of the success with which she had hastened to make up for lost time. Her two first children (with our patient the elder) had been born with the shortest possible interval between them, in a single calendar year; and she had in fact two children by the time she was 32. What Monsieur le Professeur had said to my patient meant therefore: ‘Take comfort from the fact of being so young. You’ll have the same destiny as your mother, who also had to wait a long time for children, and you’ll have two children by the time you’re 32.’ But to have the same destiny as her mother, to put herself in her mother’s place, to take her place with her father - that had been the strongest wish of her youth, the wish on account of whose non-fulfilment she was just beginning to fall ill. The prophecy promised her that the wish would still be fulfilled in spite of everything; how could she fail to feel friendly to the prophet? Do you regard it as possible, however, that Monsieur le Professeur was familiar with the facts of the intimate family history of his chance client? Out of the question! How, then, did he arrive at the knowledge which enabled him to give expression to my patient’s strongest and most secret wish by including the two numbers in his prophecy? I can see only two possible explanations. Either the story as it was told me is untrue and the events occurred otherwise, or thought-transference exists as a real phenomenon. One can suppose, no doubt, that after an interval of 16 years the patient had introduced the two numbers concerned into her recollection from her unconscious. I have no basis for this suspicion, but I cannot exclude it, and I imagine that you will be readier to believe in a way out of that kind than in the reality of thought-transference. If you do decide on the latter course, do not forget that it was only analysis that created the occult fact - uncovered it when it lay distorted to the point of being unrecognizable.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4653

If it were a question of one case only like that of my patient, one would shrug it aside. No one would dream of erecting upon a single observation a belief which implies taking such a decisive line. But you must believe me when I assure you that this is not the only case in my experience. I have collected a whole number of such prophecies and from all of them I gained the impression that the fortune-teller had merely brought to expression the thoughts, and more especially the secret wishes, of those who were questioning him, and that we were therefore justified in analysing these prophecies as though they were subjective products, phantasies or dreams of the people concerned. Not every case, of course, is equally convincing and in not every case is it equally possible to exclude more rational explanations; but, taking them as a whole, there remains a strong balance of probability in favour of thought-transference as a fact. The importance of the subject would justify me in producing all my cases to you; but that I cannot do, owing to the prolixity of description that would be involved and to the inevitable breach of the obligations of discretion. I will try so far as possible to appease my conscience in giving you a few more examples.

One day I was visited by a highly intelligent young man, a student preparing for his final examinations for a doctorate, but unable to take them since, as he complained, he had lost all interest and power of concentration and even any faculty for orderly memory. The previous history of this condition of quasi-paralysis was soon revealed: he had fallen ill after carrying out a great act of self-discipline. He had a sister, to whom he was attached by an intense but always restrained devotion, just as she was to him. ‘What a pity we can’t get married!’ they would often say to each other. A respectable man fell in love with the sister; she responded to his affection, but her parents did not assent to the union. In their difficulty the young couple turned to her brother, nor did he refuse his help. He made it possible for them to correspond with each other, and his influence eventually persuaded the parents to consent. In the course of the engagement, however, an occurrence took place whose meaning it was easy to guess. He went with his future brother-in-law on a difficult mountain-climb without a guide; they lost their way and were in danger of not returning safe and sound. Shortly after his sister’s marriage he fell into this condition of mental exhaustion.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4654

The influence of psycho-analysis restored his ability to work and he left me in order to go in for his examinations; but after he had passed them successfully he came back to me for a short time in the autumn of the same year. It was then that he related a remarkable experience to me which he had had before the summer. In his University town there lived a fortune-teller who enjoyed great popularity. Even the Princes of the Royal House used to consult her before important undertakings. Her mode of operation was very simple. She asked to be given the date of the relevant person’s birth; she required to know nothing else about him, not even his name. She then proceeded to consult her astrological books, made long calculations and finally uttered a prophecy relating to the person in question. My patient decided to call upon her mystical arts in connection with his brother-in-law. He visited her and told her the relevant date. After carrying out her calculations she made her prophecy: ‘The person in question will die in July or August of this year of crayfish- or oyster-poisoning.’ My patient finished his story with the words: ‘It was quite marvellous!’

From the first I had listened with irritation. After this exclamation of his I went so far as to ask: ‘What do you see that’s so marvellous in this prophecy? Here we are in late autumn and your brother-in-law isn’t dead or you’d have told me long ago. So the prophecy hasn’t come true.’ ‘No doubt that’s so,’ he replied, ‘but here is what’s marvellous. My brother-in-law is passionately devoted to crayfish and oysters and in the previous summer - that’s to say, before my visit to the fortune-teller - he had an attack of oyster-poisoning of which he nearly died.’ What was I to say to this? I could only feel annoyed that this highly-educated man (who had moreover been through a successful analysis) should not have a clearer view of the position. I for my part, rather than believe that it is possible to calculate the onset of an attack of crayfish- or oyster-poisoning from astrological tables, prefer to suppose that my patient had not yet overcome his hatred for his rival, the repression of which had earlier led to his falling ill, and that the fortune-teller was simply giving expression to his own expectation: ‘a taste of that kind isn’t to be given up, and one day, all the same, it will be the end of him.’ I must admit that I cannot think of any other explanation for this case, unless, perhaps, that my patient was having a joke with me. But neither then nor at a later time did he give me grounds for such a suspicion, and he seemed to be meaning what he said seriously.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4655

Here is another case. A young man in a position of consequence was involved in a liaison with a demi-mondaine which was characterized by a curious compulsion. He was obliged from time to time to provoke her with derisive and insulting remarks till she was driven to complete desperation. When he had brought her to that point, he was relieved, became reconciled with her and made her a present. But now he wanted to be free of her: the compulsion seemed to him uncanny. He noticed that this liaison was damaging his reputation; he wanted to have a wife of his own and to raise a family. But since he could not get free from this demi-mondaine by his own strength, he called analysis to his help. After one of these abusive scenes, when the analysis had already started, he got her to write something on a piece of paper, so as to show it to a graphologist. The report that he received from him was that the writing was that of someone in extreme despair, who would certainly commit suicide in the next few days. This did not, it is true, occur and the lady remained alive; but the analysis succeeded in loosening his bonds. He left the lady and turned to a young girl who he expected would be able to make him a good wife. Soon afterwards a dream appeared which could only hint at a dawning doubt as to the girl’s worthiness. He obtained a specimen of her writing too, took it to the same authority, and was given a verdict on her writing which confirmed his apprehensions. He therefore abandoned the idea of making her his wife.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4656

In order to form an opinion of the graphologist’s reports, especially the first one, we must know something of our subject’s secret history. In his early youth he had (in accordance with his passionate nature) fallen in love to the pitch of frenzy with a married woman who was still young but nevertheless older than he was. When she rejected him, he made an attempt at suicide which, there can be no doubt, was seriously intended. It was only by a hair’s breadth that he escaped death and he was only restored after a long period of nursing. But this wild action made a deep impression on the woman he loved; she granted him her favours, he became her lover and thenceforward remained secretly attached to her and served her with a truly chivalrous devotion. More than twenty years later, when they had both grown older - but the woman, naturally, more than he - the need was awakened in him to detach himself from her, to make himself free, to lead a life of his own, to set up a house and raise a family. And along with this feeling of satiety there arose in him his long-suppressed craving for vengeance on his mistress. As he had once tried to kill himself because she had spurned him, so he wished now to have the satisfaction of her seeking death because he left her. But his love was still too strong for it to be possible for this wish to become conscious in him; nor was he in a position to do her enough harm to drive her into death. In this frame of mind he took on the demi-mondaine as a sort of whipping-boy, to satisfy his thirst for revenge in corpore vili; and he allowed himself to practise upon her all the torments which he might expect would bring about with her the result he wished to produce on his mistress. The fact that the vengeance applied to the latter was betrayed by his making her into a confidante and adviser in his liaison instead of concealing his defection from her. The wretched woman, who had long fallen from giving to receiving favours, probably suffered more from his confidences than the demi-mondaine did from his brutalities. The compulsion of which he complained in regard to this substitutive figure, and which drove him to analysis, had of course been transferred on to her from his old mistress; it was from her that he wanted to free himself but could not. I am not an authority on handwriting and have no high opinion of the art of divining character from it; still less do I believe in the possibility of foretelling the writer’s future in this way. You can see, however, whatever one may think of the value of graphology, that there is no mistaking the fact that the expert, when he promised that the writer of the specimen presented to him would commit suicide in the next few days, had once again only brought to light a powerful secret wish of the person who was questioning him. Something of the same kind happened afterwards in the case of the second report. What was there concerned, however, was not an unconscious wish; it was the questioner’s dawning doubt and apprehension that found a clear expression from the graphologist’s mouth. Incidentally, my patient succeeded, with the help of analysis, in finding an object for his love outside the magic circle in which he had been spellbound.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4657

Ladies and Gentlemen, - You have now heard how dream-interpretation and psycho-analysis in general assist occultism. I have shown you from examples that by their application occult facts have been brought to light which would otherwise have remained unknown. Psycho-analysis cannot give a direct answer to the question that no doubt interests you the most - whether we are to believe in the objective reality of these findings. But the material revealed by its help makes an impression which is at all events favourable to an affirmative reply. Your interest will not come to a stop at this point, however. You will want to know what conclusions are justified by the incomparably richer material in which psycho-analysis has no part. But I cannot follow you there: it lies outside my province. The only further thing I could do would be to report observations to you which have at least so much relation to analysis that they were made during psycho-analytic treatment and were even perhaps made possible by its influence. I will tell you one such example - the one which has left the strongest impression behind on me. I shall tell it at great length and shall ask for your attention to a large number of details, though even so I shall have to suppress much that would have greatly increased the convincing force of the observation. It is an example in which the fact came clearly to light and did not need to be developed by analysis. In discussing it, however, we shall not be able to do without the help of analysis. But I will tell you in advance that this example too of apparent thought-transference in the analytic situation is not exempt from all doubts and that it does not allow us to take up an unqualified position in support of the reality of occult phenomena.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4658

Listen then:- One autumn day in the year 1919, at about 10.45 a.m., Dr. David Forsyth, who had just arrived from London, sent in his card to me while I was working with a patient. (My respected colleague from London University will not, I feel sure, regard it as an indiscretion if in this way I betray the fact that he spent some months being initiated by me into the arts of psycho-analytic technique.) I only had time to greet him and to make an appointment to see him later. Dr. Forsyth had a claim to my particular interest; he was the first foreigner to come to me after I had been cut off by the war years and to bring a promise of better times. Soon afterwards, at eleven o’clock, Herr P., one of my patients, arrived - an intelligent and agreeable man, between forty and fifty years of age, who had originally come to me on account of difficulties with women. His case did not promise any therapeutic success; I had long before proposed our stopping the treatment, but he had wished to continue it, evidently because he felt comfortable in a well-tempered father-transference to me. At that period money played no part: there was too little of it about. The sessions which I spent with him were stimulating and refreshing for me as well, and consequently, in disregard of the strict rules of medical practice, analytic work was being carried on up to a foreseen time-limit.

That day P. returned to his attempts at having erotic relations with women and once again mentioned a pretty, piquante, penniless girl, with whom he felt he might succeed, if the fact of her being a virgin did not scare him off any serious attempt. He had often talked of her before but that day he told me for the first time that, though of course she had no notion of the true grounds of his impediment, she used to call him ‘Herr von Vorsicht’. I was struck by this information; Dr. Forsyth’s visiting card lay beside me, and I showed it to him.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4659

These are the facts of the case. I expect they will seem to you paltry; but listen a little longer, there is more behind them.

When he was young, P. had spent some years in England and since then had retained a permanent interest in English literature. He possessed a rich English library and used to bring me books from it. I owe to him an acquaintance with such authors as Bennett and Galsworthy, of whom till then I had read little. One day he lent me a novel of Galsworthy’s with the title The Man of Property, whose scene is laid in the bosom of a family invented by the author, bearing the name of ‘Forsyte’. Galsworthy himself was evidently captivated by this creation of his, for in later volumes he repeatedly came back to the members of this family and finally collected all the tales relating to them under the title of The Forsyte Saga. Only a few days before the occurrence I am speaking of, he had brought me a fresh volume from this series. The name ‘Forsyte’, and everything typical that the author had sought to embody in it, had played a part, too, in my conversations with P. and it had become part of the secret language which so easily grows up between two people who see a lot of each other. Now the name ‘Forsyte’ in these novels differs little from that of my visitor ‘Forsyth’ and, as pronounced by a German, the two can scarcely be distinguished; and there is an English word with a meaning - ‘foresight’ - which we should also pronounce in the same way and which would be translated ‘Voraussicht’ or ‘Vorsicht’. Thus P. had in fact selected from his personal concerns the very name with which I was occupied at the same time as a result of an occurrence of which he was unaware.

That begins to look better, you will agree. But we shall, I think, receive a stronger impression of the striking phenomenon and even obtain an insight into its determinants, if we throw some analytic light upon two other associations brought up by P. during the same session.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4660

Firstly: One day of the previous week I had waited in vain for Herr P. at eleven o’clock, and had then gone out to visit Dr. Anton von Freund in his pension. I was surprised to find that Herr P. lived on another floor of the same building in which the pension was located. In connection with this I had later told P. that I had in a sense paid him a visit in his house; but I know definitely that I did not tell him the name of the person I visited in the pension. And now, shortly after mentioning ‘Herr von Vorsicht’ he asked me whether perhaps the Freud-Ottorego who was giving a course of lectures on English at the Volks universität’ was my daughter. And for the first time during our long period of intercourse he gave my name the distorted form to which I have indeed become habituated by functionaries, officials and compositors: instead of ‘Freud’ he said ‘Freund’.

Secondly: At the end of the same session he told me a dream, from which he had woken in a fright - a regular ‘Alptraum’, he said. He added that not long ago he had forgotten the English word for that, and when someone had asked him said that the English for ‘Alptraum’ was ‘a mare’s next’. This was nonsense, of course, he went on; ‘a mare’s nest’ meant something incredible, a cock-and-bull story: the translation of ‘Alptraum’ was ‘nightmare’. The only element in common between this association and the previous one seemed to be the element ‘English’. I was however reminded of a small incident which had occurred about a month earlier. P. was sitting with me in the room when another visitor, a dear friend from London, Dr. Ernest Jones, unexpectedly came in after a long separation. I signed to him to go into the next room while I finished with P. The latter, however, had at once recognized him from his photograph hanging in the waiting-room, and even expressed a wish to be introduced to him. Now Jones is the author of a monograph on the Alptraum - the nightmare. I did not know whether P. was acquainted with it; he avoided reading analytic literature.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4661

I should like to begin by putting before you an investigation of what analytic understanding can be arrived at of the background of P.’s associations and of the motives for them. P. was placed similarly to me in relation to the name ‘Forsyte’ or ‘Forsyth’; it meant the same to him, and it was entirely to him that I owed my acquaintance with the name. The remarkable fact was that he brought the name into the analysis unheralded, only the briefest time after it had become significant to me in another sense owing to a new event - the London doctor’s arrival. But the manner in which the name emerged in his analytic session is perhaps not less interesting than the fact itself. He did not say, for instance: ‘The name "Forsyte", out of the novels you are familiar with, has just occurred to me.’ He was able, without any conscious relation to that source, to weave the name into his own experiences and to produce it thence - a thing that might have happened long before but had not happened till then. What he did say now was: ‘I’m a Forsyth too: that’s what the girl calls me.’ It is hard to mistake the mixture of jealous demand and melancholy self-depreciation which finds its expression in this remark. We shall not be going astray if we complete it in some such way as this: ‘It’s mortifying to me that your thoughts should be so intensely occupied with this new arrival. Do come back to me; after all I’m a Forsyth too though it’s true I’m only a Herr von Vorsicht, as the girl says.’ And thereupon his train of thought, passing along the associative threads of the element ‘English’ went back to two earlier events, which were able to stir up the same feelings of jealousy. ‘A few days ago you paid a visit to my house - not, alas, to me but to a Herr von Freund.’ This thought caused him to distort the name ‘Freud’ into ‘Freund’. The ‘Freud-Ottorego’ from the lecture-syllabus must come in here because as a teacher of English she provided the manifest association. And now came the recollection of another visitor a few weeks before, of whom he was no doubt equally jealous, but for whom he also felt he was no match, for Dr. Jones was able to write a monograph on the nightmare whereas he was at best only able to produce such dreams himself. His mention of his mistake about the meaning of ‘a mare’s nest’ comes into this connection, for it can only mean to say: ‘After all I’m not a genuine Englishman any more than I’m a genuine Forsyth.’

Now I cannot describe his feelings of jealousy as either out of place or unintelligible. He had been warned that his analysis, and at the same time our contact, would come to an end as soon as foreign pupils and patients returned to Vienna; and that was in fact what happened shortly afterwards. What we have so far achieved, however, has been a piece of analytic work - the explanation of three associations brought up by him in the same session and nourished by the same motive: and this has not much to do with the other question of whether these associations could or could not have been made without thought-transference. This question arises in the case of each of the three associations and thus falls into three separate questions: Could P. have known that Dr. Forsyth had just paid me his first visit? Could he know the name of the person I had visited in his house? Did he know that Dr. Jones had written a monograph on the nightmare? Or was it only my knowledge about these things that was revealed in his associations? It will depend on the reply to these separate questions whether my observation allows of a conclusion favourable to thought-transference.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4662

Let us leave the first question aside for a while; the other two can be dealt with more easily. The case of my visit to his pension makes a particularly convincing impression at first sight. I am certain that in my short, joking reference to my visit to his house I mentioned no name. I think it is most unlikely that P. made enquiries at the pension as to the name of the person concerned; I believe rather that the existence of that person remained entirely unknown to him. But the evidential value of this case is totally destroyed by a chance circumstance. The man whom I had visited at the pension was not only called ‘Freund’; he was a true friend to us all. He was Dr. Anton von Freund whose donation had made the foundation of our publishing house possible. His early death, together with that of our colleague Karl Abraham a few years later, are the gravest misfortunes which have befallen the growth of psycho-analysis. It is possible, therefore, that I had said to Herr P.: ‘I visited a friend in your house’ and with this possibility the occult interest of his second association vanishes.

The impression made by the third association evaporates equally quickly. Could P. know that Jones had published a monograph on the nightmare if he never read any analytic literature? Yes, he could. He possessed books from our publishing house and could in any case have seen the titles of the new publications advertised on the wrappers. This cannot be proved, but neither can it be disproved. We can reach no decision, therefore, along this path. To my regret, this observation of mine suffers from the same weakness as so many similar ones: it was written down too late and was discussed at a time when I was no longer seeing Herr P. and could not question him further.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4663

Let us go back to the first event, which even taken by itself supports the apparent fact of thought-transference. Could P. know that Dr. Forsyth had been with me a quarter of an hour before him? Could he have any knowledge at all of his existence or of his presence in Vienna? We must not give way to an inclination to deny both questions flatly. I can see a way that leads to a partly affirmative answer. I may after all have told Herr P. that I was expecting a doctor from England for instruction in analysis, as a first dove after the Deluge. This might have happened in the summer of 1919, for Dr. Forsyth had made arrangements with me by letter some months before his arrival. I may even have mentioned his name, though that seems to me most improbable. In view of the other connection which the name carried for both of us, a discussion of it must inevitably have followed, of which something would have remained in my memory. Nevertheless such a discussion may have taken place and I may have totally forgotten it afterwards, so that it became possible for the emergence of ‘Herr von Vorsicht’ in the analytic session to strike me as a miracle. If one regards oneself as a sceptic, it is a good plan to have occasional doubts about one’s scepticism too. It may be that I too have a secret inclination towards the miraculous which thus goes half way to meet the creation of occult facts.

If we have thus got one miraculous possibility out of the way, there is another waiting for us, and the most difficult of all. Assuming that Herr P. knew that there was a Dr. Forsyth and that he was expected in Vienna in the autumn, how is it to be explained that he became receptive to his presence on the very day of his arrival and immediately after his first visit? One might say it was chance - that is, leave it unexplained. But it was precisely in order to exclude chance that I discussed P.’s other two associations, in order to show you that he was really occupied with jealous thoughts about people who visited me. Or one might, not to neglect the most extreme possibility, experiment with the hypothesis that P. had observed a special excitement about me (which, to be sure, I myself knew nothing of) and drew his conclusion from it. Or Herr P. (though he arrived a quarter of an hour after the Englishman left) met him on the short stretch of street which they both had to pass along, recognized him by his characteristically English appearance and, being in a permanent state of jealous expectation, thought: ‘Ah, so that’s Dr. Forsyth with whose arrival my analysis is to come to an end! And he’s probably just come straight from the Professor.’ I cannot carry these rationalistic speculations any further. We are once again left with a non liquet; but I must confess that I have a feeling that here too the scales weigh in favour of thought-transference. Moreover, I am certainly not alone in having been in the position of experiencing ‘occult’ events like this in the analytic situation. Helene Deutsch published some similar observations in 1926 and studied the question of their being determined by the transference relations between patient and analyst.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4664

I am sure you will not feel very well satisfied with my attitude to this problem - with my not being entirely convinced but prepared to be convinced. You may perhaps say to yourselves: ‘Here’s another case of a man who has done honest work as a scientist all through his life and has grown feeble-minded, pious and credulous in his old age.’ I am aware that a few great names must be included in this class, but you should not reckon me among them. At least I have not become pious, and I hope not credulous. It is only that, if one has gone about all one’s life bending in order to avoid a painful collision with the facts, so too in one’s old age one still keeps one’s back ready to bow before new realities. No doubt you would like me to hold fast to a moderate theism and show myself relentless in my rejection of everything occult. But I am incapable of currying favour and I must urge you to have kindlier thoughts on the objective possibility of thought-transference and at the same time of telepathy as well.

You will not forget that here I am only treating these problems in so far as it is possible to approach them from the direction of psycho-analysis. When they first came into my range of vision more than ten years ago, I too felt a dread of a threat against our scientific Weltanschauung, which, I feared, was bound to give place to spiritualism or mysticism if portions of occultism were proved true. To-day I think otherwise. In my opinion it shows no great confidence in science if one does not think it capable of assimilating and working over whatever may perhaps turn out to be true in the assertions of occultists. And particularly so far as thought-transference is concerned, it seems actually to favour the extension of the scientific - or, as our opponents say, the mechanistic - mode of thought to the mental phenomena which are so hard to lay hold of. The telepathic process is supposed to consist in a mental act in one person instigating the same mental act in another person. What lies between these two mental acts may easily be a physical process into which the mental one is transformed at one end and which is transformed back once more into the same mental one at the other end. The analogy with other transformations, such as occur in speaking and hearing by telephone, would then be unmistakable. And only think if one could get hold of this physical equivalent of the psychical act! It would seem to me that psycho-analysis, by inserting the unconscious between what is physical and what was previously called ‘psychical’, has paved the way for the assumption of such processes as telepathy. If only one accustoms oneself to the idea of telepathy, one can accomplish a great deal with it - for the time being, it is true, only in imagination. It is a familiar fact that we do not know how the common purpose comes about in the great insect communities: possibly it is done by means of a direct psychical transference of this kind. One is led to a suspicion that this is the original, archaic method of communication between individuals and that in the course of phylogenetic evolution it has been replaced by the better method of giving information with the help of signals which are picked up by the sense organs. But the older method might have persisted in the background and still be able to put itself into effect under certain conditions - for instance, in passionately excited mobs. All this is still uncertain and full of unsolved riddles; but there is no reason to be frightened by it.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4665

If there is such a thing as telepathy as a real process, we may suspect that, in spite of its being so hard to demonstrate, it is quite a common phenomenon. It would tally with our expectations if we were able to point to it particularly in the mental life of children. Here we are reminded of the frequent anxiety felt by children over the idea that their parents know all their thoughts without having to be told them - an exact counterpart and perhaps the source of the belief of adults in the omniscience of God. A short time ago Dorothy Burlingham, a trustworthy witness, in a paper on child analysis and the mother published some observations which, if they can be confirmed, would be bound to put an end to the remaining doubts on the reality of thought-transference. She made use of the situation, no longer a rare one, in which a mother and child are simultaneously in analysis, and reported some remarkable events such as the following. One day the mother spoke during her analytic session of a gold coin that had played a particular part in one of the scenes of her childhood. Immediately afterwards, after she had returned home, her little boy, about ten years old, came to her room and brought her a gold coin which he asked her to keep for him. She asked him in astonishment where he had got it from. He had been given it on his birthday; but his birthday had been several months earlier and there was no reason why the child should have remembered the gold coin precisely then. The mother reported the occurrence to the child’s analyst and asked her to find out from the child the reason for his action. But the child’s analysis threw no light on the matter; the action had forced its way that day into the child’s life like a foreign body. A few weeks later the mother was sitting at her writing-desk to write down, as she had been told to do, an account of the experience, when in came the boy and asked for the gold coin back, as he wanted to take it with him to show in his analytic session. Once again the child’s analysis could discover no explanation of his wish.

And this brings us back to psycho-analysis, which was what we started out from.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4666

LECTURE XXXI

THE DISSECTION OF THE PSYCHICAL PERSONALITY

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - I know you are aware in regard to your own relations, whether with people or things, of the importance of your starting-point. This was also the case with psycho-analysis. It has not been a matter of indifference for the course of its development or for the reception it met with that it began its work on what is, of all the contents of the mind, most foreign to the ego - on symptoms. Symptoms are derived from the repressed, they are, as it were, its representatives before the ego; but the repressed is foreign territory to the ego - internal foreign territory - just as reality (if you will forgive the unusual expression) is external foreign territory. The path led from symptoms to the unconscious, to the life of the instincts, to sexuality; and it was then that psycho-analysis was met by the brilliant objection that human beings are not merely sexual creatures but have nobler and higher impulses as well. It might have been added that, exalted by their consciousness of these higher impulses, they often assume the right to think nonsense and to neglect facts.

You know better. From the very first we have said that human beings fall ill of a conflict between the claims of instinctual life and the resistance which arises within them against it; and not for a moment have we forgotten this resisting, repelling, repressing agency, which we thought of as equipped with its special forces, the ego-instincts, and which coincides with the ego of popular psychology. The truth was merely that, in view of the laborious nature of the progress made by scientific work, even psycho-analysis was not able to study every field simultaneously and to express its views on every problem in a single breath. But at last the point was reached when it was possible for us to divert our attention from the repressed to the repressing forces, and we faced this ego, which had seemed so self-evident, with the secure expectation that here once again we should find things for which we could not have been prepared. It was not easy, however, to find a first approach; and that is what I intend to talk to you about to-day.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4667

I must, however, let you know of my suspicion that this account of mine of ego-psychology will affect you differently from the introduction into the psychical underworld which preceded it. I cannot say with certainty why this should be so. I thought first that you would discover that whereas what I reported to you previously were, in the main, facts, however strange and peculiar, now you will be listening principally to opinions - that is, to speculations. But that does not meet the position. After further consideration I must maintain that the amount of intellectual working-over of the factual material in our ego-psychology is not much greater than it was in the psychology of the neuroses. I have been obliged to reject other explanations as well of the result I anticipate: I now believe that it is somehow a question of the nature of the material itself and of our being unaccustomed to dealing with it. In any case, I shall not be surprised if you show yourselves even more reserved and cautious in your judgement than hitherto.

The situation in which we find ourselves at the beginning of our enquiry may be expected itself to point the way for us. We wish to make the ego the matter of our enquiry, our very own ego. But is that possible? After all, the ego is in its very essence a subject; how can it be made into an object? Well, there is no doubt that it can be. The ego can take itself as an object, can treat itself like other objects, can observe itself, criticize itself, and do Heaven knows what with itself. In this, one part of the ego is setting itself over against the rest. So the ego can be split; it splits itself during a number of its functions - temporarily at least. Its parts can come together again afterwards. That is not exactly a novelty, though it may perhaps be putting an unusual emphasis on what is generally known. On the other hand, we are familiar with the notion that pathology, by making things larger and coarser, can draw our attention to normal conditions which would otherwise have escaped us. Where it points to a breach or a rent, there may normally be an articulation present. If we throw a crystal to the floor, it breaks; but not into haphazard pieces. It comes apart along its lines of cleavage into fragments whose boundaries, though they were invisible, were predetermined by the crystal’s structure. Mental patients are split and broken structures of this same kind. Even we cannot withhold from them something of the reverential awe which peoples of the past felt for the insane. They have turned away from external reality, but for that very reason they know more about internal, psychical reality and can reveal a number of things to us that would otherwise be inaccessible to us.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4668

We describe one group of these patients as suffering from delusions of being observed. They complain to us that perpetually, and down to their most intimate actions, they are being molested by the observation of unknown powers - presumably persons - and that in hallucinations they hear these persons reporting the outcome of their observation: ‘now he’s going to say this, now he’s dressing to go out’ and so on. Observation of this sort is not yet the same thing as persecution, but it is not far from it; it presupposes that people distrust them, and expect to catch them carrying out forbidden actions for which they would be punished. How would it be if these insane people were right, if in each of us there is present in his ego an agency like this which observes and threatens to punish, and which in them has merely become sharply divided from their ego and mistakenly displaced into external reality?

I cannot tell whether the same thing will happen to you as to me. Ever since, under the powerful impression of this clinical picture, I formed the idea that the separation of the observing agency from the rest of the ego might be a regular feature of the ego’s structure, that idea has never left me, and I was driven to investigate the further characteristics and connections of the agency which was thus separated off. The next step is quickly taken. The content of the delusions of being observed already suggests that the observing is only a preparation for judging and punishing, and we accordingly guess that another function of this agency must be what we call our conscience. There is scarcely anything else in us that we so regularly separate from our ego and so easily set over against it as precisely our conscience. I feel an inclination to do something that I think will give me pleasure, but I abandon it on the ground that my conscience does not allow it. Or I have let myself be persuaded by too great an expectation of pleasure into doing something to which the voice of conscience has objected and after the deed my conscience punishes me with distressing reproaches and causes me to feel remorse for the deed. I might simply say that the special agency which I am beginning to distinguish in the ego is conscience. But it is more prudent to keep the agency as something independent and to suppose that conscience is one of its functions and that self-observation, which is an essential preliminary to the judging activity of conscience, is another of them. And since when we recognize that something has a separate existence we give it a name of its own, from this time forward I will describe this agency in the ego as the ‘super-ego’.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4669

I am now prepared to hear you ask me scornfully whether our ego-psychology comes down to nothing more than taking commonly used abstractions literally and in a crude sense, and transforming them from concepts into things - by which not much would be gained. To this I would reply that in ego-psychology it will be difficult to escape what is universally known; it will rather be a question of new ways of looking at things and new ways of arranging them than of new discoveries. So hold to your contemptuous criticism for the time being and await further explanations. The facts of pathology give our efforts a background that you would look for in vain in popular psychology. So I will proceed.

Hardly have we familiarized ourselves with the idea of a super-ego like this which enjoys a certain degree of autonomy, follows its own intentions and is independent of the ego for its supply of energy, than a clinical picture forces itself on our notice which throws a striking light on the severity of this agency and indeed its cruelty, and on its changing relations to the ego. I am thinking of the condition of melancholia, or, more precisely, of melancholic attacks, which you too will have heard plenty about, even if you are not psychiatrists. The most striking feature of this illness, of whose causation and mechanism we know much too little, is the way in which the super-ego - ‘conscience’, you may call it, quietly - treats the ego. While a melancholic can, like other people, show a greater or lesser degree of severity to himself in his healthy periods, during a melancholic attack his super-ego becomes over-severe, abuses the poor ego, humiliates it and ill-treats it, threatens it with the direst punishments, reproaches it for actions in the remotest past which had been taken lightly at the time - as though it had spent the whole interval in collecting accusations and had only been waiting for its present access of strength in order to bring them up and make a condemnatory judgement on their basis. The super-ego applies the strictest moral standard to the helpless ego which is at its mercy; in general it represents the claims of morality, and we realize all at once that our moral sense of guilt is the expression of the tension between the ego and the super-ego. It is a most remarkable experience to see morality, which is supposed to have been given us by God and thus deeply implanted in us, functioning as a periodic phenomenon. For after a certain number of months the whole moral fuss is over, the criticism of the super-ego is silent, the ego is rehabilitated and again enjoys all the rights of man till the next attack. In some forms of the disease, indeed, something of a contrary sort occurs in the intervals; the ego finds itself in a blissful state of intoxication, it celebrates a triumph, as though the super-ego had lost all its strength or had melted into the ego; and this liberated, manic ego permits itself a truly uninhibited satisfaction of all its appetites. Here are happenings rich in unsolved riddles!

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4670

No doubt you will expect me to give you more than a mere illustration when I inform you that we have found out all kinds of things about the formation of the super-ego - that is to say, about the origin of conscience. Following a well-known pronouncement of Kant’s which couples the conscience within us with the starry Heavens, a pious man might well be tempted to honour these two things as the masterpieces of creation. The stars are indeed magnificent, but as regards conscience God has done an uneven and careless piece of work, for a large majority of men have brought along with them only a modest amount of it or scarcely enough to be worth mentioning. We are far from overlooking the portion of psychological truth that is contained in the assertion that conscience is of divine origin; but the thesis needs interpretation. Even if conscience is something ‘within us’, yet it is not so from the first. In this it is a real contrast to sexual life, which is in fact there from the beginning of life and not only a later addition. But, as is well known, young children are amoral and possess no internal inhibitions against their impulses striving for pleasure. The part which is later taken on by the super-ego is played to begin with by an external power, by parental authority. Parental influence governs the child by offering proofs of love and by threatening punishments which are signs to the child of loss of love and are bound to be feared on their own account. This realistic anxiety is the precursor of the later moral anxiety. So long as it is dominant there is no need to talk of a super-ego and of a conscience. It is only subsequently that the secondary situation develops (which we are all too ready to regard as the normal one), where the external restraint is internalized and the super-ego takes the place of the parental agency and observes, directs and threatens the ego in exactly the same way as earlier the parents did with the child.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4671

The super-ego, which thus takes over the power, function and even the methods of the parental agency, is however not merely its successor but actually the legitimate heir of its body. It proceeds directly out of it, we shall learn presently by what process. First, however, we must dwell upon a discrepancy between the two. The super-ego seems to have made a one-sided choice and to have picked out only the parents’ strictness and severity, their prohibiting and punitive function, whereas their loving care seems not to have been taken over and maintained. If the parents have really enforced their authority with severity we can easily understand the child’s in turn developing a severe super-ego. But, contrary to our expectation, experience shows that the super-ego can acquire the same characteristic of relentless severity even if the upbringing had been mild and kindly and had so far as possible avoided threats and punishments. We shall come back later to this contradiction when we deal with the transformations of instinct during the formation of the super-ego.

I cannot tell you as much as I should like about the metamorphosis of the parental relationship into the super-ego, partly because that process is so complicated that an account of it will not fit into the framework of an introductory course of lectures such as I am trying to give you, but partly also because we our selves do not feel sure that we understand it completely. So you must be content with the sketch that follows.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4672

The basis of the process is what is called an ‘identification’ - that is to say, the assimilation of one ego to another one, as a result of which the first ego behaves like the second in certain respects, imitates it and in a sense takes it up into itself. Identification has been not unsuitably compared with the oral, cannibalistic incorporation of the other person. It is a very important form of attachment to someone else, probably the very first, and not the same thing as the choice of an object. The difference between the two can be expressed in some such way as this. If a boy identifies himself with his father, he wants to be like his father; if he makes him the object of his choice, he wants to have him, to possess him. In the first case his ego is altered on the model of his father; in the second case that is not necessary. Identification and object-choice are to a large extent independent of each other; it is however possible to identify oneself with someone whom, for instance, one has taken as a sexual object, and to alter one’s ego on his model. It is said that the influencing of the ego by the sexual object occurs particularly often with women and is characteristic of femininity. I must already have spoken to you in my earlier lectures of what is by far the most instructive relation between identification and object-choice. It can be observed equally easily in children and adults, in normal as in sick people. If one has lost an object or has been obliged to give it up, one often compensates oneself by identifying oneself with it and by setting it up once more in one’s ego, so that here object-choice regresses, as it were, to identification.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4673

I myself am far from satisfied with these remarks on identification; but it will be enough if you can grant me that the installation of the super-ego can be described as a successful instance of identification with the parental agency. The fact that speaks decisively for this view is that this new creation of a superior agency within the ego is most intimately linked with the destiny of the Oedipus complex, so that the super-ego appears as the heir of that emotional attachment which is of such importance for childhood. With his abandonment of the Oedipus complex a child must, as we can see, renounce the intense object-cathexes which he has deposited with his parents, and it is as a compensation for this loss of objects that there is such a strong intensification of the identifications with his parents which have probably long been present in his ego. Identifications of this kind as precipitates of object-cathexes that have been given up will be repeated often enough later in the child’s life; but it is entirely in accordance with the emotional importance of this first instance of such a transformation that a special place in the ego should be found for its outcome. Close investigation has shown us, too, that the super-ego is stunted in its strength and growth if the surmounting of the Oedipus complex is only incompletely successful. In the course of development the super-ego also takes on the influences of those who have stepped into the place of parents - educators, teachers, people chosen as ideal models. Normally it departs more and more from the original parental figures; it becomes, so to say, more impersonal. Nor must it be forgotten that a child has a different estimate of its parents at different periods of its life. At the time at which the Oedipus complex gives place to the super-ego they are something quite magnificent; but later they lose much of this. Identifications then come about with these later parents as well, and indeed they regularly make important contributions to the formation of character; but in that case they only affect the ego, they no longer influence the super-ego, which has been determined by the earliest parental imagos.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4674

I hope you have already formed an impression that the hypothesis of the super-ego really describes a structural relation and is not merely a personification of some such abstraction as that of conscience. One more important function remains to be mentioned which we attribute to this super-ego. It is also the vehicle of the ego ideal by which the ego measures itself, which it emulates, and whose demand for ever greater perfection it strives to fulfil. There is no doubt that this ego ideal is the precipitate of the old picture of the parents, the expression of admiration for the perfection which the child then attributed to them.

I am sure you have heard a great deal of the sense of inferiority which is supposed particularly to characterize neurotics. It especially haunts the pages of what are known as belles lettres. An author who uses the term ‘inferiority complex’ thinks that by so doing he has fulfilled all the demands of psycho-analysis and has raised his composition to a higher psychological plane. In fact ‘inferiority complex’ is a technical term that is scarcely used in psycho-analysis. For us it does not bear the meaning of anything simple, let alone elementary. To trace it back to the self-perception of possible organic defects, as the school of what are known as ‘Individual Psychologists’ likes to do, seems to us a short-sighted error. The sense of inferiority has strong erotic roots. A child feels inferior if he notices that he is not loved, and so does an adult. The only bodily organ which is really regarded as inferior is the atrophied penis, a girl’s clitoris. But the major part of the sense of inferiority derives from the ego’s relation to its super-ego; like the sense of guilt it is an expression of the tension between them. Altogether, it is hard to separate the sense of inferiority and the sense of guilt. It would perhaps be right to regard the former as the erotic complement to the moral sense of inferiority. Little attention has been given in psycho-analysis to the question of the delimitation of the two concepts.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4675

If only because the inferiority complex has become so popular, I will venture to entertain you here with a short digression. A historical personality of our own days, who is still alive though at the moment he has retired into the background, suffers from a defect in one of his limbs owing to an injury at the time of his birth. A very well-known contemporary writer who is particularly fond of compiling the biographies of celebrities has dealt, among others, with the life of the man I am speaking of. Now in writing a biography it may well be difficult to suppress a need to plumb the psychological depths. For this reason our author has ventured on an attempt to erect the whole of the development of his hero’s character on the sense of inferiority which must have been called up by his physical defect. In doing so, he has overlooked one small but not insignificant fact. It is usual for mothers whom Fate has presented with a child who is sickly or otherwise at a disadvantage to try to compensate him for his unfair handicap by a superabundance of love. In the instance before us, the proud mother behaved otherwise; she withdrew her love from the child on account of his infirmity. When he had grown up into a man of great power, he proved unambiguously by his actions that he had never forgiven his mother. When you consider the importance of a mother’s love for the mental life of a child, you will no doubt make a tacit correction of the biographer’s inferiority theory.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4676

But let us return to the super-ego. We have allotted it the functions of self-observation, of conscience and of the ideal. It follows from what we have said about its origin that it presupposes an immensely important biological fact and a fateful psychological one: namely, the human child’s long dependence on its parents and the Oedipus complex, both of which, again, are intimately interconnected. The super-ego is the representative for us of every moral restriction, the advocate of a striving towards perfection - it is, in short, as much as we have been able to grasp psychologically of what is described as the higher side of human life. Since it itself goes back to the influence of parents, educators and so on, we learn still more of its significance if we turn to those who are its sources. As a rule parents and authorities analogous to them follow the precepts of their own super-egos in educating children. Whatever understanding their ego may have come to with their super-ego, they are severe and exacting in educating children. They have forgotten the difficulties of their own childhood and they are glad to be able now to identify themselves fully with their own parents who in the past laid such severe restrictions upon them. Thus a child’s super-ego is in fact constructed on the model not of its parents but of its parents’ super-ego; the contents which fill it are the same and it becomes the vehicle of tradition and of all the time-resisting judgements of value which have propagated themselves in this manner from generation to generation. You may easily guess what important assistance taking the super-ego into account will give us in our understanding of the social behaviour of mankind - in the problem of delinquency, for instance - and perhaps even what practical hints on education. It seems likely that what are known as materialistic views of history sin in under-estimating this factor. They brush it aside with the remark that human ‘ideologies’ are nothing other than the product and superstructure of their contemporary economic conditions. That is true, but very probably not the whole truth. Mankind never lives entirely in the present. The past, the tradition of the race and of the people, lives on in the ideologies of the super-ego, and yields only slowly to the influences of the present and to new changes; and so long as it operates through the super-ego it plays a powerful part in human life, independently of economic conditions.

In 1921 I endeavoured to make use of the differentiation between the ego and the super-ego in a study of group psychology. I arrived at a formula such as this: a psychological group is a collection of individuals who have introduced the same person into their super-ego and, on the basis of this common element, have identified themselves with one another in their ego. This applies, of course, only to groups that have a leader. If we possessed more applications of this kind, the hypothesis of the super-ego would lose its last touch of strangeness for us, and we should become completely free of the embarrassment that still comes over us when, accustomed as we are to the atmosphere of the underworld, we move in the more superficial, higher strata of the mental apparatus. We do not suppose, of course, that with the separation off of the super-ego we have said the last word on the psychology of the ego. It is rather a first step; but in this case it is not only the first step that is hard.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4677

Now, however, another problem awaits us - at the opposite end of the ego, as we might put it. It is presented to us by an observation during the work of analysis, an observation which is actually a very old one. As not infrequently happens, it has taken a long time to come to the point of appreciating its importance. The whole theory of psycho-analysis is, as you know, in fact built up on the perception of the resistance offered to us by the patient when we attempt to make his unconscious conscious to him. The objective sign of this resistance is that his associations fail or depart widely from the topic that is being dealt with. He may also recognize the resistance subjectively by the fact that he has distressing feelings when he approaches the topic. But this last sign may also be absent. We then say to the patient that we infer from his behaviour that he is now in a state of resistance; and he replies that he knows nothing of that, and is only aware that his associations have become more difficult. It turns out that we were right; but in that case his resistance was unconscious too, just as unconscious as the repressed, at the lifting of which we were working. We should long ago have asked the question: from what part of his mind does an unconscious resistance like this arise? The beginner in psycho-analysis will be ready at once with the answer: it is, of course, the resistance of the unconscious. An ambiguous and unserviceable answer! If it means that the resistance arises from the repressed, we must rejoin: certainly not! We must rather attribute to the repressed a strong upward drive, an impulsion to break through into consciousness. The resistance can only be a manifestation of the ego, which originally put the repression into force and now wishes to maintain it. That, moreover, is the view we always took. Since we have come to assume a special agency in the ego, the super-ego, which represents demands of a restrictive and rejecting character, we may say that repression is the work of this super-ego and that it is carried out either by itself or by the ego in obedience to its orders. If then we are met by the case of the resistance in analysis not being conscious to the patient, this means either that in quite important situations the super-ego and the ego can operate unconsciously, or - and this would be still more important - that portions of both of them, the ego and the super-ego themselves, are unconscious. In both cases we have to reckon with the disagreeable discovery that on the one hand (super-) ego and conscious and on the other hand repressed and unconscious are far from coinciding.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4678

And here, Ladies and Gentlemen, I feel that I must make a pause to take breath - which you too will welcome as a relief - and, before I go on, to apologize to you. My intention is to give you some addenda to the introductory lectures on psycho-analysis which I began fifteen years ago, and I am obliged to behave as though you as well as I had in the interval done nothing but practise psycho-analysis. I know that that assumption is out of place; but I am helpless, I cannot do otherwise. This is no doubt related to the fact that it is in general so hard to give anyone who is not himself a psycho-analyst an insight into psycho-analysis. You can believe me when I tell you that we do not enjoy giving an impression of being members of a secret society and of practising a mystical science. Yet we have been obliged to recognize and express as our conviction that no one has a right to join in a discussion of psycho-analysis who has not had particular experiences which can only be obtained by being analysed oneself. When I gave you my lectures fifteen years ago I tried to spare you certain speculative portions of our theory; but it is precisely from them that are derived the new acquisitions of which I must speak to you to-day.

I return now to our topic. In face of the doubt whether the ego and super-ego are themselves unconscious or merely produce unconscious effects, we have, for good reasons, decided in favour of the former possibility. And it is indeed the case that large portions of the ego and super-ego can remain unconscious and are normally unconscious. That is to say, the individual knows nothing of their contents and it requires an expenditure of effort to make them conscious. It is a fact that ego and conscious, repressed and unconscious do not coincide. We feel a need to make a fundamental revision of our attitude to the problem of conscious-unconscious. At first we are inclined greatly to reduce the value of the criterion of being conscious since it has shown itself so untrustworthy. But we should be doing it an injustice. As may be said of our life, it is not worth much, but it is all we have. Without the illumination thrown by the quality of consciousness, we should be lost in the obscurity of depth-psychology; but we must attempt to find our bearings afresh.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4679

There is no need to discuss what is to be called conscious: it is removed from all doubt. The oldest and best meaning of the word ‘unconscious’ is the descriptive one; we call a psychical process unconscious whose existence we are obliged to assume - for some such reason as that we infer it from its effects -, but of which we know nothing. In that case we have the same relation to it as we have to a psychical process in another person, except that it is in fact one of our own. If we want to be still more correct, we shall modify our assertion by saying that we call a process unconscious if we are obliged to assume that it is being activated at the moment, though at the moment we know nothing about it. This qualification makes us reflect that the majority of conscious processes are conscious only for a short time; very soon they become latent, but can easily become conscious again. We might also say that they had become unconscious, if it were at all certain that in the condition of latency they are still something psychical. So far we should have learnt nothing new; nor should we have acquired the right to introduce the concept of an unconscious into psychology. But then comes the new observation that we were already able to make in parapraxes. In order to explain a slip of the tongue, for instance, we find ourselves obliged to assume that the intention to make a particular remark was present in the subject. We infer it with certainty from the interference with his remark which has occurred; but the intention did not put itself through and was thus unconscious. If, when we subsequently put it before the speaker, he recognizes it as one familiar to him, then it was only temporarily unconscious to him; but if he repudiates it as something foreign to him, then it was permanently unconscious. From this experience we retrospectively obtain the right also to pronounce as something unconscious what had been described as latent. A consideration of these dynamic relations permits us now to distinguish two kinds of unconscious - one which is easily, under frequently occurring circumstances, transformed into something conscious, and another with which this transformation is difficult and takes place only subject to a considerable expenditure of effort or possibly never at all. In order to escape the ambiguity as to whether we mean the one or the other unconscious, whether we are using the word in the descriptive or in the dynamic sense, we make use of a permissible and simple way out. We call the unconscious which is only latent, and thus easily becomes conscious, the ‘preconscious’ and retain the term ‘unconscious’ for the other. We now have three terms, ‘conscious’, ‘preconscious’ and ‘unconscious’, with which we can get along in our description of mental phenomena. Once again: the preconscious is also unconscious in the purely descriptive sense, but we do not give it that name, except in talking loosely or when we have to make a defence of the existence in mental life of unconscious processes in general.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4680

You will admit, I hope, that so far that is not too bad and allows of convenient handling. Yes, but unluckily the work of psycho-analysis has found itself compelled to use the word ‘unconscious’ in yet another, third, sense, and this may, to be sure, have led to confusion. Under the new and powerful impression of there being an extensive and important field of mental life which is normally withdrawn from the ego’s knowledge so that the processes occurring in it have to be regarded as unconscious in the truly dynamic sense, we have come to understand the term ‘unconscious’ in a topographical or systematic sense as well; we have come to speak of a ‘system’ of the preconscious and a ‘system’ of the unconscious, of a conflict between the ego and the system Ucs., and have used the word more and more to denote a mental province rather than a quality of what is mental. The discovery, actually an inconvenient one, that portions of the ego and super-ego as well are unconscious in the dynamic sense, operates at this point as a relief - it makes possible the removal of a complication. We perceive that we have no right to name the mental region that is foreign to the ego ‘the system Ucs’, since the characteristic of being unconscious is not restricted to it. Very well; we will no longer use the term ‘unconscious’ in the systematic sense and we will give what we have hitherto so described a better name and one no longer open to misunderstanding. Following a verbal usage of Nietzsche’s and taking up a suggestion by Georg Groddeck, we will in future call it the ‘id’. This impersonal pronoun seems particularly well suited for expressing the main characteristic of this province of the mind - the fact of its being alien to the ego. The super-ego, the ego and the id - these, then, are the three realms, regions, provinces, into which we divide an individual’s mental apparatus, and with the mutual relations of which we shall be concerned in what follows.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4681

But first a short interpolation. I suspect that you feel dissatisfied because the three qualities of the characteristic of consciousness and the three provinces of the mental apparatus do not fall together into three peaceable couples, and you may regard this as in some sense obscuring our findings. I do not think, however, that we should regret it, and we should tell ourselves that we had no right to expect any such smooth arrangement. Let me give you an analogy; analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home. I am imagining a country with a landscape of varying configuration - hill-country, plains, and chains of lakes -, and with a mixed population; it is inhabited by Germans, Magyars and Slovaks, who carry on different activities. Now things might be partitioned in such a way that the Germans, who breed cattle, live in the hill-country, the Magyars, who grow cereals and wine, live in the plains, and the Slovaks, who catch fish and plait reeds, live by the lakes. If the partitioning could be neat and clear-cut like this, a Woodrow Wilson would be delighted by it; it would also be convenient for a lecture in a geography lesson. The probability is, however, that you will find less orderliness and more mixing, if you travel through the region. Germans, Magyars and Slovaks live interspersed all over it; in the hill-country there is agricultural land as well, cattle are bred in the plains too. A few things are naturally as you expected, for fish cannot be caught in the mountains and wine does not grow in the water. Indeed, the picture of the region that you brought with you may on the whole fit the facts; but you will have to put up with deviations in the details.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4682

You will not expect me to have much to tell you that is new about the id apart from its new name. It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality; what little we know of it we have learnt from our study of the dream-work and of the construction of neurotic symptoms, and most of that is of a negative character and can be described only as a contrast to the ego. We approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations. We picture it as being open at its end to somatic influences, and as there taking up into itself instinctual needs which find their psychical expression in it, but we cannot say in what substratum. It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle. The logical laws of thought do not apply in the id, and this is true above all of the law of contradiction. Contrary impulses exist side by side, without cancelling each other out or diminishing each other: at the most they may converge to form compromises under the dominating economic pressure towards the discharge of energy. There is nothing in the id that could be compared with negation; and we perceive with surprise an exception to the philosophical theorem that space and time are necessary forms of our mental acts. There is nothing in the id that corresponds to the idea of time; there is no recognition of the passage of time, and - a thing that is most remarkable and awaits consideration in philosophical thought - no alteration in its mental processes is produced by the passage of time. Wishful impulses which have never passed beyond the id, but impressions, too, which have been sunk into the id by repression, are virtually immortal; after the passage of decades they behave as though they had just occurred. They can only be recognized as belonging to the past, can only lose their importance and be deprived of their cathexis of energy, when they have been made conscious by the work of analysis, and it is on this that the therapeutic effect of analytic treatment rests to no small extent.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4683

Again and again I have had the impression that we have made too little theoretical use of this fact, established beyond any doubt, of the unalterability by time of the repressed. This seems to offer an approach to the most profound discoveries. Nor, unfortunately, have I myself made any progress here.

The id of course knows no judgements of value: no good and evil, no morality. The economic or, if you prefer, the quantitative factor, which is intimately linked to the pleasure principle, dominates all its processes. Instinctual cathexes seeking discharge - that, in our view, is all there is in the id. It even seems that the energy of these instinctual impulses is in a state different from that in the other regions of the mind, far more mobile and capable of discharge; otherwise the displacements and condensations would not occur which are characteristic of the id and which so completely disregard the quality of what is cathected - what in the ego we should call an idea. We would give much to understand more about these things! You can see, incidentally, that we are in a position to attribute to the id characteristics other than that of its being unconscious, and you can recognize the possibility of portions of the ego and super-ego being unconscious without possessing the same primitive and irrational characteristics.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4684

We can best arrive at the characteristics of the actual ego, in so far as it can be distinguished from the id and from the super-ego, by examining its relation to the outermost superficial portion of the mental apparatus, which we describe as the system Pcpt.-Cs. This system is turned towards the external world, it is the medium for the perceptions arising thence, and during its functioning the phenomenon of consciousness arises in it. It is the sense-organ of the entire apparatus; moreover it is receptive not only to excitations from outside but also to those arising from the interior of the mind. We need scarcely look for a justification of the view that the ego is that portion of the id which was modified by the proximity and influence of the external world, which is adapted for the reception of stimuli and as a protective shield against stimuli, comparable to the cortical layer by which a small piece of living substance is surrounded. The relation to the external world has become the decisive factor for the ego; it has taken on the task of representing the external world to the id - fortunately for the id, which could not escape destruction if, in its blind efforts for the satisfaction of its instincts, it disregarded that supreme external power. In accomplishing this function, the ego must observe the external world, must lay down an accurate picture of it in the memory-traces of its perceptions, and by its exercise of the function of ‘reality-testing’ must put aside whatever in this picture of the external world is an addition derived from internal sources of excitation. The ego controls the approaches to motility under the id’s orders; but between a need and an action it has interposed a postponement in the form of the activity of thought, during which it makes use of the mnemic residues of experience. In that way it has dethroned the pleasure principle which dominates the course of events in the id without any restriction and has replaced it by the reality principle, which promises more certainty and greater success.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4685

The relation to time, which is so hard to describe, is also introduced into the ego by the perceptual system; it can scarcely be doubted that the mode of operation of that system is what provides the origin of the idea of time. But what distinguishes the ego from the id quite especially is a tendency to synthesis in its contents, to a combination and unification in its mental processes which are totally lacking in the id. When presently we come to deal with the instincts in mental life we shall, I hope, succeed in tracing this essential characteristic of the ego back to its source. It alone produces the high degree of organization which the ego needs for its best achievements. The ego develops from perceiving the instincts to controlling them; but this last is only achieved by the representative of the instinct being allotted its proper place in a considerable assemblage, by its being taken up into a coherent context. To adopt a popular mode of speaking, we might say that the ego stands for reason and good sense while the id stands for the untamed passions.

So far we have allowed ourselves to be impressed by the merits and capabilities of the ego; it is now time to consider the other side as well. The ego is after all only a portion of the id, a portion that has been expediently modified by the proximity of the external world with its threat of danger. From a dynamic point of view it is weak, it has borrowed its energies from the id, and we are not entirely without insight into the methods - we might call them dodges - by which it extracts further amounts of energy from the id. One such method, for instance, is by identifying itself with actual or abandoned objects. The object-cathexes spring from the instinctual demands of the id. The ego has in the first instance to take note of them. But by identifying itself with the object it recommends itself to the id in place of the object and seeks to divert the id’s libido on to itself. We have already seen that in the course of its life the ego takes into itself a large number of precipitates like this of former object-cathexes. The ego must on the whole carry out the id’s intentions, it fulfils its task by finding out the circumstances in which those intentions can best be achieved. The ego’s relation to the id might be compared with that of a rider to his horse. The horse supplies the locomotive energy, while the rider has the privilege of deciding on the goal and of guiding the powerful animal’s movement. But only too often there arises between the ego and the id the not precisely ideal situation of the rider being obliged to guide the horse along the path by which it itself wants to go.

There is one portion of the id from which the ego has separated itself by resistances due to repression. But the repression is not carried over into the id: the repressed merges into the remainder of the id.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4686

We are warned by a proverb against serving two masters at the same time. The poor ego has things even worse: it serves three severe masters and does what it can to bring their claims and demands into harmony with one another. These claims are always divergent and often seem incompatible. No wonder that the ego so often fails in its task. Its three tyrannical masters are the external world, the super-ego and the id. When we follow the ego’s efforts to satisfy them simultaneously - or rather, to obey them simultaneously - we cannot feel any regret at having personified this ego and having set it up as a separate organism. It feels hemmed in on three sides, threatened by three kinds of danger, to which, if it is hard pressed, it reacts by generating anxiety. Owing to its origin from the experiences of the perceptual system, it is earmarked for representing the demands of the external world, but it strives too to be a loyal servant of the id, to remain on good terms with it, to recommend itself to it as an object and to attract its libido to itself. In its attempts to mediate between the id and reality, it is often obliged to cloak the Ucs. commands of the id with its own Pcs. rationalizations, to conceal the id’s conflicts with reality, to profess, with diplomatic disingenuousness, to be taking notice of reality even when the id has remained rigid and unyielding. On the other hand it is observed at every step it takes by the strict super-ego, which lays down definite standards for its conduct, without taking any account of its difficulties from the direction of the id and the external world, and which, if those standards are not obeyed, punishes it with tense feelings of inferiority and of guilt. Thus the ego, driven by the id, confined by the super-ego, repulsed by reality, struggles to master its economic task of bringing about harmony among the forces and influences working in and upon it; and we can understand how it is that so often we cannot suppress a cry: ‘Life is not easy!’ If the ego is obliged to admit its weakness it breaks out in anxiety - realistic anxiety regarding the external world, moral anxiety regarding the super-ego and neurotic anxiety regarding the strength of the passions in the id.

I should like to portray the structural relations of the mental personality, as I have described them to you, in the unassuming sketch which I now present you with:

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4687

As you see here, the super-ego merges into the id; indeed, as heir to the Oedipus complex it has intimate relations with the id; it is more remote than the ego from the perceptual system. The id has intercourse with the external world only through the ego - at least, according to this diagram. It is certainly hard to say to-day how far the drawing is correct. In one respect it is undoubtedly not. The space occupied by the unconscious id ought to have been incomparably greater than that of the ego or the preconscious. I must ask you to correct it in your thoughts.

And here is another warning, to conclude these remarks, which have certainly been exacting and not, perhaps, very illuminating. In thinking of this division of the personality into an ego, a super-ego and an id, you will not, of course, have pictured sharp frontiers like the artificial ones drawn in political geography. We cannot do justice to the characteristics of the mind by linear outlines like those in a drawing or in primitive painting, but rather by areas of colour melting into one another as they are presented by modern artists. After making the separation we must allow what we have separated to merge together once more. You must not judge too harshly a first attempt at giving a pictorial representations of something so intangible as psychical processes. It is highly probable that the development of these divisions is subject to great variations in different individuals; it is possible that in the course of actual functioning they may change and go through a temporary phase of involution. Particularly in the case of what is phylogenetically the last and most delicate of these divisions - the differentiation between the ego and the super-ego - something of the sort seems to be true. There is no question but that the same thing results from psychical illness. It is easy to imagine, too, that certain mystical practices may succeed in upsetting the normal relations between the different regions of the mind, so that, for instance, perception may be able to grasp happenings in the depths of the ego and in the id which were otherwise inaccessible to it. It may safely be doubted, however, whether this road will lead us to the ultimate truths from which salvation is to be expected. Nevertheless it may be admitted that the therapeutic efforts of psycho-analysis have chosen a similar line of approach. Its intention is, indeed, to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the super-ego, to widen its field of perception and enlarge its organization, so that it can appropriate fresh portions of the id. Where id was, there ego shall be. It is a work of culture - not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4688

LECTURE XXXII

ANXIETY AND INSTINCTUAL LIFE

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - You will not be surprised to hear that I have a number of novelties to report to you about our conception of anxiety and of the basic instincts of mental life; nor will you be surprised to learn that none of these novelties can claim to offer a final solution of these still unsettled problems. I have a particular reason for using the word ‘conception’ here. These are the most difficult problems that are set to us, but their difficulty does not lie in any insufficiency of observations; what present us with these riddles are actually the commonest and most familiar of phenomena. Nor does the difficulty lie in the recondite nature of the speculations to which they give rise; speculative consideration plays little part in this sphere. But it is truly a matter of conceptions - that is to say, of introducing the right abstract ideas, whose application to the raw material of observation will produce order and clarity in it.

I devoted a lecture (the twenty-fifth) to anxiety in my previous series; and I must briefly recapitulate what I said in it. We described anxiety as an affective state - that is to say, a combination of certain feelings in the pleasure-unpleasure series with the corresponding innervations of discharge and a perception of them, but probably also the precipitate of a particular important event, incorporated by inheritance - something that may thus be likened to an individually acquired hysterical attack. The event which we look upon as having left behind it an affective trace of this sort is the process of birth, at the time of which the effects upon the heart’s action and upon respiration characteristic of anxiety were expedient ones. The very first anxiety would thus have been a toxic one. We then started off from a distinction between realistic anxiety and neurotic anxiety, of which the former was a reaction, which seemed intelligible to us, to a danger - that is, to an expected injury from outside - while the latter was completely enigmatic, and appeared to be pointless.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4689

In an analysis of realistic anxiety we brought it down to the state of increased sensory attention and motor tension which we describe as ‘preparedness for anxiety’. It is out of this that the anxiety reaction develops. Here two outcomes are possible. Either the generation of anxiety - the repetition of the old traumatic experience - is limited to a signal, in which case the remainder of the reaction can adapt itself to the new situation of danger and can proceed to flight or defence; or the old situation can retain the upper hand and the total reaction may consist in no more than a generation of anxiety, in which case the affective state becomes paralysing and will be inexpedient for present purposes.

We then turned to neurotic anxiety and pointed out that we observe it under three conditions. We find it first as a freely floating, general apprehensiveness, ready to attach itself temporarily, in the form of what is known as ‘expectant anxiety’, to any possibility that may freshly arise - as happens, for instance, in a typical anxiety neurosis. Secondly, we find it firmly attached to certain ideas in the so-called ‘phobias’, in which it is still possible to recognize a relation to external danger but in which we must judge the fear exaggerated out of all proportion. Thirdly and lastly, we find anxiety in hysteria and other forms of severe neurosis, where it either accompanies symptoms or emerges independently as an attack or more persistent state, but always without any visible basis in an external danger. We then asked ourselves two questions: ‘What are people afraid of in neurotic anxiety?’ and ‘How are we to bring it into relation with realistic anxiety felt in the face of external dangers?’

Our investigations were far from remaining unsuccessful: we reached a few important conclusions. In regard to anxious expectation clinical experience revealed that it had a regular connection with the libidinal economics of sexual life. The commonest cause of anxiety neurosis is unconsummated excitation. Libidinal excitation is aroused but not satisfied, not employed; apprehensiveness then appears instead of this libido that has been diverted from its employment. I even thought I was justified in saying that this unsatisfied libido was directly changed into anxiety. This view found support in some quite regularly occurring phobias of small children. Many of these phobias are very puzzling to us, but others, such as the fear of being alone and the fear of strangers, can be explained with certainty. Loneliness as well as a strange face arouse the child’s longing for his familiar mother; he is unable to control this libidinal excitation, he cannot hold it in suspense but changes it into anxiety. This infantile anxiety must therefore be regarded not as of the realistic but as of the neurotic kind. Infantile phobias and the expectation of anxiety in anxiety neurosis offer us two examples of one way in which neurotic anxiety originates: by a direct transformation of libido. We shall at once come to know of a second mechanism, but it will turn out not to be very different from the first.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4690

For we consider that what is responsible for the anxiety in hysteria and other neuroses is the process of repression. We believe it is possible to give a more complete account of this than before, if we separate what happens to the idea that has to be repressed from what happens to the quota of libido attaching to it. It is the idea which is subjected to repression and which may be distorted to the point of being unrecognizable; but its quota of affect is regularly transformed into anxiety - and this is so whatever the nature of the affect may be, whether it is aggressiveness or love. It makes no essential difference, then, for what reason a quota of libido has become unemployable: whether it is on account of the infantile weakness of the ego, as in children’s phobias, or on account of somatic processes in sexual life, as in anxiety neurosis, or owing to repression, as in hysteria. Thus in reality the two mechanisms that bring about neurotic anxiety coincide.

In the course of these investigations our attention was drawn to a highly significant relation between the generation of anxiety and the formation of symptoms - namely, that these two represent and replace each other. For instance, an agoraphobic patient may start his illness with an attack of anxiety in the street. This would be repeated every time he went into the street again. He will now develop the symptom of agoraphobia; this may also be described as an inhibition, a restriction of the ego’s functioning, and by means of it he spares himself anxiety attacks. We can witness the converse of this if we interfere in the formation of symptoms, as is possible, for instance, with obsessions. If we prevent a patient from carrying out a washing ceremonial, he falls into a state of anxiety which he finds hard to tolerate and from which he had evidently been protected by his symptom. And it seems, indeed, that the generation of anxiety is the earlier and the formation of symptoms the later of the two, as though the symptoms are created in order to avoid the outbreak of the anxiety state. This is confirmed too by the fact that the first neuroses of childhood are phobias - states in which we see so clearly how an initial generation of anxiety is replaced by the later formation of a symptom; we get an impression that it is from these interrelations that we shall best obtain access to an understanding of neurotic anxiety. And at the same time we have also succeeded in answering the question of what it is that a person is afraid of in neurotic anxiety and so in establishing the connection between neurotic and realistic anxiety. What he is afraid of is evidently his own libido. The difference between this situation and that of realistic anxiety lies in two points: that the danger is an internal instead of an external one and that it is not consciously recognized.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4691

In phobias it is very easy to observe the way in which this internal danger is transformed into an external one - that is to say, how a neurotic anxiety is changed into an apparently realistic one. In order to simplify what is often a very complicated business, let us suppose that the agoraphobic patient is invariably afraid of feelings of temptation that are aroused in him by meeting people in the street. In his phobia he brings about a displacement and henceforward is afraid of an external situation. What he gains by this is obviously that he thinks he will be able to protect himself better in that way. One can save oneself from an external danger by flight; fleeing from an internal danger is a difficult enterprise.

At the conclusion of my earlier lecture on anxiety I myself expressed the opinion that, although these various findings of our enquiry were not mutually contradictory, somehow they did not fit in with one another. Anxiety, it seems, in so far as it is an affective state, is the reproduction of an old event which brought a threat of danger; anxiety serves the purposes of self-preservation and is a signal of a new danger; it arises from libido that has in some way become unemployable and it also arises during the process of repression; it is replaced by the formation of a symptom, is, as it were, psychically bound - one has a feeling that something is missing here which would bring all these pieces together into a whole.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4692

Ladies and Gentlemen, the dissection of the mental personality into a super-ego, an ego and an id, which I put before you in my last lecture, has obliged us to take our bearings afresh in the problem of anxiety as well. With the thesis that the ego is the sole seat of anxiety - that the ego alone can produce and feel anxiety - we have established a new and stable position from which a number of things take on a new aspect. And indeed it is difficult to see what sense there would be in speaking of an ‘anxiety of the id’ or in attributing a capacity for apprehensiveness to the super-ego. On the other hand, we have welcomed a desirable element of correspondence in the fact that the three main species of anxiety, realistic, neurotic and moral, can be so easily connected with the ego’s three dependent relations - to the external world, to the id and to the super-ego. Along with this new view, moreover, the function of anxiety as a signal announcing a situation of danger (a notion, incidentally, not unfamiliar to us) comes into prominence, the question of what the material is out of which anxiety is made loses interest, and the relations between realistic and neurotic anxiety have become surprisingly clarified and simplified. It is also to be remarked that we now understand the apparently complicated cases of the generation of anxiety better than those which were considered simple.

For we have recently been examining the way in which anxiety is generated in certain phobias which we class as anxiety hysteria, and have chosen cases in which we were dealing with the typical repression of wishful impulses arising from the Oedipus complex. We should have expected to find that it was a libidinal cathexis of the boy’s mother as object which, as a result of repression, had been changed into anxiety and which now emerged, expressed in symptomatic terms, attached to a substitute for his father. I cannot present you with the detailed steps of an investigation such as this; it will be enough to say that the surprising result was the opposite of what we expected. It was not the repression that created the anxiety; the anxiety was there earlier; it was the anxiety that made the repression. But what sort of anxiety can it have been? Only anxiety in the face of a threatening external danger - that is to say, a realistic anxiety. It is true that the boy felt anxiety in the face of a demand by his libido - in this instance, anxiety at being in love with his mother; so the case was in fact one of neurotic anxiety. But this being in love only appeared to him as an internal danger, which he must avoid by renouncing that object, because it conjured up an external situation of danger. And in every case we examine we obtain the same result. It must be confessed that we were not prepared to find that internal instinctual danger would turn out to be a determinant and preparation for an external, real, situation of danger.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4693

But we have not made any mention at all so far of what the real danger is that the child is afraid of as a result of being in love with his mother. The danger is the punishment of being castrated, of losing his genital organ. You will of course object that after all that is not a real danger. Our boys are not castrated because they are in love with their mothers during the phase of the Oedipus complex. But the matter cannot be dismissed so simply. Above all, it is not a question of whether castration is really carried out; what is decisive is that the danger is one that threatens from outside and that the child believes in it. He has some ground for this, for people threaten him often enough with cutting off his penis during the phallic phase, at the time of his early masturbation, and hints at that punishment must regularly find a phylogenetic reinforcement in him. It is our suspicion that during the human family’s primaeval period castration used actually to be carried out by a jealous and cruel father upon growing boys, and that circumcision, which so frequently plays a part in puberty rites among primitive peoples, is a clearly recognizable relic of it. We are aware that here we are diverging widely from the general opinion; but we must hold fast to the view that fear of castration is one of the commonest and strongest motives for repression and thus for the formation of neuroses. The analysis of cases in which circumcision, though not, it is true, castration, has been carried out on boys as a cure or punishment for masturbation (a far from rare occurrence in Anglo-American society) has given our conviction a last degree of certainty. It is very tempting at this point to go more deeply into the castration complex, but I will stick to our subject.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4694

Fear of castration is not, of course, the only motive for repression: indeed, it finds no place in women, for though they have a castration complex they cannot have a fear of being castrated. Its place is taken in their sex by a fear of loss of love, which is evidently a later prolongation of the infant’s anxiety if it finds its mother absent. You will realize how real a situation of danger is indicated by this anxiety. If a mother is absent or has withdrawn her love from her child, it is no longer sure of the satisfaction of its needs and is perhaps exposed to the most distressing feelings of tension. Do not reject the idea that these determinants of anxiety may at bottom repeat the situation of the original anxiety at birth, which, to be sure, also represented a separation from the mother. Indeed, if you follow a train of thought suggested by Ferenczi, you may add the fear of castration to this series, for a loss of the male organ results in an inability to unite once more with the mother (or a substitute for her) in the sexual act. I may mention to you incidentally that the very frequent phantasy of returning into the mother’s womb is a substitute for this wish to copulate. There would be many interesting things and surprising connections to tell you at this point, but I cannot go outside the framework of an introduction to psycho-analysis. I will only draw your attention to the fact that here psychological researches trench upon the facts of biology.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4695

Otto Rank, to whom psycho-analysis is indebted for many excellent contributions, also has the merit of having expressly emphasized the significance of the act of birth and of separation from the mother. Nevertheless we have all found it impossible to accept the extreme inferences which he has drawn from this factor as bearing on the theory of the neuroses and even on analytic therapy. The core of his theory - that the experience of anxiety at birth is the model of all later situations of danger - he found already there. If we dwell on these situations of danger for a moment, we can say that in fact a particular determinant of anxiety (that is, situation of danger) is allotted to every age of development as being appropriate to it. The danger of psychical helplessness fits the stage of the ego’s early immaturity; the danger of loss of an object (or loss of love) fits the lack of self-sufficiency in the first years of childhood; the danger of being castrated fits the phallic phase; and finally fear of the super-ego, which assumes a special position, fits the period of latency. In the course of development the old determinants of anxiety should be dropped, since the situations of danger corresponding to them have lost their importance owing to the strengthening of the ego. But this only occurs most incompletely. Many people are unable to surmount the fear of loss of love; they never become sufficiently independent of other people’s love and in this respect carry on their behaviour as infants. Fear of the super-ego should normally never cease, since, in the form of moral anxiety, it is indispensable in social relations, and only in the rarest cases can an individual become independent of human society. A few of the old situations of danger, too, succeed in surviving into later periods by making contemporary modifications in their determinants of anxiety. Thus, for instance, the danger of castration persists under the mark of syphilidophobia. It is true that as an adult one knows that castration is no longer customary as a punishment for the indulgence of sexual desires, but on the other hand one has learnt that instinctual liberty of that kind is threatened by serious diseases. There is no doubt that the people we describe as neurotics remain infantile in their attitude to danger and have not surmounted obsolete determinants of anxiety. We may take this as a factual contribution to the characterization of neurotics; it is not so easy to say why it should be so.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4696

I hope you have not lost the thread of what I am saying and remember that we are investigating the relations between anxiety and repression. In the course of this we have learnt two new things: first, that anxiety makes repression and not, as we used to think, the other way round, and that the instinctual situation which is feared goes back ultimately to an external situation of danger. The next question will be: how do we now picture the process of a repression under the influence of anxiety? The answer will, I think, be as follows. The ego notices that the satisfaction of an emerging instinctual demand would conjure up one of the well-remembered situations of danger. This instinctual cathexis must therefore be somehow suppressed, stopped, made powerless. We know that the ego succeeds in this task if it is strong and has drawn the instinctual impulse concerned into its organization. But what happens in the case of repression is that the instinctual impulse still belongs to the id and that the ego feels weak. The ego thereupon helps itself by a technique which is at bottom identical with normal thinking. Thinking is an experimental action carried out with small amounts of energy, in the same way as a general shifts small figures about on a map before setting his large bodies of troops in motion. Thus the ego anticipates the satisfaction of the questionable instinctual impulse and permits it to bring about the reproduction of the unpleasurable feelings at the beginning of the feared situation of danger. With this the automatism of the pleasure-unpleasure principle is brought into operation and now carries out the repression of the dangerous instinctual impulse.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4697

‘Stop a moment!’ you will exclaim; ‘we can’t follow you any further there!’ You are quite right; I must add a little more before it can seem acceptable to you. First, I must admit that I have tried to translate into the language of our normal thinking what must in fact be a process that is neither conscious nor preconscious, taking place between quotas of energy in some unimaginable substratum. But that is not a strong objection, for it cannot be done in any other way. What is more important is that we should distinguish clearly what happens in the ego and what happens in the id when there is a repression. We have just said what the ego does: it makes use of an experimental cathexis and starts up the pleasure-unpleasure automatism by means of a signal of anxiety. After that, several reactions are possible or a combination of them in varying proportions. Either the anxiety attack is fully generated and the ego withdraws entirely from the objectionable excitation; or, in place of the experimental cathexis it opposes the excitation with an anticathexis, and this combines with the energy of the repressed impulse to form a symptom; or the anticathexis is taken up into the ego as a reaction-formation, as an intensification of certain of the ego’s dispositions, as a permanent alteration of it. The more the generation of anxiety can be restricted to a mere signal, so much the more does the ego expend on actions of defence which amount to the psychical binding of the repressed, and so much the closer, too, does the process approximate to a normal working-over of it, though no doubt without attaining to it.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4698

Incidentally, here is a point on which we may dwell for a moment. You yourselves have no doubt assumed that what is known as ‘character’, a thing so hard to define, is to be ascribed entirely to the ego. We have already made out a little of what it is that creates character. First and foremost there is the incorporation of the former parental agency as a super-ego, which is no doubt its most important and decisive portion, and, further, identifications with the two parents of the later period and with other influential figures, and similar identifications formed as precipitates of abandoned object-relations. And we may now add as contributions to the construction of character which are never absent the reaction-formations which the ego acquires - to begin with in making its repressions and later, by a more normal method, when it rejects unwished-for instinctual impulses.

Now let us go back and turn to the id. It is not so easy to guess what occurs during repression in connection with the instinctual impulse that is being fought against. The main question which our interest raises is as to what happens to the energy, to the libidinal charge, of that excitation - how is it employed? You recollect that the earlier hypothesis was that it is precisely this that is transformed by repression into anxiety. We no longer feel able to say that. The modest reply will rather be that what happens to it is probably not always the same thing. There is probably an intimate correspondence which we ought to get to know about between what is occurring at the time in the ego and in the id in connection with the repressed impulse. For since we have decided that the pleasure-unpleasure principle, which is set in action by the signal of anxiety, plays a part in repression, we must alter our expectations. That principle exercises an entirely unrestricted dominance over what happens in the id. We can rely on its bringing about quite profound changes in the instinctual impulse in question. We are prepared to find that repression will have very various consequences, more or less far-reaching. In some cases the repressed instinctual impulse may retain its libidinal cathexis, and may persist in the id unchanged, although subject to constant pressure from the ego. In other cases what seems to happen is that it is totally destroyed, while its libido is permanently diverted along other paths. I expressed the view that this is what happens when the Oedipus complex is dealt with normally - in this desirable case, therefore, being not simply repressed but destroyed in the id. Clinical experience has further shown us that in many cases, instead of the customary result of repression, a degradation of the libido takes place - a regression of the libidinal organization to an earlier stage. This can, of course, only occur in the id, and if it occurs it will be under the influence of the same conflict which was introduced by the signal of anxiety. The most striking example of this kind is provided by the obsessional neurosis, in which libidinal regression and repression operate together.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4699

I fear, Ladies and Gentlemen, that you will find this exposition hard to follow, and you will guess that I have not stated it exhaustively. I am sorry to have had to rouse your displeasure. But I can set myself no other aim than to give you an impression of the nature of our findings and of the difficulties involved in working them out. The deeper we penetrate into the study of mental processes the more we recognize their abundance and complexity. A number of simple formulas which to begin with seemed to meet our needs have later turned out to be inadequate. We do not tire of altering and improving them. In my lecture on the theory of dreams I introduced you to a region in which for fifteen years there has scarcely been a new discovery. Here, where we are dealing with anxiety, you see everything in a state of flux and change. These novelties, moreover, have not yet been thoroughly worked through and perhaps this too adds to the difficulties of demonstrating them. But have patience! We shall soon be able to take leave of the subject of anxiety. I cannot promise that it will have been settled to our satisfaction, but it is to be hoped that we shall have made a little bit of progress. And in the meantime we have made all sorts of new discoveries. Now, for instance, our study of anxiety leads us to add a new feature to our description of the ego. We have said that the ego is weak in comparison with the id, that it is its loyal servant, eager to carry out its orders and to fulfil its demands. We have no intention of withdrawing this statement. But on the other hand this same ego is the better organized part of the id, with its face turned towards reality. We must not exaggerate the separation between the two of them too much, and we must not be surprised if the ego on its part can bring its influence to bear on the processes in the id. I believe the ego exercises this influence by putting into action the almost omnipotent pleasure-unpleasure principle by means of the signal of anxiety. On the other hand, it shows its weakness again immediately afterwards, for by the act of repression it renounces a portion of its organization and has to allow the repressed instinctual impulse to remain permanently withdrawn from its influence.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4700

And now, only one more remark on the problem of anxiety. Neurotic anxiety has changed in our hands into realistic anxiety, into fear of particular external situations of danger. But we cannot stop there, we must take another step - though it will be a step backward. We ask ourselves what it is that is actually dangerous and actually feared in a situation of danger of this kind. It is plainly not the injury to the subject as judged objectively, for this need be of no significance psychologically, but something brought about by it in the mind. Birth, for instance, our model for an anxiety state, can after all scarcely be regarded on its own account as an injury, although it may involve a danger of injuries. The essential thing about birth, as about every situation of danger, is that it calls up in mental experience a state of highly tense excitation, which is felt as unpleasure and which one is not able to master by discharging it. Let us call a state of this kind, before which the efforts of the pleasure principle break down, a ‘traumatic’ moment. Then, if we take in succession neurotic anxiety, realistic anxiety and the situation of danger, we arrive at this simple proposition: what is feared, what is the object of the anxiety, is invariably the emergence of a traumatic moment, which cannot be dealt with by the normal rules of the pleasure principle. We understand at once that our endowment with the pleasure principle does not guarantee us against objective injuries but only against a particular injury to our psychical economics. It is a long step from the pleasure principle to the self-preservative instinct; the intentions of the two of them are very far from coinciding from the start. But we see something else besides; perhaps it is the solution we are in search of. Namely, that in all this it is a question of relative quantities. It is only the magnitude of the sum of excitation that turns an impression into a traumatic moment, paralyses the function of the pleasure principle and gives the situation of danger its significance. And if that is how things are, if these puzzles can be solved so prosaically, why should it not be possible for similar traumatic moments to arise in mental life without reference to hypothetical situations of danger - traumatic moments, then, in which anxiety is not aroused as a signal but is generated anew for a fresh reason. Clinical experience declares decidedly that such is in fact the case. It is only the later repressions that exhibit the mechanism we have described, in which anxiety is awakened as a signal of an earlier situation of danger. The first and original repressions arise directly from traumatic moments, when the ego meets with an excessively great libidinal demand; they construct their anxiety afresh, although, it is true, on the model of birth. The same may apply to the generation of anxiety in anxiety neurosis owing to somatic damage to the sexual function. We shall no longer maintain that it is the libido itself that is turned into anxiety in such cases. But I can see no objection to there being a twofold origin of anxiety - one as a direct consequence of the traumatic moment and the other as a signal threatening a repetition of such a moment.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4701

I feel sure you are rejoicing, Ladies and Gentlemen, at not having to listen to any more about anxiety. But you have gained nothing by it: what follows is no better. It is my design to introduce you to-day as well to the field of the libido theory or theory of the instincts, where there have equally been a number of new developments. I will not claim that we have made great advances in it, so that it would be worth your taking any amount of trouble to learn about them. No. This is a region in which we are struggling laboriously to find our bearings and make discoveries; you will only be witnesses of our efforts. Here too I shall have to go back to some of the things I told you earlier.

The theory of the instincts is so to say our mythology. Instincts are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness. In our work we cannot for a moment disregard them, yet we are never sure that we are seeing them clearly. You know how popular thinking deals with the instincts. People assume as many and as various instincts as they happen to need at the moment - a self-assertive instinct, an imitative instinct, an instinct of play, a gregarious instinct and many others like them. People take them up, as it were, make each of them do its particular job, and then drop them again. We have always been moved by a suspicion that behind all these little ad hoc instincts there lay concealed something serious and powerful which we should like to approach cautiously. Our first step was modest enough. We told ourselves we should probably not be going astray if we began by separating two main instincts or classes of instincts or groups of instincts in accordance with the two great needs - hunger and love. However jealously we usually defend the independence of psychology from every other science, here we stood in the shadow of the unshakable biological fact that the living individual organism is at the command of two intentions, self-preservation and the preservation of the species, which seem to be independent of each other, which, so far as we know at present, have no common origin and whose interests are often in conflict in animal life. Actually what we are talking now is biological psychology, we are studying the psychical accompaniments of biological processes. It was as representing this aspect of the subject that the ‘ego-instincts’ and the ‘sexual instincts’ were introduced into psycho-analysis. We included in the former everything that had to do with the preservation, assertion and magnification of the individual. To the latter we had to attribute the copiousness called for by infantile and perverse sexual life. In the course of investigating the neuroses we came to know the ego as the restricting and repressing power and the sexual trends as the restricted and repressed one; we therefore believed that we had clear evidence not only of the difference between the two groups of instincts but also of the conflict between them. The first object of our study was only the sexual instincts, whose energy we named ‘libido’. It was in relation to them that we sought to clarify our ideas of what an instinct is and what is to be attributed to it. Here we have the libido theory.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4702

An instinct, then, is distinguished from a stimulus by the fact that it arises from sources of stimulation within the body, that it operates as a constant force and that the subject cannot avoid it by flight, as is possible with an external stimulus. We can distinguish an instinct’s source, object and aim. Its source is a state of excitation in the body, its aim is the removal of that excitation; on its path from its source to its aim the instinct becomes operative psychically. We picture it as a certain quota of energy which presses in a particular direction. It is from this pressing that it derives its name of ‘Trieb’. People speak of ‘active’ and ‘passive’ instincts, but it would be more correct to speak of instincts with active and passive aims: for an expenditure of activity is needed to achieve a passive aim as well. The aim can be achieved in the subject’s own body; as a rule an external object is brought in, in regard to which the instinct achieves its external aim; its internal aim invariably remains the bodily change which is felt as satisfaction. It has not become clear to us whether the relation of the instinct to its somatic source gives it a specific quality and if so what. The evidence of analytic experience shows that it is an undoubted fact that instinctual impulses from one source attach themselves to those from other sources and share their further vicissitudes and that in general one instinctual satisfaction can be replaced by another. But it must be admitted that we do not understand this very well. The relations of an instinct to its aim and object are also open to alterations; both can be exchanged for other ones, though its relation to its object is nevertheless the more easily loosened. A certain kind of modification of the aim and change of the object, in which our social valuation is taken into account, is described by us as ‘sublimation’. Besides this, we have grounds for distinguishing instincts which are ‘inhibited in their aim’ - instinctual impulses from sources well known to us with an unambiguous aim, but which come to a stop on their way to satisfaction, so that a lasting object-cathexis comes about and a permanent trend. Such, for instance, is the relation of tenderness, which undoubtedly originates from the sources of sexual need and invariably renounces its satisfaction.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4703

You see how many of the characteristics and vicissitudes of the instincts still escape our comprehension. A further distinction should be mentioned here which is exhibited between the sexual and self-preservative instincts and which would be of the greatest theoretical importance if it applied to the groups as a whole. The sexual instincts are noticeable to us for their plasticity, their capacity for altering their aims, their replaceability, which admits of one instinctual satisfaction being replaced by another, and their readiness for being deferred, of which we have just given a good example in the aim-inhibited instincts. We should be glad to deny these characteristics to the self-preservative instincts, and to say of them that they are inflexible, admit of no delay, are imperative in a very different sense and have a quite other relation to repression and to anxiety. But a little reflection tells us that this exceptional position applies, not to all the ego-instincts, but only to hunger and thirst, and is evidently based on a peculiar character of the sources of those instincts. A good part of the confusing impression made by all this is that we have not given separate consideration to the alterations which the influence of the organized ego makes in the instinctual impulses that belonged originally to the id.

We find ourselves on firmer ground when we investigate the manner in which the life of the instincts serves the sexual function. Here we have acquired quite definite knowledge, with which you too are already familiar. It is not the case, then, that we recognize a sexual instinct which is from the first the vehicle of an urge towards the aim of the sexual function - the union of the two sex-cells. What we see is a great number of component instincts arising from different areas and regions of the body, which strive for satisfaction fairly independently of one another and find that satisfaction in something that we may call ‘organ-pleasure’. The genitals are the latest of these ‘erotogenic zones’ and the name of ‘sexual’ pleasure cannot be withheld from their organ-pleasure. These impulses which strive for pleasure are not all taken up into the final organization of the sexual function. A number of them are set aside as unserviceable, by repression or some other means; a few of them are diverted from their aim in the remarkable manner I have mentioned and used to strengthen other impulses; yet others persist in minor roles, and serve for the performance of introductory acts, for the production of fore-pleasure. You have heard how in the course of this long-drawn-out development several phases of preliminary organization can be recognized and also how this history of the sexual function explains its aberrations and atrophies. The first of these ‘pregenital’ phases is known to us as the oral one because, in conformity with the way in which an infant in arms is nourished, the erotogenic zone of the mouth dominates what may be called the sexual activity of that period of life. At a second level the sadistic and anal impulses come to the fore, undoubtedly in connection with the appearance of the teeth, the strengthening of the muscular apparatus and the control of the sphincter functions. We have learnt a number of interesting details about this remarkable stage of development in particular. Thirdly comes the phallic phase in which in both sexes the male organ (and what corresponds to it in girls) attains an importance which can no longer be overlooked. We have reserved the name of genital phase for the definitive sexual organization which is established after puberty and in which the female genital organ for the first time meets with the recognition which the male one acquired long before.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4704

So far all this is trite repetition. And you must not suppose that the many things I have not mentioned this time no longer hold good. This repetition was necessary so that I might use it as the starting-point for a report on the advances in our knowledge. We can boast of having learnt much that is new, particularly about the early organizations of the libido, and of having obtained a clearer grasp of the significance of what is old; and I will give you at least a few examples to demonstrate this. Abraham showed in 1924 that two stages can be distinguished in the sadistic-anal phase. The earlier of these is dominated by the destructive trends of destroying and losing, the later one by trends friendly towards objects - those of keeping and possessing. It is in the middle of this phase, therefore, that consideration for the object makes its first appearance as a precursor of a later erotic cathexis. We are equally justified in making a similar subdivision in the first, oral phase. In the first sub-stage what is in question is only oral incorporation, there is no ambivalence at all in the relation to the object - the mother’s breast. The second stage, characterized by the emergence of the biting activity, may be described as the ‘oral-sadistic’ one; it exhibits for the first time the phenomena of ambivalence, which become so much clearer afterwards, in the following sadistic-anal phase. The value of these new distinctions is to be seen especially if we look for the dispositional points in the development of the libido in the case of particular neuroses, such as obsessional neurosis or melancholia. You must here recall to mind what we have learnt about the connection between fixation of the libido, disposition and regression.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4705

Our attitude to the phases of the organization of the libido has in general shifted a little. Whereas earlier we chiefly emphasized the way in which each of them passed away before the next, our attention now is directed to the facts that show us how much of each earlier phase persists alongside of and behind the later configurations and obtains a permanent representation in the libidinal economy and character of the subject. Still more significant have studies become which have taught us how frequently under pathological conditions regressions to earlier phases occur and that particular regressions are characteristic of particular forms of illness. But I cannot go into that here, it forms part of the specialized psychology of the neuroses.

We have been able to study transformations of instinct and similar processes particularly in anal erotism, the excitations arising from the sources of the erotogenic anal zone, and we were surprised at the multiplicity of uses to which these instinctual impulses are put. It may not be easy, perhaps, to get free from the contempt into which this particular zone has fallen in the course of evolution. Let us therefore allow ourselves to be reminded by Abraham that embryologically the anus corresponds to the primitive mouth, which has migrated down to the end of the bowel. We have learnt, then, that after a person’s own faeces, his excrement, has lost its value for him, this instinctual interest derived from the anal source passes over on to objects that can be presented as gifts. And this is rightly so, for faeces were the first gift that an infant could make, something he could part with out of love for whoever was looking after him. After this, corresponding exactly to analogous changes of meaning that occur in linguistic development, this ancient interest in faeces is transformed into the high valuation of gold and money but also makes a contribution to the affective cathexis of baby and penis. It is a universal conviction among children, who long retain the cloaca theory, that babies are born from the bowel like a piece of faeces: defaecation is the model of the act of birth. But the penis too has its fore-runner in the column of faeces which fills and stimulates the mucous membrane of the bowel. When a child, unwillingly enough, comes to realize that there are human creatures who do not possess a penis, that organ appears to him as something detachable from the body and becomes unmistakably analogous to the excrement, which was the first piece of bodily material that had to be renounced. A great part of anal erotism is thus carried over into a cathexis of the penis. But the interest in that part of the body has, in addition to its anal-erotic root, an oral one which is perhaps more powerful still: for when sucking has come to an end, the penis also becomes heir of the mother’s nipple.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4706

If one is not aware of these profound connections, it is impossible to find one’s way about in the phantasies of human beings, in their associations, influenced as they are by the unconscious, and in their symptomatic language. Faeces - money - gift - baby - penis are treated there as though they meant the same thing, and they are represented too by the same symbols. Nor must you forget that I have only been able to give you very incomplete information. I may hurriedly add, perhaps, that interest in the vagina, which awakens later, is also essentially of anal-erotic origin. This is not to be wondered at, for the vagina itself, to borrow an apt phrase from Lou Andreas-Salomé, is ‘taken on lease’ from the rectum: in the life of homosexuals, who have failed to accomplish some part of normal sexual development, the vagina is once more represented by it. In dreams a locality often appears which was earlier a simple room but is now divided into two by a wall, or the other way round. This always means the relation of the vagina to the bowel. It is also easy to follow the way in which in girls what is an entirely unfeminine wish to possess a penis is normally transformed into a wish for a baby, and then for a man as the bearer of the penis and giver of the baby; so that here we can see too how a portion of what was originally anal-erotic interest obtains admission into the later genital organization.

During our studies of the pregenital phases of the libido we have also gained a few fresh insights into the formation of character. We noticed a triad of character-traits which are found together with fair regularity: orderliness, parsimoniousness and obstinacy; and we inferred from the analysis of people exhibiting these traits that they have arisen from their anal erotism becoming absorbed and employed in a different way. We therefore speak of an ‘anal character’ in which we find this remarkable combination and we draw a contrast to some extent between the anal character and unmodified anal erotism. We also discovered a similar but perhaps still firmer link between ambition and urethral erotism. A striking allusion to this connection is to be seen in the legend that Alexander the Great was born during the same night in which a certain Herostratus set fire to the celebrated temple of Artemis at Ephesus out of a sheer desire for fame. So the ancients would seem not to have been unaware of the connection. You know, of course, how much urination has to do with fire and extinguishing fire. We naturally expect that other character traits as well will turn out similarly to be precipitates or reaction-formations related to particular pregenital libidinal structures; but we have not yet been able to show this.

It is now time, however, for me to go back both in history and in my subject-matter and once more to take up the most general problems of instinctual life. To begin with, the opposition between the ego-instincts and the sexual instincts lay at the base of our libido theory. When later on we began to study the ego itself more closely and arrived at the conception of narcissism, this distinction itself lost its foundation. In rare cases one can observe that the ego has taken itself as an object and is behaving as though it were in love with itself. Hence the term ‘narcissism’, borrowed from the Greek myth. But that is only an extreme exaggeration of a normal state of affairs. We came to understand that the ego is always the main reservoir of libido, from which libidinal cathexes of objects go out and into which they return again, while the major part of this libido remains permanently in the ego. Thus ego-libido is being constantly changed into object-libido and object-libido into ego-libido. But in that case they could not be different in their nature and it could have no sense to distinguish the energy of the one from the energy of the other; we could either drop the term ‘libido’ or use it as synonymous with psychical energy in general.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4707

We did not maintain this position for long. Our feeling of their being a contrariety in instinctual life soon found another and sharper expression. It is not my wish, however, to put before you the origin of this novelty in the theory of the instincts; it too is based essentially on biological considerations. I shall offer it to you as a ready-made product. Our hypothesis is that there are two essentially different classes of instincts: the sexual instincts, understood in the widest sense - Eros, if you prefer that name - and the aggressive instincts, whose aim is destruction. When it is put to you like this, you will scarcely regard it as a novelty. It looks like an attempt at a theoretical transfiguration of the commonplace opposition between loving and hating, which coincides, perhaps, with the other polarity, of attraction and repulsion, which physics assumes in the inorganic world. But it is a remarkable thing that this hypothesis is nevertheless felt by many people as an innovation and, indeed, as a most undesirable one which should be got rid of as quickly as possible. I presume that a strong affective factor is coming into effect in this rejection. Why have we ourselves needed such a long time before we decided to recognize an aggressive instinct? Why did we hesitate to make use, on behalf of our theory, of facts which were obvious and familiar to everyone? We should probably have met with little resistance if we had wanted to ascribe an instinct with such an aim to animals. But to include it in the human constitution appears sacrilegious; it contradicts too many religious presumptions and social conventions. No, man must be naturally good or at least good-natured. If he occasionally shows himself brutal, violent or cruel, these are only passing disturbances of his emotional life, for the most part provoked, or perhaps only consequences of the inexpedient social regulations which he has hitherto imposed on himself.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4708

Unfortunately what history tells us and what we ourselves have experienced does not speak in this sense but rather justifies a judgement that belief in the ‘goodness’ of human nature is one of those evil illusions by which mankind expect their lives to be beautified and made easier while in reality they only cause damage. We need not continue this controversy, since we have argued in favour of a special aggressive and destructive instinct in men not on account of the teachings of history or of our experience in life but on the basis of general considerations to which we were led by examining the phenomena of sadism and masochism. As you know, we call it sadism when sexual satisfaction is linked to the condition of the sexual object’s suffering pain, ill-treatment and humiliation, and masochism when the need is felt of being the ill-treated object oneself. As you know too, a certain admixture of these two trends is included in normal sexual relations, and we speak of perversions when they push the other sexual aims into the background and replace them by their own aims. And you will scarcely have failed to notice that sadism has a more intimate relation with masculinity and masochism with femininity, as though there were a secret kinship present; though I must add that we have made no progress along that path. Both phenomena, sadism and masochism alike, but masochism quite especially, present a truly puzzling problem to the libido theory; and it is only proper if what was a stumbling-block for the one theory should become the cornerstone of the theory replacing it.

It is our opinion, then, that in sadism and in masochism we have before us two excellent examples of a mixture of the two classes of instinct, of Eros and aggressiveness; and we proceed to the hypothesis that this relation is a model one - that every instinctual impulse that we can examine consists of similar fusions or alloys of the two classes of instinct. These fusions, of course, would be in the most varied ratios. Thus the erotic instincts would introduce the multiplicity of their sexual aims into the fusion, while the others would only admit of mitigations or gradations in their monotonous trend. This hypothesis opens a prospect to us of investigations which may some day be of great importance for the understanding of pathological processes. For fusions may also come apart, and we may expect that functioning will be most gravely affected by defusions of such a kind. But these conceptions are still too new; no one has yet tried to apply them in our work.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4709

Let us go back to the special problem presented to us by masochism. If for a moment we leave its erotic components on one side, it affords us a guarantee of the existence of a trend that has self-destruction as its aim. If it is true of the destructive instinct as well that the ego - but what we have in mind here is rather the id, the whole person - originally includes all the instinctual impulses, we are led to the view that masochism is older than sadism, and that sadism is the destructive instinct directed outwards, thus acquiring the characteristic of aggressiveness. A certain amount of the original destructive instinct may still remain in the interior. It seems that we can only perceive it under two conditions: if it is combined with erotic instincts into masochism or if - with a greater or lesser erotic addition - it is directed against the external world as aggressiveness. And now we are struck by the significance of the possibility that the aggressiveness may not be able to find satisfaction in the external world because it comes up against real obstacles. If this happens, it will perhaps retreat and increase the amount of self-destructiveness holding sway in the interior. We shall hear how this is in fact what occurs and how important a process this is. Impeded aggressiveness seems to involve a grave injury. It really seems as though it is necessary for us to destroy some other thing or person in order not to destroy ourselves, in order to guard against the impulsion to self-destruction. A sad disclosure indeed for the moralist!

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4710

But the moralist will console himself for a long time to come with the improbability of our speculations. A queer instinct indeed, directed to the destruction of its own organic home! Poets, it is true, talk of such things; but poets are irresponsible people and enjoy the privilege of poetic licence. Incidentally, such ideas are not foreign even to physiology: consider the notion, for instance, of the mucous membrane of the stomach digesting itself. It must be admitted, however, that our self-destructive instinct calls for support on a wider basis. One cannot, after all, venture on a hypothesis of such a wide range merely because a few poor fools have linked their sexual satisfaction to a peculiar condition. A more profound study of the instincts will, I believe, give us what we need. The instincts rule not only mental but also vegetative life, and these organic instincts exhibit a characteristic which deserves our deepest interest. (We shall not be able to judge until later whether it is a general characteristic of instincts.) For they reveal an effort to restore an earlier state of things. We may suppose that from the moment at which a state of things that has once been attained is upset, an instinct arises to create it afresh and brings about phenomena which we can describe as a ‘compulsion to repeat’. Thus the whole of embryology is an example of the compulsion to repeat. A power of regenerating lost organs extends far up into the animal kingdom, and the instinct for recovery to which, alongside of therapeutic assistance, our cures are due must be the residue of this capacity which is so enormously developed in the lower animals. The spawning migrations of fishes, the migratory flights of birds, and possibly all that we describe as manifestations of instinct in animals, take place under the orders of the compulsion to repeat, which expresses the conservative nature of the instincts. Nor have we far to look in the mental field for its manifestations. We have been struck by the fact that the forgotten and repressed experiences of childhood are reproduced during the work of analysis in dreams and reactions, particularly in those occurring in the transference, although their revival runs counter to the interest of the pleasure principle; and we have explained this by supposing that in these cases a compulsion to repeat is overcoming even the pleasure principle. Outside analysis, too, something similar can be observed. There are people in whose lives the same reactions are perpetually being repeated uncorrected, to their own detriment, or others who seem to be pursued by a relentless fate, though closer investigation teaches us that they are unwittingly bringing this fate on themselves. In such cases we attribute a ‘daemonic’ character to the compulsion to repeat.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4711

But how can this conservative characteristic of instincts help us to understand our self-destructiveness? What earlier state of things does an instinct such as this want to restore? Well, the answer is not far to seek and opens wide perspectives. If it is true that - at some immeasurably remote time and in a manner we cannot conceive - life once proceeded out of inorganic matter, then, according to our presumption, an instinct must have arisen which sought to do away with life once more and to re-establish the inorganic state. If we recognize in this instinct the self-destructiveness of our hypothesis, we may regard the self-destructiveness as an expression of a ‘death instinct’ which cannot fail to be present in every vital process. And now the instincts that we believe in divide themselves into two groups - the erotic instincts, which seek to combine more and more living substance into ever greater unities, and the death instincts, which oppose this effort and lead what is living back into an inorganic state. From the concurrent and opposing action of these two proceed the phenomena of life which are brought to an end by death.

You may perhaps shrug your shoulders and say: ‘That isn’t natural science, it’s Schopenhauer’s philosophy!’ But, Ladies and Gentlemen, why should not a bold thinker have guessed something that is afterwards confirmed by sober and painstaking detailed research? Moreover, there is nothing that has not been said already, and similar things had been said by many people before Schopenhauer. Furthermore, what we are saying is not even genuine Schopenhauer. We are not asserting that death is the only aim of life; we are not overlooking the fact that there is life as well as death. We recognize two basic instincts and give each of them its own aim. How the two of them are mingled in the process of living, how the death instinct is made to serve the purposes of Eros, especially by being turned outwards as aggressiveness - these are tasks which are left to future investigation. We have not gone beyond the point at which this prospect lies open before us. The question, too, of whether the conservative character may not belong to all instincts without exception, whether the erotic instincts as well may not be seeking to bring back an earlier state of things when they strive to bring about a synthesis of living things into greater unities - this question, too, we must leave unanswered.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4712

We have travelled somewhat far from our basis. I will tell you in retrospect the starting-point of these reflections on the theory of the instincts. It was the same as that which led us to revise the relation between the ego and the unconscious - the impression derived from the work of analysis that the patient who puts up a resistance is so often unaware of that resistance. Not only the fact of the resistance is unconscious to him, however, but its motives as well. We were obliged to search out these motives or motive, and to our surprise we found them in a powerful need for punishment which we could only class with masochistic wishes. The practical significance of this discovery is not less than its theoretical one, for the need for punishment is the worst enemy of our therapeutic efforts. It is satisfied by the suffering which is linked to the neurosis, and for that reason holds fast to being ill. It seems that this factor, an unconscious need for punishment, has a share in every neurotic illness. And here those cases in which the neurotic suffering can be replaced by suffering of another kind are wholly convincing. I will report an experience of this kind.

I once succeeded in freeing an unmarried woman, no longer young, from the complex of symptoms which had condemned her for some fifteen years to an existence of torment and had excluded her from any participation in life. She now felt she was well, and she plunged into eager activity, in order to develop her by no means small talent and to snatch a little recognition, enjoyment, and success, late though the moment was. But every one of her attempts ended either with people letting her know or with herself recognizing that she was too old to accomplish anything in that field. After each outcome of this kind a relapse into illness would have been the obvious thing, but she was no longer able to bring that about. Instead, she met each time with an accident which put her out of action for a time and caused her suffering. She fell down and sprained her ankle or hurt her knee, or she injured her hand in something she was doing. When she was made aware of how great her own share might be in these apparent accidents, she, so to say, changed her technique. Instead of accidents, indispositions appeared on the same provocations - catarrhs, sore throats, influenzal conditions, rheumatic swellings - till at last she made up her mind to resign her attempts and the whole agitation came to an end.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4713

There is, as we think, no doubt about the origin of this unconscious need for punishment. It behaves like a piece of conscience, like a prolongation of our conscience into the unconscious; and it must have the same origin as conscience and correspond, therefore, to a piece of aggressiveness that has been internalized and taken over by the super-ego. If only the words went together better, we should be justified for all practical purposes in calling it an ‘unconscious sense of guilt’. Theoretically we are in fact in doubt whether we should suppose that all the aggressiveness that has returned from the external world is bound by the super-ego and accordingly turned against the ego, or that a part of it is carrying on its mute and uncanny activity as a free destructive instinct in the ego and the id. A distribution of the latter kind is the more probable; but we know nothing more about it. There is no doubt that, when the super-ego was first instituted, in equipping that agency use was made of the piece of the child’s aggressiveness towards his parents for which he was unable to effect a discharge outwards on account of his erotic fixation as well as of external difficulties; and for that reason the severity of the super-ego need not simply correspond to the strictness of the upbringing. It is very possible that, when there are later occasions for suppressing aggressiveness, the instinct may take the same path that was opened to it at that decisive point of time.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4714

People in whom this unconscious sense of guilt is excessively strong betray themselves in analytic treatment by the negative therapeutic reaction which is so disagreeable from the prognostic point of view. When one has given them the solution of a symptom, which should normally be followed by at least its temporary disappearance, what they produce instead is a momentary exacerbation of the symptom and of the illness. It is often enough to praise them for their behaviour in the treatment or to say a few hopeful words about the progress of the analysis in order to bring about an unmistakable worsening of their condition. A non-analyst would say that the ‘will to recovery’ was absent. If you follow the analytic way of thinking, you will see in this behaviour a manifestation of the unconscious sense of guilt, for which being ill, with its sufferings and impediments, is just what is wanted. The problems which the unconscious sense of guilt has opened up, its connections with morality, education, crime and delinquency, are at present the preferred field of work for psycho-analysts.

And here, at an unexpected point, we have emerged from the psychical underworld into the open market-place. I cannot lead you any further, but before I take leave of you for to-day I must detain you with one more train of thought. It has become our habit to say that our civilization has been built up at the cost of sexual trends which, being inhibited by society, are partly, it is true, repressed but have partly been made usable for other aims. We have admitted, too, that, in spite of all our pride in our cultural attainments, it is not easy for us to fulfil the requirements of this civilization or to feel comfortable in it, because the instinctual restrictions imposed on us constitute a heavy psychical burden. Well, what we have come to see about the sexual instincts, applies equally and perhaps still more to the other ones, the aggressive instincts. It is they above all that make human communal life difficult and threaten its survival. Restriction of the individual’s aggressiveness is the first and perhaps the severest sacrifice which society requires of him. We have learnt the ingenious way in which the taming of this unruly thing has been achieved. The institution of the super-ego which takes over the dangerous aggressive impulses, introduces a garrison, as it were, into regions that are inclined to rebellion. But on the other hand, if we look at it purely psychologically, we must recognize that the ego does not feel happy in being thus sacrificed to the needs of society, in having to submit to the destructive trends of aggressiveness which it would have been glad to employ itself against others. It is like a prolongation in the mental sphere of the dilemma of ‘eat or be eaten’ which dominates the organic animate world. Luckily the aggressive instincts are never alone but always alloyed with the erotic ones. These latter have much to mitigate and much to avert under the conditions of the civilization which mankind has created.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4715

LECTURE XXXIII

FEMININITY

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - All the while I am preparing to talk to you I am struggling with an internal difficulty. I feel uncertain, so to speak, of the extent of my licence. It is true that in the course of fifteen years of work psycho-analysis has changed and grown richer; but, in spite of that, an introduction to psycho-analysis might have been left without alteration or supplement. It is constantly in my mind that these lectures are without a raison d’etre. For analysts I am saying too little and nothing at all that is new; but for you I am saying too much and saying things which you are not equipped to understand and which are not in your province. I have looked around for excuses and I have tried to justify each separate lecture on different grounds. The first one, on the theory of dreams, was supposed to put you back again at one blow into the analytic atmosphere and to show you how durable our views have turned out to be. I was led on to the second one, which followed the paths from dreams to what is called occultism, by the opportunity of speaking my mind without constraint on a department of work in which prejudiced expectations are fighting to-day against passionate resistances, and I could hope that your judgement, educated to tolerance on the example of psycho-analysis, would not refuse to accompany me on the excursion. The third lecture, on the dissection of the personality, certainly made the hardest demands upon you with its unfamiliar subject-matter; but it was impossible for me to keep this first beginning of an ego-psychology back from you, and if we had possessed it fifteen years ago I should have had to mention it to you then. My last lecture, finally, which you were probably able to follow only by great exertions, brought forward necessary corrections - fresh attempts at solving the most important conundrums; and my introduction would have been leading you astray if I had been silent about them. As you see, when one starts making excuses it turns out in the end that it was all inevitable, all the work of destiny. I submit to it, and I beg you to do the same.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4716

To-day’s lecture, too, should have no place in an introduction; but it may serve to give you an example of a detailed piece of analytic work, and I can say two things to recommend it. It brings forward nothing but observed facts, almost without any speculative additions, and it deals with a subject which has a claim on your interest second almost to no other. Throughout history people have knocked their heads against the riddle of the nature of femininity -

Häupter in Hieroglyphenmützen,

Häupter in Turban und schwarzem Barett,

Perückenhäupter und tausend andre

Arme, schwitzende Menschenhäupter. . . .¹

Nor will you have escaped worrying over this problem - those of you who are men; to those of you who are women this will not apply - you are yourselves the problem. When you meet a human being, the first distinction you make is ‘male or female?’ and you are accustomed to make the distinction with unhesitating certainty. Anatomical science shares your certainty at one point and not much further. The male sexual product, the spermatozoon, and its vehicle are male; the ovum and the organism that harbours it are female. In both sexes organs have been formed which serve exclusively for the sexual functions; they were probably developed from the same disposition into two different forms. Besides this, in both sexes the other organs, the bodily shapes and tissues, show the influence of the individual’s sex, but this is inconstant and its amount variable; these are what are known as the secondary sexual characters. Science next tells you something that runs counter to your expectations and is probably calculated to confuse your feelings. It draws your attention to the fact that portions of the male sexual apparatus also appear in women’s bodies, though in an atrophied state, and vice versa in the alternative case. It regards their occurrence as indications of bisexuality, as though an individual is not a man or a woman but always both - merely a certain amount more the one than the other. You will then be asked to make yourselves familiar with the idea that the proportion in which masculine and feminine are mixed in an individual is subject to quite considerable fluctuations. Since, however, apart from the very rarest cases, only one kind of sexual product - ova or semen - is nevertheless present in one person, you are bound to have doubts as to the decisive significance of those elements and must conclude that what constitutes masculinity or femininity is an unknown characteristic which anatomy cannot lay hold of.

¹ Heads in hieroglyphic bonnets,

Heads in turbans and black birettas,

Heads in wigs and thousand other

Wretched, sweating heads of humans....

(Heine, Nordsee.)

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4717

Can psychology do so perhaps? We are accustomed to employ ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ as mental qualities as well, and have in the same way transferred the notion of bisexuality to mental life. Thus we speak of a person, whether male or female, as behaving in a masculine way in one connection and in a feminine way in another. But you will soon perceive that this is only giving way to anatomy or to convention. You cannot give the concepts of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ any new connotation. The distinction is not a psychological one; when you say ‘masculine’, you usually mean ‘active’, and when you say ‘feminine’, you usually mean ‘passive’. Now it is true that a relation of the kind exists. The male sex-cell is actively mobile and searches out the female one, and the latter, the ovum, is immobile and waits passively. This behaviour of the elementary sexual organisms is indeed a model for the conduct of sexual individuals during intercourse. The male pursues the female for the purpose of sexual union, seizes hold of her and penetrates into her. But by this you have precisely reduced the characteristic of masculinity to the factor of aggressiveness so far as psychology is concerned. You may well doubt whether you have gained any real advantage from this when you reflect that in some classes of animals the females are the stronger and more aggressive and the male is active only in the single act of sexual union. This is so, for instance, with the spiders. Even the functions of rearing and caring for the young, which strike us as feminine par excellence, are not invariably attached to the female sex in animals. In quite high species we find that the sexes share the task of caring for the young between them or even that the male alone devotes himself to it. Even in the sphere of human sexual life you soon see how inadequate it is to make masculine behaviour coincide with activity and feminine with passivity. A mother is active in every sense towards her child; the act of lactation itself may equally be described as the mother suckling the baby or as her being sucked by it. The further you go from the narrow sexual sphere the more obvious will the ‘error of superimposition’ become. Women can display great activity in various directions, men are not able to live in company with their own kind unless they develop a large amount of passive adaptability. If you now tell me that these facts go to prove precisely that both men and women are bisexual in the psychological sense, I shall conclude that you have decided in your own minds to make ‘active’ coincide with ‘masculine’ and ‘passive’ with ‘feminine’. But I advise you against it. It seems to me to serve no useful purpose and adds nothing to our knowledge.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4718

One might consider characterizing femininity psychologically as giving preference to passive aims. This is not, of course, the same thing as passivity; to achieve a passive aim may call for a large amount of activity. It is perhaps the case that in a woman, on the basis of her share in the sexual function, a preference for passive behaviour and passive aims is carried over into her life to a greater or lesser extent, in proportion to the limits, restricted or far-reaching, within which her sexual life thus serves as a model. But we must beware in this of underestimating the influence of social customs, which similarly force women into passive situations. All this is still far from being cleared up. There is one particularly constant relation between femininity and instinctual life which we do not want to overlook. The suppression of women’s aggressiveness which is prescribed for them constitutionally and imposed on them socially favours the development of powerful masochistic impulses, which succeed, as we know, in binding erotically the destructive trends which have been diverted inwards. Thus masochism, as people say, is truly feminine. But if, as happens so often, you meet with masochism in men, what is left to you but to say that these men exhibit very plain feminine traits?

And now you are already prepared to hear that psychology too is unable to solve the riddle of femininity. The explanation must no doubt come from elsewhere, and cannot come till we have learnt how in general the differentiation of living organisms into two sexes came about. We know nothing about it, yet the existence of two sexes is a most striking characteristic of organic life which distinguishes it sharply from inanimate nature. However, we find enough to study in those human individuals who, through the possession of female genitals, are characterized as manifestly or predominantly feminine. In conformity with its peculiar nature, psycho-analysis does not try to describe what a woman is - that would be a task it could scarcely perform - but sets about enquiring how she comes into being, how a woman develops out of a child with a bisexual disposition. In recent times we have begun to learn a little about this, thanks to the circumstance that several of our excellent women colleagues in analysis have begun to work at the question. The discussion of this has gained special attractiveness from the distinction between the sexes. For the ladies, whenever some comparison seemed to turn out unfavourable to their sex, were able to utter a suspicion that we, the male analysts, had been unable to overcome certain deeply-rooted prejudices against what was feminine, and that this was being paid for in the partiality of our researches. We, on the other hand, standing on the ground of bisexuality, had no difficulty in avoiding impoliteness. We had only to say: ‘This doesn’t apply to you. You’re the exception; on this point you’re more masculine than feminine.’

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4719

We approach the investigation of the sexual development of women with two expectations. The first is that here once more the constitution will not adapt itself to its function without a struggle. The second is that the decisive turning-points will already have been prepared for or completed before puberty. Both expectations are promptly confirmed. Furthermore, a comparison with what happens with boys tells us that the development of a little girl into a normal woman is more difficult and more complicated, since it includes two extra tasks, to which there is nothing corresponding in the development of a man. Let us follow the parallel lines from their beginning. Undoubtedly the material is different to start with in boys and girls: it did not need psycho-analysis to establish that. The difference in the structure of the genitals is accompanied by other bodily differences which are too well known to call for mention. Differences emerge too in the instinctual disposition which give a glimpse of the later nature of women. A little girl is as a rule less aggressive, defiant and self-sufficient; she seems to have a greater need for being shown affection and on that account to be more dependent and pliant. It is probably only as a result of this pliancy that she can be taught more easily and quicker to control her excretions: urine and faeces are the first gifts that children make to those who look after them, and controlling them is the first concession to which the instinctual life of children can be induced. One gets an impression, too, that little girls are more intelligent and livelier than boys of the same age; they go out more to meet the external world and at the same time form stronger object-cathexes. I cannot say whether this lead in development has been confirmed by exact observations, but in any case there is no question that girls cannot be described as intellectually backward. These sexual differences are not, however, of great consequence: they can be outweighed by individual variations. For our immediate purposes they can be disregarded.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4720

Both sexes seem to pass through the early phases of libidinal development in the same manner. It might have been expected that in girls there would already have been some lag in aggressiveness in the sadistic-anal phase, but such is not the case. Analysis of children’s play has shown our women analysts that the aggressive impulses of little girls leave nothing to be desired in the way of abundance and violence. With their entry into the phallic phase the differences between the sexes are completely eclipsed by their agreements. We are now obliged to recognize that the little girl is a little man. In boys, as we know, this phase is marked by the fact that they have learnt how to derive pleasurable sensations from their small penis and connect its excited state with their ideas of sexual intercourse. Little girls do the same thing with their still smaller clitoris. It seems that with them all their masturbatory acts are carried out on this penis-equivalent, and that the truly feminine vagina is still undiscovered by both sexes. It is true that there are a few isolated reports of early vaginal sensations as well, but it could not be easy to distinguish these from sensations in the anus or vestibulum; in any case they cannot play a great part. We are entitled to keep to our view that in the phallic phase of girls the clitoris is the leading erotogenic zone. But it is not, of course, going to remain so. With the change to femininity the clitoris should wholly or in part hand over its sensitivity, and at the same time its importance, to the vagina. This would be one of the two tasks which a woman has to perform in the course of her development, whereas the more fortunate man has only to continue at the time of his sexual maturity the activity that he has previously carried out at the period of the early efflorescence of his sexuality.

We shall return to the part played by the clitoris; let us now turn to the second task with which a girl’s development is burdened. A boy’s mother is the first object of his love, and she remains so too during the formation of his Oedipus complex and, in essence, all through his life. For a girl too her first object must be her mother (and the figures of wet-nurses and foster-mothers that merge into her). The first object-cathexes occur in attachment to the satisfaction of the major and simple vital needs, and the circumstances of the care of children are the same for both sexes. But in the Oedipus situation the girl’s father has become her love-object, and we expect that in the normal course of development she will find her way from this paternal object to her final choice of an object. In the course of time, therefore, a girl has to change her erotogenic zone and her object - both of which a boy retains. The question then arises of how this happens: in particular, how does a girl pass from her mother to an attachment to her father? or, in other words, how does she pass from her masculine phase to the feminine one to which she is biologically destined?

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4721

It would be a solution of ideal simplicity if we could suppose that from a particular age onwards the elementary influence of the mutual attraction between the sexes makes itself felt and impels the small woman towards men, while the same law allows the boy to continue with his mother. We might suppose in addition that in this the children are following the pointer given them by the sexual preference of their parents. But we are not going to find things so easy; we scarcely know whether we are to believe seriously in the power of which poets talk so much and with such enthusiasm but which cannot be further dissected analytically. We have found an answer of quite another sort by means of laborious investigations, the material for which at least was easy to arrive at. For you must know that the number of women who remain till a late age tenderly dependent on a paternal object, or indeed on their real father, is very great. We have established some surprising facts about these women with an intense attachment of long duration to their father. We knew, of course, that there had been a preliminary stage of attachment to the mother, but we did not know that it could be so rich in content and so long-lasting, and could leave behind so many opportunities for fixations and dispositions. During this time the girl’s father is only a troublesome rival; in some cases the attachment to her mother lasts beyond the fourth year of life. Almost everything that we find later in her relation to her father was already present in this earlier attachment and has been transferred subsequently on to her father. In short, we get an impression that we cannot understand women unless we appreciate this phase of their pre-Oedipus attachment to their mother.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4722

We shall be glad, then, to know the nature of the girl’s libidinal relations to her mother. The answer is that they are of very many different kinds. Since they persist through all three phases of infantile sexuality, they also take on the characteristics of the different phases and express themselves by oral, sadistic-anal and phallic wishes. These wishes represent active as well as passive impulses; if we relate them to the differentiation of the sexes which is to appear later - though we should avoid doing so as far as possible - we may call them masculine and feminine. Besides this, they are completely ambivalent, both affectionate and of a hostile and aggressive nature. The latter often only come to light after being changed into anxiety ideas. It is not always easy to point to a formulation of these early sexual wishes; what is most clearly expressed is a wish to get the mother with child and the corresponding wish to bear her a child - both belonging to the phallic period and sufficiently surprising, but established beyond doubt by analytic observation. The attractiveness of these investigations lies in the surprising detailed findings which they bring us. Thus, for instance, we discover the fear of being murdered or poisoned, which may later form the core of a paranoic illness, already present in this pre-Oedipus period, in relation to the mother. Or another case: you will recall an interesting episode in the history of analytic research which caused me many distressing hours. In the period in which the main interest was directed to discovering infantile sexual traumas, almost all my women patients told me that they had been seduced by their father. I was driven to recognize in the end that these reports were untrue and so came to understand that hysterical symptoms are derived from phantasies and not from real occurrences. It was only later that I was able to recognize in this phantasy of being seduced by the father the expression of the typical Oedipus complex in women. And now we find the phantasy of seduction once more in the pre-Oedipus prehistory of girls; but the seducer is regularly the mother. Here, however, the phantasy touches the ground of reality, for it was really the mother who by her activities over the child’s bodily hygiene inevitably stimulated, and perhaps even roused for the first time, pleasurable sensations in her genitals.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4723

I have no doubt you are ready to suspect that this portrayal of the abundance and strength of a little girl’s sexual relations with her mother is very much overdrawn. After all, one has opportunities of seeing little girls and notices nothing of the sort. But the objection is not to the point. Enough can be seen in the children if one knows how to look. And besides, you should consider how little of its sexual wishes a child can bring to preconscious expression or communicate at all. Accordingly we are only within our rights if we study the residues and consequences of this emotional world in retrospect, in people in whom these processes of development had attained a specially clear and even excessive degree of expansion. Pathology has always done us the service of making discernible by isolation and exaggeration conditions which would remain concealed in a normal state. And since our investigations have been carried out on people who were by no means seriously abnormal, I think we should regard their outcome as deserving belief.

We will now turn our interest on to the single question of what it is that brings this powerful attachment of the girl to her mother to an end. This, as we know, is its usual fate: it is destined to make room for an attachment to her father. Here we come upon a fact which is a pointer to our further advance. This step in development does not involve only a simple change of object. The turning away from the mother is accompanied by hostility; the attachment to the mother ends in hate. A hate of that kind may become very striking and last all through life; it may be carefully overcompensated later on; as a rule one part of it is overcome while another part persists. Events of later years naturally influence this greatly. We will restrict ourselves, however, to studying it at the time at which the girl turns to her father and to enquiring into the motives for it. We are then given a long list of accusations and grievances against the mother which are supposed to justify the child’s hostile feelings; they are of varying validity which we shall not fail to examine. A number of them are obvious rationalizations and the true sources of enmity remain to be found. I hope you will be interested if on this occasion I take you through all the details of a psycho-analytic investigation.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4724

The reproach against the mother which goes back furthest is that she gave the child too little milk - which is construed against her as lack of love. Now there is some justification for this reproach in our families. Mothers often have insufficient nourishment to give their children and are content to suckle them for a few months, for half or three-quarters of a year. Among primitive peoples children are fed at their mother’s breast for two or three years. The figure of the wet-nurse who suckles the child is as a rule merged into the mother; when this has not happened, the reproach is turned into another one - that the nurse, who fed the child so willingly, was sent away by the mother too early. But whatever the true state of affairs may have been, it is impossible that the child’s reproach can be justified as often as it is met with. It seems, rather, that the child’s avidity for its earliest nourishment is altogether insatiable, that it never gets over the pain of losing its mother’s breast. I should not be surprised if the analysis of a primitive child, who could still suck at its mother’s breast when it was already able to run about and talk, were to bring the same reproach to light. The fear of being poisoned is also probably connected with the withdrawal of the breast. Poison is nourishment that makes one ill. Perhaps children trace back their early illnesses too to this frustration. A fair amount of intellectual education is a prerequisite for believing in chance; primitive people and uneducated ones, and no doubt children as well, are able to assign a ground for everything that happens. Perhaps originally it was a reason on animistic lines. Even to-day in some strata of our population no one can die without having been killed by someone else - preferably by the doctor. And the regular reaction of a neurotic to the death of someone closely connected with him is to put the blame on himself for having caused the death.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4725

The next accusation against the child’s mother flares up when the next baby appears in the nursery. If possible the connection with oral frustration is preserved: the mother could not or would not give the child any more milk because she needed the nourishment for the new arrival. In cases in which the two children are so close in age that lactation is prejudiced by the second pregnancy, this reproach acquires a real basis, and it is a remarkable fact that a child, even with an age difference of only 11 months, is not too young to take notice of what is happening. But what the child grudges the unwanted intruder and rival is not only the suckling but all the other signs of maternal care. It feels that it has been dethroned, despoiled, prejudiced in its rights; it casts a jealous hatred upon the new baby and develops a grievance against the faithless mother which often finds expression in a disagreeable change in its behaviour. It becomes ‘naughty’, perhaps, irritable and disobedient and goes back on the advances it has made towards controlling its excretions. All of this has been very long familiar and is accepted as self-evident; but we rarely form a correct idea of the strength of these jealous impulses, of the tenacity with which they persist and of the magnitude of their influence on later development. Especially as this jealousy is constantly receiving fresh nourishment in the later years of childhood and the whole shock is repeated with the birth of each new brother or sister. Nor does it make much difference if the child happens to remain the mother’s preferred favourite. A child’s demands for love are immoderate, they make exclusive claims and tolerate no sharing.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4726

An abundant source of a child’s hostility to its mother is provided by its multifarious sexual wishes, which alter according to the phase of the libido and which cannot for the most part be satisfied. The strongest of these frustrations occur at the phallic period, if the mother forbids pleasurable activity with the genitals - often with severe threats and every sign of displeasure - activity to which, after all, she herself had introduced the child. One would think these were reasons enough to account for a girl’s turning away from her mother. One would judge, if so, that the estrangement follows inevitably from the nature of children’s sexuality, from the immoderate character of their demand for love and the impossibility of fulfilling their sexual wishes. It might be thought indeed that this first love-relation of the child’s is doomed to dissolution for the very reason that it is the first, for these early object-cathexes are regularly ambivalent to a high degree. A powerful tendency to aggressiveness is always present beside a powerful love, and the more passionately a child loves its object the more sensitive does it become to disappointments and frustrations from that object; and in the end the love must succumb to the accumulated hostility. Or the idea that there is an original ambivalence such as this in erotic cathexes may be rejected, and it may be pointed out that it is the special nature of the mother-child relation that leads, with equal inevitability, to the destruction of the child’s love; for even the mildest upbringing cannot avoid using compulsion and introducing restrictions, and any such intervention in the child’s liberty must provoke as a reaction an inclination to rebelliousness and aggressiveness. A discussion of these possibilities might, I think, be most interesting; but an objection suddenly emerges which forces our interest in another direction. All these factors - the slights, the disappointments in love, the jealousy, the seduction followed by prohibition - are, after all, also in operation in the relation of a boy to his mother and are yet unable to alienate him from the maternal object. Unless we can find something that is specific for girls and is not present or not in the same way present in boys, we shall not have explained the termination of the attachment of girls to their mother.

I believe we have found this specific factor, and indeed where we expected to find it, even though in a surprising form. Where we expected to find it, I say, for it lies in the castration complex. After all, the anatomical distinction must express itself in psychical consequences. It was, however, a surprise to learn from analyses that girls hold their mother responsible for their lack of a penis and do not forgive her for their being thus put at a disadvantage.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4727

As you hear, then, we ascribe a castration complex to women as well. And for good reasons, though its content cannot be the same as with boys. In the latter the castration complex arises after they have learnt from the sight of the female genitals that the organ which they value so highly need not necessarily accompany the body. At this the boy recalls to mind the threats he brought on himself by his doings with that organ, he begins to give credence to them and falls under the influence of fear of castration, which will be the most powerful motive force in his subsequent development. The castration complex of girls is also started by the sight of the genitals of the other sex. They at once notice the difference and, it must be admitted, its significance too. They feel seriously wronged, often declare that they want to ‘have something like it too’, and fall a victim to ‘envy for the penis’, which will leave ineradicable traces on their development and the formation of their character and which will not be surmounted in even the most favourable cases without a severe expenditure of psychical energy. The girl’s recognition of the fact of her being without a penis does not by any means imply that she submits to the fact easily. On the contrary, she continues to hold on for a long time to the wish to get something like it herself and she believes in that possibility for improbably long years; and analysis can show that, at a period when knowledge of reality has long since rejected the fulfilment of the wish as unattainable, it persists in the unconscious and retains a considerable cathexis of energy. The wish to get the longed-for penis eventually in spite of everything may contribute to the motives that drive a mature woman to analysis, and what she may reasonably expect from analysis - a capacity, for instance, to carry on an intellectual profession - may often be recognized as a sublimated modification of this repressed wish.

One cannot very well doubt the importance of envy for the penis. You may take it as an instance of male injustice if I assert that envy and jealousy play an even greater part in the mental life of women than of men. It is not that I think these characteristics are absent in men or that I think they have no other roots in women than envy for the penis; but I am inclined to attribute their greater amount in women to this latter influence. Some analysts, however, have shown an inclination to depreciate the importance of this first instalment of penis-envy in the phallic phase. They are of opinion that what we find of this attitude in women is in the main a secondary structure which has come about on the occasion of later conflicts by regression to this early infantile impulse. This, however, is a general problem of depth psychology. In many pathological - or even unusual - instinctual attitudes (for instance, in all sexual perversions) the question arises of how much of their strength is to be attributed to early infantile fixations and how much to the influence of later experiences and developments. In such cases it is almost always a matter of complemental series such as we put forward in our discussion of the aetiology of the neuroses. Both factors play a part in varying amounts in the causation; a less on the one side is balanced by a more on the other. The infantile factor sets the pattern in all cases but does not always determine the issue, though it often does. Precisely in the case of penis-envy I should argue decidedly in favour of the preponderance of the infantile factor.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4728

The discovery that she is castrated is a turning-point in a girl’s growth. Three possible lines of development start from it: one leads to sexual inhibition or to neurosis, the second to change of character in the sense of a masculinity complex, the third, finally, to normal femininity. We have learnt a fair amount, though not everything, about all three.

The essential content of the first is as follows: the little girl has hitherto lived in a masculine way, has been able to get pleasure by the excitation of her clitoris and has brought this activity into relation with her sexual wishes directed towards her mother, which are often active ones; now, owing to the influence of her penis-envy, she loses her enjoyment in her phallic sexuality. Her self-love is mortified by the comparison with the boy’s far superior equipment and in consequence she renounces her masturbatory satisfaction from her clitoris, repudiates her love for her mother and at the same time not infrequently represses a good part of her sexual trends in general. No doubt her turning away from her mother does not occur all at once, for to begin with the girl regards her castration as an individual misfortune, and only gradually extends it to other females and finally to her mother as well. Her love was directed to her phallic mother; with the discovery that her mother is castrated it becomes possible to drop her as an object, so that the motives for hostility, which have long been accumulating, gain the upper hand. This means, therefore, that as a result of the discovery of women’s lack of a penis they are debased in value for girls just as they are for boys and later perhaps for men.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4729

You all know the immense aetiological importance attributed by our neurotic patients to their masturbation. They make it responsible for all their troubles and we have the greatest difficulty in persuading them that they are mistaken. In fact, however, we ought to admit to them that they are right, for masturbation is the executive agent of infantile sexuality, from the faulty development of which they are indeed suffering. But what neurotics mostly blame is the masturbation of the period of puberty; they have mostly forgotten that of early infancy, which is what is really in question. I wish I might have an opportunity some time of explaining to you at length how important all the factual details of early masturbation become for the individual’s subsequent neurosis or character: whether or not it was discovered, how the parents struggled against it or permitted it, or whether he succeeded in suppressing it himself. All of this leaves permanent traces on his development. But I am on the whole glad that I need not do this. It would be a hard and tedious task and at the end of it you would put me in an embarrassing situation by quite certainly asking me to give you some practical advice as to how a parent or educator should deal with the masturbation of small children. From the development of girls, which is what my present lecture is concerned with, I can give you the example of a child herself trying to get free from masturbating. She does not always succeed in this. If envy for the penis has provoked a powerful impulse against clitoridal masturbation but this nevertheless refuses to give way, a violent struggle for liberation ensues in which the girl, as it were, herself takes over the role of her deposed mother and gives expression to her entire dissatisfaction with her inferior clitoris in her efforts against obtaining satisfaction from it. Many years later, when her masturbatory activity has long since been suppressed, an interest still persists which we must interpret as a defence against a temptation that is still dreaded. It manifests itself in the emergence of sympathy for those to whom similar difficulties are attributed, it plays a part as a motive in contracting a marriage and, indeed, it may determine the choice of a husband or lover. Disposing of early infantile masturbation is truly no easy or indifferent business.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4730

Along with the abandonment of clitoridal masturbation a certain amount of activity is renounced. Passivity now has the upper hand, and the girl’s turning to her father is accomplished principally with the help of passive instinctual impulses. You can see that a wave of development like this, which clears the phallic activity out of the way, smoothes the ground for femininity. If too much is not lost in the course of it through repression, this femininity may turn out to be normal. The wish with which the girl turns to her father is no doubt originally the wish for the penis which her mother has refused her and which she now expects from her father. The feminine situation is only established, however, if the wish for a penis is replaced by one for a baby, if, that is, a baby takes the place of a penis in accordance with an ancient symbolic equivalence. It has not escaped us that the girl has wished for a baby earlier, in the undisturbed phallic phase: that, of course, was the meaning of her playing with dolls. But that play was not in fact an expression of her femininity; it served as an identification with her mother with the intention of substituting activity for passivity. She was playing the part of her mother and the doll was herself: now she could do with the baby everything that her mother used to do with her. Not until the emergence of the wish for a penis does the doll-baby become a baby from the girl’s father, and thereafter the aim of the most powerful feminine wish. Her happiness is great if later on this wish for a baby finds fulfilment in reality, and quite especially so if the baby is a little boy who brings the longed-for penis with him. Often enough in her combined picture of ‘a baby from her father’ the emphasis is laid on the baby and her father left unstressed. In this way the ancient masculine wish for the possession of a penis is still faintly visible through the femininity now achieved. But perhaps we ought rather to recognize this wish for a penis as being par excellence a feminine one.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4731

With the transference of the wish for a penis-baby on to her father, the girl has entered the situation of the Oedipus complex. Her hostility to her mother, which did not need to be freshly created, is now greatly intensified, for she becomes the girl’s rival, who receives from her father everything that she desires from him. For a long time the girl’s Oedipus complex concealed her pre-Oedipus attachment to her mother from our view, though it is nevertheless so important and leaves such lasting fixations behind it. For girls the Oedipus situation is the outcome of a long and difficult development; it is a kind of preliminary solution, a position of rest which is not soon abandoned, especially as the beginning of the latency period is not far distant. And we are now struck by a difference between the two sexes, which is probably momentous, in regard to the relation of the Oedipus complex to the castration complex. In a boy the Oedipus complex, in which he desires his mother and would like to get rid of his father as being a rival, develops naturally from the phase of his phallic sexuality. The threat of castration compels him, however, to give up that attitude. Under the impression of the danger of losing his penis, the Oedipus complex is abandoned, repressed and, in the most normal cases, entirely destroyed, and a severe super-ego is set up as its heir. What happens with a girl is almost the opposite. The castration complex prepares for the Oedipus complex instead of destroying it; the girl is driven out of her attachment to her mother through the influence of her envy for the penis and she enters the Oedipus situation as though into a haven of refuge. In the absence of fear of castration the chief motive is lacking which leads boys to surmount the Oedipus complex. Girls remain in it for an indeterminate Iength of time; they demolish it late and, even so, incompletely. In these circumstances the formation of the super-ego must suffer; it cannot attain the strength and independence which give it its cultural significance, and feminists are not pleased when we point out to them the effects of this factor upon the average feminine character.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4732

To go back a little. We mentioned as the second possible reaction to the discovery of female castration the development of a powerful masculinity complex. By this we mean that the girl refuses, as it were, to recognize the unwelcome fact and, defiantly rebellious, even exaggerates her previous masculinity, clings to her clitoridal activity and takes refuge in an identification with her phallic mother or her father. What can it be that decides in favour of this outcome? We can only suppose that it is a constitutional factor, a greater amount of activity, such as is ordinarily characteristic of a male. However that may be, the essence of this process is that at this point in development the wave of passivity is avoided which opens the way to the turn towards femininity. The extreme achievement of such a masculinity complex would appear to be the influencing of the choice of an object in the sense of manifest homosexuality. Analytic experience teaches us, to be sure, that female homosexuality is seldom or never a direct continuation of infantile masculinity. Even for a girl of this kind it seems necessary that she should take her father as an object for some time and enter the Oedipus situation. But afterwards, as a result of her inevitable disappointments from her father, she is driven to regress into her early masculinity complex. The significance of these disappointments must not be exaggerated; a girl who is destined to become feminine is not spared them, though they do not have the same effect. The predominance of the constitutional factor seems indisputable; but the two phases in the development of female homosexuality are well mirrored in the practices of homosexuals, who play the parts of mother and baby with each other as often and as clearly as those of husband and wife.

What I have been telling you here may be described as the prehistory of women. It is a product of the very last few years and may have been of interest to you as an example of detailed analytic work. Since its subject is woman, I will venture on this occasion to mention by name a few of the women who have made valuable contributions to this investigation. Dr. Ruth Mack Brunswick was the first to describe a case of neurosis which went back to a fixation in the pre-Oedipus stage and had never reached the Oedipus situation at all. The case took the form of jealous paranoia and proved accessible to therapy. Dr. Jeanne Lampl-de Groot has established the incredible phallic activity of girls towards their mother by some assured observations, and Dr. Helene Deutsch has shown that the erotic actions of homosexual women reproduce the relations between mother and baby.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4733

It is not my intention to pursue the further behaviour of femininity through puberty to the period of maturity. Our knowledge, moreover, would be insufficient for the purpose. But I will bring a few features together in what follows. Taking its prehistory as a starting-point, I will only emphasize here that the development of femininity remains exposed to disturbance by the residual phenomena of the early masculine period. Regressions to the fixations of the pre-Oedipus phases very frequently occur; in the course of some women’s lives there is a repeated alternation between periods in which masculinity or femininity gains the upper hand. Some portion of what we men call ‘the enigma of women’ may perhaps be derived from this expression of bisexuality in women’s lives. But another question seems to have become ripe for judgement in the course of these researches. We have called the motive force of sexual life ‘the libido’. Sexual life is dominated by the polarity of masculine-feminine; thus the notion suggests itself of considering the relation of the libido to this antithesis. It would not be surprising if it were to turn out that each sexuality had its own special libido appropriated to it, so that one sort of libido would pursue the aims of a masculine sexual life and another sort those of a feminine one. But nothing of the kind is true. There is only one libido, which serves both the masculine and the feminine sexual functions. To it itself we cannot assign any sex; if, following the conventional equation of activity and masculinity, we are inclined to describe it as masculine, we must not forget that it also covers trends with a passive aim. Nevertheless the juxtaposition ‘feminine libido’ is without any justification. Furthermore, it is our impression that more constraint has been applied to the libido when it is pressed into the service of the feminine function, and that - to speak teleologically - Nature takes less careful account of its demands than in the case of masculinity. And the reason for this may lie - thinking once again teleologically - in the fact that the accomplishment of the aim of biology has been entrusted to the aggressiveness of men and has been made to some extent independent of women’s consent.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4734

The sexual frigidity of women, the frequency of which appears to confirm this disregard, is a phenomenon that is still insufficiently understood. Sometimes it is psychogenic and in that case accessible to influence; but in other cases it suggests the hypothesis of its being constitutionally determined and even of there being a contributory anatomical factor.

I have promised to tell you of a few more psychical peculiarities of mature femininity, as we come across them in analytic observation. We do not lay claim to more than an average validity for these assertions; nor is it always easy to distinguish what should be ascribed to the influence of the sexual function and what to social breeding. Thus, we attribute a larger amount of narcissism to femininity, which also affects women’s choice of object, so that to be loved is a stronger need for them than to love. The effect of penis-envy has a share, further, in the physical vanity of women, since they are bound to value their charms more highly as a late compensation for their original sexual inferiority. Shame, which is considered to be a feminine characteristic par excellence but is far more a matter of convention than might be supposed, has as its purpose, we believe, concealment of genital deficiency. We are not forgetting that at a later time shame takes on other functions. It seems that women have made few contributions to the discoveries and inventions in the history of civilization; there is, however, one technique which they may have invented - that of plaiting and weaving. If that is so, we should be tempted to guess the unconscious motive for the achievement. Nature herself would seem to have given the model which this achievement imitates by causing the growth at maturity of the pubic hair that conceals the genitals. The step that remained to be taken lay in making the threads adhere to one another, while on the body they stick into the skin and are only matted together. If you reject this idea as fantastic and regard my belief in the influence of lack of a penis on the configuration of femininity as an idée fixe, I am of course defenceless.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4735

The determinants of women’s choice of an object are often made unrecognizable by social conditions. Where the choice is able to show itself freely, it is often made in accordance with the narcissistic ideal of the man whom the girl had wished to become. If the girl has remained in her attachment to her father - that is, in the Oedipus complex - her choice is made according to the paternal type. Since, when she turned from her mother to her father, the hostility of her ambivalent relation remained with her mother, a choice of this kind should guarantee a happy marriage. But very often the outcome is of a kind that presents a general threat to such a settlement of the conflict due to ambivalence. The hostility that has been left behind follows in the train of the positive attachment and spreads over on to the new object. The woman’s husband, who to begin with inherited from her father, becomes after a time her mother’s heir as well. So it may easily happen that the second half of a woman’s life may be filled by the struggle against her husband, just as the shorter first half was filled by her rebellion against her mother. When this reaction has been lived through, a second marriage may easily turn out very much more satisfying. Another alteration in a woman’s nature, for which lovers are unprepared, may occur in a marriage after the first child is born. Under the influence of a woman’s becoming a mother herself, an identification with her own mother may be revived, against which she had striven up till the time of her marriage, and this may attract all the available libido to itself, so that the compulsion to repeat reproduces an unhappy marriage between her parents. The difference in a mother’s reaction to the birth of a son or a daughter shows that the old factor of lack of a penis has even now not lost its strength. A mother is only brought unlimited satisfaction by her relation to a son; this is altogether the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of all human relationships. A mother can transfer to her son the ambition which she has been obliged to suppress in herself, and she can expect from him the satisfaction of all that has been left over in her of her masculinity complex. Even a marriage is not made secure until the wife has succeeded in making her husband her child as well and in acting as a mother to him.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4736

A woman’s identification with her mother allows us to distinguish two strata: the pre-Oedipus one which rests on her affectionate attachment to her mother and takes her as a model, and the later one from the Oedipus complex which seeks to get rid of her mother and take her place with her father. We are no doubt justified in saying that much of both of them is left over for the future and that neither of them is adequately surmounted in the course of development. But the phase of the affectionate pre-Oedipus attachment is the decisive one for a woman’s future: during it preparations are made for the acquisition of the characteristics with which she will later fulfil her role in the sexual function and perform her invaluable social tasks. It is in this identification too that she acquires her attractiveness to a man, whose Oedipus attachment to his mother it kindles into passion. How often it happens, however, that it is only his son who obtains what he himself aspired to! One gets an impression that a man’s love and a woman’s are a phase apart psychologically.

The fact that women must be regarded as having little sense of justice is no doubt related to the predominance of envy in their mental life; for the demand for justice is a modification of envy and lays down the condition subject to which one can put envy aside. We also regard women as weaker in their social interests and as having less capacity for sublimating their instincts than men. The former is no doubt derived from the dissocial quality which unquestionably characterizes all sexual relations. Lovers find sufficiency in each other, and families too resist inclusion in more comprehensive associations. The aptitude for sublimation is subject to the greatest individual variations. On the other hand I cannot help mentioning an impression that we are constantly receiving during analytic practice. A man of about thirty strikes us as a youthful, somewhat unformed individual, whom we expect to make powerful use of the possibilities for development opened up to him by analysis. A woman of the same age, however, often frightens us by her psychical rigidity and unchangeability. Her libido has taken up final positions and seems incapable of exchanging them for others. There are no paths open to further development; it is as though the whole process had already run its course and remains thenceforward insusceptible to influence - as though, indeed, the difficult development to femininity had exhausted the possibilities of the person concerned. As therapists we lament this state of things, even if we succeed in putting an end to our patient’s ailment by doing away with her neurotic conflict.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4737

That is all I had to say to you about femininity. It is certainly incomplete and fragmentary and does not always sound friendly. But do not forget that I have only been describing women in so far as their nature is determined by their sexual function. It is true that that influence extends very far; but we do not overlook the fact that an individual woman may be a human being in other respects as well. If you want to know more about femininity, enquire from your own experiences of life, or turn to the poets, or wait until science can give you deeper and more coherent information.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4738

LECTURE XXXIV

EXPLANATIONS, APPLICATIONS AND ORIENTATIONS

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - Perhaps you will allow me for once, as a relief from the dry tone of these lectures, to talk to you about some things which have very little theoretical significance but which concern you closely in so far as you are friendlily disposed to psycho-analysis. Let us imagine, for instance, that in your leisure hours you take up a German, English or American novel, in which you expect to find an account of contemporary people and society. After a few pages you come upon a first comment on psycho-analysis and soon afterwards upon others, even though the context does not seem to call for them. You must not imagine that it is a question of applying depth-psychology to a better understanding of the characters in the book or of their actions - though, incidentally, there are other and more serious works in which an attempt of that kind is in fact made. No, these are for the most part facetious remarks intended by the author to display his wide reading and intellectual superiority. Nor will you always form an impression that he really knows what he is talking about. Again, you may go as a recreation to a social gathering - and this need not necessarily happen in Vienna. After a short time the conversation turns upon psycho-analysis and you will hear the greatest variety of people passing their judgement on it, mostly in voices of unwavering certainty. It is quite usual for the judgement to be contemptuous or often slanderous or at least, once again, facetious. If you are so imprudent as to betray the fact that you know something about the subject, they fall upon you with one accord, ask for information and explanations and soon convince you that all these severe judgements had been arrived at without any basis of knowledge, that scarcely any of these critics had ever opened an analytic book or, if they had, had gone beyond the first resistance aroused by their contact with this new material.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4739

You may perhaps expect an introduction to psycho-analysis to give you instructions, too, on what arguments you should use to correct these obvious errors about analysis, what books you should recommend to give more accurate information, or even what examples you should bring up in the discussion from your reading or experience in order to alter the company’s attitude. I must beg you to do none of this. It would be useless. The best plan would be for you to conceal your superior knowledge altogether. If that is no longer possible, limit yourself to saying that, so far as you can make out, psycho-analysis is a special branch of knowledge, very hard to understand and to form an opinion on, which is concerned with very serious things, so that a few jokes will not bring one to close quarters with it - and that it would be better to find some other plaything for social entertainment. Nor, of course, will you join in attempts at interpretation, if unwary people repeat their dreams; and you will resist the temptation to curry favour for analysis by retailing reports of its cures.

But you may raise the question of why these people - both the ones who write books and the conversationalists - behave so badly; and you may incline to the view that the responsibility for this lies not only on them but also on psycho-analysis. I think so too. What you come upon as prejudice in literature and society is an after-effect of an earlier judgement - the judgement, namely, that was formed upon the young psycho-analysis by the representatives of official science. I once complained of this in a historical account I wrote, and I shall not do so again - perhaps that once was too often - but it is a fact that there was no violation of logic, and no violation of propriety and good taste, to which the scientific opponents of psycho-analysis did not give way at that time. The situation recalled what was actually put in practice in the Middle Ages when an evil-doer, or even a mere political opponent, was put in the pillory and given over to maltreatment by the mob. You may not realize clearly, perhaps, how far upwards in our society mob-characteristics extend, and what misconduct people will be guilty of when they feel themselves part of a crowd and relieved of personal responsibility. At the beginning of that time I was more or less alone and I soon saw that there was no future in polemics but that it was equally senseless to lament and to invoke the help of kindlier spirits, for there were not courts to which such appeals could be made. So I took another road. I made a first application of psycho-analysis by explaining to myself that this behaviour of the crowd was a manifestation of the same resistance which I had to struggle against in individual patients. I refrained from polemics myself and influenced my adherents, when little by little they appeared, in the same direction. This procedure was the right one. The interdict which lay upon psycho-analysis in those days has been lifted since then. But, just as an abandoned faith survives as a superstition, just as a theory which has been given up by science continues to exist as a popular belief, so the original outlawing of psycho-analysis by scientific circles persists to-day in the facetious contempt of the laymen who write books or make conversation. So this will no longer surprise you.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4740

But you must not expect to hear the glad tidings that the struggle about analysis is over and has ended in its recognition as a science and its admission as a subject for instruction at universities. There is no question of that. The struggle continues, though in more polite forms. What is also new is that a sort of buffer-layer has formed in scientific society between analysis and its opponents. This consists of people who allow the validity of some portions of analysis and admit as much, subject to the most entertaining qualifications, but who on the other hand reject other portions of it, a fact which they cannot proclaim too loudly. It is not easy to divine what determines their choice in this. It seems to depend on personal sympathies. One person will take objection to sexuality, another to the unconscious; what seems particularly unpopular is the fact of symbolism. Though the structure of psycho-analysis is unfinished, it nevertheless presents, even to-day, a unity from which elements cannot be broken off at the caprice of whoever comes along: but these eclectics seem to disregard this. I have never had the impression that these half- or quarter-adherents based their rejection on an examination of the facts. Some distinguished men, too, are included in this category. They, to be sure, are excused by the fact that their time and their interest belong to other things - to those things, namely, in mastering which they have achieved so much. But in that case would they not do better to suspend their judgement instead of taking sides so decisively? With one of these great men I once succeeded in effecting a rapid conversion. He was a world-famous critic, who had followed the spiritual currents of the time with benevolent understanding and prophetic penetration. I only came to know him when he was past his eightieth year; but he was still enchanting in his talk. You will easily guess whom I mean. Nor was it I who introduced the subject of psycho-analysis. It was he who did so, by comparing himself with me in the most modest fashion. ‘I am only a literary man,’ he said, ‘but you are a natural scientist and discoverer. However, there is one thing I must say to you: I have never had sexual feelings towards my mother.’ ‘But there is no need at all for you to have known them,’ was my reply; ‘to grown-up people those are unconscious feelings.’ ‘Oh! so that’s what you think!’ he said with relief, and pressed my hand. We went on talking together on the best of terms for another few hours. I heard later that in the few remaining years of his life he often spoke of analysis in a friendly way and was pleased at being able to use a word that was new to him - ‘repression’.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4741

There is a common saying that we should learn from our enemies. I confess I have never succeeded in doing so; but I thought all the same that it might be instructive for you if I undertook a review of all the reproaches and objections which the opponents of psycho-analysis have raised against it, and if I went on to point out the injustices and offences against logic which could so easily be revealed in them. But ‘on second thoughts’ I told myself that it would not be at all interesting but would become tedious and distressing and would be precisely what I have been so carefully avoiding all these years. So you must forgive me if I pursue this path no further and if I spare you the judgements of our so-called scientific opponents. After all it is nearly always a question of people whose one qualification is the impartiality which they have preserved by keeping at a distance from the experiences of psycho-analysis. But I know there are other cases in which you will not let me off so lightly. ‘Nevertheless’, you will tell me, ‘there are such a number of people to whom your last remark does not apply. They have not evaded analytic experience, they have analysed patients and have perhaps been analysed themselves; for a time they have even been your collaborators. Yet they have arrived at other views and theories on the basis of which they have seceded from you and founded independent schools of psycho-analysis. You ought to throw some light for us on the possibility and significance of these secessionist movements which have been so frequent in the history of analysis.’

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4742

Well, I will try to do so; but only in brief, since they contribute less to an understanding of analysis than you might expect. I feel sure you will be thinking in the first place of Adler’s ‘Individual Psychology’, which, in America for instance, is regarded as a line of thought collateral with our psycho-analysis and on a par with it and which is regularly mentioned alongside of it. Actually, Individual Psychology has very little to do with psycho-analysis but, as a result of certain historical circumstances, leads a kind of parasitic existence at its expense. The determinants which we have attributed to this group of opponents apply to the founders of Individual Psychology only to a limited extent. Its very name is inappropriate and seems to have been the product of embarrassment. We cannot allow the legitimate use of the term as an antithesis to ‘group psychology’ to be interfered with; moreover, our own activity is concerned for the most part and primarily with the psychology of human individuals. I shall not enter to-day upon an objective criticism of Adler’s Individual Psychology; there is no place for it in the plan of these introductory lectures. Besides, I have already attempted it once, and feel no temptation to change anything in what I said then. I will, however, illustrate the impression his views produce by a small episode dating from the years before analysis.

In the neighbourhood of the little Moravian town in which I was born, and which I left when I was a three-year-old child, there is a modest health-resort, prettily situated in the woods. During my schooldays I went there several times in the holidays. Some twenty years later the illness of a near relative was the occasion for my visiting the place again. In the course of a conversation with the physician attached to the spa, who had attended my relative, I enquired among other things about his relations with the peasants - Slovaks, I believe - who constituted his whole clientèle during the winter. He told me that his medical practice proceeded as follows. In his consulting hours the patients came into his room and stood in a row. One after another stepped forward and described his complaint: he had backache or pains in his stomach or had tired legs, and so on. The doctor then examined him and, after satisfying himself as to what was the matter, called out the diagnosis, which was the same in every case. He translated the word to me; it meant approximately ‘bewitched’. I asked in astonishment whether the peasants made no objection to his verdict being the same with every patient. ‘Oh, no!’ he replied, ‘they are very pleased with it: it is what they expected. Each of them, as he went back to his place in the row, showed the others by looks and gestures that I was a fellow who understood things.’ Little did I guess at the time in what circumstances I should come across an analogous situation once again.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4743

For, whether a man is a homosexual or a necrophilic, a hysteric suffering from anxiety, an obsessional neurotic cut off from society, or a raving lunatic, the ‘Individual Psychologist’ of the Adlerian school will declare that the impelling motive of his condition is that he wishes to assert himself, to overcompensate for his inferiority, to remain ‘on top’, to pass from the feminine to the masculine line. In my young student days we used to hear something very much the same in the out-patients’ department when a case of hysteria was introduced: hysterical patients, we were told, produce their symptoms to make themselves interesting, to draw attention to themselves. It is a remarkable thing how these ancient pieces of wisdom keep on cropping up. But even at that time this fragment of psychology did not seem to cover the riddle of hysteria. It left unexplained, for instance, why the patients used no other methods for attaining their purpose. There must, of course, be something correct in this theory of the ‘Individual Psychologists’: a small particle is taken for the whole. The self-preservative instinct will try to profit by every situation; the ego will seek to turn even illness to its advantage. In psycho-analysis this is known as the ‘secondary gain from illness’. Though, indeed, when we think of the facts of masochism, of the unconscious need for punishment and of neurotic self-injury, which make plausible the hypothesis of there being instinctual impulses that run contrary to self-preservation, we even feel shaken in our belief in the general validity of the commonplace truth on which the theoretical structure of Individual Psychology is erected. But a theory such as this is bound to be very welcome to the great mass of the people, a theory which recognizes no complications, which introduces no new concepts that are hard to grasp, which knows nothing of the unconscious, which gets rid at a single blow of the universally oppressive problem of sexuality and which restricts itself to the discovery of the artifices by which people seek to make life easy. For the mass of the people themselves take things easily: they call for no more than a single reason by way of explanation, they do not thank science for its diffuseness, they want to have simple solutions and to know that problems are solved. When we consider how very far Individual Psychology goes in meeting these demands, we cannot suppress the recollection of a sentence in Wallenstein:

Wär’ der Gedank’ nicht so verwünscht gescheidt,

Man wär’ versucht, ihn herzlich dumm zu nennen.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4744

Criticism from specialist circles, which is so relentless against psycho-analysis, has in general handled Individual Psychology with kid gloves. It is true that in America one of the most highly respected psychiatrists published a paper against Adler under the title ‘Enough’, in which he gave energetic expression to his boredom at the ‘compulsion to repeat’ of Individual Psychology. If others have treated it far more amiably, no doubt their antagonism to analysis has had much to do with it.

I need not say much about other schools which have branched off from our psycho-analysis. The fact that they have done so cannot be used either for or against the validity of psycho-analytic theories. You have only to think of the strong emotional factors that make it hard for many people to fit themselves in with others or to subordinate themselves, and of the still greater difficulty justly insisted on by the dictum ‘Quot capita tot sensus’. When the differences of opinion had gone beyond a certain point, the most sensible thing was to part and thereafter to proceed along our different ways - especially when the theoretical divergence involved a change in practical procedure. Suppose, for instance, that an analyst attaches little value to the influence of the patient’s personal past and looks for the causation of neuroses exclusively in present-day motives and in expectations of the future. In that case he will also neglect the analysis of childhood; he will have to adopt an entirely different technique and will have to make up for the omission of the events from the analysis of childhood by increasing his didactic influence and by directly indicating certain particular aims in life. We for our part will then say: ‘This may be a school of wisdom; but it is no longer analysis.’ Or someone else may arrive at the view that the experience of anxiety at birth sows the seed of all later neurotic disturbances. It may thereupon seem to him legitimate to restrict analysis to the consequences of this single impression and to promise therapeutic success from a treatment lasting from three to four months. As you will observe, I have chosen two examples which start from diametrically opposite premisses. It is an almost universal characteristic of these ‘secessionist movements’ that each of them takes hold of one fragment out of the wealth of themes in psycho-analysis and makes itself independent on the basis of this seizure - selecting the instinct for mastery, for instance, or ethical conflict, or the mother, or genitality, and so on. If it appears to you that secessions of this sort are already more numerous to-day in the history of psycho-analysis than in other intellectual movements, I am not sure that I should agree with you. If it is the case, the responsibility must be laid on the intimate relations which exist in psycho-analysis between theoretical views and therapeutic treatment. Mere differences of opinion would be tolerable for far longer. People like accusing us psycho-analysts of intolerance. The only manifestation of this ugly characteristic has been precisely our parting from those who think differently from us. No other harm has been done to them. On the contrary, they have fallen on their feet, and are better off than they were before. For by their separation they have usually freed themselves of one of the burdens which weigh us down - the odium of infantile sexuality, perhaps, or the absurdity of symbolism - and are regarded by their environment as passably respectable, which is still not true of those of us who are left behind. Moreover, apart from one notable exception, it was they who excluded themselves.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4745

What further claims do you make in the name of tolerance? That when someone has uttered an opinion which we regard as completely false we should say to him: ‘Thank you very much for having given voice to this contradiction. You are guarding us against the danger of complacency and are giving us an opportunity of showing the Americans that we are really as "broad-minded" as they always wish. To be sure, we do not believe a word of what you are saying, but that makes no difference. Probably you are just as right as we are. After all, who can possibly know who is right? In spite of our antagonism, pray allow us to represent your point of view in our publications. We hope that you will be kind enough in exchange to find a place for our views which you deny.’ In the future, when the misuse of Einstein’s relativity has been entirely achieved, this will obviously become the regular custom in scientific affairs. For the moment, it is true, we have not gone quite so far. We restrict ourselves, in the old fashion, to putting forward only our own convictions, we expose ourselves to the risk of error because it cannot be guarded against, and we reject what is in contradiction to us. We have made plentiful use in psycho-analysis of the right to change our opinions if we think we have found something better.

One of the first applications of psycho-analysis was to teach us to understand the opposition offered to us by our contemporaries because we practised psycho-analysis. Other applications, of an objective nature, may claim a more general interest. Our first purpose, of course, was to understand the disorders of the human mind, because a remarkable experience had shown that here understanding and cure almost coincide, that a traversable road leads from the one to the other. And for a long time it was our only purpose. Then, however, we perceived the close relations, the internal identity indeed, between pathological processes and what are known as normal ones. Psycho-analysis became a depth-psychology; and, since nothing that men make or do is understandable without the co-operation of psychology, the applications of psycho-analysis to numerous fields of knowledge, in particular to those of the mental sciences, came about of their own accord, pushed their way to the front and called for ventilation. These tasks unluckily came up against obstacles which, rooted as they were in the circumstances, have not yet been overcome even to-day. An application of this kind presupposes specialized knowledge which an analyst does not possess, while those who possess it, the specialists, know nothing of analysis and perhaps want to know nothing. The result has been that analysts, as amateurs with an equipment of greater or less adequacy, often hastily scraped together, have made excursions into such fields of knowledge as mythology, the history of civilization, ethnology, the science of religion and so on. They were no better treated by the experts resident in those fields than are trespassers in general: their methods and their findings, in so far as they attracted attention, were in the first instance rejected. But these conditions are constantly improving, and in every region there is a growing number of people who study psycho-analysis in order to make use of it in their special subject, and in order, as colonists, to replace the pioneers. Here we may expect a rich harvest of new discoveries. Applications of analysis are always confirmations of it as well. There, too, where scientific work is further removed from practical activity, the inevitable differences of opinion will no doubt take a less embittered form.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4746

I feel a strong temptation to conduct you through all the applications of psycho-analysis to the mental sciences. They are things worth knowing by anyone with intellectual interests; and not to hear about abnormality and illness for a time would be a well-deserved relaxation. But I must renounce the idea: it would once more carry us outside the framework of these lectures and, I must honestly admit, I should not be equal to the task. It is true that in a few of these regions I myself took the first step; but to-day I no longer embrace the whole field, and I should have to do a great deal of studying in order to master what has been accomplished since my beginnings. Any of you who are disappointed by my refusal may make up for it in the pages of our periodical Imago, which is designed to cover the non-medical applications of analysis.

But there is one topic which I cannot pass over so easily - not, however, because I understand particularly much about it or have contributed very much to it. Quite the contrary: I have scarcely concerned myself with it at all. I must mention it because it is so exceedingly important, so rich in hopes for the future, perhaps the most important of all the activities of analysis. What I am thinking of is the application of psycho-analysis to education, to the upbringing of the next generation. I am glad that I am at least able to say that my daughter, Anna Freud, has made this study her life-work and has in that way compensated for my neglect.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4747

The road that led to this application is easily traced. When in the treatment of an adult neurotic we followed up the determinants of his symptoms, we were regularly led back to his early childhood. A knowledge of the later aetiological factors was not sufficient either for understanding the case or for producing a therapeutic effect. We were therefore compelled to make ourselves acquainted with the psychical peculiarities of childhood; we learnt a quantity of things which could not have been learnt except through analysis, and we were able to put right many opinions that were generally held about childhood. We recognized that particular importance attached to the first years of childhood - up to the age of five, perhaps - for several reasons. Firstly, because those years include the early efflorescence of sexuality which leaves behind it decisive instigating factors for the sexual life of maturity. Secondly, because the impressions of this period impinge upon an immature and feeble ego, and act upon it like traumas. The ego cannot fend off the emotional storms which they provoke in any way except by repression and in this manner acquires in childhood all its dispositions to later illnesses and functional disturbances. We realized that the difficulty of childhood lies in the fact that in a short span of time a child has to appropriate the results of a cultural evolution which stretches over thousands of years, including the acquisition of control over his instincts and adaptation to society - or at least the first beginnings of these two. He can only achieve a part of this modification through his own development; much must be imposed on him by education. We are not surprised that children often carry out this task very imperfectly. During these early times many of them pass through states that may be put on a par with neuroses - and this is certainly so in the case of all those who produce manifest illnesses later on. In some children the neurotic illness does not wait till maturity but breaks out already in childhood and gives parents and doctors plenty of trouble.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4748

We had no misgivings over applying analytic treatment to children who either exhibited unambiguous neurotic symptoms or who were on the road to an unfavourable development of character. The apprehension expressed by opponents of analysis that the child would be injured by it proved unfounded. What we gained from these undertakings was that we were able to confirm on the living subject what we had inferred (from historical documents, as it were) in the case of adults. But the gain for the children was also very satisfactory. It turned out that a child is a very favourable subject for analytic therapy; the results are thorough and lasting. The technique of treatment worked out for adults must, of course, be largely altered for children. A child is psychologically a different object from an adult. As yet he possesses no super-ego, the method of free association does not carry far with him, transference (since the real parents are still on the spot) plays a different part. The internal resistances against which we struggle in adults are replaced for the most part in children by external difficulties. If the parents make themselves vehicles of the resistance, the aim of the analysis - and even the analysis itself - is often imperilled. Hence it is often necessary to combine with a child’s analysis a certain amount of analytic influencing of his parents. On the other hand, the inevitable deviations of analyses of children from those of adults are diminished by the circumstance that some of our patients have retained so many infantile character traits that the analyst (once again adapting himself to his subject) cannot avoid making use with them of certain of the techniques of child-analysis. It has automatically happened that child-analysis has become the domain of women analysts, and no doubt this will remain true.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4749

The recognition that most of our children pass through a neurotic phase in the course of their development carries with it the germ of a hygienic challenge. The question may be raised whether it would not be expedient to come to a child’s help with an analysis even if he shows no signs of a disturbance, as a measure for safeguarding his health, just as to-day we inoculate healthy children against diphtheria without waiting to see if they fall ill of it. The discussion of this question has only an academic interest at present, but I may venture to consider it here. The mere suggestion would seem to the great bulk of our contemporaries to be a monstrous outrage, and in view of the attitude towards analysis of most people in a parental position any hope of putting through such an idea must be abandoned for the time being. Prophylaxis such as this against neurotic illness, which would probably be very effective, also presupposes a quite other constitution of society. The watchword for the application of psycho-analysis to education is to be found to-day elsewhere. Let us make ourselves clear as to what the first task of education is. The child must learn to control his instincts. It is impossible to give him liberty to carry out all his impulses without restriction. To do so would be a very instructive experiment for child-psychologists; but life would be impossible for the parents and the children themselves would suffer grave damage, which would show itself partly at once and partly in later years. Accordingly, education must inhibit, forbid and suppress, and this it has abundantly seen to in all periods of history. But we have learnt from analysis that precisely this suppression of instincts involves the risk of neurotic illness. As you will remember, we have examined in detail how this occurs. Thus education has to find its way between the Scylla of non-interference and the Charybdis of frustration. Unless this problem is entirely insoluble, an optimum must be discovered which will enable education to achieve the most and damage the least. It will therefore be a matter of deciding how much to forbid, at what times and by what means. And in addition we have to take into account the fact that the objects of our educational influence have very different innate constitutional dispositions, so that it is quite impossible that the same educational procedure can be equally good for all children. A moment’s reflection tells us that hitherto education has fulfilled its task very badly and has done children great damage. If it discovers the optimum and carries out its task ideally, it can hope to wipe out one of the factors in the aetiology of falling ill - the influence of the accidental traumas of childhood. It cannot in any case get rid of the other factor - the power of an insubordinate instinctual constitution. If now we consider the difficult problems that confront the educator - how he has to recognize the child’s constitutional individuality, to infer from small indications what is going on in his immature mind, to give him the right amount of love and yet to maintain an effective degree of authority - we shall tell ourselves that the only appropriate preparation for the profession of educator is a thorough psycho-analytic training. It would be best that he should have been analysed himself, for, when all is said and done, it is impossible to assimilate analysis without experiencing it personally. The analysis of teachers and educators seems to be a more efficacious prophylactic measure than the analysis of children themselves, and there are less difficulties in the way of putting it into practice.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4750

We may mention, though only as an incidental consideration, an indirect way in which the upbringing of children may be helped by analysis and which may with time acquire a greater influence. Parents who have themselves experienced an analysis and owe much to it, including an insight into the faults of their own upbringing, will treat their children with better understanding and will spare them much of what they themselves were not spared.

Parallel with the efforts of analysts to influence education, other investigations are being made into the origin and prevention of delinquency and crime. Here again I am only opening the door for you and showing you the rooms that lie beyond it, without leading you inside. I am certain that if you remain loyal to your interest in psycho-analysis you will be able to learn much that is new and valuable on these subjects. I must not, however, leave the topic of education without referring to one particular aspect of it. It has been said - and no doubt justly - that every education has a partisan aim, that it endeavours to bring the child into line with the established order of society, without considering how valuable or how stable that order may be in itself. If one is convinced of the defects in our present social arrangements, education with a psycho-analytic alignment cannot justifiably be put at their service as well: it must be given another and higher aim, liberated from the prevailing demands of society. In my opinion, however, this argument is out of place here. Such a demand goes beyond the legitimate function of analysis. In the same way, it is not the business of a doctor who is called in to treat a case of pneumonia to concern himself with whether the patient is an honest man or a suicide or a criminal, whether he deserves to remain alive or whether one ought to wish him to. This other aim which it is desired to give to education will also be a partisan one, and it is not the affair of an analyst to decide between the parties. I am leaving entirely on one side the fact that psycho-analysis would be refused any influence on education if it admitted to intentions inconsistent with the established social order. Psycho-analytic education will be taking an uninvited responsibility on itself if it proposes to mould its pupils into rebels. It will have played its part if it sends them away as healthy and efficient as possible. It itself contains enough revolutionary factors to ensure that no one educated by it will in later life take the side of reaction and suppression. It is even my opinion that revolutionary children are not desirable from any point of view.

I propose further, Ladies and Gentlemen, to say a few words to you about psycho-analysis as a form of therapy. I discussed the theoretical side of this question fifteen years ago and I cannot formulate it in any other manner to-day; I have now to tell you of our experience during this interval. As you know, psycho-analysis originated as a method of treatment; it has far outgrown this, but it has not abandoned its home-ground and it is still linked to its contact with patients for increasing its depth and for its further development. The accumulated impressions from which we derive our theories could be arrived at in no other way. The failures we meet with as therapists are constantly setting us new tasks and the demands of real life are an effective guard against an overgrowth of the speculation which we cannot after all do without in our work. I have already discussed long ago the means used by psycho-analysis in helping patients, when it does help them, and the method by which it does so; to-day I shall enquire how much it achieves.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4751

You are perhaps aware that I have never been a therapeutic enthusiast; there is no danger of my misusing this lecture by indulging in eulogies. I would rather say too little than too much. During the period at which I was the only analyst, people who were ostensibly friendly to my ideas used to say to me: ‘That’s all very nice and clever; but show me a case that you have cured by analysis.’ This was one of the many formulas which in the course of time have succeeded one another in performing the function of pushing the uncomfortable novelty aside. To-day it is as out of date as many others: the analyst, too, has a heap of letters in his files from grateful patients who have been cured. The analogy does not stop at that. Psycho-analysis is really a method of treatment like others. It has its triumphs and its defeats, its difficulties, its limitations, its indications. At one time a complaint was made against analysis that it was not to be taken seriously as a treatment since it did not dare to issue any statistics of its successes. Since then, the Psycho-Analytic Institute in Berlin, which was founded by Dr. Max Eitingon, has published a statement of its results during its first ten years. Its therapeutic successes give grounds neither for boasting nor for being ashamed. But statistics of that kind are in general uninstructive; the material worked upon is so heterogeneous that only very large numbers would show anything. It is wiser to examine one’s individual experiences. And here I should like to add that I do not think our cures can compete with those of Lourdes. There are so many more people who believe in the miracles of the Blessed Virgin than in the existence of the unconscious. If we turn to mundane competitors, we must compare psycho-analytic treatment with other kinds of psychotherapy. To-day organic physical methods of treating neurotic states need scarcely be mentioned. Analysis as a psycho-therapeutic procedure does not stand in opposition to other methods used in this specialized branch of medicine; it does not diminish their value nor exclude them. There is no theoretical inconsistency in a doctor who likes to call himself a psychotherapist using analysis on his patients alongside of any other method of treatment according to the peculiarities of the case and the favourable or unfavourable external circumstances. It is in fact technique that necessitates the specialization in medical practice. Thus in the same way surgery and orthopaedics were obliged to separate. Psycho-analytic activity is arduous and exacting; it cannot well be handled like a pair of glasses that one puts on for reading and takes off when one goes for a walk. As a rule psycho-analysis possesses a doctor either entirely or not at all. Those psychotherapists who make use of analysis among other methods, occasionally, do not to my knowledge stand on firm analytic ground; they have not accepted the whole of analysis but have watered it down - have drawn its fangs, perhaps; they cannot be counted as analysts. This is, I think, to be regretted. But co-operation in medical practice between an analyst and a psychotherapist who restricts himself to other techniques would serve quite a useful purpose.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4752

Compared with the other psychotherapeutic procedures psycho-analysis is beyond any doubt the most powerful. It is just and fair, too, that this should be so for it is also the most laborious and time-consuming; it would not be used on slight cases. In suitable cases it is possible by its means to get rid of disturbances and bring about changes for which in pre-analytic times one would not have ventured to hope. But it has its very appreciable limits. The therapeutic ambition of some of my adherents has made the greatest efforts to overcome these obstacles so that every sort of neurotic disorder might be curable by psycho-analysis. They have endeavoured to compress the work of analysis into a shorter duration, to intensify transference so that it may be able to overcome any resistance, to unite other forms of influence with it so as to compel a cure. These efforts are certainly praiseworthy, but, in my opinion, they are vain. They bring with them, too, a danger of being oneself forced away from analysis and drawn into a boundless course of experimentation. The expectation that every neurotic phenomenon can be cured may, I suspect, be derived from the layman’s belief that the neuroses are something quite unnecessary which have no right whatever to exist. Whereas in fact they are severe, constitutionally fixed illnesses, which rarely restrict themselves to only a few attacks but persist as a rule over long periods or throughout life. Our analytic experience that they can be extensively influenced, if the historical precipitating causes and accidental auxiliary factors of the illness can be dealt with, has led us to neglect the constitutional factor in our therapeutic practice, and in any case we can do nothing about it; but in theory we ought always to bear it in mind. The radical inaccessibility of the psychoses to analytic treatment should, in view of their close relationship to the neuroses, restrict our pretensions in regard to these latter. The therapeutic effectiveness of psycho-analysis remains cramped by a number of weighty and scarcely assailable factors. In the case of children, where one might count on the greatest successes, the difficulties are the external ones connected with their relation to their parents, though these difficulties are after all a necessary part of being a child. In the case of adults the difficulties arise in the first instance from two factors: the amount of psychical rigidity present and the form of the illness with all that that covers in the way of deeper determinants.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4753

The first of these factors is often unjustly overlooked. However great may be the plasticity of mental life and the possibility of reviving old conditions, not everything can be brought to life again. Some changes seem to be definitive and correspond to scars formed when a process has run its course. On other occasions one has an impression of a general stiffening of mental life; the psychical processes, to which one could very well indicate other paths, seem incapable of abandoning the old ones. But perhaps this is the same thing as what I mentioned just now, only looked at differently. All too often one seems to see that it is only the treatment’s lack of the necessary motive force that prevents one from bringing the change about. One particular dependent relation, one special instinctual component, is too powerful in comparison with the opposing forces that we are able to mobilize. This is quite generally true with the psychoses. We understand them well enough to know the point at which the levers should be applied, but they would not be able to move the weight. It is here, indeed, that hope for the future lies: the possibility that our knowledge of the operation of the hormones (you know what they are) may give us the means of successfully combating the quantitative factors of the illnesses: but we are far from that to-day. I realize that the uncertainty in all these matters is a constant instigation towards perfecting analysis and in particular the transference. Beginners in analysis especially are left in doubt in case of a failure whether they should blame the peculiarities of the case or their own clumsy handling of the therapeutic procedure. But, as I have said already, I do not think much can be achieved by efforts in this direction.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4754

The second limitation upon analytic successes is given by the form of the illness. You know already that the field of application of analytic therapy lies in the transference neuroses - phobias, hysteria, obsessional neurosis - and further, abnormalities of character which have been developed in place of these illnesses. Everything differing from these, narcissistic and psychotic conditions, is unsuitable to a greater or less extent. It would be entirely legitimate to guard against failures by carefully excluding such cases. This precaution would lead to a great improvement in the statistics of analysis. There is, however, a pitfall here. Our diagnoses are very often made only after the event. They resemble the Scottish King’s test for identifying witches that I read about in Victor Hugo. This king declared that he was in possession of an infallible method of recognizing a witch. He had the women stewed in a cauldron of boiling water and then tasted the broth. Afterwards he was able to say: ‘That was a witch’, or ‘No, that was not one.’ It is the same with us, except that we are the sufferers. We cannot judge the patient who comes for treatment (or, in the same way, the candidate who comes for training) till we have studied him analytically for a few weeks or months. We are in fact buying a pig in a poke. The patient brings along indefinite general ailments which do not admit of a conclusive diagnosis. After this period of testing it may turn out that the case is an unsuitable one. If so we send him away if he is a candidate, or continue the trial a little longer if he is a patient on the chance that we may yet see things in a more favourable light. The patient has his revenge by adding to our list of failures, and the rejected candidate does so perhaps, if he is paranoid, by writing books on psycho-analysis himself. As you see, our precautions have been of no avail.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4755

I am afraid these detailed discussions are exhausting your interest. But I should be still more sorry if you were to think it is my intention to lower your opinion of psycho-analysis as a therapy. Perhaps I really made a clumsy start. For I wanted to do the opposite: to excuse the therapeutic limitations of analysis by pointing out their inevitability. With the same aim in view I turn to another point: the reproach against analytic treatment that it takes a disproportionately long time. On this it must be said that psychical changes do in fact only take place slowly; if they occur rapidly, suddenly, that is a bad sign. It is true that the treatment of a fairly severe neurosis may easily extend over several years; but consider, in case of success, how long the illness would have lasted. A decade, probably, for every year of treatment: the illness, that is to say (as we see so often in untreated cases), would not have ended at all. In some cases we have reasons for resuming an analysis many years afterwards. Life had developed fresh pathological reactions to fresh precipitating causes; but in the meantime our patient had been well. The first analysis had not in fact brought to light all his pathological dispositions, and it was natural for the analysis to have been stopped when success was achieved. There are also severely handicapped people who are kept under analytic supervision all through their lives and are taken back into analysis from time to time. But these people would otherwise have been altogether incapable of existence and we must feel glad that they can be kept on their feet by this piecemeal and recurrent treatment. The analysis of character disorders also calls for long periods of treatment; but it is often successful; and do you know of any other therapy with which such a task could even be approached? Therapeutic ambition may feel unsatisfied by such results; but we have learnt from the example of tuberculosis and lupus that success can only be obtained when the treatment has been adapted to the characteristics of the illness.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4756

I have told you that psycho-analysis began as a method of treatment; but I did not want to commend it to your interest as a method of treatment but on account of the truths it contains, on account of the information it gives us about what concerns human beings most of all - their own nature - and on account of the connections it discloses between the most different of their activities. As a method of treatment it is one among many, though, to be sure, primus inter pares. If it was without therapeutic value it would not have been discovered, as it was, in connection with sick people and would not have gone on developing for more than thirty years.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4757

LECTURE XXXV

THE QUESTION OF A WELTANSCHAUUNG

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - At our last meeting we were occupied with little everyday concerns - putting our own modest house in order, as it were. I propose that we should now take a bold leap and venture upon answering a question which is constantly being asked in other quarters: does psycho-analysis lead to a particular Weltanschauung and, if so, to which?

‘Weltanschauung’ is, I am afraid, a specifically German concept, the translation of which into foreign languages might well raise difficulties. If I try to give you a definition of it, it is bound to seem clumsy to you. In my opinion, then, a Weltanschauung is an intellectual construction which solves all the problems of our existence uniformly on the basis of one overriding hypothesis, which, accordingly, leaves no question unanswered and in which everything that interests us finds its fixed place. It will easily be understood that the possession of a Weltanschauung of this kind is among the ideal wishes of human beings. Believing in it one can feel secure in life, one can know what to strive for, and how one can deal most expediently with one’s emotions and interests.

If that is the nature of a Weltanschauung, the answer as regards psycho-analysis is made easy. As a specialist science, a branch of psychology - a depth-psychology or psychology of the unconscious - it is quite unfit to construct a Weltanschauung of its own: it must accept the scientific one. But the Weltanschauung of science already departs noticeably from our definition. It is true that it too assumes the uniformity of the explanation of the universe; but it does so only as a programme, the fulfilment of which is relegated to the future. Apart from this it is marked by negative characteristics, by its limitation to what is at the moment knowable and by its sharp rejection of certain elements that are alien to it. It asserts that there are no sources of knowledge of the universe other than the intellectual working-over of carefully scrutinized observations - in other words, what we call research - and alongside of it no knowledge derived from revelation, intuition or divination. It seems as though this view came very near to being generally recognized in the course of the last few centuries that have passed; and it has been left to our century to discover the presumptuous objection that a Weltanschauung like this is alike paltry and cheerless, that it overlooks the claims of the human intellect and the needs of the human mind.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4758

This objection cannot be too energetically repudiated. It is quite without a basis, since the intellect and the mind are objects for scientific research in exactly the same way as any non-human things. Psycho-analysis has a special right to speak for the scientific Weltanschauung at this point, since it cannot be reproached with having neglected what is mental in the picture of the universe. Its contribution to science lies precisely in having extended research to the mental field. And, incidentally, without such a psychology science would be very incomplete. If, however, the investigation of the intellectual and emotional functions of men (and of animals) is included in science, then it will be seen that nothing is altered in the attitude of science as a whole, that no new sources of knowledge or methods of research have come into being. Intuition and divination would be such, if they existed; but they may safely be reckoned as illusions, the fulfilments of wishful impulses. It is easy to see, too, that these demands upon a Weltanschauung are only based on emotion. Science takes notice of the fact that the human mind produces these demands and is ready to examine their sources; but it has not the slightest reason to regard them as justified. On the contrary it sees this as a warning carefully to separate from knowledge everything that is illusion and an outcome of emotional demands like these.

This does not in the least mean that these wishes are to be pushed contemptuously on one side or their value for human life under-estimated. We are ready to trace out the fulfilments of them which they have created for themselves in the products of art and in the systems of religion and philosophy; but we cannot nevertheless overlook the fact that it would be illegitimate and highly inexpedient to allow these demands to be transferred to the sphere of knowledge. For this would be to lay open the paths which lead to psychosis, whether to individual or group psychosis, and would withdraw valuable amounts of energy from endeavours which are directed towards reality in order, so far as possible, to find satisfaction in it for wishes and needs.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4759

From the standpoint of science one cannot avoid exercising one’s critical faculty here and proceeding with rejections and dismissals. It is not permissible to declare that science is one field of human mental activity and that religion and philosophy are others, at least its equal in value, and that science has no business to interfere with the other two: that they all have an equal claim to be true and that everyone is at liberty to choose from which he will draw his convictions and in which he will place his belief. A view of this kind is regarded as particularly superior, tolerant, broad-minded and free from illiberal prejudices. Unfortunately it is not tenable and shares all the pernicious features of an entirely unscientific Weltanschauung and is equivalent to one in practice. It is simply a fact that the truth cannot be tolerant, that it admits of no compromises or limitations, that research regards every sphere of human activity as belonging to it and that it must be relentlessly critical if any other power tries to take over any part of it.

Of the three powers which may dispute the basic position of science, religion alone is to be taken seriously as an enemy. Art is almost always harmless and beneficent; it does not seek to be anything but an illusion. Except for a few people who are spoken of as being ‘possessed’ by art, it makes no attempt at invading the realm of reality. Philosophy is not opposed to science, it behaves like a science and works in part by the same methods; it departs from it, however, by clinging to the illusion of being able to present a picture of the universe which is without gaps and is coherent, though one which is bound to collapse with every fresh advance in our knowledge. It goes astray in its method by over-estimating the epistemological value of our logical operations and by accepting other sources of knowledge such as intuition. And it often seems that the poet’s derisive comment is not unjustified when he says of the philosopher:

Mit seinen Nachtmützen und Schlafrockfetzen

Stopft er die Lücken des Weltenbaus.¹

¹ Heine.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4760

But philosophy has no direct influence on the great mass of mankind; it is of interest to only a small number even of the top layer of intellectuals and is scarcely intelligible to anyone else. On the other hand, religion is an immense power which has the strongest emotions of human beings at its service. It is well known that at an earlier date it comprised everything that played an intellectual part in men’s lives, that it took the place of science when there was scarcely yet such a thing as science, and that it constructed a Weltanschauung, consistent and self-contained to an unparalleled degree, which, although it has been profoundly shaken, persists to this day.

If we are to give an account of the grandiose nature of religion, we must bear in mind what it undertakes to do for human beings. It gives them information about the origin and coming into existence of the universe, it assures them of its protection and of ultimate happiness in the ups and downs of life and it directs their thoughts and actions by precepts which it lays down with its whole authority. Thus it fulfils three functions. With the first of them it satisfies the human thirst for knowledge; it does the same thing that science attempts to do with its means, and at that point enters into rivalry with it. It is to its second function that it no doubt owes the greatest part of its influence. Science can be no match for it when it soothes the fear that men feel of the dangers and vicissitudes of life, when it assures them of a happy ending and offers them comfort in unhappiness. It is true that science can teach us how to avoid certain dangers and that there are some sufferings which it can successfully combat; it would be most unjust to deny that it is a powerful helper to men; but there are many situations in which it must leave a man to his suffering and can only advise him to submit to it. In its third function, in which it issues precepts and lays down prohibitions and restrictions, religion is furthest away from science. For science is content to investigate and to establish facts, though it is true that from its application rules and advice are derived on the conduct of life. In some circumstances these are the same as those offered by religion, but, when this is so, the reasons for them are different.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4761

The convergence between these three aspects of religion is not entirely clear. What has an explanation of the origin of the universe to do with the inculcation of certain particular ethical precepts? The assurances of protection and happiness are more intimately linked with the ethical requirements. They are the reward for fulfilling these commands; only those who obey them may count upon these benefits, punishment awaits the disobedient. Incidentally, something similar is true of science. Those who disregard its lessons, so it tells us, expose themselves to injury.

The remarkable combination in religion of instruction, consolation and requirements can only be understood if it is subjected to a genetic analysis. This may be approached from the most striking point of the aggregate, from its instruction on the origin of the universe; for why, we may ask, should a cosmogony be a regular component of religious systems? The doctrine is, then, that the universe was created by a being resembling a man, but magnified in every respect, in power, wisdom, and the strength of his passions - an idealized super-man. Animals as creators of the universe point to the influence of totemism, upon which we shall have a few words at least to say presently. It is an interesting fact that this creator is always only a single being, even when there are believed to be many gods. It is interesting, too, that the creator is usually a man, though there is far from being a lack of indications of female deities; and some mythologies actually make the creation begin with a male god getting rid of a female deity, who is degraded into being a monster. Here the most interesting problems of detail open out; but we must hurry on. Our further path is made easy to recognize, for this god-creator is undisguisedly called ‘father’. Psycho-analysis infers that he really is the father, with all the magnificence in which he once appeared to the small child. A religious man pictures the creation of the universe just as he pictures his own origin.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4762

This being so, it is easy to explain how it is that consoling assurances and strict ethical demands are combined with a cosmogony. For the same person to whom the child owed his existence, the father (or more correctly, no doubt, the parental agency compounded of the father and mother), also protected and watched over him in his feeble and helpless state, exposed as he was to all the dangers lying in wait in the external world; under his father’s protection he felt safe. When a human being has himself grown up, he knows, to be sure, that he is in possession of greater strength, but his insight into the perils of life has also grown greater, and he rightly concludes that fundamentally he still remains just as helpless and unprotected as he was in his childhood, that faced by the world he is still a child. Even now, therefore, he cannot do without the protection which he enjoyed as a child. But he has long since recognized, too, that his father is a being of narrowly restricted power, and not equipped with every excellence. He therefore harks back to the mnemic image of the father whom in his childhood he so greatly overvalued. He exalts the image into a deity and makes it into something contemporary and real. The effective strength of this mnemic image and the persistence of his need for protection jointly sustain his belief in God.

The third main item in the religious programme, the ethical demand, also fits into this childhood situation with ease. I may remind you of Kant’s famous pronouncement in which he names, in a single breath, the starry heavens and the moral law within us. However strange this juxtaposition may sound - for what have the heavenly bodies to do with the question of whether one human creature loves another or kills him? - it nevertheless touches on a great psychological truth. The same father (or parental agency) which gave the child life and guarded him against its perils, taught him as well what he might do and what he must leave undone, instructed him that he must adapt himself to certain restrictions on his instinctual wishes, and made him understand what regard he was expected to have for his parents and brothers and sisters, if he wanted to become a tolerated and welcome member of the family circle and later on of larger associations. The child is brought up to a knowledge of his social duties by a system of loving rewards and punishments, he is taught that his security in life depends on his parents (and afterwards other people) loving him and on their being able to believe that he loves them. All these relations are afterwards introduced by men unaltered into their religion. Their parents’ prohibitions and demands persist within them as a moral conscience. With the help of this same system of rewards and punishments, God rules the world of men. The amount of protection and happy satisfaction assigned to an individual depends on his fulfilment of the ethical demands; his love of God and his consciousness of being loved by God are the foundations of the security with which he is armed against the dangers of the external world and of his human environment. Finally, in prayer he has assured himself a direct influence on the divine will and with it a share in the divine omnipotence.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4763

I feel sure that while you have been listening to me you have been bothered by a number of questions which you would be glad to hear answered. I cannot undertake to do so here and now, but I feel confident that none of these detailed enquiries would upset our thesis that the religious Weltanschauung is determined by the situation of our childhood. That being so, it is all the more remarkable that, in spite of its infantile nature, it nevertheless had a precursor. There is no doubt that there was a time without religion, without gods. This is known as the stage of animism. At that time, too, the world was peopled with spiritual beings resembling men - we call them demons. All the objects in the external world were their habitation, or perhaps were identical with them; but there was no superior power which had created them all and afterwards ruled them and to which one could turn for protection and help. The demons of animism were for the most part hostile in their attitude to human beings, but it appears that human beings had more self-confidence then than later on. They were certainly in a constant state of the most acute fear of these evil spirits; but they defended themselves against them by certain actions to which they ascribed the power to drive them away. Nor apart from this did they regard themselves as defenceless. If they desired something from Nature - if they wished for rain, for instance - they did not direct a prayer to the weather-god, but they performed a magical act which they expected to influence Nature directly: they themselves did something which resembled rain. In their struggle against the powers of the world around them their first weapon was magic, the earliest fore-runner of the technology of to-day. Their reliance on magic was, as we suppose, derived from their overvaluation of their own intellectual operations, from their belief in the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’, which, incidentally, we come upon again in our obsessional neurotic patients. We may suppose that human beings at that period were particularly proud of their acquisitions in the way of language, which must have been accompanied by a great facilitation of thinking. They attributed magical power to words. This feature was later taken over by religion. ‘And God said "Let there be light!" and there was light.’ Moreover the fact of their magical actions shows that animistic men did not simply rely on the power of their wishes. They expected results, rather, from the performance of an action which would induce Nature to imitate it. If they wanted rain, they themselves poured out water; if they wanted to encourage the earth to be fruitful, they demonstrated a dramatic performance of sexual intercourse to it in the fields.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4764

You know how hard it is for anything to die away when once it has achieved psychical expression. So you will not be surprised to hear that many of the utterances of animism have persisted to this day, for the most part as what we call superstition, alongside of and behind religion. But more than this, you will scarcely be able to reject a judgement that the philosophy of today has retained some essential features of the animistic mode of thought - the overvaluation of the magic of words and the belief that the real events in the world take the course which our thinking seeks to impose on them. It would seem, it is true, to be an animism without magical actions. On the other hand, we may suppose that even in those days there were ethics of some sort, precepts upon the mutual relations of men; but nothing suggests that they had any intimate connection with animistic beliefs. They were probably the direct expression of men’s relative powers and of their practical needs.

It would be well worth knowing what brought about the transition from animism to religion, but you may imagine the obscurity which to-day still veils these primaeval ages of the evolution of the human spirit. It appears to be a fact that the first form assumed by religion was the remarkable phenomenon of totemism, the worship of animals, in whose train the first ethical commandments, the taboos, made their appearance. In a volume called Totem and Taboo, I once elaborated a notion which traced this transformation back to a revolution in the circumstances of the human family. The main achievement of religion as compared with animism lies in the psychical binding of the fear of demons. Nevertheless a vestige of this primaeval age, the Evil Spirit, has kept a place in the religious system.

This being the prehistory of the religious Weltanschauung let us turn now to what has happened since then and to what is still going on before our eyes. The scientific spirit, strengthened by the observation of natural processes, has begun, in the course of time, to treat religion as a human affair and to submit it to a critical examination. Religion was not able to stand up to this. What first gave rise to suspicion and scepticism were its tales of miracles, for they contradicted everything that had been taught by sober observation and betrayed too clearly the influence of the activity of the human imagination. After this its doctrines explaining the origin of the universe met with rejection, for they gave evidence of an ignorance which bore the stamp of ancient times and to which, thanks to their increased familiarity with the laws of nature, people knew they were superior. The idea that the universe came into existence through acts of copulation or creation analogous to the origin of individual people had ceased to be the most obvious and self-evident hypothesis since the distinction between animate creatures with a mind and an inanimate Nature had impressed itself on human thought - a distinction which made it impossible to retain belief in the original animism. Nor must we overlook the influence of the comparative study of different religious systems and the impression of their mutual exclusiveness and intolerance.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4765

Strengthened by these preliminary exercises, the scientific spirit gained enough courage at last to venture on an examination of the most important and emotionally valuable elements of the religious Weltanschauung. People may always have seen, though it was long before they dared to say so openly, that the pronouncements of religion promising men protection and happiness if they would only fulfil certain ethical requirements had also shown themselves unworthy of belief. It seems not to be the case that there is a Power in the universe which watches over the well-being of individuals with parental care and brings all their affairs to a happy ending. On the contrary, the destinies of mankind can be brought into harmony neither with the hypothesis of a Universal Benevolence nor with the partly contradictory one of a Universal Justice. Earthquakes, tidal waves, conflagrations, make no distinction between the virtuous and pious and the scoundrel or unbeliever. Even where what is in question is not inanimate Nature but where an individual’s fate depends on his relations to other people, it is by no means the rule that virtue is rewarded and that evil finds its punishment. Often enough the violent, cunning or ruthless man seizes the envied good things of the world and the pious man goes away empty. Obscure, unfeeling and unloving powers determine men’s fate; the system of rewards and punishments which religion ascribes to the government of the universe seems not to exist. Here once again is a reason for dropping a portion of the animistic theory which had been rescued from animism by religion.

The last contribution to the criticism of the religious Weltanschauung was effected by psycho-analysis, by showing how religion originated from the helplessness of children and by tracing its contents to the survival into maturity of the wishes and needs of childhood. This did not precisely mean a contradiction of religion, but it was nevertheless a necessary rounding-off of our knowledge about it, and in one respect at least it was a contradiction, for religion itself lays claim to a divine origin. And, to be sure, it is not wrong in this, provided that our interpretation of God is accepted.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4766

In summary, therefore, the judgement of science on the religious Weltanschauung is this. While the different religions wrangle with one another as to which of them is in possession of the truth, our view is that the question of the truth of religious beliefs may be left altogether on one side. Religion is an attempt to master the sensory world in which we are situated by means of the wishful world which we have developed within us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But religion cannot achieve this. Its doctrines bear the imprint of the times in which they arose, the ignorant times of the childhood of humanity. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is no nursery. The ethical demands on which religion seeks to lay stress need, rather, to be given another basis; for they are indispensable to human society and it is dangerous to link obedience to them with religious faith. If we attempt to assign the place of religion in the evolution of mankind, it appears not as a permanent acquisition but as a counterpart to the neurosis which individual civilized men have to go through in their passage from childhood to maturity.

You are of course free to criticize this description of mine; I will even go half way to meet you on this. What I told you about the gradual crumbling away of the religious Weltanschauung was certainly incomplete in its abbreviated form. The order of the different processes was not given quite correctly; the co-operation of various forces in the awakening of the scientific spirit was not followed out. I also left out of account the alterations which took place in the religious Weltanschauung itself during the period of its undisputed sway and afterwards under the influence of growing criticism. Finally, I restricted my remarks, strictly speaking, to one single form taken by religion, that of the Western peoples. I constructed an anatomical model, so to speak, for the purpose of a hurried demonstration which was to be as impressive as possible. Let us leave on one side the question of whether my knowledge would in any case have been sufficient to do the thing better and more completely. I am aware that you can find everything I said to you said better elsewhere. Nothing in it is new. But let me express a conviction that the most careful working-over of the material of the problems of religion would not shake our conclusions.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4767

The struggle of the scientific spirit against the religious Weltanschauung is, as you know, not at an end: it is still going on to-day under our eyes. Though as a rule psycho-analysis makes little use of the weapon of controversy, I will not hold back from looking into this dispute. In doing so I may perhaps throw some further light on our attitude to Weltanschauungen. You will see how easily some of the arguments brought forward by the supporters of religion can be answered, though it is true that others may evade refutation.

The first objection we meet with is to the effect that it is an impertinence on the part of science to make religion a subject for its investigations, for religion is something sublime, superior to any operation of the human intellect, something which may not be approached with hair-splitting criticisms. In other words, science is not qualified to judge religion: it is quite serviceable and estimable otherwise, so long as it keeps to its own sphere. But religion is not its sphere, and it has no business there. If we do not let ourselves be put off by this brusque repulse and enquire further what is the basis of this claim to a position exceptional among all human concerns, the reply we receive (if we are thought worthy of any reply) is that religion cannot be measured by human measurements, for it is of divine origin and was given us as a revelation by a Spirit which the human spirit cannot comprehend. One would have thought that there was nothing earlier than the refutation of this argument: it is a clear case of petitio principii, of ‘begging the question’ - I know of no good German equivalent expression. The actual question raised is whether there is a divine spirit and a revelation by it; and the matter is certainly not decided by saying that this question cannot be asked, since the deity may not be put in question. The position here is what it occasionally is during the work of analysis. If a usually sensible patient rejects some particular suggestion on specially foolish grounds, this logical weakness is evidence of the existence of a specially strong motive for the denial - a motive which can only be of an affective nature, an emotional tie.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4768

We may also be given another answer, in which a motive of this kind is openly admitted: religion may not be critically examined because it is the highest, most precious, and most sublime thing that the human spirit has produced, because it gives expression to the deepest feelings and alone makes the world tolerable and life worthy of men. We need not reply by disputing this estimate of religion but by drawing attention to another matter. What we do is to emphasize the fact that what is in question is not in the least an invasion of the field of religion by the scientific spirit, but on the contrary an invasion by religion of the sphere of scientific thought. Whatever may be the value and importance of religion, it has no right in any way to restrict thought - no right, therefore, to exclude itself from having thought applied to it.

Scientific thinking does not differ in its nature from the normal activity of thought, which all of us, believers and unbelievers, employ in looking after our affairs in ordinary life. It has only developed certain features: it takes an interest in things even if they have no immediate, tangible use; it is concerned carefully to avoid individual factors and affective influences; it examines more strictly the trustworthiness of the sense-perceptions on which it bases its conclusions; it provides itself with new perceptions which cannot be obtained by everyday means and it isolates the determinants of these new experiences in experiments which are deliberately varied. Its endeavour is to arrive at correspondence with reality - that is to say, with what exists outside us and independently of us and, as experience has taught us, is decisive for the fulfilment or disappointment of our wishes. This correspondence with the real external world we call ‘truth’. It remains the aim of scientific work even if we leave the practical value of that work out of account. When, therefore, religion asserts that it can take the place of science, that, because it is beneficent and elevating, it must also be true, that is in fact an invasion which must be repulsed in the most general interest. It is asking a great deal of a person who has learnt to conduct his ordinary affairs in accordance with the rules of experience and with a regard to reality, to suggest that he shall hand over the care of what are precisely his most intimate interests to an agency which claims as its privilege freedom from the precepts of rational thinking. And as regards the protection which religion promises its believers, I think none of us would be so much as prepared to enter a motor-car if its driver announced that he drove, unperturbed by traffic regulations, in accordance with the impulses of his soaring imagination.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4769

The prohibition against thought issued by religion to assist in its self-preservation is also far from being free from danger either for the individual or for human society. Analytic experience has taught us that a prohibition like this, even if it is originally limited to a particular field, tends to widen out and thereafter to become the cause of severe inhibitions in the subject’s conduct of life. This result may be observed, too, in the female sex, following from their being forbidden to have anything to do with their sexuality even in thought. Biography is able to point to the damage done by the religious inhibition of thought in the life stories of nearly all eminent individuals in the past. On the other hand intellect - or let us call it by the name that is familiar to us, reason - is among the powers which we may most expect to exercise a unifying influence on men - on men who are held together with such difficulty and whom it is therefore scarcely possible to rule. It may be imagined how impossible human society would be, merely if everyone had his own multiplication table and his own private units of length and weight. Our best hope for the future is that intellect - the scientific spirit, reason - may in process of time establish a dictatorship in the mental life of man. The nature of reason is a guarantee that afterwards it will not fail to give man’s emotional impulses and what is determined by them the position they deserve. But the common compulsion exercised by such a dominance of reason will prove to be the strongest uniting bond among men and lead the way to further unions. Whatever, like religion’s prohibition against thought, opposes such a development, is a danger for the future of mankind.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4770

It may then be asked why religion does not put an end to this dispute which is so hopeless for it by frankly declaring: ‘It is a fact that I cannot give you what is commonly called "truth"; if you want that, you must keep to science. But what I have to offer you is something incomparably more beautiful, more consoling and more uplifting than anything you could get from science. And because of that, I say to you that it is true in another, higher sense.’ It is easy to find the answer to this. Religion cannot make this admission because it would involve its forfeiting all its influence on the mass of mankind. The ordinary man only knows one kind of truth, in the ordinary sense of the word. He cannot imagine what a higher or a highest truth may be. Truth seems to him no more capable of comparative degrees than death; and he cannot join in the leap from the beautiful to the true. Perhaps you will think as I do that he is right in this.

So the struggle is not at an end. The supporters of the religious Weltanschauung act upon the ancient dictum: the best defence is attack. ‘What’, they ask, ‘is this science which presumes to disparage our religion - our religion which has brought salvation and consolation to millions of people over many thousands of years? What has it accomplished so far? What can we expect from it in the future? On its own admission it is incapable of bringing consolation and exaltation. Let us leave them on one side then, though that is no light renunciation. But what about its theories? Can it tell us how the universe came about and what fate lies before it? Can it even draw us a coherent picture of the universe, or show us where we are to look for the unexplained phenomena of life or how the forces of the mind are able to act upon inert matter? If it could do this we should not refuse it our respect. But none of these, no problem of this kind, has been solved by it hitherto. It gives us fragments of alleged discovery, which it cannot bring into harmony with one another; it collects observations of uniformities in the course of events which it dignifies with the name of laws and submits to its risky interpretations. And consider the small degree of certainty which it attaches to its findings! Everything it teaches is only provisionally true: what is praised to-day as the highest wisdom will be rejected to-morrow and replaced by something else, though once more only tentatively. The latest error is then described as the truth. And for this truth we are to sacrifice our highest good!’

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4771

I expect, Ladies and Gentlemen, that, in so far as you yourselves are supporters of the scientific Weltanschauung which is attacked in these words, you will not be too profoundly shaken by this criticism. And here I should like to recall to you a remark that once went the rounds in Imperial Austria. The old gentleman once shouted at the Committee of a parliamentary party that was troublesome to him: ‘This isn’t ordinary opposition any more! It’s factious opposition!’ Similarly, as you will recognize, the reproaches against science for not having yet solved the problems of the universe are exaggerated in an unjust and malicious manner; it has truly not had time enough yet for these great achievements. Science is very young - a human activity which developed late. Let us bear in mind, to select only a few dates, that only some three hundred years have passed since Kepler discovered the laws of planetary movement, that the life of Newton, who analysed light into the colours of the spectrum and laid down the theory of gravitation, ended in 1727 - that is to say, little more than two hundred years ago - and that Lavoisier discovered oxygen shortly before the French Revolution. The life of an individual is very short in comparison with the duration of human evolution; I may be a very old man to-day, but nevertheless I was already alive when Darwin published his book on the origin of species. In the same year as that, 1859, Pierre Curie, the discoverer of radium, was born. And if you go further back, to the beginnings of exact science among the Greeks, to Archimedes, to Aristarchus of Samos (about 250 B.C.) who was the fore-runner of Copernicus, or even to the first beginnings of astronomy among the Babylonians, you will only have covered a small fraction of the length of time which anthropologists require for the evolution of man from an ape-like ancestral form, and which certainly comprises more than a hundred thousand years. And we must not forget that the last century has brought such a wealth of new discoveries, such a great acceleration of scientific advance that we have every reason to view the future of science with confidence.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4772

We must admit to some extent the correctness of the other criticisms. The path of science is indeed slow, hesitating, laborious. This fact cannot be denied or altered. No wonder the gentlemen in the other camp are dissatisfied. They are spoilt: revelation gave them an easier time. Progress in scientific work is just as it is in an analysis. We bring expectations with us into the work, but they must be forcibly held back. By observation, now at one point and now at another, we come upon something new; but to begin with the pieces do not fit together. We put forward conjectures, we construct hypotheses, which we withdraw if they are not confirmed, we need much patience and readiness for any eventuality, we renounce early convictions so as not to be led by them into overlooking unexpected factors, and in the end our whole expenditure of effort is rewarded, the scattered findings fit themselves together, we get an insight into a whole section of mental events, we have completed our task and now we are free for the next one. In analysis, however, we have to do without the assistance afforded to research by experiment.

Moreover, there is a good deal of exaggeration in this criticism of science. It is not true that it staggers blindly from one experiment to another, that it replaces one error by another. It works as a rule like a sculptor at his clay model, who tirelessly alters his rough sketch, adds to it and takes away from it, till he has arrived at what he feels is a satisfactory degree of resemblance to the object he sees or imagines. Besides, at least in the older and more mature sciences, there is even to-day a solid ground-work which is only modified and improved but no longer demolished. Things are not looking so bad in the business of science.

And what, finally, is the aim of these passionate disparagements of science? In spite of its present incompleteness and of the difficulties attaching to it, it remains indispensable to us and nothing can take its place. It is capable of undreamt-of improvements, whereas the religious Weltanschauung is not. This is complete in all essential respects; if it was a mistake, it must remain one for ever. No belittlement of science can in any way alter the fact that it is attempting to take account of our dependence on the real external world, while religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from its readiness to fit in with our instinctual wishful impulses.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4773

I am under an obligation to go on to consider other Weltanschauungen which are in opposition to the scientific one; but I do so unwillingly, for I know that I am not properly competent to judge them. So you must bear this proviso in mind in listening to the following remarks, and if your interest has been aroused you should seek better instruction elsewhere.

And here I must first mention the various systems of philosophy which have ventured to draw a picture of the universe as it is reflected in the mind of thinkers who were for the most part turned away from the world. But I have already attempted to give a general account of the characteristics of philosophy and I am probably as unqualified as few people have ever been to form an estimate of the different systems. So I will invite you to join me in turning to a consideration of two other phenomena which, particularly in our days, it is impossible to disregard.

The first of these Weltanschauungen is as it were a counterpart to political anarchism, and is perhaps a derivative of it. There have certainly been intellectual nihilists of this kind in the past, but just now the relativity theory of modern physics seems to have gone to their head. They start out from science, indeed, but they contrive to force it into self-abrogation, into suicide; they set it the task of getting itself out of the way by refuting its own claims. One often has an impression in this connection that this nihilism is only a temporary attitude which is to be retained until this task has been performed. Once science has been disposed of, the space vacated may be filled by some kind of mysticism or, indeed, by the old religious Weltanschauung. According to the anarchist theory there is no such thing as truth, no assured knowledge of the external world. What we give out as being scientific truth is only the product of our own needs as they are bound to find utterance under changing external conditions: once again, they are illusion. Fundamentally, we find only what we need and see only what we want to see. We have no other possibility. Since the criterion of truth - correspondence with the external world - is absent, it is entirely a matter of indifference what opinions we adopt. All of them are equally true and equally false. And no one has a right to accuse anyone else of error.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4774

A person of an epistemological bent might find it tempting to follow the paths- the sophistries - by which the anarchists succeed in enticing such conclusions from science. No doubt we should come upon situations similar to those derived from the familiar paradox of the Cretan who says that all Cretans are liars. But I have neither the desire nor the capacity for going into this more deeply. All I can say is that the anarchist theory sounds wonderfully superior so long as it relates to opinions about abstract things: it breaks down with its first step into practical life. Now the actions of men are governed by their opinions, their knowledge; and it is the same scientific spirit that speculates about the structure of atoms or the origin of man and that plans the construction of a bridge capable of bearing a load. If what we believe were really a matter of indifference, if there were no such thing as knowledge distinguished among our opinions by corresponding to reality, we might build bridges just as well out of cardboard as out of stone, we might inject our patients with a decagram of morphine instead of a centigram, and might use tear-gas as a narcotic instead of ether. But even the intellectual anarchists would violently repudiate such practical applications of their theory.

The other opposition has to be taken far more seriously, and in this instance I feel the liveliest regret at the inadequacy of my information. I suspect that you know more about this business than I do and that you took up your position long ago in favour of Marxism or against it. Karl Marx’s investigations into the economic structure of society and into the influence of different economic systems upon every department of human life have in our days acquired an undeniable authority. How far his views in detail are correct or go astray, I cannot of course tell. I understand that this is not an easy matter even for others better instructed than I am. There are assertions contained in Marx’s theory which have struck me as strange: such as that the development of forms of society is a process of natural history, or that the changes in social stratification arise from one another in the manner of a dialectical process. I am far from sure that I understand these assertions aright; nor do they sound to me ‘materialistic’ but, rather, like a precipitate of the obscure Hegelian philosophy in whose school Marx graduated. I do not know how I can shake off my lay opinion that the class structure of society goes back to the struggles which, from the beginning of history, took place between human hordes only slightly differing from each other. Social distinctions, so I thought, were originally distinctions between clans or races. Victory was decided by psychological factors, such as the amount of constitutional aggressiveness, but also by the firmness of the organization within the horde, and by material factors, such as the possession of superior weapons. Living together in the same area, the victors became the masters and the vanquished the slaves. There is no sign to be seen in this of a natural law or of a conceptual evolution. On the other hand the influence exercised upon the social relations of mankind by progressive control over the forces of Nature is unmistakable. For men always put their newly acquired instruments of power at the service of their aggressiveness and use them against one another. The introduction of metals - bronze and iron - made an end to whole epochs of civilization and their social institutions. I really believe that it was gunpowder and fire-arms that abolished chivalry and aristocratic rule, and that the Russian despotism was already doomed before it lost the War, because no amount of inbreeding among the ruling families of Europe could have produced a race of Tsars capable of withstanding the explosive force of dynamite.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4775

It is possible, indeed, that with our present economic crisis, following after the Great War, we are only paying the price of our latest tremendous victory over nature, the conquest of the air. That does not sound very illuminating, but the first links at least in the chain are clearly recognizable. English politics were based on the security which was guaranteed by the seas that washed her coasts. In the moment at which Blériot flew across the Channel in his aeroplane this protective isolation was breached; and in the night during which (in peace-time and on an exercise) a German Zeppelin cruised over London the war against Germany was no doubt a foregone conclusion.¹ Nor must the U-boat threat be forgotten in this connection.

I am almost ashamed to comment to you on a subject of such importance and complexity with these few inadequate remarks, and I know too that I have told you nothing that is new to you. I merely want to draw your attention to the fact that the relation of mankind to their control over Nature, from which they derive their weapons for fighting their fellow-men, must necessarily also affect their economic arrangements. We seem to have come a long way from the problem of a Weltanschauung, but we shall very soon be back to it. The strength of Marxism clearly lies, not in its view of history or the prophecies of the future that are based on it, but in its sagacious indication of the decisive influence which the economic circumstances of men have upon their intellectual, ethical and artistic attitudes. A number of connections and implications were thus uncovered, which had previously been almost totally overlooked. But it cannot be assumed that economic motives are the only ones that determine the behaviour of human beings in society. The undoubted fact that different individuals, races and nations behave differently under the same economic conditions is alone enough to show that economic motives are not the sole dominating factors. It is altogether incomprehensible how psychological factors can be overlooked where what is in question are the reactions of living human beings; for not only were these reactions concerned in establishing the economic conditions, but even under the domination of those conditions men can only bring their original instinctual impulses into play - their self-preservative instinct, their aggressiveness, their need to be loved, their drive towards obtaining pleasure and avoiding unpleasure. In an earlier enquiry I also pointed out the important claims made by the super-ego, which represents tradition and the ideals of the past and will for a time resist the incentives of a new economic situation. And finally we must not forget that the mass of human beings who are subjected to economic necessities also undergo the process of cultural development - of civilization as other people may say - which, though no doubt influenced by all the other factors, is certainly independent of them in its origin, being comparable to an organic process and very well able on its part to exercise an influence on the other factors. It displaces instinctual aims and brings it about that people become antagonistic to what they had previously tolerated. Moreover, the progressive strengthening of the scientific spirit seems to form an essential part of it. If anyone were in a position to show in detail the way in which these different factors - the general inherited human disposition, its racial variations and its cultural transformations - inhibit and promote one another under the conditions of social rank, profession and earning capacity - if anyone were able to do this, he would have supplemented Marxism so that it was made into a genuine social science. For sociology too, dealing as it does with the behaviour of people in society, cannot be anything but applied psychology. Strictly speaking there are only two sciences: psychology, pure and applied, and natural science.

¹ I was told of this from trustworthy sources during the first year of the war.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4776

The newly achieved discovery of the far-reaching importance of economic relations brought with it a temptation not to leave alterations in them to the course of historical development but to put them into effect oneself by revolutionary action. Theoretical Marxism, as realized in Russian Bolshevism, has acquired the energy and the self-contained and exclusive character of a Weltanschauung, but at the same time an uncanny likeness to what it is fighting against. Though originally a portion of science and built up, in its implementation, upon science and technology, it has created a prohibition of thought which is just as ruthless as was that of religion in the past. Any critical examination of Marxist theory is forbidden, doubts of its correctness are punished in the same way as heresy was once punished by the Catholic Church. The writings of Marx have taken the place of the Bible and the Koran as a source of revelation, though they would seem to be no more free from contradictions and obscurities than those older sacred books.

And although practical Marxism has mercilessly cleared away all idealistic systems and illusions, it has itself developed illusions which are no less questionable and unprovable than the earlier ones. It hopes in the course of a few generations so to alter human nature that people will live together almost without friction in the new order of society, and that they will undertake the duties of work without any compulsion. Meanwhile it shifts elsewhere the instinctual restrictions which are essential in society; it diverts the aggressive tendencies which threaten all human communities to the outside and finds support in the hostility of the poor against the rich and of the hitherto powerless against the former rulers. But a transformation of human nature such as this is highly improbable. The enthusiasm with which the mass of the people follow the Bolshevist instigation at present, so long as the new order is incomplete and is threatened from outside, gives no certainty for a future in which it would be fully built up and in no danger. In just the same way as religion, Bolshevism too must compensate its believers for the sufferings and deprivations of their present life by promises of a better future in which there will no longer be any unsatisfied need. This Paradise, however, is to be in this life, instituted on earth and thrown open within a foreseeable time. But we must remember that the Jews as well, whose religion knows nothing of an after-life, expected the arrival of a Messiah on earth, and that the Christian Middle Ages at many times believed that the Kingdom of God was at hand.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4777

There is no doubt of how Bolshevism will reply to these objections. It will say that so long as men’s nature has not yet been transformed it is necessary to make use of the means which affect them to-day. It is impossible to do without compulsion in their education, without the prohibition of thought and without the employment of force to the point of bloodshed; and if the illusions were not awakened in them, they could not be brought to acquiesce in this compulsion. And we should be politely asked to say how things could be managed differently. This would defeat us. I could think of no advice to give. I should admit that the conditions of this experiment would have deterred me and those like me from undertaking it; but we are not the only people concerned. There are men of action, unshakable in their convictions, inaccessible to doubt, without feeling for the sufferings of others if they stand in the way of their intentions. We have to thank men of this kind for the fact that the tremendous experiment of producing a new order of this kind is now actually being carried out in Russia. At a time when the great nations announce that they expect salvation only from the maintenance of Christian piety, the revolution in Russia - in spite of all its disagreeable details - seems nonetheless like the message of a better future. Unluckily neither our scepticism nor the fanatical faith of the other side gives a hint as to how the experiment will turn out. The future will tell us; perhaps it will show that the experiment was undertaken prematurely, that a sweeping alteration of the social order has little prospect of success until new discoveries have increased our control over the forces of Nature and so made easier the satisfaction of our needs. Only then perhaps may it become possible for a new social order not only to put an end to the material need of the masses but also to give a hearing to the cultural demands of the individual. Even then, to be sure, we shall still have to struggle for an incalculable time with the difficulties which the untameable character of human nature presents to every kind of social community.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4778

Ladies and Gentlemen, - Allow me in conclusion to sum up what I had to say of the relation of psycho-analysis to the question of a Weltanschauung. Psycho-analysis, in my opinion, is incapable of creating a Weltanschauung of its own. It does not need one; it is a part of science and can adhere to the scientific Weltanschauung. This, however, scarcely deserves such a grandiloquent title, for it is not all-comprehensive, it is too incomplete and makes no claim to being self-contained and to the construction of systems. Scientific thought is still very young among human beings; there are too many of the great problems which it has not yet been able to solve. A Weltanschauung erected upon science has, apart from its emphasis on the real external world, mainly negative traits, such as submission to the truth and rejection of illusions. Any of our fellow-men who is dissatisfied with this state of things, who calls for more than this for his momentary consolation, may look for it where he can find it. We shall not grudge it him, we cannot help him, but nor can we on his account think differently.

4779

THE ACQUISITION AND CONTROL OF FIRE

(1932)

4780

Intentionally left blank

4781

THE ACQUISITION AND CONTROL OF FIRE

In a footnote to my Civilization and its Discontents I mentioned - though only incidentally - a conjecture which could be formed on the basis of psycho-analytic material, about primal man’s acquisition of control over fire. I am led to take up this theme again by Albrecht Schaeffer’s contradiction (1930) and by Erlenmeyer’s striking reference in the preceding paper to the Mongolian law against ‘pissing on ashes’.¹

For I think my hypothesis - that, in order to gain control over fire, men had to renounce the homosexually-tinged desire to put it out with a stream of urine - can be confirmed by an interpretation of the Greek myth of Prometheus, provided that we bear in mind the distortions which must be expected to occur in the transition from facts to the contents of a myth. These distortions are of the same sort as, and no worse than, those which we acknowledge every day, when we reconstruct from patients’ dreams the repressed but extremely important experiences of their childhood. The mechanisms employed in the distortions I have in mind are symbolic representation and turning into the opposite. I should not venture to explain all the features of our myth in this fashion; apart from the original set of facts, other and later occurrences may have contributed to its content. But the elements which admit of analytic interpretation are, after all, the most striking and important - viz. the manner in which Prometheus transported the fire, the character of his act (an outrage, a theft, a defrauding of the gods) and the meaning of his punishment.

¹ This refers no doubt to hot ashes, from which fire can still be obtained, and not to ashes which are quite extinct. - The objection raised by Lorenz (1931) is based on the assumption that man’s subjugation of fire only began when he discovered that he could produce it at will by some sort of manipulation. As against this, Dr. J. Hárnik refers me to a remark made by Dr. Richard Lasch (in Georg Buschan’s compilation Illustrierte Völkerkunde, 1922, 1, 24), who writes: ‘Presumably the art of conserving fire was understood long before that of kindling it; we have evidence of this in the fact that, although the present-day pygmy-like aborigines of the Andamans possess and conserve fire, they have no indigenous method of kindling it.’

The Acquisition And Control Of Fire

4782

The myth tells us that Prometheus the Titan, a culture-hero who was still a god¹ and who was perhaps originally himself a demiurge and a creator of men, brought fire to men, having stolen it from the gods, hidden in a hollow stick, a fennel-stalk. If we were interpreting a dream we should be inclined to regard such an object as a penis symbol, although the unusual stress laid on its hollowness might make us hesitate. But how can we bring this penis-tube into connection with the preservation of fire? There seems little chance of doing this, till we remember the procedure of reversal, of turning into the opposite, of inverting relationships, which is so common in dreams and which so often conceals their meaning from us. What a man harbours in his penis-tube is not fire. On the contrary, it is the means of quenching fire; it is the water of his stream of urine. This relationship between fire and water then connects up with a wealth of familiar analytic material.

Secondly, the acquisition of fire was a crime; it was accomplished by robbery or theft. This is a constant feature in all the legends about the acquiring of control over fire. It is found among the most different and widely separated peoples and not merely in the Greek myth of Prometheus the Bringer of Fire. Here, then, must be the essential content of mankind’s distorted recollection. But why is the acquisition of fire inseparably connected with the idea of a crime? Who is it that was injured or defrauded by it? The Promethean myth in Hesiod gives us a straight answer; for, in another story, not itself directly connected with fire, Prometheus so arranged the sacrifices to the gods as to give men the advantage over Zeus. It is the gods, then, who were defrauded. We know that in myths the gods are granted the satisfaction of all the desires which human creatures have to renounce, as we have learnt from the case of incest. Speaking in analytic terms, we should say that instinctual life - the id - is the god who is defrauded when the quenching of fire is renounced: in the legend, a human desire is transformed into a divine privilege. But in the legend the deity possesses nothing of the characteristics of a super-ego, he is still the representative of the paramount life of the instincts.

¹ Heracles, at a later time, was a demi-god, and Theseus wholly human.

The Acquisition And Control Of Fire

4783

Transformation into the opposite is most radically present in a third feature of the legend, in the punishment of the Bringer of Fire. Prometheus was chained to a rock, and every day a vulture fed on his liver. In the fire-legends of other peoples, too, a bird plays a part, and it must have something to do with the matter; but for the moment I shall not attempt an interpretation. On the other hand, we feel on firm ground when it comes to explaining why the liver was selected as the location of the punishment. In ancient times the liver was regarded as the seat of all passions and desires; hence a punishment like that of Prometheus was the right one for a criminal driven by instinct, who had committed an offence at the prompting of evil desires. But the exact opposite is true of the Bringer of Fire: he had renounced an instinct and had shown how beneficent, and at the same time how indispensable, such a renunciation was for the purposes of civilization. And why should the legend treat a deed that was thus a benefit to civilization as a crime deserving punishment? Well, if, through all its distortions, it barely allows us to get a glimpse of the fact that the acquisition of control over fire presupposes an instinctual renunciation, at least it makes no secret of the resentment which the culture-hero could not fail to arouse in men driven by their instincts. And this is in accordance with what we know and expect. We know that a demand for a renunciation of instinct, and the enforcement of that demand, call out hostility and aggressiveness, which is only transformed into a sense of guilt in a later phase of psychical development.

The Acquisition And Control Of Fire

4784

The obscurity of the Prometheus legend, as of other fire myths, is increased by the fact that primitive man was bound to regard fire as something analogous to the passion of love - or, as we should say, as a symbol of the libido. The warmth that is radiated by fire calls up the same sensation that accompanies a state of sexual excitation, and the shape and movements of a flame suggest a phallus in activity. There can be no doubt about the mythological significance of flame as a phallus; we have further evidence of it in the legend of the parentage of Servius Tullius, the Roman king. When we ourselves speak of the ‘devouring fire’ of love and of ‘licking’ flames - thus comparing the flame to a tongue - we have not moved so very far away from the mode of thinking of our primitive ancestors. One of the presuppositions on which we based our account of the myth of the acquisition of fire was, indeed, that to primal man the attempt to quench fire with his own water had the meaning of a pleasurable struggle with another phallus.

It may thus well be that, by way of this symbolic analogy, other elements, of a purely imaginative sort, have made their may into the myth and become interwoven with its historical elements. It is difficult to resist the notion that, if the liver is the seat of passion, its significance, symbolically, is the same as that of fire itself; and that, if this is so, its being daily consumed and renewed gives an apt picture of the behaviour of the erotic desires, which, though daily satisfied, are daily revived. The bird which sates itself on the liver would then have the meaning of a penis - a meaning which is not strange to it in other connections, as we know from legends, dreams, linguistic usage and plastic representations in ancient times. A short step further brings us to the phoenix, the bird which, as often as it is consumed by fire, emerges rejuvenated once more, and which probably bore the significance of a penis revivified after its collapse rather than, and earlier than, that of the sun setting in the glow of evening and afterwards rising once again.

The Acquisition And Control Of Fire

4785

The question may be asked whether we may attribute to the mythopoeic activity an attempt to give (in play, as it were) a disguised representation to universally familiar, though also extremely interesting, mental processes that are accompanied by physical manifestations, with no motive other than the sheer pleasure of representation. We can certainly give no decided answer to this question without having fully grasped the nature of myths; but in the two instances before us, it is easy to recognize the same content and, with it, a definite purpose. Each describes the revival of libidinal desires after they have been quenched through being sated. That is to say, each brings out the indestructibility of those desires; and this emphasis is particularly appropriate as a consolation where the historical core of the myth deals with a defeat of instinctual life, with a renunciation of instinct that has become necessary. It is, as it were, the second part of primal man’s understandable reaction when he has suffered a blow in his instinctual life: after the punishment of the offender comes the assurance that after all at bottom he has done no damage.

A reversal into the opposite is unexpectedly found in another myth which in appearance has very little to do with the fire myth. The Lernaean hydra with its countless flickering serpent’s heads - one of which was immortal - was, as its name tells us, a water-dragon. Heracles, the culture-hero, fought it by cutting off its heads; but they always grew again, and it was only after he had burnt up the immortal head with fire that he overcame the monster. A water-dragon subdued by fire - that surely makes no sense. But, as in so many dreams, sense emerges if we reverse the manifest content. In that case the hydra is a brand of fire and the flickering serpent’s heads are the flames; and these, in proof of their libidinal nature, once more display, like Prometheus’s liver, the phenomenon of re-growth, of renewal after attempted destruction. Heracles, then, extinguishes this brand of fire with - water. (The immortal head is no doubt the phallus itself, and its destruction signifies castration.) But Heracles was also the deliverer of Prometheus and slew the bird which devoured his liver. Should we not suspect a deeper connection between the two myths? It is as though the deed of the one hero was made up for by the other. Prometheus (like the Mongolian law) had forbidden the quenching of fire; Heracles permitted it in the case in which the brand of fire threatened disaster. The second myth seems to correspond to the reaction of a later epoch of civilization to the events of the acquisition of power over fire. It looks as though this line of approach might take us quite a distance into the secrets of the myth; but admittedly we should carry a feeling of certainty with us only a short way.

The Acquisition And Control Of Fire

4786

In the antithesis between fire and water, which dominates the entire field of these myths, yet a third factor can be demonstrated in addition to the historical factor and the factor of symbolic phantasy. This is a physiological fact, which the poet Heine describes in the following lines:-

Was dem Menschen dient zum Seichen

Damit schafft er Seinesgleichen.

The sexual organ of the male has two functions; and there are those to whom this association is an annoyance. It serves for the evacuation of the bladder, and it carries out the act of love which sets the craving of the genital libido at rest. The child still believes that he can unite the two functions. According to a theory of his, babies are made by the man urinating into the woman’s body. But the adult knows that in reality the acts are mutually incompatible - as incompatible as fire and water. When the penis is in the state of excitation which led to its comparison with a bird, and while the sensations are being experienced which suggest the warmth of fire, urination is impossible; and conversely, when the organ is serving to evacuate urine (the water of the body) all its connections with the genital function seem to be quenched. The antithesis between the two functions might lead us to say that man quenches his own fire with his own water. And primal man, who had to understand the external world by the help of his own bodily sensations and states, would surely not have failed to notice and utilize the analogies pointed out to him by the behaviour of fire.

4787

WHY WAR?

(1933)

(EINSTEIN AND FREUD)

4788

Intentionally left blank

4789

WHY WAR?

Caputh near Potsdam, 30th July, 1932

Dear Professor Freud,

The proposal of the League of Nations and its International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation at Paris that I should invite a person, to be chosen by myself, to a frank exchange of views on any problem that I might select affords me a very welcome opportunity of conferring with you upon a question which, as things now are, seems the most insistent of all the problems civilization has to face. This is the problem: Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war? It is common knowledge that, with the advance of modern science, this issue has come to mean a matter of life and death for civilization as we know it; nevertheless, for all the zeal displayed, every attempt at its solution has ended in a lamentable breakdown.

I believe, moreover, that those whose duty it is to tackle the problem professionally and practically are growing only too aware of their impotence to deal with it, and have now a very lively desire to learn the views of men who, absorbed in the pursuit of science, can see world-problems in the perspective distance lends. As for me, the normal objective of my thought affords no insight into the dark places of human will and feeling. Thus, in the enquiry now proposed, I can do little more than seek to clarify the question at issue and, clearing the ground of the more obvious solutions, enable you to bring the light of your far-reaching knowledge of man’s instinctive life to bear upon the problem. There are certain psychological obstacles whose existence a layman in the mental sciences may dimly surmise, but whose interrelations and vagaries he is incompetent to fathom; you, I am convinced, will be able to suggest educative methods, lying more or less outside the scope of politics, which will eliminate these obstacles.

Why War?

4790

As one immune from nationalist bias, I personally see a simple way of dealing with the superficial (i.e. administrative) aspect of the problem: the setting up, by international consent, of a legislative and judicial body to settle every conflict arising between nations. Each nation would undertake to abide by the orders issued by this legislative body, to invoke its decision in every dispute, to accepts its judgements unreservedly and to carry out every measure the tribunal deems necessary for the execution of its decrees. But here, at the outset, I come up against a difficulty; a tribunal is a human institution which, in proportion as the power at its disposal is inadequate to enforce its verdicts, is all the more prone to suffer these to be deflected by extrajudicial pressure. This is a fact with which we have to reckon; law and might inevitably go hand in hand, and juridical decisions approach more nearly the ideal justice demanded by the community (in whose name and interests these verdicts are pronounced) in so far as the community has effective power to compel respect of its juridical ideal. But at present we are far from possessing any supranational organization competent to render verdicts of incontestable authority and enforce absolute submission to the execution of its verdicts. Thus I am led to my first axiom: the quest of international security involves the unconditional surrender by every nation, in a certain measure, of its liberty of action, its sovereignty that is to say, and it is clear beyond all doubt that no other road can lead to such security.

The ill-success, despite their obvious sincerity, of all the efforts made during the last decade to reach this goal leaves us no room to doubt that strong psychological factors are at work, which paralyse these efforts. Some of these factors are not far to seek. The craving for power which characterizes the governing class in every nation is hostile to any limitation of the national sovereignty. This political power-hunger is wont to batten on the activities of another group, whose aspirations are on purely mercenary, economic lines. I have specially in mind that small but determined group, active in every nation, composed of individuals who, indifferent to social considerations and restraints, regard warfare, the manufacture and sale of arms, simply as an occasion to advance their personal interests and enlarge their personal authority.

But recognition of this obvious fact is merely the first step towards an appreciation of the actual state of affairs. Another question follows hard upon it: How is it possible for this small clique to bend the will of the majority, who stand to lose and suffer by a state of war, to the service of their ambitions? (In speaking of the majority, I do not exclude soldiers of every rank who have chosen war as their profession, in the belief that they are serving to defend the highest interests of their race, and that attack is often the best method of defence.) An obvious answer to this question would seem to be that the minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them.

Why War?

4791

Yet even this answer does not provide a complete solution. Another question arises from it: How is it these devices succeed so well in rousing men to such wild enthusiasm, even to sacrifice their lives? Only one answer is possible. Because man has within him a lust for hatred and destruction. In normal times this passion exists in a latent state, it emerges only in unusual circumstances; but it is a comparatively easy task to call it into play and raise it to the power of a collective psychosis. Here lies, perhaps, the crux of all the complex of factors we are considering, an enigma that only the expert in the lore of human instincts can resolve.

And so we come to our last question. Is it possible to control man’s mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychoses of hate and destructiveness? Here I am thinking by no means only of the so-called uncultured masses. Experience proves that it is rather the so-called ‘Intelligentzia’ that is most apt to yield to these disastrous collective suggestions, since the intellectual has no direct contact with life in the raw, but encounters it in its easiest synthetic form - upon the printed page.

To conclude: I have so far been speaking only of wars between nations; what are known as international conflicts. But I am well aware that the aggressive instinct operates under other forms and in other circumstances. (I am thinking of civil wars, for instance, due in earlier days to religious zeal, but nowadays to social factors; or, again, the persecution of racial minorities.) But my insistence on what is the most typical, most cruel and extravagant form of conflict between man and man was deliberate, for here we have the best occasion of discovering ways and means to render all armed conflicts impossible.

I know that in your writings we may find answers, explicit or implied, to all the issues of this urgent and absorbing problem. But it would be of the greatest service to us all were you to present the problem of world peace in the light of your most recent discoveries, for such a presentation well might blaze the trail for new and fruitful modes of action.

Yours very sincerely,

A. EINSTEIN.

Why War?

4792

Vienna, September, 1932.

Dear Professor Einstein,

When I heard that you intended to invite me to an exchange of views on some subject that interested you and that seemed to deserve the interest of others besides yourself, I readily agreed. I expected you to choose a problem on the frontiers of what is knowable to-day, a problem to which each of us, a physicist and a psychologist, might have our own particular angle of approach and where we might come together from different directions upon the same ground. You have taken me by surprise, however, by posing the question of what can be done to protect mankind from the curse of war. I was scared at first by the thought of my - I had almost written ‘our’ - incapacity for dealing with what seemed to be a practical problem, a concern for statesmen. But I then realized that you had raised the question not as a natural scientist and physicist but as a philanthropist: you were following the promptings of the League of Nations just as Fridtjof Nansen, the polar explorer, took on the work of bringing help to the starving and homeless victims of the World War. I reflected, moreover, that I was not being asked to make practical proposals but only to set out the problem of avoiding war as it appears to a psychological observer. Here again you yourself have said almost all there is to say on the subject. But though you have taken the wind out of my sails I shall be glad to follow in your wake and content myself with confirming all you have said by amplifying it to the best of my knowledge - or conjecture.

Why War?

4793

You begin with the relation between Right and Might. There can be no doubt that that is the correct starting-point for our investigation. But may I replace the word ‘might’ by the balder and harsher word ‘violence’? To-day right and violence appear to us as antitheses. It can easily be shown, however, that the one has developed out of the other; and, if we go back to the earliest beginnings and see how that first came about, the problem is easily solved. You must forgive me if in what follows I go over familiar and commonly accepted ground as though it were new, but the thread of my argument requires it.

It is a general principle, then, that conflicts of interest between men are settled by the use of violence. This is true of the whole animal kingdom, from which men have no business to exclude themselves. In the case of men, no doubt, conflicts of opinion occur as well which may reach the highest pitch of abstraction and which seem to demand some other technique for their settlement. That, however, is a later complication. To begin with, in a small human horde, it was superior muscular strength which decided who owned things or whose will should prevail. Muscular strength was soon supplemented and replaced by the use of tools: the winner was the one who had the better weapons or who used them the more skilfully. From the moment at which weapons were introduced, intellectual superiority already began to replace brute muscular strength; but the final purpose of the fight remained the same - one side or the other was to be compelled to abandon his claim or his objection by the damage inflicted on him and by the crippling of his strength. That purpose was most completely achieved if the victor’s violence eliminated his opponent permanently - that is to say, killed him. This had two advantages: he could not renew his opposition and his fate deterred others from following his example. In addition to this, killing an enemy satisfied an instinctual inclination which I shall have to mention later. The intention to kill might be countered by a reflection that the enemy could be employed in performing useful services if he were left alive in an intimidated condition. In that case the victor’s violence was content with subjugating him instead of killing him. This was a first beginning of the idea of sparing an enemy’s life, but thereafter the victor had to reckon with his defeated opponent’s lurking thirst for revenge and sacrificed some of his own security.

Why War?

4794

Such, then, was the original state of things: domination by whoever had the greater might - domination by brute violence or by violence supported by intellect. As we know, this régime was altered in the course of evolution. There was a path that led from violence to right or law. What was that path? It is my belief that there was only one: the path which led by way of the fact that the superior strength of a single individual could be rivalled by the union of several weak ones. ‘L’union fait la force.’ Violence could be broken by union, and the power of those who were united now represented law in contrast to the violence of the single individual. Thus we see that right is the might of a community. It is still violence, ready to be directed against any individual who resists it; it works by the same methods and follows the same purposes. The only real difference lies in the fact that what prevails is no longer the violence of an individual but that of a community. But in order that the transition from violence to this new right or justice may be effected, one psychological condition must be fulfilled. The union of the majority must be a stable and lasting one. If it were only brought about for the purpose of combating a single dominant individual and were dissolved after his defeat, nothing would have been accomplished. The next person who thought himself superior in strength would once more seek to set up a dominion by violence and the game would be repeated ad infinitum. The community must be maintained permanently, must be organized, must draw up regulations to anticipate the risk of rebellion and must institute authorities to see that those regulations - the laws - are respected and to superintend the execution of legal acts of violence. The recognition of a community of interests such as these leads to the growth of emotional ties between the members of a united group of people - communal feelings which are the true source of its strength.

Here, I believe, we already have all the essentials: violence overcome by the transference of power to a larger unity, which is held together by emotional ties between its members. What remains to be said is no more than an expansion and a repetition of this.

Why War?

4795

The situation is simple so long as the community consists only of a number of equally strong individuals. The laws of such an association will determine the extent to which, if the security of communal life is to be guaranteed, each individual must surrender his personal liberty to turn his strength to violent uses. But a state of rest of that kind is only theoretically conceivable. In actuality the position is complicated by the fact that from its very beginning the community comprises elements of unequal strength - men and women, parents and children - and soon, as a result of war and conquest, it also comes to include victors and vanquished, who turn into masters and slaves. The justice of the community then becomes an expression of the unequal degrees of power obtaining within it; the laws are made by and for the ruling members and find little room for the rights of those in subjection. From that time forward there are two factors at work in the community which are sources of unrest over matters of law but tend at the same time to a further growth of law. First, attempts are made by certain of the rulers to set themselves above the prohibitions which apply to everyone - they seek, that is, to go back from a dominion of law to a dominion of violence. Secondly, the oppressed members of the group make constant efforts to obtain more power and to have any changes that are brought about in that direction recognized in the laws - they press forward, that is, from unequal justice to equal justice for all. This second tendency becomes especially important if a real shift of power occurs within a community, as may happen as a result of a number of historical factors. In that case right may gradually adapt itself to the new distribution of power; or, as is more frequent, the ruling class is unwilling to recognize the change, and rebellion and civil war follow, with a temporary suspension of law and new attempts at a solution by violence, ending in the establishment of a fresh rule of law. There is yet another source from which modifications of law may arise, and one of which the expression is invariably peaceful: it lies in the cultural transformation of the members of the community. This, however, belongs properly in another connection and must be considered later.

Why War?

4796

Thus we see that the violent solution of conflicts of interest is not avoided even inside a community. But the everyday necessities and common concerns that are inevitable where people live together in one place tend to bring such struggles to a swift conclusion and under such conditions there is an increasing probability that a peaceful solution will be found. Yet a glance at the history of the human race reveals an endless series of conflicts between one community and another or several others, between larger and smaller units - between cities, provinces, races, nations, empires - which have almost always been settled by force of arms. Wars of this kind end either in the spoliation or in the complete overthrow and conquest of one of the parties. It is impossible to make any sweeping judgement upon war of conquest. Some, such as those waged by the Mongols and Turks, have brought nothing but evil. Others, on the contrary, have contributed to the transformation of violence into law by establishing larger units within which the use of violence was made impossible and in which a fresh system of law led to the solution of conflicts. In this way the conquests of the Romans gave the countries round the Mediterranean the priceless pax Romana, and the greed of the French kings to extend their dominions created a peacefully united and flourishing France. Paradoxical as it may sound, it must be admitted that war might be a far from inappropriate means of establishing the eagerly desired reign of ‘everlasting’ peace, since it is in a position to create the large units within which a powerful central government makes further wars impossible. Nevertheless it fails in this purpose, for the results of conquest are as a rule short-lived: the newly created units fall apart once again, usually owing to a lack of cohesion between the portions that have been united by violence. Hitherto, moreover, the unifications created by conquest, though of considerable extent, have only been partial, and the conflicts between these have called out more than ever for violent solution. Thus the result of all these warlike efforts has only been that the human race has exchanged numerous, and indeed unending, minor wars for wars on a grand scale that are rare but all the more destructive.

Why War?

4797

If we turn to our own times, we arrive at the same conclusion which you have reached by a shorter path. Wars will only be prevented with certainty if mankind unites in setting up a central authority to which the right of giving judgement upon all conflicts of interest shall be handed over. There are clearly two separate requirements involved in this: the creation of a supreme agency and its endowment with the necessary power. One without the other would be useless. The League of Nations is designed as an agency of this kind, but the second condition has not been fulfilled: the League of Nations has no power of its own and can only acquire it if the members of the new union, the separate States, are ready to resign it. And at the moment there seems very little prospect of this. The institution of the League of Nations would, however, be wholly unintelligible if one ignored the fact that here was a bold attempt such as has seldom (perhaps, indeed, never on such a scale) been made before. It is an attempt to base upon an appeal to certain idealistic attitudes of mind the authority (that is, the coercive influence) which otherwise rests on the possession of power. We have seen that a community is held together by two things: the compelling force of violence and the emotional ties (identifications is the technical name) between its members. If one of the factors is absent, the community may possibly be held together by the other. The ideas that are appealed to can, of course, only have any significance if they give expression to important affinities between the members, and the question arises of how much strength such ideas can exert. History teaches us that they have been to some extent effective. For instance, the Panhellenic idea, the sense of being superior to the surrounding barbarians - an idea which was so powerfully expressed in the Amphictyonic Council, the Oracles and the Games - was sufficiently strong to mitigate the customs of war among Greeks, though evidently not sufficiently strong to prevent warlike disputes between the different sections of the Greek nation or even to restrain a city or confederation of cities from allying itself with the Persian foe in order to gain an advantage over a rival. The community of feeling among Christians, powerful though it was, was equally unable at the time of the Renaissance to deter Christian States, whether large or small, from seeking the Sultan’s aid in their wars with one another. Nor does any idea exist to-day which could be expected to exert a unifying authority of the sort. Indeed it is all too clear that the national ideals by which nations are at present swayed operate in a contrary direction. Some people are inclined to prophesy that it will not be possible to make an end of war until Communist ways of thinking have found universal acceptance. But that aim is in any case a very remote one to-day, and perhaps it could only be reached after the most fearful civil wars. Thus the attempt to replace actual force by the force of ideas seems at present to be doomed to failure. We shall be making a false calculation if we disregard the fact that law was originally brute violence and that even to-day it cannot do without the support of violence.

Why War?

4798

I can now proceed to add a gloss to another of your remarks. You express astonishment at the fact that it is so easy to make men enthusiastic about a war and add your suspicions that there is something at work in them - an instinct for hatred and destruction - which goes halfway to meet the efforts of the warmongers. Once again, I can only express my entire agreement. We believe in the existence of an instinct of that kind and have in fact been occupied during the last few years in studying its manifestations. Will you allow me to take this opportunity of putting before you a portion of the theory of the instincts which, after much tentative groping and many fluctuations of opinion, has been reached by workers in the field of psycho-analysis?

According to our hypothesis human instincts are of only two kinds: those which seek to preserve and unite - which we call ‘erotic’, exactly in the sense in which Plato uses the word ‘Eros’ in his Symposium, or ‘sexual’, with a deliberate extension of the popular conception of ‘sexuality’ - and those which seek to destroy and kill and which we group together as the aggressive or destructive instinct. As you see, this is in fact no more than a theoretical clarification of the universally familiar opposition between Love and Hate which may perhaps have some fundamental relation to the polarity of attraction and repulsion that plays a part in your own field of knowledge. But we must not be too hasty in introducing ethical judgements of good and evil. Neither of these instincts is any less essential than the other; the phenomena of life arise from the concurrent or mutually opposing action of both. Now it seems as though an instinct of the one sort can scarcely ever operate in isolation; it is always accompanied - or, as we say, alloyed - with a certain quota from the other side, which modifies its aim or is, in some cases, what enables it to achieve that aim. Thus, for instance, the instinct of self-preservation is certainly of an erotic kind, but it must nevertheless have aggressiveness at its disposal if it is to fulfil its purpose. So, too, the instinct of love, when it is directed towards an object, stands in need of some contribution from the instinct for mastery if it is in any way to obtain possession of that object. The difficulty of isolating the two classes of instinct in their actual manifestations is indeed what has so long prevented us from recognizing them.

Why War?

4799

If you will follow me a little further, you will see that human actions are subject to another complication of a different kind. It is very rarely that an action is the work of a single instinctual impulse (which must in itself be compounded of Eros and destructiveness). In order to make an action possible there must be as a rule a combination of such compounded motives. This was perceived long ago by a specialist in your own subject, a Professor G. C. Lichtenberg who taught physics at Göttingen during our classical age - though perhaps he was even more remarkable as a psychologist than as a physicist. He invented a Compass of Motives, for he wrote: ‘The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds and might be given names in a similar way: for instance, "bread-bread-fame" or "fame-fame-bread".’ So that when human beings are incited to war they may have a whole number of motives for assenting - some noble and some base, some which are openly declared and others which are never mentioned. There is no need to enumerate them all. A lust for aggression and destruction is certainly among them: the countless cruelties in history and in our everyday lives vouch for its existence and its strength. The satisfaction of these destructive impulses is of course facilitated by their admixture with others of an erotic and idealistic kind. When we read of the atrocities of the past, it sometimes seems as though the idealistic motives served only as an excuse for the destructive appetites; and sometimes - in the case, for instance, of the cruelties of the Inquisition - it seems as though the idealistic motives had pushed themselves forward in consciousness, while the destructive ones lent them an unconscious reinforcement. Both may be true.

Why War?

4800

I fear I may be abusing your interest, which is after all concerned with the prevention of war and not with our theories. Nevertheless I should like to linger for a moment over our destructive instinct, whose popularity is by no means equal to its importance. As a result of a little speculation, we have come to suppose that this instinct is at work in every living creature and is striving to bring it to ruin and to reduce life to its original condition of inanimate matter. Thus it quite seriously deserves to be called a death instinct, while the erotic instincts represent the effort to live. The death instinct turns into the destructive instinct when, with the help of special organs, it is directed outwards, on to objects. The organism preserves its own life, so to say, by destroying an extraneous one. Some portion of the death instinct, however, remains operative within the organism, and we have sought to trace quite a number of normal and pathological phenomena to this internalization of the destructive instinct. We have even been guilty of the heresy of attributing the origin of conscience to this diversion inwards of aggressiveness. You will notice that it is by no means a trivial matter if this process is carried too far: it is positively unhealthy. On the other hand if these forces are turned to destruction in the external world, the organism will be relieved and the effect must be beneficial. This would serve as a biological justification for all the ugly and dangerous impulses against which we are struggling. It must be admitted that they stand nearer to Nature than does our resistance to them for which an explanation also needs to be found. It may perhaps seem to you as though our theories are a kind of mythology and, in the present case, not even an agreeable one. But does not every science come in the end to a kind of mythology like this? Cannot the same be said to-day of your own Physics?

For our immediate purpose then, this much follows from what has been said: there is no use in trying to get rid of men’s aggressive inclinations. We are told that in certain happy regions of the earth, where nature provides in abundance everything that man requires, there are races whose life is passed in tranquillity and who know neither coercion nor aggression. I can scarcely believe it and I should be glad to hear more of these fortunate beings. The Russian Communists, too, hope to be able to cause human aggressiveness to disappear by guaranteeing the satisfaction of all material needs and by establishing equality in other respects among all the members of the community. That, in my opinion, is an illusion. They themselves are armed to-day with the most scrupulous care and not the least important of the methods by which they keep their supporters together is hatred of everyone beyond their frontiers. In any case, as you yourself have remarked, there is no question of getting rid entirely of human aggressive impulses; it is enough to try to divert them to such an extent that they need not find expression in war.

Why War?

4801

Our mythological theory of instincts makes it easy for us to find a formula for indirect methods of combating war. If willingness to engage in war is an effect of the destructive instinct, the most obvious plan will be to bring Eros, its antagonist, into play against it. Anything that encourages the growth of emotional ties between men must operate against war. These ties may be of two kinds. In the first place they may be relations resembling those towards a loved object, though without having a sexual aim. There is no need for psycho-analysis to be ashamed to speak of love in this connection, for religion itself uses the same words: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’ This, however, is more easily said than done. The second kind of emotional tie is by means of identification. Whatever leads men to share important interests produces this community of feeling, these identifications. And the structure of human society is to a large extent based on them.

A complaint which you make about the abuse of authority brings me to another suggestion for the indirect combating of the propensity to war. One instance of the innate and ineradicable inequality of men is their tendency to fall into the two classes of leaders and followers. The latter constitute the vast majority; they stand in need of an authority which will make decisions for them and to which they for the most part offer an unqualified submission. This suggests that more care should be taken than hitherto to educate an upper stratum of men with independent minds, not open to intimidation and eager in the pursuit of truth, whose business it would be to give direction to the dependent masses. It goes without saying that the encroachments made by the executive power of the State and the prohibition laid by the Church upon freedom of thought are far from propitious for the production of a class of this kind. The ideal condition of things would of course be a community of men who had subordinated their instinctual life to the dictatorship of reason. Nothing else could unite men so completely and so tenaciously, even if there were no emotional ties between them. But in all probability that is a Utopian expectation. No doubt the other indirect methods of preventing war are more practicable, though they promise no rapid success. An unpleasant picture comes to one’s mind of mills that grind so slowly that people may starve before they get their flour.

Why War?

4802

The result, as you see, is not very fruitful when an unworldly theoretician is called in to advise on an urgent practical problem. It is a better plan to devote oneself in every particular case to meeting the danger with whatever means lie to hand. I should like, however, to discuss one more question, which you do not mention in your letter but which specially interests me. Why do you and I and so many other people rebel so violently against war? Why do we not accept it as another of the many painful calamities of life? After all, it seems to be quite a natural thing, to have a good biological basis and in practice to be scarcely avoidable. There is no need to be shocked at my raising this question. For the purpose of an investigation such as this, one may perhaps be allowed to wear a mask of assumed detachment. The answer to my question will be that we react to war in this way because everyone has a right to his own life, because war puts an end to human lives that are full of hope, because it brings individual men into humiliating situations, because it compels them against their will to murder other men, and because it destroys precious material objects which have been produced by the labours of humanity. Other reasons besides might be given, such as that in its present-day form war is no longer an opportunity for achieving the old ideals of heroism and that owing to the perfection of instruments of destruction a future war might involve the extermination of one or perhaps both of the antagonists. All this is true, and so incontestably true that one can only feel astonished that the waging of war has not yet been unanimously repudiated. No doubt debate is possible upon one or two of these points. It may be questioned whether a community ought not to have a right to dispose of individual lives; every war is not open to condemnation to an equal degree; so long as there exist countries and nations that are prepared for the ruthless destruction of others, those others must be armed for war. But I will not linger over any of these issues; they are not what you want to discuss with me, and I have something different in mind. It is my opinion that the main reason why we rebel against war is that we cannot help doing so. We are pacifists because we are obliged to be for organic reasons. And we then find no difficulty in producing arguments to justify our attitude.

Why War?

4803

No doubt this requires some explanation. My belief is this. For incalculable ages mankind has been passing through a process of evolution of culture. (Some people, I know, prefer to use the term ‘civilization’.) We owe to that process the best of what we have become, as well as a good part of what we suffer from. Though its causes and beginnings are obscure and its outcome uncertain, some of its characteristics are easy to perceive. It may perhaps be leading to the extinction of the human race, for in more than one way it impairs the sexual function; uncultivated races and backward strata of the population are already multiplying more rapidly than highly cultivated ones. The process is perhaps comparable to the domestication of certain species of animals and it is undoubtedly accompanied by physical alterations; but we are still unfamiliar with the notion that the evolution of civilization is an organic process of this kind. The psychical modifications that go along with the process of civilization are striking and unambiguous. They consist in a progressive displacement of instinctual aims and a restriction of instinctual impulses. Sensations which were pleasurable to our ancestors have become indifferent or even intolerable to ourselves; there are organic grounds for the changes in our ethical and aesthetic ideals. Of the psychological characteristics of civilization two appear to be the most important: a strengthening of the intellect, which is beginning to govern instinctual life, and an internalization of the aggressive impulses, with all its consequent advantages and perils. Now war is in the crassest opposition to the psychical attitude imposed on us by the process of civilization, and for that reason we are bound to rebel against it; we simply cannot any longer put up with it. This is not merely an intellectual and emotional repudiation; we pacifists have a constitutional intolerance of war, an idiosyncrasy magnified, as it were, to the highest degree. It seems, indeed, as though the lowering of aesthetic standards in war plays a scarcely smaller part in our rebellion than do its cruelties.

Why War?

4804

And how long shall we have to wait before the rest of mankind become pacifists too? There is no telling. But it may not be Utopian to hope that these two factors, the cultural attitude and the justified dread of the consequences of a future war, may result within a measurable time in putting an end to the waging of war. By what paths or by what side-tracks this will come about we cannot guess. But one thing we can say: whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war.

I trust you will forgive me if what I have said has disappointed you, and I remain, with kindest regards,

Sincerely yours,

SIGM. FREUD

4805

MY CONTACT WITH JOSEF POPPER-LYNKEUS

(1932)

4806

Intentionally left blank

4807

MY CONTACT WITH JOSEF POPPER-LYNKEUS

It was in the winter of 1899 that my book on The Interpretation of Dreams (though its title-page was post-dated into the new century) at length lay before me. This work was the product of the labours of four or five years and its origin was unusual. Holding a lectureship in Nervous Diseases at the University, I had attempted to support myself and my rapidly increasing family by a medical practice among the so-called ‘neurotics’ of whom there were only too many in our society. But the task proved harder than I had expected. The ordinary methods of treatment clearly offered little or no help: other paths must be followed. And how was it by any means possible to give patients help when one understood nothing of their illness, nothing of the causes of their sufferings or of the meaning of their complaints? So I eagerly sought direction and instruction from the great Charcot in Paris and from Bernheim at Nancy; finally, an observation made by my teacher and friend, Josef Breuer of Vienna, seemed to open a new prospect for understanding and therapeutic success.

For these new experiments made it a certainty that the patients whom we described as neurotic were in some sense suffering from mental disturbances and ought therefore to be treated by psychological methods. Our interest therefore necessarily turned to psychology. The psychology which ruled at that time in the academic schools of philosophy had very little to offer and nothing at all for our purposes: we had to discover from the start both our methods and the theoretical hypotheses behind them. So I worked in this direction, first in collaboration with Breuer and afterwards independently of him. In the end I made it a part of my technique to require my patients to tell me without criticism whatever occurred to their minds, even if they were ideas which did not seem to make sense or which it was distressing to report.

My Contact With Josef Popper-Lynkeus

4808

When they fell in with my instructions they told me their dreams, amongst other things, as though they were of the same kind as their other thoughts. This was a plain hint that I should assign as much importance to these dreams as to other, intelligible, phenomena. They, however, were not intelligible, but strange, confused, absurd: like dreams, in fact - which for that very reason, were condemned by science as random and senseless twitchings of the organ of the mind. If my patients were right - and they seemed only to be repeating the ancient beliefs held by unscientific men for thousands of years - I was faced by the task of ‘interpreting dreams’ in a way that could stand up against scientific criticism.

To begin with, I naturally understood no more about my patients’ dreams than the dreamers did themselves. But by applying to these dreams, and more particularly to my own dreams, the procedure which I had already used for the study of other abnormal psychological structures, I succeeded in answering most of the questions which could be raised by an interpretation of dreams. There were many such questions: What do we dream about? Why do we dream at all? What is the origin of all the strange characteristics which distinguish dreams from waking life? - and many more such questions besides. Some of the answers were easily given and turned out to confirm views that had already been put forward; but others involved completely new hypotheses with regard to the structure and functioning of the apparatus of the mind. People dream about the things that have engaged their minds during the waking day. People dream in order to allay impulses that seek to disturb sleep, and in order to be able to sleep on. But why was it possible for dreams to present such a strange appearance, so confusedly senseless, so obviously contrasted with the content of waking thought, in spite of being concerned with the same material? There could be no doubt that dreams were only a substitute for a rational process of thought and could be interpreted - that is to say, translated into a rational process. But what needed explaining was the fact of the distortion which the dream-work had carried out upon the rational and intelligible material.

My Contact With Josef Popper-Lynkeus

4809

Dream-distortion was the profoundest and most difficult problem of dream life. And light was thrown on it by the following consideration, which placed dreams in a class along with other psychopathological formations and revealed them, as it were, as the normal psychoses of human beings. For our mind, that precious instrument by whose means we maintain ourselves in life, is no peacefully self-contained unity. It is rather to be compared with a modern State in which a mob, eager for enjoyment and destruction, has to be held down forcibly by a prudent superior class. The whole flux of our mental life and everything that finds expression in our thoughts are derivations and representatives of the multifarious instincts that are innate in our physical constitution. But these instincts are not all equally susceptible to direction and education, or equally ready to fall in with the demands of the external world and of human society. A number of them have retained their primitive, ungovernable nature; if we let them have their way, they would infallibly bring us to ruin. Consequently, learning by experience, we have developed organizations in our mind which, in the form of inhibitions, set themselves up against the direct manifestations of the instincts. Every impulse in the nature of a wish that arises from the sources of instinctual energy must submit itself to examination by the highest agencies of our mind, and, if it is not approved, is rejected and restrained from exercising any influence upon our movements - that is, from coming into execution. Often enough, indeed, such wishes are even forbidden to enter consciousness, which is habitually unaware even of the existence of these dangerous instinctual sources. We describe such impulses as being repressed from the point of view of consciousness, and as surviving only in the unconscious. If what is repressed contrives somehow to force its way into consciousness or into movement or into both, we are no longer normal: at that point the whole range of neurotic and psychotic symptoms arise. The maintenance of the necessary inhibitions and repressions imposes upon our mind a great expenditure of energy, from which it is glad to be relieved. A good opportunity for this seems to be offered at night by the state of sleep, since sleep involves a cessation of our motor functions. The situation seems safe, and the severity of our internal police-force may therefore be relaxed. It is not entirely withdrawn, since one cannot be certain: it may be that the unconscious never sleeps at all. And now the reduction of pressure upon the repressed unconscious produces its effect. Wishes arise from it which during sleep might find the entrance to consciousness open. If we were to know them we should be appalled, alike by their subject-matter, their unrestraint and indeed the mere possibility of their existence. This, however, occurs only seldom, and when it does we awake as speedily as possible, in a state of fear. But as a rule our consciousness does not experience the dream as it really was. It is true that the inhibitory forces (the dream censorship, as we may call them) are not completely awake, but neither are they wholly asleep. They have had an influence on the dream while it was struggling to find an expression in words and pictures, they have got rid of what was most objectionable, they have altered other parts of it till they are unrecognizable, they have severed real connections while introducing false ones, until the honest but brutal wishful phantasy which lay behind the dream has turned into the manifest dream as we remember it - more or less confused and almost always strange and incomprehensible. Thus the dream (or the distortion which characterizes it) is the expression of a compromise, the evidence of a conflict between the mutually incompatible impulses and strivings of our mental life. And do not let us forget that the same process, the same interplay of forces, which explains the dreams of a normal sleeper, gives us the key to understanding all the phenomena of neurosis and psychosis.

My Contact With Josef Popper-Lynkeus

4810

I must apologize if I have hitherto talked so much about myself and my work on the problems of the dream; but it was a necessary preliminary to what follows. My explanation of dream-distortion seemed to me new: I had nowhere found anything like it. Years later (I can no longer remember when) I came across Josef Popper-Lynkeus’s book Phantasien eines Realisten. One of the stories contained in it bore the title of ‘Träumen wie Wachen’, and it could not fail to arouse my deepest interest. There was a description in it of a man who could boast that he had never dreamt anything nonsensical. His dreams might be fantastic, like fairy tales, but they were not enough out of harmony with the waking world for it to be possible to say definitely that ‘they were impossible or absurd in themselves’. Translated into my manner of speech this meant that in the case of this man no dream-distortion occurred; and the reason produced for its absence put one at the same time in possession of the reason for its occurrence. Popper allowed the man complete insight into the reasons for his peculiarity. He made him say: ‘Order and harmony reign both in my thoughts and in my feelings, nor do the two struggle with each other.... I am one and undivided. Other people are divided and their two parts - waking and dreaming - are almost perpetually at war with each other.’ And again, on the question of the interpretation of dreams: ‘That is certainly no easy task; but with a little attention on the part of the dreamer himself it should no doubt always succeed. - You ask why it is that for the most part it does not succeed? In you other people there seems always to be something that lies concealed in your dreams, something unchaste in a special and higher sense, a certain secret quality in your being which it is hard to follow. And that is why your dreams so often seem to be without meaning or even to be nonsense. But in the deepest sense this is not in the least so; indeed, it cannot be so at all - for it is always the same man, whether he is awake or dreaming.’

Now, if we leave psychological terminology out of account, this was the very same explanation of dream-distortion that I had arrived at from my study of dreams. Distortion was a compromise, something in its very nature disingenuous, the product of a conflict between thought and feeling, or, as I had put it, between what is conscious and what is repressed. Where a conflict of this kind was not present and repression was unnecessary, dreams could not be strange or senseless. The man who dreamed in a way no different from that in which he thought while awake was granted by Popper the very condition of internal harmony which, as a social reformer, he aimed at producing in the body politic. And if Science informs us that such a man, wholly without evil and falseness and devoid of all repressions, does not exist and could not survive, yet we may guess that, so far as an approximation to this ideal is possible, it had found its realization in the person of Popper himself.

My Contact With Josef Popper-Lynkeus

4811

Overwhelmed by meeting with such wisdom, I began to read all his works - his books on Voltaire, on Religion, on War, on the Universal Provision of Subsistence, etc. - till there was built up clearly before my eyes a picture of this simple-minded, great man, who was a thinker and a critic and at the same time a kindly humanitarian and reformer. I reflected much over the rights of the individual which he advocated and to which I should gladly have added my support had I not been restrained by the thought that neither the processes of Nature nor the aims of human society quite justified such claims. A special feeling of sympathy drew me to him, since he too had clearly had painful experience of the bitterness of the life of a Jew and of the hollowness of the ideals of present-day civilization. Yet I never saw him in the flesh. He knew of me through common acquaintances, and I once had occasion to answer a letter from him in which he asked for some piece of information. But I never sought him out. My innovations in psychology had estranged me from my contemporaries, and especially from the older among them: often enough when I approached some man whom I had honoured from a distance, I found myself repelled, as it were, by his lack of understanding for what had become my whole life to me. And after all Josef Popper had been a physicist: he had been a friend of Ernst Mach. I was anxious that the happy impression of our agreement upon the problem of dream-distortion should not be spoilt. So it came about that I put off calling upon him till it was too late and I could now only salute his bust in the gardens in front of our Rathaus.

4812

SÁNDOR FERENCZI

(1933)

4813

Intentionally left blank

4814

SÁNDOR FERENCZI

We have learnt by experience that wishing costs little; so we generously present one another with the best and warmest of wishes. And of these the foremost is for a long life. A well known Eastern tale reveals the double-sidedness of precisely this wish. The Sultan had his horoscope cast by two wise men. ‘Thy lot is happy, master!’ said one of them. ‘It is written in the stars that thou shalt see all thy kinsmen die before thee.’ This prophet was executed. ‘Thy lot is happy!’ said the other too, ‘for I read in the stars that thou shalt outlive all thy kinsmen.’ This one was richly rewarded. Both had given expression to the fulfilment of the same wish.

It fell to me in January, 1926, to write an obituary of our unforgettable friend, Karl Abraham. A few years earlier, in 1923, I could congratulate Sándor Ferenczi on the completion of his fiftieth year. To-day, scarcely a decade later, it grieves me that I have outlived him too. In what I wrote for his birthday I was able to celebrate openly his versatility and originality and the richness of his gifts; but the discretion imposed on a friend forbade my speaking of his lovable and affectionate personality, with its readiness to welcome everything of significance.

Since the days when he was led to me by his interest in psycho-analysis, still in its youth, we have shared many things with each other. I invited him to go with me to Worcester, Massachusetts, when in 1909 I was called upon to lecture there during a week of celebrations. In the morning, before the time had come for my lecture to begin, we would walk together in front of the University building and I would ask him to suggest what I should talk about that day. He thereupon gave me a sketch of what, half an hour later, I improvised in my lecture. In this way he had a share in the origin of the Five Lectures. Soon after this, at the Nuremberg Congress of 1910, I arranged that he should propose the organization of analysts into an international association - a scheme which we had thought out together. With slight modifications it was accepted and is in force to this day. For many successive years we spent the autumn holidays together in Italy, and a number of papers that appeared later in the literature under his or my name took their first shape in our talks there. When the outbreak of the World War put an end to our freedom of movement, and paralysed our analytic activity as well, he made use of the interval to begin his analysis with me. This met with a break when he was called up for military service, but he was able to resume it later. The feeling of a secure common bond, which grew up between us from so many shared experiences, was not interrupted when, late in life unfortunately, he was united to the outstanding woman who mourns him to-day as his widow.

Sandor Ferenczi

4815

Ten years ago, when the Internationale Zeitschrift dedicated a special number to Ferenczi on his fiftieth birthday, he had already published most of the works which have made all analysts into his pupils. But he was holding back his most brilliant and most fertile achievement. I knew of it, and in the closing sentence of my contribution I urged him to give it to us. Then, in 1924, his Versuch einer Genitaltheorie appeared. This little book is a biological rather than a psycho-analytic study; it is an application of the attitudes and insights associated with psycho-analysis to the biology of the sexual processes and, beyond them, to organic life in general. It was perhaps the boldest application of psycho-analysis that was ever attempted. As its governing thought it lays stress on the conservative nature of the instincts, which seek to re-establish every state of things that has been abandoned owing to an external interference. Symbols are recognized as evidence of ancient connections. Impressive instances are adduced to show how the characteristics of what is psychical preserve traces of primaeval changes in the bodily substance. When one has read this work, one seems to understand many peculiarities of sexual life of which one had never previously been able to obtain a comprehensive view, and one finds oneself the richer for hints that promise a deep insight into wide fields of biology. It is a vain task to attempt already to-day to distinguish what can be accepted as an authentic discovery from what seeks, in the fashion of a scientific phantasy, to guess at future knowledge. We lay the little book aside with a feeling: ‘This is almost too much to take in at a first reading; I will read it again after a while.’ But it is not only I who feel like this. It is probable that some time in the future there will really be a ‘bio-analysis’, as Ferenczi has prophesied, and it will have to cast back to the Versuch einer Genitaltheorie.

Sandor Ferenczi

4816

After this summit of achievement, it came about that our friend slowly drifted away from us. On his return from a period of work in America he seemed to withdraw more and more into solitary work, though he had previously taken the liveliest share in all that happened in analytic circles. We learnt that one single problem had monopolized his interest. The need to cure and to help had become paramount in him. He had probably set himself aims which, with our therapeutic means, are altogether out of reach to-day. From unexhausted springs of emotion the conviction was borne in upon him that one could effect far more with one’s patients if one gave them enough of the love which they had longed for as children. He wanted to discover how this could be carried out within the framework of the psycho-analytic situation; and so long as he had not succeeded in this, he kept apart, no longer certain, perhaps, of agreement with his friends. Wherever it may have been that the road he had started along would have led him, he could not pursue it to the end. Signs were slowly revealed in him of a grave organic destructive process which had probably overshadowed his life for many years already. Shortly before completing his sixtieth year he succumbed to pernicious anaemia. It is impossible to believe that the history of our science will ever forget him.

May 1933

4817

THE SUBTLETIES OF A FAULTY ACTION

(1935)

4818

Intentionally left blank

4819

THE SUBTLETIES OF A FAULTY ACTION

I was preparing a birthday present for a woman friend - a small engraved gem for insertion into a ring. It was fixed in the centre of a piece of stout cardboard and on this I wrote the following words: ‘Voucher for the supply by Messrs. L., jewellers, of a gold ring . . . for the attached stone bearing an engraved ship with sail and oars.’ But at the point at which I have here left a gap, between ‘ring’ and ‘for’ there stood a word which I was obliged to cross out since it was entirely irrelevant. It was the little word ‘bis’. Why should I have written it at all?

When I read the short inscription through, I was struck by the fact that it contained the word ‘für’ twice in rapid succession: ‘for the supply’ - ‘for the attached stone’. That sounded ugly and should be avoided. It then occurred to me that ‘bis’ had been substituted for ‘für’ in an attempt to escape this stylistic awkwardness. No doubt that was so; but it was an attempt that made use of remarkably inadequate means. The preposition ‘bis’ was quite out of place in this context and could not possibly be substituted for the necessary ‘für’. So why precisely ‘bis’?

But perhaps the word ‘bis’ was not the preposition determining a time-limit. It may have been something totally different - the Latin ‘bis’ - ‘for a second time’, which has retained its meaning in French. ‘Ne bis in idem’ is a maxim of Roman law. ‘Bis! bis!’ cries a Frenchman if he wants a performance repeated. So that must be the explanation of my senseless slip of the pen. I was being warned against the second ‘für’, against a repetition of the same word. Something else must be put instead of it. The chance identity in sound between the foreign word ‘bis’ which embodied the criticism of the original phraseology and the German preposition made it possible to insert ‘bis’ instead of ‘für’ as though by a slip of the pen. But this mistake gained its purpose not by being made, but only after it had been corrected. I had to cross out the ‘bis’ and in so doing I had myself, so to speak, done away with the repetition which was disturbing me. A variant, not without interest, of the mechanism of a parapraxis!

The Subtleties Of A Faulty Action

4820

I felt very much pleased with this solution. But in self-analysis the danger of incompleteness is particularly great. One is too soon satisfied with a part explanation, behind which resistance may easily be keeping back something that is more important perhaps. I related this little analysis to my daughter, and she immediately saw how it went on:

‘But you gave her a stone like that for a ring once before. That’s probably the repetition you want to avoid. One doesn’t like always to be making the same present.’ I was convinced by this; the objection was obviously to a repetition of the same present, not of the same word. There had been a displacement on to something trivial with the object of diverting attention from something more important: an aesthetic difficulty, perhaps, in place of an instinctual conflict.

For it was easy to discover the further sequel. I was looking for a motive for not making a present of the stone, and that motive was provided by the reflection that I had already made the same (or a very similar) present. Why should this objection have been concealed and disguised? Very soon I saw clearly why. I wanted not to give the stone away at all. I liked it very much myself.

The explanation of this parapraxis was found without raising any great difficulties. Indeed, a consoling thought soon occurred to me: regrets of this kind only enhance the value of a gift. What sort of gift would it be if one were not a little bit sorry to part with it? Nevertheless the episode enables one to realize once more how complicated the most unobtrusive and apparently simplest mental processes may be. I made a slip in writing out some instructions - put in a ‘bis’ where a ‘für’ was needed - I noticed it and corrected it: a small mistake, or rather attempt at a mistake, and yet based upon this large number of premisses and dynamic determinants! Indeed, the mistake could not have occurred if the material had not been particularly favourable.

4821

A DISTURBANCE OF MEMORY ON THE ACROPOLIS

(1936)

4822

Intentionally left blank

4823

A DISTURBANCE OF MEMORY ON THE ACROPOLIS

AN OPEN LETTER TO ROMAIN ROLLAND ON THE

OCCASION OF HIS SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY

My dear Friend,

I have been urgently pressed to make some written contribution to the celebration of your seventieth birthday and I have made long efforts to find something that might in any way be worthy of you and might give expression to my admiration for your love of the truth, for your courage in your beliefs and for your affection and good will towards humanity; or, again, something that might bear witness to my gratitude to you as a writer who has afforded me so many moments of exaltation and pleasure. But it was in vain. I am ten years older than you and my powers of production are at an end. All that I can find to offer you is the gift of an impoverished creature, who has ‘seen better days’.

You know that the aim of my scientific work was to throw light upon unusual, abnormal or pathological manifestations of the mind - that is to say, to trace them back to the psychical forces operating behind them and to indicate the mechanisms at work. I began by attempting this upon myself and then went on to apply it to other people and finally, by a bold extension, to the human race as a whole. During the last few years, a phenomenon of this sort, which I myself had experienced a generation ago, in 1904, and which I had never understood, has kept on recurring to my mind. I did not at first see why; but at last I determined to analyse the incident - and I now present you with the results of that enquiry. In the process, I shall have, of course, to ask you to give more attention to some events in my private life than they would otherwise deserve.

A Disturbance Of Memory On The Acropolis

4824

Every year, at that time, towards the end of August or the beginning of September, I used to set out with my younger brother on a holiday trip, which would last for some weeks and would take us to Rome or to some other region of Italy or to some part of the Mediterranean sea-board. My brother is ten years younger than I am, so he is the same age as you - a coincidence which has only now occurred to me. In that particular year my brother told me that his business affairs would not allow him to be away for long: a week would be the most that he could manage and we should have to shorten our trip. So we decided to travel by way of Trieste to the island of Corfu and there spend the few days of our holiday. At Trieste he called upon a business acquaintance who lived there, and I went with him. Our host enquired in a friendly way about our plans and, hearing that it was our intention to go to Corfu, advised us strongly against it: ‘What makes you think of going there at this time of year? It would be too hot for you to do anything. You had far better go to Athens instead. The Lloyd boat sails this afternoon; it will give you three days there to see the town and will pick you up on its return voyage. That would be more agreeable and more worth while.’

As we walked away from this visit, we were both in remarkably depressed spirits. We discussed the plan that had been proposed, agreed that it was quite impracticable and saw nothing but difficulties in the way of carrying it out; we assumed, moreover, that we should not be allowed to land in Greece without passports. We spent the hours that elapsed before the Lloyd offices opened in wandering about the town in a discontented and irresolute frame of mind. But when the time came, we went up to the counter and booked our passages for Athens as though it were a matter of course, without bothering in the least about the supposed difficulties and indeed without having discussed with one another the reasons for our decision. Such behaviour, it must be confessed, was most strange. Later on we recognized that we had accepted the suggestion that we should go to Athens instead of Corfu instantly and most readily. But, if so, why had we spent the interval before the offices opened in such a gloomy state and foreseen nothing but obstacles and difficulties?

A Disturbance Of Memory On The Acropolis

4825

When, finally, on the afternoon after our arrival, I stood on the Acropolis and cast my eyes around upon the landscape, a surprising thought suddenly entered my mind: ‘So all this really does exist, just as we learnt at school!’ To describe the situation more accurately, the person who gave expression to the remark was divided, far more sharply than was usually noticeable, from another person who took cognizance of the remark; and both were astonished, though not by the same thing. The first behaved as though he were obliged, under the impact of an unequivocal observation, to believe in something the reality of which had hitherto seemed doubtful. If I may make a slight exaggeration, it was as if someone, walking beside Loch Ness, suddenly caught sight of the form of the famous Monster stranded upon the shore and found himself driven to the admission: ‘So it really does exist - the sea-serpent we’ve never believed in!’ The second person, on the other hand, was justifiably astonished, because he had been unaware that the real existence of Athens, the Acropolis, and the landscape around it had ever been objects of doubt. What he had been expecting was rather some expression of delight or admiration.

Now it would be easy to argue that this strange thought that occurred to me on the Acropolis only serves to emphasize the fact that seeing something with one’s own eyes is after all quite a different thing from hearing or reading about it. But it would remain a very strange way of clothing an uninteresting commonplace. Or it would be possible to maintain that it was true that when I was a schoolboy I had thought I was convinced of the historical reality of the city of Athens and its history, but that the occurrence of this idea on the Acropolis had precisely shown that in my unconscious I had not believed in it, and that I was only now acquiring a conviction that ‘reached down to the unconscious’. An explanation of this sort sounds very profound, but it is easier to assert than to prove; moreover, it is very much open to attack upon theoretical grounds. No. I believe that the two phenomena, the depression at Trieste and the idea on the Acropolis, were intimately connected. And the first of these is more easily intelligible and may help us towards an explanation of the second.

The experience at Trieste was, it will be noticed, also no more than an expression of incredulity: ‘We’re going to see Athens? Out of the question! - it will be far too difficult!’ The accompanying depression corresponded to a regret that it was out of the question: it would have been so lovely. And now we know where we are. It is one of those cases of ‘too good to be true’ that we come across so often. It is an example of the incredulity that arises so often when we are surprised by a piece of good news, when we hear we have won a prize, for instance, or drawn a winner, or when a girl learns that the man whom she has secretly loved has asked her parents for leave to pay his addresses to her.

A Disturbance Of Memory On The Acropolis

4826

When we have established the existence of a phenomenon, the next question is of course as to its cause. Incredulity of this kind is obviously an attempt to repudiate a piece of reality; but there is something strange about it. We should not be in the least astonished if an attempt of this kind were aimed at a piece of reality that threatened to bring unpleasure: the mechanism of our mind is, so to speak, planned to work along just such lines. But why should such incredulity arise in something which, on the contrary, promises to bring a high degree of pleasure? Truly paradoxical behaviour! But I recollect that on a previous occasion I dealt with the similar case of the people who, as I put it, are ‘wrecked by success’. As a rule people fall ill as a result of frustration, of the non-fulfilment of some vital necessity or desire. But with these people the opposite is the case; they fall ill, or even go entirely to pieces, because an overwhelmingly powerful wish of theirs has been fulfilled. But the contrast between the two situations is not so great as it seems at first. What happens in the paradoxical case is merely that the place of the external frustration is taken by an internal one. The sufferer does not permit himself happiness: the internal frustration commands him to cling to the external one. But why? Because - so runs the answer in a number of cases - one cannot expect Fate to grant one anything so good. In fact, another instance of ‘too good to be true’, the expression of a pessimism of which a large portion seems to find a home in many of us. In another set of cases, just as in those who are wrecked by success, we find a sense of guilt or inferiority, which can be translated: ‘I’m not worthy of such happiness, I don’t deserve it.’ But these two motives are essentially the same, for one is only a projection of the other. For, as has long been known, the Fate which we expect to treat us so badly is a materialization of our conscience, of the severe super-ego within us, itself a residue of the punitive agency of our childhood.

A Disturbance Of Memory On The Acropolis

4827

This, I think, explains our behaviour in Trieste. We could not believe that we were to be given the joy of seeing Athens. The fact that the piece of reality that we were trying to repudiate was to begin with only a possibility determined the character of our immediate reactions. But when we were standing on the Acropolis the possibility had become an actuality, and the same disbelief found a different but far clearer expression. In an undistorted form this should have been: ‘I could really not have imagined it possible that I should ever be granted the sight of Athens with my own eyes - as is now indubitably the case!’ When I recall the passionate desire to travel and see the world by which I was dominated at school and later, and how long it was before that desire began to find its fulfilment, I am not surprised at its after-effect on the Acropolis; I was then forty-eight years old. I did not ask my younger brother whether he felt anything of the same sort. A certain amount of reserve surrounded the whole episode; and it was this which had already interfered with our exchanging thoughts at Trieste.

If I have rightly guessed the meaning of the thought that came to me on the Acropolis and if it did in fact express my joyful astonishment at finding myself at that spot, the further question now arises why this meaning should have been subjected in the thought itself to such a distorted and distorting disguise.

The essential subject-matter of the thought, to be sure, was retained even in the distortion - that is, incredulity: ‘By the evidence of my senses I am now standing on the Acropolis, but I cannot believe it.’ This incredulity, however, this doubt of a piece of reality, was doubly displaced in its actual expression: first, it was shifted back into the past, and secondly it was transposed from my relation to the Acropolis on to the very existence of the Acropolis. And so something occurred which was equivalent to an assertion that at some time in the past I had doubted the real existence of the Acropolis - which, however, my memory rejected as being incorrect and, indeed, impossible.

A Disturbance Of Memory On The Acropolis

4828

The two distortions involve two independent problems. We can attempt to penetrate deeper into the process of transformation. Without for the moment particularizing as to how I have arrived at the idea, I will start from the presumption that the original factor must have been a sense of some feeling of the unbelievable and the unreal in the situation at the moment. The situation included myself, the Acropolis and my perception of it. I could not account for this doubt; I obviously could not attach the doubt to my sensory impressions of the Acropolis. But I remembered that in the past I had had a doubt about something which had to do with this precise locality, and I thus found the means for shifting the doubt into the past. In the process, however, the subject-matter of the doubt was changed. I did not simply recollect that in my early years I had doubted whether I myself would ever see the Acropolis, but I asserted that at that time I had disbelieved in the reality of the Acropolis itself. It is precisely this effect of the displacement that leads me to think that the actual situation on the Acropolis contained an element of doubt of reality. I have certainly not yet succeeded in making the process clear; so I will conclude by saying briefly that the whole psychical situation, which seems so confused and is so difficult to describe, can be satisfactorily cleared up by assuming that at the time I had (or might have had) a momentary feeling: ‘What I see here is not real.’ Such a feeling is known as a ‘feeling of derealization’. I made an attempt to ward that feeling off, and I succeeded, at the cost of making a false pronouncement about the past.

These derealizations are remarkable phenomena which are still little understood. They are spoken of as ‘sensations’, but they are obviously complicated processes, attached to particular mental contents and bound up with decisions made about those contents. They arise very frequently in certain mental diseases, but they are not unknown among normal people, just as hallucinations occasionally occur in the healthy. Nevertheless they are certainly failures in functioning and, like dreams, which, in spite of their regular occurrence in healthy people, serve us as models of psychological disorder, they are abnormal structures. These phenomena are to be observed in two forms: the subject feels either that a piece of reality or that a piece of his own self is strange to him. In the latter case we speak of ‘depersonalizations’; derealizations and depersonalizations are intimately connected. There is another set of phenomena which may be regarded as their positive counterparts - what are known as ‘fausse reconnaissance’, ‘déià vu’, ‘déjà raconté’ etc., illusions in which we seek to accept something as belonging to our ego, just as in the derealizations we are anxious to keep something out of us. A naïvely mystical and unpsychological attempt at explaining the phenomena of ‘déjà vu’ endeavours to find evidence in it of a former existence of our mental self. Depersonalization leads us on to the extraordinary condition of ‘double conscience’, which is more correctly described as ‘split personality’. But all of this is so obscure and has been so little mastered scientifically that I must refrain from talking about it any more to you.

A Disturbance Of Memory On The Acropolis

4829

It will be enough for my purposes if I return to two general characteristics of the phenomena of derealization. The first is that they all serve the purpose of defence; they aim at keeping something away from the ego, at disavowing it. Now, new elements, which may give occasion for defensive measures, approach the ego from two directions - from the real external world and from the internal world of thoughts and impulses that emerge in the ego. It is possible that this alternative coincides with the choice between derealizations proper and depersonalizations. There are an extraordinarily large number of methods (or mechanisms, as we say) used by our ego in the discharge of its defensive functions. An investigation is at this moment being carried on close at hand which is devoted to the study of these methods of defence: my daughter, the child analyst, is writing a book upon them. The most primitive and thorough-going of these methods, ‘repression’, was the starting point of the whole of our deeper understanding of psychopathology. Between repression and what may be termed the normal method of fending off what is distressing or unbearable, by means of recognizing it, considering it, making a judgement upon it and taking appropriate action about it, there lie a whole series of more or less clearly pathological methods of behaviour on the part of the ego. May I stop for a moment to remind you of a marginal case of this kind of defence? You remember the famous lament of the Spanish Moors ‘Ay de mi Alhama’, which tells how King Boabdil received the news of the fall of his city of Alhama. He feels that this loss means the end of his rule. But he will not ‘let it be true’, he determines to treat the news as ‘non arrivé’. The verse runs:

‘Cartas le fueron venidas

que Alhama era ganada:

las cartas echo en el fuego,

y al mensajero matara.’

It is easy to guess that a further determinant of this behaviour of the king was his need to combat a feeling of powerlessness. By burning the letters and having the messenger killed he was still trying to show his absolute power.

A Disturbance Of Memory On The Acropolis

4830

The second general characteristic of the derealizations - their dependence upon the past, upon the ego’s store of memories and upon earlier distressing experiences which have since perhaps fallen victim to repression - is not accepted without dispute. But precisely my own experience on the Acropolis, which actually culminated in a disturbance of memory and a falsification of the past, helps us to demonstrate this connection. It is not true that in my schooldays I ever doubted the real existence of Athens. I only doubted whether I should ever see Athens. It seemed to me beyond the realms of possibility that I should travel so far - that I should ‘go such a long way’. This was linked up with the limitations and poverty of our conditions of life in my youth. My longing to travel was no doubt also the expression of a wish to escape from that pressure, like the force which drives so many adolescent children to run away from home. I had long seen clearly that a great part of the pleasure of travel lies in the fulfilment of these early wishes - that it is rooted, that is, in dissatisfaction with home and family. When first one catches sight of the sea, crosses the ocean and experiences as realities cities and lands which for so long had been distant, unattainable things of desire - one feels oneself like a hero who has performed deeds of improbable greatness. I might that day on the Acropolis have said to my brother: ‘Do you still remember how, when we were young, we used day after day to walk along the same streets on our way to school, and how every Sunday we used to go to the Prater or on some excursion we knew so well? And now, here we are in Athens, and standing on the Acropolis! We really have gone a long way!’ So too, if I may compare such a small event with a greater one, Napoleon, during his coronation as Emperor in Notre Dame, turned to one of his brothers - it must no doubt have been the eldest one, Joseph - and remarked: ‘What would Monsieur notre Père have said to this, if he could have been here to-day?’

A Disturbance Of Memory On The Acropolis

4831

But here we come upon the solution of the little problem of why it was that already at Trieste we interfered with our enjoyment of the voyage to Athens. It must be that a sense of guilt was attached to the satisfaction in having gone such a long way: there was something about it that was wrong, that from earliest times had been forbidden. It was something to do with a child’s criticism of his father, with the undervaluation which took the place of the overvaluation of earlier childhood. It seems as though the essence of success was to have got further than one’s father, and as though to excel one’s father was still something forbidden.

As an addition to this generally valid motive there was a special factor present in our particular case. The very theme of Athens and the Acropolis in itself contained evidence of the son’s superiority. Our father had been in business, he had had no secondary education, and Athens could not have meant much to him. Thus what interfered with our enjoyment of the journey to Athens was a feeling filial piety. And now you will no longer wonder that the recollection of this incident on the Acropolis should have troubled me so often since I myself have grown old and stand in need of forbearance and can travel no more.

I am ever sincerely yours,

SIGM. FREUD

January, 1936

4832

LETTER TO GEORG FUCHS

(1931)

After reading your letter I felt a wave of the deepest sympathy, but it was soon halted by two reflections - an internal difficulty and an external obstacle. A sentence from your own preface offers me an apt expression of the former: ‘No doubt, however, there are people who have so poor an opinion of the civilized humanity of to-day that they deny the existence of a world conscience.’ I believe I am one of those people. For instance, I could not subscribe to the assertion that the treatment of convicted prisoners is a disgrace to our civilization. On the contrary, a voice would tell me, it is in perfect harmony with our civilization, a necessary expression of the brutality and lack of understanding which dominate the civilized humanity of the present time. And if by some miracle people suddenly became convinced that the reform of the penal system is the first and most urgent task before our civilization, what else would emerge than that capitalist society has not now the means for meeting the expenditure which that reform would demand? The second, the external, difficulty is brought to light in the passages in your letter in which you exalt me into a recognized intellectual leader and cultural innovator and attribute to me the privilege of having the ear of the civilized world. I only wish, my dear Sir, that it were so: I should not in that case refuse your request. But it seems to me that I am persona ingrata, if not ingratissima, with the German people - and moreover with the learned and the unlearned alike. I hope most positively that you will not think that I feel seriously aggrieved by these signs of disapproval. It is tens of years since I have been so foolish; measured by your example, moreover, it would be too ridiculous. I only mention these trivialities to confirm the fact that I am no desirable advocate for a book which seeks to kindle its readers’ sympathies on behalf of a good cause. Let me add that your book is a moving one, noble, wise and good.

4833

PREFACE TO RICHARD STERBA’S DICTIONARY OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

(1936)

July 3, 1932.

Dear Dr. Sterba, Your Dictionary gives me the impression of being a valuable aid to learners and of being a fine achievement on its own account. The precision and correctness of the individual entries is in fact of commendable excellence. English and French translations of the headings are not indispensable but would add further to the value of the work. I do not overlook the fact that the path from the letter A to the end of the alphabet is a very long one, and that to follow it would mean an enormous burden of work for you. So do not do it unless you feel an internal obligation - only obey a compulsion of that kind and certainly not any external pressure.

Yours sincerely,

Freud.

4834

PREFACE TO MARIE BONAPARTE’S

THE LIFE AND WORKS OF EDGAR ALLAN POE: A PSYCHO-ANALYTIC INTERPRETATION

(1933)

In this volume my friend and pupil, Marie Bonaparte, has directed the light of psycho-analysis upon the life and work of a great writer of a pathological type. Thanks to her interpretative efforts, we can now understand how much of the characteristics of his work were determined by their author’s special nature; but we also learn that this was itself the precipitate of powerful emotional ties and painful experiences in his early youth. Investigations of this kind are not intended to explain an author’s genius, but they show what motive forces aroused it and what material was offered to him by destiny. There is a particular fascination in studying the laws of the human mind as exemplified in outstanding individuals.

4835

TO THOMAS MANN ON HIS SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY

(1935)

My Dear Thomas Mann, Accept as a friend my affectionate greetings on your sixtieth birthday. I am one of your ‘oldest’ readers and admirers and I might wish you a very long and happy life as is the custom on such occasions. But I shall not do so. Wishing is cheap and strikes me as a relapse into the days when people believed in the magical omnipotence of thoughts. I think, too, from my most personal experience, that it is well if a compassionate fate sets a timely end to the length of our life.

Nor do I think the practice deserves imitation by which affection on these festive occasions disregards respect, and by which the subject of the celebration is compelled to hear himself loaded with praise as a man and analysed and criticized as an artist. I shall not be guilty of such presumption. I can allow myself something else however. In the name of a countless number of your contemporaries I can express to you our confidence that you will never do or say - for an author’s words are deeds - anything that is cowardly or base. Even in times and circumstances that perplex the judgement you will take the right path and point it out to others.

Yours very sincerely,

Freud

June 1935.

4836

MOSES AND MONOTHEISM

THREE ESSAYS

(1939)

4837

Intentionally left blank

Moses And Monotheism

4838

I

MOSES AN EGYPTIAN

To deprive a people of the man whom they take pride in as the greatest of their sons is not a thing to be gladly or carelessly undertaken, least of all by someone who is himself one of them. But we cannot allow any such reflection to induce us to put the truth aside in favour of what are supposed to be national interests; and, moreover, the clarification of a set of facts may be expected to bring us a gain in knowledge.

The man Moses, who set the Jewish people free, who gave them their laws and founded their religion, dates from such remote times that we cannot evade a preliminary enquiry as to whether he was a historical personage or a creature of legend. If he lived, it was in the thirteenth, though it may have been in the fourteenth, century before Christ. We have no information about him except from the sacred books of the Jews and their traditions as recorded in writing. Although a decision on the question thus lacks final certainty, an overwhelming majority of historians have nevertheless pronounced in favour of the view that Moses was a real person and that the Exodus from Egypt associated with him did in fact take place. It is justly argued that the later history of the people of Israel would be incomprehensible if this premiss were not accepted. Indeed, science to-day has become altogether more circumspect and handles traditions far more indulgently than in the early days of historical criticism.

The first thing that attracts our attention about the figure of Moses is his name, which is ‘Mosheh’ in Hebrew. ‘What is its origin?’ we may ask, ‘and what does it mean?’ As we know, the account in the second chapter of Exodus already provides an answer. We are told there that the Egyptian princess who rescued the infant boy from exposure in the Nile gave him that name, putting forward an etymological reason: ‘because I drew him out of the water’. This explanation, however, is clearly inadequate. ‘The Biblical interpretation of the name as "he who was drawn out of the water"’, argues a writer in the Jüdisches Lexicon,¹ ‘is popular etymology, with which, to begin with, it is impossible to harmonize the active form of the Hebrew word - for "Mosheh" can at most only mean "he who draws out".’ We can support this rejection by two further arguments: in the first place, it is absurd to attribute to an Egyptian princess a derivation of the name from the Hebrew, and secondly, the water out of which the child was drawn was most probably not the water of the Nile.

¹ Herlitz and Kirschner (1930), 4 (1), 303.

Moses And Monotheism

4839

On the other hand, a suspicion has long been expressed, and in many different quarters, that the name ‘Moses’ is derived from the Egyptian vocabulary. Instead of enumerating all the authorities who have argued in this sense, I will quote the relevant passage from a comparatively recent book, The Dawn of Conscience (1934), by J. H. Breasted, a writer whose History of Egypt (1906) is regarded as a standard work: ‘It is important to notice that his name, Moses, was Egyptian. It is simply the Egyptian word "mose" meaning "child", and is an abridgement of a fuller form of such names as "Amen-mose" meaning "Amon-a-child" or "Ptah-mose" meaning "Ptah-a-child", these forms themselves being likewise abbreviations for the complete form "Amon-(has-given)-a-child" or "Ptah-(has given)-a-child". The abbreviation "child" early became a convenient rapid form for the cumbrous full name, and the name Mose, "child", is not uncommon on the Egyptian monuments. The father of Moses without doubt prefixed to his son’s name that of an Egyptian god like Amon or Ptah, and this divine name was gradually lost in current usage, till the boy was called "Mose". (The final s is an addition drawn from the Greek translation of the Old Testament. It is not in the Hebrew which has "Mosheh").’¹ I have repeated this passage word for word and I am by no means ready to share responsibility for its details. I am also rather surprised that Breasted has failed to mention precisely the analogous theophorous names which figure in the list of Egyptian kings, such as Ahmose, Thoth-mose and Ra-mose.

¹ Breasted, 1934, 350.

Moses And Monotheism

4840

Now we should have expected that one of the many people who have recognized that ‘Moses’ is an Egyptian name would also have drawn the conclusion or would at least have considered the possibility that the person who bore this Egyptian name may himself have been an Egyptian. In relation to modern times we have no hesitation in drawing such conclusions, though nowadays people bear not one name but two - a family name and a personal name - and though a change of name or the adoption of a similar one in fresh circumstances is not beyond possibility. Thus we are not in the least surprised to find it confirmed that the poet Chamisso was French by birth, that Napoleon Buonaparte, on the other hand, was of Italian extraction and that Benjamin Disraeli was indeed an Italian Jew, as we should expect from his name. In relation to ancient and primitive times, one would have thought that a conclusion such as this as to a person’s nationality based on his name would have seemed far more reliable and in fact unimpeachable. Nevertheless, so far as I know, no historian has drawn this conclusion in the case of Moses - not even any of those who, once again like Breasted himself (1934, 354), are ready to assume that ‘Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians’.¹

What prevented their doing so cannot be judged with certainty. Possibly their reverence for Biblical tradition was invincible. Possibly the notion that the man Moses might have been anything but a Hebrew seemed too monstrous. However that may be, it emerges that the recognition that the name of Moses is Egyptian has not been looked upon as affording decisive evidence of his origin, and that no further conclusions have been drawn from it. If the question of this great man’s nationality is regarded as important, it would seem to be desirable to bring forward fresh material that would help towards answering it.

¹ Although the suspicion that Moses was an Egyptian has been voiced often enough without reference to his name, from the earliest times up to the present.

Moses And Monotheism

4841

That is what my short paper aims at doing. Its claim to be given a place in the pages of Imago rests on the fact that the substance of what it has to contribute is an application of psycho-analysis. The argument arrived at in this way will undoubtedly only impress that minority of readers who are familiar with analytic thinking and who are able to appreciate its findings. To them, however, it will, I hope, appear significant.

In 1909 Otto Rank, who was at that time still under my influence, published, following a suggestion of mine, a book bearing the title Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden.¹ It deals with the fact that ‘almost all the prominent civilized nations... began at an early stage to glorify their heroes, legendary kings and princes, founders of religions, dynasties, empires or cities, in brief their national heroes, in a number of poetic tales and legends. The history of the birth and of the early life of these personalities came to be especially invested with phantastic features, which, indifferent peoples, even though widely separated by space and entirely independent of each other, present a baffling similarity and in part, indeed, a literal conformity. Many investigators have been impressed with this fact, which has long been recognized.’ If, following Rank, we construct (by a technique a little like Galton’s) an ‘average legend’ that brings into prominence the essential features of all these stories, we arrive at the following picture:

‘The hero is the child of the most aristocratic parents; usually the son of a king.

‘His conception is preceded by difficulties, such as abstinence or prolonged barrenness or his parents having to have intercourse in secret owing to external prohibitions or obstacles. During the pregnancy, or even earlier, there is a prophecy (in the form of a dream or oracle) cautioning against his birth, usually threatening danger to his father.

¹ It is far from being my intention to belittle the value of Rank’s independent contributions to the work.

Moses And Monotheism

4842

‘As a result of this the new-born child is condemned to death or to exposure, usually by the orders of his father or of someone representing him; as a rule he is given over to the water in a casket.

‘He is afterwards rescued by animals or by humble people (such as shepherds) and is suckled by a female animal or by a humble woman.

‘After he has grown up, he rediscovers his aristocratic parents after highly variegated experiences, takes his revenge on his father, on the one hand, and is acknowledged on the other and achieves greatness and fame.’

The oldest of the historical figures to whom this myth of birth is attached is Sargon of Agade, the founder of Babylon (c. 2800 B.C.). For us in particular it will not be without interest to quote the account of it, which is attributed to him himself:

‘Sargon, the mighty King, the King of Agade am I. My mother was a Vestal, my father I knew not, while my father’s brother dwelt in the mountains. In my city, Azupirani, which lies on the bank of the Euphrates, my mother, the Vestal, conceived me. Secretly she bore me. She laid me in a coffer made of reeds, closed my doorway with pitch, and let me down into the river, which did not drown me. The river carried me to Akki, the drawer of water. Akki, the drawer of water, lifted me out in the kindness of his heart. Akki, the drawer of water, brought me up as his own son. Akki, the drawer of water, made me his gardener, While I worked as a gardener, Ishtar grew fond of me, I became King and for forty-five years I held kingly sway.’

The names most familiar to us in the series which begins with Sargon of Agade are Moses, Cyrus and Romulus. But in addition to these Rank has brought together a whole number of other heroic figures from poetry or legend, of whom the same story of their youth is told, either in its entirety or in easily recognizable fragments - including Oedipus, Karna, Paris, Telephos, Perseus, Heracles, Gilgamesh, Amphion and Zethos, and others.

Moses And Monotheism

4843

Rank’s researches have made us acquainted with the source and purpose of this myth. I need only refer to them with some brief indications. A hero is someone who has had the courage to rebel against his father and has in the end victoriously overcome him. Our myth traces this struggle back as far as the individual’s prehistory, for it represents him as being born against his father’s will and rescued despite his father’s evil intention. The exposure in a casket is an unmistakable symbolic representation of birth: the casket is the womb and the water is the amniotic fluid. The parent-child relationship is represented in countless dreams by pulling out of the water or rescuing from the water. When a people’s imagination attaches the myth of birth which we are discussing to an outstanding figure, it is intending in that way to recognize him as a hero and to announce that he has fulfilled the regular pattern of a hero’s life. In fact, however, the source of the whole poetic fiction is what is known as a child’s ‘family romance’, in which the son reacts to a change in his emotional relation to his parents and in particular to his father. A child’s earliest years are dominated by an enormous overvaluation of his father; in accordance with this a king and queen in dreams and fairy tales invariably stand for parents. Later, under the influence of rivalry and of disappointment in real life, the child begins to detach himself from his parents and to adopt a critical attitude towards his father. Thus the two families in the myth - the aristocratic one and the humble one - are both of them reflections of the child’s own family as they appeared to him in successive periods of his life.

We may fairly say that these explanations make the widespread and uniform nature of myths of the birth of heroes fully intelligible. For that reason it is all the more deserving of interest that the legend of the birth and exposure of Moses occupies a special position and, indeed, in one essential respect contradicts the rest.

Moses And Monotheism

4844

Let us start from the two families between which, according to the legend, the child’s destiny is played out. According to the analytic interpretation, as we know, the families are one and the same and are only differentiated chronologically. In the typical form of the legend, it is the first family, the one into which the child is born, which is the aristocratic one, most often of royal rank; the second family, the one in which the child grows up: is the one that is humble or has fallen on evil days. This tallies, moreover, with the circumstances to which the interpretation traces the legend back. Only in the legend of Oedipus is this difference blurred: the child which has been exposed by one royal family is received by another royal couple. It can scarcely be by chance, one feels, that precisely in this example the original identity of the two families may be dimly perceived in the legend itself. The social contrast between the two families provides the myth - which, as we know, is designed to stress the heroic nature of a great man with a second function which becomes of special significance when applied to historical personages. For the myth can also be employed to create a patent of nobility for the hero, to raise his social standing. To the Medes, Cyrus was a foreign conqueror; but by means of a legend of exposure he became the grandson of their king. The same applies to Romulus. If any such person existed, he must have been an adventurer of unknown origin, an upstart; the legend, however, made him offspring and heir of the royal house of Alba Longa.

With Moses things were quite different. In his case the first family, elsewhere the aristocratic one, was sufficiently modest. He was the child of Jewish Levites. But the place of the second family, elsewhere the humble one, was taken by the royal house of Egypt; the princess brought him up as her own son. This deviation from type has puzzled many people. Eduard Meyer, and others following him, assumed that originally the legend was different. Pharaoh, according to them, had been warned by a prophetic dream¹ that a son born to his daughter would bring danger to him and his kingdom. He therefore had the child exposed in the Nile after his birth. But he was rescued by Jewish people and brought up as their child. For ‘nationalist motives’ (as Rank puts it²) the legend would then have been given the modified form in which we know it.

¹ This is also mentioned in the account given by Flavius Josephus.

² Rank, 1909, 80 n.

Moses And Monotheism

4845

A moment’s reflection, however, tells us that an original legend of Moses like this, one no longer deviating from the other legends, cannot have existed. For it was either of Egyptian or of Jewish origin. The first alternative is ruled out: the Egyptians had no motive for glorifying Moses, since he was no hero to them. We are to suppose, then, that the legend was created among the Jewish people - that is to say, that it was attached in its familiar form to the figure of their leader. But it was totally unsuitable for that purpose, for what would be the use to a people of a legend which made their great man into a foreigner?

The legend of Moses, in the form in which we have it to-day, falls notably short of its secret intention. If Moses was not of royal birth, the legend could not stamp him as a hero; if it left him as a Jewish child, it had done nothing to raise his social standing. Only one small fragment of the entire myth remains effective: the assurance that the child had survived in the face of powerful external forces. (This feature recurs in the story of the childhood of Jesus, in which King Herod takes over the role of Pharaoh.) Thus we are in fact free to suppose that some later and clumsy adapter of the material of the legend found an opportunity for introducing into the story of his hero Moses something which resembled the classical exposure legends marking out a hero, but which, on account of the special circumstances of the case, was not applicable to Moses,

Our investigations might have had to rest content with this inconclusive and, moreover, uncertain outcome, and they might have done nothing towards answering the question of whether Moses was an Egyptian. There is, however, another and perhaps more hopeful line of approach to an assessment of the legend of exposure.

Let us return to the two families of the myth. At the level of analytic interpretation they are, as we know, identical; whereas at the level of the myth they are differentiated into an aristocratic family and a humble one. Where, however, the figure to whom the myth is attached is a historical one, there is a third level - that of reality. One of the families is the real one, in which the person in question (the great man) was actually born and grew up; the other is fictitious, fabricated by the myth in pursuit of its own intentions. As a rule the humble family is the real one and the aristocratic family the fabricated one. The situation in the case of Moses seemed somehow different. And here the new line of approach will perhaps lead to a clarification: in every instance which it has been possible to test, the first family, the one from which the child was exposed, was the invented one, and the second one, in which he was received and grew up, was the real one. If we have the courage to recognize this assertion as universally true and as applying also to the legend of Moses, then all at once we see things clearly: Moses was an Egyptian - probably an aristocrat - whom the legend was designed to turn into a Jew. And that would be our conclusion. The exposure in the water was at its correct point in the story; but, in order to fit in with the fresh purpose, its aim had to be somewhat violently twisted. From being a way of sacrificing the child, it was turned into a means of rescuing him.

Moses And Monotheism

4846

The deviation of the legend of Moses from all the others of its kind can be traced back to a special feature of his history. Whereas normally a hero, in the course of his life, rises above his humble beginnings, the heroic life of the man Moses began with his stepping down from his exalted position and descending to the level of the Children of Israel.

We started on this brief enquiry in the expectation of deriving a fresh argument from it in support of the suspicion that Moses was an Egyptian. We have seen that the first argument, based on his name, failed with many people to carry conviction.¹ We must be prepared to find that this new argument, based on an analysis of the legend of exposure, may have no better success. It will no doubt be objected that the circumstances of the construction and transformation of legends are, after all, too obscure to justify a conclusion such as ours and that the traditions surrounding the heroic figure of Moses - with all their confusion and contradictions and their unmistakable signs of centuries of continuous and tendentious revisions and superimpositions - are bound to baffle every effort to bring to light the kernel of historical truth that lies behind them. I do not myself share this dissenting attitude but neither am I in a position to refute it.

¹ Thus Eduard Meyer writes (1905, 651): ‘The name "Moses" is probably Egyptian, and the name "Pinchas" in the priestly family of Shiloh . . . is undoubtedly Egyptian. Of course this does not prove that these families were of Egyptian origin, but, no doubt, that they had connections with Egypt.’ We may ask, to be sure, what sort of connections this is supposed to make us think of.

Moses And Monotheism

4847

If no more certainty could be reached than this, why, it may be asked, have I brought this enquiry into public notice at all? I am sorry to say that even my justification for doing so cannot go beyond hints. For if one allows oneself to be carried away by the two arguments which I have put forward here, and if one sets out to take the hypothesis seriously that Moses was an aristocratic Egyptian, very interesting and far-reaching prospects are opened up. With the help of some not very remote assumptions, we shall, I believe, be able to understand the motives which led Moses in the unusual step he took and, closely related to this, to obtain a grasp of the possible basis of a number of the characteristics and peculiarities of the laws and religion which he gave to the Jewish people; and we shall even be led on to important considerations regarding the origin of monotheist religions in general. Such weighty conclusions cannot, however, be founded on psychological probabilities alone. Even if one accepts the fact of Moses being an Egyptian as a first historical foothold, one would need to have at least a second firm fact in order to defend the wealth of emerging possibilities against the criticism of their being a product of the imagination and too remote from reality. Objective evidence of the period to which the life of Moses and with it the Exodus from Egypt are to be referred would perhaps have fulfilled this requirement. But this has not been obtainable, and it will therefore be better to leave unmentioned any further implications of the discovery that Moses was an Egyptian.

Moses And Monotheism

4848

II

IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN . . .

In an earlier contribution to this periodical,¹ I attempted to bring up a fresh argument in support of the hypothesis that the man Moses, the liberator and law-giver of the Jewish people, was not a Jew but an Egyptian. It had long been observed that his name was derived from the Egyptian vocabulary, though the fact had not been properly appreciated. What I added was that the interpretation of the myth of exposure which was linked with Moses necessarily led to the inference that he was an Egyptian whom the needs of a people sought to make into a Jew. I remarked at the end of my paper that important and far-reaching implications followed from the hypothesis that Moses was an Egyptian, but that I was not prepared to argue publicly in favour of these implications, since they were based only on psychological probabilities and lacked any objective proof. The greater the importance of the views arrived at in this way, the more strongly one feels the need to beware of exposing them without a secure basis to the critical assaults of the world around one - like a bronze statue with feet of clay. Not even the most tempting probability is a protection against error; even if all the parts of a problem seem to fit together like the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle, one must reflect that what is probable is not necessarily the truth and that the truth is not always probable. And lastly, it did not seem attractive to find oneself classed with the schoolmen and Talmudists who delight in exhibiting their ingenuity without regard to how remote from reality their thesis may be.

Notwithstanding these hesitations, which weigh as much with me to-day as they did before, the outcome of my conflicting motives is a decision to produce the present sequel to my earlier communication. But once again this is not the whole story nor the most important part of the whole story.

¹ Imago, 23 (1937).

Moses And Monotheism

4849

(1)

If, then, Moses was an Egyptian - our first yield from this hypothesis is a fresh enigma and one which it is hard to solve. If a people or a tribe¹ sets out upon a great undertaking, it is only to be expected that one of its members will take his place as their leader or will be chosen for that post. But it is not easy to guess what could induce an aristocratic Egyptian - a prince, perhaps, or a priest or high official - to put himself at the head of a crowd of immigrant foreigners at a backward level of civilization and to leave his country with them. The well known contempt felt by the Egyptians for foreign nationals makes such a proceeding particularly unlikely. Indeed I could well believe that this has been precisely why even those historians who have recognized that the man’s name was Egyptian, and who have ascribed to him all the wisdom of the Egyptians, have been unwilling to accept the obvious possibility that Moses was an Egyptian.

This first difficulty is promptly followed by another. We must not forget that Moses was not only the political leader of the Jews settled in Egypt but was also their law-giver and educator and forced them into the service of a new religion, which to this very day is known after him as the Mosaic one. But is it so easy for one single man to create a new religion? And if anyone wishes to influence another person’s religion, would he not most naturally convert him to his own? The Jewish people in Egypt were certainly not without a religion of some form or other; and if Moses, who gave them a new one, was an Egyptian, the presumption cannot be put aside that this other new religion was the Egyptian one.

There is something that stands in the way of this possibility: the fact of there being the most violent contrast between the Jewish religion which is attributed to Moses and the religion of Egypt. The former is a rigid monotheism on the grand scale: there is only one God, he is the sole God, omnipotent, unapproachable; his aspect is more than human eyes can tolerate, no image must be made of him, even his name may not be spoken. In the Egyptian religion there is an almost innumerable host of deities of varying dignity and origin: a few personifications of great natural forces such as heaven and earth, sun and moon, an occasional abstraction such as Ma’at (truth or justice) or a caricature such as the dwarf-like Bes; but most of them local gods, dating from the period when the country was divided into numerous provinces, with the shape of animals, as though they had not yet completed their evolution from the old totem animals, with no sharp distinctions between them, and scarcely differing in the functions allotted to them. The hymns in honour of these gods say almost the same things about all of them, and identify them with one another unhesitatingly, in a manner hopelessly confusing to us. The names of gods are combined with one another, so that one of them may almost be reduced to being an epithet of the other. Thus, in the heyday of the ‘New Kingdom’ the principal god of the city of Thebes was called Amen-Re’; the first part of this compound stands for the ram-headed god of the city, while Re’ is the name of the falcon-headed sun-god of On. Magical and ceremonial acts, charms and amulets dominated the service of these gods as they did the daily life of the Egyptians.

¹ We have no notion of what numbers were concerned in the Exodus from Egypt.

Moses And Monotheism

4850

Some of these differences may easily be derived from the fundamental contrast between a strict monotheism and an unrestricted polytheism. Others are evidently the result of a difference in spiritual and intellectual level, since one of these religions is very close to primitive phases, while the other has risen to the heights of sublime abstraction. It may be due to these two factors that one occasionally has an impression that the contrast between the Mosaic and the Egyptian religions is a deliberate one and has been intentionally heightened - when, for instance, one of them condemns magic and sorcery in the severest terms, while in the other they proliferate with the greatest luxuriance, or when the insatiable appetite of the Egyptians for embodying their gods in clay, stone and metal (to which our museums owe so much to-day) is confronted with the harsh prohibition against making an image of any living or imagined creature.

But there is still another contrast between the two religions which is not met by the explanations we have attempted. No other people of antiquity did so much to deny death or took such pains to make existence in the next world possible. And accordingly Osiris, the god of the dead, the ruler of this other world, was the most popular and undisputed of all the gods of Egypt. On the other hand the ancient Jewish religion renounced immortality entirely; the possibility of existence continuing after death is nowhere and never mentioned. And this is all the more remarkable since later experiences have shown that belief in an after-life is perfectly well compatible with a monotheist religion.

It was our hope that the hypothesis that Moses was an Egyptian would turn out to be fruitful and illuminating in various directions. But the first conclusion we drew from that hypothesis - that the new religion which he gave to the Jews was his own Egyptian one - has been invalidated by our realization of the different, and indeed contradictory, character of the two religions.

Moses And Monotheism

4851

(2)

Another possibility is opened to us by a remarkable event in the history of the Egyptian religion, an event which has only lately been recognized and appreciated. It remains possible that the religion which Moses gave to his Jewish people was nevertheless his own - that it was an Egyptian religion, though not the Egyptian religion.

In the glorious Eighteenth Dynasty, under which Egypt first became a world power, a young Pharaoh came to the throne in about the year 1375 B.C. To begin with he was called, like his father, Amenophis (IV), but later he changed his name and not only his name. This king set about forcing a new religion on his Egyptian subjects - a religion which ran contrary to their thousands-of-years-old traditions and to all the familiar habits of their lives. It was a strict monotheism, the first attempt of the kind, so far as we know, in the history of the world, and along with the belief in a single god religious intolerance was inevitably born, which had previously been alien to the ancient world and remained so long afterwards. The reign of Amenophis, however, lasted for only seventeen years. Very soon after his death in 1358 B.C., the new religion was swept away and the memory of the heretic king was proscribed. What little we know of him is derived from the ruins of the new royal capital which he built and dedicated to his god and from the inscriptions in the rock tombs adjacent to it. Whatever we can learn about this remarkable and, indeed, unique personality is deserving of the highest interest.¹

¹ Breasted calls him ‘the first individual in human history’.

Moses And Monotheism

4852

Every novelty must have its preliminaries and preconditions in something earlier. The origins of Egyptian monotheism can be traced back a little way with some certainty.¹ For a considerable time, tendencies had been at work among the priesthood of the sun temple at On (Heliopolis) in the direction of developing the idea of a universal god and of emphasizing the ethical side of his nature. Ma’at, the goddess of truth, order and justice, was a daughter of the sun god Re’. During the reign of Amenophis III, the father and predecessor of the reformer, the worship of the sun god had already gained a new impetus - probably in opposition to Amun of Thebes, who had become too powerful. A very ancient name of the sun god, Aten or Atum, was brought into fresh prominence, and the young king found in this Aten religion a movement ready to hand, which he did not have to be the first to inspire but of which he could become an adherent.

The political conditions in Egypt had begun at this time to exercise a lasting influence on the Egyptian religion. As a result of the military exploits of the great conqueror, Tuthmosis III, Egypt had become a world power: the empire now included Nubia in the south, Palestine, Syria and a part of Mesopotamia in the north. This imperialism was reflected in religion as universalism and monotheism. Since the Pharaoh’s responsibilities now embraced not only Egypt but Nubia and Syria as well, deity too was obliged to abandon its national limitation and, just as the Pharaoh was the sole and unrestricted ruler of the world known to the Egyptians, this must also apply to the Egyptians’ new deity. Moreover, with the extension of the empire’s frontiers, it was natural that Egypt would become more accessible to foreign influences; some of the royal wives were Asiatic princesses,² and it is possible that direct incitements to monotheism even made their way in from Syria.

¹ What follows is in the main based on the accounts given by Breasted (1906 and 1934) and in the relevant sections of the Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. II.

² This may perhaps be true even of Nefertiti, the beloved wife of Amenophis.

Moses And Monotheism

4853

Amenophis never denied his adherence to the sun cult of On. In the two Hymns to the Aten which have survived in the rock tombs and which were probably composed by him himself, he praises the sun as the creator and preserver of all living things both inside and outside Egypt with an ardour which is not repeated till many centuries later in the Psalms in honour of the Jewish god Yahweh. He was not content, however, with this astonishing anticipation of the scientific discovery of the effect of solar radiation. There is no doubt that he went a step further: that he did not worship the sun as a material object but as the symbol of a divine being whose energy was manifested in its rays.¹

We should not, however, be doing justice to the king if we regarded him merely as an adherent or promoter of an Aten religion already in existence before his time. His activity was a far more energetic intervention. He introduced something new, which for the first time converted the doctrine of a universal god into monotheism - the factor of exclusiveness. In one of his hymns he declares expressly: ‘O thou sole God, beside whom there is no other!’² And we must not forget that in assessing the new doctrine a knowledge of its positive contents is not enough: its negative side is almost equally important - a knowledge of what it rejects. It would be a mistake, too, to suppose that the new religion was completed at a single blow and sprang to life fully armed, like Athene out of the head of Zeus. Everything suggests, rather, that in the course of the reign of Amenophis it increased little by little to ever greater clarity, consistency, harshness and intolerance. It is likely that this development came about under the influence of the violent opposition to the king’s reform which arose among the priests of Amun. In the sixth year of the reign of Amenophis this antagonism had reached such a pitch that the king changed his name, of which the proscribed name of the god Amun formed a part. Instead of ‘Amenophis’ he now called himself ‘Akhenaten’.³ But it we not only from his own name that he expunged that of the detested god: he erased it too from every inscription - even where it occurred in the name of his father, Amenophis III. Soon after changing his name Akhenaten abandoned the Amun-dominated city of Thebes and built himself a new royal capital lower down the river, which he named Akhetaten (the horizon of the Aten). Its ruined site is now known as Tell el-’Amarna.4

¹ ‘But, however evident the Heliopolitan origin of the new state religion might be, it was not merely sun-worship; the word Aton was employed in the place of the old word for "god" (nuter), and the god is clearly distinguished from the material sun.’ Breasted, 1906, 360. - ‘It is evident that what the king was deifying was the force by which the Sun made himself felt on earth.’ Breasted, 1934, 279. - Erman (1905, 66) makes a similar judgement on a formula in honour of the god: ‘These are . . . words which are meant to express as abstractly as possible that it is not the heavenly body itself that is worshipped but the being which reveals itself in it.’

² Breasted, 1906, 374 n.

³  I adopt here the English spelling of the name (alternatively ‘Akhenaton’). The king’s new name has approximately the same meaning as his earlier one: ‘The god is satisfied.’ Cf. the German ‘Gotthold’ and ‘Gottfried’.

4 It was there that in 1887 the discovery - of such great historical importance - was made of the Egyptian kings’ correspondence with their friends and vassals in Asia.

Moses And Monotheism

4854

The persecution by the king fell most harshly upon Amun, but not on him alone. Throughout the kingdom temples were closed, divine service forbidden, temple property confiscated. Indeed, the king’s zeal went so far that he had the ancient monuments examined in order to have the word ‘god’ obliterated in them where it occurred in the plural.¹ It is not to be wondered at that these measures taken by Akhenaten provoked a mood of fanatical vindictiveness among the suppressed priesthood and unsatisfied common people, and this was able to find free expression after the king’s death. The Aten religion had not become popular; it had probably remained restricted to a narrow circle surrounding the king’s person. Akhenaten’s end remains veiled in obscurity. We hear of a few short-lived, shadowy successors from his own family. His son-law, Tut’ankhaten, was already compelled to return to Thebes and to replace the name of the god Aten in his name by that of Amun. There followed a period of anarchy till in 1350 B.C. a general, Haremhab, succeeded in restoring order. The glorious Eighteenth Dynasty was at an end and simultaneously its conquests in Nubia and Asia were lost. During this gloomy interregnum the ancient religions of Egypt were re-established. The Aten religion was abolished, Akhenaten’s royal city was destroyed and plundered and his memory proscribed as that of a criminal.

¹ Breasted, 1906, 363.

Moses And Monotheism

4855

It is with a particular purpose that we shall now emphasize a few points among the negative characteristics of the Aten religion. In the first place, everything to do with myths, magic and sorcery is excluded from it.¹ In the next place, the manner in which the sun-god was represented was no longer, as in the past, by a small pyramid and a falcon, but - and this seems almost prosaic - by a round disk with rays proceeding from it, which end in human hands. In spite of all the exuberant art of the Amarna period, no other representation of the sun-god - no personal image of the Aten - has been found, and it may confidently be said that none will be found.² Lastly, there was complete silence about the god of the dead, Osiris, and the kingdom of the dead. Neither the hymns nor the tomb inscriptions have any knowledge of what perhaps lay closest to the hearts of the Egyptians. The contrast to the popular religion cannot be more clearly demonstrated.³

¹ Weigall (1922, 120-1) says that Akhenaten would hear nothing of a Hell against whose terrors people might protect themselves with innumerable magical formulae: ‘Akhnaton flung all these formulae into the fire. Djins, bogies, spirits, monsters, demigods, demons, and Osiris himself with all his court, were swept into the blaze and reduced to ashes.’

² ‘Akhnaton did not permit any graven image to be made of the Aton. The True God, said the king, had no form; and he held to this opinion throughout his life.’ (Weigall, 1922, 103.)

³ ‘Nothing was to be heard any more of Osiris and his kingdom.’ (Erman, 1905, 70.) - ‘Osiris is completely ignored. He is never mentioned in any record of Ikhnaton or in any of the tombs at Amarna.’ (Breasted, 1934, 291.)

Moses And Monotheism

4856

(3)

I should now like to venture on this conclusion: if Moses was an Egyptian and if he communicated his own religion to the Jews, it must have been Akhenaten’s, the Aten religion.

I have already compared the Jewish religion with the popular religion of Egypt and shown the opposition between them, I must now make a comparison between the Jewish and the Aten religions in the expectation of proving their original identity. This, I am aware, will present no easy task. Thanks to the vindictiveness of the priests of Amun we may perhaps know too little of the Aten religion. We only know the Mosaic religion in its final shape, as it was fixed by the Jewish priesthood some eight hundred years later in post-exilic times. If, in spite of this unfavourable state of the material, we find a few indications which favour our hypothesis, we shall be able to set a high value on them.

There would be a short path to proving our thesis that the Mosaic religion was none other than that of the Aten - namely, if we had a confession of faith, a declaration. But I fear we shall be told that this path is closed to us. The Jewish confession of faith, as is well known, runs: ‘Schema Jisroel Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echod.’ If it is not merely by chance that the name of the Egyptian Aten (or Atum) sounds like the Hebrew word Adonai and the name of the Syrian deity Adonis, but if it is due to a primaeval kinship of speech and meaning, then the Jewish formula might be translated thus: ‘Hear, O Israel: our god Aten (Adonai) is a sole god.’ Unfortunately I am totally incompetent to answer this question, and I have been able to find but little about it in the literature of the subject.¹ But in all probability this is making things too easy for us. In any case we shall have to come back once more to the problems concerning the name of the god.

¹ Only a few passages in Weigall (1922, 12 and 19), to the effect that ‘the god Atum, the aspect of Ra as the setting sun, was probably of common origin with Aton who was largely worshipped in North Syria’, and that a ‘foreign queen with her retinue may have therefore felt more sympathy with Heliopolis than with Thebes.’

Moses And Monotheism

4857

The similarities as well as the differences between the two religions are easily discernible without giving us much light. Both of them were forms of a strict monotheism, and we shall be inclined a priori to trace back what they had in common to this fundamental characteristic. Jewish monotheism behaved in some respects even more harshly than the Egyptian: for instance in forbidding pictorial representations of any kind. The most essential difference is to be seen (apart from their gods’ names) in the fact that the Jewish religion was entirely without sun worship, in which the Egyptian one still found support. When we were making the comparison with the popular religion of Egypt, we had an impression that, apart from the fundamental contrast, a factor of intentional contradiction played a part in the difference between the two religions. This impression seems to be justified if now, in making the comparison, we replace the Jewish religion by the Aten religion which, as we know, was developed by Akhenaten in deliberate hostility to the popular one. We were rightly surprised to find that the Jewish religion would have nothing to do with the next world or a life after death, though a doctrine of that kind would have been compatible with the strictest monotheism. But this surprise vanishes if we turn back from the Jewish to the Aten religion and suppose that this refusal was taken over from it, since for Akhenaten it was a necessity in his fight against the popular religion, in which Osiris, the god of the dead, played a greater part, perhaps, than any god in the upper world. The agreement between the Jewish and the Aten religions on this important point is the first strong argument in favour of our thesis. We shall learn that it is not the only one.

Moses And Monotheism

4858

Moses did not only give the Jews a new religion; it can be stated with equal certainty that he introduced the custom of circumcision to them. This fact is of decisive importance for our problem and has scarcely ever been considered. It is true that the Biblical account contradicts this more than once. On the one hand it traces circumcision back to the patriarchal age as a mark of a covenant between God and Abraham; on the other hand it describes in a quite particularly obscure passage how God was angry with Moses for having neglected a custom which had become holy,¹ and sought to kill him; but that his wife, a Midianite, saved her husband from God’s wrath by quickly performing the operation. These, however, are distortions, which should not lead us astray; later on we shall discover the reason for them. The fact remains that there is only one answer to the question of where the Jews derived the custom of circumcision from - namely, from Egypt. Herodotus, the ‘father of history’, tells us that the custom of circumcision had long been indigenous in Egypt, and his statements are confirmed by the findings in mummies and indeed by pictures on the walls of tombs. No other people of the Eastern Mediterranean, so far as we know, practised this custom; it may safely be presumed that the Semites, Babylonians and Sumerians were uncircumcised. The Bible story itself says this is so of the inhabitants of Canaan; it is a necessary premiss to the adventure of Jacob’s daughter and the prince of Shechem.² The possibility that the Jews acquired the custom of circumcision during their sojourn in Egypt in some way other than in connection with the religious teaching of Moses may be rejected as completely without foundation. Now, taking it as certain that circumcision was a universal popular custom in Egypt, let us for a moment adopt the ordinary hypothesis that Moses was a Jew, who sought to free his compatriots from bondage in Egypt and lead them to develop an independent and self-conscious national existence in another country - which was what in fact happened. What sense could it have, in that case, that he should at the same time impose on them a troublesome custom which even, to some extent, made them into Egyptians and which must keep permanently alive their memory of Egypt - whereas his efforts could only be aimed in the opposite direction, towards alienating his people from the land of their bondage and overcoming their longing for the ‘flesh-pots of Egypt’? No, the fact from which we started and the hypothesis which we added to it are so incompatible with each other that we may be bold enough to reach this conclusion: if Moses gave the Jews not only a new religion but also the commandment for circumcision, he was not a Jew but an Egyptian, and in that case the Mosaic religion was probably an Egyptian one and, in view of its contrast to the popular religion, the religion of the Aten, with which the later Jewish religion agrees in some remarkable respects.

¹ ‘Heilig.’

² I am very well aware that in dealing so autocratically and arbitrarily with Biblical tradition - bringing it up to confirm my views when it suits me and unhesitatingly rejecting it when it contradicts me - I am exposing myself to serious methodological criticism and weakening the convincing force of my arguments. But this is the only way in which one can treat material of which one knows definitely that its trustworthiness has been severely impaired by the distorting influence of tendentious purposes. It is to be hoped that I shall find some degree of justification later on, when I come upon the track of these secret motives. Certainty is in any case unattainable and moreover it may be said that every other writer on the subject has adopted the same procedure.

Moses And Monotheism

4859

I have pointed out that my hypothesis that Moses was not a Jew but an Egyptian created a fresh riddle. His course of conduct, which seemed easily intelligible in a Jew, was ununderstandable in an Egyptian. If, however, we place Moses in the time of Akhenaten and suppose him in contact with that Pharaoh, the riddle vanishes and the possibility is revealed of motives which will answer all our questions. Let us start from the assumption that Moses was an aristocratic and prominent man, perhaps in fact a member of the royal house, as the legend says of him. He was undoubtedly aware of his great capacities, ambitious and energetic; he may even have played with the notion of one day being the leader of his people, of becoming the kingdom’s ruler. Being close to the Pharaoh, he was a convinced adherent of the new religion, whose basic thoughts he had made his own. When the king died and the reaction set in, he saw all his hopes and prospects destroyed; if he was not prepared to abjure all the convictions that were so dear to him, Egypt had nothing more to offer him - he had lost his country. In this predicament he found an unusual solution. Akhenaten the dreamer had alienated his people and let his empire fall to pieces. The more energetic nature of Moses was more at home with the plan of founding a new kingdom, of finding a new people to whom he would present for their worship the religion which Egypt had disdained. It was, we can see, a heroic attempt to combat destiny, to compensate in two directions for the losses in which Akhenaten’s catastrophe had involved him. Perhaps he was at that time Governor of the frontier province (Goshen) in which certain Semitic tribes had settled (perhaps as early as in the Hyksos period). These he chose to be his new people - a historic decision.¹ He came to an agreement with them, put himself at their head and carried the Exodus through ‘by strength of hand’. In complete contrast to the Biblical tradition, we may presume that this Exodus took place peacefully and unpursued. The authority of Moses made this possible and at that time there was no central administration which might have interfered with it.

According to this construction of ours, the Exodus from Egypt would have occurred during the period between 1358 and 1350 B.C. - that is, after Akhenaten’s death and before Haremhab’s re-establishment of state authority.² The goal of the migration could only have been the land of Canaan. After the collapse of the Egyptian domination, hordes of warlike Aramaeans had irrupted into that region, conquering and plundering, and had shown in that way where a capable people might win fresh land for themselves. We learn of these warriors from the letters found in 1887 in the ruined city of Amarna. There they are called ‘Habiru’, and the name was transferred (we do not know how) to the later Jewish invaders - ‘Hebrews’ - who cannot be intended in the Amarna letters. South of Palestine, too, in Canaan, there lived the tribes which were the nearest relatives of the Jews who were now making their way out of Egypt.

¹ If Moses was a high official, this makes it easier to understand the role of leader which he assumed with the Jews; if he was a priest, then it was natural for him to emerge as the founder of a religion. In both these cases he would have been continuing his former profession. A prince of the royal house might easily have been both - a provincial governor and a priest. In the account given by Flavius Josephus (in his Jewish Antiquities), who accepts the exposure legend but seems to be in touch with traditions other than the Biblical one, Moses, as an Egyptian general, fought a victorious campaign in Ethiopia.

² This would make the Exodus about a century earlier than is supposed by most historians, who put it in the Nineteenth Dynasty under Merenptah. Or it may have happened a little later, for the official histories seem to have included the interregnum in the reign of Haremhab.

Moses And Monotheism

4860

The motives which we have discovered for the Exodus as a whole apply also to the introduction of circumcision. We are familiar with the attitude adopted by people (both nations and individuals) to this primaeval usage, which is scarcely understood any longer. Those who do not practise it look on it as very strange and are a little horrified by it, but those who have adopted circumcision are proud of it. They feel exalted by it, ennobled, as it were, and look down with contempt on the others, whom they regard as unclean. Even to this day a Turk will abuse a Christian as an ‘uncircumcised dog’. It may be supposed that Moses, who, being an Egyptian, was himself circumcised, shared this attitude. The Jews with whom he departed from his country were to serve him as a superior substitute for the Egyptians he had left behind. On no account must the Jews be inferior to them. He wished to make them into a ‘holy nation’, as is expressly stated in the Biblical text, and as a mark of this consecration he introduced among them too the custom which made them at least the equals of the Egyptians. And he could only welcome it if they were to be isolated by such a sign and kept apart from the foreign peoples among whom their wanderings would lead them, just as the Egyptians themselves had kept apart from all foreigners.¹

Later on, however, Jewish tradition behaved as though it were put at a disadvantage by the inference we have been drawing. If it were to be admitted that circumcision was an Egyptian custom introduced by Moses, that would be almost as much as to recognize that the religion delivered to them by Moses was an Egyptian one too. There were good reasons for denying that fact, so the truth about circumcision must also be contradicted.

¹ Herodotus, who visited Egypt about 450 B.C., enumerates in his account of his journey characteristics of the Egyptian people which exhibit an astonishing similarity to traits familiar to us in later Jewry: ‘They are altogether more religious in every respect than any other people, and differ from them too in a number of their customs. Thus they practise circumcision, which they were the first to introduce, and on grounds of cleanliness. Further they have a horror of pigs, which is no doubt related to the fact that Seth in the form of a black pig wounded Horus. And lastly and most markedly, they hold cows in the greatest honour, and would never eat or sacrifice them, because this would offend Isis with her cows horns. For that reason no Egyptian man or woman would ever kiss a Greek or use his knife or his spit or his cauldron or eat the flesh of an otherwise clean ox if it had been cut with a Greek knife . . . They look down in narrow-minded pride on other people, who are unclean and are not so close to the gods as they are.’ (Erman, 1905, 181.) - We must not, of course, overlook parallels to this in the life of the Indian people. - And, incidentally, who suggested to the Jewish poet Heine in the nineteenth century A.D. that he should complain of his religion as ‘the plague dragged along from the Nile valley, the unhealthy beliefs of Ancient Egypt’?

Moses And Monotheism

4861

(4)

At this point I expect to be met by an objection to my hypothesis. This placed Moses, an Egyptian, in the Akhenaten period. It derived his decision to take over the Jewish people from the political circumstances in the country at that time, and it recognized the religion that he presented to or imposed on his protégés as the Aten religion, which had actually collapsed in Egypt itself. I expect to be told that I have brought forward this structure of conjectures with too much positiveness, for which there is no basis in the material. This objection is, I think, unjustified. I have already laid stress on the factor of doubt in my introductory remarks; I have, as it were, placed that factor outside the brackets and I may be allowed to save myself the trouble of repeating it in connection with each item inside them.

I may continue the discussion with a few critical remarks of my own. The kernel of my hypothesis - the dependence of Jewish monotheism on the monotheist episode in Egyptian history - has been suspected and mentioned by various writers. I spare myself the trouble of quoting these opinions here, since none of them is able to indicate how this influence can have come into operation. Even though in our view that influence remains linked to the figure of Moses, we ought also to mention some other possibilities in addition to the one we prefer. It must not be supposed that the fall of the official Aten religion brought the monotheist current in Egypt to a complete stop. The priesthood at On, from which it started, survived the catastrophe and may have continued to bring under the sway of its trend of ideas generations after Akhenaten’s. Thus the action taken by Moses is still conceivable even if he did not live at the time of Akhenaten and did not fall under his personal influence, if he was only an adherent or perhaps a member of the priesthood of On. This possibility would postpone the date of the Exodus and bring it closer to the date which is usually adopted (in the thirteenth century); but it has nothing else to recommend it. Our insight into the motives of Moses would be lost and the facilitation of the Exodus by the prevailing anarchy in the country would no longer apply. The succeeding kings of the Nineteenth Dynasty established a strong régime. It was only during the period immediately after the heretic king’s death that there was a convergence of all the conditions, external and internal alike, that were favourable to the Exodus.

Moses And Monotheism

4862

The Jews possess a copious literature apart from the Bible, in which the legends and myths are to be found which grew up in the course of centuries round the imposing figure of their first leader and the founder of their religion, and which have both illuminated and obscured it. Scattered in this material there may be fragments of trustworthy tradition for which no room was found in the Pentateuch. A legend of this sort gives an engaging account of how the ambition of the man Moses found expression even in his childhood. Once when Pharaoh had taken him in his arms and playfully lifted him high in the air, the little three-year-old boy snatched the crown from the king’s head and put it on his own. This portent alarmed the king, who did not fail to consult his wise men about it.¹ There are stories elsewhere of his victorious military actions as an Egyptian general in Ethiopia, and, in this connection, how he fled from Egypt because he had reason to be afraid of the envy of a party at Court or of Pharaoh himself. The Biblical account itself attributes some features to Moses to which credence may well be given. It describes him as being of an irascible nature, flaring up easily, as when, in indignation, he slew the brutal overseer who was ill-treating a Jewish workman, or when in his anger at the people’s apostasy he broke the Tables of the Law which he had brought down from the Mount of God; indeed God himself punished him in the end for an impatient deed, but we are not told what it was. Since a trait of this kind is not one that would serve for his glorification, it may perhaps correspond to a historical truth. Nor can the possibility be excluded that some of the character traits which the Jews included in their early picture of their God - describing him as jealous, severe and ruthless - may have been at bottom derived from a recollection of Moses; for in fact it was not an invisible God but the man Moses who brought them out of Egypt.

¹ This anecdote, in a slightly different form, also appears in Josephus.

Moses And Monotheism

4863

Another trait attributed to Moses has a special claim to our interest. Moses is said to have been ‘slow of speech’: he must have suffered from an inhibition or disorder of speech. Consequently, in his supposed dealings with Pharaoh, he needed the support of Aaron, who is called his brother. This again may be a historical truth and would make a welcome contribution to presenting a lively picture of the great man. But it may also have another and more important significance. It may recall, slightly distorted, the fact that Moses spoke another language and could not communicate with his Semitic neo-Egyptians without an interpreter, at all events at the beginning of their relations - a fresh confirmation, then, of the thesis that Moses was an Egyptian.

Now, however, or so it seems, our work has reached a provisional end. For the moment we can draw no further conclusions from our hypothesis that Moses was an Egyptian, whether it has been proved or not. No historian can regard the Biblical account of Moses and the Exodus as anything other than a pious piece of imaginative fiction, which has recast a remote tradition for the benefit of its own tendentious purposes. The original form of that tradition is unknown to us; we should be glad to discover what the distorting purposes were, but we are kept in the dark by our ignorance of the historical events. The fact that our reconstruction leaves no room for a number of show-pieces in the Bible story, such as the ten plagues, the passage of the Red Sea and the solemn law-giving on Mount Sinai - this does not disconcert us. But we cannot treat it as a matter of indifference if we find ourselves in contradiction to the findings of the sober historical researches of the present day.

These modern historians, of whom we may take Eduard Meyer (1906) as a representative, agree with the Bible story on one decisive point. They too are of opinion that the Jewish tribes, which later developed into the people of Israel, took on a new religion at a certain point of time. But in their view this did not take place in Egypt or at the foot of a mountain in the Sinai Peninsula, but in a certain locality known as Meribah Kadesh, an oasis distinguished by its wealth of springs and wells in the stretch of country south of Palestine, between the eastern exit from the Sinai Peninsula and the western border of Arabia. There they took over the worship of a god Yahweh, probably from the neighbouring Arabian tribe of Midianites. It seems likely that other tribes in the vicinity were also followers of this god.

Moses And Monotheism

4864

Yahweh was unquestionably a volcano god. Now, as is well known, Egypt is without volcanoes and the mountains of the Sinai Peninsula have never been volcanic; on the other hand, there are volcanoes which may have been active till recent times along the western border of Arabia. So one of these mountains must have been the Sinai-Horeb which was regarded as the home of Yahweh.¹ In spite of all the revisions to which the Biblical story was subjected, the original picture of the god’s character can, according to Eduard Meyer, be reconstructed: he was an uncanny, bloodthirsty demon who went about by night and shunned the light of day.²

The mediator between God and the people in the founding of this religion was named Moses. He was the son-in-law of the Midianite priest Jethro, and was keeping his flocks when he received the summons from God. He was also visited by Jethro at Kadesh and given some advice by him.

Though Eduard Meyer says, it is true, that he never doubted that there was some historical core in the story of the sojourn in Egypt and the catastrophe to the Egyptians,³ he evidently does not know how to place and what use to make of this fact which he recognizes. The only thing he is prepared to derive from Egypt is the custom of circumcision. He adds two important indications which go to confirm our previous arguments: first, that Joshua ordered the people to be circumcised in order to ‘roll away the reproach of Egypt from off you’, and secondly a quotation from Herodotus saying that ‘the Phoenicians (no doubt the Jews) and the Syrians of Palestine themselves admit that they learnt the custom of the Egyptians’.4 But he has little to say in favour of an Egyptian Moses: ‘The Moses we know is the ancestor of the priests of Kadesh - that is, a figure from a genealogical legend, standing in relation to a cult, and not a historical personality. Thus (apart from those who accept tradition root and branch as historical truth) no one who treats him as a historical figure has been able to give any content to him, to represent him as a concrete individual or to point out what he may have done and what his historical work may have been.’5

¹ At a few places in the Biblical text it is still stated that Yahweh came down from Sinai to Meribah-Kadesh.

² Meyer, 1906, 38 and 58.

³ Meyer, 1906, 49.

4 Meyer, 1906, 449.

5 Meyer, 1906, 451.

Moses And Monotheism

4865

On the other hand, Meyer is never tired of insisting on the relation of Moses to Kadesh and Midian: ‘The figure of Moses, which is intimately bound up with Midian and the cult-centres in the desert . . .’¹ and: ‘This figure of Moses, then, is inseparably linked with Kadesh (Massah and Meribah) and this is supplemented by his being the son-in-law of the Midianite priest. His link with the Exodus, on the contrary, and the whole story of his youth are entirely secondary and simply the consequence of the interpolation of Moses into a connected and continuous legendary story.’² Meyer also points out that the themes included in the story of the youth of Moses were one and all dropped later: ‘Moses in Midian is no longer an Egyptian and grandson of Pharaoh, but a shepherd to whom Yahweh revealed himself. In telling of the plagues there is no longer any talk of his former connections, though effective use might easily have been made of them, and the command to kill the sons of the Israelites is completely forgotten. In the Exodus and the destruction of the Egyptians Moses plays no part whatever: he is not even mentioned. The heroic character which the legend of his childhood presupposes is totally absent from the later Moses; he is only the man of God, a miracle-worker equipped by Yahweh with supernatural powers.’³

¹ Meyer, 1906, 49.

² Meyer, 1906, 72.

³ Meyer, 1906, 47.

Moses And Monotheism

4866

We cannot dispute the impression that this Moses of Kadesh and Midian, to whom tradition could actually attribute the erection of a brazen serpent as a god of healing, is someone quite other than the aristocratic Egyptian inferred by us, who presented the people with a religion in which all magic and spells were proscribed in the strictest terms. Our Egyptian Moses is no less different, perhaps, from the Midianite Moses than is the universal god Aten from the demon Yahweh in his home on the Mount of God. And if we have any faith at all in the pronouncements of the recent historians, we shall have to admit that the thread which we have tried to spin from our hypothesis that Moses was an Egyptian has broken for the second time. And this time, as it seems, with no hope of mending.

(5)

Unexpectedly, here once more a way of escape presents itself. Efforts to see in Moses a figure that goes beyond the priest of Kadesh, and to confirm the grandeur with which tradition glorifies him, have not ceased even since Eduard Meyer. (Cf. Gressmann and others.) Then, in 1922, Ernst Sellin made a discovery which affected our problem decisively. He found in the Prophet Hosea (in the second half of the eighth century B.C.) unmistakable signs of a tradition to the effect that Moses, the founder of their religion, met with a violent end in a rising of his refractory and stiff-necked people, and that at the same time the religion he had introduced was thrown off. This tradition is not, however, restricted to Hosea; it reappears in most of the later Prophets, and indeed, according to Sellin, became the basis of all the later Messianic expectations. At the end of the Babylonian captivity a hope grew up among the Jewish people that the man who had been so shamefully murdered would return from the dead and would lead his remorseful people, and perhaps not them alone, into the kingdom of lasting bliss. The obvious connection of this with the destiny of the founder of a later religion does not concern us here.

Moses And Monotheism

4867

Once again I am not, of course, in a position to judge whether Sellin has interpreted the passages from the Prophets correctly. But if he is right we may attribute historical credibility to the tradition he has recognized, for such things are not readily invented. There is no tangible motive for doing so; but if they have really happened, it is easy to understand that people will be anxious to forget them. We need not accept all the details of the tradition. In Sellin’s opinion Shittim, in the country east of the Jordan, is to be regarded as the scene of the attack on Moses. But we shall soon see that that region is not acceptable for our notions.

We will borrow from Sellin his hypothesis that the Egyptian Moses was murdered by the Jews and the religion he had introduced abandoned. This allows us to spin our threads further without contradicting the authentic findings of historical research. But apart from this we shall venture to maintain independence of the authorities and to ‘proceed along our own track’. The Exodus from Egypt remains our starting-point. A considerable number of people must have left the country with Moses; a small collection would not have seemed worth while to this ambitious man with his large aims in view. The immigrants had probably been living in Egypt long enough to have grown into quite a large population. But we shall certainly not be going wrong if we assume, with the majority of the authorities, that only a fraction of what was later to be the Jewish people had experienced the events in Egypt. In other words, the tribe that returned from Egypt joined up later, in the stretch of country between Egypt and Canaan, with other kindred tribes, which had been settled there for a considerable time. This union, from which sprang the people of Israel, found expression in the adoption of a new religion, common to all the tribes, the religion of Yahweh - an event which, according to Eduard Meyer, took place under Midianite influence at Kadesh. Thereafter, the people felt strong enough to undertake their invasion of the land of Canaan. It would not tally with this course of events to suppose that the catastrophe to Moses and his religion occurred in the country east of the Jordan; it must have happened long before the union of the tribes.

Moses And Monotheism

4868

There can be no doubt that very different elements came together in the construction of the Jewish people; but what must have made the greatest difference among these tribes was whether they had experienced or not the sojourn in Egypt and what followed it. Having regard to this point, we may say that the nation arose out of a union of two component parts; and it fits in with this that, after a short period of political unity, it split into two pieces - the kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Judah. History is fond of reinstatements like this, where a later fusion is undone and an earlier separation re-emerges. The most impressive example of this was afforded, as is well known, by the Reformation, which, after an interval of over a thousand years, brought to light once more the frontier between the Germany which had at one time been Roman and the Germany which had remained independent. In the instance of the Jewish people it is not possible to point to such a faithful reproduction of the old state of things; our knowledge of those times is too uncertain to allow us to assert that the settled tribes were once more to be found together in the Northern Kingdom and those who had returned from Egypt in the Southern Kingdom; but here too the later split cannot have been unrelated to the earlier joining up. The former Egyptians were probably fewer in numbers than the others, but showed themselves culturally the stronger. They exercised a more powerful influence on the further evolution of the people, because they brought along with them a tradition which the others lacked.

Perhaps they brought something else with them more tangible than a tradition. One of the greatest enigmas of Jewish prehistory is that of the origin of the Levites. They are traced back to one of the twelve tribes of Israel - that of Levi - but no tradition has ventured to say where that tribe was originally located or what portion of the conquered land of Canaan was allotted to it. They filled the most important priestly offices, but they were distinct from the priests. A Levite is not necessarily a priest; nor is it the name of a caste. Our hypothesis about the figure of Moses suggests an explanation. It is incredible that a great lord, like Moses the Egyptian, should have joined this alien people unaccompanied. He certainly must have brought a retinue with him - his closest followers, his scribes, his domestic servants. This is who the Levites originally were. The tradition which alleges that Moses was a Levite seems to be a clear distortion of the fact: the Levites were the followers of Moses. This solution is supported by the fact which I have already mentioned in my earlier essay that it is only among the Levites that Egyptian names occur later.¹ It is to be presumed that a fair number of these followers of Moses escaped the catastrophe which descended on him himself and the religion he founded. They multiplied in the course of the next generations, became fused with the people they lived among, but remained loyal to their master, preserved his memory and carried out the tradition of his doctrines. At the time of the union with the disciples of Yahweh they formed an influential minority, culturally superior to the rest.

¹ My hypothesis fits in well with Yahuda’s statements on the Egyptian influence on early Jewish literature. See Yahuda, 1929.

Moses And Monotheism

4869

I put it forward as a provisional hypothesis that between the fall of Moses and the establishment of the new religion at Kadesh two generations, or perhaps even a century, elapsed. I see no means of deciding whether the Neo-Egyptians (as I should like to call them here) - that is, those who returned from Egypt - met their tribal kinsmen after the latter had already adopted the Yahweh religion or earlier. The second possibility might seem the more probable. But there would be no difference in the outcome. What happened at Kadesh was a compromise, in which the share taken by the tribes of Moses is unmistakable.

Here we may once again call on the evidence afforded by circumcision, which has repeatedly been of help to us, like, as it were, a key-fossil. This custom became obligatory in the Yahweh religion as well and, since it was indissolubly linked with Egypt, its adoption can only have been a concession to the followers of Moses, who - or the Levites among them - would not renounce this mark of their holiness. So much of their old religion they wished to rescue, and in return for it they were prepared to accept the new deity and what the priests of Midian told them about it. They may possibly have gained yet other concessions. We have already mentioned that Jewish ritual prescribed certain restrictions on the use of God’s name. Instead of ‘Yahweh’ the word ‘Adonai’ must be spoken. It is tempting to bring this prescription into our context, but that is only a conjecture without any other basis. The prohibition upon a god’s name is, as is well known, a taboo of primaeval age. We do not understand why it was revived precisely in the Jewish Law; it is not impossible that this happened under the influence of a fresh motive. There is no need to suppose that the prohibition was carried through consistently; in the construction of theophorous personal names - that is, in compounds - the name of the God Yahweh might be freely used (e.g. Jochanan, Jehu, Joshua). There were, however, special circumstances connected with this name. As we know, critical Biblical research supposes that the Hexateuch has two documentary sources. These are distinguished as J and E, because one of them uses ‘Jahve’ as the name of God and the other ‘Elohim’: ‘Elohim’, to be sure, not ‘Adonai’. But we may bear in mind a remark by one of our authorities: ‘The different names are a clear indication of two originally different gods.’¹

¹ Gressmann, 1913, 54.

Moses And Monotheism

4870

We brought up the retention of circumcision as evidence for the fact that the founding of the religion at Kadesh involved a compromise. We can see its nature from the concordant accounts given by J and E, which thus go back on this point to a common source (a documentary or oral tradition). Its leading purpose was to demonstrate the greatness and power of the new god Yahweh. Since the followers of Moses attached so much value to their experience of the Exodus from Egypt, this act of liberation had to be represented as due to Yahweh, and the event was provided with embellishments which gave proof of the terrifying grandeur of the volcano god - such as the pillar of smoke which changed at night into a pillar of fire and the storm which laid bare the bed of the sea for a while, so that the pursuers were drowned by the returning waters. This account brought the Exodus and the founding of the religion close together, and disavowed the long interval between them. So, too, the law-giving was represented as occurring not at Kadesh but at the foot of the Mount of God, marked by a volcanic eruption. This account, however, did grave injustice to the memory of the man Moses; it was he and not the volcano god who had liberated the people from Egypt. So a compensation was owing to him, and it consisted in the man Moses being transferred to Kadesh or to Sinai-Horeb and put in the place of the Midianite priests. We shall find later that this solution satisfied another imperatively pressing purpose. In this manner a mutual agreement, as it were, was arrived at: Yahweh, who lived on a mountain in Midian, was allowed to extend over into Egypt, and, in exchange for this, the existence and activity of Moses were extended to Kadesh and as far as the country east of the Jordan. Thus he was fused with the figure of the later religious founder, the son-in-law of the Midianite Jethro, and lent him his name of Moses. Of this second Moses, however, we can give no personal account - so completely was he eclipsed by the first, the Egyptian Moses - unless we pick out the contradictions in the Biblical description of the character of Moses. He is often pictured as domineering, hot-tempered and even violent, yet he is also described as the mildest and most patient of men. These last qualities would evidently have fitted in badly with the Egyptian Moses, who had to deal with his people in such great and difficult matters; they may have belonged to the character of the other Moses, the Midianite. We are, I think, justified in separating the two figures and in assuming that the Egyptian Moses was never at Kadesh and had never heard the name of Yahweh, and that the Midianite Moses had never been in Egypt and knew nothing of Aten. In order to solder the two figures together, tradition or legend had the task of bringing the Egyptian Moses to Midian, and we have seen that more than one explanation of this was current.

Moses And Monotheism

4871

(6)

Once again I am prepared to find myself blamed for having presented my reconstruction of the early history of the people of Israel with too great and unjustified certainty. I shall not feel very severely hit by this criticism, since it finds an echo in my own judgement. I know myself that my structure has its weak spots, but it has its strong points too. On the whole my predominant impression is that it is worth while to pursue the work in the direction it has taken.

The Bible narrative that we have before us contains precious and, indeed, invaluable historical data, which, however, have been distorted by the influence of powerful tendentious purposes and embellished by the products of poetic invention. In the course of our efforts so far, we have been able to detect one of these distorting purposes. That discovery points our further path. We must uncover other similar tendentious purposes. If we find means of recognizing the distortions produced by those purposes, we shall bring to light fresh fragments of the true state of things lying behind them.

And we will begin by listening to what critical Biblical research is able to tell us about the history of the origin of the Hexateuch, the five books of Moses and the book of Joshua, which alone concern us here.¹ The earliest documentary source is accepted as J (the Yahwistic writer), who in the most recent times has been identified as the priest Ebyatar, a contemporary of King David.² Somewhat - it is not known how much - later we come to the so-called Elohistic writer, who belonged to the Northern Kingdom.³ After the collapse of the Northern Kingdom in 722 B.C., a Jewish priest combined portions of J and E and made some additions of his own. His compilation is designated as JE. In the seventh century Deuteronomy, the fifth book, was added to this. It is supposed to have been found complete in the Temple. In the period after the destruction of the Temple (586 B.C.), during and after the Exile, the revision known as the ‘Priestly Code’ was compiled; and in the fifth century the work was given its final revision and since then has not been changed in its essentials.4

¹ Encyclopaedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, Vol. III, 1910. Article ‘Bible’.

² See Auerbach (1932).

³ The Yahwistic and Elohistic writings were first distinguished by Astruc in 1753.

4 It is historically certain that the Jewish type was finally fixed as a result of the reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah in the fifth century before Christ - that is, after the Exile, under the Persian domination which was friendly to the Jews. On our reckoning, some nine hundred years had passed since the emergence of Moses. These reforms took seriously the regulations that aimed at making the entire people holy; their separation from their neighbours was made effective by the prohibition of mixed marriages; the Pentateuch, the true book of the laws, was given its final form and the revision known as the Priestly Code brought to completion. It seems certain, however, that these reforms introduced no fresh tendentious purposes, but took up and strengthened earlier trends.

Moses And Monotheism

4872

The history of King David and of his period is most probably the work of a contemporary. It is genuine historical writing, five hundred years before Herodotus, the ‘father of History’. It becomes easier to understand this achievement if, on the lines of our hypothesis, we think of Egyptian influence.¹ A suspicion even arises that the Israelites of that earliest period - that is to say, the scribes of Moses - may have had some share in the invention of the first alphabet.² It is, of course, beyond our knowledge to discover how far reports about former times go back to early records or to oral tradition and how long an interval of time there was in individual instances between an event and its recording. The text, however, as we possess it to-day, will tell us enough about its own vicissitudes. Two mutually opposed treatments have left their traces on it. On the one hand it has been subjected to revisions which have falsified it in the sense of their secret aims, have mutilated and amplified it and have even changed it into its reverse; on the other hand a solicitous piety has presided over it and has sought to preserve everything as it was, no matter whether it was consistent or contradicted itself. Thus almost everywhere noticeable gaps, disturbing repetitions and obvious contradictions have come about - indications which reveal things to us which it was not intended to communicate. In its implications the distortion of a text resembles a murder: the difficulty is not in perpetrating the deed, but in getting rid of its traces. We might well lend the word ‘Entstellung’ the double meaning to which it has a claim but of which to-day it makes no use. It should mean not only ‘to change the appearance of something’ but also ‘to put something in another place, to displace’. Accordingly, in many instances of textual distortion, we may nevertheless count upon finding what has been suppressed and disavowed hidden away somewhere else, though changed and torn from its context. Only it will not always be easy to recognize it.

¹ Cf. Yahuda, 1929.

² If they were subject to the prohibition against pictures they would even have had a motive for abandoning the hieroglyphic picture writing while adapting its written characters to expressing a new language. (Cf. Auerbach, 1932.)

Moses And Monotheism

4873

The distorting purposes which we are anxious to lay hold of must have been at work already on the traditions before any of them were committed to writing. We have already discovered one of them, perhaps the most powerful of all. As we have said, with the setting-up of the new god, Yahweh, at Kadesh, it became necessary to do something to glorify him. It would be more correct to say: it became necessary to fit him in, to make room for him, to wipe out the traces of earlier religions. This seems to have been achieved with complete success as regards the religion of the resident tribes: we hear nothing more of it. With those returning from Egypt it was not such an easy matter; they would not let themselves be deprived of the Exodus, the man Moses or circumcision. It is true that they had been in Egypt, but they had left it, and thenceforward every trace of Egyptian influence was to be disavowed. The man Moses was dealt with by shifting him to Midian and Kadesh, and by fusing him with the priest of Yahweh who founded the religion. Circumcision, the most suspicious indication of dependence on Egypt, had to be retained but no attempts were spared to detach the custom from Egypt - all evidence to the contrary. It is only as a deliberate denial of the betraying fact that we can explain the puzzling and incomprehensibly worded passage in Exodus, according to which on one occasion Yahweh was angry with Moses because he had neglected circumcision, and his Midianite wife saved his life by quickly carrying out the operation. We shall presently come across another invention for making the uncomfortable piece of evidence harmless.

The fact that we find signs of efforts being made to deny explicitly that Yahweh was a new god, alien to the Jews, can scarcely be described as the appearance of a fresh tendentious purpose: it is rather a continuation of the former one. With this end in view the legends of the patriarchs of the people - Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - were introduced. Yahweh asserted that he was already the god of these forefathers; though it is true that he himself had to admit that they had not worshipped him under that name.¹ He does not add, however, what the other name was.

¹ This does not make the restrictions upon the use of this new name more intelligible, though it does make them more suspect.

Moses And Monotheism

4874

And here was the opportunity for a decisive blow against the Egyptian origin of the custom of circumcision: Yahweh, it was said, had already insisted on it with Abraham and had introduced it as the token of the covenant between him and Abraham. But this was a particularly clumsy invention. As a mark that is to distinguish one person from others and prefer him to them, one would choose something that is not to be found in other people; one would not choose something that can be exhibited in the same way by millions of other people. An Israelite who was transplanted to Egypt would have had to acknowledge every Egyptian as a brother in the covenant, a brother in Yahweh. It is impossible that the Israelites who created the text of the Bible can have been ignorant of the fact that circumcision was indigenous in Egypt. The passage in Joshua quoted by Eduard Meyer admits this without question but for that very reason it had to be disavowed at any price.

We must not expect the mythical structures of religion to pay too much attention to logical coherence. Otherwise popular feeling might have taken justified offence against a deity who made a covenant with their forefathers with mutual obligations and then, for centuries on end, paid no attention to his human partners, till it suddenly occurred to him to manifest himself anew to their descendants. Even more puzzling is the notion of a god’s all at once ‘choosing’ a people, declaring them to be his people and himself to be their god. I believe this is the only instance of its sort in the history of human religions. Ordinarily god and people are indissolubly linked, they are one from the very beginning of things. No doubt we sometimes hear of a people taking on a different god, but never of a god seeking a different people. We may perhaps understand this unique event better if we recall the relations between Moses and the Jewish people. Moses had stooped to the Jews, had made them his people: they were his ‘chosen people’.¹

¹ Yahweh was undoubtedly a volcano god. There was no occasion for the inhabitants of Egypt to worship him. I am certainly not the first person to be struck by the resemblance of the sound of the name ‘Yahweh’ to the root of the other divine name ‘Jupiter (Jove)’. The name ‘Jochanan’ is compounded with an abbreviation of the Hebrew Yahweh - in the same kind of way as ‘Gotthold’ and the Carthaginian equivalent ‘Hannibal’. This name (Jochanan), in the forms ‘Johann’, ‘John’, ‘Jean’, ‘Juan’, has become the favourite first name in European Christendom. The Italians, in rendering it ‘Giovanni’ and moreover calling a day of the week ‘Giovedi’, are bringing to light a resemblance which may possibly mean nothing or possibly a very great deal. At this point, extensive but very uncertain prospects open up before us. It seems that, in those obscure centuries which are scarcely accessible to historical research, the countries round the eastern basin of the Mediterranean were the scene of frequent and violent volcanic eruptions, which must have made the strongest impression on their inhabitants. Evans assumes that the final destruction of the palace of Minos at Knossos too was the consequence of an earthquake. In Crete at that period (as probably in the Aegean world in general) the great mother-goddess was worshipped. The realization that she was not able to protect her house against the assaults of a stronger power may have contributed to her having to give place to a male deity, and, if so, the volcano god had the first claim to take her place. After all, Zeus always remains the ‘earth-shaker’. There is little doubt that it was during those obscure ages that the mother-goddesses were replaced by male gods (who may originally perhaps have been sons). The destiny of Pallas Athene, who was no doubt the local form of the mother-goddess, is particularly impressive. She was reduced to being a daughter by the religious revolution, she was robbed of her own mother and, by having virginity imposed on her, was permanently excluded from motherhood.

Moses And Monotheism

4875

The bringing-in of the patriarchs served yet another purpose. They had lived in Canaan, and their memory was linked with particular localities in that country. It is possible that they were themselves originally Canaanite heroes or local divinities, and were then seized on by the immigrant Israelites for their prehistory. By appealing to the patriarchs they were as it were asserting their indigenous character and defending themselves from the odium attaching to an alien conqueror. It was a clever twist to declare that the god Yahweh was only giving them back what their forefathers had once possessed.

In the later contributions to the text of the Bible the intention was put into effect of avoiding the mention of Kadesh. The place at which the religion was founded was fixed once and for all as the Mount of God, Sinai-Horeb. It is not easy to see the motive for this; perhaps people were unwilling to be reminded of the influence of Midian. But all later distortions, especially of the period of the Priestly Code, had another aim in view. There was no longer any need to alter accounts of events in a desired sense - for this had been done long before. But care was taken to shift back commands and institutions of the present day into early times - to base them, as a rule, on the Mosaic law-giving - so as to derive from this their claim to being holy and binding. However much the picture of the past might in this way be falsified, the procedure was not without a certain psychological justification. It reflected the fact that in the course of long ages - between the Exodus from Egypt and the fixing of the text of the Bible under Ezra and Nehemiah some eight hundred years elapsed - the Yahweh religion had had its form changed back into conformity, or even perhaps into identity, with the original religion of Moses.

And this is the essential outcome, the momentous substance, of the history of the Jewish religion.

Moses And Monotheism

4876

(7)

Of all the events of early times which later poets, priests and historians undertook to work over, one stood out, the suppression of which was enjoined by the most immediate and best human motives. This was the murder of Moses, the great leader and liberator, which Sellin discovered from hints in the writings of the Prophets. Sellin’s hypothesis cannot be called fantastic - it is probable enough. Moses, deriving from the school of Akhenaten, employed no methods other than did the king; he commanded, he forced his faith upon the people.¹ The doctrine of Moses may have been even harsher than that of his master. He had no need to retain the sun-god as a support: the school of On had no significance for his alien people. Moses, like Akhenaten, met with the same fate that awaits all enlightened despots. The Jewish people under Moses were just as little able to tolerate such a highly spiritualized religion and find satisfaction of their needs in what it had to offer as had been the Egyptians of the Eighteenth Dynasty. The same thing happened in both cases: those who had been dominated and kept in want rose and threw off the burden of the religion that had been imposed on them. But while the tame Egyptians waited till fate had removed the sacred figure of their Pharaoh, the savage Semites took fate into their own hands and rid themselves of their tyrant.²

¹ At that period any other method of influencing them was scarcely possible.

² It is really remarkable how little we hear in the thousands of years of Egyptian history of the violent removal or murder of a Pharaoh. A comparison with Assyrian history, for instance, must increase our surprise at this. It may, of course, be accounted for by the fact that Egyptian history was entirely written to serve official ends.

Moses And Monotheism

4877

Nor can it be maintained that the surviving text of the Bible gives us no warning of such an end to Moses. The account of the ‘wandering in the wilderness’, which may stand for the period during which Moses ruled, describes a succession of serious revolts against his authority which were also, by Yahweh’s command, suppressed with bloody punishment. It is easy to imagine that one such rebellion ended in a way different from what the text suggests. The people’s defection from the new religion is also described in the text - only as an episode, it is true: namely in the story of the golden calf. In this, by an ingenious turn, the breaking of the tables of the law (which is to be understood symbolically: ‘he has broken the law’) is transposed on to Moses himself, and his furious indignation is assigned as its motive.

There came a time when people began to regret the murder of Moses and to seek to forget it. This was certainly so at the time of the union of the two portions of the people at Kadesh. But when the Exodus and the foundation of the religion at the oasis were brought closer together, and Moses was represented as being concerned in the latter instead of the other man, not only were the demands of the followers of Moses satisfied but the distressing fact of his violent end was successfully disavowed. In actual fact it is most unlikely that Moses could have taken part in the proceedings at Kadesh even if his life had not been cut short.

Moses And Monotheism

4878

We must now make an attempt at elucidating the chronological relations of these events. We have put the Exodus in the period after the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty (1350 B.C.). It may have occurred then or a little later, since the Egyptian chroniclers have included the succeeding years of anarchy in the reign of Haremhab, which brought them to an end and lasted till 1315 B.C. The next (but also the only) fixed point for the chronology is afforded by the stela of Merenptah (1225-15 B.C.), which boasts of his victory over Isiraal (Israel) and the laying waste of her seed (?). The sense to be attached to this inscription is unfortunately doubtful, it is supposed to prove that the Israelite tribes were already at that time settled in Canaan.¹ Eduard Meyer rightly concludes from this stela that Merenptah cannot have been the Pharaoh of the Exodus, as had been lightly assumed previously. The date of the Exodus must have been earlier. The question of who was the Pharaoh of the Exodus seems to me altogether an idle one. There was no Pharaoh of the Exodus, for it occurred during an interregnum. Nor does the discovery of the stela of Merenptah throw any light on the possible date of the union and founding of the religion at Kadesh. All that we can say with certainty is that it was some time between 1350 and 1215 B.C. We suspect that the Exodus comes somewhere very near the beginning of this hundred years and the events at Kadesh not too far away from its end. We should like to claim the greater part of this period for the interval between the two occurrences. For we need a comparatively long time for the passions of the returning tribes to have cooled down after the murder of Moses and for the influence of his followers, the Levites, to have become as great as is implied by the compromise at Kadesh. Two generations, sixty years, might about suffice for this, but it is a tight fit. What is inferred from the stela of Merenptah comes too early for us, and since we recognize that in this hypothesis of ours one supposition is only based on another, we must admit that this discussion reveals a weak side of our construction. It is unlucky that everything relating to the settlement of the Jewish people in Canaan is so obscure and confused. Our only resort, perhaps, is to suppose that the name on the ‘Israel’ stela does not relate to the tribes whose fortunes we are trying to follow and which combined to form the later people of Israel. After all, the name of ‘Habiru’ (Hebrews) was transferred to these same people in the Amarna period.

¹ Eduard Meyer, 1906, 222 ff.

Moses And Monotheism

4879

The union of the tribes into a nation through the adoption of a common religion, whenever it may have taken place, might easily have turned out quite an unimportant happening in world history. The new religion would have been carried away by the current of events, Yahweh would have had to take his place in the procession of departed gods in Flaubert’s vision, and all twelve of his tribes would have been ‘lost’ and not only the ten of them which the Anglo-Saxons have been in search of for so long. The god Yahweh, to whom the Midianite Moses then presented a new people, was probably in no respect a prominent being. A coarse, narrow-minded, local god, violent and bloodthirsty, he had promised his followers to give them ‘a land flowing with milk and honey’ and urged them to exterminate its present inhabitants ‘with the edge of the sword’. It is astonishing how much remains, in spite of all the revisions of the Biblical narratives, that allows us to recognize his original nature. It is not even certain that his religion was a genuine monotheism, that it denied the divinity of the deities of other peoples. It was enough probably that his people regarded their own god as more powerful than any foreign god. If, nevertheless, in the sequel everything took a different course from what such beginnings would have led one to expect, the cause can be found in only one fact. The Egyptian Moses had given to one portion of the people a more highly spiritualized notion of god, the idea of a single deity embracing the whole world, who was not less all-loving than all-powerful, who was averse to all ceremonial and magic and set before men as their highest aim a life in truth and justice. For, however incomplete may be the accounts we have of the ethical side of the Aten religion, it can be no unimportant fact that Akhenaten regularly referred to himself in his inscriptions as ‘living in Ma’at’ (truth, justice).¹ In the long run it made no difference that the people rejected the teaching of Moses (probably after a short time) and killed him himself. The tradition of it remained and its influence achieved (only gradually, it is true, in the course of centuries) what was denied to Moses himself. The god Yahweh had arrived at undeserved honour when, from the time of Kadesh onwards, he was credited with the deed of liberation which had been performed by Moses; but he had to pay heavily for this usurpation. The shadow of the god whose place he had taken became stronger than himself; by the end of the process of evolution, the nature of the forgotten god of Moses had come to light behind his own. No one can doubt that it was only the idea of this other god that enabled the people of Israel to survive all the blows of fate and that kept them alive to our own days.

¹ His hymns lay stress not only on the god’s universality and oneness, but also on his loving care for all creatures; and they encourage joy in nature and enjoyment of its beauty. (Breasted, 1934.)

Moses And Monotheism

4880

It is no longer possible to estimate the share taken by the Levites in the final victory of the Mosaic god over Yahweh. They had taken the side of Moses in the past, when the compromise was reached at Kadesh, in a still live memory of the master whose retinue and compatriots they had been. During the centuries since then they had become merged with the people or with the priesthood, and it had become the main function of the priests to develop and supervise the ritual, and besides this to preserve the holy writ and revise it in accordance with their aims. But was not all sacrifice and all ceremonial at bottom only magic and sorcery, such as had been unconditionally rejected by the old Mosaic teaching? Thereupon there arose from among the midst of the people an unending succession of men who were not linked to Moses in their origin but were enthralled by the great and mighty tradition which had grown up little by little in obscurity: and it was these men, the Prophets, who tirelessly preached the old Mosaic doctrine that the deity disdained sacrifice and ceremonial and asked only for faith and a life in truth and justice (Ma’at). The efforts of the Prophets had a lasting success; the doctrines with which they re-established the old faith became the permanent content of the Jewish religion. It is honour enough to the Jewish people that they could preserve such a tradition and produce men who gave it a voice - even though the initiative to it came from outside, from a great foreigner.

I should not feel secure in giving this account, if I could not appeal to the judgement of other enquirers with a specialist knowledge who see the significance of Moses for the Jewish religion in the same light as I do, even though they do not recognize his Egyptian origin. Thus, for instance, Sellin (1922, 52) writes: ‘Consequently we must picture the true religion of Moses - his belief in the one moral God whom he preaches - as thenceforward necessarily the property of a small circle of the people. We must necessarily not expect to meet with it in the official cult, in the religion of the priests or in the beliefs of the people. We can necessarily only reckon to find an occasional spark emerging, now here and now there, from the spiritual torch which he once kindled, to find that his ideas have not entirely perished but have been silently at work here and there upon beliefs and customs, till sooner or later, through the effect of special experiences or of persons specially moved by his spirit, it has broken out more strongly once more and gained influence on wider masses of the population. It is from this point of view that the history of the ancient religion of Israel is necessarily to be regarded. Anyone who sought to construct the Mosaic religion on the lines of the religion we meet with, according to the chronicles, in the life of the people during their first five hundred years in Canaan, would be committing the gravest methodological error.’ Volz (1907, 64) speaks even more clearly: it is his belief that ‘the exalted work of Moses was understood and carried through to begin with only feebly and scantily, till, in the course of centuries, it penetrated more and more, and at length in the great Prophets it met with like spirits who continued the lonely man’s work.’

Moses And Monotheism

4881

And here, it seems, I have reached the conclusion of my study, which was directed to the single aim of introducing the figure of an Egyptian Moses into the nexus of Jewish history. Our findings may be thus expressed in the most concise formula. Jewish history is familiar to us for its dualities: two groups of people who came together to form the nation, two kingdoms into which this nation fell apart, two gods’ names in the documentary sources of the Bible. To these we add two fresh ones: the foundation of two religions - the first repressed by the second but nevertheless later emerging victoriously behind it, and two religious founders, who are both called by the same name of Moses and whose personalities we have to distinguish from each other. All of these dualities are the necessary consequences of the first one: the fact that one portion of the people had an experience which must be regarded as traumatic and which the other portion escaped. Beyond this there would be a very great deal to discuss, to explain and to assert. Only thus would an interest in our purely historical study find its true justification. What the real nature of a tradition resides in, and what its special power rests on, how impossible it is to dispute the personal influence upon world-history of individual great men, what sacrilege one commits against the splendid diversity of human life if one recognizes only those motives which arise from material needs, from what sources some ideas (and particularly religious ones) derive their power to subject both men and peoples to their yoke - to study all this in the special case of Jewish history would be an alluring task. To continue my work on such lines as these would be to find a link with the statements I put forward twenty-five years ago in Totem and Taboo. But I no longer feel that I have the strength to do so.

Moses And Monotheism

4882

III

MOSES, HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEIST RELIGION

PART I

PREFATORY NOTE I

(before March, 1938)

With the audacity of one who has little or nothing to lose, I propose for a second time to break a well-grounded intention and to add to my two essays on Moses in Imago the final portion which I have held back. I ended the last essay with an assertion that I knew my strength would not be enough for this. By that I meant, of course, the weakening of creative powers which goes along with old age;¹ but I was thinking of another obstacle as well.

We are living in a specially remarkable period. We find to our astonishment that progress has allied itself with barbarism. In Soviet Russia they have set about improving the living conditions of some hundred millions of people who were held firmly in subjection. They have been rash enough to withdraw the ‘opium’ of religion from them and have been wise enough to give them a reasonable amount of sexual liberty; but at the same time they have submitted them to the most cruel coercion and robbed them of any possibility of freedom of thought. With similar violence, the Italian people are being trained up to orderliness and a sense of duty. We feel it as a relief from an oppressive apprehension when we see in the case of the German people that a relapse into almost prehistoric barbarism can occur as well without being attached to any progressive ideas. In any case, things have so turned out that to-day the conservative democracies have become the guardians of cultural advance and that, strange to say, it is precisely the institution of the Catholic Church which puts up a powerful defence against the spread of this danger to civilization - the Church which has hitherto been the relentless foe to freedom of thought and to advances towards the discovery of the truth!

¹ I do not share the opinion of my contemporary Bernard Shaw, that human beings would only achieve anything good if they could live to be three hundred years old. A prolongation of life would achieve nothing unless many other fundamental changes were to be made in the conditions of life.

Moses And Monotheism

4883

We are living here in a Catholic country under the protection of that Church, uncertain how long that protection will hold out. But so long as it lasts, we naturally hesitate to do anything that would be bound to arouse the Church’s hostility. This is not cowardice, but prudence. The new enemy, to whom we want to avoid being of service, is more dangerous than the old one with whom we have already learnt to come to terms. The psycho-analytic researches which we carry on are in any case viewed with suspicious attention by Catholicism. I will not maintain that this is unjustly so. If our work leads us to a conclusion which reduces religion to a neurosis of humanity and explains its enormous power in the same way as a neurotic compulsion in our individual patients, we may be sure of drawing the resentment of our ruling powers down upon us. Not that I should have anything to say that would be new or that I did not say clearly a quarter of a century ago: but it has been forgotten in the meantime and it could not be without effect if I repeated it to-day and illustrated it from an example which offers a standard for all religious foundations. It would probably lead to our being prohibited from practising psycho-analysis. Such violent methods of suppression are, indeed, by no means alien to the Church; the fact is rather that it feels it as an invasion of its privileges if someone else makes use of those methods. But psycho-analysis, which in the course of my long life has gone everywhere, still possesses no home that could be more valuable for it than the city in which it was born and grew up.

I do not only think but I know that I shall let myself be deterred by this second obstacle, by the external danger, from publishing the last portion of my study on Moses. I have made yet another attempt to get the difficulty out of the way, by telling myself that my fears are based on an over-estimation of my own personal importance: that it will probably be a matter of complete indifference to the authorities what I choose to write about Moses and the origin of monotheist religions. But I feel uncertain in my judgement of this. It seems to me much more possible that malice and sensationalism will counter-balance any lack of recognition of me in the contemporary world’s judgement. So I shall not give this work to the public. But that need not prevent my writing it. Especially as I have written it down already once, two years ago, so that I have only to revise it and attach it to the two essays that have preceded it. It may then be preserved in concealment till some day the time arrives when it may venture without danger into the light, or till someone who has reached the same conclusions and opinions can be told: ‘there was someone in darker times who thought the same as you!’

Moses And Monotheism

4884

PREFATORY NOTE II

(June, 1938)

The quite special difficulties which have weighed on me during my composition of this study relating to the figure of Moses - internal doubts as well as external obstacles - have resulted in this third and concluding essay being introduced by two different prefaces, which contradict each other and indeed cancel each other out. For in the short space of time between the two there has been a fundamental change in the author’s circumstances. At the earlier date I was living under the protection of the Catholic Church, and was afraid that the publication of my work would result in the loss of that protection and would conjure up a prohibition upon the work of the adherents and students of psycho-analysis in Austria. Then, suddenly, came the German invasion and Catholicism proved, to use the words of the Bible, ‘a broken reed’. In the certainty that I should now be persecuted not only for my line of thought but also for my ‘race’ - accompanied by many of my friends, I left the city which, from my early childhood, had been my home for seventy-eight years.

I met with the friendliest reception in lovely, free, magnanimous England. Here I now live, a welcome guest; I can breathe a sigh of relief now that the weight has been taken off me and that I am once more able to speak and write - I had almost said ‘and think’ - as I wish or as I must. I venture to bring the last portion of my work before the public.

There are no external obstacles remaining, or at least none to be frightened of. In the few weeks of my stay here I have received countless greetings from friends who were pleased at my arrival, and from unknown and indeed uninvolved strangers who only wanted to give expression to their satisfaction at my having found freedom and safety here. And in addition there arrived, with a frequency surprising to a foreigner, communications of another sort, which were concerned with the state of my soul, which pointed out to me the way of Christ and sought to enlighten me on the future of Israel. The good people who wrote in this way cannot have known much about me; but I expect that when this work about Moses becomes known, in a translation, among my new compatriots, I shall forfeit enough of the sympathy which a number of other people as well now feel for me.

Moses And Monotheism

4885

As regards internal difficulties, a political revolution and a change of domicile could alter nothing. No less than before, I feel uncertain in the face of my own work; I lack the consciousness of unity and of belonging together which should exist between an author and his work. It is not as though there were an absence of conviction in the correctness of my conclusion. I acquired that a quarter of a century ago when in 1912 I wrote my book about Totem and Taboo, and it has only grown firmer since. From that time I have never doubted that religious phenomena are only to be understood on the pattern of the individual neurotic symptoms familiar to us - as the return of long since forgotten, important events in the primaeval history of the human family - and that they have to thank precisely this origin for their compulsive character and that, accordingly, they are effective on human beings by force of the historical truth of their content. My uncertainty sets in only when I ask myself whether I have succeeded in proving these theses in the example which I have chosen here of Jewish monotheism. To my critical sense this book, which takes its start from the man Moses, appears like a dancer balancing on the tip of one toe. If I could not find support in an analytic interpretation of the exposure myth and could not pass from there to Sellin’s suspicion about the end of Moses, the whole thing would have had to remain unwritten. In any case, let us now take the plunge.

Moses And Monotheism

4886

A

THE HISTORICAL PREMISS¹

Here, then, is the historical background of the events which have absorbed our interest. As a result of the conquests of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Egypt became a world-empire. The new imperialism was reflected in the development of the religious ideas, if not of the whole people, at least of its ruling and intellectually active upper stratum. Under the influence of the priests of the sun-god at On (Heliopolis), strengthened perhaps by impulses from Asia, the idea arose of a universal god Aten to whom restriction to a single country and a single people no longer applied. In the young Amenophis IV a Pharaoh came to the throne who had no higher interest than the development of this idea of a god. He promoted the religion of Aten into the state religion, and through him the universal god became the only god: everything that was told of other gods was deceit and lies. With magnificent inflexibility he resisted every temptation to magical thought, and he rejected the illusion, so dear to Egyptians in particular, of a life after death. In an astonishing presentiment of later scientific discovery he recognized in the energy of solar radiation the source of all life on earth and worshipped it as the symbol of the power of his god. He boasted of his joy in the creation and of his life in Ma’at (truth and justice).

This is the first and perhaps the clearest case of a monotheist religion in human history; a deeper insight into the historical and psychological determinants of its origin would be of immeasurable value. Care has however been taken that none too much information about the Aten religion should reach us. Already under Akhenaten’s feeble successors all that he had created collapsed. The vengeance of the priesthood which he had suppressed raged against his memory; the Aten religion was abolished, the capital city of the Pharaoh, who was branded as a criminal, was destroyed and plundered. In about 1350 B.C. the Eighteenth Dynasty came to an end; after a period of anarchy, order was restored by general Haremhab, who reigned till 1315 B.C. Akhenaten’s reform seemed to be an episode doomed to be forgotten.

¹ I begin with a résumé of the findings of my second study on Moses, the purely historical one. Those findings will not be submitted here to any fresh criticism, since they form the premiss to the psychological discussions which start out from them and constantly go back to them.

Moses And Monotheism

4887

Thus far what is established historically; and now our hypothetical sequel begins. Among those in Akhenaten’s entourage there was a man who was perhaps called Tuthmosis, like many other people at that time¹ - the name is not of great importance except that its second component must have been ‘-mose’. He was in a high position and a convinced adherent of the Aten religion, but, in contrast to the meditative king, he was energetic and passionate. For him the death of Akhenaten and the abolition of his religion meant the end of all his expectations. He could remain in Egypt only as an outlaw or as a renegade. Perhaps as governor of the frontier province he had come in contact with a Semitic tribe which had immigrated into it a few generations earlier. Under the necessity of his disappointment and loneliness he turned to these foreigners and with them sought compensation for his losses. He chose them as his people and tried to realize his ideals in them. After he had left Egypt with them, accompanied by his followers, he made them holy by the mark of circumcision, gave them laws and introduced them into the doctrines of the Aten religion, which the Egyptians had just thrown off. The precepts which this man Moses gave to his Jews may have been even harsher than those of his master and teacher Akhenaten, and he may, too, have given up dependence on the sun-god of On, to which Akhenaten had continued to adhere.

We must take the period of the interregnum after 1350 B.C. as the date of the Exodus from Egypt. The interval of time which followed, up to the completion of the occupation of the land of Canaan, is particularly inscrutable. Modern historical research has been able to extract two facts from the obscurity which the biblical narrative has left, or rather created, at this point. The first of these facts, discovered by Ernst Sellin, is that the Jews, who, even by the account in the Bible, were headstrong and unruly towards their law-giver and leader, rose against him one day, killed him and threw off the religion of the Aten which had been imposed on them, just as the Egyptians had thrown it off earlier. The second fact, demonstrated by Eduard Meyer, is that those Jews who had returned from Egypt united later on with closely related tribes in the region between Palestine, the Sinai Peninsula and Arabia, and that there, in a well-watered locality named Kadesh, under the influence of the Arabian Midianites, they took on a new religion, the worship of the volcano god Yahweh. Soon after this they were ready to invade Canaan as conquerors.

¹ Such as, for instance, the sculptor whose studio was found at Tell el-’Amarna.

Moses And Monotheism

4888

The chronological relations of these two events to each other and to the Exodus from Egypt are very uncertain. The closest historical point of reference is provided by a stela of the Pharaoh Merenptah (who reigned till 1215 B.C.) which in the course of a report on campaigns in Syria and Palestine names ‘Israel’ among the defeated enemy. If we take the date of this stela as a terminus ad quem, we are left with about a century (from after 1350 to before 1215 B.C.) for the whole course of events, starting from the Exodus. It is possible, however, that the name ‘Israel’ did not yet relate to the tribes whose fortunes we are following and that in fact we have a longer interval at our disposal. The settlement in Canaan of what was later the Jewish people was certainly no rapidly completed conquest but took place in waves and over considerable periods of time. If we free ourselves from the limitation imposed by the Merenptah stela, we can all the more easily assign one generation (thirty years) to the period of Moses,¹ and allow at least two generations, but probably more, to elapse up to the time of the union at Kadesh.² The interval between Kadesh and the irruption into Canaan need only be short. The Jewish tradition, as was shown in the preceding essay, had good grounds for shortening the interval between the Exodus and the founding of the religion at Kadesh, while the reverse is in the interest of our account.

¹ This would correspond to the forty years of wandering in the wilderness of the Bible text.

² Thus we should have about 1350 (or 1340)-1320 (or 1310) B.C. for the Moses period; 1260 B.C., or preferably later, for Kadesh; the Merenptah stela before 1215 B.C.

Moses And Monotheism

4889

All this, however, is still history, an attempt to fill up the gaps in our historical knowledge and in part a repetition of my second essay in Imago. Our interest follows the fortunes of Moses and of his doctrines, to which the rising of the Jews had only apparently put an end. From the account given by the Yahwist, which was written down in about 1000 B.C. but was certainly based on earlier records, we have discovered that the union and the founding of the religion at Kadesh were accompanied by a compromise in which the two sides are still easily distinguishable. The one partner was only concerned to disavow the novelty and foreign character of the god Yahweh and to increase his claim to the people’s devotion; the other partner was anxious not to sacrifice to him precious memories of the liberation from Egypt and of the grand figure of the leader, Moses. The second side succeeded, too, in introducing both the fact and the man into the new account of prehistory, in retaining at least the external mark of the religion of Moses - circumcision - and possibly in establishing certain restrictions in the use of the name of the new god. As we have said, the representatives of these claims were the descendants of the followers of Moses, the Levites, who were separated from his contemporaries and compatriots by only a few generations and were still attached to his memory by a living recollection. The poetically embellished narrative which we attribute to the Yahwist, and to his later rival the Elohist, were like mausoleums beneath which, withdrawn from the knowledge of later generations, the true account of those early things - of the nature of the Mosaic religion and of the violent end of the great man - was, as it were, to find its eternal rest. And if we have guessed what happened correctly, there is nothing left about it that is puzzling; but it might very well have signified the final end of the Moses episode in the history of the Jewish people.

The remarkable thing, however, is that that was not the case - that the most powerful effects of the people’s experience were to come to light only later and to force their way into reality in the course of many centuries. It is unlikely that Yahweh differed much in character from the gods of the surrounding peoples and tribes. It is true that he struggled with them, just as the peoples themselves fought with one another, but we cannot suppose that it came into the head of a Yahweh-worshipper of those days to deny the existence of the gods of Canaan or Moab or Amalek, and so on, any more than to deny the existence of the peoples who believed in them.

Moses And Monotheism

4890

The monotheist idea, which had flared up with Akhenaten, had grown dark once more and was to remain in darkness for a long time to come. Finds in the island of Elephantine, just below the First Cataract of the Nile, have given us the surprising information that a Jewish military colony had been settled there for centuries, in whose temple, alongside of the chief god Yahu, two female deities were worshipped, one of them named Anat-Yahu. These Jews, it is true, were cut off from their mother-country and had not taken part in the religious development there; the Persian government of Egypt (of the fifth century B.C.) conveyed information to them of the new rules of worship issued from Jerusalem.¹ Going back to earlier times, we may say that the god Yahweh certainly bore no resemblance to the Mosaic god. Aten had been a pacifist like his representative on earth - or more properly, his prototype - the Pharaoh Akhenaten, who looked on passively while the world-empire conquered by his ancestors fell to pieces. No doubt Yahweh was better suited to a people who were starting out to occupy new homelands by force. And everything in the Mosaic god that deserved admiration was quite beyond the comprehension of the primitive masses.

I have already said - and on that point I have been glad to be able to claim agreement with other writers - that the central fact of the development of the Jewish religion was that in the course of time the god Yahweh lost his own characteristics and grew more and more to resemble the old god of Moses, the Aten. It is true that differences remained to which one would be inclined at a first glance to attribute great importance; but these can easily be explained.

In Egypt Aten had begun to dominate during a fortunate period of established possession, and even when the empire began to totter, his worshippers had been able to turn away from the disturbance and continued to praise and to enjoy his creations. The Jewish people were fated to experience a series of grave trials and painful events; their god became harsh and severe and, as it were, wrapped in gloom. He retained the characteristic of being a universal god, reigning over all countries and peoples, but the fact that his worship had passed over from the Egyptians to the Jews found expression in the additional belief that the Jews were his chosen people whose special obligations would eventually meet with a special reward as well. It may not have been easy for the people to reconcile a belief in being preferred by their omnipotent god with the sad experiences of their unfortunate destiny. But they did not allow themselves to be shaken in their convictions; they increased their own sense of guilt in order to stifle their doubts of God, and it may be that they pointed at last to the ‘inscrutable decrees of Providence’, as pious people do to this day. If they felt inclined to wonder at his allowing one violent aggressor after another to arise and overthrow and maltreat them - Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians - they could yet recognize his power in the fact that all these evil foes were themselves conquered in turn and that their empires vanished.

In three important respects the later god of the Jews became in the end like the old Mosaic god. The first and decisive point is that he was truly acknowledged as the only god, beside whom any other god was unthinkable. Akhenaten’s monotheism was taken seriously by an entire people; indeed, that people clung so much to this idea that it became the main content of their intellectual life and left them no interest for other things. On this the people and the priesthood who had become dominant among them were at one. But whereas the priests exhausted their efforts in erecting the ceremonial for his worship, they came in opposition to intense currents among the people which sought to revive two others of the doctrines of Moses about his god. The voices of the Prophets never tired of declaring that God despised ceremonial and sacrifice and required only that people should believe in him and lead a life in truth and justice. And when they praised the simplicity and holiness of life in the wilderness they were certainly under the influence of the Mosaic ideals.

¹ Auerbach, 2, 1936.

Moses And Monotheism

4891

It is time to raise the question of whether there is any need whatever to call in the influence of Moses as a cause of the final form taken by the Jewish idea of God, or whether it would not be enough to assume a spontaneous development to higher intellectuality during a cultural life extending over hundreds of years. There are two things to be said about this possible explanation which would put an end to all our puzzling conjectures. First, that it explains nothing. In the case of the Greeks - unquestionably a most highly gifted people - the same conditions did not lead to monotheism but to a disintegration of their polytheist religion and to the beginning of philosophical thought. In Egypt, so far as we can understand, monotheism grew up as a by-product of imperialism: God was a reflection of the Pharaoh who was the absolute ruler of a great world empire. With the Jews, political conditions were highly unfavourable for the development from the idea of an exclusive national god to that of a universal ruler of the world. And where did this tiny and powerless nation find the arrogance to declare itself the favourite child of the great Lord? The problem of the origin of monotheism among the Jews would thus remain unsolved, or we should have to be content with the common answer that it is the expression of the peculiar religious genius of that people. Genius is well known to be incomprehensible and irresponsible, and we ought therefore not to bring it up as an explanation till every other solution has failed us.¹

In addition to this, we come upon the fact that Jewish records and historical writings themselves point us the way, by asserting most definitely - this time without contradicting themselves - that the idea of a single god was brought to the people by Moses. If there is an objection to the trustworthiness of this assurance, it is that the priestly revision of the text we have before us obviously traces far too much back to Moses. Institutions such as the ritual ordinances, which date unmistakably from later times, are given out as Mosaic commandments with the plain intention of lending them authority. This certainly gives us ground for suspicion, but not enough for a rejection. For the deeper motive for an exaggeration of this kind is obvious. The priestly narrative seeks to establish continuity between its contemporary period and the remote Mosaic past; it seeks to disavow precisely what we have described as the most striking fact about Jewish religious history, namely that there is a yawning gap between the law-giving of Moses and the later Jewish religion - a gap which was at first filled by the worship of Yahweh, and was only slowly patched up afterwards. It disputes this course of events by every possible means, though its historical correctness is established beyond any doubt, since, in the particular treatment given to the Biblical text, superabundant evidence has been left to prove it. Here the priestly revision has attempted something similar to the tendentious distortion which made the new god Yahweh into the god of the Patriarchs. If we take this motive of the Priestly Code into account, we shall find it hard to withhold our belief from the assertion that Moses really did himself give the monotheist idea to the Jews. We should be all the readier to give our assent since we can say where Moses derived this idea from, which the Jewish priests certainly knew no longer.

¹ This same consideration applies, too, to the remarkable case of William Shakespeare of Stratford.

Moses And Monotheism

4892

And here someone might ask what we gain by tracing Jewish to Egyptian monotheism. It merely pushes the problem a little way further back: it tells us nothing more of the genesis of the monotheist idea. The answer is that the question is not one of gain but of investigation. Perhaps we may learn something from it if we discover the real course of events.

B

THE LATENCY PERIOD AND TRADITION

We confess the belief, therefore, that the idea of a single god, as well as the rejection of magically effective ceremonial and the stress upon ethical demands made in his name, were in fact Mosaic doctrines, to which no attention was paid to begin with, but which, after a long interval had elapsed, came into operation and eventually became permanently established. How are we to explain a delayed effect of this kind and where do we meet with a similar phenomenon? It occurs to us at once that such things are not infrequently to be found in the most various spheres and that they probably come about in a number of ways which are understandable with greater or less ease. Let us take, for instance, the history of a new scientific theory, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution. At first it met with embittered rejection and was violently disputed for decades; but it took no longer than a generation for it to be recognized as a great step forward towards truth. Darwin himself achieved the honour of a grave or cenotaph in Westminster Abbey. A case such as that leaves us little to unravel. The new truth awoke emotional resistances; these found expression in arguments by which the evidence in favour of the unpopular theory could be disputed; the struggle of opinions took up a certain length of time; from the first there were adherents and opponents; the number as well as the weight of the former kept on increasing till at last they gained the upper hand; during the whole time of the struggle the subject with which it was concerned was never forgotten. We are scarcely surprised that the whole course of events took a considerable length of time; and we probably do not sufficiently appreciate that what we are concerned with is a process in group psychology.

Moses And Monotheism

4893

There is no difficulty in finding an analogy in the mental life of an individual corresponding precisely to this process. Such would be the case if a person learnt something new to him which, on the ground of certain evidence, he ought to recognize as true, but which contradicts some of his wishes and shocks a few convictions that are precious to him. Thereupon he will hesitate, seek for reasons to enable him to throw doubts on this new thing, and for a while will struggle with himself, till finally he admits to himself: ‘All the same it is so, though it’s not easy for me to accept it, though it’s distressing to me to have to believe it.’ What we learn from this is merely that it takes time for the reasoning activity of the ego to overcome the objections that are maintained by strong affective cathexes. The similarity between this case and the one we are endeavouring to understand is not very great.

The next example we turn to appears to have even less in common with our problem. It may happen that a man who has experienced some frightful accident - a railway collision, for instance - leaves the scene of the event apparently uninjured. In the course of the next few weeks, however, he develops a number of severe psychical and motor symptoms which can only be traced to his shock, the concussion or whatever else it was. He now has a ‘traumatic neurosis’. It is a quite unintelligible - that is to say, a new - fact. The time that has passed between the accident and the first appearance of the symptoms is described as the ‘incubation period’, in a clear allusion to the pathology of infectious diseases. On reflection, it must strike us that, in spite of the fundamental difference between the two cases - the problem of traumatic neurosis and that of Jewish monotheism - there is nevertheless one point of agreement: namely, in the characteristic that might be described as ‘latency’. According to our assured hypothesis, in the history of the Jewish religion there was a long period after the defection from the religion of Moses during which no sign was to be detected of the monotheist idea, of the contempt for ceremonial or of the great emphasis on ethics. We are thus prepared for the possibility that the solution of our problem is to be looked for in a particular psychological situation.

Moses And Monotheism

4894

We have already repeatedly described what happened at Kadesh when the two portions of what was later to be the Jewish people came together to receive a new religion. In those, on the one hand, who had been in Egypt, memories of the Exodus and of the figure of Moses were still so strong and vivid that they demanded their inclusion in an account of early times. They were grandchildren, perhaps, of people who had known Moses himself, and some of them still felt themselves Egyptians and bore Egyptian names. But they had good motives for repressing the memory of the fate with which their leader and lawgiver had met. The determining purpose of the other portion of the people was to glorify the new god and to dispute his being foreign. Both portions had the same interest in disavowing the fact of their having had an earlier religion and the nature of its content. So it was that the first compromise came about, and it was probably soon recorded in writing. The people who had come from Egypt had brought writing and the desire to write history along with them; but it was to be a long time before historical writing realized that it was pledged to unswerving truthfulness. To begin with it had no scruples about shaping its narratives according to the needs and purposes of the moment, as though it had not yet recognized the concept of falsification. As a result of these circumstances a discrepancy was able to grow up between the written record and the oral transmission of the same material - tradition. What had been omitted or changed in the written record might very well have been preserved intact in tradition. Tradition was a supplement but at the same time a contradiction to historical writing. It was less subjected to the influence of distorting purposes and perhaps at some points quite exempt from them, and it might therefore be more truthful than the account that had been recorded in writing. Its trustworthiness, however, suffered from the fact that it was less stable and definite than the written account and exposed to numerous changes and alterations when it was handed on from one generation to another by oral communication. A tradition of such a kind might meet with various sorts of fate. What we should most expect would be that it would be crushed by the written account, would be unable to stand up against it, would become more and more shadowy and would finally pass into oblivion. But it might meet with other fates: one of these would be that the tradition itself would end in a written record, and we shall have to deal with yet others as we proceed.

Moses And Monotheism

4895

The phenomenon of latency in the history of the Jewish religion, with which we are dealing, may be explained, then, by the circumstance that the facts and ideas which were intentionally disavowed by what may be called the official historians were in fact never lost. Information about them persisted in traditions which survived among the people. As we are assured by Sellin, indeed, there was actually a tradition about the end of Moses which flatly contradicted the official account and was far nearer the truth. The same, we may assume, also applied to other things which apparently ceased to exist at the same time as Moses - to some of the contents of the Mosaic religion, which had been unacceptable to the majority of his contemporaries.

The remarkable fact with which we are here confronted is, however, that these traditions, instead of becoming weaker with time, became more and more powerful in the course of centuries, forced their way into the later revisions of the official accounts and finally showed themselves strong enough to have a decisive influence on the thoughts and actions of the people. The determinants which made this outcome possible are for the moment, it is true, outside our knowledge.

This fact is so remarkable that we feel justified in looking at it once again. Our problem is comprised in it. The Jewish people had abandoned the Aten religion brought to them by Moses and had turned to the worship of another god who differed little from the Baalim of the neighbouring peoples. All the tendentious efforts of later times failed to disguise this shameful fact. But the Mosaic religion had not vanished without leaving a trace; some sort of memory of it had kept alive - a possibly obscured and distorted tradition. And it was this tradition of a great past which continued to operate (from the background, as it were), which gradually acquired more and more power over people’s minds and which in the end succeeded in changing the god Yahweh into the Mosaic god and in re-awakening into life the religion of Moses that had been introduced and then abandoned long centuries before. That a tradition thus sunk in oblivion should exercise such a powerful effect on the mental life of a people is an unfamiliar idea to us. We find ourselves here in the field of group psychology, where we do not feel at home. We shall look about for analogies, for facts that are at least of a similar nature, even though in different fields. And facts of that sort are, I believe, to be found.

Moses And Monotheism

4896

During the period at which, among the Jews, the return of the religion of Moses was in preparation, the Greek people found themselves in possession of an exceedingly rich store of tribal legends and hero-myths. It is believed that the ninth or eighth century B.C. saw the origin of the two Homeric epics, which drew their material from this circle of legends. With our present psychological insight we could, long before Schliemann and Evans, have raised the question of where it was that the Greeks obtained all the legendary material which was worked over by Homer and the great Attic dramatists in their masterpieces. The answer would have had to be that this people had probably experienced in their prehistory a period of external brilliance and cultural efflorescence which had perished in a historical catastrophe and of which an obscure tradition survived in these legends. The archaeological researches of our days have now confirmed this suspicion, which in the past would certainly have been pronounced too daring. These researches have uncovered the evidences of the impressive Minoan-Mycenaean civilization, which had probably already come to an end on the mainland of Greece before 1250 B.C. There is scarcely a hint at it to be found in the Greek historians of a later age: at most a remark that there was a time when the Cretans exercised command of the sea, and the name of King Minos and of his palace, the Labyrinth. That is all, and beyond it nothing has remained but the traditions which were seized on by the poets.

Moses And Monotheism

4897

National epics of other peoples - Germans, Indians, Finns - have come to light as well. It is the business of historians of literature to investigate whether we may assume the same determinants for their origin as with the Greeks. Such an investigation would, I believe, yield a positive result. Here is the determinant which we recognize: a piece of prehistory which, immediately after it, would have been bound to appear rich in content, important, splendid, and always, perhaps, heroic, but which lies so far back, in such remote times, that only an obscure and incomplete tradition informs later generations of it. Surprise has been felt that the epic as an art-form has become extinct in later times. The explanation may be that its determining cause no longer exists. The old material was used up and for all later events historical writing took the place of tradition. The greatest heroic deeds of our days have not been able to inspire an epic, and even Alexander the Great had a right to complain that he would find no Homer.

Long-past ages have a great and often puzzling attraction for men’s imagination. Whenever they are dissatisfied with their present surroundings - and this happens often enough - they turn back to the past and hope that they will now be able to prove the truth of the unextinguishable dream of a golden age.¹ They are probably still under the spell of their childhood, which is presented to them by their not impartial memory as a time of uninterrupted bliss.

If all that is left of the past are the incomplete and blurred memories which we call tradition, this offers an artist a peculiar attraction, for in that case he is free to fill in the gaps in memory according to the desires of his imagination and to picture the period which he wishes to reproduce according to his intentions. One might almost say that the vaguer a tradition has become the more serviceable it becomes for a poet. We need not therefore be surprised at the importance of tradition for imaginative writing, and the analogy with the manner in which epics are determined will make us more inclined to accept the strange hypothesis that it was the tradition of Moses which, for the Jews, altered the worship of Yahweh in the direction of the old Mosaic religion. But in other respects the two cases are still too different. On the one hand the outcome is a poem and on the other a religion; and in the latter instance we have assumed that, under the spur of tradition, it was reproduced with a faithfulness for which the instance of the epic can of course offer no counterpart. Accordingly enough of our problem is left over to justify a need for more apposite analogies.

¹ This was the situation on which Macaulay based his Lays of Ancient Rome. He put himself in the place of a minstrel who, depressed by the confused party strife of his own day, presented his hearers with the self-sacrifice, the unity and the patriotism of their ancestors.

Moses And Monotheism

4898

C

THE ANALOGY

The only satisfying analogy to the remarkable course of events that we have found in the history of the Jewish religion lies in an apparently remote field; but it is very complete, and approaches identity. In it we once more come upon the phenomenon of latency, the emergence of unintelligible manifestations calling for an explanation and an early, and later forgotten, event as a necessary determinant. We also find the characteristic of compulsion, which forces itself on the mind along with an overpowering of logical thought - a feature which did not come into account, for instance, in the genesis of the epic.

This analogy is met with in psychopathology, in the genesis of human neuroses - in a field, that is to say, belonging to the psychology of individuals, while religious phenomena have of course to be reckoned as part of group psychology. We shall see that this analogy is not so surprising as might at first be thought - indeed that it is more like a postulate.

We give the name of traumas to those impressions, experienced early and later forgotten, to which we attach such great importance in the aetiology of the neuroses. We may leave on one side the question of whether the aetiology of the neuroses in general may be regarded as traumatic. The obvious objection to this is that it is not possible in every case to discover a manifest trauma in the neurotic subject’s earliest history. We must often resign ourselves to saying that all we have before us is an unusual, abnormal reaction to experiences and demands which affect everyone, but are worked over and dealt with by other people in another manner which may be called normal. When we have nothing else at our disposal for explaining a neurosis but hereditary and constitutional dispositions, we are naturally tempted to say that it was not acquired but developed.

Moses And Monotheism

4899

But in this connection two points must be stressed. Firstly, the genesis of a neurosis invariably goes back to very early impressions in childhood.¹ Secondly, it is true that there are cases which are distinguished as being ‘traumatic’ because their effects go back unmistakably to one or more powerful impressions in these early times - impressions which have escaped being dealt with normally, so that one is inclined to judge that if they had not occurred the neurosis would not have come about either. It would be enough for our purposes if we were obliged to restrict the analogy we are in search of to these traumatic cases. But the gap between the two groups appears not to be unbridgeable. It is quite possible to unite the two aetiological determinants under a single conception; it is merely a question of how one defines ‘traumatic’. If we may assume that the experience acquires its traumatic character only as a result of a quantitative factor - that is to say, that in every case it is an excess in demand that is responsible for an experience evoking unusual pathological reactions - then we can easily arrive at the expedient of saying that something acts as a trauma in the case of one constitution but in the case of another would have no such effect. In this way we reach the concept of a sliding ‘complemental series’ as it is called, in which two factors converge in fulfilling an aetiological requirement. A less of one factor is balanced by a more of the other; as a rule both factors operate together and it is only at the two ends of the series that there can be any question of a simple motive being at work. After mentioning this, we can disregard the distinction between traumatic and non-traumatic aetiologies as irrelevant to the analogy we are in search of.

In spite of a risk of repetition, it will perhaps be as well to bring together here the facts which comprise the analogy that is significant for us. They are as follows. Our researches have shown that what we call the phenomena (symptoms) of a neurosis are the result of certain experiences and impressions which for that very reason we regard as aetiological traumas. We now have two tasks before us: to discover (1) the common characteristics of these experiences and (2) those of neurotic symptoms, and in doing so we need not avoid drawing a somewhat schematic picture.

¹ This therefore makes it nonsensical to say that one is practising psycho-analysis if one excludes from examination and consideration precisely these earliest periods - as happens in some quarters.

Moses And Monotheism

4900

(1) (a) All these traumas occur in early childhood up to about the fifth year. Impressions from the time at which a child is beginning to talk stand out as being of particular interest; the periods between the ages of two and four seem to be the most important; it cannot be determined with certainty how long after birth this period of receptivity begins. (b) The experiences in question are as a rule totally forgotten, they are not accessible to memory and fall within the period of infantile amnesia, which is usually broken into by a few separate mnemic residues, what are known as ‘screen memories’. (c) They relate to impressions of a sexual and aggressive nature, and no doubt also to early injuries to the ego (narcissistic mortifications). In this connection it should be remarked that such young children make no sharp distinction between sexual and aggressive acts, as they do later. (Cf. the misunderstanding of the sexual act in a sadistic sense.) The predominance of the sexual factor is, of course, most striking and calls for theoretical consideration.

These three points - the very early appearance of these experiences (during the first five years of life), the fact of their being forgotten and their sexual-aggressive content - are closely interconnected. The traumas are either experiences on the subject’s own body or sense perceptions, mostly of something seen and heard - that is, experiences or impressions. The interconnection of these three points is established by a theory, a product of the work of analysis which alone can bring about a knowledge of the forgotten experiences, or, to put it more vividly but also more incorrectly, bring them back to memory. The theory is that, in contrast to popular opinion, the sexual life of human beings (or what corresponds to it later on) exhibits an early efflorescence which comes to an end at about the fifth year and is followed by what is known as the period of latency (till puberty) in which there is no further development of sexuality and indeed what has been attained undergoes a retrogression. This theory is confirmed by the anatomical investigation of the growth of the internal genitalia; it leads us to suppose that the human race is descended from a species of animal which reached sexual maturity in five years and rouses a suspicion that the postponement of sexual life and its diphasic onset are intimately connected with the history of hominization. Human beings appear to be the only animal organisms with a latency period and sexual retardation of this kind. Investigations on the primates (which, so far as I know, are not available) would be indispensable for testing this theory. It cannot be a matter of indifference psychologically that the period of infantile amnesia coincides with this early period of sexuality. It may be that this state of things provides the true determinant for the possibility of neurosis, which is in a sense a human prerogative and from this point of view appears as a vestige - a ‘survival’ - of primaeval times like certain portions of our bodily anatomy.

Moses And Monotheism

4901

(2) Two points must be stressed in regard to the common characteristics or peculiarities of neurotic phenomena: (a) The effects of traumas are of two kinds, positive and negative. The former are attempts to bring the trauma into operation once again - that is, to remember the forgotten experience or, better still, to make it real, to experience a repetition of it anew, or, even if it was only an early emotional relationship, to revive it in an analogous relationship with someone else. We summarize these efforts under the name of ‘fixations’ to the trauma and as a ‘compulsion to repeat’. They may be taken up into what passes as a normal ego and, as permanent trends in it, may lend it unalterable character-traits, although, or rather precisely because, their true basis and historical origin are forgotten. Thus a man who has spent his childhood in an excessive and to-day forgotten attachment to his mother, may spend his whole life looking for a wife on whom he can make himself dependent and by whom he can arrange to be nourished and supported. A girl who was made the object of a sexual seduction in her early childhood may direct her later sexual life so as constantly to provoke similar attacks. It may easily be guessed that from such discoveries about the problem of neurosis we can penetrate to an understanding of the formation of character in general.

The negative reactions follow the opposite aim: that nothing of the forgotten traumas shall be remembered and nothing repeated. We can summarize them as ‘defensive reactions’. Their principal expression are what are called ‘avoidances’, which may be intensified into ‘inhibitions’ and ‘phobias’. These negative reactions too make the most powerful contributions to the stamping of character. Fundamentally they are just as much fixations to the trauma as their opposites, except that they are fixations with a contrary purpose. The symptoms of neurosis in the narrower sense are compromises in which both the trends proceeding from traumas come together, so that the share, now of one and now of the other tendency, finds preponderant expression in them. This opposition between the reactions sets up conflicts which in the ordinary course of events can reach no conclusion.

(b) All these phenomena, the symptoms as well as the restrictions on the ego and the stable character-changes, have a compulsive quality: that is to say that they have great psychical intensity and at the same time exhibit a far-reaching independence of the organization of the other mental processes, which are adjusted to the demands of the real external world and obey the laws of logical thinking. They are insufficiently or not at all influenced by external reality, pay no attention to it or to its psychical representatives, so that they may easily come into active opposition to both of them. They are, one might say, a State within a State, an inaccessible party, with which co-operation is impossible, but which may succeed in overcoming what is known as the normal party and forcing it into its service. If this happens, it implies a domination by an internal psychical reality over the reality of the external world and the path to a psychosis lies open. Even if things do not go so far, the practical importance of this situation can scarcely be overestimated. The inhibition upon the life of those who are dominated by a neurosis and their incapacity for living constitute a most important factor in a human society and we may recognize in their condition a direct expression of their fixation to an early portion of their past.

Moses And Monotheism

4902

And now let us enquire about latency, which, in view of the analogy, is bound to interest us especially. A trauma in childhood may be followed immediately by a neurotic outbreak, an infantile neurosis, with an abundance of efforts at defence, and accompanied by the formation of symptoms. This neurosis may last a considerable time and cause marked disturbances, but it may also run a latent course and be overlooked. As a rule defence retains the upper hand in it; in any case alterations of the ego, comparable to scars, are left behind. It is only rarely that an infantile neurosis continues without interruption into an adult one. Far more often it is succeeded by a period of apparently undisturbed development - a course of things which is supported or made possible by the intervention of the physiological period of latency. Not until later does the change take place with which the definitive neurosis becomes manifest as a belated effect of the trauma. This occurs either at the irruption of puberty or some while later. In the former case it happens because the instincts, intensified by physical maturation, are able now to take up the struggle again in which they were at first defeated by the defence. In the latter case it happens because the reactions and alterations of the ego brought about by the defence now prove a hindrance in dealing with the new tasks of life, so that severe conflicts come about between the demands of the real external world and the ego, which seeks to maintain the organization which it has painstakingly achieved in its defensive struggle. The phenomenon of a latency of the neurosis between the first reactions to the trauma and the later outbreak of the illness must be regarded as typical. This latter illness may also be looked upon as an attempt at cure - as an effort once more to reconcile with the rest those portions of the ego that have been split off by the influence of the trauma and to unite them into a powerful whole vis-à-vis the external world. An attempt of this kind seldom succeeds, however, unless the work of analysis comes to its help, and even then not always; it ends often enough in a complete devastation or fragmentation of the ego or in its being overwhelmed by the portion which was early split off and which is dominated by the trauma.

Moses And Monotheism

4903

In order to convince the reader, it would be necessary to give detailed reports of the life histories of numerous neurotics. But in view of the diffuseness and difficulty of the topic, this would completely destroy the character of the present work. It would turn into a monograph on the theory of the neuroses and even so would probably only have an effect on that minority of readers who have chosen the study and practice of psycho-analysis as their life-work. Since I am addressing myself here to a wider audience, I can only beg the reader to grant a certain provisional credence to the abridged account I have given above; and this must be accompanied by an admission on my part that the implications to which I am now leading him need only be accepted if the theories on which they are based turn out to be correct.

Nevertheless, I can attempt to tell the story of a single case which exhibits with special clarity some of the characteristics of a neurosis which I have mentioned. We must not expect, of course, that a single case will show everything and we need not feel disappointed if its subject-matter is far removed from the topic for which we are seeking an analogy.

A little boy, who, as is so often the case in middle-class families, shared his parents’ bedroom during the first years of his life, had repeated, and indeed regular, opportunities of observing sexual acts between his parents - of seeing some things and hearing still more - at an age when he had scarcely learnt to speak. In his later neurosis, which broke out immediately after his first spontaneous emission, the earliest and most troublesome symptom was a disturbance of sleep. He was extraordinarily sensitive to noises at night and, once he was woken up, was unable to go to sleep again. This disturbance of sleep was a true compromise-symptom. On the one hand it was an expression of his defence against the things he had experienced at night, and on the other an attempt to re-establish the waking state in which he was able to listen to those impressions.

Moses And Monotheism

4904

The child was aroused prematurely by observations of this kind to an aggressive masculinity and began to excite his little penis with his hand and to attempt various sexual attacks on his mother, thus identifying himself with his father, in whose place he was putting himself. This went on until at last his mother forbade him to touch his penis and further threatened that she would tell his father, who would punish him by taking his sinful organ away. This threat of castration had an extraordinarily powerful traumatic effect on the boy. He gave up his sexual activity and altered his character. Instead of identifying himself with his father, he was afraid of him, adopted a passive attitude to him and, by occasional naughtinesses, provoked him into administering corporal punishment; this had a sexual meaning for him, so that he was thus able to identify himself with his ill-treated mother. He clung to his mother herself more and more anxiously, as though he could not do without her love for a single moment, since he saw in it a protection against the danger of castration which threatened him from his father. In this modification of the Oedipus complex he passed his latency period, which was free from any marked disturbances. He became an exemplary boy and was quite successful at school.

So far we have followed the immediate effect of the trauma and have confirmed the fact of latency.

The arrival of puberty brought with it the manifest neurosis and disclosed its second main symptom - sexual impotence. He had forfeited the sensitivity of his penis, did not attempt to touch it, did not venture to approach a woman for sexual purposes. His sexual activity remained limited to psychical masturbation accompanied by sadistic-masochistic phantasies in which it was not hard to recognize off-shoots of his early observations of intercourse between his parents. The wave of intensified masculinity which puberty brought along with it was employed in furious hatred of his father and insubordination to him. This extreme relation to his father, reckless to the pitch of self-destruction, was responsible as well for his failure in life and his conflicts with the external world. He must be a failure in his profession because his father had forced him into it. Nor did he make any friends and he was never on good terms with his superiors.

When, burdened by these symptoms and incapacities, he at last, after his father’s death, had found a wife, there emerged in him, as though they were the core of his being, character-traits which made contact with him a hard task for those about him. He developed a completely egoistic, despotic, and brutal personality, which clearly felt a need to suppress and insult other people. It was a faithful copy of his father as he had formed a picture of him in his memory: that is to say, a revival of the identification with his father which in the past he had taken on as a little boy from sexual motives. In this part of the story we recognize the return of the repressed, which (along with the immediate effects of the trauma and the phenomenon of latency) we have described as among the essential features of a neurosis.

Moses And Monotheism

4905

D

APPLICATION

Early trauma - defence - latency - outbreak of neurotic illness - partial return of the repressed. Such is the formula which we have laid down for the development of a neurosis. The reader is now invited to take the step of supposing that something occurred in the life of the human species similar to what occurs in the life of individuals: of supposing, that is, that here too events occurred of a sexually aggressive nature, which left behind them permanent consequences but were for the most part fended off and forgotten, and which after a long latency came into effect and created phenomena similar to symptoms in their structure and purpose.

We believe that we can guess these events and we propose to show that their symptom-like consequences are the phenomena of religion. Since the emergence of the idea of evolution no longer leaves room for doubt that the human race has a prehistory, and since this is unknown - that is, forgotten - a conclusion of this kind almost carries the weight of a postulate. When we learn that in both cases the operative and forgotten traumas relate to life in the human family, we can greet this as a highly welcome, unforeseen bonus which has not been called for by our discussions up to this point.

I put forward these assertions as much as a quarter of a century ago in my Totem and Taboo (1912-13) and I need only repeat them here. My construction starts out from a statement of Darwin’s and takes in a hypothesis of Atkinson’s. It asserts that in primaeval times primitive man lived in small hordes, each under the domination of a powerful male. No date can be assigned to this, nor has it been synchronized with the geological epochs known to us: it is probable that these human creatures had not advanced far in the development of speech. An essential part of the construction is the hypothesis that the events I am about to describe occurred to all primitive men - that is, to all our ancestors. The story is told in an enormously condensed form, as though it had happened on a single occasion, while in fact it covered thousands of years and was repeated countless times during that long period. The strong male was lord and father of the entire horde and unrestricted in his power, which he exercised with violence. All the females were his property - wives and daughters of his own horde and some, perhaps, robbed from other hordes. The lot of his sons was a hard one: if they roused their father’s jealousy they were killed or castrated or driven out. Their only resource was to collect together in small communities, to get themselves wives by robbery, and, when one or other of them could succeed in it, to raise themselves into a position similar to their father’s in the primal horde. For natural reasons, youngest sons occupied an exceptional position. They were protected by their mother’s love, and were able to take advantage of their father’s increasing age and succeed him on his death. We seem to detect echoes in legends and fairy tales both of the expulsion of elder sons and of the favouring of youngest sons.

The first decisive step towards a change in this sort of ‘social’ organization seems to have been that the expelled brothers, living in a community, united to overpower their father and, as was the custom in those days, devoured him raw. There is no need to balk at this cannibalism; it continued far into later times. The essential point, however, is that we attribute the same emotional attitudes to these primitive men that we are able to establish by analytic investigation in the primitives of the present day - in our children. We suppose, that is, that they not only hated and feared their father but also honoured him as a model, and that each of them wished to take his place in reality. We can, if so, understand the cannibalistic act as an attempt to ensure identification with him by incorporating a piece of him.

Moses And Monotheism

4906

It must be supposed that after the parricide a considerable time elapsed during which the brothers disputed with one another for their father’s heritage, which each of them wanted for himself alone. A realization of the dangers and uselessness of these struggles, a recollection of the act of liberation which they had accomplished together, and the emotional ties with one another which had arisen during the period of their expulsion, led at last to an agreement among them, a sort of social contract. The first form of a social organization came about with a renunciation of instinct, a recognition of mutual obligations, the introduction of definite institutions, pronounced inviolable (holy) - that is to say, the beginnings of morality and justice. Each individual renounced his ideal of acquiring his father’s position for himself and of possessing his mother and sisters. Thus the taboo on incest and the injunction to exogamy came about. A fair amount of the absolute power liberated by the removal of the father passed over to the women; there came a period of matriarchy. Recollection of their father persisted at this period of the ‘fraternal alliance’. A powerful animal - at first, perhaps, always one that was feared as well - was chosen as a substitute for the father. A choice of this kind may seem strange, but the gulf which men established later between themselves and animals did not exist for primitive peoples; nor does it exist for our children, whose animal phobias we have been able to understand as fear of their father. In relation to the totem animal the original dichotomy in the emotional relation to the father (ambivalence) was wholly retained. On the one hand the totem was regarded as the clan’s blood ancestor and protective spirit, who must be worshipped and protected, and on the other hand a festival was appointed at which the same fate was prepared for him that the primal father had met with. He was killed and devoured by all the tribesmen in common. (The totem meal, according to Robertson Smith.) This great festival was in fact a triumphant celebration of the combined sons’ victory over their father.

Moses And Monotheism

4907

What is the place of religion in this connection? I think we are completely justified in regarding totemism, with its worship of a father-substitute, with its ambivalence as shown by the totem meal, with its institution of memorial festivals and of prohibitions whose infringement was punished by death - we are justified, I say, in regarding totemism as the first form in which religion was manifested in human history and in confirming the fact of its having been linked from the first with social regulations and moral obligations. Here we can only give the most summary survey of the further developments of religion. They no doubt proceeded in parallel with the cultural advances of the human race and with the changes in the structure of human communities.

The first step away from totemism was the humanizing of the being who was worshipped. In place of the animals, human gods appear, whose derivation from the totem is not concealed. The god is still represented either in the form of an animal or at least with an animal’s face, or the totem becomes the god’s favourite companion, inseparable from him, or legend tells us that the god slew this precise animal, which was after all only a preliminary stage of himself. At a point in this evolution which is not easily determined great mother-goddesses appeared, probably even before the male gods, and afterwards persisted for a long time beside them. In the meantime a great social revolution had occurred. Matriarchy was succeeded by the re-establishment of a patriarchal order. The new fathers, it is true, never achieved the omnipotence of the primal father; there were many of them, who lived together in associations larger than the horde had been. They were obliged to be on good terms with one another, and remained under the limitation of social ordinances. It is likely that the mother-goddesses originated at the time of the curtailment of the matriarchy, as a compensation for the slight upon the mothers. The male deities appear first as sons beside the great mothers and only later clearly assume the features of father-figures. These male gods of polytheism reflect the conditions during the patriarchal age. They are numerous, mutually restrictive, and are occasionally subordinated to a superior high god. The next step, however, leads us to the theme with which we are here concerned - to the return of a single father-god of unlimited dominion.

Moses And Monotheism

4908

It must be admitted that this historical survey has gaps in it and is uncertain at some points. But anyone who is inclined to pronounce our construction of primaeval history purely imaginary would be gravely under-estimating the wealth and evidential value of the material contained in it. Large portions of the past, which have been linked together here into a whole, are historically attested: totemism and the male confederacies, for instance. Other portions have survived in excellent replicas. Thus authorities have often been struck by the faithful way in which the sense and content of the old totem meal is repeated in the rite of the Christian Communion, in which the believer incorporates the blood and flesh of his god in symbolic form. Numerous relics of the forgotten primaeval age have survived in popular legends and fairy tales, and the analytic study of the mental life of children has provided an unexpected wealth of material for filling the gaps in our knowledge of the earliest times. As contributions to our understanding of the son’s relation to the father which is of such great importance, I need only bring forward animal phobias, the fear, which strikes us as so strange, of being eaten by the father, and the enormous intensity of the dread of being castrated. There is nothing wholly fabricated in our construction, nothing which could not be supported on solid foundations.

If our account of primaeval history is accepted as on the whole worthy of belief, two sorts of elements will be recognized in religious doctrines and rituals: on the one hand fixations to the ancient history of the family and survivals of it, and on the other hand revivals of the past and returns, after long intervals, of what has been forgotten. It is this last portion which, hitherto overlooked and therefore not understood, is to be demonstrated here in at least one impressive instance.

Moses And Monotheism

4909

It is worth specially stressing the fact that each portion which returns from oblivion asserts itself with peculiar force, exercises an incomparably powerful influence on people in the mass, and raises an irresistible claim to truth against which logical objections remain powerless: a kind of ‘credo quia absurdum’. This remarkable feature can only be understood on the pattern of the delusions of psychotics. We have long understood that a portion of forgotten truth lies hidden in delusional ideas, that when this returns it has to put up with distortions and misunderstandings, and that the compulsive conviction which attaches to the delusion arises from this core of truth and spreads out on to the errors that wrap it round. We must grant an ingredient such as this of what may be called historical truth to the dogmas of religion as well, which, it is true, bear the character of psychotic symptoms but which, as group phenomena, escape the curse of isolation.

No other portion of the history of religion has become so clear to us as the introduction of monotheism into Judaism and its continuation in Christianity - if we leave on one side the development which we can trace no less uninterruptedly, from the animal totem to the human god with his regular companions. (Each of the four Christian evangelists still has his own favourite animal.) If we provisionally accept the world-empire of the Pharaohs as the determining cause of the emergence of the monotheist idea, we see that that idea, released from its native soil and transferred to another people was, after a long period of latency, taken hold of by them, preserved by them as a precious possession and, in turn, itself kept them alive by giving them pride in being a chosen people: it was the religion of their primal father to which were attached their hope of reward, of distinction and finally of world-dominion. This last wishful phantasy, long abandoned by the Jewish people, still survives among that people’s enemies in a belief in a conspiracy by the ‘Elders of Zion’. We reserve for discussion in later pages how the special peculiarities of the monotheist religion borrowed from Egypt affected the Jewish people and how it was bound to leave a permanent imprint on their character through its rejection of magic and mysticism, its invitation to advances in intellectuality and its encouragement of sublimations; how the people, enraptured by the possession of the truth, overwhelmed by the consciousness of being chosen, came to have a high opinion of what is intellectual and to lay stress on what is moral; and how their melancholy destinies and their disappointments in reality served only to intensify all these trends. For the moment we will follow their development in another direction.

Moses And Monotheism

4910

The re-establishment of the primal father in his historic rights was a great step forward but it could not be the end. The other portions of the prehistoric tragedy insisted on being recognized. It is not easy to discern what set this process in motion. It appears as though a growing sense of guilt had taken hold of the Jewish people, or perhaps of the whole civilized world of the time, as a precursor to the return of the repressed material. Till at last one of these Jewish people found, in justifying a politico-religious agitator, the occasion for detaching a new - the Christian - religion from Judaism. Paul, a Roman Jew from Tarsus, seized upon this sense of guilt and traced it back correctly to its original source. He called this the ‘original sin’; it was a crime against God and could only be atoned for by death. With the original sin death came into the world. In fact this crime deserving death had been the murder of the primal father who was later deified. But the murder was not remembered: instead of it there was a phantasy of its atonement, and for that reason this phantasy could be hailed as a message of redemption (evangelium). A son of God had allowed himself to be killed without guilt and had thus taken on himself the guilt of all men. It had to be a son, since it had been the murder of a father. It is probable that traditions from oriental and Greek mysteries had had an influence on the phantasy of redemption. What was essential in it seems to have been Paul’s own contribution. In the most proper sense he was a man of an innately religious disposition: the dark traces of the past lurked in his mind, ready to break through into its more conscious regions.

Moses And Monotheism

4911

That the redeemer had sacrificed himself without guilt was evidently a tendentious distortion, which offered difficulties to logical understanding. For how could someone guiltless of the act of murder take on himself the guilt of the murderers by allowing himself to be killed? In the historical reality there was no such contradiction. The ‘redeemer’ could be none other than the most guilty person, the ringleader of the company of brothers who had overpowered their father. We must in my judgement leave it undecided whether there was such a chief rebel and ringleader. That is possible; but we must also bear in mind that each one of the company of brothers certainly had a wish to commit the deed by himself alone and so to create an exceptional position for himself and to find a substitute for his identification with the father which was having to be given up and which was becoming merged in the community. If there was no such ringleader, then Christ was the heir to a wishful phantasy which remained unfulfilled; if there was one, then he was his successor and his reincarnation. But no matter whether what we have here is a phantasy or the return of a forgotten reality, in any case the origin of the concept of a hero is to be found at this point - the hero who always rebels against his father and kills him in some shape or other.¹ Here too is the true basis for the ‘tragic guilt’ of the hero of drama, which is otherwise hard to explain. It can scarcely be doubted that the hero and chorus in Greek drama represent the same rebellious hero and company of brothers; and it is not without significance that in the Middle Ages what the theatre started with afresh was the representation of the story of the Passion.

We have already said that the Christian ceremony of Holy Communion, in which the believer incorporates the Saviour’s blood and flesh, repeats the content of the old totem meal - no doubt only in its affectionate meaning, expressive of veneration, and not in its aggressive meaning. The ambivalence that dominates the relation to the father was clearly shown, however, in the final outcome of the religious novelty. Ostensibly aimed at propitiating the father god, it ended in his being dethroned and got rid of. Judaism had been a religion of the father; Christianity became a religion of the son. The old God the Father fell back behind Christ; Christ, the Son, took his place, just as every son had hoped to do in primaeval times. Paul, who carried Judaism on, also destroyed it. No doubt he owed his success in the first instance to the fact that, through the idea of the redeemer, he exorcized humanity’s sense of guilt; but he owed it as well to the circumstance that he abandoned the ‘chosen’ character of his people and its visible mark - circumcision - so that the new religion could be a universal one, embracing all men. Though a part may have been played in Paul’s taking this step by his personal desire for revenge for the rejection of his innovation in Jewish circles, yet it also restored a feature of the old Aten religion - it removed a restriction which that religion had acquired when it was handed over to a new vehicle, the Jewish people.

¹ Ernest Jones has pointed out that the god Mithras, who kills the bull, might represent this ringleader boasting of his deed. It is well known for how long the worship of Mithras struggled with the young Christianity for the final victory.

Moses And Monotheism

4912

In some respects the new religion meant a cultural regression as compared with the older, Jewish one, as regularly happens when a new mass of people, of a lower level, break their way in or are given admission. The Christian religion did not maintain the high level in things of the mind to which Judaism had soared. It was no longer strictly monotheist, it took over numerous symbolic rituals from surrounding peoples, it re-established the great mother-goddess and found room to introduce many of the divine figures of polytheism only lightly veiled, though in subordinate positions. Above all, it did not, like the Aten religion and the Mosaic one which followed it, exclude the entry of superstitious, magical and mystical elements, which were to prove a severe inhibition upon the intellectual development of the next two thousand years.

The triumph of Christianity was a fresh victory for the priests of Amun over Akhenaten’s god after an interval of fifteen hundred years and on a wider stage. And yet in the history of religion - that is, as regards the return of he repressed - Christianity was an advance and from that time on the Jewish religion was to some extent a fossil.

It would be worth while to understand how it was that the monotheist idea made such a deep impression precisely on the Jewish people and that they were able to maintain it so tenaciously. It is possible, I think, to find an answer. Fate had brought the great deed and misdeed of primaeval days, the killing of the father, closer to the Jewish people by causing them to repeat it on the person of Moses, an outstanding father-figure. It was a case of ‘acting out’ instead of remembering, as happens so often with neurotics during the work of analysis. To the suggestion that they should remember, which was made to them by the doctrine of Moses, they reacted, however, by disavowing their action; they remained halted at the recognition of the great father and thus blocked their access to the point from which Paul was later to start his continuation of the primal history. It is scarcely a matter of indifference or of chance that the violent killing of another great man became the starting-point of Paul’s new religious creation as well. This was a man whom a small number of adherents in Judaea regarded as the Son of God and as the Messiah who had been announced, and to whom, too, a part of the childhood story invented for Moses was later carried over, but of whom in fact we know scarcely more with certainty than of Moses - whether he was really the great teacher portrayed by the Gospels or whether, rather, it was not the fact and circumstances of his death which were decisive for the importance which his figure acquired. Paul, who became his apostle, had not known him himself.

Moses And Monotheism

4913

The killing of Moses by his Jewish people, recognized by Sellin from traces of it in tradition (and also, strange to say, accepted by the young Goethe without any evidence¹) thus becomes an indispensable part of our construction, an important link between the forgotten event of primaeval times and its later emergence in the form of the monotheist religions.² It is plausible to conjecture that remorse for the murder of Moses provided the stimulus for the wishful phantasy of the Messiah, who was to return and lead his people to redemption and the promised world-dominion. If Moses was this first Messiah, Christ became his substitute and successor, and Paul could exclaim to the peoples with some historical justification: ‘Look! the Messiah has really come: he has been murdered before your eyes!’ Then, too, there is a piece of historical truth in Christ’s resurrection, for he was the resurrected Moses and behind him the returned primal father of the primitive horde, transfigured and, as the son, put in the place of the father.

The poor Jewish people, who with their habitual stubbornness continued to disavow the father’s murder, atoned heavily for it in the course of time. They were constantly met with the reproach ‘You killed our God!’ And this reproach is true, if it is correctly translated. If it is brought into relation with the history of religions, it runs: ‘You will not admit that you murdered God (the primal picture of God, the primal father, and his later reincarnations).’ There should be an addition declaring: ‘We did the same thing, to be sure, but we have admitted it and since then we have been absolved.’ Not all the reproaches with which anti-semitism persecutes the descendants of the Jewish people can appeal to a similar justification. A phenomenon of such intensity and permanence as the people’s hatred of the Jews must of course have more than one ground. It is possible to find a whole number of grounds, some of them clearly derived from reality, which call for no interpretation, and others, lying deeper and derived from hidden sources, which might be regarded as the specific reasons. Of the former, the reproach of being aliens is perhaps the weakest, since in many places dominated by anti-semitism to-day the Jews were among the oldest portions of the population or had even been there before the present inhabitants. This applies, for instance, to the city of Cologne, to which the Jews came with the Romans, before it was occupied by the Germans. Other grounds for hating the Jews are stronger - thus, the circumstances that they live for the most part as minorities among other peoples, for the communal feeling of groups requires, in order to complete it, hostility towards some extraneous minority, and the numerical weakness of this excluded minority encourages its suppression. There are, however, two other characteristics of the Jews which are quite unforgivable. First is the fact that in some respects they are different from their ‘host’ nations. They are not fundamentally different, for they are not Asiatics of a foreign race, as their enemies maintain, but composed for the most part of remnants of the Mediterranean peoples and heirs of the Mediterranean civilization. But they are none the less different, often in an indefinable way different, especially from the Nordic peoples, and the intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones. The other point has a still greater effect: namely, that they defy all oppression, that the most cruel persecutions have not succeeded in exterminating them, and, indeed, that on the contrary they show a capacity for holding their own in commercial life and, where they are admitted, for making valuable contributions to every form of cultural activity.

¹ ‘Israel in der Wüste’. In the Weimar Edition, 7, 170.

² On this subject see Frazer’s well-known discussions in Part III of The Golden Bough (The Dying God).

Moses And Monotheism

4914

The deeper motives for hatred of the Jews are rooted in the remotest past ages; they operate from the unconscious of the peoples, and I am prepared to find that at first they will not seem credible. I venture to assert that jealousy of the people which declared itself the first-born, favourite child of God the Father, has not yet been surmounted among other peoples even to-day: it is as though they had thought there was truth in the claim. Further, among the customs by which the Jews made themselves separate, that of circumcision has made a disagreeable, uncanny impression, which is to be explained, no doubt, by its recalling the dreaded castration and along with it a portion of the primaeval past which is gladly forgotten. And finally, as the latest motive in this series, we must not forget that all those peoples who excel to-day in their hatred of Jews became Christians only in late historic times, often driven to it by bloody coercion. It might be said that they are all ‘mis-baptized’. They have been left, under a thin veneer of Christianity, what their ancestors were, who worshipped a barbarous polytheism. They have not got over a grudge against the new religion which was imposed on them; but they have displaced the grudge on to the source from which Christianity reached them. The fact that the Gospels tell a story which is set among Jews, and in fact deals only with Jews, has made this displacement easy for them. Their hatred of Jews is at bottom a hatred of Christians, and we need not be surprised that in the German National-Socialist revolution this intimate relation between the two monotheist religions finds such a clear expression in the hostile treatment of both of them.

Moses And Monotheism

4915

E

DIFFICULTIES

Perhaps by what I have said I have succeeded in establishing the analogy between neurotic processes and religious events and in thus indicating the unsuspected origin of the latter. In this transference from individual to group psychology two difficulties arise, differing in their nature and importance, to which we must now turn.

The first of these is that we have here dealt with only a single instance from the copious phenomenology of religions and have thrown no light on any others. I must regretfully admit that I am unable to give more than this one example and that my expert knowledge is insufficient to complete the enquiry. From my limited information I may perhaps add that the case of the founding of the Mahommedan religion seems to me like an abbreviated repetition of the Jewish one, of which it emerged as an imitation. It appears, indeed, that the Prophet intended originally to accept Judaism completely for himself and his people. The recapture of the single great primal father brought the Arabs an extraordinary exaltation of their self-confidence, which led to great worldly successes but exhausted itself in them. Allah showed himself far more grateful to his chosen people than Yahweh did to his. But the internal development of the new religion soon came to a stop, perhaps because it lacked the depth which had been caused in the Jewish case by the murder of the founder of their religion. The apparently rationalistic religions of the East are in their core ancestor-worship and so come to a halt, too, at an early stage of the reconstruction of the past. If it is true that in primitive peoples of to-day the recognition of a supreme being is the only content of their religion, we can only regard this as an atrophy of religious development and bring it into relation with the countless cases of rudimentary neuroses which are to be observed in the other field. Why it is that in the one case just as in the other things have gone no further, our knowledge is in both cases insufficient to tell us. We can only attribute the responsibility to the individual endowment of these peoples, the direction taken by their activity and their general social condition. Moreover, it is a good rule in the work of analysis to be content to explain what is actually before one and not to seek to explain what has not happened.

Moses And Monotheism

4916

The second difficulty about this transference to group psychology is far more important, because it poses a fresh problem of a fundamental nature. It raises the question in what form the operative tradition in the life of peoples is present - a question which does not occur with individuals, since there it is solved by the existence in the unconscious of memory-traces of the past. Let us return to our historical example. We have attributed the compromise at Kadesh to the survival of a powerful tradition among those who had returned from Egypt. This case involves no problem. According to our theory, a tradition of this kind was based on conscious memories of oral communications which people then living had received from their ancestors only two or three generations back who had themselves been participants and eye-witnesses of the events in question. But can we believe the same thing of the later centuries - that the tradition still had its basis in a knowledge normally handed on from grandfather to grandchild? It is no longer possible to say, as it was in the earlier case, who the people were who preserved this knowledge and handed it on by word of mouth. According to Sellin the tradition of the murder of Moses was always in the possession of priestly circles till eventually it found expression in writing which alone enabled Sellin to discover it. But it can only have been known to a few people; it was not public property. And is that enough to explain its effect? Is it possible to attribute to knowledge held like this by a few people the power to produce such a lasting emotion in the masses when it came to their notice? It seems, rather, as though there must have been something present in the ignorant masses, too, which was in some way akin to the knowledge of the few and went half way to meet it when it was uttered.

Moses And Monotheism

4917

A decision is made still more difficult when we turn to the analogous case in primaeval times. It is quite certain that in the course of thousands of years the fact was forgotten that there had been a primal father with the characteristics we know and what his fate had been; nor can we suppose that there was any oral tradition of it, as we can in the case of Moses. In what sense, then, does a tradition come in question at all? In what form can it have been present?

In order to make it easier for readers who do not desire or are not prepared to plunge into a complicated psychological state of affairs, I will anticipate the outcome of the investigation that is to follow. In my opinion there is an almost complete conformity in this respect between the individual and the group: in the group too an impression of the past is retained in unconscious memory-traces.

In the case of the individual we believe we can see clearly. The memory-trace of his early experience has been preserved in him, but in a special psychological condition. The individual may be said to have known it always, just as one knows about the repressed. Here we have formed ideas, which can be confirmed without difficulty through analysis, of how something can be forgotten and how it can then reappear after a while. What is forgotten is not extinguished but only ‘repressed’; its memory-traces are present in all their freshness, but isolated by ‘anticathexes’. They cannot enter into communication with other intellectual processes; they are unconscious - inaccessible to consciousness. It may also be that certain portions of the repressed, having evaded the process, remain accessible to memory and occasionally emerge into consciousness; but even so they are isolated, like foreign bodies out of connection with the rest. It may be so, but it need not be so; repression may also be complete, and it is with that alternative that we shall deal in what follows.

Moses And Monotheism

4918

The repressed retains its upward urge, its effort to force its way to consciousness. It achieves its aim under three conditions: (1) if the strength of the anticathexis is diminished by pathological processes which overtake the other part, what we call the ego, or by a different distribution of the cathectic energies in that ego, as happens regularly in the state of sleep; (2) if the instinctual elements attaching to the repressed receive a special reinforcement (of which the best example is the processes during puberty); and (3) if at any time in recent experience impressions or experiences occur which resemble the repressed so closely that they are able to awaken it. In the last case the recent experience is reinforced by the latent energy of the repressed, and the repressed comes into operation behind the recent experience and with its help. In none of these three alternatives does what has hitherto been repressed enter consciousness smoothly and unaltered; it must always put up with distortions which testify to the influence of the resistance (not entirely overcome) arising from the anticathexis, or to the modifying influence of the recent experience or to both.

The difference between whether a psychical process is conscious or unconscious has served us as a criterion and a means of finding our bearings. The repressed is unconscious. Now it would simplify things agreeably if this sentence admitted of reversal - if, that is, the difference between the qualities of conscious (Cs.) and unconscious (Ucs.) coincided with the distinction between ‘belonging to the ego’ and ‘repressed’. The fact of there being isolated and unconscious things like this in our mental life would be sufficiently novel and important. But in reality the position is more complicated. It is true that everything repressed is unconscious, but it is not true that everything belonging to the ego is conscious. We notice that consciousness is a transient quality which attaches to a psychical process only in passing. For our purposes therefore we must replace ‘conscious’ by ‘capable of being conscious’ and we call this quality ‘preconscious’ (Pcs.). We then say, more correctly, that the ego is mainly preconscious (virtually conscious) but that portions of the ego are unconscious.

Moses And Monotheism

4919

The establishment of this latter fact shows us that the qualities on which we have hitherto relied are insufficient to give us our bearings in the obscurity of mental life. We must introduce another distinction which is no longer qualitative but topographical and - what gives it special value - at the same time genetic. We now distinguish in our mental life (which we regard as an apparatus compounded of several agencies, districts or provinces) one region which we call the ego proper and another which we name the id. The id is the older of the two; the ego has developed out of it, like a cortical layer, through the influence of the external world. It is in the id that all our primary instincts are at work, all the processes in the id take place unconsciously. The ego, as we have already said, coincides with the region of the preconscious; it includes portions which normally remain unconscious. The course of events in the id, and their mutual interaction, are governed by quite other laws than those prevailing in the ego. It is in fact the discovery of these differences that has led to our new view and justifies it.

The repressed is to be counted as belonging to the id and is subject to the same mechanisms; it is distinguished from it only in respect to its genesis. The differentiation is accomplished in the earliest period of life, while the ego is developing out of the id. At that time a portion of the contents of the id is taken into the ego and raised to the preconscious state; another portion is not affected by this translation and remains behind in the id as the unconscious proper. In the further course of the formation of the ego, however, certain psychical impressions and processes in the ego are excluded from it by a defensive process; the characteristic of being preconscious is withdrawn from them, so that they are once more reduced to being component portions of the id. Here then is the ‘repressed’ in the id. So far as intercourse between the two mental provinces is concerned, we therefore assume that, on the one hand, unconscious processes in the id are raised to the level of the preconscious and incorporated into the ego, and that, on the other hand, preconscious material in the ego can follow the opposite path and be put back into the id. The fact that later on a special region - that of the ‘super-ego’ - is separated off in the ego lies outside our present interest.

All of this may appear to be far from simple. But when one has grown reconciled to this unusual spatial view of the mental apparatus, it can present no particular difficulties to the imagination. I will add the further comment that the psychical topography that I have developed here has nothing to do with the anatomy of the brain, and actually only touches it at one point. What is unsatisfactory in this picture - and I am aware of it as clearly as anyone - is due to our complete ignorance of the dynamic nature of the mental processes. We tell ourselves that what distinguishes a conscious idea from a preconscious one, and the latter from an unconscious one, can only be a modification, or perhaps a different distribution, of psychical energy. We talk of cathexes and hypercathexes, but beyond this we are without any knowledge on the subject or even any starting-point for a serviceable working hypothesis. Of the phenomenon of consciousness we can at least say that it was originally attached to perception. All sensations which originate from the perception of painful, tactile, auditory or visual stimuli are what are most readily conscious. Thought-processes, and whatever may be analogous to them in the id, are in themselves unconscious and obtain access to consciousness by becoming linked to the mnemic residues of visual and auditory perceptions along the path of the function of speech. In animals, which lack speech, these conditions must be of a simpler kind.

Moses And Monotheism

4920

The impressions of early traumas, from which we started out, are either not translated into the preconscious or are quickly put back by repression into the id-condition. Their mnemic residues are in that case unconscious and operate from the id. We believe we can easily follow their further vicissitudes so long as it is a question of what has been experienced by the subject himself. But a fresh complication arises when we become aware of the probability that what may be operative in an individual’s psychical life may include not only what he has experienced himself but also things that were innately present in him at his birth, elements with a phylogenetic origin - an archaic heritage. The questions then arise of what this consists in, what it contains and what is the evidence for it.

The immediate and most certain answer is that it consists in certain dispositions such as are characteristic of all living organisms: in the capacity and tendency, that is, to enter particular lines of development and to react in a particular manner to certain excitations, impressions and stimuli. Since experience shows that there are distinctions in this respect between individuals of the human species, the archaic heritage must include these distinctions; they represent what we recognize as the constitutional factor in the individual. Now, since all human beings, at all events in their early days, have approximately the same experiences, they react to them, too, in a similar manner; a doubt was therefore able to arise whether we should not include these reactions, along with their individual distinctions, in the archaic heritage. This doubt should be put on one side: our knowledge of the archaic heritage is not enlarged by the fact of this similarity.

Nevertheless, analytic research has brought us a few results which give us cause for thought. There is, in the first place, the universality of symbolism in language. The symbolic representation of one object by another - the same thing applies to actions - is familiar to all our children and comes to them, as it were, as a matter of course. We cannot show in regard to them how they have learnt it and must admit that in many cases learning it is impossible. It is a question of an original knowledge which adults afterwards forget. It is true that an adult makes use of the same symbols in his dreams, but he does not understand them unless an analyst interprets them to him, and even then he is reluctant to believe the translation. If he makes use of one of the very common figures of speech in which this symbolism is recorded, he is obliged to admit that its true sense has completely escaped him. Moreover, symbolism disregards differences of language; investigations would probably show that it is ubiquitous - the same for all peoples. Here, then, we seem to have an assured instance of an archaic heritage dating from the period at which language developed. But another explanation might still be attempted. It might be said that we are dealing with thought-connections between ideas - connections which had been established during the historical development of speech and which have to be repeated now every time the development of speech has to be gone through in an individual. It would thus be a case of the inheritance of an intellectual disposition similar to the ordinary inheritance of an instinctual disposition - and once again it would be no contribution to our problem.

Moses And Monotheism

4921

The work of analysis has, however, brought something else to light which exceeds in its importance what we have so far considered. When we study the reactions to early traumas, we are quite often surprised to find that they are not strictly limited to what the subject himself has really experienced but diverge from it in a way which fits in much better with the model of a phylogenetic event and, in general, can only be explained by such an influence. The behaviour of neurotic children towards their parents in the Oedipus and castration complex abounds in such reactions, which seem unjustified in the individual case and only become intelligible phylogenetically - by their connection with the experience of earlier generations. It would be well worth while to place this material, which I am able to appeal to here, before the public in a collected form. Its evidential value seems to me strong enough for me to venture on a further step and to posit the assertion that the archaic heritage of human beings comprises not only dispositions but also subject-matter - memory-traces of the experience of earlier generations. In this way the compass as well as the importance of the archaic heritage would be significantly extended.

On further reflection I must admit that I have behaved for a long time as though the inheritance of memory-traces of the experience of our ancestors, independently of direct communication and of the influence of education by the setting of an example, were established beyond question. When I spoke of the survival of a tradition among a people or of the formation of a people’s character, I had mostly in mind an inherited tradition of this kind and not one transmitted by communication. Or at least I made no distinction between the two and was not clearly aware of my audacity in neglecting to do so. My position, no doubt, is made more difficult by the present attitude of biological science, which refuses to hear of the inheritance of acquired characters by succeeding generations. I must, however, in all modesty confess that nevertheless I cannot do without this factor in biological evolution. The same thing is not in question, indeed, in the two cases: in the one it is a matter of acquired characters which are hard to grasp, in the other of memory-traces of external events - something tangible, as it were. But it may well be that at bottom we cannot imagine one without the other.

Moses And Monotheism

4922

If we assume the survival of these memory-traces in the archaic heritage, we have bridged the gulf between individual and group psychology: we can deal with peoples as we do with an individual neurotic. Granted that at the time we have no stronger evidence for the presence of memory-traces in the archaic heritage than the residual phenomena of the work of analysis which call for a phylogenetic derivation, yet this evidence seems to us strong enough to postulate that such is the fact. If it is not so, we shall not advance a step further along the path we entered on, either in analysis or in group psychology. The audacity cannot be avoided.

And by this assumption we are effecting something else. We are diminishing the gulf which earlier periods of human arrogance had torn too wide apart between mankind and the animals. If any explanation is to be found of what are called the instincts of animals, which allow them to behave from the first in a new situation in life as though it were an old and familiar one - if any explanation at all is to be found of this instinctive life of animals, it can only be that they bring the experiences of their species with them into their own new existence - that is, that they have preserved memories of what was experienced by their ancestors. The position in the human animal would not at bottom be different. His own archaic heritage corresponds to the instincts of animals even though it is different in its compass and contents.

After this discussion I have no hesitation in declaring that men have always known (in this special way) that they once possessed a primal father and killed him.

Two further questions must now be answered. First, under what conditions does a memory of this kind enter the archaic heritage? And, secondly, in what circumstances can it become active - that is, can it advance to consciousness from its unconscious state in the id, even though in an altered and distorted shape? The answer to the first question is easy to formulate: the memory enters the archaic heritage if the event was important enough, or repeated often enough, or both. In the case of parricide both conditions are fulfilled. On the second question there is this to be said. A whole number of influences may be concerned, not all of which are necessarily known. A spontaneous development is also conceivable, on the analogy of what happens in some neuroses. What is certainly of decisive importance, however, is the awakening of the forgotten memory trace by a recent real repetition of the event. The murder of Moses was a repetition of this kind and, later, the supposed judicial murder of Christ: so that these events come into the foreground as causes. It seems as though the genesis of monotheism could not do without these occurrences. We are reminded of the poet’s words:

Was unsterblich im Gesang soll leben,

Muss im Leben untergehn.¹

¹ [Literally: ‘What is to live immortal in song must perish in life.’] Schiller, ‘Die Götter Griechenlands’.

Moses And Monotheism

4923

And lastly a remark which brings up a psychological argument. A tradition that was based only on communication could not lead to the compulsive character that attaches to religious phenomena. It would be listened to, judged, and perhaps dismissed, like any other piece of information from outside; it would never attain the privilege of being liberated from the constraint of logical thought. It must have undergone the fate of being repressed, the condition of lingering in the unconscious, before it is able to display such powerful effects on its return, to bring the masses under its spell, as we have seen with astonishment and hitherto without comprehension in the case of religious tradition. And this consideration weighs heavily in favour of our believing that things really happened in the way we have tried to picture them or at least in some similar way.

Moses And Monotheism

4924

PART II

SUMMARY AND RECAPITULATION

The part of this study which follows cannot be given to the public without extensive explanations and apologies. For it is nothing other than a faithful (and often word-for-word) repetition of the first part, abbreviated in some of its critical enquiries and augmented by additions relating to the problem of how the special character of the Jewish people arose. I am aware that a method of exposition such as this is no less inexpedient than it is inartistic. I myself deplore it unreservedly. Why have I not avoided it? The answer to that is not hard for me to find, but it is not easy to confess. I found myself unable to wipe out the traces of the history of the work’s origin, which was in any case unusual.

Actually it has been written twice: for the first time a few years ago in Vienna, where I did not think it would be possible to publish it. I determined to give it up; but it tormented me like an unlaid ghost, and I found a way out by making two pieces of it independent and publishing them in our periodical Imago: the psycho-analytic starting-point of the whole thing ‘Moses an Egyptian’, and the historical construction erected on this ‘If Moses was an Egyptian . . .’. The remainder, which included what was really open to objection and dangerous - the application to the genesis of monotheism and the view of religion in general - I held back, as I thought, forever. When, in March 1938, came the unexpected German invasion, which forced me to leave my home but also freed me from my anxiety lest my publication might conjure up a prohibition of psycho-analysis in a place where it was still tolerated. I had scarcely arrived in England before I found the temptation irresistible to make the knowledge I had held back accessible to the world, and I began to revise the third part of my study to fit it on to the two parts that had already been published. This naturally involved a partial re-arrangement of the material. I did not succeed, however, in including the whole of this material in my second version; on the other hand I could not make up my mind to give up the earlier versions entirely. And so it has come about that I have adopted the expedient of attaching a whole piece of the first presentation to the second unchanged - which has brought with it the disadvantage of involving extensive repetition.

Moses And Monotheism

4925

I might, however, console myself with the reflection that the things I am treating are in any case so new and so important, apart from how far my account of them is correct, that it can be no misfortune if the public is obliged to read the same thing about them twice over. There are things which should be said more than once and which cannot be said often enough. But the reader must decide of his own free will whether to linger over the subject or to come back to it. He must not be surreptitiously led into having the same thing put before him twice in one book. It is a piece of clumsiness for which the author must take the blame. Unluckily an author’s creative power does not always obey his will: the work proceeds as it can, and often presents itself to the author as something independent or even alien.

Moses And Monotheism

4926

A

THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL

If we are clear in our mind that a procedure like ours of accepting what seems to us serviceable in the material presented to us and of rejecting what does not suit us and of putting the different pieces together in accordance with psychological probability - if we are clear that a technique of this kind can give no certainty that we shall arrive at the truth, then it may justly be asked why we are undertaking this work at all. The answer is an appeal to the work’s outcome. If we greatly tone down the strictness of the requirements made upon a historico-psychological investigation, it will perhaps be possible to throw light on problems which have always seemed to deserve attention and which recent events have forced upon our observation anew. As we know, of all the peoples who lived round the basin of the Mediterranean in antiquity, the Jewish people is almost the only one which still exists in name and also in substance. It has met misfortunes and ill-treatment with an unexampled capacity for resistance; it has developed special character-traits and incidentally has earned the hearty dislike of every other people. We should be glad to understand more of the source of this viability of the Jews and of how their characteristics are connected with their history.

We may start from a character-trait of the Jews which dominates their relation to others. There is no doubt that they have a particularly high opinion of themselves, that they regard themselves as more distinguished, of higher standing, as superior to other peoples - from whom they are also distinguished by many of their customs.¹ At the same time they are inspired by a peculiar confidence in life, such as is derived from the secret ownership of some precious possession, a kind of optimism: pious people would call it trust in God.

¹ The aspersion, so common in antiquity, that the Jews were ‘lepers’ (cf. Manetho) no doubt has the sense of a projection: ‘they keep as much apart from us as though we were lepers.’

Moses And Monotheism

4927

We know the reason for this behaviour and what their secret treasure is. They really regard themselves as God’s chosen people, they believe that they stand especially close to him; and this makes them proud and confident. Trustworthy reports tell us that they behaved in Hellenistic times just as they do to-day, so that the complete Jew was already there; and the Greeks, among whom and alongside of whom they lived, reacted to the Jewish characteristics in the same way as their ‘hosts’ do to-day. It might be thought that they reacted as though they too believed in the superiority which the people of Israel claimed for themselves. If one is the declared favourite of the dreaded father, one need not be surprised at the jealousy of one’s brothers and sisters, and the Jewish legend of Joseph and his brethren shows very well where this jealousy can lead. The course of world-history seemed to justify the presumption of the Jews, since, when later on it pleased God to send mankind a Messiah and redeemer, he once again chose him from the Jewish people. The other peoples might have had occasion then to say to themselves: ‘Indeed, they were right, they are God’s chosen people.’ But instead of this, what happened was that redemption by Jesus Christ only intensified their hatred of the Jews, while the Jews themselves gained no advantage from this second act of favouritism, since they did not recognize the redeemer.

On the basis of our earlier discussions, we may now assert that it was the man Moses who imprinted this trait - significant for all time - upon the Jewish people. He raised their self-esteem by assuring them that they were God’s chosen people, he enjoined them to holiness and pledged them to be apart from others. Not that other peoples were lacking in self-esteem. Just as to-day, so in those days each nation thought itself better than any other. But the self-esteem of the Jews was given a religious anchorage by Moses: it became a part of their religious faith. Owing to their especially intimate relation to their God they acquired a share in his grandeur. And since we know that behind the God who had chosen the Jews and freed them from Egypt stands the figure of Moses, who had done precisely that, ostensibly at God’s command, we venture to declare that it was this one man Moses who created the Jews. It is to him that this people owes its tenacity of life but also much of the hostility it has experienced and still experiences.

Moses And Monotheism

4928

B

THE GREAT MAN

How is it possible for a single man to evolve such extraordinary effectiveness that he can form a people out of random individuals and families, can stamp them with their definitive character and determine their fate for thousands of years? Is not a hypothesis such as this a relapse into the mode of thought which led to myths of a creator and to the worship of heroes, into times in which the writing of history was nothing more than a report of the deeds and destinies of single individuals, of rulers or conquerors? The modern tendency is rather towards tracing back the events of human history to more concealed, general and impersonal factors, to the compelling influence of economic conditions, to alterations in food habits, to advances in the use of materials and tools, to migrations brought about by increases in population and climatic changes. Individuals have no other part to play in this than as exponents or representatives of group trends, which are bound to find expression and do so in these particular individuals largely by chance.

These are perfectly justifiable lines of approach, but they give us occasion for drawing attention to an important discrepancy between the attitude taken up by our organ of thought and the arrangement of things in the world, which are supposed to be grasped by means of our thought. It is enough for our need to discover causes (which, to be sure, is imperative) if each event has one demonstrable cause. But in the reality lying outside us that is scarcely the case; on the contrary, each event seems to be overdetermined and proves to be the effect of several convergent causes. Frightened by the immense complication of events, our investigations take the side of one correlation as against another and set up contradictions which do not exist but have only arisen owing to a rupture of more comprehensive relations.¹ Accordingly, if the investigation of a particular case demonstrates to us the transcendent influence of a single personality, our conscience need not reproach us with having by this hypothesis flown in the face of the doctrine of the importance of the general and impersonal factors. There is room in principle for both. In the case of the genesis of monotheism, however, we can point to no external factor other than the one we have already mentioned - that this development was linked with the establishment of closer relations between different nations and with the building up of a great empire.

¹ I protest, however, against being misunderstood to say that the world is so complicated that any assertion one may make is bound to hit upon a piece of truth somewhere. No. Our thought has upheld its liberty to discover dependent relations and connections to which there is nothing corresponding in reality; and it clearly sets a very high value on this gift, since it makes such copious use of it both inside and outside of science.

Moses And Monotheism

4929

Thus we reserve a place for ‘great men’ in the chain, or rather the network, of causes. But it may not, perhaps, be quite useless to enquire under what conditions we confer this title of honour. We shall be surprised to find that it is never quite easy to answer this question. A first formulation - ‘we do so if a man possesses to a specially high degree qualities that we value greatly’ - clearly misses the mark in every respect. Beauty, for instance, and muscular strength, however enviable they may be, constitute no claim to ‘greatness’. It would seem, then, that the qualities have to be mental ones - psychical and intellectual distinctions. As regards these, we are held up by the consideration that nevertheless we should not unhesitatingly describe someone as a great man simply because he was extraordinarily efficient in some particular sphere. We should certainly not do so in the case of a chess master or of a virtuoso on a musical instrument; but not very easily, either, in the case of a distinguished artist or scientist. In such cases we should naturally speak of him as a great poet, painter, mathematician or physicist, or as a pioneer in the field of this or that activity; but we refrain from pronouncing him a great man. If we unhesitatingly declare that, for instance, Goethe and Leonardo da Vinci and Beethoven were great men, we must be led to it by something other than admiration for their splendid creations. If precisely such examples as these did not stand in the way, the idea would probably occur to us that the name of a ‘great man’ is preferably reserved for men of action - conquerors, generals, rulers - and is in recognition of the greatness of their achievement, the force of the effects to which they gave rise. But this too is unsatisfactory and is entirely contradicted by our condemnation of so many worthless figures whose effects upon their contemporary world and upon posterity can nevertheless not be disputed. Nor shall we be able to choose success as a sign of greatness, when we reflect on the majority of great men who instead of achieving success have perished in misfortune.

Moses And Monotheism

4930

For the moment, then, we are inclined to decide that it is not worth while to look for a connotation of the concept of a ‘great man’ that is unambiguously determined. It seems to be only a loosely used and somewhat arbitrarily conferred recognition of an over-large development of certain human qualities, with some approximation to the original literal sense of ‘greatness’. We must recollect, too, that we are not so much interested in the essence of great men as in the question of the means by which they affect their fellow-men. We will, however, keep this enquiry as short as possible, since it threatens to lead us far away from our goal.

Let us, therefore, take it for granted that a great man influences his fellow-men in two ways: by his personality and by the idea which he puts forward. That idea may stress some ancient wishful image of the masses, or it may point out a new wishful aim to them, or it may cast its spell over them in some other way. Occasionally - and this is undoubtedly the more primary case - the personality works by itself and the idea plays a quite trivial part. Not for a moment are we in the dark as to why a great man ever becomes important. We know that in the mass of mankind there is a powerful need for an authority who can be admired, before whom one bows down, by whom one is ruled and perhaps even ill-treated. We have learnt from the psychology of individual men what the origin is of this need of the masses. It is a longing for the father felt by everyone from his childhood onwards, for the same father whom the hero of legend boasts he has overcome. And now it may begin to dawn on us that all the characteristics with which we equipped the great man are paternal characteristics, and that the essence of great men for which we vainly searched lies in this conformity. The decisiveness of thought, the strength of will, the energy of action are part of the picture of a father - but above all the autonomy and independence of the great man, his divine unconcern which may grow into ruthlessness. One must admire him, one may trust him, but one cannot avoid being afraid of him too. We should have been led to realize this from the word itself: who but the father can have been the ‘great man’ in childhood?

Moses And Monotheism

4931

There is no doubt that it was a mighty prototype of a father which, in the person of Moses, stooped to the poor Jewish bondsmen to assure them that they were his dear children. And no less overwhelming must have been the effect upon them of the idea of an only, eternal, almighty God, to whom they were not too mean for him to make a covenant with them and who promised to care for them if they remained loyal to his worship. It was probably not easy for them to distinguish the image of the man Moses from that of his God; and their feeling was right in this, for Moses may have introduced traits of his own personality into the character of his God - such as his wrathful temper and his relentlessness. And if, this being so, they killed their great man one day, they were only repeating a misdeed which in ancient times had been committed, as prescribed by law, against the Divine King and which, as we know, went back to a still more ancient prototype.¹

If on the one hand we thus see the figure of the great man grown to divine proportions, yet on the other hand we must recall that the father too was once a child. The great religious idea for which the man Moses stood was, on our view, not his own property: he had taken it over from King Akhenaten. And he, whose greatness as the founder of a religion is unequivocally established, may perhaps have been following hints which had reached him - from near or distant parts of Asia - through the medium of his mother or by other paths.

¹ Cf. Frazer, loc. cit.

Moses And Monotheism

4932

We cannot follow the chain of events further, but if we have rightly recognized these first steps, the monotheist idea returned like a boomerang to the land of its origin. Thus it seems unfruitful to try to fix the credit due to an individual in connection with a new idea. It is clear that many have shared in its development and made contributions to it. And, again, it would obviously be unjust to break off the chain of causes at Moses and to neglect what was effected by those who succeeded him and carried on his ideas, the Jewish Prophets. The seed of monotheism failed to ripen in Egypt. The same thing might have happened in Israel after the people had thrown off the burdensome and exacting religion. But there constantly arose from the Jewish people men who revived the fading tradition, who renewed the admonitions and demands made by Moses, and who did not rest till what was lost had been established once again. In the course of constant efforts over centuries, and finally owing to two great reforms, one before and one after the Babylonian exile, the transformation was accomplished of the popular god Yahweh into the God whose worship had been forced upon the Jews by Moses. And evidence of the presence of a peculiar psychical aptitude in the masses who had become the Jewish people is revealed by the fact that they were able to produce so many individuals prepared to take on the burdens of the religion of Moses in return for the reward of being the chosen people and perhaps for some other prizes of a similar degree.

Moses And Monotheism

4933

C

THE ADVANCE IN INTELLECTUALITY

In order to bring about lasting psychical results in a people, it is clearly not enough to assure them that they have been chosen by the deity. The fact must also be proved to them in some way if they are to believe it and to draw consequences from the belief. In the religion of Moses the Exodus from Egypt served as the proof; God, or Moses in his name, was never tired of appealing to this evidence of favour. The feast of the Passover was introduced in order to maintain the memory of that event, or, rather, an old-established feast was injected with the contents of that memory. Nevertheless, it was only a memory: the Exodus belonged to a hazy past. In the present, signs of God’s favour were decidedly scanty; the people’s history pointed rather to his disfavour. Primitive peoples used to depose their gods or even to castigate them, if they failed to do their duty in securing them victory, happiness and comfort. In all periods kings have been treated in no way differently from gods; an ancient identity is thus revealed: an origin from a common root. Thus, modern peoples, too, are in the habit of expelling their kings if the glory of their reign is spoilt by defeats and the corresponding losses in territory and money. Why the people of Israel, however, clung more and more submissively to their God the worse they were treated by him - that is a problem which for the moment we must leave on one side.

It may encourage us to enquire whether the religion of Moses brought the people nothing else besides an enhancement of their self-esteem owing to their consciousness of having been chosen. And indeed another factor can easily be found. That religion also brought the Jews a far grander conception of God, or, as we might put it more modestly, the conception of a grander God. Anyone who believed in this God had some kind of share in his greatness, might feel exalted himself. For an unbeliever this is not entirely self-evident; but we may perhaps make it easier to understand if we point to the sense of superiority felt by a Briton in a foreign country which has been made insecure owing to an insurrection - a feeling that is completely absent in a citizen of any small continental state. For the Briton counts on the fact that his Government will send along a warship if a hair of his head is hurt, and that the rebels understand that very well - whereas the small state possesses no warship at all. Thus, pride in the greatness of the British Empire has a root as well in the consciousness of the greater security - the protection - enjoyed by the individual Briton. This may resemble the conception of a grand God. And, since one can scarcely claim to assist God in the administration of the world, the pride in God’s greatness fuses with the pride in being chosen by him.

Among the precepts of the Moses religion there is one that is of greater importance than appears to begin with. This is the prohibition against making an image of God - the compulsion to worship a God whom one cannot see. In this, I suspect, Moses was outdoing the strictness of the Aten religion. Perhaps he merely wanted to be consistent: his God would in that case have neither a name nor a countenance. Perhaps it was a fresh measure against magical abuses. But if this prohibition were accepted, it must have a profound effect. For it meant that a sensory perception was given second place to what may be called an abstract idea - a triumph of intellectuality over sensuality or, strictly speaking, an instinctual renunciation, with all its necessary psychological consequences.

Moses And Monotheism

4934

This may not seem obvious at first sight, and before it can carry conviction we must recall other processes of the same character in the development of human civilization. The earliest of these and perhaps the most important is merged in the obscurity of primaeval ages. Its astonishing effects compel us to assert its occurrence. In our children, in adults who are neurotic, as well as in primitive peoples, we meet with the mental phenomenon which we describe as a belief in the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’. In our judgement this lies in an over-estimation of the influence which our mental (in this case, intellectual) acts can exercise in altering the external world. At bottom, all magic, the precursor of our technology, rests on this premiss. All the magic of words, too, has its place here, and the conviction of the power which is bound up with the knowledge and pronouncing of a name. The ‘omnipotence of thoughts’ was, we suppose, an expression of the pride of mankind in the development of speech, which resulted in such an extraordinary advancement of intellectual activities. The new realm of intellectuality was opened up, in which ideas, memories and inferences became decisive in contrast to the lower psychical activity which had direct perceptions by the sense-organs as its content. This was unquestionably one of the most important stages on the path to hominization.

We can far more easily grasp another process of a later date. Under the influence of external factors into which we need not enter here and which are also in part insufficiently known, it came about that the matriarchal social order was succeeded by the patriarchal one - which, of course, involved a revolution in the juridical conditions that had so far prevailed. An echo of this revolution seems still to be audible in the Oresteia of Aeschylus. But this turning from the mother to the father points in addition to a victory of intellectuality over sensuality - that is, an advance in civilization, since maternity is proved by the evidence of the senses while paternity is a hypothesis, based on an inference and a premiss. Taking sides in this way with a thought-process in preference to a sense perception has proved to be a momentous step.

Moses And Monotheism

4935

At some point between the two events that I have mentioned there was another which shows the most affinity to what we are investigating in the history of religion. Human beings found themselves obliged in general to recognise ‘intellectual’ forces - forces, that is, which cannot be grasped by the senses (particularly by the sight) but which none the less produce undoubted and indeed extremely powerful effects. If we may rely upon the evidence of language, it was movement of the air that provided the prototype of intellectuality, for intellect derives its name from a breath of wind - ‘animus’, ‘spiritus’, and the Hebrew ‘ruach (breath)’. This too led to the discovery of the mind as that of the intellectual principle in individual human beings. Observation found the movement of air once again in men’s breathing, which ceases when they die. To this day a dying man ‘breathes out his spirit’. Now, however, the world of spirits lay open to men. They were prepared to attribute the soul which they had discovered in themselves to everything in Nature. The whole world was animate; and science, which came so much later, had plenty to do in divesting part of the world of its soul once more; indeed it has not completed that task even to-day.

The Mosaic prohibition elevated God to a higher degree of intellectuality, and the way was opened to further alterations in the idea of God which we have still to describe. But we may first consider another effect of the prohibition. All such advances in intellectuality have as their consequence that the individual’s self-esteem is increased, that he is made proud - so that he feels superior to other people who have remained under the spell of sensuality. Moses, as we know, conveyed to the Jews an exalted sense of being a chosen people. The dematerialization of God brought a fresh and valuable contribution to their secret treasure. The Jews retained their inclination to intellectual interests. The nation’s political misfortune taught it to value at its true worth the one possession that remained to it - its literature. Immediately after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by Titus, the Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai asked permission to open the first Torah school in Jabneh. From that time on, the Holy Writ and intellectual concern with it were what held the scattered people together.

This much is generally known and accepted. All I have wanted to do is to add that this characteristic development of the Jewish nature was introduced by the Mosaic prohibition against worshipping God in a visible form.

The pre-eminence given to intellectual labours throughout some two thousand years in the life of the Jewish people has, of course, had its effect. It has helped to check the brutality and the tendency to violence which are apt to appear where the development of muscular strength is the popular ideal. Harmony in the cultivation of intellectual and physical activity, such as was achieved by the Greek people, was denied to the Jews. In this dichotomy their decision was at least in favour of the worthier alternative.

Moses And Monotheism

4936

D

RENUNCIATION OF INSTINCT

It is not obvious and not immediately understandable why an advance in intellectuality, a set-back to sensuality, should raise the self-regard both of an individual and of a people. It seems to presuppose the existence of a definite standard of value and of some other person or agency which maintains it. For an explanation let us turn to an analogous case in individual psychology which we have come to understand.

If the id in a human being gives rise to an instinctual demand of an erotic or aggressive nature, the simplest and most natural thing is that the ego, which has the apparatus of thought and the muscular apparatus at its disposal, should satisfy the demand by an action. This satisfaction of the instinct is felt by the ego as pleasure, just as its non-satisfaction would undoubtedly have become a source of unpleasure. Now a case may arise in which the ego abstains from satisfying the instinct in view of external obstacles - namely, if it perceives that the action in question would provoke a serious danger to the ego. An abstention from satisfaction of this kind, the renunciation of an instinct on account of an external hindrance - or, as we say, in obedience to the reality principle - is not pleasurable in any event. The renunciation of the instinct would lead to a lasting tension owing to unpleasure, if it were not possible to reduce the strength of the instinct itself by displacements of energy. Instinctual renunciation can, however, also be imposed for other reasons, which we correctly describe as internal. In the course of an individual’s development a portion of the inhibiting forces in the external world are internalized and an agency is constructed in the ego which confronts the rest of the ego in an observing, criticizing and prohibiting sense. We call this new agency the super-ego. Thenceforward the ego, before putting to work the instinctual satisfactions demanded by the id, has to take into account not merely the dangers of the external world but also the objections of the super-ego, and it will have all the more grounds for abstaining from satisfying the instinct. But whereas instinctual renunciation, when it is for external reasons, is only unpleasurable, when it is for internal reasons, in obedience to the super-ego, it has a different economic effect. In addition to the inevitable unpleasurable consequences it also brings the ego a yield of pleasure - a substitutive satisfaction, as it were. The ego feels elevated; it is proud of the instinctual renunciation, as though it were a valuable achievement. We believe we can understand the mechanism of this yield of pleasure. The super-ego is the successor and representative of the individual’s parents (and educators) who had supervised his actions in the first period of his life; it carries on their functions almost unchanged. It keeps the ego in a permanent state of dependence and exercises a constant pressure on it. Just as in childhood, the ego is apprehensive about risking the love of its supreme master; it feels his approval as liberation and satisfaction and his reproaches as pangs of conscience. When the ego has brought the super-ego the sacrifice of an instinctual renunciation, it expects to be rewarded by receiving more love from it. The consciousness of deserving this love is felt by it as pride. At the time when the authority had not yet been internalized as a super-ego, there could be the same relation between the threat of loss of love and the claims of instinct: there was a feeling of security and satisfaction when one had achieved an instinctual renunciation out of love for one’s parents. But this happy feeling could only assume the peculiar narcissistic character of pride after the authority had itself become a portion of the ego.

Moses And Monotheism

4937

What help does this explanation of the satisfaction arising from instinctual renunciation give us towards understanding the processes that we want to study - the elevation of self-regard when there are advances in intellectuality? Very little, it seems. The circumstances are quite different. There is no question of any instinctual renunciation and there is no second person or agency for whose sake the sacrifice is made. We shall soon feel doubts about this last assertion. It can be said that the great man is precisely the authority for whose sake the achievement is carried out; and, since the great man himself operates by virtue of his similarity to the father, there is no need to feel surprise if in group psychology the role of the super-ego falls to him. So that this would apply too to the man Moses in relation to the Jewish people. As regards the other point, however, no proper analogy can be established. An advance in intellectuality consists in deciding against direct sense-perception in favour of what are known as the higher intellectual processes - that is, memories, reflections and inferences. It consists, for instance, in deciding that paternity is more important than maternity, although it cannot, like the latter, be established by the evidence of the senses, and that for that reason the child should bear his father’s name and be his heir. Or it declares that our God is the greatest and mightiest, although he is invisible like a gale of wind or like the soul. The rejection of a sexual or aggressive instinctual demand seems to be something quite different from this. Moreover, in the case of some advances in intellectuality - for instance, in the case of the victory of patriarchy - we cannot point to the authority which lays down the standard which is to be regarded as higher. It cannot in this case be the father, since he is only elevated into being an authority by the advance itself. Thus we are faced by the phenomenon that in the course of the development of humanity sensuality is gradually overpowered by intellectuality and that men feel proud and exalted by every such advance. But we are unable to say why this should be so. It further happens later on that intellectuality itself is overpowered by the very puzzling emotional phenomenon of faith. Here we have the celebrated ‘credo quia absurdum’, and, once more, anyone who has succeeded in this regards it as a supreme achievement. Perhaps the common element in all these psychological situations is something else. Perhaps men simply pronounce that what is more difficult is higher, and their pride is merely their narcissism augmented by the consciousness of a difficulty overcome.

Moses And Monotheism

4938

These are certainly not very fruitful considerations, and it might be thought that they have nothing at all to do with our enquiry as to what has determined the character of the Jewish people. That would only be to our advantage; but a certain connection with our problem is betrayed nevertheless by a fact which will concern us still more later on. The religion which began with the prohibition against making an image of God develops more and more in the course of centuries into a religion of instinctual renunciations. It is not that it would demand sexual abstinence; it is content with a marked restriction of sexual freedom. God, however, becomes entirely removed from sexuality and elevated into the ideal of ethical perfection. But ethics is a limitation of instinct. The Prophets are never tired of asseverating that God requires nothing other from his people than a just and virtuous conduct of life - that is, abstention from every instinctual satisfaction which is still condemned as vicious by our morality to-day as well. And even the demand for belief in him seems to take a second place in comparison with the seriousness of these ethical requirements. In this way instinctual renunciation seems to play a prominent part in the religion, even if it did not stand out in it from the first.

This is the place, however, for an interpolation, in order to avoid a misunderstanding. Even though it may seem that instinctual renunciation and the ethics founded on it do not form part of the essential content of religion, yet genetically they are most intimately connected with it. Totemism, which is the earliest form of a religion which we recognize, carries with it, as indispensable constituents of its system, a number of commands and prohibitions which have no other significance, of course, than as instinctual renunciations: the worship of the totem, which includes a prohibition against injuring or killing it, exogamy - that is, renunciation of the passionately desired mothers and sisters in the horde - the granting of equal rights to all the members of the fraternal alliance - that is, restricting the inclination to violent rivalry among them. In these regulations are to be seen the first beginnings of a moral and social order. It does not escape us that two different motives are at work here. The first two prohibitions operate on the side of the father who has been got rid of: they carry on his will, as it were. The third command - the granting of equal rights to the allied brothers - disregards the father’s will; it is justified by an appeal to the necessity for permanently maintaining the new order which succeeded the father’s removal. Otherwise a relapse into the earlier state would have become inevitable. It is here that social commands diverge from the others which, as we might say, are derived directly from religious connections.

The essential part of this course of events is repeated in the abbreviated development of the human individual. Here, too, it is the authority of the child’s parents - essentially, that of his autocratic father, threatening him with his power to punish - which calls on him for a renunciation of instinct and which decides for him what is to be allowed and what forbidden. Later on, when Society and the super-ego have taken the parents’ place, what in the child was called ‘well-behaved’ or ‘naughty’ is described as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ or ‘virtuous’ and ‘vicious’. But it is still always the same thing - instinctual renunciation under the pressure of the authority which replaces and prolongs the father.

Moses And Monotheism

4939

A further depth is added to these discoveries when we examine the remarkable concept of holiness. What is it really that seems to us ‘holy’ in preference to other things that we value highly and recognize as important? On the one hand, the connection of holiness or sacredness with what is religious is unmistakable. It is insisted upon emphatically: everything religious is sacred, it is the very core of sacredness. On the other hand, our judgement is disturbed by the numerous attempts to apply the characteristic of sacredness to so many other things - people, institutions, functions - which have little to do with religion. These efforts serve obvious tendentious purposes. Let us start from the prohibitive character which is so firmly attached to sacredness. What is sacred is obviously something that may not be touched. A sacred prohibition has a very strong emotional tone but has in fact no rational basis. For why, for instance, should incest with a daughter or sister be such a specially serious crime - so much worse than any other sexual intercourse? If we ask for a rational basis we shall certainly be told that all our feelings rebel against it. But that only means that people regard the prohibition as self-evident and that they know of no basis for it.

It is easy enough to show the futility of such an explanation. What is represented as insulting our most sacred feelings was a universal custom - we might call it a usage made holy - among the ruling families of the Ancient Egyptians and of other early peoples. It was taken as a matter of course that a Pharaoh should take his sister as his first and principal wife; and the later successors of the Pharaohs, the Greek Ptolemies, did not hesitate to follow that model. We are compelled, rather, to a realization that incest - in this instance between a brother and sister - was a privilege which was withheld from common mortals and reserved to kings as representatives of the gods, just as similarly, no objection was taken to incestuous relations of this kind in the world of Greek and Germanic legend. It may be suspected that the scrupulous insistence upon equality of birth among our aristocracy is a relic of this ancient privilege and it can be established that, as a result of the inbreeding practised over so many generations in the highest social strata, Europe is ruled to-day by members of a single family and a second one.

Moses And Monotheism

4940

Evidence of incest among gods, kings and heroes helps us as well to deal with another attempt, which seeks to explain the horror of incest biologically and to trace it to an obscure knowledge of the damage done by inbreeding. It is not even certain, however, that there is any danger of damage from inbreeding let alone that primitive peoples can have recognized it and reacted against it. The uncertainty in defining the permitted and forbidden degrees of kinship argues just as little in favour of the hypothesis that a ‘natural feeling’ is the ultimate basis of the horror of incest.

Our construction of prehistory forces us to another explanation. The command in favour of exogamy, of which the horror of incest is the negative expression, was a product of the will of the father and carried this will on after he had been removed. Hence come the strength of its emotional tone and the impossibility of finding a rational basis for it - that is, its sacredness. We confidently expect that an investigation of all the other cases of a sacred prohibition would lead to the same conclusion as in that of the horror of incest: that what is sacred was originally nothing other than the prolongation of the will of the primal father. This would also throw light on the hitherto incomprehensible ambivalence of the words which express the concept of sacredness. It is the ambivalence which in general dominates the relation to the father. [The Latin] ‘sacer’ means not only ‘sacred’, ‘consecrated’, but also something that we can only translate as ‘infamous’, ‘detestable’ (e.g. ‘auri sacra fames’). But the father’s will was not only something which one might not touch, which one had to hold in high respect, but also something one trembled before, because it demanded a painful instinctual renunciation. When we hear that Moses made his people holy by introducing the custom of circumcision we now understand the deep meaning of that assertion. Circumcision is the symbolic substitute for the castration which the primal father once inflicted upon his sons in the plenitude of his absolute power, and whoever accepted that symbol was showing by it that he was prepared to submit to the father’s will, even if it imposed the most painful sacrifice on him.

Going back to ethics, we may say in conclusion that a part of its precepts are justified rationally by the necessity for delimiting the rights of society as against the individual, the rights of the individual as against society and those of individuals as against one another. But what seems to us so grandiose about ethics, so mysterious and, in a mystical fashion, so self-evident, owes these characteristics to its connection with religion, its origin from the will of the father.

Moses And Monotheism

4941

E

WHAT IS TRUE IN RELIGION

How enviable, to those of us who are poor in faith, do those enquirers seem who are convinced of the existence of a Supreme Being! To that great Spirit the world offers no problems, for he himself created all its institutions. How comprehensive, how exhaustive and how definitive are the doctrines of believers compared with the laborious, paltry and fragmentary attempts at explanation which are the most we are able to achieve! The divine Spirit, which is itself the ideal of ethical perfection, has planted in men the knowledge of that ideal and, at the same time, the urge to assimilate their own nature to it. They perceive directly what is higher and nobler and what is lower and more base. Their affective life is regulated in accordance with their distance from the ideal at any moment. When they approach to it - at their perihelion, as it were - they are brought high satisfaction; when, at their aphelion, they have become remote from it, the punishment is severe unpleasure. All of this is laid down so simply and so unshakeably. We can only regret that certain experiences in life and observations in the world make it impossible for us to accept the premiss of the existence of such a Supreme Being. As though the world had not riddles enough, we are set the new problem of understanding how these other people have been able to acquire their belief in the Divine Being and whence that belief obtained its immense power, which overwhelms ‘reason and science’.

Let us return to the more modest problem which has occupied us hitherto. We wanted to explain the origin of the special character of the Jewish people, a character which is probably what has made their survival to the present day possible. We found that the man Moses impressed this character on them by giving them a religion which increased their self-esteem so much that they thought themselves superior to all other peoples. Thereafter they survived by keeping apart from others. Mixtures of blood interfered little with this, since what held them together was an ideal factor, the possession in common of certain intellectual and emotional wealth. The religion of Moses led to this result because (1) it allowed the people to take a share in the grandeur of a new idea of God, (2) it asserted that this people had been chosen by this great God and were destined to receive evidences of his special favour and (3) it forced upon the people an advance in intellectuality which, important enough in itself, opened the way, in addition, to the appreciation of intellectual work and to further renunciations of instinct.

This is what we have arrived at. And, though we do not wish to take back any of it, we cannot hide from ourselves that it is somehow or other unsatisfying. The cause does not, so to speak, match the effect; the fact that we want to explain seems to be of a different order of magnitude from everything by which we explain it. May it be that all the investigations we have so far made have not uncovered the whole of the motivation but only a certain superficial layer, and that behind it another very important factor awaits discovery? In view of the extraordinary complexity of all causation in life and history, something of the sort was to be expected.

Moses And Monotheism

4942

Access to this deeper motivation would seem to be given at a particular point in the previous discussions. The religion of Moses did not produce its effects immediately but in a remarkably indirect manner. This does not mean to say simply that it did not work at once, that it took long periods of time, hundreds of years, to deploy its full effect, for that is self-evident when it is a question of the imprinting of a people’s character. But the restriction relates to a fact which we have derived from the history of the Jewish religion or, if you like, have introduced into it. We have said that after a certain time the Jewish people rejected the religion of Moses once more - whether they did so completely or retained some of its precepts we cannot guess. If we suppose that in the long period of the seizure of Canaan and the struggle with the peoples inhabiting it the Yahweh religion did not differ essentially from the worship of the other Baalim, we shall be on historical ground in spite of all the later tendentious efforts to throw a veil over this shaming state of things.

The religion of Moses, however, had not disappeared without leaving a trace. A kind of memory of it had survived, obscured and distorted, supported, perhaps, among individual members of the priestly caste by ancient records. And it was this tradition of a great past which continued to work in the background, as it were, which gradually gained more and more power over men’s minds, and which finally succeeded in transforming the god Yahweh into the god of Moses and in calling back to life the religion of Moses which had been established and then abandoned long centuries earlier.

In a previous portion of this study we have considered what assumption seems inevitable if we are to find such an achievement of tradition comprehensible.

Moses And Monotheism

4943

F

THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED

There are a quantity of similar processes among those which the analytic investigation of mental life has taught us to know. Some of them are described as pathological, others are counted among the diversity of normal events. But that matters little, since the boundaries between the two are not sharply drawn, their mechanisms are to a large extent the same, and it is of far more importance whether the alterations in question take place in the ego itself or whether they confront it as alien to it - in which case they are known as symptoms.

From the mass of material I shall first bring forward some cases which relate to the development of character. Take, for instance, the girl who has reached a state of the most decided opposition to her mother. She has cultivated all those characteristics which she has seen that her mother lacked, and has avoided everything that reminded her of her mother. We may supplement this by saying that in her early years, like every female child, she adopted an identification with her mother and that she is now rebelling against this energetically. But when this girl marries and herself becomes a wife and a mother, we need not be surprised to find that she begins to grow more and more like the mother to whom she was so antagonistic, till finally the identification with her which she surmounted is unmistakably re-established. The same thing happens too with boys; and even the great Goethe, who in the period of his genius certainly looked down upon his unbending and pedantic father, in his old age developed traits which formed a part of his father’s character. The outcome can become even more striking when the contrast between the two personalities is sharper. A young man whose fate it was to grow up beside a worthless father, began by developing, in defiance of him, into a capable, trustworthy and honourable person. In the prime of life his character was reversed, and thenceforward he behaved as though he had taken this same father as a model. In order not to miss the connection with our theme, we must keep in mind the fact that at the beginning of such a course of events there is always an identification with the father in early childhood. This is afterwards repudiated, and even overcompensated, but in the end establishes itself once more.

Moses And Monotheism

4944

It has long since become common knowledge that the experiences of a person’s first five years exercise a determining effect on his life, which nothing later can withstand. Much that deserves knowing might be said about the way in which these early impressions maintain themselves against any influences in more mature periods of life - but it would not be relevant here. It may, however, be less well known that the strongest compulsive influence arises from impressions which impinge upon a child at a time when we would have to regard his psychical apparatus as not yet completely receptive. The fact itself cannot be doubted; but it is so puzzling that we may make it more comprehensible by comparing it with a photographic exposure which can be developed after any interval of time and transformed into a picture. I am nevertheless glad to point out that this uncomfortable discovery of ours has been anticipated by an imaginative writer, with the boldness that is permitted to poets. E. T. A. Hoffmann used to trace back the wealth of figures that put themselves at his disposal for his creative writings to the changing images and impressions which he had experienced during a journey of some weeks in a post-chaise while he was still an infant at his mother’s breast. What children have experienced at the age of two and have not understood, need never be remembered by them except in dreams; they may only come to know of it through psycho-analytic treatment. But at some later time it will break into their life with obsessional impulses, it will govern their actions, it will decide their sympathies and antipathies and will quite often determine their choice of a love-object, for which it is so frequently impossible to find a rational basis. The two points at which these facts touch upon our problem cannot be mistaken.

First, there is the remoteness of the period concerned,¹ which is recognized here as the truly determining factor - in the special state of the memory, for instance, which in the case of these childhood experiences we classify as ‘unconscious’. We expect to find an analogy in this with the state which we are seeking to attribute to tradition in the mental life of the people. It was not easy, to be sure, to introduce the idea of the unconscious into group psychology.

¹ Here, too, a poet may speak. In order to explain his attachment, he imagines: ‘Ach, du warst in abgelebten Zeiten meine Schwester oder meine Frau.’ [Literally: ‘Ah, you were, in a past life, my sister or my wife.’]

Moses And Monotheism

4945

Regular contributions are made to the phenomena we are in search of by the mechanisms which lead to the formation of neuroses. Here again the determining events occur in early childhood times, but here the stress is not upon the time but upon the process by which the event is met, the reaction to it. We can describe it schematically thus. As a result of the experience, an instinctual demand arises which calls for satisfaction. The ego refuses that satisfaction, either because it is paralysed by the magnitude of the demand or because it recognizes it as a danger. The former of these grounds is the more primary one; both of them amount to the avoidance of a situation of danger. The ego fends off the danger by the process of repression. The instinctual impulse is in some way inhibited, its precipitating cause, with its attendant perceptions and ideas, is forgotten. This, however, is not the end of the process: the instinct has either retained its forces, or collects them again, or it is reawakened by some new precipitating cause. Thereupon it renews its demand, and, since the path to normal satisfaction remains closed to it by what we may call the scar of repression, somewhere, at a weak spot, it opens another path for itself to what is known as a substitutive satisfaction, which comes to light as a symptom, without the acquiescence of the ego, but also without its understanding. All the phenomena of the formation of symptoms may justly be described as the ‘return of the repressed’. Their distinguishing characteristic, however, is the far-reaching distortion to which the returning material has been subjected as compared with the original. It will perhaps be thought that this last group of facts has carried us too far away from the similarity with tradition. But we ought not to regret it if it has brought us close to the problems of the renunciation of instinct.

Moses And Monotheism

4946

G

HISTORICAL TRUTH

We have undertaken all these psychological diversions in order to make it more credible to us that the religion of Moses only carried through its effect on the Jewish people as a tradition. It is likely that we have not achieved more than a certain degree of probability. Let us suppose, however, that we have succeeded in completely proving it. Even so the impression would remain that we have merely satisfied the qualitative factor of what was demanded, but not the quantitative one as well. There is an element of grandeur about everything to do with the origin of a religion, certainly including the Jewish one, and this is not matched by the explanations we have hitherto given. Some other factor must be involved to which there is little that is analogous and nothing that is of the same kind, something unique and something of the same order of magnitude as what has come out of it, as religion itself.

Let us try to approach the subject from the opposite direction. We understand how a primitive man is in need of a god as creator of the universe, as chief of his clan, as personal protector. This god takes his position behind the dead fathers, about whom tradition still has something to say. A man of later days, of our own day, behaves in the same way. He, too, remains childish and in need of protection, even when he is grown up; he thinks he cannot do without support from his god. That much is undisputed. But it is less easy to understand why there may only be a single god, why precisely the advance from henotheism to monotheism acquires an overwhelming significance. No doubt it is true, as we have explained, that the believer has a share in the greatness of his god; and the greater the god the more reliable is the protection which he can offer. But a god’s power does not necessarily presuppose that he is the only one. Many peoples regarded it only as a glorification of their chief god if he ruled over other deities who were inferior to him, and they did not think it diminished his greatness if there were other gods besides him. No doubt, if this god became a universal one and had all countries and peoples as his concern, it meant a sacrifice of intimacy, too. It was as though one were sharing one’s god with the foreigners and one had to make up for this by the proviso that one was preferred by him. We can make the further point that the idea of a single god means in itself an advance in intellectuality, but it is impossible to rate this point so highly.

Moses And Monotheism

4947

Pious believers, however, know how to fill this obvious gap in motivation adequately. They say that the idea of a single god produced such an overwhelming effect on men because it is a portion of the eternal truth which, long concealed, came to light at last and was then bound to carry everyone along with it. We must admit that a factor of this kind is at last something that matches the magnitude both of the subject and of its effect.

We too would like to accept this solution. But we are brought up by a doubt. The pious argument rests on an optimistic and idealistic premiss. It has not been possible to demonstrate in other connections that the human intellect has a particularly fine flair for the truth or that the human mind shows any special inclination for recognizing the truth. We have rather found, on the contrary, that our intellect very easily goes astray without any warning, and that nothing is more easily believed by us than what, without reference to the truth, comes to meet our wishful illusions. We must for that reason add a reservation to our agreement. We too believe that the pious solution contains the truth - but the historical truth and not the material truth. And we assume the right to correct a certain distortion to which this truth has been subjected on its return. That is to say, we do not believe that there is a single great god to-day, but that in primaeval times there was a single person who was bound to appear huge at that time and who afterwards returned in men’s memory elevated to divinity.

We had assumed that the religion of Moses was to begin with rejected and half-forgotten and afterwards broke through as a tradition. We are now assuming that this process was being repeated then for the second time. When Moses brought the people the idea of a single god, it was not a novelty but signified the revival of an experience in the primaeval ages of the human family which had long vanished from men’s conscious memory. But it had been so important and had produced or paved the way for such deeply penetrating changes in men’s life that we cannot avoid believing that it had left behind it in the human mind some permanent traces, which can be compared to a tradition.

We have learnt from the psycho-analyses of individuals that their earliest impressions, received at a time when the child was scarcely yet capable of speaking, produce at some time or another effects of a compulsive character without themselves being consciously remembered. We believe we have a right to make the same assumption about the earliest experiences of the whole of humanity. One of these effects would be the emergence of the idea of a single great god - an idea which must be recognized as a completely justified memory, though, it is true, one that has been distorted. An idea such as this has a compulsive character: it must be believed. To the extent to which it is distorted, it may be described as a delusion; in so far as it brings a return of the past, it must be called the truth. Psychiatric delusions, too, contain a small fragment of truth and the patient’s conviction extends over from this truth on to its delusional wrappings.

Moses And Monotheism

4948

What follows, from here to the end, is a slightly modified repetition of the discussions in Part I.

In 1912 I attempted, in my Totem and Taboo, to reconstruct the ancient situation from which these consequences followed. In doing so, I made use of some theoretical ideas put forward by Darwin, Atkinson and particularly by Robertson Smith, and combined them with the findings and indications derived from psycho-analysis. From Darwin I borrowed the hypothesis that human beings originally lived in small hordes, each of which was under the despotic rule of an older male who appropriated all the females and castigated or disposed of the younger males, including his sons. From Atkinson I took, in continuation of this account, the idea that this patriarchal system ended in a rebellion by the sons, who banded together against their father, overcame him and devoured him in common. Basing myself on Robertson Smith’s totem theory, I assumed that subsequently the father-horde gave place to the totemic brother-clan. In order to be able to live in peace with one another, the victorious brothers renounced the women on whose account they had, after all, killed their father, and instituted exogamy. The power of fathers was broken and the families were organized as a matriarchy. The ambivalent emotional attitude of the sons to their father remained in force during the whole of later development. A particular animal was set up in the father’s place as a totem. It was regarded as ancestor and protective spirit and might not be injured or killed. But once a year the whole male community came together to a ceremonial meal at which the totem animal (worshipped at all other times) was torn to pieces and devoured in common. No one might absent himself from this meal: it was the ceremonial repetition of the killing of the father, with which social order, moral laws and religion had taken their start. The conformity between Robertson Smith’s totem meal and the Christian Lord’s Supper had struck a number of writers before me.

To this day I hold firmly to this construction. I have repeatedly met with violent reproaches for not having altered my opinions in later editions of my book in spite of the fact that more recent ethnologists have unanimously rejected Robertson Smith’s hypotheses and have in part brought forward other, totally divergent theories. I may say in reply that these ostensible advances are well known to me. But I have not been convinced either of the correctness of these innovations or of Robertson Smith’s errors. A denial is not a refutation, an innovation is not necessarily an advance. Above all, however, I am not an ethnologist but a psycho-analyst. I had a right to take out of ethnological literature what I might need for the work of analysis. The writings of Robertson Smith - a man of genius - have given me valuable points of contact with the psychological material of analysis and indications for its employment. I have never found myself on common ground with his opponents.

Moses And Monotheism

4949

H

THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT

I cannot here repeat the contents of Totem and Taboo in greater detail. But I must undertake to fill up the long stretch between that hypothetical primaeval period and the victory of monotheism in historical times. After the institution of the combination of brother-clan, matriarchy, exogamy and totemism, a development began which must be described as a slow ‘return if the repressed’. Here I am not using the term ‘the repressed’ in its proper sense. What is in question is something in a people’s life which is past, lost to view, superseded and which we venture to compare with what is repressed in the mental life of an individual. We cannot at first sight say in what form this past existed during the time of its eclipse. It is not easy for us to carry over the concepts of individual psychology into group psychology; and I do not think we gain anything by introducing the concept of a ‘collective’ unconscious. The content of the unconscious, indeed, is in any case a collective, universal property of mankind. For the moment, then, we will make shift with the use of analogies. The processes in the life of peoples which we are studying here are very similar to those familiar to us in psychopathology, but nevertheless not quite the same. We must finally make up our minds to adopt the hypothesis that the psychical precipitates of the primaeval period became inherited property which, in each fresh generation, called not for acquisition but only for awakening. In this we have in mind the example of what is certainly the ‘innate’ symbolism which derives from the period of the development of speech, which is familiar to all children without their being instructed, and which is the same among all peoples despite their different languages. What we may perhaps still lack in certainty here is made good by other products of psycho-analytic research. We find that in a number of important relations our children react, not in a manner corresponding to their own experience, but instinctively, like the animals, in a manner that is only explicable as phylogenetic acquisition.

Moses And Monotheism

4950

The return of the repressed took place slowly and certainly not spontaneously but under the influence of all the changes in conditions of life which fill the history of human civilization. I cannot give a survey here of these determinants nor more than a fragmentary enumeration of the stages of this return. The father once more became the head of the family, but was not by any means so absolute as the father of the primal horde had been. The totem animal was replaced by a god in a series of transitions which are still very plain. To begin with, the god in human form still bore an animal’s head; later he turned himself by preference into that particular animal, and afterwards it became sacred to him and was his favourite attendant; or he killed the animal and himself bore its name as an epithet. Between the totem animal and the god, the hero emerged, often as a preliminary step towards deification. The idea of a supreme deity seems to have started early, at first only in a shadowy manner without intruding into men’s daily interests. As tribes and peoples came together into larger unities, the gods too organized themselves into families and into hierarchies. One of them was often elevated into being supreme lord over gods and men. After this, the further step was hesitatingly taken of paying respect to only one god, and finally the decision was taken of giving all power to a single god and of tolerating no other gods beside him. Only thus was it that the supremacy of the father of the primal horde was re-established and that the emotions relating to him could be repeated.

The first effect of meeting the being who had so long been missed and longed for was overwhelming and was like the traditional description of the law-giving from Mount Sinai. Admiration, awe and thankfulness for having found grace in his eyes - the religion of Moses knew none but these positive feelings towards the father-god. The conviction of his irresistibility, the submission to his will, could not have been more unquestioning in the helpless and intimidated son of the father of the horde - indeed those feelings only become fully intelligible when they are transposed into the primitive and infantile setting. A child’s emotional impulses are intensely and inexhaustibly deep to a degree quite other than those of an adult; only religious ecstasy can bring them back. A rapture of devotion to God was thus the first reaction to the return of the great father.

Moses And Monotheism

4951

The direction to be taken by this father-religion was in this may laid down for all time. Yet this did not bring its development to an end. Ambivalence is a part of the essence of the relation to the father: in the course of time the hostility too could not fail to stir, which had once driven the sons into killing their admired and dreaded father. There was no place in the framework of the religion of Moses for a direct expression of the murderous hatred of the father. All that could come to light was a mighty reaction against it - a sense of guilt on account of that hostility, a bad conscience for having sinned against God and for not ceasing to sin. This sense of guilt, which was uninterruptedly kept awake by the Prophets, and which soon formed an essential part of the religious system, had yet another superficial motivation, which neatly disguised its true origin. Things were going badly for the people; the hopes resting on the favour of God failed in fulfilment; it was not easy to maintain the illusion, loved above all else, of being God’s chosen people. If they wished to avoid renouncing that happiness, a sense of guilt on account of their own sinfulness offered a welcome means of exculpating God: they deserved no better than to be punished by him since they had not obeyed his commandments. And, driven by the need to satisfy this sense of guilt, which was insatiable and came from sources so much deeper, they must make those commandments grow ever stricter, more meticulous and even more trivial. In a fresh rapture of moral asceticism they imposed more and more new instinctual renunciations on themselves and in that way reached - in doctrine and precept, at least - ethical heights which had remained inaccessible to the other peoples of antiquity. Many Jews regard this attainment of ethical heights as the second main characteristic and the second great achievement of their religion. The way in which it was connected with the first one - the idea of a single god - should be plain from our remarks. These ethical ideas cannot, however, disavow their origin from the sense of guilt felt on account of a suppressed hostility to God. They possess the characteristic - uncompleted and incapable of completion - of obsessional neurotic reaction-formations; we can guess, too, that they serve the secret purposes of punishment.

Moses And Monotheism

4952

The further development takes us beyond Judaism. The remainder of what returned from the tragic drama of the primal father was no longer reconcilable in any way with the religion of Moses. The sense of guilt of those days was very far from being any longer restricted to the Jewish people; it had caught hold of all the Mediterranean peoples as a dull malaise, a premonition of calamity for which no one could suggest a reason. Historians of our day speak of an ageing of ancient civilization, but I suspect that they have only grasped accidental and contributory causes of this depressed mood of the peoples. The elucidation of this situation of depression sprang from Jewry. Irrespectively of all the approximations and preparations in the surrounding world, it was after all a Jewish man, Saul of Tarsus (who, as a Roman citizen, called himself Paul), in whose spirit the realization first emerged: ‘the reason we are so unhappy is that we have killed God the father.’ And it is entirely understandable that he could only grasp this piece of truth in the delusional disguise of the glad tidings: ‘we are freed from all guilt since one of us has sacrificed his life to absolve us.’ In this formula the killing of God was of course not mentioned, but a crime that had to be atoned by the sacrifice of a victim could only have been a murder. And the intermediate step between the delusion and the historical truth was provided by the assurance that the victim of the sacrifice had been God’s son. With the strength which it derived from the source of historical truth, this new faith overthrew every obstacle. The blissful sense of being chosen was replaced by the liberating sense of redemption. But the fact of the parricide, in returning to the memory of mankind, had to overcome greater resistances than the other fact, which had constituted the subject-matter of monotheism; it was also obliged to submit to a more powerful distortion. The unnameable crime was replaced by the hypothesis of what must be described as a shadowy ‘original sin’.

Moses And Monotheism

4953

Original sin and redemption by the sacrifice of a victim became the foundation stones of the new religion founded by Paul. It must remain uncertain whether there was a ringleader and instigator to the murder among the band of brothers who rebelled against the primal father, or whether such a figure was created later by the imagination of creative artists in order to turn themselves into heroes, and was then introduced into the tradition. After the Christian doctrine had burst the framework of Judaism, it took up components from many other sources, renounced a number of characteristics of pure monotheism and adapted itself in many details to the rituals of the other Mediterranean peoples. It was as though Egypt was taking vengeance once more on the heirs of Akhenaten. It is worth noticing how the new religion dealt with the ancient ambivalence in the relation to the father. Its main content was, it is true, reconciliation with God the Father, atonement for the crime committed against him; but the other side of the emotional relation showed itself in the fact that the son, who had taken the atonement on himself, became a god himself beside the father and, actually, in place of the father. Christianity, having arisen out of a father-religion, became a son-religion. It has not escaped the fate of having to get rid of the father.

Only a portion of the Jewish people accepted the new doctrine. Those who refused to are still called Jews to-day. Owing to this cleavage, they have become even more sharply divided from other peoples than before. They were obliged to hear the new religious community (which, besides Jews, included Egyptians, Greeks, Syrians, Romans and eventually Germans) reproach them with having murdered God. In full, this reproach would run as follows: ‘They will not accept it as true that they murdered God, whereas we admit it and have been cleansed of that guilt.’ It is easy therefore to see how much truth lies behind this reproach. A special enquiry would be called for to discover why it has been impossible for the Jews to join in this forward step which was implied, in spite of all its distortions, by the admission of having murdered God. In a certain sense they have in that way taken a tragic load of guilt on themselves; they have been made to pay heavy penance for it.

Our investigation may perhaps have thrown a little light on the question of how the Jewish people have acquired the characteristics which distinguish them. Less light has been thrown on the problem of how it is that they have been able to retain their individuality till the present day. But exhaustive answers to such riddles cannot in fairness be either demanded or expected. A contribution, to be judged in view of the limitations which I mentioned at the start, is all that I can offer.

4954

AN OUTLINE OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

(1940)

4955

Intentionally left blank

4956

AN OUTLINE OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

The aim of this brief work is to bring together the tenets of psycho-analysis and to state them, as it were, dogmatically - in the most concise form and in the most unequivocal terms. Its intention is naturally not to compel belief or to arouse conviction.

The teachings of psycho-analysis are based on an incalculable number of observations and experiences, and only someone who has repeated those observations on himself and on others is in a position to arrive at a judgement of his own upon it.

PART I

CHAPTER I

THE PSYCHICAL APPARATUS

Psycho-analysis makes a basic assumption, the discussion of which is reserved to philosophical thought but the justification for which lies in its results. We know two kinds of things about what we call our psyche (or mental life): firstly, its bodily organ and scene of action, the brain (or nervous system) and, on the other hand, our acts of consciousness, which are immediate data and cannot be further explained by any sort of description. Everything that lies between is unknown to us, and the data do not include any direct relation between these two terminal points of our knowledge. If it existed, it would at the most afford an exact localization of the processes of consciousness and would give us no help towards understanding them.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4957

Our two hypotheses start out from these ends or beginnings of our knowledge. The first is concerned with localization. We assume that mental life is the function of an apparatus to which we ascribe the characteristics of being extended in space and of being made up of several portions - which we imagine, that is, as resembling a telescope or microscope or something of the kind. Notwithstanding some earlier attempts in the same direction, the consistent working-out of a conception such as this is a scientific novelty.

We have arrived at our knowledge of this psychical apparatus by studying the individual development of human beings. To the oldest of these psychical provinces or agencies we give the name of id. It contains everything that is inherited, that is present at birth, that is laid down in the constitution - above all, therefore, the instincts, which originate from the somatic organization and which find a first psychical expression here in forms unknown to us.¹

Under the influence of the real external world around us, one portion of the id has undergone a special development. From what was originally a cortical layer, equipped with the organs for receiving stimuli and with arrangements for acting as a protective shield against stimuli, a special organization has arisen which henceforward acts as an intermediary between the id and the external world. To this region of our mind we have given the name of ego.

Here are the principal characteristics of the ego. In consequence of the pre-established connection between sense perception and muscular action, the ego has voluntary movement at its command. It has the task of self-preservation. As regards external events, it performs that task by becoming aware of stimuli, by storing up experiences about them (in the memory), by avoiding excessively strong stimuli (through flight), by dealing with moderate stimuli (through adaptation) and finally by learning to bring about expedient changes in the external world to its own advantage (through activity). As regards internal events, in relation to the id, it performs that task by gaining control over the demands of the instincts, by deciding whether they are to be allowed satisfaction, by postponing that satisfaction to times and circumstances favourable in the external world or by suppressing their excitations entirely. It is guided in its activity by consideration of the tensions produced by stimuli, whether these tensions are present in it or introduced into it. The raising of these tensions is in general felt as unpleasure and their lowering as pleasure. It is probable, however, that what is felt as pleasure or unpleasure is not the absolute height of this tension but something in the rhythm of the changes in them. The ego strives after pleasure and seeks to avoid unpleasure. An increase in unpleasure that is expected and foreseen is met by a signal of anxiety; the occasion of such an increase, whether it threatens from without or within, is known as a danger. From time to time the ego gives up its connection with the external world and withdraws into the state of sleep, in which it makes far-reaching changes in its organization. It is to be inferred from the state of sleep that this organization consists in a particular distribution of mental energy.

¹ This oldest portion of the psychical apparatus remains the most important throughout life; moreover, the investigations of psycho-analysis started with it.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4958

The long period of childhood, during which the growing human being lives in dependence on his parents, leaves behind it as a precipitate the formation in his ego of a special agency in which this parental influence is prolonged. It has received the name of super-ego. In so far as this super-ego is differentiated from the ego or is opposed to it, it constitutes a third power which the ego must take into account.

An action by the ego is as it should be if it satisfies simultaneously the demands of the id, of the super-ego and of reality - that is to say, if it is able to reconcile their demands with one another. The details of the relation between the ego and the super-ego become completely intelligible when they are traced back to the child’s attitude to its parents. This parental influence of course includes in its operation not only the personalities of the actual parents but also the family, racial and national traditions handed on through them, as well as the demands of the immediate social milieu which they represent. In the same way, the super-ego, in the course of an individual’s development, receives contributions from later successors and substitutes of his parents, such as teachers and models in public life of admired social ideals. It will be observed that, for all their fundamental difference, the id and the super-ego have one thing in common: they both represent the influences of the past - the id the influence of heredity, the super-ego the influence, essentially, of what is taken over from other people - whereas the ego is principally determined by the individual’s own experience, that is by accidental and contemporary events.

This general schematic picture of a psychical apparatus may be supposed to apply as well to the higher animals which resemble man mentally. A super-ego must be presumed to be present wherever, as is the case with man, there is a long period of dependence in childhood. A distinction between ego and id is an unavoidable assumption. Animal psychology has not yet taken in hand the interesting problem which is here presented.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4959

CHAPTER II

THE THEORY OF THE INSTINCTS

The power of the id expresses the true purpose of the individual organism’s life. This consists in the satisfaction of its innate needs. No such purpose as that of keeping itself alive or of protecting itself from dangers by means of anxiety can be attributed to the id. That is the task of the ego, whose business it also is to discover the most favourable and least perilous method of obtaining satisfaction, taking the external world into account. The super-ego may bring fresh needs to the fore, but its main function remains the limitation of satisfactions.

The forces which we assume to exist behind the tensions caused by the needs of the id are called instincts. They represent the somatic demands upon the mind. Though they are the ultimate cause of all activity, they are of a conservative nature; the state, whatever it may be, which an organism has reached gives rise to a tendency to re-establish that state so soon as it has been abandoned. It is thus possible to distinguish an indeterminate number of instincts, and in common practice this is in fact done. For us, however, the important question arises whether it may not be possible to trace all these numerous instincts back to a few basic ones. We have found that instincts can change their aim (by displacement) and also that they can replace one another - the energy of one instinct passing over to another. This latter process is still insufficiently understood. After long hesitancies and vacillations we have decided to assume the existence of only two basic instincts, Eros and the destructive instinct. (The contrast between the instincts of self-preservation and the preservation of the species, as well as the contrast between ego-love and object-love, fall within Eros.) The aim of the first of these basic instincts is to establish ever greater unities and to preserve them thus - in short, to bind together; the aim of the second is, on the contrary, to undo connections and so to destroy things. In the case of the destructive instinct we may suppose that its final aim is to lead what is living into an inorganic state. For this reason we also call it the death instinct. If we assume that living things came later than inanimate ones and arose from them, then the death instinct fits in with the formula we have proposed to the effect that instincts tend towards a return to an earlier state. In the case of Eros (or the love instinct) we cannot apply this formula. To do so would presuppose that living substance was once a unity which had later been torn apart and was now striving towards re-union.¹

¹ Creative writers have imagined something of the sort, but nothing like it is known to us from the actual history of living substance.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4960

In biological functions the two basic instincts operate against each other or combine with each other. Thus, the act of eating is a destruction of the object with the final aim of incorporating it, and the sexual act is an act of aggression with the purpose of the most intimate union. This concurrent and mutually opposing action of the two basic instincts gives rise to the whole variegation of the phenomena of life. The analogy of our two basic instincts extends from the sphere of living things to the pair of opposing forces - attraction and repulsion - which rule in the inorganic world.¹

Modifications in the proportions of the fusion between the instincts have the most tangible results. A surplus of sexual aggressiveness will turn a lover into a sex-murderer, while a sharp diminution in the aggressive factor will make him bashful or impotent.

There can be no question of restricting one or the other of the basic instincts to one of the provinces of the mind. They must necessarily be met with everywhere. We may picture an initial state as one in which the total available energy of Eros, which henceforward we shall speak of as ‘libido’, is present in the still undifferentiated ego-id and serves to neutralize the destructive tendencies which are simultaneously present. (We are without a term analogous to ‘libido’ for describing the energy of the destructive instinct.) At a later stage it becomes relatively easy for us to follow the vicissitudes of the libido, but this is more difficult with the destructive instinct.

¹ This picture of the basic forces or instincts, which still arouses much opposition among analysts, was already familiar to the philosopher Empedocles of Acragas.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4961

So long as that instinct operates internally, as a death instinct, it remains silent; it only comes to our notice when it is diverted outwards as an instinct of destruction. It seems to be essential for the preservation of the individual that this diversion should occur; the muscular apparatus serves this purpose. When the super-ego is established, considerable amounts of the aggressive instinct are fixated in the interior of the ego and operate there self-destructively. This is one of the dangers to health by which human beings are faced on their path to cultural development. Holding back aggressiveness is in general unhealthy and leads to illness (to mortification). A person in a fit of rage will often demonstrate how the transition from aggressiveness that has been prevented to self-destructiveness is brought about by diverting the aggressiveness against himself: he tears his hair or beats his face with his fists, though he would evidently have preferred to apply this treatment to someone else. Some portion of self-destructiveness remains within, whatever the circumstances; till at last it succeeds in killing the individual, not, perhaps, until his libido has been used up or fixated in a disadvantageous way. Thus it may in general be suspected that the individual dies of his internal conflicts but that the species dies of its unsuccessful struggle against the external world if the latter changes in a fashion which cannot be adequately dealt with by the adaptations which the species has acquired.

It is hard to say anything of the behaviour of the libido in the id and in the super-ego. All that we know about it relates to the ego, in which at first the whole available quota of libido is stored up. We call this state absolute, primary narcissism. It lasts till the ego begins to cathect the ideas of objects with libido, to transform narcissistic libido into object-libido. Throughout the whole of life the ego remains the great reservoir from which libidinal cathexes are sent out to objects and into which they are also once more withdrawn, just as an amoeba behaves with its pseudopodia. It is only when a person is completely in love that the main quota of libido is transferred on to the object and the object to some extent takes the place of the ego. A characteristic of the libido which is important in life is its mobility, the facility with which it passes from one object to another. This must be contrasted with the fixation of the libido to particular objects, which often persists throughout life.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4962

There can be no question but that the libido has somatic sources, that it streams to the ego from various organs and parts of the body. This is most clearly seen in the case of that portion of the libido which, from its instinctual aim, is described as sexual excitation. The most prominent of the parts of the body from which this libido arises are known by the name of ‘erotogenic zones’, though in fact the whole body is an erotogenic zone of this kind. The greater part of what we know about Eros - that is to say, about its exponent, the libido - has been gained from a study of the sexual function, which, indeed, on the prevailing view, even if not according to our theory, coincides with Eros. We have been able to form a picture of the way in which the sexual urge, which is destined to exercise a decisive influence on our life, gradually develops out of successive contributions from a number of component instincts, which represent particular erotogenic zones.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4963

CHAPTER III

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SEXUAL FUNCTION

According to the prevailing view human sexual life consists essentially in an endeavour to bring one’s own genitals into contact with those of someone of the opposite sex. With this are associated, as accessory phenomena and introductory acts, kissing this extraneous body, looking at it and touching it. This endeavour is supposed to make its appearance at puberty - that is, at the age of sexual maturity - and to serve the purposes of reproduction. Nevertheless, certain facts have always been known which do not fit into the narrow framework of this view. (1) It is a remarkable fact that there are people who are only attracted by individuals of their own sex and by their genitals. (2) It is equally remarkable that there are people whose desires behave exactly like sexual ones but who at the same time entirely disregard the sexual organs or their normal use; people of this kind are known as ‘perverts’. (3) And lastly it is a striking thing that some children (who are on that account regarded as degenerate) take a very early interest in their genitals and show signs of excitation in them.

It may well be believed that psycho-analysis provoked astonishment and denials when, partly on the basis of these three neglected facts, it contradicted all the popular opinions on sexuality. Its principal findings are as follows:

(a) Sexual life does not begin only at puberty, but starts with plain manifestations soon after birth.

(b) It is necessary to distinguish sharply between the concepts of ‘sexual’ and ‘genital’. The former is the wider concept and includes many activities that have nothing to do with the genitals.

(c) Sexual life includes the function of obtaining pleasure from zones of the body - a function which is subsequently brought into the service of reproduction. The two functions often fail to coincide completely.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4964

The chief interest is naturally focused on the first of these assertions, the most unexpected of all. It has been found that in early childhood there are signs of bodily activity to which only an ancient prejudice could deny the name of sexual and which are linked to psychical phenomena that we come across later in adult erotic life - such as fixation to particular objects, jealousy, and so on. It is further found, however, that these phenomena which emerge in early childhood form part of an ordered course of development, that they pass through a regular process of increase, reaching a climax towards the end of the fifth year, after which there follows a lull. During this lull progress is at a standstill and much is unlearnt and there is much recession. After the end of this period of latency, as it is called, sexual life advances once more with puberty; we might say that it has a second efflorescence. And here we come upon the fact that the onset of sexual life is diphasic, that it occurs in two waves - something that is unknown except in man and evidently has an important bearing on hominization.¹ It is not a matter of indifference that the events of this early period, except for a few residues, fall a victim to infantile amnesia. Our views on the aetiology of the neuroses and our technique of analytic therapy are derived from these conceptions; and our tracing of the developmental processes in this early period has also provided evidence for yet other conclusions.

¹ Cf. the suggestion that man is descended from a mammal which reached sexual maturity at the age of five, but that some major external influence was brought to bear on the species and at that point interrupted the straight course of development of sexuality. Other transformations in the sexual life of man as compared with that of animals might be connected with this - such as the abolition of the periodicity of the libido and the exploitation of the part played by menstruation in the relation between the sexes.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4965

The first organ to emerge as an erotogenic zone and to make libidinal demands on the mind is, from the time of birth onwards, the mouth. To begin with, all psychical activity is concentrated on providing satisfaction for the needs of that zone. Primarily, of course, this satisfaction serves the purpose of self-preservation by means of nourishment; but physiology should not be confused with psychology. The baby’s obstinate persistence in sucking gives evidence at an early stage of a need for satisfaction which, though it originates from and is instigated by the taking of nourishment, nevertheless strives to obtain pleasure independently of nourishment and for that reason may and should be termed sexual

During this oral phase sadistic impulses already occur sporadically along with the appearance of the teeth. Their extent is far greater in the second phase, which we describe as the sadistic-anal one, because satisfaction is then sought in aggression and in the excretory function. Our justification for including aggressive urges under the libido is based on the view that sadism is an instinctual fusion of purely libidinal and purely destructive urges, a fusion which thenceforward persists uninterruptedly.¹

The third phase is that known as the phallic one, which is, as it were, a forerunner of the final form taken by sexual life and already much resembles it. It is to be noted that it is not the genitals of both sexes that play a part at this stage, but only the male ones (the phallus). The female genitals long remain unknown: in children’s attempts to understand the sexual processes they pay homage to the venerable cloacal theory - a theory which has a genetic justification.²

With the phallic phase and in the course of it the sexuality of early childhood reaches its height and approaches its dissolution. Thereafter boys and girls have different histories. Both have begun to put their intellectual activity at the service of sexual researches; both start off from the premiss of the universal presence of the penis. But now the paths of the sexes diverge. The boy enters the Oedipus phase; he begins to manipulate his penis and simultaneously has phantasies of carrying out some sort of activity with it in relation to his mother, till, owing to the combined effect of a threat of castration and the sight of the absence of a penis in females, he experiences the greatest trauma of his life and this introduces the period of latency with all its consequences. The girl, after vainly attempting to do the same as the boy, comes to recognize her lack of a penis or rather the inferiority of her clitoris, with permanent effects on the development of her character; as a result of this first disappointment in rivalry, she often begins by turning away altogether from sexual life.

¹ The question arises whether the satisfaction of purely destructive instinctual impulses can be felt as pleasure, whether pure destructiveness without any libidinal admixture occurs. Satisfaction of the death instinct remaining in the ego seems not to produce feelings of pleasure, though masochism represents a fusion which is entirely analogous to sadism.

² The occurrence of early vaginal excitations is often asserted. But it is most probable that what is in question are excitations in the clitoris - that is, in an organ analogous to the penis. This does not invalidate our right to describe the phase as phallic.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4966

It would be a mistake to suppose that these three phases succeed one another in a clear-cut fashion. One may appear in addition to another; they may overlap one another, may be present alongside of one another. In the early phases the different component instincts set about their pursuit of pleasure independently of one another; in the phallic phase there are the beginnings of an organization which subordinates the other urges to the primacy of the genitals and signifies the start of a co-ordination of the general urge towards pleasure into the sexual function. The complete organization is only achieved at puberty, in a fourth, genital phase. A state of things is then established in which (1) some earlier libidinal cathexes are retained, (2) others are taken into the sexual function as preparatory, auxiliary acts, the satisfaction of which produces what is known as fore-pleasure, and (3) other urges are excluded from the organization, and are either suppressed altogether (repressed) or are employed in the ego in another way, forming character-traits or undergoing sublimation with a displacement of their aims.

This process is not always performed faultlessly. Inhibitions in its development manifest themselves as the many sorts of disturbance in sexual life. When this is so, we find fixations of the libido to conditions in earlier phases, whose urge, which is independent of the normal sexual aim, is described as perversion. One such developmental inhibition, for instance, is homosexuality when it is manifest. Analysis shows that in every case a homosexual object-tie was present and in most cases persisted in a latent condition. The situation is complicated by the fact that as a rule the processes necessary for bringing about a normal outcome are not completely present or absent, but partially present, so that the final result remains dependent on these quantitative relations. In these circumstances the genital organization is, it is true, attained, but it lacks those portions of the libido which have not advanced with the rest and have remained fixated to pregenital objects and aims. This weakening shows itself in a tendency, if there is an absence of genital satisfaction or if there are difficulties in the real external world, for the libido to hark back to its earlier pregenital cathexes (regression).

During the study of the sexual functions we have been able to gain a first, preliminary conviction, or rather a suspicion, of two discoveries which will later be found to be important over the whole of our field. Firstly, the normal and abnormal manifestations observed by us (that is, the phenomenology of the subject) need to be described from the point of view of their dynamics and economics (in our case, from the point of view of the quantitative distribution of the libido). And secondly, the aetiology of the disorders which we study is to be looked for in the individual’s developmental history - that is to say, in his early life.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4967

CHAPTER IV

PSYCHICAL QUALITIES

I have described the structure of the psychical apparatus and the energies or forces which are active in it, and I have traced in a prominent example the way in which those energies (in the main, the libido) organize themselves into a physiological function which serves the purpose of the preservation of the species. There was nothing in all this to demonstrate the quite peculiar characteristic of what is psychical, apart, of course, from the empirical fact that this apparatus and these energies are the basis of the functions which we describe as our mental life. I will now turn to something which is uniquely characteristic of what is psychical, and which, indeed, according to a very widely held opinion, coincides with it to the exclusion of all else.

The starting-point for this investigation is provided by a fact without parallel, which defies all explanation or description - the fact of consciousness. Nevertheless, if anyone speaks of consciousness we know immediately and from our most personal experience what is meant by it.¹ Many people, both inside and outside science, are satisfied with the assumption that consciousness alone is psychical; in that case nothing remains for psychology but to discriminate among psychical phenomena between perceptions, feelings, thought-processes and volitions. It is generally agreed, however, that these conscious processes do not form unbroken sequences which are complete in themselves; there would thus be no alternative left to assuming that there are physical or somatic processes which are concomitant with the psychical ones and which we should necessarily have to recognize as more complete than the psychical sequences, since some of them would have conscious processes parallel to them but others would not. If so, it of course becomes plausible to lay the stress in psychology on these somatic processes, to see in them the true essence of what is psychical and to look for some other assessment of the conscious processes. The majority of philosophers, however, as well as many other people, dispute this and declare that the idea of something psychical being unconscious is self-contradictory.

¹ One extreme line of thought, exemplified in the American doctrine of behaviourism, thinks it possible to construct a psychology which disregards this fundamental fact!

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4968

But that is precisely what psycho-analysis is obliged to assert, and this is its second fundamental hypothesis. It explains the supposedly somatic concomitant phenomena as being what is truly psychical, and thus in the first instance disregards the quality of consciousness. It is not alone in doing this. Some thinkers (such as Theodor Lipps, for instance) have asserted the same thing in the same words; and the general dissatisfaction with the usual view of what is psychical has resulted in an increasingly urgent demand for the inclusion in psychological thought of a concept of the unconscious, though this demand has taken such an indefinite and obscure form that it could have no influence on science.

Now it would look as though this dispute between psycho-analysis and philosophy is concerned only with a trifling matter of definition - the question whether the name ‘psychical’ should be applied to one or another sequence of phenomena. In fact, however, this step has become of the highest significance. Whereas the psychology of consciousness never went beyond the broken sequences which were obviously dependent on something else, the other view, which held that the psychical is unconscious in itself, enabled psychology to take its place as a natural science like any other. The processes with which it is concerned are in themselves just as unknowable as those dealt with by other sciences, by chemistry or physics, for example; but it is possible to establish the laws which they obey and to follow their mutual relations and interdependences unbroken over long stretches - in short, to arrive at what is described as an ‘understanding’ of the field of natural phenomena in question. This cannot be effected without framing fresh hypotheses and creating fresh concepts; but these are not to be despised as evidence of embarrassment on our part but deserve on the contrary to be appreciated as an enrichment of science. They can lay claim to the same value as approximations that belongs to the corresponding intellectual scaffolding found in other natural sciences, and we look forward to their being modified, corrected and more precisely determined as further experience is accumulated and sifted. So too it will be entirely in accordance with our expectations if the basic concepts and principles of the new science (instinct, nervous energy, etc.) remain for a considerable time no less indeterminate than those of the older sciences (force, mass, attraction, etc.).

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4969

Every science is based on observations and experiences arrived at through the medium of our psychical apparatus. But since our science has as its subject that apparatus itself, the analogy ends here. We make our observations through the medium of the same perceptual apparatus, precisely with the help of the breaks in the sequence of ‘psychical’ events: we fill in what is omitted by making plausible inferences and translating it into conscious material. In this way we construct, as it were, a sequence of conscious events complementary to the unconscious psychical processes. The relative certainty of our psychical science is based on the binding force of these inferences. Anyone who enters deeply into our work will find that our technique holds its ground against any criticism.

In the course of this work the distinctions which we describe as psychical qualities force themselves on our notice. There is no need to characterize what we call ‘conscious’: it is the same as the consciousness of philosophers and of everyday opinion. Everything else psychical is in our view ‘the unconscious’. We are soon led to make an important division in this unconscious. Some processes become conscious easily; they may then cease to be conscious, but can become conscious once more without any trouble: as people say, they can be reproduced or remembered. This reminds us that consciousness is in general a highly fugitive state. What is conscious is conscious only for a moment. If our perceptions do not confirm this, the contradiction is only an apparent one; it is explained by the fact that the stimuli which lead to perception may persist for considerable periods, so that meanwhile the perception of them may be repeated. The whole position is made clear in connection with the conscious perception of our thought-processes: these too may persist for some time, but they may just as well pass in a flash. Everything unconscious that behaves in this way, that can thus easily exchange the unconscious state for the conscious one, is therefore preferably described as ‘capable of becoming conscious’ or as preconscious. Experience has taught us that there is hardly a psychical process, however complicated it may be, which cannot on occasion remain preconscious, even though as a rule it will, as we say, push its way forward into consciousness. There are other psychical processes and psychical material which have no such easy access to becoming conscious but must be inferred, recognized and translated into conscious form in the manner described. For such material we reserve the name of the unconscious proper.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4970

Thus we have attributed three qualities to psychical processes: they are either conscious, preconscious or unconscious. The division between the three classes of material which possess these qualities is neither absolute nor permanent. What is preconscious becomes conscious, as we have seen, without any assistance from us; what is unconscious can, through our efforts, be made conscious, and in the process we may have a feeling that we are often overcoming very strong resistances. When we attempt to do this with someone else, we should not forget that the conscious filling-in of the gaps in his perceptions - the construction we are presenting him with - does not mean as yet that we have made the unconscious material in question conscious to him. All that is true so far is that the material is present in him in two records, once in the conscious reconstruction he has been given, and besides this in its original unconscious state. Our continued efforts usually succeed eventually in making this unconscious material conscious to him himself, as a result of which the two records are brought to coincide. The amount of effort we have to use, by which we estimate the resistance against the material becoming conscious, varies in magnitude in individual cases. For instance, what comes about in an analytic treatment as a result of our efforts can also occur spontaneously: material which is ordinarily unconscious can transform itself into preconscious material and then becomes conscious - a thing that happens to a large extent in psychotic states. From this we infer that the maintenance of certain internal resistances is a sine qua non of normality. A relaxation of resistances such as this, with a consequent pushing forward of unconscious material, takes place regularly in the state of sleep, and thus brings about a necessary precondition for the construction of dreams. Conversely, preconscious material can become temporarily inaccessible and cut off by resistances, as happens when something is temporarily forgotten or escapes the memory; or a preconscious thought can even be temporarily put back into the unconscious state, as seems to be a precondition in the case of jokes. We shall see that a similar transformation back of preconscious material or processes into the unconscious state plays a great part in the causation of neurotic disorders.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4971

The theory of the three qualities of what is psychical, as described in this generalized and simplified manner, seems likely to be a source of limitless confusion rather than a help towards clarification. But it should not be forgotten that in fact it is not a theory at all but a first stock-taking of the facts of our observations, that it keeps as close to those facts as possible and does not attempt to explain them. The complications which it reveals may bring into relief the peculiar difficulties with which our investigations have to contend. It may be suspected, however, that we shall come to a closer understanding of this theory itself if we trace out the relations between the psychical qualities and the provinces or agencies of the psychical apparatus which we have postulated - though these relations too are far from being simple.

The process of something becoming conscious is above all linked with the perceptions which our sense organs receive from the external world. From the topographical point of view, therefore, it is a phenomenon which takes place in the outermost cortex of the ego. It is true that we also receive conscious information from the inside of the body - the feelings, which actually exercise a more peremptory influence on our mental life than external perceptions; moreover, in certain circumstances the sense organs themselves transmit feelings, sensations of pain, in addition to the perceptions specific to them. Since, however, these sensations (as we call them in contrast to conscious perceptions) also emanate from the terminal organs and since we regard all these as prolongations or offshoots of the cortical layer, we are still able to maintain the assertion made above. The only distinction would be that, as regards the terminal organs of sensation and feeling, the body itself would take the place of the external world.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4972

Conscious processes on the periphery of the ego and everything else in the ego unconscious - such would be the simplest state of affairs that we might picture. And such may in fact be the state that prevails in animals. But in men there is an added complication through which internal processes in the ego may also acquire the quality of consciousness. This is the work of the function of speech, which brings material in the ego into a firm connection with mnemic residues of visual, but more particularly of auditory, perceptions. Thenceforward the perceptual periphery of the cortical layer can be excited to a much greater extent from inside as well, internal events such as passages of ideas and thought-processes can become conscious, and a special device is called for in order to distinguish between the two possibilities - a device known as reality-testing. The equation ‘perception = reality (external world)’ no longer holds. Errors, which can now easily arise and do so regularly in dreams, are called hallucinations.

The inside of the ego, which comprises above all the thought-processes, has the quality of being preconscious. This is characteristic of the ego and belongs to it alone. It would not be correct, however, to think that connection with the mnemic residues of speech is a necessary precondition of the preconscious state. On the contrary, that state is independent of a connection with them, though the presence of that connection makes it safe to infer the preconscious nature of a process. The preconscious state, characterized on the one hand by having access to consciousness and on the other hand by its connection with the speech-residues, is nevertheless something peculiar, the nature of which is not exhausted by these two characteristics. The evidence for this is the fact that large portions of the ego, and particularly of the super-ego, which cannot be denied the characteristic of preconsciousness, none the less remain for the most part unconscious in the phenomenological sense of the word. We do not know why this must be so. We shall attempt presently to attack the problem of the true nature of the preconscious.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4973

The sole prevailing quality in the id is that of being unconscious. Id and unconscious are as intimately linked as ego and preconscious: indeed, in the former case the connection is even more exclusive. If we look back at the developmental history of an individual and of his psychical apparatus, we shall be able to perceive an important distinction in the id. Originally, to be sure, everything was id; the ego was developed out of the id by the continual influence of the external world. In the course of this slow development certain of the contents of the id were transformed into the preconscious state and so taken into the ego; others of its contents remained in the id unchanged, as its scarcely accessible nucleus. During this development, however, the young and feeble ego put back into the unconscious state some of the material it had already taken in, dropped it, and behaved in the same way to some fresh impressions which it might have taken in, so that these, having been rejected, could leave a trace only in the id. In consideration of its origin we speak of this latter portion of the id as the repressed. It is of little importance that we are not always able to draw a sharp line between these two categories of contents in the id. They coincide approximately with the distinction between what was innately present originally and what was acquired in the course of the ego’s development.

Having now decided upon the topographical dissection of the psychical apparatus into an ego and an id, with which the difference in quality between preconscious and unconscious runs parallel, and having agreed that this quality is to be regarded only as an indication of the difference and not as its essence, a further question faces us. What, if this is so, is the true nature of the state which is revealed in the id by the quality of being unconscious and in the ego by that of being preconscious and in what does the difference between them consist?

But of that we know nothing. And the profound obscurity of the background of our ignorance is scarcely illuminated by a few glimmers of insight. Here we have approached the still shrouded secret of the nature of the psychical. We assume, as other natural sciences have led us to expect, that in mental life some kind of energy is at work; but we have nothing to go upon which will enable us to come nearer to a knowledge of it by analogies with other forms of energy. We seem to recognize that nervous or psychical energy occurs in two forms, one freely mobile and another, by comparison, bound; we speak of cathexes and hypercathexes of psychical material, and even venture to suppose that a hypercathexis brings about a kind of synthesis of different processes - a synthesis in the course of which free energy is transformed into bound energy. Further than this we have not advanced. At any rate, we hold firmly to the view that the distinction between the unconscious and the preconscious state lies in dynamic relations of this kind, which would explain how it is that, whether spontaneously or with our assistance, the one can be changed into the other.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4974

Behind all these uncertainties, however, there lies one new fact, whose discovery we owe to psycho-analytic research. We have found that processes in the unconscious or in the id obey different laws from those in the preconscious ego. We name these laws in their totality the primary process, in contrast to the secondary process which governs the course of events in the preconscious, in the ego. In the end, therefore, the study of psychical qualities has after all proved not unfruitful.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4975

CHAPTER V

DREAM-INTERPRETATION AS AN ILLUSTRATION

An investigation of normal, stable states, in which the frontiers of the ego are safeguarded against the id by resistances (anticathexes) and have held firm, and in which the super-ego is not distinguished from the ego, because they work together harmoniously - an investigation of that kind would teach us little. The only thing that can help us are states of conflict and uproar, when the contents of the unconscious id have a prospect of forcing their way into the ego and into consciousness and the ego puts itself once more on the defensive against this invasion. It is only under these conditions that we can make such observations as will confirm or correct our statements about the two partners. Now, our nightly sleep is precisely a state of this sort, and for that reason psychical activity during sleep, which we perceive as dreams, is our most favourable object of study. In that way, too, we avoid the familiar reproach that we base our constructions of normal mental life on pathological findings; for dreams are regular events in the life of a normal person, however much their characteristics may differ from the productions of our waking life. Dreams, as everyone knows, may be confused, unintelligible or positively nonsensical, what they say may contradict all that we know of reality, and we behave in them like insane people, since, so long as we are dreaming, we attribute objective reality to the contents of the dream.

We find our way to the understanding (‘interpretation’) of a dream by assuming that what we recollect as the dream after we have woken up is not the true dream-process but only a façade behind which that process lies concealed. Here we have our distinction between the manifest content of a dream and the latent dream-thoughts. The process which produces the former out of the latter is described as the dream-work. The study of the dream-work teaches us by an excellent example the way in which unconscious material from the id (originally unconscious and repressed unconscious alike) forces its way into the ego, becomes preconscious and, as a result of the ego’s opposition, undergoes the changes which we know as dream-distortion. There are no features of a dream which cannot be explained in this way.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4976

It is best to begin by pointing out that the formation of a dream can be provoked in two different ways. Either, on the one hand, an instinctual impulse which is ordinarily suppressed (an unconscious wish) finds enough strength during sleep to make itself felt by the ego, or, on the other hand, an urge left over from waking life, a preconscious train of thought with all the conflicting impulses attached to it, finds reinforcement during sleep from an unconscious element. In short, dreams may arise either from the id or from the ego. The mechanism of dream-formation is in both cases the same and so also is the necessary dynamic precondition. The ego gives evidence of its original derivation from the id by occasionally ceasing its functions and allowing a reversion to an earlier state of things. This is logically brought about by its breaking off its relations with the external world and withdrawing its cathexes from the sense organs. We are justified in saying that there arises at birth an instinct to return to the intra-uterine life that has been abandoned - an instinct to sleep. Sleep is a return of this kind to the womb. Since the waking ego governs motility, that function is paralysed in sleep, and accordingly a good part of the inhibitions imposed on the unconscious id become superfluous. The withdrawal or reduction of these ‘anticathexes’ thus allows the id what is now a harmless amount of liberty.

The evidence of the share taken by the unconscious id in the formation of dreams is abundant and convincing. (a) Memory is far more comprehensive in dreams than in waking life. Dreams bring up recollections which the dreamer has forgotten, which are inaccessible to him when he is awake. (b) Dreams make an unrestricted use of linguistic symbols, the meaning of which is for the most part unknown to the dreamer. Our experience, however, enables us to confirm their sense. They probably originate from earlier phases in the development of speech. (c) Memory very often reproduces in dreams impressions from the dreamer’s early childhood of which we can definitely assert not only that they had been forgotten but that they had become unconscious owing to repression. That explains the help - usually indispensable - given us by dreams in the attempts we make during the analytic treatment of neuroses to reconstruct the dreamer’s early life. (d) Furthermore, dreams bring to light material which cannot have originated either from the dreamer’s adult life or from his forgotten childhood. We are obliged to regard it as part of the archaic heritage which a child brings with him into the world, before any experience of his own, influenced by the experiences of his ancestors. We find the counterpart of this phylogenetic material in the earliest human legends and in surviving customs. Thus dreams constitute a source of human prehistory which is not to be despised.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4977

But what makes dreams so invaluable in giving us insight is the circumstance that, when the unconscious material makes its way into the ego, it brings its own modes of working along with it. This means that the preconscious thoughts in which the unconscious material has found its expression are handled in the course of the dream-work as though they were unconscious portions of the id; and, in the case of the alternative method of dream-formation, the preconscious thoughts which have obtained reinforcement from an unconscious instinctual impulse are brought down to the unconscious state. It is only in this way that we learn the laws which govern the passage of events in the unconscious and the respects in which they differ from the rules that are familiar to us in waking thought. Thus the dream-work is essentially an instance of the unconscious working-over of preconscious thought-processes. To take an analogy from history: invading conquerors govern a conquered country, not according to the judicial system which they find in force there, but according to their own. It is, however, an unmistakable fact that the outcome of the dream-work is a compromise. The ego-organization is not yet paralysed, and its influence is to be seen in the distortion imposed on the unconscious material and in what are often very ineffective attempts at giving the total result a form not too unacceptable to the ego (secondary revision). In our analogy this would be an expression of the continued resistance of the defeated people.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4978

The laws that govern the passage of events in the unconscious, which come to light in this manner, are remarkable enough and suffice to explain most of what seems strange to us about dreams. Above all there is a striking tendency to condensation, an inclination to form fresh unities out of elements which in our waking thought we should certainly have kept separate. As a consequence of this, a single element of the manifest dream often stands for a whole number of latent dream-thoughts as though it were a combined allusion to all of them; and in general the compass of the manifest dream is extraordinarily small in comparison with the wealth of material from which it has sprung. Another peculiarity of the dream-work, not entirely independent of the former one, is the ease with which psychical intensities (cathexes) are displaced from one element to another, so that it often happens that an element which was of little importance in the dream-thoughts appears as the clearest and accordingly most important feature of the manifest dream, and, vice versa, that essential elements of the dream-thoughts are represented in the manifest dream only by slight allusions. Moreover, as a rule the existence of quite insignificant points in common between two elements is enough to allow the dream-work to replace one by the other in all further operations. It will easily be imagined how greatly these mechanisms of condensation and displacement can increase the difficulty of interpreting a dream and of revealing the relations between the manifest dream and the latent dream-thoughts. From the evidence of the existence of these two tendencies to condensation and displacement our theory infers that in the unconscious id the energy is in a freely mobile state and that the id sets more store by the possibility of discharging quantities of excitation than by any other consideration;¹ and our theory makes use of these two peculiarities in defining the character of the primary process we have attributed to the id.

¹ An analogy may be seen in the behaviour of a non-commissioned officer who accepts a reprimand from his superior in silence but vents his anger on the first innocent private he comes across.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4979

The study of the dream-work has taught us many other characteristics of the processes in the unconscious which are as remarkable as they are important; but we must only mention a few of them here. The governing rules of logic carry no weight in the unconscious; it might be called the Realm of the Illogical. Urges with contrary aims exist side by side in the unconscious without any need arising for an adjustment between them. Either they have no influence whatever on each other, or, if they have, no decision is reached, but a compromise comes about which is nonsensical since it embraces mutually incompatible details. With this is connected the fact that contraries are not kept apart but treated as though they were identical, so that in the manifest dream any element may also have the meaning of its opposite. Certain philologists have found that the same held good in the most ancient languages and that contraries such as ‘strong-weak’, ‘light-dark’ and ‘high-deep’ were originally expressed by the same roots, until two different modifications of the primitive word distinguished between the two meanings. Residues of this original double meaning seem to have survived even in a highly developed language like Latin in its use of words such as ‘altus’ (‘high’ and ‘deep’) and ‘sacer’ (‘sacred’ and ‘infamous’).

In view of the complication and ambiguity of the relations between the manifest dream and the latent content lying behind it, it is of course justifiable to ask how it is at all possible to deduce the one from the other and whether all we have to go on is a lucky guess, assisted perhaps by a translation of the symbols that occur in the manifest dream. It may be said in reply that in the great majority of cases the problem can be satisfactorily solved, but only with the help of the associations provided by the dreamer himself to the elements of the manifest content. Any other procedure is arbitrary and can yield no certain result. But the dreamer’s associations bring to light intermediate links which we can insert in the gap between the two and by aid of which we can reinstate the latent content of the dream and ‘interpret’ it. It is not to be wondered at if this work of interpretation (acting in a direction opposite to the dream-work) fails occasionally to arrive at complete certainty.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4980

It remains for us to give a dynamic explanation of why the sleeping ego takes on the task of the dream-work at all. The explanation is fortunately easy to find. With the help of the unconscious, every dream that is in process of formation makes a demand upon the ego - for the satisfaction of an instinct, if the dream originates from the id; for the solution of a conflict, the removal of a doubt or the forming of an intention, if the dream originates from a residue of preconscious activity in waking life. The sleeping ego, however, is focused on the wish to maintain sleep; it feels this demand as a disturbance and seeks to get rid of the disturbance. The ego succeeds in doing this by what appears to be an act of compliance: it meets the demand with what is in the circumstances a harmless fulfilment of a wish and so gets rid of it. This replacement of the demand by the fulfilment of a wish remains the essential function of the dream-work. It may perhaps be worth while to illustrate this by three simple examples - a hunger dream, a dream of convenience and a dream prompted by sexual desire. A need for food makes itself felt in a dreamer during his sleep: he has a dream of a delicious meal and sleeps on. The choice, of course, was open to him either of waking up and eating something or of continuing his sleep. He decided in favour of the latter and satisfied his hunger by means of the dream - for the time being, at all events, for if his hunger had persisted he would have had to wake up nevertheless. Here is the second example. A sleeper had to wake up so as to be in time for his work at the hospital. But he slept on, and had a dream that he was already at the hospital - but as a patient, who has no need to get up. Or again, a desire becomes active during the night for the enjoyment of a forbidden sexual object, the wife of a friend of the sleeper. He has a dream of sexual intercourse - not, indeed, with this person but with someone else of the same name to whom he is in fact indifferent; or his struggle against the desire may find expression in his mistress remaining altogether anonymous.

Naturally, every case is not so simple. Especially in dreams which have originated from undealt-with residues of the previous day, and which have only obtained an unconscious reinforcement during the state of sleep, it is often no easy task to uncover the unconscious motive force and its wish-fulfilment; but we may assume that it is always there. The thesis that dreams are the fulfilments of wishes will easily arouse scepticism when it is remembered how many dreams have an actually distressing content or even wake the dreamer in anxiety, quite apart from the numerous dreams without any definite feeling-tone. But the objection based on anxiety dreams cannot be sustained against analysis. It must not be forgotten that dreams are invariably the product of a conflict, that they are a kind of compromise-structure. Something that is a satisfaction for the unconscious id may for that very reason be a cause of anxiety for the ego.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4981

As the dream-work proceeds, sometimes the unconscious will press forward more successfully and sometimes the ego will defend itself with greater energy. Anxiety dreams are mostly those whose content has undergone the least distortion. If the demand made by the unconscious is too great for the sleeping ego to be in a position to fend it off by the means at its disposal, it abandons the wish to sleep and returns to waking life. We shall be taking every experience into account if we say that a dream is invariably an attempt to get rid of a disturbance of sleep by means of a wish-fulfilment, so that the dream is a guardian of sleep. The attempt may succeed more or less completely; it may also fail, and in that case the sleeper wakes up, apparently woken precisely by the dream. So, too, there are occasions when that excellent fellow the night-watchman, whose business it is to guard the little township’s sleep, has no alternative but to sound the alarm and waken the sleeping townspeople.

I will close this discussion with a comment which will justify the length of time I have spent on the problem of the interpretation of dreams. Experience has shown that the unconscious mechanisms which we have come to know from our study of the dream-work and which gave us the explanation of the formation of dreams also help us to understand the puzzling symptoms which attract our interest to neuroses and psychoses. A conformity of such a kind cannot fail to excite high hopes in us.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4982

PART II

THE PRACTICAL TASK

CHAPTER VI

THE TECHNIQUE OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

A dream, then, is a psychosis, with all the absurdities, delusions and illusions of a psychosis. A psychosis of short duration, no doubt, harmless, even entrusted with a useful function, introduced with the subject’s consent and terminated by an act of his will. None the less it is a psychosis, and we learn from it that even so deep-going an alteration of mental life as this can be undone and can give place to the normal function. Is it too bold, then, to hope that it must also be possible to submit the dreaded spontaneous illnesses of mental life to our influence and bring about their cure?

We already know a number of things preliminary to such an undertaking. According to our hypothesis it is the ego’s task to meet the demands raised by its three dependent relations to reality, to the id and to the super-ego - and nevertheless at the same time to preserve its own organization and maintain its own autonomy. The necessary precondition of the pathological states under discussion can only be a relative or absolute weakening of the ego which makes the fulfilment of its tasks impossible. The severest demand on the ego is probably the keeping down of the instinctual claims of the id, to accomplish which it is obliged to maintain large expenditures of energy on anticathexes. But the demands made by the super-ego too may become so powerful and so relentless that the ego may be paralysed, as it were, in the face of its other tasks. We may suspect that, in the economic conflicts which arise at this point, the id and the super-ego often make common cause against the hard-pressed ego which tries to cling to reality in order to retain its normal state. If the other two become too strong, they succeed in loosening and altering the ego’s organization, so that its proper relation to reality is disturbed or even brought to an end. We have seen it happen in dreaming: when the ego is detached from the reality of the external world, it slips down, under the influence of the internal world, into psychosis.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4983

Our plan of cure is based on these discoveries. The ego is weakened by the internal conflict and we must go to its help. The position is like that in a civil war which has to be decided by the assistance of an ally from outside. The analytic physician and the patient’s weakened ego, basing themselves on the real external world, have to band themselves together into a party against the enemies, the instinctual demands of the id and the conscientious demands of the super-ego. We form a pact with each other. The sick ego promises us the most complete candour - promises, that is, to put at our disposal all the material which its self-perception yields it; we assure the patient of the strictest discretion and place at his service our experience in interpreting material that has been influenced by the unconscious. Our knowledge is to make up for his ignorance and to give his ego back its mastery over lost provinces of his mental life. This pact constitutes the analytic situation.

No sooner have we taken this step than a first disappointment awaits us, a first warning against over-confidence. If the patient’s ego is to be a useful ally in our common work, it must, however hard it may be pressed by the hostile powers, have retained a certain amount of coherence and some fragment of understanding for the demands of reality. But this is not to be expected of the ego of a psychotic; it cannot observe a pact of this kind, indeed it can scarcely enter into one. It will very soon have tossed us away and the help we offer it and sent us to join the portions of the external world which no longer mean anything to it. Thus we discover that we must renounce the idea of trying our plan of cure upon psychotics - renounce it perhaps for ever or perhaps only for the time being, till we have found some other plan better adapted for them.

There is, however, another class of psychical patients who clearly resemble the psychotics very closely - the vast number of people suffering severely from neuroses. The determinants of their illness as well as its pathogenic mechanisms must be the same or at least very similar. But their ego has proved more resistant and has become less disorganized. Many of them, in spite of their maladies and the inadequacies resulting from them, have been able to maintain themselves in real life. These neurotics may show themselves ready to accept our help. We will confine our interest to them and see how far and by what methods we are able to ‘cure’ them.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4984

With the neurotics, then, we make our pact: complete candour on one side and strict discretion on the other. This looks as though we were only aiming at the post of a secular father confessor. But there is a great difference, for what we want to hear from our patient is not only what he knows and conceals from other people; he is to tell us too what he does not know. With this end in view we give him a more detailed definition of what we mean by candour. We pledge him to obey the fundamental rule of analysis, which is henceforward to govern his behaviour towards us. He is to tell us not only what he can say intentionally and willingly, what will give him relief like a confession, but everything else as well that his self-observation yields him, everything that comes into his head, even if it is disagreeable for him to say it, even if it seems to him unimportant or actually nonsensical. If he can succeed after this injunction in putting his self-criticism out of action, he will present us with a mass of material - thoughts, ideas, recollections - which are already subject to the influence of the unconscious, which are often its direct derivatives, and which thus put us in a position to conjecture his repressed unconscious material and to extend, by the information we give him, his ego’s knowledge of his unconscious.

But it is far from being the case that his ego is content to play the part of passively and obediently bringing us the material we require and of believing and accepting our translation of it. A number of other things happen, a few of which we might have foreseen but others of which are bound to surprise us. The most remarkable thing is this. The patient is not satisfied with regarding the analyst in the light of reality as a helper and adviser who, moreover, is remunerated for the trouble he takes and who would himself be content with some such role as that of a guide on a difficult mountain climb. On the contrary, the patient sees in him the return, the reincarnation, of some important figure out of his childhood or past, and consequently transfers on to him feelings and reactions which undoubtedly applied to this prototype. This fact of transference soon proves to be a factor of undreamt-of importance, on the one hand an instrument of irreplaceable value and on the other hand a source of serious dangers. This transference is ambivalent: it comprises positive (affectionate) as well as negative (hostile) attitudes towards the analyst, who as a rule is put in the place of one or other of the patient’s parents, his father or mother. So long as it is positive it serves us admirably. It alters the whole analytic situation; it pushes to one side the patient’s rational aim of becoming healthy and free from his ailments. Instead of it there emerges the aim of pleasing the analyst and of winning his applause and love. It becomes the true motive force of the patient’s collaboration; his weak ego becomes strong; under its influence he achieves things that would ordinarily be beyond his power; he leaves off his symptoms and seems apparently to have recovered - merely for the sake of the analyst. The analyst may shamefacedly admit to himself that he set out on a difficult undertaking without any suspicion of the extraordinary powers that would be at his command.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4985

Moreover, the relation of transference brings with it two further advantages. If the patient puts the analyst in the place of his father (or mother), he is also giving him the power which his super-ego exercises over his ego, since his parents were, as we know, the origin of his super-ego. The new super-ego now has an opportunity for a sort of after-education of the neurotic; it can correct mistakes for which his parents were responsible in educating him. But at this point a warning must be given against misusing this new influence. However much the analyst may be tempted to become a teacher, model and ideal for other people and to create men in his own image, he should not forget that that is not his task in the analytic relationship, and indeed that he will be disloyal to his task if he allows himself to be led on by his inclinations. If he does, he will only be repeating a mistake of the parents who crushed their child’s independence by their influence, and he will only be replacing the patient’s earlier dependence by a new one. In all his attempts at improving and educating the patient the analyst should respect his individuality. The amount of influence which he may legitimately allow himself will be determined by the degree of developmental inhibition present in the patient. Some neurotics have remained so infantile that in analysis too they can only be treated as children.

Another advantage of transference, too, is that in it the patient produces before us with plastic clarity an important part of his life-story, of which he would otherwise have probably given us only an insufficient account. He acts it before us, as it were, instead of reporting it to us.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4986

And now for the other side of the situation. Since the transference reproduces the patient’s relation with his parents, it takes over the ambivalence of that relation as well. It almost inevitably happens that one day his positive attitude towards the analyst changes over into the negative, hostile one. This too is as a rule a repetition of the past. His obedience to his father (if it is his father that is in question), his courting of his father’s favour, had its roots in an erotic wish directed towards him. Some time or other that demand will press its way forward in the transference as well and insist on being satisfied. In the analytic situation it can only meet with frustration. Real sexual relations between patients and analysts are out of the question, and even the subtler methods of satisfaction, such as the giving of preference, intimacy and so on, are only sparingly granted by the analyst. A rejection of this kind is taken as the occasion for the change-over; probably things happened in the same way in the patient’s childhood.

The therapeutic successes that occurred under the sway of the positive transference are open to the suspicion of being of a suggestive nature. If the negative transference gains the upper hand, they are blown away like chaff before the wind. We observe with horror that all our trouble and labour hitherto have been in vain. Indeed, what we might have regarded as a permanent intellectual gain by the patient, his understanding of psycho-analysis and his reliance on its efficacy, suddenly vanish. He behaves like a child who has no power of judgement of his own but blindly believes anyone whom he loves and no one who is a stranger to him. The danger of these states of transference evidently lies in the patient’s misunderstanding their nature and taking them for fresh real experiences instead of reflections of the past. If he (or she) becomes aware of the strong erotic desire that lies concealed behind the positive transference, he believes that he has fallen passionately in love; if the transference changes over, then he feels insulted and neglected, he hates the analyst as his enemy and is ready to abandon the analysis. In both these extreme cases he has forgotten the pact that he made at the beginning of the treatment and has become useless for continuing the common work. It is the analyst’s task constantly to tear the patient out of his menacing illusion and to show him again and again that what he takes to be new real life is a reflection of the past. And lest he should fall into a state in which he is inaccessible to all evidence, the analyst takes care that neither the love nor the hostility reach an extreme height. This is effected by preparing him in good time for these possibilities and by not overlooking the first signs of them. Careful handling of the transference on these lines is as a rule richly rewarded. If we succeed, as we usually can, in enlightening the patient on the true nature of the phenomena of transference, we shall have struck a powerful weapon out of the hand of his resistance and shall have converted dangers into gains. For a patient never forgets again what he has experienced in the form of transference; it carries a greater force of conviction than anything he can acquire in other ways.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4987

We think it most undesirable if the patient acts outside the transference instead of remembering. The ideal conduct for our purposes would be that he should behave as normally as possible outside the treatment and express his abnormal reactions only in the transference.

The method by which we strengthen the weakened ego has as a starting-point an extending of its self-knowledge. That is not, of course, the whole story but it is a first step. The loss of such knowledge signifies for the ego a surrender of power and influence; it is the first tangible sign that it is being hemmed in and hampered by the demands of the id and the super-ego. Accordingly, the first part of the help we have to offer is intellectual work on our side and encouragement to the patient to collaborate in it. This first kind of activity, as we know, is intended to pave the way to another, more difficult, task. We shall not lose sight of the dynamic element in this task, even during its preliminary stage. We gather the material for our work from a variety of sources - from what is conveyed to us by the information given us by the patient and by his free associations, from what he shows us in his transferences, from what we arrive at by interpreting his dreams and from what he betrays by his slips or parapraxes. All this material helps us to make constructions about what happened to him and has been forgotten as well as about what is happening in him now without his understanding it. But in all this we never fail to make a strict distinction between our knowledge and his knowledge. We avoid telling him at once things that we have often discovered at an early stage, and we avoid telling him the whole of what we think we have discovered. We reflect carefully over when we shall impart the knowledge of one of our constructions to him and we wait for what seems to us the suitable moment - which it is not always easy to decide. As a rule we put off telling him of a construction or explanation till he himself has so nearly arrived at it that only a single step remains to be taken, though that step is in fact the decisive synthesis. If we proceeded in another way and overwhelmed him with our interpretations before he was prepared for them, our information would either produce no effect or it would provoke a violent outbreak of resistance which would make the progress of our work more difficult or might even threaten to stop it altogether. But if we have prepared everything properly, it often happens that the patient will at once confirm our construction and himself recollect the internal or external event which he had forgotten. The more exactly the construction coincides with the details of what has been forgotten the easier will it be for him to assent. On that particular matter our knowledge will then have become his knowledge as well.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4988

With the mention of resistance we have reached the second and more important part of our task. We have already learnt that the ego protects itself against the invasion of undesired elements from the unconscious and repressed id by means of anticathexes, which must remain intact if it is to function normally. The more hard-pressed the ego feels, the more convulsively it clings (as though in a fright) to these anticathexes, in order to protect what remains of itself from further irruptions. But this defensive purpose does not by any means accord with the aims of our treatment. What we desire, on the contrary, is that the ego, emboldened by the certainty of our help, shall dare to take the offensive in order to reconquer what has been lost. And it is here that we become aware of the strength of these anticathexes in the form of resistances to our work. The ego draws back in alarm from such undertakings, which seem dangerous and threaten unpleasure; it must be constantly encouraged and soothed if it is not to fail us. This resistance, which persists throughout the whole treatment and is renewed at every fresh piece of work, is known, not quite correctly, as the resistance due to repression. We shall find that it is not the only one that faces us. It is interesting to notice that in this situation the party-divisions are to some extent reversed: for the ego struggles against our instigation, while the unconscious, which is ordinarily our opponent, comes to our help, since it has a natural ‘upward drive’ and desires nothing better than to press forward across its settled frontiers into the ego and so to consciousness. The struggle which develops, if we gain our end and can induce the ego to overcome its resistances, is carried through under our direction and with our assistance. Its outcome is a matter of indifference: whether it results in the ego accepting, after a fresh examination, an instinctual demand which it has hitherto rejected, or whether it dismisses it once more, this time for good and all. In either case a permanent danger has been disposed of, the compass of the ego has been extended and a wasteful expenditure of energy has been made unnecessary.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4989

The overcoming of resistances is the part of our work that requires the most time and the greatest trouble. It is worth while, however, for it brings about an advantageous alteration of the ego which will be maintained independently of the outcome of the transference and will hold good in life. We have also worked simultaneously at getting rid of the alteration of the ego which had been brought about under the influence of the unconscious; for whenever we have been able to detect any of its derivatives in the ego we have pointed out their illegitimate origin and have instigated the ego to reject them. It will be remembered that it was one of the necessary preconditions of our pact of assistance that any such alteration of the ego due to the intrusion of unconscious elements should not have gone beyond a certain amount.

The further our work proceeds and the more deeply our insight penetrates into the mental life of neurotics, the more clearly two new factors force themselves on our notice, which demand the closest attention as sources of resistance. Both of them are completely unknown to the patient, neither of them could be taken into account when our pact was made; nor do they arise from the patient’s ego. They may both be embraced under the single name of ‘need to he ill or to suffer’, but they have different origins though in other respects they are of a kindred nature. The first of these two factors is the sense of guilt or consciousness of guilt, as it is called, though the patient does not feel it and is not aware of it. It is evidently the portion of the resistance contributed by a super-ego that has become particularly severe and cruel. The patient must not become well but must remain ill, for he deserves no better. This resistance does not actually interfere with our intellectual work, but it makes it inoperative; indeed, it often allows us to remove one form of neurotic suffering, but is ready at once to replace it by another, or perhaps by some somatic illness. The sense of guilt also explains the cure or improvement of severe neuroses which we occasionally observe after real misfortunes: all that matters is that the patient should be miserable - in what way is of no consequence. The uncomplaining resignation with which such people often put up with their hard fate is most remarkable, but also revealing. In warding off this resistance we are obliged to restrict ourselves to making it conscious and attempting to bring about the slow demolition of the hostile super-ego.

It is less easy to demonstrate the existence of another resistance, our means of combating which are specially inadequate. There are some neurotics in whom, to judge by all their reactions, the instinct of self-preservation has actually been reversed. They seem to aim at nothing other than self-injury and self-destruction. It is possible too that the people who in fact do in the end commit suicide belong to this group. It is to be assumed that in such people far-reaching defusions of instinct have taken place, as a result of which there has been a liberation of excessive quantities of the destructive instinct directed inwards. Patients of this kind are not able to tolerate recovery through our treatment and fight against it with all their strength. But we must confess that this is a case which we have not yet succeeded in completely explaining.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4990

Let us once more glance over the situation which we have reached in our attempt at bringing help to the patient’s neurotic ego. That ego is no longer able to fulfil the task set it by the external world (including human society). Not all of its experiences are at its disposal, a large proportion of its store of memories have escaped it. Its activity is inhibited by strict prohibitions from the super-ego, its energy is consumed in vain attempts at fending off the demands of the id. Beyond this, as a result of continuous irruptions by the id, its organization is impaired, it is no longer capable of any proper synthesis, it is torn by mutually opposed urges, by unsettled conflicts and by unsolved doubts. To start with, we get the patient’s thus weakened ego to take part in the purely intellectual work of interpretation, which aims at provisionally filling the gaps in his mental assets, and to transfer to us the authority of his super-ego; we encourage it to take up the struggle over each individual demand made by the id and to conquer the resistances which arise in connection with it. At the same time we restore order in the ego by detecting the material and urges which have forced their way in from the unconscious, and expose them to criticism by tracing them back to their origin. We serve the patient in various functions, as an authority and a substitute for his parents, as a teacher and educator; and we have done the best for him if, as analysts, we raise the mental processes in his ego to a normal level, transform what has become unconscious and repressed into preconscious material and thus return it once more to the possession of his ego. On the patient’s side a few rational factors work in our favour, such as the need for recovery which has its motive in his sufferings, and the intellectual interest that we may awaken in him in the theories and revelations of psycho-analysis; but of far greater force is the positive transference with which he meets us. Fighting against us, on the other hand, are the negative transference, the ego’s resistance due to repression (that is, its unpleasure at having to lay itself open to the hard work imposed on it), the sense of guilt arising from its relation to the super-ego and the need to be ill due to deep-going changes in the economics of his instincts. The share taken by the last two factors decides whether the case is to be regarded as slight or severe. Apart from these, a few other factors may be discerned as having a favourable or unfavourable bearing. A certain psychical inertia, a sluggishness of the libido, which is unwilling to abandon its fixations cannot be welcome to us; the patient’s capacity for sublimating his instincts plays a large part and so does his capacity for rising above the crude life of the instincts; so, too, does the relative power of his intellectual functions.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4991

We shall not be disappointed, but, on the contrary, we shall find it entirely intelligible, if we reach the conclusion that the final outcome of the struggle we have engaged in depends on quantitative relations - on the quota of energy we are able to mobilize in the patient to our advantage as compared with the sum of energy of the powers working against us. Here once again God is on the side of the big battalions. It is true that we do not always succeed in winning, but at least we can usually recognize why we have not won. Those who have been following our discussion only out of therapeutic interest will perhaps turn away in contempt after this admission. But here we are concerned with therapy only in so far as it works by psychological means; and for the time being we have no other. The future may teach us to exercise a direct influence, by means of particular chemical substances, on the amounts of energy and their distribution in the mental apparatus. It may be that there are other still undreamt-of possibilities of therapy. But for the moment we have nothing better at our disposal than the technique of psycho-analysis, and for that reason, in spite of its limitations, it should not be despised.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4992

CHAPTER VII

AN EXAMPLE OF PSYCHO-ANALYTIC WORK

We have arrived at a general acquaintance with the psychical apparatus, with the parts, organs and agencies of which it is composed, with the forces which operate in it and with the functions allotted to its parts. The neuroses and psychoses are the states in which disturbances in the functioning of the apparatus come to expression. We have chosen the neuroses as the subjects of our study because they alone seem accessible to the psychological methods of our intervention. While we are trying to influence them, we collect observations which give us a picture of their origin and of the manner in which they arise.

I will state in advance one of our chief findings before proceeding with my description. The neuroses (unlike infectious diseases, for instance) have no specific determinants. It would be idle to seek in them for pathogenic excitants. They shade off by easy transitions into what is described as the normal; and, on the other hand, there is scarcely any state recognized as normal in which indications of neurotic traits could not be pointed out. Neurotics have approximately the same innate dispositions as other people, they have the same experiences and they have the same tasks to perform. Why is it, then, that they live so much worse and with so much greater difficulty and, in the process, suffer more feelings of unpleasure, anxiety and pain?

We need not be at a loss to find an answer to this question. Quantitative disharmonies are what must be held responsible for the inadequacy and sufferings of neurotics. The determining cause of all the forms taken by human mental life, is, indeed, to be sought in the reciprocal action between innate dispositions and accidental experiences. Now a particular instinct may be too strong or too weak innately, or a particular capacity may be stunted or insufficiently developed in life. On the other hand, external impressions and experiences may make demands of differing strength on different people; and what one person’s constitution can deal with may prove an unmanageable task for another’s. These quantitative differences will determine the variety of the results.

We shall very soon feel, however, that this explanation is unsatisfactory: it is too general, it explains too much. The aetiology put forward applies to every case of mental suffering, misery and disablement, but not every such state can be termed neurotic. The neuroses have specific characteristics, they are miseries of a particular kind. So we must after all expect to find particular causes for them. Or we may adopt the supposition that, among the tasks with which mental life has to deal, there are a few on which it can especially easily come to grief; so that the peculiarity of the phenomena of neurosis, which are often so very remarkable, would follow from this without our needing to withdraw our earlier assertions. If it remains true that the neuroses do not differ in any essential respect from the normal, their study promises to yield us valuable contributions to our knowledge of the normal. It may be that we shall thus discover the ‘weak points’ in a normal organization.

The supposition we have just made finds confirmation. Analytic experiences teach us that there is in fact one instinctual demand attempts to deal with which most easily fail or succeed imperfectly and that there is one period of life which comes in question exclusively or predominantly in connection with the generation of a neurosis. These two factors - the nature of the instinct and the period of life concerned - call for separate consideration, although they are closely enough connected.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4993

We can speak with a fair degree of certainty about the part played by the period of life. It seems that neuroses are acquired only in early childhood (up to the age of six), even though their symptoms may not make their appearance till much later. The childhood neurosis may become manifest for a short time or may even be overlooked. In every case the later neurotic illness links up with the prelude in childhood. It is possible that what are known as traumatic neuroses (due to excessive fright or severe somatic shocks, such as railway collisions, burial under falls of earth, and so on) are an exception to this: their relations to determinants in childhood have hitherto eluded investigation. There is no difficulty in accounting for this aetiological preference for the first period of childhood. The neuroses are, as we know, disorders of the ego; and it is not to be wondered at if the ego, so long as it is feeble, immature and incapable of resistance, fails to deal with tasks which it could cope with later on with the utmost ease. In these circumstances instinctual demands from within, no less than excitations from the external world, operate as ‘traumas’, particularly if they are met half way by certain innate dispositions. The helpless ego fends them off by means of attempts at flight (repression), which later turn out to be inefficient and which involve permanent restrictions on further development. The damage inflicted on the ego by its first experiences gives us the appearance of being disproportionately great; but we have only to take as an analogy the differences in the results produced by the prick of a needle into a mass of cells in the act of cell-division (as in Roux’s experiments) and into the fully grown animal which eventually develops out of them. No human individual is spared such traumatic experiences; none escapes the repressions to which they give rise. These questionable reactions on the part of the ego may perhaps be indispensable for the attainment of another aim which is set for the same period of life: in the space of a few years the little primitive creature must turn into a civilized human being; he must pass through an immensely long stretch of human cultural development in an almost uncannily abbreviated form. This is made possible by hereditary disposition; but it can almost never be achieved without the additional help of upbringing, of parental influence, which, as a precursor of the super-ego, restricts the ego’s activity by prohibitions and punishments, and encourages or compels the setting-up of repressions. We must therefore not forget to include the influence of civilization among the determinants of neurosis. It is easy, as we can see, for a barbarian to be healthy; for a civilized man the task is hard. The desire for a powerful, uninhibited ego may seem to us intelligible; but, as we are taught by the times we live in, it is in the profoundest sense hostile to civilization. And since the demands of civilization are represented by family upbringing, we must bear in mind the part played by this biological characteristic of the human species - the prolonged period of its childhood dependence - in the aetiology of the neuroses.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4994

As regards the other point - the specific instinctual factor - we come upon an interesting discrepancy between theory and experience. Theoretically there is no objection to supposing that any sort of instinctual demand might occasion the same repressions and their consequences; but our observation shows us invariably, so far as we can judge, that the excitations that play this pathogenic part arise from the component instincts of sexual life. The symptoms of neuroses are, it might be said, without exception either a substitutive satisfaction of some sexual urge or measures to prevent such a satisfaction; and as a rule they are compromises between the two, of the kind that come about in accordance with the laws operating between contraries in the unconscious. The gap in our theory cannot at present be filled; our decision is made more difficult by the fact that most of the urges of sexual life are not of a purely erotic nature but have arisen from alloys of the erotic instinct with portions of the destructive instinct. But it cannot be doubted that the instincts which manifest themselves physiologically as sexuality play a prominent, unexpectedly large part in the causation of the neuroses - whether it is an exclusive one remains to be decided. It must also be borne in mind that in the course of cultural development no other function has been so energetically and extensively repudiated as precisely the sexual one. Theory must rest satisfied with a few hints that betray a deeper connection: the fact that the first period of childhood, during which the ego begins to be differentiated from the id, is also the period of the early sexual efflorescence which is brought to an end by the period of latency; that it can hardly be a matter of chance that this momentous early period subsequently falls a victim to infantile amnesia; and lastly, that biological changes in sexual life (such as the function’s diphasic onset which we have already mentioned, the disappearance of the periodic character of sexual excitation and the transformation in the relation between female menstruation and male excitation) - that these innovations in sexuality must have been of high importance in the evolution of animals into man. It is left for the science of the future to bring these still isolated data together into a new understanding. It is not in psychology but in biology that there is a gap here. We shall not be wrong, perhaps, in saying that the weak point in the ego’s organization seems to lie in its attitude to the sexual function, as though the biological antithesis between self-preservation and the preservation of the species had found a psychological expression at that point.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4995

Analytic experience has convinced us of the complete truth of the assertion so often to be heard that the child is psychologically father to the adult and that the events of his first years are of paramount importance for his whole later life. It will thus be of special interest to us if there is something that may be described as the central experience of this period of childhood. Our attention is first attracted by the effects of certain influences which do not apply to all children, though they are common enough - such as the sexual abuse of children by adults, their seduction by other children (brothers or sisters) slightly their seniors, and, what we should not expect, their being deeply stirred by seeing or hearing at first hand sexual behaviour between adults (their parents) mostly at a time at which one would not have thought they could either be interested in or understand any such impressions, or be capable of remembering them later. It is easy to confirm the extent to which such experiences arouse a child’s susceptibility and force his own sexual urges into certain channels from which they cannot afterwards depart. Since these impressions are subjected to repression either at once or as soon as they seek to return as memories, they constitute the determinant for the neurotic compulsion which will subsequently make it impossible for the ego to control the sexual function and will probably cause it to turn away from that function permanently. If this latter reaction occurs, the result will be a neurosis; if it is absent, a variety of perversions will develop, or the function, which is of immense importance not only for reproduction but also for the entire shaping of life, will become totally unmanageable.

However instructive cases of this kind may be, a still higher degree of interest must attach to the influence of a situation which every child is destined to pass through and which follows inevitably from the factor of the prolonged period during which a child is cared for by other people and lives with his parents. I am thinking of the Oedipus complex, so named because its essential substance is to be found in the Greek legend of King Oedipus, which has fortunately been preserved for us in a version by a great dramatist. The Greek hero killed his father and took his mother to wife. That he did so unwittingly, since he did not know them as his parents, is a deviation from the analytic facts which we can easily understand and which, indeed, we shall recognize as inevitable.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4996

At this point we must give separate accounts of the development of boys and girls (of males and females), for it is now that the difference between the sexes finds psychological expression for the first time. We are faced here by the great enigma of the biological fact of the duality of the sexes: it is an ultimate fact for our knowledge, it defies every attempt to trace it back to something else. Psycho-analysis has contributed nothing to clearing up this problem, which clearly falls wholly within the province of biology. In mental life we only find reflections of this great antithesis; and their interpretation is made more difficult by the fact, long suspected, that no individual is limited to the modes of reaction of a single sex but always finds some room for those of the opposite one, just as his body bears, alongside of the fully developed organs of one sex, atrophied and often useless rudiments of those of the other. For distinguishing between male and female in mental life we make use of what is obviously an inadequate empirical and conventional equation: we call everything that is strong and active male, and everything that is weak and passive female. This fact of psychological bisexuality, too, embarrasses all our enquiries into the subject and makes them harder to describe.

A child’s first erotic object is the mother’s breast that nourishes it; love has its origin in attachment to the satisfied need for nourishment. There is no doubt that, to begin with, the child does not distinguish between the breast and its own body; when the breast has to be separated from the body and shifted to the ‘outside’ because the child so often finds it absent, it carries with it as an ‘object’ a part of the original narcissistic libidinal cathexis. This first object is later completed into the person of the child’s mother, who not only nourishes it but also looks after it and thus arouses in it a number of other physical sensations, pleasurable and unpleasurable. By her care of the child’s body she becomes its first seducer. In these two relations lies the root of a mother’s importance, unique, without parallel, established unalterably for a whole lifetime as the first and strongest love-object and as the prototype of all later love-relations - for both sexes. In all this the phylogenetic foundation has so much the upper hand over personal accidental experience that it makes no difference whether a child has really sucked at the breast or has been brought up on the bottle and never enjoyed the tenderness of a mother’s care. In both cases the child’s development takes the same path; it may be that in the second case its later longing grows all the greater. And for however long it is fed at its mother’s breast, it will always be left with a conviction after it has been weaned that its feeding was too short and too little.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4997

This preface is not superfluous, for it can heighten our realization of the intensity of the Oedipus complex. When a boy (from the age of two or three) has entered the phallic phrase of his libidinal development, is feeling pleasurable sensations in his sexual organ and has learnt to procure these at will by manual stimulation, he becomes his mother’s lover. He wishes to possess her physically in such ways as he has divined from his observations and intuitions about sexual life, and he tries to seduce her by showing her the male organ which he is proud to own. In a word, his early awakened masculinity seeks to take his father’s place with her; his father has hitherto in any case been an envied model to the boy, owing to the physical strength he perceives in him and the authority with which he finds him clothed. His father now becomes a rival who stands in his way and whom he would like to get rid of. If while his father is away he is allowed to share his mother’s bed and if when his father returns he is once more banished from it, his satisfaction when his father disappears and his disappointment when he emerges again are deeply felt experiences. This is the subject of the Oedipus complex, which the Greek legend has translated from the world of a child’s phantasy into pretended reality. Under the conditions of our civilization it is invariably doomed to a frightening end.

The boy’s mother has understood quite well that his sexual excitation relates to herself. Sooner or later she reflects that it is not right to allow it to continue. She thinks she is doing the correct thing in forbidding him to handle his genital organ. Her prohibition has little effect; at the most it brings about some modification in his method of obtaining satisfaction. At last his mother adopts the severest measures; she threatens to take away from him the thing he is defying her with. Usually, in order to make the threat more frightening and more credible, she delegates its execution to the boy’s father, saying that she will tell him and that he will cut the penis off. Strange to say, this threat operates only if another condition is fulfilled before or afterwards. In itself it seems too inconceivable to the boy that such a thing could happen. But if at the time of the threat he can recall the appearance of female genitals or if shortly afterwards he has a sight of them - of genitals, that is to say, which really lack this supremely valued part, then he takes what he has heard seriously and, coming under the influence of the castration complex, experiences the severest trauma of his young life.¹

¹ Castration has a place too in the Oedipus legend, for the blinding with which Oedipus punishes himself after the discovery of his crime is, by the evidence of dreams, a symbolic substitute for castration. The possibility cannot be excluded that a phylogenetic memory-trace may contribute to the extraordinarily terrifying effect of the threat - a memory-trace from the prehistory of the primal family, where the jealous father actually robbed his son of his genitals if the latter became troublesome to him as a rival with a woman. The primaeval custom of circumcision, another symbolic substitute for castration, can only be understood as an expression of submission to the father’s will. (Cf. the puberty rites of primitive peoples.) No investigation has yet been made of the form taken by the events described above among peoples and in civilizations which do not suppress masturbation in children.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4998

The results of the threat of castration are multifarious and incalculable; they affect the whole of a boy’s relations with his father and mother and subsequently with men and women in general. As a rule the child’s masculinity is unable to stand up to this first shock. In order to preserve his sexual organ he renounces the possession of his mother more or less completely; his sexual life often remains permanently encumbered by the prohibition. If a strong feminine component, as we call it, is present in him, its strength is increased by this intimidation of his masculinity. He falls into a passive attitude to his father, such as he attributes to his mother. It is true that as a result of the threat he has given up masturbation, but not the activities of his imagination accompanying it. On the contrary, since these are now the only form of sexual satisfaction remaining to him, he indulges in them more than before and in these phantasies, though he still continues to identify himself with his father, he also does so, simultaneously and perhaps predominantly, with his mother. Derivatives and modified products of these early masturbatory phantasies usually make their way into his later ego and play a part in the formation of his character. Apart from this encouragement of his femininity, fear and hatred of his father gain greatly in intensity. The boy’s masculinity withdraws, as it were, into a defiant attitude towards his father, which will dominate his later behaviour in human society in a compulsive fashion. A residue of his erotic fixation to his mother is often left in the form of an excessive dependence on her, and this persists as a kind of bondage to women. He no longer ventures to love his mother, but he cannot risk not being loved by her, for in that case he would be in danger of being betrayed by her to his father and handed over to castration. The whole experience, with all its antecedents and consequences, of which my account has only been able to give a selection, is subjected to a highly energetic repression, and, as is made possible by the laws operating in the unconscious id, all the mutually contending emotional impulses and reactions which are set going at that time are preserved in the unconscious and ready to disturb the later development of the ego after puberty. When the somatic process of sexual maturation puts fresh life into the old libidinal fixations which had apparently been surmounted, sexual life will turn out to be inhibited, without homogeneity and fallen apart into mutually conflicting urges.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4999

It is no doubt true that the impact of the threat of castration upon a boy’s budding sexual life does not always have these dreaded consequences. It will depend once again on quantitative relations how much damage is done and how much avoided. The whole occurrence, which may probably be regarded as the central experience of the years of childhood, the greatest problem of early life and the strongest source of later inadequacy, is so completely forgotten that its reconstruction during the work of analysis is met in adults by the most decided disbelief. Indeed, aversion to it is so great that people try to silence any mention of the proscribed subject and the most obvious reminders of it are overlooked by a strange intellectual blindness. One may hear it objected, for instance, that the legend of King Oedipus has in fact no connection with the construction made by analysis: the cases are quite different, since Oedipus did not know that it was his father that he killed and his mother that he married. What is overlooked in this is that a distortion of this kind is inevitable if an attempt is made at a poetic handling of the material, and that there is no introduction of extraneous material but only a skilful employment of the factors presented by the theme. The ignorance of Oedipus is a legitimate representation of the unconscious state into which, for adults, the whole experience has fallen; and the coercive power of the oracle, which makes or should make the hero innocent, is a recognition of the inevitability of the fate which has condemned every son to live through the Oedipus complex. Again it was pointed out from psycho-analytic quarters how easily the riddle of another dramatic hero, Shakespeare’s procrastinator, Hamlet, can be solved by reference to the Oedipus complex, since the prince came to grief over the task of punishing someone else for what coincided with the substance of his own Oedipus wish - whereupon the general lack of understanding on the part of the literary world showed how ready is the mass of mankind to hold fast to its infantile repressions.¹

Yet more than a century before the emergence of psycho-analysis the French philosopher Diderot bore witness to the importance of the Oedipus complex by expressing the difference between the primitive and civilized worlds in this sentence: ‘Si le petit sauvage était abandonné à lui-même, qu’il conservât toute son imbécillité, et qu’il réunît au peu de raison de l’enfant au berceau la violence des passions de l’homme de trente ans, il tordrait le col à son père et coucherait avec sa mère.’² I venture to say that if psycho-analysis could boast of no other achievement than the discovery of the repressed Oedipus complex, that alone would give it a claim to be included among the precious new acquisitions of mankind.

¹ The name ‘William Shakespeare’ is very probably a pseudonym behind which a great unknown lies concealed. Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, a man who has been thought to be identifiable with the author of Shakespeare’s works, lost a beloved and admired father while he was still a boy and completely repudiated his mother, who contracted a new marriage very soon after her husband’s death.

² [‘If the little savage were left to himself, preserving all his foolishness and adding to the small sense of a child in the cradle the violent passions of a man of thirty, he would strangle his father and lie with his mother.’]

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

5000

The effects of the castration complex in little girls are more uniform and no less profound. A female child has, of course, no need to fear the loss of a penis; she must, however, react to the fact of not having received one. From the very first she envies boys its possession; her whole development may be said to take place under the colours of envy for the penis. She begins by making vain attempts to do the same as boys and later, with greater success, makes efforts to compensate for her defect - efforts which may lead in the end to a normal feminine attitude. If during the phallic phase she tries to get pleasure like a boy by the manual stimulation of her genitals, it often happens that she fails to obtain sufficient satisfaction and extends her judgement of inferiority from her stunted penis to her whole self. As a rule she soon gives up masturbating, since she has no wish to be reminded of the superiority of her brother or playmate, and turns away from sexuality altogether.

If a little girl persists in her first wish - to grow into a boy - in extreme cases she will end as a manifest homosexual, and otherwise she will exhibit markedly masculine traits in the conduct of her later life, will choose a masculine vocation, and so on. The other path leads by way of abandoning the mother she has loved: the daughter, under the influence of her envy for the penis, cannot forgive her mother for having sent her into the world so insufficiently equipped. In her resentment over this she gives up her mother and puts someone else in her place as the object of her love - her father. If one has lost a love-object, the most obvious reaction is to identify oneself with it, to replace it from within, as it were, by identification. This mechanism now comes to the little girl’s help. Identification with her mother can take the place of attachment to her mother. The little daughter puts herself in her mother’s place, as she has always done in her games; she tries to take her mother’s place with her father, and begins to hate the mother she used to love, and from two motives: from jealousy as well as from mortification over the penis she has been denied. Her new relation to her father may start by having as its content a wish to have his penis at her disposal, but it culminates in another wish - to have a baby from him as a gift. The wish for a baby has thus taken the place of the wish for a penis, or has at all events split off from it.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

5001

It is an interesting thing that the relation between the Oedipus complex and the castration complex should take such a different shape - an opposite one, in fact - in the case of females as compared to that of males. In males, as we have seen, the threat of castration brings the Oedipus complex to an end; in females we find that, on the contrary, it is their lack of a penis that forces them into their Oedipus complex. It does little harm to a woman if she remains in her feminine Oedipus attitude. (The term ‘Electra complex’ has been proposed for it.) She will in that case choose her husband for his paternal characteristics and be ready to recognize his authority. Her longing to possess a penis, which is in fact unappeasable, may find satisfaction if she can succeed in completing her love for the organ by extending it to the bearer of the organ, just as happened earlier when she progressed from her mother’s breast to her mother as a whole person.

If we ask an analyst what his experience has shown to be the mental structures least accessible to influence in his patients, the answer will be: in a woman her wish for a penis, in a man his feminine attitude towards his own sex, a precondition of which would, of course, be the loss of his penis.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

5002

PART III

THE THEORETICAL YIELD

CHAPTER VIII

THE PSYCHICAL APPARATUS AND THE EXTERNAL WORLD

All of the general discoveries and hypotheses which I brought forward in the first chapter were, of course, arrived at by laborious and patient detailed work of the kind of which I have given an example in the previous chapter. We may now feel tempted to make a survey of the increases in knowledge that we have achieved by work such as this and to consider what paths we have opened for further advances. In this connection we may be struck by the fact that we have so often been obliged to venture beyond the frontiers of the science of psychology. The phenomena with which we were dealing do not belong to psychology alone; they have an organic and biological side as well, and accordingly in the course of our efforts at building up psycho-analysis we have also made some important biological discoveries and have not been able to avoid framing new biological hypotheses.

But let us for the moment keep to psychology. We have seen that it is not scientifically feasible to draw a line of demarcation between what is psychically normal and abnormal; so that that distinction, in spite of its practical importance, possesses only a conventional value. We have thus established a right to arrive at an understanding of the normal life of the mind from a study of its disorders - which would not be admissible if these pathological states, neuroses and psychoses, had specific causes operating in the manner of foreign bodies.

The study of a mental disorder occurring during sleep, which is transient and harmless and which, indeed, performs a useful function, has given us a key to the understanding of the mental diseases which are permanent and injurious to life. And we may now venture on the assertion that the psychology of consciousness was no better capable of understanding the normal functioning of the mind than of understanding dreams. The data of conscious self-perception, which alone were at its disposal, have proved in every respect inadequate to fathom the profusion and complexity of the processes of the mind, to reveal their interconnections and so to recognize the determinants of their disturbances.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

5003

The hypothesis we have adopted of a psychical apparatus extended in space, expediently put together, developed by the exigencies of life, which gives rise to the phenomena of consciousness only at one particular point and under certain conditions - this hypothesis has put us in a position to establish psychology on foundations similar to those of any other science, such, for instance, as physics. In our science as in the others the problem is the same: behind the attributes (qualities) of the object under examination which are presented directly to our perception, we have to discover something else which is more independent of the particular receptive capacity of our sense organs and which approximates more closely to what may be supposed to be the real state of affairs. We have no hope of being able to reach the latter itself, since it is evident that everything new that we have inferred must nevertheless be translated back into the language of our perceptions, from which it is simply impossible for us to free ourselves. But herein lies the very nature and limitation of our science. It is as though we were to say in physics: ‘If we could see clearly enough we should find that what appears to be a solid body is made up of particles of such and such a shape and size and occupying such and such relative positions.’ In the meantime we try to increase the efficiency of our sense organs to the furthest possible extent by artificial aids; but it may be expected that all such efforts will fail to affect the ultimate outcome. Reality will always remain ‘unknowable’. The yield brought to light by scientific work from our primary sense perceptions will consist in an insight into connections and dependent relations which are present in the external world, which can somehow be reliably reproduced or reflected in the internal world of our thought and a knowledge of which enables us to ‘understand’ something in the external world, to foresee it and possibly to alter it. Our procedure in psycho-analysis is quite similar. We have discovered technical methods of filling up the gaps in the phenomena of our consciousness, and we make use of those methods just as a physicist makes use of experiment. In this manner we infer a number of processes which are in themselves ‘unknowable’ and interpolate them in those that are conscious to us. And if, for instance, we say: ‘At this point an unconscious memory intervened’, what that means is: ‘At this point something occurred of which we are totally unable to form a conception, but which, if it had entered our consciousness, could only have been described in such and such a way.’

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

5004

Our justification for making such inferences and interpolations and the degree of certainty attaching to them of course remain open to criticism in each individual instance; and it cannot be denied that it is often extremely difficult to arrive at a decision - a fact which finds expression in the lack of agreement among analysts. The novelty of the problem is to blame for this - that is to say, a lack of training. But there is besides this a special factor inherent in the subject itself; for in psychology, unlike physics, we are not always concerned with things which can only arouse a cool scientific interest. Thus we shall not be very greatly surprised if a woman analyst who has not been sufficiently convinced of the intensity of her own wish for a penis also fails to attach proper importance to that factor in her patients. But such sources of error, arising from the personal equation, have no great importance in the long run. If one looks through old text-books on the use of the microscope, one is astonished to find the extraordinary demands which were made on the personality of those who made observations with that instrument while its technique was still young - of all of which there is no question to-day.

I cannot undertake to attempt a complete picture here of the psychical apparatus and its activities; I should find myself hindered, among other things, by the circumstance that psycho-analysis has not yet had time to study all those functions equally. I shall therefore content myself with a detailed recapitulation of the account in my opening chapter.

The core of our being, then, is formed by the obscure id, which has no direct communication with the external world and is accessible even to our own knowledge only though the medium of another agency. Within this id the organic instincts operate, which are themselves compounded of fusions of two primal forces (Eros and destructiveness) in varying proportions and are differentiated from one another by their relation to organs or systems of organs. The one and only urge of these instincts is towards satisfaction, which is expected to arise from certain changes in the organs with the help of objects in the external world. But immediate and unheeding satisfaction of the instincts, such as the id demands, would often lead to perilous conflicts with the external world and to extinction. The id knows no solicitude about ensuring survival and no anxiety; or it would perhaps be more correct to say that, though it can generate the sensory elements of anxiety, it cannot make use of them. The processes which are possible in and between the assumed psychical elements in the id (the primary process) differ widely from those which are familiar to us through conscious perception in our intellectual and emotional life; nor are they subject to the critical restrictions of logic, which repudiates some of these processes as invalid and seeks to undo them.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

5005

The id, cut off from the external world, has a world of perception of its own. It detects with extraordinary acuteness certain changes in its interior, especially oscillations in the tension of its instinctual needs, and these changes become conscious as feelings in the pleasure-unpleasure series. It is hard to say, to be sure, by what means and with the help of what sensory terminal organs these perceptions come about. But it is an established fact that self-perceptions - coenaesthetic feelings and feelings of pleasure-unpleasure - govern the passage of events in the id with despotic force. The id obeys the inexorable pleasure principle. But not the id alone. It seems that the activity of the other psychical agencies too is able only to modify the pleasure principle but not to nullify it; and it remains a question of the highest theoretical importance, and one that has not yet been answered, when and how it is ever possible for the pleasure principle to be overcome. The consideration that the pleasure principle demands a reduction, at bottom the extinction perhaps, of the tensions of instinctual needs (that is, Nirvana) leads to the still unassessed relations between the pleasure principle and the two primal forces, Eros and the death instinct.

The other agency of the mind, which we believe we know best and in which we recognize ourselves most easily - what is known as the ego - has been developed out of the id’s cortical layer, which, through being adapted to the reception and exclusion of stimuli, is in direct contact with the external world (reality). Starting from conscious perception it has subjected to its influence ever larger regions and deeper strata of the id, and, in the persistence with which it maintains its dependence on the external world, it bears the indelible stamp of its origin (as it might be ‘Made in Germany’). Its psychological function consists in raising the passage in the id to a higher dynamic level (perhaps by transforming freely mobile energy into bound energy, such as corresponds to the preconscious state); its constructive function consists in interpolating, between the demand made by an instinct and the action that satisfies it, the activity of thought which, after taking its bearings in the present and assessing earlier experiences, endeavours by means of experimental actions to calculate the consequences of the course of action proposed. In this way the ego comes to a decision on whether the attempt to obtain satisfaction is to be carried out or postponed or whether it may not be necessary for the demand by the instinct to be suppressed altogether as being dangerous. (Here we have the reality principle.) Just as the id is directed exclusively to obtaining pleasure, so the ego is governed by considerations of safety. The ego has set itself the task of self-preservation, which the id appears to neglect. It makes use of the sensations of anxiety as a signal to give a warning of dangers that threaten its integrity. Since memory traces can become conscious just as perceptions do, especially through their association with residues of speech, the possibility arises of a confusion which would lead to a mistaking of reality. The ego guards itself against this possibility by the institution of reality-testing, which is allowed to fall into abeyance in dreams on account of the conditions prevailing in the state of sleep. The ego, which seeks to maintain itself in an environment of overwhelming mechanical forces, is threatened by dangers which come in the first instance from external reality; but dangers do not threaten it from there alone. Its own id is a source of similar dangers, and that for two different reasons. In the first place, an excessive strength of instinct can damage the ego in a similar way to an excessive ‘stimulus’ from the external world. It is true that the former cannot destroy it; but it can destroy its characteristic dynamic organization and change the ego back into a portion of the id. In the second place, experience may have taught the ego that the satisfaction of some instinctual demand which is not in itself intolerable would involve dangers in the external world, so that an instinctual demand of that kind itself becomes a danger. Thus the ego is fighting on two fronts: it has to defend its existence against an external world which threatens it with annihilation as well as against an internal world that makes excessive demands. It adopts the same methods of defence against both, but its defence against the internal enemy is particularly inadequate. As a result of having originally been identical with this latter enemy and of having lived with it since on the most intimate terms, it has great difficulty in escaping from the internal dangers. They persist as threats, even if they can be temporarily held down.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

5006

We have heard how the weak and immature ego of the first period of childhood is permanently damaged by the stresses put upon it in its efforts to fend off the dangers that are peculiar to that period of life. Children are protected against the dangers that threaten them from the external world by the solicitude of their parents; they pay for this security by a fear of loss of love which would deliver them over helpless to the dangers of the external world. This factor exerts a decisive influence on the outcome of the conflict when a boy finds himself in the situation of the Oedipus complex, in which the threat to his narcissism by the danger of castration, reinforced from primaeval sources, takes possession of him. Driven by the combined operation of these two influences, the contemporary real danger and the remembered one with its phylogenetic basis, the child embarks on his attempts at defence - repressions - which are effective for the moment but nevertheless turn out to be psychologically inadequate when the later re-animation of sexual life brings a reinforcement to the instinctual demands which have been repudiated in the past. If this is so, it would have to be said from a biological standpoint that the ego comes to grief over the task of mastering the excitations of the early sexual period, at a time when its immaturity makes it incompetent to do so. It is in this lagging of ego development behind libidinal development that we see the essential precondition of neurosis; and we cannot escape the conclusion that neuroses could be avoided if the childish ego were spared this task - if, that is to say, the child’s sexual life were allowed free play, as happens among many primitive peoples. It may be that the aetiology of neurotic illnesses is more complicated than we have here described it; if so, we have at least brought out one essential part of the aetiological complex. Nor should we forget the phylogenetic influences, which are represented in some way in the id in forms that we are not yet able to grasp, and which must certainly act upon the ego more powerfully in that early period than later. On the other hand, the realization dawns on us that such an early attempt at damming up the sexual instinct, so decided a partisanship by the young ego in favour of the external as opposed to the internal world, brought about by the prohibition of infantile sexuality, cannot be without its effect on the individual’s later readiness for culture. The instinctual demands forced away from direct satisfaction are compelled to enter on new paths leading to substitutive satisfaction, and in the course of these détours they may become desexualized and their connection with their original instinctual aims may become looser. And at this point we may anticipate the thesis that many of the highly valued assets of our civilization were acquired at the cost of sexuality and by the restriction of sexual motive forces.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

5007

We have repeatedly had to insist on the fact that the ego owes its origin as well as the most important of its acquired characteristics to its relation to the real external world. We are thus prepared to assume that the ego’s pathological states, in which it most approximates once again to the id, are founded on a cessation or slackening of that relation to the external world. This tallies very well with what we learn from clinical experience - namely, that the precipitating cause of the outbreak of a psychosis is either that reality has become intolerably painful or that the instincts have become extraordinarily intensified - both of which, in view of the rival claims made on the ego by the id and the external world, must lead to the same result. The problem of psychoses would be simple and perspicuous if the ego’s detachment from reality could be carried through completely. But that seems to happen only rarely or perhaps never. Even in a state so far removed from the reality of the external world as one of hallucinatory confusion, one learns from patients after their recovery that at the time in some corner of their mind (as they put it) there was a normal person hidden, who, like a detached spectator, watched the hubbub of illness go past him. I do not know if we may assume that this is so in general, but I can report the same of other psychoses with a less tempestuous course. I call to mind a case of chronic paranoia in which after each attack of jealousy a dream conveyed to the analyst a correct picture of the precipitating cause, free from any delusion. An interesting contrast was thus brought to light: while we are accustomed to discover from the dreams of neurotics jealousies which are alien to their waking lives, in this psychotic case the delusion which dominated the patient in the day-time was corrected by his dream. We may probably take it as being generally true that what occurs in all these cases is a psychical split. Two psychical attitudes have been formed instead of a single one - one, the normal one, which takes account of reality, and another which under the influence of the instincts detaches the ego from reality. The two exist alongside of each other. The issue depends on their relative strength. If the second is or becomes the stronger, the necessary precondition for a psychosis is present. If the relation is reversed, then there is an apparent cure of the delusional disorder. Actually it has only retreated into the unconscious - just as numerous observations lead us to believe that the delusion existed ready-made for a long time before its manifest irruption.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

5008

The view which postulates that in all psychoses there is a splitting of the ego could not call for so much notice if it did not turn out to apply to other states more like the neuroses and, finally, to the neuroses themselves. I first became convinced of this in cases fetishism. This abnormality, which may be counted as one of the perversions, is, as is well known, based on the patient (who is almost always male) not recognizing the fact that females have no penis - a fact which is extremely undesirable to him since it is a proof of the possibility of his being castrated himself. He therefore disavows his own sense-perception which showed him that the female genitals lack a penis and holds fast to the contrary conviction. The disavowed perception does not, however, remain entirely without influence for, in spite of everything, he has not the courage to assert that he actually saw a penis. He takes hold of something else instead - a part of the body or some other object - and assigns it the role of the penis which he cannot do without. It is usually something that he in fact saw at the moment at which he saw the female genitals, or it is something that can suitably serve as a symbolic substitute for the penis. Now it would be incorrect to describe this process when a fetish is constructed as a splitting of the ego; it is a compromise formed with the help of displacement, such as we have been familiar with in dreams. But our observations show us still more. The creation of the fetish was due to an intention to destroy the evidence for the possibility of castration, so that fear of castration could be avoided. If females, like other living creatures, possess a penis, there is no need to tremble for the continued possession of one’s own penis. Now we come across fetishists who have developed the same fear of castration as non-fetishists and react in the same way to it. Their behaviour is therefore simultaneously expressing two contrary premisses. On the one hand they are disavowing the fact of their perception - the fact that they saw no penis in the female genitals; and on the other hand they are recognizing the fact that females have no penis and are drawing the correct conclusions from it. The two attitudes persist side by side throughout their lives without influencing each other. Here is what may rightly be called a splitting of the ego. This circumstance also enables us to understand how it is that fetishism is so often only partially developed. It does not govern the choice of object exclusively but leaves room for a greater or lesser amount of normal sexual behaviour; sometimes, indeed, it retires into playing a modest part or is limited to a mere hint. In festishists, therefore, the detachment of the ego from the reality of the external world has never succeeded completely.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

5009

It must not be thought that fetishism presents an exceptional case as regards a splitting of the ego; it is merely a particularly favourable subject for studying the question. Let us return to our thesis that the childish ego, under the domination of the real world, gets rid of undesirable instinctual demands by what are called repressions. We will now supplement this by further asserting that, during the same period of life, the ego often enough finds itself in the position of fending off some demand from the external world which it feels distressing and that this is effected by means of a disavowal of the perceptions which bring to knowledge this demand from reality. Disavowals of this kind occur very often and not only with fetishists; and whenever we are in a position to study them they turn out to be half-measures, incomplete attempts at detachment from reality. The disavowal is always supplemented by an acknowledgement; two contrary and independent attitudes always arise and result in the situation of there being a splitting of the ego. Once more the issue depends on which of the two can seize hold of the greater intensity.

The facts of this splitting of the ego, which we have just described, are neither so new nor so strange as they may at first appear. It is indeed a universal characteristic of neuroses that there are present in the subject’s mental life, as regards some particular behaviour, two different attitudes, contrary to each other and independent of each other. In the case of neuroses, however, one of these attitudes belongs to the ego and the contrary one, which is repressed, belongs to the id. The difference between this case and the other is essentially a topographical or structural one, and it is not always easy to decide in an individual instance with which of the two possibilities one is dealing. They have, however, the following important characteristic in common. Whatever the ego does in its efforts of defence, whether it seeks to disavow a portion of the real external world or whether it seeks to reject an instinctual demand from the internal world, its success is never complete and unqualified. The outcome always lies in two contrary attitudes, of which the defeated, weaker one, no less than the other, leads to psychical complications. In conclusion, it is only necessary to point out how little of all these processes becomes known to us through our conscious perception.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

5010

CHAPTER IX

THE INTERNAL WORLD

We have no way of conveying knowledge of a complicated set of simultaneous events except by describing them successively; and thus it happens that all our accounts are at fault to begin with owing to one-sided simplification and must wait till they can be supplemented, built on to, and so set right.

The picture of an ego which mediates between the id and the external world, which takes over the instinctual demands of the former in order to lead them to satisfaction, which derives perceptions from the latter and uses them as memories, which, intent on its self-preservation, puts itself in defence against excessively strong claims from both sides and which, at the same time, is guided in all its decisions by the injunctions of a modified pleasure principle - this picture in fact applies to the ego only up to the end of the first period of childhood, till about the age of five. At about that time an important change has taken place. A portion of the external world has, at least partially, been abandoned as an object and has instead, by identification, been taken into the ego and thus become an integral part of the internal world. This new psychical agency continues to carry on the functions which have hitherto been performed by the people in the external world: it observes the ego, gives it orders, judges it and threatens it with punishments, exactly like the parents whose place it has taken. We call this agency the super-ego and are aware of it in its judicial functions as our conscience. It is a remarkable thing that the super-ego often displays a severity for which no model has been provided by the real parents, and moreover that it calls the ego to account not only for its deeds but equally for its thoughts and unexecuted intentions, of which the super-ego seems to have knowledge. This reminds us that the hero of the Oedipus legend too felt guilty for his deeds and submitted himself to self-punishment, although the coercive power of the oracle should have acquitted him of guilt in our judgement and his own. The super-ego is in fact the heir to the Oedipus complex and is only established after that complex has been disposed of. For that reason its excessive severity does not follow a real model but corresponds to the strength of the defence used against the temptation of the Oedipus complex. Some suspicion of this state of things lies, no doubt, at the bottom of the assertion made by philosophers and believers that the moral sense is not instilled into men by education or acquired by them in their social life but is implanted in them from a higher source.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

5011

So long as the ego works in full harmony with the super-ego it is not easy to distinguish between their manifestations; but tensions and estrangements between them make themselves very plainly visible. The torments caused by the reproaches of conscience correspond precisely to a child’s fear of loss of love, a fear the place of which has been taken by the moral agency. On the other hand, if the ego has successfully resisted a temptation to do something which would be objectionable to the super-ego, it feels raised in its self-esteem and strengthened in its pride, as though it had made some precious acquisition. In this way the super-ego continues to play the part of an external world for the ego, although it has become a portion of the internal world. Throughout later life it represents the influence of a person’s childhood, of the care and education given him by his parents and of his dependence on them - a childhood which is prolonged so greatly in human beings by a family life in common. And in all this it is not only the personal qualities of these parents that is making itself felt, but also everything that had a determining effect on them themselves, the tastes and standards of the social class in which they lived and the innate dispositions and traditions of the race from which they sprang. Those who have a liking for generalizations and sharp distinctions may say that the external world, in which the individual finds himself exposed after being detached from his parents, represents the power of the present; that his id, with its inherited trends, represents the organic past; and that the super-ego, which comes to join them later, represents more than anything the cultural past, which a child has, as it were, to repeat as an after-experience during the few years of his early life. It is unlikely that such generalizations can be universally correct. Some portion of the cultural acquisitions have undoubtedly left a precipitate behind them in the id; much of what is contributed by the super-ego will awaken an echo in the id; not a few of the child’s new experiences will be intensified because they are repetitions of some primaeval phylogenetic experience.

‘Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast,

Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen.’¹

Thus the super-ego takes up a kind of intermediate position between the id and the external world; it unites in itself the influences of the present and the past. In the establishment of the super-ego we have before us, as it were, an example of the way in which the present is changed into the past. . . .

*       *       *       *       *

¹ [‘What thou hast inherited from thy fathers, acquire it to make it thine’]

5012

ANALYSIS TERMINABLE AND INTERMINABLE

(1937)

5013

Intentionally left blank

5014

ANALYSIS TERMINABLE AND INTERMINABLE

I

Experience has taught us that psycho-analytic therapy - the freeing of someone from his neurotic symptoms, inhibitions and abnormalities of character - is a time-consuming business. Hence, from the very first, attempts have been made to shorten the duration of analyses. Such endeavours required no justification; they could claim to be based on the strongest considerations of reason and expediency. But there was probably still at work in them as well some trace of the impatient contempt with which the medical science of an earlier day regarded the neuroses as being uncalled-for consequences of invisible injuries. If it had now become necessary to attend to them, they should at least be disposed of as quickly as possible.

A particularly energetic attempt in this direction was made by Otto Rank, following upon his book, The Trauma of Birth (1924). He supposed that the true source of neurosis was the act of birth, since this involves the possibility of a child’s ‘primal fixation’ to his mother not being surmounted but persisting as a ‘primal repression’. Rank hoped that if this primal trauma were dealt with by a subsequent analysis the whole neurosis would be got rid of. Thus this one small piece of analytic work would save the necessity for all the rest. And a few months should be enough to accomplish this. It cannot be disputed that Rank’s argument was bold and ingenious; but it did not stand the test of critical examination. Moreover, it was a child of its time, conceived under the stress of the contrast between the post-war misery of Europe and the ‘prosperity’ of America, and designed to adapt the tempo of analytic therapy to the haste of American life. We have not heard much about what the implementation of Rank’s plan has done for cases of sickness. Probably not more than if the fire-brigade, called to deal with a house that had been set on fire by an overturned oil-lamp, contented themselves with removing the lamp from the room in which the blaze had started. No doubt a considerable shortening of the brigade’s activities would be effected by this means. The theory and practice of Rank’s experiment are now things of the past - no less than American ‘prosperity’ itself.

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5015

I myself had adopted another way of speeding up an analytic treatment even before the war. At that time I had taken on the case of a young Russian, a man spoilt by wealth, who had come to Vienna in a state of complete helplessness, accompanied by a private doctor and an attendant.¹ In the course of a few years it was possible to give him back a large amount of his independence, to awaken his interest in life and to adjust his relations to the people most important to him. But there progress came to a stop. We advanced no further in clearing up the neurosis of his childhood, on which his later illness was based, and it was obvious that the patient found his present position highly comfortable and had no wish to take any step forward which would bring him nearer to the end of his treatment. It was a case of the treatment inhibiting itself: it was in danger of failing as a result of its - partial - success. In this predicament I resorted to the heroic measure of fixing a time limit for the analysis. At the beginning of a year’s work I informed the patient that the coming year was to be the last one of his treatment, no matter what he achieved in the time still left to him. At first he did not believe me, but once he was convinced that I was in deadly earnest, the desired change set in. His resistances shrank up, and in these last months of his treatment he was able to reproduce all the memories and to discover all the connections which seemed necessary for understanding his early neurosis and mastering his present one. When he left me in the midsummer of 1914, with as little suspicion as the rest of us of what lay so shortly ahead, I believed that his cure was radical and permanent.

¹ See my paper published with the patient’s consent, ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (1918b). It contains no detailed account of the young man’s adult illness, which is touched on only when its connection with his infantile neurosis absolutely requires it.

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5016

In a footnote added to this patient’s case history in 1923, I have already reported that I was mistaken. When, towards the end of the war, he returned to Vienna, a refugee and destitute, I had to help him to master a part of the transference which had not been resolved. This was accomplished in a few months, and I was able to end my footnote with the statement that ‘since then the patient has felt normal and has behaved unexceptionably, in spite of the war having robbed him of his home, his possessions, and all his family relationships’. Fifteen years have passed since then without disproving the truth of this verdict; but certain reservations have become necessary. The patient has stayed on in Vienna and has kept a place in society, if a humble one. But several times during this period his good state of health has been interrupted by attacks of illness which could only be construed as offshoots of his perennial neurosis. Thanks to the skill of one of my pupils, Dr. Ruth Mack Brunswick, a short course of treatment has on each occasion brought these conditions to an end. I hope that Dr. Mack Brunswick herself will shortly report on the circumstances. Some of these attacks were still concerned with residual portions of the transference; and, where this was so, short-lived though they were, they showed a distinctly paranoid character. In other attacks, however, the pathogenic material consisted of pieces of the patient’s childhood history, which had not come to light while I was analysing him and which now came away - the comparison is unavoidable - like sutures after an operation, or small fragments of necrotic bone. I have found the history of this patient’s recovery scarcely less interesting than that of his illness.

I have subsequently employed this fixing of a time-limit in other cases as well, and I have also taken the experiences of other analysts into account. There can be only one verdict about the value of this blackmailing device: it is effective provided that one hits the right time for it. But it cannot guarantee to accomplish the task completely. On the contrary, we may be sure that, while part of the material will become accessible under the pressure of the threat, another part will be kept back and thus become buried, as it were, and lost to our therapeutic efforts. For once the analyst has fixed the time-limit he cannot extend it; otherwise the patient would lose all faith in him. The most obvious way out would be for the patient to continue his treatment with another analyst, although we know that such a change will involve a fresh loss of time and abandoning fruits of work already done. Nor can any general rule be laid down as to the right time for resorting to this forcible technical device; the decision must be left to the analyst’s tact. A miscalculation cannot be rectified. The saying that a lion only springs once must apply here.

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5017

II

The discussion of the technical problem of how to accelerate the slow progress of an analysis leads us to another, more deeply interesting question: is there such a thing as a natural end to an analysis - is there any possibility at all of bringing an analysis to such an end? To judge by the common talk of analysts it would seem to be so, for we often hear them say, when they are deploring or excusing the recognized imperfections of some fellow-mortal: ‘His analysis was not finished’ or ‘he was never analysed to the end.’

We must first of all decide what is meant by the ambiguous phrase ‘the end of an analysis’. From a practical standpoint it is easy to answer. An analysis is ended when the analyst and the patient cease to meet each other for the analytic session. This happens when two conditions have been approximately fulfilled: first, that the patient shall no longer be suffering from his symptoms and shall have overcome his anxieties and his inhibitions; and secondly, that the analyst shall judge that so much repressed material has been made conscious, so much that was unintelligible has been explained, and so much internal resistance conquered, that there is no need to fear a repetition of the pathological processes concerned. If one is prevented by external difficulties from reaching this goal, it is better to speak of an incomplete analysis rather than of an unfinished one.

The other meaning of the ‘end’ of an analysis is much more ambitious. In this sense of it, what we are asking is whether the analyst has had such a far-reaching influence on the patient that no further change could be expected to take place in him if his analysis were continued. It is as though it were possible by means of analysis to attain to a level of absolute psychical normality - a level, moreover, which we could feel confident would be able to remain stable, as though, perhaps, we had succeeded in resolving every one of the patient’s repressions and in filling in all the gaps in his memory. We may first consult our experience to enquire whether such things do in fact happen, and then turn to our theory to discover whether there is any possibility of their happening.

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5018

Every analyst will have treated a few cases which have had this gratifying outcome. He has succeeded in clearing up the patient’s neurotic disturbance, and it has not returned and has not been replaced by any other such disturbance. Nor are we without some insight into the determinants of these successes. The patient’s ego had not been noticeably altered and the aetiology of his disturbance had been essentially traumatic. The aetiology of every neurotic disturbance is, after all, a mixed one. It is a question either of the instincts being excessively strong - that is to say, recalcitrant to taming by the ego - or of the effects of early (i.e. premature) traumas which the immature ego was unable to master. As a rule there is a combination of both factors, the constitutional and the accidental. The stronger the constitutional factor, the more readily will a trauma lead to a fixation and leave behind a developmental disturbance; the stronger the trauma, the more certainly will its injurious effects become manifest even when the instinctual situation is normal. There is no doubt that an aetiology of the traumatic sort offers by far the more favourable field for analysis. Only when a case is a predominantly traumatic one will analysis succeed in doing what it is so superlatively able to do; only then will it, thanks to having strengthened the patient’s ego, succeed in replacing by a correct solution the inadequate decision made in his early life. Only in such cases can one speak of an analysis having been definitively ended. In them, analysis has done all that it should and does not need to be continued. It is true that, if the patient who has been restored in this way never produces another disorder calling for analysis, we do not know how much his immunity may not be due to a kind fate which has spared him ordeals that are too severe.

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5019

A constitutional strength of instinct and an unfavourable alteration of the ego acquired in its defensive struggle in the sense of its being dislocated and restricted - these are the factors which are prejudicial to the effectiveness of analysis and which may make its duration interminable. One is tempted to make the first factor - strength of instinct - responsible as well for the emergence of the second - the alteration of the ego; but it seems that the latter too has an aetiology of its own. And, indeed, it must be admitted that our knowledge of these matters is as yet insufficient. They are only now becoming the subject of analytic study. In this field the interest of analysts seems to me to be quite wrongly directed. Instead of an enquiry into how a cure by analysis comes about (a matter which I think has been sufficiently elucidated) the question should be asked of what are the obstacles that stand in the way of such a cure.

This brings me to two problems which arise directly out of analytic practice, as I hope to show by the following examples. A certain man, who had himself practised analysis with great success, came to the conclusion that his relations both to men and women - to the men who were his competitors and to the woman whom he loved - were nevertheless not free from neurotic impediments; and he therefore made himself the subject of an analysis by someone else whom he regarded as superior to himself. This critical illumination of his own self had a completely successful result. He married the woman he loved and turned into a friend and teacher of his supposed rivals. Many years passed in this way, during which his relations with his former analyst also remained unclouded. But then, for no assignable external reason, trouble arose. The man who had been analysed became antagonistic to the analyst and reproached him for having failed to give him a complete analysis. The analyst, he said, ought to have known and to have taken into account the fact that a transference-relation can never be purely positive; he should have given his attention to the possibilities of a negative transference. The analyst defended himself by saying that, at the time of the analysis, there was no sign of a negative transference. But even if he had failed to observe some very faint signs of it - which was not altogether ruled out, considering the limited horizon of analysis in those early days - it was still doubtful, he thought, whether he would have had the power to activate a topic (or, as we say, a ‘complex’) by merely pointing it out, so long as it was not currently active in the patient himself at the time. To activate it would certainly have required some unfriendly piece of behaviour in reality on the analyst’s part. Furthermore, he added, not every good relation between an analyst and his subject during and after analysis was to be regarded as a transference; there were also friendly relations which were based on reality and which proved to be viable.

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5020

I now pass on to my second example, which raises the same problem. An unmarried woman, no longer young, had been cut off from life since puberty by an inability to walk, owing to severe pains in the legs. Her condition was obviously of a hysterical nature, and it had defied many kinds of treatment. An analysis lasting three-quarters of a year removed the trouble and restored to the patient, an excellent and worthy person, her right to a share in life. In the years following her recovery she was consistently unfortunate. There were disasters in her family, and financial losses, and, as she grew older, she saw every hope of happiness in love and marriage vanish. But the one-time invalid stood up to all this valiantly and was a support to her family in difficult times. I cannot remember whether it was twelve or fourteen years after the end of her analysis that, owing to profuse haemorrhages, she was obliged to undergo a gynaecological examination. A myoma was found, which made a complete hysterectomy advisable. From the time of this operation, the woman became ill once more. She fell in love with her surgeon, wallowed in masochistic phantasies about the fearful changes in her inside - phantasies with which she concealed her romance - and proved inaccessible to a further attempt at analysis. She remained abnormal to the end of her life. The successful analytic treatment took place so long ago that we cannot expect too much from it; it was in the earliest years of my work as an analyst. No doubt the patient’s second illness may have sprung from the same source as her first one which had been successfully overcome: it may have been a different manifestation of the same repressed impulses, which the analysis had only incompletely resolved. But I am inclined to think that, were it not for the new trauma, there would have been no fresh outbreak of neurosis.

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5021

These two examples, which have been purposely selected from a large number of similar ones, will suffice to start a discussion of the topics we are considering. The sceptical, the optimistic and the ambitious will take quite different views of them. The first will say that it is now proved that even a successful analytic treatment does not protect the patient, who at the time has been cured, from falling ill later on of another neurosis - for, indeed, of a neurosis derived from the same instinctual root - that is to say, from a recurrence of his old trouble. The others will consider that this is not proved. They will object that the two examples date from the early days of analysis, twenty and thirty years ago, respectively; and that since then we have acquired deeper insight and wider knowledge, and that our technique has changed in accordance with our new discoveries. To-day, they will say, we may demand and expect that an analytic cure shall prove permanent, or at least that if a patient falls ill again, his new illness shall not turn out to be a revival of his earlier instinctual disturbance, manifesting itself in new forms. Our experience, they will maintain, does not oblige us to restrict so materially the demands that can be made upon our therapeutic method.

My reason for choosing these two examples is, of course, precisely because they lie so far back in the past. It is obvious that the more recent the successful outcome of an analysis is, the less utilizable it is for our discussion, since we have no means of predicting what the later history of the recovery will be. The optimists’ expectations clearly presuppose a number of things which are not precisely self-evident. They assume, firstly, that there really is a possibility of disposing of an instinctual conflict (or, more correctly, a conflict between the ego and an instinct) definitively and for all time; secondly, that while we are treating someone for one instinctual conflict we can, as it were, inoculate him against the possibility of any other such conflicts; and thirdly, that we have the power, for purposes of prophylaxis, to stir up a pathogenic conflict of this sort which is not betraying itself at the time by any indications, and that it is wise to do so. I throw out these questions without proposing to answer them now. Perhaps it may not be possible at present to give any certain answer to them at all.

Some light may probably be thrown on them by theoretical considerations. But another point has already become clear: if we wish to fulfil the more exacting demands upon analytic therapy, our road will not lead us to, or by way of, a shortening of its duration.

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5022

III

An analytic experience which now extends over several decades, and a change which has taken place in the nature and mode of my activity, encourage me to attempt to answer the questions before us. In earlier days I treated quite a large number of patients, who, as was natural, wanted to be dealt with as quickly as possible. Of late years I have been mainly engaged in training analyses; a relatively small number of severe cases of illness remained with me for continuous treatment, interrupted, however, by longer or shorter intervals. With them, the therapeutic aim was no longer the same. There was no question of shortening the treatment; the purpose was radically to exhaust the possibilities of illness in them and to bring about a deep-going alteration of their personality.

Of the three factors which we have recognized as being decisive for the success or otherwise of analytic treatment - the influence of traumas, the constitutional strength of the instincts and alterations of the ego - what concerns us here is only the second, the strength of the instincts. A moment’s reflection raises a doubt whether the restrictive use of the adjective ‘constitutional’ (or ‘congenital’) is essential. However true it may be that the constitutional factor is of decisive importance from the very beginning, it is nevertheless conceivable that a reinforcement of instinct coming later in life might produce the same effects. If so, we should have to modify our formula and say ‘the strength of the instincts at the time’ instead of ‘the constitutional strength of the instincts’. The first of our questions was: ‘Is it possible by means of analytic therapy to dispose of a conflict between an instinct and the ego, or of a pathogenic instinctual demand upon the ego, permanently and definitively?’ To avoid misunderstanding it is not unnecessary, perhaps, to explain more exactly what is meant by ‘permanently disposing of an instinctual demand’. Certainly not ‘causing the demand to disappear so that nothing more is ever heard from it again’. This is in general impossible, nor is it at all to be desired. No, we mean something else, something which may be roughly described as a ‘taming’ of the instinct. That is to say, the instinct is brought completely into the harmony of the ego, becomes accessible to all the influences of the other trends in the ego and no longer seeks to go its independent way to satisfaction. If we are asked by what methods and means this result is achieved, it is not easy to find an answer. We can only say: ‘So muss denn doch die Hexe dran!’ - the Witch Metapsychology. Without metapsychological speculation and theorizing - I had almost said ‘phantasying’ - we shall not get another step forward. Unfortunately, here as elsewhere, what our Witch reveals is neither very clear nor very detailed. We have only a single clue to start from - though it is a clue of the highest value - namely, the antithesis between the primary and the secondary processes; and to that antithesis I shall at this point turn.

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5023

If now we take up our first question once more, we find that our new line of approach inevitably leads us to a particular conclusion. The question was whether it is possible to dispose of an instinctual conflict permanently and definitively - i.e. to ‘tame’ an instinctual demand in that fashion. Formulated in these terms, the question makes no mention at all of the strength of the instinct; but it is precisely on this that the outcome depends. Let us start from the assumption that what analysis achieves for neurotics is nothing other than what normal people bring about for themselves without its help. Everyday experience, however, teaches us that in a normal person any solution of an instinctual conflict only holds good for a particular strength of instinct, or, more correctly, only for a particular relation between the strength of the instinct and the strength of the ego.¹ If the strength of the ego diminishes, whether through illness or exhaustion, or from some similar cause, all the instincts which have so far been successfully tamed may renew their demands and strive to obtain substitutive satisfactions in abnormal ways.² Irrefutable proof of this statement is supplied by our nightly dreams; they react to the sleeping attitude assumed by the ego with an awakening of instinctual demands.

¹ Or, to be perfectly accurate, where that relation falls within certain limits.

² Here we have a justification of the claim to aetiological importance of such non-specific factors as overwork, shock, etc. These factors have always been assured of general recognition, but have had to be pushed into the background precisely by psycho-analysis. It is impossible to define health except in metapsychological terms: i.e. by reference to the dynamic relations between the agencies of the mental apparatus which have been recognized - or (if that is preferred) inferred or conjectured - by us.

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5024

The material on the other side is equally unambiguous. Twice in the course of individual development certain instincts are considerably reinforced: at puberty, and, in women, at the menopause. We are not in the least surprised if a person who was not neurotic before becomes so at these times. When his instincts were not so strong, he succeeded in taming them; but when they are reinforced he can no longer do so. The repressions behave like dams against the pressure of water. The same effects which are produced by these two physiological reinforcements of instinct, may be brought about in an irregular fashion by accidental causes at any other period of life. Such reinforcements may be set up by fresh traumas, enforced frustrations, or the collateral influence of instincts upon one another. The result is always the same, and it underlines the irresistible power of the quantitative factor in the causation of illness.

I feel as though I ought to be ashamed of so much ponderous exposition, seeing that everything I have said has long been familiar and self-evident. It is a fact that we have always behaved as if we knew all this; but, for the most part, our theoretical concepts have neglected to attach the same importance to the economic line of approach as they have to the dynamic and topographical ones. My excuse is therefore that I am drawing attention to this neglect.

Before we decide on an answer to this question, however, we must consider an objection whose force lies in the fact that we are probably predisposed in its favour. Our arguments, it will be said, are all deduced from the processes which take place spontaneously between the ego and the instincts, and they presuppose that analytic therapy can accomplish nothing which does not, under favourable and normal conditions, occur of itself. But is this really so? Is it not precisely the claim of our theory that analysis produces a state which never does arise spontaneously in the ego and that this newly created state constitutes the essential difference between a person who has been analysed and a person who has not? Let us bear in mind what this claim is based on. All repressions take place in early childhood; they are primitive defensive measures taken by the immature, feeble ego. In later years no fresh repressions are carried out; but the old ones persist, and their services continue to be made use of by the ego for mastering the instincts. New conflicts are disposed of by what we call ‘after-repression’. We may apply to these infantile repressions our general statement that repressions depend absolutely and entirely on the relative strength of the forces involved and that they cannot hold out against an increase in the strength of the instincts. Analysis, however, enables the ego, which has attained greater maturity and strength, to undertake a revision of these old repressions; a few are demolished, while others are recognized but constructed afresh out of more solid material. These new dams are of quite a different degree of firmness from the earlier ones; we may be confident that they will not give way so easily before a rising flood of instinctual strength. Thus the real achievement of analytic therapy would be the subsequent correction of the original process of repression, a correction which puts an end to the dominance of the quantitative factor.

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5025

Thus far our theory, which we cannot give up except under irresistible compulsion. And what does our experience have to say to this? Perhaps our experience is not yet wide enough for us to come to a settled conclusion. It confirms our expectations often enough, but not always. One has an impression that one ought not to be surprised if it should turn out in the end that the difference between a person who has not been analysed and the behaviour of a person after he has been analysed is not so thorough-going as we aim at making it and as we expect and maintain it to be. If this is so, it would mean that analysis sometimes succeeds in eliminating the influence of an increase in instinct, but not invariably, or that the effect of analysis is limited to increasing the power of resistance of the inhibitions, so that they are equal to much greater demands than before the analysis or if no analysis had taken place. I really cannot commit myself to a decision on this point, nor do I know whether a decision is possible at the present time.

There is, however, another angle from which we can approach this problem of the variability in the effect of analysis. We know that the first step towards attaining intellectual mastery of our environment is to discover generalizations, rules and laws which bring order into chaos. In doing this we simplify the world of phenomena; but we cannot avoid falsifying it, especially if we are dealing with processes of development and change. What we are concerned with is discerning a qualitative alteration, and as a rule in doing so we neglect, at any rate to begin with, a quantitative factor. In the real world, transitions and intermediate stages are far more common than sharply differentiated opposite states. In studying developments and changes we direct our attention solely to the outcome; we readily overlook the fact that such processes are usually more or less incomplete - that is to say, that they are in fact only partial alterations. A shrewd satirist of old Austria, Johann Nestroy, once said: ‘Every step forward is only half as big as it looks at first.’ It is tempting to attribute a quite general validity to this malicious dictum. There are nearly always residual phenomena, a partial hanging-back. When an open-handed Maecenas surprises us by some isolated trait of miserliness, or when a person who is consistently over-kind suddenly indulges in a hostile action, such ‘residual phenomena’ are invaluable for genetic research. They show us that these praiseworthy and precious qualities are based on compensation and overcompensation which, as was to have been expected, have not been absolutely and fully successful. Our first account of the development of the libido was that an original oral phase gave way to a sadistic-anal phase and that this was in turn succeeded by a phallic-genital one. Later research has not contradicted this view, but it has corrected it by adding that these replacements do not take place all of a sudden but gradually, so that portions of the earlier organization always persist alongside of the more recent one, and even in normal development the transformation is never complete and residues of earlier libidinal fixations may still be retained in the final configuration. The same thing is to be seen in quite other fields. Of all the erroneous and superstitious beliefs of mankind that have supposedly been surmounted there is not one whose residues do not live on among us to-day in the lower strata of civilized peoples or even in the highest strata of cultural society. What has once come to life clings tenaciously to its existence. One feels inclined to doubt sometimes whether the dragons of primaeval days are really extinct.

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5026

Applying these remarks to our present problem, I think that the answer to the question of how to explain the variable results of our analytic therapy might well be that we, too, in endeavouring to replace repressions that are insecure by reliable ego-syntonic controls, do not always achieve our aim to its full extent - that is, do not achieve it thoroughly enough. The transformation is achieved, but often only partially: portions of the old mechanisms remain untouched by the work of analysis. It is difficult to prove that this is really so; for we have no other way of judging what happens but by the outcome which we are trying to explain. Nevertheless, the impressions one receives during the work of analysis do not contradict this assumption; indeed, they seem rather to confirm it. But we must not take the clarity of our own insight as a measure of the conviction which we produce in the patient. His conviction may lack ‘depth’, as one might say; it is always a question of the quantitative factor, which is so easily overlooked. If this is the correct answer to our question, we may say that analysis, in claiming to cure neuroses by ensuring control over instinct, is always right in theory but not always right in practice. And this is because it does not always succeed in ensuring to a sufficient degree the foundations on which a control of instinct is based. The cause of such a partial failure is easily discovered. In the past, the quantitative factor of instinctual strength opposed the ego’s defensive efforts; for that reason we called in the work of analysis to help; and now that same factor sets a limit to the efficacy of this new effort. If the strength of the instinct is excessive, the mature ego, supported by analysis, fails in its task, just as the helpless ego failed formerly. Its control over instinct is improved, but it remains imperfect because the transformation in the defensive mechanism is only incomplete. There is nothing surprising in this, since the power of the instruments with which analysis operates is not unlimited but restricted, and the final upshot always depends on the relative strength of the psychical agencies which are struggling with one another.

No doubt it is desirable to shorten the duration of analytic treatment, but we can only achieve our therapeutic purpose by increasing the power of analysis to come to the assistance of the ego. Hypnotic influence seemed to be an excellent instrument for our purposes; but the reasons for our having to abandon it are well known. No substitute for hypnosis has yet been found. From this point of view we can understand how such a master of analysis as Ferenczi came to devote the last years of his life to therapeutic experiments, which, unhappily, proved to be vain.

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5027

IV

The two further questions - whether, while we are treating one instinctual conflict, we can protect a patient from future conflicts, and whether it is feasible and expedient, for prophylactic purposes, to stir up a conflict which is not at the time manifest - must be treated together; for obviously the first task can only be carried out in so far as the second one is - that is, in so far as a possible future conflict is turned into an actual present one upon which influence is then brought to bear. This new way of stating the problem is at bottom only an extension of the earlier one. Whereas in the first instance we were considering how to guard against a return of the same conflict, we are now considering how to guard against its possible replacement by another conflict. This sounds a very ambitious proposal, but all we are trying to do is to make clear what limits are set to the efficacy of analytic therapy.

However much our therapeutic ambition may be tempted to undertake such tasks, experience flatly rejects the notion. If an instinctual conflict is not a currently active one, is not manifesting itself, we cannot influence it even by analysis. The warning that we should let sleeping dogs lie, which we have so often heard in connection with our efforts to explore the psychical underworld, is peculiarly inapposite when applied to the conditions of mental life. For if the instincts are causing disturbances, it is a proof that the dogs are not sleeping; and if they seem really to be sleeping, it is not in our power to awaken them. This last statement, however, does not seem to be quite accurate and calls for a more detailed discussion. Let us consider what means we have at our disposal for turning an instinctual conflict which is at the moment latent into one which is currently active. Obviously there are only two things that we can do. We can bring about situations in which the conflict does become currently active, or we can content ourselves with discussing it in the analysis and pointing out the possibility of its arising. The first of these two alternatives can be carried out in two ways: in reality, or in the transference - in either case by exposing the patient to a certain amount of real suffering through frustration and the damming up of libido. Now it is true that we already make use of a technique of this kind in our ordinary analytic procedure. What would otherwise be the meaning of the rule that analysis must be carried out ‘in a state of frustration’? But this is a technique which we use in treating a conflict which is already currently active. We seek to bring this conflict to a head, to develop it to its highest pitch, in order to increase the instinctual force available for its solution. Analytic experience has taught us that the better is always the enemy of the good and that in every phase of the patient’s recovery we have to fight against his inertia, which is ready to be content with an incomplete solution.

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5028

If, however, what we are aiming at is a prophylactic treatment of instinctual conflicts that are not currently active but merely potential, it will not be enough to regulate sufferings which are already present in the patient and which he cannot avoid. We should have to make up our minds to provoke fresh sufferings in him; and this we have hitherto quite rightly left to fate. We should receive admonitions from all sides against the presumption of vying with fate in subjecting poor human creatures to such cruel experiments. And what sort of experiments would they be? Could we, for purposes of prophylaxis, take the responsibility of destroying a satisfactory marriage, or causing a patient to give up a post upon which his livelihood depends? Fortunately, we never find ourselves in the position of having to consider whether such interventions in the patient’s real life are justified; we do not possess the plenary powers which they would necessitate, and the subject of our therapeutic experiment would certainly refuse to co-operate in it. In practice, then, such a procedure is virtually excluded; but there are, besides, theoretical objections to it. For the work of analysis proceeds best if the patient’s pathogenic experiences belong to the past, so that his ego can stand at a distance from them. In states of acute crisis analysis is to all intents and purposes unusable. The ego’s whole interest is taken up by the painful reality and it withholds itself from analysis, which is attempting to go below the surface and uncover the influences of the past. To create a fresh conflict would thus only be to make the work of analysis longer and more difficult.

It will be objected that these remarks are quite unnecessary. Nobody thinks of purposely conjuring up new situations of suffering in order to make it possible for a latent instinctual conflict to be treated. This would not be much to boast of as a prophylactic achievement. We know, for instance, that a patient who has recovered from scarlet fever is immune to a return of the same illness; yet it never occurs to a doctor to take a healthy person who may possibly fall ill of scarlet fever and infect him with scarlet fever in order to make him immune to it. The protective measure must not produce the same situation of danger as is produced by the illness itself, but only something very much slighter, as is the case with vaccination against small-pox and many other similar procedures. In analytic prophylaxis against instinctual conflicts, therefore, the only methods which come into consideration are the other two which we have mentioned: the artificial production of new conflicts in the transference (conflicts which, after all, lack the character of reality), and the arousing of such conflicts in the patient’s imagination by talking to him about them and making him familiar with their possibility.

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5029

I do not know whether we can assert that the first of these two milder procedures is altogether ruled out in analysis. No experiments have been particularly made in this direction. But difficulties at once suggest themselves, which do not throw a very promising light on such an undertaking. In the first place, the choice of such situations for the transference is very limited. The patients cannot themselves bring all their conflicts into the transference; nor is the analyst able to call out all their possible instinctual conflicts from the transference situation. He may make them jealous or cause them to experience disappointments in love; but no technical purpose is required to bring this about. Such things happen of themselves in any case in most analyses. In the second place, we must not overlook the fact that all measures of this sort would oblige the analyst to behave in an unfriendly way to the patient, and this would have a damaging effect upon the affectionate attitude - upon the positive transference - which is the strongest motive for the patient’s taking a share in the joint work of analysis. Thus we should on no account expect very much from this procedure.

This therefore leaves only the one method open to us - the one which was in all probability the only one originally contemplated. We tell the patient about the possibilities of other instinctual conflicts, and we arouse his expectation that such conflicts may occur in him. What we hope is that this information and this warning will have the effect of activating in him one of the conflicts we have indicated, in a modest degree and yet sufficiently for treatment. But this time experience speaks with no uncertain voice. The expected result does not come about. The patient hears our message, but there is no response. He may think to himself: ‘This is very interesting, but I feel no trace of it.’ We have increased his knowledge, but altered nothing else in him. The situation is much the same as when people read psycho-analytic writings. The reader is ‘stimulated’ only by those passages which he feels apply to himself - that is, which concern conflicts that are active in him at the time. Everything else leaves him cold. We can have analogous experiences, I think, when we give children sexual enlightenment. I am far from maintaining that this is a harmful or unnecessary thing to do, but it is clear that the prophylactic effect of this liberal measure has been greatly over-estimated. After such enlightenment, children know something they did not know before, but they make no use of the new knowledge that has been presented to them. We come to see that they are not even in so great a hurry to sacrifice for this new knowledge the sexual theories which might be described as a natural growth and which they have constructed in harmony with, and dependence on, their imperfect libidinal organization - theories about the part played by the stork, about the nature of sexual intercourse and about the way in which babies are made. For a long time after they have been given sexual enlightenment they behave like primitive races who have had Christianity thrust upon them and who continue to worship their old idols in secret.

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5030

V

We started from the question of how we can shorten the inconveniently long duration of analytic treatment, and, still with this question of time in mind, we went on to consider whether it is possible to achieve a permanent cure or even to prevent future illness by prophylactic treatment. In doing so, we found that the factors which were decisive for the success of our therapeutic efforts were the influence of traumatic aetiology, the relative strength of the instincts which have to be controlled, and something which we have called an alteration of the ego. Only the second of these factors has been discussed by us in any detail, and in connection with it we have had occasion to recognize the paramount importance of the quantitative factor and to stress the claim of the metapsychological line of approach to be taken into account in any attempt at explanation.

Concerning the third factor, the alteration of the ego, we have as yet said nothing. When we turn our attention to it, the first impression we receive is that there is much to ask and much to answer here, and that what we have to say about it will prove to be very inadequate. This first impression is confirmed when we go further into the problem. As is well known, the analytic situation consists in our allying ourselves with the ego of the person under treatment, in order to subdue portions of his id which are uncontrolled - that is to say to include them in the synthesis of his ego. The fact that a co-operation of this kind habitually fails in the case of psychotics affords us a first solid footing for our judgement. The ego, if we are to be able to make such a pact with it, must be a normal one. But a normal ego of this sort is, like normality in general, an ideal fiction. The abnormal ego, which is unserviceable for our purposes, is unfortunately no fiction. Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent; and the degree of its remoteness from one end of the series and of its proximity to the other will furnish us with a provisional measure of what we have so indefinitely termed an ‘alteration of the ego’.

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5031

If we ask what is the source of the great variety of kinds and degrees of alteration of the ego, we cannot escape the first obvious alternative, that such alterations are either congenital or acquired. Of these, the second sort will be the easier to treat. If they are acquired, it will certainly have been in the course of development, starting from the first years of life. For the ego has to try from the very outset to fulfil its task of mediating between its id and the external world in the service of the pleasure principle, and to protect the id from the dangers of the external world. If, in the course of these efforts, the ego learns to adopt a defensive attitude towards its own id as well and to treat the latter’s instinctual demands as external dangers, this happens, at any rate in part, because it understands that a satisfaction of instinct would lead to conflicts with the external world. Thereafter, under the influence of education, the ego grows accustomed to removing the scene of the fight from outside to within and to mastering the internal danger before it has become an external one; and probably it is most often right in doing so. During this fight on two fronts - later there will be a third front as well - the ego makes use of various procedures for fulfilling its task, which, to put it in general terms, is to avoid danger, anxiety and unpleasure. We call these procedures ‘mechanisms of defence’. Our knowledge of them is not yet sufficiently complete. Anna Freud’s book (1936) has given us a first insight into their multiplicity and many-sided significance.

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5032

It was from one of those mechanisms, repression, that the study of neurotic processes took its whole start. There was never any doubt that repression was not the only procedure which the ego could employ for its purposes. Nevertheless, repression is something quite peculiar and is more sharply differentiated from the other mechanisms than they are from one another. I should like to make this relation to the other mechanisms clear by an analogy, though I know that in these matters analogies never carry us very far. Let us imagine what might have happened to a book, at a time when books were not printed in editions but were written out individually. We will suppose that a book of this kind contained statements which in later times were regarded as undesirable - as, for instance, according to Robert Eisler (1929), the writings of Flavius Josephus must have contained passages about Jesus Christ which were offensive to later Christendom. At the present day, the only defensive mechanism to which the official censorship could resort would be to confiscate and destroy every copy of the whole edition. At that time, however, various methods were used for making the book innocuous. One way would be for the offending passages to be thickly crossed through so that they were illegible. In that case they could not be transcribed, and the next copyist of the book would produce a text which was unexceptionable but which had gaps in certain passages, and so might be unintelligible in them. Another way, however, if the authorities were not satisfied with this, but wanted also to conceal any indication that the text had been mutilated, would be for them to proceed to distort the text. Single words would be left out or replaced by others, and new sentences interpolated. Best of all, the whole passage would be erased and a new one which said exactly the opposite put in its place. The next transcriber could then produce a text that aroused no suspicion but which was falsified. It no longer contained what the author wanted to say; and it is highly probable that the corrections had not been made in the direction of truth.

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5033

If the analogy is not pursued too strictly, we may say that repression has the same relation to the other methods of defence as omission has to distortion of the text, and we may discover in the different forms of this falsification parallels to the variety of ways in which the ego is altered. An attempt may be made to raise the objection that the analogy goes wrong in an essential point, for the distortion of a text is the work of a tendentious censorship, no counterpart to which is to be found in the development of the ego. But this is not so; for a tendentious purpose of this kind is to a great extent represented by the compelling force of the pleasure principle. The psychical apparatus is intolerant of unpleasure; it has to fend it off at all costs, and if the perception of reality entails unpleasure, that perception - that is, the truth - must be sacrificed. Where external dangers are concerned, the individual can help himself for some time by flight and by avoiding the situation of danger, until he is strong enough later on to remove the threat by actively altering reality. But one cannot flee from oneself; flight is no help against internal dangers. And for that reason the defensive mechanisms of the ego are condemned to falsify one’s internal perception and to give one only an imperfect and distorted picture of one’s id. In its relations to the id, therefore, the ego is paralysed by its restrictions or blinded by its errors; and the result of this in the sphere of psychical events can only be compared to being out walking in a country one does not know and without having a good pair of legs.

The mechanisms of defence serve the purpose of keeping off dangers. It cannot be disputed that they are successful in this; and it is doubtful whether the ego could do without them altogether during its development. But it is also certain that they may become dangers themselves. It sometimes turns out that the ego has paid too high a price for the services they render it. The dynamic expenditure necessary for maintaining them, and the restrictions of the ego which they almost invariably entail, prove a heavy burden on the psychical economy. Moreover, these mechanisms are not relinquished after they have assisted the ego during the difficult years of its development. No one individual, of course, makes use of all the possible mechanisms of defence. Each person uses no more than a selection of them. But these become fixated in his ego. They become regular modes of reaction of his character, which are repeated throughout his life whenever a situation occurs that is similar to the original one. This turns them into infantilisms, and they share the fate of so many institutions which attempt to keep themselves in existence after the time of their usefulness has passed. ‘Vernunft wird Unsinn, Wohltat Plage’¹ as the poet complains. The adult’s ego, with its increased strength, continues to defend itself against dangers which no longer exist in reality; indeed, it finds itself compelled to seek out those situations in reality which can serve as an approximate substitute for the original danger, so as to be able to justify, in relation to them, its maintaining its habitual modes of reaction. Thus we can easily understand how the defensive mechanisms, by bringing about an ever more extensive alienation from the external world and a permanent weakening of the ego, pave the way for, and encourage, the outbreak of neurosis.

¹ [‘Reason becomes unreason, kindness torment.’]

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5034

At the moment, however, we are not concerned with the pathogenic role of the defensive mechanisms. What we are trying to discover is what influence the alteration of the ego which corresponds to them has upon our therapeutic efforts. The material for an answer to this question is given in the volume by Anna Freud to which I have already referred. The essential point is that the patient repeats these modes of reaction during the work of analysis as well, that he produces them before our eyes, as it were. In fact, it is only in this way that we get to know them. This does not mean that they make analysis impossible. On the contrary, they constitute half of our analytic task. The other half, the one which was first tackled by analysis in its early days, is the uncovering of what is hidden in the id. During the treatment our therapeutic work is constantly swinging backwards and forwards like a pendulum between a piece of id-analysis and a piece of ego-analysis. In the one case we want to make something from the id conscious, in the other we want to correct something in the ego. The crux of the matter is that the defensive mechanisms directed against former danger recur in the treatment as resistances against recovery. It follows from this that the ego treats recovery itself as a new danger.

The therapeutic effect depends on making conscious what is repressed, in the widest sense of the word, in the id. We prepare the way for this making conscious by interpretations and constructions, but we have interpreted only for ourselves not for the patient so long as the ego holds on to its earlier defences and does not give up its resistances. Now these resistances, although they belong to the ego, are nevertheless unconscious and in some sense separated off within the ego. The analyst recognizes them more easily than he does the hidden material in the id. One might suppose that it would be sufficient to treat them like portions of the id and, by making them conscious, bring them into connection with the rest of the ego. In this way, we should suppose, one half of the task of analysis would be accomplished; we should not reckon on meeting with a resistance against the uncovering of resistances. But what happens is this. During the work on the resistances the ego withdraws - with a greater or less degree of seriousness - from the agreement on which the analytic situation is founded. The ego ceases to support our efforts at uncovering the id; it opposes them, disobeys the fundamental rule of analysis, and allows no further derivatives of the repressed to emerge. We cannot expect the patient to have a strong conviction of the curative power of analysis. He may have brought along with him a certain amount of confidence in his analyst, which will be strengthened to an effective point by the factors of the positive transference which will be aroused in him. Under the influence of the unpleasurable impulses which he feels as a result of the fresh activation of his defensive conflicts, negative transferences may now gain the upper hand and completely annul the analytic situation. The patient now regards the analyst as no more than a stranger who is making disagreeable demands on him, and he behaves towards him exactly like a child who does not like the stranger and does not believe anything he says. If the analyst tries to explain to the patient one of the distortions made by him for the purposes of defence, and to correct it, he finds him uncomprehending and inaccessible to sound arguments. Thus we see that there is a resistance against the uncovering of resistances, and the defensive mechanisms really do deserve the name which we gave them originally, before they had been more closely examined. They are resistances not only to the making conscious of contents of the id, but also to the analysis as a whole, and thus to recovery.

The effect brought about in the ego by the defences can rightly be described as an ‘alteration of the ego’ if by that we understand a deviation from the fiction of a normal ego which would guarantee unshakable loyalty to the work of analysis. It is easy, then, to accept the fact, shown by daily experience, that the outcome of an analytic treatment depends essentially on the strength and on the depth of root of these resistances that bring about an alteration of the ego. Once again we are confronted with the importance of the quantitative factor, and once again we are reminded that analysis can only draw upon definite and limited amounts of energy which have to be measured against the hostile forces. And it seems as if victory is in fact as a rule on the side of the big battalions.

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5035

VI

The next question we come to is whether every alteration of the ego - in our sense of the term - is acquired during the defensive struggles of the earliest years. There can be no doubt about the answer. We have no reason to dispute the existence and importance of original, innate distinguishing characteristics of the ego. This is made certain by the single fact that each person makes a selection from the possible mechanisms of defence, that he always uses a few only of them and always the same ones. This would seem to indicate that each ego is endowed from the first with individual dispositions and trends, though it is true that we cannot specify their nature or what determines them. Moreover, we know that we must not exaggerate the difference between inherited and acquired characters into an antithesis; what was acquired by our forefathers certainly forms an important part of what we inherit. When we speak of an ‘archaic heritage’ we are usually thinking only of the id and we seem to assume that at the beginning of the individual’s life no ego is as yet in existence. But we shall not overlook the fact that id and ego are originally one; nor does it imply any mystical overvaluation of heredity if we think it credible that, even before the ego has come into existence, the lines of development, trends and reactions which it will later exhibit are already laid down for it. The psychological peculiarities of families, races and nations, even in their attitude to analysis, allow of no other explanation. Indeed, more than this: analytic experience has forced on us a conviction that even particular psychical contents, such as symbolism, have no other sources than hereditary transmission, and researches in various fields of social anthropology, make it plausible to suppose that other, equally specialized precipitates left by early human development are also present in the archaic heritage.

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5036

With the recognition that the properties of the ego which we meet with in the form of resistances can equally well be determined by heredity as acquired in defensive struggles, the topographical distinction between what is ego and what is id loses much of its value for our investigation. If we advance a step further in our analytic experience, we come upon resistances of another kind, which we can no longer localize and which seem to depend on fundamental conditions in the mental apparatus. I can only give a few examples of this type of resistance; the whole field of enquiry is still bewilderingly strange and insufficiently explored. We come across people, for instance, to whom we should be inclined to attribute a special ‘adhesiveness of the libido’. The processes which the treatment sets in motion in them are so much slower than in other people because, apparently, they cannot make up their minds to detach libidinal cathexes from one object and displace them on to another, although we can discover no special reason for this cathectic loyalty. One meets with the opposite type of person, too, in whom the libido seems particularly mobile; it enters readily upon the new cathexes suggested by analysis, abandoning its former ones in exchange for them. The difference between the two types is comparable to the one felt by a sculptor, according to whether he works in hard stone or soft clay. Unfortunately, in this second type the results of analysis often turn out to be very impermanent: the new cathexes are soon given up once more, and we have an impression, not of having worked in clay, but of having written on water. In the words of the proverb: ‘Soon got, soon gone.’¹

¹ [‘Wie gewonnen, so zerronnen.’]

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5037

In another group of cases we are surprised by an attitude in our patients which can only be put down to a depletion of the plasticity, the capacity for change and further development, which we should ordinarily expect. We are, it is true, prepared to find in analysis a certain amount of psychical inertia. When the work of analysis has opened up new paths for an instinctual impulse, we almost invariably observe that the impulse does not enter upon them without marked hesitation. We have called this behaviour, perhaps not quite correctly, ‘resistance from the id’. But with the patients I here have in mind, all the mental processes, relationships and distributions of force are unchangeable, fixed and rigid. One finds the same thing in very old people, in which case it is explained as being due to what is described as force of habit or an exhaustion of receptivity - a kind of psychical entropy. But we are dealing here with people who are still young. Our theoretical knowledge does not seem adequate to give a correct explanation of such types. Probably some temporal characteristics are concerned - some alterations of a rhythm of development in psychical life which we have not yet appreciated.

In yet another group of cases the distinguishing characteristics of the ego, which are to be held responsible as sources of resistance against analytic treatment and as impediments to therapeutic success, may spring from different and deeper roots. Here we are dealing with the ultimate things which psychological research can learn about: the behaviour of the two primal instincts, their distribution, mingling and defusion - things which we cannot think of as being confined to a single province of the mental apparatus, the id, the ego or the super-ego. No stronger impression arises from the resistances during the work of analysis than of there being a force which is defending itself by every possible means against recovery and which is absolutely resolved to hold on to illness and suffering. One portion of this force has been recognized by us, undoubtedly with justice, as the sense of guilt and need for punishment, and has been localized by us in the ego’s relation to the super-ego. But this is only the portion of it which is, as it were, psychically bound by the super-ego and thus becomes recognizable; other quotas of the same force, whether bound or free, may be at work in other, unspecified places. If we take into consideration the total picture made up of the phenomena of masochism immanent in so many people, the negative therapeutic reaction and the sense of guilt found in so many neurotics, we shall no longer be able to adhere to the belief that mental events are exclusively governed by the desire for pleasure. These phenomena are unmistakable indications of the presence of a power in mental life which we call the instinct of aggression or of destruction according to its aims, and which we trace back to the original death instinct of living matter. It is not a question of an antithesis between an optimistic and a pessimistic theory of life. Only by the concurrent or mutually opposing action of the two primal instincts - Eros and the death instinct -, never by one or the other alone, can we explain the rich multiplicity of the phenomena of life.

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5038

How parts of these two classes of instincts combine to fulfil the various vital functions, under what conditions such combinations grow looser or break up, to what disturbances these changes correspond and with what feelings the perceptual scale of the pleasure principle replies to them - these are problems whose elucidation would be the most rewarding achievement of psychological research. For the moment we must bow to the superiority of the forces against which we see our efforts come to nothing. Even to exert a psychical influence on simple masochism is a severe tax upon our powers.

In studying the phenomena which testify to the activity of the destructive instinct, we are not confined to observations on pathological material. Numerous facts of normal mental life call for an explanation of this kind, and the sharper our eye grows, the more copiously they strike us. The subject is too new and too important for me to treat it as a side-issue in this discussion. I shall therefore content myself with selecting a few sample cases.

Here is one instance. It is well known that at all periods there have been, as there still are, people who can take as their sexual objects members of their own sex as well as of the opposite one, without the one trend interfering with the other. We call such people bisexuals, and we accept their existence without feeling much surprise about it. We have come to learn, however, that every human being is bisexual in this sense and that his libido is distributed, either in a manifest or a latent fashion, over objects of both sexes. But we are struck by the following point. Whereas in the first class of people the two trends have got on together without clashing, in the second and more numerous class they are in a state of irreconcilable conflict. A man’s heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa. If the former is the stronger it succeeds in keeping the latter latent and forcing it away from satisfaction in reality. On the other hand, there is no greater danger for a man’s heterosexual function than its being disturbed by his latent homosexuality. We might attempt to explain this by saying that each individual only has a certain quota of libido at his disposal, for which the two rival trends have to struggle. But it is not clear why the rivals do not always divide up the available quota of libido between them according to their relative strength, since they are able to do so in a number of cases. We are forced to the conclusion that the tendency to a conflict is something special, something which is newly added to the situation, irrespective of the quantity of libido. An independently-emerging tendency to conflict of this sort can scarcely be attributed to anything but the intervention of an element of free aggressiveness.

If we recognize the case we are discussing as an expression of the destructive or aggressive instinct, the question at once arises whether this view should not be extended to other instances of conflict, and, indeed, whether all that we know about psychical conflict should not be revised from this new angle. After all, we assume that in the course of man’s development from a primitive state to a civilized one his aggressiveness undergoes a very considerable degree of internalization or turning inwards; if so, his internal conflicts would certainly be the proper equivalent for the external struggles which have then ceased. I am well aware that the dualistic theory according to which an instinct of death or of destruction or aggression claims equal rights as a partner with Eros as manifested in the libido, has found little sympathy and has not really been accepted even among psycho-analysts. This made me all the more pleased when not long ago I came upon this theory of mine in the writings of one of the great thinkers of ancient Greece. I am very ready to give up the prestige of originality for the sake of such a confirmation, especially as I can never be certain, in view of the wide extent of my reading in early years, whether what I took for a new creation might not be an effect of cryptomnesia.

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5039

Empedocles of Acragas (Girgenti),¹ born about 495 B.C., is one of the grandest and most remarkable figures in the history of Greek civilization. The activities of his many-sided personality pursued the most varied directions. He was an investigator and a thinker, a prophet and a magician, a politician, a philanthropist and a physician with a knowledge of natural science. He was said to have freed the town of Selinunte from malaria, and his contemporaries revered him as a god. His mind seems to have united the sharpest contrasts. He was exact and sober in his physical and physiological researches, yet he did not shrink from the obscurities of mysticism, and built up cosmic speculations of astonishingly imaginative boldness. Capelle compares him with Dr. Faust ‘to whom many a secret was revealed’. Born as he was at a time when the realm of science was not yet divided into so many provinces, some of his theories must inevitably strike us as primitive. He explained the variety of things by the mixture of the four elements, earth, air, fire and water. He held that all nature was animate, and he believed in the transmigration of souls. But he also included in his theoretical body of knowledge such modern ideas as the gradual evolution of living creatures, the survival of the fittest and a recognition of the part played by chance (τύχη) in that evolution.

But the theory of Empedocles which especially deserves our interest is one which approximates so closely to the psycho-analytic theory of the instincts that we should be tempted to maintain that the two are identical, if it were not for the difference that the Greek philosopher’s theory is a cosmic phantasy while ours is content to claim biological validity. At the same time, the fact that Empedocles ascribes to the universe the same animate nature as to individual organisms robs this difference of much of its importance.

¹ I have based what follows on a work by Wilhelm Capelle (1935).

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5040

The philosopher taught that two principles governed events in the life of the universe and in the life of the mind, and that those principles were everlastingly at war with each other. He called them φιλία (love) and υεΐκος (strife). Of these two powers - which he conceived of as being at bottom ‘natural forces operating like instincts, and by no means intelligences with a conscious purpose’¹ - the one strives to agglomerate the primal particles of the four elements into a single unity, while the other, on the contrary, seeks to undo all those fusions and to separate the primal particles of the elements from one another. Empedocles thought of the process of the universe as a continuous, never-ceasing alternation of periods, in which the one or the other of the two fundamental forces gain the upper hand, so that at one time love and at another strife puts its purpose completely into effect and dominates the universe, after which the other, vanquished, side asserts itself and in its turn defeats its partner.

The two fundamental principles of Empedocles - φιλία and υεΐκος - are, both in name and function, the same as our two primal instincts, Eros and destructiveness, the first of which endeavours to combine what exists into ever greater unities, while the second endeavours to dissolve those combinations and to destroy the structures to which they have given rise. We shall not be surprised, however, to find that, on its re-emergence after two and a half millennia, this theory has been altered in some of its features. Apart from the restriction to the biophysical field which is imposed on us, we no longer have as our basic substances the four elements of Empedocles; what is living has been sharply differentiated from what is inanimate, and we no longer think of the mingling and separation of particles of substance, but of the soldering together and defusion of instinctual components. Moreover, we have provided some sort of biological basis for the principle of ‘strife’ by tracing back our instinct of destruction to the death instinct, to the urge of what is living to return to an inanimate state. This is not to deny that an analogous instinct already existed earlier, nor, of course, to assert that an instinct of this sort only came into existence with the emergence of life. And no one can foresee in what guise the nucleus of truth contained in the theory of Empedocles will present itself to later understanding.

¹ Capelle (1935), 186.

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5041

VII

In 1927, Ferenczi read an instructive paper on the problem of the termination of analyses. It ends with a comforting assurance that ‘analysis is not an endless process, but one which can be brought to a natural end with sufficient skill and patience on the analyst’s part’. The paper as a whole, however, seems to me to be in the nature of a warning not to aim at shortening analysis but at deepening it. Ferenczi makes the further important point that success depends very largely on the analyst’s having learnt sufficiently from his own ‘errors and mistakes’ and having got the better of ‘the weak points in his own personality’. This provides an important supplement to our theme. Among the factors which influence the prospects of analytic treatment and add to its difficulties in the same manner as the resistances, must be reckoned not only the nature of the patient’s ego but the individuality of the analyst.

It cannot be disputed that analysts in their own personalities have not invariably come up to the standard of psychical normality to which they wish to educate their patients. Opponents of analysis often point to this fact with scorn and use it as an argument to show the uselessness of analytic exertions. We might reject this criticism as making unjustifiable demands. Analysts are people who have learned to practise a particular art; alongside of this, they may be allowed to be human beings like anyone else. After all, nobody maintains that a physician is incapable of treating internal diseases if his own internal organs are not sound; on the contrary, it may be argued that there are certain advantages in a man who is himself threatened with tuberculosis specializing in the treatment of persons suffering from that disease. But the cases are not on all fours. So long as he is capable of practising at all, a doctor suffering from disease of the lungs or heart is not handicapped either in diagnosing or treating internal complaints; whereas the special conditions of analytic work do actually cause the analyst’s own defects to interfere with his making a correct assessment of the state of things in his patient and reacting to them in a useful way. It is therefore reasonable to expect of an analyst, as a part of his qualifications, a considerable degree of mental normality and correctness. In addition, he must possess some kind of superiority, so that in certain analytic situations he can act as a model for his patient and in others as a teacher. And finally we must not forget that the analytic relationship is based on a love of truth - that is, on a recognition of reality - and that it precludes any kind of sham or deceit.

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5042

Here let us pause for a moment to assure the analyst that he has our sincere sympathy in the very exacting demands he has to fulfil in carrying out his activities. It almost looks as if analysis were the third of those ‘impossible’ professions in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results. The other two, which have been known much longer, are education and government. Obviously we cannot demand that the prospective analyst should be a perfect being before he takes up analysis, in other words that only persons of such high and rare perfection should enter the profession. But where and how is the poor wretch to acquire the ideal qualifications which he will need in his profession? The answer is, in an analysis of himself, with which his preparation for his future activity begins. For practical reasons this analysis can only be short and incomplete. Its main object is to enable his teacher to make a judgement as to whether the candidate can be accepted for further training. It has accomplished its purpose if it gives the learner a firm conviction of the existence of the unconscious, if it enables him, when repressed material emerges, to perceive in himself things which would otherwise be incredible to him, and if it shows him a first sample of the technique which has proved to be the only effective one in analytic work. This alone would not suffice for his instruction; but we reckon on the stimuli that he has received in his own analysis not ceasing when it ends and on the processes of remodelling the ego continuing spontaneously in the analysed subject and making use of all subsequent experiences in this newly-acquired sense. This does in fact happen, and in so far as it happens it makes the analysed subject qualified to be an analyst himself.

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5043

Unfortunately something else happens as well. In trying to describe this, one can only rely on impressions. Hostility on the one side and partisanship on the other create an atmosphere which is not favourable to objective investigation. It seems that a number of analysts learn to make use of defensive mechanisms which allow them to divert the implications and demands of analysis from themselves (probably by directing them on to other people), so that they themselves remain as they are and are able to withdraw from the critical and corrective influence of analysis. Such an event may justify the words of the writer who warns us that when a man is endowed with power it is hard for him not to misuse it.¹ Sometimes, when we try to understand this, we are driven into drawing a disagreeable analogy with the effect of X-rays on people who handle them without taking special precautions. It would not be surprising if the effect of a constant preoccupation with all the repressed material which struggles for freedom in the human mind were to stir up in the analyst as well all the instinctual demands which he is otherwise able to keep under suppression. These, too, are ‘dangers of analysis’, though they threaten, not the passive but the active partner in the analytic situation; and we ought not to neglect to meet them. There can be no doubt how this is to be done. Every analyst should periodically - at intervals of five years or so - submit himself to analysis once more, without feeling ashamed of taking this step. This would mean, then, that not only the therapeutic analysis of patients but his own analysis would change from a terminable into an interminable task.

At this point, however, we must guard against a misconception. I am not intending to assert that analysis is altogether an endless business. Whatever one’s theoretical attitude to the question may be, the termination of an analysis is, I think a practical matter. Every experienced analyst will be able to recall a number of cases in which he has bidden his patient a permanent farewell rebus bene gestis². In cases of what is known as character-analysis there is a far smaller discrepancy between theory and practice. Here it is not easy to foresee a natural end, even if one avoids any exaggerated expectations and sets the analysis no excessive tasks. Our aim will not be to rub off every peculiarity of human character for the sake of a schematic ‘normality’, nor yet to demand that the person who has been ‘thoroughly analysed’ shall feel no passions and develop no internal conflicts. The business of the analysis is to secure the best possible psychological conditions for the functions of the ego; with that it has discharged its task.

¹ Anatole France, La révolte des anges.

² [‘Things having gone well.’]

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5044

VIII

Both in therapeutic and in character-analyses we notice that two themes come into especial prominence and give the analyst an unusual amount of trouble. It soon becomes evident that a general principle is at work here. The two themes are tied to the distinction between the sexes; one is as characteristic of males as the other is of females. In spite of the dissimilarity of their content, there is an obvious correspondence between them. Something which both sexes have in common has been forced, by the difference between the sexes, into different forms of expression.

The two corresponding themes are in the female, an envy for the penis - a positive striving to possess a male genital - and, in the male, a struggle against his passive or feminine attitude to another male. What is common to the two themes was singled out at an early date by psycho-analytic nomenclature as an attitude towards the castration complex. Subsequently Alfred Adler brought the term ‘masculine protest’ into current use. It fits the case of males perfectly; but I think that, from the start, ‘repudiation of femininity’ would have been the correct description of this remarkable feature in the psychical life of human beings.

In trying to introduce this factor into the structure of our theory, we must not overlook the fact that it cannot, by its very nature, occupy the same position in both sexes. In males the striving to be masculine is completely ego-syntonic from the first; the passive attitude, since it presupposes an acceptance of castration, is energetically repressed, and often its presence is only indicated by excessive overcompensations. In females, too, the striving to be masculine is ego-syntonic at a certain period - namely in the phallic phase, before the development to femininity has set in. But it then succumbs to the momentous process of repression whose outcome, as has so often been shown, determines the fortunes of a woman’s femininity. A great deal depends on whether a sufficient amount of her masculinity complex escapes repression and exercises a permanent influence on her character. Normally, large portions of the complex are transformed and contribute to the construction of her femininity: the appeased wish for a penis is destined to be converted into a wish for a baby and for a husband, who possesses a penis. It is strange, however, how often we find that the wish for masculinity has been retained in the unconscious and, from out of its state of repression, exercises a disturbing influence.

As will be seen from what I have said, in both cases it is the attitude proper to the opposite sex which has succumbed to repression. I have already stated elsewhere¹ that it was Wilhelm Fliess who called my attention to this point. Fliess was inclined to regard the antithesis between the sexes as the true cause and primal motive force of repression. I am only repeating what I said then in disagreeing with his view, when I decline to sexualize repression in this way - that is, to explain it on biological grounds instead of on purely psychological ones.

¹ ‘"A Child is being Beaten"’ (1919e).

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5045

The paramount importance of these two themes - in females the wish for a penis and in males the struggle against passivity - did not escape Ferenczi’s notice. In the paper read by him in 1927 he made it a requirement that in every successful analysis those two complexes must have been mastered.¹ I should like to add that, speaking from my own experience, I think that in this Ferenczi was asking a very great deal. At no other point in one’s analytic work does one suffer more from an oppressive feeling that all one’s repeated efforts have been in vain, and from a suspicion that one has been ‘preaching to the winds’, than when one is trying to persuade a woman to abandon her wish for a penis on the ground of its being unrealizable or when one is seeking to convince a man that a passive attitude to men does not always signify castration and that it is indispensable in many relationships in life. The rebellious overcompensation of the male produces one of the strongest transference-resistances. He refuses to subject himself to a father-substitute, or to feel indebted to him for anything, and consequently he refuses to accept his recovery from the doctor. No analogous transference can arise from the female’s wish for a penis, but it is the source of outbreaks of severe depression in her, owing to an internal conviction that the analysis will be of no use and that nothing can be done to help her. And we can only agree that she is right, when we learn that her strongest motive in coming for treatment was the hope that, after all, she might still obtain a male organ, the lack of which was so painful to her.

¹ ‘. . . Every male patient must attain a feeling of equality in relation to the physician as a sign that he has overcome his fear of castration; every female patient, if her neurosis is to be regarded as fully disposed of, must have got rid of her masculinity complex and must emotionally accept without a trace of resentment the implications of her female role.’ (Ferenczi, 1928, 8.)

Analysis Terminable And Interminable

5046

But we also learn from this that it is not important in what form the resistance appears, whether as a transference or not. The decisive thing remains that the resistance prevents any change from taking place - that everything stays as it was. We often have the impression that with the wish for a penis and the masculine protest we have penetrated through all the psychological strata and have reached bedrock, and that thus our activities are at an end. This is probably true, since, for the psychical field, the biological field does in fact play the part of the underlying bedrock. The repudiation of femininity can be nothing else than a biological fact, a part of the great riddle of sex.¹ It would be hard to say whether and when we have succeeded in mastering this factor in an analytic treatment. We can only console ourselves with the certainty that we have given the person analysed every possible encouragement to re-examine and alter his attitude to it.

¹ We must not be misled by the term ‘masculine protest’ into supposing that what the man is repudiating is his passive attitude - what might be called the social aspect of femininity. Such a view is contradicted by an observation that is easily verifiable - namely that such men often display a masochistic attitude - a state that amounts to bondage - towards women. What they reject is not passivity in general, but passivity towards a male. In other words, the ‘masculine protest’ is in fact nothing else than castration anxiety.

5047

CONSTRUCTIONS IN ANALYSIS

(1937)

5048

Intentionally left blank

5049

CONSTRUCTIONS IN ANALYSIS

I

It has always seemed to me to be greatly to the credit of a certain well-known man of science that he treated psycho-analysis fairly at a time when most other people felt themselves under no such obligation. On one occasion, nevertheless, he gave expression to an opinion upon analytic technique which was at once derogatory and unjust. He said that in giving interpretations to a patient we treat him upon the famous principle of ‘Heads I win, tails you lose’.¹ That is to say, if the patient agrees with us, then the interpretation is right; but if he contradicts us, that is only a sign of his resistance, which again shows that we are right. In this way we are always in the right against the poor helpless wretch whom we are analysing, no matter how he may respond to what we put forward. Now, since it is in fact true that a ‘No’ from one of our patients is not as a rule enough to make us abandon an interpretation as incorrect, a revelation such as this of the nature of our technique has been most welcome to the opponents of analysis. It is therefore worth while to give a detailed account of how we are accustomed to arrive at an assessment of the ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ of our patients during analytic treatment - of their expression of agreement or of denial. The practising analyst will naturally learn nothing in the course of this apologia that he does not know already.

¹ [In English in the original.]

Constructions In Analysis

5050

It is familiar ground that the work of analysis aims at inducing the patient to give up the repressions (using the word in the widest sense) belonging to his early development and to replace them by reactions of a sort that would correspond to a psychically mature condition. With this purpose in view he must be brought to recollect certain experiences and the affective impulses called up by them which he has for the time being forgotten. We know that his present symptoms and inhibitions are the consequences of repressions of this kind: thus that they are a substitute for these things that he has forgotten. What sort of material does he put at our disposal which we can make use of to put him on the way to recovering the lost memories? All kinds of things. He gives us fragments of these memories in his dreams, invaluable in themselves but seriously distorted as a rule by all the factors concerned in the formation of dreams. Again, he produces ideas, if he gives himself up to ‘free association’, in which we can discover allusions to the repressed experiences and derivatives of the suppressed affective impulses as well as of the reactions against them. And, finally, there are hints of repetitions of the affects belonging to the repressed material to be found in actions performed by the patient, some fairly important, some trivial, both inside and outside the analytic situation. Our experience has shown that the relation of transference, which becomes established towards the analyst, is particularly calculated to favour the return of these emotional connections. It is out of such raw material - if we may so describe it - that we have to put together what we are in search of.

What we are in search of is a picture of the patient’s forgotten years that shall be alike trustworthy and in all essential respects complete. But at this point we are reminded that the work of analysis consists of two quite different portions, that it is carried on in two separate localities, that it involves two people, to each of whom a distinct task is assigned. It may for a moment seem strange that such a fundamental fact should not have been pointed out long ago; but it will immediately be perceived that there was nothing being kept back in this, that it is a fact which is universally known and, as it were, self-evident and is merely being brought into relief here and separately examined for a particular purpose. We all know that the person who is being analysed has to be induced to remember something that has been experienced by him and repressed; and the dynamic determinants of this process are so interesting that the other portion of the work, the task performed by the analyst, has been pushed into the background. The analyst has neither experienced nor repressed any of the material under consideration; his task cannot be to remember anything. What then is his task? His task is to make out what has been forgotten from the traces which it has left behind or, more correctly, to construct it. The time and manner in which he conveys his constructions to the person who is being analysed, as well as the explanations with which he accompanies them, constitute the link between the two portions of the work of analysis, between his own part and that of the patient.

Constructions In Analysis

5051

His work of construction, or, if it is preferred, of reconstruction, resembles to a great extent an archaeologist’s excavation of some dwelling-place that has been destroyed and buried or of some ancient edifice. The two processes are in fact identical, except that the analyst works under better conditions and has more material at his command to assist him, since what he is dealing with is not something destroyed but something that is still alive - and perhaps for another reason as well. But just as the archaeologist builds up the walls of the building from the foundations that have remained standing, determines the number and position of the columns from depressions in the floor and reconstructs the mural decorations and paintings from the remains found in the debris, so does the analyst proceed when he draws his inferences from the fragments of memories, from the associations and from the behaviour of the subject of the analysis. Both of them have an undisputed right to reconstruct by means of supplementing and combining the surviving remains. Both of them, moreover, are subject to many of the same difficulties and sources of error. One of the most ticklish problems that confronts the archaeologist is notoriously the determination of the relative age of his finds; and if an object makes its appearance in some particular level, it often remains to be decided whether it belongs to that level or whether it was carried down to that level owing to some subsequent disturbance. It is easy to imagine the corresponding doubts that arise in the case of analytic constructions.

The analyst, as we have said, works under more favourable conditions than the archaeologist since he has at his disposal material which can have no counterpart in excavations, such as the repetitions of reactions dating from infancy and all that is indicated by the transference in connection with these repetitions. But in addition to this it must be borne in mind that the excavator is dealing with destroyed objects of which large and important portions have quite certainly been lost, by mechanical violence, by fire and by plundering. No amount of effort can result in their discovery and lead to their being united with the surviving remains. The one and only course open is that of reconstruction, which for this reason can often reach only a certain degree of probability. But it is different with the psychical object whose early history the analyst is seeking to recover. Here we are regularly met by a situation which with the archaeological object occurs only in such rare circumstances as those of Pompeii or of the tomb of Tut’ankhamun. All of the essentials are preserved; even things that seem completely forgotten are present somehow and somewhere, and have merely been buried and made inaccessible to the subject. Indeed, it may, as we know, be doubted whether any psychical structure can really be the victim of total destruction. It depends only upon analytic technique whether we shall succeed in bringing what is concealed completely to light. There are only two other facts that weigh against the extraordinary advantage which is thus enjoyed by the work of analysis: namely, that psychical objects are incomparably more complicated than the excavator’s material ones and that we have insufficient knowledge of what we may expect to find, since their finer structure contains so much that is still mysterious. But our comparison between the two forms of work can go no further than this; for the main difference between them lies in the fact that for the archaeologist the reconstruction is the aim and end of his endeavours while for analysis the construction is only a preliminary labour.

Constructions In Analysis

5052

II

It is not, however, a preliminary labour in the sense that the whole of it must be completed before the next piece of work can be begun, as, for instance, is the case with house-building, where all the walls must be erected and all the windows inserted before the internal decoration of the rooms can be taken in hand. Every analyst knows that things happen differently in an analytic treatment and that there both kinds of work are carried on side by side, the one kind being always a little ahead and the other following upon it. The analyst finishes a piece of construction and communicates it to the subject of the analysis so that it may work upon him; he then constructs a further piece out of the fresh material pouring in upon him, deals with it in the same way and proceeds in this alternating fashion until the end. If, in accounts of analytic technique, so little is said about ‘constructions’, that is because ‘interpretations’ and their effects are spoken of instead. But I think that ‘construction’ is by far the more appropriate description. ‘Interpretation’ applies to something that one does to some single element of the material, such as an association or a parapraxis. But it is a ‘construction’ when one lays before the subject of the analysis a piece of his early history that he has forgotten, in some such way as this: ‘Up to your nth year you regarded yourself as the sole and unlimited possessor of your mother; then came another baby and brought you grave disillusionment. Your mother left you for some time, and even after her reappearance she was never again devoted to you exclusively. Your feelings towards your mother became ambivalent, your father gained a new importance for you,’ . . . and so on.

Constructions In Analysis

5053

In the present paper our attention will be turned exclusively to this preliminary labour performed by constructions. And here, at the very start, the question arises of what guarantee we have while we are working on these constructions that we are not making mistakes and risking the success of the treatment by putting forward some construction that is incorrect. It may seem that no general reply can in my event be given to this question; but even before discussing it we may lend our ear to some comforting information that is afforded by analytic experience. For we learn from it that no damage is done if, for once in a way, we make a mistake and offer the patient a wrong construction as the probable historical truth. A waste of time is, of course, involved, and anyone who does nothing but present the patient with false combinations will neither create a very good impression on him nor carry the treatment very far; but a single mistake of the sort can do no harm. What in fact occurs in such an event is rather that the patient remains as though he were untouched by what has been said and reacts to it with neither a ‘Yes’ nor a ‘No’. This may possibly mean no more than that his reaction is postponed; but if nothing further develops we may conclude that we have made a mistake and we shall admit as much to the patient at some suitable opportunity without sacrificing any of our authority. Such an opportunity will arise when some new material has come to light which allows us to make a better construction and so to correct our error. In this way the false construction drops out, as if it had never been made; and, indeed, we often get an impression as though, to borrow the words of Polonius, our bait of falsehood had taken a carp of truth. The danger of our leading a patient astray by suggestion, by persuading him to accept things which we ourselves believe but which he ought not to, has certainly been enormously exaggerated. An analyst would have had to behave very incorrectly before such a misfortune could overtake him; above all, he would have to blame himself with not allowing his patients to have their say. I can assert without boasting that such an abuse of ‘suggestion’ has never occurred in my practice.

Constructions In Analysis

5054

It already follows from what has been said that we are not at all inclined to neglect the indications that can be inferred from the patient’s reaction when we have offered him one of our constructions. The point must be gone into in detail. It is true that we do not accept the ‘No’ of a person under analysis at its face value; but neither do we allow his ‘Yes’ to pass. There is no justification for accusing us of invariably twisting his remarks into a confirmation. In reality things are not so simple and we do not make it so easy for ourselves to come to a conclusion.

A plain ‘Yes’ from a patient is by no means unambiguous. It can indeed signify that he recognizes the correctness of the construction that has been presented to him; but it can also be meaningless, or can even deserve to be described as ‘hypocritical’, since it may be convenient for his resistance to make use of an assent in such circumstances in order to prolong the concealment of a truth that has not been discovered. The ‘Yes’ has no value unless it is followed by indirect confirmations, unless the patient, immediately after his ‘Yes’, produces new memories which complete and extend the construction. Only in such an event do we consider that the ‘Yes’ has dealt completely with the subject under discussion.

A ‘No’ from a person in analysis is quite as ambiguous as a ‘Yes’, and is indeed of even less value. In some rare cases it turns out to be the expression of a legitimate dissent. Far more frequently it expresses a resistance which may have been evoked by the subject-matter of the construction that has been put forward but which may just as easily have arisen from some other factor in the complex analytic situation. Thus, a patient’s ‘No’ is no evidence of the correctness of a construction, though it is perfectly compatible with it. Since every such construction is an incomplete one, since it covers only a small fragment of the forgotten events, we are free to suppose that the patient is not in fact disputing what has been said to him but is basing his contradiction upon the part that has not yet been uncovered. As a rule he will not give his assent until he has learnt the whole truth - which often covers a very great deal of ground. So that the only safe interpretation of his ‘No’ is that it points to incompleteness; there can be no doubt that the construction has not told him everything.

Constructions In Analysis

5055

It appears, therefore, that the direct utterances of the patient after he has been offered a construction afford very little evidence upon the question whether we have been right or wrong. It is of all the greater interest that there are indirect forms of confirmation which are in every respect trustworthy. One of these is a form of words that is used (as though by general agreement) with very little variation by the most different people: ‘I didn’t ever think’ (or ‘I shouldn’t ever have thought’) ‘that’ (or ‘of that’). This can be translated without any hesitation into: ‘Yes, you’re right this time - about my unconscious.’ Unfortunately this formula, which is so welcome to the analyst, reaches his ears more often after single interpretations than after he has produced an extensive construction. An equally valuable confirmation is implied (expressed this time positively) when the patient answers with an association which contains something similar or analogous to the content of the construction. Instead of taking an example of this from an analysis (which would be easy to find but lengthy to describe) I prefer to give an account of a small extra-analytical experience which presents a similar situation so strikingly that it produces an almost comic effect. It concerned one of my colleagues who - it was long ago - had chosen me as a consultant in his medical practice. One day, however, he brought his young wife to see me, as she was causing him trouble. She refused on all sorts of pretexts to have sexual relations with him, and what he expected of me was evidently that I should lay before her the consequences of her ill-advised behaviour. I went into the matter and explained to her that her refusal would probably have unfortunate results for her husband’s health or would lay him open to temptations that might lead to a break-up of their marriage. At this point he suddenly interrupted me with the remark: ‘The Englishman you diagnosed as suffering from a cerebral tumour has died too.’ At first the remark seemed incomprehensible; the ‘too’ in his sentence was a mystery, for we had not been speaking of anyone else who had died. But a short time afterwards I understood. The man was evidently intending to confirm what I had been saying; he was meaning to say: ‘Yes, you’re certainly quite right. Your diagnosis was confirmed in the case of the other patient too.’ It was an exact parallel to the indirect confirmations that we obtain in analysis from associations. I will not attempt to deny that there were other thoughts as well, put on one side by my colleague, which had a share in determining his remark.

Constructions In Analysis

5056

Indirect confirmation from associations that fit in with the content of a construction - that give us a ‘too’ like the one in my story - provides a valuable basis for judging whether the construction is likely to be confirmed in the course of the analysis. It is particularly striking when, by means of a parapraxis, a confirmation of this kind insinuates itself into a direct denial. I once published elsewhere a nice example of this. The name ‘Jauner’ (a familiar one in Vienna) came up repeatedly in one of my patient’s dreams without a sufficient explanation appearing in his associations. I finally put forward the interpretation that when he said ‘Jauner’ he probably meant ‘Gauner’, whereupon he promptly replied: ‘That seems to me too "jewagt".’ Or there was the other instance, in which, when I suggested to a patient that he considered a particular fee too high, he meant to deny the suggestion with the words ‘Ten dollars mean nothing to me’ but instead of dollars put in a coin of lower value and said ‘ten shillings’.

If an analysis is dominated by powerful factors that impose a negative therapeutic reaction, such as a sense of guilt, a masochistic need for suffering or repugnance to receiving help from the analyst, the patient’s behaviour after he has been offered a construction often makes it very easy for us to arrive at the decision that we are in search of. If the construction is wrong, there is no change in the patient; but if it is right or gives an approximation to the truth, he reacts to it with an unmistakable aggravation of his symptoms and of his general condition.

We may sum the matter up by asserting that there is no justification for the reproach that we neglect or underestimate the importance of the attitude taken up by those under analysis towards our constructions. We pay attention to them and often derive valuable information from them. But these reactions on the part of the patient are rarely unambiguous and give no opportunity for a final judgement. Only the further course of the analysis enables us to decide whether our constructions are correct or unserviceable. We do not pretend that an individual construction is anything more than a conjecture which awaits examination, confirmation or rejection. We claim no authority for it, we require no direct agreement from the patient, nor do we argue with him if at first he denies it. In short, we conduct ourselves on the model of a familiar figure in one of Nestroy’s farces - the manservant who has a single answer on his lips to every question or objection: ‘It will all become clear in the course of future developments.’

Constructions In Analysis

5057

III

How this occurs in the process of the analysis - the way in which a conjecture of ours is transformed into the patient’s conviction - this is hardly worth describing. All of it is familiar to every analyst from his daily experience and is intelligible without difficulty. Only one point requires investigation and explanation. The path that starts from the analyst’s construction ought to end in the patient’s recollection; but it does not always lead so far. Quite often we do not succeed in bringing the patient to recollect what has been repressed. Instead of that, if the analysis is carried out correctly, we produce in him an assured conviction of the truth of the construction which achieves the same therapeutic result as a recaptured memory. The problem of what the circumstances are in which this occurs and of how it is possible that what appears to be an incomplete substitute should nevertheless produce a complete result - all of this is matter for a later enquiry.

I shall conclude this brief paper with a few remarks which open up a wider perspective. I have been struck by the manner in which, in certain analyses, the communication of an obviously apt construction has evoked in the patients a surprising and at first incomprehensible phenomenon. They have had lively recollections called up in them - which they themselves have described as ‘ultra-clear’ - but what they have recollected has not been the event that was the subject of the construction but details relating to that subject. For instance, they have recollected with abnormal sharpness the faces of the people involved in the construction or the rooms in which something of the sort might have happened, or, a step further away, the furniture in such rooms - on the subject of which the construction had naturally no possibility of any knowledge. This has occurred both in dreams immediately after the construction had been put forward and in waking states resembling phantasies. These recollections have themselves led to nothing further and it has seemed plausible to regard them as the product of a compromise. The ‘upward drive’ of the repressed, stirred into activity by the putting forward of the construction, has striven to carry the important memory-traces into consciousness; but a resistance has succeeded, not, it is true, in stopping that movement, but in displacing it on to adjacent objects of minor significance.

Constructions In Analysis

5058

These recollections might have been described as hallucinations if a belief in their actual presence had been added to their clearness. The importance of this analogy seemed greater when I noticed that true hallucinations occasionally occurred in the case of other patients who were certainly not psychotic. My line of thought proceeded as follows. Perhaps it may be a general characteristic of hallucinations to which sufficient attention has not hitherto been paid that in them something that has been experienced in infancy and then forgotten returns - something that the child has seen or heard at a time when he could still hardly speak and that now forces its way into consciousness, probably distorted and displaced owing to the operation of forces that are opposed to this return. And, in view of the close relation between hallucinations and particular forms of psychosis, our line of thought may be carried still further. It may be that the delusions into which these hallucinations are so constantly incorporated may themselves be less independent of the upward drive of the unconscious and the return of the repressed than we usually assume. In the mechanism of a delusion we stress as a rule only two factors: the turning away from the real world and its motive forces on the one hand, and the influence exercised by wish-fulfilment on the content of the delusion on the other. But may it not be that the dynamic process is rather that the turning away from reality is exploited by the upward drive of the repressed in order to force its content into consciousness, while the resistances stirred up by this process and the trend to wish-fulfilment share the responsibility for the distortion and displacement of what is recollected? This is after all the familiar mechanism of dreams, which intuition has equated with madness from time immemorial.

This view of delusions is not, I think, entirely new, but it nevertheless emphasizes a point of view which is not usually brought into the foreground. The essence of it is that there is not only method in madness, as the poet has already perceived, but also a fragment of historical truth; and it is plausible to suppose that the compulsive belief attaching to delusions derives its strength precisely from infantile sources of this kind. All that I can produce to-day in support of this theory are reminiscences, not fresh impressions. It would probably be worth while to make an attempt to study cases of the disorder in question on the basis of the hypotheses that have been here put forward and also to carry out their treatment on those same lines. The vain effort would be abandoned of convincing the patient of the error of his delusion and of its contradiction of reality; and, on the contrary, the recognition of its kernel of truth would afford common ground upon which the therapeutic work could develop. That work would consist in liberating the fragment of historical truth from its distortions and its attachments to the actual present day and in leading it back to the point in the past to which it belongs. The transposing of material from a forgotten past on to the present or on to an expectation of the future is indeed a habitual occurrence in neurotics no less than in psychotics. Often enough, when a neurotic is led by an anxiety-state to expect the occurrence of some terrible event, he is in fact merely under the influence of a repressed memory (which is seeking to enter consciousness but cannot become conscious) that something which was at that time terrifying did really happen. I believe that we should gain a great deal of valuable knowledge from work of this kind upon psychotics even if it led to no therapeutic success.

Constructions In Analysis

5059

I am aware that it is of small service to handle so important a subject in the cursory fashion that I have here employed. But none the less I have not been able to resist the seduction of an analogy. The delusions of patients appear to me to be the equivalents of the constructions which we build up in the course of an analytic treatment - attempts at explanation and cure, though it is true that these, under the conditions of a psychosis, can do no more than replace the fragment of reality that is being disavowed in the present by another fragment that had already been disavowed in the remote past. It will be the task of each individual investigation to reveal the intimate connections between the material of the present disavowal and that of the original repression. Just as our construction is only effective because it recovers a fragment of lost experience, so the delusion owes its convincing power to the element of historical truth which it inserts in the place of the rejected reality. In this way a proposition which I originally asserted only of hysteria would apply also to delusions - namely, that those who are subject to them are suffering from their own reminiscences. I never intended by this short formula to dispute the complexity of the causation of the illness or to exclude the operation of many other factors.

If we consider mankind as a whole and substitute it for the single human individual, we discover that it too has developed delusions which are inaccessible to logical criticism and which contradict reality. If, in spite of this, they are able to exert an extraordinary power over men, investigation leads us to the same explanation as in the case of the single individual. They owe their power to the element of historical truth which they have brought up from the repression of the forgotten and primaeval past.

5060

SPLITTING OF THE EGO IN THE PROCESS OF DEFENCE

(1940)

5061

Intentionally left blank

5062

SPLITTING OF THE EGO IN THE PROCESS OF DEFENCE

I find myself for a moment in the interesting position of not knowing whether what I have to say should be regarded as something long familiar and obvious or as something entirely new and puzzling. But I am inclined to think the latter.

I have at last been struck by the fact that the ego of a person whom we know as a patient in analysis must, dozens of years earlier, when it was young, have behaved in a remarkable manner in certain particular situations of pressure. We can assign in general and somewhat vague terms the conditions under which this comes about, by saying that it occurs under the influence of a psychical trauma. I prefer to select a single sharply defined special case, though it certainly does not cover all the possible modes of causation.

Let us suppose, then, that a child’s ego is under the sway of a powerful instinctual demand which it is accustomed to satisfy and that it is suddenly frightened by an experience which teaches it that the continuance of this satisfaction will result in an almost intolerable real danger. It must now decide either to recognize the real danger, give way to it and renounce the instinctual satisfaction, or to disavow reality and make itself believe that there is no reason for fear, so that it may be able to retain the satisfaction. Thus there is a conflict between the demand by the instinct and the prohibition by reality. But in fact the child takes neither course, or rather he takes both simultaneously, which comes to the same thing. He replies to the conflict with two contrary reactions, both of which are valid and effective. On the one hand, with the help of certain mechanisms he rejects reality and refuses to accept any prohibition; on the other hand, in the same breath he recognizes the danger of reality, takes over the fear of that danger as a pathological symptom and tries subsequently to divest himself of the fear. It must be confessed that this is a very ingenious solution of the difficulty. Both of the parties to the dispute obtain their share: the instinct is allowed to retain its satisfaction and proper respect is shown to reality. But everything has to be paid for in one way or another, and this success is achieved at the price of a rift in the ego which never heals but which increases as time goes on. The two contrary reactions to the conflict persist as the centre-point of a splitting of the ego. The whole process seems so strange to us because we take for granted the synthetic nature of the processes of the ego. But we are clearly at fault in this. The synthetic function of the ego, though it is of such extraordinary importance, is subject to particular conditions and is liable to a whole number of disturbances.

Splitting Of The Ego In The Process Of Defence

5063

It will assist if I introduce an individual case history into this schematic disquisition. A little boy, while he was between three and four years of age, had become acquainted with the female genitals through being seduced by an older girl. After these relations had been broken off, he carried on the sexual stimulation set going in this way by zealously practising manual masturbation; but he was soon caught at it by his energetic nurse and was threatened with castration, the carrying out of which was, as usual, ascribed to his father. There were thus present in this case conditions calculated to produce a tremendous effect of fright. A threat of castration by itself need not produce a great impression. A child will refuse to believe in it, for he cannot easily imagine the possibility of losing such a highly prized part of his body. His sight of the female genitals might have convinced our child of that possibility. But he drew no such conclusion from it, since his disinclination to doing so was too great and there was no motive present which could compel him to. On the contrary, whatever uneasiness he may have felt was calmed by the reflection that what was missing would yet make its appearance: she would grow one (a penis) later. Anyone who has observed enough small boys will be able to recollect having come across some such remark at the sight of a baby sister’s genitals. But it is different if both factors are present together. In that case the threat revives the memory of the perception which had hitherto been regarded as harmless and finds in that memory a dreaded confirmation. The little boy now thinks he understands why the girl’s genitals showed no sign of a penis and no longer ventures to doubt that his own genitals may meet with the same fate. Thenceforward he cannot help believing in the reality of the danger of castration.

Splitting Of The Ego In The Process Of Defence

5064

The usual result of the fright of castration, the result that passes as the normal one, is that, either immediately or after some considerable struggle, the boy gives way to the threat and obeys the prohibition either wholly or at least in part (that is, by no longer touching his genitals with his hand). In other words, he gives up, in whole or in part, the satisfaction of the instinct. We are prepared to hear, however, that our present patient found another way out. He created a substitute for the penis which he missed in females - that is to say, a fetish. In so doing, it is true that he had disavowed reality, but he had saved his own penis. So long as he was not obliged to acknowledge that females have lost their penis, there was no need for him to believe the threat that had been made against him: he need have no fears for his own penis, so he could proceed with his masturbation undisturbed. This behaviour on the part of our patient strikes us forcibly as being a turning away from reality - a procedure which we should prefer to reserve for psychoses. And it is in fact not very different. Yet we will suspend our judgement, for upon closer inspection we shall discover a not unimportant distinction. The boy did not simply contradict his perceptions and hallucinate a penis where there was none to be seen; he effected no more than a displacement of value - he transferred the importance of the penis to another part of the body, a procedure in which he was assisted by the mechanism of regression (in a manner which need not here be explained). This displacement, it is true, related only to the female body; as regards his own penis nothing was changed.

This way of dealing with reality, which almost deserves to be described as artful, was decisive as regards the boy’s practical behaviour. He continued with his masturbation as though it implied no danger to his penis; but at the same time, in complete contradiction to his apparent boldness or indifference, he developed a symptom which showed that he nevertheless did recognize the danger. He had been threatened with being castrated by his father, and immediately afterwards, simultaneously with the creation of his fetish, he developed an intense fear of his father punishing him, which it required the whole force of his masculinity to master and overcompensate. This fear of his father, too, was silent on the subject of castration: by the help of regression to an oral phase, it assumed the form of a fear of being eaten by his father. At this point it is impossible to forget a primitive fragment of Greek mythology which tells how Kronos, the old Father God, swallowed his children and sought to swallow his youngest son Zeus like the rest, and how Zeus was saved by the craft of his mother and later on castrated his father. But we must return to our case history and add that the boy produced yet another symptom, though it was a slight one, which he has retained to this day. This was an anxious susceptibility against either of his little toes being touched, as though, in all the to and fro between disavowal and acknowledgement, it was nevertheless castration that found the clearer expression. . . .

*       *       *       *       *

5065

SOME ELEMENTARY LESSONS IN PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

(1940)

5066

Intentionally left blank

5067

SOME ELEMENTARY LESSONS IN PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

An author who sets out to introduce some branch of knowledge - or, to put it more modestly, some branch of research - to an uninstructed public must clearly make his choice between two methods or techniques.

It is possible to start off from what every reader knows (or thinks he knows) and regards as self-evident, without in the first instance contradicting him. An opportunity will soon occur for drawing his attention to facts in the same field, which, though they are known to him, he has so far neglected or insufficiently appreciated. Beginning from these, one can introduce further facts to him of which he has no knowledge and so prepare him for the necessity of going beyond his earlier judgements, of seeking new points of view and of taking new hypotheses into consideration. In this way one can get him to take a part in building up a new theory about the subject and one can deal with his objections to it during the actual course of the joint work. A method of this kind might well be called genetic. It follows the path along which the investigator himself has travelled earlier. In spite of all its advantages, it has the defect of not making a sufficiently striking effect upon the learner. He will not be nearly so much impressed by something which he has watched coming into existence and passing through a slow and difficult period of growth as he would be by something that is presented to him ready-made as an apparently self-contained whole.

It is precisely this last effect which is produced by the alternative method of presentation. This other method, the dogmatic one, begins straight away by stating its conclusions. Its premisses make demands upon the audience’s attention and belief and very little is adduced in support of them. And there is then a danger that a critical hearer may shake his head and say: ‘All this sounds most peculiar: where does the fellow get it from?’

In what follows I shall not rely exclusively upon either of the two methods of presentation: I shall make use now of one and now of the other. I am under no delusion about the difficulty of my task. Psycho-analysis has little prospect of becoming liked or popular. It is not merely that much of what it has to say offends people’s feelings. Almost as much difficulty is created by the fact that our science involves a number of hypotheses - it is hard to say whether they should be regarded as postulates or as products of our researches - which are bound to seem very strange to ordinary modes of thought and which fundamentally contradict current views. But there is no help for it. We must begin our brief study with two of these hazardous hypotheses.

Some Elementary Lessons In Psycho-Analysis

5068

THE NATURE OF THE PSYCHICAL

Psycho-analysis is a part of the mental science of psychology. It is also described as ‘depth psychology’ - we shall later discover why. If someone asks what ‘the psychical’ really means, it is easy to reply by enumerating its constituents: our perceptions, ideas, memories, feelings and acts of volition - all these form part of what is psychical. But if the questioner goes further and asks whether there is not some common quality possessed by all these processes which makes it possible to get nearer to the nature, or, as people sometimes say, the essence of the psychical, then it is harder to give an answer.

If an analogous question had been put to a physicist (as to the nature of electricity, for instance), his reply, until quite recently, would have been: ‘For the purpose of explaining certain phenomena, we assume the existence of electrical forces which are present in things and which emanate from them. We study these phenomena, discover the laws that govern them and even put them to practical use. This satisfies us provisionally. We do not know the nature of electricity. Perhaps we may discover it later, as our work goes on. It must be admitted that what we are ignorant of is precisely the most important and interesting part of the whole business, but for the moment that does not worry us. It is simply how things happen in the natural sciences.’

Psychology, too, is a natural science. What else can it be? But its case is different. Not everyone is bold enough to make judgements about physical matters; but everyone - the philosopher and the man in the street alike - has his opinion on psychological questions and behaves as if he were at least an amateur psychologist. And now comes the remarkable thing. Everyone - or almost everyone - was agreed that what is psychical really has a common quality in which its essence is expressed: namely the quality of being conscious - unique, indescribable, but needing no description. All that is conscious, they said, is psychical, and conversely all that is psychical is conscious: that is self-evident and to contradict it is nonsense. It cannot be said that this decision threw much light upon the nature of the psychical, for consciousness is one of the fundamental facts of our life and our researches come up against it like a blank wall and can find no path beyond it. Moreover the equation of what is mental with what is conscious had the unwelcome result of divorcing psychical processes from the general context of events in the universe and of setting them in complete contrast to all others. But this would not do, since the fact could not long be overlooked that psychical phenomena are to a high degree dependent upon somatic influences and on their side have the most powerful effects upon somatic processes. If ever human thought found itself in an impasse it was here. To find a way out, the philosophers at least were obliged to assume that there were organic processes parallel to the conscious psychical ones, related to them in a manner that was hard to explain, which acted as intermediaries in the reciprocal relations between ‘body and mind’, and which served to re-insert the psychical into the texture of life. But this solution remained unsatisfactory.

Psycho-analysis escaped such difficulties as these by energetically denying the equation between what is psychical and what is conscious. No; being conscious cannot be the essence of what is psychical. It is only a quality of what is psychical, and an inconstant quality at that - one that is far oftener absent than present. The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is in itself unconscious and probably similar in kind to all the other natural processes of which we have obtained knowledge.

Psycho-analysis bases this assertion on a number of facts, of which I shall now proceed to give a selection.

We know what is meant by ideas ‘occurring’ to one - thoughts that suddenly come into consciousness without one’s being aware of the steps that led up to them, though they, too, must have been psychical acts. It can even happen that one arrives in this way at the solution of some difficult intellectual problem which has previously for a time baffled one’s efforts. All the complicated processes of selection, rejection and decision which occupied the interval were withdrawn from consciousness. We shall not be putting forward any new theory in saying that they were unconscious and perhaps, too, remained so.

Some Elementary Lessons In Psycho-Analysis

5069

In the second place, I shall pick a single instance to represent an immensely large class of phenomena.¹ The President of a public body (the Lower House of the Austrian Parliament) on one occasion opened a sitting with the following words: ‘I take notice that a full quorum of members is present and herewith declare the sitting closed.’ It was a slip of the tongue - for there can be no doubt that what the President intended to say was ‘opened’. Why, then, did he say the opposite? We shall expect to be told it was an accidental mistake, a failure in carrying out an intention such as may easily happen for various reasons: it had no meaning - and in any case contraries are particularly easily substituted for each other. If, however, we bear in mind the situation in which the slip of the tongue occurred, we shall be inclined to prefer another explanation. Many of the previous sittings of the House had been disagreeably stormy and had accomplished nothing, so that it would be only too natural for the President to think at the moment of making his opening statement: ’If only the sitting that’s just beginning were finished! I would much rather be closing then opening it!’ When he began to speak he was probably not aware of this wish - it was not conscious to him - but it was certainly present and it succeeded in making itself effective, against the speaker’s will, in his apparent mistake. A single instance can scarcely enable us to decide between two such different explanations. But what if every other instance of a slip of the tongue could be explained in the same way, and similarly every slip of the pen, every case of mis-reading or mis-hearing, and every faulty action? What if in all those instances (one might actually say, without a single exception) it was possible to demonstrate the presence of a psychical act - a thought, a wish or an intention - which would account for the apparent mistake and which was unconscious at the moment at which it became effective, even though it may have been conscious previously? If that were so, it would really no longer be possible to dispute the fact that psychical acts which are unconscious do exist and that they are even sometimes active while they are unconscious and that in that case they can even sometimes get the better of conscious intentions. The person concerned in a mistake of this kind can react to it in various ways. He may overlook it completely or he may notice it himself and become embarrassed and ashamed. He cannot as a rule find the explanation of it himself without outside help; and he often refuses to accept the solution when it is put before him - for a time, at all events.

¹ Cf. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b)

Some Elementary Lessons In Psycho-Analysis

5070

In the third place, finally, it is possible in the case of persons in a state of hypnosis to prove experimentally that there are such things as unconscious psychical acts and that consciousness is not an indispensable condition of activity. Anyone who has witnessed such an experiment will receive an unforgettable impression and a conviction that can never be shaken. Here is more or less what happens. The doctor enters the hospital ward, puts his umbrella in the corner, hypnotizes one of the patients and says to him: ‘I’m going out now. When I come in again, you will come to meet me with my umbrella open and hold it over my head.’ The doctor and his assistants then leave the ward. As soon as they come back, the patient, who is no longer under hypnosis, carries out exactly the instructions that were given him while he was hypnotized. The doctor questions him: ‘What’s this you’re doing? What’s the meaning of all this?’ The patient is clearly embarrassed. He makes some lame remark such as ‘I only thought, doctor, as it’s raining outside you’d open your umbrella in the room before you went out.’ The explanation is obviously quite inadequate and made up on the spur of the moment to offer some sort of motive for his senseless behaviour. It is clear to us spectators that he is in ignorance of his real motive. We, however, know what it is, for we were present when the suggestion was made to him which he is now carrying out, while he himself knows nothing of the fact that it is at work in him.¹

¹ I am describing experiments made by Bernheim at Nancy in 1889 at which I myself assisted. In these days there is no need for me to discuss any doubts as to the genuineness of hypnotic phenomena of this kind.

Some Elementary Lessons In Psycho-Analysis

5071

The question of the relation of the conscious to the psychical may now be regarded as settled: consciousness is only a quality or attribute of what is psychical, and moreover an inconstant one. But there is one further objection with which we have to deal. We are told that, in spite of the facts that have been mentioned, there is no necessity to abandon the identity between what is conscious and what is psychical: the so-called unconscious psychical processes are the organic processes which have long been recognized as running parallel to the mental ones. This, of course, would reduce our problem to an apparently indifferent matter of definition. Our reply is that it would be unjustifiable and inexpedient to make a breach in the unity of mental life for the sake of propping up a definition, since it is clear in any case that consciousness can only offer us an incomplete and broken chain of phenomena. And it can scarcely be a matter of chance that it was not until the change had been made in the definition of the psychical that it became possible to construct a comprehensive and coherent theory of mental life.

Nor need it be supposed that this alternative view of the psychical is an innovation due to psycho-analysis. A German philosopher, Theodor Lipps, asserted with the greatest explicitness that the psychical is in itself unconscious and that the unconscious is the truly psychical. The concept of the unconscious has long been knocking at the gates of psychology and asking to be let in. Philosophy and literature have often toyed with it, but science could find no use for it. Psycho-analysis has seized upon the concept, has taken it seriously and has given it a fresh content. By its researches it has led to a knowledge of characteristics of the unconscious psychical which have hitherto been unsuspected, and it has discovered some of the laws which govern it. But none of this implies that the quality of being conscious has lost its importance for us. It remains the one light which illuminates our path and leads us through the darkness of mental life. In consequence of the special character of our discoveries, our scientific work in psychology will consist in translating unconscious processes into conscious ones, and thus filling in the gaps in conscious perception. . . .

*       *       *       *       *

5072

A COMMENT ON ANTI-SEMITISM

(1938)

5073

Intentionally left blank

5074

A COMMENT ON ANTI-SEMITISM

In the course of examining the remarks in the press and in literature provoked by the recent persecutions of the Jews, I came upon one essay which struck me as so unusual that I made précis of it for my own use. What its author wrote was approximately as follows:

‘By way of preface I must explain that I am not a Jew and therefore I am not driven into making these observations by any egoistic concern. Yet I have felt a lively interest in the anti-semitic excesses of to-day and have directed my particular attention to the protests against them. These protests come from two directions - ecclesiastical and secular - the former in the name of religion, the latter appealing to the claims of humanity. The former were scanty and came late; but they did come in the end, and even His Holiness the Pope raised his voice. I confess that there was something I missed in the demonstrations coming from both sides - something at their beginning and something else at their end. I will try now to supply it.

‘All these protests, I think, might be preceded by a particular introduction, which would run: "Well, it’s true, I don’t like Jews either. In some sort of way they seem strange to me and antipathetic. They have many disagreeable qualities and great defects. I think, too, that the influence they have had on us and our affairs has been predominantly detrimental. Their race, compared with our own, is obviously an inferior one; all their activities argue in favour of that." And after this what these protests do in fact contain could follow without any discrepancy: "But we profess a religion of love. We ought to love even our enemies as ourselves. We know that the Son of God gave His life on earth to redeem all men from the burden of sin. He is our model, and it is therefore sinning against His intention and against the command of the Christian religion if we consent to Jews being insulted, ill-treated, robbed and plunged into misery. We ought to protest against this, irrespectively of how much or how little the Jews deserve such treatment." The secular writers who believe in the gospel of humanity, protest in similar terms.

A Comment On Anti-Semitism

5075

‘I confess that I have not been satisfied by any of these demonstrations. Apart from the religion of love and humanity there is also a religion of truth, and it has come off badly in these protests. But the truth is that for long centuries we have treated the Jewish people unjustly and that we are continuing to do so by judging them unjustly. Any one of us who does not start by admitting our guilt has not done his duty in this. The Jews are not worse than we are; they have somewhat other characteristics and somewhat other faults, but on the whole we have no right to look down on them. In some respects, indeed, they are our superiors. They do not need so much alcohol as we do in order to make life tolerable; crimes of brutality, murder, robbery and sexual violence are great rarities among them; they have always set a high value on intellectual achievement and interests; their family life is more intimate; they take better care of the poor; charity is a sacred duty to them. Nor can we call them in any sense inferior. Since we have allowed them to co-operate in our cultural tasks, they have acquired merit by valuable contributions in all the spheres of science, art and technology, and they have richly repaid our tolerance. So let us cease at last to hand them out favours when they have a claim to justice.’

It was natural that such determined partisanship from some one who was not a Jew should have made a deep impression on me. But now I have a remarkable confession to make. I am a very old man and my memory is no more what it was. I can no longer recall where I read the essay of which I made the précis nor who it was who was its author. Perhaps one of the readers of this periodical will be able to come to my help?

A whisper has just reached my ears that what I probably had in mind was Count Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi’s book Das Wesen des Antisemitismus, which contains precisely what the author I am in search of missed in the recent protests, and more besides. I know that book. It appeared first in 1901 and was re-issued by his son in 1929 with an admirable introduction. But it cannot be that. What I am thinking of is a shorter pronouncement and one of very recent date. Or am I altogether at fault? Does nothing of the kind exist? And has the work of the two Coudenhoves had no influence on our contemporaries?

Sigm. Freud

5076

LOU ANDREAS-SALOMÉ

(1937)

On February 5 of this year Frau Lou Andreas-Salomé died peacefully in her little house at Göttingen, almost 76 years of age. For the last 25 years of her life this remarkable woman was attached to psycho-analysis, to which she contributed valuable writings and which she practised as well. I am not saying too much if I acknowledge that we all felt it as an honour when she joined the ranks of our collaborators and comrades in arms, and at the same time as a fresh guarantee of the truth of the theories of analysis.

It was known that as a girl she had kept up an intense friendship with Friedrich Nietzsche, founded upon her deep understanding of the philosopher’s bold ideas. This relationship came to an abrupt end when she refused the proposal of marriage which he made her. It was well known, too, that many years later she had acted alike as Muse and protecting mother to Rainer Maria Rilke, the great poet, who was a little helpless in facing life. But beyond this her personality remained obscure. Her modesty and discretion were more than ordinary. She never spoke of her own poetical and literary works. She clearly knew where the true values in life are to be looked for. Those who were closer to her had the strongest impression of the genuineness and harmony of her nature and could discover with astonishment that all feminine frailties, and perhaps most human frailties, were foreign to her or had been conquered by her in the course of her life.

It was in Vienna that long ago the most moving episode of her feminine fortunes had been played out. In 1912 she returned to Vienna in order to be initiated into psycho-analysis. My daughter, who was her close friend, once heard her regret that she had not known psycho-analysis in her youth. But, after all, in those days there was no such thing.

Sigm. Freud

February, 1937.

5077

FINDINGS, IDEAS, PROBLEMS

(1941 [1938])

London, June.

June 16. - It is interesting that in connection with early experiences, as contrasted with later experiences, all the various reactions to them survive, of course including contradictory ones. Instead of a decision, which would have been the outcome later. Explanation: weakness of the power of synthesis, retention of the characteristic of the primary processes.

July 12. - As a substitute for penis-envy, identification with the clitoris: neatest expression of inferiority, source of all inhibitions. At the same time disavowal of the discovery that other women too are without a penis.

‘Having’ and ‘being’ in children. Children like expressing an object-relation by an identification: ‘I am the object.’ ‘Having’ is the later of the two; after loss of the object it relapses into ‘being’. Example: the breast. ‘The breast is a part of me, I am the breast.’ Only later: ‘I have it’ - that is, ‘I am not it’ . . .

July 12. - With neurotics it is as though we were in a prehistoric landscape - for instance, in the Jurassic. The great saurians are still running about; the horsetails grow as high as palms (?).

July 20. - The hypothesis of there being inherited vestiges in the id alters, so to say, our views about it.

July 20. - The individual perishes from his internal conflicts, the species perishes in its struggle with the external world to which it is no longer adapted. - This deserves to be included in Moses.

Findings, Ideas, Problems

5078

August 3. - A sense of guilt also originates from unsatisfied love. Like hate. In fact we have been obliged to derive every conceivable thing from that material: like economically self-sufficient States with their ‘Ersatz products’.

August 3. - The ultimate ground of all intellectual inhibitions and all inhibitions of work seems to be the inhibition of masturbation in childhood. But perhaps it goes deeper; perhaps it is not its inhibition by external influences but its unsatisfying nature in itself. There is always something lacking for complete discharge and satisfaction - en attendant toujours quelquechose qui ne venait point¹ - and this missing part, the reaction of orgasm, manifests itself in equivalents in other spheres, in absences, outbreaks of laughing, weeping, and perhaps other ways. - Once again infantile sexuality has fixed a model in this.

August 22. - Space may be the projection of the extension of the psychical apparatus. No other derivation is probable. Instead of Kant’s a priori determinants of our psychical apparatus. Psyche is extended; knows nothing about it.

August 22. - Mysticism is the obscure self-perception of the realm outside the ego, of the id.

¹ [‘Always waiting for something which never came’]

5079

ANTI-SEMITISM IN ENGLAND

(1938)

20 Maresfield Gardens

London, N.W.3.

16.11.1938.

To the Editor of Time and Tide.

I came to Vienna as a child of 4 years from a small town in Moravia. After 78 years of assiduous work I had to leave my home, saw the Scientific Society I had founded, dissolved, our institutions destroyed, our Printing Press (‘Verlag’) taken over by the invaders, the books I had published confiscated or reduced to pulp, my children expelled from their professions. Don’t you think you ought to reserve the columns of your special number for the utterances of non-Jewish people, less personally involved than myself?

In this connection my mind gets hold of an old French saying:

Le bruit est pour le fat

La plainte est pour le sot;

L’honnête homme trompé

S’en va et ne dit mot.¹

I feel deeply affected by the passage in your letter acknowledging ‘a certain growth of anti-semitism even in this country’. Ought this present persecution not rather give rise to a wave of sympathy in this country?

Respectfully yours

Sigm. Freud.

¹ [‘A fuss becomes the Fop

A Fool’s complaints are heard;

A Gentleman betrayed

Departs without a word.’]

About This Edition

The intention of this edition is to make Freud freely available to anyone who wants him.

You are encouraged to distribute this file. On no account, however, may anything, other than a nominal fee for its distribution, be charged.

This text is also available in the following formats:

Microsoft® CHM (Freud_Complete_Works.chm)

Adobe® PDF (Freud_Complete_Works.pdf)

EPUB® (Freud_Complete_Works.epub)

DJVU (Freud_Complete_Works.djvu)

Isilo® PDB (Freud_Complete_Works.pdb)

Microsoft® HLP (Frcw2.zip)

The text in all seven versions is, apart from a few minor textual corrections, identical.

Ivan Smith  2000, 2007, 2010, 2011.

All rights reserved.